Once an Eagle

  “Blow the bloody bugle,

  Beat the bloody drum,

  —Uppercut and out the cow

  To Kingdom-bloody-Come! …”

  The refrain was followed by a cheer, and a chorus of approval and commendation from the Diggers in the room (“That’s showing them the way, Yank!” “I heard ’im slang you, I did—the dirty little dingo … ”). There were handshakes, introductions, and drinks all around. Damon brought over their glasses and they sat down with the girls.

  “What a bonzer cove you are,” Hallie said to Ben. “Did you hear them barrack you? You’re the dinkum oil.”

  Ben threw open his hands. “Whatever that is, that’s me … ”

  “Sorry about all that,” Damon said to the nurse. “Ben’s the impetuous type.”

  “Thank heaven someone shut him up. It was disgusting. Are there a lot of Englishmen like that?”

  “Let’s hope there are only a few—for Eisenhower’s sake.”

  “It’s always the nasty ones who have the connections. He’s a friend of General Blamey, did you hear him?”

  Damon nodded. “Not worried about repercussions, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” she laughed. “They can’t put us in the stockade—they need us all too badly!”

  They had another drink there, and then went on to what Hallie Burns referred to as a sly grog shop, obviously some kind of speakeasy where the gin was even more escharotic and a three-piece band—fiddle, accordion and clarinet—wheezed along brightly, and the tiny dance floor shook to the thump and slide of boots. Hallie seemed to know everybody. She worked for the war office, but as a civilian secretary. “I will not put on a uniform,” she informed them. “My pa said it’s the beginning of servitude and the end of the private dream.”

  “But suppose everybody felt like you.”

  “If everybody felt like me, Benjy,” she retorted, her violet eyes glowing, “it’d be a lot wilder world. When my pot-and-pan put on his uniform I told him: ‘All well and good, chum, but you’ll never get out of it again.’ And do you know, it was true as your eyes. He never did.”

  “Why do you call him a pot-and-pan?” Ben wanted to know.

  “I don’t know.” Hallie shrugged happily. “Rhymes with old man, do you see? Instead of a wife you have a trouble-and-strife. Instead of head you say lump-of-lead.”

  “Hey, I like that. Can we make up our own?”

  “Can’t see why not.”

  “Where’s your pot-and-pan serving now?”

  “He’s not, love. He’s dead and gone. Stopped one at Tobruk.” They all expressed condolences, but she was having none of it. “What’s over is over. No sad songs. That’s what war’s for, isn’t it? to kill people. Anyway, it’s all chance. Like dice in a hopper.”

  “Do you really see life that way?” Joyce asked her.

  “Of course. What else is there? We’re all just leaves floating down a river: the wind blows this way, the current pulls another, kids poke some with sticks, some come to rest on the riverbanks, some fill with water and sink to the bottom. But the stream keeps rolling along anyway.”

  This inaugurated a long, earnest, rambling discussion about free will versus necessity. Ben declared that we had oceans of choice. “When I make up my mind to do something, that’s it.”

  “God stone the crows,” Hallie said, and rolled her eyes. “You’re just a piece of taffy in a taffy machine: you stretch any way they pull you.”

  “Oh, the Army, sure—but what about just now? I went over and laid into that insufferable Limey, didn’t I? I decided to shut him up and I did.”

  “Taradiddle.” She blinked at him impudently. “What you saw were two fine and tricksy Sheilas and over you came. He could have been talking in Maori.”

  Ben grinned at her. “Maybe so. But then why did I lay into him?”

  “That’s easy. He stands for what you’ve always hated.”

  Ben stared at her. “You could see that?”

  “It could have been painted on a hoarding, love …”

  Their argument ran on, amicable and aimless. Damon turned to Joyce. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I used to think we had all kinds of free will—now I’m not sure we have much at all. I think we’re pushed along by a thousand things we don’t even recognize, we don’t even know are working on us.”

  “Slaves to passion?”

  She smiled faintly, and nodded. “Yes—sort of. Passion and obligation.”

  “How about marriage?” he asked impulsively. “Do we choose, or are we chosen?”

  “Don’t ask me that.” She laughed softly but her eyes were grave. “It was the mistake of my life.”

  “Your pot-and-pan?”

