GOODBYE, SOUL BROTHER -1 Cont

Lef rye lef hada lef rye lef out of the major’s (Zev’s) quarters, back into the boonies.  A female FuPeg bows.  Tiny creatures.  The males are small.  The females are tiny.  Tiny and strictly off limits.  This is an unnecessary rule of engagement.  The troopers don’t find the female FuPegs attractive.  Cute, in their tiny yellow way, even adorable.  They will not look a trooper in the eyes, but shy away their own, bow and sometimes, when they think they will not be heard, giggle like a schoolgirl.  Early in their occupation Capt. Shuvee encountered a frightened female FuPeg and when she looked up at him out of sheer nervousness he disarmed her with a wink and she blushed.  Like a woman.  Yes, they giggle like schoolgirls and blush like women.  Tiny yellow fragile women.  If a trooper attempted consummation he would split her with a single thrust.  Not on purpose.  Seems they don’t do anything on purpose in Fusaichi.  They don’t even purposely control their sick boonified bodies.  

    Boonification, the squadron’s chief medical officer coined the term.  Described it as a kind of caving in of the constitution, a sinking of the temperament.  A slow and steady implosion of spirit.  

    No one in the squadron had more American spirit than the doc, Dr. Theodore “Teddy” Fager who pioneered “meatball surgery” in Fusaichi before the breath of the Korean War hushed path a single ear.  A rough ‘n tumble kind of guy seeking his better self he received a rude awakening in Fusaichi.  An aspiring surgeon, he learned that most ailments in Fusaichi were constitutional and unsurgical with the first lesson coming from a lonely private with a French connection.  The squadron knows him as the soldat.  He came gibbering about the last rose of summer and it took a while for the doc to figure out that he was gibbering about a broken romance.  But the brokenness was really boonification.  Had an injury, slipped, fell, broke his tail bone and came for medical consultation.  

    “Broke my ass, doc.”

    “Say coccyx.”

    “Say cock what?”

    “Kok siks.”

    And so the first sign of boonification was born:  a trooper’s cock’s sick.  Sick in the green the everlasting green of Fusaichi Foo Say Itchy however it’s pronounced it is green and hot and forgotten.  And Capt. Shuvee lef’s and rye’s toward the quarters of Dr. Fager who did his damndest to lef and rye his obligation out of war service.  Walk out.  Disengage.  Didn’t want to serve.  At least not in Fusaichi, at Fort Marcy.  He didn’t serve with these troopers.  But the troopers with whom he did serve were ordered to the real world, a.k.a. Big America.  He asked for a transfer to another unit because he wanted for surgical experience and he was offered Fort Marcy or Fort Wand where he would be in charge of  the wounded soldier boys at Tosconova.  Wounded but fixable, devastated but healable.  None of them wounded and devastated and boonified beyond his poor ability to mend.  Go for Wand, he was advised.  He wanted, first and foremost, to go to Little America in London where the girls, he was told, fall head over heels for the brazen charm and the Yankee passion of a Yankee gentleman with the accent of Hollywood movie stars and a certain suave voir faire, a je ne c’est quoi, a certain umph and oh soooo lovely teeth.  London girls living on London time and American hands on English tits and . . . ahhhh . . . they even kiss in a different accent and they like the cadence of it, the drawl and clip of it, the it against the other it and none of it was offered to Doc Fager.  Marcy or Wand, that was it.  And before he made his decision Wand was claimed by Dr. Freeland who quickly became the wonderful wizard of Wand.  Has magic hands, it was quickly said.  Fixed em up and sent them home, back to the world.  Yes, Dr. Reynaldo Freeland, a.k.a. Reynaldo the wizard of Wand, fixes the fixable, stitches the stitchable and continues to ride the wave of divisional fame while Dr. Fager doses the boonified soldiers of Marcy with candy, you know, to salvage whatever remains of their intestinal fortitude.  

 

1.36.  Gotta stay awake for fire guard and need a jump start?  Eat some chocolate candy and take one helluva rail trip, yep, just hold on and ride the rails until your shift is over and you must come down, relax, sit back and swallow a lemon drop, kid, it’s sure to make you mellow, fellow.  Either candy ride is available much obliged to the candyman.  If anyone can make it happen the candyman can.  Magic candy with no candy stripes.  Just chew suck bite crunch swallow and forget Foosayitchy while you ride either high or mellow.  Even if your cock is sick.

 

1.37.  “I don’t understand.”

    There are many things that Capt. Shuvee doesn’t understand:  oceanography, astronomy, anything dealing with the sea, the stars, algorithms and beyond the sciences he doesn’t understand how anyone can keep an unfaithful lady’s secret or reject the hard truth that Zev’s gone west  not to be a modern day forty niner determined to strike the gold but because he knew that Fort Marcy is doomed and he, when it came to this point, determined to get out of Dodge and this determined point, given their circumstances, compelled him to board the Miss Kearney and leave his squadron to the doomnation damnation boonification at their will.  

