The Captains (38 page)

“Certainly, sir,” Dannelly said. “I'm sorry, sir.”

“How old are you, Major?” Georgia heard herself asking. “You look a little young to be a major.”

“Twenty-four,” he said.

“Christ,” General Black said, “I knew you were young, but not that young.” Then he looked at Georgia. “George Armstrong Custer was a brigadier general when he was twenty-one, Miss Paige,” he said. “But that was during the Civil War. You see very few twenty-four-year-old majors these days. As a matter of face, you see practically
no
twenty-four-year-old majors.” The subject seemed to fascinate him. He turned back to Lowell. “Jiggs get you the leaf after Task Force Lowell?” he said.

“Actually about two hours before we linked up,” Lowell said.

“Oh, you were with Task Force Lowell, were you, Major?” Colonel Dannelly asked.

“That's why they called it Task Force Lowell, Colonel,” General Black said, sarcastically.

“What's a Task Force Lowell?” Georgia asked.

“This young man took thirty-eight M46 tanks, Miss Paige,” General Black said, “and some self-propelled artillery, and using them as an armored force is supposed to be used—which hasn't often happened in this war, unfortunately—ran them around the enemy's rear, disrupting his lines of communication, blowing up his dumps and his bridges, for nine days. Phil Sheridan couldn't have done any better.”

Georgia had no idea who Phil Sheridan was. But it was obvious that the general, for different reasons, was as favorably impressed with this blond young man as she was.

The young major sensed Georgia's eyes on him, looked at her, and blushed.

All of a sudden, it occurred to Georgia Paige that when these people talked about George Armstrong Custer, they weren't thinking of Errol Flynn playing a role, but a real person. General Black, who was obviously impressed with the young major, had
really
known and fought with General Patton. The young man who blushed when he looked at her, had actually done whatever the general had said he had done, “disrupting lines of communication, blowing up dumps and bridges.”

Confirmation came when they were walking from the general's mess to the outdoor theater where they would give the final performance in the XIX Corps (Group) area.

“Well, that explains what he's doing as an aide,” Colonel Dannelly said.

“The blond kid, you mean?” Wayne Baxley asked. “I didn't get to hear much of that conversation.”

“What were you saying, Colonel?” Georgia asked.

“Every once in a while, a really outstanding young officer turns up,” Dannelly said. “One that they know is going to be a general. So they give him assignments to train him. Working as a general's aide is one of them.”

“You mean, they could look at that kid and tell he's going to be a general?” Wayne asked, disbelievingly.

“He's halfway there already,” Colonel Dannelly said. “I feel a little foolish. I should have known who he was. He's wearing the 73rd Tank patch.”

Midway through her act (which consisted of a couple of minutes of repartee with Wayne Baxley, most of his “humor” a mixture of innuendo and wide-eyed staring at her boobs, followed by three vocals, during which she had the chance to slink around the stage in a dress cut incredibly low in the back to remind everybody that she was the one who went braless), she looked into the wings and saw Lowell standing there in a shadow.

She sang the rest of the song to him, looking over the microphone right at him, wondering (the thought somewhat shocking her) if he screwed as well as he fought. She normally didn't have thoughts like that, and even if she was attracted physically to some man, she didn't think words like “screwing.” She was a little bit afraid of him, she realized. Now that she thought of it, she didn't believe he was twenty-four. They had been pulling Dannelly's leg. She was twenty-three. He had to be older; otherwise, how could he make her feel like a foolish girl?

He was gone from backstage when she finished her act, and she didn't see him again that night, although she hung around the general's mess until it was late, hoping he would show up.

He wasn't at breakfast either, and when she asked Dannelly where he was, Dannelly said he'd flown ahead to IX Corps to make sure the trucks with the troupe's portable stage and all the props had arrived safely.

When the C-47 landed at the IX Corps airstrip, she looked out the window for him. He was sitting on the hood of a jeep. When the door of the airplane opened, and the photographer's flashbulbs started going off, he was standing to one side. Their eyes met. Georgia smiled. She had a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. Down there.

He knows, she thought. And I should be embarrassed, but I'm not.

At lunch, when they had a rare moment alone, Georgia realized she had to get him away from the others. She had an idea.

“I've never been close to a tank,” Georgia said, winsomely.

“They're all on the line,” he said. “You're not permitted up there.”

“Please,” she said. For some damned reason it was important.

“I'll see if I can get one down here for you to see,” he said.

“Thank you,” Georgia said.

She touched him then for the first time, letting her hand rest for a moment on his lower arm. He was warm and muscular.

He was also (although perhaps with the exception of Captain Sanford T. Felter, who was his best friend, no one would believe it) very inexperienced with women. Certainly none of the men in the 73rd Heavy Tank would believe that the Duke had known only two women sexually in his life. There had been an afternoon session in a sailboat just before he had been expelled from Harvard College. He got so excited finally getting her white shorts off, finally seeing what one really looked like, that his loss of virginity occurred on the second stroke.

When he had been sent to Germany, where women were quite literally available for a half-box of Hershey bars, or a box of Lux from the PX, he had remained chaste, less from a sense of morality than a sense of horror of what would happen to him, down there, if he caught something. The army had prepared a technicolor training film with a lot of footage taken in Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the ward where patients suffering from the third stage of syphilis were treated. There was a lot of footage of suppurating open ulcers on the genital organs. Eighteen-year-old Private Craig W. Lowell had been convinced. He took his sexual gratification through masturbation, thinking of the girl at college, and what it had looked like, felt like, in the thirty seconds it had been all his.

