Jack Cady's novella, "The Night We Buried Road Dog," (January, 1993), was one of the most talked-about stories of that year. It was reprinted several times and is considered a classic already. This should not surprise readers already familiar with Jack's novels, such as the well-received Street from St. Martin's Press. Jack is one of the strongest, most original voices in our field.
Now he returns to our pages with another novella. "Kilroy Was Here" finds adventure in the most unlikely setting, and heroics among the most unlikely heroes. Beneath it all is a story of courage so powerful it will surely break your heart, just as it broke ours.
He dreamed his feet were so cold that he ran to the battalion aid station, and there were his mother and sister fixing him some hot food over a wood fire, and poking up the fire so he could warm his feet. But before he could eat the food or warm his feet he woke up -- and his feet were still cold.
Ernie Pyle -- Brave Men
I
The V.A. Hospital Sits solemn and grand above this too busy northwest city where traffic rumbles and rain mostly pours. Darkness lies between this place and the city, a darkness we've but noticed lately. I totter at a red hot half-a-mile an hour along lighted halls and Burnside generally outruns me. Burnside drives a wheelchair and his motto is, "Leave no nurse's butt unpatted," because, as he says, "Waste is a sin and I'm practicin' to be a preacher."
And this V.A. hospital, itself, is no bad place for a Burnside type of ministry. The hospital stands like a temple, and through its halls and secret passages and operating rooms eternally pour shapes of human hope and pain; shapes of mystery, dread, high times and low. People stride or tippy-toe or cakewalk these halls depending on who's got what share of joy or trouble, and where that trouble lives. Talking about the geriatric ward, Burnside says to me, "It ain't altogether a noble occupation, Ross, but it's three hots and a flop. It is, by God, a livin'."
"It's a dying," I tell him. "It's the jump-off place where the world takes its last Shot, and Sarge, the world is gonna win." When you talk to Burnside you have to mix good sense with a touch of facts or he won't understand. Burnside has flung b.s. for seventy-six of his seventy-eight years, having been somewhat slow as a baby.
He rolls that wheelchair like a Hell's Angel of the geriatric ward; a wheelchair with racing stripes, a foxtail, an ooga-ooga horn, and the remnants of a Japanese battle flag fluttering from a stick of the kind you see on bicycles. Burnside has arms and shoulders like a dwarfed goliath, and legs so thin his small feet look like powderpuffs attached to toothpicks. "It's a real adventure being in this kind of shape," he tells me. "You learn to crap in a lotta new ways." Burnside has about three red hairs remaining along each temple, his dome is bald, his mustache gray, and hair sprouting from his ears approaches maroon.
The kind thing would be to let him pass away in silence, and the smart thing would be to pass away myself; but days stretch long when the brain is good and the body is shot -- and for too long, maybe, we've been silent. My hands no longer hold a pen, but thanks to the mysterious East I have a tape recorder that works. My hips almost don't work. I've got hips like cracked glass.
My tape recorder purrs like a Japanese cat as I tell about what happens, or has happened, and as I concentrate on Burnside. Burnside was okay until, some years ago, he bounced a Honda Goldwing off a phone pole and into a lady's petunia patch. She stood wailing over bruised petunias. He claims to have hammed it up over a busted motorcycle and a busted pelvis, taking advantage of the situation in an attempt to lure her into the sack.
Other people around here are lucky, maybe. They fester in a vegetable state. They've disconnected from the world, have dreamed their ways into the past, and become ghosts who sit before the dayroom TV; listening to chatter, patter, gossip, and lisping cartoons. The TV spooks are more ghostly than the real ghosts who plague this hospital. This place is a ghost factory.
It was the real ghosts who started things. We lifers were peaceful enough telling lies about our different wars, and about our lives in and out of the military. We were happy checking obituaries each day, and chortling over the passing of generals and presidents. "The main difference between dead and alive," says Burnside, "is that 'dead' means off the payroll."
Then the ghosts got into it. They generally hang around the cemetery out back with its brightly glowing slabs, or else jungle up in broom closets or under beds. They wisp their ways through these halls, rolling along silent as the soft paws of dust kittens. The orderlies don't see them. The nurses don't see them. We can hardly see them.
"It's a perfect set-up," Burnside says. "Plenty of company, cafeteria, television, bed, and a cemetery right at hand." Then he tells a Burnside-type of story. Once, in the days after he retired from the Infantry, he worked as a groundskeeper in a corpse-farm called Rest Eternal. "They had amazin' discounts for employees," he tells anyone who will listen. "I was losin' money every day I stayed alive."
But stories about Burnside's past didn't amount to a pastel damn once the present took over. The ghosts in this geriatric ward began manifesting. We didn't know what was happening at first. We did know our ranks were thinning . . . around here the ranks are always thinning. In a little over a month two beds opened up as Sgts. Smith and Sanders passed to the great beyond. Their empty chairs in the dayroom quickly filled with a couple of retired Marines still dumb enough to believe they were assigned to temporary duty. Plus, another bed was knocking on empty. The door to Corporal Harvey's room stayed closed. Nurses came and went, came and went. Doctors avoided the place. All signs read "Farewell, Dan Harvey."
Darkness started to roll along the hallways, and darkness clustered in the geriatric ward. The dayroom clouded, became blue like a 1940's bar filled with jazz and tobacco smoke. A clarinet wailed as the TV ceased its quack and faded without a flicker. Darkness fell in individual rooms and squelched the common sounds of people puking, or gasping and sucking for breath, or wimpering as pain pills wore off.
Not a mother's son or daughter in that dayroom missed a thing, although nurses kept scampering back and forth, back and forth, unseeing.
Ghosts appeared tricked out in their best things, and so solid you could see them. The men wore '40's uniforms, and the women looked like Greta Garbo, except more fun; American, English, other kinds, mostly oriental. Some of the gals wore uniforms, most wore dresses. The clarinet wailed like the love-ridden and lonesome voice of a transport leaving dock, the voice behind final waves, final goodbyes. The clarinet talked about Lili Marlene, and in the background a trombone sobbed. The ghosts seemed to be trying to tell us something. A sailor ghost flagged semaphore; colored flags whipping around the alphabet, but the only man on the ward who knew how to read it was a blind quartermaster, so that was a loss.
The halls became bluer, smokier, like lukewarm passions in the dusk of an old man's mind. Chill air moved through the halls, and the door tO Corporal Harvey's room opened. A nurse stepped through the doorway, her shoulders slumped, her hair astray, and she carried that beaten look the nurses get when they have lost.
"Janet," Burnside said in an abstract and irrelevant way that for the moment held no b.s. "Susan. Yukiko san. The girls we left behind." He watched another dejected nurse leave Corporal Harvey's room. "That poor sumbitch is so dead," he muttered, "that he really ought to go on sick call."
We sat blinking. No one here ever thought of ghosts as more than shadows or memories, fragments of aged imaginations. The past adds up as men age, and remembered voices come from everywhere. Now it seemed there was more to it. I thought of reasons for being in a haunted place. I thought of history, of how things begin.
We credit tuberculosis with the building of this hospital. In the early parts of the century the "tee bees" took lives in breathless manners as lungs turned to shreds of dangling tissue, as lesions and excrescence sought out final gasps behind lips stained with choked-up blood. Tuberculosis is not the most vivid of diseases. That score goes to cholera; but unlike cholera, t.b. spelled equal opportunity. It killed schoolteachers and bankers and captains of industry.
Our government, being enlightened, warehoused victims instead of shooting. It built hospitals in remote places. This hospital towers on a long hill overlooking a city that was once a place of neighborhoods if not a city of light. The hospital is thus downwind from prevailing weather patterns. The hospital is rage, serving as a landmark for airplanes, and even a landmark for ships cruising Puget Sound. Its outside displays yellow brick, and its inside glows mental-ward green.
By 1940 the docs found ways to beat tuberculosis. Some hospitals closed for lack of customers. Then, as Burnside points out, the happiest circumstance occurred. World War II arrived and spelled a blessing for the medics. "Gave them something to do," Burnside says. "Kept 'em off the streets and out of jail. I never heard of a single doc who got ragged."
A great mixing of ghosts began as the hospital resurrected, first under the military, then under the V.A. Spirits whirled, like in a Waring blender. On the west coast most casualties came from the South Pacific, although a lot of freeze and burn cases came from that snafu in the Aleutians. Men died in colorful ways, or were launched to new adventures from the ORs; adventures in learning to walk without legs, work without hands, see without eyes -- adventures in sipping beer through a straw when too sad and drunk to pick a glass up with a G.I. prosthesis. Brain cages cooked like french fries as electricity zapped, shock therapy being a hobby with the best medical minds of the day. A grateful nation, loving its loyal sons, did its damndest to sweep the warped remnants of men under the shaggy shagrug of history.
Fortunately for the hospital, as Burnside points out, the country discovered a conscience. "War saves people from themselves," Burnside says, "and we found how to save the slanteyes. We can shoot in any Asian language."
The hospital did not finish sweeping up WWII before Korea vets began to hurt, and Korea did not get swept up even after VietNam. Around here, docs still sweep, and nurses slump with fatigue and failure when another soul goes west.
What with soldiers and sailors and jarhead marines, it is no surprise this hospital seems loaded with ghosts. I say "loaded" and not "haunted" because until Corporal Harvey checked out, the ghosts saw us the same way we saw them, which is to say, insubstantial. Ghosts didn't give a hang for us, nor did they give a fat rat's behind. And we didn't think they were any too loveable.
I sat, still blinking, and thinking of history and ghosts and blue light and 1940's bars, of transports and tears. Our ghosts had just held a real shindig, then disappeared. The ghost waving semaphore was last to leave.
"Sarge," I said to Burnside, "what in the world was all of that about?" I eased into a chair in the dayroom, sitting among TV stiffs, and looked around. Twenty old soldiers parked there, including a couple of Wacs . . . during WWII one of those kids helped run an ops center in jolly old Liverpool, the other did time in a supply room in Norfolk. There are not many women in V.A. geriatric wards. We only have these two.
Now the Wacs nudged the guys beside them, and the gals made dry-throat giggles of the kind that say, "catch me if you can." Tallulah Bankhead had nothing on these kids, and who would've ever suspected?
"Ross, old buddy, that's amazin'." Burnside watched the women, watched the surprised but suddenly interested men. "If that's the best they can do, okay. I've got my sights a few clicks higher."
"No b.s.," I told him. "What was all of that about?" I looked around the dayroom. No clarinet, no blue light, nobody waving semaphore or goodbye. The door to Corporal Harvey's room remained closed. Come lights-out orderlies would steal in with a gurney, play body-snatcher, and by dawn's early light Corporal Harvey would become a fading memory. This hospital never snatches corpses in broad daylight. It depresses the troops.
"I can't figure it. If the corporal's on the far side, why is the far side waving goodbye? Makes me right uneasy." Burnside popped a wheelie. The wheelchair rayed like a pony with ambition, then hit the floor as Burnside spun in a circle. He would catch fire-breathing hell if any nurse saw that wheelie. Staff does not like wheelies. Wheelies mark the deck, cause scuff marks the buffers almost can't erase, and wheelies are traces of rebellion by patients.
Plus everyone would know it was Burnside's wheelie. He's the only one of the wheelchair bunch strong enough to pop a good one. He spun the chair in three intersecting circles, like an ad for Ballantines. "A snort before lunch, and a snooze after." He pointed the chair toward his room.
"It's the solitary drinkers who end up doing time," I told him. "You shouldn't drink alone." I followed Burnside, and I followed slow. On good days I can make it through these hallways leaning on a cane. Most days I chase a walker. This place is-- this place. If we did not have bullshit, we'd be dead. Let me explain.
Pain around here is real. Around here bodies do not heal, and exercise does not work out stiffness. Doctors can mask some serious pain with pills, and people can hide from pain a little bit by using sedatives and drugged sleep. Pain here is eternal, like sunrise and sunset. It's a part of conditions, part of a deal which says: if you live long enough, you have to hurt.