  “Ex-pot.” He was a physics instructor; she had met him at a party at Berkeley where she was a pre-med student. “I told myself I was making a noble choice—renouncing an illustrious career for the man I loved. It wasn’t true at all. I was scared to death I was going to flunk out—I would have, too, I know it—I can see now I was looking for a way out all along; and Brad was the answer.” Her hands were large and capable, the fingers long and nicely tapered; her large, clear eyes were shadowed with a humorous ruefulness; her voice was deep for a woman’s, and a little husky. “It’s funny—he seemed so much older than I, so much more wise and disciplined and reliable. It took me three years to discover that he would never grow up, that he didn’t want to. And I did. Badly … I’ve got a theory about people.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We all stop at a certain age. Really stop. And everything after that is just a repetition of all the earlier attitudes, going through the motions. We freeze, sort of. At a crucial place.”

  “Traumatic catalyst?”

  “Not necessarily. It can also be a time of your life when everything was most vivid, and you want that time to continue. Or when you became aware of things being terribly different from what you thought they were. For instance my sister Georgia stopped at fourteen. She’s thirty-two now, but she’s really still the willful little adolescent resentful of the adult world that betrayed her when Dad left home. There’s no reason she should cling to that moment, but she does, somehow.”

  “How about you?”

  “I stopped at twenty-two, I think. When Mother died of cancer. We’d never been very close but I was seized with a sense of obligation—that I must sacrifice myself for the good of mankind: medicine, social work—and now I’m out here. Not a very interesting syndrome, I’m afraid.”

  “How about me?” he felt constrained to ask. “Where did I stop?”

  “… I don’t know you well enough.” She smiled again: it was a lovely smile, a surprising smile—it transformed her broad-cheeked, placid, almost plain face into a younger, more attractive woman’s. That sense of solace, of resilience and trust in her large, brown eyes reached out to him; he was all at once conscious of the heavy male voices and the clump of boots above and around him, and time’s racing.

  “Tell me more,” he heard himself saying eagerly, gliding on the gin, the hard pressure—aware that he was guilty of a kind of dereliction and not caring, not caring at all. His hand held this glass which was cool and moist, his heart beat densely, this girl sat here beside him looking wistful and vulnerable and composed. Life. Warm flesh, animate flesh …

  “—This Aussie patois is tremendous,” Ben broke in on him. “It’s full of surprises. You know what they say for money? Bees.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Bees-and-honey. Get it? A bastard is a swell guy, and a cow is a bum, but you can’t say bum—”

  “No you can’t, Benjy,” Hallie sang.

  “—and smooge means—what do you think smooge means?”

  “To get soot all over you from cleaning the chimney flue.”

  “No—it means to neck with a girl … I’m going to settle down here. When this late incommodiousness is over and they toss me on the slag pile I’m going to come out here. It’s my kind of subcont
inent.”

  “And you’re my style of Fitzroy Yank,” Hallie concurred.

  “Great. Let’s dance.”

  “Beaut!”

  The fun, the need—which was also the fun—was in talking. About all the things you could remember—the trivial things that swept back over you with the fine emerald clarity of time: the rich, faintly gritty taste of buckwheat cakes on a chill fall morning, with the pheasants moving hesitantly through the stubble, the cock like some exotic Eastern satrap; or May afternoons with the apple trees in blossom and the hummingbirds dancing at the bells of the lilies; or desert evenings with the sky swept in vast skeins of mauve and orange cloud and the smell of sage dusty and pungent, like wildly scattered spices. The evening swam away; they danced and drank and told one another all their lives’ histories, sympathized and made predictions, compared tastes in food in different parts of the country, parts of the world. Frenchy Beaupré, just out of hospital, came by, looking like a fierce little rooster with his red hair, which grew perversely in two directions, making that curious ridge through the center of his scalp; and later Jimmy Hoyt with a Red Cross girl named Alma Mergenthaler, who giggled at everything anyone said and announced that she wanted to settle in Australia, too … It was curious how things repeated themselves, slid around again until you felt you’d been here long before. Damon thought of Devlin and Michele dancing to the tinny Gramophone in the narrow, high-ceilinged room overlooking the Marne, and later Denise sitting there so still, the tears staining her pretty little china-doll face. So long ago. Was it déjà vu he had? No, that was something else. It was certainly a different war, a very different war—and yet these moments, these images rose up so poignantly the same …

  And then all at once it was late, very late. They went out into the cool night air and piled into the jeep Damon had promoted from command headquarters that morning. When they reached the place where Hallie lived Ben got out, too.

