Bullet Through Your Face (improved format)

by Edward Lee

  “How in the hail did they even know to come here?”

  They followed the line of stretcher-bearing men, back out to the front’a the facilerty, and that’s where they saw two bigass buses with the State Health Department logo on ‘em. All them fellas was quickly loadin’ them unconscious boys unto the buses.

  “This don’t make no sense, Hays.” Kinion’s head flashed in the sun.

  “Somebody must’ve seen that gym before we did, Chief, and then called these state health fellas.”

  “Yeah, but who?”

  A slim shadow crossed their backs. “It was me.”

  Kinion and Hays jerked around at the voice—

  “I called them, Chief Kinion,” Captain Majora informed them.

  V To commit what might be deemed an incongruenty within the parameters of structural and/or editorial protocol, here we now discover a violation in the standard and accepted acknowledgement that when an author composes, say, 16,000 words of a novella told entirely from a third-person-limited point of view . . .

  Art Koll pushed himself up from the meeting table, a formidable feat being that he weighed a solid 300 pounds. He wore the buzzcut and chiseled face quite appropriately as perhaps the most outspoken member of VFW Post 3063, outspoken in that he eagerly spoke out against homos, lesbos, freakos, pervertos, pinkos, druggos, and any other denomination that sought to undermine the moral fabric of this grand country. And the kids, Jesus! Look at the kids these days! Devil tattoos’n all these metal gewgaws in their faces and t-shirts with serial-killers on ‘em or pictures’a Jesus shootin’ up drugs. Just last year he’d flown all the way out to Frisco to attend the 30th reunion of Alpha Company, 2/81st, 1st Armored Division, of which he’d been a proud Sheridan M551 loader during the Big One: Viet Nam, and he’d stood right up in front of all surviving 16 members and proclaimed into the microphone: “Like the great Mac said, ‘Old soldiers never die!’ Shee-it, men, thirty years ago we was fightin’ fer the freedom of our children, and look what our children become! Boys wearin’ lipstick’n dresses, gals shavin’ their heads! Fer lunch today I walked just downtown in this fucked-up freako city and I’se swear I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. All freako tattoos with upside-down sataneric crosses on ‘em, rivets in their tongues’n nails’n fish hooks in their faces, and hair stickin’ out the color’a Kool-Aid! And I’se wearin’, quite proudly, my M551 shirt which reads HANOI OR BUST, and some boy with yellow hair’n blue lipstick’n what looked like shower curtain rings in his ears walks up ta me in a black dress’n says, ‘Guess you went bust, huh, babykiller!’ so’s instead’a cleanin’ his fruito perverto clock, I said, ‘We shorely would’a made it ta Hanoi if we’d had a coupla you fellas in the field with us ‘cos then Charlie Com would take one look at’cha and they’d be bent over laughin’ so hard we could’a benchmarked all their dink asses and won the fuckin’ war in one day!’ So then this thing in the dress kinda goes hummph the way a gal does when she knows she’s wrong, and then it says ‘Yeah but you baby-killers didn’t win the war,’ and then he whips out his compact and starts fixin’ his lipstick, so’s I say ‘Listen, sister, we may’ve failed in achievin’ our primary objecterive of keepin’ the good people of South Vietnam out’a the clutchers of Commurnism only because we had a bunch’a pinkos in the White House’n fuckin’ Congress, but we shore as hail didn’t lose that war. The dinks killed 58,000 of us but we scratched two million of their gook asses and we blowed the arms or legs of half a million more and turned their entire road system into craters that they still ain’t been able ta fix and we defolierated half their farmland with good ‘ol Agent Orange and they still cain’t grow nothin’ there, so you tell me we lost? We kicked the rice out’a those dink motherfuckers so hard they’se still seein’ stars, and you know why, girlie? To show the world that the United States of America will challenge any diabolical plot to spread Commernism inta the free world and looks what happens, Susy, like right now there ain’t no Commernism at all ‘cept in fuckin’China’n North fuckin’Korea and a coupla other dink hell-holes, and the whole lot of ‘em cain’t even make it no more without the financial investerments from us! And it’s a dang good thang we fought that war ‘cos if we hadn’t, Betty, you shore as shit wouldn’t be standin’ here with hair the color of a fuckin’canary’n wearin’lipstick and a fuckin’dress’n havin’enough metal in yer face to fill a tacklebox, nor would you even be able to exercise yer freedom’a speech ‘cos there wouldn’t be none, Harriet! You’d be in some fruit camp somewhere eatin’ tree bark and shit’n bent over plantin’ rice fer the Commissar!’”

