The Last Run (26 page)

During his junior year in college they moved into a tiny house next door to East Whittier Friends, the church where they’d married. She found work across the street as a secretary for the denomination’s supervisor. He sent résumés to seventy-two schools up and down the California coast looking for a job teaching and got no bites. (He couldn’t speak Spanish, so he was considered unqualified.) So he took a temp job for the Western Auto Supply Company, read gas meters for the state utility and delivered concrete block to building sites before finally filling out an application to the Coast Guard in November of 1974. Six months later, at his wife’s insistence, he called the recruiting office. “Sorry for not calling you back, Mr. LeFeuvre,” said the petty officer who answered. “We lost your phone number. You’ve been selected.”

So began their lives as a Coast Guard couple. Kathy gave birth to Michelle weeks after their arrival in Eureka, California, his first assignment, and Cam came along a year later. After that, the LeFeuvres crisscrossed the country, moving from air base to air base. He flew rescue missions. She took up watercolor painting and crochet.

Only once, during seventeen years and nineteen address changes, did he have even the slightest clue that his wife was miserable. That was in New Orleans. One night he’d been playing a board game with the kids. She was doing the laundry. Offhandedly, he asked her why she didn’t wash the clothes during the day and she flew into a rage.
My time is mine. You will not dictate to me.
And she stormed out. He thought about her outburst for a moment, shrugged it off and went back to his Parcheesi game.

In 1988 he was reassigned to Kodiak. That first year in Alaska he was away 180 days on fishery patrols. He wasn’t home much the following year either. Then, one May afternoon, he came home after a monthlong deployment on the Bering and she gave him an especially warm greeting. She even invited him to dinner, to a Mexican place he liked.

They had ordered and were picking at an appetizer of spicy cheese nachos when she put down her napkin, gave him a sidelong look and said firmly:

“Jim Rao asked me to leave with him.”

Rao was a pilot who lived downstairs with his wife, Leigh-Anne. In a month they were supposed to be leaving for Florida. Ted LeFeuvre lifted a nacho out of the basket.

“Well,” he said, “that must have been funny.” He snapped the dangling cheese with his finger and lowered the nacho into his mouth. “So what did you tell him?”

“I told him I wanted to go with him.”

He stopped chewing.

“Oh.”

She looked down at her plate. He finished chewing the nacho and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.

“So”—he cleared his throat—“what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Stop it.”

He wanted to say something cute, something smart, but all that came out was, “Are you going, then?”

“I’m afraid to.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid you’ll get the kids.”

Years later he thought it might not have been as bad if she had not caught him in the parking lot and told him to go right back inside and pay the bill because she had no money. He also thought it might not have been as bad if she hadn’t forbade him to tell anyone about her affair in order to protect her lover’s Coast Guard career. It certainly wouldn’t have been as bad if he had simply cut his losses right then, if they’d split and gone their separate ways.

But he couldn’t. Lord knows he did not want to love his wife. But Lord knows he did and time and again he would plead with her to save their family. Sometimes she softened and promised never to see her lover again. And then the following morning he would come down to breakfast and she’d gaze blankly at him, as though she didn’t know him from the queen of Siam.

He remembered in San Diego, where they transferred him a year later, how he’d lie in bed beside her and stare up at the bedroom ceiling. It was a vaulted ceiling with joists that came together at one point over their bed and he would stare at that one particular spot for hours and hours. It became his symbol of agony. The light of the streetlamps would come through the big window and illuminate the ceiling and he would look up at the way the ceiling gathered above him and the way the shadows of the leaves of the tree outside moved on the ceiling and in this see the loss of everything. He would see the loss of his family, of his children, of the complete control he’d once had over his emotions, and he would go limp and cry easily about words she’d thrown at him, like daggers.

“Have you been in contact with him again?”

“Think what you want.”

“I need you to tell me you weren’t with him.”

“I can’t do that.”

