by R. M. Ryan
“Where we’re going to read about him killing someone.”
“Leon, you could say that about half the people here, including you. Here, read the Second Amendment of the Constitution, Leon.”
Dmitri handed him the book.
“Read it to us, Leon. It’s on page twenty-two.”
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Corporal Kravitz was not used to reading and stumbled on some of the wording.
“See, Leon? It’s perfectly legal to carry a mortar or two. Fact is, I’m thinking of getting one for myself.”
Corporal Kravitz stomped off then. He was afraid of Halter.
“Look, Ryan,” Halter told me on another shift. “I’ve been around dickheads all my life. Remember I grew up in the Bronx. You can’t give these fuckers space enough to breathe. You let those bastards get going, pretty soon you won’t have a place to live.”
52.
This is now November of 1970. I have been in the army for sixteen months. For all these hours and days and weeks I have been able to kid myself—to believe that the boy who writes poetry and reads Ralph Waldo Emerson is still inside my soul. I brought a volume of Emerson with me to Germany and have a new notebook and I sit in the apartment at the used table I bought and try to read and write on one of my days off but I sit there staring up at the skylight and turgid gray sky beyond. I haven’t seen a blue sky for weeks. Jenny is coming in December, and I try to get excited about her arrival, but I just can’t. Instead I get more and more depressed thinking of the time I’m wasting in the army.
I pace around the apartment, trying to jog my brain out of its funk, but the floor is covered with a rubberized tile that keeps causing me to trip and fall. One night, by accident, I bring my .45 pistol home from work. I take it out of my holster, trying to think of a safe place to store it as I walk into my bedroom. I trip, and the gun goes spinning into the air, and I watch it in slow motion, thinking this might be the end of me if it hits the floor and fires. I close my eyes in terror, but it lands, and the clip of shells pops out, and I fall to the floor weeping.
I go to work and sit in the gray, blue light of the hangar and feel my creative juices leak away. It gets easier and easier to yell at the stupid GIs standing in front of me than write poetry.
“Your duffel bag,” I scream at a PFC in the middle of the night. “Empty your fucking duffel bag on the floor: that’s what I want you to do.”
I poke through his dirty clothes with my billy club and scatter them around.
“Now pick up this shit and get out of here. Now. I said. Now.”
I follow him as he walks away, toward the exit. I follow him and scream “Now” over and over at his back. He pulls the duffel bag along by the strap with one hand and holds batches of his clothes with the other hand. He keeps dropping shirts and socks and underwear.
“Get that crap out of my inspection area,” I yell as he walks out of the hangar.
“Be careful,” Halter says to me later. “You’re starting to sound like Leon. Relax, Ryan. This isn’t your show, buddy. You just want to get out of here alive with your soul intact.”
It seems like the sunshine went away forever that November. Day after day, low-hanging clouds give the world the look of hard iron. I get more depressed. Day after slow-moving day, night after slow-moving night I live in the gray of my work followed by the gray of the apartment, which now depresses me to no end. Gray despair hangs in the chambers of my head the way the smells of boiled cabbage and fried liver linger in the hallways of that Mörfelden apartment building. I keep tripping on the rubberized floor. When I come home from the air base, I sit in the one chair I’d bought and stare at the wall, watching the gray daylight come and go. I don’t go anywhere on my days off.
Corporal Leon Kravitz, though, is cheerful, and his good cheer rubs on my psyche like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Corporal Kravitz loves the army. When he isn’t threatening us, he tries to sell us on its many benefits. He even likes our nine-on-and-three-off schedule.
“The great thing about the army,” Corporal Kravitz explains, sitting with his shiny boots up on the desk in the Twenty-Second MP house, “is that we make your week nine days long. You go in the army, and you’ll live two days longer every week. Think about it. That’s a hundred days a year. Two thousand days over a twenty-year career. Shit, you get 2,000 extra days, a pension, and lifetime medical benefits. The army’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
“I never liked sliced bread all that much,” Halter says. “Sliced bread is way overrated if you ask me.”
