GOODBYE, SOUL BROTHER 1 - finished

1.89.  Hey, reader, pray for the troopers away from home who want to be home again.  

1.90  Brother Derek shared a story:  He was in Kentucky and visited Faraway Farm, home of the colonel, where he witnessed the fulfillment of a pastor’s Faraway dream.  He approached with his hands up, palms out, and declared, “I have just put these hands on the colonel.”

1.91.  The colonel is dead.  Capt. Shuvee enters the Fort Marcy Church and sees Papa Clem sitting in a FuPeg pew.  Zev ordered the segregation of FuPegs and troopers.  The rear pews for FuPegs and the front pews for the troopers because free-shitting unbelievers must earn their place.  

1.92.  He sits in the Kilroy Prayed Here pew.  His hair so white it’s almost pale blue and a bitter almond smell comes from him.  Bit and pieces of him are like cyanide and manages to have a funny cide, a distorted humor, a sharp humor despite his age.  An old man with a battle plan to win the battle against the devil in Fusaichi.

    Sitting and seemingly praying (a prayer for relief from the endless green heat?) he has often said to Capt. Shuvee that the Lord at peace is slightly dangerous and the Lord at war is very much at peace and when asked for an explanation always he shrugs, smiles at what the captain can only guess is a private joke.  

    When Trooper Ben’s cat was murdered it was Papa Clem who said a prayer for it after Doc Fager declared it dead.  Why’d he bring it to him, the doc wanted to know, as he wasn’t a cat doctor.  To appease Trooper Ben, Papa Clem answered, and, in addition, for someone who isn’t a cat doctor, the doc sure fixed himself a fair play of pussy.  Much obliged to the candyman.  NonFuPegese females.  He procures them for all the troopers with a prospect of getting laid and so is also known as Mr. Prospector.  These imported females are good and tough and don’t mind the exploding prospect of being glazed with that which is seminal in a man.  They come and go.  They aren’t so yellow as every Fusaichi lady and although she is rarely the perfect chosen lady of a trooper (tits too small or big, thighs too thick or skinny, ass too . . . humma humma, she is his lady of choice for the evening and this, both the doc and the candyman believe, has a deep impact on the troopers, keeps them from becoming boonified.  See, trooper, your cock ain’t sick.  How the candyman finds them, brings them, returns them in such a businesslike manner profounds the whole squadron.  But business is business at Fort Marcy, Fusaichi and supply and demand is booming.  Keep the troopers active, keep them fucking, keep them from believing their cocks are sick and succumbing to the boonies.  If staving off boonification requires fornication then the squadron is so blessed to have as a reliable man as the forever prospecting candyman.  And Papa Clem says a thankful prayer for him too.  

    A man needs release.  Please.  Just ask Trooper Jones who believed the surest way to keep his cock from getting sick was to always keep it a little warm.  Ready to go, you know?  A bold bidder, he accepted a spectacular bid to be the first American to fuck a female FuPeg.  He bet twice and twice over that he would be the first to score with a tiny yellow FuPegese lady, particularly the groupies of the FuPeg groupie dolls.  This particular groupie doll had a caucasian infatuation, particularly regarding American caucasians, particularly American soldier caucasians whose speaking she found relaxing, not so taxing.  Regimented.  The leisure of their lips when they spoke, the soft loll of their tongues, their soft whispers even when they whisped hardily.  The cadence of their communication lullabied her.  Especially the way it could take a swift turn from hardness to softness, from frosted with confidence to thawed with subservience.  She was the ultimate prize.  The mythological consequence of sequence.  The Fusaichi pegasus.  Lay her and lay the world.  Trooper Jones was the first dude to declare game on, dude and he 

1.93.  Capt. Shuvee sits beside Papa Clem.  Says nothing.  He is reading, the old man, and his hands hold steady an open Bible.  He never pounds the pulpit as if with the fist of God, indeed, he barely does so much as tap it.  He is not a pulpiteer performing on the gold stage of redemption.  He believes in honour and glory but is not a redeemer.  He is a soul seeker and the captain finds him sitting in a FuPeg pew reading the Bible and praying because Fusaichi is soulless.  Filled with green and heat and humidity and bereft of soul.  Seeking the soul of a FuPeg has been as difficult as finding a dog or a goat in Fusaichi.  

