The Patriot

by Evan S. Connell

  All at once Sam Horne stamped his feet and in the fireplace from between two cracked yellow bricks a stream of dust seeped, and then suddenly poured and quickly built a cone of earth-yellow powder on the hearth.

  “It would be dangerous to enter the house any further,” Jake said. “It’s late. We’ll drive back to the town for supper and then return to Kansas City. I hope you enjoyed the trip.”

  “Yes, sir, I did,” said Horne. And later, on the highway to Kansas City, he added, “I can’t explain why, but I feel a little better. Something about that battlefield—I don’t know, sir, but there was a sort of purpose to it, if you know what I mean.”

  “The war was dreadful. Every war is dreadful, but sometimes we have no choice.”

  Melvin did not respond; he had not been able to eat much supper; he felt oppressed. It seemed to him that if there were a purpose to what he had seen it had been a senseless purpose, coursing perfectly as a torpedo and as indifferent to the consequence.

  6

  Melvin and Sam Horne left for Memphis the following afternoon. While they were boarding the train Melvin happened to stumble against an old woman with an evil temper who clearly disliked men in the service and who came near to hitting him with her stick. She was traveling with a lovely young girl whom he guessed, from a resemblance in the chin and brow, to be her granddaughter. That evening, on their way to the dining car, he bumped into the old woman again because he had been attempting to get in line next to the girl, and being exceedingly embarrassed he apologized, stepped backward, and tripped over a little boy who was eating a banana and who ran off screaming. The girl burst into shrieks of shrill, stupid laughter, Sam Horne clutched his head in despair, and Melvin hurried away trembling with mortification and excitement, unable to think of anything except the girl, whose rich auburn hair hung to her waist and whose skin, which was a deep golden copper suffused with tones of platinum and pink, seemed to absorb and reflect the light and give to her the immortal beauty of a figure in an oil painting. The more he thought of her the more it seemed to him that if he could not possess her he would go out of his mind: her throat, her arms, the slim and muscular elegance of her ankles, her pouting, childish lips, the eyelids so strangely experienced and mature, the simple-witted innocence, the half-conscious sexuality—soon he had stimulated himself to the point where he had ruined his appetite and could not do anything but walk nervously back and forth in the corridor while he tried to think up a plan for getting her away from the old woman.

  Later that evening he managed to slip her a note, not knowing what would happen as a result, but so obsessed that he did not care; and in about an hour he got a note in return. Her name was Polly Ann Bergstrom, she was on her way to Memphis for the summer, and the old woman was not her grandmother, it was her mother.

  Melvin wrote another note asking for her telephone number, but there was no response during the night or the next day.

  He was standing on his seat trying to dislodge his duffle bag from the overhead rack when she came down the aisle looking neither to the left nor to the right, followed by her mother. Apparently she did not see him. But after they had gone through the coach he noticed Sam Horne, with a puzzled expression, unfold a chewing-gum wrapper which had dropped on the seat. On the inside of the wrapper was a number scrawled with an eyebrow pencil.

  “That’s meant for me,” Melvin said, reaching for it.

  Horne looked at the number again and frowned. He was reluctant to let go of something that might turn out to be valuable.

  “It’s no good to you,” Melvin said. “Hand it over.”

  “I think I’ll keep it,” said Horne.

  Melvin jumped down from the seat and said, “You don’t even know her name. Besides, I saw her first.”

  “You give me her name and I’ll share the number with you,” said Horne.

  “It belongs to me,” said Melvin.

  “If I can’t have the name, you can’t have the number,” said Horne.

  Melvin was enraged by this, but decided to conceal his feelings. “Well,” he remarked in a superior tone, “to my way of thinking, that’s disgusting, but of course—”

  Horne grabbed him by the shirt. “You call me disgusting? Jesus, I’ve heard everything! No matter where we go you only got one thing on your mind. What happened to that broad in Iowa you thought you were in love with? Answer me that! You got the morals of a billy goat, but here you are calling me disgusting! That’s a laugh! Ha!”

  “You don’t have to tear my shirt in half about it,” said Melvin. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re perfectly welcome to keep the number, since it means so much to you.”

  “I think I will,” said Horne, and he tucked it in his wallet.

  But the next afternoon, without a word, he flipped the gum wrapper onto Melvin’s bunk.

  In the weeks that followed they found they did not have much more liberty at this base than at any other, but what little there was Melvin spent with Polly Ann. The rosy bloom of her lips and the delicate, eternally altering contours of her shoulders and throat unbalanced and maddened him so that when he should have been thinking about his studies, or about flying, he found himself tense and congested with lust. On days when cadets had liberty he was the first one out the gate, the first one aboard the bus, and the only one who never hesitated when the bus unloaded in Memphis; he loped away toward the house where she was spending the summer with an aunt, her mother having returned to Kansas.

