Author: James Jones
Category: Literature
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When he had his ticket he picked up his bag and stepped away from the window. With his ticket in his hand and a half hour to wait, his intense direction of purpose was ended for the moment, and he relaxed and looked around, orienting himself.
The station, bigger dirtier and older than the other, was terribly crowded. Swirls of people rushed this way at some train call and subsided to rush the other way upon discovering their train was not that one after all. All the waiting seats were filled: seam-faced old men and women, young girls in their teens with squalling babies in their inexperienced arms and wings or rank insignias pinned to their coat lapels, soldiers with legs in casts and crutches leaning against the seat beside them. Great hordes of soldiers rushed here and there, and back, frantic at wasting time that was so precious to them. Harried clerks rebelled against even pseudo-courtesy knowing they could quit tomorrow and become riveters or welders for twice or thrice the money.
Everything was rush and hurry; everything was sick with a war fever that no atabrine or sulfas or penicillin could cure. Johnny saw three decent-looking girls picked up in less than five minutes. Take what you can, the crowd seemed to scream from its red excited face. Soldiers with conspicuous bulges of whiskey bottles under their greatcoats wavered here and there grinning vaguely at crimson-lipped girls who were going to visit brothers or husbands or boyfriends. Sleep with me, the soldiers’ faces seemed to say, sleep with me; I’m going to die in a month or two; sleep with me. Okay, came the unspoken answer from the girls, okay; what the hell; my old man’s at a POE; he’ll be shipped in another week. Life surged frantically, trying to jam twenty years into two months. Sex flared brightly, instinctively trying to recoup its losses to artillery shell and aerial bomb by more and quicker fornication. Sex, its laws and taboos for a long time broken and laughed at in private by the great majority of citizens, now flaunted itself in the open and thumbed its nose at society.
Johnny checked his bag and walked through this hysterical scene toward the nearest pair of MPs. As he came close to them, he stared pointedly at their feet. He had discovered that by doing this he could always make them self-conscious; self-conscious, they lost their sneering toughness of Authority.
“Jesus Christ!’’ he said to the biggest of the pair. “This place is a madhouse. Everybody’s nuts.”
The MP grinned. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. “We got to spend eight hours a day in this joint.” He stared at Johnny’s ribbons a little enviously; in 1943 ribbons were still unusual enough to cause some notice.
Johnny grinned sympathetically at the MP’s remark. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a big stinking deal.”
“Where was you overseas?” the MP asked.
Johnny told him. After the MPs had seen his ribbons, Johnny put on his topcoat. He stood talking to the two MPs for a little while.
“Well, are them Japs tough?” asked the first MP, “or they just . . .” He broke off in the middle and stepped out into the aisle. “Hey, Mack,” he bellowed toughly.
A private who was walking away from them turned around and pointed a finger at himself. “Me?”
“Yeh, you,” sneered the MP. “Who the hell you think I meant? Come over here.”
The private walked slowly to him.
“Let’s see your pass, Mack,” the MP said with a hard look at the private.
The private looked at him with resentment and began to fish in his hip pocket. Finally, he brought out a wallet and took a three-day pass out of it. The MP took the pass and examined it minutely. Then he looked at the private suspiciously.
“You didn’t make this pass out yourself, did you?” he asked threateningly.
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” protested the private. “You can see it’s signed, can’t you?”
“Sure,” sneered the MP. “But you could a signed it yourself.”
“Well I didn’t,” said the private. “For Christ’s sake. I haven’t done nothing. What you jumping on me for?”
“Okay,” said the MP with a belligerent nod. “Button up that collar and tighten your tie. You a sojer not a defense worker.”
“You goddam MPs,” said the private. “You put them brassards on, and you know nobody can do nothing.” He finished buttoning his collar and tightening his tie and reached for his pass.
“Lissen you,” said the MP, who had extended the pass but now drew it back; his voice was elaborately indifferent. “Don’t give me none of your lip. Or I’ll tear up this goddam pass and run you in.”
