Empty Bed Blues

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bed blues

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bed blues george garrett

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2006 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 10 09 08 07 06 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrett, George P., 1929– Empty bed blues / George Garrett. p. cm. Summary: “Garrett’s eighth collection of short fiction includes fifteen stories that blend fact and fiction, comedy and pathos, and the voices of diverse characters while focusing on the themes of love and death as well as the complexities of human relations.”—Provided by publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1630-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8262-1630-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3557.A72E46 2006 813'.54—dc22 2005032955 ™This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Jennifer Cropp Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Baskerville and Copperplate

Publication of this book has been assisted by the William Peden Memorial Fund

This book is gratefully dedicated to my good friend and mentor—the late William Peden. For we have heard the chimes at midnight . . . .

Other Books by George Garrett

Short Stories

King of the Mountain In the Briar Patch Cold Ground Was My Bed Last Night A Wreath for Garibaldi The Magic Striptease An Evening Performance Whistling in the Dark Novels

The Finished Man Which Ones Are the Enemy? Do, Lord, Remember Me Death of the Fox The Succession Poison Pen Entered from the Sun The Old Army Game The King of Babylon Shall Not Come against You Double Vision

Poetry

The Reverend Ghost The Sleeping Gypsy Abraham’s Knife For a Bitter Season Welcome to the Medicine Show Luck’s Shining Child The Collected Poems of George Garrett Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments Plays

Sir Slob and the Princess Enchanted Ground Other

James Jones Understanding Mary Lee Settle The Sorrows of Fat City My Silk Purse and Yours Going to See the Elephant Bad Man Blues Southern Excursions

Contents

Prologue: Independence Day Feeling Good, Feeling Fine A Story Goes with It A Short History of the Civil War The Misery and the Glory of Texas Pete Tanks Empty Bed Blues Ghost Me What’s Holy Now Spilling the Beans: A Letter to Linda Evangelista Pornographers With My Body, I Thee Worship Heroes A Perfect Stranger Gator Bait Epilogue: My Life as a Home Movie

1 2 6 50 57 61 69 83 105 117 124 147 155 164 177

Acknowledgments

Versions and variations of some of these stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines—Archipelago, Blackbird, Five Points, Meridian, The Sewanee Review, 64, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, Witness; and as well, in several books published since 1985: The Old Army Game, Bad Man Blues, Southern Excursions, and Whistling in the Dark. For some of the material used in “Ghost Me What’s Holy Now,” the author is gratefully indebted to the scholarship and textual acument of F. H. Mares in The Memoirs of Robert Carey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Empty Bed Blues is a work of fiction. All the characters, dialogue, thoughts, and events are imagined and imaginary and are not intended to resemble any actual conduct by real-life people.

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“. . . The world began without us. It can live on any grief.” —Louis Coxe, “Revival”

Prologue Independence Day

Time: Early in the days of the Great Depression. Place: Florida East Coast, just south of the still-undeveloped, still-unspoiled Daytona Beach; a cottage in the dunes facing the sunstruck, breezy Atlantic. Persons: Ourselves, kith and kin, mostly cousins and children, camped there for a whole month. Also, from the only other cottage nearby, a group of pale young men, Yankees by their accent, but nice and quiet and neighborly, though having some odd habits like going to and from the beach in their bathrobes. Then came the Fourth of July. We waited for dark with our sparklers and Roman candles. Grown-ups, uncles and such, set off rockets over the ocean. A fine time until, all of a sudden, out on the front porch of their cottage the young men appeared, stood in a row, and, amid blooms of flame and earthshaking, ear-shattering noise, fired off fully automatic tommy guns. Shooting at the sky in happy celebration. Couple of days later, our neighbors were gone. Lucky for them, because soon after, here came the police and the FBI in many cars. “You boys are too late,” my father told them, laughing. They told us that the pale young men were the one and only John Dillinger gang. They said we were lucky to be alive. “Well, one thing for sure,” Father said. “They are all patriots.” “And they had very good manners,” my mother added, “even if they were Yankees.”

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Feeling Good, Feeling Fine

A boy and a man in the park. Between them a wooden bat, a battered and dirty baseball, and one leather glove, well tended and cared for, oiled and supple, but old, too, its pocket now as thin as paper. The boy and the man are sweating in the late afternoon light. Lazy end of a long summer day. The park (no more than a rough grass field) is empty now except for the two of them. Somewhere not far away a car horn toots, a dog barks, a woman calls her children in for early supper. “Come on,” the man shouts. “Knock it to me!” The boy, all concentration, tosses the ball up and then swings the bat to loft it high above the man. Who, skinny and raggedy as a scarecrow, moves back and away and underneath the high fly ball. Spears it with the glove. Then throws it high back toward the boy. The ball rolls dead, an easy reach from his feet. “Let’s quit and go home,” the boy calls. The tall man shakes his head and moves back deeper. “One more,” he hollers. “Just one more.” Crack of the bat on the ball, and this is the best one yet. A home run ball in the fading light, almost lost in the last blue of the sky. The man shading his eyes as he runs back and back until he’s there where he has to be to snag it. Snags it. Then comes running in toward the boy, grinning, a loping outfielder who has made the final catch of an inning. You might think the boy would be pleased to have swung his bat

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(the glove and the bat and the ball are all his) that well and knocked the ball so high and far. But truth is the boy hates baseball. “It’s my least favorite sport,” he will tell anyone who asks. Anyone except the man running toward him, his uncle, his mother’s brother, who has recently come to live with them after several years away at the state hospital. Uncle Jack, he’s had a hard time of it. First time he went crazy, his wife ran off with their two daughters, the boy’s cousins, to California or some place like that and disappeared for keeps. Boy doesn’t know it, can’t comprehend it even if he could imagine it, but he won’t ever see that woman and his two cousins again. Uncle Jack is living with the boy’s family for the time being, “until he has a chance to get things straightened out,” the boy’s father explains. When the boy complains about the hours spent—wasted as far as he’s concerned—knocking fungoes and chasing flys and grounders with Uncle Jack, his father simply says, “Humor him, boy. He’s good at it. Let him be.” He ain’t that good, the boy sometimes thinks, but doesn’t say. Said it once, though, and his father corrected him. “Listen, boy, he’s rusty and he hasn’t been well. But believe me, I’m here to tell you, he was some kind of a baseball player. A real pleasure to watch.” “Minor league,” scornfully said the boy, who can’t imagine anyone settling for anything less than the top of the heap. If he liked baseball enough to want to play at it, he would be in the majors or nothing. He sure enough wouldn’t be happy with some old photographs in an album and some brittle, yellowing newspaper clippings. And if he was a crazy man back from the state hospital and had a nephew who was required to humor him, the boy would never pretend, let alone believe for one minute, that he was getting himself back in shape so he could join the New York Yankees or the Washington Senators or somebody like that. Shit, Uncle Jack couldn’t even play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Uncle Jack now has the bat in one hand and the other arm around the boy’s shoulders (the boy carries the glove and the ball) as the two of them head for home in the twilight. “You hit that last one a helluva good lick,” Uncle Jack says. “You could be a real hitter if you put your mind to it. It’s all in the coordination, and you have got that, all you could ever need.”

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Why, if he hates baseball, does the boy relish and rejoice in the man’s words? Why, if his Uncle Jack is some kind of crazy person and is fooling himself and everybody else, too, about what a great ballplayer he was and thinks he still is, why does the boy automatically accept and enjoy his uncle’s judgment? Why, if his uncle is mostly embarrassment and trouble, someone to be ashamed of, does the boy at this very instant, altogether in spite of himself, wish more than anything that this tall, thin, raggedy, graceful man was and is everything he ought to be or could have been? (Years and years later, when this boy is a grandfather himself, for reasons he won’t understand then any more than he does now, he will tell his grandchildren, and anyone else who will bother to listen to him, all about his Uncle Jack, who was, briefly—but is not all beauty and all great achievement as brief as the flare of a struck match?—a wonderful athlete, a baseball player much admired and envied by his peers, someone who, except for a piece or two of bad luck, would have been named and honored among the very best of them. Someone to be proud of. Someone who once tried to teach him how to play the game.) They are close to home now. They have left the raw, wide field behind and are coming under a dark canopy of shade. Houses with green crisp lawns, dark earth and, here and there, a sprinkler pulsing bright water. Can see the lights of the boy’s house being switched on downstairs. Can hear briefly, before his father’s voice calls out a crisp command, music playing on the radio. That will be his sister or his little brother fooling around. Upstairs probably. He is almost close enough to see through the lighted windows of the dining room his mother and Hattie, the maid, who works late and long for them in this Great Depression, setting the supper table with flat silver, napkins, and water glasses. For a little time, the short walk, more of a stroll into gradual dark, he has been almost content. Weary, sweated out, but feeling good, feeling fine, soothed by his uncle’s complimentary words. Confident that whatever he does from here and now to the end of his life will be and go well. Even more: that he will be able not only to enjoy this feeling of satisfaction, of joy, really, but will be able to share it with others less fortunate than himself. What he cannot know, even as he and his uncle come across the lawn and into the house and shut the front door behind him, what

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he can’t know and will not choose to remember years and years later when he rakes the bitter ashes of his life searching for even one remaining glowing coal, is what happens next. At the table his father (who includes the whole family, even Hattie, in almost everything) will tell them about the long-distance telephone call he received at his office this same afternoon from a doctor at the state hospital in Chattahoochee. The doctor has told him that there is a new kind of operation on the brain that might, just might, cure Uncle Jack for good and all. No more coming and going, no more breakdowns and slow recoveries. It is a new thing. There can be no promises or guarantees, of course. And, as in any operation, there is always danger, there are always risks. But . . . Everybody listens intently. (Except Hattie, who elects to slip back into the kitchen quietly.) Everybody listens. And then before Jack or anyone can say anything, his mother bursts into tears. Sobs at the table, trying to hide her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking. Later that evening the boy will see his father, for the first and maybe the only time, slap his mother full across her soft face, making her sob again as they quarrel about what may be the best thing for her brother to do. His uncle will settle the quarrel by freely and cheerfully choosing to return to the hospital to undergo this operation. And—the boy and man would warn them then and now, if there were some way, any way, if only he could—it went badly, as badly as can be, leaving his uncle no more than half alive, a vegetable in that hospital for the rest of his life. The boy will live to be an old man, will go to war and live through it, will learn all the lessons—of love and death, of gain and loss, of pride and of regret— a long life can teach. But none of this has happened yet. Man and boy have spent a long afternoon in the park together and, at the end of it, have come home. They come in the front door. Jack grabs his sister, the boy’s mother, and gives her a bear hug, lifts her in the air. The boy goes to put the bat and the ball and the glove in the hall closet. Over his shoulder he hears his sister and brother coming down the stairs like a pair of wild ponies. Looking up, turning, he sees his father, smiling in shirtsleeves, coming out of the living room with the evening paper in his hands. “Here they are,” he says. “Here come our baseball players just in time for supper.”

A Story Goes with It

Fade In Insert: Berlin 1941 Ext. Berlin: Day We establish the city scene, busy and prosperous, lively. Except for a scattering of men in uniforms, there is no indication that there is a war going on. Ext. Military Staff Car: Day We follow the progress of a military staff car weaving its way through light traffic. The only sound we hear is music. Someone out of frame and off camera is whistling a tune, a child’s ditty or a little folk song. The sound of the whistling dissolves into a flute playing the same tune, as the car pulls up and parks in a space directly in front of an imposing building (the Reich Chancellery), well guarded, with flags, including the swastika, flying. A young junior officer jumps out of the front passenger seat and moves quickly to open the right rear door. He clicks his heels and salutes smartly as a mediumsized, middle-aged, high-ranking naval officer, wearing a heavy, full-length overcoat, steps out of the car, tosses a vaguely casual return salute to the young officer, and then moves briskly forward toward the main entrance.

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The young officer has to hurry to catch up. Which he does just as the guards at the entrance pop to attention and present arms. Int. Chancellery: Day To the continuing flute music and the quick rhythm of their boot heels, the two men march down a high-ceilinged hallway. They are directed by another junior officer, who leaves his desk to point them toward a doorway. Int. Map Room: Day They enter the chamber to see a group of uniformed men, men of high rank and importance, wearing dress uniforms, glittering and beribboned. All but one, who is wearing the brown and simple uniform of a common soldier. (Which, after all, is all that he ever was, a corporal, when he was a soldier.) All are gathered in close around the map table, their backs to the door, listening intently to the man in the plain brown uniform, who uses a pointer like a conductor’s baton. There is also present, close by the legs of the man with the pointer, a small dog, a wirehaired terrier. The dog reacts and barks once. All turn toward the door. The music, that lively and cheerful little tune, dies instantly as if cut off by a switch. Close Shot: Hitler Complete silence. Freeze-frame except for slight fixed smile of recognition. Word had come to Admiral Canaris that the Führer wanted to see him right away. Needless to say, Canaris dropped whatever it was that he was doing at the time and hurried away to report to his boss immediately. This would probably have to have been in late December of 1941, Christmastime coming on, after Germany had declared war on the United States, and close to the time when Churchill came over to the United States to try to help Roosevelt persuade a doubtful

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Congress that we had to fight the Krauts first and then try to take care of the Japs later. One at a time. All in due time. Europe first, Asia later. The Führer had come up with an idea. He wanted to try it out for size on Canaris. Canaris would recruit a dozen or so GermanAmericans. These men would be trained as saboteurs, sent over to America on a couple of submarines and secretly landed there. They would then proceed to bomb some factories and buildings and dams and so forth and so on and scare the living shit out of the Americans, who may have sincerely believed that three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean would keep them snug and safe from any real danger. He would show them a thing or two. Hitler wanted to do this just as soon as possible. He would turn over all the details to Canaris. Acting on a direct order from the Führer, Canaris could then do pretty much anything he wanted to or needed to. Just get it done. Spend a few weeks—a month or so ought to do it—training these clowns in your basic sabotage (for amateurs), then stuff them on the U-boats and dump them out on the beach over there. What do you think, Admiral? Canaris knows exactly how to answer that question when it refers to a project that has originated with the Führer, himself. With affirmative enthusiasm, that’s how. Back then, in 1941, Canaris was still riding high in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. He would—probably not to his surprise—rise even higher. Meanwhile, even though he had his full share of rivals and enemies, his apparent close and good relationship with the Führer gave him the power and resources to do all kinds of interesting things. Whenever he told somebody, anybody at all, that he was acting on the direct orders of the Führer (which was, in fact, true much of the time), they snapped to attention and shut up. Thus Canaris replied to the Führer that it sounded like a fine idea, a really swell idea, a neat plan, to him and that he would certainly be able to take care of it right away. Then get on with it, Hitler told him and waved him on his merry way. Canaris knew that it wouldn’t work. He knew it was going to be a complete disaster from the get-go. Even assuming that he could find enough German-Americans to fill the Führer’s requirements,

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then what? Of course he couldn’t and wouldn’t depend on or trust these people, but they wouldn’t learn anything of value, anyway. More to the point, they could not possibly be trained and turned into effective spies or saboteurs. They were all going to die. And what if these people had sense enough to run off and forget about the whole thing? Or if they turned themselves in to the Americans? So what? Never mind. No harm done. Still, Canaris thought, in the staff car on the way back to his office, there was definitely a plus side. For one thing, and always a serious consideration, there was an excellent chance that Hitler would now proceed to forget about the whole thing. As was often the case, a brand-new and interesting idea would soon pop into his head like a melody and take its place. Chances were good, really, that nothing would ever come of this one. Canaris would have to cover his ass, to be sure. Well, he would set things in motion and then see what, if anything, came to pass. Meantime, using the marvelous blank check of a direct order from Hitler, himself, he took over some nice farmland to serve as a special base and training camp, not just for the stumblebums that he would be sending to their swift and certain deaths, but for his own, much more serious intelligencers in the Abwehr. This secret base, with a wealth of equipment and training facilities, could pay off in many other ways. His people recruited some men who more or less fit the Führer’s requirements and then set to work, in a very casual way, training them for their deadly mission. They all played at being saboteurs during the daytime and partied well into the night. Everybody might as well have some fun while they were at it. And it could have gone along just like that indefinitely, right up until the end of the war, maybe, if the Führer hadn’t suddenly sent for Canaris and asked how things were coming along on the operation, now officially named Operation Pastorius. This second conversation about the saboteurs would probably have taken place in early 1942, say a month or so after the earlier one. We know that Hitler was in Berlin during most of January of ’42. He probably met again with Admiral Canaris before the thirtieth, because on that day we knew for sure that Hitler was host for a luncheon for a few close friends (not including Canaris) on the ninth anniversary of his succession to power in Germany on

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January 30, 1933. We even know some of the things he talked about at that lunch—rambling anecdotes about his days in prison and some thoughts about his present puppet government in Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t seem to have mentioned or referred to his secret plan to send saboteurs to the United States. Now then, please take a minute or two to consider that there were terrible things taking place all around the globe, any number of which—the war on the eastern front, for example, the back-andforth battles in North Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, where German U-boats were busily sinking hundreds of ships and maybe winning the war—could have claimed the full and undivided attention of both the Führer and the admiral. It is hard to remember, it requires an act of the imagination and maybe a fact or two, since we, here and now, can’t quite be unaware of the eventual outcome, that things weren’t going all that badly for the Axis or all that well for the Allies in late 1941 and early 1942. Out in the Pacific, our huge fleet (all but the aircraft carriers, thank God) was mostly resting at the bottom of the sea. Everywhere—Malaya, the Philippines, Indo-China, the East Indies, the South Pacific, the Japs were really kicking ass. It looked like nothing in the world could stop them or even slow them down a little. As a result of the strategic decisions by Roosevelt and Churchill to fight and (if possible) to defeat the Germans first, the Japanese were going to be able to take over enormous amounts of valuable real estate and to kill or capture many thousands of Americans and their allies while they were at it. Consider that, living in a very different world than our own, the American people, democracy or not, were not going to be allowed to participate in that strategic decision or any other. Or, for that matter, even know that such a decision was being made. We would fight, basically, a rearguard action in the Pacific, throwing away our assets piecemeal, holding on as best we could until the war in Europe was over and done with. Was this the right decision? Who knows? It was probably the only thing we could do at the outset. We did not yet have the means to fight on all fronts. Surrender or a separate peace with the Japs doesn’t seem to have been a serious option. These days somebody might try to cut a deal, but not then.

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How about the other side—Hitler’s decision to declare war against the United States? Of course, he had a treaty obligation to join with his ally, Japan. But, like most thoughtful leaders of that era, and of ours as well, he was never wont to let some old treaty stand in the way of what he perceived to be his immediate best interests. Truth is (I think), Hitler knew that sooner or later he was going to have to fight a war against the United States, anyway. Sooner the better, because he was fully aware of our enormous potential; in fact, he probably overestimated it. Meantime, like almost everybody then and since then, including the American government, he greatly underestimated the courage and resolve of the American people, betting the farm that after he finished off the Soviet Union, he could cut a favorable peace deal with Britain and America. Meanwhile, in late 1941, there is plenty going on, plenty of trouble all around. In North Africa the war goes back and forth, like a yo-yo, but whether they are advancing or retreating, the Afrika Corps under Rommel are clearly the force to be reckoned with. Sooner or later, they could go all the way to India and link up with the Japs, if the Japs don’t get there first. No kidding. Meanwhile the Mediterranean is nobody’s lake, and the Atlantic seems to belong to the German U-boats. On the eastern front the Germans are in the suburbs of Leningrad and Moscow, and by early December, deep into Russia everywhere else, though they are soon to be driven back by some Russian counterattacks. Trouble is, though, for the Russians, anyway, they have already lost something like five million men killed in action (and another three million captured) since the Germans invaded in June. They have also lost many thousands of their tanks and artillery pieces. If there is no real breakthrough by the Ruskies, come springtime, the Krauts will surely rock and roll again. Of course, bear in mind always that nobody except the leaders at the very highest levels among the Axis, the Allies, or anybody else, certainly not the ordinary people, the “informed citizenry,” knew anything about any of this. Like ourselves, they were at the mercy of the press. Lest the people should lose heart, it is a time for some bold symbolic gestures, a little good publicity. The Brits are commencing to

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bomb some of the German cities late at night. No real harm done, but it’s a thought, a beginning. They also make some little commando raids on the Lofoten Islands (in late December) and manage to blow up some local radio stations and a couple or three fish oil factories. Not a whole lot of big help (or much harm either) in the overall, worldwide war effort, but at least it is a little bit of cheery news for the stay-at-homes at the year’s end. It also hinted, if it did not demonstrate or prove, that it was at least possible that the Allies might someday or other decide to come ashore again on the European Continent. Maybe. . . . Folks at home could take heart. Meanwhile, however, the Krauts were not exactly quaking in their shiny jackboots. And not to mention the irony, of which Canaris, as chief of German military intelligence, would probably know all about as soon as anybody else did, i.e., in April of 1942, of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo with sixteen B-25 bombers. Its purpose was essentially identical to that of Operation Pastorius. In any case, here the Führer was at it again, still harping on his cockamamie scheme of carrying the war to America, in a symbolic way at least, by means of the saboteurs. Like the Doolittle Raid, it would serve chiefly as a little gesture to brighten up folks on the home front. When Hitler asked him how things were coming, what do you think Canaris said? He of course said that everything was coming along fine and dandy, right on schedule, my Führer. Just the way you wanted. Just the way you told me. Good, said the Führer. I’m very glad to hear that. And now I want you and your people to stop farting around and get this operation under way. Do you understand me, Admiral? Yes, sir. I want the operation to take place immediately. You understand that? Yes, sir. Like immediately, if not sooner. (Let me pause here long enough to say the chances are that the Führer did not say “farting around,” because, as you may very well know, Hitler suffered from serious flatulence problems and was more than a little sensitive on the subject. Moreover, I seriously doubt that any of them talked the way I have them doing here. My

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German, not used since my army days, is pretty rudimentary. So? As long as we get the gist of it, who cares?) You understand exactly what I’m saying to you, Admiral? Yes, my Führer. I fully appreciate and understand and will take care of it at once. Even though I am the one telling you this tale, it’s really Eddie’s story as he told it to me, and as I remember it, a long time ago. Eddie, my old and good friend, is dead and gone now, I’m sorry to say. We miss him. And so, for the time being, you are stuck with me, with my voice and my version of what, once upon a time, he told me, and as it was recorded at the time and has been preserved and maintained in my old man’s fallible and slowly fading memory. I sincerely wish I could honestly claim the same thing for myself. I have to admit that I have always had an almost irresistible urge to sneak some hard facts into the never-never land of fiction. (As witness this story here and now.) Or vice versa. I have demonstrated a desire to take control and to shape real stories as it pleased me to and all too often with no more than a casual fidelity to the original facts. Eddie was fully aware of this bad habit of mine and (I think) he was amused by it. From his point of view it was more like a kind of clowning around than anything else. No serious harm done. A grain of salt was in order. Which leads me directly to confront another problem in this version of the saboteur story. He talked and I (mostly) listened. Regardless of my ambiguous reliability, I was seriously interested, but not planning, not then or ever after, to “use” this material in a work of fiction or in any other form or for any other purpose whatsoever. I wasn’t even aiming to remember it. So that what we are dealing with here and now, all these years later, is only what I can’t help but remember. Memory plays all kinds of tricks on all of us, as we all know. All the more so when that memory has been stashed away, lying dormant like my old black-and-tan hound dog by the fireplace, snoring away. You know what Wright Morris is quoted as saying in a lecture at Princeton? He said: “Anything processed by memory is fiction.” In that sense, this is all fiction. In that sense, a lot of our “real” lives is pure fiction. Even Eddie is a “character” as I imagine him. So? So in honor of the late Eddie Weems and for the sake and memory

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of our long friendship, I hereby solemnly promise to tell you nothing more or less than what I do truly remember. Except for little things like imaginary dialogue (we already mentioned that they didn’t talk like that). I plan to stick close to the facts, insofar as I know what they are. It was bound to happen. After lying dormant for many years, our subject—the Nazi saboteurs who came to America in 1942—is back in the press. Terrorism and the contemplated and controversial use of military tribunals to deal with contemporary terrorists have made the story briefly pertinent at this writing. Somebody somewhere, out there in the ranks of the altricial media, was bound to remember those Nazi saboteurs of days gone by. And, sure enough, my February issue of the Atlantic Monthly arrived in the mail, featuring an excellent piece, “The Keystone Kommandos,” by Gary Cohen—thorough and enhanced by photographs of the saboteurs and of the military tribunal that tried them. Not long thereafter (February 17), here came the New York Times, checking in with a full-page article and several relevant photographs— “Terrorists among Us (Back in ’42),” by Andy Newman. Also available at roughly the same time was an article in the Coast Guard magazine, the Reservist (Jan.-Mar.), itself excerpted from a July 1997 “World War II Beach Patrol feature”: “Enemies on the Beach: Sixty Years ago, an alert Coast Guardsman stopped hostile enemies from infiltrating American soil.” These pieces inevitably overlap somewhat, since the writers were using a lot of the same primary materials, including various and sundry government documents now finally and fully available for examination, together with the official trial transcript of the tribunal. In the Atlantic, the “In This Issue” editorial page and the contributors’ notes tell us: “Gary Cohen (‘The Keystone Kommandos’) recently delved into more than 3000 pages of trial transcripts at the National Archives and the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, to unearth the story of their [the Nazis’] mission, capture and trial.” And all three of these pieces, though adding some facts and new information of their own, also, as they dutifully acknowledge, owe a very large debt to the basic published book on the subject— They Came to Kill: The Story of Eight Nazi Saboteurs in America (1962), by Eugene Rachlis.

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From Rachlis to Cohen and Newman and the U.S. Coast Guard you can’t find fault with any of these guys. They have definitely done their homework and their duty and their delving; and, within the limits and the ambiguous authority (and veracity) of the available official documents, their versions are about as accurate and authentic as can possibly be expected. To be sure, Eddie’s version is a little bit different. You’ll see. As luck would have it—and luck will have it all, after all, in the literary life as well as real life, I had long since finished this fiction, “A Story Goes with It,” and, in fact, already published a short version of it in the Sewanee Review, when there appeared on the scene a new book on the subject. It is called Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (2004), by Michael Dobbs. Mr. Dobbs, who is a reporter for the Washington Post, has done a wonderful job of assembling the basic facts and digging out the important details. Like Eddie, he actually went to the places and interviewed the people he could find. He writes, “My travels took me from the grounds of a former Nazi sabotage school in Brandenberg, Germany, to a windswept beach in Amagansett, Long Island; from Hitler’s bunker in the lake district of northeastern Poland to the streets of Chicago, where the saboteurs played cat-and-mouse games with their FBI pursuers.” I learned a great deal from Mr. Dobbs’s book. Some of it, both large and small points, firmly contradicts my own (Eddie’s as best I can recall it) version. Other things are confirmed. It is hard to imagine a better factually correct version of this story than Saboteurs; for all practical purposes it’s likely to be the last word on the subject. There is also a fairly recent study of the legal and constitutional issues of the saboteurs and this trial by military tribunal: Nazi Saboteurs on Trial: A Military Tribunal and American Law (2003), by Louis Fisher. Meanwhile, for mostly impractical purposes, my story is a work of fiction. If I were writing it in Turkish, I would use what is called “the rumor tense,” beginning: “Maybe it happened, and maybe it didn’t.” After finishing some basic training (if you can call it that), at the Abwehr farm, nine men are shipped off to Paris, carrying with them large sums of American money along with maps and plans and a

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George Garrett

lot of forged identification documents and so on. The plan is for them to go to Paris (then under German occupation), and thence to a German U-boat base on the French coast, where they can ship out to America. Plenty happens on the train to Paris. First of all, these guys get all drunk and rowdy and boisterous. They tell other people— employees and fellow passengers, anybody who will bother to listen to them—that they are German spies on a top-secret mission. When they finally get off the train in Paris, they somehow manage to leave behind them the whole kit and caboodle of American money, ID cards, maps, instructions, et cetera. The French conductor, who sometimes does a little part-time, amateur, after-hours spying on the side for the Resistance, picks up this trash and immediately turns it over to his superiors. So the French know all about it from the outset. And, indeed, they do take note of this information. But you must always bear in mind that the French are a lot more subtle and nuanced than we are. They will not be fooled by anything so obvious as this. They figure it’s a dumb Kraut trick. So they deep-six all the materials and don’t bother to mention it to anyone else at the time or even (especially) later. As for the saboteurs, they now have to wait around for a little while, maybe a week or ten days, while a whole new package of materials is put together by the Abwehr and then brought to them. They spend most of their time in Paris barhopping and sightseeing and chasing tail. And they continue to tell all kinds of people, in public and private places, that they are highly trained, heavy-duty German saboteurs getting ready to go to America and to blow a whole lot of important infrastructure sky-high. Naturally their behavior and their claims come to the attention of the French and even of Allied intelligence, all of whom promptly disregard it as just one more boneheaded German trick. One of the saboteurs manages to get himself a serious dose of clap while screwing around in Paris. Lucky for him, he is scrubbed from the mission. The others, eight of them, now reequipped with the money and papers and maps and plans, are taken down to a submarine base and put aboard two U-boats there, lone wolves of the new Type 9. At the very last minute, just before the subs slip out and away, here comes a special motorcycle courier, driving wide open and practi-

17 A Story Goes with It

cally airborne, with a special personal message to them from the Führer himself. This cheerful farewell missive advises them that while they are at it, they should be sure to try to blow up a few Jewish department stores in New York City. Ends with the Nazi equivalent of “Have a nice day!” The late John Edward Weems (born 1924) was, among other things, a first-rate journalist and writer. Beginning with A Weekend in September, an account of the great Galveston hurricane of 1900, he published, by my informal count, some fourteen books on a variety of subjects. Among them two fine books about Admiral Peary—Race for the Pole (1960) and Peary: The Explorer and the Man (1967); several books of solidly researched and well-written popular history—The Fate of the Maine (1958), Dream of Empire: A Human History of the Republic of Texas (1971), To Conquer a Peace: The War between the United States and Mexico (1974), Death Song: The Last of the Indian Wars (1976); another book or two about stormy weather—The Tornado (1984) and If You Don’t Like the Weather (1986). One of my favorites is a wonderful book about some early American rascals and scoundrels—Men without Countries: Three Adventurers of the Early Southwest (1969). These three rogues were spies for Thomas Jefferson—or maybe against him. We’ll never know for sure. Here Eddie introduced me to a character, James Wilkinson, I would love to turn loose in a wildly picaresque novel or a movie or an opera or a comic book about chicanery and hanky-panky and hocus-pocus among the Founding Fathers. Wilkinson was an American general at twenty-one in the Revolutionary War. Made a quick fortune, married a Biddle, and was, in the words of the book jacket, “an incorrigible double-dealer.” He was also, we soon learn, a spy for Spain even while serving on the southwest frontier as commander of U.S. forces there. Wilkinson was something of a writer in his own right, covering his ass and his tracks in a threevolume memoir—Memoirs of My Own Times (1816). I plan to read it some day if I live long enough. Meanwhile I have Eddie’s book. At one time Eddie was also an editor and the associate director of the University of Texas Press. Which is how he happened to be my editor and how I first got to know him. While he was there,

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Texas published two books of mine—The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems (1958) and In the Briar Patch: A Book of Stories (1961). These books were beautifully made—one won a design prize—and I was and remain proud and grateful. Some years later, in 1971, a little magazine called The Mill Mountain Review did a special issue, “In Appreciation of George Garrett,” about my work. And, hey, that was fine and dandy with me. I can enjoy appreciation as much as the next guy. It was all very nice and satisfactory; some poets contributed poems, some people submitted stories or essays. Eddie Weems sent along a loosey-goosey sequence of anecdotes (oddly appropriate to this piece I am writing more than thirty years later), which I now shamelessly quote: Your recent request for “critical essays, poems, stories, memories, anecdotes and whatever else comes to light, all concerning George Garrett—his career, his work and himself” left me bemused. The request evoked happy memories of years ago—most of them funny, a few even hilarious (which I regard as an intrinsic compliment to George Garrett), but at the same time hardly material for critical essays, poems, or stories. Many of the happenings would, in fact, be better kept in strictest confidence between George and me, rather than be used in any literary tribute to George. An instance of this is the time when, as promotion and advertising director of the University of Texas Press (George was an author of ours), I drove him from Austin to Fort Worth, where he spoke at a writers’ day luncheon at Texas Christian University. That night, while returning to Austin after partaking festively of chocolate milk and Jack Daniels (which does not represent depraved taste, as so many people have believed), we had a flat—just south of Waco. The tirechanging process of fitting those holes in the wheel to the lugs was made even more challenging than usual, and I spent fifteen minutes, in absolute darkness, trying without success to put on the spare, while George stood by wondering what the trouble could be. Finally he struck a match, and we saw our difficulty: I had been trying to put the spare on backwards. Now, as I said, these remembrances would not make any sort of tribute to George, but I suppose this one might: it commemorates his helpfulness. Had he not struck that match I probably would have been there until sunrise trying to put the spare on backwards. As I said at first, I had not intended to write a tribute to George

19 A Story Goes with It

Garrett from these recollections of years ago, but the more I think about them the more I see that they do illuminate George’s good qualities, after all. There was, for another instance, the time I saw his inherent honesty displayed—at a crowded bar-and-billiard parlor near the beach in Venice, California. I had stopped over in Los Angeles (en route home from a university presses meeting at Stanford University) to visit George, who was then in Hollywood writing the screenplay for “The Young Lovers” for Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. We had sallied forth to the beach during the afternoon—it was one of those days of unusual Southern California heat—and had removed ourselves to the bar-and-billiard parlor for several hours to escape the blistering sun. Leaving, we were already outside the door before realizing we had left change for a ten-dollar bill on our table, and we hurried back to retrieve the pile of money before the waiter thought it was all meant for a tip. Blinking in the nowunaccustomed dark interior and disconcerted anew by the din and general confusion of the place (as well as the mist that seemed to hang over everything), I nevertheless thought I had found the change, still on the table—bills and coins—and had just picked it up when a group of mean-looking pool-shooters rushed toward us with cues and bottles in their fists, shouting, “Look! They’ve come back—and they’re taking our money!” After I had dropped their change and quickly picked up our own money from the correct table George—exhibiting his usual honest appraisal of any situation—said to me (after we had again made our exit), “That was their money. We’re lucky to be alive.” Not only is George Garrett honest in his appraisals, he is (as further reflection shows me) without pretense or hypocrisy. I recall the time when, many years ago, he spoke at a Protestant church-affiliated school in Texas (a description that should indicate adequately the rules and regulations therein) and was quartered overnight in a plush guest room, one of several apartments maintained by the school in its Bible building. That night he invited several of us to partake of more Jack Daniels (with water this time, considering what we had endured after the chocolate milk) then, later, replaced the empty bottle in the bag and tossed it in a trash basket. Weeks afterward I heard from a relative associated with the school that George had created something of a scandal. The janitor, apparently in his routine inspection of trash, had found the bottle and had reported its presence to the administration—a fact of which I believe George is even now unaware. He had put the empty bottle back in the bag, to save their feelings, but he would not hypocriti-

20

George Garrett

cally or cravenly carry it outside and throw it in a large trash bin some distance away, where its ownership probably would have remained unknown, even to inspecting janitors. Humility is another characteristic I have observed in George—on one occasion during a visit to his home in Houston, where he was associated some years ago with the Alley Theatre and with Rice University. While I was there the mail came, including the latest issue of the Princeton University alumni magazine. That publication carried a list of books by Princeton authors, and in this issue mentioned George’s book of contemporary poems, Abraham’s Knife—listed in a category entitled “Books on the Civil War.” I reflected at the time that it required humility to laugh the way George did, but on the other hand—he had not then been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Now that I am caught up in these memories I could go on, but— to repeat—these recollections (and some few George might add) would be better kept confidential. Instead, as a tribute, I have dedicated a book to be published later this year by Simon and Schuster to “some men in the world of books who have been encouraging and helpful in past years”—to George Garrett and a few others. This seems much more appropriate, mutually, to our current professional dignities than written recollections of much younger days— or critical essays, poems, and stories based on those memories. The book might sell only 1,018 copies (taking for an estimate the average sales of five previous books), but the dedication to a talented, lively author is no less sincere. (174–75)

What has all this got to do with those eight saboteurs bobbing and barfing their way across the wide Atlantic in the cramped and stinking and highly dangerous little world of a submarine? Well, along about that same time, the late fifties or early sixties, Eddie and his agent cut a deal with a major commercial publisher for a book about the Nazi saboteurs. What happened next was that, even before Eddie had finished up his extensive research, the Rachlis book came out. Out of the blue. And Eddie’s publisher soon decided there really wasn’t enough interest to justify two books on the exact same subject. As Eddie understood it, They Came To Kill had sold the paperback rights up front for a lordly sum. There was also a movie sale and so forth. Not much left over, slim pickings (if any), for ole Eddie’s book. The publisher, surprisingly enough, offered him a pretty good deal to just drop the book

21 A Story Goes with It

and the subject. They didn’t have to, but nevertheless, they said he could keep all of the large advance. Moreover, to sweeten things even more, they also proposed that they would pay him something more than that, a kind of “kill fee.” In return he would give them, as their property to use or abuse as they saw fit, all his notes and as much of the manuscript as he might have already written. His agent characteristically advised him to take the money and run. It had all been a kind of assignment, anyway. Eddie was always a pro, first to last. Win a few, lose a few. He needed the money, and he had plenty of other subjects he was interested in working on. So why not? The downside was all the time and energy and effort he had already spent on it. Eddie went far beyond the version available from the trial transcript and such government documents as he could get ahold of at the time. He had traveled over to Germany and France and all across America searching for and interviewing people who were involved in the story one way or another. As for myself, I had been interested in the story of the Nazi saboteurs for a long time, ever since I was a teenager (1942) living in Florida, mostly, that year, in an old house, a shack really, set in the sand dunes, facing the Atlantic Ocean near what is now called New Smyrna Beach. It was called Coronado Beach then. We could sit in our rocking chairs on the front porch and watch the Coast Guard patrol the beach every evening. We saw all kinds of wreckage and great gobs of oil and even sometimes dead bodies that washed up on the beach. We witnessed some firefights involving planes, Wildcats from a nearby airport, and German U-boats as tankers and freighters tried to run safely north or south close along the Florida coast. Jacksonville Beach, (Ponte Vedra), where one group of four of the Nazi saboteurs came ashore from a submarine, was north of where we were. But we heard all about it, long before we were ever able to read anything in the papers or in the magazines. We took it to be yet another rumor, only one among many. We saw no reason to doubt it. There were already stories that German sailors, captured or killed, were found to have receipts from grocery stores and even ticket stubs for movie theaters in Daytona, St. Augustine, Cocoa Beach, et cetera, all up and down the East Coast.

