GOODBYE, SOUL BROTHER 1-cont

 

1.50.  March, 1947, Lieut. Gibson received a dispatch that advised him of the death of Winston Churchill, affectionately, the “British Bulldog” who attacked and snatched on to his enemies like a bulldog on a bone with a stiff upper lip (don’t forget his quivering bottom one, Zev sneered after the evacuation of Dunkirk) and despite this sneering Zev ordered the American flag to be flown at half mast alongside the Union Jack in all its George-Patrick-Andrew saintliness.  The candyman procured it as he procured everything that the official quartermaster could not.  

    Hankering for chewing gum or a nice pizza pie?  Well, the candyman was also the pizza man and he could get gum for chewing as easily as he could grains, hops and yeast for brewing.  The troopers are boonified yet alive much obliged to the candyman, yes, Capt. Candyman can, indeed he can.  If you can drink it or eat, beat it or fuck it he can get it.  Some troopers think he is one in the same as Kilroy.  Others think he is they actual quartermaster operating an underground business.  The rest know him and knowledge is power and those who have the gift of knowledge at Fort Marcy, Fusaichi, get what they want or pass the word on behalf of the unknowledgeable.

    So they thought Winston Churchill dead.  Planned a big ceremony in his honor.  An honorific event, the event of the year.  The troopers were excited.  They were damn well doing something!  - lining up in parade formation, all buffed and polished and starched to put on the most lavish and showiest and most - - - no, zero luxury in Fusaichi - - - and gaudiest ceremony that the FuPegs ever saw.  They were going to play Taps, but just before a young trumpeter began to blow the loot received another dispatch that advised him that the death was that of the American Winston Churchill, a novellist whom not even the voracious reader Capt. Shuvee knew.  

    The troopers were dismissed into the green to do their green duties.  Talk about a buzz kill.

 

1.51.  That soldat, the one that had a mild affair at the charity dance, yeah, he ended up being transferred to Fort Marcy, got a “sick cock” and found himself a pretty place in the boonies where he doused himself with gas meant for the Miss Kearney, struck a matchlite and died by self-immolation, really boonification.

 

1.52.  Capt. Shuvee concedes that Major Treat begs a lot of questions.  He is still their commander and his order that the colonel’s death will be secret is an order that he, the captain, will obey.  Really?  Doc Fager wants to know.  The captain confirms, Yes, really.  Because if orders stop being obeyed they will lose all purpose.  The doc argues that all purpose was lost the second they put their boots on the green ground of Fusaichi, dystopian before its time.  The doc explains that Fusaichi is already what will be in the aftermath of the fulfillment of the prophecy of Albert “the great” Einstein:  I do not know with which weapons WWIII will be fought, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones - or sticks and bricks, anyway, sticks.

 

1.53.  No whiskey and so no whiskey wisdom to influence the captain on his next move.  Sure, he must move - lef rye lef hada lef rye lef - to the Fort Marcy Church, but then . . . should he confide his inside information about the colonel’s death to Papa Clem who hasn’t gotten over the worst experience of his ordained life? - when Winslow Homer damned him for lying.  Papa Clem is smart.  Strike him with a moral or religious vexation and, after a prudent pulse of reflection, sinful chagrin falls.  Sin comes and prevails a fleeting lingering often worrying moment of time, but not before time reminds us that sin does not follow.  Such shit often spews from Papa Clem, especially when he is self-reflective and worrying that he should have lingered longer in his hometown instead of going afleet from it, hey, going afleet, Alexandria, VA.  Going to spread the word in Fusaichi where the FuPegs don’t know Jesus and the troopers who know Him have a meek faith in Him which the troopers who don’t know Him find putrid.  This Papa Clem learned in a letter from Brother Derek, one of three missionaries who, after trying for nearly a year, had not managed to so much as convert a single FuPeg to give a heavenly glance, nevermind seek heaven.  

    They came, the brethren of Brother Derek, Brother Liam and Brother Thomas, a couple of months after the troopers.  They came.  They saw.  They surrendered.  A noble mission, sure, but far from a mission accomplished.  Brother Thomas, from Bayakoa, a Spanish-speaking city, dubbed their mission La Paz, “peace,” never suspecting that it would end up a mission impazible.  Started off pretty good.  They had a valid invitation from Zev’s boss and they made a valid appeal to Zev’s good side with a bottle of wine, very very vintage wine from a very fine year.  The only thing older than the wine was the dust on the bottle.  

