Oh God, said the listener to himself. Enchiladas in green sauce. Dos Equis. Maybe a burrito or two.
We had this battalion of Thais attached to us, said the old sergeant. Nicest people you’d ever want to meet. We used to call their area Thailand, like it was a whole country. They are small of stature. We used to party with them a lot. What they drink is Mekong, it’ll curl your teeth. In Kria we weren’t too particular.
Enchiladas in green sauce and Gilda. Gilda in her sizzling blouse.
This time I’m talking about, we were partying at Thailand, there was this Thai second john who was a personal friend of mine, named Sutchai. Tall fellow, thin, he was an exception to the rule. We were right tight, even went on R&R together, you’re too young to know what that is, it’s Rest and Recreation where you zip off to Tokyo and sample the delights of that great city for a week.
I am young, thought the listener, young, young, praise the Lord I am young.
This time I am talking about, said the old sarge, we were on the side of a hill, they held this hill which sort of anchored the MLR—that’s Main Line of Resistance—at that point, pretty good-sized hill I forget what the designation was, and it was a feast day, some Thai feast, a big holiday, and the skies were sunny, sunny. They had set out thirty-seven washtubs full of curry I never saw anything like it. Thirty-seven washtubs full of curry and a different curry in every one. They even had eel curry.
I cannot believe I am sitting here listening to this demento carry on about eel curry.
It was a golden revel, said the sergeant, if you liked curry and I did and do. Beef curry, chicken curry, the delicate Thai worm curry, all your various fish curries and vegetable curries. The Thai cooks were number one, even in the sergeant’s mess which I was the treasurer of for a year and a half we didn’t eat like that. Well, you’re too young to know what a quad-fifty is but it’s four fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on a half-track and they had quad-fifties dug in on various parts of their hill as well as tanks which was just about all you could do with a tank in that terrain, and toward evening they were firing off tracer bursts from the quad-fifties to make fireworks and it was just very festive, very festive. They had fighting with wooden swords at which the Thais excel, it’s like a ballet dance, and the whole battalion was putting away the Mekong and beer pretty good as were the invited guests such as me and my buddy Nick Pirelli who was my good buddy in the motor pool, anytime I wanted a vehicle of any type for any purpose all I had to do was call Nick and he’d redline that vehicle and send it over to me with a driver—
I too have a life, thought the listener, but it is motes of dust in the air.
They had this pretty interesting, actually highly interesting, ceremony, said the sargie-san, as part of the feast, on that night on that hill in Kria, where everybody lined up and their colonel, that was Colonel Parti, I knew him, a wise and handsome man, stripped to the waist and the men, one by one, passed before him and poured water on his head, half a cupful per man. The Colonel sat there and they poured water on his head, it had some kind of religious significance—they’re Buddhists—the whole battalion, that’s six hundred men more or less, passed in front of him and poured water on his head, it was a blessing or something, it was spring. Colonel Parti always used to say to me, his English wasn’t too good but it was a hell of a lot better than my Thai which didn’t exist, he always used to say “Sergeant, after the war I come to Big PX”—that’s what they called America, the Big PX—“I come to Big PX and we play golf.” I didn’t even know they had golf in Thailand but he was supposed to be some kind of hot-shot golf player, I heard he’d been on their Olympic golf team at one time, funny to think of them having one but they were surprising and beautiful people, our houseboy Kim, we had these Krian houseboys who kept the tent policed up and cleaned your rifle and did the laundry, pretty near everybody in Kria is named Kim by the way, Kim had been with the division from the beginning and had gone to the Yalu with the division in ’50 when the Chinese came in and kicked our asses all the way back to Seoul and Kim had been in a six-by-six firing some guy’s M-1 all the way through the retreat which was a nightmare and therefore everybody was always very respectful of him even though he was only a houseboy . . . Anyhow, Kim had told me Colonel Parti was a high-ranked champion golfer. That’s how I knew it.
He reminds me of poor people, thought the young man, poor people whom I hate.
The Chinese pulled all these night attacks, said the sergeant.
The babble of God-given senility, said the listener to his inner ear.
It was terrifying. There’d be these terrifying bugles, you’d sit up in your sleeping bag hearing the bugles which sounded like they were coming from every which way, all around you, everybody grabbing his weapon and running around like a chicken with his head cut off, DivArty would be putting down a barrage you could hear it but God knows what they thought they were firing at, your communications trenches would be full of insane Chinese, flares popping in the sky—
I consign you to history, said his hearer. I close, forever, the book.
