Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  “That’s how it should be,” I said. “Let me tell you the greatest bunch of men I ever came across. The glory brigades who landed at Normandy on D Day, pissy with fear, climbing that fucking cliff into the path of those fortified Nazi cock-suckers, soaked to the soul in blood, brine, sand, and shit, choking with putrescible courage and moving ahead into the goddamn vortex of exploding death. Who’s got balls? Those guys had cojones big as combat boots. I arrived two weeks after Normandy, a goddamn latecomer, a slacker, a shitassed mewling little yellowbelly, and I got separated from my outfit for three days with no food or water and then I saw a Nazi, a fat fucking killer of women and children and newborn baby Jews, an asswipe shitface murdering swine of a fucking Nazi prick, and I got him in my sights and shot him through the nose. Then somebody shot at me. It was dusk. I couldn’t see where the shot came from, but obviously he had a Kamerad on his flank, and so I went back into my cave, my earthworks, and laid low. Four days without food by this time, and we piss and moan when we miss a meal. I crawled as far into my earthworks as earth would allow and I heard someone up there walking around calling, “Here, doggie, come on, nice little doggie,” all this with a kraut accent, of course, thinking I’d fall for the old dog-biscuit offer. He probably didn’t even have a dog biscuit. Then it grew silent and I went dead out, probably slept two more days. It might’ve been a month. Who knows how long, or how well, or how deeply, or how significantly, or how richly, or how comfortably we sleep when we’re fucking asleep? We’re asleep, aren’t we? So how the hell are we supposed to know how well, or how deeply, and so on? But to get to the point—are you with me?”

  “Dogfood,” said Bosco.

  “Good,” I said. “So I came up from the earthworks, crawling out like some goddamn creature of the substructure, some toad of the underground river, some snake of the primeval slime, some cockroach from the cooling ooze of creation. I came up and looked out into the sky and saw it was fucking dawn or fucking twilight, what you will. Another fucking crepuscular moment, let’s call it. And I said to myself, it’s going to be all fucking right in half an hour. But what was going to be all right?”

  “There’s a question on the floor,” Bosco said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Crepuscularity,” he said.

  “Of course. So I surveyed the scene as best I could and saw that the Nazi I’d shot through the nose was still there in the distance. I had a perfect vision of how he’d fallen, how his helmet went up on the right ear, how the blood coursed down his ex-nose into his mouth, et cetera. I listened for any telltale sign of that sly fucker with the goddamned dog biscuits and I stayed put but made demarcative notations in my brain of what lay between that Nazi son of a bitch and myself, what approximate distance I had to traverse, for I had already decided, with a form of self-defense made known to me by every cell in my body, that if I did not eat within several minutes I would die.

  “I have no stomach for death, especially my own, and so I calculated the hectares, the rods, and the metrical leftovers between the Nazi and me, and I slithered on my belly like a lizard up from the putrid slush, the foul paste, the vomitous phlegm of a slop-jar swamp, and in time I reached my target, of whose freshness I was assured, unless I had been asleep for several days. I took his helmet off, cut off his head and let it roll, sliced his clothing, ripped him up the middle and cut a split steak off his stomach, turned him over and cut two chops off his buttocks, stuck him in the gizzard and ripped him sideways just so he’d remember me, slithered back to my cave with the steak and chops in his helmet, waited till dark, sealed up the cave so no fire would be seen, cut out a chimney for the smoke, then dined on filet of Nazi, chops on the Rhine, and lived to tell the tale.”

  The whore looked me in the eye.

  “You made steak and chops out of a German soldier?” she inquired.

  “Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” I asked her.

  “You just said it.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you. Whores should be fucked but not heard.”

  She signaled to a man at the bar who was a perfect double of the hanged man in the film I’d just seen. Clearly there is a problem of identity here, I thought, as four of the men at the bar (one looking incredibly like the Captain) moved toward our booth and separated me from Bosco and the blond whore forever.

