Gus didn’t. He looked at the other newcomers, seven in all, in the back seats of the van. They didn’t either.
The driver explained: “None of them, see, want to stay in Milk River. Uh-uh. They figure they hook up with some dumb-ass flyboy, they can move the fuck out when the dumb-ass flyboy move the fuck out.” The driver adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could see his passengers. “Knock one up, you buyin her ticket out. She own your lame ass. You do her, you best keep your unit tarped.”
The airmen looked at each other. Gus said, “Huh?”
The driver shook his head and laughed.
They crossed a viaduct that passed over the railroad tracks and river, then headed north on graveled washboard.
“Welcome to the Big Muthafucken Empty,” the driver said. “Bible say God made the world outa nothin. Up here the nothin still show through.” Gus looked out at the vast prairie. “Maybe you be from a actual city. Chicago? New York? Frisco? You got to go apeshit after a time. Oh yeah! The Big Empty turn loose snakes in your head you didn’t know you had!”
“How so?” Gus ventured.
The driver’s generous laugh rumbled in his chest. He adjusted the rearview mirror, aiming it at Gus. “How so?” he said. “When it happen, airman, you fucken know how so. Listen up, Milk River be honeycombed underneath the sidewalks with opium dens and bordellos from the Wild West days. Your head be like that—honeycombed, but since you be youngbloods, you don’t know it yet. You see what I’m sayin?”
“No,” the new airmen said in unison.
“The Chinamens what laid the railroad? They had to take they poontang and opium underground cuz of snakes the Big Empty turn loose in they heads. You can’t be havin Chinamens go apeshit in the streets of the wild muthafucken west. Uh-uh. This road we on? Called Crazy Horse Highway. You ever get on a crazy horse? You don’t take it for a ride. It take you.”
The van skated on loose gravel. Gus felt the yaw and pitch as the tires sprayed the small stones into the undercarriage. The driver, still using only two fingers to steer the van, kept the speed below fifty. The trip seemed to have no end. Then, in the distance, Gus saw the white spheres of the radar domes.
“That be your home for the next few years,” the driver said. “Only one airman hung himself since I been here. Hung his sorry ass from a showerhead. Used a ten-amp jump cable.”
“How long have you been here, Sarge?” Gus asked.
“Seven months, goin on seven years.”
The newcomers sat upright in their seats. They stared at the mushroom-like domes on the horizon.
“It still twenty miles away,” the driver said. “What looks close, aint. You think you almost there but you got a long stretch to go. That’s how it be in the Big Empty.”
The driver was quiet for a while, then started singing the R&B hit “My Baby Loves Western Movies” in a wheezing mirthful baritone.
3
It took a while for Flora and FDR to find Gus’s duty station. They were disappointed and hurt that Gus had not been forthcoming. They hired a Biloxi private detective to find out exactly where he’d been sent. They could have asked the air force directly but they didn’t know where to begin such an inquiry. Easier to hire someone who did.
In two hours of phone calls the detective found out where Gus was stationed. He’d called every air force installation in Montana, talked to the personnel officers, told them that he was a credit manager from a Biloxi auto dealership and that Airman Gus Reppo had run out on his car payments. The air force didn’t like to harbor deadbeats. A personnel officer at Malmstrom gave up Gus’s duty assignment to the detective: The 999th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, on the Canadian border, north of Milk River, Montana.
FDR rented a house in Milk River. It was a two-story turn-of-the-century “Plains Cottage” with ornamented gables. It had a wide bay window on the lower level that looked out on the Milk, the grazing fields north of the river, and the limitless horizon beyond. FDR had rented a similar house in Biloxi. In Biloxi it was called a “Bayed Cottage.”
They furnished the house so that it would remind Gus of home. Photos of Gus at varying ages, including his high school graduation picture, hung on the walls. His bedroom was made to look like his bedroom back in La Jolla. They’d brought his childhood toys and comic books and strewed them about the room, as if by a careless boy.
The barracks Gus was assigned to was partitioned into small rooms. Gus shared one of these with a senior radar operator and a mess hall cook. The cook was a tall country boy with enormous feet named Lamar Harkey. Gus got the bunk above Harkey.
