The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Shouldn’t you kids be in school?” the leader asked. “This is Wednesday, isn’t it?”

  “Teacher let us out,” Gypsy said. “Matter a fact, she took us out. To bury a mule.”

  “To what, pardon me?” the leader asked.

  Two other soldiers joined us. “Perimeter’s secure, sir!” one of them said, saluting. “Sir, I think Lieutenant Bosco broke his arm in the landing.”

  “I’ll look at it, Sergeant,” the leader said, and then he called toward the glider, “UNLOAD, DEPLOY, AND TORCH IT!” Then he pointed at us and said to the soldiers behind us, “Segregate ’em, search ’em, and silence ’em.” The men saluted him and he took off at a run.

  The soldiers separated us, making us stand several feet apart with our hands raised on tree trunks while they patted us over, as if we’d have any weapons, which of course we didn’t, not even pocketknives. Two soldiers argued with each other over the privilege of searching Gypsy. I was brooding about the officer’s last command: I knew that “silence” was a euphemism for “put to death,” and I wondered if they could really get away with it, destroying innocent country kids.

  “Do I look like I’ve got anything on me?” I demanded of the soldier who was patting me.

  “Hush, kid!” he snapped. “No talking.” Then he fished the pencil out of my shirt pocket and asked, “What’s this?”

  “A ray gun,” I said. “Deadly.”

  He twisted his fingers into the collar of my shirt. “Don’t get smart, punk.”

  “It’s my tool,” I said. “I write for the newspaper.”

  The officer was back. “Private, didn’t I say ‘silence’?”

  “Yessir but this squirt was giving me lip.”

  “Son,” the officer said to me, “we’re going to ask for your full cooperation from now till our bivouac is fixed.”

  I gave him a good military salute and said, “Yes sir!”

  He looked at me kindly but a bit quizzically. “Do you know what a bivouac is?”

  “You fellers is a-fixin to camp out,” I said.

  He chuckled. “That’s right. And we can’t do it here.” He turned and spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear him, “Let’s MOVE OUT!” He gestured northward.

  Those guys were efficient. The poor mule was loaded up with packs and packs and boxes and boxes of stuff that had to be all roped together, and then the mule was led away. I didn’t see how the mule could carry all that stuff, but he kept his head up like a good soldier.

  Then a corporal with a flamethrower set the glider on fire. In no time at all the big crate was cinders.

  “What kind of airship was that?” I asked the officer, walking rapidly beside him as he headed north.

  “It was a Waco CG-4A,” he said. “It did its job. Now excuse me.”

  He trotted away from me, to the head of the column of men and mule. Four soldiers marched ahead, behind, and in between us six Axis, keeping us apart from each other and hurrying us if we slowed down on the march. For some reason I was in front and the others behind me. Gypsy and Ella Jean were having a rough go of it, especially because of the way the soldiers were ogling them as if they hadn’t seen a female in months…and maybe they hadn’t.

  I was thirsty and, I suddenly realized, very hungry. It was past time for what would’ve been our noon dinner at school, where my dinner pail and everyone else’s was still in the foyer. And poor Willard, always obsessed with his stomach, was visibly wilting from hunger.

  We came out of the forest at the road that dissolves into a woodland trail not far up above the old dogtrot house, the Dill family place, where Latha lived with her husband Every Dill. As soon as we reached the road, the officer halted the column and silently made a bunch of hand gestures that strung his men out into two files along both sides of the road. The officer dropped back and asked me, “Where does this road go?”

  “Well, pretty soon it comes to an old cabin where an auto mechanic lives with his beautiful wife who’s the town’s postmistress and storekeeper and—”

  “What about the other way?” he asked.

  “Oh, it just sort of peters out, up that way. There’s a deserted old house maybe half a mile up in those woods.”

  “You know the country pretty well, don’t you?” he said with admiration.

  “Lived here all my life,” I said. And I couldn’t resist adding, “I have to know all the roads real well in order to deliver my newspaper.”

  “Are we keeping you from your paper route?” He pronounced it “root,” not “rowt.”

