by Thom Jones
I, on the other hand, had never shot so well in my life. After we collected our brass cartridge casings, Mississippi drew up next to me and said, “He ain’t gonna hit the broadside of a barn, boah; what say ah put five rounds through the bull’s eye and y’all pick up on the other five?”
“That’s a Rog,” I said. “That’s a definite.”
I was shooting four positions to the right of Lieutenant Baker while Mississippi was directly next to him in the fire lane to the left. When the butt pullers yanked up the targets we all commenced firing. Mississippi grouped five rounds in the heart of Baker’s bull’s eye. Then it was my turn. I grouped three shots in the same spot then put a round low into the second ring. I cursed myself. Even if I made my last shot, Baker would not qualify. Mississippi tossed me a look of disgust. I shook my head in disbelief and proceeded to put the next round in my original group. The targets went down and came up with white paper ribbons showing where each shot had scored. The field observer studied Lieutenant Baker’s target with his binoculars. “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch. There’s eleven rounds in that target.” There was a quick conference with the range officer, who said that someone must have shot wide, most likely Mississippi who was directly to the lieutenant’s left, and who had hit his own target a sum total of four times. Mississippi was cursing, pretending like he was highly pissed with himself.
My range observer pulled a chocolate doughnut out of a white sack, took a sip of hot coffee, and said, “You could have had a nice score, Marine. Too bad you blew it.” A group of nonshooters had congregated around me in the hope I might shoot a perfect score. “Nerves,” I said. I had my chance to be a hero and then just like that I was suddenly just another fucked-up PFC in the Big Green Machine. I think the fact that I knew I could have enjoyed a little ego enhancement is what caused me to blow my next to last shot at Lieutenant Baker’s target. I was a victim of ambiguity.
Then the range officer announced that Baker would not—roger, he would not—have to repeat the five hundred. Because of the tight grouping in the heart of the bull’s eye, the range officer deemed the eleventh shot on Baker’s target to be a stray and qualified the man.
When it dawned on the lieutenant that he passed, when he realized he would be promoted to first lieutenant and could re-enlist and go to Vietnam where the life expectancy of a platoon commander was about eighty-nine seconds, he became the happiest man on earth. Everybody was whooping it up and slapping him on the back, even me. You go a year without smiling or experiencing a single endorphin passing through your brain, a smile can be a very exhausting exercise. I had a sore face for three days but in my heart I was glad because I did what every Marine would do, I helped a buddy. All the guys in our platoon threw a little party for Baker when he got his silver bars. We chipped in and bought him a new rifle-cleaning kit. Never saw Baker after that party. Much later, when I got to Da Nang, somebody told me he got greased the second week he went out on the line. You might think selling appliances in Topeka, doing anything in Topeka, Kansas, would have been preferable, but Baker, who was assigned to the rear echelon, volunteered for the line. I believe he died happy. I do not suffer from guilt for helping him get there without proper marksmanship skills. Topeka would have been his pot shack. Would have turned him into a Haitian zombie.
Captain McQueen continued to carry a hard-on for me. Most of your run-of-the-mill assholes have better things to do than sustain a grudge but McQueen was the king of assholes. Not only was I off the boxing team, I lost my gig as a typist in S-2. Got sent to the grunts along with Mississippi where I began to go through the Brasso and Kiwi dark brown at an accelerated rate. Mississippi got his three teeth pulled and was fitted with his first set of government-issue dentures. With teeth in his mouth he was altogether impossible to understand but one night when his gums were bleeding and he pulled his dentures out, he told me the story about his tattoo. He said he had no recollection of getting it and had no idea who or what “Nudey” was, but whatever, he didn’t like it. Mississippi’s real name was Homer Haines. “Homer” of course was a fighting word right up there with “Nudey.” The grunts who knew Mississippi called him “Bud.”
