Once an Eagle

  But this was different. He would have to speak of it now.

  “Massengale caused your dad’s death, Joey. On Pala.”

  The battalion commander stared at him.

  “Yes. And I aided and abetted him. In a manner of speaking.” It was hard. He had not realized how hard it would be to say this out loud; after all this time. But he told it, slowly, evenly, while the jeeps roared up and down the squalid, noisy midway and the girls in their silk slacks called to the fitful parade of suntans and olive drab: PYLON, and the promise of the reserve, the angry conference in his headquarters tent, the attack, and the loss of contact, and standing there holding that radio from Porky Bannerman—the hollow, awful realization; and the others all looking at him in the silence …

  “I see.” Krisler nodded rapidly, his face stiff. “I see.”

  “Didn’t you know anything about it, Joey? You never heard anything?” The younger man shook his head. It was what Tommy always said: Everybody always heard about it but the goat.

  “—It seems impossible!” Joey burst out.

  “Yes. It does, at times.”

  “It all—it really happened like that?”

  He looked at the Light Colonel, whose eyes still held a shade of distrust. “You don’t think I’d make up something like this, do you?” he asked quietly.

  “No. No, of course not … But why—couldn’t you have told him to go shit in his hat?”

  “Yes. I could have. I thought about it. But he’d have loved that—he’d have shoved Ryetower in and run it off, anyway. I thought we might get away with it. And then of course”—and he could feel his lip curl—“I was under the impression I had Porky out there if anything did go wrong … ”

  “The bastard.” Joey’s face had turned very hard and plain, all ridges; he no longer looked like his mother at all. “But then why didn’t you tear it open?” he cried hotly. “A thing that low, that rotten—why didn’t you demand a court …?”

  He shifted his feet. “Probably I should have. I guess that was where I was weak. I didn’t have an airtight case—some of my radios got lost when Dick moved the headquarters. Massengale had only given me his word about the Forty-ninth, there was nothing in writing.” He smiled grimly. “Only his word as an officer and a gentleman. He had all those powerful connections you know about, in Congress, the AG’s office—and he had a sparkling victory behind him, remember. He’d have come out all right; and they’d have burned me bad. To no purpose that I could see.”

  “But you owe a man that much—at least that much! To square it …”

  He sighed. “You’re probably right. I know … It was all over and done by then. The Salamanders were gone: your dad, Ray, Joe, Stan Bowcher, Jackson. All the old men, the good ones … You’ve got to remember”—his voice had taken on a supplicant note that distressed him—“the Kyushu and Honshu operations were still hanging over us: we didn’t know how Luzon and Mindanao were going to turn out. Leyte and Pala were grim beyond belief. I figured I could be of more help to the Divison as its CO, fighting for it, than I could as a cashiered invalid holding down a cot at Walter Reed …”

  He fell silent, thinking. When his eyes met Joey’s he saw, behind the outrage and anger, a flicker of the bitter disappointment a man feels on finding a revered superior afflicted with feet of clay. Rugged old Uncle Sam, holder of the CMH, who had saved whole beachheads single-handed, who never flinched from a point of honor, had succumbed to expediency in this vicious incident like any grubby little staff conniver. He was just like all the rest, then: no better and no worse—

  He lowered his eyes and picked at the callus on his thumb. He’d seen that look in Donny’s face once, back at Garfield; that time he’d told the boy all men (himself included) were afraid … The Tweaker had glared at him in the harsh light of the corridor, his pixie satan’s brows quivering, and demanded: “What did you expect: Damon?—an arachnid? a cephalopod?” Now Donny was dead nearly twenty years, and he, bereft, had served as surrogate father to a fatherless Joey—who now thought less of him. Well, that was only fair enough; he’d thought a good deal less of himself ever since that afternoon in the hospital at Reina Blanca. Maybe that was simply the price you paid for the truth: you exposed your own frailties along with those of others …