  “Well, I wanted to bring out an Extra this afternoon to tell all about your landing and all, but it don’t look like I’m going to get a chance to do that, does it?”

  He stared at me a while. Then he said, “Oh. I get it. You’re not just a paperboy. You publish a paper.”

  “Yes, sir, and I sure would appreciate an interview.”

  He smiled. “We call it ‘interrogation.’ And your turn will come. Now show us that deserted house.”

  Chapter fourteen

  When we climbed to the dark holler of the mountain forest containing the abandoned farmstead, one of several in the environs that were so run down that not even the squatting Dingletoons would have cared to use them, the first thing the officer wanted to do was test the water in the well. The well housing was of crumbling rock masonry, but its cap was a huge cement slab with a hole in it large enough to accommodate a bucket. There was no bucket, and only the frayed remains of a well rope dangling from the rusted iron pulley, but of course they had a bucket, possibly made from the very metal of our War Effort Scrap Drive, and they lowered it and brought up some water, and tested it with some kind of chemical strips. Then one of the men was told to step off the distance from the well to the outhouse, a teetering shack without its door. “Ninety-two and a half feet, sir,” he reported.

  I understood what they were doing, and I spoke up. “I don’t believe anybody’s used that outhouse for a dozen years.”

  “Were you here a dozen years ago?” the officer asked me.

  I was not, but I could have assured him that the water in that well was perfectly potable, and I was dying for a few gulps of it. Still the officer had to be sure that some kind of tablets were dropped into the water before he could let us have any. Then he had the first drink himself, either from the privilege of seniority or perhaps he figured if he didn’t drop dead at once it would be all right for the rest of us to drink it.

  When we’d all slaked our thirst, Ella Jean spoke up on behalf of our hunger. “Mister,” she said to the officer, “we’uns aint et our dinner yit.”

  “Hoo!” said one of the soldiers, “‘We’uns aint et our dinner yit.’”

  “Polacek!” the officer snapped at the soldier. “This young lady would probably think your Bronx accent is hilarious if she got a chance to hear it. Why don’t you say something for her?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Polacek said.

  “Say it to her, Polacek!”

  “High big department, miss,” Polacek said to Ella Jean. Or something like that.

  The officer said to us, “Isn’t it kind of early for dinner? We haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Hereabouts,” I told him, “the noon meal is always dinner. And it’s way past noon, I think.” The high sun had moved past its zenith, and was getting hotter.

  “My mistake,” the officer apologized. “Well, let’s all have dinner, then. Rucker!” A soldier came up and saluted. “Rucker, give these people our best bash.”

  The officer had a sense of humor. His idea of a bash was to let us share the soldier’s rations, an assortment of canned meat products, two types of biscuits, canned cheese, fruit bars, and chocolate bars. Willard astounded Rucker and the other men by consuming enough of the biscuits to feed the whole platoon. But the officer didn’t eat with us; he was too busy reconnoitering the farmstead and giving instructions to the men for the setting up of the bivouac.

  “What do you think they’ll do with us?”
I asked Willard.

  “I don’t rightly keer, as long as they feed us,” Willard said, grinning. Then, more seriously, he said, “I reckon they’re bound to turn us loose directly.”

  Corporal Rucker said, “Hey, you guys pipe down. Lieut says you gotta keep quiet till he’s finished.”

  “Finished what?” I asked.

  Rucker held up five fingers, and named each one. “Search. Segregate. Silence. Speed. Safeguard. That’s the rules. Doesn’t say feed. Says, ‘Do not give them cigarettes, food, or water.’ We’ve given you guys plenty of the last two. You need a cigarette?”

  The officer, whom Rucker had called “Lieut,” returned to us. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll take you one at a time in order of seniority. Who’s oldest?” The officer took Joe Don and they disappeared into the old house, whose floorboards, I knew, were mostly rotten. They were gone a while. What was happening to Joe Don? Gypsy and Ella Jean attempted to exchange nervous speculations, but Rucker silenced them. We waited anxiously to hear a scream.

