Walk in Hell (51 page)

“Lucky, hell,” Enos said indignantly. “That was skill, Grover, nothing else but.”

“Skill, my foot,” Grover retorted. “Anybody who draws three cards and comes out holding a flush shouldn’t play poker with honest people. You ought to go looking for wallets instead.”

Said in a different tone of voice, that would have been an invitation to brawl. As things were, it was only rueful mourning over lost cash. George said, “Well, all right, maybe I was lucky.” Laughing, they rowed across the Cumberland to the waiting shacks.

They tied up the boat at a bush by the edge of the river, there being no other wharf: till the war, this hadn’t been a place where anyone stopped. But it was a place where people stopped now. George smelled ribs cooking in some kind of spicy sauce. He hadn’t known he was hungry, but he knew it now. He scrambled out onto the mud of the riverbank and hurried toward the shack.

“Good day to you, gentlemens,” said the colored fellow who ran the place. His name was Othello. He grinned, showing white teeth all the whiter for being set in a black, black face. “Got me some barbecue cookin’, best you gwine find this side o’ the Kentucky Smoke House.”

He spoke as if that were some kind of touchstone. Maybe it was, but it didn’t touch George. Still, he said, “All I know about Kentucky is that
we’re
on this side of it. And all I know about that meat is that it smells better than anything that ever came out of the galley.”

To that, Grover and the other two sailors—Albert and Stanley—added loud, profane agreement. Othello grinned again, and served up great slabs of sizzling-hot meat. Barbecue wasn’t something Enos had known back in Boston, but, he thought, it was something he could get used to.

Othello had rags for napkins and sometimes eked out his mismatched, battered china with box lids. None of that mattered. “This pig died happy,” George declared, and again no one argued with him.

“You boys want somethin’ to wash that there down?” Othello asked, looking sly. Cumberland water wasn’t so bad. Next to the water of the Mississippi, Cumberland water was pretty damn fine. But the jars the cook displayed, though they’d come out of the Cumberland and were dripping to prove it, hadn’t been in there to fill with water, only to keep cool.

Grover shook his head. “God only knows why we drink that panther sweat,” he said. “I could get the same feeling hittin’ myself in the head with a hammer six or eight times, and it’d be cheaper.”

“Taste better, too,” Stanley said. But when Othello set a jar on the rickety table around which the sailors sat, nobody asked him to take it away. Nobody threw the cups and mugs he gave them at him, either. They paid him, poured the deadly-pale whiskey, and drank it down.

“Jesus,” George wheezed when he could speak again. Another mug of that, he thought, and he was liable to know Jesus face to face—and, in the mood he’d be in, he’d probably want to wrestle. He drank the second mug. Jesus didn’t appear, and he didn’t die. Tomorrow morning, he might want to, but not now.

A colored woman walked into the shack. All she wore was a thin cotton shift. When she was standing between anybody looking at her and a source of light, the shape of her body was easy to make out.

“Boys,” she said, “if you done spent
all
your money here, my friends and me, we is gonna be powerful disappointed in y’all.”

Othello laughed. George didn’t know whether he got a rakeoff from the whores who’d set up shop next door, but that laugh made him think so. “Mehitabel, I left ’em with somethin’,” he said. “You kin git yo’ share.” He made no bones about being there for any other reason than skinning the men from the
Punishment
or any other U.S. river monitors that came by. And if the Confederate Navy made it back to this stretch of the Cumberland, he’d skin them, too.

Mehitabel placed herself so she was displayed to best advantage. George wished he hadn’t let that second mug of whiskey char its way to his stomach. He wasn’t thinking about Sylvia now, any more than a stallion thought of anything when you put him in with a mare in season.

He got up from the table. The other sailors shouted bawdy advice. Rolling her big hips, the whore led him out of one shack toward the other. In broad daylight, she might as well not have been wearing that shift. She sure as hell wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.

George’s heart drummed in his chest. His breath whistled in his throat. That was what he thought at first, with rotgut half stunning his senses. But he knew the sound of incoming shells in his gut, not just in his head, which wasn’t working very well right then.

