The Million-Dollar Wound (Nathan Heller) Read online

  “Wrong on two counts,” I said. “First, I turned thirty-six, when you weren’t looking. Squeaked by the draft, thank you very much. Second, you’re a married man. I know, I know, you’re getting a divorce; but then you’re going to marry Cathy, first chance you get, right?” Cathy was this beautiful showgirl Barney had taken up with after his marriage went sour. “Well,” I went on, “they only take married men up to age twenty-six. And you haven’t been twenty-six since you fought McLarnin.”

  He looked gloomily in his beer. “I don’t intend to shirk my duty by using some loophole. As far as I’m concerned, I ain’t married anymore, and even so, I’m joining up.”

  “Oh, Barney, please. You got dependents, for Christ’s sake. You got family.”

  “That’s just why I’m doing it. I got a special obligation to represent my family in the armed service.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged expansively. “Because nobody else was able to go. Ben’s too old, Morrie’s got back trouble, Sammy’s got the epileptic fits, and Georgie’s got flat feet and the draft board turned him down.”

  “That poor unlucky bastard, Georgie. Imagine goin’ through life with flat feet when you could’ve got ’em shot the hell off.”

  “I take this serious, Nate. You know that. Think about what’s happening overseas, would you, for once? Think about that cocksucker Hitler.”

  A word that harsh was rare for Barney; but the feeling ran deep. He’d gotten very religious, in recent years; and his religion was what this was most of all about.

  “Hitler isn’t your problem,” I said, somewhat lamely.

  “He is! He’s mine, and he’s yours.”

  We’d been over this ground many times, over the last three or four years. Longer than that, really. From the first news of persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, Barney had gone out of his way to remind me that I too was a Jew.

  Which I didn’t accept. My father had been an apostate Jew, so what did that make me? An apostate Jew at birth? My late mother was a Catholic, but I didn’t eat fish on Friday.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “You hate Hitler; you’re going to whip those lousy Nazis. Fortunately for you, Armstrong isn’t on their side.” Armstrong was who Barney lost his title to. A little desperately I added, “But why the goddamn Marines? That’s the roughest damn way to go!”

  “Right.” He sipped his beer, very cool, very measured. “They’re the toughest of all the combat outfits. If I’m going to do this thing, I’m going to do it right. Just like in the ring.”

  I tried a kidney punch. “What about your ma? It was rough enough on her when you were fighting in a ring—now you want to go fight a war? How could you do that to her?”

  He swallowed; not his beer—just swallowed. His puppy-dog eyes in that bulldog puss were solemn and a little sad. His hair was salt-and-pepper and he really did look too old to be considering this; he looked older than me, actually. But then I hadn’t taken as many blows to the head as him. Very deliberately, he said, “I don’t want to bring no more heartache to Ma, Nate. But wars have to go on no matter how mothers feel.”

  It was like trying to argue with a recruiting poster.

  “You’re serious about this, this time,” I said. “You’re really going to go through with it.”

  He nodded. Smiled just a little. Shyly.

  I finished my beer in a gulp and waved toward the bar for another. “Barney, look at this place. Your business is going great guns. Ever since you switched locations, seems like it’s doubled.”

  “Ben’s going to take over for me.”

  “Aw, but you yourself are such an important part of it—the celebrity greeting his customers and all. No offense to your brother, but it’ll flop without you.”

  Again he shrugged. “Maybe so. But if Hitler comes riding down State Street, I’ll be out of business permanent.”

  Such a child. Such a simple soul. God bless him.

  “How far have you gone with this thing?”

  “Well,” he said, smiling, embarrassed now, “they turned me down at first. Told me I was overage and should go run my cocktail lounge. Just like you did. But I kept swinging, and finally they sent a letter to Washington to see about getting me a waiver on the age rule. Took sixty days for it to come through. And today I got the word. All I got to do is sign on the dotted line, and pass the physical.”

  I sat there shaking my head.

  “The recruiting office is in the post office,” he said. That was just a few blocks away. “They’re open twenty-four hours, these days. I’m going down tonight. Why don’t you keep me company?”

