by Max Shulman
I stood up. “Thanks for the drinks, P. B. We hate to run, but we’ve really got to.”
“Where?” came a feminine shriek from across the room.
“There!” answered another. “Follow me.”
Blanche came loping off the dance floor with Madge close behind her. A pair of balding, disappointed men who had been planning big things for later that evening pursued them both. The men gave up the chase midway in answer to an invitation from a pair of hot-eyed lady welders.
“I told you it was them,” said Blanche triumphantly as they skidded into our table. “Hello, dears.”
“Why, Blanche and Madge,” said Sam with real pleasure. “How nice to see you again. Won’t you sit down?”
“Yes,” said I. “Make yourselves comfortable. We have to be running along now. P.B. will buy you a drink in memory of Montag’s mother. Won’t you, P.B.?”
“It’s the least I can do,” he said.
“Come along, Montag.”
“I don’t think it’s time yet,” he said smilingly. “We’d better sit down for a few more minutes. Remember? Bang-bang. Gooey-gooey youey-youey.”
I sat down. “Montag,” I said, “you should go far in the engineers. You engineered me in here nicely tonight.”
“Why, Dan!” he said, hurt.
“Well, let’s all have a drink,” proposed P.B. He ordered eight Sty Stingers. “Mrs. Gooberman and Mrs. Spetalnik, I want you to meet Ruth and Rachel Replevin.”
“How do you do?” said the twins. “We dyed our hair once. It came out even worse than yours.”
“They’re not very bright,” said Sam quickly. “Tell me, girls, what have you been doing since we saw you last?”
“Dearie,” said Madge, “a terrible thing happened to me. Last night I am entertaining a tool and die maker in my flat when in walks Rex—that’s Mr. Spetalnik. ‘Who is this man?’ he says.
“‘Who are you?’ asks the tool and die maker.
“‘I’m her husband,’ says Rex, although we been divorced now six months.
“‘A con game,’ says the tool and die maker. ‘I been tricked.’
“‘Well, of all the nerve,’ says I. ‘Accusing me of running a con game. I’ll have you know that this is a high-class establishment. Please to take your things and go.’
“Well, I bum-rushed him the hell out of there, and I turns on Rex and says, ‘Now will you please explain what is the grand idea you busting into my place with manure on your feet and driving off my friends?’”
The waiter interrupted with our drinks. “Hang on to your cash-register checks, folks,” he said. “They got your Spin-O numbers on ’em.”
“It’s about time we were going, isn’t it, Montag?” I said.
“Please,” he protested. “The lady is right in the middle of a story.”
“You bastard,” I muttered into my drink. “You’re fixing to railroad me again tonight.”
“How come you told us your name was Jordan last time?” asked Blanche.
“Modest,” Sam explained.
“We’re getting more and more helpless,” announced the Replevins.
“‘Now, don’t get sore,’ Rex says,” continued Madge. “‘I just came up here to ask you a question.’
“‘Well, hurry up and ask it and get the hell off the rug,’ I told him. ‘Last time I sent that rug to the cleaners’ they refused it.’
“‘I want to ask you about that cod-liver oil I been taking,’ he says. ‘Am I supposed to take a teaspoon of cod-liver oil with a glass of water or a glass of cod-liver oil with a teaspoon of water?’
“‘A teaspoon of cod-liver oil with a glass of water, you jerk,’ I says.
“‘My God,’ he says, ‘no wonder I been scared to go out of the house on Fridays.’”
I finished my Sty Stinger. “Montag, it’s time.”
“Everybody have your cash-register checks ready,” called the m.c. “It’s time to play Spin-O. Miss Fligg, will you please come up and spin the magic wheel?”
Miss Fligg came up to the wheel, dipped her leg through the slit in her gown in a low curtsy, and spun the wheel around. “Number 162,” she announced. “Will the lucky winner step forward?”
“That’s you,” Blanche screeched, pulling me to my feet. “Get up there.”
I threw my ticket under the table rapidly. “No, you’re wrong,” I said desperately.
Sam swooped under the table and retrieved my ticket. “Number 162,” he said. “That’s you, Dan.” He pushed me forward.
