Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

by Max Shulman

  “Nobody does nothin’ like that to us!” said Grady.

  “You betcher butt,” said Charlie and Wally and Ed and Fred.

  “If they’re lookin’ for trouble, by God, we’ll give it to ’em!” said Grady.

  “Yeh,” said Charlie and Wally and Fred, but Ed, who was a shade more cautious, asked, “Give ’em what, hey?”

  “A rumble!” declared Grady.

  “Oh,” said the others with a large lack of enthusiasm.

  “You ain’t chicken?” asked Grady, looking hard at his crew.

  “Of course not,” said Charlie. “Hell, I love a good rumble. But who needs it with these guys? What I mean, our broads’ll be runnin’ back to us before you know it. I mean, this is only the first time they seen these Army cats. Wait’ll the novelty wears off.”

  “Sure!” cried Wally and Ed and Fred, embracing the argument.

  “Yeh?” said Grady doubtfully.

  “Sure!” said all with great positiveness.

  “Well, maybe you’re right,” Grady allowed. “But,” he added grimly, “it better not take too long. Otherwise there’s gonna be blood spilt—G.I. blood!”

  “Hello, fellows,” Lieutenant Guido di Maggio said, strolling by. “Did you get enough to eat?”

  “Yeh,” they said.

  “That’s nice,” said Guido and strolled on and came upon Maggie Larkin, who was working at the punch bowl.

  “Hi, hon,” he said with a loving smile.

  “Hi, dear,” said Maggie, smiling back. “What a wonderful party!”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Guido agreed. “I was kind of worried at first.”

  “About Captain Hoxie?” said Maggie. “Oh, he’s a perfect lamb. I’ve been watching him. He stands there and talks to everybody just as nice as pie!”

  “I knew he’d like the people if he gave them half a chance,” said Guido.

  “And your soldier boys are darling!” said Maggie. “Just darling!”

  “Yes,” nodded Guido. “A dandy group.”

  “As far as public relations is concerned, you haven’t got a thing to worry about,” said Maggie.

  “You know something?” said Guido, smiling like the Mask of Comedy. “I believe you’re right!”

  19

  Guido di Maggio, frowning like the Mask of Tragedy, crouched in front of the dugout at the Little League Field on Ram’s Head Beach. The Mask of Comedy had not stayed with him long. It had, in fact, slipped off the very day after the Welcome Nike party when Guido, still jovial, had come into Captain Walker Hoxie’s office and had said cheerily, “Well, sir, that was quite a little shindig yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  “Grn,” Walker had said.

  “It’s like I felt from the beginning,” Guido had continued. “There’s nothing basically incompatible between us and the town. We give a little, they give a little—that’s all it takes.”

  “Rowr,” Walker had said.

  “A lot of people asked me yesterday when they could come out and see the base,” Guido had said. “When do you think we should have an Open House, sir?”

  “How about two days after I die?” Walker had said.

  “Ha, ha,” Guido had said. “But seriously, sir, I promised them an Open House, so we better set a date.”

  “Listen, sonny,” Walker had said, “and listen good. You do whatever you want with those cruddy feather merchants, but let’s get one thing straight: they are never going to set foot on my Army post. Never! You got that?”

  “But, sir—” Guido had said.

  “You mention Open House once more and you will be the first commissioned officer in history to pull permanent K.P.” Walker had said. “Now get out of here.”

  That had been the initial step in Guido’s decline. Then, a couple of weeks later, had come the Tall Walnuts affair.

  Walker had summoned Guido into the BC van one afternoon. “Look at this radarscope,” he had said. “There’s some funny blips about a quarter of a mile north of here.”

  Guido had looked. “Ah!” he had said. “That must be Tall Walnuts.”

  “What’s Tall Walnuts?” Walker had said.

  “It’s a park, sir,” Guido had replied. “The pride and joy of Putnam’s Landing. It’s got the finest walnut trees in all New England. Nearly a hundred feet tall, some of them.”

  “They got to come down,” Walker had said.

  “What?” Guido had gasped, blanching.

  “They’re interfering with our radars, you damn fool!” Walker had said.

  “Well, sir,” Guido had said, licking his lips, “couldn’t we build our radars a little higher?”

