The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

by Richard Hugo

  Three whores had set up shop in a pumphouse about a quarter of a mile from the squadron and had operated there for weeks. When the command discovered them, clued by the sudden breakout of VD in the men, it took photos before throwing them out, and pasted the pictures on placards which were posted on the squadron bulletin board. The caption read “The Pumphouse Trio” in big printed letters. Then under the photo of the three wretched-looking creatures, a sarcastic diatribe congratulated the American G.I. on his taste in women. The poor prostitutes looked so scroungy I imagined one might contact VD just looking at the photo.

  Italians seem to remember subjects of gossip no matter how old, and Vincenzo picked up as I told him and the driver about the whores. The word for pumphouse was beyond me, but torre d’acqua was good enough.

  Soon we were approaching the site. The farm buildings we had used for group headquarters and the squadron mess hall were still intact. My wife knew we had found it, and she murmured, “Oh, dear” and started to cry softly. I never understood how she knew. I’d never described it to her nor had I given any sign of recognition.

  There they were. The squadron mess hall on the corner. The courtyard that had been our outdoor theater where Joe Louis, the only celebrity to visit, us, walked through the crowd of G.I.s who were yelling, “Hey, Joe. Want to fight?” and stood on the stage, his huge hands reaching nearly to his knees because his powerful shoulders were so slanted. The group intelligence building. The group commander’s upstairs quarters, and below it the briefing room where we would sit very early in the morning and stare at the red ribbon on the map leading to the target. Silence when the ribbon led to Vienna and back (would we get back?), or to Munich, or Linz. Joking if it was a “milk run.” More often than not we heard our fearful silence as we stared at the map and listened to the briefing.

  The other buildings were gone, the squadron headquarters, the squadron intelligence building, the sheet-metal quon-set hut movie house and theater. Remember the marvelous Italian magician? The Italian jazz band that played famous American numbers and had the solos memorized note for note? Even the drum solo was Krupa, no variation from the original. The movie Bombardier, when Pat O’Brien said, “General, you’ll see the day when the pilot is only a taxi driver paid to carry the bombardier over the target,” and the riot that threatened to start when the pilots in the audience, who worked themselves to exhaustion flying formation for eight and nine hours each mission, began to scream while the bombardiers cheered? What was the name of that even worse movie where Noah Beery, Jr., home with wounds and recuperating on the sands of Santa Monica with Martha O’Driscoll, said with solemnity and resolve, “I can’t wait to get another crack at them,” and we yelled “Shit,” and “Fuck you,” and “Oh, my naked ass”? And wasn’t that a good build? Martha O’Driscoll’s? We whistled and stomped when she came on the screen in her bathing suit.

  Beautiful fields of grain now and recently constructed farmhouses nearby, a part of the Mezzogiorno program. I showed my wife where our tent had been, and I remembered a subnormal farm boy who brought eggs to sell. We teased him a lot. One of us would say, “New York.” And he would say, “New York fineesh.” He thought major American cities had been leveled by bombing, and we found his ignorance funny.

  Maybe because the day was bright, the grain a warm green in the wind, and the ground hard, I remembered Captain Simmons, the squadron supply officer who didn’t provide us with enough blankets, and the cold, wet winter of 1944–45 when we shuddered at night trying to escape into sleep from the cold. I wrote Grandmother and asked for a sleeping bag and she sent one. In 1964 I still had it, somewhere among our belongings back home. Simmons didn’t seem to do much but make excuses and bullshit a lot and hate Italians.

  A young G.I., maybe nineteen (I was twenty) knocked up a farm girl who lived near the base. Her father demanded the boy marry her and the boy wanted to. But Simmons intervened. “I’m not going to stand by and see that nice kid throw his life away on a goddamn eye-tie.” Simmons and some others had gone to the farm to “reason” with the father. I don’t know how they communicated with no common language, but Simmons bragged about knocking “the old bastard” around when he insisted on the wedding. “All that son-of-a-bitch wants is to marry his daughter off to an American so they can get in on some of our money,” Simmons explained with no self-doubt. A long time later, I knew enough about the southern Italian peasant and the power of religion in that life to realize what a sad business it had been. On bad days, Italians were our enemies.

  And it was here where the grain now grew that Squadron Commander Joel O. Moe of North Dakota knocked on each tent door one afternoon and drunkenly announced that he would demonstrate the correct way to slide into third base. No grain then. Only unrelieved mud. And in his fresh uniform, while we stood in front of our tents, Major Joel O. Moe came running down the sloppy road between the two tent rows and hit the mud in what must remain baseball’s longest and filthiest slide and we applauded and called him safe.

  The mess hall was now a school operated by two nuns who had been little girls in Cerignola during the war. Had they begged me once for candy and cigarettes? They gave us strega and cookies and we spent a warm hour there. Later I would try to do the experience justice.