“I’ll get you for this,” I snarled.
“Well,” crowed Miss Fligg, “well, well, well. It’s Daniel Miller, folks. The hero.”
Led by Sam, the audience applauded wildly.
“Well, dearie,” said Miss Fligg, “I got a real nice prize for you. Here, take a look at it.” She handed be a black wooden box. I jumped back six or eight feet. “It won’t hurt you,” she laughed. “I’ll open it.” To my immeasurable relief it contained a bottle of scotch packed in straw. “Real stuff,” Miss Fligg assured me. “Not what I sell here. But before I give it to you I think you ought to say a few words to the folks.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said. With the determination of a long-suffering man in overdue revolt and the confidence born of four Sty Stingers I stepped firmly to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, it would be a shocking thing for me to stand here and pretend to be a hero.” I smiled as I saw Sam go white. “What I have done,” I continued, “is no more than what any soldier would have done in the line of duty. I am no hero.
“But there is a hero, a real hero, with us tonight. He’s sitting over there at the table I just left. His name is Sam Wye. S-A-M W-Y-E. He is very modest and calls himself Montag Fortz. But his name is Sam Wye. S-A-M W-Y-E. Remember it.”
“He’s drunk,” yelled Sam.
“See how modest he is,” I said. “He doesn’t want me to tell what he has done. But such deeds as he has performed must be told. The people have a right to know. On Guadalcanal Sam Wye—S-A-M W-Y-E—alone and unarmed, captured one hundred and twenty Japs. He made a sarong out of a shelter half, put a couple of coconuts in it, fixed his hair in an upsweep, and, thus disguised as a Geisha girl, enticed one hundred and twenty Japs into the American camp, where they were taken alive.”
The patrons stamped and whistled, and Madge rained wet kisses on Sam.
“There’s more,” I said. “He’s not only a hero, he’s a secret weapon. He has destroyed more than fifty U-boats by diving under water and punching holes in their sides with a dirk.”
Now the customers began showering coins and a little folding money on him. “He’s out of his head,” cried Sam. “His nerves are gone.”
“Ah, modest Sam Wye—S-A-M W-Y-E,” I said lovingly. “And now let me tell you his crowning feat, probably the most daring exploit of a United States soldier in all history. He parachuted into the imperial palace in Tokyo, kidnaped Hirohito, rowed him across the Pacific in a rubber boat to San Francisco, where he is now a prisoner in the Mark Hopkins Hotel!”
Now there were no coins—just folding money.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Now I will take my prize and go sit at the feet of my hero, Sam Wye—S-A-M W-Y-E.”
“You bastard,” he cursed after I had fought my way through the crowd around our table. “You bastard.”
“Do you think it’s time to go now?” I asked in high good humor.
He rose quickly and we bucked our way out. “Hey,” called P.B. Gelt, “if you’re not Fortz, then I didn’t kill your mother, did I, Al?”
“No,” said Al.
I put my wooden box containing the scotch in the back seat next to the dynamite, and Sam drove the Stutz Bearcat away in silence. “You’re not mad, are you, Sammy?” I asked, feeling very good.
He didn’t answer for a few minutes, “No, I’m not mad,” he said finally. “Just a little hurt, that’s all.”
I glowed happily.
“Well, what’s done is done,” h
e philosophized. “We’ve got work to do now. There’s an old bridge a few miles west of the highway. It’s on an old abandoned farm. We’ll go blow that up. I think I can find it.”
“O.K., Sammy,” I said genially.
He swung abruptly off the highway. The cutoff he had taken before we stopped at the Sty was an air cushion compared to what we were driving over now. There was no road. We were going forty miles an hour over open fields, newly furrowed before the spring planting. The two boxes in the back seat leaped and bounded and clashed together like lethal castanets. They caromed off the sides of the car, met in the middle of the seat, recoiled, and were slammed to the floor only to bounce back to the seat and then the sides and the ceiling and the seat and floor once more.
“Sam!” I hollered in mortal terror. “Sam!”
We plunged in and out of a mudhole, and I heard the wood crack in the two boxes. “Sam! What are you doing?”
