The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Combined with these qualities was a cruel streak, however, which put fallen favorites to work transplanting meningitis. It became a refrain with him—”There’s plenty of virus work, Private!”—so that the draftees regarded keeping one jump ahead of friction with the colonel as almost a matter of life and death. That year he happened to chair the Court-martial Board as well, and, while probably no outright miscarriages of justice occurred, when he would come back saying that the prisoner had cried, he was contemptuously pleased. Gerry in a gingerly way argued with him, wondering if, sooner or later, his decisions could help being affected by his attitude. Besides the thefts and AWOLs, another board he sat on considered unsuitability discharges, such as the WAC clerk who gave herself shocks with an electrical gizmo in order to cure her acne, or the corporal who hid in the chaplain’s closet.

  “I asked him why he didn’t take some pills if he felt like that, instead of hiding in the closet. He said he couldn’t swallow pills.”

  “So? If he couldn’t swallow them he couldn’t swallow them.”

  “Well, he could take them in water; he could have dissolved them. Or he could chew them,” the colonel laughed. “It’s a sign of mental trouble not to be able to swallow pills.”

  “That’s what the hearing was all about, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure. We’re letting him out. Don’t worry about him. He must be already packing.” He imitated giddy packing, although he wasn’t nearly as reluctant to grant these releases as were the less intelligent officers. In fact, he was one of the least “chicken” officers around, the liveliest, the cleverest, who cared nothing about salutes, detested swagger, and who, though he was shy in the outside world, was conversant with it—went to recitals and plays and belonged to a club up in New York. He corresponded with German professors he’d met on his duty tours there, and directed the Officers’ Quarters with a silken hand. The general got him to host dignitaries, since he knew how, but afterwards he passed blank little weekends alone on the post. His happiest days were the working weekdays, yet the doctors who used his facilities drew distinctions between him and them. He didn’t especially take to them either, with their mockery of the army at the same time as they were enjoying status in it. He liked to propose dirty deals for the enlisted men, which he had no intention of carrying out, in order to see them disapprove.

  With the sergeants, too, Colonel Wetthall was intricate. For instance, Sgt. Washburn, who loathed blood, was assigned to the vein-sticking room every so often, where she cried and cried. She was enormously fond of him, the main man in her life. The two of them worked cheerfully side by side much of the time. He teased her by calling her Sergeant Wash-born, imitating a mountain girl’s speech and then shifting to his manorial smile. He liked functioning on a par with his peppily IQed draftees still more. Digs at the legal profession, or “What now? What’s new?” he would say when Gerry appeared, wanting an answer he didn’t expect. He’d gather the whole crew to watch him mix media syrup, and then swing around to ask why the floor hadn’t been buffed. “Haven’t had time?” he said, so that they couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or ironic. Because of the colonel’s changeableness the under-officers treated everybody with caution, and the sergeants, like humble technicians, weren’t formidable unless someone twisted their tails. Sfc. Reynolds, the administrative sergeant, was a self-propelled man from a starved coal town who allowed himself the pleasure of questioning the college boys when they wanted a pass but otherwise, strict and fair, held himself back.

  The few privates were tender as mothers from the emotionalisms of stress—a sort of a breakneck golden rule—and knew each other’s every heartbeat, lavish like men with high hopes on a raft. Two were displaced druggists, one was a dentistry school dropout from Hawaii, one was a fabrics designer from Newark, and one was a playground director from the tough Bronx. In the barracks Fallon, the playground director, had the bed next to Gerry’s. He was a dreamy, competent boy who let his sly jaw down to laugh and got along peacefully with the wildest types, as at home. He was serious rather than kidding, and his ambition was to build a boat patterned after a late-nineteenth century sloop whose owner had sailed around the world.

  Gerry’s girl situation was probably still for the record as much as for real, but he had a fine girl named Babs Babineau, a Vermont French Canadian. The colonel frowned slightly because her last boyfriend had been a Nisei, but Babs was a practical, nurse-like girl, doing X-rays, with lovely hair and a graceful shrug. Her prim face lighted when she was at ease, or particularly if she was told she was pretty. Though she was ashamed of being in the army, it had been a good move away from her home. She was stiff-upper-lip and misfortune-prone, with a thin-mouthed smile, even, square teeth, a trick knee, a shallow asthmatic’s cough. She underdressed for the cold and if she took something hot in her mouth would insist upon sweating with it, not spitting it out. She turned their walks in the country into endurance tests and had a sharp hungry whine like a child set upon. Nevertheless, she was a sweetie, as dependable as she was obstinate. “She? Who’s ‘she,’ the cat’s mother?” Babs exclaimed, if Gerry neglected to introduce her around.

  Terribly grateful, he lolloped affection on her, and loved the curve she curled into when she read in his rooms, her nylons glinting like two snakeskins, or seeing her come toward him at a distance, with a lean, lonely beauty unaware of itself, and lift her arms quickly to him. Escaping that monotonous city sarcasm was also fun—to be able to say, “Aren’t you glad you’re with me?” and have Babs’s reliable “yes.” But such a drab life she’d been brought up to look for says one must make the best of one’s lot in the world, that grim brand of puritanism that thinks everything given away is gone.

