Once They Heard the Cheers

by Wilfred Charles Heinz

  "I was on the point," he was saying, "and we come on the bridge. We were looking down and we said, 'Look at that place, that village down there. Look at that bridge.' For three hours they wouldn't let us cross."

  "It took that long," I said, "to get confirmation from Division and Corps and Army. It was a big risk, because if they put you people across and the bridge went out behind you and the Germans counterattacked, everybody would have been lost."

  "We kept looking down at that bridge," he said, "and saying, 'Why don't they let us go? We can grab that bridge.' "

  "What were you in, a half-track?"

  "Yeah, I was on a half-track," he said, "and when they let us go and we got down in there I grabbed a machine gun. You know, when you pile out of a half-track you grab anything, and I happened to grab a machine gun, and guys were goin' nuts. Later planes were comin' down, and we were firing on everything. We even fired on frog men."

  The Germans tried with everything they had to knock out the bridge before, ten days after its capture, it finally collapsed into the river. They laid on all the artillery they could move up and sent in planes, and finally at night, six Navy frog men carrying pliable plastic explosives. Our people dropped depth charges and turned searchlights on them and fired on them and captured all six. I remember the one I saw in the jail in the town across the river, lying there, sullen, in his black rubber suit on that cot in that cell.

  "My name is in a book," Rubio said, and he got up and walked to the book shelves at the end of the room and he came back. "They sent it to me. I didn't buy it."

  He handed me the book. It was The Bridge at Remagen, by Ken Hechler, a paperback published by Ballantine Books in 1957.

  "I have a copy at home," I said. "It's a good book."

  "I've never read it," he said, and he took the book back and turned some pages, yellowing now like those in my copy, and then showed it to me again. "But my name is here. See?"

  On pages 236 and 237 of the Appendix, in agate type, are listed the names, three columns on a page, of the members of the leading units that crossed the bridge. At the top of the left-hand column on page 237 is the name Norman Rubio.

  "That's good," I said. "I'm glad you're in there."

  "It just came in the mail once," he said. "I didn't ask for it or anything."

  When the news of the bridge got back to Washington, the members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate stopped their deliberations to stand up and cheer. Its capture was not only to shorten the war in Europe by months but to save no one knows how many thousands of casualties.

  "I was in the Bulge, too," Rubio said now. He had taken the book back to the book shelves and had sat down again.

  "I probably covered you people then, too," I said, "but everything was so disorganized that I can't recall it now."

  As long as the Americans were on the offensive we could handicap our units, but when the Germans broke through we were never sure where anybody was. They chased us out of one press camp and bombed us out of another, but as always, we still had it so much better, of course, than the infantry and the tankers in the lines.

  "You know what they told us?" he said now. "They said, 'Go out there. A small skirmish of Germans broke through.' A small skirmish? It was the whole German Army. We had to sleep in that snow and ice-cold water. I figured when I came out I wouldn't be able to do anything.

  "They sent up these new kids. They didn't even know how to put a clip in. This one kid wasn't even eighteen. I put his clip in and he said, 'What do I do now?' I said, 'Just shoot at anything you see out there.' He stood up and—bam!—right through the head. Dead.

  "One time in a cellar, a shell came in on me and this fella. It threw us back and the blood came out of my nose and ears, and I thought I was dead."

  And that night in the Garden, I was thinking now, when you were taking that licking from that Docusen kid, I had no idea that less than two years before you had been through all of that.

  "Then we were firing on the Russians," he said. "What was the name of that river?"

  "The Elbe."

  That was another time when all our handicapping came up wrong. It was a time of just mopping up small pockets of Germans, with the tanks rolling and the infantry riding on them in the half-tracks and trucks, and we were trying to figure what division would get the honor of pushing to the river to meet the Russians. We reasoned that it would go to one of the old outfits that had slugged it out all the way from the Normandy beaches, maybe the First Infantry or the Fourth Infantry or the Ninth, or maybe the Third Armored that had led the breakthroughs. Then the Sixty-ninth Infantry, which was new to the theater, pushed a patrol out and made the first contact, and we all rushed up there and crossed the river in the racing shells of the Torgau Rowing Club to meet the Russians who were friendly, to a point, but whose crudities made our GJ.s seem like babies.

  "We were firing on those Russians, and then we saw this white flag," he said, and then he shrugged and said, "but it don't mean nothing. I have a son was in Viet Nam."

  He got up and brought over to me two framed color photographs. The one was of their older son and his wife and their small son, the other a wedding picture of their older daughter and her husband.

  "I got four kids, all in good health," he said. "If not for money, I have a perfect life."

  "That's good," I said.

  "I got no complaints," he said.

  "Did you ever want your boys to be fighters?" I said.

  "No," he said, "I wouldn't want it. You're like a race horse, on a continuous training schedule, from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed. You're on special food all the time. You ain't supposed to have a girl friend. So what kind of life is that? It's inhuman.

  "You see this?" he said, and got up again and walked over to the telescope on its tripod in front of the fireplace. "Gary went to college and studied astronomy. Now he's got us all lookin' at the moon, and things like that. Star gazing. It's nice."

