The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

Lowell stripped standing where he was, letting his clothes fall into a pile on the floor. When he was naked, he went to the bed and lay down beside her.

  She would not look at him. He put his hand to her breast. It was as firm and warmed as it looked. By now, he thought, his hard-on should be tickling his chin. But it hadn’t even started to thicken, much less stand up.

  He slid his hand down her body to her crotch. There was no response in her, either. He might as well be patting a dog. He put his hand to her breast again. She rolled over on her back and spread her legs. He got between them. Nothing. He had a limp, useless dick.

  He rolled off her, out of the bed, went to the bathroom and pumped himself furiously. Nothing. He stayed in the bathroom five minutes, thinking lewd thoughts, manipulating himself, all to no avail.

  What it was, he thought, was shame for thinking that way about Cush’s sister. Jesus Christ, for his first whore, why did he have to pick one who looked like a nice girl, and made him feel like a slobbering pervert?

  He didn’t know what to say to her when he came out. When he finally did open the bathroom door, she was gone.

  Humiliated, furious, he tried to go to sleep. He tossed and turned for forty-five minutes, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and began to masturbate. His penis thickened instantly, and immediately afterward, he felt the birth of his orgasm. He came all over the back of the toilet seat and the floor, and before he was able to go to bed, he had to get down on his hands and knees and wipe it all up with toilet paper.

  (Four)

  The girl came into the bar of the Bayrischen Hof the next night, ten minutes after Lieutenant Lowell had come in. He had spent the afternoon being measured for pink-and-green uniforms, which would be made to order. ODs from the quartermaster officer’s store would be altered to fit him perfectly. He had bought additional items of uniform. A leather-brimmed, fur-felt officer’s cap. A gabardine trench coat. Three pairs of pebble-grained chukka boots. Two pairs of tanker’s boots. After he had bought the jeep, he had been out of money. He’d wired home, asking for a thousand dollars. The reply, a telegraphic authorization to draw a thousand dollars from the American Express office, had come within forty-eight hours. It had been in his pocket, uncashed, during the hectic form-a-polo team days. He had taken it to be cashed that afternoon.

  When he presented it, at first he thought something was wrong. The clerk had taken the telegram and gone into a rear office. The manager had come out, smiling.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “But this cable draft is to Private Lowell.”

  “I’ve just been commissioned,” Lowell said. “I’ve got an ID card…”

  “That won’t be necessary at all, Lieutenant Lowell,” the manager said. “But there is something else.”

  He handed him another telegram.

  J. FRANKLIN POTTS

  GENERAL MANAGER

  AMERICAN EXPRESS ACTIVITY GERMANY

  INFO COPY

  AMEXCO BAD NAUHEIM

  IN RECEIPT GUARANTEE OF HONOR DRAFTS UP TO $1000.00 PER CALENDAR MONTH ISSUED BY PRIVATE CRAIG W. LOWELL HQ US CONSTABULARY BAD NAUHEIM AGAINST US, MORGAN GUARANTY NEWYORK OR CRAIG POWELL KENYON AND DAWES, NEWYORK. UNDERSTAND LOWELL IS GRANDSON OF GEOFFREY CRAIG, CHAIRMAN OF BOARD, CRAIG POWELL KENYON AND DAWES. TELETYPE CONSTITUTES AUTHORITY TO DO SO.

  ELLWORTH FELLOWS

  GENERAL MANAGER, AMEXCO, EUROPE, PARIS

  “If there is anything we can ever do for you, Lieutenant Lowell, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Lowell said.

  “As I said, anything that we can do, anything at all.”

  Lieutenant Craig Lowell smiled smugly to himself as he walked out of the AMEXCO office toward the PX. Grandpa was passing out a thousand a month because he was under the impression Craig was being a well-behaved little private. Wait till the old man found out he was an officer.

  That started him thinking of home. He thought there was six hours’ difference between Bad Nauheim and Cambridge. That meant it was eight o’clock in the morning in Cambridge.

