Rules of the Road

by Lucian K. Truscott

  Sam’s office was a small space off the orderly room with an interior door connecting with the colonel’s. It was furnished with government-issue institutional sturdy desk, chair, bookcase, typewriter table, typewriter. All were metal, all were painted puce green and black, all were so well worn they probably dated back to World War II. He sat behind his desk, put his feet up. He remembered when Lieutenant Colonel Duchamp used to say a platoon leader ought to be able to carry his desk in his pocket, and for two years under Duchamp when he was company commander, that’s exactly what the then Lieutenant Butterfield did. Everything there was to know about his platoon—in fact, about his entire life—was tucked inside his fatigue shirt pocket in a three-by-five-inch notebook.

  But now here he was in an office again, at a new desk, in a new job in a new unit, and even, as it had turned out, with a new/old girlfriend he hadn’t expected but whom he had taken to his bed like a prospector too long away from a waterhole.

  He heard a knock at his door.

  “Enter,” he called out.

  The door opened. Lieutenant Colonel Duchamp loomed in the doorway.

  The new executive officer leapt to his feet and stood at attention.

  “Out here in the orderly room, Major. I want to have words with you.”

  Sam walked into the orderly room where it appeared all of the battalion officers and senior NCO’s had gathered. Was this some kind of initiation rite in the Three-Sixty-one, he wondered.

  “Take off your fatigue shirt, Major,” commanded the colonel.

  “Sir?”

  “I said take it off, Butterfield. No questions. Do as I say.”

  He unbuttoned and doffed his shirt. The colonel took it from him. He reached behind him and the sergeant major handed him something.

  “Put this on,” commanded the colonel, holding out a fresh shirt.

  Sam did as the colonel said. When he was finished buttoning and tucking in the fresh fatigue shirt, the colonel held out his hand.

  “Congratulations, Major Butterfield, and welcome to the Three-Sixty-one,” said the colonel with a big grin.

  Sam glanced at his shirt. Sure enough, the unit patch had been sewn on the left shoulder. Then the colonel handed him a small blue box containing two battalion insignia.

  “The orderly room crew chipped in and picked these up for you at the quartermaster’s,” said the colonel.

  “Thanks … guys.”

  “Nothing to be said, mister,” said the colonel. “Get back to work. There will be an officer’s call at the O-Club at eighteen hundred hours, gentlemen. We have a brand new XO in our midst who needs to be exposed to the Three-Sixty-one way of doing things. This of course calls for something of a celebration. The Three-Sixty-one will celebrate this evening, gentlemen, and we will show these non-Ranger sons-of-bitches how a Ranger wets his whistle. Any questions?”

  “No, sir!” came a chorus of voices.

  “Dismissed,” commanded the colonel.

  Sam retreated to his office and sat at his desk.

  The rest of the day went by in a blur—a tour of the battalion area with the sergeant major, a visit to each company headquarters and introductions to the first sergeants, tour of the motor pool, a quick trip out to the firing range. Before he knew it, eighteen hundred hours was upon them, and the battalion repaired to the Officers Club to raise not a few glasses to their new member, and raise a little Ranger hell in the presence of their compatriots. Much singing. A few rather confused speeches on the subject of Rangerhood. More singing. More paeans to the wonders and mysteries of Rangerhood. Some frisbee-like tossing of the Ranger beret across the O-Club bar. More singing.

  He called Hillary from a pay phone and arranged to meet her back at the double-wide.

  In the days and weeks to come, he would remember thinking later that night, as he and his old flame cooked spaghetti, that things hadn’t been this good for him in years.

  The next day the paperwork started. This was the domain of the executive officer: paperwork and more paperwork—status reports, strength reports, motor pool tool counts, arms room weapons counts, pay records, personnel updates, reports of surveys on missing equipment, requisitions for new equipment to replace that which was missing—on and on it went in a never-ending snow flurry of gibbering military attention to detail in a manner which asserted, however ridiculously, that in the army no detail was too small to deserve its own separate and equal piece of paper, or poopsheet.

