by Youers, Rio
The war was over. Sometimes he tried to write about it but he usually could not. Too often when he would try to write about it, he would find himself writing about what other men had seen and done and not what he himself had seen and done and had to give it up as a bad job.
Adam Nichols put down his tackle and rod and sat down by the pool and lit a cigarette. It tasted good. There is a clean, clear and sharp smell when you light a cigarette outdoors. He was not surprised to find Rinelli sitting alongside him even though Rinelli was dead. Rinelli was smoking, too.
“Isn’t this fine? Isn’t this everything I said it would be?” Adam Nichols asked.
“It’s grand, it sure is. It’s just swell,” Rinelli answered.
“Tonight, we’ll drink some whiskey with really cold water. And we’ll have one hell of a meal,” Adam Nichols said. “Trout. I’ve got my old man’s recipe.” He drew reflectively on his cigarette. “My old man, he was the one who taught me to hunt and fish. He was the one taught me to cook outdoors.”
“You haven’t introduced me to your father,” Rinelli said.
“Well, he’s dead, you see. He was a doctor and he killed himself. He put his gun to his head and he killed himself.”
“What do you figure, then? Figure he’s in hell now?”
“I don’t know. Tell you, Rinelli, I don’t really think there’s anything like that. Hell. Not really.”
Rinelli looked sad and that’s when Adam Nichols saw how dead Rinelli’s eyes were and remembered all over again that Rinelli was dead.
“Well, Adam, you know me, I don’t like to argue, but I tell you, there is, too, a hell. And I sure as hell wish I were there right now.”
Rinelli snapped the last half inch of his cigarette into the trout pool. A small fish bubbled at it as the trout pool turned into blood.
* * *
A few days later Rinelli was pretty bad off. Sometimes he tried to joke with Adam but he didn’t make any sense and sometimes he talked in Italian to people who weren’t there. He looked gray, like a dirty sheet. When he fell asleep, there was a heavy, wet rattle in his throat and his mouth stayed open.
Adam Nichols wasn’t feeling any too swell himself. It was funny, how when you were getting better, you hurt lots worse. Sister Katherine jabbed a lot of morphine into him. It helped, but he still hurt and he knew he wasn’t always thinking straight.
There were times he thought he was probably crazy because of the pain and the morphine. That didn’t bother him really. It was just that he couldn’t trust anything he saw.
At dusk, Adam Nichols opened his eyes. He saw Sister Katherine by Rinelli’s bed. She had her crucifix and she was praying hard and quiet with her lips moving prettily and her eyes almost closed.
“That’s good,” Rinelli said. “Thank you. That is real nice.” His voice sounded strong and casual and vaguely bored.
Sister Katherine kept on praying.
“That’s just swell,” Rinelli said. He coughed and he died.
Sister Katherine pulled the sheets up over Rinelli’s face. She went to Adam. “He’s gone.”
“Well, I guess so.”
“We will not be able to move him for a while. We do not have enough people, and there’s no room…” Sister Katherine looked like she had something unpleasant in her mouth. “There is no room in the room we’re using for the morgue.”
“That’s okay,” Adam Nichols said. “He can stay here. He’s not bothering me.”
“All right then,” Sister Katherine said. “All right. Do you need another shot of morphine?”
“Yes,” Adam said, “I think so. I think I do.”
Sister Katherine gave him the injection, and later there was another, and then, he thought, perhaps another one or even two. He knew he had had a lot of morphine because what he saw later was really crazy and couldn’t have actually happened.
It was dark and Sister Katherine came in with her little light. Rinelli sat up in bed then. That had to be the morphine, Adam Nichols told himself. Rinelli was dead as a post. But there he was, sitting up in bed, with dead eyes, and he was stretching out his arms and then it all happened quick just like in a dream but Rinelli was out of bed and he was hugging Sister Katherine like he was drunk and silly.
