The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (11 page)

I was by then receiving letters almost daily from my “mistress,” I suppose you could call her, Laurel—feverish, highly spiced messages in a blatantly legible hand acquired at Miss Hewitt’s. I understand that it is rare for a lady to develop a full-blown pornographic style, but my darling’s imagination was stunningly lewd; the raunchy letters, often written on her husband’s stationery—“F. Edward Lieberman, M.D. Practice Limited to Ear, Nose and Throat”—though they made me only to a small degree sorry for old Ed, had an effect on my glands which ever afterward rendered insipid the word “aphrodisiac.” Our present era of air travel had only commenced then, and New York was still more than five hundred miles away by unimproved highway and train; through superhuman exertion, however, it was barely possible (on those infrequent weekends when circumstances caused us to be at liberty as early as the middle of Saturday afternoon) to drive at suicidal speeds the three hundred miles to Washington, where one could board a train that arrived in Manhattan just before the bars closed at three on Sunday morning. It was a ridiculously abbreviated visit—one had to leave New York no later than nine the next evening in order to be back at the base by reveille on Monday
morning—and the lack of sleep it entailed still awes me. But such was our desperation to escape the nightmare in which we found ourselves—and so tormenting was my crucifixion of lust—that Lacy and I made the insane journey every time the chance presented itself.

And so, already exhausted from days and nights in the swamps, we would barrel out of camp in Lacy’s Citroën, heading north at terrible speed. Even so, the French had not built that model to go as fast as we might have wished. In compensation, Lacy was a sharp-witted, aggressive driver with reflexes that seemed almost computerized, so swiftly and correctly did they discriminate between the long chance and indubitably fatal error; my heart capered wildly when on one of those two-lane Carolina roads at seventy miles an hour—against opposing traffic—he overtook some huge lumber truck, throwing the car into its next-to-last gear just in time to edge in ahead and with so little margin to spare that I felt more than once the oncoming truck or car trade with us a great soughing whoosh, as the Citroën quivered with the strain. Yet each time I realized how exquisitely Lacy had maneuvered—the entire job far more a display of coolness and timing than of any machismo. Sometimes I took turns driving with Lacy. I was not anywhere near as skillful as he was, and far less nervy, but even so I performed stunts that can make me feel queasy when I think of them to this day: a race to an unbarricaded grade crossing with an Atlantic Coast Line passenger train, for instance, when I gunned past the blinking red warning lights at such speed that the car, mounting the crowned hump of the tracks, literally sailed through the air like some resurrected image from the Keystone Kops and regained the asphalt on the
other side only seconds before the engine pounded past us, trumpeting in a frenzy. For a long time afterward, I recall, Lacy and I sat in feeble silence while the dusty emerald tobacco fields swept by, and the forlorn stretches of marshland and pine slumbered in the heat, until at last Lacy, shaken but in grasp of the lovely aplomb I had grown accustomed to in him, said in a distant voice: “Twenty-four kilometers to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Do you like
moules marinières?”

But the time I truly saw the face of death was not then—it was worse even than this wrenching scare—and it is important to me not alone for the aspect it presented, memorable yet somehow ultimately banal, but for the strange vision the same encounter evoked in Lacy, a vision which he told me about and which I’ve never forgotten.

We had arrived at Penn Station at some hour in the dark of Sunday morning—encrusted with the dust of twenty North Carolina and Virginia counties and the grime of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s most senile and airless parlor car—and had debarked into the arms of our eager girls. Their very presence was like a renewal of life: Lacy’s wife, Annie, very French-looking, not really beautiful but possessing oval provocative eyes and a luminous smile, and, beside her, Laurel, not really beautiful either but with tousled blond hair and adorable lips parted in moist, concupiscent welcome. They bore no gifts but themselves, which was more than enough.

