The Captains (39 page)

“She's dead,” he said. “She was killed in a car crash.”

“While you were here?” She knew that, somehow.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “I'm so sorry.” She put her hand on his arm.

The crew climbed out of Blueballs, and then helped her climb up on it.

Lowell went in first, then put his hands on her hips and lowered her inside. It was white inside, dirty, and smelled of burned powder and burned electrical wiring and oil. There were 90 mm cannon shells in racks, and boxes of machine-gun ammunition, and leather helmets.

“This was yours?” she asked.

“Yes. From Pusan to the Yalu,” he said. There was deep pride in his voice.

“Blueballs?” she asked.

He blushed again.

“For the reason I think?” she asked.

He didn't reply. She put her hand out and touched his cheek.

“We better get out of here,” he said. “They'll be looking for us.”

He put his hands on her hips again and hoisted her half out of the turret. She could feel his hands trembling.

“Wait a minute,” she said, and found a footing on something, then pulled furiously at her khaki shirt and jerked the brassiere out of the way. Then she lowered herself back down inside the tank, until her breasts were at the level of his face, and he could suckle at her famous nipples.

(One)
Ch'orwon, North Korea
5 September 1951

Miss Georgia Paige's good intentions to keep her personal life and her professional life separate vanished as she stood in the door of the C-47 which would take her, and the other members of the Wayne Baxley troupe, from the IX U.S. Corps airstrip to K16 at Seoul and eventually, via Tokyo, home.

Dressed in a khaki shirt (fetchingly unbuttoned almost to her navel) and khaki trousers, with a fatigue cap perched on top of her head, she smiled and waved for the photographers, and actually turned to duck her head and enter the aircraft. But then she jumped off the airplane and ran weeping into the arms of an impeccably dressed young major, clinging tightly to him, her face first buried against his chest, and then raised to kiss him.

The hundred or more troops gathered to watch the troupe make its departure applauded, whistled, and cheered. Wayne Baxley finally had to get off the C-47 to get her, wearing a broad “Ain't that touching” smile on his face for the benefit of the photographers, but actually furious in the knowledge that photographs of her smooching that goddamned Lowell kid were the ones that would make the papers, not those taken of himself.

In the door, finally, tears streaming down her face, Georgia Paige threw Major Lowell a kiss and mouthed the words, “I love you.”

And then Wayne Baxley pulled her inside, and the door was closed. The C-47's left engine kicked into life with a cloud of blue smoke and the plane taxied to the end of the pierced-steel planking landing strip and took off.

It was the first time an oral expression of love had passed between the young officer and the young actress. They had, however, frequently expressed their affection physically following Georgia's uncontrollable urge to offer Lowell her breasts in the turret of Blueballs. They had spent that night making love on Lowell's narrow cot in his tent on Colonel's Row, getting no more than an hour's sleep at a time, one or the other of them waking to lightly stroke and awaken the other, and then to join their bodies and fall asleep entwined together.

At 0400 Georgia had “sneaked” back into the VIP quonset hut on the hill, past one of the guards who had an enormous knowing grin on his face. If she was going to fuck some officer, the enlisted men were generally agreed, Major Lowell was the deserving one. The Duke had class.

At 0530, Major Lowell had carried a tray with toast and coffee and jelly from the general's mess to the VIP quonset in case one of the VIPs had wakened early and wanted toast and coffee. Only one of the VIPs was awake, and she was not interested in toast and coffee. She was fresh from her shower, and at 0535 she and Major Lowell were making the beast with two backs in the somewhat wider and more comfortable bed with which the VIP quarters were equipped.

At 0615, when the corps commander entered his mess after his ritual first-thing-in-the-morning check of the situation map, he found Major Lowell and Miss Paige, heads close together, having breakfast, and saw what looked very much like the imprint of human teeth marks on Major Lowell's lower neck.

The Wayne Baxley troupe gave a 1030 performance near the 8077th MASH for MASH, ordnance, engineer and chemical units in the immediate area. A second performance on the same stage was given at 1430 for personnel of the 223rd and 224th Infantry Regiments of the 40th U.S. Infantry Division, and their immediate supporting units, the 555th Artillery Group and the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion (Reinforced). The 73rd lived up to their reputation, as reported to Colonel Minor by the captain he had dispatched to “keep an eye on things.”

