The Night in Question: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  I didn’t answer.

  “If the only thing that impresses you is having a big name, then you must be a regular midget. At least that’s the way I see it.” He gave me a hard look and gripped the salt and pepper shakers like a machine gunner about to let off a burst.

  “That’s not the only thing that impresses me.”

  “Oh yeah? What else, then?”

  I let the question settle. “Moral distinction,” I said.

  He repeated the words. They sounded pompous.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I have a feeling that’s not your department, moral distinction.”

  I didn’t argue.

  “And you’re obviously not a celebrity.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So where does that leave you?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “Think you’d remember your own obituary?”

  “Probably not.”

  “No probably about it! You wouldn’t even give it a second thought.”

  “Okay, definitely not.”

  “You wouldn’t even give it a second thought. And you’d be wrong. Because you probably have other qualities that would stand out if you were looking closely. Good qualities. Everybody has something. What do you pride yourself on?”

  “I’m a survivor,” I said. But I didn’t think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.

  Givens said, “With me it’s loyalty. Loyalty is a very clear pattern in my life. You would’ve noticed that if you’d had your eyes open. When you read that a man has served his country in time of war, stayed married to the same woman forty-two years, worked at the same job, by God, that should tell you something. That should give you a certain picture.”

  He stopped to nod at his own words. “And it hasn’t always been easy,” he said.

  I had to laugh, mostly at myself for being such a dim bulb. “It was you,” I said. “You did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Called in the obit.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That would be saying I did it.” Givens couldn’t help smiling, proud of what a slyboots he was.

  I said, “You’re out of your ever-loving mind,” but I didn’t mean it. There was nothing in what Givens had done that I couldn’t make sense of or even, in spite of myself, admire. He had dreamed up a way of going to his own funeral. He’d tried on his last suit, so to speak, seen himself rouged up and laid out, and listened to his own eulogy. And the best part was, he resurrected afterward. That was the real point, even if he thought he was doing it to throw a scare into Dolly or put his virtues on display. Resurrection was what it was all about, and this tax collector had gotten himself a taste of it. It was biblical.

  “You’re a caution, Mr. Givens. You’re a definite caution.”

  “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

  “Relax,” I told him. “I’m not mad.”

  He scraped his chair back and stood up. “I’ve got better things to do than sit here and listen to accusations.”

  I followed him outside. I wasn’t ready to let him go. He had to give me something first. “Admit you did it,” I said.

  He turned away and started up Powell.

  “Just admit it,” I said. “I won’t hold it against you.”

  He kept walking, head stuck forward in that turtlish way, navigating the crowd. He was slippery and fast. Finally I took his arm and pulled him into a doorway. His muscles bunched under my fingers. He almost jerked free, but I tightened my grip and we stood there frozen in contention.

  “Admit it.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll break your neck if I have to,” I told him.

  “Let go,” he said.

  “If something happened to you right now, your obituary would be solid news. Then I could get my job back.”

  He tried to pull away again but I held him there.

  “It’d make a hell of a story,” I said.

  I felt his arm go slack. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “Yes.” Just that one word.

  This was the best I was going to get out of him. It had to be enough. When I let go of his arm he turned and ducked his head and took his place in the stream of people walking past. I started back to Tad’s for my box. Just ahead of me a mime was following a young swell in a three-piece suit, catching to the life his leading-man’s assurance, the supercilious tilt of his chin. A girl laughed raucously. The swell looked back and the mime froze. He was still holding his pose as I came by. I slipped him a quarter, hoping he’d let me pass.

  Casualty

  B.D. carried certain objects. He observed in his dispositions and arrangements a certain order, and became irritable and fearful whenever that order was disrupted. There were certain words he said to himself at certain moments, power words. Sometimes he really believed in all of this; other times he believed in nothing. But he was alive, and he gave honor to all possible causes.

