Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “No,” the tall and angular soldier said, “we’ll be able to hold our backs up straight and sort of carry ourselves like soldiers, as some won’t feel like doing.”

  The lukewarm shower poured down over the chest and back of the drill sergeant. This was his second year in the Army and now he found himself continually surprised at the small effect that the stream of words of the soldiers had upon him.

  Standing in the narrow aisle between his own bunk and that of the copper-headed corporal, he pulled on his clean khaki clothes before an audience of naked soldiers who lounged on the two bunks.

  “When I marry,” the wiry-headed sergeant was saying, “I’ll marry me a WAC who I can take right to the front with me.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” the corporal said, “she might be wounded in action.” He and the angular, wiry-headed sergeant laughed so bawdily and merrily that the drill sergeant joined in, hardly knowing what were the jokes they’d been making. But the other naked soldiers, of more regular shapes, found the jokes not plain enough, and they began to ask literally:

  “Can a WAC and a soldier overseas get married?”

  “If a married WAC gets pregnant, what happens?”

  “When I get married,” said one soldier who was stretched out straight on his back with his eyes closed and a towel thrown across his loins, “it’ll be to a nice girl like the sergeant here’s married.”

  The sergeant looked at him silently.

  “But wherever,” asked Slim, “are you going to meet such a girl like that in such company as you keep?”

  The soldier lying on his back opened one eye: “I wouldn’t talk about my company if I was you. I’ve saw you and the corporal here with them biddy-dolls at Midway twiest.”

  The corporal’s eyes shone. He laughed aloud and fairly shouted. “And he got me the date both times, Buck.”

  “Well,” said Buck, with his eyes still closed and his hands folded over his bare chest, “when I marry it won’t be to one of them sort. Nor not to one of your WACs neither, Slim.”

  Slim said, “Blow it out your barracks bag.”

  One of those more regularly shaped soldiers seemed to rouse himself as from sleep to say, “That’s why y’like ’em, ain’t it, Slim? Y’like ’em because they know how?” His joke was sufficiently plain to bring laughter from all. They all looked toward Slim. Even the soldier who was lying down opened one eye and looked at him. And Slim, who was rubbing his wiry mop of black hair with a white towel, muttered, “At least I don’t pollute little kids from the roller rink like some present.”

  The naked soldier named Buck who was stretched out on the cot opened his eyes and rolled them in the direction of Slim. Then he closed his eyes meditatively and suddenly opened them again. He sat up and swung his feet around to the floor. “Well, I did meet an odd number the other night,” he said. “She was drinking beer alone in Connor’s Café when I comes in and sits on her right, like this.” He patted his hand on the olive-drab blanket, and all the while he talked he was not looking at the other soldiers. Rather his face was turned toward the window at the end of his cot, and with his lantern jaw raised and his small, round eyes squinting, he peered into the rays of sunlight. “She was an odd one and wouldn’t give me any sort of talk as long as I sit there. Then I begun to push off and she says out of the clear, ‘Soldier, what did the rat say to the cat?’ I said that I don’t know and she says, ‘This pussy’s killin’ me.’ ” Now all the other soldiers began to laugh and hollo. But Buck didn’t even smile. He continued to squint up into the light and to speak in the same monotone. “So I said, ‘Come on,’ and jerked her up by the arm. But, you know, she was odd. She never did say much but tell a nasty joke now and then. She didn’t have a bunch of small talk, but she come along and did all right. But I do hate to hear a woman talk nasty.”

  The potbellied corporal winked at the drill sergeant and said, “Listen to him. He says he’s going to marry a nice girl like yours, but I bet you didn’t run up on yours in Connor’s Café or the roller rink.”

  Buck whisked the towel from across his lap and drawing it back he quickly snapped it at the corporal’s little, hairy potbelly. The drill sergeant laughed with the rest and watched for a moment the patch of white that the towel made on the belly which was otherwise still red from the hot shower.

