Now I sat and looked at the windrow; and then I pulled back the throttle and raised the blade. I swung into the windrow, and the gravel loaded clean onto the blade and cleanly ran off in two even rolls at the sides. When I sensed that the gravel was all off the blade, I stopped, shifted into high reverse, pulled the left steering clutch to me, let in the master clutch, stamped the left brake.…
That was the thing, then. Back-blading that roll out—the long small windrow of gravel that had run off the ends of my blade. As I backed over it, the machine straddling it, I dropped the blade on it and floated it so that it smoothed out the roll. Then it was that I looked back—force of habit, for a bulldozer that size can do real damage backing into powerpoles or buildings—and I saw the muzzy bit of fill.
It was a patch of spread gravel that seemed whirling, blurred at the edges. Look into the sun and then suddenly at the floor. There will be a muzzy patch there, whirling and swirling like that. I thought something funny had happened to my eyes. But I didn’t stop the machine, and then suddenly I was in it.
Again.
It built up slowly, the agony. It built up in a way that promised more and then carefully fulfilled the promise, and made of the peak of pain a further promise. There was no sense of strain, for everything was poised and counterbalanced and nothing would break. All of the inner force was as strong as all the outer forces, and all of me was the point of equilibrium.
Don’t try to think about it. Don’t try to imagine for a second. A second of that, unbalanced, would crush you to cosmic dust. There were years of it for me; years and years.… I was in an unused stockpile of years, somewhere in a hyperspace, and the weight of them all was on me and in me, consecutively, concurrently.
I woke up very slowly. I hurt all over, and that was an excruciating pleasure, because the pain was only physical.
I began to forget right away.
A company doctor came in and peeped at me. I said, “Hi.”
“Well, well,” he said, beaming. “So the flying catskinner is with us again.”
“What flying catskinner? What happened? Where am I?”
“You’re in the dispensary. You, my boy, were working your bulldozer out on the fill and all of a sudden took it into your head to be a flying kay-det at the same time. That’s what they say, anyhow. I do know that there wasn’t a mark around the machine where it lay—not for sixty feet. You sure didn’t drive it over there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That, son, I wouldn’t know. But I went and looked myself. There lay the Cat, all broken up, and you beside it with your lungs all full of your own ribs. Deadest looking man I ever saw get better.”
“I don’t get it. Did anybody see this happen? Are you trying to—”
“Only one claims to have seen it was a Puerto Rican bottom-dump driver. Doesn’t speak any English, but he swears on every saint in the calendar that he looked back after dumping a load and saw you and twenty tons of bulldozer forty feet in the air, and then it was coming down!”
I stared. “Who was the man?”
“Heavy-set fellow. About forty-five. Strong as a rhino and seemed sane.”
“I know him,” I said. “A good man.” Suddenly, then, happily: “Doc—you know what his name is?”
“No. Didn’t ask. Some flowery Spanish moniker, I guess.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “His name is Kirkpatrick. Alonzo Padin de Kirkpatrick.”
He laughed. “The Irish are a wonderful people. Go to sleep. You’ve been unconscious for nearly three weeks.”
“I’ve been unconscious for eleven years,” I said, and felt foolish as hell because I hadn’t meant to say anything like that and couldn’t imagine what put it into my head.
Poor Yorick
IF YOU DON’T want to read an unpleasant story, we are even. Because I didn’t want to write it either.
It can be told because it’s doubtful whether June will ever get hold of it because she doesn’t read the way you do. She is one of those who flatter themselves that they are too busy to waste time reading. She talks a great deal instead, and is only one-third of a person, the other two-thirds being entertainment-receptors for the radio and the movies respectively.
