Gods Go Begging (44 page)

Fate had given him possession of four tragic lives. No, he had been given possession of nine lives, including Calvin‘s, Little Reggie’s, and those of the three boys on the hill. To do justice to this case, it would take three decades to tell their stories. He would begin at the very beginning and feel his way through. The jury could only believe so much. He knew where he should begin—with the death of a friend, a Creole sergeant, years ago and ten thousand miles away.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my name is Jesse Pasadoble, and I have been given a very great privilege and honor. I have been given the opportunity to defend Calvin Thibault.”

Jesse turned to face his client, his back to the jury. The lawyer and his client made eye contact. Calvin smiled.

“When I first met you in the jail upstairs, Calvin, I felt the way that each of the jurors felt when they first laid eyes on you: I felt that you were guilty. If not guilty of the crimes charged, you must certainly have been guilty of something. How could it be otherwise? How could it possibly be otherwise? You were a young black man from the Potrero Hill projects, one of the poorest places in the city. You live on a hill where the fences are topped with concertina wire, the shopkeepers are armed, and the earth is mined with failure. You were and are a boy born in a combat zone.”

Jesse turned to address the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I felt the same way that you did, and when he first opened his mouth and began to speak, I became even more sure of his guilt. Here was a boy who spoke in code, the secret, stilted language of the sidewalks and streets. He spoke the lingo of millimeters, Teflon rounds, and calibers. Nothing that could come from his mouth would ever be believed by me or by you … by anyone. You heard his taped statement right here in this courtroom. Who on earth could believe someone who speaks like that?

“But I am a defense lawyer and I couldn’t afford to feel the way you did. I can’t afford to confuse belief with truth. It is my job to defend the boy, to protect him from an assault of lies, to be his point man and guide him through this war of words. So I set about not to change him but to give him the tools that he would need in order to reveal himself to you—and to himself.

“I gave him books to read and I forced him to read carefully and to write about what he found on the pages. In time we broke the code of the hill. You saw and heard the results. The heart must have a lyric. It must have a grammar or it can never hear itself. The heart must articulate or it will never be heard. On this witness stand you each saw a far more eloquent young man stating honestly and clearly what is now so apparent to us all: that he is innocent.”

Jesse walked to the prosecutor’s table and bent down, placing the palms of both hands on the oak surface. He leaned forward, his face coming within inches of the police detective’s face.

“The young man you heard from this witness stand could have easily withstood the rigors and deceptions of an interview with a veteran homicide detective who had already made up his mind about this case.”

Jesse stood upright then walked back to face the jury.

“This young man could tell each of you, and did tell you with candor and precision, of his deep love for Mai Adrong. Can any of you doubt that he loved her life while despising his own as he stood by helplessly on that night in the Amazon Luncheonette? Something has changed since that tragic evening when Persephone Flyer and Mai Adrong—two vital and powerful women—were brutally murdered. I’m sure you could see from his testimony that Calvin was heartbroken by it when it happened.

“Look at him. Once his own spirit was a riddle, an unbreakable code. What has changed is Calvin’s newfound ability to name the things within his own soul, to give them voice. You have to know that your life is empty before you can begin to fill it. Ladies and gentlemen, the first step is to give a name to the emptiness.”

Jesse extended his arm and pointed toward his client.

“If you can recognize heartsickness, then you will see it there, in his face. Does any one of you have any doubt whatsoever that the boy you saw up on the witness stand could compose a love poem for beautiful Mai Adrong? The stupid boy that you heard on that cassette tape could never do that. That boy’s voice, speaking to us from the past, could barely defend himself from a set of devious and manipulative questions, much less the cruelty and the savagery of Little Reggie Harp. What Calvin Thibault could never do, the Biscuit Boy can. Biscuit Boy has left the hill and is now engaged with the world around him. For that accomplishment alone, I am proud to be his lawyer.”

Jesse walked toward his client, extended his hand, then shook hands with him. The Biscuit Boy rose from his chair and smiled, clearly moved by the gesture. In the audience the Biscuit Boy’s mother beamed with pride, for a precious moment forgetting the charges against her son. Jesse left his client and walked across the courtroom to resume his place in front of the jury.

