‘Yes, I knew Lillian Wallace,’ he said. ‘As for the rest, I couldn’t say; you’ll have to take it up with Rollo.’
‘What passed between you and this…Lillian is your business,’ said Cap’n Jake. ‘Anything else is ours too.’
Conrad got to his feet. ‘Are we done here?’
‘Not if that’s your attitude,’ said Frank Paine.
Conrad fastened his eyes on him. ‘You don’t understand. I’m asking you to leave.’
Glances were exchanged, but what could they do? A man was entitled to call the shots in his own home.
Conrad made a point of holding the door open for them. Ned lingered while the others headed to the trucks.
‘I done some asking,’ he said. ‘They’re rich folk them Wallaces, powerful folk, with pull. You think we don’t already have us enough problems with that bill comin’ up in Albany?’
‘This isn’t about fishing.’
‘You’re a fisherman. You do anything rash, we all look bad. You know that.’
In the last year there’d been a marked rise in hostilities between the local fishermen and the recreational anglers, who had taken to dumping scrap iron in the favored dragging spots so the nets got hung up and torn. Gear left on the beach overnight would be sabotaged. Any kind of retaliation had the sports racing for the State Assembly in Albany, like the school bully running to teacher with a bloody nose. Just the month before, Seth Tuttle had taken a knife to the tires of a surfcaster’s sedan. The lawyers pushing for the bass bill were all over it still.
‘They’ll bend it any way they like if you give ‘em the excuse,’ said Ned.
‘They don’t need an excuse. One thing I’ve learned: money takes what it wants then comes back for more.’
‘We’ll beat them.’
‘This year, maybe. Next, too. But they’ll keep coming back, they’ll win in the end, they always do.’
Ned glanced over at the others waiting in the trucks.
‘I’m sorry for the girl,’ he said, looking back. ‘I am. But if anything happens to Rollo, you’ll have me to answer to.’ He paused. ‘You put a mark on my word, you hear me?’
Conrad nodded.
‘He won’t be pitchin’ up for work no more. If he shows, you turn him away.’
The moment the trucks left, Conrad felt the strength drain out of him through his boots. He set about tidying away the cups, but found himself reaching for a chair and slumping into it.
Rollo was the closest thing he had to kin. He was alone—the way it had to be, he knew that—but he hadn’t seen it hitting so hard. At least it had come from Ned, at least he’d been spared the task of driving Rollo off. His plan had been to lie, fall back on the ribs as an excuse, to suggest they take a break for a week or so while he fully recovered, by which time it should all be over.
He had played the scene with Rollo in his head, but he hadn’t thought about how it might hit him. There was no solace in the seclusion, just one scrap of comfort: Rollo was safe now; he couldn’t be damaged by the misfortune that seemed intent on dogging Conrad, circling him, sparing him while picking off those around him, almost in mockery.
He had never discussed it with anyone, fearing that his words would only breathe more life into the specter. It was the men of his Company in Italy who had first forced the issue into the open.
He wasn’t the only one to survive the grueling assault on Monte la Difensa—their first bitter taste of combat in Italy—but few who had been in the thick of the fight had emerged completely unscathed. Twice he’d been lifted clear off his feet by the vacuum of a shell from an enemy 88 snapping past his head. He had cowered like all the others as lead from the MG-42s tore into the icy rock around them, but not once had he been so much as nicked by one of the lethal shards of flying granite. He had seen the aluminum fin of an enemy shell embed itself in the forehead of a man crouching beside him in a German slit trench they’d only just occupied; and against all apparent logic he’d witnessed a good friend disappear in a plume of scarlet vapor when the fellow was standing further from the mortar burst than himself.
At night, the time when they did most of their work, it was as if an invisible hand was swatting away the tracer bullets arcing through the darkness towards him, like shooting stars fallen to earth. One time, returning from a raid, he had been bounding over the rocks back to his lines when he collided with an enemy soldier coming in the opposite direction. Thrown to the ground, they both spilled their weapons in the darkness. The German was first to react, snatching up the nearest gun, which happened to be Conrad’s M-1, beating him to the draw. The M-1 jammed. The German’s Schmeisser didn’t.
‘You’re one lucky sonofabitch,’ Dexter had remarked one night during a welcome lull between barrages. By now they had secured the summit, repelling numerous German counterattacks, and were preparing for an assault on the saddle below so the British could have a crack at the peak of Monte Camino. It was a cold night with a light sleet falling and they were hunched beneath their ponchos, spread out in foxholes along the first line of defense.
‘I want her number, Labarde,’ called Crane.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Your fairy godmother.’
‘Me, I got a lucky rabbit’s foot,’ came another voice.
‘Not so l-l-l-ucky for the goddamn r-r-r-abbit.’
The laughter built quickly along the line until they were all creased up—young men; boys, most of them—finding a vent for their confusion and fear.
Maybe the German forward observers heard them, maybe not, but the mortars started landing again. They really worked them over this time. When it was done, the joker in the night—the stocky lumberjack from Wyoming with the stammer—had bought it from a direct hit.