  Now the drill sergeant was dressed. He combed his sandy-colored hair before a square hand mirror which he had set on the windowsill. The sight of himself reminded him of her who would already be waiting for him on that other ridge. She with her soft, Southern voice, her small hands forever clasping a handkerchief. This was what his own face in the tiny mirror brought to mind. How unreal to him were these soldiers and their hairy bodies and all their talk and their rough ways. How temporary. How different from his own life, from his real life with her.

  He opened his metal footlocker and took out the history book in which he had been reading of battles that once took place on this campsite and along the ridge where he would ride the bus tonight. He pulled his khaki overseas cap onto the right side of his head and slipped away, apparently unnoticed, from the soldiers gathered there. They were all listening now to Slim who was saying, “Me and Pat McKenzie picked up a pretty little broad one night who was deaf and dumb. But when me and her finally got around to shacking up she made the damnedest noises you ever heard.”

  With the book clasped under his arm the drill sergeant passed down the aisle between the rows of cots, observing here a half-dressed soldier picking up a pair of dirty socks, there another soldier shining a pair of prized garrison shoes or tying a khaki tie with meticulous care. The drill sergeant’s thoughts were still on her whose brown curls fell over the white collar of her summer dress. And he could dismiss the soldiers as he passed them as good fellows each, saying, “So long, Smoky Joe,” to one who seemed to be retiring even before sundown, and “So long, Happy Jack,” to another who scowled at him. They were good rough-and-ready fellows all, Smoky Joe, Happy Jack, Slim, Buck, and the copper-headed one. But one of them called to him as he went out the door, “I wouldn’t take no book along. What you think you want with a book this night?” And the laughter came through the open windows after he was outside on the asphalt.

  The bus jostled him and rubbed him against the civilian workers from the camp and the mill workers who climbed aboard with their dinner pails at the first stop. He could feel the fat thighs of middle-aged women rubbing against the sensitive places of his body, and they—unaware of such personal feelings—leaned toward one another and swapped stories about their outrageous bosses. One of the women said that for a little she’d quit this very week. The men, also mostly middle-aged and dressed in overalls and shirt-sleeves, seemed sensible of nothing but that this suburban bus somewhere crossed Lake Road, Pidgeon Street, Jackson Boulevard, and that at some such intersection they must be ready to jerk the stop cord and alight. “The days are getting a little shorter,” one of them said.

  The sergeant himself alighted at John Ross Road and transferred to the McFarland Gap bus. The passengers on this bus were not as crowded as on the first. The men were dressed in linen and seersucker business suits, and the women carried purses and wore little tailored dresses and straw hats. Those who were crowded together did not make any conversation among themselves. Even those who seemed to know one another talked in whispers. The sergeant was standing in the aisle but he bent over now and again and looked out the windows at the neat bungalows and larger dwelling houses along the roadside. He would one day have a house such as one of those for his own. His own father’s house was the like of these, with a screened porch on the side and a fine tile roof. He could hear his father saying, “A house is only as good as the roof over it.” But weren’t these the things that had once seemed prosaic and too binding for his notions? Before he went into the Army had there not been moments when the thought of limiting himself to a genteel suburban life seemed intolerable by its restrictions and confinement? Even by the confinement to the comp
any of such people as those here on the bus with him? And yet now when he sometimes lay wakeful and lonesome at night in the long dark barrack among the carefree and garrulous soldiers or when he was kneed and elbowed by the worried and weary mill hands on a bus, he dreamed longingly of the warm companionship he would find with her and their sober neighbors in a house with a fine roof.

  The rattling, bumping bus pulled along for several miles over the road atop the steep ridge which it had barely managed to climb in first gear. At the end of the bus line he stepped out to the roadside and waited for his streetcar. The handful of passengers that were still on the bus climbed out too and scattered to all parts of the neighborhood, disappearing into doorways of brick bungalows or clapboard two-storieds that were perched among evergreens and oak trees and maple and wild sumac on the crest and on the slopes of the ridge. This would be a good neighborhood to settle down in. The view was surely a prize—any way you chose to look.

