The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  I was afraid she was in here someplace. Maybe lying on the floor, overcome by the smoke. Maybe cowering in the closet.

  I stumbled around the room, coughing and calling for her. I opened the closet and thrust my arms into a thicket of clothes.

  Someone grabbed my elbow.

  “She’s not in there, old boy. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  Dulwich was holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. I let him pull me out of the house.

  The usual crowd of bungalow dwellers had gathered around to gawk. Mrs. Dean was still going nuts. Tears were streaming out of the eyes of Dulwich and me. Suddenly five red-hatted firemen came running up the seven steps from the street. They dragged a big brown hose into the house and had the fire put out in short order.

  Mrs. Dean, who I never knew was so religious, repeatedly thanked the Lord when she found out the fire hadn’t spread beyond the bed, and her bungalow, though smoky and scorched and waterlogged, was intact. The firemen were leaving as Lois and Jerry showed up. They were dressed up and drunk and seemed to be returning from a night on the town.

  “Where’s Sophie?” yelled Lois when she figured out the center of all the excitement was her own home. “Where’s my little girl?”

  But nobody knew. Mrs. Dean wanted to know how the fire had started. Had one of them been smoking in bed?

  “We been gone for hours,” said Lois, “how could we have been smoking in bed?”

  “When was the last time you saw Sophie?” I said.

  “Well, it was when we left here, what time was that, Jerry, a little after six?”

  “It was her that done it!” said Jerry. “The little brat!”

  “Oh, Jerry, you don’t mean that—”

  “The hell I don’t! And now she’s run away, to escape her proper punishment!”

  “But why would she set the bed on fire?” said Dulwich.

  Jerry glowered furiously at Dulwich, at the same time taking a step backwards.

  “I’m not talking to you no more, Mr. Dulwich. Not after being the innocent victim of your fisticuffs. You caught me by surprise that time, Mr. Dulwich, but maybe next time you won’t be so lucky!”

  “Jerry,” said Mrs. Dean, “I hope you understand that you and Lois will have to pay for the damages to my unit.”

  Jerry looked taken aback. “But don’t you have insurance?”

  “Not for this sort of thing.”

  “That little monster don’t belong to me. I’m not responsible for what she does.”

  “Don’t call her that! Don’t call my daughter a monster!” said Lois, and then she took a swing at Jerry. It popped him right on the ear.

  He yowled in pain. “Jumping Jesus! I think you broke my goddamn eardrum!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to,” and she reached for his ear, but he batted her hand away.

  “I’ve had it, Lois! You and your little brat haven’t been nothing but trouble for me! I’m getting my stuff and I’m moving out! And don’t try and stop me!”

  Jerry stormed toward the bungalow as Lois wailingly tried to stop him. Their neighbors looked on, slackjawed with satisfaction, as though this had all been an especially good episode of The Shadow or Amos ’n’ Andy.

  I turned to Dulwich and said: “Where’s the nearest bus station?”

  Chapter 19

  THE GREYHOUND DEPOT was downtown, on South Los Angeles Street. A terrible beggar with some kind of shiny steel contraption in place of a lower jaw sat out front; he had a straw boater with a few pennies and nickels in it. Inside, in the waiting area, several sailors were sitting around chewing gum and drinking sodas and smoking cigarettes and reading magazines. A shabbily dressed woman in a Gilligan hat was stretched out on a bench asleep, using her suitcase as a hard pillow. A guy with thinning, slicked-back hair and a checkered vest was sitting with his legs stuck out and his fingers interlaced over a plump belly. He had a smug smile, and was gazing with beady, barely open eyes at Sophie, who was sitting directly across from him.

  A little suitcase sat by her feet. She was reading a book. She looked up at me as I walked over. She seemed surprised.

  “Hi, Sophie.”

  “Hi.”

  I gave the guy in the vest a hard look.

  “I think your bus is about to leave.”

  He kept the smug smile. He checked his watch, said: “You’re right, friend. Thanks,” then stood up and sauntered away, taking his sweet time about it, melodiously whistling “Beautiful Dreamer.”