  “No!” Walker had roared. “Now you go tell those cruddy feather merchants to lower those trees or I’ll send a work detail over and chop ’em right down to the ground.”

  “Yes, sir,” Guido had said mournfully, feeling certain that public relations would not be conspicuously improved when the town’s beloved Tall Walnuts became Truncated Walnuts.

  The next blow to Guido’s reeling esprit had been due to Little League. This time it had been Maggie Larkin, not Walker Hoxie, who had lowered the boom.

  Guido had been uneasy about Maggie from the very beginning of the Little League season. True to her word, she had been his enthusiastic collaborator from the day he organized the Rockets, as his team was inevitably called. She had served as scorekeeper, cheer leader, and house mother, and the boys, duly inspired, had responded with a series of six straight wins.

  But all the time Guido had felt a gnawing certainty that there would be trouble. When you put together such a volatile combination as Maggie and children, an explosion was inevitable.

  And it had come. At first there had been some warning rumbles—frowns and coldness from Maggie, a steady diminishing of enthusiasm. She had stopped keeping score, then stopped cheering, then stopped giving pep talks, and finally stopped coming to the games altogether.

  “What’s the matter, hon?” Guido had asked, dreading the answer.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she had replied stiffly.

  “But you’re going to,” he had said. “So it might as well be now.”

  “Very well,” she had said and turned to him with eyes brimming with tears. “Guido, I know I promised to help you with Little League, and I tried. I tried with all my heart! I closed my eyes as long as I could to all the ghastly things that were going on … But no more! I’m finished. I can no longer stand by and watch you traumatize those children.”

  “What are you talking about?” he had said, astounded. “They’re the happiest team in Little League! They’re in first place!”

  “Are all of them happy?” she had asked. “Even the poor little tykes who sit on the bench game after game, developing a festering inferiority?”

  “Oh, come on now,” Guido had protested. “I give everybody a chance to play.”

  “Sure!” she had replied bitterly. “When the team is so far ahead that it doesn’t matter, you let the poor little bench-warmers come in for an inning or two. Oh, Guido, can’t you see what you’re doing to their plastic young souls? Can’t you see that you’re giving them scars they will carry all their lives?”

  “Aw, Maggie,” Guido had said, “didn’t you promise me you were giving up all that nonsense about child psychology?”

  “I do not call it nonsense,” she had said coldly, “to protect little children from being warped. Either you let everybody play an equal number of innings, or I’m through!”

  “Through with Little League, you mean?” Guido had asked hopefully.

  “Through with you!” she had declared.

  Guido had looked at her determined eyes, her uncompromising mouth, her hard chin. Then he had looked at the soft expanse below, and he had known that he could not say her nay.

  “Okay,” he had said, sighing, and from that day forward, at the end of the third inning, which is the midpoint in a Little League game, he had benched his regulars and sent in his scrubs, and as a result, the Roc
kets had been creamed the next three times in a row.

  As a further result Guido had created a brand-new set of enemies for the United States Army—namely, the parents of his regulars. Though Guido had carefully explained to them that he was benching their sons in order to keep the psyches of the scrubs free from trauma, he had met with a signal lack of understanding. All they had done was mutter and grow tight around the corners of the mouth. With each succeeding loss their tempers had shortened; lately they had taken to baring their teeth whenever they saw Guido.

  Now as Guido crouched in front of the dugout at the Little League Field on Ram’s Head Beach, the Rockets were in the process of dropping still another game. It was the bottom of the sixth and final inning, the score was Mustangs 4—Rockets 3, and Guido’s scrubs were at bat. The first man up, Daniel Bannerman by name, drew a walk. (This is not strange when you consider that Daniel was only 36 inches high and batted from a crouch.) Guido flashed a bunt sign to the next batter, Jimmy Armitage. (The bunt sign was quite simple; Guido just held up a sign which said “BUNT!”) Jimmy obediently dropped a bunt down the third base line. (“Dropped” is perhaps a misnomer; the ball went fifteen feet up in the air.) The third baseman, having cleverly stolen the bunt sign, charged in and was waiting with outstretched glove as the ball descended.

