Four for a Quarter: Fictions

Dutch Boy

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SOAP OPERA

32-V-1

If you ask him, her husband finds it strange that she paints and repaints so often the living room of their house. If you ask her, and he never does, she would not tell you the real reason she paints and repaints the living room of their house. She paints and repaints the living room when she believes she will, finally, break it off with her lover of long standing, a man she has slept with, off and on, for a dozen years now. Sometimes she paints after she has told him it is over, painting as a distraction, or painting as a reward, or painting as a dramatization that she has moved on, but, by the time she finishes, she has called him or he has called her. Inhaling the heady odor of the drying paint, she weeps into the phone to say she wants to meet again. At other times, she begins to paint to build up momentum to tell him it is over, the painting a kind of mental conditioning, a signal for her to signal her lover that their affair must come to an end. It is perhaps the thick rich smell of the paint, the vapor of its evaporation, that is the trigger — canned inspiration. That perfume's endnote is the endnote of the affair. Or, perhaps, the end is signaled by the visual stimuli of blur, the blur the paint-mixer makes at the paint store as it mixes the cans — the cans vice-locked in place with the thumbscrews, plates, and springs. The electric motor whirs, the slurring glug of the liquid inside the cloud of can, that metallic blubbering blurring. Or there is the folding and the unfolding of the paint-splattered drop cloth with its sloppy archeological record of the past paintings, the drips and smears in stark contrast to the pristine walls whose color never really has time to age or dull or even fade. Sometimes the paint hasn't had time to dry, has barely even dried before she begins to mask out the window sills and doorjambs with the blue, blue masking tape whose sound, that long zipped ripping, also contributes to this ritual of change — the whole elaborate complex of her particular compulsion that the larger project, consciously and unconsciously, conspicuously represents. To mask. It is complicated. It has never been easy for her, the affair, and the energy expended in meeting, the anxiety of discovery, and the persistence of guilt — all of it goes into the walls regularly. Painting draws this thing to a close, and painting promises a new beginning. Clean slate. Eggshell finish, of course. And painting, the sheer act of painting, is a soothing contemplative repetitive exercise, an applied yoga of application, that allows her to meditate on the course of the affair, its ups and downs, her marriage, its lefts and rights. As she paints she eyes the various shades of aching grief, the tint of ecstatic pleasure. She paints with brush and roller. She stirs and stirs, watches the paint slide down the stick, drip, like paint, into the soup of this occasion's color. The drips drip, disturb the surface tension on the surface of the paint in the can. She knows, now, these four walls intimately. Here the slight buckle of the load-bearing, there a water stain that she never quite seals or covers. She's spackled again, patched the holes made by the picture hanging. The wall opposite the window warms differently than the wall with the window. Painting the four walls again brings her face to face with memories of painting these four walls before. In that corner she thought this, or along the floorboard, there, she thought that, and when she gets to those places again with this new paint she will remember what she was thinking two or three coats ago and remember remembering, just a coat before, what she was thinking and remembering about her thinking now all mapped on the wall, a location that coordinates with the wiring in the gray matter of her brain. Here around this outlet she thought of her thinking, thinking about her gray brain. She loads the brush — always a new brush — to begin again to paint the living room. The furniture pushed to the center of the room covered by the dappled drop cloths that form a kind of scale model of an idealized mountain range, its glacial folds falling to the floor covered by the new unspoiled ice-blue tarp.

MARBLEHEAD

32-V-2

It will be a gray this time, another gray. She is thinking this, this gray, even while her lover is finishing behind her. Her hands are flat against the wall, pushing the wall to push back against him as he pushes into her. She has already come. The wall in front of her is a gray. She can't be sure. There's a trick of the light in the room as the late afternoon shadows break across the surface before her eyes. She senses an unevenness, what seems to be another kind of shadow, a shadow of the drywall in the space between her spread arms, flexing, springing back against him. No amount of paint can disguise it, a sloppy application of the mud, that lack of sanding. Tomorrow she will look through the paint chips for the right gray. There are hundreds of chips, each tweaked to register the slight variation of brightness, intensity, saturation. After she has been with him, she likes to paint the living room of her house. She has lost count of the number of times she has painted the living room. She has been seeing him a dozen years. There must be a dozen dozens of layers of paint, a gross of layers. How many layers will it take to contract the volume of the room, to build up, to fill in the in of the room? She likes to stay with the neutral colors, the whites and all the off-whites, the grays, and the other grays. Other colors bleed through the new paint, taking too long to cover, needing too many extra coats to cover. The paint's been rolled on here in this room or maybe sprayed. He is moving faster and his hands have left her breasts and moved to her hips. And in the mix, she thinks she sees, some sparkle, a mica fleck. At least it isn't paper with its patterns and seams. Her husband never asks why she paints the living room over and over. He compliments her on the room once it is done as she washes the brushes in the sink, asks her if he can move back the furniture. Her lover likes to make love to her after she has made love to her husband. She doesn't ask him why. The color of come, she thinks, is the color of this wall, the wall she is looking at as her lover finishes behind her, inside her. It lacks the pearlescence of semen though, cloudy nacreous mix of light and its reflection, the wet paint sheen that encapsulates the flat depthless milt beneath the shiny marble glass skin. She likes to watch it dry. The come. The paint too. She sits for hours in the living room, after she's finished painting it once again, to watch it take on its color, steep and deepen. Sand. Stone. Marble. Mountain. She imagines that a woman somewhere thinks of the names for all the grays, a kind of poetry. Now, he tells her when he is about to, stops, holds still, then does, waits, waits, waits then slides out of her. She lunges away, disconnects, no longer up on her toes, collapses forward, falls onto the wall as if the wall emits its own gravitational pull. She's drawn in, adheres. She presses her whole body along the wall, flattens herself against it, wants to pass right through it into the next room. She turns her head to the side to feel its cool color, feel its pallor, the pigment rub off on her breasts, her belly and thighs, her flushed cheek.

MT. MCKINLEY

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v

At the first session of each new Congress the representative from President McKinley's home district in Ohio rises to take the floor and introduces legislation to retain the mountain's appellation, preventing it from being renamed Denali for another two years. The measure is accompanied by additional remarks concerning the mountain to be read into the record.

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The mountain's gray silhouette indicates two major summits, twin peaks, the southern one the highest, and reveals a massif with a melodramatic ridgeline of lesser ascending and descending slopes out of which flow four major glaciers, variations of the same denouement.

