Whipple's Castle (37 page)

“You're yellow.”

“Maybe I am, sir.”

“Shut up! I know and you know you're not yellow. You think I'd of recommended you for OCS if I thought for one goddam minute you were yellow? Now listen close. I'm going to try and explain one more time. In fact, I'll give you an example that's much too close to home, and it's something I surely should not do. How'd you like to go into combat, your platoon led by Lieutenant Knobloch?”

Wood considered his answer. Before he could speak, the captain said, “That's what I thought. You bet your sweet ass you wouldn't. How'd you like to have your men at the mercy of that stupid shit? Why, he's so goddam dumb he couldn't pour piss out of a boot. I know it and you know it.”

The captain fumed for a moment.

“Now I really am mad,” he said, “ ‘cause you made me to say that about an officer in front of an enlisted man. Hear? I am now highly pissed off!”

The captain walked up and down the orderly room, past the first sergeant's desk and back. He snapped his cap against his leg and looked out a window onto the dusty parade ground and its islands of starved grass. “Private Stefan's in your squad, isn't he?” he said.

“Yes sir. I'd like to ask you about him.”

“Ask what?”

“If you could get him out of that place, and back in the company. Evidently the medics think he's a good thing. They make him do all the dirty work.”

“How do you know?” The captain looked at him closely.

“I saw him just now.”

“You saw him just now. You took it upon yourself to go see him, and now you, a buck private, want to get him out of the funny farm. Did you tell him you'd take care of it?”

“I told him I'd do what I could, sir.”

“I'll tell you exactly what you can do, Private. You can take the matter up with Sergeant Garbanks, who can, if he so chooses, take it up with Lieutenant Knobloch, who, if he gives a shit, might come to me with it. If we were up to our full T.O., of course, you'd go through your squad leader, who'd be a sergeant, who'd go through his section leader, who'd be a staff sergeant, who'd go through Lieutenant Knobloch, who'd go through the executive officer, who might possibly mention it to me. In the meanwhile those medics have found a cheap orderly. But I'll tell you what I'll do. If you happen to get any ideas about how you might implement some sort of decision in the case of Private Stefan, I give you permission to come straight to me instead of through channels. There's mess call. Dismissed.”

Wood had taken his tray to the table before he realized, or perhaps let himself realize, the captain's threat. He ate his pale porkchops, sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. Someone spoke, or began to speak to him, and must have noticed his preoccupied mood. It was Seabolt, one of the small, usually quiet ones, and as Wood got up he put his hand on Seabolt's thin shoulder to show he knew he'd been spoken to. Seabolt, gravely pleased by this, nodded toward his tray. Wood resented Seabolt's pleasure as much as he despised his own preoccupation with Stefan and his fate. Everything seemed to make him come out fake, and he despised his patronizing gesture toward Seabolt.

He dumped his garbage in the GI can and went back to the barracks. Tomorrow was Saturday, and those men who could remember their general orders, provided they weren't on Sergeant Garbanks' shit list and on guard or K.P., could go on weekend pass. Perrone and Quillen had reserved a hotel room, where they planned to have an “orgy,” if possible. He'd been invited to drop in anytime. He did have some curiosity about what they considered an orgy to be, and in any case he wondered how they would go about getting the girls. They had been disconcerted at least once when two semiprofessional whores in their middle or late twenties had directed motherly smiles at them and told them they were too young to commence a life of sin just yet. In their training, in the warp of explosions, when they skewered the bayonet dummies with steel, they prepared for real war, but Perrone was eighteen and Quillen was nineteen, and they risked being patronized by the V girls. This was demoralizing, to say the least.

“You git to be an officer,” Quillen said, “you git all the nooky you want.”

Perrone looked at Wood—the slightly abstracted look that meant he was thinking basic thoughts about Wood's character.

“Neither of us can figure you out, Whip,” he said.

“Well, I can't either,” Wood said.

“Don't you want to get laid?” Perrone said.

“I don't know. I figure I've got a lot of that to do later, and I don't want to get dosed up now because of some prostitute.”

