Adultery & Other Choices (15 page)

After two months his hope became desperate, he started smoking before breakfast, and he was doing a couple of things that Mary called a nervous habit and which she said made her nervous too. He pinched his cheek while they talked over soiled plates at the dinner table, and he did a lot of pacing in the living room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. They were six months married and she was three months pregnant and she thought he was nervous about being a father and maybe a husband as well. He was twenty years old, tall and slender, and she had believed that marriage would fill him out (it was what her mother told her), but instead he seemed to be getting thinner. Or maybe she only thought so because, with her baby, she was gaining weight.

About two weeks before the gun fight he became very quiet, distracted; when she asked if he wanted to try another channel or what he wanted to eat, he wouldn't answer. At first she simply asked him again in a louder voice. But after a few days she was certain that he regretted her pregnancy and therefore their life together. So one night when she asked him to throw her the cigarettes and he kept staring at the television, she said ‘Hey!' and loudly clapped her hands. His face jerked at her, his eyes returning in a startled instant from that fearful distance. She left the room and he followed her. She stood at the kitchen sink, gulping milky water from a glass unwashed since dinner, looking out the window at the dark, while he asked her what was wrong.

‘You don't love me,' she said.

He tried to soothe her, but his hands on her shoulders and arms were no more intimate than the brushing touch of a stranger on a bus.

Phil's dream was this: six people (he finally got their number straight) came for him and carried him alive to his grave. They took him from a bed and a room of eclectic familiarity: he could not recall these in detail, but in his daylight memory he felt that the bed was from some other house and time in his life, the enclosing walls and ceiling from another. He thought some of the people were women, but their bodies were vague or robed—he didn't know which—and their faces were merely shapes without features. They lifted him from the bed and all at once he was in a dark cemetery, and above the staring faces were black crowns of trees. They always brought him to the edge of a grave whose waiting depth he sensed yet never saw, for he was looking up at them, pleading with them and sometimes asking who they were and why were they doing this to him, but he never knew whether all his questions and pleas were only in his mind and for some reason not being voiced, or if he was indeed talking aloud and they were simply ignoring him. In any case, they never seemed to hear. They spoke to him, though, but he wasn't sure what they said. Remembering—next morning, afternoon, evening, night—he thought they only said one or two words at odd and meaningless intervals.

Then on a foggy Monday morning in May, two days before he went (as the Navy doctor and the newspaper said) berserk, he learned what they were saying at night. He had just stepped out of the shower, dried himself, put on his shorts, and stood at the steamed mirror; he was wiping it so he could shave when he heard the voice behind him, at the toilet. It said
Yes
. He spun around, already knowing his eyes were useless for something like this.

For the next two days he heard the voices, fought them, tried to get back to the far-off land he had left behind, so that sometimes he knew quite clearly that he loved his wife, he was looking forward with curiosity to the birth of a child, he had only one more year to do in the Navy, and he had a job waiting in his uncle's auto body shop in Eugene, Oregon. He saw all this, knew it to be true, knew that if he could rid himself of the voices of night he could return to those modest yet pleasurable expectancies of his days. But this knowledge came to him only in moments which were more and more separated until, watching television Wednesday night, he suddenly rose, upsetting an ash tray from the arm of his chair, and went quickly to the kitchen: not running only because there wasn't enough room, for he wanted to run—fear at first, then a sense of victorious flight, of ultimate purpose, having left the voices in the room with the television, though as he jerked open the kitchen drawer and fumbled for a handle, any handle of any knife, they were after him again, at his back in the kitchen:
Yes
—
Well: you, surely—Yes;
and he got the paring knife and slashed then sawed at his wrist, the knife had always been dull, then Mary was there, moving at him, reaching for him, and he slashed at her too, missing the breasts, and she turned screaming and ran from the house.

