Something About a Soldier - Charles Willeford

by Charles Willeford

  Forever!

  It was best not to dwell upon this aspect of the job, but my mind would get around to it by midafternoon whether I wanted to think about it or not. By two or two-thirty I would have cut or burned myself at least once, my back would be aching, and sweat would be flowing from every pore in my body.

  Then, in spite of myself, I would start to think about Wheeler, wondering what he was doing, where he was, what he was thinking about, and worrying that he would think about what an awful job he had left here and would decide not to retum from his ninety-day furlough. And if he didn't come back, I would remain here in this horse-shoeing shack, day after day, for three years, shoeing eight horses a day until my enlistment was up. Of course, I thought Wheeler would be a damned fool to desert the Army. The Army rarely looked for deserters because it was too expensive to do so, but all the same, if he ever got into some kind of trouble with the law and was fingerprinted, it would come out that he was a deserter. Then, whether he was convicted of some civilian crime or not, he would be turned over to the army for a ourts-martial.

  As a rule, deserters were only sentenced to six months, served four and a half months, and then were returned to duty. But all four and a half months in the guardhouse were bad days, and they would have to be made up before the man could be discharged. Meanwhile, when a man was a deserter, he couldn't get a government job, not even at the post office during the Christmas holidays. A good many men deserted, or went A.W.O.L. from time to time (less than a ninety-day absence was just A.W.O.L. time), but they usually came back by themselves. Their conscience got the better of them, I suppose.

  One day an old guy came onto the post and turned himself in at the guardhouse. He was in his late seventies, and he had deserted from some old fort in Montana that had long since been dismantled and plowed under. He had deserted, he told the sergeant of the guard, because he didn't want to fight Indians. This old man wasn't courts-martialed; the regimental commander gave him a "deserter's release" and sent him on his way. But it just went to prove that sooner or later a man came back, even from the Indian wars. I tried to take some cheer from this case, and I thought that because Buffalo was so cold Wheeler would get tired of it and come back to California, where it was warm. But all those miles, three thousand miles each way, and perhaps more, and Wheeler without a dime . . . maybe he was trying to hitchhike back now? Or maybe he was frozen to death in some field in the Midwest, having been hit by a truck at night on the highway, and no one would ever iind the body? Or he would starve to death in Buffalo, or get killed in a barroom fight, or get lost somewhere in the middle of Kansas? I didn't even know what he looked like. No one in the stable gang had a photograph

  of him.

  "What kind of guy is Wheeler?" I asked Socky one day.

  "He's all right," Socky said.

  "What kind of guy is Wheeler?" I asked Wild Horse.

  "He did his work," Halkins said.

  Socky and Halkins were not into character analysis, but I wanted some kind of personality picture so I could make up my mind one way or another about Wheeler. If he didn't return, I would finally make P.F.C. I would be the official third horseshoer instead of being in the limbo I was in now, and then I could look forward someday to becoming the second horseshoer, P.F.C., fourth class specialist.

  Then, when I had four years' service, I would get five percent fogy pay tacked onto the forty-five dollars. But in order to make second horseshoer, Socky would have to make stable sergeant, and old Sergeant Bellows had at least ten more years to go before retirement. Socky, as a P.F.C., third class specialist, had said many times that he didn't want the headaches that were attached to a sergeant's stripes. He was happy in the horseshoeing shack, with his twelve years of service and fifteen percent fogy pay. He had nothing to gain as a sergeant except prestige.

  So even if I made P.F.C. and officially became the third horseshoer, I would still be at a dead end. Hell, I still might be better off as the dining room orderly. The D.R.O. could make himself a pork chop sandwich anytime he wanted one, and his work, despite the seven-day week, was clean and simple, and during the winter months he was in a nice warm mess hall instead of out riding around in the rain. Because my mind wandered, I had accidents too often.

