“I don’t think you’ll have to write this down, Lieutenant, having had a painful lesson, which caught your attention, but metal at forty degrees below zero sticks to the hand.”
“I feel like a fucking fool,” Jack said, examining his angry red fingers. “I knew better than that.”
“Feeling like a fucking fool is the first step to acquiring—more important, remembering—knowledge,” Lunsford said unctuously. “Can I trust you with the ice pick, or will you stab yourself in the hand with it?”
Jack picked up one of the blocks of ice, put it into the galvanized tub, and began hacking at it.
“After you ram knowledge down the throats of the unwilling to learn, it is necessary to pat them on the head,” Lunsford said. “It’s something like giving a dog a bone. Unfortunately, the Army doesn’t recognize this universal truth, and officers have to pay for the beer themselves.”
When there were three cases of beer covered with ice in the tubs, Lunsford carefully chained the refrigerator and freezer doors again.
“Now we go outside, and act as if we haven’t moved, until our reluctant students show up, huffing and puffing and feeling sorry for themselves,” he said.
With Thomas leading the column, the men trotted up to them five minutes later.
Master Sergeant Thomas saluted.
“Sir, the detail is formed,” he said.
Lunsford returned the salute casually. He did not get up.
“Put the men at at ease, please, Sergeant,” Lunsford said.
Thomas executed an about-face movement and bellowed, “At ease!”
The men relaxed, and put their hands behind their backs.
“As Sergeant Thomas may have told you,” Lunsford said. “Lieutenant Portet will now critique our little operation. Lieutenant, will you please stand up and face the men?”
Jack, feeling very awkward, got to his feet and looked at fifteen black, scornful, unfriendly faces.
“We are now going to play truth or consequences,” Lunsford said. “And we will start with Lieutenant Portet. Lieutenant, what is the first thing you think of when you hear Sergeant Thomas attempt to speak Swahili?”
Jack looked at Thomas and was horrified to hear himself blurt, “He sounds like a white man.”
That was too much for Master Sergeant Thomas.
“With all respect, Lieutenant, I think I learned my Swahili the same way you learned yours, from a missionary.”
“At the Presidio, you mean, Sergeant Thomas?” Lunsford asked sympathetically.
The Army Language School was at the Presidio, in San Francisco, California.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said righteously. “The instructor told us he learned Swahili as a missionary in the Congo.”
“All those who remember what I said to you the first time we met about ‘never trust anyone,’ and ‘always remember that things are very seldom what they first appear to be,’ raise your hands,” Lunsford said.
One by one, fourteen soldiers, feeling like schoolchildren, raised their hands.
“You don’t remember me saying that, Sergeant Thomas?” Lunsford asked.
Sergeant Thomas raised his hand.
“You may now lower your hands,” Lunsford said.
There were some smiles as they did so.
“Since you all obviously need it, I will now prove that you should never trust anyone,” Lunsford said. “I told Sergeant Thomas that Lieutenant Portet was studying to be a missionary, and that he learned how to speak Swahili in the Florida Baptist College. I lied.”
He let that sink in a moment.
“He is not, in other words, what he appears to be. I happen to know his teacher, and she assures me that Lieutenant Portet speaks Swahili, and several other Congolese dialects, as well as anyone born and raised there. Lieutenant Portet wasn’t born there, but he was raised there. He learned how to speak Swahili at the knee of the toughest black lady I have ever met. Her name is Mary Magdalene Lotetse. She’s got three inches and fifty pounds on Sergeant Thomas, and if she says Lieutenant Portet’s Swahili is perfect, I am not about to argue with her. But just for the record, I know his Swahili is better than mine.”
He let that sink in for a moment.
“Is there among this band of would-be warriors, Lieutenant Portet, in your judgment, any one who would not be spotted as a tool of the Imperialist Devils—the prize for which, gentlemen, is having your head sliced open, or off, on the spot, with a dull machete—the minute he opened his mouth in the woods around Stanleyville?”
