Player Piano (34 page)

“Constableville. The stop is Constableville. Next station, Remsen.”

A poker game was going on in the facing seats behind Paul, and a superannuated first sergeant, zebra-like under symbols for patience, individual bloodlettings, and separations from home, was telling tales of the last war—of the Last War.

“Jesus,” he said, riffling through the deck absently, as though his mind were a thousand miles away, “there we was, and there they was. Imagine the men’s room there’s a hogback, with the bastards dug in deep on the reverse slope.” The recruits looked at the men’s room through narrowed, battle-wise eyes, and the sergeant shuffled the cards some more. “The night before, a lucky shot knocked out the generator.”

“Holy cow!” said a recruit.

“You can say that again,” said the sergeant. “Anyway—five-card stud, nothing wild—there we were with no juice, eighteen of us facing five hundred of them. The microwave sentinels, the proximity mines, the electric fence, the fire-control system, the remote-control machine gun nests—pfft! No juice, Queen, ace, ace, and dealer gets a deuce. Bet the first ace.

“Well, boys—a dime to me? Raise it a dime just to make things interesting. Well, boys, then the fun started. At seven hundred hours they tried a hundred-man patrol on us, to see what we had. And we had nothin’! And communications was cut to hell, so we couldn’t call for nothin’. All our robot tanks’d been pulled out to support a push the 106th was makin’, so we was really alone. Snafu. So, I sent Corporal Merganthaler back to battalion for help.—Two queens, no help, two aces, and dealer catches another lousy deuce. Bet the aces. So over they come, screamin’ bloody murder, and us with nothing but our goddamn rifles and bayonets workin’. Looked like a tidal wave comin’ over at us.—Aces check? Aw, hell, deuces’ll try a dime.—Just then, up comes Merganthaler with a truck and generator he’s moonlight-requisitioned from the 57th. We hooked her into our lines, cranked her up, and my God, I wish you could of seen it. The poor
bastards fryin’ on the electric fence, the proximity mines poppin’ under ’em, the microwave sentinels openin’ up with the remote-control machine-gun nests, and the fire-control system swiveling the guns and flamethrowers around as long as anything was quiverin’ within a mile of the place. And that’s how I got the Silver Star.”

Paul shook his head slightly as he listened to the sergeant’s absurd tale. That, then, was the war he had been so eager to get into at one time, the opportunity for basic, hot-tempered, hard-muscled heroism he regretted having missed. There had been plenty of death, plenty of pain, all right, and plenty of tooth-grinding stoicism and nerve. But men had been called upon chiefly to endure by the side of the machines, the terrible engines that fought with their own kind for the right to gorge themselves on men. Horatio on the bridge had become a radio-guided rocket with an atomic warhead and a proximity fuse. Roland and Oliver had become a pair of jet-driven computers hurtling toward each other far faster than the flight of a man’s scream. The great tradition of the American rifleman survived only symbolically, in volleys fired into the skies over the dead in thousands of military cemeteries. Those in the graves, the front-line dead, were heirs to another American tradition as old as that of the rifleman, but once a peaceful tradition—that of the American tinker.

“Gosh! Sarge, how come you never went after a commission?”

“Me go back to college at my age? I’m not the school kind, sonny. Gettin’ that B.S. was enough for me. Two more years and an M.A. for a pair of lousy gold bars? Naaaaaah!—And a queen, and no help, and a jack, and no help, and a five, and no help, and dealer gets a—what do you know? Three deuces. Looks like my lucky day, boys.”

“Middleville. The stop is Middleville. Next station, Herkimer.”

“Sarge, d’ya mind talkin’ about your wound stripes?”

“Hmmm? No—guess not. This ’un’s for a dose of Gamma rays at Kiukiang. This ’un’s—lemme see—radioactive dust in the bronchial tubes at Afyon Karahisar. And this little bastard—uh—trenchfoot at Kransystav.”

“Sarge, what was the best piece you ever had?”

“A little redheaded half-Swede, half-Egyptian in Farafangana,” said the Sarge without hesitation.

“Boy! I hope that’s where they send me.”

That much of a fine old American military tradition, Paul supposed, would always be alive—send me where the tail is.