  His name was Benjamin Delano Sears, B.D. for short, but his friends in the unit had taken to calling him Biddy because of his fussiness and the hennish way he brooded over them. He always had to know where they were. He bugged them about taking their malaria pills and their salt tablets. When they were out in the bush he drove them crazy with equipment checks. He acted like a squad leader, which he wasn’t and never would be, because Sergeant Holmes refused to consider him for the job. Sergeant Holmes had a number of sergeant-like sayings. One of them was “If you don’t got what it takes, it’ll take what you gots.” He had decided that B.D. didn’t have what it took, and B.D. didn’t argue; he knew even better than Sergeant Holmes how scared he was. He just wanted to get himself home, himself and his friends.

  Most of them did get home. The unit had light casualties during B.D.’s tour, mainly through dumb luck. One by one B.D.’s friends rotated stateside, and finally Ryan was the only one left. B.D. and Ryan had arrived the same week. They knew the same stories. The names of absent men and past operations and nowhere places had meaning for them, and those who came later began to regard the pair of them as some kind of cultish remnant. And that was pretty much how B.D. and Ryan saw themselves.

  They hadn’t started off as friends. Ryan was a lip, a big mouth. He narrated whatever was happening, like a sportscaster, but the narration never fit what was going on. He’d complain when operations got canceled, go into fey French-accented ecstasies over cold C-rats, offer elaborate professions of admiration for orders of the most transparent stupidity. At first B.D. thought he was a pain in the ass. Then one morning he woke up laughing at something Ryan had said the night before. They’d been setting out claymores. Sergeant Holmes got exasperated fiddling with one of them and said, “Any you boys gots a screwdriver?” and Ryan said, instantly, “What size?” This was regulation blab, but it worked on B.D. He kept hearing Ryan’s voice, its crispness and competence, its almost perfect imitation of sanity.

  What size?

  Ryan and B.D. had about six weeks left to go when Lieutenant Puchinsky, their commanding officer, got transferred to battalion headquarters. Pinch Puchinsky saw himself as a star—he’d been a quarterback at Penn State, spoiled, coddled, illegally subsidized—and he took it for granted that other men would see him the same way. And they did. He never had to insist on an order and never thought to insist, because he couldn’t imagine anyone refusing. He couldn’t imagine anything disagreeable, in fact, and carried himself through every danger as if it had nothing to do with him. Because hardly any of his men got hurt, they held him in reverence.

  So it was in the nature of things that his replacement, Lieutenant Dixon, should be despised, though he was not despicable. He was a proud, thoughtful man who had been wounded twice already and now found himself among soldiers whose laxity seemed perfectly calculated to finish him off. The men didn’t maintain their weapons properly. They had no concept of radio discipline. On patrol they were careless and noisy and slow
to react. Lieutenant Dixon took it upon himself to whip them into shape.

  This proved hard going. He owned no patience or humor, no ease of command. He was short and balding; when he got worked up his face turned red and his voice broke into falsetto. Therefore the men called him Fudd. Ryan mimicked him relentlessly and with terrible precision. That Lieutenant Dixon should overhear him was inevitable, and it finally happened while Ryan and B.D. and some new guys were sandbagging the interior walls of a bunker. Ryan was holding forth in Lieutenant Dixon’s voice when Lieutenant Dixon’s head appeared in the doorway. Everyone saw him. But instead of shutting up, Ryan carried on as if he weren’t there. B.D. kept his head down and his hands busy. At no time was he tempted to laugh.

  “Ryan,” lieutenant Dixon said, “just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Still in the lieutenant’s voice, Ryan said, “Packing sandbags, sir.”

  Lieutenant Dixon watched him. He said, “Ryan, is this your idea of a j-joke?”

  “No, sir. My idea of a j-joke is a four-inch dick on a two-inch lieutenant.”

  B.D. closed his eyes, and when he opened them Lieutenant Dixon was gone. He straightened up. “Suave,” he said to Ryan.

  Ryan pushed his shovel into the dirt and leaned against it. He untied the bandana from his forehead and wiped the sweat from his face, from his thin shoulders and chest. His ribs showed. His skin was dead white, all but his hands and neck and face, which were densely freckled, almost black in the dimness of the bunker. “I just can’t help it,” he said.

