High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  Up the street a couple girls from one of the local colleges were handing out "literature." They both had straight hair and baggy-looking clothes, and it appeared that they were doing their level best to look as ugly as possible, even though they were both not really that bad. I knew the type. Most of the GI's were ignoring them, and the two kids looked a little desperate.

  "Here, soldier," the short one said, mistaking my look of sympathy for interest. She thrust a leaflet into my hand. I glanced at it. It informed me that I was engaged in an immoral war and that decent people looked upon me as a swaggering bully with bloody hands. Further, it told me that if I wanted to desert, there were people who were willing to help me get out of the country.

  "Interesting," I said, handing it back to her.

  "What's the matter?" she sneered. "Afraid an MP might catch you with it?"

  "Not particularly," I said.

  "Forget him Clydine," the other one said. That stopped me.

  "Is that really your name?" I asked the little one.

  "So what?"

  "I've just never met anybody named Clydine before."

  "Is anything wrong with it?" she demanded. She was very short, and she glared up at me belligerently. "I'm not here for a pickup, fella."

  "Neither am I, girlie," I told her. I dislike being called "fella." I always have.

  "Then you approve of what the government's doing in Vietnam?" She got right to the point, old Clydine. No sidetracks for her.

  "They didn't ask me."

  "Why don't you desert then?"

  Her chum pitched in, too. "Don't you want to get out of the country?"

  "I've just been out of the country," I objected.

  "We're just wasting our time on this one, Joan," Clydine said. "He isn't even politically aware."

  "It's been real," I told them. "I'll always remember you both fondly."

  They turned their backs on me and went on handing out pamphlets.

  Farther up the street another young lady stopped me, but she wasn't offering politics. She was surprisingly direct about what she was offering.

  Next a dirty-looking little guy wanted to give me a "real artistic" tattoo. I turned him down, too.

  Farther along, a GI with wasted-looking eyeballs tried to sell me a lid of grass.

  I went into another bar — a fairly quiet one — and mulled it around over a beer. I decided that I must have had the look of somebody who wanted something. I couldn't really make up my mind why.

  I went back on down the street. It was a sad, grubby street with sad, grubby people on it, all hysterically afraid that some GI with money on him might get past them.

  That thought stopped me. The four hundred I'd won was in my blouse pocket, and I sure didn't want to get rolled. It was close enough after payday to make a lone GI a pretty good target, so I decided that I'd better get off Pacific Avenue.

  But what the hell does a guy do with himself on his first night back in the States? I ticked off the possibilities. I could get drunk, get laid, get rolled, or go to a movie. None of those sounded very interesting. I could walk around, but my feet hurt. I could pick a fight with somebody and get thrown in jail — that one didn't sound like much fun at all. Maybe I could get a hamburger-to-go and jump off a bridge.

  Most of the guys I'd come back with were hip-deep in family by now, but I hadn't even bothered to let my Old Lady know I was coming back. The less I saw of her, the better we'd both feel. That left Jack. I finally got around to him. Probably it was inevitable. I suppose it had been in the back of my mind all along.

  I knew that Jack was probably still in Tacoma someplace. He always came back here. It was his home base. He and I hadn't been particularly close since we'd been kids, and I'd only seen him about three times since the Old Man died. But this was family night, and he was it. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have driven a mile out of my way to see him.

  "Piss on it," I said and went into a drugstore to use the phone.

  "Hello?" His voice sounded the same as I remembered.

  "Jack? This is Dan."

  "Dan? Dan who?"

  Now there's a great start for you. Gives you a real warm glow right in the gut. I almost hung up.

  "Your brother. Remember?" I said dryly.

  "Dan? Really? I thought you were in the Army — in England or someplace."

  "Germany," I said. "I just got back today."

  "You stationed out here at the Fort now?"

  "Yeah, I'm at the separation center."

  "You finishing up already? Oh, that's right, you were only in for two years, weren't you?"

  "Yeah, only two," I said.

  "It's my brother," he said to someone, "the one that's been in the Army. How the hell should I know? — Dan, where are you? Out at the Fort?"

