“When I gots to go, I gots to go. Even the Army can’t keep you from going when you really gots to go. Let’s go, Corporal Sandy. I don’t mean no harm.”
Solly swore underneath his breath. He got up. “Okay, let’s go.” And they went downstairs together. Solly stopped at the door. “I’ll wait here.”
“You better come inside. I might jump out of the window, and you’ll have to do my time for me, and I sure would hate to see that happen. I wanna see you get promoted. You gon be a great big colored man in Charlie’s Army.”
Solly cussed softly and went inside with him and waited and they went back upstairs, and Scotty never did stop talking while Solly tried to drown out the sound of Scotty’s voice by beating up the typewriter. He breathed heavily and looked up from the typewriter, his soft eyes growing dark with heat and anger. “Look, Corporal Scott, I have work to do. I want you to be a little quieter. After all, whatever trouble you’re in, it’s no fault of mine. This is the first time I ever saw you in all my life. So lay off, will you?”
“Okay, buddy boy. You and Charlie got the world in a jug.” He was actually silent for a couple of seconds. And then on and on and on he talked and endlessly. About twenty minutes later, Scotty said, “Oops—I gots to go again. It’s that damn lousy beer I drunk last night.” And they went downstairs again, and up again, Solly getting angrier by the second. Ten minutes later Scotty had to go again. Solly looked up from his work and said, “Go ahead and come right back.”
And as soon as Scotty left, Solly sat there wishing he had gone with him. It would be a simple matter for Scotty to continue out of the barracks and down the company street and be long gone, and he would be left to do Scotty’s time. All his possibilities would go up in dust. It was unfair, it was stupid for the Army to leave him, nothing but a raw recruit, to guard a hardened criminal like Scotty and nothing to guard him with. But maybe they were testing him. To see if he really had the stuff in him—to be a non-com and, even more, to be a commissioned officer in the Army of the U.S.A. He tried to concentrate on the K.P. roster, but he couldn’t help wondering what was keeping Scotty so long . . . . Perspiration broke out all over him; he got a sharp pain in his belly. Maybe he should go downstairs and see what was holding him. Just as he jumped up from his chair he heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He hoped it was Scotty. He prayed it was Scotty. He stood there waiting, out of breath, as Scotty came through the door again.
“What the hell were you doing down there so long?” he said to Scotty in angry relief.
“I was peeing, that’s what. I’m a long-range pisser and ain’t no law against it. Not even in Army Regulations. And thank God for that.” Scotty started yacking all over again. “The Army is a mama-jabber. They put you to guard me. If I had wanted to run away, I wouldn’t’ve come back to camp in the first damn place. Ain’t that right? These people don’t make no sense at all. The bad part about it is, everything one of these gray officers say, you have to do it, whether it make sense or it don’t, and they got some stupid sapsuckers with that shining shit on their shoulders, you can believe me when I say so.” He paused and Solly could feel his angry staring eyes poking fun at him. “Gots to go again, Corporal Sandy, I really gots to.”
He went downstairs and Solly tried to push the uneasiness out of his mind and he banged away at the typewriter, making mistakes. This damn Scotty was messing him up, but good. He looked at his watch about ten minutes later. What the hell was Scotty doing down there so long? But he wasn’t going to let Scotty run him crazy, and he was staring at his work, making himself concentrate, sweat dripping down into his eyes, his belly boiling, when the recruit in charge of the second-floor barracks ran into the orderly room with a broom in his hands.
“Corporal Solly! Corporal Solly! He’s running away! He’s running away!”
Solly scrambled from behind the table and ran out into the barracks, sweating all over now, his heart pounding in his forehead, and he could see Scotty’s days and months and years in the stockade piling up on him, and oh Lordy—Lord! He would never get promoted!
“What? Where?”
“Your prisoner! I looked out of the window and saw him hauling ass across the field and disappearing into the woods. He’s headed for the highway to Ebbensville!”
“Oh Lord!” Solly mumbled. “Goddammit!” He saw himself facing a court-martial, felt the stockade walls closing in around him and his tremendous expectations gone forever.