He’s dancing with her, that’s what he’s doing, Adam Nichols thought, and he figured he was thinking that because of all the morphine. Sure, he said he was going to dance with Sister Katherine before he went home. “Hey, Rinelli,” Adam Nichols said. “Quit fooling around, why don’t you?”
Sister Katherine was yelling pretty loud and then she wasn’t yelling all that loud because it looked like Rinelli was kissing her, but then you saw that wasn’t it. Rinelli was biting her nose real hard, not like kidding around, and she was bleeding pretty much and she twisted and pushed real hard on Rinelli.
Rinelli staggered back. With blood on his dead lips. With something white and red and pulpy getting chewed by his white teeth. With a thin bit of pink gristle by the corner of his mouth.
Sister Katherine was up against the wall. The middle of her face was a black and red gushing hole. Her eyes were real big and popping. She was yelling without making a sound. She kind of looked like a comic strip.
It was a bad dream and the morphine, Adam Nichols thought, a real bad dream, and he wished he’d wake up.
Then Sister Anne came running in. Then she ran out. Then she ran back in. Now she had a Colt .45. She knocked back the slide like she really meant business. Rinelli went for her. She held her arm straight out. The gun was just a few inches from Rinelli’s forehead when Sister Anne let him have it. Rinelli’s head blew up wetly in a lot of noise. A lot of the noise was shattering bone. It went all over the place.
That was all Adam Nichols could remember the next morning. It wasn’t like something real you remember. It was a lot more like a dream. He told himself it had to be the morphine. He told himself that a number of times. The windows were open and the breeze was nice but the small room smelled of strong disinfectant. There was no one in the other bed.
When Sister Anne came in to bring his breakfast and give him morphine, Adam Nichols asked about Rinelli.
“Well, he’s dead,” Sister Anne said. “I thought you knew.”
Adam Nichols asked about Sister Katherine.
“She’s no longer here,” the old nun said, tersely.
“I thought something happened last night. I thought I saw something awful.”
“It’s better you don’t think about it,” Sister Anne said. “It’s war and everybody sees a lot of awful things. Just don’t think about it.”
VI
“Let’s talk about your suicidal feelings.”
“There are times I want to kill myself. How’s that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Who’s on first?”
“You pride yourself on being a brave man.”
“I am. Buck Lanham called me the bravest man he’s ever known.”
“Hooray. I’ll see you get a medal.”
“Maybe I deserve a medal. I’ve pissed in the face of death.” The old man winked then. That and what he had just said made him look ridiculous. It made him look ancient and crazy. “I have killed, after all.”
“I know. You are a very famous killer. You have antlers and tusks and rhino horns. You’ve shot cape buffalo and geese and bears and wild goats. That makes you extremely brave. You deserve medals.”
“Who are you to deride me?” The old man was furious. He looked threatening and silly. “Who are you to hold me in contempt? I have killed men!”
VII
The time is a drunken blur in his memory. It is the “rat race” summer and fall of 1944, and he is intensely alive. A “war correspondent,” that is what he is supposed to be, but that is not all he can allow himself to be.
He has to go up against Death every time. With what he knows, oh, yes, he has to meet the flat gaze of Mr. Death, has to breathe Mr. Death’s hyena breath, he has to.
&nbs
p; That is part of it.
He calls himself a soldier. He wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a war. He appoints himself an intelligence officer. He carries a weapon, a .32 caliber Colt revolver.
And don’t the kids love him, though? God, he sure loves them. They are just so goddamned beautiful, the doomed ones and the fortunate, the reluctant warriors and those who’ve come to know they love it. They are beautiful men as only men can be beautiful.
You see, women, well, women are women, and it is the biological thing, the trap by which we are snared, the old peg and awl, the old bellyrub and sigh and there you have it, and so a real man does need a woman, must have a woman so he does not do heinous things, but it is in the company of men that men find themselves and each other.
