American Front (61 page)

“That’s why we built ’em,” Kidde said. He didn’t sound dreamy. He sounded predatory.

By the sound, by the feel, of the engines, they were making better than twenty knots. An hour passed after they steamed out of Pearl Harbor, then another one. A colored steward came by with sandwiches and coffee from the galley. Pete Jonas got out a deck of cards. Kidde waved for him to put it back in his pocket. He made a sour face, but obeyed.

All of a sudden, the
Dakota
swung hard aport. The engine’s roar picked up the flank speed. “What the deuce—” Luke Hoskins said, an instant before the torpedo slammed into the port side of the ship.

The deck jerked under Carsten’s feet. If you got hit the right—or rather, the wrong—way, the shock wave from an explosion like that could break your ankles. That didn’t happen, but Sam sat down, hard, on the steel plates of the deck. The electric lights in the sponson flickered. Then, for a dreadful second or two, they went out. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” Jonas moaned, which was pretty much what Carsten was thinking, too.

He scrambled to his feet. He’d just regained them when the lights came back on. He glanced toward the door that led out of the sponson, out to the stairway to the top deck, out to the deck itself, out to the lifeboats. He didn’t move toward the door, not a step. Nobody else did, either, in spite of bawling klaxons and shouts outside in the corridor. They were still at battle stations. Nobody had given any orders about abandoning ship.

Danger—hell, fear—made his mind work very quickly, very clearly. “We got sucker-punched,” he exclaimed. “Nothing else but. The Japs put that little fleet out there where we had to spot it—Christ, they sent out that aeroplane to lead us right to it. And they posted submersibles right out here between it and Pearl, and just sat there waiting for us to come running out. And we did—and look what it got us.”

“How come you’re so goddamn much smarter than the admiral?” Kidde sounded half sardonic, half respectful.

“Not likely,” Sam answered. “Now that we’ve been torpedoed, I bet he’s figured out what’s going on, too.”

“If the engines quit, we’re in trouble,” Luke Hoskins said. “That’ll mean the boilers are flooded.” He stood quite still, a thoughtful look on his face. “We’re listing to port, I think.”

Carsten could feel it, too: the deck wasn’t level, not any more. He glanced to the doorway again. If he left without orders, it was a court-martial. If he stayed and the battleship sank, a court-martial was the least of his worries. But the engines kept running, and the list wasn’t getting worse in a hurry.

Lieutenant Commander Grady came in, “Looks like we’re going to make it,” he said. “Compartmenting’s holding up, engines are safe, and the aft magazine didn’t go up.” He scratched his chin. “If it had, I think we would have known it.”

“So what have we got, sir?” Kidde asked. “A couple thousand tons of water in us?”

“Something like that,” Grady agreed. “We limp back to Pearl Harbor if we can, we go into drydock for six months or however long it takes to patch us up again, and then we go back to war.” His features, lean, scholarly—more a professor’s face than a naval officer’s—went grim. “We got off lucky. They sank the
Denver
, and it doesn’t look like many of her crew had time to get off before she went down. Not a better cruiser in the Pacific Fleet than the
Denver
.”

“They were laying for us,” Carsten said, “They showed the fleet and the aeroplane to bring us out, and then—”

“I’d say you’re right,” Grady replied. “The ships kept the submarines in fuel and supplies, too: not likely they’d have the range to go from Manila to here and back without stocking up along the way. I hope the rest of the fleet manages to punish them. We’re out of the fight for now.”

Out of the fight
. The words seemed to echo in the sponson as Grady left to pass the news to the rest of the gun crews under his command. The
Dakota
swung through a long, slow turn, as awkward as a horse with a lame hind leg, and began limping back toward Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t done anything wrong except pursue too eagerly, but they were, sure as hell, out of the fight.

“Fuck it. We’re alive,” Luke Hoskins said.

Sam looked back at the doorway one last time. He wouldn’t have to run out through it, hoping he could make it up on deck before water or fire engulfed him. When you got down to it, that wasn’t such a bad bargain. “We’re alive,” he repeated, and the words sounded very fine.

Mary McGregor bounced up and down on the seat of the wagon beside her father. “What are we going to get?” she said. She’d been saying that ever since they’d left the farm for the trip into Rosenfeld, Manitoba.

