The Feather Merchants

by Max Shulman

  “No.”

  “We’ve meant a great deal to one another, Estherlee,” I said throatily.

  “It’s better to break clean.”

  I paused the proper length of time. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I am, Dan. It’s better this way. You know how I feel. Nothing can change that.”

  “I’m sorry, Etherlee.”

  “It’s not your fault, dear—Dan. It’s just the way things worked out.”

  “It’s certainly funny the way things worked out,” I said with a short, bitter laugh.

  “It certainly is.”

  “Then this—this is good-by.”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “It’s funny saying good-by like this—on a telephone, as though we’ve never meant anything to one another.”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Well, good-by, Estherlee. I would like to see you just once more, just to say good-by properly. But I suppose we should do it like this.”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right. But I can’t help wishing that our good-by weren’t so cold, so impersonal. Perhaps we could just have dinner tonight. What time are you through rolling bandages?”

  “Five-thirty. But, Dan, I think it’s better—”

  “All right. I’ll pick you up at the Red Cross. Good-by, dear, someone’s at the door.”

  I hung up. Well, said I, rubbing my palms briskly, well. I’d soon put a stop to this foolishness. She was being damned unreasonable. Was it my fault if I was safe, sound, and healthy?

  The night before I had left for the Army we had, as she euphemistically put it, “gone all the way.” A quick, unsatisfactory spasm it had been, but, nonetheless, a major step. Weeks of conversations, reassurances, plans, vacillations, considerations, rationalizations, yeas and nays, pros and cons, had preceded the act. At length a sort of agreement had been reached, an agreement that had half negated itself during its actual consummation.

  I was enlisted in the aviation cadets at that time. In June Estherlee and I were both graduated from the University of Minnesota. In other years we would have become engaged on commencement night (our romance had weathered our senior and part of our junior years), but this was Armageddon. Who could think of engagements or marriages? We had learned in the previous twenty years that nobody would survive the next war. Now we were in the next war, a just, unavoidable war, and all the young cynics turned into heroes. All values paled before this single significance: the young, strong men (among them, I) were going off to war. It was a time of tragic magnificence, as any fool could plainly see.

  I waited through that summer for my induction orders. During the days I went around doing little kindnesses for people so that they would remember me favorably when I was dead. The nights were spent with Estherlee in hot, desperate clinging. Bravely we talked about how dulcet and decorous it was to die for one’s country. From our morbid convictions it followed naturally that we deserved a little of the summum bonum before it was too late; would, in fact, be remiss not to take it. So we talked and necked and hemmed and hawed and needled one another into emotional turmoils until the night before I left, when we finally agreed that my certain destiny outweighed the moral considerations. In spite of gnawing last-minute doubts and fantastic inexperience on her part and acute nervousness on mine, it was done. I went off dry-eyed to war.

  For three weeks I was an aviation cadet. As eager as any of them, I bounded from my bed at reveille, learned to salute, drill, march, and sing the Air Corps song, did calisthenics that previously I had seen only on the Orpheum circuit, ran around the camp during my off-duty hours to develop my wind, read nothing but aircraft-silhouette books, and took ice-cold showers. By God, I said, feeling my flabby muscles congeal, I’m going to get some of them bastards before they get me.

  Then I was washed out on a slight technicality—something about I couldn’t see.

  I was transferred to the Air Force ground forces and sent to a new Oklahoma airfield from whose outraged topsoil cotton had been rooted out only a few weeks before. I was a member of a “cadre” (from the Latin cadere, meaning it shouldn’t happen to a bachelor of arts). Living and working in a buildingless, roadless camp, our job was to get the field organized for a complement that would arrive some months later.

  Our lieutenant was a nice, inarticulate guy who had been scoutmaster of a troop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for ten years prior to entering the Army, and during that decade his troop had taken six firsts and three seconds in statewide fire-by-friction contests. One year the troop did not compete because of the untimely indisposition of its star incendiary and anchor man, Harold (Blazes) McNachnie. The contest that year was held on the day before Easter Sunday, and on that day McNachnie, a religious fanatic, always suffered from bleeding palms.

