Before My Life Began (38 page)

“We'd love to hear the story,” Gail said.

“Well, I'll tell you this, that we met each other when they sent me down to rest up after they fixed my ear, down to a place they called Savoy, which was the same as the name of the famous dance place up in Harlem then. We all liked that. They sent soldiers there from all over France, you see, away from where the fighting was to where they had beautiful mountains and lakes and these special places to take baths, all stone and marble, where the Romans once did the same. You even saw giant mountains with snow on them that they drove us out to see, where Hannibal crossed over the Alps, only those mountains look like nobody ever walked on them, they so high and clean.”

I thought of Tony and me, talking about how nice it would be to live out in the country someday, each of us in our own private homes, with our families, surrounded by beautiful green mountains. Without a wife, could Tony just take off one afternoon and never see his father or his brothers again? And if Abe was right about the trouble that was coming, even though Tony and I weren't friends anymore, would we somehow be able to avoid being enemies? I looked at Beau Jack, as if to give him permission to continue. He smiled. Gail had said that according to the laws of quantum physics, disorganization always increased within a closed system. Salt and pepper, in layers in a shaker, became gray when mixed and, no matter how much you kept shaking, would never again return to separate layers of black and white. I'd given her theory to Abe and he had said that men like Rothenberg and Fasalino didn't need to go to college to discover such things, to believe that the moment you stopped expanding you were already dead.

“I was stationed up in Saint Nazaire till then mostly, unloading ships—we had more than fifty thousand colored soldiers there working as stevedores, and they tried to make things nice for us too. We had canteens and women come over on ships from the States to set up Y.M.C.A. buildings and Hostess Houses and Honey Bee Clubs for us to spend our free time in. To give us the gentle and civilizing influence of women, is the words they used. And they brought in colored French women too, from their colonies in Africa, for our dances. But you don't want to hear all about Beau Jack in the Army, do you?”

“But I do,” Gail said.

“Well, you just like Davey then, didn't you know that? When he was a boy, he couldn't get enough of Beau Jack's stories. Oh I seen terrible things, Gail—Davey can tell you—I seen such terrible things when I was young then. I seen men when they be clutching their stomachs from being shot and then they got their fingers blowed off their hands. I seen men with their eyes wide open and their whole jaws hanging half off. I seen brains spill out the backs of heads and I seen them string up poor colored boys in their pretty uniforms—they made us come out and watch, all in lines—'cause they say they raped the French girls. War was more personal then, like they say, and Davey, he had a way to make me tell him about all that bad stuff. He loved to hear about all the fighting I seen, only you know how I knew he still had a good heart?”

“Tell me.”

“Because one day when I was telling him about what the trenches were like and what mustard gas did to you, how you got to look right at the people you were killing and they got to look at you, and how they trucked us out afterwards in gangs for burying all those poor white boys, and when I say to Davey that he just like all these smart kids who think war is fine till they get over there themselves, when I ask if he wants to be a soldier when he grows up, like me and his uncle Abe, he answers me no. Just like that. Oh no, he says. Oh no, Beau Jack. I like to
play
soldier, but I wouldn't want to ever have to really kill somebody. I wouldn't ever want to hurt anybody. So that I see he knows the difference.”

“I hope so,” Gail said. She took my hand. I settled back in my chair, knowing there was no way we would leave without hearing the rest of Beau Jack's story. That was fine with me. Gail said her father wanted to talk with me privately and I wasn't looking forward to that. As for reporting to Abe about Vincent, I figured that could wait until we got home. If anything urgent was up, Abe would get a message to me, probably by hand, since he was convinced that Fasalino had had a drop on our telephone lines for the past few weeks. I listened to Beau Jack's voice and wondered the way I'd always wondered when I was with him, about how the world beyond his voice and his room could be as real as I knew it was. Who could tell? Maybe Vincent was on the level and loved Sheila and was going to pay Abe back. Maybe Fasalino really wanted peace. Maybe I could telephone Tony—in my mind I saw him smiling and brushing his hair back, happy to hear me talk to him the way he had always talked to me—and suggest that he get back together with Regina, knock her up good and then marry her so that the two of us could go down to the schoolyard together and, while we played one-on-one, talk about solving the problems we had in common.

