The Last Run (10 page)

He thought about that terrible winter when Laurie suffered from post-partum depression after having Brendan. He remembered how she couldn’t stop slapping herself and the night he finally had to drive her to the hospital in Newport so she could check herself in for acute depression. Then he thought about that afternoon in Sitka when the hospital called him at work and told him his wife was having her stomach pumped. Later, she insisted it hadn’t been a suicide attempt. She had washed down twelve Xanax pills with a can of warm Pepsi so she could go to sleep for a day or two. It was an accidental overdose. Truly.

He did not mind being awake now and he remembered how it had been once when they did not lie to each other and when the lovemaking was sweet and never too hot, or too cold, but steady burning like a well-tended pile of driftwood, and for some reason he began thinking about the afternoon in Newport, Rhode Island, when he first saw her. At the time he was just a third-class SK—a supply clerk —much lankier, with an unruly lack of grace, and short on cigarettes. He went into the exchange and waited on the checkout line behind a woman who was struggling with a bag of limestone. She wasn’t strong enough to lift it herself and place it on the counter, so he offered to do it for her. It was not until he thunked the sack on the counter that he noticed the cashier was gorgeous.

“Doesn’t he look like such a nice gentleman?” the woman who was buying the limestone said.

The cashier’s sassy eyes, transparent as topaz, and full, moist lips threw him into a trance of lust. She looked up from the register keys, glanced at him as if preoccupied and said:

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Every afternoon for the next two weeks he bought cigarettes at the exchange. Finally, one night after a pickup basketball game, he walked in determined to find out if she was married, had a boyfriend, or if, God forbid, she preferred women. She was mopping the floors. He fished a bottle of Diet Pepsi out of the cooler, going over every word of his questionnaire in his mind, popped the bottle top and stood, so puppylike it was almost pathetic, in front of the register.

She put the broom down, came over to wipe down the counter and then watched him sip his soda.

“By the way,” she said, “my name is Laurie. What’s yours?”

He gagged on a mouthful of soda, spitting it out everywhere, and stumbled backward.

“Hey!” she snapped. “What was
that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I just cleaned that floor!”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Here!” She thrust a roll of paper towels at him. “That’s not my mess. That’s yours. Clean it.”

Two weeks later he took her to a Mexican joint, Amigos, and six weeks later she moved into his apartment at the end of a runway where the National Guard launched jet sorties. A year after that they wed at a church in Westminster, Vermont, not far from his hometown of Bellows Falls, in front of two hundred people, most of them his family. She wore an ivory gown and a long train. He wore a tux and kept a flask in his pocket for nerves.

It was the only truly extraordinary thing to happen to him in all of his first twenty-eight years, falling in love with Laura Mae Raymond. And yet, even though it had happened only nine years earlier, it felt as if it were part of his other life, a life that was long gone and buried. History. Not the drinking, of course. But the rest of it. Over and gone and separate, as though someone were telling him the sad story of some other fool on a bar stool at Ernie’s Saloon. There was no going back.

Like all of the other things in his life the marriage had started out so promisingly, so lovingly, and then soured. It had started going bad in the second year, after Brendan came along. By the time Katie was born, five years later, they had grown used to wounding each other. Every day they hurt each other a little more without the slightest compunction. Their lovemaking fluctuated between vicious, complacent, inconsolable, maddening, passionless, and then finally infrequent, while the tone of their voices slowly petrified until most everything they said to each other was either repellent, vulgar, stony or, worst of all, indifferent. They were so dead to themselves that even the poisonous talk that accompanies separation—the barrages spouses unleash at each other to make the break permanent—seemed fatigued.

The marriage was actually over long before they shoved off to Alaska. But it was in Sitka that she finally filled the void he had left, or perhaps had never filled, in her heart.

