by Andre Dubus
“He told.”
Ted could not see his eyes but he knew there were tears in them; his heart seemed to drop and melt and flow coldly down through his legs.
“The sonofabitch told Doc Butler! At request mast.”
Hahn crossed the room and stood in front of him.
“What did you tell him?”
His voice was low, hoarse.
“I don’t know, I—”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him what happened, that’s all.”
McKittrick stepped beside Hahn.
“He told them everything,” he said.
Then he was leaning forward, reaching for Ted, one fist cocked, but Hahn stuck an arm across his chest.
“Wait. Mr. Price telling ’em that?”
“No. The Goddamn board already knew about it. They was the one’s asking.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we were just grab-assing with him and he never bitched about it or we’d have stopped.”
“What about the other night? What’d you tell ’em?”
“I said we got carried away, that’s all.”
“We, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“We.”
“That’s right. What do you think?—I look like Freeman or something?”
“Get out of here, Freeman,” Hahn said.
Ted started to rise but could not because they were standing so close to him. Then Hahn grabbed his wrist and jerked him off the chair and shoved him toward the dental office.
“I don’t want to see you—”
He kicked him, at the base of the spine, and Ted winced as he stumbled forward into the room. Without looking at them he shut the door, then faced the small room of silver equipment. He brushed at the seat of his trousers, limped to the dental chair, and sat down. He had lighted a cigarette before he saw there was no ashtray, so he flicked the ashes in his palm. Finally he looked around, saw a wastebasket, and got up and brought it to the chair and sat down again.
From the other room he could hear Hahn and McKittrick: urgent voices without meaning. Gradually there were longer spaces between the voices, until there was mostly silence. He tried to avoid looking at his watch, but it was no use: he read the time at least once every five minutes. He heard Jensen return, then voices, and the door closing again. So they were saving him for last. After a while he decided that Mr. Price was smart to do that.
He smoked long after inhaling bored him. Once, looking at the drill and lamp above his left shoulder, he wondered what it was like to be a dentist, saw himself with an office some place near mountains and the sea but without Washington’s rain: maybe east of the Cascades, or down in Monterrey. Jan wanted to spend their honeymoon in Monterrey. It looked like, he thought, if a man could take apart and put together an M-1, .45, a BAR, and a light .30, he could learn to work on teeth.
He heard footsteps in the other room, and his hands gripped the arms of the chair, his body rigid. But they were not coming toward him. For a while, the goose was alone on one bank of the river.
So, later, it was with more relief than fear that he followed the orderly—who had opened the door and looked strangely at Ted, sitting in the chair—down the passageway to Commander Craig’s door, where the orderly stopped, knocked twice, and opened the door when someone in the room called: “Okay. Come on in.”
Then Ted wasn’t relieved anymore. The voice was Commander Craig’s and it sounded too old, too official; he walked in, seeing no one but Mr. Price who motioned him to a single chair facing Commander Craig’s desk. A Naval lieutenant he didn’t know sat at one end of the desk; at the other end was Doc Kellog, who had interviewed him for a secret clearance, had even been friendly—though he probably remembered none of it. Commander Craig sat behind the desk. Ted looked up at Mr. Price and waited. Mr. Price asked him to stand and be sworn in. He stood at attention, raised his right hand, and answered in a voice that was not his:
“I do.”
Mr. Price told him to sit down again. He sat stiffly, his hands touching in his lap, and answered Mr. Price’s questions. In that strange voice he told them his full name, his service number, his present duty station. Then he told what had happened when they jumped McKittrick. Mr. Price made him start with him and Hahn and Jensen waiting for McKittrick. While he spoke he was wondering why he had to start there, why he couldn’t say what happened before, couldn’t even say Hahn and Jensen had been coming for him; and his panic went into his voice, shaming him. He reached the part about looking up from McKittrick’s legs, then stopped.
“Tell the board what you saw,” Mr. Price said. “In your own words: it’s all right.”
He told them.
“What did you do when you saw that?” Mr. Price said.
“I left, sir. I went to the classroom.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, groping.
“I didn’t want to be there, sir.”
“Why?”
“I felt dirty, sir.”
“All right: that’s enough for now. Would you sit in that chair by the bulkhead, please?”
He got up, feeling onstage as he passed the board, and sat in the chair. The board was to his right now. He looked straight ahead, at a painting of a destroyer on the opposite bulkhead, near the door. Mr. Price was at the door now, thrusting his head out and talking to the orderly.
When First Sergeant Tolleson came in, he looked at Ted, then around the room until he found Mr. Price. While he was being sworn in, Ted wished he had been allowed to wait with the First Sergeant, wherever he had waited. He listened as the First Sergeant, speaking slowly and loudly, glancing alternately from Mr. Price to the members of the board, told of his performance as a Marine, of his fast promotion to Pfc, his chance to be a corporal. Then the First Sergeant was excused.
