Smiley’s Tavern

By David Norling

David Norling is this month’s winner of $547.50 for a story on listening and understanding what we hear.

Bio: David Norling has published a number of stories in literary magazines, and is currently working on a novel. He lives outside Seattle, Washington, where much of “Smiley’s Tavern” is set.

Without further ado, “Smiley’s Tavern” by David Norling.

Will Smiley lost his right arm on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The date, at least, was certain. The actual circumstances of the event, however, tended to change depending on who was around to hear the story. The regulars at Smiley’s Tavern had heard just about all of them—a direct hit on his Higgins boat on Omaha Beach, shrapnel on Utah, friendly fire from a terrified private while storming gun emplacements on the bluffs above—but none of them could say with any assurance which was the true story. And that was just how Will Smiley liked it.

“You’re there to listen and pour,” Smiley’s father had told him once. “The more you listen, the more you pour. Listen to their stories. Nod and smile. And if they want you to tell a story, well, then tell them a story about themselves they want to be true.” Smiley Sr., Smilin’ Bill Smiley, always had the seed of a wink in his left eye, not quite a twitch but something more than an arched eyebrow, and it was difficult not to read more into what he said than he’d intended. And so young Will Smiley pondered this, never quite sure what he meant. It sometimes seemed to Will that he had lived his whole life in the shadow of his father’s wink.

Smilin’ Bill had founded the tavern in south Seattle in the first wave of post-prohibition euphoria. He nursed it through the Great Depression, and after Pearl Harbor, found that it was ideally located just down the street from the burgeoning Boeing aircraft factory. Minutes after shift change at the plant, customers would be standing three deep at the bar, and the dozen tables at the back would be commandeered for the rest of the evening. Will Smiley loved the place then. He loved the feel of the old mahogany bar with its pitted surface and its slick brass rails, the dark aroma of tobacco and beer; he loved the filigreed mirror behind the shelves of bottles that seemed to double the size of the crowd and drown it in a glittering light. It was a raucous world of hard-drinking men and what his mother called “forward” women, and they were all loud and boisterous and wonder-fully alive.

Will was tall, lanky and blond just like his father, and he was sometimes mistaken for Smilin’ Bill by customers who’d gotten a little too deep into their pints. Will was always pleased when this happened. He couldn’t imagine a better life than running the tavern just like his old man, holding court behind the bar while the whole wide world walked in through the front door and pulled up a stool. He would help stocking the shelves or rolling in kegs of beer, and occasionally on a slow night, although he was underage, Smilin’ Bill would even let him serve while he himself joined a card game in the back. But all this changed when Will was drafted and shipped over to England, and when he returned with just the one arm to sit out the end of the war, he found he had all the time in the world to make up stories he imagined people might want to hear.

Will’s wife Irene and his friends knew the real story about how he’d lost his arm. It wasn’t really a secret. It was more like an embarrassing and somewhat off-color family anecdote; it was probably best to keep close.

Will had been in Southampton for nearly six months, training, drilling, and positioning ordnance for the great invasion everyone knew was coming. Finally, on the night of June 5, word went out that the following morning, weather permitting, they would cross the Channel. Will lay on his bunk after lights out, listening to the murmurs of the men around him, the mixture of bravado and fear and relief that the wait was finally over, and he suddenly found himself weeping silently into his pillow. He kept replaying the scenes of his life—growing up in and around Smiley’s Tavern under the watchful wink of his father, school and baseball and shooting pool and pitching pennies, his first kiss and the ones that followed and the last, passionate, bruising kiss from Irene on the train platform before shipping out to Basic—and these scenes kept ending in a sudden, terrible blackness. The story, his story, just ended. And he understood why. He was utterly certain that this was the last night of his life, that he would be killed the moment he set foot on the beach in France.

After a while, he sat up. What was he doing in his bunk? If he was going to die tomorrow, he decided, by god he would spend his last night on earth getting gloriously, transcendently drunk and making love with a beautiful woman. He had gotten gloriously, transcendently drunk a few times already but had never once made love to a woman, beautiful or otherwise. Well, he reflected, he had finally run out of time. Or almost.