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On a ridge near the summit of Denali, the Japan Alpine Club has established a meteorological observatory that was donated to The University of Alaska. The weather station is one of only two such installations in the world located above 18,000 feet. Japanese newlyweds consummate their marriages at lodges in the shadow of Denali as the northern lights, the aurora borealis, unfold overhead, in the belief that such conditions are fortuitous for the resulting pregnancies as well as therapeutic for those who have been unable, until now, to conceive.

v

Meanwhile, it is the spring solstice in Alaska. Each succeeding twenty-four-hour period sees an additional five minutes of sunlight added to the day. As the northern hemisphere begins to tip toward the sun in spring, shadows lengthen in the folds found on the distant mountain. The serrated ridge of Denali holds onto the increasing sunlight the longest, an incision of the lengthening shadow etched next to the crest line, rising up to the cloudless sky. The sharply defined horizon tilts south, soon to deny, by summer, the sun's sunset.

THE EDGE OF NIGHT

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She changes out of her painting clothes — a plaid flannel shirt and actual white (well, once they were white) cut-off-at-the-knees painter's pants — and catches herself in the mirror, pasted together in broad fields of skin. The parts of her body that were exposed as she painted, her hands and arms, her face and hair, her lower legs, are splotched with gray paint. Dried, the paint has taken on the texture of the pores beneath it, scaled and creased and puckered where it has splashed on her elastic, sliding, scaling skin. Her skin is like the skin old paint generates when left in an old can, a pudding's skin, the color and the medium separating beneath the rubbery suspended crust at the top, a fossil liquid. She rubs off what she can, the fine hair of her forearms snagging in the crumbs of erased paint. In the failing light, her body in the mirror reflects swathes of gray planes, swatches of gray strokes. A sheet of gray on her belly folds under at a jutting hipbone. The tops of her thighs race down her legs, V to the bright dollops of her knees. Her collarbones are cut-out scallops, sloughed epaulets of contracting light. She's contracting too, flattening, an illusion. Over her shoulder, her shoulder blade fans out, ribbed with the weak pattern the window's blind projects. The weakening available light seeps in in the dusk. Paint on her skin picks up what's left of the light, lights up what gloss there is, the speckled constellation along the arm, a milky way of milky paint along the shin. Her forehead is a fresco, a wall, a white-washed wall. Her left cheek has been redrawn, is disconnected from her face, slides down her chin. It is a kind of careless camouflage, this sloppy paint splatter in the dark. She is becoming hard to see. She can't even see herself. She is breaking up, broken up, in bits. She has left her lover again. In the shower, the paint dissolves, peels. It is water-based. She scrubs, likes the feeling, the exfoliation, flaying the same paint that in the living room downstairs is shrinking microns as it dries, to fit a new thin skim on the walls. For a long time she had thought that the Dutch Boy of the paint was the same Dutch boy of legend who patches a dam with his finger, and she wondered what that had to do with paint. But she looked closely at Dutch Boy's Dutch boy on the can. He sits there topped with the hat and bobbed haircut, in the blousy blouse and blousy coveralls, the wooden shoes, holding up a loaded paintbrush like a torch. She supposes it is in a Flemish style, this Dutch Boy, all light and shadow. A brown study. In the shower, she imagines she is the girl on the salt box in the rain, the salt girl running as the paint begins to run. With her finger, she draws through the beads of water adhering to the tiles of the shower stall. As the finger moves, the beads come together, streak and smear, follow the gesture she paints. She pictures a picture of a brushstroke made up of brushstrokes. The swipes of water shatter back into quivering beads. The shower steams. She is made of salt or she is made of the color of salt and she dissolves and is dissolving in the rain, drains down the drain. The Dutch Boy is painting, painting the long wall of the dike that divides the land from the Zuiderzee, the Zuiderzee that disappears in the Dutch distance. And now the thin layer of soap she has applied to her body the color of the color of — but in this light it is hard to tell its color. It begins to peel in sheets as well. It runs. And as it drains, it assumes the spiral habit it has as it disappears in the shadows at her feet. She thinks: it will be that thin layer of paint that holds back that wall of all that water waiting to find its own true straight level.

Four in Hand

WINDSOR

I have always tied my father's ties. At the time I started tying my father's ties, wide ones were in style. My father bought big wide ones in woolly fabrics, ones with length. He liked the knobby triangle of the Windsor knot. That's what he had me tie. It was like a fist at his throat. After I tied the tie, I slid the knot down along the narrow end, leaving it knotted, making a loop big enough to slip over my head. I gave the tie to my father. This went on for years. It went on until the day my father died. I learned to tie the ties from following the diagrams printed on a pamphlet I got at the department store where my father bought the ties. “Dad,“ I said, “this is easy. Just look into the mirror and follow the directions.“ He directed me to hang the tied ties on a hook in his closet. I'd tie three or four of them at a time. This wasn't good for the ties. It ruined them to leave them knotted like that. The Windsor was in fashion when I started tying my father's ties, a big wad of cloth at his throat. Then that look went out of fashion, and the tie widths and fabric changed. But then ties got wider once more, and my father looked okay again.

BOW

I myself wear a bowtie when I wear a tie at all. Most people think the bowtie is hard to tie, but it's not. It is the same knot everyone knows and uses when tying a shoelace. It's just in a different place. Under your chin. I told my father that. He watched me tie a knot in the mirror. I poked one bow through the loose knot. He had taught me how to tie my shoes. He used his thumb to make the loop. My favorite part of tying a bowtie is holding the loops and the two unlooped ends at the same time, drawing the knot tight in the middle. And I like how easily it falls apart when you untie it simply by pulling one end. I thought I would wear one when we buried my father, but I thought better of it and went with a half Windsor, a neat and subdued knot.

HALF WINDSOR

In the mail, I got boxes of untied ties. Sometimes these were my father's new purchases, but, more often, they were gifts I had given him or ties I had tied years ago for him that had come untied somehow and that he needed retied. Those ties were wrecked with wrinkles, and when I tied them, I could never tie them in such a way that the creases fell and crimped where they had before. After my father died, I undid the lot of these same ties, ironed the ones I could, and gave them to the Salvation Army. Once he called in a panic. He had a new tie he needed to tie. I was a thousand miles away. So I looked in a mirror and tied a tie talking to him while he followed along. My head and shoulder squeezed the phone to my ear, my neck craned. He followed along on the other end of the line. It was hard. I could hear the silk slapping the phone's mouthpiece. I could hear him breathing. I thought a half Windsor would work, depleted as it is of wrapping and tucking. My hands moved by themselves at my throat. I heard my voice and I heard my father's voice repeating what I was saying in the silence between the words I was saying.

