The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (88 page)

Mike’s rifle had fallen from his shoulders where it had been slung. Now he grabbed it up and fired two quick shots, then dove into the brush. He staggered through the jungle toward the place he had chosen to start the fire. Heedless of danger, he dropped to his knees, scraped together some sticks, and with paper from his pocket, lit the fire.

A shot smacked dully into the log near him, and he rolled over. The flame took hold, then a volley of shots riddled the brush around him. By a miracle he was unhurt. A Japanese came leaping into the growing firelight, and Mike’s rifle cracked. The soldier fell headlong. Another, and another shot.

The flame caught in a heap of dead branches, flared, and leaped high. In a roaring holocaust, it swirled higher and higher, mounting a fast crescendo of unbelievable fury toward the dark skies. The scene around was lit by a weird light, and into it came the Japanese.

Desperately, yet methodically, making every shot count, Mike Thorne began to fire. He sprang to his feet, rushed, changed position, opened fire again. A bullet stung him along the arm, something struck his leg a solid blow. He raised to one knee, blood trickling from a cut on his scalp, and fired again.

Then, suddenly, another rifle opened fire across the clearing. Taken on the flank, the advancing enemy hesitated, then broke for the jungle.

Suddenly, over the roar of the fire, Mike heard the roar of motors. Their planes, taking off!

He saw them mount, swing around, then a bomb dropped. He heard it one instant before it exploded and hurled himself flat. The earth heaved under him, and the fire lifted and scattered in all directions, but roared on.

T
HEN OUT OF THE NIGHT
he heard the high-pitched whine of a diving plane, and the night was lit with the insane lightning of tracer gone wild, while over his head the sky burst into a roaring, chattering madness of sound.

Battle! Planes had come, and there was fighting up there in the darkness. He rolled over, swearing in a sullen voice, swearing in sheer relief that his warning had been successful. He fired at a Japanese soldier, saw the flames catch hold anew, and then as his rifle clicked on an empty chamber, he lunged erect, hauling out the smatchet.

Suddenly, something white loomed in the sky, and then a man hit the ground beside him. It was a paratrooper! An American! Then the night was filled with them, and Mike staggered toward the man.

A forward observer grabbed Mike’s arm. “What is it? Where the devil are they coming from?”

Mike roared the information into his ear, and the officer began a crisp recital of the information into the radio.

A plane roared over, then explosions came from the chasm below, the night changed from the bright rattle of machine-gun fire to the solemn, unceasing thunder of big bombs as the bombers shuttled back and forth, releasing their eggs over the enemy field.

Mike staggered back, feeling his numbed leg. It wasn’t bleeding. Evidently a stick knocked against his leg by a bullet, or a stone. He turned, dazed.

Jerry Brandon came running toward him. “Mike! Are you all right?”

“Sure,” he said. “Where…?”

“I came up the trail. I thought maybe I could make it, and when the fighting started up there, I got through all right.”

The Army officer walked back through the smoke and stopped beside Mike. “This is a good night’s work, friend,” he said. “Who are you?”

Briefly, Mike told him. The officer looked curiously at Jerry. Mike explained, and the officer nodded. “Yes,” he said dryly, “we heard about you. Incidentally, your father’s safe. He got into Henderson Field last night.”

They turned away. Mike looked at Jerry, smiling wearily. “Lady,” he said, “tired as I am, I can still wonder at finding a girl like you in the Solomons. If there wasn’t a war on…” He looked at her again. “After all,” he said thoughtfully, “what’s a war between friends?”

Jerry laughed. “I think you could handle the war, too,” she said.

Afterword

O
f all these volumes of the Collected Short Stories series this one is my favorite. Tales that for years have cried out to be presented together have now found a home in the same binding. An era in the life of Louis L’Amour is finally available in a manner where the work almost becomes an autobiography in fiction.

The first several stories in this collection are some of the most recently written, stories that Louis wrote from the early 1950s to the early 1960s; they show the end of an arc that also included “The Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow,” a story published in
The Collected Short Stories, Volume One.
The rest of this collection, however, flashes back to Louis’s very beginnings as a writer and, in fact, includes the first story he ever published: one recently unearthed and offered here for the first time.

