by Andre Dubus
The man who picked him up was a Lutheran minister who was returning home from services and going only a few miles south of the city; but he drove Roy all the way to Camp Pendleton, called him Sergeant, wondered aloud about the damages to the fleet and if the Japs were going to keep on coming, to California; he spoke of coastal defense, of going into the Navy as a chaplain (he was thirty-six), and at the main gate he firmly shook Roy’s hand, and said: ‘Good luck, and God bless you, Sergeant.’ Roy nearly smiled. He thought of the man in uniform, the cross on his lapel. Roy had heard little of what the minister had said: on the drive south he had been thinking about his gear waiting for him, clean and ready, and trying to imagine what was happening in the barracks, and he knew he was late for something, but for what? What was the platoon doing? The company? He thought of them digging foxholes in the hills overlooking the beach; saw them marching to trucks which would drive them to ships. What happened when a war started? How did you finally get to where the war was? He could not imagine it. It was all too big.
Later that week he wrote his last lie to Sheila: told her his promotion had come through the day after the war started. He never saw her again. Exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor he followed Lieutenant DiMeo through the surf and across the beach at Guadalcanal. The Japanese were not there; that came two weeks later, farther inland.
In the summer of 1944, when he was certain as he could be that he would spend the rest of the war as a drill instructor, he applied for leave to get married, took some obscene harassment from the First Sergeant (and enjoyed it), and phoned Sheila, telling her to go ahead with the plans for the wedding. He felt no sense of duty. He wanted to hold her and tell her about the war. He had written about it, but not much: except for a few words his letters could have been written by any man doing work away from home. He had left out the details he now wanted to share with her because he had not wanted her to know them until he was with her.
The truth had not occurred to him: that because of newsreels and newspapers and magazines there was nothing he could tell her that would be as terrifying as what she had already imagined. She never wrote of this in her letters. Also, Marshall had its dead and its maimed (she never wrote of this either), and one—a victim of shell shock—who daily walked the streets, though his mind was permanently somewhere else; people treated him kindly, spoke to him as though he were sane; he liked to imitate the sound of a train whistle, did it often, and was very good at it. So Roy had protected her from nothing.
From nothing at all, so that when he did not get off the train the morning before the wedding she was heartbroken and humiliated (already thinking of the phone calls she would have to make), but she was not absolutely surprised. She did not phone the Recruit Depot. That night her father got quietly drunk and finally said: ‘I should have put a shotgun to his butt eight years ago and marched him down to the church.’ Sheila moved to the sofa and sat beside him and held his hand to shut him up; she told him she was all right, it was better to learn this about Roy now than find it out later when they were married and maybe even had children. Though she was afraid he would start to mutter about seduction and damaged goods, she also felt loved because he knew, and she wished things were different between them and that she could take him out on the porch, away from her mother, and ask him how, all those years, from the very beginning, he had known. She promised herself that someday when she was older (and at this moment she knew she would leave Marshall soon, and would, yes, marry) she would take him aside, out in her backyard in Houston or Dallas (yes, it would have to be a city now, after this) and she would ask him how he had known. But she never did.
Yet out of that promise to herself came the vision of her future. A month later she moved to Houston and got a job as a dentist’s receptionist. The dentist was single and was soon dating her. He was forty-two years old; she found that interesting, but little more. At one of his parties she met a geologist who had just returned to his job with an oil company after flying Corsairs from an aircraft carrier; his left arm was gone. At first when they made love and the stump moved above her right breast and shoulder she remembered Roy’s arm: both arms on the earth in the woods. And sometimes she felt that the spirit of the arm extended from the stump and held her. When she told him, he said he could feel it too. Lying with him at night she listened to his war stories; a year later they drove to Marshall and got married.
