by Irwin Shaw
The assistant editor leaned over and put the bottle down. On the street below, three Frenchmen passed, singing loudly.
“I’m thirty years old and I write worse than I ever did. I don’t know what I’ll do after the war. Once, when I was in the Engineers, I sent her a letter. She was married, she wrote me, and she was having a kid on May seventeenth. She was going to call it David, after her husband’s uncle, she said. She asked me to pray for it. I haven’t written back. Well, what’s the difference?” He put his glasses on again. “The Filmarte Theatre.” He laughed and stood up. “I wish I had two hack writers I could throw stories to and know they’d come out right,” he said. “I wouldn’t get so tired. Well, it’s pretty late. Got to go to bed. Tomorrow’s another war.”
The radio was sending out American jazz now, the deep familiar horns of America pounding like all the music in all the dance halls and all the night clubs and at all the spring proms any American ever went to, any girl in a white dress ever danced at.
The assistant editor listened, his eyes blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. When it was over, he walked into his own room slowly, his shirt dumpy and wrinkled, to take one last look at his desk, and made sure everything was all right before going to bed.
Gunners’ Passage
“In Brazil,” Whitejack was saying, “the problem was girls. American girls.”
They were lying on the comfortable cots with the mosquito netting looped gracefully over their heads and the barracks quiet and empty except for the two of them and shaded and cool when you remembered that outside the full sun of Africa stared down.
“Three months in the jungle, on rice and monkey meat.” Whitejack lit a large, long, nickel cigar and puffed deeply, squinting up at the tin roof. “When we got to Rio, we felt we deserved an American girl. So the Lieutenant and Johnny and myself, we got the telephone directory of the American Embassy, and we went down the list, calling up likely names—secretaries, typists, interpreters, filing clerks.…” Whitejack grinned up at the ceiling. He had a large, sunburned, rough face, that was broken into good looks by the white teeth of his smile, and his speech was Southern, but not the kind of Southern that puts a Northerner’s teeth on edge.
“It was the Lieutenant’s idea, and by the time we got to the Q’s he was ready to give up but we hit pay dirt on the S’s.” Slowly he blew out a long draught of cigar smoke. “Uh-uh,” he said, closing his eyes reflectively. “Two months and eleven days of honey and molasses. Three tender and affectionate American girls as loving as the day is long, with their own flat. Beer in the icebox from Sunday to Sunday, steaks big enough to saddle a mule with, and nothing to do, just lie on the beach in the afternoon and go swimmin’ when the mood seized yuh. On per diem.”
“How were the girls?” Stais asked. “Pretty?”
“Well, Sergeant,” Whitejack paused and pursed his lips with thoughtful honesty. “To tell you the truth, Sergeant, the girls the Lieutenant and Johnny Moffat had were as smart and pretty as chipmunks. Mine …” Once more he paused. “Ordinarily, my girl would find herself hard put to collect a man in the middle of a full division of infantry soldiers. She was small and runty and she had less curves than a rifle barrel, and she wore glasses. But from the first time she looked at me, I could see she wasn’t interested in Johnny or the Lieutenant. She looked at me and behind her glasses her eyes were soft and hopeful and humble and appealing.” Whitejack flicked the cigar ash off into the little tin can on his bare chest he was using as an ash tray. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “a man feels mighty small if he just thinks of himself and turns down an appeal like that. Let me tell you something, Sergeant, I was in Rio two months and eleven days and I didn’t look at another woman. All those dark-brown women walkin’ along the beach three-quarters out of their bathing suits, just wavin’ it in front of your face.… I didn’t look at them. This runty, skinny little thing with glasses was the most lovin’ and satisfactory and decent little person a man could possibly conceive of, and a man’d just have to be hog-greedy with sex to have winked an eye at another woman.” Whitejack doused his cigar, took his ash tray off his chest, rolled over on his belly, adjusted the towel properly over his bare buttocks. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to get myself a little sleep.…”
In a moment Whitejack was snoring gently, his tough mountaineer’s face tucked childishly into the crook of his arm. Outside the barracks the native boy hummed low and wild to himself as he ironed a pair of suntan trousers on the shady side of the building. From the field, two hundred yards away, again and again came the sliding roar of engines climbing or descending the afternoon sky.
