“You really think the English and the Japanese are just sitting back, waiting for us to come to them?” Sam asked Crosetti. “They could cause a lot of trouble if they took the Sandwich Islands back from us.”
“Yeah, they could, but they won’t,” Crosetti said. “When the president declared war on England, I don’t figure he waited five minutes before he sent us sailing for Pearl Harbor. We caught the damn limeys with their drawers down. They hadn’t reinforced the place yet, and they couldn’t hold it against everything we threw at ’em. But we got more men, more ships there than you can shake a stick at. They want it back, they’re gonna hafta pay one hell of a bill.”
“That’s all true,” Carsten said. “But now that we’ve got all those men there and we’ve got all those ships there, what are the limeys and the Japs going to think we’ll do with ’em? Sit there and hang on tight? Does that sound like Teddy Roosevelt to you? They’re going to figure we’re heading out toward Singapore and Manila sooner or later unless they do something about it. Even if they don’t land on Oahu, they’re going to do their damnedest to smash up the fleet, right?”
Vic Crosetti scratched at one cheek while he thought. If Sam had done anything like that, he probably would have drawn blood from his poor, sunbaked skin. After a bit, Crosetti gave him a thoughtful nod. “Makes pretty good sense, I guess. How come the only stripe you got on your sleeve is a service mark? Way you talk, you oughta be a captain, maybe an admiral in one of those damnfool hats they wear.”
Carsten laughed out loud. “All I got to say is, if they’re so hard up they make
The grin that stretched across Crosetti’s face was altogether impudent. “I ain’t gonna argue with you about that,” he said, whereupon Sam made as if to wallop him over the head with his mop. They both laughed. Crosetti grew serious, though, unwontedly fast. “You do talk like an officer a lot of the time, you know that?”
“Do I?” Carsten said. His fellow swabbie-at the moment, in the most literal sense of the word-nodded. Sam thought about it. “Can’t worry about chasing women all the damned time. You got to keep your eyes open. You look around, you start seeing things.”
“I see a couple of lazy lugs, is what I see,” a deep voice behind them said. Sam turned his head. There stood Hiram Kidde, gunner’s mate on the five-inch cannon Carsten helped serve. He had plenty of service stripes on his sleeve, having been in the Navy for more than twenty years. He went on, “Go ahead, try and tell me you were workin’ hard.”
“Have a heart, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten said, using Kidde’s universal nickname. “Can’t expect us to be busy every second.”
“Who says I can’t?” Kidde retorted. He was broad-faced and stocky, thick through the middle but not soft. He looked like a man you wouldn’t want to run into in a barroom brawl. From what Sam had seen of him in action, his looks weren’t deceiving.
“Petty officers never remember what it was like when they were seamen,” Crosetti said. He looked sly. “’Course, it is kind of hard remembering back to when Buchanan was president.”
Kidde glared at him. Then he shrugged. “Hell, I figured you were gonna say, when Jefferson was president.” Shaking his head, he walked on.
“Got him good, Vic,” Carsten said. Crosetti grinned and nodded. They went back to swabbing the deck-still not working too hard.
Jefferson Pinkard kissed his wife, Emily, as she headed out the door of their yellow-painted company house to go to the munitions plant where she’d been working the past year. “Be careful, honey,” he said. He meant that a couple of ways. For one, her usually fair skin was still sallow from the jaundice working with some of the explosives caused. For another, riding the trolley in Birmingham, as in a lot of cities in the Confederacy these days, was something less than safe.
“I will,” she promised, as she did whenever he warned her. She tossed her head. These days, she’d cut her strawberry-blond hair short, to keep it from getting caught in the machinery with which she worked. Jeff missed the braid she’d worn halfway down her back. She kissed him again, a quick peck on the lips. “I got to go.”
“I know,” he said. “You may get home a little before me tonight-I got to vote, remember.”
“I know it’s today,” she agreed. She gave him a sidelong look. “One of these days, I reckon I’ll be voting, too, so you won’t have to remind me about it.”
He sighed and shrugged. It wasn’t worth an argument. She’d come up with more radical ideas since she started working than in all the time they’d been married up till then. She hurried off toward the trolley. He stood in the doorway for half a minute or so, watching her walk. He would have forgiven a lot of radical ideas from a woman who moved her hips like that. It gave him something to look forward to when he came home from work.
Because the company housing was only a few hundred yards away from the Sloss foundry, he didn’t have to leave as soon as his wife did to get to work on time. He went back in, finished his coffee and ham and eggs, set the dishes to soak in soapy water in the sink, grabbed his dinner pail, and then headed out the door himself.
As he walked into the foundry, he waved to men he knew. There weren’t that many, not any more: most of the whites in the Sloss labor force had already been conscripted. Every time he opened his own mailbox, Pinkard expected to find the buff-colored envelope summoning him to the colors, too. He sometimes wondered if they’d lost his file.
Along with the white men in overalls and caps came a stream of black men dressed the same way. Many of them, nowadays, were doing jobs to which they wouldn’t have dared aspire when the war began, jobs that had been reserved for whites till the front drained off too many. They still weren’t getting white men’s pay, but they were making more than they had before.
Pinkard had been working alongside a Negro for a good long while now. Though he’d hated the notion at first, he’d since come to take it for granted-until the uprising had broken out the month before. Leonidas, the buck he was working with these days, had kept right on coming in, uprisings or no uprisings. That would have made Pinkard happier, though, had Leonidas shown the least trace of brains concealed anywhere about his person.
He went into the foundry and out onto the floor. The racket, as always, was appalling. You couldn’t shout over it; you had to learn to talk-and to hear-under it. When it was cold outside, it was hot in there, hot with the heat of molten metal. When it was hot outside, the foundry floor made a pretty good foretaste of hell. It smelled of iron and coal smoke and sweat.
Two Negroes waited for him: night shift had started hiring blacks well before they got onto the day crew. One was Agrippa, the other a fellow named Sallust, who didn’t have a permanent slot of his own but filled in when somebody else didn’t show up.
Seeing Sallust made Jeff scratch his head. “Where’s Vespasian at?” he asked Agrippa. “I don’t ever remember him missin’ a shift. He ain’t shiftless, like that damn Leonidas.” He laughed at his own wit. Then, after a moment, he stopped laughing. Leonidas
Agrippa didn’t laugh. He was in his thirties, older than Pinkard, and right now he looked older than that-he looked fifty if a day. His voice was heavy and slow and sober as he answered, “Reason he ain’t here, Mistuh Pinkard, is on account of they done hanged Pericles yesterday. Pericles was his wife’s kin, you know, an’ he stayed home to help take care o’-things.”
“Hanged him?” Pinkard said. “Lord!” Pericles had been in jail as an insurrectionist for months. Before that, he’d worked alongside the white man in the place Leonidas had now. He’d been a damn sight better at it than Leonidas, too. Pinkard shook his head. “That’s too damn bad. Maybe he was a Red, but he was a damn fine steel man.”
“I tell Vespasian you say dat,” Agrippa said. “He be glad to hear it.” Sallust sent him a hooded glance. Pinkard had seen its like before. It meant something on the order of,
The two black men from the night shift left. Jeff got to work. He had to work harder without Leonidas around, but he worked better, too, because he didn’t have to keep an eye on his inept partner. One of these days, Leonidas would be standing in the wrong place, and they’d pour a whole great crucible full of molten metal down on his empty head. The only things left would be a brief stink of burnt meat and a batch of steel that needed resmelting because it had picked up too much carbon.
Leonidas came strutting onto the floor twenty minutes late. “Lord, the girl I found me las’ night!” he said, and
