He dialed the long-distance operator once more. When the call went through, his mother started yelling at him again. He might as well not have left the line. She started crying again, too.
Finally, he went, “Mom, will you just-hold on a second?” You couldn’t tell your mother to shut up, however much you wanted to. Well, you could, but you wouldn’t make yourself popular if you did.
“Why should I?” she wailed.
“So I can get a word in edgewise and let you know you’re gonna be a grandmother, that’s why.”
“But you let them take your own-” His mother wasn’t the swiftest at shifting mental gears. The stop, when it came, must have lasted for ten or fifteen seconds. Then she asked, “What did you say?”
“I said you’d be a grandmother. Esther’s going to have a baby.”
More tears. More yelling. They were happy tears and joyful yells. She said they were, anyway. They sounded pretty much the same to Mike. She shouted for his father, so he got congratulated twice. Then Pete Sullivan said, “You still have to fix things for your brother, Charlie.”
“I’m doing everything I know how to do, Pop. I can’t make them do what I tell ’em, you know.”
Like his mother, his father knew nothing of the sort. Charlie got off the line as fast as he could. Esther sent him a sympathetic look. “You did your best,” she told him.
“Yeah, and a fat lot of good it did me. They listened to me the same way Mikoian did. If I’d told ’em that, they would’ve hit the roof. It’s true anyhow.” He gestured invitingly toward the telephone. “Your turn now. Your folks will be glad to get the news.”
While she made the call, he went back to the kitchen and fixed himself another drink. He understood why his parents felt the way they did. He felt that way himself. Nobody wanted to see a loved one carted off to a labor encampment. He blamed himself even more than his mother and father blamed him. He didn’t need them to shovel guilt down on top of him. He already felt plenty guilty. Did they understand that? Did they understand anything?
He scowled and drank some more Wild Turkey. By the evidence, they didn’t.
In the front room, Esther was chatting excitedly with her mother. Every so often, she’d slip out of English and into Magyar, of which Charlie knew not a word. He got, and used, some Yiddish. Anybody from New York did. Esther certainly did. But she’d learned the Hungarians’ language even before English. She’d told him the hardest thing she had to do was stop rolling her r’s. To this day, she could sound like a lady vampire when she wanted to.
But then she said, “Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t know you’d heard about it.” A beat, and then she went on, “Of course he’s doing everything he can.” After that, she added something in Magyar that sounded as if it ought to sterilize frogs. Charlie hoped she wasn’t saying anything that sounded like that about him. She must not have been, because after she said her good-byes she gave him a kiss and told him, “That’s from my mother.”
“How about one from you, babe?”
“How about that?” she said. The second kiss was a good bit warmer than the first. But she made a face afterwards. “I don’t like bourbon-or bourbon doesn’t like me-now even secondhand.”
“That’s a crying shame.” Charlie liked bourbon just fine. And two stiff drinks put more pathos in his voice than he could have got without them. “A whole bunch of things are crying shames.”
“Let’s put you to bed,” Esther said firmly, and steered him in that direction.
“How do you mean that?” he asked over his shoulder.
“We’ll both find out,” she said, and they did.
* * *
Mike looked at the palms of his hands in amazement and dismay. He’d done so much typing that he’d worn the fingerprints off the tips of both index fingers. He’d had a writer’s callus, too, next to the nail on his right middle finger. But for those, his hands had been soft and smooth.
They had been. They weren’t any more. Swinging an axe and working with a variety of saws had turned his palms all blistered and bleeding. John Dennison advised him to rub them with turpentine as often as he could. Dennison even called in a favor to get some so he could. It sounded horrible, but the stuff cooled and soothed the burning.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, not in a million years,” Mike told him.
He shrugged. “That’s one I knew before I got here. They didn’t send us here to have fun, but we don’t got to make it worse’n it already is.”
“I guess not. It’s bad enough anyway.” Mike yawned. He was always tired. No, he was always exhausted. They didn’t give you enough time to sleep. When he first saw the bare bunks in Barracks 17, he’d wondered if he could sleep on slats. Now he was convinced that, if they told him he had to hang by his feet like a bat, he’d still get as much shut-eye as they let him have. He’d never worked so hard or so long in his life.
He was always hungry, too. They didn’t feed the wreckers enough for the labor they had to do. Watery oatmeal in the morning, a cheese sandwich on bad bread to take to the woods, stew and more bad bread in the evening. Sometimes the stew had bits of creature in it; sometimes it was full-but not full enough-of beans. Mike had to hold up his pants with a length of rope.
The only thing that ever made him forget being hungry was how tired he was. The only thing that made him forget being tired was how hungry he was. They rigged things so you couldn’t win.
Here he was, for instance, in some of the most beautiful country God ever made. The encampment wasn’t far from Yellowstone National Park. There weren’t geysers and hot springs and such things here, but there were mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. The sky was as enormous as Montana’s nickname promised.
And Mike hardly ever saw, or got to pay attention to, any of it. A mountain was something he had to stumble up and down, not something he could admire from a scenic distance. Trees were things he had to knock over and chop up, not things he could look at and savor. The sky? He didn’t have time to see the sky. The guards growled if you slowed down for anything.
The guards in the camp were easygoing. They could afford to be. They carried guns. The wreckers had nothing. Out on work details, things were different. The men doing the labor needed tools. They weren’t beavers, to chop down trees with their front teeth. They had to have those axes and saws.
But tools were also weapons. A wrecker who decided he had nothing left to lose could start swinging an axe and try to chop down some guards before they filled him full of holes. From what Dennison said, they’d got a few guards right after the encampment opened up. The GBI bastards hadn’t figured out all the angles then themselves.
They had now. Any time a wrecker approached, he had to come slowly and not get too close. Mike got used to having a Tommy gun aimed at his brisket, even when he was asking for something as harmless as permission to go behind a pine and crap. The guards didn’t know he was just going to do that. They didn’t take chances, either.
Now. . Now Mike rolled a cigarette. He still wasn’t as good at it as John, but he was a lot better than he had been. Custom hath made it in me a property of easiness, he thought. Hamlet still sprang to mind, here where the nearest hamlet that wasn’t a labor encampment was miles away.
He offered John the makings, too. He kept his tobacco in a metal box that had held throat lozenges. “Thanks,” Dennison said. “Nice box. Where’d you get it?”
“Found it by the infirmary,” Mike answered. “A doctor must’ve chucked it out a window or something.” No wrecker would have been so prodigal. You could use a little metal box for all kinds of things.
John didn’t ask where Mike had got the tobacco. That was just as well. His pride had gone before a smoke. In the outside world, he wouldn’t have dreamt of polishing another man’s boots. Here, he’d made a guard’s shine almost as if by a light of their own. And he’d got his reward. The guard, one of the more nearly human ones, didn’t even make him beg like a dog getting up on its hind legs in hopes of a scrap.