by Daniel Kraus
He was also convinced, no matter what I said, that my name was “X-Man.” He introduced himself as Captain America, a reference to a flick he liked called Easy Rider, and so contagious was the dippy atmosphere that I accepted the name as readily as if it had been “Bill.” He slid down his visor to protect against the sun as we walked, the same sun that laid bare my every blot of gouge and spoil.
“You don’t look so hot, X-Man. You drop some of that bad brown acid going around?”
Captain America apologized for the third degree I’d gotten at the gate but explained how most of the artists were arriving by helicopter because of the not-cool roadways. We reached backstage, a teeming village of tents and yurts, and there he lifted his visor, made me promise to keep rocking and rolling, and stressed once again that, should I be offered the brown acid, I’d best decline, or at least limit it to half a tab.
From a godlike PA blasted corroboration.
“Everyone, stay away from the brown acid, all right? It’s just bad acid.”
I craned my neck at the back of the stage. Hours away from showtime, and workers still bandsawed wood, hammered nails, connected cables, and secured a jumbo tarpaulin to the overhead girders. From backstage I couldn’t see the audience, but I could see distant roads filled with biblical multitudes. Organizers had estimated fifty thousand over the phone, but this was so many times that size that chain-link fences crumpled before the crowd like saplings, leaving the Woodstock promoters no choice but to deem the show free to all. I inhaled and believed that I could smell, beneath the body odor and patchouli, the deathbed breath of the sixties, that mix of sweet dandelion and burnt motor oil that would haunt a generation.
“Jim DeCampo, go to the hot dog stand. Your brother has your medicine.”
Presently the first performer, Richie Havens, a giant in an African boubou, climbed the stage stairs, tuning his guitar while his bassist and bongo player exchanged high fives. It might be three days before I was brought to the stage, so I decided to make use of the time and do something about my clothes. I hadn’t packed get-ups like I’d seen aboard the Alligator Express—Old West sheriffs, Tolkien wizards, superheroes—but there was a film crew documenting the concert, and I refused to be immortalized in plaid. I ditched my blazer, rolled up my right sleeve, and tucked shut my left.
“Jessica Harley, call your parents. They’re worried about you, sister.”
Havens attacked his guitar with enough zest to distract from the helicopters. I wandered to the edge of the backstage property, where construction cranes and bulldozers sat paralyzed like horrified retirees, and I found there a quartet of young laborers sprawled atop their machines, passing a joint, bare chests furred with sawdust, overhaired heads bopping to the bongos. They were the embodiment of carefree youth, and I hated that I had to interrupt them.
“It’s getting real windy, folks. Can we all be cool and move away from the towers?”
I opened my rucksack, pushed past the cans of lighter fluid, removed the allowance Ruthie Ness had parceled to me throughout the year, and explained the set dressing that my act required. Ah, these boys!—my age, yet bigger-hearted than I’d ever been. Though thrilled by the money, they demanded I keep half of it, as the task would only take a couple hours and they didn’t feel right ripping off a vet who’d lost a limb in Nam. I wished for the emotional release of tears, pocketed half the bills to appease them, and thanked them for a favor no currency could repay.
Off they went, happily ignorant of what they were building, as I drifted toward backstage. Havens relinquished his position to a bearded yogi called Swami Satchidananda, who delivered an invocation regarding the celestial powers of music (or equivalent drivel) before handing the duties to a band called Sweetwater, who then made way for a strummer named Bert Sommer. A rain—just a normal rain, but one that would become historic—began to fall.
The luckiest festival goers had acquired strips of clear polyethylene that they wrapped around themselves and their pals, beneath which they squirmed like unborn litters inside placental sacs. The less fortunate made the best of it, stripping to the buff and creating impromptu nudist colonies or clearing fifty-foot runways of mud and sliding across them at top speed until they, like me, were difficult to classify as either man or woman or black or white. Backstage we gathered beneath tenting in groups large enough that I hoped no one could pinpoint the worst of the odors as coming from me.
