“I wouldn’t want any kind of accounts like that.”
“Maybe not; protocol says you’d get them anyway. I could look into it for you, but listen. In a sheep-dipping, the entity is rinsed and later on he goes back the way he was; after the hard clearing the entity is no longer extant. He’s either killed on paper or they destroy whatever records they get access to that he ever lived. That can’t really be what you want.”
“Yessir, it is.”
“There is a protocol but—you know, there’s even an envelope.” He described the physical attributes of the envelope and what it contained, documents making it possible for the entity and his net worth to go on living free of his past, for the duration. “You know what they call that envelope? They call it a Luke Nine: Sixty-two: ‘No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom.’”
It was the rapture hope, taking shape.
“You don’t really want that,” Lorch said. “Your head ain’t straight. You haven’t done anything wrong. Think what you owe the people who made you.”
* * *
• • •
BUT IT WAS of those same people and what he owed them that he must not think, that he would refuse to think, and that in the end the man he became would never learn to stop thinking. Long after Vollie Frade had mostly disappeared from his mind, his mother and father—on whom he had turned his back in order to face the void that seemed his true home—would abide in his inner world, with terrible sweetness. The smells of their hair, their snores. What good did it do them to be thought of? His heart shared its substance with them and could not be made to love them less. However he tried to excuse, his heart would not allow him to forget what he owed them. His debt never diminished. The interest compounded. Someday, to someone, it would be paid.
Lorch was eager to get Vollie away from the snoops on base and arranged for him to fly to California. While permission for the hard clearing was still under review, a room was arranged for him in a dormitory inside the Presidio of Monterey, where he didn’t know anybody and most of his neighbors were squids learning Russian or Chinese at the Defense Language Institute there, college types who ate together at their designated tables chatting unintelligibly. Nobody asked him, If you aren’t a student, what are you doing here? because nobody asked him anything. Nobody pretended to give him a job. This went on a couple of days. His orders were to wait. Then it went on a few months. He ate. He ran by the emerald ocean amid deafening winds.
One morning a knock came at his dormitory door. There stood a civilian he had seen in the library and taken for a professor. The man asked for a moment of his time to deliver a message from a friend they had in common and looked inside as though inspecting the condition of the tiny room. A smiling fellow, with an unplaceable accent, wearing a heavy sweater from the pocket of which he took a couple of wrinkled cigarettes.
Vollie offered him the desk chair while he himself stood against the wall. It was the first time anyone else had been in the room with him.
“I find the weather here beastly,” the professor said to the window, in which the luminous yellow leaves of a walnut tree shook and a breeze entered smelling of the surf. The smile he wore was of a middle-aged person determined to be grateful for the trials he had endured.
Vollie said, “I think it’s the most beautiful place I ever saw.”
“But such a monotonous consistency of temperature. I would have liked to be put in Chicago.” He spoke as though his life were finished. He scanned the room distractedly. Vollie handed him a foil ashtray. “Yes, thank you. I hope you’ve found your stipend sufficient to your needs, the accommodations reasonable?”
“I don’t need much.”
“It was the best I could do within the bounds of discretion. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to speak with you before, but our common acquaintance regards his protocols with a certain punctiliousness. I was not to communicate until I received a definitive message. Your mattress is firm?” The professor poked the bed pillow as if testing a steak on a grill. It gave and sprang back. “He wishes you to know that the initial request for a hard clearing has been denied. That was his phrase. Confidentially, I would advise you to pay close attention when that man uses the passive voice to elide the subject of a verb. You might infer, not unreasonably, that he himself is in some degree the subject. Be that as it may, he wishes to know if you will reconsider. That is, if you would agree to proceed on the basis of his original proposition. Again, these are his words.”
“Let me make sure I understand.”
“You may of course ask whatever you like, but bear in mind that I know nothing more than what I have just related. Irrespective of your answer, you are to remain at the Presidio and wait.”
“Do you really teach here?”
“I do,” he said with smiling weariness. “I am adjunct associate professor of Romanian. I’m sorry to report that after this conversation we will probably not have another chance to talk. I am an irregular channel of communication, you understand.”
“Tell him no.”
“He will want to know whether this ‘no’ comes bearing any conditions.”
“Just tell him no.”
“Very well. There’s excellent seafood in the town. Salmon and . . . now I’m forgetting.” He made a yakking puppet gesture.
“Clams.”
“Clams, thank you. You shouldn’t miss them. The shellfish of no two places are alike, I find.”
“Water’s different everywhere you go,” Vollie said.
“I’m sure that’s true.”
They shook hands. From the shallow drooping pocket in the breast of the professor’s cardigan, a clump of mustard and mayonnaise packets peeked, as well as a pencil, a chewed straw, and several plastic forks still in their cellophane envelopes. The handshake lasted longer than custom required. It suggested a mutual understanding that since they were to speak only once, their parting merited a moment’s extended ceremony. It was a handshake with mortality in it. Then the professor left the room.
