Stage Door Canteen (19 page)

They pushed their way through the crowd, through the doors and out into the parking lot. A bright night sky spread stars and a quarter moon over their heads, although the air coming across the flatlands was bitter cold.

“Aw, Runt’s in love,” Loy said, buttoning up his mackinaw, “he don’t get that way often. He’s in love with a little Yankee girl in New York.”

Gene’s brothers and their wives had already discussed his so-called girlfriend at some length inside. Giving him a hard time about it, Howard joked.

Earlene said, “Aw, c’mon, y’all, stop teasing Gene. Why wouldn’t girls chase after him? He’s a good-looking little feller, better looking than the whole bunch of you. That’s why you pick on him all the time.”

“I don’t pick on him,” Howard said.

“Yes you do, all of you do. You’re just jealous because Eugene is the only one who’s got the stuffing to go fight those damned little Japs after we got bombed at Pearl Harbor. He couldn’t wait to get into the war, and he said so! My God Almighty, he was fired up, there was no holding him back!”

“Earlene, I got four kids to look after. They wouldn’t even draft me, and you know it.”

“Cut it out, you two,” Loy said. “It’s Eugene’s day, let him enjoy it.”

“It’s been Eugene’s day all week,” Donna Marie said. “I’m getting wore out with it.”

She had a quart bottle of Seagram’s bourbon in a brown paper bag. They carried their own booze as the Rancho Bar-None was a bottle and set-ups roadhouse; one paid admission for dancing and the band. Donna Marie offered Gene a drink while Loy went to look for his pickup and Reece for his car. But after a swallow Gene decided he didn’t want to drink anymore that night. He’d reached the point where it felt like what was going down was going to come right back up. Never a good sign. Loy’s wife was pretty well out of it, too: as soon as the cold air outside in the parking lot hit her, Rebah started laughing wildly at something Earlene said, and fell across the hood of somebody’s 1936 Buick, whooping and slapping it with her hands like she was beating a drum. Cursing, Loy went to get his wife to quit pounding on the Buick before somebody came out to see what was going on.

The parking lot was crowded with cars and pickup trucks. Dina’s words about getting somebody sober enough to drive still rang in Gene’s ears. He found himself wishing for the hundredth time he was back in New York. After the interview at the Odessa radio station they had all gone over to have a drink at a hotel bar next door. Then, on their way to Paintbrush Wells they passed the Rancho Bar None, which all of them had known since high school days.

When Reece came back with his Studebaker sedan, Loy and Rebah wanted all of them to go on over to Midland to do some more drinking, instead of going straight home.

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” Earlene said under her breath, “How can they even think something like that? Donna Marie doesn’t need any more booze. For that matter, neither does Gene. And if you don’t watch Gene he’s going to throw up all over the inside of your car.”

“You watch him, Earlene,” Reece said. “You put him in the back seat between you’n Howard. And don’t you let him puke in my automobile, y’hear? I got to take care of what I got, there’s no more damned automobiles to be had for love nor money until the war’s over.”

“You don’t have to yell at me, Reece Struhbeck.” When they said goodbye to Loy and Rebah, Earlene remarked sourly, “I bet they’re going over to Midland anyway, and stay up all night. Loy throws away money hand over fist, more than one person’s told me that, even though he’s got a good job at Humble. He’s making more than he ever made in his life, and roughnecking keeps him from getting drafted. Although from the looks of it money just slips through his fingers—and hers, too—as fast as he can bring it home.”

After some debate they put Gene on the left hand side in the back seat, next to the window in case he should have to throw up in a hurry. Donna Marie had another drink out of the bottle in the paper sack and tried to pass it around, but nobody wanted another go at the lukewarm bourbon. She turned on the radio and rolled the dial around looking for some music so that, she said, they could sing. Earlene groaned.