Stais closed his eyes wearily. Ever since he’d got into Accra he had done nothing but sleep and lie on his cot, day-dreaming, listening to Whitejack talk.
“Hi,” Whitejack had said, as Stais had come slowly into the barracks two days before, “which way you going?”
“Home,” Stais had said, smiling wearily as he did every time he said it. “Going home. Which way you going?”
“Not home.” Whitejack had grinned a little. “Not home at all.”
Stais liked to listen to Whitejack. Whitejack talked about America, about the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains where he had been in the forestry service, about his mother’s cooking and how he had owned great dogs which had been extraordinary at finding a trail and holding it, about how they had tried hunting deer in the hills from the medium bomber, no good because of the swirling winds rising from the gorges, about pleasant indiscriminate week-end parties in the woods with his friend Johnny Moffat and the girls from the mill in the next town.… Stais had been away from America for nineteen months now and Whitejack’s talk made his native country seem present and pleasantly real to him.
“There was a man in my town by the name of Thomas Wolfe,” Whitejack had said irrelevantly that morning. “He was a great big feller and he went away to New York to be an author. Maybe you heard of him?”
“Yes,” said Stais. “I read two books of his.”
“Well, I read that book of his,” said Whitejack, “and the people in town were yellin’ to lynch him for a while, but I read that book and he got that town down fair and proper, and when they brought him back dead I came down from the hills and I went to his funeral. There were a lot of important people from New York and over to Chapel Hill down for the funeral and it was a hot day, too, and I’d never met the feller, but I felt it was only right to go to his funeral after readin’ his book. And the whole town was there, very quiet, although just five years before they were yellin’ to lynch him, and it was a sad and impressive sight and I’m glad I went.”
And another time, the slow deep voice rolling between sleep and dreams in the shaded heat.… “My mother takes a quail and bones it, then she scoops out a great big sweet potato and lays some bacon on it, then she puts the quail in and cooks it slow for three hours, bastin’ it with butter all the time.… You got to try that some time.…”
“Yes,” said Stais, “I will.”
Stais did not have a high priority number and there seemed to be a flood of colonels surging toward America, taking all the seats on the C-54’s setting out westward, so he’d had to wait. It hadn’t been bad. Just to lie down, stretched full-out, unbothered, these days, was holiday enough after Greece, and anyway he didn’t want to arrive home, in front of his mother, until he’d stopped looking like a tired old man. And the barracks had been empty and quiet and the chow good at the transient mess and you could get Coca-Cola and chocolate milk at the PX. The rest of the enlisted men in Whitejack’s crew were young and ambitious and were out swimming all day and going to the movies or playing poker in another barracks all night, and Whitejack’s talk was smooth and amusing in the periods between sleep and dreams. Whitejack was an aerial photographer and gunner in a mapping-and-survey squadron and he’d been in Alaska and Brazil and back to the States and now was on his way to India, full of conversation. He was in a Mitchell squadron and the whole squadron was suppo
sed to be on its way together, but two of the Mitchells had crashed and burned on the take-off at Natal, as Whitejack’s plane had circled the field, waiting to form up. The rest of the squadron had been held at Natal and Whitejack’s plane had been sent on to Accra across the ocean, by itself.
