There's a Man With a Gun Over There (35 page)

Meanwhile, I run into DuWayne Leonard. I knew him in Fayetteville. He's now evidence custodian for the army's Criminal Investigation Division, which is the army's version of the FBI.

“I want to show you something,” he says late one afternoon. I've stopped by his office to pick him up. He's coming over to our apartment in Ladenburg for dinner. Afterward we'll listen to the new Santana album: “Abraxas.”

“Here,” he says as he opens the door of a tall green safe with a crinkled metal finish. “What's your pleasure?”

Inside the safe are shelves holding four- or five-inch balls, some brown, some tar black, some with both colors like a vanilla and chocolate cake.

“I don't know what you mean.”

DuWayne laughs.

“I'll choose,” he says and slices off a small piece from one of the balls and wraps it in white paper like a piece of cheese.

After dinner, he produces a small brass pipe, and Jenny and I have our first taste of drugs—of, in fact, opiated hash.

Let me take you down
, and down the lane we skipping go, bouncing around in the landscape of our heads, rainbows connecting everything. What other word is there but, you guessed it: Wow. Yes, wow and wow and wow.

DuWayne sleeps on our couch, and, after breakfast the next morning, we take a couple of more puffs on the hash and walk to a nearby park. My footsteps seem to have springs in them, and I make a tinkling sound as I walk. The ground is covered with vibrant blue and green patterns that look as though Peter Max designed them. Yellow birds fly out from under my feet as I walk.

Cool, I think. This is so cool.

Do I also think about the fact that I'm smoking evidence that sent someone to jail? Do I think about my hypocrisy?

Boom. Boom. Snare.

Boom. Boom. Snare
.

55.

A
h, yes, the good life, all courtesy of the US Army. And, oh, Angelika. I musn't forget my Angelika, my little German revolutionary.

She was the administrator at a University of Maryland office in Turley Barracks. Her office was right across the hall from mine. It was a place where the soldiers from the tank corps, who made up most of Turley's population, could sign up for classes. Perhaps because the office was in a military police station, she didn't get much business, so she spent most of her time reading or hanging out in a nearby army snack bar drinking Cokes. When Lance B. Edwards was gone, she took to visiting me.

Slightly buck-toothed, Angelika exuded a simple sexuality. She wore very short skirts and would occasionally bend over in front me, showing me the crotch of her pink panties. She wore translucent blouses, and you could see the dark outlines of her puffy nipples. When we talked, she would sometimes run her index finger down my arm, and I would often be in a state of half tumescence when I spoke with her, unsure of what we said.

Even though she was German, we had oddly similar backgrounds—both of us were the children of unhappy government workers. We'd both majored in English literature and believed we were intellectuals. We were both working for the US Army and thought of ourselves as subversives, though Angelika, if her pictures were to be believed, was a little more serious than I was.

She showed me a snapshot of her standing before a Che Guevara poster holding some kind of automatic weapon. She also loved the Baader-Meinhof Gang and had a scrapbook filled with newspaper articles about them. She told me she knew many of the gang members.

Since what mostly interested me about Angelika was her sexuality, I didn't pay much attention to the political stuff. I didn't care about politics.

One morning, she came into my office, gave me a lingering French kiss, and sat down on the top of my desk. Her legs straddled my chest; her crotch was right there in front of me. Without thinking, I began caressing it. She closed her eyes and began humming a tune.

“Oh, my little soldier boy, such fingers
du hast
. My. Yes. My. My.”

The next thing she was sitting on my lap rocking back and forth, trying to unzip me.

Even now, decades later, I have to close my eyes when I think of the waves of longing that came over me.

“Your place,” I said, breathing hard. “I'll take you home from work. Three thirty. I'll leave early. We can't do this here.”

She got up, pulled her tiny skirt down over her exposed panties, blew me a kiss, and left.

I looked down at my crotch. It had blotches of her wetness there.

I ached looking at the slow passage of time on my watch but then we were out the door and into the Volvo and she was unzipping my pants and sucking on my cock and I was driving to her little apartment in Neckargmünd. It was really just a large room with a sink and a hot plate and a bathroom to one side and then we were out of our clothes and making love on her squeaky bed.

I get dizzy thinking about the months we were together. I usually stayed until six or seven. I told Angelika I had to leave because I had to check in at my barrack because of my security clearance. When I got home to Jenny, I told her we'd been having special military exercises and that I'd be coming home late for the foreseeable future.

I led this delicious double life. I was having it all. Saint Moritz and Paris and London. A cool apartment. New Dansk dishes. Two women to fuck. All brought to me courtesy of the United States Army. Wonderful.

Sometimes Angelika and I would sneak away from work in the middle of the day and lie around her apartment making love and drinking Riesling. Other times we would have sex standing up in the storage closet at the back of her University of Maryland office.

Angelika wanted me to be her boyfriend, and I didn't have the courage to tell her I was already married. I just kept making up stories about my security clearance when she asked me to go out in public with her.

“We've got to keep this a secret,” I said. “I'm not allowed to be seen with a German national. It would compromise my job.”