“Nobody’s asking you Halter,” Corporal Kravitz says. “Even the army can’t save you from being an idiot.”
“Well, I might be an idiot, but I can do math. I’m afraid no one can add days to the calendar.”
Jenny arrived in early December. The air had turned chilly, and it was still gray.
As a joke, Halter suggested that we pick her up at the civilian airport in our MP uniforms. We’d pretend to take her into custody.
“Shit, man, we’re pretend cops, so we might as well do a pretend custody,” he said. “Come on, man, it’ll be funny. Two cute little cops like us.”
Yes, that’s right. Underneath it all I still thought it was some kind of joke. The sensitive poet, playing policeman. Yes, it would be funny, and there we were in the American Airlines waiting area with our white hats and Sam Browne belts, our billy clubs and our sidearms, waiting for Jenny to land.
Of course people were whispering and pointing at us, and they left a big circle around us.
And there was Jenny coming out of the airplane wearing a floppy leather hat and Italian-looking sunglasses with huge round lenses. She was carrying her guitar. She looked like a model, a model dressed up as a hippie.
“Pretty cool,” Halter said. “Pretty fucking cool, man.”
“You’ll have to come this way, ma’am,” I said, and slowly her whole moment of being a cool-looking hippie just evaporated. She stared in disbelief at this new person I’d become.
“Please, Steve, you’ve got to get me out of here.”
I called Goldberg in Mannheim.
“Maybe I can get you a job here. Give me a few days.”
“Steve,” I pleaded a week later.
And a week after that, a few days before Christmas, I was in my green sport coat driving the Volvo to Mannheim for my new job.
“Yes,” I said, pumping the air with my fist. Goldberg had rescued me.
“Just remember,” Corporal Kravitz told me at the end of my last Rhein-Main shift, “ ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.’ That’s what you’ll be protecting, Ryan. Keep those Marlboro cigarettes out of enemy hands. ‘Filter, Flavor, Flip-Top Box.’ ”
53.
“This is big, Ryan,” Lance B. Edwards said just after I came to work that first morning at Turley Barracks in Mannheim. “We found tools in a mail inspection. We think it’s some kind of ring. They’re stealing tools and sending them back to the States. Their commanding officer brought them here for questioning. Here, Ryan, you talk to Clarence. He’s waiting in the storeroom. You take him down to the other office in the basement. No one will bother you there.”
My new boss, Lance B. Edwards, handed me some affidavit forms.
“Take Clarence down to the basement office and see if he will talk.”
He opened the door to the storeroom, and this giant, oafish-looking man stood up. He must have been six five, but he had a stooped posture. With his thick hands and heavy shoes, he looked like the monster in some drawing from a fairy tale. His face was pale, with the color and texture of mashed potatoes.
“Clarence, this is Mr. Ryan. Mr. Ryan has some questions he’d like to ask you.”
Clarence’s hand enveloped mine when we shook. It was limp. It felt like the hand of the Pillsbury Doughboy.
Turley Barracks had probably be
en built to withstand artillery attacks. Its walls were three or four feet thick. The basement had massive cast-iron bars over its deeply recessed windows, and our office there had the look of an ancient prison. Large metal hooks were fastened on the basement walls outside our office. They looked like places to hang meat carcasses or bodies. I learned later they were hooks to store the workers’ bicycles, but that morning, they looked like something from a torture scheme, grim reminders on the way to the abattoir.
I was scared to death. I had never interrogated anyone before. My hand trembled when I held the lighter up to my Winston. I offered Clarence a cigarette. He shook his head and stared at the floor.
We sat down at an old oak desk with a recessed place in the middle for the typewriter. I put carbons between three MP statement forms, tapped them on the desk to align them, and then rolled them into the giant Underwood. Drops of sweat formed a little rivulet down my spine.
“Clarence,” I said. He looked up from where he sat. He seemed surprised to see me there. “What’s your last name?”
