by John Rechy
Somewhere in the house, he kept a sword from one of his operas, an actual sword, unsheathed, that required a safety cover during performances. He would change its secret hiding place. We lived in fear that at any moment he would fulfill his threat to bring it out of hiding and slash at us. When he left, my mother and I and my sister Olga—Blanca was already married; Yvan and Robert were in the army—would scurry about the house, trying to locate the lethal weapon, to hide it where he would not be able to find it.
In moments of erupting blackness, he would inch toward me, closer, closer, his malevolent face threatening disaster, until he had cornered me. The more I shouted at him, the more menacing he became, until he had pinned me against the wall, his face so close to me that if there had not been the full intimation of violence, his action would have suggested the intimacy of a kiss. Directly in my face, he shouted:
“Say one more word and I’ll smash your pretty face so no one will ever look at you.” His fist clenched, ready to mangle my face. My sister Olga would try to pull him away; my mother begged him to leave me alone. For minutes, frozen before me, he did not budge.
On his desk he kept a piece of petrified wood. He would call me over, in a voice that seemed to be kind. In that same soft tone, he would say: “This petrified stone was once the hand of a child who raised it against his father.”
I would try not to look at that stone whenever I passed it; but, always, my eyes would be drawn to it, as powerful as a curse, as powerful as the curses he repeatedly aimed at me:
“A father’s curse is lasting, and I curse you to be miserable for all your life.”
When he sat playing solitaire, deep into the night and in a voice that belied the monstrosity of his next words, he would say to me: “When you’re asleep, I’m going to kill your mother, and you’ll be left alone, to face me.”
I would lie waiting for the door to the room he slept in to close, a closed door that contained every possibility of horror if it swept open. When I heard it close, I would rush up out of my bed in the back of the ugly house. My mother would get up from her bed in the room separated from his by the closed door. We would exchange places. I would then arm myself with wooden boards, whatever I could find outside, so that, on the slightest stirring behind that closed door, I would reach for something to ward off the threatened attack on my mother. As morning dawned, my mother would wake me softly—if I had managed to fall asleep. Once again we would exchange places, so that he would not know of our subterfuge and overwhelm it.
Days, nights, weeks, months, years of that, years, days and nights when I would lie awake, knowing that tomorrow, even that very night, I might face new violence.
After my sister Olga’s wedding, we were preparing a picnic, my sister Olga, who was pregnant; her husband; my mother; and I. We then would drive to nearby Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico for a rare outing, leaving before dawn. The night before, my mother had prepared food to take. It was placed neatly on the kitchen table, rare treats she had managed to concoct: sandwiches, a salad, lemonade.
My father had neither agreed to go with us nor decided against it. When we had announced the trip, he had fallen silent. I prayed he would not come with us, marring the few hours we would be away. The night before we were to leave, he sat at his desk playing frantic solitaire, thrusting cards down as if each depicted his doom. Deep into the night, he went to bed and closed the door of his room.
I woke up, eager for our trip to begin, eager to be away from him. I ran to my sister’s apartment a block away, to wake her and her husband, who was driving us in his car. I rushed back to get the food we were taking.
Entering the weed-ridden backyard, I saw my mother standing in the still dark morning, terrified. A few desperate stars remained in the sky.
“Don’t go in!” she shouted at me.
I rushed past her, into the house, to grab the food, to make sure that our trip would happen. My father stood over the table, his face distorted. He was hiding something in his lowered hand. As I reached for the packed basket, he slashed at me with the kitchen knife he had been hiding.
Olga’s husband, alerted by my mother, yanked me back before the knife could slice my stomach open.
We went on the short trip, rendered desolate by fear. What would we face when we returned? What we returned to were his racked sobs as he sat at his desk again orchestrating his abandoned music.
The Greyhound bus screeched. Several passengers were jolted awake. There had been a loud strange sound, a dull thud, dragging. “Everything’s all right, folks,” the driver assured us. “Must’ve hit something on the highway.”