The private looked at him for a moment. “Okay,” he said. The MP handed him the pass. The private walked off muttering to himself.
“Tell me something,” Johnny asked the MP genially. “What made you stop that guy?”
“Ah,” said the big MP. “You can most always tell a guy who ain’t got a pass. He’ll try to give you the go by instead of walking right past you. You get to know it after a while.”
“Oh,” said Johnny with a nod of understanding.
Another soldier came up to the MP. “Where’s the USO around this rat race?” he asked.
The MP pointed up the stairs to a tiny sign in one corner, and the soldier walked off toward it. Johnny watched him for a moment and then turned back to the MPs.
“You can always tell a ree-croot,” said the second MP.
“I don’t know why them guys want to go to the USO,” said the first MP. “The coffee is rotten, and the doughnuts is just plain dough.”
All three laughed heartily at this sally. Johnny stood and talked casually with them for several minutes. Then, his little stratagem completed, he walked away. His watch said he had twenty minutes more to wait. He decided to follow the other soldier to the USO. He walked up the steps toward the tiny sign, pleased with himself and inwardly laughing at the MPs and the excitement of breaking the law. He took off his topcoat and slung it over his arm. He could stay in that station for days and not be bothered by that pair of MPs.
The USO was crowded with soldiers drinking coffee, soldiers eating doughnuts, soldiers swallowing tiny cheese sandwiches. They all looked alike and they were dressed alike and they all gobbled doughnuts alike. There were four women behind the counter. Three of them were middle-aged and fat and gray-haired; the other was a young slim woman. Johnny watched them sweating and scurrying hurriedly about to see that all the boys got coffee and whatever else they had to offer.
Three Dear Moms and one Young Matron with lieutenant overseas, he thought. Dispensing good cheer measured out in coffee cups. Ministering to the lower classes. Three cheers for Dear Mom and the Old Homestead.
Johnny felt intensely irritated as he looked around the little room. The counter was covered with a thin sand of spilled sugar, was sticky with slopped coffee. The soldiers sat around at the tiny tables or leaned here and there against the wall. The women laughed and talked from behind their red faces and passed the coffee and doughnuts across the counter. It seemed as if on the two sides of the counter were two different worlds. The women handed down the coffee and doughnuts through a curtain of clouds beyond which they could not see into the nether world of the army. If they could have dissipated the obscuring clouds, they would not have done so. They supplied the coffee to the army, and insisted upon seeing the picture they wanted to see: happy young men with full bellies rushing off joyously to fight a war.
The soldiers, in their world, if they thought about it at all, saw only free coffee and doughnuts. The two worlds on different sides of the counter were so alien that neither could see into the other. The soldiers drank the coffee and ate the doughnuts because they were there and they were free, and thought no more about it unless it was to vaguely resent this disgusting cheerfulness. They went back to whatever miserable life they were living without being happily, or even unhappily, full.
It was wetly hot in the smell crowded room, and the soldiers between gulps of coffee wiped the sweat from their foreheads. When Johnny entered the room, it was with the intention of getting a cup of coffee. After watching the sce
ne for several moments, he turned and started out. It would have been a personal degradation for him to accept a cup of coffee from these women and under these circumstances. The scene he saw made him intensely angry. If the coffee had been offered as coffee, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but this coffee was intended to be more than simple prosaic coffee. This coffee was offered not only as a reason for fighting the war but as a reason for not being bitter about it. This coffee was like Salvation Army coffee, where the coffee is blessed of God and offered as a bait to salvation. This USO coffee, it seemed to him, was offered as a solution to the problems of the war and also of the post-war world by the women who shoveled it out, and by the advertisers was portrayed Dear Mom to sell bars, refrigerators, commodes, shoes, shirts, spectacles, liquor, houses, brassieres, radios, and menstruation cloths. This USO coffee was offered by Dear Mom with apparent pride as her contribution to “the war effort,” Johnny could not stomach it.
