Short Stories: Five Decades (40 page)

Night in Algiers

I
t was late at night in Algiers and in the army newspaper office the clatter of typewriters had long since died down. Most of the men had gone to sleep upstairs and the halls were empty. The wisecracks and decisions and sudden laughter were over for the day, and in another building the presses were comfortably turning out the next day’s paper.

On the walls, the pictures of all the pretty girls with big bosoms looked a little weary in the dim light. Down on the street outside the Red Cross building, late-traveling soldiers whistled for hitches in the dark and a soldier who had had some wine was singing the “Marseillaise” in English, the brave words and the brave tune floating up a little uncertainly through the darkness until a truck stopped and picked the singer up. In the office the radio was on and Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto was coming in, moody and sorrowful, from London.

An assistant editor with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves came in and sat down wearily in front of the radio. He stared at it, remembering many things that had nothing to do with his job, remembering home and what his college campus looked like in June and how it had felt to sail out of New York harbor in the rain.

“Have some wine,” said the reporter who was sitting there listening to the music. The reporter had no stripes on his sleeves at all. The assistant editor took the wine and forgot to drink, just sitting there holding the bottle.

“There’s a bar in New York,” the assistant editor said. “Ralph’s. On Forty-fifth Street. Ugly little joint. I like to drink there. Ever been there?”

“Uhuh,” the reporter said.

“Scotch whisky,” the assistant editor said. “Cold beer.”

The concerto ended in wild, mournful thunder and a polite English voice said it had been Toscanini conducting and Horowitz at the piano, the names sounding strange on the night-time African coast. The polite voice said good night and the reporter got Berlin. There were waltzes on from Berlin, very prettily played, lilting through the small, paper-littered room. A polite German voice described the waltzes and once more the violins and trumpets swept out of the radio.

“The Germans,” the assistant editor said. “They should be deprived of music for fifty years. Should be part of the peace treaty.”

A rewrite man, a corporal, on his way up to bed, stuck his head in. “Anybody want a gumdrop?” He brought out the box. “Just got my rations today.”

The assistant editor and the reporter reached out. They chewed consideringly on the gumdrops, listening to the waltz.

“Nice music,” the rewrite man said.

“Fifty years,” said the assistant editor.

The rewrite man yawned and stretched. “Going to bed,” he said, and started out. “Maybe when I wake up tomorrow the war’ll be over. Good night.” He went out and the assistant editor washed down the rationed gumdrop with a little wine.

“Did you ever eat a gumdrop in civilian life?” he asked.

“No,” said the reporter.

“Neither did I.” He rolled the wine around reflectively in the bottle. “God, it’s dull around here. I wish I could have gone to Italy.” The radio turned to Hungarian dances and the assistant editor stared gloomily at it. He drank a little wine. “That’s the trouble, though. Now that the invasion has come at last, other guys are covering it. Other guys’ll write great stories. I’ll be sitting here on my can in Africa. The editor. The assistant editor … When I got out of college I wrote better than I do now. Eight years ago.” He rubbed his bald spot thoughtfully. “Somehow I got to be an editor. Eight years.” He finished the wine. “Maybe I should’ve got married.”

“Probably wouldn’t make any difference,” said the reporter, who was married.

“Probably not.” The assistant editor shrugged. “There was a girl back in college in my sophomore year. She was a year older than me. You had to date her up in October for the spring prom. There was a fellow with a car who used to drive her to breakfast, lunch and dinner and send her flowers every day, but she used to take walks with me and lunch sometimes. She did the most marvelous thing that anyone ever did for me. I was a kid then and maybe it oughtn’t to seem like so much to me now, but it still does. She broke a date with this other guy and went to the spring prom with me, I gave her orchids and we went to a couple of speakeasies and it was the best night I ever had in my whole life.” He sat back, remembering the orchids and the speakeasies. “I introduced her to a friend of mine that summer. He had a lot of dough and called her long distance three times a week and six months later they got married. You can’t blame a girl. Want to see her picture?”

“Yes,” the reporter said.

The assistant editor took out the picture, yellowed and raveled at the edges. It was of a pretty, graceful girl, in a white dress, sitting erect, a hint of strength in her face, mixed with ancient coquetry. “I don’t know why I keep it,” the assistant editor said, looking at the picture. “Maybe for luck.” He put it back carefully into his wallet. He leaned back and his thick glasses and square, angular, plain, decent face shone in the dim light, clearly and painfully the face of a man who all his life might expect to find his best friends taking his girl.

“There was another girl. A Danish girl,” the assistant editor went on. “I met her at a party in the Village. She’d come down from Boston with a friend, to be an actress. She worked at the Filmarte as an usher. I must have seen the last part of ‘Grand Illusion’ twelve times.”

He smiled.

“I’d go around for the last reel or two of the pictures,” he said, “and take her out to Sunnyside. She lived there with her friend. She liked me, but she wouldn’t have anything much to do with me, even though I used to sleep out on the living-room couch five times a week. We had a fight and she decided she didn’t want to be an actress and she went home to Boston. I guess I would’ve married her then if I hadn’t fought with her so much.” He took off his glasses and stared wearily at them. “About six months later she came down to New York on a visit and it was different. She moved right in and we had a wonderful time. We’d go out on week ends in the country. Just drive around in the summertime and stop in for drinks here and there and go swimming and laugh. She met me in Provincetown and we stayed with a Danish family. There was a great party. Provincetown, on Cape Cod. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better time and I keep remembering it.… Maybe I should’ve married her. I don’t know.”