    “Prove it,” says the doc.

    Proof requested and proof given in the form of the dispatch.  

    “Well, Gibson is nothing if not reliable.  So he is dead.  The colonel is dead.  What are our orders?”

    “To say nothing.”

    “Say nothing to prevent what?  His death will be world news.”

    Doc Fager is right.  No one can prevent the news from spreading any more than he could have prevented Buck Sergeant Winslow Homer from dying.  

 

1.38.  He had a saintly persuasion, was everybody’s buddy and every buddy’s saint.  Wore a silver charm that clinked and clanged against his dog tags and that charm was for a saint and it compelled him to soldier on!  Saint who?  Saint Ballado?  Ne guh tiv.  Saint Michael who shaded all his shades of glory until he arrived at Fort Marcy, Fusaichi.  

 

1.39.  Where he became boonified by malaria and bed-ridden, restricted to quarters and candy.  The rumor spread:  his cock’s sick.  His cock, his everything, sick and quartered and regularly ministered by Papa Clem.  

    “Am I gonna be alright, papa?”

    All the time the truth was comma to the top and all the time it was stopped by Papa Clem saying, “Yes, you’ll be alright.”

    

1.40.  Alright, until

 

1.41.  Buck Sergeant Homer couldn’t piss for himself.  Too bed-ridden, too sick, too boonified and sickly alive to hold his own dick and take a piss in the greenness of Foosayitchy and the doc dosed him not with candy but with atabrine, a synthetic antimalaria drug.  

Fort Marcy has a one good time with atabrine, by God!  Everything is atabrine:  The Atabrine Officers Club and the Atabrine NCO Club, affectionately, the Atabrine juke joint which revels in absurdity with its sign TEN CENTS ADMISSION TO KEEP OUT MOSQUITOS AND OTHER RIFF RAFF.  The only word seen more than Atabrine is Kilroy and he is everywhere and never seen.  Everywhere:  the Atabrine Juke Joint - Kilroy Drank Here; the Holy Assembly of the Atabrine Church - Kilroy Prayed Here; the Atabrine Asylum (hospital) - Kilroy Puked Here; near the pine bluff - There But For The Grace Of God Goes Kilroy; at the ocean shore by a chaos of footsteps in the sand - Kilroy Danced Here.  The troopers who made this last discovery decided to join in the dance.  

 

1.42.  Doc Fager often remembers a dance held at a country house in a la ville rouge called La Troienne in the La Prevoyante district of France.  It was a charity dance and for a charitable donation of ten cents a dance a soldat could romance a girl on the dance floor.  Many of the soldiers had to take a swift swallow of wine to be courageous enough to pay up and ask a mademoiselle in elegant shyness, quiet, understated, elusive because of her shy elegancy and understated quietness, to have a dance with him.  A whole gallorette of mesdamoiselles to pick from and one American soldat chose one that he first saw at the bend or at the oxbow of the ville’s riviere d’or, its gold river, affectionately called “goldikova.”  So goldly pristine anyone would think it was made of pure anabaa.  Doc Fager saw that soldat seeing that mademoiselle by the river, saw and felt that the soldat felt he saw a mademoiselle born gold.  Later he witnessed them dance and he danced in a soldat’s uniform and she danced in a poor village girl’s dress though she might as well have been dancing in silks for her quiet and shy enthusiasm which she could not disguise.  Her eyes.  They gave her away.  That soldat made her brown eyes blue

 

1.43.  Ain’t no blue eyes in Fusaichi, not among the FuPegs.  No green eyes either.  Something fundamentally wrong about that in nothing but green Fusaichi.

 

1.44.  and evaporated her shyness, turned up the volume of her quietness.  Soon the issue wasn’t ten cents a dance but ten cents a kiss, just a kiss, a brushup of lips.  He was fascinated, Doc Fager, and appreciated the fascination because it distracted him from the surgical scenery of the aftermath of a combat zone.  A majority of the soldats were injured, somehow sidelined, Americans sidelined and injured in the European Theater and Doc Fager wondered if they wondered about why they were sidelined, why they were diminished.  Nearly finished.  Many of them at least a quarter less than they physically were before the war.  And some of them not obviously less.  Like with the soldat and the mademoiselle:  the soldat moves as smoothly, as liquid as Capt. Shuvee moves, and as Doc Fager watched he listened:

    Damn, most of these soldats can’t move enough to dance.

    And they must pay to dance.  Contribute to their own charity with a dance fee.  Something fundamentally wrong about that.

    Most of these soldiers are only a whole half.

    How can you have a whole half of a soldier?

    Ask the war department, they know how to do it.

