Nothing but a Smile (16 page)

He'd thought about grabbing someone and kissing them like that—acting crazy. Maybe kiss Sal, just to play it safe, not grab some stranger's girl on the street, maybe get his block knocked off. But it just wasn't in him to do any of that.

For one thing, he didn't have a clue what he was going to do with his life. For as long as he could remember, the answer to that question lay on the white drawing tablet in his lap. And though that had been closed to him for more than a year now, somehow, he hadn't really felt a need to think about it as seriously because he could always tell himself
There's a war on.
Now, with peace suddenly dropped on them like a ton of bricks, it felt like nothing more than pressure to make serious plans.

Sal had even seemed a little thrown by this sudden peace. Chesty would eventually be coming home, and Wink got the idea that she'd grown fond of their unofficial side business.

The night of V-J Day, in fact, she'd confessed that she'd secretly felt she was doing something to help. “I always imagined,” she said, “or I guess hoped, that one day some vet would come up and tell me that the photos, you know,
helped
just a little.”

She seemed almost glum, and he'd decided to tease her out of it. “So we haven't been doing this for the money?” She laughed and he told her, “Hey, just because no one's ever come up and told you that yet, about the girlies helping, doesn't mean it's not true.”

When he got home from trying to draw in the park, she must have seen him coming because she was standing out on the sidewalk, waiting for him, hugging herself though it wasn't quite yet Labor Day, the sun golden in her hair, on her yellow dress. She started in when he was still half a block away, calling out to him as he approached. “Hey. You know how we've talked about how someday we're going to have to explain to Chesty what we've been doing here? The photos and all?”

He saw she was grinning, which maybe meant she'd come up with a good explanation. Which was good, because he wasn't sure himself that he'd be able to explain it to the guy when the time came.

“Yeah …” He stepped into the shop, and she followed him in.

“Well, better start working on that explanation,” she said, and he noticed now she was clutching a postcard with a palm tree. “He's coming home.”

Sergeant William “Chesty” Chesterton stood looking out at the San Francisco Bay, his ears filled with the clamor of seagulls. Pretty, but not five hours' worth of pretty.

There would be a bus arriving, eventually, that would get him from the naval yard to the train station, but that wasn't for five hours, and he didn't even have a magazine. He'd been cleaned out, the whole collection pilfered during the crossing from Hawaii. A fellow couldn't even go topside for ten minutes without risking having his gear tossed and pawed through. It was like traveling with monkeys, really. He especially wished he hadn't lost the girlies he'd been thinking about showing Sal; the couple issues with the girl that looked so much like her—that is, if you squinted a little and ignored the fact the hair was all wrong. Anyway, he still hadn't fully decided if he would show them to her, let alone tell her about them. Probably he would. Sal was pretty all right. She might actually get a charge out of it, knowing some sexy girl in a magazine looked—to him at least—just like her.

He was shooting with the Argus—boring long perspectives of the docks, close-ups of the moorings, panoramas of the disappointingly unfoggy Bay, all a bit unpeopled for his taste—when he heard someone calling him.

“Hey, shutterbug—84 Charlie!”

They'd been calling him that all the way from Hawaii. He squinted into the sun at a shadowy figure on the gangplank of a navy freighter. He was pretty sure it was an ensign he recognized from the trip over.

“Over here! You wanna get an eyeful of something really wild, check this out.”

The cargo class was docked right next to the cattleboat they'd just come over on. He imagined this guy wasn't going home, like him, but probably shipping out on another troopship. Chesty felt sorry for the poor bastard.

Grinning like he was camp happy, gesturing to follow, the ensign called over his shoulder, by way of explanation, “You gotta see this. It's relief for the Japs, right, but you tell me what the jumping Jesus the skibbies plan on doing with all
this.”

Stepping down into the hold, the metal clang of the stairs got quiet about halfway down, the reverberation muffled. He strained to see why in the dark, his eyes slowly adjusting to take in mountains of white powder only partially contained by a scattering of wooden crates. It was everywhere, floating in the air like misty breath on a winter's morning.

