The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  “Think what you want.”

  “I need you to tell me you weren’t with him.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  It went on like that for three years. Oddly, just before the very end, it seemed things were improving. She was less preoccupied, her kisses less indifferent, and she talked about their going away someplace, even retiring together. It was during the spring of 1992, and he had to go to Alabama for flight simulations. She went to her mother’s in Zebuline, south of Atlanta, and surprised him by showing up in Mobile a day before his training ended. She insisted on making love in his barracks room. He gave in, knowing that it violated regulations. The next afternoon they drove back to Zebuline without a word.

  That night he lay in bed, his mind numbed from dread. The marriage was over. The lovemaking at the barracks was the coup de grâce. He knew it. He felt the way her skin prickled when he touched her. Abruptly she got out of bed and went to the living room. He followed. She was crying. When he reached out to dry her cheeks she pulled away.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  “I want to leave you.”

  “To be with him?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said. “I don’t love you. I’ve missed that for such a long time.”

  “Kathy,” he said.

  “No, no, no,” she said. She shook her head. “I want a divorce. I want to be with Jim. I haven’t loved you for the longest time. I want us to separate. I want us to have two apartments. Maybe we could live in the same apartment complex together. Michelle can live with me, and Cam with you. Cam could come over sometimes for dinner.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  And then the rage flew out of her. Afterward, he lay awake. He was tired but strung out. When a faint glow lit the edges of the window shade he sat up in bed. He had it all planned out. It was a flawless plan. He’d go jogging. He always went jogging in the morning. He stood up and slipped on a T-shirt, white socks, gray shorts. She’d never suspect a thing. He tied his running shoes. He’d jog down to the closest thoroughfare. There was one not too far. He stood up and went to the door of the bedroom and turned the knob. All he had to do was jog against the flow of traffic. When he saw a truck coming at a good clip he’d throw himself in front of it…

  “Ted?”

  He turned slowly around. Kathy was sitting up in bed, peering at him.

  “Come back to bed, honey,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Please, Ted,” she said soothingly. “Please come back to bed.”

  He wanted to believe. He wanted so much to believe.

  “I have to go.”

  “No, Ted. I’ve changed my mind. I have. I really do love you. I do. Please, honey. Please come back to bed.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please?”

  Sixteen months later the divorce was official. When his promotion to Sitka came through he was so dead to himself that he thought Alaska would be perfect for him. The kids would be a big loss. But he needed to be away from her. What he needed was his job, his base, his habits. Yes, his habits. Keep your habits, he would repeat to himself as he lay in bed waiting for sleep to take him, because you are going to need them.

  THIRTY-ONE

  On his fourth afternoon as commander of the air station Ted LeFeuvre was at his desk poring over a mound of papers when he heard a knock at his door.

  A voice said, meekly, “Captain LeFeuvre?”

  He looked up. In the hallway stood a tall, thin fellow, balding on top, with a uniform that could have used an ironing. He had a grim smile and sad eyes. Saddest eyes he had ever seen on a man.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir,” the man in the doorway said, “I’m Bob Doyle, your chief warrant officer in supply.”

  “Yes?”

  “We had an appointment?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “So we did. Come in. Come in and shut the door.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door closed with the click of a breaking icicle. Ted LeFeuvre made one last notation on the contract he was reviewing, capped his pen and dropped it in a cup. He leaned back in the chair and studied the man more closely.

  “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  In the chair the man lost some of his awkwardness. He did not look in awfully good shape, his cheeks sallow and right on the edge of drawn, the eyes thinly glazed with deep, purple-black smudges under them. A vein throbbed in his throat.

  “So,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I’m told you’ve been missing work lately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many days did you miss this week?”

  “Three.”

  “And last week?”

  “Four.”

  He had heard things about this officer, none of them very complimentary. Nobody could keep track of him. His supervisor, Bill Adickes, an officer Ted LeFeuvre had a good impression of, had described the man as a classic drunk and, like all alcoholics, worthless.

