Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  David saw Ben in the air, swimming, parallel to his bike, on his face still that same determined, closed look. Then he and the bike came down together. They all got to him pretty quickly; David was proud that he was the first to get there, and they tried to untangle him. It was serious, he knew—no mere scrape case. Ben’s head didn’t want to come off the handlebars. They all knew enough to leave it alone while the girls’ screams brought authority from inside the school.

  Dr. Winston was there in ten minutes. When he and the school nurse removed Ben from his bike, Ben’s long hands spread and contracted as though he were rubbing coins between his thumbs and fingers. They took him off to Northlee to the hospital, and by the next day the janitor had put bleach on the cement where Ben had bled, and a sawhorse over the canted block of sidewalk.

  How were they all affected by this? It was shocking enough, but it was only a bicycle accident. That hex nut, for instance, that dented Ben’s skull—he’d turned it with a wrench while Ben held the handlebars straight. It was too familiar, not the instrument for the drama they all wanted in their lives—not with the shadow of a Corsair in their minds and that huge radial engine still roaring in their ears.

  When he met Mr. Caswell on the street a few days after the accident—he had called at the house earlier—he asked again how Ben was getting along.

  “Ben is still very sick, David,” he said. “He’s very, very sick.”

  “Is he going to be out of school long?”

  “We don’t know how long.” Mr. Caswell’s voice was calm and exact. “He hasn’t come to yet, you see.”

  Later, when David found out the truth—that the part of Ben’s brain that governed consciousness had been damaged—he wondered if Mr. Caswell really knew it then. His voice was calm, but his eyes were glittery—not really wet, but they looked as if they had been polished.

  “I hope he gets well soon,” David said.

  “Thank you. Thank you, David,” Mr. Caswell said.

  David didn’t know what to do, so he stared at Mr. Caswell for a moment, not able to share his feelings, though he knew immediately that Ben was in very grave danger and that Mr. Caswell was grieving for his son. Already grieving—that he knew. He told Mr. Caswell that Mr. Skelton had announced in assembly that Ben would get full credit for the spring term and become a senior in the fall.

  “Yes, he told us,” Mr. Caswell said.

  And then a strange thing happened to Mr. Caswell’s mouth. As he drew in a long breath, his teeth clicked together, hard, about ten times. Nothing else happened, except that David suddenly felt that grief behind his own eyes, and his throat hurt badly. For a moment Mr. Caswell looked straight at him, seeing what David was embarrassed to be caught at. David thought: It isn’t certain that Ben won’t get well again. But he knew, and he felt himself begin to burn with an indignation inexpressible any other way.

  “It was that lousy bike!” he shouted. “That stupid bike!” Mr. Caswell was surprised. His mouth opened and closed upon the colorless, uniform rows of his dentures. He made a motion with his arm, and because David thought he meant to put his mailbag down, so that he could comfort him, he turned quickly from Mr. Caswell and walked away without looking back.

  17

  As Wood fell exhaustedly to sleep, or as he woke sometimes for moments in the sleeping barracks, after a day of marching, running, or the nervous fondling of the new weapons, from the long Georgia hill to the west came the stutter and pah of machine guns. If he looked from the window beside the head of his bunk, the tracers arched into the hill and then, erratic after their impact, rose slowly in fountains, in single aberrant parabolas into the black sky before they burned dull red and out. In between each tracer were four dark bullets, invisible as planets among stars, but though they trailed no fire, they were there. The Georgia sky was sewn with copper and lead.

  On farther ranges howitzers lofted their shells, and the deeper bark and cough of these, the 105s, grew louder and closer if the wind were right. The men snored and complained in their sleep, and the rumble, the faraway crush of concussion, was always there, day and night.

  Men? Wood lay awake in the heat of the July night. About him the children slept. It was a wonder they could hold grenades in their trembling hands, throw them and move forward into the red dust raised by the explosions. But they did. He wondered if the war were being fought by children such as Talley and Pickett, Stallings, Scarpone, Warfield, Shoup and the others. Even Sergeant Garbanks, behind his rehearsed sarcasm, peered at his effect with a pleased surprise he could only conceal as a child might, with a cartoon scowl. But then it was only children he warned and frightened, and perhaps he knew that.

