A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  “Uh … what? You talking to me?”

  It was Lieutenant Cherry.

  “Uh … yeah, I guess so. Sir.”

  “Just thought I’d drop by. See how you guys were makin’ out.”

  The steam clouded up the lieutenant’s glasses. Even his gleaming silver bars were misty. He moved down past Gasser, who waved at him with his ladle, and we toiled on.

  During the next break, one of the other KPs, a short Mexican Pfc from an Engineering company joined our little group. His name was Gomez and he had the smell of Regular Army about him, crafty and laconic.

  “Hey, Gomez,” Gasser said between mouthfuls of powdered scrambled eggs, “what do you guys do in your outfit?”

  “We’re Engineers.”

  Gomez was one of those guys whom you have to prod continually to get anything at all out of.

  “Yeah, but what do you do?” Gasser kept on prodding.

  “What the hell do you think we do? What do you think the Engineers do?”

  Gasser thought about this solemnly for a moment. Finally Ernie chipped in with his two cents:

  “I almost got assigned to the Engineers out of Basic. But I got the Signal Corps instead.”

  Gomez, sensing a slur, shot back: “Well, y’can’t win ’em all. Some guys are lucky; other guys are just dumb.”

  We rocked back and forth on our haunches in the steady rumbling silence for a while, until Gasser, swabbing out his mess kit with a chunk of bread, continued our listless investigation of the life and times of Pfc Gomez, Engineer Corps, USA.

  “Gomez, I don’t like to pry but I am very curious about what your unit does. Now take me and my sweaty friends here. We are in Radar. By that I mean we are in a unit that gets no promotions, no stripes whatsoever. We just get a lot of shocks, and fool around with soldering irons and crap like that. And …”

  Gasser knew what he was doing. Radar men were universally looked upon by the great mass of real soldiers about the same way that the Detroit Lions evaluated George Plimpton.

  “Shee-it,” Gomez said, “don’t tell me about Radar. I got a cousin in it, a goddamn fairy. He has to squat to piss.”

  Ernie cleared his throat and counterattacked: “Listen, Gomez, we had nine guys in the hospital last month alone, all with the clap.”

  Gomez picked his teeth casually with a kitchen match. “Probably give it to each other,” he muttered.

  God, I thought, would I like to turn Zynzmeister loose on this bird.

  “Okay, you guys, let’s get movin’. Here they come.” The sergeant banged a spoon loudly on the stainless steel as once again the devouring swarm of human locusts engulfed us, eating everything in their path, leaving behind desolation and bread crusts.

  By now all of us had broken through that mysterious invisible pane of glass that separates dog fatigue from what is called “the second wind.” A curious elation, a lightheaded sense of infinite boundless strength filled me. I whistled “Three Blind Mice” over and over as I maniacally ladled my beloved gravy. Me, the Gravy King.

  “Three blind mice, see how they run …

  Three blind mice, see …”

  For the first time in my life I really looked at gravy. In the Hemingway sense, gravy was true and real. My gravy was the most beautiful gravy ever seen on this planet, brown as the rich delta land of the Mississippi basin; life-bringer, source of primal energy. How lovely was my gravy. It made such sensual, swirling patterns as it dripped down over the snowy mashed potatoes and engulfed the golden pound cake with its rich tide of life force. I wondered why no one had ever seen this glory before. Was I on the verge of an original discovery involving gravy as the universal healer, a healer which could bind mankind together once they had discovered that the one thing that they had in common was my lovely, lovely gravy? Maybe I should wander the earth, bearing the glad tidings. Salvation through gravy. Gravy is love. God created gravy, hence gravy is the Word of God. More gravy, more gravy is what we all need!

  Yes, it is such thoughts as these that surface when the mind sags with fatigue and reason flees.

  “Hey, you on the gravy.”

  It was the mess sergeant yelling from the other end of the car.

  “Yes?” I heard myself replying. “I am the Gravy King.”

  “Not any more you’re not, Mack. You and your buddies are going into the other car to take over Pots and Pans. Now get movin’, let’s keep it movin’.”