There followed then the usual scenario (this being not an exact rendition of that particular visit but—alas, for my poor memory—a synthesis of those several times): after a quick good-bye to Lacy and Annie I hurry with Laurel to the taxi ramp, where she has foresightedly kept a cab waiting.
We have spoken to each other a few words—cheerful, obligatory, with a slight tremolo betraying our madness: “Hello, honey. Gee, you look good. How was the trip?” She crawls into the cab with the modesty of a stripper, exposing the inner slope of a thigh tanned at Fire Island and—through the interstices of black peekaboo panties—rosy hints of her marvelously supple, inverted-heart-shaped ass. Suddenly I realize that I am running a fever—no mere hectic lovesick flush, either, but the high fever of terminal illness, pneumonia, anthrax, plague. I sink next to her, surround her with my arms, and hear myself utter a demented gargling sound as the cab heads south toward the Village. Along Ninth Avenue oblongs of neon, green and red, flash through my clenched eyelids, and the wet interplay of our tongues astounds me. Slick tongues, darkly wrestling, underwater shapes, they dominate all my sensations—save for the feel of her industrious fingers at work on my fly, with its critical tumescence, and with its stuck zipper. And that is just as well, I am able to reflect even then; satisfied that no precipitate “petting to climax”—in the sexologist’s odious phrase—might vitiate any of the mortal lovemaking left to me.

And so together, in a borrowed basement apartment on Christopher Street—and it is necessary neither to describe the rococo fictions Laurel employs in order to spend a night away from Dr. Lieberman and Fire Island on a beautiful summer weekend, nor to dwell in any great detail upon the amatory rites performed in our incandescent little hideaway. That Laurel is a thoroughgoing adept in bed has already been made clear. She also commands a huskily vocal, hortatory, descriptive style that I find compatible with my own inclination—though I certainly need no inducement to boost
a flagging appetite. But right now (and the apparatus of boudoir photography comes to mind), despite my suspicion that to employ the zoom lens would be a technique falling somewhere between the mandatory and the trendy, I must draw back, out of the feeling that such efforts will produce only another stale portrait of fornication, irrelevant and distracting. No, what stands out most clearly from this distant vantage point is not a glimpse of the tanned, entangled bas-relief of our screwing (like me, she occasionally enjoys mirrors, or professes to) but the sheer urgency, the almost amnesiac concentration I place in the service of my passion—as if by subsuming my entire self to an awareness of my groin I might obliterate the future, validate life, and triumph over the terror of extinction. Sleep is in abeyance, too time-devouring to be indulged in; we seem never to be unjoined; the light of dawn seeps through the window, mid-morning arrives, then noon. At three in the afternoon we are still at it, awash, bruised, scratched, aching, and only then do I doze for a few minutes, awaking to find her in tears as she crouches above me. “You
men,”
she weeps, “all the good
fucking
there is to be had in the world and you men blow it all to hell by going to
war!
There must be something
wrong
with you men!” And then I have one long, luscious, ferocious go at her, reaching oblivion a final time before, irrevocably, it is the moment to leave—to shower and sleepily dress, to have a lingering, gluttonous, late Sunday afternoon meal in a good Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street, and at last to meet Lacy at Penn Station just before eight o’clock. … End of scenario. Total time elapsed: seventeen hours.

But somehow it was all too much, too brutal, frantic, and there came a point when I realized that the word
“suicidal”—by which even then I characterized these journeys—was not at all facetious and that in the starkest way there was contained in these desperate weekends the powerful essence of self-destruction. Returning in the car to the base on Monday morning at dawn, after a New York visit that had been especially exhausting, mainly because of this marathon venery but also because of a train that was two hours behind schedule, and because of the train itself with its heat and its sordid flatulence, its bellowing candy butchers and its relentless onslaught of shrieks from tormented babies, and because of the desolating effect of newspaper headlines announcing huge marine casualties in Korea, and because of a flat tire we had to change outside of Richmond, in pouring rain—returning this morning with a sore throat and the runny beginnings of a summer cold, I had the feeling (and I sensed Lacy’s sharing it) that rather than endure another such pilgrimage I would willingly allow myself to be sent to combat and let the Chinese get a hunk of my pelt or my balls, or even my life. I was so tired that my bones ached, forestalling real sleep, and as I half-drowsed I had become the prey of crazy hot flashes and prickly little hallucinations. I had driven the first long lap from Washington down to Emporia, Virginia, while Lacy tried to sleep; now Lacy had been driving for several hours across the Carolina tidewater, murderously forcing the Citroën to its uttermost limit as we plowed through the twilit pearly light of dawn, swirling with patches of dusty fog that breathed up out of level monotonous fields of tobacco and green cotton.

