by Maddy Wells
She slipped a wad of bills into my hand, “in case we don’t meet up later,” she said. I waited until she was done looking back at Alex, waving good-bye, then finally out of sight in the Headquarters’ Building, before I relaxed my fist and counted the money. Forty dollars. It would get us home and then some. I breathed as if I had been holding my breath for days. I tried not to prorate Alex’s prostitution. But I couldn’t help it. Five dollars an hour. That was the price of knowing Alex in the biblical sense.
Dougherty didn’t say anything when we appeared once again in his orderly room. He was right where we left him, fingering the letters of On the Geneology of Morals, like he was carving the Rosetta Stone. His blond hair, while longer than allowed the recruits, was greasy and matted in a swirling pattern around his head, as if a helicopter had landed on it. His uniform was so wrinkled it was obvious he had slept in it with no more respect than the draft resisters who wore the green as satire. I wondered if he was aware of the words he was typing, or if, after a hundred pages he would notice the page and say, “Oh, my God! What is this crap?”
He looked up when he felt my stare. “He’s been waiting for an hour in the day room.”
“Which would be where?” I was annoyed that we had wasted so much time and no one had notified us.
Dougherty pointed to the door of a hallway while going back to his typing. “End of the hall, two flights down.”
We followed the sound of smacking pool balls. The Army was starting to seem like a subversive organization that was secretly schooling the nation’s next generation of pool sharks.
Alex, during all this, was quiet. She no longer seemed anxious to see Rick, more resigned. She glided into the room pausing in the doorway, as good-looking people do, to give everyone a chance to get used to the fact that the locus of attention has shifted.
“Jesus!” A young man with dark stubble over his misshapen head smiled through his discolored and crooked teeth at us. His narrow face looked familiar. It took a minute to register that it was Rick.
“Jesus, yourself,” I said, so glad he looked terrible I almost laughed aloud. I couldn’t help thinking that this is what Samson in the Bible must have looked like when he was shorn. In a weird way, it was cosmic symmetry. I did laugh.
“It’s short, I know,” he grinned and ran his fingers, bony and yellow, over the moon-like landscape of his head. He tried to get Alex’s attention, but she stared stonily away. “Baby, what are we going to do?” It was impossible that he was unaware of how ridiculous he looked, but there it was. He was blissed-out thinking that his rock n’roll persona could somehow translate into army drab; impervious to the fact that the thing Alex loved about him was anything other than the illusion he spun with his guitar and long hair. Without those things, he was just another cull in a barnyard full of them.
“How’s the little one?” he whispered, sidling up to her and touching her .
“Stop it!” she slapped his hand away.
“Hey!” He looked hurt. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Of course, I’m glad to see you. I’m here aren’t I? It was just a long trip down here and I’m exhausted.” She seemed confused by her own revulsion.
“I know, little mother.”
“I’m not your little mother,” she said.
“Hey, I’m the father, aren’t I?”
“Of course, you’re the father. When do I ever get a minute away from you? Jesus, no one would even have a minute to slip it in.”
“Is that a complaint, or what? You want some time alone for someone else to slip it in?” He frowned, which was no more becoming on his awkward features than a smile.
“I had a bad night.” She looked down at the floor as if she had tossed and tumbled all night because of the wretched humidity, rather than in the arms of a lesbian with a broken leg. “Sorry. It just seems so hopeless. I don’t know…I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Recently, the evidence had been piling up (to me, at least) that to become an adult meant a paring down of illusions until you reach the core truth, which is this: any perceived advantage you start out with is equalized somewhere down the line. Beauty fades. Fortunes are spent. Brains can get twisted. Even good intentions can be strangled in the bitter tangle of unfulfilled desires.
“So are we going or what?” Rick whispered, looking around surreptitiously, thinking that someone cared what he was saying.
“Aren’t you kind of like, stuck here now? I mean, you’re sworn in and everything.”
