The Suicide Run Part 2

Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin' to me- I had become spoiled. Having lived for weeks as the sole occupant of a room designed for two, I had all but forgotten the possibility of a roommate-who plainly had just moved in. As a matter of fact, his efficiency was such that he had already been inspired to add his name to the card on the frame of the door, and below my name had neatly printed his identification: SECOND LT. DARLING P. JEETER, JR., USMC.

Bemused, I gazed at the card for some time, struck by the cadence of the name itself, which I tested several times on palate and tongue, but also by the absence, at the end of "USMC," of an "R," designating a reserve. And my spirits sank as I realized that come what may I had drawn a regular. I opened the door, the music boomed forth: Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin' to me-

Had me jumpin' an' a-humpin' till half past three-

And I beheld, seated at the desk naked but for his green skivvy drawers, stamping out time to the cretinous song with bare feet, a stocky, muscular young man of twenty-one or twenty-two with acne scars on his cheeks and shoulders, wire-rimmed spectacles, straw-colored hair clipped to a half-inch skinhead cut, and-largely due to a wet, protuberant lower lip and an exceptionally meager forehead-an expression of radiant vacuity. If this description seems more than reasonably unfavorable, it is because I mean it to be, since nothing my roommate did or said during the course of our acquaintanceship diminished that first impression of almost unprecedented loutishness.

"Howdy," he said, rising and turning down his phonograph, coming forward to shake my hand. I noticed that he had pushed the proofs of my novel somewhat aside on the desk, also my dictionary and several other of the few books I had brought with me-Oscar Williams's modern American verse anthology and the Viking Portable Dante were two I remember-and these now shared s.p.a.ce with a mountainous pile of phonograph records, presumably of the order of "Ding-dong Daddy," three long, unsheathed, murderous-looking blue-steel knives, a stack of "men's" magazines (True, Argosy, and the like), a box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a random a.s.sortment of toilet articles including, I could not help but notice, a large cellophane-wrapped pack of fancy condoms known as "wet skins."

He gave me a firm grip. "Name's Darling Jeeter," he declared in a hearty voice, clearly that of an Ole Country Boy. "Muh friends all call me Dee."

I was relieved that he so quickly took care of the name business (he must have had the problem before) since had he not offered me the way out I was prepared to say politely and immediately: "I'm very sorry but I cannot possibly call you Darling." For although the patronymic is certainly venerable enough (was it mere whimsy that led Barrie to give that honored name to the family in Peter Pan?), and although to christen one's offspring with a family name is a common enough practice throughout the South (my roommate, as it turned out, hailed from down in Florence, South Carolina), I considered myself already too sensitive to this new and, on my part, desperately unwanted intimacy to compound my discomfort by having to say things like "Darling, would you mind handing me the soap?" or, G.o.d forbid ... well, the possibilities were too numerous to contemplate.

Anyway, I introduced myself to Dee, and while I was groggy with the need for a short nap, I felt it only proper that the two of us-officers, gentlemen, southerners at that-sit down and at least go through the motions of getting acquainted, especially when it looked as if we were destined to be cheek by jowl for some time that summer in a climate not really suited for harmonious relations at close quarters. Dee, as it turned out, was a hand-to-hand-combat expert, his specialty knife fighting "close in"; the reason I had enjoyed several weeks of grace without his company was because this period he had spent in California, at the marine base at Camp Pendleton, where he had learned all the tricks of his trade. He had been sent back to Lejeune as an instructor, and was looking forward enormously to his vocation, brief as he hoped it would be.

"I'll go anywhere the Corps sends me, that's muh duty you see, but if you want to know the G.o.d-durn real truth what I really want to do is get over to Korea and stick about six inches of cold steel in as many of those G.o.d-durned gooks I can get holt of."

"How long have you been in the Corps?" I asked.

"Nine months and eight days," he replied. "I was in ROTC"-he p.r.o.nounced it "Rotacy"-"at Clemson and then I took a commission and they done sent me to Quantico. Couldn't fire a rifle worth a s.h.i.t on account of muh eyes"-he gestured toward his spectacles, and peered out at me from behind them with an expression that seemed peculiarly faraway and dim, like a rodent's, not aglint with the fervor of a knife fighter but somehow mossed over with the glaze of arrested development, or perhaps only fifteen years or so of slow fruition in the schools of South Carolina-"but I got me a waiver on the eyes, and I volunteered for knife fightin', which is the thing I truly come to love. Sometimes I think that a knife is the G.o.d-durned prettiest thing in the world. Stick that ole thing in, twist an' shove, twist an' shove-shee-it, man! Care for some pogey bait?"

Not since my early days in the Corps in World War II had I heard the words "pogey bait"-old-time marine and navy slang for candy-and as he reached for the box of Baby Ruths I declined, saying that the weather was too hot and that, besides, my stomach felt rather poorly. Most of the reserves had made a point, generally, of not using the accepted seagoing vocabulary; I soon learned that Dee employed a salty locution whenever possible-"deck" for "floor," "bulkhead" for "wall"-which did little to further weld our relationship.

"Ordinarily," he went on, "I relish an Almond Joy or two along about this time of the morning, but the PX run out of Joys. Had to settle for the Ruths."

"Tell me," I said, honestly curious, "have you ever killed anybody with one of those knives?"

He took the question with equanimity. "Naw," he replied, "at Pendleton we practiced on dummies-and on each other, but with rubber blades. Naw, I ain't killed anybody yet-I'll have to confess."

I could not help but pursue the tack I had embarked upon and I said: "Dee, listen, don't you think killing people with a knife might just sicken you? I mean, just to watch some guy's guts fall out, and the blood and everything-well, I know knife fighting is sometimes necessary and d.a.m.ned useful when the chips are down, but Jesus, how can you actually think you're going to like it?" He had gnawed off the end of a Baby Ruth and was masticating it thoughtfully; the candy was sweetly odorous on the close hot air, and for an instant, vaguely nauseated, I was borne away in a queasy trance of chocolate, peanuts, vanillin, lecithin, hydrogenated vegetable oil, emulsifiers. A runnel of sweat made its way down his hairless belly which, like the rest of him, seemed as tight as rawhide despite his confectionery yen. I l.u.s.ted for sleep, felt my eyelids slide closed, and listened to a cicada's shrill crickety screech, electric against the eardrum, as it sc.r.a.ped somewhere outside in the lowering heat.

