Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  “It ain’t be fittin’,” the boy said. Others called him “Silent Tom.” The nurses must have bathed him and washed his hair. He looked like a sulking angel in baggy trousers.

  “Oi had me a home, and oi intends to return to it.”

  “Tom,” Sonny said, “they’ll shoot you down like a dog. These are invasion plans. None of us counts. But I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow, if I can, I’ll take you for a ride in my jeep. We’ll tour Tiverton together.”

  The wild boy frowned. “Tiverton, he says. What be Tiverton to the Sands? A pot of the nasty. Oi can see the French coast on a windy day with a magnifyin’ glass. You’ll never get across, you Yanks, not when Jerry’s Atlantic Wall is waitin’ for ye with turrets—’tis a castle without an end.”

  And Silent Tom went off to the latrine, hiking up his trousers—like Chaplin’s Tramp.

  6.

  SONNY WAS UP IN HIS TOWER, pecking away with two fingers, writing a novel that seemed to lurch backward with every line, move into invisibility, as if whatever he wrote could erase itself, when he got a call from command. Sottotenente Tropea had escaped from the chicken coop on the Bolham Road in his prison pajamas. He knew the Limeys and their Home Guard would cripple Lorenzo, so Sonny had to get to him first. He summoned Corporal Benson, and they rode in the jeep with their CIC siren at full blast, as a warning to any intruders. They passed under the crumbling arch that wool merchants had erected on Gold Street a good while ago—when wool owned the world—and parked outside the Blue Mermaid, with blackout slits on their headlights. Sonny ran into the café, just as two of “Dad’s Soldiers” were trying to arrest Lorenzo. They had clubs and hammers, and must have been sixty years old—there was bedlam in their eyes. They were walloping Lorenzo into the linoleum of the Blue Mermaid until Sonny arrived. The massacre ended as Sonny strode into the path of their hammers. They were a mite cautious around Sonny’s armband and gold badge, emblems they didn’t quite fathom. Both of Dad’s Soldiers had blackened teeth.

  “Look here, mate, he’s a fugitive. He might have interfered with some young miss, and …”

  “Well,” Sonny said, “shall we call Collipriest House and untangle this mess?”

  “No need to get snotty,” said the senior member of the Home Guard. And they both took off with their clubs and hammers.

  Lorenzo limped back to his window table, as if Dad’s Soldiers and their hammers had been some illusion, an illusion of blood, and he continued reading The Sun Also Rises in his prison pajamas while he drank Arabian coffee from the gigantic tin can Sonny had brought to the Mermaid—it was Sonny who had given Lorenzo an overseas pocket edition of Hem’s novel. He had fixed the sottotenente up with a permanent library of pocketbooks.

  “You know what would have happened once Dad’s Soldiers had you permanently in their hands. You’d have a broken head and a one-way ticket to Wormwood Scrubs as a menace to society. Can you imagine what those convicts at the Scrubs would do to a prisoner of war?”

  “I don’t care,” Lorenzo said, holding up The Sun Also Rises as his shield. “I’ll have had my cup of coffee with a bit of sun in my eyes. I’m not going back to that chicken coop.”

  “Sottotenente, after we cross, whenever that is, I’ll get you Hemingway’s signature.”

  Lorenzo was deeply suspicious. “Don’t you dare tempt me with your tricks.”

  “It’s not a trick,” Sonny said. “Hemingway wouldn’t miss the show. Wherever we are, he’ll be there, too. The War Department wouldn’t have him, but he’ll wear a correspondent’s clothes and carry credentials.”

  “And you’ll tell him about me, a prisoner of war who loves his every word.”

  “I will.”

  And Sonny escorted Lorenzo back to the Bolham Road. But when he returned to the castle, the bus with blackout curtains was already assembled, like some participant of a mass deportation. Slapton Sands. Sonny knew secrets he had never been told but had to intuit for himself. There would be no more baseball games behind the fence at Collipriest House. All the players were gone. The division’s tents and Quonset huts were deserted. The base had disappeared. A few stranded captains had been left behind—they rumbled about like buffoons in battle fatigues, clutching messages that tore in the wind.

  7.

  HIS MEMORY FELL. All that pertained to this phantom exercise was like a farrago in his skull. He did recall climbing off the bus and stepping onto red gravel and shards of red slate, his CIC commander, Captain Blunt, swiping the air with his swagger stick. “Carry on, Salinger. Don’t stand there like a dummy.” But he did stand there. Perhaps it was the fractured nature of the CIC, men and boys who soldiered other soldiers but didn’t quite know how to soldier themselves. Or it was the nervousness of it all, the great unknown.

