He changed the subject. “How’s the good lieutenant?”
Her face did a warm pink flush. “Bob’s fine. He’s out at Worthington Farms with the rest of your comrades. He’s having dinner with us tonight.”
Solly stared at the floor. She said, “Is that all right? And then we’re going over to the Southern Cross. I’m not trying to plan your thirty days, but I thought at the outset—I mean you are a stranger in our—”
He said offhandedly, “Fine—fine—fine. Fair dinkum.”
She said, “The Southern Cross is a serviceman’s club for all United Nation soldiers, without regard to race or color or that sort of rot.”
She saw his face grow warm and farawayish, and he got up and went toward the kitchen for another drink. He brought the bottle with him and came back and sank down into the chair. “Do me a favor. I don’t want to hear about the war or the race question or any of that man-made stupidity for thirty days. All right?”
“Fair dinkum, Solly.”
“Fair dinkum.” Fair-damn-dinkum!
And he began to drink, like her whiskey was the last on earth, and the more he drank the quieter he became. Just drinking and staring morbidly at the bottles brought in from the kitchen as if they were really dead soldiers bleeding on some lonely beach, and every now and then he responded to a question from Celia, and every now and then staring at her thinking to himself, why in the hell am I here with you and why are you alive and healthy and Millie who had everything to live for is dead and buried in the cold earth and Fannie Mae is thousands of miles from this place, and Solomon Saunders Junior is dying dying always dying? Dying lonely by himself and frightened and eight-and-nine-and-ten-and-eleven years old in a cold-water flat in New York City, dying in a Georgia jail and Georgia hospital, dying on the bleached-red beachheads with Sergeant Greer and Calvin Potter and Sergeant Anderson and the little Irish soldier who should have gone home on rotation and the men of the 19th Anti-Aircraft and Lanky Lincoln and with homo sapiens dying everywhere on all the beachheads on all the far-flung battlefields, in the trenches in the cities and along the countryside all over the goddamn death-driven world. Dying with his dead Madonna. Even Rosita might be dead. He wished he had died with Millie. He sometimes dreamed of having died with her and being buried in the ground with her, locked together forever in each other’s arms.
What in the hell was this white wench doing here alive and arrogantly white and securely white, with Millie dead and Fannie Mae on the other side of the world somewhere, teaching children to dream, whose dreams were murdered long before they learned to dream?
He looked up and stared at Celia. What the hell is your excuse for living, pale-faced wench? Sitting there as if you have the world in a jug and the stopper in your anemic hands. You and your lieutenant make a wonderful pair with your ALL-MEN-ARE-BROTHERS crap, as you wallow in your brotherhood while the world around you goes to pot with song and fanfare and bands playing and flags waving. Boys dying, always dying—the boys are dying over there. He was really getting drunk. Drunk and angry with the world. He’d better not drink anymore until after dinner or he would get as sick as a soldier on a beachhead. And he was already sick—sick of all the crap that went for Western civilization. This much he knew—man was born dying. And therefore man was born to die. He smiled. But man was born to die for something—a little tiny bit of something. Anything! But what?
And Celia was wondering. Is he always like this? Moody and non-communicative and maybe even antagonistic? She’d gotten a different impression on the hospital ship. He’d been warm and friendly and articulate, and she’d looked forward to a growing relationship. Friendship only, nothing more. He was probably in a mild state of protracted shock and not entirely himself. His fight to live, his wife’s death—the bloody war. The party at the Southern Cross would be just the thing for him. He pricked her curiosity. What was Solly Saunders really like? Who was this handsome somber black man?
Thoughts in his mind leaped about like grasshoppers in the hot sunlight. He was thinking about Jesus Christ and John Brown and Calvary and Harpers Ferry and Nat Turner at Southampton in Virginia. All of them had died for something. Dying—dying—dying. He thought aloud, “Good Lord, I wouldn’t mind dying if I died to free the people.”
She said, “What did you say?”
He mumbled, “Man was born to change the world.”
She said, “What?”
