Dog Tags (19 page)

I went back to the old hut one day to examine Cuttis and found four strangers at the door. One I recognized, a scarred street Negro named Fennimer, from Philadelphia I think. The other three were white but all four were angry, and they all shared an aspect, an attitude: tough city kids. You could tell right away. Trezevant was holding them off, trying to soothe them. Fennimer rounded on me. “You give us that Ewald.”

“What's he done?”

“Stole food. Stole two mon-toes.”

Trezevant said, “What's mon-toes?”

“Steamed dough,” I told him. “Back home you'd spit it out. How do you know Ewald took them?”

“We know,” Fennimer said. “He was there, talking sweet shit about those slants, and then he was gone and they were gone.”

“If he's so sweet with the Chinese how come he has to steal food? And where'd you get the mon-toes?”

“Up yours, officer. You give us Ewald. Now.”

Ah, a touch of home and youth! “Yeah, well just hold it,” I said. “How would that look, we just give you our guy like that. Ewald! You in there?”

“He's in there,” one of the white guys said.

“Who're you?”

“What do you care, officer?”

“Just curious. Where you from, then?”

“Scranton.”

“You guys?”

“Atlanta.”

“Seattle.”

“New York,” I said, between tears and laughter, and they heard, the big town, pops, don't mess with Benny the blade; and it sickened me, disgusted and nauseated me, this brutish street scene, quiet talk, don't draw cops, treaties broken, tribal laws, jagged broken milk bottles. Blood must answer blood. God help us.

“We ought to hang together against these people,” I said. “Got plenty of fights without making more.”

“Never mind these people,” Fennimer said. “We're in here for
good
. For a good long time. Got to figure that way. Got no more fight with them. Got a fight with Ewald.”

“Sergeant,” I said, “tell Ewald I want the mon-toes.”

Trezevant stepped inside, and left me alone.

“Sergeant,” Scranton repeated. “Lieutenants and corporals and all. Got any eagle scouts?”

“Ordinarily I'd let you solve your own problem,” I said. “But we've got plenty of sick and dying, and we're trying to save all we can.”

“Nobody dying no more,” Fennimer said.

That was true. I was astonished. No one had died for a couple of weeks.

“Can't save Ewald anyway,” Fennimer went on. “Unless you get him a transfer. I mean, Lieutenant, after all, sooner or later, you know.”

I nodded. Truth was truth. Sooner or later, you know. “Buy him off, maybe,” I said. “He's a medic. We need him. What would you want?”

They conferred in silence. Note well: four grown men, two lumps of steamed dough. The other three left it to Fennimer. He hesitated, so I made the move. “Double the mon-toes, and I'll punish him myself.”

“Where you going to get mon-toes?”

“Up yours. I can get you aspirin too.”

“Aspirin? What the fuck we going to do with aspirin? That's right, though: you solid with these cats.”

“Shut up about that,” I said.

“Cigarettes, maybe,” Fennimer said.

“Maybe.”

Trezevant lazed out and leaned against the jamb, as if he would say, “Gentlemen.” Instead he held forth a round white lump and said, “I got one. He ate the other one. Don't seem like much to fight about.”

“Two more,” Fennimer said, “and the other stuff.”

“A deal,” I said.

“Solid,” he said. “How you going to fix Ewald?”

“There's ways,” I said. “It won't happen again. But you lay off, all right? I can make trouble too.”

“Last thing we want is trouble,” Fennimer said, and they all grinned.

“All right then. You're in eighteen.”

“That's right,” Fennimer said.

“Where Sumner was.”

“That's right,” Fennimer said.

“By tomorrow noon,” I said. “And you lay off.”

“That's right, we lay off,” Fennimer said. “I guess we better make it four cigarettes and four aspirins. I mean there's four of us. And you with your connections.”

When they were gone Trezevant said, “Sumner?”

“Dysentery,” I said. “He smelled bad. So they put him out overnight and he froze to death and they brought him back in before dawn.”

“How do you know that?”

“Doctors know everything.”

Life was not all crime reporting; there was also the society page, and shortly I was caught up in the mad, bubbling whirl of the international set: I was invited to dinner. Blue suit. Among the notables were Ou-yang, Wei, Chang, a few interrogators and Doctor Li. Li Die-foo. The invitation arrived in the form of a guard who jabbed a stubby finger at me and pointed the way with a mean thumb, like a homicidal hitchhiker; Kinsella shouted after me, “Stand fast, Beer.”

