It was almost two o’clock and over one hundred degrees when I reached San Antonio. The skyline was rigid in the heat, and on the hills above the city I could see the white stucco homes and red-tiled roofs of the rich with their terraced gardens and mimosa trees. I turned into the Mexican district and drove through blocks of secondhand clothing stores, Baptist missions, finance companies, and pawnshops. Slender pachucos in pegged slacks and maroon shirts buttoned at the cuff, with oiled hair combed back in ducktails, leaned idly against the front of pool halls and wino bars.
I pulled into the Mission Motel, a dirty white building constructed to look like the Alamo. There were arches and small bell towers along an outer wall that faced the street. Cracked earthen jars, containing dead plants, stood in an imitation courtyard in front of the office. The bricks in the courtyard had settled from the rains and Johnson grass grew between the cracks. I took a room that I’d had before, a plaster-of-Paris box with a double bed (an electric, coin-operated vibrating machine built in), a threadworn carpet, walls painted canvas yellow, and a bucket of ice and two thick restaurant glasses placed on the dresser. I cut the seal on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured a glass half full over ice. I sat on the edge of the bed, lit a cigar, and drank the whiskey slowly for five minutes. The red curtains were pulled across the window, but I could still see the hot circle of the sun in the sky. I finished the glass and had another. Then I felt it begin to take me. I had always liked to drink, and I’d found that during the drinking process the best feeling came right before you knew you were drunk, that lucid moment of control and perception when all the doors in your mind spring open and the mysteries suddenly reduce themselves to a simple equation.
I dialed an unlisted number given to me three years ago by R. C. Richardson, a Dallas oilman whom I’d kept out of prison after he defrauded the government of fifty thousand dollars on a farm subsidy. He had written out a ten-thousand-dollar check on my office desk, his huge stomach hanging over his cowboy belt, and handed me his business card with the number penciled on the back.
“I don’t know if lawyers like Mexican chili, but you won’t find none better than this,” he said.
He was crude, but he was right in that it was one of the best call-girl services in Texas—expensive, select, and professional. I always felt that the money and organization must have come from the Mafia in Galveston, because none of the girls or the woman who answered the phone seemed to be afraid that the client might be a cop.
The woman on the phone sounded like a voice from an answering service. There was no inflection, accent, or tonal quality that you could identify with a region or with anyone whom you had ever met. I used to imagine what she might have looked like. She must have answered calls from hundreds of men in motel rooms and empty houses, their voices nervous, slightly drunk, hoarse with embarrassment and passion, cautious in fear of rejection. I wondered if those countless confessions of need and inadequacy had given her a devil’s insight into the respectable world, or if she was merely a mindless drone. I couldn’t identify her with the image of a fat, bleached madam with glass rings on her fingers, who would be altogether too human for the voice over the phone. Finally, I had come to think of her as a hard, asexual spinster, thin and colorless, who must have developed a quiet and cynical sense of power in her ability to manipulate the sex lives of others without any involvement on her part.
As always she was discreet and subtly indirect in asking me what type of girl I wanted and for what services. And as always I made a point of leaving my motel registration name—R. C. Richardson.
I hung up the phone and poured another whiskey over ice. Thirty minutes later the girl arrived in a taxi. She was Mexican, tall, well dressed in expensive clothes, and she had a delicate quality to her carriage. Her black hair was combed over her shoulders, and her white complexion would have been perfect except for two small pits in one cheek. She had high breasts and shoulders, and her legs were well formed against her tight skirt. She smiled at me and I saw that one of her back teeth was missing.
“You want a whiskey and water?” I said.
“It’s too hot now. I’m not supposed to drink in the afternoon, anyway,” she said. She sat in a chair, took a cigarette from her purse, and lit it.
“Have one just the same.” I poured a shot into a second glass.
“It won’t make me do anything extra for you, Mr. Richardson.”
“People in Dallas call me R.C. You can use my name in the Petroleum Club and it’s better than a Diners card.”