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George Garrett

Why doubt the possibility of some saboteurs? One of my sisters remembers going to a beach party up at Jacksonville Beach along about the same time that the saboteurs (we later learned) were supposed to have come ashore. On the way back home, they got stopped at several checkpoints. They had to prove their identity and submit to a search of the car. My sister and her friend thought it must be something to do with the abuse of gas rationing. We only had an “A” card, three gallons a week. But the police and soldiers offered no explanation of the checkpoints. And something else. I knew a woman who was a newspaper reporter. She told me how she had gone up to Jacksonville Beach to see some of the evidence against the saboteurs after the whole thing was known, namely some supplies and explosives that they were supposed to have buried when they first landed. The FBI was there to show off the stuff, to let reporters take some pictures, and to answer any questions. What troubled her a little was the fact that the shallow hole in the sand was obviously very recently dug. Like maybe an hour or so before the reporters arrived. You can tell a thing like that easily in soft beach sand. Moreover, the materials were all brand-new, and some items looked to be American-made, not German at all. Surprise, surprise? Well, not really. Everybody knew better than to ask too many questions about anything in those days. Information was carefully rationed, doled out, managed, manipulated (as they say). Like meat and sugar and leather and gasoline. Bear in mind that the first photographs that showed dead American corpses were allowed to be published in 1943 or 1944. The president is said to have asked that some photographs of American dead should begin to be published in the magazines so that the public could get used to the idea before D-day. Remember, too, that we were years finding out the details of exactly what had happened at Pearl Harbor. We were told it was bad, but we had no idea just how bad it had been until much later in the war. So, sometime in the late 1960s, as I recall, I asked Eddie Weems to tell me something about the Nazi saboteurs of 1942. Have I already mentioned that Eddie and I were drinking? Bourbon on the rocks, I’m sorry to say (or am I?). We did a lot of that in those days, and I guess I could tell you a thing or two. However, I only mention it here because it is one more factor in

23 A Story Goes with It

the veracity of this story. Eddie was telling me his version, not for posterity or publication, but because I had asked him to. Meanwhile I was listening and sipping some good whiskey and enjoying the story for its own sake and nothing else. Oh, all right, since you asked, a couple of quick bourbon stories. Like the time I went up to Austin for the publication of In the Briar Patch. We had a party at Eddie’s house. All kinds of people, friends of Eddie and Jane, showed up. Two were honored and prominent Texas men of letters, men I had admired for most of my adult years but never imagined getting to meet in person—J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb. It was wonderful to meet these men and to talk to them for awhile. It was only years later that I heard (I still don’t know if it’s true, but . . .) that Dobie and Webb had quarreled and that they never went to any place socially where the other one was likely to be. Only for Eddie Weems would they turn up together. That says something about Eddie Weems. We had a fine old time, to be sure; and on the morning after, hungover, but still young enough to be cheerful, I dropped by the Press to see Eddie and to make my manners to Frank Wardlaw, director of the Press. He and Eddie were going to drive me out to the airport. I brought along a bottle, and we sat in Frank’s office, laughing and scratching and talking trash and taking some hits until it was time for us to go to the airport. Got there (safe and sound). It was a terrible-looking little airport. Parking lot empty. Tall grass growing everywhere. Not much activity that we noticed. We still had some time to kill. So we sat in the car talking and taking some more pulls on that rapidly dwindling bottle. About that time a man driving a great big grass mower (a bush hog?) came alongside, cutting a swath of tall grass near where we were parked. He cut down a couple of rows of grass and weeds and then pulled up right next to us and cut his engine so we could at least hear each other. “You boys waiting for an airplane?” he asked. “Yes, sir. Going to fly out of here to Houston in about fifteen minutes.” “Well, sir, I don’t reckon you’re going to make that flight and there won’t be another one coming along right away, either.” “How come? If you don’t mind my asking.”

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George Garrett

“Not at all,” he said. “This here airport has been closed up tight for the last five years ever since they built the new one across town. I think you might have better luck if you drove over there and waited.” “Much obliged.” It was then that one of us, probably sharp-eyed Eddie, noticed that the roof of the terminal was all caved in and there was a chain and a huge padlock on the front door. Or, another tale selected from among many, there is the time Eddie, as a world-class expert on storms of all kinds, was hired by the Houston Post, also in 1961 I think, to go down to Galveston and cover a hurricane that was headed there. He was to go down and weather the worst of the weather and call in his copy (if he could). On the way down, Eddie swung by my house in Houston and picked me up to come along with him as company. I was given a camera and some bogus press credentials, and we headed off into the teeth of the storm (as they say). Eddie wanted to rest his eyes a little and maybe to take a brief nap. So we switched off. I was driving and Eddie was stretched out in the backseat of my old Rambler. He was snoring away like my old hound dog. The road was open and empty (officially closed). The rain was hard and horizontal; the wind was high. I am peering into it, squinting, leaning up close to the windshield, cocking my head, and keeping time with the windshield wipers, driving along at a crawl. Here comes a Texas State Trooper blinking and flashing his lights. Pulls me over. Parks and comes around to my window and raps on it. I run it down. “May I see your license and registration, please, sir?” he asks politely. “And if you don’t mind my asking, just what the fuck do you think you are doing here?” “Going to Galveston, officer.” “No, you ain’t, sir. This road is closed to civilian traffic.” “We’re not civilians. We’re from the Houston Post.” “Got any press credentials?” “Sure. Only he’s got them all with him.” Eddie, curled up in the backseat like a bull seal or a walrus, is still snoring away. “He’s the reporter, and I’m the photographer.”

25 A Story Goes with It

“How would I know that?” “Well, sir,” I tell him. “Here’s my camera. . . .” It does indeed say “Property of the Houston Post” on it. I wouldn’t know how to take a picture with it if my life depended on it. Which, thank goodness, it doesn’t. “Okay, buddy,” the trooper allows. “What about him?” I am struck with sudden inspiration. We do, after all, have a copy of Eddie’s book on the great Galveston hurricane, Weekend in September, sitting on the front seat. It has a nice picture of an unmistakable Eddie Weems on the jacket. I hold it up high so the trooper can see for himself. He peers at the picture and then at Eddie. “That is John Edward Weems, officer. He wrote the book on hurricanes.” Trooper thinks about it, then suddenly waves us on our way. “If he don’t wake up soon, he ain’t going to write another book today.” I am off and running, laughing and scratching. After a while ole Eddie wakes up and stretches. “Everything okay?” He asks. “Everything is copacetic, five-by-five.” Lucky for us, it turned out not to be quite so bad as everybody had expected. It was a powerful storm, though. When we finally got to Galveston, the place was pretty much evacuated and abandoned except for (as ever and always) cops and firemen and rescue workers. We looked around. Eddie talked to a policeman or two and took some notes. Then he drove around looking for something familiar, found it, it seemed, and pulled up and parked right in front of an enormous birthday cake of a Victorian mansion. There were some pale lights, candles probably, from inside. “What next?” “We wait right here,” he told me. So we sat there in the car, pelted by the heavy rain, our car windows fogged over, ourselves passing the bottle back and forth while we waited. For what, I wasn’t sure. The end of the world maybe. Maybe a half hour or forty-five minutes later—not a long time, but long enough for us to get ourselves somewhat inebriated—a couple of police cars came sloshing along through the rising water, together with a bus. They pulled into the driveway of the big house, and a couple of cops in wet and shiny slickers clumped

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George Garrett

up the stairs and pounded on the front door. We kept busy wiping the windows inside, trying to see. Shortly the front door opened, and here came a line of young women, all of them dressed in bathrobes, running for the bus, with the cops, like a brace of sheepdogs, herding them along. “I knew it!” Eddie said. “I knew damn well this is exactly how it would be.” He put on the car lights and got out and stood there in the rain watching. Some of the young women did a kind of double take when they saw Eddie standing in the light and waved at him. “Hey, Eddie!” somebody called out. “Hey, Eddie! What are you doing here?” He neither waved nor answered. “They’ve got me confused with somebody else,” he said to me. After the cops and the bus drove away, Eddie got back in the car, wiped off as best he could and took a couple or three major swallows of bourbon, the latter, as he explained to me, so he wouldn’t end up catching a bad cold. As for what we had just witnessed, he had nothing to say except this: “Bastards! Wouldn’t you know they would keep them waiting until the very last minute to be evacuated. It’s a damn shame.” We drove around until we found a phone booth, one that still worked. “Wait right here in the car,” Eddie said, taking his notes (already well soaked with rain) and the bottle with him. The light in the booth didn’t work, so he had me to jockey the car around where the car lights could do the job. I watched him putting coins into the phone, then talking to somebody. Talked awhile, then hung up. Took another pull from the bottle and walked slowly back to the car. “Let’s go home,” he told me. “Back to Houston. It’s all over.” “What do you mean? What happened?” “I called in and dictated my story, and they took it all down carefully and read it back to me. Then they fired me. Bill Hobby fired me in person.” “Why did he do that?” “Beats me,” Eddie said. “It was a hell of a good story, too—how they evacuated the best whorehouse in Galveston in the big middle of a hurricane.”

27 A Story Goes with It

To the best of my recollection (as witnesses always say in courtroom dramas), I have only told Eddie’s version of this saboteur story a couple of times before now. Both times that I told it, different occasions, were at the same place—evening on the front porch of my house in York Harbor, Maine, overlooking the York River. In the evening, that river, with its moored lobster boats and sailboats and large and small pleasure craft, rising or falling according to the tide, glistens with a ghostly light like a wet blacksnake. Anyway, I told Eddie’s saboteur story (separately) to two old friends—John McPhee and David Slavitt. McPhee seemed to like the story and said so. Slavitt liked it, too, and wondered out loud if he could maybe make a piece of fiction, a novel, out of the subject, creating his own version and not exactly using Eddie’s version or anybody else’s. I couldn’t think of any good reason why not. Slavitt, a brilliant and prolific poet, novelist, story-writer, critic, and translator (author of more than eighty books at this writing and more are in the pipeline), gave the story of the saboteurs his own inimitable twists and turns. Ringer (1982) tells its own story, based, as he allows in his “acknowledgments,” on Rachlis’s They Came to Kill (1961), but also clearly and boldly a work of fiction. “I have merely extended the truth into what I hope is a plausible and entertaining story.” He used few of the details from Eddie’s version (as remembered and told by me), but he was wonderfully faithful to the spirit of Eddie’s unwritten story. On the one hand, Ringer is a fast-paced, page-turning, classic thriller deftly plotted and enhanced by the usual required ingredients of sex and violence, murder and mayhem. Just as it is, it would make a swell action movie. In his blurb, Richard Elman called it “a movie in words.” If Eddie’s version calls for the Coen brothers, Ringer might be perfect for Tony Bill. On the other hand, there is a gracious plenty of “comic relief,” of slapstick and pratfalls. Ringer is a Shakespearean mix in the way that Eddie’s version is a mix (and, if you insist, as mine is here and now. As, alas, real life is.) Slavitt produced a very clever, original, and complex piece of work. Playing fast and loose with many of the facts, he nevertheless managed to follow the true history fairly closely. The biggest change in Slavitt’s version was to make the

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George Garrett

mission a double-barreled plot. The saboteurs, all of them hopeless and hapless amateurs, are supposed to blow up Jewish department stores in New York City. That is their one and only suicidal assignment. Among them, however, and unknown to any of them until late in the story, there is the “ringer,” a real professional, a hit man by trade, who has the special assignment of murdering Albert Einstein. This leads up to a wild final sequence in Princeton during the annual Princeton Reunions, where, among other things, two men in Princeton Tiger costumes pull each others’ tails and shoot it out on stage in front of a large crowd of drunken alumni. I have to believe Slavitt put that in as a little thank-you tip of the hat to me—I went to Princeton, as did John McPhee, who was a class behind me. Slavitt also has a character who is a master sergeant, my old rank, by the name of Garrett, who appears briefly and is celebrated for his “style of invective.” Never mind. We have our little private jokes from time to time. I have read most of Slavitt’s books but somehow had not read Ringer until right now, right in the big middle of doing my own version. There probably have been others, too, but so far Ringer is the only work of fiction that I know of about the Nazi saboteurs of 1942. You ought to read it sometime. From here on Eddie’s version of what really happened in the saboteur story differs significantly from all other accounts that I know of. If there is any truth, or even a serious probability in Eddie’s version, then you wouldn’t expect the people who were involved—the Coast Guard, the FBI, the president, the attorney general, the Supreme Court, et cetera, to confirm it unless they got caught and had to. Otherwise they almost certainly would, as is the habit and wont of all governments, large and small, local and global, have attempted to cover it up as much as possible. Real people with real names were duly honored with medals and with public praise, J. Edgar Hoover among them, for the bold and efficient way they dealt with the challenge of the Nazi saboteurs. People have had buildings and streets named after them. Let it be. Let them all rest in peace. From here on, with the exception of some of the dead saboteurs and maybe a few others, I won’t badmouth anybody. The Jacksonville Beach landing went well, everyone agrees. No

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problem. The four men who landed there scattered at once and didn’t get caught until later on. The other group landed on Long Island. On the quiet and foggy night of June 13, 1942, near midnight, four saboteurs paddled a rubber boat towards shore. They wore German uniforms so that if they were captured while landing, they would legitimately be taken as prisoners of war, not spies. Army or navy uniforms? Nobody can agree on that now. I, myself, prefer to imagine them (why not?) in regular Wermacht uniforms with those heavy and distinctive German steel helmets. Who knows? As luck would have it, they paddled right up to a pier that was part of the Amagansett Station of the U.S. Coast Guard. Happens there was a Coast Guard seaman there, too, out on patrol. This seaman was a kind of a discipline problem and was pulling this night patrol duty as a punishment. He saw the four men paddling up to the pier and snubbing a line on a cleat there. He pulled out his .45 pistol and pointed at them. The four men dutifully raised their hands. The sailor stepped over to a field telephone that directly contacted the duty officer at the station. “Sir,” he said, “I got me four guys down here, all dressed up like German soldiers, tying up to our pier. What you want me to do about them?” “What I want you to do, you little shit, is to hang up that phone and get your ass out on beach patrol immediately. And if you ever call me again with some kind of a crazy story like that, I will personally see to it that you stand a court-martial.” (Or words to that effect.) “Yes, sir.” Hangs up the phone. Puts pistol back in its holster. Waves politely to the four men in German uniform, who are just standing there trying to make up their minds whether to run for it or give up. Not a word but waves his friendly hello and goodbye and then hops off the pier and starts walking away along the beach. Just as he was told to do. The four men pull the rubber boat and their other gear up under the pier and just above the high-tide line as marked by seaweed and flotsam and jetsam. They proceed to shed their uniforms and bury them casually in the sand. They settle down to catch some shut-eye while waiting for dawn.

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While I was writing this story, I got in touch with my old friend Allen Wier, a gifted novelist and story writer. Allen and I had once made a tour of Texas colleges reading from our new books— Allen’s Departing as Air and my novel The Succession. One of the places we went to was Baylor, where Allen had gone to school. Baylor is in Waco, which is where Eddie Weems was living at that time. I think Eddie was working at Baylor. Now I asked Allen for any recollections he might have of our time with Eddie in Waco. He replied, and I’ll be quoting from his letter to me dated June 3, 2002. “When we got to Waco, we stayed at Eddie and Jane Weems’s house. Eddie drove us over to Baylor for our reading. After the reading, Eddie piled us into his car . . .” Politely Allen avoids the subject of the reading itself. Baylor was and is a very strict and straightlaced place. Good school, but kind of strict. Allen is too polite to remind me that all three of us, he and Eddie and myself, having had a few drinks to prepare for this important occasion, were reeking of alcohol. People left in goodsize clumps and crowds even before we had been so much as introduced or read a word out loud. A bad scene . . . “After the reading, Eddie piled us into his car, winking and grinning. He wouldn’t tell us where we were headed, just that he had something to show us. We drove all across Waco in the dark and stopped in front of one of those big metal buildings they erect in about a week. This one was blue metal, and there was a big neon sign—I think it was ‘The 500 Club,’ something like that—pink neon lighting up a large parking lot full of pickup trucks and Cadillacs and Lincolns. Eddie sat there grinning as if we were parked in front of the Taj Mahal. “ ‘Just last week,’ he told us, ‘a fellah rode his horse inside.’ “Remember, George, you and I had to catch a red-eye flight very early the next morning on a ‘Git-along-little-dogie’ airline, en route to Abilene Christian College, I think. And we were already pretty bushed—ten readings in eight days (or was it eight readings in ten days?). Anyway, ole Eddie herded us into that big blue metal building where rock-and-roll and strobe lights pulsed steadily, and there were all these nekkid girls everywhere you looked. That place must have had four or five little stages and a stripper or two on every stage.

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“Several of the dancers waved and hollered at Eddie as we walked in. Once we were seated at a table, a girl in a French maid’s outfit came and took our drink orders. Eddie was handing out credit cards and big smiles in all directions. It was as if we were celebrating birthdays or one of us was fixing to get married the next day. “Eddie paid for ‘table dances’ for both of us, and in my memory he hired two or three girls to dance for each of us at the same time. Our little black cocktail table was crowded with women undressing up close and personal.” One thing I do remember, Allen, was this. At some point a very good-looking young woman, beautifully and expensively dressed (hat and gloves too as I choose to recall), a creature of “real class,” came in accompanied by a tall, handsome, well-dressed man. He looked like a young corporate executive. All the girls crowded around to greet her warmly. Turned out, or so it seemed, she was a former dancer at the 500 Club who had recently married the man she was with. She introduced him all around. And then they sat down at a table. After a little while, one of the naked dancers beckoned to her to come on up to the stage. Laughing, she jumped up from the table and joined the dancers. Danced for a few moments in all her fine new clothes, then suddenly began to shuck off those clothes and become another naked dancer. I remember her wedding ring, a big diamond that she had proudly shown off to her friends, glinting in the light. The expression on her husband’s face was . . . well, ambiguous, uncertain. I couldn’t rightly guess whether he was pleased and proud or utterly dismayed. Did the dancing wife know Eddie Weems? I don’t know. Why not? She should have. Everybody else did. I think we would have noticed only if she hadn’t known Eddie. “I remember looking at you and your head was nodding with pure fatigue. I thought we might turn out to be the first men in the history of the 500 Club to fall asleep during a table dance. “Finally, after Eddie had signed plenty of credit card slips and spread plenty of goodwill, we convinced him we couldn’t take any more fun that night, and he drove us home, where Jane got up and welcomed us back and then, more than good-naturedly, got up again along about two or three hours later to make us coffee before Eddie drove us off to the airport, clearly sad to see us go.

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“I hope that Jane will see this story as a tribute to Eddie even if, as I like to think, those nekkid girls are now angels up in heaven, waving and dancing and delivering drinks on the house all around the clouds.” I am sorry to report that Jane Weems has also died since then. She was always an angel to put up with him and us, too. I am not going to tell some of the other versions of this story so that you can then compare and contrast them with Eddie’s account. Suffice it to say, they give a picture that, in general and in many details, is much more serious, more dangerous than Eddie’s account. Since, as indicated, the other versions, though excellent, are uniformly based on official government documents and data, the actions taken (or not taken) by the FBI, the Coast Guard, the Justice Department, et cetera, are inevitably shown in a favorable light. As soon as the saboteurs were caught, they were given the benefit of a speedy military tribunal, convicted, and six of them were executed soon thereafter. There was no particular value at the time for the U.S. government to portray them as a bunch of clowns and stumblebums. Best that they should be presented to the general public as extremely dangerous and diabolically clever Nazi agents. (Here a word or two more may be in order. My friend, Richard Dillard, poet and novelist and coauthor of the screenplay for Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, tells me that Hitler’s political party was originally called Naso, for National Socialists. The word Nazi was originally used by the opposition and means something like “buffoon” in English. For some reason they began to call themselves Nazis. At least that’s what Dillard says. And it was no joke by 1941, though you would have to admit that a movie/musical like The Producers returns things to their original mint condition.) Best that the Americans should not be complete clowns either. And the relatively quick roundup and capture of the eight saboteurs should not be attributed to dumb luck, but rather to the always alert, dedicated, and determined efforts of the Americans, especially Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and his band of merry men over at the FBI.

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So, four German saboteurs came ashore in uniform near a Coast Guard station on Long Island. They immediately encountered a Coast Guardsman, but nothing came of that encounter. Whatever took place, they were not taken into custody. They rested awhile, smoking German cigarettes (leaving crumpled-up cigarette packages behind) and drinking some German schnapps (also leaving the empty bottle behind), and changed back into civilian clothing (leaving the German uniforms behind) and just disappeared. As did the submarine that had brought them there. Focus now on George John Dasch, the eldest of the saboteurs and the leader of the group that landed on Long Island. When, early on the morning of June 14, they scattered and made their separate ways, by public transportation, into New York City, Dasch used a public telephone as soon as possible to call the FBI office in New York. The people he talked to there were surprisingly polite. They listened to him, then told him that this news was so vital, so important, that he should take it directly, and in person, to the director of the FBI in Washington, D.C. Dasch realized that these people thought he was nuts. The only way he could stop the mission cold before a lot of people were hurt and some infrastructure (as they call it now) was damaged and destroyed would be if he did exactly what they had suggested and went on down to Washington and tried to see Hoover. If he went in person to the New York office, that person (himself) would probably find himself locked up somewhere. Then—worst-case scenario—let us say that the mission succeeded. Would the FBI agents in New York City be happy to learn that Dasch wasn’t crazy after all and that he had been telling them the truth, the real “skinny,” from the beginning? Would they let their future careers in the bureau be jeopardized? No, siree. What would be jeopardized would be the life of one expendable George Dasch, who would find himself on the bottom of the East River, or maybe even the Hudson, wearing huge concrete shoes. To allay suspicions, Dasch met with the other saboteurs as had been planned, reconfirmed their immediate future plans, then took a train to Washington. Got there. Found and went to Hoover’s office and asked for an appointment. “And what is the nature of your problem, Mr. Dasch?” He explained, briefly, that he had some extremely urgent and

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sensitive information that he could deliver only to the director, himself, personally. He then took the chair that the receptionist offered him and began to catch up on his magazine reading. If this were a story of research rather than mere fictive memory, I would probably tell you what he might have been reading in the magazines. People came and went from the inner sanctum. Dasch waited calmly and read those old magazines. From the beginning, from the day he was recruited by the Abwehr for this mysterious mission—and Dasch was the very first person they picked—Dasch had planned to betray the operation. He was delighted when they accidentally landed at the Coast Guard station. Alarmed but pleased when the sailor drew down on them. Sincerely disappointed when, for some reason, that sailor simply let them go. But Dasch was ever an optimist. Always looking for the silver lining. Thus the response of the New York office of the FBI to the news that a gang of German saboteurs was in town, while disappointing, was helpful. For one thing, it meant his luck was holding. Suppose he had stupidly gone straight to the office and made his declaration then and there. Go figure. Meanwhile their funny—ha-ha—brush-off (“This is really important. You must report at once to the director in person.”) told him something about the culture of the FBI, itself, namely that these agents had not much respect for their boss. That it popped into their minds so quickly (“This looks like a job for Superman!”) also indicated to Dasch that it was probably just the kind of thing Hoover was looking for and would go for. They, the N. Y. guys, were betting the store that an obvious loony like that would never get into Hoover’s office. And even if he did, it would be a good joke, and one he couldn’t pin on them, at Hoover’s expense. They were dead wrong on every count. Dasch did get to see Hoover. (“You got five minutes. I’ll give you five minutes and the clock is already ticking, pal.”) It took two full days of just sitting there reading and being calm, cool, and collected before he had his chance. But it didn’t take five full minutes to convince J. Edgar that this was really hot stuff. It did take a little longer to convince him that it was all or mostly true. Dasch suggested that Hoover should call up his agents in New York City and tell them to haul ass out to Long Island and to check

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directly under the pier of the Coast Guard station for any signs that maybe some Nazis had been camping out there recently. Dasch was taking a chance or two, to be sure. He did not tell Hoover that he had already tried his luck (and failed) with those New York guys. So Hoover would not begin by chewing them out but instead would issue crisp, loud orders, thus indicating they were at least still on the payroll and more or less in his good graces. There was no percentage in their not finding the evidence. There was every incentive to locate some if they could. Note that Dasch didn’t suggest calling the Coast Guard, which might have been quicker and more efficient: “Hey, guys, run on down and take a look underneath your own pier and see if you can find some Nazi regalia and stuff from the other night when they landed there, okay?” The United States Coast Guard had no incentive whatsoever to find any evidence that a bunch of Nazis had been hanging out over at their place. Note that Dasch was also betting that the Coast Guard had not found anything yet, on their own, in the two and a half days since the saboteurs had first encountered the sailor. He was betting that they hadn’t found anything because they hadn’t bothered to look yet. He could have been wrong, but what-the-hell, he couldn’t be in a whole lot more trouble than he was already. Right? Dasch goes back to his chair and his limp magazines. Hoover catches up on some paperwork. After a while, an hour or so, the phone rings, and in a trice (as they say), George Dasch is the man of the hour. Hoover is so happy he takes Dasch out to dinner at a first-class Washington restaurant (Harvey’s?) where they can get a good piece of steak. Hoover already guesses that he is going to have to depend a great deal on the kindness and goodwill of Dasch to catch and convict the rest of this gang. He has already guessed Dasch’s weakness and so devotes some time to praising the guy as a great American patriot who has done his country a service above and beyond the call of duty. Rolling up the rest of them, except for one case, is no big problem. Thanks to Dasch, the government has complete information on all the others in both groups and on where they are supposed to be and what they are up to.

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Everybody but one, Herbert Haupt of Chicago, at twenty-one the youngest of them, is taken into custody. They, the New York FBI, have Haupt under close surveillance. He has been making a lot of phone calls from various phone booths, and they think maybe he has some contacts that Dasch doesn’t know about or anyway hasn’t yet revealed. Trailing him, several agents follow Haupt to Penn Station, where he buys a one-way ticket to Chicago and boards, aptly, the Twentieth Century Limited. So do they. They don’t tell anybody else what they are doing except the people in the New York office. In Chicago, Haupt hops in a cab and the FBI agents do likewise. “Follow that cab!” Haupt’s cab goes directly to his home address, where (to their knowledge) his mother lives. He goes in. The FBI guys settle in for a long wait after explaining to the cabby what rights he doesn’t have and what happens to uncooperative cab drivers in wartime. But they don’t have to wait long, anyway. Here comes young Haupt backing his mother’s old Packard out of the attached garage. “Follow that car!” Haupt goes downtown and parks near the federal building. They follow him inside. A couple of them ride up with him in the elevator. Elevator stops and opens, and Haupt hops out and opens a frosted glass door marked “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” “Jaysus, and Jay Edgar! What the fuck is going on?” It looks really weird to our New York boys. What they don’t know won’t help or hurt them now. Seems that a month or so ago a draft notice for Haupt arrived home in the mail. (“Greetings from the President of the United States!”) Being in Germany at the time, he missed it. Since then a second notice followed by a stern warning have come. The warning informed him that unless he checked, by a certain date, with the FBI, a warrant for his arrest would be issued. He is already a day or two late. So what happens is that he tells the Chicago FBI people that he has been out of the country, mostly in Mexico, but that he is back for good now and will, of course, report at once to Selective Service. They tell him not to sweat it. “Thanks for coming by.” Leaves, pulling the door to quietly. Smiling. Whistling a happy tune while waiting for the elevator. Maybe it is the same tune we heard back at the beginning.

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These New York guys are really baffled and unsure now. They phone home for instructions, and their office tells them under no circumstances to deal with or say anything to the Chicago FBI office. Just keep that Nazi kid under tight surveillance and wait for more instructions. Cut to the end of the chase. What happens next is that Haupt, following orders, checks into a Chicago hotel. Fade In Ext. Drake Hotel: Day A shot of the Chicago hotel. We hear the sound of someone whistling the tune we first heard in the opening scene of this story. Zoom In A moving, over-the-shoulder shot, following a group of unidentified men in suits and hats as they brush past the doorman and hurry across the lobby toward the bank of elevators where they have to wait. Cut To Int. Hotel Bathroom Here is Haupt taking a bubblebath and happily whistling his heart out. Camera PULLS BACK, leaving him and moves into bedroom, where we see the New York FBI men tiptoeing around very quietly and going through Haupt’s luggage and papers. Cut To Int. Hallway Elevator stops and disgorges the unidentified men in suits who cautiously tiptoe down the hall, pausing in front of a doorway. One motions and another one nods and moves to be in position to kick down the door. They then produce pistols. At some signal the door is kicked down and they burst into the room, guns drawn, firing. The New York FBI boys shoot back. Both groups are shooting and missing and shouting “FBI! FBI! FBI! Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons!” Suddenly they recognize that they are all, for better or worse, FBI agents.

