Con half-laughed sarcastically. “I guess so.”
“I’ll have it set up so you’re ordered back,” Gus said.
“Never mind,” Con said. “I’ll just tell Carla I have to leave.”
“I’ll watch out for her,” the Greek said in a new, kind voice. “I promise that. Not that she needs it. She’s been a big help to me at the office.”
“Does she need anything? I mean money or anything like that.”
“You have some money?” Gus asked.
“Twenty-five thousand American. My uncle, from Rangoon, left it to me.”
“Your Uncle Chris was a fine man. Christo should have been a poet not a business man. No, Carla doesn’t need a thing. She had a considerable amount when she arrived here and has made some very wise investments. You want to marry her, I understand.”
“The government doesn’t think I’m capable of enough judgment to decide that.”
“It will work out.”
“Suppose we have a child, Gus. Suppose that happened.”
“Then I would personally put pressure to see that your request was granted.”
“Will you do something now?”
Gus was thoughtful for a moment. “Give it another month or two. Then if nothing’s been done I’ll do what I can.”
“I’d appreciate that. I’ll get your man for you.”
“I think you will, too,” he said inserting a Turkish cigarette into his ivory holder. Then in his exaggerated English acent. “Well, carry on old boy. And good luck.”
They shook hands and Con left and took a taxi back to the Hotel.
He walked into the lobby bar. There were two American officers, a major and a captain, Air Force Liaison SEAC, trying to pick Carla up. He had paused near a vine covered pillar to look at her sitting there in that poised, majestic way of hers and saw the officers approach her. She had said something to them, then when they persisted turned her head. Con walked over.
“Beat it,” he said.
The major, very young with long, smooth, dark hair, looked up at him from his bent over position and gave a short cynical little laugh, then turned back to Carla.
“Beat it,” Con said louder. Neither the major nor the captain turned but Carla was looking at him now. “Beat it,” Con said louder still to the major. He pretended not to notice.
Con grabbed him suddenly, spun him around, hit him hard with a left to the belly, then a right to the face, smashing in hard on his nose, feeling and hearing at the same instant the bone give way under his fist. The major went down flowing blood in the crowded bar. The Air Force captain turned looking first at the figure on the floor, then to Con. Con was white with rage and his eyes glared belligerently. The captain bent over his major. Con threw a ten rupee note on the table. “The name’s Reynolds,” he said. “And if you want to make a case out of molesting this woman let’s make a case.”
There was a crowd around them now. The major, shaking and bleeding hard, shook his head. The captain started to say something then changed his mind shaking his head. Con took Carla by the arm and pushed through the crowd. They caught the four-thirty train for Colombo.
They never spoke a word on the way to the train or on the train ride back. Con was sullen, almost remorseful. As they pulled into the Colombo station Con suggested that they go somewhere and have dinner. They went to Gus’s office while she freshened up, then to the Galle Face Hotel. They went to the bar for a drink. As their silence grew longer, and seemingly louder, it became more constrained and awkward. They took their drinks out on the bathing pavilion. There was an outdoor pool on a large red tiled veranda that overlooked the sea and the beach. They sat on the wall of the veranda, near the sand, and there was light from the floodlights that lit the hotel and from the moon.
“Well, why don’t you go ahead and say it? Why did I hit the son-of-a-bitch?” Con said finally.
“Why did you?” She said composedly from a distance.
“Because I wanted to. That’s why. Because, because.… You wouldn’t understand.”
She was smoking, holding the cigarette high in front of her eyes, and the sea wind was blowing her hair, and he saw her half-smile a superior, cynical little smile.
“Well, say something,” he said.
“What’s there to say? You hit him. I don’t know, maybe you had a good reason to hit him. You’re the one that felt bad. I was just … well, frightened. I’d never seen you like that.”
“I’ve never been like that before. I’d never really felt like that before. Yes, once I felt like that. Once in my first term in college. I joined a fraternity and something happened and I felt like that.”
