Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Stefan coughed deeply, his hand over his mouth, the uneven bones of his shoulders turning. It was as if Wood could see a diagram of his awkwardly cantilevered bones.

  Lenore was heating Georgie’s bottle in a pan of water, and Stefan held Georgie, who cried, then stared, his face wrinkling and unwrinkling, in focus and out.

  “He was born with an enlarged thymus gland,” Stefan said. “And Lenore didn’t make enough milk, she’s so little up there. We had quite a time of it, didn’t we, Georgie?” He chuckled and crooned into Georgie’s damp pink ear. “He’s fine now, though. He’s a healthy baby now, isn’t he, Georgie? Isn’t he?”

  Georgie stared from his olive-colored eyes, and hit the table a miniature blow with his fist.

  After a while, Wood said goodbye to Pop Stefan and Lenore. “See you Monday morning,” he said. When Stefan’s face grew stiff, almost ashy at this prospect, he wished he hadn’t said it.

  “You won’t have supper with us?” Lenore said.

  “I said I’d meet Perrone and Quillen,” Wood said. This was almost a lie—there had been only a vague sort of arrangement. He knew the Stefans had no time for company, and hardly any money. What he really meant to do was to go by the hotel and if Perrone and Quillen weren’t in its bar—called “The Boiler Room”—he’d buy a magazine, eat while reading it in some restaurant, then take an early bus back to camp. This seemed a pleasant enough prospect. The city depressed him; it felt invaded, and in the eyes of the civilians he found a mixture of greed and disgust that amounted to disease. At least the Army camp was free of this. On a weekend when the company was on pass it would be free of about everything, in fact.

  As he walked back downtown, keeping an eye out for officers he would have to salute, he thought of the pleasantness of an evening by himself. He preferred this emptiness. He would not think of the Stefans, would not pity them, would not tremble for them. Macon was full of such people, some of them doomed—maybe all of them. He could see the thin girl-mother, the unhealthy scraped color of her legs. Did she and Stefan take each other seriously? Could they believe in their own future, and if so what did they foresee? He saw her having her periods, her headaches, babies, sniffles, bowel movements, intercourse with her frail and awkward husband. On and on, so real because it would go on for a while, and yet not real. If for some reason he went back to the Stefans’ apartment, would they still be there? It was as if the Stefans were made of cardboard and weren’t aware of it. They thought they were real, but the damp would creep in and they would grow spongy and disintegrate, and no one would ever really be called upon to care very much.

  Stefan had gone to Ohio Wesleyan for two years, then lost interest in college, then sold advertising for the local newspaper, but didn’t sell much. He’d tried to sell other things, he’d told Wood with as little interest in the telling as there had been in the doing. Selling was always there for a while, for those who couldn’t do it. What Stefan really wanted was to be home with Lenore, where they could play, and she could get him his dinner. He was color-blind, and was amazed that the Army took him. He hadn’t got over that amazement yet, and if he didn’t it might kill him.

  Wood cursed himself and kept walking. He saluted a captain with a service forces patch on his shoulder, a harried-looking captain whose garrison cap wasn’t on straight, an obvious civilian type. Somewhere down a side street an MP’s whistle blew, shrill as a scream, and in the comer of his eye, in the corner of his head, was the feeling of running and of fear.

  Perrone and Quillen were in The Boiler Room, and saw him as he stood in the door. The big room was full of the khaki of the summer uniforms.

  “Hey, Whip!” Perrone yelled, standing up and motioning him over. It always gave Wood the feeling, when he was called this name, that he was impersonating his father. Perrone’s square, dark face split and there was the flash of his huge grin. Wood sometimes found himself counting Perrone’s teeth. “Hey, you Yankee bastard!” The word came out “basstid.” Perrone came from what he called “Goombahdaville—Seconanyeh.” This meant Second Avenue, in Manhattan. But soon Wood understood Perrone’s language clearly enough, even when, for ironic and sometimes crazy reasons of his own, he spoke half in Italian. These Italian phrases he translated in the same breath. “Mangia qualunque cosa mangefran’—he eats anything.” This about poor fat Smallers in the mess hall.

