What About Reb

by What About Reb (retail) (epub)

  ‘She wasn’t the type,’ Reb said.

  ‘Cause she’s not a college girl?’

  Reb wanted to say because she was the kind who would have had it and put it up for adoption.

  ‘Should I call her up?’ he said.

  ‘Why not. All she can say is no, right?’

  ‘Wrong. The only chance you give a broad is to say yes and that’s what I have to figure out how to do with her now.’ To change the subject he said he’d call her that night. But there seemed little point to it and he never did.

  Vinnie came to Sunday dinner the next day and after it was over he and Reb and Soderini sat in the kitchen drinking coffee while Angelina hovered around the sink cleaning up.

  ‘All right, Ribelle. This time you see things you didn’t see before? Your eyes are open now?’ Soderini said.

  Reb glanced at Vinnie. Vinnie sat back in comfort, visibly brightening up. What was Reb going to answer? He wished he could tell his father about the farce of training, the way they let one man in each squad throw a grenade while everybody else looked on. Most of them would be in Korea in a month’s time. Reb wished he could tell Soderini that when you went out for the football team in high school they made you throw the ball a couple of thousand times, all for a game, but put a guy in combat where he’s risking his life and the only practice he gets is lobbing one or two dummy grenades.

  ‘You like how they make you salute the men up above you?’ Soderini asked.

  Vinnie laughed. Reb glowered. He never saluted. When he saw an officer coming he ducked or turned a different direction or dropped down and tied a shoelace. Anything.

  ‘And how about obeying the authority?’ Soderini said.

  The first seven weeks the company commander made them wear overshoes to build up their legs for the speed march during the final week when the whole company was timed carrying packs over a five mile course. But on the day of the timing the commander pulled all the consistent stragglers out and assigned them to kitchen work. That way his outfit came up with the best time. The bastard cheated.

  ‘Pa, when you say about the military do you mean the army?’

  ‘Of course. The same thing.’

  ‘Oh. Cause the way you talk they sound like two different things. You trying to say it’s degrading.’

  ‘Yes,’ Soderini said.

  ‘Go on then.’ Vinnie was treating it like a tennis match. Head going back and forth, back and forth. The shit. Soderini didn’t know the half of it. That platoon leader the first week at Devens, an ex-GI just called up from the reserves. He would march them to mess and fifty feet from the mess hall door, calling pla-toon halt, pla-toon dismissed, grin to see forty men break and run and pile up in the door like animals. Thirtynine. Reb would have died of hunger before letting anyone see him sprint to that door.

  ‘And the killing?’ Soderini said.

  ‘That ain’t an issue anymore. They can’t send me to Korea so I’ll never be put in that position. I’ll never have to kill anybody.’

  ‘But there’s the principle, porco dio. There’s still the question of principle.’

  ‘Emilio, lower your voice,’ Reb’s mother said.

  ‘Please, Pa. Stop trying to dictate my life with words. These principles all the time. Haven’t they caused enough bad feelings between us.’

  ‘Ribelle, can’t you see for what ends, for what purposes, the military is using you? Just because the war is over there don’t think you’re not a part of it. Even if you can’t go you free another man to go and that man is pulling the trigger.’

  ‘Pa, stop saying the military please. I’m not in the military, I’m in the army. US 51330435, that’s me, a number on a tag here.’ Reb yanked at his shirt front to indicate his dog tags but his dog tags were upstairs on his bureau. ‘When you’re a number they don’t tell you what their plans are.’

  ‘I said purposes.’

  ‘And I said keep your voice down.’

  ‘They don’t tell me that either,’ Reb said. ‘Far as I can make out they don’t even have any purposes.’ He shot a glance at Vinnie, looking for help. Vinnie’s eyes were on his father. ‘All I know is I’m a little piece of meat they’re trying to squeeze through a grinder so I don’t give a shit about their purposes, I just don’t wanna be a hunk of hamburger.’

  With that he went up to his room.

  At four that afternoon Vinnie drove Reb to the bus station. On the way he said, ‘What a great old man you got.’

  ‘Great?’