“I mean that stud was shaking ass!” Willie Johnson said. “You better do something and do it quick.”
Solly started down the steps two at a time. Halfway down he turned around and came back into the orderly room. He couldn’t catch Scotty with a ten-minute start on him. What the hell could he do? He heard footsteps coming up the steps from the first floor. The barracks were spinning around and around inside of his head. The Army had tested him and he had screwed up. He had disgraced himself completely.
“What’s the matter, Corporal?” Lieutenant Samuels asked. “Where’s your prisoner?”
“He—he ran away, sir—” He felt like the damnedest fool in the world and the angriest soldier.
“Ran away! You realize—”
“He went downstairs to take a leak and took off across the field and through the woods. How can I guard a man with a fountain pen?”
“All right—all right—you come with me. Maybe we can catch him in my jeep.” They bounded down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, and jumped in the jeep and took off down the road toward the highway leaving behind them tornadoes of red chalky dust.
“You should have never let him out of your sight, Corporal. You’re responsible for him, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” He started to tell the lieutenant about how many times he had been downstairs with Scotty, and he had had his own work to do, but he didn’t, because the whole story sounded ludicrous even to him, made him look ridiculous, or stupid, as Scotty had put it, and it wouldn’t do Solly’s case any good anyhow. He had been placed in charge of another soldier, a desperate prisoner, and had let him escape, and that was all there was to it, the way he figured the Army would figure. He had been given responsibility and he had goofed and he would suffer the consequences.
They turned onto the main highway going to Ebbensville. “How in the hell can they place a soldier in charge of a prisoner and not give him any kind of weapon?” the lieutenant muttered, mostly to himself. “What sense does that make?”
Solly said irritably, “That was my question—”
The lieutenant was silent for a moment. “There he is—there he is, Corporal.” Solly had already spotted Scotty hoofing it down the road, kicking up trails of dust behind him.
They gained on him easily, and when they were almost upon him, he stopped running and threw up his arm, pointing with his thumb toward Ebbensville. He couldn’t see who they were for the smoke screen of red chalky dust. They began to slow down, and as they passed, he shouted, “Hey there, how about a ride, com—rads?” They went past him a few feet and came to a stop. He started to trot toward them. “I sure do appreciate—” And then he recognized Solly and he halted in his tracks.
“Well, kiss my ass in Macy’s window—I’ll be a rotten mama-jabber!”
“All right, soldier,” the lieutenant said matter-of-factly, “hop in and let’s go.”
“I don’t believe I want to ride with you. I’d ruther walk. I ate too much this morning.”
“Get into the jeep, soldier,” the lieutenant said evenly, determined not to lose his poise.
“I am a corporal,” Scotty said sharply. “Don’t you see my stripes? Respect my rank if you don’t respect me.”
“Get into the jeep, soldier, goddammit. I guarantee you won’t own those stripes much longer.” The officer’s tan face was red with anger, his small eyes getting smaller.
“That’s all right, as long as I got ‘em, I’m gonna demand goddammit you respect ‘em, and don’t cuss at me neither. Who the
hell do you think you are anyhow?”
The lieutenant looked from Scotty to Solly to Scotty again. “Are you going to obey an order or are you?” A forty-five rested snugly in its holster on the officer’s hip.
Solly said, “For your own good, Corporal Scott, get in the jeep like the lieutenant said.”
Scotty got into the back of the jeep, muttering and swearing, and Solly turned the jeep around and started back toward the camp. Scotty kept up a steady fire of cusswords under his breath, but just loud enough for the lieutenant and Solly to hear. Solly didn’t want to hear.
“I want you to shut up,” the lieutenant finally said. “And right away.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Yelling at an American red-blooded soldier—you goddamn ninety-day wonder! I was in the Army when you were pissing in your mammy’s lap.”
Solly wished there was some way he could stuff his own ears with cotton and put a gag in Scotty’s mouth. He didn’t want to be a witness. It was a crazy nightmarish movie, and he was strapped in his seat and watching against his will. He wanted to tell Scott to shut his big mouth. Most of all he didn’t want to be a part of whatever was developing at the rate of a hundred miles a minute.
