“And the whole sonofabitching rest of the army,” Turk pointed out. “C’mon, troop, this is no time to come down with a case of nervous in the service.”
Mickey was not to be swayed. “I wish to Christ they were shipping us to some base in Germany where we wouldn’t get our asses shot off, is all.”
That startled me. The Chinese were an enemy I had not quite caught up with, but Germans still were the bad guys from the last war, as far as I was concerned. Fiends all the way up to Hitler, and down to the enemy soldiers my family had a personal reason to hate forever.
“Yeah, right, Mick.” Gordon rolled his eyes about Germany for me. “Over there where you could put on your jockstrap spats and wow the fr?uleins.”
“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, Gordo.”
I was starting to realize what a long way I had to go to be accomplished in cussing.
Snickering again, Gordon maintained that if anybody’s ass was going to get shot off, it could not possibly be his. “Mine’s gonna be the size of a prune, from the pucker factor.” All three soldiers roared at that, and while I didn’t entirely get it, I joined in as best I could.
When the laughter died down, I figured maybe I ought to contribute something. “My daddy was in the war,” I announced brightly. “The last one. He was on one of those boat kind of things at Omaha Beach.”
“A landing craft?” Turk whistled through his teeth, looking at me a different way. “Out the far end!” he exclaimed, which took me a moment to savvy as soldier talk for outstanding and then some. “D-Day was hairy. Came back in one piece, did he? Listen up, Mick.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth about that. “He always, uh, says he’s in pretty good shape for the shape he’s in.”
Gordon leaned across the aisle. “So what’s your old man do?”
“He’s a”—it’s amazing what a habit something like this gets to be—“crop duster.”
“No crap?” Gordon sounded envious. “Grainfield flyboy, is he. Then how come you have to travel by dog? Why doesn’t he just give you a lift in his airplane?”
“It’s too far. See, I’m going to visit my rich aunt and uncle. They live back east. In Decatur, Illinois.”
“Never heard of the place. What’s there?”
“The Cat plant.” That drew three blank looks. “Where they make bulldozers and graders and stuff like that.” I was developing a feel for the perimeter of story that could be got away with. A detail or two expanded the bounds to a surprisng extent, it seemed like.
So, there it went, again. Out of my mouth something unexpected, not strictly true but harmlessly made up. Storying, maybe it could be called. For I still say it was not so much that I was turning into an inveterate liar around strangers, I simply was overflowing with invention. The best way I can explain it is that I was turned loose from myself. Turned loose, not by choice, from the expected behavior of being “a good kid,” which I was always a little restless about anyway. “You’re being a storier,” Gram would warn whenever I got carried away spinning a tale about one thing or another. Now, with no check on my enthusiasm when it started playing tricks upstairs in me—the long bus trip seemed to invite daydreaming, mine merely done out loud—I was surprising myself with the creations I could come up with. I mean, what is imagination but mental mischief of a kind, and why can’t a youngster, particularly one out on his own, protectively occupy himself with invention of that sort before maturity works him over? One thing for sure, the soldiers on their way to their own mind-stretching version of life ahead did not doubt my manufactured one in the least.
Shoulders shaking with laughter, Mickey forcefully nudged Gordon. “If it was the cat house, you’d know all about it, huh, Gordo?”
Gordon turning the air blue in response, Turk nudged me for the autograph book. “Somebody’s got to go first.” I instructed him in the mystery of the Kwik-Klik, and with it in hand, he balanced the book on his knee and wrote for a good long time. When he was through, I passed things across to Gordon, who looked over Turk’s entry with a mocking expression but didn’t say anything before writing his own.
Mickey balked when the autograph collection reached him. “I don’t know about this happy horseshit of writing in here. What am I supposed to say?”
“Pretend it’s your coloring book,” Gordon wisecracked. But Turk took right in on the reluctant penman. “Get with the program, troop. If the kid’s good enough to give a damn about us, the least we can do is put some ink on the page for him.”
Without looking up, Mickey did so, and after laboring through, passed the autograph book and pen across to me. Gratefully thanking the three of them up, down, and sideways, I retreated to my own seat to catch my breath.
? ? ?
GIDDY WITH SUCCESS, I read the soldiers’ inscriptions over and over, the pages as distinct from each other as handwriting could possibly be.
Life is like a deck of cards.
When you are in love it’s s.
Before you are married it’s s.