"Well you see, ordinarily I might get sick like you say," he replied. "I don't truly like the sight of blood any more than the next man. But this here is a different matter now. We face the greatest peril this country has ever known. Did you see that movie they shown us at Pendleton? Red Evil on the Earth it was called, somethin' like that, about how those Communist b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are takin' over everywhere. Sons of b.i.t.c.hes. Guy with the bushy beard-what's his name?-Marx, and that other Russian son of a b.i.t.c.h, I forget his name, the bald one with that itty-bitty goatee on him like a streak of dog doo, G.o.d durn, boy, let me get a knife into both of them Communist sons of b.i.t.c.hes, twist an' shove, twist an' shove, that's all, and you'll figure out pretty quick how a man can love cold steel."

"They're both already dead," I said.

"They're both dead, all righty-dighty," he said evenly. "Then I'll kill some other good Communist son of a b.i.t.c.h, preferably the color of yellow. You know what the only good kind of Communist there is, don't you?"

"Yes," I said, "a dead one. Look, Dee, I was up at four this morning and I'm terribly tired. I wonder if you'd mind shutting off the music for a while and let me take a little nap."

"Sh.o.r.e," he replied, "you go right ahead. I'll just be real quiet and put muh gear away. You go on and have you some good sack duty while ole Dee gets things squared away."

As I was drifting off I heard him say: "How do you figure the situation shapes up for a little nooky around here?"

"A few navy nurses, Dee," I murmured, "that's all. O.K. if you like them real big. Or short and scrawny."

"Shee-it, man," I heard him say, far off through the misty onset of slumber, "I love nooky any which way. I'm just like muh ole daddy. If I could find me a p.u.s.s.y big enough I'd set up camp inside-mess tents, flagpole, parade ground and all."

Dee's connection with his daddy was, as it turned out, neither casual nor merely reminiscent. When I returned to the B.O.Q. the next morning after spending a night in the field, Dee and his father were sitting at the desk munching on Almond Joys. The elder Jeeter was a man in what I took to be his late fifties or early sixties, haggard-looking with a pale, sad, gentle face deeply furrowed and lined; even at my first glance I saw that he was desperately sick. He wore an imitation pongee sport shirt through which a few old chalky-white hairs poked limply, and sacklike trousers, rather wrinkled and dirty, of a defeated greenish hue. He smelled mysteriously of something bitter and metallic, and was seized now and then by a horrible racking cough; I could recall no one for whose health on so short an acquaintance I felt such immediate alarm. He called Dee "Juney." A onetime Gunner-the marine term for warrant officer-he had served in the Corps for thirty-five years and had just come up from Florence to visit his newly commissioned son. He was a widower.

"What do you do on the outside, son?" the retired Gunner inquired of me in a kindly voice. Like Jeeter junior he spoke in a rich, loamy, Low Country drawl, with overtones of that arcane South Carolina dialect called Geechee. He sucked tirelessly at cigarettes.

"I'm a writer," I replied.

"You work around hosses?" he went on pleasantly.

"Not rider," I said sharply, "writer. I'm a writer. I write books. Prose. Prose fiction. What the French call romans." My sarcasm was heavy and intentional. A blaze of rage flared up behind my eyes, prompted in part by the Gunner's well-meaning density but also because of the sense of crowdedness the room suddenly gave me-cramped enough with two persons, it was made to seem positively thronged by the presence of a third-and because of my despair over new rumors that we were soon to ship out for Korea and by a general sense of doom and frustration that had begun to overtake me more often as the summer pa.s.sed, and that was in no way alleviated now by the feel in my pocket of a letter which I had received in the same mail as Laurel's obscene bulletin: sent by my editor in New York, it contained the first review of my book, and although I had not yet read it I could somehow sense that the review was bad.

The Gunner went into a paroxysm of coughing as Dee explained to me: "Daddy's an old-time marine, seen 'em all. Western Front in 1918, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guantanamo-wherever the action was at, Daddy was. Ain't that right, boss man? French girls, Spanish girls, even n.i.g.g.e.r girls down in Haiti, whenever Daddy went ash.o.r.e the word got around, 'Stud Jeeter's a-comin', Stud Jeeter of the Horse Marines!' Ain't that right, boss man?"

"Well, Juney," he said, wiping his eyes and with a rattle of phlegm at the back of this throat, "I like to say that I done my time thataway near about as good as the next marine around."

"Tell about that wh.o.r.ehouse in-where was it, Daddy?-Cuba, wasn't it, you know where they run a movie show on the ceiling and they washes off your p.e.c.k.e.r with coconut oil. Tell about that."

I was quite frankly unaccustomed to such merry s.e.xual candor between parent and offspring, and I listened restlessly for half an hour or so as the Gunner, coughing and obviously in real distress but still eager to recapture the roustabout joys of other days, methodically anatomized brothels in Havana, Port-au-Prince, and Buenos Aires. But finally the effort seemed too much for him; he half-strangled and turned an ashen gray, and Dee got up and led him out of the room, saying that what his father doubtless needed was a Dr. Pepper at the PX for a pick-me-up.

For a while, after they had gone, I lay on my bed in the terrible heat trying to muster courage to read the review. Having subsequently, over the years, received as much vituperative criticism as any of my colleagues in the trade, and in some respects considerably more, yet having perforce developed an all but impermeable skin, I marvel now as I recall the anguish with which I approached the review-my first as a bona fide writer. It was not, to be sure, a review in the most important sense of the word, being merely a prepublication appraisal in one of the journals of the book-publishing industry. But it must be remembered that it was my initiation. For me it was like a crucible, and I read it with a growing and sickening sense of ruin. I think my editor's "Don't let this bother you" had been the tip-off.