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They stand there and look at each other sheepishly. Lucky nobody was hurt. As it dawns on them what has happened, they turn as if synchronized to look at the bathroom door. Cut To Bathroom Haupt in tub, terrified and slathered with soap foam, slowly raises his hands in surrender and, for no good reason at all, begins whistling that tune again. Dissolve If they ever do a movie of Eddie’s version, that could be, in the hands of the right director, a dynamite scene. Now, fiction or no, alas, it all gets a little bit serious and complicated as things will sometime do. What begins in farce, a few laughs, ends in something like tragedy with a stage littered with corpses. Only six dead bodies in this case (same as in Hamlet, if you care to count Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). And they are all saboteurs. You can see it all for yourself. Headlines, a fair and speedy military tribunal, followed by a speedy appeal that is lost in the Supreme Court, followed by a fair and speedy execution by means of the electric chair in the D.C. jail on August 8, 1942, a little less than two months after they landed. Justice moved more swiftly in those days. Read the versions based on the tribunal transcript. Get the facts there. Eddie’s version of the end game doesn’t differ much from the official one except that in the latter, our brilliant and steadfast FBI guys are shown to be right on top of things from the get-go. They have saved the nation. And the lesson to all Americans from the president and all our fearless leaders on down is that we are safely in good hands. Everybody (except the six saboteurs) gets something good out of it besides the praise of a thankful public. Hoover gets a special medal. The two saboteurs who weren’t electrocuted didn’t make out quite as well as they might have. Dasch was under the understanding that, having betrayed the operation and been a fully cooperative government witness, he would be acquitted or, any-

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way, given “a slap on the wrist.” He was told to expect a presidential pardon. What he got instead was thirty years in the slammer, effective immediately. He was cuffed and carried away from the tribunal. Clearly Hoover didn’t want anybody running around free as the breeze who knew the whole truth about the sequence of what was called a SNAFU in that war (Situation Normal All Fucked Up). Dasch covered for them in his testimony, somewhat to his own disadvantage. But one day he might well change his mind and tell another story. Hoover might, wisely, have preferred to execute him with the others. He could have. But he had at least some sense of loyalty. How much harm could Dasch do to him or national security from deep in bowels of a federal penitentiary? Because they felt they needed to have two witnesses for the sake of the tribunal and appearances, the government also used another man, one whom Dasch “turned” for them—Ernest Burger, an American citizen who had served in the National Guard once upon a time. In a busy life, he had also been a stormtrooper in the Nazi party in Germany and a private in the Wermacht. On top of all that, he logged more than a year as a political prisoner in a concentration camp for bad-mouthing the Gestapo. Burger got thirty years, too. His understanding was that later on, and as soon as possible, he would quietly be set free. In his excellent and informative Atlantic piece, Gary Cohen writes: “Dasch and Burger spent some six years in U.S. Prisons and then were deported to Germany in April of 1948.” Dasch told Eddie, in an interview, that there was no kind of new hearing or anything, no warning either. Just suddenly, in the middle of the night, some FBI guys came to his cell, gave him a set of civilian clothes, and put him on a plane for Germany. He was widely known and hated in Germany as the Judas among the saboteurs. According to Gary Cohen, Dasch had a hard time of it but lived on until 1992. He adds this fascinating sentence: “Late in his life Dasch befriended Charlie Chaplin, who was living in nearby Switzerland, and the two men compared notes on how J. Edgar Hoover had ruined their lives.” Eddie didn’t know whatever became of the other one. I have on my desk in front of me right now a book about espionage during World War II—The Shadow War (1991). Okay, so I did

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do a little reading and research, but not all that much. It lies open to page fifty-seven, where there is a black-and-white photograph of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. He is in uniform, though most of his uniform is concealed within a large, dark, heavy foot-length overcoat with shiny little epaulets on the shoulders. And he is wearing what we would call a visored garrison cap, replete with “scrambled eggs” on the visor. He is walking along, hands behind his back, looking across at the camera. There are two other men, one on each side, walking with him, wearing Wermacht uniforms—no overcoats, riding britches, high, and highly polished riding boots. They are identified in the caption as “two key aides”—General Erwin Lahousen, head of sabotage, and Colonel Hans Pickenbrock, chief of espionage. Canaris looks to be very serious, more so in the context of the caption, which tells us that “a grim Wilhelm Canaris trudges to Adolf Hitler’s office on June 30 to explain the collapse of Operation Pastorius.” Trudges, that’s a nice associative touch. Sets the tone. Only in truth the three men just seem to be walking slowly along. Trudges is a pure judgment call. “Grim” is also. Serious, as already said, yes, indeed, but poker-faced, really. They don’t look specially sad or troubled. Maybe if we could only see his eyes, which are in the shadow of his visor, we would know better. . . . There are other photos of Canaris in The Shadow War. In a fullpage portrait, from a certain angle (again he has just turned towards the camera), Canaris, with his garrison cap on but now set well above the large, heavy-lidded eyes, looks quite a bit like Eric von Stroheim. Remember him? Without a cap on he looks quite different—silky silver hair and heavy silver eyebrows, a good-looking man of early middle age, handsome, yes, yet somehow also nondescript. In photographs with others—Himmler, Goebbels, his longtime rival and enemy Reinhard Heydrich—Canaris is a trim man of medium height and, always, that pleasant poker face. The Shadow War describes him as more than a little eccentric: “A pillpopping hypochondriac who wore heavy winter clothing year round [that, if true, may explain the heavy overcoat he wore on June 30], Canaris harbored an irrational dislike of tall people and those with small ears” (p. 4). This sounds more like some kind of a joke originating from the bored Time-Life editors, who had to put this book together, than confirmed fact. Those guys, the editors, try to make something out of “his rumpled uniform, eccentric

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mannerisms, and lisping voice” and point out that he “fretted obsessively over the health of his pets.” They also quote him as saying: “My dachshund is discreet and will never betray me. I cannot say that of any human being.” Who knows? Maybe he and Hitler, a couple of certified dog lovers, had that to talk about. In any case, a lot of people who know enough to have a legitimate opinion regard Canaris as the great spymaster of World War II. I have also on my desk Master Spy (1952) by Ian Colvin, who argues that Canaris, while not actually working for or with the British, was a kind of secret ally of theirs, strongly favoring them over the Russians and, towards the end, even the Führer, and, from time to time, giving the British some information, serious aid, and comfort whenever he could get away with it. Colvin makes a strong, if, finally, inconclusive, case. Some people speculate that Canaris cooperated with the Brits to help set up the assassination, in May 1942, of Reinhard Heydrich, who, among other things, was SS Deputy Protector of BohemiaMoravia. It is entirely possible, but there are no confirming documents. Very few documents concerning Canaris survive. He lives only in the memory of a few very old men. I am perfectly willing to write off that heavy overcoat in the big middle of June on the assumption that the comment on Canaris’s sumptuary eccentricity is factually correct—that he wore winter clothing all year-round. I have to admit that I haven’t yet found any other evidence of that except for this photograph. But let it be. I do have a couple of other minor problems with the June 30 photograph and its caption. The saboteurs, all but Dasch, who was still free until early July, were finally caught and in custody by June 25. Thanks to the eager (if supremely self-serving) efforts of J. Edgar Hoover, the news about the saboteurs and their capture was in all the American and Allied newspapers beginning June 27. Certainly Canaris, the old master spy, himself, would have been fully aware of that much. Whether or not Hitler, who was busy concentrating on the eastern front that summer of ’42, would have known (or cared) much about it, one way or the other, on or before June 30, I wonder. . . . I’m thinking that Canaris was bringing him the news in person on June 30. That’s what was happening. Which would have been the right (smart) thing to do. And whatever may or may not have

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happened at that meeting, if it, in fact, ever took place, we don’t know. In any case, we don’t hear from any other sources (and they are plentiful) that the Führer was particularly upset at that particular time or angry at Canaris. Canaris came and went (if he, in fact, came and went) without getting into any big trouble with Hitler, at least at that time. His troubles were yet to come. Don’t fail to consider this—that the events, just as they had been played out, actually served both sides. Hoover was out to prove that we could defend ourselves from any kind of sneak attack, not counting Pearl Harbor. The Germans, on the other hand, had succeeded in planting the idea, at least back home, that they could come ashore whenever and wherever they chose to. Meantime the U-boats were still out there sinking American ships by the dozens, lots of them within sight of the lights of New York City. It is entirely possible that Hitler congratulated Canaris, in June of ’42, for successfully mounting Operation Pastorius, even though it had failed. Fade In Ext. Rastenberg Airfield: Day A small airfield amid pine woods of East Prussia Long shot as light airplane, a Storch, lands and taxis towards a camouflaged building. A staff car appears and picks up a single passenger from the airplane. Car drives off quickly on a dirt road into the surrounding forest. Close Shot: Admiral Canaris. He is sitting in the backseat, holding a well-stuffed briefcase in his lap. He removes his cap and pats his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. He looks genuinely anxious. Title: “January 31, 1943” Admiral Canaris is being driven in a staff car from the airfield to meet with and report as ordered to the Führer at the Führer’s headquarters—the Wolfsschanze. He hasn’t got the slightest idea why the Führer wants to see him today. It could be any number of

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things. So many problems these days. Things seem to be falling apart bit by bit in North Africa and more so on the eastern front. The bad news of that particular day is the loss of Stalingrad and the surrender, by newly promoted Field Marshal Paulus, of the German Sixth Army there, more than 90,000 men (of which only about 5,000 will live to return home many years later). The worst single defeat in German military history. Canaris is not looking forward to talking with the Führer. Canaris, an intelligencer after all, will already know something about how the Führer is holding up these days. Not very well. He will know what the great tank general Guderian will soon discover and later report. Of course, both men will be and were shocked because they had not, in fact and flesh, seen Hitler or talked with him in a while. Here’s how Guderian would describe him: “His left hand trembled, his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his eyes protruded but lacked their former luster, his cheeks were flecked with red. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure and was prone to angry outbursts and ill-considered decisions.” Canaris arrives and is ushered at once into the Führer’s office. To the surprise of the admiral, it is very calm and quiet there. No glittering generals. Not a lot of the usual yelling and screaming going on. No phones ringing off the hook and no clerks and messengers coming and going. Hitler’s favorite dog, the Alsatian Blondie, is there but does not bark at the admiral. It is quiet enough that Canaris can hear someone nearby, out of sight, idly pecking away at a typewriter. Maybe writing a poem. A few years later, in the early ’50s, while I was a soldier stationed at Linz, Austria, I witnessed the return of some of these men, those who had somehow or other survived, from the infamous Soviet Gulag. Still later, maybe a decade after, I wrote a story based on the experience—“Whistling in the Dark.” It includes, as its final scene, the moment when two men, American soldiers, a sergeant (myself) and a corporal, are pulling duty as Courtesy Patrol. After lunch in a country gasthaus, they drive a jeep into town and park at the railroad station. Now then, full of good food and beer and full of goodwill toward humankind, one and all, our two soldiers have driven into town and parked their jeep in a reserved space and are taking a stroll

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around the Bahnhof. They will check the papers of a few GIs who are arriving and departing. They will caution a soldier or two to button up a shirt pocket or tighten up a necktie. And they will watch the trains come and go. The weather is really fine and dandy, couldn’t be better. Nice and warm and getting warmer with the afternoon. The air is scented with springtime. Or is it the little bouquets of flowers so many people seem to be carrying? The girls are in their light dresses already. Splendid, if a little pale from winter. Sap stirs in the limbs of the sergeant and the corporal. Unusually crowded today. They are separated by the crowds. No matter. They will meet up sooner or later on one of the platforms or back at the jeep. Alone, I stroll, not strut, out of the great barn of a building (most GIs call it the Barnhof) into the sunlight on a platform. People, crowds of them, smiling and jabbering, waiting for a train. Even if my German were good enough to understand more than a few rudimentary phrases, I could not hear what they are saying. Somewhere nearby, though I can’t yet see it, a brass band is playing cheerful oompah music. Deafening and delightful. Must be a local holiday of some kind. Now I am closer to the band. I see the middle-aged musicians, their cheeks chipmunking as they play. I am standing close by the huge bass drum, which keeps a steady rhythm. The band members are of an age that would allow them to have played all through the war. I wonder if they did that. Now, even as I hear the shrill scream of the train whistle, I see all the faces in the crowd turn toward the track, where a train is coming slowly, with sighs of steam, easing into the station. To my amazement I see their faces, all of them, change entirely in a wink of time. A moment ago they were animated, smiling. Now each mask of flesh is anxious and searching. And, as if at an order, they all begin to cry. I have never been among a huge crowd of weeping people before. Sobs and tears all around me. Stunned and lost, I feel, out of empathy (and perhaps out of a military reflex), tears well up in my own eyes. I am one of them; I am one with them, though I do not know why. Now many in the crowd are holding up enlarged photographs, placards with names printed large on them. Like some kind of grotesque parody of a political rally.

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The doors open, and out of the train, helped by porters, many of them with crude canes and crutches, here come, one after another, a ragged company of dazed, shabby, skinny scarecrows. They are weeping also, some of them. Others study the crowd, searching with hard looks and dry eyes for familiar faces. The band is deafening. Next to me the bass drum pounds and pounds in tune and in time with my heart. In time, very soon, in fact, I will learn that they are the latest contingent of Austrian veterans from the eastern front, returning home from Siberia. The Russians are moving slowly, in their own inexorable, patient, glacial fashion, toward a treaty here in Austria (as I will learn much later), if not a war first. Part of that movement is to let some of the scarecrows who have somehow managed to survive until now come home. But here and now I know nothing of that and care less. I see a homecoming of the defeated and the wounded. Some greeted with great joy, with flowers and embracing. Some, as always, alone now even at home—though I see schoolchildren have been assigned the duty of making sure that everyone gets a greeting and some flowers. I stand there knowing one thing for certain—that I am seeing our century, our time, close and truly. Here it is, and, even among strangers, I am among them, sharing the moment of truth, whether I want to or not. An American sergeant stands in the swirling crowd with tears rolling down his cheeks. He will be gone from here soon, first miles, then years and years away. But he will not, because he cannot, forget this moment or himself in it, his share of this world’s woe and joy, the lament and celebration of all living things. Fade In Ext. Staff Car: Day The car follows the twisty road through the forest. Int. Staff Car: Day Close Shot: Admiral Canaris He seems comfortable and quite alone in the backseat. Straightens his cap.

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Allows himself a little smile. Suddenly begins to whistle the tune we heard in the beginning and when Herbert Haupt was taking a bath in the hotel in Chicago. Ext. Staff Car: Day The tune continues, grows louder as the car arrives at the airfield . . . Dissolve Hitler paces up and down, back and forth. He is mumbling something. Canaris listens very closely, and what he thinks he hears is: “Twelve loyal Germans . . . twelve loyal Germans . . .” Canaris doesn’t have a clue. “Very sad,” he says, finally. “It’s a very sad thing, my Führer.” “Sad? It is a fucking disaster, a complete and utter disaster, and it will never ever happen again. You and I must make certain that it can never happen again.” “Absolutely, sir. We won’t allow that.” Just then Admiral Canaris figures out what’s going on around here, what the Führer is talking about. And it ain’t Stalingrad or the war in Tunisia. It’s those wacko saboteurs again. Canaris had by now forgotten all about them. After all, six of the eight were executed by the Americans way back in August of 1942. Maybe that fact was really slow in getting to and arousing the Führer’s distracted attention. Canaris has to be mildly pleased with himself for figuring it out. After all, there weren’t actually twelve of them, only nine if you count in that lucky guy who caught the clap in Paris. And, as far as Canaris knows, they were, all of them, Americans, not Germans, loyal or not. “Never again,” Hitler repeats for emphasis. “No, sir. Absolutely not. Never again.” “Admiral, I want you to prepare and to send out many more missions to America. I want waves of saboteurs to be landed on their shores. Use Jews and criminals only from now on. This is my direct order to you. Do whatever is necessary to accomplish this goal.” “Yes, sir.” “I have complete trust and faith in you.” “Thank you, sir.” “That’s all.”

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Canaris salutes and exits quickly and smartly. He isn’t happy, not exactly overjoyed by this latest assignment. Still . . . it’s another vague and ongoing project, again all under the protective angelic wings of a direct order from the Führer. Canaris ought to be able to use that for all kinds of interesting purposes. Meantime, my friends, he can do exactly what he, in fact, does. He obeys Hitler’s instructions (more or less) to the letter. And no, he doesn’t send any more teams to America, and the Führer never mentions that crazy idea again. But Canaris does manage to round up a large number of prominent Jews, culled from concentration camps and thus saved from almost certain death. The reader is reminded that in January of 1942, one year earlier, it was Canaris’s enemy, Heydrich, who proposed the Endlosung (Final Solution) at the famous Wannsee meeting. Only recently, at this writing, we have the benefit of a book by Steven T. Katz of Boston University, Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe (2005), which points out that from the earliest days of the war Admiral Canaris tried to protect Jews. Here we learn that the Lubavitcher community in America, together with lawyer Benjamin Cohen, Justice Louis Brandeis, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, asked Admiral Canaris to help them save the life of the rebbe, who was in occupied Poland in late 1939 and early 1940. We also learn that Canaris sent out a rescue party of Abwehr soldiers, under the command of a Major Ernest Bloch, to rescue the rebbe and his family and get them safely to Sweden. Bloch succeeded, facing down the SS. How Canaris got away with all this, we do not know. We do know that Canaris maintained the charade of the training camp at his secret base. And nothing changes when Canaris, himself, is dead and gone. The endless and pointless training program for his once and future Jewish and criminal saboteurs goes on and is still in progress in April of 1945 when the Russians arrive and capture the base. A good place, give or take, to end the movie of it. Fading or even irising out on a full close shot of the silver-haired admiral sitting there whistling away like a delighted child. If this were a movie, the admiral wouldn’t have anyone to tell that this is a melody that he hasn’t heard or even thought of since childhood.

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No! That’s not true. He remembers that he has heard Hitler whistling the selfsame happy tune on more than one occasion, back in better times. Did you know that Hitler was a wonderful whistler?1 Only it does not, in fact, all end there. Ends not so nicely. The whole world knows that the admiral was implicated and involved in the plot to kill Hitler in 1944. He could have fled to safety but did not. And the British did not come to his rescue in his hour of need. He was arrested, tortured, and then held until early 1945 when he was secretly tried before an SS court-martial. Just before the end of the war on April 9, 1945, he was suddenly stripped naked in his cell (there are witnesses to that), put in chains, and dragged away from his cell to a crude homemade gallows, where, with the aid of an iron collar, which slowed down the effects of strangulation, he was hanged until he was dead. The process took a little more than half an hour. Eddie Weems was a great big guy, huge really. Did I mention that? No, and I didn’t mention that he had served in the U.S. Navy, either. He was a handsome man, at least six and a half feet tall, probably more, and as big and wide as any pro football player. He had once been a serious jock in his own right back when he was in college. His father was a coach. And Eddie always tried to keep in some kind of shape, and to keep his weight down, regularly jogging before that became such a trendy thing to do with your spare time. While he was working at the Press in Austin, he would often skip lunch and go over to the track, which was inside the football stadium. He would put on his sweat clothes, drive over there and park, then lumber, steady and slow (and, as indicated, very large), around and around the track until he had worked up a good sweat and racked up a couple or three miles. One day he was jogging around the track, all alone that day . . . well, not quite. They were working on the stadium, making some 1. “Hitler was a beautiful whistler. While I played he’d recline and whistle the melody, tremolo. How he enjoyed those Pudding Club scores!” —Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengel, quoted in Harvard Magazine, July–August 1974.

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repairs and replacing some seats and so forth. Very noisy. Nobody else running on the track, though. All by himself. Eddie took his sweet time, ran his couple or three miles, and then started for home to shower and change. He heard the sound of a lot of sirens, fairly close by on the Texas campus. Thought it must be a big fire or something. Switched on his car radio to see if there might be any news. There was some news all right. Very excited news. Somebody was up on the tall tower in the middle of the campus shooting people. Killing and wounding a good many. What dawned on Eddie, well before he reached the safety of home and his own driveway, was that he had just spent the last half hour or so, a huge, heavy guy slowly running around and around the track, as an absolutely perfect moving target for the shooter up on the tower. A couple of people on the other side, well beyond the far side of the stadium, had been hit. He would learn that later in the next day’s morning paper. From the tower, through a telescopic sight, Eddie would have been very much like a large tin duck in a carnival shooting gallery. Surely that man on the tower— Whitman was his name, wasn’t it?—who proved himself to be a hell of a good shot, if nothing else, must have sighted in on Eddie, focused on him, followed him as he jogged along, and then never fired a shot at him. Why? Who knows? Maybe it was just too easy. No sport in it. Maybe the sight of that big old guy thumping his way around the track pleased or amused the shooter. Eddie had no answer at the time. I don’t, either, here and now. Fade To Black In memory of John Edward Weems

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR

This has been a magnificent epic. In God’s name, let it not terminate in a farce. —General John C. Breckenridge

Well might the dead who struggled in the slime Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime. —Siegfried Sassoon

Note: Like many other Southerners, I had blood kin on both sides of the War. These anecdotes and fragments are, then, excerpts lifted from the written words of two of my kinsmen: Toomer Porter of Charleston, South Carolina, an Episcopal minister and, during the War, a chaplain in the Confederate army; and Colonel Oliver Hazard Palmer, a lawyer who became the commanding officer of the 108th New York Volunteers.

PRESCIENCE Toomer Porter—Charleston, 1861 Walking on the Battery, I met Colonel James Chestnut (formerly a Congressman):

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“These are troublous times, Colonel,” I told him. “We are at the beginning of a terrible war.” “Nonsense!” he said. “There will be no war. I will drink all the blood shed in this war.” ACTIVE DUTY Colonel O. H. Palmer—Maryland, 1862 The work is severe and the privations unimaginable. It is not strange that Regiments soon melt away. This suffering must be remedied or the Army will disappear like June frost or wax before a fire. If anyone thinks there is fun being in the Army, he is making a very great mistake.

SHORT RATIONS Toomer Porter—Charleston, 1861 Some old bills from Klinck & Wikenberg (grocers): Champagne, madeira sherry, pâté de foie gras, French green peas, sardines and Spanish olives, formed the staple of soldiers’ fare. Time came soon enough when a lone sweet potato would have been pure luxury.

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COMMAND DECISIONS Colonel O. H. Palmer—Antietam, 1862 I went directly to Richardson in the rear and reported to him the condition of my men. I asked why in God’s name the reserves were being allowed to remain in their safe position when humanity required that they should advance at once and relieve my men. He replied as follows: “To tell you the truth, Colonel, the General is dead drunk.” ESCAPE Toomer Porter—Warrenton, Virginia, 1862 Looking at some distant hills, I suddenly saw a line of bluecoats emerging from the near horizon. I was wearing Confederate uniform, so I struck off for a nearby ravine until I was out of range. As I did not wish to be captured and go to a Northern prison, I did some good dodging. LIGHT SHOW Colonel O. H. Palmer—Fredericksburg, 1862 We had about 150 guns and the scene was terrific & sublime in the highest degree. It seemed as though all the artillery of heaven had been let loose. The whizzing

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A Short History of the Civil War

shrieking & crashing of shot & shell were intensely exciting, magnificent & appalling. . . . SLAUGHTER Toomer Porter—James Island, South Carolina, 1864 As the fog lifted the Federals made a second assault. The cannon poured shot into their ranks. The parapet was lined with men who knew how to shoot and we were on their flank concealed and dealing death. It was awful. I walked towards the edge of the woods, took my stand in a cotton field. Bullets were coming uncomfortably close, too many to be pleasant. Colonel Hagood crawled out of the thicket and asked me what I was doing there. “Waiting,” I said. “To see what I can do.” “I order you, sir, to leave.” “Well,” I replied. “You are not my Colonel And I will not obey you.” We both laughed. DOOMED Colonel O. H. Palmer—Fredericksburg, 1862 Broken & shattered companies, regiments & brigades falling back. . . . Dead & wounded officers and men being borne to the rear in blankets, on the shoulders of their comrades. . . . one here with one arm another there with one leg moaning and swearing.

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A poor fellow trying to save the half of him not shot away would disappear in fragments of solid shot or amidst the smoke of an exploding shell. It was a sorry sight. HOLY COMMUNION Toomer Porter—Columbia, South Carolina, 1865 You would have to be placed in like condition of us to understand the meaning of the first Communion after that dreadful night. The sun shone down on a blackened desolate city and a brokenhearted people. After all we had endured at the hands of the enemy we could still go to this feast of love where all wrath and bitterness must be left behind. Thou has stricken us, Lord. But we will not believe Thou has forsaken us. SPEECH Colonel O. H. Palmer—Falmouth, Virginia, 1863 Remember always that you are fighting to maintain and to perpetuate the free institutions bequeathed us by Washington and his compatriots—that the eyes of all liberty-loving men and women are upon you, that their prayers are constantly ascending to Heaven on your behalf.

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Afterwards Lieutenant Colonel Powers apologized for the absence of applause, saying the men were all in tears and could not manage to raise a cheer. SERMON Toomer Porter—Charleston, 1865 My text is from Isaiah, thirty-eighth chapter: Set this house in order: I urged the hearers to turn their backs on the past, not to waste energy on vain regrets, but to realize they were on a wreck. To save life they must build out of the materials at hand a raft to bear them to shore. RECONSTRUCTION Toomer Porter—Charleston, 1865 A burly black man, armed and wearing United States uniform, guarded the front door. “You can’t go in there,” he said. “Why not? This is my house.” “No it ain’t. Belongs to the Freedman’s Bureau.” “Does it?” (His accent told me that he was one of our island Negroes.) “Look here, darkey, this is my house And if you don’t get out of the way, then I will make you.”

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(It was mere bluff and a kind of test of the old habits of obedience.) “Yes, sir, boss. You go right on in.”

In memory of Stephen Becker

THE MISERY AND THE GLORY OF TEXAS PETE

And then there are those stories that become a kind of common property that, in the absence of anything more than myth and memory, we can freely choose to believe or doubt. Here’s one of those, a story I first heard in the Downtown Barber Shop when I was maybe ten years old and have heard ever since, most recently when I went back home for a visit after many years and was taken to be a stranger in my own hometown. Way back in the bitter days of the Great Depression our town couldn’t afford to maintain a real police force. They kept cutting budgets, and pretty soon they got down to a single constable. Then they tried to make do with what they called in those days a “day marshal,” a guy who was on duty (and on salary) only during daylight hours. After sunset it was anything goes. Pretty soon they couldn’t even afford to pay for a day marshal. What to do? There were some—jokers to be sure, but not completely kidding—who thought maybe there might be a future for our town as a sort of sanctuary for criminals, common and otherwise. A free city, kind of like some of those pirate communities in the Caribbean way back in the days of big-time piracy. But, as the more sober citizens were quick to point out, what moderately successful, self-respecting criminal would want to come and live here? Well, in the end, they decided to keep the position of day marshal but to ratchet down the credentials and requirements as well as the pecuniary rewards and fringe benefits.

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They advertised, as widely and cheaply as they could, for a lowrent day marshal. The only application they got came from an eighty-five-year-old gentleman, a retired sheriff from Wild West days. He was mainly interested in the climate here because he thought it might help his arthritis—his “misery,” as he called it. So the old fellow (everybody called him Texas Pete, but not to his face) tottered around town during daylight hours, wearing a nice, clean khaki uniform with a big, shiny, five-pointed star badge pinned on his shirt pocket. And he strapped on an antique, singleaction, black-powder pistol, a big old .44 hog that looked to be too heavy for him to lift out of his holster, let alone to shoot somebody or something with. Everybody in town liked the old gent. They really did. Everybody was on their best behavior. We were almost crime-free. People behaved themselves so as not to cause him any trouble or aggravation. The town elders were absolutely convinced that they would never be able to hire a living lawman as cheaply as that. Well, then, one fine day, it being the high season for such things in the U.S. of A., a gang of bank robbers came driving into town in a souped-up four-door Ford that would outrun anything in town or the county either, assuming anybody would be foolhardy enough to chase after them. They parked right in front of the old Sunshine Bank and Trust Company, the only bank left in town in those days. One sat at the wheel with the motor running while the other three went in to rob the bank. So there they are, right in the middle of robbing the Sunshine Bank, when here comes our day marshal, old Texas Pete, stumbling and tottering along the sidewalk, headed in the general direction of the bank, aiming, apparently, to deposit his pitiful monthly check. He’s about fifty yards away from everything when all of a sudden the outside alarm goes off—Clang! Clang! Clang! He stops walking and puts on his thick old glasses and peers from under the shade of his wide-brim hat and sees, sure enough, the three bad guys, guns and loot in hand, come out of the bank. He raises his left hand in admonition and starts tugging at his pistol with his right. “Halt in the name of the Law!” he says in a thin, quavery, but nonetheless audible voice. Almost matter-of-fact. Like it is something he has said before in dim days beyond recall. And, quavery or not, it has some ghostly authority to it.

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Now the bad guys can’t believe this whole scene. They think it is funny as a whoopee cushion. And they start laughing loud and shooting at him as fast as they can. Bullets are zinging and ricocheting all around him while he keeps tugging at that old pistol of his. He finally pulls it free of the holster, cocks it (you have to cock those single-action jobs for each and every shot), takes it in both hands, points it, aims very carefully, and pulls the trigger. WHAMMO! There is this tremendous explosion and then a cloud of smoke all around him. And one of the bad guys is down and dead as can be from a shot directly between the eyes. By the time this dawns on the other perpetrators, he has already managed somehow to cock the pistol and shoot and kill another one. With one shot right between the eyes. Hands up and we surrender from the last two, the driver and the other guy. They can’t quit quick enough. Some thoughtful person calls the undertaker to come and pick up the stiffs, and the day marshal deputizes a few men on the spot. And they march the two survivors off to the pokey. Which hasn’t been used in so long that they have to get the lights and water turned on. Never mind. The word goes out and spreads like wildfire in the criminal community. You better stay away from that place, I’m telling you. They have got some kind of a Hoot Gibson policeman there who can blow your head off with one shot at fifty yards. And he will sure enough do it, too. I mean to tell you, this fella is some kind of a cold-blooded killing machine. You want to do yourself in? You want to die quick and young? Just go down there and try to knock over the Sunshine Bank. Now, you know and I know that criminals tend to exaggerate, especially when they are describing the power and the glory of the lawmen who have managed to collar them and send them away to the cooler. You have to believe that the man (or woman nowadays) who took you down was not much shy of being Superman. And locally, the myth is just the opposite—how this helpless old-timer somehow pulled it all together long enough to stop the only bank robbery we ever had. Because that was, in fact, the beauty of it all— that there has never been another bank robbery in our town. Throughout the rest of the depression, banks all over the South were being held up so often they barely had time to conduct normal

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banking business. Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd, all of them and many more. But not here. Not as long as the old guy was still alive. Not as long as the story outlived him. The man who tells it to me, taking me for a stranger, is, like many another American of our end-of-the-century era, more than a little disillusioned with how things have turned and are turning out. “From Wild West to sensitivity training,” he says. “From pioneers to pansies in one generation.” Then he says: “Poor old Texas Pete, he put in for the price of the two bullets, and they turned him down flat, arguing that they didn’t authorize the use of the pistol for anything but decoration, anyway.” “Is that a fact?” I say. “Take my word for it.”

TANKS

It began with an act of violence—a tank accidentally driving into and over a cluster of soldiers in sleeping bags. At dawn a tank, suddenly and hugely out of nowhere looming, out of mist and halflight. A terrifying shape. I don’t know, never will, if any of those poor guys woke up enough in their sleeping bags to see and comprehend what was fixing to crush and to kill them. A tank is so noisy. They must have heard it coming, but they had been up all night in some kind of training exercise. If they did wake up enough to see it, then the last thing they saw in this world was monstrous. That’s where I was going to begin my story, this story, when it first happened and I thought about writing a story about it. Beginning with the deafening noise of the tank’s engine and treads. Then a view of the soldiers all zipped up in their sleeping bags as the dark, cold, enormous shape of the tank appears and plows through the little bivouac. Somebody among them must have heard it, seen it, and escaped it just in time. Bound to have. Open with noise and misty dark. Then the tank as seen from the point of view of the soldiers. One of them is awake and shouting to no good purpose, his voice lost in the sound of the roaring engine. He scrabbles and writhes his way to escape. Then looks back at the wide treadmarks in the soft earth where he was just moments before.

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Leave him there gagging and weeping as others come running from all around. . . . When William Styron published The Long March, a fine, clean, strong piece of work, one of his best, I could have done a dervish dance and died on the spot. I really admired The Long March, even though it was spooky how it shadowed what had happened to me and what I had wanted to write about. Both stories take place during the time of the Korean War. Both take place, though, in the United States. Both involve reservists recalled to active duty and training for combat. Both stories begin with an act of violence. In the Styron story, some mortar rounds fall short of their target and kill several marines. The story I wanted to write begins, just as it did in fact, with a tank driving over some sleeping soldiers and killing them. Both of these stories then turn from the violent prologue to others, not directly involved, who are making a forced march back to base. About the tank and the dead men, we don’t hear or know anything at first. We will hear all about it later or at the end of our long march. But, even so, just as in the Styron story, it will haunt and shadow us all day long. We are a field artillery battalion of an understrength U.S. Army Reserve division. We are doing two weeks of summer training at Camp Drum near Watertown, New York. There are two divisions training here, ourselves and the New Jersey National Guard. I think that they were the Eighty-eighth Division. The bad scene with the tanks and one tank driving right over sleeping soldiers involved troops from the National Guard. (Guess who was the commanding officer of that division at that time. General Schwarzkopf, the father of Stormin’ Norman. And guess where Stormin’ Norman’s daddy went that summer. Answer: Iran. Look it up some time.) In those days both the reserve and the National Guard were still chiefly composed of veterans of World War II and (already) Korea. Most everybody did it for the money and the benefits. At least that’s what they all said. It wasn’t, yet, a ticket to freedom from full-time active duty. Joining the reserve or the National Guard didn’t spare you anything in those days. I was just back from a couple of years of active duty overseas in Trieste and Austria. I was a married graduate student at Prince-

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ton, and I needed the money, needed every nickel and dime I could get. I had come out of the army as sergeant first class, a nice swaggering kind of rank. Together with the next rank, master sergeant, it was better than being anything else except maybe a fieldgrade officer. We met in an armory near Trenton, New Jersey, one night a week (drawing a full day’s pay for those two hours) and for two weeks of summer training. We were a pretty good outfit. Everybody had seen service overseas. A lot of them, especially old-timers from World War II, had logged a lot of combat hours. We had one sergeant who had been captured by the Krauts at Kasserine Pass. Our first sergeant had been bayoneted by a Jap and lived to tell the tale and to show a huge, pink, swollen scar, chest and back, in the shower. The old guys weren’t much for spit and polish, but they knew everything that could ever be known about and done with our basic weapon—the 105-millimeter howitzer. Styron’s story, as I recall it, centers on two young marine infantry lieutenants and their commanding officer, who is some kind of a shithead. There isn’t much sense of the outfit from their point of view. A couple of candy-ass second lieutenants. What do they know about anything? When we got up that day, had reveille and breakfast in the field, we found out what was scheduled for the day. A speed march. We had been firing our howitzers on the range for a few days. Now we were going back to camp. Instead of riding back in trucks, we were going to hike it back. (Hump is the Vietnam word for it, and I guess is more accurately poetic than hike.) I seem to remember hearing some of the officers arguing among themselves at breakfast. I was hunkered down blowing on my canteen cup, breathing the sweet steam of fresh coffee and waiting for my cup to cool, when I heard them, nearby and oblivious to me, complaining about the speed march. Seems it was the colonel’s idea. Or, anyway, somebody had dared him or challenged him, and he took the dare. The fuck did I care? I was young and strong, in good shape, still in my twenties. Had done this kind of thing many times, within months of here and now. I was able and ready. I had in my pack a pair of women’s nylon panties. Nothing better to wear for a speed march. Regular underwear got creased and snarled up and would

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chafe and rub blisters. And I never went anywhere, especially in the field, without my little can of footpowder and a thin, tight pair of nylon socks to wear underneath the heavy GI socks for a hike. There may have been other tricks of the trade (I know I discarded everything except essential equipment so my load would be as light as I could make it), but I can’t remember them now. When I came to write the story, I would have to make something out of myself as a character. Not something nice. There would be this guy, see, much like myself, a sergeant first class just back from active duty overseas. He would have earned his stripes at a leadership school. He would be what we used to call sharp. He would know a lot of things. He would be highly and quietly contemptuous of all the old-timers and their old wars and wounds. He would be especially contemptuous of the red-haired first sergeant with the bayonet scar. That contempt would be, he thinks, because the first sergeant is so soft and easygoing. A pussy is what our sergeant first class would classify him. Never out loud, of course, and never by any sign or twitch on his well-trained poker face. Truth is, the first sergeant likes him, thinks he is a good soldier and a good guy. Which only adds coals to the younger man’s contempt. What the younger man will not admit to himself is that the fuel for his contempt for the first sergeant is rivalry. He wants to be first sergeant of the battery. Deeper yet, he would like to have been wounded, himself. Nothing like those ugly bayonet scars but some nice little nick he could show in the shower or maybe show off to some girl when the time came. Our real colonel, the battalion commander, was a great guy and one of the finest officers I ever served under. He was a big, tall, good-looking guy, going to fat now but impressive. Black hair and a big smile. He treated all his subordinates with respect and with trust. The latter is a very rare thing in the army or any other hierarchical or corporate organization. You can’t trust too many people too much because they may let you down, and then you are in more trouble than they are. But the colonel, whose name has now gone from me for good, could take the heat. The buck stopped with him. He was the same with us regardless of the pressure on him. Same in success or adversity. A whole man and a fearless one, really. My young sergeant first class might not, probably would not,

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appreciate him for what he was (though I think he would have learned enough about leadership to sense that the colonel was a genuine leader; he might even have envied that), but he would, at least at the outset, respect him and want to win his notice and approval. Our colonel, the real one, the big guy, was a heavy boozer. I could tell after a mile in the hot sun that he would never make it. He didn’t seem to know that. He insisted on leading the battalion. Up front about ten yards or so. Sure, he didn’t have to carry a field pack or anything extra except his steel helmet and his M2 carbine. But there was a lot of him, and he really was not in shape for it. A mile or so and his tight coveralls (he wore World War II coveralls, zipped up the front, not fatigues like the rest of us) were wet and soaked with his sweat. After another mile or so, he was bright red. Couple more miles and he turned purple, a dark, grapy purple color. And he was breathing hard. But he kept moving and grinning, leading the pack, which was beginning to stagger and stretch out behind him. Old-timers finding out the hard way that they couldn’t hack it anymore. Or, anyway, giving up before they had to learn any bad lessons about themselves. He was good about breaks. Ten minutes every hour. Everybody sprawled out like dropped rag dolls at roadside. Himself not taking a break but moving up and down the line, encouraging the guys, calling for the medics to get a move on if somebody had acquired bad blisters. I was feeling okay. No way you aren’t tired and muscle-weary. But you are still young and blessed with quick recovery. During the break I sat by the road and watched the colonel, wondering if he would make it. Guessing that he would not. My sergeant first class will come to the same conclusion, but with very mixed feelings. He will be somebody who is always made uncomfortable by the clash of contradictory feelings but is nevertheless often possessed by them. His ideal will be pure and simple feeling, single-mindedness. But mostly he will be more complicated than he wants to be. Pity is beyond him, of course. That would be simple enough but contemptible. And, no denying it, there is always some pleasure in observing someone with power and authority failing, fucking up. At the same time, because he thinks the colonel likes him, thinks (and hopes) the colonel can see him

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for what he really is and can be—a likely choice for first sergeant— he wants the colonel’s authority, credibility, self-respect to be undiminished. What good would it do to have a big loser on your side? He will sit by the side of the road and watch the purple-faced, sweaty, grinning, brave old colonel in his tight coveralls and will want to warn him. To look after him. To make sure the colonel makes it all the way. What if the old fart falls over dead? I forget what happens in the middle of the Styron story. Details are long gone. I do remember being impressed that the writing and the accumulation of details are so good that the march back to base assumes an urgency, some real suspense. That is the whole line of any march story, whether it’s a speed march or a forty-year trek in the wilderness. There is a destination. There are many difficulties (demons and dragons, outer and inner) to overcome before arriving at the final destination. Styron’s two lieutenants do, indeed, make it back, more or less in one piece, to the bachelor officers’ quarters. So did our outfit. So did the colonel. He led us first to last. We ended up in a little shady grove of trees not far from our barracks. Took off packs and helmets. Propped our weapons, M1 rifles and carbines, on the packs or against tree trunks. Lay there in the hot shade, breathing hard at the very end, sweat turning the dust on our faces and bodies into a thin, muddy coat. It was like a little island in the middle of nowhere. Like we were survivors of a shipwreck, tossed up on shore in the shade there. I had my eyes on the colonel. Who finally allowed himself to sit down, back firm against the trunk of a pine tree. Nobody was watching him except me. Very slowly, gingerly, he began to unlace and remove his combat boots. I noticed his hands were shaking a little, his fingers trembling. When the first boot was unbuckled and unlaced, he very slowly, carefully eased it off his foot. Held the foot lightly in both hands and bent close to look at it. I could see that the soles were bloody; the blood had soaked through his regulation GI socks. Blisters had broken and bled, and he had walked (how many miles?), leading the battalion all the way home on bloody feet. And now I think for the first time how the pain of his bloody feet

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came alive and swept over him. He knew what had happened and what he had done, and the pride went out of him like a long sigh. I saw his large, jowly face, a hurt moan beneath the gray and black of his thick, close-cropped hair, begin to change. As if it were wax in heat. Too close to flame. Begin to change and melt. That colonel (and I knew it and so would my character) had been a captain and a battery commander in the Battle of the Bulge. Had a battery of 155-millimeter howitzers and they were firing support at a distant and unseen enemy when suddenly a bunch of Kraut Tiger tanks came barreling into the battery area. Came out of nowhere from all sides. Pure killing machines killing everything moving. Killed most of the battery and wounded the captain. Desperately wounded, unable to move, he somehow lived to see the tanks drive over his men, treads gorging mud a few feet from himself. In his hurt and stricken face there at the end of our speed march, I could tell he was suddenly alive in that old nightmare again. I could see and feel all of it as vividly as if I had been there and could remember it, too. And then suddenly he was shouting at the top of a cracked, hoarse, voice, begging for one of the medics to come quick. To please come. To help him. Please . . . ! Falling completely apart at the tag-end after holding himself and all the rest of it together for so long. Suddenly now becoming an old man in pain and surprise beyond all bearing. I could not look anymore. Turned away from him. Tried to busy myself with my own sore feet and stiff legs. In the story I was someday going to write (and never did until this moment), my sergeant first class would not, does not turn away. He looks directly into the pain-riddled eyes of his colonel. Both of them sharing now the vision that has haunted the edges of consciousness all day—those great dark shapes, towering and terrible in vision, of the tanks, rearing and lunging out of the woods and brush, bringing death to those sleeping soldiers this selfsame day. For a moment they can share this vision, can share this death. The sergeant first class is possessed by mixed feelings still, as always. But one of them, one of those feelings, anyway, is very close to the stab and thrust of love. He has forgotten the first sergeant, his imaginary rival, and his ugly bayonet scar. Probably

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the first sergeant did not even finish the march. Now it is the colonel my character loves and envies and admires with mixed feelings. One of those feelings takes the form of a wish. Wishing that he, the young man, could somehow take on himself all of the colonel’s pain and dismay, and his wealth of terrible memory, all of it, and thereby leave the old man his pride.

