But with each hour that passed the chances of him getting out of there alive grew less likely. His company was surrounded on all sides.
It had happened overnight. They heard the North Korean tanks to the south and more moving in from the north. As it was, there were only fourteen men left. They had lost all communications a few days ago and were huddled together in a round ditch that they had dug last night. They were supposed to have been relieved a week ago by another company but they had been pushed back so far behind the lines, they couldn’t be sure they would be found. In the frantic scramble they had lost most of their K rations and had no idea where they were or how far away the other Americans were.
Everything was cold and white. They couldn’t see more than a foot in front of them. When it wasn’t snowing, a white misty ground fog came in. It was such a strange, surreal war, as if it were being fought in cotton. The sound of machine-gun fire was all around them, soft and muffled, but still they knew it was deadly. So strange to be so terrified with the whole world gone soft and white or to be covered with sweat in the middle of a snowstorm. They could occasionally hear voices calling out in the distance, to them or to one another, they didn’t know. Most of these men, including Bobby, had grown up in movie theaters watching World War II movies, and the shrill, high-pitched, Oriental language that sounded just like Japanese struck a twelve-year-old’s fear in their hearts. But this was no movie. And their sergeant was not John Wayne. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid from Akron, Ohio, who had just gotten married a year ago. Soon they had run out of everything, food, ammunition, and any options. They could not signal where they were or they would be ambushed. They were trapped. Dead if they moved, dead if they didn’t.
Then, at about one o’clock that afternoon, Bobby suddenly said to the man beside him, “The hell with this. I’m going to go and find them.” He handed the man his gun and crawled over the top of the ditch and disappeared. He knew he could not stand up without getting his head shot off, so he crawled. As he slowly inched forward in the snow he suddenly remembered something Jimmy had told him at the Trolley Car Diner years ago, right before the bubble gum contest: “Don’t look to your right. Don’t look to your left. Concentrate. Remain calm, stay the course.” He kept repeating it over and over in his mind. Thinking about that day, thinking about the bubble he blew, thinking about the applause. . . . Don’t get rattled. Concentrate. Nice and easy all the way.
While he continued to move forward inch by inch, moving for his life and the life of the other men on the line, thousands of miles away in Elmwood Springs, the high school senior class was busy with such benign matters as who to vote for in “Who’s Who,” what color stone they wanted in the senior ring, and who they were going to ask to the prom. That afternoon his best friend, Monroe, would be sitting in the drugstore drinking cherry Cokes with his girlfriend, Peggy, and asking Doc if he had heard from him.
Twenty-eight hours later he had crawled within six feet of a dead body and twenty feet past a North Korean machine-gun nest, where three soldiers were sleeping. But he never saw any of them. After he made it up the hill, he stood up and ran and fell and ran again until someone heard him yelling at the top of his lungs, “Hi-yo, Silver, away!” The Americans, nervous and quick to shoot at anything that moved, knew at once that this was no Korean and came out and found him. He was half out of his mind and had no idea why he had been yelling, but it saved his life.
By the time he was able to lead that company to his outfit, six of the men had already frozen to death but they were able to save the rest. He refused a medal and never told anyone what he had done. As he explained to the major, “There was nothing brave about it. I was just too scared to stay there and die.”
A Close Call
BOBBY CAME OUT of the army happy to be home but a very different man from the one who had left. He was quiet and introspective and seemed to have lost his old zest for life. Although his parents did not say anything, they were worried. He did not seem to have any desire to date or go out with his old friends. While he was gone Monroe had married Peggy and was working for her father down at the tire store. They had gone fishing and bowling a few times but he mostly just sat around the house or went down to the diner and talked to Jimmy.
After a few months Dorothy became very concerned. She began to wonder if he would ever go back to being his old self or be able to find a girl he liked. She thought if he just found a nice girl and fell in love, maybe it would help him. She did not know it, but her son had fallen hopelessly in love and he was not over it yet. Maybe it was because he had seen too many movies, but Bobby had always been wildly imaginative and full of idealistic visions of knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, and living happily ever after. He had had his little crushes on girls for years but when he was seventeen he had fallen so completely and painfully head over heels in love that it had almost killed him. It had consumed him like a raging fire. She had been the first thing on his mind when he awoke and the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep and dreamed about her. It had not been just an infatuation. This was a real overwhelming passion, an obsession, and he had been almost sick with it. So in love with her that at times it hurt to breathe. When she’d smiled at him or spoke to him in the most casual way, he had lived off of it for a week. He was a gangly, awkward, pimply-faced boy and she was a grown, mature woman of twenty-eight. He could not tell anyone, not even Monroe, about how he felt, so he suffered in silence. He was sent flying into the heights of ecstasy and thrown down into the depths of hell by her slightest move, sometimes in the same day.
