The Young Lions Part 30

There was silence then, and Noah could tell that all the players were looking at him, but he did not look up from his letter.

"We also march," Noah wrote slowly. "We march uphill and downhill, and we march during the day and during the night. I think the Army is divided into two parts. The fighting Army and the marching and window-was.h.i.+ng Army, and we happen to be a.s.signed to the second part. I have developed the springiest arches ever to appear in the Ackerman family."

"The Jews have large investments in France and Germany," another voice said from the poker game. "They run all the banks and wh.o.r.ehouses in Berlin and Paris, and Roosevelt decided we had to go protect their money. So he declared war." The voice was loud and artificial, and aimed like a weapon at Noah's head, but he refused to look up.

"I read in the papers," Noah wrote, "that this is a war of machines, but the only machine I have come across so far is a mop-wringer ..."

"They have an international committee," the voice went on. "It meets in Poland, in a town called Warsaw, and they send out orders all over the world from there: Buy this, sell this, fight this country, fight that country. Twenty old rabbis with beards ..."

"Ackerman," another voice said, "did you hear that?"

Noah finally looked across the bunks at the poker players. They were twisted around, facing him, their faces pulled by grins, their eyes marble-like and derisive.

"No," said Noah, "I didn't hear anything."

"Why don't you join us?" Silichner said with elaborate politeness. "It's a friendly little game and we're involved in an interesting discussion."

"No, thank you," Noah said. "I'm busy."

"What we'd like to know," said Silichner, who was from Milwaukee and had a trace of a German accent in his speech, as though he had spoken it as a child and never fully recovered from it, "is how you happened to be drafted. What happened-weren't there any fellow-members of the lodge on the board?"

Noah looked down at the paper in his hand. It isn't shaking, he thought, looking at it in surprise, it's as steady as can be.

"I actually heard," another voice said, "of a Jew who volunteered."

"No," said Silichner, wonderingly.

"I swear to G.o.d. They stuffed him and put him in the Museum."

The other poker players laughed loudly, in artificial rehea.r.s.ed amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I feel sorry for Ackerman," Silichner said. "I actually do. Think of all the money he could be making selling black-market tires and gasoline if he wasn't in the infantry."

"I don't think," Noah wrote with a steady hand to his wife far away in the North, "that I have told you about the new Sergeant we got last week. He has no teeth and he lisps and he sounds like a debutante at a Junior League meeting when he ..."

"Ackerman!"

Noah looked up. A Corporal from another barracks was standing beside his bunk. "You're wanted in the orderly room. Right away."

Very deliberately, Noah put the letter he was writing back in the olive-colored box and tucked the box away in his foot-locker. He was conscious of the other men watching him closely, measuring his every move. As he walked past them, keeping himself from hurrying, Silichner said, "They're going to give him a medal. The Delancey Street Cross. For eating a herring a day for six months."

Again there were the rehea.r.s.ed, artificial volleys of laughter.

I will have to try to handle this, Noah thought as he went out the door into the blue twilight that had settled over the camp. Somehow, somehow ...

The air was good after the cramped, heavy smell of the barracks, and the wide silence of the deserted streets between the low buildings was sweet to the ear after the grating voices inside. Probably, Noah thought, as he walked slowly alongside the buildings, probably they are going to give me some new h.e.l.l in the orderly room. But even so he was pleased at the momentary peace and the momentary truce with the Army and the world around him.

Then he heard a quick scurry of footsteps from behind a corner of the building he was pa.s.sing, and before he could turn around he felt his arms pinned powerfully from behind.

"All right, Jew-boy," whispered a voice he almost recognized, "this is dose number one."

Noah jerked his head to one side and the blow glanced off his ear. But his ear felt numb and he couldn't feel the side of his face. They're using a club, he thought wonderingly as he tried to twist away, why do they have to use a club? Then there was another blow and he began to fall.

When he opened his eyes, it was dark and he was lying on the sandy gra.s.s between two barracks. His face was collapsed and wet. It took him five minutes to drag himself over to the wall of the building and pull himself up along its side to a sitting position.

