Novella: “The Heaven of Victory” (Part Three; Final)

7.

The Singular WAVES

When Pearl Harbor had happened during Mena and Kara’s senior year of high school, Rake had been in his senior year as well and Bob had been a freshman at a black college about fifty miles west of Philadelphia. Nate Jefferson, a Harlem Renaissance child till their parents’ move to Philadelphia in 1928, was almost a decade older than Bob and had already been playing for six or seven seasons with a ballteam called the Indianapolis Clowns.

            “You going to join up?” somebody had asked Rake on his snowbound high school athletics field; he had been a talented runner and long-jumper at that time and he liked to stand around outside on the field even when the season was not ongoing.

            “You going to join up?” somebody had asked Bob in his intro physics class; his college’s science curriculum was well-thought-of and he had a good head for numbers.

            Both of them had said yes, immediately and almost impulsively; neither of them at this time—they had later found out that it was December 10 for both of them, only about an hour apart in the late morning—had wanted to join up, not as Mena had wanted to. They would not have gone to the trouble of moving to a different state or lying about their age, as Mena had had to do upon finding that the minimum age for a WAAC was twenty. For them, joining up was not exactly the path of least resistance, but it seemed like the normal and natural thing to do; for Mena it had required a deviation, a sudden swerve out from her life’s ordinary trajectory. For Rake—Rollie, then—and for Bob it had been almost ordinary, unusual only insofar as the war itself was unusual.

            Bob had gone in to a Navy recruiting station in West Philly during his winter break from school and had been told that there was very little he’d be allowed to do as a black man in the Navy at this point in the war. The secretary who had told him this had been sympathetic to his frustrations—as a black man from the Northeast who had never lived under Jim Crow, he was not exactly eager to put himself under segregation on purpose—and so she had told him to come back later in the war because she had a suspicion that more positions would start opening up as things continued. So for the first six months of the war Bob had bided his time at college and completed the first year of a major in chemistry.

            Rollie had asked his parents about enlisting and had been told that this was a poor man’s war orchestrated by the socialists and the foreign element in New York. He had enlisted anyway and, by the spring of ’42, had already had the rake incident happen and acquired his nickname. Apparently he had resisted the nickname for several weeks but eventually gotten used to it, which explained to Mena why he now accepted it and answered to it with so little fuss. He had had more or less a good time of it during his posting at Fort Dix in South Jersey, which was where Mena was going to be posted as well within the next few days, and he had encouraged Debbie to join up once the WAAC had been established. At that point Debbie had been working as a secretary in Harrisburg and dating a man called John Jordan.

            Rake and Bob had first met late in the summer of ’42 when Rake, having just had a trying and confusing tryst with another soldier at Fort Dix, first found the Stationmaster’s Place and went in jumpy and frightened. Bob had been going there for about two months at that point but had not been there looking for trade, as the saying imported from the Brits went. Bob had been sitting next to a WAVE, talking companionably, when Rake had walked up to them.

            “I couldn’t help but notice you talking to this lady,” Rake said. “You okay if I sit with you guys? It’s my first time here and…”

            “You not interested in guys?” the WAVE asked.

            “Oh, no, nothing like that,” said Rake. “You just seemed…well, companionable, is all.”

            The WAVE shrugged. “Never been accused of that before,” she said. “My friend here and I are just arguing a point of grammar.”

            “Oh Christ. Seriously?” asked Rake. Bob nodded solemnly. “And what’s that?” asked Rake.

            “I’m a WAVE, see? Bob thinks I ought to be ‘a WAVES’ instead.”
            “It doesn’t make any sense as a plural,” Bob said insistently. “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. The plural word there is ‘Women’ and the singular also begins with a W. The singular and the plural should both be ‘WAVES.’”

            “Acronyms have a life of their own,” the WAVE said. “You study chemistry, my friend; I had a degree in English before the war.” Bob raised his eyebrows, as did Rake. “Smith, same place I got trained as an officer,” said the WAVE, although neither Bob nor Rake had been sure that this was what they wanted to ask.

            “Lincoln,” said Bob.

            “Are you in the service?” Rake asked Bob.

            “Not yet,” Bob said. “I’m biding my time, seeing if they’ll open up more positions and ranks to colored folk. I don’t have it in me to be a mess attendant, so instead I’m studying science and who knows, maybe they’ll have me testing weapons or something.” He shrugged. “You never know. Some of these physicists and chemists are back and forth from Washington all the time—you didn’t hear that from me, though.”
            “Seems like you trust me,” said Rake, sitting down between them.

            “Trusting you isn’t the way I’d put it. I make it a policy to trust everyone who comes in here and stays more than a few minutes,” Bob said.

            Rake laughed a little at this and the three of them did a round of drinks. This was the point at which Rake started, for some reason, and he thought perhaps childishly, to wish that he could spend more time with his sister on evenings like this.

