Walk in Hell

blew out the lamp, plunging the bedroom into blackness. No moon, not tonight, and no town close by, either. Sometimes, when all the guns up at the front were going at once, that glow would flicker on the horizon: the Northern Lights of death. But the guns were quiet tonight, too, or as quiet as they ever got.

Still in his union suit, McGregor slid under the covers. Afterwards, he didn’t know whether he first reached for Maude or she for him. After being married so long, after working so hard every day, desire was a flame that guttered, and sometimes guttered low. But it had never quite gone out, and, like any guttering flame, sometimes flared high, too.

Neither one of them undressed. They were almost as formal with each other as they would have been with strangers. He kissed her carefully, knowing he hadn’t had time to shave in the past couple of days, knowing also he would rasp her face raw if he wasn’t careful.

His hand closed on her breast through the cotton nightshirt she wore. She sighed. He squeezed her nipple. It stiffened against the soft fabric. He did the same with her other breast. They were still firm after nursing three children-and, in any case, in the darkness she was always a bride and he a bridegroom ever so glad to be out of his uncomfortable fancy suit and the top hat he’d never had on a day of his life before or since.

He reached under the hem of the long nightshirt. Her legs slid apart for him. His hands were hard with endless labor, and she-she was softer there than anywhere else. Of themselves, her legs drifted wider. When her breath began to come short and quick, he stopped what he was doing and unbuttoned the union suit with fingers clumsy not only from work but from desire. He poised himself above her. The mattress rocked, ever so slightly. She was nodding, urging him to hurry, something she would never have done with words.

She gasped when he entered her, and soon shuddered beneath him. He went on, intent on what he was doing-and also too tired to be able to do it quickly. She began to gasp again, her arms tightened around his back, her hips moving no matter how unladylike motion at such times was. She let out a small, involuntary moan at about the same time joyous fire poured through him.

He rolled off her almost at once, and set his underwear to rights. “Good night,” she said, turning onto her side to get ready to sleep.

“Good night,” he answered. They always said that. He kept wondering if there shouldn’t be something more. But if there was more, their bodies had said it. For a little while, he hadn’t thought about anything, not even Alexander. But making love didn’t make trouble go away; it just shoved the trouble to one side. He brooded, but not for long. Sleep shoved trouble to one side, too.

In the morning, though, the sun would rise. The trouble would still be there.

George Enos slapped at a mosquito. He killed it-he squashed it flat, smearing red guts across his forearm. “That means it’s bitten somebody,” Wayne Pitchess said. “That’s blood in there.”

“Of course it’s bitten somebody, for God’s sake.” Enos rolled his eyes. “You think I squashed it because it was throwing pillows at me?”

The Punishment lay at anchor a few miles beyond Clarksville, Tennessee. George didn’t like lying at anchor. He looked to the south, to the hills below which the Cumberland flowed. Somewhere out there, the Rebs were liable to have a gun waiting to start throwing shells at the river monitor, and a moving target was harder to hit than a stationary one.

What worried him more than anything else was that monitors regularly tied up here: so regularly that the locals-the colored locals, anyhow-had run up a couple of shanties by the riverside to cater to Yankee sailors’ needs-or their desires, anyhow. If you were off duty, and if your commanding officer was in a good mood, you could row over to the shanties, eat fried chicken or roast pork, drink some horrible homemade rotgut that tasted as if it should have gone into a kerosene lamp instead of a human being, or get your ashes hauled in the crib next door.

George had eaten the food, which was pretty good. He’d drunk the whiskey, and awakened the next morning with a head that felt like the Punishment’s boiler at forced draft. He hadn’t laid his money down for any of the colored women, not yet. The sailors who had gone into the shabby little makeshift whorehouse came out with stories of how ugly the girls were. That hadn’t stopped a lot of them from going back.

That was another reason he wished the Punishment would go upstream or down. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Sylvia, or the top part of his mind didn’t. But he’d been away from her and without a woman for a long time now. If he went over to one of those shacks for some pork ribs and had himself a glass or two of that godawful bad whiskey, maybe he wouldn’t care how ugly the whores were supposed to be or how much he missed Sylvia. Sometimes you just wanted to do it so badly, you…

He found himself fondling the curve of the water jacket on his machine gun as if it were Sylvia’s breast-or, for that matter, the breast of one of the colored women in that shack. He jerked his hand away from the green-gray painted iron as if it had become red-hot, or as if everyone on the monitor could see what was on his mind.

He went back to work, stripping and cleaning the machine gun with the same dogged persistence he might have shown trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic. He wished he were trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic, or would have wished it had the ocean not been full of warships and commerce raiders and submarines, all of which looked on a fishing boat as a tasty snack.

And keeping the machine gun in perfect order didn’t only distract him from thoughts of Sylvia (though, when he thought on how he’d rubbed the cooling jacket, it hadn’t distracted him much, had it?); it also made his coming through a fight alive more likely. He approved of that.

But, as the sun began to slide down the sky in the afternoon, three men made for one of the Punishment’s boats to improve their outlook on life. One of them called to George: “Come on, have a few with us.”

The deck officer was standing close by. Moltke Donovan was a fresh-faced lieutenant who took his duties very seriously. One of those duties was keeping his men in top fighting trim, and that meant, every now and then, letting them go off on a toot. Lieutenant Kelly would probably have said no. His replacement smiled and said, “Go ahead, Enos. That machine gun’s in better shape than when they tore it out of its crate.”

“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.