by James Jones
Looks like you need another drink, he thought, you arent getting mad enough yet apparently. This one this time apparently is going to be more than a one drink job. Personally, I think its more than a two drink job, even. Personally, I think this job is going to be one of those that calls for a workout punching on the heavy bag. Yes, I think thats what it is, he decided, running his tongue over his mustache to see if it was short enough to keep from tickling him and, satisfied, stepped back and raised his arm and tossed the scissors over his shoulder like a rich man giving a bum a dollar, listening happily to the clashing clatter of their fall. There was plenty money in the Company Fund, let them buy some new ones. Let Dynamite take care of it, that was about his speed. He picked them up and laid them, with a full inch of one point broken off, on Holmes’s desk on top the transfer letter, in the box marked Urgent, and went upstairs to corner Karelsen, his punching bag, in the room they shared together off the first floor porch. Pop Karelsen, being one of Mazzioli’s intellectual confreres, but smarter, made the best heavy bag anywheres around. Mazzioli would serve for a light bag, speed workout, but there wasnt enough weight to him to make a heavy bag that developed power.
“Pete,” he bawled, charging in and blowing apart the quiet rainy-day privacy that had been in the little room, “I’m sick of it. I’m turning in my stripes. This is the goddamnedest fuckedup outfit I was ever in. Man like Dynamite’s a goddam disgrace to the goddam uniform he sports around. Him and that punk Culpepper.”
Pop Karelsen was undressing, sitting on his bunk to ease the aching joints of his arthritis that was so familiar to him now it had become almost a friend, had just taken off his hat and denim blouse, and was disengaging his false teeth, both plates. He looked up noncommittally, irritated that his privacy was invaded, afraid Mad Milton was off on another of his rampages though hoping he was not, but still not wanting to involve himself in anything, until he knew just where he stood.
“In the Old Army,” he said profoundly, but discreetly, “an officer was an officer, not a clothes horse,” and dropped the teeth into their glass of water on the table, hoping for the best.
“Old Army, my bleeding ass,” raged Warden joyously, pouncing on the platitude. “You bums and your Old Army make me want to puke. There never was any Old Army. The boys from the Civil War told it to the Indian War Recruits, just like the oldtimers from the Revolution told it to the boys of 1812. And all of them only tryin to excuse themself, for being bums and taking the shit they’ve always taken.”
“You know all about it, I guess,” Karelsen said stiffly, in spite of himself, because he knew now for sure that Milt was off again, and that the only way to handle him when he was a madman like this was to keep your equanimity. “You served with Braddock, didnt you?” The only trouble was, he could never do it.
“I served long enough to know enough not to be snowed with this Old Army shit,” Warden bawled at him. “I re-enlisted once myself.”
Karelsen only grunted, bending down over his belly to untie his muddy field shoes, trying to keep his equanimity, but Warden plumped down on his own bunk and banged his fist down on the castiron bedrail.
“Pete,” he bellowed at the other man accusingly, “I dont have to tell you about this Company. You’re no punk. I’m too good a man to waste my talents in this outfit. They’re killin me off, slow but sure. Jockstraps! Boys from Bliss! And now a new one.”
Old Pete’s face opened up vainly into a smug grin, as it always did when he conceived a mot. “This man’s Army,” he said distinctly, his equanimity recovered, “has always been a jockstrap Army, ever since Tunney first started fighting for the Marines in France. And it’ll probably stay that way.” The kid, he thought, Mazzioli, would really have enjoyed that one.
“What do you mean, new one?” Pete said, equanimously slipping it on the end, like a senator sticking his rider on a sure-thing bill. “Did the transfer of this Fort Kam cook go through?”
“Who else?” Warden cried impatiently. “A cook. I got more would be cooks than I know what to do with now. And now he’s bringin in this Stark.”
“Yeah? Say, thats too bad,” Pete comforted comfortably. “By the way,” he said, with all the gossip’s subtlety, “whats the story on this guy? The Old Man mean to make him Mess Sergeant? What’ll he do with Preem?”
