Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

  I got the address of the restaurant and hailed a cab.

  The restaurant was a cheap, greasy diner, across the street from a garage. I looked around for Harry for some time before realizing that he was on a stool at the counter, watching me in the cigarette machine mirror.

  He was wearing coveralls. He turned on his stool, and held out a hand whose nails were edged in black. “Shake hands with the new birdseed king,” he said. His grip was firm.

  “Harry, you’re working as a mechanic,” I said.

  “Not half an hour ago,” said Harry, “a man with a broken fuel pump thanked God for me. Have a seat.”

  “What about the catchup business?” I said.

  “It saved my marriage and it saved my life,” said Harry. “I’m grateful to the pioneers, like the Buntings, who built it.”

  “And now you’ve quit, just like that?” I snapped my fingers.

  “I was never in it,” said Harry. “Bunting has promised to keep that to himself, and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same.”

  “But you know so much about catchup!” I said.

  “For eighteen months after Celeste struck it rich and we moved here,” said Harry, “I walked the streets, looking for a job suitable for the husband of the famous and beautiful Celeste.”

  Remembering those dark days, he rubbed his eyes, reached for the catchup. “When I got tired, cold, or wet,” he said, “I’d sit in the public library, and study all the different things men could do for a living. Making catchup was one of them.”

  He shook the bottle of catchup over his hamburger, violently. The bottle was almost full, but nothing came out. “There—you see?” he said. “When you shake catchup one way, it behaves like a solid. You shake it another way, and it behaves like a liquid.” He shook the bottle gently, and catchup poured over his hamburger. “Know what that’s called?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Thixotropy,” said Harry. He hit me playfully on the upper arm. “There—you learned something new today.”

  Der Arme

  Dolmetscher

  I was astonished one day in 1944, in the midst of front-line hell-raising, to learn that I had been made interpreter, Dolmetscher if you please, for a whole battalion, and was to be billeted in a Belgian burgomaster’s house within artillery range of the Siegfried Line.

  It had never entered my head that I had what it took to dolmetsch. I qualified for the position while waiting to move from France into the front lines. While a student, I had learned the first stanza of Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei” by rote from a college roommate, and I happened to give those lines a dogged rendition while working within earshot of the battalion commander. The Colonel (a hotel detective from Mobile) asked his Executive Officer (a dry-goods salesman from Knoxville) in what language the lyrics were. The Executive withheld judgment until I had bungled through “Der Gipfel des Berges foo-unk-kelt im Abendsonnenschein.”

  “Ah believes tha’s Kraut, Cuhnel,” he said.

  My understanding in English of the only German I knew was this: “I don’t know why I am so sad. I can’t get an old legend out of my head. The air is cool and it’s getting dark, and quiet flows the Rhine. The peak of the mountain twinkles in evening sunshine.”

  The Colonel felt his role carried with it the obligation to make quick, headstrong decisions. He made some dandies before the Wehrmacht was whipped, but the one he made that day was my favorite. “If tha’s Kraut, whassat man doin’ on the honey-dippin’ detail?” he wanted to know. Two hours later, the company clerk told me to lay down the buckets, for I was now battalion interpreter.

  Orders to move up came soon after. Those in authority were too harried to hear my declarations of incompetence. “You talk Kraut good enough foah us,” said the Executive Officer. “Theah ain’t goin’ to be much talkin’ to Krauts where weah goin’.” He patted my rifle affectionately. “Heah’s what’s goin’ to do most of youah interpretin’ fo’ ya,” he said. The Executive, who had learned everything he knew from the Colonel, had the idea that the American Army had just licked the Belgians, and that I was to be stationed with the burgomaster to make sure he didn’t try to pull a fast one. “Besides,” the Executive concluded, “theah ain’t nobody else can talk Kraut at all.”

  I rode to the burgomaster’s farm on a truck with three disgruntled Pennsylvania Dutchmen who had applied for interpreters’ jobs months earlier. When I made it clear that I was no competition for them, and that I hoped to be liquidated within twenty-four hours, they warmed up enough for me to furnish the interesting information that I was a Dolmetscher. They also decoded “Die Lorelei” at my request. This gave me command of about forty words (par for a two-year-old), but no combination of them would get me so much as a glass of cold water.