  The second out was made by Daniel Bannerman, who got tagged off first base when he wandered into short right field to pick a daisy. The last out was scored by an athlete named Dickie Sutphen, who went down swinging at three consecutive fast balls, each fifteen inches over his head.

  Maggie Larkin, bright as the dawn, came bustling into the Rockets’ dugout. “It’s all right, boys,” she chirped, distributing loving pats all around. “You tried your best. After all, it isn’t winning that counts. It’s playing the game! Isn’t that right, Guido?”

  “Grn,” said Guido, fighting off a shiver. The parents of the regulars were filing past the dugout, giving him looks that frosted his bones. Soon now, he was thinking, Colonel Thorwald would be coming to Putnam’s Landing to look over the state of public relations. It was not impossible he would find that Guido had turned the town into the anti-military capital of America. Guido shivered again, a sudden vision of Alaska looming frigidly in his mind.

  “And now, boys,” said Maggie, clapping her hands merrily, “let’s all go get some ice cream.”

  “Just,” muttered Guido, “what I need.”

  Three hundred yards away on another part of Ram’s Head Beach, Laura Beauchamp was rehearsing her folk drama.

  Laura sat on a high lifeguard’s chair, shouting through a megaphone and deploying her mammoth cast. “Places!” she called. “Places for the last act, everybody! Minutemen, get behind the breastworks. Redcoats, into the longboats. Quickly, please.”

  The high school boys, led by Grady Metcalf, took their positions behind a rampart of sand which had been heaped up on the beach. The soldiers, led by Opie Dalrymple, clambered into a flotilla of three rowboats moored in the lee of a projecting dune.

  “All right,” shouted Laura. “Quiet, please. Enter Good-wife Putnam.”

  Goodwife Putnam, played by Comfort Goodpasture, emerged from behind the bath-house and ran to Grady Metcalf. “Oh, Ethan,” she cried, “have a care, for the King’s hated militia are well known for their prowess with the long rifle!”

  “I fear not,” replied Grady Metcalf. “If my blood contribute to the seed-time of this new nation of free men, I count it well spent, hey.”

  “Longboats!” shouted Laura. “Come in, longboats!”

  The rowboats lurched sluggishly around the dune. Standing in the prow of the lead boat was Lord Cornwallis, played by Opie Dalrymple.

  “Heave ho, muh horties,” said Opie. “Let us show this here rabble that His Majesty’s sojers shall not cringe before ennathang!”

  “Beach the longboats and form a hollow square!” shouted Laura.

  They did.

  “Now advance on the breastworks!” called Laura. “Keep in formation … Minutemen, wait until they get as far as the trash can before you open fire … Oh, that’s splendid. Very tense! Very effective! … All right, Minutemen: FIRE!”

  “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” said Grady Metcalf and his Minutemen, pointing index fingers at the advancing Redcoats.

  The British started to die in droves. Every other man clutched his breast and fell to the ground, kicking and twitching extravagantly.

  Opie, however, stayed erect and led the surviving soldiers right up to the edge of the rampart. Then he looked around and saw that his forces had been decimated. “Sound retreat, drummer boy,” said Opie. “Ah have gravely underestimated the mettle of these here formers and ortisans.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Private William O. Wambess. “Brrm, brrm, brrm,” he said, beating a roll on an imaginary drum, and the remnants of the invading army turned and ran ignominiously for the boats. They piled in and paddled away.

  “Thus always to tyrants!” cried Comfort, coming out from behind the bath-house.

  “Huzzah!” cried the Minutemen.

  “Excellent, excellent!” shouted Laura Beauchamp. “Of course it will go much better when we get our costumes and props … Take five minutes now, and then we’ll run through it again from the top.”

  The actors broke for a brief recess. They broke neatly into two distinct groups: Grady Metcalf and the high school boys went over and lounged against the bath-houses; Opie Dalrymple and the G.I.S sprawled on a dune.

  Then a third group came into the scene—a gaggle of high school girls who had been observing the rehearsal from the road at the top of the beach. They walked down from the road now, clustered around Comfort, and then, all together, headed for the dune and the G.I.s. On the way they passed the townies, who glared at them balefully, but the girls chattered and giggled and did not even turn their heads.

  The girls and the soldiers exchanged hilarious greetings and proceeded to pair off—Comfort, of course, with Opie. “Hi,” said she.

