Bagombo Snuff Box (12 page)

“Here he is,” whispered Ed Newcomb, who had been standing
watch by the window.

A moment later, the rich voice came through the wall. “Good
heavens, you’ve got all those plants in there with you again!”

“Just got lonesome,” said Mrs. Dickie.

“But my dear Mrs. Dickie,” said Cady, “think of—”

“The motion’s been carried, then,” said Chief Atkins in a
loud voice. “Mr. Beaton is to be a committee of one to inform Mr. Cady that his
fire department membership, unfortunately, is in violation of the by-laws,
which call for three years’ residence in the village prior to election.”

“I will make it clear to him,” said Beaton, also speaking
loudly, “that this is in no way a personal affront, that it’s simply a matter
of conforming to our by-laws, which have been in effect for years.”

“Make sure he understands that we all like him,” said Ed Newcomb,
“and tell him we’re proud an important man like him would want to live here.”

“I will,” said Beaton. “He’s a brilliant man, and I’m sure
he’ll see the wisdom in the residence requirement. A village isn’t like a
factory, where you can walk in and see what’s being made at a glance, and then
look at the books and see if it’s a good or bad operation. We’re not
manufacturing or selling anything. We’re trying to live together. Every man’s
got to be his own expert at that, and it takes years.” The meeting was
adjourned.

The Ilium real estate man was upset, because everyone he
wanted to see in Spruce Falls was out. He stood in Hal Brayton’s grocery store,
looking at the deserted street and fiddling with his fountain pen.

“They’re all with the fire engine salesman?” he said.

“They’re all going to be paying for the truck for the next
twenty years,” said Upton Beaton. He was tending Brayton’s store while Brayton
went for a ride on the fire engine.

“Red-hot prospects are going to start coming through here in
a week, and everybody goes out joy-riding,” said the real estate man bitterly.
He opened the soft drink cooler and let the lid fall shut again. “What’s the
matter—this thing broken? Everything’s warm.”

“No, Brayton just hasn’t gotten around to plugging it in
since he moved things back the way they used to be.”

“You said he’s the one who doesn’t want to sell his place?”

“One of the ones,” said Beaton.

“Who else?”

“Everybody else.”

“Go on!”

“Really,” said Beaton. “We’ve decided to wait and see how
Mr. Cady adapts himself, before we put anything else on the market. He’s having
a tough time, but he’s got a good heart, I think, and we’re all rooting for
him.”

Joe Bane was a pawnbroker, a fat, lazy, bald man, whose features
seemed pulled to the left by his lifetime of looking at the world through a jeweler’s
glass. He was a lonely, untalented man and would not have wanted to go on
living had he been prevented from playing every day save Sunday the one game he
played brilliantly—the acquiring of objects for very little, and the selling of
them for a great deal more. He was obsessed by the game, the one opportunity
life offered him to best his fellow men. The game was the thing, the money he
made a secondary matter, a way of keeping score.

When Joe Bane opened his shop Monday morning, a black
ceiling of rainclouds had settled below the valley’s rim, holding the city in a
dark pocket of dead, dank air. Autumn thunder grumbled along the misty hillsides.
No sooner had Bane hung up his coat and hat and umbrella, taken off his
rubbers, turned on the lights, and settled his great bulk on a stool behind a
counter than a lean young man in overalls, shy and dark as an Indian, plainly
poor and awed by the city, walked in to offer him a fantastic pocketwatch for
five hundred dollars.

“No, sir,” said the young farmer politely. “I don’t want to
borrow money on it. I want to sell it, if I can get enough for it.” He seemed
reluctant to hand it to Bane, and cupped it tenderly in his rough hands for a
moment before setting it down on a square of black velvet. “I kind of hoped to
hang on to it, and pass it on to my oldest boy, but we need the money a whole
lot worse right now.”

“Five hundred dollars is a lot of money,” said Bane, like a
man who had been victimized too often by his own kindness. He examined the
jewels studding the watch without betraying anything of his inner amazement. He
turned the watch this way and that, catching the glare of the ceiling light in
four diamonds marking the hours three, six, nine, and twelve, and the ruby
crowning the winder. The jewels alone, Bane reflected, were worth at least four
times what the farmer was asking.

