by Clark Howard
“Oh, you can graduate,” she replied, her voice sounding irked. “I can’t very well not let you graduate, now can I?”
Richie could not suppress a slight grin. “I don’t think so.”
“I should only give you half a diploma.” Shaking her head in irritable resignation, the teacher leaned forward on her desk and pointed a pencil at him. “I want you to promise me something,” she said. “I want you to promise me that someday I will be able to tell myself that I did the right thing.”
“I promise,” Richie said.
On the night of the senior prom, Richie put on his new graduation suit. It was medium blue, double-breasted; Sam Levy had helped him pick it out and seen to it that it was altered properly. It was Richie’s first suit and he felt like he was donning the robes of a king.
“You look all grown up,” his grandmother said.
“I was born grown up,” Richie cracked.
It was just turning dark outside. Jennie was going to pick him up next to the post office. It had been her idea that they attend the prom together, and she had been adamant about it. “I don’t care what anybody says and I don’t care what anybody thinks,” she had proclaimed. “We are going to the prom together.”
Richie tried to dissuade her, for her own good. “Just how are you going to explain it to your parents?”
“I’ll simply tell them that it’s just an informal date, a convenience date so I won’t have to miss out on my own senior prom just because my fiancé is becoming a naval officer. I’ll tell them it’s strictly platonic.”
“I think it’s a mistake,” Richie said. “You’re asking for trouble.”
“I was asking for trouble when I took you home that first time. We deserve this, Richie—one night together, out in the open.”
“It’s not smart,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t care!”
That had been that. He had agreed to go because he could not say no to anything she wanted, he loved her too much. And the fact that she was so insistent about going, so emphatic about not caring what the consequences were, so unrelenting in her decision, made him finally believe, without reservation, that she loved him too. Encouraged by that, he turned his mind loose and let forth a deluge of ideas that he had previously dared not consider. They could get married, he and Jennie. They’d have to leave Lamont, of course; he could not ask her to come and live in his grandmother’s dilapidated house, nor would he feel comfortable moving into her parents’ big home. But if she would come to Chicago with him, he was certain they could make it. With a high school diploma, no one would bother to check his age; he could get a job, they could find a little housekeeping apartment, be together every night, their own bed—God!
It could work, he convinced himself, as he reknotted his necktie. It was so outrageous, so unexpected, that it definitely could work. And he felt in the deepest, warmest part of him that Jennie would do it.
“Don’t forget the flowers,” Mrs. Clark said as he buttoned his coat.
Richie got a florist’s box containing a white corsage out of his grandmother’s rickety old refrigerator.
“Have a good time,” she yelled, waving to him as he walked briskly up the street. If he had not known better, he would have sworn she was close to being teary-eyed. But that was silly. Not Miss Ethel.
It was ten past eight by the post office clock when he got there. He was five minutes early. With the clean handkerchief he always carried—good old Miss Menefee, he wondered how she was—he blotted his forehead and upper lip of the light perspiration he had worked up walking to town. Able to see his reflection in the post office window, he checked his necktie to make sure the knot was still centered. Then he stood off to the side in the shadow of a big tree, and waited for Jennie’s headlight to swing around the corner.
At eight-thirty, when she was fifteen minutes late, Richie began pacing. She was always on time within a couple of minutes. But then, he rationalized, she didn’t always have to put on a formal gown and do her hair up fancy, either. God, how he loved her hair—all of it.
Eight-thirty-five.
Eight forty.
Eight forty-five.
Jennie was half an hour late. He thought about walking over to City Drug and calling her. But if her mother or father answered, he did not know what he would say. Jennie said she had told her parents about their date, but Richie was not too sure; she may have just said that so he would relent and agree to go. Besides, what if she was already on her way? He decided to wait a few more minutes.
At nine o’clock he started walking. Her house was ten minutes from the other side of the square. From across the street he could look up the incline and see through the open garage door that her car was not there. He shook his head, completely at a loss. Could he have misunderstood their plans? After all the times she had picked him up at the post office, had he simply gone there out of habit, when perhaps she meant for him to meet her at school? Now he shook his head in irritation: no, that was ridiculous. The meeting place was the post office; he would not have gotten that wrong.
