by Robert Lowry
He dozed off finally. The conductor had to wake him to get his ticket.
The conductor looked at Red’s ticket, then looked at Red. I must look funny, Red thought, with this swollen jaw.
“Where you going, soldier?” the conductor asked.
“I’m goin to Elder, Tennessee,” Red said.
The conductor’s smile was sarcastic; he glanced around at several other passengers to bring them in on the joke.
“Well, you’re sure going a funny way to get to New Orleans,” the conductor said. “This train is bound for Los Angeles.”
Red just looked at the conductor. The conductor meanwhile was punching the detective-story fan’s ticket.
“I can fix it for you to get off at the next stop and catch the train going the other way,” the conductor said.
“When is the next train?”
The conductor looked at his watch. “Next train at . . . 12:32 A.M. tomorrow.”
Red began to figure quickly. If this was the right train, he thought, I’d have one day at home. But this ain’t the right train and I won’t have any days at home so there’s no sense going on.
“I’ll just stay on this way,” Red said.
The conductor punched his ticket, gave him part of it back, and went on up the aisle.
He sat for a long time looking out of the train window without seeing anything. He felt the thirty-thirty shell in his pocket. I can mail it to him, he thought.
After a while he went out on the platform. There was a bunch of other soldiers out there and they gave him a drink from their bottle.
“Just gettin back from a furlough?” one fat soldier with a great mop of black hair asked.
“Yeah,” Red said. He turned his face away so they wouldn’t see it.
•
THE WAR POET
HE HAD SO MANY big tobacco-stained teeth hanging out of his mouth that you thought he must own about a dozen more than any other living being—and all of them twice the average size. The fact that there was an enormous hunk of guy built around these teeth didn’t alter the impression at all: they were the biggest teeth in the entire camp, maybe even in the whole world. His chin receded and seemed to set back about an inch under them, and whenever he was around, you had to stare at him, stare at that perpetual grin of his, exposing incisors that made everything else about that massive stoop-shouldered awkward guy pale accessories.
Even with his clothes off here in the shower building he gave the same appearance. He was lathering himself good, working up the soap in the sandy hair under his arms, and jabbering about something to the two smaller guys, Pack Reed and Silent Byers, both airplane mechanics who’d been overseas in Africa and Italy for two years like “The Grin.” That was what the other GIs, searching for humor in this dull mudpuddle of an airfield in Italy, called him. “The Grin.” He didn’t seem to resent that. He just showed more of his teeth when they said it, and everybody thought he was smiling.
“I got a chance to get home in six months,” he was saying, “at the rate they’re sending guys home. They’re sending a half per cent a month and we’ve got close to two hundred guys and there are ten guys got more time than I have. So it’ll take about six months the way it’s going. Maybe they’ll step it up.”
Pack and Silent weren’t listening to him; they were discussing earnestly the Italian girl they’d picked up in Foggia last Sunday. The squadron had divided itself up into cliques, like a girls’ school, as a way of enduring the leveling communal life, and since The Grin didn’t live in the same tent or work on the same crew with Pack and Silent, they weren’t concerned with him.
“Oh, she wasn’t a bad piece,” Pack was saying. “Only my idea is if you pay a broad ten bucks she ought to be something pretty good, not some dirty bitch like her.”
“What do you want?” Silent said. “What do you expect to find up in Foggia, Hedy Lamarr?”
“Yeah,” Pack said.
“I never go up town no more,” The Grin said. “I haven’t been up town now I guess for two months.”
“What do you mean?” Pack asked, for the first time paying attention to him. “What do you do, just sit around here?”
“What’s there up town but the Red Cross and a movie?” The Grin said. “We got movies out here. I don’t like Red Cross doughnuts. I got a chance to get home in six months and that’s all I’m waiting for.”
“That’s what you think,” Pack said, winking at Silent. “I hear they’re cutting out rotation. They lost so many men in France they’re scrapping rotation and transferring about 200,000 Air Corps guys into the Infantry.”
