“That’s exactly what I have been waiting for,” McPherson said. And just barely remembered to add, “Sir.”
I wanted to talk with McPherson. I hadn’t had a word with him since that night before the first battle, when we’d exchanged confidences about our girlfriends. We’d both spent all our free time since then in the company of those girlfriends. I missed him.
So one afternoon I decided to return to the bivouac and apologize to him for having spent so much of my time with Ella Jean. As it turned out, however, Ella Jean insisted on going with me up to the bivouac. “Just for old time’s sake,” she said, reminding me that the bivouac had been as much a campground or playground for her as it had been for me. I let her go with me, I held her hand along the way, but I warned her in advance that I wanted to have just some private “boy talk” with Mac.
“That’s okay,” she said. “While you’re chawing with him, I’ll just socialize with Emil.”
“Emil who?” I asked.
“Polacek.” She looked at me sideways. “Didn’t ye know he was sweet on me?”
“I didn’t even know that was his name,” I declared.
As we neared the bivouac, we came to the turning in the climbing trail where it had always been our custom to look over our shoulder—which I had not been able to do the time Rosa Faye followed me because I had a washtub over my head. I glanced over my shoulder and my heart stopped when I beheld a figure behind me. Ella Jean caught a glimpse of him too before he dashed into the woods.
“Was that Sog Alan?” I asked her.
“Looked like it,” she said.
“Darn. Let’s not go to the bivouac then, in case he’s following us.”
We took a logging trail that cut off up the mountain to the south, almost toward that remote pasture where the glider had landed, and then we cut back and approached the old farmstead from a different angle, making sure that we didn’t see anyone following us.
Chapter twenty-three
When I was alone with McPherson, I felt obliged to tell him that we had been followed part of the way by Sog Alan, who, I suspected, was trying to find out the location of the bivouac so he could tattle to the Yanks—not his own Yanks but Stoving’s. I said I hoped McPherson wouldn’t be upset: Ella Jean and I had deliberately taken that diversionary route so that Sog couldn’t follow us to the bivouac, but still he might have detected the general location of it.
But McPherson was not upset at all. I was surprised at his indifference. I wondered—but stopped short of asking him—if he was getting bored with the exercise himself and maybe even wanted the bivouac to be discovered so the exercise would be over. Or possibly his mind, like mine, had concluded that the pursuit of the opposite sex was a more worthy mission than warfare.
“I guess Annie is all that matters to you.” I was just thinking out loud.
And as he had often done, he needed to study my face for a while to understand just what I was intending with what I’d said. While he was looking at me, I suddenly realized how tired he was. Unlike Captain Stoving, who could drive all over creation in one of his jeeps, McPherson had to go on foot, and his feet were tired. But out of his exhaustion he managed to smile and say, “There’s no way you could have prevented Sog or one of his Yank buddies from finding the bivouac.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand as if to wipe away the weariness. “But yes, you’re right. I’m not thinking about much other than Annie. That’s dangerous, and not fair to my men. Fighting and loving simply don’t mix. Probably Mare Coe understood that when he was on Iwo Jima. I suspect that he had to put Gypsy out of his mind before he could return those grenades that were thrown at him.”
His mention of Gypsy reminded me of her favorite animal. “Maybe,” I suggested, “you ought to load up Jarhead and move on out of here to a different spot.”
“Roger,” he said. “We’ve got that contingency in mind. But first we want to see if the enemy is able to find us here, and, if they can, we want to defend it. It’s our home, and right now we’re taking a little rest in it.”
“When you’re done resting,” I offered, “I could show you a good place to go, where nobody would ever find you.”
“On Ledbetter Mountain?” he said. “The hollow with the waterfalls and bluff shelters?”
“It’s so far back up in those coves you have to keep wiping at the shadows,” I said, as close to poetry as I ever got. I did not tell him that I myself had been lost up there at the age of almost six. “How did you find it?”