  He felt all at once bleak and defeated, enormously tired. He longed with all his heart to be home in Monterey, working downstairs in the shop or walking along the shore at Point Piños with the sea swirling through the black pinnacles of rock and the seals’ heads bobbing in the swells. Old men shouldn’t try to run things: the young, with their boundless confidence, their naked credulity and hope, should do it … It was so important, so desperately important for Joey to see what was at stake here! But the Colonel sat staring into his empty glass, his short, square face closed and hard. Why in God’s name had he brought up PYLON? What good had it done? He’d only upset the boy; wounded him deeply, and for no good reason. “Bête,” Michele had said with still, implacable wrath. “You hurt everyone you touch. You are hateful.” And he had suffered, and suffered again, and thought about it all the while—and it hadn’t done him much good, truth to tell. He hadn’t learned much of anything …

  The flat, stark edges of the day were softening: it was late. One of those two-wheeled carts was coming down the road, pulled by a Khotianese farmer, his shoulders twisting at the shafts; and behind him another. At the sight of them Damon’s heart sank. Why this sense of despondency that mounted and mounted, and hung over him like a cloud? He was afraid. Sitting here in the onrushing tropic twilight he shivered. Two guards passed the entrance to the café, swinging in stride, carbines at sling: the indolent, time-eating swagger of the soldier on guard duty in any era, any land. He frowned at his hands. A soldier. All his life a soldier. A narrow, topsy-turvy kind of trade—bound to scorn in days of peace, flung into the most terrible power in time of war. Westy, sick and beaten, had looked up at him helplessly and moaned, “I can’t look at them. My boys. I can’t look at them anymore!” and so he had taken matters into his own hands, made the ruthless decisions as to who should live, who should die. He had hardened his heart, lashed his command into a capacity for killing, ordered the death of others of his fellowmen by steel, by hunger, by fire. In order that it might be got over; and Joyce Tanahill, lying beside him with one arm behind her head, had murmured, “No, I don’t suppose there’s any other way.”

  In order that it might be got over. But it was never over—each conflict he’d struggled so arduously to end had led only to another, and another. The hot, fugitive hope he’d felt all around him in ’45 was gone: war was ascendant everywhere, the threat of war was even grimmer; these younger men sitting at tables near him were swallowed up in it, exchanging tales of the rigors of the Pusan Perimeter, the Bulge, the fight for Duc Trang-na …

  A soldier. He thought of Lin Tso-han, and the old Chinese proverb about good iron and the nail … And yet that wasn’t all of it, either. It wasn’t only flint hearts and slaughter. It was worth remembering, wasn’t it, here in the hot red dust, that the hero of the Bhagavad Gita was a warrior, that old King David had been a soldier first and foremost, that it was of a Roman Centurion the Nazarene said: “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” … ? The real hero of the Iliad was Hector, that bulwark of a doomed city; Othello had been a military leader of merit, but desperately led astray—he hadn’t understood women any better than the rest of them; there was Roland, and Harry Plantagenet, and the persevering Aeneas, and Prince Andrei, whose luck finally ran out at Borodino—

  He reached in his right cargo pocket, felt for and found the worn one-franc piece and took it out and looked at it. The girl in her Phrygian cap and oakleaf garland was nearly effaced now; he could barely make out the profile and the line of the eye. She had reminded him of Michele—that same long, straight nose, the suggestion of fullness at the chin, the vif glance. Was that why he’d chosen it? Luck. He’d carried it ever since the afternoon of the Paris Parade, g
uided by the old soldier’s essentially humble knowledge that you did all you could, as long and as well as you could—but that even then you needed a little luck. Just a little.

  Well, he’d had luck: a lot of it, if the truth were known. He put the coin on the table and spun it smartly with his thumb: it stood in a pulsing yellow meniscus, slowed, wobbling; settled and was still.

  Tails. On the reverse the doubled cornucopias were clearly visible, and so were those three magic words that had electrified two centuries, and turned the world inside out. He put his hand over his mouth, watching absently several Khotianese unloading sacks of rice from one of the carts, which had stopped across the street. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Now these Indochinese farmers and fishermen wanted them, too; but there were those abroad who, like the landed aristocracy of the ancien régime, didn’t want them to have them—or wanted them to have them only under certain very special conditions. “But they’re Asiatics, Damon,” Colonel Fahrquahrson had informed him with patronizing congeniality; “separate is better.” Lin Tso-han had wiggled his comical Groucho Marx eyebrows and observed: “It is curious how the Western World sees us,” and in the spare, graceful room up in Plei Hoa, Hoanh-Trac held his joined hands before his face and cried softly, “But it is our civil war! …”

  Forbes and Giandoli were coming back from the message center, again besieged by prostitutes; Tony Gee blew one of them a kiss, slipped his arm around another, a plump girl with her silky black hair in bangs, and began to walk along with her. Forbes scowled at him and said something and Tony, grinning, shrugged and reluctantly disengaged.

