The Moth

27

To which, writing on one side of the paper and getting all words properly spelled, I wired back: WELL ISN’T THAT TOO UTTERLY NICE OF YOU BUT WIRING HIM AND USING BEST ENDEAVORS ON ME MIGHT WORK BETTER. Then I sat around the hotel to sulk. Deep in me, of course, providing they wired me anything that made sense, I knew I was going. But I wanted to think about it, and I meant to take my time, as all and sundry, in that household at least, had certainly taken theirs. For three years, more than three years as a matter of fact, I’d been in the Army, but little they did about it, and they could have. I had got my greetings early in 1942, while I was still sitting around Long Beach. But, in accordance with the military genius of our War Department, which built all the camps in the wrong place and sent all the guys to the wrong camps, I was enrolled in California and ordered to Fort Meade, Maryland, which is south of Baltimore and east of Washington. Naturally, when I bumped into reporters from the Sun, there were pieces about me in the papers, with pictures. It seemed to me, if they were worried about somebody being “spared,” either Sheila or Nancy or both of them might have come down there, maybe with a bag of cookies under one arm, and we could have had a little reunion. But nobody showed, so instead of taking my leaves in Baltimore, I slipped over to Washington, which I knew almost at well, from my student days. And when I went to boot camp and came out a lieutenant, it seemed to me they might have sent me a picture postcard or something, as that was in the papers too. But it drew a blank. And when I was ordered overseas, it seemed to me that might have stirred them up, as it had been hinted at in the paper too. But they slumbered on, my little gypsy sweethearts. So when I got to England, I quit worrying about them, my father, or anything that reminded me of Baltimore, the first time I ever really did. I can’t say I was exactly happy in the Army. It was one long fever dream, with mud, fog, and rifle range mixed up with a stupor they call sleep. I got upped to first lieutenant, to captain, to major, and I didn’t notice much difference, except the higher I got, the more hell I caught. Then came June 1944. My division, the 79th, went ashore, most of it, on the fourteenth, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth that we were due to shoot krauts. Along about six o’clock the evening of the eighteenth, I began to worry about four trucks that were supposed to have come up, and that hadn’t. They were bringing nothing but a load of K, just rations for my battalion, but by that time I’d got a little hipped on the subject of grub. In Washington, in the Library of Congress, I had done a little reading on the military thing. And the more I read, whether it was about Grant, and how nuts he was about water transportation, or Napoleon, and what he said about an army fighting on its belly, the more I saw that your outfit was as good as its supply. With K in their pockets, they could keep on going. With nothing in their pockets, they’d poop. So when the trucks didn’t come, I called 313th regimental headquarters to find out why. There was no why. They were on their way. All couriers were at their posts to guide them in, it was all under control, be sure to report any movement of my CP — command post. In the last war it had been PC — post of command. Some bright brass, no doubt, got decorated with palm for figuring that change, but you’ve got to admit it was constructive.

2100, no K.

At 2200, or ten o’clock, after three more calls to regimental, I ordered my jeep and started back. At first we just crawled, on account of new stone the engineers had cracked up and put on the road, but I had Hayden, my driver, take the shoulder, and it was a little slippery but we made better time. About a mile from a place called Golleville I picked up the first courier. He said he’d talked to the next man about ten minutes before, and the trucks were stuck, on account of engine trouble. A few hundred yards further on, the next courier said the same thing. In a half hour, maybe, fighting our way back through three lines of trucks, guns, tanks, half tracks, and what had been coming ashore for ten or twelve days, we found my K. All four trucks were jammed in a little side road, where they’d been trying to bull their way into the main parade, but couldn’t as the lead truck was stalled. When I got there the driver had eight GI’s, the whole detail aboard all four trucks, swinging on a crank, trying to get it going by hand. I asked him what the trouble was. “Starter, sir.”

“How do you know?”

“Got to be.”

“Why?”

“... I checked everything else.”