The Grin stopped lathering and stared through the steam at him. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Read it in Stars and Stripes,” Pack said, inventing fast. “I think some general said it.”
The Grin lifted one of his big fleshy legs and began to wash his foot. “I don’t believe they can do that,” he said slowly. “It would hurt morale too much.”
“They not only can do it,” Pack said, “they’re doing it.”
“I don’t see how they can,” The Grin said slowly. “I don’t believe they can. I’ve got to get home.”
“So do I,” Pack said.
“I’m twenty-three years old,” The Grin said. “I’ve got to get home and make something out of myself.”
Pack and Silent looked at him incredulously. He was such a simple-minded, honest kind of galoot and the corny things he could say, like “make something out of myself,” completely staggered them. He didn’t bother to keep up a certain standard in the camp for sneery fast GI jargon.
“What do you think you’re going to make out of yourself?” Pack asked. With that face, he was thinking.
The Grin put down his left foot and lifted up his right and washed it slowly. He was very serious now and not looking at Pack and Silent, who were both doing a lot of looking at him. His upper lip almost closed over the big teeth, he was so serious. Then very softly and without glancing up The Grin said, “I’m going to be a poet.”
Pack and Silent just looked at him.
“Do you write poems?” Silent asked at last, quietly.
The Grin was washing between his toes. He’d never let this out to anybody in the camp before and it was hard for him. “I wrote two poems the eight months we were in Africa,” he said, almost reverently. “I tried to write a poem last night, the first poem since we came to Italy.”
“Were you a poet before you got in the army?” Pack asked.
“I wanted to be one,” The Grin said. He still didn’t look at them. “I first started wanting to be one when I was in high school.”
“You mean you really wanted to be one?” asked Silent, to whose adding-machine mind such an ambition was practically unbelievable. “Or did you just write poems for class like everybody else had to?”
“When I was seventeen,” The Grin said, looking away from them and stopping his lathering altogether now, letting the water run down his great meaty back, “I left home. I lived in Clearwater, Kansas, and I went to Chicago. I’ll tell you, I tried it for three months. But then the groceries ran out and I had to go to work in a meat-packing plant. I carried sides of beef around till I damn near died.”
“What did you try for three months?” Pack asked him.
The Grin turned his weak, close-together eyes on Pack. “I tried writing poetry,” his frog mouth said quietly. “I sent a poem to a magazine and waited weeks to hear about it. Then I wrote them a letter but they didn’t answer. So I went on writing them letters and finally I got an answer from a woman named Elsie Ford Annilimater: she said they never received my poem. I wrote and enclosed a couple of other poems, but she just sent them back with a note saying how sorry she was. I never will forget her name. She was in New York.”
“That was pretty discouraging, I guess,” Pack said.
“Since then,” The Grin said, “I always make more than one copy of the poems I write. I make one copy for myself and one copy for the magazine an
d one copy I send home to my mother for her scrapbook.”
Pack and Silent were looking at The Grin in breathless amazement.
“How many poems has your mother got in her scrapbook?” Pack asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“I guess she’s got almost twenty now. I’ve thought up lots more poems, but I was always too tired to write em down when I came home from work. Working in a meat-packing plant is a lot of work.”
“You mean you worked there till you got in the army?”
“When I knew I was going to get drafted any day I went home to see my mother for a week. But I worked there all the rest of the time—over three years. I learned quite a lot at that place. I know all the cuts of meat.”
“Did you write a poem about them?” Pack asked.
The Grin was holding his face right up into the water now, but he took it out long enough to say, “Yeah, I did. I just wrote a poem about all the bloody meat. Sort of description.”
“Hell, you oughta be up at the front with all that experience with meat,” Pack said, and Silent laughed.
The Grin didn’t say any more until they were out of the shower and getting dressed. “That’s what’s wrong with me now,” he said. “Last night I tried to write a poem, but it didn’t turn out like a poem at all. It’s the first one I wrote since I been in Italy.”
