A good deal of traffic was going to and from Fort Riley, where Desiree had been stationed, and so she was able to make it back to Forks County three different times during the month of September—easing her concern that her fast-growing baby daughter might forget her face and voice. When a week and a half went by, and Desiree was unable to find a flight back, Clyde bought a plane ticket and took Maggieon a stress-ridden three-leg flight down to Fort Riley. They stayed illegally in the officers’ quarters for a couple of nights and then flew home.
Each individual moment of September seemed to last forever. When Clyde was at work, he worried about Maggie, who was usually in the care of one of the Dhont wives. There was nothing really to worry about, but he worried anyway and could not wait for his shift to be over. When he was out campaigning, going door-to-door with Maggie strapped to his back, he checked his wristwatch between houses and was always crestfallen to see how little time had gone by. And the time spent taking care of Maggie was worst of all. He loved the little critter, but he just couldn’t concentrate on her the way Desiree could. The baby was the center of Desiree’s attention; she could concentrate on Maggie and Maggie alone for hours at a time; the baby chased all other thoughts from her mind.
It wasn’t like that for Clyde. He and his wife had worked out an arrangement whereby she handled the tactics of child rearing and he handled the strategy, always walking a couple of paces ahead of them, club in hand, looking out for tar pits and saber-toothed tigers. He was always thinking about how to rewire the ceiling fixtures in the apartment building so that he could get some tenants in there next month and get some cash flow to divert into Maggie’s college account, keeping track of the oil-change schedule for the station wagon. He tried to retool his brain for Desiree’s role and just couldn’t do it. He’d sit there spooning mush into the child’s mouth, and instead of making each spoonful into a little event unto itself, and lavishing praise on Maggie for her advanced mush-slurping capabilities, he would just move that little spoon back and forth like an industrial robot, staring at a squirrel out in the yard or some other irrelevant focus point, saying nothing whatsoever.
Desiree wrote letters, even though they talked on the phone every night and saw each other almost every week, so that Clyde ended up getting each individual piece of news three times. Even though the Army appeared to be gearing up for war, the nurses were not unusually busy. She had been posted not at the main base hospital, but at an outlying clinic, filling in for other nurses who had been sent off to California for desert exercises. She was much more apt to see the spouses and children of soldiers, and retirees, than soldiers themselves. After a couple of weeks, though, her role changed.
_First big batch of reservists hits town next week. We are gearing up to in-process them. Translation: your wife will spend the next couple weeks sticking needles into butts. So I’ll pack up my stuff again and move to new quarters nearer the main hospital. No more private rooms, I’m afraid. Army called up a batch of cardiovascular surgeons and put them in barracks with no blankets. They flew off the handle, but Army doesn’t care because Army has them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Making some friends with the other nurses now. Found out I was wearing my rank in the wrong place. But everyone’s a little rusty, and things are always looser in the Medical Corps, so they didn’t make me peel potatoes or anything. But I was warned that things will get stricter if/when I get closer to the action._
Despite the fact that each individual moment of September seemed to last forever, the month as a whole flew by. Starting on Labor Day, Dr. Jerry Tompkins, as a way of garnering some free publicity, had begun to release weekly polling results to the newspaper, and they showed that Clyde’s popularity had surged to within a few points of Sheriff Mullowney’s in the weeks following Desiree’s move to Fort Riley. This was small comfort to Clyde, who no longer cared about the election. It did help give him the energy to keep campaigning for another week or two, until more poll results came out showing that his standings had dropped to a bit short of where they had been to begin with. Man-in-the-street interviews on the front page of the Times-Dispatch suggested that, in the view of the electorate, Clyde ought to be concentrating on taking care of his baby and not out campaigning, or for that matter trying to run thesheriff’s department.
_I see butts in my sleep: white butts, black butts, hairy butts, smooth butts, pimply butts. Some of the owners of these butts squawk and fuss, but generally they take it pretty well. Some of these people were even more surprised than I was when they were called up. They believed (like me) that the call-up would never happen. Some of them are claiming hardship, which makes me PO’d because some have fewer hardships than we do. All the motels and campgrounds are full of wives and kids. If you bring Pumpkin down again, we will have a harder time sneaking you into the BOQ. Maybe we could rendezvous in Kansas City._
Do you remember the Post Gas Chamber?