I climbed in the bed and we drank out of the bottle. You would never believe the first thing she said to me.
“Have you ever killed anybody?” she whispered. “Tell me about it.”
I told her I didn’t know. In the artillery you don’t see what you are shooting at most of the time. They telephone or radio back when they have got a target for you to shoot at and then you just keep on shooting until they tell you to quit.
“I don’t mean like that,” she said. “I mean up close with a knife or something.”
The only thing I could figure was she was drunk and had all that Phantom Killer stuff on her mind. I could tell she wanted me to say yes. I don’t know why. I guess she wanted to feel bad, dirty maybe. She wanted to pretend she was in bed with some terrible man. Maybe she wanted to pretend that the Phantom Killer was raping her or something. I was drunk enough myself so I didn’t care. So I told her yes I had killed a whole lot of gooks with my knife. I made up a couple of long-winded phony stories and that seemed to excite her. I’ll say this for Delma, she was all right in bed even if she did carry on, laughing and crying the whole time until I was afraid the man would throw us out.
Later on, in the early hours of the morning, she got up real quiet and started to get dressed. I sat up in bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”
It was still dark. I snapped the lamp beside the bed and it didn’t go on. I tried the bulb and it was tight. I gave the cord a pull and it was free. She must have yanked the plug out while I was out buying the whiskey when we first came in.
“How come you unplugged the light?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t want you to see me,” she said.
“I saw you when we came in,” I said. “I know who you are.”
“Not like this,” she said. “You didn’t see me like this.”
Then she started crying. I thought the hell with it. Just the hell with it all. And I got up and found my clothes and got dressed in the dark. Before we went out the door she took hold of me.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“It’s going to cost you twenty dollars.”
“I’ll be damn,” I said. “I didn’t know you were a whore.”
“I’m not!” she said. “I’m not a whore. But I’ve got my kid to think about.”
“Your kid? I didn’t even know you were married.”
“Now you know,” she said. “And it costs twenty bucks to spend the night with me.”
“That’s a pretty high price.”
Even if I felt bad about being fooled, I went ahead and gave her the money. What was the use of arguing? It was my own fault.
We drove back to town without saying a word. I turned on the radio and picked up some hillbilly music. We finally got to the boardinghouse and I pulled over to let her take the wheel. I got out and started to walk away. She called to me.
“Listen,” she said, “you’re not mad, are you?”
“Mad? Why should I be mad?”
“I just want to be sure,” she said. “I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I just wanted to know,” she said. “Will I see you again?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?”
“Suit yourself,” she said and she drove off.
I just about had time to put on my boots and work clothes before we left for work. I didn’t even have time to shave. Pete was already waiting for me when I walked in the house.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Go on out and wait in the truck,” I told him. “I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
The others left without us. We drove out on the highway alone for an hour or so. Pete just curled up in a corner of the cab and went to sleep. I had a hard time staying awake myself, driving along the long straight road in the first light of the morning. The tires were humming. I nodded and rubbed my eyes and drove on. After a while I turned off onto a back road that led into swamp country where we had been working before. I drove as far as we had worked yesterday. Then I nudged Pete and woke him up.
“Where are the other guys?” I said.
“Where are we?”
He looked around a minute, blinking his eyes.
“Goddamn!” he said. “You went to the wrong place.”
“I thought we were supposed to finish the line we were running.”
“Yeah? You thought! Well, it’s been changed.”
“You could have told me.”
“Drive on up the road and see if there’s a place we can turn around. I think I remember a shack down the road a piece.”
I started up the truck again and drove on.
“Well,” Pete said, “while you were out catting around with Delma last night, you missed all the fun.”
“What fun?”
“Peanuts,” he said. “They beat the living hell out of him.”
“Jesus Christ! What did they do that for?”
“They got him drunk last evening, see? Usually when he’s drunk he’s just funny. But this time he was kind of mean, mean drunk. Some of the boys egged him on and he was just drunk enough to swing at them. They gave that black sonofabitch a real going-over. Hell, they had to take him to the hospital when they got through.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“You should’ve been there.”
“I can’t believe anybody would do anything like that.”
I was thinking what a crazy terrible thing it was for some grown men to beat up a poor feeble-minded nigger like that. I was sleepy and hungry and hung over and it was all mixed up in my mind with all that had happened to me last night. Thinking about that married woman, Delma, and how she had to get herself all worked up by pretending she was in bed with some kind of a killer. She couldn’t have believed it, but she needed to pretend that she did. Just like those men in town at the station had to pretend that Peanuts had done something to them and then beat him up to feel better. I felt so sick about everything in the whole world I wanted to die. I just wanted to fall over dead.
“Hey!” Pete yelled. “Turn in here.”
There was a shack all right, just a patch of bare ground with the swamp all around it. It was all falling to pieces, but there were chickens running around the yard and a nigger without a shirt on was sitting on the front stoop picking at a guitar.
“The hell with it,” Pete said. “He had it coming.”
“Who?”
“Peanuts. They shouldn’t let anybody that stupid run around loose.”
“For what?” I said. “For what does anybody have things like that coming to him? Answer me that.”
