To the End of the War (6 page)

His remark was unexpected, and it took the other two by surprise. They looked at him and then looked at each other. They began to grin.

“Well,” said Wilkinsson, grinning malevolently, “you know how it is: You can’t take chances with a non-com till you know what kind of guy he is, can you? Let’s have another beer.”

They ordered more beer and drinking it, began to plan how best to get out of town. Wilkinsson showed an amazingly accurate knowledge of roads and routes. Wilkinsson was going to Denver; Gettinger was going to a small town in Maine. Johnny had decided on the spur of the moment to go back to Endymion, where he had not been, and had had no inclination to be, since he had first joined the army.

“What are you guys going to do with your stuff?” Johnny asked.

“To hell with it,” said Gettinger.

“Listen,” said Johnny. “I’ve got plenty of money. I drew nine months’ pay at one crack, last payday. Besides that, I’ve cleaned up a couple of games. Here’s fifteen bucks apiece.” The two men hesitated to take the money, “Go ahead,” Johnny said. “If I needed it, I wouldn’t give it to you. You’ll need dough, if you want to keep from being picked up. I may never see either of you again. So if you never pay me back, okay; if you do, okay.”

They took the money. “You better get your stuff and ship it in to Campbell,” Johnny said, “It’ll be there waiting for you when you do get there.”

“Ah, to hell with it,” growled Wilkinsson. “I’ve been red-lined for three months. Let ’em make out a statement of charges. Me and the army are about kits.”

“That’s right,” said Gettinger.

Johnny shrugged. “Where can I get some liquor?” he asked.

Gettinger told him the name of a hotel and the name of the bell captain and to say that Robinson sent him. Johnny made a mental note.

After making their plans, they sat on in the bar until long after the train had left, drinking beer and talking. Johnny intended to go to Endymion by train. The other two would hitchhike. When they left the bar, they shook hands warmly, and split up, each going his own way.

Johnny got his bag from the station. On his way to the other station he took a cab and stopped at the hotel Gettinger had told him. He bought three quarts of bonded whiskey with the seal unbroken. He inspected the bottles for needling and, satisfied, paid the bell captain the thirty dollars he charged. Johnny packed the bottles in his bag with a sour grin. Not even an Armageddon could keep the American people from their prime function in life: making money.

He limped out across the high marble lobby with its potted plants. Wilkinsson was right: A man could only stand so much. Beyond that he could not go. When he had stood all he could take, he was forced to do something. Johnny stopped in the lobby and took the military tickets from his pocket. When he walked out toward his waiting cab, the torn pieces of the tickets fluttered in an eddy of air behind him. They floated to the floor. Later a hotel servant swept them up and deposited them in a waste can.

On French leave, Johnny Carter found himself in a booming wartime wasteland with vapid USO helpers: brainwashed civilians with unrealistic views about war and drunken, carousing, prevaricating soldiers (Johnny’s membership in this group was prepaid). Johnny found a sexual partner on the train, no strings attached, as easily as Jones had compliant women in the Peabody Hotel.

This is the way it was, Jones defiantly declared. Maxwell Perkins had an inkling that Jones was giving a realistic picture of his world in late 1943, but he was unable to help Jones reshape his story. Perkins timidly believed the American public was not interested in Jones’s subject and that civilians and military people would have been insulted by the presentations.

Perkins was probably wrong.

ON THE ROAD, AUTUMN 1943

B
Y DECIDING TO GO AWOL,
Johnny Carter was doing something unprecedented in his career as a soldier. It was the first time he had deliberately absented himself for any period longer than a few hours. He knew the unending repercussions that would come out of his action: busted to a private, dirty jobs, maybe a six months’ jail sentence; like waves from a stone dropped into a quiet pool. But when he walked into the other station in Memphis, his jaw was set and his walk was pointed and resolute. He had made his decision and his plans; a man could only stand so much. He walked straight to the window and bought a ticket to Endymion.

He had an elder cousin in Endymion with whom he could stay for a while and he made up his mind to go there. He would have a much better chance of steering clear of MPs in Endymion than if he went to his brother in Miami Beach; the Beach was alive with MPs. Beyond Endymion he could not see, and he did not care to see. And so, because of chance or fate, he was determined to return to Endymion where he had been born. Had it not been for these circumstances, he would probably have never gone to that town again.

