The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (16 page)

“You're all very welcome,” she said, composing herself, “and I hope you all have a pleasant holiday.”

Mercifully, the bell rang then, and in the jostling clamor of retreat to the cloakroom it was no longer necessary to look at Miss Snell. Her voice rose above the noise: “Will you all please dispose of your paper and ribbons in the basket before you leave?”

John Gerhardt yanked on his rubbers, grabbed his raincoat, and elbowed his way out of the cloakroom, out of the classroom and down the noisy corridor. “Hey, Howard, wait up!” he yelled to Howard White, and finally both of them were free of school, running, splashing through puddles on the playground. Miss Snell was left behind now, farther behind with every step; if they ran fast enough they could even avoid the Taylor twins, and then there would be no need to think about any of it anymore. Legs pounding, raincoats streaming, they ran with the exhilaration of escape.

UNTIL HE GOT
his name on the police blotter, and in the papers, nobody had ever thought much about John Fallon. He was employed as a clerk in a big insurance company, where he hulked among the file cabinets with a conscientious frown, his white shirt cuffs turned back to expose a tight gold watch on one wrist and a loose serviceman's identification bracelet, the relic of a braver and more careless time, on the other. He was twenty-nine years old, big and burly, with neatly combed brown hair and a heavy white face. His eyes were kindly except when he widened them in bewilderment or narrowed them in menace, and his mouth was childishly slack except when he tightened it to say something tough. For street wear, he preferred slick, gas-blue suits with stiff shoulders and very low-set buttons, and he walked with the hard, ringing cadence of steel-capped heels. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens, and had been married for ten years to a very thin girl named Rose who suffered from sinus headaches, couldn't have children, and earned more money than he did by typing eighty-seven words a minute without missing a beat on her chewing gum.

Five evenings a week, Sunday through Thursday, the Fallons sat at home playing cards or watching television, and sometimes she would send him out to buy sandwiches and potato salad for a light snack before they went to bed. Friday, being the end of the workweek and the night of the fights on television, was his night with the boys at the Island Bar and Grill, just off Queens Boulevard. The crowd there were friends of habit rather than of choice, and for the first half hour they would stand around self-consciously, insulting one another and jeering at each new arrival (“Oh Jesus, looka what just come in!”). But by the time the fights were over they would usually have joked and drunk themselves into a high good humor, and the evening would often end in song and staggering at two or three o'clock. Fallon's Saturday, after a morning of sleep and an afternoon of helping with the housework, was devoted to the entertainment of his wife: they would catch the show at one of the neighborhood movies and go to an ice-cream parlor afterwards, and they were usually in bed by twelve. Then came the drowsy living-room clutter of newspapers on Sunday, and his week began again.

The trouble might never have happened if his wife had not insisted, that particular Friday, on breaking his routine: there was a Gregory Peck picture in its final showing that night, and she said she saw no reason why he couldn't do without his prize fight, for once in his life. She told him this on Friday morning, and it was the first of many things that went wrong with his day.

At lunch—the special payday lunch that he always shared with three fellow clerks from his office, in a German tavern downtown—the others were all talking about the fights, and Fallon took little part in the conversation. Jack Kopeck, who knew nothing about boxing (he had called the previous week's performance “a damn good bout” when in fact it had been fifteen rounds of clinches and cream-puff sparring, with the mockery of a decision at the end), told the party at some length that the best all-around bout he'd ever seen was in the Navy. And that led to a lot of Navy talk around the table, while Fallon squirmed in boredom.

“So here
I
was,” Kopeck was saying, jabbing his breastbone with a manicured thumb in the windup of his third long story, “my first day on a new ship, and nothing but these tailor-made dress blues to stand inspection in. Scared? Jesus, I was shakin' like a leaf. Old man comes around, looks at me, says, ‘Where d'ya think
you're
at, sailor? A fancy-dress ball?'”

“Talk about inspections,” Mike Boyle said, bugging his round comedian's eyes. “Lemme tell ya,
we
had this commander, he'd take this white glove and wipe his finger down the bulkhead? And brother, if that glove came away with a specka dust on it, you were dead.”

