The Barracks Thief, page 4
Hubbard came back from the hospital in a white jeep. He was wearing a shiny metal cast over his nose, held by two strips of tape that went across his face. The first sergeant met him and I waited while they talked. When Hubbard finally turned and started towards the barracks, I came up to him. We walked together without speaking for a moment, then I said, “Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I followed him inside and sat on the next bunk while he took his boots off and stretched out, hands behind his head. He stared up at the ceiling. The cast gleamed dully.
“You really didn’t see him?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Well, I didn’t do it,” I said. “I swear I didn’t.” Without thinking about it I put my hand over my heart. I could feel my heart beating.
Hubbard looked at me. His lips were pressed together. He was utterly dejected. I could not imagine him pointing a rifle at someone’s head. He looked back up at the ceiling. “Who said you did?” he asked.
“Nobody. I just wanted you to know.”
“Fine,” he said. “I never thought it was you anyway.” Suddenly he turned his head and looked at me again. It made me uncomfortable.
“Just between us,” I said, “who do you think it was?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like to be alone right now if that’s all right with you.”
“Whatever you want,” I said. “If I can do anything, let me know. That’s what friends are for.”
At first he didn’t answer. Then he said, “That was stupid, what we did out at the ammo dump. You probably think it was some big deal, but if you want to know the truth I almost throw up every time I think of it. We nearly got ourselves killed. Don’t you ever think about that?”
“Sure I do.”
“About being dead? Do you think about being dead?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly,” he said. “Boy, you’re really something. No wonder you like the Army so much.”
I waited for Hubbard to go on, and when he didn’t I stood up and looked down at him. His eyes were closed. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” I said. “That’s why I came by.”
“Thanks,” he said, and touched the cast on his nose curiously, as if I had just reminded him of it. “It isn’t only this,” he said. Then, with his eyes still closed, he told me about his friends getting killed.
It spooked me. It was like a ghost story, the way Hubbard had talked about them so much on the day it happened. I thought I should say something. “That’s tragic,” I said, the word used in my family for all deaths, and as soon as it was out of my mouth I regretted it. I didn’t know then that it is nearly impossible to talk to other people about their own suffering. Instead of giving up I tried again. “I know how you feel,” I said. “I’d feel the same way if I lost my best friends.”
“You don’t have any,” Hubbard said, “not like Vogel and Kirk, anyway.” He rolled onto his side so that he was facing away from me. “Nobody that close,” he said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“I just know.”
I understood that Hubbard wanted me to leave. And I was glad to get away from him. It was too late to go anywhere so I went back to my own building. It was empty. I sat down on my bunk. I thought about what Hubbard had said, that I had nobody close. It got to me, coming from Hubbard, because we should have been close after what we’d been through together, he and Lewis and I.
Anyway, it just wasn’t true.
I tried to read, but it took an effort in that big quiet room full of bunks. While I stared at the book I thought of other things. I wondered how I would hold up if I got wounded. I’d only been hurt once before, when I was eight, in a fall from a tree. My leg had been broken and I wasn’t very brave about it. For several months everyone knew exactly how uncomfortable I was at any given moment. Keith was following me in those days. After I got out of the cast I walked with a limp, and Keith began to limp, too. It drove me crazy. I used to scream at him. Once I shot him with my B-B gun, trying to make him go away—but he kept limping after me, bawling his eyes out.
The door banged open and two men came in, a little drunk. Though it was still fairly early they turned off all the lights and went to bed. I had no choice but to do the same.
For a long while I lay in the dark with my eyes open. My unhappiness made me angry, and as I became more angry I began to brood about the thief. Who was he? What kind of person would do a thing like that?
5
Lewis shuffles along the road leading out of Fort Bragg, muttering to himself and trying to hitch a ride, but he is so angry that he glares at all the drivers and they pass him up. He’s angry because he couldn’t talk his friends into going to the pictures with him. Bob Hope is his favorite actor but it’s not as much fun going alone. He thinks they owed it to him to come.
