by David Mamet
“And they told me, they come upon him, he was dead . . .” Mike raised his head and looked at her. “We knew he wasn’t dead,” she said, “as the white boys, killing him, would’ve spoiled their glee, you see. Of some fitting punishment, some ongoing thing.”
“What were they punishing him for?” Mike said.
“Being black,” Peekaboo said. “Their pretext being that he was fucking some white girl in town. Li’l white whore.”
“Was he?” Mike said.
“Yes. He was,” Peekaboo said. “But he wu’nt paying her. Uh-uh. And then, to her mind, he tired of her, an’ she went and had her revenge.
“But I always knew. Either they killed him, his friends, at his request. Or he asked them for a moment, and the knife, and he did it hisself.” She picked a tobacco crumb from her lip.
“He was twenty-two years old. We mourned for him. The pastor, n’th’ undertaker, wu’nt let us see him, you know, below the neck.
“Well. I’d’ve killed those motherfuckers. Boys wanted to, the men. Whites would’ve struck back, of course. That didn’t stop the odd road accident. White boy was killed by accident, driving too fast. Out hunting, tripped ov’a log, shot himself, all that.
“Whyn’tcha take off your coat? . . . S’hot in here,” she said. “You, I know, read all that shit, Belgium, and so on, Germans raping nuns.”
“I wasn’t in Belgium,” Mike said.
“Take off your coat,” Peekaboo said.
Mike looked around, and then shrugged himself out of his coat, then took off his jacket.
“No, you wu’nt in Belgium, you were in . . . where were you in?”
“France,” Mike said.
“Oh yes. And saw all of them sporty houses in Paris?”
“Not exactly,” Mike said.
“No?” Peekaboo said.
“You could have any girl in Europe for a stick of gum,” Mike said.
“Princess, and all that . . . ?” Peekaboo said.
“You bet,” Mike said.
“Well, how about that,” Peekaboo said.
They sat silently for a while.
“. . . Drifting away, drifting away,” Peekaboo said. “Some do that. You’ve seen ’em, I would guess? Over there? Those, can’t put it together again. Or never was together at all. This, or the coke, or whatever kills them quicker. Someone said, ‘They do it to live,’ but we know better.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette. She put her head back and blew smoke at the ceiling.
“Drifting away,” she said. “Or call on Jesus, those who can, ‘who washes away all despair.’ But you could, as soon, do that with a cut-throat razor. Some girls? Did themselves? This very house.”
Peekaboo stared down at the tabletop. She tapped the cigarette ash into the ashtray.
“I don’t blame ’em,” she said.
She poured two drinks.
Mike reached over and threw down the proffered shot of rum. He poured another from the bottle.
“Folks go insane,” Peekaboo said, “I heard, many of ’em, over there, woke up one morning, ‘Thiz my day to die,’ they feel it. Is that true?”
“That might be true,” Mike said.
“Because,” Peekaboo said, “anybody, long enough life, see things, turn your hair? Straight or curly. Depending.
“Many things might be cured, by the Grace of God, and I won’t say no; for I’ve seen it, but I can’t say that it touched me, other than, it spared me, come this far, or long, or however you put it, for all the times one would think, ‘That’s not a blessing.’”
The answer to his grief became clearer to him as he drank himself into a coma. And that answer was to obliterate the question. He holed up in his flat, where he was found by Parlow, from whose care he escaped. He was next discovered, bloody and raving, at LaSalle and Jackson, by a cop. He had assaulted the cop and was clubbed to the ground.
The Tribune’s lawyers pulled the necessary strings. The charge of assault was quashed, and Mike was remanded to the custody and bond of Clement Parlow.
Chapter 19
Parlow took him to Yuniko’s flat. He came morning and evening, with the doctor, and sometimes stopped by in the afternoon, to sit and smoke a cigarette.
The doctor injected the paraldehyde. After a week, the delirium tremens had passed, but the injections continued. Mike supposed that they were opiates. In any case, they made him drowsy, and he reflected that longing to die gave one a magnificent freedom to not give a shit about any other thing.
