And carried sin around inside him like a growing, festering wound, to be lanced and seared and torn from him in the clammy confessional, through shame and sweat-bathed agony.
It didn’t seem fair, the scars he carried because of his sexuality, and here were Kenyon and his buddies, and they talked about things which would have paralyzed him, literally crippled him.
Sodomy: by mouth by asshole by force by consent
Incest: little sister big sister; man, that child could go, wanting to teach her little brother something fine; mama, oh, mama.
Rape; masturbation; experimentation.
And music. God, they turned music into a sexual experience. Close your eyes, baby, and let it take you take you don’t hold back. Slow hard winding grinding brain-shattering torso-twisting pelvic thrusts, tight hard buttocks shoving it shoving it.
Patrick learned how to do that anyway, how to let the music reach inside of himself and become part of his being. Kenyon taught him how, in some whore’s house (but a good house; Kenyon knew the best). He had gone mind-stoned with pot and music and Kenyon telling him how, Kenyon right there, hell, Kenyon, and the whore, with tiny hands, warm tiny hands and strong little fingers warm and moist, hell, Kenyon, not with you right there watching, for Christ’s sake.
But why the fuck not, baby? Why not?
Why not?
Now how the hell would his father like that?
Two weeks before their tour ended, Kenyon fell on a mine. There was enough left to ship home; the lower portion of his body was blown away. His face seemed peaceful enough and untouched by what had happened to the rest of him.
The C.O. was a young guy with a skin crew cut, a sawed-off chin, small beads for eyes, thin shoulders, long legs and no experience in combat. He was from Kansas and figured anyone from New York was neighbor to anyone else from New York. Patrick didn’t bother to explain the kinds of distance that separated Riverdale and Harlem. The C.O. sent him home two weeks early, along with Kenyon’s body and instructions to convey his personal and the Army’s generalized sympathy and compliments.
“You tell them the importance of the work done by Private Kenyon; he was a devoted soldier and that knowledge might make their grief easier to bear.”
There were several corpses besides Kenyon’s aboard the 707 charter flight but that didn’t seem to dampen the spirits of the two hundred and forty men aboard, or of the eight stewardesses who raced through the plane with continuously smiling bright faces. The smiles were good, real, not plastic pulling of phony mouths, but warm and generous, given when eye contact was made and attention established.
They wore brown uniforms with light-beige blouses. Patrick preferred to see girls dressed in blue or, best of all, in red. But the girls held up during the long flight; they couldn’t possibly have managed to catch more than an hour or two of sleep through the whole twenty-six-hour deal, yet they bounced down the aisle, seemed to have plenty of energy and attention to spare. They didn’t give out with any of that stale yes-soldier, no-soldier, whatever-you-say-soldier shit that the U.S.O. staff handed out or any of the quick, on-again, off-again aren’t-I-noble crap of the professional entertainers who came over to Nam from time to time.
Patrick was attracted to the girl because her shiny brown hair slipped from its pinnings and she just casually shoved it under the little brown cap, and when it slid out again, she bit her lip and whispered a spirited “Oh shit” to herself, and when she saw that he had lip-read her, she grinned and leaned close to him. Her smell was fruit and flower and the vague essence of soap.
“Don’t report that to my captain or he’ll have me write out a list of twenty alternatives which would be much more acceptable. He’s a Mormon and very gung ho.”
Patrick pulled a blank face. “I’m from Salt Lake City, miss...er...What did you say your name was?”
The little name plate said Eileen and she covered it quickly, stared at him with large, startled dark eyes, then her face relaxed and she shook her head. “Oh, you’re really mean. If you’re from Salt Lake City, pal, you missed your stop by about a thousand miles.” She leaned forward, squinted at his name plate. “Hmm. Patrick O’Malley, that’s a nice mean trick for one Irishman to pull on another. Sure, it’s Eileen O’Flaherty you’re talking to.”