“Death, Westbound” was actually mentioned by Louis in his memoir,
Education of a Wandering Man,
although he didn’t mention the title. “I placed my first story for publication,” he wrote. “It was a hobo story, submitted to a magazine that had published many famous names when they were starting out. The magazine paid on publication, but that never happened. The magazine folded after accepting my story and that was the end of it.”

Interesting, but not exactly true….

Fifty-five years
earlier
Louis had written to a girlfriend of his saying, “I have…managed to have one short story accepted by a small magazine one finds on the newsstands. It pays rather well but is somewhat sensational. The magazine…is generally illustrated by several pictures of partially undressed ladies, and they are usually rather heavily constructed ladies also. It is called
10 Story Book.
My story was a realistic tale of some hoboes called “Death, Westbound.”

Now, I knew for a fact that Dad was trying to impress this gal like all get out. But it
seemed
like he was talking about the same story that he mentioned many years later. A check of his list of story submissions for the nineteen thirties revealed that he had continued to submit work to
10 Story Book
for the next several years…. Not what you’d expect if they had “folded.” Much later in life, had Louis felt compelled to mention this early moment of triumph but at the same time deny his connection to the magazine’s somewhat sleazy content?

A number of searches showed that very few copies of
10 Story Book
existed in libraries or public archives. So I began to put the word out to magazine aficionados, pulp collectors, and the fairly offbeat subculture of antique pornography collectors. About five years passed with little result other than occasionally calling or e-mailing various people and reminding them that I was still interested. But one day my in-box divulged a scan of “Death, Westbound” by Louis D. Amour. One of my contacts had finally come through. I don’t know if the name, D. Amour, was a mistake or an early attempt at a pseudonym, but this was Louis L’Amour’s first recorded sale.

Sensational photos (for the 1930s) aside, Dad seems to have been in good company; Jack Woodford is listed in the table of contents of the edition and I assume that this is the novelist, screenwriter, and short-story master of
Jack Woodford on Writing
fame. Other famous writers of the early twentieth century are also reputed to have been published here, too;
10 Story Book
following a model later used by
Playboy,
where the promise of unclothed women draws in readers who otherwise would never have bothered with literature at all; and the literature gave the magazine some class and protection from the opinions of moralists and pro-censorship types.

In this collection, “Death, Westbound” begins a cycle that will carry the reader through stories that relate to many actual events in Louis’s early life. It should not be assumed that these stories are always literally true but they are a snapshot of the times—the 1920s and 1930s—and how Louis L’Amour experienced those times. Greatly influenced by Jack London, Eugene O’Neal, and later John Steinbeck, Louis began his career by trying to document the era that he lived in. Whether “Death, Westbound” is a “true story” or not, Louis did ride the side-door Pullman’s of the Southern Pacific on many occasions; from Arizona to Texas and back again, and from Arizona to California even more often.

The stories “Old Doc Yak,” “It’s Your Move,” and “And Proudly Die,” soon followed, and were drawn from actual people that Louis knew in the time he spent waiting for a ship or “on the beach,” as the sailors called unemployment, in San Pedro, California. Louis wrote of that time in an introduction from
Yondering:
“Rough painting or bucking rivets in the shipyards, swamping on a truck, or working ‘standby’ on a ship were all a man could find. It wasn’t enough. We missed meals and slept wherever we could. The town was filled with drifting, homeless men, mostly seamen from all the countries in the world. Sometimes I slept in empty boxcars, in abandoned buildings, or in the lumber piles on the old E. K. Wood lumber dock.”

The piled lumber Louis mentions often left gaps or overhangs, some well off the ground, which were shelter of a sort. But if you had a few cents, the vastly preferred place to spend the night was the Seaman’s Church Institute, sort of a YMCA for seamen. “Survival,” another story of that time, was based on a story that Louis had heard in his time around the Seaman’s Institute, but many gaps in the narrative have been filled with his own material, and it is populated with mostly fictional characters.

