Gods Go Begging

by Alfredo Vea

  This man, Mr. Homeless, had a mouth and a voice box that had recited far too much, had spoken even more than the eyes had taken in or the spirit and mind could process. There could be no doubt that the homeless man in the dark was a military chaplain. No one else on earth could have so much finality, so many last words littering his voice box and cluttering his tongue.

  “Do you despise me?” asked the man in the filthy fatigue jacket. “Do you despise me because I deserted my flock? For so long I’ve desired to ask you that question. Even after all of these years, Jesse, I can still feel your eyes staring at the hack of my head.”

  “No one despised you, padre,” said Jesse quietly. “You know how we were back then. We were confused and dying and hardening in that condition. Our bodies were pinned down while our hearts were stampeding. When you left, we were all wounded by it. We … I felt alone. We knew that one of us … you had to remain human. You were our template. We could look to you and see our former selves. We could see what we might once again become.

  “I guess that leaving was the only human thing to do. But what is one sane act in a sea of insanity? Sometimes I feel like I’m still standing there, padre, with the war at my back and you in front of me mumbling and screaming and walking through the dead toward the river. You shitcanned that war in a few minutes; the rest of us have taken years. I still haven’t gotten there.”

  The padre sighed; it had taken so much longer than a few minutes. The chaplain moved toward the narrow shaft of light that shot through the hole overhead. For the first time Jesse could see the face of the other man. Tears, like rivulets, had washed away the layers of black dirt beneath his eyes. The other two homeless men had taken their leave and were rustling around in the compound, playing with the dogs.

  “It’s that speedometer of yours, isn’t it? Too fast for this world? You’re out of step… can’t dance… can’t touch a living thing because it’s always dying in your eyes… can’t love.” The padre rambled into silence. “… can’t love.”

  “Where did you go, padre? What have you been doing all these years? How did you get here?”

  The padre shook his head in disbelief. The voice that issued from Jesse’s mouth was the voice of the eighteen-year-old soldier, not the voice of the lawyer.

  “First, tell me where you’ve gone, Jesse. What do you do? Until a few moments ago, when you asked about Oscar Wilde, I thought I would never hear supposings again.”

  “I go into the jails and do triage,” said Jesse. “I try to keep the state from compounding the crimes of this world. I haven’t gone far.”

  “I see,” whispered the chaplain. A smile may have appeared on his face. “This time you’re the guerrilla. Me, I followed my flock and I followed the only woman I have ever loved. I knew where she would be because she had written it on her arm.”

  For an hour Jesse stood near the fire as the padre told his bizarre tale of three hills: one in Laos, one in Chihuahua, and one in San Francisco. As he spoke the padre slipped almost absentmindedly from English to Spanish and occasionally into Cantonese, Ladino, and even Yiddish. When the two men were finally about to part, the lawyer touched the chaplain’s shoulder softly, then handed him a subpoena.

  “Was Wilde right? Do we kill the things we love?”

  “Alleh bridder,” said the chaplain. He rose from his seat and threw his arms around the shoulders of the Chicano sergeant. “Aren’t we all brothers? Don’t things die around us because we can’t love them? That’s the same as killing.”

  “I know that you saw it all,” said Jesse as he pulled away from the padre’s embrace and shoved aside one of the ponchos that hung at the entrance.

  “I know you saw what happened to those two women on the hill.”

  “The women on which hill?” asked the padre. There was no answer forthcoming.

  “You’re speaking of Mai and Persephone, aren’t you?” said the padre. His mind had flown from the two Mexican Painted Ladies in Chihuahua to the burned female bodies on the hill near Laos before settling on the Amazon Luncheonette.

  “Don’t you know what’s wrong with heaven, Jesse?”

  The voice in the dark seemed very far away. Jesse shook his head as he stepped outside.

  “There are children in it,” whispered the chaplain.

  Jesse let the poncho fall and began to traverse the compound toward his car. In the distance he could just make out the army hooches of Dong Ha. Beyond was the road to Quang Tri.