FOUR IN HAND

“I can't do it,“ he said at last. And he never would learn, he said. I told him it was easy, especially the four in hand. Just wrap it around and tuck it back up, under, and through. That is what I tied when I tied the tie he wore in his coffin. The tie was new and polyester. It will last forever, I thought. The department store pamphlet I have with directions for tying the different knots said that the four in hand was popularized by King Edward the VII. Think of that. I watched my father sometimes as he slipped a tied tie over his head. It ruins the ties to keep them tied. He slid the knot up the narrow end. He folded down his collar and flicked his fingers through his hair to fluff it up. He turned to me, and I straightened the knot snug at the collar. For a second, I pressed my hand flat on his starched chest beneath the two ends of the tie and made sure it all looked all right.

Antebellum

THE PRESIDENT'S MANSION

The story goes that the president's wife, brandishing a broom on the veranda, shooed away elements of the Iowa Cavalry sent to burn the college. The event is re-enacted each fall. The dragoons slump in their saddles, exhausted by the hard ride and the day's fighting. They watch a woman race back and forth on the porch above them like a carved figure wound up inside a cuckoo clock bursting from its doors on the hour, while their mounts, nearly blown, shit on the trampled flower beds in the formal gardens.

GORGAS HALL

They'll tell you that back then this brick building was the college commissary, and it was saved because the Yankees were hungry and thirsty after burning the rest of the college. Today, it's used mainly as a venue for fancy weddings where the young women in the bridal parties wear the antique hoopskirts and crinolines of the time before the war. Around back, next to the ongoing archaeological excavation, the wood privy is still intact, or has been reconstructed exactly, and the students working the site watch as a bride fits herself and her organdy train into the tiny neoclassical house beneath the magnolia.

THE OLD OBSERVATORY

That night, the flames from the college still burning brightly made any star in the sky impossible to see. The guidon bearer, bivouacked there, curried his horse beneath the cracked copper dome where the telescope, long before scrapped and melted for its metal, once stood. Even then, the college kept a little museum of curiosities there. The corporal ended up claiming as contraband a shard of iron like a chunk of grapeshot shrapnel that had, one night before the war, fallen from a very starry sky, striking a house in Pickens County and lodging, finally, in the headboard of the owner's bed while the owner and his wife lay there staring up at the ceiling.

THE LITTLE ROUND HOUSE

Legend has it that this Gothic octagon was the only building of any military value at the college. It was built as a guardhouse and lookout and seems, considering the destruction, to have failed miserably in both those roles. The federal troops used it as a surgery where today, still, a hand-lettered sign indicates the bloodstains of a half dozen or so hurried amputations. From the roof, the signal corps tethered one of their new balloons, which floated above the smoldering ground for weeks, its observer gazing over the green horizon for relief or reinforcements which, in both cases, failed to materialize.

Four Found Postcard Captions

THE WADSWORTH-LONGFELLOW HOUSE

Portland, Maine

1.

This most historic house in the State was built in 1785 by Major General Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who spent much of his life here.

2.

The Boy's Room was occupied by all the Longfellow boys at various times. Here the Poet wrote his first poem. Here also is the old trundle bed and the scarred school desk.

3.

The Rainy Day Room. Its chief interest is in the old desk on which the Poet wrote, in 1841, “The Rainy Day.“ “It rains, and the wind is never weary.“

4.

The Guest Room of the house contains the four-poster bed and rocking chairs of the General's wife, Elizabeth. To this room the Poet brought his bride, and here, later, the Poet's father died.

Quadratic

A

That year, Mr. Clark taught four sections of high school algebra. The classes met the first four periods of the day, finishing up before we juniors, who took the course, went to lunch in the basement cafeteria. Pretty early in the semester we noticed Mr. Clark, who is dead now, had developed a persistent and pervasive habit of speech.

Some of us were also taking speech and debate. The teacher there, Mr. Schultz, would have us do what he called a clapping speech. The clapping speech was meant to illuminate the little things we all say and do without thinking. Like saying “um“ or “you know“ or looking up at the ceiling when you are trying to think of the next word or licking your lips during the pauses between words in your prepared text. Mr. Schultz listened to us give a speech — mine was on “Harvesting the Riches of the Sea“—and while you were talking, he picked out a particular tic you were repeating — mine was fiddling with a shirt button, I think. And then he clapped his hands together, startlingly loud. You'd jump, but you would have to go on giving your speech, all the time trying to figure out what it was you were doing.

Mr. Clark said “for it“ at the end of his sentences. He did it so many times that you would be clapping all the time if he was giving a clapping speech. He didn't seem to notice. The “for it“ was kind of a vestigial phrase. “This is what you would do for it.“ It got worse as the semester wore on, to the point where he would chalk out an equation on the board, turn back to the class, and say simply “for it,“ pointing at the conclusion, the punctuation of some sentence he was speaking to himself. And then he began saying “for it, for it,“ sending my classmates, who had begun counting the number of for its, into fits of laughter. “Hey, what's so funny, for it?“ he asked. It was something. He retired the next year.

B

All the classes were driven to distraction by this. Everyone was keeping track. We would compare figures at lunch. Mark Maxwell organized the effort and designated an official counter for each class. At lunch each day, he posted the final tally on the cafeteria bulletin board — the aggregate numbers, the total daily accumulation. He kept running charts, the bars of the graphs in different colors, of the trends and averages, the correlation with the days of the week and the weather. There was a special category for the double for it and a place for a triple for it that never did come.

Mr. Clark commented often on our attentiveness. We hung on to his every word. We waited through his long string of explanations and proofs about squares and their roots to get to the periodic moment where he would conclude with a for it. We watched the scorekeeper in our class make another hash mark in his notebook. We looked for patterns at lunch. Did the frequency diminish over time? Increase? Some tried to cook the books, asking questions about the material designed to have Mr. Clark reflect meditatively. This made it all the more likely he would utter the formula.

X

Mr. Clark gave an assignment to create our own quadratic equations. We all used i and t as variables. At the board, Mr. Clark reduced and canceled our redundant integers, our camouflage of multiples. He drew the final = and solved for x. The answer was always the same: x=4it. He tapped the chalk on the board a couple of times, dotting the i, and turned to us triumphantly, “The solution is four eye tee, for it.“ We applauded.

C

We didn't learn a thing, of course, about quadratics. It's true what they say about high school math. I never needed it in life after high school. I am writing this, years later, on graph paper I found lying around. I use it to keep the lines of my handwriting more or less level. I thought I would jot down this memory before it got away from me. I like filling in the spaces of the grid, one letter to a square, a word or two or three in each ten-by-ten box of squares. I am doing this early in the morning before my kids wake up. They find pretty much everything I do now hard to understand.

Four Men in Uniform

MEAT

Because I could play baseball, I never went to Korea.

