Walk in Hell (63 page)

John Liholiho peered over toward the jutting prominence of Diamond Head while the two sailors talked with each other. The presumably British school he’d attended had trained him in more things than an upper-crust accent; he showed very plainly that he was not listening to a conversation not intended for him. Carsten wished most of the sailors he knew had a matching reserve instead of being snoops.

He didn’t really know how he was going to make this more fun than getting lit up and having his ashes hauled, either. After a little thought, he asked, “So how do you like it, living under the Stars and Stripes?”

The Sandwich Islander—no matter how he thought of himself, that was how Carsten thought of him—frowned. “You do realize, of course, that this is a question on which circumspection might be the wisest course for me?” Seeing Sam hadn’t the slightest idea what circumspection was, he translated his English into English: “I might be wiser to keep quiet or lie.”

“What am I going to do, shoot you?” Sam said, laughing. Crosetti plucked at his sleeve again. He shook off his pal.

Liholiho gave him a serious look. “Two friends of my father’s of whom I know for certain have suffered this fate. It does give one pause. On the other side of the coin, the protectorate the British exercised over these islands was also imperfectly humane. Mr. Carsten, would you prefer to be thought of as a bloody wog or a nigger?”

Since Sam had been thinking of John Liholiho as a nigger not ten minutes before, he had to work as hard at keeping his face straight as when he was raising on a pair of fives in a poker game. “Anybody called me either one of those things, I’d punch him in the teeth.”

“Yeah.” Now Vic Crosetti’s attention was engaged. “I get called a fuckin’ dago or a wop, that’s bad enough.”

“People seldom
call
me these things to my face, though I have heard
nigger
in a mouth or two since you Americans came.” The surf-rider seemed to have a British sense of precision, too. He went on, “What one is
called
, however, sometimes matters less than how one is
seen
. If the powers that be reckon one a wog or a nigger, one is not apt to be taken seriously regardless of the potential value of one’s contributions.”

“That’s too complicated for me,” Carsten said, thinking he should have headed out and got drunk after all.

But Crosetti got it. “He’s saying it’s like he’s an ordinary sailor, and he’s trying to convince an admiral he knows what he’s talking about.”

John Liholiho beamed at him. “Mr. Crosetti, I am in your debt. You Americans and our former British overlords do tend to look at race as if it were rank, don’t you?—yourselves being admirals, by the very nature of things. I shall have to use the analogy elsewhere.”

A Sandwich Islander as near naked as made no difference…with whom would he use an analogy (whatever an analogy was; Sam gathered it meant something like
comparison
, but it was another word he didn’t think he’d ever heard before)? Then Carsten remembered that, even though John looked like a savage, he was a local bigwig’s son. That he had to think twice before the fellow’s station came to mind went a long way toward making his point for him.

Dipping his head again, the brown-skinned man said, “And now, if you will excuse me—” He turned and, carrying his surfriding board, trotted out into the Pacific. Once in the water, he climbed up onto the board, lay on his belly atop it, and used his arms to paddle farther from shore.

Sam turned to Vic Crosetti. “All right,
now
we can have all the fun we want to. That didn’t take real long, and it was sort of interesting.”

“Yeah, sort of.” Crosetti stared out at John Liholiho’s receding shape. “I bet he’s a limey spy. He sure talks like a limey spy, don’t he?”

“He talks like a limey, anyway,” Carsten answered. “But so what? Even if he is a spy, how’s he going to get word off the island? And if you’re going to start seeing spies under every bed—”

“If I look under a bed,” Crosetti said with great assurance, “it’s to make sure I can hide there if her husband comes home before he’s supposed to.” Both men laughed, and headed into town to see what kind of damage they could do to the fleshpots there.

Reggie Bartlett trudged wearily into Wilson Town, Sequoyah. Seeing houses around him felt strange after so long on the prairie with no human-made artifacts close by but the occasional oil well…and the trenches, and the shells, and the other appurtenances of war.

Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll called, “We got to hold this town, boys. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of Sequoyah left to us, and we have to hang on to what there is, not let the damnyankees run us out of the whole state. Remember, the Germans don’t hold all of Belgium even now.”

