he couldn’t boogie-woogie worth a damn

At first he did not dare to venture out on the streets at all in daylight. She would bring him pizza and wine from the shop downstairs, saying she had company upstairs. Since she often had company there, there was nothing unusual in this. But with him in the room she had no means of bringing other soldiers there, and the pizza and wine cost many francs.

At first he had had plenty money. He’d been lucky all through Africa and Italy, and he had no one to send money to at home. But now the francs were almost gone and he would have to put on his uniform and take his chances.

She had put a blazing shine on his boots and wasn’t satisfied even after he’d laced them up and the little bulb overhead was reflected in the boots like two tiny underwater moons tethered in each toe. She had to kneel to give them a final gloss.

When he was quite ready she gave him a final inspection, while he stood rigidly at attention, eyes forward and palms along his thighs. Then she kissed him on each cheek as though she were de Gaulle, and he kissed her on the mouth as though he were exactly what he was: Pfc Isaac Newton Bailey, U. S. Army, unattached, unassigned, and whereabouts unknown.

She went down the narrow stair well before him and stood blinking into the white Mediterranean light a moment in the narrow door. The door opened onto an off-limits street and he waited in shadow behind her until the ubiquitous jeep, bearing two MPs and a gendarme, came rolling, gently and alertly, down the ancient street. When it turned down the Rue Phocéens he gave her hand a final squeeze and she watched his slender back until it got safely around the corner. No more hide-and-seek today, she thought sadly, with a child’s sadness. She had come to enjoy the game of hiding him.

For she’d been playing hide-and-seek on her own since she’d been fourteen in Algiers; and it was more fun when there were two to play. Then there was always something for which to cry warning: an American jeep or the white belt of a French MP. The Americans never walked, they’d drive the jeep up a staircase if they could. Always the jeep, the jeep; but the ones with the white belts and the cross of Lorraine on their helmets walked, slowly and sadly, like shamed men, wherever they went.

In the dark one could spot the French helmets half a block away, and they were easier to talk to than the Americans. Perhaps the Americans were afraid because they were in a strange land; for they always spoke with contempt, like conquerors. And to Michele they were all conquerors: the Americans, the French, the British, as the Germans had been before them. As the Italians had tried to be, but had seemed more like gypsies instead. With all of them, one must never laugh, for conquerors felt that all laughter, save their own, was directed at them. She liked this dark hiding one because he laughed with her, and the pair of them laughed at them all.

The dark hiding one was losing himself in the noonday crowds along the Rue Cannebière, not walking too fast, not loitering, a little glad that he was a Negro because, among so many Negro GIs and French colonials, it was easier for the MPs to spot a white awol than a black one.

He ate at the transient mess, slyly pocketing a piece of cake for Michele, and walked over to the PX line. This was the riskiest angle of all, because the N.C.O. at the door checked ration cards against dog tags, and Bailey wasn’t wearing his own dog tags any more. He’d stolen the ones he now wore at the Red Cross showers and had made out the ration card to correspond to the tags.

He bought a carton of Pall Malls and a mess of soap, candy, and toilet articles. The stuff cost almost nothing, so he bought all the odds and ends of unrationed supplies he could stuff into his pockets: shoe polish, hair oil, bath towels, and razor blades. He earmarked a pack of chewing gum and two packs of cigarettes for Michele in a side pocket, and disposed of everything else except the razor blades and a small bar of soap in a barbershop half a block down the street. Then he strolled east down the Cannebière to the Columbia Red Cross.

Here the showers were unheated, but the danger of being spotted by anyone from his own outfit was less than at the Rainbow Red Cross. He’d decided to postpone making a break for the States until he was certain that his outfit was already back there. It would be just his luck, if he didn’t, to creep on board some tank and wake up looking at his old C.O. He went across the Cannebière, feeling better for the shower, to the GI movie, entering without pausing to see what was playing. It turned out to be GI Joe, and halfway through he knew he was going to be sick and got out just in time.

