Separate Flights (13 page)

He took out his billfold, which bulged with wide folded yen and tried unsuccessfully to count it in the dark. He thought there should be around thirty-six thousand, for the night before—at sea—he had received the letter, and that morning when they tied up in Yokosuka he had drawn one hundred and fifty dollars, which was what he had saved since the cruise began in August because she wanted a Japanese stereo (and china and glassware and silk and wool and cashmere sweaters and a transistor radio) and in two more paydays she would have had at least the stereo. That evening he had left the ship with his money and two immediate goals: to get falling, screaming drunk and to get laid, two things he had not done on the entire cruise because he had had reason not to; or so he thought. But first he called home—Louisiana—to hear from her what his mother had already told him in the letter, and her vague answers cost him thirty dollars. Then he bought the Old Crow and went into the bar and the prettiest hostess came and stood beside him, her face level with his chest though he sat on a barstool, and she placed a hand on his thigh and said
Can I sit down?
and he said
Yes, would you like a drink?
and she said
Yes, sank you
and sat down and signaled the bartender and said
My name Betty-san
and he said
What is your Japanese name?
She told him but he could not repeat it, so she laughed and said
You call me Betty-san
; he said
okay, I am Gale. Gale-san? Is girl's name. No
, he said,
it's a man's
.

Now he buttoned his collar and slipped his tie knot into place and went inside.

‘You gone long time,' she said. ‘I sink you go back ship.'

‘No. S'koshi sick. Maybe I won't go back ship.'

‘You better go. They put you in monkey house.'

‘Maybe so.'

He raised his glass to the bartender and nodded at Betty, then looked at the cuff of his sleeve, at the red hashmark which branded him as a man with four years' service and no rank—three years in the Army and eighteen months in the Marines—although eight months earlier he had been a private first class, nearly certain that he would soon be a lance corporal, then walking back to the ship one night in Alameda, two sailors called him a jarhead and he fought them both and the next day he was reduced to private. He was twenty-four years old.

‘I sink you have sta'side wife,' Betty said.

‘How come?'

‘You all time quiet. All time sink sink sink.'

She mimicked his brooding, then giggled and shyly covered her face with both hands.

‘My wife is butterfly girl,' he said.

‘Dat's true?'

He nodded.

‘While you in Japan she butterfly girl?'

‘Yes.'

‘How you know?'

‘My mama-san write me a letter.'

‘Dat's too bad.'

‘Maybe I take you home tonight, okay?'

‘We'll see.'

‘When?'

‘Bar close soon.'

‘You're very pretty.'

‘You really sink so?'

‘Yes.'

She brought her hands to her face, moved the fingertips up to her eyes.

‘You like Japanese girl?'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘Very much.'

2

N
OW HE COULD NOT SLEEP
and he wished they had not gone to bed so soon, for at least as they walked rapidly over strange, winding, suddenly quiet streets he had thought of nothing but Betty and his passion, stifled for four and a half months, but now he lay smoking, vaguely conscious of her foot touching his calf, knowing the Corporal of the Guard had already recorded his absence, and he felt helpless before the capricious forces which governed his life.

Her name was Dana. He had married her in June, two months before the cruise, and their transition from courtship to marriage involved merely the assumption of financial responsibility and an adjustment to conflicting habits of eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom, for they had been making love since their third date, when he had discovered that he not only was not her first, but probably was not even her fourth or fifth. In itself, her lack of innocence did not disturb him. His moral standards were a combination of Calvinism (greatly dulled since leaving home four and a half years earlier), the pragmatic workings of the service, and the ability to think rarely in terms of good and evil. Also, he had no illusions about girls and so on that third date he was not shocked. But afterward he was disturbed. Though he was often tormented by visions of her past, he never asked her about it and he had no idea of how many years or boys, then men, it entailed; but he felt that for the last two or three or even four years (she was nineteen) Dana had somehow cheated him, as if his possession of her was retroactive. He also feared comparison. But most disturbing of all was her casual worldliness: giving herself that first time as easily as, years before, high school girls had given a kiss, and her apparent assumption that he did not expect a lengthy seduction any more than he expected to find that she was a virgin. It was an infectious quality, sweeping him up, making him feel older and smarter, as if he had reached the end of a prolonged childhood. But at the same time he sensed his destruction and, for moments, he looked fearfully into her eyes.

They were blue. When she was angry they became suddenly hard, harder than any Gale had ever seen, and looking at them he always yielded, afraid that if he did not she would scream at him the terrible silent things he saw there. His memories of the last few days before the cruise—the drive in his old Plymouth from California to Louisiana, the lack of privacy in his parents' home—were filled with images of those eyes as they reacted to the heat and dust or a flintless cigarette lighter or his inability to afford a movie or an evening of drinking beer.

He took her home because in Alameda she had lived with her sister and brother-in-law (she had no parents: she told him they were killed in a car accident when she was fifteen, but for some reason he did not believe her) and she did not like her sister; she wanted to live alone in their apartment, but he refused, saying it was a waste of money when she could live with her sister or his parents without paying rent. They talked for days, often quarreling, and finally, reluctantly, she decided to go to Louisiana, saying even that would be better than her sister's. So he took her home, emerging from his car on a July afternoon, hot and tired but boyishly apprehensive, and taking her hand he led her up the steps and onto the front porch where nearly five years before, his father—a carpenter—had squinted down at him standing in the yard and said:
So you joined the Army. Well, maybe they can make something out of you. I shore couldn't do no good
.

3

S
TRANGE FISH
and octopus and squid were displayed uncovered in front of markets, their odors pervading the street. The morning was cold, damp, and gray: so much like a winter day in Louisiana that Gale walked silently with Betty, thinking of rice fields and swamps and ducks in a gray sky, and of the vanished faces and impersonal bunks which, during his service years, had been his surroundings but not his home.