When he had his ticket he picked up his bag and stepped away from the window. With his ticket in his hand and a half hour to wait, his intense direction of purpose was ended for the moment, and he relaxed and looked around, orienting himself.

The station, bigger dirtier and older than the other, was terribly crowded. Swirls of people rushed this way at some train call and subsided to rush the other way upon discovering their train was not that one after all. All the waiting seats were filled: seam-faced old men and women, young girls in their teens with squalling babies in their inexperienced arms and wings or rank insignias pinned to their coat lapels, soldiers with legs in casts and crutches leaning against the seat beside them. Great hordes of soldiers rushed here and there, and back, frantic at wasting time that was so precious to them. Harried clerks rebelled against even pseudo-courtesy knowing they could quit tomorrow and become riveters or welders for twice or thrice the money.

Everything was rush and hurry; everything was sick with a war fever that no atabrine or sulfas or penicillin could cure. Johnny saw three decent-looking girls picked up in less than five minutes. Take what you can, the crowd seemed to scream from its red excited face. Soldiers with conspicuous bulges of whiskey bottles under their greatcoats wavered here and there grinning vaguely at crimson-lipped girls who were going to visit brothers or husbands or boyfriends. Sleep with me, the soldiers’ faces seemed to say, sleep with me; I’m going to die in a month or two; sleep with me. Okay, came the unspoken answer from the girls, okay; what the hell; my old man’s at a POE; he’ll be shipped in another week. Life surged frantically, trying to jam twenty years into two months. Sex flared brightly, instinctively trying to recoup its losses to artillery shell and aerial bomb by more and quicker fornication. Sex, its laws and taboos for a long time broken and laughed at in private by the great majority of citizens, now flaunted itself in the open and thumbed its nose at society.

Johnny checked his bag and walked through this hysterical scene toward the nearest pair of MPs. As he came close to them, he stared pointedly at their feet. He had discovered that by doing this he could always make them self-conscious; self-conscious, they lost their sneering toughness of Authority.

“Jesus Christ!’’ he said to the biggest of the pair. “This place is a madhouse. Everybody’s nuts.”

The MP grinned. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. “We got to spend eight hours a day in this joint.” He stared at Johnny’s ribbons a little enviously; in 1943 ribbons were still unusual enough to cause some notice.

Johnny grinned sympathetically at the MP’s remark. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a big stinking deal.”

“Where was you overseas?” the MP asked.

Johnny told him. After the MPs had seen his ribbons, Johnny put on his topcoat. He stood talking to the two MPs for a little while.

“Well, are them Japs tough?” asked the first MP, “or they just . . .” He broke off in the middle and stepped out into the aisle. “Hey, Mack,” he bellowed toughly.

A private who was walking away from them turned around and pointed a finger at himself. “Me?”

“Yeh, you,” sneered the MP. “Who the hell you think I meant? Come over here.”

The private walked slowly to him.

“Let’s see your pass, Mack,” the MP said with a hard look at the private.

The private looked at him with resentment and began to fish in his hip pocket. Finally, he brought out a wallet and took a three-day pass out of it. The MP took the pass and examined it minutely. Then he looked at the private suspiciously.

“You didn’t make this pass out yourself, did you?” he asked threateningly.

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” protested the private. “You can see it’s signed, can’t you?”

“Sure,” sneered the MP. “But you could a signed it yourself.”

“Well I didn’t,” said the private.
“
For Christ’s sake. I haven’t done nothing. What you jumping on me for?”

“Okay,” said the MP with a belligerent nod. “Button up that collar and tighten your tie. You a sojer not a defense worker.”

“You goddam MPs,” said the private. “You put them brassards on, and you know nobody can do nothing.” He finished buttoning his collar and tightening his tie and reached for his pass.

“Lissen you,” said the MP, who had extended the pass but now drew it back; his voice was elaborately indifferent. “Don’t give me none of your lip. Or I’ll tear up this goddam pass and run you in.”

The private looked at him for a moment. “Okay,” he said. The MP handed him the pass. The private walked off muttering to himself.

