The Patriot

by Evan S. Connell

  “Maybe. But it might be on my record as well as his, and I didn’t want anything to spoil my record. I’m going a long way in this outfit and no pansy is going to stop me. Your old buddy is going right up the ladder. I won’t make it to the top because I’m not Annapolis, but I can go to captain or maybe rear admiral if I play it right. And I’ll play it right, you watch,” he added in a low, determined voice. He had been looking at the paintings on the wall with an expression of annoyance. “I thought you’d eventually get squared away, but I should’ve known better. The international situation the way it is, and you’re still in a dream world.”

  Melvin shrugged. “There’s always an international situation.”

  “Oh, Jesus! If there’s one thing that burns me up!” Horne cried and jumped halfway to his feet, but then collapsed heavily in the chair. “Those Commies mean business while you lie around painting pictures! Oh, forget it, forget it, let’s not get in an argument. Honest to God, there’s something about you that just drives me wild, I don’t know what it is. I never have been able to figure out what it is.” He loosened his belt and gave a comfortable grunt.

  “All the way through that stupid cadet program I kept trying to give you the word, but you didn’t pay any attention to me. You had to do things your own way, and I admired you for that, believe it or not. But look what it got you. Living in a moldly basement. What future have you got? You got less future than when you were a cadet. It’s the truth.” He paused and appeared to be thinking, absently tugging at the flesh under his jaw. Then he remarked in a friendly voice, “You’ve changed, baby. But I have too. My hair stopped falling out, though. I was afraid I was going to lose it all out there in the Pacific. As soon as I got back to the States I started going to a beauty parlor twice a week. It was the damnedest thing. They sit you down near those dryers, those big aluminum sons of bitches that look like the warhead of a torpedo. Okay, there I was, me, Sam Horne—an hour and a half twice a week for about six months listening to a bunch of ignorant broads quack about percale sheets. Can you feature that? I had to sit there looking at a movie magazine or the Ladies’ Home Journal, and then some fruit by the name of Donald came around to give me a massage, a massage on the top of the head. I never been so mortified in my whole life. Vinegar and lemon juice and I don’t know what. I’m telling you, if it starts to fall out again I’m going to get myself a wig and the hell with it.”

  There was a pan of breakfast rolls on the stove; he had been studying the rolls as he talked and now got up and helped himself, covered a roll with butter and strawberry jam, and began to eat it with a look of intense satisfaction. After he had finished he wiped the crumbs from his lips and brushed his sleeves. His fingertips were sticky from the jam; he began to lick them, staring around the basement. His eyes, Melvin noticed, were still suspicious and burned frigidly, as blue as a flower or a gem, and they missed nothing. His voice was nearly the same, a little deeper, but as hoarse and abrasive as ever. His face, though, had altered, the features thickened; and his nose had swollen—it was underlaid with crimson veins as though something within him were rising to the surface.

  “I thought you’d show up one day,” Melvin said. “I’ve been looking forward to it more than I realized. Lots of times I’ve asked myself what I’d like to know particularly about everything that’s happened since Pensacola, and this is going to sound foolish, but you know how all through the program I was hoping to fly a Corsair?”

  “Yuh. And you’re lucky you never got to. You don’t goof off in one of those, not if you want to be around for supper.”

  “Maybe so. Anyway, that’s one thing I want to know. What it feels like to fly a Corsair. Is it anything like a Dauntless?”

  Horne said, “I’d almost forgotten you and that old Dauntless.” He hesitated, and the thought of it seemed to puzzle or irritate him. “What were you trying to prove? Why didn’t you bail out of that crate?”

  Melvin stirred restlessly and took a sip of coffee. Horne and everyone else might forget that crash landing but he had not and knew he never would. At any moment he could see the concrete tilt toward him just beyond the oil-spattered glass, feel the searing heat, the crunch of metal, and the grinding shock, and smell the burning oil.