Michael was thinking of beer. He walked deliberately behind Ackerman, in the dusty heat, thinking of beer in gla.s.ses, beer in schooners, beer in bottles, kegs, pewter mugs, tin cans, crystal goblets. He thought of ale, porter, stout, then returned to thinking of beer. He thought of the places he had drunk beer in his time. The round bar on Sixth Avenue where the Regular Army Colonels in mufti used to stop off on the way uptown from Governor's Island, where they served beer in gla.s.ses that tapered down to narrow points at the bottom and where the bartender always iced the gla.s.s before drawing the foaming stuff out of the polished spigots. The fancy restaurant in Hollywood with prints of the French Impressionists behind the bar, where they served it in frosted mugs and charged seventy-five cents a bottle. His own living room, late at night, reading the next morning's paper in the quiet pool of light from the lamp, as he stretched, in slippers, in the soft corduroy chair before going to bed. At baseball games at the Polo Grounds in the warm, hazy summer afternoons, where they poured the beer into paper cups so that you couldn't throw the bottles at the umpires.

Michael marched steadily. He was tired and ferociously thirsty. His hands were numb and swollen, as they always were by the fifth mile of any hike, but he did not feel too bad. He heard Ackerman's harsh, grunting breath, and saw the way the boy rolled brokenly from side to side as he climbed the gentle slope of the road.

He felt sorry for Ackerman. Ackerman had obviously always been a frail boy, and the marches and problems and fatigues had worn the flesh off his bones, so that he now looked like a stripped-down version of a soldier, reedy and breakable. Michael felt a little guilty as he stared fixedly at the heaving, bent back. The long months of training had thinned Michael down, too, but with an athlete's leanness, leaving his legs steel-like and powerful, his body hard and resilient. It seemed unjust that in the same column, just in front of him, there was a man whose every step was suffering, while he felt so comparatively fit. Also, there had been the sickening hazing that Ackerman had been submitted to in the last two weeks. The constant ill-tempered jokes, the mock political discussions within Ackerman's hearing, in which men had said loudly. "Hitler is probably wrong most of the time, but you've got to hand it to him, he knows what to do about the Jews ..."

Michael had tried once or twice to interrupt with a word of defense, but because he was new in the company, and came from New York and most of the men were Southerners, they ignored him and continued with their cruel game.

There was another Jew in the company, a huge man by the name of Fein, who wasn't bothered at all. He wasn't popular, but he wasn't annoyed. Perhaps his size had something to do with it. And he was good-natured and dangerous-looking. He had large, knotty hands and seemed to take everything easily and without thought. It would be hard to get Fein to take offense at anything, or even realize that he was being offended, so there would be little pleasure in baiting him. And if he did take offense he probably would do a tremendous amount of damage. So he was quietly left in peace by the men who bedeviled Ackerman. The Army, Michael thought.

Perhaps he'd been wrong to tell the man who had interviewed him at Fort Dix that he wanted to go into the infantry. Romantic. There was nothing romantic about it once you got into it. Sore feet, ignorant men, drunkenness, "Ah'm goin' to teach you how to pick up yo' rahfle and f.a.ght fo' yo' lahf ..."

"I think I can put you into Special Service," the interviewer had said, "with your qualifications ..." That would probably have meant a job in New York in an office all during the war. And Michael's self-consciously n.o.ble reply. "Not for me. I'm not in this Army to sit at a desk." What was he in the Army for? To cross the state of Florida on foot? To re-make beds that an ex-undertaker's a.s.sistant found not made to his liking? To listen to a Jew being tortured? He probably would have been much more useful hiring chorus girls for the USO, would have served his country better in Shubert Alley than here on this hot, senseless road. But he had to make the gesture. A gesture wore out so quickly in any army.

The Army. If you had to put what you thought of it in a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph ... what would you say? It would be impossible. The Army was composed of ten million splinters. Splinters in motion, splinters that never coalesced, that never went in the same direction. The Army was the Chaplain who gave you the talk after they showed you the s.e.x hygiene picture. First the horrible closeups of the riddled p.e.n.i.s, then the man of G.o.d in his Captain's uniform, in front of the blank screen where lately the shabby wh.o.r.es and the vile flesh had been shown. "Men, the Army has to be practical ..." The chanting Baptist voice, in the sweltering plank auditorium. "The Army says, 'Men will expose themselves. Therefore we show you this picture and show you how a prophylaxis station works. But I am here to say that G.o.d is better than a prophylaxis, religion is healthier than l.u.s.t ..."

One splinter. Another splinter. The ex-high-school teacher from Hartford with the sallow face and the wild eyes, as though he feared a.s.sa.s.sination each night. He had whispered to Michael, "I'm going to tell you the truth about myself. I'm a Conscientious Objector. I don't believe in war. I refuse to kill my fellowman. So they put me on KP. I've been on KP for thirty-six days in a row. I've lost twenty-eight pounds and I'm still losing, but they are not going to force me to kill my fellowman."

