A God in Ruins

by Leon Uris

  “It passed through my mind to reenlist.”

  “One of the chaplains from the Sixth Marines was with me at a retreat a few months ago. He told me that your battalion lost four commanders in the first day.”

  “Saipan was a shit kicker. So were Guadalcanal and Tarawa. The worst foxhole is the one you happen to be in when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Did you find something along the way?”

  “Yeah, right in the beginning. On the train on the way to boot camp in San Diego. In Buffalo there was another train of recruits. To join them we had to walk through the station to their platform. The station in Buffalo was scary, high and icy and silent, a walk to the unknown. When the two trains merged they were so full, some recruits were sleeping on the floor. I ended up in a lower bunk with another guy. That’s the way fighting for space had been back home.

  “Later in the trip we slowed down at the tip of daylight. I had the window position that night and rolled the shade up. Outside was a huge green lawn before a beautiful, newly painted station. Douglass, Kansas. Beyond, I could see nice houses, like Mickey Rooney lived in when he played Andy Hardy.”

  “Weren’t you trying to deceive yourself, Dan? Pretending there are perfect places outside Brooklyn? If you knocked on any door in this Kansas place, you’d find Brooklyn once removed.”

  “Well, what have I got here? There are still five of us in our home on top of each other trying to ace each other out of the bathroom. My parents are arguing. Everyday ordinary conversation is argumentative. Some fifteen-year-old niece is knocked up, someone is stitched up from a fight, and the friggin’ bed is lumpy.”

  “It sounds like you’ve been making a plan for a long time.”

  “I want to see Douglass, Kansas, and a lot of the places my men came from.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, but you’ll not drive far enough to escape trouble. The virgin you saw at dawn may now show you some pimples on her ass in the midday sun.”

  Dan became excited. “After Douglass, Kansas, we’ll head for Colorado and visit the parents of the one great friend of my life, Justin Quinn. It drives me, Scan. I can’t rest until I see Justin’s mom and dad and let them know what a powerful Marine their son was. Justin Quinn was the man among us, winning any broad with a glance, winning the division rodeo. Ah, the fucking fool, trying to win the battle of Saipan by himself. Maybe after that I’ll concentrate on settling down. I’m too restless now.”

  “Well, you should be. Your war has been taken away from you. When do you plan to go?”

  “After the wedding.”

  “Does Siobhan know?”

  “Ah, Jaysus, I can’t face the tears now.”

  “Has it occurred to you that she might not want to go? She’s very tribal.”

  “Yes, but I have to take the chance.”

  The bachelor’s stag party was but three nights away. There would be nearly a hundred cops boozing and relatives all the way from Jersey and just maybe one of those weasly guys with an 8mm projector and dirty films.

  Siobhan was picking up puzzling vibrations from Dan at a rapid rate. Did he truly want to marry? Was it coming back from a war too emptied out? He spoke little of vicious battles or malaria or dengue fever. From a strange, secret place he’d mutter the name of one of the boys in his platoon. Except for Justin Quinn. He’d talk about Justin.

  “Two more days and I’ve got you,” Siobhan said. “I understand the boys will have a couple of strippers at your stag party. Just remember, you’re an officer of the law.”

  “Ah, geez, Siobhan, the captain himself is sending them.”

  “How does Mrs. Jane O’Connell sound?” she asked. “Or should I continue to use Siobhan?”

  “You use Mrs. Daniel Timothy O’Connell. If it was good enough for the liberator of Ireland, it’s good enough for the likes of us.”

  “Oh, thank you, milord, but I’ll be using my own Christian name.”

  “Look at what the war went and done,” Dan retorted. “All you ladies got liberated to work in the defense factories. That doesn’t give you the right to throw your husband’s fine name out with the garbage.”

  It was wonderful. Dan knew new ways of defusing his woman. The official engagement had many advantages. He could touch her breasts any time he wished. Every damned time, she liked it! She’d put her hand atop his to make him stay awhile. Having petted her into a weak state, he sprang forth.

