Ice-Cream Headache (3 page)

“Alley fights were the best. You have to learn to be quick and clean, or you do not get to use your technique very long.
N’est-ce pas
?” His hatchet face grinned. His bright eyes commanded Johnny as he jammed the knife back into its sheath. His bright eyes commanded everybody.

Johnny stood quietly wondering when he would finally shut up. Perhaps he did not know left hooks as he knew knives? He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly but the other would not go out with it. It was like a cat on the ladder and would not come down.

“I think I will go and find our host,” Lon said. “It is about time I was leaving.”

He stuck out his hand. Johnny shifted his glass to his left hand and took it. There was a heavy, smooth, clean pressure in Lon’s handclasp.

“I hope I have not upset you by my bloody talk,” Lon said.

“No. It didn’t bother me.” The knife was lying sheathed upon the table as before.

When Lon left him, he sat down in the nearest chair. He could feel the memory rising, as a gas-filled corpse rises to the surface of the sea. He tried listening to the conversation near him. His jaws tightened in the struggle.

T
HEY HAD CONVERSED LITTLE
and softly, lying in a slit trench three feet by seven feet by two feet. Most people did not know the difference between a slit trench and a foxhole since the famous chaplain said there were no atheists in foxholes. You could not lie down in a foxhole and they were harder to dig and they were only for special cases. Even after digging a slit trench a man would be exhausted and drenched with sweat. And that when they were not even under fire.

On the line they never dug them any closer than five and it was often ten or fifteen or even twenty yards, when the line was too great for the number of them as it so often was in the early days of the Canal.

It was so different, this war, from the other, it was not like you read. Archie Binns did a good job of showing what it would come to be, next time, with his Japanese and Russians in Siberia in
The Laurels Are Cut Down.
Chivalry Was Dead, he said. Long live chivalry, I said, it all was dead. That trick of crawling in between the slit trenches at night, then jumping in from behind. Probably some point of
Bushido
honor: come back with a souvenir of a kill. Apparently honor also is subject to the Law of Relativity. But then they did not mind dying. Or maybe it was just that they were so hungry and they did it to get the luxurious cans of C ration each Yankee carried. You never knew, not any more.

He was terribly sleepy. After a certain point you were always terribly sleepy. Even if the guy in the next slit trench had the watch you did not sleep. How could you sleep? It was an all-out war, they said, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behavior. Paydays used to be a half holiday, back in peacetime. This was it, they said, this was really the war to end war, this time we mean it, no crap, this is the one that counts, think of your sons. Probably the Russians said the same thing. But apart from that your ears and your nerves were always wide awake anyway, for a sound or a feel, always reaching, reaching out.

He heard no sound. Or felt anything either. He just knew it was there, suddenly. The hairs on the back of his neck rose up and prickled. Somewhat the same feeling you get when you suddenly know somebody is staring at you from behind and you turn around and sure enough there is somebody staring at you. Only this, of course, was greatly enhanced. When it hit him it shot clear through like an electric shock and he was wide awake. Yet he heard nothing.

He was lying on his belly with the brim of his helmet dug into the dirt to keep his face out of the mud. This slit trench was not really wet. It was only muddy with that thin film clay gets when the dew is mashed into it. Oh, it was a slick war all right, they said, it was a slick war.

He always lay on his belly with his back up. Really comical how hard it is to lay on your back. You can’t do it. Whenever you heard one coming you always lay on your belly while you waited. Maybe you dug your fingernails into the slick too, but then that was different. They will always flop over on their belly when they hear one coming if they are on their back. You just can’t help it. Like a fish or a porcupine.

He turned his head to the left very slowly to look back. He could see nothing. The sky was clouded and there were no stars to outline a figure. He strained his eyes until he felt their muscles would crack and curl up like springs. Nothing. Still, he knew it was there. He could tell. The instinct told him. It was invariably right. He had developed it over a period of weeks. It was what they did not teach you in the field manuals.

It was very quiet and his eyes rolled in his head. Somewhere in the silence a grenade popped, fizzed, went off, sending a shower of little screamings outward. This was too close for a grenade and you could not fire without the muzzle blast betraying you. At night it was always the knife. This was his first.

