Aces & Eights

Compulsive excitement filled Sergeant Charlie Twohig, down to his toes. Ledo, at this end of the Burma Road, was not a scavenger's post with a limited amount of personnel; it was an army metropolis burgeoning even in the darkness with a kind of stateside activity. The muffled sound of a laboring engine crawled out of a nearby valley, sounding as if it were under wraps, promising more engines up the line with the sometimes slow hum of war. From the edge of night he heard the tom-tom of a hammer beating on sheet metal. Night guards, bent on their watches and patrols, loomed as hulking giants working thick shadows. The heat, floating down out of another valley, at first did not seem to bother Charlie Twohig. Noise and activity meant people and people meant money and money meant gambling. The long haul from North Africa had been worth the trouble; the pigeons, his resolute mind said, were ready for the taking.

Into his bunk he crawled and felt a slight but not new discomfort. His throat was dry and he needed a drink and an itching sensation began to crawl on his hands with the purchase of a seven-day itch. His heart, he swore, was pumping faster than ever and he convinced himself it was more of the excitement. A strange heat was subtilely making way in his body.

Private Jake Breda twisted in the bunk above him. Twohig wanted to talk. "Hey, Jake, you awake?"

"Yuh, Sarge."

"You ever been really excited, Jake? I mean so bad you got sick from it."

"Sure, when I got married."

"Right at the altar?"

"Hell, no, Sarge. When I closed the door behind me at the motel. What have you got to be so excited about?"

"I'm in a streak, Jake. I never felt this way in my life. It ain't I won so much, but I haven't lost since that blackjack game in Ceylon."

"What's it feel like? I never felt really different when I was winning. Never parleyed much to begin with, so can't tell by me."

"Jake, I swear my hands are sweating for a deck of cards right now. Hell, I wished it was morning. I wish it was tomorrow already. I swear I'm going to win big, so big it's burning a hole right through me."

Breda dropped a hand down the side of the bunk. "Give me a smoke, will you, Sarge." Twohig was for the moment a suddenly accessible sergeant.

"Sure, Jake, keep the deck. God, I'm burning with excitement. I wish I didn't have to sleep at all. Tomorrow I'm going to line me up some real good ones. Blackjack, that's what it's going to be. Black jack. I can't lose. I can't lose. Tomorrow, all day, it'll be twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one. I'm in the groove."

He fell asleep dreaming of getting hit and hit and hit with aces and deuces and treys and coming up twenty-one every time out of the gate. He did not see a king or queen all night. Twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one.

Parts of the journey that brought him here to Ledo, at the end of the world in upheaval, clamor everywhere, came across his memory with unusual clarity, with unusual color. He didn't think much about Ohio, and only knew the new uneasiness in him as irregular. Odds be damned!

***
Weeks earlier they had been at sea. Sergeant Charlie Twohig, long, lean and dark, with a mysterious ailment, as yet unknown to him, threatening to work its way into his consciousness, leaned against a metal bulkhead of a lead LST and felt the heat sinking into his back, blacksmith's iron if anything. The perspiration falling off his brow he had long been aware of and continually tried to dismiss its presence by constantly shuffling a deck of cards, a veritable extension of his hands...fingers, hands, cards, money, they were partners forever.

Behind him where he gazed the uncoupled train of LSTs moved with a cumbersome plodding out of the Suez Canal and into the searing brightness of the Red Sea. The indignant, hot and worried cargo was a company of Graves Registration men that, already in the first flush of dawn, felt the slamming of solar heat, the huge and imponderable hammer of it. To a man they had heard and believed the waters before them boiled under an hour of sun. There was much evidence about them: with explosive quickness of a flare the sun had popped up over Asia and dark welts were maps on their fatigues. It was impossible to sit still and let sweat crawl a horde of ants over the skin, yet it was just as difficult to move about on the boats or find a piece of shade. And the worst was yet to come. It was like a sore throbbing elsewhere.

Behind them the flat oblique shadows of the LSTs lay on the waters of the Red Sea; ahead of them was half the company's final target, India and Burma and the dead. The other two platoons, under Captain Redmond, were to continue on to China. At both ends of the Burma Road the dead needed to be buried.

Corporal Tally Biggs sat beside Charlie Twohig and eyed the deck of cards. He said, his head at a condescending angle, "You know, Twig, if I never saw you with a deck of cards I'd of thought you were naked." Biggs pronounced naked as if it were nekid, and he had the ungracious habit of speaking with little lip movement, watching guard perhaps on any commitment. An inconsistent green in his eyes likewise operated under a controlled guise. Biggs was not easy to like, and found few fast friends, if any at all, in the ranks of comrades.