Once, they wanted to send me to cooks-and-bakers school, said the sergeant who was wearing a dull-red bathrobe, but I told them no, I couldn’t feature myself a cook, that’s why I was in heavy weapons. This party at Thailand was the high point of that tour. I never before or since saw thirty-seven washtubs full of curry and I would like to go to that country someday and talk to those people some more, they were great people. Sutchai wanted to be Prime Minister of Thailand, that was his ambition, never made it to my knowledge but I keep looking for him in the newspaper, you never know. I was on this plane going from Atlanta to Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, I had to have some scans, there were all these young troopers on the plane, they were all little girls. Looked to be about sixteen. They all had these OD turtlenecks with Class A uniforms if you can imagine, they were the sloppiest soldiers I ever did see, the all-volunteer Army I suppose I know I shouldn’t criticize.
Go to cooks-and-bakers school, bake there, thought the young man. Bake a bathrobe of bread.
Thirty-seven damn washtubs, said the sergeant. If you can imagine.
Requiescat in pace.
They don’t really have worm curry, said the sergeant. I just made that up to fool you.
Heroes
—THESE GUYS, you know, if they don’t know what’s the story how can they . . .
—Exactly.
—So I inform myself. U.S. News & World Report. Business Week. Scientific American. I make it a point to steep myself in information.
—Yes.
—Otherwise your decisions have little meaning.
—Right.
—I mean they have meaning, because no decisions are meaningless in and of themselves, but they don’t have informed meaning.
—Every citizen has a right.
—To what?
—To act. According to his lights.
—That’s right.
—But his lights are not going to be that great. If he doesn’t take the trouble. To find out what’s the story.
—Take a candidate for something.
—Absolutely.
—There are all these candidates.
—More all the time. Hundreds.
—Now how does the ordinary man—
—The man in the street—
—Really know. Anything. About these birds.
—The media.
—Right. The media. That’s how we know.
—Façades.
—One of these birds, maybe he calls you on the telephone.
—Right.
—You’re flattered out of your skull, right?
—Right.
—You say, Oh my God, I’m talking to a goddamn senator or something.
—You’re covered with awe.
—Or whoever it is. He’s got your name on
a little card, right? He’s holding the card in his hand.
—Right.
—Say your name is George. He says, Well, George, very good to talk to you, what do you think about the economy? Or whatever it is.
—What do you say?
—You say, Well, Senator, it looks to me like it’s a little shaky, the economy.
—You’ve informed yourself about the economy.
—Wait a minute, wait a minute, that’s not the point. I mean it’s part of the point but it’s not the whole point.
—Right.
—So you tell him your opinion, it’s a little shaky. And he agrees with you and everybody hangs up feeling good.
—Absolutely.
—But this is the point. Does he act on your opinion?
—No.
—Does he even remember your opinion?
—He reaches for the next card.
—He’s got just a hell of a lot of cards there.
—Maybe two hundred or three hundred.
—And this is just one session on the phone.
—He must get tired of it.
—Bored out of his skull. But that’s not the point. The point is, the whole thing is meaningless. You don’t know one damn thing more about him than before.
—Well, sometimes you can tell something. From the voice.
—Or say you meet him in person.
—The candidate. He comes to where you work.
—He’s out there in the parking lot slapping skin.
—He shakes your hand.
—Then he shakes the next guy’s hand. What do you know after he’s shook your hand?
—Zero. Zip.
—Let me give you a third situation.
—What?
—You’re standing on the sidewalk and he passes in his motorcade. Waving and smiling. What do you learn? That he’s got a suntan.
—What is the reality? What is the man behind the mask? You don’t learn.
—Therefore we rely on the media. We are forced to rely on the media. The print media and the electronic media.
—Thank God we got the media.
—That’s what we have. Those are our tools. To inform ourselves.
—Correct. One hundred percent.
—But. And this is the point. There are distortions in the media.
—They’re only human, right?
—The media are not a clear glass through which we can see a thing clearly.
—We see it darkly.
—I’m not saying these are intentional. The ripples in the clear glass. But we have to take them into consideration.
—We are prone to error.
—Now, you take a press conference.
—The candidate. Or the President.
—Sometimes they ask them the questions that they want to be asked.
—Pre-prepared questions.
—I’m not saying all of them. I’m not even saying most of them. But it happens.
—I figured.
—Or he doesn’t pick the one to answer that he knows is going to shoot him a toughie.
—He picks the guy behind him.
—I mean he’s been in this business a long time. He knows that one guy is going to ask him about the economy and one guy is going to ask him about nuclear holocaust and one guy is going to ask him about China. So he can predict—
—What type of question a particular guy is going to pop on him.
—That’s right. Of course some of these babies, they’re as smart as he is. In their own particular areas of expertise.
—They can throw him a curve.
—He’s got egg on his face.
—Or maybe he just decides to tough it out and answer the damned question.
—But what we get, what the public gets—
—The tip of the iceberg.
—There’s a lot more under the surface that we don’t get.
—The whole iceberg.
