Short Stories: Five Decades (42 page)

“No,” said Stais, still lying back, abstractedly wondering whether the waving would get worse or better, “not at all.”

“This girl in Flushing, Long Island,” Novak said slowly. “It’s easy for Whitejack to make fun of me. The girls fall all over themselves chasing after him; he has no real conception of what it’s like to be a man like me. Not very good-looking. Not much money. Not an officer. Not humorous. Shy.”

Stais couldn’t help grinning. “You’re going to have a tough time in India.”

“I know,” Novak said. “I have resigned myself to not having a girl until the armistice. How did you do with the girls in the Middle East?” he asked politely.

“There was a nice Viennese girl in Jerusalem,” Stais said dreamily. “But otherwise zero. You have to be very good unless you’re an officer in the Middle East.”

“That’s what I heard,” Novak said sorrowfully. “Well, it won’t be so different to me from Oklahoma. That was the nice thing about this girl in Flushing, Long Island. She saw me come into the jewelry store where she worked and … I was in my fatigues and I was with a very smooth feller who made a date with her for that night. But she smiled at me, and I knew if I had the guts I could ask her for a date, too. But of course I didn’t. But then later that night I was sitting in my room in the YMCA and my phone rang. It was this girl. The other feller had stood her up, she said, and would I take her out.” Novak smiled dimly, thinking of that tremulous moment of glory in the small hotel room far away. “I got my fatigues off in one minute and shaved and showered and I picked her up. We went to Coney Island. It was the first time in my entire life I had ever seen Coney Island. It took three and a half weeks for me to finish my course and I went out with that girl every single night. Nothing like that ever happened to me before in my life—a girl who just wanted to see me every night of the week. Then the night before I was due to leave to join my squadron she told me she had got permission to take the afternoon off and she would like to see me off if I let her. I called at the jewelry shop at noon and her boss shook my hand and she had a package under her arm and we got into the subway and we rode to New York City. Then we went into a cafeteria and had a wonderful lunch and she saw me off and gave me the package. It was Schrafft’s candy, and she was crying at the gate there, crying for me, and she said she would like me to write, no matter what …” Novak paused and Stais could tell that the scene at the gate, the hurrying crowds, the package of Schrafft’s chocolates, the weeping young girl, were as clear as the afternoon sunlight to Novak there on the coast of Africa. “So I keep writing,” Novak said. “She’s written me she has a Technical Sergeant now, but I keep writing. I haven’t seen her in a year and a half and what’s a girl to do. Do you blame her?”

“No,” said Stais, “I don’t blame her.”

“I hope I haven’t bored you,” Novak said.

“Not at all.” Stais smiled at him. Suddenly the dizziness had gone and he could close his eyes. As he drifted down into that weird and ever-present pool of sleep in which he half-lived these days, he heard Novak say, “Now I have to write my mother.”

Outside, the Negro boy sang and the planes grumbled down from the Atlantic and laboriously set out across the Sahara Desert.

Dreams again. Arabs, bundled in rags, driving camels along the perimeter of the field, outlined against the parked Liberators and waiting bombs, two Mitchells still burning on the shores of Brazil and Frank Sloan burning there and circling above him, Whitejack, who had told him he’d sleep with his wife and had, the hills around Jerusalem, gnarled, rocky, dusty, with the powdered green of olive groves set on slopes here and there, clinging against the desert wind, Mitchells slamming along the gorges of the Blue Ridge Mountains, bucking in the updraughts, their guns going, hunting deer, the Mediterranean, bluer than anything in America, below them on the way home from Italy, coming down below oxygen level, with the boys singing dirty songs over the intercom and leave in Alexandria ahead of them. The girl from Flushing, Long Island, quietly going hand in hand with Novak to Coney Island on a summer’s night.…

It was Whitejack who awakened him. He woke slowly. It was dark outside and the electric light was shining in his eyes and Whitejack was standing over him, shaking him gently.

“I thought you’d like to know,” Whitejack was saying, “your name’s on the bulletin board. You’re leaving tonight.”

“Thanks,” Stais said, dimly grateful at being shaken out of the broken and somehow sorrowful dreams.

“I took the liberty of initialing it for you, opposite your name,” Whitejack said. “Save you a trip up to the field.”