  “Howdy, honey,” said he.

  “Did you do it?” said she.

  “Ah said Ah would, didn’t Ah?” said he.

  “I thought you might have been kiddin’,” said she.

  “No, ma’am!” said he, giving her an earnest look. “Ah don’t kid about important things like that.”

  “Gee!” she said, wriggling with delight. “I bet I’m the only girl in Webster High who ever had a song written to her.”

  “Wanna hear it?” asked Opie. “Ah brought muh gitfiddle.” He slung his gorgeously decorated guitar around his neck.

  “Now?” said Comfort, somewhat dismayed. “You mean in front of all these people?”

  “Why not?” said Opie.

  “Well, golly, I thought it was kind of—you know—private.”

  “Honey, do you know the wonderful thang about love?” he asked. “The wonderful thang about love is the more you tell the world about it, the more it’s yores.”

  “I never thought of it in quite that way,” confessed Comfort.

  Opie struck a loud chord on his guitar. “Frinds,” said he to all assembled, “Ah’d like to sang a little song Ah wrote—from the hort—to this charmin’ young lady by muh side.”

  “Pshaw!” said Comfort, reddening with pleasure. Opie ran off a few introductory measures and began:

  Ah lost mah hort in Putnam’s Landin’

  By old Long Island Sound.

  Ah loved you when Ah saw you standin’

  So purty on the ground.

  Ah lost muh hort in Putnam’s Landin’

  In old Connecticut State.

  Yore so sweet and undemandin’

  And you weigh a perfeck weight.

  Together we’ll grow old.

  We won’t never scold.

  We’ll nicely kiss

  And yodel like the Swiss

  As the years unfold.

  Ah lost muh hort in Putnam’s Landin’

  Neath the old New England sky,

  A
h found me a gal that’s real outstanding’,

  Yippee-o, yippee-ay, yippee-I.

  Comfort listened entranced, her lips parted, her eyes gleaming. All around Opie couples stood with arms circling waists, swaying gently as he hummed a second chorus, and then they were all humming together, their hearts full, their young voices drifting sweet and clear across the still water.

  And lounging against the bath-house wall, their sideburns like brackets enclosing blobs of hate, sat Grady Metcalf and the New Delinquents. “Sure,” snarled Grady to the others. “You cats are so damn smart. Them Army guys are only a novelty, huh? The broads’ll come runnin’ back to us as soon as the novelty wears off, huh? … Kee-rap!”

  The rest, having no answer, were silent.

  “I told you right from the beginning,” continued Grady hotly. “A rumble! That’s the only way. Now are you cats chicken, or are you with me?”

  “Jees, Grady,” said Charlie, “it ain’t a question of bein’ chicken. It’s just that I wouldn’t feel right about beltin’ an Army guy. I mean it’s a little un-American, ain’t it?”

  “Yeh,” said Wally and Ed and Fred.

  “Chicken!” said Grady, rejecting their argument whole. “You’re scared of them Army cats. That’s what it is.”

  “No, hey,” insisted all.

  “Yeah, you’re scared,” continued Grady. “I don’t know why you should be. Hell, they’re only eighteen, and you guys are seventeen and a half. How much stronger can they get in six lousy months?”

  “That ain’t the point,” said Wally. “The point is what’s the use of gettin’ into a rumble when we don’t need to? I mean the broads are bound to come back to us when the novelty wears off. Let’s just sweat it out a little longer.”

  “Yeh,” said Charlie and Ed and Fred.

  “I’ll clue you,” said Grady. “There’s gotta be a rumble. You cats keep on dreamin’ if you wanna, but sooner or later, mark my words, it’s comin’ to a rumble!”

  “Places!” shouted Laura Beauchamp. “Places, children!”

  20

  The following events occurred in Putnam’s Landing on the Fourth of July:

  At five A.M. an unidentified citizen, full of Blatz and patriotic fervor, threw a large firecracker from a speeding car. It exploded in front of the home of Mrs. Angela Hoffa. Angela sat bolt upright in bed, shrieking and clutching her heart. In a moment she realized it was only a firecracker and tried to go back to sleep. Sleep, however, would not come, nor would the panic leave her bosom.