  Every turn of the truck’s wheels brought a new question: “What’s the word for ‘army’? … How do I ask for the bathroom? … What’s the word for ‘sick’? … ‘well’? … ‘dish’? … ‘brother’? … ‘shoe’?” My phlegmatic instructors tired, and one handed me a pamphlet purporting to make German easy for the man in the foxhole.

  “Some of the first pages are missing,” the donor explained as I jumped from the truck before the burgomaster’s stone farmhouse. “Used ’em for cigarette papers,” he said.

  It was early morning when I knocked at the burgomaster’s door. I stood on the step like a bit player in the wings, with the one line I was to deliver banging around an otherwise empty head. The door swung open. “Dolmetscher,” I said.

  The burgomaster himself, old, thin, and nightshirted, ushered me into the first-floor bedroom that was to be mine. He pantomimed as well as spoke his welcome, and a sprinkling of “Danke schön” was adequate dolmetsching for the time being. I was prepared to throttle further discussion with “Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin.” This would have sent him padding off to bed, convinced that he had a fluent, albeit shot-full-of-Weltschmerz, Dolmetscher. The stratagem wasn’t necessary. He left me alone to consolidate my resources.

  Chief among these was the mutilated pamphlet. I examined each of its precious pages in turn, delighted by the simplicity of transposing English into German. With this booklet, all I had to do was run my finger down the left-hand column until I found the English phrase I wanted, and then rattle off the nonsense syllables printed opposite in the right-hand column. “How many grenade launchers have you?” for instance, was Vee feel grenada vairfair habben zee? Impeccable German for “Where are your tank columns?” proved to be nothing more troublesome than Vo zint eara pantzer shpitzen? I mouthed the phrases: “Where are your howitzers? How many machine guns have you? Surrender! Don’t shoot! Where have you hidden your motorcycle? Hands up! What unit are you from?”

  The pamphlet came to an abrupt end, toppling my spirits from manic to depressive. The Pennsylvania Dutchman had smoked up all the rear-area pleasantries, the pamphlet’s first half, leaving me with nothing to work with but the repartee of hand-to-hand fighting.

  As I lay sleepless in bed, the one drama in which I could play took shape in my mind….

  DOLMETSCHER (to BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER): I don’t know what will become of me, I am so sad. (Embraces her.)

  BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER (with yielding shyness): The air is cool, and it’s getting dark, and the Rhine is flowing quietly.

  (DOLMETSCHER seizes BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER, carries her bodily into his room.)

  DOLMETSCHER (softly): Surrender.

  BURGOMASTER (brandishing Luger): Ach! Hands up!

  DOLMETSCHER and BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER: Don’t shoot!

  (A map, showing disposition of American First Army, falls from BURGOMASTER’S breast pocket.)

  DOLMETSCHER (aside, in English): What is this supposedly pro-Ally burgomaster doing with a map showing the disposition of the American First Army? And why am I supposed to be dolmetsching with a Belgian in German? (He snatches .45 automatic pistol from beneath pillow and aims at BURGOMASTER.)

  BURG
OMASTER and BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER: Don’t shoot! (BURGOMASTER drops Luger, cowers, sneers.)

  DOLMETSCHER: What unit are you from? (BURGOMASTER remains sullen, silent. BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER goes to his side, weeps softly. DOLMETSCHER confronts BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER.) Where have you hidden your motorcycle? (Turns again to BURGOMASTER.) Where are your howitzers, eh? Where are your tank columns? How many grenade launchers have you?

  BURGOMASTER (cracking under terrific grilling): I—I surrender.

  BURGOMASTER’s DAUGHTER: I am so sad.

  (Enter GUARD DETAIL composed of Pennsylvania Dutchmen, making a routine check just in time to hear BURGOMASTER and BURGOMASTER’S DAUGHTER confess to being Nazi agents parachuted behind American lines.)

  Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller couldn’t have done any better with the same words, and they were the only words I had. There was no chance of my muddling through, and no pleasure in being interpreter for a full battalion in December and not being able to say so much as “Merry Christmas.”

  I made my bed, tightened the drawstrings on my duffel bag, and stole through the blackout curtains and into the night.

