I lowered my eyes. “Bad news,” I said.
“I knew it!”
“She had a visitor.”
“I fucking knew it. At the house?”
I nodded. “He was there for two hours. Then I had to leave, but he was still there when I checked back around dawn.”
“The son of a bitch.”
“I ran his plate,” I said. “I got a name and address.”
“You’re a pal,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to,” I told him. “Waiting out there, thinking about what was going on inside your house, I started getting mad at him myself. I don’t know what you’ve got planned for him, and I don’t want to horn in on it, but I think I ought to be there to watch your back.”
“Let’s go,” he said, then stopped himself. “Maybe I should stop home first,” he said. “Light her up a little, then drop in on lover boy.”
“Of course, if you can tell her how you’ve already gone and cleaned his clock...”
“You’re right,” he said. “Cut off his dick, walk in and tell her I brought her a present. Maybe I’ll put it in a box and giftwrap it so I can get a look at her face when she opens it. ‘What’s this, Michael? It looks familiar...’”
“Be something to see,” I agreed.
I made a phone call and we got in the squad car. On our way he said, “You’re a damn good friend, you know that? And you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get her to fuck you.”
For a second I thought he meant his wife.
“She’ll do anything I tell her to do,” he said. “Crazy bitch is wild. We’ll team up on her, turn her every way but loose.”
I didn’t know what to say.
We drove across town to a dead-end street in the old Tannery district. It was a bad block, and the address I had wasn’t the best house on it. It was a little square box of a house, with some of the window panes broken and weeds poking up through the litter on the front lawn. The paint job was so far gone it was hard to say what color it was.
“Better Homes and Gardens,” Walbeck said. “I can see why he likes to spend the night at my place, the son of a bitch.”
“That’s his car,” I said, pointing to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a crumpled fender and a busted taillight.
“He parked that piece of shit on my street? You’d think he would have been ashamed.”
He led the way, marched right up to the front door. He put a hand on the butt of his service revolver and made a fist of the other. “Police!” he bellowed, as he pounded on the door. Then, before anyone could open it, he drew back his foot and kicked it in.
The shotgun blast picked him up and blew him back onto the front porch.
I was standing to the side when the gun went off, and I already had my own revolver drawn. The weasel-faced little guy in the broken-down armchair had triggered both barrels, and I didn’t give him time to reload. I put three slugs in his chest, and they told me later that two of them got the heart and the third didn’t miss it by much. He was dead before the shots quit echoing.
I knelt down beside my partner. He was still breathing, but he’d taken a double load of buckshot and he was on his way out. But it was important to tell him this before he was gone.
“I’m the one,” I said. “I’ve been dicking your wife for months, you dumb shit. It was fun, putting one over on you, but finally we both got sick of having you around.”
I was looking at his eyes as I spoke, and he got it, he took it in. But he didn’t hang on to it for long. A moment later his eyes glazed and he was gone.
* * *
For a long moment the room was silent, but for the crackling of the fire and an impressive rumbling from the bowels of the old man dozing over his book. “There’s a metaphor,” the doctor said. “Life is just one long dream, punctuated by the occasional fart.”
“That’s quite a story, Policeman,” the soldier said. “Quite a story to tell on yourself.”
“It happened a long time ago,” the policeman said.
“And you set the whole thing up. Who was the man with the shotgun?”
“He was wanted in three states,” the policeman said, “for robbery and murder, and he’d sworn he would never be taken alive. One of my snitches told me where he was holed up.”
“And the rest of it was your doing,” the priest said.
The policeman nodded. “Mea culpa, Priest. The call I made before we rolled was to the station, to let them know we were investigating a tip on a fugitive. I let the perp gun down Walbeck, and then I took him out before he could do the same for me.”
“And made sure to tell your partner what had happened.”
“I wanted him to know,” the policeman said.
“And it was true, what you said? You’d been with his wife for months?”
“For a few months, yes. Not as long as he’d been suspicious of her. His suspicions were groundless at first, but I was intrigued, and filled with some sort of righteous indignation at the way he was treating her. I’d have been less outraged, I’m sure, if I hadn’t deep down wanted to have her myself.”
“And how long did you have her, Policeman?”
“When I set up her husband,” he said, “I thought I’d wait a decent interval and marry the woman. But over the next several weeks I came to see why Walbeck cheated on her. It turned out the woman was a pain in the ass. The affair ran its course and ended, and she married someone else.”
“And you didn’t worry she would let slip how you’d arranged her husband’s death?”
“She never knew,” the policeman said. “As far as she was concerned, it was a death in the line of duty. He got a medal awarded posthumously and she got a generous widow’s pension.”
“Because she was such a generous widow,” the doctor suggested. “Did the old fellow fart again?”
“I think that was the fire.”
“I think it was the man himself,” the doctor said. “And what did you get, Policeman? A citation for bravery?”
“A commendation,” the policeman said, “and a promotion not long thereafter.”
