“This is it, Corporal.”
Samuels got out of the jeep, and Solly got out and leaned against it. “So it is, Lieutenant.” A worried expression settling over Samuels’s face now that he had arrived at his destination. He took off his glasses and wiped them with an olive-drab handkerchief.
“You want me to stay out here and wait for you, Lieutenant? And keep the motor running?” He had no illusions now about himself or Samuels. If Samuels ordered him to accompany him, he’d go. Otherwise he did not need heroics today. He was no hero. He did not need to visit the scene of his degradation.
The lieutenant stared at him. “Suit yourself.”
Solly snapped his heels to attention and saluted him with exaggeration, and Samuels turned and walked up the long walk to the courthouse. Halfway along the walk he stopped and turned and stopped again and then came back to the jeep.
Solly said maliciously, “Did you change your mind, Lieutenant? Scared of the big bad Chief of Police?” He did not want to go inside this place ever again.
“I think you should accompany me, Saunders.”
“You give the orders. I’m just a soldier who doesn’t need to be a hero.”
Samuels forced a smile. “You’re not scared yourself, are you, Corporal?”
Solly stood there hating the lieutenant. Maybe I am scared. Maybe it was my head they whipped and not my Great White Buddy’s.
“Let’s go, Corporal.”
Solly thought, maybe these are my balls aching. Maybe that’s why I am scared.
A young cop with a face full of red freckles was seated at the desk reading a Sunday funny paper and picking at his big pimply nose. The lieutenant cleared his nervous throat. The cracker policeman pretended not to hear. Finally he looked up from the paper and said, “You want us to keep this boy in jail overnight, Lieutenant? It’s all right with us. We’ll take good care of him.” He looked at Solly and laughed.
Solly broke into a sweat. He glared at the cop. He stared at the lieutenant.
“I want to speak to the Chief of Police,” the lieutenant said.
“Maybe I can help you.”
The Chief came in from an adjoining room. Solly felt himself grow hot all over and his stomach turning upside down and his heart beating fiercely away up in his temples. He could hear his heart thumping through his ears. His thighs began to throb in pain. His entire body remembered. What the hell was he doing back in this place?
“What’s going on in here?” the Chief of Police said. “Oh, it’s you, Lieutenant,” he said to Samuels. “What can I do for you? Why don’t you let that boy stay outside till you get through with your business? Come on in and have a sitdown. It don’t cost nothing. Or maybe you want us to lock him up again. We always happy to co-operate.”
“I’m glad you want to co-operate, Chief Watson. I—”
“Don’t be so formal,” the friendly faced chief cop said. “Come on into the back room. Let your boy wait outside, lessen you want us to lock him up again.” He stared at Solly and laughed.
The lieutenant was undecided, about going into the back room, that is, and Solly’s heart beat double time and he was worried about his Great White Buddy, but was relieved when the lieutenant didn’t move. “All I want to know, Chief, is the name of the Army colonel in here the night this soldier here was arrested. I won’t bother you any further.”
The friendly Southern hospitality vanished. “What colonel?”
“The colonel here the night this soldier was here.” Suddenly the office got warmer and warmer and stuffier as the air got heavier.
“What you want with him?”
The throbs were painful and distinct now, the muscles in his thighs were dancing in fire to an off-time rhythm. He was weak all over.
“All I want is his name, and I’ll look him up myself,” the lieutenant said. “I want to have a little chat with him.”
“What you want to talk to him about?”
“A few Army matters,” the lieutenant said.
“What colonel?” the Chief said. Sharp and alert now, on the ball. “I don’t know nothing about no colonel.” His face afire with Southern “white-folks” righteous anger.
“Corporal Saunders here says that there was an Army colonel here the night he was here.”
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to what that boy say, Lieutenant. He most probably don’t rightly remember. Do you, boy?”
