Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

Biff was as white as chalk. Around the corners of his mouth was a slack sullenness. The perspiration that had made small damp areas on his upper lip and forehead was now pouring from his entire face. He had a letter in his hand. He looked, Jimmie thought, like a man who has just been hit. In the vivid vocabulary of Jimmie’s memory, that simile meant hit mortally, with a splinter of a bomb or a spear of flying glass. Jimmie seized his brother’s arm strongly and said, “Hey, fellow! What’s wrong?”

“Laugh some more,” Biff replied vacuously, insanely.

Jimmie seized the letter. He frowned perplexedly and looked around the table. His family seemed scared. “It just says,” Jimmie reported calmly, “that Biff, my proud young brother, has been drafted.”

“Just!” said Biff. “Just says!”

“What’s the matter with that?” Jimmie asked.

Mrs. Bailey was rising. A dewy light shone in her eyes and her face was working.

She ran to her son’s side. “Oh, Biff, Biff, Biff! I won’t let them take you away. My boy, my youngest boy!”

Her husband threw into the scene a tone of reasonableness. “Take it easy, Mother.

This whole thing’s preposterous, and you know it. There must be something we can do.

I’ll look into it—immediately.”

“Of course, you can do something,” Mrs. Bailey answered, sniffling, but comforted. “It’s such a waste! Biff was just getting ready to hunt for the right job!”

Jimmie glanced at his frantic mother, his frowning father, and his sister, who seemed to be undergoing mixed emotions. Then he brought his gaze “I’m not scared,” Biff said harshly. He met Jimmie’s eyes, and Jimmie knew that was the truth. “But I’ll be everlastingly damned if I’m going to spend a year of my life marching around with a lot of Boy Scouts, getting up at the crack of dawn, doing day labor, eating swill—just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt says there’s an emergency! And that’s flat!”

Mrs. Bailey added her explanation. “I told Biff he should do something when he wrote out the application—or whatever you call it. He was bound to get an ‘A’ rating.

Maybe we can do something about his physical examination.”

“I’m a football player,” Biff said coldly.

His mother answered, “Still, we must know the examining physician—whoever it is. Laddy Bedford got put way back because of his heart, though I never heard before about his having heart trouble. There must be some loophole, somewhere.” She seemed to see a stoniness in Jimmie’s stare. She added, “It isn’t as if we really needed an army! As if we’d been invaded, or anything! Besides, there still isn’t enough equipment to drill with for half the boys that they’ve already taken. They shouldn’t call any more until they have the things.

And even Congress almost had sense enough, last summer, to put a stop to it!”

Jimmie said, “That’s a devil of a mood to show a guy who’s about to join the army.”

She said, “Jimmie!”

Mr. Bailey pontificated. “Now, James, this is something that demands thought.

Thought—and possible action. A boy like Biff is too valuable to be put in the infantry.

And the time for raising a militia hasn’t come, even if the president does create it later.

You’re fresh from other people’s battles. You’ll have to Jet us work this out in the way most suitable to Americans in America.”

“Biff’s going,” Jimmie said bluntly.

Biff whirled. “Says who?”

“Says me, Biff.” Jimmie was very quiet.

“You think you can make me?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

Jimmie shrugged. He was still sitting at his place. He picked up the letter. “Here.

It tells you to report. You’ll pass the physical, because you have the constitution of a buffalo. So-you’ll go. If you”—he spoke still more quietly—“or Dad, or Mother, or anybody tries to weasel on this, I’ll go before the draft board or committee—or whatever it is—and report the whole unselfish and patriotic conversation we have just been having here! I promise you!”

He stopped there—because Biff slugged him. He hit from the floor, with all his might. Biff was also sitting. Otherwise the blow would have downed Jimmie. It caught him on the cheekbone. It made a nasty sound. Sarah screamed. Biff grabbed his fist and rubbed it. He said, “I’ll run this show! You interfere—and that’s just a sample! I’ll about kill you!” His voice was shaking.

Jimmie lowered his head a moment. The first fierce pain died away. The sparks stopped floating. He put his hand up to his cheek and rubbed hard. His palm was bloodied. He took out his handkerchief, dipped it in his tumbler, and pressed it against the cut bruise. “I didn’t see that one coming,” he said, finally. “You better always throw ’em without warning me. You’re a husky boy, Biff. But I’ve been training in the home guard for nearly two years. If you ever slug me again I’ll lay you cold. If you want to fight fair—come on outside. Do you?”

Biff said nothing.

Mrs. Bailey was weeping voluminously. Her husband was staring rabidly at his sons. Sarah sat still, shivering. The telephone rang. Westcott came in. He was astonished by the tableau. He showed it only slightly. “For you, Mrs. Bailey. It’s Mrs. Wilson.”

“I can’t possibly—” said Mrs. Bailey. Then she gulped. “Mrs. Wilson!” She rose.

While she was away no one said a word.

When she came back her face was pasty and her eyes were bleak. “The p-p-party tonight is off,” she said hollowly. “Off-because of Jimmie’s views. That’s the real truth.

Mrs. Wilson is telling people—except us, of course—that she’s been taken very ill, all of a sudden.” She sat down and burst into tears again. “Now, everything’s ruined.”

JIMMIE WALKED to the paint works. His mother, emerging from her woebegone condition for a single, considerate moment, had offered a car for him to drive.

He had preferred to walk. It wasn’t much more than a mile to the plant; and Jimmie was used to walking. He hadn’t bothered to tell his mother that he was used to walking now.

He had felt too inert and too wounded—wantonly wounded—to take the trouble to remind her that he had just come from England, where there was a hideous war and people walked places whenever they could. No more use turning the screw, driving the barb.

Something had happened to his family in the six years of his absence. They’d lost something—heart, guts, reason, even great chunks of knowledge—and all they had left were glass brick walls, automobiles, cocktails, bad tempers.

He tramped through the pretty part of town, the hill part, squirting the slush vindictively; he entered the shabbier section with less spattering steps, as if the poorer people had more delicate sensibilities, or as if they were fellow sufferers rather than the authors of his fury. The ugliness of the rows of frame houses, painted in the most repugnant shades of yellow and green and brown, stung like a rebuke; nobody taught the poor people anything; they couldn’t learn for themselves; even if they learned, they couldn’t do much about their learning, because they were poor. His father would call these people—the women hanging out clothes in the back yards, the old men stealing kindling from the railroad right-of-way—by the single name of Labor. His father would call what was going on inside Jimmie’s mind Communistic. But Jimmie wasn’t thinking about economics—he wasn’t thinking at all; he was only feeling—and his feelings were raw as his right cheek, and as unpleasant to behold.

At the Corinth Works he was given a pass by the boss’s secretary, Miss Melrose, and shown to the lab that had been made ready for his coming. A big lab, a good lab, a fairly dramatic lab. Too intricate for the layman’s eyes it was like the insides of a great engine, made of glass. He kicked off his overshoes, hung his hat on the spout of a retort, put on a brand new rubber apron, and walked around, reading the labels on hundreds of bottles, cocking his eye, now and again, to note that the old man had so much imagination, and so much money for chemicals. The apparatus was magnificent. The layout could not be improved. Light poured from windows high overhead, all around the room—twenty or more, big and opaque, so no one could watch the alchemy in progress.