“Herkimer. The stop is Herkimer. Next station, Little Falls.”

“Say, Sarge, is this train a local?”

“You might call it that. How’s about a round of cold hands for the odd change?” said the sergeant.

“O.K. with me. Oops. Lousy trey. A queen for Charley. An eight for Lou. And, I’ll be go to hell, the Sarge catches a bullet.”

“Say, Sarge, hear Pfc. Elmo Hacketts is shipping out.”

“Yep. Been asking for overseas ever since he joined the outfit. Pair of treys for Ed, nothing for Charley, jack for Lou, and dealer catches a—I’ll be damned.”

“Ace!”

“Little Falls. The stop is Little Falls. Next station, Johnsonville.”

“Here we go around again, and—What you know about that?” said the sergeant. “Ed’s got three treys. Yep—hate to see Hacketts go. With a coupla years seasoning, I could see him as a helluva fine guidon bearer. But, if he wants to throw all that over, that’s his business. Nothing for Charley, and Lou gets my ace. Three treys got it so far.”

“Where’s Hacketts going? You know?”

“And no help, and help, and no help, and no help,” said the sergeant. “Yeah, his orders came through today. Last time around, boys. No help, no help, no help, and—”

“Jesus!”

“Sorry about that third ace, Ed. Guess that one’s mine too. Yeah, Hacketts gets his overseas duty all right. Shipping out for Tamanrasset tomorrow morning.”

“Tamanrasset?”

“The Sahara Desert, you dumb bastard. Don’t you know any geography?” He grinned wolfishly. “How about a little blackjack for laughs?”

Paul sighed for Hacketts, born into a spiritual desert, now being shipped to where the earth was sterile, too.

“Johnsonville … Ft. Plain … Fonda … Ft. Johnson … Amsterdam … Schenectady … Cohoes … Watervliet … Albany … Rensselaer … Ilium, the stop is Ilium.”

Bleary-eyed, Paul shuffled to the door, inserted his ticket, and stepped onto the Ilium station platform.

The door on the baggage compartment clattered open, a coffin slid onto a waiting freight elevator and was taken into the refrigerated bowels of the station.

No cabs had bothered to meet the unpromising train. Paul phoned the cab company, but no one answered. He looked helplessly at the automatic ticket vendor, the automatic nylon vendor, the automatic coffee vendor, the automatic gum vendor, the automatic book vendor, the automatic newspaper vendor, the automatic toothbrush vendor, the automatic Coke vendor, the automatic shoeshine machine, the automatic photo studio, and walked out into the deserted streets on the Homestead side of the river.

It was eight miles through Homestead, across the bridge, and up the other side of the river to home. Not home, Paul thought, but the house where his bed was.

He felt dull, mushy inside, with an outer glaze of bright heat—sleepy yet sleepless, assailed by thoughts yet thoughtless.

His footsteps echoed against Homestead’s gray façades, and lifeless neon tubes, proclaiming one thing and another of
no importance at this hour, were empty, cold glass for want of the magic of electrons in flight through inert gas.

“Lonesome?”

“Huh?”

A young woman, with bosoms like balloon spinnakers before the wind, looked down from a second-story window. “I said, are you lonesome?”

“Yes,” said Paul simply.

“Come on up.”

“Well,” Paul heard himself saying, “all right, I will.”

“The door next to the Automagic Market.”

He climbed the long, dark stairway, each riser of which proclaimed Doctor Harry Friedmann to be a painless dentist, licensed under the National Security and Health Plan. “Why,” asked Friedmann rhetorically, “settle for less than a D-006?”

The door on the hallway, next to Doctor Friedmann’s, was open, the woman waiting.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Proteus.”

“Any relation to the big cheese across the river?”

“My half-brother.”

“You the black sheep, honey?”

“Yup.”

“Screw your brother.”

“Please,” said Paul.

He awoke once during the remainder of the night with her, awoke from a dream in which he saw his father glowering at him from the foot of the bed.

She mumbled in her sleep.

As Paul dropped off once more, he murmured an automatic reply. “And I love
you
, Anita.”

