The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (2 page)

“Remarkable,” said the colonel again, “simply ingenious. Imagine, building a boat. How perfectly remarkable.”

“Our boats were out since six, also the harbor police. They found no trace, so they must be ashore.”

“Ransacking some house in Great Neck, no doubt.” The
colonel paused, inspecting the tips of his fingers, then looked up to contemplate, with dreamy, moist eyes, the far reaches of the Sound. “I must say it was most remarkable.” Wilhoite was a round man of about fifty with thinning gray hair and a florid elastic face upon which an exceedingly stunted and inconsequential nose had been implanted, like a pittance or an afterthought. It was a feature which detracted from a face that otherwise might have been formi dable and strong, and may have been a factor which had helped to prevent him from becoming a general. He had distinguished himself in action at Belleau Wood, but a touch of asthma and other things had kept him from seeing combat in this war.

Blankenship, waiting, watched him narrowly. So far, Wilhoite had proved unpredictable, and Blankenship had not been very successful in his attempts to gauge what was forthcoming from the man. He would not yet be so extreme as to call the colonel a fool, but there was something about him which was silly and erratic, that much was true. He was a man of changey moods, a generally amiable person who ran his affairs with a sort of harried competence. He had freely admitted to Blankenship his ignorance of prisoners, asking plaintively why, of all places, headquarters should have sent him here. This candor, Blankenship felt, had in a human sort of way been to his credit. But it embarrassed Blankenship—with a crawling, inward discomfort—to know that he knew more than his commanding officer, and that Wilhoite—with his awkwardly solicitous, ingratiating over-familiarity—
knew
he knew more, too. With sudden ugly pain at this thought, and with the confusion of the last few hours still boiling about in his mind, Blankenship, who had
been peering up at Wilhoite as he gazed dreamily, chin on fingertips, out to sea, turned uneasily away, thinking that he had known superior officers who had been bullies and drunkards and cowards, or all three, but never before one to whom his own attitude stopped, for some reason, just so short of actual indifference.

The colonel finally spoke. “Look, Gunner, we can’t pin this on anyone. We’re just lucky we’ve had such a good record so far.” He paused, sucking his lips. “Look, you had brig duty in the Old Corps. How the hell do you think we can stop this sort of thing? If those birds did it so easily, there are two thousand others around here who’ll get the same idea.”

Even as he spoke Blankenship had almost parted with the words, having stored them up a half hour before, having sensed, somehow, that he would be asked. Yet now he chose his manner of speaking, avoiding brusqueness and, above all, condescension: “One, sir, I’d double the guard on foggy nights. Two, I’d suggest securing and lock-bolting all those old window frames. Then I’d shake down—right now—every barracks and cell block on the island and get rid of any old stored-up pipes and crowbars. As for boats, sir, that’s a bit outside my experience, but I’d certainly keep a tight watch on my tools and lumber.”

The words were out, the advice delivered. Blankenship felt a vague sense of shame, almost as if, a child, he had been beset by his own father for some scrap of wisdom. He wished the interview were over.

“And they were—who, Gunner?” Pencil poised, the colonel waited while Blankenship said all he knew, giving him the same dry and tedious details—the names of the two
men, their home addresses, convictions and sentences and conduct in confinement—that he had hastily that morning memorized from the record books and had already told the colonel not five minutes before. He had prepared himself for this, too, with casual almost unthinking efficiency born out of ten years’ habit which forced him to consider in times of crisis not only the crisis itself but its future complications. It was one of the talents he had which had gotten him his warrant, and he knew it—a reflex as effortless as breathing which caused him to grasp an emergency at its core while aware each second of its all but invisible growths and tendrils, too, its imminent threats and its chances for exploitation. It was a talent which applied in this situation—an exasperating flight of two yardbirds who should never have been allowed to be in a position to escape at all—with no more or less fitness than it had applied on Guadalcanal, where with a mortar-blasted hunk of flesh as big as a small fist gouged out of his leg, flat on the ground with the hot funky stench of jungle in his nose, he had kept up for a night and a day a telephoned hourly situation report to Division, “thus contributing substantially to interunit liaison and to the success of the operation,” his Silver Star citation had read, and thus being, as General Stokes had afterward told him himself, “the only goddam operations chief in the goddam division who ever remembered to let us know what the hell was going on.”

