Lawrence A. Perkins - SOLDIERS' HOME [ss]

Anthony Randolph, late a cavalry lieutenant in Mosby's Rangers, gloomily stared at the scuffed toe of his left shoe in a late afternoon sunbeam, feeling trapped and helpless. Damn! Five years - five bloody, hazardous years - of sacrifice, rigor, hunger; five years of seeing his men wounded, killed, even hanged by that Yankee devil Custer, just so that he could sit uselessly in this stupid room watching a mindless sunbeam creep over his foot. Damn, damn, damn!

But the Yankees must be watching for him, and this little room was at least safe. The Yankees must know that he had been Johnny Reb, that he had been an officer in the only guerrilla force that had ever really hurt them. They had hanged captured Rangers when the outcome of the war had still been uncertain, stopping only when Mosby had hanged an equal number of Yankees. Now that the Yankees had won, what would they do to Randolph if they could find him?

And how had he gotten into this room? There had been the mustering out at Salem twelve days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House - if Lee had surrendered, who else could carry on? - and his next clear memory was of his sitting on this plain bunk, in these peculiar clothes, talking to Miss Stimson.

He had not understood her because there seemed to be a tough, resilient barrier in his mind that bounced back what people said even before they said it. But she had asked him some simple, direct question that he had answered. She had been so pleased that he had tried to answer her next questions very carefully, hoping that she would be pleased again. Miss Stimson was nice. But he wished now that he had asked her then about his being in this room, this tiresome room, this little prison.

He did ask about his little room now, as directly as he dared, but Miss Stimson never gave him an answer that he could understand. A strange masked feeling, as though he had just awakened and had not yet quite understood the messages of his senses, hovered over him. Had the Yankees, notwithstanding Miss Stimson's disclaimer, had him put in the little room? Miss Stimson answered his questions volubly, but the resilient barrier in his head muffled the answers, wrapped them in cotton. What was wrong with him? He shook his head and wondered.

Miss Stimson swore that the Yankees had not put him in the room and that they could not get at him there - that much was clear - but something bitter in her assurances somehow made him distrust them. He had been one of Mosby's Rangers and he was in enemy country now. Careful, he warned himself. It's hardly possible to be too cautious, too careful.

Well, he would be careful - but at least he could relax in the safety, the peace and safety, that the little room offered after five years, five horrible years, of dirt and danger and deprivation. Peace, he reassured himself, wondering why the innocent word made him feel so tense and guilty. Surely this was peace - the safe little room, the good food, the pleasant people like Miss Stimson that he could talk to. He thought of all the watching people as misstimsons, but of course his Miss Stimson told all of the other misstimsons what to do. Surely they could keep any dangerous Damn Yankees away.

There were also the dwellers, the men who wore clothing just like his. He saw them at mealtimes and at the social sessions, and he supposed that they all had nice little rooms just like his. He enjoyed talking to the other dwellers, except that he had to be so very careful because of the Damn Yankees.

And there was yet another category. Alarmingly hidden in the background were The People, except that they were in charge of everything here and even Miss Stimson paid them homage. Randolph constantly brooded about The People, wondering if they had any connection with the Yankees. If they did, his tidy little room was not at all safe. Therefore he never quite trusted Miss Stimson, although he longed to trust somebody and Miss Stimson certainly was nice.

One of the dwellers that Randolph noted at table and saw fleetingly during the social sessions impressed him strangely. He was a rangy youth with brown hair and a full brown beard and mustache, but Miss Stimson and her misstimsons always somehow prevented him from speaking to Brownbeard. Randolph increasingly felt frustrated as the impotent and meaningless days passed, and wondering what elusive thing about Brownbeard so appealed to him was almost as cankering to his spirit as not knowing how he had gotten into this peculiar place - although he enjoyed the good, plentiful food, and Miss Stimson was nice.

The social sessions took up most of the afternoon, and they seemed very strange to Randolph. The dwellers were carefully arranged in pairs or larger groups to do things or just to talk, although only the misstimsons seemed to understand the etiquette. Some of the dwellers tended to sit exactly where they had been put and others were incapable of sitting still at all. Some seemed never to speak at all and some chattered constantly. Randolph felt uneasily certain that the whole thing must have been set up by the Yankees. At her last visit - interview, conference? - Miss Stimson had gotten suspiciously angry in denying that the Yankees, the Damn Yankees, were involved in the program. Probably the Yankees had told the misstimsons how to identify anybody who had served with Mosby, especially anybody who had been an officer under Mosby. Randolph reminded himself again that it was impossible to be too careful. Those Yankees, those Damn Yankees, could be anywhere!

