The Young Lions, page 51
The guns stopped outside and the planes droned back towards the German lines. Michael slipped the barracks bag off his chest and rolled the helmet away from his groin. Ah, God, he thought, ah, God, how long it this going to last?
Then the guard he was to relieve poked his head into the tent and pulled Michael's toe under the blankets.
"On your feet, Whitacre," said the guard. "You're going for a walk."
"OK, OK," Michael said, pushing back the blankets. He shivered and hurriedly put on his shoes. He put on his field jacket and picked up his carbine, and, shivering badly, stepped out into the night. It had clouded over and a fine drizzle was falling. Michael reached into the tent and got out his raincoat and put it on. Then he went over to the guard, who was leaning against a jeep, talking to another sentry, and said, "All right, go on back to sleep."
He stood leaning against the jeep, next to the other guard, shivering, feeling the drizzle filtering in under his collar and rolling down his face, peering out into the cold wet darkness, remembering all the women he had thought about during the raid, remembering Margaret, and trying to compose a letter, a letter so moving, so tender and heartbreaking and true and loving, that she would see how much they needed each other and would be waiting for him when he got back to the sorrowful, chaotic world of America after the war.
"Hey, Whitacre," it was the other sentry, Private Leroy Keane, who had already been on duty for an hour, "do you have anything to drink?"
"No," said Michael. He was not fond of Keane, who was garrulous and a scrounger, and who had, to boot, the reputation of being an unlucky man to be with, because the first time he had left camp in Normandy his jeep had been strafed and two of the men in it had been wounded, and one killed, although Keane had not been touched. "Sorry." Michael moved away a little.
"Have you got any aspirin?" Keane asked. "I got a terrible headache."
"Wait a minute." Michael went back to his bivouac and brought back a small tin of aspirin. He gave the tin to Keane. Keane took six of them and tossed them into his mouth. Michael watched, feeling his own mouth curl in distaste.
"Don't you use water?" Michael asked.
"What for?" asked Keane. He was a large, bony man of about thirty, whose older brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honour in the last war, and Keane, trying to live up to the glory of the family, put on a very tough front.
Keane gave Michael the aspirin box. "What a headache," Keane said. "From constipation. I haven't been able to move my bowels for five days."
I haven't heard anybody use that expression, Michael thought, since Fort Dix. He walked slowly beside the line of bivouacs along the edge of the field, hoping Keane wouldn't follow him. But there was the clumsy scuffle of Keane's boots in the grass beside him and Michael knew there was no escaping the man.
"I used to have a perfect digestion," Keane said mournfully.
"But then I got married."
They walked in silence to the end of the row of tents and the officers' latrine. Then they turned and started back.
"My wife stifled me," said Keane. "Also she insisted on having three children, right away. You wouldn't believe it, that a woman who wanted children like that was frigid, but my wife is frigid. She can't bear to have me touch her. I got constipated six weeks after the wedding day and I haven't had a healthy day since then. Are you married, Whitacre?"
"Divorced."
"If I could afford it," Keane said, "I would get divorced. She's ruined my life. I wanted to be a writer. Do you know many writers?"
"A few."
"Not with three children, though, that's a cinch." Keane's voice was bitter in the darkness. "She trapped me from the beginning. And when the war began, you don't know what a job I had getting her to allow me to enlist. A man from a family like mine, with my brother's record… Did I ever tell you how he won the medal?"
"Yes," said Michael.
"Killed eleven Germans in one morning. Eleven Germans," Keane said, his voice musical with regret and wonder. "I wanted to join the paratroopers, and my wife threw a fit of hysterics. It all goes together, frigidity, lack of respect, fear, hysteria. Now look what I'm doing. Pavone hates me. He never takes me out with him on his trips. You were at the front today, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"You know what I was doing?" asked the brother of the Medal-of-Honour winner bitterly. "I was sitting here typing up rosters. Five copies apiece. Promotions, medical records, allowances. I'm really glad my brother isn't alive, I really am."
They walked slowly, in the rain, the water dripping from their helmets, the muzzles of their carbines held low, pointing groundward, to keep the wet out.