  “Can I sit down?”

  She nodded.

  “What are you reading?”

  She showed me the cover of the book: Kidnapped! by Robert Louis Stevenson.

  “Is it good?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know I was here?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Well—I’m not going back.”

  “Don’t you wanna know if your house burned down?”

  She looked away. “I didn’t do it.”

  “You scared me to death, Sophie. I thought you were in there. I couldn’t see anything because of the smoke.”

  She looked back at me. “You ran into a burning house…just to look for me?”

  “Dulwich did too. It didn’t burn down though. Just the bed.”

  Sophie gave me a sniff. “So that’s what you smell like. Smoke.”

  “You already got your ticket?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For New York?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Where’d you get the money?”

  “I been saving up for it.”

  “I woke up today. When you were taking the money out of my wallet.”

  She regarded me with a mixture of guilt and puzzlement. “Then why didn’t you stop me?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, don’t worry, I’ll pay you back. When I get a job. Every penny.”

  “Look. Here’s the deal. I can’t let you go off to New York. Not now. Not by yourself.”

  “How you gonna stop me?”

  “I’m bigger than you.”

  “But I can run faster.”

  “Sophie, you’re just too young. I have a friend, she ran away from home when she was about your age. She couldn’t protect herself. Horrible things happened to her on the road.”

  “Horrible things happen to me at home.”

  “I know. But Dulwich and me, we live right across the courtyard. From now on, anything happens, you just come to us. And anyway, Jerry said he’s moving out.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “Tonight. When he and your mom came home, and found out about the fire. They got in a big fight, and your mother punched him in the ear, then he said he was leaving.”

  “He always says that. Any time they fight. But he never does.”

  “Like I said. We’re just across the courtyard. So what do you say we try and get a refund on your ticket? Then we’ll see if we can find a drugstore that’s still open, and I’ll buy you a chocolate soda.”

  Sudden angry tears filled Sophie’s eyes. “I’m not five years old! You think you can bribe me with a chocolate soda? Why should I go anywhere with you? You were so…mean. You made me feel…dirty. No good.”

  “Sophie, listen, I’m sorry. You’re the last person in the world I’d ever want to hurt. I mean that.”

  Sophie’s knuckles were pressed against her mouth, as she fought back tears and stared off bitterly at nothing.

  I offered her my handkerchief. She wiped her nose with it, then handed it back to me. Then she stood up, and picked up her suitcase.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The nice man at the ticket counter gave her back the thirty-two fifty with no problem. She made me put five bucks in the straw hat of the jawless beggar. As we walked to my car, a Greyhound bus moved past, its engine growling as it picked up speed, and I too felt the lure of leaving, of sitting in the rumbling dark with dozens of strangers, of venturing forth into the dreaming, star-lit nation, of breaking with
the present and embracing the unknown—and then I felt Sophie’s hand slip into mine.

  “I’m glad you found me,” she said.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  Chapter 20

  TURNED OUT SOPHIE was wrong about Jerry. The next day the population of our bungalow court was minus one unemployed plaid-sports-coated door-to-door salesman.

  To celebrate, Dulwich and I took Sophie to Capezio’s and bought her some new tap-dancing shoes, then we wandered down Hollywood Boulevard. A store had signs in the window that said: “SOUVENIRS. PRACTICAL JOKES. LIVE BABY TURTLES.” We declined to get her a baby turtle, but we agreed to buy her green trick dice that only rolled sevens and a metal ashtray in the shape of the state of Louisiana.

  When we returned to La Vista Lane, a pair of workmen were taking a mattress out of a truck under the scrutiny of the grim eyeglasses of Mrs. Dean. Matilda was in Sophie’s bungalow helping Sophie’s mother clean things up, and Sophie got recruited to help; she pitched in immediately with all the cheerful enthusiasm of a shanghaied sailor.

