The sergeant shrugged, set the paper on his knee. “I expect somewhere along the line they got tired of being shit on. That’s what usually happens. It don’t take much to turn a man into an animal.” He leaned over and spat in the helmet. “You’ll see what I’m talking about when you get to the Front.”
The lieutenant blanched a little, took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Last night, all of them drugged and naked and slick as pigs, Lucas had donned Bovard’s service cap and suggested that they play a game. After a little coaxing, Caldwell agreed to play a captured German officer, and they tied him to a chair with strips of cloth torn from a sweat-stained pillowcase. They had done all sorts of things to extract information from the dirty Hun. It had been great fun for a while, a bit reminiscent for Bovard of his boarding school days, until Lucas stuffed a sock in the pharmacist’s mouth and pulled the leather whip out from under the bed. Caldwell’s eyes grew big as saucers then, and he fought like the dickens trying to break loose from his bonds, but all he succeeded in doing was toppling the chair and knocking himself unconscious when his head hit the hard oak floor. “Christ,” Lucas said, “I don’t know what got into him. He usually likes this sort of thing.”
“Shouldn’t we do something?” Bovard had asked as he watched a trickle of blood run from Caldwell’s nose into his open mouth.
“Absolutely,” Lucas said, nonchalantly tossing the whip into the corner on top of the druggist’s straw hat and climbing over him onto the bed. “There’s all sorts of things we should do.” He settled back against the headboard and smiled. “I can’t wait to show you a couple of them.”
“No, I mean about Caldwell.”
“Oh, hell, don’t worry about him,” Lucas had said. “Clarence is tougher than he looks. Just stick that candle up his ass and get over here.”
Lighting his cigar, Bovard realized, as he inhaled the smoke, that he could still taste the theater manager in his mouth. He turned away and pretended to study a column of soldiers from the 157th marching past, listened to the sergeant carefully tear out the article about the outlaws and stick it in his pocket. Last night had been the strangest and most exhilarating experience of his life, and though he still felt essentially the same disgust and shame with himself as he had on that bleary afternoon in the hotel room when the Irish trollop revealed to him his true nature, at least he no longer had to fret about whether or not he was going to die a virgin.
26
ELLSWORTH CAME UP out of one of his fields and started down the road toward home. He’d been checking the corn again, trying to judge how much yield to expect. The summer had been hotter than usual, and there hadn’t been a decent rain in weeks; and so, from the looks of things, they’d be lucky to make enough money to get through the winter and spring. They had a hog they could butcher, and Eula had her chickens, but once you figured in taxes and coal and other essentials, they still needed, at the very least, a hundred dollars cash. He was damning the cattle swindler to hell again when he looked up and saw the Taylor boy coming toward him carrying a little bundle over his shoulder. “Howdy, Tuck,” Ellsworth said when he got closer. “What you up to?”
“I went to Meade to join the army,” the boy said, wiping a bead of sweat from his upper lip, “but they wouldn’t have me.”
“Why not?” Ellsworth said. “You got something wrong with ye?”
“They said I was too young,” Tuck said. “Said you got to be at least eighteen to volunteer.”
“Why, that don’t make no sense,” Ellsworth said, “them taking Eddie and not you. He ain’t no older than you are, is he?”
“Eddie?” the boy said.
“Sure, he’s been a-soldierin’ almost a month now. Hadn’t you heard?” Ellsworth watched as a puzzled look came over Tuck’s face. “You know something I don’t know?” he asked the boy.
Tuck swallowed, then said, “Mr. Fiddler, Eddie ain’t in the army.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
“I seen him down in Waverly just last week.”
“No, you must be mistaken. I had a man at the camp tell me he was there.”
“Well, I don’t know why the man would’ve told ye that, but it was Eddie I saw in Waverly. Maybe he got kicked out or something.”
Ellsworth suddenly felt a little light-headed. “Was he with anybody?” he asked.
“Yeah, one of them Newsome girls. The one they call Spit Job. She was hangin’ all over him. And some old feller playin’ music.”
“Music?”
“Yeah, he was blowin’ on a harmonica.”
“Was he drunk?”
“You mean Eddie? Probably. I doubt if he’d let himself be seen dancing a jig out in public with Spit Job unless he was loaded.”
“You don’t know Eddie then,” Ellsworth said, a bitter taste rising in his throat. “He’s went clear off the rails here lately.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said.
“No, no, I’m glad you told me. Leastways now I won’t have to worry about him getting his fool head shot off in Germany.”
“I wish they would’ve let me in,” Tuck said. “I’d give anything to go.”