Joe Steele (24 page)

Sure enough, the guards went through the count four times before
they were satisfied. Then the wreckers hurried to the kitchen. Everyone got a chunk of brown bread. In New York City, Mike would have turned up his nose at the coarse, stale stuff. After days of worse, it made him think of manna from heaven.

Once they'd grabbed their bread, the inmates walked past cooks who ladled stew into their mess tins. “Hey, Phil,” John said to one of the men: like the rest, an inmate himself. “Give my pal Mike here something good, okay?”

“Natch,” Phil said. “Just like the fuckin' Waldorf.” He filled Mike's tin, then jerked his thumb toward the rough tables. “Gwan, get outa here.”

Mike gobbled the bread. He spooned up the stew. The gravy was thin and watery. In it floated bits of potato and turnip and cabbage and a few strings of what might have been meat. He would have stomped out of any place that dared charge even a penny for it. Right here, right now, it seemed terrific.

He'd got his tin almost perfectly clean before he thought to wonder, “What kind of meat was that, anyway?”

John Dennison was eating more slowly. “Some questions here, you don't ask. You don't ask what somebody did to wind up here. He can tell you if he wants to, but you don't ask. And you don't ask what the meat is. It's there, is what it is—when it
is
there. If you knew, maybe you wouldn't wanna eat it. And you gotta eat here, or else you fold up and die.”

“Okay,” Mike said. All kinds of interesting possibilities went through his mind. Bear? Coyote? Skunk? Squirrel? Stray dog? He wouldn't have ordered any of those at a greasy spoon back home. But he wasn't about to pick them out of his tin, either. He tried another question: “Can I ask you what you did for a living before you got here?”

“Oh, sure. I was a carpenter.” John chuckled. “I know the wood a hell of a lot better now than I did then. I know it with the skin on, I guess you'd say. How about you?”

“I wrote for a newspaper,” Mike said.

“Did you?” John Dennison chuckled again. “Then I bet I don't have to ask how you wound up here.” He held up a hasty hand. “And I'm
not
asking. You don't got to say anything if you don't feel like it.”

“I don't care,” Mike said. “That's what happened, all right. I bet I'm a long way from the only reporter here.”

“Won't touch that one. I'd lose,” Dennison said. “Me, I got drunk and stupid and I told off Joe Steele. I think the bastard who turned me in was the guy who wanted my building, only he couldn't get it from me. So he ratted on me to the Jeebies, and I won my five to ten, plus a big old knot on the side of my head. They still do that when they grab you?”

“Oh, hell, yes. I already told you I got blackjacked.” Mike rubbed his own bruise, which was sore and swollen yet. “Sort of a welcome-to-the-club present.”

“Welcome-with-a-club present, you mean,” John said. Of all the things Mike hadn't expected to do in a labor encampment, laughing his head off stood high on the list. He did it now, though.

*   *   *

C
harlie had to call Stella back and tell her he couldn't do anything for Mike. She burst into tears. “What am I gonna do without him?” she wailed. He didn't know what to say to that. He didn't think anybody could say anything to that.

And, just to make his joy complete, he had to call his folks and tell
them
he couldn't help Mike. His mother answered the telephone. Bridget Sullivan didn't take the news well. “Why didn't you stop him?” she demanded bitterly. “Why didn't you keep him from writing that stuff about the President? Then he wouldn't have got in trouble.”

“What was I supposed to do, Mom? He's a grown man. Should I have held a gun to his head? Or maybe an ether cone over his nose?”

“I don't know,” his mother said. “All I know is, you didn't stop him, and now he's in one of those horrible places people don't come back from.” She started crying, too.

He got off the phone as fast as he could, which wasn't nearly fast enough. Then he walked into the kitchen, pulled an ice-cube tray from the freezer, put rocks in a glass, and poured three fingers of bourbon over them. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, coming back to the front room.

“Sounded like it,” Esther said.

He took a healthy swig. “Whew! That hits the spot! Good for what ails
me, all right.” He looked from the glass to his wife and back again. “Sorry, hon. I'm being rude and crude. Want I should fix you one, too?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “Bourbon hasn't tasted good to me lately.”