There was an old Japanese man in a cardigan. He must have been nearby, for any unusual noise or movement on Mike’s part brought him into the room.
In the beginning he administered the alcohol, one ounce, every two hours, day and night. He always found Mike awake, and waiting.
The man brought thin soup and hardtack twice a day. Most of the food was taken away uneaten, and Mike’s body began to stink of the excreted alcohol, the paraldehyde, and of the famine devouring it.
He had obtained some solace from the revelation that his mind, equally, was rotten, but that soon passed, and he was left with the fact.
He remembered a poem, a long-ago, schooldays poem.
“If it chance your eye offend you, pluck it out, lad, and be whole . . . But play the man, stand up and end you, when the sickness is your soul.”
He found comfort in thinking the poet, as he had when he was young, a fraud and a fool. For who could advise the tortured who was not tortured himself; and, if so tortured, why had the adviser not taken his own advice?
He could not understand how the girl could have died, and recurred to a problem which, to him, seemed the easier: who had committed the murder, and in retribution or warning for what offenses of Mike’s commission?
But, in truth, the two questions were not connected.
Mike realized he had devolved to the second, as it was, at least potentially, capable of solution. But he could reason his way to no solution, given all the time in the world, which his incarceration seemed to him, each moment not being longer than the previous, but quite long enough to last forever.
“An understanding of the process,” Parlow had said, “does not exempt one from the process.”
“What could exempt one from the process?” Mike had asked. He remembered they had been speaking of lust, or love, but he could not remember which.
He spent the day sleeping when he could. Often, in half sleep, he would hear the doctor speaking low, to Parlow. He remembered a voice which must have been that of his caretaker, speaking in Japanese, and, perhaps, being answered by a woman. But he never saw the woman. He assumed that she must have been Yuniko, Parlow’s mistress, and smiled remembering the cub reporter’s lesson “Never assume.”
Mike relished any train of thought which he might follow, for whatever time, to turn himself from his obsession with suicide.
“Pat and Mike were found dead on the living room floor. The only clues were a pool of water around them, and a cat in the corner. Figure it out.” Every cub reporter heard it in his first week, at the bar, from an old souse.
“Never assume.”
“Pat and Mike were goldfish,” Mike said aloud. He smiled.
And then the story that he told himself was done, and his thoughts were not his own. He alternated between outright delirium and obsession. He subdued himself, occasionally, with the making of lists.
His lists were his bequests. He had few possessions, but it occupied him to plan their distribution. Each would be accompanied by a note which would, as if that were required, further establish his thoughtfulness, and, thus, the loss, to the world, of his presence.
He would assign the speech “We never knew how much he suffered” now to this recipient, now to that one, then smile, to himself, at his fatuousness. But he did not stop making lists.
There was a girl he’d wronged, so many years ago.
He’d told the story to Peekaboo, at the end of one drunken night.
One of the girls was
cooking breakfast. Breakfast was a skillet-fry of the night’s unsold meals. There were always potatoes and eggs, and meat or fish, and it was highly spiced and peppered. “They, one time,” Peekaboo had said, “the Nawlins girls, called it pottifer—I know that’s pot-au-feu—but no one else, I ever knew, just called it anything. One thing I do know: to make it, you have to be a whore.”
The girl at the stove and Marcus nodded. “Or have been a whore,” Peekaboo said, “or you can’t make it.”
The girl ladled out two large helpings into bowls, and set the bowls before Peekaboo and Mike.
“Thank you, honey,” Peekaboo said.
“Y’ever heard of puttanesca?” Mike said.
“No, I have not,” Peekaboo said.
“In Italy, they make it with macaroni.”
“Uh-huh,” Peekaboo said.
“Puttanesca means ‘whorehouse style.’”
“No, you don’t tell me,” Peekaboo said.
“That’s right,” Mike said.