  Wary sentinels directed me to Battalion Headquarters, where I found most of our officers either poring over maps or loading their weapons. There was a holiday spirit in the air, and the Executive Officer was honing an eighteen-inch bowie knife and humming “Are You from Dixie?”

  “Well, bless mah soul,” he said, noticing me in the doorway, “here’s old ‘Sprecken Zee Dutch.’ Speak up, boy. Ain’t you supposed to be ovah at the mayah’s house?”

  “It’s no good,” I said. “They all speak Low German, and I speak High.”

  The executive was impressed. “Too good foah ’em, eh?” He ran his index finger down the edge of his murderous knife. “Ah think we’ll be runnin’ into some who can talk the high-class Kraut putty soon,” he said, and then added, “Weah surrounded.”

  “We’ll whomp ’em the way we whomped ’em in Nawth Ca’lina and Tennessee,” said the Colonel, who had never lost on maneuvers back home. “You stay heah, son. Ah’m gonna want you foah mah pussnel intupretah.”

  Twenty minutes later I was in the thick of dolmetsching again. Four Tiger tanks drove up to the front door of Headquarters, and two dozen German infantrymen dismounted to round us up with submachine guns.

  “Say sumpin’,” ordered the Colonel, spunky to the last.

  I ran my eye down the left-hand columns of my pamphlet until I found the phrase that most fairly represented our sentiments. “Don’t shoot,” I said.

  A German tank officer swaggered in to have a look at his catch. In his hand was a pamphlet, somewhat smaller than mine. “Where are your howitzers?” he said.

  The Boy Who

  Hated Girls

  George M. Helmholtz, head of the music department and director of the band of Lincoln High School, could sound like any musical instrument. He could shriek like a clarinet, mumble like a trombone, bawl like a trumpet. He could swell his big belly and roar like a sousaphone, could purse his lips sweetly, close his eyes, and whistle like a piccolo.

  At eight o’clock one Wednesday night, he was marching around the band rehearsal room at the school, shrieking, mumbling, bawling, roaring, and whistling “Semper Fidelis.”

  It was easy for Helmholtz to do. For almost half of his forty years, he’d been forming bands from the river of boys that flowed through the school. He’d sung along with them all. He’d sung so long and wished so hard for his bands that he dealt with life in terms of them alone.

  Marching beside the lusty pink bandmaster, his face now white with awe and concentration, was a gangly sixteen-year-old named Bert Higgens. He had a big nose, and circles under his eyes. Bert marched flappingly, like a mother flamingo pretending to be injured, luring alligators from her nest.

  “Rump-yump, tiddle-tiddle, rump-yump, burdle-burdle,” sang Helmholtz. “Left, right, left, Bert! El-bows in, Bert! Eyes off feet, Bert! Keep on line, Bert! Don’t turn head, Bert! Left, right, left, Bert! Halt—one, two!”

  Helmholtz smiled. “I think maybe there was some improvement there.”

  Bert nodded. “It’s sure been a help to practice with you, Mr. Helmholtz.”

  “As long as you’re willing to work at it, so am I,” said Helmholtz. He was bewildered by the change that had come over Bert in the past week. The boy seemed to have lost two years, to become what he’d been in his freshman year: awkward, cowering, lonely, dull.

  “Bert,” said Helmholtz, “are you sure you haven’t had any injury, any sickness recently?” He knew Bert well, had given him trumpet lessons for two years. He had watched Bert grow into a proud, straight figure. The collapse of the boy’s spirits and coordination was beyond belief.

  Bert puffed out his cheeks childishly as he thought hard. It was a mannerism Helmholtz had talked him out of long before. Now he was doing it again. Bert let out the air. “Nope,” he said.

  “I’ve taught a thousand boys to march,” said Helmholtz, “and you’re the first one who ever forgot how to do it.” The thousand passed in review in Helmholtz’s mind—ranks stretching to infinity, straight as sunbeams. “Maybe we ought to talk this over with the school nurse,” said Helmholtz. A cheerful thought struck him. “Unless this is girl trouble.”

  Bert raised one foot, then the other. “Nope,” he said. “No trouble like that.”

  “Pretty little thing,” said Helmholtz.

  “Who?” said Bert.

  “That dewy pink tulip I see you walking home with,” said Helmholtz.

