The Rebellion of Yale Marratt

by Robert H. Rimmer

  Sitting in the beach chair she watched the sky. The moon was completely obscured now by slow moving black clouds. Ricky, she thought, I want you. I want to kiss and make love with you. I want to talk to you. I want your arms around me. I want to hide under the quilts with you and pretend that I am a little girl again. A little girl frightened at the dropping of the leaves against her window, or the bewildered flappings of some summer insect trying to escape into the night. I want your arms around me. I want you to put your lips on my breasts, and feel my nipples tight and hard under your tongue. I want you to touch the crinkly brown hair on my mons. I'm not a confident Red Cross girl ready to cheer up bewildered men. I'm something little that's afraid. I need you. Ricky! I'm war lost!

  Anne jumped up. She kicked the ground as if trying to kick herself back to reality.

  "Mrs. Anne Wilson." The public address system crackled. The words floated impersonally on the warm night air. She turned sharply as if there were someone behind her. "Mrs. Anne Wilson," the voice repeated. "Call at the main desk with your personal effects, please."

  She shivered. This was it. Goodbye, Ricky. Anne walked up the steps into the hotel. And Christmas night, too. What a hell of a note to be setting off to war. On Christmas night.

  On the night that Christ was born, one thousand nine hundred and forty-four years later, Anne Wilson was going to India where Christ himself might have spent a few years.

  Anne laughed. She was back to reality.

  4

  The C-54, a four propeller airplane stripped bare on the inside except for bucket seats that lined the walls, belonged to one of many commercial lines that were transporting soldiers to Europe and Africa. Once in the theater of war the Air Transport Command took over shuttling the soldiers to forward bases. This one was a Pan American Airways plane.

  It was the first extended flight Yale had ever taken. When he returned to the Floridian Hotel after his night with Kathie, he found that he was on orders for the next flight to Casablanca. There was no possibility of leaving the hotel. At first he thought of trying to telephone Cynthia, but he knew that was hopeless. Mat and she were living in a trailer. Even if he had been able to see her, how could he talk to her in front of Mat? He might as well face reality. The dream called Cindar was over. It had finished five years ago. He had simply lacked the sense to realize it.

  The plane landed at Kindley Field, Bermuda, with an hour stop-over while they refueled for the next lap which would cover the Atlantic to the Azores. While he waited in the air terminal Yale drank a cup of coffee. A major who sat near him asked him where he was bound. He introduced himself as Joe Trafford from St. Louis. Yale told him he was on orders for Karachi.

  "I thought so," Trafford said, bitterly. "Everyone on this flight is headed for India. I have the god-damndest luck. I was scheduled for London. Then at the last minute comes this all-out push in India to finish the pipeline into China. Bang, I'm on different orders. You're the only officer aboard who hasn't his wings. Must be a shortage of f.o.'s in the Assam Valley." Trafford looked straight at him with an amused expression on his hard, angular face.

  Yale shrugged. "Fuck off's or finance officers -- someone has to pay you fur-jacketed snobs. I never saw such a clique. All I've listened to all the way from Miami is what heroes you are. Hell, just because you wear wings doesn't mean a thing . . . you're glorified bus drivers, who trained for a few hundred hours and learned how to fly an airplane."

  Trafford laughed. "Don't get your ass in an uproar, chum. I was in Burma for two years. That's why I'm getting the dubious honor of going back. This time as base adjutant at a new pipeline base in the Assam Valley. My guess is that's where you're going, too. You'll get your final orders in Karachi. The rest of these looeys aboard haven't even finished transition training. They're stepping things up at the back door of China. It will take the pressure off the Pacific. Spread the Japs even further."

  Two lieutenants, with new shiny wings, asked if they could sit at the table. They introduced themselves as Al Kanachos and Bill Stevens. Al's moon face and ruddy complexion proclaimed his ancestry.

  "Heard you mention the Hump," Bill said nervously. "What's it like?"

  "A crock," Trafford said, breezily. "You fly over one day. A day later you fly back. On one side you have Chinese nookie. A day later you shack up with some of the saddest looking specimens called women you ever saw. In both cases you chance V.D., beriberi, cholera, yellow fever, or what the hell have you. In season, in India it rains every day. Then the hottest sun you ever sat under comes out and turns the whole damned place into a steam bath. It's a crock . . . a crock of shit."