As Johnny reached the door, one of the women trying futilely to serve half a dozen hands at once saw him and walked down the counter toward him. “Do you want something, Corporal?” she called. She seemed proud of her knowledge of rank. “Don’t be bashful. Jump right in like everybody else.” Her gray hair was beginning to look straggly, and a few drops of sweat stood out on her wrinkled forehead. Her face opened in a sweet motherly smile as Johnny turned back from the door.
“Don’t you wish a cup of coffee?” she asked him.
Johnny looked at her for a moment. She seemed to be the living counterpart of the magazine advertisement. (“Gosh, Mom. Gee, Mom. This sure is a swell war, Mom. I wish I was home so I could play with old Towser, Mom.”)
“No, thank you,” Johnny said. “I don’t want anything. I just came in to watch the fun.”
The gray-haired woman looked puzzled. “Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?” she asked. “We’ve got some mighty fine coffee.”
“No, thank you,” Johnny said, looking into her face with dead eyes. “I never drink coffee: It rusts your stomach. Do you have any whiskey? I’d enjoy a drink of whiskey . . . I’d even take rum, seeing how hard whiskey is to get nowadays,” he added.
The woman laughed a forced tinny laugh. “Now, now,” she chided jokingly. “Why does a healthy young man like you want to drink whiskey? Have a cup of coffee instead, Corporal.”
“Don’t you have any whiskey?”
“Of course not,” she said in an irritated voice. “We can’t serve intoxicating drinks here. We do all we can to make the boys happy, but we don’t want to aid them in ruining themselves.”
“Oh,” said Johnny. He stared at the woman solemnly. “I didn’t mean to insult the USO. I’ve never been in a USO before, you see, so I didn’t know. I just got back from Guadalcanal, and I’ve been in the hospital for ten months.
“Besides,” he added modestly, “My first sergeant was a Regular Army soldier. He was neurotic. He made me swear an oath that I’d nearer go into a USO before he would sign my evacuation papers.”
The gray-haired woman looked at him with puzzlement for a moment. She was not sure whether he was trying to ridicule her or not. At his mention of Guadalcanal, she immediately glanced at his left shirt pocket. The poor boy must have been through a lot of terrible experiences. She smiled at him again, at ease once more, and showing him she was not angry at what he had said to her.
“I saw your ribbons,” she said, smiling. “Tell me what they mean. What’s that one?” she asked, pointing to the Purple Heart.
Johnny stared at her for a moment with expressionless eyes set in a deadpan face. “Well-l-l,” he said suddenly, in the expansive manner of a Rotarian explaining his button to a non-Rotarian, “that’s the Purple Heart. You get that one for being wounded or killed. . . . I wasn’t killed,” he added; “I was only wounded.”
The gray-haired woman laughed. “Where were you wounded?”
“I was wounded,” he said after an expressionless pause, “in the leg. A terrible wound. They had to amputate my leg four inches above the knee,” he said proudly. He leaned forward confidentially. “I’m wearing an artificial leg now,” he said in a low voice.
“And this one,” he said, pointing to the Pacific-Asiatic ribbon, “is the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got that for capturing a hundred and twenty-two Japs single-handed. Maybe you saw my picture in the paper? I’m the one that’s going to make war bond tours for the rest of the war.”
“No, no,” said the gray-haired woman excitedly. “I didn’t see it. What paper was it in?”
“Oh,” he said with a magnanimous gesture. “It was in all the New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Miami papers.”
“Wait just a minute,” said the gray-haired woman breathlessly. “I want the other girls to meet you. You’re the first real hero we’ve had come into our little place.”
“No, no, no,” he protested. “Don’t call them. I’m sort of shy about talking about myself. Besides, I have to go and endorse some soap advertisements. My train’s about due in, and I have to find a shot of whiskey before I leave. I’ll need some morale on the train.”
Johnny walked to the door. A couple of soldiers who had been standing behind him grinned hugely. “You see?” Johnny said from the door. “If you’d had some whiskey, I’d have stayed and talked to the girls.