  Still, this man had made an appointment and wanted to talk. The fair thing to do was to hear him out.

  “Do you mind, Mr. Doyle, if I ask why you’ve not been coming to work?”

  “No, sir.” A slow flush crept up the man’s throat. “You see… I, uh, can’t…”

  “You can’t?”

  “No, sir, I —”

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “It’s stressful, sir. It’s just—it’s stressful.”

  “Stressful?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And why is that?”

  “On account of my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “She’s been shacking up with a guy here at the station.” The man let out a thin sigh and looked down at the floor. “An enlisted man, sir. A mechanic.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Koval. Rick Koval.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the floor. “Do you know him?”

  Ted LeFeuvre recalled hearing the name once. “What makes you think this affair is going on? Have you ever caught them together?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Never?”

  “Not yet.”

  Ted LeFeuvre sat back.

  “I just can’t come in and see him here,” the officer, Bob Doyle, said. And then he muttered, “It’s awful.”

  “Is it?”

  And then he launched into his tale of woe; how he missed his wife and how awful that was, and how it distressed him to come to work and see the man who had ruined his family, and how Koval would goad him and try to pick fights, and how Koval’s friends in the hangar would ridicule him, and how much he missed his kids, and on and on, until Ted LeFeuvre looked at his watch and saw that nearly half an hour had passed. He also noticed that a sweat had broken out across the man’s long, perfect Irish upper lip, and he considered it and wondered if the man wasn’t exaggerating or inventing the whole thing. Ted LeFeuvre didn’t smell any alcohol on him. Just the odor of stale cigarettes.

  “Mr. Doyle,” Ted LeFeuvre said finally, interrupting him. “You don’t mind if I call you Bob, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good.”

  The man’s face brightened at the gentle tone of his captain’s voice.

  “You know, Bob,” Ted LeFeuvre said gently, “you and I are sort of like one another.”

  “Sir?”

  “Well, think about it. We’re both grown men. We’ve both made a career in the Coast Guard. We’ve both had families. And we’ve both lost them.”

  “Sir?”

  “You see, Bob,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “my wife left me, too. And yes, she was unfaithful, just like your wife.”

  The man nodded solemnly. He certainly knows how to play parts, Ted LeFeuvre thought. Alcoholics are great showmen. Always good at showing people what they want them to see. He continued in the same gentle tone.

  “It went on for three years, Bob. Three years. Can you imagine that?” Ted LeFeuvre leaned forward
over his papers. He did not smile now.

  “And she took my kids.” His eyes hardened. “But you know something, Bob? In the midst of all of it, I went to work.”

  Bob Doyle said nothing.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Bob?”

  “Captain?”

  “You will come to work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you will do your assignments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now the man’s eyes grew furtive and the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the lines and wrinkles and bags under his blue eyes were gone. It drew tighter and tighter as if being stretched across a skull. His lips drew in tight and what little color had been in his face drained out of it so that now Bob Doyle’s skin was the color of used candle wax.

  “Now,” Ted LeFeuvre said, leaning back in his chair again, “is there anything else?” He glanced at his watch. He had a meeting in the hangar deck in five minutes.

  Bob Doyle stared at him with those sad, remote eyes. The eyes were the only things that had not changed during the conversation. The rest of his face had fallen apart.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  One morning that August, Ted LeFeuvre sent two of his lieutenants, Bill Adickes and Karl Frey, around to Bob Doyle’s house just before lunchtime. He had not shown up for work in a week. He had not called either.

  They found the front door open and the hall lights on. In the den, beside an empty bottle of Crown Royal and a pile of cat dung, they found Bob Doyle sprawled on the floor in full dress uniform, snoring.

  Two months later, the police pulled him over on Sawmill Creek Road and charged him with his second DUI violation. Six months after that, Ted LeFeuvre had Bob Doyle retired.