“Virtue rewarded. And the other lady? Joanie Jellin, the convict’s wife?”
“I consoled her,” the policeman admitted. “And once again came to appreciate my late partner’s point of view. The woman did kindle the flames of lust. But I just spent a few afternoons with her and bowed out of the picture.”
“No keeping her company on conjugal visits?”
“None of that, no.”
“The flames of lust,” the soldier said, echoing the phrase the policeman had used. “They cast a nasty yellow glow, don’t they? Lust ruled your partner, ran his life and ran him out of it, but wasn’t it lust that drove all the parties in your story? You, certainly, and both of the women.”
“It was the story that came to mind,” the policeman said, “when the conversation turned to lust.”
“Lust,” the soldier mused. “Is it always about the sexual impulse? What about the lust for power? The lust for gold?”
“Metaphor,” the priest said. “If I am said to have a lust for gold, the man who so defines me is saying that my desire for gold has the urgency of a sexual urge, that I yearn for it and seek after it in a lustful manner.”
“And what of blood lust?” The soldier cleaned the dottle from his pipe, filled the bowl from his calfskin pouch, struck a wooden match and lit his pipe. “Is that a metaphor, or is it indeed sexual? I can think of an incident that suggests the latter.” He drew on his pipe. “I wonder if I should recount it. It’s not my story, not even in the sense that the priest’s story was his. That was told to him by one of the tale’s principals. Mine came to me by a less direct route.”
They considered this in silence, a silence broken at length by a low rumbling from the hearthside.
“Was that another fart?” the doctor wondered. “No, I believe it was a snore. The old man’s a whole impolite orchestra, isn’t he?” He sighed. “Tell your story,
Soldier.”
* * *
I believe it was Robert E. Lee (said the soldier) who expressed the thought that it was just as well war was so horrible, or else we would like it too much. But it seems to me that we already like it to a considerable degree. Who doesn’t recall George Patton proclaiming his love for combat. “God help me, I love it!” he cried.
Or at least George C. Scott did, in his portrayal of Patton. Was that accurate, or do we owe some Hollywood screenwriter for the creation of this myth?
I’m not sure it matters. It’s clear Patton loved it, whether he ever said so or not. And, while it’s quite appropriate that he was played by Scott rather than, say, Alan Alda, I’m sure the man was not entirely lacking in sensitivity. He may have loved war, but he was very likely aware that he shouldn’t.
But people do, don’t they? Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many wars. They seem to retain their popularity down through the centuries, and for all that they grow ever more horrible, we do go on having them. Old men make wars, we are occasionally told, and young men have to fight them. The implication is that older men, safely lodged behind desks, feel free to make decisions that cost the unwilling lives of the young.
But does anyone genuinely think there would be fewer wars fought if younger men were their nations’ leaders? The reverse, I think, is far more likely. The young are more reckless, with others’ lives as well as their own. And it is indeed they who fight the wars, and die in them, because they are often so eager to do so.
I am not wholly without experience here. I saw combat in one war, and ordered men about in others. War is awful, certainly, but it is also quite wonderful. The two words once had the same meaning, did you know that? Awful and wonderful. The former we reserve now for that which we regard as especially bad, the latter for what seems especially good, yet they both have the same root meaning. Full of awe, full of wonder.
War’s all of that and more.
It is exciting, for one thing. Not always, as the monotony of it can be excruciating, but when it ceases to be boring it becomes very exciting indeed, and that excitement is heightened by the urgency of it all. One might be killed at any moment, so how can the body fail to be in a state of excitement? That, after all, is what adrenaline is for.
And there’s the camaraderie. Men working together, fighting together, united not merely in a common cause but in a matter of life and death. To do so seems to satisfy a fundamental human urge.
On top of that, there’s the freedom. Does that strike you as strange? I can see that it might, as there’s no one less at liberty in many ways than a soldier. His every action is in response to an order, and to defy a direct order is to court severe punishment. Yet this apparent slavery is freedom of a sort. One is free of the obligation to make decisions, free too of the past and the future. One’s family, one’s career, what one is going to do with one’s life—all of this disappears as one follows orders and gets through the day.
And, of course, there’s the chance to kill.
I wonder how many soldiers ever kill anybody. Relatively few have the opportunity. In any war, only a fraction of enlisted troops ever see combat, and fewer still ever have the enemy in their sights. And only some of those men take aim and pull the trigger. Some, it would appear, are reluctant to take the life of someone they don’t even know.
Others are not. And there are those who find they like it.
* * *
Lucas Hallam, if I may call him that, was to all appearances entirely normal prior to his service in the armed forces. He grew up in a small Midwestern town, with three brothers (two older than himself) and a younger sister. Aside from the usual childhood and adolescent stunts (throwing snowballs at cars, smoking in the lavatory) he was never in trouble, and in school he was an average student, in athletics an average participant. There are three childhood markers for profound antisocial behavior, as I understand it, and Luke, as far as anyone knew, had none of them. He did not wet the bed, he did not set fires, and he did not torture animals. (The pathological implications of the latter two are not hard to infer, but what has bedwetting to do with anything? Perhaps the doctor will enlighten me later.)
