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  Gus asked around but there were no witnesses to the incident except Runkle’s partner, Jeff Sparks. According to Runkle, and backed up by Sparks, Springer came in at three a.m. from a night of hard drinking. He got pissed off that Runkle didn’t open the gates immediately when Springer pulled up to them honking his horn. Runkle testified he did not take his time opening the gates, but Springer thought he had and went crazy. He drove his car into the AP shack once he was inside the gates, knocking some siding off. Then he got out of his car and came after Runkle with a tire iron. Runkle produced the tire iron for the Board of Inquiry. Runkle said he was forced to use the nightstick aggressively to defend himself. He had the sequence of events written down in his notebook. “I would have been within my rights to shoot him,” Runkle said, “The way he was acting, I felt my life was in danger.”

  Gus didn’t believe the story. He knew Runkle hated Ray’s guts. Ray, having seen action in the big war, had an aura that most respected. But some, like Runkle, felt Ray wore that aura a little too visibly. Runkle was the most vocal of these. Ray Springer was only a staff sergeant, but young lieutenants deferred to him because of his wartime experience as a ball turret gunner with three confirmed Focke-Wulf kills. Ray, in this sense, outranked everyone on the base except George Walters, the radio op, First Sergeant Burnside, and Major Darling.

  After his shift Gus went into town and borrowed FDR’s Buick without asking Flora and headed to Great Falls. Two hours later he parked outside Malmstrom’s front gate. He identified himself to the AP guarding the main entrance. The AP checked the roster of airmen stationed at the 999th, found Gus’s name, then gave Gus a temporary clip-on ID badge.

  Gus asked the AP for directions to the base hospital. The AP drew a black “X” on an onionskin map then gave the map to Gus, pointing out the best route to take. The hospital was a ten-minute walk past the commissary, equipment sheds, the flight line, and several monolithic rows of gray, two-story barracks.

  A flight of Scorpions, afterburners lit, scorched the sky on their way to intercept other Scorpions simulating attacking Tupolevs. Rows of KC-97 tankers were parked on the tarmac next to giant hangars. Two blue helicopters flying side by side passed low overhead. A squad of rifle-carrying APs in jump boots and white helmets jogged past Gus in double-time. There was a sense here of the vast and serious business of the United States Air Defense Command. Gus felt proud to be part of it. He thought: Too bad shitheads like Mutt Runkle were also a part of it.

  Ray Springer was in the critical ward. There were only six beds in it and two of them were empty. A nurse showed him in. The nurse was a first lieutenant. Gus didn’t know whether he was supposed to salute her or not. He opted not to. She seemed indifferent, one way or the other. Her nameplate said “Lt. Doris J. Dorio.” She was at least five inches taller than Gus.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Gus said.

  First Lieutenant Doris J. Dorio, who looked to be in her mid-thirties, glanced at Gus with the interest she might have had for a moth. She yawned. “I’ve been on duty since six this morning,” she said. “I’m ready to pack it in.” She had the raspy voice of a heavy smoker. Her skin was shaded toward olive, her short black hair was lustrous under the ward’s fluorescents.

  “I know what you mean, ma’am,” Gus said.

  “No, kid, you don’t. Not unless you’ve worked thirty-two beds of sick airmen fourteen hours straight with a twenty minute break to attend to your own bodily needs.”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Gus said.

  “Hell, it’s what I signed up for. But I’m a short-timer. I’ll be out in another month. Twenty-eight days, to be exact.”

  She smiled. The smile transformed her from an overworked and hostile functionary to an overworked angel of mercy. She wasn’t beautiful, but she didn’t have to be beautiful to be attractive. Physical beauty, Gus speculated, probably had nothing to do with attractiveness, once you understood the difference.

  “Didn’t mean to bite your head off, kid,” she said.

  Gus liked First Lieutenant Doris J. Dorio. She was impressive in the seasoned way young girls could not be. She told Gus where to find Sergeant Springer, then left him standing there, mute with admiration.

