Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Always parachute drops,” McDougald said helpfully. But there weren’t many of those anymore. Pittsburgh had cost the CSA a god-awful lot of transports. No more than a handful tried to make the trip these days; U.S. Wright fighters ruled the skies above western Pennsylvania.

Outside the hospital, the thunder of U.S. guns went on around the clock. O’Doull hardly noticed it. He might have looked up in surprise if it stopped. Incoming rounds were growing scarcer. That Confederate Army might have got into Pittsburgh. It didn’t look as if it would get out.

“How are you doing there?” McDougald asked after a while.

“Oh, he’ll live. I’m not so sure he’ll think that’s doing him a favor, though,” O’Doull said. “I think he’ll have a penis that works, even if he won’t get much fun out of it. I sure hope it works-otherwise, it’s catheter time.”

“Ouch.” McDougald winced. “Don’t even want to think about that.”

“It’s a bitch.” O’Doull used the smallest needles and finest catgut for his sutures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done such delicate work. He wished he could have done more for the wounded soldier, but the essential parts were gone.

At last, the job was done. McDougald surveyed the site. “Well, I think you did about as much as anybody would have been able to,” he said.

“Yeah.” O’Doull gave back a somber nod. “I wish I could say more. I wish I had a drink, too.”

“Don’t blame you a bit. Why don’t you, once you get out of the OR?”

“When I come off, maybe I will,” O’Doull said. “Don’t want to do it now-odds are I’ll be operating again before long.”

“There is that,” McDougald allowed. “I’ll tell you something, though-I’ve known plenty of docs that wouldn’t have stopped for a second, let alone a minute. Some of the old-timers in the last war, the guys who’d been in the Army since 1880-hoo-boy!” He rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, I ran into some of those fellows, too,” O’Doull said. “This one surgeon named Schnitzler-I don’t think he drew a sober breath all the time I knew him. But put a wounded man in front of him and a scalpel in his hand and he’d do as good a job as anybody you’d ever want to meet. He could operate in his sleep. I think he did sometimes.”

“That’s the kind I mean,” McDougald said. “There’s the drunk who goes and drinks till he passes out. And then there’s the other kind, the guy who gets a buzz in the morning and stays buzzed all day long, and as long as he is, he’s fine.”

“Till his liver craps out on him, anyway,” O’Doull said.

“Oh, sure.” By the way McDougald said that, he took it for granted. “Of course, there are some of the first kind, too. Part of the way I learned surgery was when one of the docs who should have been doing it got too toasted to see, let alone operate. If I didn’t cut, this soldier was ruined for sure. If I did, maybe he had a chance. So I did, and he made it-and I thought, Son of a bitch! I can do this shit! I was hooked.”

“It grows on you, all right,” O’Doull agreed. “What happened to the drunken doctor?”

“He kept at it whenever he was sober enough to work,” McDougald answered. “After a while, people said I was doing better work than he was. I don’t know about that. He had the training, after all, and I was amateur city. But I sure was doing more work than he was, ’cause he got loaded more and more often.”

“They should have discharged the fool.” Though a Catholic, O’Doull had more than a little New England Puritan sternness in him.

Granville McDougald shook his head. “It was a war, Doc. If he was only a quarter of what he should have been, that was still a quarter of a surgeon more than they would have had if they canned him. Hell, he may be in the Army yet. He may be in the OR next door, for all I know.”

“He probably killed patients he should have saved,” O’Doull said.

“So have I,” McDougald said. He didn’t ask if O’Doull had. That was generous of him. Like any doctor, O’Doull had buried some of his mistakes. It came with being human. The most important thing was trying not to make the same mistake twice.

Hotel Street in Honolulu was a raucous, drunken place twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Sailors who had liberty got drunk and got laid, caring about nothing but the moment. George Enos, Jr., knew exactly how they felt. He should have-he was one of them.

He’d drunk enough to make the sidewalk seem to sway and twist under his feet like the Townsend ’s deck in a heavy sea. But the pavement wasn’t listing-he was.

“Where do we go now?” he asked Fremont Dalby. He’d pretty much given up thinking on his own. If the gun chief could manage it, George would follow along.

Dalby made a production out of pondering. He’d taken plenty of antifreeze on board, too. “Well, do we want to drink some more, or do we want to screw?” he asked.

George frowned. He didn’t want to decide anything. He wasn’t sure he could decide anything. Fritz Gustafson settled things by walking through the next open door they passed.

If it had been a brothel, they would have done their best there. But it was another gin mill. The air smelled of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and vomit. A record player was cranking out Hawaiian music much too loud. George’s head started to ache, and he wasn’t even hung over yet. That would come tomorrow morning, and tomorrow morning might as well be ten years away.

He and his buddies from the Townsend elbowed their way up to the bar. A couple of the men they muscled by gave them sour stares, but nobody threw a punch. “What’ll you have, gents?” the barkeep asked.

“Whiskey,” Fremont Dalby said. George nodded. So did Fritz Gustafson. The man behind the bar poured the booze into three glasses, added ice, and waited till he saw money before sliding the drinks across the bar. Dalby gulped his. So did Gustafson. George went a little slower. By himself, he would have stuck with beer. He liked it better. But when he was out with friends, whiskey got him drunk faster. On a forty-eight-hour liberty, speed mattered.

He wasn’t sorry this had turned out to be a bar, not a cathouse. He always felt bad about being unfaithful to Connie. Oh, not while he was in the act-it felt wonderful then. It always did. How could it not, even with a bored Chinese floozy who chewed gum while you pounded away? But he never failed to feel guilty afterwards.

“Drink up, George,” Dalby said. “The night is young, and you are-hell, I ain’t drunk enough to think you’re beautiful.”

George laughed. He knocked back his drink, then coughed two or three times. The rotgut in the glass was smooth as sandpaper. Gustafson pounded him on the back. “Thanks,” he wheezed.

“Sure,” the loader said. Even pretty well lit up, he spent words as if he paid for them out of his own pocket.

“Another round,” Dalby told the the bartender.

“Coming up.” The man’s gray hair said he’d been around a while. So did his faint British accent. The Sandwich Islands had belonged to the limeys before the USA took them away in 1914. A lot of the old-timers had been here since the Union Jack flew alongside the flag of the Sandwich Islands, which joined it to the Stars and Stripes in what had been the old Kingdom of Hawaii’s doomed effort to keep everybody happy.

George would have loved to spend the rest of his life in the Sandwich Islands. He didn’t suppose many people who came here didn’t want to stay. After the winter he’d just been through, he would never look at January in Boston the same way again. He wouldn’t look at the North Atlantic in January the same way again, either. Oh, they had swells here. But nothing he’d seen came within miles of the Nantucket sleighride. And you’d never have to worry about working on deck in the middle of an ice storm.