American Front (26 page)

By now, Scipio knew better than to try to match wits with Duchamp. The artist’s conversation was as confusing as his paintings; he used words to reflect back on one another till common sense vanished from them. Stolidly, the butler repeated, “Would you like me to wire my mistress about the champagne, sir?”

“I give you the advice of Rabelais: do as you please,” Duchamp said, which helped not at all. The Frenchman cocked his head to one side. “Your mistress, you say. In what sense is she yours?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, sir,” Scipio said.

Marcel Duchamp stabbed out a long, pale forefinger. “You are her servant. You were, at one time, her slave, is it not so?” He waved a hand to encompass not just the dining room of the Marshlands mansion but the entire estate.

“I was a slave of the Colleton family, yes, sir, although I was manumitted not long before Miss Anne was born,” Scipio said, nothing at all in his voice now. He didn’t like being reminded of his former status, even if his present one represented no great advance upon it.

Duchamp sensed that. He didn’t let it deter him; if anything, it spurred him on. “Very well.
You
are
her
servant. She may dismiss you, punish you, give you onerous duties, do as she likes with you. Is it not so?”

“It may be so in theory,” Scipio said warily, “but Miss Colleton would never—”

Duchamp waggled that forefinger to interrupt him. “Never mind. It is in this sense of the word that you are her servant. Now, you say
she
is
your
mistress. How may you, in your turn, punish her if she fails of the requirements of a mistress?”

“What?” Even Scipio’s politeness to a guest at Marshlands, and to a white man at that (not that the Marshlands estate was likely to entertain a colored guest), proved to have limits. “You ought to know I can’t do that, sir.”

“Oh, I do know it. I know it full well. Many have accused me of being mad, but few of being stupid.” The artist winked, as if to say even here he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. But he was, or at least he sounded, serious as he went on, “So how is the charming and wealthy Miss Colleton
yours
, eh, Scipio? You cannot punish her, you cannot control her, you cannot possess her, either in economic terms or in the perfumed privacy of her boudoir, you—”

Scipio abruptly turned on his heel and walked out of the dining room, out of the mansion altogether. That Frenchman was crazy, and the people who’d told him so knew what they were talking about. In the Confederate States of America, you had to be crazy if you talked about a Negro servant possessing a white woman in her bedroom—even if you called it a boudoir. Oh, such things happened now and again. Scipio knew that. They always ended badly, too, when they were discovered. He knew that, too. But whether they happened or not, you didn’t go around
talking
about them. You sure as the devil didn’t go around suggesting them to a Negro.

“Words,” Scipio said in his educated voice. Then he repeated it in the slurred dialect of the Congaree: “Words.” Marcel Duchamp played games with them nobody had any business playing.

The hell of it was, this time he did make a corrosive kind of sense. Anne Colleton wasn’t
his
mistress in the same way he was
her
butler. The two sides of the relationship weren’t heads and tails of the same coin, the way they looked to be if you didn’t think about them. Few Negroes did think about them, instead taking them for granted…which was precisely what the white aristocracy of the Confederate States wanted them to do.

Scipio looked out toward the cotton fields from which Marshlands drew its wealth—from which Anne Colleton drew
her
wealth. The Negroes out in those fields were
her
workers, almost as they had been before manumission. But was she
theirs
? Hardly. In his own way, Duchamp was an influence as corrupting as
The Communist Manifesto
.

And Anne Colleton hadn’t a clue that was so. There were a lot of things the mistress (
his
mistress?—he’d have to think about that) didn’t have a clue about when it came to what really went on at Marshlands. Scipio hadn’t had a clue about them, either, not until he discovered the forbidden book in Cassius’ cottage.

He still wished he’d never seen it. But, to protect his own hide, he’d been reading a lot of Marx and Engels and Lincoln, and then talking things over with Cassius. The more you looked at things from an angle that wasn’t the one white folks wanted you to use, the uglier the whole structure of the Confederacy looked.

And, as if deliberately sent by a malicious God to make his misgivings worse, here came Cassius, a shotgun over one shoulder, a stick with four possums tied by the tail to it on the other. The possums, presumably, were for his own larder: Scipio tried to imagine what Marcel Duchamp would say if presented with baked possum and greens. He’d learned a little about swearing in French. He figured that would teach him a good deal more.

Cassius couldn’t wave, but did nod. “How you is?” he asked.

“I been better,” Scipio answered, as usual in the dialect in which he was addressed.

Nobody else was in earshot, and it was normal for the hunter and the butler to stand around talking. With a sly grin on his face, Cassius said, “Come de revolution, all of we be better.”

“You gwine get youself killed, is all, you talk like that,” Scipio said. “The white folks, they shoot we, they hang we. The poor buckra, they look fo’ the chance every day. You want to give it to they?”

