“Right,” I said, pinching her, “but I’m a lovely guy anyway. Horny bitch, lieutenant.”
“Don’t hold it against me, sergeant. Rank has its privileges.” She poked me in the ribs with a sharp fingernail. “And responsibilities. Good-day.” She turned to leave, then handed me a letter. “Your mail.” I recognized the handwriting. “Your stateside sweetheart, sergeant?”
“My, ah, ex-wife.”
“Tell her she can’t have you back,” she whispered, then walked away.
“Hey,” I said.
“What?”
“Tell Morning I always took him seriously.”
“Tell her I take you seriously too,” she said, nodding toward the letter.
The jealousy was nice, but the possessiveness worried me, but she smiled a little as she left.
I let the letter sit for a minute as I basked in the love of a good woman, then I opened it, ready for another bout with tolerance and political persuasion.
Dear Jake, she began, As you can see from the return address, I’m staying with your folks for awhile. I hadn’t seen, though. I’ve come back from Mississippi to rest and my father wouldn’t have me in the house. After the things I said to him after our divorce, I don’t really blame him. I guess I don’t blame anyone for anything any more. Just me.
As I said, I’m back from Mississippi, to rest. I was already feeling old — pushing 29 and childless is old — when I lost a bit of my fervor. (Politics is such a dirty business, in spite of the cliché, just dirty as hell, and I couldn’t stand it forever.) Teaching was all right, in fact, I loved it. Fifty- and sixty-year-old women learning to read, even one seventy-year-old man, right in front of your eyes. Jake, it was great. But the other side, the cold planning of who will get their head broken in nonviolence this weekend, and who next. I stayed out as long as I could, but Dick talked me into it.
We tried to block a registrar’s office, marched in front of the court house door until they moved us with cattle prods and billy clubs. I never thought they would hit the women, but they did. I fell down and rolled to the sidewalk, but the girl next to me, a lovely girl from Ohio, was hit on the side of the head. Her ear split right in half. I pulled her behind the court house, tried to stop the bleeding, then went for help.
I couldn’t get anyone to help, no one, white, Negro, no one. Everyone was screaming and hitting. No one.
When I went back two Negro boys were dragging her between them across the street and into an alley. I thought they were trying to help, so I followed, but when I got there, they were raping her. She came to long enough to try to fight them, then to cry that she would give them what they wanted, she would give it to them, she would love them, but not now when her head hurt, not now. They cursed her, then told her that they didn’t want her to give them anything; they’d take what they wanted; then one of them began slapping her while he was on her.
I ran back into the street, grabbed three white men, and screamed at them, “Those niggers are raping her, a white girl, raping her.” The white men stopped them, but they also beat the Negro boys so badly they both had to be hospitalized. Dick had the white men arrested for assault, and tried to say that they had attacked demonstrators. The girl from Ohio refused to testify, so I did, and the men got off. Dick called me an ofay bitch, and I caught the next bus home.
Baby, I’m confused. Please write me, please see me when you get home. You used to make such good sense to me. I won’t ask you to forgive me, but please write.
She went on, inquiring about my leg and the plane crash, recounting news from home, wishing me a quick recovery, and a speedy trip home.
* * *
What do you do? All the good memories came back. The breathless dizzy kiss after a football game, the summer afternoons on the banks of the Nueces watching a scissor-tail and a squirrel argue over the live oak above us, the first time she read Kafka and the lovely perplexity wrinkling her nose as she said “I don’t understand it but I like it.”… What do you do?
* * *
“Write her,” Abigail said after reading the letter. “She sounds lost. I hate it, but write her.” She looked down the ward, the other casualties, the dismembered kid, both legs and an arm lost to a mine, the two blind ones, the one with no face, five with bullet-scrambled insides, three crazy with malaria, one with a virus fever no one could diagnose, assorted missing and broken limbs, and me. “Write her. Men don’t understand what they do to women. You’re all bastards.” She arranged a smile on her face, then walked to the next bed.
