“You can try,” the submersible skipper answered. “My duty is to escape if I can.” He nodded to George Enos. “I wish I’d never seen you once, let alone twice, but I do thank you for speaking up for me there.”
George looked him in the eye. “If you were the skipper of the damn commerce raider that got my fishing boat when I was still a civilian, you’d be swimming now, for all of me.”
“Get moving,” Lieutenant Crowder said again, and, along with his crew, Ralph Briggs headed for the-
“The brig. Briggs is going to the brig,” George said, and laughed as the Confederates, one by one, went down the hatchway and disappeared.
Standing in Bay View Park, Chester Martin peered east across the Maumee River to the Toledo, Ohio, docks. Mist that was turning to drizzle kept him from seeing as much as he would have liked, but a couple of light cruisers from the Lake Erie fleet were in port, resupplying so they could go off and bombard the southern coast of Ontario again.
Martin turned to his younger sister. “You know what, Sue? This business of watching the war from the far side of the river is a…lot more fun than being in it up close.” The pause came from his swallowing a pungent intensifier or two. In the trenches, he cursed as automatically as he breathed. He’d horrified his mother a couple of times, and now tried to watch himself around his female relatives.
Sue giggled. She’d caught the hesitation. She found his profanity more funny than horrifying, but then she was of his generation. They shared a sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned family look, though Sue’s hair was brown, not sandy heading toward red like his.
She said, “I’m just sorry you had to get hurt so you could come home for a while.”
“Oh, I knew it was a hometowner as soon as I got it,” he said, exaggerating only a little. “Never worried about it for a minute. Now that my arm’s out of the sling, I expect they’ll be sending me back to the front before too long.”
“I wish they wouldn’t,” she said, and took his good right hand in both of hers. She was careful with his left arm, even if he’d finally had it released from its cloth cocoon.
From behind him, a gruff voice said, “You there, soldier-let’s see your papers, and make it snappy.”
Martin’s turn was anything but snappy; it let the military policeman see the three stripes on his sleeve. The MP was only a private first class. He didn’t worry about that, though, not with the law on his side. Martin was convinced the military police attracted self-righteous sons of bitches the way spilled sugar drew ants.
But this fellow wouldn’t be able to give him a hard time. He took the necessary paperwork from a tunic pocket and handed it to the MP. “Convalescent leave, eh?” the fellow said. “We’ve seen some humbug documents of this sort lately, Sergeant. What would happen if I took you back to barracks and told you to show me a scar?”
“I’d do it, and you’d get your ass in a sling,” Martin answered steadily. He looked the private first class up and down with the scorn most front-line soldiers felt for their not-quite-counterparts who hadn’t seen real action. “Why is it, sonny boy, the only time you ever see a dead MP, he’s got a Springfield bullet in him, not a Tredegar?”
Sue didn’t get that. The military policeman did, and turned brick red. “I ought to keep these,” he said, holding Martin’s papers so the sergeant couldn’t take them back.
“Go ahead,” Martin said. “Let’s head back to your barracks. We can both tell your commanding officer about it. Like I say, doesn’t matter a bean’s worth to me.”
A soldier ready to go back to barracks and take his case to the officer of the day was not a spectacle the MP was used to. Angrily, he thrust Martin’s papers back at him. Angrily, he stomped off, the soles of his boots slapping the bricks of the walkway.
“That’s telling him,” Sue said proudly, clutching her brother’s arm. “He didn’t have any business talking to you like that.”
“He could ask for my papers, to make sure I’m not absent without leave,” Martin said. “But when he got nasty afterwards-” He made a face. “He didn’t have any call to do that, except he’s a military policeman, and people have to do what he tells them.”
“Like the Coal Board officials,” Sue said. “And the Ration Board, and the Train Transportation Board, and the War Loan subscription committees, and-” She could have gone on. Instead, she said, “All those people were bad enough before the war. They’re worse now, and there are more of them. And if you’re not a big cheese yourself, they act like little tin gods and give you a nasty time just to show they can do it.”
“Makes you wonder what the country’s coming to sometimes, doesn’t it?” Martin said. “Old people say there used to be more room to act the way you pleased, back before the Second Mexican War taught us how surrounded we are. Gramps would always go on about that, remember?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I was only six or seven when he died. What I remember about him was his peg leg, and how he always pretended he was a pirate on account of it.”
“Yeah. He got hurt worse than I did, and the doctors in the War of Secession weren’t as good as they are nowadays, either, I don’t suppose. He used to talk about stacks of cut-off arms and legs outside the surgeons’ tents after a battle.”
Sue looked revolted. “Not with me, he didn’t.”
“You’re a girl,” Chester reminded her. “He used to tell me and Hank all the horrible stuff. We ate it up like gumdrops.”
She sighed. “I was only seven when Henry died, too. What a horrible year that was, everybody wailing all the time. I miss him sometimes, same as Gramps.”
“I was-eleven? Twelve? Something like that,” Martin said. “He was two years older than me, I know that much. I remember the way the doctor kept shaking his head. For all the good he did us, he might as well have been a Sioux medicine man. Scarlet fever, any of those things-I wish they could cure them, not just tell you what they are.”
“He’d be in the Army, too-Henry, I mean.” Sue’s laugh was startled. “I don’t think I ever thought of Henry all grown up till now.”
“He’d be in the Army, all right,” Chester agreed. “He’d be an officer, I bet. Hank was always sharp as a razor. People listened to him, too. I didn’t-but I was his brother, after all.” A chilly breeze from off the lake seemed to slice right through his uniform. “Brr! Enough sightseeing. Let’s go home and sit in front of the fire.”
They caught the trolley and went southwest down Summit, alongside the Maumee. After three or four miles, the trolley car turned inland and clattered past the county courthouse and, across the street from it, the big bronze statue of Remembrance, sword bared in her right hand.
Pointing to it, Sue said, “We just got some new stereoscope views of New York City. Now I know how good a copy of the statue on Bedloe’s Island that one is, even if ours is only half as tall.”
“We’ve still got a lot to pay people back for-the United States do, I mean,” Martin said. Now he laughed. “I’ve got a Rebel to pay back, and I don’t even know who he is.”
The trolley took them over the Ottawa River, a smaller stream than the Maumee, and up into Ottawa Heights. The closest stop was three blocks from their apartment house. Chester remembered how cramped he’d felt in the flat before the war started. He had no more room now-less, in fact, because they’d had to make room for him when he came back to convalesce-but he didn’t mind. After crowded barracks and insanely crowded bombproof shelters, a room of his own, even a small one, seemed luxury itself.
His mother-an older, graying version of Sue-all but pounced on him when he came in the door. “You have a letter here from the White House!” Louisa Martin exclaimed, thrusting the fancy envelope at him. The Martin family had a strong tradition of never opening one another’s mail; that tradition, obviously, had never been so sorely tested as now.