He put the gun against his temple and his finger caressed the trigger. It would take so little and he could just be with the only men he cared about or could feel love for, who were most of them resting under crosses on shithole islands nobody ever heard of and would soon forget.
“Earl,” came Junie’s voice. “Earl, the car is here. Come on now, we have to go.”
Earl decocked the automatic, slipped it back into his belt, pulled the tunic tight over it, buttoned up and walked out.
2
They walked out to the car in the West Portico of the White House.
“Your last official duty as a United States Marine,” said the young captain, who seemed a good enough kid. “You should be very proud. You accomplished so much. I should salute you, First Sergeant. You shouldn’t salute me.”
“Son, don’t you worry about it,” Earl said. “You’ll git your chance, if I know the world.”
They reached the car, an olive-drab Ford driven by a PFC.
The captain opened the door for Earl and Junie.
Suddenly Earl was seized with a powerful feeling. When he got in the car, the door slammed shut, then it was all over, forever—that part of his life. A new part would start, and where it would lead he had no idea. He was not a man without fear—he’d lived with fear every day for three years in the Pacific—but the fear he felt now was different. It wasn’t a fear that threatened to overwhelm you suddenly, to drive you into panic, into letting your people down, that sometimes came under intense fire. It was deeper; it was fear down in the bones or even the soul, it was the fear of the lost. It came from far away, a long time ago.
He shook his head. The air was oppressive, like the air of the islands. The huge wedding cake of the White House office building rose on the left; around, the green grass and trees moldered in the heat. Beyond the gate, black fleets of cars rolled up and down Pennsylvania.
Earl grabbed Junie. He held her hard and kissed her harder.
“I love you,” he said. “I really, truly do. You are the best goddamn thing ever happened to me.”
She looked at him with surprise, her lipstick smeared.
“I can’t drive back,” he said. “I just can’t. Not now. I don’t feel very good. Tell the kid. I’ll see you tonight in the room, before we leave for the train.”
“Earl. You’ll be drinking again.”
“Don’t you worry about nothing,” he said with fake cheerfulness. “I’m going to take care of everything.”
If there was pain on her face, he didn’t pause to note it. He turned, reached to his neck and removed the beribboned medal, wadded it and stuffed it in his pocket. He reached the street, turned to the left and was soon among the anonymous crowds of a hot Washington late afternoon.
• • •
REDS KILL 4 MARINES IN CHINA, a headline on the Star screamed.
Nobody cared.
“UNTOLD MILLIONS” LOST IN WAR FRAUD the Times Herald roared.
Nobody paid any attention.
NATS DROP TWO yelled the Daily News.
OPA OKS 11% PRICE HIKE announced the Post.
Earl pushed his way through it all, among anonymous men in straw fedoras and tan suits and women in flower print dresses with their own huge hats. Everybody seemed so colorful. In his years in the Marine Corps he had adjusted to a basically monochromatic universe: OD and khaki and that was it. Yet America was awaking from its long commitment to wartime austerity, the windows were suddenly full of goods, you could buy gas again, makeup on the women was expected, and the men wore gay yellow ties against their white shirts, as if to speak to a springtime of hope.
The medals on Earl’s chest and the darkness of his deep blue tunic excited no attention; everybody was familiar with uniforms and the medals meant little. They’d seen heroes. Many of them were heroes. He joined their anonymity, just another nobody meandering up Connecticut toward who knows what. Soon enough he came to a splurge of freedom, which was Farragut Square, with its trees, its benches, its stern admiral staring toward the White House. Pigeons sat and shat upon the naval officer and young men and women sat on the park benches, talking of love and great hopes for tomorrow.
A low growl reached the park, and people looked up, pointing.
“Jets!”
A formation of the miracle planes flew high overhead, southwest to northeast, each of the four trailing a white feathery contrail, the sunlight flashing off the sleek silver fuselages.