—We’re like blind men feeling the iceberg.
—So you have to have many, many sources. To get a picture.
—Both print and electronic.
—When we see a press conference on the tube, it’s not even the whole press conference.
—It’s the highlights.
—Just the highlights. Most of the time.
—Maybe there was something that you wanted to know that got cut out.
—Five will get you ten there’s something touching your vital personal interests that got cut out.
—Absolutely.
—They don’t do it on purpose. They’re human beings.
—I know that. And without them we would have nothing.
—But sometimes bias creeps in.
—Very subtle bias that colors their objectivity.
—Maybe they’re not even aware of it but it creeps in. The back door.
—Like you’re looking at the newspaper and they have pictures of all the candidates. They’re all out campaigning, different places. And maybe they run one guy’s picture twice as big as another guy’s picture.
—Why do they do that?
—Maybe it’s more humanly interesting, the first guy’s picture. But it’s still bias.
—Maybe they ought to measure them, the pictures.
—Maybe they like the guy. Maybe they just like him as a human being. He’s more likable. That creeps in.
—One-on-one, the guy’s more likable.
—But to be fair you should print the guy’s picture you don’t like as big as this guy’s.
—Or maybe the guy they don’t like, they give him more scrutiny. His personal life. His campaign contributions.
—Or maybe you want a job if he gets elected. It’s human.
—That’s a low thought. That’s a terrible thought.
—Well, be realistic.
—I don’t think that happens. There aren’t that many jobs that they would want.
—In the damn government there aren’t that many jobs?
—That were better than their present jobs. I mean which would you rather be, some government flunky or a powerful figure in the media?
—The latter. Any day in the week.
—I mean what if you’re the goddamn Wall Street Journal, for instance? A powerful voice. A Cassandra crying in the wilderness. They’re scared of what you might reveal or might not reveal. You can hold your head up. You bow to no man, not even presidents or kings—
—You have to stand up if he comes into the room, that’s the rule.
—Well, standing up is not bowing.
—The thing is to study their faces, these guys, these guys that are running, on the tube. With the sound turned off. So you can see.
—You can read their souls.
—You can’t read their souls, you can get an idea, a glimpse. The human face is a dark pool with dark things swimming in it, under the surface. You look for a long time, using your whole experience of life. To discern what’s with this guy.
—I mean he’s trying to look good, the poor bastard, busting his ass to look good in every nook and cranny of America.
—What do we really know about him? What do we know?
—He wants the job.
—Enormous forces have pressured him into wanting the job. Destiny. Some people are bigger than you or I. A bigger destiny. It’s tearing him apart, not to have the job, he sees some other guy’s got the job and he says to himself, My destiny is as big as that guy’s destiny— If I can just get these mothers to elect me.
—The rank and file. Us.
—If I can just get them to rally to my banner, the dummies.
—You think he thinks that?
—What’s he going to think? It’s tearing him apart, not to be elec
ted.
—We’re mere pawns. Clowns. Garbage.
—No. Without us, they can’t realize their destinies. Can’t even begin. No way.
—We make the judgments. Shrewd, informed judgments. Because we have informed ourselves.
—Taking into account the manifold distractions of a busy fruitful life.
—If it is fruitful.
—It’s mostly going to be fruitful. If the individual makes the effort, knows what’s the story—
—How did they know before they had the media?
—Vast crowds would assemble, from every hearth in the land. You had to be able to make a speech, just a dilly of a speech. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”—William Jennings Bryan. You had to be larger than life.
—The hearer of the speech knew—
—They were noble figures.
—They had to have a voice like an organ.
—The vast crowd swept by a fervor, as if by a wind.
—They were heroes and the individual loved them.
—Maybe misled. History sorts it out.
—Giant figures with voices like a whole church choir, plus the organ—
—A strange light coming from behind them, maybe it was only the sun . . .
Bishop
BISHOP’S STANDING outside his apartment building.
An oil truck double-parked, its hose coupled with the sidewalk, the green-uniformed driver reading a paperback called Name Your Baby.
Bishop’s waiting for Cara.
The martini rule is not before quarter to twelve.
Eyes go out of focus. He blinks them back again.
He had a beer for breakfast, as usual, a Pilsner Urquell. Imported beer is now ninety-nine cents a bottle at his market.
The oil truck’s pump shuts off with a click. The driver tosses his book into the cab and begins uncoupling.
Cara’s not coming.
The painter John Frederick Peto made a living playing cornet in a camp meeting for the last twenty years of his life, according to Alfred Frankenstein.
Bishop goes back inside the building and climbs one flight of stairs to his apartment.
His bank has lost the alimony payment he cables twice a month to his second wife, in London. He switches on the FM, dialing past two classical stations to reach Fleetwood Mac.
Donald Barthelme Page 74