I was standing on the dock in San Francisco with my entire company. We stood at parade rest, wearing helmets, loaded down with winter and summer gear. We were ready to embark. My name was called. I remember saying excuse me to the men in rank as I tried to get by with my equipment. Then I sat on my duffel and watched them file aboard, bumping up the side of the ship, the cables flexing. There was rust in the bilge. I could hear the water below me. Sailors laughed way over my head. It only took a few hours. There were some people there to wave good-bye, though not for the soldiers since our shipping out was something secret.

Nothing was ever said. I was transferred to another unit where all the troops were baseball players. I played second base on the Third Army team. I batted seventh and bunted a lot. We traveled by train from one base to another in Texas, Georgia, and on up into New Jersey for the summer. We had a few cars to ourselves including a parlor with an open platform. The rest of the train was made up of reefers full of frozen meat. The train was aluminum and streamlined. We could stand in the vestibules, or in the open doorway of the baggage car where we kept the bags of bats and balls and the pinstriped uniforms hung on rods, and look out over the pink flat deserts. There wouldn't be a cinder from the engine, the train's wheels a blur. You would see up ahead on the slow curves the white smoke of the whistle trailing back over the silver boxcars of meat, and then you would hear the whistle. Some cars still needed to be iced, so we'd stop in sad little towns, play catch and pepper while the blocks melted in the sun and the sawdust turned dark and clotty on the platform. We'd hit long fly balls to the local kids who hung around. We left them broken bats to nail and tape.

The meat was our duty. It was what we said we did even though everyone knew we played baseball. The Army wanted us to use frozen meat instead of fresh. We ran the tests in messes to see if the men could tell the difference. We stood by the garbage cans and took the plates to scrape and separate the scraps of meat to weigh for waste. A red plate meant the meat was fresh. The bone, the chewed gristle, the fat. I picked it out of the cold peas and potatoes. Sometimes whole pieces would come back, gray and hard. The gravy had to be wiped off before the meat went on the scale. Those halls were huge, with thousands of men hunched over the long tables eating. We stood by watching, waiting to do our job.

It made no difference, fresh or frozen, to the men. This pleased the Army. Things were changing. Surplus from the war was being given to the UN for the action in Korea. There were new kinds of boots and rifles. Back then every camp still had walk-in lockers. The sides of meat hung on racks. The cold blew through you. Blue inspection stamps bled into the yellow fat of the carcasses. All gone now. That's what I did in the service.

But the baseball didn't change. The ball still found my glove. There were the old rituals at home. I rubbed my hands in the dirt, then wiped them on my pants, took the bat and rapped it on the plate. The pitch that followed always took me by surprise — hard and high, breaking away. The pitcher spun the ball like a dial on a safe. And trains still sound the same when they run through this town. At night, one will shake our house (we live near an overpass) and I can't go back to sleep. I'll count the men who walked up that gangway to the ship. The train wheels squeal and sing. It might as well be hauling the cargo of my dreams.

DISH NIGHT

Every Wednesday was Dish Night at the Wells Theatre. And it worked, because she was there week in and week out. She sat through the movie to get her white bone china. A saucer. A cup. The ushers stood on chairs by the doors and reached into the big wooden crates. There was straw all over the floor of the lobby and balls of newspaper from strange cities. I knew she was the girl for me. I'd walk her home. She'd hug the dish to her chest. The streetlights would be on and the moon behind the trees. She'd talk about collecting enough pieces for our family of eight. “Oh, it's everyday and I know it,“ she'd say, holding it at arm's length. “They're so modern and simple and something we'll have a long time after we forget about the movies.“

I forget just what happened then. She heard about Pearl Harbor at a Sunday matinee. They stopped the movie, and a man came out on stage. The blue stage lights flooded the gold curtain. It was dark in there, but outside it was bright and cold. They didn't finish the show. Business would pick up then, and the Wells Theatre wouldn't need a Dish Night to bring the people in. The one we had gone to the week before was the last one ever, and we hadn't known it. The gravy boat looked like a slipper. I went to the war, to Europe, where she wrote to me on lined school paper and never failed to mention we were a few pieces shy of the full set.

This would be the movie of my life, this walking home under the moon from a movie with a girl holding a dinner plate under her arm like a book. I believed this is what I was fighting for. Everywhere in Europe I saw broken pieces of crockery. In the farmhouses, the cafés. Along the roads were drifts of smashed china. On a beach, in the sand where I was crawling, I found a shard of it the sea washed in, all smooth with blue veins of a pattern.

I came home and washed the dishes every night, and she stacked them away, bowls nesting on bowls as if we were moving the next day.

The green field is covered with tables. The sky is huge and spread with clouds. The pickup trucks and wagons are backed in close to each table so that people can sit on the lowered tailgates. On the tables are thousands of dishes. She walks ahead of me. Picks up a cup, then sets it down again. A plate. She runs her finger around a rim. The green field rises slightly as we walk, all the places set at the tables. She hopes she will find someone else who saw the movies she saw on Dish Night. The theater was filled with people. I was there. We do this every Sunday after church.

WHAT I SEE

I was killing time at the ranger station in West Glacier, twirling the postcard racks by the door. There was an old one of some teenagers around a campfire near Swift Current Lake. They have on dude ranch clothes, indigo jeans with the legs rolled into wide cuffs. The boys have flattops. There is a ukulele. One girl, staring into the fire, wears saddle shoes. The colors are old colors, from the time women all wore red lipstick. Beyond the steel blue lake the white glaciers are smearing down the mountainsides. I saw the glaciers even though it was night in the card. They gave off their own light. No one ever bought this card, not even as a joke. I was looking at this card when a woman walked in with her son. They mounted the stair above the model of the park. The models of the mountains were like piles of green and brown laundry, the glaciers sheets. The lakes were blue plastic. A red ribbon stood for the Going to the Sun Highway. It all looked manageable. The mother pointed. In the corner was the little house. You are here. She said to me then: Is there any place we can go to overlook the grizzlies?

This year the wolves have moved back into the park. And number 23 had mauled a camper, his third this year, but didn't kill her. Children walk through the station with bells on their feet. When the wind is right you can hear the songs drifting in from the higher trails. We were told more people would be here this season because of the way the world has turned. There are too many people here for this place ever to be wild wild.

The cable's come as far as Cutbank. I rent a room in town my days off and watch the old movies they've juiced up with color. But the colors are as pale as an old rug, like they've already faded from old age. Now the blue sky outside looks manufactured, transported here from the other side of the mountain, its own conveyer belt. A bolt of dyed cloth. It drips with color. And my shorts here are khaki, which is Urdu for the word dirt. Sometimes my eyes hurt from seeing the situation so clearly. Every ten minutes or so I hear the ice tumble in the machine out on the breezeway. Then the condenser kicks on. Beyond the hot tableland I can see the five white fingers of the glacier.

