American Front (76 page)

McGregor got an answer, far more quickly and with far more confidence in his accuracy than if he’d had to do arithmetic on paper. If you filled the heads of people like that with nonsense like that, and did it for a few years or maybe for a generation at most, what would you have? You’d have people who weren’t empty-headed Canadians any more. You’d have people who were empty-headed Americans instead.

“Maybe we won’t send you back to that school after all,” he said slowly. Julia beamed at him, looking as much surprised as delighted. And Mary let out such a whoop of delight that her mother came out of the kitchen to see what had happened.

When Arthur McGregor explained what he said and why, Maude nodded. “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said. “If they’re going to try to make us over, we can’t very well let them, can we?”

“I aim to do everything I can to stop them, anyhow,” he answered. “We have primers of one sort or another here around the house, anyway. You and I can give the girls some lessons, anyhow. That way, when this country is back in Canadian hands the way it’s supposed to be, they won’t have lost too much time with their schooling.”

“Oh, thank you, Papa!” Julia breathed. “Thank you so much.”

Mary was looking less pleased with the solution. “You mean we’ll have to go to school
here
?” she said. “That’s no good.”

“I expect your mother and I can probably do a better job of riding herd on you than any schoolteacher ever born,” McGregor said.

By the expression on Mary’s face, she expected the same thing, and the expectation filled her with something other than delight. She turned on her big sister. “Now look what you’ve gone and done,” she said shrilly.

“It’s not my fault,” Julia said. Before Mary could demand whose fault it was if not hers, as Mary was plainly about to do, she answered the not yet spoken question on her own: “It’s the Americans’ fault.” That, for a wonder, satisfied her little sister. Mary believed the Americans capable of any enormity. Arthur McGregor was inclined to agree with her.

Later that night, after the children were asleep and he and Maude lying down in their bed, his wife said to him, “I wouldn’t mind so much sending the children to the school, no matter what it taught about history and such, if…” Her voice trailed away.

McGregor understood what she meant. He didn’t want to say it, either, but say it he did: “If you thought they’d only have to listen to American lies for another year, or two at the most.”

Beside him, Maude nodded. The night was warm, but she shivered. “I’m afraid we’re going to lose the war, and I’m afraid we won’t have a country we can call our own any more.”

I’m afraid we’re going to lose the war
. Neither of them had come out and said that before now. “I think we’ll beat them in the end,” McGregor answered, trying to keep up his spirits as well as hers. “They haven’t licked us yet, and the mother country is helping all she can. Everything will turn out right. You wait and see.”

“I hope so,” she said. But then she sighed and fell asleep. Arthur McGregor hoped so, too, but he’d long since discovered the difference between what he hoped and what came true. Now that Maude had named the fear, he could feel it nibbling at his soul, too.
I’m afraid we’re going to lose the war
. No matter how tired he was, sleep took a long time catching up with him.

Sam Carsten peered out of the barracks at Pearl Harbor toward the drydock where the damaged
Dakota
was being repaired. Other buildings hid the drydock from sight, but he knew exactly where it was. He thought he could have been dropped anywhere in or near Honolulu and pointed accurately toward it, just as a compass reliably pointed north. His affinity for the ship was hardly less than the instrument’s for the North Magnetic Pole.

Knowing the
Dakota
was wounded ate at him, so much so that he burst out, “I’m afraid we’re going to lose the goddamn war.”

Hiram Kidde understood him perfectly. “Fleet’s not gonna go to the devil on account of we’re one battleship light,” the gunner’s mate said reassuringly. He got a sly look in his eye. “’Sides, Sam, I know what’s really eating you.”

“What’s that?” Carsten said.

“Now that we’re stuck here on the beach, we have to make like soldiers instead of sailors,” Kidde answered.

“That’s not all bad.” Carsten pointed to the row on row of iron cots. “Nice to be able to get some sack time without Crosetti farting in my face from the top bunk. Chow’s better, too, same as it always is when we’re in port instead of steaming. But…yeah. I haven’t been out of a ship for such a long stretch since I joined up. I don’t much like it.”

