by Trevanian
I had a front-row seat for those nights when the police came to break up street fights. The prowl cars seldom came during the day because most street fights were fueled by drinking, which didn’t get going until nightfall. When a prowl car came, I would move back into the shadows of my room so I was invisible to anyone outside, and I would watch the rotating red light atop the prowl cars rake brick walls and sweep over the cobbles. Twice the police came when someone broke into Kane’s Grocery, and Mrs Kane put her head out her window and screamed in short earsplitting blasts like a mechanical alarm, as the befuddled thieves ran away. And once the police came shortly before dawn because an old tramp had gone off his nut and was breaking the basement windows along the street, kicking them in with his bare feet. When I went out to start my paper route at dawn the next morning, I found his bloody footprints on the pavement.
One night I was startled out of a consoling reverie by the noisy arrival of two prowl cars. Cops piled out with much bluster and slamming of car doors. They had come to arrest Patrick Meehan because he had badly beaten up a boy who had taken his sister, Brigid, up the back alley. Four of them dragged the writhing, snarling Patrick out onto the stoop where, furious because he had punched a couple of them, they beat him with their nightsticks until he lay unmoving on the pavement. Then they folded him into the back seat of one of the prowl cars. Brigid and her mother rushed out to plead with them not to take Patrick away. The cops tried to make Mrs Meehan let go of the car’s door handle so they could drive off, but she couldn’t let go. Unaware of her compulsive inability to release things, they thought she was just being obstructive, so one of them hit her knuckles with his stick and she howled with pain, but still didn’t let go, so they drove off slowly, thinking that would break her grip, but she held on, and they dragged her along the street for a distance before finally her hand came off the handle and she lay in the street sobbing, her knees scuffed and bleeding.
The prowl cars left and the street was empty again, except for the growling, cursing knot of Meehans around their stoops. Down the street, Mrs Meehan sat on the curb, her skirt up to her hips, her shoulders heaving with silent sobs as she bent forward and gingerly touched her tongue to her scraped knees. Young Joe Meehan, who had taken over the leadership of the clan when Old Joe died, led Brigid up the stoop and into the house, drawing her along by her slack arm. I felt sure he intended to use her, now that her brother would be safely out of the way for a while.
• • • • • • • • •
Sacrifice and Courage were constant motifs in war movies and in radio dramas, and everyone talked about how our boys in the service were getting along, and wondered when we were going to open a second front in Europe to take the pressure off the Russians. But at the same time, people were beginning to express irritation about rationing and shortages. For the first time since Pearl Harbor they talked about what they were going to do ‘after the war’. So the war had stopped being an eternal condition of life and was already beginning to loosen its grip on us, preparatory to slipping into history.
Mother and Ben’s bank account grew with his monthly allotment checks and its accruing interest, and I sometimes found myself half-believing in their tourist cabins out in Wyoming when the war was over. I accompanied Mother to the bank when she had to sign something, and for the first time I experienced the cool marble, dark wood, and glistening brass of a temple of capitalism. It would be more than twenty years before I found myself in a bank again. Most people from North Pearl Street, or any other slum in America, went through their entire lives without ever seeing the inside of a bank, just as they never learned to drive or went on vacation. Banks, automobiles, holidays, these were for rich people.
After being sent back to England to recover from his second wound, Ben was assigned to instructing in a Signal Corps school, where he worked his way back up to sergeant. His letters never failed to ask how Anne-Marie was getting on with her dancing lessons, and if I was still the star pupil in school. Well, no, in fact. I had given up trying to excel in the classroom because there was no point in it. If things went wrong between Mother and Ben, I would have to get a job at sixteen anyway, so why bother?
