Fresh & Ripe

 

Love and Death in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

(The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Robert B. Gentry

           

      A well-designed book gives vivid clues about its contents. So it is with Cormac McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road.1

      Book jacket: Mostly soot black. Title burnt umber, letters modulating and searing the darkness like sizzling embers. Author ash gray, his frayed letters like those of the title and the spine’s fiery identifiers.

           

      Hard cover: Umber muted to rusty orange, front and back wordless. Narrow black border fused with black spine where identifiers are frozen in flame. Hold the spine up to the light: The title glows like a golden moon.

      These tensions of color and line reflect major elements in The Road: fire as destruction, necessity, goodness; ash as poisonous residue of world cataclysm; the blackness of despair and death vs. the golden hope of life and love. Further, the novel's many page breaks do more than signal changing situations. Paradoxically, they provide spatial relief from the story's intensity and grip the mind with a sense of the tragic void of world ruin.

    

     Told in spare prose like McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, The Road begins with an unnamed man and his son shivering in dark woods somewhere east of the Mississippi River. The world has been devastated since shortly before the boy was born (of indeterminate age, he seems about 9 or 10). The disaster began with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that stopped clocks at 1:17 a.m. McCarthy does not specify the cause of the catastrophe or the time period of the story. He trains his keen eye on the effects as they impact the man and boy.

      Hoping to escape the worst of winter, they head south on a highway, all they own in two knapsacks and the wiggly wheeled cart they push along. Over many weeks they trudge into a valley region, up through mountains, finally to the southeastern coast of what used to be the United States.2 Their canned food meager, soon gone. Their face masks scant protection against ash and dust. Landscapes burnt, barren. Trees black, crashing to the ground. Rivers rotten. No birds in the ash-gray sky. No fish in the dead sea. Houses and stores desolate. Vehicles empty wrecks. Grisly remains everywhere. Here corpses shriveled, mindlessly mummified. There bodies fried in asphalt. A human head wearing a ball cap, beneath a cake bell. Each day darker than the last! Fear and starvation plague the man and boy. Despair dogs them. Cannibals rob them, chase them.

      Yet love keeps them going in a drama that glows with much tenderness between father and son. Will they survive? Is there any hope for the planet? These questions strike the reader with increasing urgency as conflicts dominate The Road, underscoring it as metaphor for the tragic journey of love and death. By isolating and focusing on elements that interrelate in the story, perhaps we can get a better grasp of how each contributes to the overall theme.

 

Man and boy vs. the environment. The man’s love for the child energizes his ingenuity. He knows how to fix things, how to improvise. When the mother gives birth, the man delivers the child making good use of kitchen materials. Through luck and his keen sense of search, he finds apples in an orchard, pure water in a cistern, useful supplies in a deserted house and sailboat. But danger keeps him and boy moving. Necessities are always scarce. Supplies critically short. The boy gets paler, thinner. The man coughs up blood. Like apocalyptic horsemen, hunger and thirst and disease and despair threaten to drive the man and boy into death’s corral.

 

Man vs. wife. Narrative flashbacks reveal a husband and wife who sat up many nights “debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall.” (49) Their final argument may show traces of Keats and Freud, but I posit no borrowing by McCarthy of these writers. Rather I find them useful in approaching the complications between the man and wife.

           

       In Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” the speaker’s “heart aches.” He yearns to “leave the world unseen,” to “fade far away” and escape a reality of pain “and leaden-eyed despairs.” Inspired by the melodious bird, he flies away “on the viewless wings of Poesy” and recalls that “many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death.” As the bird reaches “an ecstasy” of song, the speaker muses, “Now more than ever seems it rich to die.”

