Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

“They’re still your dice,” the flyer said, picking up the bill and looking at Al.

“I don’t need them,” said Al. He stood up.

“Need any dough?” the flyer asked him. Looking at him curiously.

“Got no use for it,” Al said.

“We’ve got to get the hell out to Alcalá,” the flyer said. “We’ll have a game some night soon. We’ll get hold of Frank and the rest of them. We could get up a pretty good game. Can we give you a lift?”

“Yes. Want a ride?”

“No,” Al said. “I’m walking. It’s just down the street.”

“Well, we’re going out to Alcalá. Does anybody know the password for tonight?”

“Oh, the chauffeur will have it. He’ll have gone by and picked it up before dark.”

“Come on, Baldy. You drunken sleepy bum.”

“Not me,” said Baldy. “I am a potential ace of the people’s army.”

“Takes ten to be an ace. Even if you count Italians. You’ve only got one, Baldy.”

“It wasn’t Italians,” said Baldy. “It was Germans. And you didn’t see her when she was all hot like that inside. She was a raging inferno.”

“Carry him out,” said a flyer. “He’s writing for that Meridian, Mississippi, paper again. Well, so long. Thanks for having us up in the room.”

They all shook hands and they were gone. I went to the head of the stairs with them. The elevator was no longer running and I watched them go down the stairs. One was on each side of Baldy and he was nodding his head slowly. He was really sleepy now.

In their room the two I was working on the picture with were still working over the bad camera. It was delicate, eye-straining work and when I asked, “Do you think you’ll get her?” the tall one said, “Yes. Sure. We have to. I make a piece now which was broken.”

“What was the party?” asked the other. “We work always on this damn camera.”

“American flyers,” I said. “And a fellow I used to know who’s in tanks.”

“Goot fun? I am sorry not to be there.”

“All right,” I said. “Kind of funny.”

“You must get sleep. We must all be up early. We must be fresh for tomorrow.”

“How much more have you got on that camera?”

“There it goes again. Damn such shape springs.”

“Leave him alone. We finish it. Then we all sleep. What time you call us?”

“Five?”

“All right. As soon as is light.”

“Good night.”

“ Salud . Get some sleep.”

“ Salud ,” I said. “We’ve got to be closer tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have thought so too. Much closer. I am glad you know.”

Al was asleep in the big chair in the room with the light on his face. I put a blanket over him but he woke.

“I’m going down.”

“Sleep here. I’ll set the alarm and call you.”

“Something might happen with the alarm,” he said. “I better go down. I don’t want to get there late.”

“I’m sorry about the game.”

“They’d have broke me anyway,” he said. “Those guys are poisonous with dice.”

“You had the dice there on that last play.”

“They’re poisonous fading you too. They’re strange guys too. I guess they don’t get overpaid. I guess if you are doing it for dough there isn’t enough dough to pay for doing it.”

“Want me to walk down with you?”

“No,” he said, standing up, and buckling on the big web-belted Colt he had taken off when he came back after dinner to the game. “No, I feel fine now. I’ve got my perspective back again. All you need is a perspective.”

“I’d like to walk down.”

“No. Get some sleep. I’ll go down and I’ll get a good five hours’ sleep before it starts.”

“That early?”

“Yeah. You won’t have any light to film by. You might as well stay in bed.” He took an envelope out of his leather coat and laid it on the table. “Take this stuff, will you, and send it to my brother in N.Y. His address is on the back of the envelope.”

“Sure. But I won’t have to send it.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you will now. But there’s some pictures and stuff they’ll like to have. He’s got a nice wife. Want to see her picture?”

He took it out of his pocket. It was inside his identity book.

It showed a pretty, dark girl standing by a rowboat on the shore of a lake.

“Up in the Catskills,” said Al. “Yeah. He’s got a nice wife. She’s a Jewish girl. Yes,” he said. “Don’t let me get wet again. So long, kid. Take it easy. I tell you truly I feel O.K. now. And I didn’t feel good when I came out this afternoon.”

“Let me walk down.”

“No. You might have trouble coming back through the Plaza de Espana. Some of those guys are nervous at night. Good night. See you tomorrow night.”

“That’s the way to talk.”

Upstairs in the room above mine, Manolita and the Englishman were making quite a lot of noise. So she evidently hadn’t been arrested.

“That’s right. That’s the way to talk,” Al said. “Takes you sometimes three or four hours to get so you can do it though.”

He’d put the leather helmet on now with the raised padded ridge and his face looked dark and I noticed the dark hollows under his eyes.

“See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s.”

“What time?”

“Listen, that’s enough,” he said. “Tomorrow night at Chicote’s. We don’t have to go into the time.” And he went out.

If you hadn’t known him pretty well and if you hadn’t seen the terrain where he was going to attack tomorrow, you would have thought he was very angry about something. I guess somewhere inside of himself he was angry, very angry. You get angry about a lot of things and you, yourself, dying uselessly is one of them. But then I guess angry is about the best way that you can be when you attack.

IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY WITH THE DUST blowing, we came back, dry-mouthed, nose-clogged and heavy-loaded, down out of the battle to the long ridge above the river where the Spanish troops lay in reserve.

I sat down with my back against the shallow trench, my shoulders and the back of my head against the earth, clear now from even stray bullets, and looked at what lay below us in the hollow. There was the tank reserve, the tanks covered with branches chopped from olive trees. To their left were the staff cars, mud-daubed and branch-covered, and between the two a long line of men carrying stretchers wound down through the gap to where, on the flat at the foot of the ridge, ambulances were loading. Commissary mules loaded with sacks of bread and kegs of wine, and a train of ammunition mules, led by their drivers, were coming up the gap in the ridge, and men with empty stretchers were walking slowly up the trail with the mules.

To the right, below the curve of the ridge, I could see the entrance to the cave where the brigade staff was working, and their signaling wires ran out of the top of the cave and curved on over the ridge in the shelter of which we lay.

Motorcyclists in leather suits and helmets came up and down the cut on their cycles or, where it was too steep, walking them, and leaving them beside the cut, walked over to the entrance to the cave and ducked inside. As I watched, a big Hungarian cyclist that I knew came out of the cave, tucked some papers in his leather wallet, walked over to his motorcycle and, pushing it up through the stream of mules and stretcher-bearers, threw a leg over the saddle and roared on over the ridge, his machine churning a storm of dust.

Below, across the flat where the ambulances were coming and going, was the green foliage that marked the line of the river. There was a large house with a red tile roof and there was a gray stone mill, and from the trees around the big house beyond the river came the flashes of our guns. They were firing straight at us and there were the twin flashes, then the throaty, short bung-bung of the three-inch pieces and then the rising cry of the shells coming toward us and going on over our heads. As always, we were short of artillery. There were only four batteries down there, when there should have been forty, and they were firing only two guns at a time. The attack had failed before we came down.