“Hell, I’ll stick if you want me to,” Ingram said, unscrewing the back plate of the radio. “But a white man and a colored man traveling together attract attention. You know that. You and your woman will have a better chance without me.”
“Okay, okay,” Earl said shortly. “We’ll split up.”
“I can go on foot,” Ingram said. “Hop the bus on the highway and be on my way. You and your woman shouldn’t have any trouble getting out in the car.”
“Okay, goddamit, we’ll split up.”
“We going to meet at the World Series?” Ingram asked with a faint smile.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Earl said, rubbing his forehead. “We’ll drink some beer and I’ll tell you what to watch for.” Why did he say that? he thought. Why keep piling up lies? “What the hell are you doing with the radio?” he said abruptly.
Ingram had arranged a number of parts in a neat pattern on the table. “Maybe I can fix it,” he said.
“Yeah? What do you know about radios?”
“Can’t hurt to try, can it? These old sets were made good and solid. Like those old dollar Ingersoll watches. You drop ’em and they usually work better afterwards.” He peered into the radio, puckering up his lips in a soundless whistle.
“No good, eh?” Earl watched him closely, sick and weary with a new fear: he didn’t want Ingram to know they’d lied to him. Let him find out when the cops grabbed him. Not here... “It’s too busted-up, eh?” he said, unable to keep the hope from his voice.
Ingram glanced at him. “Maybe, maybe not.” He went back to work. “If the rectifier tube is shot, there’s no chance. But it might just be the speaker leads are pulled loose. Something like that.”
“Where’d you learn about radios?”
“In the Army. I was in a communications section.”
“Communications, eh?” Earl put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match with a flip of his thumbnail. “That was a soft touch, I guess.”
“No, sir. They worked us four hours on and four hours off for three days at a stretch. That was overseas, though. In the States it wasn’t bad.”
“Where were you overseas?”
“England. Near a town called Weymouth most of the time. But we got to London regularly.”
Earl said dryly, “You call England overseas?”
Ingram grinned. “You show me a way to get there on dry land.”
Earl stood and limped back to the windows, savoring a sudden, stimulating anger; it was a sustaining emotion, a hot thing that burned away all the doubts that had been nagging at him. The wise-cracking about the Army had triggered it; that’s the way they all acted when they forgot their place. Puffed up, slapping your back and offering you drinks out of their bottle. Crowding close to you... Earl knew this as a general truth, but he wasn’t interested in general truths now; he was suddenly aware of a big truth; it was all right for him to hate Ingram. It was a responsibility, in fact, doubly important since Ingram had done him a favor. That was the essential thing. You treated people the way they ought to be treated — regardless of how they treated you. That’s what took guts.
The thoughts beat warmly in his mind, suffusing him with a sense of virtue and confidence. It was okay to lie to Ingram; it was a duty. Earl wasn’t sure how he had reached these conclusions, but their truth couldn’t be denied; they rang vigorously through his whole body, drowning out the tiny voices of doubt and guilt.
“So how was it overseas?” he said quietly, standing rigid and tense with his back to Ingram. “How was the stuff in England, Sambo?”
“We didn’t have it too bad.” Ingram bent over the radio, frowning intently at one of the tubes. “We lived in barracks, and the CO was pretty good about passes.”
“It sounds nice and cozy,” Earl said.
“The Army’s the Army,” Ingram said. “Good deal or bad deal, it’s still the Army. You know that.”
Earl watched him with narrowed eyes. “You must have liked England, I guess. They went for you over there, I heard.”
“The people were real nice.” Ingram laughed. “You ask ’em for directions and they’d take your arm and walk halfway to where you were going, saying, ‘You cawn’t miss it, old chap, really you cawn’t!’” Ingram shook his head. “They talk like that, no kidding.”
“You’ve got the limey accent down pretty good. Somebody must have taught it to you.”
“I heard enough of it, I guess.” Earl limped back toward the sofa, staring at Ingram’s bent head. “You got along fine with the people, didn’t you?”
“Most of them were friendly to soldiers. You know how that is. They’d show us pictures of their sons off in Burma or some place, ask questions about America.”
“You must have given ’em an earful,” Earl said.
Ingram shrugged and managed a smile. He could feel Earl’s anger beating at him like a blast furnace. What the hell was wrong with him? What had started him up like this?
“Well, how about the people, Sambo?” Earl said. “I’d like to know about them. I never saw anything but mud and Germans.”
“Well, they were friendly and nice, like I told you.” He knew now what Earl was getting at, and an old primitive caution stirred in his blood. “I didn’t get to know any of them real well, but they were always nice to us.”
“You didn’t get to know any of them, eh?”
“Well, I knew one fellow pretty well,” Ingram said. “Not for long, but that didn’t seem to matter. He was the kind of guy you understood right away, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m dumb, Sambo. I don’t know what you mean.”
“I met him in a bar one night in London,” Ingram said. “He was just standing there with a beer and we got to talking.”
“You went into the bars with them, eh?”
Ingram looked steadily at him. “That’s right. We used the same toilets, too. That’s what we were fighting for. Democracy. Community crap houses.”
“So what about him?” Earl’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What about him, Sambo?”
“He was from Scotland,” Ingram said, still staring steadily at the anger in Earl’s face. “He was about sixty. He liked music. He asked me if I’d like to go to a concert with him the next day. I said fine. We went to the concert. Next day he took me and a buddy of mine around London. Out to neighborhoods where there were row after row of little brick houses with flower gardens in front of them. Then he took us to Piccadilly, and then to the East End where the people were so poor they never used up their Scotch and gin rations. All the little pubs had Scotch and gin. He knew a lot about history. He told us that an Englishman named Disraeli once said, ‘The good things in life are for the few — the very few.’ The Scotchman didn’t like that idea. He dropped us at Paddington Station and we caught the train back to our outfit.” Ingram let his penknife fall to the table. “That’s the story of the people of England.”
“Well, why did he pick you up? Was he queer?”
“You couldn’t prove it by me.”
“And how about the girls? How about the shack jobs, Sambo?”
Ingram shifted his eyes from Earl’s face. He couldn’t face the senseless anger there. Why? he thought bitterly. Why should I have to apologize for what my body did ten years ago? “I’ll tell you this much,” he said, suddenly contemptuous of himself and contemptuous of Earl. “I never took anything in England that wasn’t offered to me. On a platter.”
“A great war you had. You weren’t in the Army, you were in heaven.”
“They gave me a soldier suit and put me on a ship. What was I supposed to do? Jump overboard and swim to the front lines with my rifle in my mouth?”