  The lieutenant was no mean fire-by-frictioner himself. Scorning cigarette lighters and matches alike, he always kept in his desk drawer some sticks and thongs with which he lit his cigarettes. The lieutenant’s cigarette-lighting impedimenta, by the way, afforded him a heap of innocent merriment. When you came into his office he would take a handful of thongs out of his drawer and say, “Do you know what these are?”

  You would say, “Thongs.”

  To which he would answer, “You’re welcome,” and his pale blue eyes would dance with deviltry behind tortoise-shell glasses.

  But I digress. I was saying that I was a member of a cadre and our lieutenant was a nice, inarticulate guy. He considered it a matter for rejoicing that we were the first arrivals on the field. Occasionally he would call us together and say in his sincere, halting manner, “Men, I don’t know what you think about being here—that is, I’m sure you have your own ideas—but, well, to me it’s something admirable. Admirable, in that it is to be admired. I mean this mud and everything and nobody is here yet, except, of course, we are here, and maybe there are no streets or buildings—I say ‘maybe.’ Of course there aren’t. I, and all of you, too, of course, can see that—and maybe we do sleep in empty Garand cases. But what I feel is that we’re all lucky to be here now when there is nothing. I realize, of course, that there are certain hardships or difficulties to be endured or undergone, that is, comparatively speaking. By comparatively I mean compared to later when we have beds and barracks and real company streets. But, on the other hand, I look at it this way: we are pioneers, in a sense. We will see this post grow and the blue skies above it—of course they are gray at this time of year, which is winter, no matter how mild it seems to a Northerner like me, and, of course, many of you, but I can promise you, barring, of course, unseasonal weather, that in summer they, the skies, I mean, will be, as I said, blue—we will see in the skies, blue or gray, depending on the season, the planes of the Army Air Forces, and we will know—those of us who are still here, for you can never tell in the Army—that this cadre’s groundwork made it all possible.”

  Then we would give him three cheers and a tiger, hoist him to our shoulders, and carry him around the mud for a time singing the Air Corps song. At length with mock severity he would order us to let him down and go into his office and light a few fires as he always did when he was pleased.

  The scoutmaster was right. The camp grew, and the barracks, row on row of livable eyesores, sprang up. Concrete was poured over the insurgent cotton, and soon there was a runway around the camp. Black-topped company streets wound their way through the mire; before long it got so a man could finish a day’s work with clean shoes. The camp, before our eyes, perceptibly, took shape.

  When my college-weakened eyes had eliminated me from the aviation cadets and put me into the ground forces I had felt about as useful as a rotolactor in a bull pen. I thought they were going to make a mechanic out of me, and I knew that if the outcome of the war depended on my so much as changing a spark plug, Hitler would soon be eating dairy lunches in the White House. When they wisely gave me a clerical job, I considered suicide. In my righ
teous, civilianish opinion, a soldier who held a desk job was a slacker, unless he was deathly ill, and such I suspected of malingering. I soon learned that you don’t put ten million citizens in an army and get them where they have to be, fully trained and fully equipped, without a million miles of paper. Every spoon in every mess kit and every Flying Fortress has to be accounted for. All the trivia, all the data, have to be on paper, to be sifted and sent higher up, resifted and sent still higher, and so on until the silver-starred boys in map-covered rooms like my father’s den can move colored-headed pins around and know that what each pin represents is going to be where that pin is sticking. It can’t be done any other way, and each soldier who types, files, and records papers is in every sense a soldier. I learned my work and learned it well; my rapid promotions proved that.