“Well, hello, Eileen O’Flaherty. You got a place in New York?”
She put one hand on a nicely rounded, brown-skirt-encased hip, fussed with the waistband for a minute. “Quiet, you’ll wake your buddy there. Sure, I’ve a place in New York, along with four others. Safety in numbers, right, mate?”
“Not necessarily.” Patrick watched her cute, pert, alive face, the skin flushed pink and slightly damp from her exertions of serving food, running the length of the plane’s narrow aisles, soothing, providing blankets and pillows and small talk.
Something so provocatively alive about her irritated him suddenly, irrationally. Her ease with him, her ease at the closeness of all of their male bodies, her complete lack of awareness of where they’d been, what they’d done, of what they’d seen and lived with, of how they’d fought death. All of it, with a heavy weight he couldn’t understand, obliterated the sense of her femaleness and he wanted to strike out at her.
“Well, Eileen O’Flaherty,” he said carefully, aware of the sense of cold calculation which filled him even though he couldn’t understand the reason, “tell me, what services do you provide for the passengers to the rear?”
She misunderstood, pulled a mouth at him as though he’d said something with a double meaning, but the boyish face fixed into an expression which puzzled her, held her. She touched her hair lightly and asked him, “What do you mean, O’Malley? Which passengers to the rear?”
“Oh, four or five of them, I guess. You don’t have to feed them or settle them down or tuck them in or arrange their heads on pillows or flirt with any of them. I guess they make the best passengers of all, huh?”
He noted with a sudden alarm that her face went white as she realized what he meant. He filled with a regret as sudden and unanticipated as his need to attack had been, but she turned too quickly, was down the aisle before he could extricate himself from his seat and he didn’t see her again until they landed.
As they all inched down the aisles, wedged together toward the exit, she suddenly appeared, close against him, surprised and caught.
“Hey, look, Eileen,” he said, “hey, look, I’m sorry. I was out of line. Just feeling a little weightless upstairs, okay?”
She studied the expression carefully, thoughtfully. She didn’t flick on a quick okay-soldier smile. She bit her lower lip and frowned. “I shouldn’t have run off like that. My fault, I take offense too quickly.” Then she grinned. “That’s very Irish, isn’t it? Listen, good luck, O’Malley. I really mean it.”
He held her wrist; it was warm in his large hand. She was very short, and he had to lean down to her. “If you really mean it, how about a phone number? Come on, O’Flaherty, I’ve been gone a long time. I could use some kindhearted company. For a couple of drinks?”
She dug a scrap of paper from a pocket in her skirt and as they moved, their bodies carried along by bodies, down the aisle, she jotted her name and address and phone number, then pressed the paper into his hand.
“I’m a working girl, you know, Patrick. Kind of give me a shove toward the front of the ship, will you?”
The address was in Woodside, Queens, and Eileen winked at his puzzled expression. “I told you I share with four others: my mother, father, and two brothers. Come on down here a minute.” When he ducked down toward her, she whispered in his ear, “That’s where we start from. There are places, you know.”
She disappeared in the press of young male bodies and when he finally saw her again, some twenty minutes later, and she checked his name on her clipboard, he carefully put his duffel bag on the floor next to his feet, reached for her face with both of his hands and for a long moment held his lips against hers to the cheers of the other soldiers.
Eileen O’Flaherty, freed finally, grinned, adjusted her cap and smoothed her blouse and said cheerfully, “Well, isn’t it nice that the soldier enjoyed his flight so much.”
THIRTY-TWO
DUDLEY KENYON’S WAKE WAS held at the Armory on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. It was a misplaced gray fortress with battlements overlooking unworthy terrain.
The hall where the coffin had been placed was huge, a drill hall converted for the purpose, with an arrangement of chairs, banks of flowers, an aisle down which black ushers escorted visitors.
“Yes, can I help you?” The man’s voice was powerful and deep and he held his head to one side as a sign of courtesy to the soldier who stood so obviously ill at ease in the surroundings.