“What’s the difference?” he said. “Nothing matters any more.”
“What are you—Sam!—talking about? Nothing matters any more. Do you think I got you in—Sam!—trouble? Look what you did to me. At least there were no news—Sam!—papermen around when I put the blocks to you. You’re the guy that told me not to—Sam!—worry, and now you’re acting like this.”
“I’m not worried,” he said, crashing through a picket fence (“Sam!”). “I’m just hurt and disappointed that you should do such a thing to me.”
There was a stream straight ahead. He couldn’t possibly be thinking of—He pressed harder on the accelerator. “SAM! SAM! Stop the car! Now! This minute! Stop the car!”
He screeched to a stop on the brink of the stream. I reached into the back seat, opened the box that contained the scotch, and took a long, deep pull. Then I dropped the bottle and leaped out of the car and ran to a haystack three hundred yards away and covered myself.
Sam came over shortly with the bottle. “Don’t you want to get there? It’s only a couple of miles more.”
I trembled negatively.
“How am I going to teach you demolition if you won’t let me?”
“Please,” I croaked. “Let’s not even talk about it. Let’s wait a little while for the dynamite to cool off and then you take me home.”
“If you say so.” He gave me the bottle, and I drank eagerly. “Yes, Dan,” he said, “that was a shoddy thing you did to me tonight.”
“Oh, come off that. Look what you did to me.”
“I’ll admit it. But I was trying to make amends. I was devoting my last night before I went overseas to teaching you demolition. I was actually risking my life for you. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get killed playing around with dynamite.”
I hit the bottle again, hard.
“Well, let’s forget about it,” he said. “It’s good to find out who your friends are.”
We sat silently. Occasionally I would begin to shake, and I would pour another slug of scotch in me. More than half the bottle went to quiet my tremors.
At the end of a half hour Sam said it was safe, and we went back to the car. “Please drive slowly,” I begged.
He nodded. He drove carefully across the field back to the highway. On the highway he drove well under thirty. I leaned back on the seat. The night air, the scotch, and the Sty Stingers were affecting me strangely. I put the bottle of scotch back in the box in the back seat. We drove some more, and a great sense of sadness came over me. By the time we were back in the city I was sniffling.
“That’s all right, Danny,” said Sam. “It doesn’t matter about me.”
I’m not sure that that was what I was crying about, but it seemed logical at the time. “Sam,” I said, “I did a shoddy thing to you tonight.”
“That’s all right,” said Sam.
“Tomorrow you’re going overseas, and you spend your last night at home risking your life teaching me demolition, and I do a shoddy thing like that to you.”
“It’s O.K., Dan. Forget it.”
“It’s shoddy. That’s what it is, shoddy.”
I sat abjectly until we were in front of my house. “Sam, I want you to know that no matter how shoddily I acted tonight, I’m grateful to you. And if you’ll accept my good wishes, I want to wish you the best of luck when you go across. And I hope we will soon be together again, on which occasion I will do my best to try to repay you for what you have done.”
“Thank you,” he said simply.
“Now you must go get some sleep. It’s shoddy of me to keep you up.”
I offered him my hand and he shook it warmly. “Good-by, Sam,” I said thickly. “We’ve been good friends, haven’t we?”
“Yes, Roberto. Don’t forget your scotch.”
I reached back and picked up the box. “The other one,” he said gently.
“I could have sworn it was this one.”
“No, Dan, the other one.”
“Thank you, Sam. You’re so good to me, and I’m so shoddy.”
I took the box and staggered to the door of my house, waving at Sam long after he had gone. I found my way upstairs to my room, threw the box on the bed, and switched on the light. Then I saw that I had taken the dynamite box.
I leaped frantically under the bureau, where I lay shuddering. When nothing happened for several minutes, I stuck my head out cautiously. The box lay quietly on my bed. The lid had come off. I crawled closer.