  Tretitoli, Where the Bomb Group Was

  Windy hunks of light, no prop wash, bend

  the green grain no one tried to grow

  twenty years ago. Two nuns run a school

  where flyers cursed the endless marmalade

  and Spam, or choked their powdered eggs

  down throats Ploesti tightened in their dreams.

  Always phlegm before the engines warmed

  and always the private gesture of luck—

  touching a bomb, saying the name of a face

  spun in without a sound at Odertol.

  Hope to win a war gets thin when nuns

  pour strega in a room where dirty songs

  about the chaplain boomed. Recent land reform

  gave dirt to the forlorn. That new farm

  stands where I would stand in the afternoon

  alone and stare across those unfarmed miles

  and plan to walk them to the yellow town

  away from war, disguised in shepherd black.

  That pumphouse hid three whores for weeks

  until disease began to show.

  Now, no roar. No one sweats the sky out

  late in day. No trace of squadron huts

  and stone block walls supporting tents.

  Those grim jokes. The missions flown

  counted on the plane in cartoon bombs.

  Always wide awake toward the end

  when the man came saying time to fly,

  awake from dreams complete with mobs,

  thick clubs and slamming syllables of hun

  I couldn’t understand, trapped behind

  cracked glass somewhere deep in Munich

  I had never seen, waiting for their teeth

  to snip me from the drunken songs of men.

  We drive off. Children wait for class.

  Grain is pale where truck pools were,

  parked planes leaked oil or bombs were piled.

  The runway’s just a guess. I’d say, there.

  Beyond the pumphouse and restricted whores

  where nuns and shepherds try to soar by running,

  arms stuck out for wings against the air,

  and wind is lit in squadrons by the grain.*

  Not good enough. I should have given it more time. The last six lines in the third stanza refer to a recurring nightmare I suffered the last weeks before we left for home. That face spun in at Odertol was a young man named Sofio from Chicago, a bombardier, eager to be friends. His pilot’s name was Martin, and the crew seemed doomed from the first. They crashed once on takeoff and survived. Another time, separated from the formation in a plane crippled by flak damage, they were hopped by three ME-109 fighters and would not have lived had not four P-51
fighters from the only Negro fighter squadron in the theater of operations shown up to rescue them. Only two of the American planes bothered to attack the Germans. The other two hung back in reserve above a cloud. The blacks were hot pilots, and two were enough to route the Messerschmidts. We watched it from the formation.

  Because I was a warm, friendly man (still am, I guess), I was sometimes mistaken for a homosexual. Sofio was warm and friendly, too, and years later when I remembered this, I caught myself wondering if he had been homosexual. I was too sexually naïve to consider those matters when I was twenty. Whatever his sexual leanings, he was a likable young man. He died at Odertol near the Polish border, nailed by centrifugal force to the interior of a B-24 that would never pull out of the tight spin down five miles of sky. I remember the Messerschmidts shooting into the bomber even after it was hopelessly locked in the spin. I remember my terror that day, the unbelievable number of German fighters that struck during the eight minutes we were left unprotected by our own fighters on the bomb run because those who took us up there for the long haul had to turn back to avoid running short of fuel, and my certainty we would be killed. We had crashed only a week before—miraculously the full load of gas and bombs hadn’t ignited. That was our first mission following the crash and it was hardly one to rebuild our confidence. I was so frightened that day that the sight of Martin and crew spinning into oblivion remained immediate and vivid long after the fear was in the past. It is still vivid. Sofio. Why did I think of him that day in 1963 in Tretitoli? I didn’t know him well. Maybe because in a world of men he remained, like me, a boy, and I sensed that. Like me, he had not developed the cold exterior expected of men in those times.

  Our losses were terrible. The wing must have lost at least 30 percent, the highest we suffered that late in the war. And no publicity because it happened on December 17, 1944, the same day the Battle of the Bulge began.

  One German fighter had come into the formation, and instead of shooting and pouring through had put the nose up, like putting on the brakes, and hung in full view like a hesitant bird. Our tail gunner, Tony Cartwright, said it was like a target in a shooting gallery. He, no doubt with help from other gunners in our six-ship box, blew it apart. He speculated that the pilot was a woman, given the timidity of the unexpected and fatal maneuver. We had heard rumors that German women were flying fighters that late in the war. We gave each other congratulations on the ground, loud, wild, laughing congratulations for being alive. We did not mourn those who hadn’t come back. We were too happy to have made it ourselves.

  I remembered the dark green man from the gunnery shed who had to be flown to Bari for hospitalization. Our co-pilot flew him there. His wife had sent him a “Dear John” letter. He could do nothing about his loss but dwell on it until it was too much and he blew his stomach open with a .45 he had just repaired.

  I remembered that only a day or two after we arrived we were called to a meeting of officers in squadron headquarters where we heard the squadron commander deliver an incoherent speech about formation flying. He ended this chaotic diatribe by assuring us that he was a good guy and if any of us would just have a drink with him we’d realize just how good a guy he was. A week later he was sent home, a mental casualty of the war.

