Some of Your Blood (8 page)

The next day he went to town and saw the man at the post office and the first thing Aunt Mary knew about it was when he brought back the papers for her to sign, he was on his way. It come so sudden she and Uncle Jim did not know what to say even, she kind of puddled up and Uncle Jim just kept on saying Well whaddaye know, well whaddaye know, and when George was in his store clothes he said Son all we did was the best we could. George he just smiled that smile he had when he did not know what to say, and he took off.

Well they say a lot about the army it is no good, it is hurry up and wait, it is this lousy army, this goddamn army. Well I am here to tell you there is lots of guys get a better deal in the army they ever got before, there is a lot of them griping the worst never had a word to say before they got the wrinkles out of their belly the first time in their whole lives. There is better grub than army grub but army grub is a whole lot better than a lot of these guys ever saw before at least that regular. And you would be surprised how many guys never in their whole life got enough sleep week in week out and kept themselves clean before. You do what they tell you and never volunteer, and you find you got a life. You want to worry, go ahead, but it will be all peanuts and chicken spit you are worrying about, the big things is all thought out for you, you do not have to worry yourself. I said this before and I will have to say it again, when you come right down to it there is not a thing a man needs than a way to fill his belly and let somebody take care of all his thinking, he don’t have to if he don’t want to. And if that is not the army through and through I do not know what is.

For once in his life George figured he done the right thing. He was sorry sometimes he could not see Anna but whatever happened to her she was not alone in the world and she would be all right unless she died and then what can you do. Anyway for the two-year hitch and training and motor mechanic school George had everything he wanted and for once some money besides. It was the state school all over again for him only bigger and easier too. When he come to the school he had to spend a long time learning what to do and what not, but in the army he already knew, he knew better than a lot of guys who never lived in a dormitory or a barracks before. He did not bother with nobody and nobody bothered with him, he was still a big guy who kept his mouth shut which is the recipe for getting left alone if you want to.

Time come to re-enlist he did, you know he did not even take his furlough but just hung around the base, it was in California. And it could be he fell in this slot people are always falling in, getting the idea that things are going to go on like they are for ever. Well they ain’t.

First a lot of rumors and you know how to shuck off rumors, but what really happened was one of the rumors you shucked off. The whole outfit shipped overseas. Some said it was a war and some a police action and I guess it was a big joke to some of them.

For George it was bad, there was nobody to talk to about it and he would not know what to say if he did. He moved around a lot in the army, Louisiana, New Jersey, Michigan, California, but no move was like this move. And that old hot place come back to him in his gut, and there was not much he could do about it. Overseas it was not so easy to go off hunting and there was not much to hunt if you did. And there was none of this trading passes and easy coming and going. Every thing was laced up a notch, tight.

Then there was drilling and that never bothered George, but this one day it was on the airstrip and these three C-119s came in with casualties and they told off infantrymen for stretcher-bearers. They took out one hundred and sixty-three stretcher cases altogether and you see this and you hear this and you are never the same again.

All you can say about the way George felt is he was a little kid again he was going to get for something he did or for nothing. The father would do it but the father coming home, even coming home drunk, did not mean he would get hit just then. The only thing you could be sure of was getting hit, that was going to happen and no fooling. You just never knew when, that is all. And George with the school and the farm, but especially the army, George had like grown away from all that, it was dead and gone and past so forget it. And then these casualties, they were for real. So getting hit for sure, but you don’t know just when—here it was again. And here it always had been. George thought he left it behind, well he did not. And maybe tonight and maybe next week you would go over there where they made stretcher cases out of men. And when you went maybe you would not get yours tonight or next week, but get it you pos-i-loot-ly would.

George was not the only one felt this way and he knew it. Some laughed and talked louder and ran faster and did everything heavier and some slunk off every chance they got and sat and looked worried, and some spent all their time figuring out how to get loose just one time and get especially drunk. But George, there was only one thing he wanted and needed and he began to think of Anna, think of Anna like he never did before, think of Anna so much he could almost smell Anna the way she was, warm.

And there was not nothing he could do about it, that was the worst. So what he done was as hard as anything he ever did because he never done it before, he decided to write a letter. It must have took him four days to write that letter and most of the time was just sitting looking at the paper. Then he wrote his letter and that was that, it did not make him feel no better but it was all he could think of to do and he done it and there was nothing more he could do. And nobody else knew how he felt. He never was a talker. When somebody talked to him about getting shipped over, he would just smile. I guess nobody really knew at all.

Then one day they called him to see this doctor, this colonel. And he went and that is where I began this story. Phil said I could begin it any place as long as I explained whatever I said.

Well old George Smith just went stateside and he clammed up like he never did in his life before, and when you come down to it it is a good idea nobody bothered with him once they welded him into that tank. Because he was away down deep crazy mad at first. Not crazy, crazy mad, there is a big difference. So anyone pushing at him when he felt that way he would of just got stubborn maybe fight some more. But a crazy mad is like a fire, you shut it up by itself for long enough it is just naturally going to go out.

So one day the door opened and the guard let in this doctor, only he was just a sergeant and not very big. Bigger than Uncle Jim but not very big. And he had black bushy hair and glasses and he right away said he was a doctor all right but call him Phil and how did he feel. And George could of broke him in two over his knee or snapped him like a rattlesnake when you want to break his neck you got no stick, but Phil just waved at the guard go away, and the guard locked him in and Phil sat down near him on the bed and handed cigarettes although this George Smith never did smoke he wished he did.

