Buck Rogers said, “Don’t use that word around here. This is America, you stupid prick. Besides these fucking bunks might be wired for sound.” He jumped up and turned one of the cots over and started to examine it.
The men laughed. Buck was forever clowning when the officers were absent. “Don’t laugh,” he said. “I like it here. By now I’m a red-blooded American. I don’t want the man sending me back to Trinidad. I got enough of that British Subject shit.”
Bookworm said seriously, “Double-V for Victory. Tell ‘em, Solly!”
Buckethead said, “Trinidad? Ain’t no Trinidad in Mississippi.”
Lanky said, “This is the white man’s country and he can do you any way he wants to do you and ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
Buckethead said, “When Charlie cracks his whip, all you can do is say, ‘Mass’r, my back may be broken, but my spirit’s undaunted!’”
Solly said, “And he’ll pat you on the head and put a little more on your back.” The men chuckled and laughed. He said, “But remember, fellows, when the burden gets heavy and the going gets rough, just remember we’re fighting a war for democracy.” He felt good and big and comradely.
Buckethead said, “Fighting who? We ain’t fighting nobody. You think these crackers gon let you go over there and shoot at other crackers? They don’t even give you a rifle to do Guard Duty. White sentries around here carry rifles and colored ones carry sticks. Man, a spook ain’t nothing never was nothing and ain’t never gon be nothing.”
Bookworm turned on Buckethead. “You bad-foot, handkerchief-head mother-huncher, you the kind that keeps the Race back!” He turned to Solly. “There ought to be something we could do to get this Texas peckerwood offa our backs. Maybe with that Double-V-for-Victory jive, we could take our case to the N-double-A-C-P. You ought talk to Fannie Mae Branton. That lady knows all about everything.”
The bottle was empty and the Ebbensville White Lightning put a brand-new color on everything. And the image evoked at the mention of the PX lady—the church the ice cream parlor Fannie Mae. The comradeship he felt this moment with the men. Everything conspired against him. Without thinking deeply he said, “We could write a letter to the colored papers. Tell them how Negro soldiers are fighting these crackers for democracy down in Camp Johnson Henry in Ebbensville, Georgia. Blow the lid off of this goddamn camp. Tell the whole world about Charlie’s plantation. So what could they do to us?” As soon as the stupid words were out of his mouth he was sorry he had said them. He was biting the hand that wanted to feed him.
“They could blow your heads off,” Rogers said, sobering up immediately. “You ain’t in no Boy Scouts of America. You’re in the Army of the United States and your country is at war. You ain’t even a second-class citizen anymore. You’re a second-class soldier.”
“All right, Uncle Thomas,” Worm said disgustedly.
Buckethead said, “Colored folks ain’t gon never stick together about nothing nohow. All the white man got to do is give one of you some combread and a drink of licker, and pot-licker at that—”
Rogers said seriously, “I’m surprised at you, Corporal Solly. I’d expect something stupid from a fathead sucker like Bookworm, but you’re an educated man. You know you can’t start no stuff like that in the Army. Your whiskey must be talking to you.”
Solly’s mind cleared for a sober minute. He admitted, “That’s some bad whiskey you were giving away.”
Worm pulled at his arm. “Come on, Solly. Let’s go get the letter written. Don’t pay no attention to that uncle tom faggot.”
Solly mumbled, “I drank too much—drank too much—”
Solly had gotten up off the cot. He sat down again. His head swam around. He was drunk, he told himself, Ebbensville-White-Lightning drunk, and unable to consider the pros and cons. And he was going to be an officer and he was drunk and going to be an officer. And Worm wasn’t going anywhere. Fannie Mae knew the difference between him and Bookworm Taylor. You’d better believe she knew the difference.
Worm pulled at his arm again, almost pulled him to his feet. “Come on now. Don’t get chicken. You supposed to be a stud that practice what you preach.”
Buckethead said, “Corporal Solly may be crazy but he, ain’t nobody’s fool. He loves that company-clerk job—sitting on his pretty ass in a office all day long.”