Two of the men had spoken surprisingly good Congolese, and Jack found their faces. He could not recall their names, but that didn’t matter, he realized with relief, because Lunsford had said they were all at least sergeants.
“The sergeant there, sir,” Jack said, pointing. “And the sergeant there, sir. They could, with a little luck, pass themselves off as Congolese.”
“Let the record show the witness identified Sergeant First Class DeGrew,” Lunsford said. “And Staff Sergeant Williams. Try to remember their names, Lieutenant. I know all we Negroes look alike to you honkies, but if you’re going to be with us, I would appreciate it if you would try to learn people’s names.”
Now there were a number of smiles. The major’s giving it to the lieutenant, too.
“Sergeant DeGrew and Sergeant Williams, you have an additional duty from this moment forward,” Lunsford said. “Every time, and I mean every time, you hear anyone—including our beloved Master Sergeant Thomas—saying anything wrong in Swahili, you will not only correct him on the spot, but make him repeat it and repeat it for however long it takes until he’s got it right. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Williams and DeGrew said in unison.
“The U.S. government has invested a lot of my tax dollars in you people,” Lunsford said. “And I don’t want it flushed down the toilet, as it would be if you’re running around the bush, open your mouth to some bona fide African, and he says, ‘Hey, that brother speaks Congolese like a honky’ or words to that effect, and cuts your stupid head off. Clear?”
There were shrugs of acknowledgment, admitting the logic behind Lunsford’s orders.
“And now another show of hands, please. If I announced that this honky airplane driver wants to join our little private army, but that I was leaving it up to you, how many of you would vote to take him?”
After a long pause, one hand went up, and it was evident from the look on his face that he had done it to get a laugh. He got it.
“And I was just starting to hope that maybe at least of couple of you weren’t as stupid as you look,” Lunsford said.
He waited until that had time to settle in, then went on.
“Let me set the scene for you. You are a Belgian paratrooper. You have just landed in Stanleyville, where some really nasty people have been practicing cannibalism on white people, possibly including your relatives. You go to the apartment house where you hope your relatives are. There are dead white people all over the lawn, and in the elevators. You break into your apartment, and there is this barefoot black guy in a Belgian officer’s tunic, a leopard skin, and shorts. And, of course, holding a gun. You’d blow the motherfucker away, right?”
There were no smiles now.
“Teeter?” Lunsford said, pointing to one of them.
“Yes, sir, that’s what I’d do.”
“Anybody who wouldn’t blow the motherfucker away, raise your hand.”
No hand raised.
“Well, lucky for me—I was the black guy in the Simba suit— that paratrooper thought before he pulled the trigger. Lucky for me, that Belgian paratrooper had control of himself under pressure. I don’t think I would have had that control myself. That Belgian paratrooper did.”
“You’re talking about the lieutenant, aren’t you, sir?” Master Sergeant Thomas said. “We heard that an American jumped with the Belgians. . . .”
Lunsford didn’t reply.
“Anybody who wants to change his mind about the lieutena
nt,” Sergeant Thomas said. “Raise your hand.”
His hand rose.
“Jesus, Major, how were we supposed to know?” one of them asked as his hand went up.
“You were supposed to think,” Lunsford said. “The only way you’re going to stay alive is if you think.”
Lunsford waited until they all had raised their hands.
“Enough with the hands bullshit,” he said. “You all look ridiculous. And this is the Army—we don’t take votes.”
Now there was laughter.
“From this moment, Lieutenant Portet is our resident expert,” Lunsford said. “If he says something, you treat it like it came from me. I just hope you’re smart enough to understand how lucky we are to have him.” He paused. “One more thing. If one of you runs off at the mouth and repeats what I said about Lieutenant Portet being the American who jumped on Stanleyville, I’ll feed him his balls.”
He paused.
“You have anything else, Lieutenant?”