When he gets to the bottom of Smoke Bomb Hill someone in a convertible stops for him. The driver of the convertible is a teacher who works at the elementary school on post. He is nervous, shy. Lewis leans over the side of the convertible and asks him something which he can’t understand because Lewis’s voice is so loud and thick. The teacher just keeps looking straight ahead and gives a little nod.
Lewis gets in. He tells the teacher that a fellow in Lawton had a car like this one and drove it across someone’s yard one night and got his head cut off by a metal clothesline. They never did find the head, either. Lewis says he figures one of the dogs on the street got ahold of it and buried it somewhere.
He takes out a package of gum and crams four sticks in his mouth, dropping the wrappers on the floor of the car. He has unwrapped the last stick and is about to put it in his mouth when he remembers his manners and holds the gum out to the teacher. The teacher shakes his head, but Lewis stabs it at him until he takes it. When he starts to chew on it Lewis smiles and nods.
They leave the post and head toward town. The road is lined with drive-in restaurants and used-car lots advertising special deals for servicemen. American flags hang limp above the air-conditioned trailers where terms are struck, and salesmen in white shirts stand around in groups. In the early dusk their shirts seem to glow. The air smells of burgers.
The teacher sneaks a look at Lewis. Lewis says something incomprehensible and the teacher looks away quickly and nods. Lewis turns the radio on full blast and starts punching the buttons. When he doesn’t get anything he wants he spins the tuning knob back and forth. Finally he settles on a telephone call-in show. People are calling in their opinions as to whether we should drop an atomic bomb on North Vietnam.
A man says we should, right away. Then a woman gets on the line and says that she believes the average person in North Vietnam is probably a lot like the average person here at home, and that their leaders are the ones making the trouble. She thinks we should be patient, and if that doesn’t work then we should figure out a way to just bomb the leaders. Lewis chews up a storm. He watches the radio as if listening with his eyes.
He reminds the teacher of one of his students. It’s the unfinished face, the way he stares, his restlessness. He asks Lewis to turn down the radio, and as Lewis reaches for the knob the teacher notices his hand—puffed-up and livid. In the five days since Lewis’s brush with the nettles the swelling has hardly gone down at all. The teacher asks Lewis what happened to it.
Lewis holds it up in front of his face and turns it back and forth. Nettles, he says. Hurts like hell, too, and that’s no lie.
What did you put on it? the teacher asks.
Nothing, Lewis says.
Nothing?
I’m in the Army, Lewis says.
The teacher is going to say that Lewis should go on sick call, but he decides that they’ve probably bullied him into thinking there’s something wrong with that. His father was an Army officer and he knows how they do things. He feels sorry for Lewis, for being helpless and in the Army and having his hand so hideously swollen. You really should put some calamine lotion on it, he says.
Never heard of it, Lewis says.
It’s what you do for nettles, the teacher says. It eases the pain and makes the swelling go down.
I don’t know, Lewis says. I just as soon wait and see. Every time you go to the doctor it ends up they stick a needle in you.
You don’t have to go to a doctor, the teacher says. You can buy it in a drugstore. Lewis nods and looks off. The teacher can tell that he has no intention of spending his money on calamine lotion. He can almost see that hand throbbing away, getting worse and worse, and the boy doing nothing about it. Everybody uses it, he says. We’ve always got a bottle around.
The teacher is not inviting Lewis to his home. He just wants him to comprehend that calamine lotion is no big undertaking. But Lewis misunderstands. What the hell, he says, I’ll try anything once. Long as I get to the pictures by eight.
The teacher turns to explain. But there’s no way to do it without sounding like he’s backing out. Just before they reach town he pulls off on a side street bordered with pines. Almost immediately the sound of traffic dies. The nasal voice coming out of the radio seems unbearably loud and stupid. It embarrasses the teacher to belong to a species that can think such things. When he stops the car in front of the house he sits for a moment, letting the silence calm him.
