I woke up later on, pain running through my arms and legs like they’d had nails driven into them, in a dark hole in the ground that smelled like feces and had just a grate at the top so I could see a little of the sky.
Luckily, I still had a pack of gum on me — I kept it in this small pouch at the back inside of my skivvies that my mother had sewn for me to hide money. Instead, I hid Wrigley’s gum, and I took a sliver of a piece and began chewing it just to feel as if I were still an American and that things mattered even if I was in a hole in the ground.
5
I was a little boy when my mother taught me the game, only it wasn’t really a game the way she told me about it. It was a way to get calm and to try and get through pain. I guess I was probably four when she taught me it. She said my grandmother had taught her, and that her grandfather knew about it, too. It was like make believe, but when I had scarlet fever as a kid, I really needed something to help me get through it. I was sure I was going to die, even though I didn’t know what death was at four. But scarlet fever gave me an inkling. I was feverish and delusional, and I remember being wrapped in blankets and taken in the car to Dr. Winding over in Palmerston, and lying naked on his ice cold metal table while his nurse drew out the longest needle I had ever seen in my life and they told me it wouldn’t hurt, but I screamed and screamed and my mother and father had to hold me down while that needle went into my butt. Even though I still had fever, it wasn’t quite so bad. But my butt stung, and, wrapped in blankets on the way home, I was in my mother’s arms, a baby again. She whispered to me to try the game, that’s what she called it.
I named it the Dark Game later on. When it got to me.
At home, in my room, she sat beside my bed and told me to close my eyes despite my moans and groans, and she told me to take her hand. But I couldn’t close my eyes. I kept opening them. Finally she took a handkerchief and put it over my eyes like a blindfold. She began the rhyme. I said it along with her in a singsong kind of voice. After a bit, she and I were somewhere else, in the woods, in darkness, and I could not feel the pain or the fever at all.
She told me that it was a way the mind worked that was like magic, that it got you out of yourself and out of where you were.
When I began to teach my friends how to do it as a kid, she pulled me aside and told me that I should keep it to myself.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it can be bad, too. It’s important to stay in the world. To not delve into that too much. If you need God, there’s church. If you need friends, don’t go off into your head too much.”
But I didn’t understand what she meant then, and I’m not sure I do now.
Or maybe I do and I just don’t want to look at it.
“It’s a daylight game,” she said. “Between you and me. It’s a Raglan game. It’s just to make things easier when they’re rough.”
I played it, all by myself, my eyes closed, that wintry day in the smokehouse when I shot my dog, too.
I played it in that hole in the middle of the jungle without a hope in hell of getting out of there alive.
6
The first day and night, They watched me.
They, being the enemy. I don’t want to call them what we called them back then. It was racist. It was nasty. It was a nasty place to be. I hated their guts. They were Enemy. They were They. We were Us. My boys — that’s how I thought of Gup and Stoddard and Davy — screamed at night. I heard them clearly. I’m pretty sure Stoddard died right away. That’s what I heard, anyway. I could picture him working hard to piss off the Enemy, even if his nuts were being nailed to the wall. Gup might hang in there. Davy, I worried most about. He was practically just a kid.
I began to discover my darkness in my dirty pit of a bedroom. I began to feel my environment. I guess I was about twenty feet down. Some kind of well. Maybe it was dug for water. Or prisoners. I don’t know. It was deep but not wide. I had just enough room to sit with my knees nearly touching my chest. It was dirt and rock, and they lowered water down after midnight, just a cup on a string. Half the water had dropped out of the cup by the time it reached me. Not even a cup, I discovered. A turtle shell. Drank out of it because I was damn thirsty, and I soon discovered that if I didn’t drink out of it fast, they yanked it back up.
They.
Sons of bitches.
I stared up through the grate, trying to see the stars or at least something that meant the hole was not just an o in the earth that had no beginning and no end.
7
Memory: back to Texas, back to the night I got tied up, back when I was barely more than a kid and out on an adventure.
The girl who tied me up was named Genie, and she could be had in that sunbaked Texas town for less than twenty bucks.
I was too young to be sure what I could do with a girl like that — I had left my sheltered island a virgin of eighteen, and knew that I would have six months or so before getting my orders overseas into the heart of the war. I didn’t want to die a virgin; and I doubt there has been a virgin in existence that wanted to die in that state, untouched by another. So, when my buddies and me went out to the local rat bar called The Swinging Star, playing pool and downing too many beers, I let down my guard a bit when one of my friends, named Harry Hoakes, slapped me on the back and whispered in my ear with his sour mash breath that he and a couple of the guys were going down to Red Town, a part of the desert where the whores were cheap and fast and you could buy a few for a good deal less than a week’s pay.
I look back with shame, of course, upon this youthful episode in my life. I do not proudly admit that my first experience with a woman was at the hands of a seasoned pro of twenty-six, but it is what it is — or, it was what it was. I was drunk, stupid, pretty sure I was going to die in some distant jungle, so I went with my compadres out in a truck that some townie drove — no doubt the pimp for the Red Town girls. Then, we unloaded outside yet another bar, and went in, and there they were, like glittery fool’s gold, or broken glass mistaken for diamonds on a moonlit highway.