“I don’t think you’ll get your money’s worth if you drink much more,” she said.
“Watch. I’m a real gunfighter when I get loaded.”
I stood up and took off my shirt and tie. The whiskey had started to hum in my head.
“You should pay me before we start,” she said. She smoked and looked straight ahead.
My white linen coat hung on the back of a chair. I took my billfold from the inside pocket and counted out seventy-five dollars on the dresser top.
“Does any of your organization come out of Galveston?” I said.
“We don’t learn about those things.”
“You must meet some of the juice behind it. An occasional Italian hood wearing sunglasses and a sharkskin suit.”
“Your date is for two hours, Mr. Richardson.”
“Take a drink. What about that voice on the phone? Has she ever been laid herself?”
The girl set her cigarette on the dresser edge, slipped her shoes off, and rolled her hose down. I drank a long swallow from my glass.
“Maybe she’s Lucky Luciano’s grandmother smoking a reefer into the receiver,” I said.
“You must not get a chance to talk much.”
She stood up, put her arms around my neck, and pressed her stomach hard against me. I could smell the perfume in her hair. She moved the flat of her hand down my back and bit my lip lightly with her eyes closed.
“Don’t you think we should start?” she said.
I kissed her mouth and could taste the whiskey on my own breath.
“Why don’t you have a drink?” I said. “I don’t like a woman to wither under me because of Jack Daniel’s.”
“You’re married, aren’t you?” She smiled and worked her fingers under my belt.
“I just don’t enjoy women who look like they’re in pain when you bend over them. It’s part of my R. C. Richardson genteel ethic.”
“You must be a strange man to live with.”
“Give me a try sometime.”
She pushed her stomach into me again, then dropped her arms and finished undressing. She had a wonderful body, the kind you rarely see in whores, with high breasts and long legs tanned on the edge of some gangster’s swimming pool, a flat stomach kept in form by twenty-five sit-ups a night, the buttocks pale right below the bathing-suit line, and a small pachuco cross with three rays tattooed inside one thigh.
I took off my trousers and shorts and laid them across the top of the chair. I picked up my cigar from the ashtray and looked into the full-length mirror on the closet door. At age thirty-five I had gained fifteen pounds since I played varsity baseball as a sophomore at Baylor. I had a little fat above the thigh bones, the veins in my legs were purple under the skin, and my hair had receded a little at the part; but otherwise I was as trim as I had been when I shut out almost every team in the Southwestern Conference. There was no fat in my chest or stomach, and there was still a ridge of muscle in the back part of my upper left arm from two years of throwing a Carl Hubbell screwball. My shoulders had grown slightly stooped, but I still stood over six feet barefooted, and the bit of gray in my sand-colored hair made me look more like a mature courtroom lawyer than an aging man. Then there was my war wound, two holes in each calf, white and scarred over, placed in an even, diagonal line as though they had been driven there by an archer’s arrow.
We made love on the bed for an hour, stopping only for me to pour another glass. My head was swimming with whiskey, m
y heart was beating, and my skin felt hot to my own touch. The floor was unlevel when I walked to the bottle on the dresser, and my breathing became heavier and more hoarse in my throat. We went through all the positions that she knew and all the experiments I could think of, re-creating the fantasies of adolescent masturbation. She affected passion without being deliberately obvious, and she tensed her body and widened her legs at the right moment. After the third time when I didn’t think I could go again she bent over my stomach and kissed me and used her hands until I was ready to enter her. She was soft inside, and she hadn’t been at her trade enough years yet to enlarge too much. She raised herself on her elbows so that her breasts hung close to my face, and constricted the muscles in her stomach and twisted one thigh sideways each time we moved until I began to feel it swell inside me, then build in force like a large stone rolling downhill over the lip of a canyon, and burst away outside of me with the empty tranquility of an opium dream.
