The Good Old Stuff (14 page)

Saggerty and Hartshaw realized that Dan and I could work well together. I’m tall, dark, lean, and nervous. I blow off the handle about once a week and ride the hell out of the guys who work for me and the guys I work for. I’ve always worked best under pressure. I used to be able to get along on four hours sleep and a dozen cups of coffee a day.

Dan is the other way. He’s middle height, but heavy in the chest and shoulders. A blondish reddish guy with freckles and a good grin. He moves slow and talks slow, and it takes him about ten minutes to load the pipe he smokes all the time. He’s smart—smarter than I am by a long way. He plays them close to the vest, but there’s nothing devious or hypocritical about him. In the old days, we drove the men and drove the equipment and sweated over the plans. We built stuff and it stayed built. The firm made dough on us and paid us back a nice little fraction of it.

Dan’s married. But when the board tapped us on the shoulder, we both got tapped at the same time. Same outfit for basic. Same group going through engineer’s OCS. Oh, we were sharp kids with those little gold bars. Big shots.

We had managed to stay together. At one point I was his company commander, and that burned him down to the ground.

Then we got the assignment to C.B.I., and for some strange reason we got shoved into staff work in Delhi. There were some decent guys around, but it suffered from the usual dry
rot of any theater headquarters in a relatively inactive theater. We each objected in our own way. I stomped and stormed and beat on the walls, wrote nasty little formal notes through channels.

Don’t get the idea that we were being boy heroes, yearning for the sound of rockets and grenades. Far from it. We wanted to get away from the starched-shirt boys and go build something. That’s a hard fever to explain. I will never be able to understand what sort of satisfaction there is in working at a desk. Any kind of a desk. But if you’ve thrown a stinking little bridge over a dry creek, you can go and look at it in one year or twenty, and it will be there. You can step on it and touch it. Spit on it and jump off of it. It’s tangible. It exists.

Dan used his own system of objecting. He merely loaded his pipe and leaned on the wall in the colonel’s outer office. Whenever he saw the colonel, he smiled. The colonel knew what Dan was thinking. After a time he got tired of having his wall held up. He got tired of the pipe.

We were both called in on the same day at the same time.

“Garry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s your orders. You fly over the hump to Chengdu and join a Major Castle. It’s a little trip over a proposed route for the Trans-Iranian Highway into China. You come back with a complete report of all construction necessary.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Christoff. You’re going down to Ceylon and join Lord Louis Mountbatten’s staff. He wants a man for a survey of local materials for floating dock construction for an amphib invasion he’s cooking.”

That seemed to be all. We grinned at each other and then pulled our faces back into the right lines. We highballed him and started out.

He said, “Wait a minute, gentlemen.” We stopped and turned around. “I’ve got to consider the reputation of this office. Can’t send out experts unless they look like experts. I’ve requested captaincies for both of you. Ought to clear this afternoon. Pick up your orders for promotion and travel in the A.G.’s office.
Get out of town tonight. You’re both driving me nuts. Good luck.”

We had joined hands in the hall and done a solemn circling dance. He slapped me on top of the head, and I nearly broke a knuckle on his shoulder. Outside of a quick beer in the room, that was the last I saw of him.

So I wanted to see him again, and we could drink beer and check on the year or so that had elapsed. I wouldn’t have much to tell.

I rolled over onto my back on the hatch cover. The long gray-blue swells raced by the ship, and she bobbed her bow in stately dance. The sun blazed down on me. I lifted my head and looked down at my legs. They were the worst part. Wasted muscles. Coat of tan on sagging flesh. Emaciated.

It was
a forty-six-day trip. We coasted down the long channel of L.A. Port with the factories on either side. October in the States. I saw a blond dish in an aqua convertible steaming down the road that bordered the channel. She looked good.

Carter, an ex-accountant from Philadelphia, one of the boys they left behind to clean up the property accounting, came up beside me where I leaned on the rail. We had gotten fairly friendly on the trip back. He didn’t talk too much or try to ask questions or dish out the dripping sympathy.