It seemed like a funny answer, but I told the GI’s to rest, raised the hood, and went in there myself — in the dark, of course, as nothing like a flashlight was allowed. I felt at the head of the cylinders, the fuel pump, the carburetor, things like that, and the more I felt the funnier it got. Then I got to the distributor. Right away I found a loose wire. I lifted the top of the box that holds it and a screw was missing, the one that made the connection with the dangling wire. I ran my little finger around, and not only was it gone from the connection, but it wasn’t rolling around in the box. That didn’t make sense. It’s something that never happens, and if it had happened, the screw had to be in the box. I figured on it a minute or two before I said anything. I thought I knew the answer: that screw had been removed. But had it been thrown away? The more I thought the less like it seemed that a driver who had cooked up a trick to duck a trip to the front would leave himself on a limb so he couldn’t take a powder back. And nobody knew, at that time, what was waiting for us. Maybe it was a rear guard, and maybe it was the whole German army. “Driver, where’s that screw?”

“... What screw?”

“From the distributor.”

“Sir, I don’t know nothing about any screw. I... never saw no screw. I—”

It wasn’t a driver that was all crossed up because his truck wouldn’t go. It was a guardhouse cadet at his own court-martial who knew perfectly well what I was talking about, but thought I couldn’t prove it. Then it came to me what had hit me so funny before. It wasn’t cuss-hungry. Think of that, it had to be the starter, the night before a drive, and yet he hadn’t one goddam for it, or a kick, or even spit! I turned to the GI’s. “Men!”

“Yes, sir.”

“This driver has a setscrew in his pocket, a thing no bigger than a potato bug, that I need to make this truck go. Get it, before he throws it away, or swallows it, or—”

I turned my back. What they did to him I don’t know, but from the way he whimpered it wasn’t pretty. “Here it is, sir.”

“O.K. Any of you men drive?”

“I do, sir.”

“Take that wheel. I’ll be in the jeep. Follow me.”

When we got to the first courier, I turned the driver over to him, with orders to take him back and have him held for a court. The next courier, that we reached after another twenty minutes of bulling our way along, said: “Sir, my buddy and I have been out, looking things over in these fields. They’re rough, but they’re solid, with no heavy mud, or walls of any kind. We think they’d be better going, and get you there quicker than the road, with all this traffic.”

“Fine, thanks.”

I led the way into the field, and it was pretty bumpy, but we could move, with the four trucks jamming along behind. Each courier picked us up and passed us on to the next guy, and it wasn’t long before we came to a side road, and the last courier stood at attention. “Straight into your CP, sir, a little more than one kilometer.”

“O.K. — good work.”

We bore left, and in about two minutes, when I figured we’d gone about a kilometer, I stopped Hayden and got out. The sentry’s orders were to have all challenges answered on foot, and by one person only, so it looked like it would save time if I reached him that way. I walked about a hundred yards. Then I went maybe fifty more. Then it came to me it ought not to be that far. I stopped and tried to see. It was so still I could hear my heartbeat. That’s something they don’t tell you about in the books, though sometimes they get it in a song: the death hush of a battlefield, around two o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was about to start up again when I happened to look down, and my guts dropped through the seat of my pants. We had trouble coming out, as I’ve said, from loose stone. There was no loose stone here, nothing but Normandy mud. It flashed through my mind what had happened; the couriers, trying to help me out, in the dark picked the wrong road. Then, even while I was thinking, came something like an awful whisper from hell: “... Nocht nicht... noch nicht...”

I did a belly slide into the ditch, behind some kind of a hay wagon that had been overturned there, and looked through a crack. I could see a little stone house, maybe to cool cream in, that had been built over a little stream that crossed the road, in a culvert, a few steps further on. In a second I saw something above it that was round and dark like a kraut helmet. I kept staring and it went down. Then here it came back up. Then beside it was another, and then another. But how many more there were, whether this was just some outpost or a battalion, I couldn’t tell.

I had two grenades with me, and unhooked them and laid them on the bank. Then I slid down into the ditch. Then I let the first one go on a high lob, then heaved the other. In a second or two I heard them hit the mud. Then a kraut wailed: “Jesus Christus — zurück!”

