by Andre Dubus
“I’m sure that’s true, because I don’t think you’d be insubordinate without some reason. Now I don’t mean to pry, but maybe if you could tell me it would help you with this other thing.”
He held up the letter from Jan. Freeman looked at it, then looked at the bulkhead and said:
“He was harassing me, sir. About my girl being pregnant.”
“What did he say?”
“Sir, he said the Detachment was going to have another Teddy-Baby.”
“He said that in front of other troops? While he was supervising clean-up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Yes, sir, but I’d rather not repeat it, sir.”
“All right,” Dan said.
He stood up.
“Tell you what: you stay here and read your letter and I’ll step out for a while.”
Freeman came to attention, clicking his heels.
“Aye-aye, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Dan went out and shut the door, then knocked on Tolleson’s door.
“Sir,” the Corporal of the Guard said, “First Sergeant said to tell the Lieutenant he’s gone to the chief’s mess.”
“All right. How ’bout getting hold of Burns for me.”
Dan waited in Tolleson’s stateroom for Burns, a tall lean boy with dark hair whose cutting at Boot Camp he probably still regretted; he was a saxophone player. Or he had been before joining the Marine Corps, and he meant to play again, professionally, when he got out. He had the qualities of a good clerk: he was smart enough to work in the small office with Dan and Tolleson every day, to join their small talk when he was invited or allowed, while never making Dan or Tolleson feel that he was trying to have anything more than a professional relationship with them. When he came to Tolleson’s door, Dan told him to prepare a release order for Freeman.
“And Burns—”
“Yes, sir?”
“When you go in there to type it, don’t tell Freeman what it is.”
Burns smiled, like a friend planning a surprise party.
“Aye aye, sir,” he said.
Then Dan was alone. He closed the door and sat smoking because things were happening fast now and he had to think. First he would release Freeman, telling him that he could understand the causes of insubordination (he would not say that Corporal McKittrick had been wrong, had used his rank for bullying, because he did not want to undermine that rank); he would say that, considering the circumstances, he felt one day in the brig was sufficient punishment, and that he expected Freeman to control himself in the future and to come see him or the First Sergeant if he had any more personal conflicts with NCO’s. Then, with Tolleson, he would arrange to fly Freeman home. And last, before leaving the barracks that night, he would reprimand Corporal McKittrick. Then he would go to his stateroom and study his platoon commander’s notebook, and write to Khristy.
He would reprimand her too.
He went into his office and told Burns to step outside. He signed the release order, leaning over the desk, then slowly straightened and turned to Freeman who stood at parade rest. He told Freeman he was released from confinement, and he told him why, watching the fading defiance in his face. Then he told him to stand by for word on a flight off the ship.
“I don’t know if it can be done,” he said. Then he smiled. “But after all, Freeman, it occurs to me that this is an aircraft carrier and there’s a mail plane that takes people to Japan.”
Freeman smiled and said: “Yes, sir.” Dan told him he could go and, still grinning, Freeman clicked his heels, smartly about-faced, and walked out.
Dan sat in the office waiting for Tolleson, sipping a cup of coffee which he got from the percolator near the Corporal of the Guard’s desk, having crossed the classroom where several troops were shining shoes, having felt so completely in control of the Detachment and himself that he had been unaware of those troops and—for once—had not bothered to fix on his face the public expression of an officer: a look of serene confidence, as if he had transcended all the problems of the enlisted world and was now preoccupied with the logistics of an amphibious landing on the shores of China. He had merely crossed the room, watched by the troops, thinking of Freeman and Jan starting a baby on a sunny afternoon in Oakland, and as he recrossed the classroom to enter his office, he was smiling warmly to himself.
He leaned back in the swivel chair, looking at the overhead and thinking of Khristy, having forgotten the time difference and wondering what day and what hour of that day it was in California: perhaps morning and she was walking to some place on the campus for breakfast, her long brown hair curling upward at her shoulders, her lips freshly and lightly reddened, the scent of toothpaste still on her breath, and her greyish-blue eyes as calm and alert as her father’s might be while he read an operations order from higher command. Her eyes were not always that way. When she and Dan laughed together they would brighten, looking at him with a sudden intimacy that made him feel he had known her all his life
On that last night with Khristy, after she had told him he should get out of the Marine Corps, they had with their usual facility changed their conversation and their moods. They had been in one of the two restaurants in Oceanside which provided left-over atmosphere: a dark place, behind whose bar was a large stuffed martin flanked by sections of a fishnet arranged as neatly as bunting; on another wall a black low-crowned flat-brimmed hat was suspended as if a Flamenco dancer had come through head first and lodged there, his bent-over body trapped outside in the moving fog—and Dan thought of Winnie-the-Pooh caught in Rabbit’s hole, and told Khristy; and squeezing his hands on the table she laughed until tears sparkled her eyes. Beneath the hat was a red poncho. Farther left there was a sombrero, a white one, with a green serape below it; directly between the two hats a coiled bullwhip hung over two crossed banderillas.
“That’s the wetback wall,” Dan said over the organ music, loudly enough so that he quickly looked around to be sure his next statement was true: “Only thing is, they can’t afford to come see it.”
