Richard Ford - Rock Springs

The woman looked at Sims looking at her and smiled a big smile. She was the one smoking dope, Sims thought. She’d slipped off from her friends and gotten loaded. He had smoked plenty of it in the Army. In Oklahoma. Everybody had stayed loaded all the time then. It was no different now, and no reason it should be.

“Where’s your pretty wife?” the sergeant said casually when she got to Sims. She arched her brows and put her knee up on the armrest of Marge’s seat. She was loaded, Sims thought. Her smile spoke volumes. She didn’t know Sims from Adam.

“She’s gone off to bed.”

“Why aren’t you with her,” the woman asked, still smiling down over him.

“I’m not sleepy. She wanted to go to sleep,” Sims said. The woman smelled like marijuana. It was a smell he liked, but it made him nervous. He wondered what the Army people would think. Being in the Army was a business now. Businessmen didn’t smoke dope.

“You two have kids?”

“No,” Sims said. “I don’t like kids.” She looked down at her friends who were playing cards in two groups. “Do you?” Sims said.

“None that I know about,” the woman said. She wasn’t looking at him.

“Are you a farmer?”

“No,” Sims said. “Why?”

“What else is there to do out here?” The woman’s look unexpectedly turned sour. “Do you say nice things to your wife?”

“Every day,” Sims said.

“You must really be in love,” she said. “That’s the coward’s way out.” The woman quickly smiled. “Just kidding.” She ran her fingers back through her hair and gave her head a shake as if she was clearing her thoughts. She looked down the aisle again and seemed, Sims thought, not to want to go back down there. He looked at the name BENTON on her brass tag. It also had tiny sergeant’s stripes stamped on it. Sims looked at the woman’s breast underneath the tag. It was in a big brassiere and couldn’t be defined well. Sims thought about his own age. Forty-two.

“Your friends are having a good time, it sounds like.”

“They’re not my friends,” she said.

This time the other Army woman in the group got up and looked back where Sergeant Benton was standing beside Sims’s seat. She put her hands on her hips and shook her head in a mock disapproving way, then waved an arm in a wide wagon-train wave at Sergeant Benton. “Get back down here, Benton,” the woman shouted. “There’s money to be made off these drunks.”

The other sergeants said, “Whoa!” then laughed. Another beer can popped. Cards were shuffled. The other woman was fat and short with black hair.

“They think they’re your friends,” Sims said.

“Let ’em think it. I just met them tonight,” the woman said. “It’s the easygoing camaraderie of the armed forces. They’re all nice people, I guess. Who knows? Where’re you going if you’re not a farmer?”

“Minot,” Sims said.

“Which rhymes with why-not. I remember that from school. Pierre rhymes with queer.” She shook her head again and touched her palm to her forehead. She had big hands, red and tough looking. Hands that had worked. Bigger than his own hands, Sims suspected. “I feel a little light-headed,” the woman said.

“Must be the dope you smoked,” Sims said.

She grinned at Sims. “Well, do tell.” She look scandalized but wasn’t scandalized at all. “You’re just full of ideas, aren’t you?”

“I’m a veteran myself,” Sims said.

“What of? Modern life?”

“I was in Vietnam,” Sims said. The words just popped out of his mouth. They shocked him. He didn’t want them back, but they shocked him. How many people had been there, after all? He tried to guess how old Sergeant Benton was, if she might’ve been there herself. Thirty. Thirty-five. It was a long time ago.

“When was that?” the woman said.

“When was what?” Sims said.

“Vietnam? Was that a war or what?” She looked disgustedly at Sims. “I don’t believe you were in Vietnam. Do you know how many of you guys I’ve met?”

“How many?”

“Two million,” the woman said, “possibly three.”

“I was in the Navy,” Sims said.

“And you were probably on a boat that patrolled the rivers shooting blindly in the jungle day and night, and you don’t want to discuss it now because of your nightmares, right?”

“I worked on an air base,” Sims said. This seemed safe to say.

“That’s a new one,” Sergeant Benton said. “The nonviolent tactic.”

“What’s your job in the Army?” Sims felt a big smile involuntarily crossing his face. He wished he’d never mentioned Vietnam. He wished he had that part of his life story to tell over again. He was relieved Marge wasn’t here.

“I’m in intelligence,” Sergeant Benton said brazenly. “Don’t I look smart?”

The fat woman stood up and faced Sergeant Benton again. “Stop harassing the civilians, Benton,” she shouted. A laugh went up.

“You look plenty smart,” Sims said. “You look great, if you ask me.” Sims realized he was still grinning and wished he weren’t. He wished he’d told her to go to hell in a rickshaw.

“Well, aren’t you nice?” the woman said in a voice Sims thought was vulgar. The sergeant kissed her fingertips and blew him a kiss. “Sweet dreams,” she said and walked off down the aisle to where the other soldiers were laughing and drinking.

Sims took a walk back to the sleeping car to check on Marge. Two of the sergeants turned and watched him leave. He heard someone chuckle and somebody say, “Gimme a break.”

When he stepped out onto the vestibule he noticed it was colder, a lot colder than Spokane. It was September the eighteenth. It could freeze tonight, he thought. Canada wasn’t far north of where they were. That was not an appealing world, Sims thought. Cold and boring.

The train was coming into a station when he looked in on Marge. There was one main street that came straight up to the main tracks. The sky was cloudy in front of a big harvest moon. Down the street were red bar signs and Christmas lights strung across one intersection. Here was a place, Sims thought, you’d want to stay drunk in if you could.

Marge was asleep on top of the covers, still in her clothes. The reading light was on. She had a mystery novel open on her chest. She was dead to the world.

Sims took down the extra blanket and covered Marge up to her neck. He put the book on the window ledge and turned off the light. It was cold in the roomette. There was hardly room for him in the bed.

Out the window on the station platform he saw the big sergeant walk past, then the other Army people. He could see a green Army van waiting in a parking lot, its motor running in the chilled air. A few Indian men were standing along the wall of the station in their shirt sleeves. Two dogs sat in front of them. One of the Indians saw Sims looking out and pointed to him. Sims, leaning over Marge, waved and gave him the thumbs-up. All the Indians laughed.

The Army sergeants, seven in all, carrying their bags, walked down to the parking lot and climbed in the van. The one fat woman was with them, and the big man was giving the orders. They looked cold. Where could they be going, Sims wondered. What was out here?

A bell sounded. The train moved away before the Army van left. Sims kept watching. The Indians all gave him the thumbs-up and laughed again. They had bottles in Sneaky-Pete sacks.

“What’s happening?” Marge said. She was still asleep, but she was talking. “Where are we now?”

“Nowhere. I don’t know,” Sims said softly, still leaning over her, watching the town slide by. “Everything’s fine.”

“Okay,” Marge said. “That’s good news.”