Fellow Travelers (23 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

March 11, 1955

69th Infantry Division
Fort Dix, N.J.
March 11, 1955

Dear Francy,

Well, I’m 5½ weeks into it, and maybe this time I’ll get the whole way through. “Last time, you will recall”—as one of our old serials used to say—I made it to nineteen days before that chest cold put me in the camp hospital. That got me “recycled”: everybody who drops out has to start over from the beginning, because it’s too hard to find slots
in medias res
. (How much Latin do you remember?)

So, guess what? This round, for everything except knowledge of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, my first set of marks are even lower than the last. This is attributable, I guess, to natural incompetence and a tougher company commander, a second lieutenant who’s very demanding but nice enough underneath. So far he’s called me “shitbird” only twice, and he’s allowed us to perform the rifle-reassembly test in simple lights-out darkness instead of with blindfolds. (Some commanders do that—I’m not kidding.)

So: two and a half weeks to go.

Coming in, back in January, I was told to gain ten pounds; I’ve managed to lose three. It’s so cold here that the barracks furnace (coal! just like 9th Avenue) never stops puffing. But for real bone-rattling chill, nothing can beat last week’s bivouac. We were doing “camouflage and concealment” maneuvers, and I couldn’t puncture the can of evaporated milk with the opener: the stuff had frozen solid!

I’ve got the top bunk again. The other seven guys in the squad are mostly like the ones I used to give a wide berth to back at St. Agnes’, but I’ve made friends with a nice doctor (they draft them in droves) who’s got a wife (pregnant) back home.

Strange to think of Dad being here in the CCC twenty years ago. (He once told me it was the only place he ever saw reefer!)

I’m sorry I haven’t written. You scold me about it worse than Mom, who’s sort of given up on the subject. You ask if I’m running away from something, or someone. Mostly the drill instructor! He’ll actually pound you on the back if you’re not marching fast enough with your rifle. (The M-1 is a lot easier to reassemble than it is to carry.)

I might have to welsh on my Easter promise. On Sunday, April 10th, I could be on my way to wherever it is I’ll be doing Advanced Individual Training (not as customized as it sounds). I don’t have my assignment yet, and God only knows what they’ll decide I’m suited for, but that’s the story.

Say hi to Tom and kiss Maria Loretta for me.

Love,

Beetle Bailey

P.S. Please don’t worry. All shall be well.

Timmer xxx

Folding the letter, he wondered what it would be like to run away from something
with
somebody, the two of you fleeing the same thing together. In the papers, Princess Margaret’s RAF boyfriend was now saying that they would be willing to accept exile if they were allowed to marry. It sounded like the grandest of fates: to be safely joined in some realm beyond the one that had refused to provide the two of you a place. Of course, all of this first assumed that both of you actually wanted each other.

He had trouble being ashamed of writing so few letters, not when he always had more to leave out than put in. Was he really supposed to tell Francy about the guy in the squad who was, he felt sure, like himself—this draftee clerk from a New York City government office who had pronounced the old olive-drab uniforms more “attractive” than the new Army Green ones and observed that camouflage-and-concealment sounded “a little like Max Factor’s latest”?

Maybe that guy would be the one to bug out? To go sobbing to the headshrinker in the camp hospital? Actually not, thought Tim. More likely it would be the loudmouth from Bridgeport who loved to hold his M-1 in one hand and his crotch in the other, and say—

This is my rifle

This is my gun

This is for killing

This is for fun—

as if it weren’t the two-hundredth time they’d all heard it.

The falling marks he’d just mentioned to Francy still had him slightly above average in “coordination” and “resourcefulness” (no one understood how they measured it), but below par in “aggressiveness.” All this had probably been predictable from the Armed Forces Qualifying Test he’d taken at the examining station in D.C. before leaving for Fort Dix. He’d run into Kenneth Woodforde at a cafeteria right after sitting the exam, and the journalist had mocked his enlistment, revealing himself to be 4-F and expressing regret only about having gotten his classification on physical rather than moral grounds. “They discovered my bad shoulder before my voter registration,” he said, the first concrete indication Tim had ever had that Woodforde might really be a Communist.

Department of State
Washington, D.C.
March 11, 1955

Dear Dog-Face,

I don’t know how you can sign yourself that way, and it’s the last time I’ll ever use it as a salutation, but there you go.

Thanks for the snapshot. White sidewalls, no? Isn’t that what they call the haircut? They make you look even younger.

Are you sure they can’t detail you back to civilian life for a week or two? I could use some extra help here: Senator Knowland wants to start World War Three by having the 7th Fleet intercept a Finnish tanker that’s heading to Red China to deliver jet fuel, and Beverly is spending more time over at the Congressional Secretaries Club than she is here. Someone in Senator Stennis’ office bent the membership rules so she could take a small wisecracking part (“very Eve Arden,” she says) in “Revisin’ and Extendin’,” the revue they’ll be doing to benefit some clinic in Georgetown for retarded children. I think Mrs. Nixon was pictured with a couple of them in yesterday’s
Star
. (The children, not the secretaries.) So if you see a mushroom cloud, it’s the result of Beverly not being at her typewriter to send Senator Knowland and his colleagues those gentle policy pleadings from Mr. Morton.

Even so, it’s hard to blame her. These days she appears to be the happiest person on the floor; maybe in the whole building.