  What had George Caldwell said at Angers? “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” He had meant to look it up and never had. None more wonderful than man. How intriguing it would be to escape time, hang in some exalted celestial net and watch the faltering, interminable passage of this earthly primate, with his perfectly apposable thumb and mighty cerebrum; following him as he developed speech, mastered tools and then engines and finally electrical impulses and radio waves—and never, for all his lordly capacity for wonder and reflection, overcame his need to lead, dominate, tyrannize over his fellows—

  “General—”

  Forbes was speaking to him. Joey had got to his feet, their faces swung toward the southeast; and turning he heard the pulsing bass drone, saw the long, low silhouette like some predatory bird hanging just above the purple mass of hills, its riding lights winking, stately and festive. Troubled, he watched its creeping descent. Why did man seek power so ardently? It meant so much to him: he was willing to give over so many glories, so much simple happiness, to its pursuit. And there was a palpable hook to its achievement, too—like facing the sphinx. The slave served the tyrant with his body: the slave, once his duties were discharged, was free to dream of other worlds, indulge in political heresies, even write poetry if he chose. The tyrant was the prisoner of his own design: he could not deviate, he could not afford the luxury of heresy. Too much was at stake: he must hew to the line, come what may …

  “And about time,” Joey was saying tersely. “What’s he been doing—holding a God damn press conference?”

  The big plane was landing, sinking gently down through the warm twilight air, melting into the dun and violet earth, merging with it. And with its thundering approach a sense of perfect dread slipped over Damon like a noisome cloak. It’s going to crash, he thought unhappily. Jesus. It’s going to crash and burn right there on the end of the runway, before anyone can get to it. But still he sat there, inert, imprisoned by foreboding and despair, remembering his father-in-law standing at the rain-soaked window, his face stern, saying: “Let’s make sure it is the last argument …” Wonders are many. And what conclusions could a half-way earnest man draw from his more than three-score years—

  No. It had landed, bounced once, gently, again, and twin plumes of dust spurted from its tires; it was rolling, ghostly and vast, toward the squat cluster of buildings at the far end of the field. Inside the cabin the lights were on. It wasn’t going to crash at all, it was going to taxi up to the administration building and the Undersecretary was going to get out, supported by his little retinue. And he would have to gird himself, get ready to do battle once more.

  “Mahogany bar, home movies, blonds in the upper berths ready and aching to spread,” Corporal Giandoli marveled, following the smooth, dark hulk down the runway, his eyes shining. “Man, that’s living! Hey Chief, what do you say we—”

  He was in a globe of light and sound. Light and sound that passed beyond human sensibility. He was on the ground, sitting on the ground, and bits of unrelated movement slipped past him in too bright panels. Bomb, the thought sank into him. But his mind could go no farther. How had he got here? His ears were ringing, he heard sounds like midnight echoes in deserted streets. Dumbly he watched Joey crawl to his feet, gripping his carbine; his cap was gone, his face was blackened, blood was running in a neat little trickle down his neck. His entire left sleeve was gone. Bomb, the thought came again. That handcart. Yes. Now he could hear firing, the sudden chatter of automatic weapons. Brrrrappppapppappp! Joey was returning the fire deliberately, very calm, the slender brass shells spilling gaily on the table’s surface, spinning. What the hell was he doing here? on his duff? He started to get to his feet, and pain came in a long, bright wave. He felt hollow and sticky and all apart. Hollowed all apart. Carefully he looked down. The front of his shirt was blown away, his trousers; there was a slick blue furrow right where his belt had been.

