Time hung suspended amid the faint chirpings of crickets and the distant cawing of crows. Ernie’s head reappeared briefly in the window. He held up a large paper sack in triumph. And then it happened.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee …
Like the distant wail of an avenging banshee, our sealed troop train shuddered a long menacing evil creak as it slowly began to move. I grabbed Gasser’s arm.
“Gasser! We’re moving!”
Gasser wordlessly leaned out to see if Ernie was on his way. The gravel inched slowly past our hanging feet. We were barely moving. Gasser soundlessly waved his arms, hoping that Ernie would get the message. We couldn’t yell because at least fifty officers would have heard and known that we had done the one thing beyond all law, namely illegally leaving a top-security sealed troop movement. That’s firing squad stuff.
Suddenly Ernie appeared at the side of the shack. He looked smaller, shorter, as he struggled through the weeds, carrying his precious sack of beer. At first he didn’t seem to notice that the train was moving. Gasser and I both waved frantically. Already the train was gathering momentum.
“Oh, my God,” Gasser gasped. “Oh, my God! Ernie!”
Ernie broke into a frantic run. Through the quiet air we could hear the distant clank of beer bottles and the thud-thud-thud of his GI shoes. He angled upward along the steep incline, slipping and sliding as he ran.
“Ah, he’s got it made,” Gasser said with relief as Ernie drew nearer and nearer.
At first it really did look like there was no problem. Ernie pounded toward us, his right arm cradling the bag of beer like a halfback lugging a football. The train moved faster and faster, but Ernie was closing the gap. Then he hit a patch of loose shale. He slid down the side of the bank, his legs churning.
Gasser, clinging to the back edge of the car, extended his hand far out into the breeze.
“Ernie! Grab my hand! ERNIE!”
Ernie’s eyes rolled wildly as he struggled on. His left hand reached high, his fingers within inches of Gasser’s grasping mitt.
The engine of our train let go a long, moaning blast. I sometimes hear this in my sleep, ringing hollow and lost, like a death knell.
I grabbed Gasser’s knees to hold him in the car. “I’ll hold your legs, Gasser,” I grunted. “Grab him!”
Gasser leaned even further out over the racing gravel. I braced my feet on the floor, fear clutching my gut like an octopus. Gasser kept saying over and over again: “Oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ, Christ Almighty …”
Peering between Gasser’s straining legs I saw Ernie’s contorted exhausted face, his legs pounding weaker and weaker.
clink-clink-clink-clink-clink-clink …
The sound of his dog tags jingled with each painful stride.
… clink-clink-clink.
And then all three of us knew it. He was not going to make it.
Ernie was gone. But he pounded on, dropping further and further behind. He had become a tiny distant stick-man, naked and alone. He still clung to the beer.
The mess car was now swaying and rocking along at almost full speed. We both gazed outward at Ernie’s tiny figure, still hopelessly striding along down on the sad two-lane country road. The sun was going down over the distant hills. The sky had purpled.
As the faint clink-clink-clink-clink of Ernie’s dog tags receded forever into limbo, both Gasser and I knew without exchanging a word that we had been part of a historic moment. At the time, naturally, we didn’t realize that the Legend of Ernie would grow and grow until every enlisted man in the Signal Corps knew his name and would tell the story of the GI who was lost from the sealed troop train. Some, naturally, don’t believe he ever existed. After all, as a people we Americans prefer to believe that all heroic figures were frauds and shams. But I was there. I knew Ernie.
The train rounded a great bend. We entered the gloom of a high Arkansas valley. Gasser got to his feet. I followed. Without a word we donned our fatigues and headed back to Company K, men bearing a fear and a grief that few know in their lifetime.
As we inched our way through car after car, amid seas of alien troops, we held our own counsel. Back in The Georgia Peach, Company K lay sprawled, travel-stained by the long trip. Listless eyes gazed at us as we went back to our seats. I eased myself down into the scratchy mohair. Gasser glanced up and down the car before taking his seat. He whispered:
“Play it cool. Don’t tell ’em a goddamn thing.”
We sat, and for a moment we both feigned sleep. Lieutenant Cherry loomed over us.