It went on like that for three years. Oddly, just before the very end, it seemed things were improving. She was less preoccupied, her kisses less indifferent, and she talked about their going away someplace, even retiring together. It was during the spring of 1992, and he had to go to Alabama for flight simulations. She went to her mother’s in Zebuline, south of Atlanta, and surprised him by showing up in Mobile a day before his training ended. She insisted on making love in his barracks room. He gave in, knowing that it violated regulations. The next afternoon they drove back to Zebuline without a word.

That night he lay in bed, his mind numbed from dread. The marriage was over. The lovemaking at the barracks was the coup de grâce. He knew it. He felt the way her skin prickled when he touched her. Abruptly she got out of bed and went to the living room. He followed. She was crying. When he reached out to dry her cheeks she pulled away.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”

“I want to leave you.”

“To be with him?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said. “I don’t love you. I’ve missed that for such a long time.”

“Kathy,” he said.

“No, no, no,” she said. She shook her head. “I want a divorce. I want to be with Jim. I haven’t loved you for the longest time. I want us to separate. I want us to have two apartments. Maybe we could live in the same apartment complex together. Michelle can live with me, and Cam with you. Cam could come over sometimes for dinner.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

And then the rage flew out of her. Afterward, he lay awake. He was tired but strung out. When a faint glow lit the edges of the window shade he sat up in bed. He had it all planned out. It was a flawless plan. He’d go jogging. He always went jogging in the morning. He stood up and slipped on a T-shirt, white socks, gray shorts. She’d never suspect a thing. He tied his running shoes. He’d jog down to the closest thoroughfare. There was one not too far. He stood up and went to the door of the bedroom and turned the knob. All he had to do was jog against the flow of traffic. When he saw a truck coming at a good clip he’d throw himself in front of it…

“Ted?”

He turned slowly around. Kathy was sitting up in bed, peering at him.

“Come back to bed, honey,” she said.

“No.”

“Please, Ted,” she said soothingly. “Please come back to bed.”

He wanted to believe. He wanted so much to believe.

“I have to go.”

“No, Ted. I’ve changed my mind. I have. I really do love you. I do. Please, honey. Please come back to bed.”

He hesitated.

“Please?”

Sixteen months later the divorce was official. When his promotion to Sitka came through he was so dead to himself that he thought Alaska would be perfect for him. The kids would be a big loss. But he needed to be away from her. What he needed was his job, his base, his habits. Yes, his habits. Keep your habits, he would repeat to himself as he lay in bed waiting for sleep to take him, because you are going to need them.

O
n his fourth afternoon as commander of the air station Ted LeFeuvre was at his desk poring over a mound of papers when he heard a knock at his door.

A voice said, meekly, “Captain LeFeuvre?”

He looked up. In the hallway stood a tall, thin fellow, balding on top, with a uniform that could have used an ironing. He had a grim smile and sad eyes. Saddest eyes he had ever seen on a man.

“Yes?”

“Sir,” the man in the doorway said, “I’m Bob Doyle, your chief warrant officer in supply.”

“Yes?”

“We had an appointment?”

“Oh, yes,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “So we did. Come in. Come in and shut the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed with the click of a breaking icicle. Ted LeFeuvre made one last notation on the contract he was reviewing, capped his pen and dropped it in a cup. He leaned back in the chair and studied the man more closely.

“Have a seat.”

“Thank you, sir.”

In the chair the man lost some of his awkwardness. He did not look in awfully good shape, his cheeks sallow and right on the edge of drawn, the eyes thinly glazed with deep, purple-black smudges under them. A vein throbbed in his throat.

“So,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “I’m told you’ve been missing work lately.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many days did you miss this week?”

“Three.”

“And last week?”

“Four.”

He had heard things about this officer, none of them very complimentary. Nobody could keep track of him. His supervisor, Bill Adickes, an officer Ted LeFeuvre had a good impression of, had described the man as a classic drunk and, like all alcoholics, worthless.

Still, this man had made an appointment and wanted to talk. The fair thing to do was to hear him out.

“Do you mind, Mr. Doyle, if I ask why you’ve not been coming to work?”

“No, sir.” A slow flush crept up the man’s throat. “You see… I, uh, can’t…”

“You can’t?”

“No, sir, I —”

“Mind telling me why?”