           

       Similarly, the wife in The Road is heart sore, wants to go off alone and escape the world, and speaks lovingly of death. Otherwise, she is the polar opposite of Keats’ speaker. Her mood and words are grimly prosaic, her situation dire. When the husband mentions that they’re survivors, she berates him:

 

We’re the walking dead in a horror film....You can’t protect  us. You say you'd die for us but what good is that? ....Sooner or later…they [cannibals] are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t….I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot….(47-48)

 

       “Death is not a lover,” (48) the man counters. He begs her to choose life, but like the character White in McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited, she sees life as meaningless and is bent on suicide:

           

I should have done it a long time ago…. I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take ….My heart was ripped out of me the night he [the boy] was born so don’t ask for sorrow now….[Y]ou won’t survive yourself. I know because I would not have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness….(47-48)

  

       In Freudian terms the wife makes a stronger case for death (Thanatos) than the man makes for life (Eros).3 She plans to kill herself “with a flake of obsidian” (49) that ironically the man taught her how to use when he was considering suicide. She leaves without saying goodbye to her son, and the boy shows no concern about her departure. Undoubtedly she is self-absorbed and wracked with despair. Does she suggest something else? Did she hate to bring a child into the ruined world? (“my heart was ripped out of me the night he was born”) During years of hardship did she cobble together a dutiful attachment to son and husband? Did she prostitute herself to help the family cope with want and suffering? (“my own whorish heart”) Is she saying that a “passable ghost” of love is the only positive left? Has she left most of the parenting to the man and thus alienated the child? Does she feel guilt and seek to end it in death? Is she nobly removing herself to give the man and boy a better chance at survival? Given what the story reveals about her, these questions have no conclusive answers.

           

       This writer is left pondering the wife as a measure of the gulf between romantic death in nineteenth-century writers like Keats and starkly realistic death in contemporary authors of whom McCarthy is one of the best.

 

Man vs. boy. The fear the boy feels on the road, the terrible things he sees depress him. At one point he gets so down he says, “I wish I was with my mom.” The man’s attempt to stop his son’s dejection ends in uncertainty: 

           

            “You mean you wish that you were dead.”

           

            “Yes.”

 

            “You mustn’t say that.”

 

            “But I do.”

           

            “Don’t say it. It’s a bad thing to say.”

 

            “I can’t help it.”

 

            “I know. But you have to.”

 

            “How do I do it?”

 

            “I don’t know." (46-47) 4

       The man gives all his love to the golden-haired child. Anyone else he fears and suspects: They could be “road agents” or “blood cults” (types of cannibals). The man’s exclusivity is like an extreme version of Freud's idea of love:

[L]ove...imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way….He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him….But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him….Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of harm he does to me.5

 

        In contrast, the son in The Road is inclusive and compassionate by nature and for a time naively so. He wants to reach out to a stray dog, to a man struck by lightning, to a little boy. The father won’t allow any of it. Too dangerous! Despite their caution, a cannibal grabs the boy. The father shoots the man and washes brains out of his son’s hair. Shocked, the boy clams up. In the process of getting the boy to talk, the father sounds a bit like a biblical patriarch:  

           

            “You have to talk to me.”

 

            “Okay.”

 

            “You wanted to know what the bad guys look like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that. I will kill anybody who touches you. Do you understand?”

 

            “Yes….Are we still the good guys?”

 

            “Yes. We’re still the good guys.”

 

            “And we always will be.”

 

            “Yes. We always will be.” (65-66)

 

        The boy heeds the father, gets more cautious. Still, tension arises when they meet Ely, the only named character in the novel. The father thinks he may be a decoy for road agents. But he turns out to be a fearful, starving, half-blind old man who says some strange things. The boy wants to feed him and take him with them on the road. Grudgingly, the father allows Ely a little food and an overnight stay.

        

        Later when they catch a thief with their supplies, the father makes the man strip, takes his clothes, and leaves him naked and shivering. The son pleads and cries and finally turns the father from blind hatred to a reluctant sense of justice. They conduct a risky search but can’t find the thief. This scene concludes sadly:

Finally he piled the man’s shoes and clothes in the road. He put a rock on top of them. “We have to go,” he said. “We have to go.” (219)

        These lines contain a technique seen often in McCarthy’s work. Rick Wallach calls it a “blurring or recombinance of identity.” 6 The blurred he ironically joins father and son in resolution (their intent to return the thief’s clothes) and a futile attempt at restitution.

 

Man vs. man. Like Outer Dark, McCarthy’s second novel, The Road contains horrible scenes of cannibalism. On the run, the man and boy see how road agents enslave people before eating them and other ghastly results of what seems to be the only enterprise on earth. Besides the physical challenge of cannibals, Ely presents a spiritual challenge.7 In strained conversations with the man, Ely makes contradictory statements about his age and about living on the road, says his name is not Ely, and won’t give his real name because he can’t trust anyone with it.

