The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (8 page)

Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—

I had become spoiled. Having lived for weeks as the sole occupant of a room designed for two, I had all but forgotten the possibility of a roommate—who plainly had just moved
in. As a matter of fact, his efficiency was such that he had already been inspired to add his name to the card on the frame of the door, and below my name had neatly printed his identification:

S
ECOND
L
T
. D
ARLING
P. J
EETER
, J
R
., USMC

Bemused, I gazed at the card for some time, struck by the cadence of the name itself, which I tested several times on palate and tongue, but also by the absence, at the end of “USMC,” of an “R,” designating a reserve. And my spirits sank as I realized that come what may I had drawn a regular. I opened the door, the music boomed forth:

Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—
Had me jumpin’ an’ a-humpin’ till half past three—

And I beheld, seated at the desk naked but for his green skivvy drawers, stamping out time to the cretinous song with bare feet, a stocky, muscular young man of twenty-one or twenty-two with acne scars on his cheeks and shoulders, wire-rimmed spectacles, straw-colored hair clipped to a half-inch skinhead cut, and—largely due to a wet, protuberant lower lip and an exceptionally meager forehead—an expression of radiant vacuity. If this description seems more than reasonably unfavorable, it is because I mean it to be, since nothing my roommate did or said during the course of our acquaintanceship diminished that first impression of almost unprecedented loutishness.

“Howdy,” he said, rising and turning down his phonograph, coming forward to shake my hand. I noticed that he had pushed the proofs of my novel somewhat aside on the desk, also my dictionary and several other of the few books I had brought with me—Oscar Williams’s modern American
verse anthology and the Viking
Portable Dante
were two I remember—and these now shared space with a mountainous pile of phonograph records, presumably of the order of “Ding-dong Daddy,” three long, unsheathed, murderous-looking blue-steel knives, a stack of “men’s” magazines
(True, Argosy
, and the like), a box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a random assortment of toilet articles including, I could not help but notice, a large cellophane-wrapped pack of fancy condoms known as “wet skins.”

He gave me a firm grip. “Name’s Darling Jeeter,” he declared in a hearty voice, clearly that of an Ole Country Boy. “Muh friends all call me Dee.”

I was relieved that he so quickly took care of the name business (he must have had the problem before) since had he not offered me the way out I was prepared to say politely and immediately: “I’m very sorry but I cannot possibly call you Darling.” For although the patronymic is certainly venerable enough (was it mere whimsy that led Barrie to give that honored name to the family in
Peter Pan?)
, and although to christen one’s offspring with a family name is a common enough practice throughout the South (my roommate, as it turned out, hailed from down in Florence, South Carolina), I considered myself already too sensitive to this new and, on my part, desperately unwanted intimacy to compound my discomfort by having to say things like “Darling, would you mind handing me the soap?” or, God forbid … well, the possibilities were too numerous to contemplate.

Anyway, I introduced myself to Dee, and while I was groggy with the need for a short nap, I felt it only proper that the two of us—officers, gentlemen, southerners at that—sit down and at least go through the motions of getting acquainted, especially when it looked as if we were destined to
be cheek by jowl for some time that summer in a climate not really suited for harmonious relations at close quarters. Dee, as it turned out, was a hand-to-hand-combat expert, his specialty knife fighting “close in”; the reason I had enjoyed several weeks of grace without his company was because this period he had spent in California, at the marine base at Camp Pendleton, where he had learned all the tricks of his trade. He had been sent back to Lejeune as an instructor, and was looking forward enormously to his vocation, brief as he hoped it would be.

“I’ll go anywhere the Corps sends me, that’s muh duty you see, but if you want to know the God-durn real truth what I really want to do is get over to Korea and stick about six inches of cold steel in as many of those God-durned gooks I can get holt of.”

“How long have you been in the Corps?” I asked.

“Nine months and eight days,” he replied. “I was in ROTC”—he pronounced it “Rotacy”—“at Clemson and then I took a commission and they done sent me to Quantico. Couldn’t fire a rifle worth a shit on account of muh eyes”—he gestured toward his spectacles, and peered out at me from behind them with an expression that seemed peculiarly faraway and dim, like a rodent’s, not aglint with the fervor of a knife fighter but somehow mossed over with the glaze of arrested development, or perhaps only fifteen years or so of slow fruition in the schools of South Carolina—“but I got me a waiver on the eyes, and I volunteered for knife fightin’, which is the thing I truly come to love. Sometimes I think that a knife is the God-durned prettiest thing in the world. Stick that ole thing in, twist an’ shove, twist an’ shove—shee-it, man! Care for some pogey bait?”

Not since my early days in the Corps in World War II
had I heard the words “pogey bait”—old-time marine and navy slang for candy—and as he reached for the box of Baby Ruths I declined, saying that the weather was too hot and that, besides, my stomach felt rather poorly. Most of the reserves had made a point, generally, of
not
using the accepted seagoing vocabulary; I soon learned that Dee employed a salty locution whenever possible—“deck” for “floor,” “bulkhead” for “wall”—which did little to further weld our relationship.

“Ordinarily,” he went on, “I relish an Almond Joy or two along about this time of the morning, but the PX run out of Joys. Had to settle for the Ruths.”

“Tell me,” I said, honestly curious, “have you ever killed anybody with one of those knives?”

He took the question with equanimity. “Naw,” he replied, “at Pendleton we practiced on dummies—and on each other, but with rubber blades. Naw, I ain’t killed anybody
yet
—I’ll have to confess.”

I could not help but pursue the tack I had embarked upon and I said: “Dee, listen, don’t you think
killing
people with a knife might just
sicken
you? I mean, just to watch some guy’s guts fall out, and the blood and everything—well, I know knife fighting is sometimes necessary and damned useful when the chips are down, but Jesus, how can you actually think you’re going to
like
it?” He had gnawed off the end of a Baby Ruth and was masticating it thoughtfully; the candy was sweetly odorous on the close hot air, and for an instant, vaguely nauseated, I was borne away in a queasy trance of chocolate, peanuts, vanillin, lecithin, hydrogenated vegetable oil, emulsifiers. A runnel of sweat made its way down his hairless belly which, like the rest of him, seemed as tight as rawhide despite his confectionery yen. I
lusted for sleep, felt my eyelids slide closed, and listened to a cicada’s shrill crickety screech, electric against the eardrum, as it scraped somewhere outside in the lowering heat.

“Well you see, ordinarily I might get sick like you say,” he replied. “I don’t truly like the sight of blood any more than the next man. But this here is a different matter now. We face the greatest peril this country has ever known. Did you see that movie they shown us at Pendleton?
Red Evil on the Earth
it was called, somethin’ like that, about how those Communist bastards are takin’ over everywhere. Sons of bitches. Guy with the bushy beard—what’s his name?—Marx, and that other Russian son of a bitch, I forget his name, the bald one with that itty-bitty goatee on him like a streak of dog doo, God durn, boy, let me get a knife into both of them Communist sons of bitches, twist an’ shove, twist an’ shove, that’s all, and you’ll figure out pretty quick how a man can love cold steel.”

“They’re both already dead,” I said.

“They’re both dead, all righty-dighty,” he said evenly. “Then I’ll kill some other good Communist son of a bitch, preferably the color of yellow. You know what the only good kind of Communist there is, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “a dead one. Look, Dee, I was up at four this morning and I’m terribly tired. I wonder if you’d mind shutting off the music for a while and let me take a little nap.”

“Shore,” he replied, “you go right ahead. I’ll just be real quiet and put muh gear away. You go on and have you some good sack duty while ole Dee gets things squared away.”

As I was drifting off I heard him say: “How do you figure the situation shapes up for a little nooky around here?”

“A few navy nurses, Dee,” I murmured, “that’s all. O.K. if you like them real big. Or short and scrawny.”

“Shee-it, man,” I heard him say, far off through the misty onset of slumber, “I love nooky any which way. I’m just like muh ole daddy. If I could find me a pussy big enough I’d set up camp inside—mess tents, flagpole, parade ground and all.”

Dee’s connection with his daddy was, as it turned out, neither casual nor merely reminiscent. When I returned to the B.O.Q. the next morning after spending a night in the field, Dee and his father were sitting at the desk munching on Almond Joys. The elder Jeeter was a man in what I took to be his late fifties or early sixties, haggard-looking with a pale, sad, gentle face deeply furrowed and lined; even at my first glance I saw that he was desperately sick. He wore an imitation pongee sport shirt through which a few old chalky-white hairs poked limply, and sacklike trousers, rather wrinkled and dirty, of a defeated greenish hue. He smelled mysteriously of something bitter and metallic, and was seized now and then by a horrible racking cough; I could recall no one for whose health on so short an acquaintance I felt such immediate alarm. He called Dee “Juney.” A onetime Gunner—the marine term for warrant officer—he had served in the Corps for thirty-five years and had just come up from Florence to visit his newly commissioned son. He was a widower.