“Me, neither,” Kidde said, “on both counts, and I been in the Navy damn near as long as you’ve been alive. Other thing is, when you’re on a ship you aren’t just spinning your wheels. You keep things clean, you keep things neat, on account of it makes the ship work better. Doing it on dry land…Why bother?”

“Orders,” Carsten said, making it a dirty word. “Somebody says you got to do it, you got to do it, never mind whether it makes sense.”

“I’m damn glad you understand how that is, Sam, damn glad,” Kidde said in a tone of voice that made Carsten realize he’d been betrayed—worse, that he’d just gone and betrayed himself. Smiling at how nicely the trap had worked, Kidde went on, “Got a lot of walks out there that need policing. Get yourself a broom and get to it.”

“Have a heart, ‘Cap’n,’” Sam said piteously. “You send me out in the sun for a couple hours here and they can stick an apple in my mouth and serve me up at the officers’ mess tonight. I’ll be cooked meat.” He ran a hand along his arm, showing off his fair, fair skin.

“Grab a broom,” Kidde said, all at once sounding much more like a chief petty officer than a buddy.

“I hope you screw Maggie Stevenson,” Carsten said, and then, while Kidde was still blinking (any male human being who didn’t want to screw Maggie Stevenson had to have a screw loose himself), he added, “right after the guy with the chancre.”

There were people who, when they said things like that, started fights. When Carsten said things like that, he got laughs. “You’re a funny guy—funny like a crutch,” Kidde said, but, if he was trying not to chuckle, it was a losing effort. “Go on, funny guy, get moving.”

Sam smeared his arms and his nose and the back of his neck with zinc oxide ointment. He was unhappily aware that the stuff didn’t do much good, but it was, or at least it might have been, better than nothing. He supposed that made up for the medicinal stink of the goop.

Resigning himself to baking, he went out, broom and dustpan in hand. The dustpan wasn’t standard military issue; some ingenious soul had mounted it on the end of a broomstick, too, so Sam didn’t have to bend down every time he swept something into it. He approved of that. He approved of anything that made work easier, especially when it was work he had to do.

The walks were pretty clean. Even ashore, sailors were most of them neat people, carrying over the habits they’d picked up at sea. Whenever he came across a cigar butt or a crumpled-up empty pack of cigarettes or a scrap of paper, he swept it into the dustpan with a muttered, “God damn the Marines.”

He muttered his curses for two reasons. First, he didn’t know whether Marines were actually responsible for the trash, though he would have bet on it: they weren’t trained to neatness the way ordinary Navy men were. The other reason was that, even if he’d been right, some Marines walking by might have heard him, and they’d have beaten the stuffing out of him just as enthusiastically as if he’d been wrong.

Marines strolled through Pearl Harbor as if they owned the world. Marines acted that way even aboard ship. It drove Navy men crazy—but you had to be worse than crazy to want to mess with one of the hard-faced men in forest green. Even if you were a tough guy and you beat him, all of his buddies would come after you then, and they hung together a lot tighter than sailors did. Marines put Sam in mind of mean hunting dogs. You took them to where the game was, you pointed them at it, and you stood back and let them kill it. If you got in the way, they’d chew you up, too.

And so, when, after an hour or so of Sam’s being out in the sun, a Marine walking past turned to his friend and said, “You smell something scorched?” Carsten kept on pushing his broom. Both Marines, themselves bronzed and fit-looking, laughed. He sighed. He couldn’t do anything about the kind of skin he had except wish he were back in San Francisco, or maybe up in Seattle. Seattle was a good town if you were fair. The sun hardly ever came out, and when it did it was a lot paler than the lusty fire in the sky above Pearl Harbor.

Thinking of things in the sky above Pearl Harbor, Sam scanned it for aeroplanes. He didn’t see any, either American or belonging to the enemies of the USA. He wished he hadn’t seen the last aeroplane, that one from Japan. If it hadn’t come buzzing around, the
Dakota
wouldn’t have been in drydock with a large hole blown in her flank.