            The WAVE got up abruptly, went up to the bar, and asked for a bowl of pretzels. Rake and Bob regarded her with an odd sort of awe. She was moving in this twilight world more readily and courageously than they were. The barkeep seemed deferential to her. Bob, in particular, was wowed by this deference; Rake was used to being deferred to, but at different times and for different reasons, and it had not happened in his six months since leaving high school. (Debbie had asked him, concernedly, if he intended to go back and finish high school after the war; he had said that yes, of course he did, even if he was twenty-one or so by then. There were a few other students from his class who had enlisted early also.)

            Bob stayed at the bar through the night and then staggered to church, Rake and the WAVE in tow. Bob’s family at had some point or another become Episcopalians, which Rake and the WAVE also, coincidentally, both were. Bob had heard church architecture referred to as “theology in stone” by somebody or other and he often repeated this, even before he had grasped what it actually meant. By August 1942 he had grasped what it meant and Rake seemed to agree with him on it. The WAVE saw her church attendance as an obligation rather than as a joy and grumbled her way through the responses in Morning Prayer. After church Bob went back to his shabby West Philadelphia apartment, Rake took a bus back towards Fort Dix, and the WAVE joined him as far as a town called Mount Laurel.

            “I didn’t catch your name,” Rake said to her.

            “Tomlinson,” she said primly. “Kay Marie Tomlinson. Ripley, right?”

            Rake nodded. “Roland. My buddies call me Rake.”

            “I can’t see why,” Tomlinson said. Rake shrugged and got back to his book, some crummy paperback with a tattered yellowish cover and crinkled yellowish pages, by an author whose name was almost as obviously fake as people thought his father’s was. By the time the bus got back to Fort Dix, he had to go to the bathroom very badly.

 ❦

Bob got undressed at his apartment and took a bath. While he was in the bath he thought intently about Rake. He had liked him and thought he had an appealing boyishness even though he was not really that much younger than him; if he had been much younger the boyishness would have been alarming, at least in the setting of the Stationmaster’s Place, rather than appealing.

            Rake got seconded to the Army Corps of Engineers about a month and a half later after it came out that he was good at multiplying fractions. This was around the same time Bob finally joined the Navy, and was more relieved to be kept on shore duties than he would have wanted to be. They met occasionally, mostly in Philadelphia at first, until Bob got assigned to a Naval air station near Dix. He actually was working mostly in the mess at this point but he had a little more respect and authority within the mess than he might have had a year ago. He was promised more, and different, duties to come.

            They started getting dressed and undressed around each other well before they started doing anything about it. To look instead of to eat was Bob’s philosophy right now in love as in the more faith-ridden aspects of his life. This did not stay the case forever. By Christmas matters had progressed to such a point that Rake decided to invite Bob home, as a friend, for Christmas. It was his hope that this would pacify his parents about several different things at once—black people, the service, and Rake’s ability to make friends who were, as far as his parents would be able to tell, morally upstanding. This turned out to be a serious error in Rake’s judgment, and to a lesser extent in Bob’s for going along with it.

            Christmas at the Ripleys’ was courteous but strained. Debbie was in the WAAC by now and was in California with Mena, whom she had already mentioned as a good friend in two letters home. Carrington Ripley and his wife, Ernestina, seemed to have decided several days before Bob arrived to treat him as a replacement for their far-distant child. How they had missed the fact that Bob was a black man rather than a white woman was probably a question for the philosophers.

            Bob, for reasons best known to his past self, had decided to visit the Ripleys again for New Year’s Day and things had gone no better. Matters had progressed with amazing rapidity after that. Less than a week into 1943 Rake had been transferred to California, apparently as part of some ostensibly-humane policy on the part of his CO to put him closer to where his sister was (which of the siblings this was intended to benefit more was a mystery, but both of them at least initially were happy about it). A week after that Carrington and Ernestina decided to send a goon to beat up Bob because they suspected him of having in fact stolen some silver and china that Ernestina had misplaced. By the end of January Nate had gotten wind of what had happened and come home to Philadelphia for the last couple months of the baseball off-season; legal wrangling got underway in February and escalated into early March, when the idea for the payoff was arrived at. In mid-March Tomlinson—for it was she who was the WAVE who was supposed to be involved in the payoff—was transferred to Texas and a little later in the month Mena’s services were requested.

            At this point Rake was getting almost-daily letters and telephone calls from his parents but not much of anything from Bob. He was able to deduce from this, if deduction was the right word, that Bob was probably under some kind of investigation or surveillance. This surveillance seemed to last until late June, at which point Rake started getting letters from Bob again. It was three weeks into July that Rake’s commanding officer, for reasons best known to himself, determined to send Rake back east—in preparation, it was suggested, for deployment to the ETO at some point after the first of the year. Rake, who was not out of his teens yet, did not have the presence of mind and instinct to realize that he was in danger; Bob did realize this, but was for that very reason even happier than Rake was that they would be in the same area again.