Along the outdoor GI bar quite a crowd had gathered. GIs were helping an old Frenchie to get drunk. He’d drink half a can of GI beer and pour the rest over his head to show his gratitude. His head was shaven, wet and shining in the sun; sweat and beer mingled down his cheeks and soaked the front of his shirt. He’d do a little jig while giving himself a beer shower and daubed himself delicately under the armpits, like a woman in a bath.

The French watched solemnly. When one can was emptied, there would be another waiting. The GIs crowded the fence bordering the bar, shouting encouragement, calling to their buddies to come over and watch, and demanding that the old man dance, that he box, that he sing, that he make a speech and take another drink.

The French waited curiously. The old man, in a pair of trousers covered with grime and grease, his sockless feet in a pair of American tennis sneakers, lifted one trouser leg daintily, pointing one toe, to indicate that he was now a ballet dancer.

“None of that fancy stuff, Pop! Jitterbug it!”

The old one understood. He wiped sweat and beer off his forehead, drained half of a can, poured the remainder into his ears, and went into a kind of cancan with Gilda Gray variations, ending by pivoting in a Virginia reel beneath the beer can, held by two fingers against his skull. And the white light beat on his skull while dust rose under his feet. He licked at the sweat coming off his temples with his tongue and came forward slinking, arms dangling in a kind of senile boogie-woogie, until the crowd gave back; it surged back as he retreated, his mouth agape as though to catch raindrops on his tongue. The GIs applauded crazily. But the French only watched with blank, unpitying faces, looking from the soldiers to the dancer to see what was so funny.

To Isaac Bailey the performance seemed pathetic, and he felt curious about the old man; but most of all it seemed insane: the open mouths of the GIs on the fence, like inmates of an asylum applauding a fellow having a fit. The French looked like visitors to the State Asylum, where all aberrations were uniformed, regulated, and made presentable to the public eye; but were no less insane for having been made presentable. These visitors watched their demented cousins behind the fence emotionlessly; saw the open mouths of brainless laughter, the ecstatic gesturing and the manic persistence of madmen exalting each other’s madness.

The old one announced abruptly, in gravel-voiced French: “Le Carpentier contre Le Dempsey,” and went immediately into a wild exchange of blows against the air, ducking unseen gloves, countering a jab by leaping straight up in the air and batting himself in the eye. He was Dempsey, he was Carpentier, he was Luis Angel Firpo, he was the winner, the loser, the second, the referee, he was down on all fours, then up to shove the imaginary ref aside and kick his opponent, now prostrate, à le sabot, squarely in the teeth; he sat on his imaginary victim’s head and banged it against the sidewalk. In the white heat the whole business had a routine, street-corner sort of insanity, about as funny as a sun-struck newsboy tearing up the late editions and tossing the paper about like confetti.

Isaac Bailey walked off, feeling depressed, wondering whether it was himself or the soldiers with whom there was something missing. He didn’t know. All he knew was that, suddenly and certainly, he felt that he’d never feel homesick for Memphis again.

The main business was yet to do and must wait for night. His Algérienne needed a dress, and you couldn’t even buy a decent scarf for under a thousand francs. Money came easy, but didn’t go far. Yet down by the docks overcoats were piled to the rafters in the supply depots. They were worth five thousand francs each on the market—the price of a dress. He strayed into the Bar Odéon and drank vin rouge, slowly, already feeling squeamish about what he had to do.

In the corner booth five GIs were heckling a tart, giving her the come-on and then telling her to scram, bum, till, like an obedient dog that comes when called and runs when it’s kicked at, the girl didn’t know whether she was being accepted or rejected. She stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, her head cocked like a puppy’s to one side, not knowing whether to laugh with them or be insulted, to sit down with them or go far away.

Bailey saw the first lights of the night coming on along the boulevard, and with their coming the eager, seeking, searching faces of the wandering sidewalk thousands became anxious, pallid, and fearful. Along the bars and down the alleys, beside the docks and in the shadowed corners of these ancestral streets, he was haunted by these Mediterranean faces. The whole city, somehow, wore a mask of such impenetrable grief, after the thousand years of battle and defeat, that he was reminded of a woman’s face after a loss so profound that she knew herself to be forever beyond tears. Yet it was not an unhappy face, for it possessed the wisdom of having known joy, of being possessed by joy while realizing that, at the end, there was no joy.

