Pride

by William Wharton

  Cap’s gums had also been affected by the gas, so he lost most of his teeth except for four on top in front and six on the bottom. The roots had turned blue-purple and rotted out. He was fitted for a full mouth plate so he could chew food properly.

  Also the bulk of his thick blond hair had fallen out, leaving only a thin, fuzzy coating over top of his head. The doctors were not sure if real hair would ever grow back. Cap’s scalp was rubbed each morning and evening with hot oil to try stimulating some growth, but nothing helped.

  He was truly Captain Sture Modig now. He’d been promoted to that field rank in recognition of his service. He was also issued a second purple heart and a distinguished service cross. He mailed both back to his parents in Wisconsin along with simply written explanations as to why he still was not home. He did not tell them the extent of his injuries. Cap Modig had learned to lie by omission.

  He was twenty-two years old and was growing up the hard way. He was also growing restless in the hospital. The handsome, blond, blue-eyed youth with so much promise was now a sallow, sad, unsmiling man who’d lost confidence in promises.

  Finally, just a year after he was wounded, in late 1919, he was discharged. He was declared seventy percent disabled on a permanent basis. For the rest of his life he would receive a monthly disability check from the U.S. government.

  His parents cried when they saw him. It was almost impossible to recognize him as the smiling, always helpful, almost saintly boy who had gone away. He was no longer innocent. In his heart he felt a deep, unresolvable guilt. Cap suffered from what in those days was called shell shock, a combination of a sense of loss for the comradeship he’d known in the midst of battle and a guilt for still being alive.

  The farm was in deep trouble. The prices of milk, butter, grain were so low his parents couldn’t meet the mortgage payments on their acreage. During the years, they’d paid off the second mortgage by hard work, but now had loans on the $10,000 first mortgage. The combination of interest payments owed on the mortgage at $3.60 per acre and taxes of $1.90 per acre were greater than could be earned. Sture’s father was fast becoming a renter farmer, with an insurance company holding the loan on his property; he was in grave danger of losing his equity on the whole farm, a lifetime of hard labor. This was happening at that time to farmers all over the region: Minnesota, Idaho, Wisconsin, the Dakotas.

  Sture decided he could make the farm pay if he invested in a tractor. He had all his back disability money and pay from the time he was in the hospital as well as his discharge bonus. He put it into an International Harvester tractor.

  This tractor became the joy of Sture’s life. He had reason to live again. He’d work it all day in the field, breaking virgin territory into meadows, pulling stumps, plowing. Then, at night, he’d work on it in the barn, taking it apart, learning all its mechanical secrets, designing improvements. Often, he’d stay awake all night, breaking down, studying, analyzing the function of his machine. He began to regain something of his innate confidence in life, in living.

  But the farm still couldn’t make enough money. Cap was fighting something beyond him, an economic tragedy in the making that finally disintegrated into the Great Depression. Sture was also beginning to be restless on the farm.

  Cap, who now wore a cap all the time to hide his premature baldness, wanted to be around motors. He was convinced he could get a job as a mechanic in Detroit, then send home money to help his mom and dad hold on to the farm: There was good money to be made in Detroit if one had mechanical skills, and Cap was convinced he was as good as anybody could be with machines, almost as good as he was with animals.

  His parents were not happy, but they knew it was the only way they could keep the farm, their life dream of being independent. They also saw that Sture was not himself any more. He didn’t get the same joy from animals. He rushed through milking to tinker with his tractor. He was a grown man and had to make his own life.

  Cap walked to Detroit from the farm. He carried extra socks, two extra shirts, extra underwear, and a second pair of pants, all wrapped in a large red bandana at the end of a stick. He looked like a hobo in a comic strip. He also carried a small leather satchel with his tools. Cap didn’t see anything funny in it; this was the way he could carry his things with the least bother; it was like carrying a rifle and an ammo case.

  It didn’t take Cap long to get a job in Detroit. It had become a center for manufacturing automobiles. Cap quickly was recognized as a natural. This bland-faced bald man knew machines as if he’d invented them.

