The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [102]
Only belatedly did he become conscious of being observed in his troubled séance with the set of letters. He tried not to show the extent of his embarrassment, and missed by far.
Angelides gruffly offered up: "This appears serious."
"I have to hope she is," Ben trying a doomed grin along with it.
Angelides waited, attentive to more to come.
"I'm in a fix, Andy. She's married."
The sentences escaped from him before he knew it. He hadn't told Prokosch when he had the opening. Never would he have told Danzer. He had not even confided in Jake, repository of life's complications that he was. Angelides in alert stillness on the next bunk he would have trusted with his life, but the confession he had just made came under another category entirely. I'm not equipped for this. Ben creased the letters closed. "Keep it under your hat, okay? I can't take any pride in being a homewrecker. If that's what I turn out to be, even."
"Sorry, I'm no help to you there," Angelides said as if it was a test he hadn't taken. "All I've ever been round is love 'em and leave 'em. I got left."
Ben looked over at him. One spill of guts for another. It seemed his turn to come up with something medicative. "You'll have better luck later on. Civvie life will be full of lovelies looking for Marines in shining armor, you'll see."
In an exceedingly swift motion Angelides no longer was flat on his back but sitting tight as a coil on the edge of his bunk. "Ben? Something you maybe better know. In case it affects what you want to write or something like that. When the shooting match is over"—that always meant the war in conversations like this—"I'm staying in." He worked up a rough grin behind the exchange of confidences. "True-blue to the stinking Corps."
Ben did not say anything immediately, confounded once again by a teammate he was supposed to know like an open book. War mocked the notion of some sort of order in the human race. The only sane route he thought he knew—it was also true of Cass, Jake, anyone he would lay down his life for and they for him—was to serve as dutifully as you could during the duration, then reconstitute yourself when peace came in whatever measure. Get on with the existence you were cut out for, or, in terms blindingly similar to the argument he would have made to Dex Cariston, we are servants of war forever. Yet here was Angelides, capability itself, turning his back on the TSU degree and probably married life, to stay on in uniform as a glorified groundpounder foreman, rewarded with stripes on his arm and little else. A garrison career for enlisted men was boredom with bad surprises sewn in; just ask the poor suckers stationed on Guam in 1941 when the Japanese imperial army showed up.
By now Ben's silence was saying much in itself. "You're sure," he tried with Angelides, "you just want grunt life to go on and on?"
The bared smile. "You can't tell by looking? It fits me like a cork in a virgin."
Word came that a piece of cargo with highest priority and his name all over it awaited at the airfield, and when Ben went to fetch the dreaded recording equipment, it was attended by the wearer of the most disheveled uniform on Eniwetok.
"Hi, Lieutenant. Gosh, it's hot here."
"Jones!" Elated to see that familiar ugly puss under the crumpled fatigue cap, he fought back the impulse to ask a torrent of questions about East Base, especially the WASP side of things. "Old home week, right here in equatorial Eden. I can't believe Tepee Weepy took a fit of sanity and sent you along. I can use all the help there is." Saying so, Ben circled the recorder in its carrying case distrustfully. It basically resembled the bulkiest suitcase imaginable. He looked around the cargo shed for the technician whiz promised with it, then realized.
"Jones, I hate to take your name in vain, but please don't tell me you're the tech aide, too."
"That was the order that came down," this stanza of the enlisted men's repertoire practically sang