Hot Valley

by James Lear

  Captain Chester and I looked at each other. War, for both of us, had been about opportunity, about hiding from reality, about turning a profit and getting our dicks sucked. War had been about young, normal men like Howard doing things that they would never have done in peacetime, and that they would deny for the rest of their lives, except perhaps in their solitary reveries. War had seen the world turned upside down—a Negro fighting for the slave owners, a boy like Billy acting like a woman, a Union sheriff transformed into a Confederate officer. Our camp was that crazy world in microcosm. I had found myself a lover, a companion both of my bed and of my heart, whom I was teaching to read and write and fuck and suck. Captain Chester had put his talents to good use, while Captain Jed Brown had worked his way through every young man in the camp, enjoying his authority and handing out a unique form of “discipline.” Billy was living almost full-time as a “woman” now, having been taken up by a visiting major who exempted him from active service—in the normal sense of the word—and kept him as other men would keep a mistress, showering him with gifts in return for sexual favors. There was only one crucial difference, Billy told me one night—and that was that the general enjoyed being fucked just as much as he enjoyed fucking. “He’s got everything he needs in one package, he says,” Billy remarked. “Now he says he’ll never need to cheat again.”

  But, to the major’s dismay, Billy folded up his finery on the day we were mobilized, locked his jewelry and his money in a case, packed a trunk with his skirts and wigs, and said, “And they won’t come out again until the war is over.”

  We paraded at dawn to receive our marching orders. Jed Brown was more impressive than ever; he may have been playing a role, but he played it well.

  “Men of Company K. And ladies!”

  This got a laugh and set us at our ease; all of us, at one time or another in the last few weeks, had taken the lady’s part.

  “We move out today, bound for the Shenandoah Valley. The Yankees are burning the corn, burning the houses, killing folk, killing the cattle. We must do all we can to stop them. We may not be many, we may not be strong, but we are all together, are we not?”

  There was a faint cheer.

  “We are brothers in arms. We have been together, here in this camp, for long enough now. We have worked together, trained together, fought together—”

  “And fucked together!” This, of course, was Charlie.

  “And fucked together, yes,” Jed Brown said, “and I know of no man who hasn’t become a better soldier for learning to take it up the ass. Am I right?”

  This time the cheer was anything but faint.

  “So let’s march with pride in our hearts and friends on either side. Who would dare to cross the men of Company K?”

  There was much more in the same vein, and much cheering and whistling, much shaking of hands and kissing, much slapping of backs and asses. We marched out of town with the old Alhambra band at our head, playing “Dixie.” Our hearts were light though our packs were heavy. I had Howard at my side, and I told him that I would not let anything happen to him.

  And so we set out for the Shenandoah Valley, each of us stifling in our hearts the fear that we might never return alive.

  XIII

  MY MEDICAL TRAINING WAS BASIC, TO SAY THE LEAST, AND was frequently interrupted by the attentions of Captain Healey, who regarded me as his personal property and fucked me whenever he liked. I was an unwilling and unresponsive lover, but I dared not refuse him in case he decided—as he frequently threatened—to turn me over to the police for my part in the St. Albans raid. He had a whole string of charges that, he said, would land me in a military prison for the rest of my life, if I didn’t cooperate.

  Under Healey’s tutelage, I began to see how sex, which I had always regarded as a pleasant and harmless pastime, could become a form of abuse, an expression of corrupted power. At one time, not so very long ago, the idea of “corrupted power” would have excited me, particularly if it involved a brutally handsome, bald, muscular man in an officer’s uniform who simply wanted to fuck my ass and mouth. It was the sort of thing I dreamed about back home in Bishopstown, jacking myself off to sleep with visions of domination just such as that which I was now experiencing. But the dream was very different from the reality. Healey didn’t care if he hurt me, or if I wasn’t in the mood to be fucked. He didn’t even care if my ass was in no fit state to be fucked due to its more natural function as an egress for excrement. He reveled in my discomfort, and if I fouled his prick he used it as an excuse to degrade me even further. I was obliged to submit, and thankfully I was always able to perform efficiently enough to get the ordeal over with quickly, but I came to hate Healey and what he was doing to me as much as I have ever hated anyone in my life. I had ample opportunity to kill him, or to betray him to the authorities, but I knew that it would have made life worse for me. So I suffered in silence.

