Chiefs (23 page)

Frank Mudter drew back and looked at him, followed Will Henry’s gaze to Foxy, looked back at him with curiosity. He was still trying to speak. The doctor leaned forward and looked into Will Henry’s face. “Can you speak, Will Henry? You haven’t got long, old fellow, I can’t do anything for you.”

Will Henry’s lips formed a word, but no sound came out. He sucked in another painful breath and tried again, his eyes still riveted to Foxy, seeming to ignore Carrie, who held his head up in her hands. “Again—” he managed to whisper, still staring at Foxy. He bit at another breath, but it rattled from him in a long sigh.

Darkness came slowly. He closed his eyes. He could feel Carrie’s cheek against his, her tears on his skin, her lips at his ear; she loved him, she was saying. He knew it, and he was glad.

*

BOOK TWO

Sonny Butts

Chapter 1.

BILLY LEE, or more formally, Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Lee III, Army Air Corps, was in a daze, a mixture of simple relief, intense happiness, and equally intense fear. He was relieved that the Germans would no longer be trying to kill him, having surrendered just that day; he was very happy to be in the company of the girl he could just see disappearing toward the ladies’ room of the crowded London pub; and he was terribly afraid that when she came back she would not agree to marry him.

Billy had had what he would later come to think of as a good war. He had already earned a junior partnership in a large Atlanta law firm when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came, but he had unhesitatingly enlisted in the army, using Hugh Holmes’s influence with the Roosevelt administration to keep him out of the judge advocate’s clutches and get him into flight school. His age had kept him out of fighters, where he really wanted to be, but bombers were the next best thing, and his maturity had helped him earn responsibility when, after suffering a shrapnel wound in the seat of the pants on his thirty-eighth mission, he was able to return to his squadron as its executive officer. By assigning himself to fly whenever his commanding officer would look the other way, he had completed his fiftieth mission two days before the European war ended.

But if that would seem like a “good” war later, all that mattered to him now was that it was over and that he was alive and that, somehow, he might talk this girl into marrying him. He made an effort to stop rehearsing proposals and looked around for distraction; he would do better if he had to improvise. It had always been that way in court. A young infantry captain was slouched beside him, staring glumly into a pint of warm beer. A cane was hooked over the bar at his elbow.

“Where you from, Captain?” The young officer looked up. Billy thought he was probably a little drunk, but then so was he.

“Elmira, New York, sir.”

“I guess you’ll be going home pretty soon now.”

“Yes, sir.” He tapped the cane. “This’ll keep me out of the Pacific. Nothing permanent, though. I was lucky.”

“You don’t look too happy about it. Aren’t you ready to get back?”

“Oh, sure, I’ve got a wife and a kid I’ve only seen once. I’ll find it real easy to be a civilian again—even one with a limp. I was just thinking, though, there’ll be some guys who’ll be sorry it’s over.”

“Sorry not to get shot at any more?”

The captain looked up from his beer at Billy. “You’re a pilot?”

“B-17’s.”

“You’ve killed some people in this war, then.”

“Not much doubt about that.”

“Did you like it?”

“Flying bombers?”

“Killing people.”

“I try not to think about it. Dresden, especially. I have a hard time not thinking about that.”

“There are men who like it.”

“Killing people?”

The captain shifted his weight painfully on his barstool and continued in the careful way of speaking of a man who knows he’s drunk, but wants to be understood. “There was a man in my company, a kid, really, a sergeant.” He paused and took a deep breath. “I promoted him to sergeant. In the worst of it during the Bulge he led a platoon when his lieutenant bought it. He loved it.”

“Leading the platoon?”

“Killing. He loved making other men die. I think it made him feel—” His words trailed off.

Billy started to say something, to change the subject, but the captain continued.

“I found him … there was this big shell hole, and he had these German soldiers, really young kids and a couple of old men … we saw a lot of that, it was all they had at the end. There were eight of them in the hole, and I came up on him; I heard his Thompson firing and thought he needed help. I saw him shoot the last one. He was at least sixty.”

“Well, one man against eight, he had to defend himself. They were armed, weren’t they?”

“The one I saw him shoot, the last one, he was armed with a rifle with a fixed bayonet, and there was a handkerchief, a white flag tied to the bayonet. He didn’t see me at first. He waited a minute; the man was begging. And then he shot him. He was grinning while he did it. He loved it. All eight of them.”

“It’s hard to know what a man thinks or feels at a time like that. It might have been different than you think.”

“I know what he was feeling. His fatigues were wet. His pants. He came in his pants. It was all just a big wet dream to him.”

Billy winced. “Did you … was he charged with anything?”

“Before I could do anything at all a mortar shell went off somewhere behind me. I woke up in a field hospital. I was in England the next day. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, but I hope he’s dead. At home they’re not going to know what to do with somebody like that. He’d go back as a hero. He was the most decorated man in the regiment, and it was all because he loved his work. He’d been trained to kill people, and he learned to like it. I think I suspected it, but I couldn’t relieve him; I needed him. All I could do in the end was to write to the new CO from the hospital, and I don’t even know if he got the letter.”

Billy looked up and saw her picking her way back through the crowd. “I hope he got the letter, Captain, and I guess that’s all you can do, too. I hope you’ll have an easier time forgetting it than I’ve had forgetting Dresden, and I wish you luck. Excuse me.” He struggled toward her and took her hand. “Let’s get some air, okay?” They headed for the door.