  Oh, he said; or thought he said. He was hit. Hit past mending this time. A warm seeping through his body, his legs. What was it Lin Tso-han had said? “Once in the arm, once in the leg; but the third time will be fatal.” Three times and out. He gripped his belly gently in both hands and looked around. Tables and chairs, splintered and upended; the bar was a sodden mass of shattered glass. Someone was shouting something. A body lay near him, the face pressed against the floor, a cratered nest like an inverted rose behind one ear. Tony Gee. He tried to move again, and barely repressed a shriek. Above him, directly ahead of his gaze Joey reversed the taped-together banana clip with perfect precision, fired five more rounds. With an immense effort he twisted his head to the right and saw a man in black jacket and trousers, slumped near the entrance, reaching for a grenade that lay not two feet away. The ring was still in it, however; it wasn’t armed. Odd: that grenade. Joey fired again and again, and still the gnarled brown hand strained to reach the smooth shiny metal egg, stretched and strained. Then the body all at once contracted, but the fingers continued to scratch at the worn wood.

  The firing had stopped: there was a great commotion that made no sense. His guts slipped and slithered wetly through his fingers; all of him sliding away. Got a general, he thought numbly; got themselves a three-star general. Big deal.

  “Sam. Sam—!”

  Joey’s voice, Joey bending down; his cap was gone, he had a towel around his neck, splotched with red. The too-bright globe had lowered itself around him, set him afire, bubbling. This was serious. Quite serious. Without warning.

  “Joey,” he said. “You’ve got to do it now. By yourself. What I told you.”

  It’s all right, Chief. Take it easy. He could see Joey’s lips moving. Chief. What Joe Brand had called him, the other Joe. Reb had called him Skipper, or sometimes Cap. Ben had called him Chief, too. Or Sam. What Dev had called him. Old Dev. Took it where you did, in the gut.

  “No, Joey, I mean it—you’ve got to go up there …”

  The boy had turned away, was looking past him somewhere. Why wouldn’t he listen to him! God damn it, this was important. The huge globe was fading, in its place black rings began coiling out from the center of his forehead and the pain swelled higher; it came on wires, in darts, in flaring windblown torches and seared him.

  “Joey,” he said. “Joey, they say we’re only robots and yes-men. Stupid, no minds of our own. It isn’t so. Give the lie to it—go on up there and block those b
astards. What does one man’s career matter if he can stop the black drift of things for a while, even the shortest while …?” Jesus, it was hard to talk. To keep his mind on things. It kept slithering away from him, hooking and sliding. “Joey, the only thing I’ve learned in sixty-five years, only one: the romantic, spendthrift moral act is ultimately the practical one—the practical, expendient, cozy-dog move is the one that comes to grief. Yes. Remember that. Joey, if it comes to a choice between being a good soldier and a good human being—try to be a good human being …”

  Had he said that? any of it? Joey had looked away again. He wasn’t going to do it; he could tell from the look in his eyes. Didn’t he see what this meant? For the whole yearning, waking world, for the fellow at the sink? The most important thing that had ever happened to them, and he couldn’t make the boy see it. “You drive right on,” Dev had murmured, watching him with fearful, desolate eyes. “You’re that kind of guy, you see a thing and that’s the only way it can be. Nobody can say no to you …” Now it was the only really important time: and he had failed.

  The voices went on above him, but they had changed subtly: instead of angry, urgent cries they were cold and terse, shuttling back and forth. Things incredibly sharp, incredibly jagged tugged at him, stabbed at him: it wasn’t possible to suffer this much and still be here to suffer. The rings were much blacker, coiling. Joey was nowhere to be seen. He made another effort and twisted his head, and again saw the Hai Minh guerrilla, the blood-soaked head and chest, the fiercely outstretched arm whose fingers twitched and quivered.

  He looked away. The rings had melted into a great murky circle; a swollen, chaotic whirling that frightened him more than the pain. Luck had run out. All run out. The one-franc piece was still there. On the table. Somewhere here. Like Lin he hadn’t survived his war. Tommy, he thought with a start of pure agony, you knew. Funny Cassandra girl. He felt weaker suddenly, really sick: his head kept falling back and back through greasy, hollow spheres.