“You’re a good man, Pelagrini,” Keeley grinned weakly. “I didn’t mean what I said. Come on, Jeff, let’s go find the Frenchman.”
“No more beer?” Pelagrini asked.
“No more beer.”
“No more for me,” said Jeff. “Thanks, though.”
They all got up. Keeley went back into the barbershop and put on his necktie. He reminded himself to buy a new necktie at the PX. The G.I. neckties were bad. They wrinkled too quickly. Maybe that’s why they were issued. In the mirror he saw the photograph of the horse’s head.
“Who’ve you got tomorrow, Pelagrini? Who’re you betting on?”
“No bets tomorra. The odds are not good.”
“How many war bonds you got, Pelagrini?”
“Plenty,” smiled Pelagrini.
“Atta boy. We’ve got to hurry up and win this war, you know. Come on, Jeff. Let’s find the Frenchman.”
Pelagrini watched them go, then locked the door and went to the phone. He called a number. As he waited for her to come to the phone he thought about Keeley and Jeff. The war was like an operation in the hospital, he thought. You worried a lot about it before and then, when you got to it, it was nothing. What was it he had said? He had only said, “How many Japs you killed?” Too excitable. That’s what the war was. Too excitable.
She answered the phone.
“Hello?” he said. “Theresa? It’s me. I got some beer. You want to come over?”
CHAPTER III
Even the most daring slop chute in the Town served only near beer. It tasted like bitter soda pop. But a guy can get tight even on three point two. It depends purely on mental attitude. A soldier at the front wants beer or whisky to quench his thirst, to remind him of a taste he once had. A man in barracks wants an anesthetic to make him forget he isn’t fighting, that he actually isn’t in the war, that he is like an unborn child living in the limbo of his mother’s womb, except that he has memories. A man who is afraid of the dark trembles at the merest sound. A man who wants to get drunk needs only the semblance of alcohol to accomplish the trick.
Jeff Mitchell was getting tight on near beer. He had told Keeley the story and even the story had sounded drunk.
Keeley toyed with his glass of beer and made small wet circles on the wooden table top. A few women in uniform were close by at other tables. They had eager eyes and made an effort to appear occupied but they were hungry for the male companionship they rarely had had in civilian life and sorely wanted now.
“Why did she do it, Pete? Why?”
“Have you called her? Have you talked to her?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she has a side to this, too. Look. If she came to you and said she had done this, you wouldn’t believe her. You’d say it was a lie. But one of those kids tells a story about a woman who may not even be your wife, and you believe it.”
“You don’t understand, Pete.”
“Understand what?”
“She hasn’t written to me for two weeks. More. Almost three weeks. At first I tried to tell myself she did write and somehow the letter got lost. Then I thought maybe they were delivering the mail to the wrong barracks. After that I got the idea that somebody was stealing my mail. But now I know. She just didn’t write.”
“Let’s go to the smoker tonight. A couple of good fights will take your mind off her.”
“We were never even separated for one day until I was drafted.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jeff, the world’s burning to hell and you’re worried about something like this.”
“She’s my world. She’s the only world I’ve got.”
“You haven’t got a world. No soldier has. All he’s got is a loused-up bed, a few memories, and an urge for a woman. And that’s the trouble with you. You want to get laid.”
“I don’t want anybody but her.”
Keeley knew that words couldn’t help Jeff. Doubt was in his blood and it was a slow acid eating away his reason. Words would never serve as an antidote.
“You virtuous husbands give me a pain,” Keeley mumbled into his glass of beer. “You hear a third-hand story and take it for gospel. If you love her so much, give her the benefit of the doubt. Tell yourself it’s a lie. Go home on furlough as you planned. Get into bed. Forget the whole business. Never even mention it.”
“Getting into bed won’t settle anything.”
“All right. Then it won’t settle anything.”
Keeley rose and went to the phone booth. He put in a long-distance phone call to Jeff’s wife, Mary. Miraculously he got through at once. He heard her voice at the other end of the wire saying she would accept the charges. Then she was on. He told her he was a friend of Jeff’s. Keeley. Yes, she knew the name. She had to come down at once. Right away. Take a plane. Anything. But get there. Yes. Something was wrong. He didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. If she arrived over the week end she should come to the Stewart Hotel in Washington. Jeff was in trouble. He couldn’t come to the phone. No. It was not a joke. No. He was not drunk. Yes. It was important. She was to come right away. At once. Yes. He knew reservations were hard to get but this was important. Try the airport. Maybe there would be a cancellation. She had to try. Yes. It was that important. No. Jeff was not sick. Again he told her it was not a joke. Then he hung up and came back to the table. He would have to remember to take Jeff to D.C. with him.
