Once an Eagle

  He had just reached the back steps of the mess hall when the reaction hit him. She could have died. A few hours ago. Before I got back. She might have died …

  The fear pierced his vitals like a steel splinter. He found he had sunk onto the bottom step, was gripping the worn wood with both hands. The very idea of losing her loomed before him like a gale of endless night. Thank God, he muttered inaudibly. Oh thank God—

  There was a step on the porch. He turned. Sergeant Swicka’s square, blunt face was leaning out around the screen door. “You all right, Lieutenant?”

  “Hello, Steve. Yes, I’m all right …”

  “You don’t look so good right now.”

  “No,” he said. “No, no, I’m fine.” Swicka’s solicitous expression, his bristling black hair like a porcupine’s quills made him want to laugh, but he couldn’t. Oh, thank God, he cried to himself in a sick ecstasy of relief, nothing matters as long as nothing happened to her. Nothing else matters at all.

  3

  “The Rivayra!—gee, it must have been keen,” Mae Lee Cleghorne said, and her flat Oklahoma voice throbbed with emotion. “What was it like? Tell me.”

  “Oh, it’s very sunny, and gay,” Tommy Damon answered. “With grand hotels along the waterfront—in Cannes it’s called La Croisette—all white and black with turrets and things … I wasn’t there very long, you know. A little less than a month.”

  “A month in a place like that—that’s forever!” Mae Lee cried. “Gosh, I’d give anything if we could get to Europe.” She was a thin, nervous girl with straw-colored hair combed back from her forehead and fastened in a sort of tousled topknot. At the moment she was seven months pregnant, and the long, tight swell of her belly gave her a pitiful, anemic look. “Jack put in for Tientsin—you know, the Fifteenth. Jack says in Tientsin you rate a number one and a number two boy and a coolie and an amah. Imagine! But they say nobody draws China except a few favored people … Rusty!” she shouted, and a little towheaded boy playing near the edge of the buffalo grass turned and called, “What?”

  “Come here to Mama.”

  Rusty stared at her resentfully. “I’m playing tractor …”

  “All right. Don’t you go any further than that, now.—Look at him,” she said to Tommy. “He looks like he’s just come in off the reservation. I’ve got to get his hair cut.” She sighed. “Boy, I wouldn’t mind having one of those amahs around the old plantation. I’m so sick of washing and mending I could spit.” Eagerly, a little deferentially she asked: “Do you think we’ve got any chance for China?”

  “Sure, you do. Half of it is the luck of the draw, anyway … ”

  “How is it your daddy hasn’t asked for Sam, honey? Doesn’t he want to go out there?”

  Tommy frowned, her eyes on her sewing. “I don’t imagine the AG’s office would take a very happy view of that,” she said, a little more tartly than she’d meant to. “Besides, Sam would never ask it of Poppa. You know Sam: he’d never ask favors of anyone.”

  “I know … He’s so proud. Only trouble, there’s such a thing as being too high-crested in this world. I mean, what’s the good of it if it lands you out in a place like this?”

  “You’ve got a point,” Tommy said. “You’ve certainly got a point, Mae Lee.”