  And with that diatribe, the rest of the members of Alpha 2/81 jumped to their feet and applauded, much in the same way that the members of VFW Post 3063 applauded him every week right here at their HQ in Luntville, after which they all sat around drinking beer and telling neat war stories so they wouldn’t have to go home while their wives were still up. Yes, it was a grand country, and Art reasoned that every time back in the Nam when he’d slammed a one fifty five full of APERS or white phosphorous into that big Sheridan breach, he’d helped make it a little greater. And, no, he’d never killed any babies—well, there was that pack of 10-year-olds on Highway 13 and Art had chopped them up with the coax but, hell, the kids were all sappers anyway. If someone was trying to kill you, what difference did it make how old they were? Just another lesbo homo freako perverto pinko druggo sensibility. So, anyway, right now Art lumbered back up and said “Jimmy fix me up with another Dixie, will ya?” and then he excused himself to the rear of the meeting hall and slipped into the bathroom.

  He urinated with gusto, relishing the fine life God had given him, the nice doublewide he fully owned now, the nice truck (not one of those Jap jobs, a Ford), and a fine job at the mill. And just as he would damn near fill that urinal with the wares of his bladder—

  “Daggit!”

  —all the lights went off.

  An unconscious change in his position caused the remaining

  stream of his kidney juice to buffet against the side of the urinal and splashed back onto his slacks.

  “Daggit!”

  But what happened to the lights? At first he suspected that maybe someone had turned them off as a joke but then no one was in here but him, and if anyone else had entered he’d have certainly seen them since he was standing right next to the fucking door. Power failure? he considered. Sure, it happened sometimes during storms but tonight there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Just the moon, the stars, and the twilight heavens.

  “What’n dang tarnations!” he exclaimed. “A blammed fuse must’a blowed!” He zipped back up and turned, feeling for the door handle, but when he pulled that door open—

  “Hoooooly—”

  Art stuck his big face in the door gap, peering out into the meeting hall. No lights out there, either, at least not the white overhead fluorescent lights he would expect.

  It was blue light he saw now. A dark, fluttering blue light that barely offered any illumination at all. Kind of reminded him of those hippie blacklights they had in the sixties, that’d light up pinko peacenick hippie peace posters.

  And then—

  The windows began to explode—

  And he saw—

  VI “Simple, Chief Kinion,” the salubrious Captain Majora explained once they got back to the station. “Pure coincidence, yes, but I merely overheard your dispatch to 861 Mount Airy Road over my police scanner. I happened to be in the area—that’s why I got there first and was able to call the State Health Department and apprise them of status at the County Watch-House for Boys. Then they deployed the EMT buses.”

  “ Now I get’cha, Captain,” the Chief confessed, perfectly satisfied with the shapely woman’s account. “You Army folks shore are thorough. Who’d have thunk’a that: monitorin’ the police radio band.”

  Hays smirked, pluggin’ the coffee pot in across the booking room. “One question, though, Captain. You say you just ‘happened’ to be in the area. Well what did
you just ‘happen’ ta be doin’, huh?”

  “Hays, how the Captain spends her time ain’t none’a yer business,” Kinion said through a smrik of his own.

  “Yeah, but Chief, I just thank it’s a mite—”

  “Just shut up and fetch the coffee like I tolt ya!” Then the Chief turned his jowls to the lovely Captain who sat across from him at the desk. “I’se shorely apolergize fer the sassy tone my deputy’s taken of late.”

  “No apology necessary, Chief,” Majora replied, and it might be worth noting that, now, she was not dressed in her of ficial Army summer khakis but instead a real purdy burgundy blouse and a pair’a black denim jeans that, well, accentuated her southerly regions quite nicely. “I was just out for a drive, familiarizing myself with the locale, and I might add, Chief, this is a beautiful town you have here.”

  “Why . . . thank you, Captain—” “Please, Chief, call me Dana,” she invited. “It’s perfectly appropriate when I’m off duty and not in standard duty uniform.”

  The Chief about crapped his size 54 trousers. Gawd in Heaven! She just asked me ta call her by her first name! Maybe . . . maybe she really has taken a likin’to me!

  “And I must say,” she continued, leveling those cool, clear eyes, “I really am honored to be able to work with a man so professional and perceptive.”

