“The sexy one!” said Henry.
Jacob was in a medium-brown glen plaid, blue shirt, regular shoes. He looked better, and richer, than Henry. He said, “Who do I look like?”
Claire said, “No one in Des Moines.”
He laughed.
Paul came in. Claire saw his eyebrows shoot up and then down; then he smiled and said, “Jacob! Didn’t know you were in this country.”
“I’m at Wisconsin.”
“Go, Badgers,” said Paul.
Joe, Lois, Minnie, and the kids bustled in ten minutes later, followed by Rosanna, who was already talking as she came through the door. “Well, after all that wet weather the last few days, I was sure the roads would be frozen solid with the cold snap, but Joe—” She caught sight of Jacob and stopped dead. Then she looked around to make sure she was in the right house.
Henry stepped in, put his arms around her, and said, “Hi, Mom. Merry Christmas.” He kissed her firmly on both cheeks, and, Claire saw, he held her rather tightly, as if restraining her. She said, “My goodness.”
Henry spoke smoothly and brightly. “I want you to meet Jacob Palmer. He’s a friend of mine from England. Remember when I worked on that dig in Yorkshire? Now he’s getting his doctorate at Wisconsin.”
Jacob smiled and held out his hand. They all saw Rosanna hesitate, and they all saw Henry lean toward her slightly. She held out her hand rather limply, and Jacob grasped it. As he said, “I’ve heard all about you, Mrs. Langdon,” in a crisp and jolly way, Rosanna seemed to remember herself, and participate in the hand shaking. But when it was over, she stepped back, went around everyone, and said to Claire, “How’s the turkey?”
It was Minnie, of course, who engaged Jacob in conversation, while Joe undressed the kids and Lois took the food into the kitchen. When Claire followed her, Rosanna was closing the oven door. She stood up and said, “What accent is that?”
“He’s Jamaican.”
“You’ve met him before?”
“In England, when we visited Henry last year.”
“He and Henry are friends?”
“Looks that way,” said Lois, neutrally.
Rosanna pursed her lips, then said, “Well, we have to be hospitable.”
Claire felt a sudden flush of anger.
Rosanna put her hands on her hips. “But I thought those riots in Watts last summer were just terrible. A hundred people were killed.”
Henry appeared in the doorway. He said, “That’s not true.”
“Well—” said Rosanna.
Henry stared at her. Claire had never seen Henry look so strict. Usually, he looked agreeably distant, as if he didn’t quite speak their language. Lois was pouring brandy over the fruitcake. Then Henry said, “And Jacob has never been to Los Angeles. So he knows just about as much about those riots as you do. His specialty is the Caribbean slave trade.”
Rosanna said, “They don’t have that anymore….”
“You need to talk to Jacob about that.”
“Well!” said Rosanna, as if she was about to lose her temper. She plopped down in a chair. But then she looked up at Henry, who was staring at her as if she were a misbehaving student who had better straighten up and fly right. Claire looked at the kitchen clock and said, “Do you think we really have to turn this turkey on its back?”
Rosanna snapped, “I don’t understand why you cooked it on its side in the first place. I never heard of such a thing.”
“Craig Claiborne—”
“Oh,” exclaimed Rosanna, “some man!”
But that was the end of it. Once she had mashed the potatoes and made the gravy, Rosanna settled down, and by the time she and Claire carried the food into the dining room, everyone was seated around the table. Gray was already in his high chair, laughing and receiving a piece of roll from Jesse, who was also laughing. Jacob was seated between Joe and Minnie; they were deep into a discussion of everyone’s favorite topic, the weather. Terrible in Madison, said Jacob. He smiled. “Last year, when I first got there, I had never been anywhere that cold in the winter before. I was walking across the campus on a day when it was, oh, twenty below zero, and one of my teachers came running up to me and asked if I had a hat. I said no, and she gave me hers, right off her head. She told me that you lose sixty percent of your body heat through the top of your head. No one had bothered to tell me that.”
Everyone agreed that it was much colder in Wisconsin than in Iowa, and snowier and windier, too, and then the conversation turned to Minneapolis, and Rosanna asked, if you had to live somewhere “up there,” well, which would be the lesser evil, Milwaukee or Minneapolis? And someone knew someone who lived in Fargo—who was that again? Claire and Henry exchanged a smile.
