A Fistful of Fig Newtons (14 page)

My God, I thought, “Free The Pueblo.” I could hardly even remember what that was all about, but that smashed Buick Skylark remembered.

Way up near the top was a twisted, battered bumper from what looked like what was left of a moribund Dodge Charger. A torn sticker read WARNING–I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS. I thought
dreamily, Poor bastard, after all that braking for chipmunks and box turtles somebody didn’t brake for HIM. My mind thinks like that when I’m locked in my Proustian vinyl-lined GT, away from the cares and hubbub of everyday life with its phone calls and its feckless excursions and alarms.

I glanced in my rearview mirror. Blue Jowls, steady as a rock, was dogging me even closer. He seemed to have his front wheels up on my rear deck and was riding piggyback. He was also picking his teeth with what looked like a Boy Scout knife. I could clearly see the Scout insignia on its black bone handle. I continued reading the sad signs and pennants on the departed cars ahead of me.

Halfway up the pile, a canary-yellow Coronet had what looked like crude letters taped to its rusted bumper. They were made of faded red Day-Glo tape. I peered into the haze of blue diesel exhaust that was roaring over me from the truck. The letters spelled two names: WALT on the driver’s side of the bumper, EMILY on the passenger side. Between them was a jagged, half-obliterated heart, pierced by a childish Day-Glo arrow.

Walt, I thought, poor Walt, where are you today? Somehow I felt a deep, sorrowful compassion for Walt, and Emily too. I saw that bright sunny day; that long-awaited day when they stood in the showroom taking the keys to their beautiful new Coronet. My mind conjured Walt up as being rather short, a bit beefy, but with a friendly sort of dumb face. His dark hair was cut in a bristly crew cut, the height of fashion for the day. His head looked a little like a furry bowling ball. Emily was thin and wore sagging blue shorts of the Montgomery Ward type, and she wore her hair in a Debbie Reynolds ponytail. I saw them together, polishing the Dodge on long summer weekends, Walt industriously working the Simoniz rag while Emily did the chrome. I had a brief vision of Walt making one of the endless payments on the Coronet at some sort of grilled window like they have in loan offices. He had lost a little hair and had gotten a little fatter, but you could tell it was still Walt all right. Through the window of the loan office I
caught a glimpse of Emily waiting patiently in the car. There were now two kids jumping up and down on the back seat of the car. They both appeared to be boys, but it was hard to tell in all that diesel smoke coming back at me from the truck ahead. Emily looked even thinner, and her hair was put up in a pile of pink plastic curlers. The Coronet had lost two of its hubcaps, the chrome was rusting, and there wasn’t much left of that bright canary-yellow paint.

I glanced again in my rearview mirror. My tailgater was now jogging up and down, his eyes glazed, his mouth hanging slackly in the manner of tailgating rock fiends.

Walt, I thought, where are you today, Walt? Are you and Emily still together? Has one of the kids been busted for Possession? Walt, do you know that your Coronet, after all these years, is still roaring along Route 22? It will be tonight in the hold of a tramp freighter sailing out of the port of Newark, Walt, a ship called, maybe, the
Funky Maru
, manned by a polyglot crew of cutthroats. Walt, your Coronet may come back to you someday in the form of a 105 mm shell.

My mind dreamily moved on. Suddenly my tailgater whistled off 22 onto the Garden State Parkway exit. He was still sucking at his Pepsi bottle. I saw him fasten himself to the back of a Mustang II.

I shifted to the left and passed the flatbed and its load of memory-laden carcasses. The mind does great things in our vinyl-lined GTs. Proust would have understood. Maybe even Balzac, for that matter.

God, I love cars. Now, I know that this is something that you’re just not supposed to say these days, but there it is. We all have our faults. Sometimes I lie in the sack and run through my mind the images of all the cars I’ve owned in my life. I wish I could say that I thought about all the beautiful women I’ve known, but they tend to blend together. Not the cars
.

The women, though … There was Daphne. And Wanda. I had a brief, fleeting image of her gleaming glasses and hint of malocclusion. Women, the whipped cream on the cake. Maybe they’re the cake itself
.

I fiddled nervously with the air-intake vent. I wonder if women have any idea what they do to men? I glanced at the grimy tiled tunnel wall next to me, hazy images of women I have known drifting in and out of my mind, forever the same age, never changing. Where are they now? PTA members? Library patrons? Shopping cart pushers? No, not Daphne, never!

Without warning, a mysterious white pinched face appeared out of my Mammoth Cave of a subconscious. She seemed to be at a distance, moving. She waved nervously, and disappeared back into
the blackness. Who was she? I didn’t recognize her, yet I remembered her. My mind groped for a clue
.

Another face appeared, a young man; thin, big Adam’s-apple. I grunted to myself. “Yes, of course, yes.”

That girl. The pickup truck. And poor lost Ernie
.

The troop train had been underway for about three hours when the saga of Ernie began. You don’t use a word like “saga” lightly, if you have any sense, but what happened to me and Gasser and Ernie is sure as hell a saga. At least, certainly, what happened to Ernie.

Without warning, Company K, our little band of nearsighted, solder-burned Radar “experts,” had been rousted out of the sack at three o’clock in the morning, two full hours before reveille, given a quick short-arm, issued new carbines and combat field equipment, and had been told to fall out into the company street when Sergeant Kowalski blew his goddamn whistle. Stunned, we milled about under the yellow light bulbs of our icy barracks. Some laughed hysterically; others wept silently. A few hunched over their footlockers, using stubby pencils to make last-minute finishing touches to their wills.