A thousand years of lust and poverty and war and the degradation of war. He saw not only the women whose men had died in Italy and Africa and Germany and Spain: it was also for those who had fallen before Syracuse and Rome; for the thousand forgotten campaigns in which they, the people of the narrow places, had always, and would always be, the everlasting losers.

And always the children who had never been children, the ancient, innocent wiseacres with the light of old Egypt in their eyes and American slang on their tongues.

There were also the great sea fogs, gentle as sleep itself, moving through the thronging streets to announce the morning and lifting in the forenoon to let the bronze sun see: then for a few hours the bars were gay, the loud-speakers of Vieux Marseilles shook the walls with the “Marseillaise” and canned speeches, the GIs came in loaded with the day’s quota of blackmarket supplies, and the red-fezzed Moroccans sold cigarettes assyriennes while smoking Camels themselves. Then the night came down and the little bars were darkened and the GIs rode home drunk and far and over the sea a great bronze bell began tolling the long sea hours.

A city with a face as tragic as a human face: the composite face of all humanity, foolish and arrogant and humble and patient and lined by greed and fear and the perpetual search for the moment of swift joy, with always in the eyes the resigned waiting for the last great bell, tolling the last sea hour.

It was also a workers’ city, a dirty dockside mechanic sprawling, in a drunken sleep, his feet trailing the littered sea.

In a doorway a chicken was tied by one leg with a piece of string, and a dog’s howl came in spirals down a darkened stair well. And everything had the gaunt and shrouded look of dead Egypt: the stone ways, the barbarian terraces, and the clean ancestral light, giving a freshly tanned smell to the girls and a ring to the voices of the people and a copper-colored hue to the night.

He looked in the faces of the children and saw: Hun and Spaniard and Basque and Moor; Gaul and Levantine.

And whenever he heard the great sea bell he felt it must have tolled so when Egyptian legions held this shore: to those mercenaries, he realized, the lion-colored hills of Africa must have looked like home.

He spent a pleasant few moments fancying himself just such a soldier, of such a time: only the uniform had changed. The allegiance had been no stronger then than now. It had always been somebody else’s war, so everything was really the same. Except, of course, for the American radios, and the American dances, the American jeeps. And the American transports in the harbor, waiting restlessly, like all things American.

At the corner of the Rue Petits Puits, where you duck under the Restaurant Verdi sign, through the arch and up the stone steps to Old Marseilles, he saw the Moroccan. He was standing very erect in the shadows, the top of his hat almost touching the top of the door against which he leaned. When he turned his face, Bailey saw the tribal markings, like a cat’s scratches, blue-black, down either side of the face from the cheekbone to the corners of the mouth, as cruel and innocent as a child’s.

“Hey, you, Joe,” he heard the Moor call. “You speak, Joe—how much?”

How much for anything, that was. You name it, he’ll buy it, a hat or a Hershey bar or a gun or a toothbrush. They made two hundred francs a month and would peel off five hundred for a carton of Pall Malls without even making a dent in the roll. They were easier to deal with than the French and had more money, because they were bolder. If it was dark enough they didn’t bother to bargain; they took what they wanted. Bailey fished out a pack of razor blades.

“Cinquante.”

The Moor whistled. “Trop cher.” And nodded toward the bar, to suggest retiring, like gentlemen, to a booth to talk “beesness.” Bailey knew better. The bar was all right for the Moor but was off limits to English and Americans. When they got you inside, with your rations on the wood, they’d start stalling. Then, because you’d realize suddenly that you were under the double pressure of dealing in black market and of being off limits, you’d take anything just to get out. You couldn’t blame them. It was the Americans who’d started the caveat-emptor business by selling them cigarette cartons wadded with newspaper.

Bailey threw in a stick of chewing gum, a bar of Red Cross soap, and his necktie.

“Cent francs.” The price was going up.

“Trop cher.” At seventy-five they reached an agreement. Then he fingered Bailey’s trousers. Ten bucks for the pants.