1966
AFTERWARD, when Tim thought back to those weeks before he went into the army, all he remembered was sleeping. He could have also remembered drinking, but it seemed in retrospect as though he were drunk with sleep, not asleep with drink. His roommates studied (he sometimes opened his eyes and saw them huddled over their desks, trapped in a circle of light). They took their exams (he sometimes rolled over as they came back into the room). Brian even made his bed for him and picked stuff up off the floor. But then he had flunked out, and there he was, finally awake, sitting in the living room at home, and his dad was staring at him. His dad was also talking, but he barely heard that. What he really paid attention to was the disbelieving stare. Yes, he had signed up, since he was going to be drafted anyway, and, no, he could not think of a single other way to occupy his time. Boot camp, a training school, deployment—no, he could not imagine Vietnam. He didn’t read the papers, he didn’t know what he was “getting himself into,” but who was his dad to say a word against it? Didn’t he, Arthur Brinks Manning, promote the war all the time? Hadn’t he hit the roof when he found out that Mom went to that big antiwar protest in Washington? Hadn’t his own father been a career military officer?
Then Dad said, “I want some sense of purpose, Tim. Some idea that you know what you are doing instead of just putting one foot in front of the other!”
Tim gave what he considered a perfectly logical reply: “Enlisting rather than waiting to be drafted has a sense of purpose.”
“What do you want to do over there?”
“Don’t they always tell you what to do?”
Dad blew out some air, trying, in his usual way, not to lose his temper completely; Dean walked past out in the hall and shouted, “You’re an idiot!”
“Fuck you!” yelled Tim. Then he jumped up, felt in his pocket for his keys, and headed out the door. After that, the days were a blur of snow and rain, until he got to Fort Bliss, where the weather was hot all day and cold all night and the landscape was as flat as a frying pan except where it was mountainous, dry, and crumbly. No rain. One kid on the bus, from Dallas, said that it only rained in El Paso if the temperature was over a hundred, and Tim couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not.
The screaming began immediately. Uniformed drill sergeants in hats leaned into them, and screamed in their ears to run, run, move it. Tim ran, while trying to carry his duffel bag. He who had never been scared before was, he had to admit, a little scared, especially when the duffel bag fell off his shoulder and hit Sergeant Wheeler, who then chased him nearly across the parking lot, screaming at the top of his lungs.
They were chased into the barracks and told to claim their beds. Tim claimed one of the upper bunks. The kid below him was named Harry Pine, from Waterloo, Iowa. Tim did not mention the farm in Denby. The barracks was shaped like a giant H. A squad of ten or twelve recruits lived in each leg of the H. The latrine and the showers were in the crossbar—no curtains, no walls. The platoon, which was what the four squads were called, had kids of all kinds—black, Mexican, white, even Chinese, one guy named Jim Song.
Tim had his head shaved. He was yelled at by drill sergeants. They ran, they marched, they shot weapons (never guns) at targets, they ran some more, they carried packs, they ate, they yell
ed (but only “Yes! Sir!” and “No! Sir!”). They were yelled at, they spoke when spoken to, and looked where they were told to look. One night, when Tim was sound asleep, he heard just the fragment of a shout, and then found himself pummeled from below and launched out of his bunk by the long legs of Harry Pine, who was having a nightmare. He landed on his ass, and it hurt to run, run, move it the next day, but he ran anyway.
Sergeant Wheeler leaned over the recruits. Every time a recruit opened his mouth or shifted his weight, Sergeant Wheeler asked him who the hell he thought he was, and if he thought he was someone, well, he, Sergeant Wheeler, was there to fucking teach him a lesson. Where was that soldier from? From Texas? Well, all they had here in Texas was steers and queers, and Sergeant Wheeler didn’t see any horns on that soldier! Was he from California? Well, all they had in California was homos and strip shows, and he didn’t see a G-string on that soldier! And then that soldier (sometimes but not often Tim) would be sent to do two or four laps at top speed around the training field, and he had better not pass out. Sergeant George stood in front of a recruit, practically on the guy’s toes, staring into his face, and screaming until it seemed like he was going to knock the kid over, but he never did—they weren’t allowed to actually touch you, Tim realized. Twenty-five push-ups, shouting what kind of pansy are you? the whole time. Sergeant George asked him where the fuck had he learned to make a bed like that, and ripped off the covers and told him to do it over. Sergeant Wheeler told him to present his weapon, and peered down the barrel and asked him who the fuck he thought he was, that he didn’t clean every last trace of powder out of that fucking barrel? Twenty-five push-ups right now!