In the infantry, I soon humped my gut off and in the process I learned that there were officers that were such nitpickers they made Captain McQueen seem like a pure candy-ass. Mississippi said he had him a mind to join recon. It was bad there but it was fair. I was young with less than a year in the Corps and more than three to go. Time was dragging heavy on my ass. So when I ran into my old buddy Jorgeson, my mainline man from the Island, and he too said there were openings in recon, where they take awful to a whole new level, I introduced him to Mississippi. We all got good and drunk at the EN Club, talked about jumping out of airplanes and shit, and then as soon as we ran out of beer money, we went over to headquarters company and signed the transfer papers in a hot second. A hot second, bro.
I’m not stupid, and I’m not pleading drunk. I don’t like awful. But awful awful can sometimes be very interesting.
I Need a Man to Love Me
HER PHONE WAS one of those black, old-time heavy jobs with a Bakelite dial, the base made out of ceramic or something—granite maybe…lead. It was like, heavy-and-a-half, an anvil. Seemed like a moron’s phone if you don’t know her, since in her condition she could barely lift it and it was getting all but impossible to dial. The left hand was super bad. No fast-draw Billy the Kid hand; it had no strength whatever. When it worked, when all was optimal, it was a cold blue claw and she could hook things with it. Captain Hook. People saw her Mickey Mouse around with the old phone and there was no sympathy.
The right hand was a little stronger. Not a lot, but it was her bread-and-butter hand. As the years passed it also got weaker. She wasn’t Stephen Hawking yet, or like that guy with the left foot, Christy Brown, but close. That’s why she liked to keep everything about her the same—the environment the same. This house, this home, her all-her-life home, forty-seven years in a shotgun shack. Okay, don’t get morbid—the once cheerful, and still not such a bad…bungalow, was home. Period. The doors and windows were now secured with metal bars, a little crack action down on the corner but, hey!—that’s New Orleans for y’all. Two bedrooms, a full basement, the add-on front porch done when her father was still alive. Busy beaver with a paintbrush and flower gardens was he. Her dad, Corliss, had a mania for tidiness, and her mother, too, which made the latter hell on wheels when the diagnosis came through; when they learned that she would be crippled for life. Turned her mother into a pisser.
First memories. Let’s see…she could remember walking when she was maybe four. Just a little, you know. Ugly prosthetic shoes. Then the wheelchair. Oh Lord, your bony ass could get sore in one of those, day after day, even on a pile of lambskin. So how could a mother not love her only kid? Well, it wasn’t that Lou Ann didn’t love her, it was just that with Lou Ann being a perfectionist and all—there was a certain ambiguity, and when you have to wait on somebody hand and foot—a certain amount of resentment and you start feeling like a slave. You start feelin’ that way because it’s true. Corliss rose to the occasion and Lou Ann did, too, after he passed on. Finally! Lou Ann finally accepted the situation and tried to make the best of it. On top of everything else there was all the stress and strain of an adult daughter living with a mother, but what are you going to do? Then Lou Ann ups and dies. Her face looked like a fried prune in the coffin. A face like dried goat shit. A final accusation…like, “See what you did to me!”
Her dad had been a concentrated good guy, had a different temperament, but Lou Ann really never could take it. Corliss was dead now fourteen years—Lou Ann, three, leaving her to get by with daykeepers. Quite unlike her temporal home—her scrawny, dilapidated body—the house was still in good condition. You take a normal human body, you could abuse it with drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and junk food and still it would last longer than practically anything. It would last longer than a Westinghouse can opener, a pair of Levi’s, or a Panama pa
rrot. The average human body lasted longer than just about everything you laid eyes on except a house. A house could last…this house. But not the puny body that was hers. The house was still going strong. Sell it and she’d have two years in a nursing home and then indigent—a ward of the state. What happened then? You probably went down pretty fast. Some night, hooked up on a heart monitor, you know, one of those Jamaican nurse aides—Fuck dis shit, I’m going out for a cig’rette. A Parliament cig’rette. Yeah, I want to have me a Parliament cig’rette. You could let dis here bitch die in the meantime. So what. World gonna miss her? I doesn’t think so, daddy. Seriously doubts it.
Mabel? Have you been out smoking again?
No, sir, I sure hasn’t been smokin’, I been right here, honey, like I s’posed to be. Turn my back an’ she stroked out, thass all I know.
She would be under clover and the house would still be going strong. It was a waste of money keeping the yard so perfect. Putting on the vinyl siding—whew, she got jobbed on that one, but the salesman was so nice—man, that motherfucker poured out the charm. Oh well. It did look good. The roof needed work. Maybe next year. If there is a next year, huh? There wouldn’t be any tomorrow if she could implement the plan, but she was an ol’ scaredy-cat in regards to the plan.
Anyhow, there was the illusion of safety in keeping everything approximately the same. Better the old phone than something new. A brand-new, glossy, plastic featherweight phone would be a kind of formal acknowledgment, open up a two-lane highway from the pineal gland and pump out the death hormones. Dead wasn’t so bad but dying like this was a bitch. A real live sumbitch and then pfffttt! So much for this incarnation. “Dear God, what was I supposed to figure out forty-eight years in this wheelchair?” Forty years plus of staring at the ceiling in silence, looking out the window, staring at the wallpaper, listening to classical FM radio, and looking at her face in the bureau mirror—a pretty face once, now not so hot, not with all of the makeup in the world. Bust the damn mirror. Stare at the ceiling, stare at the floor. Drink gin and watch TV. She never got out much but she knew life all too well, this life this…shadow cave and from her life she could extrapolate. Nobody but nobody was happy. They might think so, but they were wrong. When you got right down to it, they would rue the day they were born. Ho, ho, ho. Don’t believe it? Wait and see. Ain’t nobody escaped dying. Yeah, everybody wants to go to heaven, but ain’t nobody wants to die.
Bobby was back in town. A blast from the past. Just out of prison and he lays a diamond necklace on her, a little trifling he picked up. He barely hits the streets and he’s stealing again. Came over that afternoon, hardly says hi, and suddenly he’s on the phone trying to buy her a new refrigerator ’cause the one she’s got is “too loud.” Whoever heard of such a thing? Too loud. That was pure Bobby. “But I spent a lot of money on that refrigerator. It’s not even a year old.”
“Yeah,” he says, “and it just goes to show ya, they’ve been making refrigerators for years and listen to it. How can you even think? It’s loud in jail, let me tell you, but that refrigerator is a killer. Good heavens, child, that machine is putting out Richter waves. What we gonna have to do here is go with the foreign made. Japanese.”
“What, a Panasonic refrigerator?”
“Along those lines, darlin’. All I know is they don’t take over the damn house. Believe it. I’m a thief. I’m in a lot of kitchens in the dead of night and I hear refrigerators of every make and description, and at these times I’m glad they are loud, but I didn’t come over heah to steal and that thing is overbearin’. It’s audacious and it’s jes’ a kitchen appliance. An object. So where does it get off? What right do it have?”
Bobby hopped on the phone and started making calls. Placed “on hold,” he craned his neck around the corner and said, “America cannot make a refrigerator anymore. What are they but a damn box, a compressor an’ some shelves and trays? People graduating from Harvard with degrees in engineering—you would think they could make a better refrigerator! Somebody ought to look into it and develop a whisper-quiet line of kitchen appliances. That fridge you got is loud, darlin’. The German ones are much better an’ the Italian ones does look peachy but for a combination of quiet and style, my personal preference is Japanese. You know, the president of Japafreezor over they in Tokyo will bring every new model home and live with it. He will ask questions of the family. Say to the old lady, ‘How you liking this fridge, baby?’ Say to the kids, ‘How you liking this fridge, honorable son, honorable daughta?’ And these are not crude people, we dealin’ with. They won’t march directly forward with a bald statement lest they give offense. It’s like a damn tea ceremony gettin’ a straight answer since they are very civilized people. That’s the way of doin’ when you got seven million to the square mile. Maybe the son will get bold and say, “Why, it’s not a bad refrigerator, suh, but the ice does tastes like dishwatah, they is mold on the cheddar, the Popsicles is gooey, an’ the damn thing hums too much.’ ‘Just as I thought,’ Mr. Japafreezor will say before he hops into his Lexus su-preme dream and drives back to the factory at eleven o’clock at night, rolls up his sleeves and gets down to business. He is wishin’ someone would invent a pill so he never has to sleep; so he can work twenty-three hours a day. Make it better. Make it better! No ice in the Jell-O, no mold on the cheddar cheese. Make it quiet. Get the texture of the Popsicles right. Make it pretty. None of those avocado paint jobs that looked all right in 1968 but became the worst color in the world a year later. The only American that clever, industrious, and hardworking is yoah dope fiend with a two-thousand-dollar-a-day heroin habit.”
Bobby gave her a look like, “I’ve been in jail for almost four years, but even I know that one,” and then suddenly he’s talking turkey with a sales representative. Oh yeah—the automatic defrosters cause all the racket. They’ve got side-by-side doors or over-and-under. Gallon jug capacity in the door. Egg storage, also in the door. Colors. Cubic footage. Automatic ice maker.
In less than an hour, a delivery truck showed up and Bobby and the delivery men, smiling Asians in neat blue uniforms, tore the packing box apart and transferred all her food from the old refrigerator to the new one. There wasn’t much—lettuce, baloney, milk—the usual. Bobby watched them with intense interest. “We Americans underpower our motors, don’t you think? On a hot day, that ol’ thing is huffing constantly. It’s sufferin’ from emphysema as we speak. The poor Little Engine that couldn’t. Soundin’ like a D-6 Cat with a Kotex in a Coke can for a muff-a-ler. Ever since I walked in the door it has been causin’ me great psychic duress. I believe that my nerves are more than slightly frayed. That I am a bit edgy. Forgive me for rattlin’ on so. I’m somewhat overcome. Perhaps I should make the switch ovah from regular coffee to a decaffeinated brand.”
A worker plugged in the new refrigerator and flipped on the power settings for the freezer, the meat drawer, and the main compartment. It was virtually impossible to hear the motor but Bobby placed his hands in the freezer and proclaimed that it was working. “Black is a’ ace of a color, don’cha think? Pretty cool, huh?”
He paid the delivery men with a roll of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. “Thanks evah so much, fellas,” he said, handing them each an extra hundred. “Here is a little kiss goodbye for such fast and courteous service. The world needs more people who take special pains to get things right.” He gave them a hand in gathering up the packing materials and then as they rolled the old refrigerator out to their truck, he waved goodbye.
Geez! The size of Bobby’s roll made her paranoid. He had to be printing money again. Thirty-four months in prison and he comes out and starts committing serious federal crimes. He would never learn. The diamond necklace—bought with phony money or stolen outright? Don’t ask. It was merchandise. It gave her a small thrill to wear it but she really didn’t want the damn thing or the new refrigerator either. Ultimately it would be nothing but guilt and depression.
It was sad to see Bobby do this but there was no need t
o drive him off with a lecture. And she had to get in the rest of her Carl and Maizie story. Those two were under her skin like bugs but it was hard to talk about it with all of the refrigerator stuff going on. Her story was rambling and incoherent but Bobby was quick; he got the gist of it. She felt better to get it out, and he listened with empathy. He kissed her tears away and carried her to bed, pulled back the sheets, white satin sheets, and Bobby remembered. Said, “White satin sheets and an ultra-firm Posturpedic. One hundred percent goose-down pillows. I often thought of you in these delicious circumstances while I was racked out in jail. You here, me there. Muslin sheets, a foam pad, and a steel slab are hard to take in your middle age; one develops delicate sensibilities as the years go by. Don’t you find this to be true?”
It had been so long since a man touched her she practically came when he picked her up. He brought her to orgasms that were like epileptic seizures and dropped her into a deep and peaceful slumber from which she hoped never to return. Daykeeper #2, Lucille, came by to cook supper and help her with her toilet. After an hour of TV, Lucille put her to bed where she discovered a note from Bobby.
He promised to call back around nine and he did call, exactly at nine. “Hello.” Somebody actually, finally did something they promised they would do.