“Because she was such a generous widow,” the doctor suggested. “Did the old fellow fart again?”
“I think that was the fire.”
“I think it was the man himself,” the doctor said. “And what did you get, Policeman? A citation for bravery?”
“A commendation,” the policeman said, “and a promotion not long thereafter.”
“Virtue rewarded. And the other lady? Joanie Jellin, the convict’s wife?”
“I consoled her,” the policeman admitted. “And once again came to appreciate my late partner’s point of view. The woman did kindle the flames of lust. But I just spent a few afternoons with her and bowed out of the picture.”
“No keeping her company on conjugal visits?”
“None of that, no.”
“The flames of lust,” the soldier said, echoing the phrase the policeman had used. “They cast a nasty yellow glow, don’t they? Lust ruled your partner, ran his life and ran him out of it, but wasn’t it lust that drove all the parties in your story? You, certainly, and both of the women.”
“It was the story that came to mind,” the policeman said, “when the conversation turned to lust.”
“Lust,” the soldier mused. “Is it always about the sexual impulse? What about the lust for power? The lust for gold?”
“Metaphor,” the priest said. “If I am said to have a lust for gold, the man who so defines me is saying that my desire for gold has the urgency of a sexual urge, that I yearn for it and seek after it in a lustful manner.
“And what of blood lust?” The soldier cleaned the dottle from his pipe, filled the bowl from his calfskin pouch, struck a wooden match and lit his pipe. “Is that a metaphor, or is it indeed sexual? I can think of an incident that suggests the latter.” He drew on his pipe. “I wonder if I should recount it. It’s not my story, not even in the sense that the priest’s story was his. That was told to him by one of the tale’s principals. Mine came to me by a less direct route.”
They considered this in silence, a silence broken at length by a low rumbling from the hearthside.
“Was that another fart?” the doctor wondered. “No, I believe it was a snore. The old man’s a whole impolite orchestra, isn’t he?” He sighed. “Tell your story, Soldier.”
#
I believe it was Robert E. Lee (said the soldier) who expressed the thought that it was just as well war was so horrible, or else we would like it too much. But it seems to me that we already like it to a considerable degree. Who doesn’t recall George Patton proclaiming his love for combat. “God help me, I love it!” he cried.
Or at least George C. Scott did, in his portrayal of Patton. Was that accurate, or do we owe some Hollywood screenwriter for the creation of this myth?
I’m not sure it matters. It’s clear Patton loved it, whether he ever said so or not. And, while it’s quite appropriate that he was played by Scott rather than, say, Alan Alda, I’m sure the man was not entirely lacking in sensitivity. He may have loved war, but he was very likely aware that he shouldn’t.
But people do, don’t they? Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many wars. They seem to retain their popularity down through the centuries, and for all that they grow ever more horrible, we do go on having them. Old men make wars, we are occasionally told, and young men have to fight them. The implication is that older men, safely lodged behind desks, feel free to make decisions that cost the unwilling lives of the young.
But does anyone genuinely think there would be fewer wars fought if younger men were their nations’ leaders? The reverse, I think, is far more likely. The young are more reckless, with others’ lives as well as their own. And it is indeed they who fight the wars, and die in them, because they are often so eager to do so.
I am not wholly without experience here. I saw combat in one war, and ordered men about in others. War is awful, certainly, but it is also quite wonderful. The two words once had the same meaning, did you know that? Awful and wonderful. The former we reserve now for that which we regard as especially bad, the latter for what seems especially good, yet they both have the same root meaning. Full of awe, full of wonder.
War’s all of that and more.
It is exciting, for one thing. Not always, as the monotony of it can be excruciating, but when it ceases to be boring it becomes very exciting indeed, and that excitement is heightened by the urgency of it all. One might be killed at any moment, so how can the body fail to be in a state of excitement? That, after all, is what adrenaline is for.
And there’s the camaraderie. Men working together, fighting together, united not merely in a common cause but in a matter of life and death. To do so seems to satisfy a fundamental human urge.
On top of that, there’s the freedom. Does that strike you as strange? I can see that it might, as there’s no one less at liberty in many ways than a soldier. His every action is in response to an order, and to defy a direct order is to court severe punishment. Yet this apparent slavery is freedom of a sort. One is free of the obligation to make decisions, free too of the past and the future. One’s family, one’s career, what one is going to do with one’s life---all of this disappears as one follows orders and gets through the day.
And, of course, there’s the chance to kill.
I wonder how many soldiers ever kill anybody. Relatively few have the opportunity. In any war, only a fraction of enlisted troops ever see combat, and fewer still ever have the enemy in their sights. And only some of those men take aim and pull the trigger. Some, it would appear, are reluctant to take the life of someone they don’t even know.
Others are not. And there are those who find they like it.