  They went out for dinner, then he took her dancing, and then they began to argue: he wanted her to come to a hotel with him, but she would not. They had the same argument every night he came to town. He could not understand why she would not come with him, or, if he did understand, he claimed that he could not, while she insisted she could not understand why he kept asking the same question. He became exasperated, then sullen, and told her he was not going to see her any more, but they both knew he was lying. Clearly she was fascinated by his persistence. He was dimly aware of this and he perceived that because of it, because she was a little horrified by his demand, she could not resist him indefinitely. He redoubled his arguments. He became crafty; he spent hours thinking of ways to arouse her and weaken her. When they were together he always managed to have a hand somewhere on her; when she shrugged him off, or pushed him away, or glared at him, he would only grin and drift around to the other side. He gazed at her almost all the time, so that she was either pale or flushed, and after the first few evenings he made her so nervous that she was apt to drop things. He began to bring her gifts, mostly flowers and candy, and when she derisively called him old-fashioned he understood that he was not far from the goal.

  It took them an hour or so to say good night. In fact, without either of them mentioning it, they began to end their evenings about nine-thirty or ten o’clock so there would be plenty of time to say good night. On the front porch of her aunt’s home she would pat his cheek and then try to slip inside the screen, but he never failed to catch hold of her and pull her outside again. Then, after a long, whispered argument, she consented to give him a kiss. This led to another, and another, and after a while they would both be so excited and groggy that they were no longer able to stand up; he would stagger across the porch to the swing, dragging her with him, and there they would flounder around until the creaking chain or Polly Ann’s sporadic resistance woke up her aunt, who would call softly from an upstairs window, “Dear, is that you?”

  Polly Ann, rising from the swing with a look of terror, would call anxiously while straightening her dress, “Yes, Tanty!”

  “Is there someone with you, dear?”

  “He’s leaving right now, Tanty!” she always answered, and then—for what reason he could never discover—she would deal him a painful blow in the ribs. At this he would give up and wearily stumble through the muggy Southern night to the bus depot with his uniform wrinkled and his collar smeared with lipstick.

  Polly Ann put up a long and courageous resistance, for she wa
s sixteen years old and played soccer in a convent, but eventually Melvin was too much for her. And so it came about that one sultry evening in July, after an especially grim and noiseless struggle on the porch swing, she gave an odd little sob, almost of luxury, and, leaning back, closing her eyes, struggled no more. Melvin, fiercely sprawled over her like a hawk on a rabbit, sensed the great nervousness leaving her body and he was electrified.

  The next day she called the base and kept him on the telephone for half an hour, although, so far as he could tell, there was nothing in particular she wanted to talk about. She telephoned again two days later, and again the following day. Soon she began to call him at six in the morning or twelve at night, telling the switchboard it was an emergency. He was exasperated by these interminable, senseless conversations, and very soon grew sick of talking to her; but whenever he was summoned to the telephone he went, although he did not say much, and before long did not even listen to what she was saying. Whenever she paused he would mumble or clear his throat to prove he was still there. He could not imagine why she continued to call, since she abused him steadily, accusing him of all sorts of defects, and was apt to hang up without warning, after which he would stand quite still for a moment and gaze at the telephone in astonishment.

  Then, in August, Polly announced triumphantly over the telephone that she was pregnant. With surly and vindictive relish she detailed her symptoms while Melvin listened, mute with horror, the receiver pressed tightly to his ear so the WAVE on duty nearby could not overhear. He had no idea what to do about this situation. Until now it had always been a joke. His first thought was to telephone his father for a suggestion, but a few moments of imaginary dialogue changed his mind.

  Polly Ann called the base more and more frequently and challenged him to hang up before she finished. He never took the challenge. He had become very much afraid of her. He did not know what she might do if he antagonized her, nor could he imagine how the affair was going to end.

  As if this were not enough, he began to have trouble in the air. The Immelmann turn bewildered him. In this exercise he was supposed to begin a loop, but instead of going all the way around he was expected to stop upside down at the top, just as the earth descended from where the sky was supposed to be, and roll the N2S right side up. If everything was done correctly he was flying straight and level in the opposite direction from which he started. Horne could do it, and of course any instructor could do it easily, but he himself could not. Time after time he stalled. Hanging from the safety belt, with dust in his nostrils and the blood collecting in his brain, he slowly dropped away into a disgusting spin. Down he went, cursing and whirling, and eventually, having straightened it out, pulled through the bottom of the dive with the goggles blown halfway off his face.

  As he spiraled upward to try again he would brood over Polly Ann’s condition. Her malice was staggering. She had become so vicious that he was more awed than hurt, and no longer made the least attempt to reply, partly because she instantly attacked whatever he said. If he observed that the weather at the station was pleasant she accused him of enjoying himself; on the other hand, if he said it was hot, she accused him of trying to make her feel worse. If he kept silent she berated him for not caring what happened to her. If he protested he had been worrying about her, she would become sarcastic and inquire what there was for him to worry about. Once he said, brusquely, for he had been made desperate by her nagging, that things would work out all right. She gasped; he seized this moment to hang up. It was the first time he had ever dared hang up on her and he felt frightened by his audacity, but also rather proud of himself.

