Later, he asked, “Do you want me to blow out the lamp?”
“Whichever way you’d like,” she answered. She was probably less shy about undressing with it burning than he was; he reminded himself she was used to being with a man. They got under the covers together, not for modesty but for warmth.
Later still, after they’d warmed themselves enough to kick most of the blankets onto the floor, they lay with their arms wrapped around each other. The cot was so narrow it gave them little choice about that. Yeager ran a hand down Barbara’s back, learning the shape and feel of her. There hadn’t been time for that aboard the Caledonia; there hadn’t been time for anything except raw, driving lust. He’d never known anything to match that, maybe not even the night he lost his cherry, but this was pretty fine, too. It felt somehow more certain, as if he could be sure it would last.
Barbara’s breasts slid against his chest as she leaned up on one elbow. She lay between him and the lamp, so her face was full of shadow. When she spoke, though, her words weren’t quite what he thought of as romantic: “Do you want to see if you can buy some rubbers tomorrow, Sam? This place seems in good shape; the drugstore may still have a supply.”
“Uh, okay,” he said, taken aback. She was indeed used to being with a man, he thought. He did his best to sound matter-of-fact as he went on, “Probably a good idea.”
“Certainly a good idea,” she corrected. “We’re all right about the first time-I know-and I don’t mind taking a chance now and again, but if we’re going to be making love a lot, we’d better be careful. I don’t want to be expecting going cross-country in a wagon train.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’ll try and find some. Uh-what happens if I don’t?” He wished he hadn’t said that. It would make her think he only wanted to lay her. He did want to lay her, but he’d learned you seldom got anywhere treating a woman like a piece of meat, especially not a woman like this, who’d been married to a physicist and had plenty of brains herself.
He was in luck-she didn’t get mad. Her hand wandered now, or rather moved, for she knew where it was going. It closed on him. “If you don’t,” she said, “we’ll just have to figure out something else to do.” She squeezed gently.
He couldn’t decide whether he wanted some Detroit Lakes drugstore to have rubbers or not.
Behind Mutt Daniels, the Preemption House was burning. His heart felt like breaking for several reasons. It was always sad to see history go up in smoke, and the two-story Greek Revival frame building had been one of Naperville, Illinois’, prides since 1834. More immediately, it was far from the only burning building in Naperville. Mutt didn’t see how the Army could hold the town-and there wasn’t a hell of a lot behind Naperville but Chicago itself.
And more immediately still, the Preemption House had been Naperville’s leading saloon. Daniels hadn’t been in town long, but he’d managed to liberate a fifth of good bourbon. He wore three stripes on his sleeves these days; just as kids had looked to him on how to be ballplayers, now he had to show them how to be soldiers. These days he borrowed his precepts from Sergeant Schneider instead of his own old managers.
Every half a minute or so, another liquor bottle inside the Preemption House would cook off, like a round inside a burning tank. Looking back, Mutt saw little blue alcohol flames flickering among the big lusty red ones from the burning timbers. He sighed and said, “Hell of a waste.”
“You bet, Sarge,” said the private beside him, a little four-eyed fellow named Kevin Donlan, who, by his looks, would probably start shaving one day fairly soon. Donlan went on, “That building must be more than a hundred years old.”
Daniels sighed again. “I wasn’t thinkin’ so much about the building.”
A whistling roar in the sky, growing fast, made both men dive for the nearest trench. The shell went off above ground level fragments hissed through the air. So did other things that pattered and bounced off the hard ground like hailstones.
“You gotta watch where you put your feet now, son,” Daniels said. “That bastard just spit out a bunch o’ little bombs or mines or whatever you want to call ’em. First saw those out around Shabbona. You step on one, you’ll walk like Peg-Leg Pete in the, Disney cartoons the rest of your days.”
More shells rained down; more of the little rolling mines scattered from them. A couple went off with short, unimpressive cracks, hardly louder than the screams that followed them, “They keep throwin’ those at us, we ain’t gonna be able to move around at all, Sergeant Daniels,” Donlan said.
“That’s the idea, son,” Mutt said dryly. “They pound on us for a while, freeze us in place like this, then they bring in the tanks and take the ground away from us. If they had more tanks, they’d’ve finished kickin’ our butts a long time ago.”
Donlan-hadn’t seen close-up action yet, he’d joined the squad during the retreat from Aurora. He said, “How can those things beat on us like this? They ain’t even human.”
“One of the things you better understand right quick, kid, is that a bullet or a shell, it don’t care who shot it or who gets in the way,” Daniels said. “Besides, the Lizards got plenty o’ balls of their own. I know the radio keeps callin’ ’em ‘push-button soldiers’ to make it sound like all their gadgets is what’s whuppin’ us and keep the civilians cheerful, but don’t let anybody tell you they can’t fight.”
The artillery barrage went on and on. Mutt endured it, as he’d endured similar poundings in France. In a way, France had been worse. Each of the Lizards’ shells was a lot more deadly than the ones the Boches had thrown, but the Germans had thrown a lot of shells, so it sometimes seemed whole steel mills were falling out of the sky on top of the American trenches. Men would go mad from that-shell shock, they called it. This bombardment was more likely to kill you, but it probably wouldn’t drive you nuts.
Through a pause in the shelling, Daniels heard running feet behind him. He swung around with his tommy gun-maybe the Lizards had used their whirligig flying machines to land troops behind human lines again.
But it wasn’t a Lizard: it was a gray-haired colored fellow in blue jeans and a beat-up overcoat running along Chicago Avenue with a big wicker basket under one arm. A couple of shells burst perilously close to him. He yelped and jumped into the trench with Daniels and Donlan.
Mutt looked at him. “Boy, you are one crazy nigger, runnin’ around in the open with that shit fallin’ all around you.”
He didn’t mean anything particularly bad by his words; in Mississippi, he was used to talking to Negroes that way. But this wasn’t Mississippi, and the colored man glared at him before answering, “I’m not a boy and I’m not a nigger, but I guess maybe I am crazy if I thought I could bring some soldiers fried chicken without getting myself called names.”
Mutt opened his mouth, closed it again. He didn’t know what to do. He’d hardly ever had a Negro talk back to him, not even up here in the North. Smart Negroes knew their place… but a smart Negro wouldn’t have braved shellfire to bring him food. Braved was the word, too; Daniels didn’t want to be anywhere but here under cover.
“I think maybe I’ll shut the fuck up,” he remarked to nobody in particular. He started to address the black man directly, but found himself brought up short-what did he call him? Boy wouldn’t do it, and Uncle wasn’t likely to improve matters, either. He couldn’t bring himself to say Mister. He tried something else: “Friend, I do thank you.”
“I’m no friend of yours,” the Negro said. He might have added a couple of choice phrases himself, but he had an overcoat and his basket, of chicken to set against Daniels’ stripes and tommy gun. And Mutt had, after a fashion, apologized. The colored man sighed and shook his head. “What the hell’s the use? Here, come on, feed yourselves.”