Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

He didn’t have a chance of catching it if he took the train or hitched, so he began calling the various airlines. He learned that one airline would fly him to Dallas and then to Los Angeles for a hundred and one dollars and ninety-seven cents, and that another airline would fly him from Los Angeles to San Diego for ten dollars and twenty-eight cents, including tax, and the whole trip would take about seven hours, and that would get him back in time to catch his ship.

There was only one trouble. By this time, Mike was flat broke, and the girl had been awaiting her allotment check, which hadn’t come, and between them they couldn’t raise the fare. So he tried the U.S.O., which sent him to the Red Cross, which sent him to the Seaman’s Institute, but no one seemed able to come up with the cash he needed for that plane ride back to Dago.

In desperation, he called his wife in Easton and said, “Honey, I’m stranded in New Orleans, and I need a hundred and twenty dollars to get me back to Dago, would you wire it to me right away, please?”

His wife asked him what he was doing in New Orleans, and he said he’d been sent there for a signalman refresher course and was calling from the school where he’d got stranded when the rest of the group left, all lies that Mike’s wife might have bought if the six-year-old kid hadn’t come into the room right then and asked to talk to his mommy. Mike tried to push the kid away from the phone, telling him it wasn’t his mommy on the other end, but the kid kept yelling, “Let me talk to Mommy! Let me talk to Mommy!” which Mike’s wife heard clearly and distinctly. She may have been ignorant of most nautical matters, but she knew damn well they didn’t have little kids running around signalman schools asking for their mommies. She didn’t know what kind of a refresher course Mike was taking, but she was willing to bet it had nothing to do with blinker lights. So she told him to go to hell, and hung up on him.

Mike needed that money the way only a man facing a charge of desertion in time of war could need it. He walked into town, found a closed pawnshop, broke in by forcing a window, and stole a hundred and fifty dollars from the cash drawer. He kissed the commando’s wife, and then slapped that little six-year-old kid as hard as he’d ever slapped anyone in his life. He might have caught the ship were it not for a delay in the Dallas airport. But there was a delay, and he did miss the ship, and the SPs picked him up the next day. He was charged with desertion and burglary, the burglary charge having followed him cross-country from New Orleans, where the commando’s wife had notified the local shore patrol of Mike’s little adventure. Apparently, he shouldn’t have slapped her son before he left.

So there he was at Camp Elliott, serving something like twenty years, and hoping to be out of prison and the navy by the time he was eighty-eight or so. We got to be pretty good friends. He was a good talker, and I enjoyed listening to him, and we’d spend a lot of time discussing what we were going to do when we got out. It seemed like a pretty good friendship until the review board examined my plea again in December of ’45 and told me my request had been granted, I would be returned to active duty the following May.

I began to get excited then, Gilly. There it was. There was the whole damn world waiting for me. And naturally, the first person I told about it was Mike.

He listened to me silently, nodding his head, and then he said, “You’ll be leaving me, huh, buddy?”

I said something like “Don’t worry, Mike, you’ll be out of here before you know it,” or something equally foolish to a man who was facing such a long prison stretch, and Mike simply nodded again.

“You’ll be leaving me,” he said, as if I were doing him a great injustice.

“Hey, come on,” I said. “Aren’t you happy? I’m getting out! Man, I’m getting out!”

And Mike nodded and continued staring at me, and said nothing.

I was almost out when it happened. I had ten days to go when it happened.

It was May, Gillian, and very hot. I don’t think you’ve ever lifted a sledge hammer, and maybe you don’t know how heavy one can get after you’ve been raising it and dropping it for hours. I don’t suppose you know the way rock dust can get into your nostrils and under your clothes, either, the fine pumice that drifts on the air after each hammer blow, like powdered glass, crawling into your nose and under your shirt and making you itch, and getting into your eyes until you can’t tell the tears from the sweat. I was working side by side with Mike that day. We were wearing the leg irons, we didn’t always, but this was a little way from the prison and there was only one guard for twelve men, and all he carried was a rifle and a billet.

We were working side by side, the hammers going in that sort of mechanical picking-up-and-dropping, which is not really work, only labor. The guard assigned to our work detail had a voice like a parrot. Every five minutes he would yell out, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.” He delivered the line as if he had just made it up and was testing it for a laugh. Every five minutes his voice would cut through the hanging dust, you could almost set your watch by it, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.” Twelve men were pounding at the rock pile, and dust was hanging on the air and choking us. You could barely see the man three feet away from you, but you could hear that voice drifting through the layers of dust every five minutes, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.”

And suddenly, right next to me, there was another voice.

Mike’s.

And it yelled, “Go to hell, you moron!”

I turned to look at him, and suddenly there was a deep silence, Gillian, and into the silence the guard said, “What?” He said it very quietly. He didn’t seem at all shocked. He asked the question as if he hadn’t quite heard what was said the first time and was politely inquiring about it. “What?” he asked.

And through the hanging dust, Mike answered, “Go to hell, you fat bastard!”

The guard walked over to us. The hammers had stopped. The dust was settling now. We stood staring at him, our legs manacled together, the sweat and the dust and the tears streaking our faces, our throats dry, squinting against the bright hot sunlight as the dust settled. The guard wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, either. He seemed a little hurt, like a night-club comic who’d been heckled by a drunk. He stood very close to us with the rifle hanging loosely at his side, and with the heel of his right hand cupped over the handle of the billet on his belt.

Very quietly he said, “Who said that?”

No one answered. I was shaking, Gillian. I was ten days away from getting out of that place, Gillian. I could see spending another two years on that rock pile. I could see everything I’d worked for vanishing as I stood there in the sun, biting my lip, gripping the handle of the sledge tight, keeping myself from shouting, “He said it! Mike Arretti said it!”

The guard waited patiently. “Well, what do you say, mates?” he asked, and there was more silence. “What do you say now?” Silence.

I had begun crying, Gillian. Not out loud, not so any of the men standing around the silent pile of rocks could tell I was crying, there was so much sweat on my face anyway, and tears from the dust, but I’d begun crying soundlessly, waiting for Mike to say something, waiting for Mike to tell the truth, waiting .

“Well now,” the guard said. “This don’t look too good, does it?” He waited. Then he turned to me slowly. Slowly and deliberately, he turned to me and said, “What do you say, Regan? Who’s the wise guy here, Regan?”