by James Jones
“Lots of guys coming home,” Dave grinned. He took the bag and set it with the furlough satchel. The driver, watching him, began to laugh.
“That was sure some little farewell speech you made those other soljerboys just before we left Chicago.”
“Well, they came to see me off. I had to tell them something.”
“You told them. I just wish my wife could of heard that little bit about kickin the 4-Fs out of their beds. That war was hard on us bus drivers, too.”
“I bet it was also hard on bus drivers’ wives,” Dave said.
The driver laughed arrogantly and pushed back his cap with a thumb and put the backs of his palm soiled gloves immaculately on his hips. “You know, I was born and raised about fifteen miles from here myself,” he said.
“Where?”
“West Lancaster.” It was a muddy little community, weathering away on the riverbank beside a discontinued ferry.
“Sure. I know West Lancaster.” Dave hadn’t heard the words in years.
“You don’t see me going back,” the driver offered. He looked around him at the square of business houses and grinned. “I know these towns. No bars. No burlyque. No nightclubs. No racetracks.” He bent down again at the luggage compartment in the side. “You can’t even buy whiskey, except in a package. Gimme Chicago.”
“They still sell beer,” Dave said, looking at the sign over a tavern. He kept his face deadpan: “And there’s always the church socials.”
The driver looked up, his face pained. “Jesus God! You mean they still have those?”
Dave laughed, looking again around the square with its business houses.
“Well, you can always learn to play golf,” the driver said, bending his head again to the compartment. “Parkman’s got a snazzy Country Club.”
“My brother’s a wheel in the Country Club,” Dave said.
The driver didn’t hear it. But then, Dave didn’t really care. Perhaps he hadn’t even said it to the driver, perhaps he’d said it to himself. Or to the town.
The driver had his head in the baggage compartment. Dave was still looking off across the town. It was curious, that association of golf and his brother Frank in his mind. Out on the West Coast where he had been living when he was drafted, there were almost as many golf courses as golfers; and he never passed one that it wasn’t immediately Frank he thought of first. Dear Frank, Dear Brother Frank the little breadwinner, Brother Frank the family father. Brother Frank the jeweler. Across the square on the east side, he could see the building. He couldn’t read the words painted on the two plate-glass windows, but he knew what they said, in their gold-and-black jeweler’s script: Frank Hirsh, Jeweler, and Frank Hirsh’s Jewelry Store. The building had not changed any in nineteen years, and neither had the business block it was a part of, and they would not be changed, either, the words, and the window displays would still be arranged carefully with that racial trait of Germanic thoroughness that was as natural to the Hirshes as their ball-like heads and blocky bodies. Only now there would be clerks, instead of just Frank and his wife, Agnes. Brother Frank would probably be in the back in the office, right now smooching around with his office girl. As he watched from across the square, a woman in a coat with a fur collar went inside. Dave had worked there all through high school. It was hard to believe.
The bus driver had pulled two big bundles of magazines to the lip of the opening. “Well, I had best get on with my chores,” he said. “I’ve already got your checks. You’re loose.”
“It’s too bad you don’t get off duty here,” Dave said suddenly. “You and me would throw a party. I’ve got plenty of money.”
If his voice was harsh, the driver didn’t notice. “Well, I ain’t,” he said. “And these people want to get on down the road.” He pulled off his black gloves and touched up his tie. Then he put the gloves back on and picked up the bundles. “But you ever get back up to Chi look me up the Randolph Street Station. Name’s O’Donnell.” He carried the bundles across the sidewalk and inside where probably a woman worked, holding them carefully away from his slick lady-slaughterer’s uniform.
Dave watched him go in under the sign over the storefront that read PARKMAN NEWS AGENCY; on the window was painted another sign BUS STATION PARKMAN ILLINOIS. The place was both. It had been both nineteen years ago, too.