  “How about a nice glass of plonk?” said Dulwich, and though I didn’t know what plonk was, I said sure. He took a bottle of French red wine out of the cupboard. We sat in his living room sipping the plonk, and Dulwich smoked some opium; then he said it was beastly hot in here and suggested we go outside.

  It was late afternoon, and the courtyard was mostly in shadow. We sat cross-legged like Indians on the grass in front of his flower bed. Tinker sat with us. Dulwich absently scratched the back of her neck. Suddenly she began producing a strange clicky kind of sound in her throat.

  Her tail twitched. Her emerald eyes were fixed on a flock of sparrows that had descended on Mrs. Dean’s birdseed.

  “Careful, Miss Tink,” said Dulwich. “The redoubtable Mrs. Dean is about.”

  “Have you finished your story yet?”

  “No. I gave it up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t any good. I really need to face the simple fact that I am not a writer. I’m not much of anything, really. I’m fortunate enough to have a modest monthly income that lets me live a very pleasant, very little sort of life. I thought when I was young that I was destined for some kind of greatness. Obviously I was absurdly mistaken.”

  I felt bad for Dulwich, but didn’t know what to say. We sat there silently for a while. A cooling breeze blew across the grass. Then Dulwich said softly:

  “You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

  Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

  Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

  The hell where youth and laughter go.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A poem. By a soldier named Sassoon.” A pause, and then: “I was reminded of the war.”

  I looked around the courtyard. “Reminded by what?”

  “The sparrows. I used to watch flocks of sparrows and starlings feeding on the Turkish corpses hanging in the barbed wire. Outside the mud fort at Kut.”

  “What’s Kut?”

  “You don’t really want to hear a lot of old war stories, do you?”

  “Sure I would. If you wouldn’t mind telling me.”

  “No. I wouldn’t mind.”

  He took a thoughtful sip of plonk.

  “Kut was a dreary little mud town on the banks of the Tigris River in Mesopotamia. We had come to Mesopotamia because the Turks had seized the facilities of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company at the port of Basra. The British Navy was in dire need of that oil, we were told, and by George we were the ones that would get it back!

  “Well, Danny, the Turks made such a poor show of it at Basra that our brilliant brass hats decided it would be a good idea to push inland and capture Baghdad. So an army of 10,000 went marching forth from Basra, and the cry was: ‘Baghdad by Christmas!’

  “Mesopotamia was a featureless brown immensity, and we were 10,000 specks crawling across it, and it swallowed us up. We actually made it to within sight of the fabled city of Sinbad; I can see as though they were in front of me now its turquoise minarets shining in the sun. But then we were met by a force of 20,000 Turks, they had yellow uniforms and barbarically long bayonets, whereupon the brass hats decided it would be a good idea for the British Indian Expeditionary Force to retrace its steps.

  “We fell back on Kut. There it was decided we would make a stand, and await reinforcements. We were swiftly encircled by the Turks.

  “A mud fort was erected northeast of the town, to serve as an observation post for our guns. I was a lieutenant in the 17th Brigade, which was given the task of defending the fort.

  “The Turks shelled the fort relentlessly day after day. And then at 8:30, on Christmas Eve morning, the biggest bombardment to date began. It lasted for three hours, then all became silent. Then we began to hear something outside the fort. We looked through the loopholes in the walls, we could see nothing through the smoke and dust, but we heard the thudding of boots, and then we saw the glint of the long bayonets through the smoke and then we could see clearly the Turkish infantry running toward us.

  “Our machine guns shot them down and they became tangled in the barbed wire and the future food of birds but they were wonderfully brave and they kept coming, kept coming. The bombardment had blown a hole in the northeast wall, and finally the Turks fought through the breach and were inside the fort and amongst us.

  “It was quite terrifying, Danny, fighting your enemy face to face like that, but it was also exhilarating. For as long as it lasted, I don’t think I ever had a thought in my head, it was all animal instinct and action. There was no time to reload your rifle or pistol, your weapons were bombs and bayonets and rifle butts; I even bashed in a man’s head with a cooking pot! So much for any lingering schoolboy notions I might have had about the nobility of man, his supposed superiority to the rest of the creation. By far, Homo sapiens is the most violent species. As a lamb is to a lion, so a lion is to a man.

