W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors

by The Majors(Lit)

  Jeannie Laird knocked at a wooden door, and without waiting she walked in.

  There was a young man in the bed, both hands wrapped in white gauze. There was more gauze wrapped around his otherwise bare chest, and still more around his right leg.

  The only clothing he was wearing was a pair of pajamas.

  The right leg of those was cut off above the knee. Melody could see the hair around his thing peeking out of the fly. She flushed and looked away. He didn't have any eyebrows. Where they were supposed to be, he was coated with a pink grease.

  She realized his eyebrows had been burned off. He didn't look old enough to have done what Mrs. Laird said he had done.

  "Ladies, I am sorry to say I think you're in the wrong place,"

  Greer said.

  "I don't think so. I'm Jean Laird."

  "Jesus!" Greer said, then: "Sorry."

  "And this is Melody Dutton," Jeannie Greer said. "She was kind enough to drive me over here."

  "Hi!" Melody said. Greer looked at Melody and nodded his head, just once.

  "I wanted to thank you, Mr. Greer," Jeannie Laird said,

  "for what you tried to do for Scotty."

  "Nothing to thank me for," Greer said.

  "Everyone has been telling me he went quickly, without pain," Jeannie Laird said. Greer nodded. "If that happens to be true, I'd like to hear that from you. You saw it. No one else did."

  "He went quick," Greer said.

  "He was dead when you got there?" Jeannie Laird asked.

  "Oh, yeah," Greer said. "He died when it hit."

  "Then why did you.., risk what you did, to do what you did?"

  Greer looked at her a moment. Then he shrugged.

  "Then you did what you did more for me, than for my husband?" Jeannie Laird asked. After a moment, Melody realized that what Mrs. Laird was asking was why Greer had risked his life to pull a corpse from a wreck. And then she understood why: because otherwise the body would have burned.

  "I did it because I would want somebody to do the same thing for me," Greer said.

  "If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Greer, Scotty would have done the same thing for you had the circumstances been reversed," Jeannie Laird said, and then, for just a moment, her voice broke and there was the suggestion of a sob. Then she got control of herself.

  "I've brought you something, Mr. Greer," she said. She reached in her purse and came out with a battered silver flask.

  She handed it to him.

  "I don't want that," Greer said, uncomfortably.

  "If it wasn't for you, Mr. Greer," Jeannie Laird said, "it would have melted."

  "Jesus Christ!" Greer said.

  "I'm sure giving it to you would be what Scotty would want me to do with it," she said. She laid it on the bed. He picked it up awkwardly in his bandaged hands. Melody saw there were tears in his eyes.

  "There's something in it," Greer said.

  "Then I think we should drink it," Jeannie Laird said. "Don't you?"

  "Why not?" Greer said. His voice broke.

  Jeannie picked the flask up, opened it, and tilted it up.

  "Good brandy," she said. That was his medicine for everything."

  She started to hand him the flask, and then saw how encumbered he was with the bandages. She held it to his mouth.

  He took a healthy swallow. Then Jeannie handed the flask to

  Melody. Melody didn't want to drink straight liquor, and she especially didn't want to do it from a dead man's flask. But she realized there was nothing she could do. She took a swallow.

  It burned her throat. It made her cough.

  "I don't think your friend is used to booze," Greer said.

  The door opened. Bob and Barbara Bellmon started to come into the room, but stopped when they saw Greer had visitors.

  They continued when they saw who it was.

  "You all right, Jeannie?" Colonel Bellmon asked.

  "We've just been having a little drink," Jeannie said. "Recognize this, Bob?"

  "How well," he said.

  "Scotty carried that for twenty years," she said. "Longer."

  "I think you'd better hang on to it, Mrs. Laird," Greer said.

  "Thank you just the same."

  "I've told Mr. Greer that Scotty would want him to have it. Do you think he would?"

  "Absolutely," Barbara Bellmon said. "Absolutely."

  Colonel Bellmon took the flask, shook it, and opened it.

  "Here's to you, Scotty," he said, and took a large swallow, and then handed it to his wife. Barbara Bellmon took a large swallow, but said nothing.

  They passed the flask between them, Melody included, until it was empty. Jeannie Laird and Barbara Bellmon took turns holding it to Greer's mouth.

  "Now that it's all gone," Jeannie Laird said, "that probably wasn't the best thing we could do for Mr. Greer."

  "I just checked with the flight surgeon," Colonel Bellmon said. "He'll be out of those bandages tomorrow except for his hands. He looks worse than he is."

  "Hell, I was hoping for a thirty-day convalescent leave,"

  Greer said.

  "You've got it," Colonel Bellmon said.

