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We tried to block a registrar's office, marched in front of the court house door until they moved us with cattle prods and billy clubs. I never thought they would hit the women, but they did. I fell down and rolled to the sidewalk, but the girl next to me, a lovely girl from Ohio, was hit on the side of the head. Her ear split right in half. I pulled her behind the court house, tried to stop the bleeding, then went for help.
I couldn't get anyone to help, no one, white, Negro, no one. Everyone was screaming and hitting. No one.
When I went back two Negro boys were dragging her between them across the street and into an alley. I thought they were trying to help, so I followed, but when I got there, they were raping her. She came to long enough to try to fight them, then to cry that she would give them what they wanted, she would give it to them, she would love them, but not now when her head hurt, not now. They cursed her, then told her that they didn't want her to give them anything; they'd take what they wanted; then one of them began slapping her while he was on her.
I ran back into the street, grabbed three white men, and screamed at them, "Those niggers are raping her, a white girl, raping her." The white men stopped them, but they also beat the Negro boys so badly they both had to be hospitalized. Dick had the white men arrested for assault, and tried to say that they had attacked demonstrators. The girl from Ohio refused to testify, so I did, and the men got off. Dick called me an ofay bitch, and I caught the next bus home.
Baby, I'm confused. Please write me, please see me when you get home. You used to make such good sense to me. I won't ask you to forgive me, but please write.
She went on, inquiring about my leg and the plane crash, recounting news from home, wishing me a quick recovery, and a speedy trip home.
What do you do? All the good memories came back. The breathless dizzy kiss after a football game, the summer afternoons on the banks of the Nueces watching a scissor-tail and a squirrel argue over the live oak above us, the first time she read Kafka and the lovely perplexity wrinkling her nose as she said "I don't understand it but I like it."… What do you do?
"Write her," Abigail said after reading the letter. "She sounds lost. I hate it, but write her." She looked down the ward, the other casualties, the dismembered kid, both legs and an arm lost to a mine, the two blind ones, the one with no face, five with bullet-scrambled insides, three crazy with malaria, one with a virus fever no one could diagnose, assorted missing and broken limbs, and me. "Write her. Men don't understand what they do to women. You're all bastards." She arranged a smile on her face, then walked to the next bed.
I wrote that confusion must be a condition of growing older, of seeing more, of living, because I must confess to confusion too. I promised that I would see her when I got home. I told her that I was in love with a sweet girl, and thinking about marrying again.
"You can tell her that you love me, but you can't tell me," Abigail said when she read my letter. "Why?"
"It's different, that's all."
"Sure," she sneered. "This way you don't risk anything. You keep her from hoping and you keep me on the hook." She walked away.
I tore up the letter, then didn't know what else to do, so I put the pieces back together and recopied it.
Late the night before Gallard was to return, Abigail came while I was sleeping. I woke with her fallen on my chest, her mouth against my ear, her tears on my face. I held her.
"Jake," she sobbed. "I'm sorry. I'm a fool. I want to break your leg again, keep you here. I love you. I won't push."
Her mouth was wet and rubbery with gin against mine, hot, hungry; her teeth nipped at my lower lip. She had been to the Club with one of the younger doctors, but had slipped out into the night and run all the way to the hospital.
"And I'm drunk," she said, sitting up.
"That's okay; I'm asleep…"
"And having wonderful dreams," she whispered. She stood up, her hands smoothing the wrinkled white linen dress down over long tight thighs. "Please," she whispered, then left, quick and graceful with pride, hips swaying slightly with drink and heat. "Please."
12. Gallard
Gallard came back from Hong Kong, had me rolled into a room, nearly ripped the cast off, threw a smaller one on, then handed me my crutches, saying, "I want to see you in my office, Sgt. Krummel." Then he walked away.
As I stood, my brain reeled a bit and my eyes unfocused, and my first swinging step swung a little loose.
"Let me help you at first," the orderly said.
"Buzz off, jack, I got it under control."
"Well, fall on your ass, wise guy. Nobody'll care."
"You're telling me," I said, swinging out of the room.
He sat, back to the door, feet propped on a typing table, smoking a furious cigar. The blue cloud of smoke whirled about his head as if he had just stepped out of it and his words were as forcefully calm as the orders of a potentate when he said, "Shut the door, Sgt. Krummel." I did, then sat down across the desk from his back.
"I didn't tell you to sit down, sergeant," he said, still facing the wall.
I said nothing.
He turned quickly, pointed his cigar at me, the chewed frayed end, saying, "I didn't tell you to sit down, sergeant."
"You notice I didn't ask you. You got some shit in your ear, man, don't try to lay that military jazz on my ass."
He looked down for a moment, then half-gri
"I seem to remember you saying that it was your idea."
"We all make mistakes," he said. "I don't know if I should turn you over to the Air Police or the psychiatrist. One or the other, for sure, but which… Oh, not that it's not good," he said, digging it out of his drawer. "Layman that I am, I still know it's good, you might even call it art, as long as you say art for art's sake, if my jargon is correct. But it is evil, Krummel, a lovely lie and twice as evil for being lovely. Maybe you're like that, but not mankind. I've only been so frightened in quite the same way once before in my life.
"The war had caught me after I graduated from Drake, or I caught the war, you might say, and I joined with flying in mind, but ended up being a medical supply officer. At the end of the war I was on Okinawa while they were still mopping up. A medical convoy had stalled atop a small ridge, and in the valley below I could see Marines chasing women and children through a cane field, shooting them down, laughing, shouting, jumping for real joy. I counted seven women and nineteen children shot down and left to rot.
"The patrol came up the ridge later, to see what was wrong with our trucks. They were young and bright and happy, kids with new toys, a new shipment of carbines, the first they'd seen and they scared me to death." He paused, puffed billows of smoke from the battered cigar. "This," he said, pointing to the manuscript, "made me feel the same way.
"Oh, not that it's not good, but it's just not true…"
"It was meant to be true not beautiful. If it's good," I said, "that's an accident of truth."
"You're mad as the March Hare, Krummel."
He went on at some length about the necessity for truth in art.
"Hey, stop it will you," I said. "All you're saying is that you've met a murderer, found him interesting, liked him, and you're ashamed of that part of you which loves violence as much as I do, and since you don't know how to deny me, you're trying to make me feel guilty about something I did honestly. The trick is to deny actions but never people. Easy. Actions can be evil; people can't. Joe Morning taught me that, though he didn't mean to."