The Wars

  ‘I s’pose so,’ said Robert. He didn’t want to go over. Even the thought of Taffler intimidated him. Still, it was impossible not to go, since Taffler was a Captain and therefore senior to Clifford and himself.

  They rode over slowly.

  ‘You’re out looking for those mustangs, aren’t you,’ Taffler said. He was over six feet tall and his face and torso were shrouded in dust. His mouth, his eyes and his nipples looked as if someone had been sculpting him and had left their thumbprints behind.

  Robert said: ‘Yes, sir. We lost them in this area this morning.’

  Taffler juggled the stones in his hand. Aureoles of dust appeared.

  ‘I could come with you, if you think I’d be useful,’ he offered.

  ‘No thank you, Captain,’ Robert said, ‘We’re sorry to have disturbed you.’

  ‘I suppose you wonder what in hell I’m doing, eh?’ Taffler gave them a smile. ‘Welllllll…’ he drawled and squinted at the bottles—took aim and threw a stone. It arrived and the bottle was demolished. ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘Killing bottles.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Robert.

  ‘I have to keep my arm in, you see.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Clifford with enthusiasm. ‘I’ve seen you give those varsity passes. What a pity.’

  ‘A pity, Mister…?’

  ‘Purchas, sir.’

  ‘A pity, Mister Purchas? Why’s that?’ He took aim and fired again.

  Bam!

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir. Maybe just that we aren’t all playing football, I guess.’

  Taffler looked off towards the sun.

  “Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity.’ Then he turned and looked at the horsemen. ‘The distance,’ he said, ‘between our lines and theirs is often no more than a hundred yards. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘One hundred yards,’ said Taffler. He gestured at the remaining bottle. It was green and had a tall, thin neck. ‘All you get in this war,’ he said, ‘is one little David against another.’ Then he threw—and broke the tall, thin neck clean off. ‘Like that. Just a bunch of stone throwers.’

  Robert wondered if the bitterness was only the twist in his throat as he threw the stone—or was it really that Taffler wanted the war to pit him against Goliath?

  Taffler reached down and picked up his shirt.

  ‘You’re sure I can’t help?’

  ‘Yessir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ He smiled again. ‘There’s still an hour till sundown. The dog and I can go and kill some rattlesnakes.’

  This was the end of their conversation and since Taffler was out of uniform they were not obliged to salute him, so they simply turned around and rode away. Robert forced his horse ahead of Clifford’s at a gallop—Clifford crying after him: ‘alley! alley! alley!’ just as if Robert had sighted a fox. But Robert galloped so far ahead that in minutes he was riding alone. Then, looking back, he saw that Clifford had given up pursuit and was ambling along at a trot—probably singing ‘Home on the Range.’ It was only then that Robert slowed to a walk. Taffler was just a dot on the horizon. Dots were anonymous. Don’t ask questions. Distance was safety. Space was asylum.

  Later that evening they rode home through sunset leading behind them two captured mustangs. The sky held both the sun and the moon. Far, far away the coyotes howled. Robert kept on riding—leading. Clifford wondered out loud if Taffler could kill a coyote with a stone. The sky was green. Robert did not reply. He was thinking that perhaps he’d found the model he could emulate—a man to whom killing wasn’t killing at all but only throwing. Bam! A bottle. A man to whom war wasn’t good enough unless it was bigger than he was. Bam! A David. A man who made his peace with stones.

  The sun began to sink. It was enormous. Clifford wanted to stop and watch. Robert said no. He was afraid to turn around and look, though he didn’t know why. It just seemed dangerous. So they went on riding. Clifford sang. ‘Bring me, oh bring me a cup of cold water, and cool my temple, the cowboy said, but when they returned with the cup of cold water, the spirit had left and the cowboy was dead…’ Slats of orange were lifted all along the horizon. Four horses. Two horsemen.

  14 The summer had been dry. When autumn came, the situation was reversed. It rained unceasingly. All over North America and Europe the rain poured down from late September through to the end of October. In November, it began to snow. It even snowed in England, where it hadn’t snowed in years.

