To the End of the War (7 page)

“Don’t you wish a cup of coffee?” she asked him.

Johnny looked at her for a moment. She seemed to be the living counterpart of the magazine advertisement. (“Gosh, Mom. Gee, Mom. This sure is a swell war, Mom. I wish I was home so I could play with old Towser, Mom.”)

“No, thank you,” Johnny said. “I don’t want anything. I just came in to watch the fun.”

The gray-haired woman looked puzzled. “Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?” she asked. “We’ve got some mighty fine coffee.”

“No, thank you,” Johnny said, looking into her face with dead eyes. “I never drink coffee: It rusts your stomach. Do you have any whiskey? I’d enjoy a drink of whiskey . . . I’d even take rum, seeing how hard whiskey is to get nowadays,” he added.

The woman laughed a forced tinny laugh. “Now, now,” she chided jokingly. “Why does a healthy young man like you want to drink whiskey? Have a cup of coffee instead, Corporal.”

“Don’t you have any whiskey?”

“Of course not,” she said in an irritated voice. “We can’t serve intoxicating drinks here. We do all we can to make the boys happy, but we don’t want to aid them in ruining themselves.”

“Oh,” said Johnny. He stared at the woman solemnly. “I didn’t mean to insult the USO. I’ve never been in a USO before, you see, so I didn’t know. I just got back from Guadalcanal, and I’ve been in the hospital for ten months.

“Besides,” he added modestly, “My first sergeant was a Regular Army soldier. He was neurotic. He made me swear an oath that I’d nearer go into a USO before he would sign my evacuation papers.”

The gray-haired woman looked at him with puzzlement for a moment. She was not sure whether he was trying to ridicule her or not. At his mention of Guadalcanal, she immediately glanced at his left shirt pocket. The poor boy must have been through a lot of terrible experiences. She smiled at him again, at ease once more, and showing him she was not angry at what he had said to her.

“I saw your ribbons,” she said, smiling. “Tell me what they mean. What’s that one?” she asked, pointing to the Purple Heart.

Johnny stared at her for a moment with expressionless eyes set in a deadpan face. “Well-l-l,” he said suddenly, in the expansive manner of a Rotarian explaining his button to a non-Rotarian, “that’s the Purple Heart. You get that one for being wounded or killed. . . . I wasn’t killed,” he added; “I was only wounded.”

The gray-haired woman laughed. “Where were you wounded?”

“I was wounded,” he said after an expressionless pause, “in the leg. A terrible wound. They had to amputate my leg four inches above the knee,” he said proudly. He leaned forward confidentially. “I’m wearing an artificial leg now,” he said in a low voice.

“And this one,” he said, pointing to the Pacific-Asiatic ribbon, “is the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got that for capturing a hundred and twenty-two Japs single-handed. Maybe you saw my picture in the paper? I’m the one that’s going to make war bond tours for the rest of the war.”

“No, no,” said the gray-haired woman excitedly. “I didn’t see it. What paper was it in?”

“Oh,” he said with a magnanimous gesture. “It was in all the New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Miami papers.”

“Wait just a minute,” said the gray-haired woman breathlessly. “I want the other girls to meet you. You’re the first real hero we’ve had come into our little place.”

“No, no, no,” he protested. “Don’t call them. I’m sort of shy about talking about myself. Besides, I have to go and endorse some soap advertisements. My train’s about due in, and I have to find a shot of whiskey before I leave. I’ll need some morale on the train.”

Johnny walked to the door. A couple of soldiers who had been standing behind him grinned hugely. “You see?” Johnny said from the door. “If you’d had some whiskey, I’d have stayed and talked to the girls.

“The USO,” he said, “ought to give the boys what they want. Whiskey and a nice young girl to spend the night with are much better for the morale than coffee and doughnuts.” He turned and walked out of the place quickly before the woman had a chance to answer. Her eyes and mouth were open as she began to realize what he had said.

