Walk in Hell

“It’s not enough,” Alexander said. “Not going along with the Yanks, I mean-it’s not enough. We shouldn’t be talking about not doing things with them-that’s why you don’t send my sister to the school they set up. Like I say, it’s good, but it’s not enough. We’ve got to figure out ways to do things to the Americans.”

“Like that bomb in Rosenfeld?” Arthur McGregor asked. His son nodded, gray eyes fierce. But McGregor sighed. “It’s possible, I suppose, but it’s not easy. They almost made me one of the hostages they took after that bomb went off, remember. They would have given me a blindfold, lined me up against a wall, and shot me. This is a war, son, and you can’t back out and say you didn’t mean it if something goes wrong.”

“I know that!” Alexander exclaimed. But the jaunty tone with which he’d replied gave him away. He didn’t believe for a moment that anything could go wrong in a scheme to tweak the Yankees’ tails. When you were fifteen, you knew everything always turned out fine in the end. Arthur McGregor was a good deal past twice fifteen. He knew how foolish you were at that age.

He addressed his son with great seriousness: “I want you to promise me you won’t go off on your own to try to do anything to the Americans. And once you make that promise, I expect you to keep it.”

Now Alexander McGregor looked most unhappy. “Aw, Pa, I don’t want to have to lie to you.”

“I don’t want you to have to lie to me, either,” his father said. McGregor was at the same time proud of his son for not taking a lie for granted and alarmed at how serious he was in wanting to do something to strike at the American soldiers holding-and holding down-Manitoba.

“Believe me, Pa,” Alexander went on, “I’m not the only fellow who wants to-” He stopped. Kerosene light was on the ruddy side, anyhow, but McGregor thought he turned red. “I don’t think I should have said that.”

“I wish you hadn’t, I’ll tell you that.” McGregor studied Alexander, who did his inadequate best to show nothing on his face. How many boys were there on the scattered farms of Manitoba-and boys they would have to be, for everyone of conscription age before the land was overrun had already been called to the colors-plotting heaven only knew what against the USA?

“Whatever these fellows have in their minds, you will not be a part of it. Do you understand me?” Arthur McGregor knew he sounded like a prophet laying down the Law. He hadn’t taken that tone with Alexander for years; he’d had no need. Now he wondered whether his son, who was nearly a man and who thought himself more nearly a man than he was, would still respond to it as he had when he was smaller. And, sure enough, defiance kindled in Alexander’s eyes. “I understand you, Pa,” he said, but that was a long way from pledging his obedience.

McGregor exhaled heavily. “I’m not just saying this for myself, you know. What do you suppose your mother would do if the Yanks caught you at whatever mischief you have in mind?” He knew that was a low blow, and used it without compunction or hesitation.

It went home, too. Alexander winced. “It wouldn’t be like that, Pa,” he protested.

“No? Why wouldn’t it?” McGregor pressed the advantage: “And how would you keep Julia out of it, once you got in? Or even Mary?”

“Julia’s just a girl, and she’s only twelve,” Alexander said, as if that settled that.

“And she hates the Americans worse than you do, and she’s stubborner than you ever dreamt of being,” McGregor said. Before Alexander could respond, he went on, “And one of these days you and your pals would decide that the Yanks couldn’t think she was dangerous because she’s a girl and she’s only twelve. And you’d send her out to do something, and she’d be proud to go. And what if she got caught, son? The Yanks are nasty devils, but Lord help you if you think they’re stupid.”

“We’d never-” Alexander began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. When you were in a war, who could say what you might be driven to do?

Neither of them spoke of Mary. That was not because she had but seven years. It had more to do with a certainty father and son shared that the littlest girl in the house would take any chance offered her to hurt the U.S. cause, and an equally shared determination not to offer her any such chance. Mary was very bright for her age, but unacquainted with anything at all related to restraint.

“I asked you once for your promise, and you would not give it,” McGregor said. “I’m going to ask you again.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited to hear what his son would say. If Alexander said no…He didn’t know what he would do if Alexander said no.

His son let out a long, deep sigh, the sigh not of a boy but of a man facing up to the fact that the world doesn’t work the way he wished it would. It was the most grown-up noise McGregor had ever heard from him. At last, voice full of regret, he said, “All right, Pa. I promise.”

“Promise what, Alexander?” That was Mary, coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been putting away the plates her mother had washed and her big sister dried.

“Promise to tickle you till you scream like there’s American soldiers coming down the chimney instead of Santa Claus,” Alexander said, and made as if to grab her. That could be dangerous; she fought as ferociously as a half-tame farm cat.

But now she hopped back, laughing. She turned to Arthur McGregor. “What did he promise, Pa?”

“To be a good boy,” McGregor said. Mary snorted. That sort of promise meant nothing to her. McGregor had to hope it meant something to her brother.

IV

Jonathan Moss peered down at his whiskey, then up toward the ceiling of the officers’ club; the rafters were blurry not from the effects of drink-though he’d had a good deal-but because of the haze of tobacco smoke. He knocked back the whiskey, then signaled the colored steward behind the bar for another one.

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, and passed him a fresh glass full of the magical amber fluid that inflamed and numbed at the same time.

His tentmates sat around the table: Daniel Dudley, who usually went by “Dud,” the flight leader; Tom Innis, fierce as a wolf; and Zach Whitby, new in the tent, replacing a casualty, and still a little hesitant on the ground because of that. None of the four lieutenants was far past twenty. All of them wore twin-winged pilot’s badges on the left breast pockets of their uniform tunics.

Tom Innis got a villainous pipe going. Its fumes added to those already crowding the air. Moss flapped a hand in his direction. “Here,” he said, “don’t start shooting poison gas at us.”

“You should talk, those cheroots you smoke,” Innis retorted, running a hand over his brown, peltlike Kaiser Bill mustache. “They smell like burning canvas painted with aeroplane dope.”

Since that was at least half true, Moss didn’t argue with it. He leaned back in his chair, almost overbalancing. Dud Dudley spotted that, as he might have spotted a Canuck aeroplane with engine trouble trying to limp back toward Toronto. “How are you supposed to handle a fighting scout when you can’t even fly a chair?” he demanded.

“Well, hell.” Moss landed awkwardly. “When I’m up in a fighting scout, I’ll be sober. It does make a difference.”

That struck all four men as very funny, probably because none of them was sober. The weather had been too thick to fly for several days now, leaving the pilots with nothing to do but fiddle with their aeroplanes and gather in the officers’ club to drink. As Moss had found the year before, winter in Ontario sometimes shut down operations for weeks at a time.

He sipped his fresh whiskey and looked around the club. Other groups of pilots and observers had their own circles, most of them raucous enough that they paid little attention to the racket he and his friends were making. On the walls were pictures of the fliers who had served at the aerodrome: some posed portraits, some snapshots of groups of them or of them sitting jauntily in the cockpits of their aeroplanes, a few with their arms around pretty girls. Moss hadn’t had much luck along those lines; most Canadian girls wanted little to do with the Americans who occupied their country.

A lot of the pilots in the photographs were men he’d never known, men killed before he’d joined the squadron as a replacement, new as Zach Whitby. Others had died after Moss came here: Luther Carlsen, for instance, whose place Whitby was taking. The rest were survivors…up till now. The quick and the dead, he thought.