  They were called for their flight. A Red Cross girl preceded them to the door. Trafford jumped ahead of them and opened the door for her.

  "My name is Trafford," he said, leering at her. "Would you like to take a little spin over to Casablanca tonight, and look around? Tomorrow, I'll show you the Casbah."

  Trafford's voice assumed a heavy French accent. The girl laughed. They walked abreast to the plane. Walking behind her Yale noticed her straight legs and her erect posture. He liked the jaunty way the Red Cross overseas cap perched on her blonde hair. He listened with interest to the "snow" job that Trafford was giving her. She obviously wasn't reacting. Once they boarded the plane, she went to her seat which was just behind the navigation compartment. She smiled at Yale. Trafford tried to take her hand. He eyed the young pilot who was seated near her with a grim scram-buddy look. She withdrew her hand. "The name, Major, is Wilson, Mrs. Anne Wilson." She accentuated the Mrs.

  "I'm married myself, Mrs. Wilson," Trafford said, genially. "Married women are just the best, I always say."

  "Well, goody for what you always say, Major. If you don't mind it's one o'clock in the morning. I hope to get a little sleep between here and the Azores."

  Trafford followed Yale to the rear of the plane. He sat beside him. Al Kanachos and Bill Stevens, evidently entranced by Trafford's rank and experience, sat close by. "That one is a cold dish," Trafford said. "Just the type that joins the Red Cross. Gives you all the come-on of a sexpot. Looky here, boys. See this nice thing I got here for you, but don't you dare touch it or I'll scream. Reminds me of that joke about the girl who screwed with her shoes on. . . ."

  The plane had taken off. As it gained altitude the cabin became colder.

  Yale rolled a blanket around his head. He tried to cut off Trafford's voice. He was sick of listening to the same old discussions of sex; weary of the endless trading of dirty jokes. Trafford's voice came through to him despite the muffling of the blanket. They must be up at least twelve thousand feet already, he thought. He could feel a tightening in his sinuses. The heaters evidently weren't working properly. Cold air blew under the cargo hatch. Yale pulled his army blanket tighter around him. It was going to be a cold night.

  Again his thoughts returned to Cynthia in Miami, and then he tried not to think of her. He had a sudden picture of her in bed with Mat. He tried to recall the face of the Red Cross girl. She had an oddly appealing face, with a kind of elfin characteristic. Yale had looked in her dark blue eyes only for a second but he knew that Trafford was wrong. He would bet that Mrs. Wilson would be a very passionate woman. But why think of her? Thinking of women was a futility. It always seemed to lead him back to Cindar.

  Finally, he dozed, intermittently, lulled by the vibration of the C-54's engines. When he awoke he was cramped; a pain in his neck, his buttocks sore from the steel bucket seat. He looked at his watch, and was surprised that it was six o'clock in the morning. Most of the passengers had rolled up in blankets and were sleeping on the floor of the plane. In the front he could see the Red Cross girl. She was awake. She looked at him for a moment, then turned away. He guessed that the two of them were the only people awake in the cabin, but she quite obviously wasn't interested in talking to him.

  The plane was a skeleton, he thought sleepily, wrapped in a thin layer of aluminum skin. A living skeleton. In this womb of a fuselage, the pass
engers were curled up like foetuses. The way the plane was bumping, now rising and then falling sickeningly, he could even carry his analogy further. He could say that the skeleton was in the first stages of labor.

  In the pale light of the early morning, he saw they were passing through heavy cloud layers. He wondered idly how much gas the ship was carrying; whether the pilot could go on if the Azores were closed in. He didn't really care. His mind was catching at thoughts. Like dead leaves in a breeze they passed down the streets of his consciousness, scarcely regarded.

  I've got to stop thinking about Cindar. I've got to forget her or go crazy. He struggled to his feet, stretched and then sat heavily down on a bucket seat near a window. It was still soupy, but through occasional rifts in the clouds he could see the ocean. The water seemed strangely black. Like hardened lava, cold and wrinkled in the morning light.