Miss Anne Hatcher, the drama teacher with the beautiful voice and soft brown eyes . . . Miss Anne Hatcher, who had broken his heart when at the start of his junior year she became engaged to Hugh Sparrow, the high school civics teacher. Sparrow was an older widower with two children. Bobby had been a movie usher that year and they had come to the theater a couple of times and he had walked the two of them down the aisle to their seats. He hated the way the paunchy, balding man had walked in front of her and it almost made him sick to his stomach when he saw him put his arm around the back of her seat like he owned her. He hated his guts. It was clear to him that Sparrow had no idea how wonderful she was. How special. He could not possibly love and appreciate her like Bobby did. All Sparrow wanted was a mother for his children. Bobby fantasized about going over to her house, declaring his love, and asking her to marry him. He fantasized about challenging the civics teacher to a duel and killing him. But he did neither. Instead, the day he was eighteen he joined the army. Anything other than being around for their wedding. He had thought about her all through the war. And now that he was home, what had been a raging, burning love was a dull ache in the pit of his stomach whenever he saw her or heard someone speak her name.
He had come back not feeling much enthusiasm about anything. He was feeling the same way he used to feel when he and Monroe would stumble out of the Elmwood Theater each Saturday, bleary-eyed from sitting through four hours of movies and cartoons. Compared to the Technicolor images they had just seen, the world outside the theater had always looked so gray and dingy. Real life had no beautiful background music, and all the people in town had seemed so dull and bland.
It seemed as if all the magic had gone out of the world and he was bored and restless.
But then one night, Monroe and his wife, Peggy, took Bobby with them to the Polar Bear Tastee-Freez drive-in and Wanda Ricketts, wearing a short skirt with fringe, skated up to the car and took their order and suddenly a light came back into Bobby’s eyes. “Who’s that?” he asked as she skated away. Peggy told him the Ricketts family had moved to town a few years ago and added, “I hear she’s a little fast.”
“Really?” said Bobby, his curiosity piqued even further. As it turned out, Wanda was quite the little femme fatale of the Elmwood Springs high school set. A few boys already had WANDA tattooed on their arms, including the Dockrill boy, who was going to be a preacher.
She had
been dating three or four different boys in town but they were no match for Bobby, who had grown into a good-looking young man. Pretty soon he and Miss Wanda Ricketts were a hot-and-heavy item and his old enthusiasm started coming back, along with his imagination. As usual, Bobby started to romanticize Wanda and to see things that were not there. He spent a dazzled two months convinced she looked exactly like Marilyn Monroe, which could not have been further from the truth. Other than their dyed blond hair and being female, the similarity ended. When he brought her home for dinner the first time, after she had stuck her chewing gum on the side of her plate, she announced, “Me and my family are big wrestling fans. Me and Momma think Gorgeous George is cute enough to eat. Momma says he can put his shoes under her bed anytime.”
“Oh, really?” said Dorothy pleasantly, but secretly horrified. Doc and Mother Smith had just stared at their plates but Bobby, oblivious to the sudden lull in the dinner conversation, continued to stare at her with a goofy look on his face. Needless to say, Dorothy had not been favorably impressed with Wanda, but she never said a word against her.
One day Bobby was down at the Trolley Car Diner going on and on about how beautiful Wanda was and asked Jimmy what he thought about the idea of them getting married. Jimmy had not said anything before but since he had been asked he said, “Frankly, I think it would be the biggest mistake you ever made. Your parents aren’t going to say anything but I don’t want to see you mess up your entire life just because some little carhop has you all whipped around and not thinking straight. If that girl were to come up pregnant, you’re stuck with her. Think about what you’re doing, buddy, before it’s too late.”
Just then Ed the barber came in for a chili dog and sat down. Before Jimmy went over he said quietly, “I’m telling you, that girl is not for you. You can do better than that.”
Bobby felt like someone had just thrown cold water in his face. But Jimmy was right, of course. The rose-colored glasses started clearing up a little and he started noticing Wanda’s black roots and how she began to look less and less like Marilyn Monroe. He suddenly took a closer look at the Ricketts family, the mother, an older version of Wanda with wrinkles and the same dyed blond hair and penciled-in eyebrows, who at fifty still wore short shorts and a halter top; the father, with the dirty fingernails and the collection of Over Sexteen magazines he kept trying to show Bobby; and the rest of the strangely misshapen Ricketts brothers and sisters . . . and the spell was broken. The thought of spending the holidays with the Rickettses for the rest of his life finally did the trick. Earlier, Mother Smith had offered her opinion of the entire Ricketts family to Dorothy quite succinctly. “Common, honey, just plain common.” But when Bobby told his mother he had broken up with Wanda she did not ask why. All she said was, “Well, I’m sure you know best, dear.”
When he asked Monroe what he thought he said, “I’m glad to hear it. Peggy and I hadn’t wanted to say anything but that girl was as dumb as a post.”
Several months later, Wanda, clearly not heartbroken over breaking up with Bobby, ran off and married the twenty-five-year-old manager of the Polar Bear drive-in.
Two weeks later, the next time Macky saw Bobby at the barbershop he said, “Had yourself a kind of a close call there, didn’t you?”
It was a small town.
Tot Whooten Strikes Again
THE FRIDAY AFTER Macky had run into Bobby, he was busy searching through his stock for a fifteen-foot extension cord for Old Man Henderson when the phone rang. He said, “Let me get this,” and went back and picked up. “Hardware.”
