“Yes, sir,” George said, if not happily, then without sackcloth and ashes, too. He set down the rag, stuck the little screwdriver into a loop on his belt, and hurried for the boat.
As he clambered in, one of the other sailors said, “I know you got money in your pocket, on account of you were lucky last night.”
“Lucky, hell,” Enos said indignantly. “That was skill, Grover, nothing else but.”
“Skill, my foot,” Grover retorted. “Anybody who draws three cards and comes out holding a flush shouldn’t play poker with honest people. You ought to go looking for wallets instead.”
Said in a different tone of voice, that would have been an invitation to brawl. As things were, it was only rueful mourning over lost cash. George said, “Well, all right, maybe I was lucky.” Laughing, they rowed across the Cumberland to the waiting shacks.
They tied up the boat at a bush by the edge of the river, there being no other wharf: till the war, this hadn’t been a place where anyone stopped. But it was a place where people stopped now. George smelled ribs cooking in some kind of spicy sauce. He hadn’t known he was hungry, but he knew it now. He scrambled out onto the mud of the riverbank and hurried toward the shack.
“Good day to you, gentlemens,” said the colored fellow who ran the place. His name was Othello. He grinned, showing white teeth all the whiter for being set in a black, black face. “Got me some barbecue cookin’, best you gwine find this side o’ the Kentucky Smoke House.”
He spoke as if that were some kind of touchstone. Maybe it was, but it didn’t touch George. Still, he said, “All I know about Kentucky is that we’re on this side of it. And all I know about that meat is that it smells better than anything that ever came out of the galley.”
To that, Grover and the other two sailors-Albert and Stanley-added loud, profane agreement. Othello grinned again, and served up great slabs of sizzling-hot meat. Barbecue wasn’t something Enos had known back in Boston, but, he thought, it was something he could get used to.
Othello had rags for napkins and sometimes eked out his mismatched, battered china with box lids. None of that mattered. “This pig died happy,” George declared, and again no one argued with him.
“You boys want somethin’ to wash that there down?” Othello asked, looking sly. Cumberland water wasn’t so bad. Next to the water of the Mississippi, Cumberland water was pretty damn fine. But the jars the cook displayed, though they’d come out of the Cumberland and were dripping to prove it, hadn’t been in there to fill with water, only to keep cool.
Grover shook his head. “God only knows why we drink that panther sweat,” he said. “I could get the same feeling hittin’ myself in the head with a hammer six or eight times, and it’d be cheaper.”
“Taste better, too,” Stanley said. But when Othello set a jar on the rickety table around which the sailors sat, nobody asked him to take it away. Nobody threw the cups and mugs he gave them at him, either. They paid him, poured the deadly-pale whiskey, and drank it down.
“Jesus,” George wheezed when he could speak again. Another mug of that, he thought, and he was liable to know Jesus face to face-and, in the mood he’d be in, he’d probably want to wrestle. He drank the second mug. Jesus didn’t appear, and he didn’t die. Tomorrow morning, he might want to, but not now.
A colored woman walked into the shack. All she wore was a thin cotton shift. When she was standing between anybody looking at her and a source of light, the shape of her body was easy to make out.
“Boys,” she said, “if you done spent all your money here, my friends and me, we is gonna be powerful disappointed in y’all.”
Othello laughed. George didn’t know whether he got a rakeoff from the whores who’d set up shop next door, but that laugh made him think so. “Mehitabel, I left ’em with somethin’,” he said. “You kin git yo’ share.” He made no bones about being there for any other reason than skinning the men from the Punishment or any other U.S. river monitors that came by. And if the Confederate Navy made it back to this stretch of the Cumberland, he’d skin them, too.
Mehitabel placed herself so she was displayed to best advantage. George wished he hadn’t let that second mug of whiskey char its way to his stomach. He wasn’t thinking about Sylvia now, any more than a stallion thought of anything when you put him in with a mare in season.
He got up from the table. The other sailors shouted bawdy advice. Rolling her big hips, the whore led him out of one shack toward the other. In broad daylight, she might as well not have been wearing that shift. She sure as hell wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.
George’s heart drummed in his chest. His breath whistled in his throat. That was what he thought at first, with rotgut half stunning his senses. But he knew the sound of incoming shells in his gut, not just in his head, which wasn’t working very well right then.
He threw himself flat-not on top of the whore, but to the ground. The roar of the explosions stunned him. Mehitabel screamed like a cat with its tail in a door. Dirt flew as shells smashed into the soft ground south of the Cumberland. Great columns of water leaped from shells landing in the Cumberland. And, to George’s horror, two enormous columns of smoke and flame sprang from the Punishment as one shell struck her near the stern, the other square amidships.
More shells walked across the Cumberland toward him. Some of the water they kicked up splashed down onto him and onto Mehitabel, plastering the thin shift to her rounded contours. Enos didn’t care about that. He didn’t care about anything except approaching death and the fate of his crewmates.
The shells stopped falling before they reached the north bank of the Cumberland. He looked out toward the Punishment. The river monitor was burning and sinking fast. A moment later, as flame reached the magazines, it stopped burning and exploded. Mehitabel’s mouth was open as wide as it would go, which meant she had to be screaming, but George couldn’t hear a thing.
The heat of the fireball scorched his face. When at last it faded, twenty feet or so of the bow of the Punishment stuck up out of the river like a tombstone. The rest of the monitor was gone. A couple of bodies and a few pieces of bodies floated in the water, food for the snappers.
Stanley and Albert and Grover came out of the shack where they’d been drinking. They looked as bad as Enos felt. He suddenly realized he wasn’t drunk any more. Horror and terror had scorched the whiskey out of him.
He also realized, looking at his crewmates, that they were the only four Yankee sailors in hostile country, and that none of them carried anything more lethal than a belt knife. Absurdly, he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time on that machine gun when all it turned out to be good for was getting blown up.
“Get into bed this minute, do you hear me?” Sylvia Enos snapped at George, Jr., punctuating her words with a whack on his fanny.
As nothing else would have, that convinced him she meant what she said. “Good night, Mama!” he exclaimed, and planted a large, wet kiss on her cheek. He hurried off into the bedroom, humming an artillery march.
Sylvia looked down at the palm of her hand. It still stung, which meant his behind had to sting, too. He hadn’t even noticed, except that the swat had reminded him of what he needed to do. She stared after him. Was she raising a little boy or training a horse?
Mary Jane had peacefully gone to bed an hour before. By the haggard look on Brigid Coneval’s face when Sylvia had picked up her children, the reason Mary Jane was peaceful in the evening was that she’d raised hell all afternoon, and worn herself out doing it.