  Three nights later Lieutenant Dixon sent Ryan out on ambush with a bunch of new guys. This was strictly contrary to the arrangement observed by Lieutenant Puchinsky, whereby the shorter you got the less you had to do. You weren’t supposed to get stuck with this kind of duty when you had less than two months to go. Lieutenant Dixon did not exactly order Ryan out. What he did instead was turn to him during the noon formation and ask if he’d like to volunteer. Ryan said that he would love to volunteer, that he’d been just dying to be asked. Lieutenant Dixon put his name down.

  B.D. watched the detail go out that night. With blackened faces they moved silently through the perimeter, weaving a loopy path between mines and trip-flares, and crossed the desolate ground beyond the wire into the darkness of the trees. The sky was a lilac haze.

  B.D. went back to his bunk and sat there with his hands on his knees, staring at the mess on Ryan’s bunk: shaving gear, cigarettes, dirty clothes, sandals, a high-school yearbook that Ryan liked to browse in. B.D. lifted the mosquito netting and picked up the yearbook. The Aloysian, it was called. There was a formal portrait of Ryan in the senior class gallery. He looked solemn, almost mournful. His hair was long. The photographer had airbrushed the freckles out and used backlights to brighten the outline of his head and shoulders. B.D. wouldn’t have known him without the name. Below Ryan’s picture was the line “O for a beakerful of the warm South!”

  Now what the hell was that supposed to mean?

  He found Ryan in a few group pictures. In one, taken in metal shop, Ryan was standing with some other boys behind the teacher, holding a tangle of antlerish rods above the teacher’s head.

  B.D. studied the picture. He was familiar with this expression, the plausible blandness worn like a mask over cunning and mockery. It made B.D. want to catch Ryan’s eye and let him know that he saw what was going on. He put the book back on Ryan’s bed.

  His stomach hurt. It was a new pain, not sharp but steady, and so diffuse that B.D. had to probe with his fingers to find its source. When he bent over the pain got worse, then eased up when he stood and walked back and forth in front of his bunk. One of the new guys, a big Hawaiian, said, “Hey, Biddy, you okay?” B.D. stopped pacing. He had forgotten there was anyone else in the room. This Hawaiian and a guy with a green eyeshade and a bunch of others were playing cards. They were all watching him.

  B.D. said, “Haven’t you read the surgeon-general’s warning?”

  The Hawaiian looked down at his cigarette.

  “Fuckin’ Biddy,” said the man with the eyeshade, as if B.D. wasn’t there. “Eight months I’ve been in this shithole and he’s still calling me new guy.”

  “Ryan calls me Tonto,” the Hawaiian said. “Do I look like an Indian? Seriously, man, do I look like an Indian?”

  “You don’t exactly look like a white man.”

  “Yeah? Well I don’t even look like an Indian, okay?”

  “Call him Kemo Sabe. See how he likes that.”

  “Ryan? He’d love it.”

  B.D. walked toward Sergeant Holmes’s hooch. The sky was low and heavy. They’d had hamburgers that night for dinner, “ratburgers,” Ryan called them (Hey, Cookie, how about tucking in the tail on this one?), and the air still smelled of grease. B.D. felt a sudden coldness on his back and dropped to a crouch, waiting for something; he didn’t know what. He heard the chugging of generators, crumple and thud of distant artillery, the uproarious din of insects. B.D. huddled there. Then he stood and looked around and went on his way.

  Sergeant Holmes was stretched out on his bunk, listening to a big reel-to-reel through a set of earphones that covered his head like a helmet. He had on red Bermuda shorts. His eyes were closed, his long spidery fingers waving languorously over his sunken belly. He had the blackest skin B.D. had ever seen on anyone. B.D. sat down beside him and shook his foot. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Russ.”

  Sergeant Holmes opened his eyes, then slowly pulled the earphones off.

  “Dixon has no business sending Ryan out on ambush.”

  Sergeant Holmes sat up and put the earphones on the floor. “You wrong about that. That’s what the man’s business is, is sending people out.”

  “Ryan’s been out. Plenty. He’s under two months now.”

  “Same-same you, right?”

  B.D. nodded.

  “I see why you worried.”

  “Fuck you,” B.D. said.