  “What, and join up with you? Not on your life.”

  “Nate,” he said, reaching across to touch my hand. It wasn’t something I remembered him ever doing before. “I’m not trying to talk you into any such thing. You have every right to stay here, doing what you’re doing. You’re past draft age, now, you got my blessing. Really. All I want is yours.”

  He didn’t know I’d already given it to him. I just sat there shaking my head again, but smiling now. He took his hand off mine. Then suddenly we were shaking hands.

  That’s when we started to seriously drink.

  It gets hazy after that. I know that my own mixed feelings—my own barely buried desire to get into this thing myself, my expectation of being drafted having turned to guilt-edged relief when the call-up missed me—came drifting to the surface, came tumbling out in confession to Barney, and, well, I remember walking him to the post office, singing, “Over There,” along the way and getting strange and occasionally amused looks from passersby.

  I remember studying a poster boasting the great opportunities the Marine Corps offered a man. There were three Marines on the poster—one rode a rickshaw, one was cleaning the wings of an airplane, one was presenting arms on a battleship. I remember, albeit vaguely, studying this poster for the longest time and experiencing what must have been something akin to a religious conversion.

  I’m sure it would have passed, given time.

  Unfortunately, time for sober reflection wasn’t in the cards. The blur that follows includes a recruiting sergeant in pressed blue trousers, khaki shirt, necktie, and forest ranger hat (a “campaign” hat, I later learned). I remember looking down at his shoes and seeing my face looking up at me. I also remember saying, “What a shine!” Or words to that effect.

  The conversation that followed is largely lost to me. I remember being asked my age and giving it as twenty-nine. That stuck with me because I had to concentrate hard, in my condition, to be able to lie that effectively.

  I remember also one other question asked of me: “Any scars, birthmarks, or other unusual features?”

  And I remember asking, “Why such a question?”

  And I remember the matter-of-fact response: “So they can identify your body after you get your dog tags blown off.”

  One would think that would have sobered me up (and perhaps that question was the recruiting officer’s attempt to do so, to not take undue advantage of my condition); but one would be wrong. It took the next morning to do that.

  The next morning, by which time Barney Ross was in the Marines.

  And so, when I woke up, was I.

  We took a train at Union Station and left Chicago behind. Ahead, immediately ahead, was San Diego. Boot camp.

  It was a three-day journey cross-country. Barney and I weren’t the only ones aboard over thirty, and a fair share of these recruits were in their twenties; but the bulk of ’em were kids. Goddamn kids—seventeen, eighteen years old. It made me feel sad to be so old; it made me feel sadder that they were so young.

  But so was the war, and, judging from the high spirits of its passengers, this train might’ve been headed for a vacation camp. Oh, it’d be a camp, all right; but hardly vacation. Still, the trip—particularly the first day or so—was filled for them with childish fun, yelling and pranks and waving out the windows at cows and cars and particularly girls.

  These ki
ds had never been west before. Both Barney and I had, but just the same we sat like spellbound tourists and looked out the window at the passing scenery. As the farm country gradually gave way to a more barren landscape, it seemed fitting somehow. I was leaving America slowly behind.

  The kids knew who Barney was, and some of them razzed him, but mostly they wanted autographs and to hear stories. He’d humor them, fight Canzoneri again and again (which he’d had to do in real life, as well), and occasionally get the heat off himself by trying to make me out as somebody.

  “Talk to Nate, here,” he’d say, “if you want to hear about celebrities. He knows Capone.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “Sure he does! Frank Nitti, too. Nate was there the night Dillinger got shot in front of the Biograph theater.”

  “Is that so, Nate?”

  “More or less, kid.”

  So word got around about the boxer and the private eye and we got paid a certain gosh-wow respect because of it. And our ages, we were the oldest aboard by a yard; nobody since that recruiting officer seemed convinced I was twenty-nine. Including me.

  I had plenty of time on the train to reflect on the nature of my enlistment. Even before we left Barney had said, “You might be able to get out of it, Nate.”

