by Oakley Hall
“What?” she said.
“I say I’d kill you!” and he was too shaken to look at her any longer. “Both of you,” he said.
“I’ll go out with whoever I want to. You don’t own me.”
“I’m telling you. Don’t you ever let Red…” The words turned to thick wool in his mouth and he almost gagged on them. He wiped his hand across his eyes.
V said, “Jack, you know I…”
“Get out,” he said. He reached across her and flung open the door.
He felt her hand on his leg and her voice was strange and tender. “Jack, I’m just going up to see…”
He slapped her hand away. “Get out!” he shouted. She got out and the door slammed shut as the car shot away from the curb.
He almost fought with Red the next day. It would have been all right if Red had let him alone, for he had come to his senses quickly. He knew he had been crazy to think such a thing. But Red would not let him alone; Red would never let go of anything like that, and he wouldn’t take it from Red. He could take the kidding, except Red’s kidding, because he hated Red.
He did not know why he hated Red, except that something had started the time he, instead of Red, had been given a new Adams grader, and it had been building up ever since. And with his kidding and his jeering laughter, Red had slowly come to symbolize the whole degradation of what V had done to him; that there were others who had her besides himself; that he wasn’t good enough to satisfy her; the admission to himself of what he felt for her when she was so indifferent. But if Red had only let him alone, the fight would not have been inevitable.
Red would not let him alone, and they fought, and Red was killed. Afterward he knew that in a way it was not his fault; he tried again and again to tell himself it was not. He tried to blame it on V. He tried to blame it on Red for picking the fight, and then for insisting on running the cat and tampers when he was groggy. He tried to blame it on Ben and Harry for letting him. But in the end he always had to blame himself. He had not wanted to stop hitting Red. Hitting Red, he was hitting back at V, and he had not wanted to stop. He had stopped only when his strength was gone.
He drove up to the timekeeper’s shack, jumped off the grader, and without checking in, got in his car and drove home. He had to hold the wheel and shift gears with his left hand. His right hand was broken; he could feel the bones grate together when he pulled at the two middle fingers.
In the room he packed his shaving kit, his suit, three shirts and a handful of shorts, scribbled a note to Ben that he had gone to join the Navy, and left for Los Angeles. He didn’t look back as he passed through the southern outskirts of Bakersfield on the tree-lined highway that pointed straight toward the mountains to the south, his head bent forward to escape the punishing wind.
He didn’t let his right foot up from the floorboards until the mountains separated him from the San Joaquin Valley, and in Glendale a police car pulled him over and he was given a ticket for speeding. He tore it up. He sold his car to a used-car dealer for one hundred and twenty-five dollars and went to a doctor to get his hand set.
The doctor said it would be two weeks at least before the hand healed and he could enlist. He found a room in an expensive hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, and for the first three nights he whored and stayed drunk, and slept all morning and most of the afternoons. Then, suddenly, he was through with that forever.
For the next week he lay on his bed all day and read detective magazines, rising only to eat when he was hungry and to go to a movie at night. And while he was reading, or eating, or seeing a movie, or trying to sleep, he thought about what he had done.
There were two charges that lay on his conscience like unpaid bills. It was the start of the stack. He had seduced V. He had made her what she was and what she might become. And out of that and because of that he had killed a man. Red was dead because of the action and reaction between V and himself. And V’s part in it had been only the reaction. His was the original action that had set it all off. His was the responsibility.
There it was. It pressed down on him. Even when he cursed and explained and reasoned and rationalized and exonerated himself, it was with him. It pressed down on him, and each day it grew heavier. When he could stand the thinking in the sterile hotel room no longer, he stripped the cast from his hand, cleaned off the tape marks with lighter fluid, and went down to enlist in the Seabees. Perfect physical shape, they said.
6
He got his orders for discharge on Maui, in early September, 1945. Their battalion had shipped from Guam to Maui to join the 4th Marine Division, which had just returned from Iwo Jima, and they had been making ready for the landings on Japan when V-J Day came.
The camp was on the side of Haleakala, the enormous extinct volcano that sucked up the rest of the island like a boil, and on the mountain it had rained constantly. Even through August and the first week of September it had rained almost every afternoon.
Rain came down in sheets along the front of the pyramidal, dripping in around the edge of the door, leaking in the flap at the top and running down the stanchions to make little puddles in the corners. Jack sat on his cot with his sea chest open in front of him, watching it rain.
Fergie had gone to the Marine PX and Mort was asleep, the sound of his snoring like a ripsaw in rotten wood. He twitched as Jack looked over at him, lying on his face with his arms under his body. The endless Hawaiian music tinkled from Fergie’s radio.
Jack’s orders lay on the unmade cot beside him, a sheaf of coarse, mimeographed paper. He picked them up and riffled through the sheets. Toward the end the orders changed to four lines of typed endorsement, signed in blue ink: “W. D. Farrington, for J. V. Smith, Lt. Cmdr., USNR.”
He tossed the orders onto the cot and stared out at the rain again, locking his hands around one knee and balancing on the rail of the cot. Guitars clunked from the radio as he watched the rain fall steadily. The roofs of the warehouses below the drill field were bright silver. It seemed to be raining everywhere.
Finally he took his sea bag from the chest, unfolded it and propped it upright. He worked quickly, filling it, putting in a layer of clothing and packing it tight and bouncing the sea bag so each layer would settle. He grunted when he uncovered the Navy .38 pistol he had found on Guam. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, feeling the grip and thinking about the last two and a half years he had considered such a waste of time.
Now he knew the time had not been wasted. He had changed, he knew; he was more than two and a half years older. He was a man, and he was ashamed of the boy that had been Jack Ward. He had seen that boy in too many of those around him.
And he knew that for him the war had been nothing terrible. Only the eternal boredom had been hard. There had never been any danger. The battalion had always gone in after the fighting was over, when an area was safe enough for them to build the air strips or roads unmolested. They had only once been under fire. It had been on Guam, and evidently the sniper was much more frightened than they, for there had been only the three, thin, crackling shots that might not even have been directed at them.
A fire team of Marines had gone after the Jap with a Tommy gun, and Jack had walked over to see him. Battered, blood-covered, dead, he had looked like Red Young.
He tucked the pistol in among his dungarees, remembering when they had all been excited about souvenirs. He had sent V a Jap flag he had found on Tarawa, but he was glad he had kept the .38. It was something to remind him he’d been in a war.
There was only rubble left in the bottom of the sea chest now; some paper-bound mysteries, envelopes whose flaps had stuck closed, a heap of worn-out socks and skivvies, and in one corner was the thin packet of letters he had received from V.
Slowly he picked up the packet and untied the string that held it together. The letters were on pink stationery, in pink envelopes with flowered linings. He fanned them out in his hand, staring at them and tiredly cursing the day he’d ever written her; the day on Guam
when, so lonely he could feel it in his stomach like hunger, he had written her the first letter.
He had written her when he had come to feel himself completely unattached from the rest of the world, when he had felt he had nothing to go back to, no one to go back to. There was only V in his life; she was the center of the orbit in which he revolved. He had written her to be sure she would be there when he returned, a fixed point in a life that had never had a fixed point, for he could think of nothing else there was to return to. And now he wished he had not written her, because he was going somewhere else and start again.
He arranged the letters by the stamped dates of their postmarks and lay down on the cot to read them. The letters did not anger him now. That part of it was gone, but he wondered why he bothered to read them at all. They were all the same and he knew by heart what was in them; crude attempts to make him jealous and keep him in line, which he recognized as such. They told what a good time V was having, who she’d been out with, where they’d gone, what they’d done, and who else she’d heard from overseas, a few reminiscences. They were crammed full of devices planned to fit her purpose.