They go in through a redwood gate in the back. Lewis whistles when he sees the pool, a piano-shaped pool designed by the teacher’s father, who also designed the house. The house has sliding doors everywhere with rice-paper panels. All the drawers and cabinets have brass handles with Japanese ideograms signifying “Long Life,” “Good Luck,” “Excellent Health.” The teacher’s father was stationed in Japan after the war and fell in love with Japanese culture. There’s even a rock garden in the front yard.
The house is empty. The teacher’s mother is visiting friends in California. His father died two years ago. The teacher leads Lewis to the living room and tells him to sit down. The chairs are heavy and ornately carved. The arms are dragons and the legs are bearded old men with their arms raised to look like they’re holding the seats up. Lewis hesitates, then lowers himself into the smallest chair as if that is the polite thing to do.
The teacher goes to the medicine cabinet and takes out the calamine lotion. He comes back to the living room, shaking the bottle. He gives the bottle to Lewis, but Lewis can’t open it because of his bad hand, so the teacher takes it back and twists off the cap. He gives the bottle to Lewis again, then sees that Lewis doesn’t know what to do with it. Here, the teacher says. Look. He sits in the chair across from Lewis. He pulls the chair close. He pours some lotion into his palm, then takes Lewis’s hand by the wrist and starts to work it in, over the swollen, dimpled knuckles, between the thick fingers. Lewis’s hand is unbelievably hot.
Hey! Lewis says. That feels fine. I wish I had some before.
The burning skin drinks up the lotion. The teacher shakes more out, directly onto the back of Lewis’s wrist. Lewis leans back and closes his eyes. The room is cool, blue. A cardinal is singing outside, one of three birds the teacher can identify. He rubs the lotion into Lewis’s hand, feeling the heat leave little by little, the motions of his own hand circular and rhythmic. After a time he forgets what he is doing. He forgets his stomach which always hurts, he forgets the children he teaches who seem bent on becoming brutes and slatterns, he forgets his hatred of the house and his fear of being anywhere else. He forgets his sense of being absolutely alone.
So does Lewis.
Then the room is silent and gray. The teacher has no idea when the bird stopped singing. He looks down where his hand and Lewis’s are joined, fingers interlaced. For once Lewis is still. He breathes so peacefully and deeply that the teacher thinks he is asleep. Then he sees that Lewis’s eyes are open. There is a thin gleam of light upon them.
The teacher unclasps his hand from Lewis’s hand.
I have to admit that stuff is all right, Lewis says. I might just go and buy me a bottle.
The teacher screws the cap on and holds the bottle out. Here, he says. Keep it. Go on.
Lewis takes it. Thanks, he says.
The teacher stands and stretches. I guess we’d better go, he says. You don’t want to miss that movie.
Lewis follows him out of the house. He stops for a moment by the pool, which the teacher walks past as if it isn’t there. The moon is full. It looks like a big silver dish floating on the water. Lewis puts his hand in his pocket and jingles the change.
He and the teacher don’t talk on the way to town. Lewis leans into the corner, one arm hanging over the car door and the other on top of the seat. He strokes the leather with just that tenderness his dog used to feel. In town the sidewalks are crowded. Recruits with shaved heads, as many as fifteen or twenty in a group, walk from bar to bar, pushing each other and laughing too loudly, the ones in the rear almost running to keep up. They fall silent when they come up to the clusters of prostitutes, but when they are well past they call things over their shoulders. Different groups shout at each other back and forth across the street. The lights are on over the bars, in the tattoo parlors and clothing stores, in the gadget shops that sell German helmets and Vietcong flags, Mexican throwing knives, lighters that look like pistols, exotic condoms, fireworks and dirty books. The lights flash on the hood of the convertible and along the sides of the cars they pass.
The teacher stops in front of the movie theater. He tells Lewis to be sure and use that lotion and Lewis promises he will. They wave to each other as the convertible pulls away.