Monty Crawford came over to the table and sat down. He had a smile like a watch fob; he wore it prominently. Before the war he had been a policeman in Chicago. His career was being nice to people. His conception of being nice was doing small favors whether you wanted them or not. This made him feel important. It also placed you in the position of being nice to him. His greatest claim to fame, a claim he would make without the slightest provocation, was that he had been held three times for manslaughter while serving on the Chicago police force. His peccadilloes had been the shooting of two Negro suspects and one Jewish petty thief, all three of them services which, Crawford would tell you, were thoroughly appreciated by the people of Chicago. If you listened with any degree of interest to his tale of heroism, he would embellish the story and explain that he “always shot niggers in the belly because then they didn’t die right away and they squirmed like hell.” The Jew he also had shot in the belly, but merely as an experiment. He had been intensely disappointed when the Jew had expired before he had had a chance to squirm. On each occasion Crawford had been released and exonerated as having killed the culprits in the line of duty.
Monty, now a top sergeant with a fierce desire to become an officer, was more than six feet tall, big-boned and heavy. He had a pair of small, bright eyes which seemed to say upon seeing you for the first time, “I’m your friend and if you ever need a favor.…” He shook hands with too firm a grip and he would openly cry when the post band played “God Bless America.”
Monty ordered a beer and said, “How’s everything?” Then as an afterthought he paternally added, “In case you ever need a little Scotch, I know just where you can get it. Regular prices, too.”
“Thanks, Monty,” Keeley said.
“Just let me know, fellas. Any time. Any time at all. Glad to do it.”
The appearance of Monty at the table drove yet another dart of agony into Jeff. He saw in Monty the reason for his being away from Mary. In this perpetual wearer of a uniform he felt the tug of the martial reins that kept him three thousand miles away from where he wanted to be. Monty was not just another soldier. He was all soldiery in one man. All the hateful regimentation, the filth, the fear, that meant being a soldier. He shined his shoes and could tell one division from another, one famous company from another; he knew which officer had led which company into glorious battle. He was courteous and loud, knew the rules and the rackets, was married and promiscuous. Jeff knew that Monty was the kind of soldier who loved his job, who in peacetime would still be a soldier. Red must have been like Monty, Jeff thought. So he hated Mo
nty.
“Have you seen the Frenchman?” Keeley asked.
“Who?” Monty asked. “The Frog?” Monty was strongly American. Frenchmen were Frogs, Negroes, niggers; Poles, Polacks; Italians, wops; Chinese, Chinks; Jews, Christ-killers.”
When Keeley did not reply, Monty said, “Oh, you mean him. Yeah. He’s been around. Getting drunk and still celebrating the liberation of Paris.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Seems I saw him somewhere. You know I really don’t understand what he’s got to celebrate. The Frogs never did a thing in this fight. We’re getting killed and they get back their country and they don’t even thank us for it. I know these lousy foreigners. All the same. Every one of ’em. Mind you, I got nothing against the good ones but.…”
Keeley was no longer listening. He merely kept nodding his head every few moments to indicate that his attention was riveted. He was thinking about the victory in France. Maybe now the war would soon be over. Then he would go back. Back where? Back to New York to his job on a daily paper? Why not? Why not back to the job? Fifty dollars a week. An occasional Sunday feature story was worth another ten or fifteen dollars. And Helen. Why not back to Helen? Pick up just where he had left off. That’s what he was always telling himself. Why not? All those wonderful little bars in New York. Maybe Helen was shacking up with other men. Maybe? He had no doubt about it. And she had no doubt about him. She knew that so long as he was sober he would find another woman. It was only when he was tight that he would need Helen. She knew it and therefore managed to get enough whisky to him so that he would continually need her. She didn’t want to need him, but she wanted him to need her.
“Take those rotten refugees,” Monty was saying. “You ought to see them hanging around the Pierre Hotel in New York and the St. Moritz and the Plaza Hotel and all the expensive places. Throwing money around, and them with all their dirty accents. And all they do is complain. Always complaining about us Americans. They ought to send them bastids back where they come from. Them Christ-killers. You know they’re running this country, don’t you? Sure. Roosevelt’s got them everywhere in Washington. But will they fight? No. They leave that to us.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have written those last two letters to her, Jeff was thinking. Maybe that’s what made her do it. Why do I write things like that to her? Still that shouldn’t make her stop loving me. She ought to know that it’s only because I miss her. I was always the strong one. Whenever she needed anything I was always there. Always. She could always depend on me. And that was wonderful. When there was a lot of talk in the papers about us getting close to war she wouldn’t even read the headlines. She said she didn’t want to read about things like that. And I understood her. Later when we were in the war and she got sick because I got my first draft notice, I understood that, too. She wanted us to run away then. She said there were plenty of other people to go fight. They wouldn’t need me. She was scared, God. And I had to hold her tight, tight all night, so she wouldn’t shake. Then there was the day I had to go away and she drove me to the induction station. Didn’t I tell her everything would be all right? And when she was going to give up her job, I told her not to. No, I said. You’ve worked for years to get where you are. Years, Mary. I’m not going to see you throw it all away just because of this. And when she wouldn’t listen I told her I would have to have something to come back to. That bucked her up. She said she would keep her job just for me. I was strong then. Very strong. But I got weaker. After a year away from her I got weak and it wasn’t all my fault. I was weak because by then I was depending on her too much. I guess that was the trouble. She never knew me like that. I never depended on anybody in my life before. Not anybody. So she couldn’t understand my letters. I’m sure of that. But is it so wrong to begin hating when there’s so much hate around? I was only hating whatever was keeping us apart. And the more I needed her in my letters, the less she was there. Why was that? Is it wrong for the strong to show a little weakness?”
