The Young Lions (44 page)

"I don't know, Sir."

Colclough's nose started to twitch again. He yawned nervously. "Listen, Whitacre," he said, "don't have any false feelings of loyalty to a man like Ackerman. He was not the type we wanted in the Company, anyway. He was useless as a soldier and he was not trusted by any of the other men in the Company and he was a constant source of trouble from beginning to end. You'd have to be crazy to risk spending your life in jail to protect a man like that. I don't like to see you do it, Whitacre. You're an intelligent man, Whitacre, and you were a success in civilian life and you can be a good soldier, in time, and I want to help you… Now…" And he smiled winningly at Michael.

"Where is Private Ackerman?"

"I'm sorry, Sir," Michael said, "I don't know."

Colclough stood up. "All right," he said quietly. "Get out of here, Jew-lover."

"Yes, Sir," Michael said. "Thank you, Sir."

He saluted and went out.

Brailsford was waiting for Michael outside the mess-hall. He leaned against the building, picking his teeth and spitting. He had grown fatter than ever, but a look of uncertain grievance had set up residence in his features, and his voice had taken on a whining, complaining note since Noah had beaten him. Michael saw him waving to him as Michael came out of the door, heavy with the pork chops and potatoes and spaghetti and peach pie of the noonday meal. He tried to pretend he had not seen the Company Clerk. But Brailsford hurried after him, calling, "Whitacre, wait a minute, will you?" Michael turned and faced Brailsford.

"Hello, Whitacre," Brailsford said. "I've been looking for you."

"What's the matter?" Michael asked.

Brailsford looked around him nervously. Other men were coming out of the mess-hall and passing them in a food-anchored slow flood. "We better not talk here," he said. "Let's take a little walk."

"I have a couple of things to do," Michael said, "before parade…"

"It'll only take a minute." Brailsford winked solemnly. "I think you'll be interested."

Michael shrugged. "O.K.," he said, and walked side by side with the Company Clerk towards the parade-ground.

"This Company," Brailsford said. "I'm getting good and browned off with it. I'm working on a transfer. There's a sergeant at Regiment who's up for a medical discharge, arthritis, and I've been talking to a couple of people over there. This Company gives me the willies…" Michael sighed. He had planned to go back to his bunk and lie down in the precious twenty minutes after dinner.

"Listen," he said, "what's on your mind?"

"Ever since that fight," Brailsford said, "these bastards have been picking on me. Listen, I didn't want to sign my name on that list. It was a joke, see, that's what they told me, the ten biggest guys in the Company, and I was one of them. I got nothing against the Jew. They told me he'd never fight. I didn't want to fight. I'm no fighter. Every kid in town used to lick me, even though I was big. What the hell, that ain't no crime, not being a pugilist, is it?"

"No," said Michael.

"Also," Brailsford said, "I have no resistance. I had pneumonia when I was fourteen, and ever since then I have no resistance. I'm even excused from hikes by the doctor. Try and tell that bastard Rickett that," he said bitterly. "Or any of the others. They treat me like I sold military secrets to the German Army, ever since Ackerman knocked me out. I stood there and took it as long as I could, didn't I? I stood there and he hit me and hit me and I didn't go down for a long time, isn't that true?"

"Yes," said Michael.

"That Ackerman is ferocious," Brailsford said. "He may be small, but he's wild. I don't like to have no dealings with people like that. After all, he gave Donnelly a bloody nose, didn't he? and Donnelly was in the Golden Gloves. What the hell do they expect from me?"

"All right," Michael said. "I know all about that. What's on your mind now?"

"I ain't got no future in this Company, no future at all." Brailsford threw away his toothpick and stared sorrowfully across the dusty parade-ground. "And what I want to tell you is neither have you…"

Michael stopped. "What's that?" he said sharply.

"The only people that've treated me like a human being," Brailsford said, "are you and the Jew that night, and I want to help you. I'd like to help him, too, if I could, I swear I would…"

"Have you heard anything?" Michael asked.