Johnny went over to the station restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. He sneaked a shot of whiskey into the coffee from the half-pint bottle he always carried in his hip pocket. He felt a little ashamed of himself for deriding the old lady, and feeling ashamed made him more angry. A man bitches up his life in the goddamned war and then he is supposed to come home meekly and take his cup of coffee and his doughnut in the USO and be cheerful, happy, and satisfied. You were supposed to give your life, the only one you had, to straighten out some situation a lot of dimbrains had botched up twenty years before—just so they could go and do it all over again. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings; his mouth had just opened and the words came out. He was as surprised as she was. These people played games with their lives; they imagined a picture of themselves and played out the part they had imagined for themselves. And who had undertaken the vast job of providing for them the picture they felt called upon to mimic with its tremendous scope and far-reaching powerful implications? and for what? If Dear Mom was only kept busy at home, she wouldn’t have time or energy to try living up to her archetype in the advertisements. These citizens could play out their mummery all their lives—at least until the deathbed scenes when the questions were asked; but you can’t go on playing a game and imagining a picture when you’re in combat. There the play is for keeps, and you learn it quick enough.

He sat in the restaurant amid the clank of dishes and the smell of rancid frying fat and drank his coffee and whiskey. The floor was sloppy and the counter wet and sticky. The waitresses yelled over his head, and the customers complained, paid, and left. He absorbed the panorama of the restaurant feeling mean and bitter. Everybody hated their jobs and everybody else. The restaurant seemed to be a parallel to his own life, a squalid reeking fetor. A pleasant picture. He gulped the reminder of his coffee and whiskey and got out of there quickly, intending to wait the remaining ten minutes at the track. It was not too great as stretch of the imagination to suppose that the old lady might call the MPs down on him. And he couldn’t afford to be picked up now. He wandered out to the track where his train would come in and stood there, his fists jammed deep in his pockets, staring at nothing with a bitter scowl on his face.

At the track, there were a number of people already lined up waiting for the train. Some of them looked like they had been waiting for hours. When the train pulled into the track, the line lengthened behind Johnny until he could not see the end of it. Everyone had waited quietly though nervously, but as soon as the train stopped, the line broke. There was a sudden wave of frenzied excitement as everyone in the line rushed the various vestibules. The agitation possessed all the people waiting, tensing their muscles and heightening their nervous perception.

Johnny was near one of the vestibules and bag in hand, his body moving without his conscious command, he grabbed the handhold and jumped with nervous quickness almost before the train had stopped. He was the first one in that vestibule, and as he entered the day coach, he could hear a bedlam of noise at the place where he entered as a crowd of people tried to force their way past other people. For a moment, he felt a sense of degradation at having allowed himself to charge and jostle like one of a herd of frightened cattle. The impulse had been almost hypnotic, a fear, a feeling that he must get on the train. And yet none of them would have been any the worse if they had not gotten on. It was humiliating. Like a bunch of wild animals. They all seemed as if they were afraid of the thought of having to do nothing but sit for a couple of hours, as if they were afraid to death to be alone with their own minds.

He grinned to himself and selected one of the few empty seats. If he didn’t get on first, somebody would beat him to it. The coach was almost full when it pulled in, and the passengers going on through Memphis already had their seats. They sat looking out of the windows at the yelling pushing throng with disdainful amusement and contempt at such antics. Johnny looked once at the young woman sitting beside him and then looked away; there was nothing worth having there. The young woman was pasty-faced, and her skin was greasy with old sweat; her eyes looked exhausted. She had evidently been riding a long time. She wore a captain’s bars pinned to her coat, and she was holding a dirty uncomfortable-looking little baby. Probably she had been to see her husband, Johnny thought. This war sure was hard on the kids.

By the time the train pulled out of Memphis, Johnny was already tired of sitting. Looking around to see if the train MPs were near, he opened his bag and extracted one of the three quarts of whiskey in it and slid the bottle into the pocket of his topcoat and hung the coat over his arm. He grinned wryly, thinking that the suitcase contained everything he owned in the world and still had room for three quarts. Asking the young woman to watch his seat for him, he started making his way to the lounge car carrying the topcoat. The aisles were full of standing passengers and each rest room was so crowded with people who had no place to sit that it was next to impossible to get into one to use the toilet. The three Pullman cars were not quite so crowded. In the last one, four soldiers were playing poker. One of them, seeing Johnny’s ribbons, called to him; he was invited to sit in. The four of them, all overseas men and all drunk, were going to Indianapolis to report for duty. They had come from the hospital in Temple, Texas, and they had been playing poker all day, fifty-cent ante and a dollar to open on jacks or better.

