She looked over at the bedside clock radio. Ten-thirty. She whispered his name.
“Mace. Mace Nukanen. Wake up.”
He stirred, threw an arm over his forehead, and settled back into a deep sleep. She got up and tiptoed across the room. She stood at the big motel mirror filling one wall of the bathroom and ran her fingers through her blond hair.
Must be those reveille runs, she mused.
She looked pretty damn good for a thirty-five-year-old woman who had spent a third of her time on the earth in the United States Army. She weighed exactly the same as she did on the day she graduated from West Point thirteen years ago. Maybe her elbows were a little sharper, her smile lines a little deeper, but her body had survived pretty much intact. Her hips curved gracefully into tight, sinewy thighs, and her waistline was nothing to be ashamed of. She remembered with some distaste a few years ago when she was in law school, studying maybe eighteen hours a day, and she had given up running and gained ten pounds that had settled around her midsection like a thick winter coat. Immediately, she had carved two hours from her studies and went back to running every morning. She had never stopped.
She splashed water on her face. She had her father’s strong jaw and serious brows, and her mother’s pointed chin and slender, elegant nose. Her deep-set, large brown eyes looked perpetually skeptical, darkly witty, and when they flashed, she could make dogs bark and small children hide their faces. Her smile was like her voice, warm and just a little husky and worn.
She heard a step, saw him in the mirror, and turned in time to catch him around the waist.
“We’ve got to go. It’s almost checkout time.”
He pulled her toward him. “No, we don’t. We can stay another day.”
“I’ve got that court-martial on Tuesday, and I’ve got to spend tomorrow prepping for it.”
“Right. Corporal Richards. It’s a tragedy what happened to him. You going to get him off?”
“I know one thing: I won’t stand a chance if we don’t get ourselves back to Benning today.”
He was taller than she was, stronger. He turned on the shower, picked her up, and stepped in. Water cascaded into their faces as he kissed her, sliding his hands down, grabbing her ass. She lifted her knees, wrapped her legs around his waist, leaned back against the shower wall. All she could hear was the rhythmic pounding of the shower, his hot wet breath on her breasts. She knew why she surrendered herself to him. He did care about her; he cared about her like she had never been cared about before, and he had insisted that she understand this even though she knew it was dangerous for both of them.
He was younger than her by several years; she had never bothered to ask how many. The lack of gray hair in his crew cut told her what she needed to know. So did his skin, which was smooth and unlined, and his eyes, which sparkled with eager intelligence, and his hands, as big as omelet pans, which he carried at his sides awkwardly like a teenager.
She had met him canoeing down a river in North Georgia. It was the middle of the week, and they were alone on the river, each in their own canoe, and they fell into following each other, taking the same line through the rapids, leaning back sunning themselves through the slow stretches. Ten miles had gone by before he asked her what she did. She told him. She asked him. He told her. Another five miles passed before he asked her what rank she was. It was already too late.
She was out there on the river with him, and she had watched his broad, tanned back glistening in the hot sun, the easy stroke of his paddle. He knew the river, embraced it like a lover, pointing to a turtle sunning on a log, a muskrat diving from the bank, swimming into its lodge, the swirl of a smallmouth bass rising for cricket caught in a ripple behind a sunken stone. They rounded a bend, and he pulled his canoe to the side of the river and climbed up the bank and slid down the muddy bed of a feeder stream into the river with a huge splash. He stood up, grinning like a big kid, and she did the same thing, and there they were, diving on their bellies down a muddy stream into the river like a couple of otters. She ran up the bank and slid down again. Her top came off, lost in the rushing water of the river. She laughed. They both ran up the bank, and he slid down and she belly flopped onto the mud. When she squirted into the river, he caught her in his arms. Later on, they set up camp on a sandbar and sat staring into the fire as darkness fell. He poked it with a stick, sending sparks flying into the night.