In this place puke is nasty, sour, bile-filled, vomit that more often than not travels along raw throats from guts that can no longer work a full shift. Puke comes laden with blood. In this place hip bones are so fragile one dares not stumble, and people who fall out of bed do not survive. When one is very, very old skin becomes thin as tissue paper, and cartilage around the nose disappears, causing it to retract. The face looks like a skull with skin.
This is human stuff; the human thing we do not like to think about, not even when it's happening. Sooner or later, though, it comes to a lot of us. The only people who are young forever are the ones who early-on have the bad luck to get in the way of bullets or trucks or killing disease. The message in this place says: you weren't smart enough to die young, so get it figured out.
Some people don't figure. They become TV stiffs, and TV sucks them into its own darkness. Some people do figure, but they mask their figuring with bullshit. Bullshit is the first line of defense against pain, or, as Burnside says of Corporal Harvey--"All that poor bastard had was cancer. I've got cancer and a Combat Infantryman's Badge."
"You've only got the prostate kind," I tell him, "and Harvey had it in the gizzard. Prostate comes from frigging around with preacher's wives. Anybody can get it."
The first line of defense against pain . . . the other secret about pain is that it's easier to handle if you don't feel sorry for yourself. Burnside and I, and most of these geriatrics, learned about not feeling sorry for yourself during grade school. Of course, all of that happened some years ago. The reasons for our learning are now in history books. As Casey Stengle used to say, "You could look it up."
So I followed Burnside as he headed for our room. We bunk two to a room in this place, until it comes time to die. Then they move us into solitary. As I followed I looked forward to a jolt of bourbon, either Burnside's bourbon or mine. Burnside could find whiskey in the middle of the Sahara, and I could find the beer chaser.
Our stash hides in what used to be a dumbwaiter. This hospital has been redesigned so many times even architects lose track of how everything fits. At one time or other dumbwaiters were plastered over. We opened this one, flushed plaster piece-at-a-time down the latrine, and I hung battalion colors of the 120th Engineers over the hole. The 120th is not my outfit anyway, and screw the 120th.
"That was one swell party. Harvey must of meant something to somebody." Burnside uncorked the Jim Beam. We were both having a tough time because of Harvey. Dan Harvey had been a good friend.
"I always thought those ghosties were just part of your imagination," Burnside said. "Ross, you're getting elderly."
He took a belt, wiped his mouth, then took a little sip and passed the bottle. I took it from him just in time to keep it from getting dropped. Burnside looked up, fumbled, saw something standing behind my shoulder. His face went white as a corpse. Then his mouth twitched, and his hands dropped to the wheels of the chair like he was ready to lead a charge. "What are you doing here?" he whispered, and for the second time in a single day his voice held no b.s. He looked at me. "You'll want to take a lick outta that bottle before you turn around."
A Japanese soldier stood behind me as I turned. He seemed polite. He looked almost solid, nearly real. This kid couldn't have been more than twenty-five, though with Japs it's hard to tell. He wore one of those dink uniforms with a sash. He bowed. I bowed right back at him, or at least as well as a stiff back and hips can. Old shapes took me over. The courtesy seemed downright civilized after bunking beside Burnside. The bow seemed to please the kid. He smiled, then vanished. Puff. Little blue mist. Nothing.
I turned to Burnside, and Burnside was so bleached I thought he died. His bald head shone, and fluorescent light lay across it like polish. Those heavy shoulders slumped, and his mouth formed what I feared was a permanent "oh." Then his hands stirred. "This is serious;" he said. "Pour another shot, but don't pass the bottle. I'll drop it surely."
I sat on the bed, and my hand, which naturally trembles, really trembled. The whiskey, which is one of the last good things in life, rolled my gut, but was worth the roll. "Tell me," I said to Burnside.
"It happened on the Canal," he told me. "At the time he was a better man than me. We accidentally bumped into each other while mutually retreating. I shot him in the gut and my M1 popped its clip. Empty. He leaned on a tree, slid down to sit on his butt, and pointed a pistol at me. He studied the situation, and saw how we'd all been reamed. I could see it in his eyes. He just plain said, 'Aw, screw it,' which is 'shiranu ga hotoke' in Japanese. Then he flipped the pistol away, tipped on his side, and declared peace on all the world."
Rubber soles padded in the hall and I hid the bottle beneath a pillow. Burnside's ears are not as sharp as mine. He took my signal, though, and had his face more or less composed by the time nurse Johnson entered the room. "There's a little more to it," he whispered.
"This had better not be happy hour," Johnson said as she entered. Nurse Johnson is on day shift, and that improves our days. "You deadbeats don't fool anybody."
Johnson gets more dejected than most of the other nurses when she loses a patient, and she'd just lost Harvey. Sometimes she hangs around us, I swear, just because we still show a little life. It perks her up. We do our best to behave indecent.
In this geriatric ward doctors outrank Jesus, who, as the Navy boys will tell you, was only a carpenter's mate. Doctors, though, stand with God at their right hands. Nurses range in rank from cherub right on up to holy saint.
And how, one may well ask, did all this come about ? And where, one may well ask, does Nurse Johnson fit among that celestial chorus? And for how long, one may further ask, has Burnside been trying to put the make on her?
Take it by-the-numbers, because Burnside isn't going to score anyway, so there's no big hurry:
Some people here are dark towers of pain, and some are small, dense, compressed mounds of pain. Burnside, for all his fanny rides a wheelchair, qualifies as a dark tower with flares burning at the top. You don't become a compressed mound, around here, until you lose sight of everything happening beyond your own body. When the body is all that's left for the brain to think about, doctors become the center of the universe. If Burnside did not cuss presidents, and chase women, and originate reams of originals and copies in the way of bullshit, he'd become a mound. I would myself, except, of course, nothing about me hurts except my walker which has four legs and thus more opportunity.
And who am I to judge? At this age everybody has his own pain and his own ghosts, or his own memories; and perhaps ghosts and memories are all the same. People wrap themselves in the past, spinning cocoons around pain. Memories insulate against the ice of death creeping upward from their feet, against eternal cold entering their veins. Men dream of childhood, of crystalline winters warm by woodstoves . . . although ice-flowers form on window panes of the soul; and they dream of a cherry tree in blossom, and perhaps the welcoming smile of a girl they met but once, yet dreamed of always.
So who am I to judge? I'm just another dogface who rode the G.I. Bill. A dogface who became a high school history teacher who became retired, who became adjudged incapable of living alone; and maybe the judges were right. On the other hand I've seen Europe and Asia, and know how to run B.A.R.s, 30 m.m.m.g.s, mortars, and tests in American history given to teenagers equally endowed with hope and beauty and zits.
And Nurse Johnson, who is she?
She's one of those dreamers for whom the world has no time. Let's call her early thirties, which is kindly, and beautiful, which is true. She tucks her long hair up under her silly little cap, and walks long-legged through these halls in a way that makes you thankful for the memories of women. Her nose is a little too sharp for the cover of fashion magazines, and her look is too kindly to ever get her hired for television. Her eyes are hazel, her mouth generous, her body enticingly slight. She moves like a girl when she's happy, and the soul of tiredness when she's not. Nurse Johnson cares too much about her job, and is going to burn out. I hope she holds on until Burnside passes. Burnside claims to have spent his whole life in debauchery, and Nurse Johnson, who is his greatest challenge, should also be his last sight when leaving this vale.
And thus, in the ranks of heaven, is Nurse Johnson a one-ring Warrant officer, which is just enough gold braid to sing alto in the chorus of the Lord.
"It's these fast machines," Burnside said to me and patted his wheelchair. "They always get the girls." To Nurse Johnson he said, "Sergeant Ross was just leaving."
Johnson stood beside the bed where I sat, smiled a sad little smile, and pretended to ignore Burnside. "The dayroom's in an uproar. You guys did something that upset everybody. What?" Her hair is kind of dishwater blond, but gleamy. It fluffs and softens the effect of that sharp little nose.
"Nothing much," I lied. "Burnside told a couple sea stories. Corporal Harvey kicked. Burnside sang something about Minnie the Moocher. Burnside's the man you want." No good could come from telling any nurse about an infestation of ghosts.
I hate to see so much sorrow in a face, and Johnson's reflected about as much sorrow as anyone could bear. She can't get it through her head that being dead is not that big a deal. Toward the end Harvey's pain outpaced the drags. He was bed-ridden. He wouldn't put up with spending his life in bed, nor would I, nor would Burnside . . . at least not alone.
"He left messages for you both," she said. "I liked Corporal Harvey, even if he did hang out with you guys." Johnson should work in a maternity ward, not with geriatrics. "Minnie the Moocher," she said to me. "Do you guys ever tell the truth?"
"On Sundays."
"Or when it don't cost a red cent," Burnside said. "Sergeant Ross is cheap, but I know how to show a girl a good time." As he spoke he kept looking around like a man searching the jungle for snipers. His Japanese ghost would probably not show up with a nurse nearby, but with ghosts who can tell?
"Both of you are going to hate this, or at least I think you are." Nurse Johnson's mouth held just the littlest bit of a sad smile. Her eyelids were a little blinky, a little teary. It came to me that maybe we're more to her than pluses or minuses on a nurse's scoresheet. On the other hand, no sense getting too emotional.
"Corporal Harvey understands why the Buddha smiles," she said to me. "He told me to say that to you. He also told me that he has been instructed not to explain it to you." She turned to Burnside, and she sort of bit her lower lip.
I tipped and nearly fell off the edge of the bed. Nurse Johnson was flipping it right back at us. Men dying of cancer do not leave final messages. Men dying of cancer live in great caverns of pain, caverns illumined with the unrighteous fires of infernos real as those of Dante. Men dying of cancer writhe internally, the violence and chaos of tumor overreaching any last intelligence. Pain becomes pure, probably, and maybe such purity has something to do with the Buddha, but sure as hell men don't talk about it.
"And for Sergeant Burnside," Nurse Johnson said, "and I quote verbatim: Harvey said, 'Get off your goldbrickin' butt and find an honest job.'"
"Got the last word, didn't he?" Burnside's voice filled with admiration even as he continued to scout the room. "Harvey always could pile it on." Burnside was not exactly distracted, but his attention went toward shadows in corners, or any other place that might hide visions and worries from the past.
I sort of blinked at Nurse Johnson, and she sort of winked at me. Burnside sat between us, and Burnside was stupidly buying every ounce of it. I figured this day marked a turning point in Nurse Johnson's career. This was bigger than Paul Bunyon. She had just bullshitted the most noted purveyor of b.s. ever to appear in the history of the American West.
For three days the geriatric ward fell back into the drone of routine, except for occasional sorties by TV stiffs. The lads, and two lasses, made tracks to the back windows of this wing beyond which lies Memorial Gardens, the military cemetery, or, as Burnside puts it, The Old Soldier's Home.
Burnside and I went as well, but we did not settle for looking out the windows. We inched through the doorway, onto a concrete terrace, and looked over the terrain, It was not a position I'd wish to defend, and not a position I'd wish to take. From a tactical point of view it's an infantryman's nightmare.
There's a narrow strip of lawn bordering the terrace, then a narrow cemetery with gleaming markers running crosswise the hill as if some wiseacre had pasted a decorated bandage on nature. At the lower edge of the cemetery there's third growth forest, gently sloping over desolate ground, the last undeveloped area. Beyond the forest a rickety footbridge spans a ravine, and, across the bridge and at the bottom of the hill, there lie the remnants of a Victorian park. The park was once a place where ladies and gentlemen strolled, and where children played. When this hospital went military in the long ago, something happened down there. Maybe it became off-limits. Maybe the darkness we've but lately noticed has dwelt in that park among shadows of neglect. The covered bandstand is broken, the roof cracked, the steps rotted. Ornamental iron fences are rusted, and ornamental trees stand unpruned, while hedges are overgrown. From a distance, though, it still looks like a spot of sanity in all that desolation.
No one goes there anymore, not even to cut firewood. Our V.A. ghosts don't go there. If it is a haunted wood, a haunted park, a haunted spot of history, then it's haunted by something more hideous than ghosts, and more dangerous than guns. This hospital has its safe side, with roads and lawns. It has this dark side, dark nearly to black, empty of life. Not even a bird chirps, and the only way you could defend that position would be with light artillery. If you attacked it you would get nothing but tree bursts from mortars.