  Gus wasn’t able to identify Springer. Three of the four airmen in the critical ward were heavily bandaged. A burn victim languished against the far wall of the ward. His ears were gone and his lips were shriveled. His nose was a wad of white putty. He glistened with unguents. An IV bag dripped saline solution and antibiotics into his unburned right arm. He seemed to be smiling, or grimacing, but that was because his upper lip was mostly nonexistent.

  Gus looked at the legs of the other airmen. The one with the shortest legs had to be Ray. He sat on the empty bed next to the short legs.

  The man with the short legs had a swollen head. His head looked like a melon wrapped in gauze. His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. His eyes were black slits surrounded by purple halos. He looked almost festive, as if he were wearing a crude mask for a costume party. Gus looked at the man’s hand and saw Ray Springer’s shrapnel pinky ring.

  “You awake, Ray?” he said.

  “Off and on. You meet my nurse, Gate?”

  “Lieutenant Dorio?”

  “Once I get my good looks back I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

  Springer’s jaws were wired together. He talked in whispers through his almost closed mouth. Gus had to lean down to hear him.

  “What the hell happened, Ray?”

  “Nothing much. Runkle wouldn’t open the gate. Let me sit out there in the cold for twenty minutes. When he got around to opening it, I lost it. Stupid. Even an old fart like me can be stupid as any fifteen year old.”

  “He had it in for you. He wanted you to lose it.”

  “And I took the bait. But look on the bright side, Gate. I’m going to marry my nurse.” Springer made a hissing sound that Gus took for laughter.

  “Lieutenant Dorio’s agreeable to that?” Gus said.

  “I’m working out a strategy. I’m going to quit the air force and settle down.”

  “Not take your retirement? You’ve only got another—what—four or five years?”

  “Retirement’s not what it’s about.”

  Gus thought: “It” again.

  “I’ve also got to quit pissing blood before I can ask for Lieutenant Dorio’s hand,” Springer said. “Marry a woman like that, your plumbing better be in good working order.” He closed his eyes and dozed.

  Gus waited a minute, then said, “She’s been around the block a few times.”

  Springer whispered, “You got a sharp eye, Gate.”

  “Maybe she’s too tough for you, Ray,” Gus said.

  “You mean for a fragile old dog like me?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “How did you mean it?”

  Gus shrugged.

  “You don’t know a whole lot about women, Gate. They all have a need, even the tough ones. The tough ones sometimes are needier. You just have to figure out the right strategy.”

  Gus was enjoying this conversation, in spite of the circumstances. “You make it sound simple,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was simple. There’s a name for it. It’s called courtship.”

  Springer dozed off again. Gus stood up. The burned man made a soft yodeling sound. Gus realized after a moment that the burned man was screaming and that the yodeling sound he made was all the scream he could muster. Gus looked for Lieutenant Dorio but couldn’t find her. When he got back to the critical ward, the burned man had stopped screaming.

  Gus sat down next to Ray Springer’s bed. “I’ll come back, next chance I get,” he said.

  “The shithouse rule, Gate,” Springer said.

  “How do you figure?” Gus said.

  “I got my ass kicked, but here’s the upside—I’m going to hook up with Lieutenant Doris J. Dorio, rhymes with Oreo. Wouldn’t have happened without Mutt Runkle’s help. Not a bad trade-off.”
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  “What if she doesn’t want to hook up with you?” Gus said. “Where’s your shithouse rule then?”

  “Then I’m just stuck in the shithouse, bound up but biding my time and hoping for a good outcome. It’s not strictly either/or.”

  Lieutenant Dorio came into the ward. She replaced the drip bag hanging over the burned man, then joined Gus at Springer’s bedside.

  “They’ll trepan his cranium tomorrow morning,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “His brain is swollen. They’ll drill holes in his skull to relieve the pressure.”

  She took Springer’s pulse and temperature, made a notation on the clipboard she was carrying. Then she did something that made Gus think Springer had a chance with Lieutenant Dorio. She picked up Springer’s hand and studied the shrapnel ring.

  “Is that a snake?” she asked.

