Reveille

"Reveille"

A short story from the collection, _THE AGONY HE SAID_

By Joe Petrulionis

All rights to these materials reserved by the author. 

“Nothing I'd ever want to see written down in any published form, Beth, but I think he saved my life. I'd planned my evening out in detail. Cleaned the cabin, parked the car out of the way over at the diner. I had gotten into my swimming trunks, some old cutoff jeans that I fished in. Then I came down here to the edge, on those rocks right over there.”

Beth closed her notebook and was in the process of leaning it against the stone ledge on which she sat. Jonathan Fost continued, “I had a 32 revolver, a pistol you know. I was going to...I was just going to.”

The young woman’s expression stopped the older man’s narration.

“But I didn’t have any ammunition, it turns out. I had never checked it to see if the damn thing was loaded or not. Didn’t feel like getting dressed to go to Williamsburg for bullets so I decided to walk over to Stencils and see if I might borrow some from somebody up there. Just as I got to Canal Street I saw Mick Berger heading my way in that old truck of mine. He pulled into the drive and asked how I was doing. I said something like, ‘well, just found out that my wife died in a car wreck, she was probably distraught over our daughter’s death, or something. Lost my job this morning, too. Think I must be broke and behind in my rent since I don’t even know who to pay the rent to anymore or how much to pay. Spent the day cleaning and don’t have any pipe tobacco or bullets. And I haven’t had anything to drink today. How are you, Mick? You don’t happen to have any spare bullets on you, do you?’”

“‘Get in the truck, Jonathan. I’ll buy you a beer,’ was his answer. Now you gotta realize, Mick offering to buy a beer for you is not something to miss. Apparently it follows the frequency of the Comet Kohoutek. But I got in the truck and he put a beer on his account at Stencil’s for me. I returned the favor for him. And we sat there in silence, listening to the sound of the hiss of the tv set that didn’t appear to be on any particular channel while Stencil hosed down the Men’s room, and mumbled to himself about the Dnieper River or maybe some river that was knee deep.”

“So finally, out of desperation for something to talk about, I asked Mick if he ever had a really bad day. ‘I mean a terrible day, Mick. What was your worst moment ever?’”

“Then he told me. His worst moment in his whole life. It wasn’t anything like the death of a parent. Not the weekend he went missing when he was a kid or even that nobody believed him about it later. It wasn’t one of his perpetual years of unemployment or being broke past the point of even feeling up to what they kept calling the poverty line. Being lonely? Lonely to the point of not even wanting to share his misery with company? Being turned down flat by the only girl he had invited to the high school prom, a girl he realized had not been asked by any other so she sat home and cried on the big night? No, Beth, his worst moment ever was when he had to pay twenty bucks to rent something that he just could have borrowed for free! And hearing about his torment made me forget to borrow any bullets myself. I have his story written down somewhere. Remind me to find it for you sometime.”

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Found in the glove compartment of an old car parked in Irvingsberg, PA.

“Mick’s Lowest Point Ever,”

Private Michael Berger, not even PFC anymore but as of yesterday afternoon buck ass Private Berger again, stood at attention in the cool rain of this Fort Stewart Georgia version of mid-January Winter. The company First Sergeant saluted on the entire formation’s behalf in the general direction of the recorded bugle call that finally concluded in a cannon shot somewhere off in the pine treed distance over toward the Divisional Headquarters. You can’t see the flag from here, but everyone present knows it was being hoisted to the sound of the bugle. Most of the enlisted men and women of this mechanized infantry division stand in this cool drizzle, as much a ritual of forced obedience as it symbolizes their loyalty to a Nation. Their chain of command, a puppet string that begins with the President of the United States and worms its long way down through the ranks to the three star General still at home in his living room drinking coffee and reading the Wall Street Journal, down through a Battalion Commander who wants to be a General so badly that he has probably been snooping around the motor pool for an hour already, looking for any signs of sloppy maintenance, down to the Company Commander sitting at his desk surrounded by four platoon leading Lieutenants, one of whom was responsible for first platoon. But Private Berger never really knew which Lieutenant he belonged to. He just saluted all officers and did whatever he was told to do by his own Sergeants. The whole thing worked better that way, he had learned.