  But there was a little trouble about persuading Estherlee. Here she was, sitting in Minneapolis, trying to convince herself that our last night was something fine and beautiful and waiting for my death notice to square her conscience. And here were my letters coming from bombproof Oklahoma: “Darling, today I was promoted to private first class.” “Darling, today I was promoted to corporal.” “Darling, today I was promoted to sergeant.” “Darling, today I’m real busy getting out a survey of nonexpendable office supplies.” “Darling, today I cut my finger on the edge of a piece of paper. I went to the infirmary and they put some sulfa on it, and it feels better already. Isn’t sulfa wonderful?”

  Estherlee sat there waiting for “The War Department regrets” and I sent her news of promotions and cut fingers. She got hotter and hotter, and her letters got colder and colder. In her last one she said, “You must be feeling proud of yourself sitting there in Oklahoma at your safe job and knowing that you got what you wanted from me.”

  “I should live so long, Estherlee,” I wrote back, “that little episode is all forgotten. It means nothing to me.”

  I must have said something wrong because after that she started sending my letters back unopened.

  Well, I guessed I could straighten things out at dinner. And now I had the whole afternoon free, and Mama was coming from the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches. I hurriedly decided to visit the campus.

  “Eat. Eat, you skeleton. Where you running?” she cried.

  I meshed the gears in Papa’s newly ringed, gas-filled car and drove off.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How green was my campus that afternoon! Emerald, serene, eternal, it sprawled on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. I had plenty of time to drive around and look at it because it took me better than an hour to find a parking space. All the campus parking lots were jammed. “More students drivin’ now account of the war,” a traffic cop explained to me. Parked at last, I proceeded on foot across the campus.

  First I wandered across the Knoll, in the good years a verdant, tree-covered acre which had served as a lunch and trysting place. Now leggy coeds flexed and posed, apparently to keep in practice, because, except for a few underage freshmen, there were no men in sight. Emboldened by sharp, two-noted whistles and undeniable winks, I stopped and talked to a group of four coeds. “Nice day,” I said.

  “It certainly is, Lieutenant,” cooed one, smiling and wiggling late pubic acquisitions.

  “This spring weather,” sighed another, slithering sinuously over the grass. “It does something to me. Does it do something to you, Captain?”

  “I feel so kind of cuddly and lovely, Major,” a third confessed, debarking a young spruce with her writhing back.

  The fourth went all out. “Colonel,” she panted, “let’s.”

  I escaped with bruises and continued my walk around the campus. In front of the library I met a lean, thin-haired young man named Blodgett who had been in my senior composition class the year before. At that time, I remembered, he had been writing a trilogy. The three novels were called Flesh, Lust, and Venery; the entire trilogy was entitled Spasm. It was a study of the aphrodisiac effects of crowding people into streetcars.

  The hero, Jason Johnson, is a streetcar conductor who is unable to please his wife in the evenings because of erotic aberrations during his day’s work. In the first book the Jason Johnsons are worried about the apparently causeless breaking up of their marriage. To save their home they try various stopgap remedies, such as reading aloud to one another and painting decals on the kitchen cupboards. But all measures fail, and the end of the first book finds them, puzzled but estranged, in a court of equity.

  In the second book they go their separate ways. She attends law school, is admitted to the bar, becomes involved in a paving scandal with an unscrupulous contractor named Mac Adam, and is banished from the town. He, through a series of preposterous errors, delivers a lecture on papal fallibility to a Knights of Columbus picnic and is nearly stoned to death. Needless to say, the Johnsons are both miserable.

  In the third book Jason hears that his wife lies ill of an intestinal complaint in a neighboring town. At this time he is penniless because of a disastrous week end at the whippet races, to which, in his moral disintegration, he has become addicted. Heedless of consequences, he absconds with his day’s streetcar receipts and rushes to the side of his ailing wife. She, however, is past hope. What is worse, in her delirium she fancies that he is the appellate court judge who denied her a writ of certiorari during her paving litigation. She dies calling down curses on him.