“I don’t like you to be wired like this. You were so relaxed for a while, Con. You were coming along so fine.”
“What do you mean coming along so fine?” he asked belligerently. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me? That I’m going the way of Lau’rel? Like that?”
“That’s not what I mean. I didn’t say anything like that at all. You jumped to a conclusion. You jumped the first few days you were here and you jumped again today. And I can’t help it if I don’t like it when you’re like that. I don’t. It frightens me, I hardly know you.”
“It’s the Time. Sometimes you don’t have Time. You have to get things done. Why should I consider that guy I clobbered? Why? It was his own damn fault. I was minding my business. He was the one that cut in. That’s all those fellows do anyway. This war is a vacation for them.”
“They didn’t mean anything wrong.”
“Hell no. They wanted to take you to bed. There’s nothing wrong with that. Not as far as I’m concerned. I suppose you felt quite flattered.”
“Don’t be ugly,” she said. “There’s no need for that.”
How could he tell her? he wondered. How could he tell her how he felt about another campaign, and another after that, and that gang in Delhi waiting for him to make one small mistake, and how he felt in the shower that he would never see Chicago again? How could he tell her without being a sentimental, dramatic ass? Or how he felt about going back to America, if he ever went back? How he didn’t want to go into business with his father ever? That business held little for him. And how would he ever manage to support them? Her child, too. What the hell could he do? What did he know how to do beside fight? And you can’t go around fighting. Not with a wife and child you can’t go around looking for a war. That was no life anyhow. Not a life of war.
She was staring at him. She saw the deep furrowed lines of his prominent forehead, the lower lip pursed thoughtfully, firmly, the glisten of the light on the red-brown goatee. She looked at his forearms, the dark hair curling up over the muscled vein. She thought if she could only paint or sculpture she would like to have his likeness just like that. She reached over and took his hand and stroked it.
“Tell me what happened in school that was like today,” she said. “Please. I want to know.”
He never looked up. He began to tell her; slowly at first. He told her how he had pledged this fraternity because of the boy he had gone away to college with; his father had belonged to it. He told her how one night he had taken out a Jewish girl that he had met in his English class and how at the weekly meeting, when the pledges were reprimanded for their demerits, it was politely hinted that he shouldn’t take the girl out again. Gentile fraternities did not intermingle with Jewish sororities; it was campus ethics.
Con did not have another date with the girl until the end of the week but that night, after the meeting, he called and made appointments with her for the next evening and the evening after that. He dated her continuously that week. At the next meeting he was called up, hinted at again, then severely paddled for several demerits he didn’t feel he deserved.
He told Carla that was when he first noticed that when the actives were together, as a group, they acted entirely different from when he would see them alone, singly. The fellows that had wanted to do all the paddling were the football men, there wa
s one besides his roommate that would not wield a paddle at all, the football men and the pre-med students. He said he had then often wondered why the premeds got such a kick out of paddling and told her that he would never forget the mental picture he had of the satisfied expression on one particular pre-med student’s face every time he struck flesh.
The next week he had dated the girl, Jane Levenson, every day. The next week he was paddled severely and when the house duty rosters came out he was on every one of them. Then they had put up additional duty rosters and he headed each of those. He was so busy with his household duties, and the crazy thing that made him see the girl, that he had little time for study. The other fraternities began to criticize his house because they couldn’t control him, and then they really put the pressure on.
At the next weekly meeting he had thirty-two marks against him. After the fourth swat of the inch thick paddle across his bare buttocks he felt only numbness but around the fifteenth he started to bleed, and then a few swats later one of the actives swung low, and up-under, and caught him on the testicle and it swelled immediately to the size of an outdoor baseball. Curled up with his pain on the floor he had begun to vomit.
