Back in the World

by Tobias Wolff

  Soldier’s Joy

  On Friday Hooper was named driver of the guard for the third night that week. He had recently been broken in rank again, this time from corporal to PFC, and the first sergeant had decided to keep Hooper’s evenings busy so that he would not have leisure to brood. That was what the first sergeant told Hooper when Hooper came to the orderly room to complain.

  “It’s for your own good,” the first sergeant said. “Not that I expect you to thank me.” He moved the book he’d been reading to one side of his desk and leaned back. “Hooper, I have a theory about you,” he said. “Want to hear it?”

  “I’m all ears, Top,” Hooper said.

  The first sergeant put his boots on the desk and stared out the window to his left. It was getting on toward five o’clock. Work details had begun to return from the rifle range and the post laundry and the brigade commander’s house, where Hooper and several other men were excavating a swimming pool without aid of machinery. As the trucks let them out they gathered on the barracks steps and under the dead elm beside the mess hall, their voices a steady murmur in the orderly room where Hooper stood waiting for the first sergeant to speak.

  “You resent me,” the first sergeant said. “You think you should be sitting here. You don’t know that’s what you think because you’ve totally sublimated your resentment, but that’s what it is, all right, and that’s why you and me are developing a definite conflict profile. It’s like you have to keep fucking up to prove to yourself that you don’t really care. That’s my theory. You follow me?”

  “Top, I’m way ahead of you,” Hooper said. “That’s night school talking.”

  The first sergeant continued to look out the window. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re doing in my army. You’ve put your twenty years in. You could retire to Mexico and buy a peso factory. Live like a dictator. So what are you doing in my army, Hooper?”

  Hooper looked down at the desk. He cleared his throat but said nothing.

  “Give it some thought,” the first sergeant said. He stood and walked Hooper to the door. “I’m not hostile,” he said. “I’m prepared to be supportive. Just think nice thoughts about Mexico, okay? Okay, Hooper?”

  Hooper called Mickey and told her he wouldn’t be coming by that night after all. She reminded him that this was the third time in one week, and said that she wasn’t getting any younger.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Hooper asked. “Go AWOL?”

  “I cried three times today,” Mickey said. “I just broke down and cried, and you know what? I don’t even know why. I just feel bad all the time anymore.”

  “What did you do last night?” Hooper asked. When Mickey didn’t answer he said, “Did Briggs come over?”

  “I’ve been inside all day,” Mickey said. “Just sitting here. I’m going out of my tree.” Then, in the same weary voice, she said, “Touch it, Hoop.”

  “I have to get going,” Hooper said.

  “Not yet. Wait. I’m going into the bedroom. I’m going to pick up the phone in there. Hang on, Hoop. Think of the bedroom. Think of me lying on the bed. Wait, baby.”

  There were men passing by the phone booth. Hooper watched them and tried not to think of Mickey’s bedroom but now he could think of nothing else. Mickey’s husband was a supply sergeant with a taste for quality. The walls of the bedroom were knotty pine he’d derailed en route to some colonel’s office. The brass lamps beside the bed were made from howitzer casings. The sheets were parachute silk. Sometimes, lying on those sheets, Hooper thought of the men who had drifted to earth below them. He was no great lover, as the women he went with usually got around to telling him, but in Mickey’s bedroom Hooper had turned in his saddest performances and always when he was most aware that everything around him was stolen. He wasn’t exactly sure why he kept going back. It was just something he did, again and again.

  “Okay,” Mickey said. “I’m here.”

  “There’s a guy waiting to use the phone,” Hooper told her.

  “Hoop, I’m on the bed. I’m taking off my shoes.”

  Hooper could see her perfectly. He lit a cigarette and opened the door of the booth to let the smoke out.

  “Hoop?” she said.

  “I told you, there’s a guy waiting.”

  “Turn around then.”

  “You don’t need me,” Hooper said. “All you need is the telephone. Why don’t you call Briggs? That’s what you’re going to do after I hang up.”

