The blond one looked like a queer and sounded like one, cultured-like and Southern-fried. “My advice to you boys is to go quietly and don’t start no rumpus.” He was a big bastard. Him and his faggoty advice.
Before Solly could say, “We’re not starting any rumpus. We just—” Scotty lowered his lion-like head and charged forward like a fullback into the midsection of the dark-haired MP and the MP ended up on the floor with Scotty on top of him. MPs came from everywhere. The pretty blond one cold-cocked Scotty with a blackjack before Solly could reach him. As Solly and Worm and Lanky and Jimmy moved toward their buddy, the MPs grabbed them and began to shove them around and jab them in the ribs with their nightsticks and twist their arms. Before they knew what was happening, they were lined up against the wall with their arms above their heads and frisked like the troublemaking criminals they were. It happened so quickly and efficiently, the party wasn’t even interrupted. Only a few nearby were aware of it. The laughter and the dancing and the colored music went on and on. They brought Scotty to his senses and stood him up against the wall with the rest.
Jimmy Larker said angrily and quietly, on the verge of tears, “Are you people completely out of your mind? Do you have any idea what the war is about?”
Solly said, “Save your breath, Jimmy.” He was hurting all over and panting like he had been running for a hundred years up a long steep mountainside. And he hated them all for what they were doing to him and Jimmy and the rest, especially to him and Jimmy, hated their goddamn unfeeling guts for pounding one more nail in the coffin of the war’s morality.
The MP in charge said, “All right, get ‘em outa here and over to the stockade.”
A white corporal with a Southern accent came up to Solly as they were being hustled out of the place. “I saw everything, Sergeant. Who do you want me to notify?”
Solly’s sides had that caved-in feeling again. He stared at the white soldier long and hard. The MP shoved him. Solly said, “We’re with the 913th Amphibious. Look for Lieutenant Samuels and Sergeant Anderson and tell them what happened. We’re on White Beach Road near Ordnance.”
The big MP said, “Shut up and keep moving.”
Solly said, “Sergeant Anderson and Lieutenant Samuels. 913 Amphibians.”
The MPs hustled the volunteers off to the base stockade. Topkick and Samuels got them out a little after midnight.
Solly told Worm they were still lucky. “Lucky they didn’t put us in the POW camp behind that barbed wire with the Japanese.”
When he reached his tent he undressed in the darkness and got into bed and tucked his net and lay there for over an hour, but he could not fall asleep. His head felt so tight he thought it was going to burst wide open. He got up and lit a lantern and got pen and paper and sat on the side of the bed and wrote:
“I speak to you, America. I still think the most and hope for you the very best while there is still time. Yours was still is the greatest dream mankind has ever known. No land has ever had the potential that was yours still is yours.”
Sweat crept all over his body like an army of insects on the march. His hand trembled. All the bugs on the island seemed to have come into his tent and flit and buzz around the lantern and into his face. He wrote:
“Take heed, America. Do not take my love for granted. I who have loved you most and betrayed you least. Unrequited love is always fraught with danger and destruction. Don’t push me into saying: “goodie, goodie! I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.” My cheeks are wearing thin with slapping, they have been turned too often.”
There was so much more he wanted to write to America the beautiful, so much to tell her in his heart, but his eyes began to ache and his hand shook now more than ever and the bugs were sitting all over the paper and on his hot face. He put out the lantern and tucked himself in and relived the evening at the Red Cross recreation center. He saw the woman’s toothy smile, and Jimmy Larker’s face and Scotty’s and Worm’s and the two MPs and the whole thing ganged up on him and his eyes were hot but he would not cry, and the trouble with him was, he still had not learned to wear this world like a loose damn garment. And finally he fell asleep.
The days came and lingered in the blue-white heat and passed into weeks and the men worked and melted on the waterfront and were eaten alive by mosquitoes at night and took atabrine and their skin turned to a greenish-yellow and half of them caught dengue and malaria fever and went to the hospital and came out again, and time went on and on and on. Malaria killed two of the Special men. And the great war seemed farther away to Solly than it had been in California.
