And so together, in a borrowed basement apartment on Christopher Street—and it is necessary neither to describe the rococo fictions Laurel employs in order to spend a night away from Dr. Lieberman and Fire Island on a beautiful summer weekend, nor to dwell in any great detail upon the amatory rites performed in our incandescent little hideaway. That Laurel is a thoroughgoing adept in bed has already been made clear. She also commands a huskily vocal, hortatory, descriptive style that I find compatible with my own inclination—though I certainly need no inducement to boost a flagging appetite. But right now (and the apparatus of boudoir photography comes to mind), despite my suspicion that to employ the zoom lens would be a technique falling somewhere between the mandatory and the trendy, I must draw back, out of the feeling that such efforts will produce only another stale portrait of fornication, irrelevant and distracting. No, what stands out most clearly from this distant vantage point is not a glimpse of the tanned, entangled bas-relief of our screwing (like me, she occasionally enjoys mirrors, or professes to) but the sheer urgency, the almost amnesiac concentration I place in the service of my passion—as if by subsuming my entire self to an awareness of my groin I might obliterate the future, validate life, and triumph over the terror of extinction. Sleep is in abeyance, too time-devouring to be indulged in; we seem never to be unjoined; the light of dawn seeps through the window, mid-morning arrives, then noon. At three in the afternoon we are still at it, awash, bruised, scratched, aching, and only then do I doze for a few minutes, awaking to find her in tears as she crouches above me. “You men,” she weeps, “all the good fucking there is to be had in the world and you men blow it all to hell by going to war! There must be something wrong with you men!” And then I have one long, luscious, ferocious go at her, reaching oblivion a final time before, irrevocably, it is the moment to leave—to shower and sleepily dress, to have a lingering, gluttonous, late Sunday afternoon meal in a good Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street, and at last to meet Lacy at Penn Station just before eight o’clock. … End of scenario. Total time elapsed: seventeen hours.
But somehow it was all too much, too brutal, frantic, and there came a point when I realized that the word “suicidal”—by which even then I characterized these journeys—was not at all facetious and that in the starkest way there was contained in these desperate weekends the powerful essence of self-destruction. Returning in the car to the base on Monday morning at dawn, after a New York visit that had been especially exhausting, mainly because of this marathon venery but also because of a train that was two hours behind schedule, and because of the train itself with its heat and its sordid flatulence, its bellowing candy butchers and its relentless onslaught of shrieks from tormented babies, and because of the desolating effect of newspaper headlines announcing huge marine casualties in Korea, and because of a flat tire we had to change outside of Richmond, in pouring rain—returning this morning with a sore throat and the runny beginnings of a summer cold, I had the feeling (and I sensed Lacy’s sharing it) that rather than endure another such pilgrimage I would willingly allow myself to be sent to combat and let the Chinese get a hunk of my pelt or my balls, or even my life. I was so tired that my bones ached, forestalling real sleep, and as I half-drowsed I had become the prey of crazy hot flashes and prickly little hallucinations. I had driven the first long lap from Washington down to Emporia, Virginia, while Lacy tried to sleep; now Lacy had been driving for several hours across the Carolina tidewater, murderously forcing the Citroën to its uttermost limit as we plowed through the twilit pearly light of dawn, swirling with patches of dusty fog that breathed up out of level monotonous fields of tobacco and green cotton.
I recall vividly that I was dreaming of a raffish assembly of gnomes, garbed as in drawings from the tales by the brothers Grimm, who were holding a Bierfest in an autumn garden. They gesticulated toward me and called to me in involute German, a language of which I knew about twenty words. Fluently, I called back to them and waved a greeting, while in the midst of this delirium my eyes snapped open to behold, or sense, or somehow apprehend simultaneously, two horrors: Lacy, nodding, eyes partly shut, hands deathly limp, half asleep at the wheel—and a huge trailer truck dead ahead, nosing out into our path. I do not know—I’ll never know—how close we were to the truck, to that intersection on the outskirts of some little farming town where the red stoplight winked at us mindlessly and serenely through the mists. I do know we were so near to collision that certain details are still as clear as those startling protuberances in a trompe l’oeil painting—the truck itself, hauling bags of fertilizer, browsing through the fog like a mastodon; the Negro driver’s bare blue-black shiny elbow perched on the window ledge and the alarmed eyes of the Negro like eggshells, rolling toward us; the great red sign on the truck, VIRGINIA-CAROLINA CHEMICAL: all of these shards of recognition were for half a second separate, random, before at once becoming merged into a single terrifying image of annihilation.
