Hard City

by Clark Howard

  A sudden single rifle shot punctured Richie’s thoughts and he leaped up, spaghetti thrown aside, machine gun in his hands. Vinnie leaped up beside him and they peered over the edge of the dugout down the hill. A white flag was being waved back and forth. The figure carrying it stepped out of the ranks of quilted-coated soldiers lined up just out of firing range and, keeping the flag high, moved precariously up the slope.

  “Maybe the war’s over,” Vinnie said.

  “This fucking war won’t ever be over,” Richie said. “It’s probably somebody coming up to ask us to surrender.”

  “I think we ought to,” Vinnie proposed again.

  “Remember Jake,” Richie said.

  “Fuck Jake! There’s no guarantee they’ll do the same thing to us. Look,” he tried to reason, “we got the short end of the fucking stick here. You, me, all these guys, the whole outfit. ‘Member all the bullshit they taught us about Marines never leaving their dead behind? Well, that’s just what it was, bullshit! They’ve left the fucking dead and the living behind, man. I say we give up.”

  “Give up if you want to,” Richie said. “Me, I’ll take one in the gut before I’ll let the cocksuckers stick my head in a pile of gook shit.”

  The white flag bobbed and weaved and the lone figure made its way along a rough path toward where they were. Lighting another cigarette, Richie studied Vinnie as the little Italian chewed nervously on his chapped bottom lip. Presently it started to bleed a little.

  “Listen, Vinnie, why don’t you go back to the bunker and start sending those coordinates again,” Richie said. “I’ll see what this gook has to say. If I think they’ll give us fair treatment, I’ll come and get you and we’ll surrender.”

  “You’re not bullshitting me?”

  “No, I mean it.” Richie nodded toward the bunker. “Go on.”

  “Okay, yeah, okay!” Vinnie looked like Jennie had looked the day Richie offered to write her book report the first time. “You’ll come get me now, right? Promise?”

  “Word of honor,” Richie said.

  Vinnie scurried out of the MLR and ran back to the bunker. After he was gone, Richie took all of the magazines out of the bandolier and laid them in a row on the lip of the dugout. He had already made up his mind to kill the gook with the white flag; he would have to because the gook was going to see that all the Marines in the MLR were dead. As soon as Richie did it, he knew they would attack. But he decided he might as well get it over with; then Vinnie could do whatever he wanted.

  When the figure with the white flag got almost up to him, Richie saw that it was one of the women. Frowning deeply, staring at her face, he realized with revulsion that she looked like an Oriental version of his mother. It was Chloe at twenty-five, except that her eyes were slanted and her cheeks were slightly rounder. Approaching closer, she smiled slightly, and it was his mother’s smile. Richie’s eyes widened, his sore lips parted, and his left hand, with the cigarette between his fingers, began to tremble. Only the weight of the submachine gun kept his other hand steady. The nearer to him the woman came, the more she looked like Chloe: the young, vibrant, determined Chloe before drugs ravaged her. Stunned, Richie climbed out of the dugout to meet her. When the Chinese woman stopped in front of him, he half expected her to speak his name.

  “What do you want?” he asked thickly. He knew she must speak English or they would not have sent her.

  “Marine give up,” she said. It was his mother’s voice. “Marine cannot win. Give up, go to nice camp, war over for you.” As she spoke, she looked curiously at the line of men on both sides of Richie. Expression turning incredulous, she said, “All dead?”

  “Yeah,” Richie replied, almost in a whisper. “All dead.” I can’t kill her, he thought.

  Suddenly, from behind Richie, came a sound he almost did not believe: the chopping-blade sound of helicopter rotors. Head snapping around, he saw half a dozen evacuation helicopters flying in formation over the crest of the hill above the bunkers. At once the horror of the Chinese woman’s presence vanished and Richie’s mind raced urgently: Jesus Christ, they were coming to get them! Vinnie came half running, half stumbling, out of the bunker, no helmet, no weapon, waving his arms frantically. Richie and the Chinese woman watched almost hypnotically as the first craft landed and half a dozen evacuation personnel leaped out and began pulling the bodies of the dead Marines from one end of the dugout. A second helicopter set down and more men disembarked, pulling stretchers after them. Vinnie was going crazy, running around screaming, patting men on the back, trying to shake hands, until a Navy corpsman took him aboard one of the helicopters. The other three craft set down and evac Marines fanned out all over the area.

  Richie looked back at the Chinese woman. He knew he should take her prisoner but on impulse he decided not to. She was pretty, like his mother had once been, and if he turned her over to the military police, there was no telling what the fucking apes would do to her. “Go back down,” he said, bobbing his chin toward the valley.

  Her face took on a vile mask then and she looked at him with anger and growing rage. Now she was the Chloe desperate for a fix, infuriated because something or somebody prevented her having it. Fiercely she threw the white flag on the ground and spat on Richie’s field jacket, snarling something at him in Chinese. Richie reached out and shoved her toward the path.

  “Go on back down!” he snapped.

  Instead, she pulled open her coat and reached for a pistol in her belt.

  “No!” Richie yelled.

  She drew the pistol anyway.

