The Last Supper: And Other Stories Page 5

  The other said, “But we got to make sure that when we know something, it fits, Marty. Otherwise, you just have ill-assorted facts. We know about Johnson, Levy and Curtis, who you’ve been making buddies out of at the plant. We know all about them, too. We know they’re redder than the rose, Marty, redder than the rose. They’re dyed in the wool. That’s why we were puzzled to figure out your angle with them. We don’t think you’re redder than the rose, Marty. As we said before, we think you’re a damn good patriotic American.”

  “That’s what we think,” one said. “That’s why we feel you want to cooperate with us. We feel you’re a patriotic American who’d want to cooperate with us. We know a lot, but we don’t know everything. There’s a lot more than Johnson, Levy and Curtis in that plant who are redder than the rose. There’s a lot more in the Union. By now, Marty, you could probably tag every one of them. And we felt you love this fine country of ours enough to want to cooperate with your legally elected government against elements like that, elements who are plotting to overthrow everything we hold dear by force and violence.”

  The other said, “You’d be surprised, Marty, how many people choose to cooperate with us. A fine class of people, too. The best people, as a matter of fact. You’d be surprised how many people come to us and say frankly, I want to cooperate with you. And we welcome them. They have nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all. We welcome them and guarantee their safety and security. They come as patriotic Americans and we welcome them as such.”

  “The main thing is that they have nothing to be afraid of. Most people hesitate about the F.B.I. They hear all kinds of stories, and they believe all kinds of nonsense. But the truth is that the F.B.I, is your institution, set up to serve you. That’s what we want to get across.”

  Daylight was fading gently and sweetly, with colors that turned the softest violet as they walked past the tax-payers, Holts’s Five, Ten and Twenty-five Cent Store, Mantini’s Shoe Repair Parlor, the First, Original Trueline Barbers, Henterman’s Habadashery and the Clover Celtic Bar and Grill, and just as Anderson had expected, in the open lot on the next block, the kids were playing association football, yelling to each other to throw the ball high, so they could see it against the subdued light left in the sky.

  “So there it is,” the other said, “and that’s the way we’re putting it to you, Marty. Are you going to cooperate? We want you to cooperate with us. And we think your’re a good enough American to do so.”

  “Go to hell,” Anderson said.

  “That doesn’t make sense, Marty. We have been talking to you man to man. The least you can do is talk to us the same way.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “After all,” the other said, “you’re just making a snap decision, Marty. It’s fine for them to build you up to this, and you just tell us to go to hell. Why we could write you down as a commie just for a crack like that, Marty. But we don’t want to, and we don’t think you’re, a commie. That is, we don’t think so right now. We could change our thinking on the subject, because as I said we don’t know everything, but I’m not sure we want to. I’m also not sure you meant what you just said. The, point is, think it over before you say yes or no. This isn’t such a light thing that you can just make a snap judgement.”

  “Or look at it from this point of view, Marty. We came to you and asked you to cooperate as a loyal American. It doesn’t raise your stock as a loyal American to tell us to go to hell. Sure, your commie pals gave you a song and dance about informers. There’s nothing they like better than to weep and whine about informers and stool pigeons, as they call anyone with enough guts to cooperate with his government as a loyal American. But maybe we were wrong in thinking of you as a loyal American. I don’t say we were wrong, but maybe we were wrong.”

  “We could be wrong,” the other said. “We have been wrong before.”

  “Damned wrong.”

  “We could be so wrong that we don’t even have a leg in the truth of it.”

  “The point is, Marty, that if we’re so wrong, it places certain responsibilities on us. That plant you left isn’t just any plant. It doesn’t only turn out tractors—it turns out parts for tanks—tanks, Marty, t-a-n-k-s-period. Tanks that are going to have to stop the red tide one day and Marty, then a lot of other folks ought to know how wrong we are. They ought to know that there are possibly some loopholes in their thinking, if they’ve been thinking about you as a loyal American.”

  “Take the plant manager, Jack Fredericks,” said the other. “He’s pretty damn well concerned about this country of ours. He might just want to know that there’s a man holding down a job in the plant who won’t cooperate with any branch of his government. He might feel damned uneasy about such a man holding down a job.”

  “In fact, he might not want such a man in the plant at all. He might just fire him the hell out.”

  “On the other hand, Marty, you might figure that such a man could find a job somewhere else. But could he—that’s the question. There isn’t a big plant in the city here that hasn’t got a piece of a government contract. It’s a fine thing to be a hero, but what do you do when your kids get hungry?”

  “I don’t think Marty looks at it that way.”

  “Neither do I,” said the other. “I like Marty. I think Marty’s a hundred percent American. That’s the straight goods, Marty, and that’s why we’re asking you to cooperate with us, to do it the American way.”

  “Go to hell and get away from me!” Anderson said.

  A sudden change came over the two young men. Their warmth fell away from them, and they became as cold as the gathering night wind. Their small blue eyes became cold and their pudgy faces set.

  “O.K., Marty.”

  “You want it that way, Marty.”