  “I’ve got something of great consequence to tell you,” he blurted.

  “We’re not going to get married!”

  “Of course we’re going to get married. Sunday we’re getting married.

  I’m addressing you on a matter after the wedding.”

  “We are still going to Niagara Falls, aren’t we, Dan?”

  “Definitely, but not by train,” he croaked.

  “I’m not walking!”

  “Will you let me get a word in edgewise!” She became silent. He paced. All of his airtight arguments disappeared in a dim puff. “Well,” he managed, “I was of a mind that when we leave Niagara Falls, we continue directly to San Francisco.”

  “Sacred Heart! I may faint!”

  “Siobhan, I tried to hint to you in my letters. I’ve met too many men from too many places not to realize that this is a great land and life could be wondrous in a way that it never could be here.”

  After a time she whispered, “I’ve been thinking much the same. Brooklyn is an island. Islands dull the race after time. Maybe I should have told you, but I would say nothing, ever, at the risk of losing you, Dan.”

  “Jaysus, now, isn’t that something.”

  Siobhan pulled off her blouse and unhooked her bra. “Kiss them, Dan.”

  He did as told and took her on his lap.

  “There will be a better life for us. You remember the Romero kid over in the eyetalian street? He put his car up on blocks for the duration of the war. He was killed at Iwo.”

  “I know.”

  “My brother Pearse knows cars as well as Henry Ford, went and inspected it from bumper to bumper. It’s in perfect condition. Father Scan said if someone bought the car, it would help Romero’s old man get over his grieving. It’s a ‘41 DeSoto.”

  “Forty-one! Aren’t we hoi polloi! Did you steal the money?”

  They stopped for a little personal entanglement. It couldn’t get too serious in the middle of the day.

  “Anyhow, I got the car for a pittance. Old man Romero wanted me to have it, his son being a fellow police officer and Marine. I, uh, paid seven hundred dollars for it.”

  “Seven hundred dollars! Besides, I never heard of anyone driving across the country. Where would we sleep? Where would we eat? We could be attacked by Indians.”

  “Let me explain, let me explain. I went to the AAA and, being a veteran, they gave me free maps and a book listing motels.”

  “What the devil are motels?”

  “Well, they’re not exactly hotels .. . they’re motor hotels.”

  They digested it.

  “Do they have toilets?”

  “Yes, toilets and private showers, and we’re apt to run into one every hundred miles or so.”

  “Are we coming back?” she whispered shakily.

  “If we don’t find something better. But we’ll never know unless we try.”

  “Are we fooling ourselves that there is something better than here?”

  “From what I’ve seen, there is every chance.”

  “How will we live?”

  “I have a New York state bonus, plus severance pay from the Marines, and I’ve got disability compensation. I’ve been sending money home, which Dad deposited. Then, you know, gambling is not illegal in the Marine Corps, and I got this knack for poker.”

  “Poker! You used to raid poker games!”

  “And some dice.”

  “You used to raid such games. You got a citation for it!”

  “In the Corps it’s perfectly legal, so when you’re in the Marines you do as the Mar
ines do.”

  “How much dirty money did you take from them?”

  “We have over nine thousand dollars in total, including the bonus and stuff like that. And don’t forget, I get two hundred a month from the government for my wound.”

  Siobhan fumed a bit at the revelations.

  “I’ve been too many places, Siobhan. I don’t want to be another Irish cop all my life.”

  She snapped her brassiere shut and put on her top. “I suppose,” she said, “I can always find my way back to Brooklyn if I have to.”

  FALL 1945

  Their honeymoon became a sort of pioneer epic. Daniel O’Connell continued to wear his Marine Corps uniform with the “ruptured duck” over his breast pocket, and he speeded up his pace every time they walked past a men’s clothing store.

  Siobhan O’Connell lost her newlywed nervousness. At the end of the day’s drive they either found a motel or the usual four-story brick hotel used by traveling salesmen, occupying a corner of the main cross streets of whatever town they were in. The similarity of rooms, the fishy-eyed desk clerks, and stuttering bell boys was striking. They were mid-range, six- to eight dollar-a-night rooms.

