I had two grenades with me, and unhooked them and laid them on the bank. Then I slid down into the ditch. Then I let the first one go on a high lob, then heaved the other. In a second or two I heard them hit the mud. Then a kraut wailed: “Jesus Christus — zurück!”
But before they could hop zurück the grenades went off and Irish confetti began falling all around. I came out shooting and they did. Something hit my leg. Then I heard shots from behind me. Then came a yell, “Kamerad,” and then my ration detail was backing six krauts onto the road. One of them didn’t back fast enough and a GI snapped up his gun butt against his chin. He went down almost on top of me and his eyeballs rolled on the road. They helped me up, anyway to stand on one leg, and through a GI that could speak a little German I found it was an outfit that had been sent out to booby-trap sheep, and had been cut off. I sent them back to headquarters under guard of two GI’s, and counted up. There were three krauts lying there, besides the one with his face bashed in, and the boys said I had got them. There were two of my own men. That left me four. I had Hayden put me in the jeep and led on. We picked up the right road, a little way across country, but by the time we got to my CP, I knew I wasn’t leading any advance that day. My leg was soaked in blood, and when one of my captains had me carried in a stable, and cut my pants away, he took command and ordered me back. It was a bad ride, and not only on account of the truck bumping me. My two GI’s lay heavy on my heart. They kept on setting heavy, through the grand tour I made of the hospitals in France, England, and all over, and even after I hit Stark Hospital in Charleston. I think they would have stayed with me, if it hadn’t been for Captain Barnham, one of the doctors there. He took a shine to me and headed off my transfer, so he could talk to me and put a little common sense, as he called it, to work. Pretty soon he had me buy a little car and take trips around, to Savannah and Atlanta and Miami and around, to get my mind off myself. Savannah I liked. It had been built right, by old Oglethorpe nearly two hundred years ago, so the parking problem was all taken care of, by “neutral ground,” as they called it then and call it now, and the traffic problem, by a lot of little two-block parks, that scatter the bottlenecks, and the street-name problem by vertical posts, that you can see in your headlights, so you never have to stop and stare and wonder like you do in other places. The hotels had real food and real drinks and real service, and pretty soon I was slipping over there a lot.
All that time, in the Army, in the hospital, and driving around, I didn’t think about my life, but at the same time it was there. I don’t know if I was bitter about it, but I wasn’t any too sold on it either, because I felt it wasn’t all my fault. I had been a heel, but I hadn’t wanted to be a heel, and I thought if things had broken different, I might not have been. Somewhere along the line, though, in the late summer of 1945, when the weather was getting a little cooler and Dixie was a place to be, I began to feel differently. I don’t know what it was that woke me up, maybe seeing colored people in all the jobs that had once been held by whites, in the hotels, garages, and other places I’d be, even Cremo College, as they call it, where they make the cigars. Understand, if they could get away with it, I was all for it. It certainly showed they were as good mechanics as the next if they were allowed to be, and proved if they could get that kind of work they could do it. But it tipped me off it wasn’t the same world as the one I had left. Ever since I’d been a man, in the 1930’s, there’d been no work to do, and what had been human beings were let sink until they were worse than slaves, they were rats. And down under everything else, that was what had made me bitter, made me feel that being a heel was something I couldn’t help. But if even colored field hands in the Carolinas could get jobs grinding valves and fixing starter teeth, that made me wonder if things might not, from now on, be different.
Then I began to hear about the new cars, and planes with pressurized cabins, and trains with vestibules you couldn’t see, except on curves, and boats with Diesel-electric stuff that hadn’t even been dreamed of before. It was my kind of world, something that spoke to what Hannah had called my mechanic’s soul. Then I got a load of the frozen food, and for ten minutes I saw things, and couldn’t fight them back. I mean, I saw something that made sense, and would fit in with my life, and let me get it back on the track, so it meant something. It seemed to me, if you could freeze stuff this new way, and have it taste good and be fresh, you could deliver dinner for a whole family with no home cooking necessary, except boiling of vegetables, and no washing up afterwards. A picture of the whole thing popped in front of my mind: central kitchens, to be located in each city I went into, where stuff would be cooking all day long, but not for any rush-hour trade, as everything would go in to freeze as soon as it was done; classified storage rooms, where everything would pack in portion units; assemblers, to work like department-store shoppers, and put each meal together in its container, with the dishes required, according to the order on the customers’ lists; trucks, with freeze compartments in them, to deliver each container to the house where it was due; other trucks, to call later, maybe late at night, to collect the containers, with dirty dishes in them, where they’d been put out like milk bottles; dish-washing rooms, that would take all dishes as the collectors brought them back, and wash them up with machines that would fit the dishes and cut breakage to a minimum. I meant to make dishes of plastic, so they could stand some slamming around, and still not get smashed.
I went into it pretty thoroughly. I talked to manufacturing plumbers on the washer stuff, and plastic people about the dishes. I took trips all around, and learned how stuff is frozen in central plants, with the ice company furnishing refrigeration by the ton of product. I got it through my head what a terrific amount of food, like the muskrat carcasses they throw away in Louisiana, goes to waste in this country, stuff I figured I could use, and show a profit on. I began to think in terms of colored help, for the handy way they had, on mechanics, and the little trouble they’d give, on organization. I was out every day, and cruised from deep bayou country up to Tennessee, all around the TVA Valley, the greatest thing in the way of farm development I ever saw. It seemed funny to be zipping around, in my little Ford car, through country I’d hoboed over, but I tried not to think of that. I knew, of course, that Mrs. America wasn’t going to do any standing broad jump into my lap for all the trouble I was taking over her, or do anything except act like the hundred-per-cent nitwit that in my opinion she was. From the beginning, I knew that this once more was a problem in public relations, or in other words that it involved people, instead of things. So, for one day I put in on freeze units, washing machinery, and fish, I put in two trying to figure the advertising, and wasn’t too proud to remember Denny, and thank him in my mind, for what he had taught me. I went into publications, art, type, and ideas. I worked out a bunch of ads, to run in three national magazines, that would eat up a hundred thousand dollars before we ever served a meal. They were all about two women, one a pretty, slick, sexy blonde, named Dora Dumb. The other was a gray-haired, quiet, refined wife, named Bessie Bright. Dora was to be the queen of all the department stores in her town, the markets, the shops, garages, beauty shops, and massage parlors. She broke appointments, charged things on the account, had five dollars put on the gasoline bill for cash because she’d forgotten to go to the bank, sent things back after she’d ordered them, and everybody was just as nice to her as they could possibly be. She had a husband named John Q. Dumb, that never had any money, that was always in hock to the furniture store, the finance company, and the loan sharks, and would try, with pencil and paper, to explain to her that all that nonsense of hers was costing them two prices on what anything ought to cost, that the interest on all that installment buying was charged just like the lamb chops were charged, that there was no need for them to be broke all the time, if she’d just pay cash, use her head, and keep things, once she bought them.