I was ushered into a large room where seven or eight people stood sipping tea and snapping pumpkin seeds; Ou-yang greeted me with a roar of hospitality and a clap on the shoulder, and I stood blinking and ducking like a barbarian at the court in Peking. Introductions. Li Die-foo. I shook hands, stunned. Where had he been when I needed him. Then the interrogators: colloquial English, my confusion compounded. Gossip. News of the war; my new commanding general was someone called Ridgway. Never heard of him. The Chinese were driving south, below the thirty-eighth parallel. My mind raced, slowed, dug in like harassed infantry: they were dissembling, deceiving me. I said little, nibbled pumpkin seeds, slurped tea.

“We will have surgical supplies,” Doctor Li informed me, “and antibiotics.”

“My men are better now or dead,” I said. “What they need is good food.”

“That too will improve,” Li said. “We plan to conform to the highest international standards. Our goal is twenty-five hundred calories per day for each man.” He nodded many times, proudly, smugly.

An interrogator said, “The baseball season has begun.”

Li said, “I attended the Peking Union Medical School.”

“Northwestern,” the interrogator said. “Psychology.”

I murmured something polite. This was scarcely credible. After dinner I would be executed, straws beneath the fingernails, the water torture. Or they would turn the conversation to book reviews and the latest vernissage and I would go mad on the spot, gangling, adrool. I groped for civilization, wit. What do you hear from Mao Tse-tung. Lin. “I had a friend in medical school,” I said, “named Lin Li-kang. From Fukien.”

“In Mandarin, Fu-
djen
,” the interrogator said primly. “Lin is a common name there, like Johnson in Minnesota.”

“It is a good name for a doctor,” Li said, “because—”

“Because the five lin, on the same tone, are the diseases of the bladder,” I said. “He told me that.”

Joyful cries, extravagant delight. “A scholar!” Li announced. “You must apply yourself, and improve your hours learning Chinese.”

Almost anything would improve my hours. Li rambled on about the modern application of certain ancient simples and nostrums. Acupuncture, he said; my heart contracted, a wrench, some old joke, confusing.

We sat on wooden chairs about a wooden table. We ate rice from bowls, with chopsticks, and in the center of the table, on a wooden platter, lay a huge baked fish in sauce. There were no portions; we all attacked the fish, nipped up flakes of flesh and dropped them, saucy, into the rice; Li spooned more sauce onto mine. There were vegetables, white vegetables Li called them, and lotus root. We had little cups too, and a man came in with earthen jugs and they poured wine into my cup, yellow wine, hot. Ou-yang rose to propose a toast in Chinese; it was to Mao so I did not participate, nothing personal you understand, and waited to be ejected; the bouncer would pad in, a wrestler, grab me by the nape and seat, and fling. They ignored me. A toast of my own, I should offer a toast, but to whom? Harry Truman? George Washington? Benedict Arnold. I knew I should not be there. Photographs. Benny Beer in the fleshpots, among the heathen. Disgrace, loss of citizenship, automobile insurance canceled. After a suitable interval, establishing moral defiance, I sipped. “No, no,” Li said. “Dry cup, dry cup.” The cups were tiny, three thimblefuls; I quaffed. The cup was filled instantly, magically. The fish diminished, vanished; no bones? Many cups were dried. Not so many by me. I explained to Li that my system was now delicate and my good health of supreme importance to some eight hundred men. Actually I had about forty patients, but you know how it is the first year. “Very wise,” he said. I belched, Aeolian, sforzando. “Good, good,” he said. “A compliment to the chef.” I smiled weakly and patted my mouth with the back of my hand. Soup was served. Delicious, intoxicating, utterly new to me. “Walnut soup,” Li said, “for extraordinary occasions.”

“It's very good,” I said uneasily. I was a penniless diner awaiting the bill, the crisis. What did they want of me?