  Siobhan usually waited in the car while Dan signed in at the registration desk. The fishy-eyed clerk guarded the gates to the kingdom like a true centurion. By the time they got to Cleveland, Mrs. Siobhan O’Connell opened her purse and slapped their marriage certificate on the desk.

  They glowed each morning and even more so when the correct safe dates appeared on the calendar. Siobhan realized that there might be other channels of gratification during the abstention part, but she had a whole life ahead to work on it. For now, though, abstention was hell.

  CHICAGO!

  A married buddy, Cliff Romanowski, lived in Chicago. Cliff had lost an arm in the earlier battle of Tarawa. Beautiful reunion. Cliff’s wife, Corinne, was six months pregnant and all popped out. Good omen, Siobhan thought.

  After a homemade dinner featuring Polish sausage, the four went out to paint the town. Dan mustered his bad leg into duty and did a sort of polka, which seemed to be the national dance of Chicago.

  The wives were deliciously tolerant of their lads’ drinking and subsequent hell-raising. They all crashed with the daylight.

  Next day, noticeably slowed, Dan took them to a Greek restaurant, the anxiety of their first meeting converted into nostalgia. At Cliff and Corinne’s apartment, they ended up sitting on the floor in a circle, propped up by pillows, and Siobhan’s toe trying to creep up inside Dan’s pant leg.

  The Marine Corps. Reminiscence began with the sweat of a double-time hike, then drifted into their patented tomfoolery and sophomoric behavior. Beer busts were recalled with kindness.

  “And me and O’Connell and Quinn hit the railroad station just as the

  last liberty train was leaving. Everything was full, the seats, the

  floor, the platform where you could sleep standing up. So the three of

  us climbed into the overhead luggage rack, where there was already men

  laying end to end. And an hour out of Wellington, the luggage rack

  comes crashing down! The lights went out and I’ve got to tell you, I

  felt a lot of Marine

  I”

  ass!

  New Zealand had been a never-never land with the bursting scenery, Maoris, flocks on the skyline, colonial ways. Siobhan was tempted to ask about the New Zealand women but held her tongue. It was the night to let their men erupt.

  Now came the war.

  “.. . remember that little runt?”

  “.. . yeah, Weasel from Arizona.”

  “.. . nobody thought he’d hold up.”

  “.. . great fighter.”

  “.. . little Weasel.”

  “.. . remember .. .”

  “.. . geez, I forgot about that bout of malaria.” . remember .. . remember ... for God’s sake, remember me, Marine.

  “I was in the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital near Frisco when you guys hit that beach at Saipan. I finally found a guy, remember Prentice in Intelligence?” Cliff asked.

  “Yeah, sure do.”

  “He told me what happened to you. All the casualties on the beach. But I think the worst was the day I heard about Justin Quinn,” Cliff recalled. “You don’t figure a Marine of his quality would catch a stray bullet.”

  “He got hit because he had to deliver a message and there were no phone lines connected yet. It was his own bloody fault. He should have waited.”

  Thump, the visit was wearily ended.

  Dan and Siobhan and Cliff and Corinne would never forget it. After two devastating hangovers, the O’Connells packed the ‘41 DeSoto and pointed it toward the corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains.

  Even though it cost a long-distance phone call, Siobhan always made certain there would be food and lodging at the end of the day. Ahead, they moved into an infinity of two-lane roads.

  It was here that Siobhan learned to drive. When stopped for speeding, she became Everywoman, coyly explaining their newlywed status, and what with her husband home from the war .. .

  “Never mind, lady, just slow down.”

  They drove through Kansas City, then chose the E-Z Inne on the road out of town because it was offering half-price rooms for veterans. There were a lot of big trucks about and a steak house right next door.

  Fooled them! Dan thought to himself as he took a long drink from his purchase from a state bottle store. Actually, a dry state, can you imagine? Must not be many Irish about.