He waited a little longer until the murmurs of his comrades slowly faded into silence, then he grabbed his uniform and shoes and slipped out to the latrine. Unnoticed there, he dressed quickly and made his way around the back of the mess hall, through the field of trashcans and empty crates and mounds of rotting food scraps, and finally into a thicket he and his friends had discovered that offered a sheltered path into a neighborhood he knew well, and that hosted several pubs.

Three hours later, Will was drinking heartily, but not in a warm pub with his arm around the waist of a buxom barmaid. Military Police were everywhere. They were patrolling the streets, loitering outside all the pubs, and checking the papers of anyone who looked even vaguely like they belonged in uniform. But Will was friendly with the owner of a small pub on a little side lane—they’d swapped stories about how pints were properly pulled on their respective sides of the Atlantic—and so the owner had let him into his back storeroom. There he found himself sitting among the ale barrels and whisky cases in the company of two other young, terrified GIs drinking their last meal together. One was a slim Italian who, after whispering his name—Rizzo, Will thought he heard, but wasn’t sure—sat weeping in the corner and kissing the St. Christopher that hung around his neck on a thin silver chain. The other was a young PFC from New Jersey, Gus Wilburton, who’d come to a similar conclusion about this being his own last night on earth. It turned out he also had the same ambitions as regards how to spend it, and he and Will had already achieved the first of these: they were transcendently drunk.

“‘twas just like this the night before Gallipoli,” the pub owner said, stepping back into the storeroom to check on them. He ran his hands up and down his woolen vest, and his great walrus mustache twitched with optimism and empathy. “We were all dead men too, and knew it, but somehow most of us made it through. Have another pint,”—and he was drawing them himself with an expert hand on a special cask in the corner—”and go and do your duty. When you get back, lads, this lovely oaken lass will be waiting for you.”

“Not the kind of lass I’m thinking of,” Gus remarked when the owner had left.

“A little too short and round,” Will agreed.

“And not nearly as soft as I’d like, either.”

They both looked at each other and then stood up.

“What do you say, buddy?” Gus said to the weeping Italian in the corner. “Wanna come with us to find some amore?” He sang the last word in what Will supposed was a sufficiently Italian accent, but the kid in the corner either didn’t hear or didn’t care, so the two of them set off alone.

The streets were relatively quiet, most of the soldiers being confined to barracks, but they still ducked behind bushes or dodged into alleys whenever a car passed by. Gus had heard rumors of a brothel somewhere near the waterfront, and while Will had not even wanted to consider this option for his first—and last!—carnal experience, he was sufficiently drunk to play along, at least for the moment. And indeed, as they neared the shipyards and made their way along a windy backstreet, they heard the seductive click of high heels on the pavement ahead of them. They followed a group of four women in long overcoats at a distance. When they turned to enter a large, three-story house with light seeping through curtains of many of the windows, Gus whistled.

“No…” Will started to say, just as one of the women turned to look at them approaching.

“Sweetheart,” Gus said, pulling off his cap. With his other hand, he pulled out of an inside pocket a bottle of whiskey.

“Oh go on, you,” she said, and Will could see in the opening of her coat not the colorful dress of what his British fellow soldiers called a tart, but the crisp white of a nurse’s uniform. One of the other women said something at which they all laughed, then they disappeared into the house.

“Nurses,” Will said. “Not…”

“Maybe,” Gus said with a wide, lascivious grin, “they’re just dressed up like nurses!”

“Or maybe they’re, you know, really nurses,” Will said. “And hey, where did you get that bottle, anyway?”

“Same place I got this one,” Gus said, pulling out a second bottle from his other inside pocket.

“Did you take that from the pub?” Will asked. “Aw, shouldn’t’a done that. The old man was really nice to us. That’s no way to treat…”

“When we get back—if we get back—we’ll pay for it,” Gus said. “And if we don’t…”

There was a small park across the street with a bench under the shade of an old elm tree, and they sat there for a time, passing one of the bottles back and forth.

“Maybe some other nurses will come by,” Gus suggested, and there was now a tinge of sadness in his tone, as if the evening, like some glorious party, had finally begun to wind down and there would now be nothing left but a dismal walk back to the fate awaiting them. But it was not other nurses walking up that made them sit forward, but the door across the street opening and two of the nurses slipping quickly out and glancing up and down the street.