  “Eventually the Turks withdrew, but that night they came back. Again they entered the fort through the breach in the northeast wall. Fighting by night is a different experience than fighting by day. The infernal flashes of light leaping out of the darkness, the silhouettes and shadows, the confusion of friend and foe, the clawing lunatic flames. Even the shouts and the screams of the combatants sounded different at night, more mysterious, more terrible.

  “During the early hours of Christmas Day, the Turks retired for good. They left behind hundreds of their dead and wounded in and around the fort. Most of my men, too, had been either killed or wounded. Astonishingly, though, I’d made it through unscathed.

  “General Townshend sent word from his headquarters in the town that the defense of the fort by the 17th Brigade would be remembered in the annals of British military history for as long as the et cetera et-cetera’d and the so on so-on’d, but he was wrong, of course. The siege of Kut is only an obscure and embarrassing footnote now. The Middle East was always just a sideshow next to France.”

  “When were you taken prisoner?”

  “Not for several months. The Relief Force was perpetually expected but it never arrived, for it, too, was attacked by the Turks. Our rations dwindled rapidly. I discovered that mules are better to eat than horses. But I drew the line at dogs and, of course,” and he glanced at Tinker and whispered, “cats. Most of our Indian troops refused to eat horse flesh for religious reasons, and so the poor devils calmly settled in to starve to death.

  “Several thousand Arabs were trapped in the town with us. It was just their unlucky fate we had chosen their town to make our stand. Some tried to escape across the river by boat or raft, but they were shot by the Turks, and their bodies floated away down the river or washed up on the banks.

  “The river became a place of horror. During the winter it was cold and rainy, and the banks of the river turned into mud. By April it had become extremely hot again, and steam curled up from the mud. The banks were littered with the rotting bodies of Turks and Arabs. The d
ecaying flesh and the mud seemed to merge into a single substance, a corrupt slime which sucked at your boots, which wanted you to join it, to become slime yourself.

  “Our position became untenable. We were starving, and racked with diseases. What was left of us surrendered on April 29, 1916.

  “The Arabs were in a panic. They feared the Turks would wreak a gruesome revenge on them for cooperating with us, and they were right. The Turks immediately set up makeshift gibbets by the river, and began hanging people; others were murdered by firing squads.

  “We officers were separated from our men. We were put aboard a river steamer, which would take us up the Tigris to Baghdad and beyond. A column of our soldiers were walking along the bank under Turkish guard. I heard someone calling my name. It was Private Pilditch, one of my favorites. A cheerful, rosy-cheeked lad, and a stalwart soldier. He was barely literate, and I used to help him write letters to his fiancée, Mary. ‘Mr. Dulwich!’ he called. ‘Ow in ’oly ’ell did we lose the ’ole blooming army?!’ I didn’t have an answer for him. He wasn’t cheerful or rosy-cheeked any longer; he was skeletally thin; he had pneumonia, and an oozing, festering sore on his leg. I waved farewell to Pilditch, and he waved forlornly back, and I watched him limp away up the river.

  “So we all went into our captivity. As it turned out, the officers were treated tolerably well, but our men suffered abominably. Few returned. Pilditch didn’t.

  “My men meant so much to me, Danny. I call them men, but they were boys, really. I was in love with them, collectively. I loved them as if they were one soldier, handsome, smiling, sturdy, youthful, brave, and afraid. And I wanted to protect my soldier, do my best for my soldier, for my brave lad, my smiling lad. But he was shot, bayonetted, blown to bits, bludgeoned, starved, drowned in irrigation ditches, blinded, emasculated, tortured, made mad. And of course Dulwich never got a scratch. Lieutenants in the Great War were expected to lead ephemeral lives, like insects hatching and mating and dying all in a day. But Dulwich just went on and on. On and on…”