“You know who’s fighting tonight?” Monty was still talking. “Max Brock. You know, the Jew kid from New York. Well, he’s boxing at the smoker tonight. Fancy Dan, they say. The Benny Leonard of the Post. Well, he’ll get his hair mussed tonight. He’s boxing Whitey. Let’s go early and get a couple of close seats. I want to see little Maxie’s blood splash.”
Keeley thought back a thousand years to 1942. Helen had had big ideas about him. He was going to be an important writer. He was going to startle the world. It was her idea that he enlist. That would give him the on-the-scene-experience he needed to write with authenticity. But Keeley had learned that men in uniform who wrote of the war had little to say, and there was little opportunity of getting it printed. The correspondent for a service paper was necessarily late with his stuff. Sometimes two months late. He had to get his material checked and censored before it could get out. And an army or navy censor regarded an enlisted correspondent with disdain. It was the correspondent in civilian clothes who got the direct wires out. The Associated Press man could reach several hundred newspapers … the uniformed correspondent might reach one service paper. The commanding officer of an attack force wanted to have millions hear of his exploits. And when somebody snapped his picture he wanted it to be, not some G.I. photographer, but a cameraman from Life magazine. Life would give him nationwide circulation. That meant much more. If it wasn’t higher rank that the officer was after, it was pure glory. Glory tasted good. Keeley had thought that some of the men in command often were fighting this war, not to defeat a brutal enemy, but to capitalize their particular branch of the service. The old-timers had waited twenty-five years for this war. They were in the headlines now. They were the important ones. They had the priorities on trains and planes. They were talked about and sought after. When the war ended they would be thrust into the background. Many a two-star general would become a colonel, and colonels would be set back to captains. So now they were making the most of it, while it lasted. That’s why it was the civilian writer whose literary favors were sought after. He was coddled. He slept in officer’s quarters and easily found the ear of a higher official. The G.I. correspondent was just a glorified copy boy. Keeley’s incentive to write had been slowly dulled by two years of mere tolerance and adverbial back-patting.
The last time he had seen Helen she had found it difficult to understand him. They had been in a Washington hotel. As usual she had seen to it that Keeley was saturated with drink. And as usual his piteous need for her satisfied her ego. She had wanted to know when he was going to write that book he had promised. He had told her that he never would write the book or anything else. Writing was for those who were failures at other things. A man could not fight well, so he won his battles with words. He was a failure with women, so he used up countless pages seducing creatures of the imagination who, if they had been real, would not have sat in the same room with him, let alone slept in the same bed. Writers were not doers. They weren’t the real thing.
Helen hadn’t understood his gibberish. He hadn’t understood it himself. And when she had made him so drunk that he could no longer stand up, she had teased and taunted him. The alcohol had made him impotent and she played her usual role of desiring him, of wanting something he could not give her. During those times he had wanted to die of shame. He thought now that perhaps what she wanted most was to prove to herself, and to him, that he was the inferior one.
“The trouble with both of you, you don’t take this thing serious enough. No pride. No spirit.” Monty was warming to his favorite topic. “You’re getting to look and think like any ordinary soldiers. And that’s a mistake because we’re not ordinary. We’re special. If they would of listened to us we never would of lost the Philippines. We knew what the score was way back. Let me tell you about something that happened in Manila.”
I don’t blame Mary, Jeff was thinking. How could she understand what I was griping about? Every day you read about men dying. And some come back and tell stories about how they had
to fight from foxholes, and how dirty and filthy everything was, and how they’d got malaria and who knows what kind of sickness. And there I was practically living in a country club and griping. Naturally she couldn’t understand it. How could Mary tell people where I was? You can’t tell people your husband is nice and safe some place and complaining when other soldiers are killing the enemy. Yes, and getting killed. Christ had to die before people respected him. Maybe that’s the way it has to be. No doubt Mary was confused about all this just like everybody else. After all, Jeff reminded himself, I’ve been away for almost a year. And she’s got a warm nature. Why, the first night we met she went to bed with me. The very first night. I thought then that maybe she always did that when she met a man. But it wasn’t true. We never separated from that first night on. Even after we got married. But she’s warm-natured. And I know she didn’t love this Red. She couldn’t have loved him.
The Brick Foxhole Page 4