The Kind One (27 page)

“Our machine guns shot them down and they became tangled in the barbed wire and the future food of birds but they were wonderfully brave and they kept coming, kept coming. The bombardment had blown a hole in the northeast wall, and finally the Turks fought through the breach and were inside the fort and amongst us.

“It was quite terrifying, Danny, fighting your enemy face to face like that, but it was also exhilarating. For as long as it lasted, I don’t think I ever had a thought in my head, it was all animal instinct and action. There was no time to reload your rifle or pistol, your weapons were bombs and bayonets and rifle butts; I even bashed in a man’s head with a cooking pot! So much for any lingering schoolboy notions I might have had about the nobility of man, his supposed superiority to the rest of the creation. By far,
Homo sapiens
is the most violent species. As a lamb is to a lion, so a lion is to a man.

“Eventually the Turks withdrew, but that night they came back. Again they entered the fort through the breach in the northeast wall. Fighting by night is a different experience than fighting by day. The infernal flashes of light leaping out of the darkness, the silhouettes and shadows, the confusion of friend and foe, the clawing lunatic flames. Even the shouts and the screams of the combatants sounded different at night, more mysterious, more terrible.

“During the early hours of Christmas Day, the Turks retired for good. They left behind hundreds of their dead and wounded in and around the fort. Most of my men, too, had been either killed or wounded. Astonishingly, though, I’d made it through unscathed.

“General Townshend sent word from his headquarters in the town that the defense of the fort by the 17th Brigade would be remembered in the annals of British military history for as long as the et cetera et-cetera’d and the so on so-on’d, but he was wrong, of course. The siege of Kut is only an obscure and embarrassing footnote now. The Middle East was always just a sideshow next to France.”

“When were you taken prisoner?”

“Not for several months. The Relief Force was perpetually expected but it never arrived, for it, too, was attacked by the Turks. Our rations dwindled rapidly. I discovered that mules are better to eat than horses. But I drew the line at dogs and, of course,” and he glanced at Tinker and whispered, “cats. Most of our Indian troops refused to eat horse flesh for religious reasons, and so the poor devils calmly settled in to starve to death.

“Several thousand Arabs were trapped in the town with us. It was just their unlucky fate we had chosen their town to make our stand. Some tried to escape across the river by boat or raft, but they were shot by the Turks, and their bodies floated away down the river or washed up on the banks.

“The river became a place of horror. During the winter it was cold and rainy, and the banks of the river turned into mud. By April it had become extremely hot again, and steam curled up from the mud. The banks were littered with the rotting bodies of Turks and Arabs. The decaying flesh and the mud seemed to merge into a single substance, a corrupt slime which sucked at your boots, which wanted you to join it, to become slime yourself.

“Our position became untenable. We were starving, and racked with diseases. What was left of us surrendered on April 29, 1916.

“The Arabs were in a panic. They feared the Turks would wreak a gruesome revenge on them for cooperating with us, and they were right. The Turks immediately set up makeshift gibbets by the river, and began hanging people; others were murdered by firing squads.

“We officers were separated from our men. We were put aboard a river steamer, which would take us up the Tigris to Baghdad and beyond. A column of our soldiers were walking along the bank under Turkish guard. I heard someone calling my name. It was Private Pilditch, one of my favorites. A cheerful, rosy-cheeked lad, and a stalwart soldier. He was barely literate, and I used to help him write letters to his fiancée, Mary. ‘Mr. Dulwich!’ he called. ‘Ow in ’oly ’ell did we lose the ’ole blooming army?!’ I didn’t have an answer for him. He wasn’t cheerful or rosy-cheeked any longer; he was skeletally thin; he had pneumonia, and an oozing, festering sore on his leg. I waved farewell to Pilditch, and he waved forlornly back, and I watched him limp away up the river.

“So we all went into our captivity. As it turned out, the officers were treated tolerably well, but our men suffered abominably. Few returned. Pilditch didn’t.