From Jennie’s house, Richie walked briskly on until, another ten minutes later, he arrived at the high school. The parking lot was full, as well as the wide drive and the street along one side. Walking back and forth, Richie scrutinized the cars. He knew Jennie could not have been in an accident; he had walked the entire route she would have driven. If her car was not at the school, he made up his mind that he would call her home.
But it was there. He located it in the middle of the lot, with the top down. What in the hell, he wondered, is going on?
He paused inside to get a drink of water at the fountain, and again blotted away the perspiration, from his neck as well this time. Then he walked into the gym. Bedecked with crepe paper and balloons, its usual glaring lights lowered to a subdued level, tables scattered around the outside of the basketball court, and a five-piece band playing on the stage at the auditorium end, the big room had been transformed into a magical, romantic place. A long table with punchbowl and party sandwiches stood near the bleachers, where there was also a chaperone table for the senior class counselors to sit. As Richie entered, Mrs. Reinhart saw him and smiled and waved. He waved back. The band was playing “My Foolish Heart” as couples, in their stocking feet so as not to mar the basketball court, danced slowly and lazily under the low lights. Scanning the crowd, Richie found Jennie almost at once. She was dancing with a man in Navy dress whites.
“So the rumors were true,” said a voice next to him. Richie’s head snapped around and he found Midge standing there. “I thought they might be, but I wasn’t sure.” She bobbed her pert chin at Jennie and the sailor. “Jerry came home unexpectedly to surprise her and take her to the prom. Wasn’t that sweet of him? I just love a considerate man.”
Richie said nothing. There was nothing to say. Jennie and her fiancé were dancing together as if they were on a goddamned honeymoon, and he was standing on the sidelines with a goddamned wilting corsage in his hand.
“If you’d stayed home last summer,” Midge vexed, “you wouldn’t find yourself left out. You’d have a steady girl.”
Richie’s eyes narrowed. “And half a farm?” he asked.
She glared at him. “I suppose you’d rather be left out?”
“I wouldn’t know how to act if I wasn’t left out,” he said flatly.
Leroy Sadler, Midge’s boyfriend, walked up to them. “You want to dance some more, sugar?” he asked Midge.
“I’d love to,” Midge said. “Slow and close, so we can rub bodies like Jennie and Jerry are doing.” As they walked away, Midge looked over her shoulder and said, “ ‘Bye, Yankee.”
Leaving the gym, Richie tossed the corsage into a wastebasket and left the school.
Walking back uptown, Richie realized once and for all that he was never going to become a part of this little town where he had been born. Simply too much was against him. Too much had been taken away by his time in the hard city of Chicago�
��and what he got in return, his experiences on the streets, was not understood in Lamont. His credits in life were not transferable.
The one place he could make himself fit in was the one place he did not want to go: Chicago. Earlier, he had been excited by the prospect of asking Jennie to run off to Chicago with him, but that was a different proposition entirely. With Jennie he would have had someone; without her, he would be alone again. And he would, he knew, unless he had some other purpose, gravitate back to Stan Klein and Bobby Casey. If he fell into that snare again, he might never get out. If you ever come back, Stan had said, make sure it’s to stay. Richie could not, would not, do that.
He needed time, he decided. Time to figure things out, decide what he should do, what he could make of himself. He needed to get away from everything old, everyone familiar.
As he walked around the quiet little town square, necktie now pulled down, coat slung over one shoulder, he was drawn to a poster in a metal frame next to the courthouse steps—a poster he passed every day on his way to school. Walking over, he stood looking at it. The graphics were bold, the message unequivocal: THE MARINE CORPS BUILDS MEN.
He studied the poster for several moments, before walking away, his expression still somber but a little more purpose to his step. Why not? he thought.
51
Richie came out of a bunker dug in the side of a hill and stepped over the body of a dead Marine named Elizondo. Setting his submachine gun on an empty ammunition box, he began searching his pockets for a match to light the cigarette that hung loosely from his dry, cracked lips. Shivering once in the thin, high Korean air, and finding that he had no matches, he knelt and rummaged through Elizondo’s pockets until he found a lighter. As he lighted his cigarette, he noticed that Elizondo’s face had frozen and turned purple during the night, making the eyelids, lips, and nostrils look as if some grotesque makeup had been applied. Starting to put Elizondo’s lighter in his own pocket, Richie hesitated, then put it back in the dead man’s pocket.