Night fell, and Tim Hardin sang “If I Were a Carpenter” in purple spotlights before Ravi Shankar and his humongous sitar took the stage amid a downpour and resigned after only three songs. The weather prohibited helicopters and sogged right through the schedule. Where was the Who? Sly might be there, but what about the Family Stone? Had anyone seen Janis Joplin? Electric bands were fearful of electrocution, so organizers bumped up another acoustic act, an unknown folk singer who went by Melanie. I watched men in rain ponchos herd the petrified young lady toward the stage, then felt a tap upon my shoulder.
There stood Captain America. Though his clothes were wetted to his skin, his helmet had kept his head dry, and he beamed through the open visor, stoned as ever.
“You must have a lucky sign, X-Man.”
“Sign? Is there a protest component to this event?”
“Zodiac sign! Ten to one you’re a Sagittarius.”
“There is nothing to the stars but more stars, I assure you.”
“Far out. Anyway, it’s your lucky day. You’re up.”
The festival had been running a mere five hours.
“Already?”
“Joan Baez is six months pregnant, man. Isn’t that a mindfuck? She’s not ready yet so they want you up there after this chick finishes. Then it’s Arlo Guthrie, then Joan. Bang!”
Wait upon Death for a century, and when he comes, he does so quickly.
“You cool, X-Man? You need to bum a smoke?”
“I . . . am fine.”
“Out of sight. Hey! Any chance you’re also Zebulon Finch?”
Finch. Now, there was a word colder than any rain.
“Who is asking?” whispered I.
“Yeah, man, it’s wild! There’s this old dude who’s looking for you. I would’ve told him to buzz off, but he’s the oldest dude I’ve seen here by a mile, and if an old dude bringing his ass to the middle of nowhere for music isn’t fucking with the power structure, then what is, man?”
I inspected the rain, all those individual daggers.
“Where is this man?”
“See that green tent? I had to get him out of the rain. Old dude like that will catch pneumonia.”
If there exists an unabridged recording of Woodstock, listen to it, and you will hear a thick, epochal silence between the applause for Melanie as she took her seat onstage and the expectant inhale before she struck her first strings. Just that quickly, I recalled how it felt to be human and suffocating for air. I took one step toward the green tent. My shoe squished into muck, and rain fell to my shoulders like concrete blocks.
“Keep it short!” cried Captain America. “Melanie’s only got fifteen minutes of material! You’re on in twenty, X-Man!”
Thirty feet was the whole of the distance, Reader, but somehow I knew what was coming, and it felt like a tour of duty in Vietnam, a march through monsoon marshes portioned by sniper fire and guided missiles. It was futile to try to walk so far, and yet I did it, then lifted the rain-heavied flap and stepped into a square, four-poled tent lit by a bare bulb pendant from an extension cord. Fifty-seven years earlier, the first conversation of consequence I’d had with the old man had also taken place in a tent, which I had to admit was our ideal backdrop, for a tent is a fragile, ephemeral structure, much like the friendship we’d built, then watched get shredded by passing storms.
Now you’ve guessed it, Reader.
The old dude was Burt Churchwell.
XII.
CHURCH WAS SEVENTY-THREE YEARS OLD. There is a bush here, sharp of thorn and poison of leaf, and we shan’t beat around
it. It is an appalling age at which to find oneself. Death has by then defeated you with a weapon more insidious than scythe: patience.
As bad as I looked, and in 1969 I looked bad indeed, Church looked worse. This was not the springing, vaulting, six-foot-five football hero of 1918 I mourned; nor was it the limping, paunched, six-foot-three scarface of 1926; nor was it the cane-wielding, wheeze-breathed, six-foot grayhair of 1941. This latest rendition of the only best friend I’d ever known was entirely bald, so far past wrinkles that he’d become a tan-fleshed wad, crumpled to a shocking four-and-a-half feet of height, though that, at least, was attributable to his wheelchair. I stared at the rain-glossed apparatus, the gloppings of mud over the wheels and push rims, the sopping chunks of grass caught in the footplates.
How far had he wheeled himself to get here? Up how many hills?
