by James Jones
“Send it home to his family, I guess.”
“He never liked his family that much.”
“No. I know. He told me that, too. But they can give it one of those big old local military American Legion funerals, out in the old cemetery. Beside his grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather, and all that. Fire a couple of volleys over it.”
“Have some Boy Scout play his bugle over it.”
“What the hell?” Winch said. “It’s only a body. It’s as good a way to dispose of it as some other.”
“You going to write them a letter?”
“No,” Winch said.
“Me neither. I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”
Winch signaled for another white wine. “Listen, you never come down here. Come on down some evening, at five-thirty or six. If you get the blues or anything.”
“We’re going out in the field day after tomorrow,” Strange said.
“Then come down when you get back,” Winch said, harshly.
Strange had nodded. “Sure. It’s only ten days.”
He had telephoned Prell that night. Winch had found out for him from Jack Alexander that the tour was in Kansas City at the Muehlebach. But Prell’s reaction made him decide right away that there was no point to calling Prell back.
The ten days out in the field were probably the best thing that could have happened to him at the moment. First, it was an abrupt switch from the garrison living. And existing under canvas that had to be pulled down and put back up twenty miles farther on in some other patch of woods every two days did not allow you much time for thinking, except in snatches. Strange could handle snatches. From 3:30 in the morning to midnight he was constantly on the run; cooking, stretching kitchen flies, feeding, overseeing that the flies and tents were ditched properly against the rain on the wooded slopes. Strange loved every minute of it.
And spring came while they were out there. For the first three days it rained, dismal winter rains at first, then each day warmer and more humid. Then, suddenly, the sun came out, and stayed out for the remaining seven days, and the leaves popped out and everything turned green.
It was absolutely beautiful. And the incredible speed with which it happened was unbelievable. Strange would stand outside his kitchen fly in the soft mud of some bare woods, checking his Lister water bags, and look off at some western Tennessee hill farmer’s rough slab cabin through the hard black lines of the bare hardwood branches. Minutes later the cabin would be invisible through the screen of leaves which had popped out, uncurling on the budded limbs.
Not many of the other men seemed to notice, or to give much of a damn. When it rained, they complained about the wet. When the sun came out, they complained about the mud. But to Strange it was unbelievably beautiful. This was the first time in six years that he had seen an American spring come on. Before the war he had spent four years in Wahoo, where there was no real winter or spring, then another year in Wahoo after the sneak attack, then a year in the South Pacific in the tropics. He hadn’t seen a real American spring in a long time.
They were out in the western Tennessee hill country, west of the Tennessee River. It was nothing like the primitive mountain country of eastern Tennessee, but if you got back into it far enough, where they were, you still found the home-built cabins covered with home-split shakes, the well and the outhouse outdoors around them. The farmers in their dilapidated hats and gum boots had eyes like wild, secretive animals. They were always willing to sell you a pint or two of homemade white lightning, yellowish and oily and evil-looking. Inside above the front door there were always some home-grown tobacco twists hanging, rolled and bent double and the ends twisted around each other. They would not sell you the tobacco but would give you a twist. The women with their hatchet faces always looked at you with gentle, tender eyes above the seamed, tight slash of their mouths. Strange had not chewed home-twist tobacco since he’d been a boy in Texas.
In almost every home, behind the home-set, swirly glass window-pane, hung one of the blue star flags with one, or two, or more blue stars in its center indicating the male members of the family in the service.
If there were any daughters, you never saw them.
On the single Saturday night of their ten-day field assignment orders came down giving them the Saturday afternoon, the night, and the Sunday morning off. The nearest town was a dinky little burg called McSwannville, three miles away. Those who could not catch a ride in on some loosened company vehicle walked it, along the muddy country lanes. Strange had control of the company’s freed kitchen jeep, and was able to take his entire kitchen force in on it. Men hung from it like overfull grapes dangling from an overladen garden cluster. After he parked it in the town, Strange wisely walked to the one hotel, intelligently thinking he should have some place to take any windfalls, and it was well he did. He got the very last room.
Men had centered on the one available town from all over the maneuver area. Infantry. Artillery. Quartermaster. A few raucous, tough paratroopers; tankers; other Signal Corps units. They all were there. It did not look like there were going to be many windfalls. But there was plenty of booze. The town was the county seat of a dry county, but there were three bootleg joints on its outskirts, where you could get real bottle whiskey instead of the always available, powerful white lightning. Each joint clearly had been alerted to stock up. Each was crowded, with a line of servicemen that came out of its door down to and along the muddy edge of the county road. As Strange walked down the one main street in midafternoon, the fistfights had already begun. One here. One there. Another starting, as still another stopped.
Not many women were even visible. Most of them stayed completely indoors. A few local bad girls and hookers hung around the two little eating places where much of the “concealed” drinking was done, or sat at one of the few tables the bootleg joints had inside, always with some soldier. The men of the town went about with a sort of business-as-usual attitude, but apparently trying to stay off the streets as much as possible. MPs with jeeps hauled jeeploads of lax drunken bodies off to some staging area where they would be collected by their outfits. Strange decided quickly there weren’t likely to be any windfalls, and concentrated on drinking. Even bad bottle whiskey tasted delicious after the white lightning.