All of what I know about the world worms its way to me from Atlanta. The message is to stay put. They have a park in Atlanta. In it is the Cyclorama, a huge picture with no edges. The battle of Atlanta is everywhere. The painting keeps wrapping around me so that even out of the corner of my eyes I see nothing but the smoke and the smoky bodies falling about me. Atlanta is a mustard yellow in the distance. Sherman rides up in front of me. The battle ends and it begins again. I climb out of the painting through a hole in the floor. There is no place to overlook it. In the basement of the building is the famous steam locomotive The General. I see Ted Turner has just painted that movie.

And it strikes me now that I looked like Buster Keaton, my campaign hat tilted like his hat, as I stood next to King on the memorial steps. The monument behind us was white, even its shadows. King's suit had a sheen like feathers or skin. The white shirts glowed. Everyone wore white shirts except for my khaki, because color hadn't been invented yet. The Muslims wore white. Their caps were white. And the crowd spilling down the steps looked like marble in white to stay cool. It was swampy near the river. They showed the speech around his birthday. I am always there, a ghost over his left shoulder. I was so young. I look as if nothing could surprise me. A ranger look. It always surprises me now. Now I know how it all came out, what happened to that man. I look like a statue. King flickers. I kept him in the corner of my eye. I watched the crowd. What I see is me seeing. I don't see what is coming. When they color it they will get the color of my eyes wrong.

In the window of the motel, I watch the day move. I have made a career with Interior. The range is being painted over by a deep blue sky. The glacier grips the mountaintop and then lets go to form a cloud. Then everything just goes.

THE TEAK WOOD DECK OF THE USS Indiana

I stabbed a man in Zulu. It had to do with a woman. I remember it was a pearled penknife I'd got from a garage. I'd used it for whittling, and the letters were wearing off. It broke off in his thigh and nicked the bone. It must have hurt like hell.

I did the time in Michigan City in the metal shop where I would brush on flux and other men would solder. Smoke would be going up all over the room. They made the denim clothes right there in the prison. The pants were as sharp as the sheet metal we were folding into dustpans and flour scoops. It was like I was a paper doll and they'd put the jacket on me by creasing the tabs over my shoulders. And the stuff never seemed to soften up but came back from the laundry shrunk and rumpled and just as stiff, until the one time when all the starch would be gone and your clothes were rags and you got some new.

There was a man in there building a ship. When I first saw it, he had just laid down the keel and the hull looked like a shiny new coffin. This guy was in for life, and he kept busy building a model of a battleship, the USS Indiana. He had hammered rejected license plates, flattened the numbers out. He'd fold and hammer. In the corner of the shop he'd pinned up the plans, a blue ship floating on the white paper. He had models made from balsa, the ribs showing through in parts. He had these molds of parts we would use for casting, these jigs and dies. His tools were blades and snips. The antennae in the model were the needles he used to sew the tiny flags. The ship was 1/48th the size of the real thing, as big as a canoe. The men who walked the deck had heads the size of peas. He painted each face differently, applied the ratings on their blue sleeves. He told me stories about each man frozen there on the bridge, here tucking into a turret, here popping out of a hatchway. He showed me letters from the same men. He had sent samples of the paint he had mixed to the men who had actually scraped and painted the real ship, asking if this was anywhere near. He knew the hour, the minute, of the day his ship was sailing, the moment he was modeling.

But this was years later. At first I saw the hull. I saw the pile of rivets he collected from the temples of old eyeglasses. He collected spools for depth charges, straws for gun barrels, window screen for the radar. He collected scraps from the floor of the shop and stockpiled them near the ship. Toothpicks, thimbles, bars of soap, gum wrappers. Lifesavers that were Lifesavers, the candy, caps from tubes for valves and knobs, pins for shell casings. Everything was something else.

Soon after he started building the ship he knew soon enough he'd finish too soon. So he went back and made each part more detailed, the guns and funnels, then stopped again and made even the parts of parts. The pistons in the engines, lightbulbs in the sockets.

Some men do this kind of thing. I whittled, but I took a stick down to nothing. I watched the black knots of the branches under the bark grow smaller with each smooth strip until they finally disappeared. Maybe I'd sharpen the stick, but that got old. Finally I got down to shavings thin like the evening paper at my feet. That was what I was after. Strip things so fine that suddenly nothing is there but the edge of the knife and the first layer of skin over my knuckle.

One of the anchors of the real battleship is on the lawn of the Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. The anchor is gray and as big as a house. I took my then wife to see it. We looked around that state for the other one but only found deck guns on lawns of the VFW, a whole battery at the football stadium near the university. In other towns, scrap had been melted and turned into statues of sailors looking up and tiny ships plowing through lead waves.

The deck of the model was the only real thing. He said the wood was salvaged from the deck of the real ship. A guard brought him a plank of it. He let me plane it, strip the varnish and splinter it into boards. A smell still rose from it of pitch, maybe the sea. And I didn't want to stop. I've seen other pieces of the deck since then, in junior high schools where it's been made into plaques for good citizens. The wood is beautiful. The metal plates engraved with names and dates are bolted on, and near the bottom is another smaller plate that says this wood is from the deck of the battleship. It is like a piece of the True Cross. And that is why I came to the capitol in Indianapolis to see the governor's desk. I heard it was made from the teakwood deck of the USS Indiana.

So imagine my surprise when in the rotunda of the building I find the finished model of the ship in a glass case with a little legend about the prisoner in Michigan City. He'd finished it before he died. The porthole windows were cellophane cut from cigarette packs. The signal flags spelled out his name. It was painted that spooky gray, the color between the sea and sky, and from the stern a blue airplane was actually taking off and had already climbed above the gleaming deck where a few seamen waved.

I felt sad for that con. He spent his life building this. He never got it right. It wasn't big enough or something.

I walked right into the governor's office. I'm a taxpayer. And the lady told me he wasn't there, but I told her I was more interested in the desk. So she let me in. “It's beautiful, isn't it?“ she said, opening the curtains for the light that skidded across the top cut in the shape of the state. One edge was pretty straight and the other, where the river ran, looked as if it had melted like a piece of butter into toast. I ran my hand along the length of it, felt how smooth it was — the grain runs north and south — when the governor walked in with his state trooper.

