Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

“You know Major Quimby isn’t talking to him. They communicate through typed memos Ellis carries back and forth. He’s the only one with a security clearance the both of them trust.”

“Interesting. Now where would our CO be the happiest?”

“I think they know each other from the Missile Crisis or the Berlin Wall, one of those great intelligence convocations.”

“Let’s put him here on the moon between Frankenstein and Nixon.”

“Knock yourself out. I’ve got to go write a letter to my parents.”

“Or maybe up there sucking on Miss April’s skull tits.”

“Have a nice day.”

By the time Griffin finally got dressed and over to the mess hall Sergeant Ramirez was bolting the door. “Goddamn sorry about that,” he said, smiling through the screen.

“Aw sarge, c’mon, let me in.”

“Ain’t no restaurant goddamnit. You know the hours. No special catering to night people goddamnit.”

“How about a piece of cake? Is there any cake left? A teeny piece of cake?”

“You like my cake?”

“Purple frosting?”

“No, all gone, only got green, plain green, goddamnit. Wait here.”

A moment later a slab of chocolate cake smeared with bright green icing was passed through the door as cautiously as atomic secrets.

“Next time be here sooner, understand? No more favors, goddamnit.”

Munching on the cake, Griffin strolled over to the mail room, a trail of brown crumbs marking his path. There he found one lonely letter forwarded from home. A national oil company offered him the use of a credit card. As a busy college student he probably often found himself with an empty tank and an empty wallet. He tossed the application in a Dumpster outside.

He walked down the red dirt road, still soft from yesterday’s rain, past the orderly room where Simon, headphones clamped to his ears, struggled daily against bureaucratic clamor and the nervous chatter of his own typewriter, 7 DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT, through the gate, pausing to deposit a wrinkled bill into a wooden bowl, the fist darting out, the money gone without a trace somewhere beneath that mud-splattered poncho. The old man. Sometimes he didn’t seem quite real.

Out on the highway Griffin hitched a ride with four privates, a maintenance crew from the 511 FAC, who were on their way over to the Happy Smiles Massage Parlor, a small concrete block building painted flamingo pink and conveniently located across from the PX. Griffin had made the obligatory visit early in his tour. Directed to a musty cubicle behind a torn shower curtain, he had found a girl younger than his sister whose childlike features were more emphasized than obscured by a hideous coating of adult makeup. Griffin had never been back. The privates were arguing about whose turn it was to have Number Three, apparently a girl of incredibly nimble fingers. Finally they decided to let her choose. Then they congratulated themselves on the easy availability of certified and inspected Grade A prime instead of village leftovers who all carried the Black Syph for which there was no known cure except an indefinite confinement in a military hospital on Okinawa until a treatment could be found and who were all VC sympathizers anyway with razor blades concealed up their snatches to mutilate imperialist pricks. Griffin left them in front of the Happy Smiles arguing about whose turn it was to stand guard over the jeep. They decided to solve this disagreement with a round of one potato, two potato.

The PX was the largest building on the base, bigger than the air terminal, bigger than the hangars, a fat ripe apple still unsplit by VC rockets. Four garage-sized doors opened into a metal cavern dense with cardboard stalagmites, shipping pallets of soap, toothpaste, and deodorant towering upward into the gloom, through which fell a fine steady snow of red dust and yellow watery light. Soldiers of every rank crowded the narrow aisles, touching with dirty fingers the stacks of electric shavers, Japanese cameras, Olympic swimming trunks, the plastic packaging of hair driers no one but an officer’s mistress would ever use or want, not even having to buy, the touch alone sufficient, a moment’s respite from the strife outside in the intimate contact of hand to synthetic as if these various goods and appliances were the last relics of a distant age of faith whose remaining magic, dim and uncertain, lingered about the few surviving objects of its worship. Then a newly arrived crate would be unpacked at the electronics counter and Griffin would be dodging a mob of shoppers in the backlot annex of a chain of super discount stores where the clearance sale signs never came down and there was always just one remaining Sony AM-FM stereo receiver with two frog-voiced teenagers ready to kill for it.

At the magazine stand Griffin leafed through a month-old newsweekly. Comic book America. He picked up a package of chocolate bars, taste of Pennsylvania, and moved toward the exit. Vietnamese women in long black hair, Hollywood makeup, and pastel smocks stood in rows punching cash registers with professional abandon. Between the checkout counters and the doors was positioned a final claim on homesick attention: a ruddy man with a gray crewcut, orange polo shirt, and the melancholy look of a retired master sergeant seated at a rickety table spread with slick pamphlets, glossy cardboard displays of General Motors’ latest models, and a paper coffee cup stuffed with soggy cigarette butts. Order now, your personalized car will be delivered upon your arrival home. Griffin wanted to know what happened to the cars whose intended owners got blown away. Was there an underground garage of gleaming Chevys hidden away somewhere? The salesman was looking the other way. He leaned back in his chair and yawned.

Outside, the jeep was still parked in front of the Happy Smiles. Unattended. Griffin wandered among the vehicles beside the PX, searching for 1069 markings. The damp air smelled like the late morning wind that rolls through the empty stalls of a metropolitan produce market. The sky resembled a gray field dressing. A helicopter the shape and color of a rotten banana passed from west to east, swinging a howitzer on a steel cable.

“Homes!”

Griffin turned.

“Yeah, you. My man.” A black hand beckoned impatiently. Peering around the corner of the PX was a tall angular PFC wearing a 101st patch. His boots and fatigue pants were plastered with red mud up to the knees. A puckered pink scar adorned his left cheek. The bushy globe of his Afro was bisected by a leather headband decorated with skull carvings. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, arms and legs rising and falling in the sudden irregular movements of a marionette whose important strings were being worked by different hands.

“Let me see now,” he said softly.

Griffin’s field of vision filled with a pair of wet black eyes, the whites yellow and shot with broken vessels. The lids snapped once like shutters collecting images. The eyes zoomed back, resolved into a face again.

“Sheeee-it, you ain’t even high.”

Griffin smiled.

“No, you ain’t.” The PFC stopped, cocked his head as if listening to faraway sounds. He chuckled quietly to himself. “Out of uniform, my man. What’s your First Sergeant’s name, boy?”

A short-timer’s stick, a length of black wood ending in a carved fist, appeared in one hand. He displayed the open palm of the other, closed it, then tapped the back of the hand with the stick, wooden fist to flesh fist. The hand turned over, opened to reveal a thimble-sized plastic vial of white powder. “Cocaine,” he whispered, “in-country R&R, a head honeymoon.” The eyes were clicking like aerial cameras.

Griffin looked and looked. He had never seen cocaine before.

“Smoke it, snort it, stuff it up your ass. You owe it to yourself.”