            “I’m getting deployed to Fort Dix,” Mena said to Rake in early August. “Isn’t that where you were at first?”

            “It was, yeah,” said Rake. “I’m not getting deployed there again, though; they’re putting me somewhere in Pennsylvania. Closer to where my family lives, actually, than Fort Dix was. God help us all.”

            “Does Debbie get along with your parents, can I ask?” Mena asked.

            “Believe it or not, Debbie actually gets along with them worse than I do,” said Rake. “I don’t think they’re surprised enough by anything I do to be disappointed in me; they still coddle me when they can and try to protect me when they think I need protecting, which I usually don’t.” He flicked some ash from his cigarette into a storm drain; they were in Santa Monica on a day that they both had off, walking through the wealth- and fame-infested streets, not looking up from their feet enough to be sightseers. “Debbie, on the other hand, Debbie they think is a brazen little bitch.”

            “Not how I’d describe her.”

            “Not how much of anyone outside our family would describe her. But apparently she acted differently in high school. They haven’t adjusted what they think of her. They don’t often adjusted what they think of anyone except downwards; it’s much easier to lose their good opinion than to gain it.”

            “What would they think of me?” asked Mena.

            “They’d hate you,” said Rake bluntly. “Someone who lied about her age and what part of the country she was from to get into the military for a war they still think we shouldn’t be involved in? They’d hate you big league.”

            “I don’t believe I’m doing too much of consequence for that war.”

            “I disagree. Would you rather be opening fire or lobbing grenades at some foxhole in Sicily or the Solomon Islands?”

            “I don’t know anymore,” said Mena. “Right now the biggest thing I want is a shower. You think you have dreams and you think you’re high-minded; really you just want to take off this uncomfortable uniform and wash the sweat off your back.”

            “Speak for yourself.”

            “Oh, get lost.”

            “All right, Mena.” Rake laughed a warmer and more easygoing laugh than he intended. “Be as prickly as you like.”

            “It’s what the last year’s made of me is all,” she reassured him.

8.

Woods within Woods

A couple of months into her time at Fort Dix, Mena showered late in the morning on a day whose afternoon she had off so that she could go out to meet Bob and the Ripleys in the woods and do something horrible and grisly. Upon getting to Fort Dix she had, contrary to her expectations, been made a secretary for a male officer whose job it was to administer discharges that occurred on this base. So far Mena had already handled about two dozen “blue” discharges, neither honorable nor dishonorable; of these two or three were for the sorts of things that the Navy shrink had been investigating Bob for earlier in the year. Mena did not particularly like the nature of the work but she did not particularly hate it either. She got along well with Colonel Blackwood and the rest of his staff. Too, against all odds and almost against her will she was growing to like the adventure of her first fall in a cold climate.

            She finished showering, dried off so that the nippy October wind would not chill her to the bones, and got dressed in her off-duty clothes for her ride on a borrowed motorcycle down into the Pines for her first-ever hunting trip. The sky was leaden and only some of the trees around Fort Dix were changing color. She ran into Colonel Blackwood on her way off-post and saluted him. For the first time in her life, as she revved up the Servi-Car that she had borrowed from a plumber in Pemberton, she felt a twinge of pointlessness to the act of shirking her duties this afternoon. It was funny that she would feel it at the act of separating good people, decent people, from their jobs of service to the country and the cause, and had not felt it at the act of helping terrified families know what had happened to their dead or captured sons.

            The Pine Barrens—the Pinelands—the immense flat evergreen forest that covered a million acres in the southern half of New Jersey, was not new to her after two months here. Some people in these parts just called it the Pines, the way Antarctica was known as the Ice to some polar explorers. When Mena had been fifteen, her home economics class had read a selection from a book called The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. It was a book about a family in the Pine Barrens that was, as was supposed, descended from some Revolutionary War hero’s dalliance with an idiotic barmaid on his way home to his wife after a battle. The family was apparently riddled with criminality, ignorance, and disease. According to the book, this was because of inherent deficiencies in their barmaid progenitrix, deficiencies written in deep letters in her genes. It was not Mena’s genes that stirred up anxiously and flickered into wariness as she drove the Servi-Car down the highway through the woods.

            The Pines were mostly pitch pines; the forest was old but the trees were young, risen phoenix-like out of cones that opened in the ashes after wildfires that caught every so often in these regions. From season to season the colors in some parts of the woods apparently barely changed at all; the trees were evergreen, the ponds were blue, the remains of the last generations were black charcoal on beds of white sand. “Sugar sand” was what they called it and it made the frosts come early.