The Army. The Regular at Fort Dix who had been in the Army thirteen years, playing on Army baseball and football teams in time of peace. Jock-strap soldiers, they called them. A big, tough-looking man with a round belly from beer drunk at Cavite and Panama City and Fort Riley, Kansas. Suddenly, he had fallen into disfavor in the orderly room and had been transferred out of the Permanent Party and had been put on orders to a regiment. The truck had driven up and he had put his two barracks bags on it, and then he had started to scream. He had fallen to the ground and wept and screamed and frothed at the mouth, because it was not a football game he was going to today, but a war. The Top Sergeant, a two-hundred-and-fiftypound Irishman who had been in the Army since the last war, had come out of the orderly room and looked at him with shame and disgust. He kicked him in the head to quiet him, and had two men lift him and throw him, still twitching and weeping, into the back of the truck. The Sergeant then turned to the recruits who were silently watching and had said, "That man is a disgrace to the Regular Army. He is not typical. Not at all typical. Apologize for him. Get the h.e.l.l out of here!"

The orientation lectures. Military courtesy. The causes of the war which You Are Fighting. The expert on the j.a.panese question, a narrow, gray-faced professor from Lehigh, who had told them that it was all a question of economics. j.a.pan needed to expand and take over the Asiatic and Pacific markets and we had to stop her and hold onto them ourselves. It was all according to the beliefs that Michael had had about the causes of war for the last fifteen years. And yet, listening to the dry, professional voice, looking at the large map with spheres of influence and oil deposits and rubber plantations clearly marked out, he hated the professor, hated what he was saying. He wanted to hear that he was fighting for liberty or morality or the freedom of subject peoples, and he wanted to be told in such ringing and violent terms that he could go back to his barracks, go to the rifle range in the morning believing it. Michael looked at the men sitting wearily beside him at the lecture. There was no sign on those bored, fatigue-doped faces that they cared one way or another, that they understood, that they felt they needed the oil or the markets. There was no sign that they wanted anything but to be permitted to go back to their bunks and go to sleep ...

In the middle of the speech Michael had resolved to get up and speak in the question period scheduled after the speaker had finished. But by the time the professor had said, "In conclusion, we are in a period of centralization of resources, in which ... uh ... large groups of capital and national interests in one part of the globe are ... uh ... in inevitable conflict with other large groups in other parts of the globe, and in-defense of the American standard of living, it is absolutely imperative that we have ... uh ... free and unhampered access to the wealth and buying power of China and Indonesia ..." Michael had changed his mind. He had wanted to say, as he thought, "This is horrible. This is no faith to die by," but he was tired, and like all the other men around him, he wanted to go back to his barracks and go to sleep.

The Army was several beautiful things too.

The flag dipping at Retreat, with the anthem over the public-address system making you dimly think of other bugles that other Americans had listened to for a hundred years at equal moments.

The soft Southern voices on the barracks stoop, after Taps, the ends of the cigarettes glowing in the dark, the voices counting over the treasures of former lives, the names of children, the color of a wife's hair, the shape of a home ... And your feeling at that obscure, lonely hour no longer separate or apart, no longer judge or critic, no longer weighing words and motives, but blindly and faithfully living, weary and at peace in the heart of a troubled time ...

In front of Michael, as he marched, Ackerman stumbled. Michael quickened his pace and held Ackerman by the arm. Ackerman looked at him coldly. "Let go," he said, "I don't need any help from anybody."

Michael took his hand away and dropped back. One of those Jews, he thought angrily, one of the proud ones. He watched Ackerman's rolling, staggering walk without sympathy as they crossed the brow of the bill.

"Sergeant," Noah said, standing before the desk in the orderly room behind which the First Sergeant was reading Superman, "I would like permission to speak to the Company Commander."

The First Sergeant did not look up. Noah stood stiff in his fatigues, grimy and damp with sweat after the day's march. He looked over at the Company Commander, sitting three feet away, reading the sports page of a Jacksonville newspaper. The Company Commander didn't look up.

Finally the First Sergeant glanced at Noah. "What do you want, Soldier?" he asked.

"I would like permission," Noah said, trying to speak clearly through the downpulling weariness of the day's march, "to speak to the Company Commander."

The First Sergeant looked blankly at him. "Get out of here," he said.

Noah swallowed dryly. "I would like permission," he began stubbornly, "to speak to ..."

"Get out of here," the Sergeant said evenly, "and when you come back, remember to wear your cla.s.s A uniform. Now get out."

