by Jon Stafford
An hour had passed. There was $4.58 on the meter. The cabbie looked up as Wiley climbed back in. “Any luck?”
“Nope.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry, Bud. You wanna try anywhere else?”
Wiley puzzled for a second. “No. If none of these people know anythin’, probably nobody here will. Just take me back to the station, I guess.”
Sorry, Long Shot, he thought.
After two hours of waiting at the station, Wiley boarded a night train to Detroit. It was a slow journey, with nine or ten stops along the way.
He watched the passengers for a long time. He was fascinated by seeing so many civilians: men not in Army uniforms, women with their long hair and dresses, young children with their parents.
It struck him that something new was happening to him wherever he went. It had happened in Albany and now on the train. People nodded at him. Men might touch their hats and say, “Soldier,” as they passed by. Some said “Lieutenant,” in such a nice way. At first he didn’t know what to make of it. They can’t be ttryin’ ta get somethin’ from me, can they? he thought. Somethin’ wrong with my uniform?
Then he realized: they were acknowledging him out of respect!
Can you beat that? he thought. He smiled over it again and again. You never can tell.
The night passed slowly. He looked out the window for a while. Outside, it was dark, except for scatters of lights when they passed through towns. It was a little cramped in coach, but he didn’t mind the upright seat. Coach seats weren’t so bad. They were a whole lot better than sleeping against a tree with the possibility that some German would stumble on you and shoot you.
Finally, he fell asleep.
Dietrich had had many letters from his wife. Wiley had copied their address down as well: Pontiac, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. It was easy to find “Jack Dietrich” in the phone book.
Over several hours the next day, he called the number repeatedly from a drugstore just around the corner. It wasn’t until 6:30 that evening that Mrs. Dietrich answered and immediately invited him to come around.
She answered the door. Wiley was immediately taken with the nice-looking woman in her early twenties, immaculately dressed in a dark blue suit with padded shoulders.
They sat facing each other in plain ladderback chairs in the tiny apartment. Mostly, she looked down at the floor but occasionally lifted her head and smiled wanly at Wiley.
“Chip, Jack wrote in detail about you and several others in your unit.”
“Mrs. Dietrich–”
“Paula,” she corrected.
“I’m sorry for what I did. I should’ve bandaged Jack better when I had the chance.”
She looked into the scout’s eyes, so calmly and understandingly. “I know war is terrible and you can’t always do what you would under other circumstances. I’m sure you did all you could, Chip. He always had good things to say about you.”
Dietrich’s death flooded back into his mind as though it had happened the day before.
“Paula, it all happened very quickly. He got hit, and in the darkness I couldn’t see how bad the wound was. If only it had been different. It was very cold and his only chance was with the local people, the Germans. They were really pretty good about takin’ in our wounded. I had my mission. A lot a lives were at stake.” Wiley stiffened. “So I took him to a house and left him. I saw them pull him in.”
“Yes, I see.”
“I got wounded right after that and wound up in the hospital. I tried ta find out about Jack. I wrote our captain, a good man named Redding.”
“Yes, Jack mentioned him too.”
“I wrote him ta check the Prisoners of War Exchange List, but he said Jack’s name was not on it.”
Wiley and the young widow sat facing one another five feet apart. But she had no words of blame for him. He thought he deserved blame, having left a helpless man. But she would not oblige him. He watched her. She had lovely and expressive hands and beautiful auburn hair carefully curled. Her back, perfectly straight, never touched the chair. She seemed lost in her thoughts.
Then she finally spoke again, in a lower voice than before. “I am sure you did all you could for my Jack.”
He felt obliged to keep the conversation going. He asked how long they had been married, though he knew the details from the endless conversations he had been part of overseas.
She looked up in happy recollection. “One day, five years ago this June, he came into the office of my father’s insurance company answering our ‘Help Wanted’ ad. It’s just a few blocks from here, you know. I’ve worked there since I was fourteen. Jack had such a nice personality that Father was won over immediately and gave him the job.
“We got to know each other working together. He was a fine and honest man. No one ever said a word against him. His old customers still ask after him. We dated and then married nineteen months later. I had my husband only twenty months, and most of that time he was overseas.”
She paused for several seconds. Wiley sat in awkward silence.
Then she looked into his eyes so seriously. “Do you think he suffered much?” Her voice wavered, then dropped to a whisper. Tears began to run down her face. “I must know. You will tell me the truth, won’t you, Chip?”
“Yes. Paula, I will. No, I don’t think he suffered. It was very cold. He got numb very quickly.”
