“Aren’t they fine boys?” said the tall man. “War is a purifying and ennobling force. The question is whether only people like ourselves here are fitted to be soldiers or whether the different services have formed us.”
“I don’t know,” said Richard Gordon.
“I would like to bet you that not three men in this room were drafted,” the tall man said. “These are the elite. The very top cream of the scum. What Wellington won at Waterloo with. Well, Mr. Hoover ran us out of Anticosti flats and Mr. Roosevelt has shipped us down here to get rid of us. They’ve run the camp in a way to invite an epidemic, but the poor bastards won’t die. They shipped a few of us to Tortugas but that’s healthy now. Besides, we wouldn’t stand for it. So they’ve brought us back. What’s the next move? They’ve got to get rid of us. You can see that, can’t you?”
“Why?”
“Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try to do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.”
“Are there many Communists in the camp?”
“Only about forty,” the tall man said. “Out of two thousand. It takes discipline and abnegation to be a Communist; a rummy can’t be a Communist.”
“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed Vet said. “He’s just a goddamn radical.”
“Listen,” the other Vet who was drinking beer with Richard Gordon said, “let me tell you about in the Navy. Let me tell you, you goddamn radical.”
“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed one said. “When the fleet’s in New York and you go ashore there in the evening up under Riverside Drive there’s old guys with long beards come down and you can piss in their beards for a dollar. What do you think about that?”
“I’ll buy you a drink,” said the tall man, “and you forget that one. I don’t like to hear that one.”
“I don’t forget anything,” the red-headed one said. “What’s the matter with you, pal?”
“Is that true about the beards?” Richard Gordon asked. He felt a little sick.
“I swear to God and my mother,” the red-headed one said. “Hell, that ain’t nothing.”
Up the bar a Vet was arguing with Freddy about the payment of a drink.
“That’s what you had,” said Freddy.
Richard Gordon watched the Vet’s face. He was very drunk, his eyes were bloodshot and he was looking for trouble.
“You’re a goddamn liar,” he said to Freddy.
“Eighty-five cents,” Freddy said to him.
“Watch this,” said the red-headed Vet.
Freddy spread his hands on the bar. He was watching the Vet.
“You’re a goddamn liar,” said the Vet, and picked up a beer glass to throw it. As his hand closed on it, Freddy’s right hand swung in a half circle over the bar and cracked a big saltcellar covered with a bar towel alongside the Vet’s head.
“Was it neat?” said the red-headed Vet. “Was it pretty?”
“You ought to see him tap them with that sawed-off billiard cue,” the other said.
Two Vets standing next to where the saltcellar man had slipped down, looked at Freddy angrily. “What’s the idea of cooling him?”
“Take it easy,” said Freddy. “This one is on the house. Hey, Wallace,” he said. “Put that fellow over against the wall.”
“Was it pretty?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon. “Wasn’t that sweet?”
A heavy-set young fellow had dragged the saltcellared man out through the crowd. He pulled him to his feet and the man looked at him vacantly. “Run along,” he said to him. “Get yourself some air.”
Over against the wall the man who had been cooled sat with his head in his hands. The heavy-set young man went over to him.
“You run along, too,” he said to him. “You just get in trouble here.”
“My jaw’s broken,” the cooled one said thickly. Blood was running out of his mouth and down over his chin.
“You’re lucky you aren’t killed, that wallop he hit you,” the thick-set young man said. “You run along now.”
“My jaw’s broke,” the other said dully. “They broke my jaw.”
“You better run along,” the young man said. “You just get in trouble here.”
He helped the jaw-broken man to his feet and he staggered unsteadily out to the street.
“I’ve seen a dozen laying against the wall over there on a big night,” the red-headed Vet said. “One morning I seen that big boogie there mopping it up with a bucket. Didn’t I see you mop it up with a bucket?” he asked the big Negro bartender.
“Yes, sir,” said the bartender. “Plenty of times. Yes, sir. But you never seen me fight nobody.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” said the red-headed Vet. “With a bucket.”
“This looks like a big night coming on,” the other Vet said. “What do you say, pal?” to Richard Gordon. “O.K. we have another one?”
Richard Gordon could feel himself getting drunk. His face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, was beginning to look strange to him.
“What’s your name?” he asked the tall Communist.
“Jacks,” the tall man said. “Nelson Jacks.”
“Where were you before you came here?”
“Oh, around,” the man said. “Mexico, Cuba, South America, and around.”
“I envy you,” said Richard Gordon.
“Why envy me? Why don’t you get to work?”
“I’ve written three books,” Richard Gordon said. “I’m writing one now about Gastonia.”
“Good,” said the tall man. “That’s fine. What did you say your name was?”
“Richard Gordon.”
“Oh,” said the tall man.
“What do you mean, ‘oh’?”
“Nothing,” said the tall man.
“Did you ever read the books?” Richard Gordon asked.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you like them?”
“No,” said the tall man.
“Why?”
“I don’t like to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“I thought they were shit,” the tall man said and turned away.
“I guess this is my night,” said Richard Gordon. “This is my big night. What did you say you’d have?” he asked the red-headed Vet. “I’ve got two dollars left.”
“One beer,” said the red-headed man. “Listen, you’re my pal. I think your books are fine. To hell with that radical bastard.”
“You haven’t got a book with you?” asked the other Vet. “Pal, I’d like to read one. Did you ever write for Western Stories, or War Aces? I could read that War Aces every day.”
“Who is that tall bird?” asked Richard Gordon.
“I tell you he’s just a radical bastard,” said the second Vet. “The camp’s full of them. We’d run them out, but I tell you half the time most of the guys in camp can’t remember.”
“Can’t remember what?” asked the red-headed one.
“Can’t remember anything,” said the other.
“You see me?” asked the red-headed one.
“Yes,” said Richard Gordon.
“Would you guess I got the finest little wife in the world?”
“Why not?”
“Well, I have,” said the red-headed one. “And that girl is nuts about me. She’s like a slave. ‘Give me another cup of coffee,’ I say to her. ‘O.K., Pop,’ she says. And I get it. Anything else the same way. She’s carried away with me. If I got a whim, it’s her law.”
“Only where is she?” asked the other Vet.
“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “That’s it, pal. Where is she?”
“He don’t know where she is,” the second Vet said.
“Not only that,” said the red-headed one. “I don’t know where I saw her last.”
“He don’t even know what country she’s in.”
“But listen, buddy,” said the red-headed one. “Wherever she is, that little girl is faithful.”
“That’s God’s truth,” said the other Vet. “You can stake your life on that.”
“Sometimes,” said the red-headed one, “I think that she is maybe Ginger Rogers and that she has gone into the moving pictures.”
“Why not?” said the other.
“Then again, I just see her waiting there quietly where I live.”
“Keeping the home fires burning,” said the other.
“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “She’s the finest little woman in the world.”
“Listen,” said the other, “my old mother is O.K., too.”
“That’s right.”
“She’s dead,” said the second Vet. “Let’s not talk about her.”
“Aren’t you married, pal?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon.
“Sure,” he said. Down the bar, about four men away, he could see the red face, the blue eyes and sandy, beer-dewed mustache of Professor MacWalsey. Professor MacWalsey was looking straight ahead of him and as Richard Gordon watched he finished his glass of beer and, raising his lower lip, removed the foam from his mustache. Richard Gordon noticed how bright blue his eyes were.
As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for.
“What’s the matter, pal?” asked the red-headed Vet.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t feel good. I can tell you feel bad.”
“No,” said Richard Gordon.
“You look like you seen a ghost.”
“You see that fellow down there with a mustache?” asked Richard Gordon.
“Him?”
“Yes.”
“What about him?” asked the second Vet.
“Nothing,” said Richard Gordon. “God damn it. Nothing.”
“Is he a bother to you? We can cool him. The three of us can jump him and you can put the boots to him.”
“No,” said Richard Gordon. “It wouldn’t do any good.”
“We’ll get him when he goes outside,” the red-headed Vet said. “I don’t like the look of him. The son-of-a-bitch looks like a scab to me.”
“I hate him,” said Richard Gordon. “He’s ruined my life.”
“We’ll give him the works,” said the second Vet. “The yellow rat. Listen Red, get a hold of a couple of bottles. We’ll beat him to death. Listen, when