These kid warriors, these glorious snotnoses like he used to be, they know he is tough. He is the legit goods. He can outshoot them, rifle or pistol, even the Two Gun Pecos Pete from Arizona. Want to play cards, he’ll stay up the night, drinking and joking. He puts on the gloves and boxes with them. He’ll take one to give one and he always gives as good as he gets.
He has a windup phonograph and good records: Harry James and the Boswells and Hot Lips Paige. He has Fletcher Henderson and Basie and Ellington. The Andrews Sisters, they can swing it, and Russ Colombo. Sinatra, he’ll be fine once they let him stop doing the sappy stuff. There are nights of music and drinking, and in the following days there are the moments burned into his mind, the moments that become the stories. Old man?
Well, he can drink the kids blindeyed and to hell and gone. He stays with them, drink for drink. The hell with most of the kissass officers. They don’t know how foolish they are. They don’t know they are clichés. The enlisted men, John Q. Public, Mr. O. K. Joe American, Johnny Gone for a Soldier, it’s the enlisted man who’s going to save the world from that Nazi bastard. It’s the enlisted men he honest to God loves.
The enlisted men call him “Papa.”
How do you like it now, Gentlemen?
The kraut prisoner was no enlisted man. He was an officer. Stiff necked son of a bitch. Deutschland uber alles. Arrogant pup. Ubermensch.
No, the German will not reveal anything. He will answer none of their questions. They can all go to hell. That’s what the German officer says. They can all get f_____.
Papa shakes a fist in the kraut’s face. Papa says, “You’re going to talk and tell us every damned thing we want to know or I’ll kill you, you Nazi son of a bitch.”
The German officer does not change expression. He looks bored. What he says is: “You are not going to kill me, old man. You do not have the courage. You are hindered by a decadent morality and ethical code. You come from a race of mongrelized degenerates and cowards. You abide by the foolishness of the Geneva Convention. I am an unarmed prisoner of war. You will do nothing to me.”
Later, he would boastfully write about this incident to the soft-spoken, courtly gentlemen who published his books. He said to the German officer, “What a mistake you made, brother.”
And then I shot that smug prick. I just shot him before anyone could tell me I shouldn’t. I let him have three in the belly, just like that, real quick, from maybe a foot away.
Say what you want, maybe they were no supermen, but they weren’t any pantywaists, either. Three in the belly, PowPowPow, and he’s still standing there, and damned if he isn’t dead but doesn’t know it, but he is pretty surprised and serves him right, too.
Then everyone else, all the Americans and a Brit or two are yelling and pissing around like they don’t know whether to shit, go blind, or order breakfast, and here’s this dead kraut swaying on his feet, and maybe I’m even thinking I’m in a kettle of bad soup, but the hell with it.
But have to do it right, you know, arrogant krautkopf or not. So I put the gun to his head and I let him have it, bang! And his brains come squirting right out his nose, gray and pink, and, you know, it looks pretty funny, so someone yells, “Gesundheit!” And that’s it, brother. That’s all she wrote and we’ve got us one guaranteed dead Nazi.
VIII
A rose is a rose is a rose
The dead are the dead are the dead except when
they aren’t and how do you like it
let’s talk and
Who is on first
I know what I know and I am afraid and I am afraid
IX
HOMAGE TO SPAIN
1.
An Old Man’s Luck
The dusty old man sat on the river bank. He wore steel rimmed spectacles. He had already traveled twelve kilometers and he was very tired. He thought it would be a while before he could go on.
That is what he told Adam Nichols.
Adam Nichols told him he had to cross the pontoon bridge. He really must and soon. When the shelling came, this would not be a good place to stay. The old man in the steel rimmed spectacles thanked Adam Nichols for his concern. He was a very polite old man. The reason he had stayed behind was to take care of the animals in his village. He smiled because saying “his village” made him feel good. There were three goats, two cats, and six doves. When he had no other choice and really had to leave, he opened the door to the doves’ cage and let them fly. He was not too worried about the cats, really, the old man told Adam Nichols; cats are always all right. Cats had luck. Goats were another thing. Goats were a little stupid and sweet and so they had not much luck.