Earl had no idea what specific type of plane they were and found the concept of a silver airplane fairly ridiculous. In the Pacific, the Japs would zero a bright gleamy bird like that in a second, and bring it down. Planes were mottled brown or sea-blue, because they didn’t want you seeing them until they saw you. They weren’t miracles at all, but beaten-up machines for war, and there were never enough of them around. But these three P-whatevers blazed overhead like darts, trailing a wall of sound, pulling America toward something new. Pretty soon, it was said, they’d be actually going faster than sound.
“Bet you wish you had them babies with you in Berlin,” a smiling bald guy said to him. “You’d have cooked Hitler’s ass but good, right, Sarge?”
“That’s right,” said Earl.
He walked ahead, the echo of the jets still trembling in his ear. The walls of the city closed in around him, and the next exhibit in the freak show of civilian life was something in a window just ahead, which had drawn a crowd. It appeared to be a movie for free streaming out of a circle atop a big radio. On its blue-gray screen a puppet jigged this way and that.
“Look at that, sir,” said a Negro woman in a big old hat with roses on it and a veil, “that’s the television. It’s radio with pictures.”
“Don’t that beat all?” said Earl.
“Yes sir,” she said. “They say we-all goin’ own one, and see picture shows in our own homes. Won’t have no reason to go out to the movies no more. You can just stay home for the picture show. They goin’ show the games there too, you know, the baseball and that like. Though who’d stay home to see the Senators, I declare I don’t know.”
“Well, ma’am,” he said, “the president himself told me it’s just going to git better and better.”
“Well, maybe so. Wish my Billy was here to see it.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. The war?”
“Yes sir. Someplace in Italy. He wasn’t no hero, like you, he didn’t win no medals or nothing. He was only a hospital orderly. But he got kilt just the same. They said it was a land mine.”
“I am very sorry, ma’am.”
“Hope you kilt a lot of them Germans.”
“No, ma’am, I did fight the Japanese, and I had to kill some of them.”
“Same thing,” she said bitterly, then forced a broken smile upon him, and walked away.
Billy’s death on some faraway Neapolitan byway stayed with Earl. Billy was part of the great adventure, one of the hundreds of thousands who’d died. Now, who cared? Not with jet planes and the television. It was all going away.
Get your mind off it, he told himself.
He was feeling too much again. He needed a drink.
He walked along until he found stairs that led downward, which he followed into a dark bar. It was mostly empty and he bellied up to the edge, feeling the coolness of the air.
A jukebox blared.
It was that happy one about going for a ride on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. That damn Judy sounded like she was about to bust a gut with pleasure. A train ride. A big old fancy train ride.
Back in Ohio where I come from
I’ve done a lot of dreamin’ and I’ve traveled some,
But I never thought I’d see the day
When I ever took a ride on the Santa Fe.
The only trains he remembered took him to wars or worse. Now he had a few hours that would take him back to a train ride to—well, to who knew what?
“Poison, Sarge? Name it, and it’s yours. One drink, on me for the USMC. Made a man out of my son. Killed
him, but made a man out of him.”
It was the bartender.
“Sorry about your boy,” said Earl, confronting another dead man.
“Nah. Only good thing he ever did was stand up to the Japs at Okinawa. You there?”
“Missed that one.”
“Well, he was a bad kid, but he had one good day in his life, when he didn’t run from the goddamned Japs. Marines taught him that. I never could. God bless the Marines. What’ll it be?”
“You carry Boone County?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Must just be an Arkansas liquor. Okay, I’ll try that Jim Beam. With a bit of water. Some ice.”
“Choo choo ch’boogie,” said the barkeep, mixing and serving the drink. “Here’s your train, right on time.”
Earl took a powerful sip, feeling the muted whack of the booze. It made his fears and his doubts vanish. He felt now he was the equal of the world.
“No, he wasn’t no good,” said the bartender. “Don’t know why he was such a yellow kid. I rode him but good, but he ran from everything. How he ended up in—”
“Mister,” said Earl, “I much appreciate this here free drink. But if you say a Marine who stood and fought on Okinawa was no good one more time, I’m going to jump over this bar and make you eat this glass, then the bar, then all the stools.”
