After breakfast, he marched a somewhat smaller formation to the commo training building. It was hotter now, but he kept them going, bellowing out, “Left, right, left, right! Jody saw your girl today!” (“Jody saw your girl today!”) “How’s he gonna stay away!” (“How’s he gonna stay away!”) “She turned your picture to the wall!” (“Turned your picture to the wall!”) “Left his boots out in the hall!” (“Left his boots out in the hall!”)
The next four or five hours were spent learning alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot. There were several radios, including the prick 10, which was about ten inches by twelve inches, looked like a school notebook, and weighed ten or fifteen pounds. They would be carrying those. The angry 19 was more of a console radio, maybe the size of a suitcase. It must have weighed sixty pounds and had a longer range. It had glowing black dials, and the operator used either a headset or a desk mike. Tim imagined himself yelling into it just before an enemy soldier burst into the room and shot him in the chest.
Thirty recruits sat in the classroom with pencils and pieces of paper. Their instructor, who had been drafted from a minor-league baseball team, lolled at the front desk like a domesticated tiger. It wasn’t only his biceps and triceps and shoulders, which rippled with muscle, or his pecs, which narrowed to a thirty-inch waist; it was his supple grace. He was waiting for one thing — to be put on the Fort Huachuca baseball team. His job was to turn on the tape. The tape ran a series of beeps, and the kids wrote as fast as they could, trying to understand and write down the letters in groups of five. What came out never meant anything, or, rather, each set meant one thing, and one thing only: Dit dit dit — S. Dit dit — O. Dit — E. Dah — T. Dah dit dit dah dah — Tim. They had to write down letters, and do so faster each week. Tim was a little bit faster than the others — it took him about a week to make sense of the letters. Private Rowan never made sense of the letters, so he was sent over to learn to cook. When the tape ran out, the kids shouted at the baseball player, “Hey, Bobby, wake up!” The tiger stretched himself and woke up, reached over, and flipped the switch.
After another meal, Tim marched everyone to more classes — army rules, army chain of command, commo etiquette—“You heard ‘over and out.’ Well, this ain’t Hollywood, this is the real thing. ‘Over’ means ‘now you talk,’ and ‘out’ means ‘goodbye,’ and ‘over and out’ means dogshit!” Another thing that he learned early on was “Diddy dum dum diddy”: “Repeat what you just said.”
—
AFTER FORT GORDON (teletype), Tim got two weeks’ leave before deployment. He spent a week at home, but he couldn’t settle down to eat or to talk or to look at his father. He was so restless that he couldn’t wait at the airport for a plane to San Francisco, where he planned to stay with Aunt Eloise for a few days. He took the plane to Los Angeles, squirming in his seat the whole way. When he got off the plane, he decided that he couldn’t take a bus, or even another plane, up the coast. He had to hitchhike, and the most direct route looked to be the 101.
Texas and Arizona had not prepared him for California. The sunshine was brilliant but refreshing, and even when the ocean was invisible, Tim could sense that it was out there — not the flat, warm, green-blue ocean he knew from Maryland and New Jersey, but something colder, more beautiful, and more endless, lit by the sun to a burnished hyacinth color hour after hour for the whole long day. And hitchhiking was easy, especially in uniform. The first car took him to Venice; that guy offered him a hamburger. The second couple, about his parents’ age, took him to Morro Bay, where they invited him to stay the night. The next one to stop was a girl, maybe seventeen, who seemed unafraid, and took him up and down a steep grade — maybe the steepest he’d ever seen — to Atascadero. A Mexican fellow got him to Salinas, and another guy dropped him near the San Jose airport. The weather was perfect, and the hills to either side of the road were pale velvety green. At San Jose, he made his way to a different highway, one that headed to Oakland, and he waited. It was almost dusk when a pickup truck — a beat-up Ford — stopped maybe a hundred feet past him, and an arm waved to him out of the passenger’s window. He shouldered his duffel bag and ran.
A guy in a sharkskin suit opened the door and got out, throwing a large package into the bed of the truck, and gesturing to Tim to throw his duffel in there. A woman was driving, maybe Tim’s age. She had on a revealing beige cotton dress and high-heeled sandals. Both the man and the woman wore sunglasses, even though the sun was about down. He got between them, and at once began to regret it. “You in the army?” said the guy, as if that wasn’t obvious, but before Tim could speak, he said, “I was a marine myself. Out of Camp Pendleton. You know where that is? Down south. We’re coming from around there now.” He looked Tim up and down, then said, “We should feed this guy to the horses.” The girl laughed. “I was in the marines for eight years. You believe that?” Tim opened his mouth, and the girl laughed and said, “No!”
“Eight fucking years,” said the guy. “Thought I was a big shot. Who did Wayne get?”
The girl said, “A sailor.”
“Yeah.”
“He said.”
“Anyway, I’m out now. Never got to ’Nam. I don’t look that old, but I’m forty.”
“You look forty,” said the girl.
“Shut the fuck up,” said the guy.
“Well, you dress like someone’s dad.”
“I dress like your dad. That’s why you fuck me.”
Tim shifted his weight. They passed a sign that said “Fremont.” Tim looked at the speedometer — eighty-seven. The girl said, “Keep telling yourself that, asshole.”
There was a pause, and then the guy turned suddenly to Tim. “Where you headed, soldier?”
Without thinking, Tim gave Eloise’s address. The two exchanged a glance across him, and the glance clearly said, Nice neighborhood. As if to underline this thought, the guy said, “We can take you right there. No trouble.”
Tim’s skin was practically prickling, he was so sure that this man was dangerous. Here it was, 1966, and he was dressed like an old-time gangster from New Jersey: the sharkskin suit, right down to the flashy tie, and his hair had marks from being combed that you only got with plenty of Vitalis. He offered Tim a cigarette, which Tim took, and then the three of them smoked in the darkness with a thoughtful air as they sped toward Oakland.
The girl knew right where to go, as if she was from Oakland, and the girl and the man exchanged two more significant glances as they turned corners. Eloise’s neighborhood hadn’t started out nice — the houses were modest wooden ones, similar to one another and probably built from kits. But the yards were large, the trees and gardens had grown up nicely, and now it was a little on the prestigious side, or so Eloise had told his mother. You could see under the streetlights that nice cars were parked in front of them, too: T-birds, a couple of Chryslers, an Oldsmobile, a Cadillac. When the man peered up through the windshield, let his gaze drift along the block with a whistle, Tim became convinced that he planned to kill Tim, and maybe Eloise and whoever was there at the moment — his cousin Rosa, her baby. He maybe outweighed Tim by fifteen pounds, but a lot of that was belly. If he had to, Tim could take him.
The man read out the addresses in the dark, and the girl pulled up in front of Eloise’s place, now dimly visible, the porch light bright. The girl turned off the engine. The three of them sat there. Then the man shifted deliberately and stared at him. He said, “I like this place. I like this whole neighborhood. Why don’t you introduce me to your friends?”