They were getting to the part of these evenings that Gene hated, with everybody more than a little drunk and acting really stupid. He sank down in the back seat by the window and put his head against the metal frame. Once Reece pulled the car onto the paved road to Midland, headed south, he concentrated on watching the images of the night flash by. The vibration of the tires on the asphalt came through the car’s window frame and the bones of his head and made his teeth buzz. He heard Donna Marie up in front remark that, all in all, she was glad they’d gone over to Odessa to watch Gene being interviewed on the radio, she’d always wanted to see what a broadcast studio looked like. And it was a big thing, that the whole country knew what a hero Eugene was. It was about time they stopped teasing him, especially about his temper. When you came right down to it, Loy had a worse temper, he was always flying off the handle.

Howard said from the back seat that it wasn’t his temper that made Runt shoot down all them Jap Zeros, it was guts. Runt had a bad temper, God knows, but he’d tackle anything three times his size. Ever since he was a little kid. His brothers could swear to that.

Gene tried not to listen. His relatives said the same things over and over again, it was one reason he hated going home. All he could think about was that he was drunk and he needed to go home and go to bed. Home in Paintbrush Wells this time was the aluminum trailer Morley Struhbeck had put on a piece of land he’d bought back in the Thirties when parts of the drought-ravaged plains were selling for a dollar an acre.

What he was seeing out the window of his brother’s car were things he had known all his life, briefly outlined in the brilliant white and pitch dark shadows made by the headlights: a gas station with general store, the overhang jutting out to cover the old-fashioned pumps with their glass cylinders on top filled with amber gasoline; metal Coca-Cola signs tacked on telephone poles, billboards with smiling girls offering Camel cigarettes. For one whole stretch between a hamlet of unpainted board shacks with open dog trots separating one side from the other and a country church with a weed-filled graveyard, there was a long line of Burma Shave signs. You had to read every damned Burma Shave, they nearly hypnotized you, all flashing black and white, black and white. He knew every sign, every gas station, every side road, as the car whipped by between Midland and Paintbrush Wells. He found himself thinking with some wonder that the truth of it was that he had been taken away, suddenly uprooted from this place where he had lived all of his life and where, if it hadn’t been for the war, he would probably still be. The U.S. military had reached out and taken him, and it was just the same with the rest of the crew, the men of the Cincy Gal: the pilot, Joe Van Dorndt, from Cincinatti, Weathersley the navigator from Chicago, Tail Gunner Wally Petit from San Leandro in California, Buddy LeTourneau of Massachusetts, the bombardier. And the dead ones, mustn’t forget them: Leon Bridges the co-pilot from Missouri; both waist gunners, Dano and Morales, from places near Detroit and Cleveland. All of them, like himself, snatched up from their hometowns by the war and flown all over the world. Perhaps never to settle back, afterwards, in the spot they’d come from. God knows he didn’t want to come back. He’d been to Florida and New York and Washington, D.C. and California and Hawaii and Midway and he knew now he wanted to get out of Paintbrush Wells and stay out.

“Hell, you can’t say that damned temper of his didn’t count for something.” The car lurched and Reece’s wife, Donna Marie, cried out, and turned to look at him. “Me’n Loy, after Momma died,” Reece went on, “had to look after him. Lord, what a job that was! I remember Runt would get mad and have a fit and hold his breath and roll his eyes back in his head—Gawd, like to scared the squat outta us! We weren’t more then ten or twelve ourselves. We’d give him anything he wanted, by God, ‘til that little booger was so spoiled rotten you couldn’t do a damned thing with him. One time he throwed a knife at Loy, and when it missed he swore he’d kill Loy some other way. I believed him. I swear you’d believe him, too, if you ever saw him red in the face as a beet, yelling fit to bust. I mean, he was something! If’n it was today they’d send a county nurse out to the house, trying to do something about him, I guess. But there wasn’t anything like that back in the Depression.”

Earlene said, “But that was no reason for you kids to put him down in the well.”

“Lord God,” Donna Marie said. “Don’t tell me they did that!”

Earlene said, “Why sure they did, mean little devils! They’d do anything they wanted to with nobody around to look out for them, and Morley off somewhere or drunk half the time.”