  Ike himself had arrived from Salisbury on Bayonet, his armored coach and sleeping car, to watch the war games. The Limeys were suspicious of a general who had never had a field command. Ike had been an operations officer, had moved men and matériel around like so many chess pieces on his private board. Half the Limey generals believed that an amphibious attack against the Atlantic Wall was a “butcher’s bill” that would lead to wholesale slaughter, and they grumbled against Ike and his war games. But there’s the rub. The whole damn Admiralty had a red face because of the cock-up surrounding Exercise Tiger, where His Majesty’s fleet was meant to play Fritz on Slapton Sands, firing live ammunition at members of the Fourth to simulate an actual cross-Channel invasion, while someone somewhere had neglected to tell these Yanks where the live ammunition would land. It was Sonny who had to count the dead.

  His Majesty’s offshore guns were meant to fire above a certain “white line,” way over the ears and eyebrows of boys who hit the Sands in their battle packs, but weren’t made aware of such esoteric details; they strove across that invisible “white line” and were smashed to pieces, their heads and limbs colliding like little earthquakes. Some made it across that blue-red hail of fire and arrived at the hedgerows, while the wounded were carted away in ambulances that bore no insignia, and the dead were cared for by a special squad of grave digger–engineers. That’s what tore at Sonny, right into his kishkes, as Sol Salinger would say. The dead didn’t really exist. The grave diggers ripped away their dog tags and piled these unidentifiable soldiers in their battle gear, as if they were handling so much freight. And into an enormous pit they went behind an abandoned farm near the Sands, piled upon one another, with Captain Blunt at the grave site.

  “Count, you son of a bitch,” the captain screamed at Sonny.

  “Sir, they’ll disappear—just like that.”

  “That’s the general idea, Salinger; we’re in the middle of an invasion.”

  “A mock invasion,” Sonny said.

  “Do—you—want—us—to—fail?” the captain screamed. “Ike will suffer—count!”

  “Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine,” Sonny recited, and wrote in his diary. He stopped at 105, while these military morticians began to cover the grave with the red gravel and red earth of Slapton Sands. They collected the helmets and dog tags and wandered off with the efficiency of postal clerks. But the grave wasn’t deep enough, and Sonny saw several fingers, bootlaces, and strands of hair.

  He picked up one of the mortician’s shovels and covered the fingers and laces with clumps of red earth.

  “That’s not your job, Salinger. The wind and rain will do the rest.”

  “What is my job, sir?”

  “To certify that we were never here. You are to cover up every mark we leave behind.”

  “But there are naval guns firing right at us, sir.”

  “That’s Force U,” the captain said. “And Force U doesn’t exist.”

  “U” was the code name for Utah Beach, one of five landing points of the future Allied invasion, but Sonny was told none of this at the time. Slapton Sands had been selected because its gravel, its hedgerows, and its hidden lagoon bore a startling likeness to Utah Beach. And Force U was a secret
training exercise to have the Fourth Division master the “dance steps” of an assault on Utah Beach.

  But the cock-up had only begun. After the first wave of attacks on the Sands, a convoy of assault ships, or LSTs, carrying soldiers, sailors, engineers, and amphibious tanks and trucks sailed from Plymouth into Lyme Bay to simulate a Channel crossing—and then follow the Fourth onto that beach of red gravel. This convoy of eight assault ships, with the code name T-4, was assigned a pair of destroyer escorts from His Majesty’s fleet. But one destroyer failed to show. And the area around Lyme Bay was crawling with German barracudas, or Schnellboote—speedboats from a base in Cherbourg. A flotilla of nine barracudas stumbled upon T-4, and mistaking it for a convoy on a simple training mission, it tore into T-4 with its guns and torpedoes, and returned to Cherbourg, not wanting to confront a sea filled with Great Britain’s own barracudas.

  There’d been a cock-up in radio frequencies, and His Majesty’s fleet lost all contact with the convoy, even as fires ripped across the LSTs and two of the assault ships sank.

