Breakthroughs

forever.

“Well, we got one,” he muttered-a tiny victory, snatched from the jaws of death. He sat on the bench again, then spoke once more to the sailor he’d pulled out of the South Atlantic: “I take it back, pal. You might as well get drunk.”

“God bless you,” the man from the destroyer said. Instead of drinking, he stuck out his hand. “You ever need anything, I’m your man. Name’s Gus Hardwig.”

“Sam Carsten,” Carsten said, and shook the proffered hand. “Believe me, I was glad to do it. We were all glad to do it.” The men in the boat with him nodded. He pointed back toward the Dakota. “Now we’d better take you home.”

They rowed over alongside the battleship, whose cranes effortlessly lifted the boat out of the water. Gus Hardwig put a cautious foot on the Dakota’s deck, then jerked it away as if the steel were red-hot. “Can’t make it,” he said.

Orderlies whisked him away in a stretcher. Carsten stood on the deck, staring north. Only a few floating bodies and an oil slick showed where the mine-clearing destroyer had gone down. Sam’s shiver had nothing to do with his wet tunic and the sharp breeze. The mine could have blown up the Dakota as readily as it had sunk the escort vessel. That could have been him floating in the water as readily as Gus Hardwig, or more likely him going down with the ship. He shivered again.

VI

Going home. Going home. Going home. The rails sang a sweet song in Jefferson Pinkard’s ears as the wheels of the train clicked over them. He’d been away too long, too far. He couldn’t wait to see Emily’s smiling face now that he’d finally got himself enough leave time to escape the front and travel back to Birmingham for a few days.

He couldn’t wait to see all of her, every inch, stretched out bare on their bed. He couldn’t wait to feel her underneath him on that bed, or on her hands and knees as they coupled like hunting hounds, or on her knees in front of him, red-gold hair spilling down over her face as she leaned forward and-

He shifted on the hard second-class seat. He was hard himself, and hoped the little old lady reading a sentimental novel next to him didn’t notice. He couldn’t help getting hard when he thought about Emily. Christ, she loved to do it! So did he, with her. When he’d got short leaves in Texas, he hadn’t felt any great urge to visit the whorehouses that did not officially exist. But Emily-Emily was something very special in the line of women.

She’d probably kick his legs out from under him as soon as he walked in the door. She’d gone without as long as he had. From her letters, she might have missed it even more than he did. “Very special,” he muttered. The woman beside him looked up from her novel, realized he hadn’t been talking to her, and began to read again.

Pinkard had the seat closer to the window. He found the Mississippi countryside more interesting than a book. Here, away from the front, the war seemed forgotten. He’d seen that as soon as the first train he’d boarded got more than an hour’s travel away from the trenches. Farmers were plowing in the fields. Actually, more farmers’ wives were in the fields than he would have seen before the war. That was a change, but only a small one when set against the absence of trenches and shell holes and artillery pieces. Everything was so green and fresh-looking, the way a landscape got to be when it wasn’t drastically revised every few days or every few minutes.

When the train rolled through a town, factory smokestacks sent black plumes of smoke into the air. The first time Jeff saw those plumes, he was alarmed; they put him in mind of fires after bombardments. But he quickly stopped worrying about that: industry got to seem normal in a hurry.

Past Columbus, Mississippi, and into Alabama the train rolled. Here and there, Pinkard did note scars on the landscape in this part of the countryside, half-healed ones from the Negro uprisings the year before. This was cotton country, with many Negroes and few whites.

Somebody a couple of rows in front of Pinkard said, “I hear tell the niggers is still shootin’ at trains every now and again.”

“Ought to do some shootin’ at them with the biggest guns we got,” the stranger’s seatmate answered.

Remembering his own train ride into Georgia and the bullets that had slammed into the cars from out of the night, Pinkard understood how that fellow felt. He’d been a new, raw soldier then, his uniform a dark, proper butternut, not faded to the color of coffee with too much cream. The fire from the Red Negroes had seemed intense, deadly, terrifying. He wondered what it would seem like now. Probably not so much of a much.