  Within the year, Cap was picked as mechanic by a racing team racing competitively all over America.

  The great boom in auto racing, especially board-track racing, was just then coming to the fore. Cap worked with a team racing the durable and popular Dusenbergs.

  Cap began to travel with them. He went to the two-mile oval board track in Maywood near Chicago. It was here he first had a chance actually to drive one of the cars in a tryout. He was electrified by the experience. Here was a chance for speed in which his damaged lungs and bum leg didn’t hinder him. Cap had tried running at the farm, slogging up hills, drifting down, coughing all the way, struggling for air. Even a mile run was more than he could manage, with his shrapnel-damaged leg.

  Next they raced at Omaha, a mile-and-a-quarter track. Cap began to get a reputation as a mechanic who could also drive. The drivers and other mechanics watched how his natural quickness, his fearlessness, his ability to think under stress gave him control of cars at high speeds. Cap began to enjoy his double reputation as mechanic and potential driver.

  It was at Des Moines, a one-mile track with steep bankings, some steep as forty-five degrees, where Cap got his chance. The driver of the second car was too drunk on the day of the race to drive. The decision was to let Cap try it.

  This car was a “blown job,” a souped-up 1922 model. Cap took his qualifying heat and then came in second in the main event. The main event was twenty-five laps, and there were sixteen cars running. Cap pushed his high-powered job to the maximum but it wasn’t the best car. Cap was the best driver, but he came in second.

  From then on, Cap was a major driver. He made more money each year. In three years he’d paid off the mortgage on the farm. But he wasn’t ready to go back milking cows. The speed, the superlative design of these machines had him captivated. He began to learn that, even more than in the war, here his fearlessness was exceptional. It was what he had to sell.

  Cap raced in Kansas City, Tacoma, Playa Del Rey, Indianapolis, Omaha, Santa Monica road races, the Atlantic City Speedway board track. He won on boards at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and came back to Detroit to win again on the tiny half-mile track there.

  After that race he took off two weeks to go visit with his parents at the farm. This wild-eyed man with the tight-set jaw was even more unfamiliar to them than the hurt and wounded boy who’d come back from the war. Cap’s mother and father didn’t know how to treat him. To them, he was still Sture, although he hadn’t been called that in over three years. He wore a leather cap now with a short bill. He turned it around on his head when he raced; the bill protected his neck from flying splinters on the board tracks. Because of this habit, his racing name was Cap, as much from his headgear as from his former military rank.

  While he was home, Cap helped with the milking and plowing. He took his beloved tractor completely down and rebuilt it. His father watched over his shoulder, shaking his head in amazement. What kind of a son did they have?

  He left the tractor in better shape than when he’d bought it new. He’d added yet more improvements: bored out the cylinders, put in oversize pistons, improved the carburetion, and installed an electro-start, battery, and generator. He left the tractor in great condition, but he also left farming. The excitement and challenges of race driving now occupied completely the forefront of his mind.

  Four years later, after many races, Cap was in California. He was racing with another team, a more important team, a te
am that raced all the major tracks throughout the nation.

  America was in the midst of a grand party, an hysterical party, an ongoing celebration of war’s end, of seeming new prosperity. It was totally unrelated to the grinding, constantly losing battle his mother and father were waging on the farm. It was impossible for Sture to put the two worlds together in his mind, so he didn’t. He was addicted to, fascinated by, the speed of these new machines, the competition, his own skills virtually unmatched, the adulation he received from every side as he won more and more prizes.

  He was staying at the Coronado Hotel right on the beach outside San Diego and had just driven a successful race in which he’d barely missed first place. It was evening, he’d eaten dinner in his hotel room, and was bored. So, he decided to go down by the waterfront.

  He borrowed one of his team’s spare cars to drive into the area where sailors hung out.

  San Diego was then primarily a sailors’ town. Sture was yearning for people of his own background, simple people who knew how to work with their hands. He was, more and more, as a famous auto racer, surrounded by the idle rich, the bored wealthy, looking for cheap thrills; using Sture as a way to obtain them. There were women who wanted him as a plaything, but Sture didn’t want to play or be played with. He was still leery of women.

