Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  The Phelans were beyond opulence. They existed out there somewhere in that realm of wealth where having things has lost meaning, where all that matters is civilized conversation . . . the acrid twang of martinis sipped from slender stemware amid the leathery elegance of a dark study . . . fresh-mown lawn stretching away out the windows to the sides and front and back . . . ladies powdered and perfumed and coiffed, the kids sparkling from the tub scrambling underfoot in pressed linens and seersuckers . . . dinners tinkling with laughter and candlelight and china and crystal . . . the gifts of breeding and bearing and attitude and charm . . .

  Every time her family was in the United States for the holidays, which was every other year between postings to one embassy or another, they spent Thanksgiving with the Joices and Christmas with the Phelans. Every year old Mr. Phelan, her maternal grandfather, fixed an obligatory martini for her father, chatted with him until each man had taken his first sip and commented upon its wonderfulness, then the old man dropped him dead and never passed another word with him. The rest of the family followed his example. No one talked to her father after old Mr. Phelan had fixed him a martini. The Phelans’s disrespect for her father went on year after year, and there seemed nothing anyone could do about it.

  At the grand old age of twelve, she had first noticed the way the Phelans treated her father. They acted as if he weren’t even there. When she was fourteen she watched them cut her father dead again. And she swore to herself she would find a way to get back at them, to make them stop treating her father like part of the furniture. She waited for the Christmas of her sixteenth year with a mixture of dread and anticipation. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she was going to do something.

  As she watched her grandfather prepare the obligatory martini for her father that Christmas, she saw her chance. Old Mr. Phelan went through a procedure peculiar to the Phelan family in order to mix a martini. It was called the Phelan Martini, naturally, and its preparation was a sight to behold.

  “Who’ll have a Phelan Martini?” the old man began, taking a sterling silver shaker in his left hand. That was the signal for her father and anyone else in the vicinity to gather round. Usually it was understood that the first Phelan Martini was intended for Mr. Phelan and Mr. Joice, so the others kept their distance.

  “First we take the ice—two kinds of ice, mind you, shaved and cubed—and we liberally pack the shaker.” Old Mr. Phelan liberally packed the shaker with his two kinds of ice from two separate ice machines under the bar in the corner of the study, an imposing room with twenty-foot ceilings and leather furniture and ancient Persian carpets on the floor and the heads of many endangered African animals killed on many safaris mounted on the wall.

  “Then we add the gin—Bombay Gin, no other will suffice.” Old Mr. Phelan added the Bombay Gin.

  “Then we wave the neck of the vermouth bottle over the shaker . . .” Old Mr. Phelan waved the neck of the vermouth bottle in the direction of the shaker and a few drops found their way into the icy mix.

  “Then we add the special secret of the Phelan Martini.” Old Mr. Phelan reached into a locked cabinet and pulled forth the special secret of the Phelan Martini.

  “A hint of aged Spanish sherry does the trick. Just a hint . . .” And old Mr. Phelan dribbled a few drops of aged Spanish sherry into the shaker, by now frosted and dribbling icy drops of condensed water on the ancient Persian carpet under his feet.

  “Then we shake, we do not stir the Phelan Martini.” Old Mr. Phelan grabbed the sterling silver cap and tapped it into place atop the frosty shaker. He gripped the shaker in his hands, and holding it at an angle at chest height, he began shaking. He took a deep breath and he shook and he shook and he shook. The more he shook, the redder he got, and still he shook some more. Just when it looked as though he would burst a blood vessel, he stopped and exhaled, and so did everyone witnessing the event.

  He poured the contents of the shaker, by now extremely well shaken, into iced martini glasses on the bar, and handed one to Cathy’s father and took the other himself. He took a sip of the martini, smacked his lips, canted his head to one side, and said:

  “Ahhhh, now that’s a good martini.”

  “Yes, sir, it sure is,” said her father with a thin smile. He knew he was something approximating the brunt of a joke to these people, but he gritted his teeth and hung in there, deferring to his wife’s wish that the holidays not be ruined by her father’s ungracious behavior or her husband’s anger.

