Polar Bear Blues Read online

  “An author knows a little bit about everything. I can tell a drill press from a milling machine. If I can’t, I can read the labels. And I have been dealing with Mick gangsters all my life. We might have to shoot a few, just so they take us seriously.” Delany heard that, didn’t even shrug. Smart guy.

  “Done. Four more hours of daylight. We need a place to kip, too.”

  “Yessir, Commander Epstein. Consider it done.”

  “Good man. Welcome to the salvage biz. Stay on your toes, we move fast.”

  >>>>>

  He said that, and I made a decision. Whatever happened, I would write it down. There needs to be a record, the more horrible an event is, the more need for history. I looked around for historians. None in sight. Just me. In the Army, you find a need, think it’s important, then you get to do the job.

  Inventory. That means paper and pens. I had a fountain pen in my duffle, a notebook, mostly full of scribblings. I looked around. There was a little blocked-off office in the front corner. Start there. Desk. Telephone that did not work. Filing cabinet, full of folders. Desk was locked, but not for long. Cheesy locks, made to keep honest people honest. Include me out. A few minutes later and I had a ream of paper, a large bottle of ink, and a couple of clipboards. One for the company, one for me. I was in the history business. Life was looking up. First step, find some brooms, second step, start the inventory. I had to guess at some of the things, but with the help of a meter stick and a little improvisation, I got the job done. I even finished before Delany came back with a mob, they were little better than that, of men, and they started dragging out the bigger pieces of broken glass, sweeping up the rest, lots of dried leaves, some shrapnel from whatever had taken the windows out. I found some shipping blankets in a far corner, where the brooms had been, the janitor’s corner, I suppose, so I made me a nest in the office. It had all its windows, looked like home to me. I have lived in a lot worse. I remember a bunker in France where a mummified fist stuck out of the dirt wall, people hung their coats on it. When I say I remember, what I mean is that I am unable to force myself to forget.

  I kept an eye out for pilferage, but there was little enough to steal. There had been a petty-cash box in the office, I took that under protective custody. I didn’t suppose Imperial Rubles were worth any more than kindling, but there was a little gold, quite a bit of silver to take care of. My pocket was a safe place. Speaking of kindling, there was a forge against the back wall, lots of busted wood everywhere, so I started a fire, got some coal started. Big piles of coal everywhere. Fuck April, it was still chilly, still rain falling.

  Delany asked permission for a few of his boys to sleep here, I said, “Sure.” As if I had any say in the matter. While I was at it. I listed the names, made a roster of what experience they had back in the States. Almost all had been soldiers, of course, many of them you didn’t have to ask. People missing arms and legs, having only one eye, or chunks out of their skulls are pretty common these days. A battered lot. I didn’t have to ask more, a lot of them told me that they were Bonus Bastards, ex-Doughboys who had dared to march to DC to get the money promised them. No need to ask how that went, either. Here they were, and here they would stay. The Bonus Bastards were the lucky ones, they were what they called Section Five men, exiled instead of imprisoned. The obstreperous ones were in Penal Battalions, PBs, out on the Line, lining track and rebuilding bombed bridges with picks and shovels. Making little ones out of big ones, they told me. “Of course a lot of them are niggers from down south…” One man informed me. Of course. “They are a hard lot, them niggers, the Klan cleaned out whole counties, moved a lot of Irish and Froggies in there for farmers. It’s a hell of a mess. Anybody says boo, they wind up right next to them, working from cain to cain’t.” He had a deep accent, seemed like one of those people that like to talk. He was pulling his weight with a broom, so let him talk. Might learn something. I wanted to call him out, ask him to say colored people, but there are a lot bigger problems in the world, and it sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

  “Where you from, mister?”

  “Little hole in the wall called Eufaula, Alabama. Cotton country. Them rich folks decided that us white trash just ain’t worth our keep anymore, not with all them beat-down Europeans willing to work for shit wages. I sure am glad I’m not out on that Line no more.”

  “The Southern Manchurian Railroad?”