This fat, confident, deafening novel by a young Virginian has received such florid advance raves that it is bound to be widely discussed and widely read even though its author's talent-while by no means inconsiderable-hardly measures up to the ex travagant claims being made for it. Set in the country-club atmosphere of a Tidewater Virginia city, the novel chronicles-at sometimes glacial pace-the woes and tribulations of a family which includes a neurotic mother, an alcoholic father, and two daughters-one a cripple and the other a nymphomaniac. Sounds like soap opera? It could be, but isn't, for the twenty-six-year-old author is a skilled wordsmith and has a gift for dialogue and imagery which transforms his witches' brew of guilt, jealousy, and Oedipal longings into a reading experience that often rises excitingly above the book's hackneyed theme. But this newcomer is hardly the literary original he is being hailed as, and too often displays his debt to Faulkner, Warren, McCullers, and even Capote and Speed Lamkin, among other recent recruits to the doom-despair-decay school of southern letters. Nonetheless, despite its shopworn subject matter and all too frequent lapses into "purple" prose, the novel signifies the arrival of an interesting new talent and should be satisfying to those serious readers seeking a change from light hammock reading. (Sept. 10. First printing 10,000.) -L.K.

I was dead. Dead. Dead as a smelt. Skilled wordsmith. Speed Lamkin. Interesting new talent. Jesus Christ, in debt to Speed Lamkin! In retrospect I can see that the review, snotty as it really might have been, did not comprise the killing hatchet job I was convinced it was as I writhed in agony on that unhappy morning. But I had been cruelly clobbered. I can remember every nuance of my misery and mortification, can-even today-recall each raw detail of my thoughts as they sought to liberate me from this outrage, strove to diminish the intensity of the hurt. "L.K." Who the f.u.c.k was "L.K."? Lydia Kerr, surely-some smart-a.s.s twenty-three-year-old Va.s.sar graduate, an English major with a fabricated pa.s.sion for medieval poetry looking down her snoot at every American novelist since Melville, a parched little d.y.k.e with blotched skin living in a Village walk-up filled with Partisan Reviews, Agatha Christie mysteries, and annotated editions of Piers Plowman-but no, a Va.s.sar graduate wouldn't write "wordsmith," or, well, would she? A hater of southerners, then, Leo Kolodny, some failed writer turned hack reviewer, a CCNY type with a heart murmur, piles, and joyless Talmudic eyes, probably teaching a seminar in modern lit at a dismal uptown night school, where he purveyed muddy wisdom about Bellow, Malamud, and the Jewish renaissance. Leo Kolodny would use "wordsmith." At any rate, I felt finished as a writer, sick at heart, and that night I went out with Lacy to Jacksonville-the garish honky-tonk town that adjoined the base-and drowned myself in a southern-made beer called Lion, so callow a concoction, and so foul, that the yeast floated in it like minute flakes of snow.

What occurred during the next forty-eight hours was improbable, bizarre, and in certain of its aspects beyond explanation-as it still is to me. When I first started to set down this chronicle, I was tempted not to include the episode (nor for that matter anything at all about Dee Jeeter and his father), feeling that it had so little to do with Paul Marriott that its presence would be superfluous and distracting. But on second thought I have decided to describe what happened, for I think it tells more about Paul than I had at first imagined, and about the Marine Corps, and what makes it such a mysterious community of men.

After coming back from Jacksonville that night I fell into a drugged sleep, only to be aroused some hours later by a dreadful racket which was unidentifiable at first and then, as I came to my senses, resolved itself into the noise of coughing. I sat upright in bed as dawn palely filtered through the windows. The spasm of coughing-from Gunner Jeeter-was truly awful to hear, a steady sepulchral hacking so helpless, so rending of the flesh that it seemed to breathe the very sound of mortality. And to my amazement, when my eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light, I saw that Dee had not simply relinquished his bed to his father (my first thought) but that they were both sleeping in it-a bed like mine, somewhat uncomfortably narrow for one. As I sat listening to the unceasing coughs I was filled with a number of emotions-chagrin, pity, concern, and, finally, anger. For while it was bad enough that these characters without so much as a by-your-leave to me (after all, I outranked both of them, though not greatly) should for whatever reason (I ruled out incest) double up in bed and further congest our tiny sleeping s.p.a.ce, it was insufferable that there should be added to this intrusion such a slumber-destroying uproar. And why in G.o.d's name wasn't the old man in the hospital?

There was a lull in the coughing and I heard Dee say: "How you feelin', Daddy?"

"Awright," the Gunner replied. "Wisht I had some terrapin hydrate, or some Smith Brothers cherry drops. I'm burnin' up with fever, though. What time is it, son?"

"'Bout half past five. Why don't you set up, boss man, and have a cigarette? That might soothe you down."

Even in those innocent days before the surgeon general's report, when I myself was a dedicated smoker, I knew that a cigarette was hardly the anodyne for the Gunner's ailment, whatever it might be, and I was about to peevishly say so when he lit his Zippo for a smoke, sitting up weakly in bed, his face a cadaverous white in the glow of the fire. I could not stand the sight. I buried my head in the pillow and slept fitfully until reveille, a cannonade of coughing agitating my dreams like the rumble of a thunder beyond a distant horizon.

When I awoke the pair of them was gone. Later in the day I saw Lacy, who thought the story was howlingly funny but was of the opinion too that in some way, if only for my own health, I should manage to throw the old man out.

"Poor old sod, I feel sorry for him," I said, "but I can't stand another night of that. I just have to get some decent sleep."

"You've got to have him evicted," Lacy insisted. "It's not just an imposition on your own rights and privacy, but it sounds to me like he's got a really virulent case of TB. Think of all those bacteria floating down on you. Get him out of there, for Christ's sake!"

That night our company had a compa.s.s problem in the woods, and I arrived back at the B.O.Q. after one o'clock, worn out, to face the same ordeal: the drowned sleep, the diabolical interruption, the long hours as I lay, rigid as a mummy, listening to the tormented hacking and hawking and the inane colloquy between father and son. Again only at dawn did I drift off to sleep, awaking a couple of hours later feeling dopey and stupefied, like one who has been given too strong a dose of barbiturates. Both of my roommates were gone.