“It's something,“ he said. He's a Republican. The trooper followed and stood behind him. “It has its own light.“

The trooper wore a sea blue uniform with sky blue patches at the shoulders and the cuff. Belts hung all over him. Stripes and creases ran down his legs. Braids and chains. The pants were wool. He watched me. And I looked at him.

Jesus, you've got to love a man in uniform.

I stepped up to the desk and saw my face and the shadow of my body deep inside the swirling wood. I took my finger and pointed to the spot not far from Zulu where I knifed a man and said, “Right there.“ I pushed hard with my nail. “That's where I was born.“

Board Games

PENNSYLVANIA

He was Grandpa Shaker because he shook, and when he died he stopped shaking. My great grandpa Shaker lived with his daughter Mary, my great aunt, until the day he died. I kept him company.

We played two-handed Rook with two dummy hands on a card table set up in the driveway during the summer. He had a glass straw that jangled against the ceramic mug. He breathed the milky coffee in and out, the straw clanking, while I turned over the cards. I could never understand the dummy hands and would have rather been playing four-handed hands with my friends in the park. In the park then, they let you play Rook because the four suits were colors — red, blue, green, black — instead of the hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades that were forbidden because those suits were more real, I guess, and would promote gambling, poker among the kids. The Park Police actually checked the games, checked the cards.

The parks had pavilions that were staffed, and there on picnic tables, I played pickup games of box hockey, kalah, chess and checkers, and Rook that got played like poker anyway in secret.

As a kid, Shaker came north and worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad as a trackwalker. That was before my time and before he shook. We played euchre too at the table with another pair of ghosts partnering with us. Every hand you shot the moon. I never won. And we never talked.

When he walked track he walked from the Baker Street station east until he met the trackwalker coming from New Haven, and then he would turn around and walk back downtown, pass the station, out west toward Roanoke, and then turn back again. He did that twice a day every day for years. He looked at the spikes and cleats and ties and rail. He carried a pike and a mallet just in case, and some extra hardware in his pocket — date nails, pliers, joint bolts, and wire for the interlocking circuit. As he walked, he played a game with himself, counted ties, but his stride never matched the distance between the sleepers. There was oil and sand on the ballast and the rotting bodies of killed things with the clouds of flies bisected by the rails.

Monopoly was impossible outside. The wind stripped away the flimsy money, so we played it inside on rainy days and in the winter after school. We never played the rule that said you had to buy the property you landed on. Shaker liked to shake the dice and move around the board, avoiding jail and buying nothing. Doubles let you shake again. We had two dummy hands — the battleship and flat-stamped cannon — that moved from square to square as well. His hand shooed the lead steam engine around the board, from square to square, and during my turn Shaker nudged the glass straw between his lips, rattling like a machine. With his other hand, he tried to tap the accumulating money into neat stacks of color, but he only ended up shuffling denominations all together into one big pastel pile. Sooner or later, my mother came to get me and took me home. I waved good-bye. And he waved back with one hand shaking and the other hand shaking, shaking the dice for another roll, his turn, now, always next, and me, now, just an absent hand.

SHORT LINE

We rode backwards on the short line from Pirgos to the ruins at Olympia along a stub-end track with no place to turn around. The dumpy station disappeared behind us. All of Pirgos was a ruin, ruined by earthquakes every other year or so. What remained were concrete boxes sprouting rusting rebar on the spoiled roofs. In the waiting room there, we played backgammon in the dust and gloom and ate grilled cheese pies. The stationmaster made clumsy passes at the Swedish students, insisted each should wear his hat while he sang the island songs of Yanni Parios playing too loud on the mistuned radio.

We were going in reverse to Olympia. The cars were blue, of course, and on the curves we could see behind us the black donkey engine pushing us along at a walking pace. Olympia was filled with motor coaches hauling tours that included breakfasts each morning of the trip. So dawn found us at the site before the crowds finished their portokalada as the guards, who spend the night onsite, were just waking up and stowing their bedding near the gate.

The place was deserted. Everyone at breakfast. The stones on the ground were where they tumbled, after some other earthquake, into the mudflats the river left behind when it was shaken out of its course. In the middle of what was left of a temple, a tiny Greek church had been plopped down a few centuries ago and was the only thing left standing in the precinct, a token. Falling from the eaves and windowsills, swallows circled above a red tiled roof and then skipped out over the field of debris, the stumps of fallen fluted column drums, the marble just beginning to catch the light.

B&O

I let him play at the piano — my niece's boy, I had no sons — when I visited my sisters in Garrett. I drank iced tea with my sisters in the kitchen and told them jokes and shot the breeze to distract them from thinking about the kid in the parlor, noodling discordant, off-key keys on the out-of-tune upright Kimball. Nobody there plays. Everything in the parlor could break, the crystal and the porcelain, the glass and the wood. Soon, when my sisters couldn't sit still any longer, they flew past me to the parlor and made the boy sit still on the davenport. They gave him the cigar box filled with the postage stamp — sized receipts the paperboy left after he collected for the week of whatever. The tiny dates were printed on each — there were a lot of weeks. They wanted him to sort the bits of paper for them for no reason.

I got him to come up from Fort Wayne telling him we would look at the old steam engines. The B&O has a roundhouse in Garrett, a Division Point shop, and now he winds up here, trying not to move. I wanted company and an excuse to leave after I had performed my obligation to my sisters — three of them — who still live in the family place not that far from the main line.

I worked nights in the power plant in Fort Wayne, City Light and Power. I managed steam mostly, moved it from one turbine to the next, tapped it from the boilers, vented it outside, blew the whistle at times of my choosing. The cold engines of the B&O, black and big as buildings, were being scrapped, and a couple guys I knew from high school let us watch them disconnect the giant steel shafts from the driving wheels, knocking the locking bolts loose with a metal sledge that drew sparks. They stripped the copper wire clean, disconnected the bells and running lights. I showed the kid the platform on the gap-toothed pilot where the firemen of old would leap from to throw switches out ahead of the panting, drifting engines slowly catching up. He jumped up on the step, then on and off for a time, and climbed the catwalk the rest of the way to the cab. The firebox was choked with ashes, and the stuffing from the engineer's seat was leaking desiccated foam rubber sand on the tread plate floor. There were twenty some hulks in the dingy house. The big window wall, gritty with old smoke, filtered the weak light onto the dirt floor sown with cinder.