  “And the Trans-Siberian neither. Folks are dying like flies out there. Mosquitoes, seven different kinds of bugs nobody never seen before, wolves big as goddamn horses. Shit, mister, they even got tigers out there.”

  “No shit?”

  “Not a word of it. We are supposed to be supporting this here Czech Legion, they’re on motorcycles. They just call them Czech, they’s got mercenaries and exiles from all over the world. Ukrainians, White Russians, IWW, Americans, Swedes, Irish, Australians, Turks. And they are supposed to be on our side. When they ain’t, they call them the Red Legion. Same damn folks, they just change the color of the rags they wear on their helmets, raise another flag and go for it. The Czechs wear red, white, and blue ribbons, the Reds, well, you know.”

  “Is this whole continent one giant cluster-fuck?”

  “Close enough. And we ain’t even counting those goddamn Mongols. Those bastards are real motherfuckers, they are. Worse than Apaches.”

  “You were out there?”

  “They take crews out there for special jobs, dig excavations and the like. Build revetments, that sort of thing. Lumberjacks. Folks they can’t afford to work to death right off. Sometimes they bring us back. I got lucky.”

  “I hear you. What’s your name?”

  “Darrell. Darrell Hoskins.”

  “I’m Miles Kapusta. I’m supposed to be the straw boss and record keeper. Pleased to meet ya.”

  “Same. Anything you need done, let me know.”

  “You know anything about these machines?” I waved my arm at the dusty ranks of tools.

  “I worked for Ford up in Detroit ‘fore I got drafted. I know how to turn the handles, but I won’t claim to be a machinist.”

  I flipped pages, wrote his name, made a note. “M.” “You get done with this floor, keep this fire going, I will rustle up some rations.”

  “Sounds like a deal to me.”

  >>>>>

  I didn’t have any worries about these Bonus Bastards being able to survive. They had been to a very hard school, more than one, in fact. After France, bumming around on the hobo was easier, but no picnic in the park by any means. At least they didn’t shoot at you with machine guns and artillery. The rations were not as good, however. Then, after the Bonus Riots in DC after the Crash last year, tens of thousands of Vets had been rounded up from Hoovervilles all over the States and shipped over here to be cannon fodder or worse. Even by Hoover’s standards, this was a major crime. The Hoovers, plural, I should have said. Herbert signed the papers and John used the National Guard, which in some places was synonymous with the Klan, to do the dirty work. Draft dodgers to a man. And here we are. And how nice it is to be us.

  It might be better than home, give or take an atrocity or two. But who’s counting? The war had gone on so long, nobody could imagine it ending, all politics had been brutalized, police states were the norm, cops hiring bullyboys to keep the local political machines in power. The unions had been busted in the mid Twenties, anybody who tried to fight that was immediately shipped off to the meat grinder in France. An IWW card was as close to a death sentence as Hoover could make it. Still, after all these years, America was still under prohibition, the Mob’s price for keeping the peace in the cities. In the rural areas, blacks were victimized and dispossessed of what little they had.

  The Klan became very powerful in the South and West, only my home area of New England had any pretensions toward being liberal, and they were under internal attack from Irish crazies fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Ireland, and anybody tricky enough to get the hell out of Italy. Ireland wa
s bad, Italy might have been even worse. Some were hired by the Mob, some fought the Mob, and some set up in competition to the established Mob. Get your score cards here, you can’t tell the players without a score card.

  Which was basically what I was trying to do for some tiny little newspapers, provide score cards, when the Feds got tired of my futile ass and sent me over here. And serves me right, most likely.

  >>>>>>>

  Delany’s boys got back with canned goods and black bread, I made a bean sandwich for late lunch, left Hoskins in charge and went looking for Eppi. He was down at the docks, glowering at the forest of tilted masts. “You know how to swim, Miles?”

  “I get seasick in the bathtub. Why?”

  “I need a couple of free divers. We need a boat, and they are all under water. I need a boat to get a ship. Once I have a ship, I can start cleaning up this mess.” He pointed back west. “Reynolds tells me there is what is left of a ferry dock back downtown, that’s where they land such supplies as they can lighter in. I’ll look at that tomorrow, but I would rather find something of my own. I need a tugboat, something with a big winch at the very least. A crane would be heaven, but I do not believe in heaven.”