  The one thing that sustained me during this time was my rapid advance in medical studies. As a medical orderly, I was expected to do little more than roll bandages, empty slop buckets, carry the wounded and sick, and occasionally hold down a soldier while his leg or arm was amputated. All of this I learned to do in the field hospital to which I was initially posted, down in Baltimore, which we reached after a three-week march from Vermont.

  I did all my work without complaint, and it soon became apparent to the overstretched doctors and nurses that I was intelligent enough to do more than mop and carry. I was taken under the wing of a nurse named Jenny Wallace, a brave, strong-shouldered farm girl who had overcome no end of opposition to obtain work at the hospital. Most of the nursing was left to badly trained soldiers such as me, or to recovering patients with little idea of hygiene, let alone how to treat sickness or injury. Jenny had been training as a nurse before the war began, and decided to put her training to some use. “I thought my ugly face would be a protection against what Daddy called man’s baser instincts,” she told me, “but I’ve realized that most men, even those who are near to dying, aren’t too fussy about what a woman looks like, as long as she’s a woman.” Jenny was homely enough, it’s true, but she had kind eyes and a beautiful smile which would have made any man of sense fall in love with her. She’d developed a wide range of techniques for thwarting unwanted attentions from the men, patients and doctors as well as men of other ranks; some of these techniques were purely verbal, while others involved a swift knee in the balls. I used a few myself to stave off unwanted suitors, and I wished I had the guts to kick Healey in the nuts the next time he started pawing me.

  After a few weeks working alongside Jenny, I was a pretty proficient nurse myself. I could clean and bandage even quite serious wounds, and I found that I was not as squeamish as I feared. I could remove bullets or shards of metal from bleeding flesh, I could pack burns with soothing creams, I could hold down a screaming man while the doctors performed hideous but lifesaving operations on him. I quickly conquered my repugnance for blood, vomit, shit, and pus; I suppose my recent way of life had counteracted the delicacy of my upbringing. I learned the properties of various medicines and could prepare sedatives or antiseptic washes. I knew how to administer the drugs that would help a man in a fever, and for those who were beyond such help I learned the arts of making them comfortable as they awaited the inevitable end. I saw many young men die in that hospital, and consoled myself with the fact that I had eased their final moments. Many of them commissioned me to write letters home, or pressed into my hand tokens of loved ones, parents, friends. They allowed me intimacies that they were afraid of allowing to Nurse Jenny, so I often had to help wounded men go to the bathroom, or wash them if they had messed themselves. I didn’t mind. I saw it as penance for a life almost entirely wasted in selfish folly.

  For once in my life, I had no idle time in which to seek pleasure or trouble. I worked every hour I could, partly because the need around me was so great, partly because it kept me from the attentions of Captain Healey, who, despite his autocratic pr
etensions, could hardly remove a nurse from the wards just because he wanted to fuck him. I often worked for 16 hours at a stretch, which allowed me two hours for other military duties, two hours in which to submit to Healey’s desires, and, if I was lucky, four hours in which to sleep. I lost weight, my muscles wasted away, and my skin took on the gray tone of exhaustion. My hair fell out even more rapidly; after a couple of months, I had a definite bald patch on top of my head. I was no longer the pretty boy who had turned heads in the White Horse.

