Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  Halliwell had made him change the last sentence to "some things can be understood but not forgiven'. He always told himself that he meant his own moment of cowardice, but he knew everyone else who read the book thought he meant Terry's "treason"

  The film ended with another scene Bob had not seen before. The fires engulfed Fotherington-Thomas's camp and faded into a blood-red banner. There was a pan down to Rodney Bewes, with long hair and fashionable clothes, sitting in a bookshop, signing copies of Bob's book.

  Filing past, with books to be autographed, were all the characters from the film. Those who had died were hideously mangled. Intermingled were life-sized teddy bears. At the end of the line, making eye contact with Rodney Bewes as he neared him, was James Bolam, still in uniform.

  On the soundtrack, a ragged chorus of soldiers sung "Teddy Bears' Picnic".

  The film ended with Rodney Bewes and James Bolam—no, damn it, Bob and Terry—looking at each other, not saying anything out loud.

  Haunted faces.

  The applause was still continuing, and Micky Powell was taking bows, smiling broadly at the small but significant section of the audience who were booing as loud as the others were cheering, as Bob made it to the

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  Gents. He was a wreck. The film had brought everything back. Now here he was in his silk shirts and his MG sports car and his poncey £2 haircut swanning around with shallow pseuds and arty-farty types who didn't care nearly as much as they pretended they did.

  Who was he trying to kid?

  He knelt over a toilet bowl and puked up the smoked salmon he had eaten at the reception. He had been presented to the King and now he was throwing up like a teenage drinker. He was sick until he was empty.

  How could he ever face anyone? Now that everyone knew?

  He staggered out of the stall and shoved his head under a running tap.

  Cold water stabbed his hackles.

  He looked up, rubbing paper towels into his neck. Water had seeped down into the back of his shirt.

  He looked into the mirror. Eyes glittered from behind him. He wasn't afraid.

  He turned.

  A shape came out of one of the stalls. Bob knew it was Brown, somehow come from out the jungle hells of the other side of the world, still intent on settling accounts, silencing the witness.

  This was the best. At least he would die as he was supposed to have died.

  It wasn't Brown.

  "Hello, our kid. This time, you're the one spewing."

  Terry was thinner than he had been. In the photographs Bob had seen, he wore his hair long and beard shaggy, but now he was clean-shaven and had a severe short back and sides.

  He wore a navy uniform.

  "I'm not enlisted in me own name," he explained.

  cc-p T' "

  lerry, 1 m...

  Terry shrugged. "Aye, I know."

  They looked at each other, just as the actors had in the film. Bob wondered if Powell were directing them.

  "For a while, in the jungle, I thought you'd done it because of Thelma," Terry said.

  Bob laughed.

  "I know, I know," said Terry. "I went daft. That's a good picture, you know. I don't know what all those English fields and teddy bears were for, but it brings it back. A lot of people are going to have their minds changed. You've done well."

  "It's not my picture."

  Terry smiled.

  "How've you been, kidder?" Bob asked.

  "Busy. But I can't take it any more. The speeches, the meetings, the organising. I can't do that. I'm just a Geordie piss-head in way over my depth. You're the clever one. I'm going to sea because I can't be a hero any more. That's your job, Bobby. Know what I mean?"

  Bob did, but shook his head.

  "It's bloody funny when you think about it, Bob. Living through it all, from Grimshaw through Khe Sanh to Fotherington-Thomas counted for nothing. Your book made people sit up, but it's only this film that will get through. From now on, the film and our lives are mixed up in a jumble. People will ask you about things in the film they made up, and you'll start to wonder whether they happened. Eventually, the film will seem more real than the life. In the meantime, you know what you have to do."

  Bob left his tailcoat in the toilet, and joined the crowd piling out into the square. The mood was strange. He wondered what the King had thought.

  A reedy young bloke shook his hand and congratulated him. Bob realised that had been Charles, Duke of Cornwall. He fancied the Prime Minister looked at him with hatred. He couldn't get within twenty yards of Powell, who was beaming between Scorsese and a small man Bob took to be Imre Pressburger. He allowed himself to be washed out of the foyer with the surge of people.