  The Chief about crapped again.

  But it was back to business right quick, it was, as the indefectible Captain Majora went on further: “It’s so anomalous, though, don’t you think, Chief? Thirty teenage boys and three detention officers, all rendered simultaneously unconscious—”

  The Chief nodded. “And at the same time too.”

  “All in the same position, and with their genitals exposed.”

  “They was exposed all right,” Hays cut in, “and hard as rocks and throbbin’.”

  “Hays!” Kinion yelled. “Weren’t you supposed ta be makin’ coffee?”

  “It’s comin’, boss. Got the filter in alls loaded up with yer favorite.”

  “Fine!” The Chief caught himself; he didn’t want to seem brusk in front of the Captain, and he certainly wanted her to get a full gander at his professional side. “But ta respond ta yer question, Captain—er, I’se mean Dana . . . I cain’t think of a much in the way of a crederable reason that would explain how all them fellas come ta be knocked out. Maybe bad venterlation, or, well, come ta thank of it, I’se remember quite a ways back when Fort Paduanna was still open and they’se was doin’ some field exercises and happened to be usin’ tear-gas, so’s all that tear gas blowed up near town and had our Boy Scout Troop 469 pitchin’ a fit out in the woods during their annual Camporee.”

  Captain Majora’s pretty eyes opened right up. “What a brilliant conjecture of feasibility, Chief! It never occurred to me!”

  Kinion’s jaw dropped. It were wonderful that she referred to somethin’ ta come out his mouth as brilliant, but . . . What the hail’s she mean? “What? You mean like tear-gas could do somethin’ like that?”

  “No, Chief, not tear gas, but what if there was an accidental leak of some Army incapacitant, like carbon trioxide or DBN? Those gasses can render human beings unconscious for protracted periods, Chief. And, as I mentioned yesterday, Fort Paduanna is no longer on active operational status but it still is utilized as a redeposition vault for binary chemical weapons awaiting destruction. I’d say it’s more than reasonably likely that they have some incapacitating agents stored there too, and it’s a good bet that some of it leaked out into the air.”

  Naturally, the Chief nodded in full agreement. “Well, Dana, that’s ‘zactly what I was gettin’ at.”

  More boos, then, fron the peanuts gallery. “Aw, shee-it, Chief. Fort Paduanna’s an easy 30 miles away. What, you’s sayin’ some milertary gas blowed thirty miles across the boondocks and wound up in the dang County Watch-House fer Boys? Less chance’a that than the Saints winnin’ the Super Bowl—”

  “Hays! You leave the calculatin’ta the Captain’n me!” the Chief advised rather loudly. “And how long’s it take you to pour coffee?”

  Hays winked discreetly at the Chief. “Shouldn’t take too long now fer this baby ta get drippin’, boss.”

  “Actually, Chief,” the exquisite Captain Majora announced, glancing at her milspec wristwatch, “it’s gaining on twenty-two hundred hours. I need to contact my brigade commander to begin an investigation on the ensiled inventory at Fort Paduanna. Then I need to turn in. Early to bed, early to rise—that’s the Army.”

  “Oh, why, a’corse,” Kinion said. Captain Majora stood up, wafting her delectible perfume scent, and when the Chief stood up hisself, as was polite to do when a lady were leavin’ the room, he glanced down quite accidently and caught a quick glimpse of her soft white cleavage showin’ in the top’a her blouse.

  The Chief suddenly felt like he had a live frog in his pants. “I’ll see you in the morning, Chief. Goonight,” she bid. Then a fast glance to Hays. “Goodnight, PFC.”

  “Guh-guh-goodnight, Captain—er, Dana,” Kinion bumbled.

  Then Captain Majora exited the station, leaving the lovely perfume scent in her wake.

  “Looks like ya got some lumber in her pants, Chief,” Hays snickered from the coffee pot.

  Kinion sat down right quick. “Dag it, Hays! She left! If you’d’ve got that coffee made in a little less time than it takes to change a transmission, she might’a stayed longer!”

  “Sorry, boss, the machine only works so fast.” Hays set a fresh cup before the Chief. “And gimme a break, Chief. Early ta bed, early ta rise? More like horny ta bed, horny ta rise. Chrast, that ice-queen bad-news stick-in-the-mud’s got it somethin’fierce fer you.”

  The Chief looked up at his deputy. “Ya . . . ya thank so, Hays?”

