“Communication,” the psychiatrist said. “There is hope if we can get her to communicate.”
I never wrote to any of the people I used to know, Gillian, because the return address on the envelope made it clear I was a prisoner and not just taking a navy rest cure.
They call it a naval retraining command, but that doesn’t fool a soul. My mother was the only one who knew I’d been put in jail, and I wrote to her maybe once a week. She told everyone in Talmadge that I was an SP at Camp Elliott. I suppose they believed the story. No one’s ever mentioned it to me, so I guess they believed it. You’re the only person in the world, besides my mother, who knows I was in prison. And I told you five minutes after I’d met you. I guess that proves something.
I’d begun serving my term in May of ’43, and at the end of two years, I applied for release. I almost got it until someone on the review board remembered that I had struck an officer. The board decided that I should remain in prison for the rest of my term. If I’d killed an old lady in Seattle, that would have been different, perhaps. But I’d struck an officer, you see. So they turned me down. I’d spent two years behind bars, but that wasn’t enough.
Gillian, two days was enough. But not to the officers on the review board, and so I was turned down. I began thinking of those years ahead of me, another three years of nothing while life went on outside, while people were laughing outside, or playing cards, or drinking beer, or standing near radiators warming their hands, free. I almost cracked. I almost said, What the hell, who cares? I’ll be here for the rest of my life, who cares? But then they dropped the atomic bombs, and then suddenly the war was over, and I could taste freedom, I figured they had no reason to keep me there any more, the war was over, they would let me go, I could taste it in my mouth. So I stuck with it, the model prisoner, hoping to reapply for release at the end of three years.
I met Mike Arretti during that time.
He’d been at Camp Elliott for quite a while, and he was going to be there for quite a while longer. He was a signalman who’d got stranded in New Orleans with a girl whose husband was in commando training in England. The girl had a six-year-old son and a house in the French Quarter. Mike had hitchhiked from San Diego, where his ship was docked, on his way to Easton, Pennsylvania, where his wife was. He had a two-week leave, and he planned to spend it with his wife, but he got sidetracked when he met the girl in New Orleans. He moved into the house with her and her six-year-old son, and stayed a week overleave, and then woke up one morning, did a little arithmetic, and figured that his ship would be pulling out for the Pacific the next day.
He didn’t have a chance of catching it if he took the train or hitched, so he began calling the various airlines. He learned that one airline would fly him to Dallas and then to Los Angeles for a hundred and one dollars and ninety-seven cents, and that another airline would fly him from Los Angeles to San Diego for ten dollars and twenty-eight cents, including tax, and the whole trip would take about seven hours, and that would get him back in time to catch his ship.
There was only one trouble. By this time, Mike was flat broke, and the girl had been awaiting her allotment check, which hadn’t come, and between them they couldn’t raise the fare. So he tried the U.S.O., which sent him to the Red Cross, which sent him to the Seaman’s Institute, but no one seemed able to come up with the cash he needed for that plane ride back to Dago.
In desperation, he called his wife in Easton and said, “Honey, I’m stranded in New Orleans, and I need a hundred and twenty dollars to get me back to Dago, would you wire it to me right away, please?”
His wife asked him what he was doing in New Orleans, and he said he’d been sent there for a signalman refresher course and was calling from the school where he’d got stranded when the rest of the group left, all lies that Mike’s wife might have bought if the six-year-old kid hadn’t come into the room right then and asked to talk to his mommy. Mike tried to push the kid away from the phone, telling him it wasn’t his mommy on the other end, but the kid kept yelling, “Let me talk to Mommy! Let me talk to Mommy!” which Mike’s wife heard clearly and distinctly. She may have been ignorant of most nautical matters, but she knew damn well they didn’t have little kids running around signalman schools asking for their mommies. She didn’t know what kind of a refresher course Mike was taking, but she was willing to bet it had nothing to do with blinker lights. So she told him to go to hell, and hung up on him.
Mike needed that money the way only a man facing a charge of desertion in time of war could need it. He walked into town, found a closed pawnshop, broke in by forcing a window, and stole a hundred and fifty dollars from the cash drawer. He kissed the commando’s wife, and then slapped that little six-year-old kid as hard as he’d ever slapped anyone in his life. He might have caught the ship were it not for a delay in the Dallas airport. But there was a delay, and he did miss the ship, and the SPs picked him up the next day. He was charged with desertion and burglary, the burglary charge having followed him cross-country from New Orleans, where the commando’s wife had notified the local shore patrol of Mike’s little adventure. Apparently, he shouldn’t have slapped her son before he left.
So there he was at Camp Elliott, serving something like twenty years, and hoping to be out of prison and the navy by the time he was eighty-eight or so. We got to be pretty good friends. He was a good talker, and I enjoyed listening to him, and we’d spend a lot of time discussing what we were going to do when we got out. It seemed like a pretty good friendship until the review board examined my plea again in December of ’45 and told me my request had been granted, I would be returned to active duty the following May.
I began to get excited then, Gilly. There it was. There was the whole damn world waiting for me. And naturally, the first person I told about it was Mike.
He listened to me silently, nodding his head, and then he said, “You’ll be leaving me, huh, buddy?”
I said something like “Don’t worry, Mike, you’ll be out of here before you know it,” or something equally foolish to a man who was facing such a long prison stretch, and Mike simply nodded again.
“You’ll be leaving me,” he said, as if I were doing him a great injustice.
“Hey, come on,” I said. “Aren’t you happy? I’m getting out! Man, I’m getting out!”
And Mike nodded and continued staring at me, and said nothing.
I was almost out when it happened. I had ten days to go when it happened.
It was May, Gillian, and very hot. I don’t think you’ve ever lifted a sledge hammer, and maybe you don’t know how heavy one can get after you’ve been raising it and dropping it for hours. I don’t suppose you know the way rock dust can get into your nostrils and under your clothes, either, the fine pumice that drifts on the air after each hammer blow, like powdered glass, crawling into your nose and under your shirt and making you itch, and getting into your eyes until you can’t tell the tears from the sweat. I was working side by side with Mike that day. We were wearing the leg irons, we didn’t always, but this was a little way from the prison and there was only one guard for twelve men, and all he carried was a rifle and a billet.
We were working side by side, the hammers going in that sort of mechanical picking-up-and-dropping, which is not really work, only labor. The guard assigned to our work detail had a voice like a parrot. Every five minutes he would yell out, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.” He delivered the line as if he had just made it up and was testing it for a laugh. Every five minutes his voice would cut through the hanging dust, you could almost set your watch by it, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.” Twelve men were pounding at the rock pile, and dust was hanging on the air and choking us. You could barely see the man three feet away from you, but you could hear that voice drifting through the layers of dust every five minutes, “All right, mates, let’s look alive! Let’s make little ones out of all those big ones.”