There were eight of them, the last dated in April, thanking him for the bottle of cologne he’d sent her for her birthday. When he finished it he crumpled them all into little balls, made a heap of them on the floor and set fire to it. They blazed fiercely for a moment, black creeping up the expanding pink balls, and then the blaze died out and the black, brittle shapes blew across the floor. He lay back on the cot again, gazing up at the slow, dark trickle of rain that made its way down the stanchion above him.
He was still lying there and Mort was still asleep, when Fergie came back. It had stopped raining, the Marines were out drilling, and Jack was listening to the rhythmic stamp of feet, the slap of hands on rifle slings, a shrill voice calling cadence: “Huhwun, hup, hreep, hup. Yerrrightflank—harch. To therip—harch. Rip, harch!”
Fergie slammed the screen door shut, shuffled his feet and hung up his poncho. He was eating an Oh Henry bar. “Hi, men,” he said, and he sat down on his cot and turned off the radio. “What the hell’d you do in here?” he demanded. “Build a fire to keep warm?”
Jack lay listening to the Marines drilling. “Ripe shoulup— harms!” came from the drill field, and the smack of palms on leather.
“Hey, grade boss!” Fergie cried.
“I burned some letters. Anything wrong with that?”
“They stink.”
“This place stinks anyway.”
“You don’t have to stink it up any more,” Fergie said. He took another candy bar from his jacket pocket and skinned off the wrapper. His fat face was lowered so that Jack could see his pink scalp under his thinning blond hair.
“Well, that’s sure tough on your dainty little nose,” Jack said. “You don’t hear the twentieth-century Rip van Winkle bitching about it, do you?”
“Christ, he’d lay there beating his ear if the whole place burned down,” Fergie said. “What was you burning, anyway?”
“Letters, I said.”
“Dear Jack, unh?”
“Just a bunch of crap I was all through with.”
Fergie stuffed the rest of the candy bar into his mouth and wiped his hands on his pants’ legs.
“All through,” Jack said. Then he said, “What’re you going to do when you get back to the States, Ferg?”
“First, or second? I don’t believe we’re ever going to get out of here, though. This points crap’s just scuttlebutt.”
“The hell,” Jack said, and he laughed. He sat up and shook the sheaf of orders at Fergie. “Proof,” he said.
“Hey, no kidding?” Fergie said. “When you going?”
“Today at eighteen hundred. Farrington wangled me a seat on the plane.”
“You lucky bastard!”
“I hope you’re stuck here forever,” Jack said, grinning. “I can see you in about ten years, sitting here eating candy bars and counting up your points and watching those gooks get lightercolored every day.”
Fergie grinned back at him, got another candy bar from his pocket and tossed it over. “Thanks,” Jack said.
“Bon voyage,” Fergie said, “Going back to the valley, Jack?”
“Hell, I don’t know where to go. San Diego, I guess.”
“Dago? That hole?”
“That’s where I get discharged.”
Fergie held up a hand, cocking his head to one side. “Hey!” he said. “Hear that? That’s your plane coming in now, you lucky bastard. Want me to wake Mort up?”
“Let him sleep,” Jack said. “I got a couple of hours yet. I’m going out and watch that plane come in.”
Outside he jumped over the puddles in the areaway until he came out on the drill field. The Marines were down at the far end: “To the rip—harch!” a corporal was yelling. “Rip, harch!” Above them Haleakala loomed, its rim fringed with clouds, and below, the pineapple field patchwork of red earth and green plants stretched down to the ocean.
The plane was circling the Kahului air field, silver and blue, its propellers two bright celluloid discs in the sun. Jack waved at it; the plane that would be taking him to Pearl Harbor, where he would catch a ship back to the States.
7
There was a call for a bulldozer operator for the Kearny Mesa job when he checked in with the union at San Diego. He met Gene at the Hogan and Griffith office. He liked her immediately; a slender, almost thin girl with dark eyes and dark, short hair. He liked the fast, breathless way she talked, her crooked smile; there was something about her that told him she was the kind of girl he should marry.