He turned back to his bags, wishing momentarily that they could have gone on talking. But when he asked himself why or what about, there wasn’t any answer. Why did he do it? things like that offer to the driver. He didn’t know. But he always did. Half angry, he picked up his bags and started down the street to the hotel.
It would have ruined all his plans for a triumph that he had worked out so carefully on the way down and he would have gone right ahead and done it anyway just like that. All around him the town lay spread out seemingly quiet and peaceful under the winter sky. He grinned. He was not fooled. Behind this misleading facade telephones still lurked, bells poised and waiting. The whole town would know he was here before suppertime.
The Hotel Francis Parkman was Parkman’s finest. There were two others. But the Parkman—named after the same historian and author of The Oregon Trail whom the founding fathers had chosen to name their town for in 1850—was the only one that had a kitchen and dining room. It was where all the corporation executives and other visiting dignitaries stayed when they came to town and Dave Hirsh was not going to stay anywhere else, either. The cold wind touched its tongue of melting snow grains to the storefronts as he passed.
In the lobby it was warm and easeful, after outside. A luxurious wood fire was burning brightly in the old-style marble fireplace, and three men in suits and ties and one carefully dressed woman sat in deep chairs near it. When the people talked, they didn’t look at each other but stared out the big window at the weather as if fascinated by it.
Dave felt his chest swelling with excitement as he set his bags down. It was the first time in some months that he had been vain about his uniform. A uniform was like anything else, when you were around where everyone else had the same thing it didn’t mean nearly as much to you.
The clerk left his work and came to the register. He was a chubby blond young man in a suit that looked too big for him. There was a Purple Heart button in his lapel and a glass eye in his face.
“Yes, sir?” With his good eye he scanned Dave’s ribbons.
“I want the best room in the house,” Dave said. He had been aware of the four loungers eyeing him. Now he could feel their gazes converge upon him like four columns of infantry.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “We have a corner suite of two rooms. That’s our best.”
“I’ll take it,” Dave said.
“Yes, sir. If you will just register, please.” He turned the card holder and pushed it forward, while the glass eye continued to stare out of his chubby face like a bright blue marble pressed into a piepan of dough. “Price is ten dollars.”
Dave printed his name carefully. He wanted to be sure everyone could read it. Under it he put his old address in North Hollywood.
Then he looked up and found himself staring into the cold reserve of the clerk’s glass eye. Time seemed to hang. Then the clerk blinked. This seemingly unnatural act, a direct violation of the laws of motion of inanimate bodies, while freeing him, shocked him like a blow from a fist, he felt the eyelid should have clicked. Or at least made a grating noise. Momentarily, the soldier in him reasserted itself. Christ what a way to get it. In the eyes.
“Have the boy bring my bags up, will you?” he said.
“I’ll bring them, sir,” the clerk said. “Our bellboy isn’t home from school yet.” He turned the register and read the card. “Hirsh?” he said politely. “We have a Mr Frank Hirsh in our town. Who owns the jewelry store.”
“Yes, I know,” Dave said, again aware of the loungers. “I’m his brother.”
It meant nothing to the clerk. But Dave was sure it meant something to the four loungers. You could almost feel i
t, in the air. He started for the back of the lobby, where the stairs were.
“Just a minute, Mr Hirsh, and I’ll show you the way,” the clerk said.
“I know the way,” Dave said, not stopping, “I was born and raised here.”
It was all just exactly like he had played it out in his mind. Except for that damned glass eye. It was almost occult, how like it was. Sometimes there had been just two loungers, sometimes six or seven. But there were always loungers. He had thought about it a lot, this homecoming, in a lot of different places—with the carnival and the circuses he worked for, later on on the bum, still later when he lived with his sister, Francine, who was Frank’s twin, in North Hollywood.
At the top of the stairs, he looked back and saw the clerk struggling up with the heavy B-4 bag and the satchel. He had completely forgotten all about him. He ran back down the stairs and held out his hand for the small bag.
“Here, give me that.”
“I can manage it,” the clerk said coldly.