Solly didn’t trust himself to speak. His legs began to ache and he thought maybe he was suddenly crazy with anger—maybe fear. He wasn’t ready to be beaten up again. Well, but it wouldn’t be so easy, since it was two of them this time, he and the lieutenant, or could he really count on the glib tan-faced New Yorker, when push came to shove? After all the lieutenant was a white man for all his Florida brownness, just like the rest of the crackers in the police station, and he was the only colored man, and blood and color were thicker than water. Two more cops came in from the back room. Perspiration drained from Solly, and he backed up without knowing.
“I say—do you, boy? You don’t rightly remember, do you?”
Solly pretended the Chief wasn’t talking to him.
“You see?” the Chief said to the lieutenant. “He ain’t even got the nerve to repeat the same lie when he gets down here in front of us honest policemen. Most probably he’d been drinking some of the bad moonshine the nigrahs make around here outa snuff and piss and washing powder. You don’t know these nigrahs like we do, Lieutenant.”
“What about it, Corporal?” the lieutenant said.
“What about what?” Was this a trap? Was the lieutenant in cahoots with these cracker cops? He didn’t want to believe it. Maybe he didn’t actually believe it, and yet the question entered his mind and would not leave.
“What about the colonel?”
“What about him? I told you he was here. I told you what he looked like. I can’t tell you his name for the simple reason I never knew it.”
“Boy, you mean to stand up there and try to make me out a liar? Do you know who you talking to?” The Chief strode to within two or three feet of Solly.
Solly backed up a couple of steps and stared the whitehaired cracker in his blue eyes. “I know whom you’re not talking to. You’re not talking to a boy. You’re talking to a man who doesn’t give a good goddamn about your white face or your white hair or your blue eyes or your Southern accent.”
The Chief changed colors as he stared at him as if Solly had escaped from a lunatic asylum. After all that whipping they gave him last month he still thought he was a man.
“He’s a crazy liar, Lieutenant,” the Chief said. “I know you’re not going to take his word before you would a white man’s. I just know you ain’t—”
There was a moment’s silence as the lieutenant seemed to be pondering seriously the great momentous question of Southern Christian morality. The walls of the room seemed to hold their breaths and the ceiling descended. The lieutenant said, “Let’s go, Corporal.”
“Must be one of them New York Jews,” one of the cracker policemen loud-talked. “He mess around with the colonel he won’t be an officer many more days. Colonel got a heap of weight and I mean he pushes it around and he don’t like no Jews to begin with nohow.”
Solly laughed and Samuels burned.
It was a long long walk out of the office and down the hall, down the brick steps and along the walk and through the square, saying nothing to each other, looking neither behind nor to the sides, just walking together and erect like soldiers have a way of walking, Solly Saunders limping slightly, Robert Samuels burning greatly. And swarms and swarms of birds overhead coming South for the winter and going further South and keeping up an awful racket in this peaceful Southern town.
When they got to the jeep, Samuels had gotten himself together. “That wasn’t too bad an ordeal for us, was it, Corporal? We shook them up a little even if we didn’t accomplish our total objective.”
Samuels was pleased with himself and Solly heard the Grea
t-White-Father crap in the officer’s voice. He was already angry with the lieutenant for ordering him to come to town and ordering him back to the scene of his debasement. Now he was enraged. He waited politely till the officer got into the jeep, like enlisted men were supposed to do, and then he leaped in and started the car and gunned the motor and took off up the street, scattering pigeons and some of the country crackers. Two blocks up he turn the corner on two wheels.
“What’s the matter with you, Saunders? This isn’t the way back to camp.”
“I seem to remember hearing that the MP station for Ebbensville is out this road about a mile and a half.”
“We’re not going to the MP station.”
Solly pulled suddenly into the curb and slammed on the brakes. “I figured that out there we might just be lucky enough to run into the colonel himself in person, and I could point him out to you. I mean we might even accomplish our total objective. That was our objective, wasn’t it, Lieutenant?”