There was a bench in the mews, at the bottom of the pub’s steps. They sat on the bench with their drinks; she pulled her knees onto the seat and faced him. Her name was Patricia Worth-Newenam, and she was Anglo-Irish. He had met her at a general’s dinner party at the Connaught and had shamelessly wooed her under the general’s nose. She was a WREN attached to Allied headquarters in London, and they had spent every possible free moment together since then. They had slept in each others arms in her London flat and in country inns, but she would not make love to him. There was an old boyfriend in the Royal Marines, a childhood sweetheart, and he thought that must be the reason. He tried not to think about the marine.

He had pulled some strings and managed to visit her family home near Kinsale, in County Cork, for a weekend. Her family were Protestants, farmers for generations, who lived in a huge run-down Georgian house set in two thousand acres of Irish countryside. Her father was a small, handsome man who was a splendid host, but wary of him. He had lost a son and heir in the war and had only a remaining son and Patricia. He did not intend to lose her to some passing American. Billy had told him flatly that he would ask her to marry him if he survived the war. “You’re a nice enough fellow,” Worth-Newenam had replied, “and you’re not the first to speak to me, as you might imagine. Colin Cudmore has wanted her all her life, and if I have my way he’ll have her. She was brought up on a horse, and she loves this land. She’ll not be happy as an American lawyer’s wife.”

“Mr. Worth-Newenam,” Billy had replied, looking him in the eye, “I know I’m a foreigner to you, and I can understand how you must want to keep her here, but I love her, and I can give her a good life. There’s land in Georgia, too, and I think that living in London has made her want more than just that. The thing that neither you nor I really knows is whether she wants me. If she decides she does, I hope you and Mrs. Worth-Newenam will give us your blessing.”

“Since we love her, too, I don’t see how we can do anything else. I guess you’d better find out if she’ll have you.”

Now he was about to do that, and all he could think about was how unbearably painful it would be if she didn’t want him. The light from the pub’s windows shone on her auburn hair, and though her eyes were in shadow he knew they were the same color. He took a deep breath and improvised.

“Listen, Trish, I think I want to be the president of the United States. Do you want to be the first lady?” In the brief silence that followed he wished he could see her eyes. Nothing else was moving.

“Oh, sure,” she said, sounding oddly American, “but how will Mr. and Mrs. Truman feel about that?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to the Yrumans yet, but Harry understands that any American boy can become president, so I don’t see how he can object.”

“Do they promote thirty-three-year-old leftenant colonels directly to president in America?”

“There’s a waiting period, usually. I thought I might go into the Congress or maybe be governor of Georgia in the meantime.” “Right.”

“I mean, with my sterling war record and my wound and everything, how could they deny me?”

“Listen, buster, just because you got shot in the arse for Uncle Sam doesn’t mean anybody’s going to vote for you. Lots of other people got shot in the arse, too, you know.”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“What was the subject?”

“You were proposing to me.”

“Oh, yeah. Did you give me an answer?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“That was it.”

His mouth fell open. She put a knuckle under his chin and closed it.

“You mean it?”

“There are conditions.”

“Your bargaining position will never be better. Name them.”

“First, you have to ask me properly.”

“Patricia Worth-Newenam, I love you, I really do, and I want you to be my wife and the mother of my children and all that. Will you marry me?”

“That was very nice. Second condition: I can’t just be a politician’s wife all day long. You have to buy me a farm.”

“Anything to bring in the farm vote.”

“I mean it.”

“I mean it, too. The farm vote is crucial in Georgia.”

“Done, then.”

“No more conditions?”

“That’s it for now.”

“God, but I love you, Trish.”

“I love you, too, Billy Lee. Take me home, and I’ll prove it.”

As they walked up the mews to find a taxi, she asked about the captain in the pub. “War stories,” he replied. “He told me the worst war story I ever heard. You really going to marry me?”

“If you promise never to tell me war stories.”

“Conditions, always conditions.”

He put his arm around her, and they walked up the mews very close together.

Chapter 2.

TOP SERGEANT Homer Butts, known to all as Sonny, stood in the sunshine of an early spring day in 1946, at rigid attention, on the baseball diamond of Delano High School. Thirty-one other Delano natives, all in army, navy, or marine uniform, stood in ranks with him.

Sonny was bored. The banker, Hugh Holmes, was droning on about service and sacrifice and honor, and Sonny had had it up to
here
with service, especially, and all that other stuff, too. It had been okay, when the war was still on; there had been something to get your blood going, but for nearly a year the most strenuous thing he had done had been to play poker while he waited, waited, waited to get out of the army.

His eyes swept the crowded grandstand, the part of it he could see without turning his head. They were here to see
him,
not these other yokels. Hometown boy—the most decorated soldier in Georgia. Well, probably. He’d damn near had the Medal of Honor, damn near. Somebody had torpedoed him, though. A friend of his, a clerk in the company orderly room, had hinted as much. Shit, if he’d had that one he’d be as famous as Audie Murphy, maybe even have a movie contract like Murphy. He was good-looking enough, he knew, better-looking than Murphy, for sure.

He knew exactly how he looked, braced up on that baseball field in that uniform the old German guy had tailored for two cartons of Luckies. Not as tall as he’d have liked, only five nine, but service had put some weight on him; he was 175 now. If he’d had that extra 20 pounds when he’d graduated from Delano High he’d have been a sure thing for a football scholarship to Georgia or Alabama or Auburn. He’d had the speed, but not the size, for college ball, the scouts had told him. He would let the blond crew cut grow out. The girls were getting tired of guys who looked like soldiers. He’d get a couple of sharp suits with the poker money, and there was enough for a good used car. A convertible, maybe.

Sonny heard his name mentioned. Holmes was reciting his list of decorations. Sonny tuned out again, then snapped back, alert. Holmes was saying something he wanted to hear.