And Then We Heard the Thunder

by John Oliver Killens

  The captain said, “As you were, Goddamit!”

  “And you want your black boy, me, to give his buddies all the reasons for killing and for being killed. No thank you, Captain Charlie!”

  The captain said, “After all I’ve done for you, this is your appreciation. It’s all my fault though. I should have burned your ass a long time ago. But I thought you had it in you, damn you, to be somebody. I made you staff sergeant and just today I recommended you for OCS.”

  They stood there squared off like prize fighters. Onh-onh. It won’t work this time, Cap’n Charlie. Take this hammer carry it to the captain tell him I’m gone. “Every white enlisted bastard I’ve met since I’ve been over here is looking for a lucky strike, a million-dollar purple heart, so he can go home and forget it. How in the hell you expect me to feel about it?”

  Solly heard the three quick blasts of sirens signifying another air alert and three short roars from the Ack-Ack guns all over the miserable island and he saw Madonna’s face and Millie with her swollen belly full of child. And Fannie Mae. And manhood. And everything goes on and on and on. And dying dying till you’re dead.

  The captain said, “Goddammit, Saunders, you’ve gone beyond redemption. Ain’t nothing I can do for you. After all I tried to teach you.” He had hurt the captain’s feelings.

  Solly felt good, speaking quietly. “I’m over here because I have to be. There is no other reason. No War to save Democracy—no nothing.”

  But the captain had not given up on his favorite student yet. He couldn’t believe a black man could be so unappreciative. So lacking in humility. “You must have gotten hold of some of that jungle juice. You’ve done a good job, else I’d break you on the spot. I gave you them stripes and by God I can take them away from you just like that. Listen now, you take this literature and look it over and we’ll talk it over tomorrow when you’re to yourself.” No black boy could be so arrogant.

  He handed the pamphlets to Solly again. Solly stared at them as if they were a deadly dose of poison, as he held a heated hurried conference with himself. The Lord giveth, the Great White Father taketh away. Use your head, you damn fool! He’s giving you another chance. He likes you. He really likes you. Use your head, forget your feelings! How badly do I want my stripes? And why shouldn’t I be a staff sergeant and even be an officer? His chest burning his stomach churning his body leaking perspiration. Use your head and not your feelings. But he was tired of feeling bad. Darling pregnant Millie! Fannie Mae and sweet Madonna! Get ahead in the White Man’s Army. Why the hell not? Why the hell not? But he was tired of feeling bad. And he was tired of making nonsense.

  When he spoke his voice was trembling, “The war is over for me, Captain Rutherford. I’m just sweating it out from here on in. I’m just here because I have to be, and I’ll do just what I have to do. I’m the worst man in the company you could get to do the job. If you order me to do it, I have no alternative but to go through the motions.”

  The captain walked up to him and ripped the stripes from Solly’s shoulders. His high-pitched voice was hysterical with rage. “Private Solomon Saunders, you are permanent Charge-of-Quarters until I tell you otherwise.”

  Solly’s voice no longer trembled. He said, “Thank you, Captain.” The taste in his mouth was like when he was a little boy in Dry Creek, Georgia, and his mother gave him six cents to put in Sunday School, and he would always give a penny for Jesus and a nickel to the man who sold ice cream cones in the little ice cream parlor down the street from Mount Olive Baptist Church.

  The captain dismissed him and he had turned and started out of the tent when he heard the captain mumble, “Too damn big for his goddamn britches!”

  Solly smiled and kept moving out into the sunlight. He had burst out of his breeches because they were meant for boys to wear. And Solly Saunders was a man. He didn’t need a Great White Father.

  CHAPTER 6

  The days rushed by with their air raids and Ack-Ack and bombardment and all the rest of it, death and destruction and starvation. The front moved on and on and ever forward and upward as the “fanatical” Japanese gave ground before the onslaught of the courageous Yankee liberators.

  The Filipino people said, some of them unconvincingly, “Japanese—no! American—yes!” Waving their hands and bowing their heads.