“What are we going to do? I’m a sergeant. You’re a major. They’ve got fraternization rules against what we’re doing. They’d discharge both of us if they found out we were out here on this river together.”
She stood up, walked to the riverbank, and threw a rock into the water. “Have you ever thought of signing up for Officer Candidate School?”
He laughed. “Me? You see me a lieutenant?”
“It’s just a thought.”
“Hey, I’ve been a sergeant for twelve years now. I’ve only got eight left for my twenty. I like being a sergeant.”
“It’d solve the fraternization problem, is all I was thinking.”
“It’s not a problem yet, is it?”
“I guess not.”
He walked over next to her, picked up a rock, and tossed it in his hand like it was a baseball. “Wanna bet I can’t hit that flat spot out there behind that rock in the middle of the river?”
She looked at the river. A large boulder had formed a V-shaped ripple that glistened in the moonlight. She turned. He was grinning. “How much?”
“One kiss.”
“You’re on.”
He wound up like a baseball pitcher and threw. The rock landed dead center, exploding the riffle in a spray of bright water. “Close enough for government work?”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth. Smiling, she said, “See? It’s a problem already.”
That night, they slept next to each other in sleeping bags near the fire, and in the morning, they stripped naked and bathed in the river and cooked scrambled eggs and looked at one another across their tin plates like they’d been doing it every morning of their lives. When they were finished eating breakfast, he took the frying pan and the plates and coffeepot to the edge of the river with a bar of hand soap and did the dishes. Of course, he hadn’t done any dishes since then, but watching him squatting at stream-side scrubbing the pots and pans and plates even once, that was enough. That was when she decided she had to have this guy.
Damn the fraternization rules. The hell with Article 134. He was worth it.
She reached around him and turned off the shower.
“We’ve really got to check out of this dump.”
He grinned. “Dump? The Commanding General’s quarters is a slum compared to a room with you in it.”
She kissed him on the nose, stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel. He was right. A twelve-by-twelve motel room with him in it on the Gulf Coast of Florida was the Ritz, and she couldn’t remember the last time she felt this way. She couldn’t even remember what it meant to feel this way, except for the fact that it meant trouble. Big trouble.
She felt him coming up behind her, and whipped around.
“Get your hands off me!” She laughed.
He dove onto the floor, grabbed a foot, started kissing her toes. He was up around her ankle chewing eagerly by the time she broke free.
“Coffee? You ever heard of coffee? You want to get some coffee?”
He looked up.
“I get plenty of coffee in the mess hall every day of the week. I only get you on the weekends.”
“We can fix that. Move out of the barracks. Get yourself a place downtown. We could spend every night together out at my place.”
“Too dangerous. Somebody’d be bound to see us.”
He was right, of course. It was one thing to sneak away down to Florida. Quite another to flaunt their illicit relationship, even off-post, around Fort Benning.
She dropped to her knees, grabbed his face in both hands, and kissed him on the mouth. He
bit her lip, and she bit his, and they tugged at one another, not wanting to let go. Monday was coming up on them too fast. The real world was about to set in and they didn’t want to let go of what they had, which was unreal, and it was illicit and it was hot and it was undeniable, and because it was all those things, it was dangerous and hugely wonderful.
“I’m going to pull rank on you.”
“Try it.”
She stood up, looking down at him. His face was framed between her breasts. His eyes were so dark and huge she felt she could dive into them and never hit bottom. He reached up for one of her breasts. She jumped back, and he fell forward on his chest on the floor, with make-believe groaning.
“It’s another goddamned Sunday. I wish Sundays would go away,” he said.
“If there wasn’t a Sunday, there wouldn’t be a Monday, and we’d never start the week and get to Friday, would we?”
“Miss Practicality. Is that what they voted you in high school?”
“Hey, it works in court, I’ll tell you that much.”