  All through the prairie autumn Robert’s parents showered him—almost perversely—with scarves and socks and mittens, most of which Robert gave away. They also sent him food. To them, it seemed he’d stepped outside the bounds of civilization—where people didn’t wear clothes or eat cooked meat. Much that was useful, however, also arrived: the necessary accoutrement the army did not provide—such as liquid compasses and riding boots and blue-tinted field glasses. Robert also wrote to his father, saying he would like an automatic pistol. This letter produced some panic. ‘DON’T THEY EVEN ARM YOU?’ his father telegraphed. ‘ONLY WITH ARTILLERY’ Robert replied.

  Lest Robert’s having to ask for his own side arms make no sense to those of you who weren’t around or haven’t read this part of history, it should be pointed out that this was a ‘people’s army’—not an army of professionals. Officers provided their own uniforms and sometimes even their own horses if they so desired. Citizens with means raised their own regimental companies and financed their outfittings. Commissions could still be bought and even the private soldier got his socks from home. At any rate—many telegrams and letters were passed back and forth about this pistol. Would it be a Webley or a Colt—a Browning or a Savage? Its fate, like the fate of Leopold Bloom’s bar of soap, became a minor Odyssey.

  One last incident remains to be told of Robert’s sojourn on the prairie. This is about the whores of Lousetown.

  15 Lousetown was a hamlet twelve miles from Lethbridge—or ‘twelve miles high’ as someone said. It would not be fair to reveal its true name because it has since become a respectable farming centre. In the old days, however, it was just a collection of houses—seven of them—sitting in the middle of nowhere. The road was hardly more than a pair of ruts. The houses were made of wood and have since been burned. The only building shared in common with the present was a General Store then run by a man called Oscar Dreyfus. But Dreyfus was a name that had fallen into bad repute, so the sign read OSCAR’S DRYGOODS. There were even people who called him that. ‘Hallo, Mister Drygoods!’ they would call out, laughing as they went in. ‘How’s Mrs Drygoods?’ Mrs Drygoods was the madam of the house next door. Her name was Maria—but she firmly adhered to the Dreyfus. Maria Dreyfus could read—and she had read ‘J’Accuse!’ Her name was something of which she was very proud. But ‘Drygoods’ stuck with everybody else and since beyond Maria’s was the garbage dump, you had what came to be known as DRYGOODS, WET GOODS and SPOILED GOODS all in a row. Wet Goods was the favourite house in town.

  Robert had to be coerced into going against his better judgement. But the ‘coercion’ was simple. He was shamed into going. If you didn’t go, you were peculiar. It was that simple. The barracks and the boarding school leave little room for the individual when it comes to sex. Either you ‘do’ or you ‘don’t’ and if you ‘don’t’ you face a kind of censure most men would rather avoid.

  As for its being against his better judgement—Robert was certain he would fail.

  They went on a Friday night in a Chevrolet. It rained and the high, thin tires of the car kept bogging down in the ruts. As a consequence, when they arrived they were spattered with mud from cap to boot: Clifford Purchas, Roddy Taylor-Bennett, Robert and a man called Gas who seemed to be a civilian. All the way there, Mister Gas and Clifford Purchas sang while Roddy Taylor-Bennett drank from a bottle of sherry. The Chevrolet’s interior stank of cigarettes and Florida Water cologne. Clifford dubbed it their ‘whorehouse on wheels.’

  Wet Goods’ windows were agleam wit
h blue lights—(blue lights for Officers—red lights for the men. Once, some card had placed a yellow light for quarantine in the window of a house across the street where body lice ran rampant.) Robert got out first. He was hatless. The rain felt good. Roddy Taylor-Bennett handed out the bottle. ‘Finish it,’ he said. Robert thought for once he would like to be drunk and tilted the bottle skyward, draining it dry. He had never been drunk before—and the smell of the bottle reminded him of his mother’s room at home.

  The road through Lousetown faded into grass beyond the garbage dump. It was not the sort of street that people hung about in, even in the best of weather. Now there was only a collection of dogs to greet them. Dogs—and a horse.

  This horse was tethered to a hitching post in front of Wet Goods. It was standing with its head down. As Robert looked—he discerned there was a shape in the mud below its belly. When he and the others stepped up onto the boards of the sidewalk, Robert kept on looking at this shape and wondered what it was and why that juxtaposition of the horse and the shape disturbed him. Then—as he searched for a place to deposit the empty bottle—he twigged. Taffler. And the shape was Taffler’s dog. Robert knew where to leave the bottle. He left it with a stone on top, by the hitching post.

