“I got a better idea,” he said. “I got something special the two of us can do.”
Two
A man AWOL is a man running scared. Richie Parsons was a man AWOL, and he was scared out of his mind. A boy AWOL, really, for Richie Parsons had crept into his eighteenth year only a scant four months ago.
Richie Parsons was running scared. He was used to being scared, he’d been scared of one thing or another as long as he could remember, but he wasn’t used to running. He’d never run before in his life, he’d always crept or sidled or tiptoed. His grammar school teachers had talked about him as “the shy, quiet little boy, the one who always edges along the wall, as though afraid to be seen.” His high school teachers had mentioned him as “the loner, the boy who doesn’t belong to the group, but only creeps around the fringes, watching and silent.” His Tactical Instructor in Air Force boot training had complained about him as “the little sneak with two left feet.” His contemporaries, in grammar school and high school and the Air Force, at all times and all ages, had spoken of him as “the gutless wonder.”
Richie Parsons, eighteen years old, five foot seven-and-one-half inches tall, weighing one hundred thirty-five pounds, with watery eyes of a washed-out blue and Kansas drought blond hair, was everything everyone had ever said about him. He was silent, solitary, sneaky and gutless. And, at the present moment, he was also running and scared.
He’d hated the Air Force. He’d hated it from the minute he’d walked into the recruiting center for his physical and his qualification tests. He’d been one of a group of about fifty young men, thrown into close proximity with them all, and he’d hated that. When he’d tried to move back against the wall, away from the milling jumble, a uniformed sergeant had hollered at him to get back with the group.
They had all been herded into a long, cold, linoleum-floored room, and they had all had to strip, down to their shoes. Then they were fifty chunks of ill-assorted, poorly developed, goose-bump-covered flesh, forming a long line and shambling on by the bored and annoyed doctors, whose examination might have been funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic.
Richie had hoped he would fail the physical. He knew he was weak, he knew he was underweight, and his eyes, without his plastic-rimmed glasses, were almost useless. But every doctor had passed him, even though he had fainted when they took the blood sample from his arm. He had fainted, calling attention to himself, and when he came back to consciousness, lying on the Army cot near the busily stabbing doctor, the rough Army blanket itchy against his nakedness, the whole line was looking at him. Frightened, embarrassed, so nervous he could hardly stand. He had crept back into the line, hoping they would all forget him, look at somebody else for a change, hoping somebody else would faint and draw the crowd’s attention away from him.
He had passed the physical. But he still believed there was a chance he would fail the mental tests, the qualification exams. Until he took them, that is, he believed he might stand a chance of failing them. After all, he had never done very well in school. He had spent seven years getting through the first six grades of grammar school, and four years getting through the three grades of junior high school. He had only gone to senior high school one year, had flunked half the courses, and quit school at seventeen to join the Air Force.
But Mama hadn’t wanted him to join the Air Force. Mama hadn’t wanted Richie to do anything not suited to a boy of ten. So Richie had to wait until his eighteenth birthday, when he could enlist without Mama’s consent.
And already, even before actually enlisting, he hated it, and he hoped he would fail the qualification tests, because he would never have the courage to just turn around and walk out. He would be doing something different, calling attention to himself, and he just couldn’t do it.
Nor could he fail the qualification tests. High score was one hundred. Passing score was ten. If Richie Parsons had been imported just that day from the jungles of the upper Amazon, speaking only Ubu-Ubu and unable to read or write, he still could have passed the Armed Forces Qualification Test. In fact, there were three Puerto Ricans among the fifty enlistees, three Puerto Ricans who spoke only Spanish, and they passed the test.
The test went like this: On the left is a picture of a screwdriver. On the right are four pictures, a wrench, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers. You have to match the picture on the left with the similar picture on the right. If you make a mistake, one of the recruiters will come to you and “explain the instructions” to you again, to make sure you do it right.
Richie tried to fail. He tried his darnedest to fail, and he got a score of forty-eight. He passed with drooping colors.
In his four-month Air Force career, the only thing Richie really came close to flunking was basic training. Left and right were totally mysterious concepts to him. It took him a month to understand that spitting on a shoe doesn’t make it dirty; when done right, spitting on a shoe makes the shoe shinier than ever. During familiarization with the carbine (in which there is no failing score), he plugged virtually every target on the field except his own. He was always at the wrong end of the formation when his group had KP, and he always wound up either in the garbage room or the grease trap. There were seventy-two trainees in his basic training flight, and his Tactical Instructor assured him he was by far the worst of the lot. When they all went to the indoor swimming pool to learn the proper way to jump off a torpedoed ship, in case they ever were onboard a ship and it happened to be torpedoed, Richie Parsons was the only one of the seventy-two basic trainees who had to be dragged, half-drowned, out of the pool.
There is always petty thievery in a barracks containing seventy-two young men. There was petty thievery in Richie Parsons’ barracks, too. The petty thief is usually never discovered. Richie Parsons was never discovered either.
Richie Parsons had never once been discovered, in a lifetime of petty thievery. It had begun with Mama’s purse, from which an occasional nickel or dime filched wasn’t noticed. It had moved on to the grammar school cloakroom, where candy bars and coins, even if their absence were noted, could certainly never be traced. The junior high school locker-room had been next, and the magazine rack at the neighborhood candy store. And in the Air Force it was his barracks-mates’ wall- and foot-lockers.
He was never discovered. He was never even suspected. His perfect record of perfect crime was not the result of any brilliant planning on his part at all. He didn’t plan a thing. His perfect record was caused by equal parts of his own personality and dumb luck. His own personality, because he was such an obvious sneak. No one in the world skulked quite as obviously as Richie Parsons. No one in the world was as obviously incompetent in absolutely everything. A guy who is completely obvious in his sneaking, and completely incompetent in his actions, could never possibly get away with petty thievery. The idea never even occurred to anybody. During the eleven weeks of basic training, almost everybody in the flight was suspected at one time or another, but no one ever suspected clumsy, obvious Richie Parsons.
During the last couple of weeks of basic training, Richie and his fellow-trainees were classified. That is, they were tested, inspected, and assigned their particular Air Force careers, usually on the round-peg-square-hole method. Richie was given an IQ test, and amazed everybody, including himself, by coming up with a score of 134. Apparently, hidden down beneath the layers of confusion and cowardice and inferiority feelings, way down deep inside Richie Parsons, where it was never used, was a mind.