The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps

by William Styron

  The Palace Café was a barnlike tavern on the town’s main drag; the blue-collar shipyard workers who were its chief clientele, and who dined on its pork-chops-and-potatoes menu, had usually cleared out by the time I arrived, a little after two in the afternoon. I seated myself under an outsized electric fan that stirred the heavy air, odorous with pork. I had the place more or less to myself then, and I would dreamily relax in the same greasy booth, listening to the jukebox and its grieving and lovelorn country troubadours—Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells—who could pluck at my heartstrings with fingers different from those of Mozart but, in their own way, almost as deft and seductive. They, like the cold astringent beer, caused the Pacific and its troubles to gently recede, even as ornate daydreams of the future filled their place. It was like a rage: I knew I must become a writer! So I’d sit there and reread my sketches, buoyed toward a vision of myself ten years hence, or twenty when my work had flowered, then fully ripened, and the fumbling novice had been crowned with the laurel branch of Art. While adrift in these largely deranged fantasies I made a concession to the needs of nutrition by lunching on potato chips and pickled pigs’ feet, the latter a specialty of the house.

  And then there was my favorite waitress, Darlynne Fulcher. Part of the appeal of going to the Palace Café was Darlynne and her flirty lewdness, a lewdness neutralized by her (to me) advanced age—she was well past forty—and by her truly daunting looks: big porous beak, spectacles, top-heavy hairdo, the works. A nice voluptuous body offset this enough to make plausible her raunchy style, though at the outset I must have sat in my booth five or six days running, taking scarcely any notice of her, before I heard her murmur, as she plopped down a beer: “You look like you need some pussy.” It was not at all a come-on; in fact, I realized it was a way to break the ice, to good-naturedly test the bounds of my dogged solitariness. Actually I welcomed the intrusion, since I enjoyed Darlynne’s simple-hearted fooling around about sex (“I bet you got a good-sized dick on you, guys with prominent noses are well-hung”), while at the same time she understood my basic need to be let alone, immersed in my remedial bath of Budweiser. In the moments when we did talk, during the late afternoon hours as she’d stand there, hands on one hip, patiently shooing away the flies, I discovered that some intimate communion we’d established made it possible for me to say a few words about the war. What I had to say wasn’t much though it was more than I’d spoken to anyone before, certainly more than I’d said to my father or Isabel.

  “From the first time I seen you sitting here I knew something was eating at you. It’s the war, ain’t it? Did something happen to you?”

  The question required some rumination. “Well, yes and no, Darlynne.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, you know. My cousin Leroy was shot up real bad over in Europe. He doesn’t like to talk about it either.”

  “No, I wasn’t shot. I never got shot at. It was something else I’d had a problem with.” I halted. “But I’d better not talk about it.” After another pause I said: “It was in my head—my mind. It was worse than being shot at.”

  She plainly understood my wanting to drop the subject. “How come a nice-looking boy like you don’t ever have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. Most of the girls I used to know—the college girls—are away for the summer. Gone to places like Nags Head or Virginia Beach. Or they have summer jobs in Washington or New York. Anyway, they’re gone.”

  “College girls won’t give you a good time. You need a real horny country girl. My baby stepsister’s just broke up with her husband, this jerk. She’s hot. She really needs a good time. I’m gonna fix you up with Linda.”

  It hardly mattered that Linda never materialized, content as I was to sit with my amber bottles and my fantasies, my pumped-up auguries of future glory, and with the thrill of the woeful rapture that always seized me when Ernest Tubb’s steel guitar struck the first chords of “Try Me One More Time.”

  Outside I could see the late-afternoon shoppers hurrying homeward. Gathering up my manuscripts I’d give Darlynne a hug, swat her on her big rump, and head homeward myself, steering the Pontiac with focused care, untroubled, optimistic from head to foot, deliciously tranquilized. I’d be going back to college soon, and this dismal battleground would be forever behind me.

  ELOBEY, ANNOBÓN,

  AND CORISCO

  Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco. These form a group of small islands off the west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, and I pondered them over and over again when we returned to Saipan, where I would lie in my tent and think with intense longing of the recent past—that is to say, my early years.

  During the philatelic period of my late childhood only a few years before, a phase that followed my obsession with raising pigeons, I had somehow come to own a moderately rare stamp from “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.” By moderately rare I mean that the Scott catalog priced the one I owned, a used specimen, at $2.75, which in those Depression days was a large enough sum to make a small boy’s stomach squirm pleasurably, totally apart from the aesthetic pleasure of the stamp itself. A note in my album revealed that “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco” was under the governance of Spain, more specifically Spanish Guinea. The stamp portrayed a “vignette,” as Scott always described the world’s scenic views, of a mountain peak and palm trees and fishing boats in a tropical harbor; the general coloration was green and blue (or, according to Scott with its painterly precision, viridian and aquamarine), and there was a title beneath: Los Pescadores. Keen-eyed, I had no trouble picking out the fishermen themselves, who were Negroes and wore white turbans and were busy at work tending their nets against a backdrop of aquamarine harbor and viridian mountains, behind which the sun appeared to be setting. There were other stamps in my collection that I greatly admired—a huge Greek airmail in gorgeous pastel facets, rather like stained glass; a gaudy number from Guatemala featuring a quetzal bird with streaming tail feathers; a glossy octagonal from Hejaz festooned with Arabic script; the Nyasaland triangle, shaped to accommodate spindly-legged giraffes—but none so arrested my imagination or so whetted my longing for faraway places as the one from that archipelago whose name itself was an incantation: Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.