“Thanks,” said Stais. “Very kind of you.”

“Also,” said Whitejack, “there’s fried chicken for chow.”

Stais pondered over the fried chicken. He was a little hungry, but the effort of getting up and putting on his shoes and walking the hundred yards to the mess hall had to be weighed in the balance. “Thanks. I’ll just lie right here,” he said. “Any news of your boys?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Whitejack. “The squadron came in.”

“That’s good.”

“All except one plane.” Whitejack sat down on the end of Stais’ cot. His voice was soft and expressionless, under the bright electric light. “Johnny Moffat’s plane.”

In all the months that Stais had been in the Air Force, on fields to which planes had failed to return, he had learned that there was nothing to say. He was only nineteen years old, but he had learned that. So he lay quiet.

“They got separated in clouds on the way out of Ascension, and they never picked them up again. There’s still a chance,” Whitejack said, “that they’ll drop in any minute.” He looked at his watch. “Still a chance for another hour and forty minutes …”

There was still nothing to say, so Stais lay silent.

“Johnny Moffat,” said Whitejack, “at one time looked as though he was going to marry my sister. In a way, it’s a good thing he didn’t. It’d be a little hard, being brothers-in-law, on some of the parties the Air Force goes on in one place and another.” Whitejack fell silent, looked down at his belly. Deliberately, he let his belt out a notch. He pulled it to, with a severe little click. “That fried chicken was mighty good,” he said. “You sure you want to pass it up?”

“I’m saving my appetite,” Stais said, “for my mother’s cooking.”

“My sister,” said Whitejack, “was passing fond of Johnny, and I have a feeling when he gets home from the war and settles down, she’s going to snag him. She came to me right before I left and she asked me if I would let her have ten acres on the north side of my property and three acres of timber to build their house. I said it was OK with me.” He was silent again, thinking of the rolling ten acres of upland meadow in North Carolina and the three tall acres of standing timber, oak and pine, from which it would be possible to build a strong country house. “There’s nobody in the whole world I’d rather have living on my property than Johnny Moffat. I’ve known him for twenty years and I’ve had six fist fights with him and won them all, and been alone with him in the woods for two months at a time, and I still say that.…” He got up and went over to his own cot, then turned and came back. “By the way,” he said softly, “this is between you and me, Sergeant.”

“Sure,” said Stais.

“My sister said she’d murder me for my hide and taller if I ever let Johnny know what was in store for him.” He grinned a little. “Women’re very confident in certain fields,” he said. “And I never did tell Johnny, not even when I was so drunk I was singing ‘Casey Jones’ naked in the middle of the city of Tampa at three o’clock in the morning.” He went over to his musette bag and got out a cigar and thoughtfully lit it. “You’d be surprised,” he said, “how fond you become of nickel cigars in the Army.”

“I tried smoking,” said Stais. “I think I’ll wait until I get a little older.”

Whitejack sat heavily on his own cot. “Do you think they’ll send you out to fight again?” he asked.

Stais stared up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “There’s nothing really wrong with me. I’m just tired.”

Whitejack nodded, smoking slowly. “By the way,” he said, “you heard us talking about the Lieutenant, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I went out to the field and had a little conversation with him. He’s just been sittin’ there all day and most of the night since we got here, outside the Operations room, just lookin’ and starin’ across at the planes comin’ in. Him and me, we’ve been good friends for a long time and I asked him pointblank. I said, ‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘there’s a question the boys’re askin’ themselves these days about you.’ And he said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘The boys’re asking if you’ve turned bad. You pass ’em and you don’t even look at them as though you recognize ’em. What is it, you turn GI after a year?’ I said. He looked at me and then he looked at the ground and he didn’t say anything for maybe a minute. Then he said, ‘I beg your pardon, Arnold. It never occurred to me.’ Then he told me what was on his mind.” Whitejack looked at his watch, almost automatically, then lifted his head again. “Ever since we got the order to go overseas he’s been worrying. About the waist gunner and his navigator.”

“What’s he worrying about?” For a moment a crazy list of all the thousand things you can worry about in the crew of one airplane flashed through Stais’ head.

