A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  SAMOZA AIR FORCE BASE

  Strategic Air Command

  “PEACE IS OUR PROFESSION”

  Someone in the English Department—probably Herb Rutherford—had once commented upon those strange quotation marks. Who were they quoting? Couldn’t they quite stomach it themselves? But of course Herb Rutherford was the sort of person who got perverse pleasure out of reading the comic strip Steve Canyon. Herb’s office was across the hall, and he was always rushing in, a dark little fellow with hair like steel wool and the most tortured ironic grin on his face. In a way he was the opposite of Geoff Lubie; both were continually hurt and disappointed by the world, but while Geoff became serious and sad, Herb Rutherford turned upon mankind the most constant, bitter grin. It was he, for instance, who read and reported upon the latest editorial in the Birmingham Bugle-Union and Blazon, the ultraconservative newspaper that dominated that section of the state, and which constantly attacked the University. Lately its publisher, Martin Bleb (a name Herb never tired of), had taken to referring to the University as “Leningrad U.” Geoff Lubie read it, too, and of course it helped confirm Geoff’s cosmology. Robert himself seldom read it; it made him vaguely angry and unhappy, and threatened, with its great power, even the security he wanted about his home. Reading it, especially its letters to the editors, could give one the feeling that the state was populated by extremely aggressive half-wits.

  The light changed, and with the slightly prickly feeling that he somehow wasn’t completely authorized, he turned into the base and approached a square little house with a lighted sign on it that said, AIR POLICE, PARK HERE. He did, and went inside. Two very young-looking airmen in pressed blue uniforms, white-painted helmet liners, wearing white-painted holsters and even white whistles on white boondoggle, quickly (it seemed like some sort of deception on their part, it was so quick—almost as though they were then going to trap him) gave him a pass. They didn’t smile, they didn’t scowl, they looked almost exactly alike. The one who asked his name, though, had a southern accent that brought forth in Robert a completely startling nostalgia. Strange after all the years: Fort Devens, Camp Wheeler, Fort Benning, Camp Beale, Fort Lawton—how many others, north and south, had been full of those soft southern voices? He hadn’t been near a military establishment for at least fourteen years—fifteen years. He’d been twenty years old and a buck sergeant when he was discharged, in 1946. And add another army camp to that list—Fort Dix, N.J., where he’d sold his wool overcoat for fifty cents to an old Negro capitalist at the gate and headed for New York in his Ike jacket with the five pretty ribbons on it. Proud, he’d been, even though the five pretty ribbons weren’t very good ones. What were they, now? Could he remember? Good Conduct ribbon—that was red and white; American theater ribbon—that was a joke, though pretty with its green and blue and yellow stripes; Asiatic-Pacific theater ribbon—that was good, but had no battle stars on it; occupation ribbon with some kind of a doodad on it that looked pretty good but didn’t mean anything; then on the other side the Presidential Unit Commendation ribbon—dark blue surrounded by gold—that was all right; and on his right sleeve the toilet-seat wreath for another unit commendation. What else? Two overseas bars on the left sleeve. And he was authorized to wear two more doodads even he had pride enough not to wear. One was the rifle sharpshooter medal, which looked too much like one he’d won at the age of eight in a Y.M.C.A. summer camp (and anyway, only Marines wore that kind of thing), and the expert infantryman’s badge, which looked too much like the combat infantryman’s badge, the best badge of all and one he did not deserve.

  He’d been just a hair too young to see combat, although he’d seen its immediate aftermath—Japanese bodies piled higher than his head, all baked black by flame-throwers; these seen through the oval lenses of a gas mask. That was on Luzon, when they’d begun to clean out the caves. And he’d seen a Filipino guard shoot five prisoners just for hatred and ordinary human sadism. And other military things. Those five skinny Japanese just fell down, kicked and died, hardly like men—or as if they’d all had plenty of practice.