EMPTY BED BLUES

Twelve Customers Gunned Down in Convenience-Store Clerk’s Imagination —Headline in the Onion

Crime? You want crime? Okay, I’ll give you crime. But not exactly (I bet) what you were thinking about when you said you wanted to hear all about crime. Crime and punishment. Now let’s get some things, the underbrush, cleared out of the way. We live in a crime-ridden country in a crime-ridden age. If you pause to consider all the laws on all the books, all the things that are (technically and in fact) defined as crimes, from, say, jaywalking to serial rape-murder, then we are probably all of us guilty criminals one way and another. If we include all the inside stuff, the heavy stuff of head and heart, if we are to be held responsible and judged for all we have thought and felt like doing (if we weren’t so scared of getting caught), we are all criminals in that sense, too, one way and another. Just glance at the Bible or maybe the Book of Common Prayer, in any version up through 1928, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. There is no health in us. . . . The indifferent dead (vive l’indifference! ) are maybe a sort of an exception in that they are no longer able to commit any crimes, worldly crimes at least. Their criminal days are behind them.

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Ghosts don’t and can’t do anything to hurt living people, much as they might like to. Sure, ghosts can scare the ever-living wee-wee out of living persons, but they can’t actually do anything harmful to anybody who is still alive. Let’s suppose that we passed a law, make it a federal law, making bad behavior by ghosts a felony or a misdemeanor or something. How would we manage to enforce that aforesaid law? Not that that kind of problem has ever troubled serious lawmakers very much. But enough of deep philosophy and on with the show-and-tell. When you are thinking about crime, you probably are thinking (I assume) about things like mugging and murder and mayhem, about dramatic crimes of violence, about crimes of senseless absurdity like, say, hey-let’s-go-and-knock-over-a-7–11. And while we are at it, baby, let us rip off a half-decent set of wheels and go to California or some sunny place like that. Or let’s deal some dope and get rich. Or white-collar crime. Let’s do a little insider trading. Or maybe we can run a scam on some of the senile folks in a nursing home. Let’s rip off their life savings so we can buy some classy threads and go eat snails in a four-star restaurant. This story—which really happened to a friend of mine, though I’ve changed some of the names and some of the sordid details just in case he should happen to pick up this book somewhere and start reading—is more about the comedy of crime than anything else. The comedy of crime? You may not have thought of it quite that way. But there are plenty of books and movies based on the comedy of crime. I guess my all-time favorite is Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty. Next to that, neck and neck, is a great Italian movie called I Soliti Ignoti (shown over here as Big Deal on Madonna Street), to which Woody Allen made what they nowadays call an homage in Small Time Crooks. Anyway, my point is that plenty of crime is basically comic. Of course, it probably wasn’t like a comedy to my friend. I never asked. I never laughed about it in front of him, either. These things are all a matter of context and point of view. Part of the comedy is the context—the world of academe. There is, of course, plenty of crime in academe. In fact, I can’t imagine any worse bunch of criminals than some of the administrators and colleagues I’ve worked for and with over the years. But, be that as it may, I’m not about to tell you some story about crimes committed solely for the sake of tenure or an office with windows and a

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better parking place. It’s just that this story took place in an academic environment, your basic town-and-gown milieu. And, let me admit it right up front, tenure was indeed involved yes, sir, peripherally at least. Marvin was up for tenure, but you needn’t concern yourself with that. It was his problem. More to the point, Marvin was horny. Profoundly horny. More than usually horny. Even for him. Partly this was because (I guess) his girlfriend, who had never been too free and easy, anyway, had recently broken up with him. Katie was a neat little blonde chick, an actress by inclination and trade, who once upon a time had a couple of spots on TV sitcoms and was hoping to get back into that game just as soon as she could swing it. Meantime she was working for our drama department and, for a little while, shacked up with ole Marvin. He claimed she had a great little tight ass and perky breasts. Perky, that’s the very word he used. Which may be the case, who knows?, but he was seeing her through the eyes of love. When she dumped him, he was heartbroken, briefly, and soon firmly horny. His condition was aggravated when he discovered the back pages of that otherwise wonderfully entertaining alternative newspaper—the Onion. On the back page, under “Adult” he found ads (and phone numbers) for exciting and specialized phone sex: “Horny Housewives,” “Horny H.S. Seniors,” “Barely Legal Coeds,” “Sex-Starved Old Women.” Since he could charge these calls to the departmental budget (at least he thought he could; actually it was a crime because we are a state university), he thought, why not?, he would see if it helped. It didn’t. Not much. True, he was able, at first, to gain the sense of “Release!” that they promised. But it was kind of embarrassing and too expensive. Marvin was a bit of a tightwad, even about things like sex that are very seldom fully cost-effective. As long as it was going to cost him, he figured, why not hire a “real” woman and enjoy a “real” experience. Big mistake, Marvin. He goes downtown to a half-decent singles bar. Meets a cute little number named Carla—dark hair, big boobs, wide ass, kind of chunky, but fit and trim—buys her a couple of drinks. Drinks a couple or three, himself. (Otherwise he might have been thinking a little more clearly.) He’s thinking that they are getting along just fine together. Talking about Clinton and the Oval Office, which he

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had found, at least with Katie, can, under certain circumstances, be a turn-on. Sooner, rather than later, the lady is ready to leave, to go somewhere else. She lives with her mother and his place is too small and totally out of control, so they go off to a cheap motel. Once they’re inside with the air conditioner rattling and humming its old familiar tune, she lets him know, politely but firmly, that this is not amateur night. She’s a pro and expects to see some money up front before she so much as unbuttons a button or unzips a zipper. Hornier than ever, he hands her the money, sits down to take off his shoes when Wham! Bam! Lights and loud voices. Rude remarks in the imperative mood. It’s the cops! She’s a cop! Next thing he knows he is in the archetypal police station. Where (in the presence of the aforesaid Carla who makes some remarks about his inadequate anatomical equipment) strip search, fingerprints, mug shot, booking, and then, clad in a set of the county’s ill-fitting orange coveralls, he is placed in a dingy room dominated by an obviously one-way mirror. Just like on television, he allows himself to opine. It gets worse when the shock wears off. Dawns on him that perky Katie will laugh her little blonde ass off and say I told you so, or something like that. This will probably be in the local paper to the delight of his enemies and the shame of his friends (if any). And there goes tenure. Just when it seemed within reach and grasp. Representing the power and glory of law and order, Carla, now cuter than ever in her neat blue police uniform, comes in. Offers him a cigarette and lights it for him. Marvin doesn’t smoke. Quit cold turkey a decade ago. But right now it tastes wonderful. And, anyway, it might be rude to refuse. Carla asks him if he has been read his Miranda rights. He can’t honestly remember. So, just in case, she reads them all over again. Carla has a husky, sexy voice. Listening to her read Miranda, he feels a little stirring in his loins. Half wishes he were still naked as a jaybird so he could show her that her initial and somewhat contemptuous judgment call was really unfounded. Then she quietly explains to him what is going to happen to him. Most likely he will get off with just a modest fine. It is, after

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all, a first offense, and, as he will see soon enough, the county lockup is overcrowded with serious criminal types. His lawyer, any old lawyer, can get him out on his own recognizance sometime tomorrow. The only bad part, she tells him, especially for a university professor like you, is the public embarrassment. To begin with, it’s been a slow night, slow for the newspaper business. For sure they will make a big deal out of it and probably a big joke, too. Chances are that it will be picked up by some other papers in the area. And, of course, Channel 4 will give you some serious attention. Sorry about that. . . . “Oh, God!” he hears himself saying. “What can I do?” “Well,” she says. Then: “Well, maybe there is something.” Maybe, she suggests, his weaknesses can be turned into positive strengths. It seems (if only he had known!) there is a racket, a call girl ring, right here in this nice little academic town. The law enforcement folks have had bad luck in trying to get enough evidence to shut down this operation. Or—and here Marvin begins his elementary education in crime and crime fighting in contemporary America—at least to control the whole thing. Not just to control the market in high-priced pussy, but also to share in the inevitable profits accrued. If the Powers That Be (top-level town and county government) can keep this criminal activity under control while allowing an uncontested monopoly and keeping the partners/perpetrators out of jail and trouble, then they (the Powers That Be) surely deserve a modest piece of the action. Does Marvin understand all this so far? More or less. More or less is enough. More or less is all that anybody understands about anything, including brain surgery and rocket science. “What does all this have to do with me?” She is not ready, not quite yet, to deal with Marvin’s particular problem. First she wants to explain some of the benefits, the allaround benefits, deriving from this “. . . operation.” Everybody understands (more or less) that the buying and selling of sexual pleasure (“Release!”) is not going to cease and desist until Judgment Day comes along to separate the sheep from the goats. Until that Day comes along, the commerce, legal and illegal, of sex will continue regardless of all laws and regulations, preaching, or

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punishment. The Powers That Be, with the law enforcement folks as their active agents, have an obligation to the community. They must keep the lid on (as they say), or they will be sooner or later replaced by other Powers That Be; and, in addition to losing their limited powers and their modest privileges and prerequisites, they will find themselves deprived of various sources of income, earned and unearned. The obvious and practical solution to something like this call girl ring is to bring these criminals (by which she does not mean the hardworking women, but rather the entrepreneurs who are the executives of the industry) into the tent. Better they are in the tent with us and pissing outside than vice versa. What can motivate them to join with us, the representatives of the community at large? The answer is several things. Several things at once. First, of course, the end of their business, at least locally. Likewise the prospect of jail time. Nobody wants to go to jail for even a few minutes after watching Oz and other such shows on TV. It’s a matter of carrot and stick. Ever the good student, Marvin wonders what the carrot can be. Good question, Marvin. Suppose the law enforcement folks and the Powers That Be, having accumulated a gracious plenty of evidence, enough to send everybody involved, at all levels, off to the slammer, just suppose these forces of law and order were to offer the criminals a deal. We don’t send you to jail. We don’t even close down your lucrative and lively activities. In return for a certain kind of discretion on your part, we allow you to continue. Suppose we allow only you to continue. Suppose, that is, we give you a monopoly on expensive commercial pussy in town. Anybody else tries to get into the act and the business and we run them out of town or haul them into the courthouse. What we have to offer you, then, in return for your good behavior and a negotiable percentage of the profits, is security. And, if you have a taste for irony, some of that, too. The law enforcement folks become your very own security. To be sure, the law enforcement people have every right to share, directly and indirectly, in your profits. Exactly how much and precisely from what source—Powers That Be or you guys—can be negotiated. Like any old contract. “Capisce?”

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“Carla, I am a little shocked, ‘taken aback’ would be more like it, by what you are telling me. I do understand, more or less. But what I do not understand is what any of this has to do with me. “I mean, okay, so I tried to solicit you for some sex. Money changed hands and the cops came in and busted me before I could even begin. . . .” “Professor,” Carla said quietly. “I have just given you an overview, a sense of the Big Picture. Now let’s go micro, down and dirty. We have got you by the balls and would very much like to squeeze them and encourage you to join with us and help us out. Not a big thing. Call it one small step for mankind. We need to catch ourselves a call girl and put a little heat on her. Are you game?” They need to catch a live call girl, more or less in the act. And then put the squeeze on her, sweating her until she is ready and willing to rat out (as they say, at least on TV) her colleagues and superiors. Maybe, if Marvin agrees to help them in this matter, they can manage to misplace and lose his paperwork and can make sure that his good name and the nature of his indiscretion do not appear in the morning papers or anywhere else. And wouldn’t that be nice? While Marvin is allowed (briefly, briefly) to think about all this, Carla adds a little spice to the bubbling sauce. “You know, Marvin, I’m really sorry about all this. I mean you seem like a pretty nice guy. We might even get to be friends, down the road a little. . . .” Looking at her large, firm breasts swelling against her policewoman’s blue shirt, Marvin feels yet another stirring of the loins (his) as he smiles a wan smile and agrees at last to cooperate with law enforcement in any way that might be helpful. Before we go any farther with this I’m going to need to tell you a little more about Marvin. Not that we were close buddies. Put it this way. I had known him pretty well for awhile. We both came to work at the university at about the same time. But we weren’t really rivals and I didn’t have anything serious against him. That made me one of his precious few friends. A lot of people at the university didn’t take to Marvin. They thought he was a wise ass and they didn’t wish him well. I was at least neutral, and that neutrality

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allows me to maintain a little more objectivity than most people trying to tell this tale could honestly claim to possess. I did not wish his misfortunes on him. Believe me, it did not give me a whole lot of pleasure, perverse or otherwise, when troubles descended on him like a cloud of gnats or mosquitoes aiming to eat him alive. Sure, I laughed at the time. That is the truth, and I’ll be the first to admit it. But I did not, as so many others most certainly did, rejoice and offer up libations of thanksgiving to whatevergods-may-be for bringing him down to his knees. Quite aside from personal feelings and ideals of good behavior, there is another very good reason for me to pause here and to tell you a little something more about Marvin. As anybody who writes some fiction will be glad to tell you—and, truth be known, both Marvin and I have written and published some fiction from time to time—if whatever happens to a central character, a protagonist, is to have any meaning or implications (read: resonance), above and beyond the simple recitation of a sequence of happy or unhappy events, if the story you are telling is to have any claim to or hope of engaging a reader and involving the reader’s feelings, then you have to know and to share a little bit of information about the aforesaid central character before he or she steps forward into the big middle of whatever shitstorm you have prepared for him/her to face and (maybe) to endure. Of course, it is very easy to overdo this, trying too hard to create sympathy, even empathy for this character when he or she may not be entitled to any sympathy at all. And that, my friends, next to a shrugging passivity on the part of many a modern ho-hum protagonist, is one of the most troublesome problems with a lot of contemporary fiction. Losers are fine and dandy, and so are many kinds of antiheroes, but somehow or other we have to generate a certain amount of engagement, if not really sympathy, with them. Well, allowing that I am somewhat limited by the fact that, even if you don’t know it and have to take my word for it, Marvin, or anyway the character by that name in this story, is “real,” there is and was a real version of my character Marvin. To that extent the story I’m telling is “true,” a piece of reportage, though only a very few people on this planet will be able to judge the authenticity and accuracy of my version. What do you need to know about Marvin? Well, even if he is, by

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trade, a professor, he isn’t your stereotypical intellectual. Sure, he can act like one if he has to. (We all can.) But when it comes to life in the academic world Marvin is really more of a hustler, a gifted con artist. You might be surprised how many people working in our colleges and universities—and bear in mind that there are now in America more college professors than steelworkers—are in it for what they can get out of it. Really dumb, you think, having in mind their (usually) very modest salaries. But don’t forget that the admittedly inadequate salary is often paying for not much more than twelve or fifteen hours of work in an average week, if that much. And the fringe benefits, health package, and pension plans are pretty good. Compared to real life in the real world, it is not a hard row to hoe. On top of which you, as professor, are invited to enjoy the privilege of high moral self-esteem for (apparently) sacrificing conventional worldly rewards for the sake of an ancient, honorable, and dedicated profession. Like a lot of academics, Marvin liked to imagine that he could have been a successful stockbroker or a lawyer or an entrepreneur, if he hadn’t freely given his life to teaching. As for the other basic things. Marvin wasn’t bad looking—medium size, good teeth, blue eyes, and a nice head of dark hair. Kept himself trim and fit playing tennis and, once in a while, a round of golf. Was—and I would guess still is—a natty dresser within the fairly lax sumptuary limits of the professional style. Somewhere along the way he had learned to play the piano a little, well enough to accompany his colleagues and their spouses and significant others in the cheerful and raucous singing of old show tunes late in the evening at the tag end of parties just before people started falling down or getting into arguments. Marvin had been married a couple of times. No children. That was a disappointment, but he had hopes of some day marrying wisely and well and even having a family. Hopes that one day he might write a reasonably successful book. He had written two books already, not scholarly; but in spite of trendy topics, good timing, and good reviews, they had both bombed out. Don’t think that some of his academic colleagues didn’t see the silver lining of his troubles. “Cheer up,” they said (not to him but to one another). “It will give him a good subject to write about.”

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Maybe it will. Are you sympathetic yet? Moving along smartly with Marvin, then. Setting up a call girl to be caught in the act turned out to be a little more difficult than you might think. The arrangement, made by Carla and her colleagues, involved, as is usually the case, rigging up Marvin’s own bedroom with audio-visual aids. He knew where the cameras were placed and where the audio “bugs” were located. But he could not tell for certain whether and when they might be turned on. This made Marvin very nervous in his own bedroom. It also made him more than a little boring to his academic colleagues when he got on the subject of privacy in America in the electronic age. At the same time, of course, we had no idea why this subject had suddenly become an obsession with him; and so it was assumed that Marvin was getting a little crazy, “touched” as the old-timers put it. Life went on. Marvin showed up to teach his classes, keep his appointments, and meet with committees. People tried to keep him as far away as possible from the subject of privacy. Meanwhile Martin was trying, under pressure, to do his bounden duty. To be brief, it took him a while to make contact with a working call girl who was not suspicious of him and his motives. Finally, though, one came to his apartment. The cops hid in closets and the bathroom, ready to rush out yelling and shouting and reading Miranda rights as soon as Marvin and the victim got (more or less) undressed and some money changed hands. Trouble was, in this case, long before Marvin and the call girl arrived at a legally defined transaction, the young woman revealed herself to be the daughter of the chairman of the history department. The best that could come from this situation was that the two principals agreed (scouts’ honor) not to tell on each other. Truth is, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. This young woman, believing she could probably trust Marvin, agreed to recommend somebody else, a call girl colleague with no known academic connections or interests. The cops were a lot less than happy about this new turn of events, but they were willing to be patient for a little while longer. During that time, the time between call girls, Marvin went out

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with Carla a couple of times, the second of which ended in his lessthan-private bedroom where Carla, good cop always, refused to admit or deny that their antic frolics were being recorded for posterity or at least for the general amusement of any and all down at the jolly police station. Carla was lively and lots of fun, and Marvin didn’t worry about making a spectacle of himself until the morning after when Carla got dressed and went off to work. He then seriously considered disabling the cameras or, anyway, erasing or changing the film. But he lacked the necessary mechanical expertise to do so. The rest you probably know about or, anyway, may vaguely remember if you happened to read our local or regional newspapers. How a big, blowsy, no-nonsense blonde came to his apartment and fell into the trap. A definite deal was made. Money changed hands. Some clothes shucked off and soon after (not soon enough as far as Marvin was concerned) cops came charging in from all directions and arrested the blondie (let’s call her Darlene) and took her into custody and away. Marvin may have believed that his task was over and done with, that he was (as they say) home free. If so, he believed that only briefly before things took an unanticipated turn. First, Darlene was in every way a lot tougher than Carla and the police had imagined or planned on. No deals. No plea. “Try me in court,” she told them. “We’ll see how it turns out.” “What’s going to happen, honey,” Carla told her, “is that if you don’t cooperate with us, you will certainly spend some time behind bars.” “Fine,” Darlene said. “I can use a vacation, anyway.” On top of Darlene’s unexpected recalcitrance there were the mechanical difficulties. What mechanical difficulties? you ask. Well, it seems that the video cameras and audio devices, while not a complete and utter failure, were not quite adequate, in and of themselves, to prove a case against Darlene. But, as Carla told Marvin, not to worry. We have other options. “Like what?” “Like you, Marvin.” Which is how, like it or not, Marvin ended up testifying in open court as a witness against Darlene. Kind of ironic, you might say, since from the beginning his whole plan and purpose was to keep

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out of the paper and save his good name. Nothing he could do about it though. Grin and bear it. Only there was more to bear than you might think. Because Darlene insisted on testifying on her own behalf. She surprised everyone, probably her own lawyer, by cheerfully and openly admitting that she was a call girl and that the evening with Marvin was strictly a business proposition. “I have never pretended to be anyone or anything other than what I am. But even if I am guilty of breaking the law—and that’s finally up to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury and nobody else, there are limits to what I will do. And one thing I will never, ever do, no matter what, is to rat out somebody else to save my own skin and reputation, like that college professor sitting over there (witness indicates Marvin) and grinning like a jackass chewing briars.” “You used the words rat out,” her lawyer said. “Would you kindly define that?” “You mean say what it means?” “Correct.” “To rat out is to tell on somebody else for the purpose of saving your own sweet ass. I would never do that, not ever, not even to him, the college professor.” “Thank you.” The jury took about forty-five minutes to acquit the call girl. Please bear in mind that it takes roughly fifteen minutes to move the jury from the court to the jury room and roughly the same time to return. Ergo: the jury deliberated about fifteen minutes before arriving at a verdict. It took a young reporter for the Daily Paper less time than that to see that there was a story there that might be a ticket to bigger and better things in his journalistic career. Later in the same week I helped Marvin pack his U-Haul trailer and stood out in the street and waved farewell as he drove off in search of a new and improved life. You may be wondering, by now, exactly where I fit into all this. If you are, I don’t blame you. Was it D. H. Lawrence who said “trust the tale and not the teller”? Or was it the other way around? After some years, marked by lumps and hard knocks, in this fic-

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tion game, I would strongly advise you not to trust anybody very much. Greet the teller and the tale both with a healthy skepticism. In my case, this particular story about my friend “Marvin,” you would be well-advised to keep in mind that I have made some serious effort to present the image of myself as a fair-minded fellow, sympathetic to my “friend,” certainly not relishing his general discomfort, objective on the whole, and not myself involved very much. Keeping my distance. All well and good. But did you guess, some of the more cynical among you, anyway, that I might be concealing or, anyway, disguising my story by so tightly focusing on his? From the very beginning, the more experienced (read: cynical) among you will have asked yourselves the basic question that always ought to be asked of any narrator and/or character, fictional or factual or a little of both. Namely: What’s in it for him? What is his angle? Your truly experienced (cynical) reader knows that nobody ever does anything at all (or leaves anything at all undone) for any reasons other than dedicated self-interest. Knows, too, that it is almost always a matter of simple self-interest to deny this and to profess its opposite. People keep saying ad nauseam: “All I want to do is leave this world a little bit better place than I found it.” Hitler probably said that, too, to his pals in the bunker in April of 1945. Our president, Bill Clinton, said exactly that, or its equivalent, from many a podium many times. And it was probably (if you ask me, which you didn’t) what he would say to Monica Lewinsky sometimes in the Oval Office when she was too busy and preoccupied to answer back and say the same thing on her own behalf. But let us not get into any arguments about politics. Let us agree to disagree, bearing in mind always that politicians, by basic definition, are one and all creatures of pure and absolute and passionate self-interest. It was more a matter of Providence than any planning on my part that when Marvin’s hopes for promotion and tenure were so rudely dashed, mine somehow were enhanced—the old seesaw effect. Look at it this way. The truth is, and I’ll be the first to admit it, that, judged objectively, Marvin deserved tenure a lot more than I. But, even so, he will be happier somewhere else, a new place where his story is less likely to be known and bandied about. A fresh new start for Marvin. He may even be grateful. All in due time.

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Not so long ago I ran into Carla. She was in her full policewoman’s uniform and on duty. But she took time out to have a coffee with me at the new Starbucks across the street from the university. She told me that she still hears from him once in a while. “It’s kind a shame,” she said. “Most of the people you meet in my line of work—the bad guys I mean, not the cops—are really no fucking good. Marvin may have had his problems, but he was a gentleman of the old school.” “You could say that.” Meanwhile Katie and I are making a good life together. She’s still teaching in the drama department, and I don’t think Hollywood will be calling her away any time soon. We are renovating a wonderful old house a few blocks from the university. She is everything I ever wanted, blonde on our blue linen sheets, and everlastingly—what was Marvin’s word?—“perky.”

GHOST ME WHAT’S HOLY NOW

PART ONE: WINE TALKING Being herewith some notes and observations upon various and sundry topics as spoken by Robert Carey, Earl of Monmouth, at the dinner table. Recorded and responded to at this time, summer of 1626, by his young clerk, John Howland, late of Oriel College, Oxford. How coaches are now becoming the very plague of London and Westminster and will soon enough be the ruination of them. How, even worse, coaches have caused much decay of the roads and highways of the kingdom. Streets of the City not built and never intended for the traffic of coaches. How there were none at all . . . “. . . or damned precious few of them, truly; for it is said that Queen Mary had a coach for a time when she also had a Spanish husband and wished to please him . . . “. . . until Queen Elizabeth had one, and a fine little coach it was, low to the ground and all aglitter with gilt and gold. More to be seen than any other purpose. Handsome and devilishly uncomfortable too.” How the Queen acquired her coach, together with a tall and haughty Dutchman, fellow by the name of Boonen, as he recalls, in 1564 or ’65 or thereabouts. That the Queen wished for the coach to be the privilege of herself alone. But that once she had gotten hers and ridden out in public

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in it, why—and no doubt she should have guessed the truth of this—it was all but foreordained that, little by little, coaches would become the fashion. All the more so since the Queen wished to discourage others from having and using them. Paradox of the intense pleasure of the forbidden. How her Court seemed to be able without difficulty to discern which of the Queen’s preferences and rules and restrictions were more to be taken as teasing challenges than as true commands. “Any who confused the two would learn the difference soon enough and loud enough. To their great embarrassment and acute discomfort. From the Queen’s own lips . . .” How well before the time of her death every gentle lady in and around the verge of Court, and, indeed, also half of the wives and even the doxies of rich merchants of London, must have their very own coaches to be seen and admired and envied while going to and fro. That then King James came and much preferred to go about by coach. But more for safety and a measure of privacy and some distance from the rabble than to be seen. For he soon came to hate and to fear the English crowds. Especially the City mobs. Here the Earl pauses to tell me that throughout most of her reign, until the very last of it, the Queen rejoiced in the presence of large crowds around her. “She drank excitement like strong wine. Sometimes she seemed drunk on popularity.” And again: “The Queen could warm herself, body and soul, by their cheers and applause. Warmed as if by a blazing bonfire. And the crowds seemed to sense how she was moved by them. And this, in turn, was a thing that excited them all the more. It became to be more like lovemaking than love . . .” How she was always most angry when too few people appeared to see her whenever she passed by. “But never mind all the times gone by, lad. See it clear as it is. The streets of London, except, perhaps, for broad Cheapside, are simply not suited to coaches. They crowd and clutter the narrow way. It is the damned coaches that have made so much noise and clamor and confusion everywhere.”

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Still and all he has to admit that he cannot in truth complain too much. For, no denying, it is his coach that makes it possible for him to go around and about in all kinds of weather. Without the use of it, at his age, he would be strictly confined to his own house. To the choice of garden or gallery for his pleasure. And yet, he tells me, it was a much different world in those days when all the great men, even the greatest of them, had no choice but to walk on foot or ride on horseback like everyone else. They were seen and known on sight by many. And these newcomers, the great men of the latest generation, are strangers to the people now. “Believe me, lad, it is much easier to hate and imagine the worst of those who are very seldom, if ever, seen and are known in flesh and blood to only a very few. True enough, your great lord may lose a kind of mystery through too much popular familiarity. But they stand a good chance to gain goodwill in the place of it. And goodwill may prove to be most precious in the long run.” Later he says to me: “There are too many in this new age of ours who prefer to be strangers to those whom they govern and rule. Well, sir, they may come to regret it. All in due time.” And again: “Look you, when those who rule over us are strangers, like absent and indifferent landlords, then you must remember that their goodness and honor and virtue are as well concealed as any of their vices. And that is a condition which can prove more troublesome to the health and welfare of the kingdom than the sum of all their vices together. For, lad, in this late age of the world, may we not assume, nay, we must assume it always, that vice and corruption go merrily along, hand in hand, with every kind of government. And it is ever so much easier—and much more entertaining—to imagine vices than virtues. Therefore the coach will prove to be more convenient for a vicious man than for a virtuous. And since it is true that in most men virtue and vice are well mixed, when they ride together, side by side so to speak, it is generally assumed that they are one and the same. And not even the most cheerfully vicious men can afford to be credited with no virtues at all.” Then: “Where was I?” Wine and age work together to cloud his mind.

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“Coaches, sir,” I say. “You were speaking of the novelty of coaches.” “Ah, yes. Well, then. Still a novelty to me, though old as the world to you. So be it, then. Let us talk of more important matters.” How now that we have wars again to fight, there is too much talk of courage and of cowardice by swaggering young fellows who have not yet demonstrated even a propensity toward either. Untested, they have yet to prove they know the difference between the two. That the beginning of understanding is to learn that to be courageous is not the same thing as to be entirely fearless. How much has been said (albeit privately, secretly) concerning the cowardice of our late King James. Well, it is true, no denying the King was always a fearful man. Much more so than merely prudent or cautious. His padded doublet. Careful protection of every kind for himself. No wonder. Not surprising. Consider the dangerous life he had to live in bloody, murderous Scotland. But to be fearful, even fearfully prudent, is nevertheless not at all the same as to be a coward. That it was a very grave mistake for so many, friends as well as enemies, to have taken him to be a coward. “What these fellows overlooked—and, yes, so did I in my ignorance—was that even if he had been so often in danger that he was all twitches and winces, like a dog or a child who has been beaten too often, still it should never have been forgotten that he had ever and always managed to prevail. Not even witches had managed to overcome him. Sooner or later, against all the odds, he had succeeded in everything he attempted. Always in Scotland. And up till the last of his days and reign in England. Sooner or later, in spite of all kinds of shame and humiliation, he was able to overcome his enemies. “What can wounds of shame and humiliation possibly mean when, in the end, all things are transformed into victories? Victory heals all wounds. It is the ancient Scots tale of Robert the Bruce patiently learning this lesson from a spider spinning a web.” He says this: That the king’s great confidence in himself, in his own stratagems and ideas, confidence in himself alone, his (yes) arrogance and his rigid certainty, these very qualities which sur-

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prised so many Englishmen (who somehow expected that a hard life had taught him to be humble more than anything else) can be seen to have been inevitable when you now pause to consider, as no man did then, not even the wise and subtle Cecil, that James had never failed at anything. On account of that he never had any good reason to look for anything other than victory and success in all of his endeavors. Danger, fear, shame, humiliation, even the continual presence of his unquenchable anxiousness, these things were only the price that had to be paid to gain the fulfillment of all his hopes. That therefore it had been a mistake for anyone to imagine, as many had done, that this king could ever have been frightened into a change of mind and heart. A great mistake to suppose that he could be turned away by fear from whatever he willed to do. “Now, boy, this is wine talking and no more than that. And if you ever choose to repeat one word of what I have been saying here, I shall deny it. And you will regret it. But . . . what real harm can be done? Most all of these people are dead and gone now. The rest, and I shall be among them, will follow them into silence soon enough.” Went on then to speak somewhat concerning all the plots and conspiracies against King James. Especially after he came here to rule in England. How, one and all, they always seemed to work to the King’s favor and advantage. “I will tell you this—and then deny it with my next breath. That I could never seriously believe very much of that business of the papists and their Gunpowder Plot in ’05. It was, to my simple mind, altogether too perfect, too reasonable, too conveniently discovered and exposed. I thought then, as I think now, that it served little Cecil (who was newly Earl of Salisbury that same year, was he not?) very well indeed. And most of all it served the King. For he was given thereby, at one stroke, all good cause and sound reasons to disregard any promises or arrangements he may have made earlier with the papists. “And the shadows of that plot made me to think again of the Bye and the Main Plots, in his first year in England. How many questions still remain unanswered. What benefits it conferred upon Cecil and the King to have Lord Grey and Cobham, and your kinsman Ralegh also, removed from the scene.

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“No man will ever know the whole truth of any of it, I suppose. But, lad, these plots and their fortunate discovery had all the signs of the same kinds of plots which old Burghley and Walsingham had discovered (or provoked, as the case may be) in the Queen’s time. “Well. I have already said much too much. Enough to have been hanged for it. So let me add this much more and then be done with it. And pray you to forget it.” That he had looked into the chronicles and accounts of the King’s history in Scotland. That he could only conclude, without either prejudice or judgment, that in every plot or conspiracy concerning him, beginning indeed with his father’s conspiracy to murder the Queen’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, even before James was born, and including the very strange death of his father in yet another plot, with (yes!) gunpowder, in all of them there is some great mystery. In all these events, from that night in his mother’s womb to that Tuesday afternoon when the Earl of Gowerie and his brother sought to kill the King in their own tower (after which the King held special service every Tuesday of his life to thank God for deliverance), in all of these are too many things which are not known and can never be known and must be taken on faith. That no man, not even Machiavelli, another Italian, could have been clever enough to concoct and design them all. Yet who in either myth or history had ever been so fortunate? Even Achilles had his heel. At the very least, any skeptic would have to admit that all the evidence seems to prove that God Himself loved his servant James Stuart very much and very well. And that Providence served to steer him directly toward everything he ever hoped and wished for. “At least until his stratagem of the Spanish Match failed utterly. Until his dream of being the Peacemaker of the world collapsed into a war. Then many things suddenly went wrong. So much that had been sweet turned bitter on his tongue. “Ah, well, we are told again and again in Holy Scripture how we shall all come to taste deep of sorrow and regret before we are allowed to leave this world. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he flieth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we be in death.”