This wasn’t the beginning of his morning, no not even. “Technically” he would have said, his day had already commenced two hours earlier, when Berger had been harassed out of the bunk by his squad sergeant yelling for the two dozen men in this barracks to “get the hell up for PT before I piss all over any shithead I find still in that bunk!”The son of a bitch would do it, too. Shuddering at the smells emerging from all over the barracks, Berger also shook out his sweat suit, safety yellow just like the identical PT suits all of the other men in his squad also kept rolled in their ponchos. He zipped on the jacket, still damp and smelling something like road kill marinated in old urine. An unspoken conspiracy among the men of Bravo squad, and perhaps the whole damned Army, an act of rebellion really: none of them had laundered these sweats since the Supply Sergeant issued them more than a year ago, despite the fact these PT uniforms were worn five mornings each week. Aside from Physical Training, this is what you wore when you put your fatigues through an abbreviated wash cycle every two weeks. You never washed the sweats. Now, the air in the barracks could bring tears.

PT commenced with a round of push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts, and on a good day, a two mile run around the parade field. Today was not a good day, nor was it a bad day. Just another day, so they ran four miles in step through the rain, repeating songs one line at a time in a call and response routine that was intended to keep the troops together, motivated, and distracted from the distance of the run and the proximity of the men wearing the unwashed,drenched,and crusty, sweatsuits:

Born in the back woods, nursed by a she bear

I can bend steel bars, I got me three coats of hair.

Some farmers found me and moved me to the city,

My case worker said it was a real pity.

To the school psychologist I was led

I shuffled in his office sprang to attention and said

“Sir I wanna be an Airborne Ranger. I wanna go to Vietnam”

“I wanna live a life of danger. Dont want to marry no soccer mom.”

Well they cut my hair and shaved my beard.

Made me look pretty goddammed weird.

Took away my old switch blade.

Got a M-16 and a hand grenade

MRE’s for dinner time and my trusty night watchman a claymore mine.

They could go on and on for miles at that pace. You wouldn’t think of dropping out of the run, it would cost you extra sessions of remedial PT, every evening for the next week. You would never drop out again. So hangover or not, diuretic or throwing up, you just ignored the smell, settled into the pace, sang your response and counted down the days till your ETS, a term that most one termers thought meant “Escape This Shit.”

But Private Berger still had a year to go. He had signed for four years, not even counting down the days yet. After the run, he rolled his wet sweats back into the poncho, the smelly bundle held together with a large rubber-band, and stuck the whole smelly thing into the top of his laundry bag tied to one end of his bunk. Then he selected the driest of two towels hanging inside his locker and stood in line for a quick shower, six showerheads but used by twelve men at a time while another dozen waited in the hall. There were no private moments in the Army. He shaved at a row of sinks along one wall while men sat at open toilets along the back wall. Crude jokes passed between them, “What the Hell, Rinfroe? Are you on a cheese and sauerkraut diet again? The vinyl tiles around your feet are blistering.”

Then Berger threw on his olive drab uniform before cleaning the latrine and mopping the concrete floor on the way out of his barracks. He just made it into place at the far left of his squad’s line at oh- eight- hundred, just in time for the command to “attention.” “All Present.” The First Sergeant did a sharp about face, saluted the pine trees and they waited a long half minute for the bugle music. So far, just a normal day in the Army.

The cannon fired, the First Sergeant turned and questioned the status of all deadlined vehicles. Sergeants confirmed or corrected him with new information. Referring to the Preventative Maintenance Control Forms that were more important than any actual service conducted, he said, “I want a fresh PMCS of everything in the motorpool on my desk by sixteen hundred. Sergeant Marcus, bring Private Berger and all of his little green buddies to the orderly room by oh nine-hundred and bring all of his shit from the barracks with him. I predict he is going to be abducted again so if he owes any of you money you better collect it right after formation. Dismissed.”

That was how Private Berger found out.

Immediately, all the squad leaders commanded their men and a few women, to attention, taking charge of the small units for the next day of Army life: police calls, equipment upkeep, preventative maintenance of military vehicles, various forms of training, and most important, the never ending battle between lower ranking enlisted personnel and boot marks on tile floors. But Sergeant Marcus and Private Berger together took an inventory of everything that he had been issued by the Army, placing everything else in a paper grocery bag. Wearing his utility uniform, field jacket, soft cap, and boots, Berger carried the paper bag to the orderly room where waited two MP’s for his final ride off of the base. The First Sergeant gave him an envelope containing some folded travel orders and bus tickets. “Don’t lose these, dipshit, it’s a long walk home unless you can catch a ride with some friendly aliens,” he said without even looking up from the paperwork. “Now get the hell off my base.”

