Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“I tried smoking,” said Stais. “I think I’ll wait until I get a little older.”

Whitejack sat heavily on his own cot. “Do you think they’ll send you out to fight again?” he asked.

Stais stared up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “There’s nothing really wrong with me. I’m just tired.”

Whitejack nodded, smoking slowly. “By the way,” he said, “you heard us talking about the Lieutenant, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I went out to the field and had a little conversation with him. He’s just been sittin’ there all day and most of the night since we got here, outside the Operations room, just lookin’ and starin’ across at the planes comin’ in. Him and me, we’ve been good friends for a long time and I asked him pointblank. I said, ‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘there’s a question the boys’re askin’ themselves these days about you.’ And he said, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘The boys’re asking if you’ve turned bad. You pass ’em and you don’t even look at them as though you recognize ’em. What is it, you turn GI after a year?’ I said. He looked at me and then he looked at the ground and he didn’t say anything for maybe a minute. Then he said, ‘I beg your pardon, Arnold. It never occurred to me.’ Then he told me what was on his mind.” Whitejack looked at his watch, almost automatically, then lifted his head again. “Ever since we got the order to go overseas he’s been worrying. About the waist gunner and his navigator.”

“What’s he worrying about?” For a moment a crazy list of all the thousand things you can worry about in the crew of one airplane flashed through Stais’ head.

“They’re not fighting men,” Whitejack said slowly. “They’re both good fellers, you wouldn’t want better, but the Lieutenant’s been watchin’ ’em for a long time on the ground, in the air, at their guns, and he’s convinced they won’t measure. And he feels he’s responsible for taking the Mitchell in and getting it out with as many of us alive as possible and he feels the waist gunner and the navigator’re dangerous to have in the plane. And he’s makin’ up his mind to put in a request for two new men when we get to India, and he can’t bear to think of what it’ll do to the gunner and the navigator when they find out he’s asked to have ’em grounded, and that’s why he just sits there outside Operations, not even seein’ us when we go by.…” Whitejack sighed. “He’s twenty-two years old, the Lieutenant. It’s a strain, something like that, for a man twenty-two years old. If you see Novak, you won’t tell him anything, will you?”

“No,” said Stais.

“I suppose things like this come up all the time in any army.”

“All the time,” said Stais.

Whitejack looked at his watch. Outside there was the growing and lapsing roar of engines that had been the constant sound of both their lives for so many months.

“Ah,” said Whitejack, “they should’ve put me in the infantry. I can hit a rabbit at three hundred yards with a rifle; they put me in the Air Force and give me a camera.… Well, Sergeant, I think it’s about time you were movin’.”

Slowly, Stais got up. He put on his shoes and put his shaving kit into his musette bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“You ready?” asked Whitejack.

“Yes,” said Stais.

“That all the baggage you got—that little musette bag?”

“Yes,” said Stais. “I was listed as missing, presumed dead, and they sent all my stuff into the supply room and all my personal belongings home to my mother.”

Stais looked around the barracks. It shone in the harsh army light of barracks at night all over the world, by now familiar, homelike, to all the men who passed through them. He had left nothing.

They walked out into the soft, engine-filled night. A beacon flashed nervously across the sky, dimming the enormous pale twinkle of Southern stars for a moment. They walked slowly, stepping cautiously over the ditches dug for the flood rains of the African West Coast.

As they passed the Operations room, Stais saw a young lieutenant slumped down in a wobbly old wicker chair, staring out across the field.

“They come yet?” Whitejack asked.

“No,” said the Lieutenant, without looking up.

Stais went into the building and into the room where they had the rubber raft and the patented radio and the cloth painted blue on one side and yellow on the other. A fat middle-aged ATC captain wearily told them about ditching procedure. There were more than thirty people in the room, all passengers on Stais’ plane. There were two small, yellow Chinese who were going to be airsick and five bouncing fat Red Cross women, and three sergeants with a lot of Air Force medals, trying not to seem excited about going home, and two colonels in the Engineers, looking too old for this war. Stais only half listened as the fat captain explained how to inflate the raft, what strings to pull, what levers to move, where to find the waterproofed Bible.…

Whitejack was standing outside when Stais started for his plane. He gave Stais a slip of paper. “It’s my home address,” he said. “After the war, just come down sometime in October and I’ll take you hunting.”

“Thank you very much,” said Stais gravely. Over Whitejack’s shoulder he saw the Lieutenant, still slumped in the wicker chair, still staring fixedly and unrelievedly out across the dark field.

Whitejack walked out to the great plane with Stais, along the oil-spattered concrete of the runway, among the Chinese and loud Red Cross women and the sergeants. They stopped, without a word, at the steps going up to the doorway of the plane and the other passengers filed past them.

They stood there, silently, with the two days of random conversation behind them and Brazil and Athens behind them, and five hundred flights behind them, and Jerusalem and Miami behind them, and the girls from Vienna and the American Embassy and Flushing, Long Island, behind them, and the Greek mountaineers behind them and Thomas Wolfe’s funeral, and friends burning like torches, and dogs under treed raccoons in the Blue Ridge Mountains behind them, and a desperate twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant painfully staring across a dusty airfield for ten days behind them, and the Mediterranean and the hospital bed in Cairo and Johnny Moffat wandering that night over the Southern Atlantic, with ten acres of meadow and three acres of timber for his house, and Whitejack’s sister waiting for him, all behind them. And, ahead of Stais, home and a mother who had presumed him dead and wept over his personal belongings, and ahead of Whitejack the cold bitter mountains of India and China and the tearing dead sound of the fifties and the sky full of Japs.…

“All right, Sergeant,” the voice of the Lieutenant checking the passengers. “Get on.”

Stais waved, a little broken wave, at Whitejack standing there. “See you,” he said, “in North Carolina.”

“Some October.” Whitejack smiled a little in the light of the floodlamps.

The door closed and Stais sat down in the seat in front of the two Chinese.

“I think these planes are absolutely charming,” one of the Red Cross women was saying loudly. “Don’t you?”

The engines started and the big plane began to roll. Stais looked out of the window. A plane was landing. It came slowly into the light of the runway lamps and set down heavily, bumping wearily. Stais stared. It was a Mitchell. Stais sighed to himself. As the big C-54 wheeled at the head of the runway, then started clumsily down, Stais put the slip of paper with Arnold Whitejack written on it, and the address, in scrawling, childlike handwriting, into his pocket. And as he saw the Mitchell pull to a stop near the Operations room, he felt for the moment a little less guilty for going home.