The Tilted World (18 page)

The camp commander called, “Karkos,” and the sergeant hustled over, and a moment later Ingersoll heard his name ring out, as he suddenly knew it would. He stepped forward, already pulling his gun from his shoulder sling and dropping to one knee. Karkos was at his side now. “Steady,” he cautioned. “Don’t hit the tower.” Ingersoll could feel Karkos’s hand on his shoulder and hear the men shouting and pointing and a field light behind him threw his shadow to the dirt. He brought his rifle up, flicked the safety off, squeezed his right eye. “Shoot,” Karkos ordered. Ingersoll did not shoot. He went into the quiet place. He rolled Sister Mary Eunice out of the way and shoved Karkos’s hovering presence farther off and silenced the men and did not hear Karkos order “Shoot!” again more frantically because Ingersoll was calculating wind velocity and the distance of fifteen hundred yards, and when he opened his right eye, it was to watch the spider sail away from his sticky strand of web, far off spider-scream falling as it fell. Ingersoll didn’t remember squeezing the trigger, yet the men were shouting his name and clapping him on the shoulder.

The camp commander pushed through the crowd and held up his hand. “Karkos,” he ordered. “Have the field telephone brought over. This private is going to telegram his folks and tell them of his status as a sharpshooter in General John J. Pershing’s army.”

Ingersoll said nothing, even when the phone was put in his hand, the commander squeezing his shoulders, telling him to go ahead son and tell the operator what he wished to say to his folks. He looked at the mouth cup. He felt the men, a silent mass, behind him, and he almost wished he hadn’t shot the saboteur just to be spared this scrutiny. The commander’s smile left the corners of his lips. “What is it, son, never used a telephone before?”

“It’s not that, sir,” said Ingersoll, though that was also true.

“Then what?”

“No folks to telegram, sir.”

“No folks?”

“Correct, sir.”

“You’re an—orphan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, by God,” said the commander. “You’re an orphan no longer. You’ve just been adopted by your Uncle Sam.” The commander pounded his back, more cheering behind and laughter, his name a strange chant on the lips of strangers.

As the commander moved away to the officers’ tent, he stopped in front of Karkos. “That’s exactly what we need to win this war. You come across any more sharpshooter orphans with steady hands and dead eyes, you let me know.”

A nickname was born and evidently had made it into his file because Lieutenant Johnson was smiling. He sank his teeth into the apple, which calved like an iceberg on his tongue, and over its crunching he spoke. “I have a French 75 arriving within the week.”

It was the most unlikely thing he could have said, but Ingersoll maintained his forward gaze. He heard the snap of the lieutenant’s teeth once more cleaving the apple. “Know how to work one?”

“No, sir.”

“Can you fake it?”

Ingersoll paused, not sure how to answer. “At ease, Corporal,” said Johnson, and Ingersoll widened his stance.

“No, I mean it,” said Johnson. “Be at your ease.”

Ingersoll looked at him now, the man’s jaw working like a circular saw. He swallowed noisily and then yelled over his shoulder, “Malone! Bring him a chair.”

A second field chair was produced and Ingersoll sat.

“Apple?”

“No, thank you, sir.” Though he hadn’t seen an apple in weeks.

“Listen,” said Johnson, leaning forward, one hand on his knee, the other gesturing with the core. “I brought you here because I need your help.” Now Johnson brought the core to his mouth and bit the bottom off. “They said I could have one of the French 75s”—another hunk of core was bitten, and he chewed as he spoke—“and the horses to pull it and the melinite high-explosive,
if
I had an officer from among the graduates of the engineering school experienced with its workings.” Ingersoll could hear the swallow and thought he should be able to see the lump of core travel down Johnson’s throat. “And I need that cannon. We need that cannon.”

Ingersoll nodded. He’d made the same argument to his previous lieutenant. They needed a field gun capable of devastating the waves of German infantry attacking in the open, and the French 75 could shoot up to fifteen rounds per minute because its recoil was hydropneumatic and so remained perfectly still on its wheels during firing and didn’t need to be re-aimed each time. Ingersoll wondered if this new lieutenant was aware that he’d been making this very argument to his old lieutenant—up to Tuesday of last week, that is, when his old lieutenant got shot while trying to re-aim the cumbersome two-rounds-per-minute field gun that was all they’d had.

