by Tobias Wolff
In the middle of the night they came to our barracks and walked up and down between us as we stood by our bunks. They looked at us. If we looked at them they said, “Why are you looking at me?” and made us do push-ups. If you didn’t act right they made your life sad.
They divided us into companies, platoons, and squads. In my squad were Wingfield and Parker and seven others. Parker was a wise guy, my friend. I never saw anything get him down except malaria. Wingfield, before the military took responsibility for him, had been kept alive somewhere in North Carolina. When he was in a condition to talk his voice oozed out of him thick and slow and sweet. His eyes when he had them open were the palest blue. Most of the time they were closed.
He often fell asleep while he polished his boots, and once while he was shaving. They ordered him to paint baseboards and he curled up in the corner and let the baseboards take care of themselves. They found him with his head resting on his outstretched arm, his mouth open; a string of paint had dried between the brush and the floor.
In the afternoons they showed us films: from these we learned how to maintain our jeeps, how to protect our teeth from decay, how to treat foreigners, and how to sheathe ourselves against boils, nervous disorders, madness, and finally the long night of the blind. The foreigners wore shiny suits and carried briefcases. They smiled as they directed our soldiers to their destinations. They would do the same for us if we could remember how to ask them questions. As we repeated the important phrases to ourselves we could hear the air whistling in and out of Wingfield’s mouth, rattling in the depths of his throat.
Wingfield slept as they showed us how our weapons worked, and what plants we could browse on if we got lost or ran out of food. Sometimes they caught him and made him stand up; he would smile shyly, like a young girl, and find something to lean against, and go back to sleep. He slept while we marched, which other soldiers could do; but other soldiers marched straight when they were supposed to turn and turned when they were supposed to march straight. They marched into trees and ditches and walls, they fell into holes. Wingfield could march around corners while asleep. He could sing the cadence and double-time at port arms without opening his eyes. You had to see it to believe it.
At the end of our training they drove us deep into the woods and set our company against another. To make the numbers even they gave the other side six of our men, Wingfield among them. He did not want to go but they made him. Then they handed out blank ammunition and colored scarves, blue for us and red for them.
The presence of these two colors made the woods dangerous. We tiptoed from bush to bush, crawled on our stomachs through brown needles under the stunted pines. The bark of the trees was sweating amber resin but you couldn’t stop and stare. If you dawdled and daydreamed you would be taken in ambush. When soldiers with red scarves walked by we hid and shot them from behind and sent them to the parking lot, which was no longer a parking lot but the land of the dead.
A wind sprang up, bending and shaking the trees; their shadows lunged at us. Then darkness fell over the woods, sudden as a trap closing. Here and there we saw a stab of flame and heard a shot, but soon this scattered firing fell away. We pitched tents and posted guards; sat in silence and ate food from cans, cold. Our heartbeats echoed in our helmets.
Parker threw rocks. We heard them thumping the earth, breaking brittle branches as they fell. Someone yelled at him to stop, and Parker pointed where the shout came from.
Then we blackened our faces and taped our jingling dog tags, readied ourselves to raid. We slipped into the darkness as though we belonged there, like shadows. Gnats swarmed, mosquitos stung us but we did not slap; we were that stealthy. We went on until we saw, not far ahead, a fire. A fire! The fools had made a fire! Parker put his hand over his mouth and shook his head from side to side, signifying laughter. The rest of us did the same.
We only had to find the guards to take the camp by surprise. I found one right away, mumbling and exclaiming in his sleep, his rifle propped against a tree. It was Wingfield. With hatred and contempt and joy I took him from behind, and as I drew it across his throat I was wishing that my finger was a knife. Twisting in my arms, he looked into my black face and said, “Oh my God,” as though I was no impostor but Death himself.
Then we stormed the camp, firing into the figures lumped in sleeping bags, firing into the tents and into the shocked white faces at the tent flaps. It was exactly the same thing that happened to us a year and three months later as we slept beside a canal in the Mekong Delta, a few kilometers from Ben Tré.
We were sent home on leave when our training ended, and when we regrouped, several of us were missing, sick or AWOL or sent overseas to fill the ranks of units picked clean in the latest fighting. Wingfield was among them. I never saw him again and I never expected to. From now on his nights would be filled with shadows like me, and against such enemies what chance did Wingfield have?
Parker got malaria two weeks before the canal attack, and was still in the hospital when it happened. When he got out they sent him to another unit. He wrote letters to me but I never answered them. They were full of messages for people who weren’t alive any more, and I thought it would be a good thing if he never knew this. Then he would lose only one friend instead of twenty-six. At last the letters stopped and I did not hear from him again for nine years, when he knocked on my door one evening just after I’d come home from work.
He had written my parents, he explained, and they had told him where I was living. He said that he and his wife and daughter were just passing through on their way to Canada, but I knew better. There were other ways to go than this and travelers always took them. He wanted an accounting.
