by Andre Dubus
Hahn’s body jerked, stiffened in recoil, and his eyes blinked as, in a loud voice, Dan read the confession, then dropped it to the desk and in the same loud voice of the parade field he went on: “The Manual for Courts- Martial calls what you did last night lewd and obscene acts and you can get a special court for it and if you plead not guilty down here or if you let the word get out on the mess decks or anyplace else, Captain Howard will hear about it and you’ll find yourself in real trouble. Now how do you plead: all of you.”
Starting with Hahn, they all pleaded guilty. Dan sat at his desk and, in a detached voice, he sentenced them to three days on bread and water. Tolleson marched them out and turned them over to the Corporal of the Guard who sent them, with a chaser, to the dispensary where they would get pre-confinement physical examinations. Tolleson had left the office door open and, knowing the troops in the classroom would be glancing in at him, Dan pushed his chair back from his desk so he could get one foot up on it; then with his handkerchief he dusted the glossy toe of his shoe. Tolleson came back and closed the door.
“Well, sir, I guess the Lieutenant outfoxed ’em.”
“I guess so.”
“Lieutenant sorta stuck his neck out with Freeman, sir.”
“Maybe. But I’ve got a long way to go in this man’s Marine Corps, First Sergeant, and I can’t be worrying about it every time I do something. Now let’s get all the troops into the classroom and when the sentries come off post at sixteen hundred I’ll talk to them too: I want to tell ’em what’s going on, so they’ll keep quiet.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Dan gave Tolleson a few minutes to get the troops assembled, sitting on benches; then, picking up his swagger stick, he left the office and went to the front of the classroom. The barracks was quiet. Far above him he could hear jets landing. From somewhere he heard the echoing ring of pounding metal. His eyes swept the troops’ faces; then he leaned slightly forward. In a voice that was urgent and low, at times almost a hoarse confidential whisper, he told them the truth: that he had just covered a serious offense, and he told them why he had done it, and asked them to keep it quiet.
4
As I told you two nights ago, Dan wrote, I need and love your letters as much as I need and love you. They’re all I have. I’ve been through all kinds of hell since I took over, problems I’ve never heard of before, and I’ve been playing it all by ear. I’m still not sure whether I’ve done anything right. The worst day was today, and this afternoon when mail call sounded I hustled to the barracks. But there was no letter and that’s thirteen days. Khristy, darling, you can’t be that busy—
He stopped writing, laid his pen down, and stood up: enclosed by beige overhead and bulkheads, a bunk made neatly by a Filipino steward who also cleaned daily, so even the lavatory below the medicine cabinet was kept glistening white, no yellow crusts of soap, and the grey metal wall locker was dusted, and the green rubber tile floor shone dully under electric lights. Then he went to his wall locker and took out his stuffed greying-white laundry bag; taking a laundry chit from a drawer, he filled it out at the desk, continuing his letter in his mind, scolding her.
He stuck the chit in the laundry bag and tossed it into the passageway, which had disturbed him when he first saw it five and a half months earlier and which now he disliked, as a man ashore dislikes driving each day from home to work through a barren strip of land. Now the passageway was lighted with red lights that gave the beige bulkheads a ghostly almost noncolor and the green deck a darkness which reminded Dan of the black ocean far beneath his feet. He sat at his desk again, but did not write.
Certainly she loved him, for she had told him so on that first and last night when she was entirely his, after all those nights when she had withheld herself, though in a way he had to admire: no teasing, none of that adolescent preintercourse workout, then home to the showers. She had finally given herself not in car-seat half-clothed desperation, but with predetermined commitment, perhaps even her idea more than his, a result of some consideration by her heart—or, she might say, her psyche—so he hardly doubted that she had meant for that night to begin a new phase in their lives. But if that was true, then how could she coldly refuse to write as often as she had the time? Or, more accurately, how could she fail to give herself the time? Fidelity was by God more than keeping your legs together.
Which he did not even worry about, assuming that with the several college boys who dated her she was as firm and controlled as she had been with him. He had, in fact, while dating her, become so accustomed to her friendly expression of what he called love—though she had never named it—that her proposition (which he decided it was) had surprised him into a momentary but quite real impotence.
Looking back now, he could see that she had probably already decided before she jumped from the pier and suggested the bar at the south end of the beach; that jump was like a preparation for the final impulse required to make love to him. So was their walk down the beach: holding hands, they had walked urgently into the darkness as if in flight, not talking much, so that Dan could hear her rapid breathing. His own breath was quicker but he tried to hide that, taking only short and silent breaths which he could not control until they had been sitting for three or four minutes inside the bar, a low-ceilinged place situated at the end of a row of beach cottages close to the sea.
They sat on a straw mat and found places to stretch out their legs under the table, two feet high, which held their pitcher of beer. Their backs rested against the wall. Khristy removed her shoes, emptied them and brushed off the sand, then brushed sand from her stockinged feet, then from her hands. She left the shoes off, looked around at the moving, talking, drunken-looking people who filled the bar, made a face as if she had swallowed something intolerably bitter, then smiled and took his hand.
