Johnny Got His Gun

by Dalton Trumbo

  Jesus he was in an awful mess. He was in an awful mess if he couldn’t even tell whether he was awake or asleep. But there wasn’t any way to tell he could think of. When you’re going to sleep you’re tired and you lie down and you close your eyes and sound dies away and then you’re asleep. Maybe even a normal guy a guy with eyes to close and ears to hear with can’t tell the actual minute he falls asleep. Maybe nobody can. There’s a little space between being awake and being asleep that isn’t either one. The two things just melt together so that without knowing it you’re asleep. And then without realizing that you’re waking up all of a sudden you’re awake.

  It was a hell of a thing. If even a normal guy couldn’t tell how was he going to tell when everything about him was like sleep all the time twenty four hours a day? For all he knew he might be slipping in and out of sleep every five minutes or so. His whole life was so much like sleep that he had no way of keeping track. Of course it stood to reason that he was awake a lot of the time. But the only time he could be positive he was awake was when he felt the nurse’s hands. And now that he knew the rat was a dream and since it was the only dream he could absolutely tie down why the only time he could be sure he was asleep was when the rat was gnawing. Of course he might have other dreams beside the rat just as he might be awake lots of times when the nurse’s hands weren’t touching him. But how in the hell could he tell?

  For example when he was a kid he used to day dream. He used to sit back and think of things he’d do some day. Or he used to think of things he did last week. But all the time he would be awake. He knew that. Yet with him lying here in bed in blackness and silence it was different. In thinking over something that happened a long while ago what seemed like a day dream might become a real dream so that as he thought of the past he fell asleep and dreamed about it.

  Maybe there wasn’t any way. Maybe for the rest of his life he would just have to guess whether he was awake or asleep. How was he ever going to be able to say well I guess I’ll go to sleep now or I just woke up? How was he going to know? And a guy had to know. That was important. It was the most important thing left. All he had was a mind and he would like to feel that it was thinking clearly. But how was he going to do it except when there was a nurse at hand or a rat on him?

  He had to do it that was all. Guys were supposed to develop extra powers when they lost parts of themselves. Maybe if he concentrated on thinking he would know he was awake just like he knew he was awake now. Then when he stopped concentrating he would know he was going to fall asleep. That meant no more dreaming about the past. That meant no more of anything but thinking thinking thinking. Then he’d get so tired of thinking that he’d be drowsy and he’d fall asleep. He had a mind left by god and that was all. It was the only thing he could use so he must use it every minute he was awake. He must think till he was tired tireder than he had ever been before. He must think all the time and then he must sleep.

  He saw he had to do it. Because if he couldn’t tell being awake from being asleep why he couldn’t even consider himself a grown-up person. It was bad enough to be shot back into the womb. It was bad enough to think of going on for years and years in loneliness and silence and blackness. But this latest thing his inability to tell dreams from thoughts was oblivion. It made him nothing and less than nothing. It robbed him of the only thing that distinguished a normal person from a crazy man. It meant that he might be lying and thinking very solemnly about something that seemed important while all the time he might really be asleep and dreaming the idiotic dreams of a two year old. It robbed him of any respect for his own thoughts and that was the worst thing that could happen to anybody. He was so mixed up that he wasn’t sure whether the nurse or the rat was real. Maybe neither was real. Maybe both were real. Maybe nothing was real not even himself oh god and wouldn’t that be wonderful.

  ix

  The campfire was built in front of a tent and the tent was under an enormous pine. When you slept inside the tent it seemed always that it was raining outside because the needles from the pine kept falling. Sitting across from him and staring into the fire was his father. Each summer they came to this place which was nine thousand feet high and covered with pine trees and dotted with lakes. They fished in the lakes and when they slept at night the roar of water from the streams which connected the lakes sounded in their ears all night long.

  They had been coming to this place ever since he was seven. Now he was fifteen and Bill Harper was going to come tomorrow. He sat in front of the fire and looked across at his father and wondered just how he was going to tell him. It was a very serious thing. Tomorrow for the first time in all their trips together he wanted to go fishing with someone other than his father. On previous trips the idea had never occurred to him. His father had always preferred his company to that of men and he had always preferred his father’s company to that of the other guys. But now Bill Harper was coming up tomorrow and he wanted to go fishing with him. He knew it was something that had to happen sometime. Yet he also knew that it was the end of something. It was an ending and a beginning and he wondered just how he should tell his father about it.

  So he told him very casually. He said Bill Harper’s coming up tomorrow and I thought maybe I’d go out with him. He said Bill Harper doesn’t know very much about fishing and I do so I think if you don’t mind I’ll get up early in the morning and meet Harper and he and I will go fishing.