“Over here,” Gus said softly, standing up and stepping out of the shadow of the elm. The nurses ran quickly across the street and sat down breathlessly on the bench beside Will.

“Can’t stay but a minute,” one of them said, a petite blonde with bobbed hair and dark red lipstick on her tiny mouth. Gus sat down beside her and passed the bottle.

“Oh, you’re such a gentleman,” she said, taking a long sip and passing the bottle to her friend. The other nurse, dark-haired, taller and a bit stern-looking it seemed to Will, took the bottle and had a sip, then passed it to him.

Twenty minutes later, with most of the first bottle gone, they had learned little more about the nurses than their names, Eleanor and Carol, and that they liked whiskey, which seemed to be enough for Gus. He’d sat with his arm on the bench back, and it gradually found its way onto the blonde nurse’s shoulder. She not only didn’t take it away, she snuggled into him. When Gus took the final swig of the bottle, he stood, took his nurse’s hand without a word, and they disappeared deeper into the park.

Will attempted to put his arm around “his” nurse’s shoulder, but she said, “Don’t even think about it. Carol’s the wild one, not me.” Then after a moment of awkward silence, she asked, “Are you going over?”

Will nodded.

“It’s soon, isn’t it?” she said. “I know you can’t tell me, but it’s soon, right?”

Again, Will nodded.

“My brother’s in the RAF. A paratrooper. He never rings me up, but he did this afternoon. I asked him if he was going over soon and he didn’t answer, but I could tell he was maybe trying to say goodbye.”

Will had spent so long thinking about crossing the Channel by ship, storming the beach against a hail of bullets, that it hadn’t really occurred to him that others would be falling from the sky. He closed his eyes and felt his stomach lurch. Maybe it was the whiskey finally catching up with him, but he felt his world spinning, no solid earth beneath him. He imagined a patchwork of fields and hedgerows rising below him as he descended through the clouds and flak, desperate at the slow pull of gravity, and when he opened his eyes, he saw Eleanor weeping silently beside him. Now he did put his arm around her shoulder and drew her to him, and she shuddered and leaned into him and wet his neck with her tears. For a long time they didn’t speak, and then finally she began to tell him about her brother—a wild boy, a hot head as she described him, always in front, reckless, and she knew he’d be the first to jump, the first to...

“He won’t make it back,” she said. “I know it.”

She dried her eyes with the sleeve of her coat and stood up. Then she suddenly leaned down and kissed Will lightly on the cheek. “But you’re going to be OK. I have a sense about these things. You’ll keep your head down and you’ll make it through all right.” And then she called out, “Carol, Carol, let’s be off!”

For a minute or so there was no sound, nothing but the wind in the tree above them, and then Carol came running, laughing and smoothing her skirt. They crossed the road and were walking up the steps of the house when Gus plopped down on the bench beside him. He gave out a loud, satisfied sigh and slapped Will on the knee.

“Well, d’you get lucky, too?”

Will thought about it for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, I got lucky, too.”

On towards 2:00 AM—they’d finished most of the second bottle on their own after the nurses had gone back in—they staggered back through the perimeter, hoping to slip unnoticed into their bunks and enjoy a couple hours of sleep before being mustered to storm the beaches of Normandy. But instead, they found the base lit up like a stage set. Trucks, jeeps and forklifts swarmed the compound. Whistles, shouts, horns, the din of engines filled the night. Companies of soldiers were carrying their rifles and assembling at checkpoints. Will and Gus staggered drunkenly in the shadows along the back of their barracks, hoping to slip in unnoticed, but they heard someone suddenly call out, “You!”

They froze.

“You two, get over here and give us a hand with this.”

They turned and saw a burly, bull-necked sergeant standing beside a truck that had tipped onto its side, spilling its cargo of ammunition crates and, frighteningly, two five-hundred-pound bombs. When Will and Gus came up, they saw two other GIs attempting to slip a winch harness under one of the big bombs that was tilted precariously against the side of the truck bed.