  When the call came for volunteers to proceed to the front in Virginia, I did not hesitate. Captain Healey tried to stop me from leaving—he had no desire to get his head blown off, he said, and he almost pleaded with me to change my mind. I suppose, in his way, he had grown fond of me, or had at least grown accustomed to the skills that I practiced on him. I had learned those skills in the heat of passion, even of love—now I reproduced them coldly, with hate in my heart. I did not want to associate those feelings of physical joy with anger, spite, and pain ever again, and if that meant losing my life in the service of the sick and dying, it didn’t seem such a bad exchange. Healey tried appealing to my sentimental streak, which he rightly guessed was a mile wide, and he even told me that he loved me. I did not believe him. No man could do the things he had done—things I do not care to remember, much less write down—to someone he loved. When I told him this, he reverted to his true character and started threatening me again. I went straight to his superior officers and told them that I was eager to be released for active service. They signed my papers right away.

  We were marching to the aid of Union forces that had been severely beaten by Confederate troops under General Early, at Kernstown, just south of Winchester. I knew little of the tactics of the operation, and understood less; it seemed to me, from what I could glean, that both sides were swinging up and down the mountains and valleys of the area inflicting terrible losses on each other with no advantage to be gained in any direction. Mine, however, was not to reason why; mine was but to patch up the wounded and comfort the dying.

  For much of the summer of 1864, I worked at the field hospital near Winchester. Our own position was dangerous enough to begin with, as Early’s forces were still running amok in the valley, ambushing our men and coming perilously close to the hospital; I often wondered who had given the order for the medical corps to be established in such a vulnerable position. All this changed, however, when General Grant sent us General Sheridan. News spread fast that this was the man who would end the war, at whatever cost. In the hospital, we braced ourselves for hard work, and in private I prayed that both sides would somehow manage to lose each other in the labyrinth of hills and gullies that characterized the area. It was a beautiful country—as beautiful in its own way as the landscape of my childhood. But as time went by it was increasingly marked by war, by fire, by death. Sheridan arrived with one mission in mind: to beat Early into submission, and to turn the Shenandoah Valley into a barren waste.

  Wounded men came into the hospital in considerable numbers every day, although they assured us that they had inflicted far greater damage than they’d sustained. Early’s men, they said, were cowards who would run rather than fight, but by the look of the wounded there were enough of Early’s men who would stand their ground rather than let the Yankees pass unchallenged. I did all that I could to help them, but with the massive numbers of sick and dying still unmoved after the Battle of Kernstown, it was all we could do to prevent disease from wiping out all of us.

  With each intake we heard new tales from the front line, some of it obviously bragging, as soldiers’ tales are apt to be—I learned to sift the truth from the fact—and some of it very strange. There’s a superstitious streak in your average fighting man, always ready to see some supernatural influence at work in the battlefield, and we heard many tales of angels coming through the smoke to carry the dying off to heaven, much as in the myths of the ancient races. And again and again I heard news of a “black devil” who fought harder and more fiercely than any other Rebel, who “rose from hell” to inflict terrible injuries before disappearing with a whiff of sulfur. I gave these tales little credence, but they became the currency of the sickroom and troubled the fever dreams of many an injured man. The Black Devil became as real a figure of the times as General Lee or Jefferson Davis.

  Work, and the horrors I witnessed, made me into an automaton, which was a blessing in disguise. When I slept, I slept like a dead man, absolutely unconscious until I awoke—suddenly, totally awake—and started working again. When I saw my face in the shaving mirror I was skinny and pale. I had always looked younger than my years; now I looked older. Perhaps all the depravity of the last few years was catching up with me at last—which would be ironic, as I was now to all intents and purposes celibate. My only intimate contact was on the wards. I cleaned and cared for the men in my charge—all colors and ages and shapes and sizes—with as much fortitude as I could muster. Sometimes, they wanted comfort of a more carnal nature and would force my hand down onto a stiff cock. Once, I would have taken advantage of the situation; now I just took a leaf out of Nurse Jenny’s book and rapped any upstanding member with a cold metal spatula which I carried in my belt for just such occasions. That soon took the pep out of them.