  “Old indomitable commander.” He drew himself up solemnly and saluted. His face was pale, and slick with sweat. Damon thought of the open carriage, rolling east along La Croisette toward the rock-and-pine headland of Golfe Juan. Ben was still holding his salute rigidly. “Terrible he rode alone, With his yemen sword for aid,” he declaimed. “Ornament it carried none, But the notches on the blade.”

  Damon grinned. “Take care now, Benbo. ‘For the fever gets in as the liquor dies out,’ you know.”

  “Kipling,” Ben answered contemptuously. “You’re relieved. If you can’t get your command across that pitiful little excuse for a creek I’m going to find me someone who can.”

  “Hush,” Hallie hissed at him. “Come along, now.”

  “Victory follows me, and all things follow victory. Who said that?”

  “Napoleon,” Damon answered.

  “You’re relieved. If you can’t manage to get across—”

  “Hush, Benjy!”

  “Check.” They moved up the steps. At the door Ben turned once more, his arm raised. “This must be a peace of victors, not—” Hallie pulled him inside and the door bumped shut.

  They drove slowly through the deserted streets, the soft, depthless glow of false dawn. Damon glanced at Joyce now and then; she was looking straight ahead, a little preoccupied. At the hospital entrance he let the jeep roll fifty feet and switched off the key, got out and walking around to her side helped her out.

  “It was fun,” he said.

  “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

  “Have you figured out yet where I stopped?”

  “Stopped? Oh …” She shook her head, her teeth on her lower lip. She was so tall her eyes were almost on a level with his. “Maybe you haven’t stopped yet.”

  “Maybe people stop and then start up again.”

  “Maybe.”

  He picked at the skin at the edge of his thumb. Joyce was still standing there, her face attentive and serene, her eyes very large in the dark. Across the street the MP on duty was watching them with the callous avidity and suspicion common to all sentries on night duty.

  “Are you on today?” he asked.

  She nodded. “But I’ll get a catnap this afternoon. I never need much sleep anyway.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Five or six hours. We all got a lot less than that during the Moapora operation.”

  “So did we.”

  They smiled at each other a moment. It would be easy to fall in love with this girl, the thought swept over him. After all these years, all the alarums and excursions; terribly, fatally easy …

  But he was not Ben. He could not slip away somewhere and climb into bed with her, as Ben had with Hallie. There was Tommy, and the kids, and all the patterns of allegiance and obligation with which his life was invested. The fierce, unreckoning need to touch, to assert the importance of his imperiled self still thrust at his vitals; but he forced it back.

  “—I’d like to see you again,” he said awkwardly. “May I?” She nodded; she was absolutely motionless. A moment longer they hung there, bound in this curious air of expectancy, of suspenseful, unresolved colloquy that hummed between them in the Queensland night. Then he stepped forward and kissed her—a strange, solemn kiss, a ridiculous kiss like an older brother’s—and released her.

  She gave a little sigh, as though she’d been awakened in her sleep; then straightened and said, “Good night.”

  “Good night.” He watched her move off toward the gate—the fine, easy carriage, her head high. Tall girl. He could see her all at once at fifteen, with that deep gold hair in braids and freckles over her nose and her ears too big, chewing gum and reading. The MP came to attention and saluted; she returned the salute smartly and moved out of sight. You God damned fool, he told himself; there was a strange constriction in his throat. The sentry was staring at him again, and he turned away and got in behind the wheel …

  “I’m going in for a swim,” Hallie Burns was telling them now. “What’s the matter with you cows? All you ever want to do is lie around in a bloody torpor …”

  “We’re storing up strength,” Ben replied. “For the ordeals to come.”

  “You can’t store it up. It’s like underground water: if you let it go by, it’s gone forever. Come on in with me, Joyce.”

  “All right.”

  “Are they like all the other Americans, Joyce? these military blokes?”