She patted his head. He felt like a big cat, ready to pounce. She stepped back from him. He leaked desire—every muscled inch of him was blazing, soaking, glowing red with it. It felt good, a man in heat at your feet. She wondered why so many years had passed by before this man had come along and made her feel this way. And then she looked down at him and he smiled at her, and she stopped wondering, and she kissed him, and she pulled him to his feet, and she shoved him toward his overnight bag.
“We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
He stepped into his jeans and pulled a sweater over his head. “I’ll take the bags down to the car.” He grabbed their overnight bags and went outside. Down the way, a door opened, and a crew cut man stepped out of his room, heading for his car. Mace turned and went quickly back inside.
She was standing at the mirror, her back to him. “Give me a minute to put on some lipstick.” She turned around and saw him standing at the window, peeking through the curtains. “What’s the matter? I thought you went out to the car.”
“I just saw Lieutenant Parks getting into his car.”
“Your platoon leader? He’s here?”
“Yeah. He almost saw me.”
“So? He signed your pass. You’re allowed a weekend at the beach.”
“Not staying in a room with a Jeep Cherokee with an officer’s sticker on the bumper, I’m not.”
She walked up behind him and peeked over his shoulder. Across the highway, the Gulf was choppy under heavy December skies. A car started, pulled out of the motel parking lot, turned down the highway and disappeared into the misty distance.
“He’s gone.”
“That was Parks?”
“Yeah. In the Corvette.”
“That was close.”
“Yeah.” He opened the door and she stepped into the parking lot. An icy wind off the Gulf of Mexico hit her so hard it took her breath away. Clouds over the water had turned into a black wall across the horizon, gray curtains of rain below slanting darkly into the Gulf.
“That’s some storm out there,” she said.
She unlocked the door of the Jeep Cherokee and climbed in the driver’s seat. He climbed in the other side. “We can stay ahead of it if we don’t stop for breakfast.”
“Let’s go.”
She pulled out of the motel parking lot and turned up Route 41, heading north toward Georgia.
Tall trees at the edge of the Parade Field bent horizontal, whipping the ground with low limbs. General William Beckwith stood at the window of his office in Headquarters. He was wearing a white shirt with a black bow tie and his drawers. His white legs disappeared into black over-the-calf socks. Outside, a lone soldier leaned hard into the wind as he made his way down the sidewalk into Headquarters.
The phone calls were starting to come in about the weather. Control was everything in the Army, and weather was just about the only thing a Commanding General couldn’t control, and he wasn’t happy about it. The phone calls meant problems and problems meant the general had to find people to solve the problems for him, and the kind of people you could count on to solve problems for you were getting damn hard to find in the Army.
The storm outside was whipping through the post with more than winter’s usual discontent. Trucks in the motor pool rocked noisily on their shocks, canvas tops whipping against steel frames like snare drums. M-1 tanks pinged and creaked as frigid air contracted their heavy iron turrets imperceptibly but noisily. Teenagers leaving the early movie were hit hard by the wind, clutched at each other, screaming soundlessly into the teeth of the storm. A girl fell. A boy who tried to help her, fell on top of her. They skidded on the icy walk. A light pole snapped, crashing to the ground, its halogen bulb exploding next to them. Someone screamed. Blood stained the sidewalk. MPs arrived, brandishing flashlights. An ambulance drove up, lights spinning, siren wailing. Over at the post hospital emergency room, two medics went through a dozen needles and two packs of suture thread stitching up cuts.
Flooding had started across the post, near the river. The water was over the curb, up to the front steps of barracks in some areas. The Chief of Staff, a florid-faced colonel by the name of Roberts, entered at a run.
“Sir, we’re getting some calls. People are wondering what you’re going to do about the flooding.”
Beckwith barked his displeasure. “They want me to stop a goddamned flood? The goddamn weather isn’t my responsibility! They should take their complaints to the big man upstairs.”
There was a long pause as Colonel Roberts thought about what he was going to say. Finally, he settled on an old military axiom. When in doubt, flatter.
