Girl by the Road at Night

by David Rabe

  He rises; and holding his breath, for he has not paid the waitress or left a tip, he goes to the street where he calls down a cab with a wave and one loud whistle. He gets in and rides for a while. The engine has a smooth, cared-for sound, unusual in cabs. Whitaker loves cars and has owned a half dozen since his sixteenth birthday. He dreams of driving them now, one after the other, the Nash; the ’52 Mercury; the Studebaker, which he hated; the Impala; the Fairlane.

  Seen at first from afar, the monument to George Washington has an icy look. Yet it makes Whitaker think of a prick and he grins. Various mists and clouds move about the sky. They spread like stains. Whitaker, listening to the engine, envies the cabbie his cab. He loves his many bright memories of old roads and engine growls, gray old two-lane Wisconsin roads white with moonlight. His hands stir with what they recall of high-flying danger, the jolt that speed and shifting gears could create. For example, in a 1964 race at Langford in Tasmania, drivers blasted along at 170 mph in the rain. He was not there with them, but he did crack 110 mph on old Route 26. He has many such islands of knowledge that he visits as if they are somehow in his life. He thrills to the idea of these daredevils, the blur of their rush down those wet straights, like stones, flat as razors, skipping over a pond.

  When the cab stops, Whitaker walks to the open driver-side window to pay. He cannot see into the mind of the man who is transfixed, lips slackened, eyes thin. He looks out fixedly at the thousands of people Whitaker takes in with a glance. They are noise and color, and the man, whose eyes seem to push Whitaker away, continues to sit there, staring even after Whitaker leaves.

  I will only stay a little while, he thinks. I hate them, he thinks. The multitude flutters near the base of the Washington Monument. He moves toward them, but feels he is separate from them in a way larger than any length of grass across which he might walk. He occupies a hole deep in his mind where he tells angry jokes and conjures up the shapes of engines, wires, pipes, and pistons. These people would not understand. Not the wires or the jokes. He is with them today only because he woke and thought to come here. Because he thought he might learn of some way not to go to the war. Except that isn’t true and he knows it. There’d been nowhere else for him to go. He might get a piece of ass. Some pussy. Some pleasure. He is a ghost among them. They demonstrate against the war, having taken a day to whoop and holler. But where is the war? They don’t know that it’s right there with them walking in their midst. They don’t know that it has fallen with all its weight upon ole Whitaker. That he has its orders in his pocket. Papers that are like a chill and bony hand. He begins to whistle “Oh It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary” as he walks.

  At a point to his right where the road curves around swells of grass leading toward the monument, he bumps into a surprising bunch of people distinguished from the others by their haircuts and clothing, their posters, their placards. They are the John Birchers, the Minutemen; and they have come to protest the protesters.

  Dressed in his civilian clothes—his faded suit, polished shoes, white shirt, and pocketed tie—Whitaker feels they might mistake him for one of them, but he belongs to no one. I’m here to see what all this has to do with me, he thinks, and shoves his hands into his pockets. The mood of the place into which he is drifting is bright and cheerful. The John Birchers would despise him for not wearing his uniform, if they knew he had one, and the others, the hippies or beatniks or whatever they are, would despise him for even being in the service. He passes over neat grass toward a slab of road and the continuing grass beyond. White-suited vendors sell hot dogs and chestnuts from small, smoke-shrouded grills. He hunches his shoulders and cups his hands to protect a sparking match rising to his cigarette. A woman in a light blue suit is strolling toward him and staring intently to his right. She makes him think of Sharon, and then deny that he has thought of Sharon. The woman is not young, yet she is lovely. She would be interesting beneath him in this grass or in some dim room. Beyond her he sees a policeman talking from high on top of a black horse to a young boy and girl in pretty clothing: purple and yellow trousers, shirts printed with flowers. The policeman’s black belt and blacker boots glitter, sharply. The woman in blue has gone past Whitaker. Watching her, he sees that she is what he wants in his mouth, not this cigarette, but her body beneath her clothing making him breathe harshly and think again of dark-eyed sweet Sharon who seems always a surprise when she proves that she can ambush him whenever she wants. He had thought her dismissed. He had not meant to want her anymore. He will never think to go to her again, he decides. He will seek some stranger first, any passerby. That woman in blue, where is she now? He doesn’t know. He scarcely looks. Anyway, is this the only day in his life? There’ve been others. I’ll get by. Who is Sharon? I’ll get by. Bitterness gouges him in jagged bursts, like someone pounding nails. Anger, old and new, burns. It mixes with his stomach acid, with coffee and eggs and toast and the knowledge that in the days following the arrival of his orders he had wanted to howl. Now he blinks and the air and space and grass around him take him back. He sees himself alone and walking. He is on his way to the hospital to get his medical records. He is in an office where medics give him his brown folder of facts and three injections against foreign, creepy diseases. Vietnam, as an actual place and sinister force against him, begins to enter his brain with the bite of the needle entering his skin, passing through layers of tissue, touching his blood: bright alien piercing. His heart understands; it shudders; yet he has no sense of what has begun until he is outside and thinking strangely about that tree on the far side of the athletic field. He must drastically avoid it or something will happen. He must not hasten toward it. He must not press like a sickened man against it. He must not hug the black, thick trunk. As if his voice is vomit, he refuses to let it loose, while a beetle probes the creases in the bark beside his nose.

