The Barracks Thief Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Laudie

  EPIGRAPH

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Antaeus and to Granta (England) where the contents of this book first appeared.

  My thanks to the Arizona Council on the Arts and Humanities for their generous support. —TW

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Tobias Wolff

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  When his boys were young, Guy Bishop formed the habit of stopping in their room each night on his way to bed. He would look down at them where they slept, and then he would sit in the rocking chair and listen to them breathe. He was a man who had always gone from one thing to another, place to place, job to job, and, even since his marriage, woman to woman. But when he sat in the dark between his two sleeping sons he felt no wish to move.

  Sometimes, because it seemed unnatural, this peace he felt gave him fears. The worst fear he had was that by loving his children so much he was somehow endangering them, putting them in harm’s way. At times he knew for a certainty that some evil was about to overtake them. As the boys grew older he had this fear less often, but it still came upon him from time to time. Then he tried to imagine what form the evil might take, from which direction it might come. When he had these thoughts Guy Bishop would close his eyes, give his head a little shake, and turn his mind to some more pleasant subject.

  He was seeing a woman off and on. They had good times together and that was all either of them wanted, at least in the beginning. Then they began to feel miserable when they were away from each other. They agreed to break it off, but couldn’t. There were nights when Guy Bishop woke up weeping. At one point he considered killing himself, but the woman made him promise not to. When he couldn’t hold out any longer he left his family and went to live with her.

  This was in October. Keith, the younger of the boys, had just begun his freshman year in high school. Philip was a junior. Guy Bishop thought that they were old enough to accept this change and even to grow stronger from it, more realistic and adaptable. Most of the worry he felt was for his wife. He knew that the break-up of their marriage was going to cause her terrible suffering, and he did what he could to arrange things so that, except for his leaving, her life would not be disrupted. He signed the house over to her and each month he sent her most of his salary, holding back only what he needed to live on.

  Philip did learn to get along without his father, mainly by despising him. His mother held up, too, better than Guy Bishop had expected. She caved in every couple of weeks or so, but most of the time she was cheerful in a determined way. Only Keith lost heart. He could not stop grieving. He cried easily, sometimes for no apparent reason. The two boys had been close; now, even in the act of comforting Keith, Philip looked at him from a distance. There was only a year and a half between them but it began to seem like five or six. One night, coming in from a party, he shook Keith awake with the idea of having a good talk, but after Keith woke up Philip went on shaking him and didn’t say a word. One of the cats had been sleeping with Keith. She arched her back, stared wide-eyed at Philip, and jumped to the floor.

  “You’ve got to do your part,” Philip said.

  Keith just looked at him.

  “Damn you,” Philip said. He pushed Keith back against the pillow. “Cry,” he said. “Go ahead, cry.” He really did hope that Keith would cry, because he wanted to hold him. But Keith shook his head. He turned his face to the wall. After that Keith kept his feelings to himself.

  In February Guy Bishop lost his job at Boeing. He told everyone that the company was laying people off, but the opposite was true. This was 1965. President Johnson had turned the bombers loose on North Vietnam and Boeing had orders for more planes than they could build. They were bringing people in from all over, men from Lockheed and Convair, boys fresh out of college. It seemed that anyone could work at Boeing but Guy Bishop. Philip’s mother called the wives of men who might know what the trouble was, but either they hadn’t heard or they weren’t saying.

  Guy Bishop found another job but he didn’t stay with it, and just before school let out Philip’s mother put the house up for sale. She gave away all but one of her five cats and took a job as cashier in a movie theater downtown. It was the same work she’d been doing when Guy Bishop met her in 1945. The house sold within a month. A retired Coast Guard captain bought it. He drove by the house nearly every day with his wife and sometimes they parked in front with the engine running.

  Philip’s mother took an apartment in West Seattle. Philip worked as a camp counselor that summer, and while he was away she and Keith moved again, to Ballard. In the fall both boys enrolled at Ballard High. It was a big school, much bigger than the one where they’d gone before, and it was hard to meet people. Philip kept in touch with his old friends, but now that they weren’t in school together they found little to talk about. When he went to parties with them he usually ended up sitting by himself in the living room, watching television or talking to some kid’s parents while everyone else slow-danced in the rec room downstairs.

  After one of these parties Philip and the boy who’d brought him sat in the boy’s car and passed a paper cup full of vodka back and forth and talked about things they used to do. At some point in their conversation Philip realized that they weren’t friends anymore. He felt restless and got out of the car. He stood there, looking at the darkened house across the street. He wanted to do something. He wished he was drunk.

  “I’ve got to go,” the other boy said. “My dad wants me in early tonight.”

  “Just a minute,” Philip said. He picked up a rock, hefted it, then threw it at the house. A window broke. “One down,” Philip said. He picked up another rock.

  “Jesus,” the other boy said. “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking windows,” Philip said. At that moment a light came on upstairs. He threw the rock but it missed and banged against the side of the house.