“Macklin found it. He’s my reconnaissance man. Remember he was the one who found the bodies of Ella Jean’s sisters below Leapin Rock.” McPherson’s face became very sad once again. But it passed. “Did you know we were using Leapin Rock when we beat Stoving in that northern assault problem yesterday? I was up there with a couple of the men firing the juyo tekidan and from that vantage point we knocked out five tanks.”
“I wondered if you would think to use Leapin Rock,” I said. “And I was about to suggest it to you, but I didn’t want to remind you of—you know.”
“Your Ella Jean seems to be over that,” he observed. I really liked his using that “your.” She was really mine.
“She’s real strong and brave,” I said proudly. And then I chuckled. “It didn’t even bother her when we learned that you were killed yesterday!”
He laughed too. “Yeah! I stood up on the edge of Leaping Rock and a sharpshooter got me. I nearly fell off.”
We both went on laughing, but I think we were both also whistling in the dark. McPherson and I often had the same kind of thoughts at the same time. So when I said what I did next, and he nodded, I knew he’d been thinking the same thing at the same moment. “But a sharpshooter might really get you when you invade Japan.” There was of course nothing he could say to that, except to nod. “Or maybe not,” I quickly added. “Maybe you guys will be lucky. And you can come back to Stay More and marry Annie!”
He hit me mildly on the shoulder with his fist. “Hey, I’d like that. And you know, maybe we will be lucky. But it’s not just luck, it’s also skill. Those tank guys are good, let me tell you. I mean, really good. They’ll make mincemeat out of Kyushu.” The thought made him happy, even though the “tank guys” were currently his enemy. “But one reason they’ll make mincemeat out of Kyushu is that my men will soften it up beforehand. And probably we’ll all be killed doing it. So that’s why I can’t even hint to Annie that I’ll be coming back to marry her.”
“That’s the same way Mare felt about Gypsy before he had to leave her and go into the marines,” I said. “But are you going to ask her to wait for you?”
“Not even that,” he said, and hung his head. But then he raised his head and gave it a shake, and said, “I’ve got to stop thinking about her! I’ve got a job to do. Tonight the mountain fighting begins.”
“I wish you guys didn’t have to keep having battles for three more innings.”
He laughed again. “You’ve been standing too close to Major Evans! But he’s right, I guess. From now on, the Yanks will be searching for us, and we’ll be defending this place against them, and then, if they take it, we’ll take it back from them. And finally, we’ll escape to the lost hollow of the waterfall on Ledbetter Mountain and see if they can find us up there. If they can’t, the exercise is over.”
“And then everybody goes back to Chaffee?” I wanted to ask, “And I won’t ever see you again?” but I could not.
“Yes, but say, listen. When the exercise is all over, we’ll all have a short leave before we have to report back to Chaffee. How about I borrow a jeep and we’ll have a double date? You and me and Ella Jean and Annie will go to the movies in Jasper. Did you know Annie has never seen a movie?”
“I don’t think Ella Jean has either.”
“Okay, so let’s count on that!”
“I can’t wait,” I said.
“Sayonara,” he said.
“Sayonara.”
Walking back to the village with Ella Jean,
I told her right away what McPherson had suggested about a double date to see the movies in Jasper. I thought she’d be tickled to pieces by the idea, but she just gave me another one of those sideways looks and said, “Emil has already asked me.”
“To the picture show?” I demanded. She nodded. “How’s he going to take you to Jasper? He couldn’t borrow a jeep like McPherson could!”
“He says he can get a jeep.”
“And you’re going to go with him?”
“I reckon I might.”
I lost my temper. The thought of that made me really angry, not so much the idea that a grown man from some weird foreign place like the Bronx would try to take my girlfriend away from me, but the fact that she would let him do it. “You’re just another one of these V-girls!” I yelled at her. “No better than Rosa Faye!”
“What’s a V-girl?”
“Victory girl. Mac says the army camps and the cities have lots of girls under sixteen who fool around with the servicemen.”