It was just too bad about the goats, the old man said. It was a sad thing.
Adam agreed. But the old man had to move along. He really should.
The old man said thank you. He was grateful for the concern. But he did not think he could go on just yet. He was very tired and he was 76 years old.
He asked a question. Did Adam truly think the cats would be all right?
Yes, Adam said, we both know cats have luck.
Adam thought they had a lot more luck than the sweet and stupid goats, and 76-year-old men who can go no farther than twelve kilometers when there is going to be shelling.
2.
Hunters In The Morning Fog
Miguel woke him. They used to call him Miguelito but the older Miguel had been shot right through the heart, a very clean shot, and so now this one was Miguel. The sun had just come up and there was fog with cold pufflike clouds near to the ground. “Your rifle,” Miguel said. “We are going hunting.”
“Hey,” Adam Nichols said, “what the hell?” He wanted coffee or to go back to sleep.
“Just come,” Miguel said.
There were five of them, Pilar, who was as tough as any man, and Antonio, and Jordan, the American college professor, and Miguel, who used to be Miguelito, and Adam Nichols. They went out to the field. Yesterday it was a battlefield. The day before that it had just been a green, flat field. Some of the dead lay here and there. Not all of the dead were still. Some were already up and some were now rising, though most lay properly still and dead. Those who were up mostly staggered about like drunks. Some had their arms out in front of them like Boris Karloff in the Frankenstein movie. They did not look frightening. They looked stupid. But they were frightening even if they did not look frightening because they were supposed to be dead.
“Say, what the hell?” Adam Nichols asked. His mouth was dry.
“It happens sometimes,” Pilar said. “That is what I have heard. It appears to be so, though this is the first time I personally have seen it.”
Pilar shrugged. “The dead do not always stay dead. They come back sometimes. What they do then is quite sickening. It is revolting and disgusting. When they come back, they are cannibals. They wish to eat living people. And if they bite you, they cause a sickness, and then you die, and then after that, you become like them and you wish to eat living people. We have to shoot them. A bullet in the head, that is what stops them. It’s not so bad, you know. It’s not like they are really alive.”
“I don’t go for this,” Adam said.
“Don’t talk so much,” Pilar said. “I like you very m
uch, Americano, but don’t talk so much.”
She put her rifle to her shoulder. It was an old ’03 Springfield. It had plenty of stopping power. Pilar was a good shot. She fired and one of the living dead went down with the middle of his face punched in.
“Come on,” Pilar said, commanding. “We stay together. We don’t let any of these things get too close. That is what they are. Things. They aren’t strong, but if there are too many, then it can be trouble.”
“I don’t think I like this,” Adam Nichols said. “I don’t think I like it at all.”
“I am sorry, but what you like and what you dislike is not all that important, if you will forgive my saying so,” Miguel said. “What does matter is that you are a good shot. You are one of our best shots. So, if you please, shoot some of these unfortunate dead people.”
Antonio and Pilar and Jordan and Miguel and Adam Nichols shot the living dead as the hunting party walked through the puffy clouds of fog that lay on the field. Adam felt like his brain was the flywheel in a clock about to go out of control. He remembered shooting black squirrels when he was a boy. Sometimes you shot a black squirrel and it fell down and then when you went to pick it up it tried to bite you and you had to shoot it again or smash its head with a rock or the stock of your rifle. He tried to make himself think this was just like shooting black squirrels. He tried to make himself think it was even easier, really, because dead people moved a lot slower than black squirrels. It was hard to shoot a squirrel skittering up a tree. It was not so hard to shoot a dead man walking like a tired drunk toward you.
Then Adam saw the old man who had sat by the pontoon bridge the other day. The old man’s steel rimmed spectacles hung from one ear. They were unshattered. He looked quite silly, like something in a Chaplin film. Much of his chest had been torn open and bones stuck out at crazy angles. There were wettish tubular like things wrapped about the protruding bones of his chest.