But she is inordinately pretty. She is very very blond and her lips are full and red, and her eyes are the color of grape juice, but bright. Her skin has indirect lighting and the lobes of her ears are always pink. She has a fiance, as she calls him in two syllables, in the South Pacific. He is a nice fellow and entirely suited to her. He and her kid brother had been inducted together and managed to stay together, and were buddies the way they always had been. She called him her kid brother because she was three-eighths of an inch taller than he, although he was older. So it was all nice and cosy, with them to watch over each other and with her to stay at home and be proud of them both. The fiance, whose name was Hal, wrote all the time, and her kid brother never wrote, which was all right too, as long as one of them did.
There was a lot of hard work and rough stuff out there but Hal found time to wrap up and send a present for her, and by hook or by crook it got to her. She opened it with two oh’s and an ooh, in the presence of both of her elderly and very gentle parents, and as the last of the wrapping fell away her mouth tried to “Eeek!” while she swallowed her gum, and her father spun on his heel and started to walk out but had to come right back to fix up her mother, who had silently fainted. The present was a Japanese skull.
After her mother was quiet and comfortable June went back into the front parlor—not a living-room, a parlor—and she and the skull stared at each other for quite a while. All the courage she had concentrated in the gingerly tip of one index finger which went out and touched it and jumped back as if the thing were hot. But it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold either. It was just smooth, and quite as clean-looking as anything could be. It was as clean as a kitchen sink. She touched it again, and gradually she saw that it was just ugly, that was all. She put out both hands and put one on each side of the skull and lifted it. She almost dropped it then because it was so light and she wasn’t prepared for that. But she held it and she had it and it was of value because Hal had sent it. And war was like that anyway, and it is good to have us at home care a little less about how we used to think about such things. All this she thought while she held the skull and it grinned quietly at her. After all, we all got one like it behind our face, she thought. She carried it upstairs and put it in her kid brother’s room, because that was the only place where no one would have to sleep with it, and after all they all ate in the parlor.
It was in the house for two days. The rest of that first day she kept it to herself but after that it was too good to keep, so the parade of her young contemporaries was called up and filed in awed and low-toned morbidity past the skull. Each of them was shocked and in a few minutes began to get raucous and crack wise to cover it up, and it made June feel good to see how scared they all were. It belonged to her and she wasn’t scared—any more.
One of them put her kid brother’s new top-hat, that he had gotten for a present with his tuxedo three months before he was drafted, on the skull, and that seemed to take the curse off it because it sure looked comical. It wasn’t a bad fit either because her brother was a little bit of a fellow too.
After a while there wasn’t anybody new to call up and show off the skull to. June racked her brains and suddenly thought of Doc Winningen. Doc Winninger was the dentist and he was the only man she knew of that had a skull. It perched up on top of his chiffonnierthing in his office, that held all the drills and picks and things, high up, right up where you could see it when he was working on you. Only hardly anybody ever noticed it. She called up Doc Winninger and he promised to come around because she made it so urgent although she didn’t tell him what for; she wanted to surprise him.
When he came she took his hat and coat and led him right upstairs. She got him lined up just right in front of her kid brother’s room and said, “Here’s t
he Jap that Hal sent me,” and threw the door open. Doc Winninger took two steps into the room and then saw the skull and stopped and said, “Good God!” And the shocked expression on his broad red face with the heavy jowls and the brilliant oval spectacles was all that she could have wished. “Isn’t he a beaut?” she said. The skull was wearing her kid brother’s topper and sure was a scream.
“Hal sent you that?”
“He sure did. Isn’t he the one, though? The big crazy.”
Doc turned his back on the skull and faced her. She didn’t know why his face looked the way it did, but whatever it was it made her stop smiling. “A fine trophy,” he said.
He made her defensive. “That little yellow rat is prettier now than he ever was when he was alive. That’s what Hal calls a good Jap!”
“Those Burma nurses … are we fighting that kind of war now? Is that what this means?” he said, thumbing over his shoulder at the skull.
“Do you mean is Hal shooting little kids? Gee, Doc, you know better than that.”
