“Did you tell Stella?” Charlie asked his mother, figuring she’d miss no chance to rub it in with her ex-daughter-in-law.
But Bridget Sullivan said, “No. Hadn’t you heard? She’s engaged to one of those draft-dodging sheenies she works for.”
“Mom. .” Charlie said. No, his mother and father had never warmed to Jews, no more than they had to.
“Esther is all right,” his mother said. “But the ones Stella works for, that’s just what they are.”
“Whatever you say.” Charlie got off the phone as soon as he could. He relayed a censored version of his mother’s message to Esther.
By the way his wife lifted an eyebrow, she could read between the lines. “Stella didn’t tell me, but I suppose she wouldn’t, all things considered. I hope she ends up happy, that’s all. She never would have dumped Mike if the Jeebies hadn’t taken him.”
“I guess not.” Charlie didn’t want to think anything good about the gal who’d left his brother. Esther was probably right, but that had nothing to do with the price of beer, not to him.
“Let’s hope they knock Japan for a loop before Mike has to go in,” Esther said.
“Amen!” Charlie said. “The Japs, they’re like a boxer on the ropes taking a pounding. The B-29s are flattening their cities one at a time. God only knows why they won’t give up and say enough is enough. Joe Steele doesn’t get it-I’ll tell you that.”
Esther’s mouth narrowed into a thin, unhappy line. “I don’t know how you can stand to work at the White House,” she said. “I can’t understand why it doesn’t drive you nuts.”
He shrugged helplessly. “When I started there, all my other choices looked worse. And you know what? They still do. If I walk away, just tell ’em I quit, you think I won’t go into a labor encampment inside of fifteen minutes? I sure don’t think I won’t. You want to raise two kids on what you’d make without me?”
“I don’t want to do anything without you,” Esther answered. “But I don’t want your job to wear you down the way this one does, either.”
Charlie shrugged again. “I like to think I do some good once in a while. Stas and me, we’re the ones who can slow Joe Steele down sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. Scriabin and Kagan and J. Edgar Hoover, all they ever do is cheer him on. If they get a new speechwriter, you can bet your boots he’d be another rah-rah guy. That’d leave Mikoian even further out on a limb than he is already.”
“How does he manage to hang on if he doesn’t see eye-to-eye with most of the people in the White House?” Esther asked.
“Funny-I asked him pretty much the same thing once,” Charlie said. “He looked at me, and he smiled the oddest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. ‘How?’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you how. Because if I go somewhere without my umbrella and it’s raining when I come out, I can dance my way home between the raindrops. That’s how.’”
“Nice work if you can get it-if you can do it, I guess I should say. If he can, good for him,” his wife said. “But when you go out in the rain, you come home dripping wet like a normal person. And I wish you didn’t have to.”
“Well, so do I,” Charlie said. “Now wish for the moon while you’re at it.”
* * *
Mike’s pack weighed him down as he trudged along the wharf to the waiting troopship. He’d landed on Okinawa in April. Here it was six months later, and he was finally getting off the miserable island. That was the good news. The bad news was that the punishment brigade, rebuilt yet again, was going somewhere that promised to be even worse.
Operation Olympic, the brass was calling it. Kyushu. The southernmost Home Island. If Tojo’s boys wouldn’t say uncle, the United States would go in there and take their own country away from them. It would cost a lot of American lives. As one of the Americans whose life it was likely to cost, Mike knew that much too well. But the number of Japs who were going to get killed beggared the imagination.
And if Operation Olympic didn’t convince the Emperor and Company the lesson Joe Steele wanted them to learn, Operation Coronet was waiting around the corner. That would seize Honshu, the main island. From what Mike had heard, something like a million men would go in if they needed that one. How many dead would come out was anybody’s guess.
Mike had a section of his own now-a couple of dozen men to ride herd on. They’d all come into the brigade after he had. Captain Magnusson was still here. Or rather, he was here again. He’d taken a bullet in the leg, but by now he’d had time to recover and risk getting one in a really vital spot.
As the soldiers settled themselves on the crowded bunks, one of them asked, “Hey, Sarge, is it true what Tokyo Rose says?”
“Jugs, if Tokyo Rose says it, bet your ass it ain’t true,” Mike answered. “Which pile of bullshit are you wondering about in particular, though?”
Jugs was properly Hiram Perkins, a Southerner who’d wound up in a labor encampment because-he said-somebody with connections had taken a shine to his wife. It was possible; people went into the encampments for all kinds of reasons. Mike wouldn’t have cared to guess if it was true. The way Perkins’ ears stuck out gave him his nickname. He said, “The one where she says the Japs’ll spear us if they don’t shoot us.”
“You’ve got a grease gun, don’t you?” Mike said.
“No, Sarge. Got me an M-1.”
“Okay. Either way, you can shoot anybody who comes after you with a spear before he sticks you, right?”
“I reckon so, yeah.”
“Well, all right, then. You won’t get speared unless somebody catches you asleep in a foxhole or something.”
Jugs worked that through. Mike could practically see the gears turning inside his head. They didn’t turn very fast; Jugs wasn’t the brightest ornament on the Christmas tree. He finally said, “That makes sense. Thanks, Sarge. I purely don’t like me no pig-stickers.”
“Other thing is,” Mike said, “if the Japs do come at us with spears, it’s because they don’t have enough rifles to go around. So let’s hope they do. The easier they are to kill, the better I like it.”
He wondered how many kamikaze planes the enemy had left. They’d been troublesome around Okinawa. Mike figured the Japs would throw everything they could at a force invading the Home Islands.
Later, he also wondered if he’d jinxed things. Less than half an hour after kamikazes crossed his mind, the troopship’s antiaircraft guns started bellowing. Down in the bowels of the ship where the enlisted men waited out the passage from Okinawa to Kyushu, they swore or prayed, depending on which they thought would do more good.
In the bunk across from Mike, another Catholic worked a rosary. Mike still more or less believed, but not that way. God was going to do what He was going to do. Why would He listen to some stupid human who wanted Him to do something else instead?
No flaming plane with a bomb under its belly slammed into the troopship. Either the gunners shot it down, or it missed and smashed into the sea, or the pilot was aiming at some other ship. The Japs were terribly, scarily, in earnest. The way their soldiers fought showed that. But kamikazes? Didn’t you have to be more than a little nuts to climb into a cockpit and take off, knowing ahead of time that you weren’t coming back? The things some people would do for their country!
Mike started to laugh. What he’d done for his country was volunteer for a punishment brigade. And his country had rewarded him how? By sending him to hell five different times. It hadn’t managed to kill him off yet, so here he was, going in for a sixth try at suicide. What was he but a slow-motion kamikaze pilot?
The guy who was telling his beads paused between one Our Father and the next. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Mike said. “Believe me, nothing.”
“Too bad. I could use a yock,” the other soldier said, and went back to the rosary.