The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “Right in the guts, son,” the general said again.

  “Right in the guts, sir,” the grizzled young sergeant with the steely eyes replied.

  I didn’t see any reason to mention that most of the CCF around Pork Chop Hill were probably Mongolians and would understand less than ten percent of what I was saying. I rationalized that they would at least recognize that it was Chinese and probably assume that it wasn’t a pep talk. I further rationalized that being a master sergeant in a little psy-war shop was far better than being a replacement rifleman in a line company. Anything was better.

  E Company of the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Division had sent back word that the CCF was whooping it up with chants and Mongolian music. The major had convinced the general that it would be a “damned fine spot to give ‘em a bit of their own medicine.” Major Schiller knew a lot of clichés and used them lavishly.

  So we rounded up a squad or so of spare riflemen who were dogging it on sick call, loaded them and the speakers and amplifiers into jeeps, and headed for Pork Chop Hill. When the jeeps could go no farther, we loaded the equipment on to the riflemen’s backs. The infantry, I thought at the time, hadn’t changed much in the last three thousand years or so.

  Major Schiller had found himself a swagger stick some place, probably the only one in Korea other than those employed by the officers of England’s two brigades, and he led us up Pork Chop Hill, swishing the swagger stick around and checking every few minutes to see that his .45 Colt automatic hadn’t fallen out of its holster.

  By the time we were halfway to E Company, it had been overrun by the Chinese and most of its men were either killed, wounded or captured. We no longer needed the loudspeakers and the amplifiers to insult the CCF. A conversational tone would do nicely. Major Schiller summoned his ranking non-coms (both of us) for a strategy conference. The corporal and I agreed that a rapid withdrawal would be expedient. The riflemen abandoned the expensive amplifiers and speakers and joined the discussion. To a man, they backed the major’s decision.

  It wasn’t really a withdrawal. It wasn’t even a retreat. It was a rout. I carried a Thompson .45 submachine gun that I’d found along the way. The major had lost his swagger stick and now gestured with his .45, but only after I had made sure that the safety catches were on. We plunged down a deep gully, the major still in the lead. Two Chinese soldiers popped out at us from behind a rock outcropping. The major tried to shoot them with his automatic, but he’d forgotten about the safety catches. I yelled, “Stinking turtles!” in Mandarin at the two Chinese, which they may or may not have understood, but which was enough of a surprise to make them hesitate. As I yelled, I dived for the cover of a rock to the left of the major and fired the Thompson as I went. I didn’t hit anything.

  The two Chinese were both armed with the highly prized, Soviet-made 7.62mm PPsh 41 burp gun. They must have had them on full automatic because they each fired long bursts at the major and me for at least forty-five seconds. If fully loaded, it meant that they had fired 144 rounds. They were rotten shots, but not all that rotten. One of the 144 rounds ricocheted into my right thigh. Another creased the major’s right forearm and made him drop his automatic, which he still hadn’t fired. I poked my head around the rock and saw that the Chinese were trying to change magazines, but that they weren’t too quick at it, so I killed them both with the Thompson, aiming it low and watching with satisfaction as it climbed up and to the left just as the sergeant at Fort Hood had promised me that it would.

  Major Schiller put me in for the Silver Star and got the National Guard general to recommend him for the Distinguished Service Cross, but neither of the medals ever made it past corps headquarters. They did, however, give us a couple of Purple Hearts and then sent us back to recuperate at Brooke General Hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

  Major Schiller quickly recovered and landed his usual cushy job, this time in Fort Sam’s Public Information Office, where his principal daily task was to issue press releases about the posthumous awarding of medals to the mothers and wives of dead servicemen. The releases were sent to the hometown newspapers and to the San Antonio Light and Express and they invariably began: “In a brief but stirring ceremony, the Silver Star today was awarded to …” It was the same release that the Public Information Office had been using since 1942 and they were used to it. So were the rewrite men on the Light and the Express.

  Schiller had promoted himself a large house on the post not too far from the Snake Hill area of cheap bars at Fort Sam’s south end. He lived there with his wife, Ruby, an accomplished legal-engineering secretary who made more money than Schiller, something that never bothered him in the least.

  The major looked like a soldier. He was tall, carried himself well, wore his uniform beautifully, and had spent most of World War II in London and Paris on what he called a “sensitive assignment.” He had a bachelor’s degree from a small college in Pennsylvania and when he was drafted in 1941 he was selling time for a radio station. Before that, he sold Willys cars. When asked about his civilian experience, Schiller always said that he had been “involved” in “radio promotion” and prior to that he had been “involved” in “the management side of the automotive industry.”

  He had a nose that just missed being a beak, a high, intelligent-looking forehead, thick black hair, a good, thin-lipped smile, and puzzled, blue eyes. He also had boundless enthusiasm for any project at hand, a remarkable ability to forget past failures, and a bad case of satyriasis. He tried to screw anything in skirts and often as not succeeded.

  They had decided to discharge me from the army in late May of 1953 despite my lack of points. It was mostly because they didn’t know what to do with a nineteen-year-old master sergeant. I had been hanging around the hospital ward, waiting for them to make up their minds, when Schiller dropped by to see me. He came by once or twice a week, usually to borrow ten or twenty until payday. He was always broke.