Late at night in the sticky heat Solly sweated and struggled with his war novel, though he hadn’t yet caught up with the fighting. He worked by a lantern light which attracted all the bugs on the island. And across the tent from him, Lanky Lincoln wrote lyrics about love. He was a man obsessed with tenderness in the midst of inhumanity.
During the second week Solly got eight letters from Millie and Worm got one from Fannie Mae. Worm told Solly, “She loves the ground you walk on, you lucky bastard.”
One of Millie’s letters made him feel like crying, but he held back the mighty flood. “When my menstrual period was late in coming, I got nervous and panicky. I told myself it was nothing to get up in the air about. It’s been late before. It would probably come tomorrow or the day after. But after a considerably long time had passed, I went to see my doctor. I didn’t dare let my hopes go up. But he said, ‘Yes, Mrs. Saunders, it seems that you are definitely pregnant.’ I was so happy I was trembling. It must have happened the last night we were together. Love was really in that room. I’m so happy I don’t know what to do!”
He kissed the letter, he rubbed his face with it like it was a washcloth. His back and shoulders vibrated with warm feelings of love and exultation. He was really going to be a father this time. He would really be a father! Millie was beautiful and pregnant and his heart was beating too hard too fast and he felt fifteen feet tall and the he of him was throbbing like a heartbeat and when he got back he would make up everything to her. I promise you, my Millie darling. I love you and I promise you I love you and I promise you—I’ll be back and make up everything to you. But even as he made his vow, he remembered Fannie Mae and the vow he made to her to never compromise his manhood.
One night about two-thirty in the morning Rutherford came into the tent. Solly had worked late on his novel and had just fallen asleep. The captain woke up the Topkick. “Come to the orderly room on the double.” Sergeant Anderson stumbled around the tent trying to wake up and get dressed at the same time. He finally partially accomplished both and went out into the night. Solly drifted slowly back to sleep and dreamed about it. A few minutes later he was awakened by a commotion of hurried footsteps going up and down the company street and loud whispering voices. He thought hazily that everybody must be up excepting Solomon Saunders. Maybe the Japanese had counterattacked. At that moment a soldier’s head appeared at the entrance to the tent. “Sergeant Saunders—Sergeant Saunders—report to orderly room on the two!”
When he got to the orderly room it was already a madhouse. Officers and non-commissioned officers and even just plain buck privates coming and going and conferring and whispering excitedly and running back and forth. He read the telegram on the captain’s desk. It ordered the 913th to board planes at the Bay Airstrip at 0900 (9 a.m.) sharp and to proceed immediately to Charlie Bee. Ducks needed badly. Time of essence. It was signed by a brigadier general. They broke camp like a circus leaving town. At 0850 they were out at the airstrip, nervous and ready. For most of them, including Solly, it was their first flight. After standing around and hem-and-hawing, they boarded a dozen planes at about nine-thirty and flew two hundred and thirteen miles unescorted and unprotected up the Island to Calhoun Bay, which was just fourteen miles from the shooting and killing.
Lieutenant Graham, the motor officer, sat in the bucket next to him; pimples of perspiration stood at attention on his forehead. He c
onfided his fear to Solly. “I’m pissing my pants,” he said. “The first time I ever been up in a plane. These goddamn two-motor bully-beef bombers are rocky as a sonofabitch. Here we are, going toward the front unescorted. This thing doesn’t have any guns in it anywhere. Two zeros could systematically knock every one of us out of the sky.”
Solly was scared too, but he laughed at the lieutenant. “We’re Uncle Sam’s most expendable nephews. I thought you were hep to that, Lieutenant. They’ve made a colored man out of you.” Solly laughed and the lieutenant stared at him and sweated more and broke wind way up in the air and didn’t say excuse me.
The telegram made no difference at all. They got the same reception. Nobody expected them. Nobody knew what to do with them. They went through almost the same routine as before. Their supplies were being brought up by boat, and after running around like chickens with their necks off, the captain and Solly finally—just before dark and just before the anopheles went on the attack—got cots from the Quartermaster and found a clearing in the jungle, and the men got rained on all night long. The next day they were stevedores on the Calhoun waterfront. It was like a bad dream that you woke up from and then went back to sleep and put the pieces together. The bad dream became a nightmare, because the rain rained harder further north and the sun shone hotter and the mosquitoes grew bigger and the grass grew taller and the flying foxes twice as vicious. And malaria and dengue and yellow jaundice. And all day long and through the night you could hear the rumbling thunder of the war, which was just around the corner now, but as far away as ever.