The MPs dropped him off at the Hinesville Greyhound Bus Terminal four hours early for his brutal reentry to civilian life which would begin with a road trip represented by that packet of tickets in his pocket. Someone had written the purpose of each ticket across the back of the cards: Atlanta, Baltimore, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Altoona, Tyrone. Inside his paper bag, Berger had a dopp kit with soap, a razor, toothbrush still in the plastic packaging, and a comb. The bag also contained a towel a washcloth and an envelope containing his separation paperwork, a D.D. 214 form with the “Less Than Honorable Discharge” block checked and no additional explanation offered. Any reader might be led to wonder if he exhibited moral turpitude, disciplinary incidents, corruptions, substance abuse, physical or emotional instability. It might have been for any of many reasons, really. But Berger realized his infraction was more serious than any of these. Mick was indeed guilty; he had let slip a small glimmer of the Truth.

As the late bus to Atlanta pulled out of the Hinesville terminal, the road appeared to be built on mud scraped from the lowlands on each side, as far into the swampy distance as Mick Berger could see. Just past the town limits the bus passed a small hand-lettered sign beside a mailbox mounted to a rusting piece of exhaust pipe next to a lane made of oyster shells, “MEXICAN JUMPING BEANS.” Nothing else on the sign, just the three words. Mick wondered if the words “for sale” were implied. Or was this a sign with some deeper meaning? He let his mind wander: If potential buyers of said jumping beans ever ventured down that unwelcoming little road to inquire about pricing and availability, did they offer any kind of quantity discounts and guarantees, and how the hell did the beans get all the way here from Mexico. Then he imagined the enterprise down there handing out glossy sales brochures, hinting at their extensive catalog of bean variants, optional equipment, and the accessory items that a fashionable young tourist to Hinesville, Georgia might purchase on an impulse. Imagining even the radio ad, “Serving the Mexican Jumping Bean needs of Liberty County for over two decades.”

Mick ran out of things to even think about the sign. “You’d have to see it yourself to ever believe it,” he muttered aloud. Then he took a quick survey of his own financial situation. Tomorrow was payday in the Army. He hadn’t been advanced anything but the bus ticket to ease his way back to Irvingsberg. An inventory of his wallet yielded four one-dollar bills. Thirty-two cents in one pocket and the rubberband from his poncho/sweatsuit roll in the other. He recalled the train he had taken to Fort Dix, New Jersey on an afternoon three years ago. At the time, that’d been the farthest he’d ever been from home while awake, he thought. Back then he had almost fifteen dollars in his pocket.

So from Mick Berger’s initial way of calculating things, this Army experience had cost him a little over ten dollars. Allowing that they had paid him along the way and fed him every day, till now, plus I sent home most of my pay anyways. So, all in bottom line, he could consider he was ahead. Mighta been worse, he thought then went to sleep. The worst moment of Mick Berger’s life was still to come.

Early in the morning, as they pulled into Atlanta, Georgia, he had to change busses. There was some kind of emergency and nobody was sure if the bus to Charlotte, North Carolina was ever going to make its departure. While attempting to purchase one cigarette from a driver on break, Mick asked the nature of the emergency. By way of answer, the kindly driver simply threw a quarter of a pack of menthols at him, saying “keep em.” Then Mr Greyhound nodded toward the street, but Mick did not immediately see that there accumulated almost an inch of snow, a half inch more than was needed down here to shut the school system and immobilize all traffic in the, so called, greater Atlanta Metropolitan Area.

The bus to Charlotte left around noon, finally. Early the next morning a similar bus stopped in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The snow was a foot deep, but they released the bus to Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, the snow was eighteen inches and still falling, but few in Pittsburgh seemed to notice. The eleven a.m. bus to Altoona left right on time.

In the mid-afternoon snowstorm, Altoona Pennsylvania looked to Mick Berger like the nice sized town he remembered from his boyhood. Back then they didn’t get into town much, just a rare shopping trip or his Father’s medical appointments or something like that. But at least Altoona was familiar ground, even if he didn’t know anyone who lived there. Mick now had a decision to make, a decision into which he invested his last menthol cigarette and a cup of machine coffee from the terminal. It cost him fifty cents. He was down to no cigarettes now and one dollar bill and some pennies, having lived on three candy bars and water fountain visits for the past three nights and two days’ homeward quest. As he smoked he wondered why anyone who liked tobacco at all would purposely buy cigarettes flavored with eucalyptus. But he smoked it.

Mick might make a phone call. But who could he call? Who was going to drive into Altoona for him in eighteen inches of new snow just to bring his sorry ass back out to Irvingsberg? He would not ask his Mother to do that, even if the car was in any condition to run, Mick was certain it had not even been started during the past three years. No way he could afford a taxi from Altoona to take him out there.But there was no possibility of affording a taxi from Tyrone either. Mick had one more ticket and ten minutes to make up his mind. Did he intend to walk home from Altoona or would he use the last ticket to take the bus to Tyrone and walk home from there? It figures, the damn Army had not even considered the last twenty miles of the trip. Either way it was going to be a twenty mile walk at night in the butt deep snow, over mountains and along rivers. And he was now completely out of cigarettes. But the bus station would not refund a government ticket for cash and Mick Berger was not going to waste the ticket. So he decided to take the Tyrone leg of his trip and, after that, to play it by ear.

