"I mean it." Commander Walsh didn't sound delighted, but he nodded. "It's irregular, but it's legal. No hard feelings here. I know you're not a regular Navy man. I know you have a family back in Boston. You've served well aboard the Oregon, and your previous skippers gave you outstanding fitness reports. If you want to leave, you've paid your dues."
George didn't hesitate for a moment. Walsh might change his mind. "Where's the dotted line, sir? I'll sign."
The exec shoved papers across the desk at him and handed him a pen. "This is the Navy, Enos. You can't get away with signing just once."
So George signed and signed and signed. He would have signed till he got writer's cramp, but it wasn't so bad as that. When he got to the bottom of the stack of papers, he said, "There you go, sir."
"Some of these are for you, for your records and to show the shore patrol and the military police to prove you're not AWOL." Walsh handed him the ones he needed to keep. "Show them to your superiors, too. We're sending a boat ashore at 1400. Can you be ready by then?"
By the clock on the wall behind the exec, he had a little more than an hour to let people know and throw stuff into a duffel. "I sure can. Thank you, sir!"
"Don't thank me. Thank Joe Kennedy." Walsh raised an eyebrow. "I wouldn't be surprised if you get the chance to do just that once you're home. If Kennedy's like most of that breed, he'll expect favors from you now that he's done you one. Nothing's free, not for those people."
From what George knew of Joe Kennedy, he figured the exec had hit that one dead center. "I'll worry about it when it happens, sir… Oh! Could you have somebody wire my wife and let her know I'm coming home?"
Commander Walsh nodded. "We'll take care of it. Get moving. You don't have a lot of time."
"Aye aye, sir." George jumped to his feet and saluted. "Thanks again, sir!"
When he showed Wally Fodor his discharge papers, the gun chief made as if to tear them up. George squawked. Grinning, Fodor handed back the precious papers. "Here you go. Good luck, you lucky stiff!"
A sailor in the waiting boat grabbed George's duffel at 1400 on the dot. George climbed down into the boat. The sailor steadied him. The boat's outboard motor chugged. It pulled away from the Oregon. George didn't look back once.
When he came ashore, he got a ride to the train station in an Army halftrack. "Nice to know they love us down here," he remarked to the soldier sitting across from him.
"Yeah, well, fuck 'em," the guy in green-gray said, which only proved the Army and the Navy had the same attitude about the Confederates.
The station was a young fortress, with concrete barricades keeping motorcars at a distance. There were barrels near the entrance, and machine guns on the roof. George showed his papers at the ticket counter and got a voucher for the trip up to Boston. When the train came in, it had machine guns atop several cars. All the same, bullet holes pocked the metalwork.
Most of the men aboard were soldiers going home on leave. When they found out George didn't have to come back, they turned greener than their uniforms. You lucky stiff was the least of what he heard from them. George just smiled and didn't let them provoke him. He didn't intend to end up in the brig instead of in Connie's arms.
Nobody fired at the train while it worked its way through the wreckage of the Confederacy. As George had when he traveled through the USA during the war, he eyed the damage with amazement-and with relief that he hadn't had to fight on land. He'd seen plenty of danger, but it might have been nothing next to this. Connie'd got mad at him for joining the Navy, but he figured he was more likely never to have come home if he'd waited for the Army to conscript him. Of course, his old man had made the same calculation…
What now? he wondered. Now he would go out to T Wharf, hope his boat didn't hit a mine loose from its moorings, and come home to watch the kids grow up and to watch Connie get old. It wasn't the most exciting way to pass the next thirty or forty years he could think of. But he'd had enough excitement to last him the rest of his days. Fishing was honest work. What more could you want, really?
The stretch from the border up past Philadelphia was as battered as anything down in the CSA. He didn't see any of the damage from the superbomb in Philly-or miss it. The towns closer to New York City hadn't been hit so hard. From New York City north, he saw only occasional damage. The main exception was Providence. The Confederates had plastered the Navy training center as hard as they could.
And then he got into Boston. On other leaves, he'd seen the pounding his home town had taken. Now he had other things on his mind, and hardly noticed. He slung his duffel over his shoulder and pushed out of the train car. Lots of people-sailors, soldiers, civilians-were getting off here.
"George!" Connie yelled, at the same time as the boys were squealing, "Daddy!"
He hugged his wife and squeezed his kids and kissed everybody. "Jesus, it's good to be home!" he said. "You know that Kennedy guy pulled wires for me?"
"I hoped he would," Connie said. "I wrote him about how you'd been in long enough and who your folks were and everything, and it worked!" She beamed.
He kissed her again. "Except on a fishing boat, I'm never leaving this town again," he said. Connie cheered. The boys clapped. They tried to carry the duffel bag. Between them, they managed. That let him put one arm around them and the other arm around Connie. It was an awkward way to leave the platform, but nobody cared a bit.
R ain drummed down out of a leaden sky. Chester Martin's breath smoked whenever he went outside. It was nasty and chilly and muddy. He only laughed. He'd lived here long enough to know this was nothing out of the ordinary. "January in Los Angeles," he said.
Rita laughed, too. "The Chamber of Commerce tries not to tell people about this time of year."
"Yeah, well, if I were them, I wouldn't admit it, either," Chester said. "They do better with photos of orange trees and pretty girls on the beach."
"I've never seen a photo of an orange tree on the beach," Carl said. While Chester was off being a top kick, his son had acquired a quirky sense of humor. Chester sometimes wondered where the kid had got it. Knowing Carl, he'd probably won it in a poker game.
"You might as well hang around the house today," Rita said. "There won't be any work."
"Boy, you got that right," Chester agreed. Rain in L.A. left construction crews sitting on their hands. "In the Army, they just went ahead and built stuff, and the heck with the lousy weather."
"Yeah, but you're not in the Army any more. Good thing, too, if anybody wants to know what I think." By the way Rita said it, he'd better want to know what she thought.
"Hey, you get no arguments from me. It wasn't a whole lot of fun." Chester still didn't want to think about what he'd done in that little South Carolina town. Oh, he wasn't the only one. He could blame Lieutenant Lavochkin for most of it. He could-and he did. But he was there, too. He pulled the trigger lots more than once. That was one thing he never intended to talk about with anybody.
Carl asked, "If it wasn't any fun, why did you do it?"
"Good question," Rita said. "Maybe you can get a decent answer out of him. I never could." She gave Chester a dirty look. She still resented his putting the uniform back on. Chances were she always would.
He shrugged. "If Jake Featherston beat us this time around, I was just wasting my time in the last war. I didn't want that to happen, so I tried to stop it."
"Oh, yeah. You were going to whip Jake Featherston all by yourself. And then you wake up," Rita said.
"Not all by myself. That colored kid did, though." Chester shook his head. "Boy, am I jealous of him. Me and all the other guys who put on the uniform. But everybody who fought set things up so he could do it." He looked at his son. "Is that a good enough answer for you?"