“In his past life there were no reasons to wake up in the morning and no particular reasons to go to sleep. There were no clocks in his home, no alarms to set, no calendars to mark. No one went to work in the morning and came home exhausted at night. There were no magazines in his living room, no books or newspapers. There was no Mozart in his life, no Brahms, no Modigliani. There were only boys doing battle for dominion of a squalid hillside. There were only children foraging for money and food. This building around us now is filled with prisoners of that war.”

Jesse paused for a moment during his summation. He glanced at some notes, but his mind was elsewhere. The war that left two women and four boys dead on the eastern slope of Potrero Hill did not begin this year, or in this decade. It did not begin in this city. It began years ago—eleven thousand days ago, to be exact—on another hillside far from this courtroom, far away from here.

He began his summation again, weaving in and out of the law and the facts of the case, invoking the testimony of witnesses, imploring twelve citizens to take the path of most resistance: true impartiality and reason. He cajoled them into seeing the world through Biscuit Boy’s eyes. He cozened them into deploring the district attorney’s bitter accusations. He terrorized them with the very nature of Little Reggie’s existence.

After two and a half hours on his feet, Jesse sat down dazed and weary beyond belief. He sat while the prosecutor offered his rebuttal. Jesse did not hear a word of it. He sat while the bailiff cleared the courtroom and the jury was led away to deliberate. Jesse did not realize that he was alone until Biscuit Boy was led away to the jails. As he rose to leave the courtroom, he saw a solitary figure seated in the rear of the courtroom. It was Carolina. Jesse stopped walking for a second, unconsciously placed the jade into his mouth, then continued toward the last row of seats. He sat down next to her with a weary smile on his face. Carolina would hear the story behind the story. She would believe.

His wife was walking all over his black and sweat-sheened face. The small impacts of her feet, like muscle spasms, could be seen moving across his brow and onto his cheeks. Now, full-size in his mind, she was sitting on his forehead, the weight of her brown buttocks spreading the wrinkles of his face, pulling the edges of his lips back into a deep, satisfied grin. Then there was her odor. Her skin always smelled like a newborn puppy. The aperture between her thighs had a salton scent of sweetness. There was the sensual burn of her nylons on his ears—or was it the burn of pain, his life seared by grim reality?

Above his position there was the sound of a mortar round whistling in overhead. It was close in by the sound of it. No more artillery, he thought. There was a deep
whoomp
sound as the round landed on the far side of the hill. They were too close now for the big stuff. Pretty soon it was going to be hand grenades, then slingshots. In the distance he heard the whistles and bugles that were the communications systems for the NVA. The sounds grew closer and closer with each shift of the wind. Now they were clear as a bell. Their stern, expressionless riflemen were on the move. Why were those men down there so willing to die?

The sergeant groaned as he wrapped his bleeding leg with a sleeve torn from someone else’s shirt. The dead boy in the torn shirt wouldn’t be needing it. Somewhere back in the world his loving parents were being plagued in their sleep by the first dark premonitions of his death. On the far side of the hill the aid station was down and wounded bandages were lying everywhere. All the defensive holes on this side of the hill were collapsed and down.

“I don’t want no more of them compacts! Do you hear?” he screamed over his left shoulder toward his scattered troops. He glanced behind himself as he shouted, but what he saw did not register. His dear wife’s lovely eyes were blocking his vision. There was a mass of motionless men on the east side. A few were crawling. A few more of the walking wounded were erecting small PSP shelters.

There were ammunition cases everywhere, claymore bags and empty smoke canisters. There were many more helmets than there were heads. The troops that had gathered together each night to do some supposing would never gather again. There would never again be a quorum. The sergeant wondered if Jesse Pasadoble was still alive.

“None of them contracts!” he cried out again. “Pas
encore!
I’ve heard you guys making them deals and I know it’s some kinda sick shit!” He was repeating himself. He tied off the sleeve, then cursed and untied the bandage. He had forgotten the sulfa powder. “It ain’t natural.
Ce n‘est pas naturel.
It’s just plain sick,” he muttered.