  Lieutenant Knobloch, who had been on Guadalcanal, took joy in telling how he had stepped from the jungle and shot twenty Japanese sailors who had come from a sinking ship. They tried to run back into the waves, and he had potted them one by one with his carbine. It had taken three magazines of ammunition before he got them all. He had recurring malaria, and wasn’t with them too often. Captain Harry T. Jones led the company on marches, but rarely spoke. He was a tall, rangy man of twenty-four, who had been wounded in the leg in North Africa. It was generally believed that he made them march and run so much because he thought it was good exercise for his leg. Sergeant Garbanks, who was with the platoon all the time, was really in charge of their training. A Corporal Hughes was listed on the platoon roster, but he was A.W.O.L., and had been A.W.O.L. no one knew how long. It was said that he held the Congressional Medal of Honor, and thus could get away with anything, could quit the Army any time he liked.

  But it was the men of his platoon, with one or two exceptions, who dismayed Wood. Poor little Pickett, who looked like a sick chicken, who couldn’t really read or write; when they were first assigned to the 3rd Battalion Pickett had been sent to the dentist’s, and he came back that afternoon with half his teeth gone from his pink ragged gums. It was hard to see how they could have pulled the splintery stumps from his white formless jaws without tearing everything into rags. His flesh didn’t seem strong enough to take such wrenching. He’d weighed 125, and before he got his false teeth he lost ten pounds. He managed to keep up with them on marches, but Wood could never understand how he did it. Then there was Talley, who remained so distant from the rest, frozen by some inner defect, maybe fear, who would never answer “Ho!” like the other Southerners when his name was called, the joke of his name freezing him still deeper into some private world or other. But Wood suspected there was no real world there at all, and the boy’s dull eyes didn’t look to any inner resources, just more dully at the fading outer world. To fight alongside him? Or Thompson, whose neck and head were a thick pillar leaning over always to the right, a pillar with colorless, slatey hair on top—he was another semiliterate. Or fat Smallers, who always lagged behind, sometimes a company or two behind, who could be seen to cry during ten-minute breaks, his pants dropped, his paper bag of talcum powder in hand as he tenderly smeared his incandescent thighs.

  Most of the men in his platoon were Southerners, who had sounded strange only at first. Soon they had revealed themselves, and they might just as well have been from Leah.

  But it was Stefan who caused him more than dismay. Stefan was older than any of them—twenty-six. He was married, and had a child. They called him “Pop,” and he was always slightly abstracted; his wide gray eyes peered seriously and somewhat askew at any problem. Quite often he put his leggings on the wrong legs, so that the lacings and buckles were on the insides. Here they could catch and trip him up, but mainly they sent Sergeant Garbanks into screaming fits; half hysterical with anger and laughter, he’d send poor Pop Stefan to all-night K.P. or guard duty. Stefan needed his sleep very badly. He was thin and always croupy, and one bony shoulder curved toward the front more than the other, as though he were pointing with it. His sternum was depressed into a cavity in his chest the size of a baseball. His voice itself came out slightly exhausted, an old man’s voice that was thin above the su
dden barrel-deep and reverberant explosions of croup.

  Wood began to keep an eye on him, and managed to save him quite a bit of sleep by telling him when only one side of his canteen hanger was hooked to his webbed belt, or when he’d left the gas-cylinder lock screw out of his rifle, and such small things. He couldn’t protect him from M-1 thumb, a condition caused by the spring-laden closure of the Garand rifle’s bolt. Stefan could never learn to take his thumb out of the way in time. That is, he could never leam a consistent way of doing it, and naturally he handled his rifle as though it were a dangerous and moody animal. At inspection he dropped it, a crime so heinous the whole platoon had lost its breath. He just stood there, sucking his inflamed thumb, and though the incredulous Sergeant Garbanks couldn’t swear in front of Captain Jones, later on his voice ricocheted from all the barracks in the battalion quadrangle.

  Now, in the night, the distant machine guns rattled in hesitant spurts, and the tracers climbed slowly into the black sky. It was three in the morning, and Wood knew he would pay tomorrow for every minute of sleep he lost now. He leaned on his elbow and watched the long hill to the west, where the tracers grew like bright worms. From beyond the hill somewhere, on one of the interlocking ranges, shell bursts lit the clouds with hot red flashes, and the sound rolled slowly toward and over him.