That was the night, he told Carla, that he had a known hate, real hate for the first time. It was a hate very similar to that hate he had in Kandy today, he said. He had cried that first night after they had gotten him into his bed. He had tried not to cry so loud that anyone would hear and had bitten into his lip until it had cut. That night he had began to grind his teeth in his half-sleep, and often now he would do it, and when someone would mention it to him he would remember that night in the fraternity house.
And that was the night, too, he told Carla, that he had learned to throw himself into his pain instead of running from it. He had found there was no place to run, and because of his exhaustive tears, and the tired frustrations of the week, he had out of necessity thrown himself into the pain. And once he had thrown himself into it he found that it wasn’t half as bad as he had expected. They made him stay in bed five days while the pre-meds took care of him.
The next meeting the president of the house called him forward. “We talked to the girl and she doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
“She’ll see me,” Con said. “And you can go to hell.”
One of the football players hit him on the side of the head, and another pushed him and he hit the floor stirring up the white nauseating pain in his testicle.
“Look, Con, we’re tired of this as you are,” the president said. “Why don’t you give up? You can’t win.”
“Give up what? You’ve never asked me to give up anything,” Con said from the floor. “You’ve only hinted. Are you afraid to ask me what to give up?”
“All right, we’re” asking you to give up this girl,” the president said.
“Why? Why do you want me to give her up?”
“Because she’s a Jew,” the president said.
“I just wanted to hear you say it. I really didn’t think you’d have enough guts to say it. Well, I can’t buy it. Maybe it was my fault coming here in the first place. But I can’t buy it. I don’t know why but I can’t.”
Then he had gotten off the floor and walked over to the fireplace mantle. He had taken his pledge pin from his sweater and placed it beside the fraternal insignia. He had walked out then, moved into a rooming house, and never went back. Oddly, he told Carla, all the boys in the house, were real friendly to him every time he had, after that, run into them on the campus. He had stayed in school until Christmas, but he didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, and quit during that vacation.
They were still sitting on the ledge of the veranda of the Galle Face. “And that’s what I’ve hated,” Con said. “The idea that men shouldn’t stand for themselves. Bastards that won’t think or do anything unless they have someone with them. Or behind them. Like those fellows today. If that major was alone he would have gotten out of there quickly. Probably politely. You know that. But it was the two of them. Two against one? No. Two proving to one. Two grown men trying to prove to each other, thus to themselves, their sainted manhood. They were more than likely together because neither one of them had the nerve to approach a woman alone. Like high school kids smoking. Kids don’t smoke alone. They never start smoking out of their own thoughts. They never start drinking alone. They never destroy property alone. It would be undemocratic to do anything alone. You’ve got to have help to corrupt yourself. You’ve got to conform to group thought. They call it Community Spirit in America. You have to be like everyone else even if it makes you miserable being the way you are.
“My father’s a big man in his city. At least among his foreign-born associates. When the war came I told him I was going to enlist. He feigned a recurrence of an old heart condition. I found out he had lied. There was nothing wrong with him. He wouldn’t ask me directly not to enlist; he just made me feel needed by that sick act. I enlisted. Two days before I was to go he asked me to meet him in the city, in Chicago. I met him in this bar. There was another fellow with him. This fellow was an ex-bigshot in the American Legion. He began to tell how horrible war was and all that sort of thing. He wanted, for a sum, to fix it with a certain Senator so that I got Stateside duty. I told them both to go to hell.
“I thought my father was a son-of-a-bitch for that, of course. He came to America with seven dollars and made the kind of living he had never even dreamed existed. But he didn’t want to invest anything back into the country. He just wanted to take, take, take, I thought. I never realized, until a few months ago, that that was his ignorant way of expressing his love. He thought that he was one hundred per cent correct. That it was a father’s duty to protect his family under any circumstances.
