It was at this gate he had stood one drizzling Sunday noon with a cigarette hole burnt in his necktie and his collar smeared with lipstick, his blue uniform soaked with liquor and his shoes half submerged in mucky puddles while he tried persistently to deceive the guard. Now the road was dry as any bone; he moved one foot and scraped a little dust into the air, the dust settled and dimmed the polish of his shoes, as though it, too, had been raised from the void. He looked at the guardhouse. The glass was cracked. A torn spiderweb sagged from the eaves.
With a handkerchief he began wiping the perspiration from his face, and noticed not far from where he stood the tracks of another pilgrim in the dust, and two cigar stubs. He squinted up at the shimmering sun. Barin Field was closed. Weeds were growing inside the fence. There must be nests of mice in the barracks, and roaches swarming in the showers. He watched two squirrels race over the ridge of the barracks roof and stop with tails aloft, like figures on a weathervane.
He nodded to his wife, who had been sitting on the suitcases with a newspaper over her head. She got up, staggering a little, he thought, and took the smaller suitcase; he took the large one and they trudged along the road to the intersection of the highway to wait for another bus.
“Do you love me?” she asked while they were walking.
“Why, of course I do!” he replied without looking around.
“How do I know?” she insisted with a birdlike chirp. “You don’t, truly, do you?”
“Certainly!” he said. “Certainly.”
She was silent for a little while. “But do you love me as much as you did last Wednesday?”
He stopped; she bumped against him and backed away with a foolish expression.
“I want you to be happy,” she said.
“I am happy!” said he, rather peeved by such nonsense. “I’m extremely happy.” He resumed walking. “However, it’s hot today.” Their relationship was an established fact; he saw no sense in discussing it or analyzing it, and he did not look around again, although he could feel her reproachful gaze.
Beyond Barin Field the highway led to Saufley. Here, too, they descended from the bus and carried the suitcases to the gate. Carrying them had become tiresome and he was irritated with himself for not having checked them through to Pencacola, but it was too late now.
Saufley Field was in operation. It was smaller than he remembered—so small that it did not quite give the impression of a military base, but rather seemed to belong to a game somehow, or to be part of a summer camp, and the forest grew right up against the barbed-wire fence. Pine branches thrust through the mesh. Not long after this station was abandoned there would be saplings in the clearing and undergrowth approaching the hangars, and in twenty years in this humid climate it would be as lost as the ruins of Chichén Itzá. However it was bustling with activity at the moment: battleship-gray Navy vehicles with big, heavily treaded tires and distinctive markings—a red cross and a thick yellow stripe—were parked in the shadow of the dispensary, obviously ready to go speeding toward the next crash. Course lights revolved from the squadron tower. Row upon row of jet planes were lined up where the old dive bombers used to be, and as he stared at them he realized he did not know anything at all about jet planes—in fact there would be instruments on the panel that he had never heard of. He did not even know what company manufactured these planes. Two SNJ’s were parked on the apron, the wings moored to bolts in the concrete; otherwise nothing looked familiar.
He was mystified and disappointed. So many things he expected to find here had vanished.
He was looking at the jets when he heard an unmistakable noise approaching the station. A Dauntless came into view, tilting over the trees, blowing a thin black stream of exhaust, the engine thudding and coughing and the pudgy wheels unfolding, flaps descending mechanically while the plane slowed in the air as though the pilot had stepped on the brakes; it came around like a bucket in the muggy Florida afternoon and floated and floated on currents rising from the runway, over tufts of brownish grass sprouting through the cracks, and finally touched down so lightly that everything he had experienced at this field came back to him with a rush.
“Did you—” he began, grasping her arm. “There! Just then—” but her expression told him that she had only seen an airplane landing, that was all.
“I suppose we ought to get into town for some lunch,” he said a moment later, feeling aimless and mildly stunned by the glaring light.
“It’s nearly one o’clock,” she said. “My isn’t it hot today!”
“Yes, it is,” he said, and picked up a suitcase. “It always was hot down here, but I don’t remember it being anything like this.”
He took another look around, the last look: the neat frame barracks on concrete pilings, the huge NO SMOKING signs, and turned once more toward the flight line which had been the focus of his life. Some cadets were playing cards in the shadow of the hangar. They wore coveralls similar to those he and his friends had worn when they lounged in that area, but these cadets did not wear canvas helmets or baseball caps; they had gaudily painted plastic crash helmets. He wondered what they would think if he went over and told them that he had been at this field during the Second World War. Would they be polite and pretend some interest—and ask a question or two, as he himself did whenever his father spoke of the first war?
In Pensacola they had lunch in the coffee shop of the hotel; it was cool and gloomy after the sun-drenched landscape and they rested there, eating spumoni and drinking iced tea, and Melvin turned around several times to study a noisy luncheon party of three ensigns and a Marine lieutenant who he knew had just been commissioned. Their uniforms were crisp and fresh, the gold collar bars sparkled. He thought he detected, too, an aura of liberation about the young officers, an indescribable psychic release which manifested itself on graduation day.
