The Pledge Read Online Free Page A

more or less reliable preventive against malaria; and this kid, New York from his speech, Italian from the look of him and the cross he wore around his neck, was talking about a Southern GI who wouldn’t take Atabrine. “He couldn’t stand the color. The dumb bastard claimed it made him colored.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œMalaria happened.”
    Hal Legerman said, “We are without question the worst bunch of racist bastards that ever infested this planet.”
    â€œColonel Hallway says it’s toilets, all toilets.”
    â€œHallway is a total cretin.”
    â€œWho’s Hallway?” Bruce asked Legerman.
    â€œHe’s famous here. He’s chief of orientation in this area and he gave a lecture about toilets. He says the world is divided into two groups, those who sit on toilets and those who whack it off the back and piss on the grass. That’s the colored part of the world. No toilets, which means they haven’t made what Hallway calls the final step into the human family.”
    â€œThe fucken moron sent a mimeo of it to the New York Times,” someone said. “Then he’d be in the PX every day to see if they printed it. He ordered that a paper be saved for him every day, and it got around and we’d manage to steal his paper. He tried to have the PX sarge court-martialed. Imagine, the PX sarge, the most important man in this shithead army.”
    Bruce listened to them. It was a forum of sorts. Men came and went, all enlisted men, no officers, an astonishing cross section, college men, men barely literate, men who sat and listened and never said a word and others who held the floor, egocentrics, easygoing, angry, every shade of mood, with a crazy assortment of ideas that ranged from the depopulation of Japan and Germany to mutiny in the enormous CBI Army, which for the most part did nothing but occupy the Indian subcontinent. When midnight came, Bruce rose reluctantly, fascinated by the conversation at this round corner table of what was called the Jewish restaurant.
    â€œWe can’t keep the driver waiting,” Legerman told him. “That guy has a short fuse.”
    â€œYou talking about Johnson?” someone asked. “Johnson’s jeep?”
    There were three applicants for rides on the jeep. Legerman, meanwhile, had changed a dollar into pice, the bottom end of the local coinage, loading his pockets with the tiny coins. “I always keep a pocketful. With ten beggars per block, you bankrupt yourself or deal in pice.”
    â€œFuck it,” a voice said. “You can’t deal with a million beggars.”
    â€œYou can try,” Legerman said. “It helps work off the guilt.”
    The city was asleep now, the moon lower, the streets darker. Johnson drove through dark passages, where Bruce saw very little. “He got antennas,” someone said.
    â€œThe army runs a kind of bus service, trucks with boards for seats. They close up at midnight.”
    A figure stood in the road, waving his arms. Johnson jammed on his brakes, and another GI climbed into the jeep.
    â€œLast one,” Johnson said. “This is no half-track, and I don’t stop for no fucken general.”
    â€œCan you believe it?” the rescued GI said. “Koorum Street. I told the fucken driver Koorum Street. I know a nurse quartered there. So he drops me at Goochum Street. Do you believe that. Where the hell is Goochum Street?”
    â€œWhere I picked you up,” Johnson said.
    â€œIt happened to me once,” Legerman said. “Lost in Calcutta at night. That has to be the scariest kind of thing you ever go up against.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œWalked all night.”
    Walked all night, Bruce thought, in this warren of six, eight, nine million people. Who knew? They lay on almost every street the jeep drove through, single men, single women, children, clusters of families, some awake, some asleep. How could