D
OCTOR
P
AUL
P
ROTEUS
had been his own man, alone in his own house for a week. He’d been expecting some sort of communication from Anita, but nothing came. There was nothing more, he realized wonderingly, to be said. She was still at the Mainland, probably. The Meadows session had another week to run. After that would come the muddle of her separating her effects from his—and divorce. He wondered on what grounds she would divorce him. Extreme mental cruelty amused him, and he supposed it was close enough to the truth. Any variation from any norm pained her terribly. She’d have to leave New York State, of course, since the only grounds for divorce there were adultery, and incitement to conspire to advocate sabotage. A case could be made for either, he supposed, but not with dignity.

Paul had gone to his farm once, and, in the manner of a man dedicating his life to God, he’d asked Mr. Haycox to put him to work, guiding the hand of Nature. The hand he grasped so fervently, he soon discovered, was coarse and sluggish, hot and wet and smelly. And the charming little cottage he’d taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a sewage-disposal plant. He hadn’t gone back.

He’d been to the Works once. The machinery had been shut off during the Meadows session, and only the guards were on duty. Four of them, now officious and scornful, had telephoned to Kroner at the Meadows for instructions. Then they’d escorted him to what had been his desk, where he’d picked up a few personal effects. They’d made a list of what he’d taken, and questioned his claim to each item. Then
they’d marched him back into the outside world, and shut the gates against him forever and ever.

Paul was in the kitchen now, before the laundry console, seated on a stool, watching television. It was late afternoon, and, for the unadorned hell of it, he was doing his own laundry.

“Urdle-urdle-urdle,”
went the console.
“Urdle-urdle-ur dull! Znick. Bazz-wap!”
Chimes sounded.
“Azzzzzzzzzz. Fromp!”
Up came the anticlimactic offering: three pairs of socks, three pairs of shorts, and the blue Meadow’s T-shirts, which he was using for pajamas.

On the television screen, a middle-aged woman was counseling her teen-age son, whose hair and clothes were disordered and soiled.

“Fightin’ don’t help, Jimmy,” she was saying sadly. “Lord knows nobody ever brought any more sunshine into the world by bloodyin’ somebody’s nose, or by havin’ his own nose bloodied.”

“I know—but he said my I.Q. was 59, Ma!” The boy was on the point of tears, he was so furious and hurt. “And he said Pop was a 53!”

“Now, now—that’s just child’s talk. Don’t you pay it no mind, Jimmy.”

“But it’s true,” said the boy brokenly. “Ma, it’s true. I went down to the police station and looked it up! Fifty-nine, Ma! and poor Pop with a 53.” He turned his back, and his voice was a bitter whisper: “And you with a 47, Ma. A 47.”

She bit her lip and looked heartbroken, then, seeming to draw strength miraculously from somewhere above eye level, she gripped the kitchen table. “Jimmy, look at your mother.”

He turned slowly.

“Jimmy, I.Q. isn’t everything. Some of the unhappiest people in this world are the smartest ones.”

Since the start of his week of idleness at home, Paul had learned that this, with variations, was the basic problem situation
in afternoon dramas, with diseases and injuries of the optic nerve and locomotor apparatus close seconds. One program was an interminable exploration of the question: can a woman with a low I.Q. be happily married to a man with a high one? The answer seemed to be yes and no.

“Jimmy, boy, son—I.Q. won’t get you happiness, and St. Peter don’t give I.Q. tests before he lets you in those Pearly Gates. The wickedest people that ever lived was the smartest.”

Jimmy looked suspicious, then surprised, then guardedly willing to be convinced. “You mean—a plain fellow like me, just another guy, folks like us, Ma, you mean we’re as good as, as, as, well, Doctor Garson, the Works Manager?”

“Doctor Garson, with his 169 I.Q.? Doctor Garson, with his Ph.D., D.Sc., and his Ph. and D. I-don’t-know-what-else? Him?”

“Yeah, Ma. Him.”

“Him? Doctor Garson? Jimmy, son, boy—have you seen the bags under his eyes? Have you seen the lines in his face? He’s carryin’ the world around on his shoulders, Jimmy. That’s what a high I.Q. got him, Doctor Garson. Do you know how old he is?”