“I’d just let Emil take me to the pitcher show,” she said. “I wouldn’t jump up and down afterwards.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was referring to. In the moment of my realizing what she meant, I couldn’t avoid a mental image of her and Polacek lying together. It looked awful, and it really got my dander up. “Well—” I groped for some good words but found none. “I sure hope you sure enjoy yourself!” And then I ran away from her. I left her on that trail and went back to town by myself, and I put the next issue of the Daily Star to bed all by myself, without any help from her, although the fourth time I slowly hand-lettered the master sheets I was running out of energy and patience and I made a bunch of dumb mistakes. It wasn’t a very good issue anyway. To fill up the increasing empty space in the daily, I’d started a “Letters to the Editor” column, but there were only two: E.H. Ingledew wrote to say he sure would be glad when these here soldiers went back to wherever they came from. And Oren Duckworth wrote to say that he was missing three dozen chickens and he wasn’t going to sue the Army for them but he wanted some kind of guarantee that the Army would leave his remaining chickens alone. In a foul mood, I added, “Editor’s Note: It’s not your chickens you ought to worry about. It’s your daughter.” Good sense prevailed, and I scratched that out.
I didn’t feel like hiking up to the bivouac again to cover the action of that night’s exercise, so I simply asked Major Evans (or rather his staff sergeant) what had happened. “The Yanks found it, and took it,” he said simply but proudly. That was, after all, what McPherson had predicted would happen but it struck me as further fuel for my foul mood. My story wasn’t an important story, and I gave it a small-lettered headline: JAP BIVOUAC SEIZED BY YANKS.
With the action of the maneuvers shifting to the mountains, Stay More became practically a ghost town again, which it had been working hard at doing for all the years I’d known it. It was littered with the soldiers’ cigarette butts, and with spent cartridges and casings here and there, and there were tank tracks all over the place, but otherwise you’d never have known that such hectic operations had been going on here. It was peaceful. After cleaning up the mess, and even smoothing out those tank tracks, the engineers went fishing and swimming. Then they took down the pontoon bridge and once again Swains Creek had to be crossed by ford or footbridge.
Major Evans’s staff sergeant informed me that in a bold night raid the Japs had attempted to retake their bivouac and had killed sixty-one Yanks before being totally wiped out themselves. Chui McPherson had committed hara-kiri with his samurai sword. Celebrating, the Yanks had accidentally set fire to the old farmhouse, and it had burned to the ground. Latha told me I ought to write in my Indian Chief: “(6) The Story of Long Jack Stapleton and His House.” I did, but I think I was getting bored with my Indian Chief. And it was all used up.
Major Evans and Captain Stoving and the dead chui had an argument, in which Stoving argued that the spoils of victory ought to include the mule belonging to the Japs. The dead chui countered that Corporal Jarhead was not simply a necessary pack animal for the samurai platoon but also a mascot, and it would demoralize his men in the ninth inning to be without it. Major Evans pointed out that in the bottom of the ninth the home team had a chance to pull out and win, although the Japs were now so far behind it didn’t look likely. He ruled that the Japs could keep Jarhead, and further that the Yanks would have to evacuate the Japs’ bivouac and remain out of sight while the Japs loaded up all their gear onto Jarhead and fled to their new secret bivouac.
I was tempted to go up to that glen of the waterfall and see McPherson and his samurai in their new location. I wanted to tell him something about mules, what Joe Don had said at Old Jarhead’s funeral about how mules do everything the easy way: “Horses will pull a load for all their might; mules’ll only use as much of their strength as they have to, and not a pound more.” Maybe that could be a lesson for McPherson’s samurai in defending that lost hollow: take it easy, and let the Yanks wear themselves out. But it was so spooky up there in those woods, and I hadn’t been back to them since the time I’d been lost six years before. Willard and Joe Don and Sammy wanted me to tell them where the Japs had moved, but I would not. I simply wrote a story, JAPS NOW DUG IN AT SECLUDED HIDEOUT.