“But,” continued Johnson, “I don’t have any engineering officers.” Ham tilted his big head up and dangled the last of the core by its stem over his maw and dropped it. “But you wanna know what I do have?” he gargled over the chunks of core.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ole Dead-Eye Orphan. And that has to be just as good, don’t you reckon?” Johnson’s Southern accent revealed itself in the question.

Ingersoll half shrugged, half nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The final swallow. “Then it’s settled.” Ham lifted the pocketknife from his thigh and speared it into the snake of peel on the carpet. Then he began nibbling the peel off the knife. “When the 75 arrives, you’re in charge. Don’t let on that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You’ll have four men to assist you and two for the horses, and if you show any doubt, they’ll smell it. And we’ll both be demoted.”

So the 75 arrived, and Ingersoll figured it out while seeming to inspect it, and he used it, under Johnson’s command, to cut corridors across the belts of German barbed wire up to five miles away. By late September, during the final Meuse-Argonne Offensive, they broke the Hindenburg line, one of the four main factors, war analysts would later state, leading to Armistice.

And the two men had become friends, or as much as you can become friends with your superior, fourteen years your senior. It was Ham who’d had Ingersoll tested, ordered up the Stanford-Binet exam on which he’d scored the 112. Others had known Ingersoll was a good shot. Ham was the first to see Ingersoll was smart. Even Ingersoll hadn’t known, really, until the results came in. Which was the point, Ingersoll figured later—not for Ham’s edification but for his own.

And now he had let Ham down, getting involved with the wrong people, withholding facts from the investigation. He was ashamed.

Ham had also been thinking of the war. He said softly, to the window, “I remember, after—after that day, you know—writing the recommendation for your medal.
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy
.”

Both men were there, in Mrs. Vatterott’s Cardinal Suite, but they were in Verdun, too. The yellow-brown mud of the trenches with their battalion of eight hundred, after most of the other eight hundred had died.
Ils
ne passeront pas
. Shriek of horses and shellfire and shit and blood and rotting flesh, the corpse bloated in the scum-covered water, the only place that they could drink, the man’s belly distended as if he’d drunk his fill. Ham received new orders; someone had to swim the contested St. Quentin canal at night and take out the fortified machine-gun nest, and he’d asked for a volunteer. He’d asked the entire battalion but in a way he was asking only Ingersoll, and Ingersoll had understood and volunteered. He’d done what he’d been asked to do. They’d left Verdun with thirty-seven men. In all these years, they’d never spoken of it.

Ham lifted his fingertips from the window and five clear circles appeared, then ghosted over.

“Eight years of partnering.” Ham shook his head. “Eight years of . . . friendship.”

“I’m sorry, Ham.”

“It’s that goddamn baby.” Ham turned. “Change your shirt and comb your hair. You’re heading over to the station, tell that captain where you spent the night.”

“I can’t do that, Ham.”

“You sure as hell can, and you sure as hell will.”

“I can’t say I was there at Holliver’s house when he wasn’t there. People don’t know she has a baby. They’ll get the wrong idea.”

“And what is the right idea, Ing?”

“Don’t do that, Ham.”

“Don’t do what, Ham?” He took a few steps toward Ingersoll, skirting the bed. “Don’t tell my subordinate he’s so far over the line he might never find his way back to it?”

Ingersoll’s fists tightened at his side.

Ham came to a stop in front of him. “Get out of here,” he yelled, flinging his arm at the door. He gained control of his voice as he continued. “Go find whoever zipped off in that boat. I’ve gotta figure out how to tell Hoover we haven’t managed to crack the moonshining operation but we have managed to kill one fat saboteur in front of a whole town while letting his fat friend sail off into the sunrise.”

W
hat Ingersoll had wanted to do was rush out of Ham’s room and down the steps of the Vatterott and into the woods and bust the still and find the other saboteur, then skate clear of Hobnob altogether and forever. Things had been hinky ever since he arrived at this damn drowning town.

But of the things he wanted, he got not a one.

He turned outcast from Ham’s door and heard a crash. Ingersoll leaned over the banister. Mrs. Vatterott and the Irish housemaid were bumping an armoire on the staircase landing.

“Nora Cannon, I ought to ship you right back to your potato farm.”

“But, ma’am—”

The housemaid was in front, biting her lips, holding her arms behind her to carry the armoire, and Mrs. Vatterott a few steps below, lifting from beneath. The problem, Ingersoll could see from above, was that they couldn’t turn it on the landing without the legs hooking the balusters. They needed to lift it higher but didn’t know or couldn’t manage. Helping them was the last thing Ingersoll desired and he considered the likelihood of a servants’ staircase, though even as he considered he knew he couldn’t use it. He sighed, then called out, “Hang on, ladies. I’m on my way.”

