The meat was our duty. It was what we said we did even though everyone knew we played baseball. The Army wanted us to use frozen meat instead of fresh. We ran the tests in messes to see if the men could tell the difference. We stood by the garbage cans and took the plates to scrape and separate the scraps of meat to weigh for waste. A red plate meant the meat was fresh. The bone, the chewed gristle, the fat. I picked it out of the cold peas and potatoes. Sometimes whole pieces would come back, gray and hard. The gravy had to be wiped off before it went on the scale. Those halls were huge, with thousands of men hunched over the long tables eating. We stood by watching, waiting to do our job. It made no difference, fresh or frozen, to the man. This pleased the Army. Things were changing. Surplus from the war was being given to the U.N. for the action in Korea. There were new kinds of boots and rifles. Then every camp still had walk-in lockers. The sides of meat hung on racks. The cold blew through you. Blue inspection stamps bled into the yellow fat of the carcasses. All gone now. That’s what I did in the service.
But the baseball didn’t change. The ball still found my glove. There were the old rituals at home. I rubbed my hands in the dirt then wiped them on my pants, took the bat and rapped it on the plate. The pitch that followed always took me by surprise — hard and high, breaking away. The pitcher spun the ball like a dial on a safe. And trains still sound the same when they run through this town. At night, one will shake our house (we live near an overpass) and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ll count the men who walked up that gangway to the ship. The train’s wheels squeal and sing. It might as well be hauling the cargo of my dreams.
What I See
I was killing time at the ranger station in West Glacier, twirling the postcard racks by the door. There was an old one of some teenagers around a campfire near Swift Current Lake. They have on dude ranch clothes, indigo jeans with the legs rolled into wide cuffs. The boys have flattops. There is a uke. One girl, staring into the fire, wears saddle shoes. The colors are old colors. Colors from the time women all wore red lipstick. Beyond the steel blue lake the white glaciers are smearing down the mountainsides. I saw the glaciers even though it was night in the card. They gave off their own light. No one ever took this card, not even as a joke. I was looking at this card when a woman walked in with her son. They mounted the stair above the model of the park. The models of the mountains were like piles of green and brown laundry, the glaciers sheets. The lakes were blue plastic. A red ribbon stood for the Going to the Sun Highway. It all looked manageable. The mother pointed. In the corner was the little house. You are here. She said to me then: Is there any place we can go to overlook the grizzlies?
This year the wolves have moved back into the park. And number 23 had mauled a camper, his third this year, but didn’t kill her. Children walk through the station with bells on their feet. When the wind is right you can hear the songs drifting in from the higher trails. We were told there would be more people here this season because of the way the world has turned. There are too many people here for this place ever to be wild wild.
The cable’s come as far as Cutbank. On my days off, I rent a room in town and watch the old movies they’ve juiced up with color. But the colors are as pale as an old rug. They look like they’ve already faded from old age. Now the blue sky outside looks manufactured, transported here from the other side of the mountain, its own conveyor belt. A bolt of dyed cloth. It is dripping with color. And my shorts here are khaki, which is Urdu for the word dirt. Sometimes my eyes hurt from seeing the situation so clearly. Every ten minutes or so I hear the ice tumble in the machine out on the breezeway. Then the condenser kicks on. Out the window I can see back to the park, beyond the hot tableland to the mountains and the five white fingers of the glacier.
All of what I know about the world worms its way to me from Atlanta. The news is to stay put. They have a park in Atlanta. In it is the Cyclorama, a huge picture with no edges. The Battle of Atlanta is everywhere. The painting keeps wrapping around me so even out of the corners of my eyes I see nothing but the smoke and the smoky bodies falling about me. Atlanta is a mustard yellow in the distance. Sherman rides up in front of me. The battle ends and it begins again. I climb out of the painting through a hole in the floor. There is no place to overlook it. In the basement of the building is the famous steam locomotive The General. I see Ted Turner has just painted that movie.
And it strikes me now that I once looked like Buster Keaton, my campaign hat was tilted like his hat, as I stood next to King on the memorial steps. The monument behind us was white, even its shadows were white. King’s suit had a sheen like feathers or skin. The white shirts glowed. Everyone wore white shirts except for my khaki since color hadn’t been invented yet. The Muslims wore white. Their caps were white. And the crowd spilling down the steps looked like marble in white to stay cool. It was swampy near the river. They showed the speech around his birthday. I am always there, a ghost over his left shoulder. I was so young. I look as if nothing could surprise me. A ranger look. It always surprises me now. Now I know how it all came out, what happened to that man. I look like a statue. King flickers. I kept him in the corner of my eye. I watched the crowd. What I see is me seeing. I don’t see what is coming. When they color it they will get the color of my eyes wrong.
In the window of the motel, I watch the day move. I have made a career with Interior. The range is being painted over by a deep blue sky. The glacier grips the mountaintop then lets go to form a cloud. Then everything just goes.
The Teakwood Deck of the USS Indiana
I stabbed a man in Zulu. It had to do with a woman. I remember it was a pearled penknife I’d got from a garage. I’d used it for whittling and the letters were wearing off. It broke off in his thigh and nicked the bone. It must have hurt like hell.
I did the time in Michigan City in the metal shop, where I would brush on flux and other men would solder. Smoke would be going up all over the room. They made the denim clothes right there in the prison. The pants were as sharp as the sheet metal we were folding into dustpans and flour scoops. It was like I was a paper doll and they’d folded the jacket on me with the tabs creased over my shoulders. And the stuff never seemed to soften up but come back from the laundry shrunk and rumpled, just as stiff until the one time when all the starch would be gone and your clothes were rags and you got some new ones.
There was a man in there who was building a ship. When I first saw it, he had just laid down the keel and the hull looked like a shiny new coffin. This guy was in for life and he kept busy building a model of a battleship, the USS Indiana. He had hammered rejected license plates, flattened the numbers out. He’d fold and hammer. In the corner of the shop he’d pinned up the plans, a blue ship floated on the white paper. He had models made from balsa, the ribs showing through in parts. He had these molds of parts he would use to cast, jigs and dies. His tools were blades and snips. The needles he used to sew the tiny flags, he used in the model as antennae. The ship was 1/48th size of the real thing, as big as a canoe. The men who walked the deck had heads the size of peas. He painted each face differently, the ratings on their blue sleeves. He told me stories about each man frozen there on the bridge, here tucking into a turret, here popping out of a hatchway. He showed me letters from the same men. He had written to them sending samples of the paint he had mixed asking the men who had actually scraped and painted the real ship if this was anywhere near. He knew the hour, the minute, of the day his ship was sailing, the moment he was modeling.