He said, “It was apropos of nothing.”
She said, “What you need is a good stiff drink.”
He was already soaring high as a P-38 and she had done herself some drinking.
He said, “Dinkie die and fair dinkum and you sure know what to say.”
Millie died for something, he thought quietly. She died to give another life.
Celia said, “Good-o,” and poured up two stiff drinks and began to open up. Her own life. She had wanted to be a creative writer, a poet, a novelist, but she was a nurse, but she would give up nursing as soon as the war was over if it ever ended. She had been married and her husband had been a union organizer, like her brother had been before the war, but when the war began her husband had volunteered, and before she knew what was happening to her he had been shipped overseas and thrown into battle and killed on the desert in Africa. She had been completely shattered.
Her eyes filled. “I didn’t know what to do. I was lost. He was older than I was, but we were so good for each other. He was mature and he was sensitive to my needs as a woman and my aspirations. But he was a dedicated antifascist. When he died and so far from home, I was completely disoriented. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t want to live at first. I thought I didn’t want to live. But then I went to the Army School for Nursing. The—the—war was taking so many lives—I wanted to help to save a few—”
Her voice choked off. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m a fool for crying like this in front of you—embarrassing you. He was a man who hated war but he was the first to volunteer to fight. Can you understand?” Her dark eyes begged him.
He looked into her eyes and was stirred against his will by the deepest pity. Her face said that her heart had lived with stormy weather. A face above which storm clouds always hovered, and he knew now that her bluntness was a shield against the sharp edge of the world’s brutality. Yet who in the hell was she to expect sympathy from him? She was white, and in this white world that insignificant fact gave her a head start on three quarters of its population.
She was crying now without restraint. “I don’t know why I’m acting like this. I don’t usually—I haven’t ever—I just somehow felt you were the only one I could open up my heart to. I feel close to you—like—like you were my brother—” She broke off again. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. The one thing I can’t stand myself is a maudlin woman—” Her shoulders shook and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and she was sorry—she was sorry—
And he might have gotten up and gone to her and sat beside her and put his arms around her and said to her, “Cry, Celia, cry as much as you feel like crying. Just help yourself.” He almost wanted to, but she was white, and he was angry with the world.
By the time Lieutenant Samuels came Celia had gotten herself together, and the lieutenant seemed genuinely glad to see his company clerk. He put his arms around Solly and laughed and stared at him.
“You look as good as a brand-new silver dollar.”
Solly said, “You look pretty good yourself, Lieutenant.”
Samuels said, “None of that lieutenant crap. This is Australia, and while we’re off duty I’m Bob and you’re Solly.”
Solly said, “My mother didn’t raise any backward children. You’re Bob and I’m Solly.” And then he noticed the double tracks on Samuels’s collar. He said, “Well-well-well—so it’s Captain Bob, is it?”
Samuels said, “In charge of a bunch of battle-scarred refugees from the fabulous 913th. They call us the 25th Amphib Platoon.”
They went out for dinner
to a small café and had steak and eggs and everybody seemed to be left-handed eaters, the way they held their knives and forks. The food was good as was the wine, and Solly began to loosen up.
Celia told him Australians ate with the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right.
He asked her, “Dinkie die?”
And she replied, “Fair dinkum.”
When they left the restaurant they went to the Southern Cross where they ran into Worm and Jimmy and Scotty, who had come into town on five-hour passes. They grabbed each other and hugged each other like long-lost brothers a million miles away from home.
Worm said, “This is one of the few places don’t many peckerwoods hang out.”
Solly thought, here it goes again, but he was overjoyed to see his buddies.
Celia’s brother said, “That’s right, mate. We don’t encourage them, and if they come they know they bloody well better behave themselves.” He was a lanky carrot-headed rugged-looking extroverted bloke. “If they come here looking for trouble we throw them right out on their arses.”
A tall stoutist balding man was playing on an old piano, Bomma-lomma-bomma-lomma, and people were dancing and some of the Aussie soldiers wore khaki shorts and a couple of the girls wore kilts of lively Scottish plaids.