On the night before he was supposed to pick up his leave papers and catch the train, Roy could not have predicted any of this. A half dozen sergeants took him out in San Diego. When they got drunk one of them joked about getting Roy laid. Roy blinked at him and was suddenly, drunkenly, depressed. He had forgotten why they were drinking. He had not forgotten the facts: that he was going on leave tomorrow, that he was going to Marshall, going to marry Sheila. But he had forgotten her presence. She seemed as far away as she had when he was younger, before the war. The friend who had suggested a whorehouse was watching him.
‘Cheer up,’ the friend said. The others looked at Roy, stopped talking.
‘The troops,’ Roy said. ‘You’ve got to train the fucking troops.’
Someone nodded, motioned to the waitress, ordered Roy a shot. Roy didn’t want it, but said nothing; then he did want it, waited with anticipation for it, felt his drunkenness taking him somewhere, somewhere he had been, somewhere he was going.
‘You got to kick ass. At the Canal we weren’t ready. Fucking Japs were ready.’
‘Peleliu,’ someone murmured, and Roy’s shot came.
‘We learned from them. We weren’t ready.’ He held the shot glass, looked at it; then he gulped it dry, seeing as clearly as the moment it happened the death of Lieutenant DiMeo walking into the jungle on Guadalcanal when they were still learning about the Japanese and camouflage; when DiMeo was ten feet from an antitank gun, looking directly at the brush that concealed it, they fired and took his head off. Roy saw himself on his belly firing into the brush, through the image of blood spurting out of DiMeo’s body that twitched and seemed to try to speak; from that moment on he had been certain he would not leave Guadalcanal. When they left the island four months later he led the platoon up the landing net, onto the ship. At the top he looked down: the troops were spread beneath him; most were not halfway up the net; several stopped to rest after each climbing step. He climbed onto the deck and looked down at their helmets and the gear on their backs and their toiling arms and legs. He had not known until then how tired they were; then he realized they hadn’t known either. ‘We were ready in here,’ he said, pointing to his heart. ‘Not here.’ He pointed to his head. ‘We had to learn. When I write to—’ He paused, waited, a moment’s blank in his mind, the moment seeming to him longer, fearfully longer, until her name floated up to him out of some region of need for women, needs satisfied and needs not—‘Sheila,’ he said. ‘When I write to her all I can write about is the troops. It’s all I know.’ He looked around at the six faces. ‘It’s all I fucking want to know. She answers the letters. She says, I’m glad your men are learning. But it’s all I write to her about: the fucking troops. You know what I mean?’
He looked at the friend who wanted to go to a whorehouse.
‘No,’ the friend said.
‘I mean I love the fucking troops. You got to train them. You got to put it in here—’ again he touched his breast ‘—and it gets there through the ass end. That’s all I write to her about. The fucking Corps. All I want to do is train troops and kick their ass and go out and drink with my Goddamn friends. I don’t want a Goddamn house full of gear. I don’t want to go home to that shit. If a man—’ he picked up his empty shot glass, looked in it; someone ordered him another ‘—if a man could have his Goddamn quarters on the base, with his bunk and his gear squared away and go home to his woman—’ He stopped again: the word woman drove Sheila’s name from his mind, replaced the image of her in a San Diego kitchen with no image at all but merely with a nebulous and designated emotion; and he glimpsed the concret
e details of his life as male and military, uniforms and gear and troops, and his needs for a woman had no surrounding details at all, they all ended in something abstract. He could not see himself in a house with one of them, could not see himself taking all but his noon meals with one of them, and could not imagine what he would do with one of them on ordinary Saturdays and the old useless Sundays: saw the two of them smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio; and the woman he saw was not Sheila, was not any woman at all, a face and body vague as the people in the far background of a newspaper photograph.
‘Fuck it,’ he said.
His curse was decisive. And he kept himself from feeling Sheila’s pain by making her generic, placing her with all the good women who had no real part in his life, so that it wasn’t Sheila he was rejecting but cohabitation, and in this brief and cathartic vision he was able to feel as guiltless and purposeful as a monk choosing prayers and a cell. Yet he wasn’t happy either. He felt despair at his limitations, and he raised his glass in an unspoken toast to the grave forecast of loneliness, and repeated his curse.