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Then (to the half-dozing servant, a man nearly as old as himself, standing by the sideboard with the wine and the cups): “Quick, man! Pour out some more wine for this scholar and myself before I begin to preach my own obsequies.” Then (to me, smacking his lips as he tastes the wine, his eyes brightening): “Where was I? What was I speaking of?” “You were speaking on the subject of fear, sir.” “Ah, yes. To be sure.” That the late King James may well have been a fearful man but no kind of coward. Less of a coward, in truth, than many more fearless men. For as above argued, he had never had any reason to discard his hopes, seeing how all things served his turn. Whether by Providence or his own designs or something of both is no matter. That, speaking of Fortune and mysterious Providence, it does often seem to him now that this very age, his own life and times— time of the Queen, time of King James, and now the bright times yet to be of our good and young King Charles—has itself been written and printed like a book. One which he has been reading even as he has experienced it. These times being as much of a book, a story, as any of those old chronicles and ancient histories we were all raised up on. As much as so much Holy Scripture is. And this book, his lifetime, inevitably teaching the selfsame incorruptible lessons again and again and again. Which is to say (“Forgive me, lad, for lecturing to a scholar on these simple things”) that we must seek continually to live always and only by the little trinity of faith and hope and charity. Because, in truth, all other things and goods being only perishable, we have no other honest choice. “As the preachers say (until we yawn and doze in their tedious faces) all else is vanity, vanity, vanity.” That the longer a man lives the more he will be taught this. Though he may freely choose to ignore it. Though he may live and die without ever taking the lessons of this world to heart. Because it is very hard to see and to bear the truth of it in the steel looking glass of oneself. Yet easy, oh, easier by far, to see it in the lives of others. Take, for instance, one among the many who have come and gone in his times, little Robert Cecil. Whose father carefully saved

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and left to him greatness of office and, as well, Theobalds which was, then, surely (for great Audley End and Hatfield were not even yet begun) all in all, the finest house in the kingdom—the Queen’s own palaces included. Except maybe for Hampton Court; and that, after all, was Wolsey’s dream. And if old Burghley left him no great fortune, still he left him very well situated, with every opportunity to find the means to preserve his station and to raise himself even higher yet. “And God knows he did so. Managed by skill and sleight of hand to serve the Queen even while likewise serving her successor (and himself ). Brought the King to this throne. Served him well. Scattered and destroyed the King’s enemies. And, of course, his own as well. Came soon enough, early in a life’s span, to the nobility. To even greater and more lucrative offices, to honor and fortune. “To building. . . . Have you been yet to see the new Exchange by the Strand? That’s his doing. Why, the old Royal Exchange in the City is pale and poor beside it. And also great Salisbury House there in Westminster. And the house at Hatfield. Traded off Theobalds, gave it to the King. Then built himself a better and grander place there at Hatfield, close by the ancient Hall where Queen Elizabeth had lived when she was young. “You must see it for yourself. You must have an occasion to see great Hatfield House before you go running away to India or Virginia or wherever your restless spirit moves you to go. “If you are able to admire the harmony and splendor of great houses—and why not, lad, for the brick and marble and glass, the plaster and fine woods are, in and of themselves, innocent enough and speak not truly of the vanity of man, but rather of the wonder and richness and variety of God’s own Creation?—why you will be startled with delight that such a place can be. And if the works of man (though they be wrought with the materials of God) please you not, then go outside into the gardens. And see the wonders gathered there by the genius of his gardener—Mr. Tradescent. “Boy, I do believe I could save you from a plain, drab life as a Puritan simply by showing you that house and those gardens. “Well, you can see, can easily imagine, how I envied him his good fortune. And how I hated him for all of the injustices, real and perhaps imaginary, which I conceived he had worked upon me. “A word more about injustice, boy.

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“I know, I know, I know what Holy Scripture tells us, especially under the New Law, and how far we fall short of it.” (How far we have come already. Here we have already passed the Second Sunday after Easter as we move through the days toward Whitsuntide. And I know that what is on his mind, even at this satiated, winey moment, is the Epistle for that Sunday. Which, together for once, we heard preached on from the great cross at Paul’s Church. Namely the second chapter of the First Epistle of Peter. I am now somewhat amused, and touched, for he has troubled himself to memorize a piece of the passage. Perhaps out of simple vanity, to prove to me that he can still fish up words from his memory when he wishes to. Taking these words not from the King’s newly wrought translation, but from the old Bishops’ version as it is to be found in his own Book of Common Prayer.) “For what praise is it, if when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye take it patiently? But if and when ye do well, and ye suffer wrong and take it patiently, then there is thanks with God. For hereunto verily were ye called.” (And I interrupting, continuing the text, but choosing, as ever, to turn to the wholesome Geneva version.) “. . . For hereunto ye are called. For Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps. Who did no sin, neither was there guile found in his mouth. Who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed it to him that judgeth righteously. Who in his own self bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we being delivered from sin, should live in righteousness by whose stripes ye were healed.” He, the old man, frowning. Wrinkling his face. For it was rude of me to interrupt him in that fashion. Vain for me to show him a caper with my own memory. “You and your Geneva text!” he says. “You and your Oriel College memory. But . . .” (a sudden grin as of triumph) “you chose to ignore the last verse of it. On purpose, as I do believe.” (Then the two of us together, smiling, repeating the verse and, yes, in his Common Prayer words for it, a duet like two windy recorders playing a melody in identical pitch and tune.) “For ye were as sheep going astray, but are now turned unto the shepherd and bishop of your souls.”

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(His laughter.) “Bishop, bishop, bishop! Ah, how you precise fellows hate the word,” he says. “Well, judging by the bishops we have, I can scarcely blame you. Where was I, say, before I began to show off my memory?” “At the life and death of the Earl of Salisbury, sir.” “Well, I confess to you (it is no news at all to the Almighty) that I most unchristianly rejoiced in heart and soul when he died (and died in great pain and sorrow too) in the springtime of 1612. I do confess how I went at once, upon receipt of the good news of his demise, directly to my privy. Where, if nowhere else, I could be alone. Where I could, and did, empty my bowels (as if upon his head) and laugh out loud, as well as inwardly, at the final justice of it all. “I confess, also, how I joined my own voice in the huge choir of the voices of those who now felt free at last to abuse him in death. We who had so hated and feared him in life. It gave me peace and a deep content to hear and to pass on the news that he had been snatched from this vale of tears by nothing more extraordinary than the French pox. “Which was, to be sure, a lie, and we knew it even as we said it, yet felt the better for saying it whether we believed it or not. Can you understand that? “Well, then. It has been fully fifteen years since then. And much has changed for better and much for worse. I am older, somewhat richer, and not a bit wiser or better. Cecil, beneath his noble and expensive tomb, is no more than a little pile of bones now. Like a large dog’s, I suppose. No more. Hatfield House and the gardens there are a wonder to behold. Better indeed than he ever saw them; for he was stone dead before the building and planting were finished. “I am deeply pleased whenever there is some occasion for me to go and be there. I find it soothing to my spirit. And now also—having laughed my laugh at his expense in the stinking air of my privy, chiefly rich with the stink of myself—I envy the man nothing. Instead I find myself strangely grateful to him. On account of what he imagined and made and had to leave behind. “Do you see what the wine and I are trying to tell you? How it calls for no prophet, how it is simple and easy enough to read the

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lesson of the Fortunes of others, friends and enemies alike, if you happen to be fortunate enough yourself to live and to see what has become of them. But Providence is another matter altogether. Darker, more mysterious by far. “I think of the Queen. Dying in silence, after many days of silence. Unable or unwilling to speak. What did she see or understand that struck her mute? “Or our poor King James. He died, you know, with his whole mouth frozen grotesquely open (as they say and I believe). As if struggling to speak. As if trying perhaps to scream, perhaps to cry out the truth of what he perceived in all his final pain and flux. Shame and humiliation. This man of many words could make no sound to the world’s ears except the gargle of his phlegm and of the juices that were drowning him. He may have seen and understood something as terrible as the head of the Medusa. Turned him to stone, it did. “It is the wine that makes me say these things. Together with all the arrogant habits and prerogatives of my old age. But, still, I confess to you that I sometimes wonder. “Does God Himself laugh out loud, rock His jeweled throne with laughter? Does He rattle the windowsills of heaven when He looks down and sees the enormities, the intricate follies and selfdeceptions of our works and days? “Cannot God laugh (sometimes) like a man? Must He always and only weep over us?” I am compelled to remind him that Jesus is described to us as weeping. And that there is no mention of his laughter anywhere. “Ah,” he says, “it is true. Still, I cannot forget the laughter of Abraham and his wife, Sarah, when the angel of the Lord told them that they would have a son and as many descendants as the stars in the sky.” That this world is to be taken, as the Scripture says, like unto a field. Where corn and grass are grown and cut down for harvest and planted and grown anew. How there are seasons of this world. How there are crops to be harvested. And how sometimes the crop is rich and abundant. How at other times the harvest is poor. “What I am saying, boy, is that it is now my old man’s judgment that there was truly a wonderful harvest of Englishmen in the Queen’s time. That great men were many enough to seem to be

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common. That in those days she could have thrown an apple or a tennis ball at her assembled Court and would have struck a worthy man. “Then came the next generation and surprised us, as we surprised ourselves, to discover that good men (never mind great men) are few and rare. King James could not have done much better than he did. If he had fired a cannon, loaded with chain shot, point blank into his assembled Court, most of the bodies they gathered up in buckets would not have been worth the price of the gunpowder it took to dismember them.” That we have witnessed a thin harvest of mankind for many years now. But that he has hopes that things will now change for the better. “For it will soon enough be in your hands, lad. And I have hope and faith in the young. For we have a young King now, too. I know him well. He’s grave and honest and courageous. Given time, he should surely grow in wisdom and stature. It will be in the future that true English hearts will be found. And at last the past will vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind.” That one of the advantages of old age (“and they are few, lad, very, very few”) is that it becomes possible for one old man to jest with another concerning things which might have been too private and too painful to speak of before. How Sir Ferdinando Gorges has often teased him about his wild ride up the North Road to Holyroodhouse in ’03. How Ferdinando has called it an antic thing to do and named it “Carey’s Ride from Bedlam to the Bedchamber.” Saying: “Robert, I could understand it better if you had fallen and broken your head before you decided to ride to the King. But you say you fell on the last day of the three. Which puzzles me no end.” How he has countered with mock dismay that Ferdinando is his friend. “Look, you,” I have told him, “I have seen what becomes of your friends. Essex was your friend. Next Ralegh. Sir, when you now profess friendship to me, I have a picture of my own head on the point of a pike above the gate of London Bridge. Some barefoot lad from the country, here to make his fortune and to become Lord Mayor of London, will look up and wonder who is that handsome fellow there?”

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“Why then,” says Ferdinando, “I shall have a man of my own to stand there to answer any questions. ‘That’s all that’s left of old Robert Carey,’ he’ll say. ‘A silly fellow who once walked all the way from London to Berwick in eleven days.’” That, speaking of jests and such, it is more often through them that we shall learn something of the true nature of others than through even the most exhaustive accountings of their words and deeds. “Here is a story of King James which tells me much. One which I heard him say with my own ears. It was early in his reign, and he was complaining of the crowds that gathered to trouble and pester him wherever he went. ‘What do they want from me? What is it they want? I ask you!’ he said. ‘Why, sir,’ says a gentleman of the Court, ‘they wish to see and to admire your face.’ ‘Then, God’s wounds, they will,’ the King replies. ‘They shall see my face. And I shall pull down my breeches and let them admire my arse, too.’” How the best of the jest is that the King truly meant it. And how the fops of the Court knew it, too. And were in a study as to how they could politely dissuade the King from exposing his bare arse to the people of England. How the wit of the old Queen could at times be quite as coarse as her cousin’s. But with a certain difference. And with a woman’s sort of satirical edge. How this concerns Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Who was a proud, insolent, and treasonous knave if ever there was one. Much hated by all but a few. And many rejoiced in this story. How the Earl, upon a certain ceremonious occasion at Court, with great flourish and ostentation did make a deep bow to the Queen. The grace and effect of which being lost by the fact that he did let fly a loud fart, heard by all in the Presence, at the deepest moment of his bow. How the Queen laughed out loud first and then the whole Court. And how the Earl was furious, half-mortified with embarrassment. How he left the Court and went off to travel on the Continent for some seven months. “To give the air a chance to clear, as it were.” How on his return the Queen did welcome him warmly. And just as he knelt at her throne, she suddenly burst out laughing again.

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“Oh, my good lord!” the Queen cried out. “I had clean forgot the fart. From then until this moment.” That one of the results, call it lucky or unlucky as the case may be, of the peace of 1604 which Cecil and King James had made with Spain has been the increase and plentitude in England of these well-fortified Spanish wines. Wines that set the blood to trilling like a flock of birds. Tongues to luffing and wagging like sails in the wind. “Perhaps this, our new and latest war with Spain, will put an end to it, though I sincerely hope not. I should sooner lose a war with Spain (as we may, lad, as we may very well) than to give up my Spanish wines. “But no matter. I have stored enough in my cellars to last much longer than I will. It is likely to be the best part of my estate.” That he not only hopes, but also surely expects me to forget every word which has been said here as soon as we rise from table and leave this room. That I solemnly promise to do so. “Indeed, sir, you can depend on it.”

PART TWO: A FACE FROM A DREAM Being the prayers and dreams and memories of Robert Carey in old age. Oh, Lord, my God, open mine eyes and enlarge my heart with true understanding of Thy great mercies, that thou has blest me withal, from my first being until my old age. Now they are beginning to vanish. It is as if they were stepping backward, as if on tiptoes, into the shadows and stealing away from me. Slowly and surely. . . . Whose face can that be? He is saying these words to himself. Not aloud. He is mouthing the words, tasting them, testing them. They seem to be referring to something he was dreaming of a moment or two before now. A sleep and a dream from which he was awakened to find himself saying words without making a sound. What he may have been dreaming he cannot remember.

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Well, there is no one else in his bedchamber to whom he could be speaking. No one else here except the young servant boy asleep on a pallet in the dark corner nearest to the chamber door. That boy groans something wordless from the deep place of his own dreaming. And then he begins to snore like an old dog by a fire. There is no fire, no coals in this chamber. Moon has long since passed over. And gone down. Could it be any darker in a tomb? He thinks that he can understand why all those old pharaohs of Egypt, and so many other heathen and pagan kings and emperors, ordered that some or all of their servants should be buried with them. In a tomb, in the dark of the grave that he must soon enough come to inhabit, he would find the groans and snores of this young oaf to be deeply reassuring. He is reassured even here and now. He smiles to himself. Tries to imagine the look on that lout’s face if he were to be told that it was his bounden duty to be entombed with his master—Robert Carey, Earl of Monmouth. There! Again! The same or another imaginary or remembered face. An angry and startled face. Whose? To whom does that face belong? Soon, he tells himself, the last pitch of darkness will begin to thin out. Will slowly and surely become simply gray. Then gray will begin to change and to fade away allowing for the gradual arrival of the softest hints of rose and pink at the edge of the window. Next will come the cock of his kitchen garden to crow his first doodle-doo of the new day. Birds in the trees of the park and in the gardens will begin to tune and sing. Closer, just beyond the small leaded panes of the window he will hear the soft, repetitive flute sounds of the mourning dove. And then, suddenly, there will be a fanfare of all the trumpets of the rising sun. The sun very seldom, if ever, finds him asleep enough to be taken by surprise. He sleeps little, in fits and starts, after midnight. Never has. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. When he did doze, easing into a sleep awhile ago, there were still some patches of gold, faint tatters of moonlight caught in the chamber. And his servant, asleep or not, made not a sound. The old Earl lay still, curtained against chill, and softly floating in his

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four-poster bed. Thinking that he had just heard the sound of an owl. Believing that if he were to lie there, keeping himself perfectly quiet and still, breathing ever so lightly, he might very well hear that owl again. Some men do fear the owl, the sound or the sight of it, as an authorized messenger of deaths and disasters. Well now. He has listened for and listened to owls for more than half a hundred years (as he can remember). And still and all death has not come scratching his sharp fingernails at the door. Not yet. Meantime, the inimitable hoot of an owl in the night can be a great comfort to a man lying half-awake and with nobody to talk to. And so he lay there content, patiently waiting for the sound of the owl and feeling with pleasure the warm, smooth, clean texture of linen sheets, these all freshly washed and sunned and aired in this exceptionally fine weather. His sheets are not so fine as were those of Leicester, each with its proud crest and initials embroidered in the corner. But Leicester is long gone now and those fine sheets are only rags or have fed the avaricious moths, together with the dozens of damask tablecloths and napkins Leicester kept here in this castle of Kennilworth. Well, these of his own are fine enough and clean enough to please a man who once upon a time and often slept on cold ground with only the wide, turning sky and the bright stars for his ceiling. He has not yet allowed himself the luxury of forgetting how that was. He felt the linen sheets he was lapped in. And he breathed the undeniable and subtle scent of lavender from sheets and pillows. He much prefers that scent to the saffron that so many folks use nowadays. Lavender, the mere whiff of it, carries him back to the lost time of the old Queen. He can feel himself to be ageless and bodiless, without any aches and pains to his name. . . . He waited for the owl and soon fell asleep. Fell directly into that dream from which he has only just now safely returned. He was speaking intently to someone in his dream. Or perhaps he was talking only to himself That face, though! He remembers that now. Indeed can here and now see, in his mind’s eye, a thin, pinched, bony, crow-trodden, scarred, blue-eyed face. Fair haired. Wearing a bloody bandage like a cap on his head.

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Whose? Who is it? Cannot remember. Well, he could slip into sleep again if he chose to. If he would close his eyes and breathe in again the sweet scent of lavender. Which, if it truly can, as they say, calm and tame a wild and ferocious lion, then why not, ‘an it please you, an aged and irascible Earl? He could, but he will not. Instead he will stare into the dark, listening for any sounds at all. He will wait for the rising of the sun. He has rested himself long enough. He can think of nothing else he is eager to dream about; and, no purpose or point in denying it any more, something or other in the dream he was set free from has left him troubled and uneasy. Yesterday was a memorable good day. Early he was on horseback. In the heat of the morning, before dinnertime, he and his new young scholar walked and talked in the garden. The garden is much improved now that they have repaired the rusty pipes that make Leicester’s fountains dance. After a fashion. In the heat of the morning he and this young man stood in the cool mist of the playing fountains. Talked about this and that. About everything under the sun: how it is, how it was, how it may be. They continued talking until they were invited to come to the table. Talked through dinner and afterward with their sweet wine and cheese and fruits and nuts. Continued their conversation until it was time for the Earl to rest himself a little while. Then, after his nap, he went out with some of the others to the shady green, a place shadowed from sunlight by the castle’s walls, where they could play at bowling. And the Earl, who has not lost all his skill at it, made and won some wagers. Won some money from them. Supper was excellent. He ate lightly (as he mostly does these days), yet still enjoyed his fill of a good fresh green sallet rich with herbs, a whole poached and stuffed pigeon, cooked in a rich sauce of berries and fruit, and then a fat capon perfectly prepared with its own sauce of wine and oranges. He finished it off with a dish of cold Italian cream and some almond tarts. And all of it washed down by the best malmsey he has tasted in some time. Everything was so well and so delicately cooked that he cannot

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now justly blame his bad dreams on bad digestion. Not that he would admit to that in any case. Lest he should then be persuaded of the need of purging. Which, he is sure, would kill him. These foolish doctors of medicine, with their purges, will kill a man long before his time comes. When he dies let it not be from purges and medicines. Let it be from an excess of malmsey. Let it be by a surfeit of cold Italian cream. He wonders if Leicester (who, rumor has it, was a master of many poisons) ever served his guests at this castle that dish. And if they, one and all, summoned up the courage to eat it at his table. Well, no doubt it was worth a poisoning. He can picture the surprise written on an otherwise blank face, an imaginary someone from those days gone by, someone or other who has just surmised that his serving of Italian cream is the last sweet thing that he will ever eat. There now! That face again! The face from the dream returns. Now the eyes are bulging and popping with surprise and outrage and something indefinably more. The eyes are clouded over with the sudden and shadowy knowledge of death. And not death by poison. Nor the look of a man who has just now been sliced or carved or stabbed with an edge or length of sharpened steel. No. This fellow is hanging by his neck. Strangling and going blue and blank in that face. It is not the hanging that overcomes the man’s face with anger and astonishment. You can tell he was born to hang and knows it. Knew it, anyway, until a few minutes ago. The only serious questions of his fate and destiny were when and where he would hang and who would hang him and for what. But there’s more. There is the look of a man who has been badly tricked. He has been cozened in some fashion. And all of a sudden, at one bright moment which happens to be his last, this man knows it. Very satisfactory for the trickster. And now it comes clear (like a face reflected in a clear, calm stream) to the Earl whose face was troubling his sleep. It’s a fellow by the name of Geordie Bourne. A Scotsman (what else?) and a thief from birth and a great and naughty reiver of the East March.

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(Queen, herself, and bless her memory, sent him up there in the ’60s to the Border country to bring a little peace and quiet even if it took fire and sword to do so. As it truly did. He was young and foolish and fearless in those days and maybe, he thinks now, she sent him there to be rid of him hanging about and coasting her Court and importuning her and the others for advancement.) Geordie was taken intact after a bloody little fight in some forsaken corner of the East March, captured alive by Carey’s men. Geordie fought bravely enough, as always. But it was a poor fighting place and there were, for once, too many against him and his men. A close friend of Sir Robert Ker, this Geordie was. Ker sent word to Carey that he would do a great deal and would be willing to give much to save Geordie’s hide and hair. Adding to his plea the promise that if some means were not found to save Geordie’s life and liberty, why, then, Ker would take pleasure in bringing fire and sword and utter destruction to the English side. Well, sir, we shall see about that. As David the King once sang: Up, Lord, and help me, O my God; for thou smitest all mine enemies upon the cheek-bone; thou has broken the teeth of the ungodly. Carey’s aim and purpose at the time was to make some mischief for Ker. To teach him something or other. To shame him, if could be. So he called together a jury. Which promptly found this Geordie guilty of March-treason. For which the penalty was death. Then Carey waited to see what Ker might do. Wondered whether to hang the man or not. Determined to go and see the fellow with his own eyes, first, before deciding. For he and Geordie had never so much as met or seen each other, as far as Carey knew, face to face. Years later Carey would write his memory of that visit. Here is what he wrote: When all things were quiet and the watch set at night, after supper about ten of the clock, I took one of my men’s liveries and put it about me. And took two other of my servants with me in their liveries. And we three, acting as the Warden’s men, came to where

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this Geordie Bourne was kept and were let into his chamber. We sat down by him and told him that we were desirous to see him because we had heard he was stout and valiant and true to his friends. And that we were sorry that our master could not be moved to spare his life.

Then they talked for a while. And, sooner not later, Geordie, being a true reiver to the inmost marrow of his bones, could not stop himself from telling them the story of his life. “He told us that he had lain with at least forty men’s wives, some in England and some in Scotland. That he had killed seven Englishmen with his own bare hands. And that he had spent and devoted his whole lifetime to whoring, drinking, stealing, and taking deep revenge for the slightest offences.” Geordie asked them if they might send him a minister of the Gospel to comfort his soul. Not that he was suffering in great fear and trembling. No, just in case Ker could not manage to free him and things really came down to his hanging. Carey later wrote: “I was so resolved that no conditions whatsoever should save his life. And so I ordered that at the opening of the gates on the following morning he should be carried to his execution. Which accordingly was performed.” I rode out myself to bear witness to the hanging. Which, no doubt, was the likely cause of the memorable look that seized command of Geordie’s face at the moment of his rough demise. Outrage and fury that he had been tricked into the confession of a lifetime of mortal sins and heinous crimes. Confession (bragging if you prefer) not to three common and simpleminded servants, as it seemed, but to the Warden of the East March, himself, that same man to whom so many (and especially Sir Robert Ker), on both sides of the Border were busy making representations of the excellent character and well-earned good reputation of the aforesaid selfsame Geordie Bourne, and of all the sound reasons why such a creature of such decent Christian character and excellent repute should justly be spared. Oh, the truth is that it took considerable effort not to have laughed out loud at the very moment our eyes met and Geordieboy recognized me for who I was and who I had been and showed plainly that he did so in the last living expression on his face.

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Lord, that would have been altogether ill-mannered and unseemly, would it not, to laugh in and at the face of one you have both condemned and hanged? God’s wounds, the poor fellow was much surprised, though, was he not? About as much as any man can be. So was Ker surprised. And, if anything, even more outraged and angry. Well, he had enough time to cultivate his rage. I never knew a man so angry about anything as Ker was concerning the sad ending of the life of Geordie Bourne. You would think that Ker seriously believed Geordie Bourne had any chance at all to die with his boots off in a comfortable bed. In the end, though, Ker and I became friends. After a fashion. It took some time and some doing. We finally shook hands upon it, and we even drank a toast to the memory of the late Geordie Bourne. But that is another story. And another tale I cannot tell to the young Oxford scholar who patiently listens to me. Who, in his ignorant youth and high puritanical seriousness, will not be able to understand the lighthearted spirit of it. Best not to mention or to tell that one. Best to write it down on paper and be done with it. Else Geordie may continue to come uninvited into my dreams. And so might others, too. Lord, if half of the men I had to hang (for their own good and for the good of the Borders) were to rise up and return to people my dreams, my nights will be more crowded than the Court at Christmas. And such ugly faces! Such wonderful, rough hewn, everlastingly ugly faces. . . . For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain: he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. The Earl thinks it might be profoundly rude and unseemly even now to laugh out loud in the privacy of his bed and bedchamber. Yet he cannot suppress the urge of it any more. His laughter fills the room. It startles his snoring servant boy awake. And so begins another summer’s day. Hears the cock crowing and, more gratifying since it confirms his sleepy first impression, he can hear a whole crowd of crows in

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the woods beyond the park crying out in a choir of furious voices. Meaning, usually, that the presence of an outsider, owl or hawk, has roused their ire. The sun is rising, and he can delay and procrastinate no longer. Time has come, sir, to tune or to play the lute. One or the other. Time has come to write down his life story, as well as he can remember it. To write it now or to forget it. The pens are sharpened. There’s a full inkhorn and plenty of good paper and fine sand ready for plenty of blotting. No more excuses or diversions will be allowed. Robert Carey, Baron of Leppington and Earl of Monmouth, will this morning, after he has pleasured himself with a full breakfast, begin to write down his memories from a long and busy life. He will begin, as is the oldest custom for these things, with a prayer. . . . And give me of thy grace to call in mind some measure of thy great and manifold blessings that thou has blessed me withal. Though my weakness be such and my memory so short, as I have not the abilities to express them as I ought to do, yet, Lord, be pleased to accept this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Spilling the Beans A Letter to Linda Evangelista

Dear Ms. Linda, I can safely be almost certain that you don’t know me or anything about me. I am counting on it. Yes it’s true. I could always be wrong. Assuming that you had the time and energy and interest, during the prime of your supermodel life, to read a book now and then, once in a great while; assuming that then or now, you might actually spend time and energy reading anything except contracts, model releases, and slick fashion magazines with limited text and plenty of pictures (some of them of you and your face sometimes, though less and less these days, on the cover), then I have to allow that it is highly improbable but just faintly possible that you might have heard of or even read some of a book called Poison Pen (1986). Maybe you were killing time (pardon the expression), browsing in a bookstore. (Do you ever just throw caution to the winds and browse?) The shiny black book jacket might have caught your attention. If that happened you would have discovered that I am the (pardon the expression) protagonist of the book. My name is Towne . . . John Towne. Good friends, of which I have a couple, tend to call me Jack. In that particular book, mishmash that it was and is, I wrote some poison-pen letters to people who were, at the time, prominent for this and that. Celebrities, in a word, many of them once famous, household names, and now dead and gone to glory or wherever. People like, for example,

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George Wallace and Timothy Leary and Truman Capote. And others getting on in years but still more or less alive and remembered, at this writing at least. People like Ursula Andress and Jean Shrimpton and Hugh Hefner. All of whom are easily old enough to be your grandparents. The longest and strangest letter in that whole book, however, was not written by me at all. It is the work of my hapless author. It is addressed to the great and obsessive love of his life—Christie Brinkley. He poured out his heart and soul to her. Needless to say she didn’t answer or reciprocate. Maybe she will some day, but it hasn’t happened yet. Well, one thing you can say about time, Linda, is that it really flies. You are still pretty young and may not have really noticed that yet. But you will. You sure enough will. Believe me. Do you by any chance happen to remember that ad for Kenar a few years ago where they posed you in the middle of a group of seven elderly Italian (maybe Sicilian) women, time-ravaged and wrinkled? Four are standing in the back and three and you—yourself cross-legged in black stockings and a sleeveless wisp of a little black dress—are sitting in slightly battered straight chairs, one of which is empty. I’m guessing it’s supposed to be some kind of joke. Beauty and the Seven Beasts, maybe. Or maybe it’s meant to be on the sardonic side like Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” remarks to poor Ophelia. But any way you choose to take it, the joke is on you. Because those old gals in their shapeless black dresses have character and strength in their faces. You look, as you often do in your unsmiling photos, like you have just smelled something really, really bad. Anyway, the old women know and we know and you ought to know that time will do the same to you. You’ll be mighty lucky if you end up looking half as good as any of them. But pay no attention to me. I’m only kidding. There is always the off chance that you will be beautiful forever—as long as you are alive that is. Even with the best undertaking and embalming, dead folks start looking bad pretty soon. Even if you end up as old and as ugly as the red rear end of a big-ass baboon, you will always be able to remember that once upon a time you looked just fine, thank you, that once upon a time people called you beautiful. You can always curl up and look at some old pictures of yourself. Which is something most people can’t or won’t do.

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Anyway, Linda, to get on with this letter and to make a long story short, after Poison Pen appeared and then vanished, time flapped leathery wings and flew away. Time passed and my author went and got old on me. At this writing, he is more than seventy years old, a fact he would rather hide from you. Christie Brinkley went and got older, too, got married a few times and even had some babies. She doesn’t look too bad yet. You can see her, together with movie star Chuck Norris, advertising exercise equipment on cable TV and smiling, smiling, smiling. Some set of swell teeth on that woman. Hey, you don’t suppose there’s anything going on between them, Chuck and Christie, do you? They act more like old friends on TV than lovers. Maybe there is more to it, though. Who knows? Over the years, one thing and another and the heavy weight of an obsessive (one-sided) love, a real yoke if there ever was one, has lifted off the author’s shoulders. Christie went her way and we went ours. The only Christie that grabs his attention these days is your buddy, Christy Turlington. Recently he read somewhere that she wants to study creative writing. Does she? If so, more power to her. My author actually teaches creative writing, but I don’t know if I can honestly recommend him as the ideal mentor. Maybe Gordon Lish. . . ? As for me, I didn’t go anywhere much or change much either as the years shuffled on by. There are, to be sure, many obvious disadvantages to life (and death) as a fictional character. I could go on and on about the subject, maybe moving you to tears by rehearsing the sorrow and the pity of it all. But you can easily imagine most of the pains and problems and issues and disappointments. Not the least of which is the almost complete absence of free will. Whether I am willing to admit it or not, most of the time I have to be and to do whatever my author wants. More to the point, I have to be and to do what he wants even when it challenges ordinary credibility and violates the sacred and sanctified rules and principles of contemporary literary criticism and contemporary literary fashion. (In a sense, we are both fashionistas, Linda.) All of which means—think about it, go figure—I not only can’t save myself, but also that I can’t come to his aid either. I end up having to take the blame, together with my ignorant author, for whatever he has made me do or leave undone. That is really and truly unfair.