  Horne evidently did not expect an answer. “Speaking of old planes, I saw something last summer that was pretty hard to believe. Me and another fellow had ferried a couple of jets to Phoenix. Well, just outside town there’s this junk yard full of World War Two amphibians. It wasn’t but a few years ago those planes were picking up survivors, but you know what? A Catalina with ‘Adak’ stenciled on the fin was actually lying there in the desert on its back—turned clear over! I guess the wind blew it over. It was awful—this great big plane with its hull turned up to the sun. It was like a dead whale, tumbleweed bouncing by, and the dust and the sand. So I stopped and talked to the guy who owned the place and he told me the government auctioned off those PBY’s so cheap he bought a dozen, thinking he might convert them into apartments for students, or coffee shops, or some damn thing, but now he’s sorry he got them. He says kids throw rocks at them and people climb over the fence at night to steal whatever’s loose. Honest to God, I could’ve cried! The tires are flat, cut to ribbons, and the sides are bashed in. When I think of only a few years ago how glad everybody in service was to see those planes! Nothing ever looked half as sweet as one of those monsters coming over the horizon. And I ought to know,” he added grimly, “because I spent practically all night on a raft one time in the Philippine Sea and a PBY picked me up at sunrise just like I was a commuter.”

  “I didn’t know you were shot down,” Melvin said, looking at him with interest.

  “I wasn’t shot down,” Horne said. “I ran out of gas.” A moment later he said, “It was my own fault, but the strangest thing is, everybody thinks it was heroic. You fall in the ocean, you’re a hero. That beats hell out of me! I can tell a civilian exactly what happened and I see from the look on his face he thinks I’m modest. But our squadron exec, now, he knew better. I’d no more than got back aboard and put on dry clothes before he started chewing me out. That man went up one side and down the other. I thought sure I was about to lose my wings.” Horne shuddered. “Next time I took off he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Lieutenant, aboard this vessel no gasoline coupons are required.’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I’ll remember that.’ And I saluted. What did you think I was going to do—be a comedian and make some bright remark? Not me! Oh—by the way, you may or may not be aware of this, but clear out in the islands they heard about you. Not you precisely, not personally, that is. But they talk about a certain cadet, and whoever tells some anecdote claims this cadet was a friend of a friend of his. But it’s you who’s mainly responsible. I must have heard three or four stories about different things you did—things I know you did, that were supposed to have been done by this sort of mythical Dilbert.” Sam Horne plucked another roll from the pan, buttered it and spread jam over it, muttered, “I got to go on a diet,” and greedily chewed up the roll, meanwhile staring at Melvin.

  “A guy from the Sixth Fleet joined our squadron in the Marianas and one night he started telling about the Corpus Christi cadet who got his foot caught underneath the rudder of an OS2U. So after everybody knocked themselves out laughing I told them it happened at Albuquerque and it wasn’t an OS, it was a Taylor-craft. And then I said—do you know what I said? I said, ‘That was my roommate!’ Yes, sir! That’s exactly what I said. All the: way out in the Pacific. ‘That was my roommate!’ I said. Even in the Sixth Fleet they’d heard about you, although, frankly, I can’t imagine how.”

  This seemed to afford him some kind of satisfaction. “One day on the beach at Honolulu,” he continued, “I overheard a lieutenant telling about the cadet that tried to shoot down his instructor, only the name of the instructor in this version wasn’t Teitlebaum—it had been told so many times it had got shortened to �
�Baum’ or maybe ‘Bowen,’ it sounded like. Anyway, you were chasing him the hell and gone around the Gulf trying to line him up in your sights. What do you think of that?” Horne demanded, pinching his belly as he spoke and eying the pan of rolls.

  “Have another one,” said Melvin.

  “All this lard,” Horne replied. “I got to cut out eating so much. I don’t know what makes me do it. I’m going to work it off one of these days.” He got up and walked to the stove, where he studied the rolls, and then without a word selected one, buttered it, and covered it thickly with jam.

  “Where’s Nick?” Melvin inquired. “Do you hear from him?”

  Horne stuffed the roll into his mouth and swallowed it, and poured another cup of coffee. He looked at the pan of rolls again. “These are good,” he said. “These really are good.”

  “My wife made them.”