* * *
I wrote that confusion must be a condition of growing older, of seeing more, of living, because I must confess to confusion too. I promised that I would see her when I got home. I told her that I was in love with a sweet girl, and thinking about marrying again.
“You can tell her that you love me, but you can’t tell me,” Abigail said when she read my letter. “Why?”
“It’s different, that’s all.”
“Sure,” she sneered. “This way you don’t risk anything. You keep her from hoping and you keep me on the hook.” She walked away.
I tore up the letter, then didn’t know what else to do, so I put the pieces back together and recopied it.
* * *
Late the night before Gallard was to return, Abigail came while I was sleeping. I woke with her fallen on my chest, her mouth against my ear, her tears on my face. I held her.
“Jake,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. I’m a fool. I want to break your leg again, keep you here. I love you. I won’t push.”
Her mouth was wet and rubbery with gin against mine, hot, hungry; her teeth nipped at my lower lip. She had been to the Club with one of the younger doctors, but had slipped out into the night and run all the way to the hospital.
“And I’m drunk,” she said, sitting up.
“That’s okay; I’m asleep…”
“And having wonderful dreams,” she whispered. She stood up, her hands smoothing the wrinkled white linen dress down over long tight thighs. “Please,” she whispered, then left, quick and graceful with pride, hips swaying slightly with drink and heat. “Please.”
12
Gallard
Gallard came back from Hong Kong, had me rolled into a room, nearly ripped the cast off, threw a smaller one on, then handed me my crutches, saying, “I want to see you in my office, Sgt. Krummel.” Then he walked away.
As I stood, my brain reeled a bit and my eyes unfocused, and my first swinging step swung a little loose.
“Let me help you at first,” the orderly said.
“Buzz off, jack, I got it under control.”
“Well, fall on your ass, wise guy. Nobody’ll care.”
“You’re telling me,” I said, swinging out of the room.
* * *
He sat, back to the door, feet propped on a typing table, smoking a furious cigar. The blue cloud of smoke whirled about his head as if he had just stepped out of it and his words were as forcefully calm as the orders of a potentate when he said, “Shut the door, Sgt. Krummel.” I did, then sat down across the desk from his back.
“I didn’t tell you to sit down, sergeant,” he said, still facing the wall.
I said nothing.
He turned quickly, pointed his cigar at me, the chewed frayed end, saying, “I didn’t tell you to sit down, sergeant.”
“You notice I didn’t ask you. You got some shit in your ear, man, don’t try to lay that military jazz on my ass.”
He looked down for a moment, then half-grinned. “If there’s any shit, as you say, in my ear, then you put it there, Krummel.”
“I seem to remember you saying that it was your idea.”
“We all make mistakes,” he said. “I don’t know if I should turn you over to the Air Police or the psychiatrist. One or the other, for sure, but which… Oh, not that it’s not good,” he said, digging it out of his drawer. “Layman that I am, I still know it’s good, you might even call it art, as long as you say art for art’s sake, if my jargon
is correct. But it is evil, Krummel, a lovely lie and twice as evil for being lovely. Maybe you’re like that, but not mankind. I’ve only been so frightened in quite the same way once before in my life.
“The war had caught me after I graduated from Drake, or I caught the war, you might say, and I joined with flying in mind, but ended up being a medical supply officer. At the end of the war I was on Okinawa while they were still mopping up. A medical convoy had stalled atop a small ridge, and in the valley below I could see Marines chasing women and children through a cane field, shooting them down, laughing, shouting, jumping for real joy. I counted seven women and nineteen children shot down and left to rot.
“The patrol came up the ridge later, to see what was wrong with our trucks. They were young and bright and happy, kids with new toys, a new shipment of carbines, the first they’d seen and they scared me to death.” He paused, puffed billows of smoke from the battered cigar. “This,” he said, pointing to the manuscript, “made me feel the same way.
“Oh, not that it’s not good, but it’s just not true…”
“It was meant to be true not beautiful. If it’s good,” I said, “that’s an accident of truth.”
