Comfort to the Enemy (2010) (6 page)

Honey, this is different, it's a war story. Get dry and I'll tell you what happened.

Chapter
Six

Gary Marion, Ex-Bull Rider

Carl and Jurgen were discussing what the Nazis have been doing to Jews. Then Carl goes to pick up Louly, who is home for a war-bond rally, an d t hey spend a night in a hotel room, with Carl recounting what he's heard from Jurgen.

Carl was shaving in his white undershorts in the bathroom, the door open, his highball on the counter; he'd come out to the bedroom to stand over Louly at the vanity in a peach teddy brushing snags out of her red hair, Carl stooping to shave in the vanity mirror while he told Louly his war story: How they lived in Quonset huts on Momote Plantation among rows of coconut palms, the 5,000- foot airstrip cutting a wide swath of packed coral through the trees. He told her fighter planes took off every day -- Australians in Hurricanes and Spitfires, the Navy sending F4U's and Hellcats -- to drop bombs o n b ypassed Japanese bases like Rabaul, keeping a good 100,000 Nips out of the war.

''Did you eat much coconut?''

''Hardly any.''

''Why not?''

''Too much trouble, and the milk gives you the runs. We hung mosquito netting over our bunks and took Atabrine tablets every day. It could turn your skin yellow.''

''So you didn't take any.''

''Once in a while I did.''

''How was the chow?'' The marine soundin interested.

''Poor to not too bad, but I ate it. Most of the time, we wore greens, the shirts and pants,'' Carl said, stepping into the bathroom to hold his razor under the faucet and drink some of his highball, ''and green baseball caps, or you could wear your white cover. You could wear dungarees or just about anything you wanted, Seabees weren't that military. We'd cut the pants down to shorts and the sleeves off the shirts, cut our combat boots into sandals.''

''It must've been hot,'' Louly said, making a face, her brush caught in a snag.

Carl took the brush, worked it free and put i back in her hand saying: ''Two degrees from the Equator, that's hot. Nobody cared -- we always had a breeze off the Bismarck Sea. I can't tell you where the sea ends and it becomes the Pacific Ocean again. I asked Jurgen -- he's the one told me why it's the Bismarck Sea, Germany taking over the Admiralties in 1884 and owned them up to the end of World War I. I said to Jurgen I was surprised you didn't put up any statues, Bismarck or any of your Kraut heroes like the Kaiser. I think Australia owns the islands now. Manus , the big one, has a huge harbor, so they made it Seventh Fleet headquarters. Los Negros is only 10 miles long, but curves around close to Manus and forms one side of the harbor. We were issued a carbine and three magazines of ammo, 45 rounds. And I had my .38 along."

"You brought it with you?" Louly surprised.

"I wore it every day for 15 years. It felt good th
e t
ime I packed it." Louly paused, holding the hairbrush in the air. "You never told me what your job was." "The lieutenant would tell me to get in the jee p a nd go check on something. We had a lot of heav y e quipment working, bulldozers and graders." Car l s miled at himself in the vanity mirror, half-turned an d m ade a muscle for Louly. "You like my tattoo?" "I love it." She said, "It's Palmer Method, huh?" looking at "Carlos" on his shoulder in perfect penmanship.

"Only cost me a buck." He reached around Louly to get a towel off the vanity. He wiped his face and said, "Look up here." Louly looked straight up at him bending her head bac k a nd he kissed her till she reached up and took his face in her hands.

After that tender moment he said: "They gave us the carbine and a steel helmet. Once in a while they'd announce general quarters over the P
. A . and we'd go down to the beach and wait for something to happen. The thing the helmet was good for, it held two cans of beer in chipped ice we'd each take to the show at night. We're Seabees, so we made seats with arms and a back that would hook on to the plank nailed to a log -- rows of hard boards going back from the screen. It rained it didn't matter, we'd go to the show. One night I was with this young Seabee, George Klein from Chicago, in the rain watching Lauren Bacall in her first movie, 'To Have and Have Not,' where she tells Humphrey Bogart if he wants anything just whistle? Lauren Bacall says to him: 'You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You put your lips together and blow.' And George Klein went crazy. At that moment he fell in love with Lauren Bacall and kept saying: 'We're the same age. You know it? Look at her. Lauren Bacall and I are the exact same age.'''

''How'd he know that?''

''I don't know, but you could see she was a kid. Listen, the guy working the projector -- I made him put the same reel back on as he was changing reels so we could watch her say it again. Sitting in the rain.''

