Miss Emily Berghauser

Miss Emily Berghauser John Mort After ten months crawling through the jungle, Jim O'Reilly, twenty-one now, left the field for his R&R in Honolulu. Unmarried soldiers chose wilder destinations such as Bangkok or Manila, and they might opt for Sydney if they were from the Midwest and figured never again to venture so far from home. Married men flew to Honolulu to meet their wives. Some couples made a second honeymoon of it. Some talked about a divorce. When Jim reached company headquarters back in Tay Ninh, First Sergeant Brack told him he'd had word that Sharon couldn't make the trip. "You talked to her?" "Came down from the Colonel's office. MARS call." Jim wanted to call her back, but those MARS calls had to be scheduled. Sharon would need to know beforehand. The call went through a series of shortwave patches and you had to say over and out, just like on the company radios. "You're already slotted for Hawaii, Jim. But if you don't wanna go, there's Watkins in Lonely Platoon. He has kids. Gets a letter every day with their little drawings." Jim hadn't heard from Sharon in three months, and in her last letter she'd gone on for two pages about all the troubles she'd had. She was lonely in the farmhouse, twelve miles from Jim's home town of Lamar, Missouri, where she'd held a waitressing job. She got sick, then better again, but her boss wouldn't take her back. So she was stuck out in the boondocks with the cows and the chickens and the coyotes. She wished she'd stayed in college. "Me, too," Jim said, 10,000 miles away, shielding Sharon's letter from the incessant rain. Reminded him of a scene in Casablanca, where rain dissolved the words in Ingrid Bergman's goodbye letter to Humphrey Bogart. Sharon's biggest headache had been the burst pipes on the second floor. Luckily, her old friend Rolly Oldfield had fixed the pipes and installed a new bathtub, too, almost for free. Jim didn't like the thought of that. Rolly was the only plumber in Dade County, that primitive place forty miles east of Lamar. Sharon herself hailed from Dadeville and she'd gone to high school with Rolly. He ran a crew of four, and back when Jim End Page 76 and Sharon were dating, at the state college down in Joplin, she'd urged Jim to work for Mr. Oldfield. "I don't wanna be a plumber," Jim said. "I know, Sweetie, just something to think about, in case college don't work out. Rolly makes awful good money." Jim endured three semesters, hating it because he had to borrow money. The school forced him to take classes in geology and sociology, which were completely irrelevant to what he wanted to do in life. He didn't know what he wanted to do in life except that he liked to read novels such as The Sirens of Titan and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Though he couldn't have defined what it was, he longed for culture. Plumbing was grunt work and his dad had put him through plenty of that already, on their Barton County farm. When he dropped out of school, the army grabbed him in no time. Sharon and he were married in no time, too, because theirs was a true and lasting love. Also, they wanted to sleep together every night. Now he grew angry with her for ruining their Hawaii vacation, though also he chided himself, because he knew she loved him. Must be something tragic going on for her to cancel the flight, and when he arrived in Honolulu he'd be sure to call her. Sad to say, he wouldn't see her in that red dress she used to wear on Saturday nights, when they went to the movies in Joplin. A thousand times, he'd visualized untying the dress and watching it fall. Just possibly, that backless red dress was what led to their marriage. "You could go to Taipei," First Sergeant said. "Let Watkins see his kids...