Which followed him through the years, the years which began next morning when he reported in uniform to the burly First Sergeant who had Roy’s leave papers waiting, along with a speech about women and marriage. Roy told him he was not going on leave, he was not getting married, and he wanted a platoon of recruits as soon as the next shitload of them came in. The First Sergeant glared at him; he did not like to show surprise but he knew it was in his face, so he exaggerated it, made it look like it wasn’t surprise at all.
‘What manner of coo-coo juice were you drinking last night, Hodges?’
‘Most of San Diego.’
‘And who called off this Texas altar-fuck?’
‘I did.’
The First Sergeant leaned back in his chair.
‘Sergeant Hodges, there are two holes a man doesn’t want to get into. One of them he can’t stay out of unless he’s buried at sea, cremated, or set upon by a tribe of bone-licking cannibals. The other is the hole between the legs of a woman who’s wearing the fuck-ring. Unless it has been placed on her finger by some other dumb son of a bitch who figured in order to fuck self-same lady he had to get a job and buy a house to do it in. I’ve had many adventures in the fuck-houses of others. You are a fortunate man: when you were seagoing I’m sure you heard many tales of woe from sailors who were unable to forgive the trespassers who entered their fuck-houses while the ship was out to sea. So I’m sure you have learned that the best duty in the Marine Corps is with the infantry, and the second best is to serve at a barracks on a naval base, so as to be available to those lonesome wives when the ships go do their merry shit at sea. I have no doubts that there are several U.S. Navy dependents who bear a resemblance to the First Sergeant who talks to you now, but who step on the toes of a sailor they call Daddy. This may also be true of certain Marine dependents. I have never known a woman who gave a fart whether she was married or not once it came upon her that what she wanted to do was fuck. But it could be that, as well-travelled as I am, my experience is still limited. For instance I have never fucked in the state of Nebraska, partly because I’ve heard it’s considered a felony there. Then again, it could be I have only known bad women, because like a pointer I smell out the pheasant and ignore the dove. You will find that sailors have the worst wives of all military men. One reason is your average sailor is a dumb shit once he sets foot on land. They spend too much time on boats. They all turn into country hicks, doesn’t matter where they came from to begin with. They get into port and they either believe everything they see, or they don’t understand it; worse than that, they believe everything they hear. Which brings us to the next point: it’s a rare sailor that gets more than six blocks from the pier. So what they do is meet the women that hang out in sailors’ bars. There you have it. What they meet is semi-pro whores. I am right now, Sergeant Hodges—though not at the moment, since you can see I’m here at my desk about to tear up your leave papers and lend a helping hand in saving your young ass from bad watering hole number two—fucking the sweet wife of a gunner’s mate, said gunner’s mate stationed on a destroyer. I hope he comes back alive. She does not talk about him, nor has she told me his name. There is a color photograph of him in uniform; it sits on the bureau in the bedroom, which allows him to watch my ass-end doing its humble work on his wife. While I am thus at labor I do believe I think about him more than she does. Sergeant Hodges, I do not mean to piss you off when I say I assume you fucked this girl who lives and reigns in Marshall, Texas. It could even be that you were the first to do the old prone dance with her—’ Roy nodded, and then was ashamed, and then he was sad, thinking of her eight years ago on the blanket in the woods. The phrase ran through his weary hung-over mind: on the blanket in the woods. ‘Ah: a virgin. I have noticed that women can be compared to shooters. The virgin—and I have only had two of them, very long ago, and will never have another unless I come across some horny old nun—the virgin uses Kentucky windage. She moves her weapon this way and that, adjusting to the wind. And you are the wind. And the wind must go. But not to Nebraska, where it’s frowned upon. I have no doubt the lady in Marshall is pretty, else you would not have spent such time and money crossing the state of Texas. So you can be assured that your place will soon be taken, and she’ll be better at it this time around, and thus you will have two people who will be thankful to you. It behooves—’
‘First Sergeant.’