As he’d done every time she asked, Arthur McGregor answered, “I don’t know. You’re the one who’s turning seven today. I’ve got fifty cents in my pocket, and you can spend it any way you please.”

“I’ll get a store doll, one with real glass eyes,” Mary declared. Then she shook her head, making her auburn curls fly around her face. “No, I won’t. I’ll get candy. How much candy can I get for fifty cents, Pa?”

“Enough to make you sick for a week,” McGregor answered, laughing. His youngest child was full of extravagant notions. He figured a few more years of living on the farm would cure her of most of them.

Off to the north, artillery rumbled. Mary took no notice of it, prattling on cheerfully about everything on which she might spend her half-dollar. If she got everything she wanted, it could easily have cost McGregor fifty times that. Moreover, her choice was liable to be severely limited: if Henry Gibbon didn’t have it in his general store, she couldn’t get it. Her father let her go on all the same. Dreams were free, even if presents weren’t.

The artillery rumbled again. Arthur McGregor sighed. Though dreams were free, they didn’t always come true. When the Anglo-Canadian offensive opened and pushed the Americans south from Winnipeg, he’d dreamt they would throw the Yankees out of Canada altogether. But Rosenfeld had never seen a single khaki uniform, not unless the Yanks had shipped prisoners through. The town and his farm hadn’t even come within artillery range of the front. It was high summer now, and everything around these parts remained under the muscular thumb of the USA.

Coming into Rosenfeld, he saw just how muscular that thumb had become. Soldiers in green-gray crowded the streets, some no doubt going up toward the front, some coming back for relief. Their boots, and the tires of motorcars and great grunting White trucks, made dust swirl like fog all through the town.

They had soldiers serving as traffic policemen, now halting a stream of trucks so an officer in an automobile could cut across, now halting a column of men who looked fresh off the train so more trucks could get through, and now holding up McGregor to let another column of soldiers, these men veterans, go by. From the veterans, whose uniforms were sun-bleached and imperfectly clean, rose a smell that put him in mind of the farmhouse the morning before the bathtub got filled. He’d smelled it in barracks, too, and especially out on maneuvers—men on the front line had little incentive and less ability to keep clean.

“Get off the main road, Canuck,” one of the soldiers called, pointing the wagon onto a little side street. There wasn’t any particular animosity in the order. McGregor could even see the need for it. But—

“What’s a Canuck, Pa?” Mary asked as he stopped disrupting traffic.

“You are,” he answered, getting out of the wagon to tie the horse to a hitching post. “I am.” He picked her up and put her down on the plank sidewalk. “It’s what Americans call Canadians when they don’t like us much.”

“Oh.” She thought about that, then nodded. “You mean the way we call them goddamn stinking Yanks?”

“Yes, just like that,” he said, and coughed. “But we don’t call them that where they can hear us. And, for that matter, who called them that where you could hear him?”

“It wasn’t a him—it was Ma,” Mary answered, which made McGregor cough all over again. He’d have to have a talk with Maude when he got home. Mary went on, “How come they get to call us names whenever they please and we don’t get to call them names whenever we please? That’s not fair.”

“Because they have more guns than we do, and they drove our soldiers out of this part of the country,” he told her. “If you have more guns in a war, you get to say what’s fair.”

She chewed on that. To his relief, she didn’t argue with him about it. He took her hand and walked toward the general store. Several U.S. soldiers smiled at her along the way. A lot of them weren’t far from McGregor’s age: reservists called up for the war, probably with daughters as old as Mary or maybe even older. She took no notice of the Americans. She made a point of taking no notice of the Americans.

“Mornin’, Arthur,” Henry Gibbon said when they went into the general store, Gibbon beamed down at Mary. “And a good mornin’ to you, little lady.”

“Good morning, Mr. Gibbon,” she answered, very politely: the storekeeper, being a Canadian, deserved not only notice but respect.

“Reason we’re here,” McGregor said, “is that somebody here just turned seven years old, and she’s got half a dollar to spend however she pleases. She’ll be wanting to look at your toys and dolls and candy, unless I miss my guess.”

“We can probably do somethin’ along those lines,” Gibbon said. He beckoned Mary over to the jars of sweets on his counter. “Why don’t you have a look at these here, little lady, and I’ll see what I’ve got in the way of toys.” He glanced up at Mary’s father. “We’re apt to be a bit picked over, things bein’ like they is.”