"Yes, Sergeant," Noah said. The Company Commander did not raise his eyes from the sports page. Noah went out of the small, hot room into the growing twilight. It was hard to know about the uniform. Sometimes the Company Commander saw men in fatigues and sometimes not. The rule seemed to change every half hour. He walked slowly back to his barracks past the lounging men and the loud sound of many small radios blaring tinnily forth with jazz music and detective serials.

When he got back to the orderly room, in his cla.s.s A uniform, the Captain wasn't there. So Noah sat on the gra.s.s across the street from the orderly-room entrance and waited. In the barracks behind him a man was singing, softly, "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier, the dying mother said...." and two other men were having a loud argument about when the war would end.

"1950," one of the men kept saying. "The fall of 1950. Wars always end right as winter sets in."

And the other man was saying, "Maybe the German war, but after that the j.a.ps. We'll have to make a deal with the j.a.ps."

"I'll make a deal with anyone," a third voice said. "I'll make a deal with the Bulgarians or the Egyptians or the Mexicans or anybody."

"1950," the first man said loudly. "Take my word for it. And we'll all get a bullet up our a.s.s first."

Noah stopped listening to them. He sat on the scrub gra.s.s in the darkness, with his back against the wooden steps, half asleep, waiting for the Captain to return, thinking about Hope. Her birthday was next week. Tuesday, and he had ten dollars saved up and hidden away at the bottom of his barracks bag, for a gift. What could you get for ten dollars in town that you wouldn't be ashamed to give your wife? A scarf, a blouse ... He thought of how she would look in a scarf. Then he thought of how she would look in a blouse, preferably a white one, with her slender throat rising from the white stuff and the dark hair capping her head. Maybe that would be it. You ought to be able to get a decent blouse, even in Florida, for ten dollars.

Colclough came back. He moved heavily up the orderly-room steps. You could tell he was an officer at a distance of fifty yards, just by the way he moved his behind.

Noah stood up and followed Colclough into the orderly-room. The Captain was sitting at his desk with his cap on, frowning impressively at some papers in his hand.

"Sergeant," Noah said quietly. "I would like permission to speak to the Captain."

The Sergeant looked bleakly at Noah. Then he stood up and went the three steps over to the Captain's desk. "Sir," he said, "Private Ackerman wants to talk to you."

Colclough didn't look up. "Tell him to wait," he said.

The Sergeant turned to Noah. "The Captain says for you to wait."

Noah sat down and watched the Captain. After a half hour, the Captain nodded to the Sergeant.

"All right," the Sergeant said. "Make it short."

Noah stood up, saluted the Captain. "Private Ackerman," he said, "has permission from the First Sergeant to speak to the Captain."

"Yes?" Colclough did not look up.

"Sir," said Noah, nervously, "my wife is arriving in town Friday night, and she has asked me to meet her in the lobby of the hotel, and I would like to have permission to leave camp on Friday night."

Colclough didn't say anything for a long time. "Private Ackerman," he said finally, "you are aware of the Company rule. The entire Company is restricted on Friday nights to prepare for inspection ..."

"I know, Sir," said Noah, "but this was the only train she could get a reservation on, and she expects me to meet her, and I thought, just this once ..."

"Ackerman," Colclough finally looked at him, the pale spot on the end of his nose white and twitching, "in the Army, duty comes first. I don't know whether I can ever teach that to one of you people, but I'm G.o.dd.a.m.n going to try. The Army don't care whether you ever see your wife or not. When you're not on duty you can do whatever you please. When you are on duty, that's all there is to that. Now get out of here."

"Yes, Sir," said Noah.

"Yes, Sir, what?" Colclough asked.

"Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir," Noah said, remembering the lecture on military courtesy. He saluted and went out.

He sent a telegram, although it cost eighty-five cents. But there was no answer in the next two days from Hope, and there was no way of knowing whether she had received it or not. He couldn't sleep all Friday night, in the scrubbed barracks, lying there knowing that Hope was only ten miles from him after all these months, waiting for him in the hotel, not knowing, perhaps, what had happened to him, not knowing about people like Colclough or the blind authority and indifference of the Army, on which love had no claims, tenderness made no impression. Anyway, he thought dreamily, as he finally dozed off right before reveille, I'll see her this afternoon. And maybe it was all for the best. The last traces of my black eye may disappear by then, and I won't have to explain to her about how I got it ...

