“Oh, we didn’t have any trouble, sir,” Pound answered. “Colonel Morrell wants to go after the bad guys just as much as I do. I hear they’ve sent him to Virginia. The people over there must be keeping him under wraps, or else we would have heard a lot more out of him.”
“I… see.” Poffenberger eyed Pound the way a man wearing a suit made of pork chops might eye a nearby bear. More than a little plaintively, the lieutenant said, “I want to go after the enemy, too.”
“Of course, sir,” Pound said in tones meant to be soothing-but not too soothing. “The point is, though, to be as sure as we can that we get them and they don’t get us.”
Poffenberger started to say something. After what had almost happened on the forward slope of the hill, though, he couldn’t say a whole lot, not unless he wanted Pound to blow a hole in it the way the antibarrel cannon had almost blown a hole in the machine he commanded. What he finally did say was, “You are a difficult man, Sergeant.”
“Why, thank you, sir!” Pound exclaimed, which only seemed to complete Lieutenant Poffenberger’s demoralization.
An officer? Who needs to be an officer? Pound thought, more than a little smugly. As long as you’ve got the fellow who’s supposed to be in charge of you eating out of the palm of your hand, you have the best of both worlds.
Bombers rumbled by overhead. Antiaircraft guns started up behind the U.S. lines-they were Confederate airplanes. By the way Poffenberger looked up at them through the cupola, they didn’t worry him nearly so much as the man with whom he shared a turret. Michael Pound… smiled.
VII
Mail call!”
Like most of his buddies, Armstrong Grimes perked up when he heard that. It wasn’t even so much that he expected mail. The only person who regularly wrote to him was his father, and Merle Grimes’ letters weren’t the most exciting in the world. But being reminded that people back home remembered the soldiers here in Utah were alive counted for a good deal.
“Jackson!” called the corporal with the mail bag.
“He’s on sentry duty,” somebody said. “I’ll take ’em for him.”
The soldier with the sack handed him half a dozen letters held together with a rubber band. He pulled out another rubber-banded clump. “Reisen!”
“I’m here,” Yossel Reisen answered, and grabbed his mail. He had a lot of family back in New York, and got tons of letters.
“Donovan!” The noncom with the mail held up some more letters and a package.
“He got wounded last Tuesday,” one of the gathered soldiers answered. The man with the mail bag started to put back the package. The soldier said, “If that’s cake or candy, we’ll keep it.”
“Depends,” the corporal said. “How bad is he?”
Etiquette required an honest answer to that question. After brief consultation, another soldier said, “He can probably eat it. Send it back to the field hospital.”
Some more names were called, including Armstrong’s. He had a letter from his father and, he was surprised to see, one from Aunt Clara. His aunt, a child of his grandmother’s old age, was only a couple of years older than he was. They’d fought like cats and dogs ever since they were tiny. He wondered what the devil she wanted with him now.
Before he could open it, the guy with the sack called, “Appleton!”
Tad Appleton’s birth name was something Polish and unpronounceable. That, at the moment, didn’t matter. Three men put what did matter into two words: “He’s dead.” One of them added, “Stopped a.50-caliber round with his face, poor bastard.” Armstrong found himself grinding his teeth. When Appleton’s body got back to Milwaukee, they’d bury him in a closed casket. No undertaker in the world could fix up what that bullet had done to him.
“Here, then.” The soldier with the mail tossed a package to the men gathered around him. That also followed etiquette-such things shouldn’t go to waste.
More letters and packages got passed out, till the sack was empty except for mail belonging to the wounded and the dead. The corporal with the sack bummed a cigarette and stood around talking with the men to whom he’d delivered the mail. A few soldiers who hadn’t got anything stood there dejectedly. Their buddies consoled them as best they could. That wasn’t just for politeness’ sake. Armstrong had seen more than one man, forgotten by the folks back home, stop caring whether he lived or died.
He opened the letter from his aunt. It turned out to be a wedding announcement. Clara was marrying somebody named Humphrey Baxter. “Humphrey?” Armstrong said. “Who the hell names their kid Humphrey?”
“There’s that actor,” Reisen said. “You know, the fellow who was in The Maltese Elephant.”
“Oh, yeah. Him.” Armstrong nodded. “This ain’t him, though, I’ll tell you that. This guy’s probably a bad actor-you know what I mean? He’s our age-gotta be-and he’s not in the Army. He’s pulling some strings somewhere, sure as hell.” He eyed the announcement with distaste. “Damn paper’s too stiff to wipe my ass with.” He scaled it away.
The letter from his father mentioned Clara’s upcoming wedding, too. Merle Grimes had little to say about Clara’s intended. Armstrong nodded to himself. His old man had seen the elephant, and took pride in it. He wouldn’t have much use for somebody who’d managed to wiggle out of conscription.
Yossel Reisen was methodically going through his mail. He held up one letter. “My aunt was in a meeting room when that auto bomb went off in front of Congress.” He always played down being the nephew of the former First Lady. If he hadn’t downplayed it, Armstrong didn’t suppose he would have had to put the uniform back on at all. Unlike this Humphrey Baxter item, Yossel pulled his weight.
“She get out all right?” Armstrong asked.
“Uh-huh. Not a scratch, she says,” Reisen answered. “She wasn’t near the front of the building, thank God.”
“That’s good,” Armstrong said, and then, “Goddamn Mormons.” The Latter-Day Saints hadn’t claimed responsibility for the recent wave of auto bombs, but Deseret Wireless didn’t go out of its way to deny anything, either. Its tone was, Take that! Serves you right, too.
“They look just like anybody else,” Yossel said. “That makes them hard to catch, hard to stop.”
“Don’t it just?” Armstrong’s agreement was ungrammatical but heartfelt. He added, “I don’t like the way Confederate Connie goes on and on about it.”
“Well, who would?” Yossel paused. “Even when you know she’s full of crap, though, she’s fun to listen to.”
“Oh, hell, yes!” Armstrong’s agreement there was heartfelt, too. Nobody he knew took Confederate Connie even a quarter of the way seriously. Like every wireless broadcaster from the CSA, she was Jake Featherston’s mouthpiece. But a doozie of a mouthpiece she was, and she sounded like a doozie of a piece, period-she had the sexiest voice Armstrong had ever heard.
She spent a lot of time between records gloating about the auto bombs that had U.S. cities so on edge. “Now you-all know how we feel,” she would say. “We’ve been putting up with these contraptions for years. You laughed when it happened to us. Do you-all reckon we’re laughing now?” She would pause. She would giggle. “Well, you know what?… You’re right!”
Yossel Reisen opened another letter. “Who’s this one from?” Armstrong asked, having already gone through his meager mail.
“My Uncle David.”
“Which one’s he again?” Armstrong asked-Yossel had a lot of relatives.
“The one who lost a leg in the last war,” Reisen answered. “He’s a right-wing Democrat now. It drives Aunt Flora nuts.”
“Oh, yeah.” Armstrong nodded. Yes, his own father was inordinately proud of the wound that made him walk with a cane. Yossel’s uncle David overtrumped Dad’s wound in a big way. Come to that, Yossel’s father had got killed before he was even born. Sure as hell, some people had had a tougher time of it than Merle Grimes, even if he wouldn’t admit it this side of the rack. Armstrong asked, “What’s he got to say?”