“They’re not fighting men,” Whitejack said slowly. “They’re both good fellers, you wouldn’t want better, but the Lieutenant’s been watchin’ ’em for a long time on the ground, in the air, at their guns, and he’s convinced they won’t measure. And he feels he’s responsible for taking the Mitchell in and getting it out with as many of us alive as possible and he feels the waist gunner and the navigator’re dangerous to have in the plane. And he’s makin’ up his mind to put in a request for two new men when we get to India, and he can’t bear to think of what it’ll do to the gunner and the navigator when they find out he’s asked to have ’em grounded, and that’s why he just sits there outside Operations, not even seein’ us when we go by.…” Whitejack sighed. “He’s twenty-two years old, the Lieutenant. It’s a strain, something like that, for a man twenty-two years old. If you see Novak, you won’t tell him anything, will you?”

“No,” said Stais.

“I suppose things like this come up all the time in any army.”

“All the time,” said Stais.

Whitejack looked at his watch. Outside there was the growing and lapsing roar of engines that had been the constant sound of both their lives for so many months.

“Ah,” said Whitejack, “they should’ve put me in the infantry. I can hit a rabbit at three hundred yards with a rifle; they put me in the Air Force and give me a camera.… Well, Sergeant, I think it’s about time you were movin’.”

Slowly, Stais got up. He put on his shoes and put his shaving kit into his musette bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“You ready?” asked Whitejack.

“Yes,” said Stais.

“That all the baggage you got—that little musette bag?”

“Yes,” said Stais. “I was listed as missing, presumed dead, and they sent all my stuff into the supply room and all my personal belongings home to my mother.”

Stais looked around the barracks. It shone in the harsh army light of barracks at night all over the world, by now familiar, homelike, to all the men who passed through them. He had left nothing.

They walked out into the soft, engine-filled night. A beacon flashed nervously across the sky, dimming the enormous pale twinkle of Southern stars for a moment. They walked slowly, stepping cautiously over the ditches dug for the flood rains of the African West Coast.

As they passed the Operations room, Stais saw a young lieutenant slumped down in a wobbly old wicker chair, staring out across the field.

“They come yet?” Whitejack asked.

“No,” said the Lieutenant, without looking up.

Stais went into the building and into the room where they had the rubber raft and the patented radio and the cloth painted blue on one side and yellow on the other. A fat middle-aged ATC captain wearily told them about ditching procedure. There were more than thirty people in the room, all passengers on Stais’ plane. There were two small, yellow Chinese who were going to be airsick and five bouncing fat Red Cross women, and three sergeants with a lot of Air Force medals, trying not to seem excited about going home, and two colonels in the Engineers, looking too old for this war. Stais only half listened as the fat captain explained how to inflate the raft, what strings to pull, what levers to move, where to find the waterproofed Bible.…

Whitejack was standing outside when Stais started for his plane. He gave Stais a slip of paper. “It’s my home address,” he said. “After the war, just come down sometime in October and I’ll take you hunting.”

“Thank you very much,” said Stais gravely. Over Whitejack’s shoulder he saw the Lieutenant, still slumped in the wicker chair, still staring fixedly and unrelievedly out across the dark field.

Whitejack walked out to the great plane with Stais, along the oil-spattered concrete of the runway, among the Chinese and loud Red Cross women and the sergeants. They stopped, without a word, at the steps going up to the doorway of the plane and the other passengers filed past them.

They stood there, silently, with the two days of random conversation behind them and Brazil and Athens behind them, and five hundred flights behind them, and Jerusalem and Miami behind them, and the girls from Vienna and the American Embassy and Flushing, Long Island, behind them, and the Greek mountaineers behind them and Thomas Wolfe’s funeral, and friends burning like torches, and dogs under treed raccoons in the Blue Ridge Mountains behind them, and a desperate twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant painfully staring across a dusty airfield for ten days behind them, and the Mediterranean and the hospital bed in Cairo and Johnny Moffat wandering that night over the Southern Atlantic, with ten acres of meadow and three acres of timber for his house, and Whitejack’s sister waiting for him, all behind them. And, ahead of Stais, home and a mother who had presumed him dead and wept over his personal belongings, and ahead of Whitejack the cold bitter mountains of India and China and the tearing dead sound of the fifties and the sky full of Japs.…