Algren at Sea (9 page)

“Boom-Boom could throw so hard,” I told the company around me, “that if he hit you on a fingertip you'd go down. He could throw so hard that his catcher never had to use signals. There was nothing to signal for.
Boom-Boom had no drop, he had no slider. He didn't even have a nothing-ball. He just threw harder than anyone else on earth.

“Sometimes he threw so hard the ball got past the batter, and when that happened the backstop would be pulled onto his hunkers by the impact.

“Fortunately for the Cubs' catching staff, this seldom happened. The bat itself, it seemed, was what Boom-Boom was aiming at. Boom-Boom's throw would streak back like a falling meteor into the right-field stands. In event of a direct hit, it would zonk against the big white E that topped the center-field scoreboard. If a batter ever caught the pitch square it was almost as sure as mortar fire to kill five or six workmen tarring a roof two miles away. Well, that was why they called him Boom-Boom.”

The company remained unimpressed.

Another thing Mr. Beck had in common with Mr. Behan, that I did not mention, was that if he wanted to have a drink, he was going to have a drink. And if he wanted to have two drinks, he was going to have two drinks. And the more drinks he had, the more stubborn he would get; the more stubborn he would get, the more drinks he would have. And the more drinks he would have, the harder he would throw the next day for being that mad at himself for having been so stubborn the day before.

And, of course, the harder he would throw, the harder he would get hit, and the harder he got hit, the more he wanted a drink, and if Boom-Boom wanted a drink he was going to have a drink and if Boom-Boom wanted two drinks—his manager summed the matter up in one phrase —“He looks like a twenty-game winner between line drives.”

Yet nobody managed Boom-Boom, least of all himself.

No one, least of all himself, manages Brendan Behan. “The first duty of a writer,” he has expressed the conviction, “is to let his country down. He knows his own people best. He has a special responsibility to let them down.”

“I once had occasion to drink with Dylan Thomas about the time God got him by the short hairs,” I recalled. “I asked him why he hit the stuff so hard and he said he didn't know. But I'm still sure that the world at the bottom of a whiskey glass is a different world than that at the bottom of a cup of tea.”

The Dublin house painter with the fighter's mug leaned across the table and touched my tie tentatively, with a faintly incredulous smile. I pressed the bulb in my pocket and it lit up fine.

He lifted his glass, holding nothing but water, and clinked it against the Guinness in mine.

“Fugh the bedgrudgers,” was Behan's toast.

The Irish have a very good rugby team.

That was soundly thrashed by Wales.

 

The following morning I walked up the ramp of an Aer Lingus plane and was pleased to see, smiling good morning down at me from the top of the ramp, an Irish stewardess waiting there expecting just me.

“Haven't you flown with me before?” she wished to know.

“No, Baby,” I told her, “but I'm ready to fly with you now.”

Farewell, picturesque Dublin, quaint metropolis of Old Erin, where the poor contrasts with the very poor and the old contrasts with the prehistoric. And the fairly sober contrasts with the stinking drunk.

Adieu and farewell, bustling capital where the world at the bottom of a glass of tea contrasts with that at the bottom of a glass of Guinness.

Goodbye, County Mayo, goodbye.

Now, I had once been most comfortably stationed on the drowsing coast of Wales in the dreaming town of Tenby in the sleeping slough of Penally.

For all the seasons of war.

And it had been a better country for our knowing, by bulletins tacked to morning reports, that elsewhere bombs were falling.

Elsewhere sirens told disaster, elsewhere great walls fell. Elsewhere V- 1's violated the sheltering sky.

But that was only upon a location, a device, a mythical nation called “South of England.” A make-believe site invented by Winston Churchill permitting the
Luftwaffe
to unload its bombs harmlessly and hurry back home to Old Heidelberg. Some
Luftwaffe.

This dreaming air, this sleepwalking rain, this land of ancestral mists reminded me so much of Champagne County, Illinois, that I was content to be anywhere up North. For up North was where wars were never fought.