  “After all this time I am only certain of one thing,” cried out the padre. “I am certain that a man can truly make love to a woman only when he has amnesia.”

  The assistant medical examiner turned off the tape machine and extinguished the overhead lights. Only a shaft of sunlight from the outer hallway allowed him to see anything at all. After cleaning up, he ran the fingers of both ungloved hands through his hair, then rubbed his aching neck. It was gesture of both fatigue and sorrow.

  His friend the chief medical examiner would go on seeing the dead every day until his retirement, and then he would dream of them. He would go on describing his halcyon days, his formative months in the morgue at Da Nang, as a coroner’s paradise. He would go on fearing that this wife was waiting up for him, sitting quietly in the dark, inhaling oxygen, and exhaling affection and loneliness into the stale air of their living room.

  The assistant sighed wearily though his skin was still quivering with excitement. He breathed deeply, then laughed spasmodically, involuntarily. He wanted to call his wife and tell her that one of the rarest events in the field of forensic medicine had occurred on this day, in this very room. Then the assistant was suddenly stricken by a horrible thought. Had that been a look if disappointment in the chief’s face this afternoon? Disappointment at a miracle?

  “… a tactile exploration of the musculature of the lower appendages reveals… no rigor. There is no rigor at all. There is no lividity whatsoever. ” The voice of the assistant medical examiner began to rise in pitch as he spoke into the microphone.

  “In fact, there are pockets of warmth in the groin area and beneath the arms! Despite being refrigerated for an hour or so, the body is maintaining heat. ”

  The assistant began to quake with excitement. He ran to the telephone and called the chief.

  “I think he’s alive! It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!”

  The old man had taken his time walking down the hallway and through the double doors. When he finally arrived, he saw what he had seen once or twice back in Da Nang, “dead” boys who had managed to snap open their own body bags, “dead” skin that had recoiled at the touch of the scalpel.

  “Call an ambulance, ”said the chief medical examiner in a monotone. He stood in the doorway but did not enter the room. “Start warming him up.” His voice trailed off as he walked back into the hallway. “You’re a doctor, you know what to do. By the way, there are no miracles. If you think it’s a miracle, you’re certainly not cut out for this work. ”

  After the boy had been whisked away to the hospital, the assistant had stood silent and motionless in the autopsy room for almost half an hour. He was certainly not cut out for this job. This was his last day of work in this building, and the thought of cutting open another deceased human body made him ill. The feel of life beneath his gloved fingers today had been exhilarating, overwhelming. Like a newborn baby, Calvin Thibault had coughed and cried before filling his lungs with life-giving air.

  The assistant medical examiner took off his white lab coat for the last time and threw it onto the table. He smiled to himself. This had been a monumental day. Today he and a young black boy had both risen from the dead. He tossed a ring of keys onto a stainless-steel counter and walked out of the building toward his car and toward his lovely wife. As he walked, the carbon dioxide in his nose transformed into expectation. At this very moment she would be naked. She always showered before dinner. Her wet skin was always so provocative.

  When he unlocked his car, he realized that he had not
written the autopsy summation. He considered returning to the building but instead extended the middle finger of his right hand and pointed it defiantly toward the gray edifice that loomed above him. Then he jumped into his car and drove away. Anyone could write a cause of death. Who on earth could write a cause of life?

  Carolina took Jesse’s hand and pulled him up from the couch. She led him through the main hallway of her home and into the bedroom. The bed had been unused since he last left, so long ago, so she removed the dusty bedspread and turned back the sheets and blanket underneath. She undressed him, then herself, then pulled him onto the bed. As they kissed he sobbed a full stratification of tears; a wrenching, rippled core sample of himself: There was belated proof of a sentient childhood, then a silvery stratum of innocence; a green layer of budding sexuality veined by lines of nascent romance; a deep cobalt layer formed by the pressurized brutality of the infamous blue ballet; then a coal-black layer, denser and deeper than all the rest combined, for all the dark years that followed—years of life without loving.

  “Poor Calvin.” Carolina sighed. “Found innocent and found dead on the same day.”