“Wow …”

“Right?” the ensign said. “Crazy, huh?”

Through the blizzard of white, he strained to make out words stamped on a nearby crate:
SWANS DOWN,
it read—a strange phrase that nonetheless stirred a gray memory he couldn't quite place, an earlier time, a younger time, safe back home, maybe in the kitchen.

“Cake flour,” the ensign said, and then it all made sense.

Except for the part where it was filling the hold of this ship, and he pointed that out to him.
“This
is a basic necessity?”

“Yeah, right? Thing hits me just the same. Only who knows? Maybe someone up top feels
so solly
for the little fuckers. Wants em to have a nice treat, maybe a nice red velvet cake. Who knows. Maybe someone's idea of a joke or it's something someone had in surplus or it was going rotten anyway, maybe boll weevils, a tax write-off—who knows how the brass thinks, am I right?”

Farther back, narrow sunlight shafted in like it would in the nave of a cathedral. Beautiful, but maybe not enough light. He lifted the Argus and adjusted the f-stop, hoping that would compensate for the lack, and fired away. The one-striper beside him stopped talking, as if watching him work or afraid sound would disrupt the shots. Chesty had a half a roll still and no real conviction he'd captured anything but blackness. Digging out the flash rig from his pack, he really started to imagine he was standing in a snowstorm. The ensign started giggling.

Framing the shot again, including the guy in this one, off to one side, turned three-quarters, Chesty saw himself back home, standing in the first heavy snowfall of the season—my God, that would be soon! two months at the most, knowing Chicago—and he thought how it had been so long since he'd seen snow, he'd missed entire winters with his wife, and he thought of her warm little kitchen and Sal in the front window, looking out at the snow blowing around outside, and pressed the trigger for the biggest flash he had ever seen, white, white, white.

They traveled, with bereavement vouchers procured through his contacts at the New York offices of
Yank,
on the Southern Pacific's Overland Route. Separate accommodations. Boarding in Chicago, he slipped the porter a couple bucks to make sure they were properly situated—not in adjoining sleepers, which might elicit disapproval from fellow passengers, but kitty-corner from each other, across the aisle and down three doors. Distant enough, he hoped, for her to feel some privacy in her grieving, but close enough that she didn't feel completely abandoned.

The body—or, as near as he'd been able to determine, an assortment of parts they'd been able to recover and box up in a coffin—was waiting on ice at the Port of San Francisco. Once they took possession, they would reboard the train and escort Sergeant William Chesterton to his final resting place—the family plot in Breakey, Nebraska.

Initially, he'd offered to travel to California in her place and bring Chesty back for burial, but Sal said no, that didn't make sense, since they wouldn't be burying him in Chicago.

This had been news to Wink. It didn't seem like the right time to pester her with a lot of questions, but he'd had no idea his friend was from Nebraska.

Somewhere beyond Laramie, he got to talking to an auburn-haired gal named Carol in the lounge car. She looked a little like Rita Hayworth, except one eye was visibly smaller than the other. Though it was somewhere between ten and midnight (he couldn't keep track of these time zones they were passing through), the lady was drinking a lot of coffee, and when he declined to join her in a cup, saying the stuff would keep him from sleeping, she seemed like she was about to say something, then thought better of it and smiled to herself instead. They talked about the steamy novel she was reading,
Forever Amber,
and when he asked if it was as scandalous as he'd heard, her mouth curled in a way he liked a great deal and she said, “It'll do.” Asking to see it, he riffled through the pages, expecting something nasty to pop out at him and grab his attention, which it didn't.

While he was still glancing at it, she stretched a little in her seat, long and lovely, and he strained a little to keep his eyes on the page. “You have to read it terribly closely to find the juicy stuff,” she explained, and that settled it for him. He handed it
back and she ordered another little pot of coffee from a passing porter—a woman, as were several of the mechanics he'd seen so far. He expected they'd all be out of work soon, sent back home now that the men were returning.

Wink wondered, a little, how she was affording all this coffee, and how she rated a travel voucher, but he didn't try to pry it out of her. She seemed either well off or accustomed to being well off, if she didn't happen to be at this particular time.