  But the sergeant had hardly more than taken his stand in the grass to wait for the streetcar, actually leaning a little against a low wall that bordered a sloping lawn, when he observed the figure of a woman standing in the shadow of a small chinaberry tree which grew beside the wall.

  The woman came from behind the tree and stood by the wall. She was within three or four steps of the sergeant. He looked at her candidly, and her plainness from the very first made him want to turn his face away toward the skyline of the city in the valley. Her flat-chested and generally ill-shaped figure was clothed with a baglike gingham dress that hung at an uneven knee length. On her feet was a pair of flat-heeled brown oxfords. She wore white, ankle-length socks that emphasized the hairiness of her muscular legs. On her head a dark felt hat was drawn down almost to her eyebrows. Her hair was straight and of a dark color less rich than brown and yet more brown than black, and it was cut so that a straight not wholly greaseless strand hung over each cheek and turned upward just the slightest bit at the ends.

  And in her hands before her the woman held a large bouquet of white and lavender sweet peas. She held them, however, as though they were a bunch of mustard greens. Or perhaps she held them more as a small boy holds flowers, half ashamed to be seen holding anything so delicate. Her eyes did not rest on them. Rather her eyes roved nervously up and down the car tracks. At last she turned her colorless, long face to the sergeant and asked with an artificial smile that showed her broad gums and small teeth, “Is this where the car stops?”

  “I think so,” he said. Then he did look away toward the city.

  “I saw the yellow mark up there on the post, but I wasn’t real sure,” she pursued. He had to look back at her, and as he did so she said, “Don’t that uniform get awful hot?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. He didn’t want to say more. But finally a thought of his own good fortune and an innate kindness urged him to speak again. “I sometimes change it two or three times a day.”

  “I’d sure say it would get hot.”

  After a moment’s silence the sergeant observed, “This is mighty hot weather.”

  “It’s awful hot here in the summer,” she said. “But it’s always awful here in some way. Where are you from?”

  He still wanted to say no more. “I’m from West Tennessee.”

  “What part?” she almost demanded.

  “I’m from Memphis. It gets mighty hot there.”

  “I oncet know somebody from there.”

  “Memphis gets awfully hot in the summer too.”

  “Well,” she said, drawing in a long breath, “you picked an awful hot place to come to. I don’t mind heat so much. It’s just an awful place to be. I’ve lived here all my life and I hate it here.”

  The sergeant walked away up the road and leaned forward looking for the streetcar. Then he walked back to the wall because he felt that she would think him a snob. Unable to invent other conversation, he looked at the flowers and said, “They’re very pretty.”

  “Well, if you like ’em at all,” she said, “you like ’em a great lot more than I do. I hate flowers. Only the other day I say to Mother that if I get sick and go the hospital don’t bring any flowers around me. I don’t want any. I don’t like ’em.”

  “Why, those are pretty,” he said. He felt for some reason that he must defend their worth. “I like all flowers. Those are especially hard to grow in West Tennessee.”

  “If you like ’em you like ’em more than I do. Only the other day I say to my Sunday School teacher that if I would die it’d save her a lot of money because I don’t want anybody to send no flowers. I hate ’em. And it ain’t just these. I hate all flowers.”

  “I think they’re pretty,” he insisted. “Did you pick ’em down there in the valley?”

  “They was growing wild in a field and I picked them because I didn’t have nothin’ else to do. Here,” she said, pushing the flowers into his hands, “you take ’em. I hate ’em.”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t think of taking your flowers. Here, you must take them back.”

  “I don’t want ’em. I’ll just throw ’em away.”

  “Why, I can’t take your flowers.”

  “You have ’em, and I ain’t going to take ’em back. They’ll just lay there and die if you put them on the wall.”

  “I feel bad accepting them. You must have gone to a lot of trouble to pick them.”

