“You know this girl I’ve sort of been going around with occasionally?” Melvin asked. “Dark hair, and named Polly. She—oh, you’ve met her. She was on the train when we came here.”
“I seem to remember.”
“Well, her name is Polly Ann Bergstrom.”
“I do vaguely recall, now you mention it,” said Horne. “So?”
“Well, ah—it’s just that it’s kind of difficult to express, if you know what I mean, but you know once in a while things don’t work out exactly like you thought they would. The way you planned. I don’t know if that’s clear or not,” he added hopefully.
“It’s clear.”
“Really? Well, let me see if I can clarify it then, because—”
“Listen,” Horne said, “do you know who you’re talking to?”
“What do you mean?” Melvin asked, looking across at him with a wondering, miserable smile.
“You’re talking to old Sam Horne. You know me, don’t you? You know me from way back. I’m the one who gets you out of trouble on the average about once every two days. So let’s go, baby, spit it out.”
Melvin’s head drooped. “It’s nothing much, really. It’s just that I’m sort of whipped. Things are pretty complicated.”
“Let me put it this way,” Horne said. “Let me be crude so we can get down to business. She’s getting ready to have a little bundle of joy, is that it?”
“Do you mean you know?”
“Do I know,” Horne inquired in a perfectly flat tone. He looked at the moon and muttered, “He asks do I know. Honest to God.” He pounded his fist on the rail. “You haven’t got the brains of a woodchuck! I sincerely mean that.”
Melvin was too alarmed to be insulted. “Do you think anybody else knows?”
“Do I think anybody else knows?” He pretended to consider, counting on his fingers. “Now let me see. I don’t think the commanding officer knows. Outside of that I wouldn’t be too sure.”
“Tell me the truth! Do you think some of the other cadets know?”
“You poor, miserable, beat-up, ignorant slob,” Sam Horne told him gently. “Why, you’re actually out on your feet, aren’t you? I don’t think you know where you’ve been for the past two months.” He went on more vigorously. “Certainly they know about it! Everybody knows about it! The WAVE at the switchboard knows about it. Your instructor knows about it. The whole battalion knows about it. I think nine-tenths of the personnel on the base know about it.”
“Oh, you’re just making this up.”
“Oh, I am, am I?”
“How could anybody possibly know?”
Horne was exasperated. He sucked at his cigar and then hurled it away. “How the hell should I know how? What difference does it make? The only thing that matters is that if the skipper hears about it, or if some hard-nose junior officer gets wind of it, you’ll be up at Great Lakes pushing a mop before you know what hit you. I swear to God, I don’t know how you get in so much trouble. It’s just one thing after another. I keep thinking it can’t go on like this, but it does. One day you lose your recognition manual. Next day you forget to salute the squadron commander. Inspection day comes around and you’ve got your socks hung up to dry against the light bulb and there’s an inch of dust under your bunk. You lose your necktie. You lose your toothpaste. The next thing, for Christ’s sake, you’ll probably step on some admiral’s bunion. It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“There’s no need to get excited about it.”
“Who’s excited?” said Horne grumpily. “It just beats the hell out of me, that’s all.” He jumped down from the railing and marched into the barracks; a minute later he came back outside with a package clumsily wrapped in tissue paper. He had not been able to manage the tissue very well; both ends of the package were criss-crossed with strips of Scotch Tape, and the red ribbon he had tied around it wore a grim little bow like a knotted shoelace.
Melvin looked at it suspiciously, afraid of a trick. “What’s that?” he demanded, refusing to accept the package.
“It’s your birthday, stupid. Happy birthday.”
“Thanks very much,” Melvin said. He accepted the gift and looked at it as though in admiration of the wrapping, and then clawed the tissue away, saying, “I’d almost forgotten this was my birthday. I got a package from my folks yesterday, as a matter of fact, that I haven’t opened, I’ve been so worried. Well—a carton of cigarettes! That’s swell. Thanks again.”
“You’re welcome,” said Horne.
Polly Ann telephoned in the morning to wish him happy birthday, and though she meant well she was still unable to conceal her indignation over what he had done to her. Even so it made his day a little happier. It was the first time in weeks she had tried to say anything nice to him. He thought that if he could just make it to Pensacola everything would turn out all right. First, he would be within sight of graduation. As an ensign drawing flight pay, and counting benefits, he would earn approximately $250 a month instead of $75. Second, if he could reach Pensacola he would be a long way from Polly Ann geographically, and he could not think of anything that would please him more.
The day after his birthday he was summoned to the telephone. With a sigh he picked up the receiver and slumped against the wall of the booth, but an instant later stood bolt upright; it was Polly Ann, as he had known it would be, but the first thing she said to him was that she was going to have an abortion and would need some money. She was afraid to borrow from her aunt, who knew nothing of the situation; therefore she was depending on him. Melvin had difficulty controlling the exultation he felt at this news, for now, if all went well, they would never be forced to see each other again. He asked how much she needed and she told him the doctor would not perform the operation for less than three hundred dollars. He promised to give it to her the next week end, and with that the conversation ended.