“How about that,” Peekaboo said. “What’s in it?”
“Macaroni,” Mike said, “eggs, bacon, ham, chicken, whatever they have at the end of the day.” Everyone in the kitchen nodded their appreciation of the human variations on a theme.
“’N’ the main thing,” Peekaboo said, “is, spiced, I mean spiced; and beer or gin, you have to, burn the damn thing out.”
The damned thing, Mike had understood, was the night. And its exertions and trauma.
Mike had confessed his desertion of what, for the purpose of the story, he had remembered as his first young love. “Honey,” Peekaboo said, “that girl? Forgot you long ago. One: that’s the way of the world.” She gestured, indicating her entire establishment. “You see what men are. You think you immune? Being so nice and all, to your self-consideration? Human as you are? She din’t get fucked over by you? Wait ten minutes, the next man comes along. She forgot you long ago.
“She could go out, a virgin again, marry the bank clerk; you, on the other hand, got to carry it around, all this time, around your neck, like some locket. ‘How good I must be, ’cause watch how bad I feel.’ That’s bullshit of a high degree. Now you can throw that magic charm away. It makes you feel too good.”
In the Japanese girl’s room he toyed with adding his youthful betrayal to what he thought of as his murder of Annie Walsh. He was diverted to find that it neither increased nor lessened his anguish, which was, he knew, neither grief nor remorse, but madness; differing from them in that it could be neither studied nor manipulated.
A month passed. Parlow and the doctor came.
Mike asked for more substantial food. It was brought to him, and the liquor was discontinued. When six hours had passed without the ration of alcohol, Mike rummaged the apartment. He found twenty-two dollars in a ceramic jar on a kitchen shelf. He took it and left.
Part Two
Chapter 20
He stayed sick drunk in the Fox River cabin. His bootlegger, the Polish kid from Milwaukee, came by on his rounds twice a week bringing liquor and food. The food remained mostly untouched. The kid asked Mike if he’d been “over there.” Mike said he’d been too young. The kid commiserated that he’d been too young, too. They agreed they’d never know what they’d missed, and there would never be a show like that again.
Mike agreed to anything to get the kid to leave. His conversation was like the excruciating probing of a wound, and after the second exchange Mike always wanted to kill him. He noted that this was a different rage from that he’d felt, time to time, in combat.
He had experienced air combat as calculation. That a Hun had shot down one of his comrades in no wise increased his determination to kill, nor did it alter his mood: he was there to shoot the other fellow down in the air, or shoot him up, if on the ground, and that was that.
He loathed the engineers of the War, the bureaucrats, the generals, and the press. If the push of a button or some similar mechanism could have consigned them to eternity he would have done it with exuberance. At first, noticing this hatred, he questioned himself at some length: but what about their families, their children, their supposed good deeds, and so on, he wondered. They weighted not at all. He wondered if this willingness to kill was the same as theirs. No, he reasoned, theirs was ideological. They could never, at their most murderous, and with the utmost success of their mindless, careless violent schemes, know the self-righteous bliss which overcame him when he fantasized their deaths.
He had heard, from many, of the German Atrocities, of the infants bayoneted, the children’s hands cut off, and so on. He had never doubted that some of the stories were true. “They might be true,” he thought, “we are capable of most anything.”
But he did not hold it against the Germans that they had had stories told about them. He, encountering a German, would consider the man like himself. And try to kill him.
They had all heard of the Christmas Truce of ’14, and of ’15. He’d spoken to infantry who claimed to’ve been part of it. He doubted their stories, as most of the infantry of the first two years was, of course, dead. But, giving them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the entertainment, he’d listened to the history of the truce: how first one man on one side, then his opposite number, would emerge from the trench.
How these men, brave or insane, would meet in No Man’s Land, and exchange tobacco and schnapps, how the truce would spread to whole battalions, meeting in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day to fraternize, to sing, and to trade cap badges, until, as with any fairy tale, at the stroke of midnight . . .
