by Mac Hyman
“You mean you dont mind it when somebody says something bad about Georgia?”
“I aint heered nobody say nothing bad about Georgia.”
“What do you think I been talking about?”
“Well, I aint thought too much about it,” I told him. “Dont you know?”
So he went on that way for a while and then all of a sudden he just quit talking and kept looking at me, and kept looking back, and we done that for a few seconds, just setting there staring, until I could tell it was getting right hard on him. He started to say something and then stopped and looked harder and I looked hard right back, and in a little bit, he got his eyes all squenched up and mine begun to burn a little bit, and we done that a while, but I knowed he had to bat them sooner or later, and after a while his whole face was getting squenched up and then all of a sudden, he just stopped and cleared his throat and looked away altogether. He picked up the papers on the desk and wrote some more on them and then rubbed his hands over his face once or twice. Then he leaned back in his chair and I got ready to start staring again, but he didnt look at me this time. Instead, he started asking me about the most foolish bunch of questions I ever listened to. He asked about all kinds of things I had done when I was a child, and what kind of life I led, and all kinds of stuff like that, and then all of a sudden, he leaned over and said, “Why did you hate your mother?” which didnt have a thing to do with what he was talking about before.
“Sir?” I said.
“Long ago your mother beat you, didnt she?”
“Well, I dont remember . . .”
“Did you ever try to remember?”
“I dont know that I have.”
“Dont you ever try to think of it at all?”
“No, I aint, but I will ifn you want me to. I dont think it’ll do much good, though, because she died when I was borned.”
And that seemed to make him kind of mad; he looked at me and frowned real hard and said, “Well, why didnt you say so in the first place?” and snatched the paper around and wrote something down on it.
So I said, “I guess I should have all right,” and said I just didnt think of it and so on, and then I figgered that maybe he was just leading up to it because he wanted to talk about his own mother, so I tried to give him a prod by saying, “Why? Did you hate your mother?”
“Certainly not,” he said.
“Well, I wouldnt think so. Did she beat you or something?”
“Look here, now,” he said. “You better watch yourself.”
So I dropped it right quick. I said I just thought he might want to talk about her for a while, and tried to explain I didnt mean no harm, but he was still right upset about it and leaned over the table saying to me, “Well, I didnt say nothing about my mother, did I? I was talking about your mother. I didnt say one word about my mother.”
“Well, I dont guess you did, and I’ll sho talk about mine ifn you want me to, but it wont do much good like I said, because she died when I was borned . . . but now I heered Pa say one time . . .”
“Well, let’s just skip it,” he said.
“I can tell you what Pa said. He used to . . .”
“No. No,” he said. “We’ll talk about something else. What about your pa? Did he ever beat you?”
“Sho.”
“Did he beat you hard?”
“Sho. Lord, I remember one time he took me out behind the pig pen and got one of them fence rails and leaned me over that fence, and Lord, I never got such a licking. Couldnt nobody beat like my pa could. I remember one time . . .”
But then he give a bounce and leaned over and stared in my face again and said, “You hated your pa, didnt you?” and kept his face poked right into mine.
And I couldnt think of a thing to say for a little bit. It looked like we was going to have to go through with all that staring again, and it seemed right silly to me, and I didnt want to hurt his feelings or nothing, but I told him then just as plain as I could how I felt. I said, “Sir, I dont hate my pa and I dont guess I hated my ma either, and if that’s all you want to know, you can write down there on that air paper that I didnt hate neither one of them, and not my grandpa or my grandma either, because I like all my folks ceptn this one uncle I got that I aint too partial to because every time he comes out to the house, he’s always wanting to rassle with our mule, and I just think he aint got very good sense because every time he comes out there he heads back for the barn and keeps the mule all wore out and tired, but there aint much harm in him neither that I can see cept him wanting to rassle with that mule, so I dont really hate . . .”
“All right,” he said. “All right.”
