by Irwin Shaw
“I was havin’ a dream,” Stellevato said, slouched into his raincoat, with all the buttons torn off, a squat, unsoldierly silhouette with a carelessly held weapon angling off its shoulder, “a dream about the United States when that son of a bitch Keane woke me up. That Keane,” Stellevato said angrily, “there’s somethin’ wrong with him. He comes over and smacks me across the shins like a cop kickin’ a bum off a park bench, and he makes a helluva racket, he keeps sayin’, loud enough to wake up the whole Army, ‘Wake up, Boy, it’s rainin’ out and you got some walkin’ to do, come on, wake up, Boy, you got to walk in the cold, cold rain.’” Stellevato shook his head aggrievedly. “He don’t have to tell me. I can see it’s rainin’. He enjoys makin’ people miserable, that feller. And this dream I was havin’, I didn’t want it to break off in the middle …” Stellevato’s voice grew remote and soft. “I was on the truck with my old man. It was a sunny day in the summertime and my old man was sitting on the seat next to me, sort of sleeping and smoking one of those crooked little black cigars, Italo Balbo cigars, maybe you know them?”
“Yes,” said Michael gravely. “Five for ten cents.”
“Italo Balbo,” said Stellevato, “he’s the one who flew from Italy. He was a big hero to the Italians a long time ago and they named a cigar after him.”
“I heard of him,” said Michael. “He got killed in Africa.”
“He did? I ought to write it to my old man. He can’t read, but my girl, Angelina, comes over and reads the letters to him and my old lady. Well, he was smokin’ one of these cigars,” Stellevato’s voice fell back into the soft Boston summertime of the dream, “and we was goin’ slow because we had to stop at every other house, and he woke up and he said, ‘Nikki, take twenty-fi’ cents’ worth up to Mrs. Schwartz today, but tell her she gotta pay cash.’ I could hear his voice just like I was back on the truck behind the wheel,” Stellevato murmured. “So I got off the truck and I picked up the ice, and I went up the stairs to Mrs. Schwartz, and my father yelled after me, ‘Nikki, come on ri’ down. Don’t you stay up there with that Mrs. Schwartz.’ He was always yelling things like that at me, and then he would go off to sleep and he wouldn’t know if I stayed up there for the matinee and evening performance. Mrs. Schwartz opened the door, we had all kinds of customers in that neighborhood, Italian, Irish, Polack, Jewish, I was very popular with everybody, and you’d be surprised all the whiskey and coffee cake and noodle soup I got in a day’s work on that route. Mrs. Schwartz opened the door, a nice fat blonde woman, and she patted my cheek and she said, ‘Nikki, it’s a hot day, stay and I’ll give you a glass of beer,’ but I said, ‘My father is waiting downstairs and he’s wide awake,’ so she said come back at four o’clock, and she gave me the twenty-five cents and I went downstairs and my father looked sore, and he said, ‘Nikki, you gotta make up your mind, are you a businessman or are you the farmer’s prize bull?’ But then he laughed and said, ‘As long as you got the twenty-fi’ cents, O.K.’ Then somehow, everybody was in the truck, the whole family, like on Sunday, and my girl Angelina, and her mother, and we were comin’ home from the beach, and I was just holding Angelina’s hand, she never lets me do anything else, because we’re going to get married, but her old lady is a different story, and we were sitting down at the table, everybody was there, my two brothers, the one that’s in Guadalcanal and the one that’s in Iceland, and my old man pouring a bottle of wine he made and my old lady bringing a big plate of spaghetti … And that’s when that son of a bitch Keane hit me across the shins …”
Stellevato fell silent for a moment. “I really wanted to come to the end of that dream,” he said softly, and then Michael knew that he was weeping.
Tactfully, Michael said nothing.