“There’s just one problem, sir. There’s a lot of beer in that building that’s going to get warm unless someone starts to drink it.”
“So there is,” Lunsford said. “Okay, what happens now is that you will form a line, walk past Lieutenant Portet, state your name, and say that you are happy to meet him, or words to that effect. With a little bit of luck, he’ll remember them the next time you see him.”
One by one, they filed past Jack and shook his hand, and said they were happy to meet him, or words to that effect. Jack had the feeling they meant it.
“If you’ve got something on your mind, Jack, say it,” Lunsford said as they were riding from Pope Air Force Base to the Main PX at Fort Bragg.
“Although there was a lot of bullshit in that session,” Jack said, “it was masterful.”
“But?”
“I’m not the heroic, calm-under-pressure officer you made me out to be, and you know it.”
“Neither am I heroic, or calm under pressure. The trick is not letting the troops find out.”
“I don’t know if I can pull that off.”
“You can if you try. I’ve been doing it for years. You owe it to the troops, Jack, to make them think you’re something special. They need to think their officers are something special. And you’re an officer now.”
Jack shrugged uncomfortably.
“And speaking of the troops, you owe me . . . three times two ninety-eight is eight ninety-six, divided by two is four forty-eight. You owe me four dollars and forty-eight cents, and I would like it now, please.”
“What for?”
“Your share of the beer.”
VI
[ ONE ]
123 Brookwood Lane
Ozark, Alabama
1550 20 December 1964
“Good, she’s home,” Marjorie Bellmon said aloud when she saw Liza Wood’s Buick station wagon in the carport.
She turned the Jaguar off the street and drove up the drive.
Liza, a tall, lithe, strikingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old who wore her flamboyantly red hair in a pageboy, was in the carport, stuffing bags into a garbage can.
When she saw Marjorie, she smiled and walked up to the car.
“Hi,” Marjorie said.
“It must be love. He’s letting you drive his Jaguar,” Liza said.
“I had to take it to the provost marshal’s to get him a temporary sticker for it,” Marjorie said, and added, “a blue sticker.”
“A blue sticker? What’s that all about?” She didn’t give Marjorie time to reply before adding, “It’ll wait until we get in the house. It’s cold out here.”
She opened the kitchen door for Marjorie, who walked in.
A small boy ran to her and wrapped his arms around her leg. “M’Jeri,” he cried happily in his best, if failing, attempt to say her name.
Marjorie scooped him up.
“Hello, handsome,” she said. “Where in the world have you and Mommy been? Aunt Mar-jor-ee has been looking all over for you.”
She looked at Liza as she spoke.
“I’m about to have a drink,” Liza said. “You want one?”
Marjorie thought it over for a moment.
“Yeah, why not? What are you offering?”
“Whatever you’d like. I’m going to have a Bloody Mary.”
“Sounds fine,” Marjorie said. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Skiing in Colorado.”
“For three weeks? Your mother-in-law wouldn’t tell me where you were.”
“I told her not to tell anyone,” Liza said. “Tell me about the blue sticker.”
“I heard about you and Johnny,” Marjorie said. “I’m sorry.”
“I wanted to get away from here, and I suppose in the back of my mind, there was the hope that I would find some handsome stud by the fireplace in the ski lodge, who would take my mind off the goddamned army.”
“The goddamned army, or Johnny?”
“Both.”
“And?”
“I wouldn’t want this spread around, it would ruin my reputation, but when it came to the nitty-gritty, I decided there had to be a better way to get my act together than letting some moronic suntanned ski bum into my pants.”
“And is your act together?”
“God, I hope so. Tell me about the blue sticker.”
“Bmari,” Allan said. “Bmari, bmari!”
Liza handed him a glass with red liquid in it.
“No booze, of course,” Liza said. “But he likes it, Tabasco and all. I live in fear I’m going to give him the wrong glass sometime.”
She handed Marjorie a Bloody Mary.