  He set the glass on the floor and submerged to the bottom of the tub.

  “Ahhhh!”

  Siobhan answered his moose call and scrubbed his back as he kept diving and coming up exclaiming “Ahhhh!”

  At the steak house, the two stared at the extraordinary size of the meat. “Sure, I’ve never had a piece of meat like this in my icebox,” Siobhan said in wonderment.

  “And it cuts with a fork. I wonder what they do to the meat?”

  “It’s not what they do,” Siobhan said, “it’s what we do after we get it.”

  Dan quickly shifted his brown-bagged bottle of bourbon as the sheriff strolled in and took a stool at the counter. In a few minutes, their waiter came and presented them with two bottles of beer, compliments of the sheriff.

  Ah, now this is living, Dan thought.

  “Notice how nice people are out here?” she noted.

  “Yeah,” Dan said so sadly he croaked. “Yeah.”

  “Dan, I’m trying to be patient and understanding. It’s not a case of merely getting rid of the war. It will always be with you, but it can no longer dominate our lives. We’ve big tomorrows to think about, and you have to shift the Marine Corps and hold it in a place close to your heart but out of the mainstream of our marriage.”

  Dan nodded and watched the big trucks speed past, their sound muffled by glass.

  “Why are we driving south tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I went over and over and over a picture in my mind of you and me

  standing before that make-believe little rail station in Douglass,

  Kansas. Me, with my arms about you, looking past the lawns to those

  beautiful doll houses

  “You can’t move your hometown because you don’t like its location. You are going to great lengths to fool yourself. If we don’t go, the memory of it will remain perfect.”

  “I’m afraid to reach Colorado,” Dan blurted. “I’m scared of seeing Justin Quinn’s parents. My visit might bring them nightmares. They don’t know we’re coming. I avoided writing them. There is something so final about it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It means you are closing the cover of a book. Not that you can ever forget Justin Quinn.”

  “We were so close, almost as close as you and me, Siobhan. You cannot say or feel that you actually love a man because that is sinful and unhealthy. But you know, we enjoyed horsing around, jumping each other, goosing each other. Strictly correct, y
ou know. With my baritone and his tenor, we could strike our tent silent. And with the two of us ... well, no one ever did anything to my boys. We cleaned out one bar that was clipping. Busted them down like lumberjacks.”

  Her hand slipped into his, and she nodded for him to continue.

  “Damned shame. His family has this tremendous spread, as they call it, beyond Denver. Justin Quinn, being the oldest son, was due to take over the ranch. First he was going to the University of Colorado, where he had won a football scholarship.”

  “Calm your fears, Dan. Justin’s folks will be eternally grateful for your visit, and we’ll be totally comfortable there.”

  No pilgrim’s ride up to Jerusalem was ever more ethereal than the one they experienced as Dan piloted the ‘41 DeSoto around their first taste of an unpaved, washboard, rutted, cliff-side excuse for a road. Every switchback brought more stupendous scenery. Siobhan took her hands from her eyes to look at the vista, gasp, and then take cover again.

  At last the township of TROUBLESOME MESA welcomed them. The West was there. All they needed was a pair of gunmen to face each other down in the dirt street.

  “M/M Ranch?” the gas station owner said.

  Yes, sir.

  “Huh. Don’t hear too much about it these days.”

  “How far is it?”

  “About fifteen miles ... up. Probably take you better part of an hour.

  Sure you want to drive it today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now,” the attendant said, shading his eyes to ascertain the time, “if you get past five o’clock and haven’t reached the ranch, turn on back. Otherwise you’ll be in stone cold darkness, and we’ll probably have to pull you out of a ravine tomorrow.”

  A crude map was drawn, and Dan thanked the attendant profusely. Half numb, Daniel Timothy O’Connell girded himself as the attendant filled his water bags.

  “If you come back tonight, I have a bed for you over the garage. Damned hotel folded when the molybdenum mine closed.”

  Half greeting and half guarding, a pair of border collies held them at bay until a man emerged from a large, fancy house.