“Tell me something,” Johnny asked the MP genially. “What made you stop that guy?”

“Ah,” said the big MP. “You can most always tell a guy who ain’t got a pass. He’ll try to give you the go by instead of walking right past you. You get to know it after a while.”

“Oh,” said Johnny with a nod of understanding.

Another soldier came up to the MP. “Where’s the USO around this rat race?” he asked.

The MP pointed up the stairs to a tiny sign in one corner, and the soldier walked off toward it. Johnny watched him for a moment and then turned back to the MPs.

“You can always tell a ree-croot,” said the second MP.

“I don’t know why them guys want to go to the USO,” said the first MP. “The coffee is rotten, and the doughnuts is just plain dough.”

All three laughed heartily at this sally. Johnny stood and talked casually with them for several minutes. Then, his little stratagem completed, he walked away. His watch said he had twenty minutes more to wait. He decided to follow the other soldier to the USO. He walked up the steps toward the tiny sign, pleased with himself and inwardly laughing at the MPs and the excitement of breaking the law. He took off his topcoat and slung it over his arm. He could stay in that station for days and not be bothered by that pair of MPs.

The USO was crowded with soldiers drinking coffee, soldiers eating doughnuts, soldiers swallowing tiny cheese sandwiches. They all looked alike and they were dressed alike and they all gobbled doughnuts alike. There were four women behind the counter. Three of them were middle-aged and fat and gray-haired; the other was a young slim woman. Johnny watched them sweating and scurrying hurriedly about to see that all the boys got coffee and whatever else they had to offer.

Three Dear Moms and one Young Matron with lieutenant overseas, he thought. Dispensing good cheer measured out in coffee cups. Ministering to the lower classes. Three cheers for Dear Mom and the Old Homestead.

Johnny felt intensely irritated as he looked around the little room. The counter was covered with a thin sand of spilled sugar, was sticky with slopped coffee. The soldiers sat around at the tiny tables or leaned here and there against the wall. The women laughed and talked from behind their red faces and passed the coffee and doughnuts across the counter. It seemed as if on the two sides of the counter were two different worlds. The women handed down the coffee and doughnuts through a curtain of clouds beyond which they could not see into the nether world of the army. If they could have dissipated the obscuring clouds, they would not have done so. They supplied the coffee to the army, and insisted upon seeing the picture they wanted to see: happy young men with full bellies rushing off joyously to fight a war.

The soldiers, in their world, if they thought about it at all, saw only free coffee and doughnuts. The two worlds on different sides of the counter were so alien that neither could see into the other. The soldiers drank the coffee and ate the doughnuts because they were there and they were free, and thought no more about it unless it was to vaguely resent this disgusting cheerfulness. They went back to whatever miserable life they were living without being happily, or even unhappily, full.

It was wetly hot in the smell crowded room, and the soldiers between gulps of coffee wiped the sweat from their foreheads. When Johnny entered the room, it was with the intention of getting a cup of coffee. After watching the scene for several moments, he turned and started out. It would have been a personal degradation for him to accept a cup of coffee from these women and under these circumstances. The scene he saw made him intensely angry. If the coffee had been offered as coffee, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but this coffee was intended to be more than simple prosaic coffee. This coffee was offered not only as a reason for fighting the war but as a reason for not being bitter about it. This coffee was like Salvation Army coffee, where the coffee is blessed of God and offered as a bait to salvation. This USO coffee, it seemed to him, was offered as a solution to the problems of the war and also of the post-war world by the women who shoveled it out, and by the advertisers was portrayed Dear Mom to sell bars, refrigerators, commodes, shoes, shirts, spectacles, liquor, houses, brassieres, radios, and menstruation cloths. This USO coffee was offered by Dear Mom with apparent pride as her contribution to “the war effort,” Johnny could not stomach it.

As Johnny reached the door, one of the women trying futilely to serve half a dozen hands at once saw him and walked down the counter toward him. “Do you want something, Corporal?” she called. She seemed proud of her knowledge of rank. “Don’t be bashful. Jump right in like everybody else.” Her gray hair was beginning to look straggly, and a few drops of sweat stood out on her wrinkled forehead. Her face opened in a sweet motherly smile as Johnny turned back from the door.