Something that had been alive … dead now.
As I walked with my father on a day of wind and tumbleweeds, he stumbled on the street, his cane spun away, twisting in the wind. He grasped at me for support. I dodged away from him and ran to the curb, leaving him there.
Through sheets of gray dust, I saw him struggling to get up, falling again. I didn’t move. I heard a car coming, its fog lights on behind a sheet of dust, dirty yellow ovals approaching. I didn’t move. The lights came nearer to where he was grasping for his cane. No, I would not move. The car braked, screeching, advancing closer to his struggling body.
I ran back to the street and I pushed him away from the path of the skidding car.
I picked my father up, carrying him across the street to safety, returning to snatch his cane as the dusty spectral car faded away into the sandstorm. In the bus, I closed my eyes and longed for tears, held in abeyance by what I was still deliberately omitting from my evaluation of my father’s life—and mine—what crouched always in my mind, murky, often a blur before clearing, what even now I tried to force away, deny, banish, a mysterious time when I felt loved by him, the only time.
(And even now, as I attempt to write about those memories, many years after that Greyhound journey to his funeral, I pull away, afraid of remembering, wanting to withhold, to camouflage, to lessen, but, now, the memories demand accounting though regrets may come later.)
I was six. My father’s cronies would come over to the decaying house to play cards with him, or dominoes. There would be five of them all together. At certain points in the noisy activity, my father would summon me over. He would say in a gentle tone, “Give me a thousand.” I never knew what “a thousand” meant; I knew only what I was being signaled to do: I would jump onto his lap. He held me tightly, laughing with the others, holding me tighter. Fondling me?—perhaps fondling me. (I must reject this memory, withhold it even now as I set it down, shelter him from the monstrous accusation, disguise it with ambiguity.) Fondling me, his hand—I nuzzled against him, feeling warmth, moments, seconds. … Then he gave me a penny or even a nickel. Still laughing—not meanly, no, not meanly, as if he was only playing a game (and was he? was that all, a meaningless game?)—he would pass me on to the laps of the other men at the table, one after the other, holding me, squeezing me, laughing, their hands on me. They each gave me a penny or a nickel.
On the Greyhound bus, nearing El Paso, the city’s lights winking into the night, I leaned back, my eyes closed; and I recalled the morning when I was leaving for the army and he had given me his precious ruby ring, which I now touched on my hand.
* * *
As if to affirm the truth of my father’s asserted importance, telegrams addressed to my mother at the Western Union office came from important figures all over the country and Mexico, those who had ignored my father’s slow dying. All the family gathered. What memories was each member evoking?
I faced my mother, faced again that she was still living in the projects in the poor neighborhood. With the allotment I had provided from my own salary for both her and my father, and with the continuing help of my brother Robert, she would be able to survive relatively well when I returned to finish my time in the army. My goal to buy her a house of her own seemed distant, so distant.
I remained in El Paso only for the few days of the required rosary, the burial.
I bought the stone for my father’s grave:
Professor Roberto Sixto Rechy.
17
I returned to Fort Breckinridge, Kentucky, only to learn that my company had received orders to go to Germany. Having been absent, I would be put into a “holding company,” disorganized groups of soldiers waiting for further orders. As deaths mounted in Korea, most recruits would be sent there. I was unprepared for war. Deliberately, I hadn’t learned how to fire a rifle, how to use a bayonet; how to survive bivouac. Even if I had learned to use the tactics of war, I was sure I would not have been able to use them.
Amid the needles of red dust and smoldering heat of Kentucky, we waited in the barren barracks, called to formation each time new orders arrived. We waited outside in fatigues—rows and rows of soldiers overseen by a lazy lieutenant who stood yawning in the shade of the orderly room.