Me, I just slumped half-asleep on the bunk, full field pack on my back, tin hat squashing my head down to my shoulder blades, and waited for the worst.

“Well, gentlemen, as my father always said, it’s wise to get a good early start on a trip. That way you avoid traffic and …”

“Zynzmeister, will you fuck the hell off!” Gasser yelled from his upper bunk where he was busily stuffing his legendary store of candy bars, especially Milky Ways and Powerhouses, into his gas mask.

“Gasser,” Zynzmeister said in his cool way, “a good brisk spin in the open air will do wonders for you. Take you out of your rut. New sights, new scenes, new people, new …”

“Zynzmeister, will you please, just this once, blow it out your goddamn manure chute.” Gasser went back to stuffing candy bars.

“Ah, it is always thus. Coarse language is eternally the last refuge of the barren and infertile mind.” Zynzmeister, our resident George Bernard Shaw, hefted his barracks bags with casual elegance amid the barracks uproar.

Corporal Elkins, our company driver and disappointed ex-air cadet, peered at me from under his tin hat.

“I told you that staff sergeant I met at Headquarters Company was not bullshitting. All you guys laughed, god dammit. Now look who’s laughing.”

“Elkins, I do not recall laughing at any rumors around here recently,” I answered, “except the one that Edwards came up with that Kowalski has only one ball.”

“Yeah, lemme tell you, we’re liable to all get our asses shot off.”

Several heads encased in tin helmets raised up at this. Elkins had come out with what we all secretly were thinking.

“The first goddamn guys they go for are the poor fuckin’ Radar slobs.” Elkins spit nervously into a butt can.

“Ironically, that is true, Elkins. In spite of the fact that our SCR 585 rarely works and when it does continually gives us false and misleading information. For that reason, gentlemen, I believe that Company K is merely a decoy to draw out enemy fire, much in the manner that a wooden duck decoy, while looking like a duck, is a clever device used to …”

Whistles blew in the frigid dark streets of the company, cutting off Zynzmeister in mid smart-ass crack. Clinking and clanking with damn near a hundred pounds of lethal equipment apiece, we jostled sullenly out the door of our barracks forever.

First Sergeant Kowalski, wearing his Signal Corps mackinaw, tin hat, gas mask, and, in spite of the pitch-dark night, his green
air corps sunglasses, stalked back and forth restlessly in the company street.

“All right, you mens, get your asses in gear. Let’s move it.”

He carried, of course, his damn clipboard. He was trailed by Corporal Scroggins, a red-faced lout from Hazard, Kentucky, who had been imported from the Infantry in order to help Kowalski impose a little military discipline on our effete rabble of Signal Corps intelligentsia. Lieutenant Cherry, our company commander, sat quietly in his jeep in front of the Orderly Room. Off to the west, in the direction of the Motor Pool, the low angry rumble of an approaching truck convoy meant to each one of us only one thing. Scroggins blew his whistle. We lined up automatically in our usual four ragged lines: Gasser to my right, Edwards to my left, Zynzmeister behind me.

“At ease.”

Kowalski himself sounded a bit subdued. We fell silent except for the faint clank and creak of equipment.

“You guys probably have noticed the fact you been issued new carbines. And also you been issued new field gear. And also it is three ayem, which is two hours before reveille. Now, many of you are probably askin’ what is this all about? Am I correct?”

All around me in the blackness there was a restless rattle of carbines and a faint shuffling of feet. Kowalski was always a great one for the rhetorical question. He also had a notable talent for belaboring the obvious.

“Lieutenant Cherry will now give you the dope on what’s gonna happen. You mens listen good. I don’t wanna have no dumbhead comin’ up to me after this formation and askin’ no stupid questions. I got enough on my hands now without answerin’ no stupid questions.”

Kowalski paused for a long significant moment in order to let his broadside sink in.

“Atten-HUT!”

All around me were the familiar sounds of the company
coming to what it liked to call “Attention,” which meant a slight shifting of the feet, a look of fierce concentration in the eye, and a faint pulling in of the stomach muscles.

“At ease.”

We relaxed. “At ease” in the Army does not mean what it means in civilian life. It means primarily “Shut up and listen.” Lieutenant Cherry casually eased himself out of the company jeep and languidly took his position in front of Kowalski, who stared stonily ahead of him.

“Gen’lmen.” Lieutenant Cherry’s voice had soft, rich southern overtones. His steel-rimmed glasses picked up a glint of light from the mess hall.

“Company K is about to embark on a great adventure.”

His voice trailed off as he stared upward into the night sky. The sinister rumble of the approaching convoy grew louder and louder. The lieutenant calmly looked up and down the ranks of Company K. A hand rested on each hip, his legs spread wide out. I felt the faint whistle of the ice-cold winter wind under the brim of my helmet.

“We are shipping.”

Gasser, in the gloom next to me, quietly cleared his throat. The lieutenant went on:

“This is not a maneuver, nor is it an exercise. We have received orders to be transported at oh-four-hundred as of this date to an undisclosed point, from which point we will be further transported by aircraft to an undisclosed destination. I have no information other than the following details.”

Kowalski handed the lieutenant his clipboard. Edwards, to my left, muttered “balls.” The lieutenant glanced at a fluttering sheet of paper on the clipboard.

“In a few minutes we will move out by truck convoy to the train siding at Area Two.”

Area Two was about fifteen miles away in a remote, mysterious part of the camp that was enclosed by high wire fences. No one ever came back from Area Two. He continued: