The Specialists

Six

By the time Murdock got back to his rooming house Tuesday night, he couldn’t have told a telegram from a turbojet. He was in Minneapolis working on and off for a firm of short-haul movers, and he had spent most of that day moving a family from a third-floor apartment on Horatio to a fourth-floor apartment just three blocks away on Van Duyzen. One stairwell was worse than the other, and they had a baby grand piano that was a bitch on wheels. By the time he was through, a beer sounded like one fine idea. After a half dozen bottles of Hamm’s it seemed like an even better idea to switch to something a mite more powerful. He woke up with vague memories of a fight in one place and of dragging ass when the owner called the cops, and then going over to some other place that some good old boy knew about and starting in all over again. Somewhere along the line he evidently decided to pack it in and head for home, and damned if he hadn’t found his way, but he couldn’t remember that part of it at all.

He threw his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He tried to remember if he had told the boss he would be coming to work that day. It didn’t make such a much whether he did or not, because fish would fly before he’d show up at that moving company, but if they were expecting him, it meant he’d be out a job. Or maybe he wouldn’t; most of the moving companies took what they could get and didn’t expect you to be reliable. Which was good news, because if there was one thing Ben Murdock wasn’t, reliable is what it was.

He was just created to raise hell, a lanky redneck with hair like straw and a mean streak that just had to pop out now and again. If he stood in the sun, freckles popped out on his face and forearms, and if he stood anywhere for any length of time, sun or shade, the meanness popped out the same way and he was ace-high certain to buy trouble for himself. He grew up in Tennessee and got thrown out of school over and over again, and when he was nineteen, he had to take off and drive up to Chicago because of a difference of opinion with a girl. His opinion was that she was sort of in the mood no matter what she said, and her opinion was that he had raped her. When she made her opinion known to the police, he borrowed himself a car and pointed it north.

They never did get him for the car he borrowed, but within a month they picked him up for drinking after hours. He did the drinking in the middle of State Street and he got the liquor by putting his foot through the store window. The judge gave him a suspended sentence.

He was in jail twice, Cook County Jail, ten days and then twenty, both times for drunk and disorderly. A little bit after he got out, he borrowed another car and cracked it up, and another judge gave him a choice between the Army and Joliet. He took the Army because he figured it would be a sight easier to bust out of.

He stayed in for fifteen years. They tried to bust his ass in basic and they just couldn’t do it, but while they were working on it something happened and they made a good soldier out of him. He made squad leader, he made Expert Rifleman. Somebody told him that they gave you double pay in the Paratroops, and he told him to shove it because all the money in the world wouldn’t get him to jump out of a plane. Then one of his bunkmates said that the Paratroops were the toughest outfit in the service, and that all they got lately was colored boys because no white man would stand up to it. He thought about that for a day and night, and the morning after that he went in and volunteered for the Paratroops.

He went Special Forces first time it was offered. He made corporal eight times and was busted back down eight times, but he never did anything bad enough to earn him a discharge or a stretch of stockade time. Just something about that old Army, he fit and he belonged and it was more a home to him than Tennessee ever was and not to say Chicago. He reckoned they would kill him sooner or later, but he also reckoned he’d stay with it until they did.

Until one day on a patrol when he made the mistake of getting in a sniper’s sights and the sniper made the mistake of putting two hunks of lead in Murdock’s left arm and missing the rest of him altogether. After they patched him up, he asked when he could rejoin his unit. They told him he had a million-dollar wound, a pin in his shoulder and another pin in his elbow, and that was the last he and the Army would be seeing of each other.

They told him he was a hero and he’d get a pension and he should be happy. He wasn’t happy. He couldn’t figure why the sniper couldn’t either do the job right or miss him altogether, because now he was just sure to go on back and buy himself some trouble. Just a couple of pissant steel pins that he never so much as knew were there unless it was raining, and for that they took him and chucked him out of his home after fifteen years.

He got up from the bed, went over to the washbowl, and rinsed some of the sour taste out of his mouth. When he turned to reach for a towel, he saw the telegram lying alongside the door. He knew what it was right away. He opened it and it was the usual message: COME HOME AT ONCE YOUR MOTHER IS DEAD. PA. The colonel didn’t like sending that message, but Murdock insisted on it. If there was one person on earth he purely hated, it was his mother. It surely tickled him to get that telegram.

He looked in his pants pockets. He had a five-dollar bill left and a couple of ones, and there was a handful of change on the dresser. He got his knife and pried up the linoleum in one corner of the room. His travel money was still there, five hundred-dollar bills and two tens. That was one thing he never touched was his travel money, no matter how drunk he got or how broke he was. Not unless the colonel sent him that wire, which was what that particular money was reserved for.

He went across the hall to the bathroom, took himself a shower, went back to his room, and put on his best clothes. He polished his good shoes with the bath towel.

He left everything else in the room. The landlady could keep them or throw them out, her choice. He could care less. He was going back to where he belonged, with the good old boys who liked to move out and all the same as he did. Old Rugged Cross with his legs gone, and Eddie and Frank and the skinny dago and the nigger captain, and by God he was going to have himself some fun.