  Then, two days after this conversation, he received in the mail a large pink and blue card with a ribbon attached, congratulating him on the new baby. The card was signed Polly Ann. But the longer Melvin thought about it the more he came to suspect she had not sent the card, the reason being that it would never occur to her. She had no sense of humor, though she would shriek with laughter at a pratfall or a pie in the face. He did not know how anyone could have found out she was pregnant, he had not confided in anyone, but somebody knew.

  He began to look sharply at his friends, convinced that one of them was taunting him, had crept up on him, so to speak, as Sam Horne had done in the forest. He did not think it could be Elmer Free, who was too dull, too slow, too simple. He thought it might be Roska, until he learned that years ago Roska had been in the same situation and even now did not think it was humorous. Then if it was not Sam Horne, and he knew somehow that it was not, who could it be? He suspected Pat Cole, who was clever and sardonic; and Nick McCampbell, who was so taciturn that nobody knew much about him. But neither they nor anyone else inquired if he had received any interesting mail or otherwise hinted, and he did not say a word.

  As summer passed and the weather remained humid and disagreeable, Polly Ann’s voice turned shrill, her features appeared to sharpen, and her complaints grew more querulous than ever. He was appalled by her increasing resemblance to the old woman and asked himself how he had ever gotten into this situation. No longer satisfied to beleaguer him by telephone, she began taking a taxicab to the air station and there she would have him summoned to the recreation center, on one pretext or another, for a monotonous, pointless, exhausting talk. He tried not to hear what she was saying because it was never of any importance; at least it was never anything new. She was simply taking advantage of a chance to humiliate and degrade him when in good conscience he could not strike back.

  She demanded to see him each week end; he obliged, though he dreaded the sound of her perpetual whining even more than her stupid, vicious accusations. They would have dinner at the finest restaurants; she insisted on this. She did not bother to read the menu, but looked only at the prices and ordered whatever was most expensive. Melvin’s heart sank as he listened to her telling him what she wanted, for he was already in debt to Sam Horne and to a lesser extent to McCampbell and Roska, and to a cadet named Ostrowski who always won a great deal of money in the dice games. He had been forced to borrow from them because the Navy was busily, impersonally, irrevocably, making deductions from his monthly pay check in order to purchase five hundred dollars’ worth of war bonds, and what little was left of his check was quickly spent on Polly Ann. So it was that each time she ordered a filet mignon, or a specialty of the house, only to push it away after the first bite, his despair changed to hatred. He would take the plate away from her and eat everything that was on it, while she, seeing him wolf down her dinner as well as his own, would begin to weep and make a scene.

  She wanted to know what he meant to do for her; he wiped his lips on the napkin, muttered, shrugged, and evasively asked what she thought could be done. Neither of them could think of anything. She liked to remark, caustically, that if he were half a man he would marry her, to which he replied with weary obstinance that aviation cadets were not allowed to marry. This was the first time he had ever found a Navy regulation to his advantage and to it he retreated as though it were a cyclone cellar whenever she brought up the subject of marriage. At the same time he sensed—though some instinct warned him not to mention it—that she did not actually want to get married; she had just become seventeen and felt that she was too young for marriage. A girl of seventeen should enjoy herself before settling down.

  After one of these dismal evenings he entered the barracks as taps was sounding and the lights were going out. It was too hot to sleep. There was no breeze at all. The long, yellowing, gray-green barracks smelled of perspiration. Most of the cadets lay wide awake on their bunks. Melvin stripped off his shirt and shoes and wandered along the aisle to the rear fire escape. Horne was outside sitting on the rail, dressed in gym trunks and a baseball cap; he was smoking a cigar while he watched the moon rise.

  “You know, baby,” he remarked a few minutes after Melvin had seated himself on the opposite rail, “I’ve been thinking a lot recently. Soon as this rat race is over I’m going to put in for my discharge and then take off for E
urope like a big bird to study with Le Corbusier.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get married,” said Melvin. But then it came to him that there had been no association between these two statements, and the name Le Corbusier extruded—so unexpected and incongruous there on the fire escape in the sweltering Tennessee night that he looked up and found Horne watching him attentively.

  “Who? I guess I wasn’t listening.”

  “He’s an architect,” Horne answered softly, and took the cigar from between his teeth. “A world-famous architect.”

  “Oh. You’ve talked about him before. Yes, I remember now.”

  Every once in a while Horne would launch into a discussion of such things as ferro-concrete pilings or elevated traffic ramps, and “space as related to form,” and he had let it be known around the barracks that he meant to become an architect after the war.

  “War means destruction,” he was explaining. He sat on the rail with his fists on his thighs and glared a trifle absently at the moon. “The thing is this: I don’t want to destroy. A person with my temperament ought to build. That’s the sort of person I am. I’ve always been that way. For example, I’m up there among those thunderheads—there!” He pointed to a huge, motionless cumulus cloud. “Well, I don’t necessarily look at it as a cloud. Sometimes I regard it as a building, if you follow me.”

  They looked at each other and Horne became embarrassed. He tugged at his baseball cap and spat over the rail.

  “You must think I’m nuts. Maybe I am.” A moment later he growled, “Christ, what a miserable climate! I’d like to know who organized this program, because he ought to get a medal for stupidity.”