sixteen-year-old girl whose heart he’d fiddled with.
I finally turned away from the wall of dead, went to the porch.
It’s not always wonderful to ponder the gene pool you squirted from. In a way it’s wonderful, I mean, but in six or seven other ways it can make one nervous concerning tragic consistency, ancestral expectations, and that horrible bloodstream urge to go on and do the questionable deeds that might make those dead faces nod in grim approval.
The porch was sideways to the kitchen, the very kitchen in which Smoke had wanted that bacon. General Jo bunked with the state in Jeff City, and we’d lived here with Panda until a few months after his release. Grandma had passed in 1944 and Panda seemed to enjoy us living there. In my mind I could see that hot grease spilling, burning down Smoke’s young body, though it might’ve been legend rather than memory.
“I’m gettin’ about to be hungry,” Smoke said. He, too, seemed subdued by this house, these walls, the clabbered history. “How ’bout you?”
“Let’s wait for Panda.”
“Okay. Whatever.” Smoke brushed his hand at his dreadlocks. “I reckon I’ll take a dump in peace, then.”
I dropped to the porch steps and had a cigarette. The brand, Lucky Strikes, took me back to the Marines, as that’s where I met the brand and took up the vice. The wall of dead had me thinking, remembering, seeing connections.
I was in boot camp the week I turned seventeen. The folks had moved to K.C., with all its boulevards and fancy strangers and different rules of conduct, and I couldn’t stand it; theCorps and possible war exerted more appeal. One evening when I was not yet eighteen and a Lance Corporal Jarhead on Guam, I fell in love with a sweet drink called the Sloe Gin Fizz at The Star Bar on Agana Drive. I overdrank like a puppy will overeat. On the walk outside of the bar, it’s midnight or so, and I’m nine thousand miles from the West Table square, and there’s an ocean out across the way and palm trees chanting in the breeze. A splendid setting for adventure. Near as I can figure it, from memory and Captain’s Mast testimony, this sailor, a total stranger, said a slander about my Jade East aftershave smelling like young pussy, and this ignited some sloe gin fantasy in me about interservice scuffling, fun-loving mayhem, and I apparently took all those thoughts for real and clubbed that Squid down with my fists, then kicked him ’til his ribs caved. It seems I felt I had done something notable and terrific, because I stood over him laughing until the Shore Patrol scooped me up. The man I had tore down in my fantasy turned out to be a Seabee, and something of a war hero. I did my brig time in a strange mood, no longer a lance corporal, sad I’d whipped a hero but sort of proud for jackin’ a Seabee, who I considered to be, man for man, the best brawlers in the service of our nation.
This was the sort of incident that repeated itself a few times in life, and got known, and blackballed me from teaching jobs. It was the type of raw act, though, I felt might get that wall of dead to nod in approval.
I didn’t want to see it if they did.
Imaru would know.
When Panda showed, he was grinning a big youthful grin, looking like a severely battered but joyful seven-year-old troll. He came clambering up from the cemetery, using his BB rifle as a cane, carrying two red squirrels by their bushy tails.
Looking at him I thought it must be true that the mighty old can turn suddenly childlike again, as when an odometer on a car turns over and it’s back to the first mile once more. Except now it’s a decrepit vehicle.
At the porch he lifted the squirrels high and said, “Lunch, boys. You clean, I’ll cook.”
Panda patted me on the shoulder, a buddy gesture, but wrapped his arms around Smoke and they hugged hard. There’s a bond of a special nature between them that’s not there between us. Smoke has always been the big delight of Panda’s
I finally turned away from the wall of dead, went to the porch.
It’s not always wonderful to ponder the gene pool you squirted from. In a way it’s wonderful, I mean, but in six or seven other ways it can make one nervous concerning tragic consistency, ancestral expectations, and that horrible bloodstream urge to go on and do the questionable deeds that might make those dead faces nod in grim approval.
The porch was sideways to the kitchen, the very kitchen in which Smoke had wanted that bacon. General Jo bunked with the state in Jeff City, and we’d lived here with Panda until a few months after his release. Grandma had passed in 1944 and Panda seemed to enjoy us living there. In my mind I could see that hot grease spilling, burning down Smoke’s young body, though it might’ve been legend rather than memory.
“I’m gettin’ about to be hungry,” Smoke said. He, too, seemed subdued by this house, these walls, the clabbered history. “How ’bout you?”
“Let’s wait for Panda.”
“Okay. Whatever.” Smoke brushed his hand at his dreadlocks. “I reckon I’ll take a dump in peace, then.”
I dropped to the porch steps and had a cigarette. The brand, Lucky Strikes, took me back to the Marines, as that’s where I met the brand and took up the vice. The wall of dead had me thinking, remembering, seeing connections.
I was in boot camp the week I turned seventeen. The folks had moved to K.C., with all its boulevards and fancy strangers and different rules of conduct, and I couldn’t stand it; theCorps and possible war exerted more appeal. One evening when I was not yet eighteen and a Lance Corporal Jarhead on Guam, I fell in love with a sweet drink called the Sloe Gin Fizz at The Star Bar on Agana Drive. I overdrank like a puppy will overeat. On the walk outside of the bar, it’s midnight or so, and I’m nine thousand miles from the West Table square, and there’s an ocean out across the way and palm trees chanting in the breeze. A splendid setting for adventure. Near as I can figure it, from memory and Captain’s Mast testimony, this sailor, a total stranger, said a slander about my Jade East aftershave smelling like young pussy, and this ignited some sloe gin fantasy in me about interservice scuffling, fun-loving mayhem, and I apparently took all those thoughts for real and clubbed that Squid down with my fists, then kicked him ’til his ribs caved. It seems I felt I had done something notable and terrific, because I stood over him laughing until the Shore Patrol scooped me up. The man I had tore down in my fantasy turned out to be a Seabee, and something of a war hero. I did my brig time in a strange mood, no longer a lance corporal, sad I’d whipped a hero but sort of proud for jackin’ a Seabee, who I considered to be, man for man, the best brawlers in the service of our nation.
This was the sort of incident that repeated itself a few times in life, and got known, and blackballed me from teaching jobs. It was the type of raw act, though, I felt might get that wall of dead to nod in approval.
I didn’t want to see it if they did.
Imaru would know.
When Panda showed, he was grinning a big youthful grin, looking like a severely battered but joyful seven-year-old troll. He came clambering up from the cemetery, using his BB rifle as a cane, carrying two red squirrels by their bushy tails.
Looking at him I thought it must be true that the mighty old can turn suddenly childlike again, as when an odometer on a car turns over and it’s back to the first mile once more. Except now it’s a decrepit vehicle.
At the porch he lifted the squirrels high and said, “Lunch, boys. You clean, I’ll cook.”
Panda patted me on the shoulder, a buddy gesture, but wrapped his arms around Smoke and they hugged hard. There’s a bond of a special nature between them that’s not there between us. Smoke has always been the big delight of Panda’s
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