“They had a choice, didn’t they? Maybe they felt they were giving their lives for something.”
“My point is that Tennyson does not describe what actually took place on that field. He doesn’t write about the scream of the chain and grape in the air or the men who are disemboweled in the saddle or the fear that makes their urine run down their thighs.”
He was going beyond the limits of the classroom now, and he swallowed and tried to hold back the words that were breaking loose like lesions in his head.
“Okay, but they were there for a reason,” the boy said. “Why does a poem have to be antiwar to be good?”
“Forget about this damn poem.” The professor leaned over the podium and pointed his finger at the boy. “When you put on that uniform, that costume, you help another man dig your grave.”
He could hear his own breathing in the room’s silence. He swallowed again and looked out the window at the blueness of the mountains. “Hey, it’s spring. You guys go drink beer in the park today or watch the tulips grow, and I’ll see you Thursday,” he said.
He made a pretense of putting his papers together and prayed that nobody would stop by the desk so that he would have to raise his eyes.
. . .
Two hours later the department secretary handed him a message. The dean of humanities would like to see him at one o’clock.
The dean was a heavy man both physically and mentally. He tried to keep his weight down by playing handball, but he only got more thick-bodied as a result, and the black hair on his arms and chest made him look simian behind his desk. He was a pragmatist, and no matter how irrational the current educational psychology was, he quickly acclimated to it and made it his. Certificates of administrative merit and student artwork that could have been painted by blind people were hung all over his office walls. The professor thought of these as appropriate symbols for the dean’s ability to collect everything that was worthless in modern education.
“Well, I got another complaint,” the dean said.
“From an ROTC kid in my general-lit class.”
“No, this one’s from two girls, but they’re in the same class.”
At least the ROTC kid is a stand-up guy, the professor thought.
“They say you use the class for your own ideas and you run people down.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I have to deal with the complaint.”
“Is it possible that those girls got a low grade on their midterms or that they have oatmeal in their heads?”
“It’s the fourth complaint to go into your folder this semester.”
“You’re actually keeping those things on file?”
“They’re part of an official record. Look, let’s talk honestly a minute. It’s my feeling that you should see the school psychologist.”
“I’ll be damned if you’re going to talk to me like this.”
The dean pushed a ring of keys around on the desktop with his finger.
“It’s either that or taking leave without pay after this semester,” he said. “I’m not in the business of mental health. That’s a problem you’re going to have to deal with yourself.”
The professor stood up and put his hands in his slacks pockets and clicked his change a moment against his thigh.
“Some situational philosophers I know have a good epigram for your kind, Dean. Stuff it, Pork Butt.”
“I’ll ignore that because frankly I think you’re losing your mind.”
“Well, you just keep on playing with your keys and maybe you’ll have your own file one day.”
The dean flattened his fingers on the desktop and kept his hand motionless.
. . .
That afternoon the professor was still thinking of his conversation with the dean when he walked to the park to watch the boys play a league game. He knew that he was finished at the college, that even if he wasn’t fired the administration would only keep him on in a capacity that was suspect and shameful. And there weren’t many other teaching jobs around, particularly when one’s recommendation from his previous position stated that he was a lunatic. It was going to be tough to start over again at his age, but then what was numerical age anyway? He was forty-six and considered old by some, but maybe he had thirty years on earth ahead of him. A boy of nineteen about to step on a claymore mine set in the middle of a jungle trail had been much older in his life span than he. And that boy had never wavered or pitied himself or complained about the time that had been allotted him.
The professor bought a hot dog from the wood stand under the elm trees and sat in the bleachers behind third base. His team had its two best pitchers knocked off the mound in the first five innings, and then the manager sent the crippled boy out from the bullpen. Think Monty Stratton, pal, the professor said to himself. Give them sliders and in-shoots that make the navel shrivel up and hide.
But they cut the boy to pieces. They crashed line drives through the infield and drove home runs all the way to the street. It looked like batting practice rather than a game. The professor walked out onto the field and motioned the umpire for time.
“Who the hell are you?” the umpire said. The umpire’s face looked like a baked apple under his black cap.
“I’m their coach from the college. You new to this league or something?”
The professor put his arm over the boy’s shoulders and bent down toward his ear.
“Throw at their heads,” he said. “After you dump one or two of them in the dirt, they’ll rattle and back off from the plate.”
But it was no use. The boy didn’t have the killer instinct, the professor thought. His best delivery was waist-high and down the middle, and each batter hit it so hard that runs were crossing the plate faster than the scorekeeper could change the numbers on the board. No, this one was not a killer, the professor thought, and maybe thank heaven for that.
After the next inning the umpire called the game because the visiting team’s lead was so great that a continuation would be a humiliating travesty. As the boys wandered off the diamond toward the bicycle racks and the park house, the professor bought two hot dogs from the concession stand and gave one to the crippled boy.
“We’re going to have to put some weight on you before your next game,” he said.
“Oh, I ain’t pitching again.”
“Sure you will.”
“Nope.”
“In a couple of days you’ll see this game correctly in your mind, and you’ll know what you did wrong, and you’ll go back out there throwing gas.”