There was this odd feeling everywhere that it was one week before the end of the world, and Strange let it pick him up and carry him.
He no longer thought about Landers with pain. People, like the seasons, all had to end sometime. In one manner or another. Somehow, seeing the spring had straightened that out for him.
Amiably drunk and at peace with this ending world he wandered through, he ate some food somewhere. Then about eleven p.m., as he walked along the one main street, he was accosted by the fat first cook of his company. The cook was sweating profusely and breathing heavily, and came out of a darkened alley.
“Hey, Sarge. Is it true you got a hotel room?”
“Yeah. I got one. Why?”
The fat first cook had been the biggest troublemaker Strange had had to deal with in the company. Naturally, he had wanted Strange’s job, and had thought he was in line for it. Strange was not about to give him half an inch. But none of that seemed to be bothering the cook, now.
“I got these two cunts, two broads, down here. I’d like to trade one of them for half a hotel room.”
Strange paused to stare at him. Strange never had liked him. If he had brought his complaints out, and had done his fighting in the open. But he hadn’t. He had done it all under cover, using other people to do his dirty work, and getting them into trouble. Strange intended to break him as soon as he could.
“How much do they want?”
“They don’t want any money. They just want to get fucked.”
“Do they know you’re trading one of them off?”
“Oh sure. It was them that suggested it. They’ll go off in the woods, or the park. But if we had a real place to take them, they’d stay all night.”<
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“How’d you find them?”
“I didn’t, really. They found me,” the cook said. “I was sitting out in the grass, drinking. By myself, And they just sort of came up out of the shrubbery. I don’t think they’re townie girls. I think they’re off some farm.”
“How old are they? Are they of age?”
“How the hell do I know? They look the right age.”
Strange looked down the dark alley. “What the hell are they hiding down there for, then? Why don’t they come on out here into the light?”
“They’re not hiding. They just don’t want to come out here where all these guys are. They’d have a mob of guys all over them, if they came out here with no men.”
“That makes sense. Okay, let’s have a look.”
Strange had made his mind up so strongly that there weren’t going to be any windfalls that he was finding it hard to shift gears.
In the dark of the alley the girls were waiting. They both wore faded print dresses that came just to the knees of their shapely legs. Each of them wore a shabby girl’s coat against the spring night’s chill. They certainly weren’t women, but they certainly weren’t underage girls, either.
Strange knew when he saw them that he wasn’t going to turn it down. The thickness in his throat when he swallowed and the breathlessness in his chest when he breathed told him that.
They didn’t mind walking along the lighted street when they had men with them. One’s name was Donna and the other’s was Ruby. Neither of them wanted anything, except to go to the hotel. Both Strange and the cook had bottles, but the girls didn’t want a drink. Neither girl drank. Nor did they want something to eat. Thinking of all the girls he had squired so grandly at the Peabody, Strange grandly offered to buy them a meal at one of the hash-houses. Neither of them wanted it.
At the hotel the boy behind the old, tiny, ramshackle desk in the tiny lobby looked at the girls with carefully widened eyes which did not seem to see them, and gave the key to Strange. In the room, which Strange had not inspected, there was one bed. This did not seem to bother the girls. Fortunately, it was a double bed. The fat cook began to get out of his green field uniform immediately. He was apparently already counting the available hours he would have.
Up to now the girls had not said more than three or four words apiece. Now they began to giggle over the naked cook with his erection, and made it plain they did not want to be watched while they undressed, or to be seen nude. The men were to turn their backs, and hide their eyes. As soon as the girls were established in the bed under the sheet, the men could come on.
Of course, both men peeked, and there was a good deal of squealing and giggling and scolding over this. What the men saw for their trouble were two lovely, firm-breasted, young slender woman bodies. Only on the tanned hands and faces were there any signs of that swift aging process that was so noticeable out here among the hill farms. Then the two girls tumbled into the bed, and told the men to come on.
And that was the way they stayed, more or less, till after seven the next morning, when the girls said they must get home in order to wash and get ready to go to church. Sometimes, rarely, they had slept, while outside the hotel around them the little town rocked and rippled with its influx of last-gasp, end-of-the-world servicemen. The shouts and fights and breaking of glass and harmony singing did not bother the girls, and it certainly did not bother Strange and the cook. It was amazing, how two couples fucking in the same bed could spend so much time there, and still be so absolutely far away from each other.
Strange, who had developed a healthy hunger and was thinking of hotcakes, butter, syrup and sausage somewhere in the sunshine of the spring morning, wanted to buy them all a scrumptious breakfast, but the girls refused. Outside the hotel, without even a kiss (they had never been much for kissing, even when fucking in the old brass bed), they said good-by and went away along the now-quiet street in the sunny morning, then off down a path, back into the shrubbery out of which they had come.