  "No, I'm downtown."

  "Pitchin' yourself a liberty, huh?"

  "Not really," I said. "I've only got three more days till I get out, and I think I'll keep my nose clean."

  "Good idea — hey, you got anything on for tonight? I mean any chickie or anything?"

  "No," I said, "just kicking around. I thought I'd just give you a call and let you know I was still alive, is all."

  "Why don't you grab a bus and bag on out? I'd come and pick you up, but Margaret's workin' tonight, and she's got the car."

  "Your wife?"

  "Yeah — and I've got to watch the kids. I've got some beer in the fridge. We can pop open a few and talk old times."

  "AU right," I said. "How do I find the place?"

  "I'm out on South Tacoma Way. You know which bus to take?"

  "I think I can remember."

  "Get off at Seventy-eighth Street and come down the right hand side. It's the Green Lodge Trailer Court. I'm in number seventeen — a blue and white Kenwood."

  "OK," I told him. "I'll be out in a half hour or so."

  "I'll be lookin' for you."

  I slowly hung up. This was going to be a mistake. Jack and I hadn't had anything in common for years now. I pictured an evening with the both of us desperately trying to think of something to say.

  "Might as well get it over with," I muttered. I stopped by a liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. Maybe with enough anesthetic, neither one of us would suffer too much.

  I sat on the bus reading the ads pasted above the windows and watching people get off and on. They were mostly old ladies. There's something about old ladies on buses — have you ever noticed? I've never been able to put my finger on it, but whatever it is, it makes me want to vomit. How's that for an inscription on a tombstone? "Here Lies Daniel Alders — Old Ladies on Buses Made Him Want to Puke."

  Then I sat watching the streets and houses go by. I still couldn't really accept any of it as actuality. It all had an almost dreamlike quality — like coming in in the middle of a movie. Everybody else is all wrapped up in the story, but you can't even tell the good guys from the bad guys. Maybe that's the best way to put it.

  The bus dropped me off at Seventy-eighth, and I saw the sickly green neon GREEN LODGE TRAILER COURT sign flickering down the block. I popped the seal on the pint and took a good belt. Then I walked on down to the entrance.

  It was one of those "just-twenty-minutes-from-Fort Lewis" kind of places, with graveled streets sprinkled with chuckholes. Each trailer had its tired little patch of lawn surrounded by a chicken-wire fence to keep the kids out of the streets. Assorted broken-down old cars moldered on flat tires here and there. What few trees there were looked pretty discouraged.

  It took me a while to find number seventeen. I stood outside for a few minutes, watching. I could see my brother putzing around inside — thin, dark, moving jerkily. Jack had always been like that — nervous, fast with his hands. He'd always had quick grin that he'd turn on when he wanted something. His success with women was phenomenal. He moved from job to job, always landing on his feet, always trying to work a deal, never quite making it. If he hadn't been my brother, I'd have called him a small-tune hustler.

 
I stood outside long enough to get used to his face again. I wanted to get past that strangeness stage when you say all kinds of silly-ass things because most of your attention is concentrated on the other person's physical appearance. I think that's why reunions of any sort go sour — people are so busy looking at each other that they can't think of anything to say.

  Finally I went up and knocked.

  "Dan," he called, "is that you? Come on in."

  I opened the screen door and stepped inside.

  "Hey there, little brother, you're lookin' pretty good," he said, grinning broadly at me. He was wearing a T-shirt, and I could see the tattoos on his arms. They had always bothered me, and I always tried not to look at them.

  "Hello, Jack," I said, shaking his hand. I tried to come on real cool.

  "God damn," he said, still grinning and hanging onto my hand. "I haven't seen you in three or four years now. Last time was when I came back from California that time, wasn't it? I think you were still in college, weren't you?"

  "Yeah, I think so," I said.

  "You've put on some beef since then, huh?" He playfully punched me in the shoulder. "What are you now? About a hundred and ninety?"

  "One-eighty," I said. "A lot of it's German beer." I slapped my belly.