Picking up his submachine gun again, cradling it naturally in one arm as if it were part of him, Richie walked across pinto-patches of snow to an outpost trench a hundred yards away where two other members of his squad, Haven and Dobcik, lay ripped open and dead from a mortar hit. Taking a pair of field binoculars from around what was left of Haven’s neck, Richie uncoupled the dried frozen blood-encrusted strap and tossed it away. Holding the lenses close to his mouth, he breathed on each of them until a coating of ice melted away and wiped them with one of his wool trigger-finger mittens. Then he lay forward against the front of the trench and focused the glasses on a valley several thousand yards below him. He shivered again, not from the cold this time, as he looked.
The fucking Chinese were still there.
Like a swarm of little bugs in their puffy, quilted coats and bloomer pants that ballooned out at the knees, they were sloshing about in the mud where the snow had already melted, cooking breakfast on camp stoves, drinking from steaming bowls, squatting off on the sides to defecate. There were still a few women with them, Richie noticed. They made him think of Reynolds, a sergeant from California whose wife had Dear-Johned him, and who, during the attacks of the previous three days, had taken particular delight in singling out and shooting the gook women. Even though Reynolds was a good shot, Richie saw now that there were at least half a dozen or so of the little fighter-whore-cooks left. Reynolds would never have the opportunity to shoot them because Reynolds himself had been shot—perhaps appropriately, in the groin—and was now dead.
Forgetting about the women, Richie moved the glasses slowly along the edge of the enemy camp, mentally counting heads to see what the odds in the next fire fight were going to be. When he got to a hundred, he thought, fuck it, and quit. Shoving the binoculars as far as they would go into a pocket of his field jacket, he tossed the butt of his cigarette away and trudged back up the hill. In the bunker, Vinnie Casino, the only other Marine left alive, was transmitting the map coordinates of their location on the field radio. An intense little Italian, he looked around apprehensively when Richie entered. “They coming?” he asked nervously.
Richie shook his head. “Eating breakfast.”
Sighing relief, Vinnie resumed transmitting. They did not know whether their signal was being picked up or not because the radio’s receiver was not functioning. So Vinnie just kept on sending, hoping some other unit was getting it.
The area they were in was called the Punchbowl, and they were on the high ground on the north rim. It lay fifty or so miles above the thirty-eighth parallel, the boundary between North and South Korea. To the west were two perfectly formed peaks called Jane Russell Hill. To the east was Sok-chori, a fishing village on the sea of Japan. It was there that they had made an amphibious landing six months earlier, in November. The navy was presently off the coast of that same fishing village, evacuating the western sector in the face of an early spring offensive by a combined North Korean-Chinese army. The outfit Richie and Vinnie were in had no way to get to the fishing village for evacuation because Sorak-san, a five-thousand-foot mountain, lay in their way, and all roads around Sorak-san were now held by the Chinese. So the outfit had dug in and radioed for evacuation assistance while being decimated by daily Chinese attacks.
“Shit, maybe we should just surrender,” Vinnie suggested wearily, leaning his head against the damaged radio. “It’s better than dying.”
Taking off his helmet, Richie shook his head. “Remember Jake,” he said.
Jake Jacobs had been captured in an earlier action when the First Marines had been driven back several miles. A month later, when they retook the same ground, they had found him submerged head-down in a frozen honey pot. A honey pot was a well in which human excrement was saved to fertilize rice paddies. The captain let them execute six prisoners as payback for Jake, but it had not done any good. Nobody who ever saw Jake’s feet sticking out, dogtags hanging from one toe to identify him, would ever forget it.
In the bunker, Richie smoked another Lucky, then said, “The bodies have to be propped up.”
“Will you do it?” Vinnie asked. “I’ll stay on the radio.”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mind doing it, do you?”
“I don’t mind.” Richie was a corporal and Vinnie only a PFC, but he knew that Vinnie did not like to leave the bunker now that they were the only two left.
