Walk in Hell (59 page)

And then, as swiftly and unexpectedly as it had appeared, the terrible Pup was gone, darting back toward the enemy lines at a pace that would have made pursuit impossible, even had the shaken Americans dared to try. Maybe the bus had run low on fuel. That was the only thing Moss could think of that might have kept it from destroying the whole flight. What would have stopped it? It had the American aeroplanes outnumbered, one against four.

Landing was glum, as it always was after losing a flightmate. “What happened?” one of the mechanics asked.

“Pup,” Moss said laconically.

The fellow in the greasy overalls bit his lip. “They really as bad as that?”

“Worse.” One word at a time was hard enough. More would have been impossible.

Along with Dudley and Phil Eaker, Moss went into Shelby Pruitt’s office. The squadron leader looked up at them. He grimaced. As the mechanic had, he asked, “What happened to Thornley?”

Instead of answering directly, Dudley burst out, “God damn it to hell, when the devil are we going to be able to sit our asses down in an aeroplane that’ll give us half a chance to go up there and come back alive, not one of these flying cart horses that isn’t fast enough to go after the Canucks and isn’t fast enough to run away from ’em, either?” All of that came out in one long, impassioned breath. On the inhale, Dudley added, “Sir.”

Major Pruitt looked down at his desk. The flight leader had told him what he needed to know. “Pup,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes, sir.” Moss spoke this time. “One Pup against the four of us. Those aeroplanes are very bad news, sir. How many do the Canucks have? Like Dud says, how long till we get something that can stand up to them?”

“They don’t have many,” Pruitt said. “We know that much. They aren’t manufacturing them on this side of the water, either: not yet, anyhow. What do you suggest we do, gentlemen? Only go up in squadron strength so we can mob them when we come across them?”

Moss and his flightmates looked at one another. What that meant was, they weren’t going to get an aeroplane that could stand up to the Pup, not tomorrow they weren’t, and not the day after, either. Slowly, Dud Dudley said, “That might help some, sir. We’d pay a bundle for every one we brought down, but we might bring some down, sure enough. Once they ran out of ’em, things’d be like they were—except we’d be missing a hell of a lot of pilots.”

“I wish I could tell you you were wrong, but I don’t think you are,” Pruitt said, shaking his head. “And it’ll all be wasted effort, too, if the limeys get another shipload of ’em over here. The Germans, now, the Germans have aeroplanes that can match these Pups and whatever the froggies are throwing at ’em. We were supposed to get plans for some of ’em, I hear, but the submersible that set out with them didn’t make it across the Atlantic. These things happen.”

“And how many of us are going to end up dead because they happen?” Moss burst out. The question had no exact answer. It didn’t need one. The approximate answer was quite bad enough.

Eaker said, “What do we need the Germans for, anyway? Why can’t we build our own aeroplanes, good as any in the world? We invented them.”

“I know we did,” Pruitt answered. “Up till the start of the war, ours were as good as anybody’s, too. But the Germans and the French and the British, they’ve all been pushing each other hard as they could, ever since the guns started going off. The Rebs and the Canucks haven’t done that to us, not to where we’ve needed to come up with a new kind of fighting scout every few months because the old ones would get shot down if we kept flying ’em. What do they call it? Survival of the fittest, that’s right.”

“We’ve got to worry about it now,” Dud Dudley said.

“I know we do,” Pruitt answered. “This time next year, if the war’s still going, I expect we’ll have aeroplanes to match anything the Kaiser’s building. Once we know we need to do something, we generally manage.”

“A lot of people are going to end up shot to pieces because Philadelphia was slow getting the message,” Moss said. “Thornley was a good kid. He had the makings of a good pilot—if he’d had a decent bus to fly.”
And if the fellow in the Pup had decided to go after me instead of him…

“I don’t even run this whole aerodrome, let alone the Bureau of Aeroplane Production.” Hardshell Pruitt got up from his swivel chair, which squeaked. He led the three survivors of Dudley’s flight to the officers’ club, threw a quarter-eagle down on the bar, and carried a bottle of whiskey over to a table.