The knife had done little: three cuts, like the footprint of a bird, were scratched near bloodlessly into the pale underside of his left wrist. He laid the knife on the stove and stood holding his wrist, though still there was only enough blood to cover the scratches. He wished he hadn't struck at Mary, he wished she hadn't run out, and he wished with all his heart she would come back; yet at the core of his despair, of his knowledge that she was never coming back, there opened for him a despair so ultimate that it gave him hope: abandoned forever, beset by the shades who quietly watched him now from some point which was in his mind yet in the kitchen too—by the refrigerator or stove—so his mind was the kitchen and the kitchen his mind, he now saw that he was about to escape forever. He would move out of this network of betrayal and attack, he would ascend crashing through the night. It was motion he wanted now, and though he was weeping and actually moaning (he hadn't known that for a minute or two), there was an affirmative briskness in his steps through the living room, three paces down the hall, left into the bedroom where he switched on the overhead light, glancing at the bed covered by a green spread, and at the bedside table which held Mary's
Redbook
and package of Rolaids. He took the .22 rifle from the closet and sat on the bed to load the tubular magazine. After inserting four rounds he realized that was three more than he needed, but he liked the joke, liked sitting there in the middle of this joke that was in the middle of the swirl of devils and Mary's reaching hands and the silence that felt like chaotic voices, as though he sat dying and unnoticed at a party of strange drunks. So he kept loading until the magazine was filled. He was considering trying for the heart or sticking the barrel in his mouth when he heard the siren, then an abrupt squeal of tires outside his house.

He rose and turned out the light; when he again faced the room there was a dull flashing red light breaking the shadows, reflected from the walls. Going to the open window he saw the truck, the blinking light atop its cab, and now entering the lawn a Marine wearing a white belt. Phil shot twice from the hip and the Marine scuttled away into the dark of the lawn or the road. Watching the window as if not a bullet but a man might come through, Phil moved backwards around the bed and pushed it against the wall beneath the windows. Then the bullets came: twice the blaze and report of a .45, shattering a raised window, cracking into the wall behind him. He fired several shots at the truck, then kneeling at the bed as in prayer, his chin on the mattress, the rifle resting across it, he waited.

C
ROUCHED
behind the fender, Chuck wished he had his deer rifle, his Winchester .30-.30 that he kept in the Barracks armory. With the first two shots from the house he had crawled into the truck and, with the brake and clutch pedals jamming his ribs, he had radioed the Corporal of the Guard, then switched off the blinking red light. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the riot squad.

They got there quickly, just as in drills, and he watched proudly as the panel truck halted a block away, the riot squad running low from the rear of the truck, spreading out as they crossed the road to the lawns and went down on their bellies, weapons thumping and rattling as they struck the earth. Chuck yelled for Visconti, and after a few moments saw him crawling in the shadow of a darkened house, and for the first time he realized that in all these dark houses people were watching, their faces exposed just enough so they could see out the windows. When Visconti reached a point where the truck was between him and the sailor's house, he sprinted across the road, bent low, his rifle at port, then squatted beside Chuck who saw the scene as a blending of his infantry training and movies of World War II.

‘Gimmee the rifle,' he said.

Visconti gave it to him.

‘The belt too. Okay. Here's what you do—' As he spoke he took clips from the pouches and, reaching up, placed them on the fender. He told Visconti to send two men to the rear of the house, that they would take cover and wait, and if the sailor ran out, they would shoot him. Then he gave Visconti the .45 and told him to bring the other three troops back to the truck, where they would set up a base of fire on the house while he and Visconti assaulted it.

‘Jesus Christ,' Visconti said.

‘You got it?'

Visconti nodded and told it back to him while Chuck, on one knee, pulled back the
MI
's bolt a couple of inches, glanced down in the dark at the dull yellow of the chambered brass cartridge, and eased the bolt forward again. Then he fired eight quick rounds over the hood; as he ducked again, one sweeping hand brought a new clip from the fender. Visconti was gone. Chuck waited for return fire from the window, but there was none. He watched the troops crawl into a cluster around Visconti three lawns away; after what seemed a long time for such simple orders, two men broke the cluster, rose and sprinted across the road. Chuck gave them two minutes to get behind the house, then he emptied three clips at the windows, remembering this time to sweep from left to right, aiming low. Still the sailor did not fire. He looked around, spotted his cap beside the truck, put it on the rifle's muzzle, steadied it so the visor pointed forward, then slowly raised it. Two slugs plunked into the hood and he jerked the rifle so the cap fell; then turning to pick it up he looked into the face of Captain Melko, bareheaded, his face tense but competent, the pale silver bars on his collar and epaulets already speaking for the silent man who wore them, relieving Chuck of command.