And then there had been Ilse. He hadn't been able to get it up with her the first time he tried it with her. But it had finally worked, and he had fallen in love, and if you are nineteen and in love, you don't cheat on your beloved. Not even if you are an officer serving with the 24th Royal Hellenic Mountain Division, and women are provided to take care of the officers.

And certainly not if you are an officer and a gentleman and an Episcopalian off in a war. As a happily married husband and father, you are aware of sexual drives, certainly, and what a strain abstinence is. You might possibly arrange for a group of Korean women to be examined by the battalion physician, but you don't have anything to do with them. What you do, if you're an officer and a gentleman and a faithful husband and father, is jerk off in a Kleenex feeling just a little ashamed that the imagery is that of your wife.

And when some drunken fucking quartermaster major in an Oldsmobile comes racing down a cobblestone road on a rainy afternoon, and wipes out your wife, then you just don't have any urges. The only thing it's now good for is to piss. It will probably never work again. It's better that way. What the hell, they had better than three years together. He had known it was too good to last. But he had thought that he would be the one to get blown away over here, not that some fucking QM asshole would wipe her out.

He didn't even think of women. He thought he would never think of women again.

And then, when Georgia Paige had leaned over to pick up something from a table, thirty seconds after he met her, and he saw the white of her brassiere down her open collar, it all came back. The photographs of her with her nipples standing up against the material of her shirt. Knowing that they were there, six feet away, right under that white brassiere.

And what was under her underpants, the outline of which he could see through her tight khaki pants.

And part of his brain telling himself he was a fucking fool. For one thing, she was a famous movie star, and what the hell would she want with him, especially after she found out how old he was. Maybe, if she'd thought he was thirty, he could have succeeded in making a pass at her. But if she did fuck him, then that meant she would fuck anybody, that the only difference between her and the Koreans in the ambulance was that she was white and didn't smell of kimchee.

“I tried to find a tank,” he told her. “There aren't any in reserve that I could get.”

“You mean there's no extras at all?”

“I mean there's only so many hours on their clocks, and I wasn't going to order one down here that they may need tonight.”

That just slipped out. For Christ's sake, what was the matter with him? She wasn't some goddamned sergeant he could tell off like that.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I shouldn't have asked,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“All it is is a big tractor with sides,” he said. “Nothing but a big steel casting one tracks. You're not missing anything.”

“I want to see what you do,” she said. His heart beat very heavily, once, twice, three times.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Take me up there,” she said.

“Out of the goddamned question,” he said.

 

She braided her hair and pinned it on top of her head. In the jeep, there were two steel helmets and two ponchos. She drove. The MPs didn't look at jeep drivers, he said.

They got to the helmet line, and he folded the top of the jeep down and laid the windshield flat on the hood, and showed her how to drape the poncho over the steering wheel. The rain on the helmet sounded like rain on a tin roof.

They went up the side of a mountain at four miles an hour, the transmission in low-low. There were fireworks overhead, beautiful orange streaks that seemed to float through the sky. He told her they were harassing and intermittent .50s, and that for every orange tracer she saw, there were four bullets she couldn't see.

A soldier with a submachine gun pointing out at them from under a poncho stepped in front of them.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, and then he saluted. “Jesus Christ, Major, we didn't expect to see you back up here.”

“You didn't,” he said. “OK?”

“You got it,” the soldier said.

“Where's Baker Company?”

“Right here,” the soldier said. “You're right in the middle of it.”

There was a sound like a freight train right over their heads.

“That's that motherfucking 8 incher,” the soldier said. “Cocksuckers try to see how close they can come.”

The soldier looked at her, idly curious, in the dim red glow of a shielded flashlight.

“Jesus Christ, I don't believe it,” he said.

“That's why you didn't see me, OK?”

“Hey, Miss Paige,” the soldier said, “I'm sorry about the language, but this is the last fucking place…Sorry.”

“It's all right,” she said.

“She wants to see a tank,” Lowell said. “Where's Blueballs?”

“Second down the line,” the soldier said. “You going to take her in the CP?”

“If you guys can keep your mouth shut,” Lowell said.

“Hell, Major, you know we can.”

“Don't leave your post,” Lowell said. “I'll have somebody relieve you.”

They gave her coffee and doughnuts in the CP, and apologized for not having any milk. Somebody had a box of flashbulbs, so they crowded everybody they could together in the pictures, until the bulbs were used up.

And when everybody in Baker Company, 73rd Heavy Tank, had either shaken the hand of, or gotten the autograph of, or been kissed by Miss Georgia Paige, Lowell took her back out in the rain and showed her Blueballs. That's what she thought he had said, and there it was, painted on the turret in yellow:
BLUEBALLS
.

“That's quite a name,” she said.

“It used to be called something else,” he said. “But then the colonel said we had to use names with a B.”

“What was it called before?”

“I forget,” he said. And then he said, “Ilse.”

“Who's Ilse?” Georgia asked, jumping on that. “Your girl?”

“I used to be married to a girl named Ilse,” he said.

“I'm sorry,” she said.