  I remembered a co-pilot from Tennessee who came into our tent and sobbed because his crew had crashed trying to land in Vis and some were dead. He had stayed behind and claimed that if he’d been there to help the pilot, it would not have happened. And I remembered his pilot when he came back weeks later, his face so disfigured I barely recognized him.

  And Charlie Marshall. Sweet, bullshitting Charlie Marshall from Texas. He had some bad luck, a couple of crashes and other narrow escapes. The Germans shot his plane up bad one day over Vienna. By holding the stick back as far as he could he managed to stagger over Yugoslavia and bail everyone out. He came back limping and pale two weeks later, having been rescued by Tito’s partisans. His leg was injured in the jump, but he was pale from the slivovitz the partisans forced on him morning to night. He also had had a frightful time talking the partisans out of shooting his co-pilot. Since the co-pilot’s name was Gross and since he didn’t drink, the partisans suspected he was not an American.

  All flying was voluntary. You could quit whenever you wanted and all you lost was your flight pay. We didn’t quit because of social pressure, fear of what others would think, and the fear of ending up in the combat ground forces, although that was a remote possibility. Charlie Marshall had had it and he quit. “Hugo,” he said to me, “for every man there’s a limit. There are pilots with 30,000 hours in the air. They haven’t reached their limit. Maybe they never will. But for old Charlie Marshall, it’s nineteen hundred and twenty-six hours.” He had acquired about 1,700 hours as an instructor before he was transferred to combat.

  They threatened Charlie with court-martial, but he knew his rights and held firm. Finally, they offered to fly him to Naples where he could catch a boat home. “You’re not flying Charlie Marshall anywhere,” he assured them. How I admired his resolve. Finally, they had to drive him across Italy in a truck. We watched him wave from the truck when it pulled out. He was grinning and very much alive, and I had the feeling he would be very much alive for a long time.

  Nothing would do but that we lunch at the home of the driver, Vincenzo’s friend. It was a house I’d passed many times on the edge of Cerignola twenty years before. Now: screaming children silenced by screaming parents. Tripe and wine. A long afternoon. Why did you come back? I don’t know. Are you still flying? No. No. That was just the war. I’m a poet now. No. Not famous at all. Just one book published. Another taken. Rich? Hardly. What did I do in America? Worked in an aircraft factory. And what do you do? What we can. Drivers sometimes. Drivers, today. No. I will not go back to the aircraft factory. When our money is gone we must go home and find jobs. Yes. Cerignola is much better now. No beggars. No bad odors. Lots of young men. Lots of grain in the fields. And it is all beautiful now, all much better now. That back there, that war. That was a terrible time. Troppo tensione. Troppo miseria. Troppo fame.

  Vincenzo drove us back to the hotel. Could we stay longer? No, we were taking a bus that afternoon to Bari. I was feeling the wine as we rode through the wide streets of Cerignola.

  Reputation? I came from a town with a bad reputation too, just like the reputation Cerignola had in Puglia. What the hell does it mean? Look at the warm, friendly time we had had at lunch, the long afternoon of hospitality. How do nice people get in a war? People like Sofio or Charlie Marshall? How does anyone? Could this be the place we ridiculed and sometimes feared and came to with hard feelings, yelling at children who begged us for food, trying to scare them away? Troppo miseria is right. That’s what the Neapolitan cabbies say about Naples and that’s what I say about the whole damned world. And what the hell can we do about it but hope we are born again, next time better. I didn’t know how good the poem would be but it would be honest and I would like it because it wouldn’t be any tougher than the human heart needs to be.

  April in Cerignola

  This is Puglia and cruel. The sun is mean

  all summer and the tramontana

  whips the feeble four months into March.

  It was far too tense. Off the streets by five.

  Flyers screaming begging children off

  and flyers stabbed. The only beauty

  is the iron grillwork, and neither that

  nor spring was here when I was young.

  It used to be my town. The closest one

  for bomb-bomb boys to buy spumante in.

  It reeked like all the towns. Italian men

  were gone. The women locked themselves in dark

  behind the walls, the bullet holes patched now.

  Dogs could sense the madness and went mute.

  The streets were mute despite the cry

  of children: give me a cigarette. But always flat—

  the land in all directions and the time.

/>   I was desolate, too, and so survived.

  I had a secret wish, to bring much food

  and feed you through the war. I wished

  you also dead. All roads lead to none.

  You’re too far from the Adriatic

  to get good wind. Harsh heat and roaring cold

  are built in like abandonment each year.

  And every day, these mean streets open

  knowing there’s no money and no fun.

  So why return? You tell me I’m the only one

  came back, and you’re amazed

  I haven’t seen Milan. I came in August

  and went home in March, with no chance