Some Faces in the Crowd (32 page)

“Maybe we’ve moved up a little too close, Al,” Duggan said. His voice sounded unnaturally high and the careful enunciation was gone.

I was scared, too, even though this was still a long way from actual combat, but I said, “Close? This isn’t close. Not for an outfit that’s supposed to be ready for action behind enemy lines.”

“It’s not myself I’m thinking about,” Duggan said. “It’s the equipment. And none of you men has been exposed to battle conditions before.”

A few minutes later Colonel Talley happened to pass by in a jeep. He was on MacArthur’s staff, one of the men through whom Duggan worked the deal that got us here. “We’ve just taken the airstrip, Josh,” Talley said. From the way he said it you could see that he enjoyed the intimacy of calling a stage celebrity Josh. “I’m flying back to Guam on the first plane out. Be back in a day or so. Want to come along?”

Duggan looked at the dead Jap, looked out at the darkening night with the lightninglike flashes on the horizon, and then addressed us all without looking directly into any one face. “Might not be a bad idea for me to hop over to Guam,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to have a talk with Colonel Partridge. Tom, you’ll be in command until I return. Carry on, men. And God bless you!”

About an hour later Luther came. He had the coffee but he had had a hard time finding us in the dark. When he came into our transmitting shack, he was breathing hard, and his face looked old.

“Well, it was tough going, but I got the old man’s coffee, Lieutenant,” he said. Then, when he didn’t see him, “By the way, where is the Colonel?”

“He’s gone back to Guam,” I said.

“No kidding, Lieutenant, where is he?” Luther said.

“I said he’s gone back to Guam, Luther,” I said.

He looked around like a little boy who’s lost his parents in a department store. “But he—the old man—he wouldn’t go without me.”

“He left with Colonel Talley,” Tom said. “Maybe you can still catch him at MacArthur’s HQ.”

“Sure, that’s it, that’s it,” Luther said. “He’s probably waiting for me up there. Hell, the old man wouldn’t go anywhere without me.” He stood up, and for the first time since I had known him I saw that he was deeply shaken. His face had gone very white, and his head was almost imperceptibly shaking like an old man’s. It wasn’t that he was frightened. He was undermined, humiliated, deeply embarrassed. We were all sitting around the shack, in the most informal dress and position—just a bunch of radio guys who happened to draw a somewhat inconvenient assignment. But Luther came to attention, saluted us just like a scene from
Journey’s End,
and said: “Thank you for the information, sir. Good night, gentlemen.”

We kept knocking out our radio stuff all night, telling Filipino guerrillas what was happening and where they could tie in to our advance patrols, and about five
A.M
. while we were trying to keep awake with the help of that coffee Luther had brought for Duggan the night before, an MP came to the door and said he wanted an officer from the radio outfit to follow him. I followed him down the beach, threading my way through ack-ack outfits, stalled jeeps, supply dumps, and all the rest of the amazing gear that man drags with him onto enemy beaches, until at last we came to a little clump of sandbrush, where Luther was lying.

“One of your men?” the MP said.

Sprawled there on his side with his smashed spectacles lying near by, he didn’t look very impressive any more. He didn’t look the way a hero is supposed to look. He just looked crumpled, deflated, like a doorman who falls asleep on the job.

“A sniper?” I said.

“No, one of our trucks,” the MP said. “Ran into him last night in the dark. The driver wasn’t using his lights, of course, and I guess the old man couldn’t see so good, anyway. Thought maybe since he was one of your guys you’d want to take him up to your camp and bury him.” I don’t remember what I thought about as I carried him back. I don’t remember thinking anything one way or another. I just carried him back. We dug a grave for him in the sand, and then we lowered him down, facing the USA. Then, since nobody had anything to say, we all just stood at attention for one minute of silence. Luther should have seen us. It was the most military moment of our entire pseudomilitary careers.

I suppose the one thought in all our minds was, Thank God, Duggan isn’t here to give us the curtain speech. But if Luther had to go, too bad he couldn’t have gone in style, storming a Jap machine-gun nest. Well, by the time Duggan got back to “21” he was sure to have Luther storming a half dozen machine-gun nests.

