Fellow Travelers (24 page)

“I suppose that’s better than having him learn to type all over again at Fort Benjamin Harrison.”

Or, God forbid, putting him into a combat arm. He once more pictured Tim bouncing toward a European death in some jeep, the same mental image he’d had at Christmas, but filled in this time with the detail of the white sidewalls he’d seen in the picture on Mary’s desk.

“Give me until tomorrow morning,” said Sorrell. “I’ll do what I can to get him back to you smooth and unscratched. The way you like them, right? At least sometimes.” Getting no response, Sorrell added hopefully, “I’m still that way myself, you know.”

Fuller laughed. “Thanks, Andy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

June 22–24, 1955

The bugle notes of reveille, tinny and recorded, reached the barracks at Fort Polk by means of a loudspeaker, but Tim had no need for them. He had already been up for an hour, on his knees in the nondenominational chapel. As on other mornings, he was finding that its pale brown walls, unadorned by any graven image, lent a sort of abstract severity to the devotions he was trying to perform.

If the First World War had seemed to hang over Fort Dix, thrown together in 1917, it was the Second that shadowed Fort Polk, onetime center of the Louisiana Maneuvers, whose millions of broiled and dehydrated participants had, more than a decade ago, included Tim’s uncle Alan. Recently reopened to quarter the First Armored Division, Polk was still operating at only a fraction of its 1940s self.

The built-in shade that Mary Johnson had described as a constant of New Orleans architecture didn’t seem to figure at this installation seven miles from the town of Leesville. He’d arrived after a confusing final week in Jersey. First he’d gotten orders for the U.S. Army Information School at Fort Slocum, but then an assignment officer overruled them on the grounds that he was already better than most USAIS graduates at the things they got taught. And so he’d been put in this on-the-job training slot instead: working on
The Kisatchian,
the camp newspaper here at Polk, where he’d shown up carrying the same suitcase he’d taken from D.C. to Fort Dix back in January. He’d also brought along a Davy Crockett cap rifle, a friendly present from several other shitbirds in basic, where he’d been widely conceded to be the single worst marksman in the company. So much, he thought, for above-average “coordination.”

When he finished his prayers this morning, he’d be reporting to Major Brillam,
The Kisatchian
’s editor. Tim liked him and the work, which could involve almost anything: rewriting recipes submitted for publication by officers’ wives; printing the official instructions for dealing with radiation skin burns; editing a local enlistee’s original story on the remarkable intelligence of somebody’s pet ostrich in Metairie.

This week he’d been laying out stories on the UN’s tenth-anniversary celebrations in San Francisco. Ike had talked of “my country’s unswerving loyalty” to the organization, and old pictures from its founding—some with Alger Hiss seated behind Secretary of State Stettinius, just as he’d sat behind FDR at Yalta—had been reappearing over the wire services.
I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.
Forget what Acheson had said; was there anyone, Tim wondered, who had
watched
his back around Hiss?

Days at
The Kisatchian
were longer than they’d been at the
Star,
and Tim tended to find most of his off-duty entertainment in the paper’s office. He almost always wound up back there after dinner in the mess or a late trip to the PX. There were so few books on the base that he’d yesterday bought an issue of
Good Housekeeping,
since it promised a whole novella by John P. Marquand. The barracks radio was always tuned to the fights or hillbilly music, and he realized that by the time his enlistment was over, most of the serials to which he’d remained so faithful would be gone from the dial. He’d once driven into Leesville with some guys in his squad to see
This Is Cinerama!
and on the base they’d all been made to watch
Face to Face with Communism,
an armed-forces feature about an air force sergeant spending a nightmare furlough in a U.S. town that appeared to have been taken over by American Communists. Happy ending: the sergeant learns it was just a role-playing exercise by the vigilant locals.

Major Brillam always called him “son,” as Potter had, and the officer had been impressed to discover in his file that Tim had worked for a United States senator. He threw as much responsibility his way as possible. The other week he’d told him that “We’re trying to avoid creating more Ronald Alleys,” Alley being a thirty-four-year-old officer who’d betrayed his fellow POWs in Korea; since one of Brillam’s buddies worked in Indoctrination, the two officers had decided that Tim should talk to a class on the base about his experience with Potter’s atrocity hearings.

The recruits snickered when Tim wrote on the blackboard and his chalk line wandered uphill, but they all took notes and one or two wound up regarding him as a person of worldly experience. However fraudulent that had made him feel, the episode did encourage him to believe that he was doing something purposeful. The same went for his work on the paper. The other day he’d written a story on an operation by the “Winds of Freedom” campaign, which had launched a fusillade of hydrogen-filled balloons from a field in Bavaria. Designed to explode at thirty thousand feet over Czechoslovakia, the balloons had showered down pamphlets listing Free World radio frequencies for the captive citizens below. The Czech UN delegate had expressed annoyance at the provocation, prompting Tim to write that “the winds are blowing, literally and otherwise, from West to East.” Major Brillam later told him that the “otherwise” was okay, but the average cracker wasn’t going to know what the Sam Hill “literally” meant.

