The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (39 page)

 

 

"You ape!" She laughed. "That'll teach you not to go around goosing
women. Not even your wife!"

 

 

Why remember that in the thousands of experiences she and Ricky had shared?
And if it had to be remembered why, she wondered, should I remember it
as I would a dream? A dream where you watch as if from some concealment
like a god, things happen to you.

 

 

Only last night she had had a similar dream. She was at some winter
resort. Ricky was there. Dad and Mom and Mr. Wilson. They had two
toboggans. They were all about to go down a long, snow-covered mountain.
Ricky had pointed the course they should take. Mr. Wilson had disagreed
with him, pointing to a course that travelled along the knife ridge
of the mountain. You'll fall off the edge, you'll get killed, Anne
dreamed. It was a gradual slope on the side they could see. But Anne,
the dreamer, the motivator, knew it was a precipitous drop on the
far side. If the toboggans rose too high on the slope they would drop
over. They all would be killed. No one agreed with her. Angrily she
took one of the toboggans. She plunged down the mountain herself. The
perspective changed. She was at the bottom looking up. She had made
the descent safely. She saw them coming and then her semi-consciousness
split three ways. She was lying in her toboggan watching them come. She
was watching herself watching them come. They banked along the top of
the hill. She was
Will
. She willed them to crash over. Then the Anne,
lying at the bottom of the hill, rebelled. She tried to revoke the will
of the other Anne. But it was too late. She had awakened with the crash
of that toboggan in her mind.

 

 

Sitting in the beach chair she watched the sky. The moon was completely
obscured now by slow moving black clouds. Ricky, she thought, I want you.
I want to kiss and make love with you. I want to talk to you. I want your
arms around me. I want to hide under the quilts with you and pretend that
I am a little girl again. A little girl frightened at the dropping of the
leaves against her window, or the bewildered flappings of some summer
insect trying to escape into the night. I want your arms around me.
I want you to put your lips on my breasts, and feel my nipples tight and
hard under your tongue. I want you to touch the crinkly brown hair on
my mons. I'm not a confident Red Cross girl ready to cheer up bewildered
men. I'm something little that's afraid. I need you. Ricky! I'm war lost!

 

 

Anne jumped up. She kicked the ground as if trying to kick herself back
to reality.

 

 

"Mrs. Anne Wilson." The public address system crackled. The words floated
impersonally on the warm night air. She turned sharply as if there were
someone behind her. "Mrs. Anne Wilson," the voice repeated. "Call at
the main desk with your personal effects, please."

 

 

She shivered. This was it. Goodbye, Ricky. Anne walked up the steps into
the hotel. And Christmas night, too. What a hell of a note to be setting
off to war. On Christmas night.

 

 

On the night that Christ was born, one thousand nine hundred and
forty-four years later, Anne Wilson was going to India where Christ
himself might have spent a few years.

 

 

Anne laughed. She was back to reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

 

The C-54, a four propeller airplane stripped bare on the inside except
for bucket seats that lined the walls, belonged to one of many commercial
lines that were transporting soldiers to Europe and Africa. Once in the
theater of war the Air Transport Command took over shuttling the soldiers
to forward bases. This one was a Pan American Airways plane.

 

 

It was the first extended flight Yale had ever taken. When he returned
to the Floridian Hotel after his night with Kathie, he found that he was
on orders for the next flight to Casablanca. There was no possibility of
leaving the hotel. At first he thought of trying to telephone Cynthia,
but he knew that was hopeless. Mat and she were living in a trailer. Even
if he had been able to see her, how could he talk to her in front of Mat?
He might as well face reality. The dream called Cindar was over. It had
finished five years ago. He had simply lacked the sense to realize it.

 

 

The plane landed at Kindley Field, Bermuda, with an hour stop-over
while they refueled for the next lap which would cover the Atlantic
to the Azores. While he waited in the air terminal Yale drank a cup
of coffee. A major who sat near him asked him where he was bound. He
introduced himself as Joe Trafford from St. Louis. Yale told him he was
on orders for Karachi.