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Please, ma’am, note the irony of it. I am composed, in fact and in any fiction that I find myself involved in, of the figments and fragments of his conscious and unconscious obsessions. He may think that he is freer than I am. If so, then that is purely and simply a delusion. Some of this may not seem so strange or unfamiliar to you, for there is a sense in which a real celebrity, especially a supermodel like yourself without any known or noticeable talent for anything else (I could be wrong—I saw once a picture of you playing, or at least holding, an accordion), could be called a fictional character. In that sense, I have an author, and you have photographers who create you. But let us defer discussion of that complex subject (do celebrities have any reality other than their celebrity?) until later on when we get to know each other better. Meanwhile, as the Brits say, not to worry. Always remember what Gertrude Lawrence said: “I am not what you would call wonderfully talented, but I am light on my feet and I do make the best of things.” There are disadvantages and disappointments aplenty when you are only a fictional character. But entre nous, Lady Linda, there is definitely a plus side as well. Unlike celebrities, many fictional characters—all except those unlucky enough to get stuck in a (pardon) bildungsroman— don’t tend to age much. Imprisoned between the covers of a book, for better or for worse, they usually remain at whatever age their author has assigned them. Forever and ever. In the nineteenth century a fictional character was often required to live out a whole life and had a very good chance of ending up dead. But in late-twentiethcentury fiction, especially in the metafiction so many authors keep fooling around with, a character can drink deep at the fountain of youth and stay young forever. But none of this can be of serious interest to you, Linda. If you happen to be reading this letter. You have your own fish to fry. Cut to the chase. What am I doing here? What the hell am I up to? Has my author brought me back to life so I can write one more poison-pen letter? Not exactly. It’s a temptation, though. I could easily exercise my limited free will and ignore all his wishes and instructions and have myself a little fun at the expense of the two of you. I have actually seen you, on film, TV, and video, lose your temper over next to nothing and then to tiptoe swiftly to the sheer, shrill edges of a major tantrum. And doing my basic research for

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this letter, I have read in various places that you are thought to be a difficult and temperamental person. The fact is that I’ve read a lot about you. I enjoyed the photos of you in that Sante D’Orazio book—A Private View. You looked pretty good, though I have to confess that some of the others, babes who bared all, looked better. But at your level it’s all a matter of taste, anyway. I read a good deal about you in Michael Gross’s Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. About how you married Gerald Marie (after he dumped Christine Bolster) and all that. Did you see what, among other things, Bolster had to say about you? “She’s very whiny. I can’t stand her.” I showed that to my author, but it didn’t discourage him at all. He is in love. On some days he thinks everything about you is neat. I have done my dead-level best to try to find out more about you. Problem is, there’s so much “raw” material, I hardly know where to begin. And there is no end to it. Mostly I have had to confine my close studies to the materials given to me by my author. I’m not sure that he is giving me things that will lead to an honest and accurate portrayal. Everyone knows that you have been on the cover of many magazines for many years (especially in the early 1990s) and even more often been featured in articles and prominent advertisements in print and TV. One of his students, aware of the author’s unseemly obsession, gave him an album of a whole lot of the off-the-wall, highly colorful ads you did with Christy Turlington for Chanel. The author passed these on to me together with a small suitcase full of old magazines with you, in a variety of hairstyles and colors, on the cover of (and/or featured in) a wealth of magazines: Cosmopolitan, Allure, Elle, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, People, Time, Newsweek, American Photo, even the New York Times Magazine. His special favorite is the New York Times Magazine for December 22, 1996, which, illustrating the headline—“How Breast Cancer Became This Year’s Hot Charity”—features you completely topless but deftly covering your teeny-tiny boobs with your left hand and arm. Wow! He also let me look at his “Linda Evangelista 1998 Calendar,” by Peter Lindbergh, showing you in a diversity of odd poses and strange clothes, including a couple of months, October and November, cross-dressing in a masculine coat and tie. The author points out to me, just in case I missed it, that you sort of vanished for a while until recently, when Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and

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Interview magazines have resurrected you (somewhat) as an older and wiser person. Is that right? Have you learned a lot of lessons over the years? Anything you’d care to share with others, real or fictional? After all my research, I conclude that I could probably (pardon) arouse some kind of a reaction from you with one of my poisonpen letters. On the other hand, I am aware that you have earned a reputation for being litigious. I read “The Model and the Maid,” by Theodore Pappas in Chronicles (October 1996), all about you and your successful lawsuit against Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front Party of France. You scored 80,000 French francs on that one. By the way, Pappas really kicked butt (yours) in that article. I couldn’t top it if I tried. And I really would rather not be sued. Of course, I don’t know if it’s possible to sue a fictional character. True, fictional characters can and do sue each other in works of fiction, but I am not sure at all, even in America, land of the bottom-feeding lawyer, that a “real” person can sue an imaginary one. Or vice versa. I feel certain that somewhere out there there’s a lawyer willing to try it out on a contingency basis. But I have my doubts that it would hold up in court. Maybe if it was a jury trial with sufficient diversity, but surely not in an appellate court. You could always sue the author, even if he is, as he is, as innocent as Adam before he listened to Eve and ate the apple. You could do that (I mean you could sue, not that you could or should eat more apples), but it would definitely be a big waste of time. My author doesn’t make enough money or have enough assets to justify all the expense and trouble. Let’s suppose you won the case. Then what? What would you ever collect from him? What is it that they say—you can’t get bread from stones or a pint of blood from a bunch of turnips? Look, I can understand full well how you must feel about people going around and bad-mouthing and saying critical things about you. But that is just one of the things that public figures, celebrity icons like you and fictional characters like me, have to learn to put up with. So don’t expect any pity from me. Understanding, yes. Sympathy? No. So some people in print have nailed your sweet, expensive (“we don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day”) hide to the barn door. So to speak. It isn’t fun. You should see the kind of stuff I have to put up with. Check it

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out sometime. When Poison Pen came out, a whole lot of critics and book reviewers got on my case and in my face. I never claimed to be a Captain Ahab or a Huck Finn, not Bech or Rabbit Angstrom or Zuckerman, either. I have been featured in half a dozen short stories as well as having starred in the widely reviewed but little read novel—Poison Pen. Most of the people who reviewed that silly, sophomoric book found something or other nice to say about my author, but they seldom if ever spoke well or kindly or gently of me. In fact, they called me everything bad and negative and insulting you can think of. And yes, ma’am, Miss Linda, it can hurt your feelings. How would you like it if the New York Times Book Review called you “a low-life crank?” The Chicago Tribune identified me as “a lecherous, misanthropic failed academic.” The Norfolk Virginia newspaper (the Pilot?) called me a “pervert.” Somebody named Madison Smartt Bell wrote in the Village Voice that I was “an exceptionally sleazy picaro.” (I won’t pause to explain to you what picaro means except that it isn’t a dirty word like maybe it sounds.) Probably the strongest and meanest judgment (it would be a clear case of slander if I were a real live person) appeared in the Greensboro News in a review by the poet and novelist Fred Chappell, who described me as “a loathsome, racist, sexist, crude and gruesome creep.” My author just laughed. He was grateful, too, for all the attention he was getting and because he, himself, was treated with a modicum of respect. Here is how the New York Times Book Review elected to characterize the author: “He is a well-respected writer with a prestigious academic position—he’s Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.” “How do you like them apples?” my author asked. “Listen here,” I replied, head up and eyes dry and unblinking. “I cannot and will not concern myself with the half-baked and halfass opinions of every minor regional writer in America.” (That was intended to make my old author feel bad. Because he isn’t half as well known as Fred Chappell.) The word creep hurt a little, even considering the source. But please excuse me for all this brief digression. And I hope and pray, sincerely, that you will not misconstrue this document as just another poison-pen letter. Try to think of it as a kind of perverse love letter. Written to you by me, but written in behalf of my

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author. Who is either too shy or too chicken to write you a love letter himself. Think of it as an updated version of “The Courtship of Miles Standish” or maybe Cyrano. Did you ever read either one of those, in school maybe? More likely you know of the latter because different versions have been on the tube. Anyway, what happened, see, is that the author, ever alert and vigilant, read somewhere that Witness magazine, a magazine he likes a lot because, from time to time, they have published some of his stuff, is planning an issue dedicated and devoted to the subject of love in America. Or something like that. He thought about it for a while and then said to me: “They won’t have any trouble getting a lot of good material for an issue like that. You can bet your sweet ass on it. Love is a subject everybody thinks he/she knows about and has experienced. But I will also bet you that nobody, not a living soul, will deal with one of the most common and pervasive forms of love in late twentieth-century America. By which I mean the often passionate and always obsessive love of celebrities. “I am not talking about this in a crude and literal sense. And I am not talking about actual stalking and all that, though I’m sure it does happen. But that is a kind of derangement. And I am not really talking about being a dedicated fan, somebody who is overwhelmed with unstinting admiration for somebody else’s talent or gifts. To be a dedicated fan is, finally, to like someone, even if that someone is a stranger. The kind of love I’m thinking of and talking about has nothing to do with liking or even with the conventional ways and means of love. It is, rather, a total surrender of the self, not to another self, but to an image or icon. It is fundamentally religious. It’s the kind of love that once upon a time and not so long ago was dedicated to God or to a multiplicity of lesser gods. In a strictly secular society like our own, God doesn’t enter into things at all. Only in prayers and sermons and services of many kinds, maybe one day a week. It’s the golden-calf idolatry that we have come to love.” “What does all this have to do with Linda Evangelista?” “Wait. Wait a minute. Just give me a chance to work this out,” he told me. “Once upon a time, we had nobility among us, kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, all that kind of thing. We were required by law and custom to honor and

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obey them. And we couldn’t help admiring them. All that brightness and beauty. All that health and welfare. We couldn’t help admiring and envying them. Nobody asked us to love them. Or, to be more accurate, they could be loved, but not for their power and glory. “Now we have created a new kind of nobility, the nobility of celebrity. And we are expected, if not explicitly required, to love them. “Are they not godlike in their almost absolute immunity from all our rules and regulations and worldly issues? They are beyond the limits of law, beyond the boundaries of vice and virtue. Look at O. J. Simpson. Look at Dennis Rodman. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at Martha Stewart. Our bounden duty is to love them and to honor them without question or reservation. “What do you think about that?” “You’re asking me?” “Who else?” “I think it sounds like a crock of shit. I think it sounds like you are losing your marbles. Rapidly. But who am I to argue or complain? You are the author.” “Fucking-A, I am, and don’t you ever forget it. But what if it were the other way around? What if you were really the author and I was only a character?” “I don’t have to answer that. And I won’t. But I will tell you this much. If I were the author, things would be different. Very different.” Well, Linda, we went on and on, back and forth. Like an old married couple. And maybe that is the image for it. Sometimes, I guess, authors love their characters, and characters love and admire their authors. In an ideal world, that would be the case. And maybe that would be an interesting subject to consider. But we didn’t. We just continued to argue about this metaphor of celebrities as the greater and lesser gods of our times and whether or not, because of the simple fact of their celebrity, these people (if you can call them that) justly deserve our love. Finally he disclosed to me his hidden agenda, his real and true purpose. Which was that he wanted me to help him compose a love letter to you. I would write it, and he would edit it and sign it. He was, he claimed, too enchanted and enamored to do himself or you any

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justice. His idea was that I would write you and tell all. I would, as it were, spill the beans in the context of a work of fiction that would be published (dream on) in Witness magazine. I tried to explain to him that even if everything worked out according to his scheme, it is extremely unlikely that you would ever be reading Witness and run across any love letter that I might compose for him. Now, lucky Linda, permit me to confess, to level with you and say that I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is he sees in you. If I were screwing around with supermodels, which I am not, I would probably be more of a Kate Moss or maybe a Niki Taylor man. If it was my fate to be shipwrecked on a desert island with a supermodel, I would prefer to share the simple life with say, Cindy Crawford. You can understand that, can’t you? I can’t imagine any scenario whatsoever in which it would be jolly fun and games to be a castaway with you. I would try to make the best of it if it were just you and me and the coconut palms happily ever after. Question is: would you try to make the best of it, too? Getting back to you for a minute, I see in the Theodore Pappas article that somebody named Mats Gustafson praised your “beautiful nostrils that tilt another way, and a mouth that angles in a third direction.” Pappas butts in and comments that this makes you “sound like one of the extras in Tod Browning’s film Freaks.” If you ever saw that movie—I have a number of times; it’s a great one—you would be, as they, say, deeply pissed. By the way, Pappas quotes me by name in the same article. I may end up some day being a celebrity, too. Then look out, world! Let us return to the purely physical. I have read, here and there, that some of the other supermodels praise you for your knees. I have examined your knees in many photographs, and I can’t tell if they are kidding or not. I don’t know that much about knees. Somewhere I ran across a picture of your bare ass (by Steven Meisel, I think, though I’m not sure). You were backstage putting on or taking off some clothes in a hurry. I know something about asses, and your ass wasn’t much. Not surprising, though. You skinny supermodels (with a very few notable exceptions) were not created for your basic meat-and-potatoes, T-and-A male appetite. All that aside, I have to admit you have really great teeth. And gums to die for. Has anyone mentioned your gums to you lately?

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Let’s leave love, at least love between you and me, out of it from now on. Fair enough? I don’t have a clue what it is with my author and you. As I mentioned earlier, he is old. And old guys have to take what they can get. They are at the mercy of their dying bodies. Maybe for some weird reason you are like a dose of Viagra to him. Who knows? Time is still flying. Time is always flying. I have got to pull my act together if I’m ever going to write that love letter for him. This isn’t it, in case you were wondering. This is just a preliminary contact, a little foreplay, a “go-see,” as you models say. I’m not betraying him. I’m like announcing him. During all this time, I have been thinking about his crackpot, cockeyed vision of America as a huge nation of celebrity lovers (starfuckers without portfolio or hope of redemption), peasants worshipping their sleazy lesser gods. And I think he may be right about some of it. It seems to me self-evident that as a Godless people we need something to love and to worship. In the absence of God (who has gone only He knows where), we are left with nothing but you people. People like you. It could be worse. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we human beings (or in my case a fictional version of a human being) are given at birth something like a trust fund, only so much love to possess and to share with others. Except for saints, all of us have the same capital asset of love, all the same, whether we are rich or poor, worthy or needy, beautiful or plain as pig tracks. Then it would follow, wouldn’t it, that the love we squander on the gods and devils of celebrity (or, in the case of you people, the love you squander on yourselves) is lost forever; and all too soon we won’t have much, if any, to give to each other even when we want to? In the scheme of things, our “real” world would soon become a loveless place, a desert island without good company. And people like you would become more and more like me—fictional characters living in a fictional world. Maybe all the above has already happened. Maybe there isn’t any true love left in America for the literary magazines to have special issues about. Maybe, like one of Job’s messengers, I alone have escaped to tell thee. But I wouldn’t want to end this introductory letter in what might turn into a real and sustained correspondence on a gloomy or

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downbeat note. My author is full of shit, a loser headed for—as if it were an allegorical destination—Oblivion. But he’s happy. And that’s what really matters, isn’t it, the ability to be happy and altogether self-deceived? As for you, Linda, I read “The Fall of the Supermodel” by Joel Stein (Time, November 9, 1998), which depicts the end of your era. Someone I never heard of is quoted as saying: “Nine years ago, you couldn’t get more glamorous than going backstage at a Versace show. Now you see Amber Valetta at a Beastie Boys concert with no make-up on and her hair back. They’re not like goddesses anymore.” Sad. Hard cheese. But, then, we don’t have to tell my author, do we? It can be our little secret. Oblivion is out there waiting for us one and all. I like to think it’s a small town, Disneylike, with neat green lawns and picket fences and front porches with swings—Oblivion, California. Or maybe it’s a ghost town, plagued by dust and tumbleweeds— Oblivion, Oklahoma. See you there, Linda. No, seriously, I have enjoyed talking to you. I don’t get out of my book very often and seldom have the occasion to meet somebody new. If you feel like writing back, please don’t hesitate. Just send a letter or a postcard to me, John Towne, c/o Witness magazine. They’ll send it along to me. Sincerely, John Towne P.S. I know you’ve tried every known color for your hair. Which color do you like best?

Pornographers

Listen to this, will you? Here I am talking to the sheriff of Quincy County, a lean, good-looking guy name of Dale Lewis, curly, pepperand-salt hair, carefully cut, dressed in a neat khaki uniform and wearing designer glasses. (There goes your old stereotype. He’s New South all the way. Uses the word nuance as if he owned it.) Here, believe it or not, verbatim (and slightly edited) from my tape machine, is what he is telling me: “There is no escaping the moral climate of the modern world. It comes here, too, of all places, in all of its twisted fury and madness. Maybe there was a time a long time ago, long before my time, when you and I could just sit here at a great distance from the throbbing heart of things and thank the good Lord for all our blessings and the difference. Let those Yankee cities go ahead and drown in their own cesspools. We could sit right here in safety and virtuously point and say ‘I told you so.’ But not anymore. We have our very own cesspool cities now—Atlanta, Miami, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Houston, New Orleans (though New Orleans was always a place of corruption, from the earliest Spanish and French days; New Orleans was Third World before that was either a term or a concept). And all of the plagues and diseases of the times have been visited upon us. . . .” Joey Singletree is the name, and true crime is my game. You know what I mean. I hover in thin air like a lazy buzzard waiting for a meal. World that we live in, sooner rather than later somebody

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will shoot up a school yard or an abortion clinic. Someone will torture and murder a couple of kids or some old lady living alone. Sooner rather than later there will be another abduction and rape. Something maybe to raise the eyebrows a little. Something that may turn out to be good material and I can get at least an article, maybe even a book out of it. It’s a living. Downside is that they don’t pay a whole lot for this kind of stuff unless it involves celebrities or bona fide public figures or a novel gimmick. And the talk shows are killing the market. How can the printed word compete? Beats me. Anyhow, I was tired of the hustle. Up to here with all the usual urban sex and violence. And I joined together an idea and a yearning: the yearning being to get back home to Florida and soak up a little sunshine and get paid for it; the idea to see how crime is playing out in the boonies, the heartland. Is it better or worse out there? Either way I’ve got a little story. So I put together a half-ass proposal, part of which follows: “These days the world comes galloping at them whether the people in the heartland like it or not. How do they deal with all that? How do they live with it? “To be sure, this is all small potatoes when measured against the slaughterhouse of this dying century or against the life and times of crime-ridden urban America. Where, other than vigorously protecting a few of the rich and the famous, the police are mostly reduced to keeping more or less accurate statistics on the crimes being committed all around them and hoping to stay healthy and to live long enough to collect their ample pensions. When I was living in Brooklyn, my crummy and expensive little apartment was repeatedly burglarized, picked clean of everything but the cockroaches. A cop finally came around to look. His best offer was to sell me a little printed copy of a prayer to St. Christopher. “It has been open warfare out there in urban America for half a century, and the people, like combat veterans in all the wars, have become accustomed to it. Atrocities, acts of terrorism and extraordinary violence, are shrugged off, are viewed as part of the basic price for contemporary civilization. “The numbers show that provincial America is not immune any-

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more. Not safe from atrocious crimes, not from drugs, not from AIDS, not from any of the habitual sorrows of Fat City. “I have an idea that this news cheers up, warms the hearts of the folks who are stuck in urban America. It lifts their spirits to hear stories of sick stuff in the deep boonies. “Maybe there is a story there. Maybe there is an audience for it.” My editor, a bright young hustler (originally from Nashville, Tennessee, though you would never guess it now) and selfpromoter known as “Sparky” (chip off the block of “Old Sparky”) to his few friends and many enemies in the publishing world, responded to my proposal with a fax to my agent: “Frankly, I think this is a heavy-breathing, bullshit proposal. But it has some faint possibilities—provincial sex and violence and racism and plenty of corny local color. All kinds of the right stuff. I can’t see how even our boy Joey could screw it up too much. So, as long as you people are not even thinking about serious money, I can’t see any real harm in going ahead with it. Let’s have lunch at Daniel’s (your treat) and work out the sordid details.” Deborah, my agent, wisely urged me to take what I could get. “Don’t piss it away,” she suggested. “You are not likely to get anything better right now. But don’t make a lifetime labor of love out of it. Just get down there, have a quick little look around, ask a few questions, then sit down and write it. Sparky is not looking for art. Art is for kids. And they are not looking for truth and beauty, either—at least not from somebody like you, Joey. The most they are hoping for is a little fun and games. Maybe a chuckle or two, a tear in one eye if you get lucky. “What I am counseling is—don’t fuck up this time, capisce?” All of which is by way of introduction to the story of the Little Princess of Paradise Springs, Florida, though, strictly speaking, she is from Quincy County since she and her family lived well outside the city limits in a mobile home. And here is the sheriff, Dale Lewis, telling it to me in his own words: The Little Princess, blonde and blue-eyed with skin like fresh cream, looked like a movie star. Like she could easily grow up and be one. Like she already was one. A truly beautiful little girl, maybe twelve years old. She attended Quincy County

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Elementary School. Which is where this story begins. Because it was there that she kept falling asleep, dead, deep asleep, in the classroom. Her teacher and the school nurse finally decided it was something more serious than a bad habit and took her over to the emergency room of the hospital. Where the doctor examined her and concluded that she was exhausted and also that she had probably been sexually abused by someone. The Little Princess said nothing. No complaint. No cooperation. Wouldn’t answer any questions. Following procedure, then, the county sent a social worker out to where she lived to evaluate the situation. Social worker didn’t come up with a whole lot. Seems that the Princess had a whole family—menagerie would be more like it—living out there in that glorified trailer. Brothers and sisters, cousins of various kinds, an aged grandfather, various and sundry “uncles” who came and went, and her mother, who may or may not (no good evidence) have been turning tricks with the “uncles.” County looked into it a little more closely and came to the tentative conclusion that the real means of support for this whole family network was the Little Princess. That what she was doing was starring in some pornographic movies that somebody was making, probably over in Gainesville. That was the best educated guess of the county. Wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do about it. I won’t bore you with the complexities of evidentiary details except to point out that we would have had a terrible time, almost impossible, of convicting anyone in the absence of a statement or admission from the Princess. Unless and until we could actually catch some real people in the act of making one of these movies. Sounds easy, but it’s not so easy if the criminals are moderately careful and about half smart. Not so easy, either, if you have a plate full of local duties and obligations and limited resources. Well, we finally came up with a guy (one of the “uncles”) that we were fairly certain was running the whole operation. But, my friend, it has been a long time and a whole lot of Supreme Court decisions since “fairly certain” has been enough to bring anybody to trial, let alone to convict. That may have changed just a little bit, time will tell, since the professional feminoids have discovered the evils and dangers of pornography. We’ll see about that.

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Meanwhile some months went by. Every so often the Princess would be taken to the emergency room and then admitted to the hospital for a little rest and recuperation. Then, as far as we could tell, back on the job. All at night, of course. Among other things, the Princess wasn’t getting enough sleep. What was happening was that the Princess would get worn out and strung out and then check into the county hospital, like a health spa, to recover her youthful bloom. Under the circumstances, the hospital should have been getting a piece of the action. Points on the gross of the movies she was making. Anyway, the hospital finally got tired of the whole thing. The hospital administrator and a couple of the doctors called me to come and talk about it. They wanted something done. I patiently explained the legal problems to them. Isn’t there anything at all you can do? they asked. Sure enough, I said. I can do a number of things. But none of them are legal. Like what? You don’t want to know. You don’t need to know. And I don’t want to hear one word from you all about it, even at second- or thirdhand, even hearsay. You are ready to have this stopped? I will stop it for you. You aren’t going to kill anybody, are you, Sheriff? Probably not. Not unless I have to. About a week later, they (and everybody else) could read in the paper the curious story of the man who was found dozing and dead drunk, sitting at the wheel of a stolen car in a rest area out on the interstate. He had enough alcohol in his system, together with serious traces of cocaine, to be embalmed. He was carrying a concealed weapon, and he had a bunch of highly illegal weapons— sawed-off shotguns and submachine guns—in the trunk, together with enough drugs to open his own pharmacy and enough stolen goods and valuables to start a jewelry store. He had no logical or coherent explanation for any of it. He got a fair and speedy trial. And then the son-of-a-bitch was sent off to Raiford for forever and a day, thus ending the film career of the Little Princess, but improving her general health and well-being. What happened to the Little Princess? I was afraid you would ask that, the sheriff says. The correct

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answer is—God only knows. It is more or less of a free country, and those folks packed up and moved on. Moved out to the West Coast, I heard. Where she probably has resumed her movie career and is hoping to be discovered some fine day and to become the next Kim Basinger or Michelle Pfeiffer. And who knows? Maybe she will. After my interview I jot down the following observation about the sheriff in my notebook: “He looks a little bit like Kevin Costner, if Costner had harder angles and edges. The etched lines around his pale blue eyes seem to come from a squinting but unblinking vision of terrible things. “What about him? Is he tried and true, a force for moral order? Not quite. Not hardly. I know for a fact that he is on the take. Nothing big time. Just a little of this and a little of that. Waiting for the big one, the drug deal, to come along. I know, too, that Dale Lewis has a terrible temper and has been known to vent it on the flesh and bones of rogues and rascals who fall into his hands for care and keeping. Who dares to blame him? There are scumbags everywhere these days. He prefers to encourage them (especially those of the colored persuasion) to keep on moving, far beyond the boundaries of Quincy County. Keeping the peace. As they say.” Reader, you may be wondering how come you never read my piece about child porn in the provinces. What happened was I got a fax from Deborah. It went like this: “Joey, here is good news and bad news. Sit down in a nice, comfortable chair. Then read and digest what I have to say here. And then—and only then—give me a call so we can discuss the details. “Let me get the bad news out of the way first. It could be worse, though you may not see it that way at the moment. First things first. Stop whatever you are doing with the piece about the Little Princess. Fact is you do not have a magazine anymore to publish it. They have just been purchased by a multinational European communications company. The story will be in tomorrow’s Times. If you still read the Times and haven’t gone native on us. . . . First thing these rich Eurotrash are going to do is to cancel all the ongoing contracts. They are dropping everything, including your little masterpiece. “Joey, the best I can do for you is maybe to fix it so you will get

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your full fee, not just the kill fee, for this one. The deal is, you quit the project right now. They will ‘own’ the project, for whatever that may be worth. Not much. Anyway, you send them something, anything you’ve got—notes and draft pages, if any. Just something they can stick in their files. Where they will be buried and forgotten. Send them the stuff and I will get you your check. And that will be that. “Now the good news. Sparky? Funny you should ask. This sudden corporate development caught our boy completely by surprise and unprepared. Pants down around his ankles. He is out of the business, at least for the time being. Tells me he has an old friend (you can believe that, a friend, if you want to), former college roommate who owns a little gourmet restaurant up in Portland, Maine. Our Sparky will soon be working there as a waiter while he tries to get his act together. A lot of people in the business will probably be making the trip up to Portland in the summer season. For all the pleasures of Maine and the special pleasure of being waited on by Sparky. “Truth is, if you have enough enemies in this business you can always survive. People in publishing need somebody to hate, somebody who is (probably) a worse person than they are. Sparky will find a new niche for himself all in due time. I’m betting everyone that he’ll be back at the Hamptons by the following summer. Back again and more obnoxious than ever.” I pack my bag and head for the airport. Back to Brooklyn. Hear my prayer, St. Christopher. And you, little blonde girl with blue eyes, Princess of downhome porn, I wish you luck in all your adventures. One way or another, we are all in the same line of work. The least we can do is admit it, from time to time, and hope for something better.

IN MEMORY OF James Whitehead

With My Body, I Thee Worship

Somewhere locked into another time and another place and, as a matter of fact, locked in the upstairs bathroom just in case. Late afternoon, after school. The other kids (he guesses) are all out and about and away doing all kinds of different things. Doing whatever kids do after school and before supper. His mother has gone out to the grocery store and to do some errands. She will be back in maybe an hour or so. His father will get home from work at just about the same time, unless he should happen to come home early for some reason or other. A thing that has happened but is not likely to. The whole house is very quiet, seems empty for a while. He is sitting close by the window and can smell the sweet odor of freshly cut grass. Sam, the black man who takes care of all the yards on this block, will have mowed the lawns today. The boy loves the odor of newly cut grass. So does everybody else. He can hear a dog barking in the near distance, most likely a block away and most likely that black-and-tan hound owned by Mr. Fishman (we all call him “Fishbait”) the undertaker. A big old house, always looking freshly painted, a spooky place where there are usually a number of dead people lying around, waiting for whatever happens next. And from the tree right outside the window . . . almost close enough from where he’s sitting to touch, he could easily squeeze through the window and safely jump out and catch onto the nearest limb. He has done that plenty of times. From that very same

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tree, a mockingbird is right now trying on some new voices and making up some new songs. Otherwise it is so quiet that he can hear the soft machine hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs. That’s a newfangled thing, the refrigerator, replacing the great big icebox and the great big iceman and his huge tongs, the man who used to come by every couple of days with his horse and wagon. In those days, so many things—fish, fruit, bread and bakery goods, scissor sharpeners, et cetera—used to come to them by wagon. The boy could doze off happily ever after and never wake up. Mustn’t waste precious time, though. There he is, surrounded by his magazines, that secret cache that includes battered old standbys of that era like Beauty Parade, Peep Show, Eyeful, Chicks and Chuckles, Frolic, and the one that he acquired with the greatest duplicity and personal difficulty—Modern Sunbathing: The American Nudist Picture Magazine. Truth is, the acquisition of all these items was, in those days, as you can well imagine, a somewhat complicated and tricky process. Stuff like that was against the law. You didn’t just walk, boldly and brazenly, into some corner drugstore and buy them right off the newsstand. They weren’t even on the magazine rack at Ivy’s Drug Store; and, even if they were, Doctor Ivy, the tall and solemn pharmacist for whom this boy used to make bicycle deliveries of prescriptions and other things like lemon-ammonia Cokes to soothe pregnant neighborhood housewives, Doctor Ivy won’t let kids linger and loiter at the magazine rack, anyway, or fool around with even any of the boring grown-up magazines. Doctor Ivy won’t let kids even touch or flip the pages of the pulp magazines like Weird Tales and True Detective. This boy got his magazines, at the beginning at least, the way some years earlier, way back then even before sex arrived in his life, he got his good shooters and marbles—by barter and trading off this and that. Borrowing, too. This was all well and good, but he was unable to put together a real and really interesting collection like he has now. He is proud of the wealth and variety of his collection of dirty magazines. He has enough of them so that he could take them with him (and he would do that, too) if he were ever cast ashore on a remote desert island. That’s a situation that

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he sometimes imagines, though he seldom pictures himself as living all alone on some island. Usually he has to share the island with one or more cheerleaders or airline stewardesses or even teachers (he likes older women). He has to share the real house and his real life with his family. He has cleverly managed to keep the sex magazines hidden from and unknown to Petey, his little brother (who wouldn’t be interested or know what to do with them anyway), and his two older sisters, who would certainly run and tell on him in about one minute flat. And then his magazines would end up in the incinerator in the backyard, nothing but white smoke. Gone with the smoke and the frigging wind. The fear of just that haunts him always, even in his moments of greatest, most intense pleasure. In fact, it seems to heighten that pleasure more than a little to pretend to himself that any time, like right here and now in the quiet house, might easily be the last time. “As I understand it,” Esther said, “you look at these magazines and then you make up stories about the women in the pictures. Then you play with yourself, for as long as you can, until you have to come. Is that correct?” “Who told you all that stuff?” “Don’t forget, I’ve got an older brother. I know a lot of different things about boys. Well?” “Sort of,” he admitted. “I mean more or less.” “Could I watch you do it sometime?” “That’s not nice. I couldn’t do that.” “Am I your good friend or not?” “Sure you’re my friend, Esther.” “Good friend!” “Okay. Okay. Good friend.” “Wouldn’t you do anything for a good friend?” “Anything within reason.” “What’s unreasonable? I mean, you do it all the time, don’t you? Completely on your own?” “That is completely different.” “It’s dangerous any way you do it.” “Dangerous?” “My father told my brother; I heard him say that it can rot your

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brain and kill you. And even if it doesn’t kill you outright, it will give you terrible headaches and hickeys and pimples and grow hair on the palms of your hands, and then everybody else will know exactly what you have been up to. There is no way you can keep it a secret.” “It isn’t a secret. I just don’t want to do it in front of you.” “Just one time,” Esther said. “Just do it and show me how it works, and then I’ll quit bothering you about it.” “What if I don’t?” “Let’s don’t think about it that way, in those terms.” “What happens if I don’t do it?” “One thing that happens,” Esther said, “is that I will quit stealing my brother’s magazines for you. I mean, I feel very guilty about it already. If he ever finds out he will beat you up.” Afterward Esther told him that it was really nice of him to prove his friendship and manhood and to share the experience with her. The only thing she complained about was the woman whose picture he had selected (“She is so unbelievably tacky!” Esther exclaimed.) and the story he made up to go along with it. “I can invent a lot better story than that.” “I’m sure you can,” he said. “But the story isn’t the most important part of it.” “It ought to be.” “But it isn’t.” Before this was going to be all over and done with, she would be selecting all the pictures for him and then making up the stories, which were more like case studies lifted right out of Kraft Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, to go along with them. It took a lot of the fun out of it. Picture this. It is an orgy, your basic Roman orgy is in progress. Right out of the movies. Lots of good-looking people of all shapes and sizes, clad in scanty and diaphanous (Love that word— diaphanous! It always turns me on!) clothing, if any clothing at all, lying around on pillows and couches, eating bunches of grapes and turkey drumsticks, drinking wine, lots of it, out of great big old goblets. Trim and topless teenage waitresses, all oiled up and shiny, with nice new tits, are sashaying around, pouring more wine from pitchers, serving food and hot towels, sprinkling rose petals

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and spraying perfumes and all that. Musicians are playing soft and sensuous music. There are some really great-looking nude dancers jumping around. And there are jugglers and acrobats, fire-eaters and all kinds of clowns. Speaking of clowns . . . I am a slave boy just about my own age— fifteen maybe, though more likely my real age of fourteen and a half. Your (my) assignment for this evening is to be “in attendance” for a proud and beautiful Roman lady of the nobility. The noble ladies have been awarded teenage slave boys for the occasion. Kind of a door prize. They get to keep you, if they want to, when it’s all over. Meanwhile you are there, along with some of her own basic entourage, to anticipate and cater to her least and idle whims. You are wearing only a snug little loincloth which is basically a glorified jockstrap. They handed you a big fan and right now you wave it back and forth slowly and gently, cooling the air around her and her handsome and musclebound young boyfriend. Probably a gladiator. . . . All in all it’s not too bad. Except you have to be careful. You have been warned by your supervisor that if, for any reason, you happen to get a hard-on and she notices it and makes a complaint, you will surely be punished. Most likely will be whipped. Whipping is a serious business in ancient Rome. And, you know it, and it doesn’t have to be said, she (they) can do anything she wants to do with you. You have got next to no civil rights. Not way back then. She can arrange for you to be “fixed” and turned into a eunuch. You sure don’t want something bad like that to happen to you. At some point, while you are still busy fanning the air, the lady touches your arm lightly, as light as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, and tells you to go and find an empty chamber in this villa, somewhere she can go to relax and “freshen up.” You go and hurry to find such a place, a small, well-lit, and wellfurnished chamber. You report back and then lead the way for the lady, who leaves all of her group behind except for her personal servant, a slave girl just about your own age, give or take. She’s very pretty, too, though not much in the boob department. And kind of smart-aleck and snotty. The lady then sends the girl back to the central orgy to get some more wine and stuff. Then, to your surprise, the lady simply steps

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out of all her scanty, diaphanous(!) clothes and, buck naked, lies face down on a couch. You try not to look because you are already feeling a little stirring and shifting movement under your loincloth. But you can’t resist sneaking a peek. And, no doubt about it, she is really something for a grown-up and mature woman. She says that she wants a good back rub, maybe even a full massage. At that moment the slave girl reappears bringing some wine and body oil and perfume for her mistress. You have never done this before in your whole life, but you have no choice. You do the best you can while the slave girl fans her. By now, of course, you have acquired a gigantic, champion erection, a huge and major hard-on. You can’t help it. You keep on massaging the lady and hoping that she won’t notice. But the slave girl notices and gets the giggles. The lady asks her what’s so funny. The girl just points and keeps on giggling. (Like they will.) The lady (wow! great tits!) rolls over, sits straight up and looks all mad and mean. She orders me to take off my jockstrap. I do so, and my dick pops out like a jack-in-the-box and stands at attention. It’s as big as I’ve ever seen it. “Shame on you, slave boy,” she says. “Please forgive me, Lady. I couldn’t help myself.” “Well,” she says, “I suppose you will have to be punished for this.” Then she turns to the girl: “Go fetch the leather strap.” Then to me: “Come a little closer. Don’t be afraid. I like little boys. Isn’t it just amazing how Mother Nature works?” “Yes, ma’am.” The girl comes back with a big fat leather strap that looks like it will really smart. “I am not going to complain to the supervisor,” the lady says. “Not yet, anyway. I’m going to let my slave girl, Puella here take care of things. But first . . .” Puella is grinning like a gooney bird, and I think she will take a lot of pleasure out of whipping my bony arse. She motions for me to bend over and grab my ankles and assume the position. But before I can do that the lady says: “Wait!” She says it would be really a shame to waste such an elegant erection. She says Puella seems to be enjoying things a little too much. She says she wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss if Puella hadn’t started giggling and carrying on. Therefore, before Puella

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gets her turn with the leather strap, she has to take care of my problem in an expeditious and efficient manner. The lady orders her to kneel down in front of me, facing me, and deftly using both hands, Puella begins. . . . Before we go any further with all this, it is necessary to make a personal disclaimer. I have been happily married to a wonderful woman for many years (more than fifty years in fact) now. And I plan to stay that way. I want the reader—and my wife, too, if she ever accidentally runs across this story somewhere—to understand that I am not reporting. It isn’t factual, my friends. It’s fiction. In this context, and on the strength of what you have already read so far, you are entitled to conclude that I have a dirty mind. To which I answer: So what, if, in fact and in real life, I behave myself most of the time? Try not to be so judgmental. “You all are Jews, aren’t you?” “What?” Esther said. “You and your family are a bunch of Jews.” “Well, yes, I guess so.” “All of you?” “What do you mean?” “Your brother, he’s one too?” “I guess so. I don’t know what he really believes.” “He can’t believe much if he collects all these dirty magazines.” “What about you?” “I’m Christian. That’s different.” “Jesus was a Jew.” “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Jesus was the founding father of Christianity. He wrote the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. How could he be a Jew at the same time? Answer me that one if you are so smart.” “Let’s drop the subject.” “I have his picture on a calendar. He’s got blond hair and blue eyes.” “Let’s talk about sex.” “Suits me.”