“I said the hell with it. Turn the truck around and let’s go.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m telling you to shut up and turn this truck around.”
“All right,” I said, turning off the engine and putting the keys in my pocket. “It was bound to come to this sooner or later.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m fixing to beat the shit out of you.”
I’ll have to say he put up a pretty good fight for a little guy. He was tough. We fought all around the truck and all over the yard, rolling on the ground, kicking and punching each other. I was so tired and sleepy I felt like I was dreaming, but I kept after him and I finally got him down so he couldn’t get up. He just lay there panting, all bloody on the ground, and I started kicking at him.
“You going to kill me?”
He looked bad lying there. He was too weak to move. In my blood and my muscles and my bones I never wanted to kill anybody so much. I wanted to tear him into pieces and stamp them in the dust. But I couldn’t do it. When he asked me was I going to kill him, all of a sudden I knew what I was doing. I knew what had happened to me and I kn
ew I wasn’t a damn bit better than those guys that beat up Peanuts or Delma or Pete or anybody else. I was so sick of myself I felt like I was going to puke.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I ought to.”
I went up to where I saw a well and hauled a bucket of water and splashed it all over me. The nigger sat there and stared at me with the guitar hanging loose in his hands. I wonder what he thought was going on.
After that I splashed Pete with water, too, and I put the keys in the truck.
“Drive me back to town,” he said.
“Drive yourself,” I said. “I’m walking.”
I was lucky to get back in my old outfit with my old job. I came into the Battery area on a Sunday afternoon. The barracks was empty except for a few guys on the first floor, broke maybe or without a pass, playing cards on one of the bunks. They were sitting around, smoking, concentrating on the game. When I walked in and went on through they just looked up and looked back down to the game. They were new since I left. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them.
I climbed the stairs and went into Mooney’s room. He wasn’t there but the room had his touch on everything in it. It was bare and clean and neat. The clothes in his wall locker were hanging evenly. The boots under his bed, side by side, were shined up nice, not all spit-shined like some young soldier’s, just a nice shine. I made up the empty bunk. I made it up real tight without a wrinkle, so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it if you wanted to. Then I threw all my stuff in the corner and just flopped down in the middle of my bunk. I felt like I was floating on top of water. I lit myself a cigarette and looked at the ceiling.
After a while I heard Mooney climbing up the stairs. He always came up real slow and careful like an old man. Once you heard him walking up stairs you would never mistake it for somebody else. He opened the door and came in.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to smoke in bed,” he said. “It’s against regulations.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I’ve heard it all before.”
“You think you know it all,” he said. “Let me tell you, you got a lot of things to learn.”
“Oh yeah? I’ve been around. I’ve been outside. I’ve seen a few things since the last time I seen you.”
“Did you learn anything?” he said. “That’s what I want to know.”
“Not much.”
“Nothing?”
“There’s one thing, just one thing I’ve got to find out from you.”
He waited for me to ask it.
“Mooney,” I said, “how come you’re so black?”
Mooney looked at me hard for a minute. Then he leaned back, rocked on his heels. The whole room rattled with his laughter and it was good to hear.
“Sunburn,” he said. “Son, I got the most awful, the most permanent case of sunburn you ever saw.”
Is it any pleasure to the Almighty, that thou art righteous? or is it gain to him that thou makest thy ways perfect?
JOB 22:3
A WREATH FOR GARIBALDI
(A True Story)
THE BEGINNING WAS PERFECTLY CASUAL, offhand, pleasant. We were sitting on the terrazzo of a modern Roman apartment drinking coffee and thick, sweet, bile-colored Strega. It was an afternoon in late March, the air was fresh and cool, the spring sunlight rinsed and brilliant. The English lady, a poet and translator, was in the hammock and the rest of us sat around in wicker chairs—an artist, an Italian princess, another translator, an expatriate gentleman from Mobile, Alabama, who writes poems about monkeys. A usual crowd.…
The talk was about politics. A Pope had died, the new Pope had been elected amid rumors and fears—“Un Straniero per Il Papa?” all the headlines read for a while—and errors: white smoke pouring out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on the very first ballot because somebody had forgotten the straw to darken the smoke. The latest government had fallen. A coalition with more strength to the right (gossip had any number of known ex-Fascists among its members) had replaced it. The talk was of politics and, inevitably, the signs of the reawakening of Fascism. Mussolini was being treated with nostalgia and kid gloves in a major picture magazine. Another magazine had been publishing a series about the War, showing how they (the Italians) lost it by a series of “mistakes” and recounting moments of bravery and success wherever they could find them. There had been a television series on recent Italian history. Everybody had been waiting to see how they would manage to handle the whole big business of Fascism and the war. It was disappointing. They treated the subject like scholars from a distant land, or maybe outer space, with careful, neutral disinterest.