 

 

"I thought so," Trafford said, bitterly. "Everyone on this flight is headed
for India. I have the god-damndest luck. I was scheduled for London. Then
at the last minute comes this all-out push in India to finish the pipeline
into China. Bang, I'm on different orders. You're the only officer aboard
who hasn't his wings. Must be a shortage of f.o.'s in the Assam Valley."
Trafford looked straight at him with an amused expression on his hard,
angular face.

 

 

Yale shrugged. "Fuck off's or finance officers -- someone has to pay
you fur-jacketed snobs. I never saw such a clique. All I've listened
to all the way from Miami is what heroes you are. Hell, just because
you wear wings doesn't mean a thing . . . you're glorified bus drivers,
who trained for a few hundred hours and learned how to fly an airplane."

 

 

Trafford laughed. "Don't get your ass in an uproar, chum. I was in Burma
for two years. That's why I'm getting the dubious honor of going back.
This time as base adjutant at a new pipeline base in the Assam Valley.
My guess is that's where you're going, too. You'll get your final orders
in Karachi. The rest of these looeys aboard haven't even finished
transition training. They're stepping things up at the back door of
China. It will take the pressure off the Pacific. Spread the Japs even
further."

 

 

Two lieutenants, with new shiny wings, asked if they could sit at the
table. They introduced themselves as Al Kanachos and Bill Stevens. Al's
moon face and ruddy complexion proclaimed his ancestry.

 

 

"Heard you mention the Hump," Bill said nervously. "What's it like?"

 

 

"A crock," Trafford said, breezily. "You fly over one day. A day later
you fly back. On one side you have Chinese nookie. A day later you shack
up with some of the saddest looking specimens called women you ever saw.
In both cases you chance V.D., beriberi, cholera, yellow fever, or what
the hell have you. In season, in India it rains every day. Then the
hottest sun you ever sat under comes out and turns the whole damned
place into a steam bath. It's a crock . . . a crock of shit."

 

 

They were called for their flight. A Red Cross girl preceded them to
the door. Trafford jumped ahead of them and opened the door for her.

 

 

"My name is Trafford," he said, leering at her. "Would you like to take
a little spin over to Casablanca tonight, and look around? Tomorrow,
I'll show you the Casbah."

 

 

Trafford's voice assumed a heavy French accent. The girl laughed. They
walked abreast to the plane. Walking behind her Yale noticed her straight
legs and her erect posture. He liked the jaunty way the Red Cross overseas
cap perched on her blonde hair. He listened with interest to the "snow"
job that Trafford was giving her. She obviously wasn't reacting. Once
they boarded the plane, she went to her seat which was just behind
the navigation compartment. She smiled at Yale. Trafford tried to take
her hand. He eyed the young pilot who was seated near her with a grim
scram-buddy look. She withdrew her hand. "The name, Major, is Wilson,
Mrs. Anne Wilson." She accentuated the Mrs.

 

 

"I'm married myself, Mrs. Wilson," Trafford said, genially. "Married
women are just the best, I always say."

 

 

"Well, goody for what you always say, Major. If you don't mind it's one
o'clock in the morning. I hope to get a little sleep between here and
the Azores."

 

 

Trafford followed Yale to the rear of the plane. He sat beside him.
Al Kanachos and Bill Stevens, evidently entranced by Trafford's rank
and experience, sat close by. "That one is a cold dish," Trafford said.
"Just the type that joins the Red Cross. Gives you all the come-on of
a sexpot. Looky here, boys. See this nice thing I got here for you,
but don't you dare touch it or I'll scream. Reminds me of that joke
about the girl who screwed with her shoes on. . . ."

 

 

The plane had taken off. As it gained altitude the cabin became colder.

 

 

Yale rolled a blanket around his head. He tried to cut off Trafford's
voice. He was sick of listening to the same old discussions of sex; weary
of the endless trading of dirty jokes. Trafford's voice came through
to him despite the muffling of the blanket. They must be up at least
twelve thousand feet already, he thought. He could feel a tightening in
his sinuses. The heaters evidently weren't working properly. Cold air
blew under the cargo hatch. Yale pulled his army blanket tighter around
him. It was going to be a cold night.

 

 

Again his thoughts returned to Cynthia in Miami, and then he tried not to
think of her. He had a sudden picture of her in bed with Mat. He tried to
recall the face of the Red Cross girl. She had an oddly appealing face,
with a kind of elfin characteristic. Yale had looked in her dark blue eyes
only for a second but he knew that Trafford was wrong. He would bet that
Mrs. Wilson would be a very passionate woman. But why think of her?
Thinking of women was a futility. It always seemed to lead him back
to Cindar.

 

 

Finally, he dozed, intermittently, lulled by the vibration of the C-54's
engines. When he awoke he was cramped; a pain in his neck, his buttocks
sore from the steel bucket seat. He looked at his watch, and was surprised
that it was six o'clock in the morning. Most of the passengers had rolled
up in blankets and were sleeping on the floor of the plane. In the front
he could see the Red Cross girl. She was awake. She looked at him for a
moment, then turned away. He guessed that the two of them were the only
people awake in the cabin, but she quite obviously wasn't interested in
talking to him.

 

 

The plane was a skeleton, he thought sleepily, wrapped in a thin layer
of aluminum skin. A living skeleton. In this womb of a fuselage, the
passengers were curled up like foetuses. The way the plane was bumping,
now rising and then falling sickeningly, he could even carry his analogy
further. He could say that the skeleton was in the first stages of labor.

 

 

In the pale light of the early morning, he saw they were passing through
heavy cloud layers. He wondered idly how much gas the ship was carrying;
whether the pilot could go on if the Azores were closed in. He didn't
really care. His mind was catching at thoughts. Like dead leaves in
a breeze they passed down the streets of his consciousness, scarcely
regarded.

 

 

I've got to stop thinking about Cindar. I've got to forget her or go crazy.
He struggled to his feet, stretched and then sat heavily down on a
bucket seat near a window. It was still soupy, but through occasional
rifts in the clouds he could see the ocean. The water seemed strangely
black. Like hardened lava, cold and wrinkled in the morning light.

 

 

He wondered what would have happened if the Atlantic Ocean had been a lava
bed instead of water. The course of the world would certainly have been
different. Or would it have? Columbus would have been years too late.
By 1492 millions of people would have walked to America. It would have been
a dangerous undertaking in those days. They would have had to carry a
tremendous supply of food and water to walk three thousand miles. They
would have done it though. That was the essence of being human. If there
were a challenge, someone, somewhere, would arise to meet it. There had
been a challenge since the beginning of history for world conquest,
and recorded history had, era by era, produced men who thought they
could meet it. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito in one century. In the next,
or the next quarter century at the pace the world was moving, someone
else would rise to meet the challenge. The only hope the little people
of the world had was that the next century would produce world conquest
in peaceful patterns.

 

 

So if the Atlantic had been lava, the people of the world would have
fought all over these millions of square miles because the challenge was
there implicit in the minds of men. They would have invented airplanes
and developed tanks because this wasteland would make an admirable
battlefield. The challenge would be flung down from generation to
generation. The phraseology and ideology changing, but the ruthless fact
not differing. This lava pile bordered by fertile land would have made
an admirable prize ring in which the people of the world could gradually
kill each other until in the middle was nothing but a monstrous heap of
bones and rotting flesh. Everyone . . . the little people of the earth
. . . those who remained on both sides of the lava pile . . . would stare
at the mess in horror; and each individual would say to himself, "It's
not my fault, it couldn't be helped, it's fate, it's the leaders, it's
the Jews, it's the Negroes. It's not my fault!" And they would develop
a new kind of noseguard that purified the air so that they could live
beside the stench that blew off the lava pile. There would be fashions
and seasonal variations in these nose ornaments. Everybody would wear them
as casually as though they were the sine qua non of the civilized man.