  “Well, I fixed it, son. You go to work next Monday morning.”

  “I go to work where?”

  “In PIO. You’re my new civilian assistant. Thirty-six fifty a year. How’s that?”

  “Lousy.”

  It didn’t faze the major. “Well, it’s not too hot to start with, but I can probably jump you a grade or two after a few months.”

  “In a few months I’ll be back in school. I told you that.”

  Schiller made one of his more expansive gestures with a new swagger stick. He had six of them, his wife later told me. “Well, hell, Lu, take it for the summer. What else have you got to do?”

  “What’U I have to do at PIO?”

  “Just what I said. You’ll be my assistant.”

  “What do you do?”

  Schiller looked around the ward to see whether anyone was listening. They weren’t. They were reading Captain Marvel as usual. “Just between you and me and the gatepost, not a hell of a lot, but I have a good time doing it.”

  “What’U I have to do?” I said again.

  “Well, you’ll accompany me on my appointed rounds. We check into the office about nine, leave for coffee at ten, then lunch at the officer’s club at twelve, back to the office at two. Downtown to the newspapers at two-thirty and then to the Gunther Hotel for a refreshing bottle of Pearl beer and to review the day’s activities. How’s it sound?”

  “Exhausting,” I said.

  “We have a staff car.”

  “What else?”

  “A WAC driver.”

  “You screwing her?”

  “Not anymore. She’s all yours.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But now the piece of resistance.” Despite Paris, the major’s French was nonexistent.

  “What?”

  “You live with us.”

  “With you and Ruby?”

  “I’ve already talked it over with her. Room and board for only seventy-five bucks a month and you supply your own liquor. Or most of it.”

  “That house only costs you eig
hty-five.”

  “Home-cooking, Lu. Ruby’s own.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “What else have you got to do until September?”

  “I know a guy in New York. I should go see him.”

  “See him in September. And by the way, there’s an added attraction.”

  “I’m already underwhelmed,” I said, stealing a line from somebody. But even a stolen line was wasted on Schiller.

  “Weekly poker with the brass. I don’t mean captains and lieutenants and light-colonels. The real brass. Nothing less than a bird colonel.”

  “Except you.”

  “I’m in public relations,” Schiller said, as if that sliced through all social barriers. I don’t know, maybe it does.

  “I’m an EM,” I said. “You know, an enlisted man, the people that the Pentagon designs uniforms for with the nicely padded hips and the carefully narrowed shoulders so that we’ll keep on looking ridiculous.”

  “As of Friday at 1500 hours you will be a civilian and as such outrank any man in the army,” Schiller said, and his sincerity was as thick as hot fudge. That was the trouble with Schiller. He was too sincere about everything. His other trouble was that he was a compulsive gambler.

  I moved in with the Schillers a week later and Ruby gave me the room with the southeast exposure on the second floor. The army hadn’t yet gotten round to air-conditioning its post houses and I welcomed the breeze at night. San Antonio is hot in May.

  Ruby and I got along well enough after I made it clear that I wasn’t to be her prime source of information about her husband’s philandering. She was a short, slim brunette in her early thirties, quite attractive in an elfish sort of a way, far more intelligent than her husband, and a fine cook. I found her to be excellent company, imagined that she was extraordinary in bed, and thought that Schiller was a fool for chasing his roundheels. I spent quite a few summer nights with Ruby as she manned the nightwatch for the wandering major. We sat there on the screened porch and looked at fireflies and drank while I told her stories about Shanghai. She liked the stories, but I never did develop a taste for Coke and Southern Comfort, which was all that Ruby drank.

  Each time that Schiller strayed she would pour her last drink around midnight and say to me, “I’m going to leave that rotten sonofabitch in the morning,” and about that time Schiller would turn in the drive with the top down on his 1949 Ford and a story of impossible misadventure that only a child would believe. Sometimes, if he had had enough to drink, he would play the piano and sing songs from the thirties and forties such as “Deep Purple,” “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Together.” He had natural pitch, knew all the words, and his piano playing was, I suppose, enthusiastic. He sang to Ruby, partly to mollify her and partly because she was the only woman available just then. By one o’clock they were on their way upstairs, sometimes arguing bitterly, but by one-fifteen the creaking bed springs either lulled me to sleep or kept me wide awake. It all depended. Ruby never did get around to leaving him in the morning.

  I met Colonel Elmore Gay at the fourth weekly poker session that I attended, this one at the house of a two-star general whom I’d taken the week before for $195. They played pot limit and four raises. No wild cards. Check and raise was not only permissible, but expected. It occasionally got hairy and more than once Schiller wrote a bum check. He usually covered them by rushing down to the finance company the next morning to see how much they would lend him on his Ford convertible. When the Ford was already in hock, he borrowed from me.

  Colonel Gay played dull, dispassionate poker. The fifth man in the game was a buck general. They were all good, but I found that the one to beat was Colonel Gay. He was thin and tall with extraordinarily wide shoulders, an amused mouth, and questioning dark gray eyes, the kind that always add up the check and count the change. It was his deal and he dealt five-card draw.

