“Don’t get it too full!” a guard shouted, as he did every couple of minutes. “You’ll need to flatten it out, remember!”
“Yes, Mommy,” John Dennison muttered from a couple of feet away. No guard could have heard him. Mike hoped his own giggles didn’t set the screws wondering what was up.
When they’d finished filling their sacks, they tied them shut with lengths of twine another guard doled out. Then they went into the supply building in a ragged line, each wrecker with his sack full of sawdust slung over his right shoulder. Yet another man inside also checked off each man’s number before reluctantly issuing him a blanket.
Mike’s was thinner than he wished it were, and almost as coarse and scratchy as if it were woven from steel wool instead of the kind that came off a sheep. Again, though, he said “Thank you” with more sincerity than he’d intended to show. The bastards who ran the camp didn’t want the wreckers to freeze to death-or at least not all of them, not right away.
Back to Barracks 17 he and Dennison went. Snow still lingered in places that didn’t get much sun. It had started in early October, which was horrible enough. Pretty soon, from what the man with WY232 on his clothes said, it wouldn’t melt back. It would just stay there, most of the way through spring. Mike had seen cold weather before, but not cold weather like that.
It would get down below zero, too. And it might stay that way for days if not for weeks. So. . blankets and these sacks of sawdust. Mike laid his on the slats where he’d been sleeping since the Jeebies sent him here. He thumped and pounded on the burlap to get it as even as he could. Then he climbed into the bunk to use his body as a steamroller to flatten the cheap makeshift mattress some more.
Cheap. Makeshift. Thin. Lumpy. All those words applied. Still, this was the most comfortable he’d been in there since he came to the camp. He wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. “Welcome to the fucking Ritz!” another wrecker exclaimed.
Mike lay back. He put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. Another minute and he would have fallen asleep. He could sleep anywhere these days, even, sometimes, standing up while the prisoners were being counted.
He didn’t get the minute. A guard thumped in. The Jeebies’ boots sounded louder than the wreckers’. Mike didn’t know why, but they did. “Come on, you lazy, good-for-nothin’ bums!” the guard yelled. “Y’all don’t git the goddamn rest cure this mornin’!”
Like a lot of the GBI men at the encampment, this guard came from somewhere between North Carolina and Arkansas. Mike couldn’t have said why the Jeebies got so many volunteers from that part of the country, but they did. The Southern guards were often rougher on the men they held than Jeebies from the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, too.
Nobody told this fellow where to go. Doing that to somebody with a Tommy gun wasn’t the smartest stunt you could pull. Even an insult would set some guards shooting. Mike had never yet heard of any Jeebie getting in trouble, no matter what he did to a wrecker. And a wrecker’s word was worth nothing when set against a guard’s.
Out the men came. Mike sent a longing, fretful look back toward his bunk. Just because the wreckers had so little, that didn’t keep them stealing from one another. Things you didn’t keep an eye on had a mysterious way of walking with Jesus.
They were taken to the woods to hack down more lodgepole pines. Snow lingered there more than it did inside the encampment. It crunched under Mike’s boots. He and John attacked a tree.
“You know,” Mike said between strokes with the axe, “we shouldn’t take stuff from each other. We should be solid. We should make a waddayacallit, a popular front-us on one side, the Jeebies on the other.”
“We should do all kinds of shit,” John Dennison said. “One of the things you should do is run your mouth less, y’know? All kinds of finks who’ll rat on you for half a pack o’ Luckies.” Thunk! His axe bit into the trunk. The sap smelled halfway between turpentine and maple syrup.
Mike spat. He swung the axe again. He didn’t blister so much any more; calluses were forming where the blisters had been. “They should have an accident or something,” he said. “Yeah, or something.”
“Sometimes they do, when they get bad,” Dennison said. “But then somebody new starts feedin’ the GBI the dope. That’s a bad time, ’cause you don’t know who to trust or whether you can trust anybody.”
The lodgepole creaked. It started to sway. Dennison pointed the direction in which it would fall. Mike sang out: “Tim-berrr!”
Wreckers scrambled back. Down came the tree, pretty much where John Dennison had said it would. Snow flew up off its branches and from the ground. After the cloud subsided, Mike and John started lopping branches off the trunk.
“I don’t want to do this,” Mike said.
“Nobody wants to do this,” Dennison answered.
“I know that. I mean, I don’t want to do it now. I want to go back to the barracks and see what sleeping on a mattress feels like.”
“Why? You won’t sleep any longer or any harder than you did without the goddamn thing,” John Dennison said.
He was bound to be right about that. Mike couldn’t sleep any longer, because he’d have to tumble out of his bunk when reveille sounded tomorrow morning. And he could only sleep harder if he died after the lights went out and before reveille drove him upright again.
“I’ll be more comfortable. I won’t be so cold,” he said.
“That counts a lot for the half a minute before you fall asleep and for the five seconds between when you wake up and when you got to get up,” John said. “Otherwise, you won’t notice. So why get excited about it?”
“Gotta grab all the fun here you can,” Mike answered. Most of the time, John Dennison was a quiet man who didn’t draw attention to himself. Now he laughed like a loon. After a minute, so did Mike. When you got right down to it, the idea of fun inside the labor encampment was, well, pretty goddamn funny.
* * *
Wire and radio reports poured in from the other side of the Atlantic. Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht-renamed as he entrenched himself in power-had marched into Austria, joining it to Germany. The Anschluss wasn’t violent. By the way things looked, most Austrians who weren’t Jewish loved it. Violent or not, though, it rearranged the map of Europe. The new, enlarged Germany was the biggest country west of Russia. It was also the strongest. And now it surrounded western Czechoslovakia on three sides. With the Führer screeching that he wanted to annex the Germans in the Sudetenland, too, that wasn’t good news for the little Central European democracy.
Charlie tried to make sense of the fast-breaking story. He tried to break it down into pieces that Americans in, say, Kansas, many of whom couldn’t have found Czechoslovakia on a map if their lives depended on it, might possibly understand. He feared it was a losing effort, but he did his best.
The phone on his desk jangled. He grabbed it. “Sullivan, AP.”
“Hello, Sullivan, AP. This is Sullivan, your wife. Things have started. I just called a taxi. I’m heading for the hospital.”
“Oh, God,” Charlie said. He’d known the day would come soon. But you’re never ready, especially not the first time. “Okay, hon. I’ll see you there. Love you.”
He finished the story he was working on. Luckily, he was almost done. He took it out of the typewriter and set it on his editor’s desk. Then he said, “I’m gone, boss. Esther just called. She’s on her way to the hospital. I’ll see you in a few days.”
“Okay, Charlie,” the editor said-an advantage of being able to set things up in advance. “Shame it has to happen just when all hell’s breaking loose in Europe.”