“Hah!” the lieutenant cried. “I’ve shut you off. You’re just talking to the walls.”
“I don’t know if you can still hear me, boys. I may just be talking to the walls, but I’m sticking to my post. Let’s have some music, what say?”
“I won’t put it on for you!”
“Over hill, over dale,
Hell, they even read our mail,
As those caissons go rolling along.
In and out, hear them shout,
I can’t wait till I get out,
As those caissons go rolling along.”
“Well, ex-sergeant, are you proud of yourself? Are you, ex-sergeant?”
“There’ll be bullshit over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.”
“On second thought I am going to record this. It will make very interesting listening at your court martial.”
“Anger’s a way, my boys,
Anger’s a way,
Why should we take their noise,
Why don’t we run away — ay — ay — ay?”
“That’s evidence. Right there. That’s evidence.”
“This is the Army, Mr. Jones,
They’ll shoot some bullets in your bones,
You had your breakfast in bed before,
But you dum la de dum in a war.”
“You’ll get yours, Mister.”
“Oh-hh say can you see
How the powers that be
Keep us down, in the groun’
With the lie that we’re free?”
He pushed his microphone away and leaned back. He was exhausted. The lights had ceased to flash. The air raid was over. Dozens had died, hundreds were wounded, but the rest of them were safe till next time.
“You didn’t sign off,” the lieutenant’s voice croaked over the loudspeaker.
“Right,” Dick Gibson said. He pulled the table mike toward him again and held it in his lap. “Fellow animals,” he said, “grr whinney whinney oink oink roar. See you at the crap table, catch you guys ’n’ gals in the bars, keep a candle in the whore’s window, meet you in the alley. Dick Gibson”—he hadn’t meant to use the name, but it slipped out— “signing off.”
MP’s came. Before they arrived Dick had to be guarded by the lieutenant. They had nothing to say to each other, and he was embarrassed that the man had no gun; it would have been simpler for them both if he had. As it was it may have appeared to Collins — Dick was the larger of the two — that Dick was doing him a favor by not resisting. More probably, he may have thought that Dick was seeking favors. That was what brutes did; time and again, in difficulty, he’d seen them go boyish, go soft, presuming upon their deprivation to toady — brutes turned housepets. Dick couldn’t be sure that he had not intended this last possibility. Perhaps he meant to underscore a new strain in his character. Certainly when the MP’s came they didn’t seem to see anything strange in arresting him, or in leading him out of the building under armed guard. He was pleased in one way, not so pleased in another. He wasn’t sure he knew what to do next. In a sense he looked forward to his conviction, to some actual ruling on his status, a documentation of sorts of his character. Then he could be genuinely what they said he was. (To divide men into officers and enlisted men was a superb idea; he didn’t know how he had lived without it.) He was even impatient for the time when he would be turned queer by the absence of women (or the presence of men), impatient to learn their desultory violence and terrifying indifference. He yearned for the debasement of his taste and fastidy — it was a way of being free. Already he was astonished by his freedom, the liberties he took with his guards, for example— “Give us a smoke, chief”— affronts, gaucheries that bordered on risk, swagger the other side of his scruple, swinging from cringe to contempt as though character were nothing more than hinged mood. It was strange and exhilarating to live by the rule of whim.
At the guard house — the British government had set aside a portion of the Inns of Court for use by the Americans as a detention center, and he had the fearful suspicion that the prisoners had been left in London to be bombed — he acted like a guilty man (that is, he behaved as if having committed one crime he could commit another), thus frightening many of the other prisoners, AWOL’s, the deserters for love, the careless missers of trains and buses, the cowards. Another prisoner remembered that he had been interviewed in Stars and Stripes and this seemed to induce awe, as if there could be no offense like the offense of the respectable. The prisoner, himself an accused murderer, pressed Dick to discover why he was there. It was when Dick admitted that he’d “told them what to do with it” that the man became deferential, words and will to him the ultimate violence. Dick decided that though the man had killed he was not one of the brutes at all.
He stayed in the guard house for a week. After he had cleaned up his room each morning there was not much to do and he listened to the BBC. It was satisfying to him chiefly because of its clear classifying of its audience — even more meticulous and useful than the distinction between officers and enlisted men. During the week he also had three interviews with the captain who was assigned to be his defense counsel, a man who was a dentist in civilian life. Dick thought him too earnest, but in fairness he had to admit that he thought all dentists earnest. Only a very earnest man would be able to stand the sight and feel of an open mouth. (It was probably their excess earnestness that kept them out of medical school.) He was certain the dentist would not be able to get him off — certain also that only the dentist’s earnest objectivity kept him from expressing then and there his opinion of Dick’s actions.
He learned that his trial was set for the end of the following week. When he was taken from the guard house four days before that date and conducted in a closed car — there was no one to guard him — to a castle in the English countryside, he was terrified. Angrily he asked his driver — a man of lower rank than Dick who, despite the protests of his lieutenant and engineer and director, was still a sergeant until proven guilty — why the dentist was not with him. “Is it a trick? My whole case rests on that guy’s arguments. If they’ve yanked my mouthpiece I’m sunk.”
“Gee, Sarge, I don’t know a thing about it,” the driver said.
Dick saw that the driver was not himself a brute (and where were they all, incidentally?) but just another poor innocent as Dick himself once had been. He watched the man’s cautious negotiation of the left side of the highway, an effort that obviously still strained him.
“So you don’t know a thing about it?”
“That’s right, Sarge.”
Dick leaned forward, almost pressing his lips against the driver’s neck. “Cut that Sarge shit, Mac,” he said levelly, “or you and me are gonna tangle assholes.” They rode on for a while in silence; then Dick became offensive again. “Fucking left side of the road,” he said brutally. “This whole fucking country is eaten up with faggotry and fuckery because the cocksuckers drive on the left side of the road. La la la. Why don’t you drive over on the right, you simple bastard? Let these assfarts know the Yanks are coming.” He leaned forward abruptly and jerked the driver’s arm so that the car swerved to the right. “Ha ha, the Yanks are coming!” Dick screamed. The driver recovered control of the car and Dick sat back, pretending to chuckle at his joke for the rest of the ride. Every once in a while he would glance at the terrorized driver. I must get used to meanness if I am to live in the world, he thought. Otherwise I won’t last, I’ll never make it.