  He is amid a cluster of trees across the road from the flat terrain of the mall and reflecting pool. Visible through foliage the Washington Monument stands, with people, like colorful snippets, gathering at its base. The policeman and his horse are plodding to the road where the woman in blue is looking confused. The young boy and girl are kissing. Her teeth touch his cheek. Whitaker, watching, feels envy and thinks how he was among the very first to come down on orders because a slim, fast-talking Irish New Yorker, Mickey Whalen, ass-kissed his way off those orders. Sleeping only a few bunks away in the same barracks as Whitaker, he brownnosed and ass-kissed a sergeant major who brownnosed and ass-kissed a captain who did the same to a major, and then the shit of it spread to a lieutenant colonel who sucked off a grinning, full, motherfucking colonel who had the orders amended—one name removed, another added. For the next few days everyone nodded at Whitaker and gave him sympathetic looks until one night, returning drunk from the post bowling alley, he pissed all over the sleeping Whalen, who jumped awake in startled disbelief, but did nothing more than stare while Whitaker weaved and towered over him, muttering and coughing and grunting until he was finally empty of his waste of beer and rage and piss.

  I’m looking for something to happen, I want something to happen to me. He is fairly tall, a level six feet with a ruddy round face, thick chest and shoulders, straw-colored hair. I should go up to that woman and say something, some pleasant thing and then we could talk, and go for a beer, or dinner and then her place. I’d like someone. He hears himself thinking and stops. What does he mean? He lets his cigarette fall to the grass. A goateed man in a brown corduroy suit goes by, carrying a briefcase and striding with force and determination. Hatred flies out from Whitaker. A professor, probably, some teacher, some asshole.

  Restless again, moving again, he looks around. The monument, very near now, strikes him as a harsher color, more the dull gray of cement. The lines of its three visible edges are like finely cut wires.

  Ahead, the road toward which he ambles is lined by people bunched together in a meager space and wearing a mixture of ordinary clothing. He is surprised that the ranks of such regular citiz
ens should contain so many police. Scattered among them are coffee urns and paper cups, an open picnic basket full of sandwiches wrapped in glittering aluminum foil. They chatter and laugh, displaying and elevating in no regimented way their sticks with tacked-on signs. BOYS ARE DYING IN VIETNAM THAT YOU MAY HAVE THE RIGHT TO PROTEST, reads one. REMEMBER HITLER AND 1938, says another. A young man in a red vinyl jacket dashes several paces forward before thrusting his slogan high: DO NOT FORGET POLAND. Behind him a slim girl, her hair piled up in thick blond curls, applauds and bounces up and down on the curb. Poland? thinks Whitaker. Two gleeful children, a boy and a girl, are stationed with a white banner at least ten feet long stretched between them. They both wear suits, hers with a skirt, his with pants, and the red letters of their message ripple in the breeze: IF YOU WANT TO BURN YOURSELF TO DEATH LIKE SOME GODLESS BUDDHIST WE HAVE THE GASOLINE FREE OF CHARGE! At the feet of each stands a red five-gallon fuel can. Within easy reach are other cans of differing sizes. Fumes, touched with sunlight, tremble above the lids.

  Whitaker, rocking from foot to foot, thinks about going over to talk to the boy and girl. He sees himself in such an odd conversation, imagines, after a while, helping to hold up their banner. Then he sees himself drenching his own clothing with gas but cleverly burning the children instead. It makes him laugh. The crowd, in horror, tries to maul and destroy him. He flees in a Lotus-Ford.

  A family is passing in front of him—five children, a mother and father—and all wear red, white, and blue paper hats and have big buttons pinned to their shirts that say war is unhealthy for children and other living things. The round, chubby father leads the way. The wife, a wobbly bird, carries a plaid picnic basket and nods, knowingly, at the father, who is saying, “I do, I do, let me tell you. I got the scars from shrapnel and other such bullshit all up and down my back.”

  “And your legs, too,” she tells him, like she might know as much about it as he does.

  Having no aim of his own, Whitaker falls in behind them. Their passing has a kind of steady suction. All together they turn, taking a slight upward detour before they turn again. Trailing along, Whitaker marches on toward a raised-up stage of dark wood set before rows of folding chairs, some metal, some wood. Ropes strung on poles driven into the ground form a perimeter. Policemen in teams man the several points of entry. Other cops pace the periphery or prowl among the chairs.

  Whitaker looks eagerly about, hoping to learn the nature of the event into which he is entering. Clearly, he has happened upon something interesting, a destination toward which countless others are on the move, converging, like the spokes of a wheel toward their hub, which is the stage before which Whitaker has come to stand. People pass him in bunches large and small, their mingled conversations an unintelligible murmur. Nothing he overhears gives him a useful clue regarding where he is and what is about to happen. The policemen politely oversee the lines filing into the chairs. They seem unconcerned with the area Whitaker occupies. So he will stay there, steer clear of them. Stay out of their way. A cop walking by gives him a glance. Whitaker nods and turns away, as if any movement at all will help him find what he needs, and he bumps into something or someone. “Excuse me,” he says, looking into the even brown eyes of a girl with endless lengths of strawberry hair braided into pigtails and decorated with two green ribbons.

  “Sure,” she says and starts away.

  A button on the front of her colorful T-shirt admonishes him to make love not war. He thinks he might tag along.

  “You know what’s gonna happen here?” he says.

  “What?”

  “What’s gonna happen here, you know?”

  “A play.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, actors.”

  “What kinda play?”

  She is eager to leave him; irritation and wariness come out of her, hurting his feelings. “I’m not sure I get it,” he says.

  “It’s gonna be about the war. How it’s bad, you know. I need to go, all right?”

  “How it’s bad?”

  “You don’t think it’s good?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “I mean, they’re going to show it in the play, how it’s immoral, more immoral than what the Nazis did to the Jews. That’s what it will be about. I need to go, all right?”

  “Sure. Fine.”

  “I’m looking for somebody,” she says, and smiles, glancing back. “If you still don’t know what you wanted ask one of the cops at those gates.”

  “All right. Fine,” says Whitaker, and he wonders how she can just walk away without knowing that he is the one she is seeking. The one she has been seeking all her life. The perfect lay. Me, me, me, he thinks. Superprick. Your lover, your oiler. Let me grease you, baby, he thinks. Lay down in the grass, I’ll grease your ass.

  There’s some sort of ruckus behind him. On the level wood of the stage a large furry figure has appeared. It is a man in an animal costume with the face of a bear or a gorilla, or so it looks to Whitaker, until he sees that it’s not either, but a made-up face like that of a monster. The creature is moving about in the manner of someone looking for something lost and pretending to be unaware of all the watching eyes.

  The body is not fur but scales, large clots of some hardened, plasterlike material. Having gotten nearer, Whitaker discovers that other creatures hover off to the side of the stage. His closeness gives him an angle to see them, though they would be hidden from the view of the people in the chairs. They clutch pistols, banners, swords, yet their postures are relaxed and conversational. He can’t hear them, but can tell that they’re chatting, casually, even cheerfully. Their eyes seem red scabs upon the boiled skin of their faces. Fangs pinch their purple lips. Their big noses have flared nostrils, like the nostrils of a snake.

  Suddenly, the prowling creature removes its animal head, revealing its human face. From somewhere unseen comes a beating drum. The creature wanders with no apparent purpose. One shrill trumpet cry floats on the noise of the drum. The red eyes of the many armed creatures hidden on the side move and fix upon the figure alone on the stage. But he does not notice. Whitaker knows what the play will be. The massed creatures will come shrieking out to drag the searching human one to the floor. In fierce pantomime, they will take his life with their fingerless hands. Whitaker pivots to leave, and the gray Washington Monument seems to have disappeared. It couldn’t have moved. He jogs a short distance before a loud shout from behind pivots him to look back. A lectern has been placed at the center of the stage and behind it stands a man in a black suit, his hands pressed solemnly upon the upper edges of the lectern. As the costumed creatures collect in a semicircle behind him, the man lifts both pink hands into the air and also, it seems to Whitaker, into the tangle of treetops hanging behind the contours of the stage. Beneath these trees is a boxlike, light blue vehicle with lines of people at either end. Large letters printed on the side read: COMFORT STATION. Piss house, thinks Whitaker. Potty. Shit house. Poo-poo-pee-pee-ca-ca.

  In a voice that hopes to possess the timbre of thunder, the power and danger of the almighty, the man behind the podium cries of god. The creatures stomp their feet and bang the butts of their weapons against the floor. Whitaker detests the unease he is feeling, the whisper of fear. Why is it there are so many here free yet he is a prisoner? None of them must go. They need not even know of his imminent departure. They are soft, disgusting people. Had they no hot dogs, he thinks, sullenly, no ice cream, no restrooms, no entertaining play to watch, they would not be here at all. He shakes his head and shakes it again. In this kind of heavy, evil mood he knows he must beware, because he can do vicious, destructive things even to himself. Two years ago, he leaped from his ’52 Mercury, dented and steaming with water and oil beside the shattered telephone pole into which he had crashed. Scampering to the sidewalk he smashed his fists into the face of a startled bystander. For ninety-one days afterward, he slept on a hard bed in a jail cell under bars through which the city could be viewed only from on top
of the shoulders of a fellow inmate. Sometimes overcrowding moved him into a cell block where crammed, restless prisoners milled, laughing, talking, telling stories. In sleep, they frowned and, dreaming, met their demons to whom they spoke, growling or crying out with choking sounds. Whitaker and Willy were the same age and of nearly the same build, and neither wanted to be touched by the queers thrown in from off the streets. They slept uncertainly and near each other. Then Willy was released, and three days later the ninetieth and final day of Whitaker’s sentence went by, but no one came for him. The walls remained around him. Exhausted and frightened, he was seized by a brutal darkness of feeling and knowledge: he would never get out. He had disappeared and no one knew of him any longer. It was a feeling more awful than any he had ever known. Only lying facedown on his bunk with his teeth biting into his palms and his throat constricted by his refusal to sob or scream made him feel any better.

  4

  Standing among the curving, wrinkled trunks of palm trees, Lan is thinking of the ocean and Vung Tau’s sandy shore. Her almond eyes are dark. The water is warm there. Buses make the forty-mile journey often. You pay your fare and then, if the VC stop you, there are taxes to be paid to them. Occasionally land mines blow up buses along the way, but these are mostly accidental. Does she have enough money? She would love to swim. To make such a trip by airplane would be a wonder. However, that is not a thing she can really hope for, though she does know a girl who claims to have flown. But the girl is a continual and foolish liar, and not out of politeness. She lies because she enjoys tricking people. But she is Chinese, and so her double-dealing is to be expected.