“Oh. Well—I have to go.” He started out but June blocked him. She felt somehow cheated. “Wait. You didn’t even take a good look.”
“I saw enough, Junie.” He sounded as if he was sorry for her or something. As if she was sick.
“Aw, now wait. There is something you’d want to look at. That Jap’s had teeth filled. Don’t you want to see if the Japs do as good a job as you do?”
She had hit him where he felt it. He turned back into the room and picked up the skull. He glanced at the two fillings in the upper lateral incisors, suddenly stared. June had the feeling that he stopped breathing. When he turned around his old face was working. “June—this is—is …” He stopped and swallowed and then sort of grinned at her. “June, could I take this along and keep it for a couple of days? There’s something very interesting that I—I want to show to somebody.”
June was annoyed with him but she could see he was so excited about it that she couldn’t refuse him. She laughed. “I knew I’d get you going! Sure, go ahead. But be careful of it. It means a lot to me.”
“I can see it would.” He walked out the door and down the stairs, carrying the skull, and making small talk over his shoulder. “What do you hear from Hal?”
“Him! He’s well and fighting mad. Him and my kid brother got separated a while back on little mopping-up patrols, but we’ll hear about the kid when Hal joins up with him again. That little monkey never writes.”
June’s parents were glad to see the skull go out of the house although they didn’t say anything about it. But they were just as mad as June when Doc Winninger called up two days later and said he was sorry but he had left the skull in a taxi and when he located the taxi the skull was gone. They were so mad about it that they got another dentist and never went to him again. Even if he had been their dentist since before the kids were born.
Which was all right with Doc Winninger. He knew the family too well. He knew every filling in their mouths. He didn’t lose the skull, he took it right to the middle of the bridge and threw it into the river. He didn’t take it to a doctor to find out for sure if it was an oriental skull or not. He didn’t want to know. He liked to think the whole thing about the fillings was a coincidence, even if June’s kid brother was such a tiny little fellow.
Crossfire
2 July 1944
DEAR—
Before me is a bottle of cognac … half full. I have drunk half the bottle. It is young. It burns. It is good. I sit now in a large kitchen, the most important room of this particular farm house, and look out to a yard that is quite active, in a natural sort of way … i.e., a boar is presently servicing a sow, and I find it most diverting, or, to say the least … distracting. It is now a question of will … mind over country matters, in order for me to take advantage of the last moments of light to type a word or two to you. I am disappointed in the lazy performance of this boar whose seed will turn to sucklings, and many of them, no doubt. How unjust. My wildest efforts amount to nothing!—that is, nothing but a transitory sense of satisfaction. I must interrupt this biological scribendi to partake of more cognac. That pig depresses me. I must have a drink. He’s unmindful of 88’s bursting seeds of death about his cycle of natural functions … but I’m not. I, alone and feeling a neuter entity whilst this boar exercises his male root, must have done with this nonsense.…
A short while ago I prevailed upon the owner of this farm to fix me up with a bucket of hot water … so I could take what the boys call, “A whore’s bath.” Such a bath is, perhaps, more commonly known as a “sponge bath” … but that latter denomination lacks oomph. You, in your 16-room house, probably have a shower-bath and proper tub with the best of plumbing. A bath is commonplace to you. Aha! … but you don’t have pigs to pork shop over!