“The poor buckra in the Army, fight the rich white folks’ war,” Cassius said. “Not enough leff to stop we, come de day.”

They’d gone round and round on that one, pummeling each other like a couple of prizefighters. Scipio tried a new argument: “Awright. Suppose we beat the white folks, Cass. What happen then? Ain’t just we the white folks is fightin’, like you say. We rise up, we give the USA the fight. The USA, they don’ love niggers hardly no better’n our own white folks.”

He’d hoped he would at least rock Cassius back on his mental heels, but the hunter—the revolutionary, the Red—only shook his head and smiled, almost pityingly. “Kip, the revolution ain’t jus’ here. The USA, they gwine have they own revolution, right along with we.”

Scipio stared at Cassius. Whatever else you could say about him, he didn’t think small. At last, cautiously, Scipio said, “They ain’t got enough niggers in the USA to rise up against they gov’ment.”

“They got plenty white folks up no’th what’s ’pressed,” Cassius answered. “You get worked sunup to sundown, don’t matter you is black or you is white. You ’pressed the same, either which way. You rise up the same, either which way. The damnyankees, they shoot they strikers same as they shoot niggers here. When the broom of revolution come out, it gwine sweep away the ’pressors in the USA the same as here.”

He sounded like a preacher stirring up the congregation. That was what he was, though he would have been furious had Scipio said so. But a lot of workers on the plantation took
The Communist Manifesto
as Gospel. Gloomily, Scipio said, “You gwine get a lot o’ niggers killed. They rise up in the USA, lots o’ they poor buckra get killed. We don’ rise up together. They white, we black. Things is like that, an’ that’s how things is.”

“Come the revolution, black an’ white be all the same,” Cassius said.

For once, Scipio got the last word: “Yeah. All be
dead
the same.”

VII

Captain Irving Morrell lay between starched white sheets in an airy Tucson hospital that smelled of carbolic acid and, below that, of pus. He was sick of hospitals. The words
sick to death of hospitals
ran through his mind, but he rejected them. He’d come too close to dying to make jokes, or even feeble plays on words, about it.

His leg still throbbed like a rotten tooth, and here it was December when he’d been hit in August. More than once, the sawbones had wanted to take it off at the hip, for fear infection would kill him. He’d managed to talk them out of it every time, and having a toothache down there was heaven compared to what he’d gone through for a while. He could even walk on the leg now, and with aspirin he hardly noticed the pain—on good days.

A doctor with captain’s bars on the shoulders of his white coat approached the bed. Morrell had never seen him before. He didn’t know whether he’d see him again. The doctors here—the doctors at every military hospital these days—were like factory workers, dealing with wounded men as if they were faulty mechanisms to be reassembled, often moving from one to the next without the slightest acknowledgment of their common humanity. Maybe that kept them from dwelling on what they had to do. Maybe they were just too swamped to invest the time. Maybe both—Morrell had learned things were seldom simple.

The doctor pulled back the top sheet. He peered down at the valley in the flesh of Morrell’s thigh. “Not too red,” he said, scribbling a note. The skin of his hands was red, too, and raw, cracked from the harsh disinfectant in which he scrubbed many times a day.

“It’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Morrell agreed. He didn’t know whether that was true or not, but he did know how much he wanted to get out of here and return to the war that was passing him by.

The doctor prodded at the wound with a short-nailed forefinger, down at the bottom of the valley where a river would have run had it been a product of geology rather than mere war. “Does that hurt?”

“No.” The lie came easily. Morrell’s conscience, unlike his leg hurt not at all. Compared to what he’d been through, the pain the doctor inflicted was nothing, maybe less.
I really am healing
, he thought in some amazement. For a long time, he’d thought he never would.

Another note, another prod. “How about that?”

“No, sir, not that, either.” Another lie.
If I can convince everyone else it doesn’t hurt. I can convince myself, too. If I can convince the quack, maybe he’ll let me out of here. Worth trying for
. The judgment was as cool and precise as if Morrell were picking the weak spot in an enemy position. That was how he’d got shot in the first place, but he chose not to dwell on such inconvenient details.

Two orderlies came into the warm, airy room, one pushing a wheeled gurney, the other walking beside it. Bandages covered most of the head of the still figure lying on the gurney. Yellow serum stained the white cotton at a spot behind the left temple. Between them, the orderlies gently transferred what had been a man from the gurney to a bed. The axles creaked slightly as they turned the gurney in a tight circle and rolled it away.

In his time on his back, Morrell had seen a lot of wounds like that. “Poor bastard,” he muttered.

