The Longest Night (30 page)

“To the reservoir?” asked Benson, unfamiliar with the Idaho Falls area. “Why's your wife driving to the reservoir?”

“To swim. She can drive it anywhere she likes,” Paul repeated, stirred by goodwill. He thought of the thrill Nat would get when he drove home a new car just for her. She'd throw her arms around his neck; she'd smile from ear to ear. He was going to be generous with her every day, from here on out. He was going to be his best self all of the time.

“Do you really need two cars?” Mayberry asked. He was proud that his household of seven got by on one, but Paul figured that this must be because Mrs. Mayberry never set foot outside the front door.

“She already has a car,” Richards said.

Paul turned to him, assuming that Richards was somehow referring to Mayberry's wife and feeling confused by this, but too sleepy and content to press further.

“I'll take the Fireflite, and she can have a
new
car,” Paul went on. “That way I can get to work on my own, and she won't have to drive me to the bus stop if she wants the car for the day.” Paul felt he was talking a little too much. He doubted this group of lounging men could really care about the specifics of his family's car situation.

Richards was looking at Paul with a strange, wide-eyed expression. “No,” he said, “I mean your wife already has a new car.”

“I'm sorry?” said Paul.

“It's a green Dodge Wayfarer.”

Paul sat up and looked Richards in the eye. “
Who
has a new car?” he asked.

The Danes glanced between Paul and Richards, probably unsure as to whether they were following this conversation correctly.

“Your wife,”
he said pointedly, speaking loudly as if Paul were deaf or slow, “is driving a new car already. Her friend gave it to her.”

“What friend?” asked Paul. He tried to think of who Nat knew: Chrissie next door, or Edna, whose daughter occasionally babysat for them; a woman named Patrice whom Nat had mentioned getting together with a few times while Paul was at work. They were all nice ladies, but Paul couldn't imagine any of them giving her a car.

“Her friend,” Richards said, taking a sip of his beer. “The
cow
boy.”

Everyone was looking at Paul now, and he felt his face turn deeply red. “What are you talking about?”

Richards sat forward with a bleary expression. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Sorry for what?”

“I gotta go to bed,” Richards said, rubbing his eyes. “It's been nice, fellas. But it's cold and weird here.”

“Sir,” Paul cried, and his voice felt far-off and desperate even to his own ears, “are you talking about my wife, Nat Collier?”

“I apologize,” Richards said. “It was just something Jeannie told me. There's a fellow who's been hanging around your house since you've left. A cowboy type, a local. He gave your wife a car.”

“That doesn't make any sense at all.”

“Now, now. I'm sure he's merely a friend. People have just noticed, is all.”

Benson and Mayberry exchanged glances. One of the Danes looked on openmouthed, holding his beer below his chin.

Paul's heart sped up; he felt clammy and horrified, as if all his insides had just been drained from his body, landing in a bucket below him with a heavy slop. Everyone stared at him in pity. He said to Richards, “If you are lying, I will kill you.”

“Whoa,” said Mayberry, snapping to action and putting a hand on Paul's shoulder. “We've all had a bit to drink here. I really don't think the master sergeant knows what he's saying.”

Richards stood, a little wobbly, and buttoned the flaps of his hat under his chin. He looked ridiculous. His expression grew solemn, almost maudlin. “I sure wish to God that I were lying, Paul,” he said.

He had never before called Paul anything but his surname, and this seemed to confirm that the rumor Richards had just told was true: Richards felt sorry enough for him to call him by his first name.

Paul bolted to his feet. “You stop right there,” he shouted. “Do you know what you have just said? Do you know what you have accused my wife of?”

“They are going to fight,” said one of the Danish men, in quiet wonder.

“No, they're not.” Mayberry scrambled to his feet behind Paul and put his hand across Paul's chest. “No one knows what they're saying here.
You
don't,” he said, pointing to the retreating Richards; and then, tightening his grip on Paul, “and you sure as hell don't, either.” He waited a moment until Richards had left the club, and then he nudged Paul to the door and steered him in the opposite direction down Main Street. “Good night, gentlemen,” he called back through the door, before shutting it.

The empty cold surrounded Paul all at once. It was a horrible place. “Did you hear what Richards said?” he cried. “Do you think he's crazy? What in God's name is going on here?”

“Don't waste another thought on it.” Mayberry led him to their barracks. “The guy talks out of his ass, you know that. Besides, he's half-drunk, and probably still pissed at you for sucker-punching him. It's a pretty low way to get back at you, making up stories like that.”

“What he said seemed so specific,” Paul said. “A green Dodge Wayfarer? Why would he make that up?”

“You heard all those tall tales he was inventing about Nanumea. If he could invent a, you know, seventeen-year-old island girl with a twenty-inch waist and a lust for army techs, he could invent a green Dodge Wayfarer.”

“Maybe,” said Paul dully. He jerked away from Mayberry. “
I'm
not drunk. You don't have to lead me everywhere like some fucking horse.” Then he felt very strange and he said, “I'm going to be sick. I'm going to throw up.”

“You need to go to the latrine?”

Paul paused, swallowing. “No.”

“It was a load of BS,” Mayberry kept saying. “He wants to get back at you, or he's just stupid. Why the hell would your wife be driving around in another man's car? Everyone would see. No woman would be that foolish. It's deployment gossip and nothing more. Get it out of your head.”

They got back to the barracks, where a few guys were already sleeping. Mayberry opened the door. Paul paused for a moment, then went in. Mayberry clambered up to his bunk and tossed his boots down to the floor with two leaden thumps.

Paul slid out of his own boots and fell into his bunk in his uniform, his head spinning. He tried to close his eyes and force himself to sleep, hoping the beers he'd drank would take him there faster. But all the alcohol tossed seasick thoughts back and forth in his mind. Could it be true Nat had befriended some local asshole cowboy, driving the man's car around so that everyone could see? It sounded ludicrous, and yet Paul couldn't tell himself with certainty that it was something Nat wouldn't do. Maybe it had started innocently; maybe she didn't realize how it would look. He burned with horror to think of Nat opening the door of their house to this person, her smile welcoming but shy, the dimple in her left cheek showing: He could see it all. And every time he thought he had imagined the worst—Nat touching this guy on the arm, or sitting carelessly next to him on the couch without remembering to tug down the hem of her skirt first—he would realize that there was something even worse to imagine, until his mind seemed to be tumbling down a long corridor with dozens of tiny doors opening and closing, flashing images that tormented him.

“Go to sleep, Collier,” Mayberry called down from his bunk.

“Leave me alone,” Paul said.

“Both of you, shut up,” someone grumbled.

Nat loved him; she loved their family. But he knew—and this knowledge had burned into an ulcer on his brain—that Nat was sometimes not careful, that she neglected to observe the rules other people followed.

She didn't safeguard her honor. Even when he'd first met her, Nat had been loose. The word jarred him, but it was the only one that fit. On that San Diego beach, she'd asked him to walk away from the bonfire. They'd strolled from the safe circle of friends who were supposed to be watchful, away from men she knew. No one in the group had seemed concerned about her honor, actually, and what Paul had hoped was a sign of their unscrupulousness might have just been evidence that Nat had little honor to lose in the first place. She had invited him to go swimming with her in that dark, wild ocean. When he kissed her, she'd kissed him back.

Richards had reached over and touched Nat's neck at that dinner party, had smoothed the napkin right onto her lap, and she hadn't flinched or told him off. A drunken buffoon had touched her in front of her husband and an entire dinner party, and she had
thanked
him.

Paul flipped in bed, kicked the cot twice, hard, as if it were a body below him. When Nat was supposed to be home taking care of their family, stepping nobly into an enhanced role in her husband's absence, what had she really been doing? Spending time with the sort of man who would move in on an absent soldier's pregnant wife? This was the kind of sordid thing Paul heard of other people involved in, the sort of thing his parents might have done, but now it was his own family, his own wife.

He didn't know how he could stand the next few weeks, doubly tortured by his exile and by not knowing what Nat was doing, what she had done, while he was away. He rolled onto his side and gritted his teeth. The room fell into sleep sounds. A bunk creaked, and, above Paul, Mayberry cleared his throat. Someone across the room was snoring.

J
eannie's little vacation was over and she readied herself for Mitch's return. A paper-wrapped pork tenderloin came to room temperature on the counter; a fresh bottle of Old Smuggler stood lookout on the wet bar. In a plume of steam over the stove, she blanched pearl onions and picked away their skins. They rolled gently in a pan of oil like peeled eyeballs.

Martha took Angela for a haircut while Jeannie enjoyed a Mitchless nap. The scent of onion clung to her fingertips when she awoke. She rolled onto her side, not sure why she felt sad. It was no surprise that Mitch was coming home; Mitch was always coming home. She looked at his half of the bed, still made, and wished Eddie would materialize there. But, no: Eddie was off trotting around town with his pregnant child bride, most likely. So Jeannie got Mitch. That was the way it would always be.

The windows rattled; Jeannie shivered as she slid out of bed. For two weeks it had been bitterly cold. Up until his departure for Greenland, Mitch had been spending an awful lot of time in his “study,” the private hideaway at the back of the house, where he kept a space heater. Jeannie had a love-hate relationship with Mitch's study. Despite its cultivated aura as a place of “man's work,” she knew it was mostly a quiet spot where he could stare into space and politely avoid his wife and child. Most of his work documents were classified and could not be brought out of the office on base, so how much paperwork could he have to do anyway?

