“Why aren’t you President?” the girl asked. “You could be an excellent president.”
“Me President? I served in the Montana National Guard when I was sixteen. But I never wore a bow tie in my life and I am not, nor ever have been, an unsuccessful haberdasher. I have none of the qualifications for the Presidency. I couldn’t even head the opposition even though I don’t have to sit on telephone books to have my picture taken. Nor am a no-fight general. Hell, I never even was at SHAEF. I couldn’t even be an elder statesman. I’m not old enough. Now we are governed in some way, by the dregs. We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box.”
“I don’t understand it because my American is so incomplete. But it sounds awful. But don’t be angry about it. Let me be angry for you.”
“Do you know what an unsuccessful haberdasher is?”
“No.”
“It is not discreditable. There are many of them in our country. There is at least one in every town. No, Daughter, I am only a fighting soldier and that is the lowest thing on earth. In that you run for Arlington, if they return the body. The family has a choice.”
“Is Arlington nice?”
“I don’t know,” the Colonel said. “I was never buried there.”
“Where would you like to be buried?”
“Up in the hills,” he said, making a quick decision. “On any part of the high ground where we beat them.”
“I suppose you should be buried on the Grappa.”
“On the dead angle of any shell-pocked slope if they would graze cattle over me in the summer time.”
“Do they have cattle there?”
“Sure. They always have cattle where there is good grass in the summer, and the girls of the highest houses, the strong built ones, the houses and the girls, that resist the snow in winter, trap foxes in the fall after they bring the cattle down. They feed from pole-stacked hay.”
“And you don’t want Arlington or Père Lachaise or what we have here?”
“Your miserable boneyard.”
“I know it is the most unworthy thing about the town. The city rather. I learned to call cities towns from you. But I will see that you go where you wish to go and I will go with you if you like.”
“I would not like. That is the one thing we do alone. Like going to the bathroom.”
“Please do not be rough.”
“I meant that I would love to have you with me. But it is very egotistical and an ugly process.”
He stopped, and thought truly, but off-key, and said, “No. You get married and have five sons and call them all Richard.”
“The lion-hearted,” the girl said, accepting the situation without even a glance, and playing what there was she held as you put down all the cards, having counted exactly.
“The crap-hearted,” the Colonel said. “The unjust bitter criticizer who speaks badly of everyone.”
“Please don’t be rough in talking,” the girl said. “And remember you speak worst of all about yourself. But hold me as close as we can and let’s think about nothing.”
He held her as close as he could and he tried to think about nothing.
CHAPTER XXX
THE Colonel and the girl lay quietly on the bed and the Colonel tried to think of nothing; as he had thought of nothing so many times in so many places. But it was no good now. It would not work any more because it was too late.
They were not Othello and Desdemona, thank God, although it was the same town and the girl was certainly better looking than the Shakespearean character, and the Colonel had fought as many, or more times than the garrulous Moor.
They are excellent soldiers, he thought. The damned Moors. But how many of them have we killed in my time? I think we killed more than a generation if you count the final Moroccan campaign against Abdel Krim. And each one you have to kill separately. Nobody ever killed them in mass, as we killed Krauts before they discovered Einheit.