When Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker telephoned the motor sergeant to announce that he was through for the day with his transport, a motor pool corporal went to Base Headquarters to fetch it. He then drove it to the motor pool, where he examined the odometer to see how many miles Stecker had driven that day. He then filled out the trip ticket with probable, if wholly imaginary, destinations to correspond with the miles driven. It was universally recognized that Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker had more important things to do with his time than fill out forms like a fucking clerk.
With that done, the vehicle went through prescribed daily maintenance. The fuel tank was filled; the tire pressure checked; and the oil level and radiator water replenished. The vehicle was then turned over to whatever enlisted men had run afoul of Rocks and Shoals; had gone to Office Hours; and were now performing punitive extra duty in the motor pool.
They washed the vehicle with soap and water, every inch of it, inside and out-except for the glove compartment, which was off limits. When the vehicle was washed and dried, it was swept out with whisk brooms, making sure there was no dust or sand in the cracks of the rubber covering of the running board or between the wooden planks of the bed. The vehicle was then inspected by the motor transport corporal. If the wax polish seemed to need touching up, the pickup was waxed. When it was finally judged likely to meet Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker's standards, it was parked overnight inside, in the hoist section of the garage.
In the morning, a motor transport corporal drove the pickup to Base Headquarters, where he parked it in a space marked FOR OFFICIAL VISITORS ONLY, so that it would be available should Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker need transport.
When the first Trucks, one-quarter ton, four-by-four, General Purpose (called "Jeeps") had been issued to Quantico, it had been proposed to Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker that one be assigned to him, with a driver, for his use. Stecker had somewhat icily informed the motor transport sergeant that even though he could doubtless spare someone to spend most of his duty day sitting around with his thumb up his ass waiting to drive somebody someplace, he certainly could find real work for him to do that would be of value to the Corps.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker had other reasons to refuse the assignment of a jeep and driver. One of them was that a driver would come to know where he went, and why, and talk about it at night in the barracks. The less the men knew where he went and what he did, the better. Neither could Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker see any reason why he should exchange a perfectly satisfactory vehicle, which came with nicely upholstered seats and roll-up windows, for a small open truck with thin canvas-covered pads to cushion his bottom.
There was absolutely nothing that Stecker could find wrong, which is to say unmilitary, in finding comfort wherever it might be found. In his twenty-five years of service, he had been acutely uncomfortable on more occasions than he liked to remember. And there was no question whatever in his mind that he would be made acutely uncomfortable again- possibly, the Corps being what it was, as soon as tomorrow.
It was not necessary to train to be uncomfortable. That came naturally, like taking a leak.
When Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker reached the Known Distance rifle range itself, he put wax plugs in his ears to protect them from the damaging crack of riflefire, and then got out of his pickup and approached the Range Tower. Pretending not to see the range officer, a young lieutenant who was in the tower itself, he examined the firing records, checked over two weapons that had failed to function, and the general police of the area; then discreetly inquired of the range sergeant how the new range officer was working out.
"He's all right, Gunny," the range sergeant said. "Better than most second lieutenants» to tell you the truth."
Stecker nodded. Then, with hands folded against the small of his back and the range sergeant trailing him, he marched to one end of the firing line, pausing now and again when the targets were marked or to stand behind one prone rifleman and his coach. Then he reversed course and marched to the other end. He found nothing that required correction. He really hadn't expected to. Except for the general truth that the way to keep things running smoothly was to keep your eye on them, there had really been no reason for him to "have a look" at the range.
Then he returned to the pickup and drove back to his office.
There was a glistening LaSalle convertible in one of the "Official Visitor" parking spaces. Stecker had almost bought a LaSalle convertible. Although he considered his Packard Phaeton to be a fine piece of machinery, sometimes he wished he had gone to the LaSalle. It wouldn't have cost nearly so much money, and it was, under the skin, a Cadillac. And there would not have been so many eyebrows raised at a Master Gunnery Sergeant driving a LaSalle.
The question was how could an enlisted man, even one in the highest enlisted grade, afford the monthly payments on a Packard Phaeton? The answer was that mere were no monthly payments. He had paid cash on the barrel head for it. And the reason cash was available to pay for it was that shortly after he had married, when he was a twenty-one-year-old sergeant, he had gone out on payday and got tanked and blown most of his pay in a poker game.
Elly gave him what he later came to call "her look." Then she put it to him simply: Not only was he a damned fool, but she was in the family way, and if the marriage wasn't going to work, it would be better if they faced it and called it off. Either she would handle the money from now on, or she was going home to Tatamy the next day.
She then put him on an allowance, like a little boy, and kept him on it even later, when he'd gotten more stripes. When the kids were big enough, she'd gotten her teacher's certificate and gone to work. And it wasn't just her making the buffalo on the nickels squeal before she parted with one; Elly put the money to work.
Right from the first, she had started buying and selling things. She would read the "Unofficial" section of the Daily Bulletin looking for bargains for sale. She didn't only buy things to use (like kid's clothes and from time to time a nice piece of furniture), she bought things to resell. And she was good at buying things and selling them. She told him once that she had a twenty-five percent rule: She wouldn't buy anything unless she could buy it for twenty-five percent less than what somebody was asking for it, and she wouldn't sell it for less than twenty-five percent more than she had paid for it.
So the boy's college fund kept growing. Elly was determined from the beginning that the boys would go to college. And then, as the fund grew, her determination changed to "the boys would go to a good college."
In '34, when the Depression was really bad (Jack Stecker was a staff sergeant then), the bank had foreclosed on her brother Fritz's house in Tatamy. Elly took a chance and put in a bid at the sheriff's auction. Most everybody else in Tatamy had been laid off from Bethlehem Steel, too, and not many people wanted an old three-family row house anyway. So she got it at a steal and without the down payment really making a big dent in the boys' college fund.
Fritz went on living in what had been his apartment, and his oldest son and his family in another-neither of them paying rent, because they were out of work-but the third was rented out for nearly enough money to make the mortgage payment.
Jack Stecker hadn't said anything to her, because he always considered the boys' college money to really be Elly's money, and if she wanted to help her family out when they were in a bind, he understood that, too.
He came later to understand that what Elly had really done was put the money to work, and that if it also made things a little easier for her brother and nephew, fine, but that wasn't the reason she had bought the house.