“What’s the matter with you?” his wife asked.
“Why,” said he, as though nothing could be more obvious, “those are cadets.”
She looked again. “I thought the ones with wings and stripes were officers. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“Yes, yes,” he answered vacantly without hearing what she said.
After lunch they wandered along Palafox Street. He paused in front of a photographer’s studio. One evening, on liberty from Ellyson Field, he had not been able to locate Horne and had come wandering down Palafox and discovered him waiting in this studio, evidently about to be photographed, but peeking apprehensively out the window as though he did not want to be seen, his beady blue eyes darting along the street. He had been attempting to comb his hair in preparation for the picture and he was carrying a stuffed alligator. At some invisible summons he whirled and disappeared; and later, in the barracks, he had sensed that Melvin had seen him there, and scowled and fussed about, crumpling papers in his mortification, and finally snarled, “What’s so funny? If you got anything to say, let’s have it!”
“Why are you grinning?” she insisted, plucking at his shirt. “Answer me. It must have something to do with a woman.”
“Sam Horne got his picture taken here.”
“Sam Horne,” she replied after a pause. “He’s the one from Iowa.”
“That’s right. I guess I’ve told you about him before. I expect this must be dull for you, but I want to go over to the main station—Mainside, we called it.”
“The day is yours. The night will be mine,” she said. “I’m ready when you are.”
Mainside had not changed, though he had thought it was oriented differently: south now seemed north. But the substantial red brick Colonial administration buildings, the white hospital—these he recognized, though without much sense of recovering the past; not until they walked along the coast toward Fort Barrancas, beyond the officers’ club, and he saw the fine white sand drifting over the weeds, and the scrubby pines and twisted brush growing from hollows and hillocks near the Spanish fort. Then, gradually, as though recalling a dream, one incident before anot
her, the interval vanished and when he shut his eyes and listened to the crunch of footsteps on the road he could believe it was not his wife walking beside him, but Horne, or Roska, or Nick McCampbell, and that they were going to meet some WAVEs on the beach, and that someone there would have a portable radio to listen to the news broadcasts: the Marshall Islands had been invaded, a task force was shelling Saipan.
Melvin pointed across the inlet. “That’s Santa Rosa Island. We could get a room over there and spend a day or so. It’s been a long trip. If you’d like.”
“That would be nice.”
“I want to visit Ellyson and Whiting. You could stay in town this afternoon and I could meet you. Maybe you’d like to do some shopping.”
She immediately shook her head and insisted on going along and he sensed that she was jealous, but of what he had no idea. As they approached Ellyson Field he stared up in speechless dismay, for the air was swarming with helicopters teetering and flailing in mindless, drunken orbits, oscillating, rocking, dipping and rising straight up and hanging suspended in mid-air, turning around and around after their tails like flea-bitten dogs. He had never liked helicopters; now they had invaded and actually taken over this base, altering the very atmosphere and giving off unfamiliar noises. The dipping, spinning machines struck him as idiotic; he glared at them, mumbled, turned around, and went back to the highway.
After a long wait they got another bus and traveled to Whiting Field, and there, as they were standing outside the gate while Melvin showed his identification cards, she looked up and saw the hawks which lived in the dense pine woods surrounding the base. She pointed them out to him and asked why he had never mentioned them. Melvin shaded his eyes and watched the hawks circling motionless in the currents high above the field and did not answer because he could not remember them. The instrument squadron had been located here and the cockpit had been hooded most of the time he was aloft; even so it was odd that he had not glimpsed the soaring hawks, or noticed them from the ground. He squinted again at the drifting specks in the sky.
And often he thought of them during the next three days as he lay on the beach of Santa Rosa Island, and thinking of them he thought of Louis Kahn, without knowing why, unless it could be that Kahn, like the hawks, had killed as they killed, without remorse, regarding it as necessary to survival.
Uneasily he reached out to touch his wife, and felt her thigh. She was lying beside him in a depression not far from the water, and with that touch he realized he was almost asleep, sinking into the beach, the hour, and the light, with a few grains of sand on his lips and, now, one finger hooked inside the waistband of her bathing suit—as though they slept in Arabia where she might be stolen—while the luminous waves splashed ever closer, and ever and anon on the horizon the burning sun retreated to the high western sea.
He turned his head and wiped the sand from his lips. An off-shore breeze was blowing. The beach was cool. He and his wife were alone, but for the midsummer constellations glittering overhead and the small white crabs that scuttled along the water’s edge. She was seated cross-legged and was smoking a cigarette with the curious ineptitude of women, as though, having begun, she was not quite certain how it would end. The war for which he had been so meticulously and mysteriously prepared, like a ram for a festivity, was already a subject for historians who could not record the life and death of anonymous men any more than they could record these crabs—these opaque specters dashing to and fro, popping with such alert frenzy out of one hole into another.
He sat up, stiffly. Some hairpins, a mirror, and a comb slipped off his chest. She often used him as a table when he was asleep.