  “I probably will,” she said. “Listen, Hoop, I’m not really on the bed. I was just pulling your chain.”

  “I knew it,” Hooper said. “You’re watching the tube, right?”

  “Somebody just won a saw,” Mickey said.

  “A saw?”

  “Yeah, they drove up to this man’s house and dumped a truckload of logs in his yard and gave him a chainsaw. This was his fantasy. You should see how happy he is, Hoop. I’d give anything to be that happy.”

  “Maybe I can swing by later tonight,” Hooper said. “Just for a minute.”

  “I don’t know,” Mickey said. “Better give me a ring first.”

  After Mickey hung up Hooper tried to call his wife but there was no answer. He stood there and listened to the phone ringing. At last he put the receiver down and stepped outside the booth, just as they began to sound retreat over the company loudspeaker. With the men around him Hooper came to attention and saluted. The record was scratchy, but, as always, the music caused Hooper’s mind to go abruptly and perfectly still. He held his salute until the last note died away, then broke off smartly and walked down the street toward the mess hall.

  The Officer of the Day was Captain King from Headquarters Company. Captain King had also been Officer of the Day on Monday and Tuesday nights, and Hooper was glad to see him again because Captain King was too lazy to do his own job or to make sure that the guards were doing theirs. He stayed in the guardhouse and left everything up to Hooper.

  Captain King had grey hair and a long, greyish face. He was a West Point graduate with twenty-eight years of service behind him, just trying to make it through another two years so he could retire at three-quarters pay. All his classmates were generals or at least bird colonels but he himself had been held back for good reasons, many of which he admitted to Hooper their first night together. It puzzled Hooper at first, this officer telling him about his failures to perform, his nervous breakdowns and Valium habit, but finally Hooper understood: Captain King regarded him, a PFC with twenty-one years’ service, as a comrade in dereliction, a disaster like himself with no room left for judgment against anyone.

  The evening was hot and muggy. Little black bats swooped overhead as Captain King made his way along the rank of men drawn up before the guardhouse steps. He objected to the alignment of someone’s belt buckle. He asked questions about the chain of command but gave no sign as to whether the answers he received were right or wrong. He inspected a couple of rifles and pretended to find something amiss with each of them, though it was clear that he hardly knew one end from the other, and when he reached the last man in the line he began to deliver a speech. He said that he had never seen such sorry troops in his life. He asked how they expected to stand up to a determined enemy. On and on he went. Captain King had delivered the same speech on Monday and Tuesday, and when Hooper recognized it he lit another cigarette and sat down on the running board of the truck he’d been leaning against.

  The sky was grey. It had a damp, heavy look and it felt heavy too, hanging close overhead, nervous with rumblings and small flashes in the distance. Just sitting there made Hooper sweat. Beyond the guardhouse a stream of cars rushed along the road to Tacoma. From the officers’ club farther up the road came the muffled beat of rock music, which was almost lost, like every other sound of the evening, in the purr of crickets that rose up everywhere and thickened the air like heat.

  When Captain King had finished talking he turned the men over to Hooper for transportation to their post
s. Two of them, both privates, were from Hooper’s company and these he allowed to ride with him in the cab of the truck while everybody else slid around in back. One was a cook named Porchoff, known as Porkchop. The other was a radio operator named Trac who had managed to airlift himself out of Saigon during the fall of the city by hanging from the skids of a helicopter. That was the story Hooper had heard, anyway, and he had no reason to doubt it; he’d seen the slopes pull that trick, though few of them were as young as Trac must have been then—eight or nine at the most. When Hooper tried to picture his son Wesley at the same age hanging over a burning city by his fingertips, he had to smile.

  But Trac didn’t talk about it. There was nothing about him to suggest his past except perhaps the deep, sickle-shaped scar above his right eye. To Hooper there was something familiar about this scar. One night, watching Trac play the video game in the company rec room, he was overcome with the certainty that he had seen Trac before somewhere—astride a water buffalo in some reeking paddy or running alongside Hooper’s APC with a bunch of other kids all begging money, holding up melons or a bag full of weed or a starving monkey on a stick.