“Oh, he still does,” Beau Jack said to Gail. “Which is why tonight I'll just skip the war story and give you the love story. The love story, though, it got the same bad ending the war stories have, except it only happened to two people and nobody died from it.

“The French, they had their colored soldiers in separate units like we did, and the French people, they the same as people all over and they have funny ideas about us, that all we ever think about is gambling and making love with their daughters and stealing from them. Some of them think we got tails like monkeys too, and they get nasty with us. So we keep to our own pretty much, except in this place they send us to rest, where they liked us better because of a legend they have there.

“In this little town, see, near where they have the baths, they would take us in groups to see a church—I showed Davey the photo from the newspaper—and up front in the church they have a statue on the altar of a little black child in Mary's arms, and that child wearing robes of gold and diamonds, and the people in the towns all around, they come there to get themselves healed. They call it the Church of the Black Madonna, and there be crutches and canes and eyepatches and the like around, from people who come there to be blessed. Lots of our boys done the same with their prayers, and didn't it work sometimes too?

“Now the story they tell to us was that the town this church was in, Aix-les-Bains, it got destroyed by a mountain-slide hundreds of years before, with only the church left standing and all the families from the village inside the church, praying to God to be saved. This pretty girl be our guide, and she was telling us the story in English and some of our boys were starting in to pray, and I see something in that girl's eyes that draw me right down inside her—you know how I mean?—and I say to her, I say, does she think that if I pray hard enough I'll get my ear grown back? Now I didn't say that with the other boys around but when she all finished with her speech and we were left alone to wander around and light candles if we wanted, and you know what she do when I ask my question?”

“What?” Gail asked.

“She just start in laughing and laughing, and she reaches right up and lifts my bandage and peeks under and then she laughs some more. Her laugh kind of gurgles from down low, and when she looks at me all I want is to be nearer and nearer to her. You know how that feels? She had hazel-brown eyes with these flecks in them like gold slivers, and even though I was scared, I can't help but want to be nearer to her and look in those eyes and make her laugh some more. So when she was done laughing we got to talking. She asked me questions about myself and how I lost my ear, and then she says, ‘Come on, brown soldier boy,' just like that, and she takes me for a walk, holding my hand, and before you know it I was getting out of the hospital every chance I could and I was telling her that the real miracle, it was the two of us meeting one another. How you explain that, I ask her, that out of all the world to wander in, we happen to be in the same place on the same day? How you explain it, that if I don't lose my ear and she don't be so good in English at school that they make her a guide, that we might never know each other existed? I lost my ear, but I found you, I say to her. You
hear
that? That's the way I talk to her, to make her laugh and to cry, and oh sure, how I got my name is one day out at the lake she just start in calling me her Beau Jack so that my name be half-French and half-American. She liked to take my bandage off and touch my ear and make me promise not to take no more chances, especially not to gamble no more, ‘cause if somebody take my other ear off, then how I gone to hear her laugh?”

“You lost your ear
gambling?”
Gail asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Oh child, we got to leave some mysteries for you, didn't you know that? If you and Davey know
everything
about Beau Jack, what gone to make you come back for more stories? Marcelle and me, we talk about that, how it was the same being in love, that you know you're in love when you still always wanting to know more about the other person even when you think you never been closer to anyone.

“But we were awful scared, from the first. Her mother be warning her all the time about colored soldiers, and our officers warning us about staying away from white women, and maybe being scared made our love a little more special too—we admit that to each other—and what happened finally is that we made up to meet at this band concert they have every Sunday afternoon in these gardens in town, to show we not hiding, and when she gets there to meet me, her Momma's there too—her father be dead from the time she was eleven—Marcelle, she's wearing a yellow kerchief on her head. I can see it now, ‘cause it wasn't gold like that child's robe and it wasn't bright like the sun. It was just flat yellow like grass without rain.