  16 On entering Wet Goods, you were greeted by a large, male mute who was said to be Swedish. His hair was of the white-blond shade most often associated with albinos. His eyes were the colour of steel and he had killed three men. A negro woman took away your coats and called you ‘Cap’n’ no matter what your rank. Then you were left to stand in the hallway, not quite sure which way to turn.

  There was a stairway with a potted fern on the landing. Directly opposite the door, there was a wall that was covered with paintings of Odalisques and mirrors, so the first thing you saw was yourself, intermingled with a lot of pink arms and pale breasts. Sweet rose perfumes mitigated the smell of horse and dog manure that came in on your boots.

  Robert waited with his hands behind his back. It was not as he’d expected. He’d thought they would enter and be greeted by a horde of naked women wafted on clouds of opium. It was not like that at all. It was really quite sedate. In a moment, Maria Dreyfus came into the hallway from a room that had been hidden by a pair of sliding doors. Maria was German. She was small—with bright copper hair, frizzy as a Medusa’s and she wore a black dress. She made no more apology for being a German than she did for being a Jew. She put out her hand and said: ‘Good effning.’ Nobody laughed at the way she spoke. Her presence and her bearing forbade it. She ushered them into the room beyond the doors and the doors slid closed behind them.

  In the room, there were seven girls and two other men. The men were cowboys, presumably, or railroad men or farmers’ sons. At any rate, they were not in the army. Robert could not tell whether they were ‘finished’ or ‘beginning.’ He had no idea of procedure. Neither, as it turned out, had any of the others he’d come with, with the possible exception of Mister Gas, who seemed to be known to one of the women.

  The women—(or girls: they were really both)—at first appeared to be dressed like actresses in a play. The colours they wore were high-toned and garishly mixed: chartreuse and black—orange and blue. It was not until his eyes had adapted to the golden glow of the lamps that Robert realized he could see right through the dresses and the shadows weren’t shadows but the shadings of hair and of nipples rouged with henna.

  Whiskey bottles sat on a silver tray. Mister Gas went up and poured himself a drink. Robert did likewise. Every man in the room went over and stood by the whiskey bottles. The women sat discreetly waiting. They were smiling. Finally, Maria Dreyfus saw there was an impasse and went around the room booming at the girls: ‘Minkle! Minkle! Shtand und minkle!’ She placed a disc on the gramophone and started it spinning.

  A girl with orange-red hair that was piled on top of her head came across the room at Robert. Her shoulders were naked bones and her eyelids were painted black. She was wearing a violet dress that was open down the front and tied with a sash and she seemed to be a walking pelvis.

  ‘You wanna trot?’ she said to Robert, breathing cloves in his face.

  ‘Trot?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Dance.’

  ‘I don’t think I know how to do that,’ said Robert. He didn’t trust women with red hair. Heather Lawson had red hair.

  ‘All right,’ said the girl with the cloves in her mouth. ‘Then I’ll show ya.’ She said her name was Ella.

  She put both her arms around his neck and pressed her pelvis hard against his groin. Robert was immobilized.

  ‘Move,’ she said and pushed.

  Robert began to stumble around to the music—‘nigger music’ as it was called in those days—full of shouts and thumping pianos and a golden wailing cornet. The dancers pressed around and around the room and the heat from the stove in the corner and the airlessness and the raw, high taste of the whiskey soon began to have an effect that was dizzying and Robert had never felt so far away from the floor before in his life. The dancing—pelvis to pelvis—had a kind of crazy, marching formality to it—everyone locked in military pairs—round and round and round—straight-backed and stiff-legged. Round and around and around, till Clifford Purchas fell down drunk on the rug. No one paid the least attention. Everyone went on dancing. Clifford lay on his back—with his eyes wide open—gazing upward, ecstatic. ‘I can see it,’ he said as the women stepped above his face. ‘Lordy, Lordy! I can see it! Look at that!’

  Finally, Maria Dreyfus thought he’d lain there long enough. She clapped her hands for the mute and Clifford was lifted giggling from the floor and carried up the stairs, hanging down the Swede’s wide back with his fingers dabbling in the skirts of the woman who followed him. Everyone applauded.