“I ain’t seen any Germans in Sequoyah,” Nap Dibble said. Sweat cut ravines through the dust caking his face. “You see any o’ them damn Huns, Reggie? Yankees is bad enough, but them folks—”

“Haven’t seen any Germans, Nap,” Bartlett answered. He’d long since figured out Nap, while a good fellow, wasn’t what anybody would call sharp. When Dibble lined up in front of the paymaster, he signed his name with an X. No wonder he’d be on the lookout for Germans smack in the middle of Sequoyah.

“We have to save this town,” Lieutenant Nicoll repeated. A shell crashed down a few hundred yards off to the left, arguing that the Confederate soldiers didn’t have to do any such thing.

Bartlett would have been more impressed with the speech if the lieutenant hadn’t said the same thing about Duncan, which had fallen several weeks before. He’d heard the same kind of speech on the Roanoke front, too. There it had sometimes presaged a retreat like this one, and sometimes a counterattack that left dead men piled high in exchange for retaking a couple of hundred yards of chewed-up, worthless ground.

Nicoll tried something new. Pointing south, he spoke in dramatic tones: “There are the people who depend on us to protect them.”

As far as Reggie could see, the people of Wilson Town weren’t depending on the Confederate Army for any such thing. A lot of houses already looked to have been abandoned. More folks—Indians, whites, a handful of Negro servants and laborers—were throwing whatever they could into buggies and wagons and hightailing it south toward the Texas line.

Sergeant Pete Hairston spat in the dust of the road. “If the damnyankees want a pack of damn redskins, they’re welcome to ’em, far as I can tell. Weren’t for the oil round these parts, hell, I’d give Sequoyah to the USA and say, ‘You’re welcome to it.’”

“Will you look at that?” Bartlett pointed to a side-curtained grocery wagon and to the tall, gray-bearded man in a black suit and homburg who was, instead of loading things into it, selling things from it. “Crazy Jew peddler, doesn’t he know he’s liable to get blown to hell any minute?” He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, you! Hymie!”

That got the peddler’s attention. He wasn’t just big; he looked strong and tough, too, in spite of those snowy whiskers. “Vot you vant?” he asked, his voice wary—no matter how tough he was, he had the brains not to argue with anybody toting a Tredegar.

“You’d better get out of here before you get killed,” Bartlett told him.

“Oh. Dot vot you talk about.” The peddler shrugged. “Soon I go.”

Hairston made money-counting motions. “Business is good, huh?” He laughed. “Damn fool Jew. Money ain’t worth your neck.”

The Jew muttered something under his breath. Reggie didn’t think it was a compliment. He didn’t think it was English, either, which was likely to be just as well: if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to notice it. That made something else occur to him: “Hey, Hymie, you sell a lot to the Indians around here?”

“A lot, yes,” the peddler answered. “Is most of folk.”

“How do you talk to ’em?” Bartlett asked. The Jew stared at him, not following the question. He tried again: “What language do you use when you sell to them?”

“Oh.” The Jew’s face lit with intelligence. “They speak Henglish, same like me.” Reggie burst out laughing; from what little he’d seen of them, most of the local Chickasaws and Kiowas spoke English better than the peddler.

“Go on, get the hell out of here,” Hairston said, and the peddler, not without a sigh or two of regret for business lost, scrambled up into the wagon and rattled south out of Wilson Town, almost the last one to leave it.

Methodically, the troops of Lieutenant Nicoll’s company began to dig in. Nap Dibble said, “Wish them niggers what was in this town would’ve stayed a bit. They could have done this here entrenching for us.”

“Back on the Roanoke front, we had us lots of nigger labor battalions,” Reggie said as he made the dirt fly. “Haven’t seen so much of that here out west.”

“
Ain’t
that much of it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Like I been tellin’ you since you got here, Bartlett, ain’t that much of anything.”

“Except Yankees,” Reggie said.

“Yeah, except them,” Hairston agreed. “But they ain’t got any more’n—well, ain’t got a whole lot more’n—what we do, ’cept maybe soldiers.”

“Except,” Reggie said again. He dug and dug, steady as a steam shovel. The ground was the perfect consistency: not so hard that he had to labor to force his entrenching tool into it, not so soft or muddy that the edges of the trench he was digging started falling down into what he’d already dug. He flipped the dirt up in front of his excavations to form a parapet. “Wish we had some more barbed wire.” He scooped out another couple of shovelfuls. “Wish we had
any
barbed wire.”

