Ghost Traps

Commander of the Buffaloes

Commander of the Buffaloes The 104th Transportation Company was moved in May of 1942 from the West Coast to a tiny town in Missouri about halfway between Hannibal and St. Louis. Though the Army supplied no reasons, the troops, all black, assumed the recent attack on Pearl Harborhad alerted someone that coastal installations might be imperiled by Japaneseair raid, if not also by Nazi submarine. The tanks were moved byrail, but the trucks, most of them, were driven in a near fiasco of lost drivers, a green caravan by day, a file of cat's-eye headlights by night, rumbling across the southwestern deserts until it reached that ancient artery of transportation, the Mississippi River. And thus the Army, in its wisdom, placed the 104th Buffaloes at the mercy of Ridgevale. Sam Bertram, company clerk of the Buffaloes, as the 104th was called, was still grieving about the move when the white sheriff showed up in the day room and asked, or rather demanded , to speak to Captain Arnold. Sam and his desk interposed between the impatient sheriff and his commanding officer , and Sam, lethargic still with grief at having moved from the delights of Los Angeles to this cracker town in Nowhere, Missouri—Ridgevale, for God's sake—shifted a few unpacked boxes around before he took up the sheriff's "request" in earnest. "Did you hear me, boy?" Commander of the Buffaloes 33 "I heard you," Sam said. "Please state the nature of your business with the Captain." "I'm sort of a welcoming committee." The sheriff exuded a quick, self-satisfied chuckle, then regarded Sam with compelling insolence. "Name, sir?" "Keets. Bill Keets." Sam glanced awaynow, out of habit, and not having anyparticular desire to let the sheriff ruffle him. He stepped around the partition behind him and into the Captain's lair. "A Sheriff Keets is out front, sir. He wants to talk to you." Arnold droppedhis feet from the desk and carefully placed a cigar in the ashtray on the windowsill. The window looked out across a bald field to a row of corrugatedsteel sheds where the company's trucks were stored and being repaired and readied for shipment into combat. Sam couldn't look out, much less walk out into the new base without feeling a shock of hurt. Things had been so fine in L.A.,just so, so fine. "Send him in, I guess." Arnold folded his blue-white hands on the desk and gave Sam a look of unconscious despair, probably not so much for the recent move as for his hangover. Captain had a lot of problems, only white man on the post, "and not your basic Whiz Kid," as Sam's ally, Mo Henderson, had put it. Troop morale had bottomed out, too, and a speech the Captain had given that morning to reassure the men the move had been a tactical necessity crucial to the war effort only deepened the malaise. Everyone's misery being what it was, Sam didn't feel sorry for the Captain at all. He didn't feel much of anything for Arnold, who apparentlyrepaid the compliment as long as Sam did his work and kept things running smoothly. "Captain will see you, Sheriff." Sam didn't look at the man 34 Ghost Traps and the sheriff said nothing as he ambled, butt-heavy with nightstick and pistol, into the Captain's office. No matter how much work was staring him in the face at the moment, Sam knew very well he could not miss the conversation that was about to transpire in Arnold's office and he positioned himself just outside the door with clipboard in hand. Mo had observed long ago that a man with a clipboard, even a black man, could go anywhere in the Army without being questioned, and in this case the clipboard contained a report that Arnold would eventually need to sign. Protected thus with official business at the ready, Sam put his ear to the door. Ridgevale, he heard Sheriff Keets explain, had become a little anxious about the Buffaloes, the law of the region being what it was. His sworn duty being to uphold that law, Keets had come to inquire whether the Army could, therefore, provide transportation for soldiers returning from leave at night, inasmuch as the bus station was to the east of Ridgevale and the base to the west? Arnold received...