  The two women were sitting on the Damons’ cramped porch—it was too narrow for four to sit on it except in a row, like the inmates of some old folks’ home—sewing and keeping an eye on their offspring. Donny was perched on a blanket waving his arms and crowing at Rusty, who was pushing a little iron fire engine through the dust and rubble, making harsh barking noises. Beyond them the land swept out and out—a faintly uptilting expanse furred with grass and dotted with squat black clumps of mesquite and chaparral. Tommy gazed out at it, her eyes narrowed from the glare, hating its pitiless, arid force. Fort Hardee had been by almost any standards a hardship tour, but Fort Dormer was worse. It lay a hundred and fifty miles southeast of El Paso, sunk deep in desert. Their quarters were two tiny rooms with concrete floors and adobe walls, this tiny porch and a sort of lean-to tacked onto the back of the structure which served as the kitchen. The wind blew for days, a thin, high moan like the keening of dead souls, and the sagebrush and wild indigo tumbled endlessly over the desert floor; red dust sifted in and over and through everything—food and clothing and the scraps of furniture they’d brought down from Hardee. Lizards raced along the woodwork uttering their chittering war cries, snakes crawled up the icebox drainpipes, scorpions dropped from the ceilings and writhed about on the cold, damp floor, whipping their terrible curled tails. The land drifted away toward Mexico and the end of time—a sink of desert harboring an infinity of loneliness and despair. It was not quite America—and it certainly was not overseas. A limbo. Another limbo in the great American wasteland, only worse; for while Fort Dormer could boast a vivid past abounding in crafty Indian attacks and the tenacious, indomitable figure of General George Crook, it was able to offer very little in the way of a future: it had no post movies, the commissary was poorly run, and the commandant, a dour little Presbyterian minister’s son named Howden, took a dark view of the frivolities attendant on the Saturday night hops. Sam had been elated when he’d first been informed of the change of station—he was told he would command a company; but in two months a captain was assigned to the battalion, and Sam had had to give way …

  Only half listening to Mae Lee, Tommy watched Donny crawling about on the blanket, his head bobbing up and down. It was nine o’clock, and the sun hadn’t yet begun to burn oppressively, but already the desert shimmered and rippled in the heat waves. Cruel country: country without water was cruel country. Men weren’t meant to live there—she’d noticed that only hard-bitten, implacable natures, true solitaries, responded to it. Lieutenant Colonel Pownall’s wife, who was brought up in the Big Bend, had said to her at one of the post teas: “There’s only two kinds moved in down here: good tough and bad tough: but whichever, they’re all tough!” She’d laughed softly, and her dusty slate eyes had rested for a moment on Tommy. “This country’s hard on people: it runs through them, in a manner of speaking …”

  “I keep feeling if we could just get away,” Mae Lee was saying to her now. “Some place totally different—foreign and, you know, exotic. Jack wouldn’t be so restless: he might become more—satisfied with things. More attentive, the way he used to be. He’s so touchy!” She laughed, too volubly, and her eyes darted around the porch. “He’s been acting so different lately, I don’t know what to make of him. Mama always told me it’s human nature for men to lose interest, but I never believed her …”

  Tommy frowned. One of the things she disliked about post life was the incessant intimacy among army wives: the confidences, the unburdenings, the gossip—and the inexorable division of this narrow, isolated world into hostile forts of trapped, put-upon women and carefree, self-indulgent men. You could tell by the changed tone when one of these sessions was beginning. Yet here was this waif of a girl, obviously troubled by her husband’s increasing lack of interest; it was a genuine fear, she was seeking help, reassurance. Was there any? Tommy had watched it happen in the year they’d been at Dormer. Jack had enlisted in that last rush of hometown fervor before the war had ended; they had met at a dance that fall—Mae Lee had told her the story half a dozen times. They were married in a military wedding asparkle with all the fairy-tale panoply of crossed swords and a white tower of a cake and soft shadows under the magnolia trees, and the punctilious babble of an officers’ club reception… and in the middle of it all stood Mae Lee, starry-eyed at her rare good fortune. She could leave that grim little Oklahoma town and her mother’s soured litany of disparagement and denial, and dwell in a clarion land of receptions and dances and parades. A new life …

  Now, five years later, under the hard, shadowless sky of west Texas, the sea change had come. Jack Cleghorne, fresh out of Arkansas, had seen still another world—one in which Mae Lee was no longer the sum and substance of his dreams.
He had met women from the subtler, more sophisticated cities of the North and East; and they filled him with a restless hunger. He danced with them, brought them coffee or punch, his romantic eyes sharp with longing. They had seen so much, they possessed graces so far beyond anything he had ever known; and here he was, marooned in a border station, tramping a somber treadmill of marches, inspections, drill. Ambition, hot reveries consumed him. He had missed the war to end war through no fault of his own, he was still a second lieutenant pinned far behind the promotion hump—and nothing reminded him of all that so much as Mae Lee’s fearful deference, her flat Oklahoma gaucherie.

