By that time we were making too much to risk sending it to the States in those hundred-dollar money orders you could get. We had the problem of how to put the green stuff into such a portable form we could get it back to the States without any questions when we were shipped home.
As if we didn’t have enough problems, old mushmouth Lucius Lee Brevard busted himself up in a jeep after a big evening in the city, and Captain Richard E. Driscoll took over C Company. He was a little blond guy with long eyelashes, chilly blue eyes, and a way of holding himself very erect. He did absolutely nothing for three days. Just when we were beginning to relax, he made his move. He conducted an official inspection without warning. Then he called a company formation. It had been so long since anything like that, the boys felt they were being imposed upon.
We looked like a sad-sack outfit. I don’t think any two guys were dressed alike. I can remember him standing so straight out there in that white-hot sunlight, with the wind kicking up little dust devils in the area.
“At ease!” His voice was thin, but you could hear it. “All officer and enlisted personnel are restricted to the company area until further notice.” He waited quietly until the long groan was over. “No vehicle will leave the motor pool without a proper trip ticket countersigned by me. All personnel will wear the uniform. There will be a complete showdown inspection tomorrow morning at nine. All non-coms in the three top grades will assemble at the orderly room in ten minutes. Dismissed!”
No pep talk. No statement of intent. Just G.I. chicken, right out of the book. We endured a week of it and it didn’t slack off an inch. Driscoll was ruining our income. So Arnie and me had a little meeting, and we called in some of the other guys we knew were all right.
Everybody had ideas. A lot of them were no good. Too many of them were outright defiance and would end you up in the stockade, back to buck private. But some of the ideas were okay. You see, if Driscoll had had a good officer team, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. But he was trying to operate with the same batch of foul-ups Captain Brevard had left him.
Arnie summarized it. “Okay, guys. Get the word around. Whatever you do, you do slow. Whatever can be dropped, you drop it. And follow every order right to the letter. The stuff everybody has been doing as routine, you don’t do it unless you’re ordered to do it.”
Within two weeks the company went to hell. We’d barely managed to scrape along the old way, without bringing the brass down on us. But now nothing worked. A sergeant would take six trucks down to the docks. After he was long overdue to come back with a load, an officer would go down in a jeep to find out what happened. He’d bring the sergeant back to the Captain.
“Sergeant, Lieutenant Quinn reports he found the loaded trucks parked at dockside. Why didn’t you come back?”
“Sir, I was ordered to take the trucks down for the load. Nobody told me where to take the load. I waited for orders, sir.”
“Sergeant, I will give you an order. In the future, every time you go to the docks for cargo, you will bring it back here for warehousing.”
“Yes, sir.”
And two weeks later he was on the carpet again. He had picked up a load in ten trucks and brought it back when he was supposed to take it directly to the sub-depot at Dum Dum.
“But, sir, the Captain ordered me to bring all cargo back here, sir.”
Trucks weren’t gassed because nobody ordered them to be gassed. The mess ran out of chow because nobody ordered it to be requisitioned. There was nothing Driscoll could use as a basis for courts martial, or even company punishment. Everybody obeyed orders — slowly and awkwardly. If it had been just a few guys, maybe Driscoll could have fixed it by transferring them out. But it was the whole company. He got the message all right. He knew that all he had to do was loosen up and we’d get back to our normal low level of efficiency. But he was too stubborn to quit. He tried to be everywhere at once. He couldn’t trust his own lieutenants to follow through. It peeled the weight off him, what little there was to start with. No matter how hard he tried, the battalion brass was on his neck every minute. Seven weeks from the day he took over, he was relieved of command.
It only took a week to break in the next guy, and by then Arnie and me were hack in the money business. By the time we were rotated home on points for discharge in July of ’45, we had comfortable little balances back in the States, and quite a load to take with us. I’d been able, through a lot of breaks and hard work, to get mine in U.S. cash. I carried it home in a hollowed-out wood carving from Java, packed tight. Arnie invested all his in perfect star rubies and sapphires, put them in the bottom of his canteen, poured melted wax on them, and when it had set, filled the canteen with water.
One week after they had turned us into civilians at Fort Dix, we totted up the scores. I had a little better than thirty-eight thousand bucks out of the war, and Arnie had almost thirty-one. But I’d had a start on him.
We’d figured on going into business together, but he didn’t like the ideas I came up with, and I didn’t think much of his. So we split, and I started with the one parking lot, and he worked as a waiter until he found the place where he figured it would make sense to buy in. But we kept in close touch. He married a year before I did, and when I decided to marry Marie, the house next to his was for sale, and it was a nice neighborhood, so we moved in. Marie and Janice get along just fine.
And we’d spent a lot of hours out in his back yard drinking beer and talking over the angles, and talking about the old days. Lately, he’d been trying to talk me into a new deal. He thought he could talk his partners into letting him go to Europe to line up new sources of supply for some of the fancy stuff they serve at his restaurant. He wanted to take a big wad of loose money over and open up two number accounts in Switzerland for us. He’d looked it all up.
“It’ll work like this, Jerry. With a number account, nobody can trace you. It’s against their law. And you can tell the Swiss bank what to invest in. They hold the securities in the number account and bank the dividends. By the time we’re fifty we could have such a big slug of dough over there, we could quit and move to Spain or Italy and live like kings the rest of our lives. What the hell’s the good of just blowing the loose money?”
It sounded pretty good, but I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I was up to about twenty-six thousand in the wall safe, and I didn’t feel exactly easy about turning it all over to him. If he decided to get funny, I couldn’t yell cop, could I?
But the idea of a number account or any other kind of account had gone pretty sour. I lit another cigar but it tasted so bad I threw it into the darkness. I knew I should be hungry, but the thought of eating made my stomach knot up.
It was a little after eleven when I heard Arnie drive in. My house was dark so I knew Marie had gone to bed.
Arnie came out into the yard and said, “Hi, Jerry. Where the hell are you?”
“Over here.”
“Janice said you wanted to see me about something.” He fumbled his way to a beach chair beside mine and sat down.
“How are things going?” I asked him.
“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy. And you?”
I knew I was going to tell him. I didn’t know how to start. I had to tell him how it was at six o’clock when I was helping out at the biggest lot on account of the rush. And a guy came in and I didn’t look at him, just held my hand out for the stub, but he didn’t give me one, and then I looked at him and nearly sat down on the asphalt. He hadn’t changed as much as I’ve changed and Arnie has changed. He hadn’t put on the pounds like we have. He was smiling, and in our past relationship I hadn’t seen him smile much.