Louis left San Pedro on a voyage that would eventually take him around the world and “Thicker Than Blood” and “The Admiral” are drawn from that experience. I don’t know if the events in these stories are true in whole or in part, but buried in among Louis’s papers I found the following photographs…

To the right is Leonard Duks, first mate of the SS
Steel Worker
and Louis’s nemesis on a voyage that took them from San Pedro west to Japan, China, the Dutch East Indies, the Federated Malay States, Aden Arabia, the Suez Canal, and on into Brooklyn, New York. I don’t know if Duks truly lived up to his fictional reputation in “Thicker Than Blood,” but Louis didn’t like the man and appointed himself as a spokesman for the crew’s complaints about the unbelievably bad food and other various working conditions.

The ship did not call in Shanghai twice, so much of “The Admiral” may be fictional. However, the note on the back of the next photograph suggests otherwise. It reads, “Tony and Joe taken on the beach at Balikpapan (Borneo). Tony is the one in ‘The Admiral.’”

Additional photographs from Balikpapan include one of the
Steel Worker
at anchor with much of what looks like their cargo of pipe in the foreground…

And the following, which reads, “Luflander, Malay barber, myself at eighteen, Balikpapan, Borneo.”

“The Admiral” was originally published by
Story,
a magazine which was very prestigious at the time, and Louis’s being included raised some favorable comment. Dad, more than anything, wanted to continue in this vein. He imagined a cycle of stories about San Pedro and another cycle that took place in Shanghai, both utilizing loosely interconnected sets of colorful characters; hoboes and seamen, soldiers of fortune and gangsters, historical characters and working stiffs just trying to get by.

However, he also needed to get paid. The literary magazines paid on publication and while that was bad enough when the stories were scheduled months ahead of time, often they were not scheduled at all: the story was accepted but the editor had no idea when he would run it and thus no idea when he would pay. The pulp magazines, which published a far less literary fare, paid better and, more important, they paid faster, sending out a check the moment they accepted a story. Ultimately, Louis found this combination hard to beat. At times, though, he did wonder rather wistfully about what kind of career he would have had if he’d been able to keep writing in this more “personal adventure, personal experience” style.

“The Dancing Kate” seems to mix some of the more realistic elements of those “personal experience” stories with those of a pulp adventure while “Glorious! Glorious!” returns to the more anti-heroic style. Louis could not have participated in the Riffian War where the forces of Abdel-Krim fought both the Spanish and the French Foreign Legions but the
Steel Worker did
sail the Moroccan coast during its final days. “Off the Mangrove Coast” has a plot similar to a story that Louis told about his own life, a story where he and several others unsuccessfully attempted to salvage a riverboat that was supposedly full of the treasure that a rajah from the Federated Malay States took with him when some form of uprising forced him from power. “The Cross and the Candle” is also based on an actual experience, though I do not believe that Louis was there for the climax of the story or that he played a part in solving the murder of the man’s ill-fated sweetheart.

“A Friend of the General” is interesting because there is no indication of when it was written. I suspect that Louis wrote it quite late in his career, possibly in 1979 or ’80, in order to include it in the collection
Yondering.
Louis’s unit, a Quartermaster’s Truck Company,
was
based out of Château de Spoir, home of the Count and Countess Dulong du Rosney. The count and countess had indeed moved into a gardener’s cottage across the road from the château itself. The “cottage” (more appropriately, the home of the estate manager) was of a style and size that would have attracted notice even in Beverly Hills, so they were nicely housed even though first the German and then the American army had taken over the main residence. The Countess Dulong du Rosney has no memory of Lt. Louis L’Amour, Parisian black-market cafés, or the mysterious “General,” but she still may have been the model for the countess in the story. When I spoke to her a few years ago it was obvious that she had that same sense of unflappable self-assurance. The story of the ill-fated arms merchant Milton is one that Louis told many times as if it were true, suggesting that he was teaching boxing at a fencing and martial arts academy in Frenchtown (a section of old Shanghai) at the time.