  His peers, his chums from St. Mark’s, his new friends from Harvard—those the provost had decided were Harvard material “worth salvaging,” unlike those like himself who were not—were at that very moment lined up in their ROTC uniforms on the grass about to do a little close-order drill. If he should somehow manage to have himself miraculously transported to Cambridge, they would have to come to attention, salute, and call him “sir.”

  How amusing.

  He decided he would have a photograph taken and send it to someone, Bunky Stevens, probably. “Having lovely time, wish you were here.”

  As he was fitted for his pinks and greens, and waited for change to be made after paying the bill, he daydreamed of home. He had not allowed himself to dwell on that subject very often. The cold truth of the matter was, he had been quite terrified of the army. The power of the corporals in basic training over him had been the most frightening thing to happen to him in his entire life, including the death of his father. From the moment he had raised his hand in the induction center, the previous February, five months ago, he had ceased being who he was, a Lowell, and had become, as indeed the corporal had lost no time at all in telling him, a miserable pissant. He had been advised to give his soul to Jesus, because his ass now belonged to the army.

  He had been so terrified of basic training that for the first time in his life he had made a conscious, consistent effort to behave and to deliver what was expected of him. He had become, if not a model soldier, then the next best thing, a nearly invisible one. He had not called attention to himself. He had neither talked back nor whined. On the rifle range, at the last moment, he had remembered to miss. If he shot High Expert, of which he was perfectly capable, he knew that he would have been taken out of the pipeline at the end of training and made into a marksmanship instructor.

  Eight hours a day of Garand rifles going off in one’s ear for the indeterminate future would be an awful way to pass one’s penal servitude. He had been terrified on receipt of orders to proceed to Camp Kilmer for further shipment to Germany, and had spent his entire seven days’ delay-en-route leave at Broadlawns on Long Island, half drunk, refusing to think about the future.

  The troopship to Bremerhaven had been a floating Dante’s inferno, a two-week horror. Only when he had arrived in Bad Nauheim and been assigned to the Constab as a clerk-typist had life begun to resemble at all the life he had known, and that similarity was limited to having sheets on the bunk, a place to take a bath, and food served on plates.

  He had been in Germany only a week, and at the Constab only two days, when he came to understand that the venereal disease rate among the troops seemed to be the constant preoccupation of the Army of Occupation. Even the army radio station had commercials.

  A GI solemnly pronounced: “Six fifteen hours, Central European Time. Remember, soldier! VD walks the streets tonight! And penicillin fails once in seven times!”

  The army’s solution to the problem was clean and wholesome sports, apparently in the theory that the troops would be exhausted to the point where they would not be interested in fornicating with frauleins. Every sport known to Western civilization was played, on command. Including, to his surprise, golf.

  He had gone out for golf. At home, on the lawns of Broad-lawns, which connected with the fairways of Turtle Creek Country Club, he had been whacking the ball around since he learned how to walk. The first time he played the Constab links, with some really awful clubs, he’d gone around the nine-hole course in 35, one under par. He had been posted to the golf team, and eventually named caddy master.

  That was the turning point. He had moved out of the barracks into the golf course clubhouse. Slightly more civilized living. And then the polo came along. And now he was an officer and a gentleman.

  He was a little annoyed with himself for his fear and concern. There was no reason why things should be different in the army—it was, after all, nothing more than a ref
lection of the society it served. He was what he was, a Lowell, and eventually he would come out on top.

  Other people might have to spend their time washing tanks, or digging holes, or whatever; other people might have to wait, as the sign in the American Express office said in large letters, for a THREE WEEK OR MORE DELAY TO CASH PERSONAL CHECKS. He would spend his time playing golf and polo, as an officer, and would have his bank drafts honored at sight.

  And soon it would be over, and he could go home. Certainly, as an officer, there would be a cabin on the returning troop ship, not a sheet of canvas between pipes in a hold thirty feet beneath the waterline.