            Mena stopped at a gas station and diner on Route 206 about ten minutes’ drive south of the north-south road’s conjunction with the road west from Pemberton. There was a diner further up near that conjunction too but she had not been hungry earlier in the day. Now it was about time for a late lunch and she figured that she could probably order something that she could eat quickly enough to be at the meeting place with her friends only a few minutes late. The meeting place was called Grace Bible Baptist Church and it was a short distance from Route 206 right in the middle of the Pines in a town called Atsion. From there they would proceed in Bob’s truck, a civilian truck rather than a jeep, to a place where there was supposed to be good deer hunting all through the fall.

            Already feeling a little carnivorous as she thought of the possibility that she might kill something today, Mena ordered a Reuben sandwich with two kinds of lunch meat on the side. The corned beef in the sandwich came, said someone at the counter in a uniform Mena did not recognize, from Uruguay. Reciprocal trade pacts came to mind for Mena. She did not really care very much where the corned beef came from but she felt as if she was doing this man a greater kindness than she realized by listening to him and trying to take in what he was saying.

            The grey day was no longer pallid as she left the diner. There was an odd brightness to it now, as if behind the grey there was vivid blue gently reminding the grey of itself. Mena’s dark hair, worn looser off duty than on, flickered in the corners of her vision as she swept a hand over her forehead in surprise at a sudden breeze. The day was maybe fifty-five degrees and the breeze brought it down below fifty. She was glad she was wearing a coat and wished that she had a hat, although the helmet did help once she got on the motorcycle again.

            By the time she got to Atsion it was the heat of the day—almost sixty degrees. In Hawaii this would have been a breezy midnight. In New Jersey there were crows flying here and there overhead, and a flight of Canada geese leaving hither and yonder Canada for the winter. A few dead leaves, oak, danced out of the pines and across the road on the wind that the motorcycle stirred up. There was not much to Atsion, just a few public buildings without much in the way of private homes around them. There was a largeish reservoir to her right and, to her left, a dirt road winding sinisterly towards a thick, unbroken line of dark trees. She felt as if something was reaching out for her, and she was not as afraid of it as she wanted to be.

            The church was set back a ways from the main road and had a large graveyard from which the trees looked almost as if they were pulling back. Rake and Bob were already there but Debbie was not; Rake had a real hunting rifle with him but Bob was carrying some sort of carbine that you would normally expect to see carted off to the UK along with the infantry or parachutists who were being prepared for the invasion of Europe. Mena had fired guns only two or three times before, while palling around with married male NCOs and their families in California, lining up emptied Spam cans and shooting them off railings like little boys in Westerns.

            She told Rake and Bob this and Bob raised his eyebrows and said “They don’t train you with guns or anything?”

            Mena shook her head. “WACs don’t have firearms training, no, because we’re not supposed to see combat,” she said. “Of course, there are WACs in England and Sicily who’ve died in bombings, but you can’t exactly shoot down a bomb with a carbine, can you?”

            “Spoken like someone who’s never tried,” said Bob with a twinkle in his eye that set Mena at ease considering what an alarming statement this would have been had Bob not been joking.  “Anyway, if you have fired a gun a couple of times, you should be able to get along more or less okay if you just tag along with us.”

            “The thing is,” said Mena, “I’m not sure I want to fire a gun. It might feel too much like combat.” She was unsure if she was saying this because she thought she was too good for it or because she thought she was unequal to it.

            Bob shrugged his shoulders and sat down with his back to the graveyard fence to continue waiting for Debbie. It took her another ten or fifteen minutes to arrive going by Mena’s wristwatch, within which the clouds parted considerably and the high autumn sun poured down upon them. The four of them looked up, all startled, as another flock of geese flew by squawking overhead.

 ❦

Bob drove them deep into the woods, to a place where a narrow river ran between sandy banks under overhanging trees eastward into forests within forests. Then he drove them further, to the end of a dirt road that eventually turned into nothing more than two muddy ruts, going not much of anywhere, with astoundingly thick turf for late October growing in the strip of ground between them. Beyond the end of the dirt road they walked for maybe three-quarters of a mile before coming to an open expanse of golden-brown grass partially covered with dead leaves, on the other side of which was the base of a low wooded hill.

            “We’re here,” Bob said, sotto voce. He waved his arm in a way meant to indicate that they were to lie down on their bellies.

            “You’ve been hunting here before?” Mena asked once they were all lying down, keeping her voice almost but not quite as low as his was.

            “Two weeks ago,” Bob murmured. “Last time I got an afternoon off. A buddy of mine from NAES Lakehurst drove me down. Hadn’t been hunting before since my dad took me about a year before Pearl Harbor.”

            “Does your dad often hunt?” Debbie asked. 

            Bob nodded. “My brother too. Pennsylvania is a hunstman’s state, as I’m sure you two are aware.”

            “Huntsman, What Quarry?” said Mena.

            “…pardon me?” said Rake.

            “Ignore her,” said Bob. “She’s quoting the title of a book. Good book—read parts of it myself.”

            “You and I will have to discuss it, as soon as we’re not lying in wait for deer any longer,” Mena said.