Rogers said, “You goddamn right I Me and Corporal Solly the only ones in the whole damn stupid outfit that have the intellectual capacity to be made officers in this mother-hunching Army. He’s been through City College and I’ve been through Yale and all that kind of shit. I’m Ivy League.”
Worm said disgustedly, “You been through Yale, you handkerchief-head mama-jabber, with a mop and pail. Went through the front door and came out the back.”
The men were laughing now all over the top floor.
“Come on, Solly!” Worm put both arms around his shoulders.
Rogers said, “You run your big fat ignorant mouth and me and Professor Solly gon run our business. And we ain’t thinking about doing nothing to jeopardize our potential for going upward and onward in this great Army of the United States of America, where every red-blooded citizen has a chance to be commander-in-chief.”
Rogers had the stage now, and everybody on the top floor was listening, some of them moving in for a ringside seat. He was floor-showing and burlesquing and he was getting on Solly’s tender nerves. He was stabbing where it really hurt.
“Me and Solly might get to be brigadier generals if this shit last long enough. You ain’t seen no fucking bucking. Tell ‘em what we gon do, Professor. We got our future to think about even after this is over.”
The men at ringside were laughing and chuckling. Solly stared at Rogers in open disgust. He got to his feet. “You know what you can do for me.”
Bookworm followed him across the barracks to the orderly room, leaving a roar of derisive laughter behind him.
They walked inside the orderly room and Bookworm closed the door. “All right, Solly, let’s get the show on the road.”
They stood there facing each other. Solly said, “Maybe we ought to sleep over it and wait until tomorrow evening.” Millie was right. You could never trust your feelings. They betrayed you every time.
“Come on, old buddy.” He tried to steer Solly to the chair in front of the typewriter. “You know tomorrow don’t never come. If we don’t do it tonight, it’ll never get done.”
Solly said, “I had too much to drink tonight. My head isn’t clear.” Why didn’t Bookworm leave him alone? He had been feeling good and let his good feelings run away with him.
Worm repeated, “If we don’t get it done tonight it’ll never get written.”
Solly pulled angrily away from Worm and turned to face him with a righteous unfelt indignation. “What the hell you mean, it’ll never get written?”
“I mean, if our heads had been clear we wouldn’ve made the suggestion in the first damn place, and when our heads do clear up, Cap’n Charlie gon look bigger and badder than he ever did, and we gon start talking ourselves out of doing anything. That’s the way educated thinkers always do. Anything they talk themselves into they can talk themselves out of without doing nothing.”
“What makes you think you have a damn monopoly on being militant?” Solly demanded. He wanted to strike Bookworm on his wide-open signifying sanctimonious face. He heard Buck Rogers roaring out on the floor of the barracks. Rogers was a handkerchief-head opportunistic vulgar bastard!
“Don’t get mad with me, good kid. After all it was your idea, and if you done let a uncle tom faggot like Buck Rogers talk you out of it, don’t jump salty with me.”
Solly said, almost shouting, “Get this straight. Neither you or Buck Rogers or any-damn-body else can talk me into anything or out of anything.”
Worm said, “I reckin me and you is just different about this Army.”
Solly said, “You’re damn right. You’re marking time and I’m marching.”
> Worm said, “Course I see your point. And I don’t much blame you none. After all, Cap’n Charlie ain’t gon send me to OCS. I ain’t never gon be nothing but a buck-ass private, and that’s all I wanna be till they make me a civilian.”
Solly said, “Do me a favor, will you? Politely step to hell and be sure to tell them I sent you.” He walked past Worm and out of the orderly room toward his bunk, where the bull session was still holding forth. Rogers had the floor. Solly stopped and turned and moved toward the stairs and went down them two and three at a time and out into the autumn dampness that chilled his hot and angry body.