‘Did they bring tear gas?' Melko said.

‘No sir.'

Melko shut his lips impatiently; he opened the truck door and crawled in. While he was talking on the radio, Visconti shouted ‘Cover us!' and Chuck fired while they crossed the road and kneeled behind the truck and watched him. As he crouched to insert a new clip, Melko gripped his arm, not in anger or even haste, and said: ‘Don't fire again till the gas comes.'

For a moment their eyes met, then Chuck looked away, to his left, at the end of the road where, above a tall black mass of pines, a glowing cloud hid the moon.

It took five silent minutes for the truck to come, then Visconti had the tear gas, squatting beside Chuck who stood isolated within the percussion and flash of each round, aware of nothing save the kick of the rifle against his shoulder and cheek bone, the smell of powder, the dark rectangles of the windows and what he sensed behind them. When the clip pinged out and clattered against the fender he reloaded, half-crouched yet exposed over the hood, his eyes on the windows where Phil, surprised by the gas, had filled his lungs with a hot burning solid which he immediately recognized; he expelled it, then dropping the rifle he held his nose and mouth. His lungs were empty. He stood up, his flesh and tightly closed eyes burning; he waved an arm toward the window and the men behind the truck, and was about to flee out of the room and into the air when Chuck, standing erectly now, fired his last clip, hearing at some time Melko yelling ‘Cease fire! Cease fire!' He did not know how many rounds he fired after that: perhaps four, perhaps three. Then Melko grabbed his shoulder and rifle and spun him around, both of them exposed to the acrid-smelling windows, as if already they knew the firing was over.

‘Goddammit, Sergeant! We had him! We had him!'

N
EXT MORNING
after chow he offered to clean Visconti's rifle; but Visconti, with the awe of a bat boy, said he would clean it himself. Late the following afternoon the Corporal of the Guard showed him the Oak Harbor paper; he glanced at his picture, grunted, and went outside to the blacktop parade field, where a corporal was drilling troops. The day was hazy, with a faint glare from the covered sun. For nearly an hour he stood smoking, fieldstripping the butts, and watching the troops in pressed green utilities marching back and forth and in squared turns, their rifles slanted upward in perfect angles, their boot heels clomping in unison. Then he went back inside. By Taps that night he had picked up six newspapers: one on the deck in the head, four on bunks in squad bays, and one under the pool table in the rec room. The ones in the head and rec room were easiest, for each room was empty. He stalked the other four, waiting until a squad bay was either empty (this happened twice) or until no one was around the bunk that held it, and he could stand with his back to the scattered troops and slip the paper under his shirt.

The other two sergeants were married, so he shared his room with no one. That night, while outside his closed door the barracks grew quiet, he lay on his bunk and read the story and studied his picture: a full length profile, his right side to the camera, his cap restored to his head, his right arm down at his side, holding the rifle. On the second page were small pictures of the Korsmeyers, only their faces. The picture of Korsmeyer distorted Chuck's memory of the other face: drained white, turned in frozen anguish to one side, averting its open eyes from the holes in its chest and throat. To recall clearly the man who had tried to stab his wife and who had shot at him with a .22, Chuck turned back to the first page, to his own picture, where he stood forever poised in peaceful silence.

But that night's silence stayed with him and changed to something else, as if he had taken restful leave of a woman's bed, only to fall unwillingly into months of continence. It stayed with him through the long summer, broken by nights with Toni; it stayed with him through the fall when, on the eve of her husband's return, Toni told him goodbye with ceremonial lust and sorrow, Chuck feigning both and leaving her house long before dawn. In the dull rains of winter he returned often to the newspapers; they were faded yellow as in sickness, dry and delicate in his fingers, and he handled them like butterfly wings, fearing for their lives.