The bartender, a very big man, looked at him, and read the dark willingness to issue endless violence in Earl’s eyes, and swallowed. Earl was a big man too, made almost of leather from his long hard years under a Pacific sun. He was dark and glowery, with leathery pouches under his eyes from too much worry, but he had a bull’s neck and those eyes had the NCO’s ability to look through you and pin you to the wall behind. His jet-black hair was close-cropped but stood up like barbs of wire on his skull. Under his tunic, his rangy body, though full of holes, was well packed with lean muscle. His veins stood out. His voice didn’t speak so much as rumble or roar along, like the Santa Fe. Heated up, he would be a fearsome sight and then some. When he spoke in a certain tone, all men listened, as did the bartender now.
The bartender stepped back a bit.
“Look, here’s a twenty,” Earl said, peeling off his last big bill. “You put the bottle on the bar, then you go be with some other folks. You can tell them how bad your son was. You can’t say it to me.”
The bottle came; the bartender disappeared.
• • •
Earl worked on the bottle; the bottle worked on Earl. By the time it was a third gone, he was happy: he had forgotten who he was and why he was there. But by the time he reached the halfway point again, he remembered.
Choo choo ch’boogie, came another train song off the juke, driving rhythms, so full of cheer and hope it made him shiver.
I just love the rhythm
of the clickety-clack
Take me right back
to the track, Jack.
Trains again. What he remembered about trains was they took him to ships and then the ships took him out into the sea.
He remembered the ’Canal, that time it got to hand-to-hand, and he and his young boys on the ridge were fighting the Japs with entrenching tools and knives and rocks and rifle butts. There was no ammo because the planes hadn’t come in weeks. The Japs were crazy then; they came in waves, one after the other, knowing the Marines were low on ammo, and just traded lives for ammo until the ammo was gone. Then it was throat-and-skull time, an exertion so total it left you dead or, if you made it through, sick at yourself for the men whose heads you’d split open, or whose bellies you ripped out, or who you’d kicked to death. And you looked around and saw your own people, just as morally destroyed. What you did for something called your country that night! How you killed! How you gave your soul up!
Then, Tarawa. Maybe the worst single moment of the whole thing: oh, that walk in was a bitch. There was no place to go. The bullets splashed through the water like little kids in an Arkansas lake, everywhere. Tracers looped low overhead, like ropes of light, flickery and soft. You were so low in the water you couldn’t see the land or your own ships behind you. You were wet and cold and tired and if you slipped you could drown; your legs turned to lead and ice but if you stopped you died and if you went on you died. You tried to keep your people together, keep them moving, keep them believing. But all around you, men just disappeared until it seemed you were alone on the watery surface of the planet and the Japs were a nation hell-bent on one sole thing: killing you.
Earl blinked away a shudder, took another pure gulp of this here Jim Beam, as it was called. Fine stuff. He looked at his watch. He had a trip upcoming on the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, but where it would take him and why, he couldn’t remember.
Iwo, in the bunker. That he would never forget.
He killed his way along Charlie-Dog. His flamethrower people hadn’t made it. The captain was hit. There was no cover, because you couldn’t dig into the ash; it just caved in on you. He jumped into a nest, hosed it with his tommy. The bullets flew and bit into the Japs. It blew them up, tore them apart. Earl had blood on his face, Jap blood. But he kept going, nest to nest, shooting up the subsidiary positions until he’d finally killed his way to the main blockhouse.
It was secured from within. On top of that he had no weapon, as the tommy had become so fouled with ash and blood it had given up. He could hear the Nambus working from the other side of the blockhouse.
He raced back to the nest he’d just cleared, threw a Jap aside and pulled three grenades off his belt. The Jap things, you banged them to arm them. He grabbed them, ran to the metal blockhouse door, banged them hard and dumped them. He was back dragging the Nambu out from under more dead Japs when the triple concussion came.
The next part was hard to remember, but also hard to forget. He was in the blockhouse. Give this to the Japs, goddamn were they soldiers. They fought to the end, pouring fire out off Charlie-Dog, killing every moving thing they saw. They would die to kill: that was their code. Earl jumped from room to room, or rather chamber to chamber, for the place had a low, dark insect-nest quality to it, and it stunk: shit, blood, food, fear, sweat, old socks, rot, rice. He jumped into a chamber and hosed it down. But he didn’t know the Nambu was loaded up with tracers.