But before they could hop zurück the grenades went off and Irish confetti began falling all around. I came out shooting and they did. Something hit my leg. Then I heard shots from behind me. Then came a yell, “Kamerad,” and then my ration detail was backing six krauts onto the road. One of them didn’t back fast enough and a GI snapped up his gun butt against his chin. He went down almost on top of me and his eyeballs rolled on the road. They helped me up, anyway to stand on one leg, and through a GI that could speak a little German I found it was an outfit that had been sent out to booby-trap sheep, and had been cut off. I sent them back to headquarters under guard of two GI’s, and counted up. There were three krauts lying there, besides the one with his face bashed in, and the boys said I had got them. There were two of my own men. That left me four. I had Hayden put me in the jeep and led on. We picked up the right road, a little way across country, but by the time we got to my CP, I knew I wasn’t leading any advance that day. My leg was soaked in blood, and when one of my captains had me carried in a stable, and cut my pants away, he took command and ordered me back. It was a bad ride, and not only on account of the truck bumping me. My two GI’s lay heavy on my heart. They kept on setting heavy, through the grand tour I made of the hospitals in France, England, and all over, and even after I hit Stark Hospital in Charleston. I think they would have stayed with me, if it hadn’t been for Captain Barnham, one of the doctors there. He took a shine to me and headed off my transfer, so he could talk to me and put a little common sense, as he called it, to work. Pretty soon he had me buy a little car and take trips around, to Savannah and Atlanta and Miami and around, to get my mind off myself. Savannah I liked. It had been built right, by old Oglethorpe nearly two hundred years ago, so the parking problem was all taken care of, by “neutral ground,” as they called it then and call it now, and the traffic problem, by a lot of little two-block parks, that scatter the bottlenecks, and the street-name problem by vertical posts, that you can see in your headlights, so you never have to stop and stare and wonder like you do in other places. The hotels had real food and real drinks and real service, and pretty soon I was slipping over there a lot.

All that time, in the Army, in the hospital, and driving around, I didn’t think about my life, but at the same time it was there. I don’t know if I was bitter about it, but I wasn’t any too sold on it either, because I felt it wasn’t all my fault. I had been a heel, but I hadn’t wanted to be a heel, and I thought if things had broken different, I might not have been. Somewhere along the line, though, in the late summer of 1945, when the weather was getting a little cooler and Dixie was a place to be, I began to feel differently. I don’t know what it was that woke me up, maybe seeing colored people in all the jobs that had once been held by whites, in the hotels, garages, and other places I’d be, even Cremo College, as they call it, where they make the cigars. Understand, if they could get away with it, I was all for it. It certainly showed they were as good mechanics as the next if they were allowed to be, and proved if they could get that kind of work they could do it. But it tipped me off it wasn’t the same world as the one I had left. Ever since I’d been a man, in the 1930’s, there’d been no work to do, and what had been human beings were let sink until they were worse than slaves, they were rats. And down under everything else, that was what had made me bitter, made me feel that being a heel was something I couldn’t help. But if even colored field hands in the Carolinas could get jobs grinding valves and fixing starter teeth, that made me wonder if things might not, from now on, be different.

Then I began to hear about the new cars, and planes with pressurized cabins, and trains with vestibules you couldn’t see, except on curves, and boats with Diesel-electric stuff that hadn’t even been dreamed of before. It was my kind of world, something that spoke to what Hannah had called my mechanic’s soul. Then I got a load of the frozen food, and for ten minutes I saw things, and couldn’t fight them back. I mean, I saw something that made sense, and would fit in with my life, and let me get it back on the track, so it meant something. It seemed to me, if you could freeze stuff this new way, and have it taste good and be fresh, you could deliver dinner for a whole family with no home cooking necessary, except boiling of vegetables, and no washing up afterwards. A picture of the whole thing popped in front of my mind: central kitchens, to be located in each city I went into, where stuff would be cooking all day long, but not for any rush-hour trade, as everything would go in to freeze as soon as it was done; classified storage rooms, where everything would pack in portion units; assemblers, to work like department-store shoppers, and put each meal together in its container, with the dishes required, according to the order on the customers’ lists; trucks, with freeze compartments in them, to deliver each container to the house where it was due; other trucks, to call later, maybe late at night, to collect the containers, with dirty dishes in them, where they’d been put out like milk bottles; dish-washing rooms, that would take all dishes as the collectors brought them back, and wash them up with machines that would fit the dishes and cut breakage to a minimum. I meant to make dishes of plastic, so they could stand some slamming around, and still not get smashed.