"Yeah," said Brailsford. "They got him at Governor's Island, in New York, last night. Remember, nobody is supposed to know this, it's secret, but I know because I'm in the orderly room all the time…"

"I won't tell anybody." Michael shook his head, thinking of Noah in the hands of the Military Police, wearing the blue fatigues with the big white P for prisoner stencilled on the back, and the guards with the shotguns walking behind him. "Is he all right?"

"I don't know. They didn't say. Colclough gave us all a drink of Three Feathers to celebrate. That's all I know. But that ain't what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to tell you something about yourself." Brailsford paused, obviously sourly pleased with the effect he was going to make in a moment.

"Your application for OCS," he said, "the one you put in a long time ago…"

"Yes?" Michael asked. "What about it?"

"It came back," Brailsford said. "Yesterday. Rejected."

"Rejected?" Michael said dully. "But I passed the Board and I…"

"It came back from Washington, rejected. The other two guys from the Company was passed, but yours is finished. The FBI said no."

"The FBI?" Michael stared sharply at Brailsford to see if this was some elaborate joke that was being played on him.

"What's the FBI got to do with it?"

"They check up, on everybody. And they checked up on you. You're not officer material, they said. You're not loyal."

"Are you kidding me?" Michael asked.

"Why the hell would I want to kid you?" Brailsford asked aggrievedly. "I don't go in for jokes no more. You're not loyal, they said, and that's all there is to it."

"Not loyal." Michael shook his head puzzledly. "What's the matter with me?"

"You're a Red," said Brailsford. "They got it in the record. Dossier, the FBI calls it. You can't be trusted with information that might be of value to the enemy."

Michael stared out across the parade-ground. There were men lying on the dusty patches of grass, and two soldiers were lazily throwing a baseball to each other. Across the parched brown and dead green the flag whipped in a light wind at the top of its pole. Somewhere in Washington at this moment there was a man sitting at a desk, probably looking at the same flag on the wall of his office, and that man had calmly and without remorse written on his record… "Disloyal. Communist affiliation. Not recommended."

"Spain," Brailsford said, "it's got something to do with Spain. I sneaked a look at the report. Is Spain Communist?"

"Not exactly," Michael said.

"You ever been in Spain?"

"No. I helped organize a committee that sent ambulances and blood banks over there."

"They got you," Brailsford said. "They got you cold. They won't tell you, either; they'll just say you don't have the proper qualities of leadership or something like that. But I'm telling you."

"Thanks," Michael said. "Thanks a lot."

"What the hell," Brailsford said; "at least you treat me like a human being. Take a tip. Try and wangle yourself a transfer. I ain't got no future in this here Company, but you got a lot less. Colclough is crazy on the subject of Reds. You'll do KP from now till we go overseas, and you'll be first scout on every advance in combat, and I wouldn't give a damn for your chances of coming out alive."

"Thanks, Brailsford," Michael said. "I think I'll take your advice."

"Sure," Brailsford said. He took out another toothpick and poked between his teeth. He spat, reflectively. "Remember," he said, "I ain't said a word."

Michael nodded and watched Brailsford lounge slowly along the edge of the parade-ground, back to the orderly room in which he had no future.

Far away, thin and metallic over the whispering thousand miles of wire, Michael heard Cahoon's voice saying, "Yes, this is Thomas Cahoon. Yes, I'll accept a collect call from Private Whitacre…"

Michael closed the door of the telephone booth of the Rawlings Hotel. He had made the long trip into town because he did not want to make the call from camp, where somebody might overhear him. "Please limit your call to five minutes," the operator said. "There are others waiting."

"Hello, Tom," he said. "It's not poverty. It's just that I don't have the necessary quarters and dimes."

"Hello, Michael," Cahoon said, sounding very pleased. "It's all right. I'll take it off my income tax."

"Tom," Michael said, "listen carefully. Do you know anybody in the Special Services Division in New York, the people who put on shows and camp entertainments and things like that?"

"Yes," Cahoon said. "Quite a few people. I work with them all the time."