  Gus started to explain the ring but stopped himself. Ray needed to tell it. It would be a good way to begin his courtship campaign which, in any case, was going to be a long shot.

  Out at the nurses’ station, Lieutenant Dorio asked Gus what had happened to Springer. Gus told her what he knew about the incident.

  “The AP used a nightstick on him,” Gus said.

  “Nightstick? I’d say he used a lot more than a nightstick. Your Sergeant Springer was stomped.”

  “That fuckhead Runkle,” Gus said.

  “Watch the salty language, airman. This isn’t your barracks.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “Your sergeant might lose that kidney,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s possibly detached. There’s blood clots in his urine. He also has two breaks in the lower mandible and three hairline cracks in the maxilla.” She pointed to her jaw and face to let Gus see the areas she meant. “When they brought him in there was a boot print on his face.”

  “Jesus,” Gus said.

  “Someone danced on your sergeant’s head, airman.”

  “I know who the son of a bitch is.”

  “You know what I like about the little guy? He never complains. Doesn’t even seem to hold a grudge.”

  Gus went back into the critical ward. He sat down by Springer. “You’re really busted up, Ray,” he said. “They’ll probably give you a medical discharge.”

  “If I’m lucky I’ll get disability pay, Gate,” Springer whispered. “Maybe fifty percent. I could retire on that.”

  “Shithouse rule again?”

  “Not a bad system, is it?”

  Springer raised his head an inch off the pillow. “You been talking to Lieutenant Dorio about me?” he said. “What did she say?”

  “She said you’re hung like a donkey.”

  “Ah, romance,” Springer said.

  26

  Gus couldn’t look at Mutt Runkle. Seeing the AP made him sick. When he saw him, even from a distance, his heart would pound and his stomach cramped. His heart beat so hard he thought it might crack a rib. Gus was afraid of his adrenaline-fueled heart, what it might make him do.

  He didn’t feel this degree of hatred after Runkle beat him up. What was different here? Maybe he didn’t think as much of himself as he did of Ray Springer. Ray Springer, to Gus, was like an older brother, a mentor. Gus was able to say it: He loved Ray Springer. He’d wanted to talk to Ray about Orson and Marva and what had happened in Chula Vista and where he stood with FDR and Flora. No chance of that happening now, maybe not for months, thanks to Runkle.

  So he avoided Runkle. Which was easy to do since Runkle was unsocial and content with his own company. He ate by himself, lived in an NCO barracks with private rooms, conducted his gate duty with a bored indifference that was somehow menacing, barely checking out the shuttle-loads of airmen coming into the base or leaving it.

  Gus didn’t know he owned that much hate. Its acid burned his stomach like an ulcer. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw a face he didn’t recognize. Ease off, he told his image. He made the image smile, but the smile was ugly in its falsehood. It made him look crazy.

  He had a recurrent dream. Down in the ocean, walking through green water thin as air, he approached the Fisk and Orson Gunlocke. Sometimes Orson was spread out in pieces, sometimes he was whole. When he was whole Gus asked, “Am I responsible for your death?” Orson did not reply but tilted his head and scratched his chin as if working out the possibilities before he said, “Wrong question, son.” Or Gus would walk toward the Fisk in that green light to find Orson torn up, small fish feeding on the ragged strips of flesh. And Gus would ask, “What am I so mad at?” And the mutilated apparition would answer, “At every God-damned thing.” Gus said, “I did not launch the torpedo.” Orson replied, “Don’t matter who launched the torpedo. A torpedo is only an instrument.” Awake, Gus asked himself: Was I born with this? Does it go back to August Gunlocke, the civil war soldier? Did this rage come down the years to Orson, then to me?

  One night he followed Mutt Runkle to town. Mutt was on break and his first stop was the Milk River Hotel bar. Gus hid in a dark booth and watched Runkle drink double shots of house bourbon backed with mugs of tap beer. He drank alone. His sullen posture turned away any chance of genial company. After six shots and two mugs, Runkle left the bar and went to the whorehouse behind the Moomaw Dairy. Gus waited outside. Ten minutes later Runkle came out. He unzipped and pissed in the alley, rocking back and forth on his heels over the steaming spatter. As he rocked he hummed a sour tune. Gus stayed hidden behind a rack of garbage cans. A week later, Gus followed Runkle again, and Runkle repeated his routine as if it had been written down and memorized. Gus asked himself, So what? What’s Runkle’s stupid fucking habits got to do with me?

