The beginning was more or less accidental. An old dressmaker’s dummy was in the barn from the days when first his wife and then his daughter, now another man’s wife and the mother of her own children, sewed for a living. It was an easy thing to dress the dummy in his old-fashioned Army uniform, to place it on a stump at the edge of the road, to rig the right arm something like his own artificial leg so that, sitting on his rocker on the porch, he could at just the right time jerk a cord attached to the dummy’s arm. And then up went that stiff right arm to wave in clumsy benediction, bringing in reply almost invariably laughter from the passers-by. Rain or shine, night and day, the wooden soldier sat on the stump and during most of the daylight hours Peter Joshman sat in his rocking chair, alert, attentive.
S. Jay, believe it or not, was tickled.
“What the hell!” he said. “The old man always was a little crazy. At least it keeps him out of trouble.”
The children, never surfeited, wanted more of the same. And that was something to do with his evenings, to fashion a whole family to go with the wooden soldier, a plump wife and a child, a Negro servant in a white coat, to seat some, stand the others. What a spectacle when they all waved to you at once as you were passing by! By the end of a year since the road had been opened, this curious gallery was something to look forward to, a landmark almost, almost a work of art.
There were three of them, machines, motorcycles, three drivers, keen- and hard- and brown-faced as hawks, cut like figures from old coins, trim in tight Levi’s and glossy leather jackets that caught like sails at the breeze of their speed, and behind them the three girls, each plump-thighed, straddling the lean, agile machines, each, hair blowing like the hair of mermaids in the waves, clinging to the wide-belted waists of the drivers. The road sang beneath them. The landscape fled, glazed, past the wind-whipped corners of their eyes. The sun dazzled off the asphalt in fragments like breaking glass. And the highway was theirs; they owned it, weaving among the placid and safe cars, slashing around and about them as, say, the trout, fine as a blade, moves among the drowned shadows of swans. The road sang for them, tormented, and the conventional landscape shivered and hurtled backwards, unnoticed.
Rounding a curve, the Leader came on a long straight piece of road. It stretched toward the horizon and vanished there, empty, glistening, a holy invitation and a challenge, and, hearing his companions coming behind him, he leaned forward, crouched, and opened up with a great soaring lunge of speed. He grinned, hearing his girl squeal, hearing his friends’ and rivals’ engines take on the same defiant tone, accepting his dare. Nothing on either side to contend with, only the green, shocked slash pines and ahead the regular pale fields of truck farms, a few shacks, and perhaps what was a few people bunched at one place like clod-footed dummies by the roadside. Give them something to remember, something to talk about, he was thinking, edging close to that side of the road so that he’d shower them with the noise and the dust of his passage. Let them have something to dream about. The Leader grinned to himself.
Peter Joshman was dozing. The road had been empty for quite a while. It was late in the day, not late enough for people to start returning from the beaches, but too late for ordinary tourists to be going there. Peter dozed and listened to the bees in the garden, heard a humming in his half-dream—louder and more profound now than the bees, and much nearer—blinked, looked slowly, and then saw the three machines in the very instant of their passing, almost too late to wave. And with a start he jerked his rigging of cords and all the wooden arms popped up at once waving wildly. Startled, the three seemed to explode, shot away from each other, skidded, reeled, whizzed, tilted on the edge of the drainage ditches on either side, amid the clear soprano of girls’ screaming, somehow righted themselves unscathed, and resumed their proper course a half mile or so down the road, though he could see, laughing to himself, they were moving much slower now, abreast, in solemn formation going away.
When they reached the gas station at the crossroads called Evergreen, they stopped, pulled up under the shade of the roof, and dismounted. The three girls fled, rubber-jointed as drunks, to the door marked Ladies. The Leader leaned back, breathless, against a gas pump and spat into a rainbow smear of oil and grease by his feet.
“Jesus Christ! Did you see what I did?”
“A bunch of loonies!”
