Breakthroughs

“Yeah. I know what you mean.” Enos remembered that day along the Cumberland when he’d been about to go to bed with a colored whore for no better reason than that he was half drunk and more than half bored. As he’d been going from the ramshackle saloon to the even more ramshackle crib next to it, the Confederates had blown his river monitor out of the water. If he’d been aboard the Punishment, odds were he wouldn’t be breathing now.

He drew a mop and bucket and started swabbing a stretch of deck. By now, he understood perfectly the pace he had to use to keep passing petty officers happy. Once, when he fell below that pace, one of those worthies barked at him. Even then, he had an answer ready: “Sorry, Chief. I guess I was paying too much attention to the ocean out there.”

“Yeah, well, pay attention to what you’re supposed to be doing,” the veteran sailor growled.

“Aye aye,” George said. But he noted that, as the petty officer paraded down the deck, he made a point of peering out into the Atlantic every few paces. What was he doing, if not trying to spot a periscope? The limeys were still struggling to get freighters from Argentina across the ocean, and their submersibles still prowled: Lieutenant Crowder had been dead right about that. They’d have to quit sooner or later, but they hadn’t done it yet.

That evening, attacking corned beef and sauerkraut, the sailors hashed over what they’d do when the war ended. They’d done that a good many times before, but the talk had a different feel to it now. In the midst of the grapple with the enemy, they’d just been blue-skying it, and they’d known as much. Now, when the war would end in days-weeks at the most-life after it seemed much more real, and planning for it much more urgent.

George was one of the lucky ones: he had no doubts. “As soon as they let me out of the Navy, I find me a fishing boat and go back to sea,” he said. “Only thing I’ll have to worry about is hitting a drifting mine. Otherwise, things’ll be just like they were before the war for me.”

“Before the war,” somebody down the table echoed. “Jesus, I can’t hardly remember there ever was such a time.”

“Christ, what a load of horse manure, Dave,” somebody else said. “You were here on the Ericsson, same as me.”

Dave was unabashed. “Give me a break, Smitty. All we were doing here before the war was getting ready to fight the damn thing. Wasn’t hardly different than what we’re doing now, except nobody was trying to kill us back then.”

“Nobody but the chiefs, anyways,” Smitty said, which got a laugh. He went on, “We stay in the Navy, what the hell you think we’ll be doing? Getting ready to fight the next war, that’s what.”

“Well, what’s a Navy for?” Dave returned. “You better be ready to fight if you get into a war. Otherwise, you lose. Our dads and grandpas had their noses rubbed in that one.”

“Look at the clever fellow,” Smitty said. “He learned about Remembrance Day in school. Give him a hand, boys. Ain’t he smart?”

“Ahh, shut up,” Dave said. Since he was half again as big as Smitty, the other sailor did.

Changing the subject looked like a good idea. George said, “Wonder how long it’ll be till the next war.”

“Depends.” Dave, it seemed, had opinions about everything. “If we forget what we have an Army and Navy for, probably won’t be long at all. That’s what we did after the War of Secession, and Jesus, did we pay for it.”

“We do that, half of us’ll be on the beach,” Smitty said, which turned things back toward what the sailors would do after the war.

Then somebody said, “No Democrat would ever be that stupid. We’d have to elect Debs or whoever the Socialists put up three years from now.” That touched off a political argument, the Socialist minority loudly insisting they were Americans as good as any others.

“And better than a lot of people I can think of,” one of them added. “The first thing some of you want to do after the war ends is put the workers and farmers into another one.”

George asked his question again: “All right, Louie, how long do you think we’ve got till the next one?”

“If we keep electing Democrats, fifteen years-twenty years, tops,” the Socialist answered. “We finally get wise and put in some people who understand what the class structure and international solidarity really mean, maybe it won’t happen at all. Maybe this’ll be the last war there ever was.”

“Yeah, and maybe the Pope’s gonna run off with my sister, too,” Dave said. “I tell you, Louie, I ain’t holding my breath on either one.” He got a bigger laugh than Smitty had a couple of minutes before, and preened on account of it.

Fifteen years. Twenty years, tops. Nobody said peace could last longer than that. Well, Louie had, but even he didn’t sound as if he believed it. No Socialist had ever even come very close to getting elected president. George didn’t see any reason for that to change soon. If war came when people thought it would, his son would get dragged into it. He didn’t like that for beans. Hell, if war came again in fifteen or twenty years, he might get dragged into it, too. He wouldn’t be an old man. He liked that even less. Wasn’t once enough?

He didn’t have any duty after supper, so he wrote a letter to Sylvia. If the Ericsson went into port before a supply ship met her, he was liable to get into Boston before the letter did, but that would have to mean England was quitting right away, which didn’t look likely. I sure will be glad to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have one on top of it and another one underneath, he wrote. If they packed us in oil we might be sardines.

Some of that was exaggeration for dramatic effect. Arrangements aboard a fishing boat were just as cramped, and those aboard the river monitor on which he’d served had been even more crowded. However… I sure will be glad to sleep in a bed that has you in it.

One of the officers would have to censor the letter before it could leave the destroyer. Most times, George didn’t worry about that. Now he wondered if the fellow, whoever he was, would start breathing a little faster if he read something like that. After a moment, George laughed at himself. The Ericsson had a war complement of better than 130 men. If the censor hadn’t seen anything hotter than what he’d just written, he didn’t know anything about horny sailors’ imaginations.

He finished the letter, then read it over. He didn’t know about the censor, but he was breathing faster by the time he finished. To wake up in a soft bed with his wife beside him…he couldn’t think of anything better than that. He addressed an envelope and put the letter inside, but didn’t seal the flap. The censor would take care of that. George carried the letter to a collection box and put it in.

“Hey, Enos, you want to get into a card game?” the Socialist-Louie-called.

George shook his head. “Go suck in some single guy. I got a wife and two kids at home. Gotta save my money.”

“You might win,” Louie said.

“Yeah, I might,” Enos allowed, “but I usually don’t, and that’s why I don’t get into card games much any more.”

He went back to the bunkroom. He didn’t usually hit the sack till lights-out, but tonight he stripped to his skivvies and lay down. A fan was doing its best to keep the warm, muggy air moving. Its best wasn’t very good; George always woke covered in sweat. But the stuffiness helped him fall asleep fast. He yawned a couple of times and dozed off, smiling as he thought of waking up in bed with Sylvia.

XIX

From the conning tower of the Bonefish, Roger Kimball stared gloomily out into the blackness of night on the tropical Atlantic. A million stars hung overhead. The moon’s lantern floated low in the east and spilled a long track of pale yellow light across the dark water. It was as beautiful a seascape as God ever made.

He was blind to the beauty. That afternoon, the wireless telegraph had picked up orders directing all Confederate submersibles to return to their home ports, as the Confederate States had been forced to seek an armistice from the United States. Ever so reluctantly, he’d shaped course for Habana.

He’d wondered how the crew would take the news. Most of the sailors had taken it the same way he had: they’d been furious and heartsick at the same time. “God damn it, Skipper, we didn’t lose the war!” Ben Coulter had cried. “It was those stupid Army bastards who went and lost it. Nobody ever licked us.