“Now when her mother sees me, her standing there with all her family and neighbors too, she calls my name out and then she rips the kerchief off Marcelle's hair and I see that Marcelle's hair is gone. They chopped those black curls off and must of shaved the rest so that you see these little ugly red nicks, and they spitting French words at me too and all I thinking is how I wish I could cover that head and put that hair back. I seen death a thousand times over by then—good friends too—but nothing seem so terrible as that poor head. And Marcelle, while the rest all cursing me, she walks straight up to me and she kisses me hard one time on each cheek and she says to me, ‘Well, Beau Jack, we were wrong, yes? There are no miracles.'

“She was one brave girl, I tell you that. She turn back on her family and she says to them what she say to me before, when we by ourselves, that if I was good enough to stop a German bullet to help save them all, how come I'm not good enough to stop her heart and make her life happy? That's what she said, and what I think ever since is that it takes more courage to do that—to say those words—than most things I ever saw soldiers do, and I saw some brave men too.

“Poor Beau Jack, he didn't know what to do, so he stand there for a while and let them curse him, and then he just turn and run. When I got back to my place in the hospital, I tried hard to think about what choices we had, about us maybe going off together to start a new life, but it didn't take much thinking to see the foolishness it all was. You got to look at facts too sometimes, and how you gone to live when the world won't let you. So I figure the best thing for her life, it be to leave. Those French, they know how to be mean when they want, I tell you that. They mean to be mean, like they say. So I never seen Marcelle again, children, and that's the end of the story.”

We were quiet for a while. Then Gail spoke. “That's
all?”
she asked. Beau Jack nodded. I looked at Beau Jack's face—tried to read his eyes—and I recalled him telling me about the green pigeons, in France, that would fly over them and die from fright at the sound of gunfire—about how soldiers would shoot their guns into the air just so they could see the pigeons die and fall. Was it true? Had he made the story up?

“Will you get another dog?” I asked.

“No,” Beau Jack said. “It's too late and you got to think about who's gone to take care of who and what happens to some dog if something happens to me. Beau Jack's not getting younger.” He laughed to himself. “Now you take in a hungry dog from the street, you know, and you feed him and give him lots of love and get him to obey you, see, and he won't bite you.” Beau Jack stood, went to the sink and set his cup down. He turned to us. “That's the main difference between a dog and a man, you ask me.”

“Did you make that up?” Gail asked.

“Oh no. I read that on a calendar one time from something Mark Twain wrote. But here.” He reached into his locker, brought out a small package wrapped in white paper, tied with a silver ribbon. “Here's what I got for you, why I asked you to stop by today. I thought a long time until I found what I wanted for you children. But you don't open it now, all right, ‘cause it only make me upset if you do. You open it before you go to sleep, and then, when I'm getting ready to go to sleep, I'll know you be thinking of Beau Jack.”

I sat in Mr. Kogan's study, trying to pay attention to him, to what he was offering me, but all I could think of was Gail and of how happy she was when Ellen came to her in the foyer and asked permission to touch her stomach, to press her ear there.

“All right then. I'll put it as simply and frankly as I can.” Mr. Kogan tapped his pipe on an ashtray. “I'm certain you're aware that I didn't like it when you and Gail were dating, that I was not in favor of the marriage—and certainly Hannah was as upset as I was—but I do see how happy Gail is with you, and that's what matters most to me. I accept you, David. I like you, in fact.”

I stared at him, gave away nothing. I thought of Gail in a room above me, lying on Ellen's bed. I looked at the photos on Mr. Kogan's desk. To one side of the large green blotter was a head-and-shoulders picture of him in an Army officer's uniform, and tucked into a corner of the frame was a smaller photo of a group of soldiers, arms around one another. I wondered why it was that in old photos of soldiers or ballplayers or coal miners, the men always appeared to be so much older than they actually were.