  My fingernails, despite my gloves, were all broken. I had cuts and gashes on my arms and legs from nails being ripped across the flesh as a horse jerked his foot away from me. I had small burns from red-hot shoes, and my feet had both been stamped on by irritable horses. The toenail on my right foot was black, and I knew that I would soon lose this nail. Two-Spot Sally, a big black mare, had bitten me on the left shoulder, leaving a sore bruise the size of a baseball. But I couldn't complain about these accidents because Socky and Wild Horse still got hurt occasionally too. It was an occupational hazard. We worked in close quarters, and some horses simply didn't want to have new shoes. So sometimes we had to rig a sideline to give them to him anyway. A horse must have at least three legs to stand up, so if you rig a sideline and pull one of his legs into the air, he can't kick out with one of the other legs without falling down. When a horse's name came up on Socky's roster to get shoes that day, that fucking horse had new shoes before the day ended. Regardless. But a recalcitrant horse (there weren't all that many, happily) could take us two hours to shoe. 'I'hat's why instead of having Wednesday afternoons off like the rest of the troop, we shod four horses on Wednesday aftemoons too.

  When I finished paring and rasping a foot, and decided it was ready, I would call Socky over. Invariably he would take my paring knife or rasp away from me and work on the foot-a little longer before getting the shoe from the anvil. This was irritating to me, because the fine adjustments he made were so minor I couldn't tell the difference.

  He rarely did this with Halkins, although he would use Halkins' rasp once in a while, too. Then one day, after more than a month, he looked at a hoof I said was ready, nodded once, and handed me the new shoe. I had, at long last, got the hang of it. He didn't compliment me because the foot was supposed to be ready when I called him over, but for me the day was a minor triumph. After that I was even more careful, and the times for minor adjustments by Socky did not occur so often. Then something subtle happened between Socky and Halkins. None of us talked too much at work, but there was always some light banter between Socky and Halkins. Suddenly there was none. Socky, one morning, brought his little radio to the horseshoeing shack. He put it on a shelf next to the forge and turned it on low. I could barely hear it, but then when Halkins said something to him, Socky said that he was listening to the radio and that he couldn't talk and listen to the radio at the same time. With the bellows and the forge going, plus the hammering he did on the red-hot shoes at the anvil, I didn't see how Socky could hear the radio at all, turned so low, but his abrupt anger stopped all conversation. They had certainly fallen out over something or other, but I didn't know what it could be.

  Then, the next Sunday morning, right after I had mucked out my stalls, Socky came up to me in the aisle.

  "You like to take a little ride this afternoon, Will?"

  "Sure."

  "Okay. Bring your gloves and a pair of fatigue pants. We'll leave right after chow."

  I wore my suit, but not my necktie, which I had rolled up and placed in my jacket pocket. Socky wore his gray flannels, a white shirt and tie, and a twiggy tweed hacking jacket. In his civilian clothes Socky resembled a successful dentist, except that not many dentists have alower lip filled with Copenhagen snuff. We climbed into his Model A and drove down the hill. After we got through Monterey and Socky headed toward Castroville, I asked him where

  we were going.

  "To shoe a couple of horses."

  We rolled through Castroville and then took a secondary blacktop road for several miles through the brown hills before Socky turned in at a large farm. We parked by the barn. Socky got his portable forge and the bellows out of the back seat and his canvas bag of horseshoeing tools. There were two huge draft horses in the ba
rn. I took off my coat and shirt and slipped my fatigue pants on over my good suit pants. Then I pulled the shoes on the first horse. These were enormous horses, with feet like platters, but they were gentle animals and didn't give us any trouble.

  When we had almost finished the first horse, the owner came out of the farmhouse, watched us fora few minutes, and then told Socky to come up to the house when we were finished.

  After we cleaned up at the outside spigot in front of the barn, we put on our shirts and jackets and started toward the farmhouse. I headed for the front door, but Socky said, "No, let's go around to the back."

  "I'm not used to going into houses by the back door," I said.

  "But he wants us to," Socky said. "His wife usually fixes something to eat, and he gets offended if we don't eat."

  "Then he can be offended by me," I said. "I'm not going to eat in the man's kitchen."

  But after Socky knocked on the back door, and the farmer let us in, I calmed down. There was a large breakfast nook next to the window, and it was obvious that the family ate its meals in the kitchen. They weren't trying to put us down by making us come in through the back door.