  The hanged man came for me, while the other three converged on Bosco. We all went down as they stomped and punched us, then dragged us to our feet with the intention, I presume, of taking us elsewhere to cut our throats. But the hanged man could not resist punching me one more time while one of his fellows held me. Incredibly, I wrenched myself loose, though not in time to escape the punch, which sent me reeling backward toward the front door of the bar.

  “You Nazi carbuncle,” I said to the hanged man, and the thought came to me then of how well I used the language, and that if I pursued the writing life seriously I might become as successful in one art form as my father had been in another. The sugar whore came into the bar as I was reeling toward the door and when she saw me falling she let me fall, then took me by the arm and raised me up. This interrupted my beating and I gathered my wits and kicked the hanged man in the vicinity of the scrotum, causing him what I’d estimate to be moderate pain. While two thugs dragged Bosco toward the back room, I grabbed the sugar whore by the hand, thinking how our visions, even in dreams, define us, how we are products of the unfathomable unknown, how, for instance, I knew that my sugar whore was not a whore at all but a transpositional figure—Joan of Arc, Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Teresa of Avila—sent to ferry me out of danger; and, knowing this, I realized how superior I was to all in this barroom, how few people in the world could have such a beatific vision in this situation, and I pitied the crowd of them as I grabbed the whore by the wrist and ran with her out into the night streets of Frankfurt, where we would romp as lovers should, I, a prince of this darkness, about to embrace the saintly and virginal lark.

  “Will they come after us?” I asked the whore.

  “There is time and chance in all things,” she said.

  When she said that, I could not resist putting my hand under her blouse to touch the scar I had seen, if it was a scar. I felt the ridges of it, let my fingers move upward between her mounds, touch her tips.

  “Not here, not now, my darling,” she said, her voice a chorus of holy venereal rhapsodies.

  We walked on dark streets, in time coming to the banks of the Main River. On an embankment where grass grew amid the rubble, a figure dressed as a bat knelt over a supine blond woman whom I recognized as the librarian I unrequitedly loved for two years during adolescence. What retribution, I thought. How cruelly the Godhead dispenses justice. The librarian was bleeding from several orifices.

  “Don’t look,” my sugar whore said, and so I kissed her opulent mouth and put my hand under her skirt, stroking the naked thigh, the tender curve of her posterior puffs.

  “Not here, not now, my darling,” she said.

  I began to see the pattern: Bosco in the pay of the Meister, who was in the pay of Archie Bell of G-2, the main connection to army intelligence, Archie’s cover blown by my arrest and so he is shipped to Korea to bide his time for subsequent return; and the Meister moves to the Russian zone, where he is at home, and will now be viewed as a fugitive from the very structure to which he still gives allegiance; though naturally he is a double-bladed allegiant, without pride, without pity, the pluperfect hypocrite with yet a third face toward any allegiance that offers him the solace of money, or pudenda. There he will sit, accumulating slaves in his icecap of Slavic disorder, a Pharaoh, a Buddha, a slavering three-headed Cerberus, lackey to the gluttonous, glutinous garbagemasters of east and west, the accumulators, the suppurating spawn of cold-war politics, putrid fiscality, and ravenous libido.

  “Not here, not now, my darling,” said my sweet whore of this magical night as I raised her blouse for a bit of a suck.

  We walked hand in hand towa
rd the riverbank and both of us pointed to the same thing in the same instant. There, bobbing on the surface of the water, moving slowly with the current, came Bosco-Tubbs, minus his glasses, his head rotating as it bobbed, and for a moment I thought of leaping in and saving the man from drowning. But then, when he bobbed sideways, I perceived clearly that his head was connected to no body, only skull flesh, with livid neck fractions dangling free, and I knew it was pointless to effect a rescue. He was too far gone.

  “Not here, not now, my darling,” said my honeypot, pushing my hand away from the concatenation of her thighs.

  “May we go somewhere, then,” I asked, “and spend a gentle hour together?”

  “We can go where my pimp lives,” she said. “Would you like that?”

  “Is it far?” I asked.

  “About ten miles,” she said.

  “That’s a long walk,” I said.