Then they started getting sentimental. “Ah, it's a good life, though, the Navy,” Kopeck said. “A clean life. The best part about the Navy is, you're somebody, know what I mean? Every man's got his own individual job to do. And I mean what the hell, in the Army all you do is walk around and look stupid like everybody else.”

“Brother,” said little George Walsh, wiping mustard on his knockwurst, “you can say that again. I had four years in the Army and, believe me, you can say that again.”

That was when John Fallon's patience ran out. “Yeah?” he said “What parta the Army was that?”

“What part?” Walsh said, blinking. “Well, I was in the ordnance for a while, in Virginia, and then I was in Texas, and Georgia—how d'ya mean, what part?”

Fallon's eyes narrowed and his lips curled tight. “You oughta tried an infantry outfit, Mac,” he said.

“Oh, well,” Walsh deferred with a wavering smile.

But Kopeck and Boyle took up the challenge, grinning at him.

“The
infantry
?” Boyle said. “Whadda they got—specialists in the infantry?”

“You betcher ass they got specialists,” Fallon said. “Every son of a bitch
in
a rifle company's a specialist, if you wanna know something. And I'll tellya
one
thing, Mac—they don't worry about no silk gloves and no tailor-made clothes, you can betcher ass on that.”

“Wait a second,” Kopeck said. “I wanna know one thing, John. What was your specialty?”

“I was a B.A.R. man,” Fallon said.

“What's that?”

And this was the first time Fallon realized how much the crowd in the office had changed over the years. In the old days, back around 'forty-nine or 'fifty, with the old crowd, anyone who didn't know what a B.A.R. was would almost certainly have kept his mouth shut.

“The B.A.R.,” Fallon said, laying down his fork, “is the Browning Automatic Rifle. It's a thirty-caliber, magazine-fed, fully-automatic piece that provides the major firepower of a twelve-man rifle squad. That answer your question?”

“How d'ya mean?” Boyle inquired. “Like a tommy gun?”

And Fallon had to explain, as if he were talking to children or girls, that it was nothing at all like a tommy gun and that its tactical function was entirely different; finally he had to take out his mechanical pencil and draw, from memory and love, a silhouette of the weapon on the back of his weekly pay envelope.

“So okay,” Kopeck said, “tell me one thing, John. Whaddya have to know to shoot this gun? You gotta have special training, or what?”

Fallon's eyes were angry slits as he crammed the pencil and envelope back into his coat. “Try it sometime,” he said. “Try walkin' twenty miles on an empty stomach with that B.A.R. and a full ammo belt on your back, and then lay down in some swamp with the water up over your ass, and you're pinned down by machine-gun and mortar fire and your squad leader starts yellin', ‘Get that B.A.R. up!' and you gotta cover the withdrawal of the whole platoon or the whole damn company.
Try
it sometime, Mac—
you'll
find out whatcha gotta have.” And he took too deep a drink of his beer, which made him cough and sputter into his big freckled fist.

“Easy, easy,” Boyle said, smiling. “Don't bust a gut, boy.”

But Fallon only wiped his mouth and glared at them, breathing hard.

“Okay, so you're a hero,” Kopeck said lightly. “You're a fighting man. Tell me one thing, though, John. Did you personally shoot this gun in combat?”

“Whadda you think?” Fallon said through thin, unmoving lips.

“How many times?”

The fact of the matter was that Fallon, as a husky and competent soldier of nineteen, many times pronounced “a damn good B.A.R. man” by the others in his squad, had carried his weapon on blistered feet over miles of road and field and forest in the last two months of the war, had lain with it under many artillery and mortar barrages and jabbed it at the chests of many freshly taken German prisoners; but he'd had occasion to fire it only twice, at vague areas rather than men, had brought down nothing either time, and had been mildly reprimanded the second time for wasting ammunition.

“Nunnya goddamn business how many!” he said, and the others looked down at their plates with ill-concealed smiles. He glared at them, defying anyone to make a crack, but the worst part of it was that none of them said anything. They ate or drank their beer in silence, and after a while they changed the subject.