  Finally Joe Don returned. He was smiling as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t know. “I reckon you’re next,” he said to Willard, and Willard got up, belched, and went into the house.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Joe Don.

  “Kid!” Rucker yelled at me and wagged his finger. Joe Don simply made a gesture of crossing his lips with his finger as if to say they were sealed.

  We sat in silence as, one by one, Willard, then Gypsy, then Ella Jean, and then Sammy, were interrogated, or regaled, or raped, or whatever was going on in there. I was terribly impatient, and increasingly nervous. As the youngest and last, I had to endure the waiting and wondering and not one of my friends—or fellow Axis, if they weren’t exactly friends—could give me even a hint as to what to expect.

  It was midafternoon before my turn finally came, as Sammy emerged from the house, giggling. At least, I told myself as I entered, whatever was going on in there had some redeeming comic value. I exchanged glances with Sammy in passing, but he just rolled his eyes.

  Inside the house, the officer had found a spot in what once must have been the kitchen where the floorboards weren’t completely rotted through, and he had set up two canvas folding chairs, the kind that movie stars and directors and Civil War generals sit in. The two chairs faced each other, closely; he gestured for me to sit in one, and then sat in the other himself.

  “So,” he said to me, and then called me by my full name (I assumed any of the others could have told him my name). He held out his hand for a shake, and I shook it. “I have the honor of being interviewed personally by the editor-in-chief of The Stay Morning Star.” There was no sarcasm or condescension in his voice.

  “Yessir,” I said. “I guess they told you all that.”

  “Lieutenant McPherson at your service, sir,” he said. He took a real cigarette from a package in his pocket and then offered me one. “I don’t suppose you smoke?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Good. Don’t start. It’s too hard to stop.” He lit his own cigarette with enormous pleasure, took a deep draught from it, and exhaled, careful to tilt his head so that the smoke didn’t come into my face. “How long have you been putting out the Star?”

  “A year or so,” I said.

  “Mimeograph?”

  “Hectograph.”

  “Ah!” he smiled. “I had one of those.”

  “Really?” I said, warming to him. “Did you edit a newspaper?”

  “Not when I was your age,” he said. “I wasn’t nearly as bright as you.”

  I probably blushed. “I’m not very bright.”

  “None of your friends,” he pointed out, “knows the meaning of ‘bivouac.’ Where’d you learn it?”

  “I read a lot,” I said.

  “So, in a way, you already know why we’re here, and I won’t have to answer any questions along that line.”

  “Yes, you will,” I said. “Stay More isn’t enemy territory. Why are you here, when you ought to be invading Japan?”

  He stared at me as if he might even have been asking himself the same question. Then he said, “Sore yori kore-ga yoi to omoi-masu.”

  “’Scuse me?” I said. Polacek’s Bronxese I could figure out, but not this.

  “I said I think this is better than that, that being here in Stay More is better than being in Japan. I said it in Japanese.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “You don’t look Japanese.”

  He laughed. “Nor do you, Donny. But I’m told you’re the skibbiest of all the local Nips.” I must have screwed up my face in puzzlement, for he took the trouble to explain what “Nipponese” meant and to say, “I’m teasing. ‘Skibby’ is derogatory slang, originally meaning a Japanese prostitute who consorts with Occidental men but by extension it now means any Oriental man or woman.”

  “What’s an ‘accidental man’?” I wanted to know. It sounded daring, like a man who couldn’t control all the exciting episodes that befell him.

  “Occidental,” Lieutenant McPherson corrected me. “Means the western hemisphere, means us as opposed to the Orientals.”

  “So they”—I gestured in the direction where my friends were waiting—“must have told you all about the Axis and the Allies.”

  “I couldn’t get a word out of Willard Dinsmore about it,” the lieutenant said. “He’s a brilliant commander and strategist. If the real Japanese had a few generals like him, they wouldn’t be losing this wretched war.”

  “So who told you?” I asked.

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Okay. Did whoever told you also tell you how our schoolteacher, Miss Jerram, this very morning put a stop to us being Axis and Allies?”

  “I know about Old Jarhead,” he said sympathetically, “and I’m sending a detail with shovels at nightfall to finish the burial.”

