Burning the Days (15 page)

——

One thing I saw again, long afterwards. I was driving on a lonely road in the West about twenty miles out of Cheyenne. It was winter and the snow had drifted. I tried to push through but in the end got stuck. It was late in the afternoon. The wind was blowing. There was not a house to be seen in any direction, only fences and flat, buried fields.

I got out and started back along the road. It was very cold; my tire tracks were already being erased. Gloved hands over my ears, I was alternately walking and running, thinking of the outcome of Jack London stories. After a mile or two I heard dogs barking. Off to the right, half hidden in the snow, was a plain, unpainted house and some sheds. I struggled through the drifts, the dogs retreating before me, barking and growling, the fur erect on their necks.

A tall young woman with an open face and a chipped tooth came to the door. I could hear a child crying. I told her what had happened and asked if I could borrow a shovel. “Come in,” she said.

The room was drab. Some chairs and a table, bare walls. She was calling into the kitchen for her husband. On top of an old file cabinet a black-and-white television was turned on. Suddenly I saw something familiar, out of the deepest past—covering the couch was a gray blanket, the dense gray of boyhood uniforms, with a black-and-gold border. It was a West Point blanket. Her husband was pulling on his shirt. How fitting, I thought, one exregular bumping into another in the tundra, years after, winter at its coldest, life at its ebb.

In a littered truck we drove back to the car and worked for an hour, hands gone numb, feet as well. Heroic labor, the kind that
binds you to someone. We spoke little, only about shoveling and what to do. He was anonymous but in his face I saw patience, strength, and that ethic of those schooled to difficult things. Shoulder to shoulder we tried to move the car. He was that vanished man, the company commander, the untiring figure of those years when nothing was higher,
privations mean little to him, difficulties cannot break his spirit …
I was in the snow of airfields again where we dug our wheels free and taxied up and down the runway to let the exhaust melt the ice, in the rime cold of forty-five thousand feet with the heat inoperative, in dawns of thirty below, when to touch the metal of the fuselage was to lose your skin to it.

Together we rescued the car, and back at the house I held out some money. I wanted to give him something for his trouble, I said. He looked at it, “That’s too much.”

“Not for me,” I said. Then I added, “Your blanket …”

“What blanket?”

“The one on the couch; I recognize it. Where’d you get it?” I said idly. He turned and looked at it, then at me as if deciding. He was tall, like his wife, and his movements were unhurried. “Where’d we get it?” he asked her.
The ladies who come up in June …,
I thought. They’d been married in the chapel.

“That? I forget. At the thrift shop,” she said.

For a moment I thought they were acting, unwilling to reveal themselves, but no. He was a tattoo artist, it turned out. He worked in Cheyenne.

——

The summer after graduation, the first great summer of my life, passed without a trace. I had one ambition, to degrade myself. I first sped to New York to spend a weekend with a girl I had heard stories about for at least a year. The daughter of a diplomat, she was notorious throughout the regiment, passed from hand to
hand, not particularly beautiful, as I discovered, but unsurprisable and even witty. I was eager to know what the others had known, the inner circle, and to be able to mention her casually.

After this came leave in sweltering Washington, indolent days and nights, and the minimal pleasure that went with them. Horner was there also. He was living with his mother. At the end of a month, still enchanted with ourselves, he and I climbed aboard a B-17 bound for Columbus, Ohio, and lay luxuriously amid the baggage, Horner strumming on his ukulele while the crew pulled the props through and prepared for flight. Island songs were among his favorites, and one called “Standard Gas.” Soon we were in the cool, thin air of altitude, the engines lulling us to sleep. Thus, rather clownishly, began days of roving. We were headed eventually for Oklahoma, regular officers, in the comfort of our status, unaware of the multitudes and their fate.

——

From time to time I would think of Bob Morgan, most often at year’s end, when you look back, sometimes a long way. I once went as far as to get a telephone number for him from long-distance information but I never called. There among my vague recollections he never changed, he kept his broad, flat chest, his modesty and doggedness.