Driving home, we went under the viaduct labeled with the drumhead logo of the B&O, the capitol dome in the blue circle. I asked him if he could name the thirteen great states the railroad connected to the nation. That took some time, and I was happy when he gave up because I could only count a dozen in my head. To keep him busy we played I Spy and I Went to My Grandmother's House. I showed him the high tension towers and told him those wires there go all the way to the power plant where I work. “It's all connected.“

In his pockets were chunks of metal and scrap he salvaged from the roundhouse — rusted rivets and wing nuts, amber glass, a brass toggle, a lump of coal. Later, back home, he arranged the pieces over and over again on the cement squares of the driveway. He was a strange kid. He'd stay busy for hours turning the geared wheel within the geared wheel that turned the grindstone I had bolted to the workbench in the garage. He said he liked to see how they, the teeth he meant, fit together to make it all go.

READING

It opens like a book, made of tin, and all the tiles, each printed with a single letter and its parasitic subscript, are magnets that cling to the grid so that, later, when I get mad about all the words I do not know or could not guess or cannot remember, I can't toss the board over, spilling the tiles and scrambling that game's particular accumulating network of cross-words. It is a travel edition. The train I am traveling in is yawing, and this stretch of old rail still wields unwelded joints. The car skips and shutters. The compartment's above a six-wheeled truck that transmits the stammer through the old heavy metal. One reading light falls on the open game with its sticky scales of letters. The other reading light falls over her shoulder, kicking up dust in the beam, to light on the book she is reading, reading while I take my turn.

I have drawn all vowels, it seems, and most of those are Os. There is a moon outside I can see through the faint reflection of my face in the smeared window, and I can see what look like scattered cattle, black and white, lolling in the gloaming. But here before me, there isn't a tail end of an M on the board to let me couple on an O or two.

I watch her read. Her eyes scan a rhythm that seems to syncopate with the backbeat of the train's. She is reading a travel book. There are no Bs or Ks, no book or look or kook, to hook onto either end. No boo. A travel book about Greece I think — a blue train circling the Peloponnesus, the cog railway gearing up a gorge to Kalavrita.

Then, it happens. The moment when a word like the stops being the, the the-ness goes out of it. It's all Greek then. I can't make this or that mean anymore. That that will always stop me in my tracks as I read, coming upon this word this or this the or that the, some strange train wreck of letters, everything sprung, Sherman's twisted bowties knotted with the overheated rails. That's the way this game always feels to me. This impossibility that out of sheer arrangement came sense.

This is the point in the game I would usually hurl the cardboard board across the room, wooden tiles flying, but this particular travel edition has unified its fields of forces — strong, weak, magnetic, gravity — the four black engines of the universe. Things attract, stick, adhere, bond. I'll have to pass. She keeps on reading. She's in a carriage crossing the canal at Corinth, and she is here in some dark territory of Pennsylvania. The train's wheels, those Os, roll over the rail, a dime-sized connection, almost without friction. The whistle yodels an ordinary echo. Echo. Expanding rings of sound waver and warble.

Ordinary is ordinary again. I look at the board of crisscrossing letters, words, sentences, messages. The language chugs. This stands for this, I see. And this stands for this. And this for this. And this.

The First Four Deaths in My High School Class

STEVE HUBER

died in Randy Neath's swimming pool. He was electrocuted. A short in the wiring of the built-in lights. This happened years before we went to high school, but we think of him as part of the class. At the reunions, he is always listed as one of the dead on the memorial page of the program. Randy graduated. We talked about Steve at the last reunion. He played guard on my PAL basketball team. Randy's hair is still red, and he still lives in his parents' house. In the summers, he swims in the same pool where the accident happened.

HOLLY LOVE

died after she was out of high school and married. She might even have had a child by then. She was a high school teacher. Foreign languages. It was something sudden, something in her brain or in her heart, a clot or embolism. She had been in my class in grade school, where she was a lieutenant on the safety patrol. Her job had been to raise and lower the flag every school day. Her best friend growing up was Sheryl Faulkner, a neighbor, who went to Queen of Angels. Holly married Sheryl's brother. Sheryl's husband, Don Krouse, died in a car wreck on a county road. He was our age and would have been in our class, but he went to the Catholic high school instead.

JERRY KIRKPATRICK

died with AIDS, but he killed himself before the disease killed him. A gun. We had talked on the phone only a month before he died. This was after college, and he was living, then, in Atlanta. When I called, he was in the middle of refinishing a wooden door. He had just applied the chemical stripper, and he was letting it work while we talked. He said, “I'll let it work.“ We had met in junior high school. His real name was Ralph, but he went by Jerry. That caused some confusion when “Ralph Kirkpatrick“ was listed, in our reunion program, as one of the dead in our high school class.

FRITZ SHOEMAKER

died after killing his wife, Mary, who had been Mary Knight in high school. So, technically, Fritz was the fifth to die in my high school class. He shot himself with the same rifle he used to kill his wife, who I never knew. It was a large high school. There were over six hundred students in our one class. During commencement at the Memorial Coliseum, it took a while for all of our names to be read. We graduated when platform shoes were in style, and everyone in their shiny red gowns walked carefully up the stairs to the stage. Fritz played the accordion, wore glasses, and came to my eighth birthday party when we both were in Mrs. Hanna's third-grade class, where he sat, toward the back, near Debbie Saunders, Greg Street, and Mark Taylor.

Four Foursquare Houses

1730 SPRING STREET

There is a porch across the full front of the house. The door is in the center. The living room is on the left as you go in with the stairs leading up in the back. The dining room is on the right with the kitchen and a little breakfast nook behind it. Upstairs, the hallway runs down the middle. Two bedrooms on the left and the bathroom with its tiled picture of a flamingo at the top of the stairs. The other bedroom, on the right toward the front, has a linoleum floor I watched my parents install, square by square, the same summer I learned to read there.

1815 ALABAMA AVENUE

There is a porch across the full front of the house. The door is to the right. The living room fills the front half of the ground floor. The dining room is on the left in back. The kitchen is behind the stairs rising from the center, up and to the right, to the landing and then switched back upstairs. There is a big bedroom above the living room and a bedroom behind it with a bathroom across the hall. And in the back, a sunporch, windows on three sides, that looked down on the backyard with clotheslines propped and diapers drying, frozen in the winter, sheets of white chocolate.

519 NORTHWESTERN

There is a porch across the full front of the house. The door is to the left. Inside is a sitting room I used as an office. The stairs, halfway back, rise from the center to a landing on the left where there is a door that is locked. The house is a two-flat ordered from Sears and shipped here by rail. The living room is through a doorway on the right. The dining room and kitchen are on the back left, and the single bedroom is on the right behind the living room. There we had a futon on the floor. Plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling when the upstairs neighbors made love.