Then I fell into an exhausted whiskey stupor. The dust in the air looked like weevil worms turning in the shaft of sunlight that struck against the Jack Daniel’s bottle. The girl got up off the bed and began dressing, and a few moments later I heard the door click shut after her. I was sweating heavily, even in the air-conditioning, and I leaned my head over the edge of the bed to make the room stop spinning. There were flashes of color behind my closed eyes, and obscene echoes of the things I had said to the girl when the stone began to roll downhill. My throat and mouth were dry from the whiskey and heavy breathing, the veins in my head started to dilate with hangover, and I wanted to get into the shower and sit on the floor under the cold water until I washed all the heat out of my body; but instead I fell deeper into a delirium and then the dream began.
I had many dreams left over from Korea. Sometimes I would dig a grave in frozen ground while Sergeant Tien Kwong stood over me with his burp gun, occasionally jabbing the short barrel into my neck, his eyes flat with hatred. At other times the sergeant and I would return to the colonel’s interrogation room, where I sat in a straight-backed chair and looked at nothing and said nothing until the sergeant brought my head down on his knee and broke my nose. Or sometimes I was alone, naked in the center of the compound, where we were allowed to wash under the water spigot and scrub the lice out of the seams of our clothing once a week. And each time I went there and turned the rusted iron valve I saw the words embossed on the surface—Manufactured in Akron, Ohio.
But this afternoon I was back in “the Shooting Gallery,” a very special place for me, because it was there that my six days on the firing line ended. That afternoon had been quiet, and we had moved into a dry irrigation ditch that bordered a two-mile plain of rice farms with bare, artillery-scarred foothills on the far side. In the twilight I could see the shattered trees and torn craters from our 105’s, and one hill that had been burned black with napalm strikes. We had heard that the First Marine Division had made contact with some Chinese at the Chosin, but our area was thought to be secure. They had two miles of open space to cross before they could reach us, and we had strung wire and mines outside our perimeter, although it was considered unnecessary because the North Koreans didn’t have enough troops in the hills to pull a straight-on offensive. At seven-thirty the searchlights went on and illuminated the rice fields and devastated slopes; then the nightly bugles and megaphone lectures against American capitalism started. The reverberating cacophony and the unnatural white light on the hills and corrugated rice fields seemed like an experiment in insanity held on the moon’s surface. Sometimes the North Koreans would fail to pick up the phonograph needle and the record would scratch out static for several minutes, echoing down off the hills like someone raking his fingernails across a blackboard. Then the searchlights would change angle and sweep across the sky, reflecting momentarily on the clouds, and settle on another distant hilltop pocked with brown holes.
I sat with my back against the ditch and tried to sleep. My blanket was draped around me like iron in the cold, and my feet ached inside my boots. I had gotten wet that afternoon crossing a rice paddy, and grains of ice had started to form inside my clothes. Even with my stocking cap pulled low under my helmet, my ears felt as though they had been beaten with boards. In the distance I heard one of our tanks clanking down a road; then a .30-caliber machine gun began firing far off on our right flank. “What’s that fucking asshole doing?” a corporal next to me said. He was a tall hillbilly boy from north Alabama. His blanket was pulled up over his helmet, and he had cut away his glove around the first finger of his right hand. I had a small bottle of codeine in my pack, and I started to take it out for a drink. It didn’t taste as good as whiskey, but it warmed you inside like canned heat. The machine gun fell silent a moment, then began firing again with longer bursts, followed by a B.A.R. and the irregular popping of small-arms fire. “What the hell is going on?” the corporal said. He raised up on his knees with his M-1 in his hands. Suddenly, flares began bursting in the sky, burning in white halos above the corrugated fields. The corporal’s face was as pale as candle wax in the light, his lips tight and bloodless.
The first mortar rounds struck outside our wire and exploded the mines we had strung earlier. Yellow and orange flames erupted out of the earth and flicked around the strands of concertina wire. I could feel the suck of hot air from the vacuum, my ears roared with the thunder of freight trains crashing into one another, and the wall of the ditch slammed into my head like a sledge. The rim of my helmet had cut a neat slit across my nose, and I could taste the blood draining in a wet streak over my mouth. Somewhere down the line, among the shower of rocks and frozen earth, the tremors reverberating through the ground, the locomotive engines blowing apart, I heard a Marine shout, a prolonged voice rising out of a furnace, “DOOOOOOOOOOOC!” I started to crawl along the floor of the ditch on my hands and knees, then the Chinese corrected their angle of fire and marched the barrage right down the center of our line.