           

        When the man conjectures that God would know who the last man on earth is, Ely says, “There is no God and we are his prophets.” (143)The man asks, “What if I said he’s [the boy’s] a god?” Ely shakes his head and replies, “I’m past all that now. Have been for years. Where men can’t live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone.” (145)     

           

        Some of McCarthy’s work shows the influence of Nietzsche, and Ely may be another example. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s hero and alter-ego proclaims the potential of human energy to create a new consciousness that will give rise to the “Ubermensch” (an intellectual superman). Without this creative energy, Zarathustra envisions the world degenerating into a herd of "last men” where “everyone wants the same; everyone is the same”:

           

I tell you, one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves. Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I show you the last man. "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" so asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small.8

 

      Like the “last man,” Ely shows no sign of creative fire, no will to power. When the boy offers him food, the old man blinks, an act suggestive of his physical and spiritual debilities. Unlike Zarathustra, Ely cannot imagine anything beyond the hapless equality of which he is a feeble, shrinking part. “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave,” (143) he tells the man. “I’m just on the road the same as you. No different”…. “I could be anybody”…. “I’m not anything.” (144-145)

           

      Contentment is a major trait of the Nietzschean last man. Similarly, Ely seems content to drift pathetically along without identity, without compassion, without trust, barely subsisting. Like the man’s wife, he hopes for nothingness, but his view of death is more inclusive than hers and it smacks of comic nihilism:

 

Things will be better when everybody’s gone….We’ll all be better off. We’ll all breathe easier….When we’re all gone at last then there’ll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He’ll be out in the road with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go? And that’s how it will be. What’s wrong with that? (145-146)


      In his final words, however, Ely undercuts all his ideas by his denial of luck: “I don’t know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing?” Interestingly, the man and boy have the last word on him. Boy: “He’s going to die.” Man: “I know.” (147) [Boy and Man in bold are mine.]

 

Man vs. himself. Like his major influencer, William Faulkner, McCarthy has created memorable characters that poignantly show “the human heart in conflict with itself.” 9 These include Cornelius Suttree in Suttree, the Kid in Blood Meridian, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, and the father in The Road.

      Gloom and doom in the father’s outer life distort his inner life. Nightmares torture his sleep and that of the boy. His desperate efforts to live and protect his son have sapped his will to be school teacher and storyteller to the boy. He finds it harder to think of things to say. He worries that he is forgetting colors, the names of birds and of things to eat. He is most fearful of losing the names of things he believes to be true and darkly envisions the loss of all his belief. Thus he exemplifies a kind of mental loss that would likely occur in people barely subsisting in a ruined world.

         

      The man tries to wipe the wife out of his mind, even leaves her picture on the road, but she enters his “rich dreams” (111) and some of his waking memories. He thinks such visions are self-defeating, tries to dismiss them. But they reassert themselves in various forms only to be deconstructed by harsh reality. For example:

 

There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all. (109) 

       A part of him wants it all to end: “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.” (194) He even has a suicide plan for the boy and himself. But a stronger part of him vows to go on living as long as he can for the sake of the child. At one point, he urges the fearful boy to help him open a door that will lead to an underground bunker. "This is what the good guys do," he tells the child. "They keep trying. They don’t give up.” (116) He assures his son that they would never eat anybody even if they were starving because “we’re the good guys…and we’re carrying the fire.” (109)

       

       This association of fire with the father-son relationship recalls Ed Tom Bell’s dream of meeting his fire-carrying father in a mountain pass at the end of No Country for Old Men:

           

…I seen he was carryin fire in a horn…and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon….I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.10

       

      While the fire of goodness in The Road shines ever bright in the boy, it sometimes dims in the man but is never lost. Beauty he represses, but it resurrects in recollections: of flashing trout he once saw in a mountain stream, of his wife “in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts”;(111) in dreams “of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.” (229)

 

The child: part father of the man. Guided by the father, the son grows in perception and purpose. Well before the end of the novel, he and the man approach some situations and make decisions about them on a near-equal basis. At a critical point, the boy's detective work leads the man to the thief. Whenever the father must go off to check for danger or search for supplies, the boy reluctantly takes the pistol from the man, but he shows no clear resolve to follow the man’s instructions and shoot himself if things get completely hopeless.              