  His mother had written, asking him to write more letters to Horace, but what could he say to Horace? The world was full of Horaces; he was in a whole platoon of Horaces. An incident at the gas area had somehow proven the prevalence of Horaces—how, he didn’t quite know, but it had been profoundly depressing. After going into the tear-gas chamber, removing their gas masks and giving their name, rank and serial number to a masked cadre sergeant, they were assembled outside and given a lecture on gases, how each one smelled and so on. He had thought of Al Coutermarsh, and wondered which kind of gas had injured his lung. After the lecture small charges were exploded, of lewisite, mustard, phosgene and chlorine, and they had to smell the faint wisps of smoke and fill out a little mimeographed quiz on the subject. Some of the men were whispering the answers to each other when a lieutenant said sarcastically, “Don’t bother to cheat, men. You won’t flunk out of the infantry.”

  Wood had found himself nodding with satisfaction. Good, this was where he belonged. But soon he was depressed. Poor Horaces, all of them, responding in senseless ways to what was immaterial, habitual, stupid, irrelevant. Was that it? The incident didn’t seem to warrant such depression. But that wasn’t the only cause of it, of course. One of the Horaces of the world was his flesh and blood, his brother, whom he had badly hurt, and perhaps even more depressing than that, today Sergeant Garbanks had ordered him to report to Captain Harry T. Jones, who had practically ordered him to appear before the Officer Candidate Board a week from now.

  He couldn’t think of a way to say no to the captain, who had looked at him carefully, looked away, and then looked more closely at him. A strangely familiar thing had happened; he had heen recognized, as Al Coutermarsh had recognized him in Milledge & Cunningham. There was that look of recognition and equality.

  But he must sleep now, to the distant mumble of the guns. He must sleep. What could he do, go around with his lower lip hanging out, and a pendulum of drool on his chin? No, they would still find him out. The captain had said, “Whipple? At ease.” He pronounced it Whey-pul? like a question, drawling it easily and slowly as if it had several syllables in it. “Sergeant Garbanks allows you have officer potential?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Wood said, but the captain didn’t choose at first to let him mean what he really meant. The captain’s eyes widened for just a second and became clear and cold. He went on in his relaxed, soft yet ominous drawl. “The Officer Candidate Board meets next week at battalion headquarters, and I would like for you to be there.”

  “Well, sir—” Wood said, but the captain interrupted him.

  “It’s a bad war over there. You know that, don’t you? And we do what we ought to do, if we can do it? Now, we have a terrible need of infantry officers, and them that have the potential, why I feel it is no less than their duty. Whey-pul? To take on that responsibility.”

  “Yes sir,” Wood said. “But—”

  “You going to tell me you don’t think you have officer potential?” The captain smiled coolly. “You just take a careful look around this company. How we going to take these misfits into combat and bring some of ‘em back whole? Can you answer that? Some of us got to wipe their noses and tell ‘em which way to run. We got to tell ‘em what to do, because they sure not going to figure it out for themselves.”

  “Yes sir,” Wood said, but he hadn’t given in, and the captain knew it.

  “You think it over a few days more, and I’m going to ask you one more time. Dismissed.”

  He must sleep. All around him the sleeping men huffed and puffed, snored and sighed. Down the row of bunks someone squeaked loudly in complaint against his dream.

  His mother’s letters were always short and nongossipy:

  Dear Wood,

  We are all fine & hope you are. Dad’s leg doesn’t seem any worse & he is quite cheerful about the new ball bearing factory & his two tenements. He didn’t get the rent he thought from each apt. but good money & you know how much that means to him now. Gordon Ward Sr. foreclosed Sam Davis’ farm & Sam is working in the new factory & being janitor to the two tenements. Seems to be working out all right as he is on the night shift & does his janitor work days.

  Saw Lois & she says she writes to you. She is so pretty. She is going to Smith College in the fall but I suppose you know that.

  One favor I would like. Will you write to Horace? Your letters mean so much to him, Wood. He has been different since you left & not better at all. Last Wed. he woke us all up screaming he was so scared of those things he imagines. I do hate to bother you with these troubles & I know you have your own life to live in the Army, but Horace needs to know you think of him. Kate misses you, & Peggy most of all. You sure have an admirer there! David says Al Coutermarsh & Beady (?) send you their best. So do we all.

