“Go ahead, if you’ve got a hard-on for it,” Feofan told him.
So he did. It came off the pintle easily enough. But it weighed close to twenty kilos, not counting the box of bulky cartridges it fired. Using it without a tripod wouldn’t be easy.
A sentry-Ihor had said he’d kick the man’s ass if he didn’t get over to the western edge of the village-sang out: “More Americans on the way!”
And there were, too many for the Red Army men to dispose of them all so easily. After an exchange of fire, the Yanks pulled back. Then they started lobbing mortar bombs into the village. That was no fun at all. By the local Germans’ shrieks, they enjoyed it no more than Ihor did.
Before long, he and his friends had only two choices: stay where they were and get cut off and killed or pull out. Before he left, Ihor fired a belt of ammo from the heavy machine gun. He didn’t aim, or need to. Not only was it loud fun, it made the Americans move up slower than they would have otherwise.
Three or four kilometers east of the village, the Red Army men ran into their own side’s military police. “What are you slackers doing running around without orders?” a sergeant asked ominously.
“Slackers, my dick,” Ihor retorted. “Didn’t you hear the firefight? We were defending that village from the capitalist imperialists.”
“Huh.” The sergeant wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t try to arrest them all. Back under military control they went. Freedom had been fun while it lasted, but nothing lasted forever. Most things didn’t even last very long.
–
Aaron Finch scowled at the 1946 Chevy that had replaced his stolen Nash. The car was okay. Whoever’d owned it before had taken decent care of it. The payments…He scowled again. He hated paying on time; interest sucked money the way leeches sucked blood. But if you couldn’t afford to write a check, you did what you had to do.
He’d made the best deal he could. Almost the best deal-a pretty nice Ford a year newer had cost about the same. But Aaron was damned if he’d buy a Ford, even a secondhand one. Old Henry hated Jews and he hated union men. With two strikes like those, he didn’t need a third one to be out in Aaron’s book.
He unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel. He thought he’d locked the Nash the night before it disappeared, but he wasn’t sure. He made sure all the time now. Locking the barn door after the horse is gone, he thought as he turned the key and pulled out the choke.
Off to Blue Front he went. At least he didn’t have to bother people for a lift any more. He never would have been able to do that if he hadn’t lived close to the warehouse. Still and all, he’d be buying the guys who’d gone out of their way for him lunch and cigarettes for weeks to show he was properly grateful. The scales had to balance. His father had knocked that into him with a heavy hand.
If only his old man had really been even half as smart as he thought he was. Back around the time of the First World War, Mendel Finch had run a moving and hauling business up in Oregon. In his wisdom, he’d decided that trucks were just a fad, while horses and wagons would stay around forever.
Not surprisingly, he’d gone broke about a year after the Armistice was signed. And, somehow, he’d avoided honest work ever since. Well, he was within two years of his ninetieth birthday now. But to this day he wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake with his business. He had to be right, always right, right no matter what.
There in the car with nobody else to laugh at him, Aaron laughed at himself. “Wonder where I got that from?” he said. Yeah, Marvin had it worse, but neither of them was in the same league as their father.
Here was the intersection where that Russian came parachuting down from his bomber after it sent downtown Los Angeles up in smoke. Had Aaron cut his throat with a pocket knife or caved in his skull with a tire iron instead of capturing him, chances were he wouldn’t have that letter from Harry Truman on his wall now.
He laughed again, mirthlessly this time. Whether he had it or not, Roxane and Howard would still think he got his kicks oppressing the proletariat. Aaron was a good union man and a good Democrat, and that was plenty for him. To some people in his wife’s family-and to some in his own-that meant he might as well have worn a swastika button on his lapel.
When he pulled into the Blue Front parking lot, Jim Summers was just getting out of his Hudson. It was dirty. The paint was starting to peel. Jim didn’t give a damn. He paused outside the car to light a Camel and blew a stream of smoke up into the air.
Aaron parked two spaces away. He nodded to his partner. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Not too bad,” Summers said. “How about you?”
“I’m hanging in there.” Aaron lit a Chesterfield of his own. Camels were too harsh for him-unless the choice was smoking Camels or not smoking at all. He couldn’t imagine doing without coffin nails.
“You listen to Joe McCarthy on the radio last night?” Summers asked.
“Afraid I missed him.” Aaron tried to keep that as diplomatic as he could. He thought the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a blowhard with delusions of grandeur, and he thought anybody who didn’t think so was out of his tree. But he also thought fighting with the people you had to work with wasn’t the smartest thing you could do.
Jim, by contrast, liked Senator McCarthy himself, and so couldn’t imagine that any right-thinking American wouldn’t. “You shoulda tuned him in,” he said. “He ripped into old Harry Falseman somethin’ fierce. If we’d smoked out all the damn Reds we got poisoning the country a lot sooner’n we did, we wouldn’t be in the mess where we’re at now. That’s what he said-I boiled it down a little, y’understand, but there it is.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” That and How about that? were the only two phrases Aaron had ever found that you could drop in almost anywhere without making anybody want to grab for a broken bottle.
Or he’d always thought so, anyway. Jim’s furry eyebrows zoomed up toward his hairline. “Interesting? It’s important, is what it is! He says he’d got hisself a list as long as my arm of all the Commies and traitors we need to get rid of so’s we can straighten up and fly right from now on.”
Aaron wondered whether the list was real or a figment of McCarthy’s imagination. If by some chance it was real, he wondered how many of Ruth’s relatives, and of his own, were on it. To him, that seemed more an honor than a point against them.
He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. Glancing at his watch, he said, “We’d better go on in and punch the clock. I don’t want to get docked for being late.”
Jim Summers’ mouth twisted. “Yeah, Weissman’d do that, sure as hell. Crummy Hebe squeezes ever penny till he can make flour out of the wheat on the back.” He ground out the Camel under his heel as if wishing it were his boss’ head. Then he said, “Plenty o’ that kind on ol’ Senator McCarthy’s list, I betcha.”
“Jim-” Aaron wondered whether going on was worth the tsuris. They’d worked side by side since not long after the end of World War II, and Jim had no idea he was Jewish. No one would ever accuse Summers of being the brightest bulb in Times Square.
“What?” he said as they walked to the door. “C’mon. You started to say somethin’. Spill, goddammit.”
“Okay.” Aaron didn’t think it would be, but he spilled anyway: “What the devil do you think I am, a Chinaman?”
“You? You’re-” Summers broke off. Maybe he could spell CAT if you spotted him the C and the A. He grinned a rather sickly grin. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Aaron. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Hey, some o’ my best friends is Jews.”
Bad grammar aside, Aaron had never heard that said when it wasn’t a lie. Had Jim Summers been born a Bavarian, he would have been a brownshirt. Here, he was only a bigot-just the kind of guy Joe McCarthy was looking for.