Saluting the grave and listening to the bugler blow his tinny requiem, I couldn’t help thinking: This isn’t on the level. We’re really back on that empty Broadway stage and my show-business mind is jumping way ahead of Duggan’s inaugural address. After all, nobody dies in an outfit like ours. Nobody is supposed to die. We wear soldier suits and we salute and call each other by our military titles. But it’s all a charade, the kind of charade that only Duggan and Luther really know how to play—the kind of charade that Colonel Duggan, on his way to Zodiac, Illinois, to decorate Luther’s widow, has to go on playing alone, now that the soft and faithful flesh of Luther Bissell lies in its sandy and unnecessary grave.

T
HE OLD MAN HAD
just come in off the docks with Eddie and they were drinking beer in the kitchen. The old lady didn’t like them drinking beer in her kitchen—precious little work space in these cold-water flats—but it was better than having them drink themselves into the blind staggers down at Paddy’s Waterfront Bar & Grill. She didn’t like them sitting there slopping it down until they were too full to stand up straight and she’d have to shake some life into them so Pop could grope his way to bed while Eddie wandered out into the night in search of such evils as only the Devil knew.

Eddie was saying, “Pop, what gives with our West Side boys these days—can’t punch their way outa a paper bag. Last night that Mickey Cochrane, a real chumpola, and he’s supposed to be the pride of the West Side. Harlem—Little Italy—that’s where they got the fighters now. Jeez, in my day …”

The old lady looked up from the meat loaf she was preparing, but she didn’t say anything. She had heard all she wanted to hear about his day. She remembered all too well the days of glory for Eddie (Honeyboy) Finneran. He had been the “crowd-pleasing kayo artist from the West Side” then, making three, sometimes four thousand dollars a fight. In his best year, ’42, he had earned nearly thirty thousand. Quite a take for the son of a longshoreman who had worked hard all his life for his two or three thousand a year. Ma hadn’t gone for the fighting. She hadn’t been impressed when Eddie said, “Just think, Ma, in forty-five minutes Friday night I’ll make more money than the old man makes in a whole year.”

Pop would go to the fights, and their older daughter Molly and her husband Leo, but not Ma. She’d stay home with Vince, the baby of the family, and wait for the excitement to be over. One night when Eddie was fighting Joey Kaplan, his East Side rival, and she was worried for him because the sports writers had wondered if Honey-boy Finneran wasn’t “being taken along too fast,” that night she had turned on the radio for a minute and she heard: “Finneran’s got a bad gash over his right eye—but he keeps boring in—lots of heart—and another hard right hand to Finneran’s eye!” She had heard the hoarse, blood-thirsty yowl of the crowd and that was enough. She had snapped the radio off and waited. Pop came home late and very drunk because the referee had stopped the fight in the ninth to save Honeyboy from further punishment. “Magine a skinny little sheeney from the East Side lickin’ our Honeyboy,” the old man said. For days he had stayed away from his favorite saloons, he was that ashamed. And Eddie had hid out in a hotel until his face looked good enough for him to come home. Stayed up in a hotel and belted whiskey with all the trash of the neighborhood, man and woman alike, who were perfectly content to tell Eddie how he would have beaten the little East Side Jew-boy if only for some lousy breaks, all the while helping Eddie get rid of his more-money-in-forty-five-minutes-than-Pop-made-in-a-year.

Oh yes, Ma remembered
his
days all right. She remembered how he made thirty thousand in the ring and lost it in the horse rooms. And she remembered how Pop quit work because Eddie was a main-eventer at the Garden and what was the sense of making a lousy ten dollars a day when Eddie had a grand on him all the time. She remembered how Pop spent nearly all his waking time in the bars buying drinks for his longshore pals and reviewing Honeyboy’s triumphs round by round. And she remembered how a cold-water flat wasn’t good enough for the Finnerans any more, how Eddie insisted they move away from their old block between 10th and 11th, even over Ma’s objections. She had lived there since before Eddie was born and if she needed help or company there was always Mrs. Boyle and Mrs. Hanrahan right in the building, and Fred the janitor was a friend of theirs, and she liked to know that Father Corcoran was just around the corner. But they had moved because Eddie was proud and the money was burning his pocket, and because Pop and Molly had argued that if Eddie was so famous why shouldn’t they have a taste of better things? Yes, and Ma remembered, not with bitterness but with a sense of realism, how long those better things had lasted. Less than two years after Eddie’s retirement Pop was back in the shape-up again, kicking back to the hiring boss to make sure of a day’s pay, and the Finnerans were back in their railroad flat. And what did Eddie—their briefly famous Honeyboy—have to show for it but a flattened nose and one bad eye and a state of mind that wasn’t exactly punchy, but wasn’t quite up to normal, either? Eddie was excitable, unstable, with fits of delusion, and his vision was turned in upon the past. He lived more in
his
day than in the present and he had no capacity for work. The quick big money of his ring purses had spoiled him for ordinary living. A docker’s wage was sucker’s work. Not vicious enough for crime or conscientious enough for honest labor, he had drifted through the years of his retirement in search of a soft touch—working for the books, doing a little gambling, tied into the numbers racket on the waterfront. Ma hated to think the word, for she had tried to bring her children up to fear God and honor their responsibilities, but Eddie Finneran was a bum. So she said nothing while they sat at the table talking fights and the dearth of good Irish fighters on the West Side and the glories of the old days when the wearers of the green dominated the ring, Mickey Walker and Tommy Loughran, Jimmy McLarnin and Billy Conn.