  “Is that a fact! Well! Yes, sir, those are all right. Let’s see—what’d you just say? You asked something.”

  “I was wondering if you’d heard from Nick McCampbell.”

  “No, I—now wait! Let me think. Oh! Isn’t that funny I could forget? He’s dead. His number came up. I thought you knew. He was killed on an atoll near Saipan. Sure, it’s beginning to come back to me now. When I heard about it the first thing I thought was how much you used to like McCampbell, and I figured I’d better write and tell you before somebody else did. Didn’t you ever get the letter?”

  Melvin shook his head.

  “I think I wrote you, but maybe not. I guess not. Well, anyway, he got it just a few weeks after he was assigned to a combat squadron. That’s the breaks for you. He hit some flak—he was in a 2C outfit. They were coming back from a strike, I forget where, and McCampbell’s engine conked so he bailed out and landed in the surf. They thought at first he was drowned, but after a while the guys overhead saw him get to his feet and come running out of the water headed for some coconut palms. He had a forty-five in his hand. He made it to the palms all right, but there was a squad of Japs at his heels and that was the last anybody ever heard of him.”

  “He was alive, though, the last they could see?”

  “He’s dead, don’t kid yourself. Those Japs got him—he’d never surrender.”

  “Wasn’t there anything anybody could do?”

  “His wing man circled the reef as long as he could, but his gas was running low and the carrier was on its way. McCampbell just had it, that’s all. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. He was a mean little booger,” Horne added thoughtfully. “Say! I wonder where the other guys are. There were six of us, huh? You and me. McCampbell’s dead, and what’s-his-name who spun into the Gulf on that dive-bombing run.”

  “Elmer Free.”

  “That’s right. And so that narrows it down to Roska and that other guy, the one I couldn’t stand. That son of a bitch that acted like he drank from the Holy Grail.”

  “Cole.”

  “Yuh. Pat Cole. He’s another bird I wouldn’t mind running into again, although maybe I’d just as soon not. Wherever he is you can bet he’s found a soft touch.”

  “Do you know anything about Roska?”

  “I heard a report he was missing in action, so I guess he’s gone, but you never know—he could be running a cat-house in Sioux City for all I know. Or drinking himself to death, which is more likely.”

  “And you’ve gone regular.”

  “Yes. It’s not a bad life, not bad at all. The pay is fair, lot of free time, no worries. And besides, the country’s going to get suited up again pretty soon, what with the way the situation is developing in Korea, and I like being in ahead of the mob. Right now I’m on route to Washington for a special six-week course given by the Intelligence Department. I set down at Olathe to refuel and figured what the hell, I don’t have to log in till the ninth, so I called your old man’s office in Kansas City. He told me you were up here going to school and that you’d gotten married.”

  “Marriage is an understatement. You know when there was a hurricane off the coast in Florida how they used to tie the planes down by ropes from the wings to the concrete?”

  “They still do.”

  “Well, that’s the feeling,” Melvin said. “I’m nearly a father, too.”

  “I got two kids,” Horne remarked with indifference. “Little boy named Sandy and a girl named Martha. I haven’t seen them in about a year. The wife and I separated. And speaking of understatements, that’s one. Do you—ah, like it?” he asked, leaning forward.

  Melvin glanced around, thinking Jo might have appeared; he could not entirely get over a suspicion that women were able to materialize wherever they pleased. “Well, yes, yes,” he said in a discreet voice, “but it’s a little incredible. You take, for example, the hairpins. Do you have any conception of how many hairpins women use? Why, it’s fantastic! They get everywhere—all over the floor, in the ashtrays, even in bed.”

  “My wife,” said Horne, “used to wake up every morning about four o’clock. She’d rear straight up holding the covers around her neck and sort of gasp. ‘Oh!’ That’s what she’d gasp. ‘Oh!’ she’d say, and then sink down and go right back to sleep. It was the weirdest thing.”

  “Well, that is strange.”

  “Yes, and I asked her a couple of times what was the problem—did she hear a noise or something, but I never could get an answer.” He frowned.