Wiley watched as she grabbed a handkerchief off the nearby bureau and wiped the tears away. Then she was erect in the chair again, the same sad, resigned expression returning and remaining.
The soldier hadn’t been around women very much, and he failed to understand what was going on in her mind. Paula was a person of habit. She derived great satisfaction from the order of her life, begun as a young girl. A year and a half of marriage hadn’t broken the regimen. Her husband had sweetened her life immeasurably but not changed it structurally. She still arose at the same time every morning, weekday or weekend, put on her same makeup in the same way. Her job, apartment, clothes, church, and where she shopped were the same and would remain so for what seemed to all around her to be an endless time. This order was a powerful comfort for her, and she relied upon it in this life she would not have chosen for herself. She had always imagined having a lot of children, but perhaps she was better suited to a lonely life. Sometimes she lost her way and wept at the loss of her husband, but it was rare. In the quiet time, she thought of her dear, sweet Jack, and his love sustained her. It was not that she turned her back on another loving relationship but rather that another good man never seemed to come along.
Wiley noticed only that the woman was sad. The sadness brought a quality of beauty and vulnerability to her. He wondered if he should hang around for a while, maybe come back to see her on his leaves. But it was a fleeting thought. There was a dedication in her manner that said that she was taken and would remain so. When he was ready to leave, he made sure he had the address written down and assured her he would stay in touch.
Wiley spent the night in a rundown hotel off Michigan Avenue. The next day, he caught a train to Calumet City, Illinois, south of Chicago not far from the Indiana line. Thomas Kuehl had boasted to his fellow sol
diers nonstop that his hometown was “America’s number one sin city,” and Wiley saw a city that the prosperity of the war had bypassed.
Arriving at dusk, he walked from the station toward a long line of seedy hotels. The respect he had enjoyed for his uniform and rank were absent here. People drove by fast, occasionally cursing him. One even threw a bottle at him, though it failed to come very close.
As he passed an alleyway, five young men in their late teens yelled at him. “Hey, you, soldier boy! Stop!”
As they came closer, Wiley felt for the ever-present Colt pistol in his pocket.
“Drop your wallet on the ground and move back,” the leader said. “We’re gonna jump you and slit your throat if you don’t.”
Wiley sized up the boys for a minute and then laughed. “Why don’t you come and get it?” he said coyly.
Two of the boys made a move toward him, but he stood his ground. They sensed that they were overmatched and backed up, one of them cursing him. “All right, soldier boy, we’ll catch up to you later!”
“Why not now?” Wiley lifted his arms up in mock innocence. “It’s just little old me, and there are five a you great big men!”
With that the boys backed up more and, cursing, melted into the shadows.
The next day, he spent nearly five hours tracking down the Kuehl family. First he went to the address he had copied down in Germany, which turned out to be an apartment building.
He found apartment fourteen and knocked. A woman answered the door. She was huge, probably close to three hundred pounds. She wore a massive and dirty print dress and completely lacked the simple innocence the poor sometimes possess.
She responded to every question gruffly and in a language completely unknown to him. She evidently understood at least some of what he was asking. Sensing that, Wiley asked about several things, only to be baffled by the rattled-off answer and her obvious wish to close the door. Finally, she had had enough and slammed the door in his face.
Next he knocked on other doors in the complex. Three people answered their doors. One man again spoke no English, though he was most friendly. Another had no idea who the Kuehls were.
Only the third person, a man named Ogacheski, recalled the family. He was one of those men who had begun work in the 1910s, before there was much in the way of job safety. His hands and body bore the marks of serious accidents for which no compensation had been paid. Though he looked ancient, he was fifty-three and still worked the night shift in a factory that made steel electrical boxes, just as they had for thirty years. His wife long dead, with no savings and not a relative in the world, he prayed each day to last long enough to collect Social Security.
“Yessa, Ia knew dem. Day had ta go avay. I tink day ah lib near da lyberry Mr. Carnegie gab us ober dare on 12f schreet. Dat’s a big famly! Lots a kids.”
The two men talked for a long time. The old man asked about the war and was fascinated by the scout’s responses, every time nodding his head and pensively saying the same thing.
“Dat rite!”
When he left, Wiley almost said, “Tanks,” but he caught himself.
He had his lunch from a vendor who sold him a Polish sausage and a Nehi orange soda near a park and spent a nice hour sitting on a bench, watching children play and cars go by. The weather was warm for March.
He didn’t feel so well. He kept feeling odd twinges and occasional sharper jabs of pain in his side.