Church shuddered from the effort. His elbows rattled the armrests, and his head, that melted-wax lump identifiable only by the cataracted blue eyes and unhewable cleft knob of his chin, sagged from a neck banded with age like the stay lines of a masted seaship. He still wore a beard to cover the crater in his cheek, but the hair had gone raveled and gray. There were brown patches at which my hope swelled, but they were nothing more than speckles of mud.
The rainstorm barraged the canvas.
“It is,” I forced myself to say, “surprising to see you.”
He shook his head. Spit ran from lips that hung loose from a flaccid face. My loyal corporal, realized I, had been felled by a stroke. Could he even speak? The handicap of it sickened me, but I told myself to smile as widely as I could and this torment would be over that much quicker. I stepped forward to evidence goodwill, my legs stopping just shy of Church’s own withered pair. I smelled my gaminess interlard with his spoiled-fruit fragrance and saw upon his lap a rain-warped hardcover book he gripped to control his convulsing arthritis. I’d embraced this man upon his arrival at Bridey Valentine’s Beverly Hills mansion, but no longer could I imagine such a reception. Church was delicate, ghoulish. I might break his every bone.
He examined the nub of my left arm. I nodded.
“Slings and arrows by the hundreds have been fired at me by able archers. Outrageous fortunes have been revealed to me at every turn. It is too much to recount in the short time we have left. Only ten minutes, I’m afraid.”
Preventing my happy mask from slipping became arduous, then hopeless. Our protracted silence made room for Melanie’s banshee yowl to cut through the storm and the tent, shocking my buried remorse to back above the dirt. How else could I interpret Church’s impossible appearance but as a last chance to dismiss my docket of sins? I fiddled with my rucksack, afraid of his milky, watchful eyes, and shrugged at the ground like a child.
“I regret what happened in Hollywood. Believe me when I say that I’d intended to gather you. No, that is a half-truth. I intended to return with you. To New York or Iowa, anywhere you wanted, where we could protect each other across the years. The magnitude of that mistake—it is difficult to grasp. Instead, I have known decades of pointless misery, and I fear that you have as well. Would you like to hear my pathetic excuse? Perhaps you recall the photograph of the fetching lass I carried with me in the war. That was my daughter, Merle, and the morning after I put you in that Beverly Hills cab, she called and I had to rescue her, only I failed, then remembered that Bridey had a daughter as well, and that I might try to save her instead, and on that count I also failed, and then, as I’m sure you recall, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and I tried to enlist, whereupon I was arrested by a spy agency called the OSS . . .”
My encyclopedia of excuses fluttered away in favor of monitoring how mud bled through the sailcloth floor in the manner of Wright-Patterson’s Rorschach blots. What symbology did they conceal? The weight of my body, no longer attributable to rain, could not quite prevent me from peeking up at the torpid ruins of Church.
“How did you find me?”
Church smacked slobbering lips, then sighed.
“The radio,” guessed I. “The bastards publicized me.”
His nod set off a spasm that chattered his teeth, not his original set of effulgent chompers but rather a cut-rate prosthetic plate. Again I had to look away. It was lucky, I told myself, that the weather was launching my stage act early, for Ruthie Ness would have heard the same radio spots and was no doubt that very instant battling traffic. Ten minutes was nearly gone; it was time to ask the question that mattered.
“Why have you come?”
My eyes I aimed at the floor, but I could do nothing about my ears. Church’s overgrown fingernails scraped along the length of the book until one of them, heavied by some fierce emotion and embrittled with age, snapped. I shuddered; he let me; and then he spoke as slowly as was necessary to spit words in sensible portions.
“This—isn’t—what—we—fought—for.”
The sounds jabbed past my ribs and struck a thoracic vertebrae. I took hold of a tent pole anchored in boggy mud. The pole leaned, gallons of rain splooshed from an overhead pocket, and then half the tent caved, walloping me to my knees, where I, perhaps by accident, perhaps not, took hold of Church’s legs. He still hadn’t flinched, but when had he ever when it came to me? He’d read every Hollywood gossip mag to track my days with Bridey; surely he’d read every underground zine offering accounts of Zebulon X. Repeatedly I’d quit watching over Church, but never had Church quit watching over me. Isn’t that what he’d promised fifty-one years before? We Churchwells, he’d said, we pay our debts.
