I spent a lot of time in the club car with my heels hooked over the rung of a bar stool, telling lies and war stories to a slightly cross-eyed Wave with an unlimited capacity for Budweiser and a pair of tightly crossed legs. At odd moments, when I got sick of listening to her high-pitched giggle and raucous voice, I’d ease back up the train to my seat and sit staring at North Dakota and Montana sliding by outside. The prairie country was burned yellow-brown and looked like the ass-end of no place. After a while we climbed up into the mountains and the timber. I felt better men.
I had a few wild daydreams about maybe looking up the guy Sue had told me about in her last letter and kicking out a few of his teeth, but I finally decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He was probably some poor creep her mother had picked out for her. Then I thought about blousing her mother’s eye, and that was a lot more satisfying. It’s hard to hate somebody you’ve never met, but I could work up a pretty good head of steam about Susan’s mother.
I generally wound up back at the club car. I’d peel my cockeyed Wave of whomever she’d promoted to beer-buyer first class and go back to pouring Budweiser into her and trying to convince her that we were both adults with adult needs.
Anyhow, they dropped us off in Tacoma about five thirty in the morning on the fourth day after we’d landed in New York. My uniform was rumpled, my head was throbbing, and my stomach felt like it had a blowtorch inside. The familiar OD trucks from Fort Lewis were waiting, and it only took about an hour to deliver us back to the drab, two-story yellow barracks and bare drill fields I’d seen on a half dozen posts from Fort Ord to Camp Kilmer.
They fed us, issued us bedding, assigned us space in the transient barracks, and then fell us out into a formation in the company street. While they were telling us about all the silly-ass games we were going to play, my eyes drifted on out across the parade ground to the inevitable, blue-white mound of Mount Ranier, looming up out of the hazy foothills. I was dirty, rumpled, hung over, and generally sick of the whole damned world. The mountain was still the same corny, picture-postcard thing it had always been — a ready-made tourist attraction, needing only a beer sign on the summit to make it complete. I’d made bad jokes about its ostentatious vulgarity all the way through college, but that morning after having been away for so damned long, I swear I got a lump in my throat just looking at it. It was the first time I’d really felt anything for a long time.
Maybe I was human after all.
2
THEY weren’t ready to start processing us yet, so they filled in the rest of the day with the usual Mickey-Mouse crap that the Army always comes up with to occupy a man’s spare time. At four-thirty, after frequent warnings that we were still in the Army and subject to court-martial, they gave us passes and told us to keep our noses clean. They really didn’t sound too hopeful about it.
I walked on past the mob-scene in the parking lot — parents, wives, girlfriends, and the like, crying and hugging and shaking hands and backslapping — and headed toward the bus stop. I’d had enough of all that stuff.
“Hey, Alders,” someone yelled. “You want a lift into town?” It was Benson naturally. He’d been embarrassingly grateful when I’d given him back the watch, and I guess he wanted to do something for me. His folks were with him, a tall, sunburned man and a little woman in a flowered dress who was hanging onto Benson’s arm like grim death. I could see that they weren’t really wild about having a stranger along on their reunion.
“No thanks,” I said, waving him off. “See you tomorrow.” I hurried on so he wouldn’t have time to insist. Benson was a nice enough kid, but he could be an awful pain in the ass sometimes.
The bus crawled slowly toward Tacoma, through a sea of traffic. By the time I got downtown, I’d worked up a real thirst. I hit one of the Pacific Avenue bars and poured down three beers, one after another. After German beer, the stuff still tasted just a wee bit like stud horsepiss with the foam blown off even with the acclimating I’d done on the train. I sat in the bar for about an hour until the place started to fill up. They kept turning the jukebox up until it got to the pain level. That’s when I left. The sun was just going down when I came back out on the street. The sides of all the buildings were washed with a coppery kind of light, and everybody’s face was bright red in the reflected glow.
I loitered on down the sidewalk for a while, trying to think of something to do and watching the assorted GI’s, Airmen, and swab jockeys drifting up and down the Avenue in twos and threes. They seemed to be trying very hard to convince each other that they were having a good time. I walked slowly up one side of the street, stopping to look in the pawnshop windows with their clutter of overpriced junk and ignoring repeated invitations of sweaty little men to “come on in and look around, Soljer.”
I stuck my nose into a couple of the penny arcades. I watched a pinball addict carry on his misdirected love affair with a seductively blinking nickle-grabber. I even poked a few dimes into a peep-show machine and watched without much interest while a rather unpretty girl on scratchy film took off her clothes.
Up the street a couple girls from one of the local colleges were handing out “literature.” They both had straight hair and baggy-looking clothes, and it appeared that they were doing their level best to look as ugly as possible, even though they were both not really that bad. I knew the type. Most of the GI’s were ignoring them, and the two kids looked a little desperate.
“Here, soldier,” the short one said, mistaking my look of sympathy for interest. She thrust a leaflet into my hand. I glanced at it. It informed me that I was engaged in an immoral war and that decent people looked upon me as a swaggering bully with bloody hands. Further, it told me that if I wanted to desert, there were people who were willing to help me get out of the country.
“Interesting,” I said, handing it back to her.
“What’s the matter?” she sneered. “Afraid an MP might catch you with it?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
“Forget him Clydine,” the other one said. That stopped me.
“Is that really your name?” I asked the little one.
“So what?”
“I’ve just never met anybody named Clydine before.”
“Is anything wrong with it?” she demanded. She was very short, and she glared up at me belligerently. “I’m not here for a pickup, fella.”
“Neither am I, girlie,” I told her. I dislike being called “fella.” I always have.
“Then you approve of what the government’s doing in Vietnam?” She got right to the point, old Clydine. No sidetracks for her.
“They didn’t ask me.”
“Why don’t you desert then?”
Her chum pitched in, too. “Don’t you want to get out of the country?”
“I’ve just been out of the country,” I objected.
“We’re just wasting our time on this one, Joan,” Clydine said. “He isn’t even politically aware.”
“It’s been real,” I told them. “I’ll always remember you both fondly.”
They turned their backs on me and went on handing out pamphlets.
Farther up the street another young lady stopped me, but she wasn’t offering politics. She was surprisingly direct about what she was offering.
Next a dirty-looking little guy wanted to give me a “real artistic” tattoo. I turned him down, too.
Farther along, a GI with wasted-looking eyeballs tried to sell me a lid of grass.
I went into another bar — a fairly quiet one — and mulled it around over a beer. I decided that I must have had the look of somebody who wanted something. I couldn’t really make up my mind why.
I went back on down the street. It was a sad, grubby street with sad, grubby people on it, all hysterically afraid that some GI with money on him might get past them.
That thought stopped me. The four hundred I’d won was in my blouse pocket, and I sure didn’t want to get rolled. It was close enough after payday to make a lone GI a pretty good target, so I decided that I’d better get off Pacific Avenue.