Blankenship felt the wound now, as he had ten times a day in whatever damp weather and probably would for the rest of his life, an icy trembling twitch like electric voltage pulsating in his thigh: for a brief dolorous instant it battened cruel teeth down to the marrow of his bone; then the trembling
ceased. He shifted his leg, with the pain vexing him all the more because he had had to repeat these things to the colonel, and as he finished his report and the colonel began fussily to rummage through a drawer, Blankenship felt his irritation grow and grow, along with a frustrated and powerless outrage at this morning’s mess, which could have been so easily prevented but which, more importantly, had left him feeling so cheated and unfulfilled. Nor was it an anger directed so much against the colonel now, or the two escaped prisoners (whom he had never laid eyes on except for their record-book pictures), but against some totally abstract concept of order, an order which—for the moment at least—had allowed itself to become corrupted and in default. For when the corporal of the guard had aroused him hours before, breathing into his ear the word “escape,” the word had shocked him from slumber like ice water and, even as he methodically but without one second’s hesitation drew on his clothes, heavy scarf and gloves and field jacket, had made him feel a slow mounting thrill of anticipation so intense and freighted with promise that it was like a sort of ecstasy.

He had felt it before, this cold excitement involving something to which he could hardly assign a name—challenge, perhaps, or summons to duty—at any rate a quickening of his senses so clamorous and memorable that in long periods when it was not there he had found himself waiting for it, waiting for the crisis with the tranquil, fierce patience of a communicant awaiting the moment of passion, or a hunter in the marsh watching the final defenseless swoop of birds. It was as if this morning he had once again and for the first time since Guadalcanal been given the call,
ordained to bring to some sudden threat of disequilibrium a calm and unshakable sense of order. And he had rushed out into the swirling white dawn with a chill of delight up his back and with his mind clicking like an adding machine. Yet now as he watched the colonel rifling clumsily through his papers, something close to despair returned as he recalled how, instead of the escape being nipped off neatly, the sheep back in their fold, his very first glance at the ruptured window and bars separated so beautifully from their pinnings had told him that, this time, he would have little chance for triumph.

“I can’t find the main number of the F.B.I.,” the colonel said.

“I already called them, sir,” Blankenship put in.

The colonel looked up. “I should have known,” he said mildly. “I forgot. It’s in your special orders, isn’t it? And—”

“I called the rest, sir. The harbor and city police and the state police. I finally woke up some dogface over at Fort Slocum, and then I called the police in New Rochelle and in Nassau County. I also put in calls to the cops in those birds’ hometowns—Decatur, Illinois, and some little place in Wisconsin. They said they’d have their eyes peeled.”

A look of bafflement came over the colonel’s face, and perhaps of hurt, too, as if he had become impaled upon the keen cutting edge of Blankenship’s finesse. “By God, Gunner,” he said with a cramped little grin, “you got these birds all taped up.” He rose stiffly and went to the window and stood swaying there, dumpy and morose, hands locked behind him. There was little else to do, the two men were irretrievably gone, and Blankenship wished to be dismissed. He had not taped up anything; he had seized every proliferating
growth of the emergency save its essential core. He had not caught those men—that was that—and he felt stuffed with sodden, inert disappointment, remembering how not four hours before and in spite of the sight of the neatly professional breakout he had still been possessed by that familiar chill, immaculate excitement, and his mind had worked with a clarity so pure, so aerial and flawless, that it seemed as if mounds of cobwebs had been torn away from his vision, and that he was suddenly looking for the first time at everything around him through the sheerest transparent glass. And how at that moment something more than logic—an intuition, rather—had told him that those yardbirds had built a boat. Even now he could only guess at how he had arrived at that remarkable judgment, a judgment which turned out to be not only remarkable but true; he only knew that he had known it, and instantly, with as much certitude as he knew his own name, rank, and serial number, and that armed with this certitude he had been spared going through the seven or eight hapless, groping steps of another man.