One day Solly was down at the bay front, checking some supplies the men were unloading. It was so hot the grasshoppers didn’t even move about. The sun was blazing red and yet when you got a chance to look at it, when it was looking at something else, it was actually a round silvery disk with a bursting shattering brilliance. It bounced off the glassy-blue water in the bay like a thousand sparkling jewels of all shapes, sizes, and denominations. Solly had already concluded that the equatorial imaginary line ran directly across the bay front, across the bare backs and faces of the Special men. Sweat drained from everywhere on Solly’s body, dripped into his eyes, poured from his hair on top of his head. Talk about dehydration! He could feel himself drying up and losing poundage.
He was working near Scotty, when the lion-shouldered soldier stopped from loading for a moment to wipe his face and body (naked to waist) and under his arms, as the sweat continued to leak from him like the pores of his body were bleeding sweat. He did not hurry back to work. Nothing hurried. The sun beat down everything and everybody to the rhythm of a slow drag.
Staff Sergeant Buck Rogers walked toward Scotty and shouted at him in a husky sun-cooked voice, “All right, you little goldbricking mother-lover, let’s get on the ball.”
Scotty looked up at the sergeant and put his hand on the back of his hip and bent his body and went into one of his burlesques. “Yassa, old Cap’n. All right, Massa. I’sa comin’, White Folks. My back may be broken but my spirit’s undaunted.”
The stage was set. The show would soon be on the road. The men nearby began to laugh and chuckle. Sometimes the sergeant enjoyed it as much as the men.
Buck said, “I suppose you’re one of them smart ones.”
Scotty scratched his head. “Nawsa, Cap’n. I ain’t had no education and I ain’t never been to school.”
The men laughed louder. “All right, that’s enough, all of you, let’s get back to work. You, goddammit, you the big instigator.” Buck waved his arm at the Bookworm.
Worm had just put onto the truck a piece of cargo that looked to be the size of a bale of cotton. “I ain’t doing nothing, ol’ Cap’n.”
Buck was working himself up into a sweaty sunstroke. “That’s the trouble. You don’t never do nothing but signify and agitate like a goddamn Communist in Union Square!”
Buck was really angry now, but Worm was still floor-showing. He walked toward Buck, smiling angelically. “Just a minute, Sergeant. Don’t be calling me outa my name. I don’t play the dozens with no dear mother’s bastard.”
Everybody was watching the show by now. All labor battalion work had ceased. Buck shook his finger in the short soldier’s face. “Watch how you talk to your superiors, mother-fucker!”
“Oh,” Worm said smilingly, “so you were peeking, you sneaky bastard. You were peeking that night, and me and your dear old mama thought you were fast asleep—you naughty boy.”
The men were laughing unrestrained and the sun was carrying out its scorched-earth policy systematically and Buck was hotter than South Sea Island beach sand at three o’clock in the afternoon.
Buck said, “All right, you little stupid sapsucker, are you going to get back to work or do you want to be charged with insubordination?” He turned and waved his arms. “And that goes for all of you bastards!”
Worm broke into a grin and started to do a soft-shoe dance. “Hehehehehe hehehehe—I was just teasing, boss. Please don’t take me to the man. Please—” He moved away toward the stack of cargo at the water’s edge, still dancing.
Hopjack shouted, “Scat! Scat! Everybody tryna get into the act.”
The other men went snickering back to work.
It was hot hot hot.
“All right then, goddammit, I don’t want no more trouble outa you else I’m going to have your dead ass put in the stockade and you’ll be making little ones outa big ones.”
Worm turned again and bowed. “All right, boss, ol’ Cap’n. I told you I was just teasing. Please don’t tell the man on me.”
Buck said, “Just don’t give me no more lip, that’s all. Just get to hell back to work, else we’ll reverse the procedure, goddamn. We’ll give you some little ones and make you make big ones out of ‘em.”
Worm would have the last word or burst wide open. He picked up a heavy piece of cargo and maneuvered it up on his shoulder. “I told you I was just teasing, boss. I know you wasn’t peeking that night, cause your mama stuck some cotton in the keyhole.”