  With sorrow in my heart I laid down my trusty gravy ladle and the three of us, trailing sweat, struggled into the next car. It was like leaving purgatory and entering hell. Murky, writhing figures, moaning piteously, stirred great vats of bubbling food. Others squatted in the muck, peeling great mounds of reeking onions. The heat was so enormous that I could actually hear it, a low pulsating hum. A buck sergeant wearing skintight fatigues cut off just below the hips herded the three of us through the uproar to the far end of the car. Three guys armed with hoses spewing scalding water and cakes of taffy-brown GI soap capable of dissolving fingernails at thirty paces and long-handled GI brushes struggled to clean what looked like four or five hundred GI pots. The buck hollered at the three:

  “You guys are relieved. Get back to the other car, on the double. You’re gonna relieve these guys on the serving line.”

  The three pot-scrubbers, all with the look in their eyes of damned souls out for a dip in the River Styx, dropped their brushes and swabs and without a sound rushed out of hell, unexpectedly pardoned.

  “Oh, Mother of God,” Gasser mumbled as two sweating GIs appeared carrying more dirty pots, which they hurled on top of the pile.

  Thus began a period of my existence which has haunted me to this day. From time to time, when driving late at night, my car radio will inadvertently pick up Fundamentalist preachers who thunder warnings of mankind’s approaching doom and hold out promises of indescribable hells. I clutch the wheel in sudden fear, because I have been there.

  The oatmeal pots are the worst. GI oatmeal is cooked in huge vats which become lined with thick burnt-concrete encrustations of immovable oatmeal matter. Oatmeal is even worse than powdered egg scabs, which are matched only by the vats used to concoct mutton stew.

  Through the long hours Ernie, Gasser, and myself struggled against the tide of endless pots. The GI soap had shriveled my hands into tiny crab-claws, and my body was now beyond sweat. Even Gasser had fallen silent. Ernie, poor Ernie, had entered the last and crucial phase of his approaching ordeal.

  Curious thing about the truly deadening menial tasks: great stretches of time pass almost instantly. When you approach the animal state you also begin to lose the one characteristic that sets us apart from the rest of the earth’s creatures, the blessed (or cursed) sense of Time. Anthropologists tell us that truly primitive man had no sense, to speak of, of the passing moments. The more civilized one becomes, the more conscious and fearful of the passage of time. Maybe that’s why the simple peasants live to enormous ages of a hundred and thirty years or more, while astronauts and nuclear physicists die in their forties. To the three of us, amid the scalding water and searing soap, there was no Time.

  It is for this reason that I cannot honestly say how long our trial lasted. For all I know, it might have been a century or two. Maybe ten minutes. But I guess it to be more on the order of forty years. It ended suddenly and totally without warning. The buck brought in three more victims, and we were sprung.

  Like our predecessors, like hunted rats, we scurried out, back to the serving car, which now seemed incredibly cool and civilized. The car stood empty for the first time. Only the mess sergeant, alone, lounged casually against his stainless-steel rack, smoking a Camel. All that remained of the torrent of food was a simple aluminum colander piled high with apples. The sergeant blew a thin stream of Camel smoke through his nostrils as he smiled in benevolence upon us.

  “You guys did good, real good. You kept ’em movin’. How ’bout an apple?”

  I grabbed an apple with my crab-claw and bit in
to its heavenly crisp coolness, its glorious moistness, its …

  It was at that moment that I became a lifelong apple worshiper. I have often thought since of becoming the founder of the First Church of the Revealed Apple.

  We milled a bit, chomping on the McIntoshes.

  “You guys can go back to your company any time you want now. If you’d like to hang around here and cool off, be my guests. And remember, you ain’t gonna pull KP for at least sixty days. How does that grab ya?”

  The three of us, dressed only in our brown GI shorts, heavy GI shoes, and salt-encrusted dog tags, were flooded, each of us, with a sense of release. We had done a rotten, miserable, mountainous, incredibly rugged job and battled on until it was actually finished. “Hey, one of you guys help me with this goddamn door. The bastard sticks.”

  The sergeant was struggling with a vast sliding panel that formed part of the wall of the car. Gasser grabbed the handle and the two of them slid the door back. A torrent of fresh air poured into the car, flushing out the old cauliflower smells and the aroma of countless mess kits and gamy socks.