“The mess sergeant tells me you guys did a real fine job, and I want you to know I’m proud of you, y’hear?”
He patted Gasser’s shoulder and moved on back toward the rear of the car where Ernie had once sat. Seconds later he returned.
“Hey, you guys, where’s Ernie?”
“Uh …” I beamed up at the lieutenant, wearing my Innocent face, the one that had gotten me out of endless hassles in the past. “Uh … gee, Lieutenant … hehheh … I don’t know. I guess he …”
Gasser chimed in, his voice sounding as phony as a latex fourteen-dollar bill:
“He must be in the latrine. Yeah, he must be in the latrine, Lieutenant, sir.”
“Fellows, the latrines have been locked up for over an hour for cleaning.”
The lieutenant, sensing trouble the way all good officers can, leaned forward and peered deeply into both of our souls, his silver bars gleaming with all the weight of the U. S. Congress behind them.
“Where. Is. Ernie?”
He waited, a long, pregnant wait. I knew it was no use. I felt Gasser sag in the seat next to me.
“Lieutenant,” I said. “Lieutenant, we lost Ernie.”
Lieutenant Cherry’s face aged ten years; his skin the parchment white of an old man. His glasses glinted in the yellow light of The Georgia Peach.
“You lost Ernie?”
Dumbly, we both stared up at him, terror-stricken. He repeated his plaint, his primal query:
“You lost ERNIE?”
Gasser, his voice sobbing a little like the air coming out of a deflating birthday balloon, squeaked:
“You see, Lieutenant, he … this … ah … that is, we … there was this stop and … we all wanted a beer, and there was this place, and …”
His voice cracked, his sentences were broken and incoherent.
Suddenly Lieutenant Cherry leaned lower. His voice came in a hush:
“Listen, you two,” he whispered tensely, “don’t you ever say a word to anyone about this. Do you realize I’ll have to sign a Statement of Charges if this gets out? It’s bad enough if you wreck a jeep, but to lose a Pfc from a sealed troop train!”
He paused, his eyes gleaming through his GI glasses.
“Don’t you mention a word of this. I’ll fix it somehow through Headquarters.”
He disappeared, his shoulders hunched with care. We never heard another word of Ernie in Company K. No one ever mentioned his name again.
There are times when I awake at 3 A.M. from a fitful sleep hearing the clink-clink-clink of poor Ernie’s dog tags. Ernie, lost forever in Arkansas, wearing only his GI underwear, forever AWOL, a fugitive from a sealed troop train. Is he out there yet, a haggard wraith living on berries and dead frogs? A fearful outcast? Does he know the war is over? That all wars are past?
The clink-clink-clink of Ernie’s dog tags says nothing.
I stared unseeing through my bug-spotted windshield, lost in a labyrinthine reverie, seeing the faces of the soldiers I had known from that star-crossed company of military maladroit misfits, a true Company of Fools. Elkins. Gasser. Nye, of the steel-trap mind, doing humiliating push-ups in the scorching sun while the duty corporal … what was his name? Barney? Bernie? No, BENNY. Travers. Yes, that was the bastard’s name. And poor Nye passing out from the heat, and never talking much afterward. And Goldwater. Jesus Christ, Goldwater, the bullshitter, who got four-foot-long kosher salamis sent from home while all we got was
busted cookies, and Warner, Pfc Warner, who never got promoted above that one measly little stripe in spite of his 165 IQ and his ability to play whole symphonies, including the horn parts, on the piano by ear. And the captain from The Citadel, who cried because somebody busted the mirror in the cigarette machine.
A roaring van pulled up alongside me in the right-hand lane. A bearded primitive, shirtless, hunched over the wheel. It hit me: I’ll bet Ernie never saw a van. All the other lost ones would never have suspected what a mad world we now live in.
I’ve always wondered why no real literature of The Road ever came out of America, a country that for at least three quarters of the twentieth century has lived on its turnpikes and toll roads. Maybe that’s why so much of Country music is valid poetry of our time: “The Interstate Is a’Comin’ Through My Outhouse,” “White Line Fever,” “The Carroll County Accident.” This stuff gets to the core of it.
