The pharmacist’s mate behind the dispensary window was a wizened, cadaverous-looking fellow named Morton P. Lewis. On a day like today, even his face wore as much of a smile as it had room for. “Ah, Carsten,” he said, nodding rather stiffly at Sam. “Haven’t seen you for a while, but I can’t say I’m surprised to see you now.” His Vermont accent swallowed the r in Sam’s last name and turned can’t into something that might have come from an Englishman’s mouth.
“Heading up toward sunny weather,” Carsten said resignedly. “You want to give me a couple of gallons of that zinc-oxide goop?”
“It’s dispensed in two-ounce tubes, as you know perfectly well.” Lewis’ voice was prim, proper, precise.
“Oh, don’t I just,” Sam said. “Don’t I just.” He sighed. “Damned if I know why I bother with the stuff. I burn almost as bad with it as without it.”
“Your answer, I would say, boils down to the word almost,” the pharmacist’s mate replied.
“Yeah.” Carsten sighed again. “Well, let me have a tube now, would you? Sooner I start using it-” He broke off and stared at Morton P. Lewis. “ Boils down to is right. You do that on purpose, Mort?”
“Do what?” said Lewis, a man whose sense of humor, if he’d ever had one, must have been amputated at an early age. His blank look convinced Carsten he hadn’t done it on purpose. But, even if humorless, the pharmacist’s mate wasn’t stupid. “Oh. I see what you’re asking about. Heh, heh.”
“Listen, can I have the stuff, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.
“You don’t require a doctor’s prescription for zinc-oxide ointment,” Lewis said, which Carsten already knew from years at sea. “You don’t require authorization from a superior officer, either.” Carsten knew that, too. The pharmacist’s mate finally came to the point: “You do require the completion of the required paperwork.” He didn’t notice he’d used the same word twice in one sentence, and Sam didn’t point it out to him.
He did say, “Mort, if we get men wounded during an action, I hope you don’t make them fill out all their forms before you give ’em what they need.”
“Oh, no,” Lewis said seriously. “Unnecessary delay in emergency situations is forbidden by regulation.” He went back in among his medicaments before Carsten could find an answer for that.
When he returned, he was carrying a tinfoil tube and a sheaf of papers. In ordinary situations, delay seemed to be encouraged, not forbidden. Sam checked boxes and signed on lines. What it all boiled down to was that he wouldn’t use the zinc oxide for anything illegal or immoral. Since the stuff was too thick and resistant to be any fun if he wanted to jack off with it, he couldn’t imagine anything illegal or immoral he could use it for.
Wading through the paperwork meant he had to hustle to make it up on deck without getting chewed out. That was the way life in the Navy worked: you hurried so you could take it easy a few minutes later. It had never made a whole lot of sense to him, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He wasn’t holding his breath waiting for anyone to ask, either.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Hiram Kidde came by, puffing on a fat cigar. He asked Sam’s opinion: “How about Dom Pedro, eh?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, giving his own instead: “Took the wall-eyed little son of a bitch long enough.”
“Yeah,” Carsten said; he agreed with that opinion. “But he’s gone and done it. He sees the writing on the wall.”
“He’d better,” the chief gunner’s mate said. “Train was almost out of the station before he decided to jump on board.” He sneered, an expression that could turn a junior lieutenant’s bones to water. “Doesn’t cost him anything, either-just his name on four pieces of paper. Not like Brazil’s gonna do any fighting.”
“Maybe a little against Argentina,” Sam said. “But yeah, not much. Jesus, though, closing that coast to England and opening it up to us…doesn’t cost Dom Pedro much, like you say, but it does us a hell of a lot of good.”
“Uh-huh.” Kidde gave him almost the same leer Vic Crosetti had. “Does us a hell of a lot of good, but you’re going to be fried crisp when we head up that way.”
Wearily, Sam reached into his pocket and displayed the tube of zinc-oxide ointment. Hiram Kidde laughed so hard, he had to take the cigar out of his mouth. When he started to flick the long, gray ash onto the deck, Carsten said, “Whoever swabs that up ought to swab your shoes, too.”
Kidde looked down at his feet. He could have seen himself in the perfectly polished oxfords. Three steps put him by the rail. The ash went into the Atlantic. “There. You happy now?” he asked.
“Sure,” Sam answered. “Why not? Way I see things, world’s looking pretty decent these days. Yeah, I’m going to burn for a while, but the Dakota ’s home port is San Francisco. War ever ends, I figure we’ll go back there for a spell.”
“You burn in Frisco, too,” Kidde pointed out, “and that ain’t easy.”
“I know, but I don’t burn so bad there,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you one more thing, too: Brazil jumping into the war may make me burn, but it makes the limeys sweat. You come right down to it, that’s a pretty fair bargain.”
“Well, mon vieux, how is it with you?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as they made their way up toward Riviere-du-Loup. A U.S. Ford didn’t bother to honk for them to pull over, but zoomed around the wagon and shot up toward town at what had to be close to thirty miles an hour. “I wonder why he is in such a hurry,” Galtier mused. “I wonder why anyone would be in such a hurry.”
The horse did not answer, save for a slight snort that was likelier to be a response to the stink of the motorcar’s exhaust than to Galtier’s words. But the Ford kicked up hardly any dust from the fine paved road. The Americans had extended it for their own purposes, not for his, but he was taking advantage of it. Jedediah Quigley had told him he would. Jedediah Quigley had told him quite a few things. A good many more than he’d expected had turned out to be true.
His mind couldn’t help doing a little of the arithmetic the good sisters had drilled into him with a ruler coming across his knuckles. If he had a motorcar capable of thirty miles an hour-oh, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe one of these days-he could get to town in…could it possibly be so few minutes?
“My old,” he said to the horse, “I begin to see how it is that the Americans have put so many of your relations out to pasture. I mean no offense, of course.”
A flick of the ears meant the horse had heard him. It dropped some horse balls on the fine paved road. Maybe that was its opinion of going out to pasture. Maybe that was just its opinion of the road. Behind him, some chickens made comments of their own. He never paid attention to what the chickens had to say. Their first journey into town was also their last. They did not have the chance to learn from experience.
Outside Riviere-du-Loup, the snouts of antiaircraft guns poked into the sky. The soldiers who manned them wore uniforms of American cut, but of blue-gray cloth rather than green-gray. Galtier cocked his head to one side to listen to them talking back and forth. Sure enough, they spoke French of the same sort as his own. Soldiers of the Republic of Quebec, he thought. Dr. O’Doull had said there were such men. Now he saw them in the flesh. They were indeed a marvel.
“What do you think?” he asked the horse. Whatever the horse thought, it revealed nothing. Unlike the chickens, the horse was no fool. It had come into town any number of times. It knew how much trouble you could find by letting someone know what was in your mind.
Lucien drove the wagon into the market square. Newsboys hawked papers whose headlines still trumpeted Brazil’s entry into the war, though Galtier had heard about it several days before from Nicole, who had heard it from the Americans at the hospital. The newspapers also trumpeted Brazil’s recognition of the Republic of Quebec. That was actually news.