“If you’re going to be a poet,” Pack said, “you oughta write more poems. Isn’t that what a poet’s supposed to do, write poems?”
The Grin looked at him gravely. “How can I write poems now?” he asked. “Every time I sit down to write a poem I’ve been thinking about, all of a sudden I think, ‘Somebody is being killed right now. And here I am writing a poem.’ So I tear it up. It was always some description, like of a peaceful farm or people going to work in the morning in Chicago or something. How can you think of things like that when somebody’s getting killed?”
“What about this poem you wrote last night?” Pack asked. “Have you got it around? I’d like to read it.”
The Grin fumbled in his shirt pocket. He pulled out a piece of PX tablet-paper on which was some childish handwriting, decorated with doodles and figures around the margin. “I’ll read it to you.” He scanned it quickly, as if he wanted to see what it was all about himself first, and then in his cracked, slightly lisping voice he began. “I Cannot Write a Poem Tonight!” He looked up at Pack and Silent, who were staring at him intently.
“What did you say?” Pack asked finally.
“That’s the title,” The Grin explained. He moved the paper so that the weak electric bulb would shine on it and continued:
“People are being killed everywhere tonight.
Millions are cold, hungry and without homes.
Guns are exploding all over Europe. Death
is coming to many people. They don’t know why.
“Soldiers are shooting at each other.
The soldiers are Americans, English,
South Africans, Poles, Germans, Austrians,
Italians, Brazilians, Czechs, Russians,
“Yugoslavs, French, Norwegians. Some of them
are dying. Some of them are hurt. They are
killing each other tonight. Why should I
write a poem?”
The Grin looked up. His face was blank. Pack and Silent could do nothing but stare at him.
“Is that all?” Pack asked.
“No,” The Grin said. “Do you want to hear the rest of it?”
“Sure,” Pack said. “Let’s hear the rest of it.”
The Grin rattled the paper and started in again.
“My name is Andrew J. Purdy. I am a
soldier in Italy. I will not be
killed because I am in the Air Force
ground-crew. I feel guilty.
“I feel guilty because I will not be killed.
I am well-fed. I am far behind the lines.
I will go back to America alive. I feel
guilty because I will not be killed too.
“I feel guilty because I want to write poems.
I feel guilty because I am clean, not dirty.
I feel guilty because I am whole, not blown in two.
I feel guilty because I have not killed anybody.
“I feel guilty because I am a man.
I feel guilty because I do not hate the enemy.
I feel guilty because I do not believe in the war.
I feel guilty because I am not guilty of anything.
“I cannot write a poem tonight.
Too many people are dying and I feel too guilty.”
He stopped and carefully folded up the piece of paper and shoved it into his pocket.
Pack and Silent couldn’t take their eyes from him.
But he avoided their looks and became very interested in tying his shoes.
Then Silent said, “That don’t sound like a poem at all.”
Pack said, “Are all your poems like that?”
The Grin didn’t say anything. He was busy tying his other shoe.
“Come on, quit your kidding, that ain’t a poem,” Silent said.
The Grin looked up at him now. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “That’s why I called it ‘I Cannot Write a Poem Tonight!’ ”
“Are you going to send that one to your mother?” Pack asked sarcastically.
The Grin reached in his pocket and brought out the piece of tablet-paper again. He stared at it for a moment, then began tearing it into many little pieces. He opened the lid of the oil stove and threw the pieces in.
•
THE WOLF THAT FED US
I. PFC JOE HAMMOND
PFC JOE HAMMOND braced himself as the three tons of American Army truck swung around the corner out of Caserta and onto Route 7 bound for Rome. There were twenty guys in the truck, all of them American GIs except three Englishmen and one Italian. The Englishmen looked a lot alike, lean small fellows in uniforms that were too big for them. All three sat up very straight, with their legs crossed. The Italian was pulling with long appreciative drags on a cigarette Burt had given him. Joe looked at Burt and laughed.