  Though Hooper had the windows open, the cab of the truck smelled strongly of aftershave. Hooper noticed that Trac was wearing orange Walkman earphones under his helmet liner. They were against regulations but Hooper said nothing. As long as Trac had his ears plugged he wouldn’t be listening for trespassers and end up blowing his rifle off at some squirrel cracking open an acorn. Of all the guards only Porchoff and Trac would be carrying ammunition, because they had been assigned to the battalion communications center where there was a tie-in terminal to the division mainframe computer. The theory was that an intruder who knew his stuff could get his hands on highly classified material. That was how it had been explained to Hooper. Hooper thought it was a load of crap. The Russians knew everything anyway.

  Hooper let out the first two men at the PX and the next two at the parking lot outside the main officers’ club, where lately there’d been several cars vandalized. As they pulled away, Porchoff leaned over Trac and grabbed Hooper’s sleeve. “You used to be a corporal,” he said.

  Hooper shook Porchoff’s hand loose. He said, “I’m driving a truck, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “How come you got busted?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m just asking,” Porchoff said. “So what happened, anyway?”

  “Cool it, Porkchop,” said Trac. “The man doesn’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “Cool it yourself, fuckface,” Porchoff said. He looked at Trac. “Was I addressing you?”

  Trac said, “Man, you must’ve been eating some of your own food.”

  “I don’t believe I was addressing you,” Porchoff said. “In fact, I don’t believe that you and me have been properly introduced. That’s another thing I don’t like about the army, the way people you haven’t been introduced to feel perfectly free to get right into your face and unload whatever shit they’ve got in their brains. It happens all the time. But I never heard anyone say ‘cool it’ before. You’re a real phrasemaker, fuckface.”

  “That’s enough,” Hooper said.

  Porchoff leaned back and said, “That’s enough,” in a falsetto voice. A few moments later he started humming to himself.

  Hooper dropped off the rest of the guards and turned up the hill toward the communications center. There were choke-berry bushes along the gravel drive, with white blossoms going grey in the dusky light. Gravel sprayed up under the tires and rattled against the floorboards of the truck. Porchoff stopped humming. “I’ve got a cramp,” he said.

  Hooper pulled up next to the gate and turned off the engine. He looked over at Porchoff. “Now what’s your problem?” he said.

  “I’ve got a cramp,” Porchoff repeated.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Hooper said. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “I did. I went on sick call but the doctor couldn’t find it. It keeps moving around. It’s here now.” Porchoff touched his neck. “I swear to God.”

  “Keep track of it,” Hooper told him. “You can go on sick call again in the morning.”

  “You don’t believe me,” Porchoff said.

  The three of them got out of the truck. Hooper counted out the ammunition to Porchoff and Trac, and watched as they loaded their clips. “That ammo’s strictly for show,” he said. “Forget I even gave it to you. If you run into a problem, which you won’t, use the phone in the guard shack. You can work out your own shifts.” Hooper opened the gate and locked the two men inside. They stood watching him, faces in shadow, black rifle barrels poking over their shoulders. “Listen,” Hooper said, “nobody’s going to break in here, understand?”

  Trac nodded. Porchoff just looked at him.

  “Okay,” Hooper said. “I’ll drop by later. Me and the captain.” Hooper knew that Captain King wasn’t about to go anywhere, but Trac and Porchoff didn’t know that. Hooper behaved better when he thought he was being watched and he supposed that the same was true of other people.

  Hooper climbed back inside the truck and started the engine. He gave the V sign to the men at the gate. Trac gave the sign back and turned away. Porchoff didn’t move. He stayed where he was, fingers laced through the wire. He looked about ready to cry. “Damn,” Hooper said, and hit the gas. Gravel clattered in the wheel wells. When Hooper reached the main road a light rain began to fall, but it stopped before he’d even turned the wipers on.

