The Times Are Never So Bad (17 page)

He stood and moved out of the sunlight, into the shade of a maple, and unzipped and pissed, then stroked, shutting his eyes against the softness his hand encircled, seeing an infected and oozing orange peel, the softness even receding as though trying to withdraw from his abrasive fingers. He opened his eyes. Then he lay on his belly in the sunlight and pressed his cheek against the earth and held its grass with both hands.

We had to leave before you came home. We went shopping in Boston and will be back before dinner. Mark was looking for you and said he'd be back after lunch. Love, Mom
, and a smiling line for a mouth drawn inside a circle with two eyes and a nose. He left the note on the table in front of him while he ate cereal and a peanut butter sandwich, then he took the small garbage basket from under the sink and went upstairs. He went to Stephanie's room first. It was still darkened, and he opened the blinds and looked at the tossed-back top sheet and bedspread and stuffed brown bear and blue rabbit near a pillow; actors and singers watched him from the walls; he opened the drawer and took out the case and opened it with a click that tensed his arms.
It's more like a hollowed-out mushroom;
then he realized he was holding his breath, and he let it out, and breathing fast and shallow he turned the case over and watched the diaphragm drop softly among banana peels and milk carton and tuna fish can. As he put the case under silk in the drawer, he knew why he had gone to her room first: the youngest, only a few years removed from the time when pranks on each other were as much part of their days as laughter.

The basket was wicker and lined with a plastic bag. He brought it to Julie's room and opened her blinds and was crossing the floor when his name rose from outside, into the room; he stool still, gripping the basket, while Mark called again, then rang the back doorbell and called and then was quiet, but Walter could feel him down there, and he stood looking at the soft yellow wall, listening to the slow breeze and a car coming and passing by, then crept to the window and looked down at the empty terrace. Quickly he took the case from the drawer and emptied it in the basket.

In his mother's room he did not open the blinds; he walked softly as though she were sleeping there; he glanced at the sheets and pillows, and quietly slid open the drawer where last night Mark had found it, the first one they had found, while Walter was opening leather boxes of jewelry at her dresser and telling Mark to start in another room so they could work faster. He put the basket on the floor and held the open case in both hands. He lifted it closer to his eyes. He looked at it until his breathing slowed; and when he stopped hearing his breathing, he was suddenly tired, and as he lowered one hand and turned the other and watched the brief white descent, he wanted to sleep.

Their voices woke him, and when they started up the stairs, he turned quietly onto his side, his back to the door, and heard the girls with soft-crackling shopping bags going into their rooms and his mother coming to his; she stopped at the doorway and he breathed as though asleep until she turned and went to her room. He opened his eyes to the lake and trees and the low sun. He waited until he heard showers in all three bathrooms. Then he ran on tiptoes down the hall and stairs, and at the terrace he sprinted: past the pool and down toward the widening lake, and fell forward and struck with knees and palms, and rolled and stood and ran again, weight on his heels now, leaping when his balance shifted forward: running and leaping to the bottom of the hill where he could not stop: with short flat-footed steps he went across the narrow mud bank and into the water deep as his knees and then was sitting in it. He stood and looked up at the house, and higher and beyond it at the sky. Then he eased backward into the water and floated. Behind him the geese stirred and he listened to their wings as they rose and settled again. He backstroked toward the middle, then floated. Now the trees were on his left and he looked at their green crowns and the sky and waited for his mother's voice calling from the terrace.

The Captain

For Gunnery Sergeant Jim Beer

H
IS SON WORE
a moustache. Over and between tan faces and the backs of heads with hair cut high and short, and green-uniformed shoulders and chests and backs, Harry saw him standing with two other second lieutenants at the bar. His black moustache was thick. Only one woman was at happy hour, a blond captain: she had a watchful, attractive face that was pretty when she laughed. Harry stepped forward one pace, then another, and stood with his back to the door, breathing the fragrance of liquor and cigarette smoke, as pleasing to him as the smell of cooking is to some, and feeling through his body the loud talk and laughter and shouts, as though he watched a parade whose music coursed through him. In his own uniform wth captain's bars and ribbons, he wanted to stand here and have one Scotch. He did not feel that he stood to the side of the gathered men, but at their head, looking down the axis of their gaiety. A tall man, he did look down at most of them, and he wanted to watch his son from this distance. But there were no waitresses, so he went to the bar and spoke over Phil's shoulder: ‘There's one nice thing about a moustache.'