  Quillen grinned good-naturedly, with perhaps an icy glint in his eye. He was a tall Georgia boy with dark curly hair, always cheerful. Wood had always thought he’d detected a warning of violence in Quillen, and then he’d seen Quillen in a fight behind the PX one night. The violence was there, all right. He’d cold-cocked a soldier from the 2nd Battalion, and that with a left, which seemed to Wood, and most likely to the soldier from the 2nd Battalion, as being so skillfully professional it was almost unfair. He came from Gum Log. “That’s a real place, Whipple,” he’d explained. “I wouldn’t shit you, even if you are a damyankee.”

  The three of them had become more than merely acquainted because they had been assigned by Sergeant Garbanks as acting squad leaders. The other squad, the first, was led by a boy named Tate who came from a military school, knew all about military matters, spoke always in tones of command and was, by common consent, a flaming asshole.

  “Where you been?” Quillen said, signaling for beer.

  “At Pop Stefan’s place.”

  “The left-footed titmouse,” Quillen said, shaking his head.

  “Well, you got Smallers in your squad,” Perrone said.

  “And you got Pickett, Thompson and, my God, Whetzel,” Quillen said. “Let’s face it. What we plainly ought to do is let these poor li’l rabbity bastards go back home where they belong.”

  “Have a beer,” Perrone said. “You nervous in the service, Gum Log?”

  “Did you know when we got back from the range Friday that dumb-ass Philpotts had a live round-chambered in his goddam rifle? And I got to walk ahead of him?”

  Perrone’s eyes widened at this enormity. “Grabass find out?”

  “Hell, no. He would’ve strung that boy up by his puckerstring and plucked him clean. He got enough trouble in this man’s army. Hoo!”

  Wood sipped his beer and listened to their talk. In spite of their bitching they were really unconcerned, even cheerful. The stupidity or the awkwardness of the men amused them. And yet within a few months—three at the most—they would be in combat. People would be shooting at them and very sincerely trying to kill them. They ordered more beer, and the afternoon passed. Once a young soldier was sick on the way to the men’s room, and his friends cleaned him up and took him away.

  “Oh, ah,” Quillen said, “I would surely like a little clean, white poontang.”

  “If it’s poontang it ain’t clean,” Perrone said.

  “Some pretty girls in Macon.”

  “If there is any they got ‘em locked up for the duration.”

  “I come here to play basketball once, met this pretty girl name of Anna Mae Mingledorf.”

  “Sure.”

  “No, I ain’t shittin’ you, Perrone. That was her name, Anna Mae Mingledorf. Just as pretty. Big blue eyes and a little bitty butt on her. I mean she was pretty.” Quillen’s voice had turned smooth and easy, and then he shook his head as if to wake himself. “She don’t live here inny more.”

  “Anna doesn’t live here any more,” Perrone sang.

  “That’s a sad, sad song, Perrone. But the time will come. Just we sit and wait and don’t git it caught in the gears.”

  “Or shot off, maybe.” Perrone turned to Wood. “What you think, Whip? Say something. You gonna be an officer like Captain Harry T. Jones wants?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now, that’s the kind of decisive, pee-positive man we need to lead us into the blood and glory of combat,” Perrone said.

  Quillen laughed. “Oh my!” he said.

  “Anyway,” Perrone said, “it’d get you out of this crummy outfit.”

  “
I’ll tell you a awful secret,” Quillen said. “This is the best outfit in the whole U.S. of A. Army.”

  “So we lose the war,” Perrone said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Ain’t it a shame, though.”

  “It’ll be a hell of a disappointment to the folks on the home front.”

  “Hell, Perrone, ain’t you on Mussolini’s side anyways?”