He did not have three hundred dollars, or anywhere near it; the very thought of an E bond was enough to make his vitals contract. And borrowing from his father was out of the question. But Sam Horne had offered, in addition to a primitive kind of sympathy, his entire bank account. This account came to more than sixteen hundred dollars because Horne had been breeding pigs in Nebraska quite successfully.
So, carrying his friend’s check, prudently addressed to “Cash,” Melvin boarded the bus to Memphis to see his young mistress for the last time. They sat on the swing where it had all begun, and where it ended, and they talked for a little while. He offered her the check, hesitantly, fearful she might resume cursing him, slap his face, or burst into tears; she accepted the check as nonchalantly as though it were a potato chip, and he was taken aback once more by the incredible equanimity of women.
Summer was almost gone. High cumulus clouds drifted over the hangars and barracks, over the American flag above the administration building. Heat waves streamed from runways and from the paved streets of the air station, and at midday the telephone poles cast no shadow and the imitation shingle siding of the barracks was too hot to touch, and a dazzling meridian light shimmered through the network of white rafters above the swimming pool. Beneath the dark arched roof of the vast gymnasium with its gigantic sliding doors—through which it seemed a dirigible must issue, moored, towed by Navy tractors—the sound of basketballs was heard, and the thump of men on the trampoline, all the summer sounds. Yet summer was almost over, everyone knew. Soon the company would be ordered to Pensacola and after Pensacola they would move out to fight the Japanese, no longer as cadets but as ensigns or as Marine second lieutenants.
Melvin and Horne frequently lingered on the fire escape till late in the night and speculated on the future. So far only three men of the company had been killed—the Deacon the only one they had known very well—and not many had been washed out.
But then, without warning, cadets were dropped from training. Evidently some sort of a directive had come from Washington.
A cadet named Callahan washed ou
t. He had been doing well, at least he thought he had, but one day when he landed at the base he scraped a wingtip. He was brought before a board of review to account for his error in judgment. He claimed a gust of wind had struck his plane just as he was landing. Whether this was true or not nobody knew. The board would not accept the explanation. He was sent to Great Lakes.
A cadet named Vaughn, who bunked above Ostrowski and who was planning to be a priest when the war ended, drifted too close to another Stearman during a formation flight and although there was no collision the instructor in the lead plane was alarmed. Vaughn hurried to the chapel as soon as the flight ended, and that night he stayed up to read his Bible. Shortly before dawn Melvin awoke thinking a fly was buzzing around his ear, but it was Vaughn, kneeling in the aisle and praying aloud. The noise also wakened Ostrowski who rolled over and swore at him, but Vaughn, with tears streaming down his cheeks, continued to pray. He carried his Bible when he appeared before the board of review, but when he learned that the officers were going to dismiss him he flung it aside and began to scream obscenities.
More and more bunks were emptied, the mattresses doubled back. Voices echoed through the barracks. There was no waiting in line for a shower. Every day the platoons grew smaller; by the end of the month few of them were half the size they had been, and one platoon of forty men was reduced to nine.
Cole was amused by this. One day he said to Melvin, “Surely you don’t believe the Navy cares what becomes of you. You are merely one of a certain number of cadets at NAS Memphis, as that Stearman over there is one of a certain number of Stearmans. You’ll be junked as it will be junked, according to the whim of somebody at a desk in Washington. Just for fun I’ll bet fifty dollars that you never make it as far as Pensacola. Neither you nor that imbecilic Elmer Free will make it.”
But when the company at last completed the syllabus, both Melvin and Elmer were still around. Of one hundred and sixty who had come to Memphis, only thirty-eight remained. They talked of little else but Pensacola, repeating stories they had heard, which were concerned mostly with the accidents there. Crashes at Memphis had been infrequent and slightly ludicrous, even when somebody was killed—a cadet would hit a tree while practicing how to avoid the trees during an emergency landing, or, at night, mistake the lights on the water tower for the lights on the plane ahead of him in formation. But at Pensacola, so the stories went, there were high-speed midair collisions and the planes sometimes spun out of the sky like animals with horns locked together, and a wing or a piece of the tail might break off and drop stiffly for thousands of feet, or be caught by the wind and turn over and over, fluttering down to earth like the wing of a gigantic butterfly. A plane would disappear into the trees, a few seconds later the smoke came boiling up. If there was a crash at sea the plane would lift a steep, high shower of water and come to a queer, abrupt stop. Or, so it was said, a fast single-engine plane such as a fighter or a dive bomber might strike the water flat on its belly and skip across the surface like a coin or a rock until one of its wings hooked into a wave.
Furthermore, as though to prove they were advancing in the Navy, cadets killed at Pensacola were buried not in khaki, as had been the custom so far, but in blue. Melvin was somewhat shaken by this news: it was, so to speak, a form of promotion and he could not understand why the policy repelled him. He thought about discussing it with Cole but never got around to doing so.
The day before they were to leave for Pensacola he was sitting on a stack of parachutes just outside the hangar enjoying a breeze and feeling altogether contented. He was in debt so deeply that he would have no money for at least six months, but this was of little significance now that he had freed himself not only of his mistress, the very thought of whom was exhausting, but of the immediate threat of being dispatched to Great Lakes.
