The Heavenly Table

25

SERGEANT MALONE WAS sitting on a stool in front of the camp post office, his nose stuck in the Scioto Gazette, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bovard approaching. Jesus Christ, he moaned to himself, not a minute’s peace. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the lieutenant; hell, he was nicer than most of the college boys he had come across. At least he didn’t walk around like he had a broomstick shoved up his ass and his nose stuck high in the air like the Yale brats, Benchley and Smothers. And he had gotten Malone drunker than Katy’s cunt again two nights ago, so there was that, too. No, it was something else. He reminded the sergeant of those Englishmen he had watched with a telescope from a distant field hospital kicking a football out into No Man’s Land just as they began an attack, their heads swollen with glory and honor and all that other bullshit they were taught in their public schools. By the time the sortie was over, the only thing left of the entire regiment was that damn ball, bobbing around in a shell hole filled with bloody water and body parts. You might have gotten by with that sort of bravado in the past, but not anymore. Now there were machine guns that fired three hundred rounds a minute and mustard gas that turned the lungs to pink froth and generals who thought that if they only lost a few thousand men gaining an extra yard or two, why, they had achieved some great victory. Maybe it really would be, as some people predicted, the last war that would ever be fought.

“Anything interesting in the paper?” Bovard asked as he stepped up onto the porch.

“Not really, sir,” Malone said. “I just been reading about this Jewett Gang.” The lieutenant’s eyes, he noticed, were even more bloodshot than yesterday morning, and his face was flushed and sweaty, but he looked damn happy for a man who was so obviously hungover. In fact, he was practically beaming. Malone wondered if maybe he had visited the whore camp last night, perhaps gotten laid by the blonde the pimp billed as a genuine Parisian fashion model. From what he had heard, she was quite a hit with some of the officers. He held the newspaper up for Bovard to see. The main headline proclaimed in big black letters: SEARCH STILL ON FOR KILLER OUTLAWS. An interview with the local city engineer discussing the mental, physical, and spiritual benefits of indoor plumbing was the only other front-page story. The war wasn’t even mentioned.

“Yes, I heard something about them,” Bovard replied. Leaning against a porch beam, he pulled his cigar case from his pocket and offered the sergeant one. The Jewett Gang had come up in a conversation he’d had last night with an effeminate theater manager named Lucas Charles. They had bumped into each other in the Candlelight Supper Club, a quiet establishment that carried a decent brandy and was quickly becoming the lieutenant’s favorite watering hole. Lucas was girlishly slender and small-boned, with soft delicate hands and purplish bags under his rather corrupt-looking gray eyes. They had talked about this and that, and then sometime around eleven o’clock, he had invited Bovard to a room he kept above the Majestic Theater, just a bed with an unwashed sheet thrown over it and a red upholstered chair and scattered bouquets of dead flowers and half-empty jars of cold cream. A torn and faded poster of a once famous actor, twinkly-eyed and sporting a top hat and monocle, was tacked to the wall. “Ol’ boy performed here once,” Lucas said, nodding at the picture as he poured them a drink. “Fell in the orchestra pit twice, he was so plastered.” He shook his head. “Poor bastard. Couldn’t remember his lines anymore.”

“Whatever…whatever happened to him?” Bovard had asked nervously, glancing again at the bed. It had become apparent to him over an hour ago that he was being seduced, but now that push was about to become shove, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have his first sexual experience with such an obvious sissy. Wasn’t being queer bad enough without being so damn blatant about it?

“Cut his throat in Cleveland a week later during an intermission. Made a real mess of the dressing room, from what I heard. I guess they booed him off the stage for the last time.”

The lieutenant took a drink from the glass Lucas handed him as he thought back on his own dark time in the hotel room in Columbus. Fortunately, before he slipped up and mentioned it, there was a knock on the door, and a man named Caldwell entered. He was even more disheveled and limp-wristed than the theater manager. A druggist by trade, he was dressed in a wrinkled white suit and carried a battered straw boater in his hand. A half-smoked cigarette was stuck behind his ear, and his blue tie looked as if it had been dipped in a mustard pot. Tossing the hat in the corner, he kicked off his shoes and produced a vial of tincture of opium from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Damn it, Clarence,” Lucas said, as he locked the door, “I told you to quit bringing that stuff over here.”

“Yeah, but you like it, don’t you?” Caldwell said, as he uncapped the bottle.

“That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I like it too much.”

Bovard glanced uneasily at the bottle. Jesus Christ, not only were they homos, they were dope fiends, too. From what he had heard, just one little taste of that poison and you were forever after crawling the walls for it. A panicky urge to flee the room swept over him, but, in the end, the greater fear of being viewed as some sort of cowardly boor won out. And so he had stayed, and within thirty minutes of slugging down the drink Caldwell doctored up for him, there wasn’t another place in the world he would have rather been than in that filthy hole with his two new pals.

Malone lit the cigar and dropped the match into a dented helmet that served as an ashtray next to his stool. “According to this,” he told Bovard, “they might be in Ohio now.”

“And isn’t there an outlandish reward being offered for their capture?”

“Five thousand dollars. Or fifteen thousand if you take their heads to this Montgomery tycoon. Lot of jack for three sharecroppers.”

“I just don’t understand people like that.”

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.