“Wish for sugarplums for Christmas while you’re at it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Oh, we may get some wire—we had a good bit in front o’ Duncan, once we’d stayed there a while. But this here ain’t the Roanoke front—that kind of good stuff don’t grow on trees here. I just told you that a couple seconds ago, dammit. Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”

“Yeah, Sarge. I always listen,” Bartlett answered, so mildly that Hairston went back to digging for another stroke or two before giving him a dirty look. Reggie grinned back, a grin that had occasionally softened even the Yankee prison guards in West Virginia. He looked around, not to see if the Yankees were coming or the Chickasaws getting the hell out but to spot his company commander. “Now that the fighting’s picked up again, what’s the lieutenant going to do for his hooch?”

“Damned if I know.” As if reminded of what he’d traded to the men in green-gray for Lieutenant Nicoll’s supply of whiskey, Hairston rolled himself a cigarette. He sucked in smoke before going on, “Hope nothin’ bad’s happened to Toohey. He ain’t a bad guy.” After another drag, he chuckled. “Crazy sayin’ that about one of those Yankee bastards, but it’s so.”

“I know what you mean, Sarge,” Reggie replied. “Fellow who captured me, there in the Roanoke valley, he could have shot me and my pals easy as not. I ever run into him once this damn war is over, he can do all the boozing he wants. I’ll buy till he can’t even see, let alone walk.”

The sporadic Yankee shelling had been falling short of Wilson Town, so much so that the Confederate soldiers had gone on about the business of digging in without pausing at the explosions a couple of furlongs to the north. Now, suddenly, the U.S. gunners began to find the range. Hearing the hideous whistle of a shell that might have his name on it, Reggie dove headlong into the stretch of trench he’d just dug. The round hit behind him. Fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. One of the lead spheres with which the shell had been loaded drilled a neat hole in the dirt he’d heaped up in front of the trench. It would have drilled a neat hole in him, too.

He got back up and started digging again. A hoarse shout from the southern edge of town made him turn his head. The Jewish peddler didn’t care for artillery close by. He was getting his horses up to a gallop so he could escape Wilson Town in jig time. Others who had lingered, the last few, now delayed their departure no more.

Reggie laughed. “Look at ’em go,” he said, pointing. After a moment, though, it didn’t seem funny. “If two guys are in a dangerous place, and one leaves while the other stays, which one of ’em is stupid?”

Hairston laughed, too, but singularly without humor. “That’d be funny, Bartlett, if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, Sarge, I do. Wish to Jesus I didn’t.” Bartlett looked out across the broad Sequoyah prairie. “Here come the damnyankees. I don’t think they think we’re ready for ’em yet.”

“Yeah, well, if they don’t, they’re gonna be real sorry real fast,” Hairston said.

The artillery fire supporting the men in green-gray who trotted forward got heavier, but it didn’t turn into anything that would have been reckoned worse than harassment back in Virginia. Here and there, a Confederate soldier shrieked or abruptly fell silent, forever blasted from man to butcher-shop display in the blink of an eye.

But most of the C.S. troopers crouched down in the field fortifications they’d been digging and waited for the Yankees to get closer, so they could sting the enemy hard. Reggie wouldn’t have wanted to be trudging through that yellowed autumn grass, waiting for the machine guns to open up on him. He wondered how much experience the damnyankees up there had. Were they brave men advancing into what they knew would be awful or raw fish too ignorant to tell they were heading for a fish fry? In the end, it didn’t much matter. They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.

Closer, closer…A couple of Confederate riflemen opened up on the Yankees. Men in green-gray started dropping, most not because they were hit but to keep from getting hit. Others kept coming forward, running now, not trotting, as if they knew they didn’t have much time to do before they were done by. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, Bartlett picked one.

He pulled the trigger at the same time as the first machine gun began spraying precisely measured death at the U.S. soldiers. More and more of the men in green-gray were falling, and taking cover had little if anything to do with it. A couple of hundred yards off to the left, the second Confederate machine gun joined its satanic chattering to that of the first. More and more Yankees toppled.