  “Give me a man, I’ll take a walk down the bay, see if I can find a fishing boat, or something. I’m good at walking.”

  “Good.” He pointed to an overage private, who was leaning on his rifle, looking bored. Not a smart thing to do around officers. The Army has gone to hell these days. “You, Briggs. Go with Lieutenant Kapusta here. Do what he says.” Briggs saluted and joined my parade. Lieutenant? News to me. Shut up and officer, dummy.

  It was getting near dark, but the days are long. We were not far enough north to get midnight sun, nothing like that, we were actually a few degrees south of the latitude of New Haven, but the wind blew in from Siberia, bringing the cold all year long, they told me. “Unless it gets so hot you can’t stand it,” Briggs informed me, bitterly. He did have an issue flashlight clipped to his belt, I asked him if he had batteries, and he said he did, “and a couple spares.”

  Good enough. We set up around the shore line, it was, or had been almost completely built up, now it was almost completely ruined. There were boats aplenty, some had been blown right out of the water, and were now draped across the concrete piers, drooping down into the stagnant waters. Most were wood, Chinese junks, they called them, sails drooping from bamboo spars, but the steel ones were in no better shape. Big harbor, miles across, just filled with crap and trash. My heart sank. How could anybody, even Eppi, make sense of all this destruction? Thirty years of chaos. Shit, France had only been battered for half of that time. I had some faint memory of a Port Arthur Massacre, back about the time I was born, where the Japanese had killed thousands of Chinese, leaving only thirty-six men to bury the dead. And before that had been the Boxer Rebellion, and some Opium Wars. They all blurred together in my memory.

  The world was doomed. This dump was just a little ahead of the curve. Behold the Future.

  I knew Patton was keeping Germans contained in France, and was the power behind Coolidge, and Hoover after him. Everybody knew that Harding had committed suicide, but no one dared to say that out loud. Keeping Cool with Coolidge, with Patton grim-faced in almost every picture. That’s when it really started to go bad. France had been bleeding America dry, the flower of American youth had been reduced to tatters and wrecks like me. Fit for nothing but drinking, but booze was supposed to be illegal. Now that France was nearly gone, Britain had nominal control of the war. For all the good it was doing them. It was like the War was Count Dracula, enticing his victims with dark beauty, then draining their blood dry.

  Germany was another kind of monster, a patchwork of ill-assorted parts, stitched together with greed and hate. Frankenstein. Goering was holding the Western Front with White Ukrainian soldiers, having given that country theoretical autonomy in the German Empire. Most German energy was spent looting Russia, containing Reds, killing Jews. Never forget killing the Jews. It was all their fault, that the War dragged on so long. That sickness had spread to the Allies too, all the thousands of troops we used guarding concentration camps and exiling people like me could have won the goddamn war for us.

  You got the feeling that powerful people preferred the Endless Eternal War, it was making them good money. Allegedly Neutral Spain, under a general named Franco, kept feeding South American “Volunteers” into the meat grinder on the German side. Turks and Arabs could not rest unless they got to chime in too. The Ottomans were perhaps the rottenest of all the empires, now that the Chinese Empress was dead, but there was little to choose between them. The brilliant Turkish general, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was a few thousand miles away, perhaps, somewhere in Siberia, killing Allies with a will. These thoughts circle through my brain like vultures over a ripe corpse. I could never shake them entirely. At least it is better than thinking about being in the AEF in France.

  “Fuck, I need a drink,”

  And not until Briggs said, “I know a place,” did I realize I had spoken aloud. He gave me one of those significant winks, and I knew that we were taking a short leave from the Army. He led the way, across the base of another pier, through the rubble, the remnants of a shattered cement building, to where a listing ferry boat hung from its mooring ropes with a few inches of freeboard. I touched one of the thigh-thick ropes as we clambered down to the deck. It was as hard and tight as a bridge cable. There was a guard with a rifle in the wheelhouse, Briggs waved with his left hand, made a sign with his right. The guard nodded, we went down the cavernous deck where the cars had been carried. It was open now, a bar had been thrown up half way down, a few dozen more or less humans stood there, sucking down booze so raw that I could smell it from here.