"I'll tell you something," Keane said. "A couple of weeks ago, when the Germans nearly broke through here, and there was talk about our being set up as part of a defensive line, I'll admit to you, I was praying they would break through. Praying. So we would have to fight."
"You're a goddamn fool," Michael said.
"I could be a great soldier," Keane said harshly, belching.
"Great. I know it. Look at my brother. We were full brothers, even if he was twenty years older than me. Pavone knows it. That's why he takes a perverted pleasure in keeping me back here at a typewriter, while he takes other people out with him."
"It would serve you damned well right," Michael said, "if you got a bullet in your head."
"I wouldn't care," Keane said flatly. "I wouldn't give a damn. If I get killed, don't give my regards to anyone."
Michael tried to see Keane's face, but it was impossible in the dark. He felt a wave of pity for the constipated, brother-and-hero-haunted man with the frigid wife.
"I should have gone to OCS," Keane went on. "I would have made a great officer. I'd have my own company by now, and I guarantee I'd have the Silver Star…" His voice went on, mad, grating, sick, as they walked side by side under the dripping trees. "I know myself. I'd have been a gallant officer."
Michael couldn't help smiling at the phrase. Somehow, in this war, you never heard that word, except in the rhetoric of the communiques and citations. Gallant was not the word for this particular war, and only a man like Keane would use it so warmly, believing in the word, believing that it had reality and meaning.
"Gallant," Keane repeated firmly. "I'd show my wife. I'd go back to London with the ribbons on me and I'd cut a path a mile wide through the women there. I never had any luck there before because I was a private."
Michael grinned, thinking of all the privates who had done spectacularly well among the English ladies, knowing that Keane could arrive anywhere with all the ribbons in the world, and stars on his shoulders, and find only frigid women at all bars, in all bedrooms.
"My wife knew it," Keane complained. "That's why she persuaded me not to become an officer. She had it figured out, and then when I saw what she'd done to me, it was too late, I was overseas."
Michael was beginning to enjoy himself, and he had a cruel sense of gratitude to the man beside him, for taking his mind off his own problems.
"What's your wife like?" he asked maliciously.
"I'll show you her picture tomorrow. Pretty," Keane said.
"Very well formed. She looks like the most affectionate woman in the world, always smiling and lively when anybody else is around. But let the door close, let us be alone, and it's like the middle of a glacier. They trick you," Keane mourned in the wet darkness, "they trick you, they trick you before you know what's happening… Also," he went on, pouring it out, "she takes all my money. And it's awful here, because I just sit around and I remember all the things she did to me, and I could go crazy. If I was in combat I could forget. Listen, Whitacre," Keane said passionately, "you're in good with Pavone, he likes you, talk to him for me, will you?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Either let him transfer me to the infantry," said Keane, and Michael's mind registered, This one, too, and for what reasons!
"Or," Keane went on, "let him take me with him when he leaves camp. I'm the sort of man he needs. I'm not afraid of being killed, I have nerves of steel. When the jeep was strafed and the other men were hit, I just watched them as coolly as if I was sitting in a movie looking at it on the screen. That's the sort of man Pavone needs with him…"
I wonder, Michael thought.
"Will you talk to him?" Keane pleaded. "Will you? Every time I start to talk to him, he says, 'Private Keane, are those lists typed yet?' And he laughs at me. I can see him laughing at me," Keane said wildly. "It gives him a distorted pleasure to think that he has the brother of Gordon Keane sitting back in the Communication Zone typing rosters. Whitacre, you've got to talk to him for me. The war will be over and I will never be in a single battle if someone doesn't help me!"
"OK," Michael said. "I'll talk to him." Then, harshly and cruelly because Keane was the kind of man who invited cruelty from everyone he spoke to, "Let me tell you, though, if you ever get into a battle I hope to God you're nowhere near me."
"Thanks, Boy, thanks a lot," Keane said heartily. "Gee, Boy, it's great of you to talk to Pavone about me. I'll remember you for this, Boy, I really will."
