James Salter - Burning the Days

Decades passed, and I happened to be in Texas, though far from his town. On an impulse I called information again. There were no Morgans listed in Spur; I had waited too long. There were two Robert Morgans in Lubbock, a large city not far away that he often mentioned, but neither was the right one. I finally tried the Veterans Administration. There were countless Morgans on the computer, the man said, including hundreds of Roberts. He suggested I call Spur, where I talked to the editor of the local paper.

“Morgan?” Speaking to someone else, the editor said, “Didn’t we run an obituary for a Morgan this past fall? I don’t know if it was Robert,” he said to me — he had only been there since 1952, he was a newcomer, he admitted. “Wait a minute, here.” He was looking at the subscription list, “There’s a Bob Morgan who takes the Texas Spur. He’s in New Waverly, Texas.” He read me the postal code. Where New Waverly was, he couldn’t say, but I knew at last I had found him, gone but still subscribing to the hometown paper, he and Nona.

In New Waverly a woman answered the phone. Yes, she said, this was Bob Morgan’s number. I described who I was, his roommate from long ago if this was the Bob Morgan who was in the army during the war.

“He was in the Air Force,” she said.

“The Air Force? Not the paratroops?”

“I think you want his uncle,” she said. “He was in the paratroops.”

“Was he ever wounded?”

“I don’t know about that. You might ask my husband, he’d know. He’ll be home about four.”

Where did the uncle live? I asked. He lived in Plano, she said, outside of Dallas, but she used the past tense.

“He doesn’t live there anymore?” I said. She was afraid not; he’d died back here a bit.

I felt a sudden, terrible disappointment. There was no real reason. It was just that a distant piece of the shoreline had dropped away. When had it happened? I asked. She wasn’t sure. About 1985, she said. After a moment’s pause she added, “He committed suicide.”

I wanted to know more, I wasn’t sure why, and she gave me the name of his sister, who was visiting a niece in Lubbock. I called there and left a message, which they said they would get to her.

Two days later, early in the morning, the phone rang. It was Bob Morgan’s sister. I talked to her about him. I had wanted to call his widow, I said, but hadn’t known how. “He wasn’t married to her when he died,” his sister told me. “He divorced her about three years before and married the girl he always wanted to marry, he said, his high school sweetheart.”

“Nona?”

“Not Nona. He married Betty,” she said. She told me about his children; there were four, two of them his former wife’s that he adopted. “So he had two natural children?” No, she said, there was another adopted one, a girl, from an even earlier marriage to a rancher’s daughter in New Mexico.

“Actually,” she said, “I think he married her as much as anything because he liked her father. He always formed an attachment to older men, ever since his own father was murdered when Bob was, let’s see, he must have been about four. I guess he never did get over that.”

Their father was murdered by two men, she said. “They knew he was headed for Amarillo to buy some horses, and of course they never heard of a letter of credit or anything like that. They thought he was carrying a lot of money so they robbed and killed him. Actually, he only had forty dollars on him; it was a lifetime rule never to carry more than that, two twenty-dollar bills folded up. There were five of us,” she said. “My mother — she was a remarkable woman, I don’t know how she did it — was left with five small children, a ten-thousand-dollar estate and twelve thousand dollars of debt, with the Depression just ahead. That was around 1925. She moved us all into an old house and on her own learned to farm and to break horses.”

But what had happened to him, at the end?

There was a pause. “I wish I knew,” she said. They had some imbalance in the family, they were very sensitive to medication, she explained. It had taken him a long time to get over the medication they treated him with in Italy when he got wounded. Just years. Perhaps he was on some medication again. She only knew that he got ready to go to work one morning and just went into the bathroom and shot himself. He was buried in Spur, she said, in the family plot.

Afterwards I sat thinking about him. I hadn’t seen him for half a lifetime and yet I remembered him clearly. His letters always began in a touching way, My dear Jim. He’d been a sergeant in a reconnaissance platoon and had heard the colonel remark, unaware he was nearby, that if a single man was commissioned in the field, he wanted it to be Morgan. He was twenty-one at the time but true manliness arrives early. In one of his letters to me he had written, I have come a long way since I left you, and I regret every step …

IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1945, a second lieutenant wearing wings, I walked into the officers’ club at Enid, Oklahoma, with Horner. We had driven half the continent with gas coupons begged from truck drivers, occasionally shooting holes in rural road signs with our new pistols. In the club the jukebox was going. They were playing poker. We were part of the Air Force. It was our turn now. It was to be our story, our broad wake, the immense battering noise of the engines just outside the cockpit window of the B-25s we would soon be flying, roaring past the grain elevators that were close to the field. We were a form of gentleman, the sort that strolls along the beach in summer clothes after the shipwreck, making jokes about capsized lifeboats. Our interest was in the prodigious — riotous nights mainly and the emptiness of mornings when we lounged in wrinkled uniforms, recalling late hours and all we had seen and done.

Horner, who had a face that looked as if he might be reformed, given the time, and that was capable of an expression very close to earnestness, I see with a sheet pulled around him, hair awry, and the furious arm of some girl as she awkwardly throws a bottle at him, damn you! It is in the Gayoso or the Carlton, Memphis or perhaps Dallas. Four A.M. and a knock on the door — the bellboy arriving with the unobtainable fifth under his jacket. Whoever it was who said she didn’t do things like this is caught standing in bra and panties. “Why, hello, Miss Cole,” the boy says politely.

The scene shifts readily, the artistes walk on and off, some making a single appearance, others demanding more, banging on the door in the early hours with their high heels.

Withal there were moments of something else, decency, perhaps, pure amid the disorder — the two WAVES, and the one I was with, though I never saw her again, who came from a world that coolly rebuked ours. Clean-limbed in blue and white, she seemed prepared to like someone I was not ready to be, and I remembered her long after and her town, Green River, Wisconsin. I didn’t mention it to Horner, who would have used one of his familiar words: “heartrending.” In these matters, as in others, he was dauntless.

—

The end of the war, though not unexpected, came quickly. We were in Austin at the time and aware that something had happened — people were hurrying down the street and crowding in front of a doorway nearby. It was the doorway of a liquor store, and they were preparing for the greatest celebration of their lives, one which, although joining in, we observed with halfhearted enthusiasm. In one bold stroke we were devalued, like currency, and for nearly six months were transferred from field to field, to bases ever more bleak and — the aircraft mechanics having been demobilized — silent.