“I could transfer out of here tomorrow,” Warden raged on happily, “In Grade—get that? In Grade—to any one of ten compny’s in this Regmint. Why the hell should I work my ass off here with no cooperation or appreciation?”
“Oh, sure,” Pete managed to stick in, the equanimity fading. “Sure you could. I could be Chief of Staff too, except I cant stand leaving all my old buddies. But whats the story?”
“I dont have to take it,” Warden bawled. “I’m the best man in their goddam Regmint, and whats more they know it. I’m turning in my stripes, Pete, I mean it. I rather be a buckass private who just does what he’s told. If I had knew what was good for me, I’d of stayed in A Compny as a Staff.”
“We all know you’re indispensible,” Pete said bitterly.
“I’m too damn good to waste my talents in this outfit, thats a cinch,” Warden bellowed at him, going on unabashed, lashing himself into the cathartic tirade, battering at the other like the stream from a firehose. Why, he said, was Apey Galovitch running the First Platoon? Why did every noncom just happen to be a jockstrap? Why was Gentleman Jim O’Hayer the supply sergeant of this outfit? and where was Dynamite getting his gambling money that he lost like water at poker at the Club? “Officers,” he snorted. “West Point socialites. Learn to play polo, poker and bridge and which fork to use, so they can mingle with society and marry a goddam wife with money who can entertain and teach the gook maids how to serve English style and copy the colonial Britisher and be goddam professional soldiers with a private income, just like Lord-Kiss-My-Ass.
“Where do you think Holmes got his wife? Right out of a bargain basement in Washington that specializes in young ingenues, right out of Baltimore, political family with a private fortune. Only Dynamite miscalculated, and this family went broke. Before Holmes could get anything but his four polo ponies and that goddamned pair of sterling silver spurs.”
In the midst of his harangue, like a man in the calm center of a hurricane, seeing the curiosity brightening Pete’s eyes, he coolly warned himself away from Holmes’s wife and calmly steered it back to where he wanted it, on the things Pete already knew, and began on Sgt Henderson who had not pulled one day’s drill in almost two years because he was the nursemaid to Holmes’s polo ponies up at the Packtrain.
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Pete yelled back finally, putting his fingers in his ears, the equanimity beaten to death now by this wordy stream of energy that was battering him groggy. “Shut up. Leave me alone. Shut up. If you hate this place so much and can transfer out In Grade, why the hell dont you do it? And leave me alone?”
“Why!” Warden bawled indignantly. “You ask me why. Because I’m too goddamned kind-hearted for my own good, thats why. This outfit would collapse like a bamboo hut in a typhoon if I was to leave it.”
“I wonder why the General Staff aint never discovered you?” Pete yelled, feeling that what made it all so goddam bad was that damn near all of what he said was true; if it wasnt true, and he was just blowing, it wouldnt be so hard to take.
“Because they’re all too goddamned stupid, Pete, thats why,” Warden said, suddenly, easily, in a normal voice. “Gimme a butt.”
“You’ll wear them goddam stripes out,” Pete yelled at him. “Taking them off and sewing them back on so much. Sometimes I wonder how any single man so wonderful ever managed to get born.”
“Dont get excited,” Warden said. “Sometimes I wonder that myself. Gimme a goddam butt, I said.”
“I’m not excited. You’ll never change the Army,” Pete yelled, realizing that Warden wasnt yelling any more and managing to pull his own voice back down to normalcy in the middle of it, “so you might as well relax,” he
said. He tossed a crumpled raindamp pack over to the grinning Warden. The silence in the little room, with the rain heard dripping down past the open window, deafened him.
“Is these rags all you got?” Warden said distastefully. “They wont even burn, for God’s sake.”
“What do you want?” Pete yelled. “Gold tips?”
“Sure,” Warden grinned. “At least that much.” He lay back on his bunk, the enema completed, and put his arms contentedly behind his head and crossed his feet.
“You’ll never change the Army,” Pete said again. He paused and stood up in his socks and turned around to get his towel, exposing buttocks pocked with the syphilis hip shots he had been taking every two weeks for the past year, looking with his narrow shoulders and pussy hips like a child’s round-bottomed doll that cant be knocked over. In the pause, Warden could feel the epigram that was coming.