The man she had decided to go down the road with was a flight mechanic who lived four doors over in Coast Guard housing—an enlisted man, no less —whose wife had recently dumped him. His name was Rick Koval, and to Bob Doyle he was a cross between a bulldog and a boar, the size and shape of a middleweight past his prime. He had a round head set too close to his shoulders, a bulbous nose above a toothbrush mustache, fleshy jowls, a small, thin mouth and pig eyes, one of which seemed to wander a bit as he was talking. The eye had come out of its socket once when he and another mechanic had been horsing around on the hangar deck at Air Station Clearwater. They were cleaning an H-3 helicopter with long-poled wash wands, and they jousted and poked each other with them until the other mechanic jabbed the wand’s suction pad into Koval’s eye and yanked the eyeball clean out. The doctors did sew it back in and he regained some vision. But from that day forward the eye had an opaque, faraway stare to it.

Koval was heavy into computer games, hunting, Tabasco sauce, all-terrain vehicles, keg parties and guns. He was a gunsmith and stored more than forty weapons in an iron safe at home, except for a German-made howitzer that fired fifty-millimeter shells. (It didn’t fit in the safe.) He bragged that he’d once shot a buck with the howitzer from a mile off, unfortunately splattering fur and deer meat all over the forest. He often wondered what it felt like to be shot, so he and a buddy arranged to shoot each other with rubber bullets. They had loaded their ammo, donned several heavy coats, raised their guns and taken aim when the phone rang. Koval picked up. It was his mother. Just as he answered, his pal’s gun discharged and Koval doubled over, grabbing his balls. As he wailed and writhed on the floor, the friend snapped up the phone, said, “Mrs. Koval? Sorry, I just shot Rick by accident. He’ll give you a call back,” and hung up.

He might have been a big kid—preoccupied with his toys and replete with a disdain for authority —but Rick Koval was an exceptional mechanic. He was also a good welder, the premier machinist at Air Station Sitka. A chief petty officer once remarked that he was convinced the man could build an entire car with just a lathe. And so, as small as the Coast Guard community was, Koval’s reputation as a wild man never percolated up to the command. He raised his share of eyebrows. But he also had his admirers.

Bob Doyle was incredulous the day he discovered this oversize teenager was his wife’s lover. It was the afternoon of his next-door neighbor’s garage sale. He was looking at the price tag of an old Venetian-style lamp when he saw Laurie walk up. She muttered a greeting and lit a cigarette.

The back of his neck prickled up.

“Whose lighter is that?” he asked her.

“Oh,” she said, and blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth: “Rick just lent it to me.”

Later, the woman who was holding the sale pulled him aside. “Listen,” she said, “I don’t care what happens anymore. I can’t stand it. You need to know that she’s been having an affair with that guy ever since you got here.” It occurred to him that he should feel angry—embarrassed at least—that everyone else on Lifesaver Drive knew his wife was carrying on with a neighbor who occasionally sat at his dinner table. But he only felt sad. He walked home, pulled a Miller Genuine Draft out of the refrigerator and ran a bath. It was blowing outside. He listened to the wind against the windowpanes. He thought he had a fever and felt his forehead. No one was in the house. He got into the tub, shivered and thought he might like a whiskey. All of his important decisions had been figured out while he was having a whiskey. So he got up and went downstairs and fixed himself a Crown Royal.

Days later, when he confronted her, she told him to get out of the house. She won’t do it, he thought at the time. Not on my mother’s birthday. So he called her bluff. She called him something nasty. He called her something nastier. She called his XO and told him that her husband was beating her. The following day the base commander ordered him out of the house. He threw some clothes and personal items in a plastic trash bag and moved into the barracks. She got an order of protection and, days later, filed for divorce.

Then things got ugly.

Not long after he filed a chit against Rick Koval for committing adultery with the wife of a warrant officer, the flight mechanic stomped up to him in the Eagle’s Nest, jabbed a finger in his face and said, “I’m fucking your wife and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.” Another day in the smoking lounge, two officers heard Koval’s booming voice: “What am I supposed to do to get my life back? Run over him with a truck? Make a grease spot out of him?” Again he reported Koval, this time for making threats against an officer. But the charge was dropped when other witnesses said that Koval was only joking. The flight mechanic was given a warning, though, and ordered to stay away from Mrs. Doyle, at least until she no longer carried the Mrs. in front of her name.