“What do you mean? It's Wild Turkey, not the cheap stuff they scrape out of the barrel and have to fight into a bottle with a pistol and a chair.”

“It hasn't tasted good anyway,” Esther answered. “Coffee doesn't taste right, either, or even tea. Must be because I'm expecting.”

“Exp—” Charlie got half the word out, and no more. He wasn't astonished—he knew when her monthlies were due, and they hadn't come. But it was still a big thing to hear officially, as it were.

She nodded. “That's right. We wanted to. Now we're going to. I did a little thinking when I decided I was sure I was going to have a baby. If I worked it out right, Junior will be in the high school class of 1956. Can you believe that?”

“Now that you mention it, no,” Charlie said after trying and failing. “He'll probably fly to school in a rocket car, carry his phone in his shirt pocket, and go to the Moon for summer vacation.”

Esther laughed at him. “I think you let that Flash Gordon serial last year soften your brain.”

“Maybe—but maybe not, too,” Charlie said. “Look where we were twenty years ago. Nobody had a radio. Model T's were as good as cars got. People had iceboxes—when they had iceboxes—not refrigerators. You put out a card to tell the iceman how much to leave. Airplanes were made out of wood and cloth and baling wire. Can you imagine what they would've thought of a DC-3 if you stuck one in a time machine and sent it back?”

“Flash Gordon,” Esther said again, but this time her tone was thoughtful, not amused and mocking. She changed the subject: “What do you want to name it?”

“If it's a boy,
not
Charlie, Junior,” he said at once. “Let him be whoever he is, not a carbon copy of his old man.”

“Okay,” Esther said. “I was thinking the same thing. Jews don't usually name babies for someone who's still alive. I would've gone along with it if you wanted to, but I'm not sorry you don't.”

“How about if it's a girl?” Charlie said.

“Sarah? After my mother's mother?”

“Hmm . . .” He savored the name. “Sarah Sullivan. That might be okay, even if it sounds like it's out of
Abie's Irish Rose
.”

“
We're
out of
Abie's Irish Rose
, only with him and her turned around,” Esther said. “You could fill the Polo Grounds four or five times with all the couples out of
Abie's Irish Rose
. And the ones who aren't are Jewish and Italian or Italian and Irish or Russian and Irish or, or anything under the sun. The New York Mutts, that's us.”

“Sounds like a pretty good ballclub.” Charlie snapped his fingers. “Now I gotta call my folks again. They'll be glad to hear from me this time, I bet.
Hey, Ma? Guess what? You're gonna be a grandma!
Yeah, she'll go for that. And you gotta call yours, too. We'll run up the bill, but who cares?”

He dialed the long-distance operator once more. When the call went through, his mother started yelling at him again. He might as well not have left the line. She started crying again, too.

Finally, he went, “Mom, will you just—hold on a second?” You couldn't tell your mother to shut up, however much you wanted to. Well, you could, but you wouldn't make yourself popular if you did.

“Why should I?” she wailed.

“So I can get a word in edgewise and let you know you're gonna be a grandmother, that's why.”

“But you let them take your own—” His mother wasn't the swiftest at shifting mental gears. The stop, when it came, must have lasted for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she asked, “What did you say?”

“I said you'd be a grandmother. Esther's going to have a baby.”

More tears. More yelling. They were happy tears and joyful yells. She said they were, anyway. They sounded pretty much the same to Mike. She shouted for his father, so he got congratulated twice. Then Pete Sullivan said, “You still have to fix things for your brother, Charlie.”

“I'm doing everything I know how to do, Pop. I can't make them do what I tell 'em, you know.”

Like his mother, his father knew nothing of the sort. Charlie got off the line as fast as he could. Esther sent him a sympathetic look. “You did your best,” she told him.

“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it did me. They listened to me the same way Mikoian did. If I'd told 'em that, they would've hit the roof. It's true anyhow.” He gestured invitingly toward the telephone. “Your turn now. Your folks will be glad to get the news.”