  He would, of course, wear his uniform when he got home. For a couple of days, until his civvies caught up with him. Pinks and greens, of course. Perhaps even the riding crop, or would that be a bit much? The pinks and greens, he decided. No riding crop. At Jack and Charley’s 21 Club. Bunky Stevens would still be a college boy, down from Cambridge. He would be an officer, returned from overseas.

  Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell moved his beer glass on the bar in the officer’s mess of the Bayrischen Hotel, making little circles, dreaming of home.

  “May I zit here?” the whore from the night before said timidly.

  Goddamn, the last person in the entire fucking world I want to see right now!

  He looked at her, met her eyes. Jesus Christ, how can she be a whore? She’s even better looking than Cush’s little sister. She’s a goddamned certified beauty, that’s all there is to it.

  “Yes, of course, you may zit dere,” Craig Lowell said, getting to his feet. He immediately regretted mocking her English and was relieved that she hadn’t seemed to notice.

  “Zank you,” the whore said.

  “Well,” Craig Lowell said.

  “I vaited in duh park undil I see you come in.”

  “Would you be more comfortable in German?” Craig Lowell said, in German.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, and she looked at him, and there was gratitude in her eyes. “I thought that you had spoken German last night, but I wasn’t sure. I was so upset.”

  “May I offer you a drink?” he asked.

  “A Goke-a-Gola, bitte schön,” she said.

  What do I say now? How did a nice girl like you wind up in a place like this?

  He ordered the Coca-Cola from the bartender, in German.

  “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant,” the bartender said.

  “Do you live here?” he asked. Do you like Radcliffe?

  “I used to live not far,” she said. “Marburg. A very lovely little university city. You must see it before you go home.”

  She sounds like the goddamned Chamber of Commerce.

  He looked at her and saw her naked in his bed, with the thumb-sized tuft of pubic hair. He closed his eyes.

  “I vill go,” she said. “I am you making uncomfortable.”

  “No!” the refusal burst out of him. “You will stay. You will have dinner with me.” That seemed to scare her. He smiled. “We agreed to speak German, don’t you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The oaf, the captain from the night before, sat across the dining room from them and sneered at Lowell’s naiveté. What kind of a whore was it that wouldn’t give you a blow job?

  He asked her if she would like to go to the movies. She accepted. It was the same Humphrey Bogart movie. He sat beside her and once took her hand. It was limp and cold in his.

  In the jeep, when he reached for the ignition switch, she stayed his hand.

  “We must talk,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I will go with you,” she said. “But not just for one night. You understand?”

  “No.”

  “I must do what I must do,” she said. “But not for one night.”

  “Why must you do it?”

  “My father is missing,” she said. “There is no work. The state has taken over my home.”

  “What about your home?”

  “My home has been requisitioned,” she said.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “My mother no longer lives,” she said. “She did not want to live, the way things are now.”

  Lowell decided he didn’t want to know what she meant by that.

  “I must have money, and I cannot get a job,” she went on. “I have nobody. So I will do what I must do. But not for one night.” He didn’t answer. “After a while, perhaps, I will do what you like with my mouth.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Craig Lowell said. She was offering to blow him.

  “But we must have an arrangement,” she said.

  “What kind of an arrangement?”

  “You will give me one hundred dollars a month, and you will buy me things in the PX that I can sell on the black market,” she said. She looked at him. “I will be good to you,” she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “You have already given me $55,” she said. “For only $45 more, and the things from the PX, you can have me for a month.”

  “You can keep the money I gave you,” Craig Lowell said. “And I’ll take you home.” This had gone far enough. He was getting in over his head in an impossible situation.

  “I don’t have anyplace to go,” she said, and there was desperation, even something close to terror, in her voice.

  “What do you mean, you have no place to go? Where did you go last night?” Christ, if she’s playing on my sympathies, she’s doing one hell of a good job of it. How can a gentleman, like myself, fail to respond to a homeless waif? And then he was ashamed of himself for mocking her.

