Testimony and Demeanor

by John D. Casey

  “You better say something, boy,” Demry said.

  Ellridge looked over at me and gave another nervous laugh. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said to Demry.

  There were ten men in from the steps before Ellridge finished answering. They loved a fight. They probably smelled it when he opened his mouth the first time. We hadn’t had a real fight for a week. Demry got up and moved toward Ellridge. The men moved closer until they were packed tight in a ring. They knew I was behind them and that I was supposed to break it up. More men came in and squeezed around.

  It was disgusting how terrified Ellridge looked. I was surprised when he began to move his mouth again and said, with great effort, “I don’t have to talk to you.” It was like a turtle laying eggs—a quick nervous convulsion for each word, the eyes blinking slowly, out of phase with the movements of his mouth.

  Ellridge backed up, but then he laughed again. The laugh was out of control and dragged up an ugly whimper at the end. He hiccuped. It would have been funny except for Demry’s bulk leaning forward. Ellridge’s hands flew out to steady himself. One hand against the wall, the other against the rifle rack.

  Demry said, “I’m gonna make you quit laughing, boy.”

  One of the men in the front row called out, “He’s not gonna fight him—he’s gonna rape him!”

  Attacked by their laughter, Ellridge pulled an M-1 from the rack. For an instant I was afraid he might have smuggled a cartridge back from the range, but he came to a kind of high port arms and said, “Don’t you come near me—I’ll split your head.” He waggled the butt of the rifle. Demry grabbed an end of the iron locking bar and pulled it out of the last slot, from which it had been jutting askew. It trailed by his foot for an instant. He seemed to swing it lightly, but the rifle jumped two feet in the air. Ellridge jumped back into the corner as it fell. There was a notch in the side of the stock in front of the trigger housing. I’d hate to think it was the sight of damage to government property that moved me, but it was then that I pushed aside the people in front of me. I called to Demry. He turned.

  “He’s a good deal smaller than you are,” I said. “You could break him into pieces. You know that. But we couldn’t put him back together, you know.…”

  Demry looked at me meditatively.

  “Do you want him to apologize?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and handed me the locking bar. He walked back to his bunk, sat down, and held the barrel of his rifle up to his eye, pointing the other end at the window as though he were looking at the sky with a telescope.

  “Get out,” I said to the others. They really were terrible bloodsuckers sometimes.

  “Not you,” I said, somewhat unnecessarily, to Ellridge, who was still standing in the corner. The others sluggishly passed out the double door. Ellridge put the rifle back and followed me out the front door. We went around to the furnace-room side of the barracks. I leaned against the side of the building, wondering for a moment what people thought of Ellridge where he came from. Did life there go on in such simple harmony that it didn’t matter what they thought—that whatever he was was all that anyone hoped for him? Leave him to his same old tune. Or were people there distressed at weakness too? He should at least try to turn out all right. He stood facing me. When I finally spoke, he suddenly checked the buttons to the flaps of his shirt pockets.

  I said, “It might seem unfair to you but I wish you would stay away from McGlaughlin. Don’t talk to him. Don’t get in his way. In fact, don’t even put yourself next to him in formation.”

  “It was the colored boy started it.”

  “His name is McGlaughlin,” I said. “And who started it doesn’t matter. This is just to maintain the peace—like the United States keeping Chiang Kai-shek from overrunning China.”

  But that was just part of my old tune. He didn’t listen to it.

  “They said it would be a lot worse,” he said softly. “Back home they said that.”

  “It’s not so bad, then,” I concluded hopefully. “And it should get better for all of us. It’s not so long now.”

  I also defended them. One night, long after lights out, a newly assigned member of the company cadre intruded. At that time he held the rank of specialist fourth class. When I woke up, he was shining a flashlight on a pile of foot powder on the floor and demanding that it be swept up.

  I got out of bed and went over. Ellridge was sleepily refusing to get up, and the specialist, whose name was Shoemaker, brayed at him more and more noisily.

