Роберт Паркер - Double Play

Everything was rationed: gasoline, tires, bacon, butter. We used margarine instead. It came lard white with a dye pack included. I used to mix the orange-yellow dye into the recalcitrant margarine until it looked sort of like butter. I never questioned this contribution to the war effort, and felt soldierly doing it. Families with men in the war hung small square flags in the window with a star in the center of the flag, sometimes more than one star. The star colors told you the status of the warrior. A gold star meant that the warrior was dead, and the Gold Star Mother became one of the enduring icons of my childhood.

At the movies we saw Bataan, Flying Tigers, Guadalcanal Diary, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Wake Island. The Japs were unremittingly wrong. We were brave. Even the misfits learned before the end of the movie that the war had to be won. All of the bomber crews and rifle squads were a melting pot of American ethnicity, Murphy, Martinelli, Shapiro, Swenson and DeLisle. On screen the war was fought by Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant, John Garfield, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Taylor. Of course we would win. Every week at the movies we watched the newsreels which tended to treat the war as an unswerving march by our side toward victory in Europe and the Pacific. No one doubted. There would be no conditions. We required unconditional surrender. Remember Pearl Harbor as we march against the foe... Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, praise the Lord we ain’t a goin’ fishing... We’re comin’ in on a wing and a prayer...

At Mass we said prayers for our boys... Bob Hope went and entertained our boys... The Stage Door Canteen welcomed our boys... The USO brought comfort to our boys. The Red Cross, too... Tokyo Rose urged our boys not to die in vain. How could she do that?

My parents were Republicans and even during the war spoke ill of Roosevelt among their friends. How could they do that? We had some sort of intellectual grasp of the fact that Roosevelt was paralyzed. But it was only that, the knowledge of a meaningless fact, like being aware that calculus exists. Our Roosevelt moved as easily as Churchill. He was never publicly crippled.

There was gasoline rationing and all cars had a sticker designation for how much they could buy a week. We were I think a C sticker. There were ration books. Spike Jones recorded a song called “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” whose lyrics included a forceful Bronx cheer. As the war progressed some of our boys began to return, still jaundiced from tropical fevers, limping from bullet wounds, wearing slings, using canes, deaf in one ear from artillery concussion. They were celebrities, twenty missions over Berlin, veterans of Anzio and Guadalcanal, North Africa and Kwajalein, Italy and France, people who’d fought and killed and seen men die at Iwo Jima and Omaha Beach. They were more important than movie stars or ballplayers. I wished that I could have been one of them. I would have happily suffered what they suffered to have become what they became. If only I was old enough. I never thought about dying in the war. I’d have returned maybe with a wonderful sling, and would shake my head quietly when people asked me about it.

His blood count was finally normal. He did a hundred pushups and a hundred situps and a hundred pullups every day. He ran a hard two miles every day. He had lost fifty pounds after he got shot and he appeared to have no muscle at all. But his weight was back up to 190 pounds now. He had done high ironwork before the war and it had given him a lot of muscle density and the density persisted, dormant, until he got well enough to exercise.

By himself, he went to the Paramount Theater and watched The Best Years of Our Lives on a Wednesday afternoon. Then he went home and made himself a scotch and seltzer and sat in the chair by the window that looked out onto the street and lit a Lucky Strike and sipped the scotch. He looked at the white package of Luckies. Lucky Strike Green has gone to war. He smiled to himself with no amusement. Didn’t we all.

They hadn’t lived here long. The furniture had come with the apartment. She had done nothing to personalize it. There were no pictures. He went to the kitchen and made himself a salami sandwich and brought it back in and ate it and drank scotch and looked out the window some more.

There were more cars on the street than when he’d first got out of the hospital and sat staring all day out this window. Gas rationing had ended. There were new models for the first time since the war began. A thick-bodied, black and tan German shepherd dog trotted past the window, alone, going somewhere. Women walked past, some of them good-looking. Burke watched them go. Again, alone in the darkening room, he smiled slightly. For more than a year he had been focused on not dying. Now here he was eating, drinking scotch, smoking a Lucky, looking at girls. He glanced around the small, nondescript, uneventful apartment.

He said aloud, “I gotta get out of here.”

In the two weeks he spent with her, he remembered, he became adroit. I can always thank her for that, he thought. Marines taught me to shoot. She taught me to fuck. She had always encouraged him, never criticized, never judged.

“You can talk about anything,” she said, “my little Mr. Marine. You don’t have to be tough here.”

When she went to work he would stay at the apartment. She seemed able to set her own schedule at her job, and usually went late in the morning and came home early in the afternoon. He had learned very young to feed himself, and now he bought groceries and made supper. They would eat together in the little kitchen. She would light a candle.

In bed she made him feel heroic. She twisted with pleasure. She cried out with it, calling him “my dearest boy, my dearest boy.” He had never felt that way before, or since. He’d been tough early, and he’d been brave enough when he had to be; but only in her bed, listening to her gasp with the pleasure of him, had he ever felt heroic. He was a man. He would take care of her, all his life he would take care of her. The memory was harsh. But he couldn’t leave it alone. His memory kept going back to it, replaying it, feeling the hot, erotic pain of it. A fucking man, he thought. Mr. Fucking Marine Man.

Three days before his leave was over, in the darkness, enveloped in her heat and smell, he pressed her hard and told her he loved her.

“I know,” she whispered.

“I know,” he said, “we haven’t known each other very long.”

“Time doesn’t matter,” she whispered.

“I have to go, day after tomorrow,” he said.

“Shhh.”

“I don’t know if I’ll come back.”

“You’ll come back,” she said.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said.

“I’ll wait for you,” she said.

“Would you marry me before I go?”

It was out. He heard the question linger. A tangible thing, suspended in the dark.

“Of course, little Mr. Marine,” she said finally. “Of course I will.”

He packed some clothes and his .45, and took all of the mustering-out money he hadn’t spent and walked out of the apartment leaving the door unlocked and the key on the hall table. He had been in the Marines for a while with a guy named Anthony Mastrangelo, whose older brother was a bookie. After he left his apartment he went to see him. They had drinks in the North End in a bar named Spag’s.

“You’re a strong guy,” Anthony had said. “How ’bout you be a fighter. My brother Angelo could fix you up with some easy fights.”

“How easy?”

“Easy enough to win,” Anthony had said.

“These guys going in the tank?”