Burnside and I, along with the resurrected TV stiffs, gazed across rows of glowing white cemetery stones beneath the flowing flag of a great nation. We gazed toward the forest, the ravine, then toward a city that once exported food and manufactures to the world, a city that now exports only noise and entertainment; and imports everything else. Not one of the TV stiffs, viewing that lordly flag and chronically troubled city, had enough gumption to rub his crotch.
"There's more to tell about that kid," I later said to Burnside, reminding him about his Japanese ghost.
"He was young, and I made him dead. You'll recall there was a war goin' on. I was only young. I figured to score information about the enemy. I went through his pockets." Burnside motioned upward to the remnants of the Japanese battle flag. "They carried these personal battle flags. He can have it back. I only use it to get the girls. Women can't resist that kind of accomplishment." Burnside's voice seemed a little forced, like he was having a hard time spreading it; and that was another first.
Change filled the air like low-grade electricity. Everyone, except those in the final stages of senility--and maybe even those--could sense that the far side put together its own routine.
Shadows drifted along the walls, although nothing solid enough to cause a shadow appeared. Murmurs hovered behind everyone's ears, little whispers from the past. After the first day, newsreels began running in our minds, newsreels of the passing parade, a parade of history and war. I heard voices of people dead and gone, some of them loved, and some despised. I heard mutters of cannonade rumbling behind broken horizons. I heard terrified squalling of children, heard the voice of the enemy speaking crackling kraut language; and I heard the sobbing of women, because, yes, it is possible to sob in German.
I heard again sounds from the invasion of Europe and sounds from emplacements in Korea. Burnside heard things a little differently. Being ambitious, Burnside tried to square away the whole Pacific theater before doing occupation duty in Japan.
"I always feared you were a little feeble-minded," he told me, "but never thought you'd run around with someone who's hearing things. You're a nut case, Ross."
Meanwhile, routine droned right along. Nurse Johnson remained busy, distracted, continually ignoring the pain of her job as she tried to reduce swelling in lives around her. Nurse Johnson heard no ghosts and saw none, perhaps being too busy. Routine sustained her and steadied us; and this is the way routine runs, even in a geriatric ward invaded from the other world as -- we may assume -- most of them are.
Day begins at four A.M. when pain pills wear off. Very old people sleep but indifferently. We wake and wrestle whatever greets us, be it suppurating sores, or unknit bones. From four until six most lie in the stupor of half dreams. Voices from the past congregate, argue, complain about our attitudes. Brothers, long dead, appear as in their youth. They bandy jokes, or present intense situations that never really happened, but could have if everyone had been smarter at the time. Fathers cuss and mothers explain. Sometimes a favorite aunt appears . . . but, sometimes, the hours between four and six breed monsters. Men see faces: of people they have killed, or women they betrayed.
At six A.M. pill time begins. Lights up. The stage opens to the day's comedy -- or tragedy if that be the will of the Lord. At six A.M. everyone coughs a lot, and if one is destined to die choking, the odds are best around six. Pills run the range of the pharmacopoeia. Drugs take on personalities. Most are plebian, some even duller, but some are simply splendid. Some drugs cause dreams to run a riff, a coda, a trumpet ride like Ziggy Elman playing "And the Angels Sing."
Burnside, with a big reputation for going off on his own initiative, and being independent as a hog on ice, waits for no nurse or orderly. He has a system of stainless steel pulleys rigged over his bed. It's like living next door to a circus. Still, it's tough to see him swing here and there. The man would have made a fine elf or gremlin or leprechaun, or even a grown-up pixie, and he's reduced to swinging like an ape. He lowers himself into his seat and heads for the latrine, the tattered battle flag like a broken sun above that rolling chair.
Breakfast comes at seven. You can take it in your room or hit the chow line at the cafeteria. Among geriatrics the chow line carries a message: line up here and tell the world you're still kicking.
Our troops break bread in the company of younger patients, guys in their 40s to 60s who have their own specters, but who were not seeing ours. These are leftovers from later wars. Nearly all are cripples, and not a few are crazy. I wouldn't trust a one with rubber bands and paper clips, let alone a dull knife.
Physical therapy starts at 8:30 and lasts until you drop, which in most cases is 8:45. Burnside doesn't need it. His jaw works just elegant, and his legs are nearly ready to fall off, anyway. He gets plenty of wholesome push and pull from that chair. "I'd get a Harley," he complains, "but they don't build 'em."
Doctors pull rounds from ten to lunch. They detail hip replacements, spinal taps, and 'ectomies to rearrange the innards. The docs make time-tested jokes, and are capable of their own b.s. After all, what are wars created for?
"Other hospitals ain't this nice," Burnside explains to anyone who bitches. "In Japan the nurses are all dykes. In England the docs sound like Mortimer Snerd. In Frogland . . . " he then rolls his eyes and tries to appear lewd " . . . which is why DeGaulle had that tremendous big nose. DeGaulle was damn popular."
Before lunch, and especially during uncertain days, we grab the Jim Beam, "have a little sip," as Louis Armstrong used to say, then chase the whiskey with a bowl of soup. "It ain't like South Dakota," Burnside explains. "Back on the farm we never drank after four A.M." Burnside credits South Dakota as the place that made him famous. After putting in his time, and drawing retirement from Uncle Sugar, he went back home. "The only available job in all of South Dakota was with a ports-pot outfit." He worked and really strived. In just three months he got promoted to head poop.
After lunch and a nap, some patients receive visitors, be they relatives or social workers or church ladies or a chaplain. Some visitors bring photos of great-grandchildren, as if anyone here pretended to give a hang for the precious tykes, or photos of great-great grandchildren who will not need this ward until the back half of the next century. Visitors talk valentine talk. I listen and imagine those kiddies as they will become, dressed in spandex uniforms, lasers at the ready, enduring fleabites as they crawl through mud, or lie chilled and sleeping on frozen tundra. I imagine them in trenches along some MLR, huddled behind a supersonic zap gun, and they have their shod feet tucked in sleeping bags to avoid going lame from freezing. Enjoy your childhoods, youngsters, because as long as there are humans there'll always be the Infantry.
Burnside and I ran our visitors away more than a year ago, old age being a private occupation-- and at the time we thought our reasons made sense. I honestly told my visitors to shove off, but Burnside waxed eloquent. He pretended to discover religion. His wheelchair became a pulpit. He preached, favoring Moses and Abraham, and Burnside scared himself half to death. He ran his visitors away all right, but among the TV stiffs he actually made a convert, a gunner's mate named Hawkins who was, anyway, on his road to glory. "Packed him off to heaven," Burnside mumbled, " . . . no good deed goes unpunished . . . stars in my crown . . . " The power of the Word scared the living bejesus out of Burnside, and that's the truth of it.
Visitors leave by mid-afternoon, and then arrives The Hour of Charm. Until ghosts got into it, this was the hour of apparitions sliding just on the edge of perception. We could almost see days of our youth, hear the clatter of new model T Fords, or the very first singing commercial from the domed cathedral of a radio aglow with vacuum tubes. We listened as fathers and uncles bulled widely about World War I, while grandfathers flipped b.s. about Gettysburg and Shiloh, or Cuba, or the last of the Indian wars. The Hour of Charm brought a rustle of cornfields beneath midwest sun, the whisper of great rivers: the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Columbia; the heartbeat of a nation's land, salt soil, mountain, prairie, thin fields of cotton, hardwood forests.
Everything changed as ghosts put together their own lash up. Burnside's Nipponese soldier was first, but not alone. By the third day our ghosts had their drill down pat. The farside stepped forward as a Burnside story progressed:
Burnside parked in the dayroom and told how his uncle Henry saved a church after its congregation came up busted. The preacher buried uncle Henry in a likely field, then called the field a church cemetery and free of tax. As prices rose he sold the field, moved uncle Henry to another field . . . " . . . and Unc tax-exempted more land through the years than Alexander the Great. The preacher finally quit when the coffin wore out. Unc was holding up just fine. . . . "
At that point doors and windows opened. They moved methodically, not slow, but no snap to it either. Some doors and windows were real, and real weather blew like a natural broom through the geriatric ward. From the freeway came rain-ridden breeze carrying car fumes. Puget Sound contributed a little whiff of salt, and northwest mist became a sheen of moisture touching us like a thin coat of protecting fur.
Nurses closed windows, hissed at orderlies who closed doors, and staff had Burnside singled out for blame before the last breeze choked. Burnside, caught mid-story, sat blinking, silent, his tale-spinning out of balance as surrealism took over; because another door opened in the center of the dayroom, and this was a door of tribulation through which only we geriatrics could pass. Staff saw nothing.
The door opened on a scene, like rushes for a movie in which no one would want to star. An enormous room lay before us, and ranks of coffins shone dull and black before the backdrop of night. Silence as profound as eternity lay within that night. Silence resonated with power, silence that could be broken only by some mighty force, because the power of that silence swallowed all ordinary sound.
This was death, or at least part of it. Silence and darkness surrounded frail boxes containing remains even more frail. No spirits lay enclosed there, only corpses embraced by that greatest of all silences, embraced by final darkness.
Nurse Johnson sat as the single mourner, and her low sobs were the only sounds powerful enough to break that silence. Her face was barely composed, her lips trembly as they moved in prayers or confusion, her eyes red from weeping. She seemed such a small figure huddled before eternal night. We sensed her confusion, her loneliness, failure, sorrow; and we knew that each of us in that dayroom rested in one of those coffins. We knew the future by recognizing we were the past.
Nurse Johnson is a very good kid in a very bad world. We fight pain with pain, but she does not understand that, and sometimes it doesn't work all that well, anyway. The coffins sent a message, or seemed to, and the message needed figuring because it said: Take care of this young one, and maybe you are not lost. There is one more job to do. Figure it out, you sergeants and corporals and warrants. You once stirred the depths of history the way bakers stir cake mix. Get it figured, Jerks.
The enormous room, standing before eternal dark, now became shaded as if night pulled the curtain on dreams as well as life. Light drained into dusk, and movement began among the coffins. They did not open so much as they peeled away, like the droop of decaying flowers. The coffins vanished and we, the congregated souls of the V.A. geriatric ward, lay coffinless. Old bodies stretched frail as tissue across bones fragile as the frame of a child's kite. We, a museum of the dead, lay in diminishing light. Then, sinking into darkness, our bodies disappeared and only a touch of light remained, like a wisp of smoke above dead faces; old faces; closed eyes behind which lay departed hope. The curtain of dark came down. Our faces vanished. The only sound to register through eternal night was the sound of Nurse Johnson sobbing,
II
"Come out of it. Please do." She gently shook my shoulder, because she is used to dealing with frail things. Nurse Johnson stood beside me as, it seemed, half the staff of this enormous place flurried around the dayroom. Shocked patients muttered to themselves, or turned toward each other with looks of belief, not disbelief; and belief had us running scared. Even senility cases looked in touch, and no damn quarrels started over what was illusion and what was real. People looked at each other, and silent messages passed. Nobody had seen anything. Pass it on. Make it clear even to those dumb Marines. Semper Fi, jarheads. Zip your lip and your fly. Shut down the detail.
"It's okay," I whispered to her. "At least I think it is." When she takes my wrist for a pulse, or Burnside's wrist, her touch is firm but gentle. When she's troubled her touch is that of a woman who loves. I do not say "lover," but one who gently, whether motherly or sisterly or even as a lover -- touches with perfect knowledge of how affection is shown. At such times Burnside stops his mouth with stutters. He turns a shade once known as panty-pink, which is the most blood he can summon for a blush.
When she takes my wrist I remember my first young love. Years shrug away like scabs from the skinned knees of youth. I feel weak as a ten-year-old who coasts his Western Flyer into a tree.
"We had hallucinations," I whispered. "It happens among cripples and sad sacks. I blame it on the New Deal. I even blame it on Eleanor. There was a time back in Indiana when we let the cats out . . . "Then I began to mumble. Nurse Johnson is used to geriatrics wandering in their minds, but she's also accustomed to me and Burnside.
"Don't do this," she told me. "Dementia is bad enough when it's real."
I would never say "bullshit" in front of a lady. "After Harvey passed you kidded Burnside," I whispered. "Did it help?"