“We had two General Motors trucks. Painted yellow,” Stellevato said, his voice echoing with homesickness for the yellow trucks, for his father, for the streets of Boston, for the weather of Massachusetts, for the flesh of Mrs. Schwartz, and the touch of his fiancée’s hand, for the wine of his home and the clamor of his brothers’ voices over the Sunday-night spaghetti. “We was expanding. My father started out with a eighteenyear-old horse and a secondhand wagon when he arrived from Italy, and by the time the war began we had two trucks and we were thinking of buying another one and hiring a man to run it. Then me and my brothers were drafted and we had to sell the trucks and my old man went and got another horse, because he can’t read or write and he can’t run a truck. My girl writes he loves the horse, it’s a spotted one, very young, only seven years old, but it’s no General Motors truck. We were really doing all right. Right on my route I had fourteen different women I could visit any time I wanted to between the hours of nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. I’ll bet, Mike,”. Stellevato said, his voice youthfully proud, “you never had anything like that in Hollywood.”
“Never, Nikki,” said Michael gravely. “There was never anything like that in Hollywood.”
“When I get back, though,” Stellevato said soberly, “that’s all changed. I’m going to marry Angelina or somebody else if Angelina’s changed her mind, and I’m going to raise some kids, and it’s going to be one woman for me and that’s all, and if I ever catch her cheating, I’ll put the ice forks through her skull …”
I must write this to Margaret, Michael thought, the fourteen women on one route all forsworn and the single love firmly established in the war-weary heart.
Michael heard the sound of a man climbing out of his tent near by. He saw a shadowy figure approaching.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
“Pavone,” a voice said in the darkness, then, as a hurried afterthought, “Colonel Pavone.”
Pavone came up to Michael and Stellevato. “Who’s on?” he asked.
“Stellevato and Whitacre,” said Michael.
“Hello, Nikki,” said Pavone. “Having a good time?”
“Great, Colonel.” Stellevato’s voice was warm and pleased. He was very fond of Pavone, who treated him more as a mascot than as a soldier, and who occasionally traded dirty jokes and stories of the old country in Italian with him.
“Whitacre,” said Pavone, “are you all right?”
“Dandy,” said Michael. In the rainy darkness there was a sense of friendliness and relaxation that never could exist between the Colonel and the enlisted men in the full light of day.
“Good,” said Pavone. His voice was tired and reflective as he leaned against the jeep hood beside them. Carelessly, he lit a cigarette, not hiding the match, his eyebrows shining dark and heavy in the sudden small flare:
“You come out to relieve me, Colonel?” Stellevato asked.
“Not exactly, Nikki. You sleep too much anyway. You’ll never amount to anything if you sleep all the time.”
“I don’t want to amount to anything,” Stellevato said. “I just want to get back to my ice route.”
“If I had a route like that,” said Michael, “I’d want to get back to it, too.”
“Did he tell you those lies about the fourteen women, too?” Pavone asked.
“I swear to God,” Stellevato said.
“I never knew an Italian who told the truth about women,” said Pavone. “If you ask me, Nikki’s a virgin.”
“I’ll show you some of the letters they write me,” Stellevato said, his tone injured.
“Colonel,” Michael said, emboldened by the darkness and the joking, “I’d like to talk to you for a minute. That is, if you’re not going back to bed.”
“I can’t sleep,” said Pavone. “Sure. Come on, let’s take a walk.” He and Michael took two or three steps together. Pavone stopped and called to Stellevato, “Watch out for paratroopers and husbands, Nikki.”
He took Michael’s arm lightly as they walked away from the jeep. “You know something,” he said softly, “I believe Nikki’s telling the absolute truth about that ice route.” He chuckled. Then his voice grew more serious. “What’s on your mind, Michael?”
“I wanted to ask a fav
or.” Michael hesitated. Here, again, he thought irritably, the endless necessity of decision. “I want you to have me transferred to a combat unit.”
Pavone walked quietly ‘for a moment. “What is it?” he asked. “Brooding?”
“Maybe,” said Michael, “maybe. The church today, the Canadians … I don’t know. I began to remember what I was in the war for.”
“You know what you’re in the war for?” Pavone laughed dryly. “Lucky man.” They walked ten paces in silence. “When I was Nikki’s age,” he said, finally, surprisingly, “a woman gave me the worst time of my life.”
Michael bit his lips, annoyed at the manner in which Pavone had ignored him.