  For a little while his father didn’t say a thing. Then he said why sure go along Joe. And then a little later his father said has Bill Harper got a rod? He told his father no Bill hasn’t a rod. Well said his father why don’t you take my rod and let Bill use yours? I don’t want to go fishing tomorrow anyhow. I’m tired and I think I’ll rest all day. So you use my rod and let Bill use yours.

  It was as simple as that and yet he knew it was a great thing. His father’s rod was a very valuable one. It was perhaps the only extravagance his father had had in his whole life. It had amber leaders and beautiful silk windings. Each spring his father sent the rod away to a man in Colorado Springs who was an expert on rods. The man in Colorado Springs carefully scraped the varnish off the rod and rewound it and revarnished it and it came back glistening new each year. There was nothing his father treasured more. He felt a little lump in his throat as he thought that even as he was deserting his father for Bill Harper his father had volunteered the rod.

  They went to sleep that night in the bed which lay against a floor of pine needles. They had scooped the needles out to make a little hollow place for their hips. He lay awake quite a while thinking about tomorrow and his father who slept beside him. Then he fell asleep. At six o’clock Bill Harper whispered to him through the tent flap. He got up and gave Bill his rod and took his father’s for himself and they went off without awakening his father.

  It was growing dark when the terrible thing happened. They were in a rowboat trolling with spinners. They had both lines out. He was rowing and Bill Harper was at the stern sitting down facing him and holding a rod out on each side of the boat. It was very quiet and the lake was glassy still. They were both feeling a little dreamy because they had had such a wonderful time all day. Then there was a sharp whirring sound as the fish struck. The rod leaped out of Bill Harper’s hand and disappeared into the water. Both of them made wild grabs for it but they were too late. It was his father’s rod. They fished around for more than an hour with the other rod and with the oars of the boat hoping to raise it but they knew all the while there was no chance. His father’s wonderful rod was gone and they would never see it again.

  They beached the boat and cleaned the fish they had caught and then they went over to the general store for a root beer. They drank their root beer and talked in hushed tones about the rod. Then he left Bill Harper.

  All the way to the tent walking under pine trees and over soft needle carpets and hearing the sound of the streams rushing down the mountain and seeing the stars in the sky he thought about his father. His father and mo
ther never had much money but they seemed to get along all right. They had a little house set far back on a long wide lot near the edge of town. In front of the house there was a space of lawn and between the lawn and the sidewalk his father had a lot of room for gardening. People would come from all over town to admire his father’s garden. His father would get up at five or five-thirty in the mornings to go out and irrigate the garden. He would come home from work in the evenings eager to return to it. The garden in a way was his father’s escape from bills and success stories and the job at the store. It was his father’s way of creating something. It was his father’s way of being an artist.

  At first they had lettuce and beans and peas and carrots and onions and beets and radishes. Then his father got consent from the man who owned the vacant lot next door to use the lot for gardening space also. The man was glad enough to have his father use it because it would save him the expense of burning the weeds off in the fall. So on the vacant lot his father raised sweet corn and summer squash and cantaloupes and watermelons and cucumbers. He had a great hedge of sunflowers around it. The sunflower hearts were sometimes a foot across. The seeds made fine food for the chickens. In a little patch that had shade half the day his father planted everbearing strawberries so they had fresh berries from spring until late fall.

  In back of the house in Shale City they had chickens and rabbits and he had some bantams for pets. Two maybe three times a week they had fried chicken for dinner and it didn’t seem like a luxury. In the winter they had stewing hens with dumplings and potatoes from their own vines. During the season when the chickens laid a lot of eggs and eggs were cheap at the store his mother took the extra eggs from the henhouse and put them up in big crocks of waterglass. Then when winter came and eggs were expensive and the hens weren’t laying she just went down into the cellar and got her eggs for nothing. They kept a cow and his mother churned their own butter and they had buttermilk. The milk set in pans on the back porch and in the morning the milk from the night before was covered with yellow cream almost as heavy as leather. On hot summer Sundays they made ice cream using their own cream and their own strawberries and practically everything else their own except the ice.

  On the far side of the vacant lot his father had six stands of bees so that every fall they had plenty of honey. His father would go out to the bee stands and pull out the sections and check on the cells and if the stand was weak he would destroy all the queen cells and perhaps even clip the queen’s wings so that she wouldn’t swarm and split the hive.

  As soon as the weather got below freezing his father went out to some nearby farmer’s and bought fresh meat. There would be a quarter of beef and maybe half a hog hanging on the back porch frozen through and always fresh. When you wanted a steak you simply took a saw and you sawed the steak off and besides being better it didn’t cost you anything like the butcher shops charged.