Surely the proud Federals bivouacked, in equal proportion of homesick hillbillies and Chicago alley-finks of which I was a leading member, had simplified the life-and-death struggle of Western Civilization to a matter of staying in good with our nurses. Again I was a leading member.

We liked our nurses because their contempt for our officers supported our own agreement that they were jerks to a man. Indeed, our nurses' disdain for their fellow officers made the EM mind to boggle. We
admired
the nurses.

Therefore when they challenged us to a softball contest we accepted with pleasure. We were flattered.

When they whipped us, 10-8, in the tenth inning, we congratulated
one another upon having forced officers into an extra inning to beat us. We were proud of our showing.

And even more proud of our first baseman, who had been sufficiently gallant to keep his big foot off the bag long enough to let the tying run get on first. However, in letting a grounder go through him to put the winning run on, we felt that he had gone too far.

As I had not let the grounder through me through gallantry, I protested, claiming honest ineptitude. My claim was accepted so readily I was shocked. For though the TO listed me as a private of no class at all, my real rank was Infielder, Very First Class.

Subsequently, when the nurses offered the EM another chance, the public humiliation of being busted to right field faced me.

I had an escape hatch. The Service had been pressing me to accept a pass, in token recognition of the steadfast fashion in which I had held my position on the TO without shooting through the ranks, and now was the time to accept the distinction.

That the English girls were becoming impatient to see me I was well aware, but my plan was to make their hearts yet gladder by bringing each a tropical goodie. Such as a Sunkist California orange.

These I stole under cover of KP duty from our mess hall, and boarded the train the following morning with a dozen beauties cleverly concealed in my overcoat.

“I'm going to the North of England, sir,” I informed the train conductor briskly, realizing it would cheer up the kindly fellow to know he was the one bringing me.

“No, son,” the surly old bore assured me, “You're going to the South of England.”

Well I be dawg. So
that
was it. I was heading for Sunny Soho, bustling metropolis of sea-washed Piccadilly where they pick bomb fragments instead of cotton and the train was already in motion.

 

It was raining in Soho. It was raining in Hampstead. It was raining in Kent. In Piccadilly there weren't enough doors for the girls on the game. There weren't enough gaffs for the matter of that. That was the kind of war winter was waging on women in Soho.

Theirs was the Dunkirk of which no one spoke. Yet they had come by all available craft.

To walk like sisters, pairing off under parasols of summers past, or a cheap winter umbrella, through the rain.

They walked like cats that circle and come back. Slowly wheeling, in an encompassing circle, the black taxis of Piccadilly outflanking them.

That wheeled like little hearses and came back. When evening came the women fell into ranks, for all came from a single nation. Enlistees of the eldest republic, whose citizens live by the sweat of their sex.

Enlistees who look straight ahead without knowing name, rank, or serial number of the enlistee beside them.

By the sweat of their sex. By the tools of their trade.

The woman pressed into prostitution by war is more at ease with herself than the one who has had no more than the complicity of peace. That men are to blame for her hard lot is more plain then. So when she puts the issue straight to the soldier, he has to feel, if he's any sort at all, that her need is the only real consideration.

For she comes like a sister in the rain.

The American GI who carries himself with conscious superiority of the natives is, at the same moment, secretly uneasy because his superiority depends upon access to cheap toothpaste. He carries his PX card wrapped in guilt. Or his guilt wrapped in a PX card, as you will. This makes him a setup for sister. Especially in a rain.

For what is a big grown man doing toting a box of nut-filled Hershey bars around, whether it comes from the PX or was shipped by Mother? Who does he think he is, in a fish-and-chips country, to be eating chocolate?

Actually he doesn't feel like eating the sickening junk himself; yet it's sweeter than money to the girls of Piccadilly. If he hands it to one and walks off, he's really a mark. If he trades it off for love, she's the mark. Then too, what becomes of his promise to Mother, to return to her as pure as the day he was inducted? The soldier is wisest to pay the girl in pounds, and put the candy on her as a fringe benefit. Let Mother be the mark. She always was.

