Читать книгу False River - Stinson Carter - Страница 4

There’s still a picture of him in his dress blues on his mother’s fridge. In a Sunday call home she told him how handsome he was, but he said it was just because there wasn’t anything to his face but sunburn and cheekbones after Hell Week. She told him it looked just like the posters, but he knew he was dripping mud and water from the waist down. She asked him to wear the dress uniform when he came home, whenever that would be. And he let her know it didn’t work that way.

They had to stand in line for hours on a parade ground in the rain, wearing just their skivvy shirts and trousers. There were only a dozen dress jackets and caps for a thousand worn out boys, neither the few nor the proud. They’d each slip into a jacket warmed by the grunts before them, then quickly hand it off after steeling their faces for a ration of Kodachrome. They don’t tell you to smile and they don’t offer retakes for blinked eyes. Cam reckoned that’s why so many dead kids have lousy pictures on the evening news.

Just a few months after picture day, Cam Daltry was riding in the back of a troop carrier to an Okinawa-bound cargo plane when he jumped onto the tarmac and ran like hell. He followed a dried-up storm drain to the 405 freeway and thumbed a ride to San Clemente.

Cam had lined up a short-term bed through a guy in his platoon whose mother wanted him out of the Marines. The night before Okinawa he got USMC tattooed on his arm and Cam got an address scribbled on his palm.

She was the other kind of mother than Cam’s. Some mothers become schoolteachers when they get divorced, and some become teenagers again; one chases old age while the other chases it away. The mother Cam stayed with in San Clemente showed a thong when she bent over to open up her fridge, instead of a pair of unloved handles. And there were bottles of water and sushi in the fridge instead of Carnation creamer and doggie bags.

Every night at 6, she drove him to his under-the-table job at a college bar and stayed awake long enough to pick him up at 3am. She would open his door to say goodnight; the hallway light through her chiffon nightgown showing Cam how nice her body used to be. And he would say “sweet dreams,” and she would ease back into her room without closing the door.

By the time Cam figured out it was really just a man she wanted back in the house, she’d already seen him with the girls at the bar; giving them the kind of eyes that would’ve paid his room and board. So the night came when there was no chiffon goodnight and no “sweet dreams,” just the sound of her door clicking shut for the first time. And his next ride from the bar was a ride back to Pendleton with a pair of MP’s.

The two months he spent in the brig weren’t much worse than boot camp. The 5 a.m. reveille gave him the same headache and the 10 p.m. taps the same heartache. And in between them, the showers were colder and the hours were slower but the food was about the same. When he finally had his hearing, they gave him a dishonorable discharge and shipped him back to the mother in Louisiana.