“Tonight, lying there in my tent, during the air raid, I kept remembering it,” Pavone said reflectively. “That’s why I couldn’t sleep. I was nineteen years old and I was running a burlesque theatre in New York. I was making three hundred dollars a week and I kept a girl in an apartment on Central Park South. A beautiful girl …” In Pavone’s voice, soft and full of memory and longing, the beauty of the girl in the apartment on Central Park South so many years before was sorrowfully celebrated. “I was crazy about her. I spent all my money on her, and I used to think about her all day long. When you’re nineteen years old and as funny-looking as I am, your gratitude can unhinge your mind. You don’t see the plainest thing that every elevator operator and colored maid understands the first time they clap eyes on you and the girl together. She had a friend. A girl from Minneapolis who worked in the same night club. I used to take them both out to dinner almost every night. They used to make me feel like a big man, laughing at my jokes, giving me silly presents they’d buy for me … Shaking their heads and worrying about my drinking too much and smoking too many cigars. Two women like that can make you feel more important than the President of the United States. At the age of nineteen, I thought I was one of the most promising and unique specimens ever to show up on Manhattan Island. Then one afternoon, I came home early and I found them in bed together.” Pavone stopped and pulled thoughtfully at a loose piece of canvas on a weapons carrier that was parked under a tree. “I’ll never forget the way they looked at me when I came into the room. Cold, wild, despising me … Then my girl giggled. I remember the first thing that came into my head, ‘They’re laughing at me because I’m a Wop.’ I went after them. I beat them till I couldn’t raise my hands any more. They tried to run away from me, but they never opened their mouths. They didn’t scream or beg or anything, they just kept running around the apartment, naked, falling, not making a sound, until I quit and left. When I went downstairs into the street I was sure everyone knew all about me, everyone in the city, that I was a fool, that I was no good as a man … I couldn’t stand it. I went down to the office of the French Line and I got passage on the Champlain for the next day. I stayed drunk all the way over and I arrived in Paris with forty dollars to my name … I’ve been running away from that bedroom ever since … God,” he said, looking up at the dark, rainy sky, “twenty years later, in a hole in the ground, in the middle of an air raid, I wake up feeling myself blush from head to toe, thinking about it. Thanks for listening to me,” Pavone said brusquely. “If it’s dark enough, or I’m drunk enough, I can tell the story. It helps considerably. I’m going back to bed.”
“Colonel,” Michael began, “I started to ask you a favor.”
“What?” Pavone stopped and turned back to Michael.
“I want to ask you to transfer me to a combat outfit,” Michael said, feeling silly at the heroics of his request.
Pavone chuckled sourly. “What bedroom are you running from?” he asked.
“It isn’t anything like that,” Michael said, encouraged by the darkness. “It’s just that I feel I have to be of use …”
“What egotism,” Pavone said, and Michael was surprised by the loathing in his voice. “Christ, I hate intellectual soldiers! You think all the Army has to do these days is make sure you can make the proper sacrifice to satisfy your jerky little consciences! Not happy in the service?” he inquired harshly. “You don’t think driving a jeep is dignified enough for a college graduate? You won’t be content until you get a bullet in your balls. The Army isn’t interested in your problems, Mr. Whit-acre. The Army’ll use you when it needs you, don’t you worry. Maybe for only one minute in four years, but it’ll use you. And maybe you’ll have to die in that minute, but meanwhile don’t come around with your goddamn cocktail-party conscience, asking me to give you a cross to climb on. I’m busy running an outfit and I can’t take the time or the effort to put up crosses for half-baked PFC’s from Harvard.”
“I didn’t go to Harvard,” Michael said absurdly.
“Never mention that transfer to me again, Soldier,” Pavone said. “Good night.”
“Yes, Sir,” Michael said. “Thank you, Sir.”
Pavone turned and strode off in the darkness toward his pup-tent, his shoes making a sliding wet sound on the grass.