She whispered back. "Are we really talking? Are you serious?" Her whisper is like dandelion down riding warm breezes. Where was this woman when I was her age and lonely? Not born yet. Ships pass, and I would rather die than put up with being young again. Since that's what's going to happen my attitude is wholesome. At the same time, ships pass in history and not just on ponds.
"I'm serious," I said. "You conned Burnside. Did it help you? Not, did it help Burnside, or me. Did it help you?"
"It made me sad. It was fun for a minute, and then it made me sad."
That was not the answer I expected, and sure as gospel didn't want.
"All suffering is wrong," she said. "Dog suffering is wrong. Even bug suffering is wrong." She struggled with some sort of nursish ethics, and decided in my case to make an exception. "Corporal Harve . . . "She honestly choked, a genuine chokeup.
"It hurt him." I tried to make my voice kind. "It's supposed to hurt. Part of the rules."
Around us staff moved with the caution of a combat patrol. They whispered to patients, and glanced at doors and windows. V.A. hospitals are not supposed to be weird. They are supposed to be palaces of dependability, dull as prunes.
"You beat the Bible," I told her. "The Bible gives us three score and ten. You helped Harvey make it for ten years beyond that." I stopped. She did not want to hear that. Her thought lay elsewhere.
"His spirit died," she said almost timidly. "Something awful is chasing you guys."
I sat frozen. Someone turned up the volume on the television. Soap is soap, but terror has some shape to it. Around me staff settled patients back into manageable routine, and patients looked at each other with unspoken promises to talk as soon as we got rid of staff.
Something awful chased us. It was not only what Johnson said, but the way she said it. Something awful.
Memories flashed. We once had our m.g.s dug in on Hill Seven-twenty in Korea, losing more men from freeze than from enemy fire. Ice. Snow. Blood on snow. Chinese corpses lay strewn across roads and fields and ditches like seed, frozen, mouths open, ice on their teeth. Here and there smoke plumes rose where our troops burned farmers' houses in order to stay alive. Oil on the m.g.s froze, making their action sluggish. Hill Seven-twenty spelled Hell on Earth. Nurse Johnson talked about something worse.
Nurse Johnson is a kid, but a kid with experience. She hasn't seen as many men die as I have, because that would amount to several, but she may have seen a couple dozen. If Harvey died differently she would know. I shuddered before a chill. I sat feeble and helpless. My teeth clicked.
Hill Seven-twenty was a comfort because you knew that for the rest of your life you would never be more miserable. This was different. We now spoke of something after death, and my chill came because of Johnson's words, and because ghosts waved goodbye. Burnside said those goodbyes made him uneasy. I wish to God I could settle for "uneasy."
"I'm not a preacher," I told her. "What do you mean, 'spirit'?"
"I'm not a preacher either, but when Corporal Harvey died nothing happened. Nothing."
"I don't read you."
"Absolutely nothing."
"You were tired."
"Absolutely nothing."
When men die they sort of expire, assuming they are not blown to bits. Something happens. The person leaves. Nothing romantic about it, nothing impressive. They just go until they stop, and then stop. Sometimes the body ticks on for a second or seconds. The point is, no matter how minuscule, something always happens. There is a stepping off, a final sigh or choke or spasm. Always. When you turn out a light bulb you are aware that light departs. It goes quick, but there is a "going away." Same with men who die.
And with Harvey nothing happened. Something nailed him before he could give a final shrug. I mourned Harvey for exactly two seconds, and would mourn more later -- if there was going to be a "later."
Nurse Johnson trembled. "I should keep quiet when I don't know what I'm talking about."
In general that's true, because it stands her in the ranks of the rest of the world, but in this case it wasn't true. "You did me a favor," I told her. "Maybe you did all of us a favor. Will you help me to my room?"
Helplessness is the lousiest of lousy feelings. Around here we pretend independence, but could not defend ourselves against a bouncing puppy; and at our age a bouncing puppy can kill. One stumble, one fall. The clock was running. If something popped Harvey, it waited to pop us. We had little time for defense, were physically capable of squat. This would take brains, and half the brains in this asylum are covered with dust.
Ghosts accompanied us as Nurse Johnson led me to my room, whispy ghosts who made no points. These were people I never knew or even shot at. They were vaguely oriental, maybe Malay, and small but pretty. They went nervously about their business, but even in these polished halls I could smell, like an echo, the sharp scent of cordite. If they were Malay the cordite likely came from Japanese artillery. These Malays sort of chirped in that soft, island language that seems all vowels, and Nurse Johnson led me through packs of them. You can get used to anything.
I wondered what Burnside saw, and waited in the room knowing he would come a-rolling any minute. Nurse Johnson parked me, patted my shoulder with a gentle hand, and went about her business.
Ghosts passed before me, around me, and it really didn't matter. They are around us, always, and we pay no attention. They are spirits of the past, and the past is friendly. The reason to understand history is not to avoid the mistakes of history-- because some fool will make those mistakes for you. Some maniac will start a war, and some other maniac will drop an atom bomb, and you'll be the poor bastard who gets to drop the bomb or be hit by it.
No, you understand history so you can understand yourself.
When Burnside wheeled into the room he looked like a man who needed the chaplain. His chair moved slowly, the tattered battle flag not lifted by any breeze, and Burnside was a man who had the trap knocked out of him. He swung into bed like he aimed to stay for the duration. Not a good sign.
He turned on his side. Then he fidgeted; didn't like the idea, turned on his back and stared at the ceiling. He didn't like that either, so he sat up and did some truly magnificent cussing. He swore quietly, like a man talking to a jammed carbine while fearing the enemy is in the neighborhood and close. He didn't repeat a word. It was stupendous cussing. Inspired.
" . . . like a garage sale at a mortuary," he said finally. "Ross, we're boogered on this one. We got a Chinaman's chance in Toyko, that's what we got."
I didn't contradict, but if ghosts wanted to nail us, why bother to get elaborate? Our ghosts seemed trying to help.
"They're trying to tell us something,," I said to Burnside. I did not say anything about Harvey. No reason to send Burnside into deeper funk. "Plus," I told him, "other ghosts seem trying to help. Your Japanese kid was never on staff around here before."
From beyond the doorway the hall filled with murmurs, and from the dayroom a voice raised in a thin cry. One of the senility boys sang " . . . you don't know what lonesome is 'til you get to herdin' cows. . . . "followed by, "here's to the captain, here's to the crew, and here's to the girls. . . . " and somebody hushed him.
"I copped my first feel, at least the first feel I remember, when I was six." Burnside seemed about to become senile himself. Either that, or this was more b.s. I waited for a Burnside story -- waited for the end of the world -- for the dead to rise -- for the second coming -- for a face-to-face with whatever dark evil waited to axe our spirits.
" . . . there was no call to kill that kid," Burnside whispered. "We could of worked something out. We could have both kept running." His voice became harsh and controlled, the kind of voice a noncorn uses when he reads out a total screwup. We take pride in not feeling sorry for ourselves, but Burnside took it a little too far. He had bullshitted around this issue for his whole life, and now the b.s. didn't work. He would not be talking harsh if he was not eating away on guilt. You'd think, after all these years, the Japanese kid would be at peace. You'd think Burnside would have come to terms with it. Instead he sat, wiped, totally blown out of town.
"Shish kata ga nai. It can't be helped," I said to him. "It was a fatality, a fatalism. Forget it."
"He was skinny at the time," Burnside said in a voice just above a whisper. "They were on short rations. Skinny and sick and dirty in that crappy way you only get in jungles. He had diarrhea. Even after he died."
The kid looked better as a ghost. Clean uniform, healthy smile. Death seemed to agree with him. I wasn't proud of the way I thought. There is b.s. and there is sick b.s. I whispered, "Good luck, soldier."
"You know how it goes," Burnside said. "He maybe wasn't the first, but he was the worst. Dammit, Ross."
I knew what he meant. I also owned problems in that line, but didn't want to think about them . . . and thanks for the memories.
"Both of you were wrong," I told Burnside, "especially him. He was a soldier who acted like a priest. He sentenced you to life. You lived it. He didn't. You're both kicked in your ornaments." Some kind of flak erupted in the dayroom. A quavery voice began reciting poetry in the sing-song-y manner of schoolkids. The guy tried a passage from "The Wreck of the Hesperus." Memorized in about sixth grade. He got it wrong, but mostly right.
"I'm so damn popular," Burnside said, "because I overcharge and do poor work." He lay down, turned his back to me. "If something's gonna happen, let it."
Men sometimes acted this way in Korea. Temperatures dropped. Chinese artillery pounded. Chinese attacked. They came in swarms, and there did not seem enough explosive in the world to stop them. After the heat of attack, and as sweat began to freeze deep in our clothes, a man might climb into his sleeping bag where he would not be warm but could keep from freezing. And, the man became pupa, determined not to hatch. Men did that when they gave up. You couldn't even kick them out of those bags. Men died in attacks because they lay snugged in, refusing that last ration of hell the world so generously served.
"I got a problem," I said to Burnside. "I don't have the strength to club your sorry butt."
He grunted. "I know a guy," he mumbled, "that when he dies is going to have his ashes sprinkled on a farm in South Dakota."
" . . . a thumbnail history of the Japanese on Guadalcanal," I told him. "Courage, combined with stupidity, does not make successful soldiers. Think about that before you check out." Here he was, talking about his ashes while I'm sweating his spirit.
Still, it was his spirit. One man, one vote.
I sensed movement in the far corner of the room. Mist slowly gathered, and movement in the mist did not seem occidental. If our ghosts tried to help then Burnside lay as perfect fodder. The mist might contain a clot of Burnside's personal ghosts. I didn't say a word. Just shuffled away on legs not exactly inspired, but feeling less worse than usual. The Japanese kid, and maybe an entire slew of ghosts, formed up to do a number on Burnside. Either ghosts are a metaphor for history, or history is a metaphor for ghosts.
Nurse Johnson would think I was a real gadabout. I moved back toward the dayroom feeling grim. Absolute Evil exists. As kids we geriatrics learned all about it, and no damn social worker had better come along and blame "evil" on "conditions." Evil is a force in the universe, a force using any weakness it finds to do its dirt; and with Evil, Hell is just a sideline.
My mind sorrowed. Harvey had been snatched. He was an old, old soldier, but inside him lived a spirit that was blithe. If his spirit lay hostage, or destroyed, even ghostland took a loss.
Besides, Harvey was a good friend. We weep no tears, knowing he would be too proud of us to weep for us. Still, there are such things as invisible tears. Nurse Johnson weeps them, as well as the other kind.
And then there is Nurse Johnson, a good kid in a bad world. Her world reeks with folk who hold no beliefs, or cheap beliefs; people who hope, when they die, to report to Saint Peter with clean bowels. They worry about cholesterol while their kids shoot each other down in the streets.
Nurse Johnson lives in a nation that whines over self-inflicted wounds while claiming itself a victim. At least the people I walked toward did not have minds filled with that kind of shinola. Like everyone else we are filled with a certain amount of crap, but not that crap.
. . . something feathered around my mind, almost like the touch of inspiration portrayed in Victorian pictures, or the whisper of someone long dead who wanted to pass me a tip. I almost understood our final act, and why we must act. Then the feathery thing went away. I started counting backward from 100, it's the classic test to see if you've got Alzheimer's. The feathery notion might return, because 99 went to 98, and so forth. . . .
Evil uses Hell as a parking lot, and you don't have to die to park. Evil sets people in the middle of war, famine, excess prosperity, or other of Hell's appurtenances, then stands back as people freeze or sizzle; and screw themselves. The main interest of Evil is destruction of faith in gods and ethics, knowledge and honor. When faith is destroyed people create their own hells, and a sign stretches across the universe writ large for all to see. It reads: The Future Is Canceled.
Maybe it was not simply our spirits at risk, because, as the world turns, faith these days is doing hard time. Maybe Nurse Johnson, and all the other fine people I didn't know, but who must be in the world, were at risk. When faith is destroyed, what happens to those who are faithful to their trust? I tottered along figuring that if evil was after me I could stand it, but if it came for Nurse Johnson then this pilgrim was pissed.