“I understand that,” he answered. “But if anybody in Rosenfeld has anything good, you’re the man.”

“That I am,” the storekeeper agreed solemnly. He had just turned around to see what a pasteboard box held when something exploded across the street. The plate-glass window at the front of the general store shattered, fragments flying inward. One glittering shard flicked McGregor’s sleeve; another stuck out of the floor boards bare inches from his foot.

Mary screamed. He ran to her and scooped her up, afraid some of the shrapnel-like slivers of glass had cut or stabbed her. But she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, though glass dust sparkled in her hair like diamonds. She trembled in his arms.

“Holy Jesus!” Henry Gibbon said. He looked at what had been his window and said “Holy Jesus!” again, louder. Then he looked out through what had been his window and said “Holy Jesus!” a third time, louder still. This time, he amplified it somewhat: “That’s the
Register
office, blown to hell and gone.”

McGregor had been too worried about his daughter even to think about what might have blown up out there. Now he looked, too. Sure enough, the wood-and-brick building that had housed Rosenfeld’s weekly newspaper was nothing but a ruin now, and beginning to burn. If the fire engines didn’t get here in a tearing hurry, that whole block was liable to go up in smoke, and maybe this one, too, if the wind blew sparks across the street.

In the street lay U.S. soldiers, some down and writhing, some down and still. A couple of horses were down, too, screaming like women in torment. An officer went up to them and quickly put them out of their torment with his pistol. McGregor thought well of him for that; he would have done the same.

In that spirit, he set Mary down and went out of the general store to see if he could do anything for the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were the enemy, yes, but watching anybody suffer wasn’t easy. One of them had a leg bent at an unnatural angle. McGregor knew how to set broken bones.

He never got the chance. The officer who’d shot the two horses swung up his pistol and aimed it at McGregor’s head. “Don’t move, Canuck,” he snapped. “You’ll be hostage number one. We’ll take twenty of you bastards, and if the bomber doesn’t give himself up, we’ll line you up against a wall and teach you a lesson you’ll remember the rest of your life.” He laughed.

McGregor froze. He’d known the Yankees did things like that, but he’d never imagined it could happen to him.

Mary came flying out of the general store. “Don’t you point a gun at my pa!” she screamed at the officer. McGregor grabbed her before she could hurl herself against the American. He had to move to do that, but the man didn’t fire.

Henry Gibbon came out of the store, too. “Have a heart, Crane,” he said to the U.S. officer. “Arthur McGregor’s no bomber, and he doesn’t live in town, so he doesn’t make much of a hostage, neither. Only reason he came in is that today’s his little girl’s seventh birthday.” He pointed to Mary.

The U.S. officer—Crane—scowled—but after a moment he lowered the pistol. “All right,” he said to McGregor. “Get the hell out of here.”

McGregor’s legs felt loose and light with fear and relief, so he seemed to be floating above the ground, not walking on it. He steered Mary toward the side street on which he’d left the wagon.

“But I didn’t get my birthday presents!” she said, and started to cry.

“Oh, yes, you did,” he told her.

“No, I didn’t!” she said, “Not anything, not even one peppermint drop.”

“Oh, yes, you did,” he repeated, so emphatically that she looked up in puzzled curiosity. He pointed to himself. “Do you know what you got? You got to keep me.”

She kept on crying. He wasn’t a doll or a ball or a top or a peppermint drop. He didn’t care. He was alive, and he was going to stay that way a while longer.

Jefferson Pinkard got to the foundry floor at the Sloss works a few minutes early, as he usually did, Vespasian and Agrippa, the two Negroes who’d taken over the night shift, nodded and said, “Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” together.

“Mornin’,” Pinkard said. Both blacks had proved themselves solid workers, worthy of being talked with almost as if they were white men. He looked around. “Where’s Pericles at? He’s usually in here before I am.”

After a pause, Vespasian said, “He ain’t comin’ in today, Mistuh Pinkard.”

“Oh?” Jeff said. “He sick?” Pericles and Vespasian were kin or in-laws or something of the sort; he couldn’t quite remember what. Just because you talked with black men didn’t mean you had to keep track of every little thing about them.