  Yet he was a good man, Tommy knew; he was neither small nor vicious. He would not leave Mae Lee; he would not philander—at least not yet. Now he took his nagging restlessness out in field problems, in the company ball team Sam ran, where he played an aggressive third base. He was through with Mae Lee really, that was the trouble; he had outstripped her in a few short years. All that was needed was an Irene Keller to break it open. There was one on every post—vivid, high-strung, a superb rider and dancer, drawing the junior officers around her like flies, her eyes glittering with that peculiar inward glare … Mae Lee had sensed all of this in a dumb, intuitive way; recoiling from its terrifying implications she had sought solace elsewhere. Now she was pregnant again—an event she publicly deplored, knowing the additional drain on Jack’s meager pay another child would be. It had been instinctual: Jack had been attentive and affectionate to her before, when she was carrying Rusty; why shouldn’t he be again? But he wasn’t; this time he was moody and irascible.

  Tommy glanced at the girl. Her cheeks looked white and drawn; there were great strokes of fatigue under her eyes. Oh God, she’ll begin to weep now, she thought crossly; if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s weepy women: can’t they get a grip on themselves? Then in the next instant she felt an overpowering rush of affection.

  “Oh well, men,” she said aloud finally; her voice was flatter, more callous than she’d intended. “They’ve got their own world, they go their own way. The plain truth of the matter is we were biologically mousetrapped. From the start … Men don’t ever stick with anything, for the simple reason they don’t have to. There aren’t any consequences. We’ve got the consequences, all of them, and they know it and it makes them feel guilty, so they go running off and fire rifles or blow up old tar-paper shacks or throw a baseball at each other as hard as they can. It gives them the illusion they’re doing something grand … ”

  She trailed off, fuming; she felt she was being disloyal to Sam with this headlong tirade, but at the moment she couldn’t help it; it seemed true enough. What were they doing, right now? Sitting around in the company office probably, telling each other raunchy jokes or reminiscing about dear old Corned Willy Hill, while their devoted spouses were mending and washing clothes and watching over their precious offspring. “The whole system is rigged,” she ranted on. “They doll themselves up in all those stars and bars to make themselves feel important—it’s ego building pure and simple. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and good fellowship and all that drivel—”

  She broke off in distress. Mae Lee was crying now, great shiny tears that dripped onto the apple green pongee dress she’d let out and let out until it looked like a shiny old tent.

  “—Tommy, he doesn’t care about me anymore at all …”

  “Of course he does.”

  “It’s Major Keller’s wife. He’s—he’s attracted to her.” The girl’s eyes were large and hollow with fear; hanging on her with desperate hope. “What am I going to do?”

  “It’s nothing,” she heard herself say, “she’s always making a play for every man in sight.”

  “At the hop two weeks ago. She was dancing with him.”

  “Sweetie, he’s got to dance with her—so does Sam. It’s a duty dance.”

  “Not that way. And Jack was—responding …”

  “Irene Keller is a—well, we know what she is.”

  “He’s fallen in love with her. Just head over heels …”

  “No he hasn’t, honey.” Tommy was out of her chair and had her arm around the girl now, rocking her gently. “Now, you’re just worn down from carrying the baby and you’ve got everything all out of proportion. Jack’s a fine boy—he’s just wound up over the change in battalion COs. Sam’s the same way, they’ve got these things on their minds. Just the other evening Jack was telling me what a wonderful help you’ve been to him this past year …” Gently she soothed her, thinking: God forgive me, what the hell, they’re lies in a good cause. “Go on in and take a nap and you’ll feel better. I’ll watch Rusty.”

  “No. It’s not fair.”

  “Sure it is. Of course it is. I’ll wake you at eleven thirty. Okay?”

  “Thanks, Tommy. I didn’t mean to come all apart like this.” Mae Lee heaved herself up and waddled off around the porch to the Cleghornes’ quarters next door.

