The War Heist

by Ralph Dennis

  Thirty years in this man’s Army, and faster than you could remember how to say “Kiss my ass” in French, you were retired and it was that man’s Army you were talking about. You were on the outside, drawing the check every month, and it was supposed to be the time of your life. That was what they told you, but it was a far piece from being the truth.

  The time of your life was being a green recruit and getting your butt rubbed raw on a saddle chasing Pancho Villa all over the American side of the border and even down into Mexico. And, Lord, those Mexican women felt like their bodies had trapped the sun’s heat.

  And it was France during the Great War. It was when being an American meant something, and having that second stripe was about like being a sergeant was now. It was coming out of the trenches after two or three months with the dirt and the rain and the rats, and you soaked the mud off—it peeled off in layers—and you got dressed in your Class-A uniform. You got yourself a bottle of that popskull they called Cognac or Calvados, and you drank it down like you couldn’t taste how bad it was. That was so you could forget how those French women smelled and how hairy they were. And, hot damn, the amazement that first time when you found out those French women did better with their mouths than with the other part the good Lord intended it for.

  After the war was over, there was post life. People still respected the uniform. He’d made his third stripe over there, and he was all piss and vinegar and full of himself until he laid eyes on the top sergeant’s pretty daughter, Amy Loughlin. After that first look at her, there just wasn’t any woman in the world could shine with her. He just had to marry her. It was that or settle for a life where the beer was always flat, the whiskey sour, and the food all had the taste of sawdust and old newspaper mixed together and fried.

  He married her, and it had been a good life, most of what he wanted, though Amy said she didn’t care what those French women did, all it did was just prove how nasty they were.

  Two children were born of that marriage. Bobby was older by a year. The girl, Cathy, was only a few months old when Amy died. It was cancer, and Amy was like a dried stick when he buried her. He didn’t marry again. There wasn’t any woman who could match Amy. No use looking. He raised the two children with the help of a sister who was a widow.

  Bobby saw all he wanted to of the Army while he was growing up on all those posts. As soon as he was out of high school he took the first job offered him. It was driving a milk truck. What you could say for him was that he did have ambition. He worked his way up until he managed the whole fleet of milk trucks.

  Cathy wasn’t Army either. At seventeen she married a short-timer who was waiting out his discharge for his first hitch. The husband, Jeff, wasn’t worth much, and it wasn’t any great surprise to Gunny when he walked right out of the Army and took a job working in a mill.

  When the children were gone, Gunny lost interest in them. He told himself that that was the end of them. He saw Bobby about once a year or every two years. Cathy was different. She acted like she cared about him. She remembered Father’s Day and his birthday, and she named her first boy after him. Junius. And when she heard he was retiring, she wrote him and said that she could not bear to think of him living alone in some rooming house somewhere. And, now, she was not going to take no for an answer. She fixed a room for him, one that she had been renting out before, and told him she would rather do without the rent money and have real family living with her.

  Not that she did without. Gunny cashed his check each month and put half of it aside for himself and gave the other half to Cathy.

  That was how Gunny Townsend came to be living at 103 Blanding Street in Sumter, South Carolina. Fifty-one years old and going on fifty-two. In a house that had a bathtub but didn’t have hot water unless you heated it on the stove. The house was on the next-to-last white street before black town began. With a daughter who was getting fat from eating too much and a son-in-law who worked at Williams Furniture Factory.

  Every Saturday Gunny’s routine was the same. That Saturday the middle of June wasn’t any different. After breakfast he poured himself another cup of the Eight O’Clock coffee that Cathy made. He went out and sat on the front porch, mostly hidden by the tins and lard cans of flowers that Cathy potted and placed on the porch railings. He sipped his coffee and read the State, the newspaper from Columbia. He read it from cover to cover except for the advertisements.

  At 11:00, exactly, he returned to his room and undressed. He put on clean underwear and clean socks and his best clean shirt. He left the house and walked up Liberty Street to the YMCA. For a quarter he got a towel and a small bar of soap. If it wasn’t crowded, he stood under the hot shower for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, dressed, feeling clean for the first time in a whole week, he walked over to Main Street. It would be just 12:00 noon by the City Hall clock. When he reached Main Street he took a right and headed for South Main. That was where the taverns were.