“Maybe.”
They sat down in the empty bleachers and ate the hot dogs. The mountains were so blue against the sky that they hurt the eyes.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” the boy asked.
“Go ahead.”
“Sometimes you look real happy when you watch us play. Then you look real sad. Is it because we mess up or something?”
“My son was killed three years ago at Khe Sanh.”
“Was it in a car accident?”
The professor smiled and turned the boy’s cap sideways.
“No,” he said.
In the silence the boy looked straight ahead, his eyelids blinking.
“Hey,” he said, and took a folded leaflet out of his back pocket. “Did you hear about these Cheerio yo-yo contests they’re going to have in front of the drugstore? They’re giving away maple-leaf badges and sweaters and all kinds of crap.”
“Partner, you’re looking at the guy who wrote the book on Cheerio yo-yo contests. I think we’d just better toggle on over to the drugstore and buy us a couple of those babies.”
They walked off through the trees toward the street. In the dappled light they looked out of step with their own shadows.
HACK
From where he sat in his straight-back wicker chair on the front porch, he could dimly see the green river and the sloping hills and the oak trees on the crests. But his pale blue eyes, frosted with cataracts, really
didn’t need to see them. He could smell the land, the water, and the trees in the hot July wind, and sometimes when he slipped into memory again, he could even smell the herds of cattle moving seventy years ago to the rail pens in San Antonio. He was ninety-four today, or at least that was what they told him, and it had been years since he had stopped caring about losing his sight. Memory and the lucid, bright dreams of sleep provided everything he needed.
His son Jack had dressed him in his low-topped brown boots, his Oshman’s western suit, a soft shirt buttoned at the throat, and the pearl John B. Stetson that he always wore when he sat on the front porch. The flower boxes on the railing were filled with showers of purple and white petunias, and Jack had hung twists of red and white bunting all over the latticework. When Hack, the old man, looked at the colored paper, he became confused about the reason for the party. Was it July the Fourth or really his birthday? They often lied to him or even made up stories about him. They said he did things he hadn’t. Only moments ago he heard them talking about him through the screen. They talked about him as though he were a deaf or a drunk man who couldn’t hear.
He found the whiskey under the cupboard and set the bed on fire with his pipe. He would have been burnt up if my nigras hadn’t seen the smoke.
The wind blew across the tall yellow grass in the field below the house and bent the limbs of the pin-oak tree in the Holland family cemetery. The whitewashed markers were dappled with shadow and light, and as the vision of the cemetery slipped with him into sleep, he smelled the hot, drowsy odor of wild poppies in the wind.
His sleep took him many places, where all the people and towns and the elemental sweep of Texas were unchanged. Each dream brought it back into focus, without distortion, as though he had stepped away from it just a moment before: the drunken New Year’s party with the other Texas Rangers in the El Paso saloon and bordello where John Wesley Hardin was killed in 1895; racing his horse into the Rio Grande in a shower of mud and water, the reins in his teeth, while he fired one shot after another from his Winchester carbine at three Mexican rustlers headed for home; and the beautiful childlike faces of the Mexican girls who groaned under him after he came back from a raid on Pancho Villa’s troops.
He heard more pickup trucks and cars banging up the corrugated road to the front lot, then the voices of people who passed him on the porch and let the screen slam behind them. Someone threw a pair of socks partly wrapped in white tissue paper and ribbon into his lap. The voices inside were like a whiskey hum in his head in the hot shade of the porch, senseless and too many to understand. He heard the screen slam again, the wood boards bend with someone’s weight close to him, and he looked into the face of his son-in-law, the history professor at the University in Austin, who was leaning over as though he were trying to see around something. It was a stupid face, one that went with a tape recorder and a half pint of Jim Beam and patronizing questions.
“How are you, Hack? I gave Jack a little bottle of red-eye for you.”
“Bring it out on the porch.” His words were full of phlegm and still caught somewhere in afternoon sleep.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” the son-in-law said slowly, smiling, his eyes grinning with wrinkles at his wife. “Jack says you’ve already raised too much hell this week.”
“Give me a cigarette,” Hack said.
“The doctor says you’re supposed to stay off smoking tobacco, Hack. Maybe I can get you a twist to chew on from inside.”
Hack looked away at the yellow haze on the fields, the burst of red blood drops in the tomato acreage, and thought he could smell the poppies again in the wind.
“Bonnie says you told her you knew Frank Dalton. Is that true?” the son-in-law said.
“I knew Frank and I knew Bob Dalton, too.”
“Grandpa, you’ve got it mixed up,” Bonnie, his daughter, said. “It was Wesley Hardin you locked in jail over in Yoakum. You never knew the Daltons.”
“There was eight of them rode into the lot. Emmett and Bob and Frank was in front. They wanted water from the well for their horses, and Bob Dalton had a brace of pistols hung over his pommel. They was shot all over the street in Coffeyville, Kansas, two months later.”
“Are you sure that’s not just a story, Hack?” the son-in-law said.
“You’re a fool,” Hack said.
