In Pharaoh's Army

by Tobias Wolff

  Then he started coming out of it. He liked being babied, so he wore his invalid droop and mopery as long as I let him. When I helped him in and out of bed he groaned and mewed and walked as if his joints had rusted shut. He had me buy him an ice bag, which he wore like a tam-o’-shanter, his eyes tremulous with self-pity. All day long he called out his wishes in a small desolate voice—cheese and crackers, please, some Gouda on stone-ground Wheat Thins would be swell, with a little Tabasco and red onion, if I wouldn’t mind. Palm hearts with cream cheese, por favor, and this time could I skip the paprika and just sprinkle a little onion salt on them? Thanks a mil! Ginger ale, old son, over ice, and would it be too much trouble to crush the ice?

  He was relentless and without shame. Once he pushed me too far and I said, “Jesus, Duke, suffer in silence awhile, okay?” This was the first time in my life I’d called him by that name, and the sound of myself saying it made me cringe. But he didn’t object. It probably reassured him that I was ready to vacate any outstanding claims on him as his child and accept a position as his crony. I never called him Duke again. I wanted to feel as if I still had a father out there, however singular the terms.

  He started feeling better after the second day, and I was almost sorry. I liked taking care of him. I’d blitzed the apartment with cleansers, stocked his cabinets with cans of stew and hash and clam chowder and the treats he favored—Swedish flatbread, palm hearts, macadamia nuts. I had a new muffler put on the Cadillac. While he was laid up sick the smallest acts felt purposeful and worthwhile, and freed me from the sodden sensation of uselessness. Out running errands, I found myself taking pleasure in the salt smell and hard coastal light, the way the light fired the red-tiled roofs and cast clean-edged shadows as black as tar. In the afternoons I brought a chair and a book out to the sidewalk and faced the declining sun, chest bared to the warmth, half listening for the old man’s voice through the open window at my back. I was reading Portnoy’s Complaint. Geoffrey had sent it to me some time before and I’d never been able to get past the first few pages, but now it came to life for me. I read it in a state of near collapse, tears spilling down my cheeks. It was the first thing I’d finished in months.

  My father took note of my absorption. He wanted to know what was so fascinating. I let him have it when I was through, and that evening he told me he’d never read anything so disgusting—not that he’d finished it. Come on, I said. He had to admit it was funny. Funny! How could such a thing be funny? He was baffled by the suggestion.

  “Okay,” I said. “What do you think is funny, then?”

  “What b-book, you mean?”

  “Book. Movie. Whatever.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. He was stretched out on the couch, eating a plate of scrambled eggs. “Wind in the Willows,” he said. Now there was a book that showed you didn’t have to be dirty to be humorous. He happened to have a copy on hand and would be willing to prove his point.

  More than willing; I knew he was dying to read it aloud. He’d done this before, to Geoffrey and me, one night in La Jolla seven years earlier. It was a dim memory, pleasant and rare in that it held the three of us together. Of the book itself I recalled nothing except an atmosphere of treacly Englishness. But I couldn’t say no.

  He started to read, smiling rhapsodically, the ice bag on his head. I was bored stiff until Toad of Toad Hall made his entrance and began his ruinous love affair with the automobile. “What dust clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way!” he cried. “What carts shall I fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset!” Toad had my attention. I found him funny, yes, but also familiar in a way that put me on alert.

  Toad is arrested for stealing a car, and in the absence of any remorse is sentenced to twenty years in a dungeon. He escapes dressed as a washerwoman and manages to commandeer the very car he was imprisoned for stealing, after the owner offers a lift to what he thinks is a weary old crone. Toad pins the Samaritan with an elbow and seizes the wheel. “Washerwoman indeed!” he shouts. “Ho, ho! I am the Toad, the motorcar snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes! Sit still, and you shall know what driving really is, for you are in the hands of the famous, the skillful, the entirely fearless Toad!”