“The USO,” he said, “ought to give the boys what they want. Whiskey and a nice young girl to spend the night with are much better for the morale than coffee and doughnuts.” He turned and walked out of the place quickly before the woman had a chance to answer. Her eyes and mouth were open as she began to realize what he had said.
Johnny went over to the station restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. He sneaked a shot of whiskey into the coffee from the half-pint bottle he always carried in his hip pocket. He felt a little ashamed of himself for deriding the old lady, and feeling ashamed made him more angry. A man bitches up his life in the goddamned war and then he is supposed to come home meekly and take his cup of coffee and his doughnut in the USO and be cheerful, happy, and satisfied. You were supposed to give your life, the only one you had, to straighten out some situation a lot of dimbrains had botched up twenty years before—just so they could go and do it all over again. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings; his mouth had just opened and the words came out. He was as surprised as she was. These people played games with their lives; they imagined a picture of themselves and played out the part they had imagined for themselves. And who had undertaken the vast job of providing for them the picture they felt called upon to mimic with its tremendous scope and far-reaching powerful implications? and for what? If Dear Mom was only kept busy at home, she wouldn’t have time or energy to try living up to her archetype in the advertisements. These citizens could play out their mummery all their lives—at least until the deathbed scenes when the questions were asked; but you can’t go on playing a game and imagining a picture when you’re in combat. There the play is for keeps, and you learn it quick enough.
He sat in the restaurant amid the clank of dishes and the smell of rancid frying fat and drank his coffee and whiskey. The floor was sloppy and the counter wet and sticky. The waitresses yelled over his head, and the customers complained, paid, and left. He absorbed the panorama of the restaurant feeling mean and bitter. Everybody hated their jobs and everybody else. The restaurant seemed to be a parallel to his own life, a squalid reeking fetor. A pleasant picture. He gulped the reminder of his coffee and whiskey and got out of there quickly, intending to wait the remaining ten minutes at the track. It was not too great as stretch of the imagination to suppose that the old lady might call the MPs down on him. And he couldn’t afford to be picked up now. He wandered out to the track where his train would come in and stood there, his fists jammed deep in his pockets, staring at nothing with a bitter scowl on his face.
At the track, there were a number of people already lined up waiting for the train. Some of them looked like they had been waiting for hours. When the train pulled into th
e track, the line lengthened behind Johnny until he could not see the end of it. Everyone had waited quietly though nervously, but as soon as the train stopped, the line broke. There was a sudden wave of frenzied excitement as everyone in the line rushed the various vestibules. The agitation possessed all the people waiting, tensing their muscles and heightening their nervous perception.
Johnny was near one of the vestibules and bag in hand, his body moving without his conscious command, he grabbed the handhold and jumped with nervous quickness almost before the train had stopped. He was the first one in that vestibule, and as he entered the day coach, he could hear a bedlam of noise at the place where he entered as a crowd of people tried to force their way past other people. For a moment, he felt a sense of degradation at having allowed himself to charge and jostle like one of a herd of frightened cattle. The impulse had been almost hypnotic, a fear, a feeling that he must get on the train. And yet none of them would have been any the worse if they had not gotten on. It was humiliating. Like a bunch of wild animals. They all seemed as if they were afraid of the thought of having to do nothing but sit for a couple of hours, as if they were afraid to death to be alone with their own minds.
He grinned to himself and selected one of the few empty seats. If he didn’t get on first, somebody would beat him to it. The coach was almost full when it pulled in, and the passengers going on through Memphis already had their seats. They sat looking out of the windows at the yelling pushing throng with disdainful amusement and contempt at such antics. Johnny looked once at the young woman sitting beside him and then looked away; there was nothing worth having there. The young woman was pasty-faced, and her skin was greasy with old sweat; her eyes looked exhausted. She had evidently been riding a long time. She wore a captain’s bars pinned to her coat, and she was holding a dirty uncomfortable-looking little baby. Probably she had been to see her husband, Johnny thought. This war sure was hard on the kids.