His mind had flown back over a dozen years to a frozen field in Korea. Compacts had been made back then.

“Listen up, lieutenant, if I get shot in the nuts or if my face is gone, you’ve got to do me. Put your carbine next to my ear and do me. My wife likes to look into my eyes when we make love. You’ve got to promise me.”

His friend, a young first lieutenant from Florida, had nodded his stern agreement, shook hands with the sergeant, and countered with his own contractual conditions: “If I lose my legs, sarge, or if I can’t ever move them again, you have to take care of me.”

The lieutenant had been a star athlete at the University of Arizona. His fiancée had absolutely adored his athletic skills. She had once been a gymnast and a head cheerleader.

Compacts were not unusual in the field, they happened when the probability of being dismembered or maimed grew imminent and it was clear that support wasn’t coming. It wasn’t death that gave rise to such gruesome agreements—the sight of dismemberment did. A clean, quick death was a bad thing, but a long, disfigured life was something else again. Endless death was unimaginable; a crippled, mangled life was too damned imaginable.

“Buckle up. Drop your racks and buckle up,” he groaned to his boys, as he keyed the portable radio and began mumbling to someone on the other side of the hill. They had dropped their racks long ago, days ago. He scanned the channels until he heard a voice. He didn’t know the date, much less the time, and he didn’t bother rotating the crystals.

“Listen, man. I need to talk directly to Douglas MacArthur….”

The bandage on his leg came undone. His own muscle glistened there beneath the cloth, the white of wet bone shone through. The sergeant raised himself up and began moving toward the Salon.

“None of them deals!” he cried out again.

The sergeant crawled on hands and knees toward the Salon des Refuses. As he moved, bullets pierced the earth on both sides of his body. To his left was an Indian boy from Bravo Company. He was a foolish, gregarious child who had been right there to greet a mortar round. His legs were gone forever. The legless boy sat up with a startled look in his eyes, his waistline stunned and leaking.

He was sitting, blackened and swaying, in the center of a crater. There was brass everywhere, and pieces of concertina wire had pierced his clothing. There was a rare, wood-handled Walther P-38 in his right hand. A true collector’s weapon. Carefully, with his prized pistol, he took aim at another—a legless, lesser man—and killed himself.

The sergeant dragged himself to the entrance of the Salon. Using his arms, he pulled his deadened body into the operator’s chair and struggled for the handset of the big radio. Below him he could see the brown-uniformed horde moving in squads up the hill toward his fragmented, diminishing troops. The killing zone had moved upward and upward, but it wouldn’t matter in a minute or two; there was snake and nape in the pipeline. Soon the base and this side of the hill would be charcoal and smoke. The wrath of God was about to descend on Mount Carmel. The blasphemers would be revealed.

Inside the radio installation he located a piece of notepaper and, miraculously, a sharpened pencil. Remarkably, some signal gear was still up and running. Everything was analog now. He had shitcanned all the crypto gear hours ago. The generator behind the Salon was gunning and sputtering. All its meter readings were low, and a warning alarm was sounding. The cooling system had been riddled with bullets. He grabbed the handset and began screaming for help.

All of a sudden his wife Persephone’s eyes and lips came into clear focus. Back in Louisiana, before moving to San Francisco, his wife had been a high school biology teacher. She had moved to the West Coast to be closer to her husband. They had dreamed of opening a restaurant, but until they could afford it she taught at Daniel Web ster, the local grammar school on Potrero Hill.

The sergeant decided that she would be dressing for work about now. She would know that the white thing sticking out of his leg was a shattered fibula. He smiled as he thought of Persephone’s musical mornings in the bathroom.

“I’m shaving my legs,” she would sing out loud, while giggling uncontrollably, “because I’m not really a mammal at all. Never mind the potential for breast milk and for birthing live babies from my body. Now I’m shaving my armpits because I’m not a liberated woman, and furthermore, I have no biological need of goosebumps and hair follicles—none whatsoever.”