It was the only fun Mother ever had.

Candy or oranges, I happened to have no particular problem about Mother. The only promise I'd ever made her was not to give anything of value away without getting something of greater worth for it. She had gotten into this rut through Pa's uncanny knack for coming off poorer than ever. Had it not been his toil, sweat, blood, and tears that had filled me so
early with a determination to be a bum? Now neither God nor Patton was going to interfere with
my
career.

Bringing goodies to hungry London made me feel benign. After all, these weren't those puny Florida growths, all seeds and wrinkled peelings. These were California dandies, paunchy as a producer of B-pictures but not so pale, burned a deep orange streaked with red. (The coloring is applied in the Imperial Valley.)

The girl fortunate to win me as well as an orange would have to be a nicely sliced mandarin herself, it goes without saying. I wasn't about to be trapped by somebody's old blind hair-covered owl of a grand-stepmother.

Fleeting as fireflies under eaves, tiny flashlights revealed a woman's shadow in every nook. Click on and click off, now you see her now you don't. More than one grandmother owl never had it so good, doing better by flash than she would have by day. And blessing the Germans every night that good times were here at last. Praying a bit that they might last longer even if it cost her her son-in-law, a bombardier in the R.A.F.

“There's
a notion for a shrewd free-lance journalist,” I reminded myself, peering shrewdly, like a free-lance journalist, and consequently seeing nothing at all. “R.A.F. flier on hospital pass picks up a girl in pitch-dark London, goes to her hotel with her where she switches on the light. ‘Turn it off,' says Bombardier Cathcart, for he recognizes her as his estranged wife, Bess Cathcart. He himself is unrecognizable as he has had plastic surgery after coming down, full of night-fighter pills, in flames over Slough-on-West.

“He uses her in a fashion sufficiently vile and then declines to pay her a shilling. ‘Not a shilling, Bess my girl,' he tells her, switching the light on while buttoning himself, ‘for I am the honest lad who married you at Slough-on-West! Heah! Heah!'

“‘And I am the sensible lass who divorced you at Fugh-the-East,' she assures him, hooking her bra without his help, ‘and I recognized you on sight because on you plastic surgery isn't noticeable. Now hand over four pounds tuppence you bloody cheap officer toff or I'll have Four-F MacHeath, my mighty Bulgarian ponce, dash your head in on the ceiling and then bone you like a fish.
Theah! Theah!
'”

This epic of passion in war and peace was interrupted by a girl who bumped into me deliberately, as I had no idea where I was going.

One who had the grace to throw the light of her flash on her own face
instead of upon my own. A heart-shaped face with wide-spaced eyes burning green and a smile that lit up small flashlights all over town.

She led me into a Mack Sennett, where I sat upright, being correct. She leaned against a corner of the thin upholstery, sniffing. There was a distinct scent of oranges in the air.

‘What's in the sack, Yank?”

“Oranges.”

“Air-enjez?
Whut the bluidy hell you tottin'
air-en-jez
around London for?”

“I'm very fond of the fruit,” I assured her primly. I peeled one and offered it to her primly to prove it.

She shook her head. “I haven't eaten a brute like that in years, Yank. It'd make me deathly ill. Now if you have a bit of chocolate—”

I pitched the peeling into the dark.

“Is it much farther to your apartment, Miss—”

“You're
in
my apartment, Yank.”

“If we have to go about Piccadilly again it'll cost you another half-crown, Sandy,” the driver helped out.

On the other hand the meter was clicking like mad. Was he working it with his foot?

But as we circled Eros we began to pick up speed and were going at a really breakneck rate when we smashed headlong into a shattering
bloooo
that rocked the town and brought the cab to a wobbling halt with myself on my hunkers on the floor.

“Sink the
Bismarck!”
I exclaimed. “What was
that?”
Either we'd smashed into something in the dark or this was an unusual girl. It had left me feeling curiously weightless where I sat.