by Andre Dubus
He rose and turned out the light; when he again faced the room there was a dull flashing red light breaking the shadows, reflected from the walls. Going to the open window he saw the truck, the blinking light atop its cab, and now entering the lawn a Marine wearing a white belt. Phil shot twice from the hip and the Marine scuttled away into the dark of the lawn or the road. Watching the window as if not a bullet but a man might come through, Phil moved backwards around the bed and pushed it against the wall beneath the windows. Then the bullets came: twice the blaze and report of a .45, shattering a raised window, cracking into the wall behind him. He fired several shots at the truck, then kneeling at the bed as in prayer, his chin on the mattress, the rifle resting across it, he waited.
CROUCHED behind the fender, Chuck wished he had his deer rifle, his Winchester .30-.30 that he kept in the Barracks armory. With the first two shots from the house he had crawled into the truck and, with the brake and clutch pedals jamming his ribs, he had radioed the Corporal of the Guard, then switched off the blinking red light. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the riot squad.
They got there quickly, just as in drills, and he watched proudly as the panel truck halted a block away, the riot squad running low from the rear of the truck, spreading out as they crossed the road to the lawns and went down on their bellies, weapons thumping and rattling as they struck the earth. Chuck yelled for Visconti, and after a few moments saw him crawling in the shadow of a darkened house, and for the first time he realized that in all these dark houses people were watching, their faces exposed just enough so they could see out the windows. When Visconti reached a point where the truck was between him and the sailor’s house, he sprinted across the road, bent low, his rifle at port, then squatted beside Chuck who saw the scene as a blending of his infantry training and movies of World War II.
‘Gimmee the rifle,’ he said.
Visconti gave it to him.
‘The belt too. Okay. Here’s what you do—’ As he spoke he took clips from the pouches and, reaching up, placed them on the fender. He told Visconti to send two men to the rear of the house, that they would take cover and wait, and if the sailor ran out, they would shoot him. Then he gave Visconti the .45 and told him to bring the other three troops back to the truck, where they would set up a base of fire on the house while he and Visconti assaulted it.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Visconti said.
‘You got it?’
Visconti nodded and told it back to him while Chuck, on one knee, pulled back the MI’s bolt a couple of inches, glanced down in the dark at the dull yellow of the chambered brass cartridge, and eased the bolt forward again. Then he fired eight quick rounds over the hood; as he ducked again, one sweeping hand brought a new clip from the fender. Visconti was gone. Chuck waited for return fire from the window, but there was none. He watched the troops crawl into a cluster around Visconti three lawns away; after what seemed a long time for such simple orders, two men broke the cluster, rose and sprinted across the road. Chuck gave them two minutes to get behind the house, then he emptied three clips at the windows, remembering this time to sweep from left to right, aiming low. Still the sailor did not fire. He looked around, spotted his cap beside the truck, put it on the rifle’s muzzle, steadied it so the visor pointed forward, then slowly raised it. Two slugs plunked into the hood and he jerked the rifle so the cap fell; then turning to pick it up he looked into the face of Captain Melko, bareheaded, his face tense but competent, the pale silver bars on his collar and epaulets already speaking for the silent man who wore them, relieving Chuck of command.
‘Did they bring tear gas?’ Melko said.
‘No sir.’
Melko shut his lips impatiently; he opened the truck door and crawled in. While he was talking on the radio, Visconti shouted ‘Cover us!’ and Chuck fired while they crossed the road and kneeled behind the truck and watched him. As he crouched to insert a new clip, Melko gripped his arm, not in anger or even haste, and said: ‘Don’t fire again till the gas comes.’
For a moment their eyes met, then Chuck looked away, to his left, at the end of the road where, above a tall black mass of pines, a glowing cloud hid the moon.