I encountered Dee in the shower room a few minutes later. "Where's your father?" I demanded.

"Went down to the mess hall for breakfast," he replied, soaping lather over the acne pits of his jowls. "How's things, old buddy? You surely look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed."

"Then your eyesight is even poorer than you imagined," I said testily. "I've had hardly a moment's sleep in two nights now. Listen, Dee, I want to tell you something. I think your father is in very bad shape physically. I strongly suggest that you get him over to the hospital, and right away. There's something wrong, I mean seriously wrong, with a cough like that."

"That's all right. Daddy's always had a lot of trouble with his bronchials, ever since the war of '18. Cough like that just hangs on and hangs on, 'specially after when he gets a cold like he done a week or so ago." Steam from the shaving water had fogged over his gla.s.ses and this opaque effect, together with the mounds of white lather, made him seem to me particularly grotesque and repellent. He had just finished stropping an old-fashioned straight-edged razor-a dangerous-looking brilliant thing, the first I had seen in years-and was clothed in only a jockstrap, which I a.s.sumed was a necessary accouterment for a knife fighter. "Daddy's goin' to be all right," he went on. "Don't you worry about the ole boss man."

"Well, I don't agree with you," I said, and I heard my voice grow sharp and impatient. "But even if I did I would still be talking to you this way, because all that coughing is getting in the way of my sleep. I haven't slept for two nights now on account of that coughing. It's as simple as that. I hate to say it, but G.o.ddammit, I want your father out of that room today. Do you understand?"

He was silent for a moment, gazing at himself in the mirror, then turned slowly toward me and said in an edgy, evil, smile-when-you-say-that voice: "Gettin' a tiny bit Asiatic, ain't you, ole buddy? What's the matter, tryin' to pull rank on your ole roomie?"

"Just get him out of there," I retorted, feeling an alarming coronary turbulence as I strove to control my rage. "Just get him the f.u.c.k out of there, that's all I have to say!" And I turned and left.

Perhaps Dee would finally have complied with my ultimatum; I'll never know. That same day after lunch I returned to the room to change into my dungarees for an afternoon field problem. When I opened the door I immediately sensed something askew, and as I entered the room I saw that the Gunner, alone in the place, propped up feebly at the desk, had begun to hemorrhage; incredibly there was no sound, no coughing now, and very little motion. He merely sat leaning forward slightly with both hands clutched to his mouth, regarding me with a look of silent, abyssal fear. In rivulets the color of freshly decanted claret, blood oozed between his fingers-fingers which seemed fumblingly to be trying to force back between his lips the remorseless flow streaming over the backs of his hands and down his arms. The whole upheaval must have begun only seconds before I arrived. I was riven with panic, having no notion of what to do, whether to lay him down or stand him up, apply manual pressure somewhere or cold compresses, perhaps hot ones, fearful-as one always is when faced with the crisis of first aid-that what one might do would not just be approximately wrong but the exact opposite of right. But I did manage to yell to the corporal, on orderly duty down the hall, to summon an ambulance from the regimental dispensary, and then I grabbed a towel and thrust it into the Gunner's groping hands, figuring that he was better able to soak up the stream than I was. He had begun to moan distantly and his eyes beseeched mine in fathomless terror. And at last I could only stand there helpless, delicately stroking his wasted old shoulders and murmuring foolish words of rea.s.surance while the blood dribbled in vermilion runnels down the stringy arms, across the bruise-hued tattoo of the grand old Marine Corps globe and anchor embossed there G.o.d knew how many years ago during some whoring, celebrant sh.o.r.e leave in Seattle or Valparaiso or Shanghai, when those forearms, young and hard as whalebone, belonged to Stud Jeeter of the Horse Marines, and trickling finally into a puddle on the desk amid the candy boxes, the Gene Autry alb.u.ms, the muscle magazines, the glittering knives. "Juney," I heard him blubber. "I want to see Juney." But I could do nothing about that either.

The ambulance arrived soon, in no more than five minutes, dispatched with that remarkable efficiency of which the military service is rarely but sometimes capable. I accompanied the Gunner to the hospital and stayed there until Dee turned up, all pinched and pale with dread. But there was no hope for his boss man. He had gone into a coma. He died early the next morning, and an autopsy revealed the existence of advanced carcinoma of the lung.

The episode shook me up terribly and left me in a state of black depression. Why this was so was difficult for me to explain to myself. It hardly involved anything approaching bereavement. My acquaintance with the Gunner, largely nocturnal and unpleasant, had been so brief that I could not say that the gentle quality he had displayed at first encounter had inspired in me even so warm a response as mild liking. And as for a liking for Dee-the squalid fruit of his loins-I had none. Yet obscurely and unshakably I was haunted by the event for days afterward, without success pondering the reason why a man who must have known himself seriously ill had not sought the refuge of a hospital, and feeling a persistent, perhaps unnecessary guilt-he would have died anyway, I kept telling myself-over the fact that I myself had been so dilatory in my efforts to force him to get his lungs attended to.

Several days after all this happened, and Dee had gotten leave to go down to South Carolina to bury his father-having in the meantime, to my great relief, decamped permanently and without explanation from our room, leaving me free and solitary once more-I ran into Paul Marriott at the bar of the officers' club, where he invited me to have a drink. My oversensitiveness at the time still amazes me, but some m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic impulse had compelled me to carry the review of my book in my wallet, from which I would extract it from time to time and reread it, digesting anew the few patronizing crumbs of praise it contained and at the same moment flagellating myself with its general tone of deprecation. It embarra.s.ses me to recall that I forced it upon Paul to read, which he did, rapidly, with a slight smile.

Saying only, "You don't take that seriously, do you, really?" he handed the review back to me.

"It's a pain in the a.s.s," I groaned, "just an omen of what's to come."

"Bulls.h.i.t," he replied. "That's the work of someone who's very young or very jealous of you or both, and in any case a mediocrity. Put it out of your mind."

