Counterattack Page 9

  More or less for the hell of it, he tried the door to his apartment. It was locked, as he thought it would be. Then he went up to the roof. With a lot of effort he pushed the door open against the snow that had accumulated up there.

  What they called “the deck”—the place where Bernice and Dianne took their sunbaths—was a platform of boards with inch-wide spaces between them. Now it was covered with ice and snow, and it was slippery under his feet as he made his way across it to the fire escape.

  There was a ladder down from the roof to the top level of the fire escape, which was right outside his room. He climbed down it and tried his windows. They were locked.

  Just beyond the railing of the fire escape was the bathroom window. If that was locked, he didn’t know what the fuck he would do. He leaned over and pushed up on it, and it slid upward.

  But to get through it meant you had to stand on the fire escape railing and support yourself on the bricks of the building, while you leaned far enough over until you could put your head and shoulders into the window without falling off. Then you gave a shove. After that, you could wiggle through and end up head-down in the bathtub.

  Steve realized there was no way he could do that wearing his overcoat and brimmed cap and gloves. After he considered that, he decided he couldn’t make it wearing his blouse either; so he took all of them off and laid them on the steel-strap floor of the fire escape.

  Then he was so goddamned cold he started to shiver.

  When he stood up on the railing of the fire escape, he thought there was a very good chance that he was not going to make it, and that when his mother and her husband came home, they would find him smashed and bloody on the concrete of the entranceway four floors down, dead.

  Sixty seconds later, he was in the bathtub, head down.

  He pushed out of the way his mother’s underwear and stockings, hanging to dry over the tub, and found the light switch and flicked it on.

  He saw himself in the mirror. He didn’t look familiar. There was no fat on his face anymore, and his eyes looked like they had sunk inward. But the big difference, he realized, was the hair. Before he’d enlisted, he had had long hair, worn in a pompadour, with sideburns. What he had now was hair not half an inch long, and no sideburns.

  He went into his bedroom, opened the window, and reclaimed the rest of his uniform from the fire escape. He opened his closet and put the cap on the shelf, then found a heavy hanger for the overcoat and hung that on the pipe. It really looked strange in there, he thought, beside his red and white Mustangs Athletic Club jacket.

  His “rig” was on the shelf. He had been interested in amateur radio since he was a high school freshman and had joined the Radio Club. By the time he was a sophomore, he had learned Morse code and joined the American Amateur Radio Relay League. He had built his first receiver when he was still a sophomore, and his first really good receiver when he was a junior. He had passed the Federal Communications Commission examination for his ham ticket and had then gone on and gotten his second-class radio telephone license when he was a senior.

  Getting the money to build his first transmitter and the antenna that it needed had meant giving up a lot of nights out with the Mustangs, but finally he had it up and running in the early spring of his senior year. That had lasted a week, until the neighbors in the building found out what was causing all the static when they tried to listen to “Lowell Thomas and the News” and Fred Allen and “The Kate Smith Hour.” They’d bitched to the superintendent, and the super had made him take the antenna down from the roof.

  His mother’s husband had acted as if he had done something criminal. He’d even bitched at him for just listening to the traffic on the twenty-meter band, refusing to understand that receivers don’t cause interference. The fights they had over that had been one of the reasons he had joined The Corps.

  He took his Mustangs jacket off its hanger and slipped it on. It had a red velveteen body and white sleeves and red knit cuffs and collar. Mustangs Athletic Club was spelled out in flowing script on the back, and Mustang AC and Steve in smaller block letters on the front.

  He closed the bedroom door to examine himself in the full-length, somewhat wavy mirror mounted on it. The Mustangs jacket didn’t look right; either it had shrunk or he had grown. It was tight across his shoulders and chest, and the cuffs seemed to ride too high on his arms. He took it off and noticed something else. It looked cheap. It looked like a cheap piece of shit.

  That made him feel disloyal and sad.