Johnny played for an hour and won back the thirty he had loaned to Wilkinsson and Red, plus another ten. He quit and started back to the lounge car. They had drunk some of the whiskey, and the quart was over half-empty. He still had the half-pint bottle in his pocket and he calculated mentally, figuring he had enough to do the trick. He passionlessly intended to pick up a woman, preferably one with a Pullman berth, and he would need the whiskey. It all depended on how much the unknown wench liked to drink. If he needed more, he could always go back and get it out of the bag.

The lounge car was crowded and smoke filled. All the seats were taken, and extra passengers, mostly soldiers, were standing in all the available space. Johnny stood inside the door and looked around. The liquor he had drunk, on top of the beer, was beginning to make his head blurry; he felt a comforting relaxation stealing through his arms and legs; his lungs were free and seemed far away from him, as if it were someone else breathing this stale smoke-filled air into his lungs instead of himself. He looked around the bar until he saw a woman who seemed to fit what he wanted, a sophisticated-looking woman of about thirty-five who was sitting by a window next to a wizened old woman. There was no man with her, and Johnny watched her for a few moments, but she did not speak to the old woman. The setup seemed perfect.

He walked over to them and grinned at the younger woman. He had been like the actor who walks out upon the stage. The brief pause of orientation, the deep breath of the plunge, and suddenly he was completely another person. He was no longer Johnny Carter as he knew Johnny Carter. He was the man he divined this woman would like to see.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I’m a hero just back from the Pacific and I’ve got a bum leg. May I sit on your lap?”

The woman looked up at him coldly and she did not speak. Then, in spite of herself, she smiled.

“I don’t think you’d find my lap very comfortable; my knees are rather bony.” He felt she had accepted him. It was the gay boyish smile that did it. The gay boyish smile always worked for a starter. All he had to do now was play the tedious game through to completion. Of course, the completion didn’t always follow from the beginning, but usually it did.

“I don’t think your knees are bony,” he said gently, grinning. “They appear very rounded and beautiful to me. And I’m sure of all the laps I’ve seen, I think I’d rather sit on that one than any.”

“You have a very glib tongue, Corporal,” the woman countered, smiling. “To be honest, I’m the one that would be uncomfortable. You’re too husky-looking. But maybe there’s room for you between us.” As she spoke she glanced pointedly at the old woman, who looked back at her reprovingly but inched over so there was room enough for Johnny to squeeze in between them.

“What’s wrong with your leg, Corporal?” the woman asked as he sat down. “Were you wounded?”

“Twice,” Johnny grinned and nodded. “You may call me Johnny. I’m off duty now.”

“All right, Johnny, and my name is Carroll. Were you wounded very badly? Or maybe you’d rather not talk about it.”

“No, I don’t mind talking about it,” he said. “I love to talk about it. But it’s not very exciting. It really was nothing. I got shot in the leg with a dum-dum bullet. I went into enemy territory after a wounded major who was crying piteously for aid and carried him back to safety where the medics could give him plasma and save his life. I got hit on the way back, but that didn’t stop me because I knew that poor wounded major was vital to our winning the battle. If I got crippled or lost a leg, or even died, it didn’t matter, so long as I got that major back to where he could help direct and win the battle. That’s all there was to it. That’s not heroic or exciting. Just plain run of the mill newspaper stuff.” He made a deprecating gesture and looked at the woman very humbly.

The woman’s eyes twinkled. “Why I think that’s wonderful,” she exclaimed. “Didn’t you get a medal for such a magnificent deed?”

Johnny made a disparaging face. “Well, yes,” he said, “I did get a couple. But I was lucky: Most of the guys don’t have an influential major to recommend them. But you know how it is. Medals don’t really mean anything. Of course, they’re nice to show to your grandchildren, but they don’t mean much to us fighting men. We know there’s a great job to be done, and we just try to do our bit.

“You know anything about these ribbons?”

“No,” she smiled seriously. “I really know nothing at all about them, but I’ve always wanted to learn what they meant; it makes one feel stupid not to know the various ribbons when all the boys are wearing them. Will you explain them to me?”