There was such firm, final authority in his reaction and his manner that it gave me tremendous heart, and I drank three martinis in quick succession as a kind of diminutive celebration. Paul, I had noticed before, always drank carefully, even abstemiously, and although at home he had been most generous with alcohol for his guests I noticed that he appeared consciously to hold back, sipping perhaps two very light bourbons with water before dinner and, after the wine, a single brandy and nothing more. In a way this sparing indulgence seemed to suit him, seemed to go with the image he conveyed of a stunning fitness and vitality. He had a superb physique-the kind of supple, feline, coordinated body that one envied so at the age of fourteen, and caused one to send off for a Charles Atlas course in muscle building-and an air of ravishing health: any excess of booze would have soon coa.r.s.ened and made soggy those remarkably well-proportioned features. Paul was nursing a single bottle of Carlsberg beer. We were joined by a major and a captain, both regulars, whom I was introduced to by Paul, and the talk turned to baseball-a subject which (perversely for an American) tends to bring on in me such devastating ennui that I can feel it as an actual soreness or inflammation at the back of my skull. The conversation here did not descend to anything so ign.o.ble as batting averages; it was Mickey Mantle I think they were talking about, he was very big that year, and they were comparing him to some other batter or pitcher or whatever, from Chicago or Boston or somewhere; I lost track of it all, noting only that Paul spoke knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the sport, which did not seem at all out of character when I recollected that Lacy had told me that he had been a triple-threat athlete at V.M.I. Then after a bit the talk became more general, and I found myself morosely telling about the old Gunner who had started to die in my room just a few days before. Save for Lacy, I had not mentioned the matter to anyone, and now as I described the whole strange event in detail I found that it had for me a liberating, almost cathartic effect.

"I suppose I should have gotten him out of there the first night," I said, "pulled rank on his son or something and made sure that he got some proper treatment. But the doctor at the hospital told me that he was already done for."

"No," said Paul, "you really had no responsibility in the thing. What was the old fellow's name anyway?"

"Jeeter," I said, "regular warrant officer, retired."

Paul's jaw dropped and over his face came a look of sudden dismay. "No," he said, in a slow wondering voice. "No, it's hard to believe-Gunner Jeeter, Stud Jeeter he was called-dead! I can hardly believe it! Fellow with a sort of sad hound dog's face, melancholy eyes?"

"The same," I replied. "Yes."

He shook his head gently and reflectively. "So the Gunner's gone to his reward," he said, and his lips were touched with a wry, mischievous smile. "I only hope there are a lot of hot broads in heaven. The Gunner was one of the greatest swordsmen ever to hit the Corps."

"I've heard of the Gunner, haven't I, Paul?" said one of the other officers. "Wasn't he a Medal of Honor winner in the First World War?"

"No," Paul said. "That decoration he got in Nicaragua during the 1920s, fighting the Communist rebels. Although you are right, he had been with the Fifth Marines at Chateau-Thierry. Stud Jeeter dead and gone, why it's like the pa.s.sing of an era!" He sighed and ran his hand through his sandy, close-cropped hair. And an odd expression-remote, searching, reminiscent-came to his eyes, a look that I found unsettlingly brimful of emotion; it was not quite, but manifestly close to, real sorrow, and I discerned a mistiness that for an instant seemed to presage tears. But then he laughed hesitantly and said, "G.o.d, he was one of the most colorful characters the Corps has ever seen. Boozer, brawler, wh.o.r.emonger-and brave as Achilles. Had downed his share of p.i.s.s and punk, too, but one of the best men with a heavy-machine-gun unit the Corps ever produced. G.o.d, I didn't know he had died!" Again the tone was of real chagrin. "I wish I'd known! I'll have to go to the funeral."

"I believe the funeral was yesterday," I put in, "down in South Carolina."

"Did you know the Gunner, Paul?" one of the officers inquired. The captain and the major, though older than myself by a few years, were considerably younger than Paul, and when they asked these questions about the Gunner, all eager and attentive, I was reminded of something almost tribal-of junior Apache or Sioux braves in the presence of a wiser, more seasoned chieftain, seeking a word of a fabled place and time, of heroes who fought before the reservations existed, when the buffalo thronged the plains and drums beat along the warpath. The Old Corps.

"He was truly one of the Old Breed," Paul mused. "They don't make them like that anymore. h.e.l.l, yes, I knew him, I knew the Gunner well. My first year of sea duty as a lieutenant, on the Maryland, he was a sergeant in the marine detachment. That was in '32 or '33, and he taught me everything about sea duty I ever knew. Then later on, when I was in Shanghai before the war, the Gunner was there-a warrant officer by then-and again he taught me as much about infantry tactics as I ever learned at Quantico. He was too old to get in the fighting in the last war, and not in very good health, either. The liquor eventually got at him. I think he finally developed a diabetes that put him out of commission. He never would see a doctor, even in Shanghai when he was having terrible trouble with his liver. So I don't wonder that just now he wouldn't go to the hospital, even when he was coughing his guts up. Son of a b.i.t.c.h! What a sorry, pathetic way for the old fellow to go out! I'm sad that I didn't know he was up here, that I somehow couldn't have paid a last goodbye."

Appropriately, as Paul spoke (indeed, with an appropriateness that could only be called ba.n.a.l), the sound of a bugle fell on the late-afternoon air and I glanced outside the club where a flag was being lowered while the bugler blew "Retreat," and a scattering of marines had paused at momentary attention, their figures casting lean, gangly shadows in the slant of sunset. And for a long instant I was seized-as I always have been when I hear those piercing trumpet notes-with a sense of loss and sadness, a vision of tropic seas and strange coasts, storm-swept distances accompanied always and always in my mind's innermost recess with the m.u.f.fled tramp of booted footfalls, as of legions of men being hurried to unknown destinies. Then the sound of the bugle died away and I heard Paul's voice again through the growing clatter of the bar, where the officers' wives' unbridled laughter and "My Truly, Truly Fair," booming from the Muzak, battled each other over the incessant churning of the c.o.c.ktail shakers.

"And so his boy became a marine, did he?" he said to me. "He was so proud of that kid. The last time I saw the Gunner-it must have been ten years ago, in San Diego, just after Pearl Harbor-he said he only wished his boy had been born early enough to fight in the war. But he also said no matter, his kid would be a marine someday. And so he is. How he adored that boy! He'll get his chance in Korea. Nice fellow?"