He had lied when he told her he loved her. He didn’t love anyone. He was through with that because V had finished it in him. He was through playing the game, but he was going to be sure nobody played it with him.
He was satisfied with the way he had made the break with V. They hadn’t written for a long time, he was not going back to Bakersfield, and the thing would never have a chance to begin again. But he thought of her sometimes. He could not stop himself from thinking about her; it was like a wisdom tooth coming through, the pain acute for a time, but gradually the gum would grow over and there would be long periods when he did not think of her at all. V would marry someone in Bakersfield and settle down, and he would marry Gene. It was all over.
The job on the mesa was pushing gravel from the rock crusher to the hopper of the hot plant where the paving for the air field was mixed and loaded into dump trucks. It was dirty work. He had to wear a respirator and goggles and by the time he had finished his first run in the morning he would be covered with rock dust and asphalt. Asphalt stuck in his hair where it was not covered by his cap, his clothes were always stiff and black with it and his face, when he turned in at night, would be completely black except for three circles, a big one around his nose and mouth and smaller ones over his eyes.
Ordinarily he would have quit such a job the first day. In the Seabees he had been a kind of equipment boss, and Commander Smith had written him a letter recommending him as a grade foreman. But he knew it would be impossible to get a foreman’s job directly, and he had not even held out for a grader because he wanted to go right to work. So he stuck with it, and when one of the other skinners quit, Smitty put him on a grader, working the fine grade with Arch Huber.
He was a little surprised when Gene said she would marry him. It had not occurred to him that she might refuse, but he was surprised suddenly at the realization that he was going to be married. He found he was pleased. He wanted to be married. He wanted it to be as soon as possible.
But one night after work he was driving down the street toward his rooming house, slowing down and pulling over to the curb to park, when he saw V.
At first he did not recognize her. She was carrying a suitcase, looking up at the numbers on the houses. He was behind her, and he only knew she looked familiar. He watched her because she was blonde and had good legs, but he had the confused feeling that she was som
eone he knew who was completely out of place, that she was a person connected in his mind with somewhere else and had no reason for being here.
He frowned, letting the Mercury idle along behind her, studying her legs, and the square shoulders in the white coat, and the familiar hair, and then he was conscious of the pattern of the rapping of her heels. His legs seemed nerveless as he raised his foot to the brake pedal.
The car slowed, jerking along in high gear with his foot off the accelerator. His mind was blank. The world was silent except for the unmistakable sound of V’s heels. He watched her pass the telephone pole, the two garbage cans on the curb, and then she turned and saw him.
She stepped off the sidewalk and came over to the car. She opened the door, lifted her suitcase in, and sat down on the seat beside him. They sat and looked at each other, the Mercury nosed into the curb, the motor dead; V incredibly sitting beside him and looking exactly as he remembered her, her breathing uneven and beads of perspiration sparkling on the curve of her upper lip, looking tired, her eyes round and a little bloodshot and most of her lipstick gone. He compared her with the image in his memory; the tiny mole above her nose in the vertical crease of her forehead, the soft down on the undersides of her cheeks, the blonde hair that almost met her eyebrows at the sides of her head, the minute bare ridge around the edges of her lipstick. Her lips seemed larger than he remembered and instead of in the middle, her hair was parted now on one side and held with a silver clip. She was a picture he was studying, trying to determine its authenticity. And she sat staring back at him.
Slowly, wonderingly, he began to feel what she had always made him feel, as though he had been plugged into an electric socket, or as though there were a sun suddenly in the car, with the special kind of warmth the sun had had when they were sitting against the D-4 caterpillar in the orchard at the ranch. He reached down and pressed the starter button. He picked up her suitcase and pushed it into the back seat. It was a new suitcase, tan, with dark brown stripes. The motor whirred silently. V still stared at him, smiling, her eyes round.
