Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“There was a man in my town by the name of Thomas Wolfe,” Whitejack had said irrelevantly that morning. “He was a great big feller and he went away to New York to be an author. Maybe you heard of him?”

“Yes,” said Stais. “I read two books of his.”

“Well, I read that book of his,” said Whitejack, “and the people in town were yellin’ to lynch him for a while, but I read that book and he got that town down fair and proper, and when they brought him back dead I came down from the hills and I went to his funeral. There were a lot of important people from New York and over to Chapel Hill down for the funeral and it was a hot day, too, and I’d never met the feller, but I felt it was only right to go to his funeral after readin’ his book. And the whole town was there, very quiet, although just five years before they were yellin’ to lynch him, and it was a sad and impressive sight and I’m glad I went.”

And another time, the slow deep voice rolling between sleep and dreams in the shaded heat.… “My mother takes a quail and bones it, then she scoops out a great big sweet potato and lays some bacon on it, then she puts the quail in and cooks it slow for three hours, bastin’ it with butter all the time.… You got to try that some time.…”

“Yes,” said Stais, “I will.”

Stais did not have a high priority number and there seemed to be a flood of colonels surging toward America, taking all the seats on the C-54’s setting out westward, so he’d had to wait. It hadn’t been bad. Just to lie down, stretched full-out, unbothered, these days, was holiday enough after Greece, and anyway he didn’t want to arrive home, in front of his mother, until he’d stopped looking like a tired old man. And the barracks had been empty and quiet and the chow good at the transient mess and you could get Coca-Cola and chocolate milk at the PX. The rest of the enlisted men in Whitejack’s crew were young and ambitious and were out swimming all day and going to the movies or playing poker in another barracks all night, and Whitejack’s talk was smooth and amusing in the periods between sleep and dreams. Whitejack was an aerial photographer and gunner in a mapping-and-survey squadron and he’d been in Alaska and Brazil and back to the States and now was on his way to India, full of conversation. He was in a Mitchell squadron and the whole squadron was supposed to be on its way together, but two of the Mitchells had crashed and burned on the take-off at Natal, as Whitejack’s plane had circled the field, waiting to form up. The rest of the squadron had been held at Natal and Whitejack’s plane had been sent on to Accra across the ocean, by itself.

Vaguely and slowly, lying on the warm cot, with the wild song of the Negro boy outside the window, Stais thought of the two Mitchells burning between sea and jungle three thousand miles away, and other planes burning elsewhere, and what it was going to be like sitting down in the armchair in his own house and looking across the room at his mother, and the pretty Viennese girl in Jerusalem, and the DC-3 coming down slowly, like an angel in the dusk to the rough secret pasture in the Peloponnesian hills.…

He fell asleep. His bones knit gently into dreams on the soft cot, with the sheets, in the quiet barracks, and he was over Athens again, with the ruins pale and shining on the hills, and the fighters boring in, and Lathrop saying, over the intercom, as they persisted in to a hundred, fifty yards, twisting, swiftly and shiftily in the bright Greek sky, “They grounded all the students today. They have the instructors up this afternoon.…” And, suddenly, and wildly, fifty feet over Ploesti, with Liberators going down into the filth in dozens, flaming.… Then swimming off the white beach at Bengasi with the dead boys playing in the mild, tideless swell, then the parachute pulling at every muscle in his body, then the green and forest blue of Minnesota woods and his father, fat and small, sleeping on pine needles on his Sunday off, then Athens again, Athens …

“I don’t know what’s come over the Lieutenant,” a new voice was saying as Stais came out of his dream. “He passes us on the field and he just don’t seem to see us.”

Stais opened his eyes. Novak, a farm boy from Oklahoma, was sitting on the edge of Whitejack’s bed, talking. “It has all the guys real worried.” He had a high, shy, rather girlish voice. “I used to think they never came better than the Lieutenant.… Now …” Novak shrugged. “If he does see you, he snaps at you like he was General George Patton.”

“Maybe,” Whitejack said, “maybe seeing Lieutenant Brogan go down in Natal … He and Brogan were friends since they were ten years old. Like as if I saw Johnny Moffat go down …”

It’s not that.” Novak went over to his own cot and got out his writing pad. “It began back in Miami four weeks ago. Didn’t you notice it?”

“I noticed it,” Whitejack said slowly.

“You ought to ask him about it.” Novak started writing a letter. “You and him are good friends. After all, going into combat now, it’s bad, the Lieutenant just lookin’ through us when he passes us on the field. You don’t think he’s drunk all the time, do you?”

“He’s not drunk.”

“You ought to ask him.”

“Maybe I will.” Whitejack sat up, tying the towel around his lean middle. “Maybe I will.” He looked forlornly down at his stomach. “Since I got into the Army, I’ve turned pig-fat. On the day I took the oath, I was twenty-eight and one-half inches around the waist. Today I’m thirty-two and three-quarters, if I’m an inch. The Army … Maybe I shouldn’t’ve joined. I was in a reserved profession, and I was the sole support of an ailing mother.”

“Why did you join?” Stais asked.

“Oh,” Whitejack smiled at him, “you’re awake. Feeling any better Sergeant?”

“Feeling fine, thanks. Why did you join?”

“Well …” Whitejack rubbed the side of his jaw. “Well … I waited and I waited. I sat up in my cabin in the hills and I tried to avoid listenin’ to the radio, and I waited and I waited, and finally I went downtown to my mother and I said, ‘Ma’am, I just can’t wait any longer,’ and I joined up.”

“When was that?” Stais asked.

“Eight days …” Whitejack lay down again, plumping the pillow under his head. “Eight days after Pearl Harbor.”

“Sergeant,” Novak said, “Sergeant Stais, you don’t mind if I tell my girl you’re a Greek, do you?”

“No,” Stais said gravely. “I don’t mind. You know, I was born in Minnesota.”

“I know,” said Novak, writing industriously. “But your parents came from Greece. My girl’ll be very interested, your parents coming from Greece and you bombing Greece and being shot down there.”

“What do you mean, your girl?” Whitejack asked. “I thought you said she was going around with a Technical Sergeant in Flushing, Long Island.”

“That’s true,” Novak said apologetically. “But I still like to think of her as my girl.”

“It’s the ones that stay at home,” said Whitejack darkly, “that get all the stripes and all the girls. My motto is: Don’t write to a girl once you get out of pillow-case distance from her.”

“I like to write to this girl in Flushing, Long Island,” Novak said, his voice shy but stubborn. Then to Stais, “How many days were you in the hills before the Greek farmers found you?”

“Fourteen,” said Stais.

“And how many of you were wounded?”

“Three. Out of seven. The others were dead.”

“Maybe,” Whitejack said, “he doesn’t like to talk about it, Charley.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Novak looked up, his young, unlined face crossed with concern.

“That’s all right,” Stais said. “I don’t mind.”