  Sture went into a bar. It was noisy, smoke-filled, crowded, just what Sture was looking for, a place where he could sit and watch, feel part of things.

  He had been there perhaps an hour or more when a small, compact sailor came in the door. He had a burlap sack under his arm, and slung it onto the bar.

  “Hey, anybody here wanna buy a lion? The skipper won’t let me ship this one on and we’re heading out for Lima tonight.”

  Cap, always interested in animals, drifts over. Judging from his voice and loud bravado, the sailor had apparently been to other bars before he hit this one. Cap moves close to the lion cub. It lies bewildered, close to dying, thin, bedraggled, its fur matted and sticking in tufts from its thin body.

  Cap reaches out for it, pulling the stinking burlap away. “O.K. if I hold this feller for a minute, sailor? He looks pretty tuckered out.”

  The sailor leans over to look at Cap. He’s been getting free drinks all along the waterfront walking into bars with the lion cub. He’s about decided just to drown the animal when the evening’s over. He’s tired of cleaning up filthy, stinking messes, trying to feed it with a milk bottle, then pushing down its throat handfuls of scrap meat he begged from the cook on ship. He’d bought two cubs in Mombasa and the other had died after two days at sea. There’d been a lot of complaining in the locker from his mates about the one cub that was left, and now he had to get rid of it.

  “You wanna buy this little lion, matey? I’ll sell it cheap.”

  He shouts this out, clamoring for attention. He gets it. So far he’s gotten it wherever he’s gone. It was for this he’d kept the poor critter alive, thinking of when he got shore leave, how he’d be the center of things with a real lion.

  “No, I don’t know what I’d do with it. I’m on the move all the time myself.”

  Cap splays the cub out on the bar. He picks at where the milk and meat have clotted around the cub’s muzzle and pulls some running sleep from the corners of its eyes. The cub looks as if it doesn’t have much longer to go; it’ll probably be dead before morning.

  Cap lifts the cub, holds it against his chest. The cub wraps its huge soft front paws around his neck. The rest of the bar has huddled closer. The cub almost tilts off Cap’s cap to expose his bald head. Cap reaches up quickly to hold it in place. He’s still embarrassed by his baldness.

  Cap is surprised how light the cub is: it’s literally only skin—loose skin—and bone. Cap pulls his head back to look into the cub’s eyes and sees they’re half closed, lusterless. There is a bluish cast over them.

  “How much you asking, anyway?”

  “How much’ll you give me, mate?”

  Cap looks into the cub’s eyes again. He’s sure the poor dumb animal is dying.

  “I don’t really know what I’d do with a dead lion cub. He’s too little to make a lionskin rug in my den where I could seduce Theda Bara or somebody like that.”

  Cap is playing to the crowd, too, now. He’s trying not to show his anger at the condition of the helpless cub.

  “You saying I’m mistreating this lion, mate; that whatjur sayin’?”

  Most of the merchant sailors in any bar are looking for a fight, not necessarily one they’d get mixed up in themselves, but something to watch. Still, some of them are really looking for a fight, especially those about to ship out. They want a few cuts, black and blue marks, a black eye, maybe some loose teeth to share with their mates at sea, something to nurse during a long cruise; something to back up the wild stories they’ll tell about shore leave. If you can’t take a woman with you, the next best thing is the remnant of a tough fight.

  Cap realizes this. He doesn’t want to get involved in any rough stuff. He’s getting all the competition he needs driving cars. He’s low on aggression, hostility, desire to prove anything. He hasn’t much to waste on lonely sailors.

  “Nope, but he does look pretty well done in. I’ll bet it’s hard keeping a cub like this on a boat; lions aren’t exactly seagoing animals.”

  The sailor leans over even closer to look at Cap. The sailor’s unsteady on his feet. He has vomit and the smell of sick cat on his uniform. Cap stares levelly. He hopes he doesn’t have to fight a more than half-drunk sailor for a dying baby lion.