Instead of delving back into her book, she turned and gazed out the window. It was still very flat out there and dark and starry.

“Do you know your stars?” she asked.

“Sure,” he lied. “You've got your various Dippers, Big and Little, your Cassiopeia …”

“Which is where?”

He stared out at the night as she pulled the chain in their little table-side lamp. It helped with the illumination outside by cutting down on the reflection, but sacrificed the image of her profile he'd been checking out in the window.

“No idea,” he said. “These are Wyoming stars.”

When the coffee replacement came, along with an extra cup, presumably for him, he declined again and asked her how the hell she planned on sleeping tonight.

“That isn't my plan,” she said. “I never can on trains, anyway, so I might as well have some fun—just stay up and be wicked.”

He thought she winked. He might have imagined it—the lamp was still off and there was that oddity with her smaller eye— and then she eased a slender silver flask from her handbag and added to her half-full cup. This he didn't decline, accepting a belt minus the coffee, and it was a relief, a warm balm that allowed him to rest his eyes for just a moment, and imagine, for that moment, that the train's motion was a mothering rocking, a gentle lulling, not the friction of pistons, and for just that moment, he
imagined he didn't have Chesty's widow a few cars down that he must watch over like an orphaned ward, and so he would follow this overly stimulated stranger's lead wherever it went, which quite probably would be down to her roomette or compartment or possibly high-class drawing room, and down to her undergarments, and he would follow her hints and insinuations to her wordless gestures and finally to her husky, grunted urgings … But it was only for a moment, and then there was a return to the knowledge that his friend needed him at this crucial time to watch over his wife and make it as bearable as it could be and his other friend needed him as well, or possibly might, and even if it were only an outside chance that she would need him in the next hour or so—even for something as small as a clean handkerchief or an aspirin powder or something as big as a hug, he should be there. And so, in a moment, he said good night to lovely, possible Carol in the lounge car and returned, alone, to his roomette.

The flat farmland streaming past made him occasionally think of his uncle in Michigan. He would always have a place there, he knew, if this ever became too much for him. A place, of course, wasn't
necessarily
a life. He wondered about that. If it ever came down to that, if he turned to Uncle Len, would there be room for growth there? Could he expand the acreage, down the line— find his own farmhouse, his own wife? The pickings around St. Johns, he imagined, quite probably paled compared with what he'd seen in Chicago. Hell, what he'd seen on board this train, even. Of course, a guy could hunt a little farther afield than a five or ten mile radius around his uncle's farm.

Theoretically, he could bring someone in, like a hothouse flower. Go down to Ann Arbor or Lansing, some highbrow hot spot like that, meet a gal with a little more of a sense of the great
big world, maybe even a coed with some education … But what would stop that gal from pining for that great big world? For that matter, what would stop him from doing the same?

In Cheyenne, the porter barked past, announcing they had a half-hour stop to refuel and restock the dining car, so folks should get out and stretch if they wanted.

Wink wanted. The station was still hopping—it was not quite nine p.m. He got a milk shake at a soda fountain across the street, then returned to the station and drank it in the shoeshine chair, getting a shine. Since the newsstand was still open, he bought a copy of
Stars and Stripes,
the Denver
Post
—the old man said they didn't carry the Chicago
Tribune
—two paperback books of crossword puzzles, a handful of Hollywood gossip magazines for Sal, the latest
Esquire
for him, and a stack of girlies off the half-hidden side shelf for both of them to peruse.
At Ease
and
Wink
were among the bunch he grabbed, and he was pretty sure they had some work in both of these. Finally, he spotted that steamy novel,
Forever Amber,
and threw that on the pile, too. He wasn't sure which one of them that was for, but he figured it would, at the least, hand them a laugh. Maybe he'd read it to her out loud like a kiddie story.

“These two are the same,” the old man pointed out, holding up the two copies of the crossword puzzle book he'd selected.

Wink was aware of that. Not bothering to explain that one was for him and one was for his traveling companion, he said, “The same is fine.”