The son of a bitch, Michael thought bruisedly, it just shows you can’t trust an officer. Slowly he trudged past the line of pup-tents, obscure shadows in the wet night. He felt embarrassed and hurt. No part of a war ever turned out to be anything like what you expected it to be. He stopped at his own tent and reached in and took out the bottle of Calvados he had been hoarding. He took a long drink, the raw alcohol knotting and burning in his chest. I’ll probably die, Michael thought, of an ulcer of the duodenum, in a field hospital near Cherbourg. I’ll be buried in the same cemetery with the men of the First Division and the Twenty-ninth who died taking pillboxes and broken ancient towns, and the French will come out on Sunday and put flowers on my grave in sorrowful gratitude. He took another drink, emptying the bottle, and placed the bottle back under the canvas.
He walked thoughtfully down the line. Everybody is in flight, he thought dreamily, through the Calvados, in flight from Lesbians, in flight from the Italians and the Jews who were their parents, in flight from frigid wives and brothers who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, in flight from the infantry and regret, in flight from conscience and misspent lives. The Germans five miles away, too, it would be interesting to know what they were in flight from. Two armies in despairing flight toward each other, fleeing the dreadful memories of peace.
Ah, God, Michael thought, watching the first charcoal of dawn smudge the sky over the German Army, ah, God, how wonderful it would be to be killed today.
CHAPTER THIRTY
AT NINE O’CLOCK the planes started to come over. B-17s, B-24s, Mitchells, Marauders. Noah had never seen so many planes in his whole life. It was like the Air Forces in the recruiting posters, deliberate, orderly, shining in a bright-blue summer sky, aluminum tribute to the inexhaustible energy and cunning of the factories of America. Noah stood up in the hole he had been living in for the past week with Burnecker and watched the smooth formations with interest.
“It’s about time,” Burnecker said sourly. “The stinking Air Force. They should’ve been here three days ago.”
Noah watched without saying anything, as flak from the German guns began to bloom in black puffs among the glistening shapes so high above the lines. Here and there a plane was hit and wavered out of formation. Some of the stricken planes turned and glided down the sky, trailing smoke, making for friendly fields behind them, but others exploded in silent bursts of fire, pale against the bright sky, and hurtled down the many thousands of feet in disintegrating balls of smoke and flame. Parachutes gleamed here and there and swung deliberately over the battlefield, white silk parasols for a sunny, summer, French morning.
Burnecker was right. The attack was to have started three days before. But the weather had been bad. Yesterday the Air Forces had sent some planes over, but the clouds had closed in and after an opening bombardment, the planes had gone back and the infantry had clung to its holes. But this morning, there was no doubt about it.
“It’s sunny enough today,” Burnecker said, “to kill the whole German Army from 30,000
feet.”
At eleven o’clock, after the Air Forces had theoretically destroyed or demoralized all the opposition in front of the massed American troops on the ground, the infantry was to move, open a hole for the armor, and keep it open for the rolling fresh divisions which would pierce deep into the German rear. Lieutenant Green, who was now in command of the Company, had explained it all very clearly to them. While the men had on the surface kept a cool skepticism about this neat arrangement, it was impossible now, watching the terrible precision of the huge aircraft above them, not to feel that this was going to be easy.
Good, Noah thought, it is going to be a parade. Ever since his return from the days behind the enemy lines, he had kept to himself as much as he could, remaining reticent, trying, in the days of rest which had been permitted him, and the more or less uneventful hours in the line, to develop a new attitude, a philosophy of aloof detachment, to protect him once and for all from the hatred of Rickett and whichever other men in the Company felt as Rickett did about him. In a way, as he watched the planes roar above him, and heard the thunder of their bombs out in front of him, he was grateful to Rickett. Rickett had absolved him from the necessity of proving himself, because he had demonstrated that no matter what Noah did, if he took Paris singlehanded, if he killed an SS brigade in a day, Rickett would not accept him.
Now, Noah decided, nothing is up to me. I travel with the tide. No faster, no slower, no better, no worse. If they want to adyance, I will advance, if they want to run, I’ll run. Standing in the damp hole, behind the everlasting green hedge, listening to the wild grumbling of the bombs and the shriek of the artillery over his head, he felt strangely at peace with his new decision. It was a gloomy and hopeless peace, and it came only from the most bitter defeat of his dearest hopes, but it was soothing, relaxing, and, in a sour way, held promise of survival in it.
He watched the planes with interest.