“Well, a lot of those foreign associates of his did put in a fix. Half the sons of his prominent friends were stationed either close to the city, or in some soft job, or taking some soft special course. When I came back from Officer’s School my father went all over berating his friends for tying up their boys. And when he learned that I was going overseas he really began to criticize his friends for doing what he had tried to do with me. My mother, who adores the ground Dad walks on, went right along with him. Though, to hear her talk sometimes, the Greeks are below her station. She often says she doesn’t know how, with her background, she ever got mixed up with one. Her family, you see, are of old French-American stock. Her father was an officer in the Civil War. I don’t know what that has to do with anything but mother seems to think it has a lot to do with a lot of things.
“To get to the point, Carla, had I conformed at that fraternity or honored my father’s wishes I would never have met you or Nautaung or Danny and a lot of others that have given my life meaning. I would probably have never known the Kachins. And had I obeyed, conformed, and still met the Kachins I wouldn’t have known how to act toward them because that thing inside me that tells me when I need to be told so bad, would never have had a chance to develop. I would be afraid, yes afraid, to believe in it. That thing is myself. I wouldn’t have known what that was because like anything else it needs exercise to develop.
“So I’m against a lot of things, you might say. But if people really believe that man has a sense of purity in him, why don’t they raise their children to search for it? Instead of bringing them up to conform to the impurity of group thought. Why don’t they teach us to find ourselves before we go out on the road playing God to others. It’s terribly disillusioning to find that what you have been taught is nothing but a series of lies.
“That’s what usually throws a man. The lies. That’s what makes him bitter. But me, I’ve been the luckiest guy in the world when you come to think of it. I’ve had Nautaung and Danny and now you. And I’ve needed everything I could get from every one of you to get to the point where I am grateful instead of bitter about what has happened. And I am grateful that I’ve found out about the lies. Really grateful,” he said looking into her eyes, taking her shoulders in his
hands. “Jesus Christ,” he grinned. “Do I ever feel better. I really do. I’m such a goddamn fool. I shouldn’t have hit that fellow. I really shouldn’t have. But the hell with that. Do you feel better?”
“I feel better. When you feel good it’s catching. And you shouldn’t have hit that officer. You shouldn’t have hit him because he never understood why you were hitting him. If he understood, and you knew he did, then you should have hit him if you felt like it. But if he did understand he more than likely wouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. You have a fine right cross,” she said. “Very fine. You didn’t know I was a boxing enthusiast did you?”
“Are you really?”
“Ask me. Go ahead and ask me,” she smiled.
“What was John L. Sullivan’s nickname? And who did he lose the title to?” Con asked.
“John L. Sullivan was known as the Boston Strong Boy. He lost the title to James J. Corbett, known as Gentleman Jim, in New Orleans, Louisiana,” she said and snapped her fingers.
He laughed. “You’re wonderful. What would you like to do?”
“To dance. Tonight I’d like to dance. To have fun. To go to the sailor’s bars around the dock area. To slum.”
“Yes, I’d like that too,” he said. And kissed her and held her for a moment, then took her hand and, like two happy children, they started off.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The fourth day after Con had seen Gus in Kandy he left Colombo on a noon plane. He arrived in Calcutta and took a taxi to the Great Eastern Hotel. The next morning he went out to the Colonel’s Calcutta Headquarters. He had a long talk with the Judge Advocate, made out a new will leaving everything to Carla, and took out additional insurance in her favor. Shortly before noon he left Calcutta and arrived at the Assam base in time for dinner.
The first thing he heard when he arrived at base was the story of Ringa’s roadblock. He had, with Danny in support, thrown a block into the Myitkyina-Bahmo Road intending to hold it for twentyfour hours. The block had so surprised the Japs that they had pulled everything to try to liquidate the guerrila force. Ringa was forced to withdraw after ten hours but the concentrated Jap force suffered heavy casualties when the airforce hit them after Ringa’s retreat. Ringa had had only one killed, six wounded. But the effect was dynamic. The attacking Chinese forces had been able to push thirty five miles in two days because of guerrilla pressure. In a way this changed the tactics to be used by the Kachins from that time on. They were now looked upon by headquarters CBI as more than an intelligence, nuisance force.
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