Decades passed, and I happened to be in Texas, though far from his town. On an impulse I called information again. There were no Morgans listed in Spur; I had waited too long. There were two Robert Morgans in Lubbock, a large city not far away that he often mentioned, but neither was the right one. I finally tried the Veterans Administration. There were countless Morgans on the computer, the man said, including hundreds of Roberts. He suggested I call Spur, where I talked to the editor of the local paper.

“Morgan?” Speaking to someone else, the editor said, “Didn’t we run an obituary for a Morgan this past fall? I don’t know if it
was Robert,” he said to me—he had only been there since 1952, he was a newcomer, he admitted. “Wait a minute, here.” He was looking at the subscription list, “There’s a Bob Morgan who takes the
Texas Spur.
He’s in New Waverly, Texas.” He read me the postal code. Where New Waverly was, he couldn’t say, but I knew at last I had found him, gone but still subscribing to the hometown paper, he and Nona.

In New Waverly a woman answered the phone. Yes, she said, this was Bob Morgan’s number. I described who I was, his roommate from long ago if this was the Bob Morgan who was in the army during the war.

“He was in the Air Force,” she said.

“The Air Force? Not the paratroops?”

“I think you want his uncle,” she said. “He was in the paratroops.”

“Was he ever wounded?”

“I don’t know about that. You might ask my husband, he’d know. He’ll be home about four.”

Where did the uncle live? I asked. He lived in Plano, she said, outside of Dallas, but she used the past tense.

“He doesn’t live there anymore?” I said. She was afraid not; he’d died back here a bit.

I felt a sudden, terrible disappointment. There was no real reason. It was just that a distant piece of the shoreline had dropped away. When had it happened? I asked. She wasn’t sure. About 1985, she said. After a moment’s pause she added, “He committed suicide.”

I wanted to know more, I wasn’t sure why, and she gave me the name of his sister, who was visiting a niece in Lubbock. I called there and left a message, which they said they would get to her.

Two days later, early in the morning, the phone rang. It was Bob Morgan’s sister. I talked to her about him. I had wanted to call his widow, I said, but hadn’t known how. “He wasn’t married to her
when he died,” his sister told me. “He divorced her about three years before and married the girl he always wanted to marry, he said, his high school sweetheart.”

“Nona?”

“Not Nona. He married Betty,” she said. She told me about his children; there were four, two of them his former wife’s that he adopted. “So he had two natural children?” No, she said, there was another adopted one, a girl, from an even earlier marriage to a rancher’s daughter in New Mexico.

“Actually,” she said, “I think he married her as much as anything because he liked her father. He always formed an attachment to older men, ever since his own father was murdered when Bob was, let’s see, he must have been about four. I guess he never did get over that.”

Their father was murdered by two men, she said. “They knew he was headed for Amarillo to buy some horses, and of course they never heard of a letter of credit or anything like that. They thought he was carrying a lot of money so they robbed and killed him. Actually, he only had forty dollars on him; it was a lifetime rule never to carry more than that, two twenty-dollar bills folded up. There were five of us,” she said. “My mother—she was a remarkable woman, I don’t know how she did it—was left with five small children, a ten-thousand-dollar estate and twelve thousand dollars of debt, with the Depression just ahead. That was around 1925. She moved us all into an old house and on her own learned to farm and to break horses.”

But what had happened to him, at the end?

There was a pause. “I wish I knew,” she said. They had some imbalance in the family, they were very sensitive to medication, she explained. It had taken him a long time to get over the medication they treated him with in Italy when he got wounded. Just years. Perhaps he was on some medication again. She only knew that he got ready to go to work one morning and just went into the bathroom
and shot himself. He was buried in Spur, she said, in the family plot.