Bailey laughed good-naturedly, and the African laughed with him, but without dismissing his hope for a sale. “Vous,” he said, fingering his own trousers, “I geev.”

That was a hot one. Ten bucks and the guy’s own pants thrown in. As he walked off he realized, abruptly, how much safer he’d be in the other’s clothes, if it wasn’t for the need of his own to crash the transient line and the PX. But then, in a few months, there wouldn’t be any transient mess and the PX would be closed for keeps and he’d have to get rid of the GI suit. He laughed to think of how Michele would greet him in such an outfit. Hell, Bailey thought disgustedly, I’d be her countryman then for sure. If he was he might as well go back to Algiers with her. That’s where she was going anyhow, when the soldiers left, she’d said.

And what, he asked himself abruptly, did he have to go back to Memphis for anyhow? He couldn’t sing, he wasn’t a pug, he wouldn’t shine shoes, and he couldn’t boogie-woogie worth a damn. He couldn’t play an instrument, he never clowned, and making up berths for the Pullman Company had the same warm appeal for him as shining shoes. He wondered whether he really wanted to go back at all. Maybe he only thought so because everybody else had always been moaning for home.

He felt homesick all right. Strangely homesick: for the lion-colored hills he’d climbed in Africa. Even now, it seemed, he could hear the far-off and sorrowful sound the sea had made every night, when they’d been waiting for the green light to Italy. Then stopped in the middle of the street with the sudden realization that there was nothing to stop him from going back: no one, nothing in the whole wide world, on land or sea or above those hills.

On the Rue Petits Puits he began avoiding the lights, and when he saw the long, low-lying shape of the GI garage, he left the road and got through the hole in the wire he’d made on his last raid.

Once inside, he didn’t sneak any more. He slapped his feet down like he owned the place and hurried down the middle of the depot importantly, like any Pfc scurrying to report to his N.C.O. He glanced at his watch to see if he were late: it was ten minutes of ten. The colored guard eyed him without curiosity as he passed, and at the end of the depot he walked boldly into supply and switched on the light.

The overcoat on the top of the heap was too big. He had to have one at least approximating his own size to make it look legit. The third one was about right, and he tossed it out of the supply window, standing on a desk to do so.. Then he walked out, leaving the light burning as though he’d be back in a minute, and didn’t look back to see whether he was getting away or not. The last time he’d been here he’d worn the overcoat out; but that had been in February, when he’d first snuck into town.

He didn’t start sweating till he had the coat over his arm and was out of the light and halfway back to town. Then he decided, “That’s the last time I pull that. Positively the last.” Bailey knew about pressing one’s luck. He’d already pressed it once too often.

At the Columbia Red Cross he checked the coat and went around the corner, to sit on a bench on the little street lined by birches that goes uphill along the car tracks. He waited till a spare, wispy little middle-aged Frenchie came and sat innocently beside him and whispered, “Combien?” For five thousand francs, Bailey assured him with gestures, his overcoat was a bargain. Combien rose and led him a quarter of a mile toward a bombed-out building. They would meet there in half an hour, it was agreed, Bailey with the coat and he with the francs.

When Bailey returned there with the coat, and the bargain had been achieved, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill, American, that he’d won on the boat coming over. It was a sort of goodluck bill that he’d never used, even when hard-pressed. “That’s Memphis money,” he used to tell the boys, when they’d offer to buy it off him just because it was American money. He sold it now, by flashlight, to Combien, getting two and a half for one because it was the blue-seal bill instead of the gold-seal invasion currency. Why the blue seals brought two and a half, while the gold seals only brought two was a mystery he’d never been able to understand.

When he got rid of the bill he knew he was saying good-by to Memphis.

At the Red Cross he got the farewell feeling all over, and fell into the night’s last coke-and-donut line as a sort of good-by gesture. His mind was made up so firmly he was surprised at himself, as though something had been done for him without his consent. Just like the time he’d told the lieutenant to take the patrol out himself, he wasn’t drawing any more fire for officers that night. Some devil of fool’s courage had gotten into him at such times, and he’d had to obey or feel like a sucker.