Louly said: ''Are you coming to where you got shot? I think you said in the letter you were in a boat?''

''A duck,'' Carl said, ''it was green and looks like a 30-foot open boat but has wheels. You drive out of the water and keep going. We'd take it across a stream separating us from Manus, Los Negros was that close, and go to the supply depot for stores and 60 cases of beer. All the cans olive drab, it didn't matter what kind. On our base we kept them in a walk-in cooler and handed out two or three cans per man every other day. Naval Air Transport pilots always had whiskey and they'd sell it for 35 to 50 bucks a fifth if they needed money. Or sometimes they'd trade a bottle for a case of beer.''

''You were in the duck,'' Louly said, ''when you got shot. . .''

Carl was in the bathroom rinsing, now drying his face. He said: ''We were coming back from Manus with our stores. Crossed the stream to Los Negros, up the bank and into some growth, and the Nip hit me wit h a rifle shot." Carl stepped into the bedroom pinching the love handle above his left hip. "George Klein was with me and a big boy from Arkansas named Elmer Whaley. I remember he and I sucking on Beech-Nut scrap that trip. There were more shots as I dove for cover in the stern and saw George and Elmer Whaley go down. Not shot, taking cover. I listened to that rifle fire again in my head and held up two fingers to my mates. I said: 'We don't know where they are. We have to wait till they come to us.' I said, 'You're dead, so don't move.' George said they didn't have thei r c arbines. I didn't have mine either." Louly said, "You go armed, 'cause something like this could happen?" "No," Carl said, "the island was secured. The First Cavalry swore, no live Japs left. Over 3,000 killed. The First Cavalry lost something like 300 killed and 1,100 wounded. The war on Los Negros was over. No, we brought the carbines for fun, fire off a fe w r ounds." "Where were they, the guns?" "Up front, at the bow. George was crawlin g t oward them." "By then you must've had your .38 in yo u h and," Louly said. "The one with the front sight filed off?"

"I believe it was," Carl said, starting to grin. "The same one I used to save my husband'
s
life?"

Carl was grinning in the vanity mirror.

"You have the hammer eared back?" "I believe I did." "You hear them coming through the growth?" "Taking forever. They're both off to the left, so I held the .38 on the port-side gunnel where I though t t hey'd appear, judging from the noise they're making coming through the growth. I see an Oriental face in a dirty cap appear above the gunnel -- he's bringing up his rifle as I shot him. Now the other one, taller than the first guy, appears and I see him aiming at me as I'm looking right at him, his face pressed against the stock of his rifle. I shot him a half-second before he fired and it threw him off. I got hit in the leg instead of between the eyes.''

''My hero,'' Louly said, head lowered to brush her hair, her eyes raised to Carl in the mirror. ''I remember you got your medals and your honorable discharge and quit limping.''

''I'd served my country,'' Carl said.

''And I'm just starting.'' Louly quit brushing. ''Tomorrow I'm the lady marine at a war-bond rally.'' ''What do you do?''

''Smile, act cute in a military kind of way. Roy Eldridge and Anita O'Day'll be there, and some others.''

'''Let Me Off Uptown,''' Carl said. ''Roy an Anita don't need any others. I'll try to make it, but first I have to supervise a new guy, Gary Marion. You want to picture him, he's one of those tough little bull riders from the rodeo.''

''What's wrong with him?''

''I have to settle him down before he start shooting Germans.''

There was a coal miner named Joe Tanzi from Krebs, who started digging coal when he was a kid, 13 years old but big for his age. On his 44th birthday, still going down in the mines, he told his wife he wasn't going to work anymore. He was going to hitch a ride to McAlester and rob the first bank he came to on Choctaw Avenue. Two weeks before this at Osage No. 5 an explosion sealed off Joe Tanzi for four days wit h f our dead miners and five lunch pails. Joe didn't eat much, the smell of the dead miners made him sick. He decided he was through with mines.

His kids were grown by then. The boys had left Krebs for Tulsa and the oil fields, and the girls were married and keeping house. His wife locked the front door and went to her mother's.

That morning of his birthday Joe Tanzi had put on a clean shirt and pants with his worn-out suit coat, his cap, hitched the ride to McAlester and walked in the bank. He took out a pistol he'd bought for $6 off an old guy who was supposed to have been a Black Hand assassin in his time, and robbed the bank of $7,700 of miners' payroll.