“You’re mad as the March Hare, Krummel.”
He went on at some length about the necessity for truth in art.
“Hey, stop it will you,” I said. “All you’re saying is that you’ve met a murderer, found him interesting, liked him, and you’re ashamed of that part of you which loves violence as much as I do, and since you don’t know how to deny me, you’re trying to make me feel guilty about something I did honestly. The trick is to deny actions but never people. Easy. Actions can be evil; people can’t. Joe Morning taught me that, though he didn’t mean to.”
“You’re right, of course. I just wanted you to see the blackness of your own soul,” he said, grinning out of smoke.
“That’s what it’s all about,” I said.
“No hope for you, Krummel. Speaking of hope: Morning’s cast is off, and he still can’t or won’t walk. He says he has feeling but no control…”
“No shit,” I interrupted with a huge laugh.
Gallard frowned, perplexed, then went on. “I sent the psychiatrist in this morning, but Morning wouldn’t talk to him. The shrink said, ‘Well, Pfc Morning, I’m going to talk to you until you talk to me,’ and Morning said, ‘Well, Major Shrink, go right ahead. I was just going to jack off for the first time in about two months, so it ought to be something to take notes about,’ and he proceeded to do so until Major Psychiatrist left. And he refuses to go back until Pfc Morning changes his attitude, to which I said, ‘If he changes his attitude there, of course, won’t be any need for you to go back.’ Most shrinks are all right; overworked, but all right, but this guy is a real idiot. Don’t repeat that or I’ll have you jailed,” he chuckled.
“Will he walk?”
“Who? Morning? Sure. He’s a healthy kid, and from what you’ve told me about him, he should make it. Why don’t you get an orderly to dress him in convalescent fatigues and put him in a chair and you boys roll and hop down to the Halfway House for a Seven-up.”
“A Seven-up?”
“Tell the waiter I sent you and he’ll drop about three fingers of Scotch in the bottle. Twice, but no more.”
“Scotch? Seven-up? You gotta be kidding.”
“If you’re going to be subversive, you of course have to make sacrifices.” He laughed and waved me out.
“Hey,” I said, stopped in the door, “I’m glad you liked it.”
“I’m not so sure I’m glad I liked it. Now go on; I’ve got healing to do.”
* * *
As Morning and I made our crippled way along the sidewalk, the sun fell like golden rain on our faces, and the grass burned green beside us, and the green of the forest along the fairways was black, and the sky above crackled electric blue. Morning lifted himself out of the chair with his arms, saying, “A man could think about living in a place like this. Beautiful.”
“It’s all right.”
“Krummel, you’re a turd. A beautiful turd, but a shit all the same.” He laughed and rolled on. “Funny, you know, how being crippled and maybe dying and even frankly wanting to die cleared my brain. Somehow, man, my life seemed to sort itself out while I was down. I began to see order in all the madness and shit.”
“Maybe,” I said. “You suggesting compulsory bed rest for the world till it straightens out.”
“Maybe,” he said. “There was just one thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I’d forgotten about laughing, man. When Gallard told me you were here and all that crazy crap you got into at the beginning, I thought, ‘Man, if it drags Krummel down, there ain’t no hope for a fool like me.’ Then when you came bopping in like a big crazy cat, full of piss and vinegar and shit, and suffering for my soul like you were my second mother or something. I don’t know, I felt deserted for a moment, then when you wheeled around and roared out like Lionel Barrymore or something, muttering under your breath like an old woman. I don’t know, I cried for a long time that morning — Morning mourning all morning — but when I came out of it, I kind of remembered all the shit I put you to, all the times you saved my ass, and I even laughed about that bad scene right before Vietnam, all that running, man, and that horrible fucking hole you made me dig, and them thirty thousand push-ups — my arms got so big I had to get rid of all of my tailored fatigue shirts — but most of all I… I remembered that day you got the snipers.