Ma felt better when she heard the door creak open and Vince come in. Vince—she never looked at him or thought about him without adding automatically: Vince is a good boy. Like day and night, she would think, comparing Vince with Eddie. Her youngest was a quiet, serious boy who worked hard and minded his own business. He was making a good record at St. Xavier’s. Well, at least one Finneran was going to finish high school. Vince was her baby, her prize; somehow she had managed to keep him off the streets and out of Eddie’s circle of street-corner admirers who still thought it was something special to be an ex-pug whose name had once flashed from the Garden marquee. Vince never had a dirty mouth like Eddie and his crowd. Vince didn’t call every girl a broad and leer at every passing skirt with heavy-humored obscenities. Vince was good in chemistry. His teacher thought he should specialize in it and become a teacher or a laboratory technician.

Vince came up behind his mother, spun her around and kissed her. “Well, Mom, we beat St. Tom’s, fifty-two-forty-nine, a basket in the last thirty seconds.”

“And I bet I know who made the basket,” his mother said.

“I got lucky,” Vince said. He was tall for his age, nearly six feet, and thin and wiry, only a hundred and forty pounds; he was captain of the school basketball team and an all-around athlete, with speed and timing, though lacking Eddie’s aggressiveness.

It made her feel proud, Pop on the docks, just as her old man had been, and Eddie, who never even finished high school, roaming around up to no good, nobody on either side of the family who even saw four years of high school, and now Vince going through with honors. She looked at the tall, slender boy with the serious eyes and the thoughtful, remote way of wandering in and settling down with a book, apparently unaware of the same old conversation (Did Pop remember Eddie’s fight with Red Collins? and was Marciano going to give it to Walcott again? and could Armstrong have taken Sugar Ray if they had met in ’38 instead of ’43?).

Vince was settling down to some homework when Eddie came over and squatted on the edge of his chair.

“How’s the muscle, kid?”

“No complaints, Eddie.”

“How you feel about the Golden Gloves?”

“The Golden Gloves?”

“Yeah, I entered you.”

“Me in the Golden Gloves? You might’ve asked me, Eddie. You might’ve asked.”

Eddie had been sparring with Vince ever since the kid brother was old enough to hold his hands up. Eddie was proud of the way Vince had learned to jab, to cross with his right and to slip punches.

“Against those amateur punks you’ll be a cinch,” Eddie said. “Just do what I learned you and you’ll be a shoo-in. You’ll have height and reach on ‘em. You c’n stand back ’n pepper ’em.”

“I never said I wanted to box in the Golden Gloves,” Vince-said.

The old man got into it. “You go in there and knock their blocks off, Vinnie m’boy. Show ‘em the Finnerans are scrappers.” With one punch the old man finished off an imaginary opponent.

Ma moved in. “What’s all this talk about scrappers?”

“It’s just the amateurs, Ma. We entered Vinnie in the Gloves.”

“You leave Vince alone,” Ma said. “Vince is gonna amount to something. Vince plays basketball, a nice clean game. Who wants him in the filthy prize fights?”

“It ain’t a prize fight, Ma,” Eddie argued. “A prize fight’s for money. For blood. Three-minute rounds. Small gloves. This is for sport, see? Jus’ three two-minute rounds, gloves like pillows, and the contest (he remembered, like the announcers, not to say “fight”) “is stopped at the first sign of a scratch. Nobody gets hurt in the amateurs.”