by Tim Willocks
George’s lips and jaw stiffened into a grim and unrepentant sculpture.
“I got past all that sanctity of human life stuff a long time ago, when the bodies—friend and foe alike—were heaped as high as my shoulder and rotting while I watched.”
Ella sensed from his voice, from the reverence and the fire, that this was the central memory of his life.
She said, uncertainly, “Tarawa?”
George nodded. “Right.”
“Was that in Vietnam?”
George relaxed and smiled and shook his head. “By the time Vietnam came around the FBI’d had me pegged as an old commie agitator for ten years. They wouldn’t have let me go there even if I’d wanted to, and anyway, I was way too old.”
Ella said, “You must think I’m kind of stupid.”
“No,” said George. “When I was nineteen I didn’t know much about what’d happened fifty years ago and ten thousand miles away. Hell, at seventeen I was so stupid I joined the Marine Corps before Pearl Harbor.” He glanced at her. “That’s when the Japanese air force attacked us without warning.”
“I know that part,” said Ella.
George smiled again. “You don’t want to listen to an old man telling war stories.”
“Yes, I do, really,” said Ella.
She wasn’t humoring him. She was on the adventure of her life with this guy, she wanted to know what made him tick. It might even save her life—or his. But then she couldn’t imagine that he would ever need saving.
She pressed him. “I want to know. Go on.”
“Well,” said George. He shifted in his seat so he was more upright. “The island itself was called Betio, a pinprick on a map of the Pacific Ocean, part of Tarawa atoll. Now, I wasn’t green. I’d been with Carlson’s Raiders—Second Battalion—at Makin the year before, where we’d surprised a hundred and fifty Japs and left only two alive to tell the tale—and I thought I knew the score.” He grimaced. “Jesus Christ.”
Even though he’d said so little, Ella felt a lump in her throat. She didn’t know why. Then she realized it was because George had one in his. He coughed.
“Anyhow, on Betio there were four thousand Japs waiting for us—Imperial Marines, man for man as good fighters as any ever wore a uniform—and they were dug in deep like only those fuckers knew how.” He stopped. “Excuse me,” he said.
Ella almost said, “What for?” then realized it was for swearing. “Don’t worry,” she said.
“The island was less than one square mile in area and we dropped three and a half thousand tons of high explosives on it. When we cleared the landing craft it seemed like we might as well have dropped popcorn. We waded five hundred yards through red foam. That first day my company took sixty percent casualties and I hadn’t seen a single yellow face. That night, waiting, I wanted to kill more than I wanted to live, and when we got down to it, on the second and third days, yes, I enjoyed it too. We burned them in their hundreds and gutted them with bayonets and blasted and shelled and gunned them in their warrens and holes till the island stank to high heaven with their rotting yellow bowels. We killed all four thousand of’em and I wished it had been four million. Later, when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, I wept. For joy.”
“No,” Ella heard herself cry. “You don’t mean that. I can’t go along with that.”
“You’re right not to,” said George. “I won’t argue. But they were an evil. I’m not talking individuals but what they did as a nation. They’d murdered millions of civilians—Chinese, Siamese, Koreans, Malays—and enslaved multitudes more who didn’t even know where Japan was. They were torturers and tyrants—historical fact—and we helped set things right. I hated them then and I hate them now and if there’s such a place as the hereafter I’ll hate them there as well.”
George’s hands were clenched and rigid on the wheel. For the first time Ella felt scared of him. She didn’t think for a second he would harm her but she felt fear just the same. It was the rage and bitterness—so suddenly bright and blazing—that she feared. She didn’t want it to be in him.
“George, you’re not a hateful man. I won’t believe you.”
“You think you could spray a flamethrower over twenty screaming men trapped in a bunker—then go find more and do it again—without hatred in your belly? I couldn’t. You think those yellow maggots committed suicide by the hundred for their honor?” He snorted with contempt. “No. They were terrified—and broken—by a hatred they hadn’t imagined could exist, coming at them one inch at a time through everything they could fling against us. It seeped across the sand and through their pillboxes and into their little yellow minds till it cracked them apart. They were one of the great warrior races of the earth. We didn’t out-soldier them, we out-hated them. And then we slaughtered them. Wasn’t courage or Uncle Sam or love for the folks back home that drove us up those beaches. Through massed machine-gun fire? And the spilled-out innard workings of our buddies? No. It was hatred, black and pure and bloody as ever there’s been.”
Ella felt bombarded, battered. She grabbed at a thought and blurted it out.
“But there’s too much hatred, isn’t there? All around.”
George looked at her and something in her face wiped the fury from his eyes. His features twitched with confusion and regret. He looked shaken and gray. He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly.
“I’m sorry if I upset you, Ella,” said George. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“I know it wasn’t. And you didn’t, I’m fine.”
For a moment he was alone with his memories, of sacrifices made and horrors witnessed that she could never imagine.
“You’re right,” he said. “There’s too much hatred all around. But if we didn’t have a use for it, it wouldn’t be in us in the first place.”
She’d never thought about hatred that way before. It made sense.