It was Norma on the other end. “Macky.”
“Hi, honey. Can I call you back? I’ve got a customer.”
“I’ll hold on.”
“Okay.”
He put the phone down and returned to the old man standing in the aisle pulling out all the cords, trying to read the packages.
Macky said, “Are you sure you need fifteen feet?”
The old man said, “Yeah or I might use twenty. . . . Do you have that?”
“What’s it for?”
“I want to put my television set out on the porch so I can see the ball game.”
“Don’t you have a plug on the porch?”
“Well, if I did I wouldn’t need an extension cord, would I?”
Macky searched through the cords. “Here’s a twenty-five.”
Mr. Henderson scowled at him. “How much more is it by the foot?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll just charge you for a fifteen-foot. I thought I had them in stock but I guess I sold them.”
“Well, I guess I’d rather it be too long than too short.”
“Do you think St. Louis has a chance this year?” asked Macky.
“They might . . . if everybody else was to suddenly drop dead.”
Macky pulled out a paper bag.
“I don’t need a sack,” Mr. Henderson said.
“All right, well, you have a good day now.”
The old man slammed the door shut too hard and the bell on the door rang in Macky’s ears. Macky started putting the cords back up on the hooks, trying to figure out just how old Old Man Henderson was. He had been a friend of his grandfather’s, so that would make him at least in his early eighties. Then Macky remembered that Norma was holding on. He went back and took the phone.
“Honey, are you still there?”
“Yes . . . I am.”
“I’m sorry. What’s up?”
Norma sounded extremely controlled. After a pregnant pause she said, “I just had my hair done.”
Macky sat down on the stool behind the counter. Today was her appointment with Tot Whooten. He knew what was coming.
“Do not say one word to me, Macky, I do not want to hear one word about my hair. If you’re going to come home and say anything, just don’t come home.”
“I’m not going to say anything. What did she do this time?”
“I’m upset enough as it is without you saying something.”
“Norma! I haven’t said a word. I haven’t even seen you.”
“Well, I want you to promise me . . . give me your word . . . you won’t say anything or I’m just going to check into the Howard Johnson’s motel, and that’s all there is to it.”
“All right, Norma, calm down.”
“I mean it now.”
“I won’t say a word.”
“I am putting your lunch on the table . . . and I am just going to stay in the bedroom if you’re going to make some smart remark.”
“Norma, I won’t say anything, O.K.? Just give me a hint. What did you have done?”
There was a long silence. “We tried something new.”
“And?”
There was a longer silence. “It didn’t work out.”
Macky rolled his eyes. “Oh God.”
“See! There you go. I knew it, just don’t come home if you’re going to have that attitude—”
“I don’t have an attitude. I just said, Oh God, that’s all.”
“Yes . . . but it’s how you said it. I know you’re sitting there rolling your eyes, so if you do come home, I do not want you to even look at my hair.”
“Norma, where am I supposed to look? Your face is attached to your head. Do you want me to talk to your knees?”
“See, there you go again. You just can’t resist trying to be funny. I have had a serious hair mishap and I need your support. I don’t need you to make me feel worse than I do!”
“All right. I’m sorry but at least tell me what you two were trying to do.”
“A body wave.”
“A body wave?”
“Yes, like a permanent only lighter. It was supposed to be a light body wave. . . .”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know, all we know is it wasn’t light.”
“Well, honey, don’t worry about it. It will grow out . . . it did the last time. . . .”
“It doesn’t have to grow out,” she said.
“Why?”<
br />
“Because if you must know, if it’s so important to you to know . . . she cut it off.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“See! I can’t tell you a thing without you having a negative attitude—you ask me to tell you, then you say something smart.”
“O.K., O.K. . . . I’m sorry. But anyway, I’ll bet it looks great.” He held off. “How short is it?”
There was no answer on the other end.
“It can’t be all that short, can it?”
“It’s short.”
“How short?”
“It’s an Italian boy cut.”
“What?”
“It’s called an Italian boy cut.”
“Oh Jesus . . .”
“That’s it! Get your own lunch. I’m going to the motel.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Norma, you’re not going to any motel. I’ll be home in a little while.”
Macky had been home for ten minutes but Norma would not come out of the bedroom. Finally, after much coaxing, she stood in the doorway. He looked at her but did not react.
“Well, don’t you have anything to say? I know you’re just dying to say something—get it over with, just go ahead.”
“Well . . . it’s short all right.”
Norma burst into tears. “I’m ruined . . . I look awful . . . it’s horrible . . . I just want to die. I was supposed to look like Audrey Hepburn. . . . It looked cute in the picture.”
“Oh, honey, honey, stop it. It looks cute.”
“No, it doesn’t. You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“No, I’m not. . . . It’s cute. Really.”
Later that night, just before Norma was about to fall asleep, Macky turned over and said, “Honey, I just wanted you to know one thing. . . .”
“What?”
“You are the sexiest Italian boy I ever slept with.”
There was a pause. Then Norma patted his hand. “Muchos gracias, senor.”
Miss Henderson