He had ordered the alarm sounded, and an immediate count, sending two squads of the guard up to the work area to hunt for a place or shed where a boat might have been built or hidden. And so not ten minutes later, tearing back from the armory through the greenly mounting light, strapping on his pistol, he was neither surprised nor even particularly gratified to hear some sergeant call out through the mist and over the shrill fantastic racket of the siren: “Gunner, we found a shed … a boat was—” because he already knew. He hadn’t answered, but had just galloped to the dock and commandeered one of the patrol boats he had ordered warmed up five minutes before, despairing even then—as
the light came up dimly and revealed a Sound motionless and bare of all except a flock of swooping gulls—of finding anything, but touched still, almost to his soul, with this strange combination of fury and joy.

The colonel turned. “Gunner, just how did you know they had built this goddam boat, or skiff? Macklin told me you were out there on the water snooping around for a boat less than ten minutes after the alarm went off. If the guard had found that sprung window an hour before you’d prob ably have gotten those birds.”

“Well, one, sir, I figured they knew they’d freeze to death if they hit the water in this kind of weather. Two, the ferry stops at midnight. If they were going to try and smuggle themselves out in a truck or something on the ferry, they certainly wouldn’t make a breakout at night but just hide themselves sometime during the day and then try to get aboard. Three, the foggy night. Perfect to get lost in …” Blankenship halted. “I don’t know, sir. I guess I just
felt
this thing.”

“Remarkable, remarkable,” Wilhoite muttered and fell silent. He returned to his desk and sat down. Then he smiled, his words broadly explanatory, apologetic, and rather relieved, as if he had abruptly shifted from his shoulders a pack full of sand: “Well look, Gunner, it’s nobody’s fault, as I said. We’ve had a good record. I don’t think the Bureau will be down our necks for this. I’ll just put those recommendations of yours in effect and—” He raised his eyebrows and paused, and there was the same puzzling smile on his harried, honest face; but if his expression was meant to indicate some unspoken, possibly mysterious understanding between them, Blankenship had no idea what it was. For a moment
the look seemed to transmit a sort of shy, quiet admiration, but whatever it might be Blankenship felt embarrassed and looked away.

“Yes sir?”

The smile faded. “Nothing, Gunner,” he said briskly. “I think that’ll be all.” When he arose, Blankenship got up, too. But then the voice became soft again, even wistful. “God, how I hate this job. I envy you First Division boys. Why the hell I couldn’t have gotten one of those Saipan regiments, instead of this … hooligans and eight-balls and jerks. I’ve put in sixteen letters in the past year but every goddam time I hear BuMed has turned me down on account of my lousy wheezing chest …” As he spoke Blankenship wished to shut his ears against this labored, querulous confession, but even so felt a mild tug of sympathy for such a man, past hope of glory and with time running out, who could still entertain some lustrous vision of fulfillment. Separated by a star and a pay grade and slight asthma from the goal of his life, he had already begun to wither. Old soldiers never died, it was true, especially if they were generals, but old colonels did; for among such reasons as that, Blankenship was content with his own world, where a man out of the pure comprehension of his duty might sometimes feel the keen, rapturous excitement he had felt that morning, and need not finally end up with skull battered to a pulp against a wall of politics and chance and ambition, like Wilhoite, in whose eyes already were specters of battles unseen and medals unwon and the slow final ooze of unlaureled retirement—of lawn chairs and rose gardens and horseshoes pitched in slumberous, dying arcs against the palms of St. Petersburg. The thought depressed Blankenship; he wished the colonel would stop talking and
let him go. But when he finally did cease, with the words “That’s how it is, Gunner, those bastards at headquarters have you over a barrel every time,” Blankenship forced himself to smile—out of some momentary, curious sympathy.

“I know what you mean, Colonel,” he said. “I don’t much like brig duty, either.”

There was a knock at the door, which opened without a second’s pause to let in a chill gust of air from the corridors and a pretty blond woman of about thirty, sleek in furs. “Darling,” she said breathlessly, “I have to have—Oh,
excuse
me, I didn’t know anyone—”