lieutenant commander want with a bunch of ragamuffins in dungarees and overalls and slickers and hats that had seen better days?
Most of the couple of blocks just back of T Wharf were full of tackle shops and saloons and boatbuilders' offices and whorehouses: businesses serving the fishing trade and the men who worked it. In one of the whorehouses, a girl stood naked behind a filmy curtain: a living advertisement. A cop across the street looked the other way. Actually, he looked right in at her, but he didn't do anything about her. George looked at her, too. He was happy being married to Sylvia, but he was a long way from blind.
He flicked a glance up toward the lieutenant commander. The man's head never moved. Maybe his eyes slid to the right, but George wouldn't have bet on it. He seemed as straight an arrow as Enos had come across in some time.
He led the crew from the Spray into a Navy recruiting station sandwiched between a saloon and a cheap diner. Charlie White said, ' 'Scuse me, sir, but we already joined up.' The ex-fishermen all laughed. The sailors who filled out the crew didn't.
A couple of young men sat in there, talking earnestly with a gray-haired petty officer. Enos had a pretty fair idea what they were doing: trying to con vince him they ought to be allowed to put on whites before conscription made them don green-gray. From things he'd read about what life in the trenches was like, and from the black- bordered casualty lists the papers printed day in and day out, he had a hard time blaming them.
The lieutenant commander led the men from the Spray into a back room. 'Be seated, men,' he said, waving to the chairs around the big wooden table. There were just enough chairs for the ersatz fishermen and, at the head of the table, for the officer. As George Enos sat down, he wondered if that was a co incidence. He had his doubts. The Navy didn't run on coincidences.
He also wondered if Patrick O'Donnell would start asking questions. O'Donnell, after all, had commanded a naval vessel that had helped sink a Confederate submarine, while the lieutenant commander had the look of a man who didn't go to sea much. But the former skipper of the Ripple sat silent. He had too much Navy in his blood to pressure an officer.
The lieutenant commander coughed. Maybe he was having trouble coming to the point. George didn't like that. If somebody didn't want to tell you something, odds were you didn't want to hear it, either. At last, the officer did speak: 'Men, we are ending the program in which you have been engaged. Results have not shown themselves to be commensurate to the effort involved.'
Kemmel and Schoonhoven and a couple of other regular Navy men aboard the Spray nodded. It didn't matter to them. One job, another job — so what? They were little rivets on a big machine. They'd fit wherever someone put them.
Now Patrick O'Donnell found his voice: 'But, sir, we did sink a submarine.'
'I know you did,' the lieutenant commander said. 'Another towing couple sank one off the western coast of the Empire of Mexico, too. Both, though, came in the very earliest days of the program, and both, unfortu nately, received wide publicity. Now our enemies are suspicious of targets that look too tempting to be true, and towed submersibles are operating with a far smaller range than would be the case if they were cruising on their own. And so — ' He spread his hands.
'What do we do now, sir, in that case?' O'Donnell asked.
'You'll be reassigned, of course,' the lieutenant commander answered crisply. 'Orders have already been cut for all of you, and transportation arranged for those being moved out of the area.' He pushed back his chair; the legs scraped against the floor. 'I have them in my office. I'll distribute them to you. Wait here.'
He left the room, returning a moment later with a manila folder from which he drew envelopes with names typed on them. He handed O'Donnell his without hesitation, but had to ask who the other men were.
George Enos' fingers fumbled with the flap of the envelope, as if they didn't want to find out what lay inside. No, not as if: he had no desire whatever to learn that the faceless red-tape twisters in Philadelphia had sent him to New York or San Diego or San Francisco or Want to or not, he pulled out the papers folded into the fat envelope. The name leaped out at him at once: ' St. Louis,' he said, his voice a raw hiss of pain. Report at once to the river monitor USS Punishment, St. Louis, Missouri. A train ticket fell out of the mass of other papers. He stared at it in horrified dismay. 'Sir, this says I'm supposed to leave this afternoon!'
'That's correct,' the lieutenant commander agreed. 'We expected the Spray in three or four days ago, and made arrangements accordingly. Your family will be notified, I assure you.'