            They relaxed into the lengthening afternoon, and by about a quarter past two by Mena’s watch she had started to feel comfortable, lulled, kind, fuzzy. She felt that somewhere in the woods with them there was something kind, if poor and stupid, protecting them from some mechanical, distant-yet-nearby cruelty. It would have been silly of her, she reminded herself, to think that she was feeling the presence of God here more than she did in any other place, but something about the Pines felt strange to her in the way that prayers and meditations felt strange.

            “A great power is in the Pines,” she whispered to Rake, without knowing why she was whispering it, or why it was Rake to whom she was whispering it.

            “You ever hear about the Jersey Devil?” Rake asked, not loudly, but clearly enough for all four of them to hear.

            “Oh, let’s not get ourselves started on the Jersey Devil,” said Bob, and simultaneously Debbie just said “Horse shit,” distinctly as two separate words. Rake looked at his sister in scandalized surprise, probably at her foul language but perhaps also at her forthrightness.

            “I have heard about the Jersey Devil, a couple weeks ago when this girl who’s a Jersey native was telling me about him in the mess,” said Mena. “They say Decatur shot a cannonball clean through him.”

            “Do you believe in ghosts and devils, Mena?” asked Bob.

            Mena did not answer this except to tell Bob that she thought it was a leading question. The truth was that she did not know the answer herself; she did not want to be thought of, even by herself, as the sort of person who was credulous about unseen forces, especially when the seen, manifest, material forces abroad in the world these days were malevolent enough without needing help. She had laughed and sung along to the suggestion in “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’” that Hitler had been created by the devil as a sort of anti-Adam but it was just that, a suggestion, joking and sly. It was difficult for her to believe that there was any wickedness at work in the world that could not be attributed to mere humanity. What was at work in the woods with them this afternoon did not seem quite human but it did not seem wicked either.

 ❦

Fifteen minutes later, she came to know that it was possible that what was at work in the woods with them was a deer. A magnificently antlered buck strode out of the pines at the base of the low hill opposite and started nudging aside the dead leaves that covered the golden grass. It looked at first like he was about to eat but he seemed—Mena could not say how or why he seemed—to have something on his mind other than mere bodily hunger. She wondered what kind of mind he did have, behind those dark eyes and that prodigious forehead. Suddenly she felt, exultantly, victorious over the buck. The buck suddenly became a representation of forces that she could not fight, not because combat was not allowed to her—she was too perceptive to think of direct combat in a theatre of operations as the only thing that could be done to fight these forces—but because she could not do herself or her country the kindness of becoming a good soldier. This was her quarry, as the real enemy over the sea, still less the deeper Enemy whom she was called on to always already have rejected, never could be. She aimed the rifle that Bob had given her, breathed in and out heavily once or twice, and fired.

            The buck bolted; she knew that she had not missed entirely because a splatter of blood lay lurid on the grass, but the shot had gone wide enough that the wound was superficial and the buck was still able to run swiftly away from them along the glade. Mena, in instinct rather than on purpose, stood up almost entirely before Rake and Debbie managed to get her to lie down again; her blood was pumping hard in her body and her mind was awash with a combination of guilt, frustration, and worry. She breathed, too heavily, for several minutes before finally calming down. By now the shadows were starting to lengthen.

 ❦

They ended up getting one small doe that day. Debbie, of all people, took her down. It was only after she came down that they realized, in horror, and more or less all at once, that there was no way they were going to be able to get her back to the truck without getting blood all over their clothes. It was at this point that Mena’s faculties shut off.

            Five seconds later she woke up. She had not slept well the night before, and she had barely noticed herself falling asleep in the truck bouncing along the road back towards the church. She could not remember the walk back to the truck for several minutes, although she assumed, could only assume, that she had been awake for it. Eventually she remembered, and sat up, and said that she had to be sick out the window.

            “This was a waste of time, and of the money we spent getting here, and of the deer’s life,” Bob was saying angrily, apparently to Debbie, while Mena swam naked in that narrow river to get the sweat and vomit and blood off of herself. They had decided to all wash themselves off in turn; Rake had gone before Mena, and was currently sitting on a large stump facing away from her just as once he had at the sea inlet in California.

            “It’s a waste of all our lives,” Debbie said, and it was clear from her manner of speaking that she did not intend to placate Bob by saying this.

            “I guess it is,” said Bob with a heavy sigh. At this point Mena emerged from the water and started drying herself off and getting dressed while Bob undressed and got in. Mena was so exhausted, her nerves so rattled, that it took next to no effort to stop herself from peeking at someone whom she could remember thinking of as attractive only a few hours ago.

            Once everybody had washed and dried and redressed they all felt better somehow, in terms of mental hygiene as well as bodily. They drove back to the church and Mena bade her friends a more or less happy farewell and got back on the Servi-Car. Just before she drove off the four of them arranged to meet at the Stationmaster’s Place in one week’s time, assuming all of them could make it; if not, they could, of course, keep each other in the picture by phone.