So Strange was left with his fat first cook for a breakfast companion. It did not ruin the breakfast, but it came close to ruining nearly everything else. The cook would not stop talking about what a great night they two had had. Strange wanted only to savor it in silence. Strange felt he ought to owe the cook a favor. Instead, Strange was only angry. Finally he told the cook savagely to shut up.
“Oh, okay. Okay, John, okay.”
It was the first time the fat cook had ever dared use Strange’s first name. Strange raised his eyes and gave him a cold, murderous, fishy-eyed stare.
But the cook couldn’t ruin everything. Strange had come away from the whole thing, the bizarre night, the two girls, the drunken revel outside the hotel, with a feeling that the girls were a mythical impersonation of the spring itself, and this feeling stayed with him even in spite of the cook. Strange felt that if the spring, which had told him so much in other voiceless ways, had not been there, the girls would not have existed, either.
Together, he and the first cook slowly rounded up the rest of his kitchen force, going from place to place and group to group until they found them all. In the hot spring sunshine they had to take off their field jackets and carry them. Then they began the three-mile ride back to bivouac in the overcrowded jeep, past woods and fields that had leafed out noticeably since yesterday. They had four more days of maneuvers ahead, before they went back to camp. Most of that time was spent talking about the Saturday.
Strange would not talk about it. But this did not stop the cook from bragging to everybody about what a luckout and great night the two of them had had together, with their two hot farm girls. But Strange refused to answer all questions, even the most rollicking.
Strange was not at all proud of having doubled up with his fat cook in the same bed with two country girls. But more than that, the truth was that Strange had begun to fantasize about it.
It all had to do with whether the two girls had had orgasms or not. As far as Strange could tell, neither of the girls had come, not even once, all during the all-night lovemaking session. But this had not seemed to bother them. Or frustrate them. They seemed perfectly happy and satisfied, to be fucked over and over by the men who came on top of them.
They could not help but make him think of Linda Sue, when she was younger.
Strange had badly wanted to go down on his girl, and make her come that way. Maybe for perhaps the first time in her life. Frances Highsmith had told him that a come that way was twice as intense as a come from masturbating. But of course it had been impossible with the male cook present in the bed. And Strange himself was not so sure the girl herself would have accepted it without being shocked and horrified. It made the difference between himself and them intensely apparent.
Was he a pervert?
The whole thing was terribly distressing. And the following weekend when the company was back in out of the field, and he had gotten an overnight pass for himself into Luxor and had made a date ahead of time with Frances, he asked her about it.
They were lying in the bed with their arms around each other like two old buddies, after their first sexual thunderstorm, her breasts pressed deliciously against his stomach. Strange carefully had not questioned her about what she had been up to, or who she had been out with since he had seen her last.
“I want to ask you something,” he said, his chin on the top of her head. “Seriously. Am I a pervert?”
“Pervert why?” Her voice was muffled by his chest.
“Because I like going down on girls so much, damn it. Why else?”
Frances pushed away from him, to look into his eyes in silence. Then she smiled. “Well, are dogs perverts?” she said, finally.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Dogs lick each other’s genitals. Just about every animal does, as far as I know. And none of them seem to worry about being perverts.”
“They’re dogs. We’re people.”
“What I’m trying to say is I think it’s a pe
rfectly natural act. I don’t know who first made the rules that it wasn’t, but I think they’re full of shit. So: I think you’re only a pervert if you think you’re a pervert.”
Strange did not answer for a long moment. “I guess I think I’m a pervert,” he said in a low voice. “For liking it so much. So I guess I am a pervert, hunh?”
“Okay, you’re a pervert,” Frances said. “If you think you are, you are.” She began to laugh, “Isn’t it great?”
Strange found himself beginning to laugh. “As a matter of fact, it is. I like it.”
Her sense of humor was contagious. And it wiped all the dark fog off all of the windows. She was so sensible, Frances, and so unguilty. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to have her sense of humor with him all the time, to fall back on. Especially after he left O’Bruyerre.
“But there are a lot of people who don’t think like you and me,” Strange said.
“Yes,” she said. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to pick your shots. Like I do.”
Strange nodded. He told her the story of the two girls, the fat first cook, and the one bed.
Frances was laughing through most of it. “Yes. I would say that was one of the times when it was better to keep it to yourself.
“Are you a Christian?”
Strange had to think about that one. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “Any more.”
“But you were raised as a Christian. By religious people.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s your problem. So was I. And Christianity’s ideas about sex are as primitive as a bunch of witch doctors’. I don’t know where it all started,” Frances said, “I guess with those Puritans the damned English sent over here in 1620. The English were smart to get rid of them.”
“I’ll be going to England before long,” Strange smiled. “Maybe it’ll be a little different over there.”
“It ought to be, after the way they got rid of those Puritans. On the other hand, the Victorians didn’t do so good with it, either.” She shook her head. “I learned in college that in thirty-six of the forty-eight states it’s illegal for you and me to go down on each other. Actually against the law. All spelled out, in the particulars. I think it is, in this state. We could go to jail, if somebody caught us. All laws made by damned Christians.”