Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

At the guard house — the British government had set aside a portion of the Inns of Court for use by the Americans as a detention center, and he had the fearful suspicion that the prisoners had been left in London to be bombed — he acted like a guilty man (that is, he behaved as if having committed one crime he could commit another), thus frightening many of the other prisoners, AWOL’s, the deserters for love, the careless missers of trains and buses, the cowards. Another prisoner remembered that he had been interviewed in Stars and Stripes and this seemed to induce awe, as if there could be no offense like the offense of the respectable. The prisoner, himself an accused murderer, pressed Dick to discover why he was there. It was when Dick admitted that he’d “told them what to do with it” that the man became deferential, words and will to him the ultimate violence. Dick decided that though the man had killed he was not one of the brutes at all.

He stayed in the guard house for a week. After he had cleaned up his room each morning there was not much to do and he listened to the BBC. It was satisfying to him chiefly because of its clear classifying of its audience — even more meticulous and useful than the distinction between officers and enlisted men. During the week he also had three interviews with the captain who was assigned to be his defense counsel, a man who was a dentist in civilian life. Dick thought him too earnest, but in fairness he had to admit that he thought all dentists earnest. Only a very earnest man would be able to stand the sight and feel of an open mouth. (It was probably their excess earnestness that kept them out of medical school.) He was certain the dentist would not be able to get him off — certain also that only the dentist’s earnest objectivity kept him from expressing then and there his opinion of Dick’s actions.

He learned that his trial was set for the end of the following week. When he was taken from the guard house four days before that date and conducted in a closed car — there was no one to guard him — to a castle in the English countryside, he was terrified. Angrily he asked his driver — a man of lower rank than Dick who, despite the protests of his lieutenant and engineer and director, was still a sergeant until proven guilty — why the dentist was not with him. “Is it a trick? My whole case rests on that guy’s arguments. If they’ve yanked my mouthpiece I’m sunk.”

“Gee, Sarge, I don’t know a thing about it,” the driver said.

Dick saw that the driver was not himself a brute (and where were they all, incidentally?) but just another poor innocent as Dick himself once had been. He watched the man’s cautious negotiation of the left side of the highway, an effort that obviously still strained him.

“So you don’t know a thing about it?”

“That’s right, Sarge.”

Dick leaned forward, almost pressing his lips against the driver’s neck. “Cut that Sarge shit, Mac,” he said levelly, “or you and me are gonna tangle assholes.” They rode on for a while in silence; then Dick became offensive again. “Fucking left side of the road,” he said brutally. “This whole fucking country is eaten up with faggotry and fuckery because the cocksuckers drive on the left side of the road. La la la. Why don’t you drive over on the right, you simple bastard? Let these assfarts know the Yanks are coming.” He leaned forward abruptly and jerked the driver’s arm so that the car swerved to the right. “Ha ha, the Yanks are coming!” Dick screamed. The driver recovered control of the car and Dick sat back, pretending to chuckle at his joke for the rest of the ride. Every once in a while he would glance at the terrorized driver. I must get used to meanness if I am to live in the world, he thought. Otherwise I won’t last, I’ll never make it.

At the castle he was met not by MP’s but by three men in suits, big anonymous-looking men with the blunt faces of U.S. marshals or secret servicemen. Their very business suits suggested magicians’ costumes, bulging with what he took to be concealed pockets and trick linings, even their hatbands reversible perhaps, in emergency becoming signal strips seen for miles. Two of the men frisked him objectively, touching him heavily about his body, yet with a rapidity that made it all seem routine. They might have been checking him out to see if he was transporting fruit across a state line.

Afterward they led him through the first floor of the castle, which had been renovated and was honeycombed with offices. The women who worked in these cubicles probably knew more about the war and what was going on, Dick thought, than even old Ed Murrow back in London. Two of his escorts left him at a small elevator and he rode up with the third. He was surprised to see the man push the button for the nineteenth floor; he was quite certain that there could not be nineteen floors in the castle. Probably he was in some terrific nerve center and in reconstructing the building they had put in secret floors between floors and beneath ground level, like the extra pockets in the secret servicemen’s suits. They stepped out into a richly carpeted hallway that looked more like the corridor of a first-class hotel than it did of either a castle or the offices below (above?). The man led him toward a large door at the end of the hallway, where he made Dick stop and lean against the wall to be frisked a second time. This took longer than the first frisking and was not nearly so objective.

“Okay,” the man said finally, “you’re clean as a whistle.” Then he winked. “Incidentally, if you don’t mind my saying so, soldier, you’re mighty well hung.”

“You must be some security risk,” Dick said.

The man shrugged and knocked on the door. A voice that sounded vaguely familiar told them to come in. The secret serviceman opened the door and saluted. Dick gasped and saluted along with him; he was looking right into the eyes of a famous general. Like Dick’s guard, the general was dressed in civilian clothes and wore nothing to assert his identity save his famous face and a cluster of four small stars formed by diamonds and pinned to the breast pocket of his suit.

The secret serviceman was dismissed and the famous general narrowly studied Dick’s salute. “Pretty loyal all of a sudden, hey, young fella?” he said. Dick remained braced and continued to hold his salute. “By golly, you’re a regular West Point cadet. Off the record, lad, are you sure you’re the same fella that tells my people they’re just meat?”

Dick continued his salute, his chin so tightly drawn in toward his neck that the tendons began to quiver. “I can’t hear you, son,” the famous general said.

“Yes, sir,” Dick said. “I’m he, sir.”

“Ha. He admits it,” the famous general said, turning around. For the first time Dick noticed that several high-ranking officers from various services were also in the room. He was despondent with panic. What did the chiefs of staff — if that’s who they were — have to do with his case? Was he to be made an example? Suppose they charged him with treason? They could shoot him.

The famous general chuckled. “Child, that was sure some swell dodge your signing off that way. I’ve certainly got to hand it to you … At ease there, soldier … Yes sir, pulling all that traitor crap and then saying you were Dick Gibson instead of your real name. Of course, that wouldn’t win you an acquittal, but it’s lucky for you just the same that you thought of it. Isn’t it, boys?”

Several of the officers grunted.

“You know, my boy, your program is my favorite. Did you know that, youngster?”

“Is it, sir?”

“Hell, I’ll say so. Positively. That’s a fact. My favorite. Those songs. Stirring, absolutely stirring.”