      

       The boy’s ideals take mature form, are tempered by common sense, but never compromised. In the vehement argument over the thief, when the man snaps, “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything,” the boy makes a decisive point: “Yes I am”… "I am the one.” (218) These words convey the child’s sense of adult responsibility. They suggest that he must worry not only about the physical danger of cannibals but also about the spiritual danger of hardness of heart. In persuading the father to return the thief’s clothes, the son leads in taking compassionate risk for the sake of justice. Thus he acts as a kind of guardian angel.

           

       Later, to the dying father the son stands “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.” (230) When he kneels and hands the man a cup of water, the boy has a halo of “light all about him,” (233) and when he moves away with the cup, the light moves with him. His angelic aura, however, does not obscure the fact that in some ways he is still an unsure, fearful child in need of guidance and the father provides it.

       He tells the boy that he's too sick to go on, advises him to keep going south, and speaks to him words of love: "You have my whole heart. You always have." (235) The father's affection here sounds like that of Ed Tom Bell for his wife Loretta: "That's my heart yonder...It always was." 11 The father says that he can see the fire of goodness in his son, death won't separate them, and after he's gone they can talk to each other: "You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you'll hear me. You have to practice. Just don't give up. Okay?" "Okay," (235) the boy answers maturely with renewed hope. Some hours later, the father falls asleep in his son’s arms and dies during the night.

 

The ending: hope vs. ambiguity. The son mourns the father for three days and then he encounters a rugged, bearded, scar-faced man. This “veteran of old skirmishes” wears a gray and yellow parka, carries a shotgun, and speaks and smiles “imperfectly.” The boy points his pistol at the man and asks, “Are you one of the good guys?” (237) The man removes his hood, looks at the sky, and says he is. Is he a road agent who just stalls long enough to think up a lie? Or is he a symbolic savior who has come to rescue the boy?   

           

       The man’s facial expression, matted hair, gun, and bandolier of ammunition could describe a cannibal. However, he looks, talks, and acts like a universal good figure. He wears a parka; the boy’s father wore a parka. The yellow color of his jacket matches the boy’s hair. He lets the boy keep his pistol, wraps the dead father in a blanket, and gives the boy a choice of going with him or not. When the boy decides to go with him, the man waits a long time for him to cry and look mournfully upon his father for the last time. Moreover, the man lives with a woman and they have a boy and a girl of their own. The woman gives the orphan boy a warm welcome, and “[s]he would talk to him sometimes about God.” When the boy says the best thing he can do is to talk imaginatively to his dead father, the woman approves and speaks of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all time.” (241)

           

       Following the woman’s comment about the breath of God is the last paragraph of the novel, one of the most ambiguous passages that I have ever read. Here the narrator recalls trout that once swam beautifully and tellingly in mountain streams, fish that

           

smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and hummed of mystery. (241)

 

       A world that cannot be put back and made right again suggests hopelessness, a descent into a soulless void. Faulkner’s inspiring vision has not been realized. Humanity has neither endured nor prevailed.12

           

       But the sun still shines though dimly. Rain and snow still fall. One can find pure water and part of the land still bears fruit. People still have children and some believe in the immortality of the soul. Perhaps the orphan boy, his new family, and other good guys live in deep glens as people did before the catastrophe. Perhaps in these glens a new world is becoming and it hums with the mystery of life.

           

Notes

 

1 Cormac McCarthy. The Road. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

2 I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and attended the same grade school and high school as McCarthy at times when he did (1942 -1951). Though barely acquainted with him and some of his family then, I remember some things about him and where he lived. On the road the man and boy see a Rock City sign, an indication that they are nearing or in Tennessee. The city they pass through bears some resemblance to Knoxville and the bridge they cross recalls Knoxville’s Henley Street Bridge. According to Professor Wes Morgan, a McCarthy scholar at the University of Tennessee, the exterior of the home the man and boy visit looks like that of McCarthy’s old family home in South Knoxville. From there they trudge out Chapman Highway (Hwy 441), through a ruined resort town (Gatlinburg, Tenn.) up into mountains (Smokies), through a gap (Newfound Gap), and eventually to a coastal area which may be that of Charleston, SC.