  “They was just growing wild at the edge of a field, and the lady said they was about to take her garden. I don’t like flowers. I did her a favor, and you can do me one.”

  “There’s nothing I like better,” he said, feeling that he had been ungracious. “I guess I would like to raise flowers, and I used to work in the garden some.” He leaned forward, listening for the sound of the streetcar.

  For a minute or two neither of them spoke. She shifted from foot to foot and seemed to be talking to herself. From the corner of his eye he watched her lips moving. Finally she said aloud, “Some people act like they’re doing you a favor to pay you a dollar a day.”

  “That’s not much in these times,” he observed.

  “It’s just like I was saying to a certain person the other day, ‘If you are not willing to pay a dollar and a half a day you don’t want nobody to work for you very bad.’ But I work for a dollar just the same. This is half of it right here.” She held up a half dollar between her thumb and forefinger. “But last week I pay for all my insurance for next year. I put my money away instead of buying things I really want. You can’t say that for many girls.”

  “You certainly can’t.”

  “Not many girls do that.”

  “I don’t know many that do.”

  “No sirree,” she said, snapping the fingers of her right hand, “the girls in this place are awful. I hate the way they act with soldiers downtown. They go to the honky-tonks and drink beer. I don’t waste anybody’s money drinking beer. I put my own money away instead of buying things I might really want.”

  The sergeant stepped out into the middle of the road and listened for the streetcar. As he returned to the wall, a Negro man and woman rode by in a large blue sedan. The woman standing by the wall watched the automobile go over the streetcar tracks and down the hill. “There’s no Negro in this town that will do housework for less than two and a half a day, and they pay us whites only a dollar.”

  “Why will they pay Negroes more?” he asked.

  “Because they can boss ’em,” she said hastily. “Just because they can boss ’em around. I say to a certain person the other day, ‘You can’t boss me around like a nigger, no ma’am.’ ”

  “I suppose that’s it.” He now began to walk up and down in front of her, listening and looking for the streetcar and occasionally raising the flowers to his nose to smell them. She continued to lean against the wall, motionless and with her humorless face turned upward toward the car wire where were hanging six or eight rolled newspapers tied in pairs by long dirty strings. “How y’reckon them papers come to be up there?” she asked.

  �
�Some of the neighborhood kids or paperboys did it, I guess.”

  “Yea. That’s it. Rich people’s kids’s just as bad as anybody’s.”

  “Well, the paperboys probably did it whenever they had papers left over. I’ve done it myself when I was a kid.”

  “Yea,” she said through her nose. “But kids just make me nervous. And I didn’t much like bein’ a kid neither.”

  The sergeant looked along one of the steel rails that still glimmered a little in the late sunlight and remembered good times he had had walking along the railroad tracks as a child. Suddenly he hoped his first child would be a boy.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, soldier,” the woman beside him was saying, “I don’t spend my money on lipstick and a lot of silly clothes. I don’t paint myself with a lot of lipstick and push my hair up on top of my head and walk around downtown so soldiers will look at me. You don’t find many girls that don’t do that in this awful place, do ya?”

  “You certainly don’t find many.” The sergeant felt himself blushing.

  “You better be careful, for you’re going to drop some of them awful flowers. I don’t know what you want with ’em.”

  “Why, they’re pretty,” he said as though he had not said it before.

  Now the blue sedan came up the hill again and rolled quietly over the car tracks. Only the Negro man was in the sedan, and he was driving quite fast.

  “How can a nigger like that own a car like that?”

  “He probably only drives for some of the people who live along here.”

  “Yea. That’s it. That’s it. Niggers can get away with anything. I guess you’ve heard about ’em attacking that white girl down yonder.”

  “Yes . . . Yes.”

  “They ought to kill ’em all or send ’em all back to Africa.”

  “It’s a real problem, I think.”

  “I don’t care if no man black or white never looks at me if I have to put on a lot of lipstick and push my hair up and walk around without a hat.”