  “Would you look at that!” Gasser cheered. “The world is still there.”

  Ernie hitched up his sweaty underwear shorts higher on his bony hips and the three of us surged to the door to watch the countryside roll by. The air was crisp and cool, yet tinged with a faint balminess. Hazy purple hills rolled on the horizon. Short scrub pines raced past the open door. The four of us, including the sergeant, were the only people on this sealed train–with the exception of the engineer and maybe his fireman–who were looking out at the beautiful world. The sergeant chain-lit another Camel.

  “Any of you guys want a cigarette?” He waved his pack in the air. None of us smoked.

  “Look, I ain’t supposed to open this door except to air out the car, so if anyone asks you, that’s what I was doin’.”

  I bit into my third apple and gazed up at the fleecy white clouds and the deep blue sky. The train was riding on a high raised track. The rough gravel walls of the embankment slanted steeply down to the fields below. A two-lane concrete road paralleled the track as it ran through farm fields and patches of pines. We were moving at a fair clip.

  “Hey, Sergeant,” Ernie asked, “where the hell are we? What state is this?”

  We had been on the road for what seemed an eternity. The sergeant peered out at the landscape.

  “Well”–he paused and took a deep drag—“if you was to ask me, I’d guess that we was someplace in Arkansas. Now that’s just an educated guess.”

  “Arkansas!” Gasser said, and edged toward the door to get a closer look. “That’s the last place I’d a’guessed.”

  The three of us watched a battered old pickup truck loaded with bushel baskets roll along for a while below us. The pale face of a girl peered up at us. A man in faded overalls and a railroad engineer’s cap sat next to her, driving and puffing on a short fat cigar. We rode side by side for many seconds. She gazed at us; we gazed back. I waved. She glanced quickly at the mean-looking driver and then back at us. She waved timidly, as though she were afraid he might see her.

  “Gee, that’s a real Arkansas girl.” Ernie sat down on the floor of the car with his legs hanging over the edge in the breeze.

  “That’s the first Arkansas person I have ever seen.” Gasser and I sat beside him. Now all three of us had our legs hanging out over the racing roadbed. The girl in the truck glanced uneasily at the driver. She looked maybe thirteen or fourteen.

  “Hey, do you think they are real hillbillies?” Gasser asked with great wonder and curiosity in his voice. He was from the West Coast, where hillbillies were something seen only in Ma and Pa Kettle films.

  She continued to stare up at us. The old truck trailed blue smoke as it roared along. The three of us, who had not seen a female human being for many months, found her incredibly magnetic. Her long black hair trailed in the wind and billowed around her pale sharp features.

  “You think that guy drivin’ the Dodge is her father?” Gasser asked rhetorically. The sergeant, a man of the world, one who had seen all of life stream past the open doors of his mess car, said in his flat voice:

  “Ten to one that’s her husband.”

  “Ah, come on, you’re kidding.” Ernie found it hard to believe.

  “Listen, you guys, in these hills it ain’t nothin’ for a fifty-year-old man to marry a twelve-year-old chick. What they say is, around here, ‘If she’s big enough she’s old enough.’ A virgin in these parts is any girl that can outrun her brothers.” He flipped the butt end of his Camel neatly over our heads and out into the wind.

  Silently the three of us watched the truck as it suddenly turned left into a gravel road lined with scraggly pines. It disappeared behind us in a cloud of dust. Ernie craned his neck out further into the slipstream to catch a last glimpse of the disappearing Dodge.

  “Y’know, she was kind of cute,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Yep. She sure was, son.” The sergeant was in a thoughtful expansive mood. “They all are in these hills. Eatin’ all that fatback and grits must do som-pin to ’em. Lemme tell you one thing, and you listen. Don’t you ever say nothin’ like that ‘she’s cute’ business around any of the men in these hills.”

  Gasser looked up from his rapt contemplation of the speeding gravel.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every one of these shitkickers carries a double-barrel twelve-gauge Sears Roebuck shotgun in his pickup, for just that purpose alone. I’ll bet that bastard would have blasted you quicker’n a skunk. He wouldn’t think twice about it. Any sheriff around here’d probably give him a medal for doin’ it.”

