Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Read online

  “A hundred dollars! That’s all?”

  “That’s all it’s worth, and I’m probably a sucker to offer that,” said Bane. “What the hell—that’s an easy hundred bucks for you, isn’t it? What’d you do—cop it off some German prisoner or find it lying around in the ruins?”

  “No, sir,” said the farmer, “it was a little tougher’n that.”

  Bane, who was keenly sensitive to such things, saw that the farmer, as he began to tell how he’d gotten the watch, was regaining the stubborn confidence that had deserted him when he’d left his farm for the city to make the sale.

  “My best buddy Buzzer and me,” said the farmer, “were prisoners of war together in some hills in Germany—in Sudetenland, somebody said it was. One morning, Buzzer woke me up and said the war was over, the guards were gone, the gates were open.”

  Joe Bane was impatient at first with having to listen to the tale. But it was a tale told well and proudly, and long a fan of others’ adventures for want of any of his own, Bane began to see, enviously, the two soldiers walking through the open gates of their prison, and down a country road in the hills early on a bright spring morning in 1945, on the day the Second World War ended in Europe.

  The young farmer, whose name was Eddie, and his best buddy Buzzer walked out into peace and freedom skinny, ragged, dirty, and hungry, but with no ill will toward anyone. They’d gone to war out of pride, not bitterness. Now the war was over, the job done, and they wanted only to go home. They were a year apart, but as alike as two poplars in a windbreak.

  Their notion was to take a brief sightseeing tour of the neighborhood near the camp, then to come back and wait with the rest of the prisoners for the arrival of some official liberators. But the plan evaporated when a pair of Canadian prisoners invited the buddies to toast victory with a bottle of brandy they’d found in a wrecked German truck.

  Their shrunken bellies gloriously hot and tingling, their heads light and full of trust and love for all mankind, Eddie and Buzzer found themselves swept along by a jostling, plaintive parade of German refugees that jammed the main road through the hills, refugees fleeing from the Russian tanks that growled monotonously and unopposed in the valley behind and below them. The tanks were coming to occupy this last undefended bit of German soil.

  “What’re we runnin’ from?” said Buzzer. “The war’s over, ain’t it?”

  “Everybody else is runnin’,” said Eddie, “so I guess maybe we better be runnin’, too.”

  “I don’t even know where we are,” said Buzzer.

  “Them Canadians said it’s Sudetenland.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Where we’re at,” said Eddie. “Swell guys, them Canadians.

  “I’ll tell the world! Man,” said Buzzer, “I love everybody today. Whoooooey! I’d like to get me a bottle of that brandy, put a nipple on it, and go to bed with it for a week.”

  Eddie touched the elbow of a tall, worried-looking man with close-cropped black hair, who wore a civilian suit too small for him. “Where we runnin’ to, sir? Ain’t the war over?”

  The man glared, grunted something, and pushed by roughly.

  “He don’t understand English,” said Eddie.

  “Why, hell, man,” said Buzzer, “why’n’t you talk to these folks in their native tongue? Don’t hide your candle under a bushel. Let’s hear you sprecken some Dutch to this man here.”

  They’d come alongside a small, low black roadster, which was stalled on the shoulder of the road. A heavily muscled square-faced young man was tinkering with the dead motor. On the leather front seat of the car sat an older man whose face was covered with dust and several days’ growth of black beard, and shaded by a hat with the brim pulled down.

  Eddie and Buzzer stopped. “All right,” said Eddie. “Just listen to this: Wie geht’s?” he said to the blond man, using the only German he knew.

  “Gut, gut,” muttered the young German. Then, realizing the absurdity of his automatic reply to the greeting, he said with terrible bitterness, “Ja! Geht’s gut!”

  “He says everything’s just fine,” said Eddie.

  “Oh, you’re fluent, mighty fluent,” said Buzzer.

  “Yes, I’ve traveled extensively, you might say,” said Eddie.

  The older man came to life and yelled at the man who was working on the motor, yelled shrilly and threateningly.

  The blond seemed frightened. He went to work on the motor with redoubled desperation.

  The older man’s eyes, bleary a moment before, were wide and bright now. Several refugees turned to stare as they passed.

  The older man glanced challengingly from one face to the next, and filled his lungs to shout something at them. But he changed his mind, sighed instead, and his spirits collapsed. He thrust his face in his hands.

  “Wha’d he say?” said Buzzer.

  “He don’t speak my particular dialect,” said Eddie.

  “Speaks low-class German, huh?” said Buzzer. “Well, I’m not goin’ another step till we find somebody who can tell us what’s goin’ on. We’re Americans, boy. Our side won, didn’t it? What we doin’ all tangled up with these Jerries?”

  “You—you Americans,” said the blond, surprisingly enough in English. “Now you will have to fight them.”

  “Here’s one that talks English!” said Buzzer.

  “Talks it pretty good, too,” said Eddie.

  “Ain’t bad, ain’t bad at all,” said Buzzer. “Who we got to fight?”

  “The Russians,” said the young German, seeming to relish the idea. “They’ll kill you, too, if they catch you. They’re killing everybody in their path.”

  “Hell, man,” said Buzzer, “we’re on their side.”

  “For how long? Run, boys, run.” The blond swore and hurled his wrench at the motor. He turned to the old man and spoke, scared to death of him.

  The older man released a stream of German abuse, tired of it quickly, got out of the car, and slammed the door behind him. The two looked anxiously in the direction from which the tanks would come, and started down the road on foot.

  “Where you guys headed?” said Eddie.

  “Prague—the Americans are in Prague.”

  Eddie and Buzzer fell in behind them. “Sure gettin’ a mess of geography today, ain’t we, Eddie?” said Buzzer. He stumbled, and Eddie caught him. “Oh, oh, Eddie, that old booze is sneakin’ up on me.”

  “Yeah,” said Eddie, whose own senses were growing fuzzier. “I say to hell with Prague. If we don’t ride, we don’t go, and that’s that.”

  “Sure. We’ll just find us some shady spot, and sit and wait for the Russians. We’ll just show ’em our dog tags,” said Buzzer. “And when they see ’em, bet they give us a big banquet.” He dipped a finger inside his collar and brought out the tags on their string.

  “Oh my, yes,” said the blond German, who had been listening carefully, “a wonderful big banquet they’ll give you.”

  The column had been moving more and more slowly, growing more packed. Now it came to a muttering halt.

  “Must be a woman up front, tryin’ to read a road map,” said Buzzer.

  From far down the road came an exchange of shouts like a distant surf. Restless, anxious moments later, the cause of the trouble was clear: The column had met another, fleeing in terror from the opposite direction. The Russians had the area surrounded. Now the two columns merged to form an aimless whirlpool in the heart of a small village, flooding out into side lanes and up the slopes on either side.

  “Don’t know nobody in Prague, anyhow,” said Buzzer, and he wandered off the road and sat by the gate of a walled farmyard.

  Eddie followed his example. “By God,” he said, “maybe we oughta stay right here and open us up a gun shop, Buzzer.” He included in a sweep of his hand the discarded rifles and pistols that were strewn over the grass. “Bullets and all.”

  “Swell place to open a gun shop, Europe is,” said Buzzer. “They’re just crazy about guns around he
re.”

  Despite the growing panic of the persons milling about them, Buzzer dropped off into a brandy-induced nap. Eddie had trouble keeping his eyes open.

  “Aha!” said a voice from the road. “Here our American friends are.”

  Eddie looked up to see the two Germans, the husky young man and the irascible older one, grinning down at them.

  “Hello,” said Eddie. The cheering edge of the brandy was wearing off, and queasiness was taking its place.

  The young German pushed open the gate to the farmyard. “Come in here, would you?” he told Eddie. “We have something important to say to you.”

  “Say it here,” said Eddie.

  The blond leaned down. “We’ve come to surrender to you.”

  “You’ve come to what?”

  “We surrender,” said the blond. “We are your prisoners—prisoners of the United States Army.”

  Eddie laughed.

  “Seriously!”

  “Buzzer!” Eddie nudged his buddy with the toe of his boot. “Hey, Buzzer—you gotta hear this.”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “We just captured some people.”

  Buzzer opened his eyes and squinted at the pair. “You’re drunker’n I am, by God, Eddie, goin’ out capturin’ people,” he said at last. “You damn fool—the war’s over.” He waved his hand magnanimously. “Turn ’em loose.”

  “Take us through the Russian lines to Prague as American prisoners, and you’ll be heroes,” said the blond. He lowered his voice. “This is a famous German general. Think of it—you two can bring him in as your prisoner!”

  “He really a general?” said Buzzer. “Heil Hitler, Pop.”

  The older man raised his arm in an abbreviated salute.

  “Got a little pepper left in him, at that,” said Buzzer.

  “From what I heard,” said Eddie, “me and Buzzer’ll be heroes if we get just us through the Russian lines, let alone a German general.”

  The noise of a tank column of the Red Army grew louder.

  “All right, all right,” said the blond, “sell us your uniforms, then. You’ll still have your dog tags, and you can take our clothes.”

  “I’d rather be poor than dead,” said Eddie. “Wouldn’t you, Buzzer?”

  “Just a minute, Eddie,” said Buzzer, “just hold on. What’ll you give us?”

  “Come in the farmyard. We can’t show you here,” said the blond.

  “I even heard there was some Nazis in the neighborhood,” said Buzzer. “Come on, give us a little peek here.”

  “Now who’s a damn fool?” said Eddie.

  “Just want to be able to tell my grandchildren what I passed up,” said Buzzer.

  The blond was going through his pockets. He pulled out a fat roll of German currency.

  “Confederate money!” said Buzzer. “What else you got?”

  It was then that the old man showed them his pocketwatch, four diamonds, a ruby, and gold. And there, in the midst of a mob of every imaginable sort of refugee, the blond told Buzzer and Eddie that they could have the watch if they would go behind a wall and exchange their ragged American uniforms for the Germans’ civilian clothes. They thought Americans were so dumb!

  This was all so funny and crazy! Eddie and Buzzer were so drunk! What a story they would have to tell when they got home! They didn’t want the watch. They wanted to get home alive. There, in the midst of a mob of every imaginable sort of refugee, the blond was showing them a small pistol, as though they could have that, too, along with the watch.

  But it was now impossible for anybody to say any more funny stuff and still be heard. The earth shook, and the air was ripped to shreds as armored vehicles from the victorious Soviet Union, thundering and backfiring, came up the road. Everybody who could got out of the way of the juggernaut. Some were not so lucky. They were mangled. They were squashed.

  Eddie and Buzzer and the old man and the blond found themselves behind the wall where the blond had said the Americans could swap their uniforms for the watch and civilian clothes. In the uproar, during which anybody could do anything, and nobody cared what anybody else did, the blond shot Buzzer in the head. He aimed his pistol at Eddie. He fired. He missed.

  That had evidently been the plan all along, to kill Eddie and Buzzer. But what chance did the old man, who spoke no English, have to pass himself off to his captors as an American? None. It was the blond who was going to do that. And they were both about to be captured. All the old man could do was commit suicide.

  Eddie went back over the wall, putting it between himself and the blond. But the blond didn’t care what had become of him. Everything the blond needed was on Buzzer’s body. When Eddie peered over the wall to see if Buzzer was still alive, the blond was stripping the body. The old man now had the pistol. He put its muzzle in his mouth and blew his brains out.

  The blond walked off with Buzzer’s clothes and dog tags. Buzzer was in his GI underwear and dead, without ID. On the ground between the old man and Buzzer, Eddie found the watch. It was running. It told the right time. Eddie picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  The rainstorm outside Joe Bane’s pawnshop had stopped. “When I got home,” said Eddie, “I wrote Buzzer’s folks. I told ’em he’d been killed in a fight with a German, even though the war was over. I told the Army the same thing. I didn’t know the name of the place where he’d died, so there was no way they could look for his body and give him a decent funeral. I had to leave him there. Whoever buried him, unless they could recognize GI underwear, wouldn’t have known he was American. He could have been a German. He could have been anything.”

  Eddie snatched the watch from under the pawnbroker’s nose. “Thanks for letting me know what it’s worth,” he said. “Makes more sense to keep it for a souvenir.”

  “Five hundred,” said Bane, but Eddie was already on his way out the door.

  Ten minutes later, the shoeshine boy returned with a translation of the inscription inside the watch. This was it:

  “To General Heinz Guderian, Chief of the Army General Staff, who cannot rest until the last enemy soldier is driven from the sacred soil of the Third German Reich. ADOLF HITLER.”

  The Cruise of

  The Jolly Roger

  During the Great Depression, Nathan Durant was homeless until he found a home in the United States Army. He spent seventeen years in the Army, thinking of the earth as terrain, of the hills and valleys as enfilade and defilade, of the horizon as something a man should never silhouette himself against, of the houses and woods and thickets as cover. It was a good life, and when he-got tired of thinking about war, he got himself a girl and a bottle, and the next morning he was ready to think about war some more.

  When he was thirty-six, an enemy projectile dropped into a command post under thick green cover in defilade in the terrain of Korea, and blew Major Durant, his maps, and his career through the wall of his tent.

  He had always assumed that he was going to die young and gallantly. But he didn’t die. Death was far, far away, and Durant faced unfamiliar and frightening battalions of peaceful years.

  In the hospital, the man in the next bed talked constantly of the boat he was going to own when he was whole again. For want of exciting peacetime dreams of his own, for want of a home or family or civilian friends, Durant borrowed his neighbor’s dream.

  With a deep scar across his cheek, with the lobe of his right ear gone, with a stiff leg, he limped into a boatyard in New London, the port nearest the hospital, and bought a secondhand cabin cruiser. He learned to run it in the harbor there, christened the boat The Jolly Roger at the suggestion of some children who haunted the boatyard, and set out arbitrarily for Martha’s Vineyard.

  He stayed on the island but a day, depressed by the tranquility and permanence, by the feeling of deep, still lakes of time, by men and women so at one with the peace of the place as to have nothing to exchange with an old soldier but a few words about the weather.

  Durant fled to Chatham, at the el
bow of Cape Cod, and found himself beside a beautiful woman at the foot of a lighthouse there. Had he been in his old uniform, seeming as he’d liked to seem in the old days, about to leave on a dangerous mission, he and the woman might have strolled off together. Women had once treated him like a small boy with special permission to eat icing off cakes. But the woman looked away without interest. He was nobody and nothing. The spark was gone.

  His former swashbuckling spirits returned for an hour or two during a brief blow off the dunes of Cape Cod’s east coast, but there was no one aboard to notice. When he reached the sheltered harbor at Provincetown and went ashore, he was a hollow man again, who didn’t have to be anywhere at any time, whose life was all behind him.

  “Look up, please,” commanded a gaudily dressed young man with a camera in his hands and a girl on his arm.

  Surprised, Durant did look up, and the camera shutter clicked. “Thank you,” said the young man brightly.

  “Are you a painter?” asked his girl.

  “Painter?” said Durant. “No—retired Army officer.”

  The couple did a poor job of covering their disappointment.

  “Sorry,” said Durant, and he felt dull and annoyed.

  “Oh!” said the girl. “There’s some real painters over there.”

  Durant glanced at the artists, three men and one woman, probably in their late twenties, who sat on the wharf, their backs to a silvered splintering pile, sketching. The woman, a tanned brunette, was looking right at Durant.

  “Do you mind being sketched?” she said.

  “No—no, I guess not,” said Durant bearishly. Freezing in his pose, he wondered what it was he’d been thinking about that had made him interesting enough to draw. He realized that he’d been thinking about lunch, about the tiny galley aboard The Jolly Roger, about the four wrinkled wieners, the half-pound of cheese, and the flat remains of a quart of beer that awaited him there.

  “There,” said the woman, “you see?” She held out the sketch.