As the summer slid along the scandal turned more sordid and people wound up taking sides. There were those who took the side of the enlisted man, Koval, and thought he was well within his rights to date Laurie. Then there was the camp that thought Bob Doyle had been wronged. It was like some bad play. He began skipping work to follow his wife around town, hoping to catch her and her boyfriend in a lustful act while Koval riled up sentiment in the engineering department against his nemesis. The command, fearing that Koval might walk into the barracks guns blazing, tried to wade into the whole affair. But it only made things worse. Soon people developed opinions about what the command had done and whether it was fair or not fair, and in the end morale only sank even lower.

Then one Sunday, a number of couples who had anchored out in the sound saw Koval, Laurie and another couple returning together from a weekend boat trip. It was all over town within hours and the following morning Bob Doyle filed yet another chit. This one stuck. Koval was court-martialed that September and pleaded guilty to disobeying a written order from his superiors. It came at a bad time for Koval, who had just put in for a promotion to warrant officer; he was busted down a pay grade, though ultimately the court did allow him to stay in the Coast Guard.

The hobbling of Koval did nothing to prevent Bob Doyle from walking his own gangplank. He drank day and night, Miller Genuine Draft by day, Crown Royal by night, mostly because they were convenient. When he was transferred to Sitka and promoted to supply officer, his immediate supervisor, a lieutenant by the name of Bill Adickes, put him in charge of overseeing the exchange and the Eagle’s Nest, a pub for officers complete with outdated jukebox, pool tables worn to the threads and cheap ashtrays. It was, in retrospect, almost funny how the Coast Guard could put an alcoholic in charge of all of the booze and cigarettes he could possibly want. He took full advantage. Before closing the exchange he’d nick a couple of cases of Miller off the front display stack, a few packs of Luckies, a bottle of Crown Royal or Canadian Hunter for good measure, and polish them off at home on his couch.

He would skip work, or show up, frazzled, after lunch. His subordinates covered for him for months. But the exchange manager, one of the only people he’d ever pushed to do her job and who thoroughly despised him, went to Adickes, his supervisor, and ratted him out. One day Adickes confronted him about the missing merchandise and he denied taking it.

“Your Coast Guard career is over!” Adickes shrieked. Whenever he got upset, the veins in his neck looked like they were about to explode. “I’ll make sure of that. Now get your stuff and get out of my office!”

Bob Doyle had not gotten angry or violent over that, either. Why hadn’t he? Most anyone else would have fought back. Defended his honor. Maybe he had no honor anymore. Maybe he never should have become an officer. The Coast Guard policy had always been to move up or ship out. He liked being a Coastie, so he’d had to rise through the ranks to stay. But he never fit as an officer. It wasn’t just a simple progression. He didn’t like the politics of officialdom. The responsibility. Maybe that’s where the Coast Guard failed him —by promoting him.

It all came to a head two days before Thanksgiving in 1996, when the cops pulled him over into the parking lot of the Mormon church on Sawmill Creek Road. He’d downed more than a few boilermakers at the Eagle’s Nest and had been soaring around town in his van. The charge was driving under the influence, and they locked him up for three days.

His conviction came down in January. It was his second offense in a year, and by the book, the Coast Guard had every right to throw him out. Adickes suggested a graceful exit—an administrative discharge, he called it. And so, on April 30, 1997, twenty-one years, five months and twenty-seven days after joining up in Springfield, Massachusetts, Bob Doyle signed the forms for early retirement.

It was better that way. The divorce had already gone through, in January, and he’d had to endure seeing Laurie and Koval together on the chow line in the mess. He tried to keep with his children. The custody settlement allowed him to see Brendan, who at that time was eight, and Katie, three, on weekends. Since the court allotted his ex-wife the family van, he would send a taxi over to his old house to pick up the kids. He could never bring himself to see them walk out of another man’s house.

By then he was homeless. On weekends he rented a room at the Super 8 motel so the kids would have a place to sleep when they came to visit.

Late that summer he heard that Koval and Laurie had been granted permission to live together with the kids in Coast Guard housing. Then there was talk that Koval was being transferred to Kodiak in the spring of 1998, and that they planned to marry before the move.