She wanted my picture, and I let her photocopy the one in my customs police identification wallet. She had the photo framed and put it on her dresser.

“I've got my own soldier who will take me to live in America,” she kept saying and French kissing me afterward.

I'm not sure why Angelika liked me so much. She probably could have had any soldier she wanted. Maybe she was in love with me.

Her apartment was filled with anti-American political tracts and posters promoting—along with Che and Mao and Ho Chi Minh—the
Baader-Meinhof Gruppe
. She told me she was just a pal of the gang's, though not really a member. I suppose this confession should have triggered an alarm, but I was so interested in the next blow job that I didn't pay it any mind.

As Sergeant Dooley once explained, “You don't want the truth to interfere with your fucking.”

Angelika just kept telling me that she and I would go to America together and be revolutionaries together when I got out of the army.

She told me she loved me. She gave me a key to her apartment. How delicious it was when I would get there before she did, undress, crawl under the cool sheets, and wait to surprise her.

“
Ach, ja
,” she would say, stepping out of her skirt as she came toward me. “Here is my American soldier defending his little bit of Deutschland.”

Jean-Claude Killy, Paris. Dansk. And, now, add Angelika to that. My lovely Angelika.

56.

T
he last time I saw Angelika I was lying there, naked in her bed, waiting for her to come back to the apartment.

The door banged open when she arrived. She was furious.

“How could you do this?”

She picked up a broom and began hitting me.

“What are you doing?” I tried to roll away from her blows.

“You've made me have adultery, you asshole.”

“What?”

“I saw that woman you rode with yesterday.”

Jenny had picked me up at the office. She'd needed the car for an errand.

“I asked that man in your office, that Lance, who the woman is, and he tells me she's your wife. You're married. Because of you I make adultery. I am Catholic. I cannot make adultery and go to heaven.”

She started hitting me again with a broom.

“What kind of a man are you? What do you stand for? You stand for nothing. You are interested in nothing but yourself. What have you done to me?”

I grabbed my clothes and ran downstairs naked. I could hear her thumping down the steps behind me.

“
Du Arschloch
!” she yelled. You asshole.

I was trying to get my pants on in this little vestibule at the bottom of the stairs. I stared at the window in the door. It had these gauzy curtains, and I remember wondering whether they were handmade or store-bought and I was trying to get a leg into my pants, but the fabric was twisted somehow and turned inside out and it was as if the pants leg had been sewn shut, and suddenly there she was in that vestibule with the broom raised up over her head to hit me, and I ran outside bare-assed naked like some character in an old silent comedy, and she followed me.

We stood there in the courtyard of the apartment building, facing each other, making moves, then backing off. She held the broom over her head, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it anymore. Her face was smeared with tears.

“I will get you for this. I fix you good. I will call my Baader-Meinhof friends, and they will take care of you. Imperialist pig. Fucking American imperialist pig.”

Still naked, I ran for the Volvo and, luckily, found the keys in the pocket of my pants. I tossed my clothes in the backseat and jumped in the car and drove off. I could see her in my rearview mirror, shaking that broom over her head. I can see her to this very day.

“What have you done to me?” she yells. “What have you done?”

57.

A
nd then I was sitting in the witness chair at Sergeant Perkins's court-martial.

“So, Mister Ryan, here is what I want to know,” the major prosecuting the case asks me. “You brought Sergeant Perkins to your office for questioning. Is that correct?”

Remember Sergeant Perkins, who started this story off?

“Yessir. Correct.”

“Very good. Do you recognize this document?”

The major hands me Sergeant Perkins's confession.

“Yessir. It's a confession form.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Ryan, but who's the confession
from
?”

“I don't know. I'd have to read it, sir.”

“You don't recognize it? I mean, don't you recognize Sergeant Perkins's signature here at the end?”

“Major, I've taken a lot of these. They kind of run together. We want to be sure, don't we?”

“Of course. Of course. Look it over. Take your time.”

I glanced through it.

“Yes, it was signed by a Sergeant Perkins, sir.”

“
A
Sergeant Perkins?!” the captain defending Sergeant Perkins says, jumping up. “Don't you remember, Mister Ryan?”

“Well, as I said, we do this a lot.”

“OK, Mister Ryan,” the major interjects. “Let's talk about the rights of Sergeant Perkins. Did you read him his rights?”

The captain sits back down. I'm sure he thinks he played enough drama to convince everyone the trial is on the up and up—that he actually cares about Sergeant Perkins.

“We read everyone their rights. It's a matter of office policy.”

“But Mister Ryan, did you read Sergeant Perkins
his
rights? That's who we're concerned with here. Sergeant Perkins. The man sitting over there. You remember him, don't you?”

Sergeant Perkins looks at the floor.

“He seems familiar, sir.”

The defender and the prosecutor look at each other. The colonel acting as judge raps his pencil on his desk.

For a moment I hear it as
boom, boom, snare. Boom, boom, snare.

“So, Mister Ryan, did you, in fact, read Sergeant Perkins his rights?” the major asks after the colonel quits rapping.