  “We had a good honeymoon,” Melvin remarked. “We did a lot of sightseeing and stuff.”

  “Sightseeing and stuff?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Hell yes, I know what you mean. But if it lasts you’re luckier than me. The wife and I hadn’t been married two months when the squabbles started. Time and again. Over nothing. She always had money, that was one thing. She figured everybody did, or should, and kept wanting me to earn more so we could live higher on the hog. She never could accept the fact I was a farmer before the war. She pretended it wasn’t quite true, that it was a joke, like I spent vacations on the farm. Well, she nagged at me to get out of the Navy because that wasn’t good enough either, which I did in order to pacify her. I wanted to be an architect once, a long time ago, and thought maybe now was the time. But you don’t start out being an architect, so there I was working as a stock boy in a department store and taking a course in drafting. Meanwhile we were living on her income from stocks and bonds. Anyway, the jug turned sour. No matter what I did it was wrong as far as she was concerned. She chipped at me. She kept knocking bits off, day after day, night after night.

  “So that’s how the situation developed. I meant to write you, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was sort of ashamed, screwed up. I got so mad,” he said with an interested look, as though he were listening to someone else, “that once I knocked her cold. And do you know, when she hit the floor the first thing I thought was, ‘Damn your soul!’ and I kept saying to myself while I stood over her and saw her there at my feet, ‘You deserved it! You brought it on yourself!’ I still think if I had done that to her the first time she tried to run me around—well, maybe not, I don’t know. But she kept pushing at me, and pushing at me the way some women do, just begging for it, really, while I kept reminding myself that I was a gentleman, but then all at once it was too late—she pushed one time too often—and what she couldn’t understand, I think, was that I stretched her out with no warning. No warning at all. I remember the day. She never knew what hit her. Down she went, stiff as an old halibut. She didn’t wake up for about fifteen minutes and I thought I’d killed her. I didn’t care. If I’d happened to have a gun in my hand when she started after me I’d have shot her. It’s funny—just in a flash something happened and she wasn’t my wife, I didn’t know who she was, even her name, only that she was driving me mad.”

  He scratched his head and grunted softly. “I’m paying for it. I’ll pay for it the rest of my life. If there’s one thing she doesn’t need, it’s money, but the court ordered me to give her half the property and alimony till she ma
rries somebody else. She wanted all the property. She wept and complained—I couldn’t believe it. And at the same time I felt kind of sorry for her, she sounded so pitiful. You know what she does now?” Horne asked, gazing at the floor. “She lives in Santa Monica. She spends every day—all day—from nine in the morning till the sun goes down, lying on the beach. She lies around on one of these great big striped towels in a leopard-skin bathing suit and sits up once in a while to oil herself, and then she lies down again and puts on her polaroid glasses. That’s what she does the whole day long. All around her are those ukelele-playing bums in thatched hats and peppermint-stick pants and not one of them would funk a note if Asia sank to the bottom of the sea.” He stood up, walked briskly to the stove, and selected another roll. “In court she called me extremely cruel. I’m not cruel. I never been cruel to anything in my life, not even to a fox or a weasel.”

  “You clobbered me a time or so and frankly I never grew to love you on account of it.”

  “Those little fights we used to have at Pensacola? Those were in fun.”

  “You had more fun than I did.”

  “You never learned,” Horne explained while he spread the roll with jam. “You always left yourself wide open. I could never figure that out—every single time! Crazy.” He glanced at his wrist watch. “Come on, let’s go to Olathe!” he said enthusiastically. “Take a ride. I saw a couple of J’s there when I landed.”

  “I doubt if the Navy would care too much for my presence.”

  “Balls! They don’t know you from Dan McGrew. Come on! I got a station wagon parked outside and we can be at Olathe in half an hour. What do you say, baby? Let’s go!” He swallowed the roll and hurried over to wash his hands.

  “All right,” Melvin said. “Why not? Sure! All right, let’s go!”

  “Uh, oh,” said Horne. “I forgot. What about the wife?”

  “I’ll leave her a note. She’s at the grocery.” He tore a scrap of paper from a sack and began to scribble on it.