"Charming," I said, misty-eyed.

"That Gunner!" Paul exclaimed. "Christ, you know he wouldn't salute any officer less than flag grade, and there were even some colonels he wouldn't give the time of day to. Wore his dungarees everywhere, even at parade. What a character!" He went on with a smile, shaking his head, deeply moved, reminiscent: "You know, in 1942 they had surveyed him out for medical reasons at Pendleton-he must have been over fifty then-yet they couldn't make him quit. Here he was, technically separated from the service, and he had the gumption, the grit-the bra.s.s to hitch a ride, I mean literally stow away on a transport going to Pearl Harbor, where he stormed into the commanding general's office-in his dungarees, mind you-and demanded that he be a.s.signed to duty somewhere in the First Division. He meant Guadalca.n.a.l, too, and no rotten office job. Of course, he couldn't make it, but what grit, what splendid bra.s.s! No sir, they don't make marines like the Gunner anymore. Did you ever hear how he won that Medal of Honor-"

The Old Corps. Suddenly I understood that despite Paul's vivid anecdotal style I really didn't give a d.a.m.n how the old fart had gotten his Medal of Honor-and this was truly still a measure of my disaffection with the Corps and all it stood for. Paul, however, had warmed to his subject with all the vivacity and zeal of one of those pukka sahib types, usually played by David Niven, memorializing vanished exploits on the Afghan border; and just as my disappointment in Paul became sharpest and most vexing I realized how foolish it was for me to feel that way: he was a marine above all, first and foremost, always a marine, and for me it had been the dreamiest wishful thinking, goofy as a schoolgirl's, to see him as truly "literary" or "artistic" when these were merely components of an enlightened and superior dilettantism. It was extraordinary enough that those delicate aspects of his personality had not been obliterated by the all-demanding, all-molding pressures of the military system, had not been trampled by the ruthless boot of an organization insisting of its members that their sensibilities remain male and muscular, their culture sterile, ingrown, and philistine if not mindless. He had read Camus. This alone, it seemed to me, was almost a miracle.

The bugle call still lingered in my mind, suffusing me with a mood both restless and somber, and as I sat there in the twilight listening to Paul's stories about the Gunner, listening to his warm and feeling panegyric to this old departed mercenary warrior, to these tales of the Old Corps with their memories and echoes of sea duty and sh.o.r.e leave, of jungle bivouacs, of Haitian outposts, Nicaraguan patrols, Chinese skirmishes, and other relics of America's magisterial thrusts and forays throughout the hemisphere and the world, I realized that Paul was certainly at least as comfortable, if not more so, when talking of these matters as about French cuisine or the gentle art of fiction. He was a professional, and the ties to the small elite fellowship to which he belonged-ties of nostalgia as well as loyalty and faith-were as strong (and no more to be wondered at) in the end as those ties which bind other men to a vocation in science or the arts or a political belief or-to be more nearly precise-a church.

THE SUICIDE RUN.

I MUST MAKE A SMALL CONFESSION. Despite my aversion to military things, there are aspects of the life that I have found tolerable-fascinating even, though inferior to chess or Scarlatti. Take mortars, for example. Although I was born with, I'm sure, less than average manual dexterity, the use of mortars in the field-and my ability to supervise the men who handled them-never failed to please me in its neat meshing of teamwork, speed, subtlety of reflex, and mechanical skill. Rather like an athletic ballet with men in almost synchronous motion, the whole process of setting up the long tubes on their bipods and baseplates, locating the aiming stakes, precisely leveling and balancing the weapons with their various little cranks and wheels-all of these comprised a nimble, exciting prelude to the penultimate racket as the rounds popped forth on their lethal journey through the empyrean and to the final, gratifying, earth-jolting crump-crump when-a mile away-the sh.e.l.ls blew some poor n.i.g.g.e.r shack to sawdust. To be sure, it was never so neat and pretty in combat. Nevertheless, I think it all satisfied a thwarted boyish longing in me, a desire for the loudest and fattest firecracker in the world, though in addition there was something unnervingly priapean about those stiff up-tilted tubes poking the air, and my pleasure may have been rooted in a darker source; whatever, the sense of rhythm, precision, and completion I achieved from working with mortars helps provide another reason why military service and infantry combat in particular is such a magic lure for certain men.

Of course it was not unheard of, during training, for a mortar to burst apart with dreadful effect, killing or maiming everyone nearby, and once that summer-in another regiment-several faulty rounds fell disastrously short of the target and blotted out the lives of eight young recruits; such eventualities occasionally caused me to sweat and made my mouth grow dry with fear. But in general I managed to avoid thoughts like these and took pleasure in the work. In fact, rather paradoxically, it was the severely military aspects of my recall to service which I liked the most, or minded the least. My flesh had fallen into soft disrepair in the stews of Greenwich Village; the new routine was strenuous, with many days and nights on training problems, amphibious landings, and s.a.d.i.s.tic hikes, and after the first shock wore off it was an actual delight to develop a trooper's appet.i.te and to feel the muscle tone return to my flabby, once-sodden limbs.

I acquired a glorious suntan: a couple of snapshots taken of me at the time record the very figure of a strapping, bronzed, miserable young marine. But I had forgotten how appealing, how spirit-enhancing sheer physical exertion could be, and as I galloped through the swamps and woods with my merry crew of mortarmen I was curiously relieved of my bitter discontent-as if in a perverse way the closer my proximity was to the grime and sweat of the battle, and the more intent became my preoccupation with the niceties of infantry tactics, the less I was harried by that pitiless anxiety. No, what brought me closest to true despair was not the war games or even the frequent lectures on subjects like field sanitation, cargo loading, and the Communist menace (I could usually sleep through these), but the periods of leisure-in the evenings or on weekends-when the free time I had allowed me to reflect on the awfulness of my future. To gripe bitterly in the company of my fellow sufferers provided some solace, but its cathartic effect was ultimately limited. Therefore, during my off-duty hours at the base I retreated more and more into a private world, seeing my friend Lacy now and then or, locked in my sweltering room, poring over the galley proofs of my first novel with all the finicky vigilance of a medieval scholastic and, finally, indulging myself in epic sessions of both fancy and plain onanism. I am sure that it was during this summer at Lejeune that I shed once and for all whatever guilt I had ever possessed about the unnameable sin, Christendom's vilest. Having deprived me of an outlet for my needs, the Marine Corps could at least not outwit me when it came to my innermost dreams, and I embarked on a one-man orgy that in slyness and ingenuity would have outstripped the fancy of Alexander Portnoy Certainly enforced s.e.xual famine is one of the most important keys to an understanding of the genius of the military mystique: cause a soldier to ache with such longing for the odor of a woman's flesh that it becomes an insupportable rage, and you have often created a man who will grab a bayonet and coolly eviscerate Aggressor Enemy.