Although I didn’t do much schoolwork that year, I devoted a couple of hours each night and many Saturday afternoons to translating Poil de Carotte into English, one of those Herculean tasks that you accomplish because you don’t know it’s supposed to be impossible. I had found the book on a cart of foreign-language holdings, along with a French–English dictionary and a dog-eared first-year French grammar. I spent hours in my window niche above the sighing, gurgling radiator, working out baffling passages as though I were breaking enemy codes, and this appealed to the role-playing boy in me. Considering that I undertook this task with no preparation other than a careful study of the thirty-two-page “Introduction to French” in my High School Subjects Self-Taught, it is probably just as well that I didn’t mind whole paragraphs remaining intriguingly ambiguous...a quality I ascribed to French literature in general.
• • • • • • • • •
“We interrupt this program to...”
It was June 6, 1944, and the Allies were landing on the beaches of Normandy. Mother couldn’t sleep that night, sure that Ben was involved in the invasion, despite his repeated assurances that the wounds he had received in North Africa and Sicily would keep him in England and out of combat. We played honeymoon pinochle into the small hours, talking about the place in Wyoming and all the things we’d do when Ben came back. I made her laugh a couple of times by letting her win then pretending to be angry that she’d beaten me by just one or two tricks, but it wasn’t until a week later when we received a V-mail letter from England postmarked later than D-Day that she really believed that Ben was safe. A weight was lifted from me, too. I wanted nothing more than for them to marry and be happy and together forever and ever, leaving me free to go do something on my own. Even after her divorce came through I could never quite rid myself of the fear that I might get home from school one of these days, and there my father would be, drinking lime soda and eating green cake, and Mother would be all aglow. She’d tell me that she had decided to give him one more chance, and they’d ask me to write Ben and explain. (You’re so good at words, son.) Then, of course, Ray would run off again, and Mother would collapse into depression and bitterness, and I’d have to take care of her for the rest of her life. And mine.
The morning after the announcement of the Normandy landings, the front page of the newspaper had a map of the Cotentin peninsula with little American, British and Canadian flags indicating the assault beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword. I cut the map out and taped it on the wall beside our radio, so I could follow events as they were broadcast. Although the news reporters were confident in tone, there didn’t seem to be much advance from the beachheads in those first days. We were not told of the terrible losses our troops took on Bloody Omaha beach, nor did we know how close they came to being thrown back into the sea.62
• • • • • • • • •
Summer passed and Labor Day came to signal the beginning of school; trees in Washington Park turned gold and red before their leaves fluttered down and were swept into deep crisp piles that kids weren’t supposed to jump into and scatter, so of course they did, then ran like hell from the rickety-legged old man brandishing his rake; and pretty soon it was late autumn and the nights were cold, and brittle stars were close overhead when Mother, Anne-Marie and I walked home through dark streets after Dish Night at the Paramount Theater, where Humphrey Bogart had appeared in a special clip asking us—yes I’m talking to you, pal, sitting in that theater seat right now—to dig deep and subscribe to the Third War Bond Drive and help buy the guns and planes our boys need to beat the Japs and Nazis and come back home to the families they love. The lights were turned up, and ushers came down the aisles passing out pledge forms in which you wrote how much you would give. I was always embarrassed that w
e didn’t have enough money to buy war stamps, much less the $18.75 needed to buy the cheapest war bond. But Mother took her pledge form with a friendly smile and put it into her handbag to be used later for keeping pinochle scores.
Through that long, war-weary winter of 1944–45, I taped up the newspaper maps that recorded our army’s progress in Europe as I learned of it from nightly news broadcasts and the weekly movie newsreels. I drew and re-drew lines and blocks and curving arrows that described enemy emplacements and our troop movements as we liberated France. Meanwhile, we fought the Japanese in the Pacific where our young men died in amphibian island-hopping advances against an entrenched and stubborn enemy; but for my family the essential war was in Europe, where Ben was, and all our hopes for the future.
I finished Poil de Carotte and began Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Maybe I’d become a rich and famous translator, if only I could work out what this conditional tense was all about.