When they came to the company he slowed up the jeep. “Don’t stop,” the lieutenant said. “Go on down to the battalion headquarters. I want to get some blank forms for a general court-martial.”
“General court-martial?” Scotty repeated. “You talk like a damn jackass, Lieutenant. I ain’t been gone but five or six days. How long I been gone, Corporal Sandy? Tell this fool something.”
When they reached battalion headquarters, Lieutenant Samuels jumped from the jeep and started into the building. He turned and walked back to the jeep. “Corporal Scott, you stay in this jeep till I get back, you understand?”
“Don’t yell at me,” Scotty said. “Ain’t nothing wrong with my ears. I wash ‘em every morning.”
“You’re in charge of the prisoner, Corporal Saunders,” the lieutenant said, and turned on his heels and walked quickly toward the headquarters building.
Before Solly could say, “Not again, Lieutenant!” the lieutenant had disappeared inside of the building. Twice in the same damn day! What could he do anyhow if Scotty took a notion in his head to jump out of the jeep and run up the road? He could run up the road after him like a fool and probably catch up with him and drag him back to battalion headquarters. He could—
Suddenly Scotty broke into a loud and boisterous laughter that startled Saunders. The little husky soldier laughed and laughed, pointing at Solly. “Boy—ha—ha-ha-ha—you’re just about the most. Ha-ha-ha-ha.” Tears streamed down Scotty’s face as he shook with laughter. “You’re the no-pistol totin-est policeman I ever did run into. You ain’t even got a little short stick—ha-ha-ha-ha—oooh—haha-hahaha. Boy, this Army is just about a mama-jabber—er-he-hehehe—er-hahaha—” and slapping his thighs and shaking his head and pointing at Solly, whose face was growing hotter and hotter with anger at Scotty and the lieutenant and the soft-spoken first sergeant who had gotten him into this mess in the first place, and mad at the whole damn Army. All the while Scotty roared with laughter. Solly wanted to hit him in his mouth.
A white soldier pushed himself out from under a command car. Solly knew instantly from the maple leaf on the shoulder of his coveralls that he was a major and that he must be Major Davidson, battalion commander, the man who had a reputation for going to bat for the colored soldiers. He was a six-footer, powerfully constructed, swarthy complexioned, and his hair was a salt and pepper mixture of youth and middle age clashing and merging. “All right, soldier, not so loud. This is battalion headquarters. Men are at work inside. It couldn’t be that funny.” The major stood about twenty feet away.
Scotty stopped laughing and immediately launched his attack. He turned to Solly. “Why in the hell is all these white folks intercoursing with me today, Corporal?” Solly closed his eyes as if doing so would shut out the sound of Scotty’s voice.
“You take it easy, Scotty,” the major from Long Island advised, “and you’ll keep out of trouble. Just lower your voice a little.”
“You Georgia—” The rest of the sentence, the sonofabitch designation, was drowned out by Solly racing the motor of the jeep, making it groan and grumble and sputter, but sitting in the jeep with Scotty, he could still hear the corporal over the noise of the motor. “I ought to have you on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. We’d string your peckerwood ass up on one of them lampposts in front of the Hotel Theresa.”
Solly put the jeep in first and suddenly pulled away from the headquarters and started down the road. He couldn’t explain his actions, except he wanted to get Scotty away from the major to keep him from getting both of them in deeper and deeper, as Scotty seemed determined to do. Ever since he enlisted Solly had been racing out of breath up the Army Road to Success, but thanks to Scotty he had hit a snag. His luck had run out suddenly.
“Where you going, daddy?” Scotty asked him pleasantly and unexcitedly, as if to pass the time of day. “You wanna go over to Ebbensville? You turn here at the next block, turn right at the next—I know a couple of fine dinners in that town. We can be there inside of fifteen minutes. We can have a ball—Hey, lordy mama!”