But the snow was coming down pretty hard. As he stamped out his cigarette and stepped up into the bus, Mick noticed a snow shovel leaning against the garage door in a nearby alley. The driver said, “Twenty Inches and building. We’re going to sit right here and wait for them to get out the plows first. Make yourself comfortable if you like. Might be a few hours.”

That was when Mick realized he was the only passenger. Sitting in the first row, over next to the right hand window, Mick explained his predicament to the driver. The Army had given him tickets enough to take a bus to Tyrone. But he lived in Irvingsberg, a little village near Williamsburg. “Would there be any way,” he asked, for the driver, “to take the back road from here to Tyrone and drop him off along the William Penn Highway. It’ud save me an all night walk through the snow and probably be about ten extra minutes for the bus. We’re off schedule anyway and I appear to be the only passenger.”

“Son, they track my gas mileage. That ten minutes might seem like nothing to you. But every year those of us with good gas mileage and schedule accuracy make a little Christmas bonus. How’m I sposed to explain a small bonus to the missus? That might cost me fifteen bucks.” But the driver was not done talking. He looked significantly at Mick through the mirror, as if that had been a real question and not just some hypothetical.

It was not easy for Mick who was just not used to the ethos of the capitalist world yet. But he was learning fast, “So a big tipper could maybe get the bus to go another route? And there’s no regulation against stopping the bus if the driver thinks he sees a deer on the road. Right?”

“Son, there is no way I would run over a deer in the road. Specially out there on 22 with a big tipper passenger who needed to get out there at the Williamsburg cutoff, where's that, 866?”

Neither one smiled. Mick just said he’d be back and the driver opened the door for the young man with his paper bag.

------------------------------

So much depended

on a red handled shovel

Leaning against the garage

in the white snow,

With the gum banded acknowledgment

of guilt and desperation

-------------------------------

Mick had knocked. He probably knocked several times, walked around both the garage and the house and knocked again, too. But nobody was home or at least no one had answered the knock by a haggard and strange looking man in a military uniform. So Mick used the shovel to clear the porches, stairs, and the sidewalks of the house. He shoveled the entire front curb in case the owner of the home wanted to park their several cars out there. Then he shoveled the drive to the garage.

Then he knocked again.

Still no answer.

So he shoveled the entire sidewalk around that entire block before he made a pass through the alley. He knocked again. No answer.

Then Mick crossed the street and began to shovel the sidewalk around that block as well. A neighbor woman came to the front door and thanked him. He asked if she wanted her walk and steps cleared and she did. She offered him a cup of hot chocolate and two dollars. After shoveling another neighbor’s porch steps, a middle aged man in a sport coat there told him to get lost.

Mick shoveled the sidewalks, several of the alleyways, many porches, stairs and driveways in the neighborhoods around downtown Altoona that afternoon. Most people did not even come to the door to thank him, so he kept moving. He knocked on the door of the house where he had borrowed the shovel at least three more times during the day. No one ever answered. But before sundown, Mick Berger had accumulated $42 in hard earned tips, including a $20 bill given him by a grateful manager of a department store where curbside snow removal had to be done carefully and by ungloved hand, scraping snow from between customer cars as they came and went.

As the uniformed man replaced the snow shovel against the garage door, now with a twenty dollar rent payment rubber banded to the handle, he realized that he had given much more than he had taken that day. Forty minutes later, he handed “Mr Greyhound” an eighteen dollar tip to stop at a deer crossing up in Lorraine Township called “Canal Street.”

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Talon's, a bar known as "Stencil's" by locals.  This is what it looked like a decade after having been closed for failure to pay its taxes. The painted front window and old entry door had been taken down, sold and replaced, as can be seen here, with some siding and a few new windows. 

As Mick entered the Irvingsberg bar which had always been called “Stencils,” few if any of the six customers there could even recall the young man who had been, when they would have last seen him, a high school student. That had been three long years ago. But when he caught the eye of the the proprietor of the place, a man wearing only a thin tank top undershirt over his paint stained work pants, there was a flicker of recognition, then a two eye wink. Mick ordered “a dollar bowl of chili and two one dollar beers, please.”

“Is special tonight for militarys. Goulash chili and cracker all can eat free with Miller Beer fifty cent.”

Did Stencil lose money on that transaction or not? This would be a complex calculation. From that day until he left Irvingsberg for good, Stencil never touched another snow shovel.