“Maybe you’re right too,” she said. “I just wish you weren’t.”
“Yes,” said George. “So do I.”
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the drone of the engine and the hum of the tires on the blacktop and watching the semis rolling by. The Colt .45 in Ella’s lap didn’t feel so seductive anymore and she was glad. Maybe she’d learned more than just a piece of history from Tarawa. Maybe she could now make more sense of Charlie’s letter. Or Clarence Jefferson’s, as she was now trying to think of him. George had given her the letter and she’d read it as best she could in the street light of the City without making any comment and without George asking her any questions. Instinctively, she liked that about him, that he didn’t ask her much about herself. It made her feel like what he saw in her was what he got and that that was all he needed. It made a change from vapid bullshit and having to put on a show and make out she was more interesting than she felt herself to be. She pulled her bag up from between her feet. She hadn’t had a cigarette since getting in the car and throwing up. Now that she thought about it the craving swept through her.
“You mind if I smoke?” she said.
“Feel free,” said George.
She rolled down the window. The wind was cool, nice. She lit a Camel. The letter from Jefferson was folded in her jacket pocket. George hadn’t asked for it back. She needed to read it again.
“Can we put the light on?” she asked.
In the City George had said no, they didn’t want to draw the attention of some cop. Now he said, “Best wait until we’re off the highway.”
He bent forward to look past her at a road sign. She turned to read it but the sign was gone.
“Just a few minutes,” said George.
Ella sat back and smoked the cigarette and let her mind go drifty and blank. She was bone-tired. Exhausted. George was wrong about her: she would never have made a U.S. Marine. Could she have hated enough? Maybe she flattered herself but she just couldn’t see it. Or maybe it was because she hadn’t seen innard workings of her friends spilled at her feet. Who was she supposed to hate now? Anyone?
Did she have to, or would George handle that side? She leaned her head against the doorpost. George turned the car off the highway and swung onto a country road.
Ella stared through the open window at a night landscape full of nothing. She dragged on her cigarette. She felt lonely. She tried to think of somebody she would really rather be with instead of driving around Alabama’s answer to the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t. She couldn’t think of anywhere she’d rather be. She wasn’t in this situation by chance. It was predestined. It was in her stars. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what the fuck it was all about or that no one seemed able to tell her: if it wasn’t somehow a part of her then it just wouldn’t be happening. George thought this was his gig, she could tell, but he was wrong. It was really hers. She couldn’t explain how she knew it, but she was at the center of all that was going down.
She heard him say, from her left, “Ella? You still want I should put the light on?”
Ella shook her head vaguely, without looking at him, and the light stayed off. She would read the letter again later, when she had some brain worth using, maybe tomorrow. She let the wind whisk the butt of the cigarette from her fingers. The stuff in the letter about the apocalypse and the corpus delicti wasn’t her business anyway; it was bullshit; it wasn’t what it was all about. She was here for some other reason. And Charlie wasn’t Charlie; he was Jefferson. Clarence Jefferson. She realized that was why she felt lonely. Charlie wasn’t who she’d believed him to be for all these years.
Ella couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known Charlie. He’d been a constant, since childhood. And he’d loved her, she’d always known that, never doubted it. He’d loved her singing too; and he’d made her feel safe, always. Safe. There’d never been any reason to be afraid of anything with Charlie on her side. He’d told her that she could be whoever she needed to be and do whatever she needed to do; all she had to do was be herself, no more—but no less—than that. “Ella if you don’t have the courage to follow your dreams, why should they ever come true?” And that had been so simple, and so true, it had amazed her. That was how he’d made her feel. He’d loved her, she knew that, though he’d never said so in so many words; not even in his last letter—which he hadn’t sent to her.
And now he was dead. And he wasn’t who she’d believed him to be through all the years of her life.
With the soft night wind in her hair, and feeling as lonely and as sad as she dared, Ella MacDaniels rested one hand on the unloaded gun in her lap and fell asleep.
TWELVE
FILMORE FAROE spent the early hours—his first hours of liberty—walking around his Arcadia. His Arcadia repossessed. He toured the rooms of the mansion and found it almost unchanged. Even his clothes were still there, almost as if she had expected him to return someday He went out into the gardens he had loved. And as he walked step by step, alone, he left the safety of the graveled and spot-lit ambulatories and lost his way. And in his lostness he wandered far, then farther still.
He needed, desperately, to be outside, to breathe free air and feel nothing above his head but the sky. The craving had come upon him as a cringing Rufus Atwater had found him in his study and related a story about Clarence Jefferson and a hidden store of incriminating material. Faroe had taken the information in but had not reacted and had given no decision. His world had just turned upside down. Until an hour ago he’d been as helpless as any human being alive. Now men died at his command. A forgotten empire had dropped into his lap. His mind teemed so rapidly he had no time to formulate one thought before the next came crowding forward, itself in its turn to be shoved from his awareness, incomplete, by a successor. But as he wandered through the gardens his thoughts, such as they were, were silenced by the rising floodtide of his senses, senses made hyperresponsive by methedrine and by the eternity he had endured without using them at all. Like a man from the barrenlands withered by thirst, who bolts down water only to find himself vomiting and cramped, he found himself reeling from smell to sight and from touch to sound, from sky to earth, and from flower to fountain, in a mounting delirium of glutted perception.
