They got through the next morning’s roll call. Somebody answered for every number and name the Jeebie called out. Whether the man who answered was always the man to whom that number and name belonged. . Mike had no way of knowing. Neither John nor anyone else asked him to sing out for somebody who wasn’t there to sing out for himself.
But the morning count went wrong. Mike didn’t know how. As far as he could tell, no one noticed his shuffle from his proper place to his improper one. Still, at the end of things, the boss guard said, “We gotta do it again.” He sounded disgusted, at his men as well as at the inmates. It was an article of faith among the wreckers that the Jeebies couldn’t count to twenty-one without reaching into their pants. Smart people didn’t want work like that. No-smart people who ended up in an encampment landed there with stretches on their backs.
“No moving around, you assholes!” a guard shouted when they tried again. He kicked somebody who’d started to switch spots too soon. Not wanting a boot in the belly, Mike held his place.
The other wreckers who’d been playing games must have done the same thing, because at the end of the count the boss guard clapped a hand to his forehead in extravagant disbelief and despair. “Holy fucking shit!” he howled. “We got four o’ these pussies missing! Four! God only knows how long the turds been gone, too!”
They got no breakfast that morning. Instead of food, they got interrogations. Mike said “I don’t know” a lot. He said, “I didn’t know anybody was missing till the count came out wrong.” He said, “Could I get something to eat, please? I’m hungry.”
“You’re a lying shitsack, is what you are!” The Jeebie who was grilling him slapped him in the face. But he did it only once, and with his hand open-it was a slap, not a punch. That told Mike the guards didn’t really suspect him of anything. This guy was just knocking him around on general principles.
They put him in a punishment cell for two days. He got bread and water-and not much bread. They didn’t give him a blanket. He rolled himself into a ball, shivered, and hoped he didn’t freeze to death.
Three days after he got sent back to Barracks 17, the Jeebies brought in two live wreckers and a corpse. “This is what happens if you run away from your deserved punishment,” the camp commandant said. Then the guards beat the surviving escapees to within an inch of their lives while the rest of the wreckers watched and listened. After the stomping, the men the Jeebies had recaptured didn’t go to the encampment’s infirmary. No, they went into the punishment barracks, and for a stretch a lot longer than two days. If they recovered and came out, that was all right. And if they didn’t, the guards wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep over them.
But four men had run off. The Jeebies got hold of only three. Mike clung to that, the way a man bobbing in the sea after a shipwreck would cling to a wooden plank. Maybe the fourth wrecker was dead, frozen meat somewhere high up in the harsh Montana mountains. Maybe bobcats and cougars were scraping flesh from his bones with their rough tongues right now.
Maybe he’d got away, though. Four had escaped the labor encampment. One still wasn’t accounted for. Maybe he was free. Maybe, right this minute, he was back in Ohio. Or if he was still in Montana, maybe he was shacked up with a rancher’s pretty sister.
Mike sure hoped so. And he knew he was a long way from the only wrecker who did.
* * *
As 1940 groaned into 1941, the war seemed to pause to catch its breath. The Nazis still bombed England and torpedoed every ship they could, but it seemed plain the swastika wouldn’t fly from Buckingham Palace any time soon. The RAF raided Germany night after night. Goebbels screamed about terror flyers the way a calf screamed when the branding iron seared its rump. But the Luftwaffe hadn’t broken the Londoners’ will to keep fighting. It also seemed plain the British bombers wouldn’t scare the Berliners into abandoning Hitler.
Charlie got drunk again after Joe Steele’s third inauguration. Even toasted, he knew better than to say what he was thinking. If he came to the White House with a hangover the next morning, the President’s other aides-and the President himself-figured he’d hurt himself celebrating, not for any other reason.
On the home front, Esther got Sarah potty-trained. “Thank God!” Charlie said. “If I never see another dirty diaper as long as I live, I won’t miss ’em one bit.” He held his nose.
His wife sent him a quizzical look. “You don’t want to have another baby one of these days before too long?” she asked.
“Um,” Charlie said, and then “Um” again. Knowing he’d stuck his foot in it, he added, “Well, maybe I do. But I still don’t like diapers.”
“Nobody likes diapers except the people who make them and the companies that wash them,” Esther said. “You need ’em, though. Nobody likes babies peeing and pooping all over everything, either.”
“You got that right, babe,” Charlie agreed-a safe response, he thought.
“I didn’t want to have two kids wearing diapers at the same time,” Esther said. “That’s enough to drive anybody squirrely. But Sarah will be close to four by the time I have another one. She may even be past four if I don’t catch right off the bat.”
“Catch right off the bat?” Charlie said. “Do you want to have another baby or sign up with the Senators?” Esther made a horrible face, so he could hope she’d forgiven him.
She didn’t catch right off the bat, the way she had when they started Sarah. The little girl turned three. Out in the wider world, the Germans pulled Mussolini’s chestnuts out of the fire by invading Yugoslavia and Greece. In the North African desert, the German Afrika Korps also helped the Italians keep their heads above water against England.
And in the Far East, Japan took bite after bite out of China. The Japs had occupied airfields and naval bases in the northern part of French Indochina the year before-fallen France was in no position to tell them they couldn’t. Now they pressured the Vichy regime to let them move into the whole region.
Churchill didn’t want them doing that. It put fresh pressure on British Malaya and Singapore. Joe Steele didn’t like it, either. Indochina was too close to the Philippines, which belonged to the USA. Douglas MacArthur was one of the few senior officers Joe Steele hadn’t purged in the 1930s. He was already in the Philippines by then, helping the natives build their own army against the day when they won independence. The local authorities gave him the rank of field marshal. He was the only American ever to hold it, even if it wasn’t with his own country’s forces.
When Joe Steele didn’t like something, he did something about it. Here, he summoned Charlie to his study and said, “I am going to stop selling Japan oil and scrap metal. All they do with it is use it against China. Before you know it, they’ll use it against us, too. And I am going to freeze Japanese assets in the United States. They need to understand that I will not put up with them going down the road they’re on.”
“Yes, sir.” Charlie hesitated, then asked, “Isn’t that only about a step away from declaring war?”
“Farther than that.” Joe Steele puffed on his pipe. He didn’t say how much farther it was. He did say, “When I announce the news, I want to sugarcoat it as much as I can. I don’t want Tojo any angrier than I can help, and I don’t want Americans getting all hot and bothered about it, either. So give me a draft that leans in that direction. I’ll want it by this time tomorrow.”
Instead of shrieking in despair, Charlie nodded. “I’ll have it for you.” Being in the newspaper racket for as long as he was had got him used to impossible-seeming deadlines. And Joe Steele commonly used them as tests for his people. He remembered when you passed them. And he remembered when you didn’t. You might get by with booting the ball once. If you did it twice, you wouldn’t stay at the White House.