  “Not innocent,” whispered Jesse grimly, “just not guilty. Only God knows who’s innocent, and I’m not so sure He cares. Even I don’t know what really happened on that hill. I know that someone called out Calvin’s name,” said Jesse with growing intensity. He reached out and held Carolina’s face, forcing her to look into his eyes.

  “Someone called his name. Witnesses heard it. No one could say if it was a male’s voice or a female’s. Maybe it was poor Mai using her last breath to call out the name of her killer.”

  Jesse’s voice sounded detached and feverish. His eyes were red and glazed with distance. Carolina had heard this voice and had seen this face before. Her heart sank. Her hopes that Jesse had changed began to fade away.

  “Calvin could have reached out for her as she ran from the refrigerator,” said Jesse almost robotically. “She might have pushed him away or she might have told him how much hatred and disgust she felt for what he and Reggie were doing. Maybe Calvin was telling the truth on the witness stand when he said that he had taken the gun, leveled it, and pulled the trigger. Only it wasn’t Reggie that he wanted to kill. He aimed it at Mai and shot her in the back.”

  Carolina began to cry. Nothing had changed after all. This was the same unknowable Jesse Pasadoble, the waking narcoleptic whose heart fell asleep whenever love or comfort came near.

  “Maybe the padre’s confession to me at the homeless encampment was nothing but a pack of lies. Maybe that whole story about arañas in Mexico was a big pile of bullshit to explain away his cowardice in Vietnam. And I bought it. Maybe he was a coward. One or two of the troopers thought so. Could I have been wrong when I began to think that he was the only sane man in Southeast Asia? Maybe he was mad. Shit, he still is… or was.”

  Now Jesse’s whole body was shaking with confusion and anger. Carolina reached for him but he pushed her hands away. The old Jesse was back.

  “Maybe that hillside near Laos—that huddle of scared boys who gathered to suppose another world—never existed at all. Cornelius, Jim-Earl, and Roosky. It’s just a dream, Carolina, just a fucking dream. Maybe Sergeant Flyer napalmed his own location out of evil and nothing more. I thought, way back then when I had that jade in my mouth, that it was love that made him do it. I could see so clearly that it was crippled love, so strong that it almost burned me. To avoid the fire, I crawled into a hole just in time. I guess I’ve never crawled out.”

  Jesse closed his eyes, then covered his face with both hands. Behind his fingers and palms a radio installation had just evaporated, turning two husbands into cinders. Above everyone’s head the roar of jet engines signaled the inferno to come. All the cryptographers and all of the NVA whistle blowers had failed. Nothing at all had been communicated to anyone. Carolina touched his shoulder but he pulled away violently.

  “You didn’t die on that hill, Jesse,” said Carolina softly. “Your life went on. I can feel you. I can touch you. You’re here with me. The heart just needs some lyrics,” she said, recalling Jesse’s own words. “It needs to articulate. You can’t keep hiding among the living; you can’t keep forcing your soul to mumble in code. No one can ever answer you. Not me, not anyone.

  “I know that I can’t really comprehend what you’ve been through, but I know enough to understand that you have a choice to make and you have to make it now, tonight. Supposing you choose life, Jesse? Suppose you choose life just this once? ”

  Jesse reached down to the floor and found his pants. He probed a pocket for the sliver of jade, then placed in on his tongue. After a moment of immobile silence he went limp, as though the skin and features of his outer body had suddenly been deprived of its skeletal framework. His eyes squeezed shut and his lungs collapsed as something within him took leave.

  A moment later he was coughing and heaving huge breaths like a drowning man who had been pulled from a deep, cold river. Calm now, and with open eyes, Jesse saw Carolina dimly, and with leaden, unresponsive hands reached out for her. He strained with all his might to touch Evie’s arm as she lay soaking in the hot bathtub.

  “Thank you so much for the lemonade and the tamale pies,” he said as he seized Carolina. Then he eased her downward in soft commands, unspoken orders, kissing her eyes, her thighs. Surrendering to her breasts, he adored the fall of hair on her shoulders. All at once their pounding hearts were pressed against their ribs like quarter-notes on a treble staff.

