Free In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff Page A

sat down and cleaned my plate and let my mother fill it again. I didn’t talk and neither did she. Afterward I sat there and tried to form an intention. I couldn’t think at all. I felt weightless. My hands were on the table as if I were about to push myself up decisively, but I stayed where I was. My mother looked on, stricken and afraid. For her sake I knew I had to get out of there. I said maybe I’d better go home after all.
    I didn’t remember Yancy’s letter until late that night. I got out of bed and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where I kept my correspondence and receipts.I riffled through the pile. She had loopy, girlish handwriting, and she’d used a pencil. I could recognize the envelope at a glance and often did, with a pang, when I was looking for something else. I knew it was there, but I didn’t come up with it the first time through, nor the second.
    I slid the drawer out and put it on the floor and knelt beside it. One by one I lifted every letter, turned it over, set it aside. When the drawer was empty I still hadn’t found it. I was close to panic. I sat back and imposed calm on myself. The letter had to be somewhere in the room.
    Taking care not to hurry, I searched the other drawers. I looked under the dresser, then pulled it away from the wall and looked behind it. I emptied my duffel bag, went through the pockets of my civvies and even my uniforms. I ran my hands over the shelves in the closet. When I heard myself panting I sat on the edge of my bed and forced myself to think back to when I’d last seen the letter. I couldn’t. I got up again, took stock. Quietly, so I wouldn’t wake the house, I began to tear my room to pieces. I left no inch of it unexamined. Nothing. Yancy’s letter was gone. Had I thrown it away? Could I have done that—just thrown it away?
    I couldn’t even remember her last name.
    A few days later I thought of calling her friend, the girl I’d taken out, but the number had been disconnected and her name wasn’t listed in the directory. I called the bar where they’d both worked. No one knew any girls named Trace or Yancy.
    I don’t know exactly what I would have done if I’d found Yancy. Given her the news, of course. Tried tofind out if she’d had the baby. I wanted to ask her about the baby—lots of questions there. And I would have said I was sorry for sitting on her letter, because I was sorry, I am still sorry, God knows I am sorry.
    V ERA AND I fought more riotously every week. She took offense at something during a party and hewed out great clumps of her hair with pinking shears. One night she climbed the tree outside my bedroom window with a rope around her neck and threatened to hang herself. The outlandishness of our quarrels isolated us, and made reconciliation harder. We had to keep upping the ante, promising more of ourselves, to put the last one behind. Just before I finished language school we got engaged.
    And then my year of grace ended. At the end of it, scared, short-winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines, I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders.
    Just after I got there I was assigned to a training exercise being played out in the mountains of Pisgah National Forest. I didn’t know any of the men whose temporary commander I became; I was filling in for their regular team leader, who had other business to attend to. Our job was to parachute in and link up with another team and make a show of our expertise.
    It was over a year since I’d been in the field. In that time I had done almost no exercise, nor had I worn a uniform, carried a rifle and pack, or given an order. I hadn’t read a compass or used a map except on drives into the countryside. On the day before the drop Ilocked myself up with plenty of coffee and every field manual I could get my hands on, like a student boning up for a chemistry final.
    We gathered on the airstrip well before dawn. I tagged along with the