Wingmen (9781310207280) (30 page)

Duane knew he
had just been told to get lost, in as polite a fashion as an ensign
could tell a lieutenant. And he also knew that something was
stewing there inside Fred’s mind, something he wanted to know
about. But the doors to that mind would not open for him. It didn’t
anger him especially—he had never been comfortable when people
tried to unburden themselves to him—but who wanted a wingman with
deep, dark, depressing secrets? What if the skipper didn’t make it
back before they sailed, and he had to take the squadron into
combat? Maybe Trusteau was a psycho case about to go off the deep
end, off his nut. He picked up his drink slowly. “Okay, okay. Don’t
get all hot about it.”

“I’m not.”

“I was just
trying to be friendly. You know, cheer you up.”

“Thanks, but I
don’t need cheering up.”

“Okay.” Duane
finished his drink and slapped the top of the bar. “Well,” he said,
drawing himself up and straightening his shirt. “Think I’ll carry
on with the evening’s plans.”

“Have a good
time, Mister Higgins.”

“That I will,
Ensign, that I will.”

Higgins left
the bar without a backward look, and Fred was alone. At last. He
sighed and pushed his drink to the side, unfinished. It didn’t feel
good to get drunk; it only made him feel worse. He was so lonely he
could hardly stand it. And there was no one to whom he could talk,
pour out his feelings. He wasn’t even sure that would help. It
certainly wouldn’t change those last three days of the Marcus
cruise, when the skipper had been short to the point of rudeness
with him. And now he was gone entirely, not due back for another
week. Fred couldn’t live with him, and he couldn’t live without
him. He left the bar then with no definite plans in mind, nowhere
to go, nothing to do—and utterly sick to death with everything.

The September
countryside around Portland was beautifully foreign to Jack. The
evenings were beginning to chill now, although autumn was still a
month away, and some of the trees had begun to change. It was so
different from the grays and blues of Pacific waters, so different
from his life in the Navy that Jack felt grossly out of place. His
childhood in these same fields seemed impossibly remote, another
life entirely. And a great piece of that other life had just
recently been taken away from him.

He had, of
course, been too late to see his father alive. Monty had sent the
telegram on the afternoon of the heart attack, and even then
Randall Hardigan had hovered near death. When Jack had reached San
Francisco, he had managed a telephone call and learned his father
had died. They postponed the services for three days until he could
plane, train, and bus across three thousand miles of wartime
America. The casket had to be closed because the body just wouldn’t
keep that long.

Jack had cried
some, but death was hardly something new to him now. And men
weren’t supposed to cry, anyway. He tried to think of the good
times he and his father must have had when he was little. But he
couldn’t remember any. He ended up helping console his mother, who
was completely grief stricken.

He had been
away from the ship for exactly a week when he took the family car
and drove into the countryside, on the pretense of seeing an old
friend in Waterboro. In reality, he wanted to be alone. He had
never been very good at “thinking things out,” because things had
never needed thinking out—before now. His life had clicked smoothly
along on hidden paths, like a train in the dark. The rough spots
were infrequent. But now he had grown away from his family—mother,
father, brother, sister—and the close family ties with the
community of Portland, its churches, shops, streets, and schools.
Eight years of flying for the Navy had taken him everywhere but
back home. Until a week ago, he had been half a world away in a
place where you could take a leisurely swim in a warm ocean on
Christmas day, if you were so inclined.

He asked
himself what had gone wrong.

The little
country road he drove on was straight out of a Currier and Ives
print—or perhaps a Norman Rockwell cover for the
Saturday Evening Post
. He
rolled over a little stone bridge, stopped by the side of the road,
and got out to look at the stream. Even though he had seen it
before, many years ago, it seemed quite picturesque to him. He
walked out on the bridge, leaned on the retaining wall in
mid-stream, and looked down at the water. And thought of Fred
Trusteau.

That evening on
the flight deck was almost two weeks behind him now, but somehow
the effects of its revelations lingered. He had avoided Trusteau in
the intervening days, until they reached Pearl, where the telegram
waited. In all that time he had not faced his thoughts; instead, he
had kept busy with the everpresent paperwork, and daily flying. He
had even spent time on CAP to give some of the other men a rest.
All of his instincts had told him that it was the wrong time and
the wrong place for anything—of that nature. For that matter, the
time and the place for anything of that nature didn’t
exist
, in peace or in
war. He asked himself if he would have had those feelings if the
war had not come along, and concluded that he couldn’t have. After
all, the pressures of combat, the basically unfriendly
surroundings, new men in new situations that were always
changing—all this had naturally made him grow overly fond of
someone as friendly and helpful as Fred. Embarrassment welled up in
him as he wondered what Fred would think if he knew—

Below him a
trout patrolled the shallow water like a tiny submarine and gobbled
up a thrashing insect on the surface of the water. His eyes
followed the fish as it swam upstream with effortless ease and
grace, keeping in the shadows of the drooping trees that hung over
the water and dangled their leaves in its currents. Jack breathed
deeply and tried to relax. He wanted to feel that something good
would come out of this emergency leave, even if it had been
initiated by death. The time away from the squadron was bound to be
good for his overwrought emotions. When he got back he would
discover that the feelings he had had about Fred Trusteau had been
totally false, brought on by stress and overwork and harassment
from CAG. When he got back—and he found himself wanting to go
back—things would be better. His mind would be clear. He could get
down to what was important: surviving the war so he could come home
to his family and his birthplace and lead a normal life. He
straightened and slapped his hand on the top of the short stone
wall.