  And then they walked away from him, looking like brothers, walking like brothers, no difference in the way they were dressed, in height or manner of gait. They walked away from him, and there in front of Anderson was his home, his house, his castle, nine thousand dollars, nine hundred dollars down on the G.I. Bill of Rights, so much a month, until someday it was his, and his kids grown and educated, and he and his wife comfortable in their older years, in the warm, good years that were the gift of a land of freedom and opportunity. There was his house. He walked home almost every evening. He liked to walk home.

  Coca Cola

  THIS AND THAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT COCA COLA, AND many hold that it is more and less than a soft drink; and there are parts of the world where they refer without love to a “Coca Cola civilization.” Be that as it may, I have my own feelings about the matter, which I sometimes recall as my “Arabian adventure.”

  Nor am I in any fashion sold on the romance of Arabia, which I hold as one of the less favored spots on earth. In any case, during the month of June, it’s hotter than hell, which I know for a fact; for hell is the product of gullible imagination and an Arabian summer actually exists. This I know, for I happened to be in Arabia one June during the Second World War, traveling from Africa to the Far East and satisfying my curiosity meanwhile about what was happening on the Arabian peninsula. Perhaps in the winter season, I would have developed the kind of interest in Arabia that others have shown; as it was, a few days of the heat, sand and indescribable poverty satisfied my curiosity, and I turned my attention to getting out of Arabia.

  This was not as easy as it might seem, for apparently nothing in the way of Army Air Transport went directly out of Arabia, but instead to another airstrip. And the handful of miserable GIs at each of these airstrips, living in a perpetual state of intense dehydration, talked not of sex or the war, but of the superior quality, taste and quantity of water at some other airstrip. And in between their rather profound discussions of water, they spent their pay on Coca Cola. It’s amazing how much Coca Cola an American in the Arabian desert can consume.

  Time passed and it became hotter, and when I landed one day on an airstrip in the central part of the peninsula, staggered into the shade, and read o
n the thermometer there that the temperature was one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit, I knew that I had enough of Arabia. I inquired for the next plane out.

  I was told that in the next forty-eight hour period, only one plane would be taking off, and that one a C46, due in this very afternoon and scheduled to take off as soon as it had refueled and loaded cargo. What sort of cargo it would load at this godforsaken place in the center of a glaring, burning white-salt desert, I neither knew nor cared, just as I neither knew nor cared what the future destination of the C46 might be—secure in the knowledge that wherever that destination was, it was superior to the place I was in now.

  There were three hours before the C46 landed, and I spent those three hours dying slowly, drinking rancid yellow water, swallowing salt tablets, and joining this or that officer or enlisted man in a Coca Cola. They all looked at me as the permanent inhabitants of Death Valley—if there are any—must look at tourists in air-conditioned cars, and some of them, as they sat over Coca Cola, wept with envy and self-pity. The only spark of life they evidenced animated them when they boasted about the heat at their station. There was no denying that they had more and fiercer heat than possibly any other place in the world.

  “It’s also hot at Abadan,” I remember remarking, just to make conversation, for Abadan was well known and spoken of wherever there were GIs as the “second hottest place in the world.”

  “Abadan,” they nodded sadly. “It’s never really hot in Abadan. We go to Abadan on leave, and when we tell them how hot it is here, they get angry because they think we’re running down their place.”

  It was that way, and when the plane finally landed, I felt like a doomed man miraculously reprieved. I slowly shuffled to the porch of the mess and waited for the crew of the C46, who were approaching across the blazing concrete airstrip. They were three cheerful, healthy-looking children, with mustaches, blue eyes, and broad smiles.

  “Can you take out a passanger?” I greeted them.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” the pilot said. “That is, if you have papers?”

  “My papers are OK. You have a passenger.”

  “Why, that’s fine,” the pilot said, “and we like passangers. It makes things interesting. It’s very dull flying cargo in the desert. Nothing interesting ever happens. You’re a war correspondent, aren’t you, sir? Well, all sorts of interesting things must happen to you.”

  “Getting out of here will be the most interesting so far,” I nodded.

  “Fine—just fine. It will take us a few hours to load cargo, and then we take off. Where are you bound for, sir?”

  “Wherever you’re bound for,” wondering again what kind of cargo went out of this place. However, I soon learned, and it should have been obvious from the first. There was only one possible kind of cargo that could be shipped out of that forsaken airstrip, only one product that had lavish and extravagant consumer use. A line of sweating, staggering GIs began to load the plane with crates of empty Coca Cola bottles.

  The C46 was a strange, vast, ugly two-motored plane, a huge, whale-like, drop bellied plane, used principally to carry cargo. I had traveled in them many times and had nothing against them except the knowledge that pilots did not like them and vivid memories of the ear-splitting, nerve-wracking crash when the retractible landing gear was lowered. But since all planes were equally uncertain to me, I was able to feel kindly toward this ship from the skies that had come to prevent my body and soul from frying.

