His son, Carl, who was six, didn’t know whether to be proud of him or worried about him. Carl knew people could get shot. “You won’t let that happen to you, will you, Dad?” he would ask.
“Not me,” Chester would answer gravely. “That kind of stuff always happens to the other guy.” Carl accepted that. Chester knew better, but didn’t want to burden the boy with worries he couldn’t do anything about. Rita knew better, too, and wasted no time pointing out to Chester what a liar he was.
With all that going on, then, he wasn’t altogether unhappy escaping the little rented house in East Los Angeles and heading to the recruiting station a few blocks away when the time finally came. He took the oath there, which officially put him back in uniform. They gave him just enough of a physical to make sure he had a pulse and could see out of both eyes. If he’d flunked the second half, he suspected they would have worked something out.
They gave him a uniform, too. The tunic was too tight and the trousers were baggy; the tailoring hadn’t changed a bit since the Great War. They gave him a first sergeant’s stripes on his left sleeve. He knew what that meant. “You’re going to have me nursemaid some officer who was still spitting up sour milk when the Confederates tossed in the sponge the last time.”
He got exactly no sympathy, which was exactly what he’d expected. The sergeant who’d talked him into rejoining said, “Well, Martin? What about it? Are you going to tell me you’re not qualified for the job? I’ll say bullshit to your face if you’ve got the brass to try it.”
Martin didn’t have that kind of brass. Maybe he could keep a kid from getting some good men killed. He might even save the kid’s neck-and, with luck, his own in the process.
His orders were to report to a replacement depot in Virginia. Accompanying them was a travel voucher for rail transportation from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. He asked the noncom who gave him the voucher, “How the devil do I get from Milwaukee to where I’m supposed to go? Stick out my thumb?”
“Beats me,” that worthy said cheerfully. “For all I know, hitching’s faster than any other way. Once you get to Milwaukee, I promise they’ll tell you what to do next.”
“I hope so.” Martin didn’t trust Army bureaucracy. While the people in Wisconsin were figuring out how to get him past the Confederate corridor that split the USA in two, the people in Virginia were liable to decide he was AWOL if he didn’t show up on time and throw him in the guardhouse when he finally did. He knew that was unreasonable. He also knew the Army had some strange notions about what was reasonable and what wasn’t.
He had a brand-new green-gray duffel bag slung over his shoulder when he went to Remembrance Station, the big new railroad depot in downtown Los Angeles. Rita and Carl came along to say good-bye. If Rita cried, she wasn’t the only wife with a husband in uniform who did. He squeezed her and kissed her one last time, kissed Carl on the forehead, and climbed into a second-class car. Maybe officers got Pullman berths. Sergeants, or at least one sergeant in particular, didn’t.
More than half the men in the car were soldiers, either coming back from leave or reporting to duty for the first time. Chester listened. The chatter sounded much like what he remembered from the last go-round. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him. That didn’t surprise him. He had a lot of stripes on his sleeve, and he was at least twice the age of most of the men in green-gray.
When night came, the train slowed down to a crawl. He hadn’t thought about how the blackout applied to trains. He realized he should have. If locomotives went tearing along at full speed behind the beam of a big, bright light, they shouted, Hey, come shoot me up! at whatever enemy airplanes happened to be in the neighborhood. That made perfect sense-once you worked it out.
Conductors went through the cars making sure blackout curtains were in place on every window. Light leaking out the sides was as bad as any other kind. Chester wondered how likely an attack was. He shrugged. If it could happen at all, you didn’t want to take needless chances.
About half an hour after the blackout curtains came down, Chester went back to the dining car. The featured entree was something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland. He looked at the private at the table next to his and said, “I’m not back on duty yet, but now I feel like I’m back in the Army, by God.”
“Yeah.” The kid was pushing the gravy-smeared meat around with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “This is pretty lousy, isn’t it?” He eyed Martin’s heavily striped sleeve. “Have you, uh, been in the Army all along?”
By the way he said it, he might have meant since the War of Secession, or possibly since the War of the Roses. Chester laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I got out in 1917”-undoubtedly before the private was born-“and went on with my life.”
“Oh.” The youngster digested that, which had to be easier than digesting the Swiss steak. He risked another question: “How come you came back? They conscripted me. I had to go. But you must’ve had it made.”
“Well, not quite,” Martin said. “I was doing all right, but I wasn’t rich or anything. But I didn’t want to see Jake Featherston kicking us in the slats, and so here I am.”
“Uh-huh.” The private seemed surprised anybody who didn’t have to would put on the uniform. Maybe he was what was wrong with the USA, part of the reason the country was having so much trouble with the CSA. On the other hand, maybe he just had a good deal of common sense.
Chester wondered how the Chicago-bound train would go to avoid both the Mormon uprising and the chance of bumping into Confederate raiders. It headed east through Kingman and Flagstaff, New Mexico, and on to Santa Fe, where it turned north for a run through the mountains to Denver. It got hung up there for two days, though, at a little Colorado town called Salida. Somebody said Salida meant exit in Spanish, but there was no exit from the place till damaged track up ahead was repaired. Avalanche? Sabotage? No one seemed to want to say, which left Chester suspecting the worst.
He dug a greatcoat out of his duffel and used it to stay warm. Sleeping in his seat was anything but delightful. Everybody grumbled. Nobody could do anything but grumble. Misery might not have loved company, but had a lot of it.
Once they got going again, they made pretty good time till they came to Chicago. The Confederates had done what they could to bomb the railroad yards. Given the accuracy of night bombing, that meant the whole city had caught hell. But the crawl at which the train proceeded showed the enemy had hurt the tracks and the stations to which they led.
Following signs that said MILITARY PASSENGERS for the transfer to Milwaukee, Chester stood in line for twenty minutes and then presented his voucher to a bored-looking corporal who eyed it and said, “You’re late.”
“My whole goddamn train is late. So sue me,” Chester said. The corporal looked up, wondering who could be so cavalier about this business. Seeing a man with a lot more stripes than he owned instead of a scared young private, he kept his mouth shut. Chester went on, “I knew I was late before I got here. Now I want to know how to get where I’m going.”
“I’ll fix it, Sergeant,” the corporal promised, and he did. If he took it out on some luckless kid later on, Chester didn’t find out about that.
From Chicago to Milwaukee was a short hop, like the one from Toledo to Cleveland. Naturally, whatever eastbound transport they’d planned from Milwaukee was also obsolete. Another noncom did some more fixing. An hour and a half later, Martin found himself taking off in a twenty-two-seat Boeing transport, bound for Buffalo: the first airplane ride of his life.