The Victorious Opposition (53 page)

“Do I think what’s true, sir?” Sam asked in turn. He was panting, too. He’d been in the Navy thirty years now. These mad dashes weren’t so easy as they had been once upon a time.

“Why the captain called the general quarters,” Pottinger answered.

“I can’t begin to tell you, sir,” Sam said. “I just heard the hooter and ran like hell. What do you know?”

“I ran like hell, too,” the head of the damage-control party said. “Some men heading the other way said we’d spotted a Royal Navy ship, or maybe a Royal Navy squadron.”

“I heard the same thing, sir,” a sailor named Szczerbiakowicz said. “Damned if I know whether it’s true, but I heard it.”

“Did you, Eyechart?” Carsten used Szczerbiakowicz’s universal nickname; nobody but another Pole could have hoped to pronounce his real one. Sam turned to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. “If that’s so, sir, you think the limeys mean trouble?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Pottinger replied. “But I think maybe the skipper thinks they might.”

“Yes, sir. Does seem that way, doesn’t it?” Sam looked at all the faces in the damage-control party. He realized he was the only one there old enough to have been at sea during the Great War. Even more than the way his heart pounded after the run to general quarters, that told him how many years he was carrying. He said, “The Royal Navy’s a damn good outfit. They were still on their feet in 1917. We never did knock ’em flat; we starved England into quitting when we finally shut down the grain and beef imports from Argentina.”

The
Remembrance
rolled steeply. Everybody grabbed for a handhold to steady himself. The ship straightened, then rolled back the other way. Eyechart Szczerbiakowicz said, “I don’t care how good they are, sir. What can they do to us in seas like this?”

“Damned if I know,” Sam said, talking like the petty officer he had been rather than the officer he was. “I’ll tell you this, though: I sure as hell don’t want to find out the hard way.”

Nobody disagreed with him. Nobody wanted to see anything happen to the
Remembrance
. The men might not remember the Great War, but most of them had been through the inconclusive scrap against the Japanese. They knew too well how vulnerable to disaster even the mightiest warship could be. Huddling down here far below the main deck, away from fresh air and natural light, only served as a reminder. No one would do this if he didn’t have to.

When the all-clear sounded, Sam let out a sigh of relief. Maybe the seas were too high to let the limeys launch torpedoes or to allow for accurate gunnery, but he didn’t want to have to see by experiment.

As he left his station, he laughed at himself. For one thing, as he’d thought before, the United States were at peace with Britain, even if the two countries were a long way from friendly with each other. For another, he didn’t know for a fact that there were any Royal Navy ships within a hundred miles of the
Remembrance
. Along with everybody else in the damage-control party, he’d been building castles in the air.

Sailors coming from other stations were also buzzing about the limeys. If they were wrong, they were all wrong the same way. Carsten shrugged. If he’d had a dollar for every time he’d seen unanimous rumor prove mistaken, he could have quit the Navy and lived ashore in style.

He headed for the officers’ mess, both to grab a sandwich and some coffee and to find out what was going on from some people who might actually know. When he got there, he discovered that most of the other officers were as much in the dark as he was.

Before too long, though, Commander Cressy came into the mess. Every head swung toward the executive officer. Sam was far too junior to ask the question about which he was so curious, but that didn’t matter, because a lieutenant commander from engineering did it for him: “Did we really bump into the limeys, sir?”

The exec paused to time the ship’s roll and put cream in his coffee with the least likelihood of spilling it all over the deck. That done, he nodded. “We sure as hell did. Oh, not literally, but in dirty weather like this we have to worry about that, too: can’t spot anything till it’s right on top of you.”

“They’re patrolling farther west than they have for a while,” another officer said.

“I know.” Commander Cressy nodded again, not very happily. “We have no agreement with them that says they can’t, but they haven’t up till now. They still have a long reach, damn them.”

“Think they could link up with the Confederates, sir?” Sam asked.

