Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

  So: two and a half weeks to go.

  Coming in, back in January, I was told to gain ten pounds; I’ve managed to lose three. It’s so cold here that the barracks furnace (coal! just like 9th Avenue) never stops puffing. But for real bone-rattling chill, nothing can beat last week’s bivouac. We were doing “camouflage and concealment” maneuvers, and I couldn’t puncture the can of evaporated milk with the opener: the stuff had frozen solid!

  I’ve got the top bunk again. The other seven guys in the squad are mostly like the ones I used to give a wide berth to back at St. Agnes’, but I’ve made friends with a nice doctor (they draft them in droves) who’s got a wife (pregnant) back home.

  Strange to think of Dad being here in the CCC twenty years ago. (He once told me it was the only place he ever saw reefer!)

  I’m sorry I haven’t written. You scold me about it worse than Mom, who’s sort of given up on the subject. You ask if I’m running away from something, or someone. Mostly the drill instructor! He’ll actually pound you on the back if you’re not marching fast enough with your rifle. (The M-1 is a lot easier to reassemble than it is to carry.)

  I might have to welsh on my Easter promise. On Sunday, April 10th, I could be on my way to wherever it is I’ll be doing Advanced Individual Training (not as customized as it sounds). I don’t have my assignment yet, and God only knows what they’ll decide I’m suited for, but that’s the story.

  Say hi to Tom and kiss Maria Loretta for me.

  Love,

  Beetle Bailey

  P.S. Please don’t worry. All shall be well.

  Timmer xxx

  Folding the letter, he wondered what it would be like to run away from something with somebody, the two of you fleeing the same thing together. In the papers, Princess Margaret’s RAF boyfriend was now saying that they would be willing to accept exile if they were allowed to marry. It sounded like the grandest of fates: to be safely joined in some realm beyond the one that had refused to provide the two of you a place. Of course, all of this first assumed that both of you actually wanted each other.

  He had trouble being ashamed of writing so few letters, not when he always had more to leave out than put in. Was he really supposed to tell Francy about the guy in the squad who was, he felt sure, like himself—this draftee clerk from a New York City government office who had pronounced the old olive-drab uniforms more “attractive” than the new Army Green ones and observed that camouflage-and-concealment sounded “a little like Max Factor’s latest”?

  Maybe that guy would be the one to bug out? To go sobbing to the headshrinker in the camp hospital? Actually not, thought Tim. More likely it would be the loudmouth from Bridgeport who loved to hold his M-1 in one hand and his crotch in the other, and say—

  This is my rifle

  This is my gun

  This is for killing

  This is for fun—

  as if it weren’t the two-hundredth time they’d all heard it.

  The falling marks he’d just mentioned to Francy still had him slightly above average in “coordination” and “resourcefulness” (no one understood how they measured it), but below par in “aggressiveness.” All this had probably been predictable from the Armed Forces Qualifying Test he’d taken at the examining station in D.C. before leaving for Fort Dix. He’d run into Kenneth Woodforde at a cafeteria right after sitting the exam, and the journalist had mocked his enlistment, revealing himself to be 4-F and expressing regret only about having gotten his classification on physical rather than moral grounds. “They discovered my bad shoulder before my voter registration,” he said, the first concrete indication Tim had ever had that Woodforde might really be a Communist.

  Department of State

  Washington, D.C.

  March 11, 1955

  Dear Dog-Face,

  I don’t know how you can sign yourself that way, and it’s the last time I’ll ever use it as a salutation, but there you go.

  Thanks for the snapshot. White sidewalls, no? Isn’t that what they call the haircut? They make you look even younger.

  Are you sure they can’t detail you back to civilian life for a week or two? I could use some extra help here: Senator Knowland wants to start World War Three by having the 7th Fleet intercept a Finnish tanker that’s heading to Red China to deliver jet fuel, and Beverly is spending more time over at the Congressional Secretaries Club than she is here. Someone in Senator Stennis’ office bent the membership rules so she could take a small wisecracking part (“very Eve Arden,” she says) in “Revisin’ and Extendin’,” the revue they’ll be doing to benefit some clinic in Georgetown for retarded children. I think Mrs. Nixon was pictured with a couple of them in yesterday’s Star. (The children, not the secretaries.) So if you see a mushroom cloud, it’s the result of Beverly not being at her typewriter to send Senator Knowland and his colleagues those gentle policy pleadings from Mr. Morton.

  Even so, it’s hard to blame her. These days she appears to be the happiest person on the floor; maybe in the whole building.

  When I told Paul—yes, we’re still friendly, and yes, he’s still dating the bookkeeper—that you hadn’t been notified about your advanced individual training (have I got the name right?), he said to be sure and tell you not to let them turn you into a bean-burner, which I gather is a cook, and which I gather his bookkeeper is a much better one of than I. (I know you’ll be able to straighten out the grammar of that sentence.)

  Let me know what they do make you into. And where they’re sending you next.

  Love,

  Mary

  “Plucky wog!” exclaimed the Englishman at Couve de Murville’s table.

  With his own two hands, Prime Minister Nehru had the other day saved himself from a knife attack, knocking a would-be assassin off the running board of his limousine.

  De Murville, the French foreign minister, nodded impassively to his lunch companion here at the Sulgrave, but the Englishman’s loud compliment caught the attention of Ned Fuller and his nephew, Hawkins.

  Still, Ned had no time for thinking about subcontinentals; the Germans were again crowding his mind, thanks to Hawkins’ aunt Valerie, who the other night at dinner in New York had loudly voiced her distress over France’s belated capitulation to German rearmament. “Fortunately, the Frogs are still carping about the Saar,” Ned now told his nephew. “That gives her a little encouragement.”

  Hawkins sipped a spoonful of consommé.

  “I’m afraid,” said Uncle Ned, “that you and I have some important things to talk about. More important than whether you or your sisters are going to get my place in New Mexico.” He coughed into his water glass; the lung man down here was not doing much good.

  “You mean the world situation?” asked Hawkins. “The French and the Germans?”

  “No, your father’s financial situation.”

  Hawkins pushed away the soup bowl. “Tell me it’s unexpectedly good. I’m all ears.”

  “It’s terrible. Bad investments. And bad choice of a girlfriend. The latest one.”

  “Myrna.”

  “Maura,” Ned corrected. “It’s bad enough he pays her bills. But he seems to be paying her debts, too—all the freight her last boyfriend wouldn’t pick up. And your mother is only making things worse.”

  “Mother doesn’t make scenes.”

  Ned lit a cigarette. “No, she doesn’t. And she doesn’t make investments, good or bad. What she’s been making are a lot of charitable donations—to Catholic charities, no less. She’s spent down a lot of her own capital, and your father’s besides.”

  “Each according to her means,” said Hawkins.

  “Meaning?”

  “She can’t quite bring herself to kneel at Sheen’s altar rail. So she sacrifices at the teller’s window.”

  Ned shrugged and blew a smoke ring.

  “What are the implications?” asked Hawkins.

  “For you?”

  “Of course.” Hawkins pierced the cracked crab with his fork and
smiled.

  “Rather dire,” said Uncle Ned. “How do you feel about living off your salary? It may come to that. I hate to tell you, but you’re not even getting that house in New Mexico.”

  Hawkins looked at the choice forkful of crab. “Should I send this back and get a hamburger?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Ned, who was paying for lunch. “Cancer’s already tightened my belt. And I never had that much in the first place. Maybe a fifth as much as your profligate parents.”

  Living off his salary: Hawkins judged the idea to be no more endurable than it would be to any of his Harvard trust-fund buddies who’d gone into publishing. One might as well tell Lucy Boardman’s father to live off what Wellesley paid him to teach art history.

  “Pull your chair back,” said Uncle Ned.

  Hawkins obliged.

  “Just trying to get a look at you. See how expensive your tastes are.” Ned paused, consideringly. “I can’t see the shoes. I hope they aren’t in a league with the suit.”

  Hawkins finished his crab and asked for a cigarette while they waited for coffee. His shoes and suits were good enough to last a long while, he thought. But at some point he’d need money for trouble. One day his luck would run out; he would slip up in a way that required more than the fifty dollars for a men’s-room arrest at the Y. Money, put to bail or blackmail, would be what saved him.

  “The nerve of Dad to be spending everything on his own indiscretions!”

  Hawkins laughed as he said it, but Ned, unsmiling, coughed hard, rose from his chair, and waved off his nephew’s assistance. “Let me head to the gents. I’ll be fine.”

  As he waited for his uncle to return, Hawkins drank his coffee and regarded both de Murville and the Gilbert-and-Sullivan character at the other table. They were beginning to blur into a portrait on the wall when the waiter approached with a message.

  “A phone call, Mr. Fuller. From a Mr. Sorrell at the Pentagon.”

  “Thanks.” Hawkins headed for one of the telephone cabins, thinking how much easier it would be to focus for a moment or two on Skippy’s future instead of his own.

  He understood from a letter he’d seen on Mary’s desk that there still might be time to affect a decision about Private Laughlin’s AIT, even if his Fort Dix days with the Fighting Sixty-ninth—there was nomenclatural combination!—would be over in a couple of weeks.

  He knew someone, of course. He’d left the message with Sorrell just an hour ago.

  “Andy,” he said, taking the receiver. “You always were quick.”

  “Got your own little Private Schine, do you?”

  “What about the Monterey Language School?”

  “That’s hard to do. Actually, it’s hard to do anything like this, but I’ll accomplish what I can. Tell me his aptitudes.” He chuckled at the word.

  “Writes nicely. Clever. Terribly sincere right-winger. No particular drive. A tender disposition. Would be a wonderful boy Friday to some major general.”

  Sorrell’s leering chuckle became a full laugh. “I see.”

  Fuller said nothing, just waited for an answer.

  “Well,” Sorrell at last replied, “maybe USAIS, the information school in upstate New York.”

  “I suppose that’s better than having him learn to type all over again at Fort Benjamin Harrison.”

  Or, God forbid, putting him into a combat arm. He once more pictured Tim bouncing toward a European death in some jeep, the same mental image he’d had at Christmas, but filled in this time with the detail of the white sidewalls he’d seen in the picture on Mary’s desk.

  “Give me until tomorrow morning,” said Sorrell. “I’ll do what I can to get him back to you smooth and unscratched. The way you like them, right? At least sometimes.” Getting no response, Sorrell added hopefully, “I’m still that way myself, you know.”

  Fuller laughed. “Thanks, Andy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  June 22–24, 1955

  The bugle notes of reveille, tinny and recorded, reached the barracks at Fort Polk by means of a loudspeaker, but Tim had no need for them. He had already been up for an hour, on his knees in the nondenominational chapel. As on other mornings, he was finding that its pale brown walls, unadorned by any graven image, lent a sort of abstract severity to the devotions he was trying to perform.

  If the First World War had seemed to hang over Fort Dix, thrown together in 1917, it was the Second that shadowed Fort Polk, onetime center of the Louisiana Maneuvers, whose millions of broiled and dehydrated participants had, more than a decade ago, included Tim’s uncle Alan. Recently reopened to quarter the First Armored Division, Polk was still operating at only a fraction of its 1940s self.

  The built-in shade that Mary Johnson had described as a constant of New Orleans architecture didn’t seem to figure at this installation seven miles from the town of Leesville. He’d arrived after a confusing final week in Jersey. First he’d gotten orders for the U.S. Army Information School at Fort Slocum, but then an assignment officer overruled them on the grounds that he was already better than most USAIS graduates at the things they got taught. And so he’d been put in this on-the-job training slot instead: working on The Kisatchian, the camp newspaper here at Polk, where he’d shown up carrying the same suitcase he’d taken from D.C. to Fort Dix back in January. He’d also brought along a Davy Crockett cap rifle, a friendly present from several other shitbirds in basic, where he’d been widely conceded to be the single worst marksman in the company. So much, he thought, for above-average “coordination.”

  When he finished his prayers this morning, he’d be reporting to Major Brillam, The Kisatchian’s editor. Tim liked him and the work, which could involve almost anything: rewriting recipes submitted for publication by officers’ wives; printing the official instructions for dealing with radiation skin burns; editing a local enlistee’s original story on the remarkable intelligence of somebody’s pet ostrich in Metairie.

  This week he’d been laying out stories on the UN’s tenth-anniversary celebrations in San Francisco. Ike had talked of “my country’s unswerving loyalty” to the organization, and old pictures from its founding—some with Alger Hiss seated behind Secretary of State Stettinius, just as he’d sat behind FDR at Yalta—had been reappearing over the wire services. I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss. Forget what Acheson had said; was there anyone, Tim wondered, who had watched his back around Hiss?

  Days at The Kisatchian were longer than they’d been at the Star, and Tim tended to find most of his off-duty entertainment in the paper’s office. He almost always wound up back there after dinner in the mess or a late trip to the PX. There were so few books on the base that he’d yesterday bought an issue of Good Housekeeping, since it promised a whole novella by John P. Marquand. The barracks radio was always tuned to the fights or hillbilly music, and he realized that by the time his enlistment was over, most of the serials to which he’d remained so faithful would be gone from the dial. He’d once driven into Leesville with some guys in his squad to see This Is Cinerama! and on the base they’d all been made to watch Face to Face with Communism, an armed-forces feature about an air force sergeant spending a nightmare furlough in a U.S. town that appeared to have been taken over by American Communists. Happy ending: the sergeant learns it was just a role-playing exercise by the vigilant locals.

  Major Brillam always called him “son,” as Potter had, and the officer had been impressed to discover in his file that Tim had worked for a United States senator. He threw as much responsibility his way as possible. The other week he’d told him that “We’re trying to avoid creating more Ronald Alleys,” Alley being a thirty-four-year-old officer who’d betrayed his fellow POWs in Korea; since one of Brillam’s buddies worked in Indoctrination, the two officers had decided that Tim should talk to a class on the base about his experience with Potter’s atrocity hearings.

  The recruits snickered when Tim wrote on the blackboard and his chalk line wandered uphill, but they all took not
es and one or two wound up regarding him as a person of worldly experience. However fraudulent that had made him feel, the episode did encourage him to believe that he was doing something purposeful. The same went for his work on the paper. The other day he’d written a story on an operation by the “Winds of Freedom” campaign, which had launched a fusillade of hydrogen-filled balloons from a field in Bavaria. Designed to explode at thirty thousand feet over Czechoslovakia, the balloons had showered down pamphlets listing Free World radio frequencies for the captive citizens below. The Czech UN delegate had expressed annoyance at the provocation, prompting Tim to write that “the winds are blowing, literally and otherwise, from West to East.” Major Brillam later told him that the “otherwise” was okay, but the average cracker wasn’t going to know what the Sam Hill “literally” meant.

  What was the motto his doctor pal at Fort Dix had taught him? First do no harm? Well, when he couldn’t be doing something useful, that’s what he now vowed to do in the world: no harm to others or himself. He would keep his head down, the way he had on the obstacle course while crawling on his stomach with live ammunition flying overhead, or even the way he’d kept it down during the roller-coaster scenes in This Is Cinerama!

  Lingering in the chapel, he checked his watch and closed his eyes to say the last of his prayers, but all that came to mind, yet again, was his failed attempt at confession, at St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, on the Saturday afternoon before he’d left Fort Dix.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eighteen months since my last confession.

  He’d been able to hear Father Davett, identified by the nameplate on the confessional, shifting on his bench behind the sliding panel. The “eighteen months” had made the priest anticipate something exceptional, so he was moving closer for a better listen.

  I missed my Easter duty, Tim had continued, hopelessly, aware of how much further he had to go.