Outside again, Richie walked to the MLR—the Main Line of Resistance—which lay halfway between the bunker and the perimeter outpost trench. The MLR was a long dugout in which many Marines lay dead. Hopping down into it, Richie began to drag the dead men up and prop them partly over the outside lip of the dugout. He made sure each one had a helmet on, and worked a weapon into each corpse’s stiff arms. By doing that, it would look from the enemy camp as if there were many Marines still alive waiting to resist the next assault. The gooks that were left would then send more troops up the hill, and the Marines that were left—Richie and Vinnie—would be able to kill more of them before being overrun.
When he finished propping up bodies, Richie went back down to the perimeter outpost and scanned the Chinese camp with the binoculars again. The gooks were sitting around in groups now, filling ammo clips, oiling machine-gun mechanisms, sharpening bayonets. But where were the women, he wondered; he did not see any of the women. Then one came out of a small pyramidal tent, her bulky coat unbuttoned in front, and a Chinese officer came out after her, buckling his belt, smiling. You dirty bastard, Richie thought, wetting his cracked lips. I’m waiting up here to die and you’re down there fucking. Irritably, he focused the glasses sharply on the officer, studying him. He was taller than most of them and had a Mandarin moustache. Richie concentrated on his features, memorizing them. If you come up this hill today, motherfucker, he silently swore, you are dead.
Looking at his watch, seeing that it was nearly nine o’clock, knowing that the gooks usually launched their first attack of the day around ten, Richie went back up th
e hill and into the supply bunker. Randomly ripping open C-rations until he found a can of spaghetti-and-meatballs–his favorite–he took it, along with some instant coffee, a portable cookstove, and a new set of mess gear, and returned to the bunker where Vinnie was.
“It’s time to get down there, Vin,” he said.
Picking up a bandolier of six submachine-gun magazines, Richie returned to the MLR, to a space he had left near the middle of the long line of dead Marines he had propped up. Setting up the stove, he got the spaghetti and coffee ready to heat. Opening a tin of hard biscuits, he spread grape jelly on them for an appetizer. As he ate, Richie glanced back several times at the bunker. Finally he sighed quietly and walked back there again. Vinnie was staring dully at the radio.
“Come on, Vin,” Richie said. He pushed a submachine gun and a bandolier of magazines into Vinnie’s hands, and put a helmet on his head. “Come on,” he said again.
With an arm around Vinnie’s shoulders, Richie walked him out to the MLR. In the dugout, Vinnie sat on the ground and stared at his thermal boots. Richie put on the spaghetti and coffee. “Want some chow?” he asked. Vinnie shook his head.
Before he ate, Richie scanned the Chinese camp again. There was more activity now: packs were being folded, leggings wrapped, helmets held over fires to be blackened so they would not reflect the sun. They were getting ready, Richie knew. He played the glasses around until he located the tall officer with the Mandarin moustache. Hope you enjoyed it, Gook, he thought with jealousy.
When the coffee boiled and the spaghetti bubbled, Richie took them off and sat down on a dry patch of ground to eat. He tried to concentrate on the food, but for some reason his mind kept going back to the Chinese officer and the woman, and the things they had probably done in the tent. Richie had not been close to a woman in six months, since the battle of the Punchbowl began. Before that, there had been plenty of them: Korean girls in Seoul, Japanese girls in Kobe, Mexican girls in Tijuana, golden girls in Oceanside, California; pale girls in Beaufort, South Carolina. His experiences of the past two years had all but eclipsed the bitterness he had felt when Jennie dropped him so abruptly. His recent memories, half of them of prostitutes, including two fifteen-year-old Japanese girls in a threesome in Kobe, were all warm, fond recollections. For that reason it irritated him that the gooks had women in their ranks; women who not only fucked but fought—they charged up the goddamn hills right along with the men. A Marine Corps morale officer had told Richie’s outfit that the women were volunteers who wanted to be there; Marines, he emphasized, need have no reservations about killing them in combat. Everyone knew the gooks had kids in their ranks too: thirteen, fourteen years old. Richie tried not to think about that. He tried to keep the primary rule of combat uppermost in his mind: kill everybody that moved, and let God sort them out. But this was difficult for him at times. Women and young kids; it did not digest easily—