Those who were called, their orders received, fell out of the ranks and marched off to prepare for their destinations. The rest of us continued to wait. Everything and everyone waited. New soldiers arrived daily. They waited with us, idling in the barracks, then ordered to rush outside in formation to wait for possible orders. As we stood in the ranks, heated sand burned through thick boots. We waited in “at ease” formation—not quite at attention, feet slightly apart, hands clasped behind at waist level—for over an hour, as long as two hours.
As the endless roll of names was called by a sergeant, I located myself toward the back of the staggered ranks—and I read, a defensive tactic on my part to endure the interminable calling of names and orders, a risky decision but one made possible because of the large disorganized groups of troops, more than 100, 200, more as the ranks swelled. At the post exchange, I had found a paperback edition of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
Acting Corporal Bailey was pacing up and down between the rows of men. I had seen him before during these sloppy formations. He seemed always to want to look furious, his brows furrowed purposefully, his hands clasped tightly behind his back as he walked—no, marched, always marched—along the ranks; his thin gangly body angled as if to propel him forward. Also waiting for orders, but apparently stalled for much longer than the rest of us, he had been appointed acting corporal. The two stripes designating that title were pinned to his sleeve, a fact that made him often press them firmly as he marched, as if to assure himself that they had not fallen off.
A hand landed harshly on my shoulder. Too late to hide the book I had been reading.
“What is your name, private?”
“John Rechy.”
As Acting Corporal Bailey stood before me, his feet shuffled angrily as if to stir dust, his mouth awry, I saw that he was younger than I had thought, perhaps twenty-three. Despite his contorted features, his face looked like that of a plain child. “Now, again, soldier, what is your name?”
“Private Rechy,” I said, understanding.
“Private Rechy what?” he demanded. Others nearby in the ranks turned, alerted to something out of the ordinary, welcoming it as a break in the boredom. The awareness passed from one row to the next, more faces turning. In the distance, the lieutenant located himself at the edge of the shade he courted, closer to what was occurring. The sergeant reading today’s orders continued the call of names until he, too, alerted to the mounting altercation, began to read slowly, paused, finally stopped.
“Private Rechy, address me as sir!” Acting Corporal Bailey demanded.
“Sir?” I questioned. The frustrations of the days past, the weariness, the unresolved sadness at my father’s death, memories of my mother crying, memories of loss, these days of endless waiting, not knowing where any of us would be sent, all conspired to make me furious at this man who was interrogating me stupidly. I said recklessly for the others to hear: “You’re not an officer, Bailey, not even a real corporal; I don’t have to call you sir.”
“Private Rechy,” he barked, “you can be court-martialed for reading in ranks—and for disobeying orders.” Forced to defend himself now that muffled laughter was floating among the ranks, he had raised his voice.
“What orders … sir?” I spoke the word with such obvious derision that those around me laughed. “I’ve been waiting for orders for ages—like everyone else here, like you.” I knew that I was veering toward disaster, but I was propelled by surges of anger.
“Come with me!” he barked. He was about to take my arm to lead me, but I pulled back, and then followed, the book still in my hands. The lieutenant who waited in the shadows advanced, as if to take over the situation. It would have been he who had appointed Bailey an acting corporal.
I was in serious danger. Even if Bailey was only an acting corporal, the assigned position gave him the authority he was exercising. I had seen enough of the army to know that once the infernal machine of power was set into motion, even by an incident much less significant than this, it ground on of its own volition. I had become a candidate for a court-martial.
The lieutenant waited in the near distance now, as if to let this scene play itself out before he would move with authority.
Acting Corporal Bailey led me to the front of the ranks. Nearby was a large aluminum can, like a barrel. “Roll it over here, Private Rechy,” he said.
Increasingly aware that I might now be involved in an unstoppable disaster, I tilted the large can and rolled it to where he was indicating, the cleared space where the sergeant had been reading orders—he had stepped aside as if to become only a witness in this odd drama.
“Set it upright, Private Rechy!”
I put the book on the ground and set the can upright.
“Pick up the book, Private Rechy!”
I did. Baffled by the ridiculous situation, attempting to dissipate the fear I felt, I joined the laughter issuing from the ranks.