Dave took it anyway.
The clerk shrugged.
Again, Dave felt that reasonless fear for his own eyes. “I don’t want you to strain yourself on that thing,” he joked.
“A man can stuff everythin’ but a ten-room house in one of these things,” the clerk countered.
“This war has ruptured a lot of redcaps,” Dave said. “What if the VA had to pay them compensation?”
“Do you want the country to go broke,” the clerk countered, but he did not laugh. He was apparently used to this trick of people having to make conversation with him. He led the way on down the hall. “Here we go, Mr Hirsh,” he said, opening the door. “The bedroom is on in here.” He carted the big B-4 bag into it. Dave could hear him hanging it up on the closet door.
He disposed of his overcoat and got the bottle out of it. He had it open in his hand when the boy came back in, staring unconcernedly with the bright blue eye. It was the first undistracted look Dave had got at it and it made him want to wince. It was a botched-up job, even for the Army.
“How about a drink after all that exertion?” he said, holding it out. He tossed a half dollar on the daybed.
The clerk pocketed it. “I didn’t hear you. Sure. I can awys use a drink.”
When he spoke this time. Dave detected the accent he had been trying to put his finger on. He handed him the open bottle. “You’re not from around here, are you? Where you from, Jersey?”
“Yeah, Jersey City.” He did not quite say Joisey.
“We had a bunch of Jersey boys in my outfit,” Dave said. “What’s your name?”
“Barker. Freddy Barker. I was station down at George Field near Vincennes and married a girl from here. Came back out here after I got discharge.”
He took a sparing drink from the bottle and made as if to hand it back, but Dave made a gesture for him to have another. Instead, the clerk set it gently on the end table.
“Thanks for the drink,” he said. “Is there anything else I can get you right now, Mr Hirsh?”
“Yes, there is. As a matter of fact,” Dave said. He opened his left blouse pocket. “I’d like to have some ice. And I’ve got a bank draft here for fifty-five hundred dollars that I’d like for you to take over to the Second National Bank and deposit for me.”
There was just a second’s pause. “Why you want me to deposit it for you?”
“Because I don’t want to go over there myself,” Dave said. “And while you’re gone, pick me up a couple bottles of whiskey.”
“Okay.” The clerk was looking at him curiously with his good eye. The other, as always, was aloof and cold. “It’s got to be signed, doesn’t it?”
Dave nodded and got out his pen. “I’ll sign it right now. It’ll be worth a couple of bucks to you to get it in before the bank closes.”
“I’ll do it right away.”
Dave handed him the check and a twenty-dollar bill. “Instead of whiskey, why don’t you get me a fifth of Gordon’s gin and a bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth.”
“I doubt if anybody’ll have that kind.”
“Okay, then just get the whiskey. Any good blend.”
The clerk nodded. “That’s a lot of money to trust a stranger with,” he said.
“I know, can’t you see how worried I look?”
The clerk grinned, a little, a lopsided weird grin because his left eye did not join in and grin with the rest of him.
“You said the Second National, didn’t you?” he asked. “A checking account?”
“That’s right. Don’t you want another drink?”
“Yes. I’ll take one.” He picked the bottle up off the table. “Your brother Frank is a member of the board at the other bank, isn’t he?” he said. “At the Cray County Bank?”
“I believe he is,” Dave said. The young clerk drank the raw whiskey easily. Then he folded the check and bill and put them in his jacket pocket. When he got up, the expression of his good eye was as veiled as that of the glass one. “I’ll get this done for you right away, Mr Hirsh.”
“Have another drink before you go if you want,” Dave said.
“If I have another drink, I’ll wind up spendin’ the afternoon here,” the clerk said. There was no humor in his face. He went to the door.
“I’ll bring you back a deposit slip,” he said.