  ‘He really had you. You couldn’t even answer him,’ Vinnie said. ‘I wish I had a father that could argue like that.’

  There was no reply. Forty five minutes later the bus pulled out. What would happen next, Reb wondered. Would it be a nice soft outfit, the old hammer and saw, or what.

  20

  It was January and all over Korea, the north and the south, the snow lay deep and chill winds blew. There were daylong marches and exhaustion and feet froze inside GI boots. Fear and frostbite were general while at night, wrapped in double GI sleeping bags, still the cold crept in. Reb shivered listening to the things the men in the back of the truck were saying about their buddies over in Korea this hard winter.

  Reb was in North Carolina in a forest of longleaf pines, picking up pine cones, and it seemed to him very much like the woods at home in November before the snow. He pitied those poor bastards in Korea, especially the ones up on the line. He would not have said it to the men in the truck but both sides too. Reb stooped and picked up pine cones, stooped and picked. Why they wanted to make these woods look like his mother’s kitchen floor he knew by now not to question but at long last here was one work detail he found a pleasure.

  It was Reb’s fifth morning at Fort Bragg, his first out among the pines. Creeping along he filled his sack and in his head shaped a reply to the letter from Vinnie that was buttoned into a breast pocket of his fatigues. Left side for letters, right for his wallet. It was his little filing system and it worked. So far not a thing of his had been stolen or lost.

  Vinnie’s three lined sheets, forwarded the day before from Fort Dix, told that Wiggy had been called up and the latest from Wig’s mother was that he was there at Dix with Reb. In a PS Vinnie asked why Reb didn’t use his pull to get Wiggy into something safe. His pull. For six weeks Reb had been stuck in the replacement depot at Dix before being assigned to the post engineers at Bragg where he was now taking part in a scheme known as on the job training. Training for what no one could yet say but it beat the details he had pulled at Dix and he felt he was bound to have his hands on the old tools again before too long. Meanwhile the sandy forest of turpentine pines with their needles over a foot long fascinated him. He’d write to Vinnie about these longleaf and loblolly pines and also say something about the magnolia bushes planted all around the buildings. He stood up and stretched. When they had told him at Fort Dix about the post engineers he had said it sounded like janitor to him. Carolina.

  North Carolina. The air was pure, the silence perfect, the tops of the pines barely rocked.

  It could be worse, he told himself.

  A month later, after a week’s maneuvers in the field playing war games by day and sleeping in a tent at night, Reb entered a new phase of his on the job training. A bucket and a brush were his tools, to slap paint on it was his command, and whatever it was and as long as it did not move and whether it needed it or not Ribelle Soderini, US 51330435, Post Engineers, Fort Bragg, NC, covered it with paint.

  It could be worse.

  Several weeks passed. It was a sunny Friday afternoon in March and Reb was in the paint shed whistling something from La Traviata and slapping paint onto the raw boards of a big box for housing firefighting tools along the trails in the woods when a sergeant in sunglasses came in looking for someone. Two more of these coffins and Reb could knock off early. The sergeant said he was looking for Soderini. Reb said that was him and began rinsing his hands in turpentine.

  ‘What’s that expression on you
r face, Soderini?’

  ‘What expression?’ Reb said.

  ‘That one,’ the sergeant said. ‘Sullen.’

  ‘Already this week I got yanked off one job sharpening posts. Then before I could finish that they stuck me back here painting.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ the sergeant said. He removed his glasses. ‘Dirty job this painting.’

  ‘That ain’t what I meant,’ Reb said. ‘I meant getting yanked and never seeing a job through.’

  ‘Well, come on now. We’ve got something clean lined up for you.’

  Reb wiped his hands on a rag. ‘Kind of work’s that, sarge?’

  ‘You’ll see, climb in the jeep.’

  The sergeant drove, the engine whined, the tires tore up the road. Their little vehicle whizzed past signs saying 15 mph. With one hand Reb clutched the top of the windshield, with the other he gripped the back of his seat. They were doing better than fifteen in each wheel. There was a blurred landscape then a hard stop. The two of them climbed out. They were on a firing range.