“What do you do on the outside, son?” the retired Gunner inquired of me in a kindly voice. Like Jeeter junior he spoke in a rich, loamy, Low Country drawl, with overtones of that arcane South Carolina dialect called Geechee. He sucked tirelessly at cigarettes.

“I’m a writer,” I replied.

“You work around hosses?” he went on pleasantly.

“Not rider,” I said sharply, “writer. I’m a writer. I write books. Prose. Prose fiction. What the French call
romans.”
My sarcasm was heavy and intentional. A blaze of rage flared up behind my eyes, prompted in part by the Gunner’s well-meaning density but also because of the sense of crowdedness the room suddenly gave me—cramped enough with two persons, it was made to seem positively thronged by the presence of a third—and because of my despair over new rumors that we were soon to ship out for Korea and by a general sense of doom and frustration that had begun to overtake me more often as the summer passed, and that was in no way alleviated now by the feel in my pocket of a letter which I had received in the same mail as Laurel’s obscene bulletin: sent by my editor in New York, it contained the first review of my book, and although I had not yet read it I could somehow sense that the review was bad.

The Gunner went into a paroxysm of coughing as Dee explained to me: “Daddy’s an old-time marine, seen ’em all. Western Front in 1918, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guantánamo—wherever the action was at, Daddy was. Ain’t that right, boss man? French girls, Spanish girls, even nigger girls down in Haiti, whenever Daddy went ashore the word got around, ‘Stud Jeeter’s a-comin’, Stud Jeeter of the Horse Marines!’ Ain’t that right, boss man?”

“Well, Juney,” he said, wiping his eyes and with a rattle of phlegm at the back of this throat, “I like to say that I done my time thataway near about as good as the next marine around.”

“Tell about that whorehouse in—where was it, Daddy?—
Cuba, wasn’t it, you know where they run a movie show on the ceiling and they washes off your pecker with coconut oil. Tell about that.”

I was quite frankly unaccustomed to such merry sexual candor between parent and offspring, and I listened restlessly for half an hour or so as the Gunner, coughing and obviously in real distress but still eager to recapture the roustabout joys of other days, methodically anatomized brothels in Havana, Port-au-Prince, and Buenos Aires. But finally the effort seemed too much for him; he half-strangled and turned an ashen gray, and Dee got up and led him out of the room, saying that what his father doubtless needed was a Dr. Pepper at the PX for a pick-me-up.

For a while, after they had gone, I lay on my bed in the terrible heat trying to muster courage to read the review. Having subsequently, over the years, received as much vituperative criticism as any of my colleagues in the trade, and in some respects considerably more, yet having perforce developed an all but impermeable skin, I marvel now as I recall the anguish with which I approached the review—my first as a bona fide writer. It was not, to be sure, a review in the most important sense of the word, being merely a prepublication appraisal in one of the journals of the book-publishing industry. But it must be remembered that it was my initiation. For me it was like a crucible, and I read it with a growing and sickening sense of ruin. I think my editor’s “Don’t let this bother you” had been the tip-off.

This fat, confident, deafening novel by a young Virginian has received such florid advance raves that it is bound to be widely discussed and widely read even though its author’s talent—while by no means inconsiderable—hardly measures up to the ex travagant claims being made for it. Set in the country-club atmosphere of a Tidewater Virginia city, the novel chronicles—at sometimes glacial pace—the woes and tribulations of a family which includes a neurotic mother, an alcoholic father, and two daughters—one a cripple and the other a nymphomaniac. Sounds like soap opera? It could be, but isn’t, for the twenty-six-year-old author is a skilled wordsmith and has a gift for dialogue and imagery which transforms his witches’ brew of guilt, jealousy, and Oedipal longings into a reading experience that often rises excitingly above the book’s hackneyed theme. But this newcomer is hardly the literary original he is being hailed as, and too often displays his debt to Faulkner, Warren, McCullers, and even Capote and Speed Lamkin, among other recent recruits to the doom-despair-decay school of southern letters. Nonetheless, despite its shopworn subject matter and all too frequent lapses into “purple” prose, the novel signifies the arrival of an interesting new talent and should be satisfying to those serious readers seeking a change from light hammock reading. (Sept. 10. First printing 10,000.)