Fallon did not smile all afternoon, and he was still sullen when he met his wife at the supermarket, near home, for their weekend shopping. She looked tired, the way she always did when her sinus trouble was about to get worse, and while he ponderously wheeled the wire-mesh cart behind her he kept turning his head to follow the churning hips and full breasts of other young women in the store.

“Ow!” she cried once, and dropped a box of Ritz crackers to rub her heel in pain. “Can't you watch where you're
going
with that thing? You better let me push it.”

“You shouldn't of stopped so sudden,” he told her. “I didn't know you were gonna stop.”

And thereafter, to make sure he didn't run the cart into her again, he had to give his full attention to her own narrow body and stick-thin legs. From the side view, Rose Fallon seemed always to be leaning slightly forward; walking, her buttocks seemed to float as an ungraceful separate entity in her wake. Some years ago, a doctor had explained her sterility with the fact that her womb was tipped, and told her it might be corrected by a course of exercises; she had done the exercises halfheartedly for a while and gradually given them up. Fallon could never remember whether her odd posture was supposed to be the cause or the result of the inner condition, but he did know for certain that, like her sinus trouble, it had grown worse in the years since their marriage; he could have sworn she stood straight when he met her.

“You want Rice Krispies or Post Toasties, John?” she asked him.

“Rice Krispies.”

“Well, but we just had that last week. Aren't you tired of it?”

“Okay, the other, then.”

“What are you mumbling for? I can't hear you.”

“Post Toasties, I said!”

Walking home, he was puffing more than usual under the double armload of groceries. “What's the
matter
?” she asked, when he stopped to change his grip on the bags.

“Guess I'm outa shape,” he said. “I oughta get out and play some handball.”

“Oh, honestly,” she said. “You're always saying that, and all you ever do is lie around and read the papers.”

She took a bath before fixing the dinner, and then ate with a bulky housecoat roped around her in her usual state of post-bath dishevelment: hair damp, skin dry and porous, no lipstick and a smiling spoor of milk around the upper borders of her unsmiling mouth. ‘Where do you think you're going?” she said, when he had pushed his plate away and stood up. “Look at that—a full glass of milk on the table. Honestly, John, you're the one that makes me
buy
milk and then when I buy it you go and leave a full glass on the table. Now come back here and drink that up.”

He went back and gulped the milk, which made him feel ill.

When her meal was over she began her careful preparations for the evening out; long after he had washed and dried the dishes she was still at the ironing board, pressing the skirt and blouse she planned to wear to the movies. He sat down to wait for her. “Be late to the show if you don't get a move on,” he said.

“Oh, don't be silly. We've got practically a whole hour. What's the
matter
with you tonight, anyway?”

Her spike-heeled street shoes looked absurd under the ankle-length wrapper, particularly when she stooped over, splay-toed, to pull out the wall plug of the ironing cord.

“How come you quit those exercises?” he asked her.

“What exercises? What are you talking about?”

“You know,” he said. “You know. Those exercises for your tipped utiyus.”

“Uterus,”
she said. “You always say ‘utiyus.' It's
uterus
.”

“So what the hell's the difference? Why'd ya quit 'em?”

“Oh, honestly, John,” she said, folding up the ironing board. “Why bring that up
now,
for heaven's sake?”

“So whaddya wanna do? Walk around with a tipped utiyus the resta ya life, or what?”

“Well,” she said, “I certainly don't wanna get pregnant, if that's what you mean. May I ask where we'd be if I had to quit my job?”

He got up and began to stalk around the living room, glaring fiercely at the lamp shades, the watercolor flower paintings, and the small china figure of a seated, sleeping Mexican at whose back bloomed a dry cactus plant. He went to the bedroom, where her fresh underwear was laid out for the evening, and picked up a white brassiere containing the foam-rubber cups without which her chest was as meager as a boy's. When she came in he turned on her, waving it in her startled face, and said, “Why d'ya
wear
these goddamn things?”