“This outfit’s no worse than any other. The Army’s been that way,” Pete said distinctly, the equanimity miraculously recovered, “ever since Benedict Arnold first put the slippery dong to the Point—and got reamed for his pains.”
“Who was Benedict Arnold, Pete?”
“Go to hell,” Pete said. “God Damn You.”
“Now, Pete,” Warden said. “Now, Pete. Now dont get excited now. Keep your equanimity.”
“You think I dont know what it is you’re doing?” Pete yelled. “When you come up here and ride me like you do? You think nobody’s smart but you? You think I’ll go on taking it off you forever, just because you’re the Topkick. But I wont. Someday I’ll move out of here by god, even if I have to move out in the squadroom with the privates.”
Warden looked over at him, almost startled, without moving, a look of actual real hurt coming on his face.
“If you’re such a hotshot,” Pete yelled, “why didnt you transfer Prewitt into my platoon, like I asked you the other day? Why dont you do it now.”
“I want him where he is, Peter, in Galovitch’s platoon, thats why.”
“He’d be an asset, in my Weapons Platoon.”
“He’s an asset where he is.”
“An asset to the Post Stockade, you mean. With what that boy knows about the MGs he’d make a squad leader right off, and as soon as I had an opening I’d make him section leader.”
“Maybe I dont want him to have a rating yet. Maybe I’m tryin to educate him first.”
“And maybe you couldnt get Dynamite to sign an order giving him a rating,” Pete suggested. “Maybe you couldnt even get him to okay putting the kid in my platoon.”
“Maybe I’m training him for bigger things.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like taking a correspondence course, and recommending him for a reserve commission,” Warden sneered.
“Why dont you send him to the Army War College while you’re at it?”
“Thats an idea. Maybe I’ll do just that. How do you know how a good mind works?”
“Big-Hearted-Harry. You want to know what I think? I think you’re nuts. Pure plain crazy. Goofy as a loon. Thats what I think. I dont think you know what you mean to do yourself, with anything, least of all Prewitt, or this new transfer.”
Maybe he’s right, Warden thought. Is he right? He’s right all right. Because who does know what they mean to do themself, with anything, anymore, in the world this one’s becoming, when no man can do anything without creating some strange result he never had foreseen—like me just now.
“Thats what I think,” Pete said again.
Warden only stared at him affectionately, grinning slyly, and he went to his footlocker to get his soapbox and his razor, trying to maintain the dignity he had just had but that was fast slipping away from him in the face of Warden’s silent grinning, his body oozing the stale mushy smell of an old man who drinks too much and cannot assimilate the alcohol that in his youth he had thrown off so easily.
But he’s a sharp old bastard. But is that the way Milt Warden will grow old? end up pimping for the Old Army? for a whore that never was? to save his face? His face, Milt thought, aint even savable, without the teeth, caved in and crumpled like a crying monkey, like a good sound apple forgotten and left for twenty-two years’ service on the shelf, until its crisp moisture was evaporated and it remained, a mushy-smelling echo of itself, shrunken and brown, still whole because unmoved, but ready to crumble at the slightest pressure to move it from the shelf.
There was a legend about old Pete in the Company, one Pete worked hard to foster with his intellectualisms, about how he came of a rich family in Minnesota, and had enlisted to Save the World in the last war, caught the clap from an army nurse in France, and stayed in to get free treatment, so rare and expensive then, and because his family kicked him out. Pete loved the story, so it probably wasnt true. There were so many who prided themselves on being misfits, rebellion for rebellion’s sake, a sort of inverse sentimentality, romance in reverse. You do it some yourself. But on the other hand, what? The officers. How to choose between a false success and a fake failure? between a fake God and a false Devil? If the story had been true, it wouldnt have been romantic, to Pete or anybody else. But part of it was true anyway, he thought, the part about the clap was true, whether he got it from an army nurse in France, or from a Paris whore, or from a pickup in Chicago. You could prove that much was true, with the arthritis; on some men it went down into the bones and stayed there.