After lunch, he walked over to the neighborhood near the library, knocking on doors until he found someone who could point out exactly where the Kuehls lived. He followed the directions to a garage apartment behind one of the old tenement buildings. He could hear yelling inside and a radio blaring.
A woman of about forty with a baby in her arms opened the door.
“Yes, what you want?”
“Ma’am, I’m tryin’ ta look up the family of Private Thomas Kuehl.”
“Why you want dem?” she asked.
“Ma’am, I served with him in Europe. My name is Chip Wiley.”
“He dead.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know. I was there when he went missin’.”
The woman looked confused. “He not dead?”
The child looked at him, her face dirty, her clothes no better.
“Well, ma’am, we don’t really know what happened ta him. I was on a mission with him and we . . .”
“So, he dead!”
“Perhaps so, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Kuehl?” Wiley could see past the woman into the room. There were five children of various ages playing on the floor and a girl of perhaps sixteen.
“Mrs. Soldawitz, now. What you want?” she asked more suspiciously than before. “We don’t have no money.”
“No, no, I just wanted ta look up his family ta tell you about him.”
She looked at him blankly. “We know about him.”
In the back, he saw two of the children fighting. The older girl yelled at them, and then the entire room seemed to descend into chaos. He wondered who the mother of the infant was, the woman at the door or the young girl?
“You go now,” the woman said. She closed the door slowly, looking curiously at Wiley the whole time.
Wiley stepped back. He figured that Kuehl would have listed his family as the beneficiary of his service insurance policy. Soon they would have its $10,000. He wondered if they knew that or would know how to spend the money wisely. For a second, he thought about knocking again and telling them, but instead he walked off.
He went back to sit on the park bench. I knew Kuehl pretty well, he thought, depressed. He wasn’t much of a scout, but he was a pretty good guy. But his family has forgotten him.
He thought of the reason he was going to South Carolina: the letters from Mrs. Gregory inviting him to come whenever he could. “Please, Chip,” she’d begged, “you’re family to us. Come to Columbia whenever you can. We want to see you!”
He wondered whether it would work. People like me and Kuehl, he thought, we’re not much, and when we go nobody even notices. Many instances from the war came to mind, times he could just as easily have been killed and was not. That time in Africa when those German tanks nearly ran over me. Or in Sicily when the sniper shot and killed Enrique standing right next ta me, when I was six inches taller and several feet closer to the enemy. Why didn’t he shoot me and get it over with? Everyone would be better off.
And he still felt lousy. Aw, I guess it’s just my body gettin’ used ta movin’ around again. That Polish sausage probably didn’t help either. Stomach’s probably not used ta it after hospital food.
A ball rolled into his foot. He heard running footsteps approaching. He looked up to see a girl of perhaps seven or eight standing there, looking at him.
“Can I have my ball, sir?” she said innocently.
“Sure.” He pushed it back toward her.
She didn’t move other than to pick up the ball. “Are you a soldier, like my daddy?”
Wiley smiled. “Yes, I am.”
She perked up. “My daddy’s a soldier far away. He can’t come home now,” she said, nodding. “Mama cr
ies. She wants to see him! I want him to come home too! But he can’t, my Mama says, can’t for a long time.”
“Doesn’t know when, eh?”
She shook her head. “He was here when I was six, but he had to go to Italy. He bought me my ball then. It’s mine, just mine!”
“Where’s your mama now?”
“She works over there at the drugstore. She says we need the money. Sometimes she lets me play here when she works.”
The scout knew what this all meant. The Italian campaign had ended two years ago. The girl’s father was probably dead but still listed as “Missing in Action,” which meant that his family couldn’t get the insurance money. Probably the girl’s mother had to work to get by. The girl was probably out here alone because her mother couldn’t afford anyone to watch over her, and so just had to hope she’d be okay. A single woman with a kid should live someplace better than here, he thought. This isn’t safe for the child or her.
He had an idea. He’d have to do this quick or his chance would pass. “Would you give your mama something for me?”
The girl looked at him a little blankly.
“This will have to be a secret. Can you keep a secret?”
The girl beamed. “Oh yes!”
Wiley loosened his boot and pulled out his roll of money. He took two one hundred dollar bills from the inside of the roll and folded them very carefully. The child didn’t recognize the large bills.
“This money belongs to a princess.”
“What princess?” she asked in wonder.
“Well,” the man stumbled, “it’s a . . . a secret princess your mama knows all about. See where I took this from my boot?”