It was almost time for the madhouse to close for the night, but the PX Commandos and desperadoes were still holding forth and the jukebox was giving out with Al Cooper’s “How ‘bout That Mess?” and two beer-drunken GIs were jitterbugging with each other over near the lady’s counter in the midst of a circle of hand-clapping laughing hell-raising soldiers. Solly headed straight for the telephone booths. As he dialed the operator he felt the perspiration pour from all over his angry body. He saw the scene again in the orderly room with him and Bookworm and especially Rogers, and his stomach trembled with anger as he listened with a far-off corner of his mind to the cane-sugared voice of the Ebbensville long-distance operator as she made contact with New York City. Who in the hell was Bookworm Taylor to question his integrity? Let him do his own letter-writing. The voice of the New York operator was like home cooking and Far Rockaway and Seventh Avenue and Herald Square and “Stomping at the Savoy” and Delancey Street and “East Side, West Side, All Around the Town.” He was as militant as any sonofabitch in Camp Johnson Henry. He was not like Rogers. It was just something Worm would never understand. He was for the war, and Worm and Scott were prejudiced against it. Everything was this or that to them. Couldn’t see any further than their noses. He was an anti-fascist and the war was against fascism. He heard the New York operator repeat his number away up north in New York City, and brand-new perspiration broke out on his face as the phone began to ring. His heart began to make like a sledge hammer. Soon she would pick up the phone and they would be together again, he and Millie. But suddenly he realized he didn’t really want to hear her voice tonight. He was in no shape this night to swallow the great American legend of upward and onward ad infinitum and ad nauseam. He didn’t need that kind of dream tonight. Even as he heard her sleepy sensuous “hello,” the receiver was already descending away from his face, and he placed it quietly onto its hook. Millie was an honest person, but he didn’t need her brand of honesty at this particular moment in time and space.
He heard the telephone ringing urgently from the booth he had just left as he strode across the floor toward the lady’s counter, and the jukebox blasting now with Duke Ellington Taking the A Train. She must have seen him as he left the booth. By the time he reached the counter she had almost finished making his chocolate malted. She smiled from the tenderest depths of her heart and it made his stomach hurt.
“That’s what I call brown-skin service,” he said with a nervous grin as she gave him his malted across the counter.
“We try to please the customers.” She looked anxiously up into his face and away again. She looked at him once more and said, “Excuse me a minute,” and went to wait on another soldier. It was the first time he had seen her since that Sunday over in Ebbensville.
He put the money beside the untasted malted and said, “Not tonight” under his breath, and turned away, just as she looked back again. He needed a sour taste tonight. He made his way to the beer counter and took some quick short ones just as fast as he could swallow them.
CHAPTER 9
But if you listened to Gabriel Heatter every night and his “good news today,” you would think that the Russians would be in Berlin in two weeks’ time and the war would surely be over by the end of the year. And all the romantic soldiers were dreaming of a white Christmas thanks to Bing Crosby and Irving Berlin.
Solly went over to the Post Exchange one evening to get himself a malted. That was the reason he gave himself. He had an irresistible taste in his mouth for one of Miss Fannie Mae’s especially delicious chocolate malteds made especially by her and especially for him. And that particular evening he just had to have one. Couldn’t possibly do without it. He hadn’t been in the PX since he left the one untouched on the counter.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked him. “I didn’t know you went anywhere without your bodyguard.”
“If you’re referring to Private Joseph Taylor,” Solly said, “he’s on Guard Duty.”
“Oh,” she said. “How’s he doing?”
“At the moment, Private Taylor is protecting the ammunition dump with a little biddy black stick.”
She smiled and went to make his chocolate malted.
They talked about everything excepting the Army and the MPs and the NAACP, and she Would leave him and wait on some lonesome soldier grinning in her face and insisting that she wait on him and nobody else, and she would come back to Solly and they would talk some more.
Once she came back to him and spoke to him from the depths of her dark black eyes. “There’s so much I have to talk with you about,” she said. His heart was swelling and filling up his chest and maybe it would burst wide open. The Post Exchange was ready to close now. He had drunk four of five chocolate malteds and tasted not a single one. Let’s not talk about the Double-V. Let’s never mention that again.