No sound came from behind me, but ahead sounded a mixture of querulous voices. Mortar fire properly timed sounds like tearing paper, and so did the voices. Distance to the dayroom is sixty feet. At flank speed I could have made it in two minutes, but my own ghosts picked that moment for their own.
I leaned against a wall and found myself looking down at a misted valley-plain of rice paddies, and for once I owned the high ground. Rocks lay scattered around a low crest of hills. Behind me rose a stark mountain blasted black by gunfire. My squad had our light thirties dug in across a broad ridge in Korea, early in the war. I watched the plain, watched ground mist rise from the paddies, and knew this was a rerun. I fought against doing this twice, because no one sane would want to do it once.
Five white specks appeared in the distance and moved toward me. I knew them, did not know their names. They were patriarchs, five old men dressed in white, men who should have died in the quiet security of their homes, surrounded by sons and daughters and grandchildren. They were men who had once been the man I would become, old, not wise, but smart for their day and time.
They moved slowly through mist, as reluctant as I to again confront madness. In mist behind them, like on a movie screen, rose pictures of a few faces of Hell; reels of Pathay News, the March of Time; buildings breaking beneath artillery, walls crumbling about women and children crouching in cellars. And from the far, far distance, far at sea, tattered life jackets still afloat, bobbing, the heads of sailors so thriftily held above the waves now turned to bleached and polished skulls.
The old Koreans moved toward me. Armbands with Korean writing showed them as Rok, Republic of Korea, allies. Two carried old-fashioned, long-barreled squirrel rifles, because there were bandits in these mountains. The other three walked with staffs. As they approached they smiled, but that is not the way it went the first time. The first time went like this:
My squad dug in behind a low ridge overlooking a valley. We had a long, thin line not well armed. We did not have enough men across a broad front, and North Koreans banzaied one section of the line, then another. They kept it up all afternoon. We stacked them up like cordwood, and they stacked us.
Night came down moonless, darker than the bottom of a nighttime sea. Only our ears hinted at movement in the valley. From far, far away an occasional moan or sigh sounded as dying men lay alone, because neither side of the line so much as wiggled. There might be wounded out there, or it might be a trick.
The North Koreans hit again at midnight. They banzaied the left of our line, then banzaied again. Night came alive with tracers, and action rolled beneath flares as our mortars illuminated the valley. The attack was too far to our left to mean anything, except indignation. The attack made so much noise we could not tell what might gather right in front of us.
I froze to the pistol grip of the m.g. We heard nothing. No flares danced overhead. Night seemed concentrated, pointed, directed at our very sanity. Night seemed ready to explode with oriental voices, faces, the screams of a mindless horde, hell-a-poppin', Hell incarnate.
Then, to our left, the second attack stopped. Flares snuffed, darkness returned. The valley once more seemed covered with the dying.
"My momma didn't raise me to be a ground pounder," one of our guys whispered, "so what are we doin'. . . . " and then he shut up.
Slightly to our right and so close as to seem underfoot, a noise clicked. Wood on rock, like a rifle butt carried too low. To my right the other m.g. opened at that first snick of sound. Riflemen fired blindly, hysteric. I fired like one insane, like a man trying to kill the night, finally forcing my finger off the trigger before the barrel melted.
From right in front of us came a cry, "Ai-gue! Ai-gue!" Then a torrent of words, and then a single voice, "Ai-gue! Ai-gue!" I burned the rest of the ammo belt, the m.g. bouncing like a mad instrument as I rose, trying to get further depression. The voice sobbed. "Ai-gue. Ai-gue."
"Do that sonovabitch," someone yelled. "For Chrissake, stop the noise."
One of our guys hopped over the ridge, stumbled, then emptied a carbine in the direction of the voice. Silence. Silence. We shivered until dawn.
Korean bodies are no more remarkable than Chinese bodies, but they wear different clothes. As first light crept across the sky, lumps of white shone nearly luminescent on the downhill slope. Light gathered to show the banzai attack we fought so hysterically was no attack at all. Five old men, two nearly headless from repeated hits, lay with white beards running red. White clothing shone black-stained with drying blood. The corpses lay small and tangled. They lay like the death of history.
Our company commander appeared through morning mist, checking the line, doing his job. He looked over the ridge, looked at the corpses, said, "Musta been one whale of a fight," and walked on down the line. We sat fully ashamed, wondering "what the hell," when along came a corpsman who knew a little Korean. He said "Ai-gue! Ai-gue!" means "My Lord. My Lord."
Now they stood before me. Koreans are taller than most orientals, and these old men stood straight but not stiff. I leaned against the wall, waited, wondering if this was going to be death or a dry run.
They waited as well. Very polite, but not Jap polite. Koreans take a different fix on good behavior.
"Don't think I haven't thought about it," I told them, and did not know whether words ran from my mouth or only from my thought. "You guys were probably trying to cut a deal for your village. Maybe with us, maybe with the North. You carried two flags, depending on which army was in your neighborhood, and you did it to protect your kids."
They smiled. Koreans are not inscrutable, at least not when they're being honest. One nodded. I actually saw them relax, like a sense of relief swept over them.
"And you heard all that fighting to our left, so you skirted the action around the base of that ridge." I watched them. So far, so good. They watched me with interest. "But your mistake was to move at night. You could not tell where the lines were dug in."
The tallest one framed the word, "anio," "no," with his mouth. No sound. Just the shape of the word.
"Then you had to move at night?"
The mouth framed "neh," "yes."
"Then you were the advance. . . . "I broke off, knowing after all these years, why those men suddenly appeared under our guns. Their entire village must have been fleeing south. The enfiladed valley could not be crossed. These old men led, trying to find a way across the ridge and onto the mountain before the sun rose over their women and children. Their young men would have been gone, pressed into service by the North, or held prisoner by the Allies.
"I pray your people made it," I said, "and I honor you."
They turned to look across the valley where people worked in rice paddies, where farmer's houses sat small and distinct, and where raised paths carried the normal traffic of normal living. I heard music few occidentals can really understand, saw forms and shapes of costumes and dress, saw children sitting beside grandmothers. I saw old fashioned cities, quiet streets, small shops, colorful flags and ornaments and decorations--life before machine guns, before communism and capitalism and the ambition of generals.
And then the scene changed as across the valley rolled a totality of darkness. It came crashing like a tidal wave, and, churning like a wave in the darkness, were flashes of neon, the static of electronics, the buzz and hiss and crackle of a brave new world. The old men stood facing the surge and thump of modern times. They stood squarely, waiting the approach of darkness, then stepped toward the darkness for all the world like men headed into an all-out fight. Darkness rolled toward them, the valley disappeared, and the scene faded, dispersed; and I found myself leaning against a hospital wall and pointed toward the dayroom.
It was about as much action as this child could take. I inched forward looking for a chair, even one before a TV. I would park my carcass and take a blow. Unreal spooks lived on television, electronic spooks with names and haircuts; mindless noise. It wouldn't be the same but it might be restful. I wondered how Burnside made out back in our room. I wondered if Burnside's ghosts were having any luck. I halfway wished he would show up.
In the dayroom patterns of light swirled, illuminated faces, cast shadows; and nothing looked restful. Light danced phantasmic as aurora borealis, flashing across old faces, wattled necks, scraggly limbs. Where normal light should fall through large windows, darkness glowered. Oppressive gloom lay beyond those windows. Even as I watched gloom fell to darkness, impenetrable, empty, deep as reaches of space. Black was not simply a presence, but an aggressive absence of light. It backgrounded weirdly illuminated figures of my companions, made them into pictures surreal as effusions of Dali -- fearsome as improbable Laughter issuing from the depths of mausoleums.
Each person in that dayroom was surrounded by his own ghosts. Ghosts of the enemy mixed with ghosts of the Allies. Reinforcements seemed to be coming in from everywhere. I wondered if this was a last bastion, a place of some fateful and final resolution. I lined myself up in the direction of a chair and putzed forward. I heard the swish of a wheelchair.
"Be thankful for bald-headed people," Burnside said. "Ross, I got a problem." He wheeled his chair in front of me, twirled a couple of circles, and Burnside's mouth might be tossing a minor load of b.s. but the line across that mouth was firm. The old sarge was back on top of things.
"You're looking better," I told him. "Have you gained weight, or have you done something with your hair?" It was obvious that Burnside's ghosts had given him some sort of reason to quit pouting.
" . . . getting stuff settled with that kid. It cheered him somewhat." Burnside looked around the dayroom. " . . . like old home week at the pearly gates," he muttered. He watched some of the action, shook his head; steered his chair between me and the goings-on like a machine gunner covering a retreat. "The Good Book says 'This too shall pass,' and I've found that's always true, except in the case of gallstones."
"Welcome back," I told him and found a chair. The TV bubbled mindlessly as I watched the dayroom. What with all the silent messages between ghosts and geriatrics, what I saw was wild and less than wonderful --like a Chinese fire drill -- the Greek airforce -- the Estonian navy.
Mostly what I saw was blood and neon, history and the present, everything mixed; and, as everything mixed, darkness grew as people and ghosts became diminutive. We were getting cut down to size by darkness -- and where it came from -- what it wanted -- I could not tell.
"Did you ever hate anybody you were shooting at?" It was a dumb question in Burnside's mouth, the kind of question an old soldier is not supposed to ask. There are standard attitudes toward the enemy, and old soldiers are supposed to know them.
I was still pretty shaken up. My breath came fast and shallow. "Only when they shot back." That was not strictly true. I did not hate the standard Kraut or standard North Korean, but the German S.S. would never rest peaceful in my mind.
"Because," Burnside mused, "they were just dog soldiers. Doing a job. Nothing to get hateful about."
Either Burnside suffered a conversion, and angelic wings were about to whisk him to heavenly realms and walls of gold, or else his ghosts told him something that made him confidential. He talked about pretty personal stuff.
"The Bataan death march," I told him. "So much for your dog soldiers."
"You're a man of many parts, though somewhat scattered. Don't trap me about the far east."
What I know about the far east mostly has to do with broken cities and broken bodies. I did not spend time on R&R, and did not spend time on occupation. "History itself is scattered," I said, "and don't crap me about Bataan. I reckon you've been in touch with the farside."
We watched the dayroom, the encroaching dark, as the show began to fade. Geriatrics stood wiped out. Ghosts winked out. people stared at empty space, then turned to each other; murmured, touched hands, checked the "realness" of people and things. They jiggled chairs before sitting, just to be sure the chair existed. They did not sit quiet. Each and every. one of those kids started beating his gums.
"Toyko and peanut butter," Burnside said, "and if that isn't the damndest?" He watched our troops jaw at each other. "Makes you yearn for South Dakota."
Darkness faded, but glowered as it faded. Darkness might disappear along with our haunts, but it seemed to wait just beyond the daylight windows. It was there, pressing, and it would come for us in its time.
"Get a little more exact," I said. "Peanut butter?"
"We're sitting pretty here," Burnside said, "and Ross, you've become neglectful. What I'm gonna tell you is straight dope."
I waited for another Burnside story, figuring he would bull around some little while before getting to the point. It was a mistake. If you hit Burnside with an expectation he'll usually exceed it.
"Our fifty-first state," Burnside said about Japan. "We raised a whole generation on peanut butter."
Oriental diets are generally thin on protein. During the occupation some very bright people used peanut butter to raise protein levels among children. The kids, being kids, lapped it up.
"One thing led to another," Burnside said. "By now those kids are hurting and don't even know it. I find it less than fascinatin'."
"You and the farside had a go-around. Then you haul out of bed and get cracking. Now you're blowing smoke. What."
"The Japanese kid showed me Tokyo. Tokyo ain't Tokyo anymore," Burnside said. "It's a damn party. Something's dying in the Jap spirit. The past is dying, but something else is dying." Burnside has never been real subtle. Furrows on his forehead did not stop where the hairline had once ended. "I don't get it," he told me. "My ghosties said the same thing Harvey said: 'Get off your goldbrickin' butt and get an honest job.'"
That would have been an interesting conversation, except our ghosts weren't talking. Burnside imagined things.
"Payback time," he said. "It's the least I can do for the kid."