  “They tell me, Mr. Dye, that you were reared in Shanghai.”

  “That’s right,” I said, watching the deck. It was one of a number of things that Smalldane had taught me. “No matter if it’s the bishop himself dealing, kid,” he’d said. “Keep your eyes on the deck when it’s dealt.”

  “Do you speak Chinese?”

  “A little.”

  He switched to Mandarin. “Then I very much hope that you will join us when the cards are laid out next week. The game is to be held at my house and your presence would honor it.”

  “One cannot refuse so gracious an invitation,” I replied.

  “Yes,” he said in English, looking at the hand he’d dealt himself, “you do speak it a bit.”

  “Let’s play cards,” the two-star general said from around his cigar. “You open, Dye?”

  I opened for ten dollars on three tens. Everybody stayed and I filled with a pair of fives. I bet twenty-five into Colonel Gay’s one-card draw. He raised me twenty-five, the two-star general called. He had drawn two cards. I folded and Colonel Gay looked at me and smiled. “Four sixes,” he said, laying down his hand.

  “Beats kings over,” the general grumbled.

  “Openers, Dye?”

  I flipped three cards out in the center of the table. “Tens,” I said.

  “A lot of persons would have stayed with a full house,” Colonel Gay said.

  “A lot of persons don’t know any better,” I said and earned a glare from the two-star general.

  “They also tell me,” Colonel Gay said, “that you were the youngest master sergeant in the Army.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Why didn’t you apply for OCS?”

  “That’s what I told him,” Schiller said.

  “I’m not very ambitious, Colonel.”

  “Pot’s light,” the two-star general said.

  Gay slid two one-dollar chips in. “Sorry.”

  “Five-card stud,” the buck general said.

  “Deal,” said the general with two stars.

  “Did you like military life?” Colonel Gay asked me.

  “Not much.”

  “First king bets, Dye,” said the two star general.

  “King bets five,” I said.

  “What are your plans?” Gay asked.

  “Go back to school.”

  “Where?”

  “King-jack bets,” said the two-star general.

  “Another five,” I said. “I don’t know. Columbia maybe.”

  Colonel Gay looked at his hole card. He had a seven and a queen showing. “Raise five,” he said. I had the kings wired, so I raised him back. Only the one-star general dropped out.

  The next round brought me another king and Colonel Gay picked up another queen. I bet twenty-five on the kings and he only called. The rest of them dropped out. Neither of us improved on the final card and I bet twenty-five again. Gay folded.

  “A lot of persons would have paid to see my hole card,” I said.

  “A lot of persons don’t know any better,” he said. “By the way, here’s my address.” He gave me a card. “Why don’t you drop around early next Friday night. For dinner, say around seven?”

  The two generals exchanged glances and smiled faintly. “Why don’t you recruit on your own time, Colonel?” the two-star general said.

  “We take what we can get where we find it,” Gay said.

  “Let’s play cards,” the one-star general said.

  We played cards for the rest of the evening and nobody cheated and I won $265, two hundred of which I lent Major Schiller to cover the bum check that he wrote for his losses.

  CHAPTER 19

  Her eyes were lighter than her father’s, almost dove gray and just as gentle. She opened the door to my knock and said, “You’re Lucifer Dye. I’m Beverly Gay, the colonel’s favorite daughter. Please come in.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She was eighteen then and she wore the standard college-girl’s uniform, a sweater, a skirt, and brown loafers, but she wore them better than most. We moved down
the hall of the middle-class bungalow in a middle-class San Antonio neighborhood and I admired the way that she walked and the sway of her skirt. “What do you like people to call you, Lu, Lucifer, or Mr. Dye?”

  “Sam,” I said.

  “Is that your middle name?”

  “No. It’s Clarence.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s what I think, too. I would use my initials, but…”

  “You don’t look like an Elsie,” she said. “Why Sam?”

  “I don’t know. I just made it up.”

  We were in the living room then and it looked as if it had been furnished by a peripatetic world collector who could never say no in the native bazaars. There were spears from East Africa and rugs from the mideast. Woven cane chairs from the Philippines nestled next to American Indian pottery. Chinese scrolls of doubtful merit flanked a tapestry from Iraq. Some of the heavier pieces looked as if they had been manufactured in Berlin during the thirties and they competed grimly with some small knurled tables that may or may not have been early American. Tasseled ottomans from the mideast and gaudy leather poufs from West Africa were scattered about the room for those whose feet were weary. A large Bechstein grand piano crouched in one corner.

  “Terrible, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Well, it’s different.”

  “It belongs to some old friends of the colonel. He’s retired from the State Department and they’re doing Europe this summer. For the fifteenth time, I think. They let us have the house while Dad gets his treatments at the hospital.”

  “I didn’t know he was ill.”

  “Schistosomiasis,” she said. “It’s a blood fluke that he picked up in Burma during the war.”

  Colonel Gay came in from the hall and smiled at me. “I see you’ve met the favorite daughter.”

  “So she claimed,” I said, accepting a firm grip from his curiously slender hand.

  “She’s also my only one. What would you like to drink—martini?”