  He hadn’t seen Bob Doyle since. The man had left no forwarding address, no telephone number, and had stopped showing up at the Eagle’s Nest. He didn’t come by the base ever again, not even to collect his retirement ID card or to sign his pension forms.

  He was gone, in fact, the day they repossessed his house. All that remained were six hungry cats, animal excrement in the most unimaginable places and pizza boxes, beer bottles and empty whiskey flasks. The only furniture left was a card table and four stools—all apparently pinched from the Eagle’s Nest.

  It took the Coast Guard more than a year to renovate the place. Nothing inside was salvageable. Ted LeFeuvre ordered the cost of the renovation paid for out of Bob Doyle’s retirement check. He also had accounting deduct an additional $125.13 to cover three checks Bob Doyle had bounced at the Eagle’s Nest, the officers’ club he had been in charge of managing.

  That summer, Ted LeFeuvre wrote in Bob Doyle’s twenty-third and final evaluation:

  I have never served with an officer who accomplished so little and yet created so much work for others. Baby-sitting this CWO3 demanded more energy than any unit should have to endure. A driving-under-the-influence conviction, dozens of unexplained absences, and a total void in devotion to duty reflected the poorest judgment imaginable, and a completely unsatisfactory professional example for peers, subordinates and the community.

  Ted LeFeuvre couldn’t remember ever having written such terrible things about anyone in seventeen years in the Coast Guard. It was unfortunate, he thought. There was no enmity at all in the man. Bob Doyle wasn’t mean at heart. He wasn’t combative or angry. He didn’t have an ax to grind. He’d probably done enough good things to know what path in life he wanted to be on. He was simply incapable at that moment of getting on that path. Perhaps you’re being too coldhearted with him, Ted LeFeuvre said to himself. No. You took the only course available. You had to put him out. It was too bad. But why didn’t Bob Doyle just pull himself together? Why didn’t he just come to work? Work has always helped you, he said to himself. It’s the one thing you can always count on. There was no excuse for Doyle’s behavior. Still, it was a shame watching the man go to pieces like that. Well, it was out of his hands now. There was nothing he could do for Bob Doyle. Not anymore.

  THIRTY-TWO

  For breakfast that morning, the thirtieth of January, Ted LeFeuvre had a half bagel with cream cheese, untoasted, and a half can of Dr Pepper. Afterward, he made his bed, folded his pajamas, tucked them under his pillow and took a shower, scrubbing his graying hair with shampoo and rinsing under the prickling drive of the sharp-jetted shower. He brushed his teeth, scraped the stubble off his jaw and chin, parted his hair neatly to one side and surveyed the face in the mirror. It was not a bad face. It was a handsome face. Well, at least he could say it was a face without pity. That much he could say.

  He put on his uniform, sat at the foot of the bed and tied his shoelaces, flattened out the wrinkles he had just left on the quilt and glanced at the clock. It was six twenty-six. He went downstairs and checked the pellet stove. Low again. I’m not coming home again to an icebox, he thought. He went out to the garage, filled a used coffee can with pellets and returned to the den and poured the pellets into the stove. Then he picked a coat out of the closet, brushed a few pieces of lint from it, zipped it up and went outside and got into his Jeep. It was cold and the motor would not turn over right away.

  The streets gleamed under the streetlamps. There was a heavy mist over Swan Lake. The lake is frozen, he thought, but not yet thick enough for the skaters. He made a right on Harbor Mountain Road. Rain ticked across the windshield. It was hard focusing with the rain and darkness. He was supposed to meet with Paul McCarthy, the pastor, and the other members of the church board at seven. He glanced at the dash clock. Six forty-seven. He sped up a little. He did not like tardiness or keeping people waiting. And he had to be at the air station by eight for the morning briefing.

