She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. The lettering still said the same thing, even if it was hard to read. See what happens when you send a postcard? she thought dizzily. She hadn’t heard back from Tabakman after she mailed the photo of Mt. Shasta. She hadn’t even been sure it got to him. The postal service at all the refugee camps ranged from erratic to worse.
But she couldn’t imagine any other reason Fayvl Tabakman would suddenly wind up in Weed. She’d been looking for an excuse to waste a little time. Now she had a better one than she’d dreamt of finding.
She looked in the window. There he stood, behind the counter, in his old-fashioned cloth cap. He didn’t look up at her; he was tapping away at a shoe on a last with a little cobbler’s hammer. His face was a mask of concentration. Back in Everett, back before the world turned upside down and inside out, she’d appreciated the fine, precise work he did. That plainly hadn’t changed.
Of itself, her hand closed on the latch. It clicked under the pressure of her thumb. The door opened. A bell above it jingled, just as one had in the now-ruined shop in Everett.
The bell made him look up from what he was doing. “Hallo, what can I-?” he began automatically. Then he did a double take that would have set the whole country laughing fit to burst had Sid Caesar or Milton Berle pulled it on TV. The smile that followed would have been pretty damn funny, too. “Marian!”
“Hello, Fayvl,” she said. Here as in Camp Nowhere, a face and a voice she knew were welcome. Was it anything more than that? She’d left the camp before she’d really had to make up her mind. “Welcome to beautiful, scenic Weed.”
She didn’t say beautiful, romantic Weed. For one thing, Weed was about as romantic as the mashed potatoes from dehydrated spuds the Camp Nowhere cooks turned out by the enormous vat. For another, she hadn’t made up her mind about romantic. Till she did, if she did, careful was better.
“Scenic it is, yes. The real mountain even more than your card. Beautiful? The town?” He shrugged. “Not so much.”
“You know what? You’re right,” Marian said. “How did you end up here? I guess the card had something to do with it?” That, she figured, was one of the safer guesses she’d ever made.
He nodded. “That’s right. I was thinking, it is time I got out of the camp. Your card, it told me where I should ought to go.”
“You got down here, though,” Marian said. “You have the shop. How…?” Her own access to money had gone up in smoke, along with the bank she and Bill used. She’d assumed the same held true for Fayvl. If it didn’t, why would he have stayed at Camp Nowhere? Why would anybody stay at Camp Nowhere who didn’t have to?
“I got down here.” The cobbler nodded. “Buses run. Buses, they are cheap. The shop was not such a lot, because the man who owns the building, he wants someone in here. Anyone, almost, will do. And in the camp, there are ways to get money. You stayed in your car with your little Linda. You don’t know what it was like in the big tents.”
Marian made a questioning noise. She not only didn’t know what it had been like in the big tents, she didn’t know what Tabakman was talking about. The first thing that occurred to her was the world’s oldest profession. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine him prospering in it.
But he didn’t mean the world’s oldest profession. He meant the world’s oldest pastimes. “Always card games, always dice games, going on,” he said. “If you gamble with your head, not with your heart, you can make money. Not always, but enough. And they played chess for money. Some of them was pretty decent. Me, in Poland I was not too bad. So I got for mineself a stake. You call it in English a stake, yes?”
“That’s the word,” Marian agreed.
Me, in Poland I was not too bad. What did he mean? He wouldn’t have been a world champion or anything like that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to keep on fixing shoes. But he was good enough to win money from players he called pretty decent. As she’d thought before, there was more to him than met the eye.
“Listen, I have to get back to work,” she said. “But I’ll see you again. I’m-I’m glad you’re here.” She could say that much without lying. How much she meant by it…they’d both find out.
–
Cade Curtis clumped through the trenches on the ridge line in front of Kaeryong. His felt overboots crunched on the snow. His breath smoked even when he didn’t have a Camel in his mouth. It was cold-it was bloody cold-but he’d known worse. He wasn’t cut off and a long, long way from anybody friendly, either. He could cope with this.
He’d done better than deal with it, in fact. They’d given him this regiment and told him to hold the ridge and keep Kaeryong out of Red Chinese hands. And, rather to his own surprise, he’d damn well done it. He was modestly (well, perhaps not so modestly) proud of that.
Here came Howard Sturgis, who did have a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He gave the barest sketch of a salute and said, “Mornin’.”
“Good morning, Howie!” Cade threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the second lieutenant. “You can kiss me now.”
Sturgis recoiled. “I’d sooner kiss a pig,” he said. “Uh, sir.”
“Is that any way to talk on Valentine’s Day?” Cade sounded much more hurt than he really was.
“Valentine’s Day? Already?” Sturgis made as if to count off days on his fingers. Since, like Cade, he was wearing thick wool mittens with a slit to let him pull a trigger when he had to, he quickly gave that up as a bad job. Instead, with a sheepish smile, he said, “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
“Right,” Cade said. “It flies so fast that the year and a half I’ve been here seems like forever.”
“I believe that.” Now Sturgis’ smile turned crooked. “And how’s democracy coming along, sir?”
“Oh, shut up,” Cade said. “Hard to imagine how our enemies could like it a whole lot less than our so-called friends do.”
“Yeah, but if you shoot the Commie gooks our brass pins more medals on you,” Sturgis said. “If you make like you’re gonna shoot the ROK gooks, the brass rakes you over the coals. You already went back to Division once. How come they didn’t bust you down to PFC?”
“Because they saw I didn’t care if they did.” That was the only explanation that made any sense to Cade.
He discovered it also made sense to Howard Sturgis. “There you go!” the older man said. “I’d shake their hands and thank ’em if they made me a sergeant again. Trouble is, the fuckers know it, so they never will. You think I want to run a company? Christ!”
“You might be running one even if you were a sergeant,” Cade said. All the companies save one in his outfit had officers in charge of them, but that one was still under a veteran three-striper. It seemed to run as well as any of the others, which was…interesting, anyhow. Cade wagged a finger at Sturgis. “And don’t call ’em gooks, dammit, especially not where there’s even a little chance they can hear you.”
“What do you want I should call ’em? Niggers?”
That opened a different can of worms. As a little kid, Cade had heard the word all the time. Some Southern whites used it to revile people with dark skins, others simply to describe them. It all depended on how you said it, and on how the people who were listening to you took it.
As World War II wore on, as Americans began to see what the Nazis had done to Jews in lands they ruled, and as people with dark skins began to insist they were people like anybody else, nigger started to be used less and less. Cade had said it only a handful of times, if that, since the war ended.
Things in the South had gone on the same way, more or less, from the end of Reconstruction to Pearl Harbor. Strange to think that, but for Hitler, they might have kept on that way for another generation or two. They wouldn’t here and now. Cade could see as much.
With an effort, he wrenched himself away from the American South and back to South Korea. “Gook, to them, is as bad as nigger is to a Negro,” he said. “Even when they don’t savvy any English at all, they know what that means. So just forget you ever heard it, okay?”