  They were decent farm people and simply didn't know any better. Socky introduced me as Mr. Willeford, and I found out that the farmer's name was Kenmore.

  "There's a Kenmore Amis on Santa Barbara Avenue in L.A.," I said. "It isn't your apartment house by any chance, is it?"

  Mr. Kenmore laughed. "Lord, no," he said. "I haven't been down to Los Angeles since nineteen hundred and twenty-four. "

  Mrs. Kemnore, who was about a decade younger than her husband, placed a bubbling hot apple pie on the table. She brought a pitcher of milk to the table, which was already set for four, and held a plateful of sliced cheddar cheese. Socky, Mr. Kenmore, and I sat down, but Mrs. Kenmore poured coffee before sitting with us.

  When my tum came I helped myself to a piece of pie and two slices of cheese, but waited until the others were ready before I dug into it. It was great apple pie, and the cold unpasteurized milk was a perfect complement.

  "Where's Mr. Halkins today?" Mrs. Kenmore asked Socky.

  "I don't know," he said, "but he won't be working with me anymore. He's getting married."

  "How nice for him," she said. "Help yourself now, and take another piece, there's plenty."

  That's when I found out that Wild Horse Halkins was getting married, but I held my questions until I got outside.

  Socky and I both ate a second piece of pie, and when we left, Mr. Kenmore handed Socky eight one-dollar bills.

  When we got into the car Socky gave me two dollars, and I put the bills into my wallet.

  "What's all this shit you were telling Mrs. Kenmore about Wild Horse getting married?"

  "It's true. The sonofabitch sneaked around behind my back, got permission from Sergeant Brasely to see the captain, and the captain gave him permission to get married. He's already rented himself a used trailer at a trailer park in the Dunes."

  My first thought had been, "Who in the hell would marry Wild Horse Halkins?" But before I said anything, and thought for a moment, I knew that there were always some women who would marry someone like Halkins, or anybody else who asked them. But I still had to drag the rest of the story out of Socky. I knew already that they had fallen out over something, but it seemed unreasonable to me that Socky should be so bitter about it. What difference did it make to Socky if the dumb bastard got married?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AFTER WE GOT BACK ON THE ROAD, SOCKY TOLD me that Halkins had written to his older brother in Missouri, and that his brother was sending him out a bride—a virgin.

  I laughed. "That doesn't seem possible, to get a bride sight unseen, just like that."

  "It's possible all right," Socky said, tightening his jaw. "Halkins already sent the bus fare to his brother. As he told me, 'If a man can't trust his brother to send him a bride, who can he trust?' "

  "He might get a virgin all right," I said, "but she'l1 probably be well past the childbearing age."

  "No, I don't think so, Will. His brother wouldn't do that to him. But chances are good that one of her legs'll be shorter than the other from running in circles around the mountain. You want to get a piece of ass? There's a place in Castroville I know about where it'll only cost a

  dollar."

  "Sure."

  The place Socky drove to wasn't in Castroville. It was a wooden shack under a live oak tree about three miles south of town. The big live oak was the only tree to be seen for a mile or two in any direction, and we had to take a dirt road through fields of blooming artichokes to get to it. The girls were Mexicans in their early thirties who did a little whoring on the side when they weren't working in the fields. Socky took his inside the shack, and I took mine over to a big tractor tire that was under the oak tree. For what she did and the way that she did it, the one I had was worth much more than a dollar. I gave her the two dollars I had made shoeing horses with Socky. After all, shoeing two horses on a Sunday was found money. If Socky stayed pissed at Halkins, he might take me along with him again. I had a hunch he wouldn't stay sore at Halkins very long; they had been friends for too many years.

  ***

  I LEARNED SOMETHING VALUABLE THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON. Shoeing horses had an economic value, which was something I had never considered before. I could not, as yet, take a cold shoe out of the barrel, heat it, and shape it to fit a horse's foot, but I knew I would be able to in time, if I stayed in the horseshoer's shack long enough.