The thought of it there sent a spasm of refined terror through him. A terror of hopelessness that made him want to shrug and turn his head back and close his eyes and simply wait. Waiting for it dejectedly, yet hoping all the time the instinct was wrong, and knowing at the same time the instinct was never wrong. He felt, then, it was not worth the trouble. There were a lot of things worse than dying. Slowly disintegrating day by day was worse than dying.

He did not know, you never knew any more. When you looked back and you saw how it all came about, it was so logical. How, in the beginning, it was not at all necessary. Just simply cause and effect that, in the beginning, was not at all necessary. It was not that people did not see it, everybody saw it. Everybody always saw it. That was why it was so hard to know. It was like the being always terribly sleepy. Just to relax, to sit quietly and not be sleepy, maybe then you could know. Just to relax was all. It was really very simple. It was not a question of being paralyzed with fear, it was simply having to decide. He was wide awake and terribly sleepy and he could not decide.

While he lay in the mud-slick fatigues, unable to decide, his hand with the rolls of dirt under the cracked and crusted nails decided. It slid down over the cloth made waterproof by weeks of soaking up his body oil. Quite silently it unfastened the snap and freed the knife from the sheath strapped to his leg. Then it relaxed full length along his side, cunning as animals are cunning. Perhaps in the end that was all it was.

Over the luxurious feeling of resignation was something else apparently, a flame over the sour damp ashes; a flame, now, that never came alive until there was no other thing, burning strongly in a wind of death. The hand and this primitive flame worked together leaving him out of it.

He was astonished to realize it was not five seconds since the hair first rose. He felt like he had just carried three thousand pounds a couple of miles.

The hand jerked sideways when the nothing jumped, flopping him over on his back and raising the knife in an arc until it was sticking straight up. The knife in the hand made of the arm the sharpened spike of the elephant trap. The nothing impaled itself by the weight of the body. The falling body jarred through his arm releasing the hand from its responsibility, pushed his arm down till the knob on the knife hilt ground against his pelvic bone.

The Jap’s knife struck his helmet slitheringly and stuck itself into the clay without power. The Jap hardly made a sound, only a sharp “unh” as the knife went into him. Such a silent war this one was.

There was a little struggle when he grabbed the Jap’s wrist with his left hand. But not much. The Jap’s hand came away from the hilt of his knife fairly easily. The knife had gone into him just under the breastbone. Sort of a solar plexus punch you might say, and it took his wind.

Blood ran distastefully over his hand and he pushed the Jap’s leaden weight away from him and pulled his knife out. He could see him now, the inscrutable almond eyes and the funny bell-shaped helmet, like a woman’s 1920s hat. The Jap put both hands over his belly where the knife had been. The Jap lay on his back, eyes watching, chin pulled down against his chest, breathing with a kind of grunt.

Johnny heard the breathing above the explosions of his own heart and knew he had nothing more to fear from this one.

They looked at each other for a little while, both breathing softly. Then Johnny put his hand over the Jap’s face, the heel of his palm on his chin. The Jap did not shut his eyes and opened his mouth and bit at one of the fingers. Johnny moved the finger and thrust it up the Jap’s nose, the Jap still trying to bite it. Then he pulled his knife across the Jap’s bent throat, downward and away. The Jap quit trying to bite. He had not moved his hands from his belly.

Johnny grabbed him and rolled him out of the slit trench on the downhill side. His right hand had escaped, but he had not jerked his left hand quick enough and the geyser pumped against his arm. He wiped his hand vigorously and then lay in the slit trench, trying to keep out of the blood, waiting for morning to come. Somewhere in the silence a grenade popped, fizzed, went off, sending a shower of little screamings outward. A Nambu MG chattered in its falsetto foreign tongue. And him wishing to relax, just to relax, lying slow and easy, maybe under a tree, on a creek.

J
OHNNY TOOK A SIP
from his fresh martini. The olive oscillated slightly and a few drops sloshed over his fingers. People nearby were laughing at some quip of a Successful Author. He had missed it. The woman next to him offered to explain it, so that he could laugh too. He thanked her, seeing Lon coming toward him across the room with their hostess. Lon was wearing his rakish trenchcoat and carrying his slouch hat.