It was empty.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At ten the next morning O. Merriam Phyfe deposited me in a bunting-draped recruiting booth on a busy downtown corner. “ENLIST WITH SERGEANT DANIEL (DANNY BOY) MILLER, OUR OWN HERO” said a banner tacked across the front of the booth. “Here’s a pile of literature, Danny Boy,” said Phyfe, “and there’s a stack of enlistment blanks. You’ll stay here until noon. Then you’ll go to the studio for your radio interview with Colonel Swatch. After that you’ll pitch the first ball at the Minneapolis baseball opener. Is that all clear?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Remember, the eyes of Minneapolis and His Honor Mayor La Hoont are upon you. Carry on, Danny Boy.”
“Good-by, Phyfey Boy.”
I sat unhappily waiting for business. A few 4-Fs limped smugly by and some 3-As nervously crossed to the other side of the street.
At length some women stopped. One made me promise to see what I could do about getting her son off K.P.; one wanted information on how to attach her common-law husband’s pay; one went over me with a tapeline to get my measurements for a sweater for her son, who she reckoned was about my size; one misinformed trollop wanted to know how to get installed in an army prophylactic station; one tearfully brought me a Pomeranian for the Wags; one told me to tell Corporal Ed Gilroy, if I ran into him, that everything was all right—that stuff he sent her did the trick; one shook a finger at me and demanded to know why I got a furlough while her son had to stay in New Caledonia; one with seven small children said she’d be beholden to the government if her husband was drafted, and five tried to pick me up.
My time was almost up when a man finally stopped, if such he could be called. His face was stippled with pimples, and his voice was right off the Henry Aldrich program. “Danny Boy,” he said, “I can’t make up my mind. What I want to do is kill a lot of them bastards. Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.” He made like a machine gun. He bayoneted a few of the corpses and whirled and picked off a sniper on top of the bank building across the street. “Got him,” he said.
“There’s one in Walgreen’s doorway,” I warned.
He turned and fired twice. “There was two,” he explained. “Boy, I could kill them bastards all day. Now, look. I’ll be eighteen in a few months, and—”
“How many months?” I asked.
“Sixteen. And I’m trying to figure out what outfit I can join where I can kill the most of them bastards. First I thought I’d be a bombardier. They do a hell of a lot of killing. Then I thought, so I’m a bombardier, I’m ten thousand feet in the air, I drop my bombs, and five seconds
later I’m gone. How do I know I killed anybody? No, bombardier is out.
“It’s the same with artillery. You’re too far away to see how many you kill. Machine guns is pretty good, but they don’t get enough to suit me. I want to kill a lot of them bastards. Rifle, of course, is out of the question. I can’t make up my mind.
“Now, tell me. Is there some kind of mysterious death ray I can learn to operate?”
“Not that I know of,” I answered.
“I can’t make up my mind,” he said, and walked off leaving the unburied dead behind him.
The receptionist was holding Colonel Swatch at bay with a letter opener when I entered the radio studio. “Thank God you’re here,” she said devoutly.
“Ah, Sergeant Miller,” said Swatch. “You’re just in time. We’re on the air in a few minutes. Come into Studio A.”
I followed him into Studio A. We sat down on opposite sides of a table that had a small microphone on top of it. “Just a moment, Sergeant,” said the colonel. He walked over and goosed the lady organist.
“God damn it!” she cried. “Do you think it’s easy to play this thing standing up?”
“Now Sergeant,” he said, coming back satisfied, “this is going to be an informal interview. Just forget that I’m an officer. We won’t need a script. I’ll ask you questions, and you just answer them simply. There’s the red light. We’re on in a few seconds.”
The engineer signaled to the organist, who bent over and played the theme. Then the announcer told the world that for this day it would be deprived of Colonel Swatch’s usual analysis of the war, but that he would instead interview Minneapolis’ newest hero, the nonpareil Sergeant Daniel (Hard Rock) Miller.
“Well, Hard Rock,” said the colonel, “how does it feel to be home?”
“Great,” I answered.
“Yes, it’s always great to get home from the wars. I recollect a furlough I had from the Spanish-American War. It was a sick leave; I had received a ball in my temple in the charge up San Juan Hill. I was put in a Minneapolis hospital in the care of a 140-pound nurse. Woman was demented. She thought purgatives were the universal specific. I finally demanded to be sent back to combat.”