  In the fall his mother spent weeks canning fruit. By the end of the season the cellar was packed. You would go down there and beside the great crocks of water-glassed eggs there would be mason jars of every kind of fruit you could want. There would be apricot preserves and orange marmalade and raspberry jam and blueberry jam and apple jelly. There would be hard-boiled eggs canned in beet juice and bread and butter pickles and salted cherries and chili sauce. If you went down in October you would find three or four heavy fruit cakes black and moist and filled with citron and nuts. They would be in the coolest corner of the cellar and they would be carefully wrapped with damp cloths against the Christmas season.

  All of these things they had and yet his father was a failure. His father couldn’t make any money. Sometimes his father and mother talked together in the evenings about it. So-and-so had gone to California and had made a lot of money in real estate. So-and-so had gone and made a lot of money just by working in a chain shoe store until he got to be manager. Everybody who went to California made money and was a success. But his father in Shale City was a failure.

  It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man. He kept his children together and they ate good food fine food rich food better food than people ate hi the cities. Even rich people in the cities couldn’t get vegetables as fresh or as crisp. They couldn’t get meat as well cured. No amount of money could buy that. Those things you had to raise for yourself. His father had managed to do it even to the honey they used on the hot biscuits his mother made. His father had managed to produce all these things on two city lots and yet his father was a failure.

  He saw the tent rising ahead of him out of the mountainside like a small white cloud in the darkness. He thought about the rod again and then he knew why his father was a failure. It wasn’t that his father didn’t provide for his family and keep them in clothes and food and pleasures. It was all very plain now. His father didn’t have enough money to buy another rod. Even though the rod was his father’s most cherished possession now that it was gone he wouldn’t have enough money to buy another and so he was a failure.

  When he got to the tent his father was in bed and asleep. He stood for a minute looking down at his father. Then he went out and strung up his fish. He returned to the tent and undressed quickly and got into bed beside his father. His father stirred. He knew it was no good waiting till morning. He had to tell his father now. His voice wouldn’t come clearly when he began to talk. It wasn’t because he was afraid of what his father might say. It was because he knew that his father would never again be able to have a rod as good as the one that was gone.

  Dad he said we lost your rod. We got a quick strike and before we knew it the rod was in the water. We hunted around for it and fished with the oars but we didn’t get it so it’s lost.

  It seemed like maybe five minutes before his father made a sound. Then he turned slightly over in bed. He felt his father’s arm suddenly thrown over his chest. He felt its warm comforting pressure. Well said his father I don’t think we should let a little thing like a fishing rod spoil our last trip together should we?

  There was nothing to say so he just lay still. His father had known all along that it was really their last trip together. From now on in the summers he would come up camping with guys like Bill Harper and Glen Hogan and the rest of them. And his father would come on fishing trips with men. It had just happened that way. It had to happen that way. But he lay there in bed beside his father with the two of them jack-knifed together in the way they always slept best and his father’s arm around him and he blinked back the tears. He and his father had lost everything. Themselves and the rod.

  He awakened thinking of his father and wondering where the nurse was. He awakened lonelier than he had been since he could remember. He was lonely for Shale City and its pleasant ways. He was lonely for one look for one smell for one taste for one word that would bring Shale City and his father and his mother and his sisters back to him. But he was so cut off from them that even if they were standing beside his bed they would be as distant as if they were ten thousand miles away.

  x

  Lying on your back without anything to do and anywhere to go was kind of like being on a high hill far away from noise and people. It was like being on a camping trip all by yourself. You had plenty of time to think. You had time to figure things out. Things you’d never thought of before. Things like for example going to war. You were so completely alone on your hill that noise and people didn’t enter in your figuring of things at all. You figured only for yourself without considering a single little thing outside yourself. It seemed that you thought clearer and that your answers made more sense. And even if they didn’t make sense it didn’t matter because you weren’t ever going to be able to do anything about them anyhow.

  He thought here you are Joe Bonham lying like a side of beef all the rest of your life and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said come along son we’re going to war. So you went. But why? In any other deal even like buying a ca
r or running an errand you had the right to say what’s there in it for me? Otherwise you’d be buying bad cars for too much money or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or do that you should stand up and say look mister why should I do this for who am I doing it and what am I going to get out of it in the end? But when a guy comes along and says here come with me and risk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you’ve got no rights. You haven’t even the right to say yes or no or I’ll think it over. There are plenty of laws to protect guys’ money even in war time but there’s nothing on the books says a man’s life’s his own.

  Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can’t rob and you take away some of his liberty. You’ve got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It’s just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it’s a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let’s fight for liberty and he can’t show you liberty. He can’t prove the thing he’s talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?

  No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddam fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty—what did he mean next time? There wasn’t going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said let’s fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I’m not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I’ve got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we’re talking about and just how much of that liberty we’re going to have. And what’s more mister are you as much interested in this liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you’re a goddam fourflusher talking through your hat and I’ve already decided that I like the liberty I’ve got right here the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girl. I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won’t get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don’t care for some.