James Salter - Last Night

Newell was in the living room when Westerveldt came by. He seemed unsurprised by the visit.

— I thought I might talk to you a little, Westerveldt said.

There was a slight nod.

— Is your wife here?

— I think she’s in the kitchen.

— It’s not really my business, but are the two of you having problems?

Newell seemed to be considering.

— Nothing serious, he finally said.

In the kitchen the Czech wife had her shoes off and was painting her toenails. She looked up briefly when Westerveldt came in. He saw the exotic, European mouth.

— I wonder if we could talk for a minute.

— About what? she said. There was uneaten food on the counter and unwashed dishes.

— Why don’t you come into the living room?

She said nothing.

— Just for a couple of minutes.

She looked closely at her feet, ignoring him. Westerveldt had grown up with three sisters and was at ease around women. He touched her elbow to coax her but she jerked it away.

— Who are you? she said.

Westerveldt went back into the living room and talked to Newell like a brother. If this went on with him and his wife, it was jeopardizing his career.

Newell wanted to confide in Westerveldt. He sat silent, however, unable to begin. He was helplessly in love with this woman. When she dressed up she was simply beautiful. If you saw them together in the Wienerstube, his round white brow gleaming in the light and her across from him, smoking, you would wonder, how did he ever get her? She was insolent but there were times when she was not. To put your hand on the small of her naked back was to have all you ever hoped to possess.

— What is it that’s bothering her? Westerveldt wanted to know.

— She’s had a terrible life, Newell said. Everything will be all right.

Whatever else was said, Westerveldt didn’t remember. What happened afterward erased it.

Newell was away on temporary duty somewhere and his wife, who had no friends, was bored. She went to the movies and wandered around in town. She went to the officers’ club and sat at the bar, drinking. On Saturday she was there, bare shouldered, still drinking when the bar closed. The club officer, Captain Dardy, noticed it and asked if she needed someone to drive her home. He told her to wait a few minutes until he was finished closing up.

Early in the morning, in the gray light, Dardy’s car was still parked outside the quarters. Jana could see it and so could everyone else. She leaned over and shook him and told him he had to leave.

— What time is it?

— I don’t care. You have to go, she said.

Afterward she went to the military police and reported she had been raped.

IN HIS LONG, ADMIRED CAREER, Westerveldt had been like a figure in a novel. In the elephant grass near Pleiku he’d gotten a wide scar through one eyebrow where a mortar fragment, half an inch lower and a little closer, would have blinded or killed him. If anything, it enhanced his appearance. He’d had a long love affair with a woman in Naples when he’d been stationed there, a marquesa, in fact. If he resigned his commission and married her, she would buy him whatever he wanted. He could even have a mistress. That was just one episode. Women always liked him. In the end he married a woman from San Antonio, a divorcée with a child, and they had two more together. He was fifty-eight when he died from some kind of leukemia that began as a strange rash on his neck.

The chapel, an ordinary room with red wallpaper and benches, in the funeral home was crowded. Someone was delivering a eulogy, but in the corridor where many people stood it was hard to make out.

— Can you hear what he’s saying?

— Nobody can, the man in front of Newell said. It was Bressi, he realized, Bressi with his hair now white.

— Are you going to the cemetery? Newell asked when the service was over.

— I’ll give you a ride, Bressi told him.

They drove through Alexandria, the car full.

— There’s the church that George Washington attended when he was president, Bressi said. A little later, he said, There’s Robert E. Lee’s boyhood home.

Bressi and his wife lived in Alexandria in a white clapboard house with a narrow front porch and black shutters.

— Who said, “Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees”? he asked them.

No one answered. Newell felt their disdain for him. They were looking away, out the car windows.

— Anybody know? Bressi said. Lee’s greatest tactical commander.

— Shot by his own men, Newell said, almost inaudibly.

— Mistakenly.

— At Chancellorsville, in the dusk.

— It’s not far from here, about thirty miles, Bressi said. He had been first in military history. He glanced in the rearview mirror. How did you happen to know that? Where did you stand in military history?

Newell didn’t answer.

No one spoke.

There was a long line of cars moving slowly, going into the cemetery. People who had already parked walked alongside them. There were more gravestones than one could believe.

Bressi extended an arm and, waving lightly toward an area, said something Newell could not hear. Thill is in that section somewhere, Bressi had said, referring to a Medal of Honor winner.

They walked with many others, toward the end drawn by faint music as if coming from the ancient river itself, the last river, the boatman waiting. The band, in dark blue uniforms, had formed in a small valley. It was playing “Wagon Wheels,” Carry me home. . The grave was nearby, the fresh earth under a green tarpaulin.

Newell walked as if in a dream. He knew the men around him, but not really. He stopped at a gravestone for Westerveldt’s father and mother, died thirty years apart, buried side by side.

There were faces he thought he recognized during the proceedings, which were long. A thick, folded flag was given to what must have been the widow and her children. Carrying yellow flowers with long stems they filed past the coffin, the family and also others. On an impulse, Newell followed them.

Volleys were being fired. A lone bugle, silvery and pure, began to play taps, the sound drifting over the hills. The retired generals and colonels stood, each with a hand held over his heart. They had served everywhere, though none of them had served time in prison as Newell had. The rape charge against Dardy had been dropped after an investigation, and with Westerveldt’s help Newell had been transferred so he could make another start. Then Jana’s parents in Czechoslovakia needed help and Newell, still a first lieutenant, finally managed to get the money to send to them. Her gratitude was heartfelt.

— Oh, God. I love you! she said.

Naked she sat astride him and, caressing her own buttocks as he lay nearly fainting, began to ride. A night he would never forget. Later there was the charge of having sold radios taken from supply. He was silent at the court-martial. Above all he wished he hadn’t had to be there in uniform, it was like a crown of thorns. He had traded it and the silver bars and class ring to possess her. Of the three letters to the court appealing for leniency and attesting to his character, one was from Westerveldt.

Though the sentence was only a year, Jana did not wait for him. She went off with a man named Rodriguez who owned some beauty parlors. She was still young, she said.

The woman Newell later married knew nothing of all that or almost nothing. She was older than he was with two grown children and bad feet, she could walk only short distances, from the car to the supermarket. She knew he had been in the army — there were some photographs of him in uniform, taken years before,

— This is you, she said. So, what were you?

Newell hadn’t walked back with the others, He had no excuse to do that. This was Arlington and here they all lay, formed up for the last time. He could almost hear the distant notes of adjutant’s call. He walked in the direction of the road they had come in on. With a sound at first faint but then clopping rhythmically he heard the hooves of horses, a team of six black horses with three erect riders and the now-empty caisson that had carried the coffin, the large spoked wheels rattling on the road. The riders, in their dark caps, did not look at him. The gravestones in dense, unbroken lines curved along the hillsides and down toward the river, as far as he could see, all the same height with here and there a larger, gray stone like an officer, mounted, amid the ranks. In the fading light they seemed to be waiting, fateful, massed as if for some great assault. For a moment he felt exalted by it, by the thought of all these dead, the history of the nation, its people. It was hard to get into Arlington. He would never lie there; he had given that up long ago. He would never know the days with Jana again, either. He remembered her at that moment as she had been, when she was so slender and young. He was loyal to her. It was one-sided, but that was enough.