And I could have compounded my stupidity by continuing to babble something like, “That’s a swell idea, honeypot,” or “Okay, if you insist,” or “Well, ready or not here I come,” but I was inspired by her example to say nothing, to let silence have its eloquence as a setting for a head movement. I moved my head close to hers. I took a keen look at her mouth. Just being that near to it shook me. When I could still the tremble of my head I had to consider how to hold it. It would not be seemly to tilt it so much to get our noses out of the way of bumping. I should keep my head proudly upright but somehow in moving my mouth forward I should allow the noses to pass.
Then as we made contact—hers were mildly pursed, mine were not—I was hit with the uncertainty of how long I should maintain the contact. It did not occur to me just to wait and let her break the contact after a suitable duration; that, I assumed, was my responsibility. But I didn’t know what to do. I think she did, though. She had put her two hands on the sides of my two arms, as if to pull me closer to her. She held me like that, with our lips mashed together, as if she couldn’t let go, for a very long time.
Chapter twenty-two
When the defense of Stay More began, I had a ringside seat, as McPherson had said I would. Not only that, but the evening before the battle he attempted to give me a private lesson in just what I would be watching, so I could understand and even appreciate the various things I would see. Using blank pages of my Indian Chief, he drew maps with arrows and symbols representing tanks and troops and his own arsenal of weapons, and rectangles representing the various buildings of “downtown” Stay More, and squiggles representing the two creeks and their confluence. I tried to pay attention. Not only did I have great difficulty grasping terms or concepts like displacement and retrograde operation and point targets but also many of the words he used were neither English nor Japanese but French—echelon, defilade, abatis, melee—and I didn’t bother to ask him what they meant, not because I didn’t want to expose my ignorance but because I truly didn’t care. I simply could not concentrate because my mind was elsewhere, namely, the office of the Daily Star during the long moments of that kiss. “Are you all right?” McPherson asked me, and I realized I must not have been paying close attention. “Do you understand this flanking maneuver?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“I realize it’s confusing,” he said. “I’m not sure my men understand it, and we’ve rehearsed it a dozen times.” He took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the sheets of the Indian Chief on which he’d made his maps. “But trust me, it’s the only way to keep the tanks out of the village, and I’m not at all sure it will work.”
“How are you doing with Annie?” I suddenly asked.
Did I detect a blush? “I didn’t realize you knew about me and Annie,” he said.
“I didn’t realize you knew about me and Ella Jean,” I said.
He studied me for several moments. Then he smiled and said, “I didn’t. But it doesn’t take much to guess. So. How are you doing with Ella Jean?”
“I asked you first.”
“As a matter of fact,” he looked at his watch, “in just a little while I’m supposed to take my pal Burt Stoving over to meet her.”
“He must really be your pal, if you’re doing that,” I said.
“I was being a bit sarcastic,” he said, and reached out and rumpled my hair. “You’re my only pal. But Burt and I are not simply rivals on the battlefield, we’re also competitors in the game of life. At Camp Chaffee, he was always parading his dates in front of me. So now I’m giving him a good look at mine. I think I’m really falling for that girl. I wish you could tell me more about her. But nobody seems to know anything about her. Except her father. And how do I ask him? Vermonters are notoriously taciturn, and here I am running off at the mouth again. So tell me: how are you doing with Ella Jean?”
“I think I’m really falling for that girl,” I said.
Falling, hell. I had already fallen about as far as you can get before hitting bottom. Naturally I was just a little suspicious that the reason she had, after all these years, suddenly taken a shine to me was because her bosom companion, Gypsy, had more or less abandoned her in favor of her brother Willard, who, ever since that famous pie supper when she’d kissed him, was allowing his keen analytic mind to be diluted by daydreams of Gypsy.
