by James Jones
The two women were dressed almost identically, which was to say mannishly, in slacks, and shirts open at the neck, with big kerchiefs tied around their heads, which advertised that they were workers. Like hundreds of others Winch had seen since crossing Pacific Avenue. It was almost a uniform. Winch had even read about it, in old, fifth-hand, mud-stained copies of Pacific Yank.
She was a welder. In some machine manufacturing plant over in Oakland, that was classified as Defense Industry. So was her chum. She was no raving, beautiful lovely, like the two exquisite call girls at the “Top O’ The Mark,” but Winch did not think he could have tolerated a real lovely at this point, this first time, and she was attractive enough. She was also married. There was no ring on her finger, but there was the white mark where there had been one until very recently.
Winch’s stomach sank again. A kind of suspicious fear seized him. What if she was the wife of one of his own bemired, panting, mud-marked draftees? He thought he had some from northern California. Seeing him looking, she rummaged in her purse and giving him a sad, grim little smile, slipped the ring back on.
She wanted to dance. Winch moved her stiffly around in the press on the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. Winch was normally a good ballroom dancer, but there was nowhere to move on the crowded floor, and anyway Arlette was clearly not one. It did not matter. He welcomed the chance to dance; it gave him time to get his nerve back. What did he care if her husband was some poor draftee son of a bitch? Back at the table he bought her more drinks and listened to her talk, mostly about her work. Arlette loved welding.
At one point her friend’s drunken young Marine, who wore a Rifle Sharpshooter’s medal, glanced up from his booze and studied Winch’s Army uniform and lack of ribbons or insignia with contempt and belligerence. Winch bent on him his hard, official, on-duty 1st/sgt’s stare, which seemed to touch some well-trained, still-unnumbed nerve in the boy. Because he suddenly straightened up in his chair and felt for his necktie with panic-wide eyes, before putting his face back in his glass.
At the hotel, which was right around the corner and apparently had some deal going with the bartender of the bar, after they had visited a package store for liquor and were getting undressed, Winch asked her about the husband. He felt he had to, though he already had his shirt off. The guy was out there, all right. He was not in the Solomons, though, Winch was relieved to learn. He was in New Guinea. But Jesus, New Guinea. Buna! Gona! Morobe! Hell, they were in Salamaua right now. But the guy was not in the 32nd or 41st Divisions. He was in the Signal Corps. Not the infantry. Winch felt a little better. But still it made him angry at her. “Doesn’t it make you feel a little bit like a shit?” he said. Arlette’s eyes flared. “No, it doesn’t make me feel like a shit! Why should it? We made an agreement before he left. What do you care?”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, good for you. Then shut up. Why should I feel like a shit? He’s out there getting all he can get. Everything he can get his hands on, while he’s out there.”
“There’s nothing to get,” Winch said. “Except a bunch of scrofulous natives nobody wants.”
“He was in Australia,” Arlette said.
“Well, Australia,” Winch had to admit. “Their men are all in North Africa. I hear Australia’s great. But I was never there.”
“Are you trying to talk yourself out of a lay?” Arlette demanded. “For some reason?”
“No,” Winch said. But he had to think about that a minute.
“Because if you are, you’re doing a pretty damn good job of it. You’re from somewhere out there yourself, too, aren’t you?” Winch nodded. “I knew you were, damn it. I knew it. I knew it the minute I saw you in that bar, without any ribbons or insignia or rank markings on your uniform. But that expensive, tailor-made uniform, it fooled me. Listen, nothing ever stopped him any before, when he was here at home, before the war,” Arlette said. “Before the Army. I’ll tell you something else.”
It was as though Winch had opened some floodgate. Nude to her panties, she began to scold at him, exactly like a legal wife, her bare breasts jiggling violently with her vehemence. Going right on ahead and stripping off the panties, and exposing a gorgeously luxurious bush, she went right on with her tirade, about all the unfair practices women had to suffer.
