“Ah, the brothers Sullivan,” he said. “Have any good stories about me now, Mike? I wondered if you were that Sullivan. Now I know.” He couldn’t have thought about Mike more than once in the nine years since his arrest. . could he? Whether he had or not, he remembered everything, just the way Mikoian said he did.
“I’m that Sullivan, all right, sir. NY24601.” Mike recited his encampment number with quiet pride.
“Well, if you run into WY232 again, give him my regards, not that he’ll appreciate them.” With a nod, Joe Steele went off to get some bacon and eggs and coffee.
Mike stared after him. “Christ!” he said hoarsely.
“What?” Charlie asked.
“He even knows who my best friend in the encampment was. He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s smarter than I thought he was, and I never pegged him for a dope.”
Leon Trotsky came in with two Red bodyguards and his interpreter. “Here’s another smart SOB,” Charlie said in a low voice. “And between the two of ’em, they’ve got the whole world sewed up.”
“Ain’t life grand?” Mike said. They both started to laugh.
XXII
Mike stayed in the Army after what they called peace came. All his other choices seemed worse. They made it plain to him that, as someone who’d served a stretch in an encampment, he could live legally only in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. What would he do there? Asking the question answered it. He’d starve, that was what.
Who would hire a reporter who’d got jugged for going after Joe Steele? No one in his right mind, even if the President had personally given him a Bronze Star with V for valor. The other trade he knew was lumberjack. He hadn’t enjoyed doing it for the Jeebies enough to want to keep doing it on his own.
After a bit, he realized he’d also got good at one other thing. But how much demand for a button man was there in places like Denver or Salt Lake City or Albuquerque? Not enough, chances were, to support him in the style to which he’d like to become accustomed. And, as with cutting down trees, cutting down people was something he could do when he had to but not something he wanted for a career.
So he kept the uniform on. They promoted him to first sergeant-getting a medal from Joe Steele’s own mitts carried weight with them. And they mustered him out of the punishment brigade and into an ordinary infantry unit. He felt a pang of regret when he took off the tunic he’d worn so long, the one with the P on the sleeve. Part of the regret came from remembering how many guys he’d liked who’d worn that P with him weren’t here to take it off. Getting rid of guys like that-guys like him-was what punishment brigades were all about. It just hadn’t quite worked in his case.
He could have lied about his past and said he’d come from some other ordinary unit. When they cut his new orders, they even offered to give him a fictitious paper traiclass="underline" probably one more consequence of getting the Bronze Star from Joe Steele. But he said, “Nah, don’t bother.”
He was proud of his stretch in the punishment brigade. He was proud of the four oak-leaf clusters on the ribbon for his Purple Heart. He was proud of his stretch as a wrecker, too. A lot of the poor bastards in the encampments got their time because somebody sold them out. Not him. He’d earned a term as honestly as a man could.
And when he went to the brigade near the demilitarized zone, he found that the men there were in awe of what he’d lived through. He’d seen more hard fighting in more bad places than any four of them put together. Most of them wanted to go home as soon as they could and start reassembling the lives they’d had before they put on the uniform.
Mike had nothing left to reassemble back in the States. He’d liked seeing Charlie. But they’d gone their separate ways even before the knock on the door at one in the morning. Charlie’d come to terms with Joe Steele. Mike hadn’t and couldn’t. In the United States these days, no chasm gaped wider.
So Mike figured he was better off an ocean away from the United States. Now that he wasn’t trying to kill the Japs, he discovered they could be interesting. They bowed low to the American conquerors whenever they walked past. A lot of soldiers accepted that as no less than their due. Mike wondered what would happen if he started bowing back.
Old men stared as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Younger men-often demobilized soldiers, plainly-also acted surprised, but a few of them grudged him a smile. And women of any age went into storms of giggles. He couldn’t decide whether he was the funniest thing in the world or he embarrassed them.
They also giggled when he learned a few words of Japanese and trotted them out. He liked being able to ask for food and drink without going through a big song and dance. Beer-biru-was easy. He learned the word for delicious, too, or thought he did. That set off more laughter than anything else he said. He wondered why till a Jap with bits of English explained oishi meant something lewd if you didn’t say it just right. He did his best after that and used it a lot, because he liked Japanese food more than he’d thought he would.
He liked soaking in a Japanese bath, too. Other Americans ribbed him when he said so. “I like bathing by myself, thanks,” one of them told him.
“Hey, this beats the shit out of climbing into a tub full of disinfectant with a bunch of smelly scalps,” Mike answered. As far as he knew, the other soldier had never been within a hundred miles of an encampment. But the guy understood the slang. Joe Steele left his mark on America all kinds of ways.
He’d left his mark on Japan, too. Everyone was desperately poor. The Japs scrounged through the base’s garbage without shame. Old tin cans, scraps of wood, and broken tools were all precious to them. So was cloth, because they had so little of their own.
Not surprisingly, a black market sprang up. Some things passed from the base to the natives in unofficial ways. Americans wound up owning little artworks that hadn’t got ruined in the fighting. A village druggist rigged up a still that would have made a moonshiner proud during Prohibition. Mike had drunk plenty of worse white mule back in the States.
And, of course, some of the women paid for what they wanted in the oldest coin of all. If that bothered them, they showed it less than their counterparts in the West would have. It was, their attitude seemed to say, all part of a day’s work. Mike liked that better than the hypocrisy he’d grown up with.
Some of the men resented the Americans for beating them. There were places in South Japan where soldiers had to travel in groups so they wouldn’t get bushwhacked. The island of Shikoku was especially bad for that. It had been bypassed, not overrun and ground to sawdust. The Japs there hadn’t been licked the way the ones on Kyushu and Honshu had.
Up here near the demilitarized zone, the locals gave the Americans far less grief. Bad as things were on this side of the Agano River, all the Japs had to do was look over the border into North Japan to know they could have had it one hell of a lot worse.
The Americans were at least going through the motions of trying to get the Japs in their half of the prostrate country back on their feet. The Russians? They treated North Japan the way they treated East Germany: as a source for what they needed to rebuild their own ravaged land. Factories and mills got broken down and shipped by sea to Vladivostok for reconstruction somewhere in Russia. Farmers were herded together into agricultural collectives (Mike saw little difference between those and Joe Steele’s community farms, but nobody asked him so he kept his mouth shut).
Anyone in North Japan who complained vanished-into a reeducation camp or into an unmarked grave. Of course, anyone in South Japan who complained could find himself in big trouble, too. But there was a difference. More people tried to flee from the north to the south than the other way round. When it came to voting with their feet, the Japs preferred the U.S. Army to the Red Army.