To put it simply, I thought the chances were extremely good that I would die without ever getting laid again, and much of my extra-military energy was spent trying to prevent this from happening-even though it occurs to me now that my frantic pursuit of the goal brought me once very close to sudden death. And so a word about this- I was by then receiving letters almost daily from my "mistress," I suppose you could call her, Laurel-feverish, highly spiced messages in a blatantly legible hand acquired at Miss Hewitt's. I understand that it is rare for a lady to develop a full-blown p.o.r.nographic style, but my darling's imagination was stunningly lewd; the raunchy letters, often written on her husband's stationery-"F. Edward Lieberman, M.D. Practice Limited to Ear, Nose and Throat"-though they made me only to a small degree sorry for old Ed, had an effect on my glands which ever afterward rendered insipid the word "aphrodisiac." Our present era of air travel had only commenced then, and New York was still more than five hundred miles away by unimproved highway and train; through superhuman exertion, however, it was barely possible (on those infrequent weekends when circ.u.mstances caused us to be at liberty as early as the middle of Sat.u.r.day afternoon) to drive at suicidal speeds the three hundred miles to Washington, where one could board a train that arrived in Manhattan just before the bars closed at three on Sunday morning. It was a ridiculously abbreviated visit-one had to leave New York no later than nine the next evening in order to be back at the base by reveille on Monday morning-and the lack of sleep it entailed still awes me. But such was our desperation to escape the nightmare in which we found ourselves-and so tormenting was my crucifixion of l.u.s.t-that Lacy and I made the insane journey every time the chance presented itself.

And so, already exhausted from days and nights in the swamps, we would barrel out of camp in Lacy's Citroen, heading north at terrible speed. Even so, the French had not built that model to go as fast as we might have wished. In compensation, Lacy was a sharp-witted, aggressive driver with reflexes that seemed almost computerized, so swiftly and correctly did they discriminate between the long chance and indubitably fatal error; my heart capered wildly when on one of those two-lane Carolina roads at seventy miles an hour-against opposing traffic-he overtook some huge lumber truck, throwing the car into its next-to-last gear just in time to edge in ahead and with so little margin to spare that I felt more than once the oncoming truck or car trade with us a great soughing whoosh, as the Citroen quivered with the strain. Yet each time I realized how exquisitely Lacy had maneuvered-the entire job far more a display of coolness and timing than of any machismo. Sometimes I took turns driving with Lacy. I was not anywhere near as skillful as he was, and far less nervy, but even so I performed stunts that can make me feel queasy when I think of them to this day: a race to an unbarricaded grade crossing with an Atlantic Coast Line pa.s.senger train, for instance, when I gunned past the blinking red warning lights at such speed that the car, mounting the crowned hump of the tracks, literally sailed through the air like some resurrected image from the Keystone Kops and regained the asphalt on the other side only seconds before the engine pounded past us, trumpeting in a frenzy. For a long time afterward, I recall, Lacy and I sat in feeble silence while the dusty emerald tobacco fields swept by, and the forlorn stretches of marshland and pine slumbered in the heat, until at last Lacy, shaken but in grasp of the lovely aplomb I had grown accustomed to in him, said in a distant voice: "Twenty-four kilometers to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Do you like moules marinieres?"

But the time I truly saw the face of death was not then-it was worse even than this wrenching scare-and it is important to me not alone for the aspect it presented, memorable yet somehow ultimately ba.n.a.l, but for the strange vision the same encounter evoked in Lacy, a vision which he told me about and which I've never forgotten.

We had arrived at Penn Station at some hour in the dark of Sunday morning-encrusted with the dust of twenty North Carolina and Virginia counties and the grime of the Pennsylvania Railroad's most senile and airless parlor car-and had debarked into the arms of our eager girls. Their very presence was like a renewal of life: Lacy's wife, Annie, very French-looking, not really beautiful but possessing oval provocative eyes and a luminous smile, and, beside her, Laurel, not really beautiful either but with tousled blond hair and adorable lips parted in moist, concupiscent welcome. They bore no gifts but themselves, which was more than enough.

There followed then the usual scenario (this being not an exact rendition of that particular visit but-alas, for my poor memory-a synthesis of those several times): after a quick good-bye to Lacy and Annie I hurry with Laurel to the taxi ramp, where she has foresightedly kept a cab waiting. We have spoken to each other a few words-cheerful, obligatory, with a slight tremolo betraying our madness: "h.e.l.lo, honey. Gee, you look good. How was the trip?" She crawls into the cab with the modesty of a stripper, exposing the inner slope of a thigh tanned at Fire Island and-through the interstices of black peekaboo panties-rosy hints of her marvelously supple, inverted-heart-shaped a.s.s. Suddenly I realize that I am running a fever-no mere hectic lovesick flush, either, but the high fever of terminal illness, pneumonia, anthrax, plague. I sink next to her, surround her with my arms, and hear myself utter a demented gargling sound as the cab heads south toward the Village. Along Ninth Avenue oblongs of neon, green and red, flash through my clenched eyelids, and the wet interplay of our tongues astounds me. Slick tongues, darkly wrestling, underwater shapes, they dominate all my sensations-save for the feel of her industrious fingers at work on my fly, with its critical tumescence, and with its stuck zipper. And that is just as well, I am able to reflect even then; satisfied that no precipitate "petting to climax"-in the s.e.xologist's odious phrase-might vitiate any of the mortal lovemaking left to me.