  "You're lookin' better. You were pretty scrawny last time I seen you. Sit down, sit down, for Chrissake. Here gimme your jacket. It's too fuckin' hot for that thing anyway. Don't you guys get summer uniforms?"

  "Mine are all rolled up in the bottom of my duffle bag," I told him, pulling off the jacket. I saw him briefly glance at the pint I had tucked in my belt. I wasn't trying to hide it.

  He hung my blouse over a kitchen chair. "How about a beer?"

  "Sure." I put the brown-sacked pint on the coffee table and sat down on the slightly battered couch. He was fumbling around in the refrigerator. I think he was a little nervous. I got a kick out of that for some reason.

  I looked around. The trailer was like any other — factory-made, filled with the usual cheap furniture that was guaranteed to look real plush for about six weeks. It had the peculiar smell trailers always have and that odd sense of transience. Somehow it suited Jack. I think he'd been gravitating toward a trailer all his life. At least he fit in someplace. I wondered what I was gravitating toward.

  "Here we go," he said, coming back in with a couple caps of beer. "I just put the kids to bed, so we've got the place to ourselves." He gave me one of the cans and sat in the armchair.

  "How many kids have you got?" I asked him.

  “Two — Marlene and Patsy. Marlene's two and a half, and Patsy's one."

  "Good deal," I said. What the hell else can you say? I pushed the pint over to him. "Here, have a belt of bourbon."

  "Drinkin' whiskey," he said approvingly.

  We both had a belt and sat looking at each other.

  "Well, " I said inanely, "what are you up to?" I fished out a cigarette to give myself something to do.

  "Oh, not a helluva lot really, Dan. I've been workin' down me block at the trailer sales place and helping Sloane at his pawnshop now and then. You remember him, don't you? It's a real good deal for me because I can take what he owes me out in merchandise, and it don't show up on my income tax. Margaret's workin' in a dime store, and the trailer's paid for, so we're in pretty good shape."

  "How's the Old Lady? You heard from her lately?" It had to get around to her sooner or later. I figured I'd get it out of the way.

  "Mom? She's in Portland. I hear from her once in a while. She's back on the sauce again, you know."

  "Oh, boy," I said with disgust. That was really the last damned straw. My mother had written me this long, tearjerker letter while I was in Germany about how she had seen the light and was going to give up drinking. I hadn't answered the damned thing because I really didn't give a shit one way or the other, but I'd kind of hoped she could make it. I hadn't seen her completely sober since I was about twelve, and I thought it might be kind of a switch.

  "You and her had a beef, didn't you?" Jack asked, lighting a cigarette.

  "Not really a beef," I said. "It just all kind of built up. You weren't around after Dad died."

  "Naw. I saw things goin' sour long before that. Man, I was in Navy boot camp three days after my seventeenth birthday. I barely made it back for the funeral." He jittered the cigarette around in his hands.

  "Yeah, I remember. After you left, she just got worse and worse. The Old Man hung on, but it finally just wore him down. His insurance kind of set us up for a while, but it only took her a year or so to piss that away. She was sure Mrs. High Society for a while though. And then, of course, all the boyfriends started to show up — like about a week after the funeral. Slimy bastards, every one of them. I tried to tell her they were just after the insurance money, but you never could talk to her. She knew it all."

  "She hasn't got too much upstairs," Jack agreed, "even when she's sober."

  "Anyway, about every month, one of her barroom Romeos would break it off in her for a couple of hundred and split out on her. She'd cry and blubber and threaten to turn on the gas or some damned thing. Then after a day or so she'd get all gussied up in one of those whorehouse dresses she's partial to and go out and find true love again."

  "Sounds like a real bad scene."

  "A bummer. A two-year bummer. I cut out right after high school — knocked around for a year or so and then wound up in college. It's a good place to hide out."

  "You seen her since you split?"

  "Couple times," I said. "Once I had to bail her out of jail, and once she came to where I was staying to mooch some money for booze. Gave me that 'After all, I am your mother' routine. I told her to stick it in her ear. I think that kind of withered things."