Michael strode off ahead of Keane and for a while Keane took the hint and stayed behind and they did not talk. But near the end of the hour, just before Keane was due to go in, he caught up with Michael, and said, reflectively, as though he had been thinking about it for a long time, "I think I'll go on sick call tomorrow and get some Epsom salts. Just one good bowel movement and it may start it, I may be a new man from then on."
"You have my heartiest best wishes," Michael said gravely.
"You won't forget about talking to Pavone now, will you?"
"I won't forget. I will personally suggest," Michael said, "that you should be dropped by parachute on General Rommel's Headquarters."
"It may be funny to you," Keane said aggrievedly, "but if you came from a family like mine, with something like that to live up to…"
"I'll talk to Pavone," Michael said. "Wake Stellevato up and turn in. I'll see you in the morning."
"It was a great relief," said Keane, "to be able to talk to someone like this. Thanks, Boy."
Michael watched the brother of the dead Medal-of-Honour winner walk heavily off towards the tent near the end of the line where Stellevato slept.
Stellevato was a short, small-boned Italian, nineteen years old, with a soft dark face, like a plush sofa cushion. He came from Boston, where he had been an iceman, and his speech was a mixture of liquid Italian sounds and the harsh long 'a's of the streets adjoining the Charles River. When he served as a sentry, he stood in one place, leaning against a jeep hood, and nothing could make him move. He had been in the infantry in the States and he had developed such a profound distaste for walking that now he even got into his jeep to ride the fifty yards to the latrine. Back in England he had fought the entire Medical Corps in a stubborn, clever battle to convince the Army that his arches were bad and that he was not fit to serve any longer on foot. It was his great triumph of the war, one that he remembered more dearly than anything else that had happened since Pearl Harbour, that he had finally prevailed and had been assigned to Pavone as a driver. Michael was very fond of him and when they were on duty together like this they both stood lounging against the jeep hood, smoking surreptitiously, exchanging confidences, Michael digging into his mind to remember random meetings with movie stars whom Stellevato admired hungrily, and Stellevato describing in detail the ice-and-coal route in Boston, and the life of the Stellevato family, father, mother and three sons in the apartment on Salem Street.
"I was havin' a dream," Stellevato said, slouched into his raincoat, with all the buttons torn off, a squat, unsoldierly silhouette with a carelessly held weapon angling off its shoulder, "a dream about the United States when that son of a bitch Keane woke me up. That Keane," Stellevato said angrily, "there's somethin' wrong with him. He comes over and smacks me across the shins like a cop kickin' a bum off a park bench, and he makes a helluva racket, he keeps sayin', loud enough to wake up the whole Army, 'Wake up, Boy, it's rainin' outside and you got some walkin' to do, come on, wake up, Boy, you got to walk in the cold, cold rain.'" Stellevato shook his head aggrievedly. "He don't have to tell me. I can see it's rainin'. He enjoys makin' people miserable, that feller. And this dream I was havin', I didn't want it to break off in the middle…" Stellevato's voice grew remote and soft. "I was on the truck with my old man. It was a sunny day in the summer-time and my old man was sitting on the seat next to me, sort of sleeping and smoking one of those crooked little black cigars, Italo Balbo cigars, maybe you know them?"
"Yes," said Michael gravely. "Five for ten cents."
"Italo Balbo," said Stellevato, "he's the one who flew from Italy. He was a big hero to the Italians a long time ago and they named a cigar after him."
"I heard of him," said Michael. "He got killed in Africa."
