by Robert Lowry
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
THE TOY BALLOON
THE CHURCH
LAYOVER IN EL PASO
THE WAR POET
THE WOLF THAT FED US
VISITORS TO THE CASTLE
THE TERROR IN THE STREETS
THE GOLD BUTTON
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949 by Robert Lowry. Copyright renewed 1976.
Reprinted by permission of Robert Lowry’s heirs.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com
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These stories first appeared in the following magazines and anthologies:
Madamoiselle, The Western Review, Cross Section, Spearhead and Story.
THE TOY BALLOON
THAT FIRST DAY of his three-day pass an eagle held them both, and when the train rolled into the San Francisco station and he saw her face through the window, all alive and wonderful and more beautiful than anything he could ever have remembered, he ran along the track beside her window waving his hand at her, till the train stopped. Six months, six months it had been since he’d seen her, and those days were like a dream. Two thousand miles away from her, in an army camp, getting tough and brown, being a soldier, training for the kill. Letters, letters, they were not enough. His picture of her, that was not enough. Her voice on the telephone, not enough. It seemed like centuries since he’d left her behind him in that little apartment in St. Louis and gone away to camp, traveled over the country with his unit, been tired and hungry on maneuvers in the desert, been made to see the real war coming closer like a storm, been forced to think of things like water and rest and warmth instead of her. But now she was here, out of the train, the journey over. Hello, hello, you darling, he said, and no better words would come. Six months married and six months apart. They both cried like kids. Then the eagle grabbed them in the taxi and held them, hurting, in the hotel room. Both of them cried and they were terribly happy and terribly hurt, and all night long the eagle held them in its claws and clapped its wings above their heads and carried them out of that hotel room over far frozen wastes, where they could be warm only in themselves, two small furry things lost and hurt beyond any tears.
The second day they woke up. Whatever time it was, it was morning. He put on his brown monkey suit and she laughed and laughed at him, being really surprised to see him in it. It fits over one eye, he said, and she was laughing at how funny and wonderful he looked, that big round face with the eyes crazy and set in deep. They walked on the streets till they were tired and aching and then he grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to say what had to be said, but they just stood dazed, their eyes welded together, and he felt such a fierceness toward her as he’d never felt before, and he heard the winds stirring, the storm rising, and he said, Let’s hurry, and he needed her in all the crazy grief of their lives, with a fury he’d never needed her with before. That night was the lovely night, and they felt the force of their lives for the first time. For the first time they knew what could come of themselves. They said almost nothing to each other, yet in all their actions it was like a cry: Let it come, let it be born, they cried, and they felt that it would come, fiercer and stronger than themselves.
The first day, when they were hurt and when they wept, the war was with them completely. It gnawed at their bones, it sucked them dry. It tore at them with its claws, driving them farther and farther into the wilderness until they knew what the answer had to be. To turn in to themselves. To do the magic thing and become completely alone in the big world. To weep no more, to be secret no more. To become fierce. That gentle small she, with green eyes and a mouth turned up at the corners, the roundfaced he with buried eyes.
The third day it came. Goodbye the war, he said, you have come home to me. Home is where we are, she said. I will bite you, I will eat you, he said.
Let’s prance around the room, she said. We are a parade; our names are Anna and Tom.
They did, they paraded in that small hotel room. This was their last day and it would be good. Tomorrow he’d be nothing again, a number to be checked at reveille, but this would be the good day.
This was the good day! It started in the morning with a dream that was short and like fire.
Did you know that you have ears? he asked, and she cried and laughed both at once.
I am an animal, she said, I should have ears. I should have legs too, and she held them up to him, and arms, and her arms were around him.
If you are really an animal you should have a mouth to bite me with, he said, and she bit him.
Could life exist beyond the tall hotel window when there was more than a world in here?
And then it came to him again, that which he had felt once before when he had first loved her. But now it was stronger and bigger, and he did not think he could contain it all. I will give to you, he said, everything. I will give you that round core which is I. The first time was nothing, this is the time for us.
Anna, he said, I want to give you everything.
Anna, he said, when she was so close to him that they were hardly more than one thing now. You will pardon me but I will have to go on a journey.
It made her laugh. But where are you going? she asked, because she knew. You cannot get away from me!
I will go without getting away from you, he said. I want to give you everything that’s mine. My squab, he said (and it was practically romantic all this journeying and she had to laugh), I must go now.
And then he brought it to her. Be here, she cried, be close and I will hold everything. The tallest buildings and the dirtiest streets. The blind and the hungry, the lost. All those in this world who cannot escape from it. The stink and the rot. The public pain everywhere. He gave it to her then. He gave her the war, the big war and the crazy death, all the little endings everywhere. A chopped and mangled battalion walked into her and she had to laugh and hold him.
It isn’t enough, she laughed.
