William McGivern - A Matter of Honor

“Anybody get in touch with his aunt?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, I thought I’d drive over myself and try to tell her,” Doobie Gordon said. “She’s a nice lady, this’ll hurt her. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home. You’ll wanna change.”

The two men walked down the block toward the parked squad car. “I wish my old man would get lost for a couple of decades,” Doobie Gordon said. “Tonight I got to take him bowling for his birthday, and after that he’s gonna ask to go somewhere for ribs and beer.”

“You don’t have to be nice to me, Doobie,” Mark Weir said. “At least my father returned my call. He didn’t have to do that.”

Sergeant Gordon stepped to the driver’s side of the car, stopped and then slapped the mud-spattered hood sharply with the palm of his hand.

“Damn!” he said. “That makes four soldier boys, four! Randolph Peyton Lewis... why do you think they had to name that poor, dumb, dead nigra after a Pullman porter?”

First sergeant Karl Malleck was thirty-seven years old, a “lifer” in Army slang, almost eighteen years in the service, five with line companies in Vietnam, the last three with his current unit, working out of the old Prairie Avenue armory. In three years and six months Malleck would be eligible for retirement with full sergeant’s benefits.

His tailored Eisenhower jacket displayed a combat infantryman’s badge, two rows of campaign ribbons and six overseas hash marks. A braided gold fourragère was looped under the epaulet of his right shoulder. His hair, thick, black and cut short, grew in a ruler-straight line across a low, rounded forehead. The first sergeant’s complexion was dark and ruddy in all seasons, his skin tough as cured leather, with high, knobby cheekbones glinting like copper discs under deeply socketed eyes.

During the week Malleck lived in special quarters in the barracks, and usually woke, dry-eyed and unable to sleep, at about four o’clock in the morning. That gave him three hours for his spit and polish grooming and a couple of warming shots of whiskey before going on duty.

From his desk on the first floor of the armory on Chicago’s west side, the first sergeant faced narrow, barred windows streaming with sleeted rain. Through the panes he watched the morning storm, gray skies and gusting winds that sent spits of rain across the bricked courtyard.

Malleck had been alone in the office when the Tribune reporter called him, and his eyes went sharp with suspicion at the sound of her voice. He had seen Bonnie Caidin twice, once at the opening of the Veterans’ Assistance Center, when he had mingled with the sparse crowd, wearing civilian clothes and speaking to no one, and again on a TV talk show when she explained the purpose of the center.

Malleck had disliked Caidin on sight. There was a quality about her he found unsettling, particularly in younger women, a quality of self-containment or arrogance, or a combination of both. He had watched her in the Veterans’ office with the bright lights, taking notes while the black broad, Kastner, was making her spiel. In the reporter’s delicately arched upper lip, the sergeant had sensed condescension, and in her cool, alert eyes, a flash of threatening humor. Malleck disliked humor, especially in women. In both sexes it was the start of most insubordination, not discrimination, privilege, sadistic cruelty or even despair. Laughter, that’s where it all started, with a joke, ridicule, derision, disrespect. Once someone could smile at something, whatever it was, the next step was to stop being afraid of it. Bonnie Caidin was a smiler, Malleck thought, a cocky cunt who needed watching.

She told him she was calling about a private soldier, Randolph Lewis. The first sergeant had kept his tone mild, his answers responsive and courteous, but his caution stirred as he listened to her questions.

“Our religious editor got a call,” she had said, “from a citizen who wouldn’t leave his name. Claimed he’d seen a Hare Krishna handled roughly by soldiers with MP brassards. Do you know anything about that?”

“No, ma’am. No such report here.”

“I was told to check into this,” Bonnie Caidin said. “You understand, I’m sure, sergeant. We have brass on the city desk, too.”

“I’m doing what I can to help, ma’am.”

“Then you have no report at all, sergeant, on a Private Lewis or a disturbance involving the military at O’Hare last night?”

“No, ma’am. Nothing. And the personnel in my outfit are pretty strict about their duty reports.”

“The soldier’s aunt said she’d made an inquiry of one of your men at the Greyhound bus depot earlier in the evening — a Sergeant Roberts, or close to that.”

“What was the complete name of that soldier again?” With his thick, muscled knee Sergeant Malleck pressed a buzzer on the side of his desk. “I’m just writing out my own report here.”

“Private Randolph Peyton Lewis,” Caidin had said.

Malleck’s orderly, a tall, bony black with touches of premature white in his short hair, came in and set up a steaming canteen cup of coffee on the sergeant’s desk. Private Andrew Scales snapped to attention, his thin hands trembling as he pressed his thumbs tight to the seams of his khaki trousers.

“Excuse me a moment, Miss Caidin.” Malleck cupped his hand over the phone. “Nobody asked for coffee, Scales,” he said, his voice cold and measured. “You get your ass over to the barracks and tell Robbins I want him. On the double, snap shit!”

“Homer’s sleeping, Top. I just—”

Without changing his tone, Malleck said, “That’s gonna cost you your weekend, fuck-up. Move! Get him.”

Scales left the office at a shuffling run, rehearsing under his breath. “It’s tear-ass time, Robbins. Force Ten tear-ass. On the double! Sergeant wants to see you...”

Malleck sipped coffee from the canteen cup, watched the second hand on his watch for a full minute and then said into the phone. “My apologies, ma’am, but I’m with you now. And you said this Lewis was expected in from Germany?”

“Yes, sergeant, on MATS Flight 94.”

“That hearsay incident with a civilian Hare Krishna at O’Hare you mentioned — my men wouldn’t be involved in that kind of thing. They are on special duty. Unless the local law enforcement officers needed manpower in a riot, undue criminal activity or a like emergency of any kind, they wouldn’t be involved with civilians...

“My own theory, ma’am. Couldn’t this Private Lewis be off having a little fun on his own, maybe found a friend and decided to shack up for a while?”

“Not likely, since he wrote to ask his aunt to meet him,” Bonnie Caidin said.

Private First Class Homer Robbins hurried into the office and stood uneasily in front of Malleck’s desk. His blond hair was tousled, his soft, ruddy face creased and flushed with sleep. With a quick, furtive gesture, he zippered his uniform pants and then tucked his OD shirt under his belt as Malleck stared at him coldly.

“I came on the double, sarge,” Robbins said, “like Scales said you wanted.”

“Excuse me once again, Miss. I may have something for you.” Malleck covered the phone with his big hand. “Tell me, you lard-assed idiot,” he said to Robbins, “why didn’t you report to me that a black lady was looking for a soldier at the bus station?”

“I didn’t think it was...”

“You’re not paid to think, asshole. If you were, you’d be paid a lot less. Listen good... that lady you talked to wasn’t worried, you got that? Just wasn’t sure of when the soldier boy was coming in, got that? A case of Aunt Jemima in the big city, maybe a little coon senility, is that clear?”