“Oh shit, Lacy!” I yelled. And at that he came awake and alive, and began a herculean effort to ransom us from the grave. I still do not know how he did it; his hand spun the wheel, his foot hit the brake, and we veered awfully. I heard him gasp, heard too the scream of the tires, locked now, and my own voice repeating, “Shit, Lacy! Shit, shit, shit, oh shit!” as we lurched and yawed from side to side and skidded straight toward the trailer’s murderously glinting undercarriage, waiting to shred us into junk and bloody pulp. On and on we hurtled, squealing. I saw the Negro’s elbow go up in a wild disjointed motion and at that instant a burst of blue exhaust smoke plumed aloft from the truck’s cab. It may be that this meant that the driver’s own foot slammed down on the gas, that his own scared reflex provided the margin for the salvation of all, his included; whatever it was that saved us—his panic or Lacy’s cunning at the wheel or both, or the providence that attends innocent black truck drivers and marines fatigued to the brink of death—we squeaked through, missing the rear end of the trailer by what was clearly bare inches, and sideslipped to a jolting, vibrating halt in a weed-choked ditch. Although for long moments we were voiceless with fright, neither of us was even bruised, and the spunky Citroën had received not a nick or dent.
“Is you all right?” I heard the Negro’s voice call from up the road where he had stopped his rig.
Lacy flapped his hand in limp reassurance and after a pause shouted, “Sorry, man!” in a hoarse, broken voice. Then he put his head down against the steering wheel. I heard a muffled giggle, and what appeared to be shudders of hysteric relief coursed through his shoulders. Finally without another word he sat erect and started the car, and we proceeded again through the dawn, moving at a dignified old lady’s pace.
After several miles I managed to find words to speak, something banal and hollow like the ugly little episode itself. I cast a sidelong glance at Lacy, who for a long while had said nothing. The sensitively drawn, almost pretty face in profile had suddenly taken on a pinched and bitter cast: through the unblemished tan the boyish features were not really boyish but haggard, aging. When at last he spoke it was in a grave tone edged with anguish, and it was filled with marked, unsettling intensity, as if our dangerous escape had unloosened in him some fear long held in precarious restraint.
“I saw that motherfucking dog again,” he said.
“What dog?” I said. “Again?” For an instant I thought he might have been made temporarily addled. “Where?”
He drove on for a while without speaking. Then he said, “See that?” and held up his right hand. There small shiny mounds of scar tissue, perhaps five or six of them, traversed the palm in a ragged crescent. I had seen these marks before. Assuming they were scars from a combat wound, obviously not now incapacitating, I had never bothered to ask him how they had come about, nor had Lacy ever volunteered an explanation—until now.
“It was toward the end of the fighting on Okinawa in ’45,” he said. “I had a rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was in June, I remember, around noon on a June day and ho
tter—as an old gunny friend used to say—than the downtown part of hell. Our battalion had been on the assault for two days, trying to wipe out a dinky little town where the Japs had set up an especially strong position. They had artillery in there, a lot of heavy stuff, lot of mortars, and we’d been taking a terrible pounding. But we managed to break them down pretty well with our own big guns and several air strikes, and my company moved up, as I say, around noon, to mop up along a couple of the streets of the town.”