The piece was heavy—though one of them had lightened it by removing the drawers—and bulky, too, and the women, now below, holding the legs, made its maneuvering more, not less, difficult. Finally Ingersoll croaked, “I got it,” and grunted it onto his shoulder and trudged it up the stairs.

“Where to?”

“Third on the right, Mockingbird Suite. We’ve been advised to get valuables off the ground.”

Ingersoll didn’t wait for the women to catch up. He rested the armoire against the closed door and then felt beneath for the knob and twisted and momentum staggered him in. He gained his sea legs and bumped the piece down on its claw-feet.

Mrs. Vatterott bustled in after instructing Nora to bring the drawers from below. “Oh, Mr. Ingersoll, you are the Lord’s providence, you are.”

“Glad to help, ma’am.”

“Glad to hear it! Glad, glad, glad. If Mr. Stanley R. Vatterott, God rest his soul, was still man about the house, well, we’d be shipshape. But as it is—” She shook her head. “These are hard times for a widow. A poor defenseless widow. Perhaps you heard there was”—she dropped her voice—“a saboteur last night?”

Ingersoll nodded, taking the drawer from the housemaid.

“They say he was a revenue agent! Can you imagine?”

He tipped the rectangle of the drawer into its mouth.

“Probably crooked. They all are, you know.”

He jammed the drawer in perhaps harder than he needed to, thinking of Dixie Clay accusing him of taking a bribe from Jesse. It rankled. Sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep he’d tot up the bribes he’d been offered and rejected and marvel at the sum. But no one would believe in an honest revenuer. Only Ham, whom he’d abandoned.

“We’ve been advised to evacuate. River’s at fifty-four feet. But I can’t see leaving my house. Did you hear how many inches of rain yesterday?”

Ingersoll reached for the other drawer.

“Fifteen! Fifteen inches of rain in eighteen hours! There was a crevasse at Pine Bluff, another hundred fifty thousand acres underwater. Do you think our levee will hold, Mr. Ingersoll? The flood crest is still a few days off, the river still rising. Will our levee hold?”

No, he wanted to say. Run, he wanted to say. When Ham had finally reached Hoover he’d been told to downplay the stolen dynamite, cast doubt if possible. Secretly, he and Ham were now charged with finding the saboteurs, as Ham had predicted, though how they were supposed to accomplish this Hoover didn’t say. These people had no idea what danger they were up against. To Mrs. Vatterott he said, “Why not consider evacuating?”

“And leave all my pretty things?” She clucked to dismiss the idea and lifted the corner of her apron and licked it and rubbed it on the carved scrollwork. “This was my mother’s mother’s. Shipped to New Orleans from Ghent, Belgium.”

“You’ve got it safe now, ma’am, gotten it to higher ground. You might as well do the same thing for yourself. All right, if that’s it, I reckon—”

“Oh, do you wish to help with the Mora clock? How lovely of you. It came from Switzerland, you know.”

Ingersoll thought of Ham down the hall, who no doubt assumed that Ingersoll was right this minute buttonholing the missing saboteur.

“Please? Mr. Ingersoll?”

There was nothing to be done.

The clock was six feet tall but at least could be moved in two pieces, the glass clock face separating from the painted base. He lugged it to the Mockingbird, breathing hard, and skinned his knuckles chest-wrestling the fluted column through the door frame, and bit down on the curses knocking the back of his teeth. Downstairs at last he edged for the door, and when Mrs. Vatterott ran her fingers along the piano, the lid headstoned with framed photographs, and gave Ingersoll an imploring look, he just darkly shook his head.

“You’re a fine gentleman,” she said, and patted his arm. “I wish I had a reward. Care for a banana?”

He couldn’t tell if she was joking and was too tired to puzzle it out. “Ma’am,” and a tip of his hat, and he strode out the door.

O
n the street, he found himself wishing he’d changed his shirt, as it was lathed to his back with sweat. But then it wouldn’t matter, since it was raining again. He passed the hardware store where a sign warned,
WE HAVE NO MORE UMBRELLAS, RAIN PONCHOS, OR GALOSHES.
And underneath that, in a different hand:
OR CARBIDE LAMPS.
OR LANTERN FUEL
. And underneath that, in yet a different hand,
OR HOPE
.