I went into it pretty thoroughly. I talked to manufacturing plumbers on the washer stuff, and plastic people about the dishes. I took trips all around, and learned how stuff is frozen in central plants, with the ice company furnishing refrigeration by the ton of product. I got it through my head what a terrific amount of food, like the muskrat carcasses they throw away in Louisiana, goes to waste in this country, stuff I figured I could use, and show a profit on. I began to think in terms of colored help, for the handy way they had, on mechanics, and the little trouble they’d give, on organization. I was out every day, and cruised from deep bayou country up to Tennessee, all around the TVA Valley, the greatest thing in the way of farm development I ever saw. It seemed funny to be zipping around, in my little Ford car, through country I’d hoboed over, but I tried not to think of that. I knew, of course, that Mrs. America wasn’t going to do any standing broad jump into my lap for all the trouble I was taking over her, or do anything except act like the hundred-per-cent nitwit that in my opinion she was. From the beginning, I knew that this once more was a problem in public relations, or in other words that it involved people, instead of things. So, for one day I put in on freeze units, washing machinery, and fish, I put in two trying to figure the advertising, and wasn’t too proud to remember Denny, and thank him in my mind, for what he had taught me. I went into publications, art, type, and ideas. I worked out a bunch of ads, to run in three national magazines, that would eat up a hundred thousand dollars before we ever served a meal. They were all about two women, one a pretty, slick, sexy blonde, named Dora Dumb. The other was a gray-haired, quiet, refined wife, named Bessie Bright. Dora was to be the queen of all the department stores in her town, the markets, the shops, garages, beauty shops, and massage parlors. She broke appointments, charged things on the account, had five dollars put on the gasoline bill for cash because she’d forgotten to go to the bank, sent things back after she’d ordered them, and everybody was just as nice to her as they could possibly be. She had a husband named John Q. Dumb, that never had any money, that was always in hock to the furniture store, the finance company, and the loan sharks, and would try, with pencil and paper, to explain to her that all that nonsense of hers was costing them two prices on what anything ought to cost, that the interest on all that installment buying was charged just like the lamb chops were charged, that there was no need for them to be broke all the time, if she’d just pay cash, use her head, and keep things, once she bought them.

Bessie Bright had a husband named Louis, who always had money, never was in hock, lived twice as well as the Dumbs, and all because she paid cash, kept things, gave the stores no trouble, and got the breaks. I made it clear that Dora Dumb could not trade at Dillon, Inc. That was to be an exclusive place, reserved to Bessie Bright and her friends. And the point I was trying to put over was, that if you took the Dillon Variety Budget Dinner, you got a different meal every night in the month, but with no daily order to fool with, no mind-changing at the last minute, no Dora Dumb nonsense, we could put it on the table cheaper than Bessie could cook it, so cheap as a matter of fact, and with so little work, that Bessie needn’t keep a maid, and Louis, Jr. could have that car. I got pretty well along with it, at least in my mind. Then I went over to New Orleans and lined up my dough. I picked the biggest bank on Canal Street, went in, sat down with the cashier, and told him I wanted the name of a million dollars, “available for investment purposes.” That hit him funny, as I expected it would, and we took it easy a few minutes, he being respectful to the uniform, but plenty shy of the idea. After a few minutes he said: “Major Dillon, I’m sure the investment you have in mind is a sound one, at least to your satisfaction, and well, you know, O.K. But I can’t be sending you to anybody to—”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

“That’s what you said.”

“I asked you for a name. I didn’t ask you for a reference, anything of the kind. Naturally I’ll leave you out of it.”

“Yes, but even so—”

“Tell you what we’ll do.” I took a quarter out of my pocket, laid it down on his blotter. “There’s a two-bit piece, with the eagle on one side and George Washington on the other. Now you get yourself called outside, to have a drink at that far water cooler. Before you go, you write a name on a slip of paper, this scratch pad here. When you come back it’s gone, and I am. If I don’t land the million dollars, you keep the two bits, and it’s a comical little story for you when you’ve had a couple of these Sazerac cocktails they make down here. But if you land him, you pay me. Of course, I may use your bank to handle my money — that depends on how the million dollars feels. But it could turn out that way. Just a long shot, but worth two bits, I’d say, as a gamble.”