As Moss started to drink, he looked over at the photographs of fliers dead and gone.
One more to put up,
he thought, and then wondered whether Orville Thornley had had a photo taken since he joined the squadron. Moss didn’t think so. Thornley hadn’t been here very long. Moss gulped down his drink. If he tried hard enough, maybe he could stop thinking about things like that. Maybe he could stop thinking at all.

When Lucien Galtier came in from the fields, the sun was going down. As summer slid into fall, it set ever sooner, rose ever later. The air had—not quite a chill, but the premonition of a chill—it hadn’t held even a couple of weeks earlier. Pretty soon, frost would fern across the windows when he got up in the morning.

Marie came bustling out of the farmhouse to meet him before he came inside. She didn’t usually do that. Automatically, he began to worry. Any change in routine portended trouble. A lifetime’s experience and a cultural inheritance of centuries warned him that was true.

So did his wife’s face. “What is it now?” he asked her, and picked the two worst things he could think of: “Have we had a visit from Father Pascal while I was cultivating? Or is that the American, Major Quigley, was here?”

“No, neither of those, for which I thank
le bon Dieu
,” Marie answered. “But it is, all the same, something of which I wish to speak to you without having any of the children hear.” She looked down to make sure none of their numerous brood was in earshot.

Lucien did the same thing. “Of course, our trying to keep them from hearing but makes
them
try the more to hear,” he said, again from long experience. “But what is it that you would keep a secret from them?”

“Not from all of them, not quite.” Marie took a deep breath. When she spoke, the words tumbled out all in a rush: “Nicole just came home from the hospital”—she did not look at the big building the Americans had run up on Galtier land; she made a point of not looking at it—“and she, she, she asked permission of me to bring to supper tomorrow night one of the doctors who works there.”

“’Osti,”
Lucien said softly. Once, and once only, he stomped a booted foot on the ground. “I knew it would come to this. Did I not say it would come to this? When she went to work at that place”—he not only did not look at the hospital, he refused even to name it—“I knew it would come to this.”

“His name is O’Doull,” Marie said, pronouncing the un-Quebecois appellation with care. “He speaks French, Nicole says, and he is himself a member of the holy Catholic Church—so she assures me.”

“He is himself a member of the United States Army,” Lucien retorted. Since that was manifestly true, Marie could only nod. Her husband went on, “The people in Ottawa—the Protestants in Ottawa—had the courtesy, more or less, to leave us alone. The Americans, merely by their coming, are taking from us our patrimony.”

“I did not tell Nicole yes, and I did not tell her no, either,” Marie answered. “I told her I would tell you, and that you would decide.”

Galtier opened his mouth to declare that he had already decided, and that the answer was and would always be no. Before he did so, though, he cast a quizzical eye on Marie. She knew everything he’d said, and knew it at least as well as he did. More cautiously than he’d expected, he asked, “Why did you not say no on your own behalf?”

Marie let out a long sigh. “Because I fear the Americans will remain here in Quebec for a long time to come, and I do not believe we shall be able to make it as if they do not exist. And because I do not believe that Nicole would come to know any fondness for a man who is wicked, even if he is an American. And because one supper, here in front of the lot of us, is not the end of the world. And it could even be that, seeing this…man O’Doull here in our own place, not at the other one where she works, would be the best way to convince her he is not the proper one.”

Yes, I had good reason to be cautious,
Lucien thought. Aloud, he said, “And if I still believe this should not be?”

“Then it shall not be, of course,” his wife replied at once. She was always properly submissive, and she usually got her way.

She would get her way this time, too. “It could even be,” Galtier said in a speculative voice, “that seeing all of her family will have a chilling effect on this Dr. O’Doull.” He smiled, remembering. “This is often true, when a man who is not serious meets a young lady’s family.”

“You have reason,” Marie answered, smiling too. “Let us go in now, and tell Nicole she may bring him, then.”

“Very well,” Lucien said. It wasn’t very well, or anywhere close to being very well, but he seemed to have no good choices whatever. In that, he thought of himself as a tiny version of the entire province of Quebec.