  He hung the jacket back up and put on his uniform blouse, then looked at himself again in the mirror. He looked right, and the PFC stripe and the glistening silver marksman badges didn’t look bad either. He had two, an Expert Medal with little medals reading RIFLE and PISTOL hanging under it, and a Sharpshooter medal with BAR hanging under it. He hadn’t made Expert with the Browning Automatic Rifle, but Sharpshooter was nothing to be ashamed of. He’d only made Marksman with the .30-caliber machine gun and mortar. They had a medal for that too, but he had elected not to wear it. Everybody who qualified—and you didn’t get to graduate from Parris Island if you didn’t qualify—was a Marksman, so why the fuck bother?

  He went into the foyer, where the mystery of his missing mother and her husband was solved. There was a brochure on the table. Three Days and Three Nights, Including New Year’s Eve, at the Luxurious Beach Hotel, Asbury Park, N.J. Only $99.95 (Double Occupancy).

  That’s where they were, not thirty miles from Lakehurst.

  Christ, didn’t they know there was a war on? That the Japs had taken Wake Island two days before Christmas? That the Japs had invaded the Philippine Islands? That while they were sipping their fucking Seven-and-Seven in the Beach Hotel, there were German submarines right offshore, waiting to put torpedoes into American ships?

  (Three)

  121 Park Avenue

  East Orange, New Jersey

  2105 Hours 1 January 1942

  What I’ll do, thought PFC Stephen Koffler, USMC, is get together with the guys, maybe get a couple of drinks.

  He went to the telephone mounted on the wall in the kitchen and dialed from memory the number of his best buddy.

  Mrs. Danielli told him Vinny was out someplace, she didn’t know where. She would tell him Steve had called, she said, and asked him to wish his mom and dad a happy New Year.

  He started to call Toddy Feller, but remembered that his mother had written that Toddy had enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor Day.

  He thought, unkindly, that at this very moment Toddy was probably on his hands and knees, his fat ass in the air, scrubbing a deck at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center with a tooth-brush.

  He went back into his bedroom, where he now remembered seeing the package from Parris Island, unopened, on the closet shelf. He took it down, tore the paper off, and dug through it. There was dirty underwear and dirty socks, and the pants and shirt and shoes and toilet kit (a brand-new one) he’d taken to the post office when he’d enlisted.

  And his keys. To the lobby door, to the mailbox in the lobby, to the apartment door, and to his locker in East Orange High School. He’d kept that one for a souvenir, even though it meant paying the bastards two-fifty for a key you could have made in Woolworth’s Five & Ten for a quarter.

  He put the keys in his pocket and went out the front door and down the stairs to the Marshall apartment, on the floor below.

  He heard conversation inside when the doorbell sounded, and then he heard someone who was probably Bernice say, “I wonder who that can be?” and then the door was opened.

  Mr. Marshall looked at him a minute without recognition, until Steve spoke.

  “Hello, Mr. Marshall, is Bernice around?”

  “I’ll be damned!” Mr. Marshall said. “I didn’t recognize you. Hazel, you’ll never guess who it is!”

  “So tell me,” Mrs. Hazel Marshall said.

  “Come on in,” Mr. Marshall said, taking Steve’s arm, then putting his arm around his sh
oulder, as he led him into the living room.

  “Recognize this United States Marine, anybody?” Mr. Marshall said.

  “Why, my God, it’s Stevie,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Stevie, your mother and father are in Asbury Park!”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Oh, she’ll be heartbroken she missed you!” Mrs. Marshall said as she came to him and kissed him. Then she held him by both arms and looked at him intently. “You’ve changed.”

  “Hello, Stevie,” Dianne Marshall said. “Remember me?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hello, Dianne.”

  “And this is Leonard,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Leonard Walters. He and Dianne are sort of keeping company.”

