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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.
© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Publisher’s Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.
GO NAKED IN THE WORLD
By
Tom T. Chamales
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
DEDICATION 5
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 6
CHAPTER I 7
CHAPTER II 13
CHAPTER III 18
CHAPTER IV 28
CHAPTER V 34
CHAPTER VI 47
CHAPTER VII 63
CHAPTER VIII 73
CHAPTER IX 82
CHAPTER X 90
CHAPTER XI 103
CHAPTER XII 110
CHAPTER XIII 118
CHAPTER XIV 131
CHAPTER XV 140
CHAPTER XVI 151
CHAPTER XVII 158
CHAPTER XVIII 166
CHAPTER XIX 177
CHAPTER XX 187
CHAPTER XXI 194
CHAPTER XXII 203
CHAPTER XXIII 213
CHAPTER XXIV 229
CHAPTER XXV 237
CHAPTER XXVI 242
CHAPTER XXVII 253
CHAPTER XXVIII 261
CHAPTER XXIX 277
CHAPTER XXX 293
CHAPTER XXXI 300
CHAPTER XXXII 311
CHAPTER XXXIII 321
CHAPTER XXXIV 330
CHAPTER XXXV 340
CHAPTER XXXVI 349
CHAPTER XXXVII 356
CHAPTER XXXVIII 362
CHAPTER XXXIX 367
CHAPTER XL 375
CHAPTER XLI 381
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 385
DEDICATION
The artist and the man, inseparable, respectfully and affectionately dedicates this book to his wife, Helen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to extend his gratitude to the following people who suffered through and put up with the throes of the author’s second-book hysteria:
To Burroughs Mitchell, my editor, my friend, again for his personal encouragement, Ms unique sense of fairness, and his friendship. To Anne and Jewel Baxter for never losing faith. To Lowney and Harry Handy without whom I never would have become a writer at all. To Gloria Moss Jones for her loyalty while under the stress of her own writer husband. And to Marilyn Monroe for her sweating through the editing of it with me.
CHAPTER I
THE smell of scorched earth and black powder smoke and the sounds of the artillery and diving planes lay dormant within him, separated by a month and two continents. Now there was only the unceasing sound of the train. Out the roomette window the gentle sloping hills of Pennsylvania were richly green, fertile in the late spring.
As far as his eyes could see the hills rolled and dipped and seemed to reach up to the early morning sun. Vast and endless, they seemed to speak for all the land. For a moment their sight filled him with a nameless joy, then despair returned again. For in the three long-short years of his absence he had become a stranger to his land. And he was going home.
Yet somehow he knew now was not the time to be going home. There was a restlessness in him: a repudiation for the roots that he had inherited in favor of those that he had formed for himself.
He had felt the sudden repudiation first the last time he was in the hospital, after the pain of the operations, while his body mended. He had gone over his life step by step, street by street. In the going back he found that he was moving forward; finally approaching the edge of something concrete, meaningful.
Then they had told him he was going home. At first he had objected vehemently. He knew his family would never understand; to go would be to compromise himself. And then thinking about them, going over all they had been to each other, he knew he would have to go.
A broad-shouldered slim-hipped young man a little under six feet tall, he stood up. He fingered his slightly flattened twice busted nose, then looking into the mirror ran one finger gently over the four-inch scar along his left cheek and jawbone.
Each mark on your body, he said to himself, is like a chapter out of your life. In each there has been a lesson. How many more until the book was finished? And when? Were these scars all that was the final testament of man?
To his side Major Nick Stratton heard the door open. “Good morning, Nick,” Boomer said.
He turned around. “Boomer the Woomer,” he grinned. “We’ll be in Pittsburgh in two hours. How do you feel?”
“I got buttercups,” Boomer said, “in the belly. What are you doing? Admiring yourself?”
“What’s left of himself,” Nick glanced at Woomer. Woomer was tall, gaunt, pock-faced, with a long aquiline nose and yellowish uneven teeth.
Nick turned back to the mirror. “Christ, I look thirty,” he said.
“You look thirty-five,” Captain Woomer said. “Not a day under thirty-five. The train’s full of broads. Real American broads. For two cents I’d stay right on the train with you to Chicago.”
Major Nick Stratton was twenty-three years old.
“Back to the coal mines,” Nick said, and sat down.
Boomer was pouring himself a drink. “So early?” Nick said.
“I got buttercups, I told ya,” Boomer said, and drank. “No more mines for me, Nick. I’ll do anything, but I’m not going back to no mines.”
Nick stared out at the passing countryside remembering the first time he had seen Boomer’s calloused red knees in the shower. That was in Cairo right after Boomer got his field commission, Nick remembered, right after we did the guerilla campaign in Greece. “Does everyone that works in the mines gets knees like yours?” Nick asked.
“When you start working them as young as I did,” Boomer said, studying Nick’s rough unfinished face, the deep-set dark and melancholy eyes. No, he sure as hell don’t look twenty-three.