  The beautiful Filipino people who were always all over the 913 company area, friendly and hostile, looking just like the Japanese as far as American eyes could determine. And the proud Huks, men and women, guerrilla fighters, who came through the villages armed to the teeth, and so formidable that even some of the Filipinos would run from them, especially the collaborators who had lived with the Japanese and prospered. And the women, the beautiful women, petite and olive-complexioned and narrow-eyed and long black hair, and barefooted, and the children, many of them homeless and hungry and orphaned by the War of Liberation. And he looked for his Madonna in the eyes of every woman. The enterprising women who soon set up free-enterprise laundries all over the place to accommodate the wealthy Yankee liberators, who usually had other enterprising things on their minds for the women to do for them. And the men, many of them short of stature and handsome and proud of face and shoulders, and all of them wearing soldier suits and looking like the Japanese. But most of all the privation and the devastation, and the terrible degradation. The starving children who took their meals from the GI garbage cans and sometimes had to fight the poor starving rats over the delicious piles of GI slop.

  The first week the girls who came for the laundry resisted the GI Casanovas with: “Filipino custom—do not touch.” But by the third week the liberators, white and colored, had bought themselves into most of the homes with Yankee pesos and were touching everything and almost everybody. How long can you fight Them, from whence cometh the food-and-clothing things of life and which are never free? You can’t even fight City Hall. The Americans had the bags of rice and the pesos and the blankets and the flour sacks for making lady’s underthings and the black market and medicinal alcohol and sometimes even fresh meat, and the eternal cans of bully beef, and the Filipinos had nothing but their pride and their dignity and their ever-loving touchable selves. The white Yankees told the Filipinos not to sleep with the black Yankees because they would rape the women. The black Yankees told the Filipinos, “Them crackers ain’t no goddamn good. We colored folks got to stick together.”

  An arrogant ungrateful Huk guerrilla told Solly, “The Japanese were here yesterday, you’re here today, and we can’t see no difference.”

  Solly didn’t get around much anymore, especially at night. He was permanent Charge-of-Quarters.

  But it wasn’t long before some of the gallant men of the 913 were making themselves at home and cementing international relations and loving their lady neighbors and shacking up. In spite of the fact that they put in long hours unloading ships and carrying men and cargo up to the front and ducking bullets and having the GIs and all the rest of it, they found time to fraternize. Worm left camp every evening like he was going home from work.

  Life and living were ten cents a dozen. You were here today and gone today.

  The 913 broke camp again and moved a couple of miles around the edge of the airstrip to another point on the other side, and this time they put up camp as if they would be there for the duration of the War of Liberation. They built flooring for the tents, they built a giant latrine high up on a windy hill for the dreamers and the rumormongers. They built a supply room and a mess hall. They set rat traps in each tent and killed a hundred rats a night, but the rats kept coming on and multiplying. They poured oil on the field bordering the company area and set off a fire and must have burned alive a million rats, and rats ran and screamed and scurried, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in the rodent population. One night Solly and the supply sergeant put a rat trap in each of the tents, going from tent to tent, and when they finished they went back over their route and found a rat in every trap, and you could do this all night long and never
find an empty trap.

  Solly began to dream of rats, all sizes and descriptions and some of them in uniform. Every night when they went to bed and tucked their nets in and turned off the lanterns, the rats would invade the tents, foraging for edibles. Each rat would pick himself a likely tent. Solly would lie there some nights with the lights off and watch some big rat run around the ledges of the tent just eight or nine inches away, nothing between him and Solly but the flimsy netting. Sometimes the rat would stop and glare at Solly. Solly thought maybe this was another form of Japanese harassment.

  One night his tentmates were all tucked in and Solly set the trap with a piece of bread and turned the lantern out, and before the tent got dark and before he got to his cot, the trap went off and jumped three feet and Solly must have jumped five feet.

  The second night after they moved, Tojo laid an egg smack in the middle of the gun emplacement in the area they had just vacated and atomized everyone of Solly’s coffee-drinking Ack-Ack buddies from the bluegrass country. And now they were nothing but images and memories and fading Southern accents and dog tags, and c’est la guerre. All’s fair in love and fighting, and here today and gone today, and Stick-with-Jack-and-never-get-back. The Golden Gate in ‘48.

