American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  Out the window he could see the aftermath of the Independence Day parade: streamer confetti, apple cores, bunting gone ragged, paper fans, and popped balloons, all the rubbish either red, white, blue, or some combination thereof. Not until he noticed the banner hanging over Main Street did Tewksbury realize that this year the celebrations were a centennial. Houghton Forster had been born on the hundredth birthday of America. That sort of thing, considered Tewksbury cautiously, must be a sign. Of what exactly, he had no clue. Perhaps it was nothing.

  His gaze wandering with his thoughts, Tewksbury spotted, in a vacant shop window across the street, a cardboard placard, the letters of which were written in blue ink alternating with red. space for rent. On looking at those words he had an idea for a type of store that, with any luck, would net him just enough money to provide for his infant child. Tewksbury couldn’t have known that the one color of his new country’s flag that was missing from that placard would one day be used for the label of a soft drink that would make his son a millionaire.

  Tewksbury carried the child back to Fiona. He didn’t want to think about business ventures right now. He didn’t want to think about omens. He didn’t want to think about his mentor. A celebration was in order! Tewksbury turned to the doctor and said, “Got any more of that whisky?”

  2.2

  The Littlest General—Soda Walkabout—The Pride of Quito—“Spare a Fag?”—A German Sniper Takes a Deep Breath—The Candy Wrapper Solution

  Toward the end of his speech the CO’s voice cracked on each word. He almost seemed about to cry. “Everybody eats shit from the man above them. You know I have a man above me?” Colonel Frank Duluth said to the Ninth Regiment. “I eat his shit every goddamn day. What I’m asking is for you to eat my shit. And I’m not asking.”

  Once the colonel had finished, it was clear that his men, standing in formation, were moved by such candidness. Some of them clenched their jaws. Others stared at the ground. A few wiped tears from their eyes. On March 5, 1918, in Lorraine, France, only one of the “Manchus” of the Second Infantry Division, AEF—America’s expeditionary forces in the War to End All Wars—appeared unmoved. Instead of evincing awe Montgomery Forster was trying not to giggle.

  He had nothing against Colonel Duluth. Since the regiment’s transport across the Atlantic—twelve days at sea without cigarettes because they’d been ordered to give up their matches, the only light coming from tiny blue bulbs because all portholes were closed—the colonel, similar to what the dramatist Samuel Foote once said of a dull associate, was not only calm himself but the cause of calmness in others. The men respected him so much they didn’t even complain when forced to cross the French countryside in 40-and-8 boxcars so cramped they’d have been considered a cruel means of transit for livestock. Monty was on the verge of laughter not because of the colonel but because of the French children. He could see them behind a shed. Led by a nine-year-old boy whom Monty had begun to think of as the “Littlest General,” the group of children stood at attention, just like the regiment was now, listening as the Littlest General gave a speech that, though they were out of earshot, Monty felt certain was a verbatim copy of the one Colonel Duluth was giving at this moment.

  With one last salute the men were dismissed for their evening chow. The tight lines broke into haphazard clusters as everyone wandered back to their billets. On his walk through the village, Monty wasn’t looking forward to another night of washing out his mess kit in the street, trying to ignore the fumier heaped in front of each house. He lit the last cigarette in his pack, its gray smoke hardly distinguishable from the gray sky, a sight typical of the past month. Whoever came up with the term “Sunny France” knew from snake oil like nobody, he was thinking as someone approached him, draped an arm over his shoulder, and, in the clipped warble of a blueblood at least a quarter in the bag, said, “I’ve come down with a horrid case of Americanitis. Medic says the only cure is to relent to it.”

  Monty leaned into Nicholas. “What’d you have in mind, you stuck-up, drunk Englishman?” His friend’s breath smelled of the local vintner’s finest.

  “There’s this little place in a village just outside of Gondrecourt. Been meaning to take you. The food’s magnificent, despite being French. What do you say? I’ll understand if you prefer to eat lukewarm gruel from a Marmite can.”

  “Got any more wine for the trip?”