  Richie stroked the trigger of the submachine gun and riddled her body, plunging her thirty feet back down the hill.

  In the valley, the Chinese saw it and started their screaming uphill attack.

  Jumping across the dugout, now teeming with evac personnel removing bodies, Richie trotted toward the nearest helicopter. He had done it all now, he supposed. First he had fucked his mother when he was with Frances, and now he had killed his mother in Korea. He felt tears stream down his raw cheeks, whether from happiness at being rescued or remorse over what he had just done, he did not know. Maybe, he thought, there was no way to separate them.

  He climbed aboard the helicopter.

  In the rest camp at Inchon, behind the lines, Richie sat on his cot and looked at a stack of Red Cross stationery that was lying on the footlocker that went with the cot. Every day a Red Cross worker visited every tent and left writing material on all the footlockers. Every afternoon, when the Marines in the rest camp returned from showering after calisthenics, most of them sat or lay on their cots and passed the hour before evening chow writing letters home. Richie did not write letters. The only person he had written to was his grandmother, and he had received a letter just before Christmas the previous year, from a funeral home, telling him that Mrs. Clark had died. After that, there was no one to write letters to.

  The stack of Red Cross stationery was becoming embarrassingly high; they left a certain amount every day whether it was used or not. Richie did not know what to do with it. Somehow, it did not seem right to throw the stuff away. As he looked around the tent, it appeared that everyone was writing letters. Occasionally one or another of them would pause and look up—always, it seemed, directly at him. It was as if they were silently asking, “Well?”

  I’ll write a book report, he decided. There’s no way anyone will know; it’ll look like I’m writing a letter. Removing his boots, he sat on the cot with his knees propped up and opened one of the Red Cross tablets. Pausing in thought, he tried to decide which book to write about. He had had no difficulty getting interesting books to read in Korea; just since being in the rest camp he had read paperbacks by John O’Hara, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and W. R. Burnett. And for months, up on the lines, he had carried around a ragged paperback of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, reading random parts of it over and over, always moved.

  At the moment, however, he could not make up his mind which book he wanted to re
port on. Actually, the thought of doing it at all was no longer challenging. Richie knew, the moment he decided to do it, that it would not be fun now. Writing book reports seemed somehow ridiculous, superfluous, illogical. It was like masturbating when there was a naked woman on the bed waiting for you. Maybe, he thought, if he wrote something he had not read. Something he just made up. Something original. . . .

  On the tablet of Red Cross stationery, Richie wrote a title: “Hit and Run.” Thinking about his fight with Willie Wakefield, he began composing a story about boxing.

  52

  Richie knelt to brush some dead leaves from his grandmother’s grave, then placed a bouquet of flowers at the base of her headstone. Standing up, he dusted off the knee of his khaki uniform trousers and stood looking at the grave.

  He had only been in town an hour. After getting off the morning train from Memphis, he had left his seabag at the depot and walked uptown to the florist. With the flowers he bought, he had walked all the way out to Lamont Cemetery, which was past the high school, and roamed back and forth among the tombstones until he found Mrs. Clark’s grave. Now, after putting the flowers on it, he was standing there thinking that he should say something but not knowing what. Across the cemetery, a funeral for someone had just ended and people were walking back to their cars while two black cemetery employees waited nearby to start filling the fresh grave.

  Finally, with a restless sigh, Richie said, “Well, Miss Ethel, I’m sorry we didn’t have a little more time together.” But it was clearly time to go now, to put this place and everything in it behind him: his grandmother, the town, the past. . . .

  As he turned to leave, Richie saw a man walking toward him from the funeral group that was departing. A tall man with blondish-silver hair, he wore a seersucker suit and carried a leather-bound Bible that zipped closed on three sides. Smiling, he waved for Richie to wait. Approaching, he asked, “Are you Mrs. Clark’s grandson?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then you’re Tennessee Slim’s son?”

  “That’s right,” Richie said, dropping the “Yessir.”

  “I’m Brother Cecil of the Latter Jehovah Church. Would you be interested in some information about your father?”

  Richie felt his stomach knot up. His father! After all this time? Across all those hard years?

  “What kind of information?” he asked quietly, his mouth drying with the words.

  “One of the members of my flock is in the hospital dying of throat cancer. If you’ll come see him with me, you might be very glad you did.”

  “Who is it?” Richie asked. Could it be his father? Jesus Christ!

  “I’d rather you came and saw for yourself,” Brother Cecil said.

  It actually crossed Richie’s mind to decline, to walk away from it. Even if it was his father, what was to be gained now from seeing him? Richie was even a little afraid inside, not certain he wanted to dredge up any of the past again, unsure about how it would affect him. He had put so many things behind him now: he had a whole new life planned for himself, a future to which he was eagerly looking forward. Did he want to take a chance of upsetting that by learning something new that might interfere with the peace of mind he had worked so hard to achieve?

  The answer, he quickly decided, was yes.

  There was no way he could have refused. Whatever it turned out to be, was part of him. Part of what he was. He could not walk away from that.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Brother Cecil drove Richie to the hospital in a big shiny Packard that had a gold cross for a hood ornament. “My loyal flock gave me this car,” he said. “They had that hood ornament made special for it. Praise Jesus.” He glanced at Richie. “Are you saved, son?”