Lon shook his hand again. “Do not let my talk of knives get on your nerves. It is only that knives fascinate me.”

“No,” he said, “Forget it, Lon. Do you remember the scene in
All Quiet
where Paul kills the Frenchman in the hole and then begs his forgiveness?”

Lon looked at him curiously. “Yes. That scene. Highly sentimental stuff.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s outdated, isn’t it? You couldn’t write it that way now, could you?”

“No,” Lon said. “You couldn’t write it like that now. Pointlessly hysterical. What they call a chaotic reaction.”

Johnny nodded. “Chaotic reaction. Psychological? That’s good. In other words, they had not developed the high art of proper indoctrination in those days.”

“Yes. That’s it.”

“But this war was different, wasn’t it, Lon?”

“Yes,” Lon said. “This war was different. I must go.” He shook Johnny’s hand again. “I hope I did not upset you with my bloody talk.”

“Forget it, Lon. I’ve got a couple knives you might like to see. I took one of them off a dead Jap.”

Lon was interested. “What kind of knife is it?”

“American-made. The Jap probably took it off a dead American.”

“Oh,” Lon said. “I thought it might have a story behind it … . Well, good-bye.”

“So long.” He watched Lon stride to the door, the trenchcoat ballooning about his legs, the high collar covering his ears.

“I must see him out,” their hostess whispered. “Isn’t he fascinating? He has been everywhere and done everything.”

“He must have led a truly adventurous life.”

“Oh, you can’t know. Truly incredible. Do you want another cocktail? You are enjoying yourself? You veterans, you who have done so much, you need to relax.

“Excuse me, my dear. I must really see Lon out. I was very lucky to get him. He abhors cocktail parties, you know. Truly an amazing personality.”

“Yes,” Johnny said. “I can see that. Truly he is.”

The point is in the reference to Archie Binns and the quote about chivalry being dead, and in the boy’s comparison of his own coldblooded killing of the Japanese to the comparable scene in
All Quiet.
This is what modern warfare has come to be, with all of our blessings, and God help us for it.

This one was sold to Frederick L. Allen of
Harper’s
with the story following but was never printed for reasons described below. It was later sold to
Playboy
and printed in 1958 after Hugh Hefner suggested I make it a little plainer that the mother was the villain. I once showed this story to a newspaper editor in my hometown of Robinson, Illinois, who had known and admired my mother. The strange, guilty, upset, almost disbelieving look on his face when he handed it back, which seemed to say; “Even if it’s true, why
do
it?” was worth to me all the effort I put into writing it.

“I want a girl, just like the girl

that married dear old dad.”

—Old Popular Song

“N
OW LISTEN CAREFULLY,”
John’s mother said, and her voice was rushed and breathless.

She took him by his left arm, and her skin-flaky hand—which, as she said, was “rurned” from washing dishes—went clear around the thinness of his arm. She pulled him close to her and talked into his ear as if they were not alone in the house.

“He’ll be home in a minute,” she said to him, her eyes bright and nervous. “It’s after six now and he never stays at the office later than five. He’s been somewheres drinking. I could tell by his voice over the phone. He’ll come home with that great big ugly nasty belly tight as a drum with beer again.”

“Yes, Ma’m,” John said. He was scared by the intensity of her voice, and she was gripping his arm so hard he could hardly keep from wincing.

“Here is what I want you to do for me, John. I want you to do this for your mother who loves you. When he brings the groceries in, you run out and get in the car. You understand?”

“Yes, Ma’m,” John said. “All right, Mother.” He knew this was important, because she was shaking his arm hard. “But what for?”

“Be still. Listen to me. I asked him please not to go back downtown in his condition. I asked him to stay home. I only just hope the operator was listening. Mrs. Haddock says they always do. God knows I’ve lived with it long enough and tried to hide it and hold our heads up,” she said. “And he just laughed at me. Like he always does. But I’ve always done my duty, in the eyes of God and society. I’ve done all I could be expected to do.”