1.94.  Bible closed.  The captain asks what Papa Clem was reading.  Suffering is his answer.  What about it, the captain wants to know and is answered that suffering is always somewhere near when it’s needed.   And the cyanide aroma with the forever present Fusaichian stench.  And, just a hint, of a sweet, gangrenous perfume.  The Fusaichian stench:  decay and moribund, decadent and rotten.  Fusaichi is how death smells when it keeps on living.  

1.95.  He smiles, the old and pale Papa Clem, as if he’s just perpetrated a joke and, just for a moment, looks like a pious imbecile.  

1.96.  He just says it, the captain.  The colonel is dead.  And the poets fall silent and the angels weep, many among them a rowdy angel.  In heaven a heavenly song is sung and in Fusaichi the only ones singing are the mosquitos and the cicadas while the troopers are victimized by their own repudiation of reality, otherwise known as boonification.  

    Papa Clem wants to know how the colonel met his Maker and Capt. Shuvee answers that it is as yet unknown but he is sure that he was ready to meet Him.  Papa Clem agrees and questions if God was ready for the great ordeal of meeting the colonel.  A law unto himself.  Beholden to no man.  Not even a mucho macho man because the colonel was macho uno, the muchoest and machoest of them all.  By God.  It is not by chance, Papa Clem says, that the colonel died, if he is indeed dead, just a little over a year after the death of his true friend, Will Harbut who looked after him in his retirement at Faraway Farm.  

1.97.  A mighty ruckus of wind.  Outside is electrified with a charismatic electricity in the early morning sky, full of a wild fever, a stormin fever, vengeful and vaguely noble, searching around Fusaichi for the best spot to strike so that all will be stricken, the uneducated along with those accredited with arts and letters.  All of them.  Even the not so wise Dan Treat flirting around with his top authority in the squadron due to Zev’s vanishing trick that wasn’t even a clever trick, just board the Miss Kearney and motored away.  How about that?  Just boarded and motored.  Away.  Far away  from Fort Marcy, Fusaichi, from the stink and the heat, both perpetual, from the mosquitos and the insatiable green.  Maybe it was all too hard, maybe it was a mere impromptu foolish pleasure, you know, wanted to take a boat trip, a three hour tour to find a new providence because Fusaichi, face the facts, is not providential.  Taking a hot wet shit the heat of which always harnesses what would otherwise/place be an elusive heat has nothing to do with providence.  

1.98.  If he is dead and if the troopers are informed, how will the squadron survive?  

1.99.  Capt. Shuvee is advised by Papa Clem that he knows what he is doing and he should not use him to buttress his faith.  If it is poor and needs to be reinforced then he must say his prayers, the patria nostra and the ave maria.  The captain protests that he is not Catholic.  His allegiance be damned.  Pure faith is the only requirement, the factor that binds the soul to the savior and a propos of nothing, carpe diem.  

    Seize the day as he might, the captain cannot seize a moment of hope.  No search and seizure can seize it.  The colonel is dead.  The colonel is dead.  And now nothing can arrogate his death and nothing can disavow the weather warning.  Thunder erupts like echoes of Heaven.  

1.100.  Major Treat sits and smokes and rubs his prematurely balding head.  He believes that Zev is dead.  Dead somewhere or alive nowhere.  The colonel, on the other hand, he believes is definitely dead.  Dead nowhere but at Faraway Farm.  And in his death finally unbridled unto the grand splendor of Heaven.  The major smokes another Pall Mall and the Fusaichian mean heat stays mean and its green stays green.  Another line of thunder.  More lightning to shoot a line across the sky.  How high the sky, how green.  Green everywhere, anywhere along with heat along with humidity along with mosquitos along with boonification along with Papa Clem, Capt. Shuvee reads aloud Pslam 46:10. Be still and know that I am God.