He paused and I saw him reflectively rub his scarred palm along the edge of his cheekbone. “Well, just as we moved out of the fields toward the edge of the village we began to get clobbered from a Jap mortar position which had somehow missed getting finished off by our guns. They were suicidal little bastards, you know—this was also along about the time of the kamikaze attacks—and they were determined to take us with them; that’s why it was such miserable fighting. Anyway, we hit the deck at the edge of the road, I slid into a shallow little ditch full of muck, and that mortar began to pound the shit out of us. It was as dirty a barrage as I’ll ever want to go through. They were zeroed in on us, firing for effect, and why or how I didn’t get hit I’ll never know. It must have gone on for a full five minutes or more when suddenly I looked up from where I was lying and saw, on the other side of the road, directly opposite and no more than four or five yards away, a big black skinny dog, standing there with his four legs sort of akimbo, simply out of his mind with fear at this bombardment going on around him.
“I must have made some sort of motion with my body then, raising up slightly. Although of course I fire from my right shoulder, I’m left-handed and was holding my carbine in my left hand, trying to keep it out of the muck. As I raised up then, the dog just flew at me from the road, and before I knew it he had his jaws clamped down and completely through the palm of my free hand. It was utterly insane, a nightmare, you see—this mortar barrage, with guys getting chopped up all around me, and here this wild terrified dog had sunk his fangs into my hand, so tight that I could not make him let go, as much as I struggled and yanked and pulled. The dog didn’t make any noise, didn’t growl, didn’t snarl, simply glared at me with these mad wet eyes and chomped away at my hand. The pain was—well, beyond description; I don’t recall whether I screamed or not. My platoon sergeant was not far away but even if he had seen all this he couldn’t have done anything, pinned down like all the rest. Ah Jesus, every time I think of it my hand begins to ache all over again.”
“What in God’s name did you do finally?” I asked.
“I knew I had to shoot the dog, but it’s damned hard to fire a carbine, you know, or at least aim it well with one hand, and besides for some dumb reason I had the weapon on safety. Yet I knew I had to shoot him. And God knows I was trying to. And I kept looking at that goddam dog, kept looking into those crazy eyes. There was something—something, well, retributive, demonic about those eyes. How can I say it? It was as if for a moment I felt I was getting in a curious way my just deserts—that this dog represented all those innocent victims who are crazed and mutilated by war and finally have to lash out at their tormentors, seizing upon the first poor uniformed slob that comes to hand. A fantasy, of course—the poor beast was simply berserk with terror—but that’s what did flash through my mind.”
“And of course you finally got him?” I said.
“Yeah,” he went on, “I finally got that carbine around, and somehow worked it off safety, and shot him through the head. It was sickening, ghastly. And after the Jap mortars slackened off and the company could move ahead it took the corpsman at least five minutes to pry that dog’s fangs out of my hand. And that was the end of the war for me, because that same afternoon I was evacuated to the rear and sent out to a hospital ship for precautionary anti-rabies treatment. It was while I was getting this long course of shots—a bloody painful business, I might add—that the campaign ended on Okinawa.”
He fell silent for a moment. We were not far now from the camp, and the early-morning traffic had begun to fill the roads—farmers in pickup trucks, tourists with Florida license plates heading north for the summer, marines commuting to work at the base. Lacy drove very slowly, and with extreme care.
“Ah God,” he said at last, in a somber, grieving tone. “We’ll never make it through this war.”
MY FATHER’S
HOUSE
ONE MORNING IN THE YEAR AFTER the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars) when I had returned to my father’s house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours, I woke up after completing a weird megalomaniacal dream. Not that I was unaccustomed to dreams touched with megalomania. A few years before, for example, when I was a writing student at college, I had a dream about James Joyce. In this particular reverie I was sitting at a café table somewhere in Europe, probably Paris, having a cup of coffee with the Master. There was no hesitancy in the way he turned his purblind gaze upon me, no embarrassment in the sudden light touch of his hand on the back of my own, nor was there anything but nearly mawkish admiration in his Hibernian brogue as he uttered these words: “Paul Whitehurst, your writing has been such an inspiration to me! Without your work I could not have finished Dubliners!”
