I went “Duh” like the yokel he’d pegged me and laid a hand on my Adam’s apple to indicate my speech problem.
“Tonsillitis?” he said. “Strep throat? You got some kinda contagious damned communicative disease?”
“I have a st-st-stammer.”
“You do, huh? And astigmatism too if you couldn’t see I was holding this seat for Pumphrey.”
“P-P-Pum-?”
“P-P-Pum yourself,” he mocked. “What’s your name? I’d like to meet your whole yokel cl-cl-clan.”
He was probably from a real metropolis like Coffeyville or Enid, but I was a yokel.
“B-B-Boles,” I said. “D-D-Danny Boles.”
“Where from?”
“ Tenkiller, Oklahoma.” No stammer. Give me a medal. Send me to radio-announcer’s school.
“Well, Boles, ya goddamned Okie, move your skinny ass fore I line it with teeth.” The guy bumped me with his elbow. His nose floated in front of me like an elevator button I didn’t dare mash. “Hey, you’re still in Pumphrey’s seat.”
“B-but where can I g-g-go?”
He laughed. He couldn’t believe me, a kid innocent as bottled water. He put his thumb into the dent behind my chin, to show he meant for me to hop up. I jerked away and stumbled into the aisle-which jostled with foot traffic, landlubbers trying to get their rail legs.
I went enginewards. GIs, recruits, MPs with gunbelts sat jammed into their seats, not one tender female among them. Every car smelled of dried sweat, scorched khaki, cigarette smoke, caked boot polish.
I finally stopped on a platform between two coaches. An accordion-pleated rubber hood was supposed to join the cars (to keep passengers out of the wind and coal dust), but the train people hadn’t hooked it up. I rode the coupling. The wind felt good. So did being alone. The countryside had gentle hills, dogwoods and redbuds still showing color in amongst the evergreens. It got prettier the farther from Cherokee County we chugged. Had Congress designated the Injun Territories for their flatness and lack of trees? Probably.
I’d stood there a couple of minutes when a baby-faced GI banged through from the forward car. He scowled and patted his pockets. He shouted, “Got a smoke, buddy?”
“N-no, I d-d-don’t.”
“Screw you!” he shouted. Did he think I’d mugged a Red Cross lady for her cigarettes, then squirreled away my booty from regular Joes like him? I just stared at him. Maybe a 4-F civilian had snaked his girl, or a recruit had short-sheeted his bunk. Running into such meanness just then felt like having grain alcohol poured into a cut. My stare got harder. I lifted my fists to my ribs. The kid saw them shaking. He spit down at the tracks, easy-like, and returned to the coach he’d come from. That should’ve boosted my morale. I’d shown my steel and a GI had backed off. Problem was, he’d looked like a Campbell ’s Soup kid.
In all the wind and clatter, I began to cry. The platform had me for good, then. I couldn’t go back in with tears on my face. The GIs would’ve ridden me all the way to Georgia.
Our train wasn’t an express. It crawled through every podunk crossing, rattled to a chain-reaction stop in every town with as many as two letters to its name. Passengers lurched back and forth between coaches, but I clung to the coupling’s guard rail and ignored them.
It took an hour and a half to get to Fort Smith and another thirty minutes to pass through Fort Chaffee, the post southeast of it. Recruits off, GIs on. A trackside do-si-do. Finally, we clacked off through Arkansas again.
Later, in the dining car, I sat with three other guys who seemed to be loners too. A swabbie going to Pensacola and two dogfaces. We’d all been strangers, but the other fellas struck up a friendly debate about the credentials (Ol’ Diz would’ve said differentials) of the Cards without Enos Country Slaughter and the Dodgers without Pistol Pete Reiser, who ran full-tilt into outfield walls and knocked himself out.
My kind of debate. Except my vocal cords had a clamp on them. All I could do, like some kind of chimp, was point, nod, grunt, and grin. The other guys-the friendliest servicemen I’d yet bumped into-must’ve figured me for a runaway from the Oklahoma Institute for Hayseed Dummies. I paid my check and stumbled back to the coupling platform.
And stayed there, where my kidneys began to feel like hip-hugging cocktail shakers. In the fields whipping by, I could make out pole beans, snap beans, alfalfa, cotton. The soil had the richness of devil’s food cake. We drove deeper into the unreconstructed South. The air thickened, smells got odder, the unfamiliar crops sort of scared me.
A soldier came out onto my platform. I bent over my rail, but he didn’t go away. I could feel his stare seeping through the back of my shirt and up my arms-like kerosene through a pile of rags. Finally, I faced him.
An older guy. Stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his breast pocket, heavy lips. His coloring reminded me of a slice of Spam. A sergeant. A vet of some combat theater, probably. I relaxed. Battle-tempered noncoms showed themselves hard-noses in training camps, but teddy bears with kids and women and well-meaning civilians.
“Your name Boles?” the sergeant shouted. This scared me, but I nodded. “I’m First Sergeant Pumphrey. Private Overbeck told me about you! Described you to a T! You from Tenkiller, in Oklahoma?”
“Y-y-yessir!” I yelled back. Shaking again, not just from the rattling of the train.
“Sergeant!” he corrected me. “I’m not an officer! I’m not a gentleman! I’m damned sure no egg-sucking sir!”
“N-n-nosir!”
Pumphrey gestured at the train, the flashing rails, the marching ranks of cotton. “This is horseshit! Come on!” He yanked me into the sudden hush of the passenger car.
My ears gulped at the quiet. Pumphrey prodded me down the length of the coach, and then the length of another one, and so on until we reached a car with a lavatory. Pumphrey pushed me inside. Did he have queerish tendencies? Coach Brandon had warned us boys in fifth-period hygiene about that sort of crap, but I still didn’t get it. Half our male seniors had thought hygiene was a dirty word.
We had that lavatory almost to ourselves. The only other guy in there had his tailbone on the back edge of a toilet seat, his toes over the seat’s front edge and his arms around his knees to keep his shoes from slipping off and jolting him awake. His open mouth hissed softly. Pumphrey ignored him like he would a water stain and backed me up against a sink.
“I know your dad, Boles,” he said. “Until two weeks ago we served in the same goddamned support group at an Army airfield in the Aleuts. Ever hear of Otter Point?”
I shook my head.
“It’s on Umnak. Cold as a polar bear’s prick. Windier than Chicago. Foggier than a dry-ice factory.”
I couldn’t figure what Pumphrey wanted me to do. He seemed to blame me-or my daddy, if the part about knowing him wasn’t a lie or a smokescreen-for the Aleutian weather. His red lips flapped. Threads of spit webbed them.
“Cold, cold, cold,” he said. “Oil up there turns to peanut butter. You use blowtorches to thaw your bomber engines. If spray gets on an airplane’s windshield, it’s like trying to see through a sheet of pebbled glass. One drop of high-octane fuel on your skin-if you’re cluck enough to expose it-will lift a blister the size of a walnut. Follow?”