  “We could take the Strassenbahn. You take the number four and then transfer to the number six, then take the yellow bus and transfer to the red bus, and there you are.”

  “It would be easier if we drove,” I said, and with my Swiss knife I slit the canvas top of an old Mercedes convertible parked in front of us, hotwired it as a detective had taught me when I was covering the police beat, and away we went into the rosy-fingered dawn, moving out of fucking crepuscularity at last.

  It was about an hour before dawn when I called Giselle to tell her I’d stolen a German policeman’s car and was with a whore named Gisela at a place called Fritz’s Garden of Eden. I said I’d fallen in love with the whore because her name was the German correlative of Giselle. I think this miffed Giselle, but she nevertheless got out of bed and dressed, and as she was going out the door she thought of her camera.

  I’d given her that Leica thirty-five-millimeter with wide-angle lens, filters, light meter, the works, infecting her with light and shadow. She had moved well beyond the usual touristy snaps of me at the Köln Cathedral, or the Wurzburg Castle, and had come to think of the camera as her Gift of Eyes, the catalyst for her decision to seek out the images that lurk on the dark side of the soul. She was beginning to verify her life through the lens of her camera, while I, of a different order, was pursuing validation through hallucination, which some have thought to be demonic; and I suppose I have courted the demonic now and again.

  I once told Giselle she was the essence of the esemplastic act, for as she was giving me the curl of her tongue at that moment, she would pause to speak love words to me in three languages. That spurred me to lecture her on unity, a Greek derivation. “There is no shortage of unity but much of it is simulated,” I began. “The one from the many is no more probable than many from the one. Only sea life propagates in solitude. But here, behold the esemplastic! . . . the unity of twain—I speaking, you comprehending, I delivering, you receiving, I the supplicant, you the benefactor, I me, you thee (I was within her at that moment), and yet we are loving in a way that is neither past, present, nor future, but only conditional: a time zone that is eternally renewable, in flux with mystery, always elusive, and may not even exist.”

  She didn’t know what I was talking about, but here I was, back in that elusive time zone at Fritz’s Garden of Eden, melting with the heat of love and penance when she arrived. I was standing on what passed for a bar in this hovel of depravity, holding a glass of red wine, in shirtsleeves, delivering a singsong harangue to my audience, and biting myself on the right hand. Giselle wondered: Is he really biting himself?

  “Jesus was the new Adam, and I report to you that I am the new Jesus,” I proclaimed, and then bit myself just below the right shoulder, and everybody laughed. A stain spread on my sleeve as I talked. Giselle thought it was a wine stain.

  “Jesus descended into hell, and what did he find? He found my wonderful, lascivious mother, my saintly, incestuous father. He found all of you here, this carnival of panders and half-naked whores, scavenger cripples, easy killers, and poxy blind men. He found you burglars and dope fiends, you crutch thieves and condom salesmen, you paralytic beggars and syphilitic hags, all doomed and damned to this malignant pigmire for an eternity of endless and timeless sin.”

  The audience hooted and whistled its approval of my sermon (Giselle took a photo of them) and I laughed wildly and bit myself on the palm of my left hand, then dripped blood from my thumb into my wineglass (Giselle took another photo, sending the carnival into a new eruption of applause). What she had thought to be wine was obviously my blood, and so she moved closer to where I could see her, and when she came into view I stopped my harangue. I snatched up my coat, jumped down from the bar, sucking my hand and balancing my wine, and I kissed Giselle on the mouth with my bloody lips. She backed off from me and raised her camera.

  “I want you to see yourself as you are tonight,” she said to me, and I opened both palms outward to show her where I had invested myself with the stigmata of the new Jesus.

  “We must leave,” I said to her. “They all want to kill me for my coat and suit. And they’ll kill both of us for your camera.”

  “Where is your whore?” she asked me.

  “She’s working, over there,” I said, and I pointed to the table where my Gisela was fellating the handless wrist of a one-eyed beggar whose good hand was somewhere inside her blouse.