  Terry had vanished. Bob was no longer looking around for the mad eyes of William Brown.

  Bob fought his way to the stand of the Ex-Servicemen's Peace Campaign. A couple of Young Conservatives were jeering at the bearded men, some of whom were in wheelchairs.

  "Excuse me," he said to a man holding a placard, "but how do I join up with you?"

  CITIZEN ED

  fc

  1945-84

  Now Ed's gone and died, they're going to put up a memorial in the park. Order of Debs, First Class. Two-Time Hero of the United Socialist States of America. Loyal Servant of the Party Agricultural Committee for Waushara County. Saviour of Plainfield, Wisconsin. A bronze of his head, topped off with that plaid hat half-sideways like he always wore it. It'll be sited by the bench where he used to sit. It's a bus stop, but I never saw him ride the bus.

  Ed would wait for someone—a middle-aged or elderly woman, for preference—to sit by him, and just yap at them. Bore 'em stiff, mostly.

  Sometimes, he'd kill 'em.

  He had his little set phrases, all starting with that "ayup" sound that announced he was going to say something. "Ayup," he'd go, "life's like a joint of meat. You can carve it any which way you like, but you'll never know how bloody it is 'til you cut to the bone."

  No, I don't know what he meant either. I have some ideas. None pleasant.

  You want to hear the story of Edward Gein, Socialist Hero? Ask around and all you'll get is what's in the pamphlet. It'll tell you how he won the Medal for Marksmanship, how he got everyone through the Big Freeze of '56 with his "cured meats" how he took the state prize for American Craftsmanship with leatherwork, how he was always soooo nice and polite to his old ladies.

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  Back in the USSA

  Ask me, and I'll fill in the footnotes: he was a degenerate, murdering, corpse-fucking piece of filth.

  That doesn't mean he doesn't deserve his damn statue.

  For me, it started in the War. I know, I know. You want to hear about Plainfield, but you're getting my story. My angle on it. It was in the War that I was set on the course that ran me smack into Mama Gein's Best-Loved Boy. So I have to tell you about it. Bear with me, and it'll come straight.

  I was in Yurrup. Battle of the Bulge. We raise ten-foot snowdrifts in these parts, but that was the worst winter I ever spent. Somehow the prospect of getting killed or coming home minus a testicle made it seem a lot colder. Not a one of my unit came back with all his fingers and toes. I'm missing my left little toe. It still itches like little ants are swarming all over it. Phantom pain.

  The Allies were all mixed in at the Bulge. Normally, we stuck our own sectors of the line to stop us killing each other by mistake (or not), but when Adolf's last desperate push came through in December of '44, Brits, Yanks and Russkies all got thrown into it together. Tommies, Ivans and American officers all had boots and gloves fit for high-ranking Party officials. They damn well hung onto their frozen digits. And their ears. That's what started a lot of the complaining you heard in the '50s. Boots and gloves.

  Before the War, Capone came on the radio and said, in decadent capitalist countries, only plutocrats got decent food and clothing. In Yurrup, a lot of us saw that wasn't the way it was. The lowest latrine-scraper in His Ma
jesty's Forces was as well equipped as an American officer, and a damn sight better than any GI south of a Second Lieutenant. We came back with the feeling we'd been lied to, and didn't much like it.

  So there we were, a single company of the 83rd (Edward Bartlett) Infantry Brigade. Charles H. Marx only knows where the rest of the battalion got to in all the confusion, but our orders were to stand and fight. We were lined up along a big clearing somewhere in the Ardennes forest with a road running through the middle, a road along which, we were assured, a Panzer division would be coming before too long.

  Problems, problems. Like digging yourself a foxhole in frozen ground with army-issue entrenching tools that fold up like sheet lead if you actually try and use them for entrenching. There's a battalion of Brits to the right of us so we asked them to extend some fraternal assistance, but they just

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  told us to "fack orff" and not disturb them while they were busy drinking tea and bellyaching. So then one of the guys went over to the Ivans on our left flank and, in fluent sign language, requested the loan of some spades. They didn't say much, they just came on over with picks and shovels and helped us dig in, gave us some vodka and a bag of rice and smiled a little. They were just kids, sixteen-eighteen years old, like my brother Jim, who was just dead in the Pacific Theatre. Nice kids.

  All the while, we could hear artillery and small arms in the distance, but we didn't get out own sniff of Kraut for another six hours or so.

  Trying to guess the big picture, I assume we were up against an infantry unit that had gotten itself lost. They just settled themselves at the other side of the clearing and popped off at us with mortars and small arms. They didn't have any tanks or anything. In the big picture, it was chickenshit, but that's not how it felt at the time.

  There was a stone building in the middle of the clearing and the Brits, who had the highest ranking officer in the area, had volunteered some of the Ivans to occupy it with a couple of their heavy machine guns. The Krauts softened it up with mortars then tried to rush it with grenades and all the supporting fire they could muster. Ten minutes later, the building was half a building, but the Krauts ran off leaving half a dozen of their comrades lying roundabout, groaning or screaming. The poor Ivans inside were doing the same.

  I'd seen it once before when we were slogging through Normandy. A kind of paralysis sets in on both sides. They just stand in their foxholes, half-heartedly shooting each other's shadows, kinda disgusted by what they're doing and kinda terrified to do anything that'll make it worse. So they just wait for a superior officer, or some tanks or airplanes or bad weather—anything at all, really—to come along and change the situation without them actually having to make any decisions. That's how it was in the forest that afternoon.

  We none of us gave a hang about the wounded Germans, but those poor Russian kids who'd given us vodka and dug our nice safe holes for us, well...We could hear them shouting. The army-issue phrase book was full of helpful sentences like "I am not interested in your black market goods" or "the matter must be referred to a superior officer'.' None of us knew what "help, my leg has been minced up by a stick-grenade" sounded like in Russian.

  Then, someone did decide to do something. Captain Cooney, our political officer, told me to get over there and check them out. His Old

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  Back in the USSA

  Man was one of Capone's beer buddies, and he had been promised a position well away from the fighting, but there was a SNAFU and he found himself stuck in the field with a bunch of half-frozen, all-the-way-shit-scared GIs who, given the choice, would sooner have shot him than Hitler. Our radio was out and Cooney wanted to requisition theirs so he could squeal for Daddy to haul him out of dangerville. So, I was volunteered to squirrel across open ground, ice chunks crawling into my clothes, bullets spanging around my ass. Turned out the Ivans didn't have a radio. What they had was shrapnel wounds, bullet wounds and limbs crushed by fallen masonry.

  So, with a little supporting fire from my buddies and from the Russians next to us—and none from the Brits, who I think were taking a tea-break —I hauled the four Ivans who were still alive out of the house. The third time out, I took a Schmeisser slug in the shoulder but didn't feel it 'til a while after I'd gone in again to haul the fourth. My whole body was like a side of frozen beef. The bullet just thumped into solid meat. Later, it hurt like hell.

  I don't want to make myself out a hero. I did what I did because I was too scared not to. Lot of guys got killed because they couldn't bear for their comrades to see how chicken they were. Lots more because the habit of taking orders, especially from assholes like Cooney, was ingrained too deeply. When I unfroze, it turned out I had a wound which would mean pain 85 out of every 100 days for the rest of my life.

  Two of the Ivan kids made it. One sent me Easter cards for years, when they got through the censors. I had to write and ask him to stop: back in the '50s, mail from Russia marked you down as a counter-revolutionary and got you on the shitlist. Easter cards got you marked as a superstitious reactionary, which was another shitlist. Naturally, the two were rigorously cross-referenced. That was what the USSA's first computers were invented for.

  I also received some Russki medal that got my name on the master-shitlist underlined in neon. Cooney got a commendation for Fraternal Gesture Heroism, and a transfer to the General Staff, where he spent the rest of the War trotting around behind Patton with a Zippo lighter. Inside track for advancement within the Party, you understand.

