Long, Last, Happy Read online

  Christ, I was crying for myself. I had nothing for the other side, understand that. North Vietnam was a land full of lousy little Commie robots, as far as I knew. A place of the worst propaganda and hypocrisy. You should have read some of their agitprop around Gon, talking about freedom and throwing off the yoke, etc. The gooks went for Communism because they were so ignorant and had nothing to lose. The South Vietnamese, too. I couldn’t believe we had them as allies. They were such a pretty and uniformly indecent people. I once saw a little taxi boy, a kid is all, walk into a medevac with one arm and a hand blown off by a mine he’d picked up. These housewives were walking behind him in the street, right in the middle of Gon. Know what they were doing? They were laughing. They thought it was the most hysterical misadventure they’d ever seen. These people were on our side. These were our friends and lovers. That happened early when I got there. I was a virgin when I got to Nam and stayed a virgin, through a horde of B-girls, the most base and luscious-lipped hustlers. Because I did not want to mingle with this race.

  In an ARVN hospital tent you see the hurt officers lined up in front of a private who’s holding in his guts with his hands. They’ll treat the officer with a bad pimple before they treat the dying private. We’re supposed to be shaking hands with these people. Why can’t we be fighting for some place like England? When you train yourself to blow gooks away, like I did, something happens, some kind of popping returning dream of murder-with-a-smile.

  I needed away. I was sick. In another three months I’d be zapping orphanages.

  “Bobby, are you all right?” said Tubby, waddling out to the tree I was hanging on.

  “I shouldn’t ever’ve seen that picture of John Whitelaw. I shouldn’t’ve.”

  “Do you really think we’ll be famous?” Tubby got an enchanted look on him, sort of a dumb angel look in that small pretty face amid the fat rolls. It was about midnight. There was a fine Southern moon lighting up the field. You could see every piece of straw out there. Tubby, by my ass, had the high daze on him. He’d stepped out here in the boonies and put down his foot in Ozville.

  “This’ll get me major, anyhow. Sure. Fame. Both of us,” I said.

  Tubby said: “I tried to get nice touches in with the light coming over his face. These pictures could turn out awfully interesting. I was thinking about the cover of Time or Newsweek.”

  “It’ll change your whole life, Tubby,” I said.

  Tubby was just about to die for love of fate. He was shivering.

  I started enjoying the field again. This time the straws were waving. It was covered with rushing little triangles, these sort of toiling dots. Our side opened up. All the boys came up to join within a minute and it was a sheet of lightning rolling back and forth along the outside of the woods. I could see it all while I was walking back to the radio. I mean humping low. Tubby must’ve been walking straight up. He took something big right in the square of his back. It rolled him up twenty feet in front of me. He was dead and smoking when I made it to him.

  “C’mon, I’ve got to get the pictures,” he said.

  I think he was already dead.

  I got my phosphorus shotgun. Couldn’t think of anything but the radio and getting it over how we were being hit, so we could get dragons—helicopters with fifty cals—in quick. The dragons are nice. They’ve got searchlights, and you put two of them over a field like we were looking at, they’d clean it out in half an hour. So I made it to the radio and the boys had already called the dragons in, everything was fine. Only we had to hold them for an hour and a half until the dragons got there. I humped up front. Every now and then you’d see somebody use one of the experimental guns. The bad thing was that it lit up the gunner too much at night, too much shine out of the muzzle. I took note of that to tell them when we got back. But the gun really smacked the gook assault. It was good for about seventy-five yards and hit with a huge circle burn about the way they said it would. The gooks’ first force was knocked off. You could see men who were still burning running back through the straw, hear them screaming.

  I don’t remember too well. I was just loitering near the radio, a few fires out in the field, everything mainly quiet. Copters on the way. I decided to go take a look at Li Dap. I thought it was our boys around him, though I didn’t know why. They were wearing green and standing up plain as day. There was Oliver, smoking a joint. His rifle was on the ground. The NVA were all around him and he hadn’t even noticed. There were so many of them—twenty or so—they were clanking rifles against each other. One of them was going up behind Oliver with a bayonet, just about on him. If I’d had a carbine like usual, I could’ve taken the bayoneteer off and at least five of the others. Oliver and Li Dap might’ve ducked and survived.

