“Let’s be clear about one thing,” he said, looking down from the barracks steps into our upraised, motley, melting-pot faces. “I hate niggers. They’re black bastards to me, but I’ll just call them niggers for short around here, during duty hours.” (A Negro standing next to me winced as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.) “If anybody don’t like it, let him go and see the I.G. I also hate Jews, wops, spics, micks, cotton pickers, Georgia crackers, Catholics, and Protestants. I hate all of you, damn your eyes.”
I believe he meant it.
At this point, according to the conventions of the Tale of the Bad Sergeant, written or told, the story usually takes a turn, a peripeteia of a modest sort. You’re supposed to be given a hint of his problems before moving on. So let’s do it. I have no objection. But I reserve the right to call it giving the devil his due.
We were a crazy mixed-up bunch. Farm boys, black and white, from the Deep South. Street boys from the jungle of the big cities. College boys. Accidents: a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who got drafted by mistake, a cripple who was used for some weeks to fire up the boilers and keep the boiler room clean before his medical discharge finally came through. Two fat sullen American Indians … Mexican wetbacks … I remember one of these had a fine handlebar mustache. Quince walked up to him and plucked it. “Only two kinds of people can wear a mustache around here and get away with it,” he said, “movie stars and cocksuckers. And I don’t recall seeing your ugly face in any picture show. Shave it off, Pedro!”
So there we were. I’ll give Quince this much credit. He wasn’t the least bit interested in “molding us into a fighting team.” His reach didn’t exceed his grasp that much. He was merely involved in getting us through a cycle of Basic Training. We hated each other, fought each other singly and in groups in the barracks and in the privacy of the boiler rooms (with that poor cripple who was responsible for the care and maintenance thereof cowering in a corner behind the boiler, but armed with a poker lest he too became involved). We stole from each other, ratted on each other, goofed off on each other (“soldiering on the job” this is sometimes called in Real Life with good reason), and thus made every bit of work about twice as hard and twice as long as it had to be. And, if anything, this situation pleased Quince. He perched on his mobile Olympus and chewed briars while we played root-hog and grab-ass in the dust and mud below.
Strict? My Lord yes. I would say so. No passes at all during the whole cycle. GI Parties every night until our fatigues fell to shreds from splashed Clorox and the rough wood floors were as smooth and white as a stone by the shore. Polished the nailheads nightly too with matchsticks wrapped in cotton, dipped in Brasso. Long night hikes with full field pack. GI haircuts (marched to the so-called barber) once a week. Bald as convicts we were. Police Call was always an agony of duck waddling “assholes and elbows” on our hands and knees like penitents. How he loved Police Call! How he loved Mail Call! Gave out all the letters himself. That is, threw them into the packed hopeful faces and let us fight and scramble for them in the dark. Opened mail and packages when he pleased. Withheld mail for days at a time as a whim. Didn’t make soldiers out of us, but tractable brutes. Brutalized, cowed, we marched to and fro like the zombies in mental hospitals that they haven’t got time to bother with, so they pump them full of tranquilizers. And when we passed by, eyes front, in perfect step, he was complimented by any high-ranking officers that witnessed our coming and going.
Let me say this for Quince. I know another Sergeant who tried exactly the same thing and failed. He was of the same mold as Quince, but somehow subtly defective. In the end he had to fall his troops out of the barracks with a drawn .45. Not Quince. His lips touched to the brass whistle, even before he breathed into it, was quite enough to make us shiver.
A sadist too. Individually. Poor white, soft, round, hairy Sachs suffered indignities he couldn’t have dreamed of in his worst nightmares. Once or twice was nearly drowned in a dirty toilet bowl. Sachs with the other fat and soft boys, “Quince’s Fat Man’s Squad,” had regularly to participate in “weenie races.” What’s a weenie race? I think Quince invented it. The fat boys kneel down at the starting line, pants and drawers down. Quince produces a package of frankfurters, wrapped in cellophane. One each frankfurter is firmly inserted into each rectum. All in place? Everybody ready? Quince blows the whistle and away they crawl, sometimes a hundred yards going and coming. Last man back has to eat all the frankfurters on the spot. Tears and pleading move Quince not a whit. Nor puking nor anything else.