"I'm tired of the infantry," Michael said. "Will you try to arrange a transfer for me? I want to get out of this country. There are Special Services units going overseas every day. Can you get me into one of them?"

There was a slight pause at the other end of the wire. "Oh," Cahoon said, and there was a tinge of disappointment and reproof in his voice. "Of course. If you want it."

"I'll send you a special-delivery letter tonight," Michael said.

"Serial number, rank, and unit designation. You'll need that."

"Yes," said Cahoon. "I'll get right on to it." Still the slight coolness in his voice.

"I'm sorry, Tom," Michael said. "I can't explain why I'm doing this over the phone. It will have to wait until I get there."

"You don't have to explain anything to me," Cahoon said.

"You know that. I'm sure you have your reasons."

"Yes," said Michael. "I have my reasons. Thanks again. Now I have to get off. There's an expectant sergeant here who wants to call the maternity ward of the Dallas City Hospital."

"Good luck, Michael," Cahoon said, and Michael could sense the effort at warmth that Cahoon put into the words, almost convincingly.

"Goodbye. I hope I see you soon."

"Of course," Cahoon said. "Of course you will."

Michael hung up and opened the door of the booth. He stepped out and a large, sad-looking Technical Sergeant, with a handful of quarters, flung himself on to the small bench under the phone.

Michael went out into the street and walked down the saloon-lined pavement, in the misty neon glow, to the USO establishment at the end of the block. He sat at one of the spindly desks among the sprawling soldiers, some of them sleeping in wretched positions in the battered chairs, others writing with painful intensity at the desks.

I'm doing it, Michael thought, as he pulled a piece of paper towards him and opened his fountain pen, I'm doing what I said I'd never do, what none of these weary, innocent boys could ever do. I'm using my friends and their influence and my civilian privileges. Cahoon is right perhaps to be disappointed. It was easy to imagine what Cahoon must be thinking now, sitting near the phone, in his own apartment, over which he had just spoken to Michael. Intellectuals, Cahoon probably was thinking; they're all alike, no matter what they say. When it finally gets down to it, they pull back. When the sound of the guns finally draws close, they suddenly find they have more important business elsewhere…

He would have to tell Cahoon about Colclough, about the man in the office at the FBI, who approved of Franco, but not of Roosevelt, who had your ultimate fate at the tip of his pencil, and against whom no redress, no appeal, was possible. He would have to tell him about Ackerman and the ten bloody fights before the pitiless eyes of the Company. He would have to tell him what it was like to be under the command of a man who wanted to see you killed. Civilians couldn't really understand things like that, but he would have to try to tell. It was the big difference between civilian life and life in a military establishment. An American civilian always could feel that he could present his case to some authorities who were committed to the idea of justice. But a soldier… You lost any hope of appeal to anyone when you put on your first pair of Army shoes. "Tell it to the Chaplain, Bud, and get a TS slip."

He would try to explain it to Cahoon, and he knew Cahoon would try to understand. But even so, at the end, he knew that that little echo of disappointment would never finally leave Cahoon's voice. And, being honest with himself, Michael knew that he would not blame Cahoon, because the echo of disappointment in himself would never fully leave his own consciousness, either.

He started to write the letter to Cahoon, carefully printing out his serial number and unit, feeling, as he wrote the familiar ciphers that would seem so unfamiliar to Cahoon, that he was writing a letter to a stranger.

"I'm afraid this may sound crazy," Captain Lewis read, "and I'm not crazy, and I don't want anyone to think that I am. This is being written in the main reading-room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street at five o'clock in the afternoon. I have a copy of the Articles of War in front of me on the table and a volume of Winston Churchill's biography of the Duke of Marlborough and the man next to me is taking notes from Spinoza's Ethics. I tell you these things to show you that I know what I am doing and that my powers of reason and observation are in no way impaired…"

"In all my time in the Army," Captain Lewis said to the WAC secretary who sat at the next desk, "I never read anything like this. Where did we get this from?"

"The Provost Marshal's office sent it over," the WAC said.

"They want you to go and look at the prisoner and tell them whether you think he's faking lunacy or not."