They walked in the street, dodging through a succession of squat children with coats buttoned to their throats and women in kimonos, stooped with the weight of babies on their backs, and young men in business suits who glanced at Gale and Betty, and young girls who looked like bar hostesses and, like Betty, wore sweaters and skirts; men on bicycles, their patient faces incongruous with their fast-pumping legs, rode heedlessly through all of them, and small taxis sounded vain horns and braked and swerved and shifted gears until they had moved through the passive faces and were gone. Bars with American names were on both sides of the street. Betty entered one of the markets and, after pausing to look at the fish outside, Gale followed her and looked curiously at rows of canned goods with Japanese labels, then stepped into the street again. Above the market a window slid open and a woman in a kimono looked down at the street, then slowly laid her bedding on the market roof and, painfully, Gale felt the serenity of the room behind her. Betty came out of the market, carrying a paper bag.

‘Now I make you sukiyaki,' she said.

‘Good. I need some shaving gear first.'

‘Okay. We go Japanese store.'

‘Where is it?'

‘Not far. You sink somebody see you?'

‘Naw. Everybody's on the ship now. They'll be out this afternoon.'

‘What they do when you go back? Put you in monkey house?'

‘Right.'

‘When you go back?'

‘Next week. Before she goes to sea.'

‘Maybe you better go now.'

‘They'd lock me up anyhow. One day over the hill or six, it doesn't matter.'

‘Here's store.'

‘You buy 'em. They wouldn't understand me.'

‘What you want?'

‘Shaving cream, razor, and razor blades.'

He gave her a thousand yen.

‘Dat's too much.'

‘Keep the rest.'

‘Sank you. You nice man.'

She went into the drugstore. He waited, then took her bags when she came out and, walking back to her house, treating her with deference and marveling at her femininity and apparent purity and honesty, he remembered how it was with Dana at first, how he had gone to the ship each morning feeling useful and involved with the world and he had had visions of himself as a salty, leather-faced, graying sergeant-major.

4

—
and she was gone for a week before we could even find her and even when we got out there she told us she wasn't coming with us, she was going to stay with him and it took your daddy about a hour to talk her into coming with us and you know how mad he gets, I don't see how he didn't whip her good right there, that's what I felt like doing, and it's a good thing that boy wasn't there or I know your daddy would killed him. I don't know how long it was going on before, she used to go out at night in your car, she'd tell us she was going to a show and I guess we should have said no or followed her or something but you just don't know at the time, then Sunday she didn't come home and her suitcase was gone so I guess she packed it while I was taking a nap and stuck it in the car. I hate to be writing this but I don't know what else a mothers supposed to do when her boys wife is running around like that. We'll keep her here til you tell us what your going to do, she don't have any money and daddy has the car keys. Tell us what your going to do, I hope its divorse because she's no good for you. I hate to say it but I could tell soon as I seen her, theres something about a girl of her kind and you just married too fast. Its no good around here, she stays in your room most of the time and just goes to the kitchen when she feels like it at all hours and gets something to eat by herself and I don't think we said three words since we got her back
—

He returned the letter to his pocket, lighted a cigarette, poured another glass of dark, burning rum that a British sailor had left with Betty months before, and looked at his watch. It was seven o'clock; Betty had been gone an hour, promising to wake him when she came home from the bar. During the afternoon they had eaten sukiyaki, Betty kneeling on the opposite side of the low table, cooking and serving as he ate, shaking her head each time he asked her to eat instead of cook, assuring him that in Japan the woman ate last; he ate, sitting cross-legged on the floor until his legs cramped, then he straightened them and leaned back on one arm, the other hand proudly and adeptly manipulating a pair of chopsticks or lifting a tumbler of hot
sake
to his lips. After eating she turned on the television set and they sat on the floor and watched it for the rest of the afternoon. She reacted like a child: laughing, frowning, watching intently. He understood nothing and merely held her hand and smoked until near evening, when they watched an American Western with Japanese dialogue and he smiled.

Now he rose, brought the rum and his glass to the bedroom, undressed, went back to the living room for an ash tray and cigarettes, then lay in bed and pulled the blankets up to his throat. He lay in the dark, his hands on his belly, knowing that he could not take her back and could not divorce her; then he started drinking rum again, with the final knowledge that he did not want to live.

5

H
E STOOD
in the Detachment office, his legs spread, his hands behind his back, and stared at the white bulkhead behind the Marine captain. That afternoon, as his defense counsel told the court why he had gone over the hill, he had felt like crying and now, faced with compassion, he felt it again. But he would not. He had waited two weeks at sea for his court-martial and every night, sober and womanless and without mail, he had lain in bed with clenched jaws and finally slept without crying. Now he shut his eyes, then opened them again to the bulkhead and the voice.

‘If you had told me about it, I would've got you off the ship. Emergency leave. I'd have flown you back. Why didn't you tell us?'

‘I don't know, sir.'

‘All right, it's done. Now I want you to know what's going to happen. They gave you three months confinement today. We don't keep people in the ship's brig over thirty days, so you'll be sent to Yokosuka when we get back there and you'll serve the rest of your sentence in the Yokosuka brig. So we'll have to transfer you to the Marine Barracks at Yokosuka. When you get out of the brig, you'll report there for duty. Do you understand all that?'

‘No, sir.'

‘What don't you understand?'

‘When will I get back to the States?'

‘You'll finish your overseas tour with the Barracks at Yokosuka. You'll be there about a year.'

‘A year, sir?'

‘Yes. I'm sorry. But by the time you get out of the brig, the ship will be back in the States.'