The assistant editor leaned over and put the bottle down. On the street below, three Frenchmen passed, singing loudly.

“I’m thirty years old and I write worse than I ever did. I don’t know what I’ll do after the war. Once, when I was in the Engineers, I sent her a letter. She was married, she wrote me, and she was having a kid on May seventeenth. She was going to call it David, after her husband’s uncle, she said. She asked me to pray for it. I haven’t written back. Well, what’s the difference?” He put his glasses on again. “The Filmarte Theatre.” He laughed and stood up. “I wish I had two hack writers I could throw stories to and know they’d come out right,” he said. “I wouldn’t get so tired. Well, it’s pretty late. Got to go to bed. Tomorrow’s another war.”

The radio was sending out American jazz now, the deep familiar horns of America pounding like all the music in all the dance halls and all the night clubs and at all the spring proms any American ever went to, any girl in a white dress ever danced at.

The assistant editor listened, his eyes blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. When it was over, he walked into his own room slowly, his shirt dumpy and wrinkled, to take one last look at his desk, and made sure everything was all right before going to bed.

Gunners’ Passage

“
I
n Brazil,” Whitejack was saying, “the problem was girls. American girls.”

They were lying on the comfortable cots with the mosquito netting looped gracefully over their heads and the barracks quiet and empty except for the two of them and shaded and cool when you remembered that outside the full sun of Africa stared down.

“Three months in the jungle, on rice and monkey meat.” Whitejack lit a large, long, nickel cigar and puffed deeply, squinting up at the tin roof. “When we got to Rio, we felt we deserved an American girl. So the Lieutenant and Johnny and myself, we got the telephone directory of the American Embassy, and we went down the list, calling up likely names—secretaries, typists, interpreters, filing clerks.…” Whitejack grinned up at the ceiling. He had a large, sunburned, rough face, that was broken into good looks by the white teeth of his smile, and his speech was Southern, but not the kind of Southern that puts a Northerner’s teeth on edge.

“It was the Lieutenant’s idea, and by the time we got to the Q’s he was ready to give up but we hit pay dirt on the S’s.” Slowly he blew out a long draught of cigar smoke. “Uh-uh,” he said, closing his eyes reflectively. “Two months and eleven days of honey and molasses. Three tender and affectionate American girls as loving as the day is long, with their own flat. Beer in the icebox from Sunday to Sunday, steaks big enough to saddle a mule with, and nothing to do, just lie on the beach in the afternoon and go swimmin’ when the mood seized yuh. On per diem.”

“How were the girls?” Stais asked. “Pretty?”

“Well, Sergeant,” Whitejack paused and pursed his lips with thoughtful honesty. “To tell you the truth, Sergeant, the girls the Lieutenant and Johnny Moffat had were as smart and pretty as chipmunks. Mine …” Once more he paused. “Ordinarily, my girl would find herself hard put to collect a man in the middle of a full division of infantry soldiers. She was small and runty and she had less curves than a rifle barrel, and she wore glasses. But from the first time she looked at me, I could see she wasn’t interested in Johnny or the Lieutenant. She looked at me and behind her glasses her eyes were soft and hopeful and humble and appealing.” Whitejack flicked the cigar ash off into the little tin can on his bare chest he was using as an ash tray. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “a man feels mighty small if he just thinks of himself and turns down an appeal like that. Let me tell you something, Sergeant, I was in Rio two months and eleven days and I didn’t look at another woman. All those dark-brown women walkin’ along the beach three-quarters out of their bathing suits, just wavin’ it in front of your face.… I didn’t look at them. This runty, skinny little thing with glasses was the most lovin’ and satisfactory and decent little person a man could possibly conceive of, and a man’d just have to be hog-greedy with sex to have winked an eye at another woman.” Whitejack doused his cigar, took his ash tray off his chest, rolled over on his belly, adjusted the towel properly over his bare buttocks. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to get myself a little sleep.…”

In a moment Whitejack was snoring gently, his tough mountaineer’s face tucked childishly into the crook of his arm. Outside the barracks the native boy hummed low and wild to himself as he ironed a pair of suntan trousers on the shady side of the building. From the field, two hundred yards away, again and again came the sliding roar of engines climbing or descending the afternoon sky.

Stais closed his eyes wearily. Ever since he’d got into Accra he had done nothing but sleep and lie on his cot, day-dreaming, listening to Whitejack talk.

“Hi,” Whitejack had said, as Stais had come slowly into the barracks two days before, “which way you going?”

“Home,” Stais had said, smiling wearily as he did every time he said it. “Going home. Which way you going?”

“Not home.” Whitejack had grinned a little. “Not home at all.”

Stais liked to listen to Whitejack. Whitejack talked about America, about the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains where he had been in the forestry service, about his mother’s cooking and how he had owned great dogs which had been extraordinary at finding a trail and holding it, about how they had tried hunting deer in the hills from the medium bomber, no good because of the swirling winds rising from the gorges, about pleasant indiscriminate week-end parties in the woods with his friend Johnny Moffat and the girls from the mill in the next town.… Stais had been away from America for nineteen months now and Whitejack’s talk made his native country seem present and pleasantly real to him.

“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.”