“It’s stressful, sir. It’s just—it’s stressful.”

“Stressful?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why is that?”

“On account of my wife.”

“Your wife?”

“She’s been shacking up with a guy here at the station.” The man let out a thin sigh and looked down at the floor. “An enlisted man, sir. A mechanic.”

“What’s his name?”

“Koval. Rick Koval.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the floor. “Do you know him?”

Ted LeFeuvre recalled hearing the name once. “What makes you think this affair is going on? Have you ever caught them together?”

“No, sir.”

“Never?”

“Not yet.”

Ted LeFeuvre sat back.

“I just can’t come in and see him here,” the officer, Bob Doyle, said. And then he muttered, “It’s awful.”

“Is it?”

And then he launched into his tale of woe; how he missed his wife and how awful that was, and how it distressed him to come to work and see the man who had ruined his family, and how Koval would goad him and try to pick fights, and how Koval’s friends in the hangar would ridicule him, and how much he missed his kids, and on and on, until Ted LeFeuvre looked at his watch and saw that nearly half an hour had passed. He also noticed that a sweat had broken out across the man’s long, perfect Irish upper lip, and he considered it and wondered if the man wasn’t exaggerating or inventing the whole thing. Ted LeFeuvre didn’t smell any alcohol on him. Just the odor of stale cigarettes.

“Mr. Doyle,” Ted LeFeuvre said finally, interrupting him. “You don’t mind if I call you Bob, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

The man’s face brightened at the gentle tone of his captain’s voice.

“You know, Bob,” Ted LeFeuvre said gently, “you and I are sort of like one another.”

“Sir?”

“Well, think about it. We’re both grown men. We’ve both made a career in the Coast Guard. We’ve both had families. And we’ve both lost them.”

“Sir?”

“You see, Bob,” Ted LeFeuvre said, “my wife left me, too. And yes, she was unfaithful, just like your wife.”

The man nodded solemnly. He certainly knows how to play parts, Ted LeFeuvre thought. Alcoholics are great showmen. Always good at showing people what they want them to see. He continued in the same gentle tone.

“It went on for three years, Bob. Three years. Can you imagine that?” Ted LeFeuvre leaned forward over his papers. He did not smile now.

“And she took my kids.” His eyes hardened. “But you know something, Bob? In the midst of all of it, I went to work.”

Bob Doyle said nothing.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Bob?”

“Captain?”

“You will come to work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you will do your assignments.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now the man’s eyes grew furtive and the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the lines and wrinkles and bags under his blue eyes were gone. It drew tighter and tighter as if being stretched across a skull. His lips drew in tight and what little color had been in his face drained out of it so that now Bob Doyle’s skin was the color of used candle wax.

“Now,” Ted LeFeuvre said, leaning back in his chair again, “is there anything else?” He glanced at his watch. He had a meeting in the hangar deck in five minutes.

Bob Doyle stared at him with those sad, remote eyes. The eyes were the only things that had not changed during the conversation. The rest of his face had fallen apart.

“No, sir,” he said.

One morning that August, Ted LeFeuvre sent two of his lieutenants, Bill Adickes and Karl Frey, around to Bob Doyle’s house just before lunchtime. He had not shown up for work in a week. He had not called either.

They found the front door open and the hall lights on. In the den, beside an empty bottle of Crown Royal and a pile of cat dung, they found Bob Doyle sprawled on the floor in full dress uniform, snoring.

Two months later, the police pulled him over on Sawmill Creek Road and charged him with his second DUI violation. Six months after that, Ted LeFeuvre had Bob Doyle retired.

He hadn’t seen Bob Doyle since. The man had left no forwarding address, no telephone number, and had stopped showing up at the Eagle’s Nest. He didn’t come by the base ever again, not even to collect his retirement ID card or to sign his pension forms.

He was gone, in fact, the day they repossessed his house. All that remained were six hungry cats, animal excrement in the most unimaginable places and pizza boxes, beer bottles and empty whiskey flasks. The only furniture left was a card table and four stools—all apparently pinched from the Eagle’s Nest.