  Leonard Walters looked like a candy-ass, Steve decided. Dianne looked good. She didn’t have big boobs like Bernice, but the ones she had pressed attractively against her sweater.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” Leonard said as he shook Steve’s hand. “You’re a Marine, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How about a little something against the cold, Steve?” Mr. Marshall said.

  “Charlie, he’s only seventeen.”

  “Eighteen,” Steve corrected her. “I was hoping Bernice would be home.”

  “She had a date,” Dianne said. “She’ll be sorry she missed you.”

  “No big deal,” Steve said.

  “Seven-and-Seven OK, Steve?”

  Seven-and-Seven was Seagram’s Seven Crown Blended Whiskey and 7-Up. Steve hated it.

  “No, thank you,” Steve said.

  “See, I told you,” Mrs. Marshall said.

  “How about a little Scotch, then? That’s what I’m having.”

  “Scotch would be fine,” Steve said. He wasn’t even sure what it was, only that he had never had any before.

  “Water or soda?”

  “Soda, please.”

  Dianne walked across the room to him.

  “What are those things on your uniform, medals?”

  “Marksmanship medals.”

  She stood close to him and bent over and examined them carefully. He could see her scalp where she parted her hair; and he could smell her; and he could see the outline of her brassiere strap.

  “I’m impressed,” she said, straightening, still so close he could feel the warmth of her breath and smell the Sen-Sen she had been chewing.

  Mr. Marshall handed him a glass and Steve took a sip. It tasted like medicine.

  “That’s all right, son?”

  “Just fine,” Steve said.

  Dianne walked away. He could see her rear end quiver; she was wearing calf-high boots. Steve thought that calf-high boots were highly erotic, ranking right up there with pictures he had seen in The Police Gazette in the barbershop, of women in brassieres and underpants and garter belts.

  “So how do you like it in the Marines, Steve?” Mr. Marshall asked.

  “I like it fine,” Steve said. That wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but he understood that he couldn’t say anything else.

  “What have they got you doing?”

  “Monday I start parachute school,” Steve said.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Mr. Marshall said.

  “The Corps is organizing parachute battalions,” Steve explained. “I volunteered for it.”

  “You mean you’ll be jumping out of airplanes?” Mrs. Marshall asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Really?” Dianne asked. When he looked at her and nodded, she added, “I’ll be damned.”

  “Dianne!” her mother said. “Try to remember you’re a lady.”

  Steve sensed that Leonard wished he would leave, and while Steve thought Leonard was a candy-ass, fair was fair. If he had a date with some girl, he’d want to get her alone and away from her family and neighbors, too.

  He refused Mr. Marshall’s offer to freshen his drink, and then left.

  He called the Danielli house again, thinking that maybe Vinny had come back; but Mrs. Danielli said she hadn’t heard from him and didn’t expect to, as late as it was. He apologized for calling so late and turned the radio on.

  He quickly grew bored with that. From his living room window he could see the candy store on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue but it was closed. So there was no place he could go without a car.

  He had a damned good idea where Vinny was. He was up at The Lodge, on the mountain in West Orange, where you could get a drink even if you weren’t twenty-one. But getting one around here was an impossibility. They all knew who you were and how old you were. And you needed a car to get to The Lodge.

  But then he remembered hearing that if you were in uniform you could get a drink, period. The idea began to grow on him. There was a bar by the Ampere station. His mother and her husband never went there, so the people there wouldn’t connect him with them.

  It was worth a try. It was a shame to waste a seventy-two-hour pass sitting around listening to the radio all by yourself. If they wouldn’t serve him, he’d just leave. He’d turn red in the face, too; but that wouldn’t be too bad.

  He put on his overcoat and his brimmed cap, turned the overcoat collar up against the cold wind, and walked to the bar by the Ampere station.

  It was crowded and noisy. He pushed his cap back on his head, unbuttoned his overcoat, and found an empty seat at the bar.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.

  “Scotch and soda,” Steve said.

  The bartender said, “You got it,” and went to make it. Steve took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and laid it on the bar.