Victory in Europe
MARCH WINDS moaned around street corners, making sooty dust swirls that stung the eyes and were gritty between the teeth. The unseasonably cold wind pushed me down the steep Livingston Avenue hill when I returned from school, my arms spread wide to create more sail surface to let the wind hustle me along rubber-knee’d and pleasantly helpless. The next morning before dawn, that same searching wind made climbing the hill doubly hard because I had to bend low to offer less surface to its force. Radio news commentators informed us in triumphant tones that American and British troops, having survived the harrowing Battle of the Bulge, were driving the Germans eastwards over the Rhine as the Russians pressed them westwards to Berlin. Could victory be far away?63
My personal contribution to the war effort was a complex combat game I constructed from shards of those war movies in which actors like Errol Flynn and John Wayne single-handedly mowed down thousands of arrogant Nazis or sneaky Nips. This most athletic, most realistic, most demanding and most satisfying of all my story games was also to be the last one I would ever play.
On the first three Saturdays of that last March of the war I set my clattering alarm clock for four in the morning, dressed quietly, then slipped out of the house to walk through pre-dawn streets all the way up to Washington Park and the flat-topped artificial hill that looked down on its miniature lake and boathouse. As sunrise began to gild the topmost leaves of the park’s trees, I would work my way up this steep-sided hill, slipping back on the dewy grass at every second step. When I reached the top the game began with orders coming in over my crackling walkie-talkie stick. (After you spoke, you had to say ‘over’ and rub the side of the stick with your thumb so the other guy could speak, and you had to make his voice sound metallic and put in some static, not an easy stick to run.) I was informed that my loyal followers and I must hold this hill long enough for a reinforcement column to come up and thwart the Germans’ (or Japs’) final offensive. I accepted the assignment gravely, knowing full well the terrible sacrifices it would entail. Then I gathered together my old band of followers and told them what was expected of us, my voice tight and bitter because we had been chosen yet again for the most dangerous mission of all. Why did we always get the dirty jobs? Why us? The likelihood of our coming through this one was slim, but my band was willing to follow me; yes, even to the deepest pits of hell!
I was examining the lay of the land through my telescope stick when I suddenly realized that we were completely surrounded by machine-gun emplacements whose fire was sweeping our flat hilltop from all directions at once. Through this withering fire, I dashed from one side of the hill to the other, shooting clip after blazing clip down on the enemy with my rapid-fire stick while shouting orders and encouragements to my band. One by one, my followers got hit. Gail died with her head on my knee, looking up at me with a faint smile of admiration. I kept up a continual report of our plight to headquarters over my walkie-talkie stick, a task requiring considerable vocal acrobatics because I was also doing all the dialogue for half a dozen heroes and making the sound effects of the incoming fire that ricocheted just inches from my head. Running crouched down so that my knees almost hit my chin (and once they did, making me bite my tongue...damn it!) I got to the other side of the hill just as Reggie got it. He died with a typically British stiff-upper-lip joke, the punch line of which he was unable to say before he passed away, so I said it for him. The last of my devoted followers to die was always Tonto. There were no theatrical last words between us two Indian blood brothers. No tears. No outward demonstrations of emotion. He just nodded a last farewell, and I nodded back, and he died. Snatching up my machine-gun stick, I rushed from one side of the hill to the other, mowing down columns of ascending Germans (or Japs) until I could see the allied reinforcements slipping into place around the boathouse. The day was saved! Democracy had vanquished Totalitarianism, showing that free men fighting for what they believe in were invincible, because they—
But just then a bullet got me in the stomach, and another in the shoulder, and one in the back, and a fourth in the hip. I spun, pitched, staggered, limped, crawled to the edge of the steep hill and fell, tumbling and bouncing all the way down, collecting painful knocks, twists, bruises and scuffs along the way.
I lay unmoving at the bottom of the hill, my legs and arms splayed at unlikely angles indicating broken bones and torn ligaments. After a long time, I stirred and opened my eyes, then I slowly rose, first to my knees, then, with desperate effort and after collapsing a couple of times, to my feet. Then I staggered and slogged my way back up the steep hillside several times each morning so that this spectacular fall could be repeated, like an action re-play, and only when I was satisfied that I had drained the last drop of heroic bathos out of it, did I limp out of Washington Park, past the first early-morning pedestrians, and take the long walk home to clean up my scuffed knees, change my torn clothing, and set off on my Saturday collection round, which I accomplished with the fatalistic gravity of a boy who has been prematurely aged by seeing his closest friends die beside him.
