Robert B. Parker (6 page)

I squatted beside her in a bathing suit and T-shirt. My nose was peeling. “We love each other,” I said. “We are supposed to stay together.”

Jennifer’s bathing suit was blue and strapless with white piping. “Oh, come on, Boonie,” she said. “You were having a nice time over there, and I couldn’t stand Billy’s date so I went over with Bobbi and John and those people. It’s not like I ran off with someone.”

I still squatted, shaking my head a little. “Then tell me and I’ll go with you, but don’t leave me. We’re supposed to be together.”

Jennifer’s face showed that hint of fine puzzlement that I’d seen before. “But Billy’s your friend. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

I sat down on the rough rock beside her and put my arms around her and pulled her against me and we went over and lay on our sides, facing. “Doesn’t matter, friends, hurt, not hurt, mother, father, anything. Only you and I matter. You have to understand that. Only you and I. Nothing else. Nothing.” And I kissed her and she kissed me back in the baking sun at the edge of the Atlantic.

The letter was on Colby stationery, Office of the Dean. It said: “Dear Mr. Adams, I regret to inform you that your academic record is unsatisfactory. Your personal conduct has been disruptive, and thus can hardly
mitigate in your favor. I am therefore compelled to inform you that we cannot accept you as a student here at Colby for the fall semester. If you have questions about this decision, or need help in pursuing a course of study and conduct whereby you might be reconsidered in the spring semester, please call my secretary, or come to my office and make an appointment to see me. I regret this decision, as you must, but your scholarship and citizenship, or more accurately lack of both, leave me no other choice. Sincerely, Casper A. Brady, Dean.” … They drafted me in August.

The bus took ten hours to go from the Boston army base to Fort Dix Induction Center. We got to bed at 3:45 and were up at five standing, still in civilian clothes, in ragged rank in the company street.… Each time the M1 fired, its recoil jammed my right thumb against my right cheekbone. After three days on the range the cheek was puffy and sore with a faint purple tinge to it. “Lock and load,” one of the range cadre yelled. “One round ball ammunition.” We were sprawled in the prone position on the cold gravel. Next to me a kid from Brooklyn named Garfi murmured, “Lock and load your fucking ass.” I fired on command and the thumb banged against my puffy cheek and the bright brass casings looped sequentially out to the right.

Long, partitioned desks painted OD, the burble of dits and dahs in my earphones meant nothing. “Use some word tricks, asshole,” the instructor said. “What’s S sound like?” All fifty of us responded in derisive, bored, and hostile unison. “Chickenshit, sir.” With his hands on his
hips and his fatigues starched and his blue combat infantryman’s badge pinned over his pocket, the instructor said, “Right, assholes. You better fucking remember it when you go to frozen Chosan, ’cause it’s two-thirds of SOS. What’s Q sound like?” Again the unison response. “Here comes the bride.” The instructor smiled widely. “Very good, fuckballs, listen to it.” He pressed his key and the sound came through my earphones, dah, dah, dit, dah.

We sat together on her mother’s couch. I had a diamond ring in my pocket. “I’m going to Fort Lewis, Washington,” I said, “to a repple-depple.”

Jennifer’s head was on my shoulder. “A what?”

I squeezed her. “All us GIs talk that way. A replacement depot. Means I’m going to the Far East.”

Outside, the late fall rain rushed down and the wind that was with it made the bare tree branches toss. The streetlight that lit the room threw heaving shadows across it.

“Does that mean Korea?”

I shrugged, struggling to be manly. “Probably, that’s where the war is. But it could be Japan, or Okinawa.”

Jennifer’s voice was small. “I don’t want you to go.”

I didn’t say anything. The shadows tossed about the room and the rain sheeted against the windows.

“I know you don’t want to get married till I come back,” I said. I could barely talk. It would be a year or more without her. If I didn’t get killed. I wouldn’t get killed. “But”—I took the ring out of my pocket—“how about you wear this while I’m gone?”

She looked at the ring that I held out and didn’t take it. She said, “Oh, Boonie.”

I held it out in front of her. She stared.

“You’re not going to call up Nick Taylor and ask him to come get you, are you?” I said.

Her face shifted from the ring to me. It was more serious than I’d ever seen it.

“Try it on,” I said.

She did, slowly, and then held it out and admired it on her hand. “Oh, Boonie,” she said. The ring was too big, but I knew it could be fixed. It had belonged to my grandmother.

