“That’s fine for you,” she says. “But what am I supposed to do?”
“You got a problem there. Tell you what. You can wear stars. Three gold stars. You come as the Gold Star Girl of the Year.”
“What kind of girl do you think I am?”
“You really want to know?”
“I’m dying with curiosity.”
“You’re a goose girl, Rena,” I say. “What I mean is in olden days you probably would have been a goose girl. Nowadays, in modern times, you are a glass girl. A glass goose girl and I would like to goose you—”
“You’re a perfect riot,” she says. “But I’ve got to hang up, I’m dripping all over the floor.”
“Don’t do that. You can’t do that. This call is costing me good money. Give me a chance. Let me tell you all about money. Love is a cold kingdom and money is the key.”
“That doesn’t make sense. What is that bit from?”
“From nothing. It’s a poem, a one-line poem. I just this minute made it up.”
“Well, thanks a whole lot for calling, Longfellow—”
“Wait! Don’t hang up on me! Just one question. Do you have time to answer one vital question?”
“That depends,” she says.
“On what?”
“All right,” she says. “Go ahead and ask your question.”
“Tell the truth now. Be honest with me.”
“Ask the question.”
“Tell me the honest truth, Rena, has anybody ever tried to beat the Devil out of you?”
She hangs up on me. I look at all those coins on the floor and decide to leave them there. I am feeling a little sick, but I go back to the bar and have Hugo fix me another cup of cold poison.
“Something’s the matter with your phone, Hugo. It doesn’t work right.”
“Yeah?”
“No matter what I say—and everybody knows I always say the right thing—I keep getting all the wrong answers. Hugo, do you know what the real trouble with the world is? People can’t talk to people anymore. They don’t know how. And they won’t listen either. Not even on the phone. And you know what else? Here comes the best part. Listen, Hugo, the telephone was designed—by somebody like P. T. Barnum or Alexander Graham Belli—anyway the telephone was designed for the sole purpose of talking and listening.”
“Can you beat that?”
UNMAPPED COUNTRY
THE CAPTAIN PULLED his car off the road and got out and opened up a map. He spread it out on the hood, smoothing down the creases, and studied it. He was only a few hours away from a city and only a few minutes away from the highway, but the map showed nothing at all. The narrow dirt road he had been driving on dwindled away ahead. He had to make the choice of continuing to follow it or taking what was not much more than a rutted kind of trail that forked off to the left into the woods. He decided that he favored the dirt trail because it had to go somewhere. The road from here on looked like it might come to an end soon.
He folded the map and got back in the car, smiling. It was hard not to be smiling on a day like this, an April day in the Tennessee mountains. The air was fresh and sweet and warm, the sky was bright and clear. The leaves were newly green and he had seen dogwood blooming, wild puffs of white among the trees. With everything suddenly new, renewed, it was hard not to smile, not to feel good. It was hard to think of death. The Captain’s impulse was to loosen his necktie and loll back his head and sing to the whole wide world. But he resisted that temptation. He drove along carefully, both hands gripping the wheel, silent and alone.
The Captain braked suddenly and the car skidded to a stop in the ruts. Deep mud ahead. And just beyond the patch of mud a choked mountain stream, water swirling in white mustaches around rocks. More mud on the other side. If he went ahead he would probably be up to the axle in the mud or else drowned out in the stream. He twisted around and backed up slowly until he found a piece of hard ground for the car. Then he got out, locking the car, and walked, glad that he was in uniform with his trousers bloused in his jump boots. Of course the high shine of the boots would get messed up with mud and dirt, but it was better than getting his whole uniform dirty. He skirted the edge of the mud the best he could and then crossed the stream, stepping from rock to rock, finding his way with care. The ruts began again beyond the fresh mud on the other side.
The path wandered close to the stream for a while in a dense cool shade. He could see in clumps, close to the earth, the leaves of wild strawberry plants, promising later on the small, pink fruit, the kind that set the teeth on edge just to taste them, they are so sweet. Then the path left the shade and went uphill, twisted away up a hill and dropped off again into a pie-shaped section of low ground. He was sweating by the time he reached the top and waited a minute to catch his breath. The ground ahead was cleared ground, stony, but cleared for farming. Across it in a shade of trees there was a ramshackle unpainted shack.
He was about halfway across the field, cutting diagonally toward the shack, when he saw the dogs coming at him. Two lean, mangy hounds, pale as twin gusts of smoke, coming swift and low to the ground and barking at him. He stopped still. A man, a tall man in overalls with an ax in his hands, came around from the back of the house and shouted. The dogs held up as if he had yanked them on a leash. He shouted at them again and they slunk back, obedient, to the edge of the porch, still snarling. Then behind the man with the ax the Captain could see children, two girls, barefoot and raggedy and shy, and a boy about twelve or fourteen, who was leaning his weight against a large stick. Looking closely, the Captain saw that the boy was propped up on a homemade crutch. The three children continued to stare at him until a woman appeared and, seeming to gather them into the folds of her full, long skirt, shooed them back out of sight like a mother hen.