“Don’t worry,” the sergeant said, “they ain’t fused.” Then he laughed and added, “Least I hope they ain’t, or it’s gonna be a real short war for all of us!”

One of the GIs lying on his back beside the bomb glared up at the sergeant, opened his mouth, but then closed it again and said nothing.

“You there, Stretch,” the sergeant said, pointing at Will. “You got the longest arms. Slide on under this bad boy and see if you can get the harness rigged right under the fins. And you there,”—he pointed at Gus—“get on over to that crank and get ready to hoist her level.”

Will glanced at Gus and felt the world spinning around him. He’d badly wanted to lie down, but sure as hell not under a five-hundred-pound bomb. Gus gave him a worried look, then stepped over to the winch crank while Will reluctantly got down on his back and slid under the bomb. The GI on the other side fed him the winch harness and Will, extending his long arms, just managed to get the straps positioned under the bomb’s fin.

“All right,” the sergeant bellowed above them, “you there, crank it up!”

The bomb shifted and slowly lifted, but as Will started to slide back from underneath it the bomb seemed to swivel and follow him.

“Turn it,” the sergeant bellowed, “and flick that lever…no, goddamn it, not that…”

When Will woke up two days later, he found himself looking up into the face of an angel. Her blue eyes shown with love and compassion, her cherub cheeks were rosy and pure, and when she smiled a tiny mole at the side of her mouth… Wait a minute, he thought, angels don’t have moles. He suddenly became aware of a crushing pain in his head, and the light, a moment ago so rich and luxuriant, now was an assault on his eyes. The pain radiated down his neck and onto his right shoulder, where it seemed to gather itself and burst into flame. The angel said something to him, stroked his cheek, and then moved on to the bed beside him. There he saw a boy—surely it was just a boy—with the stump of a leg hoisted in a cradle above the white sheets, and beyond him, row after row, as if reflections in some horrible funhouse mirror, the broken, the maimed, the limbless, the dying. For this was, he would learn later, the first wave of casualties from Omaha beach. And he was among them. He rolled his head to the right and saw there, where his right arm should have been, just a stump of bloody bandages.

And, beside it, a Purple Heart pinned to his pillowcase.

Will spent two weeks in the hospital. In the end, the concussion he’d sustained when the bomb fell on top of him proved more challenging than his crushed arm. He had blinding headaches, vertigo and vision problems that caused the doctors great concern, but these gradually gave way to a kind of peaceful lethargy and amazement that he’d somehow come through. The pain at his shoulder, where the arm had been amputated, gradually subsided into a dull, rhythmic throbbing, almost like an aching beacon keeping time with the beating of his heart. The fact of his lost arm, the horrific emptiness on that side of his body, was so inconceivable that he wasn’t able to wrap his head around it, but so too was the simple wonder of his still being alive. He was alive!

The boy in the bed beside him, the one who’d lost his leg, was just eighteen. His name was Leroy or Leon, Will was never quite sure which. He was from a small town in Tennessee, and spoke with such a thick Appalachian accent that it was at first difficult for Will to understand him. On the first day Will began to stir in his bed, after the angel with the mole had changed the bandage on his shoulder and moved on to another soldier across the room, Will heard him ask:

“What git that arm a yourn?”

Arm of yarn? Will thought. His head had begun throb-bing again, and these meaningless words blowing around in his head made him feel dizzy. But the words gradually congealed into a question he thought he understood, and he replied weakly, “A bomb.”

“Whud kinna bomb?”

“A heavy one.”

Leroy or Leon was silent for a while, as if he were trying to calculate just how much a bomb would need to weigh to rip off a man’s arm. Then a new train of thought seemed to occur to him.

 “You right-hended?” he asked.

“Not anymore.”

“You gonna git you a hook?”

A hook, Will thought. Good god! He finally closed his eyes and feigned sleep until the questions ceased. But over the next few days, as the symptoms of his concussion slowly receded, he wound up talking with the boy a bit more. He learned from him that the day after the D-Day landings, when the ward was full of casualties, mostly from Omaha Beach, Brigadier General Ames came through with a box of Purple Hearts, personally presenting them to soldiers who were awake, and for others who weren’t, like Will, simply pinning them to their pillowcases. Will came to understand that he’d somehow, in the chaos of those first days after the invasion, been swept up in the tide of wounded men, and was now seen to be just another one of them.