Many of them were drinking, the captain reported, and long after the performance was over, four military policemen were found tied up and less their trousers. They had made the mistake of remonstrating with the tankers over the beer and whiskey.

The 73rd had sent a tank to the performance, God only knows why, and the obscenity painted on the turret (“Blueballs”) was certainly going to appear in press photographs, for Miss Paige had obligingly agreed to pose for photographs with the men of the 73rd and their tank. What was worse, they had appeared with a hand-lettered sign three feet tall and twenty feet long, with the legend, “Georgia Paige Can Play With Our Bats Anytime.”

Colonel Minor realistically concluded it could have been worse. With Colonel Jiggs having gone home, and Major Lowell now at Corps Headquarters—the two of them replaced by a colonel and an S-3 who understood the necessity of strict discipline—things were a lot better than they had been, even considering the beer and whiskey drinking and the vulgar sign. While there was obviously a good deal yet to be done, the 73rd Tank Battalion was considerably less a uniformed group of thugs and madmen than it had been.

Neither Miss Paige nor Major Lowell appeared for dinner that night in the general's mess, but they turned up in the general's six-by-six van, loaded for use as the star's dressing room, when the troupe showed up at the new location for the performance for troops of the 24th Infantry Division that night.

On the final day in the IX Corps area, after the daytime performances intended to entertain troops who for one reason or another could not attend the earlier ones, there was no evening performance. It was believed that now that the troops had received their creature comforts, it was all right for the brass to be entertained. The troupe entertained in the field-grade officer's mess. Those who had hoped to meet Miss Paige personally were to be disappointed, however. She disappeared immediately after performing, claiming to have a headache.

A rumor circulated that the chief of staff's aide, that boy-faced major, was fucking the ass off her, but this was generally discounted. General Harrier, not to mention the general, wouldn't stand for something like that, and anyway, why would someone like Georgia Paige want to fuck a lowly major?

The general, entering the chief of staff's office three hours after the C-47 had carried the Wayne Baxley troupe away, smiled warmly at the chief of staff's junior aide-de-camp, and politely observed that he looked a little peaked. “You getting enough sleep, Lowell?”

Twenty-two times. Twenty-two times for sure. Maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. Sometimes, it was twice in a row. He had lost count, although he tried very hard to remember each time. Jesus, he had never believed you could really fuck that often. But all she had to do was touch it, and it popped up like a spring, ready to go.

At 1500 on the day the troupe departed, General Harrier told Major Lowell that he had obviously been working around the clock, and why didn't he just knock off for the rest of the day and come in in the morning with his eyes open.

Lowell lay on his cot, half dozing, half dreaming of Georgia, but he didn't sleep. And by 2000, he came back to earth. He got dressed and went up to the White House and went to work. It was amazing how goddamned much paper could accumulate in five days.

By midnight Lowell had cleaned up the work that had accumulated while he had been off baby-sitting the USO troupe and falling in love. He went to his tent and got undressed. He realized he wasn't sleepy, and that if he didn't want to toss and turn for an hour, if he wanted to get some sleep, he would need a drink. Booze always made him sleepy. But there was no booze in the tent. He would have to go get a drink. He put on a fresh, stiffly starched fatigue uniform and started for the general's mess.

He realized he didn't want to go there. For one thing, General Harrier was liable to be there, and Harrier had told him to get some sleep. Or the general would be there, and the general's innocent crack about whether he had been getting enough sleep hadn't been innocent at all. He didn't want to see the general, or any of the other aides, especially Peebles. That left the field-grade mess.

But he didn't want to go there, either. At this hour of the night, the only people in the field-grade mess were going to be field-grade drunks, the majors and lieutenant colonels who really had nothing to do the next day they couldn't do hung over. And they could be counted on to make a pitch to the chief of staff's aide-de-camp, either for some specific, invariably idiotic personal project, or just on general principles, so they would have a friend in high places.

