Wild Things: Four Tales (6 page)

“I don’t think I can live without him,” the American said.

The woman glanced at the Italian, who still looked out at the night. Then, at the American. Then, at her empty glass.

The bar man came out and told them that he was closing up whether they stayed at the tables or not. “I have a sick little boy at home. I have a wife. I don’t have this endless night that you people have.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“We can’t leave this young man here,” the Italian said.

“Oh yes we can. Do you need a taxi?”

The American stared at her but didn’t answer.

She stood up, and reached into her purse for money. “You need sleep is all.” She said this indirectly. It could’ve been to anyone – the Italian, the American, the barman, or even herself.

The Italian remained in his chair, but looked up at her. “We can walk down to the fountain.”

“No,” she said. “Let’s go home. Back to my place.”

“Let’s go to mine,” he said.

The American stared at them both, and the woman was nearly certain that tears rolled down his cheeks. She drew a tissue from her purse and passed it to him. “It’ll be all right. Whatever it is.”

The American took the tissue, swiping it around his eyes. “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

“And you don’t have to. Don’t talk nonsense. Please.”

The Italian finally rose, pushing his chair back. “You shouldn’t have been drinking the absinthe,” he said. “It’s not good.”

“Let’s go,” the woman whispered, loudly enough for the American to hear.

“All I’m saying,” the American said. “All I’m saying is that I am thinking of killing for him. That’s all. I don’t know why he drives me to this. I don’t know what he wants. I only know I have to do what he wants.”

The Italian stepped back from the woman, and nodded. “Love is a cruel thing, sometimes. It needs proof. These are dangerous times in the world. We’ve met an assassin over drinks at Quested’s.”

As she passed by the American on her way out, the woman said, “Just go home and go to sleep. It’ll seem different when you wake up.” She nearly touched him on the shoulder as a way of comforting him, but withdrew her hand at the last second.

The woman and the Italian gentleman left Quested’s, walking out under the trees, through the park. As she stepped into the path between some thin sculptures, she shrugged off the touch of the Italian as if she were annoyed with him.

After a minute, the American got out of his chair, as well. The lights of Quested’s shut off, and the barman went home.

The American stepped into the park and moved through the shadows to catch up with the couple.

The Dark Game

1

I saw a painting once, by an artist unknown to me. The painting was of a man’s hands, bound together. The title was “Victory is freedom of mind and body.” I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory.

Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

We must find some pleasure and solace within this terrible lashing.

You want to hear it all? You want me to tell you how it went, in the prison camp? Why I like the ropes? You want to play the game with me?

First let me tell you this: youth is something you put in a drawer somewhere, you lose the thought of it behind socks and letters and medals and old passport photos and keys that no longer fit locks. You wear it when you’re of the right age, and you do things that you ought not to, and then as you gain perspective with age, you put it away, and you close the drawer.

And you lock it.

Then, you live the life you’ve built toward, and no one needs to see what’s in that drawer.

A secret is something to be hidden, and if it is hidden well enough, it never becomes a fact. It is just something that is not there when you go to look for it. It is the thing missing, but the thing that is not missed.

That is how I feel.

That is why I don’t revisit those times, often. The camp.

Or the motel room.

Or the smokehouse.

But since you have me here, like this, I’ll tell you. Maybe you’ll leave after that. Maybe you won’t want to stay here once you know about me.

2

Before the war, I was in a motel room with a girl I met outside the base, and for fun she tied me up and when she did it, I went someplace else in my head. My hands tied, my feet bound.

I remember she smelled like orange blossoms, and she enjoyed tightening the thin ropes around my hands. But my mind was just gone – drifting upward into darkness, into another place. Back to Burnley Island, I guess, and that’s where I’ve always ended up – my memories, my family, my home.

I was just not there anymore. The game had taken me over.

It had become automatic for me.

It was second nature.

My name is Gordon Raglan.