“We can have it reset if you want.”

She looked at the ring and again at me. “Boonie,” she said, “I can’t.”

Outside, the wind drove the rain persistently against the windows. From the kitchen I heard the refrigerator cycle on. “Do you love me?” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. But you have to trust that, just trust it without trying to tie me to you.”

In the far corner of the living room was a baby grand piano. Jennifer’s high school graduation picture stood on it in a gold-trimmed leather frame. Very glamorous, long hair, head tilted back, gazing upward in profile. The clock on the mantel said ten of nine. But it wasn’t. The clock wasn’t wound. It always said ten of nine.

“Will you marry me when I come back?” I said.

“I will love you while you’re gone, and love you when you come back,” she said.

I put out my hand and she took off the ring and put it on my upturned palm. I folded my hand slowly over it and put the ring in my pocket. My eyes burned.

“I gotta walk,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

We put on raincoats and she put a kerchief over her head and we walked in the rushing downpour for an hour in near perfect silence. The rain on my face helped hide the fact that I was crying. I kissed her good-bye at her door.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you understand?” she said.

“No.”

The troop ship was awash with vomit. It was ankle deep in the heads and it made the ladders slippery and sloshed along the deck. Sometimes I was the only one in the mess hall, eating by myself while even the cooks and servers were sick. Not being sick, I had a lot of time to think. Leaning on the rail, staring at the empty Pacific, at night trying to sleep in the bunks stacked five high in compartments jammed with duffel, working ration-breakdown details in the hold, I thought about Jennifer and about me. There was no mail, of course, and nineteen days across the Pacific I thought about her and feared there’d be no mail when we got to Pusan. There wasn’t. But the first letter caught up with me in Pusan, and two more reached me when I was permanently assigned. Things were the same at college. She missed me. She was going to the Bowdoin game that Friday night in Brunswick. She’d write again as soon as she got my new address. And she did. She wrote two or three letters a week, not very long, not very interesting; away from her, unadorned by the
force of her person, her disembodied language tended to be general and colorless. She’d gotten a B+ in an exam. The basketball team lost to Bowdoin. Also to Maine. She saw Guze sometimes, and Billy Murphy. They said hi. She had a date for the spring dance. No one I knew, a transfer from Cornell. Nice guy. Didn’t mean anything, just someone to go with. I wrote her every day. We were working eight on and eight off, on the radios. I wrote whenever traffic was slow. Letters about how much I loved her, about what Korea was like, about what a bunker looked like and what artillery sounded like and how a communications platoon runs; letters about the pink-cheeked boy from Wyoming they’d put in charge of the platoon, letters about what life would be like when I came home and when we got married and what we’d call our children, and please don’t go out with other people it depresses me too much. I know we agreed but I can’t stand it, ten thousand miles away, I think about you all the time. I knew it wouldn’t work when I wrote it. I knew in fact that it would work the wrong way. She’d continue to go out but she wouldn’t tell me anymore. Her letters made no further mention of dating.

After a few months of eight on and eight off I could take and receive Morse code at twenty words a minute while carrying on another conversation. The pink-cheeked platoon leader came to understand that he knew nothing about operating a radio and nothing about running wire and calmed down and got out of the way. The truce came in early summer and my regiment settled in along the Imjin River. The war ended with me alive. All I had to do was sweat out the tour and go home. Jennifer had worked the summer in a resort hotel as a waitress.
Her parents were a little embarrassed, she said, they thought it was quite blue collar, but it got her away from home for the summer and gave her freedom. Sometimes when I wrote her I sent her short stories I’d composed about us, or thinly disguised versions of us. I was always her hero; she was always feminine and yielding, needing me. When I got out I’d be different; I’d learned a lot about what was important and what wasn’t. We could live in vets apartments and I could finish school on the G.I. Bill, then I’d write and we could have kids. I thought Michael and Meredith would be good names.

In the middle of her senior year, a month and a half into the Korean winter, Jennifer wrote to say that she and the guy from Cornell had gotten pinned. She knew it would hurt me, and she’d always feel special about me, but she could never quite deal with my intensity, with my totality. She was a little afraid of it. She felt, finally, overpowered, possessed, and she couldn’t live like that.