  Hooper and Captain King sat on adjacent bunks in the guardhouse, which was empty except for them and a bat that was flitting back and forth amog the dim rafters. As on Monday and Tuesday nights, Captain King had brought along an ice chest filled with little bottles of Perrier water. From time to time he tried pressing one on Hooper, but Hooper declined. His refusals made Captain King apologetic. “It’s not a class thing,” Captain King said, looking at the bottle in his hand. “I don’t drink this stuff because I went to the Point or anything like that.” He leaned down and put the bottle between his bare feet. “I’m allergic to alcohol,” he said. “Otherwise I’d probably be an alcoholic. Why not? I’m everything else.” He smiled at Hooper.

  Hooper lay back and clasped his hands behind his head and stared up at the mattress above him. “I’m not much of a drinker myself,” he said. He knew that Captain King wanted him to explain why he refused the Perrier water but there was really no reason in particular.

  “I drank eggnog one Christmas when I was a kid and it almost killed me,” Captain King said. “My arms and legs swelled up to twice their normal size. The doctors couldn’t get my glasses off because my skin was all puffed up around them. You know the way a tree will grow around a rock. It was like that. A few months later I tried beer at some kid’s graduation party and the same thing happened. Pretty strange, eh?”

  “Yes sir,” Hooper said.

  “I used to think it was all for the best. I have an addictive personality and you can bet your bottom dollar I would have been a problem drinker. No question about it. But now I wonder. If I’d had one big weakness like that maybe I wouldn’t have had all these little pissant weaknesses I ended up with. I know that sounds like bull-pucky, but look at Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great was a boozer. Did you know that?”

  “No sir,” Hooper said.

  “Well, he was. Read your history. So was Churchill. Churchill drank a bottle of cognac a day. And of course Grant. You know what Lincoln said when someone complained about Grant’s drinking?”

  “Yes sir. I’ve heard the story.”

  “He said, ‘Find out what brand he uses so I can ship a case to the rest of my generals.’ Is that the way you heard it?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Captain King nodded. “I’m all in,” he said. He stretched out and assumed exactly the position Hooper was in. It made Hooper uncomfortable. He sat up and put his feet on the floor.

  “Married?” Captain King asked.

  “Yes s
ir.”

  “Kids?”

  “Yes sir. One. Wesley.”

  “Oh my God, a boy,” Captain King said. “They’re nothing but trouble, take my word for it. They’re programmed to hate you. It has to be like that, otherwise they’d spend their whole lives moping around the house, but just the same it’s no fun when it starts. I have two and neither of them can stand me. Haven’t been home in years. Breaks my heart. Of course I was a worse father than most. How old is your boy?”

  “Sixteen or seventeen,” Hooper said. He put his hands on his knees and looked at the floor. “Seventeen. He lives with my wife’s sister in San Diego.”

  Captain King turned his head and looked at Hooper. “Sounds like you’re not much of a dad yourself.”

  Hooper began to lace his boots up.

  “I’m not criticizing,” Captain King said. “At least you were smart enough to get someone else to do the job.” He yawned. “I’m whipped,” he said. “You need me for anything? You want me to make the rounds with you?”

  “I’ll take care of things, sir,” Hooper said.

  “Fair enough.” Captain King closed his eyes. “If you need me just shout.”

  Hooper went outside and lit a cigarette. It was almost midnight, well past the time appointed for inspecting the guards. As he walked toward the truck mosquitoes droned around his head. A breeze was rustling the treetops, but on the ground the air was hot and still.

  Hooper took his time making the rounds. He visited all the guards except Porchoff and Trac, and found everything in order. There were no problems. He started down the road toward the communications center, but when he reached the turn-off he kept his eyes dead ahead and drove past. Warm, fragrant air rushed into his face from the open window. The road ahead was empty. Hooper leaned back and mashed the accelerator. The engine roared. He was moving now, really moving, past darkened barracks and bare flagpoles and bushes whose flowers blazed up in the glare of the headlights. Hooper grinned. He felt no pleasure but he grinned and pushed the truck as hard as it would go.