28
This impression—that the war which had engulfed most of the nations in the world was already half meaningless, relegated to history no differently than any other war, and that, as veterans died and generations passed, the time would come when this cataclysm would arouse no more than the mild curiosity that he, himself, felt toward the War of the Roses—this impression persisted through the summer and autumn without lessening; it remained with him, indeed, as profoundly as his union with his wife. There were times when it seemed to him that he and she and the implications of that war in which he had not fought were inextricably bound. His life during those days, though he had not clearly distinguished it then, had not been his own to live, and this, he now reflected, was unjust. Having been given life through some power far exceeding that of all mankind, how was he, therefore, obligated to any man, except as he chose to be? His life had proceeded not according to his own need and his desire, but from the omnipotence of an agency whose purpose and nature, he grew positive, were inimical to him; a ceaseless, measureless tide, the consequence of a singular mistrust, and that subsequent multitude of murders sanely eulogized, day by day—this malevolent tide had caught him unaware with all the rest and cast him along the shore and would have drawn him beyond sight and hope of land as though he were not a living man but a derelict raft, or a sea anenome, some sodden ruptured polyp washing senselessly to and fro in the ebb and flow of the littoral foam.
One morning near the end of the year, with his mouth full of tacks and a hammer in his hand, he was repairing the linoleum in a basement apartment that he and Jo had rented. Snow drifted thinly down the steps against the basement door and lay deep in the areaways outside the windows. As he crawled across the floor, pausing here and there to drive a tack into the linoleum, which had warped during the autumn rains, it seemed to him that the tap of the hammer echoing through the gloomy basement was like the tap of a blind man’s cane; and he reflected that he himself might as well be blind, since he was being led wherever it pleased the authorities to lead him: two days previous he had received in the mail a letter from the government informing him that he was subject to the draft and that he was to report for a physical examination on the fifteenth of February. He had been so stunned by this news that for a while he thought it must be a joke; but, after reading it through again and again, he opened up a trunk in which he kept various papers and objects he considered valuable and compared it with the order to report for physical examination which he had received at the beginning of the Second World War. The signatures were different; otherwise the two notices were almost identical. It was an official notification by the draft board. There was no doubt of it.
He had placed the letter in a drawer of his desk, beneath some miscellaneous papers, to keep it out of his sight, but it was there, and it was colossal. When he was eighteen years old he had been expecting such a letter, had looked forward to it, and had been anxious to go. He remembered the excitement he felt as he left his parents and sister and hurried down the ramp at the Union Station and plunged eagerly into the crowd.
But here it was again.
He had not told Jo. He did not know what he was going to do. He was not certain how he felt; the letter had been too overwhelming. He did not like to think about it.
All at once a shadow darkened the window. He glanced up, assuming it was Jo who had gone down the hillside to the grocery, but glimpsed a bulky man wearing a green cap and a black overcoat. An instant later there was a furious pounding on the door and the buzzer began, buzzing in Morse code. Then he knew, before the code spelled out the name—Sam Horne—who stood at the door.
“Hello, baby!” Horne growled, blinking and grinning. He looked shorter, older, and he was much heavier, with prominent reddish freckles all over his face. A wattle of flesh dangled beneath his chin and when he turned his head the flesh spilled over his collar and momentarily hid the silver bars. He was a senior-grade lieutenant, two black stripes on the sleeve of his winter green uniform. Below the British-looking embroidered wings on his breast were three rows of campaign ribbons with battle stars and clusters.
“So how long has it been?” he was demanding as he shuffled flat-footed through the apartment. “I shipped out of Diego—hell, when was it? Let’s see, I was in operational at Jacksonville before that. Holy cats! It must have been right after
designation at Pensy! Sure, that was the last time I saw you.”
“You were going to a party at the BOQ,” Melvin said, and walked to the stove to put on the coffee pot. He knew quite well when they had last seen each other.
Horne chuckled. His jowls quivered. “Yuh, by God! We had a ball that night, too. And I tried to get you to sneak in and join us, but you wouldn’t. I never could figure out why.”
“By the way,” Melvin said, “you didn’t happen to go back to visit Barin not so long ago, did you? I noticed some cigar butts outside the fence and the first thing I thought of was that maybe you’d been there.”
“I got a belly full of that hole. That stupid ensign—what was his name?”
“I know who you mean. Frank, or something like that. Brink. Hunt. Lunt. Monk!”
“That’s the man! Ensign T. J. Monk. Yes, sir! And one of these days I’ll meet up with that plump little turd, and he’ll get a reaming to pay him back.”
“You’re a lieutenant. He’s probably a commander by now, if he’s still in the Navy.”
“I could get to him, don’t kid yourself. It’s a matter of knowing the right people.”
“He never bothered you especially. I was the one he loved to put on the pap sheet.”
“I’ll tell you something. He’s a homo. Once when he summoned me to his room he tried to put the make on me. ‘Why not remove our coats, Mr. Horne?’ he pipes, and that was only the beginning.”
“You didn’t mention it. You could have got him cashiered.”
The Patriot Page 43