  “I signed the papers.”

  “You were drunk, and you lied about your age. I had to get a waiver to get in, and I’m younger than you. Maybe you should…”

  “I’ll think it over.”

  Yet somehow, here I was, on a train cutting across a desert, on my way to San Diego and points God-knows-where beyond.

  On the second day of the trip, sitting in the dining car, at a table for two, Barney looked across at me and said, “Why didn’t you try, Nate?”

  “Try what?” I asked. The meal before me was a hamburger steak and cottage fries and a little salad and milk and I was digging in, instinctively enjoying what I guessed would be one of the few decent meals of my foreseeable future.

  “To get out of it,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Don’t play games, schmuck. Of the Marines.”

  I shrugged, chewed my food. Answered: “I don’t know that I could.”

  “You don’t know that you couldn’t.”

  “I’m here. Let’s leave it at that.”

  He smiled tightly and did. Never uttered another word on the subject.

  I wasn’t sure myself why I didn’t try to worm out of it. I’d worked long and hard to build my little one-man show into a real agency. It’d be waiting for me when this was over—I’d left it in the capable hands of the sole remaining operative in the agency, Lou Sapperstein, a sober soul of fifty-three who was unlikely to get drafted, or drunk and enlist, either. But why leave at all?

  I didn’t know. I was a cop once. It hadn’t worked out. It had been my dream since childhood to be a cop, to be a detective, but in Chicago the game was rigged, for cops, and to play it, you played along, and I’m no boy scout but there came a time I just couldn’t play along anymore. So I went in business for myself, and I liked it, up to a point. But ever since December 7, something had been gnawing me. My old man was a union guy, an idealistic sap who never learned to play the game when it was straight, let alone rigged; you don’t suppose I inherited something from him besides the funny shape of my toes? Who the hell knew. Not me. Not me. Maybe I was tired of following cheating husbands and cheating wives around and then coming home to read a paper filled with Bataan and Corregidor and ships going down in the Atlantic. Maybe the life I’d made for myself paled into something so insignificant I couldn’t the fuck face it anymore and, well, folks, here I was in a dining car with that Damon Runyon character I called my best friend, on my way to war.

  I wasn’t the only one. Out the windows almost all the rail traffic we passed was military. Long trains consisting of flatcar after flatcar loaded with tanks, halftracks, artillery parts. Troop trains seemed constantly to pass us, going both ways. Army troops, mostly. We hadn’t been Marines long enough to hate the Army yet, so the kids whooped and hollered at them as well, give ’em hell, guys, give ’em hell.

  In Chicago, it had been late summer and felt like winter. The morning we arrived in San Diego, it was summer and felt like it, sunlight bouncing blindingly off the cement walkways of the terminal. We were wearing heavy winter gear, the only gear we’d thus far been given, lugging sea bags, sweating, immediately sweating. Falling into ranks just alongside the train, we watched a first sergeant amble up, seeming surprisingly cheerful, and inform the noncommissioned officers among us which of the waiting buses we were to board.

  The first sergeant looked old to the kids, most likely; but I knew he was only a few years older than me, just enough so as to’ve made it into the previous war. His crisp green uniform bore campaign ribbons and a braided cord around his left arm.

  “You people have some tough training ahead,” he said, rather informally. “But it’s gonna see you through, if you can see it through. Good luck. Now, fall out—board your assigned buses!”

  On the bus, the kids were whispering about how nice the first sergeant was. Not at all like what they’d heard boot camp would be like.

  Well, they weren’t at boot camp yet, and being older than them, I didn’t allow myself to be lulled into a false sense of security by the fatherly manner of a guy not much older than me. My cop’s nose sensed trouble ahead.

  And there was nothing wrong with my sense of smell.