It took five silent minutes for the truck to come, then Visconti had the tear gas, squatting beside Chuck who stood isolated within the percussion and flash of each round, aware of nothing save the kick of the rifle against his shoulder and cheek bone, the smell of powder, the dark rectangles of the windows and what he sensed behind them. When the clip pinged out and clattered against the fender he reloaded, half-crouched yet exposed over the hood, his eyes on the windows where Phil, surprised by the gas, had filled his lungs with a hot burning solid which he immediately recognized; he expelled it, then dropping the rifle he held his nose and mouth. His lungs were empty. He stood up, his flesh and tightly closed eyes burning; he waved an arm toward the window and the men behind the truck, and was about to flee out of the room and into the air when Chuck, standing erectly now, fired his last clip, hearing at some time Melko yelling ‘Cease fire! Cease fire!’ He did not know how many rounds he fired after that: perhaps four, perhaps three. Then Melko grabbed his shoulder and rifle and spun him around, both of them exposed to the acrid-smelling windows, as if already they knew the firing was over.
‘Goddammit, Sergeant! We had him! We had him!’
NEXT MORNING after chow he offered to clean Visconti’s rifle; but Visconti, with the awe of a bat boy, said he would clean it himself. Late the following afternoon the Corporal of the Guard showed him the Oak Harbor paper; he glanced at his picture, grunted, and went outside to the blacktop parade field, where a corporal was drilling troops. The day was hazy, with a faint glare from the covered sun. For nearly an hour he stood smoking, fieldstripping the butts, and watching the troops in pressed green utilities marching back and forth and in squared turns, their rifles slanted upward in perfect angles, their boot heels clomping in unison. Then he went back inside. By Taps that night he had picked up six newspapers: one on the deck in the head, four on bunks in squad bays, and one under the pool table in the rec room. The ones in the head and rec room were easiest, for each room was empty. He stalked the other four, waiting until a squad bay was either empty (this happened twice) or until no one was around the bunk that held it, and he could stand with his back to the scattered troops and slip the paper under his shirt.
The other two sergeants were married, so he shared his room with no one. That night, while outside his closed door the barracks grew quiet, he lay on his bunk and read the story and studied his picture: a full length profile, his right side to the camera, his cap restored to his head, his right arm down at his side, holding the rifle. On the second page were small pictures of the Korsmeyers, only their faces. The picture of Korsmeyer distorted Chuck’s memory of the other face: drained white, turned in frozen anguish to one side, averting its open eyes from the holes in its chest and throat. To recall clearly the man who had tried to stab his wife and who had shot at him with a .22, Chuck turned back to the first page, to his own picture, where he stood forever poised in peaceful silence.
But that night’s silence stayed with him and changed to something else, as if he had taken restful leave of a woman’s bed, only to fall unwillingly into months of continence. It stayed with him through the long summer, broken by nights with Toni; it stayed with him through the fall when, on the eve of her husband’s return, Toni told him goodbye with ceremonial lust and sorrow, Chuck feigning both and leaving her house long before dawn. In the dull rains of winter he returned often to the newspapers; they were faded yellow as in sickness, dry and delicate in his fingers, and he handled them like butterfly wings, fearing for their lives.
Andromache
PETE AND BECKY stayed up with her that night, until she thought she could sleep; then Pete went home and Becky slept with her. But Ellen woke three hours later when the couple next door returned from the New Year’s Eve party at the Officers’ Club. She heard car doors slamming and women’s high
laughter—there seemed to be two couples—then a man singing. She reached out, and her hand touched Becky’s breast; she withdrew it and lay awake for the rest of the night. She thought of Posy, nine years old now, and perhaps in twenty years or even less she would go through this too. She thought of Ronnie, fatherless at five, and already so much like his father; but Ronnie wouldn’t have to bear this: he was a man, so he would merely die. And she thought of Joe trying to reach the escape hatch as the plane dived faster toward earth.