348 FELLOWS

There is a porch across the full front of the house. The door is to the right. The living room is the front half of the ground floor. The dining room, to the back on the left. The kitchen in back on the right. The staircases are tucked behind the wall separating the living room from the kitchen. The landing on the right turns back left. Two bedrooms in front with the closets between. A sunporch in the back we used as an office painted pencil yellow and a bathroom in front of that. Across the hall, above the dining room, another bedroom where I fall asleep counting all the rooms in which I have fallen asleep.

To Hell and Back: Four Takes

AUDIE MURPHY AT THE CHINESE THEATER WATCHES THE MOVIE CALLED To Hell and Back¹

The searchlights out front are surplus WWII, painted silver. The four blue beams of light slid along the underbelly of the low clouds. It had rained and the streets were still wet, the marquee lights reflected in the puddles in the gutters. The acetylene torches hissed in the lamps, pitched above the steady rumble of the diesel engines that sounded like the diesel engines of Sherman tanks, rotating the lights. Finding nothing in the sky overhead. The movie is to the part where I call for friendly artillery to fire on my own position. The battalion wants to know how close the krauts are. “Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards,“ I say in the movie. I wrote that in the book. The shells fall from the sky. The sky is blue. The German tanks are wrong. They are new American Pattons painted gray. The extras are too old, their uniforms too neat and out of season. They are carrying nothing more than their rifles. And, look there, they have their helmet straps cinched under their chins. The sky is too blue. This isn't southern France but somewhere in Washington State. It is the summer and not the winter. Now here's the part where I hop on up to the rear deck of the burning tank destroyer. The fire looks right. There isn't enough smoke. The machine gun I am firing sounds the same. I sweep it back and forth like the lights outside. And the Germans walking toward me fall effortlessly, hardly acting. They simply fall down like they have run out of gas. Now here's the part where I take some shrapnel in the back. I had to act because I don't remember how I acted when it happened. So this is what I did. The shells falling from the blue sky. No, the shells falling from the sky. No the shells falling. No the shells. Now the real fire is too thin and watery. But I like the way the battle looks. It looks like a battle in a movie because the battle I was in looked like a battle in a movie staged and choreographed the same way. The krauts walking in the rain of shells and the howitzers walking the shells with them and both of them walking, walking toward me over the field. I am watching myself be myself. That seems real. I was watching myself as I killed with the machine gun the walking soldiers walking through the falling shells. I am watching myself watch myself. The camera, me, we all are looking always over my left shoulder as the advance comes on, neither the extras nor the real soldiers knowing what to do, walking until they get their cue to fall down and then fall down.

AUDIE MURPHY SHOOTS A SCENE OF THE MOVIE To Hell and Back²

“Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards.“ I hold up the phone and an explosion goes off nearby. The clods of dirt it kicks up rain down on my helmet. “Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards.“ This time the cameraman is kneeling right in front of me, aiming the camera on its tripod inches from my face. I can see myself reflected in the lens, holding out the phone for them to hear how close I am to the action. “Action,“ the director says. “Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards,“ I say again. The crew is a stone's throw away in the line of the advancing enemy. The director waves and the grip on the ladder drops the bucket of dirt on my head. They will add the sound later. “Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of the bastards,“ I shout into the phone. No one is on the other end. The phone is dead. Dirt from an explosion nearby rains down on me. A stone's throw away I see the advancing enemy. This time I actually see the advancing enemy advancing. Explosions erupt within their ranks. The sound has been added. And several soldiers are launched into the air along with the dirt from the explosion close enough to rain clods of earth down on me. The “Cut!“ comes from behind me this time and the shrill whistle to signal everybody to stop, and then everything stops and then everything starts again in reverse as the advancing enemy retreats to their starting places to start over. I understand we are to try each time to get it exactly right and to get it exactly the same as the time before.

AUDIE MURPHY WRITES CHAPTER 19 OF THE MEMOIR To Hell and Back³

2ND LT. AUDIE MURPHY NEAR HOLTZWIHR, FRANCE, 26 JANUARY 1945

I must remember to remember everything. The way the snow is falling. The white of the snow. The white of the sky. The white of the map I unfold. I look out at the white field. I look at the white map. There for a second or two I was lost. I was trying not to forget and didn't pay attention to where I was. There is the white snow and the white field and the white map of the field. Hell, I say to myself, hell, and I reach for the telephone.

¹To Hell and Back (1955) 106m. *** D: Jesse Hibbs. Audie Murphy, Marshall Thompson, Charles Drake, Jack Kelly, Paul Pecerni, Gregg Palmer, Brett Halsey, David Jansen, Art Aragon, Rand Brooks, Denver Pyle, Susan Kohner. Murphy (the most decorated soldier of WW2) stars in a very good war film based on his autobiography, with excellent battle sequences depicting Murphy's own breathtaking heroic exploits. Cliches in script are overcome by Murphy and cast's easy-going delivery. CinemaScope. From Leonard Maltin's 2007 Movie Guide (Plume).

²Near Holtzwihr, France, 26 January 1945…. Second Lieutenant Murphy commanded Company B, 15th Regiment, Third Division, which was attacked by six tanks and waves of infantry. He ordered his men to withdraw while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn…. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, Lieutenant Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its.50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused the attack to waiver. For an hour, the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate Lieutenant Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as ten yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw….

³“But you've got to understand me. You see, with me—“ Murphy paused, as though deciding whether to go ahead with his thought “—with me, it's been a fight for a long, long time to keep from being bored to death. That's what two years of combat did to me!“

4 GS-14s

A CLERK WORKING FOR THE ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL FLIES THE FLAGS THAT HAVE BEEN FLOWN OVER THE CAPITOL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It luffs, sags, as I haul it in, fold, send to a middle school in the middle of nowhere. There, the invisible's visible, I guess.

THE ATTACHÉ EXPLAINS TO HIS FIANCÉE THE BOLT OF GINGHAM CLOTH IN THE CORNER

Oh, that. The Salamanca Senecas' yearly treaty obligation. I keep track of all those promises promised — wampum, trinkets — the symbolic stuff. Mine to remember, remember?

THE SPECIAL AGENT WAITS ON THE PLATFORM OF THE METRO FOR THE NEXT TRAIN TO ROCKVILLE

Last on the tour. I demonstrate. The Thompson. Full auto. Spent shells. Fly. Kids fight over brass casings. It's a crime. A waste. My life.

TUESDAY:

BOSTON LIGHT:

BREWSTER ISLAND: 42° 19′ 40.85″N, 70° 53′ 4.26″ W

THE LAST MANNED LIGHTHOUSE IN THE UNITED STATES

The keeper writes when the light, flashing white every ten seconds, shines. 0123hrs. Seas: calm. Pressure: Falling. Skies: Severely. Clear. Stars: Disappearing. 1 X 1