“We’ll see how loud you laugh now, Private Rechy,” Acting Corporal Bailey whispered into my ear. “Get the damn book and stand on top of the can.”
“You’re joking …” Anger overwhelmed fear.
“Stand on it, Private Rechy!” Acting Corporal Bailey glanced at the lieutenant, as if for permission to proceed.
The lieutenant did not move, passively allowing what was occurring to proceed.
“Get on it, Private Rechy!” Acting Corporal Bailey said.
“What the hell?”
The troops were quiet, aware of the seriousness of the proceedings—they might be swept in. The muffled snickering died down.
“I said, get on it, Private Rechy!” Acting-Corporal Bailey leaned over and muttered so close to my ear that I felt the quiver of his lips: “You’re an inch from a court-martial. Don’t take it, Private Rechy!”
I got on top of the can.
“Now read, Private Rechy!”
“What?”
“Read what you were reading in the ranks, Private Rechy Aloud!”
The lieutenant retreated into sheltering shade, away from the rancid heat.
Fury allowed me to open the book, flipping pages, wondering when this would end, hoping it would end now, but it proceeded.
“Read, Private Rechy!” Acting Corporal Bailey commanded.
The absurdity of this calamity began to soothe me, as if I was being asked to perform in a play I had not rehearsed but must now invent. I skipped pages in the book to find a dream I had read the day before; about a megalomaniacal little man, trying to assert his wounded power.
I began to read.
A loud guffaw escaped from one of the troops. Then another. Another, more, as several in the ranks made the desired connection between the man in the dream and Acting Corporal Bailey.
I continued, feeling that I could perform in someone else’s play by turning it into mine, no matter what would happen when the imaginary curtain fell.
“Get down, Private Rechy!”
“You ordered me to read.”
“Get down, Private Rechy!”
No one attempted to stop the laughter. Even the sergeant who had interrupted the reading of
orders was laughing.
The lieutenant marched authoritatively forward.
The laughter dwindled, was smothered. On seeing the officer, the sergeant called out: “Ten-shut!”
The company assumed the commanded position of stiff attention. Acting Corporal Bailey stood rigidly facing the lieutenant, his hand at his forehead in a stiff salute. I jumped off the can and took the required position. This had to stop; it had to stop; it had to stop.
The lieutenant leaned over to speak to Acting Corporal Bailey. I could not hear what was said. My ears were ringing, pulsing with tension and fear. The lieutenant marched away, to the orderly room.
“At ease!” the sergeant called out to the company, preparing to continue with the roll of orders.
“Lieutenant Howe wants you in the orderly room. Now, Private Rechy!” Bailey said to me. “Double-time!”
My body was cold in the hot humidity, which was so intense that I hadn’t realized I was sweating, perhaps trembling.
With Bailey behind me, as if I were under arrest, I walked into the orderly room, alone.
A bored clerk was typing at a desk in the small room. “Go on in, private,” he said, indicating a closed door.
I knocked.
“Come in, Private Rechy!”
I walked into the lieutenant’s office. I saluted and said words I hated but had to say now: “Private Rechy reporting as ordered … sir!”
“At ease,” Lieutenant Howe said. “Close the door.” He was young, in his mid-twenties perhaps, a trim man.
I closed the door and stood before him in an at-ease position.
Lieutenant Howe said: “Do you think that”—he pointed to the book I still held in my hand—“do you think that’s what’s wrong with Acting Corporal Bailey?”
I still waited for orders in the jagged “holding company” in the dusty heat of Kentucky. For a short time—a few hours—the incident with Bailey had transformed me into a hero among the soldiers, who slapped my back, laughed. They did not know, nor did I tell anyone, about the encounter in the orderly room with the lieutenant, especially not that I had stayed informally, sitting in his office, talking about where we had attended college, where I had studied, what I had majored in. All that the others in the company knew, what they were reacting to, was that I was back in the holding company, not arrested, not put up for a court-martial.