Lydia by Tim Sandlin

Author:Tim Sandlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

After Armistice, I had nowhere to go and no reason to do anything or not do anything else, so I volunteered to invade Russia. Most Americans don’t have a notion about that war. When I tell them, they say I’m making up a tall tale, but the fact is Americans, British—with Canadians and Australians—and a few French went in through Finland, while more Canadians, Americans, and Japanese landed in Siberia. Our purpose was to save the royalist white Russians from the Bolsheviks. The hitch: after the horrible deprivations during the war to end all wars, nobody had the enthusiasm to jump right into another one. The politicians couldn’t drum up support from a worn-down populace, and the soldiers didn’t have the spine for defending one bunch of Russians from another bunch of Russians. President Wilson hated the Tsar and backed up Lenin, till Lenin started winning. Now, it was the other way round. Our soldiers didn’t buy it.

So, a year later, the North Russian Expedition gave up, but meanwhile me and Shad decided to go see the Baltic. At the last moment, before the train pulled out for Finland, Bill yanked some strings and came with us. Bill always had a talent for yanking strings. He said he wanted a crack at Bolo girls. My belief is Bill couldn’t handle the thought of losing Shad.

You’d assume I spit in Bill’s eye and shunned his presence, after all he’d done, but by the end of the Great War, I was too hollowed out. I didn’t have the juice to maintain hatred. I’d had time to think in the convalescent hospital in Ireland, and I’d come to the conclusion that Agatha would have written that letter even if Bill hadn’t told her about Swamp Fox. The thing Agatha loathed most was boredom, and the thing she wanted most was romance, as evidenced by her pleasure in poetry. I don’t know if poetry bred romance or romance bred poetry. All I know for certain is that Agatha was not a girl to sit in her daddy’s house in Billings, Montana, waiting for a man. The one virtue she never displayed was patience.

And besides, I had wallowed with a syphilitic whore. Bill did too, and his motive for telling on me was selfish, but that didn’t change the facts. I wallowed. The consequences were mine, not Bill’s. So, while I didn’t cozy up with Bill Cox in North Russia, neither did I punch him in the face. Compare it to playing on a baseball team where the pitcher is a heel. You still play with him. You just don’t tell him secrets.

As to the incursion, there’s not much worth relating, except that guff about it’s the humidity, not the temperature is true. Thirty below on the Archangel Railroad is more miserable than thirty below at the Jackson Hole Ski Area. Mostly, our job was to cover British retreats and wave good-bye to white Russian deserters.

Years later, when Bill was a person of note in

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