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I awoke after sundown. The rain had disappeared into a mist which gathered in fuzzy balls around the street Lights. My watch had stopped. Across the hall I heard the whirr and click of a record changer and very faintly the opening bars of Bolero, The hall was empty, quiet and solemn, as if everyone had gone away. I knocked and entered when a voice said, "Come in."
A very tan young man in his shorts sat on one of the cots, resting his back against the wall and a writing pad on his knees. He had one of those clean muscular bodies in hope of which ten million little boys eat Wheaties, skin the color of butterscotch pudding, crystal-white teeth flashing in his quick grin, and one left leg entirely masked in scar tissue. A burn, obviously, puckered and crisp-bacon brown scrambled with rotten off-white. (A bucket of roofing tar had been dumped on his leg from atop a new supermarket in Laramie, Wyoming one summer.) A magnetic deformity which drew a curious eye, a lingering look, perhaps even a poke with an inquiring finger to see if, Like a burnt marshmallow, the outside would crumble and reveal a soft, sticky white core. The rest of his body seemed so perfect as if to compensate for that leg.
"Seven-thirty," he said cheerfully when I asked for the time. He paused. "You Sgt. Darly's replacement?" I nodded. He paused again, then did a good thing: he stood up, reached out a hand, and said, "Tom Novotny."
"Jake Krummel," I answered, though "Jake" sounded odd in my mouth after so many years of being "Slag." Never Jake, but always Slag, I no longer had the self-confidence or, more likely, conceit, to introduce myself by that audacious nickname. (All this a waste of time, though. I exposed my real identity the first time I got drunk.)
He offered me a smoke, handling the ritual of the pack and matches as if he had just begun smoking, though he had been for years. I think he realized how odd a cigarette looked in his healthy face. He and I sat on opposite bunks, exchanging the amenities of strangers to the increasing volume of the music.
Novotny reached to the only odd piece of furniture in the room, a chest-high mahogany cabinet, and eased the volumn down. The cabinet was rich Filipino mahogany, with carved jungle scenes on every flat surface which, when examined very closely, revealed a large number of couples, triples and daisy-chains in various stages, states and forms of – intercourse is not strong enough; fucking too crude for the artistry of the carving; copulation too limited; so I choose – cohabitation, for the figures did forever live in the wood. I had to laugh: a sexual stereo system able to handle LPs, 45's and 78's, tapes, AM-FM radio and Freudian nightmares.
"Hey, is this setup yours?" I asked.
"Naw. Belongs to Morning. Matter of fact, this isn't even my room. I just come here to write letters to my girl," Tom said. "She likes classical music."
A nice thought, I mused as I rubbed the wood. Three shelves above were filled with paperback books, perhaps arranged too neatly, too organized by subject and author. Dostoevski, of course, but no Chekhov or Tolstoy. Sartre, but no Camus. Just a shade off-center of what I would have chosen. Too French, too black, and too avant-garde for my tastes, the books still made me want to talk to their owner.
"What's this guy's name?"
"Morning. Joe Morning."
"He on my trick?"
"Yeah."
"Seems to read a lot."
"Yeah. Says he writes poetry too, but I haven't seen any of it. He spends too much time in Town to do much of anything else."
"Say, are you on my trick?"
"Sure."
"Tetrick said you all were in Town."
"Didn't go. Go to Town 'cause I'm tired of base. Sometimes I stay on base 'cause I'm tired of Town. Ain't new anymore. Only so many ways a man can get laid."
"I wonder," I said, touching a wooden maiden who clutched a small and hairy object to her crotch which I assumed to be a monkey, "after seeing this thing. There may be something new under the covers." We chuckled together in that easy way which told both of us we would be friends.
It pleased me that Novotny did not seem ill at ease or in any way treat me as a sergeant, and at the same time we understood that the moment would come when I would have to tell him to do something or other which he did not want to do. If he respected me, he would do it and not, as others would, dislike me for the accidents of time and place which made me his sergeant. The months at Fort Carlton in training school had been unpleasant because I had been a barracks sergeant, a bad barracks sergeant, too easy at first, then too hard later when the man tried to take advantage of me. I had no business being a sergeant anyway. I was just a guy who had stayed in the reserves for the hell of it and the money (and maybe because I hoped I wouldn't miss the next war as I had the Korean one). That lack of experience, and my attempts to be intellectual about something which isn't, caused me much trouble. There is no rationale about orders: they have to be given and taken, but never can make much sense if thought about. Given a choice, I would have preferred to forge my tiny link on the chain of command out of mutual understanding of and respect for the necessity and value of discipline, but men who defied God certainly were not going to bow to any abstract discipline. But oddly enough, my foolishness was going to work in the 721st because the men were good. Not all, I guess, but enough. Like Novotny: good men whatever their educational or personal differences.
As our conversation faltered, I asked Tom about a place to eat on base.
"Say the food is okay at the NCO Club," he said, giving me an out if I wanted it.
"No club tonight."
"Pretty fair steaks at the Kelly Restaurant."
"Where's that?"
"I'm going up, if you want to come along."
"Sure. What about your letter? I'll wait if you want to finish it."
"Fuck it," he laughed. "She'll marry some prick before I get stateside anyway. Get ready."
As we walked down the hall to the central stairwell to call a cab, I was again struck by the quiet, the sense of desertion, but as I moved between those rooms, those walls which could not hold even a breeze, I realized they provided an unusual privacy for enlisted men. People were behind those walls – signaled by a muffled laugh or cough, a book falling from sleepy hands, a radio humming, a bunk groaning under a restless sleeper – privately behind them. I could not remember a single moment during my first hitch of being alone in the barracks, not even in the latrines.
"You people live good," I said.
"Ain't home," Tom said, turning into the stairwell.
The Kelly Restaurant was exactly what you would expect on a military installation: the second-best eating place in any small American town where the Baptists and Methodists gather to exchange weather complaints, clothing compliments and pessimism, a warehouse of scratched and chipped formica and cracking plastic, except the Kelly Restaurant served Japanese beer in liter bottles.
"The steaks were okay," I said as Tom and I were on our fourth or fifth bottle, "but the waiters were surly as hell."
"Fuckers," he said, gri
"Just be sloppier. Huh," I said as an airman second and his date strolled past our table, "That wouldn't be a bit sloppy." The airman turned around, but I smiled at him, and he turned back around.