  During the half hour it took to reach the village, the two of them finished one bottle, both hiding it in their saddlebags between gulps. They had first met near “Washington Center,” a trench complex meant for realistic training, built by the “Blue Devils” of the French Forty-Seventh Division. That day Nicholas had shown Monty how to reload his Chauchat rifle. “Be careful should the damned thing overheat,” he’d said. “There’s more than one way to skin a Chauchat.” Since then, their friendship had become a welcome distraction from the circumstances that made it possible, allowing them to focus on each other, making jokes, trading stories, instead of what they would encounter at the front lines soon enough.

  “Be a good boy and look after your brother and sister,” Monty had written to Harold, fourteen years old, in his first letter home, and in his second, he’d written to Lance and Ramsey, both seven years old, “It’s up to y’all to keep our Haddy safe.” Monty avoided contacting his mother and father until he was out of the country, protected by an entire ocean from any chance his parents could have their sixteen-year-old son removed from the military service he’d unlawfully joined. “I hope you understand why I left under such surreptitious circumstances,” he finally wrote them. Rather than describe his training in weapons and marksmanship, Monty told his parents about the more innocuous elements of his time in the Plattsburgh camps, how he could buy stamps and stationery at the Y hut, that his favorite thing to do was watch movies at the liberty theater. He never once told them about the twenty-year-old man he’d come to think of as his best friend and with whom he was at the moment finishing a bottle of unsurprisingly good Alsatian Riesling.

  Nicholas tossed the empty bottle into a woodbine-choked shrub as he and Montgomery rode up to the tavern outside Gondrecourt. A modest building of two stories, timber framed with stucco in-fill, the tavern appeared similar to the other farmhouses in the area, except its hitching post was crowded with horses bearing the insignia of many nationalities, British and French and American. Nicholas unwrapped a hard candy, put it in his mouth, dropped the wrapper, and offered one to Monty. The man certainly loved his sweets. Throughout the time Monty had known him, Nicholas seemed to have an endless supply of hard candies, pulling one after another from his pocket, untwisting the wax paper, and placing the sugary lump on his tongue, a Eucharist of butterscotch, cinnamon, horehound, and peppermint. “No, thanks,” said Monty.

  “One day I’m going to convince you to try some of my candy,” Nicholas said as they walked into the tavern. “You’ll be so sad to learn the wonders you’ve been missing.”

  The scene inside reminded Monty of the paintings some families in the Delta had commissioned, where the artist placed the family members, attired in modern clothes and groomed in modern fashion, into the Old World milieu of a Renaissance portrait. That evening the tavern could have been mistaken for Flemish Baroque were it not for all the men in military garb eating dinner. Beneath the shining black leather of boots lay a floor covered in dirty straw. Next to the elegant flower garlands hung campaign hats stained with gun oil.

  Just as Monty and Nicholas sat down, a group of soldiers at the other end of the banquet table began to sing, with varying fidelity to the actual lyrics, “We’ll Hang Kaiser Bill to a Sour-apple Tree!” Nicholas smiled and winked at Monty. “The Allies do enjoy giving a rouse. If only they could carry a tune.” Although Monty, a corporal, had initially felt conspicuous among so many commissioned officers, both the drunken song and the wink from Nicholas, a second lieutenant, set him at ease.

  The barmaid placed a carafe of wine and two pewter goblets in front of them.
In fluent but too formal French, the proficiency of a man who’d studied up to the sixth form, Nicholas ordered gougères to start and quiche as the main course, noting afterward, “I suppose that when in Lorraine one calls it simply ‘quiche.’” He and Monty started in on the wine, toasting, over the next few hours and with only partial irony, General Pershing, Woodrow Wilson, Archduke Ferdinand, the Marne, the Somme, and His Majesty King George V. For most of the evening, their conversation bore a lightness that belied its subject matter, which was usual for them. Monty liked this about Nicholas. It was such a Dickensian way to behave. Late in the night, however, Nicholas broke the pattern by asking, “You’re scared, aren’t you?” the sudden intimacy of his tone made manifest by his fingers grazing the inside of Monty’s wrist.

  “Of course not.” Monty pulled his hand away. “Scared of what?”