The Lieutenant came in next, wearing his tropical uniform with a blouse; and juxtaposed with the Naval officers, he looked more competent than Ted had ever seen him. The Lieutenant said the same things the First Sergeant had, except he added that he had been wrong to lock up Freeman for insubordination to McKittrick. He had found out later that McKittrick had been harassing Freeman in a personal way, which possibly didn’t justify insubordination but certainly had a bearing on it. He said that only the sharpest and most reliable Marines in the Detachment were made the Captain’s orderlies, and that Freeman was one of these. With a little more confidence and with experience at troop-handling, he said, Freeman could be a good NCO, a credit to the Corps.
Burns came in next. Last night, lying in his bunk, Burns had said he was sorry about telling the First Sergeant and the Lieutenant, but he surely didn’t know at the time that anybody could think Freeman was involved too. Nobody, Ted had assured him, can figure out how people with rank will take something, and he shouldn’t feel like it was his fault. Now, always looking nervously at Mr. Price, Burns told how Freeman had been snapping in on Sunday afternoons, learning administration, so he could get into a good career field. Then Mr. Price asked him about the night of 16 November and it was Burns who, losing some of his nervousness, even showing anger, told the board of Freeman’s harassment that night, how they were coming for him with shaving cream and he—Burns—had been afraid to help; and how they had got Freeman and shaved him and painted him with Mercurochrome, that first week he was aboard (Ted wanted to shut his eyes, his ears—but Burns did not say what they had painted on his chest); he had felt sorry for Freeman, he said, and had asked him to go on liberty and that’s where he met his girl.
When Burns was finished, and had left the room with twice the dignity he had when he entered, Mr. Price asked Ted to take the stand again. Then Mr. Price faced the three officers at Commander Craig’s desk.
“I’m going to ask Private Freeman to make a sworn statement. I’m going to ask him to tell us everything that’s happened to him since he joined the Marine Corps. Everything, that is, which fits into a pattern in his life, everything that has brought him her
e this afternoon—” he looked at his watch “—if it’s still afternoon.” All three of them grinned and looked at their own watches. “I’m also going to ask him why he joined the Marine Corps, why he decided a couple of summers ago up in Washington that he wanted to be—or ought to want to be—a Marine—”
Unprepared, Ted glanced down at his hands. Last night was one thing, talking to Mr. Price in his stateroom, Mr. Price laughing and even talking about himself, how he had screwed up so many times as an ensign or with girls or the high school football team—but here, in front of these solemn men in this room, that was another thing altogether.
“—By the time he finishes his statement, I think you will have seen a young man who, if anything, needs our help. I’m not so sure he even needs that anymore, but that’s Doc Kellog’s field, not mine. What you’re going to see,” he said, “is a scared kid trying to get along, trying to get through each day without being scared. He didn’t always know what he was scared of, and sometimes he had to do strange things to get by. He had to swallow a lot and pretend he liked it. But I believe you’ll see more than just a kid afraid of his own uncertainty, his own competence, and his imagined lack of it. I think some of you, maybe all of you, will recognize feelings that you’ve had yourself. At least that’s true for me. You’ll see timidity turning to fear, fear to cowardice, cowardice to hatred. But you’ll also see a young man who—like all of us—kept trying to put all those pieces together and come out whole. Above all, you’ll see a young man who is guilty of faults, not crimes; who lives with self-doubt, not perversion; who is not evil, but unlucky.”
Now he faced Ted, his back to the board, and very quickly smiled and winked. He stepped to one side, profiled between Ted and the board:
“Private Freeman, what were you like in high school?”
Ted had no idea what to say; but, with despair, he knew that did not matter: Mr. Price would draw it out of him, and he did. He began by asking questions about sports, popularity, girls—and soon Ted was looking at the carpet but talking, slowly, finding himself going farther back than high school even, for some reason telling of dreading recess in winter because so often the other boys would take his cap and play keep-away with it and he would spend the entire recess running from one boy to another, pretending it was a fun game. Mr. Price did not stop him; instead he questioned him, calling forth the names of grade school bullies—then abruptly said:
“Why did you join the Marine Corps, Freeman?”
“I wanted to be different, sir—”
Before he had time to regret saying that, Mr. Price asked him about Boot Camp and he was talking about his Drill Instructor and the night he lifted his wall locker in his sleep and, next day, he could not even lift it an inch; then another question and he was saying the Tijuana whore seemed so old, maybe she wasn’t older than he was but she looked like it, and he’d been scared of a dose and—he shrugged his shoulders.
“That you wouldn’t do well in bed with her?”
He was blushing at the carpet.
“Yes, sir. That’s why.”
Then it was all right again because he was talking about Sea School and how much he liked it after busting the hills at Pendleton, and he was just getting warmed up about Sea School when Mr. Price asked him when he first slept with Jan Thompson and he didn’t want to answer that, it wasn’t that he was mad, but you just didn’t—
“On our third date, sir,” he said.
“Were you uneasy?”
“No, sir.”
“She loves you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were both of you in love back then? Starting to be?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You never felt uneasy with her, about anything at all?”
“No, sir. We always have a good time.”
“She’s pregnant now?”
“Ύes, sir.”
“Do you have a picture of her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you mind if I showed it to the board?”