“My men meant so much to me, Danny. I call them men, but they were boys, really. I was in love with them, collectively. I loved them as if they were one soldier, handsome, smiling, sturdy, youthful, brave, and afraid. And I wanted to protect my soldier, do my best for my soldier, for my brave lad, my smiling lad. But he was shot, bayonetted, blown to bits, bludgeoned, starved, drowned in irrigation ditches, blinded, emasculated, tortured, made mad. And of course Dulwich never got a scratch. Lieutenants in the Great War were expected to lead ephemeral lives, like insects hatching and mating and dying all in a day. But Dulwich just went on and on. On and on…”

Something startled the sparrows, and they whooshed away. Dulwich gave me a wan smile.

“More plonk?”

   DICK AND I drove out Sunset to the ocean then up the Coast Highway to Malibu then onto a little dirt road that took us up into the brown hills. It was hot but we were drinking cold beers and listening to the radio and it was a pleasant ride. We passed some dilapidated cottages and a couple of house trailers and a viciously barking dog chased us for a while till Dick threw his bottle of beer at it, then he pulled over and parked in the shade of a stunted oak tree.

You had some view from up there; the ocean was wrinkled near the shore then got smoother and smoother and you wished you were an arrow shot from the bow of an infinitely strong archer and you were flying away from Malibu into the endless blue.

We walked away from the road and up a little draw. We took some beer with us plus a paper sack filled with empty beer bottles.

Dick unzipped his fly then delivered himself of such a massive amount of piss it was a wonder his skinny frame had had the space to store it. Then he took six of the beer bottles and lined them up in a row. Then we took a position about twenty-five feet away.

I’d gone to a store on Alvarado called Andy’s Guns & Ammo and got a new Smith & Wesson .38 to replace the one the Mexicans stole; we’d come up here so I could try it out.

“I’ll take the three on the left,” said Dick.

“Okay.”

Dick took his own pistol out of his waistband, then we took turns firing. The noise disturbed a crow that flapped away, peevishly cawing, and I didn’t blame it a bit. It would’ve been ideal to have three arms so I could’ve put a finger in each ear as we blazed away.

It took Dick four shots to shatter his three bottles, but after I’d emptied my gun of bullets my three bottles still stood sassily upright, gleaming in the sun.

“Hard to believe I was ever any good at this,” I said as I reloaded.

Dick coughed, and lit up a cigarette.

“You’re right, kid. It is hard to believe.”

   BUD CALLED. HE said Darla had a pain in her back, and he wanted me to pick her up in the morning and take her to a chiropractor.

“Okay,” I said. “What time?”

“Her appointment’s at six-thirty. Address is 418 Grand. The doc’s name is Brunder.”

It seemed like a strange time to see a chiropractor, but I didn’t ask any questions. I was at Bud’s house about a quarter to six. Bo Spiller’s shotgun and smashed-raspberry face greeted me at the gate.

Darla came out of the house, a scarf over her hair and her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. She managed to look pale even through her tan. She didn’t say anything to me when I said good morning. As he opened the gate for us, Spiller gave her his best imitation of a suave grin, but unfortunately it turned into the leer of a maniac.

We drove south on La Brea through the slowly awakening city. Darla lit up a cigarette. I said: “How’s your back?”

“It’s fine,” she sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with my back.”

“But—Bud said—”

“Oh Danny, can you really be that dumb? Maybe the fellas are right about you.” She was silent, and then: “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I feel lousy. This is a lousy day. I’m having a baby. Except I’m not.”

She looked at me for the first time; at least I assumed that behind the black glasses pointing at me her eyes were looking at me.

“Well—say something.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a cheap tramp and I’m going to hell.”

“Whose idea is this? His?”

“It’s mine too. We agree on something for once. He doesn’t want a kid ’cause he says two’s company and three’s a crowd. And I don’t want a kid ’cause, well, what girl in her right mind would wanna have Bud Seitz’s baby? It’d probably be a monster, just like him. It’d probably have two heads.”

“But Darla, isn’t it wrong? Isn’t it just like killing?”

“You
are
a killer, Danny. That’s what you do. So you don’t get to judge me.”

I checked my rearview mirror. Didn’t see any sign of my buddies in the red Buick.

“Look, let’s just go. Now. You and me. I’ll be its father. It won’t have two heads. We’ll be happy.”

Darla exhaled a weary plume of smoke.

“We’d be lucky to make it to the city limits.”

“This car goes fast. Real fast.”