  “Well, boss, I cain’t thank’a any other reason why ever time she looks at you she looks like a fuckin’ jackal bitch in heat with a belly fulla spanish fly. See the wet spot in her pants when she left?”

  “Come on, Hays! She didn’t have no wet spot in her—”

  “Chief, either that Army whore had a pussy drippin’like a broke faucet when she left, or someone done dumped a bucket’a water in her lap.”

  Fuck, the Chief aptly thought. Could it be true? What could a fi ne, upstandin’ and a’corse sheer fuckin’ beauterful gal like Captain Dana Majora see in fella like the Chief? “Well, she did ask me to call her by her first name,” he voiced.

  “Chief, take it from me—I’se an expert on splittail. When the stuck-up ones act like that, they might as well be wearin’ a sign that says FUCK ME LIKE THE SPERM HOLE THAT I AM. So’s when you gonna go fer it?”

  The Chief were absolutely taken aback. “What’cho sayin’, Hays? You sayin’ I’se oughta ask her out?”

  PFC Micah Hays erupted laughter. “Ask her out? Shee-it, Chief, why do that ‘cos ya gotta spend money on her. Don’t ever spend more’n, say, five or six bucks on a gal, just enough ta git her drunk. It’s the gals who oughta be payin’ us, you ask me, ‘cos men is the ones who got the only thangs that give their lives meanin’, and that’s cock. So ta hail with all this datin’ shit, boss, just pick up a 12-rack’a Keystone, git her shit-faced in yer car, then cream in her slit’n wipe yer dick off on her fancy blouse. That’s the way all gals wanna be treated, and that’s alls they deserve anyway on account’a Eve bit into that apple in paradise and since then they ain’t nothin’but God’s cursed--that’s why He made their pussies smell worse than a pile’a catfish guts settin’in the sun on a hunnert-year-old wharf. Only reason gals walk the earth is to have fellas use ‘em fer fuck-dumps. So do it ‘nless ya wanna miss out. Be like a chef, Chief, and baste her Pussy Souffle with your Hot Southern Pecker Sauce. She’s a mutt in heat, boss. She wants ta git it till her cunt and her cornhole’s big around as a manhole. If you don’t fuck the poop out’a her, some other dog’ll come around who will.”

  The Chief was mortified, not just from the blazin’misogerny that Hays piped but ‘cos the last
thang he said. If she wants me, I better do somethin’‘bout it. ‘Cos if I don’t, some other fella will...

  “But, Hays, I cain’t just go snufflin’ around the Captain—sheeit!—I’se a married man.”

  Hays shook a forgiving head. “Don’t get me wrong, Chief. I’se have the highest respect fer your fine wife Carleen, and I don’t care that she weighs more than flatbed full’a cinderblocks on their way ta build a fuckin’dam, boss, ‘cos I’m shore she’s a wonderful wife who gives ya all the thangs in life ya want—”

  “Get to the point, Hays,” the Chief shot out with more venom than a poisernous snake. Fuck. My wife? Given me all the thangs in life I want? Only thang she gives me is a blammed headache and a bed full’a fart-stink . . .

  “Shore, Chief, and on ta back ta what you was implyin’ ‘bout how you’re hessertant ‘bout how’s you cain’t be unfaithful on account’a you’re married. Well, what I say ta that is, just ‘cos ya done made the biggest mistake of yer life, that ain’t no reason ta make the second biggest. Look at it this way, boss. Women are ashtrays and yer dick is the Marlboro. Better git in there ‘fore the ashtray gets too full up with other fellas’ butts. Gals ain’t nothin’ but spunk-buckets, well . . . fill that there bucket up ta the rim’n boogie. Besides, Captain Majora ain’t nothing but a liar anyways.”

  A liar? The Chief were outright offended. “What’choo talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “Aw, come on, Chief. That’s gal’s got more horseshit than Churchhill Downs. Tryin’ta tell us she intercepted our call over some blammed police scanner? Some funky gas leakin’ out some closed fuckin’ Army Fort thirty fuckin’ miles away? Doc Willis bein’ kilt ‘cos he was sellin’ bomb fuses or some shit ta the commies? The only thang harder ta swaller than all’a that is maybe one’a Grimaldi’s watermelons. What’cha need ta do is fuck her hard, drop yer snot, then kick her outa town ‘cos she ain’t nothin’ but a phony. Shee-it, Chief, she ain’t even in the fuckin’Army.”