Gene didn’t want to hear it again, but Donna Marie was right about one thing. Loy had the bad temper, it was worse than any of the brothers.’ It was Loy’s idea to cure Eugene’s tantrums by dunking him in the well. He said it was sort of a joke, although to give them credit Reece and Loy said they didn’t really believe the joke part. They did agree something had to be done to teach Gene a lesson, especially about throwing butcher knives and trying to set a fire under Morley’s bed and having tantrums where he’d turn blue in the face from holding his breath, and pass out.

According to the way Reece told it, the three of them got a piece of clothesline and tied Gene’s feet together, but not his hands, and then they carried him out, took the well cover off, and tied him to the bucket chain. They couldn’t get the bucket off the chain so they just pushed it out of the way and swung him over.

Howard said they were only going to scare him and make him behave himself and not act like a little fiend that nobody could let out of their sight. Gene couldn’t remember any of that; years later when they counted it all up no one could remember the month, but it was probably in the summer, or it would have been too cold. It seemed Eugene was three years, going on four. Too young to recollect much except being hauled over the concrete lip and lowered into the well head down, not screaming, not any more, but mute with terror. In the next instant the bucket chain, which the boys had forgotten to tie up, started unwinding with a hellacious racket, sending him head down into the well a lot farther than anybody had intended, almost touching the water at the bottom.

Hanging in the darkness was all Gene remembered. Hanging head down in the darkness, a little three year-old going on four year-old boy, so close to the water in the bottom of the well he could smell it. He couldn’t see them, but up in the circle of light at the top his three brothers were yelling and crying, scared to death and trying to get the galvanized chain untangled and free to roll back on the windlass so they could haul him up.

“After we got him out of the well,” Howard said, “little Eugene didn’t have no more seizures. We damned near drowned him, but it worked.”

It must have taken only a matter of minutes for his brothers to haul him to the well in the first place, tie him up, put him over the edge and then watch him, all unexpected, drop head down into the darkness. For all Loy and Reece and Howard knew, he was going to hit the water, then the bottom of the well, and break his neck, or even drown. None of them knew they had managed to tangle the well chain so that a knot in it hauled him up short just inches from the surface. When they pulled him up and untied his feet they found he’d fainted dead away. Talk about luck. Talk about children and angels. Somebody was looking after all of them, that time.

Now he just wished they’d stop talking about it. Putting him down the well wasn’t the worst thing his brothers did when they were kids, and he was just as bad as the rest of them. When he was grown up there was no reason to explain why he wasn’t crazy about being around water. Or flying over it, like in the Pacific. Or why he had never wanted to learn to swim.

Forget about it, he told himself. God knows after you’d been in the war awhile you learned to forget about a lot of things.

They dropped off Howard and Earlene in the driveway of their house, Earlene hushing Donna Marie and telling her to turn down the radio because they didn’t want to wake any of the neighbors. Howard especially wanted Gene to stay the night and let Earlene drive him out to the trailer in the morning, but he said no. He didn’t particularly look forward to waking up on the couch in the living room with all four of Earlene and Howard’s kids standing around waiting for him to open his eyes. Not the way he was feeling, anyway. Sick as he was, he was sure he was going to have a hangover.

When Reece let him out on the dirt road that ran up alongside Morley’s trailer he got the same invitation to sleep over, even though Reece had already delivered him to the door, and it was too late then to try to change anybody’s mind.

Reece wanted Gene to come over and spend the night at his house. Morley was off somewhere, God knows where, his brother reminded him; it was likely that any trip was more of the same thing that had gotten his father in trouble a few months ago over at the army base. Or he might be down in Mexico. There was plenty of U.S. war contraband exchanging hands down there. Staying with him, Reece insisted, was better than being out here all alone by hisself. Donna Marie hung out the window of the car and told them that it sure as hell was, and it probably wasn’t a good idea to sleep out here when some of those people Morley went around with might come along looking for him. And find Gene instead.

“You never can tell what they would do,” she yelled. Somebody had shot at Morley over in Ploverville a few months ago.