  For all my good intentions, I could not prevent myself from becoming fond of some of the men—I realized that mine was essentially a sentimental nature, looking to give and receive love, which is what had led me into so many ridiculous situations in the past. I had mistaken fucking for love, and had given too much of myself, to the wrong people, as a result. Most of the men I processed as a butcher would process meat, but there were a few who touched me in a different way.

  One I will never forget came to us from one of the Zouave regiments that had fought their way down the Potomac and were now dispersed among other units. He was a dark, handsome New Yorker, with a typical gruff East Coast accent, dark thinning hair, and a thick moustache—he reminded me a great deal of the railroad workers who used to fuck me at the White Horse. He had been badly injured by flying shrapnel and came to us delirious with fever, his Zouave uniform in tatters. He had lost the fez that characterized those most elegant of soldiers, but retained the tight-fitting jacket, the baggy pantaloons, the white leggings with their leather cuffs, and of course the wide, long sash that is the pride of the Zouave soldier. It was all filthy and badly torn, revealing large expanses of tanned, hairy thigh, chest, and stomach. His injuries were mostly concentrated on the right arm, which had taken a bullet in the elbow, smashing the bones to splinters. Before he recovered from his delirium, he was hurried into the operating theater, and his arm was amputated just below the shoulder. He hardly seemed to feel the pain, but tossed on his bed in terrible nightmares, occasionally screaming out. I did all I could to make him comfortable, and prayed that gangrene had not already set in.

  For two weeks I nursed him through fever, dripping water into his mouth on a sponge, feeding him when possible with soup, providing him with the means to urinate and defecate, washing him, and even trimming his hair and moustache. I tried shaving him, but it was too painful for him, and soon he had grown a beard that almost matched the moustache in thickness and splendor. It had been my job, when he first came into my care, to cut away the remnants of his splendid Zouave uniform, and to clean up the lesser cuts and lacerations. What was revealed, as the tatters came away, was a body of immense strength and elegance, the skin brown, the hair jet black. I washed him in clean water, and allowed myself to delight in the beauty of his form, which seemed like a light in all that darkness.

  His name was Michael Kardashian—he was of Armenian extraction. All this he told me when, one grim day like any other, he suddenly awoke from his fever, sat up in bed, and asked for food. By some miracle, he had survived the amputation, the fever, and the malnutrition of the last weeks, and apart from a certain haggardness, he looked as healthy as anyone in the hospital. I brought him water, and he caught me by the arm. �
��You’re the one, aren’t you? The one who took care of me?”

  I said that I was.

  “I owe you my life.”

  “I’m sorry about your…”

  “My arm? Well, I’m alive, no? There’s nothing that my right hand could do that my left hand can’t.”

  I helped him eat, shave, and wash, but he was impatient to learn to be self-sufficient. He was clumsy, slopping water into his bed as he attempted to clean himself, and I had to scold him, but we always ended up laughing. I was able to give him a little privacy by hanging sheets around his bed, while he struggled to perform the most basic functions “without an audience,” as he put it. He never minded me being there.

  I knew that Michael was well on the road to recovery when, during one of these washing sessions, he developed an erection. I’d had ample opportunity to see his cock when he was ill, and I had tried not to be too interested in its size and girth, even when (as frequently happened with fever patients) it became spontaneously, rigidly erect. Now, however, as I was washing his back, I noticed that he was trying to keep his knees together. He was sitting up in bed, and it looked like a most uncomfortable position.

  “You can lie back now, Michael.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He grinned. “I’m embarrassed.”

  “You’ve never been embarrassed before—oh. I see.” He lay back, and his dick bounced up to lie against his hairy stomach. It reached up to his belly button.

  “I guess you’ve seen it all before.” With his left hand, he was idly rubbing the hair on his chest.

  “Yes, I sure have.”

  “Don’t suppose you could…give me a helping hand? I know I said that my left hand could do as well as my right, but—”