There had been other things too—the young Fascists making some headlines by dropping mice in tiny parachutes from the ceiling of a theater during an anti-Fascist comedy. There had been the “striptease incident” in a Trastevere trattoria when a Turkish girl took all her clothes off and did a belly dance. It was a very large private party, and most people missed that part of the show. More noticed the American movie star, one of the new sex symbols, who came with a buzz and hive of fairies (like Lady Brett?) and danced barefoot (like Ava Gardner?). In fact it never would have been an issue at all except that somebody took some photographs. The place was full of plainclothesmen who had come to protect the jewels, but they didn’t go into action until the next morning when a tabloid appeared with the pictures of the belly dance. In no time the party was officially an orgy and there were lots of political implications and ramifications. It was the special kind of public prudery that interested the observer, though, the kind that had always been associated with the Fascist days. And there had been other signs and portents like the regular toppling over and defacing of the bust of Lauro di Bosis near the Villa Lante on the Gianicolo.
Something was happening all right, slowly it is true, but you could feel it. The Italians felt it. Little things. An Italian poet noticed the plainclothes policemen lounging around the area of Quirinale Palace, the first time since the war. At least they hadn’t stepped up and asked to see his papers in the hated, flat, dialect mispronunciation of Mussolini’s home district—Documenti, per favore. But—who knew?—that might be coming, too, one of these days. There were other Italians who still bore scars they had earned in police station basements, resisting. They laughed and, true to national form and manners, never talked too long or solemnly on any subject at all, but some of them worried briefly out loud about short memories and ghosts.
We saw Giuseppe Berto at a party once in a while, tall, lean, nervous, and handsome, and, in my opinion, the best novelist of them all except Pavese. And Pavese was dead. Berto’s The Sky Is Red had been a small masterpiece and in its special way one of the best books to come out of the war. Now he was married to a young and beautiful girl, had a small son, and lived in an expensive apartment and worked for the movies. On his desk was a slowly accumulating treatment and script of The Count of Monte Cristo. On his bookshelves were some American novels, including Bellow’s Seize the Day, which had been sent to him by American publishers. But he hadn’t read them, and he wasn’t especially interested in what the American writers were up to. He was very interested in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. So were a lot of other people. He was interested in Italo Svevo. He was slowly thinking his way into a new novel, a big one, one that many people had been waiting for. It was going to be hard going all the way for him because he hadn’t written seriously for a good while, except for a few stories, and he was tired of the old method of realismo he had so successfully used in The Sky Is Red. This one was going to be different. He had bought a little piece of property down along the coast of the hard country of Calabria that he knew so well. He was going to do one or two more films for quick cash and then chuck it all, leave Rome and its intellectual cliques and money-fed life, go back to Calabria.
Berto seemed worried, too. He knew all about it and had put it down in journal form in War in a Black Shirt. He knew all about the appeal of a black shirt and jackboots to a poor, sout
hern, peasant boy. He knew all about the infection and the fever, and, too, the sudden moment of realization when he saw for himself, threw up his hands and quit, ending the war as a prisoner in Texas. Berto knew all about Fascism. So did his friend, the young novelist Rimanelli. Rimanelli is tough and square-built and adventurous, says what he thinks. He had put it down in a war novel, The Day of the Lion. These people were not talking much about it, but you, a foreigner, sensed their apprehension and disappointment.
So there we were talking around and about it. The English lady said she had to go to Vienna for a while. It was a pity because she had planned to lay a wreath at the foot of the Garibaldi statue, towering over Rome in spectacular benediction from the high point of the Gianicolo. Around that statue in the green park where children play and lovers walk in twos and there is a glowing view of the whole city, in that park are the rows of marble busts of Garibaldi’s fallen men, the ones who one day rushed out of the Porta San Pancrazio and, under fire all the way, up the long, straight, narrow lane first to take, then later to lose, the high ground of the Villa Doria Pamphili. When they finally lost it, the French artillery moved in, and that was the end for Garibaldi, at least that time, on 30 April 1849. Once out of the gate they had charged straight up the narrow lane. We had walked it many times and shivered, figuring what a fish barrel it had been for the French. Now the park is filled with marble busts and all the streets in the immediate area have the full and proper names of the men who fell there.
We were at a party once and heard an idealistic young European call that charge glorious. Our companion was a huge, plain-spoken American sculptor who had been a sixteen-year-old rifleman all across France in 1944. He said it was stupid butchery to order men to make a charge like that, no matter who gave the order or what for.
“Oh, it would be butchery all right,” the European said. “We would see it that way today. But it was glorious then. It was the last time in history anybody could do something gloriously like that.”
I thought, Who is older now? Old world or new world?
The sculptor looked at him, bug-eyed and amazed. He had made an assault once with a hundred and eighty men. It was a picked assault company. They went up against an SS unit of comparable size, over a little rise of ground, across an open field. Object—a village crossroads. They made it and killed every last one of the Krauts, took the village on schedule. When it was over, eight of his company were still alive and all eight were wounded. The whole thing, from the moment when they climbed heavily off the trucks, spread out, and moved into position just behind the cover of that slight rise of ground and then jumped off, took maybe between twenty or thirty minutes. The sculptor looked at him, let the color drain out of his face, grinned, and looked down into his drink, a bad Martini made with raw Italian gin.
Evening Performance Page 31