“I don’t know, man, I saw something that day when you came back up that hill, something in your face, something I never realized about you. Mostly it was my fault for not really seeing you, but maybe a little your fault too for always acting like you know everything worth knowing in the fucking world. But what I saw, man, in your face was that you didn’t have any more control over your life than I had over mine. You just did what you had to or, I don’t know, what something inside your guts made you do. Like me, or something. You didn’t like killing those cats, but something inside said that was the right thing to do; even if it was a shitty thing it was the right thing at the right time. And you know, man, I felt for you that day. For the first time since all that shit with the fucking queer happened to me, I felt what it was like to love another man, and I didn’t feel dirty about it.
“Course it didn’t exactly work out when I went to try to explain it to you. You scared the shit out of me — but you know how our bowels were over there — I thought you were going to kill me. And after I got over being scared, and mad, I thought maybe you would have been right to kill me, and I wondered why you ever bothered to save my ass all those times, why you cared. Then I understood that because you weren’t afraid, you were really my friend…”
“You don’t have to say all that shit, man,” I said, looking away from him.
“Yeah I do. And when I came out of that van that night, I was saying to myself, ‘By god that’s what Krummel would do,’ and I did it.”
“Yeah, well, life ain’t what you’d call simple.”
“That’s okay now,” he said, spinning the wheel chair, grinning up like a kid. “I’m ready to live, man. It’s making sense for a change, and by God I’m ready for it. Bring it on, baby, from now on it’s all downhill.” No hint of false ring in his voice, no false hardiness, just youth and life.
“Well, just move that chair, cripple,” I said. “You’re standing ‘tween me and my drinking.” We went on.
About halfway down the ninth fairway, a golf ball, blinding white against the grass, rolled up beside us like a playful puppy. Morning wheeled out into the grass, picked it up, then popped it in his mouth like a piece of candy. Back on the tee, two tall slim young men and a tanned girl shouted at him to leave the damned ball alone, but Morning just rolled back to the sidewalk and went on toward the Halfway House set just behind the ninth green.
“I ain’t never eat me no golf ball,” he mumbled, trying not to laugh.
I someh
ow managed a straight face by the time the threesome caught up with us.
“Hey,” the young man shouted who had hit the ball, “what are you doing with my ball?” The other guy and the girl, tall brown and blond, stood behind him.
“Sgt. Jacob Krummel, United States Army,” I said, turning and saluting, “sir. Can I be of aid, sir?”
“Huh? Oh, well you could tell your buddy to give me my ball back. That was my best drive of the day, damnit. What the hell did he pick it up for.”
“Pfc Morning, sir,” I said, and Morning saluted. “Sir, he’s not quite right in the head. Hasn’t been since he ate all the rats. Not at all well, sir.”
“What the hell was he doing eating rats?” he asked. The girl turned white.
“It was rats, sir,” I paused, “or our own dead buddies. We were pinned down, no food, no water, for ten days. We’re the only two left.” I faked a sniffle, but oddly enough real tears seeped out of my eyes.
“Oh, crap,” he said. “Just give me my ball back.”
Morning quickly took his shirt off. His chest and stomach were covered with a maze of livid red lines where the exploding bullets had plowed flesh. Even the inside of his arms were marked. I also took off my shirt, exposing the side and the arm where the mortar had driven dirt under the raw skin like an exploding tattoo.
“Listen, I’m sorry that you were hurt,” he said, and his face seemed to agree with his words, “but could I please have my ball back.”
Morning pulled out the waistband of his pants, then spit the ball into his crotch. “Hole in one, mother,” he shouted and tried to resume the blank stupid face he had worn before, but a gale of laughter swept him away. He dove his hands into his pants, screaming, “Here it is. Got it. Ahhhh. Wrong one. Yep. Oops.” He flipped it at the young man, saying, “If you drive, man, don’t drink.”
“What’s he, crazy?”
“I told you, sir. The rats,” I said, saluting again.
“Stop the rat shit,” he said, grinning. The girl laughed, the other guy smiled. “And keep that idiot off the fairways.”
“I’m fair,” Morning said amidst a giggle.