Saggerty and Hartshaw realized that Dan and I could work well together. I’m tall, dark, lean, and nervous. I blow off the handle about once a week and ride the hell out of the guys who work for me and the guys I work for. I’ve always worked best under pressure. I used to be able to get along on four hours sleep and a dozen cups of coffee a day.
Dan is the other way. He’s middle height, but heavy in the chest and shoulders. A blondish reddish guy with freckles and a good grin. He moves slow and talks slow, and it takes him about ten minutes to load the pipe he smokes all the time. He’s smart — smarter than I am by a long way. He plays them close to the vest, but there’s nothing devious or hypocritical about him. In the old days, we drove the men and drove the equipment and sweated over the plans. We built stuff and it stayed built. The firm made dough on us and paid us back a nice little fraction of it.
Dan’s married. But when the board tapped us on the shoulder, we both got tapped at the same time. Same outfit for basic. Same group going through engineer’s OCS. Oh, we were sharp kids with those little gold bars. Big shots.
We had managed to stay together. At one point I was his company commander, and that burned him down to the ground.
Then we got the assignment to C.B.I., and for some strange reason we got shoved into staff work in Delhi. There were some decent guys around, but it suffered from the usual dry rot of any theater headquarters in a relatively inactive theater. We each objected in our own way. I stomped and stormed and beat on the walls, wrote nasty little formal notes through channels.
Don’t get the idea that we were being boy heroes, yearning for the sound of rockets and grenades. Far from it. We wanted to get away from the starched-shirt boys and go build something. That’s a hard fever to explain. I will never be able to understand what sort of satisfaction there is in working at a desk. Any kind of a desk. But if you’ve thrown a stinking little bridge over a dry creek, you can go and look at it in one year or twenty, and it will be there. You can step on it and touch it. Spit on it and jump off of it. It’s tangible. It exists.
Dan used his own system of objecting. He merely loaded his pipe and leaned on the wall in the colonel’s outer office. Whenever he saw the colonel, he smiled. The colonel knew what Dan was thinking. After a time he got tired of having his wall held up. He got tired of the pipe.
We were both called in on the same day at the same time.
“Garry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s your orders. You fly over the hump to Chengdu and join a Major Castle. It’s a little trip over a proposed route for the Trans-Iranian Highway into China. You come back with a complete report of all construction necessary.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Christoff. You’re going down to Ceylon and join Lord Louis Mountbatten’s staff. He wants a man for a survey of local materials for floating dock construction for an amphib invasion he’s cooking.”
That seemed to be all. We grinned at each other and then pulled our faces back into the right lines. We highballed him and started out.
He said, “Wait a minute, gentlemen.” We stopped and turned around. “I’ve got to consider the reputation of this office. Can’t send out experts unless they look like experts. I’ve requested captaincies for both of you. Ought to clear this afternoon. Pick up your orders for promotion and travel in the A.G.’s office. Get out of town tonight. You’re both driving me nuts. Good luck.”
We had joined hands in the hall and done a solemn circling dance. He slapped me on top of the head, and I nearly broke a knuckle on his shoulder. Outside of a quick beer in the room, that was the last I saw of him.
So I wanted to see him again, and we could drink beer and check on the year or so that had elapsed. I wouldn’t have much to tell.
I rolled over onto my back on the hatch cover. The long gray-blue swells raced by the ship, and she bobbed her bow in stately dance. The sun blazed down on me. I lifted my head and looked down at my legs. They were the worst part. Wasted muscles. Coat of tan on sagging flesh. Emaciated.
It was a forty-six-day trip. We coasted down the long channel of L.A. Port with the factories on either side. October in the States. I saw a blond dish in an aqua convertible steaming down the road that bordered the channel. She looked good.
Carter, an ex-accountant from Philadelphia, one of the boys they left behind to clean up the property accounting, came up beside me where I leaned on the rail. We had gotten fairly friendly on the trip back. He didn’t talk too much or try to ask questions or dish out the dripping sympathy.
“No bands out there for us, Garry. We’re too damn late coming home.”
“Band music gives me cramps.”
“Cheery today, hah? What’re you going to do now, go back to work? Build yourself a bridge or dig yourself a ditch someplace?”
“If the company wants me back. And you’ll go add up two and two on Market Street.”
“Nice clean work. By the way, are you in good enough shape so that they won’t stick you back into a hospital for a while?”
“Better not try it. Twenty-five pushups in a row now. Twenty slow deep knee bends. Less of a limp. Hundred and sixty-three now, according to the infirmary scales. Only seventeen to go.”
“You look good, Garry. I better get my stuff together. See you around.”
He walked off down the deck, a round little man with a tremendous store of calm and satisfaction. I envied him. Somehow I felt restless, felt a sense of impending trouble. I didn’t know what it could be. I judged that it was the aftereffects of a year of blackout. You can’t stop using your mind for a year without some very queer things happening to it. You let a field lie fallow, and it picks up chemicals you need to grow plants. The brain lies fallow and it seems to pick up a store of doubt, uncertainty, indecision. You imagine black catastrophe at every turn, and when you try to pin it down you get noplace. My dreams were an indication of that. On the average of every third night I would wake up, the sheets damp with sweat. It wouldn’t have been a specific dream, just a vague black nothingness that was about to close in on me or fall on me. Sometimes I would be on the edge of a sort of gray cliff. The path would get narrower as I stood still on it. A gray wall would move toward me, and I would know that it would force me off to fall blindly, tumbling, spinning in the moist air down and down into blackness. The little doc had been right. He had a trick of sticking the point of his pink tongue out and carefully wetting down the two halves of his thin black moustache. He told me that I had been dead for a year. I would have to think of it that way. Dead and in a cold hell where the furred demons grunted at me and forced food into my mouth.
The mechanics of discharge were a joke. The system was built for millions, and it was too unwieldy to use for hundreds. But they followed it. Each and every form, each and every lecture.
A bored sergeant counted out my fifty-eight hundred dollars’ worth of back pay. They told me that they’d mail me my discharge. Then they sent me off on a three months’ vacation with pay, which went under the alarming name of terminal leave. They gave me a life pension of fifty bucks a month. Money for cigarettes and beer. And a movie once in a while. I toyed with the idea of using the back pay to buy some place so far off in the woods that I could live on the fifty bucks. A year or two would give me a chance to heal. My body was healed, but inside my head it felt as though there were long open wounds which pulsed.