The senior radar operator, Staff Sergeant Ray Springer, had his own bunk. Springer was a lifer on his fourth enlistment. He was thirty-five years old and had joined the Army in 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor. He’d been assigned to the 8th Air Force in England. Springer had flown thirty-six missions as a B-17 ball turret gunner before he was wounded during the punitive firebomb raid on Dresden. The incendiary bombs created a firestorm five miles across. The red tornado at the center of the firestorm fed itself on, among other things, the bodies of forty thousand German civilians. They were sucked into the whirling fire by hundred mile an hour heat-generated winds. Shrapnel from an antiaircraft shell had sliced into Springer’s abdomen on that mission. He kept the piece of steel and had it fashioned into a pinky ring by a metalsmith in Canterbury.
Gus learned all this during his first week in the barracks. Springer showed the pinky ring to Gus. He said it served as a reminder.
“Reminder of what?” Gus asked.
“To not take anything too seriously, Gate. Especially yourself.”
Gus liked being called “Gate.” Gus, in Springer’s presence, thought of himself as Gate.
“I was always afraid of taking a bullet up my ass,” Springer said. “You lay back in that turret, legs up and wide, like a woman taking on all comers. You had good armor but you still offered your puckered asshole to the world like a little bull’s-eye. We called it the Fuck Me Adolf position.”
Springer, like Gus, was a small man. He was good looking in a diminutive way, with hair as carefully combed as a gigolo’s. His nickname back when he was a gunner with the 8th Air Force was “Little Slick.” No one at the 999th called him that.
Springer had been stationed in Japan before he changed his MOS to “Scope Dope” and reassigned to the Milk River radar squadron. He’d found a home in the air force. He had no higher ambition other than to keep reenlisting until he got his thirty years in.
He loved Montana. “I’ve seen just about every type of geography the world’s got to offer,” he said. “But if you’re looking for country that hasn’t been stepped on a whole lot, then Montana’s the place. You’ll never want to go back to whatever you came from. I shit you not, Gate.”
Springer had a collection of old jazz and blues records and played them late into the night. Lamar Harkey complained but had no rank and would not, in any case, take his complaint to the first sergeant. The first sergeant, like Springer, had been in the big war. Gus listened respectfully to Springer’s music but admitted he didn’t know much about it.
“You don’t need to know anything about it,” Springer said. “If it makes you tap your toe, you already know enough. If it makes you get up and stomp—amen, brother.”
Springer drove a customized 1951 Olds 88 sedan. Its horsepower had been increased by dual carburetors, dual ignition, headers, and dual glasspack mufflers. The modified Olds could lay rubber in all three gears and top out at one-hundred twenty miles an hour.
“Why all that power?” Gus asked, even though having grown up in an automobile culture he understood horsepower for its own sake was the only justification needed.
“Why anything?” Springer said. He looked at Gus. Gus shrugged. “Let me put it this way. My daddy ran moon in the Cumberlands driving a full-race flathead Deuce.”
“He trucked homemade booze in a souped-up ’32 Ford?”
“I believe I just said that
. Whiskey and fast cars are in the bloodline, Gate.”
Gus and Springer were on the same nine-days-on and four-days-off work schedule. He offered Gus a ride into town after they’d both finished a day shift and had changed into civvies. Gus jumped at the chance, even though he’d told FDR and Flora that he couldn’t come into town during his workweek.
Springer talked him out of staying on base. “There’s nothing to do here except watch old cowboy movies, flog your mule, or play penny-a-point pinochle or nickel-dime poker with the lifers. You could play flag football or half-court basketball with the jocks, but those hardlegs like to pound the shit out of little guys like us. Come to town with me, Gate. We’ll eat a steak, get drunk, and get our ashes hauled—more or less in that order. It won’t cost you more than seven or eight bucks.”
“Get our ashes hauled?” Gus said.
“Oh man, a virgin,” Springer said. “All the more reason for you to go. You got to give up that cherry, Gate, before it turns into an embarrassing curiosity. You got to get something on you besides palm grease.”
“I don’t know, Ray. I mean, who …?”
“Who is not the problem,” Springer said.