He reflected that henceforth he would be wise to profit by his adventures thus far: one should not merely accept life as it came along; it was important to evaluate, to be selective. He fell to thinking of the experiences he had had, and in a little while he was dreaming of how the Deacon died at Albuquerque, for this recurred to him persistently, at odd hours, when there was no reason to remember but every reason to forget. He recalled how absent-minded he had become during the days that followed the fatal crash, and how he had flown over the arroyo and peered down intently, as though there might be some explanation in the snow. It seemed to him that the war was ending, there was peace on earth; and the remarkable thing about this was that the war was ending not because one side was victorious but because both armies had discovered what they were doing, as though a mirror had been held up to them, one and the other, so that they were both stunned and amazed.
Melvin awoke gradually and found himself mirrored in the practical eyes of an officer who asked his name and company number. Melvin understood, without having to inquire, that he had violated another regulation, though he had no idea what it might be—perhaps it had something to do with falling asleep on the parachutes—and that in consequence he would receive ten more demerits and four more hours of extra duty. He was not greatly disturbed by this. He had become accustomed to a certain amount of extra duty; it meant simply four hours of watering the gravel to keep the dust down, or sweeping out the hangars, or whitewashing one of the buildings when he might otherwise be playing checkers or volley ball. But he was horrified to learn he could not work off the hours until the following day. He rushed to the administration building where he argued his case, respectfully, though quite desperately, as long as he could without incurring an additional penalty. The officers to whom he talked were sympathetic but adamant: according to the regulations no cadet was permitted to work off extra duty on the same day the duty was assigned. This was the regulation. It was written down in case anyone doubted it and that was all there was to the matter.
As a result, Melvin’s orders were changed and he was held over.
When his friends left for Pensacola they saw him climbing a ladder that leaned against the newly vacated barracks. He was dressed in gym trunks, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap, and even from the gate they could see that he was spotted all over with whitewash.
7
A week later Melvin arrived with the next draft from Memphis, and he felt more than anything else a vast sense of relief, as though at last he had escaped from the shadow of some threatening cloud. Here, finally, was Pensacola. He walked all around the base staring at everything, dazed by the coastal sunlight, the roaring engines, and the ceaseless activity. Here were the blinding white sand dunes of interminable beaches, and causeways barely above the level of the water, and sun-drenched pastel buildings, and naval uniforms—green, white, tropical khaki, blue, gray, black shoulder boards with gold stars and gold stripes, multicolored campaign ribbons, and gold wings everywhere—and breakers crashing on the beach, and in the sky no matter where he looked were droning formations of Navy planes. He saw hundreds of cadets going in and out of various offices with folders and manila envelopes, and it occurred to him that they had completed training and were about to be commissioned as naval aviators. Their khakis were faded, their faces and hands were deeply tanned, and about them—the way they stood, and gestured, and laughed—was a look of experience which impressed him. He was eager to talk to some of them, but did not have enough courage. They appeared to be busy; he thought they would not want to be bothered. Often he stopped with his hands clasped behind his back and his face lifted to the radiant, glaring, burning sun while he listened to the engines in the sky and sniffed the warm Gulf breeze, and was almost overcome with nervous excitement. But he felt a little sad and lost to think he would not be training here with his friends. They would be one week ahead of him all the way. He would see them now and again, they might have liberty on the same nights and could meet in town, but it would not be the same.
He discovered that Pensacola was not a single base; it consisted of a large central station, referred to as “Mainside,” and about half a dozen smaller bases within a
radius of twenty miles or so. At this main station the new cadets attended orientation lectures for several days. Then, after drawing some additional equipment—textbooks, pamphlets, flight gear—they reported to the first of the auxiliary fields. From there they moved to another, and another, and eventually, if all went well, they would return to Mainside to be commissioned as naval or Marine aviators and assigned to operational training with a combat squadron.
On his second evening at the main station he had been lying on his bunk for about an hour trying to decide whether to play billiards or go to the movies when he heard someone come striding down the corridor and stop at his room. The door was kicked open. Melvin rolled over and looked up. There stood Horne with his hands on his hips.
“What are you doing here?” Melvin asked.
“I figured I’d better wait for you,” Horne said brusquely. “You’d never get through the program alone.”
Melvin grinned. “You been telling me that for the past year, so knock it off. Listen, what are you doing here? I thought you’d be at Ellyson Field. That’s where I go first, isn’t it?”
Horne sat on the edge of the bunk, tossed his cap in the air, and caught it. “We all go to Ellyson together, day after tomorrow. Don’t ask me why. We finished the orientation last week. All I know is, we got word that our draft and yours were going to be combined.”
“You mean the other guys are still here?”
“Sure. Nick, Elmer, everybody. We’re in the next barracks. Come on over and say hello. We sort of expected you’d look us up, but then I got to thinking and I figured you wouldn’t have sense enough.”
Melvin got up and put on his cap and followed Horne out of the barracks by way of the fire escape; it was longer that way but there was less chance of encountering an officer. They had not done anything wrong; all the same, it was difficult to predict what would irritate an officer so they made a habit of avoiding them whenever possible.
The Patriot Page 10