Harry Hoakes looked like a movie star and was from L.A. and had this air of magic around him, no matter what he did. He died in the war, within a year. I heard he stepped on a mine and it just ripped him up. But that night, he was completely on and alive like lightning — all around you and illuminating the landscape. This landscape was alien to me — slovenly, lazily pretty girls who looked the way whores are supposed to, not quite unhappy yet with their situation, not quite sure of how they landed in that desert canyon, not quite hardened to the way their lives would surely go. When you’re 18, and in the army, whores don’t seem sad or needy or even lesser. They seem like angels who don’t ask for the reasons of your interest. They know you want them, and they’re perfectly fine with that.
Harry Hoakes introduced me to the girls like they were his sisters. The one who sidled up to me was named Genie.
“I’m like that old movie star, Gene Tierney. From Laura. You ever see Laura? It’s a beautiful movie. I’m gonna be a movie star someday. I am,” and she was a big brunette with big teeth, from the Midwest, she said, a farm girl who wanted adventure, and intended to wind up in Hollywood in a couple of months — some producer had discovered her already and she was just waiting to hear from him, she told me all of it so fast it made me laugh.
Then, she asked me what I wanted to do.
We got a bottle of Jack Daniels and went back to the motel and plunked down the few bucks for a two-hour stay, and then she brought out those ropes.
She told me that since I was a virgin, she wanted to make sure I didn’t do any of the work. That’s what she called it, and I guess it was her work.
But when the ropes went on, I went off, and I was no longer in a rundown motel with a big toothed girl, but was back on my island, back on Burnley Island, and it was winter, as my memories of it often are in a hot, dry, desert place, and my father tied me up to the post that sat at the center of the smokehouse. He told me that I had been bad
to do what I had done, and that he had to teach me a lesson. I was, perhaps, fourteen, my shirt had been torn off my back, and I felt the sting of his cat — a cat-o-nine-tails that he kept to discourage my brothers and me from doing the bad things we often did.
But in my Dark Game memory, I didn’t feel pain from the stings — I felt myself glowing, and becoming a powerful creature beneath the lashes. I felt as if I were commanding my father to whip me, to torment me with the bad things I’d been doing. I felt as if I were a god, and he were merely my servant.
And soon, in the Dark Game, it was my father with his shirt torn, tied to the post, and I had the whip, and I was lashing at him and telling him that he was a bad, bad man.
When I opened my eyes, the game done, I found that I was tied to that bed in the motel in Texas. Outside, the sound of trucks going by.
In a corner of the room, Genie, the whore, lay like a crumpled rag doll, her face bloodied.
8
Harry Hoakes came a-knocking at the motel room door. I was tied up in Room 13, which made it lucky, I guess. He was drunk from his own bottle of Jack Daniels, and he nearly busted down the door to get to me. Inside, he looked at me, tied up and naked on the dirty bed, and then at Genie, her big teeth all but knocked out, lying in a corner, her eyes wide.
He stared at me, then at her.
“I passed out,” I said.
“Jesus,” he scratched his head, dropping his nearly empty bottle. His fly was open from his time with his girl. He was too drunk to process everything. “Jesus. What the hell?”
“I don’t know. I passed out. We didn’t even do anything.”
“Must’ve been her pimp,” he said.
“She’s got a pimp?”
“What, you think she’s a nice girl from Iowa?”
“Maybe she’s not dead,” I said.
“If she’s not dead, then she’s the greatest actress in the world. Because she’s dead like I ever saw dead.”
“She thought she was going to be like Gene Tierney.”
“Who?”
“That pretty actress with the overbite. In Laura. You ever see Laura?”
He looked at me kind of funny, and then shook his head. “We are up the legendary creek, my friend. You got a dead whore in your room, and you’re…well, naked as a jaybird tied up.” Then, he let out a laugh. “Christ, you could not have made this up if you wanted to.”
“Help me out of these ropes,” I said. “Houdini I ain’t.”
9
In the hole, in the prison, the enemy would sometimes stand over the grate and spit. They did this a lot, and now and then, they’d take a leak down on me. I’d hear them laughing up above. This might’ve been over a few days or a few weeks. I barely saw the sun in that time, because the grate got covered by a board during the day. They didn’t want me to get that Vitamin D from the few rays of the sun, I guess. It was like living in a cave, and time seemed to evaporate. I lived in endless night.
They’d pull me out of there sometimes, too. Usually when it was dark out. They’d send a rope down, and I was to bind my hands to it. They’d pull me up. Why did I go? They fed me during those times. Fed me much better than if I stayed in the hole and ignored the rope. They brought me up and gave me fish or frog or some kind of large maggot cooked with thick flat leaves around it that didn’t taste half-bad to a starving guy. They pretended to be friendly, and the one who spoke English, who I called Harry Hoax, after my friend from Texas, because he sounded a little like the real Harry Hoakes, he made light jokes with me about my situation that actually were pretty funny.
So Harry Hoax took me aside into the mud-brown cell where I’d get the sumptuous feast, and he told me that he was my only friend.