Somehow I had believed that if I ever bought one it would come as a result of some choice I had made; that I would be killed after some positive act of my own—no matter how unconscious or reckless—but there would still be a type of control in my death. However, now I knew that I was going to die in the middle of a firestorm. I had no more chance of resisting my death than if God crashed His fist down on top of me. The shells burst in jagged intervals along the ditch, blowing men and weapons in every direction. The corporal was suddenly frozen in an explosion of light and dirt behind him. His mouth and eyes were wide, his helmet pitted and torn with shrapnel. He seemed to pirouette in slow motion, the weight of his tall body resting inside one boot, then he fell backward across me. The blood ran from his stocking cap like pieces of string over his face. He opened and closed his mouth with a wet, sucking sound, the saliva thick on his tongue. He coughed once, quietly and deep in his throat; then his eyes fixed on a phosphorescent flare burning above us.
Moments later the firestorm ended, almost too quickly, because it seemed that nothing that intense and murderous could ever end, that it would perpetuate itself indefinitely with its own cataclysmic force. I pushed the corporal off me, my ears ringing in the silence (or what seemed like silence, since automatic weapons had begun firing again on both sides of us). The corporal’s helmet rolled off his head, and I saw a long incision, like a scalpel cut, across the crown of his skull. The dead were strewn in unnatural positions along the ditch, some of them half-buried in mounds of dirt from the caved-in walls, their bodies twisted and broken as though they had been dropped from airplanes. The faces of the wounded were white with shock and concussion. Down the line a man was screaming.
“Are you hit, Doc?” It was the first lieutenant. He carried his carbine in one hand. His left arm hung limply by his side.
“I’m all right.” Our voices sounded far away from me.
“Get ready to move the wounded out of here. The right flank is getting their ass knocked off. We’re supposed to get artillery in five minutes and pull.”
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br /> “You’re bleeding pretty heavy, Lieutenant.”
“Get every man moving you can. We’re going to have gooks coming up our ass.”
However, the artillery cover never came, and we were overrun fifteen minutes later. Our automatic weapons men killed Chinese by the hundreds as they advanced across the rice fields. We packed snow on the barrels of the .30-caliber machine guns to keep them from melting, and the bottom of the ditch was littered with spent shell casings and empty ammunition boxes. The dead lay in quilted rows as far as I could see. They moved forward and died, then another wave took their place. The bugles began blowing again, potato mashers exploded in our wire, and every time a weapon locked empty or a Marine was hit they moved closer to the ditch. Our only tank was burning behind us, the lieutenant was shot through the mouth, and all of our N.C.O.’s were dead. We fired our last rounds, fixed bayonets in a silly Alamo gesture, and then the Chinese swarmed over us.
They ran along the edge of the ditch, firing point-blank into us with their burp guns. They shot the dead and the living alike, in the hysterical relief that comes with the victory of living through an attack. Their weapons weren’t designed for accuracy, but they could dump almost a full pan into a man who was closer than twenty feet. For the first time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the handles of a stretcher with a wounded Marine on it and ran across the bodies, the ammunition boxes, the bent bazookas, the knocked-out machine guns, the lieutenant spitting blood and parts of teeth on his coat, and suddenly I saw a young Chinese boy, not over seventeen, his thin, yellow face pinched with cold, standing above me in tennis shoes and quilted clothes. I guess (as I remember it) that I threw my arms out in front of me to prevent that spray of flame and bullets from entering my face and chest, but the gesture was unnecessary because he was a poor marksman and he never got above my knees. I felt a pain like a shaft of ice through both legs, and I toppled over as though a bad comic had just kicked me deftly across the shins.