  “Jesus, Ellridge, why is it always you?” I said. “Never mind, never mind.…”

  “You get back in the rack,” Shoemaker said, shining the light in my eyes.

  I put my hand over the lens, saying, “Don’t shine the light in my eyes.”

  “Don’t get lively, Bonzo. You’re in the Army now. You touch me and they’ll lock you up.”

  “You’re making an awful lot of noise. Why don’t you step outside and discuss sweeping the floor in the morning?”

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “He’s the sergeant,” Ellridge said.

  “The hell he is,” Shoemaker replied.

  “I have field stripes, I think they’re called.”

  “Field rank don’t mean diddly, Bonzo.”

  “Doesn’t,” I said. “But I think it does.”

  “You come with me,” Shoemaker insisted. “You come with me and you’ll find out what’s what.” I turned to get my clothes. “You just come as you are. You won’t get frostbite.”

  I ignored him. He turned back to Ellridge. “That better be off the floor when I get back.”

  He followed me down to my end of the barracks and, while I dressed, took the lid off the trash barrel. “This place is a pigsty,” he said, peering in. He shone his light on Demry in the lower bunk. “You go dump this in the dumpster.” Demry rolled over. I pulled my boots on without lacing them and went out the side door. Shoemaker followed me; he didn’t want me to get to Sergeant Plisetsky first. Yet when we got to the HQ he didn’t want to be the one to wake him. He invited me to. I declined.

  “They’re going to crucify you,” he said. He put his flashlight down on the desk sharply. Then he pulled open a drawer and dropped it in. Sergeant Plisetsky rolled onto his back, crossed his forearms on his stomach like flippers, and exhaled at length. He looked very comfortable. Shoemaker opened a drawer very quietly. He took up a pencil and, looking up at my name tag several times, wrote my name down on a note pad.

  “I’ve got your name,” he said, tapping it with his forefinger.

  “Well done!” I said.

  “I’ve had about enough out of you, Bonzo. Now get out. Get out of here before I put my boot so far up your ass you won’t be able to tell shit from Shinola.”

  I put my finger to my lips and nodded toward the sleeping First Sergeant.

  Shoemaker contrived a number of small inconveniences immediately after that. I think he held up some mail for a while. For example, my weekly tin of Danish cigars was late, and a little stale. But, without becoming threatened directly, he was cured of being a bother at night.

  It suddenly turned cold two days before we went on our bivouac. I liked the feel of the ground turning hard. I’d never been so constantly exposed to the countryside during a change of season. In the same cubic yard of air that was warm one afternoon you could see your breath the next. The C.O.’s jeep took a wrong turn when wheel ruts in what had been simply a damp intersection became as intransigent as railroad switches. The leaves on the ground were no longer soft and colored but shriveled up, in plain brown rigor mortis. Dull as wrapping paper. It was the evergreens that grew darker and richer. And the stars grew brighter, especially as the moon waned.

  We pitched our tents in rows on top of a ridge. The iron tent pegs were the only ones that went in successfully. There was a good deal of muttering when I asked those with iron pegs to share them with those with wooden ones, so they could at least start their holes. It was as
though the cold withered their small patches of generosity as it had the leaves. Of course, most of them were sick too. When the weather changed, First Sergeant Plisetsky had us run, and the sweat chilled on them when they would lie down during the breaks.

  The first night on bivouac it was our platoon’s chore to post a sentry every two hours of the night. Demry drew two to four and Ellridge four to six—the last two watches. As we sat outside our tent smoking, Demry didn’t seem to mind either the cold or his assignment. From the ridge we could see the blinking light on top of the hospital, the tallest building in Fort Knox. It was seven miles away. We could hear the firing from the artillery range in between the gusts of wind, but we couldn’t see the flashes.

  “There’s a shooting star,” he said.

  “Maybe it was a flare,” I said. “Or an airplane landing.”