Samuels’s tan face lost its color. “I have an officers’ meeting back at the post, Corporal. Up at regimental.”
Solly stared at him. “It wouldn’t be too much of an ordeal for you, Lieutenant. The colonel couldn’t be that much of a terror. And I’ll stand by you one hundred per cent. I appreciate what you’re trying to do for us colored folks.” You phony bastard, he almost muttered aloud. I caught you with your pants down and you have nothing to brag about. What happened to your balls, Lieutenant?
“Let’s get back to camp, Saunders. I must attend this special meeting at regimental.” He was white as a soda cracker.
“You’re giving the orders, Lieutenant, sir. I’m just your humble servant.” He made a sweeping U-turn in the middle of the block and started back in the opposite direction. Thinking, this meeting must be very very special to be called on Saturday afternoon with half the officers already off on week-end passes.
CHAPTER 13
When he came out of the hospital he didn’t go over to the PX until another week had passed. Not till she sent for him by the Bookworm.
She asked him how he had been and where he had been. He said, “Oh, just convalescing.” And smiled a sickly smile at her.
“Are you all right now?” she asked anxiously, her dark eyes widened and deep with concern for him and especially him and no one but him, and she looked lovelier than ever to his eyes, and the memory of that night put a sweet and angry aching in the bottom of his stomach. But he said bluntly, “I’m okay.”
“I wondered why you didn’t come over to the PX. Nobody over here is going to bite you. I just wanted to talk to you about the N-double-A-C-P Thanksgiving party.”
He said, “So here I am. Talk.” That N-double-A-C-P covered a multitude of innuendoes.
They discussed the Thanksgiving party between intervals of her waiting on other soldiers, and he stood there till the PX closed, talking with her but never looking her fully in her lovely anxious face. Finally she asked him, “What’s the matter, Solly?”
And he said, “Nothing’s the matter. I told you already—I’m fine.”
The Post Exchange was noisy as per usual, with the jukebox blasting eardrums with “Straighten Up and Fly Right” by the King Cole Trio.
“I don’t mean that. I don’t mean your health. You just act funny.”
“Act funny? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” People were always saying one thing and meaning something entirely different. “You mean you think I could make it as a comedian? I have comic potentials? Maybe the tragicomic, honh? That’s an idea—laugh ‘em cry ‘em to death. Maybe I won’t go back to law school after all. Maybe I’ll go to a comedy school. That’s me all right—Solomon Saunders, Junior, a Comedy of Errors. That’s the story of my life. Maybe that’s what I’ll do—be a writer and the pen is mightier than the sword and I’ll write the story of my life as a warning to every other human, but it won’t do any good. Most human beings stink anyhow.”
“We could fly straight to the moon together—”
Her dark eyes darkened larger, wider, blacker, deeper. “I mean—you’ve been out of the hospital over a week, but you didn’t come by even to say hello.”
“I’ve been very busy,” he answered. “Very very busy.” His voice was stronger now, but he couldn’t look at her anymore without growing warm all over. Warm and large. And maybe he would never look at her again without becoming warm and large.
“So I swallow my pride and send for you, and you come over against your will, and you act so funny and strange—like you never saw me before.”
“I had to catch up with a lot of work that fell behind while I was in the hospital. You understand—” He wanted to add: And I’m married! And I’m sick of you and everything and everybody.
A big-headed large-framed light-brown complexioned soldier pounded on the counter. “Hey, Miss Pretty, will you give me a banana split please, mam?”
“Be the new moon’s first inhabitants—”
“I understand,” she said to Solly with a brand-new bittersweetness. “I understand that they’ve been holding up the war while you were in the hospital, General Solomon Saunders. Private Taylor told me.”
“Lady—look—all I want is one little old banana split.”
And now it was Harry James and his sweet seductive trumpet and his orchestra and his lady singer.
“Don’t be like that, Fannie Mae.”