They found Joe’s body, but she never saw it, and the funeral was with closed caskets. Ellen sat erectly between Posy and Ronnie. She did not cry, though her mother and Joe’s mother did: subdued but continual sobbing, while the two older men sat quietly, their faces transfixed in bewildered grief. Posy didn’t cry, either. Ronnie sniffled once but Ellen whispered in his ear: Be a strong Marine; and he bit his lip and stared at Joe’s casket, flanked by the caskets of the pilot and the crewman.
At the funeral Ellen learned that the enlist crewman, a petty officer, had been only twenty-four years old; so next day she called a friend at Navy Relief, asking her to check on his widow. He probably didn’t have much insurance, Ellen said, and she may need money to get home. Then Ellen drove south with her parents, to Sacramento.
She found an apartment near a school for Posy, and started taking courses in shorthand and typing. She didn’t try to make friends. Some nights she had a drink with a couple across the hall. They were in their late twenties, and they bored her. Gradually she realized that she was boring them too: her talk was of the Marine Corps—the Fleet Marine Force bases and travel and funny anecdotes—a world as alien to this odd flabby couple as theirs was to her.
On most nights she stayed in the apartment and watched television or read magazines. Or, when Posy and Ronnie were asleep, she looked at the photographs in her album or projected home movies on a portable screen. The pictures were painful, but she was glad she had taken them. For sometimes she could not remember Joe’s face. His image often appeared in her mind but when she concentrated on it, tried to keep it there, it began to fade. Then she would look at a picture. If she were out of the apartment, she turned to one in her billfold. In that one he was wearing his green uniform and major’s oak leaves. At home, she would hurry to the bedroom where an eight-by-ten colored photograph was on the dressing table: he wore blues and captain’s bars. She had no pictures of Joe in civilian clothes, except in the movies.
It took her four months to look at the movie she had taken on Christmas Day: Ronnie and Posy with their presents and Joe sipping coffee and smiling and lighting a pipe; then he was running beside Ronnie, holding the bicycle seat, and three times she reversed the film and watched the moment when he released the bicycle and she had focused on his face as he called softly: keep steering, Son, keep steering—She began to cry, but she watched the rest: the sandwiches and cookies and punch bowl, the living room and Joe in his blues, and her clean kitchen.
She remembered an uncle’s funeral when she was fifteen. His widow had spent almost an entire day at the funeral home, where his dead face was there to look at; it wasn’t his real face, it was younger than Ellen had ever seen it, but it was dead. A woman could look at it, speak to it, touch it. But she couldn’t. Her memories of Joe were alive: he was talking, he was smiling at her, he was stern, he was walking on the cold beach at Whidbey Island, or kissing her and going to the plane.
She went to the kitchen and made an Old Fashioned, then sat in the living room again, staring at the white movie screen. She wanted to talk, but not to the couple across the hall, or to the young girls in the business school, or to her mother. For she was thinking about Camp Pendleton and Marine wives: Remember during Korea bow we’d read two papers every day, the morning and evening ones, and we’d be waiting for the mail as soon as we woke up in the morning, that was almost the first thing you thought about—except sometimes you woke up, mostly on Sundays when there’s no mail, and you’d lie there thinking it’ll always be like this: alone in the morning—but most days it was mail you thought about and you’d try to forget it because the postman wouldn’t come until ten and about nine-fifteen or so you could see women opening their front doors and looking in the mailbox, sometimes even sticking a hand in it, then they’d look up and down the street. They’d have brooms or mops in their bands. They knew the mail hadn’t come yet but they couldn’t help looking—Oh, I was the same. Remember how it was? How terrible? But we made it, didn’t we. We by God made it—
The next day she wrote to Colonel James Harkness at Camp Pendleton, California. He answered within a week: he had taken action on her request, he wrote, and he could assure her that a position with Navy Relief would always be open for her. If she would notify him several weeks prior to her arrival, he would find quarters in Oceanside. He and Marcia looked forward to seeing her again, and the Corps had lost one of its finest officers.