“What were they trying to do, kill us?”
“Christ!” the Leader again, recovered, composed. “I thought we was all gone. Liquidated, you know, dead.”
They laughed together. Then they asked Smalley, who owned the station, what it was they had seen, and he told them about Peter Joshman and his wooden dummies.
“What is it with him?”
“What’s he trying to prove?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Smalley said. “He sure gets a kick out of it.”
“The son of a bitch liked to have killed all of us.”
“This must be the first time you boys ever come down this road.”
“Yeah, but we’ll know all about it coming back.”
There came at twilight a summer cloudburst. For more than an hour Peter Joshman had been watching the dark clouds massing, swelling. Just as the sun went down and the whole flat countryside seemed to glow with an inner light, the rain began to fall in rich thick drops, soon pelting the dusty yard, rattling on the roof, shining on the slick road. He watched half-sadly, his forlorn wooden figures, unable to come in out of the rain, standing, sitting, their weathered clothing steaming. Something would have to be done about them. Then he heard S. Jay come into the house by the back door, heavy-footed, stamping his feet, breathing hard from running across the field in the rain, and Peter stood up, stretched, and limped inside for his supper.
“Old-timer,” S. Jay said, his wide young white-toothed mouth full of food, “how was your road today?”
“Is it Granddaddy’s road?” one of the children asked.
“No, honey,” his daughter answered for him. “The road belongs to the state.”
“Be nice if it was your road,” S. Jay said. “You could put up a tollgate out there. If you charged everybody who went by a dime, you’d be a rich man in no time. Then we could all sit on the front stoop and watch.”
“Let’s charge everybody ten cents, Granddaddy.”
“You could at least charge them to look at your dummies,” S. Jay said. “Maybe just ten cents a wave would be a good price.”
“You-all hush picking on Daddy,” his daughter said. “He loves those dummies.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” S. Jay said. “It’s nice to know he cares about something.”
After the rain stopped it was cooler and Peter sat again on the porch, in the first dark, the first stars, watching the cars coming back. Sometimes if they happened to drive close to the shoulder of the road, their headlights suddenly picked up the group of wooden figures, bathed them in expensive light, and he in reply gave his cords a pull and blessed those night riders with a lackadaisical wave.
The three, his enemies now, though he had no way to know it, were already on the road, returning. It hadn’t been the day it might have been for them. Once they had arrived at the beach, they headed south, leaving the resort town with its motels and neon gardens, its drugstores and bars and camera shops behind them, the rows of cottages along the dunes, troubling the dust of a narrow road which ran along just behind the dunes, past even the forlorn and separate nigger beach and far on to a place where at last even the road ended, came to a circle centered on a huge clump of palmetto, the road ending abruptly at a clump of green growth, higher than any dune. Said to be an old Indian burial mound. They parked their motorcycles out of sight and climbed over the dunes to the beach.
“What did we come down here for?” one of the girls asked. Just like a girl.
“We’re going swimming, ain’t we?” the Leader said.
“I thought …” the girl answered. “But I didn’t bring my bathing suit. I thought you said we could r
ent one.”
“You know something,” he said. “Neither did I.”
The others laughed, but laughter did not work at all. With one of the girls reluctant, unpersuadable, the other two were forced by some immemorial tribal custom to side with her, to come to her defense, and in the end the three girls sat on the dunes and smoked and chatted with each other while the three young men frolicked, halfhearted, in lean tan naked exhibition amid the crisp surf. There was no hope for them and, after a while, the men, feeling foolish now, dressed and started back, grim, frustrated.
When they reached the resort town again, they met at a red light.
“That sonofabitch!” the Leader said.
“Who?”
“That bastard with the dummies by the road.”
So with a mounting rage against the injustice of this afternoon, the three drivers, hating the hands now that clung to their belts, hating the rich, unseen knowledge of blown hair behind them, drove back the way they had come. It had been raining and the highway was slick and thrilling. They frightened their rivals in fat cars, forced them to clear the way.