“So here we are,” she said.
He only heard are. Jazz was coming too loudly from a pair of stereo speakers, one at each side of the small room, the rhythm section from one, the brass from the other, and Dan felt that he was in a space between a divided orchestra. Young people swirled before him, not dancing, just moving from table to table or bar or rest room: a boy with white duck trousers and a blue shirt tucked in and opened to the waist, showing a sunburned and blond-fuzzed chest; others in bermuda shorts and polo or T-shirts or no shirts at all, some with near-pretty and effeminate faces, others with incessantly moving smooth jaws who seemed to be delivering incomprehensible and ultimate speeches, and athletes of a couple of years ago who struck the barstool poses of Western badmen; among them moved girls like shadows, who apparently had expended money on neither cosmetics nor comb and brush since leaving puberty; girls who Dan imagined were, though not technically, in some strange way virginal. He rose and like a slow-motion broken field runner, went to the bar for another pitcher of beer. He waited for the bartender—a young man with crew-cut red hair and a large T-shirt-covered chest and belly—to break away from the two men or boys he was talking to at the curve of the semicircular bar. He looked at the wall behind the bar, but there was no mirror: only a harpoon suspended by wire. Above him, a large fishnet hung from the entire ceiling, like a camouflage net over a gun pit.
When he was sitting on the floor with Khristy again, he pretended to take a notebook from his pocket, looked at it, then looked at her.
“Are you Miss Khristen VandeBerg?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Colonel VandeBerg’s daughter, ma’am?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, ma’am, I have no jurisdiction over dependents; irregardless, I should inform you that this place is off- limits for service personnel.”
“I know. Marijuana peddlers.”
He leaned back against the wall.
“I didn’t know you knew,” he said.
She was grinning at him, and he didn’t know whether he wanted to kiss or scold her. When they finished half the pitcher they had to get rid of some of it, so they went outside and followed an arrow-
shaped sign down a rough boardwalk to a single and unlabeled door. Khristy knocked and a young man said: “Uno momento, friend.” They stepped off the walk and went all around the bar, in the sand, but there was no other door. When they got back to the rest room a girl was going in.
“That’s cute,” Khristy said.
“Phony. I’ll just go around the corner before I bust.”
He walked down the sloping sand, turned a corner into the shadows, and with his back to the sea he urinated against the wall, looking from left to right and over his shoulder when he remembered that only a couple of weeks ago he had passed the word to his platoon that if they got caught pissing in public they would have to be registered in California’s lewd person category. He stood there longer than he wanted, joined to the spot by his urine stream and thinking of himself as a scout for the tide, soaking the wall and sand it could not reach. When he was finished Khristy was still inside the rest room; or he thought she was and, after a while, he knocked lightly.
“How intimate,” she said.
“It might not have been me.”
“I could tell by the hesitant knock.”
She came out smiling and they went back to their table, Dan half-expecting it to be taken along with the half pitcher of beer he had left as an emblem of occupancy before they went outside. But both table and beer had been left alone. They sat drinking and holding hands, not trying to talk over the music which was drums and the sounds of jungle birds.
Dan was thinking this was his last night with Khristy for about a year and even then it would be touch and go, he would be under orders to a school or a security barracks or recruiting duty, certainly not Camp Pendleton again; for according to the normal career plan he would spend his last year as a lieutenant and his beginning years as a captain out of the Fleet Marine Force, where the combat units were. So the only thing was to marry as soon as he got off sea duty, or he might be sent to the East Coast and never see her again or, worse, run into her at a Marine Corps Birthday Ball some tenth of November at Quantico, perhaps, where so many officers finally returned either as instructors or students, and he could see her now: five years older with perhaps a throatier voice and crinkles at the corners of her eyes, laughing beside some dress-blued captain to whom she had pledged her life. But now he could not even think of marrying her: images of their wedding at the Camp Pendleton chapel, he in blues and Khristy in white leaving under shining Mameluke swords held by stiff but smiling officers, champagne and food at the Colonel’s quarters—all these faded and he could only think of tomorrow, seabag and suitcase in his car trunk, pressed uniforms hanging in the car, as he drove alone up the coast. He looked sadly at Khristy, who mirrored his expression, and she said:
“The trouble with us is this is all we see.”
She gestured toward the people sitting on the floor around them.
“Because we’re service people, we’re just like tourists: all we really know is the Base. We never know anything about towns except their prices and whether they’re friendly to service people, and we see the surface: creeps like these people and restaurants with vulgar regional decor—and that’s all. You know what I remember about Virginia? Quantico’s an ugly commercial cold little street and Highway One is dangerous. So when I think of Virginia I think of the Iwo Jima monument at the entrance to the base and that long beautiful road past the golf course with trees turning orange, then you get to the snappiest MP’s in the Marine Corps directing traffic. That and the officers’ quarters and the stables and the swimming pool. I’m so glad I go to UCLA. You talk to people there about California, and it’s like talking about a different state.”