  The afternoon passed in their bantering, and they seemed to like Wood for an audience. He rarely joined in. Soldiers came and went, from the bar at one moment came the signals of a near-fight—breath and silence. They watched and turned away. Perrone and Quillen decided that after they ate they’d buy a pint of Green Mule and go to the USO dance. Wood ate with them in the restaurant—thin steaks and French fries—and afterwards bade them luck and took a nearly empty bus back to camp.

  He would be alone in the barracks, where he could write the letters he had to write, to Horace and Lois and his mother. The prospect seemed like an examination, one of the bad kinds you weren’t quite prepared for. As he sat in the jiggling bus, holding the chrome rail of the empty seat ahead of him, the first easy words appeared.

  Dear Horace,

  How are you? I’m fine…

  Lights passed. Ahead he could see the glow in the sky made by the lights of all the battalion areas. After the letters, inadequate as they would be, he would crawl into his hard sack and listen to the machine guns, which stuttered out their lead day and night, weekends and all. There was a war on. Stefan would be in the frail arms of his little girl, his deformed chest and scraggly hairs against her deprived nipples, and at least for a while they would be convinced of their happiness.

  On Sunday afternoon Sergeant Garbanks came into the barracks and found Wood on his bunk reading.

  “What’s the Fourth General Order?” he said in order to engage in conversation.

  “To repeat all calls from posts more distant from the guardhouse than my own.”

  “The Fifth.”

  “To quit my post only when properly relieved.”

  “How come you ain’t in town?”

  “That town gives me the creeps,” Wood said.

  “Give you the crabs is more likely.” Sergeant Garbanks did want to talk, but beneath his suddenly mild, conversational tone was the pressure of anger.

  “Captain Jones says you don’t want to go to OCS.” Wonder was in his voice, that anyone could say such a thing to Captain Jones.

  “I told him I wasn’t sure about it.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Why don’t you go to OCS?” Wood said, aware of the danger of such an interjection.

  “I ain’t officer material. I’m a noncom and proud of it.” He seemed to be saying that it wasn’t a matter of ability, but of something like species. “You ain’t noncom material, Whipple. You’re either a buck-ass private or an officer, and Captain Jones wants you to go for an officer.” He said this sternly, yet with some diffidence. He stood straight, the neat creases of his uniform too spick and span, as though he were being observed by an officer. “Let me tell you something, and you can take it any way you like. I ain’t chickenshit and I ain’t no boy scout, but I highly recommend you don’t give Captain Jones no more of this ‘I don’t know, sir’ crap.” He stared into Wood’s eyes for a moment, and then said, “What’s the Seventh?”

  ‘To talk to no one except in the line of duty.”

  “It ain’t something you got a choice about. Captain Jones asks you to do something, you do it. It might not sound like an order, Whipple, but you let me tell you, when Captain Jones says ‘Shit,’ you squat and strain. You ain’t no civilian no more.”

  He waited for an answer, and when one didn’t come he said, “What’s the Second?”

  “To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.”

  “Okay.” Sergeant Garbanks turned stiffly and walked to the stairs and down.

  Wood had always wondered about the reverence in Sergeant Garbanks’ voice when he spoke of Captain Jones. At first he’d thought it had something to do with the training of the troops—purposely exaggerated so they would be awed by any officer’s authority. Then he thought it might have been the result of some personal thing. Had the gallant captain, wounded in chest and thigh, carried his unconscious sergeant across minefields under deadly fire? No, Sergeant Garbanks hadn’t yet been in combat. It was neither of these; this reverence was real—a delusion familiar to Wood.

  By nine o’clock on Monday morning, D Company had marched to the booby-trap area, where they stood at ease around a large dirt quadrangle. Unoccupied barracks and outbuildings surrounded the quadrangle, their windows cracked or gone, doors splintered or canted on sprung hinges. In the center, on the turned and blasted red earth, a strange lieutenant placed a steel helmet over a lighted two-inch firecracker and stepped back. Thuh. The helmet rose, and kept on rising—they couldn’t believe it—until it was tiny against the blue; then it fell the long way back, turning slowly until it hit the dirt with a loud clang.

