by Jack Cady
"Tokyo 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 far side 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.
"Pay back 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 have 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 soapbox 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 flicked 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 that 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 cliché—but around here really true. How often had she said goodbye to a patient, only to come to work next day and f
ind 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 stating 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.
