He caught one, too, and crushed it between his thumbnails. He’d almost puked the first time he found a small, pale louse in his hair. Now all he felt was satisfaction when he killed one. Familiarity bred contempt, all right.
The encampment had other kinds of adventures besides pest control. There was mail call, for instance. The Jeebies didn’t let in everything everybody wrote to you-nowhere close-but they did let in some mail. You always wanted to hear from people you loved, even if a censor’s scratchouts sometimes showed you weren’t the first one to set eyes on what they wrote.
Mail call also had another side to it. It was a gamble. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If the bastard with the sack didn’t call your name, good form said you had to turn away without showing how disappointed you were. It was like not showing that a wound hurt you in the last war. . or, Mike supposed, in this new one. Since Stella’s letters stopped coming, he’d got good at it.
One cold day-a day colder than he would have thought possible with the sun shining brightly-the guard bawled, “Sullivan! NY24601!”
“I’m here!” Mike pushed his way through the other wreckers and held out a mittened hand. The Jeebie gave him an envelope, then called out another name and number.
It wasn’t a letter from anybody Mike knew. It was one of those cellophane-windowed envelopes businesses used. The return address was printed: Hogan, Hunter, Gasarch amp; Hume, with an address not too far from where he’d lived in the half-forgotten days before he came to Montana.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. Hogan, Hunter, Gasarch amp; Hume turned out to be a firm of lawyers. And the letter turned out to be a notification of divorce proceedings against him. The cause was given as abandonment. In view of the circumstances, the letter finished, no alimony is sought in this case. A signature that might have been Gasarch’s lay under the typewritten words.
Mike stared at the piece of paper. Like so many wreckers’ wives, Stella’d had enough. She was getting on with her life without him. The Catholic Church didn’t recognize divorces. The state of New York damn well did, though. Stella might think about the world to come, but she lived in this one.
“Fuck,” Mike muttered, breathing out fog. No, he wasn’t the first guy here whose wife ran out of patience with being on her own. He knew he wouldn’t be the last. That didn’t make the hurt, the loss, or the sense of betrayal any easier to take. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it over his shoulder. It was too thick and firm to be good around a cigarette or for anything else.
XV
“I’m going to work, sweetie,” Charlie told his daughter. “Come give me a kiss bye-bye.”
“No.” Sarah was just past two. She said no at any excuse or none. Then she came over, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.
“Okay. My turn now,” Esther said after Sarah disentangled herself from her daddy.
“No,” Sarah said again.
Taking no notice of her, Esther stepped into Charlie’s arms. They kissed. He counted his blessings every time he held her. One of the big ones was that he wasn’t in a labor encampment. If he were, would Esther have dumped him the way Stella’d dumped Mike? He hoped not, but how could you know?
Stella and Esther had stayed friends in spite of everything. “It’s not that she didn’t love him,” Esther’d tried to explain to Charlie. “It’s just that he wasn’t there and he couldn’t be there and finally she got so she couldn’t stand being by herself any more and watching the world pass her by.”
Charlie still resented it. “What about that ‘in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer’ stuff?” he’d asked.
“What about ‘to have and to hold’?” Esther had returned. “She couldn’t have him, she couldn’t hold him, not for years. That’s why she talked to a lawyer. Who knows when they’ll turn him loose? Who knows whether they’ll let him come back to New York City if they do?”
He’d had no retort for that. Some wreckers had been released from labor encampments, but on condition they stayed in the empty states that held the encampments. If they broke the deal and got caught where they weren’t supposed to be, back behind barbed wire they’d go, and for a longer stretch this time around.
He squeezed Esther extra tight before heading out the door. He hoped she wouldn’t drop him and run as if from a grenade with the pin pulled if he did get thrown aboard a train and shipped to the prairie or the mountains. And he hoped the Jeebies never knocked on his door at midnight. Even when you worked in the White House, even when you talked to Joe Steele almost every day, hope was the most you could do.
A short-pants kid was hawking papers at the corner where Charlie caught the bus. “Extra!” the kid shouted. “Nazis invade Low Countries! Read all about it!”
“Oh, God!” Charlie said. The other shoe had finally dropped, then. The Germans had taken Denmark at a gulp, and hadn’t had much trouble in Norway, either. But Scandinavia was just a sideshow. Everybody knew it. The main event would be in the west, the way it had been the last time around. Now the bell for that one had rung. Charlie tossed the newsboy a nickel. “Lemme have one of those.”
“Here you go, Mister.” The kid gave him a paper.
He read it waiting for the bus, and then on it on the way to the White House. The Nazis weren’t doing anything halfway. They hadn’t just violated Belgium’s neutrality, as the Kaiser did in 1914. They’d trampled Holland’s neutrality, too. And Luxembourg’s, not that anybody gave a damn about Luxembourg. The only reason it seemed to be there was to get it in the neck.
The Luftwaffe was bombing the hell out of the Low Countries, and out of France, too. Göring had shown what it could do as far back as the Spanish Civil War. He hadn’t let up in the attack on Poland. He wasn’t letting up now, either.
And Neville Chamberlain was out as British Prime Minister. He’d underestimated Hitler over the Sudetenland. He’d said the Nazis had missed the bus even as they were devouring Scandinavia. He’d “won” a vote of confidence by a margin much smaller than the Tories’ majority in Commons-even they hadn’t had much confidence in him. Now he was gone. Winston Churchill would have to measure himself against the Führer.
Charlie carried the paper into the White House. Seeing it, Stas Mikoian pointed at it and said, “Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket over there.”
“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” Charlie agreed. “Hitler’s shoved all his chips into the pot.”
“So has everybody else,” Mikoian answered. “Now we see what the cards are worth.”
Over the next month, they did. The fighting was really decided in the first few days, when the Nazis’ tanks and troop carriers punched through the weak French defenses in the Ardennes and raced for the Channel. That only became clear looking back, though. What was obvious at the time were the surrenders of Holland and Belgium, the headlong French retreat, and the way the best French and British troops got cut off and surrounded against the sea at Dunkirk.
Most of them managed to cross the Channel to England. From the perspective of anyone who didn’t root for the Nazis, it looked like a miracle. Churchill bellowed eloquent defiance at Hitler on the BBC.
And Joe Steele summoned Charlie to the oval study above the Blue Room. The smell of the sweet pipe tobacco he favored hung in the air, as it always did there. “We need to keep England in the fight,” the President said bluntly. “Hitler is already on the Atlantic in France. If England goes down, too, America will face the whole continent united under a dictator.”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said, in place of Takes one to know one. He knew who and what he was working for. He just didn’t know how not to work for him. Well, he knew some ways, but they all struck him as cures worse than the disease.