  As it was, the eight o’clock briefing turned out to be totally unremarkable. Engineering had little to report; all three of the Jayhawks had been serviced and were up and running. The duty roster had been posted for February. Staffing had been cut to half of the normal complement for the weekend. Half of his pilots were unavailable. The operations officer, Doug Taylor, was away on vacation, as was Wayne Buchanan, the XO. Jack Newby had the day off. Four other fliers had taken postholiday leave. That left seven pilots, and him. January was not a busy fishing month. Seven was plenty. A low-pressure system was approaching from the Aleutians and was expected to move through the area in the next forty-eight hours. The forecast called for snain — snow and rain, mixed—and twenty-knot winds out of the southwest. Typical.

  Upstairs in his office he got off a good morning’s work, finishing two personnel evaluations and writing thank-you letters to several volunteers he could not remember meeting. He took a call from a city official in charge of the airport expansion. The city wanted a slice of Coast Guard property so the access road could be moved and the airport building lengthened. At eleven-thirty he changed into his sweatpants and hooded jacket and sneakers and went for a run. On Fridays he jogged along the access road, crossed the O’Connell Bridge, turned around at the intersection of Lincoln and Harbor and jogged back. That day the wind was blowing just enough to annoy him. And it was sleeting. The sleet felt like pinpricks on his face.

  Crossing the bridge, he glanced out at the sound. It looked gray, flat. He saw no boats coming or going. It felt good to run on his lunch break. His cheeks smarted from the sleet but he liked the burn in his legs.

  After lunch and a hot shower he returned to his paperwork. They were going to rehabilitate the galley, the dining facilities, the medical area and the barracks. There wasn’t enough housing for single people. He had to study the engineering plans. He took a break and went down to the machine shop, then the hangar, and then the ops center to chat with the duty officer. At two-thirty he returned to his desk and finished two more evaluations. He read over what he had typed, corrected a few things, printed out copies, signed them and put them in his drawer. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four. Another day without flying, he thought. He’d not been up in a helicopter since January 12. That was eighteen days. The last time h
e’d sat in an H-60 he and Dan Molthen had done a two-hour fishery patrol together. Kind of snotty out today, anyway, he thought. Try to go up next week.

  He put on his coat and locked his door. He saw Dave Durham in the hallway. Bull was big. Perhaps the shaved head made him look taller than he was. Perhaps that was why they called him Bull. He had never asked him. Durham was on his way home, judging by his gait.

  “Captain,” Durham said, “today is Friday, right?”

  “Last I checked.”

  “You’re home tonight if anything comes up?”

  “No,” Ted LeFeuvre told him. “I’ll be at the high school. Tonight’s the big basketball game.”

  “Right. I forgot.”

  “You can reach me on the beeper.”

  “They’re playing against Juneau, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Juneau’s got that big kid. What’s his name?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “All I know is that the NBA is scouting him and the place is going to be packed. Police are worried about scalpers.”

  They laughed.

  “What time’s the game start?”

  “Seven.”

  He drove straight home in the dark. He needed to get a move on. He had told Betty Jo he would stop by her house before six, and he didn’t like keeping people waiting.

  Betty Jo Johns was a Tlingit woman who sat next to him in church on Sundays. She’d been married twice, the last time to a Native fisherman who played around on her, and she had two sons. Some people gossiped that he and Betty Jo were an item. He enjoyed her company. He thought Betty Jo had a tremendous sense of fair play and ethics, and she loved the Lord. But he didn’t want a partner, not just then. He did not miss sex yet. When would he miss it? He did not know. No one knew. That was the funny thing about it.

  He arrived at Betty Jo’s a few minutes after six. Her son, Jeff, was still upstairs putting on his uniform. There was a large crowd at the high school. They squeezed into a space two thirds of the way up the bleachers, not far from half court. He and Betty Jo sat and watched the boys warm up. The crowd was excited. Ted LeFeuvre sat down and relaxed. He was not much of a basketball enthusiast. It did feel good, though, to be part of a crowd. It was nice not to think on a Friday night. Thinking did you no good sometimes.