“Si,” Khristy said, and lifted her martini in a toast, whether to his sense of justice or to the huts and dirt floors of fruit pickers, he didn’t know.
The organ music came from what the management called a piano bar. On the wall above the organist’s head was a photograph of the restaurant-owner shaking hands with a steady-working mediocre Hollywood actor who, Dan recalled aloud, had been twice nominated for Oscars but had not won.
“So they’ll give him one someday,” he said. “They’ll say he’s been a fixture in the industry.”
Then he picked up the menu and asked if she would like to start with a shrimp cocktail, for he was sorry he had mentioned movies. Some time ago she had accused him of having seen more movies than any person his age in the United States. They’re not real, she had told him and he replied that he was well aware of that but he didn’t care; besides, he had said, sometimes they’re more real than they seem to be. Once he had told her that Gary Cooper had been his hero since he was a boy, that he had seen The Pride of the Yankees and For Whom the Bell Tolls several times when he was very young and he had cried each time. So she had given him a large paperback edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, inscribing it: To a good trooper from a rather uncertain Maria. Taking the book from her he remembered Gary Cooper lying on his belly, aiming what Dan believed was a Lewis gun at the audience, firing, as two guerillas rode away holding Ingrid Bergman on a horse between them.
He had felt like crying at the end of the book too, then told her that Hemingway should have known better, that when you cross a road or trail in daylight you make everyone cross at once before they can zero in on you, because if you cross one at a time it’ll be just like the book, they’ll get the gun around and the people at the end of your column will have had the course. Just as she was beginning to scowl he said: Wait, and told her he was glad it worked out that way because otherwise Robert Jordan wouldn’t have had to stay behi
nd, which was the best by God thing he could have done.
I thought you’d like that, she had said.
So in the restaurant he ordered two shrimp cocktails and lobster and more martinis, having a quick fantasy of being unable to buy gasoline for his trip north tomorrow, and Khristy said with more irritation than music alone could have caused:
“Why should a town in Southern California, of all places, have nothing but organ music?”
She was looking at the piano bar whose stools were all occupied by middle-aged couples; even as she looked they began to sing “Heart of My Heart.” The organist was about fifty, a lean almost bony man, having slicked long hair without a visible touch of grey. He was smiling, with lips closed, at the singers. Khristy said he looked like he had slept with every peroxided girl and woman from San Diego to Santa Barbara and was playing his own funeral music while he waited to die.
After the martinis and shrimp cocktails and lobster, the sweetness of chocolate-covered mint patties—one apiece—which Dan bought at the candy counter in front of the cashier, the hot bitterness of coffee that sweetened their cigarettes, they sat quietly, full and rather tight, smiling oddly at each other, and Khristy said:
“Well, we might as well.”
“Might as well what?”
“Dance to this stuff. Come on.”
They danced among couples who were, in a last-lap sort of way, attractive: women whose lined tan faces suggested boats and beaches rather than age, and whose hair refused to be grey; men whose hair either silvered or did not change at all, though some had owned faithless hair which had left them to live the rest of their lives under a series of seasonal hats. Dan assumed these people inhabited the town of Oceanside, a town he referred to as a service town: a main street of barbers, tailors, dry cleaners, laundromats, and bars without even facades: mere four-walled structures where young enlisted Marines could continue their baptism into the world of men by drinking and talking as they pleased. He did not know what these dancing men did for a living. He had never been in the pastel residential section on the hill overlooking the main street. He figured of course that Oceanside had its mayor, its judge and lawyers and doctors; there must be teachers and men who erected buildings and houses; certainly there were managers of supermarkets, owners of service stations, pharmacists; there would be the ubiquitous insurance men, and someone owned the women’s clothing store which seemed to display always a brightly colored bathing suit in its window. But he could account for no one else. Then Khristy said:
“My God—let’s get out of here.”
He left a good tip, his fantasy of being utterly broke by morning now washed away by gin, and its vestiges tamped firmly beneath consciousness by lobster and potatoes; he paid the bill with the same insouciant grace; and with his arm lightly encircling her ribs, they stepped into the fog. She took his hand and led him away from the parking lot, toward the beach: she descended steep wooden steps to a pier and he thought she was going to the end of it where they would kiss swaying over the dark white-capped tide smacking against the pilings. But a third of the way down the pier, as he was reaching for her waist again, she turned in front of him and stepped rather than jumped to the sand three feet below. So he jumped after her.
“Let’s go to that place at the south end of the beach,” she said.
He had just straightened from his jump, standing close to her, her grey-blue eyes looking dark now just below his, and he was about to tell her the bar at the south end was off-limits, but instead he kissed her; taking her by surprise so that her teeth clicked against his for an instant, then she was returning the kiss and he was seeing her prone on the sand, wondering if she would ever be prone for him—although he wasn’t sure that he would, on the sand; for just as he could not look at any landscape without a tactical eye which sought out critical high ground and draws and treelines that would serve as avenues of approach, he could not see or feel sand under his feet without being reminded of amphibious landings and the difficulty of running on it wearing boots and a haversack and, once off the beach and your uniform dry, your clothes and flesh and weapons carried sand that you could not entirely brush away. But with Khristy he guessed he would, sand or not, though he imagined that somehow sand would cling to their bodies, even at their point of fusion.