From out of the night loomed a bush of ghostly lilac, which seized his eyes and pulled him—a speed-charged noctambulant—across grass so soft and yielding to feet that had known only stone that he staggered as if in mire. A memory: he had planted this tree himself. The blossom’s perfume sent him dizzy as he approached. Then, as he blundered into leaves and branches, the scent rammed up through his sinuses like thumbs and wrenched his head and dropped him blinded to the ground. His fingers squirmed in soil—erotic, moist—then, groping, found the trunk.
Its thickness spiked his heart. Through the wrinkled bark that filled his palms he felt another trunk, buried inside of the slim sapling—almost a reed—that he’d touched and held in another time. While he had shriveled in his cage in one unbroken, fogbound dream, the tree had grown and marked its years and seasons in the bole his hands now squeezed with uncontainable pain. To him those years and seasons were lost. Fundamentally lost. Without existence. He had even been denied the bitterness of the prisoner: the agony of hope and of fantasy, of the despair and self-pity of scratching the passage of days on the wall of his cell. She had taken not merely his liberty but his imprisonment too: his very being had been unknown to himself for thirteen years. The calibration appalled him with its meaninglessness: it could as well have been thirteen months or thirteen decades: he wouldn’t have known the difference. Amid that formless and infinite indifference he remembered—in gouts of shame and rage—her insults and her taunts, her perfect face shining with the primal triumph of revenge. But those moments too could have been both one or one million. They slithered through the oceanic emptiness of his memory like a shoal of voracious eels. She had robbed him of more than just pride and pleasure and power, she had robbed him of experience itself. He had lost a quarter of his life.
For an instant his mind was clear and he saw and felt his loss in all its flawless cruelty: crueler now, by far, than all the indignities he had endured.
The instant snapped shut on him, and Filmore Faroe broke.
He battered his face into the lilac’s mocking trunk. He bloodied his fingers to their quicks against its bark. He wept and roared in random bursts of emotion. His mouth filled with a bitter cud of blossom and leaves. A drumming of cold wet blows, tiny and innumerable, fell upon his back and neck and merged into the rivulets on his cheeks. The soil beneath him shifted and slid as a rain as heavy as grief fell upon him, and in it Faroe ranted and crawled, until he could no longer hear his own voice, and he slumped on his belly and lay.
Sometime later they picked him up and half carried him over the lawn and across the gravel toward the wide steps of the portico. His great wandering had taken him, he now saw, no more than a few hundred pitiful yards. The sights and sounds that had earlier provoked him to such strange ecstasy were now a dead landscape that barely penetrated his mind at all. His thoughts assumed a manageable form. He was aware of the falling rain, of the men, whose faces he’d avoided, supporting his arms, and of the grand facade of the mansion resplendent before him. He cared for none of it. If they had dragged him back to the Stone House he would not have resisted, could not have. He realized that the intense, excruciating weariness of his bones, a tiredness that excluded sleep, was familiar to him. Sitting strapped and soiled in his plastic chair, he had felt it before, many times it seemed. Yes. The injection his retarded keepers had given him that morning was wearing off—the methedrine—the artifical high now giving way to black depression. He found himself yearning for the tranquilizers that would normally return him to the fog. A sudden cold seized him and he began to shiver uncontrollably. In place of the lost experience he’d wept for stood an icy and implacable mountain: the future he must reclaim.
“I can’t do it,” he heard himself say. “I can’t.”
They were at the foot of the steps to the house. A face slick with rain hovered over his right shoulder. Rufus Atwate
r.
Atwater smiled at him as if he were a child or a dement.
“Sure you can do it, Mr. Faroe,” said Atwater. “Just a few steps now and we’re home and dry.”
Faroe clenched his teeth against the shivers racking his body. There was no point correcting Atwater but even in this state Faroe was humiliated that they thought he could not climb the steps. He shook their arms away.
“Let me go.”
Atwater let go of his right arm and nodded across Faroe to whoever was holding his left. Faroe looked up and saw the letters: ARCADIA—carved into the stone as he had once carved the letters of his name across the world. His shivering vanished. He felt a great power flow into him and with the power a rage and a resolution. He could—and would—do it. He would take his destiny by the throat and any who stood in his way would be destroyed. All this was his again, and more. He had come back from the dead. There was nothing he might not dare. He was Filmore Faroe.
It was time to take charge. Faroe could feel them all around him, waiting on his ordinance. He was, no doubt, a wretched sight: bent beyond his years, etiolated in strength, caked in the filth of his groveling and as ignorant as a nigger fieldhand. He didn’t even know who was president of the United States. Yet these men stood waiting for his word. And Faroe knew they were right. He was the man. His mind hummed. The depression of minutes before had vanished; but the physical exhaustion remained. He had to get rid of it. He needed a re-vitalizer. He turned to Atwater.
“Mr. Atwater, I want you to return to the Stone House.”
“Sir?” said Atwater.