She looked up into his face into his eyes. Her own eyes were entirely black now and filled with seriousness. “Will you drive home with me tonight? My girl friend didn’t come to work today.”
“But Joe, he’s my friend—” It was a stupid thing for him to say to her like that, and she was so beautiful and he was so susceptible. And during the past week Worm and he had seen very little of each other. After the letter that next day which they didn’t write, they had hardly spoken to each other, even though their cots lay side by side.
“He’s my friend too,” she said. “Just a friend like you are. He’s no more my friend than you’re my friend. That is, I think you are my friend.”
“I’ve got to—” It wouldn’t do any harm just to ride home with her.
“It’s all right,” she said softly and quickly. “I can understand.” She talked with her eyes as well as her lips and he should have known better.
As they drove toward the gate he saw the MPs and suddenly remembered he didn’t have a pass. “Now how can I get out of the gate without a pass?” he said angrily to no one in particular. Everything he had striven for could be lost in the next damn minute. An anxious pretty face had smiled at him and he had lost his head completely.
“They know me. They know I work at the PX. They never stop me.”
“It would be just my luck for this to be the first time,” he said. “I forgot to tell you—I’m the luckiest guy in the world—and most of my luck is bad!”
As they came nearer to the gate one of the MPs motioned for her to stop. “Oh shoot!” she uttered softly. “I never saw this one before. He must be new on the job.”
Solly did not open his mouth, but he felt his anger warmly mounting. Most of all he was angry with himself for being so stupid. Caught at the gate without a pass in a car alone with the Bookworm’s girl, and conveniently Miss Walter, or whatever her name was, hadn’t come to work that day. And the captain would know about it, as would Worm and the entire company, and it would be a mark against his record. He would be busted down to a private. No OCS—no nothing. It looked like a deliberate plot against Solomon Saunders, Junior. But he had himself to blame.
The big redheaded MP came toward them, throwing his flashlight into the car first on Fannie Mae’s and then on Solly’s angry sweating face. Just before he reached the automobile, the other MP let his flashlight play on the car. “It’s all right, Mike,” he shouted to the big redheaded one. “One of them PX broads.” He smiled at Solly and Fannie Mae. “Go ahead,” he shouted. “You’re holding up the war.”
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br /> Solly swore softly under his breath as Fannie Mae put the car in gear and pulled slowly away and onto the dark and dusty highway.
They reached the city and he stared out of the car at the small unpretentious and unprotected houses and then a section of brightly lighted streets and big impressive mansions with long white columns and dark majestic oak trees standing tall and awesome like mighty sentries in a staggered formation on the dark green lawns and the houses fifty to a hundred feet in from the sidewalk.
“This is where the real rich white people live,” she said. “This is Kings Row Avenue. You’re supposed to take off your hat and cut off the motor when you drive through here.”
He laughed. “Which one of these houses does the man live in? Mr. Ebbensville, I mean.”
She laughed. “We passed his house about a block or so back.”
She made a couple of turns and was on the narrow dark streets again, the pavement bumpy, the houses much smaller and meek and timid and nondescript, and even the trees were scantily clad. Then suddenly they left the pavement and the car slowed down almost to a walk as it went carefully over the ruts and bumps of the red and dusty road.
“I know where I am now,” Solly said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“You’re absolutely right,” she said. “This is where the club members live. This is home sweet home.”
Both of them laughed and he was aware of a great tension seizing hold of him and at the same time an almost forgotten relaxation. All the way from the camp they had avoided the Double-V like the plague. He should be back at the barracks writing a letter home. He was AWOL and he had put all his prospects on the line just to take this pretty lady home. He needed his head examined.
The car stopped in front of a snowy-white, wooden-frame, two-story house, with a white picket fence, and the flowers in the flower garden shone brightly in the moonlight. “This, kind sir, is home,” she said. “Well you don’t have to look like you’re scared of the house. It isn’t that ugly. And nothing inside of it is going to bite you.”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 13