“Well and good,” Mike thought.
He knew of two fliers, escaped to Switzerland, and repatriated, who related princely treatment at the German bases where they’d been transported.
“There is the myth of Glorious Single Combat,” Mike said, “its most pernicious feature that it’s true.” Like any aviator, he held in profound respect any maneuver he saw executed well. It did not seem to him incongruous that some of those so well skilled might use those skills to kill him.
Anyone who’d ever flown knew, on takeoff, not only that the flight could be his last, but would be, if he was not both diligent about and doubtful of every aspect of the expedition.
To his fellow fliers, death, though not preferable, was not an illogical nor unmerited penalty for lack of skill; nor was it either unfair or discreditable to have run out of luck.
One might fear terrible disfigurement, but there was always the antidote, administered by oneself or one’s friends.
A two-place Nieuport had crashed in flames on the field. The pilot’s flying suit was burning. Two mechanics dragged him from the cockpit, five yards away from the plane, and beat the fire out with blankets. A third had ducked back into the hut, emerged chambering a round in his Springfield, and run toward the plane to shoot the trapped observer.
And one might long for home, which, finally, always meant Mother, or good loving; past that, Mike saw, “home” had little meaning, nor had it come to mean much more in the years since his return.
He had loved his job, and its proximity to violence, which, he knew, was a drug, and he had loved the Irish girl; and now he was sick and grieving in that impossible grief of betrayal at having your heart broken by life.
The redheaded Polish boy lounged by the woodstove, cleaning his long filthy nails with a splinter. He cleaned each nail at length, and examined the end of the splinter, and Mike thought, “This time I will kill him.”
He was talking about several of his uncle’s friends, and their methods of jacklighting deer. This led him to a discussion of their wives, and their wives’ cooking.
“They took me, my uncle, to eat some of the venison,” he said, “at Uncle Wally’s house; he wasn’t really my uncle, the Polish word is ‘pan,’ which means, not like ‘uncle,’ but closer than ‘mister.’ His wife, I thought her name was Zosh, but that was his daughter, I think.”
Mike realized that he’d met very few truly stupid people. In his righ
t mind, he thought, he might have treasured this boy as a perfected miracle; but he was sick, and drunk.
Only noticing the kid’s shocked, hurt expression did he realize he’d said, “I fucking need to be alone.” The kid looked slapped. He took a moment to process the insult, then rose, and left the cabin.
“It can’t be the first time anyone told the fool to shut up. Or perhaps he has learned his trick so well that everyone feels sorry for him. Well, fuck him,” Mike thought.
The murderous objects in the cabin reverted to their intended, peaceable uses: the maul, the poker, the kitchen knife; the room slowly recovered from its adventure as a butcher’s den.
Mike was still shaking with adrenaline. “Well, I suppose that I was actually going to kill him,” he thought. The rumination gave him a few more moments of continued freedom from his sorrow. Mike now felt a love for the Polish kid, who had distracted him. “It would have been increased,” he thought, “if I had actually killed him,” which extended the fantasy once again. Mike toyed with it most of the afternoon, until it had cycled down, and he was left, once again, with nothing.
Parlow had joked that his country owed Mike an incalculable debt, as he was the only returned veteran who had not published a book about the War.
“There’s nothing you can say about it,” Mike said. “’N’ if there was I wouldn’t say it.”
The explanation, retold at the Port, gained Mike an increase, if not in status, then in appreciation of his sagacity, the general opinion of the old hands being, “This kid, it seems, has been holding back.”
And, Mike had concluded, neither was there anything to be said about aviation, which, he’d told the boys one drunken night, was like sex: you had to be there.
He’d deeply regretted the quip, as information of a private nature shared with uninitiates for a laugh.
For the two (and it was no one’s business but the flier’s) were, of course, linked. And barring a consideration of “mother,” or “the girl next door,” few of the fliers would have dreaded death but for its unfortunate curtailment of flying, or of fornication with the odd teenage barmaid.