  "I was only kidding, Colonel," Greer said.

  "I'm not," Colonel Bellmon said. "By the power vested in me by God and other senior headquarters, the hospital commander and the flight surgeon concurring, you are, as of midnight, on thirty-days' convalescent leave."

  "Thank you," Greer said.

  "Can I help you get home?" Jeannie Laird asked. She turned to Bellmon. "We can have him flown home, can't we, Bob?"

  "He can be flown anyplace he wants to go," Bellmon said.

  There was something about the reply that wasn't right, and

  Melody Dutton picked up on it.

  "I'm going to have to get back to my quarters," Jeannie

  Laird said. She walked to the bed and shook Greer's wrist above the bandages. "Thank you again, Mr. Greer."

  "I'm really sorry, Mrs. Laird," Greer said.

  "If there's room for me," Barbara Bellmon said, "I'll catch a ride with you. Bob can pick me up over there."

  In Melody's Ford, Mrs. Laird said, "A fine young man.

  He's just a kid. You expect warrant officers to be bald-headed and middle-aged."

  "He's not old enough to vote," Barbara Bellmon said. "Or drink. You heard about him and MacMillan in Indo-China, didn't you?"

  Jeannie Laird had not heard. Barbara Bellmon told her. And

  Melody Dutton was fascinated, awed. And then, because it gave them something else to talk about, besides Scotty Laird,

  Barbara Bellmon told Jeannie what else she knew about Warrant

  Officer Junior Grade Edward C. Greer.

  "Bob got the CIC/FBI Complete Background Investigation report on him when he had to have a Top Secret security clearance," she said. "It reads like a cheap novel. He was raised in a carnival. His father ran a freak show. His mother, who never bothered to marry his father, ran off when he was four months old. He was raised by whatever women his father happened to be playing house with at the moment."

  "That's terrible," jeannie Laird said.

  "And then by a court reporter in Indiana," Barbara Bellmon said. "The court reporter felt sorry for him and took him in when his father went to jail. She taught him to use one of those little machines..

  "Stenotype?"

  "Right. And then he ran off and joined the army. He wound up working forE. Z. Black, and Black sent him to flight school."

  "Then he doesn't have a family?" Jeannie Laird asked.

  "Just his father, and he's still in prison," Barbara Bellmon said.

  "Then where's he going on his leave?" Jeannie Laird asked.

  "The BOQ, probably. Oh, we asked him for Christmas.

  And so did Roxy MacMillan. Mac is alive because of Greer, and Roxy can be very determined when she wants to be. I guess he feels uncomfortable with families."

  Melody Dutton repeated the story that night at supper, leaving out the
details she knew would drive her father and mother up the wall. In her version of the story, WOJG Greer was an orphan who had no place to go for Christmas.

  As Melody thought she would be, her mother was touched by the story of an orphan with no place to go for Christmas dinner. She telephoned WOJG Greer at his BOQ the next day.

  WOJG Greer politely thanked her but told her that he had a previous engagement.

  Melody next saw him at the memorial services for General

  Laird on Parade Ground No. 2. Mrs. Laird had seen to it that a seat had been reserved for him on the VIP stand, in the section reserved for "friends of the family."

  Melody saw that someone must have dressed him in his dress uniform, for his hands were still swathed in bandages.

  She saw that the Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General

  E. Z. Black, who had been visibly bored when he was introduced to her father, wrapped his arms around Greer's shoulders when he saw him.

  And she heard what he said, not able to entirely hide his emotions:

  "Goddamnit, Greer, I'm glad to see you."

  "Aw, shit, boss," Greer said, and then Greer and the Vice

  Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army laughed together.

  And her mother went up to him, and said: "Mr. Greer, we're having a few people in for a buffet afterward. We'd like you to come. We'll take you back and forth, of course."

  While her mother was talking to him, Greer was looking at

  Melody. That gave her a very strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, and when she saw him nodding his head, she felt her heart beat a little faster.

  When the memorial ceremony was over, they transferred

  General Laird's flag-covered casket from the M48 tank on which it had come to the parade ground to the H-34 which would fly it to Ozark Army Airfield. There an air force transport waited to fly it to West Point along with all the generals who had come here for the ceremony. Afterward, Melody's mother went and led Greer by the arm to their Mercury.

  He rode up in front with her father and didn't say a word all the way into Ozark. Melody saw that he had a scar on his neck. She wondered if he had gotten the scar as a boy, jumping over a fence or something, or whether he had gotten it as a soldier.

  In the Dutton house, he made himself as inconspicuous as possible. Melody found him in her father's office, trying without much success to turn the pages of a magazine with his bandaged hands.