  The important thing was to keep busy. Occupy your mind—and if you couldn’t do that, occupy your hands. She went out into the yard and changed Donny and put his sun hat back on his head; he promptly pulled it off. The fire engine Rusty was playing with kept losing its rear wheels, the cotter pin that held the axle was gone; she took a hairpin and put it through the hole and bent it back on itself so it would hold, at least until Jack could fix it properly. She finished her mending, went back out on the porch and started working on the new couch cover. The heat was solider now; the wind out of Mexico had a dry, relentless pressure. Time floated by. A bugle blew, a detail of men was drilling on the parade ground; she could hear the voices, muffled by distance, the hesitation and pounce of the commands: “Col’m-layff … harrrr! col’m-layff … harrr!”

  She found herself staring at the tremendous sweep of desert with a kind of humorous amazement. Why was she doing this? What on earth had caused her to fall back into the identical world she had grown up in? Why couldn’t she have married an archaeologist, a rajah, a businessman like her Uncle Edgar? Well yes, love: you fell in love with a man and you followed him on into life. But why had she chosen to fall in love with Sad Sam Damon? Was there some higher law we all obeyed unwittingly? Doc Terwilliger, back at Hardee, said it was nothing more or less than the destiny of the human animal: we sought unerringly the familiar trail, repeated our patterns, good and bad, with all the witless absorption of our hairy-faced, bare-buttocked ancestors: we chose our own poison. Was life nothing more than a lazy, elliptical traverse back upon our own origins—were we only flying a great circle? Had the cadences of drum and bugle burned their way into her soul so deeply she could never erase them?

  Passing the needle rapidly, evenly along the hem she thought about her mother. One scene she remembered clearly: there was a bright, hot space framed by the greenish yellow scarves and wings of jungle. A man in a gay blue skirt and vest and a bright yellow headcloth had come forward with a slow, undulating walk, like a man dancing in a dream. His skin was a coppery gold and his slanted eyes glittered. Two men behind him were bare-chested, with massive gold bracelets on their arms; they carried curved knives that flashed in the sun. One of them was holding a tasseled purple parasol over the first man’s head as they moved. And then there was Poppa, looking very thin and straight in his tight-fitting khaki uniform; he walked right up to the man in yellow; he bowed, and they shook hands, and the wall of men at the edge of the jungle roared and shook their spears and swords. “That’s the Sultan, dear,” her mother was saying. “The Sultan of Palamangao.” Out on the oily water red-and-blue boats slid by with copper-colored pirate sails, and deep in the jungle a gong struck once, again—a thin, quavering sound that made her neck prickle. The Sultan of Palamangao. Her mother was holding her up so she could see. And then, filled with delight at the dancing, pirouetting figures, the bright silk robes and parasols and swords, she felt her mother’s arms trembling; and twisting around quickly saw she was afraid …

  She peered out into the glare of the yard. Donny had
been talking to himself—a chortling recitative that grew into crowing excitement. She expected to see Rusty teasing him, but the Cleghorne boy was crouched several feet away near the edge of the grass pushing his engine along. Donny was sitting bent forward on his blue-and-white patch of blanket, clapping his hands at a speckled section of hose whose end seemed to be hanging from the clothesline. But the clothesline was five feet away. And then all at once the piece of hose moved and her eyes focused on the flat, square-snouted head.

  She gave a quick, taut gasp.

  The snake shifted his head to the right, to the left again, uncertain, puzzled by the small, chuckling creature, the waving hands.

  “Oh,” she said. “Donny—”

  He paid no attention; he was absorbed in this gliding, beguiling pattern of brown-and-white diamonds that moved without moving. He laughed, his bare round head waggling. She had come to her feet. She started forward in a lurch, checked herself. The snake was too near, she was too far away. To run to the blanket would be bad: it would coil and strike before she could get to Donny and pick him up, and there would be nothing she could do. Again she started to move, and stopped. Donny was quieter now. The snake’s sudden immobility had bored him; he was gazing up at the sky. She felt cold and hollow and filled with a sickly, foaming substance that had caught in her throat. She looked around wildly once. Rusty was moving away from the snake, unaware of it. There was no one to call. Anywhere around. She must do it alone. Herself.