“Sir, to them, you are the big man upstairs,” the Chief of Staff replied without irony.
A thin, self-satisfied smile played across the general’s handsome features as he looked out his second-floor window. Roberts’s ploy had worked.
The big man upstairs. Yes indeed.
General Beckwith wasn’t physically a big man; he stood five-nine, he had narrow shoulders, a thin face with sharp features, but the way he filled a room, even standing there in his drawers, had been remarked upon since he was a lieutenant. He was quick and direct, and his voice boomed when he addressed the target of his attentions. At West Point, instructors in the Tactical Department called it “command presence,” and Bill Beck-with had it in spades, even as a plebe.
He turned around. His aide, Captain Randy Taylor, was standing in the door, a pair of uniform trousers over his arm. “Sir, your dress blue trousers are ready.”
“Put ‘em down, Randy,” boomed Beckwith. “I need a drink.”
Randy neatly folded the general’s trousers over the back of a chair and opened a mahogany cabinet exposing a built-in wet bar. He filled an old-fashioned glass with ice, and poured it half full of gin, and dropped an olive into the mix. He picked up a cocktail napkin decorated with the Infantry’s crossed rifles and handed the drink to Beckwith.
“Your martini, sir.”
“You didn’t put too much goddamned vermouth in this thing, did you, Randy?”
“No, sir.”
Beckwith took a sip, smacked his lips. “Damn good martini, Randy. You’ve got it down.”
“Thank you, sir.” There was a knock at the door. The general’s secretary, Miss Flaherty, walked in. She was nearly six feet tall, and when she spoke, the windows shook.
“Wife for you on line two, sir!”
“Tell her the car will be there at 1900.”
“I reminded her of that fact, sir! She wants to speak to you anyway, sir!”
Beckwith walked over to the phone, waved his hand, dismissing his secretary. She left. Randy was about to walk through a connecting door to his office, when the general stopped him.
“Just a minute, Randy. I’m going to need you.”
He picked up the phone. “What’s going on, hon?” He listened for a moment, nodding his head. “I’ll see what I can do about it. Right. Okay. See
you at the club.” He hung up the phone and collapsed on a leather sofa, running his hands through his hair. When he looked up, Randy could see his eyes were red, and his face had lost some of its color.
“Answer me this, Randy, will you? God is fixing to dump about twelve inches of water on this Army post with which he has entrusted me, and he’s already knocked down about thirty trees, and we’ve got an overflowing emergency room over at the hospital, and my wife calls up and tells me Colonel Sumner’s wife next door is going to wear the same dress she’s wearing to the club and what can I do about it?”
Beckwith walked over to the window, which was pelted with rain.
“The President is going to pick the next Chief of Staff of the United States Army in sixty days, and I’m on his short list. I’ve got the Sec-Def coming down for a private inspection tour next week, and the biggest problem I’ve got is Mrs.-Fucking-Colonel-Sumner and her goddamned dress.”
Randy stood before the general like he’d been training for this moment all his life, what to do when an irate general appears to be reaching the end of his rope. In the old Army, the Army of his father and his grandfather, they’d tell you to make a quip, get a laugh—help the old man over the hump. Grin and bear it. His father had been a General’s aide when he was a young man, and his grandfather had been a general. Randy had been in the room hundreds of times when moments like this were shared by men who considered that the world was a place full of people who had no understanding of those who were part of the warrior caste, those who formed a Brotherhood of the Gun, those who gathered together under the banner of Duty, Honor, Country to guard against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But this was the new Army, and this was a new kind of general. He didn’t want brotherhood—he wanted confirmation and most of all, he wanted help. He wanted his trousers pressed, and his martinis mixed. He wanted his tie adjusted, and his wife subdued. He wanted his shoes shined, his ego massaged. He wanted his way smoothed and his life not just validated by companionship and camaraderie, but managed the way “handlers” groom and buff modern American politicians.
Dress Gray Page 47
