by James Jones
“Why the hell should I? You seen me, dint you?”
Stark drew himself up drunkenly formally in the camp chair and stared at the other woodenly. “I done already got my mind made up. What to do about it. Nothing you can say will change me. Its useless to try.”
“I aint tryin yet,” Warden said.
“Wont do you any good,” Stark said. “You might as well give up. If you cant take care of yourself, Firs Sarnt, somebody got to take care of it for you. And it looks like I’m elected.
“You aint leavin this heah tent tonight, Firs Sarnt,” Stark said solemnly, folding his arms to pronounce the sentence, “until you promise me on your word of honor as a soljer you wont have nothin more to do with that slut.”
“Haw!” Warden snorted. “My word of honor as a soljer, ’ey? Wont leave this tent, ’ey?”
“Aint you got no self respeck lef a tall?” Stark said. “Dont you respeck the organization yore servin in? Dont you respeck the un’form of yore country you wornd for so many yeahs? You ought to be ashamed. Yore a dis-grace to the chevrons on yore arm, Firs Sarnt.”
“Piss on that,” Warden snarled.
Stark shook his head. “Ats my last word. I got my mind made up. You aint leavin this tent till you promise. Ats my last word, Firs Sarnt.”
Warden snorted. “Last word, ’ey? Threatening me, ’ey?”
“Dont you know what she is?” Stark hollered violently. He waved his arms. “Cant you see what she’s doin to you? She’s terrible!” he hollered, “she’s awful. Oh, you dont know her like I do, Firs Sarnt. She’s a rotten goddam whoor, she’s worse than a whoor, she’s— She’s a goddam rich man’s daughter of a degenerate, thats what she is. Why, she would—” He clamped his mouth shut and folded his arms. “But I wont let her,” he said. “You’ll promise like I said, Firs Sarnt, or else.”
“Or else what?” Warden said.
“Take care,” Stark said. “Dont trifle with me, Firs Sarnt. I know you backwards and forwards. Preem warned me about you, Firs Sarnt, before he left. But I know how to handle you. Theres only one way to handle men like you. And I know how to do it.” He settled his folded arms into an even more final finality. “I’m waiting for you to promise,” he said.
Warden was still looking at him thoughtfully. Stark was drunk, and tomorrow he would forget all about it. And tomorrow Milt Warden would also still be seeing the same triumphant face he had seen hanging on the stairway wall the time he hurt his hand.
“Promise!” he roared suddenly. “I’ll give you promise, you son of a bitch. You cant talk about the woman I love like that!”
He stepped in happily, putting all of his weight behind it joyously, and hit Stark sitting with folded arms in the camp chair as hard as he could hit him.
The folded arms flailed out sideways as the chair went over backward, shooting Stark out onto the back of his neck on the ground between the meatblock and the utensil chest, already scrambling and kicking to get back up, almost before he hit the ground. He bounced back up like a rubber ball, hoisting himself with his hands on the meatblock and the chest and trying to disentangle his feet from the canvas of the chair, his mouth open roaring inarticulately.
He wrenched the cleaver out of the meatblock and advanced on Warden like a slow thunder storm, his mouth hanging wide open bellowing. Furious, senseless, outraged, his roars filled the tent like gas fills an airtight balloon.
Warden stepped back happily and threw the bottle still hanging from his left hand. Stark ducked without even batting his bulging eyes or closing his mouth, and came on. The bottle crashed and exploded into fragments against the side of the meatblock.
Warden skipped out through the flap and hit running, hearing the cleaver hit the tent wall behind him and tear through it with a sound like a zipper being yanked open. He ran on down the path, a full dead run in the darkness, until he hit a tree branch the height of his forehead and felt his legs go right on running out from under him. Then he was flat on his back on the ground, trying to pull air into the empty paralyzed lungs. He could hear Stark bellowing and cursing and fumbling on the dark ground for his cleaver.
Warden crawled, like a rifleman working in under fire, back in under the bushes behind him off the path. Now you’ve done it, he told himself as soon as he could breathe again, now you’ve cooked it, the only man in the fucking outfit who would even make a cook let alone a good mess sergeant. But he could not stop himself from laughing. He had looked so stupidly surprised, standing there, with the cleaver in his hand and bellowing like a castrated bull.