“There is gin in there, so make sure he doesn’t pick it up. Now, what about the blue sticker? The temporary blue sticker, I think you said.”
“Did they have newspapers where you were?”
“No, they communicate with tom-toms and smoke signals out there. Blue sticker?”
“Then you read about what happened at Stanleyville?”
“Sure. God, that was terrible. They were actually . . . cannibals.”
“Specifically, did you see the picture of the Belgian paratrooper carrying the little girl in his arms?”
Liza searched her memory.
“Yeah, I did. It looked like he’d been shot in the nose.”
“He wasn’t shot in the nose. He fell off a truck. That was Jack.”
“I have the strangest feeling that you’re not pulling my leg,” Liza said after a long moment.
“Girl Scout’s honor,” Marjorie said. “Cross my heart and hope to die, et cetera.”
“What the hell was he doing in Africa?” Liza asked.
“He wasn’t supposed to jump with the Belgians, but he did anyway. The Belgians are going to give him a medal.”
Liza shook her head.
“And we’re going to get married,” Marjorie said.
“That’s even worse news,” Liza said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Marjorie agreed. “And he came back, and I drove to Bragg to see him, and he proposed in words I will remember to my dying day. ‘Screw your job,’ my knight in shining armor said, ‘let’s get married.’ ”
Liza smiled at her.
“And you apparently were overwhelmed by the eloquence and said ‘yes.’ ”
“Yeah,” Marjorie said.
“Well, you’re obviously happy about it, so I’m happy for you. And he’s an officer now, with his own blue sticker?”
“Yeah,” Marjorie said, and chuckled. “First lieutenant. Bobby had to pin his insignia on for him. He didn’t know how.”
“First lieutenant? That ought to make things easier for you at home.”
“And I want you to be my maid of honor.”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
“Why not?”
“He whose name I have sworn never again to say out loud, your daddy’s dog-robber, will be there, right?”
“Wha
t’s that got to do with anything?”
“Let me pass, Marjorie, please,” Liza said.
“That’s an admission you don’t have your act together,” Marjorie accused. “You still love him.”
“I didn’t say I don’t love the sonofabitch,” Liza said. “I said I wasn’t going to go through the pain of losing a husband again, or, worse, put Allan through something like that. I gave him the choice, the Army, or Allan and me, and it wasn’t Allan and me.”
Marjorie didn’t reply.
“I don’t want to be a camp follower, Marjorie. And there’s no reason we have to be. You heard about the money he got from his father’s estate?”
“Not in much detail,” Marjorie said. “I overheard Craig Lowell tell my father that his sister and brother-in-law had tried to cheat him.”
“They did. And didn’t get away with it. Jack came out of that with two million three hundred twenty thousand dollars. And change.”
“I had no idea it was that much,” Marjorie said.
“It would have been more, if he had been willing to stick her the way she tried to stick him. But he’s an officer and a gentleman, and he wanted ‘to be fair.’ ”
“That’s hardly a character flaw,” Marjorie said.
“With that kind of money, and with what I’ve got, we could have really built a life for ourselves. I’d have done anything he wanted, the whole ‘whither thou goest’ routine, as long as it wasn’t someplace the Army could find him and send him off somewhere to get killed.”
“My father spent his entire life in the Army, and he’s alive,” Marjorie said.
“And all her life, your mother worried herself sick that he would be,” Liza said. “I’ve been down that road. You’re about to start down it yourself. I don’t have that kind of strength. Not an opinion. A fact. I waited for Allan to come back, I prayed—my God, how I prayed—that he would come back. And he did. In a casket. And I damned near died. I’m not going to go through that again, because I know I couldn’t handle it again.”
They looked at each other a moment.
“We’re on opposite sides on this one, Marjorie,” Liza said. “I hope the same thing doesn’t happen to you. I’ll pray that it doesn’t happen to you, but thank you just the same, I’ll pass on being your matron of honor.”
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