“Yes, sir. I’ve come to pay my respects to Private Kenyon and his family.”
The funeral director said, “How kind of you. May I have your name, sir, to relay to the family.”
As he gave his name, the funeral director jotted it on a small pad which he held in the palm of his hand.
Beyond the solicitous funeral director, Patrick saw nothing but dark faces. To his left, he spotted flashes of bright color, young men and women decked out in African garb, men and women dressed alike in long, flowing billows of color, topped by huge, fragile, billowy, spun-sugar bubbles of hair. As he went down the aisle, he felt a wave of hostility unmistakably directed at him. He caught the coming together of faces, the folding of arms, the unblinking bright eyes that followed him and made him intensely aware of himself.
He was escorted to the coffin and he could feel all the attention in the room center on him, on the back of his head, along his neck and stiff, rigidly erect body. He tried not to look anywhere but at the coffin, but he glanced involuntarily at the honor guards who flanked the flag-draped box. The tall, thin chocolate soldier at the foot was stoned out of his skull; his round eyes, glazed, looked through Patrick without seeing him; his mouth was slack and he was humming softly.
Patrick crossed himself, bowed his head and stood uncertainly since there was no kneeling bench. He stopped midway through a prayer and opened his eyes and stared at the contours of the coffin. He tried to visualize Kenyon inside, in there, Kenyon dead in there, but nothing came back to him and the bright tomato-red of the stripes of the flag held his gaze to fascination. What the hell any of this had to do with Kenyon or with him he couldn’t say.
His elbow was touched lightly and he moved away from the coffin, grateful to be escorted to the side of the room where everyone was dressed in black and seemed older and somewhat less hostile and angry.
“This is Private Kenyon’s mother,” he was told. “This is Private Patrick O’Malley, come to offer his respects.”
Patrick offered his hand and said, “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Kenyon. Dudley was a friend of mine.”
She lifted her face, tilted it to one side for a better view of him and in so doing offered a better view of herself. It was an unexpected face, neither young nor old, ageless, smooth and warm and brown. She narrowed her dark eyes for a moment and her voice was deep and a small smile crept up the corners of her mouth, vague and familiar. She held his hand firmly in her own gloved hand and examined him with interest.
“Didn’t nobody call him Dudley,” she said softly.
“No. No, ma’am. I mean, we always called him Kenyon. We all did.”
She nodded as though he had met some requirement, released his hand and indicated the chair beside her. “Your ears are fire-red. You walk from the subway in that cold wind?”
He touched an ear stupidly and nodded.
“Well, you were good to come all this way,” she said without knowing where he’d come from, only that it had to be some distance from where they were now. It was an acknowledgment of a different kind of distance and Patrick bit his lip because he didn’t know how to speak to her. “You were together in Nam?”
He nodded again, then realized he had to speak. “Yes, ma’am, same unit. We were, well, Kenyon and I, we worked together for more than a year.”
Her eyes, beetle-black, carefully blue-lidded, slightly theatrical, with long fringy lashes, studied his face and accused him of nothing, yet he felt accused. The accusation came from within himself, pounded with his heartbeat, his eye blink, his every awareness of life. He sat here and Kenyon, what was left of what used to be Kenyon, was up there in that box under that flag.
Look, lady, I’m alive. Okay. You don’t know anything about it, about how it was, about Kenyon and me and living and dying and killing and getting killed.
A bead of sweat started down along his temple though he didn’t feel warm. He felt somewhat short of breath and each inhalation included the heavy, sweet scent, sweet and spicy, powdery, sensuous, which surrounded Kenyon’s mother. Her face was broad, with high cheekbones that gave an odd smiling countenance. There was something almost mocking about the way she held her head to one side, the way she studied him and was aware of his discomfort.