  Sumter was the county seat, and Saturday was the big shopping day for the farmers. The streets got packed with them from dawn to dark. Their mules and wagons filled the rutted back lots. And all the niggers came in, too.

  By noon the streets smelled of hot dogs cooking in grease and hamburgers with the raw, sliced onion that came with them. The children lined up at the Rex Theater for the early showing of some cowboy movie. The popcorn machine in the entranceway of the Rex flooded the summer streets with its special brown scent. You could smell the popcorn and the butter all the way down South Main.

  Saturday, June 15, wasn’t any different. Just the routine. At least it started that way. He sat at the counter of Bob’s Jewel Café and had his first ice-cold Pabst a few minutes after noon. With his second beer he had one of Bob’s hamburgers with a thick slice of onion. The hamburger, he said, was to soak up the beer, and the onion was to keep all the pretty girls from bothering him during his drinking hours.

  He was on the fourth Pabst when he felt the tickle in the back of his throat. He fought back the urge to cough. He didn’t panic. He put down his beer and mashed out his cigarette and walked out the back door. A narrow catwalk there led to the bathroom. He went inside and locked the door and waited. He leaned over the grimy, splattered toilet with the busted seat, and this time, when it came, he didn’t fight it back. He coughed and it broke out of his chest. The hamburger came up and part of the last beer and a ropelike clot of something. Blood. For the first time in months he was coughing up blood again.

  He remained in the toilet for ten or fifteen minutes. He wanted to be sure he’d coughed all of it up. Somebody tried the door and found it locked. He banged a time or two and grumbled as he walked away. Then Gunny was pretty sure it was over. He wiped his mouth with toilet paper and used a wad of it to clean the blood from the rim of the bowl. He flushed the toilet a couple of times and went out to the catwalk.

  A young man with greasy black hair that smelled of hair tonic was waiting there. He pitched a cigarette over the railing and stared at Gunny hard. “I thought you died in there.”

  “Almost,” Gunny said. “Almost.”

  He had a swallow of the beer and left for home. His face, in the bedroom mirror—the pasty, yellow sheen of his skin—scared him, and he could feel the fever that came with the new outbreak.

  The doctors had said it was cured. They’d said there was only a ten-percent chance the TB would come back.

  “And if it does come back?”

  There had been a lot of fumbling talk but no exact answer he could take home with him.

  That night he told Cathy he didn’t feel good. She brought him a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. He sat up in bed and ate a few spoons of it. After she left, he waited a few minutes and then carried the bowl of soup to the bathroom and flushed away what was left.

  The chills and fever were on him bad. Twice during the night he had to make a run for the bathroom. He hoped nobody heard him coughing.

  After the second time he carried the washbasin back to his bedroom. He placed it nex
t to the bed. The next morning, Sunday, the basin was about one-quarter full of curdled blood and tissue. He got the basin emptied and washed before anybody else was up. All morning he stayed in bed. He coughed and nothing came up. His lungs felt sore, constricted, so that he counted each breath he took.

  He didn’t want Cathy to worry. He had Sunday supper with them. He picked at the fried chicken and the baked sweet potatoes. He had trouble swallowing—his throat didn’t want to work—but he forced enough down to satisfy Cathy.

  He was in bed the next afternoon. In his fever, like a dream, he was trying to figure out how long he had left. Days and weeks and months. Cathy heard the knock at the front door. She brought the telegram to Gunny. She sat on the edge of his bed and watched him while he read it.

  The telegram was from Captain Whitman, the one who was a lieutenant when Gunny served under him. He read the message through a few times. Maybe it was the fever. It didn’t make much sense to him.

  “Is it bad news, Daddy?” The concern and worry was on her face. Telegrams did that to some people.

  “Not a bit.” He folded the telegram and stuffed it in his pajama-top pocket. “Some old Army buddies are having a reunion.”

  Junius, the boy named after him, was around the house. It was summer vacation from school. Gunny wrote out the message he wanted sent:

  FINE WITH ME. WHEN AND WHERE?

  Junius took the message to the Western Union office downtown. Gunny paid him a quarter to do it.

  The return telegram came the next morning. It was from Major Tom Renssler. He’d been a captain the last time Gunny’d seen him.

  COME FORT BELWIN SOON AS YOU CAN.

  After lunch Gunny packed a bag. He told Cathy he would be back in a few days. He caught the bus to Columbia where he transferred, after a two-hour wait, to the bus headed north.

  Richard Betts knew it was time to be moving on. He knew it gut deep, all the way down to his toenails. There wasn’t anything wrong with the job. Hell, as work went, it was fine. You got all the suntan you’d get at some beach and all the ticks and bugs you’d get while big-game hunting in Africa.

  What was wrong about the job was all the way personal.

  And it was just too damned bad. The pay was good, and it looked like the job might last through the summer. It was 1,900 acres of land that was thick-assed with stumps from the last two or three times the timber crews worked their wide path across it. The last pass by, they took every tree as big as three inches in diameter.

  It was good land, land that didn’t know what a plow was yet. It would know soon. But now, all you could see in all directions were the stumps sticking up two or three feet in the air. Except where Richard and his crew had been: there, there wasn’t anything but pocks where the stumps used to be. That was the job. Richard and his crew—two powder monkeys—trying to keep half a day ahead of the mule crew: the twenty mules, the ten blacks, and the white boss.

  In a good day, taking it slow and careful with the sticks and the caps, working from first light to last light, Richard and his crew could clear maybe two acres of land.

  Right behind them, dogging them, the mule crew followed. The drag chains attached, two mules to the stump, one black leading the mules, and the white boss, Ben Chambers, yelling the whole day. The stumps were hauled away, stacked, and left for the night fire crew. All night long at the company tents, you could smell the green-wood smoke and see the bonfire glow.

  It was a good operation. Timing and planning went into it. When the land was cleared, it was going to grow cotton until hell froze over and there was a market for ice cubes. It was going to grow more cotton than any other plantation in the whole state of Alabama.

  Wouldn’t you know it? You had to know it. The only problem was a woman. Both the powder monkeys worked their tails lean. They were good learners and they knew the dangers of working with the sticks. The burr in Richard’s hide was that one of his crew, Bill Truesdale, had a wife. He hadn’t wanted to leave her at home, and he talked the company into hiring her to cook for the whites, for him, for his helpers, and the boss white.

  Now, Lord, Bill’s wife, Ethel, wasn’t no Jean Harlow. Far away from that. During Richard’s hitch in the Army he wouldn’t have pissed on most women as plain as she was. But the backwoods wasn’t Fort Belwin or Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina. These backwoods were the ass-end of anywhere. A week of waking up with that fence pole in the cot with him, and Ethel started looking more and more like a movie star all the time. And, hell, up against Bill Truesdale, he supposed he’d always looked handsome to her. He hadn’t done much. All he did was give her his hundred-watt smile and talk nice about how good she could cook. She didn’t say much back, but he could see her begin to act girlish around the kitchen tent. It wasn’t no accident that she pranced by his tent that night about midnight when he was sitting out there smoking the last one of what had been a whole pack two hours before. And it wasn’t no accident that the camp stool he was sitting on just happened to have a blanket on it that he was using as a cushion.

  He walked a distance from the camp with her. It had been grease-slide easy. All he had to do was say that he sure had fallen in love with her and it sure was his bad luck that she had to be married.

  It didn’t take much more saying before the blanket was spread and they were down on it making more noise than two hogs in a dry cane field. And he had been like a boar hog having all he wanted of her, and her acting like love had just come to her at the age of thirty.

  Damn, but she was dumb. Now she was looking at him with those doe eyes in the kitchen tent, and, late at night, she kept going on about how much she loved him and how they were going to have to tell Bill soon. Bill was, she said, getting suspicious anyway.