  “I’m getting out of here,” the other boy said. He started the car and Philip got back inside. He began to laugh as they drove away, though he knew there was nothing funny about what he’d done. The other boy stared straight ahead and said nothing. Philip could see that he was disgusted. “Wait a minute,” Philip said, grabbing the sleeve of the Nehru jacket the other boy had on. “I don’t believe it. Where did you get the Nehru jacket?” When the other boy didn’t answer Philip said, “Don’t tell me—it’s your dad’s. That’s why your dad wants you home early. He likes to know where his Nehru jacket is.”

  When they got to Philip’s apartment building they sat for a moment without talking. Finally Philip said, “I’m sorry,” and put out his hand. But the other boy looked away.

  Philip got out of the car. “I’ll give you a call,” he said, and when he got no response he added: “I was just kidding about the Nehru jacket. It must have looked really great about twenty years ago.”

  Philip had always wanted to go to Reed College, but by the time he finished high school that year his grades were so bad he was lucky to graduate at all. Reed sent him a form rejection letter and so did the University of Washington, his second choice. He went to work as a busboy in a motel restaurant and tried to stay out of the apartment. Keith was always there, playing records or just lying around, his sadness plain to see though he had begun to affect a breezy manner of speech. Philip suspected that he was stoned a lot of the time, but he didn’t know what
to do about it, or if he should do anything at all. Though he felt sorry for Keith, Philip was beginning to dislike him. He wanted to avoid anything that might cause trouble between them and add to the dislike he felt. Besides, he had a smoke now and then himself. It made him feel interesting—witty, sensitive, perceptive.

  Sometimes the owner of the theater where she worked gave Philip’s mother a ride home. One night, coming home late himself, he saw them kissing in the owner’s car. Philip turned around and went back up the street. The next day he refused to speak to her, and refused to tell her why, though he knew he was being theatrical and unfair. Finally it drove her to tears. As he sat reading Philip heard her cry out in the kitchen. He jumped up, thinking she must have burned herself. He found her leaning on the sink, her face in her hands. What had happened to them? Where were they? Where was her home, her cats, her garden? Where was the regard of her neighbors, the love of her family? Everything was gone.

  Philip did his best to calm her. It wasn’t easy, but after a time she agreed to go for a walk with him, and managed to collect herself. Philip knew he had been in the wrong. He told his mother that he was sorry, and that his moodiness had had nothing to do with her—he was just a little on edge. She squeezed his arm. This won’t go on forever, Philip thought. In silence, they continued to walk the circular path around the small park. It was August and still warm, but the benches were empty. Now and then a pigeon landed with a rush of wings, looked around, and flew away again.

  Their parish priest from the old neighborhood had friends among the local Jesuits. He succeeded in getting Philip a probationary acceptance to Seattle University. It was a good school, but Philip wanted to get away from home. In September he moved to Bremerton and enrolled at the junior college there. During the day he tried to keep awake in his classes and at night he worked at the Navy Yard, doing inventory in warehouses and dodging forklifts driven by incompetents.

  Philip didn’t get to know many people in Bremerton, but sometimes when he got off work at midnight he went drinking with a few of the Marine guards. Bremerton was a soft berth for them after a year in Vietnam. They’d been in the fighting, and some of them had been wounded. They were all a little crazy. Philip didn’t understand their jokes, and if he laughed anyway they gave him mean looks. They talked about “asshole civilians” as if he weren’t there.

  The Marines tolerated Philip because he had a car, an old Pontiac he’d bought for fifty dollars at a police auction. He ferried them to different bars and sometimes to parties, then back to the Yard through misty wet streets, trying to keep his eyes open while they laughed and yelled out the window and threw beer on each other. If one of them got into a fight all the others piled in immediately, no questions asked. Philip was often amazed at their brutishness, but there were times, after he’d let them off and watched them go through the gate together, when he envied them.

  At Christmas Philip’s mother asked him to talk to Keith. Keith was doing badly in school, and just before vacation one of his teachers had caught him smoking a joint in a broom closet. He’d been alone, which seemed grotesque to Philip. When he thought of Keith standing in the dark surrounded by brooms and cleanser and rolls of toilet paper, puffing away all by himself, he felt disgusted. Only by going down to the school and pleading with the principal, “groveling,” as she put it, had Philip’s mother been able to dissuade him from reporting Keith to the police. As it was, he’d been suspended for two weeks.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Philip said, “but it won’t do any good.”

  “It might,” she said. “He looks up to you. Remember the way he used to follow you around?”

  They were sitting in the living room. Philip’s mother was smoking and had her feet on the coffee table. Her toenails were painted red. She caught Philip staring at them and looked down at her drink.

  “My life isn’t going anywhere,” Philip said. He got up and walked over to the window. “I’m going to enlist,” he said. This was an idea he’d had for some time now, but hearing himself put it in words surprised him and gave him a faint sensation of fear.

  His mother sat forward. “Enlist? Why would you want to enlist?”