A couple of Navy men came by. They weren’t off the
Dakota
; Carsten hadn’t seen them before. He picked up snatches of their conversation—place names, mostly: “Kodiak…Prince Rupert…Victoria…Seattle.”

Since he’d just been thinking wistfully of a cooler clime, he called after them: “What about Seattle?”

The two men stopped. “Nothing good,” one of them answered. “The goddamn Japs have reinforced the limey fleet off British Columbia.”

“You’re right—that isn’t good,” Sam agreed. The places they’d mentioned made sense to him now. “They sailed up by way of Russian Alaska and then down along the west coast of Canada, did they?”

“That’s what they did, all right, the bastards,” the other sailor agreed unhappily. “On account of it, the North Pacific Squadron can’t hardly stick its nose out of Puget Sound.”

“You don’t have to tell me about the Japs,” Carsten said. “I was on the
Dakota
after they suckered us out of Pearl.” The two strangers nodded sympathetically, for once at a predicament other than his sunburn. He went on, “You ask me, everybody in the whole damn Pacific had better watch out on account of the Japs. They’re making like they’re buddy-buddy with England, but if the limeys ever turn their backs on ’em, they’ll get cornholed faster’n you’d believe. Us, too. I already seen that happen.”

“We weren’t out here yet when the Japs suckered you guys,” one of the strangers said. He stuck out his hand. “Homer Bradley, off the
Jarvis
.” He was sandy-haired but, to Carsten’s annoyance, suntanned.

“Dino Dascoli, same ship,” his companion added. The Honolulu sun wouldn’t faze him; he was as swarthy as Vic Crosetti.

Carsten shook hands with both of them and introduced himself. Then he explained how the Americans’ dash after the fleet that had launched the aeroplane had gone wrong, finishing, “As soon as we got torpedoed, it was easy to figure out what the hell we hadn’t thought about. Next time, I hope we don’t stick our dicks in the meat grinder that particular way.”

“That’s the truth,” Bradley agreed. He studied Carsten’s uniform. “You talk like a Seaman First, Sam, but you sort of sound like you think like an officer, you know what I mean?”

“Too damn much time on my hands, that’s what it is, just like everybody else on the
Dakota
who isn’t fixing her up,” Sam said. “Nothin’ to do but stuff like this or else sit around and play cards and shoot the breeze and think about things.” He grinned, “Catch me at my battle station and I’m as stupid as anybody could want.”

His new acquaintances grinned. “You got a good way of lookin’ at things, Sam,” Dino Dascoli said. He lowered his voice. “And since you got a good way of lookin’ at things, maybe you got a good way of lookin’ for things, too. A guy wants to have a good time around here, where’s the best place at?”

“A good, good time?” Sam asked. Dascoli nodded. “You don’t mind spending some money?” Dascoli nodded again. Sam smiled till his sunburned face hurt. “All right. What you do, then, is you hop on the trolley into Honolulu and you get off at the Kapalama stop. There’s this gal named Maggie Stevenson…” Dascoli and Bradley leaned closer.

Down below Jonathan Moss, the town of Guelph, Ontario, was dying a slow, horrible death. Incessant artillery fell on the Canadians and Englishmen still holding out in the provincial town built of gray stone. The guns had been hammering at the Church of Our Lady Cathedral for days; the Canucks weren’t shy about putting artillery observers up in the spires, and so the spires had to come down. Come down they had. Only smoke rose above the cathedral now. It rose high enough to make Moss cough and choke some thousands of feet above the ruined house of God.

In a way, he wished the order loosing the one-deckers to fly above enemy-held territory had not come. It would have spared him the sight of towns given over to pounding from the big guns. He’d seen plenty of that while piloting observation aeroplanes, and would not have minded missing it in his flying scout.

In another way, though, it mattered little. Although he might not have seen them as they were being wrecked, he’d flown over plenty of towns after the United States took them away from Canada, and they made a pretty appalling spectacle then, too.