The Night In Question Read Online Free Page B

foot.
    “It’s about Lieutenant Dixon, sir.”
    “Oh, Christ. You’re
not
going to tell me you’re having trouble with Lieutenant Dixon.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    When Lieutenant Puchinsky asked if he’d gone through channels, B.D. knew he’d already lost his case. He tried to explain the situation but couldn’t find the right words, and Lieutenant Puchinsky kept interrupting to say that it wasn’t his outfit anymore. He wouldn’t even admit that an injustice had been done since Ryan had, after all, volunteered.
    “Lieutenant Dixon made him,” B.D. said.
    “How was that?”
    “I can’t explain, sir. He has a way.”
    Lieutenant Puchinsky didn’t say anything.
    “We did what you wanted,” B.D. said. “We kept our part of the deal.”
    “There weren’t any deals,” Lieutenant Puchinsky said. “It sounds to me like you’ve got a personal problem, soldier. If your mission requires personal problems, we’ll issue them to you. Is that clear?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “If you’re so worried about him, why don’t
you
volunteer?”
    B.D. came to attention, snapped a furiously correct salute, and turned away.
    “Hold up, Biddy.” Lieutenant Puchinsky walked over to him. “What do you expect me to do? Put yourself in my place—what am I supposed to do?”
    “You could talk to him.”
    “It won’t do any good, I can guarantee you that.” When B.D. didn’t answer, he said, “All right. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll talk to him.”
    B.D. did feel better, but not for long.
    He had trouble sleeping that night, and as he lay in the darkness, eyes open, a rusty taste in his mouth, the extent of his failure became clear to him. He knew exactly what would happen. Lieutenant Puchinsky thought he was going to talk to Lieutenant Dixon, and he would be loyal to this intention for maybe an hour or two, maybe even the rest of the night, and in the morning he’d forget it. He was an officer. Officers could look like men and talk like men, but when you drew the line they always went over to the officer side because that was what they were. Lieutenant Puchinsky had already decided that speaking to Lieutenant Dixon wouldn’t make any difference. And he was right. B.D. knew that. He understood that he had known it all along, that he’d gone to Lieutenant Puchinsky so he wouldn’t be able to deal with Lieutenant Dixon afterward. He’d tipped his hand because he was afraid to play it, and now the chance was gone. In another four or five days, the next time battalion sent down for an ambush party, LieutenantDixon would be out there asking for a volunteer, and Ryan would shoot off his mouth again.
    And Lieutenant Puchinsky thought that he, B.D., should go out instead.
    B.D. lay on his back for a while, then turned on his side. It was hot. Finally he got up and went to the doorway of the hooch. A new guy was sitting there in his boxer shorts, smoking a pipe. He nodded at B.D. but didn’t say anything. There was no breeze. B.D. stood in the doorway, then went back inside and sat on his bunk.
    B.D. wasn’t brave. He knew that, as he knew other things about himself that he would not have believed a year ago. He would not have believed that he could walk past begging children and feel nothing. He would not have believed that he could become a frequenter of prostitutes. He would not have believed that he could become a whiner or a shirker. He had been forced to surrender certain pictures of himself that had once given him pride and a serene sense of entitlement to his existence, but the one picture he had not given up, and which had become essential to him, was the picture of himself as a man who would do anything for a friend.
    Anything meant anything. It could mean getting himself hurt or even killed. B.D. had some ideas as to how this might happen, acts of impulse like going after a wounded man, jumping on a grenade, other things he’d heard and read about, and in which he thought he recognized the possibilities of