  This was just one of many reasons Cathy Joice admired her father, and it was the source of her determination to stand up to her grandfather and let him know that if you pushed one Joice around, you’d better count on pushing all of them.

  So, at age sixteen, having waited two years for her chance, she stood next to her father in mock admiration of her grandfather’s performance. She waited until the two men had tasted their martinis and pronounced them ideal. Then she stepped forward, smiling with youthful enthusiasm, and announced excitedly, to her father’s amazement:

  “Daddy, Daddy, let’s fix a Joice Martini for Grandpa!” She smiled at her father and nudged him and pinched his hand and smiled so wide she thought she’d burst, and nodded her encouragement.

  “Daddy, Daddy. Please. I’ve watched you so many times, and you showed me how and I make them at home. Please, Daddy. Let me make a Joice Martini for Grandpa. Please . . .”

  Her father looked at her and she winked. Her grandfather was bending over the sink, washing the martini shaker, and missed the exchange between father and daughter.

  “Okay, Cathy, make us a Joice Martini,” said her father.

  She took the shaker from her grandfather.

  “Grandpa, have you ever had a Joice Martini?”

  He looked bewildered and shook his head.

  “I . . . I . . . don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” he stammered.

  “Well, it’s a little different from a Phelan Martini, but it’s just as good. I know, because Daddy always gives me sips. Don’t you, Daddy?”

  “Just little ones,” said her father. “A martini isn’t really the proper drink for a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “I know, Daddy. I know.”

  She stepped up to the bar and made sure she had her grandfather’s full attention. On the edges of their little group at the bar in the study, various Phelan cousins gathered. Something was going on. They could feel it. The old man hadn’t taken his seat at the end of the leather sofa and begun holding court. Cousin Cathy had him trapped behind the bar, up against the sideboard.

  “Grandpa, you make a Joice Martini in a shaker, just like you make a Phelan Martini,” she began, tossing her pigtails in an exaggeratedly cute way. Her grandfather smiled.

  She had him now. She knew it.

  “The Joice Martini got invented, I think, five years ago when we were in Sri Lanka. Isn’t that right, Daddy? You have to correct me if I’m wrong, Daddy. Help me.”

  He played along.

  “That’s right, Cathy. In Sri Lanka.”

  “Sri Lanka is kind of backward, Grandpa, and the electricity went out all the time, so quite often we didn’t have ice. Did we, Daddy?”

  “Not much of it, no we didn’t,” he said, picking up her flow.

  “And we didn’t have much gin, either, did we, Daddy?”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “You remember, Daddy. They were always running out at the store. You remember.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” said her father.

  “But we always had plenty of vermouth, didn’t we, Daddy? The Italian ambassador always gave everyone a case of vermouth for Christmas. Remember?”

  “Oh yes, Antonio Lombardi. I remember him well. I think his family owned the company that made it. The vermouth, I mean.”

  “That’s right, Daddy. He did.”

  “Good man, Antonio. Didn’t have much of a taste for a martini, but he did like his vermouth. Drank it as an aperitif, as I recall.”

  “That�
��s right, Daddy. So . . .” She put the shaker on the bar and straightened her skirt. She had their attention now. No doubt about it.

  “Daddy still wanted a martini before dinner, so he invented the Joice Martini, didn’t you, Daddy?”

  “Yes. Out of necessity, of course.” He was into it now.

  “So Daddy would make a Joice Martini. First he poured in six jiggers of gin, didn’t you, Daddy?” She picked up the bottle of gin and a jigger and measured six jiggers into the shaker.

  “Then, because we didn’t have much gin but we had lots of vermouth, Daddy poured in three jiggers of vermouth.” She picked up the vermouth bottle and measured three jiggers into the mix.

  “Then he would take a long spoon”—she picked up a bar spoon— “and he would stir the Joice Martini until it was nicely mixed.”

  She stirred the mixture with a look of sublime happiness on her face, as if she had been making Joice Martinis all her life.