  But I couldn’t pick and choose. I hardly even thought. The barrel of the shotgun was up and I pulled on the trigger, aiming at the bayoneteer.

  I burned them all up.

  Nobody even made a squeak.

  There was a flare and they were gone.

  Some of my boys rushed over with guns. All they were good for was stomping out the little fires on the edges.

  When we got back, I handed over Tubby’s pictures. The old man was beside himself over my killing a general, a captured general. He couldn’t understand what kind of laxity I’d allowed to let twenty gooks come up on us like that. They thought I might have a court-martial, and I was under arrest for a week. The story got out to UPI and they were saying things like “atrocity,” with my name spelled all over the column.

  But it was dropped and I was pulled out and went home a lieutenant.

  That’s all right. I’ve got four hundred and two boys out there—the ones that got back—who love me and know the truth, who love me because they know the truth.

  It’s Tubby’s lost fame I dream about.

  The army confiscated the roll and all his pictures. I wrote the Pentagon a letter asking for a print and waited two years here in Vicksburg without even a statement they received the note. I see his wife, who’s remarried and is fat herself now, at the discount drugstore every now and then. She has the look of a kind of hopeless cheer. I got a print from the Pentagon when the war was over and it didn’t matter. Li Dap looked wonderful—strained, abused and wild, his hair flying over his eyes while he’s making a statement full of conviction.

  It made me start thinking of faces again.

  Since I’ve been home I’ve crawled in bed with almost anything that would have me. I’ve slept with high school teachers, Negroes and, the other night, my own aunt. It made her smile. All those years of keeping her body in trim came to something, the big naughty surprise that the other women look for in religion, God showing up and killing their neighbors, sparing them. But she knows a lot about things and I think I’ll be in love with her.

  We were at the John Whitelaw vs. Whitney Maxwell play off together. It was a piece of wonder. I felt thankful to the wind or God or whoever brought that fine contest near enough by. When they hit the ball, the sound traveled like a rifle snap out over the bluffs. When it was impossible to hit the ball, that is exactly when they hit it.

  My aunt grabbed hold of my fingers when the tension was almost up to a roar. The last two holes. Ah, John lost. I looked over the despondency of the home crowd.

  Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

  Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed

  IT MAKES ME SICK WHEN WE KILL THEM OR RIDE HORSES OVER THEM. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.

  One day I rode up on a fellow in blue and we were both out of ammunition. He was trying to draw his saber and I was so outraged I slapped him right off his horse. The horseman behind me cheered. He said I’d broken the man’s neck. I was horrified. Oh, life, life—you kill what you love. I have seen such handsome faces with their mouths open, their necks open to the Pennsylvania sun. I love stealing for fo
rage and food, but I hate this murdering business that goes along with it.

  Some nights I amble in near the fire to take a cup with the boys, but they chase me away. I don’t scold, but in my mind there are the words: All right, have your way in this twinkling mortal world.

  Our Jeb Stuart is never tired. You could wake him with a message any time of night and he’s awake on the instant. He’s such a bull. They called him “Beauty” at West Point. We’re fighting and killing all his old classmates and even his father-in-law, General Philip St. George Cooke. Jeb wrote about this man once when he failed to join the Confederacy: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.”

  Gee, he can use the word, Jeb can. I was with him through the ostrich feathers in his hat and the early harassments, when we had nothing but shotguns and pretty horses. He was always a fool at running around his enemy. I was with him when we rode down a lane around a confused Yank picket, risking the Miniés. But he’s a good family man too, they say.