“Geez, Ray.” Gus hated the sound of his voice, which had risen with the tide of panic.
“What are you—nineteen, twenty?”
“Eighteen,” Gus said.
“Still too old to be sporting a cherry. We got to do something about that. Let’s get this out of the way, Gate.”
Springer kept the speedometer at seventy on Crazy Horse Highway. The car seemed to float above the washboard-rippled road. Gus felt the car fishtail. Springer seemed unconcerned.
A herd of fifty or more pronghorns running parallel to the road raised a cloud of dust before they veered away. Straight ahead and high above, a pair of red-tail hawks rode a thermal in wide circles. The sky’s blue arch seemed too deep and too wide, the dimensions too generous. Gus was getting used to Montana’s enormous horizon-to-horizon sky but now and then it took him by surprise. He’d never taken in so much of the planet in one glance. It took some adjusting to. Springer punched Gus’s shoulder.
“You see it?” Springer said.
“See what?”
“It. Out there. The works. It.”
Gus looked out his window. “Nice country,” he said.
Springer laughed. “Wake up or close your eyes, Gate.”
The grain elevators of Milk River came into view. Their massive, shoulder-to-shoulder shapes made them seem like gray sentinels guarding access to the city.
“The metropolis and all its pleasures,” Springer said as they crossed the viaduct into downtown Milk River.
They ate steaks at the Townhouse Café then cruised the streets of Milk River until dusk. The dirty trombone tones of the Oldsmobile’s twin glasspack mufflers turned heads wherever they went. They idled past an ice cream parlor called the Athenian.
“That’s where the local kids hang out,” Springer said. “The girls, some of them anyway, think airmen are cool.”
“I’ve heard,” Gus said.
“You’ll want to steer clear of the town boys. They catch you alone, they’ll stomp your ass. They don’t care for airmen. Young bucks in blue represent unfair competition.”
Springer pulled into an alley and pointed to a clapboard addition to a concrete block building. The building the addition was attached to was the Moomaw Dairy.
“This is the airmen’s poontang parlor, Gate. There’s a house down the street with Indian girls, the prettiest girls this side of Reno, but they don’t let flyboys in. Screwing flyboys for them would be like screwing Custer’s pony soldiers. The Indians up here have long memories. You got five dollars on you?”
Gus’s pocket was heavy with silver dollars. The old cartwheels, most of them minted in the 1880s, were the only dollars in circulation. They were standard for Montanans who still didn’t fully trust paper money.
The whores—three of them in black underwear and garter belts under their filmy kimonos—were middle-aged heavyweights. They lounged on a sofa in the small foyer. A ceiling lamp infused the room with purple light, making the women seem randomly bruised. One of them pushed herself out of the sofa and took Gus by the arm.
“Got me a young’n,” she said to the others.
“Eat him up, Norrie, he looks sweet as candy,” one of the women said.
“Give Tiny Tim a good roll, girl,” the other one said.
Gus said, “I’ve got to …”
“You got to pee, Little Britches?” Norrie said.
“… think about this.”
“Too late for thinkin. Thinkin won’t do it no good.”
Her stiff orange hair was held down, front and back, by steel barrettes. Her nose was off-center, broken at least once, and her upper left bicuspid had a silver crown. Even so, she reminded Gus of Flora. She could have been Flora’s loose-living sister gone to low-rent whoring.
Gus said, “Whoa, ma’am …” but she pulled him into her crib before he could complete the thought, which, at any rate, he hadn’t been able to find words for. The reek of dimestore cologne and the musky residues of sex made him queasy. Something—a white toad—floated in a jam jar on the shelf above her cot. Gus couldn’t take his eyes from it.
“Take no notice of that, Little Britches,” she said. “Strip down but leave your socks on.” She rolled onto her back. Her kimono slipped open. “Come on now, get with it, son. Five cartwheels don’t buy you half the goldurn night.”
Gus tried to kiss her lips (wasn’t that how you made love?) but she averted her face. He stroked her breasts (she allowed this but grimaced and rolled her eyes.) The tips of her nipples became hard (in spite of her impatient get-on-with-it sighs.) They were fissured, as though teams of babies had pulled at them over hungry decades. (Gus lingered too long on this sobering possibility.)
