Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

The examining yeoman came in, a narrow-faced young man in a white tunic.

“Which of you men is first?” he said. He went into the adjoining room and switched on the light over an eye-testing chart on the far wall.

“Go ahead, Alec.” He got up and followed the yeoman, who shut the door behind him. In no more than a minute, he opened the door and came out smiling.

“Favorable verdict?” I asked.

“20/20. It sounds like something by H. G. Wells.”

“Next,” the examiner said through the doorway. I stepped in and closed the door.

“Stay where you are.” He handed me a piece of cardboard with a round hole in it. “Now look through this hole with the right eye and walk forward until you can read the letters at the top.”

I moved forward a couple of steps and read the jumbled alphabet aloud. Another two steps and I could read everything on the card.

“O.K.” the yeoman said. “Now go back and try it with the left eye. Read them backwards this time.”

I had to trek nearly the whole length of the room before I could read the smallest letters at the bottom of the card.

“Not so good,” the yeoman said. “How do you account for the comparative weakness of your left eye? Did anything ever happen to it?”

“Yes,” I said. An old anger woke up and moved in my stomach. “A Nazi officer hit me across the face with his swagger stick in Munich six years ago. That eye’s never been the same since.”

“No wonder you want to get into this war,” he said. “But I’m afraid the Navy won’t take you. Maybe the Army will, I don’t know.”

“What’s my score?”

“Not good enough, I’m sorry to say. Your right eye just about makes the grade but your left is way down. Too bad.”

I said, “Thanks,” and walked out to the front office. I didn’t realize I could still be angry after six years, but my legs were stiff with rage. I put my slip on Curtis’s desk and sat down to wait for Alec.

Curtis saw the figures on my slip and the look on my face and said, “That’s too bad, Dr. Branch.”

“Thanks. Where’s Judd?”

He jerked his thumb towards an open door. “He’s being interviewed. It takes half an hour or so.” He went back to work on a pile of papers in front of him.

I remembered the glasses in my hand and put them on and looked out of the window. What I saw was a street in Munich on a night six years before: brown stone walls like carved cliffs in the lamplight and four men in black uniform coming out of a doorway like an arched cave, walking in step. I saw again like a repeated nightmare the stick raised above the white hostile face, and the girl getting up from the road with bloody knees. I felt the hot pain of the swishing stick across my face and the pleasure of bruising my knuckles on the white snarl and hearing the head strike the pavement.

A sharp pain in my right hand reminded me that the place was Detroit and the time was six years later. I looked at my hand and saw that I was clenching my fist so tightly that the nails were digging into the palm. I lit a cigarette and tried to relax.

I had been waiting for about half an hour when Alec came into the outer office. His back was straighter than ever, if possible.

He handed Curtis a sheaf of papers and said, “Can I take the physical now?”

“Not this afternoon,” Curtis said. “Any morning, though. To-morrow morning if you can make it. We open at 8:30 and the earlier you come the shorter time you’ll have to wait.”

“I’ll be here at 8:30 to-morrow,” Alec said, and turned to me. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Finished?”

“As much as I can do to-day.” His voice lowered sympathetically as we went out the door: “You didn’t come in for your interview. Didn’t you make it?”

“My left eye is not the eye of an American eagle,” I said. “I’d still like to meet Carl von Esch, to talk over old times.”

“Don’t let it ride you.” He squeezed my arm. “The Army’s sure to take you when your number comes up again. They’re reclassifying, you know.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t brood,” I said, and manufactured a grin. “It looks as if you’ll make it, doesn’t it?”

“If I can pass the physical. The officer who interviewed me was pretty encouraging.”

“Congratulations.”

We took the elevator down and went out into the street. The sky was still blue and bright but the memory of the night in Munich hung across it like a shadow. There was a first faint chill of winter in the air, and I felt older.

On the way back to the parking-lot neither of us said anything. We were good enough friends not to have to talk, and I had nothing to say. Alec seemed to be thinking about something. The lines that slanted down from his blunt nose were deep and harsh, and he didn’t walk as fast as he had before.

Even after we reached the car and headed out of the city, the silence remained unbroken. He’d have unfinished business to worry about, I thought, and let him worry. He drove smoothly and automatically by instinct, and his brain went on working on something else.

When we were approaching Dearborn, I got tired of reading billboards to myself and said, “Are passengers allowed to talk to the driver of this bus?”

“Eh?” He smiled a little sheepishly.

“What’s eating you? You tell me not to brood and immediately pull a Hamlet yourself.”

“Sorry. Matter of fact, I want to talk to you about this. Let’s go in there and have a beer.” He nodded his head at a tavern that we were passing.

“I could do with a beer.”

He turned down the next side-street and parked, and we got out and walked back to the tavern. It was a long, dim room lit by red neon, with a black bar running the length of it punctuated by red leather stools. The juke box at the back of the room looked like a small French chateau that had swallowed a rainbow. As we entered somebody put in a nickel and it began to cough rhythmically.

The place was nearly empty and we had one end of the bar to ourselves. We slid onto stools and Alec ordered two beers from a waitress who wore powder like a clay mask.

When we got our beer, I said, “What’s on your mind?”

He wasn’t ready to talk. “Look about you,” he said. “The twentieth-century inferno, and we pay to sit in it. Red light like hell-fire. Ear-busting noise, and we pay the juke to lambaste our ears. Bitter beer.”

“And horrible hags to serve it,” I said. At the other end of the bar the two waitresses were giggling together over the exploits of their grandchildren.

“Walk down the streets of Detroit and what do you see,” Alec went on. “Grey streets bounded by grey walls. Men caught in the machines. The carnivores creep between the walls on rubber tires. The parrots squawk from the radio in every home. The men run round in the buildings like apes in iron trees. A new kind of jungle.” He drained his glass and ordered more.

“Baloney,” I said. “Look at the other side of the medal. Hot lunches for children and advanced medical facilities. Cars for everybody – after the war. Education for everybody now. It’s a fairly Utopian jungle to my mind.”

“I won’t argue. I’m a country bumpkin and Detroit always gets me.” He was born in Detroit. “But education isn’t everything. A car in every garage isn’t everything, nor a helicopter on every roof.”

“You sound like Thoreau,” I said. “What good is a telegraph line from Maine to Texas, if Maine has nothing to say to Texas?”

“Exactly.” He was talking now, and he let me have it: “Education isn’t everything. There’s a certain Doctor of Philosophy, for example, that I suspect of doing a pretty barbarous thing.”

“Dr. Goebbels?”

“This is serious. You can keep it under your hat.” I nodded.