Neatly folded on top are a pair of khaki boxer shorts. He slips them on. Next come white athletic socks, followed by a white cotton tee-shirt—roundneck, not strappy. The shapes of his dogtags stand out against it, as do his biceps and quads. They aren’t as good as they were in A Shau and Dong Ha, but they aren’t bad for a guy who is closing in on forty.
Now, before he finishes dressing, it is time for penance.
He goes to another stack of cabinets and rolls out the second drawer. He thumbs rapidly through the bound ledgers there, passing those for late 1982, then thumbing through those from this year: Jan–April, May–June, July, August (he always feels compelled to write more in the summer), September–October, and at last the cur-rent volume: November–December. He sits at his desk, opens the ledger, and flicks rapidly through pages of densely packed writing. There are small variations in the writing, but the essence is always the same:
He only writes for ten minutes or so this morning, pen scratching busily, sticking to the basic fact of the matter:
He finishes—no, he never finishes, but he finishes for today—and puts the current ledger back between those finished and all those yet to be filled. Then he returns to the stack of file-cabinets which serve as his chest of drawers. As he opens the one above his socks and skivvies, he begins to hum under his breath—not “Do You Hear What I Hear” but The Doors, the one about how the day destroys the night, the night divides the day.
He slips on a plain blue chambray shirt, then a pair of fatigue pants. He rolls this middle drawer back in and opens the top one. Here there is a scrapbook and a pair of boots. He takes the scrapbook out and looks at its red leather cover for a moment. The word MEMO-RIES is stamped on the front in flaking gold. It’s a cheap thing, this book. He could afford better, but you don’t always have a right to what you can afford.
In the summer he writes more sorries but memory seems to sleep. It is in winter, especially around Christmas, that memory awakens. Then he wants to look in this book, which is full of clippings and photos where everyone looks impossibly young.
Today he puts the scrapbook back into the drawer unopened and takes out the boots. They are polished to a high sheen and look as if they might last until the trump of judgment. Maybe even longer. They aren’t standard Army issue, not these—these are jumpboots, 101st Airborne stuff. But that’s all right. He isn’t actually trying to dress like a soldier. If he wanted to dress like a soldier, he would.
Still, there is no more reason to look sloppy than there is to allow dust to collect in the pass-through, and he’s careful about the way he dresses. He does not tuck his pants into his boots, of course—he’s headed for Fifth Avenue in December, not the Mekong in August, snakes and poppy-bugs are not apt to be a problem—but he intends to look squared away. Looking good is as important to him as it is to Bill, maybe even more important. Respecting one’s work and one’s field begins, after all, with respecting one’s self.
The last two items are in the back of the top drawer of his bureau stack: a tube of makeup and a jar of hair gel. He squeezes some of the makeup into the palm of his left hand, then begins applying it, work-ing from forehead to the base of his neck. He moves with the uncon-cerned speed of long experience, giving himself a moderate tan. With that done, he works some of the gel into his hair and then recombs it, getting rid of the part and sweeping it straight back from his fore-head. It is the last touch, the smallest touch, and perhaps the most telling touch. There is no trace of the commuter who walked out of Grand Central an hour ago; the man in the mirror mounted on the back of the door to the small storage annex looks like a washed-up mercenary. There is a kind of silent, half- humbled pride in the tanned face, something people won’t look at too long. It hurts them if they do. Willie knows this is so; he has seen it. He doesn’t ask why it should be so. He has made himself a life pretty much without ques- tions, and that’s the way he likes it.
“All
He goes back to the closet for the red jacket, which is the reversible type, and the boxy case. He slips the jacket over his desk chair for the time being and puts the case on the desk. He unlatches it and swings the top up on sturdy hinges; now it looks a little like the cases street salesmen use to display their knockoff watches and questionable gold chains. There are only a few items in Willie’s, one of them broken down into two pieces so it will fit. There is a sign. There is a pair of gloves, the kind you wear in cold weather, and a third glove which he used to wear when it was warm. He takes out the pair (he will want them today, no doubt about that), and then the sign on its length of stout cord. The cord has been knotted through holes in the cardboard at either side, so Willie can hang the sign around his neck. He closes the case again, not bothering to latch it, and puts the sign on top of it—the desk is so cluttery, it’s the only good surface he has to work on.
Humming (we chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there), he opens the wide drawer above the kneehole, paws past the pencils and Chap Sticks and paperclips and memo pads, and finally finds his stapler. He then unrolls the ball of tinsel, placing it carefully around the rectangle of his sign. He snips off the extra and staples the shiny stuff firmly into place. He holds it up for a moment, first assessing the effect, then admiring it.
“Perfect!” he says.
The telephone rings and he stiffens, turning to look at it with eyes which are suddenly very small and hard and totally alert. One ring.
Two. T hree. On the fourth, the machine kicks in, answering in his voice—the version of it that goes with this office, anyway.
“Hi, you’ve reached Midtown Heating and Cooling,” Willie Shearman says. “No one can take your call right now, so leave a mes-sage at the beep.”
He listens tensely, standing over his just-decorated sign with his hands balled into fists.
“Hi, this is Ed, from the NYNEX Yellow Pages,” the voice from the machine says, and Willie lets out a breath he hasn’t known he was hold-ing. His hands begin to loosen. “Please have your company rep call me at 1-800-555-1000 for information on how you can increase your ad space in both versions of the Yellow Pages, and at the same time save big money on your yearly bill. Happy holidays to all! Thanks.”
Willie looks at the answering machine a moment longer, almost as if he expects it to speak again—to threaten him, perhaps to accuse him of all the crimes of which he accuses himself—but nothing happens.
“Squared away,” he murmurs, putting the decorated sign back into the case. This time when he closes it, he