“Quit thinkin, boy,” she said. “I can hear the wheels in your head turnin.” She pulled him down into the unfamiliar terrain of her body. Gus felt helpless as an infant sprawled on its mother’s belly. A pang of guilt assaulted him. His only desire was the desire to run.
“I never made love before, ma’am,” he confessed.
“This aint love, Sunshine. It’s just fuckin.”
She took him in hand, got him ready. “This here’s where you normally put it,” she said, guiding him in.
Gus, hesitation gone, gave way to the kinetic impulses of his body.
“Whoa pup!” she said. “Don’t be a-lungin like that, gol-durnit! Slow ’er down! What are you, a jackrabbit? I’m feelin sorely put-upon tonight. Some rank sodbuster done me like he was diggin post-holes in hardpan. Said the missus couldn’t take him no more. Can’t says I blame her. These tractor jockeys come in firedup and fulla grit, specially they got a tight old lady at home parcels it out real stingy-like, or not at all if she smells drink.”
Gus got dressed while she douched. When she finished she bit a piece off a twist of chewing tobacco. She studied Gus as she worked it down to cud. “Tell you true, Sunshine,” she said, “you aint much in the saddle.” She offered this as disinterested analysis, her jaw muscles bulging. “You got another five cartwheels, I’ll take you to school. You the type could benefit from instruction.” She spit a brown stream into an empty soup can. “You come back, Norrie’ll show you how to mount and ride and how to rein in so’s you won’t disappoint the ladies more’n you need to. I was you, gunfighter, I wouldn’t apply for stud work just yet.”
“Gunfighter?” Gus said.
“You got a hair trigger, Little Britches,” she said. “Ladies who know better won’t crib-up with Quick Draw McGraw more than once, less’n they’re desperate.”
Gus tied his shoes, aware she was still studying him.
“You a mama’s boy, aintcha?” she said. She was sitting on her cot in her unbelted see-through kimono. Cross-wired emotions confused him: Pity and shame. Anger and remorse. Resurrected lust. He wished he had five more dollars, glad he didn’t.
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“No way,” Gus said.
“I’d put a dollar on it,” she said.
“You’d lose,” Gus said.
She looked at Gus sidelong. “Naw, I can always tell a mama’s boy. Aint nothin particular wrong with it. It just takes them a stretch longer to cut the cord. Until then they can’t figure out what the ladies look for in a man. They think it’s loyalty, respect, and keeping the cupboards stocked. The ladies want that, all right, but these days they want a sight more than that.”
“You’re wrong about me, ma’am,” Gus said.
“I’m hardly ever wrong about you young’ns. But somethin else aint right about you. Probably gonna cause you some trouble down the line. It’s writ all over you. You a touch crazy, maybe?”
The question annoyed Gus. The jam jar on the shelf above her bed caught his attention again. “What is that, a toad?” he said. Gus stood, stepped close to the shelf. The white thing was not a toad. “Jesus, it’s a baby,” he said.
“Fetus,” she corrected. “Can’t be havin babies in this line of work. Wayne’s pickled in brine. He wanted out five months early. Couldn’t wait to see the big ole messed-up world. Lucky for him he come out with undeveloped lungs. Stillborn. I call the trick-baby Wayne, after the cowboy actor. Wayne’d be about your age by now.”
Gus stumbled over the feet of a long-legged whore on his way out, the one who called him “candy.” She was playing solitaire in the foyer and smoking a cigarette. “Watch it, Tiny Tim,” she said. Out in the alley he emptied his bladder. Then he got into Springer’s car.
Ray Springer came out ten minutes later. “So it’s not the Tokyo Ginza,” he said. “The ladies here get shipped up from Kansas City by the syndicate that runs them. The local cops are on the their payroll. They protect the girls and get free tail when they want it. You want to find out what the local cops are like, shortchange a whore. The ladies are mostly over-the-hill types, like old ballplayers getting sent down to the bush leagues. It’s one of the drawbacks of getting your ass stationed in the boonies. The town girls take up the slack. For an old man like me the boonies are their own reward. This is God’s own country.”
Mama's Boy Page 2