  Solly sat in the orderly room a few weeks later, writing to Millie, who was expecting their baby the following month. He was still permanent Charge-of-Quarters and was back where he had started, at the bottom of the ladder. Private Solomon Saunders, Junior. It was after midnight and they had already had a couple of air raids and the Black Widows were up, the nightfighters, and scouting the perimeter of the Philippine skies. The Black Widows were big black double-fuselaged pursuit bombers and highly efficient, and far deadlier than their namesake in the spider world. With them up there, there would be no more air alerts tonight. You could give odds on it. You could go to sleep and forget it. Calvin Potter stood in the entrance to the orderly room, looking like an apparition out of breath. He shook himself like a dog come in out of the rain, only it was dust that flew from him instead of water. He had been romeoing and had hitchhiked his way home on the road which was always ankle-deep in dust or mud, and he was covered from head to foot. He was old and gray with dust. He had been transferred to the Amphibs back on the other island.

  He said, “Man, if that pom-pom wasn’t so good, I’ll be damn if my old lady wouldn’t have to do without me most of these nights. That highway is just about a dusty mama-huncher.”

  Solly looked up from his letter. “There couldn’t be much dust left on the road. You brought most of it with you.”

  Calvin said, “Man, her sister is prettier than she is, and she really got hot nuts for you. Always asking me, ‘How’s that Mexican beauty—how’s Sergeant Solly?’”

  Calvin was about as big as a half a minute lengthwise and otherwise. He looked like a good strong wind would blow him away. But he was the greatest lover who ever lived and ever loved, and that was a natural fact which you could prove by asking Calvin.

  “These Filipino women gon kill me yet, and they are pretty women, you hear me, but they ain’t no size at all. None of em. Don’t weigh no more than forty-eight pounds soaking wet. But with Maria, that’s forty-eight pounds of plump and juicy pompomming pussy. You hear me, Sergeant Solly?” Most of the men still called him Sergeant Solly even though he was a private.

  Solly said, “I hear you. Now get the hell outa here so I can finish my letter.” Solly remembered a previous night when Calvin, who had eyes almost as big as he was and bulging out of his head, and an over-all appearance reminding you of an undernourished Woody the Woodpecker, had told him about his amorous exploits back in Buffalo, New York, with Brenda Sutton, the internationally famous burlesque queen, who used to make the money and bring it to him cause she liked the way he grinded.

  Cal sat down. “Whew! Man, Maria got forty-eight pounds of clean-cut tenderloin and she naturally knows what the Good Lord put it there for.”

  Solly said, “Look buddy boy, do me a favor. Spare me the details, I mean I really can do without them.”

  “Sergeant Solly, we grinded for a while tonight, and we used every position known to man and animals. OOoooooh-weee—we started out the old-fashioned way—”

  Solly was getting warm in the collar. He said quietly to Calvin, “Fucking is very private and personal and sometimes even a sacred affair between a man and a woman and it is the concern of no other person. And I for one do not get kicks by hearing about how two other parties fucked each other. And if you had ever grown up or if you had any respect for Maria you wouldn’t be shooting off your mouth like a—”

  Calvin looked like a wounded woodpecker. “You’re right, Sergeant Solly.” He shook his head up and down. “I shouldn’t be talking about her like this, cause she is a nice girl and I do respect her.”

  Solly said drily, “I’m glad to hear it.”

  Calvin said, “I sure am glad we liberated these people from the Japanese. These people so poor they make your heart hurt.”

  “Yeah,” Solly said absently. “And we don’t seem to have made them rich and we were here before the Japanese. A long long time before them.”

  Calvin said, “And, man, me and my old lady, whewee—we did a rear maneuver that made the moon start shining in the other direction, and then I backed into it, dog-paddling, and she moaned and groaned a while . . . and . . . ”

  Solly stared at the little man, half listening, and he wondered how it was possible to do all this fancy love-making in a one-room hut where the family slept and ate and lived—Maria’s elderly mother and father and her grandmother and her brothers and all of her sisters. He shook his head and he realized that it did not matter whether he listened or not. Calvin was talking for himself to hear, reliving the entire scene for his own enjoyment.