The tall man in overalls had not moved. He stood next to the shack, holding the ax in huge, slack hands. The edge of the blade caught the light and glinted.
“Hello,” the Captain said.
There was no answer. The man might have nodded. There was what might have been a briefest tip of his head.
“I’m looking for somebody. Wonder if you can help me.”
Still no answer. The man seemed to tighten his grip on the ax handle. He stared at the Captain, suspicious and hostile, but with a kind of ease and pride too.
It must be his land, the Captain thought. He must have cleared it stump by stump, rock by rock with his owns hands—
“I’m trying to locate a Mr. Cartwright that lives around here somewhere. Edward T. Cartwright.”
“Are you the law?”
“No, sir, I’m not a policeman.”
“How come you’re wearing that uniform?”
“I’m a soldier,” the Captain said. “I’m in the Army.”
“What army would that be?”
The Captain would have laughed out loud except for the expression on the tall man’s face—still suspicious, still hostile, but now also simply curious—that stopped even the beginnings of laughter in the Captain’s throat.
“The United States Army,” the Captain said.
“Why didn’t you say so?” the man said. “Come on over here where I don’t have to yell at you.”
He mumbled something at the dogs and together they slid off the porch like two streams of poured water and crawled under it. He waited for the Captain to approach.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” the man said. “Nothing against the law as I know of. But a man can’t be too careful—”
“No, sir. I understand how it is.”
“I don’t want anybody to have the idea, especially the government, they can come tramping across my land just any damn time they feel like it, without I give an invitation first.”
The tall farmer was a powerfully built man. His wide heavy shoulders were stooped as if under the strain of a yoke of heavy weight and his hands were gnarled and misshapen. His hair was cut short and shot with streaks of gray. The Captain could not have guessed his age.
>
“I’m sorry to trouble you—” the Captain began.
“You say you’re looking for Ed Cartwright?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you a friend of his?”
“No, I just want to see him about something.”
“Do you know him? You know what he looks like?”
“If you can just tell me where I can find—”
“What do you want to see him about?”
The Captain started to speak and then checked himself. Never mind whose business it was. The farmer was making it his, and he might just as well play his part in the ritual interrogation or he would have to go all the way back to the place he had come from with nothing accomplished.
“It’s about his son.”
“Eddie? The boy’s dead.”
“I know,” the Captain said. “That’s what I came to see him about.”
“Did you know Eddie in the Army?”
The Captain nodded.
“What was he to you?”
“I was his commanding officer.”
“I’m Ed Cartwright,” the tall man said. “Let’s go around front and sit on the stoop. It ain’t no use standing up to talk if you don’t have to.”
The farmer see his ax against the wall and together they walked around to the front of the shack and sat down on the low first step. The Captain offered him a cigarette and he accepted it, pinching the end so he could grip it with his lips like a roll-your-own. He struck a kitchen match against the rough board and held a light for the Captain.
“He must not have been such a much of a soldier,” Cartwright said, “to get hisself killed so quick.”
“It was an accident,” the Captain said. “It could have happened to anybody.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Don’t you know? Didn’t they give you the details?”
“Surely,” Cartwright said. “They notified me and they give me the details. And then they even sent a sergeant with a box and a flag. I just want to hear you tell it, that’s all.”
A day on the Grenade Range. A cold raw grassless place under a low gray winter sky. The Captain stood on the range tower with the young Range Officer, stamping his feet against the cold. His lunch lay heavy in his stomach and the long afternoon was ahead of him. The Captain was a combat officer by experience and inclination, condemned for the time being to the boredom and frustration of training new recruits. You get them in their civilian clothes, wrinkled and dirty from a bus or train ride, shaggy-headed with their ducktails, sideburns, and pompadours, and so forth. You make them shave their faces and shine their boots. And you have a few weeks during which to try to turn them into something like a soldier. They come and go. You don’t even have time to learn how most of the list of names you command corresponds with the faces in front of you before they are gone and you are starting all over again—
Below and at a little distance from the range tower six pits had been dug into the hard clay. Each with a sergeant instructor. Six at a time the men of the Captain’s company come double-timing forward from a place to the rear and take places in the pits. The Range Officer calls off commands and instructions with his hoarse bullhorn. And left to right in steady sequence the recruits are to throw two live hand grenades over the top of the sandbagged pits and duck while a slight explosion rocks the startled earth. They are young and new to the hand grenade. Some of them are scared. Their palms sweat—
There is a sudden shout from one of the pits. The instructor is shouting something. The Captain looks and finds the Sergeant is locked in a furious embrace with a soldier, wrestling. The soldier has frozen from fear with the pin pulled and the grenade in his fist. Over the Captain’s shoulder the Range Officer is yelling something into the bullhorn, something which is lost in a blur of static. Now the Captain is moving, swinging over the side of the tower and quickly down the ladder and so he does not see the grenade fall free, losing its handle, and roll into the pit. He does not see the recruit standing there still and stiff as a bronze statue or the Sergeant swooping, grabbing for the loose grenade. The Captain drops heavily to the ground and is already running forward hard toward the pits when the blast knocks him flat. Dazed, he staggers to his feet and runs on.