  Back on Saipan I found myself an unwilling visitor to one of those faraway places of my stamp collection and yearned for nothing better than to be stretched out on the floor of the living room, merely dreaming of one of those places rather than being actually in one. In the tent, half-drowsing in the wicked heat, I would convert my identity into that of a small boy again, re-creating in memory ever younger incarnations of myself. In the stamp collection sequence, for example, it would be Sunday afternoon: sprawled on the crimson rug I would lick little cellophane hinges while my mother, her steel-braced leg propped on a stool beneath an afghan, read the sepia-tinted rotogravure section of the New York Times, and my father, seated at the antique walnut secretary, penned one of his innumerable letters regarding the Whitehurst family genealogy. Warm, too warm (for in the winter my mother was always cold), the room contained the lingering smell of the roast chicken we had eaten for Sunday dinner, and the whole sunny space, cocoon-like, was wrapped in layers and layers of sound: the New York Philharmonic from the table-top Zenith radio. Forest horns and kettledrums. Swollen ecstasy. Johannes Brahms. Sunday’s murmurous purple melancholy.

  Another scene from a younger time: my father alongside me as we lay at the edge of the bank above the muddy James. He was teaching me to shoot. The .22 bullets were greasy to the fingertips, the odor of burnt powder both sweet and pungent as the casings flew from the chamber. Squeeze slowly, he would murmur, and my heart would skip a beat when I saw the green whiskey bottle turn to flying shards in the sand. Younger, much younger, I felt the ceramic bowl chill against my legs while he taught me accuracy in peeing. Stand close, son were his words; hit the hole. I couldn’t locate any memories of my father earlier than this, nor of the protectiveness and safety he embodied for his son lost in the
Pacific distances. Anything earlier than this would have meant oblivion, prememory, only my father’s seed and my mother’s womb. And that womb, likewise protective and safe, was from time to time another place I longed for in the persistent ache of my dread.

  For in truth the embryonic fear I’d felt on the ship had swollen hugely. I was scared nearly to death. While previously Okinawa had been an exciting place to dream about, an island where I would exploit my potential for bravery, now the idea of going back there nearly sickened me. Thus I found myself in a conflict I had never anticipated: afraid of going into battle, yet even more afraid of betraying my fear, which would be an ugly prelude to the most harrowing fear of all—that when forced to the test in combat I would demonstrate my absolute terror, fall apart, and fail my fellow marines. These intricately intertwined fears began to torment me without letup. And though I continued my jaunty masquerade, more often than not dread won out. And when that happened I would seek my tent, if I had the chance, and lie on my cot gazing upward at the stitch and weave of the canvas, and try to exorcise the dread, whispering: Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.

  PUBLISHER’S

  NOTE

  The Suicide Run consists of five narratives by William Styron, one previously unpublished and four never before collected. All five are drawn from Styron’s experiences in the U.S. Marine Corps. Together they present a complex picture of military life—its hardships, deprivations, and stupidities; its esprit, camaraderie, and seductive allure.

  “Blankenship,” written during the summer of 1953, was first published in the journal Papers on Language and Literature in a special issue (Autumn 1987) devoted to Styron’s work. “Marriott, the Marine” and “The Suicide Run” were composed in the early 1970s as parts of “The Way of the Warrior,” a novel that Styron put aside to write Sophie’s Choice (1979). “Marriott” was first published in the September 1971 issue of Esquire; “The Suicide Run” appeared initially in the American Poetry Review for May/June 1974. “My Father’s House” is the opening section of an unfinished novel, begun in 1985, that Styron intended to base on his experiences during the spring and summer of 1946, just after he had been discharged from the Marine Corps. The middle portion of “My Father’s House” appeared in The New Yorker, under the title “Rat Beach,” in the double fiction issue for July 6/13, 2009. The vignette “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco,” previously unpublished, was composed in 1995.

  The text of “Blankenship” is based on the surviving typescript in the William Styron Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. The text of “Marriott, the Marine” is taken from its appearance in Esquire, with corrections from the manuscript in the Styron collection at the W. R. Perkins Library, Duke University. The setting-copy typescript of “The Suicide Run”—preserved in the archives of the American Poetry Review, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania—is the source for the text published in this volume. Texts for “My Father’s House” and “Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco” have been established from extant manuscripts and typescripts in the Styron papers at Duke.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WILLIAM STYRON (1925–2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, A Tidewater Morning, and Havanas in Camelot. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, and the Légion d’Honneur. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts.

  Copyright © 2009 by the Estate of William Styron

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Four of the five stories in this work have been previously published: “Blankenship” originally appeared in Papers on Language and Literature, Autumn 1987; “Marriott, the Marine” originally appeared in Esquire, September 1971; “The Suicide Run” originally appeared in the American Poetry Review, May/June 1974; and the middle portion of “My Father’s House” originally appeared in The New Yorker, July 20, 2009.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Styron, William, 1925–2006

  The suicide run : five tales of the Marine Corps/William Styron ;

  [edited by James L. W. West III].

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-906-2

  1. United States. Marine Corps—Fiction. I. West, James L. W. II. Title.

  PS3569.T9S85 2009

  813′.54—dc22 2008047610

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