“So if you want to write that air down I’ll be on my way and maybe you can find somebody else that hates their folks . . .”
“You just sit down,” he said. “We arent half through yet.”
“Well, now, I’m through with that much of it . . .”
“You what!” he said leaning over the table at me; but then he kind of stopped and set back again and rested a little bit and rubbed his face, and when he looked back at me again, he looked altogether different. He was smiling as nice as he could like he had just seen me and we was old friends. And then he leaned over and said, kind of whispering it, “Will, what do you think about the girls?”
“How’s that?”
“Girls,” he said. “Girls. How do you like ’em?”
“What girls is that, sir?”
“Just girls. Just any girls.”
“Well, I dont like just any girls. I know there is one old girl back home that aint got hair no longer than a hound dogs, and she’s the meanest girl I ever did see. One time . . .”
“I dont mean that, quite. I mean girls in a different sense. When I say girls, I mean . . .” and he hedged around some more, and twisted and turned, and finally got way off the subject, and I never heered such talking as he did then. He got all wound up and wanted to know about girls in Georgia and I’d start to tell him and he’d say, “No, I dont mean that . . .” and then he’d be off again telling me about girls and what he meant when he said girls, and he got wound up so much it was just like I warnt there. He leaned back and put his head back and squenched up his face and talked and talked, and I listened for a while and glanced around and seen that most of the others had gone already, only he hadnt even noticed it. So I settled back and just let him go on and he kept talking about girls, only not about no particular girl but just about girls in general. So we chatted a good while about girls that way, and then I told him a joke I heered Pa tell one time, about Ike and Mike at the circus, and he was getting a right big kick out of it, leaned way across the table with his mouth open and his eyes all lit up, until he finally noticed that the others had gone, and then he set back right quick and the grin come off his face and he broke in on me and said, “Yes. Yes. Well, I guess I better let you go now.”
“Well, I aint told you the end of it yet . . .”
“No, that’s all. That’s not what I mean anyhow . . .”
So I got up and told him how much I enjoyed talking with him, and he said, “Yes. Yes,” and I told him if he wanted to talk about girls some more that he ought to come over to the barracks because the boys over there was always talking about the girls and knowed a lot of good jokes theirselves, and he said, “Yes. Yes. Well, that’s all. Yes. Thank you,” and I told him that maybe if he went out and seen some girls every once in a while he wouldnt worry so much about them, but by that time he was picking up his papers and he got them all together and pushed his chair back and kept saying, “Yes. Yes,” and finally said, “Well, I better go,” and took off down the hall and out the door without even saying good-bye to me.
So I got through that part too all right, and Sergeant King was right proud of it. When I told him about how the Major had done and how peculiar he was and all like that, he patted me on the back and said, “Well, he was the main one I was worried about all right. And I think you done right good on it too, Will. The f
act that you’re still walking about in the open is proof enough of that for me. I think we might make it after all.” And he seemed right happy about it. There warnt too much else to do, he said, and in a few more days, I would be classified sure enough.
14
Anyhow, that next day was the one when I had to go to the pressure chamber, and Sergeant King stopped me on the way out and started telling me all about it again. He said, “You can get to be a gunner anyhow. I know you can. If you can just get through the pressure chamber, you can make it all right. And they cant prove you’ve got the bends or the sinus or nothing if you just keep your mouth shut. So you got to be careful, see? You wouldnt want to not be classified and have to stay here as a latrine orderly all the time, would you? So you watch it now.”
And he kept on like that until all the others outside started yelling to get started, and then he let me go, and we marched down to this theatre where they was going to lecture us about the pressure chamber. And just as I was making myself comfortable to nod a little bit, I really got a surprise because down in front of me was little ole Ben’s head sticking up over one of the seats, and there was Lucky next to him, and Irvin and Pete and all the rest of them! I couldnt even say anything for a minute, but then I yelled out, “Ben! Ben!” and he turned around and seen me and said, “It’s Will, yall. It’s Will!”