3 For more on Eros and Thanatos see Chapter VI of Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. Ed. James Strachey. W. W. Norton  and Company, Inc., 1961.

4 McCarthy dislikes commas, uses few apostrophes and no quotation marks. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with his work, I have added quotation marks and apostrophes.

5 This passage and more of Sigmund Freud on love and aggression appear in Chapter V of Civilization and Its Discontents.

6 See the nineteenth paragraph of Rick Wallach’s Theater, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy, Fresh and Ripe section, this website.

7 The name Ely recalls Eli of the Book of Samuel; Elijah, the Old Testament prophet; and Eli in the cry of dying Jesus on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani” (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?). Unlike Elijah, Ely in The Road heralds no messiah. Whereas Elijah is a strong prophet of all powerful Yahweh, Ely is a weak prophet of nothingness. Unlike Christ on the cross, Ely lacks compassion and struggle. He is perhaps closest to Eli, the priest at Shiloh whose family was destroyed as foretold by Yahweh. Eli lived to be a blind, very old man who died when he heard about the theft of the Ark of the Covenant.  

8 This passage appears in the Prologue of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. Viking Penguin, 1982.
 
9 From William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize Speech. Nobel Prize Foundation.

 

10 No Country For Old Men. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005, 309.

11 No Country For Old Men, 300.

12 Faulkner’s Nobel speech ends thus: “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

 

 

Authors  |  Home  |  Top

_________________________________________________________

 

Tom Glenn lives in Ellicott City, Maryland. His stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, Potpourri, The Baltimore Review, and Antietam Review among others. He won the Hackney Literary Award and the grand prize in the 2004 Maryland Writer's Association novel competition. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Award and a Baltimore ArtScape Literary Award.

      Many of Glenn’s stories come from the better part of thirteen years he operated under cover in Vietnam. Nearly all his writing is, in one way or another, about fathers and children (he has four) and is haunted by his five years of work with AIDS patients (all gay, all died), two years of helping the homeless, and seven years of caring for the dying in the hospice system.

      "Short-Timers" won the prestigious 2008 Page Edwards Award for Short Fiction and appears in The Book of Scars, a prose collection work. "The Gift of the Father" was first published in The Seven Hills Review.

Short-Timers

Tom Glenn

    

     It was the M-16 that started me with them. The Major gave it to me my first night on Cobra Mountain, the same night I came down with a cold. We were outside the officers’ club tent sipping Bloody Marys and watching the twinkles from skirmishes in the valley far below.

             

     “Keep your weapon cleaned and oiled,” the Major said. “Carry it with you at all times. The lull could end without warning.”

           

     I gave him a smile. “I’m a reporter, not one of your soldiers.”

           

     I kept the M-16 in the transient tent, pitched on the western slope of the mountain, above the main camp and a couple of hundred feet from the crest. No electricity—generators, cranked up at night, were for the Officers’, NCO, and EM club tents. I wrote in the afternoon with the blinding sun and gritty December wind at my back and used empty ammunition clips to hold down my papers. Even though I kept my typewriter in its case and covered with plastic, I had to clean out blood-red dust every time I used it.

           

     My second week there, two guys in the main camp further down the mountain caught my eye. Hammering and sawing and getting in each other’s way like silent movie comedians, they were stripped to the waist and shining with sweat despite the snap in the air. I put on my fatigue cap, covered my typewriter, grabbed the M-16, and walked down to the battalion street.

           

     The guy in charge was a big kid, maybe nineteen at the most, with a handle-bar mustache, glasses, and wide eyes the color of smoke.

           

     “What’re you up to?” I asked.

           

     The other kid, a beanpole with olive skin and blue-black hair, stopped hammering and swept me with his eyes. “He must be a nug, Bear. Look at his boots.”

           

     Bear looked at my boots. I looked at my boots. Then I saw the difference. Theirs were half canvas and half leather. Jungle boots. Mine were standard state-side issue, all leather.

