“So you were as close as anybody American,” Cunningham said. It wasn’t a question: he was putting a card in his mental filing cabinet. He went on, “You didn’t come down with radiation sickness, right? Your hair didn’t fall out? You didn’t start puking?”
“No, nothing like that,” Mike said.
Cunningham nodded. “Haven’t heard that any of us there came down with it. Some Americans who were too close to Nagano did.”
“Some Americans who were in fucking Nagano, there’s nothing left of them now. Nothing left of a big old pile of Japs, either,” Mike said.
“Well, you’ve got that right. I don’t know how many Russians we toasted in Sendai, either,” Gary Cunningham said. “But getting back to you. . The short answer is, nobody knows what the radiation dose you picked up will do to you ten, twenty, thirty years down the line. You’re a guinea pig. If you die of cancer, maybe you can blame it on being too close to the bomb. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. I can’t tell you. Right now, I don’t think anyone can. The docs’ll be studying you and the other soldiers and the Japs who were in the neighborhood, and when your son’s as old as you are maybe they’ll know what’s what.”
“I don’t have any kids. My wife deep-sixed me when I was in an encampment,” Mike growled. “Suppose I meet somebody now. Do I need to worry about what the bomb did to my nuts?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, either. I can’t even begin to guess, so I won’t try, okay?” Cunningham said. He cocked his head to one side and studied Mike. “So you were a scalp, too, huh?”
“Damn straight. Sullivan, Michael, NY24601. I was up in Montana, chopping down trees. How about you?”
“Cunningham, Gary, AZ1797. I dug irrigation ditches in New Mexico and Colorado.” Cunningham took off the gloves shielding his hands from the cold. His palms were all over calluses, even after what had to be a good length of time away from forced labor. “They turned me loose in ’44, and I got drafted right afterwards. I liked the Army better than anything I could do on Civvy Street, so I stayed in. What’s your story?”
“I volunteered in ’42 to get out of the encampment,” Mike replied.
“Wait. .” Cunningham eyed him again, in a different way this time. “Guys who did that went straight into a punishment brigade.”
“Uh-huh,” Mike said dryly.
“But. . Fuck, they told me what the odds were if I went into an outfit like that. I stayed in till my stretch ended on account of it. How many other guys who started out with you are still here?”
“The ones who went all the way through everything and didn’t get maimed early on? My company CO did it. I know of two, three others. They weren’t people I was tight with or anything.”
“Damn!” Cunningham said. “Now I feel like I’ve seen the Great White Whale. My hat’s off to you, man.” He doffed it. It was a fur cap with earflaps, the kind the guards in Montana would have drooled over. Mike didn’t think it was Army issue; he wondered if Cunningham had scavenged it from a dead North Japanese soldier or a Russian.
“Yeah, well, that and a couple of yen’ll buy me some sake. Want to go into Wakamatsu and buy some sake?” Mike said. “You go through weather like this, you understand why the Japs drink it hot.”
“That’s a fact,” Cunningham said. “I’ll buy you a couple. I’m honored to. You don’t run into many guys who went through everything you did and came out in one piece.”
“Well, almost.” Mike rubbed the bottom of his left earlobe, which was most of an inch higher than the bottom of his right ear. “But thanks-I’ll take you up on that.” After so much terror and pain, serving in that punishment brigade had finally paid off-a couple of shots of sake’s worth, anyhow. What the hell? You took what you could get.
* * *
After Esther discouraged him from drowning his sorrows whenever he got the urge, Charlie didn’t go to the tavern near the White House anywhere near so often as he had before. He felt better for staying away, too. . most of the time. Every once in a while, often on days when he’d had more of Vince Scriabin than he could take, he needed a Band-Aid for his brain. Bourbon did the trick better than anything else he knew.
When he did go in there, he commonly found John Nance Garner perched on his usual barstool. Joe Steele ran the country. Joe Steele, in fact, ran most of the world that wasn’t Red. The USA was the only big power that hadn’t had its economy ravaged by war. The American economy had boomed louder than American guns. Anyone who wanted help had to keep the President happy.
John Nance Garner presided over this tavern and the United States Senate. Comparing the time he spent in the Cabinet to the time he spent here, Charlie knew which part of his little domain mattered more to him. Well, with things as they were in Washington during Joe Steele’s fifth term, the bartender here held more power than the Senate did.
When Charlie walked in on a mild spring afternoon, Garner greeted him with, “Hey, if it ain’t Charlie Sullivan! How are things out in the real world, Sullivan?” A cigarette in his hand sent up a thin strand of smoke. The full ashtray in front of him said he’d been here a while. So did the empty glasses.
“The real world? What’s that? I work in the White House,” Charlie said, and then, to the bartender, “Wild Turkey over ice, please.”
“Comin’ right up, suh,” the Negro replied. Charlie slid a half-dollar and a dime tip across the bar. Prices had climbed after the war; not even Joe Steele could keep them down, any more than King Canute had been able to hold back the tide.
Garner puffed, chuckled, and puffed again. “Hell, I wouldn’t know. Damned if I remember the last time I went inside there. Joe Steele don’t want me around. I’m a poor relation. I embarrass him.”
“If you embarrassed him, he wouldn’t put you on the ticket every four years,” Charlie said. He didn’t think that was the problem at all. The need to have a Vice President reminded a President of his mortality. These days, Joe Steele’s own body was giving him reminders like that. He didn’t need John Nance Garner around to rub them in.
“Sonny, the only reason I stay on there is ’cause he knows I don’t make waves,” Garner said. It had to be one reason; Charlie didn’t think it was the only one. The Veep went on, “If he put me out to pasture back in Uvalde, wouldn’t break my heart, not one bit.”
“Oh, come on. I don’t believe that,” Charlie said. “You’d been in Washington a long time before you started running with Joe Steele. You have to like it here, or at least be used to it.”
“I’m used to it, all right.” Garner screwed up his face. “That don’t got to mean I like it, though.”
“Okay. Sure.” Charlie wasn’t going to argue with him. If he said anything about protesting too much, Garner would just get mad. He finished his drink and held up a forefinger to show he wanted another.
Garner had another one, too. After so many, what was one more? After the Vice President died, if he ever did, they really needed to take out his liver and donate it to the Smithsonian. It was a national treasure, if not a national monument.
“Another term,” Garner said with a maudlin sigh. “And then another term after that, and maybe another term after that.” By the way he used the word, he might have been talking about stretches in a labor encampment, not the country’s second highest elected office.
But the difference between highest and second highest was even starker in politics than it was in sports. Charlie was pretty sure he could rattle off every World Series winner from 1903 to this past October. He was much hazier on the teams that had lost. Who wasn’t?
The difference between President and Vice President, though, wasn’t the difference between winning and losing. It was the difference between winning and not getting to play. Joe Steele could order two-thirds of the world around. John Nance Garner could order. . another bourbon. And he had.