“Well, now, got
it all figgered out?”

Jack whirled at
the sound of the voice. An elderly gentleman was leaning against
the retaining wall on the other side of the narrow bridge. Jack had
no idea how long he had been there.

“Didn’t mean to
startle you, son, but you looked so wrapped up I just didn’t have
the heart to interrupt.” The old man was dressed like a farmer in
worn blue overalls, plaid shirt, big black shoes.

“Good
afternoon,” said Jack. The man crossed and stood beside him,
leaning on the retaining wall.

“Howdy,” he
said. “You from the navy station in Portsmouth?”

“No, sir,” said
Jack. “Home on leave.”

“Like I said, I
didn’t want to interrupt your thinking. Man needs time to himself
once in a while to sort of jiggle things around in his mind and
decide what to do. What was it you were pondering on?”

“It was
personal,” said Jack, turning to leave, slightly peeved at the
man’s intrusion.

“Well, far be
it for me to butt in on a man’s personal life. You know, I got a
son in the Navy myself.”

The two men
fell into step together and headed for Jack’s car, a hundred yards
distant.

“Where is he
stationed?” asked Jack.

“Some place
called Jacksonville, in Florida. A training outfit. Suits the hell
out of me, if you know what I mean. I want him back when this war’s
over, even if he does bring some strange girl from down south with
him.” Jack said nothing. They reached the big blue Chrysler. “You
know, son,” the man went on, “I think this war can do a lot of good
for a lot of folks. Take my son, now. He’s just like a heap of
other youngsters who’re gonna bring back some new bride from
wherever it was they was serving. And that’s a good thing because
these little towns like Waterboro and Quincy really need the new
blood, if you know what I mean. Back in ’39 and ’40, they was all
talking about leaving and heading for the big cities to try and
make a bundle of money. Then this war comes along, and they all go
off to the Navy or the Army, and when it’s all over they’ve seen
the world. Home all of a sudden looks mighty good to them.
Especially if they have a new wife to support. And all these little
towns like Waterboro and Quincy will be doing better than ever, if
you know what I mean.” They were standing by the driver’s door;
Jack wished the man would quit talking so he could be on his way.
“That wouldn’t be your problem, now would it, son?”

“What’s that?”
asked Jack.

“You wouldn’t
be wondering whether or not to get hitched up to an out-of-state
girl, now would you?”

This man’s world is so well
ordered
, thought Jack.
He’s got it all figured out. He knows just where
everything is and where it’s going to end up when the war is over.
And no one will convince him otherwise.

“No, sir, that
isn’t my problem.” Jack opened the car’s big door. “Could I give
you a lift into town?”

“No, thank you,
son,” said the man, “the good Lord gave me two feet, and they been
serving me well for over fifty years. But thanks kindly for the
offer.”

“You’re
welcome,” said Jack. He climbed into his car and closed the door.
He glimpsed the man in his rearview mirror. Then he drove down the
Norman Rockwell country road, telling himself that everything was
all right and that when he got back to the ship on the other side
of the world things would be better.

The barbershop was
incongruously like the one Fred had gone to in San Jose every two
weeks for most of his life. There were three chairs and big mirrors
and stacks of tattered magazines. The rows of little shelves over
the sinks were filled with the same after-shave lotions,
hairdressings, talcum powders. But for the occasional swooping
feeling one had when the ship heeled over or took a heavy swell,
the spacious shop could have been in landlocked Idaho or Nebraska,
on some small main street where cars were parked in front and
people stuck their heads through the door to say hello.

The big chair
was comfortable, but the sheet the barber spread over Fred cut out
more of the already meager supply of air and made him warm and
sweaty. As the taciturn barber, who was a third class petty
officer, clipped away slowly and carefully, Fred thumbed through a
magazine which he only now discovered to be the same issue of the
National
Geographic
that had been in the ready room back at the air
station on Oahu. The pages were coming out of the binding. There
was a picture of navy fliers in their ready room prior to the
landings in North Africa, and someone had made them appear to be
reciting a dirty limerick which began, “A clever young girl from
Duluth,” by writing in the words with a ball-point pen. There
wasn’t enough room on the page to complete the poem, however, and
Fred had just turned the page to see if it was completed elsewhere
when there was a commotion in the corridor outside. Two men came
in. It was Jack and Duane Higgins.

The commanding
officer of VF-20 entered first, taking off his hat. For a second he
didn’t notice that the man in the end chair was his wingman. Duane
came in behind him, and he did notice. Fred and Duane exchanged a
long look. The barber stopped his work and impatiently stepped
aside to clean his clippers as Fred turned his head and said
loudly, “Welcome back, Skipper.” Jack stood quite still for a
moment, caught in the act of tucking his garrison cap under his
belt. He looked hard at the other pilot. “Thank you, Ensign,” he
said.

The barber
resumed his work, and Fred had to look back down at his magazine.
He could think of nothing else to say.

There was only
one other barber in the shop, a grim-faced Filipino steward. He had
one customer, and two more officers were sitting and waiting in the
only two chairs; now one of them stood and offered his chair to his
senior, Lieutenant Commander Hardigan. Jack waved him back, though,
and swung up into an unused barber chair. Fred watched it all
through the corner of his eye, electrified by Jack’s presence. He
tried to calm his nerves, slow his pounding heart, but was not
successful.