And so together, in a borrowed bas.e.m.e.nt apartment on Christopher Street-and it is necessary neither to describe the rococo fictions Laurel employs in order to spend a night away from Dr. Lieberman and Fire Island on a beautiful summer weekend, nor to dwell in any great detail upon the amatory rites performed in our incandescent little hideaway. That Laurel is a thoroughgoing adept in bed has already been made clear. She also commands a huskily vocal, hortatory, descriptive style that I find compatible with my own inclination-though I certainly need no inducement to boost a flagging appet.i.te. But right now (and the apparatus of boudoir photography comes to mind), despite my suspicion that to employ the zoom lens would be a technique falling somewhere between the mandatory and the trendy, I must draw back, out of the feeling that such efforts will produce only another stale portrait of fornication, irrelevant and distracting. No, what stands out most clearly from this distant vantage point is not a glimpse of the tanned, entangled bas-relief of our s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g (like me, she occasionally enjoys mirrors, or professes to) but the sheer urgency, the almost amnesiac concentration I place in the service of my pa.s.sion-as if by subsuming my entire self to an awareness of my groin I might obliterate the future, validate life, and triumph over the terror of extinction. Sleep is in abeyance, too time-devouring to be indulged in; we seem never to be unjoined; the light of dawn seeps through the window, mid-morning arrives, then noon. At three in the afternoon we are still at it, awash, bruised, scratched, aching, and only then do I doze for a few minutes, awaking to find her in tears as she crouches above me. "You men," she weeps, "all the good f.u.c.king there is to be had in the world and you men blow it all to h.e.l.l by going to war! There must be something wrong with you men!" And then I have one long, luscious, ferocious go at her, reaching oblivion a final time before, irrevocably, it is the moment to leave-to shower and sleepily dress, to have a lingering, gluttonous, late Sunday afternoon meal in a good Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street, and at last to meet Lacy at Penn Station just before eight o'clock. ... End of scenario. Total time elapsed: seventeen hours.

But somehow it was all too much, too brutal, frantic, and there came a point when I realized that the word "suicidal"-by which even then I characterized these journeys-was not at all facetious and that in the starkest way there was contained in these desperate weekends the powerful essence of self-destruction. Returning in the car to the base on Monday morning at dawn, after a New York visit that had been especially exhausting, mainly because of this marathon venery but also because of a train that was two hours behind schedule, and because of the train itself with its heat and its sordid flatulence, its bellowing candy butchers and its relentless onslaught of shrieks from tormented babies, and because of the desolating effect of newspaper headlines announcing huge marine casualties in Korea, and because of a flat tire we had to change outside of Richmond, in pouring rain-returning this morning with a sore throat and the runny beginnings of a summer cold, I had the feeling (and I sensed Lacy's sharing it) that rather than endure another such pilgrimage I would willingly allow myself to be sent to combat and let the Chinese get a hunk of my pelt or my b.a.l.l.s, or even my life. I was so tired that my bones ached, forestalling real sleep, and as I half-drowsed I had become the prey of crazy hot flashes and p.r.i.c.kly little hallucinations. I had driven the first long lap from Washington down to Emporia, Virginia, while Lacy tried to sleep; now Lacy had been driving for several hours across the Carolina tidewater, murderously forcing the Citroen to its uttermost limit as we plowed through the twilit pearly light of dawn, swirling with patches of dusty fog that breathed up out of level monotonous fields of tobacco and green cotton.

I recall vividly that I was dreaming of a raffish a.s.sembly of gnomes, garbed as in drawings from the tales by the brothers Grimm, who were holding a Bierfest in an autumn garden. They gesticulated toward me and called to me in involute German, a language of which I knew about twenty words. Fluently, I called back to them and waved a greeting, while in the midst of this delirium my eyes snapped open to behold, or sense, or somehow apprehend simultaneously, two horrors: Lacy, nodding, eyes partly shut, hands deathly limp, half asleep at the wheel-and a huge trailer truck dead ahead, nosing out into our path. I do not know-I'll never know-how close we were to the truck, to that intersection on the outskirts of some little farming town where the red stoplight winked at us mindlessly and serenely through the mists. I do know we were so near to collision that certain details are still as clear as those startling protuberances in a trompe l'oeil painting-the truck itself, hauling bags of fertilizer, browsing through the fog like a mastodon; the Negro driver's bare blue-black shiny elbow perched on the window ledge and the alarmed eyes of the Negro like eggsh.e.l.ls, rolling toward us; the great red sign on the truck, VIRGINIA-CAROLINA CHEMICAL: all of these shards of recognition were for half a second separate, random, before at once becoming merged into a single terrifying image of annihilation.

"Oh s.h.i.t, Lacy!" I yelled. And at that he came awake and alive, and began a herculean effort to ransom us from the grave. I still do not know how he did it; his hand spun the wheel, his foot hit the brake, and we veered awfully. I heard him gasp, heard too the scream of the tires, locked now, and my own voice repeating, "s.h.i.t, Lacy! s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, oh s.h.i.t!" as we lurched and yawed from side to side and skidded straight toward the trailer's murderously glinting undercarriage, waiting to shred us into junk and b.l.o.o.d.y pulp. On and on we hurtled, squealing. I saw the Negro's elbow go up in a wild disjointed motion and at that instant a burst of blue exhaust smoke plumed aloft from the truck's cab. It may be that this meant that the driver's own foot slammed down on the gas, that his own scared reflex provided the margin for the salvation of all, his included; whatever it was that saved us-his panic or Lacy's cunning at the wheel or both, or the providence that attends innocent black truck drivers and marines fatigued to the brink of death-we squeaked through, missing the rear end of the trailer by what was clearly bare inches, and sideslipped to a jolting, vibrating halt in a weed-choked ditch. Although for long moments we were voiceless with fright, neither of us was even bruised, and the s.p.u.n.ky Citroen had received not a nick or dent.

"Is you all right?" I heard the Negro's voice call from up the road where he had stopped his rig.