Peter Joshman must have heard them coming. It was a solemn unison of buzzing sound that preceded the grim trinity of avengers as they came, slowing down as they passed through Evergreen, looking for their victims, three lights as bright and single as the Cyclops’ furious eye, in formation as if passing in review. He must have heard them before he saw them and may have guessed then, for the first time, what was going to happen. Anyway, he didn’t move. What could he do? From aimless, really impersonal malice like that of the trench mortar that shredded and took away his leg, there was no moving, only a waiting to suffer or, by sheer luck, to be saved. He may even have closed his eyes and not seen them when they stopped and fell on the foolish wooden figures in the dark. Shouting, cursing as they stripped off clothing, they broke the wooden bodies to pieces, stamped heads into the dust.
S. Jay heard them, though, and came out of his bedroom in his undershorts roaring, across the porch in one long-legged leap, his shotgun bursting forth, both barrels at once, an orange choleric mushroom against the astounded night sky, hitting nothing, or nothing important (one of the girls squealed like a frightened pig, but maybe it was nothing more than the noise and the shock of bird shot in the air). He ran toward them then, as they clambered on the motorcycles, stamped furiously on starters, cursing them as they fled down the road, knelt to reload, kneeling among the shattered corpses of the figures and the debris, the stuffing, glass eyes and torn clothing, but he was too late. Still in a rage, S. Jay fired again high and pointlessly into the trees, and the leaves sighed. He came back to the house slowly, dragging his gun butt in the dust.
“Sonofabitches!” he said. “Old-timer, they wrecked all your dummies.”
“Maybe it’s just as well.”
“What do you mean, just as well?” S. Jay yelled at him. “It’s my land, ain’t it? I’ll kill the son of a bitches if they ever come back.”
“I say maybe it’s just as well,” Peter said. “It was a crazy idea in the first place. I let it get a hold to me and started to care too much. Nothing is worth caring that much about.”
“I can’t figure you out for the life of me,” S. Jay said. “Ain’t you going to try and fix them up again?”
“I don’t know,” Peter Joshman said. “I’ll sleep on it.”
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
WALLACE STEVENS
—“No Possum, No Sop, No Taters”
THE OLD ARMY GAME
EVERYBODY HAS GOT A STORY about the Bad Sergeant in Basic Training. Sit down some evening with your buddies, and you’ll find that’s one subject everybody can deal out like a hand of cards. And that’s not a bad image for it, because those stories, told or written or even finally mounted in memory, acquire a bright conventional two-dimensional character. All the people in them are face cards. Which seems to me as good a way as any to introduce Sergeant First Class Elwood Quince.
Lean and hard-faced, a face all angles like a one-eyed jack. Perfectly turned out, everything tailored skintight, glossy, spit-shined, and glowing. Field cap, almost white from washing and wear and care, two fingers over the nose. Casts a flat gray semicircular shadow that way. Calls attention to the mouth. The thin tight lips. Open, you’d expect to see even rows of fine white teeth; instead you’d see them yellow and no good and all awry and gaping like a worn-out picket fence. And when he did smile, it was all phony, like a jackass chewing briars. Back to the field cap. Calls attention to the mouth and hides the eyes in shadow like a mask. The eyes—with the cap off and resting on a desk and his large restless hands patting his straw-blond hair, long and rich on top, but sidewalled so that with cap or helmet on he looks as shaved clean as a chicken ready for the oven, the eyes are peculiarly light and cloudy at the same time, like a clear spring that somebody has stirred up the mud in the bottom of with a stick. Can you see him yet? But he’s standing still. Let’s breathe upon him and let him walk because Quince’s walk is important. He has two of them. The official walk when he’s marching troops, in formation, etc. The former is conventional, ramrod, but natural. Well-trained soldier. The latter is really quite special. Light-footed, easy, insinuative, cat- and womanlike. Creepy. He seemed like a ghost to us. You always look over your shoulder before you speak because chances are he’s right there behind you and everywhere at once.