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Earlier, reader, I was talking about the boy and his magazine collection and his perversely pleasurable fear that he would somehow lose his collection. That, in truth, as you will soon enough see, since this is a short story, not a novel, is exactly what will happen to him in the foreseeable future. And it will be worse than he has imagined or prepared for. Isn’t it always worse than we ever imagine? In the future the whole story will be a lot funnier than he was capable of guessing in the tumultuous years of his adolescence. As a young man, boy no more, he will discover that if he tells his story right, straightforward, it will make some women laugh. And he will soon learn the validity of that old folk-saying: “A maid who laughs is half taken.” Actually, it was a girl his own age who helped him most in building up his collection of sex magazines. Her name (as you may have noticed already) was Esther—Esther Something-Or-Other, a Jewish name. A dark little girl, then, a genuine exotic amid all the blonde and blue-eyed giggly southern girls of the Cherokee Junior High School, each and every one, except of course Esther, a potential cheerleader. Esther was small and sad-eyed and serious and skinny and, overall, more than a little mousy. She was plenty smart enough and did okay in class. She could—and that’s how it all started—help you a lot with your homework. He needed all the help he could get and so he was always nice and polite with her. Just being friendly, you know. He never thought of her as a girl like the other girls whom he simultaneously despised and longed for and lusted after. She was more like a buddy. He even got to like her that way, as a buddy. She would help him with homework and he would, in turn, be nice. He would go to the cafeteria to eat lunch with her when nobody else would. Maybe he might buy her a popsicle or share his okra and tomatoes (which he hated, anyway, though he never let on) with her. On Valentine’s Day he sent her a secret and anonymous valentine. Of course, she had to know exactly where it came from. Who else in the world would send Esther a valentine? At that age and at that stage this boy was something of a jock. He could really pitch a softball. During gym period, and sometimes after school, he would be pitching, and Esther would be standing there at the edge of the field, not cheering him on exactly,

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that wasn’t her way. Silent and serious and plain and unnoticed by others (sometimes she seemed to be almost invisible), watching over him with a kind of pride, he could feel it, as if he were her secret boyfriend or something. As if he were doing it all for her, in her honor. He might easily have been embarrassed. After all, she was such a dog, you know. But for some reason it didn’t bother him. He really liked her as a friend. He would tell Esther almost anything. What harm? She didn’t talk much or long with anybody else. Not to his knowledge. Anything he told her, even deep secrets, would probably be safe. He did not, however, tell her anything much at first about his secret sex life. He knew better than to tell her which ones among the horde of freckled, blue-eyed girls that he hated and loved so much he would give anything to be able to fuck—if he knew exactly what that was. Someone had warned him (maybe one of his own sisters) that women/girls don’t like to listen to you talk about the other girls that you have the terrible hots for. “Don’t ever bring up the subject,” they strongly advised. “And always speak well and warmly about your mother and your sisters.” Then something changed. Some kid loaned him a dirty Andy Gump comic book. When he was walking along with Esther to the bus stop—she came and went from school on a yellow school bus while he lived close enough to walk—he dropped his books and hers. He was carrying her books. That was considered good manners at school. He dropped the books, and out on the cracked sidewalk fluttered the Andy Gump dirty funny book. To his surprise and embarrassment she scooped it up and looked at it silently and solemnly. Then she broke into a fit of bright laughter. He realized he had never seen her laugh before. She had good teeth and was almost pretty (he would have said “about half decent” at that age) when she was laughing. She asked him if she could borrow the funny book if she promised to bring it back tomorrow. He said sure, why not? What else was he going to say? So she took it with her as she ran to catch the school bus. In the morning she came to him with some bad news and some good news. The bad part was that she had been caught reading the comic book. She told them that she had found it in the girls’ lock-

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er room. She stuck to her story, and her parents took Andy Gump away from her with dire warnings and admonitions. The good news was in a brown manila envelope carefully lettered “Algebra Homework.” In that envelope there was a copy of Beauty Parade, a magazine he had never yet seen, only heard of, together with a note from her, also carefully printed out: “I filched this from my brother’s extensive personal collection. You can keep it. He will never miss it. And even if he does, he won’t be able to do anything about it. / Love XXX / Esther.” This part will end badly later on. Or, if you prefer and are a stickler for factual accuracy, you could argue that it hasn’t really ended yet since the old man, who was the young boy at the beginning of the story, still remembers it as if it happened only moments ago. Whether it will end when the old man, thus the young boy as well, is dead and gone, or when, at last, living or dead, his file of memory is nothing but trash and dust in the wind, remains to be seen. “Okay, kid, I’m not going to argue with you. I want my copy of Peep Show, the one with Betty Page on the cover, back. Right now! And I want the March issue of Sunbathing for Health magazine. You can keep the rest of them.” “I already told you. I don’t have any of your magazines. And I don’t know what you are talking about.” “All right, you little piece of dreck, I’m finished with talking. Give me back my magazines or I’ll break your goy nose and knock your teeth out!” (We had learned a lot of our dialogue style in the western movies at the Rialto on Saturday mornings.) “Turn me loose, you big bully! . . . Okay! . . . Okay! You can have the Peep Show back! I don’t have Sunbathing for Health! Honest!” “You ruined my Peep Show, you little shit. It’s got sticky spots all over it.” “Don’t blame that on me. That’s the way it was when I first got it.” “All right, shithead, get ready. I am now fixing to knock you cross-eyed.” And he did that, too, right then and there. Gave the boy double

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vision and a bloody nose and then pedaled off, a mile a minute, on his fancy bicycle. He forgot about his Sunbathing for Health, ha! ha! ha! The old man remembers the end of the scene differently, as old people so often will do. In his latest version, yes, he received a bloody nose, but he also knocked the bigger boy down and then chased him away down the street. “Come back and fight me like a man, you rotten Jew bastard!” he remembers yelling at his fleeing enemy. “Hitler is right about you guys!” Context is really important, even in memory. He would want to explain now that in the early 1930s nobody knew all that much about Hitler except that he came on the shortwave radio once in a while and yelled like a loony—you couldn’t understand a word he said—and said bad things about Jews. So? So did the boy’s father, especially after he lost his job. Most of the really good magazines came from Esther and thus from the collection of her brother. Soon, however, the boy had built up a pretty good collection of his own, enough so that he could swap and trade around and constantly improve it. Surely that boy, still in the upstairs bathroom on a school day afternoon where we left him, thinks that Esther’s big brother, that big cowardly Jewish bully, must have missed them. Must have noticed something amiss well before he hopped onto his bike and rode halfway across town to ambush and confront the boy. How could he not miss them? He probably would have come to know them quite well by then, those particular women posed in their wild and wicked underwear and their skimpy bathing suits (they call them swimsuits nowadays) or even sometimes in occasional and shadowy glory, completely bareass stark naked. The brother would wonder what had become of Betty Page and Diane Webber and Lili St. Cyr and all the others. Surely he would have suspected Esther, but, as she said, what could he do about it? Who would he go and complain to—his parents? Esther must have told on the boy. Probably because they had that dumb argument about Jesus.

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Once upon a time. When? Well, he can’t be sure now. Except that it would have to have been sometime before Sam (that’s Esther’s brother) beat him up. One time, then, Esther missed her regular school bus home. The next one she could catch wouldn’t come for an hour. He felt responsible for her for some reason. So he decided to wait there with her. But not here on the schoolyard. He shared a candy bar with her and took her to a special place he knew about where they could even smoke cigarettes if they felt like it. A couple of blocks from the school there was a swampy place (what they call “wetlands” nowadays) full of mud and reeds and cattails and stuff like that. If you knew and followed a little path, there was a dry grassy spot in the middle, well out of sight. Nobody could ever find you unless they just somehow stumbled onto it. And you could hear anybody coming long before they ever got there. That’s where he took Esther and where he lit up a Lucky Strike cigarette (stolen from his mother’s green pack). Coughing a little, they passed it back and forth, he inhaling, she puffing. “Would you let me take a look at your thing?” she asked him politely. “What? What did you say?” “Would you mind showing me your thing?” “Thing?” “You know—dick, prick, peter, cock, pee-pee. Could I just look at it for a minute?” “I don’t know, Esther. I don’t think so.” “Why not?” “That might not be right.” Then she reminded him again about all the magazines and stuff she had copped for him. And she reminded him that she had taken the whole blame for the Andy Gump funny book. And, that favorite argument of hers, how real friends do not keep secrets from each other. “It’s not like a secret,” he said. “I mean, It’s just there and all. It’s not a big deal. It’s just that I’m not sure. . . . Oh, nuts, go ahead and have a quick look if you really want to.”

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He unzipped his pants. He was embarrassed that it wasn’t a whole lot bigger, but she didn’t seem to mind. At least she didn’t say anything. She looked at it with serious, scientific interest and, he thought, genuine curiosity. All around them it was almost perfectly quiet except for a light breeze teasing and rustling the reeds. A bluejay squawked. He felt himself begin the swell and stiffen. At least, he remembers thinking at the time, that is better than if it had decided on its own to go limp and shrivel up as sometimes they will do in embarrassing situations. “That is really something,” she said. “Thank you very much,” he replied, not being able to think of anything else appropriate to say. “Would you mind if I touched it?” “Damn right I would.” “Why not?” “No way.” “I just want to see what it feels like.” “Absolutely, positively not. I don’t like other people messing around with my dick. I draw the line.” “I am not other people,” Esther said. “I’m a basically shy person,” he said. “Can’t you see that?” “You are not shy. Besides you already pulled it out and made me look at it.” “I did not. I didn’t make you do anything.” “All I want to do is just touch it. Is that too much to ask?” “What will you do for me in return? “Wait and see.” He didn’t and still doesn’t know a whole lot about Jews, and that’s a fact. Except never try to bargain or outsmart one. You will lose every time. “All right, all right,” he said finally, “But be careful, will you?” She laughed that bright pretty laugh of hers and gave him a friendly squeeze. Then he shrank back to limp normality and zipped up his pants. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said, standing up now, brushing off her skirt. “I better go now. I don’t want to miss the last bus. See ya, kiddo!” That could easily have been the end of things between them. But

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it wasn’t. Esther started waiting for the last bus on purpose. Usually they didn’t go anywhere or do anything much except maybe to sit at one of the outdoor tables on the playground and drink a Coke or something. But other times she would persuade him, usually as a dare (he could never resist the challenge of a dare), to go back to their secret place, where they could smoke some cigarettes and fool around, sometimes a little touching and feeling but mostly having long boring conversations about life and death and love and sex. Summer came along and the school year ended. He was sent away to the North Carolina mountains to work as a junior counselor at a summer camp. Fell instantly head over heels in love with a big girl, a senior counselor who could really play basketball. The only times he ever so much as touched her were when he accidentally (on purpose) bumped into her ass on the basketball court. All he ever got out of it was just one more erection and some improvement in his layup and his hook shot. Not to forget or to ignore the heavenly daydream he allowed himself, picturing the two of them taking long, steamy, slithering, soapy showers together. This clean fantasy was inspired by the fact that the boys’ and girls’ showers were right next door to each other and you could hear the water splashing on the bodies on the other side of the wall. Some of the boys made holes in the wall to peep at the girls (the girls must have known it). But the boy, as a junior counselor, covered over those peep-holes with thick tape. Besides, he didn’t want to share his fantasy with anybody else. During the summer Esther sent him a couple of funny postcards. But he didn’t answer. He wanted to be faithful to his new and mostly imaginary girlfriend. By the end of the summer Esther had moved away or something. He never saw or heard from her again. Life is like that, he thought. People just disappear out of your life. And in the same way, then, they pop up out of nowhere again. Or else, like Esther, they don’t. By the time he knows this truth, or anyway believes it to be so, this boy in the bathroom, a teenager whose habits are becoming obsessions, will be grown up, elderly even, another old geezer full of sophistry and spurious wisdom, itself the result of delusional

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experiences, declining sensory capacity, bad memory and, alas, undiminished appetites. The old guy thinks now (alone in his own bathroom or wherever else he happens to be) that maybe he never really lost sight of or touch with Esther. Because ever after that he has had (enjoyed) a special place in his heart dedicated and devoted to sex-crazed Jewish women. Whom he still thinks of (and will until his dying day) as dark, mysterious, and wholly exotic. You might wonder why he wouldn’t have, by the same token, been obsessed with (as they call them nowadays) African American women. Maybe he was a racist to the core, though the real reason, he told himself and others, was that black girls, the ones he met, anyway, were exactly like the southern white girls except for the color of their skin. They talked and acted pretty much the same. According to his view, Jewish women would do all kinds of lively and interesting things that Christian girls, regardless of race and color, would never dream of doing. Since the boy grew up, and after the war went to college on the GI Bill, he later became a writer by trade . . . not a very successful or important or influential one, “a lesser figure, but a figure no less” one critic called him, you can think of him (if at all) as being maybe like the flip side of Philip Roth. Sometimes he thinks of Roth as an up-to-date version of Esther’s brother, the big bully Sam. Of course, Sam was deeply southern, more of a redneck than a rabbi. That fact doesn’t prevent him (our narrator) from having a vision of Roth as the guy speeding away on a bicycle, laughing his ass off after beating him up and taking back most of his magazines. As a writer, the old boy doesn’t like to depend on stereotypes too much. He has learned that the humongous black guy in the seat next to you on the airplane always turns out to be an investment banker or a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist and not a ballplayer or a rap musician. They can flat-out fool you. And so it is with Jewish women. He has found that the ones he got to know, perhaps unconsciously culled from the herd, have had a more intellectual interest in sex, all of its limitations and possibilities, than any other women of any other group or class or caste that he has so far ever encountered. According to him, they like to discuss sex, to talk about it, before, during, and after and even sometimes instead of the real distinguished thing, the old tango dance, the ancient art and craft of coupling up. They like to talk

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and talk about it. To analyze it. To consider what can be seen and what cannot be seen or known except on the mutual honor system. Out of intellectual curiosity more than anything else, they like to be bravely empirical about it. They like to try out everything they have ever heard of and see if and how it works. Then, above all else, they like to talk about it. Such pillow talk with or (increasingly) without the pleasure of cigarettes. Sometimes they indulged in uninterrupted discussion right in the big and frenzied middle of the act itself. Maybe, he has thought, they justify themselves by turning copulation into a kind of seminar. Let us leave that boy enjoying the pleasures (as he imagined them then) of a Roman orgy. And let us rejoin the old geezer who has come back to his hometown and home place to see about selling it now that Petey is dead and gone, now that everyone except himself is long gone, scattered across the wide, diverse and more or less United States. He is willing to skip the Roman orgy. Instead he is, prime of life, the middle-aged pilot of a chartered jet plane flying across the remote South Pacific. It’s a fashion shoot, swimsuits, to be done on an uninhabited island. There are some very expensive models on board—people like, you know, Cindy Crawford and Christie Brinkley and Elle McPherson et al. Ones like that. Maybe even Linda Evangelista? (Please bear in mind that in pornography everybody is always young and fair, whatever age you imagine them to be, as in a fairy tale.) So okay. Naturally they crash and everybody except himself and the expensive models is instantly dead meat. Because of some navigational problem it will be a long, long time before they are located and rescued, if ever. There is enough to eat—fish and clams and coconuts and breadfruit—and plenty of fresh water too. Only, they soon discover, the water has something in it, a mysterious something that affects the models like a powerful aphrodisiac. They are wildly horny and can’t control themselves. You can see why he wasn’t all that successful as a writer. Plotting was always a weakness, among other things. You can also see

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(which he can’t) how little he has changed from the teenage kid he used to be, the one whose idea of a good time was a run-of-the-mill Roman orgy. Leave the geezer on the island and leave the kid at the orgy and let’s go to the Indiana Writers’ Workshop one summer in the late 1970s or early 1980s, give or take. It was a very hot summer in Bloomington, though chilly from the powerful air-conditioning in the Indiana Union. And there was also the blonde and chilly, admirably skinny poet from New York City. Who told the geezer (and others on the staff) that she earned her real living—and it wasn’t a bad one either—by writing letters and replies concerning sexual matters and mores for Penthouse magazine and its kissing cousin, Penthouse Forum. Chances are you have seen both of them, and others of their kind, at, for example, airports all across the land. However, if your experience is anything like that of the geezer or mine, you will never actually have seen anyone step up and buy a copy or read one. Anyway, anyone born and raised in the deep Depression in the South and only a couple of blocks away from Ivy’s Drug Store and the formidable Doctor Ivy, will never have the nerve or the resolve to support insatiable curiosity and to step up to the cash register and the motherly, gray-haired woman behind it and buy a copy. Then what? Well, this chilly and pretty and wonderfully skinny and terribly serious poet was kept very busy turning out material for her employer. There were, of course, she explained, guidelines, limits, parameters, areas of special interest and concern, based more on the findings of Dr. Kinsey than those of Masters and Johnson, more influenced by the early work of Kraft-Ebbing than the late night thoughts of Dr. Freud. Even so it was a demanding job, “taxing,” as they say. She carried around a handsome little notebook, cloth-bound as he remembers, though it might as well have been leather or, for that matter, human skin with a bold tattoo. From time to time he would see her open it and begin to write in it with her gold Mark Cross ballpoint pen or, once in a very great while, with a large, fat Mont Blanc fountain pen. Ideas would pop into her head, and she had

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to be ready to capture them then and there before they vanished forever like the morning dew. She explained to the geezer and others on the staff that, as a consultant, she didn’t actually have to write the stuff. They had their own skill-people (not a poet among them) to do that. All she had to do was to come up with interesting and somewhat kinky notions that might capture the interest and attention of the Penthouse professionals and then could be “phased in” to the letters and the Forum. Among these professionals the “burnout” rate was high. They needed a little help, somebody who could graze and browse fresh fields and pastures new. The skinny blonde New York poet explained that the deadline for her next (pardon the expression) submission was hard upon us. Very soon she was going to have to fire off her latest anthology of pornographic ideas. Either that or else to forego a large piece of change, a significant chunk of her income. She, too, she confessed, was beginning to suffer from porno burnout. Would they, could they, her newfound buddies and fellow staffers, come to her aid and comfort by sharing any ideas, be they ever so “off-the-wall” (she would be the judge of that), that popped into their heads? Would they please focus their attention on the erotic? Think of it, she suggested, as one small step for pornography and one giant leap for poetry. Or was it the other way around? In the particular case of our hero, she explained that even though Penthouse was not intended for senior citizens, it could not, in good conscience and in the name of full and objective coverage of the subject matter, completely ignore “geezer sex.” “Besides,” she added with a smile and a polite little pat on his old butt, “geezer sex, as I understand it, is primarily a masturbating experience, isn’t it?” “So they say.” Naturally our old boy set out, in spite of the odds against him, to seduce this young woman. There was, for instance, the fact that she had with her, also on the staff of the conference, a young, handsome, sturdy, and justly suspicious husband. He was sensitive (another poet) and highly observant. So the geezer’s whole campaign had to be conducted on an intellectual level.

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“What do you think?” “I think it all depends,” he said. Who could resist her challenge? Almost everybody else on the creative writing staff, that’s who. Meanwhile he wasted the entire conference concentrating on sex, trying to think of things that would make her sit up and take notice, raise her nicely plucked eyebrows and gross her out. Mostly when he checked in with his latest inventions and fabrications, she didn’t even bother to open her notebook. He was greeted with shrugs and yawns. “I read a story of yours one time in a smarmy skin magazine,” she told him. “Bully for you.” “The one about the voyeuristic kid who gets caught by the girls while window-peeping at the Soviet Union’s Olympic Women’s Crew.” “So?” “More masochistic drivel. Why do you write crap like that?” “You really want to know why I wrote that story?” “I guess so.” “Somebody told me about what Mark Twain said about Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” “What did he say?” “That Tolstoy forgot to include a boat race.” “Oh,” she said. “That explains the title, anyway.” “A Boat Race for Leo Tolstoy.” “Ha. Ha.” “Listen,” he said. “Would you mind if I asked you a personal question?” “Depends.” “Are you Jewish?” He couldn’t shock her, but he shocked himself mildly when he began to think that maybe the whole thing—collecting other people’s fantasies—might be a hoax. That in fact she didn’t work for Penthouse. That it could be a kind of “gotcha” game, the point of which was to be the exposure of her colleagues as a motley crew of dirty-minded fools. But that didn’t seem to be worth all the effort and aggravation. He began to think she was doing all this to assist with the basic libidinous arousal of her sensitive-poet husband. To

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put it politely, maybe he could only become aroused with the aid and comfort of other people’s fantasy lives. He felt like he ought to do everything he could to help him. She, on the other hand, soon seemed genuinely interested, in a sort of scientific way, in the ways and means of geezer sex. How it is almost always based on fantasy adventures. Young, and we imagine ourselves enjoying erotic events with “real” people. These, however, proved to be less interesting than their reappearance in the context of the combined fictions of memory and fantasy. Then memory is eventually jettisoned in favor of pure fantasy, as the geezer (any old geezer) reinvents his own lost adolescence. Soon we are back to basics: Roman orgies, shipwrecks on desert islands, Arabian nights in the harem, aliens from outer space on a mission to kidnap neat-looking babes from the malls and country clubs and beaches as in the famous cult film Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. None of the above materials, raw or refined, would do much for her. She and her perverse husband had long since played out every basic erotic scenario known to modern American man and woman. He urgently needed some new material, something a little different. So he shared the lemon Jello story with her. If the old guy weren’t so involved in the story of his later life, he might at least have alerted the boy to the fact that a car, his father’s old Ford, had just pulled quietly into the garage. That his old man was home an hour or so early. That the explanation was that he had just been laid off work. Which was really a bad thing to happen to anybody in those grim days. The boy is too busy at the Roman orgy. And the geezer is too wrapped up in oddball memories to worry much about the boy. And the father is feeling so down, so whipped, that he makes no more noise than a ghost as he climbs the stairs, planning to use the upstairs bathroom (where the boy is, now and forever, and so is the geezer more than half a century later). For whom the dead and gone father is, in fact, a ghost. When I first got out of the army and went to grad school on the GI Bill, Anne and I were newlyweds, and they put us in these old

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converted barracks called Veterans’ Village on the edge of the campus. My best friend was a guy from down home who had been in the army at about the same time I was and was discharged at roughly the same time and got married about the same time, too. We used to take turns driving each other over to school and the library and leaving the other car—each of us had a smoky, beat-up old heap that had seen much better days—for the wives. The routine was that whoever was driving picked up the other one early— the library opened up at eight a.m.—and we spent the whole day supposedly in the bowels of the library. Then we went home for supper. One day I picked him up, and he seemed kind of down, depressed and gloomy. “Anything wrong, Jim?” He shrugged and looked away. I waited and offered him a cigarette. We were still happy, heavy smokers back in those days. He took a couple of puffs. We pulled into the parking lot and found a place. He started to get out, the door halfway open, then changed his mind. “Listen,” he said. “Could I ask you a serious question?” “Anything.” “Frank, have you ever made love to a woman in a bathtub full of lemon Jello?” I took a deep puff and blew some sophisticated smoke rings to keep from breaking up and laughing out loud. This fellow was not what you might call a joker. I had to believe he was serious. “No, I haven’t. Never. But I have certainly heard of it.” “You have?” “Yes, indeed. It’s a fairly common practice as I understand it. Of course, different people prefer different flavors. I’ve heard that lime and raspberry are the most common favorites, but lemon is right up there.” Pause. “Why do you ask? “Well . . . you won’t laugh at me, will you? And you won’t tell anybody either?” “You can count on me, Jim.” Seems that he and his new bride, Cindy, had had an argument

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this morning. He had wondered how she felt about doing it in a tub full of lemon Jello. Instead of discussing it rationally, Cindy had lost her temper. She told him that was the sickest thing she had ever heard of, that he was some kind of a sexual pervert in urgent need of psychiatric care, and that she would rather be divorced or even dead than to do anything like that or even to talk about it. “The lady doth protest too much,” I said helpfully. “Sounds to me like she’s really interested.” “Do you think so?” “You never know about women and what they really mean.” “You can say that again.” “I suggest that the two of you sit down. Have a quiet drink together and discuss the problem. Tell her that it’s a common practice among many loving married couples and see what she thinks about that.” “Thanks, Frank. . . .” After a long day in the library we met up again in the parking lot. Jim seemed a lot more lively and cheerful than he had in the morning. “Would you mind stopping by the grocery store for a minute on the way home?” he asked me. “Sure thing.” I double-parked with the engine running (huffing and puffing smoke) while he ran inside. He emerged grinning broadly, as they say, and carrying a large case of lemon Jello. No word of explanation necessary. I dropped him off at his front door. “Thanks for everything, old buddy.” He hefted the box and started to go inside. I couldn’t miss this. I had to see it play out. Drove around the block in less than a minute, parked where he probably wouldn’t notice me or my car, and waited. Didn’t have to wait long. First, I heard some yelling. Two voices, his and hers, in a loud duet that didn’t sound anything much like something from Cossi Fan Tutti. Followed by the sight and noise of the front door of his apartment flying open. And here came old Jim, backing up, partly

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bent over, dodging something. Some things. Plural. Packets of Jello, lemon Jello, came sailing outside, some of them hitting him, others falling on the sidewalk and on the walkway. It was sad to see all that good Jello go to waste. Matter of fact, it didn’t. Next morning he put the whole reassembled case of Jello packets into my car trunk, and that was that. We never mentioned it or referred to it again. Anne and I ate a lot of lemon Jello for dessert. Plenty of protein there. After a while we came to like it, Anne and I. And sometimes, for old times’ sake, we will still indulge ourselves in a bowl of it for luck or for love. Never did try it out with Anne (or anybody else) in a bathtub. I’ll tell you who did, though. And in so doing confirmed my suspicions. You guessed it—the intensely skinny blonde poet from New York City. She said it was “all sticky and icky” and not any fun at all. I asked her if her husband felt the same way about it. She replied that men are completely crazy and not to be trusted. I can see how she might have felt that way.

HEROES

The Browning Automatic rifle, model of 1918, is an air-cooled, gasoperated, magazine-fed shoulder weapon . . . Smell my fingers. What? Smell my fingers. Try and guess what I’ve been doing. Fuck you, man. You smell your own fuckin’ fingers. Wait a minute. Hey, I’m not kidding around. I’m serious. So am I. If you want somebody to sniff your stinking fingers, you better go find somebody else. Don’t be chicken. Come on. Forget it. It’s nothing like that. Like what? What you think. I dare you. You dare me what. I double-dog dare you that you can’t smell my fingers and guess what it is. Guess what I’ve been doing. Okay. Tell you what. Make me a bet and I’ll do it. I got a good nose. Very sensitive. Ugly. What you got is a big, fat, very ugly nose. I didn’t say good-looking. I just said good. All right. I got ten dollars says you can’t smell my fingers and guess what I was doing before I came here. You got yourself a bet. Gimme.

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So? Gun oil. And bore cleaner. That’s what. You owe me ten bucks. How did you think I could miss that? How the hell could I ever forget it? You been cleaning guns. Pay me up. No problem. Double or nothing you can’t guess what I was thinking about. Who am I thinking about right now? No way. No bet. Go on. Take a chance. You just tell me. Hero. What? I am thinking about Floogie the hero. Flat-Foot Floogie . . . He was a hero all right. You can’t take that away from him. I’m not taking anything away from him. Or anybody else. You can’t even if you wanted to. They gave him his medal and that’s that. Posthumously. So what? That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The big medals go to dead guys. Mostly. Yeah. And they can have them, too. You can say that again. Neverthefuckinless, whenever I clean weapons, I always get to thinking about the BAR. And that starts me thinking about ole Floogie. I remember him every time. Know what I mean? Sequence and Method of Field Stripping Steps in stripping will be taken in the following sequence: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. k.

Cock the piece. Remove gas cylinder tube retaining pin. Remove gas cylinder tube and forearm (let mechanism forward easily). Remove trigger guard retaining pin. Remove trigger guard. Remove recoil spring guide and recoil spring. Push hammer pin through hammer pin hole in receiver. Remove operating handle. Remove hammer pin. Remove hammer. Remove slide.

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l. Push bolt guide out. m. Remove bolt, bolt lock, and bolt link. n. Remove bolt link pin and bolt link. o. Remove firing pin. p. Remove extractor and spring.

In those old days, not all that long ago in our lives, the ones who were there and lived to think about it and to tell about it, back when the BAR was still a basic infantry weapon, one to a rifle squad, as I recall, well, in those days the BAR was viewed as a kind of a punishment. Was assigned to some fuckup or loser or eight ball. And if, by some weird chance, there wasn’t any one such in the squad—and that’s hard to believe or imagine, but I guess it could happen—then, of course, the privilege of the BAR went to the smallest and weakest man in the squad. Because the BAR was genuinely heavy, see? Big and heavy and hard to carry and a perfect bitch to keep clean. And then there was all that ammo for it that you had to carry. I am telling you, it was no fun to be a BAR man. As long as there was somebody in the squad with a BAR, you could feel better off than somebody else. It wasn’t hard to feel a lot better than Floogie, most of the time. Big, tall, skinny guy with white-blond hair. Looked like some kind of an albino. An albino wino. I mean goofy-looking. Clumsy as a bear cub. Couldn’t do much of anything right. Couldn’t make his bed right or lace up his boots right. Couldn’t keep in step. Every step he took he bobbed his head like an old chicken. Always in some kind of trouble. Got his squad and the whole platoon in trouble. If you think Floogie was hopeless, you should have seen his brother. I didn’t know he had one. Not in our outfit. He might have been. But somebody with some pull or maybe a dynamite sense of humor got him assigned to special duty as the driver for a major general at Fort Campbell. So? The thing is, the brother was exactly like Floogie. A total basket case. I wouldn’t let Floogie behind the wheel of anything. I wouldn’t let Floogie have charge of a wheelbarrow.

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This brother of his couldn’t drive for shit. And he proved it on the first day on the job. He run the general’s jeep off the road and into a deep ditch and put himself and the general directly into the hospital. In traction and all wrapped up in bandages. I went to see the guy, and there he was, all trussed up, and laughing his ass off because they were fixing to put him out of the army as soon as he could get up out of the bed. Probably on a lifetime disability pension, too. Hey, it was line of duty, right? He was entitled. The dumb brother goes home with a limp and a couple of little scars and a lifetime pension. Floogie and the rest of us get our sad asses shipped off to Korea. Quit complaining. I’m not the chaplain. The whole thing is, once an eight ball, always an eight ball. Floogie was exactly the same, a total and complete fuckup from beginning to end, all up and down the Korean peninsula. Now he wasn’t chicken. You have to give him that. He was too dumb to be really scared. Mostly he had his mind on ways to get out of work and to stay off dirty details. You can’t blame him for that. The first time you had to put together some kind of a shit detail, the first person you would think of was Floogie. If he hadn’t gotten very smart about making himself scarce, he would have met himself coming and going from dirty details. But he was always there. Where can you go hide in the middle of a rifle squad in a rifle platoon of a rifle company in the stinking big middle of stinking Korea with all kinds of dinks and slopes coming at you from all directions, day and night? And, besides, he was toting the BAR and all that ammo. He couldn’t get very far if he had to. Nevertheless, he got very good at becoming and being invisible. Come some dirty detail and you couldn’t find old Floogie anywhere. And another thing. He was lucky. Pure lucky. We lost guys all of the time. Mortars and mines. Firefights. People got their asses shot off all around. But not a nick on Floogie. What’s funny is, if he had lived, he wouldn’t have even gotten the Purple Heart. The other guys thought he was a freak. But Floogie, he was like immune or something. He started believing it himself. The unit would be under fire, heavy fire. Every swinging dick would be trying to figure out a way to shrink and to climb completely inside of

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his steel helmet. And Floogie would get up, stand straight up and just stroll along in full view to find a better firing position. Then he would set up his BAR and start shooting. After a while he got pretty good with that BAR. It didn’t come natural to him, but you do something enough times and you start getting good at it. General Data Weight of rifle, 15 pounds, 8 ounces. Weight of magazine, empty, 7 ounces. Weight of magazine, filled, 1 pound, 7 ounces. Length of barrel, 24 inches. Overall length, 47 inches. Sights graduated to 1,600 yards. Caliber bore, 0.30 inch. Gas port from muzzle, 6 inches. Rate of uninterrupted automatic fire (cyclic rate), 600 shots per minute. Chamber pressure, 47,000 to 50,000 pounds per square inch. Muzzle velocity, about 2,680 feet per second. Habitual type of fire, semiautomatic. Head space limits, 1.937 inches to 1.943 inches. Length of recoil spring, 15.5 inches. I missed out on all that. I was already out of there, in Japan, in the hospital. I almost forgot about all your troubles. I’m pretty easy to forget about. Hey, it was better that way. A lot of people came and went, you know. Tell me about it. We were falling back as fast as we could. Running half the time. The gooks were right behind us. Nobody could kill enough of them. They just kept coming. We killed them, and then more came. One evening, just about dusk, we got orders to relieve some outfit on a hilltop not too far off the main road. We were to go up and relieve them and to hold onto that hill unless and until we heard otherwise.

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It could have been worse. Those guys had already dug their holes and were in them. We could switch off easy and quick and quiet, fix things up our own way a little and then settle in. A few little shit details to take care of. But mostly just settling into the new position for the night. With any kind of luck at all maybe a good night’s sleep for a change. Very late, it must have been past midnight, the word was passed to pack up very quietly and get ready to pull out of there. No noise. The gooks were pretty close out there somewhere to the front. And we were going to try and fool them and pull out. Pitch dark and no noise at all. We had to leave quite a lot of our stuff behind. We came down the hill very slowly and got to the road and then headed back south. Hiking. Breathing hard and sweating in the stinking dark. Hadn’t gone very far before we started to hear bugles and shouts and then all kinds of hostile fire coming in on the position we had just pulled out of. They were pumping all kinds of stuff in there. The sky was lit up with explosions and tracers. Wasting all of it. Getting themselves all psyched up for an assault. And we were long gone. Some of the guys couldn’t help laughing in the dark. Dumb fuckin’ gooks. Then they blew the bugles again, and we knew they were starting their assault. Surprise! Surprise! Ain’t nobody home. But then there came clear across the dark the absolutely, positively unmistakable sound of a BAR firing on full automatic. “Floogie!” the sergeant—remember old Zyder?—said. “We left Floogie.” “We couldn’t have. No. Where’s Floogie? Anybody seen Floogie?” Somebody was firing and firing, sometimes on full automatic but mostly on semi. And the sound of the firing was moving around like he was moving around the position. More bugles and then some quiet. The gooks seemed to have pulled back a little from the hill. They pumped up a couple of flares. Then we halted in the dark by the sides of the road. And the CO—that would be Captain Freer—came trolling up the road looking for Sergeant Zyder. “What the fuck is going on?” the CO said.

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“Who’s firing that BAR?” “Floogie,” Zyder said. “And from the sound of it he’s giving the gooks fits up there.” Long pause. Deep breathing. “Oh, shit,” the CO finally said. “What do we do now?” Zyder said: “Hey, let me take a few guys, a detail. And we’ll go back and get him.” The CO thought about it for a minute. You can give him that much. “No way,” he finally said. “No way at all. I am not going to lose anybody else. He was probably asleep somewhere and the gooks woke him up.” “Probably,” Zyder said. “And now he’s up there holding onto the hill all by himself.” “Only he may not know that yet,” somebody else said. “Floogie probably thinks we’re all still there with him.” “He’ll figure it out soon enough.” “Let me just take a few guys back up there.” “No way,” the CO said. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Column started up again, heading down the road on both sides. Bugles again and then a whole lot of firing. Old Floogie was really cooking with that BAR. I don’t know where he found the ammo for it, but he did. And then we were beyond where we could hear it good anymore, although when we looked back, we could still see light and flare and a lot of floating tracers . . . So Floogie, the dumb fart, sneaked off when we first occupied the position and fell asleep and never got the word when the outfit pulled out of there. That’s about the size of it. All of a sudden, there’s nothing but bugles blowing and all kinds of incoming shit and pretty soon Chinamen everywhere. And Floogie says, What the fuck, I might as well be a hero. I don’t think so. I think he woke up and didn’t know at first that we were gone. He just did what he’s here for. Probably didn’t notice anything much—he would be scared shitless anyway—until the gooks fell back to regroup. Then I can picture Floogie crawling around the position in the dark. Feeling for his buddies and not finding anybody. And then there would be the flares and the bugles again and the yelling gooks. He could have run right then. A lot of guys would have hauled ass. Floogie would be deeply pissed off. He would think we left him behind on purpose. That’s the way he was.

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Yeah. Like paranoid, right? Something like that. Anyway. He would be up there talking to himself and shooting at gooks until they finally got him. So what finally happened, see, was the next morning, early, first light, they sent us back to that position. And we didn’t have to take it back or anything. The gooks had pulled back during the night to the high ground north of our hill, and they were dug in there. We went back to the position. And I’m here to tell you, there were dead Chinamen everywhere you looked. We spent a couple of days just digging a hole big enough and deep enough to hold them all. God only knows how many he got before they got him. How? How what? How did they get Floogie? Grenade. At least that’s what it looked like. He was sure enough very dead no matter what. Still had hold of his BAR, though. I heard they put him in for a Congressional. Fat chance. Well, it was worth a try. And he got a medal anyway. Can you believe it? You know when I got back to the States, I went to see his folks— his mama. His old man was dead. She looked exactly like ole Floogie, you know? It didn’t look as bad on a woman. The brother was there, limping around. And they took me down to a park where there was a monument with all the dead guys’ names on it. Floogie’s name was there. It was weird to see his name on a stone. I would rather be almost anything but a dead hero. Even if you was Floogie? Even that. Maybe especially that. . . . The rifle is fed from a magazine having a capacity of twenty cartridges. The rifle can be fired effectively from all positions prescribed in TR 150–30. It is capable of being fired at the rate of 150 rounds per minute. The rate of fire, however, which gives the best results in the normal case is 40 to 60 shots per minute, semiautomatic . . . from War Department Training Regulations No. 320–25 (March 25, 1925).

A PERFECT STRANGER

I will sing for you sweetly, although You pluck out my beard by the roots.

