The Patron Saint of Liars (21 page)

I picked Cecilia up in my arms and she put her head on my chest. Her hair looked so pretty, spread out against my dark coat. Her hair looked so pretty in the snow.

"You know what my resolution is?" she said.

"What?" I was only half listening. I was so full of looking at her, of feeling her chest go in and out against my chest while she breathed.

"In 1942 I'm going to be the best wife Son Abbott ever wanted," she said, and then she looked up and smiled at me.

I was trying to remember if I resolved to do anything, if there was anything I wanted, or wanted to be different. I couldn't think of a thing.

The next morning when I left, Cecilia stood on the front steps of my house, holding my mother's hand. She had kissed me good-bye before, but when my father started to pull away, she came toward the car and he stopped. I rolled down the window and she leaned inside and kissed me again.

"You're not going to go off and forget me, are you?" she said. But the question was so crazy that I didn't even answer her, I just ran two fingers down along the side of her face. She was practicing for when I would go away to war. She was trying to get her good-bye just right.

"You know your mother and I have always liked Cecilia," my father said when we were a few miles from the house. "Not that we've always wanted to. That girl's given you a bad time over the years. But now that it's all settled, I'm glad about it. It's clear enough how you feel about her. We're just glad that everything's worked out. If this is any sign of what kind of a wife she'll be, you're going to do just fine for yourself."

"Don't I know it," I said. I leaned my face against my hand, hoping there would be a little of her perfume left on my glove. All the way up I thought about her, not about the war, just that I had left her and now could set about coming back.

There isn't much I remember about the first three weeks of boot camp, other than how much we were all the same. They shaved our heads first thing, stripped us down and gave us clothes. They looked in our ears and down our throats, weighed us in and measured us up against a wall. When they gave us our shots it was like they were making us even on the inside too, making sure we would all be sick at the same time, well together.

I was good at doing what I was told. I had practice. When the coach said fake to the left, I did it, never once went right just to see what it would be like. My folks told me what to do and always said I was a good son, did my chores without being reminded. After school I had a job at the seed feed store, loading bags into the backs of trucks. One hundred pounds of sweet feed for horses, one hundred pounds of corn, twenty-five pounds of rabbit chow for the Hen-leys, whose daughters kept rabbits as pets. They told me where to go and that bag was over my shoulder. I did my job. No one told me what to do more than Cecilia, to wait for her by the lockers after school, to drive her cross town to see Jeannie Allbrittan, to wave to her from the basketball court. To leave her alone. To come back to her. The marines had nothing on Cecilia. So I got up at four-thirty in the morning and showered and dressed like I was told. I folded my leggings right and tied them right and ran for an hour before breakfast. I memorized my rifle, knew it in the dark, took it apart and put it together again and loved it the way they told me to. It was a Springfield 0.3., not what we'd have later on, when the battles came, but what we had for now. I knew about guns from my father. I'd shot deer with his Winchester since I was twelve. I was hoping for a beautiful gun, a good-looking pistol to wear on my hip. Where I came from, everybody had a rifle or a shotgun of some kind or another, but handguns, automatics or even old six-shooters, were pretty much just for the movies. I would say I was a good shot, but I had nothing on the boys in Parris Island. We were Southerners mostly, and lots of those boys had been hunting since they were seven or eight. They may have had a hard time making their beds just right, but they could shoot a fly on the other side of the mess hall with a .22. In Parris Island, the way I shot was nothing special.