  Love,

  Mother

  When he’d read the words about Horace screaming he trembled with fear for Horace, and felt the boy’s desperation; tears came to his eyes. Horace would hate so much to have to scream for help. The monsters must have been doing something awful to him.

  But sleep, he must sleep. Once his mother had told him to think of a tall pine, rising, rising slowly up toward the sky, branches and trunk, needles, branches and smooth trunk growing forever upwards, smoothly rising. He would see this calm tree clear, and think of nothing.

  That Saturday Stefan took him on pass into Macon to meet his wife and child, who were living in a two-room apartment on the third floor of a wooden tenement. The rent was too high, the cockroaches passed along the mopboards in convoys, and when it rained, Stefan had told him, the punky plaster walls turned damp, and the flowered wallpaper changed color, like litmus paper. The small rooms—kitchen-living room and bedroom—smelled of damp paper and glue. Not even the smells of cooking could compete with that smell, and the apartment, hastily partitioned from what had been a larger one, did not seem whole—seemed not sure, somehow, of its walls. The kitchen was obviously not a kitchen, but a room into which a stove, an icebox and a sink had been placed. An overstuffed sofa and a bridge lamp formed the living-room side of it. The bathroom was communal, down a short hallway with a tilted, linoleum floor. The frame of one window was flush against a partitioning wall, behind which a radio played at that low, constant volume, its occasional voices not quite understandable, that indicates it is always on, from waking until sleep and perhaps beyond.

  Lenore Stefan was a thin, homely girl not much older than Wood. Her chief asset and chief vanity was a mane of long black undulating hair, silky and soft and well kept. Her narrow face was slashed with lipstick, and between the vivid red and the luxuriant black, Lenore herself seemed to peer out shyly. She was very shy of him;
when she smiled she was always in the process of looking away, so that she continued to smile at a window or a wall. Her nose was long, and gave the impression of lumpiness, yet when he looked closely Wood saw that it was an ordinary sort of nose, just too long, and indecisive toward its end.

  She seemed too fragile—she and Stefan both—to have been taken from Delaware, Ohio, and made to come to this soldier town. She could see Stefan only on Sunday or an occasional weekend, and few of them because of his tendency to get guard duty and K.P.

  She knelt at the icebox and got them each a bottle of beer, and when she put the bottles on the table to open them, Stefan noticed a Band-Aid on her thumb.

  “What happened?” he said worriedly, taking her hand.

  “Oh, I just cut myself on a can.”

  “You must be more careful,” Stefan said.

  “Now, George. I’m the one that’s careful,” she said, pleased. A flash of her smile was directed at Wood, to show him how silly and nice was her husband’s concern. “It’s just a little tiny cut. You want to see?” Stefan nodded gravely, and she peeled back the tape and let him see. He gazed at her thumb, holding her hand in both of his—that strange, seal-like stare, slightly walleyed, as though he looked at infinity. Finally he nodded, and she pressed the tape back smooth and opened the two bottles.

  “You want a glass, Wood?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” he said. The baby uttered a plaintive, questioning sound from the other room, and she went quickly after it. She came back with a large baby, pink and white, in blue pajamas, with a fat fist in its eye.

  “Georgie woke up,” she said to the baby, “Little Georgie just woke up!”

  The way she stood, her skinny but womanly hips forward, with the clear small bulge of her belly showing through the shiny rayon of her print dress, seemed pathetic to Wood. Her pelvis seemed open, canted toward openness, generous though skimpy in a childish way. Pop Stefan looked at her and at his child as though he were a child acting the part of a father. Yet this was real, and these two children had managed somehow, God knew how, to come together, to have made this child, even to have arrived here in this slum. Below on the streets the soldiers prowled. The whole city seemed dark, a jungle of olive drab, whiskey, fighting and vomit. The Negroes here seemed darker, blacker than any he had ever seen, and they prowled too, frightened and dangerous. The mattresses of the cheap hotels were full of bedbugs and lice, the women of venereal disease. Waitresses slugged the dregs of the soldiers’ glasses, and the officers who had to walk on the sidewalks tried to miss the soldiers’ eyes in order to save their tired arms from the constant saluting. It was a city of strangers, where the military police cruised along the alleys in jeeps, and areas of whole blocks were off limits.