Then the comic came out and made as if to unbutton his shirt. He looked wounded unto death when the crowd laughed instead of cheering. That only made people laugh louder, which made him look more wounded yet.
Sam hated to leave, even if he knew perfectly well that Daisy June Lee was bound to have a boyfriend-and even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t give a damn about an overage two-striper. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for?-another fragment from his lit class ran through his head.
He waved down another cab in front of the Winter Garden. This driver was a man: a man with a hook doing duty for his left hand, the one that stayed on the wheel. He drove well enough. Sam tipped him better than he had the woman who’d taken him to the theater.
“Everything all right?” he asked Lieutenant Zwilling when he came aboard the Josephus Daniels.
“Yes, sir,” the exec said. “You’re back sooner than I expected.”
Sam shrugged. “I had a good time.” Except when I was talking about you, I’m afraid. “You want to see a gal you’ll never forget, go watch Jose’s Hayride at the Winter Garden.”
“Maybe I will, sir.” By the way Zwilling spoke, he didn’t mean it. What did he do for fun? Anything? Poor bastard, Sam thought. Zwilling probably got his kicks telling other people what to do. If that wasn’t a dead-end street, Sam had never seen one.
Flora Blackford turned on the wireless in the kitchen and waited for it to warm up as the coffee started to perk and she used a spatula to turn the eggs frying in a pan. The eggs got done about the time the wireless came on. A few seconds later, two slices of toast popped up. The coffee, running behind schedule, didn’t get dark enough to suit her till she’d almost finished breakfast.
She almost didn’t recognize the patriotic song coming out of the wireless. The singer and her band didn’t seem well matched. She was more than good enough, in a conventional way. The band, by contrast, did things with syncopation and harmonies nobody else in the USA would have imagined. Flora paused with a bite of fried egg halfway to her mouth. Is that…? she wondered.
The song ended. “That was Kate Smith, with ‘God Bless the Stars and Stripes,’” the announcer said. “Backing her is the famous colored combo, Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces.”
“Thought so!” Flora said, and got up to pour herself a cup of coffee.
“Satchmo and his musicians do bless the Stars and Stripes,” the announcer continued, laying on the propaganda with a trowel. “They know too well the bars in the Stars and Bars stand for the imprisonment of their people. We’ll be back with the news on the hour following these important messages. Please stay tuned.”
Those messages were important only to the advertisers who paid for them: a soap company, a cosmetics company, a prominent brand of fountain pens, and a cigarette maker that said its products came from “the finest tobacco available.” She didn’t know how many letters she’d had from constituents in the armed forces complaining about the cigarettes that came with their rations. She couldn’t do anything about those complaints, however much she wanted to; U.S. tobacco simply didn’t measure up to what the Confederates grew.
“And now the news,” the announcer said once his station finally ran out of commercials.
“U.S. forces report significant advances in northern Georgia and western Tennessee despite the rainy weather that has slowed operations in recent days,” the newscaster said. “Our bombers punished Atlanta and Birmingham in heavy raids on industrial areas. Damage to both cities is reported to be extensive.”
“Good,” Flora murmured, though she wondered how true the reports were. If clouds covered the targets, the bombers would drop their loads anywhere they could. If the bombs came down on houses instead of factories…well, who lived in the houses? People who worked in the factories. Any which way, bombardment hurt the C.S. war effort.
“Farther north, our bombers also pounded Richmond,” the newscaster said. “Our losses were light. Little by little, we continue to beat down the enemy’s air defenses. Confederate strikes against Washington and its environs produced only slight damage. No enemy bombers appeared over Philadelphia last night.”
As far as Flora knew, that was true. She hadn’t heard any sirens. They were loud and insistent enough to make sleeping through them almost impossible. She’d done it once or twice, but no more than once or twice.
“Significant advances have also taken place in northern Arkansas, in Sequoyah, and in western Texas, where Confederate resistance seems to be crumbling,” the newsman said.
Flora hoped that wasn’t intended only to keep listeners happy with good news from a front far enough away that they couldn’t easily check up on it. The U.S. Eleventh Army was driving on Camp Determination now. If it fell, U.S. propagandists really would have something to crow about. And, if it fell, wouldn’t that also mean the Freedom Party would have a harder time killing off Negroes in the CSA?
“In an amphibious assault, U.S. Marines recaptured Wake Island, west of the Sandwich Islands,” the newsman said. “There was no fighting, the Empire of Japan having withdrawn its forces before the Marines landed. Japan no longer holds any U.S. possessions.”
And about time, too, Flora thought. That conflict would probably peter out now, the way it had a generation earlier. One of these days, there would have to be a reckoning with Japan-but not yet. Fighting through the fortified islands of the western Pacific to reach the enemy’s homeland was a distinctly unappetizing prospect.
Had Japan been able to seize the Sandwich Islands, the USA would have had a devil of a time getting them back. The U.S. West Coast would have become vulnerable to Japanese air raids. Flora remembered the Japanese strike on Los Angeles during the Pacific War, the strike that nailed the lid down on the coffin of her husband’s reelection hopes. Japan and the CSA could have worked together to cause more trouble in the eastern Pacific these days. But that wouldn’t happen now.
“In foreign news,” the broadcaster continued, “the Kaiser’s forces have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russian Army east of Kiev, and it now appears certain that the capital of Ukraine will remain in German hands. The Tsar’s wireless broadcasts speak of renewing the offensive as the Russians find the chance-as close to an admission of failure as we are likely to hear from them.”
Flora’s smile was wry. One rule held true in this war: everybody lied. Some countries lied more than others-the Confederate States, France, and Austria-Hungary came to mind. But everyone was guilty of what Churchill called terminological inexactitude now and again. You couldn’t stretch things too far. Otherwise they’d break, and the truth would bite you. But you could let your own people down easy and persuade the other side you still had plenty of fight left…whether you did or not.
“Heavy German bombing raids on Petrograd, Minsk, and Smolensk damaged Russian factories and railroad yards in those cities,” the newsman said. “And the Germans have promised to aid the nationalist uprising in Finland, and say they will recognize the Finnish provisional government.
“As if to counter that German move, the Tsar is appealing to the Russians’ ‘little brothers in the Balkans’-his term-to rebel against Austria-Hungary, whose government he terms ‘unnatural and detested by God.’ In Vienna, the King-Emperor Charles was quoted as saying that if God ever hated any regime, it was surely Russia’s.”
Takes one to know one, Flora thought. Yeah, and you know ’em all. The schoolyard taunts carried more weight when backed up by millions of men and all the munitions two industrialized countries could turn out.