Solly didn’t answer him. He just made a wide sweeping U-turn at the end of the street and came back toward the battalion headquarters. “Where are you going now, buddy? What’s the matter? You done got chickenshit already? Boy, them chicks in Ebbensville is really ready. More pussy over there than you shake a dick at. Come on, buddy. You wouldn’t turn me in to the man, now would you? I never thought you’d turn out to be an uncle tom.”
Solly’s voice trembled with his anger. “Goddammit, don’t you call me an uncle tom. If you want to act the damn fool all the time, that’s okay with me. But don’t involve me in your stupidness. If everybody had your attitude there wouldn’t be any Army.”
Scotty smiled a wide smile knowingly. “There you go.” And laughed aloud at Solly. “You sure do catch on quick. Your mama didn’t raise no stupid children.”
“You’re nothing but a first-class fuck-up,” Solly said. “But do me a favor. Stay out of my goddamn way. You hear?”
Solly came to battalion headquarters and made another sweeping U-turn and came to a halt right back where he had started from. He was fuming. The lieutenant came out of the headquarters building just as they drove up.
“Where’d you go, Saunders? You had me worried for a minute.”
“Just took a ride down the block,” Solly said, “to cool off the corporal a little bit.”
“You were supposed to stay right here till I got back,” Lieutenant Samuels said. Then he shook his head and said, “Never mind. I guess you’ve had enough for today as the unarmed representative of the Military Police.” And he got into the jeep and they headed toward the company. Scotty was silent all the way home. The men were just coming back from the motor pool when they drove up. They watched Scotty and the lieutenant and Solly get out of the jeep and walk toward the building. The men had fallen out of ranks and had to go upstairs and get their mess gear for lunch, but most of them lingered around the entrance to the barracks and watched the trio enter, as if Scotty were a famous criminal like John Dillinger, and the other two were G-men. Solly felt ridiculous as he and the lieutenant walked into the barracks with the “dangerous” little big man strolling between them, at least a head shorter than either of them, with a smile on his face and a mixture in his light brown eyes of laughter and contempt.
When they got upstairs in the orderly room, the lieutenant turned to Solly Saunders and said, “Okay, Corporal. No more MP duty for you for the present. I’ll take over from here. Go get your chow.”
“All right, sir.” And he felt a great overwhelming relief as he turned and went out of the orderly room toward his bunk to get his mess gear. The soldiers gathered around him and followed him all the way to the mess hall, asking him about Corporal Scotty, the god
damnedest soldier of them all. If he saw him again a hundred years from then it would be too damn soon for Solly.
That afternoon, he and Samuels drew up the charges against Scotty. It isn’t my fault, Solly told himself, that Scotty went AWOL for over twenty days. I have nothing to do with the court-martial. I’m just helping to draw up the charges. I’m in the Army following orders and doing a job and part of it is to draw up charges. Solly wished Lieutenant Samuels would stop looking over his shoulders. He didn’t have a thing against Jerry Abraham Lincoln Scott (he hardly knew him) except that Scott was always working overtime at making a damn fool of himself and obviously thought he was a privileged character.
Solly’s face broke out into a sweat as he worked himself into a clean violent rage against the soldier. He wished the lieutenant would stop breathing down his neck. His mind made a vivid picture of Scotty’s face with the lion-like satirical expression. In the ear of his mind he heard Scotty’s voice going on and on and everlastingly on. It seemed that he would always and forever hear him. It was Scotty’s kind who made it hard for people like himself who really wanted to do a job to win the war and get the whole thing over with. Negroes like himself who understood the deeper meaning of the war. And had ambition.
When he finished, Samuels looked at the papers. “Good job, Corporal. Damn good job. Couldn’t’ve done any better myself.”
Solly said, “Thank you, sir.” The one kind of person in the world he had no use for was a goof-off, a slacker, a goldbrick, who expected others to carry his weight. And that’s exactly what Jerry Scott was. He was no hero, he was a shirker and a gold-brick. And Solly felt good about the part he played in drawing up the charges. He convinced himself he felt wonderful.
Samuels said, “Yes indeed. You and I have similar back-grounds. I was just two years out of law school when I came into the Army.”
Solly said without enthusiasm, “I have one more year to do.”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 6