“Kindler,” he said. “Clarence Kindler.”
I wrote it down on a pad. I wanted to think before typing anything.
“Your middle initial?”
“R for Roger. My mama named me after my grandfather.”
“Well, Clarence,” I said, taking a deep breath, “may I ask you some questions?”
“You’re the boss, Mr. Ryan.”
Hearing my name put that way again surprised me and, for the briefest second, I felt as though I should look around for this mysterious Mr. Ryan.
I paused then, trying to think of what my first question should be, but Clarence got there first.
“Mr. Ryan, will there be bars like that where I’m going?”
I was so worried about getting the paperwork right that I didn’t hear him at first.
“Bars like what?” I asked back.
I was trying to remember which parts of the form were to be filled out in capital letters. I had to know what he was supposed to initial and what he should sign.
Clarence turned around in his chair and looked at the far wall. He began farting. Big, methane gas farts—a rotten, foul smell. Carrion dead for several days. I felt nauseous.
“Bars like those, over there.”
He pointed to the cast-iron bars on the small basement windows. Bars to keep the enemies out of the old kaserne—the enemies out, and the soldiers in.
Clarence stood up then. He raised his arms and began circling them, as if he might lift off and fly away from there.
“We stole them, sir. Mr. Ryan, sir,” he said. “Yessir, we stole them and mailed them back to Meyers Home.”
“What?” I asked. I finally had the forms aligned and scrolled into the Underwood. “Stole what, Clarence?”
“Started with those crescent wrenches. A couple of those, and then we started ordering cases of stuff. That expensive Sun diagnostic equipment, you know. Complete snap-on tool sets in carts on wheels. We mailed the stuff we stole back to Meyers Home.”
Clarence kept farting, and I wrote down what he said with a pen first, so I wouldn’t make any mistakes when I typed it up.
We were down there in that basement, Clarence and I, writing up the story of what would turn out to be a million dollar tool theft ring.
“Meyers Home, Clarence?” I asked.
“My granny, sir, Mr. Ryan, sir. That’s where my granny lived. Meyers Home, North Carolina. We sent them to her, and she put them in her garage, the boxes of tools we sent her.”
Clarence and his little mountain family were the patsies for this. The real crooks were a couple of master sergeants who organized everything but let Clarence be the front. I tried to help Clarence and give those sergeants a prominent role in Clarence’s confession. I spent an hour writing the whole story out in long hand and then began typing. The whap of the typewriter keys into the depth of those forms sounded final.
On or about 10 APRIL 1969 MSG Elliot KASNER and MSG Robert BLEY ordered me to mail three (3) CRAFTSMAN eighty (80) piece socket-wrench sets owned by the US Army back to my grandmother’s house in North Carolina for the purpose of selling same . . .
It was as close as I could come to the voice of Jack Webb.
“Clarence,” I said after a couple of pages of confession, “let me show these to Mr. Edwards upstairs. OK?”
The basement hallway of Turley Barracks, lit by fluorescent bulbs, was quite bright. When I got to that dim lobby, which, in the last of that weak December sunshine and in the mist and the fog, was barely lit at all, I had trouble seeing the way ahead. I felt as though I were moving through a dirty aquarium.
Lance B. Edwards’s white shirt stood out in the shadows. As I got closer I could see that he was talking to a mountainous black man—one of those people who seem both fat and muscular. He towered over Edwards.
“You’ve got to read this,” I said to Edwards. “Here.”
“You,” the black man said to me. He grabbed the front of my shirt and put his fist, hard, against my chest. It was hard to breathe. “You the one with that white Volvo?”
Major Arthur. Goldberg had told me about him. The new Mannheim provost marshal. He’d been in charge of the infamous Long Binh Jail in Vietnam. He was reputed to be tough and corrupt. He’d beat you with his bare hands and accept a bribe to stop.