Unbidden, my arm curled around his atrophied calves and my face pressed to his knee. I snarled into his pant leg and tasted wet cotton and mud.
“You’re old. You don’t understand radical acts. They’re the only thing that gets through to anyone.”
“We—learned—in the—war—about—sacri—fice.”
Church’s lungs had never recovered from Dr. Leather’s saw, and his breath chirruped as if a sparrow were trapped in the birdcage of his ribs. That wound had been my fault, too; I drove my fist against the chair. It struck the wheel lock, which disengaged. The wheelchair rolled six inches back, and I hoped, hysterically, that it would keep on rolling, right out of my life, even as I held his legs more tightly.
“You’re jealous. Because of Bridey. Because of fame. Because I’m young. There’s no place in America for the old.”
Something hot touched the back of my head. Was it a concealed knife with which Church intended to cleave my brain stem? No one in the Corps had been a more proficient soldier, and to die by his hand would be the most honorable exit.
It was much worse. His palm, pulpous with dilapidation, quavering with affliction, settled upon my scalp and gentled it, stroking my dead hair as if dreaming of his own long-gone blond silk. His soft hand assured me that all was A-OK, I could spew whatever malice I wished, the storm could clobber our tent until we were inhumed forever in mud, for no tribulation could change that he had, did, and would forever go on loving me, even if his body, unlike mine, quit working.
“If—you’re—a martyr—then—we—all are. Peanut. The—Prof. Mouse. Piano. Heck—I expect—some—of them—Huns—too. The word—don’t—mean—much. You—can’t—make—light of—death. Not when—so—many—good—men—we knew—didn’t—come back—to live—the lives—we—lived.”
“But it hurts. It hurts so bad to keep going.”
Church cupped my cheek and lifted my face.
“That’s—what—real—sacri—fice—is. To keep—going—no mat—ter how deep—the fear—gets—into your—heart.”
How many would echo Luca Testa’s warning before my death was done? Fear had kept us alive in the Great War, had compelled us to save the lives of our brothers. Fear was the distillate of life, and who knew it better than Church, who’d had the whole world set at his feet, only to have everything destroyed, and then be shown the destruction every day in mirrors for the rest of life? Death had been a way out for him at every lonely crossroad, but that, I was s
till learning, was not how they made their boys in Iowa.
He slid the book across his lap. I fumbled it from him, read the spine.
A GHOST ROLLS OVER:
The Collected Works of Jason Stavros
The Dearest Reader knows of my relationship with literature, and this book was a cinderblock. Yet it was as light as a slip of paper. Jason Stavros, the cinnamon-eyed Greek who, in the moments before certain machine-gun demise, had recited the work-in-progress poem from which this compendium took its title, had followed Church’s advice and kept going to become that least probable of things, a poet. In a daze, I paddled through pages, discovering in the words what I’d already known but refused to acknowledge, that Jason Stavros had become a vital voice in the antiwar movement, referred to as “Stavros” the same way radicals spoke of “Vonnegut” and “Heller”—a funny twist of events, seeing how anyone who’d shared his trenches had unfailingly used his full name.
My fingers lost the ability to clutch, and the book fell open to its single dog-eared page.
Dedicated to
Pvt. Z. Finch
3 BN/7 REG/2 DIV
I blinked at it, for that was what Mary Leather had taught me in 1906: blink enough, and people might think you’re human. The dedication was a memorial even more lasting than the still-to-come wall in Washington, but what lay beneath it was more incredible still. Signatures, first of Jason Stavros, second of Burt Churchwell, and third by the two dozen surviving members of the Third Battalion, filled the page, each name squiggled due to the signer’s age. Some names I recollected; others I’d let go; but all of them, it appeared, remembered Private Finch, and Church, that lame-legged, stroke-addled son-of-a-bitch, had wheelchaired all across the country to make sure that I knew it.
A splattery sound, like a Saint Bernard shaking off a suburban rain, disrupted the heartache. Someone was thrashing through the tent’s collapsed half and pushing the fallen pole back into place. The ceiling sailed upward, the light bulb soaring away as abruptly as Earth when viewed through a space capsule window.