Dave sat still a moment or two, thinking about the clerk. He liked him. But then he liked most everybody. But he hadn’t handled him right. He got up and walked over to the window, taking the bottle with him. But he did not drink, and a big arrogant grin spread over his face. He was thinking about the faces of the people in the bank, when they saw his name on that check. And he was thinking about his brother Frank’s face, when he heard about it, which he would soon enough.
Down below him Freddy came out from under the hotel marquee in a topcoat now but bareheaded in the spitting snow. Dave watched him cross the street diagonally and go up the other side to the square.
Standing at the window, for a moment he forgot the town. He seemed to go back into the Army. You didn’t get over it all at once. And the one-eyed clerk had brought out a singularly strong emotion in him. He had just finished spending four years of his life with boys like that. They called him Pop. And they brought their troubles to him. They believed that, being nearly thirty-five, he by rights ought to know more about life than they did. He had wound up as a sort of elected father of the outfit, and now he missed that. Wherever they were now. All scattered out. A lot of them dead. And a lot of them crippled, too, like Freddy.
It seemed that in the last few years the cripples had become a normal part of everyday life, a steady stream of them, rolling back from over both seas, hardly anyone even noticed them anymore. He was suddenly reminded of Falstaff’s speech about the maimed and crippled rabble, that had come home with him, from the Continental Wars.
It must have been a lot like this in Rome, too, during her great days of world leadership. Except now the government bought them cars which the taxpayers paid for. Well, civilization had advanced a lot. The only thing was he, Dave, had about got to the place where he didn’t much give a damn about civilization anymore. Except, of course, for the comforts. That’s what kept us all going wasn’t it: the comforts.
Sometimes, and increasingly the past year and a half that he’d served with the Occupation Army in Germany, Dave got the feeling he was living in a dying age. It was the same feeling he got when he listened to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a picture not of the birth of the world but the death, and the now primitive tribes that sang hauntingly of the former greatness of their people and put the rusted gun and the wrecked auto upon their stone altars and worshipped them as gods because they no longer knew how to operate them.
Along roads and streets no longer plainly marked, amongst courthouses and buildings turned into grass grown piles of masonry, filled with the rotting records of an entire civilization, gone.
And, in Germany, it was not hard to believe it completely. Here
it was a little harder.
At such times, it was not too difficult to believe that a man of his own years if he learned to throw a knife and taught himself the intricacies of archery he could plan ahead upon someday making himself chief of the Wabash Valley, or even chief of all Illinois.
Except the man was always too lazy. And he wasn’t getting any younger, either. He was getting noticeably older, in fact. Getting bald and until the Army took him and worked it off him had been getting rounder with the unhealthy fat of eating and drinking too much. The comforts. It appeared to be a toss-up, which would outlast the other, he thought, the world or the man.
But either way, the man would lose. Lose the bodies of women, lose the physical health, lose the witty intelligence, lose all the great loves the man might have had.
That seemed to be what the emotional progression always ended up at. All his life, he thought, he had been afraid of getting syphilis. Well, it was a wild, weird, melancholy thing, when it took him, and the only thing to do was wear it out. Probably thinking about all the cripples was what had brought it on.
Still holding the bottle, he left the window and went into the bedroom to the closet and from one of the sidepockets of the B-4 bag fished out his books. There were five, all Viking Portables. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe—the five major influences his sister, Francine, had called them. She had sent them to him in Europe one by one as they came out.
Dave grinned. Sister Francine. It was her address he had put on the hotel register. It was she he had been living with—and largely off of—in Hollywood when he got drafted. She was a good old gal, but she just couldn’t get over being an English teacher. It had given her an abnormal love for literature, she had to feel that what she did was important.
Well, a lot of people labored under that self-delusion. He grinned derisively at the five major influences, the biggest mark of his time spent with her—what was it? eleven, almost twelve years. Off and on.
Nevertheless, the sight of the five books there on the dresser, their pages swelled with too much reading, their covers warped from too many barracks bags, really touched him deeply. He had dragged them halfway across Europe, they had seen a lot of country with him.