What was the motto his doctor pal at Fort Dix had taught him? First do no harm? Well, when he couldn’t be doing something useful, that’s what he now vowed to do in the world: no harm to others or himself. He would keep his head down, the way he had on the obstacle course while crawling on his stomach with live ammunition flying overhead, or even the way he’d kept it down during the roller-coaster scenes in
This Is Cinerama!

Lingering in the chapel, he checked his watch and closed his eyes to say the last of his prayers, but all that came to mind, yet again, was his failed attempt at confession, at St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, on the Saturday afternoon before he’d left Fort Dix.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eighteen months since my last confession.

He’d been able to hear Father Davett, identified by the nameplate on the confessional, shifting on his bench behind the sliding panel. The “eighteen months” had made the priest anticipate something exceptional, so he was moving closer for a better listen.

I missed my Easter duty,
Tim had continued, hopelessly, aware of how much further he had to go.

Father Davett:
Yes?

I was in love with a man.
The memory of Tommy McIntyre’s voice—“You
are
in love”—had seemed to find him in yet some further abyss, a pit of lying.

How old are you?

Twenty-three.

Did you have impure thoughts about this man?

No.

He’d said it with conviction, believing that to say yes would be bearing false witness against the ecstatic, starlit thoughts he’d always had of Hawk.

Somehow he’d tried to keep going, to see if he could reach a merciful middle ground.

Father Davett (confused):
Did you have carnal awareness of this man?

Yes.

Have you ceased to?

Yes.

Are you sincerely sorry?

No.

Father Davett (exasperated):
Then why are you here?

I intend to stop. I have stopped.

That is not enough. You must be sincerely sorry.

I
can’t
be sincerely sorry.

How could he explain? Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked Earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

His love had been real—
literally
divine, if that meant inspired from above. He would now renounce—as he’d refused to, the first morning after, at St. Peter’s—but he still would not regret. Maintaining this last distinction might be the only courage he ever showed in the world.

You must
, Father Davett had finally said,
be sincerely sorry. That is demanded for every mortal sin.

As if on a diving board, he had remained unable to leap.
I can’t.
He’d realized that the priest thought all of this a quibble, that he would have preferred him to lie, to make a good confession by making a bad one.

Renunciation shows consciousness of guilt. Therefore you
are
sorry.

No. I can’t give that to God.

Why not?

It’s too much.

Nothing is too much to give God.

I’ve already returned to Him the best gift He ever gave me.

What is that?

The man I loved.

After that, Father Davett had slid shut the screen, driving him like a moneychanger from the temple.

Even so, even now at Fort Polk, he craved the forgiveness and release that the deep-voiced, by-the-book priest might have provided. And he knew that he would try again.

THE NATION

Washington, D.C., bureau

June 22, 1955

Dear Laughlin,

You’re fondly remembered in Potter’s office. About an hour ago McIntyre gave me an airmail stamp and suggested I write you. “A foine idea,” as he might say.

You’ve just missed a great show here. McCARTHY: THE COMEBACK. The audience found it so unintentionally hilarious it closed two nights after opening. The plot is easily summarized:

A rare dry weekend had left the leading man well enough to come to the Hill on Monday morning, day before yesterday, carrying with him the text for a resolution. It insisted that President Dulles bring up the “satellite” nations when he talks to the Russians in Geneva next month.

But the Democrats had a handy high horse to ride in opposition: “Sir, do you not sufficiently
trust
the President, a man from your own party, to let him negotiate with a free hand?” Before long even Knowland and Co. had to hop on. The whole bunch of them voted the thing down, 77–4, a couple of minutes ago.

Nonetheless, for two days our Savonarola of the Dairylands must have felt alive again. He chewed up the Foreign Relations Committee calendar and had a dozen reporters following him around, as if it were the grand old days of ’53 and he’d just hounded another Jewish bookworm to the poorhouse. Every flashbulb that popped threw a smile onto his face, like he’d thrown one more jigger of bourbon down his gullet.

Bob Stevens, Secretary Milquetoast, has resigned to go back to supervising the family fortune. (Do they allow you to include actual armed-forces news like this in that paper you’re putting out?) More significantly, Ridgway has retired, because he realizes the army he gave his life to is now obsolete. The Air Force will conduct the next war, while his old branch of the service will be left to herd radioactive civilians through the bombed city streets. (Thanks, by the way, for that touching bit of meteorology you sent, the balloon story. But put your own finger into the wind and you’ll begin to feel which way it’s really blowing. Did you somehow miss seeing the real papers the day the Warsaw Pact was formed last month?)

McIntyre insists you’re fleeing some great sorrow, but won’t say which. Forgive me, Laughlin, but you don’t look to me as if you’re built for a life of passion.

See you when you’re back here on a pass sometime. My new painter girlfriend will cook you a meal. She extends abstract expressionism right onto the dinner plate.

Regards,

Kenneth Woodforde, 4-F

P.S. About Potter’s little burp of courage last year: can you tell me if there’s more to the story than’s been told? Strictly off the record, of course.

“You’ve heard of
Darkness at Noon,
Miss Johnson?”

“Yes, Fuller.”

“Well, the summer solstice has given us brightness at dusk. Or at least what should be dusk. Too nice not to be out in. I’m leaving a little earlier than usual.”