“No bands out there for us, Garry. We’re too damn late coming home.”

“Band music gives me cramps.”

“Cheery today, hah? What’re you going to do now, go back to work? Build yourself a bridge or dig yourself a ditch someplace?”

“If the company wants me back. And you’ll go add up two and two on Market Street.”

“Nice clean work. By the way, are you in good enough shape so that they won’t stick you back into a hospital for a while?”

“Better not try it. Twenty-five pushups in a row now. Twenty slow deep knee bends. Less of a limp. Hundred and sixty-three now, according to the infirmary scales. Only seventeen to go.”

“You look good, Garry. I better get my stuff together. See you around.”

He walked off down the deck, a round little man with a tremendous store of calm and satisfaction. I envied him. Somehow I felt restless, felt a sense of impending trouble. I didn’t know what it could be. I judged that it was the aftereffects of a year of blackout. You can’t stop using your mind for a year without some very queer things happening to it. You let a field lie fallow, and it picks up chemicals you need to grow plants. The brain lies fallow and it seems to pick up a store of doubt, uncertainty, indecision. You imagine black catastrophe at every turn, and when you try to pin it down you get noplace. My dreams were an indication of that. On the average of every third night I would wake up, the sheets damp with sweat. It wouldn’t have been a specific dream, just a vague black nothingness that was about to close in on me or fall on me. Sometimes I would be on the edge of a sort of gray cliff. The path would get narrower as I stood still on it. A gray wall would move toward me, and I would know that it would force me off to fall blindly, tumbling, spinning in the moist air down and down into blackness. The little doc had been right. He had a trick of sticking the point of his pink tongue out and carefully wetting down the two halves of his thin black moustache. He told me that I had been dead for a year. I would have to think of it that way. Dead and in a cold hell where the furred demons grunted at me and forced food into my mouth.

The mechanics of discharge were a joke. The system was built for millions, and it was too unwieldy to use for hundreds. But they followed it. Each and every form, each and every lecture.

A bored sergeant counted out my fifty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of back pay. They told me that they’d mail me my discharge. Then they sent me off on a three months’ vacation with pay, which went under the alarming name of terminal leave. They gave me a life pension of fifty bucks a month. Money for cigarettes and beer. And a movie once in a while. I toyed with the idea of using the back pay to buy some place so far off in the woods that I could live on the fifty bucks. A year or two would give me a chance to heal. My body was healed,
but inside my head it felt as though there were long open wounds which pulsed.

There was a little town of about two thousand named Bennetville only about five miles from the separation center in Ohio. It looked quiet and clean. I registered into the only hotel. Even with my baggage, they made me hand over a week in advance. That little town was used to the army. They must have learned the hard way.

Then I took a train down into the city. After four hours I had a meager wardrobe. I put one suit on and stuffed the monkey suit into a trash basket outside the dressing room. I held the little gold button with the eagle on it in my hand for a while and looked down at it. I wasn’t being bitter. I wasn’t being the hot novelist’s idea of the cynical soldier. I just didn’t want to wear the damn thing. I knew that they’d see the button and tie it up with the little limp and the missing fingers and the deep scar across my face. I didn’t want to be a professional veteran. I tossed it into the trash can after the suit.

Then I hunted around in the used-car lots. I finally found a little ’40 Plymouth convertible with a decent motor. I paid them their thousand and got it licensed. I got back to my hotel room in Bennetville by midnight. I was tired, but I felt like a civilian. I tossed out the rest of the brown clothes and went to bed. I didn’t dream.

In the morning I placed a person-to-person call to Dan Christoff in Youngstown, Ohio. I sat and drank my breakfast coffee and felt the chill butterflies of excitement as I waited for the call to go through.

The phone rang and I picked it up. “Mr. Garry? This is the operator. Mr. Daniel Christoff isn’t at that number, and they don’t expect him back. What do you wish me to do?”