I could tell she was trying not to, but she couldn’t help but stare at the rugged terrain that was the top of Rick’s head. I couldn’t either. It was truly a marvel that something assumed to be more or less round could have so many gullies and straggly clumps. I forced myself to concentrate instead on the incredible shine that seemed to be on everyone’s combat boots.
Rick pushed Alex into a corner and whispered something urgently in her ear, and she brushed him off. He grabbed her arm.
“I said okay. Okay!” she said, turning abruptly, leaving Rick smoothing his ugly head, glaring. “Let’s get out of here,” se said, brushing by me. I followed mutely, shrugging at Rick. “I don’t know why I came here.”
We blew past Dougherty in the orderly room. He looked up from his self-imposed penance to say, “See gorgeous George?” and as an act of kindness said, “Next bus to D.C. leaves at half-past. Right outside the gate.”
We went outside to wait in the dusty road. Clumps of Carolina pines were everywhere, but they did nothing to relieve the heat that undulated around us. I could tell by the sun’s high position that it was close to eleven-thirty.
“I don’t need him to have my baby,” she said, tugging her blouse tightly around her middle. “I don’t need anyone.”
“You don’t need him,” I agreed.
We sat on a guardrail that was still a little tacky from being recently painted and I had to look to make sure no paint was getting on my jeans. The guard at the gate came out of his little hut to stare at Alex, but eventually he got bored with that and went back in to review the girlie magazine that a thousand guards before him had read. He tossed that aside when he saw the bus coming down the road from the pines, and came out to inform us of that fact as if we couldn’t see.
“There’s the bus,” he shouted.
I waved. “Thanks.”
Alex tapped her foot trying to accelerate the bus’s arrival.
“He sure got ugly looking,” I volunteered, saying what was on both of our minds.
Alex’s chest heaved. “You slept with him too. He was good enough for you.” She walked a little down the road, as if meeting the bus would hurry our departure from this sandy hell-hole.
And then we saw him, Rick running down the path that led from his barracks to the gate. He was carrying a backpack and all I could think was that he looked like a little boy running away from home. The guard saw him and picked up his rifle, just as the bus pulled up in front of us.
“Jesus,” Alex said, as detached as if she was watching a television show, “what the hell does he think he’s doing?”
She boarded the bus with a regal glance at the driver, leaving me to fish around for the money Marie Antionette had shoved in my hand. The driver, a black man with big sad eyes that made me think of Jeremy, nodded politely and checked his passengers in the rear-view mirror. You could tell he didn’t give a damn what anybody did, he just didn’t want any trouble. The bus was half-filled with freaks.
We sat in the middle. It was an old bus with windows that pushed up and no bathroom, and Alex took the seat by the window so I didn’t see right away that the guard had Rick in his rifle’s sight. It was only after I sensed that the attention in the bus had shifted to the scene outside that I saw Rick, frozen between the guard and the bus.
They both looked scared: two boys stuck in roles in someone else’s play. Neither wanted to be where he found himself then, certainly not in an Army uniform. Their positions could
have been switched, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The guard was stuck in an unnatural position, his rifle on his shoulder, squinting at Rick, at the bus, at the bus driver who didn’t want any trouble, but who seemed about to receive a bucketful. Rick was immobile, frozen in the act of running, one arm propelling him up, one leg stretched out, his little knapsack still swinging from his hand. Everyone in the bus watched as Rick and the guard faced off.
The guard shouted something and Rick answered. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Rick turned slowly, keeping his hands in the air. They talked some more and I let out a breath as the guard lowered his rifle and looked at the bus. Suddenly, the guard relaxed, resting the butt of his rifle on his toe and Rick scrambled aboard, moving down the aisle. He plopped in the seat in front of us, twisting to kneel on it and looked back happily, his misshapen head looming over us like the cratered moon. The driver closed the door and quickly drove away.
“Hey,” Rick said to Alex, but she crossed her arms and looked out the window.
I shrugged.
A blond girl wearing an Indian skirt and a red dot painted between her blue-eyes leaned across the aisle and put a nail-bitten hand on Rick’s leg. She held out a joint. “Here, man. That was so heavy. I couldn’t believe what that pig was going to do.”
Rick took a long drag . He checked out the girl while he held his breath and passed the joint to me. He held the smoke in and choked a little, but still he smiled at the girl. Everyone around us turned to give approving looks to Rick. He was some kind of hero for having not been shot.
“What did that pig say to you?” the girl asked.
“Good luck,” Rick said. “He said, ‘good luck’.”
He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and flipped through some cards, finally finding a dog-eared photo of himself with his band, and held it out for the girl to examine. “That’s really me,” he said.
You’re a musician!” the girl said. “Cool. My old man is a musician, too.”
Rick looked around to see if her old man was with her and was going to beat the shit out of him for poaching on his territory, but no one seemed interested in their mutual attraction except me.
“Don’t worry, man, he’s cool. He’s in California.” The girl laid her hand on Rick’s leg and they both seemed content with that arrangement. Rick was turned completely around and apparently forgot the reason, Alex and their baby, that he had jumped ship in the first place.
I stared out the window trying to remember that I was happy just last week when Lance and I went to Woodstock. I wanted to dwell on that happiness for a while to erase the increasing misery that was crowding this bus. But remembering it no longer pleased me. It was like looking at someone else’s photo album and feeling bored.
In misery, then, I rode in silence. A patch of pines was the only thing to occasionally break the spell until we pulled into the outskirts of Charlotte for a rest stop, the bus driver told us, where there was nothing but a Dairy Queen, a bathroom, and two military police who were sitting in their Jeep and smoking until Rick descended from the bus. They casually extinguished the butts on the side of their vehicle, stripped them down to the filter, which they shoved in their pockets before swinging their legs onto the ground, holding their rifles in a noticeably firmer grip than the guard at Fort Jackson. Alex wanted to wait until the others had come back so she wouldn’t have to stand in line for the Lady’s Room, so she didn’t see the MP poke a finger into Rick’s chest then nudge him to the back seat of the Jeep where they strapped him in with some kind of locked seatbelt and handcuffed him. The blond girl was already in the bathroom, so it was only me on deck waving his ship good-bye.
“Take care!” I yelled, and I remember that Rick searched the small crowd for the source of that cry and seeing only me, hung his poor gnarly head. Some of the people from the bus, pulled from their own world by Rick’s drama, began shouting at the MPs. The Jeep ground gears and made dust tracking out of the Dairy Queen parking lot, while the crowd chanted “Death to the Pigs” and Rick held his manacled hands over his head in a feeble peace sign.
Chapter Eleven
We found out later that Rick was court-marshaled and sent to Ft. Leavenworth. A few letters arrived from him, asking about the baby. I opened them when it became apparent that Alex wasn’t going to. I was curious what turns his life would take after being led off in handcuffs by two MPs outside a dusty little town in North Carolina. He told us about his court marshal, which he called a kangaroo court. He called the presiding officers Nazis. His own military defense lawyer went through the motions of defending him, he said, but he could tell it was just an AWOL gig to the guy, who wanted the trial to be over so he could start the serious drinking that defined his life.
“Juiceheads,” Rick wrote, in a philosophical manner new to him, “are such pricks.”
He wrote of the tedium of his cell, but kept insisting he would get out shortly. He said that his father was some big shot in Coca-Cola and had hired a civilian lawyer to try get his delinquent son’s ass out of the can and keep the family name out of the paper.
I didn’t want to answer questions about the baby, so I didn’t write back. Mostly because there was no more baby to talk about.
When we disembarked at Port Authority, we headed to Lance’s loft. Lance. He was the closest thing to home we both had, and it didn’t occur to us that we wouldn’t be wanted. And Lance came through, welcoming Alex home, albeit with a lack of mania that made it clear that during our absence he’d gotten over her. He bought a second-hand box-spring and mattress so Alex could sleep alone, bought new sheets with little yellow flowers all over them to cheer her, and was genuinely solicitous in the way a brother would be for his sister. I wondered then at the fickleness of love, but really, what he loved about Alex was the same thing that I did. She was a blank screen on which we projected our fantasies.
His lack of ardor infuriated Alex, and she turned on me, insisting that she still wanted to have the baby and that all I did was make her crazy with reasons to get rid of it. Dr. Lombardi turned up on our third day back and she immediately began interrogating him, saying she just wanted to know her alternatives. He told her she had two.
The first was that if you were less than eight weeks pregnant you could take a combination of two pills that together would block the hormones needed to maintain a pregnancy. He ticked off the side effects, and this was if they worked and they sometimes didn’t: cramping, diarrhea, vomiting. By the time he got to heavy bleeding Alex was in tears and so was I. He pulled a brown vial from his pocket and tapped two black and green Libriums into her palm and one into mine.
Her other choice was to have an abortion. “I know someone in Jersey City,” he said. “They’re good. Medical people, not back alley people.”
Abortions were illegal. Underground legend was full of girls who descended into back alley abortion clinics and never came back or returned twisted beyond recognition.
“First trimester, there shouldn’t be complications,” Dr. Lombardi said, “But the sooner the better.”
After a half hour of declaiming she wasn’t sure what she wanted, wasn’t sure whether to go through with it, most of the time spent glaring at me as if the whole screwed up situation was my fault, which I was beginning to believe, Alex finally told Dr. Lombardi to make the arrangements.
“I’ll do it from a pay phone,” he said and left.
I called our brother John through the gallery where his paintings had sold and told him what had happened. I told Alex that the more people who knew what was going on, the better, but really I was scared. More scared than I had been in my entire life and I wanted a trustworthy adult involved.
Dr. Lombardi was chain-smoking when he came to apartment the following morning to tell us where to go. “Do you have the money?” he asked Alex who shut her eyes and held up an envelope stuffed with five hundred dollars, money that she saved up from her modeling gigs.
“Does anyone have any weed?” Alex a
sked. “I could use a toke.”
Dr. Lombardi pulled a joint from his shirt pocket and flipped it to Lance. “Fire it up, but only a little. They’re going to need to know if she’s feeling any pain.”
John had arrived with coffee and donuts an hour earlier and was squashed in a beanbag chair in the corner, clenching and unclenching his hands. He waved away the joint when it came to him.
“These things aren’t that bad,” I said, not having a clue what I was talking about. “Girls do it all the time.”
“Maybe if we had a real doctor,” John hissed.
Dr. Lombardi shot him a dirty look. The phone rang. It was like a telephone ringing in church while the priest was saying mass. A model wannabe on the other end, oblivious to our little drama, wanted to schedule some time for a shoot. Lance checked his watch, then looked back at us, trying to figure out how long our business was going to take and mumbled something into the receiver before hanging up. He went to the window and put both hands on it, stretching himself like a cat, then picked up his wallet from the kitchen table, gave me a thumbs-up sign and walked out. And that was that.
Alex, John and I took the subway from St. Marks Place to Penn Station and then walked underground to the Path train that ran under the Hudson River to Jersey City. As instructed we got off at the third stop, Journal Square, climbed the steps, crossed Kennedy Boulevard, a four-lane two ways street, and stood on the curb outside the Loew’s Jersey Theater, a slightly run-down colossal 1920s movie palace showing Midnight Cowboy. It was seven o’clock when we emerged from the subway. We were to wait there until the line of people for the eight o’clock show had gone in then cross back over Kennedy Boulevard and stand in front of the subway steps. A car would come for Alex. They’d be watching and know by what we did who were were.
“Only one of us is supposed to be here,” I told John.
“They’ll be here,” John said. “Why don’t you get a soda and I’ll wait with Alex.” There was a soda shop at the corner. We both sat back on the curb next to Alex instead.