The Southern Cross was dry as a chip, but Worm led Solly to the men’s rest room and wet his whistle with apple brandy from his hip pocket.
“These Aussies are all right with me,” he told Solly. “If it don’t be for these Yankee mother-hunchers round this place we would almost have it made.”
Solly said, “You’re just prejudiced is what.”
Worm said, “Studs out at the Farm say when they first came here a year ago, everybody was nice to them. They were heroes and color didn’t mean a goddamn thing. Wined them and dined them and took ‘em home to Mama. Treated them better than they were ever treated back home in Bam where they came from. But ever since about six months ago when them Southern peckerwood divisions came over here on the Queen Mary or Elizabeth or one of them Queens, they been putting places off limits to colored soldiers all over everywhere. The MPs worse than they are in Georgia. Man, a peckerwood ain’t shit don’t care where you take him. I hate the mother-hunchers.”
Solly took another solid swig of the Bookworm’s applejack. “I do not want to hear any of your colored folks’ propaganda tonight. If you have an justifiable complaints, take them to the man himself down at headquarters on Adeline Street. General Bufford Jack, the GI’s friend—the enlisted man’s great white padre.” He felt good. The applejack moved down through his chest and spread down into his stomach and slid around, and he was feeling good.
Worm stared at his buddy. Sometimes he couldn’t tell whether Solly were serious or pulling his leg. “That head wound must’ve really messed you up.”
Solly said, “White folks ain’t so bad once you get to know them better. Some of my best—” His voice wandered off absent-mindedly. He felt goddamn good.
And Worm was speechless.
Scotty floated into the rest room with an Australian soldier dressed in khaki shorts. His name was Dobbs. He had a bottle and some paper cups. He was as bowlegged as a bulldog. He poured up five drinks and passed them out and held his own cup out toward them.
“Here’s looking up your kilts,” he said.
Solly cracked up with laughter and particularly when Scotty returned the toast with, “Up your bloody kilts.”
And Dobbs advised Scotty soberly in a drunken whisper to be careful whom he gave that toast to. “Some of the Sheilas might get the wrong impression.”
Scotty told him, “Don’t worry bout the mule going blind.”
He and Scotty went out arm-in-arm.
Solly had been drinking since mid-afternoon and by now he had a heavy load. He smiled at Worm. “The trouble with you, you need some pom-pom. It would definitely change your disposition.”
Worm shook his head in disbelief.
When they went back into the club room, the man named Danny was sweating at the piano and folks were gathered in a circle dancing the hokey-pokey.
Danny was playing and singing in a noisy baritone.
“You put your right leg in,
You take your right leg out,
You do the hokey-pokey
And you turn yourself about . . .”
And everybody was putting his right leg in and her right leg in and doing the hokey-pokey.
Celia’s sister-in-law came over to Solly. “Come on, lovey, let’s give it a go.”
She led him by the hand to join the circle, just as they were putting their backsides in.
“You take your backside out,
You do the hokey-pokey
And you turn yourself about . . .”
And Worm and Solly went into the rest room for another wet one, and Scotty and Dobbs were in there downing brandy and “Looking up your bloody kilts.” And when they came out again the folks were “Waltzing Matilda,” and Pamela asked him again would he give it a go, and they danced, and she danced very closely with him, but it was just as if she were dancing with a man who wasn’t there. Every now and then during the party Celia would come to him and ask him how he was doing, and then she would float all over the place, being saucily friendly with all of the GIs and the diggers, morale building, and especially with Captain Robert Samuels, and then back to Solly again, and Solly and Worm and Jimmy and Pam’s brother killed a whole fifth in the rest room and helped Scotty and Dobbs with theirs, and Jimmy had been a teetotaler when he came into the outfit. The Army had made him a man.
