Barbara looked up from the chair in which she was nursing Jonathan. She didn’t seem as badly beat up as she had just after he was born, but she wasn’t what you’d call perky, either. “Hello, honey,” she said. “Shut the door quietly, would you? He may fall asleep. He’s certainly been fussing as if he was tired.”
Sam noted the precise grammar there, as he often did when his wife talked. He sometimes envied her fancy education; he’d left high school to play ball, though an insatiable curiosity had kept him reading this and finding out little fragmented pieces of that ever since. Barbara never complained about his lack of formal schooling, but it bothered him anyhow.
Sure enough, Jonathan did go to sleep. The kid was growing; he took up more room in the cradle now than he had when he was first born. As soon as Sam saw he would stay down after Barbara put him in there, he touched her on the arm and said, “I got a present for you, hon. Well, really it’s a present for both of us, but you can go first with it. I’ve been saving it all morning long, so I figure I can last a little longer.”
The buildup intrigued her. “Whatdo you have?” she breathed.
“It’s not anything fancy,” he warned. “Not a diamond, not a convertible.” They both laughed, not quite comfortably. It would be a long time. If ever, before you could start thinking about driving a convertible. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a new corncob pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco, then handed them to her with a flourish. “Here you go.”
She stared as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Where did you get them?”
“This colored guy came around early this morning, selling ’em,” Sam answered. “He’s from up in the northern part of the state, where they grow some tobacco. Cost me fifty bucks, but what the heck? I don’t have a whole lot of things to spend money on, so why not?”
“It’s all right with me. It’s better than all right with me, as a matter of fact.” Barbara stuck the empty pipe in her mouth. “I never smoked one of these before. I probably look like a Southern granny.”
“Babe, you always look good to me,” Yeager said. Barbara’s expression softened. Keeping your wife happy was definitely worth doing-especially when you meant every word you said. He tapped at the tobacco pouch with his index finger. “You want me to load the pipe for you?”
“Would you, please?” she said, so he did. He had a Zippo, fueled now not by lighter fluid but by moonshine. He had no idea how he’d keep it going when he ran out of flints, but that hadn’t happened yet. He flicked the wheel with his thumb. A pale, almost invisible alcohol flame sprang into being. He held it over the bowl of the pipe.
Barbara’s cheeks hollowed as she inhaled. “Careful,” Sam warned. “Pipe tobacco’s a lot stronger than what you get in cigarettes, and-” Her eyes crossed. She coughed like somebody in the last throes of consumption. “-you haven’t smoked much of anything lately,” he finished unnecessarily.
“No kidding.” Her voice was a raspy wheeze. “Remember that bit inTom Sawyer? ‘First Pipes-“I’ve Lost My Knife,” ’ something like that. I know just how Tom felt. That stuff isstrong.”
“Let me try,” Sam said, and took the pipe from her. He drew on it cautiously. He knew about pipe tobacco, and knew what any tobacco could do to you when you hadn’t smoked for a while. Even taking all that into account, Barbara was right; what smoldered in that pipe was strong as the devil. It might have been cured and mellowed for fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes-smoking it felt like scraping coarse sandpaper over his tongue and the inside of his mouth. Spit flooded from every salivary gland he owned, including a few he hadn’t known were there. He felt dizzy, almost woozy for a second-and he knew enough not to draw much smoke down into his lungs. He coughed a couple of times himself. “Wowie!”
“Here, give it back to me,” Barbara said. She made another, much more circumspect, try, then exhaled. “God! That is to tobacco what bathtub gin was to the real stuff.”
“You’re too young to know about bathtub gin,” he said severely. Memories of some pounding headaches came back to haunt him. He puffed on the pipe again himself. It wasn’t a bad comparison.
Barbara giggled. “One of my favorite uncles was a part-time bootlegger. I had quite a high-school graduation party-from what I remember of it, anyway.” She took the pipe back from Sam. “I’m going to need a while to get used to this again.”
“Yeah, we’ll probably be there just about when that pouch goes empty,” he agreed. “God knows when that colored fellow will come through town again. If he ever does.”
They smoked the bowl empty, then filled it again. The room grew thick with smoke. Sam’s eyes watered. He felt loose and easy, the way he had after a cigarette in the good old days. That he also felt slightly nauseated and his mouth like raw meat was only a detail, as far as he was concerned.
“That’s good,” Barbara said meditatively, and punctuated her words with another set of coughs. She waved those aside. “Worth it.”
“I think so, too.” Sam started to laugh. “Know what we remind me of?” When Barbara shook her head, he answered his own question: “We’re like a couple of Lizards with their tongues in the ginger jar.”
“That’s terrible!” Barbara exclaimed. Then she thought it over. “Itis terrible, but you may be right. It is kind of like a drug-tobacco, I mean.”
“You bet it is. I tried quitting a couple of times when I was playing ball-didn’t like what it was doing to my wind. I couldn’t do it. I’d get all nervous and twitchy and I don’t know what. When you can’t get any, it’s not so bad: you don’t have a choice. But stick tobacco in front of us every day and we’ll go back to it, sure enough.”
Barbara sucked on the pipe again. She made a wry face. “Ginger tastes better, that’s for certain.”
“Yeah, I think so, too-now,” Sam said. “But if I’m smoking all the time, I won’t think so for long. You know, when you get down to it, coffee tastes pretty bad, too, or we wouldn’t have to fix it up with cream and sugar. But I like what coffee used to do for me when we had it.”
“So did I,” Barbara said wistfully. She pointed toward the cradle. “With him waking up whenever he feels like it, I could really use some coffee these days.”
“We’re a bunch of drug fiends, all right, no doubt about it.” Yeager took the pipe from her and sucked in smoke. Now that he’d had some, it wasn’t so bad. He wondered whether he ought to hope that Negro would come around with more-or for him to stay away.
The partisan leader, a fat Pole who gave his name as Ignacy, stared at Ludmila Gorbunova.“You are a pilot?” he said in fluent but skeptical German.
Ludmila stared back. Almost at sight, she had doubts about Ignacy. For one thing, almost the only way you could stay fat these days was by exploiting the vast majority who were thin, sometimes to the point of emaciation. For another, his name sounded so much likeNazi that just hearing it made her nervous.
Also in German, she answered, “Yes, I am a pilotYou are a guerrilla commander?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “There hasn’t been much call for piano teachers the past few years.”
Ludmila stared again, this time for a different reason.This had been a member of the petty bourgeoisie? He’d certainly managed to shed his class trappings; from poorly shaved jowls to twin bandoliers worn crisscross on his chest to battered boots, he looked like a man who’d been a bandit all his life and sprang from a long line of bandits. She had trouble imagining him going through Chopinetudes with bored young students.
Beside her, Avram looked down at his scarred hands. Wladeslaw looked up to the top of the linden tree under which they stood. Neither of the partisans who’d accompanied her from near Lublin said anything. They’d done their job by getting her here. Now it was up to her.