It was almost pathetic. Sammy Coe invited all his Jap friends to use the front porch of the Coe house as the grandstand to watch the great battle, because it commanded a view of downtown Stay More, and it was also safely out of the way of any stray bullets, fake and soapy though they were. All the kids were more excited than they’d ever been, except for four of them: not only were Gypsy and Willard sitting with their heads and their hands together, but also Ella Jean and I were so caught up in each other that none of us was really going to be able to play close attention to the battle. At least Willard had enough sense of the occasion to offer periodic analysis of what was happening on the battlefield, but Ella Jean and I were lost in each other. It is a wonder that I had the presence of mind to remember to save a seat for you, Gentle Reader.
But which, after all, is more exciting, love or war? As I sat there, scarcely noticing the tanks coming into town from the south or observing McPherson’s samurai as they took cover in the old mill, behind the canning factory, or even in some of our leftover foxholes, and paying more attention to what Ella Jean was saying (she was relating some gossip about Rosa Faye Duckworth, who had been fooling around with one—or more—of the soldiers bivouacked in the Duckworth meadow), my mind was dwelling neither upon the deployment of the combat nor upon sweet Ella Jean’s breathy chatter but philosophically upon the power of passion to banish one’s interest in more important things, like armed conflict. Knowing him as I did, I knew that McPherson himself would much rather be walking in the woods with Annie than trying to keep a dozen tanks out of Stay More. And I suddenly realized how much Mare Coe would have preferred being with Gypsy on the banks of Banty Creek to facing the Japanese on Iwo Jima. Was fighting a substitute for loving? Or a counter for it? A remedy to it? Or what?
These profound thoughts were scarcely interrupted by the sound of the tank corps’ battle cry, “Hang it in and let ’er go!” or the answering (and rhyming) battle cry of the samurai, “Mare Coe!” I reflected with just a little pride that McPherson and his men had chosen that battle cry after I had told them the story of our town’s boy at Iwo Jima. Both battle cries were soon accompanied by the ringing of the schoolhouse bell, sounding its mournful “BOMB!” and “DOOM!” repeatedly. I wondered who was ringing it. That elegiac, almost pastoral chiming was soon drowned out by the beginning of Major Evan’s sound effects. He had brought with him a recording of the actual sounds of battle, and these were now being played at full volume from loudspeakers the engineers had set up around the village, for the sake of realism, as if all the fake ammunition were not enough, or as if the actual tanks and guns might be induced to sally and volley and battery by the artificial noise. I tried to explain to Ella Jean how funny the idea was: that fake sounds were being used to prompt fake ammunition. But I’m not sure she got it. Or quite possibly she was so wrapped up in me that it didn’t matter. The schoolhouse bell stopped ringing, unable to compete with that noise. The ringer stepped out of the building. It was Miss Jerram.
I thought of all the kids of Stay More whose fathers had gone to the war and who had had those identical recurrent nightmares involving monstrous mayhem and the weapons in action, things they’d never actually seen but could now watch: tanks, howitzers, missile launchers, machine guns, mortars, if not the banished bazooka. What they couldn’t see they could hear, and between Major Evans’ sound effects and the actual implements of war they could hear enough battle noise to last them for the rest of their lives.
As journalists, Ella Jean and I had a responsibility to report to our readers just what happened on that day. While Ella Jean was probably more interested in reporting the spectators’
reactions, I was somewhat interested in being able to detect just who was winning that battle and how. When the smoke cleared and Major Evans turned off the sound effects, I examined the notes in my Indian Chief, based more on Willard’s running commentary than on my own observation of the fighting, and discovered that I had just the bare outlines for the lead story in the next daily: YANKS AND TANKS TAKE TOWN FROM JAPS. McPherson had prepared me to accept that outcome, but what bothered me most was that I didn’t really seem to care. What did it matter that Japs had destroyed two tanks in the middle of the WPA bridge so that the others couldn’t cross Banty Creek and had to shell the town from the schoolhouse road? Who really cared that Sergeant Harris and Corporal Rucker were both killed in the engagement? The town’s own Yanks, led by Sog Alan, were overcome with the joy of victory and were acting like maniacs, while the town’s Japs were despondent, but I really and truly didn’t think it was anything to get excited about. After all, there were still going to be more battles, weren’t there?