  Meanwhile a cordon of police breaks into the room to arrest him for the theft of the streetcar proceeds. Feigning a call of nature, he goes into the bathroom to commit suicide. He hopes to find something lethal in the medicine cabinet; there are only suppositories. He eats one or two of them, but their effect, if anything, is salubrious. Frustrated, defeated, broken, his life ruined by something he cannot even comprehend, he goes out and surrenders to the police. The crowning irony is that now he really has to go to the toilet, and he’s embarrassed to ask them again.

  “Well, Blodgett,” I said, “how’s the trilogy? Found a publisher yet?”

  “I’ve given it up,” he answered. “From now on I’m through writing significant stuff. I’ve gone commercial. I want to get my hands on some of that big money that’s floating around. I would have, too, if things hadn’t gone wrong.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was classified 4-F.”

  “How did that upset your plans?”

  “I was all set to write a book about the Army. Like Hargrove. I had the thing almost done. All I needed was to get in the Army. I had the characters all chosen, the situations all set. Sure-fire stuff. I had a sergeant—a big tough guy with a face like a bulldog, tough-talking, but a heart of gold. I had a private—dumb and innocent, a guy who did everything wrong, but lovable. I had a million laughs like this one: the soldiers are assembled by a river, and the sergeant says, ‘Fall in,’ and this dumb private falls in the river, and the sergeant says, ‘What did you do that for?’ and the private says, ‘You said, “Fall in,” didn’t you?’ I had a million laughs like that one, one right on top of another.

  “And in spite of the horseplay and hilarity in the book, I had a Message. I was going to show how you get all these different types into an army camp—farmers from Iowa, subway guards from New York, movie actors from Hollywood, cotton pickers from Georgia, all kinds of people—and after you train them a few months all their differences disappear, and they’re all the same, single-minded American fighting man.

  “But they classify me 4-F, and I’m stuck. Nobody will read a book about soldiers by a civilian. So here I’ve got a million dollars’ worth of characters and sure-fire gags—with a Message to boot—and I can’t do a thing with it.”

  “That’s rough,” I said. “The world is waiting for stuff like that.”

  “Say,” he said, looking crafty, “you used to write a little. How about selling you some of this stuff? I got a million gags. Listen: the sergeant says, ‘Present arms,’ and the private gives the sergeant his gun, and the sergeant says, ‘What did you do that for?’ and t
he private says, ‘You said to present arms, didn’t you?’ There’s just no end to them, Dan. Gag, gag, gag, one after another. This book will make you a rich man. Civilians are buying all the army books they can get their hands on. Soldiers amuse hell out of civilians.”

  I thanked him kindly and refused. “If I write a book,” I said, “it will be about civilians. Civilians amuse hell out of soldiers.”

  “Oh well,” he said philosophically, “I’ll get rid of them somewhere. I can’t be crying over spilt milk. I’ve got work to do. I’m writing a book now that should make me a million dollars. I’m going to scoop the whole world. My book will come out the day the war ends. It will be the first debunking the war. I’ll tell all about the munitions makers’ profits and the shady military purchasing deals and the bad generalship and the faulty equipment and the debauchery of army officers and homosexualism in the ranks and the fake atrocity stories and the needless amputations in army hospitals and the biggest hoax of all—the war never had to be fought.”

  “I’ve got an appointment,” I said.

  I resumed my tour of the campus. There were coeds everywhere. Some leaned against buildings. Some hung out of windows. Some sat in convertibles with motors running (both the convertibles’ and the coeds’). Some fidgeted on the grass. All kept their eyes peeled for the infrequent mate—the draftproof aeronautical-engineering student, the medical student finishing his course under army sponsorship, the seventeen-year-old freshman, the bald or balding professor.

  One of the last-named fell in beside me as I walked. “I won’t deny,” he said, guessing what I was thinking, “that at first I was pleased by all this. To be whistled at, jostled against, and mentally undressed by an attractive young woman is flattering. I am still a young man, relatively speaking, and I am still a sound man biologically if I exercise prudence. It is not unpleasant to be the object of such lascivious overtures, and there is some poetic justice in it too.