a château.’
Of course everybody’s dribbled in from the spots I put them and are gathered around. Shutzer’s pulled off his boot and is wringing out his sock.
‘Well, it isn’t the good old University of Florida with fifteen hundred acres of orange trees growing under Spanish-moss-covered oaks around an Olympic-size swimming pool, but it’s a step in the right direction, I’ll say that.’
When Shutzer gets his boot back on, we climb into the jeeps and roll uphill to the château; no mines, no machine-gun bursts, no snipers, nothing.
We force a front shutter and window with a bayonet. It’s a French window-door and, as Gordon predicted, no boobytrap. We sidle in the door and stand just inside, letting our eyes get used to the dark after all the glare outside.
My God! What a room. It looks like a ballroom or a very fancy small gym. There are parquet floors and on one end is a gigantic fireplace, big enough to walk into. Long golden damask curtains go from floor to ceiling over the windows. The windows must be fifteen feet high.
Everybody files in so we’re all standing there staring. None of us has ever seen anything like this before. And what makes it so eerie is there isn’t one piece of furniture in the room.
I know it’s time to play sergeant again; somebody has to. We need to unload all the rations and crap from the jeeps and set ourselves up. But we only stand there, overwhelmed.
I’m definitely feeling like Cinderella who was not invited to the prince’s ball. I feel very disinvited. Shutzer’s the first one who moves; he sashays out to the center of the floor. Shutzer’s about five six, round but not fat. He’s loaded down with all the military furbelows: bulging field jacket, two bandoliers around his neck, ammo belt filled with M1 cartridges, bayonet, aid kit and canteen. He wears camouflage netting over his helmet, the only one in the squad. Gordon says it makes Shutzer look like an escapee from the South Pacific. Shutzer claims he wears it so he’ll recognize his hat; helmets are too much all alike.
Shutzer’s OD pants are stiff with greasy dirt; we’re all the same, even Wilkins; there’s no way to wash them and no others to change into. The wool soaks up grease and gets darker until the fronts are stiff and almost black.
Shutzer steps out onto the floor and gazes around; then he starts singing, grunting, humming ‘The Jersey Bounce,’ and breaks into a jitterbug routine by himself in the middle of that huge room.
They call it the Jersey bounce,
The rhythm that really counts,
The temperature always mounts
Whenever they play …
‘Come on, Mel, let’s show ’em how we did it at the old USO.’
Gordon comes out, rifle slung on his shoulder. He starts dancing with Shutzer. The two of them, bayonets clanking, canteens bouncing, bandoliers swinging, try some of the classic hand-over-head jitterbug maneuvers but their rifles get in the way. I watch those crazies, working it out in the middle of the Ardennes, and I remember Shelby.
In those last days, when we finally believed they really were going to ship the Eighty-tenth Division overseas, we went into a mild state of panic. Shutzer insisted this was proof that, despite all the propaganda, we were losing the war. Sending this outfit to fight anybody must be a desperate last resort.
But the thing bothering us most is that in our squad, with the exception of Wilkins, we’re all virgins, eleven unwilling, unready to die, virgins. I don’t know if all this virginity was only a normal factor of the times or if there is some negative correlation between sexual precocity and what we call intelligence. Maybe it was only an accident of space and time. Who knows.
We’d spend evenings trying to coax details out of Wilkins. His wife was in town and he’d do anything to make sure he got his weekend pass. If his KP or guard duty happened to fall on a Saturday or Sunday, we were all willing to jump in and sub for him, a vicarious pleasure. None of us ever met Linda, but we all knew her. In a sick, sex-hungry, Biblical sense, we all knew her.
Of course, Mother was very reluctant. He wasn’t about to satisfy our puerile salaciousness. To all our entreaties, questions about how often and how much, his only reply was a sly smile and bashful ‘Oh, it isn’t like that at all,’ or ‘You guys are sex maniacs.’
So, it got to be less than three weeks before shipping out. I think it was Morrie who came up with the idea, or maybe it was Shutzer. Four of us managed a weekend pass and headed into town to hunt a nice, complaisant whore who could put us out of our misery, initiate us into the rites of manhood, emancipate us from the lonely compassion of our five-fingered widows.
All together we had fifty dollars. Ten was for a room at the Jefferson Hotel. This was for two but we knew a back way to sneak in the others. It was Gordon, Shutzer, Morrie and I. We figured any more would be some kind of gang bang and we had more romantic aspirations. The rest of our money was to go into the ‘investment’ and a bottle of bourbon. Forty dollars was a lot of money in those days.
There was much speculation and discussion on the kind of woman. I think each of us was scared we’d get involved with a real woman and wouldn’t be able to manage it. We agreed pure chance, not game skills, would decide the ‘pecker order,’ so we matched coins. Morrie won, Shutzer second, me for sloppy thirds and Gordon on the tail end. (Think of that, a quadruple pun!)
We settled into the hotel. Gordon and Shutzer had been nominated for the search, the recon part. We knew better than to hustle girls at the USO. We’d all tried that at one time or another, but the forces of morality were greater than our tactical skills. The B-girls in the bars were generally too much for us. None of us could make the grade with a genuine soldier-town whore, and none of us was willing to get a case of clap or syph. We were well-conditioned by the U.S. Army VD films. These films of festering mouth and cock sores were usually shown just before chow. Thank God they were in black and white. Morrie was convinced they showed them when the quartermasters were running short on chow allotment. Jim Freize insisted it was only a priori population control. The war was, by common consent, ex post facto birth control.
Probably what we wanted was some girl who would resemble the girl we took, or wished we’d taken, to our high-school prom. Morrie and I knew we could never make any kind of approach under any conditions. I personally had decided to sacrifice my contribution to the cause if it looked impossible. I don’t know what I actually thought could bring together my absurd romantic notions with, what seemed then, my pressing physical demand.
Gordon and Shutzer left the hotel all slicked up. They were wearing fresh underwear, had rubbed in enough Mum to make a smeary mess in their armpit hairs, splashed themselves with after-shave lotion. It was early summer, and muggy hot in Mississippi.
Morrie and I had decided to enjoy the privacy of the room. We each had a book from the post library. We stripped to our skivvies and jumped into the beds. We luxuriated in the quiet; it was accented by the sound of a huge long-bladed wooden fan hung from the ceiling rotating slowly. In turn, and on schedule, we took baths, timing ourselves as the water heater recuperated. It was a fine evening and great contrast to the streets outside roiling with other soldiers, MPs on the prowl and glaring townspeople. The feeling of civilians in Shelby seemed to be ‘What the hell are you doing here when you should be out there fighting Nazis and Japs?’
It’s past midnight when Shutzer and Gordon come back. I’m asleep; I’m sure Morrie is, too. After