Vaguely and slowly, lying on the warm cot, with the wild song of the Negro boy outside the window, Stais thought of the two Mitchells burning between sea and jungle three thousand miles away, and other planes burning elsewhere, and what it was going to be like sitting down in the armchair in his own house and looking across the room at his mother, and the pretty Viennese girl in Jerusalem, and the DC-3 coming down slowly, like an angel in the dusk to the rough secret pasture in the Peloponnesian hills.…
He fell asleep. His bones knit gently into dreams on the soft cot, with the sheets, in the quiet barracks, and he was over Athens again, with the ruins pale and shining on the hills, and the fighters boring in, and Lathrop saying, over the intercom, as they persisted in to a hundred, fifty yards, twisting, swiftly and shiftily in the bright Greek sky, “They grounded all the students today. They have the instructors up this afternoon.…” And, suddenly, and wildly, fifty feet over Ploesti, with Liberators going down into the filth in dozens, flaming.… Then swimming off the white beach at Bengasi with the dead boys playing in the mild, tideless swell, then the parachute pulling at every muscle in his body, then the green and forest blue of Minnesota woods and his father, fat and small, sleeping on pine needles on his Sunday off, then Athens again, Athens …
“I don’t know what’s come over the Lieutenant,” a new voice was saying as Stais came out of his dream. “He passes us on the field and he just don’t seem to see us.”
Stais opened his eyes. Novak, a farm boy from Oklahoma, was sitting on the edge of Whitejack’s bed, talking. “It has all the guys real worried.” He had a high, shy, rather girlish voice. “I used to think they never came better than the Lieutenant.… Now …” Novak shrugged. “If he does see you, he snaps at you like he was General George Patton.”
“Maybe,” Whitejack said, “maybe seeing Lieutenant Brogan go down in Natal … He and Brogan were friends since they were ten years old. Like as if I saw Johnny Moffat go down …”
It’s not that.” Novak went over to his own cot and got out his writing pad. “It began back in Miami four weeks ago. Didn’t you notice it?”
“I noticed it,” Whitejack said slowly.
“You ought to ask him about it.” Novak started writing a letter. “You and him are good friends. After all, going into combat now, it’s bad, the Lieutenant just lookin’ through us when he passes us on the field. You don’t think he’s drunk all the time, do you?”
“He’s not drunk.”
“You ought to ask him.”
“Maybe I will.” Whitejack sat up, tying the towel around his lean middle. “Maybe I will.” He looked forlornly down at his stomach. “Since I got into the Army, I’ve turned pig-fat. On the day I took the oath, I was twenty-eight and one-half inches around the waist. Today I’m thirty-two and three-quarters, if I’m an inch. The Army … Maybe I shouldn’t’ve joined. I was in a reserved profession, and I was the sole support of an ailing mother.”
“Why did you join?” Stais asked.
“Oh,” Whitejack smiled at him, “you’re awake. Feeling any better Sergeant?”
“Feeling fine, thanks. Why did you join?”
“Well …” Whitejack rubbed the side of his jaw. “Well … I waited and I waited. I sat up in my cabin in the hills and I tried to avoid listenin’ to the radio, and I waited and I waited, and finally I went downtown to my mother and I said, ‘Ma’am, I just can’t wait any longer,’ and I joined up.”
“When was that?” Stais asked.
“Eight days …” Whitejack lay down again, plumping the pillow under his head. “Eight days after Pearl Harbor.”
“Sergeant,” Novak said, “Sergeant Stais, you don’t mind if I tell my girl you’re a Greek, do you?”
“No,” Stais said gravely. “I don’t mind. You know, I was born in Minnesota.”
“I know,” said Novak, writing industriously. “But your parents came from Greece. My girl’ll be very interested, your parents coming from Greece and you bombing Greece and being shot down there.”
“What do you mean, your girl?” Whitejack asked. “I thought you said she was going around with a Technical Sergeant in Flushing, Long Island.”
“That’s true,” Novak said apologetically. “But I still like to think of her as my girl.”
“It’s the ones that stay at home,” said Whitejack darkly, “that get all the stripes and all the girls. My motto is: Don’t write to a girl once you get out of pillow-case distance from her.”
“I like to write to this girl in Flushing, Long Island,” Novak said, his voice shy but stubborn. Then to Stais, “How many days were you in the hills before the Greek farmers found you?”