  My red badge of stupidity was enough, when I was shipped home, to win me a sympathy appointment. Plainfield made me Deputy Sheriff Joe Costa. Might not sound much, but it was better than the six-foot

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  Victory Plots a bunch of my friends and relations wound up in. It came with a cabin on the edge of the woods; not much more than a stove and a cot in a shack, but I wasn't sharing with five others like most people.

  If I had known Ed Gein was waiting for me, I'd have jumped ship and swam back to the War.

  They had a parade for me. High schoolers in Junior Pioneer uniforms, coonskin caps and all, marching past, holding banner-sized tapestries of a heroic Capone, scar turned away from the weavers.

  I still had shellfire ringing in my ears.

  I was twenty-four years old, and sole survivor of my male graduating class. One thing Capone said that wasn't a lie was that the King and the Tsarina had been determined to fight the Axis until there wasn't an American left standing. Yurrup was bad enough, but the Pacific was the Big Betrayal. Remember, Russia had the Bomb in mid-'45 but didn't drop it until Fall. By then, 75,000 USS invasion troops had been killed fighting ditch-to-ditch, town-to-town on the Japanese mainland. 6,000 Americans died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with no Russians and no Englishmen. I've never been much of a goodthinkful socialist, but when the Limeys and the Ivans got their asses whipped in Indochina, I cheered for the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Only Party-minded thing I ever did was go door-to-door raising Fraternal Funds for the Indochinese.

  Ed wasn't at the parade, but his Mom was. Augusta Gein was still alive. It was in '45, just before the Total Victory. She didn't last out the year. She was a Lutheran and thought we should have been on the Germans' side. But she saw her duty and baked me a cake, cried and gave me a leaflet about the perils of sexual incontinence and masturbation. I don't believe Augusta remembered which of the kids I had been. Very few did. My Old Man sometimes called me "Jimmy" and promised to take me out after deer come spring.

  After the Bulge, I never wanted to hold a rifle ever again. Even before the War, it was Jimmy who had dreamed of an eighteen-point buck on the wall in his half of the bedroom. I was never sold on the idea of shooting things dead for no particular reason. But in these parts, that's like publically espousing the cause of counter-revolution.

  Augusta Gein was cracked, but no more so than half the biddies in town. She and Ed's Pop ran a collective farm out in the booni
es. When Gein Senior pegged out, she ran it with her son, Eddie. Thanks to Frank Spellman's "agricultural reforms" the place nearly came apart in the 1930s.

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  Back in the USSA

  But the War put land at a premium, and the collective almost thrived for a while. Raised hogs, mostly.

  But the Gein Place was basically the Waushara County Slaughterhouse.

  In the USSA, outside the cities, the dollar is a worthless piece of paper. Currency is something you can eat. Out here, they still use the old name for the Communist Party. The Farmer-Labor Party.

  In the 1930s, before they purged Spellman, the collectivised farm system all but collapsed. In the mid-West, everything turned to dust. That dragged down the rest of the set-up all over the place. Kids like me were raised on short rations. I grew up on a dairy farm, but didn't taste butter for ten years until a Tommy swapped me a "bully beef" sandwich for my steel helmet at a field hospital in Bastogne.

  When the time came, we were supposed to take our animals out to the Gein Place. After his Old Man died, Ed did the slaughtering, and Augusta—a Party member, naturally—decided how meat resources be allocated, which meant keeping the prime cuts for her family and cronies, and shipping the rest off to the cities where other Party officials served them to their friends. In return, we were given scrip redeemable at the Party store in town.

  Once, when Jim let off a cherry bomb in the outhouse, the Old Man threatened to haul him out to the Gein Place and turn him over to Ed and his sledge-hammer and cleavers. By rights, Jimmy should have got a whipping, but Pop was so appalled by what he had said but not meant to that the kid was let off. I wonder now if Pop hadn't had some idea. He died in '49 of the tuberculosis, so I can't ask him.

  If the business of America is butchery, then Ed Gein was Our Killer. Our Greatest Killer.

  Everyone hereabouts had to kiss up to Augusta Gein, hoping for scraps. Occasionally, she would allow a few chickens to escape the coop around Thanksgiving, Revolution Day or Christmas. You know, that made folks hate her more. She was showing them the power she had.