Then she pulled away and he said he loved her and she cried out louder than the surf that she bet no one in the world could kiss like he could, and taking his hand she led him down the beach, past the backs of restaurants and bars and darkened stores above them, crunching through burnt wood from beach fires, stepping over dried pale driftwood, saying ooh when a sand crab fled across her path. To their right the tide rushed in with dark power, emanating some preternatural sense of omnipotence and threat, and it occurred to Dan that if you really wanted to be alone you merely had to stand on an empty beach at night. Khristy was breathing hard now and he thought of her high heels driving into the sand, and of his cordovans losing their layers of spit-shine so he would have to spend an evening in Alameda working on them before he reported aboard.
Sitting in his office on the Vanguard, thousands of miles and nearly seven months from that evening, he could still see her walking on that beach. Then he thought of her at UCLA now, walking across the campus, and he hoped no hand was in hers, that no one walked beside her; that, lost and without purpose, she moved through smog with books pressed against her sweatered breasts.
Then Tolleson came into the office, his eyes for an instant puzzled by Dan’s face. Tolleson had brown eyes which were hard only when he was angry; at other times, when he was serious, they had a soft shine of disillusion, as if he had refused to cry ten years ago but the tears were still waiting there, ready; when he was joking his eyes were bright as a child’s. Looking at Tolleson’s firm jaw and erect back, Dan was suddenly convinced that he should not have released Freeman and, above all, he should not have considered sending him home.
From his own desk, Tolleson got his coffee cup, a large white mug with First Sergeant’s chevrons painted on one side and the Marine emblem on the other, and went for coffee; as he crossed the classroom he said loudly, hoarsely:
“Corporal, you keep your ass glued to that desk.”
“I had to make a head call, First Sergeant.”
“Goddammit, if it takes you that long I’ll get a Goddamn piss tube installed under the desk—you’re back there paying a social call on your Goddamn buddies.” Then his voice softened, became sarcastic: “Well, I’ll tell you a little secret, Corporal. A corporal doesn’t have buddies: he’s got military acquaintances.”
When Tolleson returned to the office, shutting the door behind him, Dan’s feet were off the desk—though he still leaned back in the chair—and he was thinking of nothing at all, but he knew that his face made him appear to be thinking six steps ahead of Tolleson.
“What did the chief say?”
“Well, sir, he said there’s a plane leaving tomorrow morning and all Freeman needs is emergency leave papers.” He paused. “Signed by the Lieutenant, sir.”
“That’s all?”
“Right, sir. He says as long as the Lieutenant is authorized to grant leave, it ain’t his business to ask questions.”
“Well—”
“Also, sir, he says this conversation between me and him never took place.”
“Good. Let’s do it then.”
Dan waited as Tolleson bent over and took his cigarettes from his sock.
“With all due respect, sir, I ought to tell the Lieutenant that it’s a big risk.”
“You don’t have to worry, First Sergeant. The responsibility is mine.”
“Goddamn, sir, I’ve got nineteen and a half years in this man’s Marine Corps and I’ve gone as far as I can go. They can’t hurt me. Sir—if Freeman gets on that plane and it goes down in that ocean, there’ll be an investigation—right, sir?”
“I suppose so.”
“And they’ll want to know how come one young Pfc Freeman was on that
plane—right, sir?”
Dan looked away and sipped his coffee.
“Sir,” Tolleson said, his voice soft, near pleading, “I hate to see the Lieutenant stick his neck out. Lieutenant’s got a long career ahead of him.”
“I’ve also got a promise to Freeman.”
“A promise, sir?”
“Well, not exactly: I told him I’d do what I could.”
“Well, sir, the Lieutenant can go down to the brig and tell that young Christian there ain’t nothing to be done.”
“He’s not in the brig. I let him out.”
“Goddammit, sir, why? He committed an offense, he was brought in to office hours—”
“Because Corporal McKittrick was harassing him.”
“Sir, I’ve been harassed for nineteen and a half years.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have been.”
“Well sir, my Drill Instructor got my cherry and after that I sort of expected it.”
Dan looked away. The mention of Drill Instructors or Boot Camp always made him feel that, in some irrevocable way, he was a coward: no matter how often he convinced himself that officer candidate training had been harder, both physically and mentally; no matter how often he told himself that candidates were not harassed as steadily and harshly as recruits were, because candidates were supposed to become leaders, were expected to get through their training on their own initiative, or give up and go home—he still believed he had basely avoided that common experience of humiliation and final reward which all enlisted Marines shared. So whenever Staff NCO’s told stories of Boot Camp, he listened in embarrassed silence; even if he could recall similar incidents from his officer candidate training, he never told them, because he knew they would listen with condescension, with impatience, if they listened at all: for they prided themselves on having suffered most, on having borne it best—
“Sir, we got problems,” Tolleson was saying. “What’s going to stop every man in this Detachment from telling these corporals to go fuck themselves—which, sir, is what Freeman did this morning.”