Parker’s daughter played with my dogs and his wife cooked steaks in the barbecue pit while we drank beer and talked and looked each other over. He was still cheerful, but in a softer, slower way, like a jovial uncle of the boy he’d been. After we ate we lay on the blanket until the bugs got to our ankles and the child began to whine. Parker’s wife carried the dishes into the house and washed them while we settled on the steps. The light from the kitchen window laid a garish patch upon the lawn. Things crawled toward it under the grass. Parker asked the question he’d come to ask and then sat back and waited while I spoke name after name into the night. When I finished he said, “Is that all? What about Washington?”
“I told you. He got home all right.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“You ought to get married,” Parker said, standing up. “You take yourself too seriously. What the hell, right?”
Parker’s daughter was lying on the living-room floor next to my golden retriever, who growled softly in his sleep as Parker lifted the girl and slung her over his shoulder. His wife took my arm and leaned against me as we walked out to the car. “I feel so comfortable with you,” she said. “You remind me of my grandfather.”
“By the way,” Parker said, “do you remember Wingfield?”
“He was with that first bunch that got sent over,” I said. “I don’t think he made it back.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody. I just don’t think he did.”
“You’re wrong. I saw him.” Parker shifted the girl to his other shoulder. “That’s what I was going to tell you. I was in Charlotte six months ago and I saw him in the train station, sitting on a bench.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh yes I did.”
“How was he? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. I was in a hurry and he looked so peaceful I just couldn’t bring myself to wake him up.”
“But it was definitely him?”
“It was Wingfield all right. He had his mouth open.”
I waved at their car until it made the turn at the end of the street. Then I rummaged through the garbage and filled the dogs’ bowls with the bones and gristle Parker’s wife had thrown away. As I inspected the dishes she had washe
d the thought came to me that this was a fussy kind of thing for a young man to do.
I opened a bottle of wine and went outside. The coals in the cooking pit hissed and flushed as the wind played over them, pulling away the smoke in tight spirals. I sensed the wings of the bats above me, wheeling in the darkness. Like a soldier on leave, like a boy who knows nothing at all, like a careless and go-to-hell fellow I drank to them. Then I drank to the crickets and locusts and cicadas who purred so loudly that the earth itself seemed to be snoring. I drank to the snoring earth, to the closed eye of the moon, to the trees that nodded and sighed: until, already dreaming, I fell back upon the blanket.
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught. She shared his views, but did not sign the protest petition. She was, after all, on trial herself—as a teacher, as a woman, as an interpreter of history.
Mary watched herself. Before giving a lecture she wrote it out in full, using the arguments and often the words of other, approved writers, so that she would not by chance say something scandalous. Her own thoughts she kept to herself, and the words for them grew faint as time went on; without quite disappearing they shrank to remote, nervous points, like birds flying away.
When the department turned into a hive of cliques, Mary went about her business and pretended not to know that people hated each other. To avoid seeming bland she let herself become eccentric in harmless ways. She took up bowling, which she learned to love, and founded the Brandon College chapter of a society dedicated to restoring the good name of Richard III. She memorized comedy routines from records and jokes from books; people groaned when she rattled them off, but she did not let that stop her, and after a time the groans became the point of the jokes. They were a kind of tribute to Mary’s willingness to expose herself.
In fact no one at the college was safer than Mary, for she was making herself into something institutional, like a custom, or a mascot—part of the college’s idea of itself.
Now and then she wondered whether she had been too careful. The things she said and wrote seemed flat to her, pulpy, as though someone else had squeezed the juice out of them. And once, while talking with a senior professor, Mary saw herself reflected in a window: she was leaning toward him and had her head turned so that her ear was right in front of his moving mouth. The sight disgusted her. Years later, when she had to get a hearing aid, Mary suspected that her deafness was a result of always trying to catch everything everyone said.
In the second half of Mary’s fifteenth year at Brandon the provost called a meeting of all faculty and students to announce that the college was bankrupt and would not open its gates again. He was every bit as much surprised as they; the report from the trustees had reached his desk only that morning. It seemed that Brandon’s financial manager had speculated in some kind of futures and lost everything. The provost wanted to deliver the news in person before it reached the papers. He wept openly and so did the students and teachers, with only a few exceptions—some cynical upperclassmen who claimed to despise the education they had received.
Mary could not rid her mind of the word “speculate.” It meant to guess, in terms of money to gamble. How could a man gamble a college? Why would he want to do that, and how could it be that no one stopped him? To Mary, it seemed to belong to another time; she thought of a drunken plantation owner gaming away his slaves.
She applied for jobs and got an offer from a new experimental college in Oregon. It was her only offer so she took it.
The college was in one building. Bells rang all the time, lockers lined the hallways, and at every corner stood a buzzing water fountain. The student newspaper came out twice a month on mimeograph paper which felt wet. The library, which was next to the band room, had no librarian and no books.
The countryside was beautiful, though, and Mary might have enjoyed it if the rain had not caused her so much trouble. There was something wrong with her lungs that the doctors couldn’t agree on, and couldn’t cure; whatever it was, the dampness made it worse. On rainy days condensation formed in Mary’s hearing aid and shorted it out. She began to dread talking with people, never knowing when she would have to take out her control box and slap it against her leg.