"He did? I ought to write it to my old man. He can't read, but my girl, Angelina, comes over and reads the letters to him and my old lady. Well, he was smokin' one of these cigars," Stellevato's voice fell back into the soft Boston summer-time of the dream, "and we was goin' slow because we had to stop at every other house, and he woke up and he said, 'Nikki, take twenty-fi' cents' worth up to Mrs Schwartz today, but tell her she gotta pay cash.' I could hear his voice just like I was back on the truck behind the wheel," Stellevato murmured. "So I got off the truck and I picked up the ice, and I went up the stairs to Mrs Schwartz, and my father yelled after me, 'Nikki, come on ri' down. Don't you stay up there with that Mrs Schwartz.' He was always yelling things like that at me, and then he would go off to sleep and he wouldn't know if I stayed up there for the matinee and evening performance. Mrs Schwartz opened the door, we had all kinds of customers in that neighbourhood, Italian, Irish, Polack, Jewish, I was very popular with everybody, and you'd be surprised all the whisky and coffee cake and noodle soup I got in a day's work on that route. Mrs Schwartz opened the door, a nice, fat, blonde woman, and she patted my cheek and she said, 'Nikki, it's a hot day, stay and I'll give you a glass of beer,' but I said, 'My father is waiting downstairs and he's wide awake,' so she said come back at four o'clock, and she gave me the twenty-five cents and I went downstairs and my father looked sore, and he said, 'Nikki, you gotta make up your mind, are you a businessman or are you the farmer's prize bull?' But then he laughed and said, 'As long as you got the twenty-fi' cents, OK.' Then somehow, everybody was in the truck, the whole family, like on Sunday, and my girl Angelina, and her mother, and we were comin' home from the beach, and I was just holding Angelina's hand, she never lets me do anything else, because we're going to get married, but her old lady is a different story, and we were sitting down at the table, everybody was there, my two brothers, the one that's in Guadalcanal and the one that's in Iceland, and my old man pouring a bottle of wine he made and my old lady bringing a big plate of spaghetti… And that's when that son of a bitch Keane hit me across the shins…"
Stellevato fell silent for a moment. "I really wanted to come to the end of that dream," he said softly, and then Michael knew that he was weeping.
Michael heard the sound of a man climbing out of his tent near-by. He saw a shadowy figure approaching.
"Who's there?" he asked.
"Pavone," a voice said in the darkness, then, as a hurried afterthought, "Colonel Pavone."
Pavone came up to Michael and Stellevato. "Who's on?" he asked.
"Stellevato and Whitacre," said Michael.
"Hello, Nikki," said Pavone. "Having a good time?"
"Great, Colonel." Stellevato's voice was warm and pleased. He was very fond of Pavone, who treated him more as a mascot than as a soldier, and who occasionally traded dirty jokes and stories of the old country in Italian with him.
"Whitacre," said Pavone, "are you all right?"
"Dandy," said Michael. In the rainy darkness there was a sense of friendliness and relaxation that never could exist between the Colonel and the enlisted men in the full light of day.
"Good," said Pavone. His voice was tired and reflective as he leaned against the jeep hood beside them. Carelessly, he lit a cigarette, not hiding the match, his eyebrows shining dark and heavy in the sudden small flare.
"You come out to relieve me, Colonel?" Stellevato asked.
"Not exactly, Nikki. You sleep too much anyway. You'll never amount to anything if you sleep all the time."
"I don't want to amount to anything," Stellevato said. "I just want to get back to my ice route."
"Colonel," Michael said, emboldened by the darkness. "I'd like to talk to you for a minute. That is, if you're not going back to bed."
"I can't sleep," said Pavone. "Sure. Come on, let's take a walk."
"I wanted to ask a favour." Michael hesitated. Here, again, he thought irritably, the endless necessity of decision. "I want you to have me transferred to a combat unit."
Pavone walked quietly for a moment. "What is it?" he asked.
"Brooding?"
"Maybe," said Michael, "maybe. The church today, the Canadians… I don't know. I began to remember what I was in the war for."
"What egotism," Pavone said, and Michael was surprised by the loathing in his voice. "Christ, I hate intellectual soldiers! You think all the Army has to do these days is make sure you can make the proper sacrifice to satisfy your jerky little consciences! Not happy in the service?" he inquired harshly. "You don't think driving a jeep is dignified enough for a college graduate? You won't be content until you get a bullet in your guts. The Army isn't interested in your problems, Mr Whitacre. The Army'll use you when it needs you, don't you worry. Maybe for only one minute in four years, but it'll use you. And perhaps you'll have to die in that minute, but meanwhile don't come around with your cocktail-party conscience, asking me to give you a cross to climb on. I'm busy running an outfit and I can't take the time or the effort to put up crosses for half-baked PFCs from Harvard."