After graduating from high school, Luke looked at the vocational opportunities open to him, thought unenthusiastically of college, and joined the army. There was no war on when he enlisted, but there was by the time he finished basic training. He was a good soldier, and his eyesight was excellent and his hand-eye coordination superb. On the firing range he qualified as an Expert Rifleman, and he was assigned to a platoon of combat infantry and shipped overseas.
At the end of his hitch he was rotated back to the States, and eventually discharged. But by then he had been in combat any number of times, and had had enemy soldiers in his sights on innumerable occasions. He had no difficulty pulling the trigger, and his skills were such that he generally hit what he aimed at.
He liked it, liked the way it felt. It gave him an enormous feeling of satisfaction. He was doing his job, serving his country, and saving his own life and the lives of his buddies by killing men who were trying to kill him. Take aim, squeeze off a shot, and you canceled a threat, took off the board someone who otherwise might take you or someone you cared about off the board. That was what he was supposed to do, what they’d sent him over there to do, and he was doing it well, and he felt good about it.
The first time he did it, actually saw his shot strike home, saw the man on the other side of the clearing stumble and fall, he was too busy sighting and shooting and trying to stay behind cover to notice how he felt. The action in a full-blown firefight was too intense for you to feel much of anything. You were too busy staying alive.
Later, remembering, he felt a fullness in his chest, as if his heart was swelling. With pride, he supposed.
Another time, they were pinned down by a sniper. He advanced, and when someone else drew the sniper’s fire, he was able to spot the man perched in a tree. He got him in his sights and felt an overall excitement, as if all his cells were more intensely alive than before. He fired, and the man fell from the tree, and a cheer went up from those of his buddies who had seen the man fall. Once again he felt that fullness in his chest, but this time it wasn’t only his heart that swelled. He noted with some surprise that there was a delicious warmth in his groin, and that he had a powerful erection.
Well, he was nineteen years old, and it didn’t take a great deal to give him an erection. He would get hard thinking about girls, or looking at sexy pictures, or thinking about looking at sexy pictures. A ride in a Jeep on a rough road could give him an erection. He thought it was interesting, getting an erection in combat, but he didn’t make too much of it.
Later, when they got back to base, he went drinking and whoring with his buddies. The sex was sweeter and more intense than ever before, but he figured it was the girl. She was, he decided, more attractive than most of them, and hot.
From that point on, sexual excitement was a component of every firefight he was in. Killing the enemy didn’t carry him to orgasm, although there was at least one occasion when it didn’t miss by much. It did render him powerfully erect, however, and, when he was able to be with a girl afterward, the union was intensely satisfying. The girl didn’t have to be spectacularly good-looking, he realized, or all that hot. She just had to be there when he was back from a mission on which he’d blown away one or more enemy troops.
As I said, his tour of duty concluded and he returned to the States. The war receded into memory. Back in his hometown, in the company of people who’d shared none of his military experiences, he let it all exist as a separate chapter of his life—or, perhaps more accurately, as another volume altogether, a closed book he didn’t often take down from the shelf.
He found work, he dated a few local girls, and within a year or so he found one who suited him. In due course they were engaged, and then married. They bought a modest home and set about starting a family.
Now and then, when he was making love to h
is wife, wartime images would intrude. They came not as flashbacks of the sort common to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but as simple memories that slipped unbidden into his consciousness. He recalled sex acts with the native prostitutes, and this made him feel guilty at first, as if he were cheating on his wife by having another woman’s image in mind during their lovemaking.
He dismissed the guilt. After all, you couldn’t hang a man for his thoughts, could you? And, if a memory of another woman enriched the sexual act for himself and his wife, where was the harm? He didn’t seek to summon up such memories, but if they came he allowed himself to enjoy them.
There were other memories, though. Memories of drawing a bead on a sniper in a tree, holding his breath, squeezing off the shot. Seeing the man fall in delicious slow motion, watching him drop never to rise again.
He didn’t like that, and it bothered him a little. He found he could will such thoughts away, and did so as quickly as they came. Then he could surrender to the delight of the moment, untroubled by recollections of the past. That, after all, was over and done with. He didn’t hang out at the Legion post, didn’t pal around with other vets, didn’t talk about what he’d seen and done. He barely thought about it, so why should he think of it now, at such an intimate moment?
Never mind. You couldn’t help the thoughts that came to you, but you didn’t have to entertain them. He blinked and they were gone.
After his second child was born, Luke’s sex life slowed down considerably. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and when he and his wife attempted to resume relations after the birth, they were not terribly successful. She was willing enough but not very receptive, and he had difficulty becoming aroused and further difficulty in bringing his arousal to fulfillment.
He’d never had this problem before.