The eyes in the turning face were dark and happy. Thèn Harry was hugging him, and Phil's arms were around his waist, tighter and tighter, and Phil leaned back and lifted him from the floor, the metal buttons of their blouses clicking together, then scraping as Phil lowered him, and introduced him to the two lieutenants as
my father, Captain LeDuc, retired
. Harry shook hands, not hearing their names, focusing intsead on their faces and tightly tailored blouses and the silver shooting badges on their breasts: both wore the crossed rifles and crossed pistols of experts, and above those, like Phil, they wore only the one red and gold ribbon that showed they were in the service during a war they had not seen. He saw them scanning his four rows of ribbons, pretended he had not, and turned to Phil, letting his friends look comfortably at the colored rectangles of two wars and a wound and one act that had earned him a Silver Star. Beside Phil's crossed rifles was the Maltese cross of a sharpshooter. The bartender emptied the ashtray, and Phil ordered another round and a Scotch and water, and Harry said: ‘What happened with the .45?'

‘I choked up. What bothers me is knowing I'm better and having to wear this till next year.
Then
I'll—' He smiled and his eyes lowered and rose. ‘Jesus.'

‘Good,' Harry said. ‘If we couldn't forget, we'd never enjoy anything after the age of ten. Or five.'

Phil turned to his friends standing at his left and said he had just told his father he didn't like having to wear the sharpshooter badge until he qualified again next year, and the three of them laughed and joked about rice paddies and Monday and jungle and Charlie, and Harry saw the bartender coming with their drinks and paid him, thinking of how often memory lies, of how so often the lies are good ones. When he was twenty-four years old, he had learned on Guadalcanal that the body could endure nearly anything, and after that he had acted as though he believed it could endure everything: could work without sleep or rest or enough food and water, heedless of cold and heat and illness; could survive penetration and dismemberment, so that death in combat was a matter of bad luck, a man with five bullets in him surviving another pierced by only one. He was so awed by the body's strength and vulnerability that he did nothing at all about prolonging its life. This refusal was rooted neither in confidence nor an acceptance of fate. His belief in mystery and chance was too strong to allow faith in exercising and in controlling what he ate and drank and when he smoked. Phil had forgotten who he was and where he was going; was that how the mind survived? The body pushed beyond pain, and the mind sidestepped. How else could he stand here, comfortable, proud of his son, when his own mind held images this room of cheerful peace could not contain? He raised a knee and drew his pack of cigarettes from his sock, and Phil gave him a light with a Zippo bearing a Marine emblem, and said: ‘What's the one nice thing about a moustache?'

‘If I have to tell you, you're fucking up on more than the .45.'

‘They don't give out badges for that.'

‘One girl?'

‘No.'

‘Good. It's too rough on them.'

‘They'll
all
miss me, Pop.'

‘I'd rather be in the middle of it. I didn't have a girl, when I was in the Pacific. But, Jesus, I was never warm in the Reservoir, not for one minute, there was always
something
cold—'

‘Frozen Chosin,' one of the lieutenants said, and drank and eyed Harry's ribbons over the glass.

‘—Right: I was frozen.
Everybody
: we'd come on dead
Chinese
frozen. And tell you the truth, I didn't think we'd get out, more fucking Chinese than snow, but I'd rather have been freezing my ass off and trying to keep it from getting between a Chinaman's bullet and thin air than back home like your mother. How do you keep waking up every day and doing what there is to do when you know your man is getting shot at? Ha.' He looked from Phil to the two lieutenants watching him, respectfully embarrassed, then back at Phil, whose dark saddened eyes had never looked at him this way before, almost as a father gazing at a son, and in a rush of age he saw himself as father of a man grown enough to give him pity. ‘I guess I'm fucking well about to find out.'

‘Fucking-A,' Phil said, and clapped his shoulder and turned to his drink.