I imagined a future sociologist lecturing on various aspects of The Car to future classes.
Sociology 101 (Hip Division)
Today, class, we are going to take up the brief study of one of the true curiosities of late twentieth-century American life, a substrata of the population which I shall herein designate as The Van Culture. There has not been much written about this in literature; hence I feel strongly that it is time to put it down for the record, a whole way of life that has evolved, quietly, without notice of the more official sociologists and compulsive categorizers of the American scene. It revolves around that homely product of automotive technology known generically as The Van.
The Van Culture, loosely speaking, is an offshoot of an earlier culture which I hereby designate the VW People. They bear little if any resemblance to The Camper Crowd, although there are some superficial, very superficial, points of resemblance. Obviously, their vehicles have some similarities, such as unwieldiness, bulk, and a marked tendency to flip in any crosswind hitting more than 20 mph in gusts. Also, both types of vehicle can be used for sleeping purposes and for lugging large crowds over the landscape. After that, the resemblances cease.
The Winnebago or Camper Crowd tends to be dedicated family types, somewhat overweight, highly conservative politically, extremely fertile, and usually middle-aged, regardless of their chronological age. They read the Readers’ Digest, Field & Stream, The American Legion Monthly, TV Guide, and can be heard any time of the day or night endlessly blabbing back and forth over their beloved CB radios, using such terms as “Code Seven,” “Ten-Four,” etc., picked up by watching “Adam 12” in reruns, one of their all-time favorite TV shows.
On the other hand, The Van People tend to be heavily bearded, dedicated lifetime subscribers to Rolling Stone, compulsive consumers of granola, and they often pride themselves on making their own yoghurt. Their social habits tend to a distinct aversion to marriage unless it is performed by a guru or a Navaho shaman standing knee-deep in the waters of Gitchee-Goomie while the assembled company bays in concert to the moon, evoking the Great Wolf God, which is guaranteed to bestow eternal happiness and good vibes forever.
In spite of the fact that a considerable number of them are now rapidly approaching their fifties, they remain forever nineteen. As for their political views, when they bother to vote at all they will cast their ballot for any black on the ticket, or, if no black is running, a woman. Their perfect candidate for any office would be a black woman, and ideally a black homosexual woman who once worked in the lettuce fields and has a strong dash of Cheyenne blood in her veins.
At this point, class, I feel it necessary to point out that I–personally–am making no value judgments, merely describing for the record some of the more significant movements of our time, the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Both groups, The Van Culture and The Camper Crowd, seem to enjoy plastering their respective vehicles with various bits of propaganda material designed to prove, apparently, to the world at large that the souls and hearts of the inmates of said vehicle are in the right place. It is in the actual contents, philosophically speaking, of the messages that the sharp divergence of the two cultures can be seen. The Camper Crowd is forever proclaiming proudly its married togetherness: The Murchisons; Al & Frieda Bugleblast; Betty, Bob, Ronnie, Bonnie, Donnie, and Rover. This is often accompanied by a frank admission of their home base, regardless of how dismal it may be. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, Teaneck, New Jersey, Frankfurt, Indiana, seem to be among the more popular locales. This is often accompanied in large block letters by the proud CB call sign: KFU 9768, apparently the assumption being that passing mobs of like persuasion would care to communicate, instantly, with Al and Frieda and presumably Bonnie Jean and Rover. They also enjoy proclaiming publicly their never-ending cheerfulness; displaying such bumper stickers as: Have a Good Day, Have You Tried Smiling? and often Christ Is the Answer or Honk If You Love Jesus.
On the political side, their stickers usually radiate suspicion of the world at large and often downright paranoia: Fight Godless Communism, Gun Control Laws Mean Only Criminals Have Guns, People Kill; Not Guns, and that all-time favorite America–Love It or Leave It.
On the other hand, The Van People are fond of plastering their equipment with such goodies as: Danger–I Brake for Animals (apparently on the assumption that the mean old Others are endlessly and maliciously bashing their cars into goats, pigs, elderly St. Bernards, draft horses, mud turtles, and other lowly creatures with which we share this planet), Have You Thanked a Green Plant Today? Boycott Lettuce (Grapes, California Tomatoes, Kohlrabi), War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things, and No Nukes! They, like their Camper brethren, feel compelled to advertise their political views through the medium of decals and stickers: Anderson–the Only Choice, Ban Hand Guns, Third World Power (Woman Power, Gay Power, Indian Power, Chicano Power, Granola Power).