“Let me talk to his wife, Dorothy Christoff.”

I waited a few seconds, and then the operator came on again. She sounded a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Garry, but Mrs. Christoff doesn’t wish to speak to you.”

“What the hell do you mean? This isn’t a collect call.”

“I know, sir, but she refuses to take the call.”

“Okay, cancel it.” I slammed the phone down onto the
cradle. I jumped up and paced the room. I drew a cigarette down until it scorched my fingers. I threw it out the window with a full arm swing. I couldn’t understand it. It sounded as though Dan and Dorothy had broken up. That didn’t make sense. They were made for each other. I remembered her as a tall, fair girl with dusky red hair and a face with a warm pallor like old ivory, gray-green eyes, and a quick wide grin like a boy’s. It didn’t make sense. We had always liked each other. I threw the stuff I’d need into the new bag I’d bought and went down to the desk. I gave them another week’s rent and got into the car. I took the little automobile by the nape of the neck and yanked it out of town. It screamed in protest on the corners. It didn’t make sense, for her to refuse to talk to me.

I drove two hundred miles before I cooled off. I had to keep the speed down, because, if I felt one of those blank spells coming on, I’d only have a few seconds to stop the car. I carefully went over every possible answer I could think of. None of them seemed to make any sense. It wasn’t fair to me. I wanted to see her, and I wanted a look at Dan’s kid. He’d been three when we left. Billy Christoff. Round and grave and sturdy.

I didn’t stop for lunch. It was quarter after four when I rolled up in front of the small bungalow on the shaded street where Dan and I had thrown the party the week before we left for the Coast. I remembered the house as being larger. The paint had been whiter. The lawn had looked greener. A chill rain was falling as I walked to the steps and went up onto the porch.

I leaned on the bell and waited. After about thirty seconds, she opened the door. Her eyes widened a little when she saw me.

“I thought you’d come here, Howard, but I didn’t want you to. I didn’t expect you so soon. I suppose I better ask you in.” She turned and walked ahead of me. She was as slim as ever but not as straight, somehow. I wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but I realized that it would be more comfortable for her if I let her handle it her own way.

She led me into the familiar living room. The furniture had been changed around, but the walls and windows were the same. There was a large picture of Dan on the mantel. He wasn’t in uniform.

When she sat on the couch, the light from the windows fell harshly across her face. It shocked me. Her face had been thin. It looked gaunt. There was no life in her eyes. There were new lines across her neck, and puffy shadows under her eyes. She sat and examined her fingernails for a few seconds. Then she looked up at me.

“Dan’s dead, you know.”

I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even considered it. The guy had always seemed so indestructible. So durable, as though he and his pipe would be around forever. I glanced up at his picture and then I looked down at the pattern in the rug. I took out a cigarette and carefully examined the little pattern of brown grains of tobacco. The white paper had a small wrinkle near the end where the label was. I took out a packet of matches: W
ORT
’
S
G
ARAGE
. B
ODY AND
F
ENDER
W
ORK
. Red and white and yellow. I struck one of the green-tipped matches on the scarred scratching surface and lit the cigarette. I drew the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaled it in a long gray column toward the far wall. It broke up in the still air. Dan was dead. You’re a long time dead. What did friend Hemingway say? When you laugh, laugh like hell—you’re a long time dead. Something like that. Dan dead. Alliteration. Both one-syllable words.

I had it under control. I looked over at her. Her eyes were still dead.

“Are you positive, Dorothy? Certain?”

“His body was recovered a few days later. Washed up on the beach.”

“Combat?”

“No. Not even line of duty, according to the army. They marked it NLD. I suppose that means not line of duty. They were going to punish him for it if he hadn’t been drowned by accident.”

“That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“I’ll get you the letter.” She stood up with a sigh and walked out of the room. I sat and waited. She was back in a few moments and handed it to me. Long stained envelope. Many times read. I opened it and pulled out the letter.