Another guard, this one from the venomous school, scowled at the two of them. “Playtime’s over, youse guys,” he said. “You better finish that trunk by the time we go back if you know what’s good for youse.”
“Sure thing, Virgil.” John didn’t sound angry or flustered. He just wanted to get along with as little trouble as he could.
After Virgil went off to inflict himself on some other wreckers, Mike asked John a low-voiced question: “How do you let that asshole roll off your back like that? It was everything I could do to keep from giving him the finger and telling him to go fuck himself.”
“Thing of it is, you’re still a scalp,” John answered placidly. Mike ran a hand through his hair. He could do that again; he had enough hair to run a hand through it. But the man with WY232 on his jacket and pants just chuckled. “You’re still a scalp inside your own head, I mean. You let things get under your skin like a tick’s mouth. Virgil ain’t worth getting excited about.”
“Not to you, maybe,” Mike said.
“Well, shit, what can you do about him that won’t get you killed? Nothin’, that’s what. So you can roll with the current or you can try and buck it. Rollin’s a lot easier.”
That made good, logical sense. When you wanted to see your axe bite into the back of someone’s head instead of lopping branches off a fallen lodgepole pine, logic went only so far. Come to that, Mike was just glad his axe hadn’t bitten into his own leg or foot. He was better with it than he had been when he got here, but not so much better as he was at rolling cigarettes. Rolling cigarettes mattered to him. How good he was with an axe mattered only to the guards. To be fair, axe work was also harder than cocooning tobacco in paper.
He and John chopped away at the pine. John could make an axe do everything but stand up and sing “Let Yourself Go.” But he didn’t move any faster than he had to, and he didn’t do much more work than Mike (though he wore himself out much less doing it). He’d mastered the age-old, glacial pace of the prisoner. . or the slave.
Mike hadn’t. He didn’t want to. He still felt he ought to be fighting, not coasting through the days. As John Dennison reminded him, he was still a scalp, a greenhorn, a beginner.
XIII
When Charlie got home after another day chasing around Washington after stories that might or might not mean anything to the rest of the country, he found Esther bouncing around as if she had springs in her shoes. She waved a small cardboard rectangle at him. “Look!” she squealed. “Look!”
“I can’t,” he said irritably-he was beat. “Hold it still, why don’t you?”
She did. It was a plain postcard, creased and battered. But the message was welcome. Hey, Charlie, the familiar script said. Just a note to let you know I’m doing all right here. Hard work, but I can do it. Let Stella and the folks know I’m okay, please. I get one card a month. Wrote Stella last. Your brother, Mike. Under that was an unfamiliar number: NY24601.
Stella hadn’t let Charlie know she’d heard from Mike. The earlier card might not have got to her. Or she might still have been mad at Charlie for not getting Mike out of the labor encampment. Wouldn’t she have told his folks, though? Of course, they might not have been happy with him, either. Everybody thought he had more pull with the administration than he really did.
“It’s good news,” he said to Esther. “Or it’s news as good as you can get when the news is bad.”
She nodded. “That’s just what it is.” Then she tapped the number with the red-painted nail of her right index finger. “Isn’t this terrible? It’s like they’ve taken away his name.”
Charlie hadn’t thought of it like that. “It’s for the file clerks,” he said. “Plenty of guys named Mike Sullivan-some parts of some towns, about one in five. But there’s only one NY24601.”
“It’s like a prisoner’s number. It is a prisoner’s number. I think it’s disgusting,” Esther said.
Since he couldn’t tell her she was wrong to feel that way, he did the next best thing: he changed the subject. “How are you doing, babe?” he asked.
She answered with a yawn. “I’m sleepy. I’m sleepy all the time,” she said. “And I tossed my cookies about twenty minutes after you left, just before I was gonna go out the door.”
“Well, they call it morning sickness,” Charlie said.
“I don’t care what they call it. I don’t like it,” Esther answered. “I wasn’t doing anything much. But I just barely made it to the bathroom in time. I’ve done more puking the last couple of months than in my whole life before, I think.”
He had no idea what to say to that. He was only a man. Morning sickness was as much a mystery to him as anything else that had to do with pregnancy. Cautiously, he asked, “Do you think you’ll be okay for dinner?” Calling it morning sickness didn’t mean it couldn’t come on any old time. He’d found that out. So had Esther, from painful experience.
She shrugged now. “Who knows? I was fine till about half a minute before I had to heave this morning. Then I was running for the pot.”
She did manage to keep the dinner down. It was ground round without onions. Sometimes anything spicy would make her give it back. Sometimes she’d give back the blandest food. Sometimes she could eat anything at all and stay fine. Her insides might understand why, but she didn’t. Neither did Charlie.
He called Stella while Esther did dishes. He’d done more long-distance calling since Mike got sent West and Esther found out she was in a family way than ever before. It was expensive, but it was quick.
“No, I didn’t get that card,” Stella told him. “I would’ve let you know if I did.”
“Okay,” Charlie said, and some of the weight of worry fell from his shoulders. His sister-in-law didn’t hate him as much as she might have, anyhow. “Maybe the next one will be to you, too. He says he gets one a month.”
“That’s awful,” she said. “Is there a return address or anything, so I can write to him?”
“Lemme see.” Charlie picked up the card. “It just says ‘National Labor Encampment System.’ If you write care of them, maybe he’ll get it. I bet it’d help if you put his number on the card.”
“His number?” Stella echoed in dismay.
Charlie gave it to her again-he’d read it when he read the rest of the message, but it must not have sunk in. Then he said, “Listen, I’m gonna get off the line. I’ve got to call Mom and Pop, let them know what’s going on.”
“I’ll do it if you want, save you the money of another long-distance call,” Stella said.
“Would you? Thanks!” Charlie didn’t want to talk to his mother, who would probably answer the phone. She’d just start crying again. And he pinched pennies harder than ever now that Esther was going to have a baby. You never knew what would happen day after tomorrow. The economy wasn’t as bad as it had been at the bottom of the Depression, but it was a long way from booming. Lose a job and God only knew when you might land another one.
There were other things to worry about, too. That NY24601 pretty much summed them up. A couple of people had vanished from the AP office into the encampments. Charlie didn’t think either Scriabin or Joe Steele disliked him enough to send the Jeebies after him. His stories about the administration stayed upbeat. Unlike Mike, he knew where the line was and didn’t try to cross it.
But you never could tell.
* * *
A guard tossed Mike a big burlap sack. “Thanks,” Mike said. His voice was less sardonic than he wanted it to be. The guard checked his number off the list on his clipboard. He jerked a thumb at an enormous, fragrant pile of sawdust from the mill. Mike went over to it and started filling the sack with a shovel. Blowing sawdust made his eyes water and went up his nose to set him sneezing. He didn’t care. He worked away with more vim than he ever showed felling trees. That was for the camp and for the government that had stuck him in the camp. This was for himself.