“Poor chap,” Danny grinned watching the plane disappear in the distance.
“The Dus they are all crazy,” Nautaung smiled. “Like the tiger.”
“It almost wasn’t a joke,” Doc Travis said. “What a blood pressure.” The Doc wiped his beard with the back of his hand, then holding his nose with two fingers leaned over and blew it. “I’ve got a little cold myself,” he said.
Con looked at him and laughed. Then they all laughed.
The word of the joke spread. It was a happy camp that day. That evening Nautaung told the Dus that some of the Scouts were composing a song about the very fine joke. That night before Con got into his sleeping bag he shook it out. A frog, a dead snake, and a live beetle the size of his thumb fell out. To the Kachins making jokes was very catching. Every one would have to be very wary the next few days. And there was only a few days until the Great Manau and the next campaign. “What did you find in your sleeping bag?” Con asked Danny.
“Two hunks of dry dung from a water buffalo and a dead fish. This bloody bag smells of dead fish, damn it. We’re in for it,” Danny scratched his shaven head.
Con stretched out in the bag. Looking up in the sky he thought he had never seen so many stars. And on the hills all around him the campfires flickered, a mule neighed, and in the distance there was laughter. He saw the outline of a man not twenty feet away. “Is that you Doc?”
“It’s me,” Doctor Travis said. “I never knew there were so many stars.”
He slid quietly into his sleeping bag. “Goodnight, Con.”
CHAPTER XXXV
The Doc could not sleep. The stars and the faint dim outline of the distant hills became, suddenly, the hills of Tennessee in the spring. Black smoke spiraled. It was a night when the mind unhindered strove to remember. A night to view from a distance the halting, jerking, swaying, round and round, up and down, ferris wheel of his life. The circle, he thought. Always the circle. How did a man gather the momentum? how did he ever spin off on the tangent? the straight direct tangent to an infinity of somewhere. Or was he forever chained by his heritage and himself to the hub of the circle. How many times did he have to go up-down-round in the dark and bright white lights before he became dizzy, unstable, and forever without perspective?
Doctor Grey Travis had been born into what some people like to refer to as old southern aristocracy. But the family, the land, and the solidarity of the once proud family had long since deteriorated and there remained only the naked tradition. Tradition without prestige was a whore without talent; it was the snowball nearing the bottom of the hill about to smash into the trees or to die slowly in the sun. It was purposeless. And once, in Grey’s highschool days, he had thought of the family remains as excellent base material for a Faulkner novel. There would be no sense in writing the author, he had thought then, he wouldn’t pay you and besides he had already done it.
Then suddenly, now, he saw the plantation in Alabama. His great uncle’s plantation; the highly polished hard wood floor, the fine sturdy old furniture, the neat white curtains, and encased in a glass case before wall to wall rich red velure drapes the original Travis sword, at least supposedly original sword, and his white haired great uncle viewing it with crossed arms as if it were a tabernacle on some strange altar.
That was the first time he had ever met his uncle. He was sixteen then, living with an aunt in Nashville, working at odd jobs. His uncle, searching for a lost family heirloom had accidentally located him. He did not know that a male Travis of their line still existed and at once took charge of the boy. Grey had gotten his first suit that week and his first long pair of pants. Uncle Pres was really pleased when he heard that Grey wanted to be a doctor. He had seen in Grey the final hope of recapturing the Travis’s prestige.
Once in his second year at Vanderbilt, Grey had written his uncle that he had been dating a girl by the name of Stallman. Grace Stallman. One week after he had mailed that letter Uncle Pres showed up on the campus. Uncle Pres took him to dinner that night at one of the downtown hotels and in detail told Grey who the Stallmans were. He said that if any marriage could bring the Travis name back to where it rightly belonged it would be a marriage to a Stallman.
Three years later they were married. That wedding, the uniting of those two old families, the grand manner in which it was performed, the papers said, brought memories of an older, better South. Grey had interned and Grace, with Uncle Pres’s help, had bought him a fine practice and a fine home.
