is an unhealthy place for asthmatics,” he observed, pulling a silver flask from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. She explained that by 1940, asthma was epidemic in the British Isles. Strong men who had never suffered before now became stricken and were summarily declared unfit for the service. If they had the means, they were instructed by their doctors to seek quiet places in which to restore their health.
“Most of the chaps from Aberdeen chose Canada for being English speaking and not a direct target. Pearl Harbor rather changed everyone’s mind about the States.” She thought she sounded intelligent and informed.
“So, Great Britain is now suffering from a sort of massive asthma attack?” he laughed.
“It is a good idea to leave, actually. The children, as well, have all been sent off but more for safety than for health. If anyone has a relative somewhere else, they pile them up with all the young ones.”
“No one could accuse the children of cowardice, certainly not,” he agreed.
“Canada sounded so romantic,” she admitted. “The Mounties, too.” British Columbia reported more men than women in a smoldering world where most men were at one front or another—a promising place to find a suitable man for a young twenty-one-year-old woman. A lassie with red hair, fleeing her mother and intolerant Aberdeen, a place too stiff for a girl with play and ambition.
“Have you been through a winter here?” he asked, signaling to the waitress.
“I arrived only days ago. It’s been only muddy, muddy and cold.”
“Nothing like Scotland. I’ve been grouse shooting there several times in fact.”
“Do you think they will bomb Aberdeen?”
“Probably, if they take London like they did Paris. Are you so afraid of the Jerries that you’d seal yourself off in this godforsaken little lumber town?” He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and offered her one. She nodded and accepted a cigarette with awkward formality.
“This is as far as I’ve gotten. The trains are full to spilling over. I’ve not made it to the coast. I have a cousin in Santa Barbara but that’s America. She said they’d had an oil refinery bombed by a Jap submarine.” Shoving her emptied water glass forward, she accepted three fingers of Scotch from his flask. Sipping, she tried to think of something intelligent to say but failed. He, on the other hand, seemed to be remembering something from the distant past, maybe connected with Santa Barbara, or America, she could not say. But she knew he was most certainly an American, and a gentleman.
When the waitress slumped over, he ordered both of their dinners without offering Phyllis a choice. “Two sirloins, rare, please,” he stated.
She had not seen decent tweed since she’d left home.
“You want to help the war effort, do you not?” he asked, breaking the silence. She wondered if he was trying to proposition her. Lately, men begged her for sex, saying that they were about to die. One last…Please. Before he was sent to the front, even Roger begged her for relief from his anguish and overwhelming terror of battle. She offered him the solace his wife could not and he said she was an Angel of Mercy and gave her his ration of cigarettes.
It turned out badly and Mum threw her out.
She examined Russell closely. “Certainly, I want to help the effort,” she said. “My brother was killed a year ago. My only brother.” She stared squarely into his green eyes as she spoke, anxious that he pay attention to her, respect her.
“My mum was devastated,” she said. “I, too.”
He moved his left hand to cover hers. For a while, both were silent.
“See this?” he held up his right hand. His thumb had been mangled; his second and third fingers had been joined so that they resembled something fleshy and pliable.
“I’m Four-F because of it, so I came to pitch in on the Al-Can highway to do my part for the effort. As things got underway, Bailey and I bought the Dawson Creek Lumber Camp. It’s the only show in town now, that and the great fishing and hunting.”
“I thought the Al-Can Highway had been completed. Somebody said it was a complete marvel, that it’s as great an achievement as the Panama Canal.”
“And they are right. I was an engineer from Princeton, that’s how I came to work on the highway. Bailey was Johnny-on-the-spot and came up with the lumber camp at the very start. We did The Road in eight months, start to finish. So, I’m back to fly fishing before I leave.”
“Leave? To where?” she asked, trying to quiet a sound of alarm ringing in her ears.
“Back to Florida for a quick trip until it gets too hot, then I’m back here again.”
“When does it get hot?” she asked, relaxing some.
“Soon, but I’m here finishing up with the lumber camp now that The Road is operating.”
“Why? What’s the purpose of it? It leads from nowhere to the very Styx.” she said, her voice lowered for effect, her interest in him was rising with each sip of Scotch.
Not surprisingly, the young girl would come to have a comfortable feeling about highways that led over the horizon. In fact she grew to count on finding that all roads would lead directly away from Rome, not back to it.
“Inland airstrips. The Road gives us an inland supply route out of reach of the Japs. We’ve got mobility, so to speak.”
“My aunt has seen the conning towers off Santa Barbara. She’s actually seen the Japs’ submarines with her own eyes. Everyone is terrified.”
“We’re ready for them,” he assured her and took a deep swallow, closing his eyes as the Scotch burned its way down his throat. He held his glass with his left hand.
“You shot off your own finger?” she asked, shaking her head.
“It was a hunting accident. The safety was off. I always keep the safety off. It’s far better that way. One day my gloves froze on the barrel. I was climbing over a barbed wire fence and the damned thing went off.”
“An accident,” she reconfirmed, looking away from his face as the waitress placed their identical steaks before them.
He got her quite drunk, or she managed to get herself pie-eyed, one or the other. But he was a gentleman to the end and drove her safely home, skidding through the mud. The next morning, when she slogged in to work late and groggy, she felt both enervated and defensive. Who was he to accuse her of cowardice, fleeing her country with the first threat when he’d put his toe on the trigger and blown his hand to bits with his shotgun just to avoid the draft? Four-F indeed! She had seen right through his story and he had attempted to seduce her after he’d gotten quite tight, and they’d kissed, long and lingeringly. She was not that sort of girl, however.
When she asserted this, he laughed.
“I want you to know that I really am asthmatic,” she told him when she looked up from her desk in the two-bit lawyer’s office to find him standing before her. Again he was in no mood to mind the queue, and she found him less attractive that morning than the night before. Her summation was affected by her own hangover. Surely his head throbbed as well because her own pulse