The doctor nodded. Next to that breathing husk, Morrell
was
a human being to him. “The worst of it is,” the doctor said, “he’s liable to stay alive for a long time. If you put food in his mouth, he’ll swallow it. If you give him water, he’ll drink. But he’ll never get up out of that bed again, and he’ll never know he’s in it, either.”

Morrell shivered. “Better to be shot dead quick and clean. Then it’s over. You’re not just—lingering.”

“That’s a good word,” the doctor said. “Head wounds are the dreadful ones. Either they do kill the man receiving them—and so many do, far out of proportion to the number received—or they leave him a vegetable, like that unfortunate soldier.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “It’s a problem where I wish we could do more.”

“What’s to be done?” Morrell said. “A service cap won’t stop a bullet, any more than your tunic or your trousers would.”

“Of course not,” the doctor said. “Some of the elite regiments wear leather helmets like the ones the German army uses, don’t they?”

“The
Pickelhaube
,” Morrell agreed. “That might help if you fell off a bicycle, but it won’t stop a bullet, either. A steel helmet might, if it wasn’t too heavy to wear. You probably couldn’t make one that would keep everything out, but—”

He and the doctor looked at each other. Then, at the same moment, their eyes went to the bandaged soldier with half his brains blown out. The doctor said, “That might be an excellent notion, certainly in terms of wound reduction. I may take it up with my superiors and, upon your discharge, I suggest you do the same with yours. Knowing how slowly the Army does everything, we could hardly hope for immediate action even if we get approval, but the sooner we start seeking it—”

“The sooner something will get done,” Morrell finished for him. He hated the way Army wheels got mired in bureaucratic mud. Maybe, with the war on, things would move faster. He hadn’t had a chance to find out; he’d been flat on his back almost since fighting broke out. But the doctor had spoken a magic word. “Discharge?”

“You’re not one hundred per cent sound,” the doctor said, glancing down at the notes he’d written. “Odds are, you’ll never be a hundred per cent sound, not with that wound. But you have function in the leg, the infection is controlled if not suppressed, and we may hope exercise will improve your overall condition now rather than setting it back. If not, of course, you will return to the hospital wherever you happen to be reassigned.”

“Of course,” Morrell said piously, not meaning a word of it. Inactivity had been a pain as bad as any from his wound. Once he got back in the field, he wouldn’t report himself unfit for duty, not unless he got shot again—and not then, either, if he could get away with it. He’d buy a walking stick, he’d detail a sergeant to haul him around as necessary—but he’d stay in action. There had been times when he thought he’d go crazy, just from being cooped up in one place for weeks at a time.

“I am serious about that,” the doctor said; Morrell had had better luck fooling some of the other quacks they’d sicced on him. “If the infection flares up again, or if it should reach the bone, amputation will offer the only hope of saving your life.”

“I understand,” Morrell said, which didn’t mean he took the medical man seriously. If they hadn’t chopped the leg off when it was swollen to twice its proper size and leaking pus the way an armored car with a punctured radiator leaked water, they weren’t going to haul out the meat axe for it now.

“Very well.” The doctor jotted one more note. “My orders are to put any men, especially experienced officers, who are at all capable of serving back on active-duty status as soon as possible. There peutically, this is less than ideal, but therapeutic needs must be weighed against those of the nation, and so you will be sent east for reassignment.”

“I will be glad to get out of here,” Morrell said, “but isn’t there any chance of sending me back down to the campaign for Guaymas? Last I heard, we’d bogged down less than a hundred miles from the town.”

“That’s my understanding, too,” the doctor said, “The reassignment center, however, has been established in St. Louis. You’ll get your orders there, whatever they turn out to be.”

Morrell nodded, accepting his fate. That sounded like the Army set up one central center somewhere, and process everyone through it. If you went a thousand miles, then came back to somewhere only a hundred miles from where you’d started, that was just your tough luck. You chalked it up to the way the system worked and went on about your assigned business.

And, of course, there were no guarantees he’d get sent back to Sonora. He could as easily end up in Pennsylvania or Kansas or Quebec or British Columbia. War flamed all over the continent.

He started to ask the doctor when he could expect to head out of Tucson, but the fellow had moved on to the next bed and was examining a sergeant who’d taken a shell fragment that had shattered his arm. He had suffered an amputation, and was bitter about it. Now that the doctor was looking at him, Morrell might as well have ceased to exist.

Knowing he would soon be allowed to escape the confines of the military hospital, to see more of Tucson’s notched, mountainous skyline than the window showed him, should have given him the patience to bear his remaining time in enforced captivity with good grace. So he told himself. Instead, he felt more trapped in his bed than ever. He fussed and fidgeted and made himself so unpleasant that the nurses, with whom he had for the most part got on well, started snapping back at him.

