One of the girls who worked in the cafeteria, Mary, used to joke around with me when I ate there. She was funny enough to be cute. When I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride on my bike one night, she said yes. In a few weeks, we were sleeping together. It was automatic—I don’t know how these things happen. Sometimes I think I was just along for the ride while my dick did the driving.
Big confession a few weeks later. Patience was very hurt. I watched her cry and knew I should feel something—I wanted to feel something—but I didn’t. I kept seeing Mary—I couldn’t stop. I even told Patience when I’d be away with Mary—don’t wait up. For revenge, Patience drove the Roach to Tampa to see an old boyfriend. She wrecked the car there. When she got back, she said she’d decided she was packing up Jack and going back to school—with me or without me.
Okay. I wasn’t sure about returning to school, but my job seemed like a monotonous path to the grave. Maybe if I had more of a challenge, I’d be interested. I went to my division boss and told him I could run the entire photomask section better than anybody there and that’s what I wanted to do. He agreed that I probably could, but I’d only been there six months. I said, okay, I quit.
CHAPTER 5
September 1970—We loaded a rental truck with all our stuff, including my bike. The plan was that Patience and Jack would drive the truck to the house we’d rented in Gainesville and I would meet them there with the Roach, which was supposed to be out of the repair shop that afternoon. The shop was late getting the Roach ready, and I didn’t leave Melbourne until eleven.
I smelled gas, but couldn’t find the leak. I drove with the windows open. I woke up lying across the front seats. Dim light glowed in through the windshield.
Too much light. Bad place for a mortar attack.
The Huey is leaking fuel?
Tell the crew chief.
Gasoline? We use jet fuel.
I sat up. The Roach’s front bumper was touching the guardrail of an overpass. No damage. I must have been going very slowly as I passed out from the fumes. I got out and watched a car hurtle beneath the overpass. Real close. Walked back to the Roach. The smell of gas was very strong, but there were only fifty miles to go. I got back in and drove with my head stuck out the window. Arrived in Gainesville feeling sick. Before I unloaded our stuff from the truck, I found the leak: the Roach had a sediment bowl just under the fuel tank that I didn’t know about. The sediment-bowl gasket leaked and the fumes were being sucked in through the dash.
At this time in my life, about the most important thing to me was my motorcycle. It was an intoxicating machine, a freedom ride. I had to return the rental truck in Ocala and take the Honda back to Melbourne for one more week of work at Radiation. I lashed the bike to the metal tie-down rings inside the truck and left that afternoon. In Ocala, a kid ran out in front of me chasing a ball. I slammed on the brakes in time to miss him. I felt a terrific crash in the back of the truck. Stopped, got out, and opened the doors. My pride-and-joy bike was lying on the deck up against the forward wall. The tie-down rings had ripped out. I lashed the bike upright and returned the truck. When I got the bike off the truck, I could see only minor damage to the front fender. When I got on the road, however, the front forks shook badly as I approached sixty. The shaking got worse as I accelerated, then went away at about eighty. I drove at eighty, thinking I should have hit the kid.
A week later, after a messy good-bye with Mary in which I knew the thing wasn’t over because I didn’t really have the guts to end it, I left Melbourne.
I was back in school studying photography.
I made pictures, enthusiastically at first, but soon got bored—a familiar pattern. Back from the war (it was still being fought) four years, yet nothing seemed to interest me. I spent a lot of time drinking and staring at television. Star Trek would hypnotize me; commercials, too. Fantasies interested me. Television was mind-numbing, which is what I wanted. Patience interrupted now and then. “Bob,” she usually said, pointing to Jack standing by my chair, “Jack’s been trying to talk to you for twenty minutes.” I’d listen to Jack telling me about some skirmish he was having with a neighbor kid for a minute and then, when he left, become absorbed in the tube, no matter what was on. I stayed up until the stations went off the air and the television showed snow. I watched that, too, trying to see things in the randomness. I was trying not to ever have to sleep, to avoid leaping up in a panic.
My idea of fun was to get on my bike at midnight, speeding down country roads at a hundred and thirty. Lying on the gas tank, headlight blazing a tunnel ahead, trees swishing by in a blur, reminding me of flying. Low-level flying. Come back, the house would be still. Air humid. Life stagnant.
I had to turn in a final project for my drawing class. I dragged out my old footlocker from Vietnam, still clearly marked: wo-1 robert c. mason; w3152420. I took everything out and set it up so the end became the bottom and the lid opened on the side. I drew a picture of myself from a slide of me holding my M-1 carbine, smiling a crazed smile, tacked it on the lid of the footlocker. I stuck my bronze star to the drawing. I put a dozen jagged punji stakes on the bottom of the locker, shoved an old fatigue blouse and a plastic wig stand into the sharp stakes. I put my flight helmet on the wig stand and pulled down the black visor. I stared at this creation for hours, short of breath. I splashed red paint all over the punji stakes; spattered drops onto the drawing.
I had a box of memories that I would bury. That would be part of the whole drawing, the burial. I needed something to get the viewers’ attention, something that’d give them a sample jolt of fear. I rigged a wire from the lid to the trigger of a pistol loaded with blanks mounted so it pointed at whoever opened the box. When they open this box, I thought, they won’t forget it.
I go to class. Set the box on a table near the rest of the drawings. Wait. A girl asks what’s in the box. My drawing. She looks puzzled, shrugs. She is not going to get this. A guy asks the same, he’s frail, scared of me because I always wear sunglasses and never talk to anybody. He is going to piss in his pants. Eugene Grissom, the department chairman, comes in to help with the grading. Grissom’s a vet. He will get it. Maybe he will also throw me out of school.
I tell my instructor, John O’Connor, I have a question. We go to his office. I tell him the nifty trick with the gun. John’s mouth drops open, looks nervous. “I get the idea, Bob. But don’t you think it’s going to scare the shit out of these people?”
“That’s the idea. Scared shitless is the drawing.”
John nods for a while. “Okay. Okay. But what if we disconnect the gun and just tell everybody it was rigged to go off? That’ll scare them, too.”
“You think just knowing it could go off will scare them?”
“Oh, yes. Yes. I believe you’ll get a very good reaction, Bob. And I won’t have to have a heart attack.”
“It’s just a blank—”
“The noise, Bob. Inside a building?”
“Oh, yeah. Inside here. Make a helluva bang, eh?” I laugh.
“So will you disconnect the gun?”
“Well, John, what about my grade? I mean, without the booby trap, lots of the idea is just… lost.”
“No. No way it’ll affect your grade, Bob. I promise.” I nod, thinking about it. O’Connor begins to breathe regularly.
“Okay. I’ll take out the blanks. Then the gun’ll just go snap. Okay?”
“Fine, Bob. That’ll be fine.” O’Connor pats my shoulder as we walk back to the grading room. “Bob. Thanks for telling me about this. I mean, I really appreciate it.”