  Still, not everything in the army of the nineties was to be found on a typewritten piece of paper. The battalion was engaged almost daily in training missions, most of which involved being the “aggressors” against other units as they roared around the far reaches of the Fort Campbell reservation. Just a month after Sam showed up for his new job, the entire unit was loaded on C-141 Starlifters—gigantic Air Force cargo jets—and airlifted en masse down to Panama to attend the two-week Jungle Warfare Course. When they returned from Panama, the XO buried himself in paperwork, because at any time the battalion could be alerted and parachuted into some new hellhole for yet even more training, which is precisely what happened two weeks later when they joined Operation Bootstrap, three weeks of training maneuvers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  Sam and Hillary spent most of their time driving between her apartment and his double-wide. The unpredictable schedule of the Ranger battalion put a strain on their burgeoning affair, but they managed to spend most weekends together. While Sam was in Panama, she surprised him by ripping up the shag in the double-wide and having some neutral-color industrial carpet installed. Over the two weeks he was on maneuvers at Fort Bragg, she managed to sneak in an order for new curtains.

  When his car finally arrived at Port Elizabeth from Germany, they flew to New York for a long weekend and took their time driving back, taking two-lane U.S. 50 most of the way. It was in the driver’s seat of the Porsche, with Hillary asleep beside him on the way back, that Sam began to wonder what was actually going on between them. Two divorced people, lovers long ago and once again, thrown together on a typical middle-of-nowhere army post …

  He didn’t really know how he felt about her. It wasn’t love, exactly. It was … hell, he didn’t know what it was, but it sure felt good.

  Spring came. One afternoon, Hillary came over and they planted roses and periwinkles around the concrete patio, and in the double-wide’s backyard put in a dozen rows of vegetables. When they were finished, the sun was setting and the patio and garden almost looked homey. Hillary fixed a pitcher of martinis and Sam lit the barbeque. They set the picnic table with a linen tablecloth and a couple of hurricane lamps, and were halfway through two T-bones and a bottle of Cabernet when Hillary reached across the table and touched his hand.

  “Sam, there’s something I want to talk to you about… .”

  Oh, no, here it comes, he thought.

  “I’ve enjoyed the last six months with you more than I can tell you, Sam.”

  “I feel the same way, Hillary. I mean, the last few years haven’t been the richest time in my life, and getting to know you again … well, it’s been great, Hillary. Really something great.”

  “We’re so much alike,” said Hillary. “We’re both majors in the army. We both like cars. We like to travel. We like to garden. It’s really kind of amazing, isn’t it? Running into each other after all these years, halfway moving in together, seeing each other all the time. Who would have thought …”

  “I know. I remember thinking when I got my orders to Fort Campbell, how was I going to meet someone down here? Then, that first night, I turned around and there you were.”

  “And you didn’t waste any time either, did you? You took me downtown, wined me, dined me, got me drunk, and drove me back here and threw me on the bed and kept me up half the night, then you had to get up and go on one of those damn reveille runs. I still don’t know how you did it.”

  “I don’t either,” Sam laughed. “I guess maybe I’m not as old as my 201 file says I am.”

/>   “Sam, I just think … I don’t want …”

  “What are you trying to say, Hillary?”

  “I’m trying to say, I think I’m trying to say that I don’t want either of us …”

  “To get hurt.”

  “To get hurt.”

  “I think I know what you’re getting at,” said Sam, taking a sip of wine. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together, but you’re not ready and I’m not ready to get married again right away. Am I right?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say, Sam. I really love being with you … hell, I really love you, Sam. But we’re both grown ups. I think maybe it would be good for both of us if we began seeing other people as well.”

  Sam took a deep breath. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that, Hillary. I mean, another marriage just doesn’t come up on the screen for me right now. I don’t know if it’s the age we’re at, or being majors, or what, but I feel in between things right now, you know?”

  “I feel the same way. I’m coming up for reassignment at the end of this year, and I didn’t want …”

  “I know what you mean, Hillary,” Sam said. “Let’s enjoy each other’s company and be glad the army saw fit to reacquaint us here at Campbell.”

  She leaned across the table and kissed him. “Me too, Major Butterfield. Me too. Now, your turn to do the dishes, or mine?”

  ***

  It was an hour past lunch, the executive officer was full of Yankee pot roast and fruit salad and peas and carrots and Black Forest cake, and he’d felt himself nodding over his by now poopsheet-strewn desk once or twice when he heard the third, or was it fourth knock at the door of his office.

  “Enter,” mumbled the beleaguered poopsheet-besotted executive officer.

  The sergeant major stepped in, closed the door behind himself, and stood next to Sam’s desk at ease.

  “Sir, there’s some weird character out here in the orderly room askin’ for you.” The sergeant major was a man of short, well-rounded stature whose operative theory of army life seemed to have encompassed never having let anything get in the way of a good meal. His looks were deceiving, however. He was from a place called Deer Lodge, Montana. He had spent the first twenty years of his life in the mountains, and the next twenty in the Rangers. He was fast on his feet, and they said he could move as quickly vertically as he could horizontally. One look at the man’s Popeye forearms, and Sam was willing to believe anything.

  “Who is it? Did he give his name?”

  “No, sir. Just said he had to see you right away.”

  Sam glanced into the orderly room.

  “Where is he?”

  “Got him stashed in a chair over by the coffeemaker, sir. He’s shakin’ so bad he can barely stand up.”

  “Send him in,” Sam said, piling the papers cluttering his desk in one corner.

  The sergeant major disappeared. When the executive officer looked up, Johnny Gee was standing before him in a skinny gray sharkskin suit, puffing nervously on a cigarette. His eyes were sunk into deep black pockets, and his hands shook visibly.

  “What in hell are you doing here, Johnny?” asked Sam, kicking the door closed with his boot. “You look terrible.”

  “They shot Spicer, man. I got no place else to go. You’re the only person on this fuckin’ earth I can trust. I had no choice. I’m sorry. I don’t want to fuck up your stuff, man, but I’m just so fuckin’ scared, I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “What were you doing there?” Sam gaped at the nervously twitching form of Johnny Gee and considered the situation with abject amazement. First you get a new job, then happen upon someone from your past and settle into something comfortable and good, and now this. The apparition before him wasn’t part of the plan. He got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “I found him early this mornin’. I was going over to his place to borrow a few bucks. And there he was dead. Just took him out in the woods next to his trailer and tied him to a tree and shot him in the head. And they’re after us.”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah. You and me. I don’t know how, but they got our names. Spicer musta given up our names ’fore he died. He was all beaten up and shit. They musta beat it outa him. Spicer never woulda given you up otherwise. They know who we are, man. Ain’t no doubt about that. The word is on the street. They’re gonna do us the same as they did Spicer. They know we seen those fuckin’ tapes, man, and nothin’ is gonna stop ’em.”

  “Spicer told us he was sending the tapes to the attorney general. That was all taken care of months ago.”

  “You read anything in the paper about any investigation? Any arrests? Don’t you think you’da seen somethin’ by now if Spicer done what he said he was gonna do? They’re after us, man. You got to believe me. They got Spicer, and now they want us.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  “How should I fuckin’ know, man? Whoever was after our asses that night you jumped in and helped me. Whoever them tapes belong to. Whoever is connected up with all them big politicians and shit. How am I ’sposed to know? All I know is, Spicer’s tied to that tree, shot in the head. I got myself outa there fast as I could. I had to. I’m on their goddamned spring cleanin’ program, man. So are you.”

  “When did you find him?”

  “This mornin’, ’bout six o’clock.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Boosted a car. Drove straight here.”

  “You stole a car?”

  “What else was I ’sposed to do, man? Call a cab? Don’t worry. I stashed it downtown behind a closed-down factory building. They won’t find it for a month. I didn’t drive it on the post here, man. I caught a bus from town.”

  “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it,” Sam said, holding his head in his hands.

  “What can’t you believe, man? They shot fuckin’ Spicer. They shot him, man. With a big fuckin’ gun. He is dead, man. And he didn’t have nothin’ to do with this thing. All he did was help us out of a jam, and they killed him for it. And it was our fault.”

  Sam looked up at Johnny Gee. He was right. Spicer had nothing to do with the tapes, nothing to do with the fight at the diner, nothing to do with the car they ran off the road so many nights ago. All he did was come through for an old friend, and he got killed for it.

  Sam thought back to the days they’d raced modifieds together. Spicer had taught him how to set up his suspension and tune it differently for tenth of a mile, quarter-mile, and half-mile tracks. He’d taught him about track conditions, how to vary tire rubber compounds to get the best traction. And one time, when Spicer had failed to make the feature race and Sam’s motor had blown in his preliminary, Spicer had lent him his motor. The two of them ripped it out of Spicer’s car and mounted it in Sam’s between the prelim and the feature. Sam won the feature, and the thing was, Spicer was as happy about the win as he was.

  Then, years later, he had climbed into the back of Spicer’s truck and Spicer had driven him out of the county, away from the swarm of cops who had been looking for him on a spurious drug rap. Without the unquestioning friendship of Spicer, Sam never would have made it to the bus from Columbus to Ft. Campbell. He would have been AWOL, in deep trouble with the army. He probably wouldn’t be sitting where he was right now, in the exec’s office in a Ranger battalion. He was numb at the thought.

  “Jesus, Johnny, he’s really dead?”

  “You’d better believe he’s dead, man. I stood right there by that tree this mornin’, ’bout as far as I am from you. They shot him in the head, and they beat him close to death ’fore they did it. Lookin’ at him, I started cryin’, man. And it’s been years since I cried. Years.” His eyes began welling up with tears, and he wiped them on his sleeve.

  “I’m sorry, man. I know I’m steppin’ on your stuff here, but I had to come.”

  The tears stopped, and Johnny Gee looked at Sam.

  “We’ve got
to do somethin’. All my life, I been runnin’ from stuff. When things would go bad, I’d just pick up and split, land somewhere else, and start the same shit over again. I never once faced nothin’ down. I let somebody else pick up the pieces of the mess I made. I was always runnin’, always runnin’. That’s what I done this time, too. I run down here to you. I didn’t know what else to do, man. Runnin’ is all I know.”

  Johnny Gee hung his head for a moment, then looked up at Sam again.

  “That’s why you got to help me, Major. I don’t wanna run no more, and I don’t think runnin’ will do me any good this time, anyway.”

  “Sit down,” Sam said, pulling up a chair.

  Johnny Gee sat down and puffed on his cigarette.

  “What are we gonna do? Spicer’s dead. He didn’t do nothin’, and he’s dead. What are we gonna do?”

  This is it, thought Sam. This is that thing they told you about in Ranger school, the thing the army spends years preparing you for. The time would come, they said, when you’d have to stand up and toe the line and make a decision that would determine whether people lived or died. Not just your own life, but the lives of others as well. If you’re a combat commander, you might do it every day. But in regular life, when there is no war to fight, most men never face the day when their lives and those of others are literally on the line. Most men spend years arranging things so this kind of moment will never come.

  Well, it’s here, he thought. It’s now.

  He stared at the skinny man in the gray suit, who was lighting another cigarette from the tip of his last one, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, tapping his pointed-toe shoes on the floor. He felt a strange affinity with this man called Johnny Gee. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason why, but he reminded him of a guy he’d raced against when he first started running his Chevy on the dirt tracks of southern Illinois. He was a country boy, maybe ten years older than Sam, and he loved racing with all his heart. He worked two jobs, and poured every cent he earned into his car. He’d been racing for a dozen years, and Sam knew that he’d turned up only once in the winner’s circle. Only once had he proudly taken that extra lap with the checkered flag flying from the window of his car. As hard as he tried, and as much money as he spent, winning races somehow consistently eluded him. He’d spin out on the first lap, or run out of gas in the forty-lap feature, or smack into a four-car pile-up he didn’t cause. He was an excellent mechanic, he was up on all the latest stock car technology, and his car was always as well prepared as any on the track, but nothing ever went his way.