“Well, they did,” he said—sliding into his lie, not looking quite at her. That was what a good liar could do: look you straight in the eyes and sell you the Tallahatchie Bridge. Not Bud; he sort of let his vision dawdle into the middle distance—'but I got some paperwork to do, and I don't want that damned lieutenant thinking any the less of me. I can't do a thing to impress him. I'll just mosey down to the Annex, check some things, diddle around, be back by midafternoon.”
“I don't see why you have to go today. You've been gone for the best part of two weeks.”
“I have a job to do,” he said.
“Let me do my job, all right?”
She reacted as if she'd been slapped, which in a way she had, as well as lied to straight up. With a bitter expression, she retreated, and then said, 'Russ hears today. If the news is good, you should be here for him and we should take him out to celebrate.”
“Would he go out with us, though? He just sits up there reading.”
“We have to try.”
“Should I go up and say good luck to him?”
“He's sleeping. Jefts gone but Russell doesn't have classes until ten today.”
“Okay. I'm sorry I yelled at you. This thing has me down.”
“It certainly does,” Jen said, numbly.
“I'll see you.”
He gave her a brief kiss, and went out and climbed into his truck.
He drove, by a roundabout way, to Holly's.
He parked and went in. It was just that simple. One woman, and then the other, without so much as a how- do you-do.
“Oh, don't you look like a stud. Bud. Bet I know what you want!”
“Holly, I got all these goddamned guns on me. Getting out of ’em is harder than getting out of my boots.”
“Well, I guess you'd rather play with them than me, Bud,” she teased, but he answered in earnest.
“I just put on this shoulder holster. It's a pain to get out of and back on adjusted just right.”
“Okay, Bud. Have it your way. You may never get another chance.”
But she was dressed herself and only teasing him. She looked so damned cute today he could hardly stop himself from wanting her. Who wouldn't want such an attractive young woman with all that spunk and that way she had of poking fun at everything? When he was with her, every other damned thing seemed to go away. It just felt so normal.
They stopped for coffee at an out-of-the-way place and then drove on to the first of her addresses, a small place in a nicely kept neighborhood on Sixteenth Street, a block or so down from Lee Boulevard near the south side of town. The lady who owned it was waiting for them, a wispy, whitehaired old bat. She took up with Holly right away, all but ignoring Bud, as though she sensed his true irrelevance to what lay before them and started gossiping with Holly like a daughter.
Bud awkwardly put his big hand with his wedding ring on it behind him, in a back pocket that pulled his jacket back, and walked up the walk behind the two ladies, feeling left out but also so strange. He now had to face it, the part of It that had left him acutely uncomfortable all these late weeks. It was this 'house-hunting” thing. Why had he agreed to it, except out of stupidity and sloth? It felt like such a violation. Actually going into another home, looking at it and imagining a life in it, while a few miles away a wife and sons went about their business, completely unaware of the betrayal that was being planned coldly against them by their sworn protector.
Bud shook his head. He climbed the porch, looked at the blooming dark void that lay before him, into which the ladies had disappeared, then swallowed and followed.
A young family had lived here, he saw in an instant. The place stank of young kids—the way they piss, the way they smear their food on everything, their warmth, their noise, their considerable odors. It was now empty, but on the cheap carpeting were the stains of baby food and spilled milk and wee wee Here and there on the walls was a smear of pudding or a dried stalk of broccoli.
“See what a nice sunroom,” the lady was saying.
“The Holloways said they used it as a family room.”
Bud looked at the small, windowed-in back porch, which smelled of mildew.
“Who lived here?” he asked suddenly.
“Sergeant Holloway and his family. He was transferred to Germany and Rose and the boys went with him, though I don't think she was too happy about it.”
“Be good for kids to see a foreign country, though,” Bud said.
“Mine never did.”
But he was thinking: another sergeant's home. Some goddamned fool for duty, giving his whatever to some bigger outfit, doing well enough but not truly well.
He looked around, sensing the other sergeant.
“Was he an artilleryman, ma'am?” he asked, wanting just one more detail somehow.
“No, I believe he was a military policeman, though with an artillery battalion. The whole battalion deployed to Germany.”
Bud nodded, looked around. Another cop!
He listened as the two women clambered up the steps.
When they were gone to the upstairs, he poked a head in the kitchen. It was small, colored yellow, with flowers on the wallpaper, and all the appliances looked scratchy and sticky. The linoleum was worn where the kitchen table had been, and a bulletin board was literally riddled with hundreds of puncture marks where various family documents must have been hung. He had one in his kitchen, too.
He sat there, imagining the shouts of children, maybe the bustling of the woman in the kitchen, trying to make a good meal without a lot to work with. And where would the sergeant be? Yes, in the living room, plunked down on the sofa, watching the goddamned football game. How many times had such a drama played out in his own house? And now and then Jen would come out and yell, 'You boys be quiet, your daddy's watching the football game” or 'Your daddy's trying to sleep.” Had she hated him for it? Had she resented it? You saw things like that all the time: the woman just finally saying to hell with it and sinking a butcher knife in the husband's chest, or getting out the deer rifle and nailing a .30-30 through him, or soaking him in hot grease.
Had Jen ever wanted to do that?
He thought of Jen as she'd been when he'd met her, all those years ago.
The prettiest woman he'd ever seen, and when she'd returned a few of his shy smiles, he'd hardly known what to do. She'd stood by her man, too. She waited for him his first two long years in the air force and married him then, spending the first two years of marriage in a tiny apartment on his sergeant's salary outside the Pope AFB in North Carolina, where he'd finished up as an air policeman.
She'd gone with him when he went back to school, and when he decided to join the troopers instead of staying the course, feeling too old among all those kids, she'd said fine, and made do with a trainee's salary, and then a Trooper First Class's salary, the long years at a corporal's salary when, even though he'd passed the sergeant's exam, others with seniority or connections got the job. She'd had the kids and done the crap work, and gradually took over every thing he didn't like doing, like the checkbook, the taxes, the PTA meetings. She always managed a part-time job. She never made a big point over how much more money her daddy had than he was able to make, and if she was disappointed in the life that Bud had built for them all those years rolling up and down Oklahoma's highways, she never let it show. She'd worked like hell out of commitment to a man and some idea of a family. Was it her fault she'd put on weight and the years had drained her face of joy and her conversation of everything except a sullen, sometimes bitter, irony?
Suddenly an overwhelming melancholy came over Bud.
He couldn't take it anymore: the teeming, swarming sense of family in the old house. The sense of a sergeant, his wife, the children, no money, and the struggle to hold it all together in some way. He turned and went out to the front porch, where a beat-up sofa sat, like a throne from which to view the neighborhood. He put himself down on the arm and took in great draughts of air. That helped somewhat.
For a second there, he'd felt like he was going to puke. He wondered if he wasn't coming down with something, and ran a hand across his brow only to have it come away damp.