  Probing here, retreating there, Jesse, in full light, in coequal rapture and dance without strength moves, in choreography without dominion, relented finally to his own human desire, and suffered the impact—the painless penetrations—the living heat of friend liest fire.

  “Biscuit Boy loved Mai with all his heart,” he whispered lovingly into the shell of her lovely ear. “In the end, Sergeant Flyer loved us all with that airstrike. He loved us all.”

  Suddenly the phone rang again. Carolina let it ring thirty times before answering it. This time when she walked back into the bedroom her face was beaming. She handed the phone to Jesse.

  “Biscuit Boy is alive,” Eddy said, his voice almost loud enough to be heard without benefit of a telephone. “He’s come back from the dead!”

  As Eddy spoke, Jesse thought of a day so many years ago when a body bag at the edge of a landing zone had moved ever so slightly. It could have been just prop wash or a trick of the wind, but something made Jesse walk over and unsnap the bag. Somewhere in all those awful injuries there had been a pulse. Jesse always wondered where that boy was today. Were his darkest dreams encased in green plastic?

  “I just talked to him at the hospital!” cried Eddy. “He says he’s never going back to the hill. Never! The homeless guy, the padre is alive, too. It’s unbelievable! The police have captured Princess Sabine. I was there when it happened. She was wearing a magenta swimsuit with matching baton and high heels.

  “It was amazing! She was firing Little Reggie’s gun like a sharpshooter. I was afraid the cops were going to kill her, so I gave Inspector Normandie a small suggestion. He got on the bullhorn and announced that Princess Sabine Harp had been named Miss San Francisco County Jail. A committee of impartial judges had agreed unanimously. When she heard that, she dropped her gun and demanded to be escorted to her dressing room by only the handsomest of policemen.”

  After he hung up the phone, Jesse Pasadoble buried his face in a pillow and laughed harder than he had ever laughed in his life. Biscuit was alive! Padre was alive! There were survivors on the hill. There were boys who had pulled through. Neither of them would ever go back to the hill.

  At that moment, high above their bed, an Afro-Mexican deep-space probe, launched from a newly supposed world and fitted with sensitive recording devices, was searching the next star system for soundless scat and alien rhythms. One unusual section, built by Nigerian scientists, was specially designed to respond to fourth-stream music a
nd permutations of bop, to alien melismatics and to embouchure without humanoid lips. If such were ever detected, the entire craft would pivot and go seek out the source.

  Guidance rockets would roar to life at the sound of subtly dissonant bars and semi-quavers, a trumpet slurring upward to somewhere far beyond high e-flat. The sensors and gauges aboard the ship would dance at the faintest presence of countermelodies and descant lines and barely measurable traces of the Ellington effect.

  Back on earth, the sliver of jade slipped from Jesse’s smiling mouth into Carolina’s. She instantly stopped moving as she saw it all. She saw the restless dead on every hill, the hellish rolling orange fire of gelatinous petroleum as it engulfed whole platoons of young men. For a timeless moment she squinted over the sights of a rifle and squeezed the trigger as Trin Adrong staggered by.

  She heard the last confession of a young Chicano soldier. She witnessed battalions of Mexican and Irish infantry and cavalry invading Spain, delivering independence to the Basques of Euskady, and finally bringing a decent cuisine to the dinner tables of Madrid and Granada. Finally she heard the faint signals from an Afro-Mexican space probe.

  Then she turned away from Jesse and spat the jade stone onto the hardwood floor where it shattered into a dozen pieces. Slowly the look of pained intensity that had filled her face for a dozen measures began to fade away in favor of laughter. In her ear the faint echoes of harsh commands slowly transformed into improvisations of brass and percussion; the sharp staccato of gun fire was syncopated, diminished in favor of the beat of her swelling heart.

  “I just heard such wonderful things!” sighed Carolina, “ ‘All the Things You Are’ and Rachmaninoff at the same time!”