  By now I knew where the déjà vu came from. My father was Toad. He wasn’t playing Toad, he was Toad, and not only Toad the audacious, Toad the shameless and incorrigible, but, as the story gave occasion, good-hearted Toad, hospitable Toad, Toad for whom his friends would risk their very lives. I’d never seen my father so forgetful of himself, so undefended, so confiding.

  He read the whole book. It took hours. I got up now and then to grab a beer and refill his glass of ginger ale, stretch, fix a plate of crackers and cheese, but quietly, so he wouldn’t break stride. The night deepened around us. Cars stopped going by. We were entirely at home, alone in an island of lamplight. I didn’t want anything to change.

  But Toad couldn’t keep up the pace. The hounds of respectability were on his neck, and finally they brought him down. He had no choice but to make a good act of contrition and promise to keep the peace, live within his means, be good.

  My father closed the book. He put it down and looked over at me, shaking his head at this transparent subterfuge. He wasn’t fooled. He knew exactly what Toad’s promise was worth.

  I’D MEANT ONLY to touch down in Manhattan Beach, but day followed day and I was still there. In the afternoons I sat by the water and read. At night I went to a bar down the road, then came home and sat up with the old man, listening to music and shooting the breeze. We talked about everything except Vietnam and prison. Only once did he mention his life there, when I asked about a livid scar on his wrist. He told me he’d been cut in a fight over which television program to watch, and that stupid as it sounded he’d had no choice, and didn’t regret it. I never heard him mention another inmate, never heard him say “the joint” or even “Chino.” He gave the impression it hadn’t touched him.

  I was drinking too much. One night he asked me if I didn’t want to give the old noggin a breather, and I stalked out and came back even drunker than usual. I wanted it understood that he could expect nothing of me, as I expected nothing of him. He didn’t bring it up again. He seemed to accept the arrangement, and I found it congenial enough that I could even imagine going on in this way, the two of us in our own circle, living on our own terms. I had nearly six thousand dollars in the bank, a year’s worth of unspent salary and hazardous duty pay. If I enrolled in the local community college I could milk another three hundred a month from the G.I. Bill. They didn’t check to see if you actually went to class—all you had to do was sign up. I could get a place of my own nearby. Start writing. By the time my savings and subsidies ran out, I’d have a novel done. Just a thought, but it kept coming. I mentioned it to the old man. He seemed to like the idea.

  It was a bad idea, conceived in laziness and certain to end miserably for both of us. Instead of masquerading as a student I needed to be a student, because I was uneducated and lacked the discipline to educate myself. Same with the novel. The novel wouldn’t get written, the money would all get spent, and then what? I had intimations of the folly of this plan, though I persisted in thinking about it.

  I’d been in town about a week when I met a woman on the beach. She was reading and I was reading, so it seemed natural to compare notes. Her name was Jan. She did speech therapy in the local schools. She had four or five years on me, maybe more. Her nose was very long and thin and she wore her blond hair mannishly close. She was calm, easy to talk to, but when I asked her out she frowned and looked away. She picked up a handful of sand, let it run through her fingers. “All right,” she said.

  Grand Illusion was showing at the local art theater. We got there early and strolled to the end of the street and back until they opened the doors. Jan wore a white dress that rustled as she walked and made her skin look dark as chocolate. She had the coolness and serenity of someone who has just finis
hed a long swim. As we were going inside I noticed that her zipper had slipped a few inches. Hold on, I said, and slowly pulled it up again, standing close behind her, my nose almost in her hair.

  I had seen Grand Illusion before, many times. My friend Laudie and I had memorized Pierre Fresnay’s death scene with Erich von Stroheim and used to play it out to impress our dates. But that night I couldn’t even follow the plot, I was so conscious of this woman beside me, her scent, the touch of her shoulder against mine, the play of light on her bare arms. At last I figured do or die and took her hand. She didn’t pull away. A little while later she laced her fingers through mine.

  When the lights came on I was awkward and so was she. We agreed to stop somewhere for a drink. She didn’t have anyplace in mind so I took her to the bar where I’d been going, an alleged discotheque frequented by former servicemen and some still in uniform. The moment I saw Jan inside the place, in her white dress and cool, manifest sanity, I saw it for what it was—a hole. But she claimed she liked it and insisted on staying.

  We’d just gotten our drinks when a hand fell on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Cap’n, you trying to keep this lovely lady all to yourself? No fuckin way, man.”

  Dicky. Dicky and his sidekick, Sleepy.

  Chairs scraped. Lighters and cigarettes and glasses descended on the table, a pitcher of beer. They were with us. Jan kept trying not to stare at Dicky, and kept failing. Dicky was clean-shaven but he had a big curly mustache tattooed above his lip. I couldn’t tell whether his intention was serious or jocular, if he actually thought he resembled a person with a mustache or was just riffing on the idea. He claimed to have been with a marine recon team near the DMZ, even to have operated in North Vietnam. I didn’t know what Sleepy’s story was.

  They were there every night, hopping tables. The last time I’d seen them they were trying to break into Sleepy’s car after he’d locked the keys inside. Dicky rigged up a wire of some kind and when that didn’t work right away he went into a rage and smashed out the driver’s window, but not before he’d kicked some dents into the door panel and broken off the radio antenna. Sleepy stood there with the rest of us who’d come out of the bar to watch, and didn’t say a word.

  Dicky caught Jan looking at him. He looked back at her. “So,” he said, “how’d you get to know this cabron? Hey, just kidding, the cap’n here’s numero fuckin uno.”

  I told him we’d been to see a film together.

  “Film? You saw a film? What happen, your specs get dirty? Hey, Sleepy, you hear that? The cap’n says he saw a film, I say, What happen, your specs get dirty?”

  “I laughed,” Sleepy said, “didn’t you hear me laugh?”

  “No, I didn’t hear you laugh. Speak up, asshole! So what film did you see, Cap’n?” For some reason sweat was pouring out of his hair and down his face.

  I gave Dicky the short description of Grand Illusion.

  He was interested. “That was some bad shit, man, Whirl War One. All that bob wire and overcoats and shit, livin like a buncha moles, come out, take a look around, eeeeeeeerrr, boom, your fuckin head gets blown off. No way, man. No fuckin way. I couldn’t get behind that shit at all. I mean, millions of assholes going south, right? Millions! It’s like you take the whole city of L.A., tell em, Hey, muchachos, here’s the deal, you just run into that bob wire over there and let those other fuckers put holes in you. Big Bertha, man. And poison gas, what about that mustard shit, you think you could handle that?”

  Jan had her eyes on me. “Were you a captain?”

  I’d told her I’d just come back from Vietnam, but nothing else. I shook my head no.

  “But I tell you straight,” Dicky said, “no bullshit. If they’d of had me and my team back in Whirl War One we coulda turned that shit around real fast. When Heinrich starts waking up in the morning with Fritzy’s dick in his hand, maybe they decide to do their yodeling and shit at home, leave these other people the fuck alone, you hear what I’m saying?”

  Sleepy’s chin was on his chest. He said, “I hear you, man.”

  “What were you, then?” Jan said to me.

  “First lieutenant.”

  “Same thing,” Dicky said. “Lieutenant, cap’n, all the same—hang you out to dry every fuckin one of em.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “The fuck it isn’t. Fuckin officers, man.”

  “I didn’t hang anybody out to dry. Except maybe another officer,” I said. “A captain, as a matter of fact.”

  Dicky ran a napkin over his wet face and looked at it, then at me. Jan was also looking at me.