For this social session Randolph had been paired with one of the silent dwellers - a neutral, average sort of person except that he sat absolutely motionless on the other end of their sofa - while the misstimsons discreetly watched. The misstimsons always watched him. They always watched everybody, everything, everywhere. What were the Yankees, the sly, secret, hidden Yankees (damn them!) expecting from this absurd encounter? Randolph decided to play as motionless as the other man and then noticed Brownbeard heading for the men's room. Instantly Randolph decided that he might as well respond to the same urge.

As Randolph washed his hands he diffidently approached Brownbeard. "Peace, friend, but don't I know you from somewhere? Haven't we met?"

Brownbeard eyed him suspiciously. "Can't say as we have."

Brownbeard spoke in a Tidewater accent, and Randolph suddenly felt more strongly than ever that he should know this man. "You're from Virginia, aren't you? I live - I used to live - in Alexandria. My name's Randolph. Anthony Randolph."

Brownbeard's eyes lit up. "Yeah, I'm from Alexandria too. Could be we ran into each other some place." He extended his right hand. "Name's Murphy. Call me Jack. Say, Tony, d'you suppose ... ?"

Just then one of the male misstimsons burst through the doorway in a flurry of anxiety. "Ah, Murphy, there you are! Arple wants to challenge you to a chess game. He says you beat him unmercifully yesterday, and he wants revenge."

Murphy must be afraid of the Yankees too, because he quickly began avoiding looking directly at Randolph. "Yeah, if he wants to get beat again. Sure." Murphy swaggered out of the men's room closely followed by the misstimson, who even more carefully avoided looking at Randolph at all.

So the Yankees really were watching him, and Miss Stimson had lied! Well, he expected nothing but lies, but he had almost begun to trust Miss Stimson. If you had been with Mosby you just couldn't be too careful. Murphy must know something that the Damn Yankees were trying to hide from him. Wondering what to do about this fresh danger, he idly glanced up at one of the lamps and froze. Was that little glass bulb really a lamp? And was a lamp really as bright as that?

Randolph struggled to sort out his memories. He had seen a lamp as bright as that - a mantle lamp - somewhere, hadn't he? But when, and where? He stared at the shining bulb again and then turned his dazzled eyes away. If that thing was a lamp, how did it burn? Lamps and lanterns had to have an air intake at the bottom and a chimney at the top, didn't they?

Holding his right hand over his right eye and closing his left eye, he made a careful crack between two fingers and stared at the bright thing. Yes, it was a pear-shaped piece of glass with no visible openings anywhere. Staggered, Randolph returned to the hall of the afternoon sessions looking for the first time to see where the light came from.

He looked up and was more shaken than he had been at seeing a lamp without airholes. Some of the light came through windows glazed with improbably huge panes, but on the ceiling there were clusters of glowing tubes as long as his arm. Great God! If the Damn Yankees had been able to develop such technical marvels, no wonder that they had been able to force Lee and Mosby to surrender!

For a moment Randolph felt a moderation in his sense of guilt at having failed Mosby and Lee and old Jeff Davis, but the warm feeling of justification faded at once. Where had this marvelous Yankee science been during the war? Sure, there had been the Minie ball and the chain shot, although the chain shot had been a spectacular failure. But a technology that could produce lights like the ones above his head should have been able to wipe out Mosby and the whole Confederate army in a week or two. Why had it taken them five bloody years?

Randolph dazedly wondered when he had seen that mantle lamp. He remembered it clearly - the two mantles under the protection of a glass shade looking like a pair of incandescent teabags, the compressed air gently hissing, the room reeking faintly of burnt gasoline. He remembered filling it and then pumping air into the tank with the little hand pump that came with the lamp.

His memory could see and smell and hear the lamp, but when and where had he pumped air into the little tank until the building pressure had begun to make the pump strokes feel spongy? Surely not with Mosby, where the usual illumination at night was a guarded campfire, a solitary candle in a safe room or cave, or the light of the full moon. Where, then, had he seen and smelled a mantle lamp?