“Now isn’t that an interesting question?” Cressy said. “You have a way of asking interesting questions, Carsten.” Almost shyly, Sam dipped his head at the praise—if that was what it was. The exec went on, “The short answer is, I don’t know. For that matter, the long answer is I don’t know, too. We haven’t spotted the Confederates doing a whole lot to build up their surface fleet—some destroyers and cruisers, but no new battleships, no carriers. They would have a devil of a time building those without our noticing. Submersibles . . . Submersibles are a different story, I’m afraid.”

The officer who’d first asked about the Royal Navy was a flame-haired Irishman named George Toohey. He said, “They started building those fuckers—pardon my French, sir—years before that Featherston bastard grabbed the reins. You can bet they haven’t stopped since.”

“We should have made ’em say uncle the second we caught ’em at it,” another lieutenant commander said. “It would have saved us a lot of grief. Their boats gave us fits in the last war. They’re liable to do worse than that if we ever have to tangle with them again.”

Nobody said he was wrong. Nobody in the Navy—nobody Sam Carsten had ever heard, anyhow—would have said he was wrong. But Commander Cressy only shrugged. “No use crying over spilt milk,” he said crisply. “We’re stuck with the world we’ve got, not the one that might have been. For better or worse, the political will to clamp down tight wasn’t there. If we ever do have another war, God forbid, I think we’ll see Royal Navy subs—and French ones, too—refitting in Confederate harbors, and C.S. boats doing the same thing on the other side of the Atlantic.” His smile bared sharp white teeth. “Makes our job a little more interesting, doesn’t it, gentlemen?”

“They won’t be using Bermuda or the Bahamas or Canada as bases against us, anyway,” Lieutenant Commander Toohey said. “Not this time around, they won’t.”

“Or Newfoundland, either.” Commander Cressy was relentlessly precise.

“If the Confederate States have a lot of submarines, holding on to the Bahamas could get expensive,” Sam remarked. “Long haul down from Philadelphia and New York City, and every mile of it right past their coast.”

A very young ensign said, “Baltimore’s closer.”

Cressy withered him with a glance. “A look at the map would remind you that Baltimore also lies within Chesapeake Bay. One assumes the mouth of the bay will be thoroughly mined. One also assumes the Confederates in Norfolk will not sleep through the commencement of hostilities.” The ensign turned pink. He left the mess in a hurry. The exec was imperturbable. “Shall we go on discussing reasonable possibilities?”

“Even if the Confederates don’t have carriers, how many land-based bombers have they got?” a lieutenant asked.

That struck Sam as a possibility altogether too reasonable. He said, “I was aboard the
Dakota
in 1917, when British bombers attacked her from the Argentine mainland. That wasn’t much fun—and the airplanes now are a lot better than they used to be.”

Commander Cressy nodded. “One reason we have carriers is to keep land-based aircraft off our fleets. Even so, though, the days of operating battleships in coastal waters may be gone for good.”

The lieutenant who’d asked about land-based bombers said, “In that case, sir, why do we keep building them?”

“I am not the right person to whom to direct that particular question, Mr. Hutton,” the exec replied. “I suggest you ask your Congressman, your Senators, and the Secretary of the Navy. You may be sure, I have done so.” His smile was cynical. “You may also be sure, my letters have done just as much good as you would expect.”

Carsten had been in the Navy his entire adult life. He understood how the top brass thought. “We got some use out of battleships in the last war,” he said, “so of course we’ll need them in the next one.”

“Yes. Of course.” But that wasn’t agreement from the executive officer. It was raw sarcasm. “By that way of thinking, it’s a miracle we have any carriers at all these days.” Another of those frightening smiles. “But of course we know everything is exactly the way it should be in this best of all possible worlds. Don’t we, gentlemen?”

No one in the officers’ mess quite knew how to answer that. Sam hoped somebody in the Navy Department did.

XIV

I
f it had been up to Armstrong Grimes, he would have dropped out of high school as soon as he could and gone to work. He wanted everything work could give him: money, money, and, well, money. He didn’t think his mother would have minded. She and Aunt Clara were keeping Granny’s coffeehouse going to bring in extra cash.