Talk? Oh my, yes, he can talk. Arkansas mountain accent. Part Southern and part Western and a little bit nasal and whiny and hard on the r’s. Picturesque. Rural similies abound. Some extended to the epic proportion. For example, to Sachs, our fat boy from New York: “Sachs when I see you draggin’ your lardass around the battery area, you put me in mind of a old woreout sow in a hogpen with a measley little scrawny litter of piglets sniffin’ and chasin’ around behind her and that old sow is just so tired and fat and godamn lazy she can’t even roll over and let ’em suck.” Also frequently scatological. Here is a dialogue. Sergeant Quince and Me. In open ranks. Inspection. He right in front of Me. I’m looking straight into the shadow his cap casts.
QUINCE: Do you know how low you are, boy?
ME (Learning to play by ear): Pretty low, Sergeant.
QUINCE: Pretty low? No, I mean just how low?
ME: I don’t know, Sergeant.
QUINCE: Well, then, since you’re so ignorant, I’ll tell you. You’re lower than whale shit. And you know where that is, don’t you?
ME: Yes, Sergeant.
QUINCE: On the bottom of the ocean.
(Quince passes on to the next victim.)
The tone of voice? Always soft. Never raises his voice except in giving commands. Otherwise speaks just above a whisper. You often have to strain to hear him.
When we arrived at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas (the Army’s mansion pitched in the seat of excrement now that Camp Polk, Louisiana, and Camp Blanding, Florida, are closed up tight as a drum, left to hobos, rats, bugs, weeds, etc.) we were assigned to take Basic Training in Sergeant Quince’s outfit. I call it his outfit because the Battery Commander had some kind of a harelip and was as shy as a unicorn, stayed in his office all day. The First Sergeant had V-shaped wound stripes from the First World War, I swear, and didn’t care about anything but getting a morning report without any erasures and also the little flower garden he had all around the Orderly Room shack that he tended and watered with a cute watering can just like Little Bo Peep’s. Nevertheless Sergeant Cobb started out as at least a presence. Austere and lonely and unapproachable, but thought of and believed to be an ultimate tribunal where wrongs might be righted, a kind of tired old god we might turn to one day in despair of any justice or salvation from Quince, come to him as broken children, and he’d sigh and forgive us. Believed until there came a test one day. Sergeant Quince marched the whole battery, one hundred and sixty-odd men in four heavy-booted platoons, right across one side of Cobb’s garden. By the time the First P
latoon had passed by Cobb was out of the office, hatless, necktie askew and loose like a long tongue, eyes burning. (Ah ha! thought we of Sergeant Quince, the original “young man so spic and span,” something unpleasant will sure hit the fan now.) But it didn’t. Cobb stood there looking and then wilted. He watched his tended stalks and blossoms go down under the irresistible marching feet of Progress, Mutability, Change, and Decay. And he never said a word. He slumped and shook his fist, a helpless old man. Meanwhile Quince ignored him, counted a crisp cadence for the marching troops and grinned just like a jackass chewing briars. And our hearts sank like stones to see how the mighty had fallen.
So, though he was merely the Field First, it was Quince’s outfit to make or break. His little brotherhood of lesser cadre revolved like eager breathless planets around him. From our first formation, we in rumpled new ill-fitting fatigues and rough new boots, he sartorial with, glinting in the sun, the polished brass of the whistle he loved so well.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “You all are about to begin the life of a soldier. My name is Sergeant Quince. Your name is Shit.”
War going on in Korea, etc. We would learn how to soldier and how not to get our private parts shot off by gooks whether we liked it or not. We would “rue the day” (his actual words) we ever saw his face or this godforsaken battery area. We would learn to hate him. We wouldn’t have dreamed we were able to hate anybody as much as we were going to hate him. Etc., etc., etc.
Evening Performance Page 21