  As soon as I started the story I knew I shouldn’t tell it. It was the story about Captain Kale wanting to bring the Chinook into the middle of the hooches, and me letting him do it. I couldn’t find the right tone. My first instinct was to make it somber and regretful, to show how much more compassionate I was than the person who had done this thing, how far I had evolved in wisdom since then, but it came off sounding phony. I shifted to a clinical, deadpan exposition. This proved even less convincing than the first pose, which at least acknowledged that the narrator had a stake in his narrative. The neutral tone was a lie, also a bore.

  How do you tell such a terrible story? Maybe such a story shouldn’t be told at all. Yet finally it will be told. But as soon as you open your mouth you have problems, problems of recollection, problems of tone, ethical problems. How can you judge the man you were now that you’ve escaped his circumstances, his fears and desires, now that you hardly remember who he was? And how can you honestly avoid judging him? But isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it? And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart? And in the end who gives a damn, who’s listening? What do you owe the listener, and which listener do you owe?

  As it happened, Dicky took the last problem out of my hands by laughing darkly when I confessed that I’d omitted to offer Captain Kale my ski goggles. He grinned at me, I grinned at him. Jan looked back and forth between us. We had in that moment become a duet, Dicky and I, and she was in the dark. She had no feel for what was coming, but he did, very acutely, and his way of encouraging me was to show hilarity at every promissory detail of the disaster he saw taking shape. He was with me, even a little ahead of me, and I naturally pitched my tune to his particular receptivities, which were harsh and perverse and altogether familiar, so that even as he anticipated me I anticipated him and kept him laughing and edgy with expectation.

  And so I urged the pilot on again, and the Chinook’s vast shadow fell again over the upturned faces of people transformed, by this telling, into comic gibbering stick-men just waiting to be blown away like the toothpick houses they lived in. As I brought the helicopter down on them I looked over at Jan and saw her watching me with an expression so thoroughly disappointed as to be devoid of reproach. I didn’t like it. I felt the worst kind of anger, the anger that proceeds from shame. So instead of easing up I laid it on even thicker, playing the whole thing for laughs, as cruel as I could make them, because after all Dicky had been there, and what more than that could I ever hope to have in common with her?

  When I got to the end Dicky banged his forehead on the table to indicate maximum mirth. Sleepy leaned back with a startled expression and gave me the once-over. “Hey,” he said, “great shirt, I used to have one just like it.”

  I CALLED Vera the next morning from a pancake house, my pockets sagging with quarters. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in over a year, and the sound of it made everything in between seem vaporous, unreal. We began to talk as if resuming a conversation from the night before, teasing, implying, setting each other off. We talked like lovers. I found myself shaking, I was so maddened not to be able to see her.

  When I hung up, the panic of loneliness I’d come awake to that morning was even worse. It made no sense to me that Vera was there and I
was here. The others too—my mother, my friends, Geoffrey and Priscilla. They had a baby now, my nephew Nicholas, born while I was in Vietnam. I still hadn’t laid eyes on him.

  I made up my mind to fly home the next day.

  That last night, the old man and I went out to dinner. For a change of pace we drove down to Redondo Beach, to a stylish French restaurant where, it turned out, they required a coat and tie. Neither of us had a tie so they supplied us with a pair of identical clip-ons, mile-wide Carnaby Street foulards with gigantic red polka dots. We looked like clowns. My father had never in his life insulted his person with such a costume and it took him a while to submit to it, but he came around. We had a good time, quietly, neither of us drinking much. Over coffee I told him I was leaving.

  He rolled with it, said he’d figured it was about time I checked in with my mother. Then he asked when I’d be coming back.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “If you’re thinking of going to school here, you’ll want to give yourself plenty of time to look around, find some digs.”

  “Dad, I have to say, I’ve been giving that a lot of thought.”

  He waited. Then he said, “So you won’t be going to school here.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  He waved away the apology. “All for the b-best, chum. My view exactly. You should aim higher.” He looked at me in the kindest way. He had beautiful eyes, the old man, and they had remained beautiful while his face had gone to ruin all around them. He reached over and squeezed my arm. “You’ll be back.”