  “She propped one leg up on the wall and the other—”

  Footsteps running past the orderly room. One excited soldier’s voice dipped into the room. “Got three whores down in the Joint Motor Pool! Three whores down in the Joint Motor Pool!” The Joint Motor Pool was a joint one, shared by the Air Force mechanics and the 913 Amphibs, and they also used it jointly as a Joint for Whoremongering. Calvin jumped up and started out of the tent. He got to the entrance and ran back toward Solly.

  “Lend me fifteen pesos, Sergeant Solly!”

  Solly was almost frothing with anger but he laughed aloud at the soldier. “For—for what?”

  “I want to get me some pom-pom down in the Joint Motor Pool! You heard the man!”

  Solly bent over laughing at the soldier but he really felt like crying for him. “A lover like you doesn’t need to buy any pompom. You just got through almost killing yourself.”

  “Come on, Sergeant Solly, you know I was just bull-jiving. How could anybody do all that kind of fucking with all them people in the house? Maria’s a nice girl—I told you that.”

  Solly stared at him and laughed and laughed. “Buddy, you are the horse’s ass. You just can’t shit running.”

  Calvin said indignantly, “I thought you were a Race man, Sergeant. You gon let them white boys outbid us and beat our time down in the motor pool?”

  Solly said, “You know what you can do for me and your Race man down in the motor pool.”

  Calvin stared at him and ran out of the tent.

  Less than a half an hour later MPs swarmed all over the place. The Air Force and the Amphibs ran and scattered like thieves in the night. The thing the MPs wouldn’t stand for was the Air Force and the Amphibs whoring interracially and interchangeably and socialistically. Jimmy, the Quiet Man, came into the orderly room out of breath.

  “It was awful, Solly. It was really disgusting! And I didn’t want to do it! I didn’t want to do it! But they kidded me day and night—they said I was a queer or something. Said I didn’t like women. But I didn’t want to take advantage of those starving women!” He was crying now and he could not help himself. “I don’t know what made me do it, Solly. I didn’t want any whore pussy. I don�
�t need it. They were lined up, white and colored, and climbing up on the Ducks, and as fast as one bastard would get up off of one of them, another would climb up and get on. They didn’t even give the poor women time to straighten up or uncock their legs, let alone time to clean themselves. One of the women had her crying baby in the Duck with her.”

  Solly stared at Jimmy unbelievingly.

  “I swear to God, Solly, I’m not like that. I’m not like that! We were like dogs! We were worse than dogs! Those pitiful goddamn women! Those goddamn pitiful women!”

  The droning sound of the Black Widows roared into the orderly room. They were coming in from their reconnaissance and making twice as much noise as when they went out. Solly and Jimmy went to the door and stared out over the airstrip and watched the big black double-fuselaged bomber-pursuit planes leisurely soaring in for landing. They were big noisy bitches, Solly thought, and Jimmy was no animal. He was one of the few softhearted human beings that the Army had not made an animal out of.

  Solly said, “Mothers and fathers, that’s the biggest lie in World War Two, the coldest shit in town. The Army’ll make a man out of your darling boy. The Army takes a human being and makes him into an animal.”

  All at once the Ack-Ack guns started sounding off about five miles down the island. One lonely Zero must have flown in at an altitude above the radar’s sensitivity and cut off his motor and dropped down for a quiet visit. And now they had discovered him from all sides, as he headed farther down the coast, farther away from the strip. Jimmy and Solly looked back toward the strip where the noisy Widows were coming in, taking their time, unconcerned with the drama at the other end of the island.

  Just as the last three planes were banking from out in the bay and turning in for a landing, the Ack-Ack started sounding off and crossing and crisscrossing and powerful searchlights flooding the sky, illuminating every nook and cranny and blazing pathways to the moon, and the ships in the bay barking and growling and roaring like monsters from another age.