It isn’t enough, she said—so he got the earth, the crazy fireball, he found a thunderbolt and gave it to her, a rainbow arc he probed her with, jagged lightning and broken glass. He gave that to her. He gave her the jolt of a freight-car’s shifting steel, the concrete wall the car smashed when it missed the curve that night, the electric spark that got our John (the reporters ran out right after and forgot to thank the warden). Forgive us, forgive us, the millions cried, and the flood surged over them—there were only waving arms. The prophet masturbating and sinking himself, leaving dung floating on the waves. A chained dog howling and a gun that blew his brains out. Now! he laughed. Is that enough?
Oh no, she said. Seven billion amputated arms and the gouged-out eyeballs of forty million children under ten are not enough. I will hold it all.
Never, never will it be enough, she said (the sun careened to the earth and killed us all); she laughed and cried and the room took off like a balloon on a voyage through the sky (the papers and the radios say we are lost and we hurry across the world dropping bottles of alcohol behind us); a cry that filled that room came from her throat and her eyes stared hard at him (the earth is a sphere, you know, and we hurry around it, arriving back upon ourselves).
And nothing, nothing, nothing will be enough, nothing will ever be enough; we go back to ourselves, the earth is round and we hurry across the world going back to ourselves. Do you see, he said. This is our last day and then we will die, but we have made it, we have made this day, we are here, we are ourselves all one, and I will give you nothing because we are everything...
(And the room fell down on the earth, like a child’s balloon landing, bouncing, and that room was very dark. All that they were and touched had changed to fur
, the softest fur—themselves, the bed, the air. Little love, he said, and stopped; there was nothing now to say or do or give....)
They came back along long lanes after rain, miles of them, with tiny houses hidden away behind dense foliage where mad and jolly people peeped out. That was the longest, longest trip of their lives, and they did not want ever to come home from it. A wet haze obscured them—large drops were suspended from the trees like tears. Those long lanes with the weeping trees and the peeping people were a sad and lovely thing, and they did not want this last time ever to end.
It was the clock that said goodbye to them, the ugly jangling alarm clock on everybody’s dresser. It jangled five times before he got up and shut it off. It said goodbye.
She did not awaken and he was glad. He dressed quickly in the soldier suit. It amused him to find his clothes fitted just the same, the pants too big around the waist and the cap too small. For he was something more now.
It was cold in the room. He kissed her on the forehead and went out. The elevator carried him down to the lobby. He did not see the man who worked the elevator, or the lobby, or the street.
He stood on the highway till someone picked him up and drove him fifteen miles to the army camp. He went into his barracks and in the dark changed into his fatigue suit. He sat on the side of the bed then, thinking nothing, waiting for the bugle to blow and the light to flash on and all these men to get up and prepare for another day in the world.
When he saw her again that evening she was powdered and pretty in her lemon dress with the red stripe around the bottom. Her mouth with the turned-up corners, her green eyes, her nose somewhat too long, suggesting a small fox, the braided hair wrapped round her head and her very dark olive skin. You, he thought. You. Only five feet high and looking quite like someone—you smell very nice.
They ate and talked and could not take their eyes from each other. But now it was gone. They were each to the other like someone in a photograph, someone loved but speechless, remembered but gone.
No, he thought, we’re just two people now—two actors who found their lives believable as characters on a stage, but who sit blinking their eyes foolishly at each other in an all-night café after the performance, their everyday selves too unreal to accept.
But it isn’t that way either, he said, looking at her so intensely with those deep-sunk eyes that she had to smile at him and touch his hand.
They did not say any more.
They had already said goodbye. That goodbye was long behind them, and tomorrow she would be gone.
She was only a simple small person. She had a small office job in a city two thousand miles away; all that was unimportant and yet she was going back to it.
They meandered through the streets of the town. Soldiers everywhere, the evening papers black with headlines. The war. What was the war? At a street corner one over-powdered stout old woman in a fancy black hat said to her friend, “I simply felt I had to go to church Sunday. You heard the President’s appeal for everyone to pray for our cause, didn’t you? I haven’t been attending at all lately, but I’d have felt like a traitor if I hadn’t gone Sunday. In times like these you’ve got to do what the President says.”
They stared dumbly at bright useless things the world held out to them from shop windows. They went down streets they hardly saw. He couldn’t stay with her tonight, he had to be at camp at twelve, and they walked, each separate in loneliness, already lost to each other.
They went back to the hotel, got the key mechanically at the desk, and rode up on the elevator. They were like two dolls a child has had at Christmas and forgotten.
They felt that they had lived a good deal of their lives and that now it was over. They were two people who meet again by chance after a great emotional farewell party.
Sitting on the bed together, they could think of nothing to say until the moment when he kissed her and stood up to go.
Oh, darling, I don’t want to go back, she said. I can’t bear to go back to nothing. If the war would only end tonight, if you didn’t have to...
He held her so tightly he hurt her and she squealed. He bruised her small mouth with a vicious kiss. He said that he would find her again.
And then he was gone. The elevator clattered open and let him on. A huge drum beat in his head and tears ran all over his face.