The Captain was due in five minutes. Nervously, Noah checked the corners of his bunk, the arrangement of the towels in his footlocker, the s.h.i.+ne on the windows behind the bunk. He saw the man next to him, Silichner, b.u.t.toning the top b.u.t.ton of the raincoat which hung in its ordered line among his clothes. Noah had made certain before breakfast that all his clothes were b.u.t.toned correctly for the inspection, but he looked once more at his own clothes. He swung his overcoat back and then blinked. His blouse, which he had checked just an hour ago, was open from the top b.u.t.ton down. Frantically, he worked on the b.u.t.tons. If Colclough had seen the blouse open he would have been certain to restrict Noah for the weekend. He had done worse to others for less, and he had made very clear the fact that he was not fond of Noah. The raincoat, too, had two b.u.t.tons undone. Oh, G.o.d, Noah thought, don't let him come in yet, not until I'm finished.

Suddenly Noah wheeled around. Riker and Donnelly were watching him, grinning a little. They ducked their heads and flicked at spots of dust on their shoes. That's it, thought Noah bitterly, they did it to me. With everyone in the barracks in on it, probably. Knowing what Colclough would do to me when he found it ... Probably they slipped back early after breakfast and slipped the b.u.t.tons out of their holes.

He checked each bit of clothing carefully, and leaped to the foot of his bunk just as the Sergeant shouted "Attention!" from the door.

Colclough looked him over coldly and carefully and stared for a long time at the rigid perfection of his footlocker. He went over behind him and fingered every piece of the clothing hanging from the rack. Noah heard the cloth swis.h.i.+ng as Colclough let the coats fall back into place. Then Colclough stamped past him, and Noah knew it was going to be all right.

Five minutes later the inspection was over and the men started to pour out of the barracks toward the bus station. Noah took down his barracks bag and reached in to the small oilskin sack at the bottom in which he saved his money. He drew the sack out and opened it. There was no money in it. The ten-dollar bill was gone. In its place there was a single piece of torn paper. On it there was one word, printed in oily pencil. "Tough."

Noah stuffed the paper into his pocket. Methodically he hung the barracks bag up. I'll kill him, he thought, I'll kill the man who did that. No scarf, no blouse, no anything. I'll kill him.

Dazedly he walked toward the bus station. He wanted to let the men from his barracks leave on another bus. He did not want to see them this morning. He knew he would get into trouble if he stood beside Donnelly or Silichner or Rickett or any of the others, and this morning was no time for trouble.

He waited for twenty minutes in the long line of impatient soldiers and got into the gasoline-smelling bus. There was no one from his company there, and suddenly the faces, shaved and scrubbed and happy with release, seemed like the faces of friends. The man standing next to him, a huge soldier with a broad, smiling face, even offered him a drink out of a pint bottle of rye he carried in his pocket.

Noah smiled at him. "No, thank you," he said. "My wife just arrived in town and I haven't seen her yet. I don't want to meet her with alcohol on my breath."

The man grinned broadly, as though Noah had just said something most flattering and agreeable. "Your wife," he said. "How do you like that? When was the last time you saw her?"

"Seven months ago," Noah said.

"Seven months ago!" The man's face grew sober. He was very young and his skin was fair, like a girl's, on his tough, agreeable face. "Seven months and this is the first time." He bent over to the man who was sitting in the seat against which Noah was standing. "Soldier," he said, "get up and let this married man sit down. He hasn't seen his wife for seven months and she's waiting for him now and he needs all his strength."

The other man grinned and stood up. "You should have told me in the beginning," he said.

"No," said Noah, embarra.s.sed but laughing. "I'll do all right. I don't have to sit down ..."

The man with the bottle pushed him down with an imperious, gentle hand. "Soldier," he said solemnly, "this is a direct order. Sit down and preserve yourself."

Noah sat down and all the men around him grinned at him.

"You wouldn't happen to have a photograph of the lady?" the big man said.

"Well," said Noah, "the fact is ..." He got out his wallet and showed the big man the photograph of Hope. The soldier looked at it soberly.

"A garden on a morning in May," he p.r.o.nounced. "By G.o.d, I'm going to get me married, myself, before I let them shoot me."

Noah put the wallet back, smiling at him, feeling, somehow, that this was an omen, that from now on things would be different, that he had reached the bottom and begun to climb up to the other side.

When the bus stopped in town in front of the post office, the large man, with elaborate care, helped him down the bus steps to the shabby street, and patted him gently and encouragingly on the shoulder. "Go along, now, Sonny," the man said, "and have a very nice week-end. And you forget that there is such a thing as the United States Army until reveille Monday morning."

Smiling, Noah waved at him, and hurried toward the hotel where Hope was waiting for him.

She was in the crowded lobby, among the surging khaki and the other wives.