Gordie, to my friends.

Captain to folks on Burnley Island.

In the war, things got worse for me.

The game got worse.

But it wasn’t so bad when I was a kid.

3

Early memory: winter.

Bitter cold.

Wind whistling around me, boxing my ears, as I trudged through three feet of snow to get out to the smokehouse. I was ten, perhaps. Heavy with a burden. It was the dog I’d had since he was a foundling of two or three years old, and I was too young to remember bringing him home from a walk in the woods. He was dying now, of some undiagnosed malady. In those days, you didn’t take the dog to the vet when it was its time. You took him someplace and you shot him. And this freezing February day, that was what I was to do. My father marched behind me. I could not bring myself to turn and look over my shoulder to see how he kept pace. I was weeping, and it would be the first and last time I would weep for years. I held my dog – a small mutt, no bigger than my arms could carry – and he looked up at me as if he understood that something not wonderful was to come.

At the smokehouse I stopped and prayed. I wished that God would intervene, just this once. I would trade, I promised God, my life for this dog’s. I would do anything God wanted me to do if he would just take a minute and breathe new life into my dog’s body. I would build a chapel. No, I would build a cathedral.

The snow bit at my cheeks and nose.

My dog, whose name was Mac, whimpered and groaned.

“Go on, son,” my father said.

He called me son more than he called me Gordie or Gordon. Sometimes I thought he wasn’t sure of my name. That I was just another son to him. Another child to deal with before I became a man.

I reached up, and opened the door to the smokehouse. I barely kept my balance, for the dog had grown too heavy for me.

My father lit the lantern inside the smokehouse – it was old-fashioned, and my mother felt it was a fire hazard, but my father insisted on using it. A yellow flickering light filled the small room.

When I’d set Mac down on some straw, I kissed him on the muzzle and kept my prayers going – my deals with God to change this, somehow.

Then, my father handed me the pistol and told me to get it over with quickly. “Misery is terrible. That animal is in misery. When you brought him home, you promised to take care of him. That is a commitment. This is a way to take care of him, so he won’t be in any more pain. You can stop his pain. He won’t get better, son. He won’t.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You have to. You promised. You promised me. And you promised that dog when you brought him home. He has had a good life here. But now he’s sick. And he needs to be taken care of.”

I looked at my dog’s face and saw the terribleness of all existence in his eyes. In his shivering form.

And that is when I learned about how life doesn’t matter at all. Not one bit. It is a misery. A wretchedness foisted on us by a God who turns His back on all. We live on a planet of ice, and the only thing we human beings can do is endure it and try to make sure that we don’t add to the misery too much.

4

Here is my life. I was born on Burnley Island, in a house called Hawthorn, and I grew up in a family called Raglan that had a history on that island. We were shepherding people, I’m told, originally. We came with Welsh and Scots and English in our blood, and we were dark and swarthy, as I am, a perfect descendant of the Raglan clan. My father was a brute, and I don’t say that lightly. He was a man more likely to lash with a belt or a switch than to scold with words. He was quick to judge, and hot-tempered, and I suppose I joined the army to get away from him more than anything else. I went off to see the world and fight the good fight, and found myself one dawn in the heat of a jungle, in the boredom of a company that was lost, our communications screwed beyond all measure, and I had a “fuck all” attitude toward the war and the jungle. I was nineteen, and the last place I wanted to be was in that miasma of heat, humidity and the stink of swamp.

And then, before much time had passed, the enemy got us.

No need to go into specifics. It was ugly. There were a dozen of us originally, but by the time I regained consciousness, tied like a pig to a stick, there were only eight or so – counting me and my buddy, Gup (short for Guppy, which was a kinder name than his original nickname, which was Shrimp), Davy, who seemed too young to be a soldier, a man I had no liking for named Larry Pastor, and Stoddard. I knew what to do if captured – name, rank, serial number, and nothing else, but the truth was, I was scared spitless and we’d all heard the stories of the POWs and how no Geneva Convention was going to stop our enemy from torturing us and then dropping us in some mosquito breeding ground, dead, when it was all over. None of us was commander. We were just soldiers, and we had no valuable information at all, and no reason for a negotiation with our commanders.