She replied that she would be there in June, then she took the children to her mother’s and told them she wanted to see Pete and Becky again before moving to Oceanside. As she told them this, she looked at Posy and wanted to say: I’ll send you to college in the midwest, far away from the Corps, and you can marry a man like that one across the ball, a man who—who what? A man you can live with. But she said: ‘We’ll do a lot of swimming there.’
Then she flew to Seattle. Pete and Becky met her at the airport; she sat between them in the car, and from Seattle to Deception Pass they talked about Whidbey Island friends and the weather. The sky was grey and the air damp and chilling. But when they approached Deception Pass, Ellen was silent. They rounded a curve and she looked at the grey roiling water and, across it, at the evergreens of Whidbey Island, and her heart quickened. She saw the rapids under the bridge, then they were on it: high above the Pass, and ahead of them were dark tall trees, and a winding blacktop road and, trembling, she lit a cigarette. Becky took her hand. As they left the bridge and entered the trees, Ellen said: ‘Pete, would you take me to the salvage area tomorrow?’
‘Sure.’
‘I want to see the plane. I never saw Joe, or the plane either. Did they bring it here?’
Pete said yes, they had; and Becky squeezed her hand.
TWO DAYS before Christmas, nine days before his death, Joe Forrest had come home in the evening while Ellen was in the kitchen, making pastries. He looked at them for a while, pausing over each tray as if he were inspecting the enlisted mess, tasted a couple of them, then said gently: ‘Make big cookies. The troops like big cookies.’
‘Oh, Joe,’ she said, ‘do you really think I have to? What’ll we do with these?’
‘We’ll eat them,’ he said, and mixed her a martini.
He went to the bedroom to take off his uniform, and she thought of him going through the ritual, carefully hanging the trousers and shirt on a wooden hangar, the blouse on another. Then he would spitshine the shoes, cordovans so heavily coated with polish now that his daily shining took hardly any time at all. He would finish by polishing the brass buckle and tip of his web belt, putting on a sport shirt and slacks, and then he would mix their second drinks. But she didn’t wait for it. While he was still in the bedroom she called that she was going to Becky’s for a minute and a roast was in the oven, but she’d be back before it was done.
Walking to Becky’s, she looked through the windows of the officers’ houses, all of them alike: picture windows and fireplaces and car ports, and cords of wood stacked outside. Though it wasn’t six o’clock yet, the sky had been black for an hour. The wind was cold and damp, and she shivered. She always told Joe that she loved Whidbey Island and she told the officers’ wives too; but she was from California and she hated the island and Puget Sound which enclosed it. She was certain that Joe felt the same, but he had been a Marine for too long and was cheerfully resigned to discomfort. She turned up the Crawfords’ sidewalk, hurrying, her overcoat useless against the wind. Becky answered the door with a drink in her hand; they went to the living room, and Pe
te stood up.
‘Where’s the old man?’ he said.
‘Shining his shoes and drinking. What else do Marines do before dinner?’
Pete had been an ace in the Second World War and he was now a squadron commander. Ellen looked condescendingly at his uniform: he was wearing two-thirds of his Navy blues, having taken off his coat and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt.
‘Those pastries I spent all afternoon on,’ she said to Becky. ‘The Major has just disapproved them.’
‘He did?’
Becky smiled, and her face wrinkled. She was a tall woman with bleached hair and a face that was lined and tan. She played golf nearly every day, even at Whidbey Island; she had said only snow could keep her away from golf, and if it ever snowed she might even paint the balls red and play in that.
‘Make big cookies,’ Ellen said. ‘The troops like big cookies.’
Pete brought Ellen a Scotch and water, then put another log on the fire.
‘He’ll probably tell me to make hot dogs too,’ she said.
Pete was smiling at her.
‘What are they drinking?’ he said.
‘Joe’s making that rum punch.’
‘Drunk Marines in Officers’ Country. You stay in the house, Becky.’
‘Maybe I won’t. Who was that snappy one at the main gate today? About five o’clock.’