All the guys in our company thought we would know each other forever, but the truth is I don't know what became of a single one of them, and none of them would know that I became the groundskeeper at a Catholic home and married a pregnant girl and said her baby was my own. In quarantine we only had each other. We thought we would go to war together, fight together, come home together. We thought we would build our houses in the same towns and talk at night the way we talked now. Maybe it was because we looked so much alike, and everywhere I turned, there I was, sometimes fairer or heavier and always shorter, but it was me. Maybe it was because we had never been away before and we didn't know that you could live with someone and not treat them as family. I wondered sometimes if it was that we were scared, and that was the thing that kept us tight, but I can't remember anybody who was smart enough to be scared. Now I'm older, and I know enough to be scared of all sorts of things, things that aren't even there, things that could never happen. But back then it was all Hirohito and Hitler, like their armies were nothing more than football teams from other towns, and you don't get scared of football teams, you just wait for your chance to go out there and lay them out in front of everybody.

In the bunk under me was a guy from Chapel Hill named Dee. He had two older brothers in the navy who'd already been shipped over to the Pacific. It was a big deal, Dee going with the marines.

"Nobody expected me to," Dee said, putting black polish on his boots and then brushing it off and then doing it over again. "But I just figured it was better, you know, spreading out a little."

I told him I just had sisters.

"Well, one of them sure likes you." He winked at me and stuck his hand deep inside his boot. "You get more good-looking envelopes than anybody here."

"That's my fiancée." I tried the word out. "Cecilia."

"You getting married? No kidding?"

"Before I get shipped out, one way or another."

"Sweet deal," Dee said. "Guy ought to have a wife waiting for him when he's off at war. I'll tell you, if there was anybody I liked, even a little, I'd marry her in a minute."

"I like her just fine," I said. It was a wonderful thing, to talk about Cecilia to someone who didn't know her, someone who hadn't watched us grow up and seen her leave and come back like a seasonal bird. Dee thought I was doing her some kind of favor by marrying her. He didn't know how it was at all.

"Pretty?"

"You better believe it."

"Blond or brunette? Or God, she's not a redhead is she?"

"Blond."

"Good thing she's not a redhead. I have this thing for redheads. I might have to get on a bus to go and meet her myself if she was a redhead."

"Then she's safe," I said.

"You got a picture?"

I put down my boot brush and wiped my hands carefully on the edge of a towel. I had a picture of Cecilia in my footlocker, in the little space for personal things we could keep. It was the same picture I'd had of her for years, the one of her in her blue sundress. I looked at that picture so much I thought I'd pull her off the paper. But then I just lost it somewhere. I never knew what became of that picture. "Here," I said, and handed it to Dee.

He took it by the corner, careful, like me. He whistled. "She's a little thing. God, what a doll. Hey, Jim," he said, calling over to the guy in the next bunk. "Get a load of this."

Jim came over and took the picture. "Yours?" he said to Dee.

"Son's. What do you make of that?"

Jim took the picture and showed it to his bunkmate, a guy from someplace in the Midwest, Illinois maybe, and from there it started to go around, up one row of bunks and down the other. Even when I couldn't see it anymore, I could hear them saying our names, Son, Cecilia, whistling. Every guy wanting to be me, wanting to have Cecilia wait for him.

Dear Cecilia,

You don't know it, but you are very popular in Parris Island. I'm not the only one who dreams about you now. Your picture has been making the rounds and everyone agrees you are the prettiest girl we are fighting for. One fellow named Sam Dixon who is from Alabama came over to my bunk early this morning before inspection and asked couldn't he please see your picture again. I guess I'll have to be very careful now, so many guys who want to know where you are.

There isn't much I can tell you about what's going on here. Everything is a secret, most of the time even from us. Whatever we're doing I am mostly thinking of marrying you. Running in the hills in the morning or marching or peeling potatoes, I am thinking about you in a wedding dress and how you will be such a beautiful bride. I can't remember a week that ever went by that I didn't see you, but now it has been almost two weeks. I think of you so much it is hard to know what else I am doing. Marry me the first day I see you again.

I love you. I keep thinking there must be a better way to say it. I wish there was a way to tell you so that you would know that no one has ever loved a girl the way I love you.