But hope is the last thing to go, and so we had it – I had it, and Gup had it, although Stoddard had already told me that he knew he’d die in the jungle and he didn’t give a damn because his girl was already pregnant by some other guy and his folks had disowned him for some reason he wouldn’t say, and what the fuck was the point? That was his attitude, and even though I felt we lived on Ice Planet and life was a hurdle into chaos, I still hoped. For the best. For life. For good to come out of bad.

I woke up later on, pain running through my arms and legs like they’d had nails driven into them, in a dark hole in the ground that smelled like feces and had just a grate at the top so I could see a little of the sky.

Luckily, I still had a pack of gum on me – I kept it in this small pouch at the back inside of my skivvies that my mother had sewn for me to hide money. Instead, I hid Wrigley’s gum, and I took a sliver of a piece and began chewing it just to feel as if I were still an American and that things mattered even if I was in a hole in the ground.

5

I was a little boy when my mother taught me the game, only it wasn’t really a game the way she told me about it. It was a way to get calm and to try and get through pain. I guess I was probably four when she taught me it. She said my grandmother had taught her, and that her grandfather knew about it, too. It was like make believe, but when I had scarlet fever as a kid, I really needed something to help me get through it. I was sure I was going to die, even though I didn’t know what death was at four. But scarlet fever gave me an inkling. I was feverish and delusional, and I remember being wrapped in blankets and taken in the car to Dr. Winding over in Palmerston, and lying naked on his ice cold metal table while his nurse drew out the longest needle I had ever seen in my life and they told me it wouldn’t hurt, but I screamed and screamed and my mother and father had to hold me down while that needle went into my butt. Even though I still had fever, it wasn’t quite so bad. But my butt stung, and, wrapped in blankets on the way home, I was in my mother’s arms, a baby again. She whispered to me to try the game, that’s what she called it.

I named it the Dark Game later on. When it got to me.

At home, in my room, she sat beside my bed and told me to close my eyes despite my moans and groans, and she told me to take her hand. But I couldn’t close my eyes. I kept opening them. Finally she took

a handkerchief and put it over my eyes like a blindfold so I couldn’t see. She started the rhyme, and I said it along with her in a singsong kind of voice, and after a bit, she and I were somewhere else, in the woods, in darkness, and I could not feel the pain or the fever at all.

She told me that it was a way the mind worked that was like magic, that it got you out of yourself and out of where you were.

When I began to teach my friends how to do it as a kid, she pulled me aside and told me that I should keep it to myself.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it can be bad, too. It’s important to stay in the world. To not delve into that too much. If you need God, there’s church. If you need friends, don’t go off into your head too much.”

But I didn’t understand what she meant then, and I’m not sure I do now.

Or maybe I do and I just don’t want to look at it.

“It’s a daylight game,” she said. “Between you and me. It’s a Raglan game. It’s just to make things easier when they’re rough.”

I played it, all by myself, my eyes closed, that wintry day in the smokehouse when I shot my dog, too.

I played it in that hole in the middle of the jungle without a hope in hell of getting out of there alive.

6

The first day and night, They watched me.

They, being the enemy. I don’t want to call them what we called them back then. It was racist. It was nasty. It was a nasty place to be. I hated their guts. They were Enemy. They were They. We were Us. My boys – that’s how I thought of Gup and Stoddard and Davy – screamed at night. I heard them clearly. I’m pretty sure Stoddard died right away. That’s what I heard, anyway. I could picture him working hard to piss off the Enemy, even if his nuts were being nailed to the wall. Gup might hang in there. Davy, I worried most about. He was practically just a kid.