            Right around the time she passed back through Vincentown it occurred to Mena to wonder about the fact that she had been in the water on a fifty-five-degree afternoon, had dried herself on rough cloth not meant for drying oneself on, was driving at speed on a motorcycle, and did not feel cold. She was still thinking about this, wondering about what it implied or whether it implied anything at all, when she got back to Fort Dix. The light was just leaving the sky and she was already starting to feel tired. She changed clothes in an almost-empty barracks and lay down for about half an hour before wandering to the WACs’ mess for dinner.

 ❦

Over the two or three weeks after her excursion into the Pines, Mena began to realize that she had suddenly gained a strong affinity for routes and pathways. She started exploring Fort Dix and the surrounding woods and fields alone and without maps when she had a few hours to spare for it, and by the middle of November she could navigate the WAC barracks and neighboring parts of the base literally with her eyes closed.

            Colonel Blackwood took her off writing out discharges and put her back to work writing condolence letters for people whose family members had been killed overseas. At one point she found herself, to her own amazement, writing a condolence letter for the death of a WAC in Africa. One Staff Sergeant Claudia Dunphy had had some bad water at a Tunisian bar and had ended up expiring from a microbe of some description two weeks later. Even though her death was not in any way connected to any action that might help win the war, even action on the part of somebody else as in friendly fire deaths, Mena still felt convicted by writing out this letter about her—oddly, not as convicted as she would have felt before her journey into the Pines.

            Around the beginning of Advent Mena was called into the office of the woman who had replaced her helping Colonel Blackwood manage the separations. Warrant Officer Hazel Vorys was one of the older WACs on post here; she was in her early forties and had nicotine-stained teeth behind thin lips on which she used much less lipstick than did most of the younger woman. She had pepper-colored hair and a steady, plodding gait. When Mena had first arrived in New Jersey, Vorys had briefly been her immediate superior, and now she commanded a typing pool of four or five WACs handling a workload that had once been that of Mena and one or two other people elsewhere on the base. Mena had seen her around, but not spoken to her for about three weeks, when on a cold early-winter day of thin but insistent sleet she was called in and had handed to her a piece of paper on which CPL ROLAND A. RIPLEY, ARMY, ADMINISTRATIVE DISCHARGE HOMOSEXUALITY; PO3 ROBIN H. JEFFERSON, NAVY, ADMINISTRATIVE DISCHARGE NERVOUS SHOCK had been written with a red pen in block letters.

            “These are people you knew well at one time, aren’t they?” Vorys asked.

            “They’re still people I know well,” said Mena. “I wish this surprised me, but it doesn’t really. Are you telling me this in the interests of friendship?”

            “Your friendship with them or my friendship with you? You and I aren’t really friends, Corporal Gentili. It would adulterate the chain of command if nothing else.” Vorys sighed, set the piece of paper down on her desk, flicked her glance out the window into the thickening sleet and then back to Mena’s face, and cracked her knuckles loudly. “Yes, I’m telling you this in the interests of your friendship with them. Ripley’s sexual aberrations caused…problems within his unit, and Jefferson’s nervous shock just set in quite recently, and all of this came on the heels of your excursion to the Pine Barrens with them.”

            “What are you saying?” asked Mena.

            “That you might want to watch your back for a while,” said Vorys. “And maybe start giving some thought to what you think you’ll do after the war.”

            “What are you going to do after the war?” asked Mena on impulse.

            “Go back to my husband, hopefully, if he makes it out okay also,” said Vorys. “Next stop, menopause, and not a moment too soon.”

 ❦

Mena was, in fact, given her administrative discharge soon after this, on December 15, 1943, after two sessions on successive days with an Army psychiatrist named Bill Upton. Upton went by “Dr. Bill” and had narrow bright blue eyes. He diagnosed Mena with a number of complaints that were individually all quite mild but added up to an overall picture of somebody no longer temperamentally equipped for the rigors of military service.

            The next day, Mena went to see Vorys again. Vorys was sitting at her desk clack-clacking away on her typewriter, and seemed to have recently had a haircut. She oozed authority and competence. In order to get to her office Mena had had to pass through the typing pool of other WACs under her command, and they all oozed authority and competence as well. Clearly she had been unprepared and had been caught unready, her shoes unpolished, her wick untrimmed.

            “You look like you want to ask me something,” said Vorys, looking up at her.

            “I wanted to apologize,” said Mena, “for never really getting to know you. I feel as if we don’t know each other at all.”

            “We didn’t notice each other until very recently,” said Vorys. “Besides, do you really think we need to know each other? Do you need to know somebody to admire them? Or even to love them?”

            “Do you admire me?” Mena asked.

            Vorys shook her head softly, or in such a way that had shaking one’s head been speech it would have been soft. “You are twenty years old, an age that you falsely claimed to have attained last year so that you could become a WAAC,” she said. “I don’t make a habit of admiring women half my age; it would distract me from the kindness of my own age, an age that the world we live in does not want me to consider kind.”