  When the bartender delivered the drink, he pushed the five-dollar bill back across the bar. “On the house,” he said.

  Steve took a sip of the whiskey. It still tasted like medicine. Not as bad as the first one, but still bad. It was probably, he decided, another brand.

  The bartender set another drink on the bar in front of Steve.

  “From the lady and the gentleman at the end,” the bartender said. Steve looked down the bar to where a middle-aged couple had their glasses raised to him.

  “My privilege,” the man called.

  “God bless you!” the woman called.

  Steve felt his face flush, and desperately hoped he wasn’t blushing to the point where it could be seen.

  “Thank you,” he called.

  It was the first time in his life that anyone had bought him a drink in a bar.

  “You meeting somebody?” a male voice asked in his ear. He turned and saw that it was Leonard.

  “No,” Steve said. “I just came in for a drink.”

  “Whyn’tcha come sit with us?” Leonard asked, with a nod toward the wall. There was a wall-length padded seat there and tiny tables, eight or ten of them, in front of it. Dianne Marshall was sitting on the bench, smiling and waving at him.

  “Wouldn’t I be in the way?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Leonard said. “If we knew you were coming here, you could have come with us.”

  Steve picked up his five-dollar bill and followed Leonard over. Dianne patted the seat next to her.

  “You should have said something, Steve,” Dianne said, “about coming here. You could have come with us. What did you do, walk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess you get a lot of that, walking, in the Marines, huh?” Leonard asked.

  “Try a thirty-mile hike with full field equipment,” Steve said.

  “Thirty miles?” Dianne asked.

  “Right. It toughens you up.”

  “I’ll bet it does,” Dianne said, and squeezed his leg over the knee.

  She wasn’t, he saw, looking for any reaction from him. She was looking at Leonard, smiling. She relaxed her fingers, but didn’t take them from his leg.

  She doesn’t mean anything by that, he decided solemnly. She has a boyfriend and I’m just the kid friend of her little sister. I mean, Jesus, she was married, and has a kid!

  He
was not used to drinking liquor; he started to feel it.

  “It’s been a long day,” he announced. “I’m going to tuck it in.”

  “You haven’t even danced with me yet!” Dianne protested.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m a lousy dancer,” he said, getting up.

  “Ah, I bet you’re not,” Dianne said.

  “You better dance with her, kid, or she won’t let you go,” Leonard said.

  “Don’t call me ‘kid,’” Steve said, nastily.

  Jesus Christ, I am getting drunk. I better leave that fucking Scotch alone!

  “Sorry, no offense,” Leonard said.

  “What’s the matter with you, Lenny?” Dianne snapped. She got up and took Steve’s hand. “I’ll decide whether you’re a lousy dancer.”

  She led him to the dance floor and turned around and opened her arms for him to hold her. And he danced with her. He was an awkward dancer, and he was wearing field shoes. And he got an erection.

  “I think we better call this off,” he said, aware that his face felt really flushed now, and that it was probably visible, even in the dim light.

  “Yes, I think maybe we should.”

  He didn’t sit down again with them, just claimed his overcoat and brimmed cap and put them on. After that he shook hands with Leonard and left.

  It was a ten-minute walk back to the apartment. Snow had started again, but it was still cold enough for him to feel that he was sobering up. He told himself he had made a mistake leaving, that maybe Dianne had meant something when she didn’t take her hand off his leg. And then came the really thrilling thought that she had felt his erection, and it hadn’t made her mad.

  By the time he got to the apartment, however, and was shaking the snow off his overcoat and wiping it off the leather brim of his cap, he had changed his mind again. Dianne was twenty-what? Twenty-two at least, probably twenty-three. She was an ex-married woman, for Christsake. She had a boyfriend. His imagination was running wild, more than likely because he had had all those medicine-tasting Scotch-and-sodas.

  The telephone rang.

  It had to be Vinny Danielli. The sonofabitch had finally come home, and his mother had told him he had called.