“You look like a real combat troop, amico,” Joe said. “You oughta see your mug. Can you really see daylight through all that dust?”
“I’m gonna keep it there till I get to Rome and sell it to them for their penthouse victory gardens,” Burt said. He lit a cigarette and pushed his fingers through his blond hair.
Joe looked at that intelligent face with the wide calm blue eyes, and thought how much he liked the guy. He was glad he was going to Rome with him. He was glad he was going to Rome with anybody. He began to feel an urgent excited way he hadn’t felt since that hitchhiking trip he’d taken when he was seventeen, long before first a job, and then the army, had settled him down. He remembered the crazy elation he’d always experienced on coming into a big city he’d never seen before, like New York or Houston; the speculation his brain had always gone through on what would happen to him there, where he’d stay, whom he’d meet, what kind of a job he’d get for a couple weeks before he moved on. He hadn’t ever felt this way in the army before. He’d been overseas fifteen months without a furlough, and there’d been nothing exciting about going anywhere with the part of the army he was with. He smiled when he thought of the army. He remembered way back two and a half years ago when, after being drafted and dressed up to look something like an American private soldier, he’d waited his turn and been interviewed by a weak-chinned GI clerk who never looked him in the eye. “What did you do in civilian life?” the clerk had asked. Joe told him he’d put in a year as a police reporter on a Chicago paper. “You can type then?” the clerk had suggested, his mind working in army channels. “Yeah, I can type,” Joe said. So the clerk had written Typist on his official qualifications card, and for fourteen months he’d worked in a typing pool, copying over memoranda, and orders. He’d finally been transferred to the Public Relations Office, and now he was overseas with a photo r
econnaissance wing finding out how it feels to live in the medieval setting of an Italian village like San Cialo for a year, with no place to go for amusement except the Red Cross with its scratched phonograph records, the bars with their lousy liquor, and the movies. No women, that was the main gripe. No women at all. He laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” Burt asked.
“I was laughing at things in general, such as the army.”
“I can’t get amused,” Burt said. “It hurts my side when I try to get amused about the army.”
“That’s because you’re married. I always heard it puts wrinkles on both sides of the mouth, when you mix marriage and army.”
“Marriage is a wonderful thing if you can work at it,” Burt told him. “I always liked marriage till I got overseas for a year and didn’t have the chance to investigate it every night.”
Joe laughed again and braced himself as the truck cut out around a two-wheel cart. He looked back. The man of the family was riding on the cart, whipping up the donkey, while his wife and three children trotted along barefooted beside it.
“The sights you do see,” he said to Burt.
“Don’t worry, you’ll see some sights when you get to Rome,” a towheaded staff-sergeant sitting across from him put in. “When you see the women to choose from in Rome you’ll think you hit paradise.”
“You been there before?” Burt asked.
“I was there two months ago, in July—that was just after we took it,” the staff-sergeant said. “Had to go up for a week and photograph all the monuments so we could show the world we didn’t damage em with our air raids. Took me about two days to get the pictures and after that all I did was shack. And what I mean, shack. I never seen a place like that before. Women like that.”
Joe leaned out of the truck, trying to catch the name of the bomb-shattered town they were coming to. It was Littoria. He looked at Littoria. At what was left of Littoria. A swallow passed over their truck like a strafing Thunderbolt and Joe wondered where the swallow had been hiding out four months ago when all hell had been raging around Littoria. The Italians had already come back to their smashed-up little town and were living among the ruins, breastfeeding their numberless bambinos, selling tomatoes and onions to each other here in the square, keeping happy on their vino. People looked pretty wonderful to Pfc Joe Hammond as he rode by in the big army truck. Fascist people, democratic people, or just people, the kind these were. The Italian people were a strong people essentially; they showed signs of surviving even Mussolini and the Flying Fortress. But all people are strong people essentially, he thought, amused at his need to make platitudes.