    This is how Papa Clem and the captain hope the troopers react when they learn of the colonel’s death.  They are still.  And they know (the colonel) is God.  No nay never.  But yes.  To the troopers the colonel is God, at least, a god.  Flesh and bone, uh fur muh tiv, blood and muscle, uh fur muh tiv.  Dead?  Maybe Lieut. Gibson made a big mistake? Maybe the colonel is sick, even at death’s door, but not dead.  Not dead.  Not dead like Trooper Homer.  Not dead like the trooper who had the French affair.  Not dead like Zev probably is.  Not dead like Trooper Ben’s cat.  Like Trooper Caleb:  death by lure.  By full frontal aggression.  Just the thing at Fort Marcy, Fusaichi.  Sometimes smart, but vain; other times just the “in” thing.  

    Papa Clem closes his eyes with a crusty sound.  Fusaichi has crusted him.  Dried him out.  The hot humid greenery has dried him up, made him a crust of himself.  Something fundamentally wrong about that.  

Wrong like the once upon a time when Zev kept one of the candyman’s girls past her booking and claimed that it was only immensity that motivated him.  The immense true moment - what a pleasure - of her whiteness, her unyellowness, her . . . her body was a scandal.  Breasts round but tear-dropped shaped at the same time, legs too slender to be real . . . he had a momentary lapse of reason.  He kept her more than a fortnight longer than he should have and when Capt. Shuvee finally persuaded him to release her the girl was more than ready to hit the road.  

Wrong like the once upon the war when Trooper Jones, a real smarty, Jones, made a declaration of war against his own survival.  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he said, I shall fear no evil cause I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley.  They weren’t in a valley, but on a palm island, nipa palm, of course, where he picked off Japs, called them Nips, of course, with extreme prejudice, even the ones who lifted their hands, palms out, same way as the pastor in Kentucky, and then he charged, both guns blazing, his rifle and his sidearm, running and shooting, a real gun runner.  Until he tripped a tripwire and was turned into a red mist from the hips down.  One moment he was the meanest and then he was the most mistful.  Also an incurable optimist he answered, when asked by Papa Clem how he liked the weather in an effort to alleviate the tragedy of the situation, Well, papa, it’s too damn misty for me.  And the shuffled off this mortal coil with a mean smile even during the death rattle.

Wrong like the time Trooper Luke McLuke drowned a FuPeg in a running stream, streaming all green and hotly over pebbles and stones, always with hotness, the pebbles proud, perhaps, of their smooth roundness and the stones, perhaps, critical of their own jagged sharpness.  And the stream ran and the hotness streamed along and the FuPeg took a gulp of the hot green stream water and Trooper McLuke resented the way he gulped without reaction just as if the refreshment was from water cool blue; red hot not for him, only for the troopers.  Red hot and green all over.  Peaceful waters, un fur muh tiv; cold water, ne guh tiv.  You like it, thought Trooper McLuke, drown in it.  

Wrong like the dear John letter received by one trooper from his best gal, Kim Rachel Alexandra.  Kim’s blues had a lot to do with her work riveting rivets, a regular “Rosie the Riveter,” this trooper’s Kim.  Worked the night shift on an assembly line at her local angel factory, hot with angel fever to love and marry her soldier man, her one riveting reason to rivet and live.  The riveting drama consumed and burned her, compelled and fevered her until the night manager, one Arthur “Artie” Schiller, seduced her and she accepted Arthur’s ring.  The trooper overdosed on lemon drops.  There was a whole lotta Kim the bitch and Kim the cunt and Kim the whore throughout the squadron.  

Wrong like lovers talk with a whore.

Wrong like living with the blackness of the blind when you’ve got eyes of belief.

Wrong like stubbornly rejecting the plain truth when you better believe it.

Wrong like the colonel’s death.

Wrong like the army power that nuked Japan back into the Stone Age?

Wrong like seeing a star shoot green, a black star too.

Wrong like the perpetual unusual heat of Fusaichi.

Wrong like the troopers being boonified and  armed n dangerous and still so sexy to the female FuPegs?

Wrong like the bean king’s food being so spicy.

Wrong like Zev’s Reckless abandon.

Zev had a tattoo, skin art:  the profile of a horse, all bold red.  What about Zev?  The Finn, being of Finish heritage.  To where in the hell did he motor off?  Strictly speaking he is AWOL.  Sort of foolish that he could just slip anchor and motor away.  Failing evidence of his death means he’s alive.  But there is a new and deeper deep concern:  the colonel’s death, though there’s only the dispatch to prove it.  No proof of life and no proof of death.  They are forsaken.