Johnny Got His Gun Page 2

  When the door at the foot of the stairs closed behind them his mother began to shake a little. Her voice came like dry air.

  “That’s not Bill. It may seem like it but it’s not.”

  He patted his mother’s shoulder. His sister relaxed down on the floor again.

  That was all.

  Well why couldn’t it be all then? How many times was he going to have to go through it? It was all over and finished and why couldn’t the goddam phone ever stop ringing? He was nutty because he had a hangover a big hangover and he was having bad dreams. Pretty soon if he had to he’d wake up and answer the phone but somebody should do it for him if they had any consideration at all because he was tired and sick of it.

  Things were getting floaty and sickly. Things were so quiet. Things were so goddam still. A hangover headache thumps and clatters and raises hell inside your skull. But this wasn’t any hangover. He was a sick man. He was a sick man and he was remembering things. Like coming out of ether. But you’d think the telephone would stop ringing sometime. It couldn’t just go on forever. He couldn’t go over and over the same business of answering it and hearing his father was dead and then going home through a rainy night. He’d catch cold if he did that much more. Besides his father could only die once.

  The telephone bell was just part of a dream. It had sounded different from any other telephone bell or any other sound because it had meant death. After all that bell was a particular kind of thing a very particular kind of thing as old Prof Eldridge used to say in Senior English. And a particular kind of thing sticks with you but there’s no use of it sticking too close. That bell and its message and everything about it was way back in time and he was finished with it.

  The bell was ringing again. Way far off as if echoing through a lot of shutters in his mind he could hear it. He felt as if he were tied down and couldn’t answer it yet he felt as if he had to answer it. The bell sounded as lonesome as Christ ringing out in the bottom of his mind waiting for an answer. And they couldn’t make connections. With each ring it seemed to get lonesomer. With each ring he got more scared.

  He drifted again. He was hurt. He was bad hurt. The bell was fading. He was dreaming. He wasn’t dreaming. He was awake even though he couldn’t see. He was awake even though he couldn’t hear a thing except a telephone that really wasn’t ringing. He was mighty scared.

  He remembered how when he was a kid he read The Last Days of Pompeii and awakened in the middle of a dark night crying in terror with his face suffocating in the pillow and thinking that the top of one of his Colorado mountains had blown off and that the covers were lava and that he was entombed while yet alive and that he would lie there dying forever. He had that same gasping feeling now. He had that same cowardly griping in his bowels. He was unchristly scared so he gathered his strength and made like a man buried in loose earth clawing out with his hands toward air.

  Then he sickened and choked and fainted half away and was dragged back by pain. It was all over his body like electricity. It seemed to shake him hard and then throw him back against the bed exhausted and completely quiet. He lay there feeling the sweat pour out of his skin. Then he felt something else. He felt hot damp skin all over him and the dampness enabled him to feel his bandages. He was wrapped in them from top to bottom. Even his head.

  He really was hurt then.

  The shock caused his heart to smash against his ribs. He grew prickly all over. His heart was pounding away in his chest but he couldn’t hear the pulse in his ear.

  Oh god then he was deaf. Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf he couldn’t hear his own heart beat? He had been hit and he had been hit bad and now he was deaf. Not just a little deaf. Not just halfway deaf. He was stone deaf.

  He lay there for a while with the pain ebbing and thinking this will give me something to chew on all right all right. What about the rest of the guys? Maybe they didn’t come out so lucky. There were some good boys down in that hole. How’ll it seem being deaf and shouting at people? You write things on paper. No that’s wrong they write things on paper to you. It isn’t anything to kick up your heels and dance about but it might be worse. Only when you’re deaf you’re lonesome. You’re godforsaken.

  So he’d never hear again. Well there were a hell of a lot of things he didn’t want to hear again. He never wanted to hear the biting little Castanet sound of a machine gun or the high whistle of a .75 coming down fast or the slow thunder as it hit or the whine of an airplane overhead or the yells of a guy trying to explain to somebody that he’s got a bullet in his belly and that his breakfast is coming out through the front of him and why won’t somebody stop going forward and give him a hand only nobody can hear him they’re so scared themselves. The hell with it.

  Things were going in and out of focus. It was like looking into one of those magnified shaving mirrors and then moving it toward you and away from you. He was sick and probably out of his head and he was badly hurt and he was lonesome deaf but he was also alive and he could still hear far away and sharp the sound of a telephone bell.

  He was sinking and rising and then going in lazy quiet black circles. Everything was alive with sound. He was nuts all right. He caught a glimpse of the big ditch where he and the guys used to go swimming in Colorado before he came to Los Angeles before he came to the bakery. He could hear the splash of water as Art did one of his high dives he’s a fool for diving so far why can’t the rest of us do it? He looked out across the rolling meadows of Grand Mesa eleven thousand feet in the sky and saw acres of columbines stirring in a cool August breeze and heard far off the roar of mountain streams. He saw his father pulling a sled with his mother on it one Christmas morning. He heard the fresh snow squealing under the runners of the sled. The sled was his Christmas present and his mother was laughing like a girl and his dad was grinning in his slow wrinkly way.

  They seemed to have a good time his mother and his father. Especially then. They used to flirt with each other right in front of him before the girls were born. Do you remember this? Do you remember that? I cried. You talked like this. You wore your hair so. You picked me up and I remembered how strong you were and you put me on old Frank because he was gentle and after that we rode across the river on the ice with old Frank picking his way carefully like a dog.

  You remember the telephone when you were courting me? I remember everything when I was courting you even the gander that used to rush and hiss at me when I took you in my arms. You remember the telephone when you were courting me silly? I remember. Then you remember the party line going eighteen miles along Cole Creek Valley and only five customers? I remember I remember the way you looked with your big eyes and your smooth forehead you haven’t changed. You remember the telephone line and how new it was? Oh it was lonely out there with nobody in three or four miles and nobody really in the world but you. And me waiting for the telephone to ring. It rang two times for us remember? Two rings and you were calling from the grocery store when the store was closed. And the receivers all along the line all five of them going click-click Bill is calling Macia click-click-click. And then your voice how funny it was to hear your voice the first time over a telephone how wonderful it always was.

  “Hello Macia.”

  “Hello Bill how are you?”

  “I’m fine are you through with the work?”

  “We just finished the dishes.”

  “I suppose everybody is listening again tonight.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Don’t they know I love you? You’d think that was enough for them.”

  “Maybe it isn’t.”

  “Macia why don’t you play a piece on the piano?”

  “All right Bill. Which one?”

  “Whatever one you like I like them all.”

  “All right Bill. Wait till I fix the receiver.”

  And then way out on C
ole Creek way west on the other side of the mountains from Denver music tinkling over telephone wires that were brand new and wonderful. His mother before she was his mother before she thought particularly of becoming his mother would go over to the piano the only one on Cole Creek and play the Beautiful Blue Ohio or perhaps My Pretty Red Wing. She would play it clear through and his father in Shale City would be listening and thinking isn’t it wonderful I can sit here eight miles away and hold a little piece of black business to my ear and hear far off the music of Macia my beautiful my Macia.

  “Could you hear it Bill?”

  “Yes. It was lovely.”

  Then somebody else maybe six miles up or down the line would break into the conversation without being ashamed at all.

  “Macia I just picked up the hook and heard you playing. Why don’t you play After the Ball is Over? Clem’d like to hear it if you don’t mind.”

  His mother would go back to the piano and play After the Ball is Over and Clem somewhere would be listening to music for maybe the first time in three or four months. Farmers’ wives would be sitting with their work done and receivers to their ears listening too and getting dreamy and thinking about things their husbands wouldn’t suspect. And so it went with everybody up and down the lonesome bed of Cole Creek asking his mother to play a favorite piece and his father listening from Shale City and liking it but perhaps growing a little impatient occasionally and saying to himself I wish the people out on Cole Creek would understand that this is a courtship not a concert.

  Sounds sounds sounds everywhere with the bell fading out and returning and him so sick and deaf he wanted to die. He was wallowing in blackness and far away the telephone bell was ringing with nobody there to answer it. A piano was tinkling far far away and he knew his mother was playing it for his dead father before his father was dead and before she had any thought of him her son. The piano kept time with the bell and the bell with the piano and in back of it there was thick silence and a yearning to listen and lonesomeness.

  Now the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing The birds are sighing, the night wind crying…

  ii

  His mother was singing in the kitchen. He could hear her singing there and the sound of her voice was the sound of home. She sang the same tune over and over again. She never sang the words to it just the tune in a kind of absent voice as if she were thinking of something else and the singing were only a way of killing time. When she was busiest she always sang.

  It was the fall of the year. The poplars and cottonwoods had turned red and yellow. His mother was working and singing in the kitchen over the old coal-burning stove. She was stirring apple butter in a big crock. Or she was canning peaches. The peaches sent a rich spicy smell through the whole house. She was making jelly. The pulp from the fruit hung in a flour sack over the cooler part of the stove. Through the cloth the juices oozed stickily down into a pan. The pan had a thick pinkish-cream scum around its edges. In the center the juice was clear and red.

  She was baking bread. She baked bread twice a week. She kept a jar of starter in the ice box from baking time to baking time so she never had to worry about yeast. The bread was heavy and brown and sometimes it swelled two or three inches over the top of the pan. When she took it out of the oven she smeared the brown crust with butter and let it cool. But even better than the bread were the rolls. She baked them to come out of the oven just before supper. They were steaming hot and you put butter inside them and it melted and then you put jam on them or apricot preserves with nuts in the syrup. That was all you wanted for supper although you had to eat other things of course. On summer afternoons you took a thick slice of the bread and put cold butter on it. Then you sprinkled sugar over the butter and that was better than cake. Or you got a thick slice of sweet bermuda onion and put it between two slabs of bread and butter and nobody anywhere in the world had anything more delicious to eat.

  In the fall his mother worked from day to day and from week to week scarcely ever getting out of the kitchen. She canned peaches and cherries and raspberries and black berries and plums and apricots and made jams and jellies and preserves and chili sauces. And while she worked she sang. She sang the same hymn in an absent voice without words as if she were thinking of something else all the while.

  There was a hamburger man down on Fifth and Main. He was slight and stooped and pasty-faced and always glad to talk with anyone who stopped by his stand. He was the only hamburger man in Shale City so he had a monopoly on the business. People said he was a dope fiend and that sometime he would get dangerous. But he never did and he made the best hamburgers anyone ever ate. He had a gas flare over his gas plate and you could smell the wonderful odor of onions frying there for a block on either side of his stand. He came out about five or six in the afternoons and made hamburgers until ten or eleven. You had to wait if you wanted a sandwich.

  His mother loved the hamburger man’s sandwiches. On Saturday nights his father worked late at the store. He would go down town on Saturday nights and wait until his father got his pay check. At about a quarter to ten when the store was getting ready to close his father would give him thirty cents for three hamburgers. He would rush with his money over to the hamburger man to get a place in line. He would order three hamburgers to go with lots of onions and sweet mustard. By the time the order was filled his father would already be on the way home. The hamburger man would put the sandwiches in a bag and he would put the bag inside his shirt next to his body. Then he would run all the way home so that the hamburgers would still be warm. He would run through the sharp autumn nights feeling the heat of the hamburgers next to his stomach. Each Saturday night he tried to beat last Saturday’s time so the sandwiches would be even warmer. He would get home and pull them out of his shirt front and his mother would eat one right away. By that time his father would be home too. It was a great Saturday night feast. The girls would be in bed being so young and it seemed to him that he had his father and mother completely to himself. He was in a way grown up. He envied the hamburger man because the hamburger man could have all the sandwiches he wanted.

  In the fall the snow came. Usually there was snow for Thanksgiving but sometimes it didn’t come until middle December. The first snowfall was the most wonderful thing on earth. His father always waked him early his voice booming out about the snow. It was usually a wet snow and it clung to everything it touched. Even the wire fence around the chicken coop in the backyard would hold the snow maybe a half inch deep. The chickens never stopped being puzzled and alarmed about the first snow. They would walk carefully in it and shake their feet and the roosters would talk about it complainingly all day long. The outbuildings were always beautiful and a fence post would have a cap four inches high. The birds in vacant lots would make little patterns in the snow crossed up once in a while by a rabbit track. His father never failed to wake him early when the snow fell. First he rushed to the window to look. Then he got into his heavy clothes and his mackinaw and his boots and his sheepskin gloves and took his flexible flyer and went out with the rest of the kids and didn’t come back till his feet were numb and his nose was frosty. The snow was a wonderful thing.

  In the spring there were primroses ail over the vacant lots. They opened in the morning and closed when the sun grew hot and then opened again in the evening. Each evening the kids went on primrose hunts. They brought back great bouquets of white flowers as big as your hand and put them in flat bowls of water. On May Day they made baskets and filled them with primroses hiding a little candy beneath the flowers. When it was dark they went from house to house and left a basket and knocked on the door and ran away fast into the night.

  Lincoln Beechy came to town. It was the first airplane Shale City ever saw. They had it in a tent in the middle of the race track over in the fair grounds. Day in and day out people filed through the tent looking at it. It seemed to be all wire and cloth. People couldn’t understand how a man would risk his life just on the strength of a wire. One little Wire gone
wrong and it meant the end of Lincoln Beechy. Away up in front of the plane ahead of the propellers was a little seat with a stick in front of it. That was where the great aviator sat.

  Everyone in Shale City was pleased with the idea of Lincoln Beechy coming to town. It was a wonderful thing. Shale City was really becoming a metropolis. Lincoln Beechy didn’t stop at every little stick-in-the-mud town. He stopped only in places like Denver and Shale City and Salt Lake and he was going on to San Francisco. The whole town turned out the day Lincoln Beechy looped the loop. He did it five times. It was the damnedest thing anybody ever saw.

  Mr. Hargraves who was superintendent of schools made a speech before the flight. He told about how the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

  After the speech Lincoln Beechy looped the loop five times and left town. A couple months later his airplane fell into San Francisco Bay and Lincoln Beechy was drowned. Shale City felt as if it had lost a resident. The Shale City Monitor ran an editorial. It said that even though the great Lincoln Beechy was dead the airplane the instrument of peace the knitter together of peoples would go on.

  His birthday fell in December. Each birthday his mother cooked a big dinner and he had his friends over to the house. Each of his friends also had birthday dinners so there were at least six big affairs during the year for the guys to get together. They usually had chicken and there was always a birthday cake and ice cream. The guys all brought presents. He would never forget the time Glen Hogan brought him a pair of brown silk socks. That was before he had long trousers. The socks seemed to mean a step forward into a grownup future. They were very handsome. After the party he put them on and stared at them for a long while. He got the long pants to go with them three months later.