Three days later, though, an orderly brought him a new captain’s uniform to replace the hospital robe he’d worn so long. In size, the new uniform was a perfect match for the blood-drenched, tattered one in which he’d been wounded. It hung on him like a tent. He could have concealed a football under his tunic without unduly stretching it, and he had to use the point of a knife to cut a new hole in his belt so his trousers would stay up. They flapped around his skinny legs like the baggy cotton bloomers women wore when they exercised.

He didn’t care. Even with the stick, walking down the corridor to the buggy that would take him to the train station left him dizzy and light-headed. He didn’t care about that, either. The driver was a gray-haired civilian who, by his bearing, had spent a good many years in the Army. “Glad to be getting back into it, sir?” he asked as Morrell struggled up into the seat behind him. After he spoke, he coughed several times. Morrell wondered if he’d come here to New Mexico in hopes of healing consumptive lungs.

That was however it was. The question had only one possible answer. “Hell, yes!” Morrell said. The driver chuckled and flicked the reins. The two-horse team started forward. Morrell leaned back in his seat. He could relax now. He was heading back toward the world where he belonged.

By the time Jonathan Moss pulled on woolen long johns, trousers, boots, tunic, heavy wool sweater, even heavier sheepskin coat, and leather flying helmet and goggles, he felt as if he’d doubled in weight. He’d certainly doubled in width. And, with so many layers of clothing swaddling him, he could hardly move. He waddled through the doorway of the battered barn by the airfield. Forcing each leg forward took a separate and distinct effort.

One of the mechanics looked up from a poker game in the corner and said, “Think you’ll be warm enough, Lieutenant?” He laughed and, without waiting for an answer, turned his attention back to the dealer. “Gimme two, Byron, and make ’em good ones for a change, why don’t you?”

Nettled, Moss snapped, “It’s cold enough down here, Lefty. Go up five thousand feet and it’s a hell of a lot colder.”

“Yeah, I know, sir,” the mechanic said, unabashed. He studied the cards Byron had dealt him. By his revolted expression, they hadn’t even come out of the same deck as the other three in his hand. You took that expression seriously at your own peril. If Lefty wasn’t a rich man by the time the war ended—if the war ever ended—it would only be because he’d invested his winnings in lousy stocks.

One thing about flying: going up in the air meant Moss wouldn’t lose any money to the mechanic for a while. Bad weather had grounded the reconnaissance squadron the past few days. It wasn’t exactly choice out there now, but they might be able to get up, look around, and come back in one piece.

Moss chuckled wryly to himself as he walked out into watery sunshine. When the fighting started—which seemed like a devil of a long time ago now—a lot of officers hadn’t wanted to pay any attention to the reports the aeroplane pilots brought back. Now people were screaming blue murder because they’d been deprived of those reports for a few days.
Go on and fly
, the attitude seemed to be.
So what if you crash?—as long as we get the information
.

“Nice to be wanted,” Moss said, and chuckled again. He climbed up into his Super Hudson. The first thing he did was check the action of the machine gun mounted in front of him. The next thing he did was check the belt of ammunition that fed the machine gun. He found a couple of cartridges he didn’t like. He took off his mittens, extracted the bad rounds from the belt, and yelled for an armorer. He soon had new cartridges more to his satisfaction. If your machine gun jammed in an aerial duel, all you could do was run away. Since the Avros the Canadians flew were faster than the Curtiss machines, you didn’t want to have to try to do that.

One by one, the other pilots of the four-aeroplane flight came out of the barn and got up into their aircraft. Baum and Nelson and McClintock were as heavily wrapped as he was, and distinguishable one from another mostly because McClintock was half a head taller than Nelson, who overtopped Baum by a like amount. They too started checking their machine guns and ammunition.

After what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes, the mechanics deigned to put down their cards long enough to help send the airmen on their way. Lefty sauntered out to Moss’ aeroplane. He had an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth; he wouldn’t strike a match till he got back to the barn.

Around that cigar, he said, “You come back safe now, sir, you hear? You got money I ain’t won yet.”

“For which vote of confidence I thank you,” Moss said, and Lefty laughed. The mechanic grabbed hold of one blade of the two-bladed wooden prop and spun it, hard. The engine sputtered but didn’t catch. Lefty muttered something so hot, it should have lighted the cigar all by itself. He spun the prop again. The engine sputtered, stuttered, and began to roar.

Moss glanced over to his flightmates. Baum’s engine was going, and so was McClintock’s. Lefty trotted toward Nelson’s aeroplane, as did a couple of other mechanics. Nelson spread his hands in frustration. You hated to break down, but what were you supposed to do sometimes?

Moss pounded a fist down onto his leg. He could hardly feel the blow through all the clothes he had on, but that didn’t matter. The flight would be short a man, no help for it. If they got jumped, the Canucks and limeys would have an edge.