  This one, however, had no doors. The C46 in service in that part of the world had large double doors, wide enough to accomodate a jeep or a howitzer, but somewhere along the line this one had dropped the doors. It was a little unorthodox to fly in a plane not too unlike a convertible car, but I was in no mood to complain, and I watched with interest as the little pile of Coca Cola crates within the plane grew. It is remarkable how many Coca Cola bottles you can load into an empty C46, but I found it even more remarkable how many bottles of Coca Cola one airstrip can consume. My interest turned to fascination. Again and again, I was certain that it could not continue, that the mess could disgorge no more Coca Cola and that the C46 could hold no more, but soon I began to realize that the capacity of both was beyond anything I had imagined. For almost three hours, under that blazing sun, a steady, unbroken stream of empty Coca Cola bottles poured into the C46. Hot as it was, I had to watch, and I was gradually overcome by a sense of fate and a wave of fascination as the great-bellied plane filled up with the crates of bottles. Thoughtfully, the crew left a narrow area between the Coca Cola bottles and the wall of the plane; otherwise there would have been no room for the single passenger.

  Finally it was done, and the navigator, the smallest member of the crew, and seemingly no more than eighteen years old under his whispy mustache, came to inform me that they were ready for the takeoff. As we walked out to the plane, I asked him where he wanted me to ride.

  “Why you just make yourself comfortable anywhere,” he answered cheerfully. “We’re awful glad to have you with us, because it’s very exciting meeting someone like yourself.”

  “Anywhere” was a passage of about eighteen inches between the Coca Cola crates and the wall of the plane, so I chose a spot just forward from the gaping doors, spread my raincoat on the floor, and stretched out to await the cool and soothing winds at five thousand feet. From where I lay, I had a pleasant view, not unlike one’s view from a convertible car, of the space where doors were supposed to be, and I watched with interest as the airstrip slid beneath us and as finally we were airborne. In moments, the airstrip was far behind us, but the cooling breeze I had anticipated failed to appear. We had climbed to about five or six hundred feet, and there we were, and it gave one a very uncomfortable feeling. We had passed over the white, salt-like expanse of flat where the airstrip was located, and now we were in a region of rolling sand hills, remarkably high sand hills, for it often seemed that we only cleared the tops of them by inches. Then the navigator left the control room and slid back to me along the wall.

  “Well, sir,” he said cheerfully, “it’s funny, but there seems to be something wrong with the balance.”

  “The what?”

  “The balance. You see, it’s how you load a plane. Now these C46s are marked off for all sorts of army loadings. For example, the marks here on the wall show you just how to load an armored car or a jeep or fifty millimeter guns—all sorts of things that you would be loading with, but of course not Coca Cola.”

  “No, I imagine not Coca Cola,” I repeated.

  “Of course, you couldn’t expect them to think of everything. We just had to use our own judgment loading these bottles, and it’s surprising how heavy they are considering that they are empty. We can’t seem to get any altitude at all, and it’s obvious that there’s something wrong with the balance. So the pilot wondered whether you would crawl back to the tail of the plane with me and that might alter the balance a little, so we could make altitude.”

  I looked at the open doors and then at the sandhills, and then I nodded and asked a foolish question about parachutes.

  “You don’t have one? Well, that’s strange, and it’s against regulations too, but it wouldn’t be much use at this altitude. There should be an indraft at the doors.”

  As we crawled back to the tail, I made a mental note to ask him what had happened to the doors, and whether they purposely flew without them or whether they had left them somewhere because a piece of whatever strange cargo they might have been carrying then had extruded; but I never did, and to this day the mystery of the doors remains unsolved. Anyway, we crawled far, far into the tail, where we crouched in the lee of a rising mountain of Coca Cola crates, but apparently the balance was still off, and craning his neck to see, the navigator admitted that we were making no more altitude than before.

  “Suppose we both go up to the control room now,” he suggested. “It may need weight forward.”

  We edged our way back to the control room, joining the pilot and the co-pilot;
and in spite of the fact that both of them were that type of young men who are apparently incapable of concern about anything, a faint aura of worry was beginning to gather about them. My own feeling was far more than a faint aura.

  “Now isn’t that something,” the pilot said to me.

  “Just can’t make any altitude,” the co-pilot said.

  “It’s the balance,” the navigator said.

  I offered my opinion. “It’s the damned Coca Cola bottles. No plane was ever made that could carry this many Coca Cola bottles.”

  “They are empty, sir,” the pilot said gently.

  “The plane isn’t empty. The plane’s full.”

  “Yes, sir. I meant the Coca Cola bottles are empty. “We did estimate the load as well as we could.”

  “It’s not the load, it’s the balance,” the navigator insisted.

  “The trouble is,” the co-pilot added sadly, “that there is nothing in the C46 manual about Coca Cola bottles. Nothing at all. You just have to guess.”

  “The trouble is,” I put in, “that sooner or later we’re going to run into one of those damned sand mountains.”

  “They’re not mountains, sir, just sandhills.”

  “They look like mountains to me, and if we lose any more altitude, we’re going to hit one.”

  “It does seem worrisome.”

  “It’s going to be more than worrisome if we come down in the desert. It seems to me that we ought to turn around and go back to the airstrip.”

  “We’ve thought of that, sir, but we’ve lost altitude since we went over a ridge back there. I don’t think we could get back to that airstrip.”

  In a way, I was relieved. “Well,” I said, “that does it. There’s only one thing we can do.”

  “Yes, sir?”