So Phil was smoking and keeping his mouth shut and George Smith begun to feel easier and finally Phil asked him what did he want most of all and George said Out. And Phil asked Why. And George was surprised at this but if it was a stupid question Phil did not look stupid. So George said, To go back to his girl and get married. Because George knew now of all the places in the world he could go to, it would have to be next to Anna, she knew what he was and she liked it too and nobody else ever would. And he did not want the army no more not after those stretcher cases.

Then Phil told him he could get out but he would have to do just what Phil said. And George Smith, he was ready to climb the wall and hang off the ceiling if Phil said to. I have to say here that I trust Phil. He wants me out, I am sure of that. I also don’t think he wants this writing of mine to be nothing but the truth. He has got nothing to sell, not to me or to anybody who reads this. I would not believe that at first but I do now.

So he told me to write the story of my life and I said I did not know how or even where to begin and he said begin anywhere but be sure you explain everything. He said like a movie or a comic where they start out a guy is an old man and go back to what happened earlier if I wanted to. Just as long as I wrote down everything important so he could understand me better. And he told me if there was trouble getting started then write it about somebody else, because he said that is a good way to back off from yourself, you remember better. So after he went I started in, I made up the name George Smith and he is right. I wrote all the rest of that day and from then on I did not do nothing but write as long as there was any light, and he come back two other times but I was not finished.

So this is the story and it is all true and it is all I can remember. I done the best I could. I do not know why I am here or why I was shipped stateside here to this nut factory instead of the can for just hitting an officer. I am not crazy, anyone is who thinks so. All I want is out. I want out of here and I want out of the army, I had enough. All I want is to go back to my girl, we will get married and leave there or maybe farm some place. Or a store.

Here is another of the letters with the letterhead discarded.

Looneybin Lane                      O-R

Orgonia, Ore.                          Feb 26

Dear Phil, damnit:

With all I’ve got to do I have been sitting here pulling on my lower lip and wondering what to say to you. I’m going to tell you right at the start that when I first got that bundle of paper from you and determined it wasn’t the Sunday
Chronicle
complete with the spring fashions supplement, I was mad as hell. And I suppose I still am. And I began by feeling that “George Smith” should be thrown out of that maniac’s motel of yours, and I wound up feeling the same way. But you made me laugh.

Well of course, you stinking psychologist you. Anything you might have said to me I’d’ve spit in your eye for, after all this time. If I thought about you and “George” at all, I thought no news is good news and you’d finished with it. Then you send me his autobiography with no comment at all, just
nothing.

So ruefully, it is to laugh. I know what you’re up to. You want me to react, i.e., think. Now you know damn well an administrator doesn’t have time to think any more than he has time to plow through a testament like this. You also know me well enough to know I’d leaf through it and get hauled in and then go back and start over and hit every word. And be impressed by the effort that went into it, not excluding your pecking it all out on the typewriter. (What’s the matter—haven’t you got enough work to do?) (Seriously, Phil, I know you did it instead of sleeping and cut that out: I need you. You’re going to kill yourself.)

Now about the biography. I am doubtless much more impressed by the pathetic horror of it than a case-hardened character like you. I am also impressed by this kid’s descriptive ability. I don’t know how a fourth-grade English teacher would parse some of his sentences (like his description of the weathered knot of wood in the boat’s side: “… you see things like that sometimes that though they do not move your eye keeps going into and out of and around and back again there are two spirals of hair on a cat’s back that way.”) but I never failed to get
exactly what
he meant. And aside from the one or two real insights he comes up with, as for example that discussion on sex and the machine-precise, almost delicate distinction he draws between Satisfy and Relieve, I am impressed by the
completeness
of his story. To this jaundiced eye he has left out nothing of significance; his portrait of himself is filled in to a substantial solid and contains no appreciable holes. What he has left out, like the exact details of his sex techniques with Anna, shouldn’t bother anyone except a grubby clinician like yourself who is beyond the reach of the chivalrous asterisk.

I think there are a great many folks on the loose, people who would pass anyone’s sanity standards with flying colors, who are
in themselves
a lot sicker than this boy. He’s one of the few human beings I’ve ever heard of who seems to have placed sex in a genuinely wholesome perspective. He’s inordinately self-reliant; as long as he’s alone, he could no more be lost than a cat can be lost. And that brings up what to my mind is the real nature of his sickness, if any.
And it isn’t his sickness.

I said above that many certifiably sane people are in themselves sicker than “George.” Where we can raise an eyebrow at George is in matters which concern, not a person, but people. No human being, not even George, lives entirely alone. Interpersonal flux isn’t just fun, or convenient, or decent, or orthodox. It is essential, vital. Homo sap. is an interdependent species. He may
not
live alone. And it’s easy to describe how “George” relates to people: he doesn’t.

Yet, in him, I don’t think it matters. He found Anna. There’s an odd aura about that relationship but whatever it is—and I’m not prying—it’s suitably convexo-concave, if you see what I mean. She sounds like a girl with pieces missing, but she has the ones he needs.

To sum up I think this guy’s only sickness is scar tissue from a regrettable childhood, and his only real crime is in being a loner. It feels criminal to us gregarious souls because we don’t think we could do it. It’s—well, unfashionable. It makes us uneasy because of an in-the-cells certainty we all have that without our fellows we could not survive. In a herd-and-hive culture like ours, a solitary bent seems in a way immoral. Tsk tsk.

All the foregoing (he said modestly) is of bull-session character; this isn’t my specialty, it’s yours. For all my irritation, I am grateful to you, old buddy, for a fascinating hour. Now for Christ’s sake turn him loose.

as ever,

Al

P.S.: What in
God’s
name do you suppose was in that air letter that alerted the major?

Here is the carbon copy of a letter.

Lingam Lane                           O-R

Catamite, Cal.                         Feb 28

Dear Kernel, corps of the Nut: