by Tom Molloy
She stretched on the couch, one hand supporting her head as she listened.
“Two weeks later I went AWOL, holed up in Seoul with two stewardesses, one Japanese, one Australian. Stayed in all day, moved by night. One night I was in a little bar way back in a neighborhood where just Korean workers hung out and this black guy comes in. He’s a couple years older than me, built like a bull. Comes right up to me and he says, ‘AWOL?” Just like that. And I said ‘Yeah.’
“He puts his hand out and says, ‘Puma.’
“Well I’m waiting for the doors to burst open and 15 M.P.’s to beat the hell out of me. I mean who is this guy? I thought he had to be Military Intelligence or F.B.I. hell, maybe he’s James Bond doing a minstrel routine, but nothing happened. He was all alone, and he was a civilian.
I spun on the floor so that I was facing her as I continued.
“So we started to talk. This guy’s been to ’Nam, now he’s in Korea, he’s been to Moscow, London, Belfast, Jerusalem, Paris, Manila, Honolulu, New Delhi. To put it briefly he’s going around the world. ‘Tying the knot,’ he called it.”
The woman stood, gathering the silk slip around her as she walked. She came over to me and took the glass from my hands, then bent to pour more wine into it. She took a sip of the liquid, handed me the glass and returned to the couch.
I resumed speaking. “I just trusted him, I’m still not sure why, but I just did, like I trust you. I told him about getting a medal for watching a guy shoot two people. I told him about the ten-year-old whore, and about the two stewardesses and our ménage à trois. I told him that I wasn’t a coward but that I had not enlisted to watch in silence as innocent unarmed people got murdered, the reward for my silence being a medal, a handshake, and a three-day pass from which I had declined to return.
Outside a car entered the yard, its headlights sweeping the frozen gravel and empty trucks once, then it spun around kicking up pebbles and was gone.
“In brief I told him I was lost, alone, scared, very, very angry, and as confused as I was pissed off. I added that I felt I had failed and disgraced my parents, even though both had been dead for many years.”
She turned on one side.
“What did he say?”
“He said a whole lot. He said I should return to my unit and face the consequences of my actions. He said he knew I was considering suicide, which I was, and he said that such a thing would be a terrible waste and a betrayal of purpose. He said I felt lost because my country had lost its way, something, he said, that seems to happen once or twice every century, something, he said, whose measure of depth can be taken by everyday rudeness and selfishness. He said he would contact me again and took my name, rank, serial number, and my address in the States, and he walked out the door.”
I got up and sat close to her on the couch as she curled her feet up to make room.
“Next morning I bid adieu to the two flight attendants, walked back to my unit, told my commanding officer I had been Absent Without Leave and got put in a cell. After two days I was taken out of the cell, and told to dig a hole six feet deep and six feet square. When I dug it I was told to fill it in. That was repeated five times, the show losing a little charm with each performance.
Somewhere in the distance fire engines sounded, their cries merging into one and stopping.
“After a number of other punishment details I was returned to my unit. Eight months later I was honorably discharged. I met a girl from Maine, married her and moved to a house in the woods around Kennebunk.”
The fire apparatus began the trek back to the station, their bells chiming rhythmically in a two-one-three cadence.
“I’d been married almost a year when Puma came walking up to my front door. My wife happened to be visiting her family at the time.
He really got a chuckle out of my tale of digging holes in Korea, said it no doubt gave me an appreciation of what the poor infiltrators had to go through. After a drink of brandy he’d brought, we went for a walk through the woods and talked.
The woman sat up, folding her hands on her lap and leaning forward.
“He told me he was also a veteran of a forgotten war, the invasion of the Dominican Republic. He was wounded there, knocked off a bridge by a sniper’s bullet. He said we were now entering an epoch of ignorance, and America was the center of it. All things being equal, America was the country in which ignorance most translated into danger, a danger that was both foreign and domestic. Finally he said, it all comes down to a willingness to act.”
The room was very quiet and past the frosted windows the cold settled closer to the ground, pressed down by the thickening darkness. I walked to the window and stood with both hands in my pockets.
“That’s it, bare bones.”
She repeated, “Bare bones.”
“Yeah.”
She asked me about Puma, his real name, where he was from, where he got his money, where he went to school, if he was married, what he was doing now. I only knew that he had been married at one point and that there was at least one child, and he possessed a rich and subtle appreciation of women.
I knew that he lived simply and resented strongly the modern media image of the American black man which he once described to me as all fists, no brain, jive talk, and sunglasses. Puma hated sunglasses as much as he loved poetry, Mozart, astronomy, and the fiction of Fitzgerald.
I’d heard about how he used to go up to kids who were carrying boom boxes and wearing sunglasses, flip off their glasses and smash the boom box. He’d then slip the kid a pair of crisp new hundred dollar bills and say, “Try thought.”
When I told her about that she laughed aloud, then shook her head so that her hair came onto one side, exposing one of her small ears.
When I finished speaking she turned onto her side, took my head in her hands, and kissed me twice on the face. A long liquid hiss came from the radiator as the pipes below clanged like someone banging on a mansion door. That sound made her words seem very soft.
“I was always a lady, always a good girl. I was never a bad girl. They always mixed me up with their smart talk, an’ they’d get me confused with it, so I didn’t know what was what. But they all wanted the same thing all right, ’cept maybe one, but I never hurt nobody which is more than I got back from them, ever.”
Because of the angle she lay at she slurped the wine as she drank.
“An’ all that women’s lib stuff, hey I’m liberated an’ all, but I like havin’ doors held open an’ all that nice stuff. I wish more of ’em did it, some guys are just so rude, ya know?”
I spoke with the glass in my hand.
“Yeah.”
She sniffed and let a small laugh pass her lips.
“No ya don’t. They beg an’ cry, an’ carry on like little kids, little kids I’m tellin’ ya, ask anybody. An when ya feel bad an’ give ’em what they want you’re a whore, an’ don’t the whole freakin world know ’bout it the next day, ya know?”
I said I thought I did, but she made the same noise as before, but this time it was more of a laugh.
“No ya don’t. Once, I did somethin’, OK it was stupid, an’ I was stupid to do it. It was where I was workin’ with this one guy, ya know, out in a car after work one night, an’ don’t the whole damn world know about it the next day?”
Her fist hit the pillow with a muffled thud, and her voice rose.
“I mean don’t just the whole goddamn world gotta know next day, huh?”
Without answering I sipped the wine, noticing how clearly sounds carried in the outside cold. I thought too that the highway looked closer in the cold. There was a rustling behind my head as she pulled on her panties and the blouse.
She bent over so that her hair fell in a bunch and brushed my face, her hand was very cool on my neck.
“I’m yours right now if ya want.”
My voice wavered from the want and I had to swallow twice.
“No, it’s OK.”
“Sure?”
&nb
sp; My voice sounded even tighter.
“Yeah sure, it’s OK, really.”
She was still again but for her fingers that lightly touched my hair. As they moved, I spoke of my wife, of the proper methods for making bread, of how it is no coincidence that it is the bakers who each day greet the dawn. Again the pipes sounded in the walls deep below.
I talked of Korea and the never ending frozen hills of the DMZ we patrolled so many years after the war was supposedly over. I told her of the hate so clear and true along that line that you could taste it on your tongue.
My tale of foreign winters made her chilled, and she dressed quickly, but my want did not diminish. We agreed I would spend time with her and tell no one. We would come to work at different times, and from her apartment I would come and go as I pleased. So would she. She would have an extra key made, and I would sleep on her couch, or if I preferred in a sleeping bag on the floor.
I would meet her later this evening in a doughnut shop at an intersection close to where the offices gave way to warehouses and they to the docks and the sea. We parted, kissing good-bye like siblings.
I walked blocks before the last remnants of sexual want drained from me. My pace was fast and I trotted across several streets, one hand in a coat pocket, fingers tight against my instruments, for the cold could be hard on them.
At a long row of phones on the street level inside the Greyhound bus terminal I took out one of them. I shivered as I did so, I could feel and smell the cold as it rose from my clothing and skin.
I remembered a night in Korea. They had captured our ship on the high seas, and now on the land, the shells were passing overhead, cold steel orbs tearing the atmosphere like razor blades passing through fine white paper. The infiltrators had gotten behind us, in front of us, among us.
I was crying, the tear and mucous frozen on my face, I was shouting and shooting at shadows, and the shells flew and flew and the evenly spaced automatic rifles sounded correctly. The radio net was a hysterical jumble of southern accents, the ground we lay on hard, cold, and even blacker than the empty Korean sky that mocked us.
The call signs were jumbled, the frequencies were wrong, the units in confusion, the young men counting their time in seconds, when Sergeant Dalton came on the line. Diamond Jim Dalton’s Virginia drawl cleared the channels of the terrified cries of all of us, and saved our asses one and all. I traced his words across the face of the wall above the phones.
WHAT THE FUCK? OVER.
6
Below us on Storrow Drive the cars fled the city four abreast in an unbroken chain of light that changed from white to red beneath the footbridge Puma and I stood upon.
In the distance, the Hatch Shell where the Boston Pops Orchestra played was a rounded cold smudge, and close by it a bronze George Patton prepared to lift field glasses to his eyes.
Puma, his back to me, faced the Hatch Shell, and Patton faced the fleeing motorists so that his ebony figure was sharply etched. Puma hadn’t said a word as I told him about Frances, my job, and our new living arrangements.
When I finished speaking he turned to face me, like a spectre among the moving white lights. His words came above the sounds of the automobiles.
“Why now? Next week is Christmas. Why not wait ’til spring? Nice weather, pretty girls in their finery. Lots of people out and about and lots of daylight. The coeds could consider your work as they enjoyed their ice cream cones. Your wife and son wouldn’t spend Christmas alone. Neither would you for that matter. What brought you back now?”
I wondered if he could see me clearly against the ebbing tide of red. It had been almost five years since I’d last travelled. I was in my late 20’s then, a little thinner, a little quicker, with an anger closer to the surface, but not as focused as now.
For months I had crisscrossed the south in the fecund heat of summer until I left a message on the wall of a bar on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Suddenly surrounded by police officers I was handcuffed and beaten unconscious, awaking with a severe concussion and charges of breaking and entering, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. A charge of possession of burglary tools was dropped.
The beating ended my odyssey in the urban South in which I had travelled unseen and untouched by what lay around me, like a canoeist riding a river’s strong current. Indirectly, it set in motion the events that led from the careless freedom of bachelor-hood to the measured steps of marital intimacy.
Having survived shot and shell in the service of my country, I had, like many men before me, returned to these shores with a gentle love for the nation. A love that goes very much unexpressed by men, it is within their chests like the after-glow of fine liquor or the perfumed scent of the lover recently held.
But the beating and the long convalescence that followed gave rise within me to the realization that this special feeling was a one-way street whose direction was reversed only for dead people and the abstraction of a once-a-year holiday. It was like being in love with a woman who’s in love with a jerk.
I drew the coat closer to me before speaking and took one hand from a pocket as I pointed at the motorists fleeing with the sun from the city.
“They’re running scared, they’ll commute two hours each way so they can live in a little white box in the suburbs. There’s a very serious shortage of truth around. Worst of all, people in this country are so frightened all the time, but they don’t even know what they’re afraid of.”
Below a horn blared, its pitch falling to a flat monotone as the car raced into the distance. I took a step closer to Puma as the lights cascaded around him. I felt like an actor peering into the footlights.
Puma hunched his shoulders as a police car shot past below, blue lights flashing as it elbowed aside other vehicles. The blue strobes touched the toes of Puma’s shoes as he spoke.
“Are you going to tell them what they’re afraid of?”
“I’m just trying to tell the truth,” I replied.
“So are others,” he said.
“Not many,” I answered.
“Hundreds,” said Puma.
Another police car passed as I spoke. “Hundreds isn’t many.”
“Hundreds,” he said, his voice rising, “have toppled governments and changed the course of life on the planet. Christianity started with twelve, National Socialism with not many more, the American Revolution with only a handful.
The silence between us lengthened as Puma waited for me to speak. Glancing at the night skyline of Boston with its beautiful glass cathedrals of capitalism, I answered him.
“Why now? Because it’s the winter solstice, because it’s dark and freezing cold. Because the truth needs challenge to be true and what greater challenge is there than America? Because America doesn’t care. It would be easier to dodge the secret police with their midnight knock than to try to push off this mush of affluence. They won’t even dignify us with their oppression. The truth is beneath their contempt; maybe it was always like this, I don’t know. But it’s our art, it’s what we are. Whether you’re on or off, The Journey is always there waiting, The Journey is always true. The phonies climb on with their trends and their social connections, but they never last. The truth isn’t packaged in a pretty blue bottle wrapped with a ribbon, but it’s a fine gift to give and get and to pass along. It matters. It’s energy. No creating, no destroying, only the same simple thing in a different form. So that’s why and that’s why now.”
In the darkness I saw him nod agreement, understanding, acceptance or perhaps a combination of the three. He turned to his left so that he faced the brownstone buildings of the Back Bay when he spoke.
“I’m going to the Pacific Northwest tomorrow. First to Seattle, then to a series of small towns in Oregon. What magnificent trees they have there. They’re older than the United States, some older than Columbus.”
“You’ll be in touch?”
“Eventually.”
We shook hands and he walked toward the darkness but hal
ted at the flight of stairs that connected the little bridge to the city and called back to me.
“How many litres?”
“A thousand.”
“How many atoms?”
“One.”
He descended the metal stairs and was gone.
I went down the opposite stairs, walking over a mile to Charles Circle where an all-night drugstore looked out over a non-stop kaleidoscope of orbiting traffic.
Heading south on Charles Street toward Boston Common, I stopped in front of an expensive boutique. Next door, the window of a travel agency advertised a 60-day tour of the world on a luxury liner. The instrument worked well, and the single word came easily to the cold wood.
SHARE
7
On the evening of the second day I stayed with her, Frances Jean Lawless lay on her couch watching the smoke of her cigarette redefine itself in the last rays of that day’s sun. She had not moved from the couch since I’d left the house almost three hours earlier to jog and swim. Vigorous exercise is an antidote to an unwanted, but common, companion of my vocation. Despair.
I felt splendid from the workout and during my run along the hardened banks of the Charles River I had defined the parameters of several messages. Now while sitting on the floor I massaged the cork of a champagne bottle, till it came free with a sound like stone hitting deep water.
Frances Jean spoke. “The first guy …”
Her hand passed through the smoke as though she disagreed with its message and she spoke again as the smoke curled downward.
“The first guy I ever had was real nice. I was only thirteen, and a skinny runty-lookin’ kid, ya know?”
I said I did.
“My folks sent me to summer camp for two weeks ’way out in the western part of the state where the mountains are, ya know?”