  “That’s just to show you we’re not playing around with ladyfingers,” the lieutenant said. “These little bastards’ll take your fingers off. They’ll blow dirt in your eyes and blind you—that’s happened. So don’t get careless or cocky. If one of these goes off within six feet of you, in combat it’d be a Jap or German mine, so consider yourself dead. You’ve got to find them, figure out which type of detonator’s used, and disarm them.” He turned toward a building at the side. “At ease! Look over there.” They all turned, and he must have given a signal. An explosion blew the porch and door into fragments. The wind pushed their faces, and splinters of wood, boards, dirt and oddly soft-shaped, suggestive things climbed above them and fell rattling and thudding on their helmet liners. Some of the men had fallen to the ground; they couldn’t believe the nearness and violence of the explosion, or that an officer, the Army, whoever was in charge of their welfare, could have allowed it to happen.

  Wood turned toward the men of his platoon and saw that they were afraid.

  “That was the real thing,” the lieutenant said. “That was a mine rigged to the door.” He seemed angry at them, at their ignorance and surprise. “Open a door like that and there’s a new face in hell!”

  The word came whispered through the ranks: this was the Mad Bomber. It’s him. Grabass said so. The sun made ovens of their helmet liners, and their rifles were slippery in their hands. Talley took off his metal-rimmed GI glasses and attempted to wipe them on his fatigues. The depressions they left on the bridge of his thin nose glowed waxy and cruel. He winced as he strung the wire bows back over his ears. Pickett, Stefan, Shoup, Thompson, Stainback, Spradlin, Whetzel—they all stood sweating, superficially alike in their green fatigues.

  The lieutenant’s black bushy chest hair puffed out of the neck of his fatigues. As he walked purposefully toward the 3rd Platoon they saw water flow down his face and chin and disappear into the black hair. Above his red, angry face, his name, warm-buck, flickered in their eyes, where it was stenciled on his helmet liner. They looked from the letters of the name to the face, and in the sun the white letters flickered.

  The platoons were separated. While the others went through the booby-trapped barracks, Sergeant Garbanks entrusted the 3rd Platoon to the Mad Bomber, who marched them down to a small grandstand. They climbed onto the wooden planks and waited. In front of them the Mad Bomber stood, grinning now, behind a big table piled with dangerous-looking tubes, wires, fuses, recognizable grenades and mines. At his back the ground dropped ten feet into a swamp—a sheer drop down to the reeds and marshy tangle. Before he spoke at all he took an olive-drab grenade—the real kind, not the black of practice nor the blue that is fused but not loaded—pulled the ring and let the fuse handle fly off. They heard the pop as the fuse began, and the wisp of smoke circled his hairy hand. By the time they thought to count the seven seconds of the fuse, they knew it was too late, but
he kept the smoking grenade in his hand, smiling at them, until it must have been much too late, and when they had begun to think it was all a trick and the grenade was not loaded, with a negligent flip of his fingers he sent it over the edge of the bank and it blew, right then. Steel fragments zicked through the top of the mulberry tree beside his table. A leaf came floating down, slowly, rocking, like any leaf falling.

  The Mad Bomber smiled. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t paid any attention to the explosion. Now he picked another O.D. grenade from the table and tossed it in his hand without looking at it. His smile seemed more vindictive now, as though his anger at them had cooled into a more lasting hatred.

  “I’m going to show you dogfaces some of the toys you’ll be playing around with in combat,” he said. “I know you’ve thrown a few grenades, but you haven’t learned to live with them and love them.” He smiled. “Now listen closely, and if any one of you can’t remember what I show you, get out your little notebook and pencil and write your last will and testament, because sure as hell one of these”—he pointed to the collection of dangerous-looking objects on the table—”one of these little toys will surely kill you.”