But dutifully I went to interview Major Evans afterward, sending Ella Jean away from me for a little while by assigning her to the story of the effect the battle had had on the town physically (her story would report that a post holding up the porch roof of the Ingledew store had suffered a direct hit from a fake grenade and had broken, collapsing the porch roof, but the engineers were already at work repairing it to better than new). Major Evans was too busy or simply didn’t have time for me. His staff sergeant gave me the “casualty figures”: thirty-two dead Yanks, three destroyed tanks; eight dead Japs, the remaining four taken prisoner, including McPherson. The sergeant would not give me the present score, if there was one, but he said the village was “secure” in Yank hands, and “the utter rout of the enemy more than makes up for the enemy’s opening ambush.” I told him he sounded like he had been rooting for the Yanks. “Well, what do you think I am?” he replied.
With Ella Jean’s stories on the parties of the town’s kids and grownups who watched the battle and made a picnic of it, and my story on the battle itself, we discovered that we still didn’t have enough news to fill the four pages of the issue. Ella Jean put her hand on top of mine. “You can just make things up,” she said, and winked at me. And so I embellished the news a bit, which one shouldn’t do. I added a story about the wholesaler’s truck bringing orders to Latha’s store right in the middle of the battle, and the truck driver being scared out of his wits and hightailing it out of town. Actually, the wholesaler’s truck had arrived during the battle, but the driver just calmly watched the action along with everybody else on Latha’s store porch.
Among the merchandise the wholesaler had sent to replenish Latha’s rapidly sold-out stock (and which it remained my job to arrange on the shelves) was a box of twenty-four bars of Palmolive soap! I eagerly bought a bar from Latha with my own newly earned riches, and, since Ella Jean wouldn’t accept a salary (other than kisses, in which she was now overpaid), I presented her with the bar.
“Why, Dawny!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “This is my favorite of all the soap there is!”
“I know,” I let slip.
“How did ye know?” she asked.
I groped for evasion. “Well, sometimes you just smell like it,” and I buried my nose in her hair.
That evening once again I made my pilgrimage to the sacred spot on Banty Creek, and my effort was rewarded: Ella Jean came down the hill to take her bath with the new bar of Palmolive. I was tempted to reveal my presence to her. After all, I was her boyfriend now. Would she mind? But I was afraid of offending her. I was glad enough, as it was, to have the privilege of the marvelous sight and the more exquisite privilege of the fragrance, and to reflect that this part of Banty Creek was remotely over the mountain from where all the soldiers were, so that none of them could ever share the sight or the fragrance.
It was hard for us to keep apart from each other, and early the next morning she came to walk with me on my rounds delivering the new issue of the Daily Star, the issue that had two of her stories in it. We held hands and talked. She told me the latest gossip about Rosa Faye, who had actually been seen jumping up and down after one of her “dates” with a soldier. And everybody knew what she was jumping up and down for: it was the best known contraceptive. I asked Ella Jean if she’d ever have any notion of going with a soldier. “Not as long as I got you,” she said, and I was so moved I had to stop walking and give her a kiss. Walking on, a little while later, she looked at me sidelong and said, “You were watching me down on Banty Creek yester evening, weren’t you?” At first I shook my head and got ready to deny it vigorously, but I saw it was no use, and I nodded. “Why didn’t ye just come and jump in too?” she asked.
“Next time I sure will!” I said. And I hoped she might even want to take another bath that very night, which would have been exceptional: I’d never known her to take one more often than biweekly. Did I have to wait two more weeks before we could bathe together?
But even if she’d wanted to bathe that very night, we wouldn’t have, because it was time for the soldiers to have their Night Exercise. In this part of the maneuvers, the village would be “given back” to the Japs, and the tanks would once again attack it, but this time from the west, over the pontoon bridge, and under cover of darkness. Major Evans decreed that the pontoon bridge itself could be neither “destroyed” nor blocked during the exercise. Tanks crossing it could be targets but not disabled on the bridge. Once again the town’s Japs congregated in the front yard of Sammy Coe’s house to watch the exercise. We couldn’t see very much because it was dark, but we could hear plenty. Ella Jean caught a lightning bug and crushed it on my nose, and I caught one and crushed it on her nose, and we both had glowing noses for a while, although a squashed lightning bug is pretty stinky.