She clicked her tongue against her teeth and spoke with an edge of annoyance, as though it was a passing, temporary thing, this whole thing about Kenyon. “I told that boy he was a damn fool for getting into it, but he never asked my opinion or cared a damn for it anyway.” She shook her head and stared straight at the coffin for a moment, then back at Patrick as though for confirmation that she was right after all. “Listen, were you with him? Right then?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’ honey. Sounds like you fit to choke over it.” She watched the blood fill his face and reached for his hand and smiled. “It’s okay. I guess you just a little bit out of water here. I know about you, Patrick O’Malley.”
He showed surprise and she sighed. “Oh, Kenyon wrote to me.” Her voice was husky and she directed a sardonic glare at the coffin, then turned back to Patrick. “He wrote home to his mama, like all good boys do. For a little piece of bread, Mama, a little loan against the future. Well, what the hell, he ain’t got much a future now, has he?” Her voice changed, filled with a womanliness, a rich wholeness that encompassed Patrick. “He told me you was a friend, baby, and you came here, so I know he was right. I’m glad you was a friend.” Her hand pressed his once, then released him, an acknowledgment of who he was and that he was not an intruder here. She moved her head to indicate the other side of the room, her eyes went toward them, then back to him. “Don’t you pay them no mind but don’t go expecting they’re going to thank you for coming like you was King Tut or something.”
Her attitude and manner disturbed him. Some essence of her surrounded him, and at the center of himself, he felt a terrible panic and sense of loss for something he’d never had. She created an intimacy with him and he wanted more, wanted some part of herself, some share of the deep world wisdom her bright and weary face revealed. Yet in his uneasiness, Patrick was not unaware that she stirred some fierce and lonely sexuality within him.
This is Kenyan’s mother, for Christ’s sake.
It didn’t matter. She was more; she was someone elemental, who didn’t have to be defined or explained or located. She was someone he would never know and he wanted some share of her unknown warmth and amused, ironic, unquestioning understanding and acceptance of unspeakable things.
Kenyon had said, “Hell, my mama got lots a’ bad reflections on her. Don’t bother her, why the hell should it bother me?”
Patrick understood something about that now. There was a different measuring here, a different meaning for Kenyon’s mother. She was of a different reality.
“Oh, Gawd,” she said suddenly. “Oh, Lord, here she comes, the old woman. No way to keep her out once she gets it into her mind.”
Patrick turned toward the center aisle and watched a small, straight, thin, gray-haired old black woman hurry toward the coffin. The funeral director followed closely and a pruney old man in clerical garb limped after them.
“That’s Kenyon’s great-grandma,” Kenyon’s mother told him.
&nb
sp; “His great-grandma?”
Her face beamed with dark, hard pride and her eyes stayed on the old woman. “My own grandmother; eighty-nine years old and full of hell, but I wished she’d a’ stayed home.”
“Oh, Lawd,” the old woman called out in a thin, high, shrill, piercing voice as she arrived at the coffin. She leaned over and whacked the coffin with the palm of her hand for a few resounding thumps and called out, beseeching the high ceiling, “Oh, Sweet Lawd Jesus, have mercy on his poor sinner’s soul. Oh, Lawd, have mercy. Sweet Jesus, have mercy. He goin’ home now!”
From the other side of the room, the bright African side, came a deep voice, sardonic, mocking, “A-men, sister, a-men. Lawdy, he a’ goin’ home!”
There was a soft wave of scornful laughter which rolled slowly from that side of the room, swept across them tangibly, heavily.
The old woman whirled around, glared wildly and shook a fist of anger at the direction of the sound. “Shame! Shame on you. Shame! The Lawd see you. He know who you are. Yes, Sweet Jesus, you sees them sinners, don’t ya?”
A man’s voice called out in answer, “Yah, sister, I sees ’em all right, I does!”
The whole left side of the room began to vibrate with a chanting sound accompanied by the sharp crack of hand-clapping.
“Oh, shit,” Kenyon’s mother said, “they gonna start that again?”
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