He lay in the bushes, trying to stifle his laughing, listening to Stark wandering vaguely up and down the paths looking for him, bellowing and cursing and smashing at the branches of trees with his cleaver. He sounded like Old Pete with his teeth out.
“No godam good,” Stark bellowed to the darkness. “Worshn fuggin whoor. Shno fuggin good. Ruinm whole fuggin life. L show im. No godam good for nothin no more. Whersh ee at? Cant even get a hard on thout bein drung. Whert ee go? L kill im. L show im. Sombishes. Whersh ee?”
Warden listened to it fade away, silently shaking with the bottled laughter. What would the drunken bastard do if he had told him the truth? how it was Holmes in the first place who had given her the dose? Probly take his cleaver and go ramming over to the CP hunting for the Company Commander. Warden lay still and waited, shaking silently and uncontrollably with laughter, and trying to fight off the clouds of mosquitoes that were like packs of baying bloodhounds trying to get at his throat. In the Roman Army they required each dogface to perform his drill bearing a burden twice as heavy as in actual combat. They conquered the world. We ought to win at least that much.
Pretty soon Stark came back to the tent. But he had figured that. He could hear the tinkling of glass fragments as the mess sergeant cleaned up the mess, then the bang and rattle as the still cursing Stark threw it all meticulously into the GI trash can and came back out and started to look for him again, this time cunningly quiet.
From up on the top of the embankment he could hear them still beating on the guitars ringingly. They were playing blues, old ones one right after another. Saint Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Truckdriver’s, Sharecropper’s, Hodcarrier’s, 219, Route 66, L & N, Thousandmile, Friday Clark carrying the rhythm base and singing, Anderson roving and ranging up and down and around behind him like a tethered falcon.
The dam fools, he giggled fighting the mosquitoes, sit up there and let themselves be eaten up by mosquitoes when they could be in bed asleep. He started to laugh again. Stark was still crashing around in the undergrowth.
No son of a bitching Texas gut robber was going to tell Milton Anthony Warden what woman he could go out with and what one he couldnt. If he wanted to go out with Karen Holmes, he was by Christ going to go out with her.
He lay happily, laughing, listening to Stark crashing and cursing, and hearing the beating guitars.
Chapter 32
“LISTEN TO THIS ONE,” Andy said.
“Hit it,” Friday said, palming his strings dead.
They all stopped talking and casually, in this attentive silence that it was his right as an accomplished craftsman to demand, Andy ran through a chord progression in diminished minors that was the latest addition to the series he had been making up all evening.
It rose out of the box like a delicately intricate filigree, then ended falling off on a diminished ninth that seemed to hang, leaving the whole thing suspended weirdly melancholy, a single unit fading off into the upper air like a rising hydrogen balloon.
From under it, Andy stared at them indifferently, very boredly wooden-faced, sitting on his legs tucked under him in that way he had when he was playing. In the silence he ran through it again.
“Hey, man!” Friday said worshipfully, like the student manager talking to the football captain. “Where’d you drag that one up from?”
“Ahh,” Andy said lazily. He pulled his mouth down. “Just stumbled onto it.”
“Play it again,” Prew said.
Andy played it again, the same way, looking at them bright-eyed but boredly wooden-faced, the same way. And they stopped talking again, as they had learned to always stop whatever they were doing and listen when Andy had been fiddling around and stumbled onto something, listening to this one now fading off the same way as before, seemingly still up in the air unfinished, so that they wanted to say Is that all? yet knowing that was all because this was more finished and complete and said all there was to say, than if it had been ended. He had been doing it all evening, cutting out to experiment and fiddle with something he had stumbled on to, then calling a halt while he played it to them if it satisfied him, or else if he was not satisfied cutting back in and picking it up from Friday, until now finally he had come up with this that was better than any of the others, which were all good, but could still not touch this now with its haunting tragedy that was so obviously tragedy that it became the mocking ironic more heartbreaking travesty of its own heartbreak, so that now he could relax a little on his triumph.
“Who’s got a cigaret?” Andy said boredly, laying the guitar aside. Friday made haste to hand the great man one.
