TWO
You’re probably wondering how a nice guy like me could end up killing people for money. A lot of nice guys, particularly young ones, start out their adult lives killing people for money. It’s called being a soldier. In my day, it was also called getting drafted, although with a lottery number breathing down my neck, I enlisted and managed to get into the Marines.
I understand plenty of guys who came back from World War Two spent their post-war years being seriously screwed up, nightmares, drinking, smacking wives and kiddies around, among other diversions. But at least those lucky bastards had a war that meant something. My war-maybe you’ve heard of it…Vietnam? — was a fucked-up bunch of nonsense and the only thing I learned from it was how to kill without giving much of a shit. Maybe I would have turned out different if I’d settled comfortably back into civilian life with the beautiful California girl I’d married before I shipped over. But it didn’t work out that way.
I was eighteen and fresh off the farm. Well, not really-fresh off the tract-house middle-class Midwestern assembly line, the kind of bland background that makes Leave It to Beaver look like a documentary. So when I got thrown into boot camp at Camp Pendleton, I was putty in the hands of a D.I. whose purpose in life was to wipe out any individuality and make us good little killing machines for God and country.
On a weekend pass, I met Joni at Gazzari’s on the Sunset Strip. She was a typical, fresh-faced mini-skirted California girl-not the beach bunny type, more the leggy Cher variety, with dark brown hair straight to her shoulders, and big brown eyes that seemed startling against blue eye shadow. She was about five eight but seemed even taller, though she didn’t wear heels-it was just the shortness of the minis she wore, making her legs go on forever.
She started coming down to visit me at San Diego, whenever I had liberty, and if I had leave, I’d go up and see her. She owned a little house in La Mirada and we would bunker in and drink beer and eat pizza, and listen to music, Beatles, Turtles, Association, watch Star Trek on TV, and fuck like guppies.
Other times, we went to Disneyland and to Grauman’s Chinese and the Santa Monica Pier, the California girl humoring the corn-fed hick with touristy junk, and we did the kind of things young lovers do that in the movies require a montage and syrupy music… Happy together…
I seemed to be able to make her laugh, and she was quiet but very sweet. She would stroke my face a lot. We talked about family, a little-how my mother had died of cancer two years ago, and my father had recently remarried, a woman I didn’t like much, a stone bitch but I wouldn’t have said that then. Joni was from a large family and they didn’t have much and her factory-worker father had been abusive (which I thought meant he hit her, but much later it occurred to me he’d been fucking her).
Frankly most of it is a blur. When I met Joni, I was a near virgin-I’d been with one girl in high school, my senior year-and the heady sex included things I’d heard about but never expected to experience…I said “heady” sex-get it? All of those memories exist in snippets, a parade of still photos interspersed with little movies of sweetness here and sensuality there, as if the films playing in my mind were scratchy old drive-in prints, kind of grainy with missing frames and garbled sound.
I remember only two conversations in some detail. One we had at a drive-in outside La Mirada (she had a little blue Marlin, a pretty slick number for a Rambler) where I was doing my best not to make a mess of a chili dog, and she was having just fries, which was the way girls dieted back then.
“I envy you,” she said.
“What for?”
“You had a normal life. You had a loving family.”
“Not really. Lonely being an only child. My mom was nice but she was sick all the time. And my dad barely spoke to me.”
“Why?”
“He was on the road a lot. In his day, he’d been a real jock. I lettered in swimming, but that wasn’t football. I read books. I liked movies. We got along okay, I guess. But maybe I wasn’t macho enough for him.”
“And now you’re a Marine!”
“He was a Marine, too.”
“So you thought that would impress him? Make him really think you’re a man?”
“Don’t make fun, Joni.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No.”
She dipped a fry into the tiny ketchup cup on the drivein tray next to her (she was behind the wheel-her car, after all).
“I still say you’re lucky,” she said. “Everybody thinks it’s glamorous out here. It’s not. It’s all spread out and you live in your own little world and you never go anywhere or get anywhere.”
“You get around.” I meant that in the Beach Boys sense — like, she had a car-and not that she was fast in any other way.
“I get around now.” She meant the car, too. “But until I was old enough to move out and make something of myself, I lived in a smaller world than you ever did, back in Idaho.”
“Ohio.”
“Wherever.” She nibbled another red-tipped fry. “We shopped and ate and went to movies all in about a sixblock radius. Never went anywhere else. That includes school. I teased you about being a typical tourist, Jack, didn’t I?”
Jack was my name then. First name. You won’t get a last one out of me-not a real one. And Quarry isn’t it.
“Yeah,” I said, “you ribbed me pretty good.”
“Well, guess what-I never went to Disneyland before. I never saw a movie on Grauman’s big screen. I never ate cotton candy or rode the carousel at Santa Monica. Not till…” Funny pause. “…till you came along.”
Now, years later, I know why she paused. I’ll fill you in, when the time comes.
Another night, possibly that same week, she drove us to a stretch of beach where, at uneven intervals, yelloworange fires glowed and sparked against the deep blue of the night and deeper blue of the ocean. These were bonfires with kids gathered around and the scene of much partying-beer, dope, sex. All the stuff that you figured happened in those Beach Party movies after the cameras stopped rolling.
We found a nice bed of sand between some big rocks and laid out a blanket. We’d been there before, three or four times; our place, our spot. Neither one of us was into dope but we had a six-pack of Coors. It was one of those warm California nights Leslie Gore sang about, even the wind off the lazy waves was warm. No humidity, though. California was another planet, too…
I loved her so fucking much. She was very beautiful, twenty-two and older than me, darkly tan except where the bikini had protected skin so shockingly white that the dark curls of her pubic triangle screamed for attention. She would lay on her back and those long slender legs would part and glistening pink would beckon and I’d be balls deep before she could finish her initial gasp. Her long legs would pump, like both our hearts, and her head would roll back and her eyes go half-lidded, and almost cross, and each time I’d thrust, her small pert breasts would thrust, too, their long erect points like little scolding fingers, naughty, naughty…
“Marry me,” I said, when we’d finished, but still inside her.
“Oh yes,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, Jack- yes. ”
So I’d married her.
From Vietnam, I wrote her love letters on a daily basis for a while, and she did the same with me, until my world got darker and it was all I could do to maybe write once a week and then once a month crawl out of that hole into temporary sunshine to say something to the girl waiting for me, the girl who was the only reason not to give in to despair and either walk into a bullet or go AWOL and maybe get sent stateside to the brig or better yet frag a moronic officer and get sent home to a firing squad or just stick around and maybe join the hardcore Corps who were slamming heroin to escape for now or maybe for good. Me, who didn’t even accept a toke when a doobie was passed, suddenly I was thinking heroin was an option.
Finally I had stopped feeling, which when they made me a sniper was a necessity. If you viewed your target as a flesh-and-blood human, you might upset your balance. You had to understand, in war, that if you weren’t