He really fretted about his Japanese soldier. Bad enough we tried to figure a message, now Burnside had to get his morals in gear.
"I got roughly the same message from Korea," I told him, "but it came from the countryside, not the city."
Burnside looked like a man in mourning. "Her name was Yukiko. I should of brought her home with me." Burnside was saturated in guilt up to his starched little dickie. "During '44 she lived in a cave with her family, avoiding bombs. Her best memory was when they caught a stray cat. It was the only meat they had in '44."
"The rules would seem to indicate," I told him, "that if you start a war you really can't complain when people drop bombs on you."
"She didn't start it, you didn't start it . . . " Burnside wallowed before an abstraction, and Burnside is not Houdini when it comes to abstractions.
He tried to say something more, and failed, but sparked that feeling in me that I somehow knew our final act.
"You're the guy with the gift of gab," I told him. "Check around. See what's up while everybody's still talking."
I had a piece of thinking ahead of me and didn't need help, especially Burnside's. "Get it right," I told him, "because we won't know what to do until we know what we've got. The time-line of history is getting a little thin."
Burnside nodded, checked me over to make sure I sat firmly settled, and wheeled away. Sometimes he reminds me of a kid in a soap box derby.
III
No one recalls the names of dog soldiers who fought beside Leonidas at Thermopylae, or with Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours; but how they fought, and what they fought for, lives through centuries. Without those forgotten men western civilization could not have come into being. They put it all on the line, because there are times in history when universal evil crawls from its cave of darkness.
When those battles happened, though, what did anyone know? The dog soldier only knew that some fool Persian had it in his head to whip the world, or a Moorish chieftain was on the prod.
And the dog soldier stood. He stood between the enemy and home, standing before a way of life that was particularly his. If in his home he was boss during peace, then during war he paid for the honor. The male of the species defends his land and home. It will always be that way. At least that is true of the Infantry.
Some such thoughts flicked through my mind, more certain than the flickering of television. Around me people who hadn't spoken to each other since they arrived started talking. Some who never talked at least tried to come from behind a camouflage of silence.
There are not enough of us here to make a platoon. We are a small group, and like other forgotten soldiers are about to become a mere dot on the wall map of the past.
Yet, the far side charged us to step forward one more once. I asked myself: what did we have to give that could be of any possible use? If anyone here was rich he wouldn't be parked at V.A.
So what use are we? Burnside hopes to die exhausted in a cathouse with the sweet-sweet taste of bourbon on his tongue. My own ambition is less raunchy. I want, at age ninety, to be gunned down while storming the Congress.
And that, of course, is so much bull. Burnside will die in bed, or of stroke in his wheelchair. Considering the remnants of his prostate, he wouldn't make any kind of show in a brothel, anyway.
TV light flickered here and there about the room. TV doesn't claim me much, but sometimes I watch light flicker on darkened walls. The rest of our troops face the screen, but I'm engrossed with flickering. Sometimes it looks like distant shellfire, and sometimes like cities burning. Sometimes, though, greens and blues chase reds away, and walls of the dayroom seem mysterious as haunted woods, or, when yellow happens, like meadows on a spring morning.
I watched the flickers, thought of modern times, and it came to me that we've never stopped fighting. When our wars ceased, a rearguard action began. We fought against deterioration of order; and lost as an old culture died and society went crazy at the funeral. Yammer got crowned King, with chatter its Queen.
At least bull keeps us from becoming maudlin. We do not deify the past, as the flickers rise upward. No one here believes in Lawrence Welk or Eisenhower.
I watched our troops clam up whenever a member of staff approached. Even Nurse Johnson had trouble getting more than a simple greeting. At the same time, people hard-of-hearing talked confidentially at the top of their voices. In a little while staff would decide that something on TV had driven us nuts, that their personal worlds ran normal; and they were doing their jobs. Humans, being creative, can rewrite anything.
. . . which is a coy way of suggesting that each young generation invents history according to its own bigotries. The rewritten history gets quoted to show that one or another special group has perpetually saved civilization while suffering abuse known only to holy saints. The justification for historians is the same as the justification for janitors. Both sweep up the mess when the public gets done trashing.
Nurses and orderlies mingled, picking up a bit here, a bit there. Nurse Johnson acted smarter, which is usual. She hung back and listened. She touched people's hands, arms, and moved like warm music. Nurse Johnson is the best of what remains good about the world. She should work in pediatrics, not a geriatric ward . . . except, I've already said that, and it isn't true. I suggested it once and she said she prefers geriatrics. What she actually said was, "You guys talk ornery as skunks, but you take care of each other." Then she said she had already worked in pediatrics, and some people don't love their children.
Nurse Johnson comes to me in dreams and I am young. Curiously, she comes as a long-loved friend, or as a wife of many, many years; although in the dreams we are both too young for that. Or, she comes like innocence that was once adolescence, of hand-holding in movies, the dark screen flashing images of love or action while hands, not yet fully grown, twine fingers in an ecstasy of investigation; learning that this -- this touching in this sweet way -- explains all there is to know about the word "happiness."
I must have dozed off. Old men do that, fall into bemused sleep. Then flaccid muscles cramp, joints scrape like bone against sandpaper, and we awake. Pain is nature's way of mentioning that pharmaceutical companies enjoy an array of opportunities.
The Hour of Charm was underway. Our troops sat pooped, worn, busted and beat from all the excitement. If any mouths yapped they yapped to themselves. If consensus had been reached I hadn't heard, and half of these palookas had forgotten it by now. The dayroom sat solidly quiet except for TV. TV spooks discoursed as if believing it meant something. As I came fully awake the main show stood in the windows facing the cemetery. Ghosts no longer impressed me, but this thing did. The figure stood like a hologram of black on deeper black, standing more needful than the king's ghost in the rampart scene from Hamlet; and like the ghost of Hamlet's father, the figure beckoned. Worse, it waved me forward in the time-honored infantryman's signal to advance.
I needed this the way guys in trenches need head lice. At the same time, who could pass up such an opportunity? I made it to my feet. My walker trembled, although, natch, I walked steady as mountains. The figure in the window waited, and maybe the dayroom stayed bright but darkness rose before me.
Something resembling Corporal Harvey stood in irons, like a man foot-bound on a chain gang; but only Harvey's eyes told any kind of story. They shone not wild, not crazy, but were great pools of sadness, a sadness portending universal judgment, universal sorrow. Worse, it seemed the figure stood in a steadily increasing wind.
That Harvey, who was once so smart, was now mindless, also showed in the eyes. Only sorrow lay there. Intelligence, if it remained, hid inaccessible, remote to Harvey, forgotten by Harvey who now stood as the ghost of a ghost of an old soldier.
The ghost of a ghost must surely be a walking memory. I felt the many memories of darkness surrounding this hospital, this century, the lives and deaths that skip or trample or stumble across time; and darkness stood before me like a slab of slate.
. . . sooner or later one of us had to get brave as well as smart. I edged past the windows and onto the terrace. The terrace seemed normal; tables, chairs, a long distance view of the city which swelled like a boil between Puget Sound and the Cascade Mountains. From distance came the roar that attends cities, and it pounded and twisted, cooed and pulsed. Light flashed above dark streets, light from skyscrapers, aircraft, and searchlights dancing above used car lots.
The cemetery started about fifty yards away, and ran across the face of the hill as ordered as a bank statement. The poor bastards kicking daisies were still lined up in ranks. White slabs shone dazzling in surrounding darkness. I wondered, as I had wondered before, if flunkies or gremlins came at night and polished those slabs.
Further down, the woods began, and beyond the woods the bridge, park, bandstand; all broken now, but in the distance still giving the appearance of sanity and order.
Darkness stained but did not obscure the landscape. It fell backward as I advanced. Darkness moved slowly, sullen, like an animal on defense but not cowed; or it moved with calm assurance that my days were short and its patience long. I searched the face of darkness and Harvey was nowhere seen, but I right away saw how Harvey had been snatched. When men die -- and I nearly have a couple of times -- they are occupied. Dying is what they're doing, their job. They don't pay attention beyond the job, and that happened to Harvey. He was taken while his attention pointed elsewhere.
"I try to run a couple months late. That way I avoid the crowds." Burnside whispered as he wheeled next to me. "We got a merry little hell on our hands. You'd better take a seat." It is not like Burnside to whisper.
"Something's coming clear," I said, and did not know whether I spoke to Burnside or Harvey or darkness. "You can only picture the future based on what you know about the past. If history dies the future can only be hideous."
"I owe my brains to my poetic nature," Burnside said, "because at least one of us is sensitive. Sit."
I hovered above my walker and regarded darkness. I now knew what it was, but just because you can name a thing does not mean you understand it.
"Fan out to my left," I told him, "like you're going to flank." I moved toward the edge of the terrace, where the concrete slab stops and grass begins. Burnside wheeled left, then rolled slowly along the edge. I watched darkness pause, retreat, become sullen as a spoiled child; more dangerous than a teenager with a Mauser. It backed five or six yards downhill. "You're right," I said to Burnside, "we do have a merry little hell, and a firefight's in the offing." I turned, found a chair near the edge of the terrace, sat. Darkness ceased retreating.
"Tell me a story," I said to Burnside.
"Nurse Johnson calmed the troops. The kid is a peach." Burnside looked downhill. In the center of darkness stood mean terrain; a gentle slope that begged for enfilading fire, a young forest to distribute shell bursts, a rickety bridge crossing a ravine that only a torrential river could love; and a haunted park. I listened, really listened as Burnside turned factual. For the first time I understood why he made top sergeant in the old Army.
"The situation ain't just tactical," he said, "it's strategic. If the damned thing was solid enough to put a fork into, you'd see the movement of armies, and they'd move across hemispheres."
"Not that I'd doubt someone who's saintly. . . . "
Burnside raised a hand to shut me up. "The dayroom has guys who have been everywhere, and it has ghosts from everywhere. This is no crap, Ross."
"How solid is it?"
"That's the trouble," Burnside said. "You can't lay a glove on it. But, what we're up against is dark as the inside of a snake, and that's not a bad picture. It throws coils."
As he talked a theme repeated over and over: darkness cut with flashes. Our men saw Rome and Madrid, Paris and Berlin, London town and Athens. They saw Hong Kong, Sidney, Bora Bora, the Falklands, Murmansk, Tunisia; and every place looked the same: thundering noise mindless as carnival rides obscured all silence, and fires rose not above military encampments, but above schools; not above shipyards but above mosques, cathedrals, meeting houses, while ceremonial dragons fled before encroaching night.
I looked into distance at the city, a dark city cut with flashes. Nurse Johnson lives somewhere in that city. Somewhere, in an apartment with a roommate or a lover or perhaps only a cat, Nurse Johnson irons dresses, fixes dinners, perhaps listens to light rock or jazz. She grows an ivy, or, more likely, a philodendron, and her kitchen curtains are a happy color, red, or orange, or blue with yellow ducks. Beyond the glow of that apartment darkness crouches. Nurse Johnson probably does not know it is there. Or, because she is young, she does not know how fast it can hit and how hard.
"You've been to college," Burnside said, "so what the hell is happening?" He rolled back and forth along the edge of the terrace, and he watched his movement cause slow waves in the darkness. "The kid's gonna be here any second, so spill."
I did not know if he meant his Nippon soldier or Nurse Johnson who would be about to go off shift.
"You're a cupcake," Burnside said to the darkness. "A Nance, a lollipop, a Shirley Temple; you're a pint of pup pee, and your ma remains disappointed. . . . " I raised my hand. When Burnside starts on insults it can take a while. He looked at me. "Why are we worked up? It runs from us."
What to tell him? Should I tell about the burning of the great library in ancient Alexandria?
"It doesn't give a damn one way or other for us," I told him. "It's come after what we remember and believe." Behind us a door swung open. Nurse Johnson, about to go off watch, stepped onto the terrace.
She stood silhouetted against darkness, and did not see the darkness. Her mouth pursed, and her face became a study in determination. Her slight form concentrated on immediate tasks. Her thoughts shaped to tell us goodbye. I wondered how it was for her working in a place where every goodbye might be a last one -- which is a cliche -- but around here really true. How often had she said goodbye to a patient, only to come to work next day and find he was dead?