When I told Paul—yes, we’re still friendly, and yes, he’s still dating the bookkeeper—that you hadn’t been notified about your advanced individual training (have I got the name right?), he said to be sure and tell you not to let them turn you into a bean-burner, which I gather is a cook, and which I gather his bookkeeper is a much better one of than I. (I know you’ll be able to straighten out the grammar of that sentence.)

Let me know what they
do
make you into. And where they’re sending you next.

Love,

Mary

“Plucky wog!” exclaimed the Englishman at Couve de Murville’s table.

With his own two hands, Prime Minister Nehru had the other day saved himself from a knife attack, knocking a would-be assassin off the running board of his limousine.

De Murville, the French foreign minister, nodded impassively to his lunch companion here at the Sulgrave, but the Englishman’s loud compliment caught the attention of Ned Fuller and his nephew, Hawkins.

Still, Ned had no time for thinking about subcontinentals; the
Germans
were again crowding his mind, thanks to Hawkins’ aunt Valerie, who the other night at dinner in New York had loudly voiced her distress over France’s belated capitulation to German rearmament. “Fortunately, the Frogs are still carping about the Saar,” Ned now told his nephew. “That gives her a little encouragement.”

Hawkins sipped a spoonful of consommé.

“I’m afraid,” said Uncle Ned, “that you and I have some important things to talk about. More important than whether you or your sisters are going to get my place in New Mexico.” He coughed into his water glass; the lung man down here was not doing much good.

“You mean the world situation?” asked Hawkins. “The French and the Germans?”

“No, your father’s financial situation.”

Hawkins pushed away the soup bowl. “Tell me it’s unexpectedly good. I’m all ears.”

“It’s terrible. Bad investments. And bad choice of a girlfriend. The latest one.”

“Myrna.”

“Maura,” Ned corrected. “It’s bad enough he pays her bills. But he seems to be paying her debts, too—all the freight her last boyfriend wouldn’t pick up. And your mother is only making things worse.”

“Mother doesn’t make scenes.”

Ned lit a cigarette. “No, she doesn’t. And she doesn’t make investments, good or bad. What she’s
been
making are a lot of charitable donations—to
Catholic
charities, no less. She’s spent down a lot of her own capital, and your father’s besides.”

“Each according to her means,” said Hawkins.

“Meaning?”

“She can’t quite bring herself to kneel at Sheen’s altar rail. So she sacrifices at the teller’s window.”

Ned shrugged and blew a smoke ring.

“What are the implications?” asked Hawkins.

“For you?”

“Of course.” Hawkins pierced the cracked crab with his fork and smiled.

“Rather dire,” said Uncle Ned. “How do you feel about living off your salary? It may come to that. I hate to tell you, but you’re not even getting that house in New Mexico.”

Hawkins looked at the choice forkful of crab. “Should I send this back and get a hamburger?”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Ned, who was paying for lunch. “Cancer’s already tightened my belt. And I never had that much in the first place. Maybe a fifth as much as your profligate parents.”

Living off his salary: Hawkins judged the idea to be no more endurable than it would be to any of his Harvard trust-fund buddies who’d gone into publishing. One might as well tell Lucy Boardman’s father to live off what Wellesley paid him to teach art history.

“Pull your chair back,” said Uncle Ned.

Hawkins obliged.

“Just trying to get a look at you. See how expensive your tastes are.” Ned paused, consideringly. “I can’t see the shoes. I hope they aren’t in a league with the suit.”

Hawkins finished his crab and asked for a cigarette while they waited for coffee. His shoes and suits were good enough to last a long while, he thought. But at some point he’d need money for trouble. One day his luck would run out; he would slip up in a way that required more than the fifty dollars for a men’s-room arrest at the Y. Money, put to bail or blackmail, would be what saved him.

“The nerve of Dad to be spending everything on his
own
indiscretions!”

Hawkins laughed as he said it, but Ned, unsmiling, coughed hard, rose from his chair, and waved off his nephew’s assistance. “Let me head to the gents. I’ll be fine.”

As he waited for his uncle to return, Hawkins drank his coffee and regarded both de Murville and the Gilbert-and-Sullivan character at the other table. They were beginning to blur into a portrait on the wall when the waiter approached with a message.

“A phone call, Mr. Fuller. From a Mr. Sorrell at the Pentagon.”

“Thanks.” Hawkins headed for one of the telephone cabins, thinking how much easier it would be to focus for a moment or two on Skippy’s future instead of his own.

He understood from a letter he’d seen on Mary’s desk that there still might be time to affect a decision about Private Laughlin’s AIT, even if his Fort Dix days with the Fighting Sixty-ninth—
there
was nomenclatural combination!—would be over in a couple of weeks.

He knew someone, of course. He’d left the message with Sorrell just an hour ago.

“Andy,” he said, taking the receiver. “You always were quick.”

“Got your own little Private Schine, do you?”

“What about the Monterey Language School?”

“That’s hard to do. Actually, it’s hard to do anything like this, but I’ll accomplish what I can. Tell me his aptitudes.” He chuckled at the word.

“Writes nicely. Clever. Terribly sincere right-winger. No particular drive. A tender disposition. Would be a wonderful boy Friday to some major general.”

Sorrell’s leering chuckle became a full laugh. “I see.”

Fuller said nothing, just waited for an answer.

“Well,” Sorrell at last replied, “maybe USAIS, the information school in upstate New York.”