“Let’s see the pass, soldier.”

He came to himself, realizing, for the first time, that the line was being ushered into the Red Cross by an MP. That’s a hot one—a pass to get a coke and a donut. He turned away in disgust. “You know what you can do with that coke,” he told the MP.

“You don’t have to drink no coke,” the MP told him, “just show the pass.”

He found a pass with a month-old date, flashed it mechanically, and the MP turned the flashlight on it.

“That’s the wrong one, Jack. Look again.”

“I guess I lost the other,” Bailey said carelessly. “The hell with the coke.”

“I can’t let you go, Jack. Look again.”

“No use looking, I ain’t got one. I left it in my coat at the Rainbow.”

“Okay. I’ll go with you.”

They sauntered, as leisurely as the MP would permit, down the Cannebière. Down the alley, Bailey thought, pushing back the rising tide of panic. Of all the luck. Of all the MPs in the Delta Base he had to catch the one joker who was still bucking.

“The war’s over,” he told the joker.

No answer. Bailey stopped.

“What the hell, Sarge. I took a run out from St. Vic to see my girl, that’s all. That’s all, Sarge. Give me a break. I’m on shipping orders. I just wanted to say good-by, you know how that is. I’ll go back in. Maybe I can do something for you sometime back in the States. Jeez, us vets got to stick togethers—you can put me on the truck yourself.”

“You’re not on no shipping orders. Not from St. Vic you ain’t.”

As in a dream Bailey saw him reaching for his whistle, swung and felt his knuckles crumple against the jaw; the whistle popped out of the mouth in a jolt of surprise and down the alley it was, heard the whistle at last and he was out on the slanting Rue Capucines, going uphill. His feet were weighted all the way up, and at the top he ducked into the railroad station, got across the tracks in front of a line of switching boxcars, and raced hell for leather, half crouched, across the darkened stubble between the bombed-out tenements where the gypsies lived.

He paused in a crevice, like a rat. Sweat was tickling his sides from his armpits to his belt. If no one had seen him duck in here he was all right. Wow. He’d never hit anyone so fast and so hard in his life. He was laughing and shaking with fear and relief, trying not to breathe too hard, and clenching his palms into his fists, all at once. It was ten minutes before he regained his breath and control. Then he waited another half hour, to be sure the MP would be off duty.

It was past one when he crept across the stubbled field toward the docks. He took a chance on an off-limits street in order to keep out of the light, and cut across the park where the Moroccans sold each other cigarettes in daylight. It was only half deserted now, even at this hour, and as he hurried past he heard a familiar whisper: “Hey, you, Joe! You speak—how much?”

When he got into the room he took off his shirt; it was stiff with perspiration. His Algérienne was sleeping, with the light still on and a cigarette still smoking in a water glass beside the couch. She was careless that way; but she couldn’t have been sleeping long.

He turned out the light and she wakened; he felt her groping sleepily for him like a child. Still half asleep, she sensed something in the dark.

“You have fear, yes?”

“You damn right I got fear. I took off ten pounds. But it’s all right now.” He wondered at his trust in her. It felt absolutely implicit. Was that because his need was for such a trust, or because she was really that trustworthy? He didn’t know and it didn’t make any difference. That’s how it was, and he wouldn’t have it changed.

“You have fear of bastille?”

“Oui.”

But it wasn’t just having to do a stretch that had scared him so. Not altogether. It was also the fear, he realized now, of losing her. It was having to do time and then be shipped back to Memphis without her that had given him the panic. “No wonder I slugged the MP,” he thought.

“We’ll have to hole up real still for a couple days,” he told her. “Then we’ll get out fast. To Espagne. Then Afrique.”

She sat up like a child being promised a trip to the circus.

“In Espagne we see los toros?”

“The hell with los toros. We’re going to get on a tanker. You think I can pass for algérien?”

“You pass fine,” she assured him. “In Algérie I have many friends. You will be my Algérien.”

And across the waters, slowly, far-off and faintly across the waters, borne full of sorrow over the sounding sea, he heard the great bell tolling, tolling, from the lion-colored hills of home.