The Van Culture shares with The Camper Crowd a compulsion to advertise its interpersonal relationships, although in a very different fashion. While The Camper Crowd seems to be very specific (Al & Frieda & the Kids), The Van Culture deals only in generalities (Love) (Peace), although just whom it loves or whom it is at peace with is never, ever specified (… I gotta keep my options open, baby).
The Van Culture appears to be, at least publicly, highly conscious of our environment. At any rate, that’s what its signs say: Don’t Pollute, Ecology Is for People and Dogs and Everybody, Honor Earth, Return the Earth to the People, No Nukes! These last seem to assume that vans don’t pollute while Pintos do, and that the diet Dr. Pepper that The Van Culture is forever swilling comes in more ecologically compatible cans than the Pabst Blue Ribbon that The Camper Crowd tends to guzzle.
Both groups have one overwhelming trait in common–they share intense self-approval. If I were less kind I would use the word “smug,” but since I’m a very kind person and am always considerate of the feelings of others and bear a total love for my fellow man (I should say fellow “person”), naturally, I cannot use this word. Future social historians, I firmly believe, are going to study the various strata in our society and their significance to the time by standards other than the old-fashioned class divisions such as economic, educational, racial, and ethnic.
All these lines are blurring rapidly, while such new social divisions as The Camper Crowd and The Van Culture are becoming more sharply defined. Incidentally, there is a newly emergent subgroup under The Van Culture that could be called The Used School Bus Tribe. I wonder what would happen to the drug traffic here in the United States if all vans magically disappeared in one puff of smoke. It is a little-known but highly significant fact that a vast percentage of quick drug buys are made out of vans. It truly could be said that a pusher who drives a van is, in fact, a Wheeler Dealer. This twist that the van has taken is somewhat ironic, since back in the early days of this type of vehicle it was first touted to the public with ads showing cool, well-educated mommies, social science majors all, obviously well-heeled suburbanites, vanning a crowd of well-scrubbed kids, off to the Li
ttle League, or camp, or whatever. Daddy taught Economics at a local junior college, wore thick glasses, religiously read the New Republic, and cherished his membership in the Adlai Stevenson I’m Proud I’m an Egghead club. These same apple-cheeked kids grew up to push smack out of an identical van from a parking lot outside a shopping center in Fort Lauderdale. This has nice overtones of the Theater of the Absurd.
On the other hand, The Camper Crowd has seen its beloved conveyance put to other than clean-limbed, nature-loving purposes. For example, a notorious string of Mafia-controlled bordellos operated very successfully (and in fact still do) out of a string of true Recreational Vehicles, complete with red plush interiors, brass spittoons, and in at least one case, a four-channel tape deck specializing in Turn-of-the-Century Whorehouse Piano.
The driving styles of both sects are as opposed as their philosophies. The Camper Crowd seems to be totally oblivious of any other machine on the road, ponderously rumbling with tanklike stolidity right down the exact middle of the turnpike. I have seen three hundred cars held up for hours by two or three strategically placed campers.
Naturally, there are exceptions in both groups and you’ll occasionally see a lunatic Winnebago driver careening along at eighty-five plus, reminding you of nothing so much as a runaway Cape Cod house on wheels with a baboon at the tiller, but generally The Camper Crowd’s driving style is as conservative as its politics.
In contrast, The Van Culture mostly drives its badly sprung, unstable, underbraked, high center of gravity, overloaded hulks as though they were so many Porsches. In fact, recently in a Howard Johnson on the Jersey Turnpike I got into a rap with a Jersey state cop who spends the days of his life patrolling the infamous NJP.
COP: Boy, I sure need this cup of coffee.
ME: How come?
COP: Me and my partner just pulled another crowd of van freaks outta the burning wreckage.
A Fistful of Fig Newtons Page 14