He nodded his head to show that he agreed; but he did not say what he felt: that giving up what you did, and being aware that you were giving it up, was to a lesser degree like knowing you were leaving tomorrow to go live aboard a grey ship: it made you feel the bravery of sacrifice, toughly committed as you were to an elusive ideal which was so often obscured by paperwork, by fat incompetent officers who could not even claim to be mercenaries in the more romantic sense, by old Staff NCO’s who you realized had soldiered for twenty years because they were afraid to try anything else—so as you followed orders from service town to service town, as you rose punctually five days a week to shave and get into uniform, you felt that you were one of the few people in the United States blessed with a profession offering dissatisfaction which you alone could transform into satisfaction by squaring away whatever number of troops you were fortunate enough to command. He did not tell her that: he felt about it, loved it, too strongly to argue, to encounter even a fleeting grimace from her lips.
They left then, back down the beach where the fog was thicker now but not low, and the sand and dark water and white breakers were unobscured; above them, to the right, Oceanside’s lights were dull and the backs of buildings dark grey in the fog. It was a long walk up the beach and they could have gone by the road, but they didn’t bother to think of it; they walked very slowly, his arm around her, neither of them short-winded this time, and Dan had forgotten the sanding of polish from his shoes. He stopped several times to kiss her, finally holding her as they were about to climb onto the pier they had jumped from earlier, and she said:
“Would you run off with me? Right now?”
“Sure. Where to?”
“Reno. We can get married and then we can go over the hill and live in Canada or Mexico.”
“Why not? Let’s go.”
“All right.”
She turned away and placed both hands on the pier; he was going to help her, but she swung one leg up and pulled herself onto the pier before he had even touched her. He swung up after her—no more gracefully, he noticed—and they held hands walking up to the gravel parking lot. In the car she sat close to him. They drove up the main street, turned on the road to the Base, and Dan slowed at the gate long enough for the MP to see his officer’s bumper sticker and salute them through. Neither of them had spoken since getting into the car. As he turned up Rattlesnake Canyon, making them about two miles from the BOQ where he lived and three miles from Colonel VandeBerg’s quarters, Khristy said in a quiet voice:
“Are you packed?”
“Yes.”
They reached the top of Rattlesnake Canyon.
“I’ve never seen where you live,” she said.
He could almost determine the instant when his palms turned cool on the steering wheel, his throat and mouth dried, and his loins seemed to dissolve and painlessly fall away.
“You can,” he said.
She did not answer. He passed one turn-off toward the BOQ before making up his mind; at the next corner he turned, and by then he was all right so he had to restrain himself, slow down and take the turn in second gear so he would not impart his passion to the cylinders, spoiling his silent rapport with Khristy by making a tire-squealing roaring plunge to the BOQ. He drove as if he were returning, rather preoccupied, from work. His body cooled, slowed, for only a moment as he opened the door to the corridor, hoping it was empty, which it was. She had still not spoken. They went slowly down the corridor, not even their hands touching, and into his room: she did not see it after all, for it was dark when they entered and still dark when they left, after she had surprised him again by proving to be a virgin, and after she had finally told him more than once, more than a dozen times, that she loved him.
Khristy’s ardor had paled only once, when he asked her to marry him, and her entire body had seemed to cool as his palms had on the steering wheel, and she had said: Let’s don’t even talk about it till you get back from sea duty. I want time to check out my psyche—
One of the troubles of being at sea was they could always get you: problems which, ashore, would be saved until morning were thrown at you over telephones, discussed in staterooms or offices, and their solutions probed after or dictated until Taps at ten o’clock or even later. So with his work done for that day, his shoes polished for the next one, his laundry ready for morning picku
p by the steward, Dan was about to return to the letter, but he did not. As he picked up the pen his phone rang: it was Commander Craig—the Gunnery Officer, his superior in the chain of command, the stepping-stone or barrier between him and Captain Howard—and Commander Craig told him, gruffly as always, that he wanted to see him.
Commander Craig’s stateroom was actually two rooms: the first, which Dan entered after knocking sharply on the door, was furnished with a large metal desk and three leather-cushioned easy chairs; the second, which he could partially see through a door, contained a bunk which should have been called a bed even by Navy supply men, and a shower. Dan stood until Commander Craig told him to sit down; then he waited while the Commander finished whatever paperwork he had found to do after dinner.
Commander Craig wore starched but wrinkled khakis, with nearly grey oak leaves on the collars of his shirt; a limp khaki grease-stained cap with a dull black visor and gold braid, long tarnished green, was on the back of his head, the way only very young boys wear their baseball caps. Because he spoke loudly and often, it was known throughout the Gunnery Department, as well as in other segments of the ship, that he had spent most of his career on destroyers and, to him, the sky had nothing to do with being a sailor; he hated airplanes, pilots, and the ship—which he called a Goddamn floating bird farm. He had been in the Navy for almost thirty years, had greying hair, sunken and sometimes twitching cheeks, and a lean body that looked more tired than fit; he would never be promoted. Probably for that reason he had the reputation of a man who never sweated anything. There was a rumor claiming he had once told the Vanguard’s executive officer—a pilot—to shove it up his airdale ass. Dan thought the rumor was exaggerated, but he chose to believe it anyway.