    The soldat and his mademoiselle kept Doc Fager’s mind engaged.  Red, white and blue merged with bleu, blanc, rouge and with steady growth they grew closer and the lady of the house, a beldame of powerful build, a handsome woman, surveyed the dance scene, made sure that nothing inappropriate happened.  There was something regal and royal about her, something natural and threatening like dangerous moonlite.  Doc Fager, watching the couple, watching the handsome beldame watching all the couples, settled into a kind of fugue state.  

    

1.45. The Fugue state threatens a return when he hears Capt. Shuvee report the colonel’s death because he knows he can do nothing about it.  The same way he can do nothing about boonification, about the troopers shitting themselves damn near to death.  Fusaichi has taken away their intestinal fortitude.  Before Sgt. Homer died he told the doc,  “I’ve shit out everything but my brains . . . one last dump . . . there they gooooo . . . there . . . they goooo!”  

    Before they went Papa Clem sat with him in the Atabrine Asylum.  Sat and prayed and assured him that he would be okay.  Just fine.  And then Sgt. Homer knew he was dying, just a few breaths and heartbeats to go, and he raged in a rusted voice, as if just awoken with a rude awakening from a long Rip Van Winkle sleep in his throat, in a rough and groggy soft whisper, “You lied to me.  You said I would be just fine.  That’s what you said.  God damn you.  You lied to me.”  And the god damned Papa Clem wished he didn’t choose the vocation of a soul saver, wished that God, the supreme super saver, would really damn him for being too proud.  Truth be damned.  He determined to spare the troopers any hard truth and the burning knowledge of his damnation stunned him, brought him to the cliff’s edge of boonification.  

    Doc Fager wished he could’ve saved Sgt. Homer.  All this wishing did nothing to alter the greenness of Fusaichi or purify the Fusaichian stink.  All remained green.  All still stunk.

 

1.46.  All Doc Fager can offer to Capt. Shuvee is a rising hope that hope springs eternal and maybe the colonel isn’t dead.  Maybe Lieut. Gibson correctly translated and incorrect piece of news.  After all, A-farts isn’t immune to mistakes.  AFRTS is fallible.  But Shuvee wants to know what happens if the news is correct.  Want me to sedate them all, Doc Fager offers, so it won’t hit so hard?  

 

1.47.  Them all.

 

1.48.  The squadron has been attrited to a little more than three hundred.  Well, if what, so what?  A big squadron isn’t required to make an elite squadron.  Ain’t the Spartans defended the war pass of Thermopylae with three hundred Spartans, a lethal phalanx and their Spartan king, Leonnatus Anteas?  The Spartans, all decked out in the war plumage of an oiseau d’guerre and Doc Fager would love to soar straight out of Fusaichi on a war bird, straight back to, no, no, not France with the soldat and the mademoiselle, but to Italy or Greece, the European or Mediterranean Theater, yes, Italy where he could admire a statue of a holy Roman emperor or that of some random military man, Albertus Maximus?, who lived under Roman rule, Greece, yes, his pockets stuffed with Greek money, his friend, Ron, the Greek doctor, sharing medical methods.  Anywhere else but Fusaichi.  Anywhere else where breathing doesn’t feel like inhaling through a hot wet towel, where free-shitting isn’t normal and the air doesn’t stink, stink through the everlasting green.  The only things that ain’t green in Fusaichi are the troopers and the yellow FuPegs and their brown free-shitted shit.  

 

1.49.  Where would he go, Capt. Shuvee wants to know, if he “pulled a Zev” and left?  The doc shrugs.  Contemplates.  Why not to live under African skies or somewhere where he can become a pioneer of the Nile, be worshipped as an American pharoah or anywhere that will justify his surgical training.  At Fort Marcy, Fusaichi, he deals with sick cocks, malaria, the shits, boonified bodies sloughing around in the sweat-stenched green a Pacific shithole.  A jungle of weird mythology, possessed of a weirder jungle mythologic.  Doc Fager admits that he sees neither myth nor logic in the major’s decision not to inform the squadron of the colonel’s death, admits that he’s “going to beat hell out of him one day, just on principle” and begins preparing doses of candy.  

    Fierce wind followed by a thunder gulch in the land of heaven, the sky, accompanied by, from way afar, heat lightning.  Yes, this storm is going to be the real thing just like the colonel.  The dead colonel who was born before the end of the Great War and has died after the end of the what?  Great enough war?  Almost great war?  Just the latest war . . . great . . . so when’s the next one?  

    Both officers relish a drink.  Whiskey with soda on the side or a slew gin fizz, a drink to toast to the next time another country is nuked into a war relic, its national emblem made a defeated war emblem, ragged and forced to fold in surrender, folded by somebody noble and whatever this emblem, Capt. Shuvee thinks, it will not receive such criticism as did our emblem from none other than American writer, Mark Twain, who criticised it and the Americans as being the “most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the Earth and at our mast head we fly one true and honest symbol:  the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.”