  “No—they’re a race apart. They don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the country. They live like the Baltic barons—you know, their own preserves, their own codes.”

  “Blasted aristocrats.”

  “Worse. Much worse. Unnatural appetites.”

  “Nurse Tanahill, you’re confined to quarters …”

  “Yes sir!”

  Damon smiled at the desultory ritual banter, studying Joyce with the almost merciless scrutiny one occasionally visits on a good friend. He found her more appealing outdoors, in the warm sunlight; her large-limbed, indolent grace seemed more suited to sea and sand and green upslanting fields. Behind them there was a sudden chorus of yells and cheering. He turned his head, saw the flying runner, the capering, gesticulating figures. Long drive. He picked up a small stone and tossed it loosely in his palm. The mantle of languor still hung over him. Another three days, or four, they would get the word and the laborious machinery would start up all over again—the preparation of attack plans and manifests and codes and troop dispositions, the pattern of arguments and rehearsals and post mortems that had only one end in view: the seizure of enemy-held territory and the destruction of the garrison force. So that the pins and arrows and black lines on the maps could move forward another stage …

  “What are those fences doing out there?” Ben asked, pointing. “Those low wood and wire backstops, there?”

  “Oh, it’s an old shark net, I guess,” Hallie answered.

  “Sharks? You’ve got sharks swimming around here?”

  “Bloody fine chance!” She laughed saucily. “Come on, Joyce. Let these lizards lie around on
their backsides.” She ran to the water, her feet lifting and falling on the sand. Joyce followed her more slowly, swaying as the water reached her thighs, then dropping forward out of sight, to reappear a few yards farther on, kicking a soft white froth. The two men watched them in silence.

  In another tone Ben said: “What did Sutherland say?”

  “Full training schedule. Range, conditioning hikes, field problems. The works.”

  “Jesus, I wish those sons of bitches in operations could be out there in the boondocks,” Ben went on crossly. “Crawling through the muck and ducking mortar fire. Just for a week. I wish—” He subsided again. “Ours but to wawl and cry. What do you think we’ll draw, Sam?”

  “I don’t know. I think Madang, or Ulingan.”

  “Jesus, I hope we don’t draw New Britain. Dick says coast watcher estimates put a hundred and sixty thousand Japs at Rabaul.” He scrubbed his scalp feverishly and said in slow, comic outrage: “A hundred and—sixty—thousand … ”

  “Come on in, Sam,” Joyce was calling. “It’s wonderful! You’ll regret it …”

  The girls were standing in the shallow water; they looked slim and glistening and vivid, like the first women at the birth of the world. Hallie pointed and they both looked off up the coast, shading their eyes. He would always remember this moment: the bright, lithe limbs against the blue sea, the pale, smoky Australian sky.

  “Come on, you two! It’s so warm and lovely …”

  “What the hell, Sam. Let’s go join them.”

  “Right.”

  The two men got to their feet and walked toward the water.

  12 Jan 43. Duke Pulleyne roared into camp yesterday. Face like a shingle hatchet, smooth silver hair, spots of fiery color high on his cheeks. Cigar chewed half through, long-barreled .38 in an open holster. Dashing cavalryman. “Damon! Brilliant job, brilliant. How many of the little slopehead bastards did you starch? Great stuff. What shape’s the Division in?” Just like that. Full of piss and vinegar, one of those perpetually wound-up types. Never heard a word I said. Well, Christ knows he’ll need all the p & v he’s got up there on the old Guinea Hen, as Jackson calls it. Tore around like a couple of drunken firemen, disrupted Hoyt’s batt working on bunker assaults, some of 484th later. Pulleyne not impressed. “What’s the matter with them? They fart around like a bunch of tired old men …” I said: “They are tired, Duke.” “Well, they better shake the lead and get cracking. They’re soldiers—with a big, dirty job to do.” How true. He’s picked up a crypto-British bush jacket made of some shiny golden chino, with patch pockets: banks of ribbons, oversize stars. Doesn’t know quite how to take me—kept vacillating between deferential queries about Moapora and profane directives on How to Run a Lean and Mean Division. Never had combat command before—went up to take over a company in the Wild Wests on Nov 10, last war. Training divisions at Bragg and heartily sick of it. Can’t say I blame him. Only why did they send him OUT HERE?