Before the first year of Grey’s practice was over he had begun to pay Grace and Uncle Pres back for the home and the practice. Then Grace had become pregnant and that was when the trouble began. Her mother moved into the house, then her aunt, and Grace grew more irritable with the passing days. Grey began to spend more and more time at the office and then the three women began to question him about that. And when he was at home they would ignore him completely. You would never have thought that any Stallman had had a baby before. Then after the first girl was born her mother and aunt left the house.
During the time of her pregnancy, in an effort to stay away from home, Doctor Travis had become interested in psychiatry. He had read alone in the office after his associate and the nurses had left. But once the child had been born things settled down again and he had abandoned his reading. Then a year later Grace became pregnant again and blamed him and wanted him to remove the baby.
“You mean you want me to perform an abortion on you?” he had asked incredulously.
“Don’t use that word,” she half-screamed. “It sounds so … so distasteful. Nasty.”
He refused adamantly. They had their worst argument over that. She began to drink a few cocktails before dinner and when the drinks didn’t settle right she would pick at him and if he tried a rebuttal of any sort she would begin to cry. Once he had asked her if she still held it against him because he had refused to remove the baby. She said he had a filthy mind, she had never asked him to do anything of the kind. Her mother and aunt moved back into the house during the fourth month of pregnancy and they went through it again. Another girl.
He had become very busy with his practice and had less and less time for his reading on psychiatry. Then one afternoon coming out of a medical meeting at the Andrew Jackson Hotel he saw his wife getting off the elevator. She hadn’t seen him. He checked with a bellman he knew, for a sum, and when he found where she had been, and with whom, he decided at once to sell his practice and get into the work he wanted to do. He came home that night and informed her of his decision never mentioning the incident at the hotel. He told her that he had lined up a job at the State institution for the insane and that they would be moving. She didn’t believe him at first, then she began to cry, and finally she said she would do whatever he wanted.
But the next night her mother and aunt showed up for dinner. And the day after Uncle Pres arrived from the Alabama plantation. He had managed to hold out very well with his mother-in-law and aunt but he could hardly refuse Uncle Pres’s advice after all he had done for him.
He threw himself into his practice harder that ever. In his spare time he continued his reading on matters of the mind. His only consolation beside his reading seemed to be his two daughters, and when, one day, it suddenly dawned on him that they had become exact replicas of their mother, even to treating him with a kind of womanly superiority, he began having an affair with one of his female patients, one of his wife’s closest friends. Then one Labor Day he happened to overhear the maid’s radio as it blared out a soap opera. The character’s drooling, sentimental dialogue had so reminded him of an afternoon meeting that he had had with his mistress the week before that he had at once terminated that affair. After then it was a nurse, and then a school teacher, and finally a hostess in a cheap nightclub.
His love-making developed to a point of complete abandonment after one drunken night with the hostess he had reached a point where he had been carried away, forgetting with an uninhibited pagan lust. He had tried to recapt
ure that night on several occasions, rarely doing so, and the failure always left him with the feeling of awkward inadequacy. And when he did revive the wild free drunken spirit of paganness he always suffered the resultant spiritual hangover. All in all his debauchery had provided little compensation, he thought now lying in the sleeping bag.
There was the muffled thud of a Very pistol from the south; a bright red glare lighting the sky. It was midnight, he knew, the outpost was secure. He had thought once that the war had been especially designed for him. An instrument to save him from the deterioration of his life in Nashville. He had never visualized war as being a place where men suffered and died. War was bands and foreign lands. War was adventure and a chance to live and adjust. But more than anything, to all men, war was a chance to get away. Was that why men started war, he asked himself now. Do men really die then just so they will have a chance to live? It sounded fantastic and yet there was a measure of truth in it, he knew. But one thing he had learned for sure: Death gave a man a thirst, a passion for life. Maybe man needed to revive that thirst occasionally. Maybe war was necessary. Maybe it taught men that life, full life, could have joy. That sounds like man; starting a war just to get away. That sounded exactly like the thought reaction of the world-wide I.Q.