Vollie ate more. He ran by the ocean, thinking and trying not to think, missing farm chores, wishing he were yanking the waterhemp out of the soybeans, work into which the useless mind disappeared. And he longed for the woods above the meadow on the farm—where the sun might go down, and a night ensue with no moon or stars, and you might walk in the woods without overturning a leaf; no sound; and not just alone but imperceptible; composed of the same material as the earth and the trees, and having no more need of a name than the trees did.
He took a bus to Big Sur on the weekends, when he could count on a crowd. Some folks lived out there, camped in the open, not a few of them ex-marines. He wasn’t really an ex-marine himself, he was still missing someplace in Vietnam. The ex-marines, spotting his tattoo, strolled up to him on the sand and asked where he’d been stationed, usually as a prelude to asking for money. They didn’t smell so bad since they bathed every day in the frigid water. He usually gave them at least half of what he had in his pocket. They wanted it, he didn’t. His spare diminished.
Then two associates from Lorch’s shop found him in the Presidio weight room. It was September 1972. They apologized for the delay and took him out for lunch at a seafood shack where Vollie ate the first oysters of his life. After a secondary review the hard clearing had been approved.
* * *
• • •
OVER SUBSEQUENT MEETINGS, they schooled him on the shop’s many tedious and paranoid protocols.
They also briefed him on the initial operation in which he would participate, an intelligence-gathering project that would burn as much as a year of his time to no apparent use at all: only the military could have commissioned it. The associates nevertheless maintained they knew neither the identity nor the motives of their ultimate customer. Such compartmentation was itself a crucial protocol, practiced all the way up the chain of in
telligence consumption. Their ignorance of the customer equaled the customer’s ignorance of them. No one could be entirely “witting”—aware at once of the intelligence, its use, and its means of cultivation. No single actor bore responsibility for it. This made the chain of consumption resistant to organized interference.
Vollie’s own place in the chain must have fallen near the bottom. He was under no circumstances to ask anyone what they knew about the subject on whom the operation centered. The protocols even required that while in the field he never speak the subject’s name. His method of operation was to gather not facts but the subset of human intelligence called rumor intelligence or “rumint”: subfacts, hearsay. He was to listen for mentions of the subject or signs of him amid the streets of the neighborhood in Queens, New York, where they were renting Vollie an apartment, and where he was to find a job and work for a living like anybody else, and where it was possible, but unlikely, the subject once had lived.
His objective there was not to find the subject but to corroborate that he was lost. If, after twelve months of careful listening, he heard nothing, they would consider his work a success. He was to be a bowl left out overnight to show in the morning that it had not rained.
Further detail would be available after his clearing, which was to be made official at a confab with superiors in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in two months’ time.
The subject’s name was Egon Hausmann. They were nearly certain he was dead.
* * *
• • •
THE BRIEFINGS in Monterey took place always over meals. Protocol dictated information be communicated in speech, never on paper, and always in public locations. The associates were both former NCOs, stoop-necked, attentive, quiet. Quiet did not mean self-absorbed or thoughtful. They had the dark unflustering other-directed eyes of horses.
He wanted to believe they weren’t liars. But even if the job was as rudimentary as they suggested, what qualified him to do it? He didn’t come from the class of people who did work like this. They must have been using him for something else. “Why would I be of any good to you?” he asked. “All I ever did was farm and drive a truck.”
One of the men choked on his chowder. The white splatter smirched his mouth.
The other said to the choker, “I told you he’d be like that.”
“Sir, you’re Staff Sergeant Frade,” the choker said through his napkin.
This told him nothing.
“You’re famous,” the choker coughed.
When Vollie recoiled in disgust and confusion, the other assured him this fame extended only to a limited circle within the intelligence community. He said, “You’re the one who made it out after the rest of those guys died.”
* * *
• • •
IN THE SPRING, Vollie finally received orders to head east. He bought a bus ticket to Dallas, a second to Pittsburgh, a third to Bridgeport, and put the tickets in his wallet.
The first bus carried him down along the California coast ranges, across the Mojave Desert, through the wastes of southern Arizona, and into New Mexico. There, it made a scheduled half-day stop at Las Cruces, a location stamped forever on his mind because the envelope containing Bobby Heflin’s letter bore a postmark from there. While the other passengers were waiting in line for the depot bathrooms, he went outside to inspect the sun and noticed a collection of ramshackle taxis waiting in the slag-covered lot.
He fished Heflin’s letter from his wallet and bent before a taxi window and showed the return address to the old cabbie inside and asked if he knew roughly where the place was.
The cabbie drew a map in the air with his chalklike finger and calculated. “Sixty miles that way,” he reckoned, pointing over a mesa. “Ninety on the road.”
Vollie stood and screwed his torso side to side, twisting the spine and stretching the cramped muscle thereabout, where the slug was lodged. He walked to the paved road and looked at it. Then he went back and asked how much the cabbie would charge to drive him out there, wait an hour while he said hello to some friends, and drive him back here to the depot.
“Fifteen dollars,” the cabbie declared.
Vollie said he didn’t have that much.
“Meter goes on running while I wait.”
“Well,” Vollie said.
If the cabbie was considering coming down on the fare, he showed no signs of it. He peeled and ate a whole banana while the noonday sun irradiated every inch of the world where Vollie stood exposed to it as inescapably as to the judgment of conscience.
Only then, the alternative presented itself. He didn’t need to do any of this. He could go live with Bobby and his friends instead. The disintegrating three-year-old invitation was right there in his hand.
“Say you dropped me instead and turned around,” Vollie said.
“Thirteen fifty.”
“I could give you eleven.”
The cabbie would go no lower than thirteen, tip included, in light of the uniform Vollie was still wearing. He suggested Vollie borrow the remaining two dollars from the friends at his destination.
Vollie straightened up. The fathomless bright sky around was blue and clean with promise. He tried on, like unfamiliar clothes, the language he would have to use: Will you lend me— Would you float me— Could I ask you for—
He breathed deep.
He put his head back in the window. “I can’t do that,” he said.
* * *
• • •
IN THE NIGHT, while he slept across the bench seat of the bus, somebody stole his wallet right out of his hip pocket. Most of his money, Heflin’s letter, the bus tickets—all were lost. From Dallas, he was constrained to walk or ask for rides from strangers.
5
Stars.
He came awake shivering in a Missouri meadow where the tall grass had hidden him and the vault of night sky hovered near enough to eat. Too cold now to sleep, he hefted his seabag and went on walking up the road. Not even the birds had yet awoken.
He humped through Grovespring—an Esso station, a P.O.—and was already halfway to Lebanon before a Peterbilt tractor trailer, colossal on little Route 5, passed him at a low, quiet, sluggard coast. The slowing rig exhaled and stopped. Its hazards began to flash. The mud flaps bore in white relief the logo of a citrus distributor in Petaluma, California. He broke into a trot. The yellow-green sky of nearly sunup. Outside a distant hog barn, the fluorescent lights went out. The rig’s sulfur exhaust floated over a plowed field where some deer stood, watching: three does, a buck, a twiggy fawn in its vest of spots. The fenders of the rig were tricked out with airbrushed flames. He came to the passenger door and opened it.
The young driver sat spitting tobacco juice from a gob in his lip into a paper coffee container. His thick hair was cropped, parted, and combed. He pointed his chin at Vollie’s bag. “I’d recognize that seabag from a mile away,” he called over the din of the engine. “You aren’t in the navy, are you?”
“Nossir,” Vollie shouted. “Marine Corps. Was.”
“Me too. Come up where I can hear you.”
Vollie mounted the running board and climbed into the light of the cab. His uniform shirt bore a masking scrim of road dust, but the driver made out the chevrons of his rank, counted them aloud, and asked where the staff sergeant was headed. Vollie told him Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the driver said, Lucky day, he was going to Rhode Island, and told Vollie to get on in.
None of the human detritus of long-haul travel littered the cab. Not so much as a pencil stub fallen to the floor. The vinyl bench and dash shone in the glow of the instrument panel as though freshly oiled. But the air smelled of the sweat-funk of small rooms where men have been sleeping alone.
The engine thrummed. Vollie slammed the door. The family of deer outside took to the air, white tails up, and dispersed among the trees. The driver stamped. The rig rattled in
to gear. The engine roared. They were off.
Sunup. They headed right at the sun like angels in a vision.
The driver asked if the staff sergeant had been in Vietnam, and Vollie said yes. The driver asked where at. Here and there, Vollie said. The driver said he’d spent thirteen months as a PFC in Chu Lai on the coast and had also done some Swift Boat patrols in the rivers and listed the villages where he had camped, naming each of these places as though they were questions. When Vollie didn’t respond to any of this, the driver said he’d also manned an M40 recoilless rifle at the battle of Hue, during Tet.
Vollie listened and went on watching the road.
After a few miles, the driver asked how come he wasn’t wearing his campaign ribbons on that shirt, and Vollie said he’d lost them.
They didn’t break for food until they had crossed half of Illinois. The driver said Vollie had better fill up, they wouldn’t stop again until supper; so he bought a coffee and two boiled eggs from the Automat. “Are you that busted?” the driver asked. Vollie said he’d had plenty at breakfast, though he’d had nothing. In truth he was down to four dollars in singles and change, most of it stowed in his bag in a shirt pocket, bound in the money clip that was really a silver-plated barrette he had managed to keep right through the tunnel days when its function was to scrape his teeth, a slim hard thing with a minute pattern of vines and leaves engraved in it that he had bought for a hooker he liked in Da Nang—a hungry-looking, broad-faced girl from the North who smelled of cabbage but paid him courtesies such as taking off all her clothes, every stitch; remembering his name; telling him in her percussive little vocabulary that he was really good at it, she was really liking it now, she could see a glow around him, which, boy that he was, he believed for months afterward—and who disappeared from her corner, just poof one afternoon, and nobody in the clubs around there ever copped to knowing her name, as Vollie didn’t know it either, looking for her at the same corner at unwonted hours, or the same hours but by different clubs, with his stupid gift in his pants.
The Volunteer Page 11