  That’s what Sonny had gleaned from the dispatches he read. He could no longer tell what was real about Force U and what was manufactured. The Schnellboote from Cherbourg could have been one more fanciful tale. Perhaps a rogue Corsair had fired upon its own convoy. But Sonny could feel a strange tug at his soul, and that’s when his mind swirled about. Somehow he was on one of the targeted ships, stranded in an oil-slicked sea, with runnels of fire in the water. He was with his own regiment, or another. Dead bodies wandered about in their Mae Wests right under his nose. Sonny didn’t have to count. Mae Wests were everywhere. He could recite what his instructors had told him at Fort Holabird—you couldn’t survive in that damn sea for very long no matter how many Mae Wests you wore. You would perish of deep bone chill marked by a precipitous drop in temperature. And so he clung to whatever he could on that sinking ship—the edge of a useless life raft that had been frozen or rusted into place, a charred beam across the fantail, a helmet glued to the deck with congealed blood—while red and green tracers from some Schnellboot whizzed past Sonny and set one of his sleeves on fire, and a lone gunnery officer on his perch was shooting at some shadow in the water that constantly shifted. It took Sonny a while to notice that this gunnery officer didn’t have any eyes and ears, that he was a limpid, looming skeleton in battle fatigues, the only other figure on board this LST.

  Sonny blinked once, and the eyeless skeleton was gone. So was the sinking ship. He was at a field hospital in South Devon, somewhere between Tiverton and the Sands, glancing at another skeleton. Captain Blunt stood near him in a British helmet with a cheek guard.

  “Look alert, will you, man?”

  Sonny realized that he was carrying an M1 carbine with a bayonet. So were other CIC agents, including Corporal Benson.

  “What happened?” Sonny asked.

  “Salinger, are you alive or dead?” And then Blunt whispered, “There was a cock-up, on land and sea. And we are here at this field unit to erase as much of it as we can.”

  Nurses were running about, and he recognized Lieutenant Hamm, with her entire Red Cross crew in their coronets and veils, with blood on their hospital smocks.

  He waved to her and then asked Blunt, “Is the exercise over, sir?”

  This lean skeleton of a CIC commander glared at him. “It’s never over until we reach the Far Shore.”

  Another code name, for the beachhead across the Channel—the Far Shore, like some treacherous Hallelujah Land. But this makeshift ward with a tottering operation table could have been a butcher shop—blood flew like globs of phlegm and spittle. The surgeons didn’t wear masks. One surgeon rasped in Sonny’s ear, “Do something! We were ordered to treat these lads as if we were veterinarians. But a damn dog hospital would give better service.”

  Sonny couldn’t say a word. He stood with his bayonet and a fixed stare.

  The Red Cross Motor Corps arrived without their usual swagger. They’d been shuttling wounded soldiers in ambulances that were little better than tin boxes on wheels, shuttling them from different landing spots to a makeshift hospital in an apple orchard that wasn’t even on the map. They didn’t have a moment of respite, a moment to wipe the blood off their oxford gray tunics. They gulped wormy water from the same canteen. They swept soldiers with missing arms and legs right off a mock battlefield, in the midst of a fake attack, and also took soldiers and sailors with severe burns off the battered LSTs. The scar on the commandant’s cheek began to twitch—Captain Norbert Whittle, whose sin was to draw sketches of Sonny’s regiment.

  “Salinger, I can’t even say one word to a chap, or accept a letter to his sweetheart. What is this bloody business?”

  The Far Shore, Sonny wanted to say. The Far Shore.

  8.

  THERE WAS A CORTEGE OF JEEPS outside Collipriest House again. The Fourth had returned to Tiverton. Its generals strolled into the front parlor in waist-high olive drab jackets that the supreme commander himself wore. It hadn’t become standard issue yet, but Ike loved to thrust his fists into the open side pockets of his new wool jacket. And these generals did the same. Their fists were always in their pockets.

  The Fourth had to be replenished. Additional troops arrived. Sonny did have an unofficial count of the dead at Slapton Sands: 747. But that number appeared nowhere except in his diary. He still had his room in the castle tower. He still had his driver. He still had his jeep. But nothing was the same. It was as if he had suffered from deep bone chill and had survived somehow. His teeth were chattering and it was well into May. His mother wrote that Oona was pregnant and expected to have her first child with the satyr in July. Sonny started to write Oona but couldn’t finish. The letter sat on his desk with the pages of his novel that were moving backward, like a crab. He had little appetite, but he sat in the underground canteen with the Red Cross nurses, who had labored ceaselessly in that field hospital after the cock-up at Slapton Sands. They couldn’t utter a word about the endless tracery of bandages, or the lads who had died in their arms with such a grip on their elbows, it took a pair of doctors to break that death lock. All their chatter was coded now, with a touch of horror in their high-pitched voices.

  “Be a lamb, will you, Salinger, and deliver a few Hershey bars to the old-timers in their huts? We’re short this month, and we wouldn’t want the geezers to suffer. They’ve lost their farms.”

  “But they’ll get them back, Lieutenant Hamm.”