  “And Daddy would pour one for himself and one for Mommy, and there they had it! The Joice Martini!”

  A look of abject terror crossed her grandfather’s face as she picked up two fresh martini glasses and poured half of the warm mixture into one and half into the other. She was actually going through with it! He was going to have to drink that vile stew! He steeled himself. Protocol was protocol. It would . . . upset the balance of things . . . if he failed to go through the Joice Martini process to the end, to the tasting and smacking of lips and pronouncements of delight, as his son-in-law had gone through the Phelan Martini process to the end, to the smacking of lips and pronouncements of delight.

  She handed one brimming martini glass to her father and one to her grandfather. Her father took a big sip from his glass and smacked his lips.

  “Ahhh, now that’s a good martini!” he exclaimed.

  Old Mr. Phelan took a sip from his glass and smacked his lips with something less than a look of relish on his face as the two-to-one mixture went down.

  “Yes indeed, that is a fine martini,” he said. “I’ll remember this . . . uh . . . for those times when we don’t have ice.”

  “Isn’t it good, Grandpa! I’m so glad you like it!” Cathy Joice hopped up and down with excitement.

  Her grandfather excused himself and headed for his perch at the far end of the leather sofa.

  Her father wrapped his big arm around her shoulders and whispered:

  “I won’t forget this martini, either, daughter.”

  Then they parted, so that nobody would suspect the conspiracy.

  It was her first con job. The fact that she’d straddled the delicate line between the opposing sides of a single family made it all the more difficult.

  She wouldn’t forget it, either. She remembered that day every time she readied herself to go forth and wring them dry, every time she convinced the reluctant to talk, the imperious to listen, the just plain dumb to shut up . . . every time she went out there and fooled them one more time.

  Thirty minutes later she was walking through the front door of the Tan Son Nhut Air Base Officers’ Club. She was wearing a simple black short-sleeved dress that was hemmed just above her knees, and a pair of plain black pumps. Her hair was twisted into a French roll. The heat hadn’t melted her makeup yet, and her purse contained a reporter’s notebook.

  Get ready, here I come, she said under her breath.

  She walked over to a telephone and dialed the number for the Officers’ Club bar, a large room at the end of the corridor.

  “Captain Terrence W. Morriss, please,” she said to the bartender when he answered the phone.

  Then she let the receiver dangle and hurried into the bar. She was standing at the curve of the horseshoe-shaped bar when a man in blue slacks and a white shirt reached the phone.

  “Captain Morriss, sir,” the man said into the receiver. He waited a moment and said it again, looking perplexed. “Can I get another beer here?” he asked, raising his hand.

  Cathy Joice slid down the bar a step at a time, slowly, shouldering her way past two lieutenants, a captain, and a colonel. He still had his hand in the air, and now he was waving at the bartender.

  “Bartender . . . bartender!” he called, to no avail. The bartender, an off-duty GI twenty ranks below Captain Morriss, was rolling dice double-or-nothing for the price of a beer with a crewcut flyboy lieutenant about nineteen years old at the far end of the bar.

  So that was Captain Morriss, the man who would be defending Lieutenant Matthew Nelson Blue IV.

  Hmmmmmmm.

  Maybe getting in to see the prisoner accused of desertion in the face of the enemy wasn’t going to be as difficult as she’d thought.

  “Bartender,” she called across the horseshoe softly. His head wheeled around as though gimballed on a ring of greased ball bearings.

  He scurried around the horseshoe past Captain Morriss and presented himself in front of Cathy Joice.

  “Yes, ma’am? What’s your pleasure?”

  “That man down the bar has been trying to get your attention longer than I have,” she said, indicating Captain Morriss with a nod of her head.

  “Give him whatever he wants and bring me a martini. Very dry. Very cold. Bombay Gin.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Cathy Joice put her purse on the bar and slipped onto a barstool.

  “Thanks,” said Captain Morriss, heading her way.

  She opened her purse and pulled out her lipstick and compact.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said.