But about that time this Captain come nodding and smiling out on the stage, so I motioned them I would meet them outside. But then he said, “As you were,” which meant to be quiet, which we done, and started to talking and I thought he never would quit. He was a ground officer—you could tell because he wore this bashed-in hat and flying officers wear straight hats, and he kept saying Roger and Wilco and things like that, and flying officers just say “Yes” and “No” and he kept talking about airplanes all the time—and he was the happiest one to be standing out there talking of any I had ever seen. He told how they had planes that could fly thirty thousand feet up and how there warnt much oxygen up there and you would be dead in just a few minutes without your mask, and all about it; and then he told us about other airplanes that would go up to fifty thousand feet and kill you in just ten seconds, and make the blood boil right up inside your body, and all about that too; and then started telling us about all the other progress the Air Force is making, and I really got tired of it after a while.
But when it was over, I went outside to wait for Ben and them, and I mean it was good to see them all too. Ben and Irvin and Lucky and all of them come out and one of them hit me on the back and then I hit him on the back, and one of them shoved me, and I shoved him, and then one of them grabbed my hat and popped me on the back of the neck with it, and I stomped on his toes, and we had a real nice time of it. Then me and Ben went off to eat together and I seen that he warnt down on the Air Force no more, but was right excited about it, and I felt right good about everything. I told him how I was a permanent latrine orderly for a while, and Ben said, “Well, I’m going to be a gunner, I think. I believe that’s the thing for me,” and when he said that, I couldnt hardly believe it, it sounded so lucky. I had a mouthful of food and couldnt hardly swallow it even.
I said, “Me too, Ben. Aint that something, though. That’s just what I’m going to be.”
“Well, I be dogged,” he said, grinning all over. “Maybe we can get together. I done passed everything now but the altitude chamber, and we get that this afternoon.”
“Well, we do too,” I said. “And I done passed everything too, and there aint going to be a thing to that pressure chamber because Sergeant King told me all about it, so I guess we might make it after all.”
So we talked a good bit about it, and before it was over, I got about as anxious to be a gunner as Ben was. We ate and sat around for a while, and Ben got to talking about the Air Force and telling me all about it, and he made it sound so exciting and everything that you just couldnt wait to get in—and then all of a sudden, you would think, Well, I am in it, and it didnt seem like the same place somehow.
We started back and he begun telling me how it was almost as good as the Infantry in a lot of ways. He said, “You just think about it. If a man gets shot in a plane, he’s got thirty thousand feet to fall, and the plane might blow up, or he might even die because of lack of oxygen, like the Captain was saying. There’s a lot of things that can happen. And you know what they did in the last war, Will? They give out Air Medals for every five missions. That’s how dangerous it was. And you know what you got after thirty missions, Will?”
“There just aint no telling,” I said.
“You doggone well right there aint. You got the DFC, by gosh. And you deserve it too, Will. Just think of all the things that can happen. So you get a medal just like that, and you fly thirty missions, and what have you got—you got at least four Air Medals and a DFC, and that’s five medals in all, plus another one if you get shot or something, and some others for just being there. How about that?”
“It sounds mighty good,” I said.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “I believe you stand about as good a chance of getting them in the Air Force as any place. You take my great-grandfather that fought under Stonewall Jackson; he fought in I dont know how many battles, and he got shot four times and lost one leg and got his head bashed in, and didnt get but one dinky little old medal, Will. Why, that aint beans today. Why, today, you can get a medal by just not doing anything wrong . . . Yessir, Will, if we get to be gunners, there just aint no telling how many we can get.”
So I took on about it a good bit, and we finally got up to the place where they had the pressure chamber, and me and Ben got to go in together. What they done was lead us into this little place that looks something like the front end of a train engine, and they talked to us some more about how we should do; and then they give us these masks and run us up to five thousand feet. But we didnt have no bends or nothing, so then they run us up to twenty thousand feet, and the fellow said over the interphone, “Now you’re going to take off your masks and see how long it takes you to get dizzy. Each man watch the man next to you and when he looks like he has done it long enough, you make him put his mask back on.”