  And damned if he wasn’t. That last weekend he came back from all of Saturday and most of Sunday in Dothan, and the first sight he saw in the kitchen tent was Ethel with a fat, puffed lip. One look at him and her mouth jerked open, soundless, like a live fish on dry land. All the time Bill sat there looking at Betts with eyes like a cluster of birdshot.

  That was at Monday breakfast. Even then, already, Bill must have worked it out in his head. Could be he’d been planning it the whole weekend. Bill wasn’t all that bright. What it took somebody else an hour to figure out it would take Bill ten or twelve.

  After breakfast, they walked over to the blasting ground. Bill didn’t say anything about Ethel. Except for his sullen way, it could have been any other morning.

  The blacks had gotten drunk that weekend. They were sweating stink stronger than hot muleshit. The boss was yelling himself right into a sore throat.

  The blasting crew was going one-two-three, just the way it was supposed to be.

  Bill and the other powder monkey, Tod, cleared the space under the stumps for the charges. Richard would look at the stump and the roots, and he’d estimate what he needed, one stick or two. Sometimes three or four. The charge bundles were made up, taped together. All Richard had to do was attach the blasting cap and the fuse. Twenty seconds on each fuse.

  When the space was dug under the stump, Richard would pass Bill or Tod the charge and they’d insert it and move away. Richard lit all the fuses himself. He’d put the match to it and yell, “Fire in the hole,” and even an acre away the blacks would stop and stick their fingers in their ears and bend over.

  It was clockwork until right before noon quitting time. Richard decided they’d do two more stumps and that would take care of it until after chowdown. Both stumps were big ones, green wood that hadn’t dried yet. Richard got two of the three-sticks out of his bag, and by the time he’d worked the blasting caps and the fuses, Bill and Tod had the holes dug under the stumps. They were waiting for him. He passed the first three-stick to Bill and saw him insert it and lay out the fuse. Richard walked past him and handed the other charge to Tod.

  Tod was on his knees. He slammed the three-stick home and stretched out the fuse tail. Richard waved him away and struck a kitchen match. He to
uched the fuse and the count started in his head. It had reached five by the time he reached the other stump. Bill stood there, blocking his path. Richard started to step around him. Bill took a step to the side and bumped against him. Richard said, “Watch out,” and raked a kitchen match down his leg.

  The count on the lit fuse behind him had reached ten.

  Richard cupped the match flame in his hand. He put out his free hand and pushed at Bill.

  Bill caught his arm. “I got to talk to you about Ethel.”

  “Nothing to say.” Richard’s eye was on the match.

  It flickered in his cupped hand. Bill swung an open hand and hit Richard’s cupped one. The match flew away and went out.

  Richard said, “Now look here, Bill …” He could smell smoke close by. Not the other charge behind him. The count was now fifteen on that one. It was shaving it close. “Bill, dammit …”

  He looked down and saw a curl of smoke drift past Bill’s leg. He understood it then. Bill had already lit the other fuse. He was doing his own count in his head. He was going to delay Richard until, when he did reach the fuse, it would go off in his face. It was supposed to be about the same time Richard realized there wasn’t any fuse to light.

  Richard said, “You dumbass.” He turned and leapfrogged two stumps. He was flying through the air, turning, falling on his side, when he looked back and saw the surprised look on Bill’s face. That was a split second before both the charges went off at the same time. Tod was yelling, “Fire in the hole” over and over again.

  At the last second Bill tried to move. The dumbass had the count wrong in his head. A piece of green root the length and circumference of a man’s arm blew up Bill’s ass and came out his throat, taking his chin with it.

  The white boss, Chambers, and two blacks took the body back to camp, wrapped in a tarp, over a mule’s back.

  Richard and Tod stayed in the field and worked until full dark.

  When they arrived at camp they found that Chambers had driven Ethel, with the body of her husband, into town. They fixed a poor supper for themselves, and Richard was in his tent later that night when Chambers returned. He stopped in the tent opening and gave Betts a sour look before he tossed some mail on the foot of the cot.