“I wonder what my old man’s gonna say when I tell him I’m not goin’ back to the mines,” Boomer said. “I don’t think he’d dare to swing at me anymore. You didn’t even tell your family you were coming, did you, Nick? They still don’t know you’re back in the States. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said, running his hand over the rought two-day stubble of beard on his leather face. He knew he ought to shave, but then the scar would bleed and he wouldn’t be able to go to the diner for an hour. And he wasn’t going to miss this final meal with Boomer.
“You still think you might stay in for a year?” Boomer asked.
“I’m not sure,” Nick said. “I’m not sure what I want to do. In the hospital I think I almost knew. The Army for a year might be a good deal. I’ve learned a lot in this Army.”
“I’d like to have your chance. I’d like to step into a big going business like your old man’s got. I’d just like to have the chance.”
“That’s all I wanted once,” Nick said, staring out the window. “But I’ve been thinking that maybe there’s more to this living than my dad’s business. Besides, you don’t know old Pete Stratton. I didn’t myself until I got away from him. He’s a sonofabitch. And he’s too goddamn smart for me. If I had any sense I wouldn’t go home at all. Not now, anyhow.”
“My old man would kill me if I called him a sonofabitch,” Boomer said contemplatively. “But he is, nevertheless.”
“Being a sonofabitch doesn’t mean you don’t love them,” Nick said. “We knew a lot of pretty good sonofabitches in this war.”
“And we’ll meet a lot in the next one,” Boomer said. “I still think you’re stupid if you stay in for a year when you got a chance to take over that business. Hell, you can always quit.”
“Nobody takes over old Pete Stratton’s business. Not until he’s dead. Then he’ll have it figured out so nobody can. And no one quits him. That’s the kind of guy he is. You got five or six generations in this country, Boomer. You don’t understand these immigrants.”
“I know immigrants,” Boomer said. “They’re all for their families. I know that. Everybody knows that.”
Nick didn’t answer now but stared on vacantly out the window and Boomer settled back and poured himself another drink. You’d think there’d be so much to say, Boomer thought, after all they’d been through together, after all the time, the three years of battles and wounds, the fight in that bar in Oran, and that time they had that case of scotch on the plane from Calcutta to Ceylon. Nick laughing when Little Jew Mike, the aid man, began puking. Then later the stench filling the plane, and finally all nine of them laying there on the floor of the not-even-bucketseat DC-3 puking and laughing. What a hell of a ride that had been. Their first holiday in over a year. Remember how crazy Nick had gone that next week when they found Little Mike with the knife in his bowels on the Colombo beach, stripped clean, his robbed twisted body between the rocks on the sand.
How many million years ago was that? Or was it ever? Or was there really any of that, ever? And Christ, now there was nothing to say. Not one goddamn thing to say. Nothing but let’s go have breakfast, so long Nick, I’ll see you later on. And that was that. No, you didn’t come back the way you went in: all fired-up, piss-and-vinegar, let-me-at-them-bastards. Somewhere along the line all that had gone away and something else was in its place, and you don’t know what it is, but you ain’t the same, and you know Nick ain’t the same, and never will be, and the whole goddamn world ain’t the same. But your old man will be the same. And Nick’s old man will be the same. So to begin with there will be a hell of a difference because you ain’t what they expected you to be. And they never were what you expected them to be. And, oh Christ, I’d better have another drink or I’ll never get off this goddamn train.
“Let’s eat,” Nick said.
“Have one,” Boomer said.
They had one drink together, silently, and then started for the diner, passing through two Pullman cars into the coaches with their peanut-strewn, cigarette-butted, beer-bottled, paper-filled floors, and the still half-asleep, beat-up-from-no-sleep soldiers in their rumpled smelly khakis, and the little flowered-dressed too young and too overly made-up little doll-wives of this Great Adventure staring bewilderingly at their swollen stomaches or staring out the windows with their lost, what-have-I-done eyes, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be or leaning tiredly on the tired khaki-clad shoulders, inhaling of thick blue smoke and the stale breaths of last night’s drunk, and the unceasing wail of small children, and the sounds of the dice rattling on and on from the crapper.
“Pillows, candy, cigarettes, and chewing gum.”
“Last chance before Pittsburgh for Coca-Cola, sandwiches and...”
“Mister, can you warm this bottle?”
“Ask the porter, Ma’am. That’s the porter’s job.”
“But I haven’t seen—”
“Hey, buddy, hand me that crutch, will ya?”
“Sure, soldier.”
“Pillows, candy, cigarettes, and...”
I wonder how those artificial arms work, Boomer wondered inquisitively, almost scientifically.
They finally made the diner and after the usual long wait were seated, fortunately, they thought, at a table for two.