  Nicholas’s facial expression, malleable as unfired pottery, shifted from coy to wry. “Of going to the Front. I want you to know it’s okay to be afraid.” He drained the last of his wine. “What is it they say? A man without fear is a man who cannot love.”

  “I don’t think they say that. I think you made it up.”

  “C’est la vie,” said the tipsy Brit just before the French barmaid asked, “Encore du vin?” He told her no but thank you, that they had a war to fight, had she not heard, as he handed her a stack of coins.

  Outside, where the air had turned crisp, Nicholas and Monty stood beneath a rare starlit, cloudless sky. They faced each other while putting on their jackets. “You’re off by one,” Nicholas said. “Let me show you.” He pulled Montgomery toward him. Alone in front of the tavern, both men swaying from drink, Nicholas unbuttoned Monty’s jacket, realigned the lapels, and, like a parent would a child, began to button it again. What happened when Nicholas reached the collar Monty did not register at first. In the moment it merely seemed as though their faces had accidently bumped against each other.

  That Nicholas did not acknowledge what he had done only confused Monty more. Whether unconcerned, carefree, or simply indifferent, Nicholas mounted his horse, not saying a word, the flickering lamp in the tavern window destabilizing the contours of his eyes, his lips, his cheeks, his nose. Monty remained on the ground, waiting for his senses to untangle themselves, sight no longer touch, taste no longer sound. As soon as they did he realized something was in his mouth. He plucked it out.

  Between his fingers, glistening in the moonlight, was a hard candy.

  * * *

  Licorice, thought Monty. It tasted like licorice. At a terrace café in Quito, Ecuador, he took another sip of the soda. “What you think?” said the waiter who had recommended it. “Good bubbles?”

  “Good bubbles.”

  That carbonated drink was the first he had come across in his travels to use anise as a flavoring agent. Reporters had dubbed the trip a soda walkabout. Following Montgomery’s graduation from Princeton on June 12, 1924, his father had offered to pay for him to travel the world, sampling foreign drinks as a kind of R & D for the Panola Cola Company. Monty accepted the offer on the condition he could avoid northwestern France. He was given an expense account, suited with the finest luggage, and booked first class on an ocean liner. The world became not a single oyster of his but a multitude, each with a taste specific to its environment as well as to its culture. In Ireland, he drank three varieties of lemonade, red and brown and white, some of them mixed with uisce beatha. In Chile, he tried a drink made from wheat and peaches called mote con huesillo, the origin of an expression that translates as “more Chilean than a mote con huesillo.” In Argentina, he drank the “national infusion,” yerba mate, sipping it with a metal straw called a bombilla. China had an herbal tea named Wong Lo Kat. Italy had a mineral water named Mangiatorella. At a beachside bar in Cuba, he downed a pint of Iron Beer, which tasted like a cross between Dr Pepper, root beer, and PanCola. While crossing the Pacific he gulped from a bottle of homemade lightning stowed away by a deckhand who used to work for a florist named O’Banion in Chicago. At a roadside stand in Peru, he quaffed an early iteration of what would become Inca Kola, whose taste could have been said to resemble bubble gum, except Dubble Bubble, the first bubble gum, had not yet been invented. He drank pear-flavored sodas in Finland, guarana-flavored sodas in Brazil, lime-flavored sodas in India, and tarragon-flavored sodas in Estonia.

  “You should try it with rum.”

  At his table in the terrace café, Monty looked up from the licorice soda named Raiz Dulce, wondering who had spoken to him. His gaze was met by a man two tables away. Deep olive in complexion, midtwenties, with dark hair slicked back, the man smiled at Monty using his eyes but not his mouth, no teeth showing from behind his closed, roseate lips. His thumb methodically rotated a gold signet ring on his pinkie. Before Monty could reply, the man flagged a waiter and spoke to him in Spanish. Then he rose from his chair, straightened his necktie, and walked over to Monty’s table.