  But in 1946 he’d been so full of youth and a kind of aggressive strength—and five years of propaganda—that it seemed the normal job of a man to see such things without getting sick. He wore his Colt .45 automatic all the time, too, and polished his holster until it shone like good cordovan. Oh, he was tough then, and wanted to have been in combat, and wanted very much to look older than he was.

  He’d been sitting in his car looking vaguely toward the entrance to the air base, and one of the young air police came to the door of the little building and looked at him curiously. He had the feeling that the boy (the soldier) wanted to tell him to move on, to get about his business. So he started the car and drove on. There was one more checking station, and here another air policeman looked carefully at his pass, then gave him directions to the high school. Straight on R, left on A. R for radiation? Funny he couldn’t hear any airplane engines.

  He drove on down the smooth, wide street, low red-brick buildings on either side, then square, windowless blocks with fancy little signs next to their sidewalks. He could just make them out. Some were familiar; he knew, for instance, what 261 Sqdrn Mtr. Pool probably was, but what was B. Amb. Hq. P. Squw.? Something like that, anyway. There were wide lawns, green in the dim street lights, and wide sidewalks, but no trees. The spaces here, the relationships between, say, the widths of the streets and the heights of the buildings, made things hard to see, and in seeing know whether the eyes were properly focused; whoever had planned all this space must not have been quite human, or had deliberately planned it all for purposes other than human ones. Perhaps that cold designer had used too cruelly straight a ruler. It reminded Robert of those thousands of pseudomodern “ranch” houses in which he always felt vaguely trapped; one always knew too well what was behind the next wall, how many rooms were partitioned off, how many rooms there were. Space was used completely, to the last celled inch. Here the whole world seemed to be subject to the same inflexible rules—if one could only solve the equation. Perhaps then (like a rat?) one could focus the eyes and trot directly to any scheduled designation.

  Suddenly the street, though still asphalt, turned bumpy and crumbly, and all around the car a completely different kind of darkness settled, as if he had driven into a chimney; even his headlights, bright though they were on little squares of broken asphalt, seemed to fade after a few yards into blackness. He actually had to rub his eyes, and remembered old dreams of being blind. He stopped the car and put his head out of the window. Near him black shapes that did not move seemed to move, black limbs, piled; he had driven between two mountains of black twisted things like limbs—bodies? He’d just been remembering the burned and putrid Japanese on Luzon, but here the smell was moist and sweet, like the woods; mist shone on things like knees and elbows. And then he saw that they were stumps, thousands of tree stumps, roots coiled in strange parodies of the death agony. Of course. In New England this would be the by-product of such unnatural space and flatness. Elm, pine, maple, spruce, poplar—all torn out by the roots, then machine-piled to be burned.

  “Good God!” he said out loud. He must have missed the turn, and he thought for a moment with real guilt that SAC wouldn’t want him to see this. But then he remembered that he was no longer military himself, he was an English professor, a bumbling, egg-headed absent-minded civilian English professor who would be expected to do such things. But he was going to be late for his class if this kept up. He turned the car around and started back toward the checking station. No one walked along the sidewalks. Cars passed him, and weapons-carrier-like vehicles that looked slightly foreign to him—they bulged in the wrong places, and were too streamlined. But where was the checking station? Just more anonymous, characterless redbrick buildings with dim lights somewhere deep in their insides.

  “Lost in an SAC base,” he said out loud, and as he desperately tried to find a street sign he began to compose a newspaper story: Robert Stiles, ass
istant professor of English, was lost for three days in Samoza Air Force Base. Found by search parties after enquiries from his wife and the University’s Dean of Liberal Arts, Professor Stiles was suffering from thirst and exposure. When asked to comment upon his ordeal, Professor Stiles said that he wasn’t really worried. He remembered, he said, his boy scout training and didn’t panic, but built a fire out of old tree stumps in order to keep warm. “The worst thing to do in such a case,” Professor Stiles said, “is to run screaming up one street and down another.…” But how would the Bugle-Union and Blazon handle it? Air force authorities are wondering why Robert Stiles, a professor at “Leningrad U.,” spent three days in a stump pile in Samoza Air Force Base. Stiles claims he was lost. We wonder whether or not there wasn’t something else in the woodpile. Did the authorities find any cameras, for instance? Who authorized the presence of such a man, from such a pinko, anti-anti-communist university ON THE BASE IN THE VERY FIRST PLACE??