‘Speak.’
‘Can I have the day off to get rid of this fucking hangover?’
‘I recommend a shot of booze, a piece of ass, and a long sleep. Here—’ He wrote on the note pad on his desk, tore the page out, and gave it to Roy.
‘Her name is Meg. Tell her you’re an old buddy of mine, just back from the wars. Don’t let her get you out of the house, or she’ll spend all your money.’
Roy neither liked nor understood the collusive look in the First Sergeant’s eyes, the softening of his mouth and jaw. But he put the paper in his pocket, borrowed a friend’s car, and drove into town and to her apartment where, after coffee and pretense at talk, he spent the day in bed, from time to time looking at the gunner’s mate watching from the bureau. Just after sundown he was lying on his back and she was licking his chest and belly, moving down, when she stopped and said: ‘He’ll ask about this too.’
‘Who?’
‘Johnny.’
It took him a moment to think of the First Sergeant as Johnny.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He likes to hear about it. While we’re screwing he likes to hear about it with somebody else.’
‘You tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘You like to tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus.’
But he was not really disturbed. Scornfully he thought of Sheila. Then Meg moved down again and he stroked her hair and thought of nothing. His curse of the night before had taken flesh, and he came in its mouth.
Two nights later he wrote to Sheila. He wrote that he loved his career and he had no place for a wife. It took him one page, and seeing his life so compressed saddened him. He dropped the page to the floor. On another page he told her how sorry he was, and how he hated himself. He thought of her standing at the train station, waiting after the last passenger had gone by. She would have been dressed up. He picked up the first letter and tore both of them in half and wadded them in his fist. Better to slash a wrist and send her a page soaked in his blood. The phone wouldn’t do either. What he needed was to see her, to be there now without transition, to deliver to her some immortal touch that was neither erotic nor comforting but something new and final between them: to firmly and lovingly squeeze her hand and look into her eyes and then disappear, like a love-rooted ghost making its farewell.
At St. Croix
PETER JACKMAN and Jo Morrison were both divorced, and had been lovers since winter. She knew much about his marriage, as he did about hers, and at
times it seemed to Peter that their love had grown only from shared pain. His ex-wife, Norma, had married and moved to Colorado last summer, and he had not seen David and Kathi since then. They were eleven and nine, and in June they were coming to Massachusetts to spend the summer with him. In May, Peter and Jo went to St. Croix to recover, as they said, from the winter. They did not mean simply the cold, but their nights tangled with the sorrow of divorce, with euphoric leaps away from it, with Peter’s creeping out of the house while Jo’s two girls slept, with his grieving for his children, and with both of them drinking too much, talking too much, needing too much.
The hotel at St. Croix was a crescent of separate buildings facing the sea. The beach was short and narrow, bounded by rocks that hid the rest of the coastline. About thirty yards out, a reef broke the surf, and the water came gently and foamless, and lapped at the beach. Peter could have walked to the reef without wetting his shoulders, but he stayed close to shore, swimming in water so shallow that sometimes his hands touched rocks and pebbles and sand. Jo was curious about him in that warmly possessive way that occurs when people become lovers before they are friends, and on the first day she asked him about the water. They were in lounge chairs near a palm tree on the beach, and she was watching his face. He looked beyond the reef at the blue sea and sky.
‘I don’t know. I’ve always been afraid of it.’
‘What about the beach at home. You said you liked it.’
‘I do. But I don’t go out over my chest.’
‘Maybe you just went for your children.’
‘No. I love it. And this.’ He waved a hand seaward. ‘And bodysurfing. The worst about that is when I turn my back. I don’t like turning my back on the sea.’
‘Let’s leave Buck Island to the fish.’
She was smiling at him, and there was no disappointment in her face or voice.