  He wondered what would have happened if the Atlantic Ocean had been a lava bed instead of water. The course of the world would certainly have been different. Or would it have? Columbus would have been years too late. By 1492 millions of people would have walked to America. It would have been a dangerous undertaking in those days. They would have had to carry a tremendous supply of food and water to walk three thousand miles. They would have done it though. That was the essence of being human. If there were a challenge, someone, somewhere, would arise to meet it. There had been a challenge since the beginning of history for world conquest, and recorded history had, era by era, produced men who thought they could meet it. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito in one century. In the next, or the next quarter century at the pace the world was moving, someone else would rise to meet the challenge. The only hope the little people of the world had was that the next century would produce world conquest in peaceful patterns.

  So if the Atlantic had been lava, the people of the world would have fought all over these millions of square miles because the challenge was there implicit in the minds of men. They would have invented airplanes and developed tanks because this wasteland would make an admirable battlefield. The challenge would be flung down from generation to generation. The phraseology and ideology changing, but the ruthless fact not differing. This lava pile bordered by fertile land would have made an admirable prize ring in which the people of the world could gradually kill each other until in the middle was nothing but a monstrous heap of bones and rotting flesh. Everyone . . . the little people of the earth . . . those who remained on both sides of the lava pile . . . would stare at the mess in horror; and each individual would say to himself, "It's not my fault, it couldn't be helped, it's fate, it's the leaders, it's the Jews, it's the Negroes. It's not my fault!" And they would develop a new kind of noseguard that purified the air so that they could live beside the stench that blew off the lava pile. There would be fashions and seasonal variations in these nose ornaments. Everybody would wear them as casually as though they were the sine qua non of the civilized man.

  So it turned out to be water instead of hardened lava. Now they were crossing it at the rate of a plane every ten minutes or so, to fight a war on somebody else's land. When it's all over Yale thought, they will write books about the valiant army of pilots of the Air Transport Command. Authors not yet born would write long histories of the development of world air transport. Then, these C-54's and C-47's, with their cargo lashed in the center and their ugly, ribbed walls flanked with steel bench seats, would seem as antiquated as trolley cars on 42nd Street.

  They would be flying in the stratosphere then. Up thirty or forty thousand feet and higher where there was no weather. They would be using jet propulsion instead of gasoline engines, and these new airships would make planes like these seem like covered wagons.

  They would be going somewhere again. They . . . the pasty-faced school teachers, the tired wheat-growers from Kansas, the nervous business executives in their pinstripe suits, the gaudy women wearing expensive furs and jewelry, the plain little clerks and laborers that worked in Boston or Seattle or Sandusky or St. Joe -- they, the people of the world, would be going somewhere again. They would look at each other and smile, and feel good inside because they were going and making progress again. Everybody would go somewhere. . . to Moscow or Berlin or Calcutta or Cairo or Chunking. They would bring back souvenirs to put in their living rooms so they could remark casually, "Oh, this little thing came from Vienna, and I picked this up in Brisbane. Do you like this, it came from Bombay?"

  Everybody would buy something to show where they had been, and they would take miles of moving pictures of themselves in slack-suits and print dresses walking up the steps of the Taj Mahal, or smiling at an Indian beggar, or walking down the steps of the Louvre. It would be so educational, this going -- and "Oh, my dear . . . when we were in Paris," they would say, or, "When Ralph and I were in Moscow or Istanbul or Tokyo we had the funniest experience. Those people are so backward, you know. These trips are an experience. You really should take one. Cook's 'Round the World' for twenty-five hundred dollars is good, but you get to see a lot of the more important things with 'World Tours.' They give you much nicer service, and the food is served by the politest German waiters. They are the most condescending people, Elsie. Once you've seen them in their own country, you will hardly believe we ever fought them. Yes, 'World Tours' is more expensive, but honestly Ralph and I believe it's worth the difference. You and Bill should take it. Take John and Susan, too. It's an education for children."

  Yale kicked at his high-laced army shoes. So the world would be going somewhere again and I will be right there with the rest of them, he thought. Going. It's a nice illusion. Keep going and you think you're civilized because you can go. Those others, the natives in Africa, the coolies in India and China, can't go. Keep going and you stop thinking. You don't have to answer those questions in your mind. You escape into a dream without boundaries because there are no boundaries to a circle.