  ‘This is a slide action repeating shotgun. Pay attention,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Slide action yeah,’ Reb said. ‘I was just wondering, sarge. Why this weapon all of a sudden?’

  ‘Now watch. Shell like this in the chamber, see. Then snap, click, and pump like this.’ The sergeant undid his work and shoved the gun at Reb.

  How did he do that? ‘This. This. And this?’ And blam, Reb triggered a blast.

  ‘That’s very good.’

  ‘Lemme try it again,’ Reb said.

  ‘No, you were fine,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘I was? I didn’t aim at anything though.’

  ‘That’ll come. Starting Monday prison chase.’

  ‘Prison what?’

  ‘Don’t get frantic. Only for a week.’

  ‘But.’ Reb felt a sinking feeling. The bastard said clean work.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter now?’

  ‘Sarge, there has to be some mistake. Didn’t you see, they’re training me for a carpenter.’ Reb’s arm was flung back in the direction of the paint shed.

  ‘Sure,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘But this is work I’m not cut out for,’ Reb said. He pictured it, the slogging through swamps up to his knees in brown water, shotgun at the ready, the dogs straining on the leash. ‘Hey, you listening to me, sergeant?’

  The sergeant was behind the wheel of the jeep motioning Reb to the other seat.

  ‘Why don’t you get some MPs,’ Reb said. ‘Yeah, MPs instead.’

  ‘Get in,’ the sergeant said.

  Reb went around to the other side, pulled himself in, and off they went. He wondered whether the rumors he had heard were true. Let a prisoner get away and you served out the rest of his time.

  The jeep hurtled through a pine woods, thick trunks zipping by on either hand so close Reb could almost smell the turpentine.

  ‘Are we out for a lap record?’ he said.

  The sergeant gave him a sunglassed stare. ‘Don’t be funny, we’re already late for the orientation lecture.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They’ll answer all your questions.’

  ‘Then we’re not headed back to the work area?’ Reb said. He felt like a lamb being led to slaughter.

  ‘No, we’re not,’ the sergeant said.

  They drew up to a cluster of low wooden buildings and slid to a stop. Was this the classroom where they taught you how to hunt down desperate men? Reb swore come Monday and his hounds got the scent he’d head them off. That was it, he’d get a bone from the cook and lure his pack the other way.

  ‘Give Captain Donovan in there your name.’

  Reb eased himself to the ground a leg at a time and leaned back into the jeep.

  ‘Look, kid, I’m in a rush,’ the sergeant said. ‘You got something to say, say it.’

  ‘Yeah, I got something to say.’

  The sergeant lifted his foot off the clutch and the jeep lurched forward. Reb held on. ‘Come on, Soderini. Hands off.’

  Reb was bounding alongside. The jeep began picking up speed. ‘I want to say this, sarge.’

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  ‘Just this.’ He let go. ‘Baa.’

  On Monday Reb stood guard over three Negroes while they raked up rotted magnolia blossoms on the lawn outside the officers’ billets. There was no chase, it was a matter of standing guard, that was all.

  He eyed his men. Prisoners were not allowed the privilege of blousing their boots or blocking their caps. As if Reb cared. Waiting until they looked the other way he gave the bulge in his handkerchief pocket a quick pat. He could not get used to the idea of holding a gun on a man and would have traded one of their rakes for his shotgun any time. The only charge against these poor buggers was AWOL. They were nervous about him with the cannon dangling off his hip. He could feel it.

  The long day ended without incident, the long long week the same. On Saturday Reb and his prisoners picked up trash out along the road to the airport. Up one side in the morning, down the other in the afternoon. Reb was the shepherd, the Negroes his flock, and the patrol jeep that kept watch from the highway the wolf.

  The week of maneuvers had been laughable. The colonel and his staff barking out orders with serious unsmiling faces. Grown men tossing firecrackers at each other while scorekeepers tallied the casualties on each side. There at least Reb had been able to get lost in the crowd. But this prison chase and all of Donovan’s rules and regulations, it took an Einstein just to remember half of them. If they ask me it would be a lot worse punishment making guards of the prisoners. They were having themselves a few days doing healthy work. He wished he could say the same for himself. Those personnel clarks know the score all right telling me back at Dix on the job training, don’t expect too much. That was already three or four months ago. Reb consulted his watch and told the prisoners it was almost quitting time. When you come to think of it, he told himself, at home in four months we can pretty near build a house.