Nothing. We babbled, some in Chinese and some in English; spoke of the war, the warm spring, Mao Tse-tung's plans for flood control, the TVA. A love feast. I was frightened. But also full. My God I was full. On a bowl of rice and a mouthful of fish. A little drunk too. Foreign guest. Big nose. Invader, rapist. What next? Honorary citizenship. Exile. My interrogator friend asked me if I knew a place called
The Blue Note
. I did not. Great place, he said. Hawkins, he said. Tatum. I told him that I had once met Tatum but that I was a fiddler. Heifetz, he said. Paganini. Tomorrow they would clap someone into solitary and tonight we ate and drank and chattered of Shakespeare. They did not look at all alike. One of the interrogators was my idea of Genghis Khan: squat, powerful, a mustache. Another was a beardless Confucius, skinny, ascetic. One was walleyed. Ou-yang was jovial and hostly. The war was discussed again, the inevitable victory of the Chinese. Of the Koreans, someone corrected, and they all said oh yes, yes, the Koreans. Asia for the Asiatics, someone said, and Ou-yang spoke swiftly in Chinese, a rebuke. A brief silence. More gossip. Li was lecturing on blood types, geographical distribution, many races, religions and blood types, and I was nodding, wearied by café society, when a rush of sound jerked my head erect and stopped my breath. Ou-yang smiled.

“What's that?” I was trembling and in pain.

“Radio Peking,” Ou-yang said. “Does that surprise you?”

“No,” I said. “
No
. That's Haydn.”

I stood up; they fell silent. I choked, in my excitement gasped and hummed. I knew the quartet, the movement, three-four; my pulse beat in threes, and the music soared, quavered, hovered, swooped. I sank back heavily, stupefied. I let go then, and sat weeping, and wept to the end. When it was over Ou-yang handed me a cigarette and said I had better go now. It was obvious that I was tired. As I left a waiter came in with a stack of hot towels; I paused, and watched them wash their hands and mouths, fastidiously, like so many satraps.

I told Kinsella that a Chinese doctor had arrived and we had talked about medicine. He smoked the cigarette and told me to be careful.

Too late. Anyway the careful man dies of bedsores. Within a couple of days eight hundred prisoners knew that Doctor Beer, that prick, had caroused with the enemy. Roast duck, whiskey, cigars. Conversations dwindled at my approach. Kinsella drew me aside. “I want the truth.” I told him the truth. He astonished me: “Oh what the hell,” he said. “Christ, I heard you had women.” I laughed hysterically for some seconds. “I'll shut them up,” he said.

But then ten men were rounded up for stealing food, not from each other but from a storeroom near the library, where perhaps a prog had spied and squealed, and Fennimer and his friends were among them. They were taken away for a time and it was announced that their rations would be cut, which was infuriating; they would be denied classroom and library privileges, which was merely amusing; they would receive no tobacco, which was definitely comic; or mail, which was hilarious since no one had yet seen so much as a post card. It was less hilarious two days later when a few dozen men, all progressives but one, received a letter apiece, among them Pfc. Bewley, Corporal Ewald and Lieutenant Beer. That night I was court-martialed by Kinsella, two captains and two lieutenants. Kinsella raged. He had warned me. Stand fast, Beer. Ou-yang had mousetrapped me. The men were saying I had informed on the thieves. “Don't be a fool,” I said.

“Don't you be a fool,” he stormed. “Of course you didn't. God damn, of course not. Last man in the whole god damn camp to do that. Any of you others think he did?”

The others did not think so.

“But you let them split you off,” he said. “Why should the men hold out if their officers betray them? Christ, man, we had little enough left. Why should they trust any of us now?”

I had no answer. Lucky Benny, the man in the middle. Gloomily I considered Ou-yang. He would not force me. He would isolate me and tempt me with Haydn and fish. Why? Why should he want me? What could I give him beyond doctoring, and he knew I'd give him that gratis. Cosmic forces at work, galactic intrigue, my soul at stake. “What does he want?”

“Not you,” Kinsella said. “Not one officer more or less. He wants converts, but mostly he wants to demoralize us. He wants to show the world a lot of reformed sinners. Show the slant world and Africa and all them. It stands to reason.”

We were sitting on the dirt floor, all but Kinsella; he stood, feet apart, shoulders square, chin high, a general chewing out a whole division.

“Okay. What do I do?”

They debated. I could stay with the Turks, or the British. No; they too knew. I could rebel and have myself popped into the hole. No; they'd say it was a trick.

“I could cut my throat,” I said.

“You may yet. God damn you. What kind of puppy dog are you? You like everybody.”