Afterwards I sat thinking about him. I hadn’t seen him for half a lifetime and yet I remembered him clearly. His letters always began in a touching way,
My dear Jim.
He’d been a sergeant in a reconnaissance platoon and had heard the colonel remark, unaware he was nearby, that if a single man was commissioned in the field, he wanted it to be Morgan. He was twenty-one at the time but true manliness arrives early. In one of his letters to me he had written,
I have come a long way since I left you, and I regret every step …

THE CAPTAIN’S WIFE

I
N THE LATE SUMMER OF
1945, a second lieutenant wearing wings, I walked into the officers’ club at Enid, Oklahoma, with Horner. We had driven half the continent with gas coupons begged from truck drivers, occasionally shooting holes in rural road signs with our new pistols. In the club the jukebox was going. They were playing poker. We were part of the Air Force. It was our turn now. It was to be our story, our broad wake, the immense battering noise of the engines just outside the cockpit window of the B-25s we would soon be flying, roaring past the grain elevators that were close to the field. We were a form of gentleman, the sort that strolls along the beach in summer clothes after the shipwreck, making jokes about capsized lifeboats. Our interest was in the prodigious—riotous nights mainly and the emptiness of mornings when we lounged in wrinkled uniforms, recalling late hours and all we had seen and done.

Horner, who had a face that looked as if he might be reformed, given the time, and that was capable of an expression very close to earnestness, I see with a sheet pulled around him, hair awry, and the furious arm of some girl as she awkwardly throws a bottle at him, damn you! It is in the Gayoso or the Carlton, Memphis or perhaps Dallas. Four
A.M.
and a knock on the door—the bellboy
arriving with the unobtainable fifth under his jacket. Whoever it was who said she didn’t do things like this is caught standing in bra and panties. “Why, hello, Miss Cole,” the boy says politely.

The scene shifts readily, the artistes walk on and off, some making a single appearance, others demanding more, banging on the door in the early hours with their high heels.

Withal there were moments of something else, decency, perhaps, pure amid the disorder—the two WAVES, and the one I was with, though I never saw her again, who came from a world that coolly rebuked ours. Clean-limbed in blue and white, she seemed prepared to like someone I was not ready to be, and I remembered her long after and her town, Green River, Wisconsin. I didn’t mention it to Horner, who would have used one of his familiar words: “heartrending.” In these matters, as in others, he was dauntless.

——

The end of the war, though not unexpected, came quickly. We were in Austin at the time and aware that something had happened—people were hurrying down the street and crowding in front of a doorway nearby. It was the doorway of a liquor store, and they were preparing for the greatest celebration of their lives, one which, although joining in, we observed with halfhearted enthusiasm. In one bold stroke we were devalued, like currency, and for nearly six months were transferred from field to field, to bases ever more bleak and—the aircraft mechanics having been demobilized—silent.

Horner and I had been separated. He was stationed in Florida, where, in a sudden conversion, like Pascal’s, he got married. I was to have been his best man but couldn’t get to the wedding. I knew the bride’s name, that was all.

We left for overseas that winter, destined for places with storied names that had now become backwaters—defeated nations, abandoned staging points. We sailed from San Francisco in early 1946,
beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, from which hung a huge sign we were unable to read. When our troopship had passed it we went to the rear deck, thrilled by the glory of mission at last though gloomy at the timing, and looked back. Facing the Pacific it read:
WELCOME HOME, HEROES
. It was the era of flight but not jet flight. The Pacific was endless—it took almost forty hours to fly to Japan and fifteen days to sail to Manila. Horner was in a group sent to Europe.

I had achieved, with assistance, a state of emotional nihilism, or had tried to achieve it. It seemed proper. We were going off for three years to the other side of the world with no real idea of what it would be like other than its great distance from home. This spoke for lack of attachment, even fatalism. At the same time, however, like a man with an unwholesome secret, I was in love.

During the final spring, at one of the last hops at West Point—gold buttons, gray trousers with black stripes, young faces, couples possessing the dream—there had been a moment when the crowd of dancers parted to reveal a girl in a black dress with many small slits, like the eyes in a silhouette, and a flesh-colored slip beneath, a girl with beautiful hair and a brilliant smile. She was leaning back from her partner and talking. It was an illumination. It overwhelmed me. They turned and she was visible on the opposite side of him. From the shadow of the balcony which was the running track, wait, that was not it, from the arched doorway that led to the stairs where the stags lingered on the landing, I stepped forward. I walked onto the floor without hesitation, as if I had received a signal, as if on cue. A hundred couples were dancing on the wide wooden floor. Not knowing her, barely knowing her partner, I said, “May I cut in?”