Darkness fell as the train rattled through the central-Alabama cotton fields. Jeff revised his thinking. If black diehards had fired a couple of belts of ammunition at this train, he would have been terrified all over again. If somebody was shooting at you and you couldn’t shoot back, terror made perfect sense.

He leaned back in the hard, uncomfortable seat and closed his eyes. He was only going to relax for a little while. So he told himself, but the next thing he knew, the conductor was shouting, “Birmingham! All out for Birmingham!”

He pushed past the gray-haired woman, who was going on farther east. As soon as he stepped out on the platform, he knew he was home again. The smoky, sulfurous air that poured from the foundries mingled with the fog that so often stole through Jones Valley to yield an atmosphere with density and character: damp and heavy and smelly, a mud bath for the lungs.

Flame poured from the tops of the chimneys of the Sloss Works, out toward the eastern edge of town. Back before the war-back before the Conscription Bureau had dragged him out of the foundry and into the trenches-he’d thought of that sight as hell on earth. Now that he’d seen war, he knew better, but the memory lingered.

Before he could get off the platform, he showed his papers to a military policeman who had to be counting his blessings at having a post hundreds of miles from the real war. The fellow inspected them, then waved him on. Trolley lines ran close by the station, taking travelers wherever they needed to go in the city. Pinkard stood at the corner and waited for the Sloss Works car he could ride out to the company housing-yellow cottages for white men and their families, primer-red for Negroes-surrounding the Sloss Works themselves. He yawned. He was still sleepy despite the nap, but figured the sight of Emily would wake him up in short order when he got home.

The trolley driver-who’d leaned crutches behind his seat and had one empty trouser leg-worked the brake and brought the car squealing to a halt at the edge of the company town. He nodded to Jefferson Pinkard as the soldier got off. Jeff nodded back. He felt the driver’s eyes on him as he walked away. Did the fellow hate him for his long, smooth strides? How could anyone blame him if he did?

Everything was quiet as Jeff headed home. Most of the cottages were dark, with men away for the war or working the evening shift or asleep if they worked days or nights. Here and there, lamplight yellow as melted butter spilled out of windows. A couple of dogs barked as Pinkard passed their houses. One of them, chained in the front yard, rushed at him, but the chain kept the big-mouthed, skinny brute from reaching the sidewalk.

Jeff turned onto his little lane. He felt swept back in time to the days before the war. How many times he’d walked this way with Bedford Cunningham, his next-door neighbor and best friend, both of them tired and hot and sweaty in their overalls after a long day’s work. Alabama had been dry for a few years, but home-brew beer never got hard to come by. A couple of bottles out of the icebox went down sweet, no doubt about it.

There stood the Cunningham house, dark and still. Pinkard sighed. Bedford had gone to war before he did, and had come back without an arm, as the trolley driver had come back without a leg. A one-armed man could do a lot of things, but going back on the foundry floor probably wasn’t one of them. Bedford and Fanny had hard times. Jeff wondered how long they’d be able to stay in company housing if Bedford wasn’t in the Army and couldn’t work for the company any more.

Lamplight shone from the curtained window of Pinkard’s own house, just past the Cunninghams’. He kicked at the sidewalk in mild disappointment. He’d expected Emily would already be asleep; come morning, she’d have to head downtown toward her munitions-plant job. He’d hoped he could take off his uniform in the front room, slip naked into bed beside her, and startle her awake the best way he knew how.

Even knowing she was awake, he went up the walk on tiptoe. If he couldn’t give her the best surprise possible, he’d still give her the biggest surprise he could. His thumb and palm closed on the doorknob. Gently, gently, he turned it. The door swung open without a squeak. He was glad Emily had kept the hinges oiled. In Birmingham, anything that didn’t get oiled rusted.