  There was another smell I recognized too. A still was cooking and mash was fermenting someplace nearby. Not below decks, those were full of water, but in one of the cabins to either side of the car deck. I didn’t inquire. You learn bootlegger etiquette real quick. Or you get hurt.

  On closer look, the clientele was assorted to the point of delirium, motley was not strong enough a word by half. I could see members of every race on earth, except maybe the Arab. But I didn’t ask for identifications. There was a makeshift band stand, a few instruments laid out, ready for use, as soon as their owners tanked up sufficiently. The bartender, a brute so big his head looked like it came to a point, asked, “What for you, gents?” His English was crude, but understandable.

  “Whattya got?”

  “Vodka.”

  “And?”

  “Cherry vodka. The mint vodka is still aging. In the keg.” I just bet.

  “Two vodkas.” I rang silver on the galvanized bar top, he looked hungry, I added another coin. Then two more. “Keep them coming. Thanks.” It was better than that panther piss I got on the train, but not much. No chaser. I saw that recommended local etiquette was to leave your shot on the bar, sneer at it for an unspecified time, then shoot it down and slam the shot glass down for another. Just like home. The burn was the good part. I inventoried the customers. One of the centers was a pussy-looking pale white guy all in white, surrounded with Mongol bruisers. They all were draped with firearms, sissy boy had a silver-plated, pearl-handed hog leg slung across his chest, handle down. The Colt looked like it had seen a lot of use. His buddies ran to Thompsons and auto-loads. The biggest one had a cut down BAR on his back, pistol grip slanting up. Serious bad asses, including Nancy-boy.

  Alongside him was a mob of Chinese all in black, wide brimmed silk hats and hatchets in the belts, pistols under their arms. I looked again, they all had their right little fingers chopped off. Tong guys. Mobsters, in other words. There was a huge black guy with two blonde Russian sluts next, he was smaller than Paul Bunyan, but not much. And so it went, around the horseshoe, evil motherfuckers, one after another. Just like waterfront bars in New Haven, if not so many Micks. But a few. I can smell them. And they all have to have something green on, especially since the G
lorious Revolution of ’18.

  Most of the Micks, four or five of the nine or ten in a cluster near us, wore shreds of US Army khaki. Their pistols and rifles looked well cared for, however. One of them was holding forth, cursing somebody named Bradley, and his goddamned false teeth. That seemed a little odd, but Briggs confided in an undertone, “Bradley’s the general out on the Line. The AEFS.” I looked dumb and he filled me in, “American Expeditionary Force Siberia. It used to be commanded by Major General William S. Graves. They started with eight thousand troops from the 27th and 31st Infantry Regiments, and a lot of volunteers from the 13th, 62nd Infantry Regiments and 12th Infantry Regiments of the 8th Division, Graves' former division.”

  “Volunteers? How cute.”

  “Tell me about it. I was there. Twelve years I been here.”

  “No wonder you need a drink.”

  “Hit me.” He threw down the cash this time. “That was in Vladivostok, August, 1918. Six months less than twelve years.”

  “Happy anniversary.”

  “Fuck that shit. We were sent out to this piss-hole in the snow called Nikolsk-Ussuriski. It’s in the north.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We froze. People shot at us, tried to steal our guns, we were well equipped, we had BARs and Auto-5 trench-clearers, Springfields and .45s. Mostly, we shot back.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing then. Graves did two hitches, I got into HQ. Graves didn’t give a shit about the Bolshies, he wanted to provide protection, they called it, for American-supplied property, help the Czechoslovak Legions evacuate Russia. He kept clashing with British, French and Japanese brass, they had troops in the area, wanted him to take what they called a more active part in the military intervention in Siberia. It was miserable. We couldn’t get food, fuel, ammunition, nothing. The Russians stole us blind. The horses froze to death. The goddamn water-cooled machine guns froze up solid and burst. We had antifreeze, but...”