Читать книгу Winged Shoes and a Shield - Don Bajema - Страница 6

They were rough, wild-humored Texans. Their house rang with laughter and singing, steamed with heartfelt conflict, occasionally spattered with their blood. That house rocked with a lust for the next expression of love, the next fight, the next joke to sum it all up. Five kids raving under the roof of two Rebels. They left their pit bulls in Waco, moved out to San Diego and put a beagle named Chino in the back yard. But the blood lust and heart of those pit bulls seemed as much a part of them as the black Indian eyes of their mother, and the sloping shoulders and wry squint of their old man.

They had audacious courage, stubborn determination, and a fierce brotherhood, because they kept their dead alive. In fact they were on a first-name basis with death. He was like a visiting uncle who carried a straight razor and told glorious stories as he bounced each of us on his knee. He appeared in cars late at night, across the border in brothels, in the bottle, staring at us with blood-red eyes. His were stories sung to the slow low keys of the piano at night, or told with laughter in the kitchen by day.

When our thirst raged hotter than water could quench, they’d take me to the ancient well that keeps the souls of our past beneath its surface. When I took their dare and peered over the edge down onto that black pool, one of them would slap my back and holler, “See, there it is” — I’d see my own reflection. We each took our turn pulling to the surface another song, pouring out another story. We’d fill ourselves with the desire to accept the next dare by gulping the cold elixir of our unique American heritage, part romantic, part psychopathic.

Until this very day when my heart drops into a dry hollow pit, or during those times it beats with the universe, or even when I’m just catching my breath, I hear a slow rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, a whisper of inspiration from those down in that well. When I fail to live as the man I was born to be, I hear a chorus of low moans as they recall their own regrets, before their time here expired.

We can’t see our ghosts, but we can hear them. When their voices echo in our songs, in our blues, in our dreams, it’s our own voice we’re hearing. Because they were who we are, and what happened to them, happened to us.

Gettysburg. Still-Breathing Ghosts.

Promise them the love of God and country; then watch them become the sons of Satan, transformed by the alchemy of war, from boys crying for their mothers into their brothers’ butchers. Long after you are sick of the sound of the victor and the vanquished, long after your heart is broken observing their astonishing efforts to prolong a life no longer worth living, you’ll hear their last song. It’ll sound just like a rebel yell.

I’m one of those still-breathing ghosts. The last few battles, I remember pinning my father’s name under my gray jacket. I wanted to go home one way or the other. I did the same thing for a few boys new to the regiment who had not seen this kind of fighting before. Without ammunition, we’d have to run more boys at them than they could kill all at once, and get it down to hand-to-hand just as fast as possible. These new boys’ hands shook so badly I penned their names in for them. They said their fingers were too cold. I took it as a white lie. We’d get up in the morning and vomit, squat somewhere and empty our bowels, and do the things you might imagine a body has to do when it is expecting to die, beside itself with numbing fear.

The older boys start yelling curses across the pasture. The answer returns in the form of a collective jeer filling the black field. The sound of voices preparing for battle drifts disembodied across the low morning fog. The momentum for hysteria builds into a peak as the fingers of the sun clutch another morning. The quiet fear in the darkness comes to light and thousands of men and boys begin to take the first steps toward true wrathful bloody passion. You’ll need it, believe me, when men are killing each other by the thousands in a ten-acre pasture on a single summer morning.

I remember I hated the sound of the clubbing and stabbing and crushing. That crunching wrong sound. The evidence of it in my hair, covering my clothes, on my face, under the nails of my hands. I hated the red pile of agony under my feet, clawing at my legs in blind animal panic. You have to teach them that a boot caving in their face is a lot worse than trying to die there quietly. I’m young, fourteen, and not the youngest by far. I’ve killed boys younger than me. I’ve pinned their arms to their sides as a couple of men with jack-off voices shouted insanely to “Stickemstickem . . . stick that little son of a bitch, . . .” watching as the boy’s white face opened in a shriek for his mother.

I’m one of the last ones left. Since I’m small, they use me to kill the wounded and the dying enemy we leave behind our advancing ranks. It’s an important job, because you never want trouble behind you. If a few wounded can somehow mount a move, you can get cut off, surrounded, which is the worst thing that can happen. Some of them were tricky, and you had to stay on your toes.

Struggling for each breath of air yourself, you stumble over a field of groaning, wild-eyed men. The man covered in blood, straining on his hands and knees, howling like a hound, shaking his gory beard — kill him. Move over to the boys encouraging each other in some desperate assurance that the fighting is over for them. Kill them. It is too early in the battle for prisoners. Out of the corner of your eye you see a blue uniform crawling fast and resting, then scrabbling again. The man crying for water, and thanking God when he sees your approach, mistaken that you have come to help him — kill him. The man you saw crawling senses your approach and drags his useless legs toward the trees lining the pasture. You hear his gasping breath falling into sequence with your own. Kill him. Stab a dead man just in case. End the sentences of a hundred whispered prayers. Kill, until everyone there is dead, even the ones still breathing.