The accident has killed instantly a veteran sergeant and the recruit—Cartwright, Edward T., Jr., Private E-1.
The farmer listened to the story, quietly smoking. When the Captain had finished, he put out his cigarette.
“I told him. Don’t anybody say I never told him. I said, son, you were born to be a dirt farmer. They won’t be able to make you into no kind of a soldier. They can’t make a soldier out of you. You’re liable to get yourself killed or something. But that boy, he was nothing if he wasn’t stubborn and willful—”
“He was only seventeen,” the Captain said.
“Sixteen,” Cartwright said. “He wasn’t but sixteen. He was a big boy and he lied about his age.”
The Captain looked at the man sitting next to him. He looked older than the Captain’s father, a handsome, healthy, and successful lawyer who could still shoot the country-club golf course and break ninety. It startled the Captain to think that this man, worn by work and hard times, was probably nearer to his own age.
“Was he any good of a soldier?”
The Captain was tempted to lie. In his own defense as much as anything else. After all, the training cycle had hardly begun when the accident happened. He had known the name, one among many on a variety of lists that passed across his desk and on papers that had to have his signature. There had not been a photograph. He had looked at that name, even written it out carefully on paper, trying to rake his mind for any recollection of the face that went with it. He had looked at the faces of his whole company drawn up in formation trying to see if by absence he could recall the missing face. In combat men under his command had been killed, but he had known them. He felt an acute sense of failure. He should have known the boy. At the same time he could not repress a sense of outrage, anger that this guilt had been imposed on him by a stranger, a soldier he could not have known even by sight because of the hectic, inevitable confusion of the first weeks of training.
“It’s hard to say in such a short time whether a man can make a good soldier or not,” the Captain said. “He didn’t get in any trouble while I had him. The men in his platoon liked him. He had some friends.”
“He was a likable one all right. He always had friends. The only thing that surprises me is he stayed out of trouble. He was never what you would call a good boy. He had a kind of wild, restless streak in his nature. He never learned how to keep still.”
“A lot of boys that age are restless.”
“What? What’s that?”
The farmer stared at him.
“What I mean is it’s not such an unusual thing. Most boys that age are pretty much alike.”
“I know what I’m talking about,” the farmer said. “Don’t you just sit here on my front steps and act like you knew more about him than I did. I’m his daddy!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I was only—”
“A good boy! Would you call that ‘a good boy’ to go running off and join the Army and leave me here all alone with the wife and the girls and the other boy to look after? All of it falling on my shoulders. I need that boy bad this spring. I ain’t hardly going to be able to raise a decent crop without him. What did he expect me to do?”
“You don’t mean it that way.”
It was a soft voice, the woman’s voice. The Captain turned and saw her standing there on the porch behind him. He stood up.
“I do too!”
The farmer stood up, too, abruptly, and stamped away out into the bare, grassless yard, keeping his back turned to them.
“He was a damn fool to do like that,” the farmer said. “To run off in the Army and get hisself killed.”
“He don’t mean a word of it,” the woman said. “He is just hurting bad and he’s got to try and hide it.”
The farmer whirled and came back toward the porch, fury in his face.
“What I want to know is what’s he doing here?” he said. “Can’t they just leave us alone now? They done sent telegrams and letters and a sergeant with the box and the flag. Seems like it would all be over and done with. What’s he trying to do, coming way out here all dressed up in his soldier suit?”
“He’s doing the right thing, the Christian thing,” the woman said. “It’s what you would have to do if it was his boy that got killed.”
“The whole thing is,” the farmer said softly, “it was my boy that got killed.”
Then he was gone. He passed by them and around the side of the shack and out of sight. In a moment they heard the ringing sound of the ax.
“Chopping wood,” the woman said. “He’ll chop awhile and work up a sweat and then be all right.”
“I’m sorry to have upset you people,” the Captain said.
“We haven’t got any reason to be mad with anybody,” she said. “Not even with the boy. He done what he thought was the right thing to do. I thank you for coming to see us.”
She offered the Captain her hand.
“I wish we could ask you to stay for supper or something,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”
“Thanks just the same,” the Captain said. “I have to try and get back to the post this evening.”
“That’s a pretty long trip.”
“I’ve got my car down there on the other side of the stream,” the Captain said.
“How about some coffee? I could heat up a pot of coffee.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, though. I’d be grateful for some water.”
“Help yourself,” she said and pointed to the well.
She turned back into the shack. The Captain walked to the well and hauled up a bucket of water. He took a tin dipper off a nail and filled it. The water was sweet and cool and his mouth felt very dry. His tongue felt heavy. He stopped drinking. The sound of the ax ringing against wood had stopped. He looked up and saw the farmer coming toward him. He stiffened.
Evening Performance Page 27
