Whipple's Castle (33 page)

When he reached the house, he dropped his bike on the grass and went up to the little porch as quietly as he could. Finally he knocked, and Mrs. Caswell came to the door. Her skin had tiny striations on it, like a Mcintosh apple; in some kinds of light she looked as though she had a rash all over. She was full of pressure, and she made him nervous.

“David, David, David,” she said, sighing with weary tolerance, as though he'd been there too often. Which he certainly hadn't. She smiled—she always smiled—and he thought it hurt her to smile, because that constant irony seemed to be the result of pain.

She put her hand on his arm and drew him inside; she was always touching him. “Our postman is in his hobby shop,” she said, “and our good boy is in his books.”

She sat him down, too deeply, into the sofa. He never knew where to sit on it, in that last moment when there was still a little choice, because the cushions tilted and shifted. This time he sat next to the arm, too deep, but he hooked an elbow over the arm to hold himself up.

“Shouldn't you allow Benjamin to do his homework?” she asked. “I suppose yours is all done, neat as pie?”

“No,” he said. Already he was going into a mild, classroomlike coma. Nothing that was going to happen was anything he wanted to happen.

“But David,” she said, affecting a reasonable tone, “how can our Benjamin be valedictorian if we don't let him study?”

This was ridiculous. Nothing in the world could keep Ben from being valedictorian. Usually a girl was, because they took easy subjects like home economics or typing, but Ben's only rival, Joan Warren, had moved to Northlee. Who cared, anyway? He didn't think Ben cared; Ben just had the habit of doing all his work. Nothing like that could ever really be pinned on Ben. But he thought: Why is she trying to ruin her son's reputation? His own mother would have more sense than that.

Ben had heard them, and came stooping down the stairs, no opinion visible on his sallow face.

“Hi, Dave,” he said. His eyes were blank, as though he were still thinking equations.

It was then that David confessed, lying, and trying to make little of it. “We were just wrestling,” he said.

“My little boys were wrestling!” Mrs. Caswell said. “My little cubs, trying out their new muscles!”

“Yeah,” David said. “Just wrestling a little.” He got up to go, but as he turned toward the door she came up to him and took him fiercely by the arm. He looked down into her hard face.

“Don't you realize that Benjamin is a genius?” she said. There was a lot of hissing in her voice; she really meant it. He didn't really doubt it himself. But she scared him. She scared him by saying such a crazy thing. He jerked his arm away from her hand and ran out of the house.

A few days later, just before school let out, Eddie Kusacs buzzed them all again. He came five times that spring, and each time would remain distinct in David's memory. He never knew where Eddie came from, or what he was doing in a Marine Corsair so far from the sea. But there he was, fracturing the blue sky above the high school, fracturing their attention, fracturing the school, the teachers, telling them all how they were prisoners of their little town. Then he was gone.

The bicycle jumping that afternoon was more daring than usual. Pete Kelly established a new record. David beat his old mark by one foot. The sunlight made him sneeze as it bounced off the sidewalk, and beneath him was the familiar noise of sprockets and spokes, the little stressful twangs and creaks of his bike—then the lift and belly thrill of the flight. No one went very high in the air, but when he landed there was a dense, hard push through his elbows, and his handlebars squeaked down an inch or two. Then the slewing in the dry dirt beyond the walk, and for a moment all the girls' eyes were upon him.

As Ben came up to take his ritual jump, David said, “Come on, genius.” This was a bit like poking a snake, and he didn't say it very loudly. He never knew if Ben heard it or not. But afterwards he would still see him clearly as he swung his long leg up over his bike—his blue sock and a section of white, hairless leg, thin and uniform as a length of two-inch pipe. He pushed off and began to pump hard. His long, limp hair came down over his forehead, and the wind pushed it aside, parted it in the middle. His mouth was set, made into a little slit by effort—the same expression he wore when he was mad at David—as he hunched over those strange handlebars that bent down and around like rams' horns. There he went, his chain grinding, and he hit the ramp. David always thought his tire blew then and his wheel buckled later, when he landed, but others said no, everything went haywire at once.

David saw Ben in the air, swimming, parallel to his bike, on his face still that same determined, closed look. Then he and the bike came down together. They all got to him pretty quickly; David was proud that he was the first to get there, and they tried to untangle him. It was serious, he knew—no mere scrape case. Ben's head didn't want to come off the handlebars. They all knew enough to leave it alone while the girls' screams brought authority from inside the school.

Dr. Winston was there in ten minutes. When he and the school nurse removed Ben from his bike, Ben's long hands spread and contracted as though he were rubbing coins between his thumbs and fingers. They took him off to Northlee to the hospital, and by the next day the janitor had put bleach on the cement where Ben had bled, and a sawhorse over the canted block of sidewalk.

How were they all affected by this? It was shocking enough, but it was only a bicycle accident. That hex nut, for instance, that dented Ben's skull—he'd turned it with a wrench while Ben held the handlebars straight. It was too familiar, not the instrument for the drama they all wanted in their lives—not with the shadow of a Corsair in their minds and that huge radial engine still roaring in their ears.

When he met Mr. Caswell on the street a few days after the accident—he had called at the house earlier—he asked again how Ben was getting along.

“Ben is still very sick, David,” he said. “He's very, very sick.”

“Is he going to be out of school long?”

“We don't know how long.” Mr. Caswell's voice was calm and exact. “He hasn't come to yet, you see.”

Later, when David found out the truth—that the part of Ben's brain that governed consciousness had been damaged—he wondered if Mr. Caswell really knew it then. His voice was calm, but his eyes were glittery—not really wet, but they looked as if they had been polished.

“I hope he gets well soon,” David said.

“Thank you. Thank you, David,” Mr. Caswell said.

David didn't know what to do, so he stared at Mr. Caswell for a moment, not able to share his feelings, though he knew immediately that Ben was in very grave danger and that Mr. Caswell was grieving for his son. Already grieving—that he knew. He told Mr. Caswell that Mr. Skelton had announced in assembly that Ben would get full credit for the spring term and become a senior in the fall.

“Yes, he told us,” Mr. Caswell said.

And then a strange thing happened to Mr. Caswell's mouth. As he drew in a long breath, his teeth clicked together, hard, about ten times. Nothing else happened, except that David suddenly felt that grief behind his own eyes, and his throat hurt badly. For a moment Mr. Caswell looked straight at him, seeing what David was embarrassed to be caught at. David thought: It isn't certain that Ben won't get well again. But he knew, and he felt himself begin to burn with an indignation inexpressible any other way.

“It was that lousy bike!” he shouted. “That stupid bike!” Mr. Caswell was surprised. His mouth opened and closed upon the colorless, uniform rows of his dentures. He made a motion with his arm, and because David thought he meant to put his mailbag down, so that he could comfort him, he turned quickly from Mr. Caswell and walked away without looking back.

As Wood fell exhaustedly to sleep, or as he woke sometimes for moments in the sleeping barracks, after a day of marching, running, or the nervous fondling of the new weapons, from the long Georgia hill to the west came the stutter and
pah
of machine guns. If he looked from the window beside the head of his bunk, the tracers arched into the hill and then, erratic after their impact, rose slowly in fountains, in single aberrant parabolas into the black sky before they burned dull red and out. In between each tracer were four dark bullets, invisible as planets among stars, but though they trailed no fire, they were there. The Georgia sky was sewn with copper and lead.

On farther ranges howitzers lofted their shells, and the deeper bark and cough of these, the 105s, grew louder and closer if the wind were right. The men snored and complained in their sleep, and the rumble, the faraway crush of concussion, was always there, day and night.

Men? Wood lay awake in the heat of the July night. About him the children slept. It was a wonder they could hold grenades in their trembling hands, throw them and move forward into the red dust raised by the explosions. But they did. He wondered if the war were being fought by children such as Talley and Pickett, Stallings, Scarpone, Warfield, Shoup and the others. Even Sergeant Garbanks, behind his rehearsed sarcasm, peered at his effect with a pleased surprise he could only conceal as a child might, with a cartoon scowl. But then it was only children he warned and frightened, and perhaps he knew that.

Lieutenant Knobloch, who had been on Guadalcanal, took joy in telling how he had stepped from the jungle and shot twenty Japanese sailors who had come from a sinking ship. They tried to run back into the waves, and he had potted them one by one with his carbine. It had taken three magazines of ammunition before he got them all. He had recurring malaria, and wasn't with them too often. Captain Harry T. Jones led the company on marches, but rarely spoke. He was a tall, rangy man of twenty-four, who had been wounded in the leg in North Africa. It was generally believed that he made them march and run so much because he thought it was good exercise for his leg. Sergeant Garbanks, who was with the platoon all the time, was really in charge of their training. A Corporal Hughes was listed on the platoon roster, but he was A.W.O.L., and had been A.W.O.L. no one knew how long. It was said that he held the Congressional Medal of Honor, and thus could get away with anything, could quit the Army any time he liked.

But it was the men of his platoon, with one or two exceptions, who dismayed Wood. Poor little Pickett, who looked like a sick chicken, who couldn't really read or write; when they were first assigned to the 3rd Battalion Pickett had been sent to the dentist's, and he came back that afternoon with half his teeth gone from his pink ragged gums. It was hard to see how they could have pulled the splintery stumps from his white formless jaws without tearing everything into rags. His flesh didn't seem strong enough to take such wrenching. He'd weighed 125, and before he got his false teeth he lost ten pounds. He managed to keep up with them on marches, but Wood could never understand how he did it. Then there was Talley, who remained so distant from the rest, frozen by some inner defect, maybe fear, who would never answer
“Ho!”
like the other Southerners when his name was called, the joke of his name freezing him still deeper into some private world or other. But Wood suspected there was no real world there at all, and the boy's dull eyes didn't look to any inner resources, just more dully at the fading outer world. To fight alongside him? Or Thompson, whose neck and head were a thick pillar leaning over always to the right, a pillar with colorless, slatey hair on top—he was another semiliterate. Or fat Smallers, who always lagged behind, sometimes a company or two behind, who could be seen to cry during ten-minute breaks, his pants dropped, his paper bag of talcum powder in hand as he tenderly smeared his incandescent thighs.

Most of the men in his platoon were Southerners, who had sounded strange only at first. Soon they had revealed themselves, and they might just as well have been from Leah.

But it was Stefan who caused him more than dismay. Stefan was older than any of them—twenty-six. He was married, and had a child. They called him “Pop,” and he was always slightly abstracted; his wide gray eyes peered seriously and somewhat askew at any problem. Quite often he put his leggings on the wrong legs, so that the lacings and buckles were on the insides. Here they could catch and trip him up, but mainly they sent Sergeant Garbanks into screaming fits; half hysterical with anger and laughter, he'd send poor Pop Stefan to all-night K.P. or guard duty. Stefan needed his sleep very badly. He was thin and always croupy, and one bony shoulder curved toward the front more than the other, as though he were pointing with it. His sternum was depressed into a cavity in his chest the size of a baseball. His voice itself came out slightly exhausted, an old man's voice that was thin above the sudden barrel-deep and reverberant explosions of croup.

Wood began to keep an eye on him, and managed to save him quite a bit of sleep by telling him when only one side of his canteen hanger was hooked to his webbed belt, or when he'd left the gas-cylinder lock screw out of his rifle, and such small things. He couldn't protect him from M-1 thumb, a condition caused by the spring-laden closure of the Garand rifle's bolt. Stefan could never learn to take his thumb out of the way in time. That is, he could never leam a consistent way of doing it, and naturally he handled his rifle as though it were a dangerous and moody animal. At inspection he dropped it, a crime so heinous the whole platoon had lost its breath. He just stood there, sucking his inflamed thumb, and though the incredulous Sergeant Garbanks couldn't swear in front of Captain Jones, later on his voice ricocheted from all the barracks in the battalion quadrangle.

Now, in the night, the distant machine guns rattled in hesitant spurts, and the tracers climbed slowly into the black sky. It was three in the morning, and Wood knew he would pay tomorrow for every minute of sleep he lost now. He leaned on his elbow and watched the long hill to the west, where the tracers grew like bright worms. From beyond the hill somewhere, on one of the interlocking ranges, shell bursts lit the clouds with hot red flashes, and the sound rolled slowly toward and over him.