When it was announced over the PA system the Dominicans’d won, the troops whooped and jitterbugged in the bleachers. I didn’t fault em. In the lingo of deeds, their champions had proclaimed their honor.
45
Mister JayMac wanted Darius to drive us to the infirmary, but he was nowhere to be found. So Major Dexter, who’d finally shed his umpire’s gear, offered to drive us around the field and through the T-square grids of the camp’s Quartermasters’ 700-series buildings to the infirmary.
“I can’t leave Darius out here,” Mister JayMac told Major Dexter. “Yall wouldn’t enlist him, would you?”
“This is a training camp, not a recruitment station.”
“I know what it is, Major. I asked if somebody out here’d accept his papers and put him in uniform.”
“Not if you don’t want us to, Mr McKissic.”
“Well I don’t.”
“Then you’ve nothing to worry about, sir.”
“If yall find him out here later, will you truss him up and hold him till I can fetch him home?”
“Yessir.”
“Well you’d better.”
Major Dexter climbed aboard the Brown Bomber and took us on a quick rickety jaunt to the infirmary.
The infirmary looked like every other bleached crackerbox structure at the camp, except it had a concrete loading dock for ambulances and supply trucks. It roosted across the road from an asphalt lot next to the Quartermaster Depot. When we arrived, Henry stood under the dock’s shake-shingled awning staring across the road at ten columns of ten men each standing in that lot in rubber sheaths-sacks, I guess-as smooth as lamb’s skin but as black as auto tires.
An NCO in a wide-brimmed hat stood in front of this whacko detail (buckra and buffalo together, whites and blacks, but more paleskins than coloreds) shouting, “Hop it, gentlemen, hop it!” so the bodies in those sacks pogoed with a floppy sighing sound-like the painful inflation of a hundred huge balloons with a hundred wheezing bicycle pumps. I beheld this show in rubbernecking disbelief.
General Holway’s command car had apparently come and gone, and when the Bomber pulled into the ambulance dock, Henry paid us no heed. He kept staring across the road, at the encondomed GIs hopping there like big vulcanized fleas. Or maybe he was staring beyond them, to the ball field where Charlie Snow’d leapt, snarled his spikes, and crumpled headlong. In fact, Henry didn’t give a cold hoot about the jumpingjacks across “K” Street. Mister JayMac rushed past Henry into the infirmary to see about his center fielder.
Muscles asked Major Dexter, “What in Uncle Sam’s army’s going on over there-a punishment detail?”
“Nosir, they’re volunteers.”
“For what, sunstroke?”
“Nosir, a Quartermaster experiment to test the resistance of GI clothing to the natural corrosives in human sweat. Our men in Alaska, the Pacific, North Africa, even here at home, need reliable clothes, and our scientists need reliable data.”
“Lord God,” Muscles said, “they’ll fall out in this heat.”
“They’ll fall out only when they’ve received the order to fall out,” Major Dexter said.
“I meant they’ll faint.” Muscles replied. “They won’t need an order to do it. No wonder yall’ve stuck em across from the infirmary-save you a few steps.”
“Mr Musselwhite, they’re wearing shorts in those sacks, just their skivvies, not full battle dress.”
“I don’t follow this, Major, not atall.”
“We’re collecting sweat. The sweat that pools in those sacks we gather into vials. Later, we apply it-the sweat, I mean-to the various fabrics proposed for use in GI clothing. The Quartermaster Corps’ scientists measure its effects on the fabrics in question.”
I wondered what the hell Mister JayMac’d found out about Snow, and just then he came out of the infirmary with a major in a white coat. Mister JayMac and the major spoke to Henry on the emergency platform. After they’d talked, Mister JayMac slumped against the wall and put his face in his hands. Henry came to the bus. He put his hands on the Bomber’s roof, just above the door, and arched his body over the gap between the bus and the concrete platform.
When Major Dexter levered open the bus’s door, Henry spoke so we all could hear. “Mr Snow has just passed.” (Passed.) Then Henry sort of hung there, bridging the Bomber to the squat ashen building in which our dead teammate lay.
Charlie Snow, R.I.P.
“It would’ve pissed him off to’ve quit with a whole inning left to go,” Turkey Sloan said.
“Anyone here who thinks they know exactly how Charlie Snow felt and thought doesn’t know the first thing,” Muscles said. “Anyway, we have to do what our own consciences say, not what we think the dead would have us do.”
“Spose they overlap?” Buck Hoey said.
Henry shoved himself away from the bus, strode across the dock to Mister JayMac, and led him into the infirmary, into the cheapjack corridors of Snow’s last passage. I began to cry. Across the road, the NCO directing the volunteer jumping jacks in their rubber sacks shouted, “… two, three, halt!” All the paid perspirers stopped on cue; four or five of em dropped to the asphalt from fatigue or fever.
“Rise from your knees and hoist your sack along with you!” the NCO shouted. “Don’t spill a drop!”
The sergeant’s voice rang in me the way my mother’s or FDR’s or Jimmy Durante’s would-I recognized it. It had the familiarity of a sadistic high school teacher’s. The sergeant pulled his hat off, wiped his neck and forehead, and pivoted towards the Bomber with a hot, curious face, amazed that till now he hadn’t even noticed our bus.
I recognized the topkick. I’d seen him-briefly-in an upstairs cubicle of The Wing & Thigh on Penticuff Strip, the startled mug of a guy caught out on secret holiday. I’d seen that face somewhere else too-namely, aboard the train that’d brought me from Tenkiller to Highbridge. The face belonged to my ravager in the Pullman car lavatory, Sergeant Pumphrey. I got on my knees on my seat and stuck my head through the window facing the parking lot.
“You filthy bugger!” I cried. “You filthy damn bugger!” No stammer, just outrage.
“For mercy’s sake, Boles, mind your manners,” Curriden said. “We’re guests out here.”
“You thief!” I shouted. “You p-p-pervert!”
A hundred dripping men in a hundred rubber sacks looked from Pumphrey to the Brown Bomber and back again. Pumphrey, DI hat in hand, gaped at me hanging out my window, nothing in his flat muddy eyes but bewilderment and a dull lack of awareness. He just didn’t know me, either from the train or from The Wing & Thigh.
“P-P-Pumphrey, you sh-sh-shitass, you owe me f-f-f-fifty b-bucks!” I shouted at him. “You owe me…” Because I didn’t know how to figure the finer, or cruder, points of his debt, I couldn’t say what he owed. I finished, “Pumphrey, you owe me!”
Pumphrey put his hat back on and adjusted its chin strap. He pointed a finger at me. “Go easy, kiddo. Wrought up that way, you run a real ugly mouth.”
But I’d abandoned the window. I hurried up the Bomber’s aisle and out its open door. No one had the sense or the speed to stop me. I rounded the bus’s front end and trotted across “K” Street to get in Sergeant Pumphrey’s face. He’d magically conjured, or freed from a canvas belt, a weapon-a billy or a swagger stick-and as I approached him, I eyed that stick as a part of Pumphrey needing amputation.
“Fifty dollars!” I screeched. “Fifty dollars and my voice back!”
“Your voice back?” Pumphrey spread his arms, crouched, and waggled his swagger stick. I had the feeling everybody near enough to see me had begun to think me utterly deranged. “You stole my voice,” I ranted. “You poked it down so f-far I can’t find it. Give me back my voice!” I feinted this way and that, and Pumphrey moved in agitated reaction to my feints, his baton swinging like a hand-held mine detector.