We thought the Yanks would never find them. Patrols of the Yanks went out into every holler and ravine of Stay More, well beyond Butterchurn Holler in one direction and almost to Parthenon in the other direction, on foot, by jeep and by motorcycle, but the tanks remained idle. And the Japs remained concealed. There was nothing to report in the Daily Star. I decided that I was going to have to convert my paper from a daily back to a weekly, especially because I didn’t have my assistant any more. I missed her. It was small comfort that she too did not know where the Japs were now hiding, and thus she couldn’t go “socialize” with old Emil.
For the final daily issue of the Star, I had to make up most of the news, such as it was. The only real news to animate its moribund pages was an announcement that I picked up by listening to Latha’s radio. Now that the town had reverted to its drowsy lethargy and I had no girlfriend to take up my time, I spent most of my hours at Latha’s store again. I even resumed listening to my old favorite shows, Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan and Terry and the Pirates. During a news broadcast, the announcer said that for the first time during the war some Americans had been killed on American soil. The War and Navy Departments had disclosed that during the past several months Japanese paper balloons carrying bombs had reached the North American mainland, and although “these attacks are so scattered and aimless that they constitute no military threat,” there was one reported incident of a woman and five children on an outing in Wyoming or Oregon or one of those western states who had been killed by a Japanese balloon-bomb.
So the final daily issue of The Stay Morning Star, with no more stories about the “occupation” of Stay More, had as its only headline, JAPANESE BALLOON-BOMB KILLS FIVE KIDS IN OREGON OR WYOMING. My editorial for that issue said that if we were all bored with the military activities being conducted around town, or rather the absence of any further military activities, we might shift our attention to the skies and start watching out for balloons.
I didn’t anticipate the effect it would have on the town. Not just kids but grownups too started walking around with their eyes anxiously scanning the heavens. I even caught myself casting a glance upward, but it was infectious: if other people are looking at something, you look too.
Ella Jean showed up again, and it was her turn to be angry. “Dawny! When I told ye just to make things up, I didn’t mean horrible things like that!”
“I hate to tell ye,” I was obliged to inform her, “but I didn’t make that up. I got it off the radio!” When she threw me another one of those maddening sidelong glances, I added, “Ask Latha if you don’t believe me! She heard it too.”
“Well,” Ella Jean said. That’s all she said, but she didn’t go away. After a while she added, “I
reckon it’s harder to believe the truth than what’s made up.”
“Yeah. And it’s harder to tell the truth than make something up.”
Another of her sidelong looks. “You don’t believe me about Emil?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. But I was quick enough to put in, “What if I don’t?”
She hung her head. “I was just trying to see if I could make ye jealous,” she confessed. “Emil never asked me to the pitcher show. I was just making that up.”
“Why would ye want to make me jealous?”
“You don’t have much feelings,” she said. “Leastways, you don’t show much feelings. Sometimes I wonder if you really care about anything.”
“I cared about you,” I said.
“Sometimes it was hard to tell.”
“Well I don’t mind saying I still care about you.”
“I care a lot about you too,” she said. “A whole lot. I would jump up and down for you.”
Once again I was slow in getting her meaning, and as if to demonstrate, she jumped up and down a little bit. It was cute. It was also ardent and devoted and sexy.
All I could think to say was, “When?”
“Tonight,” she said. “Would you like to share my Palmolive with me?”
“Oh, that would be fine and dandy,” I said, borrowing a long-lost favorite expression of Mare Coe’s, probably because I was thinking of what Mare and Gypsy had done on the banks of Banty Creek.
“You’ll be there?” she asked. “You won’t be hiding?”
“I’ll come out of hiding,” I promised.
“All right then,” she said. “I can’t wait.”
“Sayonara,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“I’ll be seeing you,” I translated, with a stress on “seeing.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 100