  “Not that I know of,” Richie said.

  “Today,” Brother Cecil speculated, “may turn out to be the most glorious day of your life!”

  Or the most fucked up, Richie thought.

  At the hospital, Brother Cecil led Richie along an antiseptic-smelling hallway, past doorways through which he got glimpses of patients, to an end room that had a screen around the door. Following Brother Cecil in, Richie saw that the blinds were closed and only a small nightlight was on, leaving the room very dim. Several women sat around the bed on metal hospital chairs, while one of them prayed quietly out loud.

  “Ladies,” Brother Cecil said, “I’m going to ask y’all to take a break for a little bit. The Lord has sent a special visitor today.”

  The ladies filed out, looking curiously at Richie, as he and Brother Cecil stepped closer to the bed. When Richie got up close, he saw that the man in the bed was not his father at all. It was the old farmer Lester, who had got him fired from Chalk’s Drug Store.

  “What the hell is this all about?” Richie demanded of Brother Cecil.

  “It’s about an opportunity!” Brother Cecil exhorted, clutching the zippered Bible to his chest for emphasis. “An opportunity for two souls to meet in the name of Jesus!” He pronounced the name “Ja-hay-us.”

  Richie turned to leave.

  “Wait!” he heard a horribly strained voice say. Looking back, he saw Lester raise a weak, pleading hand. “Wait. . . your daddy . . . I know . . . .”

  Richie stepped over to the bed. “You know what?”

  Lester turned his hollow, dark-circled eyes to Brother Cecil. “Leave us alone . . . .” Brother Cecil bowed slightly and backed out of the room. “Come closer . . . .” Lester rasped hideously to Richie. “I’ll. . . tell you . . . .”

  After sending Chloe and the boy down Moreridge Street to wait for him, Slim went over to the highway and started hiking toward his daddy’s farm. He had been hoofing it for about half an hour when a farmer in a pickup truck pulled over and gave him a lift.

  “You’re Solon Howard’s boy, ain’t you?” the driver asked.

  “Yessir. I been away for a spell. On my way back home now.”

  The driver, an older man, spat tobacco juice out his window. “Good time to show up,” he allowed. “Cotton’s about ready. Some places,” he bobbed his chin at a mile-long field they were passing, “are already picking.”

  Slim gazed out at the field hands in their straw hats, bent to the cloud-puffy cotton bursting out of its sharp bolls to draw in the morning sunshine. “Been a long time since I picked cotton,” he said quietly. “I reckon the bolls still slice a man’s hand up right smart.”

  “Cotton picking don’t change,” the farmer said. “The bolls tears up your hands, the bending wrecks your back, and the cotton dust clogs your lungs. God didn’t mean for us to get cotton cheap.”

  “Or anything else,” Slim muttered. He turned to stare at the farmer, his expression solemn, even a little frightened.

  “Somethin’ the matter?” the farmer asked.

  “Just looking at your bib overalls,” Slim said. “I once told somebody I’d never go back to wearing bib overalls.”

  The pickup continued on past the blanket-white cotton fields and followed the highway as it cut down into lower, more thickly wooded bottomland along the Mississippi River. The air changed from morning fresh to muggy wet. The river along the road was brown with mud.

  Suddenly Slim said, “Let me out along here, will you? I need to walk a little and do some thinking—”

  “I was about to pull over anyway,” the farmer said as he eased the pickup to a stop. “Take a look-see at that right rear wheel for me, will you? I thought I felt a shimmy.”

  “Be glad to,” Slim said as he got out. He walked back, knelt at the wheel, and ran his hand over the tire for a bubble. Then he gripped each side of the tire and tried to shake it. “I sure don’t see nothing wrong with it, mister,” he hollered, rising. As he turned, he found the farmer with a shotgun pointed at him.

  “My name’s Lester,” the man said. “Back just before you was sent to the penitentiary, a boy of mine drank some of your bootleg hooch at a high school dance. Tried to drive home drunk and got in a car wreck. Killed him. Now I’m fixi
n’ to kill you.”

  Extending his hands in a plea, Slim said, “Wait a minute, mister—”

  “I been waitin’, you son of a bitch, all these years. Now my waitin’s over.”

  Lester shot him point blank, blowing Slim’s chest open and hurling his body a dozen feet along the muddy bank. It landed silently in the wake of the shotgun echo.

  Lester walked over to the body and, with the toe of one work shoe, eased it into the river where it immediately sank.

  Richie stared at the old man in the hospital bed. The story he had told reverberated in Richie’s head like a shrapnel grenade, all the exploded pieces rebounding off the inside of his skull. His father . . . dead all these years, shot-gunned and dumped in the river like garbage.

  Putting a hand over his eyes, as if to block a blinding light, Richie gave a deep, hollow sigh. God, how he wished his mother were still alive, so he could tell her, so she would know that her husband had not just walked away from her like she wasn’t worth staying with. Jesus Christ, how one little bit of knowledge could so totally reshape the picture of the past. . . .