“I don’t get much call for a watch like this,” said Bane. “If
I tied up five hundred dollars in it, I might be stuck with it for years before
the right man came along.” He watched the farmer’s sunburned face and thought
he read there that the watch could be had for a good bit less.

“There ain’t another one like it in the whole county,” said
the farmer, in a clumsy attempt at salesmanship.

“That’s my point,” said Bane. “Who wants a watch like this?”
Bane, for one, wanted it, and was already regarding it as his own. He pressed a
button on the side of the case and listened to the whirring of tiny machinery
striking the nearest hour on sweet, clear chimes.

“You want it or not?” said the farmer.

“Now, now,” said Bane, “this isn’t the kind of deal you just
dive headfirst into. I’d have to know more about this watch before I bought
it.” He pried open the back and found inside an engraved inscription in a
foreign language. “What does this say? Any idea?”

“Showed it to a schoolteacher back home,” said the young man,
“and all she could say was it looked a whole lot like German.”

Bane laid a sheet of tissue paper over the inscription, and
rubbed a pencil back and forth across it until he’d picked up a legible copy.
He gave the copy and a dime to a shoeshine boy loitering by the door and sent
him down the block to ask a German restaurant proprietor for a translation.

The first drops of rain were spattering clean streaks on the
sooty glass when Bane said casually to the farmer, “The cops keep pretty close
check on what comes in here.”

The farmer reddened. “That watch is mine, all right. I got
it in the war,” he said.

“Uh-huh. And you paid duty on it?”

“Duty?”

“Certainly. You can’t bring jewelry into this country
without paying taxes on it. That’s smuggling.”

“Just tucked it in my barracks bag and brought her on home,
the way everybody done,” said the farmer. He was as worried as Bane had hoped.

“Contraband,” said Bane. “Just about the same as stolen
goods.” He held up his hands placatingly. “I don’t mean I can’t buy it, I just
want to point out to you that it’d be a tricky thing to handle. If you were
willing to let it go for, oh, say a hundred dollars, maybe I’d take a chance on
it to help you out. I try to give veterans a break here whenever I can.”

“A hundred dollars! That’s all?”

“That’s all it’s worth, and I’m probably a sucker to offer
that,” said Bane. “What the hell—that’s an easy hundred bucks for you, isn’t
it? What’d you do—cop it off some German prisoner or find it lying around in
the ruins?”

“No, sir,” said the farmer, “it was a little tougher’n that.”

Bane, who was keenly sensitive to such things, saw that the
farmer, as—he began to tell how he’d gotten the watch, was regaining the
stubborn confidence that had deserted him when he’d left his farm for the city
to make the sale.

“My best buddy Buzzer and me,” said the farmer, “were prisoners
of war together in some hills in Germany—in Sudetenland, somebody said it was.
One morning, Buzzer woke me up and said the war was over, the guards were gone,
the gates were open.”

Joe Bane was impatient at first with having to listen to the
tale. But it was a tale told well and proudly, and long a fan of others’
adventures for want of any of his own, Bane began to see, enviously, the two
soldiers walking through the open gates of their prison, and down a country
road in the hills early on a bright spring morning in 1945, on the day the
Second World War ended in Europe.

The young farmer, whose name was Eddie, and his best buddy
Buzzer walked out into peace and freedom skinny, ragged, dirty, and hungry, but
with no ill will toward anyone. They’d gone to war out of pride, not bitterness.
Now the war was over, the job done, and they wanted only to go home. They were
a year apart, but as alike as two poplars in a windbreak. Their notion was to
take a brief sightseeing tour of the neighborhood near the camp, then to come
back and wait with the rest of the prisoners for the arrival of some official
liberators. But the plan evaporated when a pair of Canadian prisoners invited
the buddies to toast victory with a bottle of brandy they’d found in a wrecked
German truck.

Their shrunken bellies gloriously hot and tingling, their
heads light and full of trust and love for all mankind, Eddie and Buzzer found
themselves swept along by a jostling, plaintive parade of German refugees that
jammed the main road through the hills, refugees fleeing from the Russian tanks
that growled monotonously and unopposed in the valley behind and below them.
The tanks were coming to occupy this last undefended bit of German soil.

“What’re we runnin’ from?” said Buzzer. “The war’s over, ain’t
it?”