And yet there remained, when the choppers filled out the watery indistinctness of the crumbled face, a firm intelligent line along the jaw, an echo of forgotten promise; and when the toothless pucker did not obscure the eyes, you could see the clearness in them of a man who knew machineguns and knew he knew them, the only satisfaction left an old man whose hobby now was collecting pornography in pictures.
“Where you going, Little Sir Echo?” Milt asked him as he clumped past to the door in the Japanese style wooden clogs.
“To take my goddam shower, if the First Sergeant’s got no objections. Where’d you think? to the movies in this towel?”
Warden sat up and rubbed his face, as if he was trying to rub all of it, Karen, the transfer, Prewitt, Pete, himself, away.
“Thats too bad,” he said. “I was just thinkin about goin over to Choy’s and lappin up some brew. And I was goin to invite you along.”
“I’m broke,” Pete said. “I aint got no money.”
“I’m buying. Its my party.”
“No thanks. You think you can buy me off with beer? Come up here and needle me all afternoon and then buy me a couple of brews and make it all all right. No thanks. I wouldnt drink your beer if it was the last beer in the world.”
Warden slapped him on the butt and grinned. “You mean if it was the very last beer? and you wouldn’t touch it?”
Pete was trying hard to keep his craving off his face. “Well,” he said. “If it was the very last beer. But I hope to God it never gets that low.”
Milt Warden smiled, charmingly, all the deep warmth rising from his eyes, striking from the record all the rest of it, in spite of Pete’s severity.
“Lets you and me go over to Choy’s and get drunkern hell and tear up all the chairs and tables.”
Pete had to grin, a little, but he would not renege all the way. “It’ll have to be on you,” he said.
“Its on me,” Warden said. “Everything’s on me. The whole fucking world’s on me. Go take your bath. I’ll wait. Couple days we’ll see what this new man Stark is like.”
They did not have to wait that long, because the new man Stark arrived the next day, barracks bag and baggage.
It was one of those first clear days that prophesied the ending of the rainy season. It had rained all morning and then suddenly cleared at noon, and the air, freshly washed today, was soft and free of dust, like dark crystal in the sharp clarity and sombre focus it gave to every image. Everything looked clean, smelled clean, and there was that holiday sense that always comes with an impending weather change. To work, on such a day,
was sacrilege, but Warden had to be on hand for the arrival, to look him over.
It was, Warden felt, very appropriate that on this day there had been the usual Preem dinner menu of canned franks and canned baked beans, sometimes called “Stars and Stripes,” but more often called now, since Preem served them almost every day, “Ratturds and Dogturds.”
Sighing inwardly at the helplessness of a man in the hands of Fate when he saw the Hickam Field taxi creeping around the quad like a stranger looking for an address, he waited till it stopped in front of here to unload a man and his equipment on the still-wet grass in this dark clean air that was as tangible as water and then went outside to meet the adversary. At least he could shake his fist at Fate that much, by refusing to fight it as a Defensive Action in the Orderly Room, he thought, prepared for anything.
“I dont care if he is a ex-dogface,” the new man said, staring after the departing taxi. “Thats still too much to pay.”
“Probly got a gook wife,” Warden said, “and half a dozen hapahaole brats to feed.”
“Aint my fault,” Stark said. “The govmint ought to pay for movin transfers.”
“They do. All except the ones that transfer at their own request.”
“They ought to pay for all of them,” Stark said doggedly, not missing Warden’s little dig.
“They will. After they get their Citizen’s Army built up to strength and we get in this war.”
“When that comes, they wont be no more transfers by request,” Stark said, and they exchanged a sudden glance of knowledge that Pete Karelsen could not have shared and that, prepared as he was, surprised Warden with his understanding. That other part of his mind that never entered into anything and always stood outside himself observing, made a mental note.
“They pay it for the officers,” Stark said in the same slow dogged drawl. “Everybody sticks the dogface. Even the ex-dogface.” He pulled a sack of Golden Grain out of his shirt pocket by its dangling tab and got a paper out. “Where I put my stuff?”
“In the cooks’ room,” Warden said.