Had it been before the war? Randolph suddenly realized that not once since he had become a dweller had he thought of his life before the war; and when he tried now to think of it, it was disquietingly vague. Light after sundown? He conjured up vague images of roaring fireplaces and banquet tables studded with ranks of blazing candelabra, uneasily aware that not every night could have been a Yuletide feast and that even after a feast he would have had to make his way to bed alone or with a suitable companion. How had he done that in the dark?

Across the room Brownbeard - was his name Murphy? - was setting up a chess game against a cringing opponent who had challenged him to a rematch. Randolph shook his head, not feeling entirely awake. How did he know that Brownbeard's name was Murphy, or that the cringing opponent was supposed to be the challenger? There was, he admonished himself, something peculiar about this whole vast hall - and never mind the impossible illumination. What's the matter with everybody? Randolph wondered. And even more to the point, what's the matter with me?

Randolph dreamily found his way back to the sofa where his social partner of the afternoon sat in the same moveless attitude, feeling impeded as though he were wading through waist-deep water. He thought briefly of wading to a shallower place, but there was no other destination to which he could slosh his way - and the misstimsons were watching, always watching, eternally watching.

Randolph considered resuming his duel of motionlessness with the other dweller, but he had conceded that match by going to the men's room. Boredom forced him to try to prod his hulk of a companion into speech or at least into some human sign of recognition. Randolph had absolutely no success and finally, feeling like a fool, he lapsed into his own silence and began watching the other people in the impossibly illuminated hall.

Chess is usually a deliberate game, but the match between Murphy and Arple seemed to be going quickly. Murphy had the black pieces, and most of the captured pieces removed from the board seemed to be white. Randolph could see nothing of Murphy but his back, but Arple's face was pale and drawn. And then Randolph saw Miss Stimson standing in the corner of the room farthest from him, watching the chess game. Instantly he sprang up and strode toward Miss Stimson. She retreated a few paces and then stood firm, waiting for him.

"Mr. Randolph, you are supposed to be entertaining Mr. Bradley."

"Entertain? Hell, Bradley wouldn't notice if I fired a musket at him." Randolph breathed deeply several times to gather and concentrate his fury. "You lied to me."

Miss Stimson retreated another pace. "I - lied to you?"

Randolph breathed deeply again because the ordinary air seemed to be unable to support his burning rage. "You told me the Yankees didn't put me here. I go to the washroom and meet a man from Alexandria, Virginia." Randolph glanced at Murphy and noted that the chess game was over; Murphy had won and Arple had only a few pieces left on the board whereas Murphy had lost only four or five.

"I go to the washroom and meet Jack Murphy from Alexandria, Virginia, and one of your people comes rushing in and snatches him away from me. Bam, just like that. And I'm supposed to believe that the Yankees aren't watching me!"

Miss Stimson thoughtfully nibbled her lower lip. "I give you my word that the Yankees have nothing at all to do with your being here." She nibbled her lip again. "Murphy will tell you that he was one of Mosby's Rangers. All right. I'll have Arple paired with Bradley, and you can talk to Murphy as much as you want. Will that satisfy you?"

"I certainly do want to talk to Mr. Murphy. Maybe he can satisfy my curiosity on a couple of points. And after all, both of us are from Alexandria, Virginia, and that's a very small town."

A few minutes later Bradley was inertly sharing the sofa with an outraged Arple while Randolph and Murphy suspiciously strolled back and forth along a wall of windows, as far away as they could get from everybody else. Murphy had been greatly agitated at first when Randolph had addressed him as a Mosby Ranger, but had calmed down when Randolph had identified himself as a fellow Ranger.

The two men had almost identical memories of their lives as Mosby's Rangers except that neither of them could remember having met before their brief encounter in the men's room. Well, Mosby's Rangers had been very loosely knit, and not all of them had necessarily known each other. Both men began to relax, suspicious only of the other people in the hall and of the ubiquitous Yankees.

Randolph gazed through a huge window at the far horizon. "I just hope that Mosby managed to slip away. With hair redder than mine and being even taller than I am, he might have trouble slipping through to some safe place."

Murphy, who had been pacing in step with Randolph, froze. "Have the Yankees set you on me?"

Randolph also froze and turned to face Murphy. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

"Mosby has dark brown hair, darker than mine. And he was just my height. Whoever told you that he had red hair must have ..."