In the distance a churchbell was ringing. Twelve o’clock. He felt a need to run. He would be late for the war.
THE CHURCH
IF ONLY HER LEGS weren’t skinny. But it wasn’t that either. Yes, the other girls were different, Lupe knew that. Gracie, little and devilish and wanting all the boys just crazy about her, but taking what she could while she could get it. Myrtle, oh she loved Myrtle, but Myrtle was older and didn’t believe in anything except just one night at a time, and sometimes she would look at Myrtle, even in Herb’s Place, where everybody was supposed to be happy, and she would think how sad Myrtle was, and Myrtle would have moisture in her eyes.
Her legs were skinny, but she knew she was beautiful. She knew she had a perfect oval of a face with dark eyes that she could do things with under the long lashes, and she knew how to fix her heavy black hair with a white comb so it shaped itself around her face and made her interesting. But the best things were the earrings she’d bought for seventy-five cents at Carmer’s store: they were just large round gold circles, but she knew they were for her and she never went without them.
And yet she was not happy and she could not help but compare herself with the other girls. They were not alike: Gracie was little and cute and impish, and Myrtle was sad and older and didn’t care who it was, just so it was someone every night, and Lily was Lily, not pretty but quiet and nice. But somehow when she thought of them they were all together, not happy, yet each of them doing what she wanted. And over here was herself all alone and not doing what she wanted and somehow different from them. And sometimes she thought it was because she wasn’t beautiful enough all over. And she looked at her skinny legs in the mirror.
Or was it because they all lived together, those three, and she lived across town with her mother and father and her baby Ida Maria, two years old?
They lived in the church, those three. It had been a negro church, made of adobe and all crumbling, but now it was partitioned with wallboard, doorways cut out and purple curtains dropped over them instead of doors. And on the front of their church-house was an inscription carved in crude letters: THIS CHURCH BLD. BY REV. J. MATTHEW WASHINGTON, WITH ASST. OF, and then there were four other names. In bigger letters under this were the words: J. MATTHEW WASHINGTON, PASTOR. Funny that the three Mexican girls and Myrtle’s mama and Myrtle’s three little brothers and sisters and the old white cat Chi-Chi lived there. Lived in a negro church.
Lupe had been born in that Mexican-border town, and she had grown up in it. It was a little town, with one main street where the shops and theater were. Eight miles beyond was the copper smelter, throwing a blanket of sulphur-smoke over the town and over the desert round about.
When she’d been little, one Mexican kid playing with the other Mexican kids on her street, the town had seemed very big and interesting, and it had been an adventure to slip away up to the avenue and look in shop windows. Or beg ten cents and sit in the movie. Going to school and just living then. Having crushes on boys. Running around the town at night, her mother thinking she was at a girl friend’s house.
Why didn’t the town still feel like it had felt then? Now she only knew that she must go away. Why hadn’t she gone away when she’d had the chance? Everything was vague, and sometimes it seemed to her all she knew about her life was contained in the photographs she carried in her bag and showed to boys who took her out.
Her troubles had come with the troubles of the whole world, that’s the way it seemed. She’d married Art Arnez, a wiry, good-looking Mexican boy, during the first year of the war. Hard to say now why she’d married him, except that she’d been eighteen and restless to get out of her parents’ h
ouse. But if that was the reason, then she’d really been crazy, for she’d never moved from the house; instead he’d come there to live, and made her pregnant, and fought with her, and finally gone away and enlisted in the army. They didn’t even write to each other. Once he came home on furlough and showed her his girl’s picture. A new girl, in California. “How you like her? Not bad, eh?” Well, she didn’t care. It hurt bad but she didn’t say a word. “I thought you came to see the baby, not to talk to me,” she told him in Spanish. “Gonna have another new baby in California,” he answered, and that hurt too, but she didn’t say a word.
The baby was two years old, and that was the only time Art Arnez came and the baby didn’t even know him.
So after Art went away again she could not keep still. She knew she had to do something; she had to do it and change her life. Or she did not know what would become of her.
Lily and Gracie and Myrtle did the same thing every night and the same thing every day. They worked in restaurants in the daytime and went to Herb’s Place for dancing after work. They always ended up with soldiers at the table. And the soldiers danced them around to the jukebox music, played bottoms-up with the beer and tom collins, shouted at Patsy to hurry and bring more. Lily had an advantage over the other girls: she couldn’t speak a word of English, so she’d turn her head on one side and smile whenever the soldiers said anything. She’d shake her finger at them as if they were being naughty. They thought she was plenty cute and wonderful.
Lupe would go along with them and the boys would dance with her. She loved to dance, and she was good and glamorous to see dancing, wearing that mysterious smile on her face.
Sometimes a soldier would want to walk home with her. She didn’t care, she let him walk her home. But she made him stop at the corner for his kiss—then pushed away, for they were hot and pleading, these soldiers. And she would run around the corner into her house, undress quickly, and jump into bed with Ida Maria, putting her arms around the little kid and hugging her close.