The valves of my life closed like a stone. The beginnings of stillness settled in me. I was inert, limp, without strength; more, it seemed as if I were without structure, as if all tangibility had drained away. I could no longer be upright.

I wrote her a letter back. I begged her. I would always love her, no one could ever cherish her as I would. Wait till I got back, don’t do this. It took two weeks for her reply. Meanwhile, I kept writing. All that I was went into the desperate flood of mail. As I wrote the letters my eyes teared, but no one saw me. Her first letter back was balanced and firm. We couldn’t change what time had brought about. They were getting engaged at graduation. I was alone in the bunker when I read it; behind me and
below, the wide brown river moved slowly. The rest of the landscape was snow-covered and almost treeless. I sank to my knees with the letter in my hand and pressed my face against the sandbag walls of the bunker and never moved when my call letters rattled on the radio. The next day my letters began to come back unopened and the stillness in me spread slowly and numbly over my whole being.

I told no one and each night I sat and wrote her a letter and after they came back unopened for a month, I stopped mailing them. But I wrote them. When they were done I put them in my footlocker with the ones she’d returned. She sent me no more mail.

My unmailed letters to her became a chronicle of my life, and a memorial to her, a manifestation of a truth I’d half-understood in the rainstorm before I left her when we weren’t getting engaged. I was trapped. I was simply love’s captive and from that time when I’d danced with her at eighteen I would never be free again. No effort of will could ever change that. No one could replace her. No other meaning existed in life. I knew that, as I wrote my unread letters, with a clarity and sureness that time has not modified. Not yet twenty-two, I had loved and lost and my life was without further purpose. And there was so much of it left, a paralyzing long time of it still to go.

The messages came in over the radio in encrypted five-letter groups. They were just sound patterns that translated into nothing. When the message finished I’d send it over to S-2 and never hear of it again. Tony dePietro and I were the best operators in the regiment. We could take code and receive it without even listening, the right hand marking down the meaningless letters as the sounds went from ear to hand without interference from the brain. I liked being good at it. The battalion commander used to brag about us, the regimental hotshots. We were still shorthanded and dePietro and I were still working to voice nets and one CW net alone, taking turns, eight on, eight off. Officers didn’t bother us. No one else understood the code and we were in our way indispensable. There was always traffic on the CW net and whenever an officer appeared we’d listen to the traffic, break in with a Q signal to ask if there was any traffic for this station, ask net control to repeat the negative, and generally look busy until the officer left.

“Knowledge is power,” dePietro said to me one day
after we’d frightened away an NG captain from S-2 with a blast of Q and Z signals that sounded vital and signified nothing. He was leaving and I was coming on. He hung around and drank coffee with me before he went to sleep.

“New batch of magazines from the Red Cross,” dePietro said as he finished his coffee. “Movie magazines,
True Romance
. Who the fuck do they think is over here?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I got letters to write.”

“Your girl?”

“Yeah.”

DePietro nodded and picked up his rifle and went out of the bunker. I read the new call letters for my station, checked in with an any-traffic-for-this-station call just to limber up, and settled in to write Jennifer. I did it in a kind of notebook now, a journal, I suppose you could call it, but always I addressed her, and as I wrote I imagined her and felt her presence and the force of her, the richness and energy. Writing her, I could remember what her mouth felt like and what she smelled like.

My Darling Jennifer
,

The army is good for keeping you from falling apart. There’s enough organization to sort of push all your pieces together. My fatigues are tailored and starched, my pants have a blousing ring and are bloused stylishly low on my shiny combat boots. The boots are jump-laced. My fatigue cap has a fifty-missions crush to it and is kept stiff by soap. I keep my bunk made so tight you can in fact bounce a coin on it (except there aren’t any coins, just paper scrip—mpc). When I salute I have a nice honor-guard flourish to it. I can carry a rifle and a prc-10 for 15 miles in full battle dress and swagger when I’m through
.
I got the second highest score in the battalion, last week, at the range. If there’s a fight at the NCO club, there’s twenty guys will jump in on my side. I’m the only guy in the battalion who’s been to college and they think I’m a genius (except the officers). I run the radios on auto pilot and think almost not at all. I pay attention to detail. I do what I’m told. I go when they say go and stop when they say stop. I initiate nothing. At night I get drunk. If it weren’t for missing you, it’s not such a bad life. Time passes and I can walk through it without having to feel anything or decide anything. Good place for a hollow man
.