"I saved you gentlemen for last," she said in a low voice, "so don't try to snow your girlfriend. Something is happening and it isn't nice."
"Mickey Mouse is only Mickey Mouse," Burnside told her, his voice grim. "Old Mickey ain't supposed to be a national hero."
She looked my way. "You're the one who keeps this guy on a leash. Does he make the least smidgen of sense?"
"He misses South Dakota and the Dust Bowl. Burnside's turning into a duffer . . . " It wasn't going to fly. Nice try, but it didn't work. . . . "When we talked about Harvey you told me something awful. You were right."
She straightened, looked around, stepped to the edge of the terrace. Darkness pulsed, moved uphill toward her. If Burnside and I did not sit on that terrace, darkness would engulf her.
Burnside muttered something about darkness, so low she could not hear, something moderately filthy.
"What I tell you stays between us," I said. "If it gets out we'll have shrinks and social workers. Our people see ghosts. We see what snatched Harvey."
"And 'scared' ain't in it," Burnside told her. "Our guys feel mean as mange. They're talking 'fight.' They're growing new teeth and toenails . . . one of the curses of being sober."
"I almost don't believe in ghosts."
She was snaring part of the problem. If ghosts are a metaphor for history, then belief is a leap into reality. If history is a metaphor for ghosts, matters get really serious.
"You believe the part about Harvey being snatched." I watched her and cursed my imagination. The fires of history burn hot and long, but memories of fires do not burn long enough. Nurse Johnson does not know that women and children are always first to be devoured. They do not die by ranks and squads and armies, but helter-skelter, the casual victims of forces headed elsewhere; forces blowing aside populations like chaff. Nurse Johnson is one strong young woman, and she knows more about suffering than almost anyone else her age . . . and she ain't seen nothing.
"I know what I saw." Now Nurse Johnson whispered about Harvey. "I have to do something. We can't . . . " and she stopped, because she about said "we can't have any more getting snatched," and she about said it while standing between seventy-eight- and eighty-year-old guys. She bit her lower lip, tried to grin, made a poor show. "You're right," she said. "We don't need social workers."
We had a doomed situation. Nurse Johnson was going to go through her share of pain and sorrow. No way out of it. No way to break it gently. I decided not to break it at all. At the same time, I couldn't betray her. "Keep staff off our backs," I told her. "It's our problem." Not true, Nurse Johnson, it's your problem too. "And if we can't handle it we'll give you a ring."
"You're really seeing ghosts?" The nice thing about Nurse Johnson is her ability to stop being a nurse and start being a woman when anything important happens. "You sound okay."
"I wish it was DTs," Burnside said, "but it ain't."
"You've never seen a bad case of DTs," she told him almost absent-mindedly. "What are you guys going to do?"
"Fight back," I told her, and then lied. "I'm not sure how. Keep staff off our backs. We'll work it out in a day or so, maybe more."
"You'll tell me?"
"I will." What a liar. I'll tell you after it's over, Nurse Johnson. News from nowhere.
She patted Burnside's bald head, which made him blush, touched the back of my hand, and left.
"Hard to win a war unless you win the battles," Burnside said.
"If we just sit still we'll get picked off one by one."
"I never made notches on my rifle or my bedpost. Seemed like cheating, somehow."
"Now I know for certain the world is gonna end," I told him. "You just confessed to being a gentleman."
"I can stand being decent," Burnside told me, "for as long as we keep it private. Plus, the fickle finger seems to be pointing our way." I could not tell if he understood what he talked about, or if this was more bull. On some level he knew we had to go into this clean; no jam on our face.
It is a creature of dissolution. It wakes when minds of men become narrow, secular, vengeful; and at some point it turns foul and crawls among us remembering flames of Inquisition.
I spent my working life patrolling the past. Now I patrolled the future. "One more battle," I told Burnside.
"If it makes sense."
"When did any of this crap ever make sense?"
"It can't be worse than the Canal."
It couldn't be worse than Hill Seven-twenty. I looked across the terrain. Hill Seven-twenty was worse, but the enemy had only been North Koreans. I thought of them, thought of how they banzaied, courageous as madness can make a man, running into the mouths of guns because a politico told them their country was attacked. I wished I had a battalion of them.
"I hope," Burnside said, and not to me -- his voice tight and not conversational -- "that being dead has taught you something about soldiering."
His Japanese ghost stood beside him. It's amazing about kids, whether Nurse Johnson or this kid; how the best of them can stand rosy with ideals and still firm as duty. This kid's smooth face was serious as combat, yet his lips did not conceal an excited little smile. I looked him over, thought of his record, and was not sure we wanted him.
"Step up to the edge of the grass," Burnside said. "I won't let nothing happen."
The kid stepped forward. Darkness tumbled, reached uphill, but did not manage to advance. On the other hand, it didn't retreat, either.
"You better stay out of this," Burnside said. "There's some real meanness down there." Burnside rolled forward, his chair side by side with the kid. Darkness did not flee, but it rolled backward at a faster rate. "Runs like a bunny," Burnside said, "but it don't run from ghosties. At the same time ghosties help." He looked up at the kid. "You bringing company?"
The kid pointed his index finger at his chest. Alone.
"It don't pay to be brave and stupid both," Burnside told the kid. "Think it over."
The kid smiled, then raised a fist without smiling, and then winked out.
I watched shadows creep across the terrain. Darkness lay beyond the city, but these shadows were natural darkness which approached with normal things like TV news, and supper, and pills. Hurry sundown.
"I'm thinking about symbols," I told Burnside. "Flags and such."
I'm thinking about recruiting posters. . . . "
"Even given help, I don't see us winning."
"You're right about one thing," Burnside said, and no bull shone through. "I miss the Dust Bowl. Who would of ever thought?"
"The jarheads seem in pretty good shape."
"I talked to them. They actually turned out right smart. Their brains ain't never been used for nothing." As we left the terrace, darkness clustered within approaching night.
Among old men, night and day are interchangeable. Night is only dark, and not even that because subdued light illumines the hallways. We wake to think, or wake to pain. Most do not fear death. Our fears are fears of weakness, of peeing your pants, of becoming senile. The crotch and the brain are the engines of history.
When I woke I felt slugged. Silence lay between snatches of Burnside's gaspy breathing. Since he did not snore he was in some stage of waking. Beyond our room the dayroom would be swept, polished, silent as mice. The main desk down the hallway would shine like a halo of heaven above the history of this place, the history of a century . . . in Flanders Field where poppies . . . antique clustering of fear and fight.
I thought of saying something to Burnside, then thought silence best. As silence became restful ghostland explained itself. Or, at least I understood how some things fit together.
The darkness in the dayroom had not been real. It was a message from ghostland about the darkness beyond these walls. The sight of coffins was a warning. The shenanigans of ghosts waving goodbye were also messages, desperate but colorful. The whole show was a hypothetical guidon, a flag, pointing toward foulness that stalked our perimeter. Our ghosts were helpless without us. It seemed that we old men were not only told to protect the future, but also to protect the past.
"I'm thinking of the disciplinary barracks at Leavenworth," Burnside muttered. "Right now it seems like a warm and happy place, real safe and friendly."
He understood most of what we faced. I had halfway hoped he did not, there being no sense in both of us feeling doomed. I decided not to explain about Harvey.
"I worry about my great grandkids," he whispered, and embarrassment almost choked him. "Keep that private. There's times I think we're guilty of a teeney bit of b.s."
Had Burnside undergone conversion and become a fledgling saint? When great grandchildren visited we pretended we were uninterested. We pretended all was well with them.
I lay in darkness, mute, without an ounce of tears or sweat, although I needed both. I lay in darkness admitting even I had managed to conceal truth beneath a pile of crap. For old men, Hell comes in two versions, lesser and greater.
The lesser version happens when history is rewritten, their records expunged, no credit given for ideals or aspirations, nothing bequeathed, all tales revised as the Present, turning, points to a false record and accuses the past for Present suffering.
That's a stern Hell, but the greater version is worse. Hell for old men arrives at that exact moment when we must admit we can no longer protect our kids, our families, our country, the shards and remnants of our love.
"I don't understand why it runs from us. It don't run from ghosties."
"We have the power of memory. We have the memory of order, and we still have voices. When memory dies civilization dies." From three or four rooms down the hall, a nurse stepped softly. No, two nurses, because two women murmured. Breeze sighed at the windows. I wondered how many of our people lay awake; listening, wondering about our worth, unable to show our loves, and, like Burnside, settling for feeling guilty. The soft padding of rubber soles moved away, the murmurs quieted.
"It's after a great deal more than us. We're in the way."
"I don't mind a scrap," Burnside said, "but not if it don't make sense." "Flags are symbols. Words are symbols. Steeples are symbols. Red lights in front of cathouses are symbols. The world don't know it, but the world lives by symbols, some good, some as had as flags."
"Dead guys don't drive wheelchairs. There's got to be advantages."
He had never talked about being crippled, except to make a joke. I thought of the tedium, of the many days and years in that chair, of the iron a man has to have in heart and soul in order to face each morning.
"I got to pee, and I was never one to favor bedpans," Burnside said, no longer muttering. "See you in the funny papers." He swung out of bed, a shadow in the darkened room; the last time I saw him alive, and all I really saw was a shadow.
Oh, Nurse Johnson, you don't know how fast it can hit, and how hard.
I dozed, waked, fretted, dozed, then came fully awake with the rough knowledge that Burnside would not make roll call. AWOL from the V.A. Silent halls filled with echoes, voices of fear and hope. Somewhere in darkness Burnside made his move, and voices of the past sent whispers into that same darkness. Whispers sped like hushed and urgent messengers patrolling against a silent-walking enemy. Ghostland seemed poised for either success or disaster, and with nothing in between. Outside, in darkness, a storm rose on Shakespearian wings. Black feathers of storm rode gusts tumultuous as passion. Darkness surrounded, clasped; a coffin of wind and rain in which a man becomes breathless and shroud-wrapped.
I sat on the edge of my bed, cussing Burnside. This deal was supposed to include me. I sat with despair of a kind known only during times of total wreckage. Helpless to act, to change matters, helpless-- but, I told myself -- not doomed. Not without a fight. Meanwhile echoes sighed and whispers moved through hallways.
I stood, already heavy with grief, and made my way to a window; opened it and listened. Rain rode cold gusts blowing off salt water. Rain hammered on leaves of trees, and water gurgled in drains. Rain pelted its ancient song, and the lyrics of that song say "May God have pity on the infantry."
Behind me sounded a rustle of clothing, and the pad of soft-soled shoes. An orderly stood, breathing hard. I had been unable to find tears earlier. I had them now. I did not turn.
"Where?" the guy said, and said it rough; a guy who already knew his tail was in a sling. No "yes sir," "no sir," "please," or "go to Hell."
"Mind your manners." I still did not turn. My voice choked only a little.
"Him and them two candy-asses," the guy said. "I'll settle with you later." He hoofed it, almost running.
"You win the first round." I spoke into the rain and dark, speaking to Burnside wherever he was. "All Hell is about to break. What you need, pal, is a miracle; you and your damn Marines."
I turned, headed for the dayroom toward people of my own kind. Grief is easier when tough-minded folk stand together and don't kid themselves about the odds.
Burnside needed a miracle, okay, but what he got was television. Search parties spread from the hospital, people -- scared mostly for their jobs -- bundled against rain. Headlights cruised the road, and police spotlights flicked through shrubbery as dawn rose gray and cold above the scene. No searchers imagined Burnside headed through the cemetery and downhill. It wasn't in them to imagine. They figured he went to town, or, like a senility case, wandered in a fog toward pretty lights and racket. As day broke, and in spite of attempts to keep a lid on the mess, somebody tipped the television. A traffic helicopter churned its course across the backside of the hill; one bumfoozled way to make the morning news.