  “May I?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  The man took a seat and introduced himself. “Juan Alhambra Diaz.” Once Monty had stated his own name, the waiter arrived with another glass of the soda as well as a carafe of clear liquid, placing the former in front of Juan and the latter at the center of the table. “The rum brings out the flavor,” said Juan, pouring from the carafe into each of their sodas. “As strawberries do champagne.” Miniature tornados formed when the rum met the carbonation.

  “You speak English very well,” Monty said. “Were you raised in Ecuador?”

  “Was I raised in Ecuador? That is to, how do you say, ‘put it mildly.’” Over the next few minutes, as Monty decided the rum did indeed bring out the flavor in his Raiz Dulce soda, Juan spoke of his family’s history in Ecuador, how his great-grandfather had fought under Antonio José de Sucre in the Battle of Pichincha and subsequently helped establish the country as an independent republic, how, throughout the following decades of instability, the Diazes had used their signature attributes, intuition and quiescence and flattery, to survive the rule of several leaders, including Vicente Rocafuerte, José María Urbina, Diego Noboa, and Pedro José de Arteta. “Not only did we survive but flourish,” Juan concluded. “And now my family is the pride of Quito!”

  In the tintype light of the deepening afternoon, Monty stared at this man and was reminded of Nicholas, those taut cheeks that looked as though they had been splashed with sandalwood oil, that black hair that seemed to have been combed with brilliantine. So clearly could he remember those two smells, one rich and woodsy and the other medicinal and tart, he could almost conjure his friend here now. Nicholas would have loved Quito. Think of it, Monty thought. The two of them, sipping coffee in the Plaza Grande on a bright morning, shoeshine boys offering a discount. The two of them, visiting the Otavalo town market to try on Panama hats, the vendors telling them how great they looked.

  “Tell me of your family, señor.”

  “Excuse me?” Monty said.

  “Your family. Tell me their story.”

  For a moment, as though a baby transfixed by a gleaming object, Montgomery could not take his gaze from Juan’s gold signet ring. He was still rotating it. “Your family is from South America,” said Monty, purposefully looking away, toward the Cotopaxi volcano, snowcapped and cloud ringed, looming in the distance. “Mine is from the American South.”

  Juan laughed. “I like that.”

  “We own a soda company.”

  “Successful?”

  “I suppose you could say that. Ever heard of Panola Cola?”

  “Sí!” While tilting his chair back, Juan grew thoughtful, and then began to hum a jingle Monty immediately recognized. He made clicking noises with his tongue, like a drumstick tapping a hi-hat, as one does when unable to remember lyrics. At the end of the tune, however, Juan managed to recall the last line, singing triumphantly, “More cola for less moolah!”

  Monty smiled. That catchphrase had been introduced a few years back as part of an effort to curb the rising pop
ularity of Coca-Cola. PanCola had changed their bottle design from the standard 6.5-ounce model to an 8-ounce one, hoping to keep customers from switching their loyalty to the small upstart based in Atlanta. Neither company foresaw that, during the Great Depression a decade later, both would be challenged when Pepsi-Cola, bordering on bankruptcy, introduced a 12-ounce bottle.

  “Do you like to dance, Montgomery?” No longer rotating his ring, Juan sat motionless across the table. An ellipsis dribbled off the end of his question, and as though in visualization of the punctuation mark, three dots of sweat formed along the brow of his curled lip.

  “On occasion.”

  “Not very far from here is a social club. Wonderful music. Very good dancing. Would you like to accompany me to this club? I believe you would enjoy it very much.”

  Monty asked the waiter for his check.

  Outside the café, walking along narrow cobblestone streets, the two men encountered a city winding both down and up, the sound of yawns mixed with that of laughter, the smell of coffee mixed with that of wine. The sky had gone purple with the approaching night. Monty followed his new friend through a labyrinth of passageways, alleys, and sidewalks, the predominance of bell towers, sometimes four on a single block, making it impossible to visualize their route.

  They reached their destination right as the last scraps of day had vanished. With his hand at the small of Monty’s back Juan led them to a brick gateway. “It is just through here, my friend,” he said, pressing Monty forward. “There is a courtyard in the back.” Their footsteps echoed against the walls of a short tunnel lit by kerosene lamps. Up ahead all was quiet.