And that understanding troubled him. He lay awake at night, listening to the coughing, the sighing, the stirring and soft moans of the suffering men, and he knew he was not like them. He still felt a curious relief and wonder that he was alive, but it was tainted with uncertainty and anxiety, with a sense of being a fraud. He waited day after day for the bureaucratic mistake to be discovered, to be found out, waited to hear what was to become of him—dishonorable discharge? Court martial? Firing squad? no, not that, he supposed—but no one seemed to know, or care, who he was or how he’d wound up there. Everyone he knew in the army, his whole unit, had crossed the Channel and were busy establishing beachheads, pushing the Jerrys back. Fighting. Dying. 

Finally, the young doctor who checked on him for two minutes every day appeared one morning with a sergeant he’d never seen before, a short, stout man with a ruddy complexion and calm, kindly eyes. The doctor signed a couple of forms, and the sergeant took Will back to an office in a nearly empty barrack. Will sat on a bench while the sergeant typed forms for about twenty minutes, stopping a few times to look up at the transom windows with a pensive expression on his face before he continued. Will sat there listening to the tippy-tap of the keys, and added typing to the growing list of things he would never be able to do again. The list had gotten so long he found himself tearing up at the enormity of it. When the sergeant was finished, he pulled the form from the typewriter, tore off the carbons and gave Will copies.

“They can’t court martial someone who just got a Purple Heart and lost an arm fighting for his country.” He paused. “Well, fighting for his country is a bit of a stretch, I suppose. The details in the casualty report and discharge papers are…well, I guess you could say they’re a bit vague and creative.” Then he gave Will a long, level look. “I’d keep them that way if I were you.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said. “Thank you, sir.”

“We’ll get you on a transport ship heading stateside next week. Meantime you can bunk down here.” He nodded toward an open door, through which Will could see rows of empty bunks; apparently this unit had already crossed the Channel as well.

The sergeant held out his right hand for Will to shake, realized it was Will’s empty side now, and so just patted him on his good shoulder.

“On behalf of a grateful nation…” he began, a speech he was apparently expected to recite, but then he just laughed and shrugged. “Jesus, what a way to get your ticket home. Wish I’d thought of it myself.”

“It just fell on you?” Smilin’ Bill asked.

Will nodded. They were sitting at the Formica table in their kitchen on his first morning back. Will’s mother had prepared a huge breakfast, all his favorites—bacon and eggs, flapjacks, cinnamon rolls, fruit custard—and now sat with a fixed and frightened smile on her face. She would glance at him occasionally, never quite letting her eyes fall on his pinned-up sleeve, then her eyes would dart around the kitchen as if the missing part of her only child might have been just misplaced somewhere.

“And it didn’t go off or nothin’, this bomb? Just fell on top of you?”

Will nodded again. He’d told them the whole story, minus the nurses and with the beer and whisky toned down somewhat, but it was in the main all true. Despite the kind sergeant’s advice, Will could never lie to his parents. But could he—hadn’t he already?—lie about what had happened? On the troop ship back across the North Atlantic, nearly empty save for a few hundred wounded soldiers and a deck full of empty cargo containers, he’d kept his silence like most of the men. They spent their days out in the open air, those who were ambulatory anyway, reading or playing cards or dozing in the sunshine. But once a young corporal, missing his left arm at the elbow and with a nasty, reddish, still somewhat bloody scar that streaked across the side of his face and disappeared where the upper half of his ear used to be, this corporal had nodded at Will’s stub of a shoulder and said, “Omaha?” Will had hesitated for a moment, feeling much sorrier for the corporal than he was feeling for himself, knowing this man would carry that scar on his face for the rest of his life. Not wanting to tell his own absurd and trivial story, Will had just nodded weakly, at which the other man muttered, “Fucking Omaha” and turned back to gaze out at the flat blue ocean. So was that a lie? Will wondered. Can you really lie without uttering a single word? Yes, he supposed you could.