So we done that a while too, and didnt have no trouble with that either, only Ben wanted to see if we couldnt keep ourn off longer than anybody else, and he got pretty white in the face before it was over. And I could feel myself getting right dizzy too and I looked at my fingernails and they was getting blue-colored, and then I looked back at Ben, and he was setting there grinning sillier and sillier. And then it seemed like I heered him telling me to put my mask back on, and I tried to tell him to put his back on, and I said, “You put put put white,” which didnt make no sense at all.
But he nodded and said, “Stonewall Air Medal and gunner.”
I said, “That’s put blue.”
And he nodded his head and said, “Sho,” and it seemed like we went on talking like that for the longest sort of time, and the next thing I knowed there was two fellows standing over us and somebody working on Ben’s mask, saying, “Give him a hundred per cent oxygen. He’ll come out of it in a minute.”
Anyhow, we didnt have no trouble after that; they took us up to thirty-five thousand feet and we didnt have no aches, and then we come back down and Ben took off his mask with his hair sticking up every which way and lines on his face where the mask had been, and we got up ready to go. He said, “Well, I guess we done all right, Will. Now all we got to pass is the eye test and we’re through for good.”
But about that time, this fellow stuck his head in and said, “You two fellows come on in here. The Lieutenant will want to see you. Didnt you hear the lecture this morning?
“Didnt we pass?” Ben said, his eyes getting wide.
“You mighty near passed out,” the fellow said. Then he thought about it, and laughed and said, “Yeah, you mighty near passed out, that’s what you did!” Then he chuckled a little more over it and told it a couple of more times, but Ben just stood there with his face ki
nd of pale, and didnt smile, so the fellow didnt tell it no more; he said, “Well come on. I’ll see if the Lieutenant has anything to say to you about it.”
So he took us down the hall and told us to sit outside while he went in to see the Lieutenant. Ben set there all hunched over with worry, and I was getting that way myself because it looked like we had failed for sure, but about that time I happened to glance in the office we were setting outside of and seen that the Lieutenant this fellow wanted us to talk to was a nigger, which was the most surprising thing because I hadnt seen many niggers since we left home. I turned to Ben and whispered, “Ben, they’s a nigger in there!” but Ben only looked hard at me, and about that time the fellow come out and said that the Lieutenant would see us now.
So we went in, and I mean it was one of the most surprising things I ever seen. He was the doggiest nigger I bet there ever was, setting there at that desk in his Lieutenant’s uniform. We come in and Ben he popped to and give him a big salute, but I was looking so hard, I guess I forgot all about it. And then the nigger said right out, “Didnt you fellows understand what the Captain said about what lack of oxygen will do for you at twenty thousand feet?” and didnt even sound like a nigger the way he talked. I dont guess I had ever seen anything like it before.
But Ben snapped out, “Yessir, it was a mistake, sir,” and he said, “Well, be more careful in the future. You passed it all right. I just wanted to warn you.” And then Ben popped him another big salute and twisted on his heel and started out the door, and then reached back and snatched me by the arm to get me going because I just stood there for a minute. I mean it’s kind of a shock to a man to have a nigger set there and start talking and not even sound like a nigger, so when we got outside I wanted to go back in and talk with him a little bit as I hadnt seen no niggers much lately, and never none like that, so I was right interested in how he got that way. I wanted to chat with him a bit because he sho seemed nice and was just as friendly as he could be, and there aint nobody any friendlier than a friendly nigger; so I wanted to go back in but Ben kept pulling at me by the arm, and then he lit into me all of a sudden. He said, “What’s the matter with you. Didnt you see he was an officer?” which was a surprise to me too because I expected Ben would be right happy about having passed and not be mad about anything.