To hell with that, too. He kept walking, and headed for the company-grade mess, where his drinking companions would be lieutenants and captains and a few majors who preferred that company to the more prestigious company they could find in the field-grade mess.

There was an enormous black man sitting alone at the bar, hunched over a drink.

Lowell walked up behind him, deepened his voice, and said: “I really hate to drink with ugly niggers.”

Captain Philip Sheridan Parker IV, after a moment's absolutely rigid hesitation, turned slowly on his stool to the right, cold fury on his face. As he turned to the right, Lowell moved out of his line of sight. Parker suddenly swung around the other way.

“Jesus Christ, look at you!” Phil Parker cried out. He grabbed Lowell by the ears and kissed him wetly in the middle of the forehead. “Oh, my God, a major! How the hell did you do that?”

“I cheated,” Lowell said.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Parker asked, as Lowell slid onto the stool beside him.

“Slumming, actually,” Lowell said. “How the hell goes it, King Kong?”

“How's Ilse? And P.P.?”

“Ilse's dead, Phil,” Lowell said.

He was shamed to realize that he hadn't thought of Ilse, or P.P., at all in the last ninety-six hours.

“Oh, my God!” Parker said, in anguish. “How the hell did that happen?”

“Automobile accident, in Germany,” Lowell said. “In September. Just about a year ago.”

“For Christ's sake, you should have written,” Parker said, angrily. “Goddamn, that's awful.”

“That's the way things go,” Lowell said.

“So you came back in the army?”

“I was here when it happened,” Lowell said. “Some quartermaster asshole in Germany got drunk and ran head on into her.”

“My God, Craig, you know how sorry I am!”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lowell said.

“A year ago?” Parker asked. “You were here a year ago?”

“Yeah. I'm about ready to rotate.” He thought: And now I have a reason to go home. I have someone to go home to.

“Seventy-third Heavy Tank?” Parker asked softly.

“Yeah.”

“I should have known that was you,” Parker said. “But I asked around and they said the task force commander had been a major, and in my innocence, I decided there was no way you could have been a major.”

Lowell didn't want to talk about that, and he didn't want any more of Parker's sympathy about Ilse. It made him very uncomfortable.

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“From the beginning,” Parker said. “I had the first M4A3s in Korea.”

“Company commander?”

“Tank Company, 24th Infantry,” Parker said. “And I was so proud of myself for making captain. I should have known you'd one-up me.”

“Just a natural recognition of my genius.”

“But you went home, when…it happened, I mean?”

“I went to Germany,” Lowell said. “It turned out that Ilse's father really is a colonel and a count. P.P. is with him.”

Phil Parker was naturally curious about that. It was a long time before Lowell could change the subject again.

“You haven't told me what you're doing here. If my tour is just about over, you should have been sent home a long time ago.”

“They're having a general court-martial,” Parker said.

“And you're on it?” Lowell said. “Great, it will give us some time together. I'm dog robber for the chief of staff.”

“I'm not on it,” Parker said. “I'm the accused.”

“What the hell did you do?”

“I am charged with violation of the 92nd Article of War,” Parker said.

Lowell searched his memory for what that meant.

“Article 92 is murder-rape,” he said, after a moment. “What happened, Phil? Some nurse change her mind?”

“I'm charged with murder,” Parker said.

“If this is some kind of joke, Phil, I miss the point.”

“No joke, Craig.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“Not particularly.”

Lowell grabbed the bottle from the bar.

“I'm taking this with me, Sergeant,” he said to the bartender. “Put it on my bill.”

“Major, you can't do that,” the bartender said.

“Sergeant, I'm not supposed to do it. There's a difference between ‘not supposed to' and ‘can't.'” He took Phil Parker's arm. “Let's go, King Kong,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“Colonel's Row,” Lowell said. “Try to behave.”

They didn't go directly to Colonel's Row. They stopped by the company-grade officer's tents, where Parker shared a squad tent with three other officers. Parker took a large manila envelope from beneath his air mattress, and when they were in Lowell's tent handed him a thick report, bound together with a metal fastener.