  “That’s nice. What’s a detail?” He explained that word to me. I was expanding my vocabulary by leaps and bounds. “You’re not keeping us till nightfall?” I asked.

  “I hope not,” he said. “It depends on you.”

  “Me? How come?”

  “Samuel Coe showed me his mark, his brand, his ‘A.’”

  “How’d you get him to do that? And what’s it got to do with me?”

  “I could require you to strip naked right now,” he said, with assurance. “And you’d do it. But I’m not going to. I don’t think you’re hiding anything, except your feelings. You really are inscrutable, you know? That’s good for a newspaperman…but not always so good for a young boy. So tell me. Why didn’t you report the Allies’ branding of Sammy in your little newspaper?”

  “It wasn’t none of their business,” I declared.

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “All the grown-ups,” I said. “Sammy’s daddy would totally exterminate the Allies if he knew about that.”

  “So you exercised your prerogative as editor to censor the news?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And likewise you did not give any coverage to the attempted abduction of Gypsy Dingletoon in the Battle of Dinsmore Trail.”

  “Wow. You know a lot!” I couldn’t conceal my admiration for his interrogative skills.

  “And might I presume,” he went on, “that you aren’t even going to report the funeral of Old Jarhead?”

  “Maybe not,” I admitted. “I haven’t really decided.”

  “So it’s time for you to make some decisions,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to make a real big one: to honor my request that no news of our landing gets into your paper.”

  “Heck,” I protested. “Probably everybody in town saw you come down.” I did not mean to make a poem, and the rhyme embarrassed me.

  “But only you and your friends out there know that we survived the wreck and burning of the glider.”

  “Why does it have to be such a big secret?”

  “Himitsu to himitsu-ni suru,” he said. “If you will promise me to keep our presence he
re strictly a secret, I will tell you one or more of our secrets.”

  “Such as? You could start off with telling me why you picked Stay More to invade.”

  “We didn’t pick it. We don’t even have terrain maps. My men out there”—his hand swept the area—“don’t even know where we are. But I assure you we are not invading Stay More. We are not hostile.”

  “Then how come you-all fired at Ella Jean when she stood up?”

  “Are you ready for the first of the many secrets I’ll swap you for your secrecy? Will you promise me not to print anything in the Star about us?”

  “Not ever? Not even after the war is all over?”

  His expression became wistful, as if I had suggested the possibility that the war would eventually end, but he might not even be around to see it. Then he spoke quietly, “Donny, there will come a time, soon, I can’t tell you when because I don’t know myself, when you can have an exclusive on a really hot story. You can scoop the big dailies. And I’ll help you all I can with that, in return for your promise to keep everything quiet until I tell you.”

  The prospect excited me. He was talking my language, journalism. I wanted to ask him what he thought of the late Ernie Pyle, but that could wait. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I promise. Nothing in the Star until you tell me.” I offered him my hand, and we shook on the deal. “Well?” I said, waiting. “So what’s the first secret you’re gonna tell me?”

  There was nobody anywhere near earshot, but he scooted his chair closer and feigned a conspiracy between us, hiding his mouth behind his hand and lowering his voice. “The bullet fired at Ella Jean,” he said, “was a blank. Each of our rifles, shoju, is Japanese, and is not loaded with a shojudan, bullet, but with a kuho, blank. The machine gun, kikanju, is a Japanese 7.7 mm copy of the French Hotchkiss, or hochikisu kikanju, loaded with blanks. The BAR, or Browning, which they pronounce burauningu kikanju, is loaded with blanks. Our mortar, a Japanese Stokes, which they pronounce sutoku-shiki kyokusha hoheiho, won’t hurt anybody. And of course all our hand grenades are just shuryudan training grenades without fillers or fuses: they will shatter on contact and leave a blob of red paint on whatever they hit. We have quite a lot of antitank rifle grenades, juyo tekidan, that are projectiles which will hit the target and cover it with the red paint. Our flares, shomei, will light, and our radio, musen tsushinki, has working batteries, but all our ammunition is fake.”