Armstrong snickered and cursed at the same time. He’d never liked his aunt, and it was mutual. They were only a couple of years apart, but these days the gap seemed wide as the Grand Canyon. Clara had escaped from school, while Armstrong was still stuck in it.

Not matter what he thought, his old man was bound and determined that he get his high-school diploma. Armstrong quarreled with his father, but he’d never had the nerve to take things too far. Merle Grimes walked with a permanent limp, yes, but that was no sign of weakness. It as much as said,
Don’t mess with me, punk. The Confederates shot me and I kept going, so why the devil should I be afraid of you?

And so Armstrong had to endure another six months of Theodore Roosevelt High School before he could escape into the real world. He said as much one night, resentfully, over supper.

His father laughed. “Once you do graduate, you’ll probably be conscripted. Two years in the Army will show you what’s real, all right.”

“They don’t conscript everybody in a whole year-class, the way they did in your day,” Armstrong said. “I’ve got a pretty good chance of just being able to get on with my life.”

“Your country is part of your life,” Merle Grimes said. “If you don’t help it, why should it help you?”

“I would if we go to war or something,” Armstrong said. “But now . . . ?” He spread his hands, as if that would tell his father what he wanted instead of a green-gray uniform. Heading the list were his own apartment, his own auto, and a good-looking girlfriend the first two items would impress.

“The peacetime Army is a steady place,” his father said. “The way things are these days, that counts for a lot. Who knows what’ll be out there? If your grades were better . . .” He gave his son a dirty look.

“So I’m no greasy grind,” Armstrong said, returning it with interest. “I do good enough to get by.”

“Good enough to get by isn’t good enough,” his father insisted. As far as Armstrong was concerned, he might have been speaking Chinese.

On the way to school the next morning, Armstrong lit his first cigarette of the day. He didn’t smoke all that much, because his father didn’t like him doing it around the house. The first drag he took made him a little sick and gave him a little buzz, both at the same time.

He didn’t pay much attention in class. He
would
get by, and he knew it. The teachers couldn’t do anything to make him study harder, not when he would escape their clutches for good in a few months. A lot of the seniors, especially the boys, acted the same way.

More because he was a senior than for anything in particular he’d done—his football career had been decent, but no more than decent—he found himself a big man on campus. The younger kids all looked up to him. He’d had that happen before, when he’d worked his way up from first grade all the way to eighth in elementary school. As an eighth-grader, he’d been a big shot. Then, all of a sudden, he’d been nothing but a freshman at Roosevelt, and freshmen were nobodies. He’d spent the rest of his time here getting back on top.

He was on his way from math to U.S. government when he stopped so suddenly, the kid behind him bumped into him. He hardly even noticed. He’d just had a very nasty thought. Once he got out of high school, he’d fall right down to the bottom of the totem pole again. He wouldn’t be a big man on campus. He’d be a kid, fighting for a break against men twice his age. How long before he got back on top again? Twenty years? Ever?

Armstrong tried to imagine twenty years. He couldn’t—it was longer than he’d been alive. In twenty years, he’d be close to forty, and if forty wasn’t old, what was? He’d intended to sneak another smoke in the boys’ room on the way to government, but he didn’t. Worrying about falling to the bottom of the totem pole had slowed him down, and he didn’t want to be tardy. They still handed out swats to kids who came in late, even to seniors.

Mr. Wiedemann, the government teacher, walked with a limp almost identical to that of Armstrong’s father. He wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his lapel, so he’d been hurt during the war, too. “We don’t look at secession the way we did before 1863,” he said. “Can anyone tell me why we don’t?” Several hands shot into the air. Armstrong’s wasn’t one of them, but Wiedemann pointed at him anyway. “Grimes!”

He didn’t need to be one of the big brains to figure that out. “On account of the Confederate States,” he said.

“Very good.” Mr. Wiedemann had a wide sarcastic streak. As long as he wasn’t aiming it at you, it made him pretty funny to listen to. “And from 1863 to the Great War, what happened to the border between the USA and the CSA?” He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Don’t everybody talk at once.”