“Your men already betrayed you,” Hoax said. “They have told the commander everything. The position of other companies. The plans of the General.”
I looked at him, grinning. “I bet they have. Good for them.”
“Yes,” Hoax said. “It is good. How are you feeling? I see sores on your shoulder.”
“I’m fine.”
“You seem in good spirits. Are you praying to your god?”
“God has more important things to worry about than me.”
“I bet you are thirsty.”
“Somewhat.”
“Good. We have some pure water for you. And even a small cup of wine. Specially for you.”
“To what do I owe this sudden bout of hospitality?”
“We are not primitive people. We may live and fight among the trees and swamps, but we have a sense of culture. You are important to us. We want you happy and healthy.”
“That’s why you put me in a hole in the ground.”
“War is evil. I know that. We know that.”
“Am I talking to ‘I’ or ‘We’?”
He laughed.
“Very good. Here,” he said, glancing at the doorway.
A young attractive woman in the garb of the local peasants entered, a wooden tray in her hands. On the tray, a small porcelain cup, and beside it some palm leaves. Atop the leaves, more of the fried grub I’d had before, and then what looked like a rabbit’s leg, also cooked.
After setting this down in front of me, she left and returned moments later with a jug of water.
“You see? We treat you well,” Hoax said. “All we ask is that you tell us a few things. They are minor, unimportant questions, really.”
“I thought my friends told all. I certainly don’t know more than they do,” I said.
Suddenly, I heard a wail from one of the other cells.
I tried to place the voice as one of my team, but I could not. I wasn’t even sure it was human.
Hoax closed his eyes for a moment as if he didn’t enjoy the sound, either. Then, he nodded to the girl with the jug. She rose and poured water into the cup.
I brought the cup to my lips and drank too fast. She refilled the cup; while I sat there with Hoax, she made sure I always had water.
“There is a small bit of opium in the water,” he said, softly. “You have pain, and it will help with it.”
“You’re drugging me?”
He sighed. “I feel bad for the state you’re in. It is just a distillation of the poppy. Not enough to make you crave it. Just enough to ease any physical torment you might be feeling.”
After a moment, I nodded. “That’s kind of you.”
“You are different from the others,” he said. “You are not like other Americans, Gordon. You have a deeper quality. We do not want to hurt you. We want to bring you into realignment with truth.”
“Ah,” I said, feeling a bit blurred around the edges. I assumed this was the opium.
Hoax began the routine questioning that had been done before, and I gave him the standard answer, which was no answer at all. At the end of this, and the end of my meal, he sighed. He told me that he wished me no harm but that the war would end with their victory and our defeat and that all my pain would be for nothing.
“Perhaps,” I told him. “Or perhaps not.”
Two interrogators came in. I recognized in their eyes the sadism I’d seen before. These were pleasure torturers.
I would be their toy for the night.
Hoax left the cell looking a little sad.
The interrogators bound my hands and ankles, and began to play a game that I believe is called, in torturing circles, the Thousand Scratches.
But it didn’t matter what they did to my body.
I closed my eyes, and I could begin the rhyme I’d learned as a child:
Oranges and lemons say the bells of St. Clemens.
And then, my mind eroded into darkness: I returned to the smokehouse, tied to the post, with my father’s cat-o-nine-tails slapping hard at my scarred shoulders.
10
My father and I had good moments, too.
He took me hunting and fishing. We spent idle summer Sundays out on a skiff that he’d borrowed from a friend down in the harbor, and he told me of his abid
ing love for the sea. He took me on his occasional deep sea fishing voyages, and he brought me closer to him when my sister Nora drowned off the island, coming home from the mainland on a small boat when a storm had hit. My father took me aside and wept with me, the closest he’d ever come to showing genuine softness and true compassion.
If I felt something other than love for him, it was no doubt honor.
I hated him for the whippings, but I knew that some demon drove him to it, and I was willing to take it for the building of my character. Perhaps in these days, people might call the police if a boy was being whipped by his father. But in those days, not long ago, it was considered nobody’s business outside the family.
My father’s demons were many, but he seemed to have an overzealous Christian sense of the Devil and of Angels and of saving his children from the Burning Fires of Hell.
He was too good a Catholic, perhaps, and felt that I was not quite Catholic enough. He’d shout at me, while he whipped, that this hurt him more than it hurt me, and that angels and Jesus wept as the lash ripped against my skin but that if I were to go to heaven, I must repent of my sinful ways, of the bad things I had done, and I must turn to Jesus and the Queen of Heaven, Mary, and to God’s grace and his iron will.
I was, he told me, of the Devil.
11
Oh, the bad things I’d done, they were truly bad, I suppose. I smoked a bit, and I drank sometimes when I was far too young to drink liquor.
Once, I tried to set fire to the smokehouse, but only managed to burn most of the field nearby and many of the small thorny trees.
He had also caught me in the woods, in a way that a boy doesn’t want to be caught, and that was part of my sin.
I deserved the whippings, and took them, played the game to get through them, and then would spend a feverish night with my grandmother’s salve all over my back to help the healing.
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