#
Lucas Hallam, if I may call him that, was to all appearances entirely normal prior to his service in the armed forces. He grew up in a small Midwestern town, with three brothers (two older than himself) and a younger sister. Aside from the usual childhood and adolescent stunts (throwing snowballs at cars, smoking in the lavatory) he was never in trouble, and in school he was an average student, in athletics an average participant. There are three childhood markers for profound antisocial behavior, as I understand it, and Luke, as far as anyone knew, had none of them. He did not wet the bed, he did not set fires, and he did not torture animals. (The pathological implications of the latter two are not hard to infer, but what has bedwetting to do with anything? Perhaps the doctor will enlighten me later.)
After graduating from high school, Luke looked at the vocational opportunities open to him, thought unenthusiastically of college, and joined the army. There was no war on when he enlisted, but there was by the time he finished basic training. He was a good soldier, and his eyesight was excellent and his hand-eye coordination superb. On the firing range he qualified as an Expert Rifleman, and he was assigned to a platoon of combat infantry and shipped overseas.
At the end of his hitch he was rotated back to the States, and eventually discharged. But by then he had been in combat any number of times, and had had enemy soldiers in his sights on innumerable occasions. He had no difficulty pulling the trigger, and his skills were such that he generally hit what he aimed at.
He liked it, liked the way it felt. It gave him an enormous feeling of satisfaction. He was doing his job, serving his country, and saving his own life and the lives of his buddies by killing men who were trying to kill him. Take aim, squeeze off a shot, and you canceled a threat, took off the board someone who otherwise might take you or someone you cared about off the board. That was what he was supposed to do, what they’d sent him over there to do, and he was doing it well, and he felt good about it.
The first time he did it, actually saw his shot strike home, saw the man on the other side of the clearing stumble and fall, he was too busy sighting and shooting and trying to stay behind cover to notice how he felt. The action in a full-blown firefight was too intense for you to feel much of anything. You were too busy staying alive.
Later, remembering, he felt a fullness in his chest, as if h
is heart was swelling. With pride, he supposed.
Another time, they were pinned down by a sniper. He advanced, and when someone else drew the sniper’s fire, he was able to spot the man perched in a tree. He got him in his sights and felt an overall excitement, as if all his cells were more intensely alive than before. He fired, and the man fell from the tree, and a cheer went up from those of his buddies who had seen the man fall. Once again he felt that fullness in his chest, but this time it wasn’t only his heart that swelled. He noted with some surprise that there was a delicious warmth in his groin, and that he had a powerful erection.
Well, he was nineteen years old, and it didn’t take a great deal to give him an erection. He would get hard thinking about girls, or looking at sexy pictures, or thinking about looking at sexy pictures. A ride in a Jeep on a rough road could give him an erection. He thought it was interesting, getting an erection in combat, but he didn’t make too much of it.
Later, when they got back to base, he went drinking and whoring with his buddies. The sex was sweeter and more intense than ever before, but he figured it was the girl. She was, he decided, more attractive than most of them, and hot.
From that point on, sexual excitement was a component of every firefight he was in. Killing the enemy didn’t carry him to orgasm, although there was at least one occasion when it didn’t miss by much. It did render him powerfully erect, however, and, when he was able to be with a girl afterward, the union was intensely satisfying. The girl didn’t have to be spectacularly good-looking, he realized, or all that hot. She just had to be there when he was back from a mission on which he’d blown away one or more enemy troops.
As I said, his tour of duty concluded and he returned to the States. The war receded into memory. Back in his hometown, in the company of people who’d shared none of his military experiences, he let it all exist as a separate chapter of his life---or, perhaps more accurately, as another volume altogether, a closed book he didn’t often take down from the shelf.
He found work, he dated a few local girls, and within a year or so he found one who suited him. In due course they were engaged, and then married. They bought a modest home and set about starting a family.
Now and then, when he was making love to his wife, wartime images would intrude. They came not as flashbacks of the sort common to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but as simple memories that slipped unbidden into his consciousness. He recalled sex acts with the native prostitutes, and this made him guilty at first, as if he were cheating on his wife by having another woman’s image in mind during their lovemaking.
He dismissed the guilt. After all, you couldn’t hang a man for his thoughts, could you? And, if a memory of another woman enriched the sexual act for himself and his wife, where was the harm? He didn’t seek to summon up such memories, but if they came he allowed himself to enjoy them.
There were other memories, though. Memories of drawing a bead on a sniper in a tree, holding his breath, squeezing off the shot. Seeing the man fall in delicious slow motion, seeing him fall never to rise again.
He didn’t like that, and it bothered him a little. He found he could will such thoughts away, and did so as quickly as they came. Then he could surrender to the delight of the moment, untroubled by recollections of the past. That, after all, was over and done with. He didn’t hang out at the Legion post, didn’t pal around with other vets, didn’t talk about what he’d seen and done. He barely thought about it, so why should he think of it now, at such an intimate moment?
Never mind. You couldn’t help the thoughts that came to you, but you didn’t have to entertain them. He blinked and they were gone.
After his second child was born, Luke’s sex life slowed down considerably. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and when he and his wife attempted to resume relations after the birth, they were not terribly successful. She was willing enough but not very receptive, and he had difficulty becoming aroused and further difficulty in bringing his arousal to fulfillment.
He’d never had this problem before.
It was normal, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. It would work itself out.