"Now just you wait a God-damn minute! Nobody needed to tell me anything about what Mosby looks like. I've talked to him hundreds of times, standing as close to him as I am to you right now." Suddenly Randolph remembered that Miss Stimson had told him that Murphy had been a Ranger. No, she had said that Murphy would say that he had been a Ranger. He blinked, wondering if he was really awake, but furious. "I suppose it was Miss Stimson that put you up to this, and I see now that the Yankees must be using ..."

The men lunged at each other and suddenly half a dozen misstimsons were there, holding them apart, quickly trundling them off to opposite ends of the great room. At his end Randolph found Miss Stimson, who was nibbling her lip again.

"Now you know why we didn't want you to talk to Murphy." Randolph, who had been furiously but ineffectively struggling with his captors, suddenly relaxed in confusion. Was he really awake? He had been ready to fight to the limits of his endurance for the right to talk to Murphy, but Miss Stimson had told him to talk to Murphy. The resilient barrier in his mind seemed to relax in his skull as his muscles relaxed in his body, and he shook his head in an effort to clear his thinking. "I'm confused."

Miss Stimson gracefully sat down at one end of a sofa and patted the other end. "Sit down and tell me about it." Miss Stimson was very nice, and the hands that had been restraining him relaxed. Randolph plumped himself down on the exact spot that she had patted.

"I was just beginning to wonder about the lights when I met Murphy." He described his bafflement at the pear-shaped bulb in the men's room, his scanty recollections of mantle lamps, and his confusion upon noticing the long, glowing tubes like the ones directly over his head now. Miss Stimson looked at him with an expression of pity that distressed and frightened him.

"The Civil War ended in 1865, right? The mantle lamp was invented by Carl Auer von Welsbach in 1885 - and I wouldn't have known that so patly if this thing hadn't come up before. You aren't allowing yourself to remember electric light because that's too recent, but mantle lamps are safe - if you don't know when they were invented, of course."

She sprang abruptly to her feet. "You were standing at the window when you talked to Murphy. Did you look down at the street?"

"Down at the street?" Randolph felt vaguely terrified. Something in him dreaded looking at the street, the world outside. "No, I didn't."

"Then come with me now and look." She kept talking as he reluctantly rose and followed her because she had asked him to and she was so very nice. "You told me that Alexandria, Virginia, is a very small town. I live in Alexandria, and the last census figures reported a population of more than two hundred thousand. This building, by the way, is in Anacostia - Southeast Washington, D.C. Now - look down. Go ahead, look. That's the Anacostia Freeway."

Randolph looked dizzily down. He had stood at this very window only a few minutes ago and had somehow avoided seeing anything of this grand prospect but the anonymous horizon and the everlasting sky. Two enormous buildings, neighbors, two gigantic towers were all of fifty stories tall. Randolph guessed that he must be peering from the middle stories of a third identical giant. Beyond the towers and not far from the ground wound a white ribbon upon which swarmed wheeled vehicles of various sizes. Somehow he knew that most of them carried human cargo, and that if he were to stand near them he would be deafened by their full-throated roaring.

Miss Stimson was speaking to him again. "Did Jack Mosby ever ride in such carriages? Or Jeff Davis either, for that matter?"

The answer was obvious, but Randolph stood in stunned silence. A small red roarer with an ivory top appeared on the white ribbon and Randolph uncannily felt that he had once owned such a thing himself and that he knew exactly how to operate it.

Miss Stimson firmly grasped his right elbow and steered him back to the sofa, and Miss Stimson certainly was nice. The afternoon session seemed to be over, and all of the other dwellers were gone, but Miss Stimson seemed not to notice or to care. "Forgive me, but we were listening to you and Murphy - that's how we knew when to step in to keep either of you from being badly hurt. And each of you described Mosby as a glorified projection of your own selves."

"We did what?"

"Think a minute. You're a tall redhead; your Mosby is an even taller man with even brighter hair. Murphy is of average height and has brown hair; his Mosby is of average height and has brown hair. And both of you were ready to fight to protect your Mosbys. It goes a lot deeper than height and hair, of course. Your Mosby was your ideal dream of yourself - wasn't he?"

Randolph was about to answer when one of The People walked in. Randolph involuntarily cringed and then his eyes that had just seen the light and the roaring vehicles saw that this uniformed man, this soldier, really was not a Yankee. Randolph, who must have known about such things once, eyed the officer's narrow shoulder-board insignia and recognized a lieutenant colonel of the medical corps of a nation that he had never really thought of as an enemy.