  21

  April, the full tide of spring over the land, and with the spring an abrupt turn in his fortunes. An easygoing major gave Reb a couple of jobs using the tools he knew best, then put him in charge of a special project, the construction of a pair of parade floats for the Memorial Day excercises early in May. Confederate Memorial Day. Major Hanson said he was pleased to find someone who could read plans.

  Reb made a good start on the floats, he was happy with the springtime, and thanks to the major it was goodbye forever to bucket and brush. One day a letter came from Livvy with the news that Jimmy Bono had been killed in action. Jimmy dead after a single month in Korea. Reb bit the inside of his cheek. If you can’t go you free someone else to go. Free someone else to pull a trigger and even to die. Jeezus, Pa.

  Reb was at the work area. The others were at mess. The platforms for the floats rested on big sawhorses.

  ‘How’s it going, Soderini? We want to be proud of the post’s entry.’ It was the major. ‘Happened to be passing this way and thought I’d check the progress. Coming nicely I see.’

  ‘We’ll get one of these platforms mounted on the carriage this afternoon,’ Reb said.

  ‘Wonderful. I know you know your stuff, Soderini. Those shelves you built for my wife, she’s delighted.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ Reb watched the major’s shoes circle the platform. Once, twice, and he was gone.

  Alone again Reb sat exactly under where one of the axles of the carriage would go. He could see it all. Fort Bragg’s big show of armaments, the strip to Fayetteville lined with people, jeeps pulling the floats past the ten miles of beer joints and car lots and hamburger places. Ribbons would be tied to the guns and behind them there would be a bank of potted azaleas and a dozen classy looking college girls in hoop skirts and toothpaste smiles. For months Reb had begged to be allowed to do something useful, something up to his skills, and when he got nothing he kept telling himself it could be worse, it could be worse. W
hat could be worse than this, one big advertisement saying how beautiful the army is. Patsy would despise him, Emilio would kill him. Reb’s eyes took in his handiwork and he was filled with shame.

  ‘Soderini. Soderini, for christ’s sake.’

  Reb broke off his whistling. He had not heard the major’s approach. It was the middle of the next afternoon. ‘Here I am, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’ve been listening to you, you’re still under there. What the hell is it now and where are your men?’

  Reb wriggled out dragging his tools behind him. ‘Sent the men for some materials. The work’s coming fine, platform’s all mounted on this one. Sir.’

  ‘But two hours ago it was the same story,’ the major said. ‘And you promised both platforms would be mounted by tonight.’

  ‘Well, the second one’s bound to go a lot faster,’ Reb said. ‘See, sir, I finally got everything worked out. The bolts holding the platform to the carriage weren’t heavy enough. I was just changing them.’

  ‘So that’s it. And have you finished?’

  Reb went into a crouch. ‘Yes, and if you’d care to stick your head under here and see how nice everything looks, sir.’

  ‘Nice? Under there? But we’re going to have colored paper or bunting or whatever hanging right to the surface of the road. Who could possibly care about seeing down under there?’

  ‘Well, sir, me,’ Reb said. ‘I like doing a job right.’

  ‘Soderini, you’re such a perfectionist. Please just tell me, are you sure we can have these floats ready before your furlough starts? Time you know. That’s the prime concern.’

  ‘I know it, sir. But I’ll have everything finished way ahead don’t you worry.’

  ‘You’ll let me know if you can use more help,’ the major said. ‘Another man or two perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe next week for the chicken wire and the colored paper,’ Reb said. ‘For now though I don’t like having too many men around.’

  ‘Next week? That’s very good. Soderini, you’re doing a splendid job.’

  Reb laughed and thanked him. The major was a decent man, always calling Reb by name and never once soldier like the other officers. His wife paid for those shelves too when Reb had not expected it.