Only I reckon he done been holding it all so long he just had to spill it.
1938
STEVE FISHER
YOU’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER ME
Steve (Stephen Gould) Fisher (1912-1980) was born in Marine City, Illinois, and joined the Marines at the age of sixteen, moving to California when he was discharged in 1932. His first short story had been published when he was thirteen, so he soon moved to New York to write for pulps, producing hundreds of stories, mostly mysteries but also stories about war, sex, and romance, graduating to the better-paying “slicks” such as Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post. When Hollywood money looked more enticing, he went to Los Angeles and became an equally prolific writer for motion pictures, with fifty-three screenplays to his credit, including Johnny Angel (1945, with Frank Gruber), Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1946), Song of the Thin Man (1947), and Cornell Woolrich’s I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948). Fisher was an even more prolific writer for television, producing more than 200 scripts for such long-running series as McMillan and Wife, Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch, Cannon, and 77 Sunset Strip, among many others.
What had been a moderately successful career changed in 1941 when he wrote I Wake Up Screaming, which was adapted in the same year into what is generally regarded as the first film noir. With the action moving from the novel’s Hollywood setting of palm trees and sunshine to the dark alleys and nightclubs of New York City, it starred Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Carole Landis. It was remade twelve years later as Vicki, this time set entirely in California, and starred Jeanne Crain, Elliott Reid, Jean Peters, and Richard Boone.
“You’ll Always Remember Me” was first published in the March 1938 issue of Black Mask.
I could tell it was Pushton blowing the bugle and I got out of bed tearing half of the bedclothes with me. I ran to the door and yelled, “Drown it! Drown it! Drown it!” and then I slammed the door and went along the row of beds and pulled the covers off the rest of the guys and said:
“Come on, get up. Get up! Don’t you hear Pushton out there blowing his stinky lungs out?”
I hate bugles anyway, but the way this guy Pushton all but murders reveille kills me. I hadn’t slept very well, thinking of the news I was going to hear this morning, one way or the other, and then to be jarred out of what sleep I could get by Pushton climaxed everything.
I went back to my bed and grabbed my shoes and puttees and slammed them on the floor in front of me, then I began unbuttoning my pajamas. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask the guys in this wing. They wouldn’t know anything. When they did see a paper all they read was the funnies. That’s the trouble with Clark’s. I know it’s one of the best military academies in the West and that it costs my old man plenty of dough to keep me here, but they sure have some dopey ideas on how to handle kids. Like dividing the dormitories according to ages. Anybody with any sense knows that it should be according to grades because just take for instance this wing. I swear there isn’t a fourteen-year-old punk in it that I could talk to without wanting to push in his face. And I have to live with the little pukes.
So I kept my mouth shut and got dressed, then I beat it out into the company street before the battalion got lined up for the flag raising. That’s a silly thing, isn’t it? Making us stand around with empty stomachs, shivering goose pimples while they pull up the flag and Pushton blows the bugle again. But at that I guess I’d have been in a worse place than Clark’s Military Academy if my pop hadn’t had a lot of influence and plenty of dollars. I’d be in a big school where they knock you around and don’t ask you whether you like it or not. I know. I was there a month. So I guess the best thing for me to do was to let the academy have their Simple Simon flag-waving fun and not kick about it.
I was running around among the older guys now, collaring each one and asking the same question: “Were you on home-going yesterday? Did you see a paper last night? What about Tommy Smith?” That was what I wanted to know. What about Tommy Smith.
“He didn’t get it,” a senior told me.
“You mean the governor turned him down?”
“Yeah. He hangs Friday.”
That hit me like a sledge on the back of my head and I felt words rushing to the tip of my tongue and then sliding back down my throat. I felt weak, like my stomach was all tied up in a knot. I’d thought sure Tommy Smith would have had his sentence changed to life. I didn’t think they really had enough evidence to swing him. Not that I cared, particularly, only he had lived across the street and when they took him in for putting a knife through his old man’s back —that was what they charged him with — it had left his two sisters minus both father and brother and feeling pretty badly.
Where I come in is that I got a crush on Marie, the youngest sister. She’s fifteen. A year older than me. But as I explained, I’m not any little dumb dope still in grammar school. I’m what you’d call bright.
So that was it; they were going to swing Tommy after all, and Marie would be bawling on my shoulder for six months. Maybe I’d drop the little dame. I certainly wasn’t going to go over and take that for the rest of my life.
I got lined up in the twelve-year-old company, at the right end because I was line sergeant. We did squads right and started marching toward the flagpole. I felt like hell. We swung to a company front and halted.
Pushton started in on the bugle. I watched him with my eyes burning. Gee, I hate buglers, and Pushton is easy to hate anyway. He’s fat and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got a body like a bowling ball and a head like a pimple. His face looks like yesterday’s oatmeal. And does he think being bugler is an important job! The little runt struts around like he was Gabriel, and he walks with his buttocks sticking out one way and his chest the other.
I watched him now, but I was thinking more about Tommy Smith. Earlier that night of the murder I had been there seeing Marie and I had heard part of Tommy’s argument with his old man. Some silly thing. A girl Tommy wanted to marry and the old man couldn’t see it that way. I will say he deserved killing, the old grouch. He used to chase me with his cane. Marie says he used to get up at night and wander around stomping that cane as he walked.
Tommy’s defense was that the old boy lifted the cane to bean him. At least that was the defense the lawyer wanted to present. He wanted to present that, with Tommy pleading guilty, and hope for an acquittal. But Tommy stuck to straight denials on everything. Said he hadn’t killed his father. The way everything shaped up the state proved he was a drunken liar and the jury saw it that way.
Tommy was a nice enough sort. He played football at his university, was a big guy with blond hair and a ruddy face, and blue eyes. He had a nice smile, white and clean like he scrubbed his teeth a lot. I guess his old man had been right about that girl, though, because when all this trouble started she dropped right out of the picture, went to New York or somewhere with her folks.
I was thinking about this when we began marching again; and I was still thinking about it when we came in for breakfast about forty minutes later, after having had our arms thrown out of joint in some more silly stuff called setting-up exercises. What they won’t think of! As though we didn’t get enough exercise running around all day!