            “I understand,” Mena said in the certainty that one day she would, if she lived long enough. Vorys nodded at her benevolently, and Mena took her leave and walked back out through the typing pool and towards the barracks, very likely for the last time.

 ❦

Two days before Christmas, Mena was in the Pine Barrens again. After her separation a week before she had stayed, scandalously, at Bob’s apartment in West Philadelphia, trying to come up with the money to take a plane or train back to California and make her way home to Hawaii from there. There was a thin crust of hoar on the ground in the Pines and Mena was there to help Rake and Bob shop for cars. The lot was one of those places that always seemed to do good trade even though it was hard to tell whom exactly in the surrounding area it was selling to, and the man who showed them the various used Fords and Pontiacs was well-groomed and seemed to be wearing a waistcoat under his winter jacket.

            “How much do you want for it?” Rake asked about the fourth car they looked at.

            “Says five hundred on the hood of the car, don’t it?” the man said. “Might could do four-fifty in a pinch. Won’t go lower than four hundred.”

            “How about eighty dollars?” said Bob.

            The man looked pale and for a second or two seemed to have dubious intentions towards Rake and Bob, but then he said “Sold” in the same tone of voice that Tom Lori used to talk to Mena’s brothers on the baseball diamond.

            “Where are you guys going again?” Mena asked Rake and Bob once the right paperwork had been signed.

            “Mexico,” Rake said. “We’re going to lie on a beach in a hot country for a while forgetting our troubles and maybe come back and do some civilian war work after a few months if we can get it. Or maybe we’ll stay abroad. The entire hemisphere’s declared war at this point. I’ve heard there’s quite a Brazilian war effort going on.”

            “Seems like an awfully roundabout way to get into the civvy workforce, but okay,” said Mena. “Suit yourselves. You could probably use a vacation anyway.”

            “Almost an exile,” Rake said. “Can’t face my family. Bob can’t face my family either.”

            “Nate can wire us money,” Bob said. “He’d stick up for me like that. It won’t be the end of the world. Say,” he said, turning to Mena, “you want to make your way home to Hawaii, yes?” Mena nodded. “If you come with us as far as Texas, you can try and catch a train west from there,” said Bob. “Probably cost you a lot less.”

            “Debbie’s on the West Coast again too,” said Rake, “so you could have a friend there to meet you in LA.”

            “All right,” said Mena with absolutely no consideration and no thought for her health or for tomorrow. She could have her things shipped to her; she could bum around in California waiting for them to arrive and find a way to get a boat home in a month or two. Things might, someday, in some way, be looking up for her. Surely somewhere she would find out where she belonged.

            She hopped into the back seat of the old Ford and left her last tether forgotten among the Pines.

9.

The Yankee Dollar Crosses the Bar 

“I’m never going to get off this rock, am I?” Mena asked Kara just before sunup.

            “It’s not so bad, is it?” Kara asked her.

            “It is in fact driving home how good I had it in some ways in the WAC,” Mena said acridly. “Just two or three days ago some soused boat pilot staggered through the shipyard and grabbed me by the wrist and planted one on me just like that, then offered me money for it.”

            “Lots of guys pay for it,” Kara said vaguely.

            “I know that, and I don’t approve of it, and besides, can you really imagine someone paying me for it? I can’t, or at least I couldn’t until the other day.”

            “And what does that mean to you?” Kara asked. “I’m glad you didn’t have to spend much time around normal men for a year and a bit, but for most of the rest of us the War hasn’t quite given us that freedom in the first place. I hear from lots of people who seem to know what they’re talking about that war can give you meaning. I think it’s only the Enemy who really thinks that war can set you free.”

            Mena thought about this fitfully and exhaustedly for about five minutes of grey silence in the grey light of earliest morning. It made sense to her, enough sense that she was forced to wonder if what she had really been after was freedom at all. She thought that it might have been silence, or the ability to be silent, that she had really wanted, but silence and solitude had made her seem antisocial to Dr. Bill and a renewed capacity for silence and reflection after winging that buck in the Pines had gotten to a point where she herself had wondered if there was something slightly the matter with her. And now through the grey skies the golden sunrise was calling to her. If the sun had been an animal, it would have been a bird, free and with a loud song.

            “I think that what I’d go to war for isn’t freedom exactly,” Mena said softly, “but it sure as hell isn’t anything that’s not freedom either. I definitely want to be free from these types of men. I’m sure Bob Jefferson wants to be free from these types of white people, white people like the Ripley parents and possibly even like Debbie Ripley from what I ended up thinking of her. And maybe in Mexico he will be. I wish him the best of luck.”