Your family will be notified. A bloodless way to say it, a gutless way to do it. Sylvia would be at the canning plant now; he couldn't reach her there. The children were at Mrs. Coneval's, but she had no telephone, any more than his own apartment did. Send a wire? He shook his head. That would make Sylvia think he'd been killed.
Charlie White said, ' San Diego,' in that same wounded, disbelieving voice. They looked at each other. Despite the difference in the color of their skins, they were, in that moment, very much alike.
Marshlands had two wheelchairs now, the old one for upstairs and a new one with bigger wheels, one also easier to maneuver outside, for downstairs. Anne Colleton had bought the second chair without a murmur after watching Scipio bump her brother down the stairway and escape losing control of the chair only by luck.
Getting Jacob Colleton downstairs without having to bring his chair along certainly made matters easier for Scipio. He wheeled the mistress' brother to the top of the staircase, helped him rise, draped one of Jacob's arms over his own shoulder, let the gassed man hang onto the banister with the other hand, and walked down more or less normally. Then he eased Jacob Colleton down into the other wheelchair. 'My gun,' Colleton rasped.
'Are you certain that is what you require, sir?' Scipio asked tonelessly. As usual, Jacob reeked of whiskey. He'd also given himself an injection of morphia not long before. The butler did not think well of a drunk, drugged man's prospects for straight shooting.
Jacob Colleton glared at him. His body was wrecked, his eyes red-tracked and blurry, but the hate and rage that poured out from them made Scipio back up half a step in alarm. They weren't aimed at him in particular, but at the world as a whole, the world that had done what it had done to Jacob. That made them more frightening, not less. 'Bring me my gun,' Colleton hissed. He paused to draw a painful breath, then added, 'If you're lucky, I'll give you a running start.'
Scipio's laugh was dutiful. He might have found that funnier if he hadn't been sure Miss Anne's brother at least half meant it. 'I'll be back directly, sir,' he said, and went upstairs again. Hung on brackets above the bed in which he could sleep only propped up by pillows, Jacob Colleton had a Tredegar military rifle. Scipio took it and a couple of ten-round clips of ammunition and carried them down to Colleton. Jacob laid the rifle across the arms of his wheelchair and stuck the ammunition in one of the deep pockets of his robe.
'Push me over by that stand of trees,' he told Scipio. 'You know, the one by the nigger cottages.'
'Yes, sir,' Scipio said.
'See what kind of varmints I can get,' Colleton went on. What a. 303 caliber bullet meant for knocking over men at five hundred yards did to a squirrel at fifty wasn't pretty, but Jacob Colleton didn't seem to care much about that. He was a good shot — a far better shot than he had been before he went off to war. He looked up at Scipio, those pale eyes blazing. 'I keep wish ing it was damnyankees in my sights. Do you have any idea what I'm telling you? No, you wouldn't. How could you?'
But Scipio did. As he opened the front door so he could push Jacob Colleton out of Marshlands, he thought of the Negro revolutionary cell to which he'd so unwillingly become attached, and of their endless, hungry murmurs of Come de revolution. Come the revolution, they'd take aim at Jacob Colleton with exactly the same loving hate he lavished on the men of the USA.
A couple of Negro children broke off their games to stare at Jacob and Scipio as they went by. Colleton made as if to lift his rifle. 'You better run fast, you damn little pickaninnies,' he croaked. Run the children did, squealing in delicious fear. Colleton laughed his ghastly, shattered laugh. He looked up at Scipio again. 'If I don't have any luck in the woods, I'll bag 'em on the way back to Marshlands.'
Scipio maintained a prudent silence. Again, he thought Colleton was mak ing a joke. Again, he wasn't sure enough to be comfortable.
Some of the trees by the Negro cabins bore fruit or nuts. The plantation hands shared out what they got from them. Some of the trees and bushes were just there, and had been there since before the War of Secession, maybe before the American Revolution.
Colleton clicked a magazine into the Tredegar and chambered the first round. Scipio stood behind the wheelchair. He had other things he needed to be doing, plenty of them. Unless Miss Anne called him, they wouldn't