While she made the call, he went back to the kitchen and fixed himself another drink. He understood why his parents felt the way they did. He felt that way himself. Nobody wanted to see a loved one carted off to a labor encampment. He blamed himself even more than his mother and father blamed him. He didn't need them to shovel guilt down on top of him. He already felt plenty guilty. Did they understand that? Did they understand anything?

He scowled and drank some more Wild Turkey. By the evidence, they didn't.

In the front room, Esther was chatting excitedly with her mother. Every so often, she'd slip out of English and into Magyar, of which Charlie knew not a word. He got, and used, some Yiddish. Anybody from New York did. Esther certainly did. But she'd learned the Hungarians' language even before English. She'd told him the hardest thing she had to do was stop rolling her r's. To this day, she could sound like a lady vampire when she wanted to.

But then she said, “Yeah, that's right. I didn't know you'd heard about it.” A beat, and then she went on, “Of course he's doing everything he can.” After that, she added something in Magyar that sounded as if it ought to sterilize frogs. Charlie hoped she wasn't saying anything that sounded like that about him. She must not have been, because after she said her good-byes she gave him a kiss and told him, “That's from my mother.”

“How about one from you, babe?”

“How about that?” she said. The second kiss was a good bit warmer than the first. But she made a face afterwards. “I don't like bourbon—or bourbon doesn't like me—now even secondhand.”

“That's a crying shame.” Charlie liked bourbon just fine. And two stiff drinks put more pathos in his voice than he could have got without them. “A whole bunch of things are crying shames.”

“Let's put you to bed,” Esther said firmly, and steered him in that direction.

“How do you mean that?” he asked over his shoulder.

“We'll both find out,” she said, and they did.

*   *   *

M
ike looked at the palms of his hands in amazement and dismay. He'd done so much typing that he'd worn the fingerprints off the tips of both index fingers. He'd had a writer's callus, too, next to the nail on his right middle finger. But for those, his hands had been soft and smooth.

They had been. They weren't any more. Swinging an axe and working with a variety of saws had turned his palms all blistered and bleeding. John Dennison advised him to rub them with turpentine as often as he could. Dennison even called in a favor to get some so he could. It sounded horrible, but the stuff cooled and soothed the burning.

“I wouldn't have believed it, not in a million years,” Mike told him.

He shrugged. “That's one I knew before I got here. They didn't send us here to have fun, but we don't got to make it worse'n it already is.”

“I guess not. It's bad enough anyway.” Mike yawned. He was always tired. No, he was always exhausted. They didn't give you enough time to sleep. When he first saw the bare bunks in Barracks 17, he'd wondered if he could sleep on slats. Now he was convinced that, if they told him he had to hang by his feet like a bat, he'd still get as much shut-eye as they let him have. He'd never worked so hard or so long in his life.

He was always hungry, too. They didn't feed the wreckers enough for the labor they had to do. Watery oatmeal in the morning, a cheese sandwich on bad bread to take to the woods, stew and more bad bread in the evening. Sometimes the stew had bits of creature in it; sometimes it was full—but not full enough—of beans. Mike had to hold up his pants with a length of rope.

The only thing that ever made him forget being hungry was how tired he was. The only thing that made him forget being tired was how hungry he was. They rigged things so you couldn't win.

Here he was, for instance, in some of the most beautiful country God ever made. The encampment wasn't far from Yellowstone National Park. There weren't geysers and hot springs and such things here, but there were
mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. The sky was as enormous as Montana's nickname promised.

And Mike hardly ever saw, or got to pay attention to, any of it. A mountain was something he had to stumble up and down, not something he could admire from a scenic distance. Trees were things he had to knock over and chop up, not things he could look at and savor. The sky? He didn't have time to see the sky. The guards growled if you slowed down for anything.

The guards in the camp were easygoing. They could afford to be. They carried guns. The wreckers had nothing. Out on work details, things were different. The men doing the labor needed tools. They weren't beavers, to chop down trees with their front teeth. They had to have those axes and saws.