  She gazed into her compact mirror and applied the lipstick slowly, first her top lip, then the bottom. She pursed her lips together, distributing the color evenly. She put the cap back on the lipstick tube and closed her compact and shoved them into her purse.

  “I’m Terry Morriss,” said the man being served a draft beer by the bartender.

  She closed her purse with a snap and turned her head.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Sure. I heard you answer the phone as I walked in.”

  The bartender delivered her Bombay Gin martini and she took a sip, leaving a large red lipstick mark on the edge of the glass.

  “Sorry,” she said, looking up at the bartender. “I guess you’ll have to wash this glass separately, won’t you?”

  “No problem,” said the bartender. “Anything for a pretty lady.”

  “I’ll get the next round,” said Captain Morriss.

  “Why . . . thank you, Captain,” she said. “That’s very nice of you.”

  “You’re that television news reporter, aren’t you? Cathy . . . ah . . .”

  “Joice. From KCKA. It’s very nice to meet you.”

  She turned to him and they shook hands.

  “I’ve always wanted to do a story on what you lawyers are doing over here in a combat zone.”

  “There are many kinds of war, Cathy. My specialty happens to be the kind that takes place in the courtroom.”

  “Fascinating. See? I was right. I always knew there’d be a story among the forgotten men of this war. I’ll take that martini now, bartender.” She smiled broadly at Captain Morriss.

  “I hear you’ve got yourself a big case.”

  The drive from Saigon to Long Binh the next morning took thirty minutes over a road that would have qualified for emergency repair in the United States. Route 316 was regularly swept for command-detonated mines, and potholes where they had been dug up blemished its surface like pockmarks.

  Captain Morriss’s jeep bumped and careened across the road’s two lanes like a bumper-car at an amusement park.

  Cathy Joice held on to the jeep’s windshield and braced herself for each pothole. Even when she raised her butt from the seat, the jeep hit the holes with such force that she would discover, when she got back to the hotel, that the blue flesh of bruises completely covered her lower back and bottom.

  “Only a mile to go, Cathy,” said Captain Morriss. “I told you it wouldn’t take long.”
/>
  “It might be a short distance in kilometers,” said Cathy Joice, “but it’s considerably longer in potholes.”

  Captain Morriss threw his head back and laughed out loud. The jeep careened from the roadway into a shallow ditch and out again. They crossed the Dong Nai River on a temporary floating bridge that had been thrown across the river by the Army Corps of Engineers when the main bridge was damaged for the twenty-third time by satchel charges detonated by VC sappers. Up ahead, the chain-link fence of the Long Binh post complex could be seen. It was surrounded by the traditional shack city that sprang up around every American base camp in Vietnam in response to the American soldiers’ insatiable appetites for beer, booze, hookers, and, for the first time in an American war, drugs.

  Captain Morriss was waved through the camp’s front gate with a snappy salute from an MP clad in starched fatigues, spit-shined boots, and white gloves. Captain Morriss drove the jeep straight to the Long Binh stockade, a complex-within-a-complex in the far northeast corner of the camp. The stockade was a group of six temporary buildings built out of corrugated aluminum, surrounded by an elaborate perimeter of tall fences and barbed wire. Guard towers stood at the four corners of the stockade, and uniformed soldiers armed with M-16s could be seen on the tower balconies, standing guard over the yard full of prisoners below.

  Captain Morriss stopped his jeep at the stockade gate. An MP checked his papers. He went back into the guard shack, talked on a field phone for a moment, then nodded. Both the outer and inner gates to the stockade opened, and Captain Morriss drove the jeep to a parking area on the far side of one of the stockade buildings.

  He turned to Cathy Joice and said:

  “Here we are! The lovely Long Binh Jail.”

  Captain Morriss led the way into the first building, which housed the stockade administration. He cleared them past a receptionist and they entered the stockade itself. All the aluminum buildings were connected by covered walkways. Morriss picked up some papers from a desk at the rear of the administration building and they headed down the first walkway.