Winch had heard most of them before. Most were fair enough complaints. Hers had mostly to do with work, and work habits. All her life she had never been allowed to work, to do anything, all her life she had had to sit at home, like some hothouse flower, until this damned war of theirs came along, and they all went off to play soldier. Well, they should never have let her get the taste for it. Because she loved working. They were going to have a damned hard time taking it away from her again, after their damned war was over. Winch could easily have sympathized with her. But he was angry with her, for what she was doing to her husband. And he didn’t see what any of it had to do with anything. He stopped listening, and concentrated on looking at her deliciously jouncing breasts and her gorgeously hairy, gorgeously gropable crotch as she flounced back and forth in front of him.
Abruptly, she stopped. And looked embarrassed. As if suddenly surprised to find she was nude. “I’m acting pretty silly, aren’t I?” She smiled.
Winch just looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said, honestly enough. It suddenly occurred to him that she was exactly like old T.D. Hoggenbeck. She did not understand anything at all about any of it. They could not get it through their thick heads that all that out there had absolutely nothing to do with any of this back here. Suddenly he wanted to split her head open with the bottle, in the same way he had wanted to smash Hoggenbeck.
“Did you really just get back from out there?” she asked. She was a thin woman, Arlette. Almost bony. But not angular. Her well-defined breasts hung straight from her lean armpits without any fat supporting the skin. The hair-covered labia of her crotch hung a little loosely, not tucked up tight underneath her, like a girl’s, as though they had received their full share of wear and tear. Winch could feel all the rigorously suppressed lusts of eleven months welling up in him.
“And you haven’t had a woman since—? For how long?”
She came immediately and sat nude on his knee and ran her hand through his hair. “Oh you poor darling.” Winch did not know whether to seize her and beat her head on the wall till he beat some sense into her, or to fuck her cross-eyed.
A sudden light of understanding dawned on her face. “You arrived today? Then, you were on that boat, that hospital ship, that pulled in today!” She got off his knee and stood staring at him. “Listen, you haven’t got anything wrong with you, have you? Is there anything wrong with you? I mean, you haven’t got an artificial leg or anything, or something like that, have you?”
Winch stood up himself, and dropped his pants and stepped out of them. He didn’t wear underpants with khakis. “I had a girlfriend once who—” Arlette began. Winch interrupted her. “A guy with an artificial leg has straps across the chest, for Christ’s sake.” Then he noticed that in taking off his pants, the two new 1st/sgt’s chevrons had slipped out of his pocket onto the floor. It was too late to retrieve them.
She picked them up off the hooked rug. “You’re a first sergeant?” She smoothed them out in her palm. “Why didn’t you have them sewn on?”
“I don’t know,” Winch said, “it didn’t seem important. Because they’re new, I guess,” he added. They were sitting on the sheets, somewhere along the bed’s edge. Arlette rolled over into it. She positioned herself firmly in the middle of it, opening wide her legs, as if ready and preparing to receive an actively violent, murderous assault. Winch accommodated her. He drove his cock, and redrove it, into her with all hate and fury and anger and rage, and outrage, that had been accumulating in him a long time. This did not disturb her a bit. It seemed only to make her happier. “Oh God, I love to fuck,” she said from under him in a clear voice. Winch however did not last long. Eleven months of denial were too mu
ch for him. Then it seemed he went blind and that his eardrums blew out. Arlette, though, was not upset. She seemed to understand, and patted his shoulder. “That’s all right, that’s all right, we’ve got plenty of time,” she said soothingly.
Winch simply stared at her, and lying beside her leaning on his elbow, fondled the one of her breasts nearest him, although his hand felt awkward and unfamiliar doing it. His stomach sank in him again. At being here with her like this. It was so unfair to all the others. He again suddenly wanted to punch her face. Instead, he put his hand, which seemed to have forgotten all about how to do this too, down between her legs. Winch felt exactly as if somebody had split him in twain with an ax, and he was desperately striving to pull the two parts of him back together.