“Everybody else is runnin’,” said Eddie, “so I guess maybe
we better be runnin’, too.”

“I don’t even know where we are,” said Buzzer. “Them Canadians
said it’s Sudetenland.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where we’re at,” said Eddie. “Swell guys, them Canadians.”

“I’ll tell the world! Man,” said Buzzer, “I love everybody today.
Whoooooey! I’d like to get me a bottle of that brandy, put a nipple on it. and
go to bed with it for a week.”

Eddie touched the elbow of a tall, worried-looking man with
close-cropped black hair, who wore a civilian suit too small for him. “Where we
runnin’ to, sir? Ain’t the war over?”

The man glared, grunted something, and pushed by roughly.

“He don’t understand English,” said Eddie.

“Why, hell, man,” said Buzzer, “why’n’t you talk to these
folks in their native tongue? Don’t hide your candle under a bushel. Let’s hear
you sprecken some Dutch to this man here.”

They’d come alongside a small, low black roadster, which was
stalled on the shoulder of the road. A heavily muscled square-faced young man
was tinkering with the dead motor. On the leather front seat of the car sat an
older man whose face was covered with dust and several days’ growth of black
beard, and shaded by a hat with the brim pulled down.

Eddie and Buzzer stopped. “All right,” said Eddie. “Just
listen to this: Wie geht’s?” he said to the blond man, using the only German he
knew.

“Gut, gut,” muttered the young German. Then, realizing the
absurdity of his automatic reply to the greeting, he said with terrible
bitterness, “Ja! Geht’s gut!”

“He says everything’s just fine,” said Eddie.

“Oh, you’re fluent, mighty fluent,” said Buzzer.

“Yes, I’ve traveled extensively, you might say,” said Eddie.

The older man came to life and yelled at the man who was
working on the motor, yelled shrilly and threateningly.

The blond seemed frightened. He went to work on the motor
with redoubled desperation.

The older man’s eyes, bleary a moment before, were wide and
bright now. Several refugees turned to stare as they passed.

The older man glanced challengingly from one face to the
next, and filled his lungs to shout something at them. But he changed his mind,
sighed instead, and his spirits collapsed. He thrust his face in his hands.

“Wha’d he say?” said Buzzer.

“He don’t speak my particular dialect,” said Eddie.....

“Speaks low-class German, huh?” said Buzzer. “Well, I’m not
goin’ another step till we find somebody who can tell us what’s goin’ on. We’re
Americans, boy. Our side won, didn’t it? What we doin’ all tangled up with
these Jerries?”

“You—you Americans,” said the blond, surprisingly enough in
English. “Now you will have to fight them.”

“Here’s one that talks English!” said Buzzer.

“Talks it pretty good, too,” said Eddie.

“Ain’t bad, ain’t bad at all,” said Buzzer. “Who we got to
fight?”

“The Russians,” said the young German, seeming to relish the
idea. “They’ll kill you, too, if they catch you. They’re killing everybody in
their path.”

“Hell, man,” said Buzzer, “we’re on their side.”

“For how long? Run, boys, run.” The blond swore and hurled
his wrench at the motor. He turned to the old man and spoke, scared to death of
him.

The older man released a stream of German abuse, tired of it
quickly, got out of the car, and slammed the door behind him. The two looked
anxiously in the direction from which the tanks would come, and started down
the road on foot.

“Where you guys headed?” said Eddie.

“Prague—the Americans are in Prague.”

Eddie and Buzzer fell in behind them. “Sure gettin’ a mess
of geography today, ain’t we, Eddie?” said Buzzer. He stumbled, and Eddie
caught him. “Oh, oh, Eddie, that old booze is sneakin’ up on me.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie, whose own senses were growing fuzzier. “I
say to hell with Prague. If we don’t ride, we don’t go, and that’s that.”

“Sure. We’ll just find us some shady spot, and sit and wait
for the Russians. We’ll just show ‘em our dog tags,” said Buzzer. “And when
they see ‘em, bet they give us a big banquet.” He dipped a finger inside his collar
and brought out the tags on their string.

“Oh my, yes,” said the blond German, who had been listening
carefully, “a wonderful big banquet they’ll give you.”

The column had been moving more and more slowly, growing
more packed. Now it came to a muttering halt.