I never thought I’d recapture the mad glee that seized me upon waking from such a cockeyed fantasy. And during the war I had no similar visitations. But the end of that exhausting conflict brought me such relief that I suppose it was inevitable that another such dream should return, rescuing my near-drowned ego. In this sequence I was seated next to Harry Truman as we cruised in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue. “Paul Whitehurst”—once again the full name, precisely enunciated—“the best advice you ever gave me was to drop the atom bomb.” Amid pennants snapping in the wind and the blare of military music, I nodded left and right to the adoring throng. “Thank you, Mr. President,” I replied. “I gave it much thought.”
And waking, I lay there for a while, helplessly disgorging cackles of laughter. At last the dream faded away, as dreams do. Then I made my mind a blank. Finally, the sound of breakfast being made was borne upstairs and I inhaled the good smell and prepared for the new day.
Except for a central drawback, which I’ll soon deal with, I was fairly contented in my father’s house. The house itself inspired a kind of contentment. My father had never been a rich man, but the war with its naval contracts had brought prosperity to the sprawling shipyard where he toiled nearly all of his life; his share in the prosperity had allowed him to move from the cramped little bungalow of my childhood to an unpretentious, comfortable, locust-shaded house whose screened porch and generous bay windows faced out on a grand harbor panorama. The enormous waterway, several miles across, was always afloat with an armada of naval ships or seabound tankers and freighters—all distant enough to be dramatic-looking rather than unsightly—and the harbor was forever being touted by the local boosters as the rival or the superior of San Francisco or Rio or Hong Kong, though to my mind they were exaggerating badly since the panorama was really too monotonous, too horizontal, to be “breathtakingly scenic,” as was claimed.
Nonetheless, it was impressive in its way. Certainly I would concede that my father had bought himself a million-dollar view—he called it that at nearly every opportunity—and so I considered the fine expanse of water, sparkling in the sun or swept by rude squalls or echoing at night with mournful horns, to be one of the more amiable bonuses of my homecoming from the war. Tidewater summers were fiercely hot and dank but the harbor often bestowed on the house an early cooling breeze—“a million-dollar breeze,” my father would say on the more hellish days. I’d awake beneath the sheet and stretch while the odor of coffee and pancakes filled my nose, and then I’d smile. What I mean is that I was conscious of making a genuine, broad, cheek-dimpling smile while I marveled over and over at my healthy living state, in which the primitive ability to smell warm pancakes and coffee was like a surprising gift. There is no mystery why these first waking moments were so
luxuriously free of anxiety, why a shiver of pleasure—no, real bliss—ran through me when I blinked awake on the sun-splashed bed, listening to the mockingbird in the locust outside my window or, farther off, the gulls and shorebirds piping over the water, a Negro flower peddler, a horse cart creaking (there were still a few horses and carts in those days, though fast vanishing), clip-clopping hooves, the cry of “Flowers, flowers!” skewering my heart as it had done when I was a child. My happiness, my bliss, was quite simple in origin: I was alive. I was alive and home in bed instead of being a moving target on the Kyushu plain, or in the rubble of an Osaka suburb, praying for one more day of life in the cauldron of a war without ending—what a miracle, what a gift! So many times, only months before, death had seemed such a certainty that my very aliveness became a recurrent marvel.
It was hard, however, to avoid a shiver of guilt when I reflected on my luck. Over three years before, when I was seventeen, bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish made me enlist in the officer training program of the Marine Corps. Since those in my age group were considerably too callow to lead troops into battle, it was decided at the Navy Department that we be sent to college, where as book-toting privates we would gain a little learning and seasoning, also a year or two of physical and mental growth, before our fateful collision with the Japs. My classmates and I, being the youngest of the young, remained uniformed college students for the longest period, while those who were only a year or so older went off for the officer training and preceded us into those terrifying island battles that marked the last stages of the Pacific war. No group among all the services had so high a casualty rate as we Marine Corps second lieutenants. This is firmly on the record. A harrowing book by an enlisted combat veteran, E. B. Sledge, called With the Old Breed, described the situation concisely: “During the course of the long fighting on Okinawa … we got numerous replacement lieutenants. They were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything about them … and saw them on their feet only once or twice. … Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare.”