  “To the park,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “You spent the night in the park?”

  She nodded, lowered her head. “If you want, I will do it with the mouth.” It was total resignation, utter submission. And he knew she was telling the truth about the park.

  “Shut up, goddamnit!” he said. He started the jeep and turned it around furiously. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to let you spend the night with me. Nothing will happen between us. I’ll give you some more money. Tomorrow, you find someplace to stay. And I will see what I can do about getting you a job.”

  She wept silently, wiping her eyes.

  When they came close to the Bayrischen Hof, she told him to stop the jeep. She jumped out and ran into the park. He waited, sure somehow that she was coming, unable to do what his logic told him to do, unable to put the fucking jeep in gear and get out of here.

  She came back with a suitcase. Like her purse, it was a quality piece of goods. It was old, but it was good leather, and there was even the vestiges of gold initials.

  “I had it hung in a tree,” she said.

  Craig Lowell had never felt before the humiliation he felt marching through the lobby of the Bayrischen Hof with his fur-line and her worn-out pigskin suitcase, before the eyes of the officers, before the eyes of the desk clerk sergeant who had thrown her out the night before.

  In the room, she asked if she might take a bath. He nodded.

  The prick in him, as he thought of it, came out when he had a mental image of her naked in his bathtub. He was paying for it; goddamnit, he had the right to see her in her bathtub. He had the right to do anything he goddamned pleased with her. She had even offered to blow him!

  He did not enter the bathroom.

  He put on clean underwear (he usually slept naked) and a cotton bathrobe. He waited until she came out, in a nightgown that went down to her ankles.

  He went to his trousers and gave her five twenty-dollar script certificates.

  “Tomorrow, you will find someplace to live,” he said. “And this will carry you through until you’ve straightened yourself out.”

  Tears ran down her cheeks. She took the money.

  “Zank you very much,” she said. “God bless you!”

  Oh, shit! That’s all I had to hear!

  They got in bed. They both faced outward, their backs to each other. After a long
time, he went to sleep. He was not going to screw her. For one thing, she probably had syphylis, gonorrhea, an army of crabs, and God alone knows what else. For another, he was a Lowell, and a gentleman, and gentlemen did not take advantage of women in distress.

  He woke up slowly, halfway into a wet dream. He had been touching Marjorie Carter’s magnificent breasts, and suddenly he was awake and in bed with a real woman.

  Her. He was really awake now, and excited. Her nightgown had riden up over her hips. He had wrapped his arm around her in his sleep. His hand was resting against her stomach. He had the World’s Prize-Winning Number One Hard-On.

  He very carefully lifted his arm and withdrew it.

  “I’m awake,” she said, softly, in German.

  “Huh?” Craig Lowell said.

  She rolled onto her back.

  “I said I’m awake,” she said. She looked up at him, and spread her legs.

  He crawled between her legs. This time it didn’t go down. This time it was ready. But it wouldn’t go in. Where the hell was her hole? He spit on his fingers, rubbed it on the head, used it as a probe, felt it slip in.

  He gave a massive thrust. It went all the way in. She yelped, softly, her hand in her mouth, biting her knuckle. It was easier now. It went in and out, in and out. She was making grunting sounds in her throat, half groans, half whimpers. Her midsection began to respond to him. She took her hand from her mouth and locked her arm around his neck, nearly choking him. She thrashed under him, calling upon Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  He came.

  He rolled off her and ran into the bathroom and washed himself, as he had been instructed to do in the technicolor VD movies. Now he was going to have clap and syphylis and crabs and Christ knows what else.

  When he went back in the bedroom, she was curled up in a fetal position, not looking at him. When he got in bed, she got out, and he heard her doing whatever it is women do in the bathroom afterward. Then she came back and very quietly got into bed.

  At first light, it happened again. Same goddamn thing. He woke up with his thing as rampant as it had ever been, pressed up against the crack of her ass.