  "When you think back to the old days," I said, when he had sat down again, "do you ever wish you were young once more?"

  "Yeah," he said, "them were the good days. I loved being in condition. To me it was fun training with all the other guys."

  "Yes," I said, "and there was a camaraderie. Fighters together were like guys together in the war."

  "Yeah," he said, "we were all friends. When you fought a guy you didn't want to hurt him or kill him, but at the same time you wanted to win, and it didn't matter if he was black or white. You know what's the trouble with fighters? I'll tell you. Fighters lose their money, and they're afraid to take the little jobs. They say, 'I can't do that.'

  "They should stay away from those bar rooms. Everybody pats them on the back and says, 'You're the greatest.' They're ashamed to work. Guys say to them, 'You doin' that kind of work? You're crazy.' "

  We talked awhile, about some of the fighters we had both known and about Ray Arcel, who worked with seventeen world champions and had trained Rubio for a number of his fights. When I got up to leave, and had shaken hands with his wife and daughter, he walked me out and we stood for a moment on the porch.

  "You should read that book," I said.

  "The stuff they write," he said, "I don't read it. I was lucky to come out good."

  "But that's an honest book," I said. "It really tells the truth of it. If you read it, you'll see what I mean."

  "People don't understand," he said. "I've seen generals, captains—officers—decorated for somethin' they never done. A guy hit the dirt got a medal. A lot of my buddies were left there. They never came back. They never mention the poor guys who died. The heroes come back, and the guys who don't are just dead, so I just hate to pick up the book."

  "I understand," I said.

  "It was nice they sent it to me, though," he said. "I mean I didn't have to pay for it or anything."

  The price is printed on the back cover of the book: $.50. Some weeks later I read in Newsweek that they had made a motion pictur
e about another bridge, the one at Arnhem, from Connie Ryan's book, A Bridge Too Far. The story said that they were paying Robert Redford "a rumored $2 million," and James Caan "at least $500,000 for twelve days' work," just to make believe.

  3

  The Man Who Belongs

  in Blue Jeans

  Levi Strauss ended last year looking robust as

  ever, with sales up 20 percent to $1.2 billion

  and profits up 62 percent to $105 million.

  Newsweek, July 5, 1977

  The Interstate highways in this country are a monument to the surveyor's calling, the engineer's profession, and the cement and asphalt industries, but traveling them is like reading those summer novels the critics suggest you pack along with your bathing apparel, the tennis gear, the suntan lotion, and the Maalox. Surviving them, you have the feeling that you haven't seen anything, come to know anyone, or been anywhere.

  This country comes alive between the highways and not on them, and we had driven halfway across it to the mid-line of America. Medora, North Dakota, dates back only to 1883 and has a year-round population of only 129, but in 1962 they started restoring it, and it has its history. In 1876, George Armstrong Custer, on his way to his unannounced retirement at Little Big Horn, camped with his Seventh Cavalry just five miles south of where the town was shortly to be built. After the Sioux were chased out and the Northern Pacific pushed past on its way west, the town grew up as a railhead and terminus for the cattle drives that started 1,200 miles south on the Oklahoma-Texas border. Cattlemen fattened their stock in the grasslands bordering the town and in the Badlands to the north. From 1883 until 1898, Theodore Roosevelt owned two ranches here, one five miles south of the town and another thirty miles to the north, and there is a National Memorial Park, in three units, named for him. Medora, itself and in season, sells Teddy to the tourists with a board-sided Rough Riders Hotel and a museum, an amphitheater, a trout pond, gift shops, and a zoo offering "all animals native to North Dakota in Teddy Roosevelt's time."

  It was mid-September and the tourists were gone, leaving what were left of the trout, I presumed, to their peaceful pursuits and zoo animals to their privacy. The hotel was closed, but at the smaller of the two motels—the one that had answered my wife, Betty's, postal enquiry addressed to "Chamber of Commerce"— the middle-aged, motherly woman who runs it with her husband had pointed us, the first evening, to the Little Missouri Saloon and Dining Room for dinner, and the next morning, to Bud's Coffee and Gift Shop for breakfast. Now she brought out a large-scale map of the land sections, and spread it on the counter in the motel office.

  "You'll have to go down here and onto the Interstate," she said. "Then it's about fourteen miles to Sentinel Butte."

  "Good," I said. "I spent a night there in '64."

  "Then the road goes north, right here."

  "I remember that," I said, "and I think it's right about on this bend of the Little Missouri."

  "I wouldn't know for sure," she said, "but I know it's out there somewhere."

  "At Bud's they said the road would probably be all right."

  "I would think so," she said. "We haven't had much rain."

  "Do you know where I might get a map like this?"

  "You can have this one."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "That's all right," she said. "I hope you find it."

  At Sentinel Butte the road that leads off the Interstate curves down a gentle hill into the town. The population of Sentinel Butte is 125, and at the corner there is a white-stuccoed general store with two gas pumps under the overhang in front.

  "Do you have any high test?" I said.

  "No," he said, middle-aged, tanned, and looking healthy, as you're supposed to look if you live in Sentinel Butte.