            “Okay, maybe it is bad,” said Kara. Her voice wafted up out of her with something like a pungent tang to it. “Maybe it really is bad, and here I am hoping that it isn’t really so bad and trying to make you think that it’s not. Maybe we’ve been lied to. Maybe we really can’t escape from the things we want to escape from by being good girls or by being good soldiers and serving our country.”

            It occurred to Mena all of a sudden that all of their history, possibly all history everywhere, had been a history of deathtraps, death matches, and narrow escapes. Kara had escaped by dint of technicality from internment; Mena had escaped into the WAAC, the WAAC had escaped from her grasp by becoming the WAC and a real part of the Army, and Mena had escaped from the Army, which was death to a real enemy, into the Pine Barrens, and from the Pine Barrens into the long journey home. Rake and Bob had been killed by their discharges and escaped their deaths into Mexico. Rake and Debbie had previously been killed by their family; Bob had, perhaps, not been killed by his, not in the same way. Mena had returned to the trap of home and the fatal combat with homebound adulthood and womanhood; Kara had evidently been caught up in that combat the whole time.

            Mena picked up a children’s book that her sister had brought over when she had visited with Mena’s niece and nephew and that had ended up in Mena’s room for some reason. She flipped it open and the first sentence she read went I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. Mena hurled the book across the room and it collided with the bakelite rosary hanging from her vanity mirror. The mirror cracked at the impact from the corner of the book and the rosary fell down to the floor with an exultant hiss. Mena clutched herself and huddled in her bed and started screaming as the sun rose higher. She was not screaming because she was sad, or heartsick, or angry, or scared. She was screaming because she had just been told something critical, undeniable, and beautiful, but utterly impossible to accept.

            “I’m amazed,” Kara said after Mena stopped screaming—Kara had her arms around her and they were rocking back and forth—“that your parents or little brother didn’t come bursting in here to say what was the matter.”

            “I’ve been screaming in nightmares in the early morning lately,” said Mena, “or so I’m told.”

            “What do you have nightmares about?”

            “Being useless. Not being able to live my life the best way I can. Not having a good death, I guess, in that we’re all a little bit dead, I think, if we’ve been at war.”

            “I don’t think of myself as a little bit dead,” said Kara, “but I think I see what you’re getting at.”

            “Do you? I don’t. I’m just saying what comes to mind.” Mena shrugged against Kara’s shoulders. “I want to help,” she said. “I want to do what I can.” Then, in a horrified voice, because she had grown into some understanding of what it meant to say this, she said “I want to serve.”

 ❦

Kara told Mena that she had been considering becoming a WAC herself, and she showed her a pamphlet called Someone to Be Proud of: Your Daughter in the WAC. Mena had to hold back tears at the appearance in the pamphlet of the phrase “your soldier daughter.” There was some call she’d neglected.

            Two weeks later Kara attempted to enlist in the WAC and was rejected with no explanation as to why. It was obvious to anyone who knew Kara’s situation that it could not but be because of her ancestry. Mena tried to reenlist but had no luck.

            It took until the very end of the war for them to find work of the kind they wanted again. In that span of time they worked in the boatyard and grew to enjoy and value it at last. They went to dances when they could, especially after the curfew was abolished, and Mena dated Tom Lori for about nine or ten months before they realized that neither of them was what the other was really looking for and went their separate ways. Kara met a man called Jim Chun and married him in very short order; they met for the first time around the time of D-Day and married around the turn of the year. Kara did not stop working right away after she got married, and in February of ’45 Jim was shipped out with the Marine Corps to some reef or atoll in the Western Pacific in preparation for the envisioned final assault on the Japanese Home Islands. After Jim left, Kara and Mena started spending time as social hangers-on to some of the WACs in Honolulu, more for reasons of getting to know new people than because they were still hung up on not being able to be WACs themselves. At one point Mena got her hands on the copy of something called Sex Hygiene Course (for Officers and Officer Candidates) and she, Kara, and Mena’s younger sister Billie spent two or three nights reading it together in Mena’s bedroom and giggling incessantly as if they were five years younger and sneaking dirty magazines from Lee’s Store.

            Mena’s ship finally came in during the feverish, swooning summer between V-E Day and V-J Day, when she heard that a Navy buddy of one of her older brothers was going to be involved in the probable occupation of Japan and wanted a civilian secretary for some reason. Mena had her brother put in a good word for her and it quickly became clear that this other guy considered her a strong candidate for the position despite the fact that she had a blue discharge. She had heard stories of other people looking for civilian work being turned down because their discharges were not honorable but apparently the friend of her brother’s had a sister who had a small-scale breakdown very similar to Mena’s and so he understood.

            Mena shipped out to be a secretary in Japan on a bright morning in the later part of the year, stable psychically speaking, single, shriven, and looking forward to what life in a foreign clime might bring her. The violence of the Bombings, and by extension of the Occupation, weighed on her soul a great deal, but she was resolved very earnestly to do what good she could. She felt, finally, that she would be able to if she tried.

The End

Summer 2019