Walk in Hell

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.

It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. An hour to myself, Sylvia thought. I can read a book. I can write a letter. I can just sit here and think about how tired I am. That last sounded particularly good to her.

She’d sat for about five minutes when someone knocked on the door. That should have been the signal for George, Jr., to come bounding out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on. But he didn’t: only soft, steady breathing came from there, not a little boy. Well, he’d been raising hell all afternoon, too; he must have run down as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Sylvia laughed to herself as she walked to the door. Try as she would, she had the devil of a time getting any peace and quiet. Here was somebody wanting to borrow some molasses or salt, or to tell her the latest scandal of the apartment house, or to give her some cookies or…a little community in its own right, the building was a busy place.

She opened the door. Standing there was no one she knew, but a youngster a year too young to do a proper job of raising the downy, fuzzy excuse for a mustache he had on his upper lip. He wore a green uniform, darker than the Army green-gray, with brass buttons stamped “WU.” “Mrs. Enos?” he said, and, at her automatic nod, went on, “Telegram for you, ma’am.”

Numbly, she accepted the envelope. Numbly, she signed for it. Numbly, she closed the door as the delivery boy hurried away. And, numbly, she opened the envelope with shaking fingers. It was, as she’d feared, from the Navy Department. REGRET TO INFORM YOU, she read, and a low moan came from her throat, THAT YOUR HUSBAND, ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS, IS LISTED AS MISSING IN EXPLOSION OF USS PUNISHMENT. NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. YOU WILL BE INFORMED DIRECTLY SHOULD HE BE FOUND OR CONFIRMED LOST. The printed signature was that of the Secretary of the Navy.

She stared at the telegram till the words were only shapes on paper, shapes without meaning, without sense. But it did not help. The meaning had already been imparted, and lay inside her mind like an icy spear, piercing and freezing everything it touched. She crumpled the flimsy yellow sheet of paper. She felt crumpled, used and used up and thrown away by something bigger than herself, something bigger than the whole country, something eating the world. It was blind and sloppy, and it would not stop until it had its fill.

Her body knew what to do. Her mind did not fight it when it set the alarm on the clock by the bed, undressed itself, and lay down. It tried to make itself go to sleep, too. It knew how tired it was. But her mind had something to say about that, and said it, loud and emphatically.

She lay and lay and lay, mind spinning useless like a trolley wheel on an icy track. Convinced she would not sleep at all, she closed her eyes to look at the darkness inside her eyelids instead of the different darkness of the ceiling. She tried to guess when it was four, when five, when six and time to rise.

She jerked in horror when the alarm went off. She had fallen asleep after all. She wished she’d had a moment’s forgetfulness on first getting up, but no. She knew. As she had after the telegram arrived, she let her body do what needed doing, and roused her children, fed them breakfast, and took them over to Brigid Coneval’s apartment almost without conscious thought.

“Are you all right, dearie?” Mrs. Coneval asked. Her husband was in the Army. “You look a bit peaked, you do.”

“It’s-nothing,” Sylvia said. She kissed her children and left for work. Brigid Coneval stared after her, shaking her head.

Mechanically, Sylvia boarded the trolley. Mechanically, she rode to the right stop. Mechanically, she got off. Mechanically, she punched in. And, mechanically, she headed for her machine.