Son

Just after New Year's we got our first Cinderella liberty. I didn't know what that meant until the D.I. came in and told us that if we weren't back on the stroke of midnight, we sure as hell better plan on turning into pumpkins. In our lives there had been so much free time, but after three weeks in boot camp, twelve whole hours without instruction seemed impossible. We didn't know where to start because there was just so much. You'd have thought we would have wanted to be alone more than anything, because we hadn't been by ourselves, not even for a minute, since we arrived. But instead we went out the gate together and stayed in our groups all night. A uniform was your ticket back then, not like it is now, and when we went down the streets of Parris Island, it was, "Hello, Marine," "How's it going there, Marine," everywhere.

Dee was in our group, and Jim from the next bunk, and his bunkmate Perry from Illinois, and that guy Sam Dixon who liked Cecilia's picture so much. We wandered through town, feeling a little anxious about the daylight. It was night we were interested in, though nobody came right out and said it. I wanted to buy a present for Cecilia, and the guys were good about coming along with me. The five of us went in and out of dress shops, talking about sizes and the color of hair. All the salesgirls were sweet, and there was one who said she'd meet Dee for a drink after work. The other guys thought of girls they'd known at home, maybe somebody they just went out with a time or two, but now they wanted to buy her something. It felt good to have a girl to send a present to, any girl. I picked out a scarf with red flowers around the edge.

"If you want to write a note for that and give me the address I could just mail it for you," the salesgirl said. "If you want, that is."

"That would be good," I said. I thought about it for a minute and then wrote something down and handed it to her. She was a pretty girl, slim and dark-haired. I thought if she was all fixed up she would have looked a little like Ava Gardner.

"Would you like to go for dinner tonight?" she said, keeping her eyes down on the counter as she wrote out the receipt.

I felt my face flush and I hoped that none of the guys had heard her. "I can't," I said quietly, "I've got a girl." I tapped the scarf on the counter.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were brown. "Here?" she asked.

"No, Tennessee."

"So do you want to have dinner with me tonight?" She started to smile, but then looked away, like all of the sudden she'd lost her nerve about the whole thing. I felt bad for her. She was a pretty girl. I wondered then if that's what it meant to be in love, turning down invitations from pretty girls when you were away from home.

I thanked her for everything and we left. It was cold and snowing a little bit and we pushed our hands into our pockets and headed down the street toward noplace in particular.

"I say we have dinner," Jim said.

Dee looked at his watch. "It's barely four o'clock."

"Well, it's too early to start drinking now. If we wait and have dinner later, it'll just cut into our drinking time." Jim was a sensible guy. He could always figure out how to do something, fix an engine or tighten his blankets to make a quarter bounce. If he said dinner was a good idea, then chances are it was. We were seventeen. We were always hungry.

By the time we'd eaten it was getting dark, and we figured we could raise any sort of hell we wanted. The first bar we went into a couple of guys bought us a round of beers and we took this as good luck. Sam and Perry shot pool while Dee and Jim and I split a pack of cigarettes. It's not that I'd never had a drink. I'd done some drinking in my day, but that was the first time it didn't matter. I wasn't breaking any rules, there was no worry in the back of my head about coming in late and drunk and seeing my mother waiting up for me in the living room. Now I was a marine out with my marine friends and I could drink what I wanted.

"You should see this guy's girlfriend," Sam said to the bartender, and put his arm around my shoulder. "Great big guy like this and he has this little bitty girlfriend." He held up his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. "This big. And pretty." He shook his head.

"Who?" Jim said.

"Cecilia. Son's Cecilia."

"To Cecilia, then," Jim said, and raised his glass, and the whole bar raised their glasses and looked up and said, "To Cecilia," and we all whooped and hollered. The bartender filled us up again and we started talking about getting over to the Pacific to show those guys what for. Then just when we were all starting to feel a little lonely, the salesgirl who liked Dee came in and gave us all a wave. She came to our table and sat right down next to Dee and kissed him on the cheek. Suddenly I missed my salesgirl and remembered her as looking more and more like Ava Gardner.