“Fourteen,” said Stais.
“And how many of you were wounded?”
“Three. Out of seven. The others were dead.”
“Maybe,” Whitejack said, “he doesn’t like to talk about it, Charley.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Novak looked up, his young, unlined face crossed with concern.
“That’s all right,” Stais said. “I don’t mind.”
“Did you tell them you were a Greek, too?” Novak asked.
“When one finally showed up who could speak English.”
“That must be funny,” Novak said reflectively. “Being a Greek, bombing Greece, not speaking the language … Can I tell my girl they had a radio and they radioed to Cairo …?”
“It’s the girl of a Technical Sergeant in Flushing, Long Island,” Whitejack chanted. “Why don’t you look facts in the face?”
“I prefer it this way,” Novak said with dignity.
“I guess you can tell about the radio,” Stais said. “It was pretty long ago. Three days later, the DC-3 came down through a break in the clouds. It’d been raining all the time and it just stopped for about thirty minutes at dusk and that plane came down throwin’ water fifteen feet in the air.… We cheered, but we couldn’t get up from where we were sitting, any of us, because we were too weak to stand.”
“I got to write that to my girl,” Novak said. “Too weak to stand.”
“Then it started to rain again and the field was hip-deep in mud and when we all got into the DC-3, we couldn’t get it started.” Stais spoke calmly and thoughtfully, as though he were alone, reciting to himself. “We were just bogged down in that Greek mud. Then the pilot got out—he was a captain—and he looked around, with the rain coming down and all those farmers just standing there, sympathizing with him, and nothing anyone could do and he just cursed for ten minutes. He was from San Francisco and he really knew how to curse. Then everybody started breaking branches off the trees in the woods around that pasture, even two of us who couldn’t stand one hour before, and we just covered that big DC-3 complete with branches and waited for the rain to stop. We just sat in the woods and prayed no German patrols would come out in weather like that. In those three days I learned five words of Greek.”
“What are they?” Novak asked.
“Vouno,” Stais said. “That means mountain. Vrohi: Rains. Theos: God. Avrion: Tomorrow. And Yassov: That means farewell.”
“Yassov,” Novak said. “Farewell.”
“Then the sun came out and the field started to steam and nobody said anything. We just sat there, watching the water dry off the grass, then the puddles started to go here and there, then the mud to cake a little. Then we got into the DC-3 and the Greeks pushed and hauled for a while and we broke loose and got out. And those farmers just standing below waving at us, as though they were seeing us off at Grand Central Station. Ten miles farther on we went right over a German camp. They fired at us a couple of times, but they didn’t come anywhere close. The best moment of my whole life was getting into that hospital bed in Cairo, Egypt. I just
stood there and looked at it for a whole minute, looking at the sheets. Then I got in very slow.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to those Greeks?” Novak asked.
“No,” said Stais. “I guess they’re still there, waiting for us to come back some day.”
There was silence, broken only by the slow scratching of Novak’s pen. Stais thought of the thin, dark mountain faces of the men he had last seen, fading away, waving, standing in the scrub and short silver grass of the hill pasture near the Aegean Sea. They had been cheerful and anxious to please, and there was a look on the faces that made you feel they expected to die.
“How many missions were you on?” Novak asked.
“Twenty-one and a half,” Stais said. He smiled. “I count the last one as half.”
“How old are you?” Novak was obviously keeping the Technical Sergeant’s girl carefully posted on all points of interest.
“Nineteen.”
“You look older,” said Whitejack.
“Yes,” said Stais.
“A lot older.”
“Yes.”
“Did you shoot down any planes?” Novak peered at him shyly, his red face uncertain and embarrassed, like a little boy asking a doubtful question about girls. “Personally?”
“Two,” Stais said. “Personally.”
“What did you feel?”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Whitejack said. “He’s too tired to keep his eyes open, as it is.”