One time Quince lost his head about one barracks which had someway failed to live up to his expectations. He and his attendant cadre went raging through that barracks, tearing up beds, knocking over wall lockers, and destroying everything “personal” they could get their hands on: cameras, portable radios, fountain pens, books, letters, photographs, etc.
How did these various things happen? You’re bound to ask. Didn’t anybody go to the Inspector General, the Chaplain, write a Congressman or Mother? Not to my knowledge. Anyone could have, it’s true, but all were very young and in mortal fear of the man. Who would be the first to go? No one went. And—mirabilis—nobody cracked up. If anything we got tougher and tougher every day. Gave our souls to God.
Or maybe—entirely justified in your contempt, “Don’t give me no sad tales of woe”—you’ll just say, “So what—what do you want me to do, punch your TS Card?” That would be to misunderstand. Agreed that in a century like ours these things are small doings, negligible discomforts. It would be sheer sentimentality to claim otherwise. And I’m not cockeyed enough to think that such events could arouse Pity and Terror. Nothing of Great Men Falling from High Place in our time. A battle royal in the anthill maybe. No, the simple facts, arranged and related, my hand of cards, will never do that. But they are nevertheless not insignificant. “Why?” you say. “Why bother?” Excuse me, but Maxim Gorky said it once and better than I can, and so I quote:
Why do I relate these abominations? So that you may know, kind sirs, that all is not past and done with! You have a liking for grim fantasies; you are delighted by horrible stories well told; the grotesquely terrible excites you pleasantly. But I know of genuine horrors, and I have the undeniable right to excite you unpleasantly by telling you about them, in order that you may remember how we live, and under what circumstances. A low and unclean life it is, ours, and that is the truth.
I am a lover of humanity and I have no desire to make any one miserable, but one must not be sentimental, nor hide the grim truth with the motley words of beautiful lies. Let us face life as it is! All that is good and human in our hearts needs renewing.
Thus we survived, endured, lived through it, and finally the cycle came to an end, a screeching halt. Last day on the Range (rocket launchers) we fired $25,000 worth of ammunition into the side of a hill as fast as we could, so that the Range Officer could get back to camp early. If he didn’t use the ammo all up, he’d be issued proportionately less for the following day. We were glad to assist him in his dilemma. We fired it away with joy and abandon. What explosions! What flashes of flame and clouds of smoke! It’s a wonder we didn’t kill each other.
That night we sat in the barracks packing our duffel bags. A fine cold rain was falling outside. And we were quiet inside, lonesome survivors, because somehow you never quite imagined something like that coming to an end. It was a calm, respectable, barracks-room scene. You could have photographed it and mailed the picture home to the family.
Up the steps, weary-footed, his cap soaking wet and his raincoat beaded with raindrops and dripping, came the old First Sergeant—Cobb. He asked us to gather around, and he talked to us quietly. There had been a personal tragedy in the family of Sergeant Quince. (That bastard had a family?) His wife had been in a terrible automobile accident and was dying. (A wife yet?) He wanted to go home before she died. He had to arrange for somebody to look after the children. (Children?) The trouble was that this time of the month Sergeant Quince didn’t have the
money, even for train fare one way. He was broke.
“Why don’t he go to the Red Cross?” somebody said.
Sergeant Cobb shrugged. “He ain’t got time, I guess,” he said. “I know he ain’t a kindhearted man, boys. And you don’t have to do this. It’s strictly voluntary. But give a little something. He’s human and he needs your help. Give from your heart.”
He took a helmet liner off of the top of somebody’s wall locker and held it in his hand like a collection plate in church. Somebody hawked and spat on the floor. I didn’t think anybody would give anything. We just stood there and stared at Sergeant Cobb until Sachs pushed through to the front.
“Here’s my contribution,” he said. And he dropped a dime into the helmet liner.