They ordered ham and eggs, but there was no ham, the waiter said. Then they ordered bacon and eggs, but there was no bacon, the waiter said, in spite of the fact that a very stout congressional-looking civilian at the next table was biting satisfyingly into what obviously was a slice of bacon. They settled for three scrambled eggs each.
Now, now that they were here and having that final meal, the awkwardness which had begun to seep into them, and which was undoubtedly the reason for the early morning drinks, the awkwardness began to increase. They had done about everything two men could do together. It would, it seemed to Nick, have been less awkward had one of them been killed, or separated by the fortunes of war, or something. They just were not used to goodbyes, at that they weren’t pros, so they just sat there with a silent awkward sullenness, each waiting for the other to lead, which the other would not, until finally, just out of the multiplying awkwardness and tension, Boomer spoke:
“You’re Catholic, ain’t you, Nick?”
Probably, had it been anyone else except Boomer, Nick would have laughed. But he didn’t.
“I don’t know if I am or not. My mother is. My father’s Greek Orthodox. My mother told me that she had me baptized in the Catholic Church, but made me promise not to tell my father. I know he had me baptized in the Orthodox Church. I’ve seen the pictures.”
“How come she wouldn’t let you tell your father?”
“Afraid, I guess. God, I was churched to death when I was a kid. I went to a Catholic school, so Mother had a good excuse to see that I went to Mass every Sunday. Then when I got back from Mass I would drive down to Chicago with my dad and go to the Orthodox Church. That started at nine-thirty and lasted until almost one.” Nick grinned sardonically: “Christ, how I hated Sundays!”
Then they were silent again, and awkward again. Nick wondered why. Whether it was that there really wasn’t anything to say?
“Well,” Boomer said, trying to start it again, “I guess you know what you’re doin’.”
“About what?”
“Your old man. Going into business with him.”
The eggs came, the coffee, toast, and margarine, too. Nick studied the eggs, their texture held his eyes for a moment. The very thought that the eggs might be powdered took part of his appetite away.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t. Not emphatically that I wouldn’t. I just think it would be better to kind of feel my way. Maybe I really want to be a professional man. I don’t know. You shouldn’t get involved in anything, if you have the chance, if you don’t know. I think that’s only fair to both sides.”
“We’ll keep in touch,” Boomer said.
“Of course,” Nick said. They both knew what they said was a lie, but somehow being a soldier you always managed to say it, Nick thought, no matter how patently trite it was to say it. (“We’ll keep in touch.”) It was as much a part of being a soldier as the uniform, as the tradition. You didn’t inherit any tradition being a soldier. Not really, Nick thought on. You became a part of it. It kind of took you over, instead of you taking it over. I mean, he thought, you are one that got inherited. Well, that would be a good thought to cut up with Woomer, but there was no TIME for that now. Not now. Not with him, probably ever, now.
“I’ve got a cousin that’s an architect,” Nick said. He really didn’t want to say anything. But after all it was his turn to make a lead. In fact, he had missed a turn. “Maybe I want to be something like that. I don’t know.”
“That takes a lot of schooling. You might be awful old by the time you got set up.”
“I don’t think that’s so important. Not really. Your youth is important, of course, but doing what you want I
think is even more important. I mean the work you want.”
“I don’t understand you, Nick. I feel that what you say is probably right, but I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. If I thought you did I’d get off the train with you and stay with you until you explained it to me. Don’t you have any idea what you want to do?”
“Anything but the mines. Maybe a tavern. I’ve got a little money saved up. I think I’d like the tavern business.”
“I’m sure you would,” Nick smiled warmly.
They finished their eggs quickly, and drank their too hot coffee quickly. Not because they wanted to, but because now, even though it was almost over, the momentum of the war was omnipresent, it seemed there was never, not since the beginning, any slowing down to the whole process of it. It was ingrained in them, like the names stencilled on the dufflebags. And you didn’t get the machine of this entire world up to such a pace, then abruptly brake it down. It wouldn’t brake. It started out abruptly this way, Nick thought, and this way it would end. They pulled out of wherever you were abruptly, and they kept it up abruptly, and then when you had gotten used to the abruptness, so much so that it had become a part of you, become second nature to you, really, then they just as abruptly threw you back.
Suddenly the waiter presented Nick with the check. It startled him, almost gave him a sense of guilt for having paused in the middle of all this monumental abruptness.
They went back to their compartments, Boomer went in to get his gear in order, then joined Nick, apologizing for wearing his ribbons, saying that he knew they would make his mother feel good.
They poured another drink, sat silently, awkwardly for a while, and then the train began to slow down as it came into the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
“I’ve been thinking,” Boomer said, “maybe you’re right staying in for a while. You know, it ain’t really for me to say. I guess that’s the trouble with this world. Guys like me so eager to give advice. Too bad a man don’t put some of that thinking on himself, maybe he wouldn’t get all tied up in a knot trying to see what he looks like through somebody else. Maybe that’s the biggest mistake of all.”
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