Miss Stimson spoke in a language that Randolph might have recognized if he had strained at it, because he had learned necessary words and phrases in a crash course as part of his army training. And for a blazing moment Anthony Randolph, late an infantry lieutenant of the United States infantry, remembered all about electric lights and who he and Jack Murphy were and how to drive his '79 electronuke red sedan with its classy ivory top.

He had decided late in the Sixties that the senseless, immoral, capitalist, imperialist war in Vietnam was evil and that the establishment was materialistic, corrupt, and degenerate. The Pentagon, lying between Alexandria and Washington - and it lied constantly in the press and on television - was the embodiment of the hateful military-industrial complex. The basic issue was simple, wasn't it? American bombs and napalm were killing little brown babies and rendering a whole nation uninhabitable.

Randolph had been in all of the local antiwar demonstrations, and after some thought he joined the Students for a Democratic Society. And eventually, when the SDS had begun to seem too do-nothing to suit him, he had transferred his allegiance to the Weathermen.

It was as members of the Weathermen that he and his neighbor and close friend Jack Murphy - by then college dropouts and deeply interested in guerrilla warfare in Northern Virginia - had intensely studied everything they could find out about Mosby's Rangers. Mosby seemed to be the only person in history who had conducted successful guerrilla warfare in Northern Virginia.

Beginning with the failed Mayday demonstration in Washington in 1971, there had been a number of attempts by the peace freaks to shut down the government, or at least the damn Pentagon. None of the first efforts had succeeded, although planned riots elsewhere had forced college after college to drop their ROTC programs. And most of the demonstrators who were arrested were released after a day or two in jail while the others got only wrist-slapping fines.

And on Monday, October 5, 1981, an army of demonstrators ably led by seasoned lieutenants like Randolph and Murphy, profiting by all of the lessons learned in all of the earlier failures, made it. They swarmed through the Pentagon, shutting the place down and smashing all of the equipment in sight from pencils and coffee urns to computers and satellite control stations. Other contingents were less successful in closing down the government in Washington, but they provided diversionary harassment and did succeed in wrecking the State Department.

Peace! No more little brown babies would be killed by bombs or napalm.

The young idealists had forgotten one thing. They had forgotten that it takes only one faction to make war, but at least two to make peace. They had forgotten that other nations had watched the United States for years with genuine fear. Within half an hour of the fall of the Pentagon a nation that had sparred for decades with the United States - the nation of the medical corps lieutenant colonel now talking to Miss Stimson - had begun an ICBM bombardment and within five hours had set up four widely separated beachheads manned by a few paratroops, but mostly by men who had landed unopposed in huge troop carriers at American airports, both military and civil.

Randolph and Murphy, who had jeered at the idea that the lieutenant colonel's country actually wanted to expand its political system over the whole earth, spent two days in shock - by then all of Southern California was occupied - before they reported together to an army recruiting station. The line was so long that they had to wait over three hours to enlist. The teeming enlistees contributed to the general confusion, as did the fact that there were not enough ROTC-trained officers to take charge, and the war was over by August of 1982. Peace!

Randolph never heard the terms to which the United States agreed, because by then he had retreated into his fantasy of honorable Confederate surrender.

Miss Stimson glanced at Randolph's slack features and turned to the officer in alarm; her command of his language was bookish but adequate. "I wish that you had not appeared just now. I fear that we have lost Tony Randolph again, just as he was beginning to recover."

The officer scowled. "How many failures is this now for this Randolph and the other one? We cannot endure forever the cost of curing these capitalist deviants."

"Four for him and five for Murphy, the other one. I believe that he would have made a complete recovery this time had you not appeared just as he was relating to reality again. This is a most unusual case - two friends who met the same psychic trauma and adopted identical delusions. But both of them have brilliant minds, and I am sure that both of them will be valuable to the Revolution when they have recovered."

Randolph never heard the officer's answer - and, considering the brevity of his crash course, might not have understood it even if he had been able to listen. But Anthony Randolph, late a cavalry lieutenant in Mosby's Rangers, gloomily inspected the scuffed, toe of his left shoe and vaguely wondered what the man and woman near him were arguing about in some heathenish foreign language. Nothing important, he decided. Probably nothing at all.