He laughed again, wrote something on the scratch pad, went out. It was just one word, when I got on the street with it, a French name I’ll call Douvain. Twenty minutes later I’d found out who Douvain was, and that afternoon I was in his office. I didn’t talk much, or try to close a deal, or anything crazy, or big. I spoke my piece in five or six minutes, told my idea, said I hoped to interest him if he’d reserve time for me whenever convenient. I made it clear I wanted a great deal of money, “at least a million dollars — if you don’t think in figures that big, say so and I’ll blow.” When I had it said, I shut up and sat there, letting him look me over. I guess it helped, what I’d learned standing reveille in the Army, to hold it an hour if I had to, without twitching my nose or coughing or scratching my leg, but I didn’t make any vaudeville show out of it, giving an imitation of a statue of Lincoln, anything like that. I just let him study me, and looked out at the street, up on the wall at the signed pictures of four or five presidents, and at his bookcases. In about five minutes he picked up the telephone, told his operator to get his home. He spoke in French, to his wife, and it seemed to me, from the basic I’d studied in camp, he was talking about me, and about dinner. When he hung up he said: “Major, you take me by surprise. I hadn’t expected to go into the restaurant business — or the polar storage business — or the farm business — or the advertising business — I’m a little confused which business you have in mind for me. But I have a feeling — some peculiar feeling of confidence you communicate to me. So I have spoken with my wife, and we shall be very glad if you can come to our home tonight, for dinner. Yes? At seven thirty?”

He spoke with a slight Creole accent, and didn’t say seven thirty but “seven sirty.” I didn’t know it then, but I’d caught him on his weakness when I began talking food. I said yes, went on back to the Roosevelt and had myself pressed and shaved and shined and powdered till I didn’t know myself, and showed up at his mansion on St. Charles Avenue at seven thirty sharp, for one of those dinner-coat things, with cocktails and lobsters and wine. By ten o’clock, I knew I was in, even if it was all in the French language. A girl played, and I sang the only French song I knew — “Bonjour, Suzon,” a thing Miss Eleanor had taught me for an encore. I went out of there with my future set.

As I walked to my car, it was one of those autumn nights they have no place in the world but Louisiana, soft, balmy, and clear, so the air has something in it that sets you nuts. I inhaled it, and as I looked up, there in a magnolia tree was the moth.

All that night it kept sweeping over me, the memory of what Hannah had said, that what had tripped me wasn’t only the breaks I’d got. It was something else, the romantic in me, that had kicked the beans into the fire twice, once in Baltimore when I’d thrown up the hotel and everything else for a girl that hadn’t even taken the ribbons off her hair yet, and again in California for the memory of her. And I faced it out with myself then, once more, lying awake in the Roosevelt Hotel: What was I going to do, leave that ghost to haunt me, and maybe louse me once more, or what? It was no trouble to remember what she looked like. I had dreamed about her, every few months, from the night I had left her, and always she looked the same, sunburned and blue-eyed and light-haired, and always twelve years old. I began to ask myself if I should go back to Maryland, or wherever she was, and get it over with. Either I’d still be in love with her, and maybe we could begin where we left off, or I’d be cured with one look, and that would be that. I asked myself if it was all imagination, if I was just being a fool, if I should go to sleep and forget her. But that night in the car, more than twelve years before, driving to hell and gone all over the face of the map, wasn’t my imagination, and being thrown out of Seven-Star wasn’t, either. I slept, of course, after a while, and saw Douvain the next day, and checked over my finances with him, as to whether I was in any personal need, as he wouldn’t be able to take up anything in detail until after the first of the year, which was two or three months away. It pleased him I was well enough heeled, at least for a major in the Army, as I still had quite a lot of the California money, several thousand as a matter of fact. He asked me questions about that and I told him the truth, anyhow that I’d been kicked out on “a difference of opinion about matrimony.” He laughed, as a Frenchman would. I had him solid, but somewhere in my belly I was uneasy. I left New Orleans after lunch, and for the night holed up at the Cherokee in Tallahassee. I got going early, and made the De Soto, in Savannah, in time for late lunch.