“Maybe later if you don't get your ass shot off first,” Perrone said.

“It's more than that, I suppose,” Wood said.

“What's more than that?”

“Love,” Wood said. They were startled, but didn't laugh, as he'd half expected them to. Their looks were somewhat skeptical, ironic but thoughtful.

“I've got to go see Lenore Stefan and tell her some lies about Pop,” he said. He'd thought of the Stefans' precarious little nest, and that was real.

“Oh my,” Quillen said. “How about that?”

Perrone grinned, then seemed to think better of that line of thought.

“What I meant,” Wood said, hearing sternness in his voice, “was that they love each other. It's real. That's all I meant.”

“Okay, okay,” Perrone said. “If it was anybody else I'd laugh my ass off, but you're too good to be true.”

“Maybe you're right,” Wood said.

Perrone looked at him. “I don't mean to say you can't be a pain in the ass sometimes.” A little bit of steel had entered Perrone's voice; he was worried about Wood's reaction, but prepared for anything.

“I know,” Wood said. He liked them, and wanted to tell them what he really thought, but of course he didn't know what he really thought. “Look,” he said. “I don't want to be anybody's nursemaid. I don't want to be an officer, or even a goddam squad leader. But every time I open my eyes some pitiful little creep is about to get in trouble. What am I supposed to do? I don't want to take care of Stefan. Do you understand? I'm younger than Stefan, for one thing. Why do I have to take charge? Captain Jones more or less told me, just before chow, he'd let Stefan rot in the violent ward if I don't go through with this OCS business.”

“Hey, hey!” Perrone said.

“Yeah, Whip,” Quillen said. “Don't you git all upset.”

“Well, God damn it!” Wood said. They were concerned. Their rugged faces were full of sympathy. He had startled them very much; but wasn't the whole thing futile? Why blow off to Perrone and Quillen? They couldn't do anything about it. He turned quickly, afraid of their concern, and left the barracks.

Yesterday he'd heard from Horace, and on the bus into town he read the letter again. Somehow he couldn't make it out; he could hardly see the big boy, and found it hard even to remember what had happened that last night. Had he actually lost his temper and hit Horace? How many times had he hit him? They had never mentioned it again—not the next morning, or in any of their letters. Horace's cracked lip had been noticed, but that was not too strange a wound for him to carry around. The tough skin of his face had recovered quickly. Perhaps Horace had been as much ashamed of his panic as Wood was of his. For a moment on that last night their weaknesses had combined to cause that violence. Sure. The real fact was that he had hit that fragile person who loved him, and done it to get him off, to get away from him.

 

Dear Wood,

Things are going pretty good here, and hope you are having a good time down south. I guess it is warm in Georgia now. I mean too hot, but it is not too bad here. I have been mowing lawns and make a quarter an hour. Not bad. When are you coming home on your furlow(?)?

Bob Pacquette dove in the scrape and cracked his head on a rock. He was not hurt bad but Dr. Winston had to put two clips in the top of his head.

Ben Caswell is still in the hospital, and he is uncontious. They feed him through a tube. Peggy got a letter from her mother saying she is fine and saving up to send for her. Peggy cries sometimes. She looks like it, any way.

Everybody sends you their love.

Love, Horace

P.S. Peggy does not want to go with her mother. That is what she cries about. Can't we keep her?

H.

 

The low sun shone across the tired, dark city, and in the long shadows the soldiers walked toward nothing, away from nothing. In their walking were those qualities, dangerous and enervating to watch, of boredom, of the true hatred of themselves and their possibilities that came from not wanting to be where they were.

He walked toward the Stefans' apartment. Pop Stefan had once told him that he ached for his wife. Ached for her. Wood had felt such a pang of jealousy for that pain, he'd turned away from Stefan to hide his face. He tried to imagine aching for Lois, but the fact was he didn't ache for Lois at all. They signed their letters “Love,” but the word was not magic, and caused no pain.