 

1.54.  Major Treat’s father, Bode Treat, was not a wine man.  He was a beer man.  They called him “Bodemeister the beer meister” and his ass sagged over a barstool six days a week, drinking and bullshitting with what he considered a pleasant colony of company that helped him drain the pleasant tap that filled their mugs with Milwaukee brew.  After a few mugs he would become wild, then subside, then become wild again.  A mercurial man, Bode Treat.

 

1.55.  The four of them, the brothers with Zev and Major Treat, sat at a round table in the mess hall.  Served by the chief cook, affectionately the “bean king,” they chowed mainly on very hot and very spicy beans which the king makes according to a secret family recipe and their hotness and spiciness make them slightly scandalous.  Say, trooper, our bean king sure does make some meanz beanz.  Hot and spicy beans on the menu for men whose intestines are at civil war.  Something fundamentally wrong about that.  

 

1.56.  Brother Liam said a prayer, “Lord, we thank you for this bounty - “

 

1.57.  One green, hot day Trooper Ben put a bounty on Trooper Caleb.  Doc Fager blamed himself because both troopers were boonified and he could not cure boonification no more than he could cure the blues.  

    At oh-eight-thirty Trooper Ben arrived at Temperence Hill to pull his shift as fire guard.  The highest point of the western front of the fort, the hill was named for the incredible self control required to endure the god awful sulfuric stench that has been damned upon it by its proximity to Fusaichi’s lone volcano.  Yep.  Uh fur muh tiv.  Free-shitting FuPegs, endless green saturating everything - except for the FuPeg turds - an impenetrable wet heat, an unidentified stink that tests a man’s gag-reflex and a volcano.  Boy, Howdy, ain’t Fusaichi got it all?  Imagine surviving the war, enduring the shit and the green, the heat and the stink only to be burdened with the possibility of being turned into a lava man on any given Saturday, any given day, really.  

    So Trooper Ben, enduring and burdened, guarded the western front and then a violent storm broke and he knew better than not to heed the storm so he took shelter in a pathetic lean-to where a cat also sheltered from the storm.  Cat?  Really?  And with a pattern of jaguar mail, really?  All jaws n paws, with attitude to boot.  No dogs, no goats in Fusaichi but, evidently, at least one cat.  Yes, sir, cat.  One single cat.  That’s something new.  Yet the goes on and the heat goes on and the stink goes on along with the shit.  The beat goes on.  The storm went on.  The cat with a red hot bat attitude, red and hot like tabasco, hell she was a tabasco cat, yes, a female, yes, a real temperamental miss on Temperence Hill.

    He named her Missy Baba and called her, affectionately, “My babu.”  And, though, yes, it’s true, rules do not allow pets, Trooper Ben took her back to his quarters when his fire guard was over and snuck into the bean king’s domain for any variety of meat that he could steal.  Trooper Ben’s cat, his “Babu,” was a roamer and roamed where she pleased.  One green, hot night she roamed to Trooper Caleb’s footlocker, which, inexplicable though it was, he left unlocked and wide open; a situation of which Trooper Ben’s “Babu” took full tactical advantage.  

    In this footlocker Trooper Caleb every-other-time kept locked a mint copy of the Saturday Evening Post featuring on its cover the colonel with his best pal and constant companion, Will Harbut and only Trooper Caleb had the key to the mint copy.  Except that one hot green night when he didn’t.  Why?  Because he was boonified.

    Missy Baba shredded that magazine.  Shredded it with her paws, gnawed it with her jaws.  

 

1.58.  Trooper Caleb got this issue much obliged to the candyman.

 

1.59.  When this crime was discovered there was only one criminal type suspected and she wasn’t an unusual suspect either, hell, given her paws with their claws and her jaws with their teeth and her free-roaming, roamed more free than the FuPegs shat.  Trooper Caleb got some troopers together, they formed Caleb’s posse and set out to get Miss Baba.  Here kitty kitty, Trooper Caleb called.  Meant to kill her and skin her.  While he hunted Trooper Ben solicited with whistles and tongue clicks, the brush he used to soothe her fur in his hand.  Trooper Caleb always teased him, Look at Ben brush that fucking pussy.  