  She got him a plate from the buffet and fed him. When their eyes met, she had a weak feeling in the pit of her stomach again.

  "You're uncomfortable here, aren't you?" she asked.

  He just looked at her and said nothing.

  "Come on," Melody said. "I'll take you out to the post."

  "Thank you," he said.

  On the way to the post, she asked: "Where are you going to spend New Year's Eve?"

  "At the club, probably. Not the main club. The annex."

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  W. E. B. Gnflin

  "Who's going to hold your drink for you?" she asked.

  "What do you want from me?" he asked.

  "I was hoping for an invitation," she said.

  "Why would you want to do that? Don't tell me you don't already have a date."

  "You want to take me or not?"

  "You're not my kind of people," he said.

  "We won't know that until we know each other better, will we?" Melody replied.

  "You wouldn't want to go to the annex," he said.

  "I want to go to the main club with you," Melody said. "I'll pick you up and take you home. You can't drive, anyway."

  "I drove to the parade ground," he said. "I can drive."

  She interpreted that as an acceptance. After she dropped him by his car at the parade ground, she went home and called the boy she had had a date with at the Ozark Country Club.

  She told him she was sorry, but she wouldn't be in town.

  She tried to call Greer three times between then and New

  Year's Eve, but he never answered the telephone. On New

  Year's Eve, she got dressed about half past six in an off-the- shoulder evening dress. She tried to call him again. This time his phcine gave her a busy signal. When she kept trying, and still got the busy signal, she decided the phone was off the hook, whether by accident or intentionally.

  When he didn't show up by seven thirty, she wondered if she had the courage to go out there. She worried that she was frightening him off. When it was time for her parents to go out to the post, and he still hadn't showed up, she lied to them.

  She told them he had called and was delayed, and that they should go out. She would be along later.

  When he didn't come by half past eight, she went out and got in the Ford convertible, and crying, told herself that she was going to go out to his BOQ and really tell him off. If he didn't want to take her out, he should have been enough of a gentleman to tell her so, not let her get all dressed up and then not show up.

  When she got to the post, she realized she didn't know where he lived. She turned around and went back to the MP house at the gate, where an obliging MP, who made it plain he thought she was something special as a woman, looked up

  GREER, Edw C WOJG (USAACDA) in the post telephone book. He lived in BOQ T-108, he told her, which was down behind the field house.

  Melody found T- 108, one of three identical two-story buildings in a row, without any trouble. And Greer's car was in the puking lot, the only one there.

  His name was on a small cardboard sign stapled to a door on the second floor.

  She knocked on the door.

  "Go the fuck away!" he called out.

  Melody flushed and started to turn to leave. But then she realized that he didn't know, couldn't know, that it was her.

  She went to the door, and raised her hand to knock again.

  Then she changed her mind and pushed it open.

  He was sitting in an upholstered chair, a magazine in his lap, a bottle of whiskey and a glass on a table beside him. A television set was playing.

  When he saw her, he looked away. Then he got up and looked out the window. She saw that he was wearing a purple bathrobe and white pajama bottoms. A pair of white hospital slippers was in front of the chair. He had stolen them, she realized. Then she thought, if I knew he didn't have a bathrobe or pajamas, I would have bought them for him for Christmas.

  "What the hell's the matter with you?" he asked, his back to her. "Coming to a BOQ?"

  "I thought we had a date," she said.

  "You thought that," he accused. "I didn't say anything."

  "I broke my date to go with you," she said.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" he said.

  She started to cry.

  "Oh, for Christ's sake!" Greer said. "What the hell is the matter with you anyway?"

  "Why didn't you call me?" she asked. "You could have at least called me."

  "I thought you'd get the message," he said. "Jesus, what do you want from me, anyway?"

  "This is how you're going to spend New Year's Eve? All alone? Getting drunk by yourself? What's wrong with you, anyhow?"

  "Look, Melody, or whatever your name is..."

  "You know damned well what my name is!"

  "Look, honey," he said, "you don't want to get involved with somebody like me."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm a flicking soldier, that's why," he said. "There's more," he added darkly.

  "Your father's in jail, is that what you mean?"

  "Who the hell told you that?" he asked, genuinely surprised that she knew. "Yeah, that's what I mean. Among other things."

  "I'm not afraid of you," Melody said. "And I don't care about your father."

  "Yeah, but just wait until His Honor the Mayor hears about it."

  "Is that all that's bothering you?" Melody asked.

  "That's just for openers," Greer said.

  "Where's your uniform?" Melody asked. "I told my father and mother we'd meet
them at the club, and we're going to meet them."