He threw himself flat—not on top of the whore, but to the ground. The roar of the explosions stunned him. Mehitabel screamed like a cat with its tail in a door. Dirt flew as shells smashed into the soft ground south of the Cumberland. Great columns of water leaped from shells landing in the Cumberland. And, to George’s horror, two enormous columns of smoke and flame sprang from the
Punishment
as one shell struck her near the stern, the other square amidships.

More shells walked across the Cumberland toward him. Some of the water they kicked up splashed down onto him and onto Mehitabel, plastering the thin shift to her rounded contours. Enos didn’t care about that. He didn’t care about anything except approaching death and the fate of his crewmates.

The shells stopped falling before they reached the north bank of the Cumberland. He looked out toward the
Punishment
. The river monitor was burning and sinking fast. A moment later, as flame reached the magazines, it stopped burning and exploded. Mehitabel’s mouth was open as wide as it would go, which meant she had to be screaming, but George couldn’t hear a thing.

The heat of the fireball scorched his face. When at last it faded, twenty feet or so of the bow of the
Punishment
stuck up out of the river like a tombstone. The rest of the monitor was gone. A couple of bodies and a few pieces of bodies floated in the water, food for the snappers.

Stanley and Albert and Grover came out of the shack where they’d been drinking. They looked as bad as Enos felt. He suddenly realized he wasn’t drunk any more. Horror and terror had scorched the whiskey out of him.

He also realized, looking at his crewmates, that they were the only four Yankee sailors in hostile country, and that none of them carried anything more lethal than a belt knife. Absurdly, he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time on that machine gun when all it turned out to be good for was getting blown up.

“Get into bed this minute, do you hear me?” Sylvia Enos snapped at George, Jr., punctuating her words with a whack on his fanny.

As nothing else would have, that convinced him she meant what she said. “Good night, Mama!” he exclaimed, and planted a large, wet kiss on her cheek. He hurried off into the bedroom, humming an artillery march.

Sylvia looked down at the palm of her hand. It still stung, which meant his behind had to sting, too. He hadn’t even noticed, except that the swat had reminded him of what he needed to do. She stared after him. Was she raising a little boy or training a horse?

Mary Jane had peacefully gone to bed an hour before. By the haggard look on Brigid Coneval’s face when Sylvia had picked up her children, the reason Mary Jane was peaceful in the evening was that she’d raised hell all afternoon, and worn herself out doing it.

It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.
An hour to myself,
Sylvia thought.
I can read a book. I can write a letter. I can just sit here and think about how tired I am
. That last sounded particularly good to her.

She’d sat for about five minutes when someone knocked on the door. That should have been the signal for George, Jr., to come bounding out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on. But he didn’t: only soft, steady breathing came from there, not a little boy. Well, he’d been raising hell all afternoon, too; he must have run down as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Sylvia laughed to herself as she walked to the door. Try as she would, she had the devil of a time getting any peace and quiet. Here was somebody wanting to borrow some molasses or salt, or to tell her the latest scandal of the apartment house, or to give her some cookies or…a little community in its own right, the building was a busy place.

She opened the door. Standing there was no one she knew, but a youngster a year too young to do a proper job of raising the downy, fuzzy excuse for a mustache he had on his upper lip. He wore a green uniform, darker than the Army green-gray, with brass buttons stamped “WU.” “Mrs. Enos?” he said, and, at her automatic nod, went on, “Telegram for you, ma’am.”

Numbly, she accepted the envelope. Numbly, she signed for it. Numbly, she closed the door as the delivery boy hurried away. And, numbly, she opened the envelope with shaking fingers. It was, as she’d feared, from the Navy Department.
REGRET TO IN
FORM YOU
, she read, and a low moan came from her throat,
THAT YOUR HUSBAND
,
ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS
,
IS LISTED AS MISSING IN EXPLOSION OF USS PUNISHMENT
.
NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME
.
YOU WILL BE INFORMED DIRECTLY SHOULD HE BE FOUND OR CONFIRMED LOST
. The printed signature was that of the Secretary of the Navy.