What he did then, he got on the interurba streetcar and rode it 20 miles to Hartshorne, the end of the line, where he was arrested the next morning at the home of his oldest sister, Loretta, who was known as Grandma Tanzi and made a living brewing and selling Choc beer to coal miners. They asked Joe Tanzi, all right, where was the money? Joe Tanzi, one of thos e b ig guys who didn't talk much, said, "What money?" They had bank people identify him an d h undred witnesses who saw him riding the streetcar with bank sacks. They asked him where he'd hid it. He wouldn't answer. They asked him using blackjacks on his kidneys till he was peeing blood and he still wouldn't tell them. For several days they searched his sister's house, her car, her property and adjoining lots. They brought dogs to the sister's house to sniff out in all directions. Once they gave up, knowing he'd never speak a word to them, they brought Joe Tanzi to federal court, charged him with bank robbery, found him guilty in five minutes and, mad as hell, sentenced him to 25 years of hard labor. This was in 1928.

In 1933 Joe Tanzi was one of six convicts in a work crew repaving Stonewall Avenue from McAlester's business district to the prison. He heard the signal as they were coming to the Barnett Memorial Church, a wolf whistle, and the six convicts took off in all directions. Joe Tanzi ran for the church hearing gunfire from the guards, but none of it coming at him. He got around back of the church and inside, the door unlocked, a man in there playing the organ, booming through part of a hymn when he heard the gunfire, went to a window to see what was going on. It allowed Joe Tanzi to get behind the organ in time to hear the guards coming, shouting, and heard the organist tell them nobody came in here, he'd have seen them. That night Joe Tanzi got pants and a shirt still damp off a clothesline, burned his prison stripes and walked two full nights to Hartshorne and dug up his bank money buried six feet deep in the middle of Grandma Tanzi's cornfield. The two thought they ought to move to Arkansas and that's what they did: paid $900 for a dinky farm near Mulberry, on the road east of Fort Smith.

"I guess they missed living in Oklahoma," Carl said to Gary Marion, "'cause now they have a farm near Idabel, close to the Red River. Cross it you're in Texas."

They were riding in the '41 Chevrolet seda with 180,000 miles on it but good tires, Gary driving, Carl watching the ex-bull rider staring straight ahead at the highway. "You start to see a lot more dogwood s y ou know you're coming to Idabel." Gary said, "This convict'll be armed?" "I don't know. He might be." "He robbed the bank he was armed."

"Sixteen years ago," Carl said. "You want him still holding a gun, don't you?" Earlier in this trip talking about Jurgen Schrenk
, Gary maintained P
. O. W
.'s were no better than fugitive offenders. He said he walked in that cell and Jurgen was set on killing him. "Why would he care about you?" Carl said. "Jurgen's a combat veteran, a captain in the Afrika Korps. He doesn't even have to talk to you he doesn't want to. What we'll do is forget the whole thing."

Approaching Idabel, Carl said: ''There are fugitive felons we can't wait to find, and there are guys like Joe Tanzi who dug coal till he couldn't dig anymore. Some parolee around here recognized him from prison and went to the county sheriff. Who knows why. Joe Tanzi's a federal fugitive, so the sheriff called Tulsa. Joe's 60 years old now, his sister's about 80. They say he bought a full section off a Choctaw was trying to grow cotton. Joe's letting a colored famil y s hare-crop it with him." "But he still owes us 20 years," Gary said "Commit the crime, you do the time." Carl could hear himself saying that when h w as 25. But even back then he wasn't anything like Gary Marion, Jesus, from some dinky town in East Texas.

"We'll visit Joe and have a talk." "What about?" "See what he's calling himself." Carl stopp
e a
nd said: "When you were competing for rodeo money you had to stay on the bull eight seconds, right? You don't get any points for staying on longer, you're judged on your ride. You hear the buzzer you try to slide off without getting thrown. Then you want to walk to th e g ate without looking back, see what the bull's doing. Am I right?" "There's girls in the stands watching," Gar said. "You take your hat off to them and keep turning to wave it at the entire arena." "While you're checking on the bull." "Some you better." "It doesn't mean you're afraid of the bull." "No -- you're showing him respect is all." "It's the same kind of thing," Carl said. "You're a peace officer. You try to handle the bull and make it look easy." Gary turned his head to point his old-time Stetson at Carl. "What I think you're saying to me , leave the wop convict to grow his cotton and nobod y g ets hurt." Carl said: "Gary, you wear me out. I'm not sur e w hy, but you and I don't seem to communicate. What I get from the way you see this, you hope Joe Tanzi pull s a gun so you can shoot him." "He pulls," Gary said, "isn't that what you'r supposed to do?"