  The music ended.

  Robert was stranded in the centre of the room with Ella. Mister Gas had made his selection and nodded at Maria. Maria nodded back and she pinched his arm as he passed with the girl of his choice. ‘Enjoy. Enjoy,’ she said. Then, turning to the rest of the room, she smiled. People were going upstairs. Everyone was happy. Roddy Taylor-Bennett was next—taking a tall, dark girl with holes in the heels of her stockings.

  Robert looked at Ella. Ella smiled.

  The cowboys sat down—one with a girl on his lap. Robert watched as the cowboy slid his hand inside her dress to fondle her breasts. In fact he could see her breasts—and the nipples starting to harden under the calloused fingers.

  Robert became alarmed. Even frightened. He thought they were going to ‘do it’—sitting right there in the chair with the girl’s legs dangling over the cowboy’s thighs and everyone watching. He looked at Maria Dreyfus to see if she would stop them but Maria was pouring herself a drink and her back was to the room. Part of Robert’s panic was his fear of what his own hands would do. It seemed they were magnets, drawn to his groin, and he had to fight to stop them from moving.

  Ella was watching him.

  Robert swallowed. ‘Have you got another clove?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ she said and handed him one.

  They went upstairs.

  17 Robert sat on the edge of the bed with his hands folded on his knees. Ella was looking in the mirror, wondering what to do with this strange young man. He sat so still and he wouldn’t look at her.

  ‘Isn’t there nothing special you’d like?’ she said. ‘I mean—here we are and everything.’ She turned around and leaned against the washstand, playing with her sash, threatening to reveal herself.

  Robert didn’t know what to say. What was special?

  ‘Look,’ said Ella. ‘This is what I’m paid for. To make ya happy. O.K.?’

  But how? Robert wanted to ask—except he didn’t know how to put that into words. Nothing he’d read had covered this situation. Whores, of course, had been discussed at school but no one actually ever said this is what you do. They’d made it all up. But what they’d made up was not like this. At all. They’d flown from trapezes and made love in bath tubs and ravish
ed several women tied to the bed posts, but no one had ever sat in a room with lilac wallpaper and been asked if there was ‘nothing special you’d like.’

  ‘Don’t ya wanta touch me?’ said Ella.

  Yes; Robert thought. And no. He had sort of a problem he couldn’t discuss.

  ‘You’re the most serious person I ever met,’ said Ella. ‘In my whole life I never met a man who didn’t say nothin’. ’Cept acourse the Swede. But his tongue was cut out by In’ians.’ She sat down beside him and put her hand on the back of his neck. She was smiling. ‘Your tongue in there?’ she said and ran her finger over his lips. ‘You’re a nice hot lookin’ boy,’ she said; ‘an’ we shouldn’t just be sittin’ here. Why don’t you let me…?’ And she put her hand inside his pants. Right inside—past his drawers. No one else had ever touched him there before. Heather Lawson’s hand had rested on his thigh one night—and when he’d moved, to get her fingers closer to the mark, she’d thought he meant to move her away and withdrew her fingers and hadn’t made that gesture again. It was not something Robert knew how to ask for. Now, the situation was worse.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ella. But she was kind about it. She went on smiling—and kissed him at the corner of his lips. When she withdrew her hand, she kept it in a fist and crossed to the washstand. Then she picked up a towel and told him to stand up.

  ‘You take them off,’ she said, nodding at his trousers; ‘an’ I’ll clean you up.’

  Robert had ejaculated coming up the stairs. His body hadn’t waited for his mind. It did things on its own.

  —

  ROBERT LAY BACK with his arm across his eyes. Ella performed her task with efficiency and tact. Nothing was said about what had happened. Even when Robert blushed, she had looked away in order to smile.

  ‘There,’ she said and threw the towel across the room. Then she clambered onto the bed and sat with her knees drawn up and watched him. ‘It’d be nicer to look at your face than it is to look at your arm,’ she smiled. Robert did not respond. ‘Hey,’ she said. She reached out and gave his arm a push. It fell aside. Robert stared at the ceiling. Ella sat back and lighted a cigarette. ‘You smoke?’ Robert shook his head. ‘Well—at least we know you’re alive!’ She laughed.