She stared at the telegram till the words were only shapes on paper, shapes without meaning, without sense. But it did not help. The meaning had already been imparted, and lay inside her mind like an icy spear, piercing and freezing everything it touched. She crumpled the flimsy yellow sheet of paper. She felt crumpled, used and used up and thrown away by something bigger than herself, something bigger than the whole country, something eating the world. It was blind and sloppy, and it would not stop until it had its fill.

Her body knew what to do. Her mind did not fight it when it set the alarm on the clock by the bed, undressed itself, and lay down. It tried to make itself go to sleep, too. It knew how tired it was. But her mind had something to say about that, and said it, loud and emphatically.

She lay and lay and lay, mind spinning useless like a trolley wheel on an icy track. Convinced she would not sleep at all, she closed her eyes to look at the darkness inside her eyelids instead of the different darkness of the ceiling. She tried to guess when it was four, when five, when six and time to rise.

She jerked in horror when the alarm went off. She had fallen asleep after all. She wished she’d had a moment’s forgetfulness on first getting up, but no. She knew. As she had after the telegram arrived, she let her body do what needed doing, and roused her children, fed them breakfast, and took them over to Brigid Coneval’s apartment almost without conscious thought.

“Are you all right, dearie?” Mrs. Coneval asked. Her husband was in the Army. “You look a bit peaked, you do.”

“It’s—nothing,” Sylvia said. She kissed her children and left for work. Brigid Coneval stared after her, shaking her head.

Mechanically, Sylvia boarded the trolley. Mechanically, she rode to the right stop. Mechanically, she got off. Mechanically, she punched in. And, mechanically, she headed for her machine.

The mechanism broke when she saw Isabella Antonelli, or rather when her friend saw her. “Sylvia!” Isabella exclaimed, recognizing the dazed, haggard face staring at her for what it was. “Your husband, your Giorgio. Is he—?”

“Missing.” Sylvia forced the word out through numb lips. “I got—the telegram—last night…” She started to cry. She should have been working already. “I’m sorry, but—” She dissolved again.

Isabella Antonelli came over and wrapped her arms around Sylvia, as Sylvia might have done for Mary Jane had her little daughter broken a favorite doll. “Oh, my friend,” Isabella said. “I am so sorry he is gone.”

“Missing,” Sylvia said. “The telegram said missing.”

“I will pray for you,” Isabella answered. She said nothing more than that.
Missing
was a forlorn hope, and one all too likely to sink on the sea of truth. She knew that. Sylvia knew it, too. She would not have admitted knowing it, not if her own life depended on that admission.

Mr. Winter came limping along to see that the day shift’s run was beginning as it should. When he saw the two women huddled together between their machines, he hurried over to them. “Here, what’s this?” he asked, his voice not angry but not calm, either. For him, the line came first, everything else afterwards. “What’s going on?”

Sylvia tried to answer and could not. Calmly—with the sort of calm that comes from having experienced too much rather than not enough—Isabella Antonelli spoke for her: “Her husband, he is missing, she hears last night from the Department of Wars.” Sylvia didn’t bother correcting her.

“Oh. I am sorry to hear that,” the foreman said, and sounded as if he was telling, if not the whole truth, then at least most of it. He studied Sylvia. “Do you want to go home, Mrs. Enos?”

“No,” Sylvia answered quickly. If she went home, they would find a substitute for her, and they might keep the substitute, too. But that was not the only reason she spoke as she did: “I’d rather be here, as a matter of fact. It will help me take my mind off, off—” She didn’t go on. Going on would have meant thinking about what she most wanted not to think about.

Mr. Winter gnawed at his mustache. “I dunno,” he said. But Isabella Antonelli gave him such a reproachful look that he softened. “All right, Mrs. Enos; we’ll see how it goes.” Had he not been interested in Sylvia’s friend as something more than an employee, he might have decided differently. Sylvia noted that enough to be amused by it, and then got angry at herself for letting anything amuse her.

She went to her machine and began pulling levers. She hoped desperately to fall into the routine that sometimes overtook her, so that half the day would go by without her consciously noticing it. To her disappointment, it didn’t happen. Her body did what it had to do, pulling her three levers, loading labels, filling the paste reservoir, and her mind ran round and round and round like a pet squirrel in a wheel.