  Sergeant Holmes grinned. It was an event in that black face.

  “This goes against the deal, Russ.”

  “Deal? What’s this deal shit? You got something on paper?”

  “It was understood.”

  “Eltee Pinch gone, Biddy. Eltee Dixon head rat-catcher now, and he got his own different philosophy.”

  “Philosophy,” B.D. said.

  “That’s how it is,” Sergeant Holmes said.

  B.D. sat there, looking at the floor, rubbing his knuckles. “What do you think?”

  “I think Lieutenant Dixon in charge now.”

  “The new guys can take care of themselves. We did.”

  “You did shit, Biddy. You been duckin’ ever since you got here, you and Ryan both.”

  “We took our chances.”

  “Hey, that’s how it is, Biddy. You don’t like it, talk to the Eltee.” He pulled his earphones on, lay back on the bunk and closed his eyes. His fingers waved in the air like seaweed.

  A few days later Lieutenant Dixon put together another ambush patrol. Before reading off the names he asked if one of the short-timers would like to volunteer. Nobody answered. Everyone was quiet, waiting. Lieutenant Dixon studied his clipboard, wrote something, and looked up. “Right. So who’s going?” When no one spoke he said, “Come on, it isn’t all that bad. Is it, Ryan?”

  B.D. was standing next to him. “Don’t answer,” he whispered.

  “It’s just great!” Ryan said. “Nothing like it, sir. You’ve got your stars twinkling up there in God’s heaven—”

  “Thanks,” Lieutenant Dixon said.

  “The trees for company—”

  “Shut up,” B.D. said.

  But Ryan kept at it until Lieutenant Dixon got impatient and cut him off. “That’s fine,” he said, then added, “I’m glad to hear you like it so much.”

  “Can’t get enough of it, sir.”

  Lieutenant Dixon slapped the clipboard against his leg. He did it again. “So I guess you wouldn’t mind having another crack at it.”

&nbs
p; “Really, sir? Can I?”

  “I think it can be arranged.”

  B.D. followed Ryan to their quarters after lunch. Ryan was laying out his gear. “I know, I know,” he said. “I just can’t help it.”

  “You can keep your mouth shut. You can stop hard-assing the little fuck.”

  “The thing is, I can’t. I try to but I can’t.”

  “Bullshit,” B.D. said, but he saw that Ryan meant it, and the knowledge made him tired. He lowered himself onto his bunk and lay back and stared up at the canvas roof. Sunlight spangled in a thousand little holes.

  “He’s such an asshole,” Ryan said. “Somebody’s got to brief him on that, because he just doesn’t get the picture. He doesn’t have any hard intelligence on what an asshole he is. Somebody around here’s got to take responsibility.”

  “Nobody assigned you,” B.D. said.

  “Individual initiative,” Ryan said. He sat down on his footlocker and began tinkering with the straps of his helmet.

  B.D. closed his eyes. The air was hot and pressing and smelled of the canvas overhead, a smell that reminded him of summer camp.

  “But that’s not really it,” Ryan said. “I’d just as soon let it drop. I think I’ve made my point.”

  “Affirmative. Rest assured.”

  “It’s like I’m allergic—you know, like some people are with cats? I get near him and boom! my heart starts pumping like crazy and all this stuff starts coming out. I’m just standing there, watching it happen. Strange, huh? Strange but true.”

  “All you have to do,” B.D. said hopelessly, “is keep quiet.”

  The power of an M-26 fragmentation grenade, sufficient by itself to lift the roof off a small house, could be “exponentially enhanced,” according to a leaflet issued by the base commander, “by detonating it in the context of volatile substances.” This absurdly overwritten leaflet, intended as a warning against the enemy practice of slipping delay-rigged grenades into the gas tanks of unattended jeeps and trucks, was incomprehensible to half the men in the division. But B.D. had understood it, and he’d kept it in mind.

  His idea was to pick up a five-gallon can of gasoline from one of the generators and leave it beside the tent where Lieutenant Dixon did his paperwork at night. He would tape down the handle of a grenade, pull the pin, and drop the grenade in the can. By the time the gas ate through the tape he’d be in his bunk.