  Gus, in his present state of mind, was not good company. Tracy Winshaw was the first to notice the change, or the first to say anything about it.

  “Something’s different about you,” she said. “You look scuzzy. Did you forget to shave? Don’t they have rules about that? You need a haircut, too.”

  Gus forced a normal smile. They had just seen The Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Orpheum. They were in FDR’s Buick, the heater turned up high, parked on a unlit street by the high school football field on the outskirts of town. It was ten below zero and windy. Gus was sweating but Tracy was shivering.

  “Nothing’s different about me,” he said, holding his manufactured smile in place. Runkle, his regular weekly routine, was on Gus’s mind. You could set your watch by Runkle’s routine.

  “Yes, something is,” she said. She tucked herself deeply into her winter coat.

  Gus gave up on the smile. “That fucking Josh,” he said, still thinking of Runkle.

  “That fucking Josh?” she said.

  “Thinks he knows it all.”

  “He knows a lot. He’s kept a 4.0 in two years at Northern.”

  “Doesn’t mean jackshit.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  “Why are you picking on Josh?”

  “I’m not picking on him. I don’t give a shit about him. There’s this guy I know, Ray Springer. I need to talk to him.”

  “Who’s Ray Springer?”

  “Someone who knows a hell of a lot more than Josh Billings.”

  “Does he read Kierkegaard? Does he read Nietzche?”

  “He doesn’t need to.”

  “Yet he knows more than Josh.”

  “Fuck Josh.”

  Gus didn’t want this argument. He changed the subject. “Good movie, huh?” he said.

  “In all respects but one,” she said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The obvious message.”

  “What message? It was science fiction.”

  “Oh please, Gus. Wake up. Didn’t you understand who the invaders were supposed to be?”

  “Martians?”

  “They came from the Red planet all right, but they were not Martians.”

  “That makes a lot of sense.”

>   “Commies, Gus. They were Commies, invading the brains of ordinary God-fearing Americans, turning them into agents of the Soviet Union.”

  “I missed that part. I guess I wouldn’t keep a 4.0 at Northern.”

  “You’ve got to learn how to read between the lines, Gus. Things are hardly ever what they seem.”

  “I was never good at reading between the lines.”

  “Keep an eye on your neighbor. He might be a convert to Socialism. That’s the message. They want to turn us into a nation of paranoid snitches doing the bidding of the capitalist war machine.”

  “Lord help us!” Gus said. He threw his hands up, feigning dismay.

  “You’re making fun of me?”

  Gus saw his mistake. He’d lumped Tracy in with Josh. Not smart, even if it was more true than false.

  They drove to his parents’ house. It was only nine o’clock but both FDR and Flora were in bed. Gus made cocoa and they sat in front of the big Capehart and watched a snowy version of The Philco Television Playhouse, a show about an independent old lady wanting to go back to work in a New York garment factory but too old now to do the demanding labor.

  “Slow death in America,” Tracy said.

  “I thought the son-in-law was a jerk,” Gus said.

  “Worse,” Tracy said. “He had the sensitivity of pavement. It’s the old story, the desperately ignorant bourgeois male unable to understand his own unhappiness.”

  “There’s no quit in you, is there?” Gus said.

  “Should there be?” she said.

  He changed the subject. “You want a drink?”

  “A drink? A drink drink you mean?”

  “My folks keep the brandy handy.”

  “Clever,” she said.

  Gus found an unopened pint and broke the seal with his thumbnail. He looked at his thumbnail. It was black. When had he showered last? He couldn’t remember. He poured brandy into two glasses. “It’s good stuff,” he said. “Imported from France.”

  “I’ve never had brandy,” Tracy said. “I tried bourbon once and hated it.”