At three in the morning, a half-hour before the alarm, his heart woke him, its anticipatory beat freeing him as normally caffeine did from that depth of sleep whose paradox he could not forgive: needing each night that respite so badly that finally nothing could prevent his having it, then each morning having to rise from it with coffee and tobacco so that he could resume with hope those volitive hours that would end with his grateful return to the oblivion of dreams. He coughed and swallowed, and coughed again and swallowed that too. Phil was in a sleeping bag on an air mattress in the middle of the small room. Last night after dinner at the officers' club, where they had talked of hunting and today's terrain, they had spread out on Phil's desk a map he got from the sportsmen's club when he drew their hunting area from a campaign hat three nights earlier, and Harry looked, nodded, and listened while Phil, using a pencil as a pointer, told him about the squares of contoured earth on the map that Harry could not only read more quickly, and more accurately, but also felt he knew anyway because, having spent most of his peacetime career at Camp Pendleton, he felt all its reaches were his ground. But he remained amused, and nearly agreed when Phil showed him two long ridges flanking a valley, and said this was the place to get a deer and spend the whole Saturday without seeing one of the other eight hunters who had drawn the same boundaries.

‘It'll take us too long to walk in,' Harry said.

‘I got the CO's jeep. I told him you were coming to hunt.'

At three-fifteen by the luminous dial of his Marine-issued wrist-watch that he felt he had not stolen but retired with him, he quietly left the bed and stood looking down at Phil. He lay on his back, a pillow under his head, all but his throat and face hidden and shapeless in the bulk of the sleeping bag. His face was paled by sleep and the dark, eyeless save for brows and curves, and his delicate breathing whispered into the faint hum, the constant tone of night's quiet. Harry had not watched him sleeping since he was a boy, and now he was pierced as with a remembrance of fatherhood, but of something else too, as old as the earth's dust: in the darkened bedrooms of Phil and the two daughters he had felt this tender dread; and also looking at the face of a woman asleep, even some he did not love when he woke in the night: his children and the women devoid of anger and passion and humor and pain, so that he yearned during their fragile rest to protect them from and for whatever shaped their faces in daylight.

‘Lieutenant,' he said, his deep voice, almost harsh, snapping both him and Phil into the day's hunt: ‘The good thing about a moustache is you can smell her all night while you sleep, and when you wake up you can lick it again.'

The eyes opened and stared from a face still in repose; the mouth was slower to leave sleep, then it smiled and Phil said: ‘You ex-enlisted men talk dirty.'

They dressed and went quickly down the corridor, rifles slung on their shoulders, Phil carrying in one hand a pack with their breakfast and lunch; they wore pistol belts with canteens and hunting knives, and jeans, and sweat shirts over their shirts, and wind-breakers; Harry wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. Still, the act of arming himself to go into the hills made him feel he was in uniform, and as Phil drove the open jeep through fog, Harry shivered and pushed his hat tighter on his head and watched both flanks, an instinct so old and now useless that it amused him. He had learned to use his senses as an animal does, and probably as his ancestors in Canada and New Hampshire had, though not his father, whose avocation was beer and cards and friends in his kitchen or theirs, the men's talk with the first beers and hands of penny ante poker in French and English, then later only in the French that had crossed the ocean centuries before the invention of things, so in the flow of words that Harry never learned he now and then heard engine and car and airplane and electric fan. So in 1936, never having touched a rifle or pistol, he went into the Marine Corps with a taste for beer and a knowledge of poker acquired in his eighteenth year and last at home, when his father said he was old enough to join the table, and he trained with young men who had killed game since boyhood, and would learn cards in the barracks and drinking in bars. Four years later he returned home; in the summer evening he walked from the bus station over climbing and dropping streets of the village to the little house where his father sat on the front steps with a bottle of beer; he had not bathed yet for the dinner that Harry could smell cooking; he had taken off his shirt, and his undershirt was wet and soiled; sweat streaked the dirt on his throat and arms, and he hugged Harry and called to the family, took a long swallow of beer, handed the bottle to Harry, and said: ‘I got you a job at the foundry.' Two days later, Harry took a bus to the recruiting office and reenlisted.