“You, soldier, you parked in the PM’s slot. That’s me, son. The provost marshal. I rule here, son. You park in my slot again, that’ll be a short way to some long hard time, soldier.”
Here I was about to break open one of the largest cases ever handled by the Twenty-Second, and I was in big trouble over a parking violation.
“Mr. Edwards,” I said, trying to keep a little of the moment’s glory. “I’ve got a signed confession. Read this.”
The major stared at me from atop that mountain of flesh. When you stood close to him, his head looked too small and far away to run such a large body.
“Hard time, boy. You remember that, OK? You got an hour to move that car.” He shoved me away from him.
Edwards and I walked into the main office of Detachment. Plenty of lights in there.
“Ryan, we’ve got to stay out of his way. Where he came from, they just beat the crap out of everybody. He’s a tough son of a bitch.”
Edwards sat down then at his desk. Holding his head in his hands, the way he always did when he read, he studied Clarence’s confession. When he was finished, he looked up and smiled.
“Nice work, Ryan. Not bad for the first day on the job. Now get down and put some cuffs on Clarence. It’s funny, but I’ve learned when someone confesses, you want to get those cuffs on him right away. It sort of wraps everything up, you know, professor, like putting a period at the end of a sentence. Oh, and move that fucking car. All right?”
“All right.”
“Oh, Ryan.”
“Yes.”
“Merry Christmas. Merry fucking Christmas.”
54.
Jean-Claude Killy, Paris, and Dansk.
The Good Life. The Dreams-Coming-True Part. It’s happening, yes: we get a wonderful apartment in the small village of Ladenburg on the Neckar River. It has a balcony and hip-looking gray carpeting. We sign up for a Learn-To-Ski Week at the army’s resort in Berchtesgaden. We go to Paris for four days. We order our Dansk dishes from the PX, and Jenny gets a job at a base library and brings home stacks of books to read. We lie around on Saturdays listening to an Armed Forces Radio show called Weekend World, which is usually about the current music scene. I put on my green sport coat and go to work in the Volvo, often stopping on the way home in the evening to buy some gourmet cheese or wine or chocolate or other treat. We buy skis; we buy European clothes. Jenny gets her guitar fixed and starts playing folk tunes in the evenings. We take weekend trips to Rothenburg and Munich. On my longer leaves, we drive the Volvo to catch the ferry to England.
It’s a great life, punctuated by these police episodes. Maybe an arrest a week keeps us ou
t of trouble with headquarters.
Meanwhile, I run into DuWayne Leonard. I knew him in Fayetteville. He’s now evidence custodian for the army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is the army’s version of the FBI.
“I want to show you something,” he says late one afternoon. I’ve stopped by his office to pick him up. He’s coming over to our apartment in Ladenburg for dinner. Afterward we’ll listen to the new Santana album: “Abraxas.”
“Here,” he says as he opens the door of a tall green safe with a crinkled metal finish. “What’s your pleasure?”
Inside the safe are shelves holding four- or five-inch balls, some brown, some tar black, some with both colors like a vanilla and chocolate cake.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
DuWayne laughs.
“I’ll choose,” he says and slices off a small piece from one of the balls and wraps it in white paper like a piece of cheese.
After dinner, he produces a small brass pipe, and Jenny and I have our first taste of drugs—of, in fact, opiated hash.
Let me take you down, and down the lane we skipping go, bouncing around in the landscape of our heads, rainbows connecting everything. What other word is there but, you guessed it: Wow. Yes, wow and wow and wow.
DuWayne sleeps on our couch, and, after breakfast the next morning, we take a couple of more puffs on the hash and walk to a nearby park. My footsteps seem to have springs in them, and I make a tinkling sound as I walk. The ground is covered with vibrant blue and green patterns that look as though Peter Max designed them. Yellow birds fly out from under my feet as I walk.
Cool, I think. This is so cool.
Do I also think about the fact that I’m smoking evidence that sent someone to jail? Do I think about my hypocrisy?
Boom. Boom. Snare.