Soldiers fell down. Soldiers passed out. Soldiers cried. Soldiers got concussions, broke arms and legs and noses. A kid from Omaha broke his jaw. Soldiers disappeared. Tim, who had climbed to the top of the bookcase when he was two years old and then gotten himself down again; who had ridden his bicycle for miles when he was six; Tim, who had thought nothing of running the whole five blocks to second grade as fast as he could go—didn’t mind the regimen. He enjoyed how the other recruits, in spite of wearing the same clothes and having the same haircuts and being told to do the same things over and over again, persisted in remaining intransigently themselves: Harry Pine was slow; no matter how they yelled at him, he could not make his limbs or his reflexes move faster. Eddie Briggs was hotheaded—Sergeant George could make him do fifty push-ups, and he still couldn’t learn not to tell Sergeant George to fuck off. Everything made Jack Saylor, a black guy from Chicago, laugh, even Sergeant George leaping into his face and shouting, “What the fuck you laughing at, soldier?” As for Tim, when he did push-ups or ran around the field, he thought music—Tell him that you’re always gonna love him, / Tell him, tell him, tell him right now.
He took tests. He had to answer problems about if you had four gallons of gas in the tank and the truck got seven miles to the gallon, could you get to Kansas City if it was thirty-five miles away, and if you had seventeen apples and twelve pears, how many men could you feed if half of the men wanted two apples and half wanted a pear and an apple? What he would do if three men in a jeep went over a ten-foot cliff, and what he would do if he saw someone in water of unknown depth screaming for help? He listened to recordings of tapping and thought of the tapping as a kind of rhythm that reminded him of playing in the Colts with Steve and Stanley Sloan. He turned out to have some commo talent, along with three other white guys and six black guys.
Sometime in week six—still no rain, but the weather was heating up—Private Wagner from Camden, South Carolina, went around asking everyone for money. Private Wagner was a tall, pasty guy, an inch taller than Tim, who was six two, with round blue eyes, glasses, and a self-confident manner that Tim at first respected—although he never actually said anything to a drill sergeant, he had been known to roll his eyes without being caught. He was going to sneak out, get a ride over to Juárez and pick up some weed. How a kid from South Carolina knew a dealer in Juárez, Tim could not imagine, but Private Wagner intimated that he knew just about everything there was to know. And, sure enough, on the designated night, after lights out, Private Wagner disappeared with fifty bucks. There was some whispering, but then Tim fell asleep. When he woke up at reveille, he glanced down the row of bunks, and there was Private Wagner, sliding out of bed as if he’d been there all night. The buzz went around that he had the stuff, and that night they smoked it. Tim, who had smoked a fair amount of dope with the Sloan boys and with Fiona, didn’t feel a thing, and thought the weed had an odd smell. Sure enough, the whisper went round two days later that the junk was weed—tumbleweed. After that, Private Wagner didn’t act quite as cocky, and Tim saw him for what he was, an eighteen-year-old kid who didn’t know his head from his ass. Tim didn’t mind basic training. The only time he was routed to KP, he didn’t have to peel potatoes—he had to get up early and smooth the frosting on the coffee cakes that had been baked the night before; every cake on the rack was covered with cockroach tracks.
—
THE BUS RIDE, sailing through the hot landscape with the windows open, seemed to Tim to go on for days instead of hours. Most of the soldiers were heading for commo, like Tim, but some (the fat ones) were looking at cooking detail. They were calmer and sat up front. Someone was in charge, and that might have been Tim himself, who had been made platoon leader for an unknown reason that probably had to do with the fact that he was over eighteen, did have some college (apparently, passing English and history was not critical to leadership abilities), and had tolerated the drilling well. They all wore their uniforms, including their helmets. They stopped here and there to drop off a few soldiers. Late in the afternoon, the bus pulled through the gates of Fort Huachuca, a much smaller complex than Fort Bliss, set in a blanker and more barren landscape. It was the beginning of April; there were wildflowers here and there—long branches of orange and red blooms struck his eye, and fields of something simple and also orange. These were, of course, interspersed with cactuses. He had seen Road Runner cartoons, he knew what a cactus was, but no pictures prepared you for what a cactus really looked like. Or Arizona, for that matter.