  She purled her eyes at Sonny. “After that incident? They’ll be lucky if their farmhouses still stand. You saw the craters.”

  “There were no craters,” Sonny said.

  “That’s right. No craters at all.”

  “But I’ll deliver the Hersheys,” he said.

  “Don’t you look smart today.”

  He, too, had a short woolen jacket with slash side pockets, a gift from his CIC commander, who’d been presented with a dozen prototypes of Ike’s jacket for his agents. He had the Hershey bars, but he couldn’t seem to go near the evacuee huts. They stank of chicken shit, he told himself. There were no chickens in the Quonset huts. He didn’t want to be reminded of all the blood and red gravel and that secret grave full of soldiers.

  Slapton Sands.

  He got into the jeep with Corporal Benson, who didn’t have an Eisenhower jacket of his own. But it was strange. Every soldier in Tiverton, it seems, saluted Sonny. He looked like a general in that jacket, Ike with big ears.

  “Where to, sir?”

  He could have gone to the Blue Mermaid or visited Sottotenente Tropea at the tiny Italian prison camp, but he wasn’t in the mood for companionship.

  “The Tivoli,” he said.

  The corporal groaned. “Aw, Sergeant, are we going to see Meet Me in St. Louis for the seventh fucking time?”

  The Fourth received the earliest cuts of every film from MGM—these cuts were pure gold. The films arrived overseas in the generals’ private pouch. Somehow, Sonny had been put in charge, Sonny selected th
e films. And since the Tivoli was starved for new releases, he would often wink at the general staff and let the town theater borrow the Fourth’s own fare.

  “Meet Me in St. Louis,” the corporal muttered to himself while he drove from the castle. “Sergeant, there isn’t any justice. Margaret O’Brien is the biggest star in the world, and she’s six years old.”

  “Seven,” Sonny insisted. He knew the birthdays of every star, shared them with his mother.

  “And who’s the second-biggest?” the corporal asked, sounding like a quiz master.

  “Lassie.”

  “That’s my whole point, sir. A fucking Collie dominates Hollywood—and a little girl with a missing tooth.”

  “It’s wartime,” Sonny said. “Audiences love loyal dogs and little girls who know how to cry.”

  There wasn’t much traffic in Tiverton, as petrol was so scarce. The corporal parked right in front of the Tivoli. He wouldn’t go inside. “I’ve had enough of Margaret O’Brien, sir.”

  The cashier wouldn’t allow Sonny to buy a ticket. “We couldn’t stay open without you, Sergeant Salinger.”

  He plunged into the dark. He wasn’t in search of soldiers and their renegade sweethearts. He didn’t even watch the flickering shadows on the Tivoli’s front wall. The dialogue comforted him when he didn’t have to pay attention to the words. He didn’t have to listen to the screams inside his head. He’d been going to the movies since he was four, most often with his sister, Doris, a divorcée who was six years older, and a buyer for Bloomingdale’s—Doris was a big deal. But Doris never loved the dark. Movies were a punishment she had to endure to keep her little brother occupied. Sol paid her a quarter to watch over Sonny, while he sat there, sucking up all the lost souls on the screen.

  He could smell the projector, feel the filament of light come out of the little cave in the rear wall. He could breathe so much better in that stale air. But the screams wouldn’t stop, not even in his private fort—at the Tivoli. He was washed right back onto that sinking LST, with the Klaxon in his ears, the warping cry that meant he had to abandon ship, with all its weaponry. He couldn’t remember climbing aboard at Plymouth. Who had sent him out to sea? He had no battle gear or life preserver. He was the lone survivor on an assault ship that didn’t have a single other passenger. Here he was, captain and first mate, cook, stoker, gunnery chief, helmsman, and engineer. He didn’t have to pilot this tub. He was bulletproof, like the heroes he could wake from all the Tivolis of his childhood. Rin Tin Tin and the Royal Whisperer. It was the age of silent serials, 1925 or ’26. The Whisperer kept a cape bunched around his shoulders. He was a casualty of the First War, and limped about on a wooden leg. He had an uncanny knack for catching criminals. The Whisperer always worked alone. There was no need of captions or subtitles. The audience never learned what this peg leg whispered into a police captain’s ear, or what his talent was all about. And that’s what intrigued Sonny. The Whisperer whispered one or twice, and the lord of crime was undone. It held a boy, seized his imagination, as if the wildest gifts could come from nowhere. And that’s what seized him now, at the Tivoli: Sergeant Salinger on a sinking ship. He could hear the cries of soldiers in the Channel waters. And still, he steered without a steering wheel. He had a destination. The Far Shore.