Nicole squealed when Marie told her (Lucien could not make himself do anything more than nod) she might invite the doctor for supper. Georges said, “Ah, so I am to have an American brother-in-law,
n’est-ce pas
?” Nicole’s face turned the color of fire. She threw a potato at him. It thumped against his ribs. Grinning still, he said, “I am wounded! The doctor must cure me!” and thrashed about on the floor.

Charles, his older brother, said nothing, not with words, but the look he sent Lucien said,
Father, how could you?
Galtier’s shrug showed how little true choice he had had. Nicole’s three younger sisters couldn’t seem to decide whether to be horrified or fascinated by the news.

Galtier went through the next day’s work as if he were a machine wound up to perform its tasks without thought. His mind had already leapt to the evening, and to the meeting with the American, O’Doull. In his mind, he ran through a dozen, a score of conversations with the man. Whether any of them would have anything to do with reality he had no idea, but he played them out all the same.

He looked up in some surprise to see the sun near setting.
Time to go in,
he realized, on most days a welcome thought but today one so much the opposite that he looked around for more chores to do. Talking with the American in the privacy of his own mind was one thing. Talking with the man in the real world was a different, far more daunting prospect.

He wiped his boots with special care. Even so, he knew he brought the aromas of the farmyard into the house with him. How could he help it? Knowing he could not help it, knowing he was not the only one on the farm who did it, he thought nothing of it most of the time. Now—

Now, there in the parlor sat a tall, skinny stranger in town clothes; he was talking with Nicole and doing what looked to be his gallant best not to be upset at having her brothers and sisters stare at him. He sprang to his feet when Lucien came in. So did Nicole. “Father,” she said formally, “I would like to introduce to you Dr. Leonard O’Doull. Leonard, this is my father,
Monsieur
Lucien Galtier.”

“I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” O’Doull said in good French, the Parisian accent with which he’d learned the tongue overlain by the rhythms of the Quebecois with whom he’d been working. Galtier took that as a good sign, a sign of accommodation. He could not imagine Major Quigley sounding like a Quebecois if he stayed in this country a hundred years.

O’Doull’s hands were pale and soft, but not smooth. The skin on them was chafed and reddened and cracked in many places, some of those cracks looking angry and inflamed. Doctors had to wash often in corrosive chemicals to keep their hands free of germs.

As for the rest of the doctor, he looked like an Irishman: fair skin with freckles, sandy hair, almost cat-green eyes, a dimple in his chin so deep a plow might have dug it. He was unobtrusively sizing up Galtier as the farmer examined him. “I do thank you very much for letting me come into your home,” he said. “I know it is an intrusion, and I know it is a”—he cast about for a word—“an awkwardness for you as well.”

He was frank. Lucien liked him the better for that. “Well, we shall see how it goes,” he said. “I can always throw you out, after all.”

“Father!” Nicole exclaimed in horror. But one of O’Doull’s gingery eyebrows lifted; he knew Galtier hadn’t meant that seriously. Again, against his will, Galtier’s opinion of the doctor went up.

Marie served up potatoes and greens and ham cooked with prunes and dried apples. Lucien got out a jug of applejack he’d bought from one of the farmers nearby. He hadn’t expected he’d want to do that. O’Doull, though, even if he was an American, seemed a man of both sense and humor. He also made appreciative noises about Marie’s cooking, which caused her to fill up his plate once more after he’d demolished his first helping. The second disappeared as quickly.

Georges made a show of looking under the table. “Where does such a scrawny fellow put it all?” he asked.

“I have a secret pocket, like a kangaroo,” O’Doull answered gravely. Georges blinked, unused to getting as good as he gave.

When supper was done and the womenfolk went off to wash and dry, the American handed cigars to Lucien and Charles and Georges. Lucien poured more apple brandy for them all.
“Salut,”
he said, raising his glass, and then, experimentally, before drinking,
“Je me souviens.”

I will remember:
the motto of Quebec in the face of many difficult times, this one more than most. He was not surprised to see that Leonard O’Doull understood not only the words but also the meaning behind them. The American doctor drank the toast, then said, “I understand how hard this is for you, and I thank you again for being so hospitable to an outsider.”

Galtier had had enough applejack by then to loosen his tongue a little. He said, “How can you understand, down deep and truly? You are an American, an occupier, not one of the occupied.”