  Once I learned how to do that, I could go out and find my own customers. With all of the farms on the peninsula and over in the Salinas Valley, there were a lot of horses to be shod. I only had about six weeks now before Wheeler came back—if he came back—and for my remaining time I was going to watch old Socky more closely. Hell, if a dumb Polack like Sokoloski could leam how to shape shoes on an anvil, I knew damned well I could.

  ***

  NOW THAT THE WORD WAS OUT, WE TRIED T0 NEEDLE Wild Horse a little at night in the stable shack, kidding him about his mail-order bride. But somehow there was no fun in it. Halkins was too serious, and too worried about the outcome of the marriage himself. He wouldn't joke back, but he didn't get angry either. His long ugly face just got a little longer, and he refused grimly to respond. Socky, as I thought he would, got over being sore after a couple of days. After all, they had been friends for too many years, but they both knew, now that Halkins was getting married, that their relationship would never be quite the same as it had been.

  When Halkins wasn't around, however, the rest of us guys talked a lot about the upcoming marriage, and Halkins wasn't around much now after five o'clock. He was fixing up his old second—hand trailer in the Dunes, and he had also managed to line up a job for his bride as a counter girl at the ten-cent store in Monterey. She would be making twelve dollars a week for a six-day week, he told Socky and me, and with her new job, plus drawing his ration money, they might even be able to save a little money after expenses. (Married men, if they wanted to, could draw their ration money instead of eating in the mess hall, and that forty-three cents a day would bring in an additional twelve or thirteen dollars a month for Halkins.) Also, now that Socky and Halkins had made up, Wild Horse would probably resume partnership of the horses they shod on Sundays. During the last few years Halkins had undoubtedly saved some money. How much, no one knew exactly, except possibly Socky, but it had to be a lot because Halkins was frugal to the point of being stingy. A two-bit box l of snuff lasted him for three days, and he didn't drink or smoke. His only expense, outside of laundry and toilet articles, was his weekly one-dollar chop suey dinner. He would have to give up those dinners now, but he would also have a cook at home to fix them for him, if he wanted chop suey, and his wife could cook a lot of pork fried rice and bean sprouts for a dollar. After I thought about it, I realized that old Wild Horse would be able to live very well on what he had coming in each month. In fact, I wondered why he had waited so long to get ma
rried, especially when it seemed so easy for him to get a bride. But then, that depended upon what kind of a woman his brother sent him from Missouri. We were almost as anxious as Halkins to see what she looked like, so anxious, in fact, that all of us in the gang, except for the Clean Old Man, who never left the post, piled into Socky's car to go down to the bus station on Friday afternoon to meet Mary Elizabeth Tuttle.

  Halkins, wearing his freshly cleaned brown gabardine suit and his polished cowboy boots, drove to the bus station with Sergeant and Mrs. Bellows in the stable sergeant's car. Mrs. Bellows was there because she was the official chaperone. She would make certain that old Halkins would never be alone with his new bride until after they were safely married. When the bus came in all of us were lined up on the platform: Sergeant Bellows in uniform with Mrs. Bellows, who was all dressed up in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a flowered dress that made her look fatter than she actually was; Socky and me, both wearing our dark suits and ties; Baldy Allen in a suede sport coat with corduroy trousers; Milam Hampe in an electric blue suit and white shoes he had bought in a Chicano store in Salinas; and Halkins. Wild Horse was a little shy, with his unruly hair plastered down with Vaseline, and he was standing about three feet behind Sergeant Bellows, chewing on his lower lip, and probably wishing it was packed with Copenhagen.

  Halkins hadn't sent his bride-to-be a picture of himself, and he hadn't received one from Mary Elizabeth Tuttle, either. I guess that both of them were afraid of being rejected if they got a good look at each other in advance—even in a snapshot—so the suspense was almost breathtaking. Four Chicanos got off the bus first (Mary Elizabeth had had to change buses in Salinas to get to Monterey); then an elderly couple, probably shoppers from Pacific Grove who had gone over to Salinas; and then a whore named Ginger, from Cannery Row. I didn't know Ginger, but Baldy Allen and Milam Hampe did. She started to say something to Baldy, but he jerked his head guardedly toward Mrs. Bellows, so Ginger just nodded instead and