There was a stiff dry breeze when they got off the bus. It didn’t feel hot—it felt hot shading into cool. It was fragrant. Tim was told to report to an office across the road. He ordered his platoon to wait for him.
Whether he was tired or just disoriented, he couldn’t have said, but when he went into the designated office, he made a mistake—almost his first mistake in the army. He knew perfectly well that you didn’t have to salute indoors, and he was holding his helmet in his right hand, so when the lieutenant saluted him, he saluted him back—but it was his left hand that moved toward his forehead. You would have thought that he had raised a pistol and shot the lieutenant, who lunged across his desk, what is the matter with you, soldier, you been through basic or not? Don’t you know the first thing about the military? Tim stood there, his face straight and his eyes a little hooded, until the lieutenant’s top finished being blown. Then he said, “Private Manning reporting, sir.” He had switched his helmet to his left hand, and now he saluted with his right. Lieutenant Canette saluted him back and sat down again, as if nothing at all had taken place. That was the last time he was yelled at.
The barracks was a long building with the latrine at the end. Tim had a top bunk about a third of the way into his platoon. Below him was Private Rowan. Reveille was at six, which these days was after sunrise. Tim’s first job of the day was to assemble his men after they had been told to drop their cocks and grab their socks by the sergeant, then dressed and made their bunks (though no one came around anymore to throw their bedclothes on the floor and berate them for wrinkles). He marched his formation from the barracks to the mess hall—a quarter-mile, he thought. “Right, left, right, left! Ain’t no use in feelin’ down!” (A chorus of “Ain’t no use in feelin’ down!”) “Jody’s got your girl in town!” (“Jody’s got your girl in town!”) “Ain
’t no use in feelin’ blue!” (“Ain’t no use in feelin’ blue!”) “Jody’s got your sister, too!” (“Jody’s got your sister, too!”) Or there might be “Dress it right and cover down!” (“Dress it right and cover down!”) “Thirty inches all around!” (“Thirty inches all around!”) Tim always scowled as he yelled, in order to make his voice even more resonant in the wind. He hadn’t realized, when he was singing with the Sloan boys, how loud his voice was, or how musical.
A few of his soldiers sat at the skinny table, where they had to eat double helpings and clean their plates, no matter whether the eggs were green or not. Two or three sat at the fat table, and Tim, who ate shit on a shingle every single day without once asking himself what was really in it, ate at the regular table. There was plenty of food—none of it good, but Tim ate up. Food was fuel.
After breakfast, he marched a somewhat smaller formation to the commo training building. It was hotter now, but he kept them going, bellowing out, “Left, right, left, right! Jody saw your girl today!” (“Jody saw your girl today!”) “How’s he gonna stay away!” (“How’s he gonna stay away!”) “She turned your picture to the wall!” (“Turned your picture to the wall!”) “Left his boots out in the hall!” (“Left his boots out in the hall!”)
The next four or five hours were spent learning alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot. There were several radios, including the prick 10, which was about ten inches by twelve inches, looked like a school notebook, and weighed ten or fifteen pounds. They would be carrying those. The angry 19 was more of a console radio, maybe the size of a suitcase. It must have weighed sixty pounds and had a longer range. It had glowing black dials, and the operator used either a headset or a desk mike. Tim imagined himself yelling into it just before an enemy soldier burst into the room and shot him in the chest.
Thirty recruits sat in the classroom with pencils and pieces of paper. Their instructor, who had been drafted from a minor-league baseball team, lolled at the front desk like a domesticated tiger. It wasn’t only his biceps and triceps and shoulders, which rippled with muscle, or his pecs, which narrowed to a thirty-inch waist; it was his supple grace. He was waiting for one thing—to be put on the Fort Huachuca baseball team. His job was to turn on the tape. The tape ran a series of beeps, and the kids wrote as fast as they could, trying to understand and write down the letters in groups of five. What came out never meant anything, or, rather, each set meant one thing, and one thing only: Dit dit dit—S. Dit dit—O. Dit—E. Dah—T. Dah dit dit dah dah—Tim. They had to write down letters, and do so faster each week. Tim was a little bit faster than the others—it took him about a week to make sense of the letters. Private Rowan never made sense of the letters, so he was sent over to learn to cook. When the tape ran out, the kids shouted at the baseball player, “Hey, Bobby, wake up!” The tiger stretched himself and woke up, reached over, and flipped the switch.