  As the buses rolled into camp, a.k.a. the Marine Corps Recruit Depot—a massive rambling assembly of cream-colored buildings with dark roofs—out the window I could see platoons of recruits rigidly marching to the individual cadence of drill instructors. Snappy as hell, had to admit. I was impressed, sure, but I’d been a guy on his own, a guy his own boss, for so many years that I couldn’t keep from seeing this mindless regimentation as stupid and pointless. I was here on a stopover before going to kill some Nazis for Uncle Sam, right? I used a gun before; I killed before—I hadn’t liked it, but I’d done it, and was prepared to do it again, for what seemed a just cause. Point me at Hitler and set me to shooting. Don’t expect me to be a martinet, for Christ’s sakes! I’m not one of these fucking kids…

  Our bus’s NCO, prior to this an agreeable sort, turned suddenly into that Nazi I’d been looking for; he stood at the front of the bus and all but screamed: “All right, you people, off the goddamned bus!”

  The kids rushed off, and Barney and I got swept up with them. We lined up with men from the other buses and counted off into groups of sixty. A truck rumbled by, carrying in its open back a work party of seasoned-looking recruits. They laughed at us.

  “You’ll be sor-eeeee,” one called, the truck leaving us behind in the dust.

  A corporal in a campaign hat came walking toward us with a tight-lipped, somehow hungry smile. He was about five-ten and probably weighed 160 pounds; smaller than me by two inches and twenty-five pounds. But he was a muscular s.o.b., with massive arms and chest and a stomach flatter than day-old beer. His cold green eyes squinted and his hawk nose jutted and he clearly hated us, and just as clearly enjoyed doing so.

  “All right, shitbirds, get in line,” he shouted, from the gut, and the heart. He began walking up and down, like Napoleon inspecting his troops, giving us the once-over twice. “So you wanna make Marines, huh?” He sneered more to himself than at us, shaking his head. “What sad sorry sacks of shit. Where the fuck’d they dig you up?”

  The kids were stunned by this; me, I smiled a little. I preferred this to the fatherly approach of the first sergeant back at the train station. This was bullshit, too, but at least it was amusing.

  Only the corporal wasn’t amused. He came over and looked me right in the face; his breath was hotter than the sun and bad.

  “What in the fuck are you doing here?”

  I knew enough not to say anything.

  “Don’t you know we don’t take grandpas in the Marines?”

  Then he noti
ced Barney.

  “What did they do, empty out the goddamn old folks home?” He shook his head, walked back and forth in front of us. “Grandma and grandpa. And I’m expected to make Marines out of this shit.”

  Out of the corner of one eye I could see Barney starting to take this wrong; we were about half a second from Barney swinging on the guy, and starting his glorious patriotic service to his country in the guard house. I nudged him with my foot and his face went expressionless.

  The corporal exploded but not, thankfully, at Barney in particular. At all of us in general: “Patoon halt, teehut. Right hace. Forwart huah. Double time, huah.”

  We didn’t know what the hell that meant, but we did it. The s.o.b. ran us up and down the streets forever, and then a while longer, and then we were in front of the wooden hut that would be home, for a while. My guts were burning, my breath a slow pathetic pant; the former lightweight/welterweight champ didn’t seem any better off. The corporal, who’d set and kept the pace, wasn’t breathing hard, fuck him.

  “Patoon halt, right hace!” He put his hands on his hips and rocked on his heels as he smiled tightly, oozing contempt. “You people are stupid. Now we know who you are. I am Corporal McRae. I am your drill instructor. This is Platoon Seven-fourteen. If any of you idiots think you don’t need to follow my orders, just step right out here and I’ll beat your ass right now.” He began walking back and forth again. “You people are shitbirds. You are not Marines. You may not have what it takes to be Marines.”

  No one was moving; they were barely breathing. I did not hate this man before us. I did not even resent him. But I was scared of the fucker.

  Before long we were in a chow line, trays flung into our hands, food flung from all directions onto the tray. One course flopped right on top of another, and if you didn’t position your tray right as you passed, the food ended up on the floor or you or some goddamn where that wasn’t the tray. The sweating cooks had done a real number on whatever this had been before it got to us.

  “Hell of way to serve a meal,” Barney said, under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. “Good thing I don’t keep kosher.”