  He put in ten gallons of the regular, and when I handed him the $10 bill and he went inside to make change, I followed him.

  "I want to go out to Jim Tescher's ranch," I said. "Do you know how I can get there?"

  "Jim Tescher's?" he said. "Sure."

  "Wait till I call my wife in," I said. "She's the navigator."

  I introduced Betty, and myself, and he said his name was Ward Cook. He marked the route on the map for us, and then, on the back of a letter I was carrying, he drew the route with the landmarks on it.

  "You go across I-94," he said, "and take a left with Camel's Hump Butte on the right. You follow the main road for ten or twelve miles to some old run-down farm buildings here on the left. You go straight about eight or nine miles to a deserted school house here on the right, and about a half mile past that you turn off left across a cattle guard. You follow that, and after maybe about twelve miles or so there'll be some signs of Jim's, I'm sure."

  "How far is it?"

  "About 36 miles," he said. "I haven't been all the way out there in twenty years."

  "You think that car of mine will make it? It's kind of low-slung."

  "You can make it at this time of year," he said. "You know Jim Tescher?"

  "Yes. I met him twelve years ago in Phoenix, while he was riding saddle broncs."

  "Jim and his brother Tom were great riders," he said, "but nobody knows it."

  "They knew it once in rodeo," I said.

  When Betty and our daughter and I had got off the plane in Phoenix on that day in '64, Skipper Lofting had come walking with that slow rolling gate down the ramp to meet us. He used to write short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and the other magazines that ran fiction in those days. He had ridden some in rodeo, and his father wrote the first book that captured me. In the first grade, each day after lunch, Miss Kessler, in a black dress and her black hair done up with a bun in the back, would stand up in front of the class and read us another chapter of Hugh Lofting's The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, and each day I could hardly wait to hear what the doctor who talked with the animals, and the duck and the monkey were going to do next.

  "I'll tell you what we'd better do," Skipper had said that first night, sitting in the bar of the motel. "I'd sure hate to steer you wrong, hang you up on somebody who just wouldn't be right for everything you want. Maybe we should go up and see Stiffy."

  It was early March, and the rodeo was on for four days. The bar was filled with big hats and broad shoulders, western shirts and big belt buckles, and jeans that tapered down into the boots with the slanted heels and pointed toes. Stiffy, after a western cartoon character, is what Skipper calls Gene Pruett. For twenty-one years Gene Pruett rode saddle broncs. In 1948 he won the world title, and he quit in 1955 and now he was editing Rodeo Sports News, the bi-weekly published by the Rodeo Cowboys Association.

  "What I want to do, or try to do," I said, after Skipper had telephoned and we had gone up to Pruett's room, "is write the definitive magazine piece about rodeo through the life of one cowboy who still ranches. I want a bronc rider or a bull rider, because they put their bodies and sometimes their lives on the line. I want him to be able to tell me how he got into rodeo and why he's in it, and I want to follow him around and into the chutes and find out not only what he does but how he does it."

  "That'd be right fine," Pruett said. He goes to well over six feet and he's thin and bony, and he was sitting sprawled, his back to the desk, with his legs stretched out and his feet on the bed. "I'd admire that."

  "But I need the right man," I said. "He doesn't have to be a champion—I don't care about that—but he does have to be the cowboy the others look up to, so that when the piece runs and they read it, they'll say, 'Yeah. That's it.' "

  "Well," Pruett said, "I'm thinkin', and there's several, but I've been thinkin' about Jim Tescher. How about Tescher, Skip?"

  "Well," Skipper said, "I've thought of Jim Tescher. Everybody respects him, and he sure can ride and he ranches, but I'm not sure how much he'll talk."

  "He's not big on the brag," Pruett said, "but I'll tell you something. It'd be real hard to pick out even two guys who can ride as good as Jim Tescher—maybe not even one—because he's just about as goo
d a bronc rider as there is today. If Jim and his brother Tom had just rodeoed and rodeoed they'd a been champions."

  "That's what Casey Tibbs said," Skipper said, and Casey Tibbs was a nine-time world champion. "Casey said, 'There's no tellin' how far those Teschers could go, if they weren't plagued with common sense.' "

  "I like that," I said.

  "That's the truth," Pruett said. "Tescher has that ranch he owns north of Medora, North Dakota, and he just doesn't get to enough rodeos."

  In rodeo the champion in each event is the one who has earned the most prize money during the year, and the world champion is the one who has earned the most in two or more events. That is like giving the Nobel Prize for medicine to some Park Avenue specialist, and I wanted a cowboy off a ranch and not one of the new school, living in a condominium somewhere, flying his own Cessna, 182 or 206 and making two and sometimes three rodeos a day.

  I wanted that, because rodeo is a reminder of a way of life that is almost gone now forever, and there is no other sport that is as indigenous to this country alone. It goes back as far as the Spanish land grants in California and to those early cattle drives when American cowboys would meet on the trail and at shipping points, and the bragging—"we got a guy can ride anything"—and the betting would start. Sometimes those outfits would bet the works, and we have no other sport that grew as naturally out of a way of life.