Evan Hunter - Sons

There’s a killing time.

There’s a time when you need to kill and must therefore kill.

That time had come for me early in 1918, and I had acted impulsively on the burning itch inside me, the desire to move into action, to strike, to hurt, to kill. Now, in April, the bloodlust was all but gone, and I knew only that I was leaving Nancy for God knew how long, maybe forever, and I wanted to weep.

Timothy Bear found me in the darkness and put his huge hand on my shoulder.

“How goes it, Bert?” he asked.

“Lousy,” I said.

“Ever think you’d see this day?”

“No,” I answered honestly.

There was comfort in his presence beside me in the darkness. I had known him all through sixteen miserable weeks of preliminary training, weeks of repeating the manual of arms, weeks of formation drills and setting-up exercises and recruit instruction, lectures on the care of clothing and equipment, military discipline and courtesy, orders for sentinels, personal hygiene and care of the goddamn feet, Articles of War, the obligations and rights of the soldier (all obligations, no rights!), weeks of inspections, drills, and more inspections. I had suffered with him through courses on rifle sighting, rifle nomenclature and care, rifle aiming, and trigger squeeze; I had endured first-aid drills with him, gas-warfare drills, grenade and bomb drills, waking at 5:45 each and every day of the week, eating swill my mother wouldn’t have allowed in her garbage can no less her kitchen, and tumbling exhausted into bed at ten each night, already dreading the sound of the bugle the next morning, damn Irving Berlin and his rotten song!

I think the company would have fallen apart in those sixteen weeks if it hadn’t been for Timothy Bear (his last name was really Graham, but somebody had dubbed him “The Bear” in the first few weeks of cantonment at Camp Greene, and the name had stuck). He was six feet four inches tall in his naked toenails, as wide across as any tree I’d ever felled in the woods north of Eau Fraiche, the Army uniform fitting him like a sausage skin strained to bursting across his powerful chest and shoulders. He could lift the rear end of a weapons carrier with his bare hands, unassisted, and his endurance was equally phenomenal; returning once from a twenty-mile forced march with full pack, Timothy Bear had wanted to go dancing in town. He never complained, not about anything, nor was his attitude faked — his face was as open as a child’s, his brown eyes totally guileless. He had blond hair which he’d worn straight and long back on his father’s Indiana farm, but which the Army barbers had cropped close to his head, heightening his resemblance to a big, affable grizzly. Lumbering, genial, inexhaustible, he became the kind of man and soldier we all wished we could be. He was eighteen years old.

Now, sitting beside me in the darkness, he understood my gloom, and reached into the pocket of his tunic for a folded sheet of paper which he handed to me. Shielding a flashlight with his cupped palm, he threw a beam of light onto the paper and said, “Have you seen this yet, Bert? A clerk from B Company ran some off on the ship’s mimeo. It’s from the Dodger.”

“The what?” I said.

“You know, the Camp Dodge newspaper.”

In the light of Timothy’s shielded flash, I unfolded and read the mimeographed sheet:

If the war doesn’t end next month, of two things one is certain: Either you’ll he sent across the great pond or you’ll stay on this side. If you slay home, there’s no need to worry. If you go across, of two things one is certain: Either you’ll he put on the firing line or kept behind the lines.

If you’re behind the lines, there’s no need to worry. If you’re at the front, of two things one is certain: Either you’re resting in a safe place or you’re exposed to danger.

If you’re resting in a safe place, there’s no need to worry. If you’re exposed to danger, of two things one is certain: Either you’re wounded or you’re not wounded.

If you’re not wounded, there’s no need to worry. If you are wounded, of two things one is certain: Either you’re wounded seriously or you’re wounded slightly.

If you’re wounded slightly, there’s no need to worry. If you’re wounded seriously, of two things one is certain: Either you recover or you don’t.

If you recover, there’s no need to worry.

If you don’t recover, you can’t worry.

When I readied the bottom of the page, Timothy, who had been reading silently over my shoulder, began chuckling. I laughed with him. In the hold of a foreign ship waiting to sail across thousands of miles of ocean to a foreign battlefront, we laughed softly in the darkness, and I wondered if we’d ever in our lives see New York City again.

I loved that city.

It took an hour and a half to get there from Talmadge, but ever since we’d organized Dawn Patrol, one or another of us guys would go in almost every Saturday to shop Forty-eighth Street or to catch whichever of the groups were downtown in the Village. My mother said I was a native New Yorker, which wasn’t quite true in spite of the fact that I was horn in New York; at Lenox Hill Hospital, in fact, on Seventy-seventh and Park. At the time, my father was attending NYU on the GI Bill of Rights, and living with my mother in a run-down apartment in what was then considered a terrible slum but was now euphemistically called the East Village. With a little help from my grandfather (or perhaps from both my grandfathers, since Grandpa Prine was still alive at the time) my father started his own business in November 1946, at first publishing stuff like street maps and industrial pamphlets, and then bringing out a series of one-shot, newsstand exploitation magazines, and then finally moving into hardbound books. We moved to Talmadge just before Christmas that year, two months after I was born, to the same house we still lived in on Ritter Avenue. So I hardly felt honest calling myself a native New Yorker, although it was technically true. Nonetheless, whenever I went into that city, I felt as if I were going home.

I didn’t feel quite that way today.

I had come in to see my father because there was something important I wanted to discuss, and I had learned over the years that the best place to talk business with him was in his place of business. This was Wednesday, and Talmadge High was having teachers’ conferences, so I’d caught the 9: 34 out of Stamford, and was in the city by 10:19. I’d spent a half-hour in Manny’s on Forty-eighth, looking over some of the new Japanese amplifiers, and then I’d called my father to ask him if I could come up. He sounded surprised but pleased, which was at least one point for our side. Still, I was scared.

I walked over to Forty-second and spent an hour or so in Bryant Park, where a fag tried to pick me up. I never knew what to say when a fag approached me. This one looked especially sad and uncertain, as if it were the first time he’d ever done anything like this, though that was probably his style. Anyway, I just said “Sorry,” and got off the bench and walked away. I was unhappy about leaving the park because it had been a good place to think; I still hadn’t come up with an approach to my father. I stopped for a hot dog and a Coke in a place on Forty-fourth and Sixth, and then ambled down to Fifth Avenue as if I didn’t have a care in the world. It was a great day for walking.

We’d once had a man from California visiting us, a publisher my father was anxious to do business with, and he’d said the only time he really enjoyed New York City was “when they started taking their coats off.” This was that kind of a day, with a blue sky stretched tight between the buildings, and bright sunshine spanking the sidewalks, and people walking along with their coats off, grinning. By the time I reached the Doubleday’s on Fifty-seventh, I’d worked out a plan, so I immediately headed back for my father’s office on Forty-eighth and Madison.