Three Saturdays in a row, I saved Democracy at the top of the Washington Park hill. After the third heroic battle my hips were stiff with accumulated bruises, I had scrapes on my knees and cheek, and I had wrenched an ankle in the final great rolling, bouncing plunge of my bullet-riddled body down the almost vertical flank of that hill and lay at the bottom, the twisted remnants of an unknown hero. Only a handful of early walkers were in the park that last Saturday when I stopped beside the four-man gondola swing and looked back at the hill and the boathouse below it. As I stood there, I felt a tug of bittersweet sadness and my eyes misted as I realized that I would never, never play a story game again. Those inventive, precious, nonsensical moments of escape and adventure were behind me.64
As a symbol of my passage from fun-seeking boyhood to responsible manhood, I left the stick that had served as a telescope/machine gun/walkie-talkie/plasma holder against one stanchion of the big wooden swing, and I walked quickly away, down the path, through the gate, to a side street leading to home and responsibilities.
About three blocks from Clinton Avenue, I stopped, turned and ran back up the street, through the gates, across the grass to the swing where, thank God, I found that my all-purpose stick had not been nicked by some kid to play his dumb games with. I carried it back home with me...just in case.65
• • • • • • • • •
I do not claim that my epic defense of the flat-topped hill in Washington Park was a determining factor in the fall of the Third Reich, but could it really be mere coincidence that on May 7, only a couple of months after I limped away from the last of my early-morning battles, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe was over?
I hawked EXTRA-A-A’s, from one corner of Pearl and State streets while other newsies worked the other three corners.
Germany surrenders!
Victory in Europe
Now let’s get those Nips!
We hadn’t heard from Ben for a
couple of weeks, and Mother had a niggling premonition that something had happened to him. Maybe he had been sent to Germany just before the surrender, and maybe he had been wounded again...or worse. She remembered her father telling her about a young man from Plattsburg who was the last American to die in the Great War, killed by a stray bullet only ten minutes before the armistice came into effect. I assured her that the army wasn’t likely to send a twice-wounded man into combat again, but she responded: “Maybe so, but don’t forget what they say: Lightning always strikes three times.”
“Well, yes...there’s that.”
On our block, anyone needing to make a telephone call had to use the pay phone on the back wall of Kane’s cornerstore. If you wanted long distance (which no one ever did until the war scattered our boys across the nation) you got a fistful of change from Mr Kane, placed your call with the operator, then hung up and sat out on the Kanes’ back steps for twenty minutes or half an hour until the operator rang back with your party on the line. Before you could speak, you had to feed coins into the box until the operator said that was enough for three minutes, then you would rush to get your business done as quickly as possible. To prevent kids from fiddling with the telephone (there was a persistent, if never realized, belief that by tapping it in just the right place you could cause a flow of coins to gush out from the coin return slot) it was placed fairly high up on the wall, with the effect that little old women had to stand on tiptoe to get their lips close to the stationary mouthpiece that protruded from the middle of the instrument. It was amusing to see them trying to speak loudly enough for their voices to carry up to the mouthpiece, yet quietly enough to keep what they said from being overheard by Mrs Kane, who always found urgent tasks to perform in the shop when there was a long-distance call, such tasks as counting the cans of tomatoes that were stocked not far from the phone. Occasionally, Mr Kane would receive incoming calls from sons or husbands who had departure leaves before going overseas but who didn’t dare send the news by telegram because on Pearl Street telegrams almost always meant that someone had died. When such a call came in Mr Kane would leave the store in his wife’s care and rush down the street to tell whoever it was that they’d better hurry up because they had a long-distance call that was costing their son an arm and a leg—perhaps not the best metaphor to use when speaking of a man who was about to go into combat.