Scotty had his arm around Hank Dobbs’s shoulders like they were long-lost drunken booze buddies. He told Solly, “Man, I really dig this stud the most. And the first time I met him I started to put him out of his misery. Came over to me and said to me, ‘Hello digger, welcome to the Southern Cross.’ I misconscrewed this cat. I thought he’d called me the name they call your folks in Georgia. You dig me? After I found out what he was putting down, I told him he’d better learn how to talk plainer than that.”
The rest room exploded with all of their laughter, including Dobbs and this time even Captain Samuels, who had just walked in and joined them.
When the laughter died away Dobbs said, “Here’s looking up your kilts.”
And Scott said, “Up your bloody kilts.”
And they finished off the two dying soldiers and threw them into a waste basket and went back in to join the party.
They were dancing now and Celia was heavy in his arms, as if she’d also been hitting the bottle, and she asked Solly for the millionth time how he was doing and he said, “Fine. How’re you doing?” And she said, “I’m having a bloody good time, but I’m knocked up, you know, so I’d better take it easy.” He thought to himself, Captain Bob isn’t letting any grass grow under his feet, and little Celia is on the air and broadcasting.
The last time Solly and Worm went to the rest room, Worm said, “These chicks are all right, but half of ‘em pregnant, and what I mean, they don’t mind telling the world about it.”
Solly said, “Different culture different values, old buddy.” His eyes and his tongue were getting heavier and heavier.
Worm said, “Here’s looking up your kilts.”
The next time he saw her she said, “I feel awfully crook. Will you please take me home? I’m knocked up, you know, I really mean it.”
He said, “The captain—I mean Bob—”
“He has to go back to camp and it’s in the opposite direction, but if the idea of taking me home is so distasteful to you—” She was pouting and angry and her sweaty mouth curved rounder and rounder and the peachy fuzz above her mouth, and he knew objectively she was the prettiest woman at the party, maybe even beautiful, and the diggers and the GIs had been shooting at her all night long, but like she kept telling her sister-in-law’s sister, Solly wasn’t remotely interested romantically, and furthermore she was Samuels’s girl. And furthermore and furthermore—
&n
bsp; Scotty and his buddy, Dobbs, sat in a booth sipping steaming hot tea and nibbling crumpets, and a couple of Yankee soldiers sat opposite them. One of them was drunk as an owl and red-faced and bald-pated and shiny-nosed and first sergeant. He kept reaching over the table and slapping Scotty on the arm and shouting, “You awright with me. Us Yankees got to stick together.” It was a thick foggy Southern accent, and Scotty stared at the friendly drunken Topkick, whose head gleamed like the cue ball in a billiard game.
The other Yankee soldier kept mumbling, “My buddy is the greatest guy in the world. Know what I mean—old Army man—salt of goddamn earth—know what I mean?”
Scotty said, “Watch yer language—ladies all over the place—”
The Topkick said to Scotty, “That’s all right, you can’t fool me, I know you from down home just like me. Both of us peckerwoods together.”
Scotty glared at the Topkick with a righteous indignation.
The Topkick got up for the third or fourth time and went stumblingly over to where Solly and Celia stood talking seriously, and each time he would unintentionally bump into Solly and Solly would accidentally shove him viciously with his shoulder and his elbow. “Can I have this dance this time, please Mam, Miss?” And she said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant. Not tonight. I’m knocked up—really I am.”
Finally Solly told the sergeant, “Look, bub, by now even you should have gotten the idea the lady isn’t dancing tonight with you.” The sergeant stared at Solly unbelievingly. If the sergeant stood there any longer, Solly would punch him in his mouth. He was itching.
The sergeant went back to the table and fell into his seat. “Prettiest girl in Kangaroo-land,” he mumbled. “Prettiest girl in Kangaroo-land, and she’s bigged and she tells me so right in front of that goddamn sergeant. Whaddaya think of that?” he asked Scotty, yanking his arm. “You can’t fool me—me and you both is Georgia peaches.”
Scotty said, “Watch yer language.”
Dobbs said drunkenly, “You’re an awright peckerwood but watch yer bloody language!”
Danny, the piano man, was bomma-lomming:
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 44