  He was completely lost, now. He simply drove on. Then he came to a building that was at least open. A strange hybrid it was—half night club and half power station. An officers’ club. “Sergeant Stiles reporting for duty, Sir,” he said, stopped his car and went in through wide glass doors. Inside was a sufficiently dim bar, tables, swizzle sticks in highball glasses, a group of handsome, youngish women at a table in the corner—all staring unhappily up at television—and a major sitting alone with a beer. No bartender in sight. With some trepidation—the enlisted man’s built-in, ineradicable consciousness of any rank above company grade—he asked the major where the high school was. The major looked up. He’d been reading a pocket-sized book in that dim bar light, and his smallish eyes widened as they focused. His face was hard, Nordic, and seemed very rugged and for just a second, forbidding; but then it creased here and there where potential creases hadn’t been apparent and it was a very friendly face after all.

  “Yes, Sir,” the major said (Sergeant Stiles felt pleasure at the “sir”), took him out on the sidewalk and pointed to what was, from its tall, lighted gymnasium windows, obviously high-school architecture. It was only about two blocks away.

  “I got lost in a lot of tree stumps,” Robert said.

  “Huh? Oh, Jesus, you must’ve been near the new east-west runway they’re building. Lucky you didn’t go any farther—the dogs would’ve been after you.” This was evidently a joke. The major laughed.

  “Dogs?”

  “You get too near the flight line and rowr!” He made his hands into huge toothy mouths. “They’ve got these ferocious, snarling police dogs—didn’t you read about ’em in LIFE? Take your goddam arm off in one bite.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t get out of the car,” Robert said.

  “A little farther and you’d of put us all on Red Alert.” This seemed funny to the major too. He caught Robert’s quick look at him and raised his eyebrows, making his face into a question: was it funny or not?

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever been on an SAC base,” Robert said as if in answer, “although I saw a movie about SAC a few years ago—with Jimmy Stewart.”

  “Ah, the dear old B-36. Now there was a nice comfortable airplane.”

  Sensing another unasked question, Robert told him he had come on the base in order to teach an extension course.

  “What subject?”

  “English.”

  “English!” The major’s eyebrows went up again. A strange subject, it must have seemed to the major. In the dim light that came through the glass doors Robert looked at the major’s conventionally handsome face. The man was about his own age; the major (those gold oak leaves had meant so much authority and responsibility) seemed older. His blue uniform was clean, pressed so that each crease did what it had been ordered to do, yet in the tough strong face was a quizzical kind of humor. Robert could not help smiling back.

  “You’re looking at your watch. What time is your class?” the major asked.

  “Seven.”

  “You’ve got a few minutes. Mind if I ask you a question?”

  “No.”

  “How did you get into teaching? I mean what made you decide to become an English professor? No, more like this—how in hell did you ever decide to make up your mind about it?”

  “That’s a hard question.”

  “Damn’ right,” the major said.

  “Well, I guess it isn’t too hard, really. When I got out of the army I had years of the G.I. Bill, so I went to school, and then I went to school some more, and pretty soon I was a graduate student, and then a graduate assistant, and I don’t know when I did make up my mind.”

  “You just sort of grew into it? Do you like it?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “You only guess so?”

  “No, I more than guess so. I’m doing all right.”

  “Are you making anything—writing books and all that? You guys have to do more than just teach, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve published a few things—little things, but they give me pleasure. And I’ve got an anthology coming out.”