The three lay on muddy ground pounded by northwest rain. A camera reported bodies like bundles of soaked rags, small, sprawled, distorted; and although news anchors knew nothing of combat, even they pretended to be impressed. The bodies lay fanned across the lower hill. Burnside made it to the bridge, actually had one hand touching the bridge, but did not get onto the bridge. Burnside lay as small and raggedy as any other dead soldier. No angels sang. A Marine sergeant lay just below the treeline, the body tangled in that awkward shape of corpses that have suffered breaks and fractures. Another Marine sergeant lay at the edge of the ravine. A torn Japanese battle flag tangled in brush within the treeline, hanging like a spot of blood and not a spot of sun; the kid a beautiful kid, but no Samurai.
The man at the ravine still lived, but had become insane; his mind and hands clawed back up the hill, his body weak, powerless to save itself. When medics brought him in he still clawed at air, fingers hooked, his voice gone from screaming.
We patients looked at each other, muttered, shook our heads. TV showed bodies hauled out by chopper. The Marine lay lumped beneath a sheet, his knees tucked up; stiffened, probably broken. Burnside, with no legs to speak of, made a lump under the sheet like a muffin or a dumpling.
Patients did not have everything figured, but knew enough to wonder how Burnside got euchred, or how he screwed up. Orderlies watched us as if we were kids on a playground, while we thought of basic infantry tactics.
Staff looked at each other to find who was guilty. Staff did not believe three old men -- one a cripple -- could go two hundred yards downhill without help. Staff blamed each other, dug political foxholes, dodged responsibility.
As this went on, doctors squared shoulders like little men and blamed everyone, patient and staff alike, for betraying some high purpose known only to does. And, when Nurse Johnson came on shift, she took the brunt. Staff blamed the day shift for not giving some warning imagined only by the night shift, and Nurse Johnson was lead nurse on the day shift.
"At least," one little prick said to her, "We're rid of your main trouble maker." The punk had bad teeth, a manicure, and he smelled the way he looked; which is to say "floral."
Nurse Johnson did not answer. Nurse Johnson looked to her patients.
"Good riddance," another said. "Caused me nothing but trouble. Why do I always get the problem cases?" This guy looked like he spent most of his time trimming hair from other people's noses.
Nurse Johnson asked no question. Her form was stiff, her face controlled. Unless you knew her well, you could not spot her confusion.
No one but we geriatrics could understand why those guys went out like that. And we, by God, were not about to enlighten. The farside joined us, and every mother's son and daughter on that ward felt more in tune with the dead than with the live theater that quacked and moaned around us.
All through the morning hours spirits of men and women appeared with stony faces, and there were no antics. Burnside lost. It might well be that our last chance was lost. A sense of tiredness, a sense of doom, rode darkly through ghostland. The farside still had feelings, because it did what we were doing; which is to say it hid them. A few women wept, and one Japanese woman seemed shocked beyond all feeling except eternal sorrow. If her name was Yukiko perhaps she wept for Burnside. More likely she wept for the kid. I didn't want to know.
And if everybody felt guilty, or felt anger at being trumped, I had them beat. I had not told Burnside about Harvey. At the time I did not want to send Burnside deeper into his funk. Burnside walked into a mousetrap, an ambush, pressing back an enemy more dark and dangerous than even he believed. I screwed up. I should have told him. Should have.
On the other hand, he was the guy who jumped offsides. I had figured we'd use another day for organization, planning; and then Burnside goes in like a kamakazi, or the Lone Ranger: That one figured easy, and to each his own.
I would have slowed them up. Either that, or Burnside tried to keep me from walking into it. I think the first, because the man knew how to soldier. If he could have found more guys who could keep up he would have waited.
During the Hour of Charm I took inventory of our troops. Three wheelchairs, their people mighty frail, two Wacs, both tough little princesses, one fused spine, three mental blanks who drooled, two bedridden, one goldbrick, two mobile but getting over operations, a bosun mate with one arm and an appliance instead of a hand, and a blind quartermaster . . . the bosun mate looked pretty good, the blind guy didn't look too bad. I took myself to the terrace to think.
The terrain lay unchanged. The broken bridge still stood. The broken bandstand in the park remained. I wondered if Burnside had had an objective, or if he just drove the enemy ahead of him until he dropped. The whole business lay ringed with mystery, with improbabilities, but also with certainty of total destruction if we failed. There might be total destruction if we succeeded, but that was someone else's problem. We could only set the standard, write our last will and testament through action, and hope someone could still read deeply enough to raise arms against the encroaching night.
Darkness glowered behind the city, reaching into the normal light of late afternoon; and it stretched toward the little park but did not enter. The bandstand stood empty in mixed sunlight. Some remnant of battle must remain, something halting an advance. The ghost of a ghost may be more than a memory. It may be a piece of history that refuses to be rewritten.
Maybe something was still left of those men. Maybe something was even still left of Harvey. Maybe Burnside had not completely failed. One thing was certain. I had very few hours to screw around.
After a battle there's a time that lies in between, a time of pause after bodies are collected, buried, or shipped. A vacuum exists between actions. The enemy does not yet arrive although the population may flee. It serves as respite, but it's not a good time for long range plans, or being born.
It might be possible to get as far as the park, to establish a position around that little place of order. Burnside and company had already absorbed the initial licking. The whole business was one of symbols, without which we cannot live. Symbols of evil abound. The world needed that symbol of order, a small Victorian park. Maybe the world would not avoid final darkness, anyway, but we could offer the world a chance.
We own the power of memory, and the memory of order . . . a door opened quietly behind me. Nurse Johnson, of course. A good kid in a bad world. Her footsteps sounded hushed across the terrace. She remained silent at first, standing beside me and looking at the terrain. The world went quiet. I could hear her breathing, practically hear her pulse.
"He was in a wheelchair," she whispered.
"He angled back and forth across the hill. When he got to the woods he dropped out of the chair and did body-rolls. Where he couldn't roll he used an infantryman's crawl. You don't need much in the way of legs. You need shoulders."
Silence returned. She did not blame me. She is not like most other people. She doesn't see her patients, or her neighbors, as problems. She's old-fashioned enough to grant room without a lot of explanations.
"They must have had reasons."
"If I explain," I told her, "it won't mean anything. It has to be discovered."
"I miss him badly. I miss all of them, but he was so ornery. Suppose I have to miss you too?"
From inside the ward, but faintly, some guy sang tuneless as a bluejay . . . " I'll be seeing you . . . " Sure, buddy, of course, right, you bet. Nurse Johnson's face came alert as a new mother hearing her baby squall. "You're too good for this place," I told her. "You shouldn't have to worry about a bunch of worn out carcass . . . " She raised her hand to shush me. The guy stopped singing.
"I don't want to lose any more of you." Her voice remained hushed. Slabs in the cemetery glowed beneath streaks of sun. A flag, that in other days you didn't have to be ashamed of, hung limp.
"I make no promises because I can't," I told her. "We may be playing out a script written half a century ago." --More than that, Nurse Johnson, because it may go back to WWI. -- I thought of all the courageous people I've known through the years. "I don't know why anyone would want to be a nurse," I told her. "I'm glad you are."
"Why would anybody want to be a soldier?" Her voice sounded husky. She controlled tears.
She doesn't know anything about Thermopylae. She is vague about the Battle of Britain. "There's blessed few who want to be soldiers," I told her. "Things happen." I felt a presence at my side, caught a glimmer of white in the corner of my eye. I didn't even need to turn in order to know that my Korean patriarchs were there, all five of them, three with staffs and two with those silly damn squirrel rifles.
"I have to do my job," she said, and it was obvious she didn't see my Koreans. "I figure you're going to try another heist." She showed more sadness than I've ever seen, even from her. "This place used to worry about what was good or bad. I can't be here every minute."
"Burnside was crazy about you," I told her, and that was the truth. Then I told a lie, but one that seemed fitting. "You're the only woman who ever made Burnside blush."
"I'm not above a little flirting." She tried to smile. "And it helps keep the guys alive. Plus, it don't cost a red cent." Then for a little while she wept.
I wanted to touch her hand, tell her it was okay, say how much her toughness and honesty meant. I wanted to say a whole lot of things; but of course there are things you shouldn't do, even if you could.
IV
Hours passed. I hobbled here and there, lining up the action-- old folks at home-- supper came and went. I talked to Quartermaster Wilson, a good man and surprisingly sane. When a guy has been blind these fifty years you don't expect his brain to amount to much. Wilson figures he has precious little to lose, and it may feel good to be needed. TV bubbled around us, and evening news forgot Burnside in its pursuit of a new sensation; fornication between politicians and lady trust officers. I talked to Bosun Tilton who will lead us, because for this job we need legs, not hands. We press the enemy backward with memories, with the power of history, with scenes of sense and order.
Meanwhile, the ward remains tranquil on its face. The two Wacs hold court, and the b.s. level rises and shifts in their direction . . . a couple of real cute tale spinners, real purveyors, and who would've ever thought? The girls have set up a deal with the wheelchair guys, and the girls are conning staff out of its collective drawers. The Wacs are spellbinders, and our guys gather round them. Staff eases off, relaxes, sees things as normal, lets down its guard. Our people seem curiously free, some for the first time in their lives, and even the senility cases are more or less in touch. Light flickers against walls, red and black like cities burning, but the ward sits busy planning while pain comes to the evening Neilsens. Our troops set about using their last resource, their helplessness, to provide cover.
And ghostland surrounds. And ghostland remains voiceless. And ghostland reaches toward us, promissory of help or support; or maybe grateful for just being remembered. We have Japanese here, a few Germans. We have Africans from Kraut rubber plantations, and native coast watchers from the islands. We have mule skinners from the Burma Road, and resistance people, French and Greek and Eyetye, Dutch and Norwegians and Belgians; Russian and Polish horsemen.
And nobody brings a flag. We have Laps and Turks, Brits and Aussies; Waltzing Matilda. Music runs more faintly than echoes. We hear few marches, mostly ballads.
And soon it will be time to go. And if anyone hears this tape it may mean that you still have a little time. It may mean that one of us got through.
I come to the terrace, watch the night, and muse.
Across the terrain light swirls as faces of Hell appear, the Twentieth century condensing in a way that would make jealous the good folk at Reader's Digest . . . this blood-saturated century.
As if on a movie screen the world's first operational tank appears, moving like a tilted triangle, squashing trenches and barbed wire. The first machine gun speaks, and the first airplane engine revs and purrs, spits and pops. In the background the first radio quacks about 1920's sex scandals while selling chewing gum and snake oil. Napalm flares from later wars and the Victory V hangs like a checkmark above blown bridges, shattered cathedrals, smouldering rings of fire where once stood huts of thatch.
And the message says that, unless it is stopped right now, it all begins again; the old hatreds, the egos rampant, the fists raised proclaiming that one or another god grants the right to yell instead of think. The message says that each time the world forgets how Evil exists, Evil gets a resurrection; and the word "honor," extinguishing, turns to smoke.
But there once lived men who knew that some things were worth dying for. There once were women who fought for their own, and fought for others as much as they were able.
In a geriatric ward a body is no big advantage, anyway, and so this is how it shapes: we can't form the future but we can show responsibility.
We'll not exactly perambulate singing, but we're going to go, a bunch of old men, some weak from operations; one blind with strong legs, one with eyes who can guide while leaning on the blind, another with a pincher for a hand; old men led or followed by ghosts of former allies and enemies fanning downhill against a void. It needs only one of us to get across that bridge in order to establish a presence, and we go with little hope of rescue; not of Burnside, or Harvey, or of ourselves. Nobody here weighs much more than an angel. We suppose the bridge will hold.
And the comrades we leave behind, and the girls we leave behind will form our cover. The two Wacs plan a ruckus just before dawn. The wheelchair guys will feign seizures. Staff will be overworked, too occupied. We'll slip away, as silent as the farside, as silent as memory, with smallest hope of helping fallen comrades, but with no farewells and no apologies, as the farside weeps; as even ghostland waves goodbye.
This story is for Wesley Baker, Bill Deen, lira Hall, Don Farmer, Fran Ross and Mieko Riggleman.
The tale of the five Korean patriarchs is adapted from The Last Campaign by Glen Ross, Harper & Bros., 1962.
The phrase "shiranu ga hotoke" does not mean "aw screw it" as reported. It translates: "The buddha is dead," and it is used by the Japanese when something incredibly stupid or vulgar has happened.
~~~~~~~~
By Jack Cady
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