Libra (14 page)

He let it be known that he’d figured out the U-2’s rate of climb. He didn’t say what it was but went into detail on other, minor matters, testing Konno’s knowledge of technical things, lecturing a little, pointing out flaws in the base’s security.

A man in a white tuxedo introduced the bathing beauties by name. Sincere applause. The two men went into the chill night. It was late and quiet and Lee pulled his windbreaker tight around him. Konno stood smoking, hunched away from the wind, knees bent, looking down an empty neon street.

Take the double-e from Lee.

Hide the double-l in Hidell.

Hidell means hide the L.

Don’t tell.

White ideograms. Roman letters ticking in the dark. Konno said they were waiting for one of the hostesses, Tammy, and he looked a little dejected about it, maybe because he needed sleep. She came out a side exit wrapped in plastic rainwear including a hat and floppy booties, and seemed ready for some hard-earned relaxation. She thought she knew a pachinko parlor that might still be open. She wanted to play pachinko.

 

 

A radarman named Bushnell was climbing the exterior stairs of his barracks when he heard a sharp noise, a single hard rap, like a ruler striking a desk. On second thought, no, that wasn’t it. More like a little popping sound, a two-inch firecracker maybe. Except that wasn’t it either. That wasn’t even close. Maybe just a slamming door actually.

He went inside and saw Ozzie sitting on a footlocker, alone in the squadbay, showing his funny smile. He had a little bitty pistol in his hand and there was a streak of blood across his left arm, above the elbow.

“I believe I shot myself,” he said.

Bushnell studied the perfect little scene. He thought Ozzie’s remark sounded historical and charming, right out of a movie or TV play.

“Where did you get the gun is what I’m thinking if I’m the duty officer and just happen to come around.”

“Meanwhile would you do something?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get a corpsman would be fine with me.”

“What’s it doing? Is it bleeding? Looks like a shaving cut to me.”

“There’s a hole in my arm.”

“You shave yet, Ozzie? I hear your mother shaves but you don’t. What happens when they see the gun?”

“It was an accident.”

“Bullshit. You should have used your .45.”

“And blow my arm off.”

“It’s government issue, shitbird. What are you supposed to tell them, I found the gun on a sidewalk at high noon?”

“I did find it.”

“Christ, Ozzie, you make me sick. You’re sitting here all alone. What if I don’t come in? You just sit and wait? If there’s anything I don’t respect, it’s bad planning.”

“Meanwhile I am shot.”

“Well big fucking deal.”

“I am bleeding, Bushnell.”

“You deserve to bleed. You deserve to go white and fucking die. This is a stunt. It is just the oldest stunt in the world. How do you expect them to walk in here and say all right you’re shot, Oswald, so you stay here and the rest of them have to ship their asses out to sea.”

“Because I am shot. That’s how I expect them to say it.”

“Completely ignoring the fact you hit only flesh, which it looks like it to me. It’s a court-martial offense, I guarantee, the minute they see a weapon that’s not authorized.”

“I took the gun out of the footlocker to turn it in when it went off.”

“Tell us how small and cute it is.”

“I am bleeding.”

“You’ll be hit with wrongful conduct, regardless. Same as if you had a riot gun.”

“It went off when I dropped it. I picked it up off the floor, which at the time I felt dizzy and thought to myself I’m in a state of shock so I closed the footlocker in an attempt to sit down, which is how you found me.”

“Don’t tell me. Tell them, shitbird.”

“Just get me a corpsman, Bushnell. Somebody has to treat me. I’m a wounded Marine.”

Postcard #1. Aboard the USS
Terrell County
in the South China Sea. Ozzie sits on the afterdeck with Reitmeyer, counting the days of ghost maneuvers in the drenching heat, wondering if he’ll ever see land again.

“What do you say I teach you to play chess?”

“Fuck you.”

“It’s for your own stupid good, Reitmeyer. Plus we have to pass the time somehow.”

“Take a flying fuck at the moon.”

“The best players in the world are generally Russian.”

“Fuck them, in spades.”

Men sit dazed in the streaming light.

 

 

Postcard #2. Corregidor, among the war ruins. John Wayne comes to visit the homesick leathernecks of MACS-l, interrupting work on a movie being shot somewhere in the Pacific. Ozzie has mess duty, he has mess duty all the time now, but he sneaks a look at the famous man eating lunch with a group of officers—roast beef and gravy that he has helped prepare. He wants to get close to John Wayne, say something authentic. He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It’s remarkable and startling to see the screen laugh repeated in life. It makes him feel good. The man is doubly real. He does not cheat or disappoint. When John Wayne laughs, Ozzie smiles, he lights up, he practically disappears in his own glow. Someone takes a photograph of John Wayne and the officers, and Ozzie wonders if he will show up in the background, in the passageway, grinning. It’s time to get back to the galley but he watches John Wayne a moment longer, thinking of the cattle drive, in Red River, the great expectant moment when it starts. Stillness, nervous steers, horsemen in dawn light, the rim of hills, the deep sure voice of aging John Wayne, the voice with so many shades of feeling and reassurance, John Wayne resolutely to his adopted son:
“Take
’em to
Missouri, Matt.”
Then rearing mounts, trail hands yahooing, the music and rousing song, the honest stubbled faces (men he feels he knows), all the glory and dust of the great drive north.