  “In case you haven’t heard,” Philip said, “there’s a war on.” That sounded false to him and he could see it sounded false to his mother as well. “It’s just something I want to do,” he said. He shrugged.

  His mother put her glass down. “When?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “Give me a year,” she said. She stood and came over to Philip. “Give me six months, anyway. Try to understand. This thing with Keith has got me coming and going.”

  “Keith,” Philip said. He shook his head. Finally he agreed to wait the six months.

  They spent Christmas day in the apartment. Philip gave Keith a puzzle that he worked on all afternoon and never came close to solving, though it looked simple enough to Philip. They had dinner in a restaurant and after they got back Keith went at the puzzle again, still with no success. Philip wanted to help, but whenever he offered a suggestion Keith went on as if he hadn’t heard. Philip watched him, impatiently at first, then thoughtfully; he wondered what it was in Keith that found satisfaction in losing. If he went on the way he was, losing would become a habit, and he would never be able to pull his weight.

  They had their talk but it went badly, as Philip knew it would. Though he tried to be gentle, he ended up calling Keith a coward. Keith laughed and made sarcastic remarks about Philip going into the service. He had suddenly decided that he was against the war. Philip pointed out that it had taken Keith seven tries to pass his driver’s license examination, and said that anyone who had that much trouble driving a car, or solving a simple puzzle, had no right to an opinion on any subject.

  “That’s it,” Philip told his mother afterwards. “Never again.”

  A few nights later Philip came back from a movie and found his mother in tears and Keith trying to soothe her, though it was obvious that he was close to the breaking point himself. Oh, hell, Philip thought, but it wasn’t what he had assumed. They weren’t just feeling sorry for themselves. Philip’s father had come by and when they refused to open the door for him he had tried to break in. He’d made a scene, yelling at them and ramming the door with his shoulder.

  Philip left Keith with his mother and drove out to his father’s place in Bellevue, an efficiency apartment near the lake. Guy Bishop had moved to Bellevue a few months earlier when the woman he’d been living with went to Sarasota to visit her family, and decided to stay there.

  He still had his windbreaker on when he opened the door. “Philip,” he said. “Come in.” Philip shook his head. “Please, son,” his father said, “come in.”

  They sat at a counter that divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. There were several pairs of gleaming shoes lined up along the wall, and the air smelled of shoe polish. On the coffee table there was a family portrait taken at Mount Rushmore in 1963. Keith and Philip were in the middle, grinning because the photographer, a Canadian, had just said “aboot” for “about.” The four presidents, eyes blank, seemed to be looking down at them. Next to the picture a stack of magazines had been arranged in a fan, so that a strip of each cover was visible.

  Philip told his father to stay away from the apartment. That was where the family lived, Philip said, and Guy Bishop wasn’t part of the family.

  Suddenly his father reached out and put his hand on Philip’s cheek. Philip stared down at the counter. A moment later his father took his hand away. Of course, he said. He would call first thing in the morning and apologize.

  “Forget the apology,” Philip said. “Just leave her alone, period.”

  “It’s not that simple,” his father said. “She called me first.”

  “What do you mean, she called you first?”

  “She asked me to come over,” he said. “When I got there she wouldn’t let me in. Which is no excuse for acting the way I did.” He folded his hands and looked down at them. r />
  “I don’t believe you,” Philip said.

  His father shrugged. A moment later he looked over at Philip and smiled. “I’ve got something for you. It was meant to be a graduation present, but I didn’t have a chance to give it to you then.” He went over to the closet and pulled out a suitcase. “Come on,” he said.

  Philip followed him out of the room and down the steps into the parking lot. It had rained. The pavement shone under the lights, and the cars gleamed. Philip’s father bent down and unzipped the suitcase. It was full of what looked like silver pipes. He lifted them out all at once, and Philip saw that they were connected. His father arranged them, tightening wing-nuts here and there, until finally a frame took shape with prongs at each end. He got two wheels from the suitcase and fastened them between the prongs. Then he bolted a leather seat to the top of the frame. It was a bicycle, a folding bicycle. He put down the kick-stand and stepped back.

  “Voila,” he said.

  They looked at it.

  “It works,” he said. He put up the kick-stand and straddled it, searching with his feet for the pedals. He pushed himself around the parking lot, bumping into cars, wobbling badly. With its little wheels and elevated seat the bicycle looked like the kind bears ride in circuses. The chrome frame glittered. The spokes caught the light as they went around and around.

  “You’ll never be without transportation,” Philip’s father said. “You can keep it in the trunk of your car. Then, if something breaks down or you run out of gas, you won’t be forced to hitchhike.” He almost fell taking a turn but managed to right himself. “Or say you go to Europe. What better way,” he said, and then the bicycle caught the fender of a car and he pitched over the handlebars. He fell heavily. The bicycle came down with him and he lay there, all tangled up in it.

  “My God,” he said. “Give me a hand, son.” When Philip didn’t come to him he said, “I can’t move. Give me a hand.”

  Philip turned and walked toward his car.