  “No. It was a shooting star. I know shooting stars all right.” He lay back. “Just look at those stars. There must be thousands of them. Hundreds of miles away.”

  I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “To begin with, there’re not thousands of them but millions. More likely billions. And they’re not hundreds of miles away. Most of them are so far they have to be measured in light-years. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year.”

  “Where’d they teach you that? At college?”

  “No. I don’t know. I learned it here and there. Like the names of birds …”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “Or the names of football teams.”

  “You know all that too. That’s real good.”

  I said nothing.

  “You still didn’t tell me what’s the funny part,” he said.

  I answered hastily, “Look—if I had asked, ‘Who’s Joe Louis?’ or—or anyone. Elvis Presley. You would have found that funny.”

  “Uh-huh. I bet you know all about Joe Louis, though. I don’t think I could tell you a thing about Joe Louis. We all know about Joe Louis.”

  Again I said nothing, although I thought how unfair it was that each slip of my tongue should have been misinterpreted just enough to keep the chance to explain slightly beyond my reach. It also occurred to me that he was deliberately taking advantage of my inexperience in a worse way than I had unwittingly offended his.

  We went to sleep without saying anything else. At two o’clock the sentry reached between the buttons on the front flaps and shook my foot. “McGlaughlin, you’re on,” he said, and left. I made a note of that. The sentry was supposed to wait until his relief was on his feet and clearly awake. But then, he might have been afraid of Demry. Or he might have waked me on purpose. I tried not to think that. Having only recently overcome my inability to see these people, I didn’t want to swing to the other extreme of paranoia.

  I shook Demry’s shoulder. He sat up. I could hear his head scraping the top of the tent.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Two. You’re on guard duty.”

  “Two o’clock in the morning?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Two o’clock in the morning.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Man, that’s my bedtime.” He lay down again.

  “Someone’s got to be on guard.”

  “I’ll just guard everything right here.”

  “Come on, Demry,” I said, laughing.

  “You go on and laugh,” he said. “I’m staying right here. It’s cold out there.”

  “Someone’s got to be on guard duty.”

  “You’re someone. You may have forgot that.”

  “Look, Demry. You know as well as I do that the only way this whole thing can work is if everyone takes his turn. You have to have turns. That’s the only way discipline can be imposed and still be fair.”

  He sat up again. “You’re very big on discipline, man. And you know why? It’s because you don’t really live here. You don’t live here at all. You get out of here and you go home. You know, home. That place where they send you magazines from. And those little cigars. That’s right—you got it—home. Where you live. But get this—I live here. I am here and you are not.” I could hear his rapid breathing as he paused. “So as long as I’m here, I’m not going to get sick or go crazy over your rules. You have it nice and easy, right? And if I sleep right alongside you a little of that is going to rub off. So we’re just going to skip walking around out there.…” He lay down. I didn’t say anything. “I’ll tell you,” he continued. “You may know a hell of a lot of things, but one thing you do not know is how to get me out there.”

  I got out from under my blankets and knelt on top of them. I thought awhile. “Would you stand guard for me?” I asked.

  He exhaled with his teeth closed. “I’m not going to talk all night, man.” He turned over. “O.K. I’ll tell you,” he said in a more moderate way. “If it was me, I’d roll over and not give a damn. If I was you, I’d say, ‘Demry baby, have yourself a good sleep!’ ”

  “O.K.,” I said, and put my clothes on. “I’ll do it for you,” I said, and unbuttoned the flaps, crawled out with my rifle and boots, and pulled my field jacket with the chevrons on it through the hole behind me as though it were a soul leaving a body.

  The stars were very bright. It really did look as though they might be not so far away—even as though it were the wind that was fanning them into a fiercer glow. I wondered if Demry thought that stars were cold.

  I walked in zigzags down the bare slope to the nearest pine trees and waited. It finally occurred to me that no matter what happened while I was in the Army, I would not really be changed—not the way I was by school or college. I was no longer being formed. All I could have from now on were sensations, which would be absorbed and digested by the way I already was. I cast my thoughts back to where my real life was going on. Where it was being considered, planned, felt. Where it was carefully creeping forward. When I would catch up with it. Way stations, rungs, nests, and resting places. Here I was a swallow flying through a long barn. A swallow among bats.

  Yet I was still a little deranged. The pine trees were very clear to me. I went and touched them, their straight needles and their unknotted trunks, not as cold as I thought they would be, or as cold as I was.

  I walked back up to the rows of tents. I didn’t hear the wind, I was so used to it. The startling noise was the coughing. From one tent at a time it came—no particular sequence to it, no set interval. As the time passed, it seemed to me I was tending one large beast that was making its noises into the night.

  At ten past four I looked at my watch. I went to wake Ellridge. They had only three buttons on their front flaps. I unhooked the loop and pulled it up. The buttons came out of the worn holes. Ellridge was sitting in the back, his knees to his chest, his blanket pulled around his shoulders. He looked like a monkey crouched in an outside cage in wintertime. He hadn’t taken his boots off. How unfair it is, I thought, to add my order to the Army’s. They suffer enough. I was about to put the flap down again when Ellridge spoke. “I’m not asleep,” he said.

  “O.K. On your feet.” I said it by instinct.

  He came out with his blanket around his shoulders. “How come McGlaughlin isn’t on guard?”

  “Look—I’m tired. It’s my bedtime. Enough of this chit-chat. Get your field jacket on and start walking around.”

  “I thought you didn’t have to do any of this guard.”

  He was exultant in a strange way, his eyes wide open and his mouth emitting little explosions—“ha! ah! oh!”—as though he had caught me doing something surprisingly daring and bad. He sucked in his breath, partly meaningfully and partly because he discovered how cold it was.

  “You were covering up. You were covering up so he could stay wrapped up. That’s right. The middle of the night. Then you came to get me up so you can crawl back in there. So you can crawl back into your hole alongside that—I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it, but I’ll say it if you make me. If you make me stand
out here with you crawling in there. But I will say it—oh, God, I will.”

  “Ellridge, will you get your rifle and stop gibbering.”

  “Oh, no. No, I won’t! I thought you was somebody pretty good, you know that? I thought you was all right. I thought you was something special, but Lord, you’re a sorry thing. You’re a nigger-lover! Nothing else at all. That’s all you do is just care for that nigger. That’s all you do is love him. Is love him and kiss him …”

  “I can’t begin to tell you how stupid you are, Ellridge.”

  He looked at the sky, as though he could see the wind in it. Then he tucked his nose under the edge of his blanket and began to cry.

  “O.K., Ellridge. Get back inside.”

  He stood there. I took him by the shoulders and turned him toward the tent. “Wait,” he said.

  We waited until he stopped crying. Then he stooped down and crawled back into the tent. I pulled the loop of the flap down over the peg and left while he was doing up the buttons.

  I wanted to go down to the pine trees again, but I stayed by the tents. I wasn’t tempted either to call Ellridge or to go into my tent and sleep. I couldn’t face either of them. I was tempted to go lie down among the pine trees, but instead I tried to resist the wind. I tried to imagine that it was blowing right through me—so cleanly and so fast that it didn’t hurt. That worked for a while. Then I couldn’t keep imagining well enough, and I began to endure every minute, looking at my watch too often.

  During the breaks the next day I had to lie down. I didn’t seem to be sweating very much, so I thought it would be all right. Each time I lay down I thought of how when we got back for the night I would gather blanketfuls of pine needles to put under me, and even around me.

  We stayed out late. And even though I knew I would be warmer with the pine needles, I didn’t get them. I crawled into the tent and lay down. Demry went to sleep. I was about to fall asleep too when I felt a hand on my foot. I sat up expectantly, but no one said, “McGlaughlin, you’re on.” There was no one there. I lay awake alternately shivering and burning, trying to command my body to be calm. It is possible, but I couldn’t bring myself to the right pitch to do it.