  “Hey, you guys, we’re slowing up.” I had noticed that gradually the train had been losing speed. The embankment was even higher here than it had been further back. The concrete road looked miles below us. I looked forward. Ahead, the long sealed train curved gently to the left like a great metal snake. Big green hills, vast vacant fields, and a few scraggly shacks trickled away to the horizon. There was some sort of trestle with lights and tanks a half-mile or so ahead of the train.

  The sergeant looked over my shoulder to see what was going on. “We’re probably stoppin’ to take on another crew, or some water or som-pin.”

  Gradually, the train eased to a stop. For the first time in hours we did not sway. There was no rumble of trucks on the roadbed. We all sat in silence. The three of us sitting on the door sill, our legs hanging out over the gravel, enjoyed the bucolic scene. Birds twittered; a distant frog croaked. In the bright blue sky high above, a couple of chicken buzzards slowly circled.

  At that precise instant events were set in motion that none of us would ever forget. It was Gasser who lit the fuse. Leaning forward so that his head extended far out into the soft, winy Arkansas air, he said:

  “Do you guys see what I see?”

  Ernie and I craned forward and looked in the direction Gasser had indicated. Down below us, far below us, was a dilapidated beaten-up old shack by the side of the concrete road. It looked like one of those countless roadside hovels that you see throughout the land on the back roads of America which appear to be made entirely of rusting Coca-Cola signs. It was deep in weeds and oil drums, but above it, swinging from a sagging iron crossbar, was a sign that bore one magic word:

  BEER

  There are few words that mean more under certain circumstances. All the thirst, the hungering insatiable throat-parching thirst earned during our sweaty backbreaking twenty-four hours of KP engulfed the three of us like a tidal wave of desire. Gasser, his tongue hanging out, dramatically gasped:

  “Beer! Oh, God Almighty, what I wouldn’t give for just one ice-cold, foamy, lip-smacking beer!”

  Through the window of the shack we could see, dimly, a couple of red-necked natives happily hoisting away.

  “Listen, you guys, I’m goin’ forward to the can. You can leave for your company any time you care to. I’ll see you guys around.”


  The sergeant disappeared from our lives forever. We were alone. Authority had gone to the can. The devil took over. I leaped to my feet.

  “Listen, I got a couple of bucks in my fatigue jacket hanging right over there back of the table. I am prepared to buy if one of you is prepared to go and get it.”

  I scurried over to my fatigues and quickly brought back the two bucks. Already I could taste that heavenly elixir: ice cold and brimming with life. Beer! Real, non-GI, genuine beer!

  Ernie looked at Gasser; Gasser looked at Ernie. We were one in our insane desire for a brew.

  “Okay, you guys,” I hissed, “guess how many fingers I’m holding up.”

  Gasser barked: “Two.”

  Ernie, his voice trembling with emotion, said: “Uh … one.” He had sealed his fate. It was the last word we ever heard him utter.

  “You’re it, baby,” I cheered, and handed him the two bucks. “Get as much as you can for this,” I added.

  Ernie grabbed the money and leaped lightly over the edge and down the steep gravel slope, his feet churning. He half-slid, half-ran down the long incline. We could hear the disappearing sounds of tiny gravel avalanches as he headed toward the shack. Ernie, like the two of us, was wearing only his sweat-stained brown GI underwear shorts, his GI shoes, and dog tags.

  “Oh, man, I can taste that Schlitz already!” Gasser thumped on the floor in excitement with his right fist. “Yay, beer!” he cheered.

  Below us, Ernie had entered the shack. We caught glimpses of his naked back through the window as the transaction was under way. Heads bobbed. Ernie glanced up at us and smiled broadly.

  Seconds ticked by and then, without warning, the faint voices of shouting trainmen drifted back to us from far forward. At first I did not grasp their significance.

  It has been wisely said many times that all of us are given clear warnings of disaster, but few of us bother to read the signs. Gasser peered toward the rear of the train.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled, “I never realized how long this bastard was.”

  The train stretched behind us almost to infinity, all the windows sealed against prying eyes, lurking enemies.