He tried mental tricks---thinking of other women, using memory or fantasy as an erotic aid. This worked some of the time, but not always, and never as well as he would have liked.
Then one day he used a fantasy about a woman at work to help him become erect, and, during the act, he tried to extend the fantasy to reach a climax. But instead it winked out like a spent lightbulb, and what replaced it was an involuntary memory of a firefight. This time he didn’t blink it away, but let himself relive the fight, the aiming, the firing, the bodies falling in obedience to his will.
His orgasm was powerful.
If it troubled him at all to have used memories of killing, any disquiet he felt was offset by the height of his excitement and the depth of his satisfaction. Henceforth he employed memories and fantasies of killing as he had previously used memories and fantasies of other women, and to far greater advantage. His ardor had waned somewhat even before the second pregnancy, as is hardly uncommon after a few years of marriage; it now returned with a vengeance, and his wife caught a little of his own renewed enthusiasm. It was, she told him, like a second honeymoon.
That set his mind entirely to rest. It was good for both of them, he realized, and if what he did in the privacy of his own mind was a little kinky, even a little unpleasant, well, who was harmed?
Memories would take him only so far. You used them up when you replayed them over and over. Fantasies, though, were pretty good. He would think of someone he’d noticed at work or on television, and he would imagine the whole thing, stalking the person, making the kill. He would spend time with the fantasy, living it over and over in his mind each time he and his wife made love, refining it until it was just the way he wanted it.
And then, perhaps inevitably, there came a time when he found himself thinking about bringing one of his fantasies to life. Or, if you prefer, to death.
#
“Hunting,” the policeman said. “Soldier, why the hell didn’t the poor sonofabitch try hunting? No safer outlet for a man who wants to kill something. You get up early in the morning and go out in the woods and take it out on a deer or a squirrel.”
“I wonder,” said the priest. “Do you suppose that’s why men hunt? I thought it was for the joy of walking in the woods, and the satisfaction of putting meat on one’s table.”
“Meat’s cheaper in a store,” the policeman said, “and you don’t need to pick up a gun to take a walk in the woods. Oh, I’m sure there are other motives for hunting. It makes you feel resourceful and self–reliant and manly, fit to hang out with Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo. But when all’s said and done you’re out there killing things, and if you don’t like killing you’ll find some other way to pass the time.”
“He’d hunted as a boy,” the soldier said. “You’d be hard put to avoid it if you grew up where he did. His brother took him out hunting rabbits, and he shot and killed one, and it made him sick.”
“What did he get, tularemia?” the doctor wondered. “You can get it from handling infected rabbits.”
“Sick to his stomach,” the soldier said. “Sick inside. Killing an animal left him feeling awful.”
“He was a boy then,” the policeman said. “Now he was a man, and one who’d killed other men and was thinking about doing it again. You’d think he’d go out in the woods, if only for curiosity.”
“And he did,” said the soldier.
#
He thought along the very lines you suggested (continued the soldier), and he went out and bought a rifle and shells, and one crisp autumn morning he shouldered his rifle and drove a half hour north, where there was supposed to be good hunting. The deer season wouldn’t open for another month, but all that meant was that the woods wouldn’t be swarming with hunters. And you didn’t have to wait for deer season to shoot varmints and small game.
He walked arou
nd for an hour or so, stopped to eat his lunch and drink a cup of coffee from the Thermos jug, got up and hefted his gun and walked around some more. Early on he spotted a bird on a branch, greeting the dawn in song. He squinted through the scope and took aim at the creature, not intending to shoot. What kind of person would gun down a songbird? But he wondered what it would feel like to have the bird in his sights, and was not surprised to note that there was no sense of excitement whatsoever, just a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach.
Later he took aim at a squirrel and had the same reaction, or non-reaction. Hunting, he could see, was not an answer for him. He was if anything somewhat relieved that he hadn’t had to shoot an animal to establish this.
He unloaded his rifle and walked some more, enjoying the crunch of fallen leaves under his feet, the sweetness of the air in his lungs. And then he came to a clearing, and in an old orchard across the way he saw a woman on a ladder, picking apples.
His pulse quickened. Without thinking he slipped into the shadows where he’d be invisible. He stood there, watching her, and he was excited.
She was pretty, or at least he thought she was. It was hard to tell at this distance. He should have brought binoculars, he thought, so he could get a better look.
And he remembered that the gun’s telescopic sight would work as well.
He spun around, walked back the way he’d come. He was not going to look at the woman through a rifle sight. That was not what he was going to do.
He walked around for another hour and wound up right back where he’d seen the woman. Probably gone by now, he told himself. But no, there she was, still in the orchard, still up on the ladder. She was working a different tree now, and he could get a better look at her now. Earlier her back had been toward him, but now he was presented with a frontal view, and he could see her face.
Not very well, though. Not from this far away.
He took the rifle from his shoulder, looked at her through the scope. Very pretty, he saw. Auburn hair---without the scope it had just looked dark---and a long oval face, and breasts that swelled the front of her plaid shirt.
Speaking of Lust - the novella Page 4