Apparently he'd been bringing more home; he was spending a lot of time typing away at his desk. Each key shot rang out like a minor celebration, followed by a long pause. He was hogging the space heater back there, and Jeannie decided that at least until he returned it should be used for the benefit of the entire household.

Maybe he's compiling his memoirs, Jeannie thought drily, buttoning her cardigan. She hadn't set foot in his study in weeks; he didn't like it cleaned because, he complained, she moved his things and he could never find them again. If by this he meant that his bottle of Scotch was moved from one side of the desk to the other, well, surely he could locate it.

The study, she soon discovered, was locked. This struck her as either childish territoriality or a typical Mitch oversight. She fetched the spare key from her jewelry box and pushed open the door, which resisted against thick carpet. As soon as she had the door open, though, she began to cough. The room reeked with an acrid, bitter smell. Her eyes watered; she fanned the air in front of her face with her hand.

With a start, she saw that the window was open. A thin layer of snow dusted the sill and the carpet below was wet.

“What on earth, Mitch?” she grunted, struggling to close the half-frozen pane. It stamped into a long line of snow, throwing glittering powder onto the carpet. She knelt and swept the snow into her hands, where it instantly melted. She wiped her hands on her skirt, surveying the room, her fingers below her nose.

Mitch's typewriter was out on his desk. It was a white Sterling portable with a pebbled finish and sea-green keys, a beauty. She had bought it for him upon his last promotion, and though it hadn't seen much use, when it was out of its case it lent an air of modernity to the room's masculine blah. Looking at the typewriter Jeannie recalled a time, several months ago, when Mitch had set Angela on his lap here and let her clack the keys. Angela had been thrilled to roll out the paper and witness the marks she made. Jeannie was peeved with Mitch over something at the time, of course, and recalled wondering snidely if the marks on paper surprised and delighted him as well. And yet the memory was still mostly a good one, little Angela with Mitch hunched around her, encouraging her to whack those typewriter keys.

Perhaps it was the glimmer of this memory that kept Jeannie rooted to the spot. No matter how often she disdained him, Mitch was hers, and his business was her own. The throat-burning smell, the open window, his new and furtive typing habits: He was doing something peculiar in here, and she needed to know what it was.

Lightly she stepped back across the room, closing the door behind her. She was the only one home, but still. With quick efficiency she began to rifle through the desk drawers. Cigars, lighter, stapler, paper clips, Scripto pens. The deeper drawers were more of a challenge, filled with folders and papers, and, at the bottom, a small collection of magazines that made Jeannie's face burn. Apparently Mitch had a thing for a lady named Paula Page who looked dignified enough, even maternal, as she sat on a bed, except that she'd forgotten to button her collared shirt, and one gigantic, flattish, liver-shaped boob hung straight out the front and dangled due south.

The pictures upset Jeannie: This was not a perky USO gal blowing kisses to the troops or the good clean fun of a swimsuited twentysomething in the waves; this was raw, unfamiliar. Was this what Mitch wanted, was this what Eddie wanted? She felt suddenly absurd, like a Tiffany lamp. She was prim and pristine and light in the chest. Her bras were tiny, well-locked safes. But, no—these
pictures
were absurd, not her. She shoved them into the bottom of a drawer and piled every other book and magazine on top.

This wasn't what she was here for, anyway, to judge Mitch and his odd manly needs. But she did want to know the source of the chemical smell, the reason he kept a window cracked in the dead of winter.

Nothing within the desk had any particular odor, so Jeannie tried the closet. As soon as she opened the accordion doors she knew she was close. She knelt and dived straight for the back corner, bypassing a row of polished shoes, a box of ties, an ancient football she'd never seen him hold. Tucked in the far right corner was a glass jar of cotton balls, a small dish of what appeared to be water, and a white pharmaceutical bottle. “Spirits of Salt,” the label read, and in tiny letters: “Muriatic Acid.” In cursive, as if this needed to be made pretty:
“For Stomach Troubles or Industrial Cleaning.”

What was Mitch up to, then? Stomach trouble, or industrial cleaning? He'd never complained of an upset stomach. Jeannie studied the bottle and carefully unscrewed the cap. It was powerful; her mucous passages instantly shrank. She recalled, dimly, this harsh smell. Her grandfather, who'd suffered all his adult life from stomach pains, drank this stuff in tiny, diluted amounts. She recalled having seen it on his nightstand, lifting the cap once to smell it (a move she'd instantly regretted) while her grandmother made lunch. (She paused here, the bottle in her hand, as it occurred to her that she'd been a lifelong snooper.) An engineer for Boeing, her grandpa called the liquid by its more scientific name, hydrochloric acid. Eventually he'd stopped drinking it because it didn't appear to help him, and not long after that he had died.