“Man,” Slade, the Air Corps boy, said. “Man, thats reet. You talk about blues, man, thats really blues.”
Andy shrugged. “Gimme a drink.” Prew handed him the bottle.
“Thats blues,” Friday said. “You cant beat blues.”
“Thats right,” Prew said. “We got an idea for our own blues,” he told Slade. “An Army blues called The Re-enlistment Blues. Theres Truckdriver’s Blues, Sharecropper’s Blues, Bricklayer’s Blues. We’ll make ours a soljer’s blues.”
“Hey,” Slade said excitedly. “That sounds fine. Thats a swell idea. You ought to call it Infantry Blues. Christ, I envy you guys.”
“Well, we aint done it yet,” Prew said.
“But we’re going to,” Friday said.
“Hey, listen,” Slade said eagerly. “Why dont you use what Andy just played for your blues? Thats what you ought to do. That would make a great theme for a blues.”
“I dont know,” Prew said. “We aint quite worked it all out yet.”
“No, but listen,” Slade said enthusiastically. “Could you do that?” he asked Andy eagerly. “You could make a blues out of that, couldnt you?”
“Oh, I reckon,” Andy said. “I reckon I could do it.”
“Here,” Slade said excitedly, “have a drink.” He handed him the bottle. “Make a blues out of it. Finish it up. Repeat the first line with a little variation and then bring it all down to a third line major ending. You know, regular twelve bar blues.”
“Okay,” Andy yawned. He wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand and handed the bottle back and picked up the guitar and went back into the private sealed communion with the strings.
They listened while he fiddled with it. Then he played it for them. It was the same mock-haunting minors, only this time set into the twelve bar blues framework.
“You mean like that?” Andy said modestly. He laid the box down again.
“Thats it,” Slade said excitedly. “Thats a terrific blues. I bet I got five hundred records back home, and over half of them are blues. But there aint a blues I ever heard could touch that blues. And that includes Saint Louis.”
“Oh, now,” Andy said demurely. “It aint that good.”
“No, I mean it,” Slade said. “Hell, man, I’m a blues collector.”
“You are?” Andy said. “Say, listen,” he said, forgetting to be bored, “have you ever heard of a guy named Dajango? Dajango Something.”
“Sure,” Slade said expansively. “Django Reinhardt. The French guitarman. You pronounce it Jango. The D is silent. He’s the best.”
“There!” Andy said to Prew. “You see? You thought I was lyin. You thought I was makin it up.” He turned back to Slade excitedly. “You got any of this Django’s records?”
“No,” Slade said. “They’re hard to get. All made in France. And very expensive. I’ve heard a lot of them though. Well what do you know,” he said. “So you know old Django?”
“Not personally,” Andy said. “I know his music. Theres nothing like it in the world.” He turned to Prew. “Thought I was kiddin you, dint you?” he said accusingly. “Thought I was ony makin it all up. What do you think now?”
Prew had another drink and shrugged defeat. Andy did not even see it. He had already turned back to Slade and launched into his story.
Andy only had one story. It was as if it was the only thing in his whole life that had ever happened to him, the only experience that had impressed him strongly enough to provide a story. Prew and Friday had both heard it a thousand times but they listened now as intently as Slade while Andy told it, because it was a good story and they never got tired of hearing it.
It was a story of Frisco and low hanging drifts of fog, the kind of fog a Middle-Westerner or Southerner half expected a Chinese hatchet man to step out of in front of you as you walked up and down the steep rain-water-running rough-brick-cobbled streets. It was a story of Angel Island, big sister of Alcatraz, the Casual Station in Frisco Bay where you waited for the transport that would ship you over.
Andy’s story brought Angel Island back to all of them: The President Pierce, the little launch that would take you over and deposit you at the foot of Market Street to go on pass; it brought back the Rock with the East Garrison of concrete barracks built in tiers up from the dock, and West Garrison of tar paper and wood where they put the Casuals and that you took the road that wound up through the officers’ quarters and then ran fairly level off across the flanks of the hills to get to, the West Garrison, a two mile walk you had to make three times a day for chow, two miles over and two miles back, getting up chilled by the fog at dawn and hungry for coffee with that two mile walk ahead of you before you could eat; it brought back the high steep hills that you were free to climb up through the sparse trees to the timber line of light second- and third-growth woods at the top because the Casual had no duty beyond policing up in the morning and an occasional KP, the Casual was only waiting on a boat and the permanent-party-men at Angel were superior and contemptuous and worked them like niggers on KP, and from the light timber you could look down across to the gray man-factory the steep-walled soul-assembly-line and shudderingly at the callous grayness decide you werent so bad off after all, here where you would walk the gravel road clear around the Island every day, past the Immigration Quarantine Station on the other side where they had the six Germans who had given up off of an injured merchant vessel interned and you could talk to them and give them cigarets and they seemed human just like you but you never knew how they would have been if the situation was reversed.
It was a story of Telegraph Hill, Andy’s story. Or was it Knob Hill, in Andy’s one and only story. It was a story of steep-streeted Chinatown and the Chinese tonks and tourist nightclubs, and of a green recruit from the Mississippi Valley who looked in awe and wonder. It was a story of the fabulous Eddie Lang, and of the mythical Django the Frenchman the “Greatest Guitarman In The World” whose last name, something German, Andy could never remember.
A rich queer had picked Andy up in one of the Chinese nightclubs, a slightly effeminate, very sad, quite rich queer. And learning that Andy was a guitarman, had taken him up to the very expensive and exclusive apartment house that he derided, but still lived in, to hear the “Greatest Guitarman In The World.” It was a lovely bachelor apartment, so lovely Andy had felt transported to some unreal other earth, because surely Andy had never seen an earth like this earth before, a place so rich and beautiful and harmonious and clean. It even had a den, and the den even had a bar, and the bar even had pyramids of glasses under colored lights, and the dark wood panelled walls lined from floor to ceiling with books and record albums. Oh, he remembered all of it, every last detail.
But when it came to describing for them who had never heard it the poignant fleeting exquisitely delicate melody of that guitar, memory always faltered. The
re was no way to describe them that. You had to hear that, the steady, swinging, never wavering beat with the two- or three-chord haunting minor riffs at the ends of phrases, each containing the whole feel and pattern of the joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth (and of that other earth). And always over it all the one picked single string of the melody following infallibly the beat, weaving in and out around it with the hard-driven swiftly-run arpeggios, always moving, never hesitating, never getting lost and having to pause to get back on, shifting suddenly from the set light-accent of the melancholy jazz beat to the sharp erratic-explosive gypsy rhythm that cried over life while laughing at it, too fast for the ear to follow, too original for the mind to anticipate, too intricate for the memory to remember. Andy was not a jazzman, but Andy knew guitars. The American Eddie Lang was good, but Django the Frenchman was untouchable, like God.
They were all foreign recordings, those of this Django, all made in France or Switzerland. Andy had never heard of him before, and never heard of him again, until Slade. He tried, but the record clerks had never heard of Django, they did not handle foreign recordings, and Andy could not tell them his last name. Just that one night remained, a half-dream half remembered, that he was not even sure any more was real. He had told and retold it so often, elaborating this or that, that he no longer knew where memory stopped and imagination started. He was glad to prove by Slade that it really had existed.
The queer said he was a real gypsy, a French gypsy, and he only had three fingers on his left hand, his string hand. Incredible. They had sat almost all night, Andy and the queer, playing them and replaying them, and the queer expanded and began to talk, how he had seen him once in the flesh in a Paris bistro, how Django had quit without giving notice, leaving a thousand francs a week to go off with a third-rate gypsy band that was touring in the South, the Meedee, he called it. The queer thought that was wonderful. The queer did not offer to proposition Andy. Either he forgot all about it in the excitement of the music, or else he wanted to keep his real love and his business separate. It was as if this queer only propositioned men who were too dull and insensitive to appreciate guitar, so he could degrade them for their lack, and himself for associating with them. He had driven Andy down through the fog to the dock to catch the last launch, and in the fog Andy could not even remember where he had been. He tried to find the house again, once later on, when he found he could not buy the records anyplace. But he never could find it. He could not even recognize the street. He was not even sure which hill it was. It was as if street and house had vanished from the earth, and he was pursuing the fading ghost of a long dead dream. He shipped out without ever seeing the man again.