  “If you’re trying to remold me, why do you bother? Why don’t you grab yourself somebody else?” she said.

  Gerry asked the colonel about menstruation, grinning as if he had reasons why he needed to know.

  “They used to say it’s the uterus weeping for its eggs. The egg that’s been waiting gives up hope. It gets flushed out in a rush of tears—if that’s not too old-fashioned for you,” Wetthall said.

  “So it means that it’s over?”

  “The cycle is over for the moment, yes.’’ He looked at Gerry in a flat, placid mood. Yet the same day the department was racked neurotically by a quarrel between him and Sfc. Reynolds, of all unlikely people—the basis silly, whatever it was—in which Reynolds threatened to let his enlistment lapse at the end of his hitch and the colonel, snickering softly, told him he had enough time left anyway to be shipped off to Germany next week and not see his wife and kids for two years. “Do you want it?”

  The sergeant’s face swelled. He shook his head.

  Gerry was an optimist. Peppiness rather than a lack of grades had veered him into the service before law school, a decision he now regretted, but in the meantime he nourished his hopes on vague chattered pledges of deals someday with other excited young men on the make. And because of his summers spent traveling, he could tell what states the rest of the soldiers came from, often having been to the very town. Since he had crossed on all the big highways, a simple map of America contained marvelous clumps of impressions for him. He was right on the fence in his pleasures, not having lost as yet the sort of immediacies he’d had in his teens. For example, he had a sixth sense, so that visitors never walked in on him unawares and he scarcely troubled to look left and right before crossing a street. He didn’t trip in the dark or bump into people when going around a corner. He was full of impulses he trusted. Once he got used to the dirty work, he didn’t anticipate that the bodies would play any role in the cozy householder’s setup that he had arranged, because they were autopsied quickly, averaging just one a week. But sometimes they’d suddenly descend, like absentee owners; and couldn’t be shunted off. Most patients died at night. If they survived the sunrise, they usually pulled through until the next night. Births also occurred then, because of the same corporeal relaxation, and he was sent stillborn babi
es. Oddly enough, they were easier to handle than the adults, being too small and too rudimentary to have achieved human dimensions. He was sad without so much empathy, as if with a cocker spaniel.

  A master sergeant in the surgical ward happened to die the same night as two soldiers who cracked up on the turnpike, and Gerry’s locked-off icebox rebroadcast its claims with a vengeance, everything baying and hollering. The nurses wheeled down the lung case, all cleaned up and stoppered, the thumbs tied together and the penis tied off, but the MPs, an hour later, pounded on the door with their flashlights as if war had started and hurried the casualties in with a curse. They were bruiser MPs, rough for a hospital because of the mental wing whose escapees they had to run down, and the bodies were ghastly, long, spattered things. An amazing deadweight spread over the whole instead of being centered, as with a living man. There weren’t wounds, only holes, like a stained diagram. The face of the soldier who hadn’t been driving was peremptory, drawing back—look out!—with a short plaintive nose. His friend wore a grimace as if he were hearing a brutal joke, and still groped for the wheel, which he had lost. Perhaps he showed some satisfaction too, because this time he had done it up brown. Despite the need to hose and scrub, despite these coarse, arrested expressions, and despite the age sympathy that Gerry felt, the two young privates were a relief to wrestle with, after the old chest patient who looked so shriveled and mauled, so systematically readied for death, and now had on an ambiguous smile.

  None of the bodies was stiff. They were just heavy, although they became more stubborn and stone-like as time went on. After a day or two they appeared to steel themselves, turning a granite color, in order to bear the hauling which they were being subjected to. And they were either all there or else not there at all, larger than life or else insignificant, like a pile of wood shavings under a sheet. A few stocky men were inexplicably light, but a Fort Dix drillmaster with a big barrel frame bulked up like a giant compared to a wasted, frail brigadier general Gerry examined the same day, who sported a harmless look, like a whistler’s, like a balloon man’s. Though a woman could hold her own, a small fellow lost out, being allowed to display none of his fervor. Even his gore was less grisly—the drillmaster’s postmortem took hours and filled up two pails. The smiles were the little man’s advocate because they wiped away bravery and pain, both together, and leveled off everything else. This cryptic twitch of the lips at the moment of death began to absorb Gerry’s interest after the rest had become tedium. Most people did wear a smile. Sometimes it wasn’t a bit cryptic, it was benevolent, knowing, or blithe and astonished and rather singing. The marks of gritting the mouth through so many weeks of suffering might remain as well, and once in a while somebody’s mouth had turned to an unmistakable loathing, but never toward an expression of fright.

  Gerry worried because he was able to eat heartily after the sights that he was exposed to and the smells that rose up—powdered bone if he used the saw. Did it mean he would adjust to anything? He got very low-key in mentioning his experiences; he avoided mentioning them. In the barracks at night, the two lines of figures under their blankets unnerved him, with the feet turning up. To lie down himself was like a rehearsal. And the smiles preoccupied him—why in those very last instants? It was a positive action, not merely the mouth going limp as it did in falling asleep. During cancer autopsies, grape-like, gray, horrible bunches were removed, yet the patient smiled. And Babs saw an old army widow die and, practically crying, told how a smile had quietly preempted her face just in the final seconds, after indescribable paroxysms and pain.