  The sailor leans back, swills down his drink.

  “All right. You look like an O.K. guy. What’ll you give me for him, anyway?”

  “How’s twenty bucks sound?”

  “Like plain robbery, that’s how it sounds.”

  The sailor reaches over and takes the cub from Cap’s arms. He grabs him from underneath behind the front paws just below the shoulder joints and holds him up in the air with one hand.

  “This bastard’s offered me twenty dollars for my lion cub. Anybody here willing to give me more than that?”

  There’s quiet up and down the bar. The bartender moves along the bar toward the sailor. Cap stares up at the cub; there are some dark marks across his muzzle as if he’s been hit or scratched. Cap holds out his hand for the cub.

  “O.K. I’ll make it twenty-five, but that’s it.”

  The sailor yanks the cub away. Cap reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He has most of his prize money stashed at the hotel but he has forty dollars in his pocket. He pulls out two tens and a five, spreads them like a poker hand, looks the half-drunk sailor in the eye, then shifts them to the eyes of the cub. This lion is so sick, so tired, he looks more like a newborn calf than anything. The sailor lowers the cub onto the bar again, looks at Cap aggressively.

  “Hell, this critter’s worth at least a hundred dollars to any zoo. He’s a valuable animal. I paid fifty dollars for two of them and had to pay the coxswain another ten to let me keep them on ship. Lost the other just out of that crummy African port. This one’s worth more than a lousy twenty-five bucks, I can tell you that.”

  He orders another drink. Cap spreads and leaves his money on the bar. He’s beginning to wonder what he’s doing. He knows he’s not drunk, but what in hell will he do with a baby lion cub? He knows he’s thinking the cub will die in a few days at the most, but even so, how’ll he smuggle it up into his hotel room? What’ll he do with it during the days? He can’t possibly travel across the country in a car with a lion cub.

  There’s a moment’s pause and the sailor sweeps Cap’s money off the bar.

  “O.K., matey. You drive a hard bargain but this here lion’s yours now. He needs a couple bottles of milk a day and he’s started eating meat. Here’s the bottle and some nipples.”

  He reaches into the shore bag at his feet. “Try to keep him warm nights; he comes from a hot place. I tell you he’s gentle as a kitten but watch out for them claws; he’s not care
ful sometimes and they’re sharp.”

  He pulls up the sleeve of one arm and shows long raked scars down the length of it. The sailors at the bar laugh. They all figure this landlubber with the leather hat’s been taken to the cleaners. Who the hell wants a lion cub anyway? He’s not much different from some alley cat, only bigger.

  The sailor pulls down his sleeve.

  “Here, mate, have a drink, on me.”

  Cap joins in, glugs down his drink. He has the cub against his chest; from its breathing he can tell it’s asleep. Its thin stomach rises and falls. Cap is surprised at how long the cub’s body is, even though it’s young. When the cub breathes out he can see the vault of his ribs; there are soft folds of skin over his empty belly. Cap wants to get out fast, buy some milk, some meat, a brush, and take the cub back to his hotel.

  Cap leaves to the cheers and jeers of sailors. He buys the things he needs at a little market by the waterfront, one he knows is open till midnight. It’s where he buys soda crackers and ginger ale to nibble on in the hotel when he can’t sleep. The old man in the store can’t believe Cap has a real live lion cub in his arms. He’s sympathetic but scared. It’s the first time Cap runs up against the almost universal fear of large cats.

  Cap manages to smuggle the cub into his room by going up the back way. He puts some milk in the bottle with a nipple the sailor gave him. The cub’s so sleepy, or maybe in the process of dying, Cap has a hard time getting him to start sucking, but once he starts the cub empties the bottle twice. Then Cap opens up the pound package of ground round he’s bought and puts it on the floor. He lowers the cub to the rug; the cub collapses onto its side. He’s so weak he can’t stand.

  So Cap takes pieces of meat and pushes them into the cub’s mouth. When he gets it past the milk teeth and onto the tongue, the cub gulps and swallows. Cap gets half his meat into the cub’s mouth before it falls asleep.