After a while he sat up, and got up out of the bed and went to get himself a drink. He felt tired and worn-down and winded.
“Make me one, too.” She smiled at him from the bed. “I told you the truth, about having plenty of time.” She explained that her crew at the plant was just coming off night shift and going on to swing shift, so they had a full day and a half off before going back on to afternoons. “But what the hell,” she said, “I don’t give a damn, I’ll take a couple more days off AWOL, and spend the rest of your pass with you. If you want me to. They can’t fire me for it. They need people too bad. And I’m too good at my job.”
Winch grinned briefly at the wall, over the shocking suddenness with which people would arbitrarily piece together and glue up an alliance between them, just out of having been to bed together once.
If it lasted a week, they called it love.
But her offer had given him an idea. If he was going to have to give up drinking definitively and finally, he ought to have himself one last fling, one last bender, to celebrate the final separation. Final separation from the booze, and final separation from the company. What better place to do it than San Francisco. What better companion to do it with than Arlette.
He brought her drink back to her in the bed, and sat down on the bed edge, and smiled at her. “All right, we’ll have ourselves a time.”
It was like one of those ideas that kept flirting around the edges of your mind, but needed a special event or special statement to bring it into awareness. It seemed to him now he had had it ever since he first stood in Hoggenbeck’s office. On the other hand he knew he was drinking too much. But he didn’t give a damn. Winch was well aware of the theorem that will power to resist booze diminished in direct proportion to the number of ounces consumed. In fact, he had made a serious life study of it. And he was aware that he had been boozing it up pretty heavy on the ship during the passage. He had had a fair number of drinks today. But what the hell, on the other hand he felt fine. The only thing wrong with him at all was a slight cold he had picked up on board the ship, and the slight, persistent cough it had left with him. He slid off the bed edge and reached over the bottle for them. Secretly, he was thinking that if he could only get her into some kind of a dress, he would take her to the “Top O’ The Mark.”
“Have you got any kids?” he said.
She stared at him. “Kids? Yes, I’ve got kids. I’ve got two kids. They live with their grandmother. My mother. She’s got a house. We couldn’t live on what I get for an allotment.”
“Don’t you think they need you?” Winch said.
“They see all of me they need to see,” she said sullenly.
She suddenly looked angry again. Winch didn’t want that to happen.
“Arlette, honey, we’ll have us a ball, you and me,” he smiled.
By the next afternoon he had made a public speech in Washington Square, nearly gotten picked up by the MPs for it, and his cold had developed into a serious bronchitis.
Arlette had gone out up to Chinatown to get them a Chinese dinner to bring back to the hotel. Winch decided to go out and do a little bar-crawling on his own. It was coming back to the hotel past the Square, after three or four bars and three or four drinks, that he got the idea to make the speech.
It was all the old duffers on their soapboxes, droning out their worn-out, ancient, old-fashioned political speeches that gave him the idea. Socialism. Unionism. Communalism. And Winch thought with a snort, Why not? Although he had siphoned a huge amount of it off into Arlette, there was still a thin, ashy residue of outrage left in him. He walked over to one of the old duffers and gave him a five-dollar bill to borrow his soapbox.
The concept for it was one he had had quite a while. It had occurred to him first on Guadalcanal, last year, lying up under a mortar barrage. He had developed and expanded it later, playing with it at times when he sat alone drinking, or watched from a ridge with the company commander as their overheated, mud-breathing platoons tried to advance. He had summarized the whole concept in the slogan he worked out for it. “Soldiers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your guns!” That was what he began to shout from the soapbox.