I know I’m going to do something with my life now, he said suddenly to himself. I know that. I know that I’m going to try for myself and do the very best and let the pieces fall in behind me. Maybe that was the disconcerting thing in life: because each of us believes the world revolves around us we expect the pieces to fall into place too readily. Maybe that’s the basis of our national immaturity; our premature attitude, our anxiety. Yes, that’s very possible. I should do some more thinking about that. That’s material for a paper. It really is.
But there you go. You see, you still haven’t learned. You haven’t done what there is to be done and you want to write papers about something you know nothing about. Something you haven’t studied, really. Which in a way proves your hypothesis. You’ve gotten the first respect you’ve every really felt you’ve earned in your life right here and it’s throwing you. You don’t want to keep it, to keep on deserving it. Not you. You want to do something that’s years away.
Maybe you haven’t been hurt enough. You have to be hurt so you won’t forget. You have to feel your hurt Con had said. He had said that the way you wished you had been able to say it. Two days after he was wounded. I will never forget that, the Doctor thought, never forget that morning with the rain coming down, and the wounded, and no planes to evacuate and Lau’rel praying incoherently on the floor of the basha and Con propped up against the pillar, pale and half-drunk, still in shock:
You’ve got to feel your hurt, Doc, he had said. You have to feel it and live with it and throw yourself into it like you do with your pain. Pain is there to show you something is wrong with your system, and your hurt is there to show you something is wrong with you. And if you don’t lie down with it, your hurt, it won’t do you any good. Like if you avoid the pain of a busted appendix and just go along without correcting it, you’ll die. And you die the other way, too.
Any jerk can hurt himself out of a weakness to protect others. Most people do just that. What’s hard is to hurt others doing what you must, what you think is right. I don’t mean to step on others, but hurt their feelings. If you had to step on them what you’d be doing wouldn’t be right to begin with. That’s the goddam trouble with the whole human race. They want to play-act God, play-act that they’re helping every body else while they really ain’t never helped themselves. (I use ain’t for emphasis, Doc). And that doesn’t figure. It doesn’t add up. You can’t teach surgery unless you know surgery. And you can’t teach humanity until you know yourself.
That’s your goddamn trouble. You’ve worried too much about being liked. What difference does that make really? Whether I like you or not isn’t going to help you sleep any better. The only thing that really makes any difference to me is how well you do your surgery. I don’t get along with Danforth because when he’s drunk he can’t do his job. Because he has talent and he wastes it. Because he fights himself. And when you fight yourself, by looking for recognition you don’t deserve, I don’t like you either. Not anymore than you’d like me if I neglected my job to the point where it might get you killed. So it’s really up to you in the first place. To me what you do, accomplish in your work, is you. A few months ago I didn’t know that. But that’s the way it is and should be. You and I are more fortunate than most. We at least know what our jobs are. Think of all the people that don’t know, that have nothing worthwhile to get their hands into. Our Kachins are worthwhile, you must admit that.
You see, Doc, you and I come from, in a sense, the same strata. We were brought up on the same lie. We were brought up to believe that as long as we had respect, whether we deserved it or not, that we were successful. And that’s a lie. Basically you and I both know what shits we are. And when we got a measure of respect we didn’t deserve, it threw us good. We knew we were wrong in accepting that respect, in eating it up, and we disrespected ourselves for that. Soon we began to be what we thought and believed. Disrespectful to ourselves, feeling shittier and shittier within ourselves. Thanks to a war maybe we’ll both be shocked out of it. So you be a good doctor, Doc, he had said a little drunkenly. Forget whether Joe Asswipe likes you or not. Forget your grandfather won that war, which ever one it was. You’ll find that by minding your own business and caring for yourself you’ll really be in demand, because a good man is always in demand.