“Forget it. I told you. He’s gotta be dead first.”

“What do you expect me to do? Turn around and go back to the house and kill him? What about all the guys he’s always got all around him? You expect me to kill Nucky and Nello and Willie the Coon and that new guy with the thing on his face too?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything anymore, Danny. Except to shut up. And leave me alone.”

Grand was downtown. It wasn’t much of a downtown; none of the buildings were more than ten or twelve stories high. The directory in the lobby of 418 Grand said Dr. Rudolph Brunder’s office was on the eighth floor. The eighth-floor hallway was empty. The pebbled-glass door to Brunder’s office was locked. I looked at my watch. We were a few minutes early.

There wasn’t any place to sit down. Darla smoked. I leaned against the wall with my hands in my trouser pockets—rattled the change there until Darla gave me a dirty look and stopped me.

In a little while the elevator down the hall opened, and a short, dark man headed our way. He had a carefully trimmed red moustache and was wearing a black homburg hat. He glanced at us as he unlocked the door and his mouth twitched in a smile-like fashion.

“Good morning,” he said, with some kind of foreign accent. “I hope I am not late?”

I didn’t like him. I shrugged. He ushered us into a small, stuffy waiting room; there was a sofa in a putrid-green color and a coffee table with some magazines and a glass jar of lollipops on it and a tall potted plant in the corner that looked like it was hanging on to life by its fingernails.

“Please have a seat,” said Dr. Brunder. “Help yourself to the lollipops. My assistant should be here shortly, and then we will get started.”

Brunder twitched his lips at us again then disappeared through another door. We neither had a seat nor helped ourselves to the lollipops. Darla lit up another cigarette and walked over to the window, while I just stood there in the middle of the room, a sort of human version of the potted plant.

The door to the hallway opened, and a woman came in. She was very fat in a particular kind of way, fairly normal at the top but getting fatter the farther down you went. Either one of her thighs was bigger around than all of Dick Prettie.

“Hi, I’m Polly,” she said with a warm smile. She waddled over to the window Darla was standing at and lifted it open. “It’s going to be another hot one,” then she looked at Darla.

“You ready, honey?”

I saw Darla’s gaze move from Polly back to the open window, and my heart gave a sickening lurch as for a fraction of a second I thought she was about to jump, but all she did was toss out her cigarette; then she followed Polly.

Polly held the door open for her, and she passed through it and out of sight. Now Polly smiled back at me.

“Help yourself to those lollipops, honey. That’s what they’re there for.”

I wanted to say who cares about your fucking lollipops and you oughta be in a circus you’re so fat but I didn’t say anything and went over to the sofa and sat down; it was very soft, and I sank down into its putrid-green embrace and closed my eyes. It wasn’t that I was sleepy; I just wanted to block from sight the dog-eared magazines from last year and the year before that and the poisonously orange and yellow and red and green lollipops and the dying plant. But the problem with closing your eyes is, it tends to awaken your mind’s eye. I saw Doc Travis standing on the balcony during a rain storm and sticking his hand out and watching the rain patter into his wrinkled black palm, and Sophie waiting all by herself to board a bus to nowhere, and Vera Vermillion’s glowing blue moon, and Bud killing Tommy with a bottle of Bacardi rum, and Dulwich’s gappy grin under his Mexican hat, and the cold eyes of the nurse on the train, and Darla standing by the lake under the moon and looking up at me as I thought we were about to kiss, like any regular guy and girl might kiss in such circumstances. By a lake. Under the moon.

I heard a pleasant soft burbling—opened my eyes and saw two pigeons on the ledge outside the window. I wondered if the pigeons ever flew inside, then I had a sudden memory: a panicked bird flying around inside a room, and my mother laughingly chasing it with a broom. She wasn’t trying to hurt it, was just trying to guide it back toward the window it had come in through. Lacy curtains hung in the window, they billowed in a luminous breeze—

The door to the hallway opened a foot or two, and a girl peered in. She saw me—looked alarmed—but came in anyway.

She sat down on the sofa as far away from me as possible. I suppose to her I was just part of the awfulness of it all. She had a small, turned-up nose, and looked sweet and pretty and not more than eighteen. I wondered who the cad was who got her in trouble and why he wasn’t here with her.