Sergeant Harris was killed again, hiding behind Miss Jerram’s house, but not before he had destroyed three tanks with his juyo tekidan. He “expired” in Miss Jerram’s arms, while Captain Stoving stopped the exercise to protest to Major Evans that none of the Japs were supposed to be on the west side of Swains Creek. Major Evans ruled that the Japs could be anywhere they damn well pleased, and, as the exercise continued, the Japs were everywhere, and this time they successfully defended the village against the attack. An occasional flare would be sent up, or in the headlights of the tanks we’d catch a glimpse of the action, although not enough to suit Willard and his analysis, so most of the civilians had to wait until the next morning’s issue of the Daily Star to find out just what had happened. Because it had been mostly dark, I could easily follow Ella Jean’s advice to “just make things up,” and I embellished the stories right and left: not only Sergeant Harris’ brave deeds at Miss Jerram’s (five tanks instead of three) but also his dramatic death in her arms and I even gave him some last words, “I can’t stay any more in Stay More.” Major Evans summoned me to his headquarters after the issue appeared and protested that the casualty figures I had posted were not those his staff sergeant had given me. Only fifty-two Yanks had been killed, not a hundred and fifty-two. I told him I was glad to know that he was reading my newspaper. And then I asked him, since he liked the metaphor of the baseball game, what inning we were in, and what the score was. He said it was the bottom of the third, and the Japs were leading, eighteen to eleven. “But don’t quote me on that,” he admonished me. Did this mean we still had six more innings to play? I wanted to know. “More or less,” he said.
I began to wonder if the Daily Star could continue to be interesting. The game, and the score, seesawed back and forth for several days. The town was taken and lost, and retaken. One of the big windows on the front of Latha’s store got shattered, but the engineers went to Harrison to get a new piece of glass, and replaced it. A soldier nearly drowned in Swains Creek but Doc Swain revived him. A dog was hit by a fake bullet and had not been seen since. Major Evans hoped for a torrential downpour to test the troops’ mud-fighting abilities, but the weather continued dry and hot. One advantage the Japs had ove
r the Yanks: the latter didn’t know about the former’s use of pennyroyal to prevent chigger bites and the use of Chism’s Dew to cure chigger bites. The Yanks were suffering, and scratching so much they couldn’t keep their tanks on track. Luther Chism had completely sold out his stock of Dew, indiscriminately to Japs and Yanks alike, and the first new corn wouldn’t be ready for picking for several more weeks. Since Major Evans couldn’t have the fifth and sixth innings in a downpour, as he’d hoped, he held the sixth inning with smoke bombs that obscured the battle even more than darkness could do. The smoke was so thick it nearly drowned the sound effects, and two Sherman tanks crashed into each other, wrecking one.
Every Dill offered to see if he couldn’t repair the busted tank. Just as legend had it that the disease hadn’t been invented that Doc Swain couldn’t cure (and, now, the new legend that the tank hadn’t been built that McPherson couldn’t destroy), the legend was that there was no mechanical apparatus devised by the hand of man that Every Dill couldn’t repair. I livened up the tedious Daily Star with a story on Every, whose garage was enjoying the greatest period of prosperity ever, with so many jobs servicing and repairing the various army jeeps and trucks that he had to hire Lawlor Coe, Sammy’s dad, to give up blacksmithing and learn auto mechanics. I was able to report that Every successfully repaired that Sherman tank. Latha and Every both made so much money that they were going to enjoy a happy retirement.
Major Evans called a meeting between Captain Stoving and Lieutenant McPherson and reminded them that the main purpose of this entire exercise was to train both of their outfits for the invasion of the mountain country of Kyushu. “Here we are in the seventh inning stretch, and everything we’ve done so far has been down here in these bottomlands.” Major Evans pointed at the mountains to the north and east. “So let’s leave the village and get up into those hills.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 99