It rained nearly every day. When it was not raining it was getting ready to rain, or clearing. The ground glinted under the grass, and the light had a yellow undertone that flared up during storms.
There was water in Mary’s basement. Her walls sweated, and she had found toadstools growing behind the refrigerator. She felt as though she were rusting out, like one of those old cars people thereabouts kept in their front yards, on pieces of wood. Mary knew that everyone was dying, but it did seem to her that she was dying faster than most.
She continued to look for another job, without success. Then, in the fall of her third year in Oregon, she got a letter from a woman named Louise who’d once taught at Brandon. Louise had scored a great success with a book on Benedict Arnold and was now on the faculty of a famous college in upstate New York. She said that one of her colleagues would be retiring at the end of the year and asked whether Mary would be interested in the position.
The letter surprised Mary. Louise thought of herself as a great historian and of almost everyone else as useless; Mary had not known that she felt differently about her. Moreover, enthusiasm for other people’s causes did not come easily to Louise, who had a way of sucking in her breath when familiar names were mentioned, as though she knew things that friendship kept her from disclosing.
Mary expected nothing, but sent a résumé and copies of her two books. Shortly after that Louise called to say that the search committee, of which she was chairwoman, had decided to grant Mary an interview in early November. “Now don’t get your hopes too high,” Louise said.
“Oh, no,” Mary said, but thought: Why shouldn’t I hope? They would not go to the bother and expense of bringing her to the college if they weren’t serious. And she was certain that the interview would go well. She would make them like her, or at least give them no cause to dislike her.
She read about the area with a strange sense of familiarity, as if the land and its history were already known to her. And when her plane left Portland and climbed easterly into the clouds, Mary felt like she was going home. The feeling stayed with her, growing stronger when they landed. She tried to describe it to Louise as they left the airport at Syracuse and drove toward the college, an hour or so away. “It’s like déjà vu,” she said.
“Déjà vu is a hoax,” Louise said. “It’s just a chemical imbalance of some kind.”
“Maybe so,” Mary said, “but I still have this sensation.”
“Don’t get serious on me,” Louise said. “That’s not your long suit. Just be your funny, wisecracking old self. Tell me now—honestly—how do I look?”
It was night, too dark to see Louise’s face well, but in the airport she had seemed gaunt and pale and intense. She reminded Mary of a description in the book she’d been reading, of how Iroquois warriors gave themselves visions by fasting. She had that kind of look about her. But she wouldn’t want to hear that. “You look wonderful,” Mary said.
“There’s a reason,” Louise said. “I’ve taken a lover. My concentration has improved, my energy level is up, and I’ve lost ten pounds. I’m also getting some color in my cheeks, though that could be the weather. I recommend the experience highly. But you probably disapprove.”
Mary didn’t know what to say. She said that she was sure Louise knew best, but that didn’t seem to be enough. “Marriage is a great institution,” she added, “but who wants to live in an institution?”
Louise groaned. “I know you,” she said, “and I know that right now you’re thinking ‘But what about Ted? What about the children?’ The fact is, Mary, they aren’t taking it well at all. Ted has become a nag.” She handed
Mary her purse. “Be a good girl and light me a cigarette, will you? I know I told you I quit, but this whole thing has been very hard on me, very hard, and I’m afraid I’ve started again.”
They were in the hills now, heading north on a narrow road. Tall trees arched above them. As they topped a rise Mary saw the forest all around, deep black under the plum-colored sky. There were a few lights and these made the darkness seem even greater.
“Ted has succeeded in completely alienating the children from me,” Louise was saying. “There is no reasoning with any of them. In fact, they refuse to discuss the matter at all, which is very ironical because over the years I have tried to instill in them a willingness to see things from the other person’s point of view. If they could just meet Jonathan I know they would feel differently. But they won’t hear of it. Jonathan,” she said, “is my lover.”
“I see,” Mary said, and nodded.
Coming around a curve they caught two deer in the headlights. Their eyes lit up and their hindquarters tensed; Mary could see them trembling as the car went by. “Deer,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Louise said, “I just don’t know. I do my best and it never seems to be enough. But that’s enough about me—let’s talk about you. What did you think of my latest book?” She squawked and beat her palms on the steering wheel. “God, I love that joke,” she said. “Seriously, though, what about you? It must have been a real shockeroo when good old Brandon folded.”
“It was hard. Things haven’t been good but they’ll be a lot better if I get this job.”
“At least you have work,” Louise said. “You should look at it from the bright side.”
“I try.”
“You seem so gloomy. I hope you’re not worrying about the interview, or the class. Worrying won’t do you a bit of good. Be happy.”
“Class? What class?”
“The class you’re supposed to give tomorrow, after the interview. Didn’t I tell you? Mea culpa, hon, mea maxima culpa. I’ve been uncharacteristically forgetful lately.”