  “You sound pretty happy, I guess.” Then an unhappy expression came over the major’s face—a dark expression, almost as though a dark color had been flashed for just a second across his face.

  “You’d better head for your class,” he said, looking at his wrist watch. “When does it get over with?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “That’s not late. Look, when you’re through stop back and I’ll buy you a drink. I’ve got more questions…Will you?”

  The face was still unhappy, the face that looked as though it could have looked upon (and perhaps had) squadrons of enemy fighters with little but steely expectancy—even in this light there was a glint of pale-blue eye—looked so sad that Robert felt his own face fall.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll stop back.”

  “Good!” The major looked a little happier. “Good! I’ll see you then.”

  His class, however, had few questions to ask. It was very serious and boring. The students were all young enlisted men, as far as he could tell, for only a few of them wore uniforms. He began the class by asking them what they were doing there—what they expected from some college credits—and one young man in a Hawaiian shirt covered with big red pineapples said he was being “cross-trained.” Robert was going to say that it sounded like something they did to the police dogs, but somehow the atmosphere of the class forbade it. No one smiled at the term, or noticed his perplexity, or volunteered to explain it. In their world, he supposed, being “cross-trained” was pretty obviously being “cross-trained,” and that was that. He never did find out exactly what it meant. The students sat attentively enough at the modern, rounded, metal desks, each of which was held up by one three-inch pipe—as if each had its own plumbing.

  He spent the first forty-five minutes explaining his terms, anyway. They had all done their assignment—that is, they had read Chapter Six of the text. He sensed immediately that they understood little of what they’d read, so he simply began with the first row and asked each man a question from the exercises. They seemed to like this.

  “What’s wrong with sentence number 18? Next man.” Nodding to the next man, a very black Negro corporal (or was two stripes still corporal?). The corporal, if he was one, studied sentence 18 for a full fifteen seconds, then looked up and said doubtfully, “Too long.”

  “Why is it too long?”

  “It don’t say much. Says the same thing over and over.”

  “What’s the term we use for a sentence like that?”

  “Redundant?”

  “That’s one. Can you think of any other terms that could apply?”

  And so on. At the end of forty-five minutes he gave them a ten-minute break and walked out onto the front steps of the school to have a cigarette. No one followed him out. The sky was clear and full of stars, and again he wondered why he heard no jet engines. At home or at school there was always a whisper of them somewhere. Far over toward t
he runways a huge silver tail stood up, unbelievably higher than the building in front of it. He couldn’t tell what kind of airplane it was, but it seemed just too big to be true, too big to fly. Once during the war he had hitched a ride in a B-29, and he’d been surprised at how small it was inside; it reminded him of a playhouse designed for children. A long round tunnel ran right through the middle of it, and there were various little nooks to explore here and there. Not much room in it for grown people. Or grown men.

  The last half of the class went like the first. It was interesting that they never caught on and counted ahead to the sentence they would have to analyse. None of them was very bright; there was no buffoon among them, and no real stupe. Probably the stupes and buffoons had all been cross-trained out.

  Finally the class was over, and he felt certain, at least, that most of them now knew the names for certain rhetorical mistakes; whether or not they would continue to make the same mistakes, now that they had words for them, he would leave to Geoff Lubie.

  It had been a depressing class, one he was sure they were as glad to see finished as he was. He would go have a drink with the sad major, and he deserved one. He hoped the major was still there, because he felt like having a drink and he’d never have the nerve to order one for himself (May I see your AGO card, Sir?).

  But the major was still there, still reading his paperback. He looked up, pleased. “What’ll you have?” he said. “By the way, my name’s…” and though Robert heard the name he immediately forgot it as he told the major his own name; then, too late by a few seconds, he tried to remember it. But it had gone—faded back, as he watched the live person in front of him, into a vague jumble of Scotch-Irish sounds: Mac something. James MacSomething.

  “Call you Bob?” the major asked, and Robert said sure.