I sent to London for some water colors and sketch pads. There are pastel colors in the brick and slate of the farm buildings that are exciting to me for I have seen nothing like them except at art exhibitions and in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I can believe Toulouse-Lautrec and others pastel-minded. They seem no more out of harmony during these last rounds of sun than the red of a rose to the green of its leaf. It’s French to the very soil; it’s beautifully real, for the visual sensation tells me so. I have no talent for painting; all I have is the urge to try and daub a bit here and there. There is noise and destruction about me and the lazy, peaceful business of brush and pencil seems the right thing to do. Were it quiet and peaceful I’d probably like to wage waste and the noisy business of destruction. (the cognac is good)
Did I tell you about my first day in this hellzapoppin’ place? I had quite an unforgettable experience. You’ve probably read about the abundance of snipers during the initial stages of this European operation. I had personal contact with one when I was on shore about one hour. At first I felt there was something unreal about my being on shore … like being on a movie set. The houses didn’t look real. The first civilians I saw looked like extra players milling about for some De Mille production. The houses, shell-torn and strangely colored, looked more like prop buildings on the back lot at MGM. The sound and effects department was doing one helluva good job with shell bursts and smoke. Then it dawned on me that this was no Hollywood scene. People lying dead in the road more like wax effigies were really very dead people who a short while ago were very much alive. The smells attested to the truth of it all … smells of powder, burnt wood, scorched flesh, and strange new odors that told me here was something all too real. I was alone at first. Don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t know. I was alone until I got to a large farm some distance away from the beach, and there I met a couple of enlisted men that I had seen a few times before. Because of wild firing we kept low in a squat-walk. I knew I had to cross the large yard of this farm because 88’s (or something like ’em) were trained on the road. A bullet sang past my face … so I did the easy thing. Ha. I ducked. I tho’t it politic to crawl a little more and keep all ten of my eyes glued to the side quadrants and toward the sky. Another bullet zizzed by me too goddamned close, so I bellied it over to a farm wagon for cover. Yet another bullet came my way from the house and then one of the boys swore he saw a female firing from an open window on the ground floor. I turned and edged my way to the sight end of the wagon when I heard and felt my heel get clipped. It didn’t frighten me. It made me mad as hell. I released the safety on my .45 and sent a slug at a movement in the curtain from whence all this lethal nonsense was coming. The boys hurled hand grenades in the upstairs windows and then we all made a rush to the main house. I soon found myself in the kitchen, where, sure enough, there was a female lying on the floor. From the door she looked young and slim. The rifle was a few feet away from her … so there was little danger from that gadget. Closer inspection showed her to be about twenty years old and too darned pretty for this kind of monkey business. She was conscious and able to talk despite a wicked hole through her shoulder (there’s no doubt that a .45 makes a mean hole. I’ve seen what they do t
o jack rabbits when I was at Fort Bliss, Texas.) She spoke to me in French, tho’ she could have been from almost anywhere. I doubt that she was French, tho’. She asked me why I shot her. Huh! I pointed at the rifle lying beside her and asked her why she shot at me. I got no answer for that. Fact is, I was in no mood to hang around since this spot was getting a little too hot for comfort. Anyway, she won’t be shooting Yanks any more. It’s a helluva mess, isn’t it? I won’t forget that as long as I live. On that same day we accounted for several other snipers. One was in a tree; another was in a church tower; and another was firing from the top floor of a barn. They were men, tho’.
I’ll have a few tid-bits for you another time. Right now I am of a mind to make my daily pilgrimage to the local curate’s brick outhouse where I can function with a modicum of security from German artillery. A couple of days ago this ancient outhouse, with me in it, seemed the target … for a shell went through the garden wall and burst close enough that my hind cheeks felt the hot breath and blast. I tho’t my favorite part(s) would be missing and, had this been a less sturdily built house of contemplation and human passage, I have no doubt but that I would now be a cipher in masculine dress, a nullity fit for some ladies’ bath house as an attendant, or something equally frustrating.
Write soon, my favorite people, and tell me all about life on Euclid Park Drive.
Love,
Noon Gun
JOE LOOKED DOWN at Mousie, walking so sedately beside him, and he thought, you’re a second-rater, and so am I. Her name wasn’t Mousie, but Sara Nell. He always called her Sara Nell except when he thought about her, and then she was Mousie. It was her hair, maybe, or the nose that was so very well shaped only one and a half sizes too large for her face. She had a little pointed face. Anyway it was Mousie, and it wasn’t affectionate.
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