  Bert grimaced. “Ah-h-h-h—her,” he said. “Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte isn’t much good?” said Helmholtz.

  “I dunno. I guess she’s all right. I suppose she’s OK. I haven’t got anything against her. I dunno.”

  Helmholtz shook Bert gently, as though hoping to jiggle a loose part into place. “Do you remember it at all—the feeling you used to have when you marched so well, before this relapse?”

  “I think it’s kind of coming back,” said Bert.

  “Coming up through the C and B bands, you learned to march fine,” said Helmholtz. These were the training bands through which the hundred men of the Lincoln High School Ten Square Band came.

  “I dunno what the trouble is,” said Bert, “unless it’s the excitement of getting in the Ten Square Band.” He puffed his cheeks. “Maybe it’s stopping my lessons with you.”

  When Bert had qualified for the Ten Square Band three months before, Helmholtz had turned him over to the best trumpet teacher in town, Larry Fink, for the final touches of grace and color.

  “Say, Fink isn’t giving you a hard time, is he?” said Helmholtz.

  “Nope,” said Bert. “He’s a nice gentleman.” He rolled his eyes. “Mr. Helmholtz—if we could practice marching just a couple more times, I think I’ll be fine.”

  “Gee, Bert,” said Helmholtz, “I don’t know when I can fit you in. When you went to Fink, I took on another boy. It just so happened he was sick tonight. But next week—”

  “Who is he?” said Bert.

  “Norton Shakely,” said Helmholtz. “Little fellow—kind of green around the gills. He’s just like you were when you started out. No faith in himself. Doesn’t think he’ll ever make the Ten Square Band, but he will, he will.”

  “He will,” agreed Bert. “No doubt about it.”

  Helmholtz clapped Bert on the arm, to put some heart into him. “Chin up!” he sang. “Shoulders back! Go get your coat, and I’ll take you home.”

  As Bert put on his coat, Helmholtz thought of the windows of Bert’s home—windows as vacant as dead men’s eyes. Bert’s father had wandered away years before—and his mother was seldom there. Helmholtz wondered if that was where the trouble was.

  Helmholtz was depressed. “Maybe we can stop somewhere and get a soda, and maybe play a little table tennis afterward in my basement,” he said. When he’d given Bert trumpet lessons, they’d always stopped somewhere for a sod
a, and then played table tennis afterward.

  “Unless you’d rather go see Charlotte or something,” said Helmholtz.

  “Are you kidding?” said Bert. “I hate the way she talks sometimes.”

  The next morning, Helmholtz talked with Miss Peach, the school nurse. It was a symposium between two hearty, plump people, blooming with hygiene and common sense. In the background, rickety and confused, stripped to the waist, was Bert.

  “By ‘blacked out,’ you mean Bert fainted?” said Miss Peach.

  “You didn’t see him do it at the Whitestown game last Friday?” said Helmholtz.

  “I missed that game,” said Miss Peach.

  “It was right after we’d formed the block L, when we were marching down the field to form the pinwheel that turned into the Lincoln High panther and the Whitestown eagle,” said Helmholtz. The eagle had screamed, and the panther had eaten it.

  “So what did Bert do?” said Miss Peach.

  “He was marching along with the band, fine as you please,” said Helmholtz. “And then he just drifted out of it. He wound up marching by himself.”

  “What did it feel like, Bert?” said Miss Peach.

  “Like a dream at first,” said Bert. “Real good, kind of. And then I woke up, and I was alone.” He gave a sickly smile. “And everybody was laughing at me.”

  “How’s your appetite, Bert?” said Miss Peach.

  “He polished off a soda and a hamburger last night,” said Helmholtz.

  “What about your coordination when you play games, Bert?” said Miss Peach.

  “I’m not in sports,” said Bert. “The trumpet takes all the time I’ve got.”

  “Don’t you and your father throw a ball sometimes?” said Miss Peach.

  “I don’t have a father,” said Bert.

  “He beat me at table tennis last night,” said Helmholtz.

  “All in all, it was quite a binge last night, wasn’t it?” Miss Peach said.

  “It’s what we used to do every Wednesday night,” said Bert.

  “It’s what I do with all the boys I give lessons to,” said Helmholtz.