No, Grey Travis thought, I will never forget that morning. I will never forget how easy it would have been for me, two days before, to shoot the Filipino had the Japs cracked the perimeter. You learned a lot in those three days, he said to himself. A hell of a lot. He ground out his cigarette. He stretched out in his sleeping bag his hands under his head. Things were going to be different this time. Prepare yourself for a shock, Grace. A real shock. He went to sleep. He smiled as he slept.
About three in the morning Doc Travis woke up. The sky was still full of stars and it was cold, the air clean. He lit a cigarette and as he struck the match Danny and Con not twenty feet away stirred in their sleeping bags. It was a hell of an hour, the Doc thought, to go looking in the woods for a latrine. He would become fully awake in his search for the latrine and would have a hard time trying to get back to sleep. Con or Danny wouldn’t go to the latrine this late. They would just get up and piss or crap in some convenient nearby place. But he, Doctor Grey Travis, would go to the latrine. That was stupid. Social mores, he thought, but he was going and would have a hell of a time finding it.
The Doc got up and started for the woods. The shadows of the trees made strange lines on the forest floor, and there was the smoke of the smoldering campfires against the silent all silence of the tired, sleeping Scouts. A Kachin would not go anywhere near a latrine at night, he recalled, walking steadily and lightly as possible. The Kachins believed there was a Nat Spirit that fed on human dung and that they might be attacked by this Spirit in the vicinity of the latrine. He made a mental bet with himself that he was probably the only guy in the whole camp that would walk to the latrine at this ungodly hour.
Once the Doc had arrived at the latrine he would not mind the walk at all. He could think there on the headquarters padded toilet seat. Con had ordered the seat and they had taken a pad of four inch sponge rubber from one of the ammo drops and cut out a piece to fit the seat; which Danny said made it the softest seat in the history of army latrines. Con had done a lot of map-work on this seat, the Doc knew, and Nautaung believed, sincerely, that Con planned his best ambushes when seated on the sponge rubber seat.
Doc Travis had often thought that he would like to have such a seat in his home in Nashville. For some reason he could always picture his mother-in-law sitting on the seat, and bouncing lightly and playfully, smiling for once; the toilet seat changing the entire routine of her life and she and the Doc finally finding somet
hing in common in that seat.
He could hear his mother-in-law tell his wife what a wonderful thing that seat was and his wife being flabbergasted at first, then he could see Grace trying it out for the first time, bouncing up and down on the seat that was so soft, and sprang so gently, and made one think so clearly. Something like that could really change a man’s life, the Doc had thought. And sometimes when the Doc had been drinking or feeling especially foolish he thought that if he never became a great psychiatrist, that he might manufacture padded toilet seats.
The Doc heared something move in the brush. He was sitting on the padded seat in the latrine and the noise made him shiver slightly. He sprang up and down once lightly on the seat and then he heard the noise again. It was alive, he thought, and not a noise a man would make. He finished and got up shivering and started through the woods for the headquarters, then he heard it again and stopped.
There was an eerie silence and only the dim light of the stars through the trees. He began to move slowly hearing only the crackle of his feet in the brush, and, then, he saw it directly in front of him, not ten feet away. He halted freezing. It was looking up at him and he could see the curve of its tusks and the hunched, bunched force of its shoulders as the boar set itself as if to charge.
He remembered the day Con had taken him to a village where they had caged a boar and he had stood outside the cage for over twenty minutes as the boar sharpened its tusks on a jagged, red rock; scrape, scrape, scrape like the sharp squeal of a street car or the thick squeeziness of two pieces of cotton rubbing together.
The sound of the honing tusks had never left him and now the boar readied to charge. It grunted and then oddly it seemed to smile. He saw, hugely magnified in front of him as if on a large motion picture screen, his two eldest daughters in their white party dresses standing before the fireplace of their Nashville home, then superimposed the aristocratic face of his mother-in-law, then Grace, his wife wearing that smug, satisfied expression he had seen on her that day she walked off the elevator of a downtown hotel, then he saw that same smug, satisfied look on the face of the boar.
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