I was way down in Tuscaloosa, far from home, living alone in a two-story, white-frame house that they call the Chair House, which is assigned to visiting writers. It was set in a little patch of pine woods with a couple of other more or less similar houses. All around the patch of woods was an enormous parking lot for the university. Truth is, though, it was a remarkably quiet place (you might as well have been in the real deep woods) except on football weekends, when hundreds, maybe even thousands, of trailers and motor homes and other big RVs of all kinds, flags flying, lights pulsing, horns tooting and beeping and playing the first few notes of the Alabama fight song, arrived to park in the parking lot, cranking up their generators, breaking out their grills, hibachis, and barbecues, and settling into a cheerful, smoky encampment. Huge and looming over everything, the stadium is only a few short blocks away. Nobody warned me that these folks were coming. This was a local joke, part of the initiation for whoever was living in the Chair House during the football season. I woke up early on the first Saturday morning to the whole house shaking and a steady humming

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noise all around me. Woke, jumped up, and went to the window and saw, in all directions, the enormous parking lot filled with throbbing vehicles. Same thing for every home game. During the week, though, the place was very quiet, even lonesome. This is a story of that lonesomeness. Now, to get the full flavor of what follows, you need to understand that I hate the telephone. Did hate it, anyway. Hated answering it. Hated talking on it and into it. Hated listening to it. Hated even to watch other people talking on the telephone or their cell phones—smiling, frowning, making faces as if the goddamn machine could somehow transmit facial expressions and reactions and body language. Besides, I grew up in the Great Depression, where we learned to talk fast and loud, shouting when it was long distance. Where we had party lines to worry about. Where you dialed or cranked the operator to place a call. When her title was “Central.” So, anyway, early one morning the phone rang and rang. Finally I stumbled and staggered out of sleep to answer it. Hello. (A woman’s voice, young-sounding, soft and husky, maybe even a little urgent.) Is this a dorm? No, it’s not. A fraternity house? No, ma’am. Is it somebody’s office? No. Not exactly. Well, this is a university number, isn’t it? I guess so. It’s a house that belongs to the university. Oh, that’s good. Maybe you have the wrong number. How could I? Aren’t you trying to reach somebody? It’s all right. You’ll do just fine. Who are you calling? Listen, you don’t have to tell me who you are, she said. That might spoil things. What things? Just talk to me. Talk to me. What about?

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Anything. Like what? Are you alone? Yes. What are you wearing? Huh? What have you got on? My undershorts. Jockey shorts or boxers? Boxers. How old are you? I could hear her breathing. My first thought was that somebody or other in the English department, or maybe one of my creative writing students, was pulling a joke on me. Maybe they were taping this conversation and would play it for general amusement at the next party. How old are you? she asked again. I’m too old for you, honey. Note that I did not simply tell her the simple truth, knowing that she would hang up on me. Did I want her to keep talking? I honestly don’t know. Are you over forty? You better believe it. Shit . . . ! Then: Are you some kind of a student? No. A teacher? Sort of. I’m just a visitor. A visiting teacher. Oh, a visitor. . . . Then: Listen. Just talk to me. Please. Say anything you want to. Anything. Just talk and keep on talking for a little while. It won’t be long. I’m almost there. Almost where? Please . . . ! Hey, thanks anyway, I said. You have a nice day. And I hung up and then walked into the bathroom and took a good look in the mirror at the ruined stranger’s face I have somehow earned and probably deserve. I shrugged and set about the business of putting myself together for the coming day. I wondered if she might call back. Not bloody likely. If it was a real call and not a joke, then most likely she had just punched out

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the university prefix and then the last four numbers without a thought or scheme. Chances are she wouldn’t even remember what the numbers were. It would be better (for her), more fun that way. On the other hand, maybe she would remember the number she had just called. If the phone rang again soon, would I answer it? And if it turned out to be the same woman, what would I say to her? Would I apologize for hanging up on her? After all, it wasn’t such a bad thing she was asking for—just for me to talk to her for a little while. All that was asked was that I talk about anything at all for a little while to somebody, a perfect stranger who, for whatever reason, felt she needed to hear a voice (evidently, but not definitely, a male voice). In a way it was flattering, even vaguely exciting to be chosen, even if by blindest chance, as the brief answer to her need and pleasure. She could easily have hung up on me when she learned I was just an old guy, far beyond forty, in boxer shorts. She clearly wasn’t happy about it. Who would be? But she had the decency not to hang up. She had better manners than I did. That’s for sure. Not counting spouses and true lovers, who in real life, your whole real life, who among all the people you have ever known, would even think about calling you and asking you for nothing except the sound of your voice to give them some kind of pleasure and satisfaction? And what if the roles were reversed? What if you, yourself, were in a state of desperate, lonesome need and began to punch out numbers blindly, randomly, hoping against hope to hear the voice of a young woman who would possess the power to offer or to deny you pleasure? It was surely something to think about. All of it. Scenario: Girl calls and he answers. In an instant he realizes exactly what is going on, and then he is able to say all the right things she wants to hear, leading her gently, deftly, inexorably to an ecstatic peak. Her final line would be the sublime cliché: Oh, God, I never knew it could be like this! She, having punched the numbers by chance and having experienced remarkable fulfillment, now directly demands to know his number.

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What can he do? Does he tell her? Scenario: He gives her his number but not his name. She promises to call again soon. Which she does. Over a little time, fairly soon in fact, they begin to know each other, to feel free and open with each other. She tells him the things to say that please her most. Knowing this much, he is able (if and when he wants to) to intensify, to maximize or minimize her experience. Or, anyway, so it seems. They are soon oddly dependent on each other. The great danger, of course, as in real life, is that the drama of the situation will lose its raw edge of suspense, that it will gradually become routine for both of them. Maybe she tells you that you have a rival, probably a younger man with a lovely voice and a highly active imagination. Who sometimes, though not always, can give her more pleasure and excitement than you can. Soon you find that you are jealous of him whether he really exists or not. If he doesn’t, well, then, you are equally or maybe even more jealous of the idea of a rival in her mind, now firmly planted in yours. In a serious effort to compete with this real or imaginary rival you concentrate and focus on the creation of outrageous fantasies. Thus you soon develop a truly dirty mind. You look in the mirror and recognize that you are being corrupted (or, as the case may be, are corrupting yourself) and will soon enough be totally depraved and corrupt if this relationship continues. You decide to break it off for the sake of the two of you. We simply can’t go on talking on the phone like this, you say in your signature cliché. Scenario: Soon you are both equally involved in the playing out of the experience. And one thing leads to another. You tell her your name, your real name. She tells you hers. Both of you agree that meeting in fact and in the flesh will probably be a bad thing. Too many variables and unknowns. Too many things can go wrong. Better to keep things just as they are.

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Suppose even ideal circumstances. Suppose you did meet, and she turned out to be wonderfully attractive, and she was not repulsed, turned off by your age and your appearance. Even so, it wouldn’t be the same. You are only right for each other on the telephone, two bodiless, ageless voices. Reality adds nothing but trouble and complexity to the experience. Say that you were able to meet under ideal circumstances and that you fell in love in reality. Then you began to live together. For a while you might be like any other couple, but soon you would probably lapse into your old, original ways. You buy a battery-powered field telephone from army surplus. You can call each other from different rooms. The downside of this is that when the field telephone rings, there can be no exciting, suspenseful doubt about who may be calling. And doubt, even for a brief instant, is half the fun. Next you buy lots of different kinds of phones—cellular phones, car phones. Both of you have your own phones with unlisted numbers known only to each other. Both of you have unlisted phones unknown to each other. Sometimes you wake in the middle of the night, and the space next to you in your queen—or king-size bed is empty. You tiptoe carefully in the dark, following the sound of her whispering voice. She is whispering remarkable, memorable things to someone else. Man or woman? Does it matter? Isn’t a voice on the phone finally androgynous? And what if no one is there listening at the other end? Whether you elect to meet and then end up being together or not, you both have to work hard to create significant erotic diversity. Both of you practice foreign accents, impersonations of living and historical characters. And you make up voices for made-up characters. Sometimes, for the joy of it, you cross over. She pretends to be you, and you pretend to be her. Both of you simultaneously become other people. After a while, you have a hard time remembering who you really are. If you really are anyone. She won’t tell you.

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Scenario: Suppose that you meet in fact and flesh but do not take to each other. She is disgusted at first sight by what the years have done to you. And you find her unattractive, beyond repair. Still, nobody else can give the good phone voice that she does. When voice is the sole reality, the most refined form of desire and satisfaction, then who cares about the real or imaginary body from which that voice emerges? In fact, isn’t it oddly exciting to know that a beautiful voice transcends its humble origins? Back in the old days, men often fell in love with telephone operators. With the voice of Central. He can readily understand that now. What if—just for the sake of argument—she really is a student or somebody in the English department whose intentions are malicious and humiliating? How would you feel if all these conversations were being recorded to be played back in some public or private way? Would you feel betrayed; or would you, instead, find some added, unexpected nuance of pleasure knowing that from then on, your shared words, her voice and yours, were being captured? When she called again (if she should ever call again), would that serve to inhibit you? Would you be angry and ashamed or strangely grateful? Would you invent things to shock your students, your colleagues, the world? When you go to class, across that vast parking lot and the campus, you see hundreds of young women coming and going, too. Which one is she? Is it that one or another? How can you ever know for sure? All of which leads to another question. Consider that, in fact, I am by craft and trade a writer. Suppose the man in this story were a writer also. How would the phone calls affect him? Maybe he would become a full-time pornographer. Out of the habit and experience of making up erotic stories for the telephone, he could, slowly but surely, find himself unable to create any other kinds of stories except those designed for this sole and specific purpose and for this interacting audience of one.

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But wait a minute. All his premises and scenarios are based on the assumption that only one young woman is involved. Maybe that isn’t so. She could have a roommate. She could have more than one roommate. She could even be a member of a sorority or club, a group where the members, from time to time, use the telephone to enhance their private lives and pleasure. There could be a whole telephone harem out there, Or—why not?—his first and only caller (so far) may have been a pledge in her sorority. Part of her initiation might be to call up a perfect stranger and get him to talk to her on her own terms. Here that part of him that is a literary critic speaks to him in an inward and spiritual voice: Forget the whole thing. Forget it. This is the kind of story that Robert Coover might write but not you. Robert Coover is a twit. He never thought of this one. He never even imagined anything like it. But he could have, easily enough, says the smug critical voice. You are such a victim of factual reality. You would never have thought of it, either, if you hadn’t actually answered a real phone on a real morning in Tuscaloosa. And now that’s all you can think about. You ought to be ashamed of yourself and all your obvious limitations. Fuck Robert Coover, you say out loud to the critic within you. And fuck you, too. See what I mean? the inner voice answers. Reality: I discover that I automatically wake up every morning. I get up out of bed and go sit in an old armchair near the phone. I wait in vain for the phone to start ringing. What will happen when I finish up my job here and go home to Charlottesville? How will I explain my new habits to my wife of many years? More to the point, how will she react to this whole story? From her point of view one could justly argue that I have been uniformly unfaithful, in principle if not in fact, ever since the first phone call.

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Scenario: It turns out to have been my wife all along. She calls and cleverly disguises her voice and fools me. To the extent that she engages me in this ongoing fiction of the phone, she has to come to terms with the idea that I am sharing an intimate experience with someone else. Worse, it is somebody I don’t even know. Worst of all, it is somebody she doesn’t know. From her point of view (and I am only guessing, not planning to ask her), a three-way conference call might be better. During which she can at least monitor my verbal behavior. Or, anyway, add her own running commentary to all of it. What next? You buy an answering machine to screen your calls. You buy some pajamas and a nice bathrobe. You wait. Sooner or later someone will call. How can the story end? Only with the end of me as a living body or a mindless one aged beyond the fringes of memory. Either way, the anticipation, which is all that I have really and truly possessed since the first and only phone call, will fade and finally cease and desist even as I do. Or will it? There is always another possibility. I shall ask here and now, before it’s too late, to be buried like Mary Baker Eddy with a telephone in my grave. At the least, then, old hypocrite reader, from time to time, a drunk or a desperate person will accidentally dial or punch the number. And the phone in my grave will ring and ring. You, reader, passing by the cemetery in the dark middle of the night, will be startled by the sound of a telephone ringing among the silent tombstones. You will hurry along to wherever you are going. And I won’t hear it, or even care one way or the other until, as my faith assures me, I will wake on Judgment Day and reach for the phone. Who will be calling me? Whose voice will I hear then?

IN MEMORY OF R. V. Cassill

GATOR BAIT

Everywhere I go these days, I hear people—and I mean good people, too, well-meaning and intelligent, speak up and speak out against cynicism. And so would I. Except that, seriously, I don’t agree with them. Whenever I do, in fact, respond, when I choose to speak up, too, I hear myself calling for more cynicism. To my surprise, if not to my shame, I hear myself saying things like this: “We must teach and encourage our children to be deeply and sincerely cynical. Otherwise they will be lost victims in the savage world we have made and are giving over to them. “Those who profess to be alarmed about the power and prevalence of cynicism in our time are really and truly (and maybe only) concerned that others will be able to see through the pathetic, shabby veils of their dedicated self-interest and self-aggrandizement.” Now is that a cynical thing to say, or what? As he remembers it now, the boy couldn’t have been in the sixth grade yet, for in the picture of himself that is part and parcel of the memory he has and holds, he is still wearing short pants. That was the family custom in those days—to change over from shorts to long pants, from child to boy, at the beginning of sixth grade at the Delaney Street Grammar School. The custom may have been different in other families and in other places and at other schools, maybe even at other schools right here in his hometown. How

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would he have known at the time? His world, at least the one outside of home and family, was mainly composed of the raw, lightly grassy playground (with squeaky swings, rust-jointed seesaws, and a jungle gym) and the sweat-smelling, fart-stinky world of classrooms within the brick school building, that world and, as well, the dangerous zone of half a mile from school and playground to the quiet, shady block called Phillips’ Place, a dead-end street running down to the edge of a lake, Lake Copeland, where he lived. “My Lord, it’s all still there and pretty much the way it was!” he exclaims to his grandchildren more than a half century later. Here he is, briefly showing them around some of the old places and the old house, if it’s still there, on Phillips’ Place. He had to stop for a traffic light by the school. At that same corner, when he finally was in the sixth grade and still years before there was a traffic light there, he had been a patrol boy with his blue overseas cap, a sash, and a badge and the power to hold up his hand and stop all traffic so that the schoolchildren could safely cross. Sometimes Officer Rogers, a real policeman, was there, too, but most often he was all on his own. Stopped a moment, waiting for the red light to change, he watches a shrill swarm of black children (not a white face among them, as far as he can tell) playing on what seem to be the same old swings, seesaws, and jungle gym. The days he is remembering were in the midst of the deep and bitter season of the Great Depression and still very much the old world of de jure segregation. Remembering now what he will not tell or try to explain to his grandchildren from Pennsylvania, not so much out of any sense of guilt or shame or of indifference as out of . . . complexity, that word we so often hide behind these days when something under discussion or debate demands more than a sound bite of serious attention. Will not tell them, not now anyway, how Velma, the maid, and Joe, her husband, who did plumbing and odd jobs, and their several children lived in a little house (itself long gone now) set behind his house. How they always ate breakfast together so Velma could cook for all the children at once, then hurried off, books and pencils and lunch bags in hand, a block or so all together in the same direction as a group, like a little team or something, except there

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were no integrated teams then, until Velma’s children turned off on a side street and headed for what everyone called the colored school, half a mile away in another direction. It was, as was ever and always for any child, purely and simply the way of the world. The world was whatever it was, not to be deeply questioned or much changed, improved or destroyed, loved or hated, except in small and separate and specific parts. World was a huge, mysterious, grown-ups’ game, and it was our (his) necessity, not merely duty, to discover the rules of that game and to abide by them or else to be punished, wounded, or even destroyed on account of his unacceptable and unholy ignorance. Thus they could eat breakfast together, the same breakfast, at the same kitchen table, with Velma’s children (he has long since, in fifty-some years forgotten their names, though he can still vaguely see their more or less interchangeable faces); could have carried exactly the same sandwiches, cookies, and pieces of fruit in their lunch bags. They could and did freely play together, a lot of the time in the pine woods behind the house or along the spooky and swampy edges of the lake, where he and his brothers would sometimes tease Velma’s boys with scary tales of savage alligators in the lake. World said that all colored people were scared to death of alligators. So why not? Once they made one of them, the youngest— was he named Willie?—cry from fear; and then Velma made a stern, sad face and said she was “disappointed” that they would try to frighten her little boy. And they solemnly and sincerely promised not to do anything like that again, an oath which, for a fact, they honored for quite a while, at least until that time when they stumbled onto the nest of a real live alligator who snapped and came at them. And they ran like a wild wind, yelling and shouting like a bunch of crazy Holy Rollers all the way back to the house and the safety of the kitchen. That Velma’s boys, even little Willie, beat them home from the lake did not necessarily confirm the truth about colored people and alligators, because Velma’s boys could always outrun them anyway. At least for short distances. Of course, it wasn’t all funny. There was a time, he remembers, when some boys from over in the colored neighborhood, which was not all that far away, came to play and fool around at the lake.

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Neither he and his brothers nor any of Velma’s boys were around at the time and only heard about it later. One of those colored boys fell into the lake. None of them could swim, so the others ran all the way back to their own neighborhood to get help instead of coming directly to any of the houses on Phillips’ Place. By the time they returned, the boy was dead, and the fire engines came, and the firemen pulled his dark, glistening body out of the water and tried to revive him. It remains something that the man can now see in memory as if he had, in fact, been there. They could and did play together in the woods and by the lake, but, it was understood and strictly observed, not in the park nearby, where the white boys played baseball or tackle football in season and where, in the words of the tough and trashy white kids— the ones who were barefoot, wore overalls, and “borrowed” sandwiches and cookies at school lunchtime or else went hungry—“no niggers allowed.” No girls either. Nigger. That was a word he wasn’t allowed to use, though sometimes, playing in the park, he used it along with the other guys just to sound as rough and ready as they were. That was where he picked up another taboo word—fuck. Which, in innocence, he used at the supper table once and earned a memorable spanking with his father’s leather belt. The light will change in a second or two, and he will drive on a couple of blocks and then turn right into Phillips’ Place to let them see the old, white-frame, two-story house, recently painted by whoever owns it, looking kind of spiffy, his father would have said. No longer a little green island shaded by live oaks and almost surrounded by tall and shadowy pine woods. Now fully “developed,” all the casual space occupied with newer houses, crowded together cheek by jowl. And the lake is now as tame and safe and private as a swimming pool. Except it is too polluted for swimming. “We used to climb all over those big old trees. We had a wonderful tree house in one of them,” is all that he will think of to tell them before turning around at the dead end. Talking about the enormous live oaks, bearded with Spanish moss and twice as old or even more than he is and likely to live more than twice longer, too, unless a hurricane should rip and tumble them or some fool should decide to cut them down in order to widen the narrow lit-

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tle street by a few feet. The town itself has lost more than a hundred of these magnificent trees to progress. He is driving his politely bored and quietly restless grandchildren to Disney or Universal or Sea World or maybe the Space Center on the East Coast, wherever it is they really want to be. Probably it will be the latter, a little distance, an hour or so from where they already are. For it is during that ride, while the children doze off, that he will start to remember the story that began with a picture of himself still wearing short pants. . . . It would have to have been a Saturday morning, a day when his father didn’t usually go to work at his downtown office. When he did choose to go to work on Saturday, he would take one of them, one of his brothers or himself, along with him. While his father did things with papers on his big shiny desk and sometimes talked on the telephone or, every once in a while, rang a little electric bell for a uniformed boy about his own age, give or take, to come and pick up a telegram and take it back to the office of Postal Telegraph or its rival—Western Union. Once in a great while, he entrusted his own son, whichever was with him at the time, to deliver the text directly to the telegraph office. This boy especially liked that, imagining himself in the splendid blue of Postal or the brown of Western Union. Jog-trotting several blocks into the heart of downtown. Bringing urgent messages that would soon enough set the wires humming and at some distant place have a boy like himself pedaling furiously on his official bicycle to deliver good or bad news to somebody. His father would do some work in his private office, and the boy would have the freedom of the rest of the office used by his father’s two secretaries and also the other room with all the law books in bookcases all around and a large table where, he was told, his father would meet with important clients and discuss business. So much that he didn’t know or understand then. He knew his father was a lawyer, evidently a good one, popular with some people (especially the plentiful poor, both black and white) and disliked by many others (especially the Country Club people), though not even they would openly express their feelings about him because he was feared as much as he was respected. He was, in fact, a powerful man and a dangerous enemy. He was, as this old man knows now and could not possibly have imagined then, some-

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thing rarer than all of the above. He was also a good man. His goodness was the source of much of his power and the reason that the others, those who came up against him, in the law courts or anywhere else, feared him. “Think of him as a little bit like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird,” one of his brothers said when it came time to return and to bury their father. “Only with balls. Peck was a pussy. Daddy would have won that case. He won tougher ones than that. He was the best.” Because he was the best, he had plenty of well-to-do clients willing to pay top dollar for his services and thus willing to support his addictive habit of pro bono work. “The most amazing thing,” his brother continued, “was that even though he took a lot of cases for indigent black clients, he was never, ever named, not out loud at least, as a ‘nigger lawyer.’ Not by anybody.” Adding: “Not by anybody who planned to keep his full mouthful of teeth and a straight nose.” On this particular Saturday morning, like the others when his father went to work on the weekend, they would go into town, a mile or so at most, hang around the office, where he could play with pencils and yellow pads and the big old typewriters and paper clips, all the stuff of an office, while his father did his work. Along about noon his father would usually quit and take him down the street to Riddle’s Drug Store, where—for a dime, equal to the boy’s weekly allowance—he could enjoy a chocolate ice cream soda. After that treat they would walk home together, his father sometimes whistling if the weather was good and he felt he had accomplished something. The walking part, going along the sidewalk to and from the little office building, always embarrassed the boy. That was because of his father’s bad limp. Badly wounded in the Great War, he had been left with one straight leg (might as well have been made of solid wood), a couple of missing fingers, and some ugly scars on his face. The boy’s older brothers told him that their father had been a big hero in that war, that he had (buried in a bureau drawer) some medals and ribbons to prove it. That proved, then and now and forever, that he was absolutely fearless. This, to the extent that it was true or, anyway, perceived as an uncontested fact, only

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added to his father’s aura of invincibility. That much he knows now. Then it also added to the boy’s embarrassment. His father was not a joiner in any case and never belonged to any of the veterans’ groups—the American Legion or the VFW. As far as he knew, his father only spoke of the war with one other human being—a Canadian man who played the organ and was the choirmaster at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Can’t remember his name, either, anymore. (Names are lost and forgotten first, they say.) But his father always had the greatest respect for the Canadian soldiers. “They were the best I ever saw,” he said. Once in a while he and the Canadian would talk in low voices about the Great War. Whatever they were saying made them laugh a lot. They walked past the school, past a row of elegant old houses, including the home of the county judge with whom his father often joshed about this and that. Usually, it was about the latest “reversal” (whatever that was) he had achieved at the expense of Judge Copperthwaite. “I’ve lost count how many times I’ve reversed that old boy,” his father said. At the office, after the exciting elevator ride up to the seventh, and top, floor, while fiddling with his keys, his father told him that in a little while a couple of clients would be coming and that he should be very quiet while they were there. It wouldn’t be for too long. Maybe as much as an hour later, he witnessed, through the partially open door to the conference and library room, the two clients arrive and be ushered into his father’s office. They were both light-skinned colored gentlemen, very well dressed, from shiny shoes to careful hair. They spoke carefully, too, with an alien and indeterminate white man’s accent. By voice alone he would have guessed that his father was the black man of the group. They also had a small, slightly yippy little dog, a yellow dog on a leash, with them. His father firmly shut the door to the conference room. But the boy knew that if he stood close, ear to door, he could hear most of what was being said in the office. Now, driving east toward some kind of tourist trap with his grandchildren, the boy, who has come to be an old man, himself,

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longer-lived than his father, cannot begin to remember all the words spoken in his hearing. Cannot replicate the text of the conversation in his father’s office. No matter. It went something like this: They said that they had heard nothing but good things about the lawyer. That he was highly respected by everyone, even his enemies; and that in the black community he was like some kind of a household god. One of them, chuckling to indicate that it was only supposed to be a joke, chided him for taking business away from some of the Negro lawyers who were not as well trusted as he was. Lawyer dropped the small talk and told them he had examined the materials, such as they were, that they had sent him. He said he had some serious questions that they, or somebody, would have to answer. He had also read the press clippings with full skepticism bordering on contempt for the ineptitude and inaccuracy of the press, especially in complex legal matters. He went on to say that though he hadn’t yet made up his mind, he was already inclined to take the case. That it was certainly a tough one, but that there was a faint chance he could win an acquittal or at least he might be able to save the defendant from the electric chair. One of them (man with dog?) allowed that except for one southern sheriff, who seemed to take his sworn duty pretty seriously, there wouldn’t be a problem and they wouldn’t be here now. How’s that? His father asked quietly. The boy knew that something had annoyed his father, sensed that his father was edgy with sudden suspicion when he spoke so softly, controlling himself. Well now, the man told him. You people don’t usually let a case like this come to court at all. I’m surprised they didn’t hang the fellow in the first twenty-four hours. His father: Sheriff, that one, anyway, is a good man. Predictably does his job and does it well. Bear in mind that with his pathetic salary, he will never own a pair of shoes as nice—English aren’t they?—as yours. And a case like this one could cost him his job and, more than that, cost himself and all his family dearly in days to come. Man said, I didn’t run for public office. Father said, Good thing, too. Other man: Please don’t misunderstand us. We are fully aware of your

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position and we understand and appreciate the position and problems of the Sheriff . . . Jackson, isn’t it? Father: Johnson. Other man: Whatever.

At this point the two visitors began to talk about money. Boy couldn’t understand much of it at the time; and though he knows some things about money now, he isn’t quite sure what transpired. He imagines that they showed his father a cashier’s check (“You can have it in cash if you want it.”) for a large sum of money. He heard his father whistle and laugh out loud. That’s a whole lot of money for a country lawyer, his father said. But let’s not talk about the money just yet. Let’s talk about the case. I’ll lay out my approach for you and you can decide for yourselves whether you want me to represent you or not. Not us, one of them said. We want to hire you to represent the defendant. We don’t want to be directly involved. Then you have a problem. You are paying for it and so he must believe that you all are responsible for him. Who knows what he knows? The poor man is retarded.

From here on memory is cloudy, partly because the words and terms were beyond the boy. Partly because he was bored and thinking ahead to an ice cream soda. Partly because there was a little gray-and-white bird, a mockingbird, outside, hopping on the windowsill, singing a variety of tunes. What happened was his father briskly went over the details of the case, a particularly vicious rape case, outlining, in a general way, the strategy he would develop. Laying out the limits of his defense. “You are something else,” one of them said. “I believe you could save his ass, for whatever that’s worth, like that. I’m impressed. But that’s not exactly what we had in mind. We see the case like this. . . .” And they outlined a plan of their own, rich with legal jargon, whereby they would like to see the man defended. “That is kind of an interesting idea,” his father told them. “It will absolutely guarantee that this man dies in the electric chair.

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No doubt about it. We do it your way and the man will die. Sorry. I won’t do that for you.” From here on the two men did most of the talking, more or less in unison. That he was clearly a first-rate lawyer in every way. No doubt. But that they would not even consider his ideas for how to handle the case. That they would be paying him a very large sum of money—bet it’s the biggest you have earned so far in your lifetime—not to showboat and show off what a brilliant litigator he is, but to do it their way, exactly the way they wanted it done. In which case your man is dead meat, his father told them. That, yes, that is exactly what would happen and exactly what they wanted to happen. I don’t think I understand you. Would you be so kind as to say it again?

What they said was something very much like this, allowing for the fact that it was, of course, more delicately expressed than the boy would have been able to remember. How they represented a very large organization (initials meaningless to the boy) that was devoted and dedicated to the enhancement of oppressed people all over the world. How the defendant was probably guilty as all get-out. How, in any event, he had nothing, nothing at all, to contribute to our society or to the world. How, thanks to the power of the press, his fate now mattered, had some meaning. How, by dying in Old Sparky, the electric chair, he would probably do more for his people and more for social justice than any or all of us sitting here in your office today. How it might have been better in the long run if he had been lynched at the outset as he very likely would have been if there had not been that unusual sheriff who was willing to risk everything to protect the man and to do his duty. How saving his life, though it might be just, and even possible, was not a serious option. How, in short, they wanted to pay a lot of money to a very good lawyer to lose the case with some style and plausibility.

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How you, sir, have been to Great War, in the thick of it, and must know more than most of us how little a single human life (especially a deformed and disabled one) matters in the grand scheme of things. To weigh the life of a retarded rapist against the goals and legitimate aspirations of a whole people, is to try to balance a feather against a wealth of gold ingots. How, finally, though there may not be other lawyers in this state who are as gifted and can do as well as he can, nevertheless, there is a gracious plenty of attorneys who will jump at the chance to earn that kind of money and notoriety. Not to mention the possibility of an ongoing retainer from their distinguished organization to handle various and sundry kinds of business for them for many years to come. How the only embarrassment they felt was in having to tell him these obvious facts of life.

After all that talking, it was very quiet for a minute or two, a long minute or two. Then or later, he pictured his father with his face turned to one side, head resting on the cool surface of his desk. Something he had seen his father do before. One of them spoke first: “Sir? Are you all right?” “No, I am not all right. Not at all,” his father began, clearing his throat and talking softly, though soon his voice would be much louder, on the edge of a yell or a shout. “I want you two to stand up and walk right out of my office. Goddamn you both to hell and your little yellow dog, too! I want you to leave here and now and never come back again. I don’t want to find you around here or even to hear that you are in the vicinity. I want you out of this town and out of my life before I can count to ten, or I will throw your sorry asses right out of the window. And then I will piss all over your grave.” He did not have to begin counting to ten because they were already out of the office, down the hall, and to the stairway (unwilling to linger and wait for the elevator to come) mumbling to each other and the little dog yipping and yapping. Then he heard his father sobbing in his office. Sobbing, as he had never heard him and never would again. Sobbing out of rage and frustration and helpless sorrow for the fallen world. He waited until the sound stopped. Looked down from the window where the mockingbird had been before and saw the two men

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jump into a big shiny car (Cadillac?) in the parking lot and take off down Orange Avenue driving fast. In a moment or two his father opened the door and came into the conference room. He looked all right, a little puffy around the eyes, but otherwise very much the same as usual. He did not mention what had just happened, not then, not ever. Instead he looked his youngest son up and down and smiled at him. “Let’s go get ourselves an ice cream soda, huh?” Took two steps toward the elevator and then turned and looked at the boy again. “Long as we are down here, let’s go over to Morrison’s Mens’ Store and buy you a half-decent pair of long pants.” “But, Daddy, I’m not in the sixth grade yet.” “Fuck the sixth grade!” His father laughed out loud. “Fuck ’em all, son. The time has come.” Years later, when my father died and we all came home from far places for the funeral, we found that he had left behind a letter for each one of us. Mine was based on the fact that, as a child, I had loved Tarzan movies and stories about exploring in Africa. For a while then I talked a lot about growing up and going to Africa and having all kinds of adventures there. I had forgotten all about that brief phase of my life until I read his letter to me. Here is part of what he wrote to me: I have never been a real explorer, but I have traveled my own way in spirit—a way that no one else could wholly follow or accompany me upon or fully understand—unless you do. So, in a sense at least, I am an explorer myself. And that is what I want you to be—an independent minded man, following your understanding as far as it will go and then faring on beyond the marches of your conscious mind, trusting without limit to your true instincts. It is that journey that ultimately will be your African adventure, your trek into the unknown. I want you to reject all conformity to the standards and conventions that does not square with your own consecrated ideals—reject them not to lower yourself below them but to elevate yourself above them. Stand for the truth, have convictions and the courage of

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them. Be yourself and fear no one. And then you will have all the danger and tribulations and all the glory of your African adventure.

Strange, he didn’t even mention the Great War, but, then, he seldom did so. What a legacy! As for myself? Well, now, that is another story, one with its own odds and ends, its predictable ups and downs. I have lived a long and not uneventful life, but I have not (yet) lived up to his passionate example or his brave expectations. Still, how grateful I am for that challenge. How deeply I cherish the example of his pride and hope.

EPILOGUE MY LIFE AS A HOME MOVIE

Once upon a time—long before the coming of video or digital cameras and all such like—I bought a little eight-millimeter movie camera and a roll of black-and-white film for it. It was a birthday present for my wife. We took it with us as we moved about and traveled here and there over the next few years, but we never really used it. Never even unpacked it from the original package until we had settled into Maine and were working there. We were living in a beautiful old (1780) house facing on the York River, and when summer finally came around, we discovered that we had a whole lot of friends, old and new, who came to visit us there. When they left, my wife would remember our little movie camera and the roll of film. It was never planned. Just happened that way. Someone would be leaving. We would remember the camera. Out from its place in a dark closet came the camera. Then my wife and /or I would take pictures of them saying good-bye as they packed their bags in the trunks of their cars. There was a lot of hugging and cheerful farewells. Our guests then climbed into their cars and waved goodbye as they drove away up a little hill to the road to Kittery. By the end of that summer we must have had a dozen brief filmed sequences of people packing up and departing. Everybody was quite cheerful about it, but, as you can imagine, the overall effect was kind of sad, and all the more so since everybody was

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smiling and smiling. We would never see each other again, not, at least, in this film. One day something happened to change our inadvertent creative habits. Nobody was leaving that day. A bunch of us, family and guests, were all sitting around on the high porch watching the gulls and cormorants and crows wheeling and dealing and the tide swiftly running out, causing the lobster boats to pull hard on their moorings. We heard the sound of music coming from somewhere not far upriver. It was getting louder. We stood up and looked all around. Lo and behold, here came a speedboat pulling behind it several shapely water-skiers, young women in identical bright and colorful swimsuits. There was another boat coming behind them with a little jazz band tootling away. “Quick! Get the movie camera.” My wife found the camera and moved out to photograph the water-skiers as they came toward us and passed by, and then, even better, what we now saw was coming along behind them and the band. Namely, a lone man in a wetsuit high in the air, hanging onto a huge kite that was being pulled by yet another speedboat. Soaring brightly in the vivid air. None of us had ever seen a kite like that. As he passed by our house, he had to let go of the line attached to the boat that was pulling him, so as not to collide with the bridge over the river, Route 103 to Kittery. The man with the kite turned loose, then sailed, briefly and beautifully, past us, then slowly glided to a soft landing in the water just out of view. If we ever found out, then or later, what was the purpose of the occasion, I can’t remember it now. It happened and afterward we settled back into our habitual routine. Somebody was always leaving. We would remember the camera and hurry to photograph yet another farewell. As luck would have it, we used up the last of that film to photograph ourselves leaving, too. Couple of years later, I was somehow or other involved in a student film festival where a lot of young and would-be filmmakers showed their wares and presented each other with prizes and awards. One of the categories was for eight-millimeter silent films. I persuaded one of the judges (an old buddy) to slip in our film, now hastily entitled “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu” (which is the

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real title of a real poem by the real poet Wallace Stevens) in the competition. The lights blink and fade. Judges sit solemnly at a long table, armed with yellow pads and little penlights with which to scribble notes and apercus. There is a small but eager audience of student filmmakers and their friends and fans. And away we go. Saw several nicely executed films before “Adieu” came up for official consideration. Then what did we see? We saw people, perfect strangers, packing their cars with luggage and, one after another, leaving. Then suddenly, without warning, out of some heavenly nowhere, a row of beautiful women flashes past. Followed by a (silent) jazz band. Followed in turn by a man and a kite in the sky flying. And then the ending. It shows me packing the car and leaving, too, shooting the last shots through the back window of our car. I was impressed. My wife is quite good with a camera, and the film looked smoothly edited, even though it wasn’t edited at all. And I was impressed, too, to hear the judges discuss the film and its multiple layers of meaning. How life is nothing more or less than a series of goodbyes, punctuated, once in a great while, maybe once in a lifetime, on a roll of film, by some extraordinary event or bright and purposeless occasion—unheard music accompanying an unearned sense of joy. Take your trendy nihilism and shove it was assumed to be the subtext. Lucky for me, and for everybody else, “Adieu” didn’t win any prizes. If this were not a “true” story, that’s where it would appropriately end, with “Adieu” maybe taking second or third place in its category. But the truth is, there isn’t any ending to the story, not yet. Truth is that not long after the student film festival we (I) misplaced the film and the camera, too. Can’t find it anywhere to this day. May never find it again, though I’m not ready to give up just yet. Meanwhile we can always rewind and play it in memory if and when we want to. And so can you, reader, now that we have shared the story with you.

About the Author

George Garrett is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. He has spent almost fifty years at work as a literary craftsman writing and publishing poetry, short stories, novels, and literary criticism. Garrett ranks among the most successful southern writers of the twentieth century; his stories have been widely anthologized and have earned numerous awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. He was Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Virginia in 2004 and the Cleanth Brooks Medal from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2005. He resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.