I recall vividly that I was dreaming of a raffish assembly of gnomes, garbed as in drawings from the tales by the brothers Grimm, who were holding a
Bierfest
in an autumn
garden. They gesticulated toward me and called to me in involute German, a language of which I knew about twenty words. Fluently, I called back to them and waved a greeting, while in the midst of this delirium my eyes snapped open to behold, or sense, or somehow apprehend simultaneously, two horrors: Lacy, nodding, eyes partly shut, hands deathly limp, half asleep at the wheel—and a huge trailer truck dead ahead, nosing out into our path. I do not know—I’ll never know—how close we were to the truck, to that intersection on the outskirts of some little farming town where the red stoplight winked at us mindlessly and serenely through the mists. I do know we were so near to collision that certain details are still as clear as those startling protuberances in a trompe l’oeil painting—the truck itself, hauling bags of fertilizer, browsing through the fog like a mastodon; the Negro driver’s bare blue-black shiny elbow perched on the window ledge and the alarmed eyes of the Negro like eggshells, rolling toward us; the great red sign on the truck,
VIRGINIA-CAROLINA CHEMICAL
: all of these shards of recognition were for half a second separate, random, before at once becoming merged into a single terrifying image of annihilation.

“Oh shit, Lacy!” I yelled. And at that he came awake and alive, and began a herculean effort to ransom us from the grave. I still do not know how he did it; his hand spun the wheel, his foot hit the brake, and we veered awfully. I heard him gasp, heard too the scream of the tires, locked now, and my own voice repeating,
“Shit
, Lacy! Shit, shit, shit, oh
shit!”
as we lurched and yawed from side to side and skidded straight toward the trailer’s murderously glinting undercarriage, waiting to shred us into junk and bloody pulp. On and on we hurtled, squealing. I saw the Negro’s elbow go up in a
wild disjointed motion and at that instant a burst of blue exhaust smoke plumed aloft from the truck’s cab. It may be that this meant that the driver’s own foot slammed down on the gas, that his own scared reflex provided the margin for the salvation of all, his included; whatever it was that saved us—his panic or Lacy’s cunning at the wheel or both, or the providence that attends innocent black truck drivers and marines fatigued to the brink of death—we squeaked through, missing the rear end of the trailer by what was clearly bare inches, and sideslipped to a jolting, vibrating halt in a weed-choked ditch. Although for long moments we were voiceless with fright, neither of us was even bruised, and the spunky Citroën had received not a nick or dent.

“Is you all right?” I heard the Negro’s voice call from up the road where he had stopped his rig.

Lacy flapped his hand in limp reassurance and after a pause shouted, “Sorry, man!” in a hoarse, broken voice. Then he put his head down against the steering wheel. I heard a muffled giggle, and what appeared to be shudders of hysteric relief coursed through his shoulders. Finally without another word he sat erect and started the car, and we proceeded again through the dawn, moving at a dignified old lady’s pace.

After several miles I managed to find words to speak, something banal and hollow like the ugly little episode itself. I cast a sidelong glance at Lacy, who for a long while had said nothing. The sensitively drawn, almost pretty face in profile had suddenly taken on a pinched and bitter cast: through the unblemished tan the boyish features were not really boyish but haggard, aging. When at last he spoke it was in a grave tone edged with anguish, and it was filled with
marked, unsettling intensity, as if our dangerous escape had unloosened in him some fear long held in precarious restraint.

“I saw that motherfucking dog again,” he said.

“What dog?” I said.
“Again?”
For an instant I thought he might have been made temporarily addled. “Where?”

He drove on for a while without speaking. Then he said, “See that?” and held up his right hand. There small shiny mounds of scar tissue, perhaps five or six of them, traversed the palm in a ragged crescent. I had seen these marks before. Assuming they were scars from a combat wound, obviously not now incapacitating, I had never bothered to ask him how they had come about, nor had Lacy ever volunteered an explanation—until now.

“It was toward the end of the fighting on Okinawa in ’45,” he said. “I had a rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was in June, I remember, around noon on a June day and hotter—as an old gunny friend used to say—than the downtown part of hell. Our battalion had been on the assault for two days, trying to wipe out a dinky little town where the Japs had set up an especially strong position. They had artillery in there, a lot of heavy stuff, lot of mortars, and we’d been taking a terrible pounding. But we managed to break them down pretty well with our own big guns and several air strikes, and my company moved up, as I say, around noon, to mop up along a couple of the streets of the town.”