A crowd of amused servicemen formed fairly quickly. At first they were laughing, and cheering him on, but some began to get disturbed as he went on. “Hey, you,” he singled out a private. “What are you making a month? Thirty-eight bucks, right? What do you think you’d be making if we were organized, hah? No, don’t laugh. Think about it. What couldn’t we do, if we were organized? Every country needs us, right? Everybody else has unions, why not us? Jap soldiers, German soldiers, English soldiers, US soldiers. Russians, French, Australians. All united. We’d corner the market. Hell, we could take the explosive charges out of the mortar shells and artillery! Put white flour in them instead! How would that be?” A couple of derogatory whistles came from the back of the crowd. “You don’t like that? Why not? No more casualties!” Winch bellowed in his command voice. “You simply walk to the rear. We could have arbitration committees to decide where the battles would be held.” He spread his arms. “No more jungles, right? Who’d pick a jungle?”
“What are you? A Communist?” a voice yelled from the rear. “They’re our enemies.”
“Me? Hell, no. Look at me. I’m a first sergeant. Look at my stripes,” Winch yelled. (Arlette had wanted to sew them on, and he had let her; she was so proud of them.) “But I’m more like a Jap first sergeant or a German first sergeant than I am like these civilian sons of bitches.” That brought cheers. “And you! You know what I make a month? You could be making that as a private, if we were organized.”
He saw the MPs coming through the crowd, pushing their way up toward him, and drew himself up to full height. “Soldiers of the world! Unite! I’ll be back. Same time tomorrow.” And jumped down off the box and fled.
Whistles and good-natured cheers and a lot of handclapping followed him.
It was only fifty yards to get into the narrow streets where he could hide and sneak off, but by the time he had run it he was astonished to find he was gasping for breath and had to stop. In an alley. He simply could not go on. A violent fit of coughing seized him. Fortunately, a number of the GIs had gotten themselves in front of the MPs, and impeded their progress. In his alley Winch was coughing up strings of foamy white mucus. But after a few minutes he was able to make it around a corner and into a bar and order a drink. The drink seemed to help.
He made it back to the hotel. But then he thought he wasn’t going to make it up the three flights of stairs to their third-floor room. He had to stop and gasp at every landing.
When he got to the door, Arlette was there looking horrified, and the Chinese food was in cardboard containers on the table. All piping hot and waiting.
“Good God, I could hear you all the way up the stairs. What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Winch said hollowly, and leaned on the door and stared at her. “A little touch of bronchitis. Nothing a good Chinese dinner, a few drinks and a fine fuck won’t cure. Don’t worry about it.”
And, indeed, after he sat in a chair and rested awhile, he felt much better. They ate the Chinese dinner, had the drinks, and accomplished the sexual assignation. Winch f
elt fine. The whole attack, which seemed to have been brought on by the fifty-yard run out of the Square, seemed to have disappeared. But then in the night another coughing fit seized him, and he woke up unable to breathe. No matter how hard he pulled, he could not seem to get air down into his lungs. When he coughed, he brought up the same foamy white froth. A couple of drinks were the only thing that seemed to help it. But then when he lay down to sleep, he found he could not breathe lying down. He wound up spending most of the night sleeping sitting straight up in a chair.
Arlette, when she wasn’t sleeping, or drinking or screwing Winch, worried about it, and about him. But whatever it was, the bronchitis did not seem to impair his ability to screw. But then in the morning, when they went out for breakfast, he almost did not make it back up the three flights of stairs. He wouldn’t have made it, if Arlette hadn’t helped him. After that, he did not go out, and let Arlette go out by herself when she wanted to go out.
He stuck it out like that for two days, but in the middle of the third night he knew he had had it. He had spent most of it leaning on his elbows on two corner towel racks in the bathroom, unable to breathe, coughing up the frothy white stuff.
“I’m going to have to go back to the hospital,” he told her hollowly. “There’s nothing else for it. Will you help me? I hate to ask you, but I don’t think I can make it by myself.”
“Of course I’ll help you,” Arlette said, frowning at him. “You’re bad sick, you know. Anyway, I have to be getting back to my job myself.”
“Then go down and call a cab.”
They said little in the cab. Once Arlette took hold of his hand and held it, and leaned over and kissed him. “I put my address and phone number in your shirt pocket,” she said.