  "She hardly ever mentions you when I see her," Jack said.

  "Maybe if I'm lucky she'll forget me altogether," I said. "I need her about like I need leprosy."

  "You know something, little brother?" Jack said, grinning at me, "you can be an awful cold-blooded bastard when you want to be."

  "Comes from my gentle upbringing," I told him. "Have another belt." I waved at the whiskey bottle.

  "I don't want to drink up all your booze," Jack said, taking the pint. "Remember, I know how much a GI makes."

  "Go ahead, man," I said. "Take a goddamn drink. I hit it big in a stud-poker game on the troopship. I'm fat city." I knew that would impress him.

  "Won yourself a bundle, huh?"

  "Shit. I was fifteen hundred ahead for a while, but there was this old master sergeant in the game — Riker his name was — and he gave me poker lessons till who laid the last chunk."

  "How much you come out with?"

  "Couple hundred," I said cautiously. I didn't want to encourage the idea that I was rich.

  "Walkin' around money anyway," he said, taking a drink from the pint. He passed it back to me, and I noticed that his hands weren't really clean. Jack had always wanted a job where his hands wouldn't get dirty, but I saw that he hadn't made it yet. I suddenly felt sorry for him. He was smart and worked hard and tried his damnedest to make it, but things always turned to shit on him. I could see him twenty years from now, still hustling, still scurrying around trying to hit just the right deal.

  "You got a girl?" he asked.

  "Had one," I said. "She sent me one of those letters about six months ago."

  "Rough."

  I shrugged. "It wouldn't have worked out anyway." I got a little twinge when I said it. I thought I'd pretty well drowned that particular cat, but it still managed to get a claw in my guts now and men. I'd catch myself remembering things or wondering what she was doing. I took a quick blast of bourbon.

  "Lotsa women," Jack said, emptying his beer. "Just like streetcars."

  "Sure," I said. I looked around. The furniture was a bit kid-scarred, and the TV set was small and fluttered a lot, but it was someplace. I hadn't had any place for so long that I'd forgotten how it felt. From where I was sitting, I could see a
mirror hanging at a slant on the wall of the little passage leading back to the bedrooms. The angle was just right, and I could see the rumpled, unmade bed where I assumed he and his wife slept. I thought of telling him that he might be making a public spectacle of his love life, but I decided that was his business.

  "What'd you take in college anyway?" Jack demanded. "I never could get the straight of it out of the Old Lady."

  "English, mostly," I said. "Literature."

  "English, for Chrissake! Nouns and verbs and all that shit?"

  "Literature, Stud," I corrected him. "Shakespeare and Hemingway, and all that shit. I figured this would be the issue that would blow the whole reunion bit. As soon as he gave me the "What the hell good is that shit?" routine, he and I would part company, fast. I'd about had a gutful of that reaction in the Army.

  He surprised me. "Oh," he said, "that's different. You always did read a lot — even when you were a kid."

  "It gives me a substitute for my own slightly screwed-up life."

  "You gonna teach?"

  "Not right away. I'm going back to school first."

  "I thought the Old Lady told me you graduated."

  "Yeah," I said, "but I'm going on to graduate school."

  "No shit?" He looked impressed. "I hear that's pretty rough."

  "I think I can hack it."

  "You always were the smart one in the connection."

  "How's your beer holding out?" I asked him, shaking my empty can. I was starting to relax. We'd gotten past all the touchy issues. I lit another cigarette.

  "No sweat," he said, getting up to get two more. "If I ran out, the gal next door has a case stashed away. We'll have to replace it before her old man gets home, but Marg ought to be here before long, and then I'll have wheels."

  "Hey," I called after him. "I meant to ask you about that. I thought your wife's name was Bonnie."

  "Bonnie? Hell, I dumped her three years ago."

  "Didn't you have a little girl there, too?"

  "Yeah. Joanne." He came back with the beer. I noticed that the trailer swayed a little when anyone walked round. "But Bonnie married some goof over at the Navy Yard, and he adopted Joanne. They moved down to L.A."