He came to the wooden fire-escape stairs that climbed toward the Stefans' apartment. The unpainted stairs and platforms listed dangerously, so much that he thought of the whole staircase sliding out and down away from the punky wood of the building, and he had a moment of vertigo. It seemed hardly any safer when he stood at the door. If the stairs began to bend and slide downward he could grab the doorsill, but he then had a vision of the sill crumbling off, and then the clapboards, and finally the whole building would crumble down into dust and disaster.

Lenore came to the door with Georgie in her arm, his bottle in his mouth. She knew Wood was coming, and she was all dressed up in a flowered print dress of shiny material, summery and pathetically gay, silk stockings and thin low shoes with little white tassels on the lacings.

“George's letter says he's all right. Is he all right, Wood?” She let him in and made him sit down.

“He's fine,” Wood said.

“Oh, good! That's wonderful!” she said, and only then turned shy. “It's so nice of you to come see us. You don't know…” At that moment Georgie came to some impasse with the bottle he gripped in both pudgy hands, and a dribble of white appeared on his cheek. She wiped his face with his bib, and held the bottle up. “Georgie's got to burp,” she said, expertly put him over her shoulder and patted his back. He burped throatily, and she took him and the remainder of the bottle into the other room. He complained once, and then Wood heard the sucking again, the avid valving of the baby's mouth. Lenore came back, smiled widely and shyly, her lips so big and red she seemed all black hair and bright red, like a flag.

“I just wanted to let you know he's fine,” Wood said.

“Oh no! Don't go yet, Wood!” she said. “Do you want a beer?” She knelt at the icebox, and he knew that she was all dressed up just for him, for the formality of his visit. Playing grown-up, she maintained the Stefan hospitality. She blushed and said she'd join him in a beer. As she stood up he saw that she was conscious of her body, that she made some attempt at grace in her posture. Through the sheer material of her dress he could see the lines of the little hems and straps that circled her, that pretended to be necessary.

She poured the beer, expertly tilting the glasses so they wouldn't foam over, then sat down across the wooden kitchen table from him. She took a small sip, left a vague smudge of lipstick on her glass, and offered him a cigarette from a crushed pack of Camels. He took it, and as he held a lighted match to her cigarette she started to take his hand, to steady it, then took her hand away and placed it in her lap, out of sight, as though it had done something wrong and should be hidden.

“Oh, poor George,” she said. “You saw him?”

“Yes, I saw him.”

“And he's going to be fine? He has this trick thing in his back, you know. Every once in a while, it doesn't matter what he's doing, it goes out somehow or other and he can't do a blessed thing until it gets better.”

He had wondered at first if it might not be a good thing for Stefan to remain in the violent ward—at least he wouldn't have to go into combat. That was before he'd seen the terrible exhaustion in Stefan's face. It was a dangerous place for him, and the danger was certain; they would keep him as long as he was sane and could do their work for them, because Stefan would never have the talent or the authority to convince a doctor over the medics' recommendations. What would happen was that Stefan would really break down. By the time they got around to giving him a section-eight discharge it might really be too late for him.

Lenore was telling him again how glad she was he could come to see them.

“I don't know anybody down here and I'm so lonely, Wood. Sometimes I wish so much Georgie was old enough to talk. Sometimes I talk and talk to him anyway even though he can't understand a blessed word of what I'm saying.” She blushed. “My, how I go on! Do you mind if I talk and talk, Wood?”

“I don't mind,” he said.

“It's so nice of you. You've been a good friend to George, I know. He never talked much, but I know. Oh, I'm getting to know you too now. It's so nice to have someone to talk to!”

She stood up and smoothed her dress down over her hips. “It's like a prison sometimes.” She walked to the window and moved the oilcloth curtains aside. “This town seems so old, like it was always full of soldiers and soldiers. There was a terrible fight in the alley last night. I heard bottles breaking, and cursing—you never heard such a sound. Like a lion roaring, right down in the alley. When I went out with Georgie to get the beer and groceries this morning there was blood on the cement, there, and later on, somebody, I don't know who, came and threw a bucket of water on it. I was scared silly. I'm still scared, except that you're here now.”