“No, sir. I don’t guess so.”
He gave Mr. Price the photograph of her standing on the blanket in the lawn behind the apartment building, wearing her two-piece aqua bathing suit. Ted watched Commander Craig looking at Jan, nodding, and passing her to Doctor Kellog, who looked up from the picture and smiled at him. A smile was somehow forming on his own lips when Mr. Price said:
“How many times did Hahn, Jensen, and McKittrick give you the shaving cream treatment?”
“Three times, sir—Hahn and Jensen.” Doctor Kellog reached over the desk and handed the picture to the Naval lieutenant. “McKittrick wasn’t with them the last time.”
“What else did they do that first time?”
“That first time, sir?”
“Yes. Your first week aboard. Tell the board about that first time.”
Mr. Price was stroking his moustache. Ted lowered his eyes; the members of the board must be watching him now; then Mr. Price’s legs moved out of his sight, returned, and Jan’s picture was in his hand again. He put it in his billfold and sat looking at the billfold resting in his hands.
“Go on, Freeman,” Mr. Price said softly. “The first time.”
He began to talk. His eyes on the billfold, he told in detail how he had tried to stop them, and everybody was watching and nobody, not one of them, said a word to help him, and he had hollered too until Hahn said to shut up—
“You hit him once, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir. Later on, the third time they did it.”
“What happened then?”
“He slapped me a few times, then they gave me the shaving cream.”
“All right. Back to the first time.”
He had given all the details he could and now he had to go on to the Mercurochrome painting. He told that slowly, about Hahn painting his flesh where they had shaved him. Maybe that would be all. Maybe Mr. Price would let him walk out of here with that. But when he stopped talking, Mr. Price’s voice came right in. His hands gripped the billfold now, twisted, squeezed. Then he told them what Hahn had painted on his body.
Now Mr. Price was talking to the board again and there was a pause and then Commander Craig said no one had any questions; and it was him again that Mr. Price was talking to, telling him he could leave now, he would not be needed anymore, telling him thank you.
He did not go to the dental office, or the barracks either. He walked aft, climbed two ladders, and was on the hangar deck. Through the large doors to either side of him the sea and sky were blue. He went between the parked bombers to the fantail, pushing the hatch shut behind him. Standing at the guardrail he smoked and looked out past the wake at the calm sea. The sun was low, the horizon already catching its gold and red. He felt nausea and realized it was hunger, but he did not go to chow. He would go later. Right now he only wanted to stand here as long as he could see the sky and sun.
6
TOWARD SUNSET the Vanguard and her destroyer escort, spread near the horizons to port and starboard, made a slight change in course. She was entering her last phase of operations: for four days she would try to hide from attack planes of the Marine Air Wing at Iwakuni. After this defensive maneuver, the Vanguard would go to Iwakuni and spend five days in port.
At eight o’clock that night the air defense watches began. During normal air defense or general quarters drills, Dan’s position was in the aft gunmount on the portside. But for these day and night watches, four hours on and eight off, he rotated with junior Naval officers from the Gunnery Department, manning what was called Sky II: a turret high above the ship, on the signal bridge. On this first night he had the midnight-to-four watch.
He tried to sleep at seven-thirty, but could not. There were so many things to worry about that he lay there waiting for nothing in particular, simply for something to happen, if only the approach of midnight. So he was grateful when, at nine-thirty, Alex came to his room, grinning but asking if he wanted to sleep before his watch.
“I
can’t.”
“I think we might have won,” Alex said.
He sat down, and Dan pulled away the covers and sat on the bunk’s edge, his bare feet on the deck whose vibration was so unobtrusive that his feet seemed to be hearing rather than feeling it.
“I’ve just been chewed by the Captain: about twenty minutes’ worth. Says I handled that board like it was a court-martial when it wasn’t. Supposed to be cut and dried. I also get the idea he’s tired of junior officers in general, you and me in particular.”
“He said that, huh? What did you do in that board?”
“Everything I could think of: even his girl’s picture in a two-piece bathing suit—”
“—Good picture.”
“Maybe it worked. When you deal with people who think in clichés, you got to talk in cliches.”
“And the Captain was pissed?”
“Was and is.”
Dan left the bunk and started dressing, putting on utilities and boots.
“You going on a hike?”
“Might as well get dressed for the big hide-and-seek game. I’m going to see the Gun Boss.”
“He can’t tell you the results yet. Captain’s job.”
“I know.”
He looked up from lacing his boots.
“I’ll try to read his eyes. Maybe he’ll wink at me, I’m so well-loved on this ship.”
He put on his cap and field jacket, and asked if Alex wanted to meet him in the wardroom for coffee.
“Okay. I’ll go watch my peers playing Monopoly.”
“Tell the sweet little things hello for me. Sometimes I wish all I wanted to be was a dumb ensign: never get chewed out, never chew anybody else—just walk around and smile and hope nobody messes up the routine.”
He left and went to the Gunnery Office, but Commander Craig wasn’t there, so he went to his stateroom. The Commander was at his desk, doing paperwork that would have been saved until the next day if the ship were in port.