The previews are just beginning. Lewis buys a jumbo popcorn and a jumbo coke and a Sugar Daddy. He sits down. A giant tarantula towers over a house. From inside a woman looks out and sees the hairy legs and screams. Lewis laughs. That’s some spider, he says out loud. The previews end and the first cartoon begins, a Tom and Jerry. Every time the cat runs into a wall or sticks his tail into a light plug Lewis cracks up. Now and then he shouts advice to the mouse. The couple in front of him move across the aisle and down. The next cartoon is a Goofy. Tinkerbell does the credits, flying from one side of the screen to the other, bringing the names out of her sparkling wand.
Tinkerbell, Lewis says. When he hears the word his stomach clenches. He gets up and walks outside. He stands under the marquee for a moment, just breathing, then runs down the sidewalk in the direction the convertible went, pushing people out of his way without regard. He runs three, four, five blocks to where the downtown ends. His eyes burn from the sweat running into them and his shirt is soaked through. He takes the bottle of calamine lotion out of his pocket and throws it into the road. It shatters. I’m no Tinkerbell, he says. He watches the cars go by for a while, balling and unballing his fists, then turns and walks back into Fayetteville to find a girl.
It is too loud, too bright. One of the women on the street smiles at him but he keeps going. He has never paid for it and he’s not about to start now. He’s never had it free either, but he came really close once at Nag’s Head and has almost managed to forget that he failed. He turns off Combat Alley and heads down a side street. The bars give out. It is quiet here. He passes the public library, a red brick building with white pillars and high windows going dark one by one. A woman holds the door as people leave, mostly old folks. Just before she locks up two girls come out, a fat one in toreador pants and another girl in shorts, her legs white as milk. They both light cigarettes and sit on the steps. Lewis walks to the corner and turns back up the street. He stops in front of the girls. This here the library? he says.
It’s closed, the fat one says.
Is that a fact, Lewis says, without looking at her. He watches the one in shorts, who is staring at her own feet and doing the French inhale with her cigarette. He can’t see her face very well except for her lips, which are so red they seem to be separate from the rest of her. Shoot, Lewis says, I wanted to get this book.
What book? the fat one asks.
Just a book, Lewis says. For college.
The two girls glance at each other. The one in shorts straightens up. She walks down the steps past Lewis and looks up the street, leaning forward and lifting up one of her long legs like a flamingo.
You’re from the post, the fat one says.
Here comes Bo, says the one in shorts. Give me another weed.
Both girls light fresh cigarettes. A car pulls up in front of the library, a ’57 Chevy full of boys. The girl in shorts sticks her head in the window. She backs away, holding a beer and laughing. The door opens. She gets in and the car peels off.
The fat girl says, She is so loose, and grinds out the cigarette under her shoe.
The car stops at the end of the block and comes back in reverse, gears screaming. The door opens again and the fat girl gets in and the car pulls away.
Lewis walks the side streets. He meets no girls, but once, passing an apartment building, he looks in a window and sees a pretty blonde woman in nothing but her panties and bra watching television. He is about to rap on the glass when a little boy comes into the room pulling a wooden train behind him and yelling his head off. The train is on its side. Without taking her eyes off the screen the woman puts the train on its wheels.
Lewis heads back to Combat Alley. There are still a couple of women on the street, but he doesn’t know how to go up to them, or what they will expect him to say. And there are all these other people walking by. Finally he goes into The Drop Zone, a bar with a picture of a paratrooper painted on the window.
Most of the prostitutes in town are reasonable women. Their reasons are their own and they aren’t charitable, but they aren’t crazy either. Mainly they want to do something easier than what they were doing before, so they try this for a while until they find out how hard it is. Then they go back to waitressing, or their husbands, or the bottling plant. Sometimes they get caught in the life, though, and there’s a time right after they know they’re caught when some of them do go crazy.