“Nothing,” a girl said without raising her hand.

She would have got in trouble if she were wrong, but Wiedemann nodded. “Very good. For a long time, people thought that border would never change. Were they right?”

Herb Rosen, the greasiest grind in the whole class, stuck up his hand. Everyone said he would end up at Harvard if he could make it into the quota for Jews there. The government teacher pointed to him. Herb said, “Maybe they were.”

That made Armstrong sit up a little straighter. He knew the United States had taken land away from the Confederate States. The way his father went on, he would have needed to be dead not to know it. It wasn’t the answer Mr. Wiedemann had expected, either. The teacher said, “Suppose you explain yourself.” He didn’t come right out and call Herb a blockhead. When it came to splitting hairs, Herb could hold his own with anybody, and he’d won a couple of arguments with Wiedemann in class. No one else could claim that.

Now Herb said, “The way things are going, Kentucky and Houston will end up back in the CSA, and maybe Sequoyah, too.”

“God help us if you’re right,” Mr. Wiedemann said. “Why did we spend so much money and so much blood and so much pain to win them if we’re going to give them back to the Confederate States?” He tapped the end of his walking stick against the floor as he spoke. Armstrong didn’t think he knew he was doing it.

Like Armstrong, Herb Rosen hadn’t been born while the Great War was going on. For him, it was as much ancient history as the reign of Caesar Augustus. Unlike the teacher, who’d done his own bleeding and hurting, Herb could think and talk about that time dispassionately. “That’s the point I’m trying to make, Mr. Wiedemann. We took them, but did we really win them? Wouldn’t most of the people in those states sooner live in the CSA than the USA? Isn’t that why we’ve never let them have a plebiscite to decide?”

Mr. Wiedemann turned a blotchy purplish color. “What are you saying?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Are you saying we were wrong to take the spoils of victory? Are you saying we should have left the Confederates on the banks of the Ohio—and in easy artillery range of this very classroom?”

That last got home to Armstrong. His mother and grandmother had had plenty of stories of what Washington was like under bombardment. Most of them had to do with the long U.S. barrage that had preceded the reconquest of the city, but they’d talked about the Confederate shelling before the occupation, too. His mother didn’t go on about those things the way she had when he was younger, but she still talked about them every now and again.

Herb, plainly, had struck a nerve. Armstrong wondered if he would back down. Kids who got too far under the skin of grownups usually regretted it. They might be clever, but grownups were the ones with the clout.

“I’m saying things have changed since the War of Secession.” Herb sounded brash as ever. “Back then, states were more important than countries. Didn’t you say Kentucky even declared itself neutral after the war started, and for a long time the USA and the CSA both had to honor that?”

“Yes, I did say that,” Mr. Wiedemann admitted, “but I don’t see what—”

Herb charged ahead: “Can you imagine a state trying to be neutral during the Great War? Things were different. Countries counted most. You thought,
I live in the United States,
or,
I’m a Confederate.
You didn’t think,
I’m a New Yorker
first, or
I’m from Georgia
. And so when we took Kentucky and Houston away from the CSA, the people there didn’t stop thinking they were Confederates, the way their grandfathers might have. I’m saying that’s why we’ve had so much trouble. The Germans have, too, haven’t they, in Alsace and Lorraine?”

Before the government teacher could answer, the bell rang. Wiedemann looked like a prizefighter who’d been saved by it. “Dismissed,” he croaked, and sat down behind his desk.

Armstrong didn’t usually have much to do with Herb Rosen. In the tightly tribal world of high school, they traveled in different packs. As they left the classroom, though, he made a point of going up to Herb. “Boy, you tied him in knots,” he said admiringly.

Herb shrugged skinny shoulders. “I like to try to get to the bottom of things. It’s interesting, you know what I mean?”

“Till just now, I didn’t think government class
could
be interesting,” Armstrong said. And, had he been coming out of math or science or literature, he would have said the same thing.

Herb blinked behind thick glasses. He looked just like what he was: a smart little sheeny. Armstrong realized he’d taken him by surprise, first by speaking to him at all and then by what he’d said. After another blink, Herb said, “It’s like putting a puzzle together for me. I want to see where all the pieces go.”

Only once in a while, as today, did Armstrong get the feeling there was a bigger puzzle that held pieces in a pattern. Keeping track of one piece at a time seemed plenty hard enough to him. He said, “You see more of them than old man Wiedemann does.”

“I hope so,” Herb Rosen answered. “He doesn’t know all that much.”

He surprised Armstrong again. Teachers knew more about what they taught than Armstrong did himself, so he’d always been willing to believe they knew a lot. Believing anything else hadn’t even occurred to him. Now it did. He suddenly saw teachers as people like store clerks or truck drivers or trombone players: all doing their jobs, some good at them, some not so good. They weren’t little tin gods, even if they wanted kids to think they were.

“You’re all right, you know?” Armstrong said.

Herb blinked again, then beamed. He’d probably been wondering if he was going to get the snot knocked out of him. “You, too,” he said, and hurried off to his next class. Armstrong went off to his, too, in what was, for him, an unusually thoughtful state of mind.

C
incinnatus Driver sighed as he pulled his truck over to the curb in front of his apartment building. He was angry at himself when he got out of the truck. It was a big, growling Studebaker, only two years old. The hauling business had been good lately. It would have been better yet if he could have got Achilles to throw in with him. He could have afforded a second truck—and if they’d had two, they would have had more before very long. Cincinnatus could see himself as somebody in charge of a real trucking outfit.

Trouble was, Achilles didn’t want to drive a truck. He would have made more money than he did clerking, but he didn’t want to come home to Grace and his children dog-tired every night, with beat-up hands and an aching back. Part of Cincinnatus scorned his son for being soft. Another part, though, admired Achilles for getting by on brains instead of brawn.

Cincinnatus went into the lobby of the apartment building and checked his mail. He sighed again once he had, this time in relief: no letter from his parents’ neighbor in Covington. That meant no more news about his slowly failing mother. But even the relief held sorrow. It didn’t mean his mother was getting better. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t. Once you went into your second childhood, you didn’t come out again.

He trudged up the stairs to his flat. How tired he really was washed over him then. His back felt as if he’d been carrying an elephant up a mountain ever since he got up in the morning. He looked forward to a long soak in a hot tub. That would get some of the kinks out. When he went upstairs, he also understood exactly why his son wanted no part of the business he’d spent so long building up. If Achilles didn’t have to, why would he want to feel like this?

And what happens if you throw your back out?
Cincinnatus didn’t want to think about that, but sometimes—especially when things in there ached more than usual—he couldn’t help it. He knew what would happen. He’d be in trouble, and so would his whole family.

The key went into the lock. He opened the door. Amanda sat at the dining-room table doing homework. Her face was set in concentration. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth. Cincinnatus smiled. His daughter never noticed when she did that.
Both my children gonna graduate high school,
he thought, and the smile got wider. That wasn’t bad at all, not for a black man who hadn’t been allowed to go to school at all growing up in Confederate Kentucky. He’d learned to read catch as catch can, and he’d had to be careful about letting white people know he could do it. Iowa wasn’t paradise—far from it—but it was better than what he’d known when he was small.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he said

Amanda jumped. “I didn’t hear you open the door.”

“I know. You was—
were
—thinkin’ about your schoolwork.”

“Test tomorrow,” she said, and sank down into that sea of study.

Cincinnatus went into the kitchen. Elizabeth was wrapping spiced ground beef in cabbage leaves. Cincinnatus’ mouth watered; he loved pigs in blankets. His wife looked over her shoulder. He gave her a quick kiss. “How’s things?” she asked.

“Not bad,” he answered. “Busy day. I’m tired.”

“Sore, too, I bet,” Elizabeth said. “I can see it, way you move.” He nodded. She wasn’t wrong. She went on, “Why don’t you take your bath now an’ soak for a while? These ain’t gonna be ready for at least half an hour.”