Jeannie held the bottle at arm's length. Could Mitch have an ulcer? Was he under some unknowable stress? She felt a pang of worry and care. Mitch was not the type to suffer in silence, but maybe he had been ill, afraid to tell her.

And yet. This was Mitch. She looked back at the jar of cotton balls, the bowl of water. She picked up a cotton ball and turned it in her fingers. It was dry, but its crunchy texture implied that it had previously been wet, and it was tapered to a point. She lifted it to her eye. A smear of gray covered the point, almost like pencil, or a smudge on one's hand made by newsprint.

A hunch began to nag at her.

Jeannie set the bottle on the carpet, moved back to the desk, and stood, staring at the drawers. Had she missed something? She went over the contents of each drawer in her mind. Then a corner of paper beneath the typewriter caught her eye, and she lifted the heavy machine. A small stack of papers was being pressed, or concealed, below. She waggled them back and forth from beneath the Sterling and extracted them, frowning.

They appeared to be a series of boring forms, the usual bureaucratic nonsense Mitch dealt with every day. There were records of reactor maintenance, taken from a three-ring binder—she knew what they were because they said, at the top, “Reactor Maintenance”—and pages that had apparently been torn from a logbook, the left edge of each lightly frayed. It was these she scrutinized first. Why had these individual pages been removed? Handwritten notes from the operators, and their signatures, made a column down the far right. Mitch had been acting queerly ever since Deke Harbaugh died, she recalled. Why had that affected him so? He'd acted as if there were aspects of his job only Harbaugh could understand, which was silly; it was an army reactor. Didn't all the operators understand everything the same way?

She flipped to one of the maintenance sheets. It did not seem particularly interesting or monumental. It listed several minor-sounding procedures that had been undertaken on the reactor over three weeks during the past spring. Jeannie switched on the small desk lamp by the typewriter and held the page to the bulb. Squinting, she noticed a small difference between the look of the paper on four of the lines. The surface on those lines was slightly fuzzy, and when she studied the type it looked fresher and darker than that on the rest of the page. The entries in question recorded the control rods being moved by Specialist Collier on three separate occasions and by Specialist Webb on another.

So this was it. This was what Mitch was up to. She could imagine him sitting at his desk, dabbing a cotton ball in acid water and then running it ever so gently back and forth over the page until the printed words lifted away. Fanning them, blowing on them, and when they were dry feeding them into his beautiful typewriter—her gift to him—to disguise whatever had previously been written there.

She didn't know the ins and outs of the information he had changed, nor why he had done it, and she didn't much care. The rub of it all, which she could see so plainly and with a sinking heart, was that he hadn't done a very good job. His new entries were often a hair above or below their companions on the lines, the ribbon darker, and while the surface of the paper had been only subtly changed, when she studied them closely she could pinpoint where. Of course, the paper trail at the reactor must be vast—this made her feel slightly better—but even so, if Mitch had sought out whatever information was here to change, wouldn't someone else, too? And wouldn't it be fairly easy to see where the documents had been altered?

Good grief, Mitch, the idiot. All she wanted was for her husband to finish out his own humdrum career. He was seventeen years in, just three more to go; one more tour and they would be done. He'd have his pension, they'd settle in St. Louis, and finally her transient life of sacrifice, her endurance of Mitch's endless quest for nubile divertissements, would be rewarded with stability. She'd always feared that something might stop them from meeting this goal, but she hadn't known what. At a party she'd struck up a conversation with an army wife whose husband died just three months shy of retirement. He'd stumbled from a cliff while hiking. In Jeannie's case, she could probably count on Mitch not to get himself killed—he was good at that—but she didn't know if she could rely on him to make good decisions, to protect his career, his name and hers. Each promotion made her superstitious; with every increase in their station she felt it more likely that they would fall. If he screwed it all up now, there would be no fixing it.

She returned the forms to their spot beneath the typewriter and then, on second thought, lifted the bulky machine again and removed just one page. The typewriter thudded back onto the desk. Jeannie's eyes flicked over the unfamiliar words; she wondered just how important all this was. Would it work? Would it really save face for Mitch? Would it incriminate someone else? Stepping back, her foot bumped the bottle on the floor, and when she turned she saw that a small, pulsating burble of acid was making its way onto the carpet.

With an almost-silent squeal she bent for the bottle, realized she couldn't touch it with bare fingers, and dashed into the hallway. There she nearly collided with Martha and Angela, and this time she did shriek. Martha, startled out of her wits, yelled also, and the two women froze.