Everybody started to laugh, and even the thick-headed ones caught on. Each of us put a dime in the pot. Ten cents for Sergeant Quince in his hour of need. Sergeant Cobb emptied the liner, put the dimes in his raincoat pocket, placed the liner back on top of the wall locker, and started to leave. At the front door he turned around, shook his head, and giggled.
“Don’t that beat all?” he said. “They done exactly the same thing in the other barracks too.”
Half an hour later we had the exquisite pleasure of looking out of the windows and seeing Sergeant Quince in his Class-A uniform with his double row of World War II ribbons stand in the rain in the middle of the battery area and get soaking wet. He cussed and cussed us and threw those dimes high, wide, and handsome and away. He wished us all damnation, death, and hell.
And this is where it ought to end. It would be a swell place to end, with the picture of Quince furioso throwing fountains of dimes in the air. Enraged and possessed and frustrated. Yes, Quince in insane rage, hurling our proffered dimes in the air, wild and black-faced with frustration and tribulation, would be a fine fade-out in the best modern manner. But not so. Not so soon did he fade out of my life. Nor, I guess, did I expect him to.
Sachs and I went on to Leadership School. What happened to the rest of them I wouldn’t know and couldn’t care less. But Sachs and myself took our duffel bags and waited in front of the Orderly Room. The harelipped Captain came out and painfully wished us well. We climbed over the tailgate of a deuce and a half and rode to the other side of camp where they try to make you into an NCO in three months flat or else turn you into jelly.
“Why are you going?” Sachs asked me. As if I understood at the outset why he was doing it. I had hardly even spoken to Sachs before that.
“Because that sonofabitch Quince is trash,” I said. “I don’t like to be pushed around by trash.”
Sachs grinned. “You Southerners,” he said. “You Southerners and all your pride and all your internal squabbles!”
I won’t bore you with the sordid details of that next place except to say that they made us and we made it. It worked. Sachs shed thirty pounds, went at every bit of it with fury and determination and emerged as the top man in the class. Believe it or not. Many a husky specimen fell among the thorns and withered out of school, but Sachs thrived, grew, bloomed. I was in the top ten myself, and both of us made Sergeant out of it. We soldiered night and day like madmen. We learned all the tricks of the trade. When we were finished we were sharp. Bandbox soldiers. The metamorphosis was complete. Still, it’s only fair to point out that we kept laughing about it. Sachs called it being in disguise and referred to his uniform as a costume. He called us both “the masqueraders.” I called myself “the invisible white man.”
One anecdote only of that time I’ll insert. The Anecdote of the Word. It helps to explain the kind of game we were playing. One week early in the course I was doing badly and it looked like maybe I would wash out. I’d get good marks and only a few gigs one day, poor marks and many the next. The TAC/NCO wrote on my weekly report that he thought I was “a good man,” but that I had been “vacillating.” He was a college boy himself and used that word. Well, shortly thereafter the Company Commander called us both into his inner sanctum. We got shaped up in a big hurry and reported. His office was a room as bare as a monk’s cell except for one huge sign on the wall that read “THIS TOO SHALL PASS.” He, the Captain, was a huge hulk of a man, a former All-American tackle from some place or other, a bull neck, a bulging chest behind the desk, and all jaw, lantern and/or granite with the Mussolini thrust to it. He was dead serious. We were quivering arrows at attention in front of him.
“I have this here report before me,” he said. “You say here that this soldier has been vacillating. What do you mean?”
The TAC gulped and patiently tried to explain what he had meant by means of the image of the pendulum of a grandfather’s clock swinging back and forth. The Captain heard him out, nodded.
“Clerk!” he roared.
The Company Clerk came tearing into the room like somebody trying to steal second. Saluted. Quivered too!
“Get me a dictionary.”
We waited in breathless anticipation. The clerk soon returned with the dictionary. Captain opened it to the v’s and followed his index finger, thick and blunt-ended as a chisel, down the line of words. Looked at the word a while and the definition. It was a pocket dictionary and defined as follows:
VAC-IL-LATE, v.i., -LATED, -LATING. 1. Waver, stagger 2. fluctuate 3. be irresolute or hesitant.
“Nothing about pendulums,” he noted. “Damn good word, though. Good word.”
He wrote it down on a pad in capitals and underlined it several times. That was that. We were dismissed.
Now from within that Orderly Room issued forth each week reams of mimeographed material for the benefit of all students. Ever after that incident the Captain cautioned that those who wished to complete the course successfully must not vacillate! This got to be a standing joke in that mirthless place.
“If I catch any of you guys vacillating in the company area,” the TAC used to tell us, “you’ve had it.”
Sachs and I made it through, were transformed from anarchists to impeccable sergeanthood. We didn’t end up going to Korea to be shot at either, but instead were sent to Europe to join a very sharp outfit where we would be able to maintain the high standards we had so recently acquired. Which we did for the rest of our service time. Sachs was so good he even made Sergeant First Class without time in grade.
More than a year later we were in Germany for maneuvers. It was the middle of summer and we were living in tents. In the evenings we used to go to a huge circus tent of a beer hall and get drunk. It was there on one hot night that we met Quince again. He was sitting all alone at a table with a big crowd of empty 3.2 beer cans around him. He was a Corporal now, two stripes down, and by the patch on his shoulder we knew he was in a mucked-up outfit, a whole division of stumblebums with a well-known cretin commanding. He looked it too. His uniform was dirty. His shirt was open all the way down the front, revealing a filthy, sweat-soaked T-shirt. Of course it’s hard to look sharp if you’re living in the field in the middle of the summer. But Sachs and I took pride in our ability to look as sharp in the field as in garrison. It took some doing, but we could do it.
“Let’s buy the bastard a beer,” Sachs said.
Quince seemed glad to see us as if we were dear, old, long-lost friends. Once we had introduced ourselves, that is. He didn’t recognize us at first. He marveled at our transformation and good luck. We couldn’t help marveling at his transformation too. (“This is the worst outfit I was ever with,” he admitted. “The Battery Commander has got it in for me.”) He bought us a round and we bought more.
Late, just before they shut the place down and threw everybody out, Quince went maudlin on us.
“I can’t explain it, but it makes me feel bad to see you guys like this,” he said. “I hated you guys, I’ll admit that. Long before the dimes. But I didn’t know you hated me so much.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“To hunt me down after all this time and shame me. Soldiering is my life. It’s just a couple of years for you guys. And here you are
with all this rank looking like old soldiers. Sergeants! Goddamn, it isn’t fair.”
“Do you know what the Army is, Quince?”
“What? What’s that?”
“I’ll tell you what the Army is to me,” Sachs said. “It’s just a game, a stupid, brutal, pointless, simple-minded game. And you know what, Corporal Quince? I beat that game. I won. I’m a better soldier now than you ever were or ever will be and it doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
Quince turned his head away from us.
“You hadn’t ought to have said that,” he said. “You can’t take everything away from a guy. You got to leave a guy something.”
We left him to cry in his beer until they tossed him out, and walked back under the stars to our tents, singing the whole way. We sat in our sleeping bags and had a smoke before we flaked out.
“You were great,” I told Sachs. “That was worth waiting for.”
But Sachs was a moody kind of a guy. He didn’t see it that way.
“You can’t beat them down,” he said. “No matter what you do. They always win out in the end. Sure I got in my licks. But he won anyway. He made me do it. So in the end he still beat me.”
“You worry too much.”
“That’s just the way I am,” he said bitterly.
“You don’t feel sorry for him, do you?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “You don’t get it. The trouble is I still hate him. I hate him worse than ever.”
And he stubbed out his cigarette and turned over and went to sleep without another word, leaving me to ponder on that for a while.
FARMER IN THE DELL
ELMER ADELOT is the Junior High School science teacher. He’s skinny as a fence post, nearsighted, and wears glasses as thick as the bottom of a fruit jar, and he has not much more on top of his head than a patch of prematurely gray hair that looks like the head of an old worn-out wet mop left out to dry and bleach in the sun. Not that he’s bad-looking after you get used to him. It’s just that by no standard whatsoever could he be called a good-looking man.
Evening Performance Page 22