 

1.60.  Zev’s favorite wine:  pouilly-fuisse, affectionately, “pussy-fussy.”

 

1.62.  She was found and lured with false tender whispers and offered food.  Trooper Caleb broke her neck, one quick twist after several scarring claw strikes, and put her neck-twisted body on top of Trooper Ben’s footlocker.  Trooper Ben found and lured Trooper Caleb with false apologies and offered candy.  And while he sucked on a lemon drop, Trooper Ben grabbed him, headlocked him and snapped his neck.

 

1.63.  Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they have done.  They were boonified.

 

1.64.  Boonified because Doc Fager could not undo the boonification.

 

1.65.  After eating the meanest of beans Zev and Major Treat, along with the brothers, shared the wine.  Brother Liam noted the engraving on the table:  Kilroy Ate Here.  Who is Kilroy, he asked.  Well, Zev, said, many say he’s a worker at a Seattle-based munitions plant.  Hell, there’s a Seattle slew of munition plant workers.  They drank and discussed the atomic bombings of Japan.  You know, the ones whose victims stumbled staggered lef lef rye lef rye lef rye rye lef all over the place as if stupid zombified victims of obeah in atomic voodoo vibrations.  War’s over, America, much obliged to that voodoo you do.  Appreciate it.  Later the world will demonize you for it.  Just so you know.

    They sat at the round table, none of them a Gallahadion Sir Gallahad.  Sat and drank and discussed the necessity of casualties in war.  Discussed the casualties and the dying and the bleeding but not dying and living and surviving, always there’s fucking survivial, and the return home when it’s discovered that the living soldier still bleeds.

 

1.66.  Mama?

 

1.67.  I hear you daddy.

 

1.68.  I’m still bleeding, mama.

 

1.69.  Daddy . . . the war’s over, all your bleeding is through.

 

1.70.  Mama . . .

 

1.71.  I hear you, daddy.

 

1.72.  I’m not done bleeding until I’m done with you.

 

1.73.  Brother Derek suggested a church.  A bonafide freshly built church in Fusaichi within the perimeters of Fort Marcy.  How’d that be?  A church was built with the help of Little Mike and, even with its travesty of a steeple, it was bereft of ridicule.  Built of native wood just like the radiotelegraph so-called room, the Fort Marcy (Atabrine) Church squats in Fusaichi like a FuPeg squatting to perform a class one download.  She is not varnished.  She is not pretty.  She is slanted and unbalanced and nondenominational.  Like a good girl.  On one of her pews is scratched:  Kilroy Worshipped Here.  

 

1.74.  Brother Liam - Oh, I’ve been told that there is much worship of the colonel.

 

1.75.  Brother Thomas - The colonel, yes, worshipped as if he is an icon project.

 

1.76.  Brother Derek - If that’s true it isn’t a very healthy image of reality here at this fort.

 

1.77.  Zev - Our reality will be judged by those who read the footnotes, not by those who trust the front page news.

 

1.78.  Brother Derek - You mean the fine print?

 

1.79.  Zev - I mean the headlines are all about the bombs.  

 

1.80.  Brother Derek - Do you think them evil?

 

1.81.  Zev - A necessary evil.

 

1.82.  Brother Liam - Evil is never done out of necessity.

 

1.83.  Zev - Tell that to Satan.

 

1.84.  Brother Thomas - So, you are saying the atomic bombs were Satan’s revenge?

 

1.85.  Zev- I’m saying the devil may care.

 

1.86.  Brother Thomas - Maybe so, maybe not.

 

1.87.  Zev - Tell that to the FuPegs.

 

1.88.  The FuPegs don’t know the devil and they may care about God.  In the forever hot and perpetual green of Fusaichi where the troopers’ lives are terminally alive and their deaths perpetuating.  Fornicating with the green, with Foosaitchy, with the mosquitos and the boonies, with the heat and the hot wet forlorning, with the shitting and the waiting and the waiting and always the waiting to . . . to . . . be anywhere else.