The Barracks Thief

by Tobias Wolff

  I explained all this to Hubbard.

  “Count me out,” he said.

  “You don’t want to come?”

  Hubbard shook his head. A dull point of light moved back and forth across the metal cast on his nose.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not my style,” he said. “I didn’t think it was yours, either.”

  “Look,” I said. “Lewis is supposed to be your friend. So what does he do? He steals from you and punches you out and then laughs in your face. Right in front of everyone. Don’t you care?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “Well, I do.”

  Hubbard didn’t answer.

  “Jesus,” I said. “We were supposed to be friends.” I stood up. “Do you know what I think?”

  “I don’t care what you think,” Hubbard said. “You just think what everyone else thinks. Beat it, okay? Leave me alone.”

  I went back to the company and lay on my bunk until lights-out. The wind picked up even more. Then it began to rain, driving hard against the windows. The walls creaked. Distant voices grew near as the wind gusted, then faded away. There should have been a real storm but it blew over in just a few minutes, leaving the air hot and wet and still.

  After the barracks went dark we got up and made our way to the latrine, one by one. For all the tough talk I’d heard at dinner, in the end there were no more than eight or nine of us standing around in T-shirts and shorts. Nobody spoke. We were waiting for something to happen. One man had brought a flashlight. While we waited he goofed around with it, making rabbit silhouettes with his fingers, twirling it like a baton, sticking it in his mouth so that his cheeks turned red, and shining it in our eyes. In its light we all looked the same, like skulls. A man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth boxed with his own shadow, which went all the way up the wall onto the ceiling so that it seemed to loom over him. He snaked his head from side to side and bounced from one foot to the other as he jabbed upwards. Two other men joined him. Their dog tags jingled and I suddenly thought of home, of my mother’s white Persian cat, belled for the sake of birds, jumping onto my bed in the morning with the same sound.

  The man with the flashlight stuck it between his legs and did a bump and grind. Then he made a circle on the wall and moved his finger in and out of it. Someone made panting noises and said, “Hurt me! Hurt me!” A tall fellow told a dirty joke but nobody laughed. Then someone else told a joke, even dirtier. No one laughed at his, either, but he didn’t care. He told another joke and then we started talking about various tortures. Someone said that in China there was a bamboo tree that grew a foot a day, and when the Chinese wanted to get something out of a person or just get even with him, they would tie him to a chair with a hole in the bottom and let the tree grow right through his body and out the top of his head. Then they would leave him there as an example.

  Somebody said, “I wish we had us one of those trees.”

  No one made a sound. The flashlight was off and I could see nothing but the red tips of cigarettes trembling in the dark.

  “Let’s go,” someone said.

  We went up the stairs and down the aisle between the bunks. The men around us slept in silence. There was no sound but the slap of our bare feet on the floor. When we got to the end of the aisle the man with the flashlight turned it on and played the beam over Lewis’s bunk. He was sitting up, watching us. He had taken off his shirt. In the glare his skin was pale and smooth-looking. The beam went up to his face and he stared into it without blinking. I thought that he was looking right at me, though he couldn’t have been, not with the flashlight shining in his eyes. His cheeks were wet. His face was in turmoil. It was a face I’d never really seen before, full of humiliation and fear, and I have never stopped seeing it since. It is the same face I saw on the Vietnamese we interrogated, whose homes we searched and sometimes burned. It is the face that has become my brother’s face through all the troubles of his life.

  Lewis’s eyes seemed huge. Unlike an animal’s eyes, they did not glitter or fill with light. His face was purely human.

  He sat without moving. I thought that those eyes were on me. I was sure that he knew me. When the blanket went over his head I was too confused to do anything. I did not join in, but I did not try to stop it, either. I didn’t even leave, as one man did. I stayed where I was and watched them beat him.

  7

  Lewis went into the hospital the next morning. He had a broken rib and cuts on his face. There was an investigation. That is, the company commander walked through the barracks with the first sergeant and asked if anyone knew who’d given Lewis the beating. No one said anything, and that was the end of the investigation.

  When Lewis got out of the hospital they sent him home with a dishonorable discharge. Nobody knew why he had done what he’d done, though of course there were rumors. None of them made sense to me. They all sounded too familiar—gambling debts, trouble with a woman, a sick relative too poor to pay doctor bills. The subject was discussed for a little while and then forgotten.

  The first sergeant’s retirement papers came through a month or so later. He had served twenty years but I doubt if he was even forty yet. I saw him the morning he left, loading up his car. He had on two-tone shoes from God knows where, a purple shirt with pockets on the sleeves, and a pair of shiny black pants that squeezed his thighs and were too short for him. I was in the orderly room at the time. The officer of the day stood beside me, looking out the window. “There goes a true soldier,” he said. He blew into the cup of coffee he was holding. “It is a sorry thing,” he went on, “to see a true soldier go back on civvy street before his time.”

  The desk clerk looked up at me and shook his head. None of us had much use for this particular officer, a second lieutenant who had just arrived in the company from jump school and went around talking like a character out of a war movie.

  But the lieutenant meant what he said, and I thought he was right.

  The first sergeant wiped his shoes with a handkerchief. He looked up and down the street, and though he must have seen us at the window he gave no sign. Then he got into his car and drove away.

  All this happened years ago, in 1967.

  My father worked at Convair in San Diego, went East for a while to Sikorsky, and finally came back to San Diego with a woman he had met during some kind of meditation and nutrition seminar at a summer camp for adults. They had a baby girl a few weeks after my own daughter was born. Now the two of them run a restaurant in La Jolla.

  Keith came home while I was in Vietnam. He lived with my mother off and on for twelve years, and when she died he took a room in the apartment building where he works as a security guard. He’s had worse jobs. The manager gave him a break on the rent. All the tenants know his name. They chat with him in the lobby when they come in late from parties, and they remember him generously at Christmas. I saw him dressed up in his uniform once, downtown, where there was no need for him to have it on.

  Hubbard and I got our orders for Vietnam at the same time. We had a week’s leave, after which we were to report to Oakland for processing. Hubbard didn’t show up. Later I heard that he had crossed over to Canada. I never saw him again.

  I never saw Lewis again, either, and of course I didn’t expect to. In those days I believed what they’d told us about a dishonorable discharge—that it would be the end of you. When I thought of a dishonorable discharge I thought of a man in clothes too big for him standing outside bus terminals and sleeping in cafeterias, face down on the table.

  Now I know better. People get over things worse than that. And Lewis was too testy to be able to take anyone’s word for it that he was finished. I imagine he came out of it all right, one way or the other. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, his face floats up to mine like the face in a pool when you bend to drink. Once I pictured him sitting on the steps of a duplex. A black dog lay next to him, head between its paws. The lawn on his side was bald and weedy and cluttered with toys. On the other sid
e of the duplex the lawn was green, well-kept. A sprinkler whirled rapidly, sending out curved spokes of water. Lewis was looking at the rainbow that hung in the mist above the sprinkler. His fingers moved over the dog’s smooth head and down its neck, barely touching the fur.

  I hope that Lewis did all right. Still, he must remember more often than he’d like to that he was thrown out of the Army for being a thief. It must seem unbelievable that this happened to him, unbelievable and unfair. He didn’t set out to become a thief. And Hubbard didn’t set out to become a deserter. He may have had good reasons for deserting, perhaps he even had principles that left him no choice. Then again, maybe he was just too discouraged to do anything else; discouraged and unhappy and afraid. Whatever the cause of his desertion, it couldn’t have been what he wanted.

  I didn’t set out to be what I am, either. I’m a conscientious man, a responsible man, maybe even what you’d call a good man—I hope so. But I’m also a careful man, addicted to comfort, with an eye for the safe course. My neighbors appreciate me because they know I will never give my lawn over to the cultivation of marijuana, or send my wife weeping to their doorsteps at three o’clock in the morning, or expect them to be my friends. I am content with my life most of the time. When I look ahead I see more of the same, and I’m grateful. I would never do what we did that day at the ammunition dump, threatening people with rifles, nearly getting ourselves blown to pieces for the hell of it.

  But I have moments when I remember that day, and how it felt to be a reckless man with reckless friends. I think of Lewis before he was a thief and Hubbard before he was a deserter. And myself before I was a good neighbor. Three men with rifles. I think of a spark drifting up from that fire, glowing as the breeze pushes it toward the warehouses and the tall dry weeds, and the three crazy paratroopers inside the fence. They’d have heard the blast clear to Fort Bragg. They’d have seen the sky turn yellow and red and felt the earth shake. It would have been something.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TOBIAS WOLFF lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. Author of the recent novel Old School, he has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His collection of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, is also a available from Ecco.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  PRAISE FOR

  THE BARRACKS THIEF

  “There is a real power in this slim novel . . .”

  —Anne Tyler

  “Tobias Wolff has somehow gotten his hands on our shared secrets, and he’s out to tell everything he knows.”

  —Raymond Carver

  ALSO BY TOBIAS WOLFF

  In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

  BACK AD

  COPYRIGHT

  THE BARRACKS THIEF. Copyright © 1984 by Tobias Wolff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

  Wolff, Tobias, 1945– The barracks thief.

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.0558B31983

  813'.54

  83-16422

  ISBN 0-88001-049-5 (PBK.)

  EPub Edition July 2014 ISBN 9780062376886

  13 14 15 BV/RRD 15 14 13 12 11 10 9

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