  The doors to the icebox grew to be like lids on a Pandora’s box that he dreaded opening. Then, in a big comedown, the row of bodies inside might look simpleminded when he pulled them out, might look like a row of public wards. A head on its wooden block seemed about to lift and complain. The doctor, to take out the brain, tipped the scalp over the cadaver’s eyes like tipping a hat, as though the fellow were mentally dim, which Gerry later tipped back for him.

  • • •

  Colonel Wetthall’s duties as court-martial chairman, meanwhile, produced other nasty stories. He seemed to enjoy telling them to Gerry and arguing with him. A prisoner objected during his trial because a guard had woken him capriciously the night before, and he hadn’t managed to go back to sleep. He didn’t feel he could defend himself alertly.

  “It’s probably true.”

  The colonel grinned. “Well, it may well be true that he got woken up, but that isn’t something to bring up in front of all of us. He might tell it to the guardhouse sergeant in the morning if he wanted to.”

  “No, you should be willing to hear him out. He hasn’t anyone else.”

  “He has the guardhouse sergeant. He has the other guards. He has himself. Let me satisfy you, young man,” Wetthall said, still friendly, not ungently. “He wasn’t beaten. We asked him that. We were laughing just a little, but we asked him. And we asked him whether soldiers ever have to fight without a good night’s sleep the night before, but he just whined. He’s a whiner.”

  “He’s a prisoner. I think you ought to take the time to hear complaints. That’s not going beyond your function, is it? It certainly shouldn’t be,” Gerry answered, disturbed because the argument tied in with earlier ones.

  “If there is any monkey business, sure. If there are violations. This is whining. We told him if he didn’t stand up straight we’d strap a board to his back to straighten it. He didn’t like that either. He’s a deadbeat, really. He stole a camera from a friend of his and now he doesn’t want to be confined. And last Sunday his girlfriend walked out from the railroad station but the man on duty wouldn’t let her in to see him, so he protests to us about that too. It’s not something in our discretion.”

  “He’s not a deadbeat, he’s a prisoner. He sounds as if he needs a little sympathy.”

  “Yes, his girlfriend does.” Wetthall chuckled. “I’m awfully sorry for her. That’s a long, hot walk and she does it for this deadbeat. We were tactful, I promise you. We didn’t laugh in front of him. We laughed when we went in the other room. I hate to upset you. You have a bleeding heart.”

  His eyes glittered, sliding away like ball bearings, and the pleasure he appeared to take in teasing Gerry must parallel what he’d felt in the deliberating room. What was he after? How could he relish his power that way and not misuse it? Gerry would be making small talk of the question with the law professors in a few months, but meanwhile the very approach of his independence aggravated his concern.

  The barracks commander, Captain Bone, was a shaved-head professional with a brisk, disposable cheeriness, a battlefield, impromptu air. But hard spells succeeded soft no matter who the captain was. They’d sleep on the floor to keep the beds tight for inspection, and polish the floor till it shone like blond hair, rub the brass faucets golden, unscrew the light bulbs to wash them, and seal the gleam on their boots with a lighted match. Like frightened dogs, Fallon and he scrambled under their beds looking for dust, except that they laughed at themselves. Gerry shut himself off in his rooms at the morgue as much as he could. When his time had got whittled down to two months, he was ready to screech from frustration at the previous, squandered twenty-two. The girlfriend illegally brought into the morgue, the diplomacy by which his officers ignored it, bored him, and Babs saw him less anyway, because he didn’t use “we” enough, she said, as if his affections weren’t permanent.

  The occasional weekend in New York City whizzed by. His job had been organized almost to disappearance. The force-fed extravagances of brotherhood that grew up in the barracks were wearying. The sergeants had lost their first novelty. The doctors were knowledgeable only about medicine, although they were so good at dissections that they stirred up his impatience to start on his own career. The colonel remained the best company in spite of the difficulties. A day could pass quickly, working with him, with no hint of their being in the army. But Wetthall withdrew from such familiarity when one of his privates approached d
ischarge, perhaps hurt to see anybody so eager to leave. A new second lieutenant had offended him somehow. During three Draconian days all the property on the books was transferred to him, terrifying the poor man, since it amounted to over a hundred thousand dollars of new responsibility.

  Gerry had oiled the tracks for himself, however, until even Captain Bone, whose energy pumped like a piston—who called privates “Duck” from their habit of marching in columns of two—treated him like a short-timer. The bodies departed from his establishment in a wide-stitch, flop-arms fashion, and no one complained. He was popular wherever his errands and other took him. Yet he had begun to pick over an uneasy notion, which was to write a letter about the state of affairs regarding Colonel Wetthall. A report would not itself be a court-martial offense, and his discharge was getting too close for most of the standard reprisals. Fallon was working on meningitis at the moment, but by now they were both so well trained that they didn’t care.