When he fired in the smoky darkness, the blue-white tracers tore through all, struck hard surfaces and bounced and bounced again, crazed and jagged. Each squirt on the trigger unleashed a kind of neon structure of pure light, blue-gray, flickery, flung out to embrace the Japs, far more power with the careening bullets than he’d have thought possible. It was like making lightning.
He raced from chamber to chamber, pausing to change magazines on the hot thing in his hands. Odd gun: the mag locked in top, not on the bottom where it would make some sense. It was no BAR; only guys who dreamed up samurai swords and kamikaze planes and human-wave attacks would have cooked up such a silly, junky thing. It even looked slant-eyed. But it worked, always.
In the last room, they waited for him with the predator’s eerie calmness. They were out of ammo. He didn’t care. They didn’t care. What happened they expected, as did he. They faced him; one had a sword out and high, but no room to maneuver in what amounted to a sewer tunnel, illuminated by a gun slit. He sprayed them with light and they danced as their own 6.5s tore through them. When they were down, he changed magazines, sprayed them again, unleashing the lightning. Then he threw the hot little machine gun away.
Earl looked at what he had wrought: a massacre. It was too easy. The Japs were committed elsewhere, their eardrums blown out by the shelling, and the gunfire, their sense of duty absolute. He merely executed them in a sleet of fiery light. He heard a moan from the last chamber and thought: one is alive. But then he heard a clank, meaning that a grenade had been primed, so out he spilled, maybe a tenth of a second before the detonation which shredded the last of the wounded.
He returned to the surface, clambering for breath. Men from his platoon had made it up Charlie-Dog now that the
blockhouse guns were silenced, but if they spoke to him, he didn’t hear, for his ears too were temporarily ruined by the ringing.
“Burn it out,” he screamed.
One of the flamethrower teams disinfected the blockhouse with a cleansing two-thousand-degree ray of pure heat; the radiance drove them all back.
The captain was saying, Goddamn he never saw nothing like it, except the captain was from something called Yale and so what he said in that odd little-girl voice of his was “I don’t believe I have ever seen a more splendid example of field-expedient aggression.” Or something like that.
Earl and his bottle took one more dance. It hit him again, and drove the thoughts out of his head, but then the thoughts came back again.
What was bothersome was the faces. They were vanishing. In one melancholy afternoon in the hospital on Guam after the bad wound on Iwo, he’d done the arithmetic, learned its savage truth.
He had been a sergeant in the Second Marines, then a platoon sergeant also in the Second, and the company gunny sergeant in the Second. When the new Fifth Marine Division was organized in September 1944, he’d been assigned to its 28th Regiment and promoted to first sergeant of Able Company. He had a total of 418 young Marines under him and had been directly responsible to three lieutenants, a captain and finally a major. Of those, 229 had been killed outright. The rest had been wounded, including himself, seven times, three times savagely. None of the officers survived. Of his NCO friends with whom he served at the Marine Detachment in Panama on December 7, 1941, he was the only survivor. Of the company professionals, including officers, from that day, he was the only survivor. Of his first platoon in the Second Marines, on Guadalcanal, he was one of ten survivors; of his company that went into the water off Tarawa, 232 men, he was one of thirty-three survivors; of his company of 216 men that hit the black-ash beach at Iwo, he was one of 111 survivors, but he had no idea how many of them had been wounded seriously. On Tinian and Saipan the numbers were a little better, but only by the standards of the Pacific war.
He knew he should not be alive, not by any law of math, and that the medals he had been awarded were much more for the brute violation of the numbers than for any kind of heroism. Manila John Basilone, the bravest man he ever knew, won the Medal of Honor on a ridge on the ’Canal, stopping a Jap attack with a .30 water-cooled and a fighting spirit and nothing else; he made a bond tour, became a celebrity, married a pretty gal, and was blown to pieces in the black ash of Iwo that first day.