           

     The guy with the hammer smiled. “We’re building the club, the new club, so’s we won’t have to use a tent no more.” He held out his hand. “Tony di Franco. And the hulk is Bear Thorenson.”

           

     “Larry Anderson. What’s wrong with using a tent for a club?”

           

     They were still staring at me when a little black guy stumbled up. His fatigue hat was pulled down to his purple aviator sunglasses. His Afro and mustache were out of control.

           

     “This here’s Diver,” di Franco grinned. “What’s the deal, Dive? Head fucked up?”

           

     Diver shuddered.

 

     DiFranco’s black eyes danced. “Diver had a little drunkie last night.”

           

     “So everything’s normal, right?” Bear said. “So let’s get to work.”

           

      They resumed their hammering and sawing. Diver, wrapped in his fatigue jacket, moved like a whipped bantam.

           

      “Hey,” I said. “Could one of you guys show me where to get some stuff to clean my M-16?”

           

      Bear stopped sawing. “Dive, you ain’t worth a damn anyways. Take the nug over to the cleaning tables.”

           

      Diver dropped his hammer and started down the battalion street. “What the hell you waiting for?”

           

      At the cleaning tables, he pointed to the solvent and oil and slumped on the ground in the shadow of a tent.

           

      “How about some help?” I said.

           

      “Go straight to hell, mother fucker.”

           

      “Hey, buddy, I haven’t cleaned a rifle in ten years.”

           

       He eased off his glasses, scanned my face with bloodshot eyes. and took in the unmarked fatigues and the boots. “Who the fuck are you?”

           

       “Larry Anderson. Reporter for Pacific Press International.”

           

       “Oh, lovin’ Jesus.” He put on his glasses and pulled the bill of his cap down as far as it would go. “Shit, I thought you was a nug.” He got up and snatched my rifle.

           

       “I’ll do it,” I said. “Just show me how.” 

           

       He went on working as if he hadn’t heard me. He cleaned and oiled the weapon faster than I’d ever seen it done and handed it to me. “Man, don’t tell the beggars you saw me hungover, and don’t write about me in your story. Deal?”

           

       “What’s a nug?”

           

        For the first time he smiled. Only a faint smile, but he was a different man when he smiled. “Tell you what.” He rubbed his palms together and paced. “I’ll clean your weapon long as you’re here, and you let me stay out of sight.” He extended his hand, and we shook on it. “A nug is a new girb.”

           

        “A what?”

           

        “A new GI rat bastard. A tenderfoot. Wet behind the ears. Can’t find the latrine or his ass in the dark. Can you hear me?”

        “I hear you.”

           

        “Smooth.”

           

        He pulled his cap down and headed up the road. I scrambled along behind.

           

        At the building site, he told the others who I was. In the silence that followed, I could hear the wind moving through the tents.

           

        “How about if I give you a hand?” I said.

           

        They glanced at each other sidelong.

           

        Bear tried to figure out what to do with his hands. “Fine, sir,”

           

        I worked with them the rest of the afternoon. They were the worst carpenters I’d ever seen—mismeasuring, sawing crookedly, bending nails, then pounding them in—and I had to bite my tongue to keep from coaching them. When the sun disappeared behind crags on the other side of the valley and the wind turned cold, they went off to their tents to get ready for guard mount. They’d be on the perimeter until midnight, they told me, then be relieved by another crew. All three were short-timers—due to rotate back to the states within the next sixty days—so they worked details six hours a day and had guard six hours. They’d keep at this routine until some action broke the lull.

           

        The next day, they didn’t show up at the site, so I worked alone. Turned out they’d been pulled off for another detail. The construction of the EM club wasn’t a high priority to the brass.

           

        By the time I got there the following day, Bear was inspecting the frame. Di Franco was picking his teeth. He sniffed like something smelled bad. Diver sat on the ground with his knees against his chest and his hands in his pockets. He’d pulled his cap down over his face, and the hair on the back of his head stuck out like dyed cotton batting.

           

        Bear scowled at planks I’d hammered in place. “Who did all this stuff?”

           

       “Sorry, guys,” I said. “Since you couldn’t be here to work, you know—” I stopped talking. I’d fucked up.

           

        Di Franco flashed his grin. “You done good, sir. We need all the help we can get.”

           

        Bear snorted, hacked, and spat.

           

        “Why do you care so much about it?” I asked.

           

        Bear gave me the expressionless look enlisted men reserve for dumb officers.

           

        “Sir,” di Franco said, “it’s going to be our club, and we want it to be good. They won’t let nobody but three guys work on it, so we’re trying to get it finished quick and do a good job all the same.” He kicked the dirt. “I mean, like, you know, it’s Our Club.”

           

        Bear scratched his armpit. “We appreciate your help, sir.” He swallowed hard. “And we’re proud to have you working with us.”

           

        After that, each day I was in camp I worked beside them. Bear watched me out of the corner of his eye to see how I drove a nail without bending it. Di Franco asked me to show him how to saw a board straight. I taught them what a plumb line was and how to use it to keep the frame vertical. Now they greeted me happily as “Mr. Anderson” or “sir.” I wasn’t one of them, but at least I wasn’t a beggar any more.

           

        Di Franco I liked because he was a con artist and loved to make a fish out of anybody who’d fall for his scam. Bear was a good kid, quiet and serious.

           

        Diver was something else. Not more than five foot eight or nine and wiry, he came to life by mid-afternoon and bopped to the music in his head, shoulders forward, hands cupped, legs ­bent, chin bouncing. The lines in his face seemed temporary, as if a good night’s sleep would erase them. His voice cracked like an adolescent’s. His chocolate eyes boogied.

            . . .

 

        I savored the time I spent with The Short-Timers, as I called them in my mind. They swaggered the way only young men can. Their masterful use of sexual expletives and street lingo made me smile. They horsed around and engaged each other in a ritual dance about the passage to manhood through war and killing. In their unfinished faces I saw sweetness hidden beneath the fear they concealed by blanking the feeling out of their eyes.

           

        One-thirty Christmas morning, ­after the O Club tent closed, I stood shivering in the moonlit battalion street. Across from me was the EM club tent. Did I really want to barge in? What if they threw me out? The wind was cutting through me. I needed company. I pulled back the flap and went in.

           

        Opposite the door was a ten-stool bar next to a platform with stereo speakers booming “Don’t Sleep in the Subways” and a fake Christmas tree rigged out with paper candy canes and a sagging star. Between me and the bar were half a dozen tables of different sizes and a collection of chairs stolen from twenty different places. The dirt floor was red, like all the earth around here. Cigarette smoke dimmed the glow from candles. The only electric light was a naked bulb hanging over the bar. Thirty or forty men were drinking, laughing, talking.

           

        “Mr. Anderson,” came a voice from the bar. It was Bear. “You decided to come see how the other half lives.”

           

        The talk stopped. The music played on.

             

        I crossed the tent among the upturned faces and blank eyes.

           

        “Sam,” Bear said to the GI tending bar, “give the man a drink. What’ll it be?”

           

        “Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks.”

         

        “Diver, hear that?” Bear called over his should­er to the closest table. “The man drinks Black Label on the rocks.”

           

        “Mr. Anderson!” Diver got out of his chair, waved to di Franco to follow him, and tottered toward me, grinning. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. His eyes came in and out of focus. “Hell, we thought you was happy with the beggars.”

           

        “Sit down, Mr. Anderson.” Bear pulled up a stool.

           

        “Make it Larry.”

           

        Diver offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. Immediately I began to cough and blow my nose.

           

        Di Franco gave me a grin full of mischief. “You got that coughing routine down real good. That only proves you’re a nug. Nugs always get colds.” His grin widened. “But we know how to fix ’em.”

           

        “Sam—” Diver said.

           

        The bartender pushed a bottle of Old Crow, a tumbler, and a bag of sugar onto the bar. Diver seized the bottle and tumbler and threw an arm around my shoulder, barely missing the bar with the bottle. “Slog down what I fix you, man. You’ll be in great shape tomorrow.”

           

        The others howled.

           

        Diver glowered. “Man, don’t laugh like that. It ain’t saltpeter.” He filled the glass one third with bourbon and dumped sugar into it. Sugar flowed over the bar and ran onto the floor. “Nit noy. Won’t hurt nothing. There you go, Mr. Anderson. You chug-a-lug that.”

           

        “Larry.” I stirred the sugar-clotted bourbon with my thumb. “Jeez, I’ll barf all over the club.”

           

        Sam slammed a second tumbler on the bar. Diver prepared another Old Crow and sugar.

           

        “Now, Larry,” he said, his voice breaking, “this here is the Cobra Cold Cure. You drink as many of these as you can without passing out and you go to bed with a bunch of blankets. You sweat all night and your cold is gone.”

           

        “Course, you get one hell of a hangover,” Bear said.

           

        “And just to show —” Diver began but broke into laughter. He got control of himself and glared at Bear. “No interrup­tions, please.” He turned to me, all stern and solemn. “Just to show I’m not trying to put one over on you, I’ll drink with you.”

           

        The GIs cheered. Diver beamed and raised his glass. I clinked mine against his. Staring at each other, we downed the bourbon.

           

        “Two more, Sam,” Bear called across the bar while Diver and I gasped for air. We drank again.

           

        “Two more!” the others chorused.

           

        Di Franco eyed us. “Feel anything yet?”

           

        “I’m starting to feel good,” I said.

           

        It wasn’t only the liquor. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t alone.

           

        Diver slapped the bar. “Ready for ’nother treatment?”

           

        We drank.

           

        “Two more!” everybody shouted, and we drank again.

           

        Diver stumbled toward the door and disappeared. Then he was back, walking carefully. He shook his head loosely and raised his hand for silence. “We took the cure, right? So now it’s time for me and Larry here to get down to some serious drinking. Sam, two Scotches.”

           

        “Numbah ten!” di Franco yelled. “The girls in town say he can’t fuck any better than he drinks.”

           

        The GIs groaned and headed back to their tables.

           

        Diver smiled at me. “Xin loi. Barfed.”

           

        “Feeling a little green myself.” The words came out in thick clots.

           

        Diver sloshed down the re­mainder of his Scotch and signaled Sam for two more. I held out a twenty.

           

        “Not a chance, man.” Diver flicked the bill from my hand and stuffed it in my shirt pocket. “You’re a nug. Tell me one more time what the fuck are you’re doing at Cobra Mountain and why you’re fuckin’ wandering around VC land without no weapon.”

           

        “Reporting on the war in the highlands. What the fuck are you doing at Cobra Mountain?”

           

        “I’m fighting the war in the highlands. Can’t you fucking tell?” His voice cracked with laughter. “How come they sent you to Nam? You don’t seem the type. You married?”

           

        “Divorced. You?”

           

        “Fucking army’s all the family I got.”

           

        “Been in long?”

           

        “Six years. Gonna get out at the end of this tour.”

           

        “Then what?”

           

        “Be a wino and forget the whole thing.”

           

        I believed him. “What’s your real name?”

           

        He lifted his glass above his head and smiled at the amber liquid. “Diver. I’m the biggest goddam alcoholic in the battalion.” He leaned toward me. “You know what, Larry? I got to see every­thing, whether it’s great or stinks like shit. You ever kill anybody, man?” His voice became a hoarse whisper. “You know something else? I’m scared of dying. Got no reason to die. No reason to live, either. Maybe I could find one if I had time to get over stuff—no, not even get over it. Just accept it, get to where I can live with it, that’s all. I don’t believe in this goddam war, and I don’t want to die with one of Charlie’s bullets in my brain or chest or belly. Christ—”

           

        He grinned. “Man, this is Christmas. And we’re runnin’ smooth and easy, right? I got forty-three days and a wake-up, and I’m out of here.” He closed his eyes.

           

        After that Christmas morning, I went to the EM club after midnight as often as I could. Diver and I had long conversa­tions about sex, war, and soldiering, punctuated by his abrupt mood shifts. He told me he never used a condom, hated the beggars, loved being a soldier. The guys’d listen for a while and then give up on us. When we were talked out, we’d get up a game of Liars’ Dice for drinks. I did pretty well because I could con everybody. Di Franco tricked me sometimes, but Diver was a pushover. All I had to do was look into his eyes, and I knew. When he tried to fool me and failed, he’d laugh and laugh in that cracked voice of his.