  I was with him when he first went around McClellan and scouted Porter’s wing. That’s when I fell in love with burning and looting. We threw ourselves on railroad cars and wagons, we collected carbines, uniforms and cow steaks that we roasted on sticks over the embers of the rails. Jeb passed right by when I was chewing my beef and dipping water out of the great tank. He had his banjo man and his dancing nigger with him. Jeb has terrific body odor along with his mud-spattered boots, but it rather draws than repels, like the musk of a woman.

  When we were celebrating in Richmond, even I was escorted by a woman out into the shadows and this is why I say this. She surrendered to me, her hoop skirt was around her eyebrows, her white nakedness lying under me if I wanted it, and I suppose I did, because I went laboring at her, head full of smoke and unreason. I left her with her dress over her face like a tent and have no clear notion of what her face was like, though my acquaintance Ruppert Longstreet told me in daylight she was a troll.

  That was when young Pelham set fire to the Yank boat in the James with his one Napoleon cannon. We whipped a warship from the shore. Pelham was a genius about artillery. I loved that too.

  It’s killing close up that bothers me. Once a blue-suited man on the ground was holding his hands out after his horse fell over. This was at Manassas. He seemed to be unclear about whether this was an actual event; he seemed to be asking for directions back to his place in a stunned friendly way. My horse, Pardon Me, was rearing way high and I couldn’t put the muzzle of my shotgun at him. Then Jeb rode in, plumes shivering. He slashed the man deep in the shoulder with his saber. The man knelt down, closing his eyes as if to pray. Jeb rode next to me. What a body odor he had. On his horse, he said:

  “Finish that poor Christian off, soldier.”

  My horse settled down and I blew the man over. Pardon Me reared at the shot and tore away in his own race down a vacant meadow—fortunate for me, since I never had to look at the carnage but only thought of holding on.

  After McClellan placed himself back on the York, we slipped through Maryland and here we are in Pennsylvania. We go spying and cavorting and looting. I’m wearing out. Pardon Me, I think, feels the lunacy even in this smooth countryside. We’re too far from home. We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore. We’re just bandits and maniacal. The gleam in the men’s eyes tells this. Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of being simply too far from home for decent return. It is like Ruth in the alien corn, or a troop of men given wings over the terrain they cherished and taken by the wind to trees they do not know.

  Jeb leads us. Some days he has the sneer of Satan himself.

  Nothing but bad news comes up from home, when it comes.

  Lee is valiant but always too few.

  All the great bullies I used to see out front are dead or wounded past use.

  The truth is, not a one of us except Jeb Stuart believes in anything any longer. The man himself the exception. There is nobody who does not believe in Jeb Stuart. Oh, the zany purposeful eyes, the haggard gleam, the feet of his lean horse high in the air, his rotting flannel shirt under the old soiled grays, and his heroic body odor! He makes one want to be a Christian. I wish I could be one. I’m afraid the only things I count on are chance and safety.

  The other night I got my nerve up and asked for him in his tent. When I went in, he had his head on the field desk, dead asleep. The quill was still in his hand. I took up the letter. It was to his wife, Flora. A daguerreotype of her lay next to the paper. It was still wet from Jeb’s tears. At the beginning of the letter there was small talk about finding her the black silk she’d always wanted near Gettysburg. Then it continued: “After the shameful defeat at Gettysburg,” etc.

  I was shocked. I always thought we won at Gettysburg. All the fellows I knew thought we had won. Further, he said:

  “The only thing that keeps me going on my mission is the sacred inalienable right of the Confederacy to be the Confederacy, Christ Our Lord, and the memory of your hot hairy jumping nexus when I return.”

  I placed the letter back on the table. This motion woke him.

  I was incredulous that he knew my first name. He looked as if he had not slept a second.

  The stories were true.

  “Corporal Deed Ainsworth,” he said.

  “Sorry to wake you, General.”

  “Your grievance?” he said.

  “No one is my friend,” I mumbled.

  “Because the Creator made you strange, my man. I never met a chap more loyal in the saddle than you. God made us different and we should love His differences as well as His likenesses.”

  “I’d like to kiss you, General,” I said.