  Yale lay on the floor of the plane again. Cindar, I want you. Why couldn't I have found whatever answers there might be with you? Would you have told me if I had been able to go back? Why, he wondered desperately, had he been so unlucky as to see her again?

  Yale was last to climb down the ramp when the plane landed at Casablanca. It was raining. The landing strip was filled with puddles of water that glistened in the slowly disappearing sunlight. The sinking sun blinded him momentarily as he stepped out of the plane. He tried to shake the feeling of apprehension that had hold of him.

  Twenty-seven hours ago they were in Miami. Yale remembered the co-pilot coming back into the cabin. He pointed down at the city, saying that in seven days he would be back in the States. Yale had better take a good look. He wouldn't see a blaze of city lights like this again for a long time -- not over Casablanca -- no, not even over Cairo or Calcutta. Only Uncle Sugar could afford to fight a world war and waste electricity at the same time.

  The Cazes Air Terminal was cold. The dampness seemed trapped in the sandstone brick walls. A few soldiers were shooting crap near the fireplace; their breaths hung in little smoke clouds. Kanachos and Trafford had located the billeting officer who greeted Yale and Bill Stevens. He assigned them accommodations at a former orphan asylum now called Camp Duchane.

  A moustached Arab, wearing a greasy English cap, told them that the bus would depart for the camp in about twenty minutes. They would arrive at Duchane in time for supper.

  They watched the Red Cross girl as she showed the billeting officer her orders. He smiled at her. "You're assigned to the Atlantic Hotel in Casa, Mrs. Wilson. I'm driving in to Casa myself in a few minutes. I'll take you in."

  "How do you like that?" Trafford asked Yale. "We get the crap. She gets a hotel." Trafford tried to convince the lieutenant to change his quarters to the Atlantic Hotel.

  "I'm sorry, Major. The Atlantic is only for rank of colonel and above -- and female Army personnel. No sense in griping, Major. You'll be on your way to Cairo in twenty-four hours, or less." He pointed at the sign leading to the finance office. "Have you c
hanged your money? It's a regulation that you change dollars into francs before you go into the city."

  Trafford wanted to know what the deal was. "The wogs must want dollars pretty badly," he said, suspiciously. "I've got about four hundred on me. I think I'll just hang onto it."

  Yale and he watched Kanachos and Stevens join the line in front of the Finance Office pay window. "They'll get about twenty-five francs for a dollar," Yale told Trafford. "That was the official rate yesterday." Yale remembered the twenty thousand dollars he was carrying in his money belt. This could be an ideal place to speculate in foreign currencies, but he would have to work fast if he wanted to accomplish anything in their short layover. "I understand you get fifty francs or more for a dollar on the black market in Casablanca. You can see why the Army makes you convert your dollars. Uncle Sam would go broke funding francs."

  Trafford whistled. "Brother, I could make another four hundred bucks -- just like that."

  "You have to switch the francs back to dollars," Yale said. "They'd make you sign your life away to convert. I guess you'd have to know a finance officer."

  "I know you!" Trafford said. His grin was friendly but insistent.

  "I haven't got a finance office, yet. Hence no money," Yale said hastily. "Sorry, I can't help you."

  "I don't see you rushing to change your dough into francs," Trafford said thoughtfully. "I just think I'll keep an eye on you. You'll get an office one of these days!"

  Yale looked at him uneasily. If he was going to maneuver successfully with his money in a space of twenty-four hours, it was necessary to elude Trafford. There was something about Trafford's suave manner and intense brown eyes that irked Yale. He had an unreasoning desire to punch his grinning face.

  They rode to Camp Duchane in a rickety bus, piloted by an Arab with a sheet rolled around his head. Trafford sat on the outside seat beside Yale who looked out the window. The Arab driver slumped in his seat and stared at the road as if it would disappear if he stopped watching it. In the misty streets, rapidly growing dark as the sun set, Yale caught glimpses of other Arabs, their dhotis billowing behind them in the wind. They pumped along on decrepit bicycles, keeping abreast of the bus for a minute or so before it finally passed them. Their faces were inscrutable shadows, lost in their white headdress.