The men were laughing now, though working, and Buck turned away, pretending not to hear the Worm. It was better that they laughed than grumbled while they worked in the hottest place on God’s greener-than-green earth.
Lanky Lincoln shaded his eyes and looked up into the face of the sun and shouted, “Hey, looka there!”
Solly looked and now the sun was flinging silver pieces at the earth. The planes seemed to come directly out of the great white disk and glitter momentarily in its mighty beam and then streak toward the sweltering earth. Plane after plane peeled off from the sun and hurtled earthward.
Jack Titus a crackerjack mechanic and expert on airplanes, fighters, bombers, A-this, B-that, and P-the other. He knew them by names and numbers. He jumped up and down and laughed and shouted, “Look at them beautiful bastards! P-38’s! Lockheed Lightnings! Fly mother-lovers! Fly! Fly!”
Solly didn’t know what they were, but they were sleek and handsome and gleaming and streaking across the sky and heading toward Calhoun Bay. Lanky was also a plane expert. He said, “Those aren’t P-38’s, those are P-40’s, man. Don’t you see that gorgeous fuselage? I thought you knew something about airplanes.”
The silver streaks got lower and lower (they moved like lightning, whatever their name) and they made a straight line for the Special men, and suddenly it was like the Fourth of July and thunder and lightning everywhere. Every ack-ack gun on the Island started sounding off and the sky was filled with tracer bullets exploding in the sky around the planes, as the silvery comets wiggled and ducked and dodged in and out of the bursting flak and kept coming on, and the Island trembled and the Special men dove under the trucks. One nervous soldier ran headlong into the sea. Watts was the only man in the outfit who never learned to swim.
From under the truck you could still see some of the silver stuff flashing across the brilliant sky and going into dives and pulling out again and laying their eggs of death and the earth beneath erupting, and one of the
silvery buzzards swooped toward a ship in the bay and dropped its egg and climbed skyward again like a sea gull. It was a direct hit and the ship jumped fifty feet in the air with pieces flying everywhere and arms and legs and other debris and heads and bodies and settled back onto the water quietly and burning and disappearing into the bay.
General Grant got so carried away he came out from under the truck and started screaming like he was out of his mind.
“Gwan, Tojo! Gwan Tojo! Fly, black man! Show these white bawstards how you can fly!” He shook his fist at the planes ducking in and out of the flak and diving and laying eggs and climbing straight up again at ninety-degree angles. “Gwan, Tojo! Go on, mawn! Show these bawstards how to do it!”
Solly, along with Worm and Lincoln and about a dozen others, had been on his knees underneath the truck, and he had not been praying, but inside his stomach was like a volcano exploding and erupting. He had never been so scared before. He had never known the earth so scared that it quaked and trembled, he had never heard such thunder nor seen such awful lightning. He had caught up with the war, and his heart was pounding as loud as the ack-ack guns and he thought it would burst his chest wide open. He thought about home and Millie and the baby really in her belly this time and Mama and darling Fannie Mae in Ebbensville and all of it a million miles away from this madness. And he might not live to see them again, he might not live another minute. He was scared deep deep in his rectum scared. But suddenly the picture of General Grant standing there out in the open and cheering the Japanese struck him as the funniest thing that ever happened. He began to laugh and laugh and howl and his stomach griped with laughter. He fell on his back and held his stomach and laughed and laughed till the tears came down. Maybe he was crying. He almost rolled from under the truck.
“Gway, Tojo! Fly your arse off! Show them paddies, mawn! Show ‘em! Show ‘em!”
Solly could hear the shrapnel from the ack-ack jagged and deadly, falling back from the sky and raining onto the truck and beating up the dust around the General and he stayed out there in the open, yelling encouragement to Tojo. Solly wanted to warn him about the shrapnel but he could not stop laughing. His stomach hurt like he needed a B.M., but he couldn’t stop laughing. He was crying too. Finally he heard Worm say to the General, “Get back under this truck, you stupid sapsucker, fore a piece of shrapnel fill up that hole in your head.” But Grant kept screaming, “Gwan, Tojo!”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 33