“Maybe you’re angry with me because I asked you to take me home that night. Maybe you’re blaming me for what happened to you in town—” Solly thought:
“—It seems I’ve dreamed this dream before—”
“Don’t be foolish,” he told her. The Post Exchange was the noisiest place in the Army which was the noisiest place in the world.
“Excuse me, lady, I don’t want to make anybody angry, but I’ve been standing here trying to get waited on for fifteen minutes. I don’t want to be unreasonable, but—”
“Solly, I just don’t know what to think. I—”
“Many many moons ago—”
“Give him a banana split before he splits a blood vessel,” Solly said.
“Thank you, General, please, sir,” the big soldier said and bowed to Solly.
“—You and I together ever—”
Soon after she came back to where he was standing it was time to close, and he walked with her and her girl friend to her struggle-buggy as she called it.
When they reached the car she turned to him, her mouth widening and curving and her eyes completely black now, black and shiny with the moonlight in them. “The one thing you can’t allow this world to do to you, Solly, is to make you bitter. I mean about the Army and the war and everything. I know a little bit of how you feel. I hate it too—I hate it for you. But you just can’t let it get you down. Not you, Solomon Saunders, Junior. That’s all there is to it. You have much too much to give to this world.”
He thought viciously, all I have to say to break up this romantic image is: I’m married, baby—and you will cloud up like an angry storm and the image will be blown to hell and back.
“We have to fight them every step of the way!” she said fiercely. “In and out of the Army. That’s the way things are for us.”
“I’m fighting for me, baby, and nobody else but me, from now on in. I’m just about the most militant opportunist you ever saw in all your sweet life.” Then he changed his tone and said, “Look, Fannie Mae. Maybe I conned myself into believing in this Army and the war, but now I know the whole damn setup is as phony as a nine-dollar bill. Don’t talk to me about bitterness.”
“I know—I know, sweetheart,” she said. She had forgotten Sally Anne was there. “It’s like we say in the N-double-A-C-P. Like I told you, we need a Double-V for Victory. Beat them at home and overseas.” He didn’t believe she believed it anymore. Empty words that meant nothing to him or her.
He loved her, there was no denying it. More than anything else in the world. He said, “Fannie Mae—”
She reache
d out and took him by the hand. “I hate it all, my darling! Everything you hate I hate!” Without warning she put her arms around his neck and kissed him quickly fiercely on his mouth. “I promise never to let you down,” she whispered. “Never ever. I’d rather die than let you down.”
He hated to feel lower than a rattlesnake. He almost hissed at her. “Don’t make me any promises. You owe me nothing and I don’t owe you anything. I’m in great shape. I just don’t have any more illusions. I don’t need them. I’m happier without them.”
She said, “There’s no other promise worth the keeping. Nothing matters without you. Even if for you and me the war is phony, you just come back home to me, and we can build a life together.”
Later that evening he lay on his sack and thought of Fannie Mae and Millie and held their faces close to him and away from him and he put his arms around them and felt their nearness to him and listened to their voices. How in the hell could he love two women? What was Fannie Mae to him, really? Realistically? She’s just a gorgeous piece, that’s all. A pretty woman whom he’d seen and wanted to have a thing with. That’s all. And he’d had his thing and more than paid the price for it. So stop romanticizing the pretty little country wench. But he loved her, more than any other woman. Even and including Millie Saunders. He couldn’t kid himself any longer. He loved her. He had messed around seriously with the idea of writing Millie and telling her about Fannie Mae and asking her for an annulment on whatever grounds were necessary. Millie was a sensible woman. But he would have to discuss it with Fannie Mae first and he had not found the strength in him to tell her he was married. He was an adulterous bastard and how did he rate two beautiful powerful women like Fannie Mae and Millie? Tomorrow evening he would write Millie and tell her about Fannie and then he would go over to the Post Exchange and tell Fannie Mae all about Millie. And he made up his mind he would do it tomorrow. He had put it off too long.
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 19