  “Oh, no. He made me abhor that. Take to your good sleep, my man. We surprise the railroad tomorrow.”

  “Our raids still entertain you?” I asked.

  “Not so much. But I believe our course has been written. We’ll kill ten and lose two. Our old Bobbie Lee will smile when we send the nigger back to him with the message. I’ll do hell for Lee’s smile.”

  The nigger came in the tent about then. He was highfalutin, never hardly glanced at me. They had a magnificent bay waiting for the letters. Two soldiers came in and took an armload of missives from General Stuart’s trunk, pressing them into the saddlebags. The nigger, in civilian clothes, finally looked at me.

  “Who dis?” he said.

  “Corporal Deed Ainsworth; shake hands,” said General Stuart.

  I have a glass shop in Biloxi. I never shook hands with any nigger. Yet the moment constrained me to. He was Jeb’s best minstrel. He played the guitar better than anything one might want to hear, and the banjo. His voice singing “All Hail the Power” was the only feeling I ever had to fall on my knees and pray. But now he was going back down South as a rider with the messages.

  “Ain’t shaking hands with no nancy,” said the nigger. “They say he lay down with a Choctaw chief in Mississip, say he lick a heathen all over his feathers.”

  “You’re getting opinions for a nigger, George,” said Jeb, standing. “I don’t believe Our Lord has room for another nigger’s thoughts. You are tiring God when you use your mouth, George.”

  “Yessuh,” said George.

  “Do you want to apologize to Corporal Ainsworth?”

  “I real sorry. I don’t know what I say,” the nigger said to me. “General Jeb taught me how to talk and sometimes I justs go on talking to try it out.”

  “Ah, my brother George,” Jeb suddenly erupted.

  He rushed to the nigger and threw his arms around him. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced the black man in the manner of my dreams of how he might embrace me.

  “My chap, my chum. Don’t get yourself killed,” said Jeb to George. “Try to look ignorant when you get near the road pickets, same as when I found you and saved you from drink.”

  “I loves you too, General Jeb. I ain’t touched nothing since you saved me. Promise. I gon look ignorant like you say, tills I get to Richmond. Then I might h
ave me a beer.”

  “Even Christ wouldn’t deny you that. Ah, my George, there’s a heaven where we’ll all prosper together. Even this sissy, Corporal Ainsworth.”

  They both looked at me benevolently. I felt below the nigger.

  George got on the horse and took off South.

  At five the next morning we came out of a stand of birches and all of us flew high over the railroad, shooting down the men. I had two stolen repeaters on my hip in the middle of the rout and let myself off Pardon Me. A poor torn Yank, driven out of the attack, with no arm but a kitchen fork, straggled up to me. We’d burned and killed almost everything else.

  Stuart rode by me screaming in his rich bass to mount. The blue cavalry was coming across the fire toward us. The wounded man was stabbing me in the chest with his fork. Jeb took his saber out in the old grand style to cleave the man from me. I drew the pistol on my right hip and put it almost against Jeb’s nose when he leaned to me.

  “You kill him, I kill you, General,” I said.

  There was no time for a puzzled look, but he boomed out: “Are you happy, Corporal Ainsworth? Are you satisfied, my good man Deed?”

  I nodded.

  “Go with your nature and remember our Savior!” he shouted, last in the retreat.

  I have seen it many times, but there is no glory like Jeb Stuart putting spurs in his sorrel and escaping the Minié balls.

  They captured me and sent me to Albany prison, where I write this.

  I am well fed and wretched.

  A gleeful little floorwipe came in the other day to say they’d killed Jeb in Virginia. I don’t think there’s much reservoir of self left to me now.

  This earth will never see his kind again.

  Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony

  IN THE ALLEYS THERE WERE SIGHS AND DERISIONS AND THE SLIDE OF dice in the brick dust. His vision was impaired. One of his eyes had been destroyed in the field near Atlanta as he stood there with his binoculars.

  Now he was in Richmond.