  Giselle rapidly snapped photos of this, and of the entire mob, as the rabble eyed us and whispered. I broke my wineglass on the floor as we retreated, insuring that at least the barefoot and shoeless freaks would think twice before following us. We fled Fritz’s Garden, leaped into the stolen Mercedes, and I then drove through the dark streets and woodlands of Frankfurt, zigzagging at wild speed, turning on two wheels (or so it felt) into a place that seemed to be a wall and certain death but was an alley, as I saw, though Giselle didn’t, and she chose to scream.

  “Let me out!” she yelled, and I slowed the car.

  “Are you bored?” I asked.

  “I find death boring. Why should I die because my husband wants to? I find it boring.”

  “You certainly have style, Giselle, to think about death when we’re out for a joy ride.”

  I reached behind the driver’s seat and found a small package, then deftly, with one hand, unwrapped it to reveal four bratwurst afloat in mustard, and I offered the mess to Giselle. She set it on her lap and I then found my bag of Brötchen, and while holding the steering wheel with my knee, I split a Brötchen, stuffed a bratwurst into its crevice, hot-dog style, and handed it to her.

  “Is this today food?” she asked.

  “As I recall.”

  “How long since you bought this?”

  “Time means nothing to me.”

  “It means everything to bratwurst.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Are you in your right mind?”

  “No, nor have I ever been. My life is a tissue of delirious memory.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Peculiar things. The Captain’s hypocritical face when we met at MP headquarters after my arrest. The smell of my father’s whiskey-and-tobacco breath when I was twelve. The desire to raise a handlebar mustache like my father’s. The spasms of bliss that always punctuate the onset of love with you. Why do you ask?”

  “I was curious about your saintly incestuous father.”

  “Did I speak of my saintly incestuous father?”

  “You did.”

  “I can’t account for it. May I take off your clothing?”

  “It remains to be seen.”

  “I would stop the car, of course.”

  “That would improve our chances of not dying a hideous death.”

  I stopped the car and went for the back of her neck, running one hand under her hair and with the other seeking blouse burtons. She pushed me away and got out and I instantly broke into a fit of sobbing. The sobs choked me, my body twisted, my face fell into the bratwurst, and I made the noises a man makes when he knows that the sorrows of the world are his alone.

  Gisel
le came round to my side of the car and opened my door, tugged me up and out. I stopped sobbing, rubbed the mustard off my face, and she and I walked together on strange streets, she silent, I smiling with what came to be known as my zombie joy. Giselle didn’t know where to take me. I’d been a fugitive now for two days and she feared premature contact with the military. My wounds, though not serious to look at, were a problem; for she envisioned the Military Police ignoring them and throwing me into a cell where I’d molder in my zombie coma, oblivious to the venomous impact my own morbid bites might be having on my body.

  “You bit yourself, Orson,” she said to me.

  “Bit yourself,” I said.

  “Our mouths are full of poison,” she said.

  “Yes. Pyorrhea. Gingivitis.”

  “What if you bit your own hand and infused the pyorrhea into your fingers?”

  The thought gave me pause. I stopped walking and looked at my hand.

  “Pestilential saliva,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Bronchial methanes, colonic phosgenes. Can they become agents of involuntary suicide?”

  “I think you’re getting the idea,” she said.

  The perception raised my spirits and Giselle decided to call Quinn, who would be getting ready for reveille, the sun now breaking through the final moments of the night. Quinn had access to a Jeep and had contacts with German newspapermen who would know where to get me treated. I liked Quinn and trusted him, which certainly proves something. I didn’t know he’d been in love with Giselle since the night she performed on the high stool at the Christmas party. Quinn went to dinner with us now and again and I saw that Giselle found him appealingly innocent.

  Quinn did know a doctor, an ex-medical officer in the Wehrmacht who had a small general practice in the suburb of Bonames. He treated my five bite wounds and then we went back to our apartment, where Giselle bathed me, washed the pomade out of my hair, and dressed me in my uniform so I would surrender as a soldier, not a madman. I was contrite at the surrender, but in a moment of messianic candor I told the officer of the day I had been to hell and back and was now prepared to redeem the world’s sins, including his.