The stupid face of his son-in-law drew away from him, and he felt the boards of the old porch creak back into their natural level, then the gentle outline of the hills and the blackjack oaks took shape again against the infinite blue, hot sky, and he thought he heard a rumble of horses and a train whistle in a field just beyond the line of his vision.
As he looked with his mind into the brilliant haze, he knew where his sleep was about to take him. There was a low, brown mountain, with a high-banked railway grade at its base. The tracks shimmered wetly in the early morning light, and the sage and stunted mesquite at the bottom of the grade were blackened by passing locomotives. Hack heard the train beyond the curve, and he and the other rangers formed their horses into an advance line and started at a walk through the field of wild poppies. The dried poppy husks brushed back over the horses’ forequarters and rattled like a snake about to strike. The horses shook their heads against the sawed reins, their eyes wide with fright, and tried to cant sideways. Captain McAlester hit his sorrel between the ears with his fist.
“Hold, you shit hog, or I’ll cut your nuts out,” he said.
One by one they pulled their carbines from their saddle scabbards. Hack propped the butt of the Winchester against his thigh and slipped the leather thong off the hammer of his Colt revolver. The wind was blowing strong across the field, and his sweat felt cold in his hair. He bit off a piece of plug tobacco, and it made a hard, dry outline in his jaw.
“Put your star outside, gentlemen,” Captain McAlester said. “We want to make goddamn sure they know who done this to them. Satan will go to church before this bunch of Mexicans ever raids in Texas again.”
They slipped their ranger stars out of their shirt pockets and pinned them on their coats. They weren’t supposed to be in Mexico, but after Villa’s last raid across the river they had ridden two days, wearing dusters over their pistols and carbines, talking to no one, eating jerky and dried corn out of their saddlebags, until they made camp in a grove of juniper trees at the edge of the field last night. While they sat drinking whiskey and coffee out of their tin cups in the firelight, the captain told them how they would take the train: they would simply take it. He was a tall, fine-looking man, Hack thought, but in the wavering light of the fire his face looked as though it had been shaped in a forge. They would attack the train just the way Sam Houston had attacked and defeated the Mexicans at San Jacinto in 1836 when he sent Deaf Smith to burn the bridge behind the enemy. Once the battle was joined, there would be no retreat for anyone. They would fight under a black flag, the captain said, and give no quarter and ask none in return.
Hack took the dry lump of tobacco out of his mouth with his fingers and put it back in his pocket.
“I bet this is more fun than throwing John Wesley Hardin in the DeWitt jail,” the captain said.
“At least that was a fair fight,” Hack said, and they both laughed.
“Here them sons of bitches come,” a man down the line said.
The locomotive pulled around the curve, the white smoke blowing back over the bending line of box and cattle and flat cars, all of them loaded with small, dark men in brown uniforms. Hack squinted his eyes and saw a machine gun set up on a tripod just behind the engineer’s cab. Mexicans sat up on the spine of the cars, their rifles in jagged silhouette, and legs hung down through the slats of the cattle cars as though there were no bodies attached. It looked more like a refugee train than part of an army en route to another campaign.
“All right, let’s fry them in their own grease,” the captain said, and kicked his horse into a trot.
It wasn’t really necessary for him to give orders, because each man kn
ew what the captain would do before he did it. Each of them was leaned partially forward in the saddle, the reins wrapped around one fist and the carbine held upward, his thighs posting easily with the horse’s motion, the stomach muscles drawn tight, the genitals tingling lightly with expectation. The captain would have made a good cavalry officer, Hack thought. The sun was at their backs and the Mexicans still weren’t sure who they were. Also, the captain knew that in a charge their quarter horses were good only for a few hundred yards, and if they began their attack at too long a distance, their horses would be spent early, their carbines would be ineffective against the train (“Them thirty-thirties would hit them cars like birdshit on a brick,” he had said), and the nine-millimeter Mausers and .30–.40 Kraigs that the Mexicans used would cut them into piles of rags.
“I think they’re about to sniff us. Git it!” he shouted.
Hack flicked his roweled spur into the ribs of his Appaloosa, leaned into the pommel and tightened his legs at the same time, and felt the power of the horse swell up under him. He was a dead shot, even from horseback, and he loaded his own soft-nosed X-cut bullets with enough grains of powder to knock down a barn door. He rose in the stirrups each time he fired, ejected the smoking brass casing with a flick of three fingers in the lever action, and fired again. The explosion in his ears and the acrid smell of the burned powder made the blood beat in his temples, and he drilled shot after shot into the tangle of soldiers caught in the cattle cars, then swung his rifle into the men on the spine who were trying to fire back from a sitting position without falling from the train.
The Winchester snapped empty, and he turned the Appaloosa into an even gallop with the train, the reins loose over the pommel, while he slipped the cartridges from the leather hoops of his bandolier into the magazine of his rifle. Two cartridges spilled from his hand, and when he tried to catch them he saw that his trouser legs were white with the beaten pulp of poppies. He felt the spring of the magazine come tight when he pushed in the last shell with his thumb, and he wrapped the reins in his fist again and leveled his rifle across his forearm to fire into any of those small men in their dirty, brown uniforms.
The Convict and Other Stories Page 7