He reads Walt Whitman in hospital ruins.

 

 

One thing about Konno. He never talked to Lee in a personal way. He seemed to be reciting, talking into a Dictaphone. There was no flexibility in his manner. He didn’t see the individual.

One other thing. He was in over his head, technically speaking. He didn’t know the terminology, all the phrases and labels in aviation electronics, high-altitude reconnaissance. An elevator operator. Ha ha.

Lee didn’t let on that he’d wounded himself with the derringer Konno had supplied. First because the strategy had failed to keep him in Japan. Then, too, he didn’t want Konno to know he’d been under his influence.

 

 

No talking.

You stand at attention until assigned.

You do not step on white paint at any time. Segments of the floor are painted white. Do not touch white. There are white lines running down passageways. Do not touch or cross these lines. Every urinal is situated behind a white line. You need permission to piss.

You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won’t show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon.

If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it.

There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage—names with a vivid history familiar from the movies.

You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms.

You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm’s length, shouting
aye aye sir
and
no sir
at the slightest sound. You are permitted to lower the seabag to the back of your neck only when you bend over to allow them to check your anal cavity for printed matter, narcotics, alcoholic beverages, digging tools, TV sets, implements of self-destruction.

This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turn-key’s area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin.

Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things—things you could crack between your fingernails and they’d break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard.

They whispered to each other in the night.

“Are you saying when you kill them, they multiply?”

“I’m saying you can’t kill them. Some things too small.”

“Sleep on top of the blanket,” Oswald told him.

“They get on through. They bore through.”

“That’s termites, that bore.”

“Hey, Jim, I live with these things for years.”

“Put the blanket on the floor. Sleep on the floor.”

“Half the floor is white lines, like they foreseen. Which anyway the lice jump down on top of me.”

A nearly bare place, simple objects, basic needs. Oswald’s senses were fearfully keyed. He tasted iron on his tongue. He heard the voices from the chicken wire, guards grumbling like heavy dogs. When they hosed down the floor of the cell block he smelled the earth embedded in concrete—pebbles, gravel, slag and broken stone, all distantly mixed with ammonia, like contempt blended in.

Dupard was from Texas.

“Leads the nation in homicides,” Oswald said.

“That’s the place.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Dallas.

“I’m from Fort Worth, off and on, myself.”

“Neighbors. Ain’t that something. How old is a kid like yourself?”

“Eighteen,” Oswald told him.

“You a baby. They throw a baby into prison. How much time you bring with you?”

“Twenty-eight days. ”

“What’s the charge?”

“First I accidentally shot myself in the arm, which they court martialed me for, but suspended the sentence.”

“If it’s accidentally, what’s their point?”

“They said I used an unregistered weapon. I had a private weapon.

“Which they never handed out.”

“Which I found. But that doesn’t matter in their eyes as long as the weapon is not registered.”

“But they suspend the sentence, so then what?”

“Then there was a second court-martial.”

“Sound like somebody push his luck.”

“Based on an incident. That’s all it was.”

“I believe it.”

“There’s a sergeant, Rodriguez, that’s been giving me mess duty all the time. Doesn’t like me, which I guarantee it’s mutual. So we had words more than once. I let him know how I felt about being singled out. He told me it’s the court-martial that’s keeping me out of the radar hut, plus general standards, which he’s saying I don’t dress or behave up to standards. I saw him at a local bar and went right over. I told him. I said get me off these menial jobs. We were standing jaw to jaw. He thought I’d say my piece and back off. But I stood right there. There were people pressing close. My mind was already working. Potential witnesses. I told him what I thought. That’s all. I didn’t wise off. I was simple and clear. I said I wanted fair treatment. I told him. I didn’t bait him. He said I was baiting him. He said I wouldn’t get him to fight. More trouble than it was worth. Lose him a stripe or something. Some guys egged us on. They told Rodriguez whip him good. But I wasn’t trying to get him to fight. I was stating my case in the matter. He called me
maricón.
He whispered to me,
maricón,
with a little sweet smile. I told him I know what that means. I heard Puerto Ricans use those words. I know those words. He said he was no Puerto Rican. I told him don’t use Puerto Rican words. It was heated then. They were all around us. Somebody shoved me and I spilled my beer all over Rodriguez. Accidentally spilled. I said you saw I was pushed. I told him. I didn’t apologize or make an excuse. It wasn’t my fault. There was shoving all around. I was only standing up for my military rights.”

“Regulate the voice,” Bobby whispered.

“So that was the second court-martial. But I defended myself this time. I questioned Rodriguez on the stand. I was proved not guilty of throwing my drink on him, which is technically an assault charge.”

“How come here we are, having this talk?”

“They said I was guilty of a lesser charge. Wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer. Article one seventeen. Bang.”