Airships (8 page)

“Say I am one of your sons. Why do I look up to you?” I said.

“Because I've tried to know the world and have tried to pass it on to the others.” He jumped off the horse right into the droppings. He looked as if he were venturing to run. “We're not simple animals. There's a god in every one of us, if we find him,” he said.

“Don't try to run. I'd kill you before I even thought,” I said.

His horse ran away. It didn't like him.

On the ground, below my big horse Mount Auburn, the old man was a little earthling in an overbig uniform. He kept chattering.

“I want a single important truth from you,” I said.

“My mouth can't do it,” he said. “But there's something here!” He struck his chest at the heart place. Then he started
running back to the depot, slapping hanging limbs out of his way. I turned Mount Auburn and rode after. We hit the clearing and Mount Auburn was in an easy prance. The old man was about ten yards ahead, too breathless to warn the troops.

In an idle way I watched their progress too. Captain Swain had been killed during our ambush. I saw the blueboys had put his body up on a pole with a rope around his neck, a target in dirty gray. His body was turning around as they tried out the repeaters on him. But ahead of me the old man bounced like a snowtail in front of Mount Auburn. We were in a harrowed field. The next time I looked up, a stand of repeaters was under my left hand three strides ahead. I was into their camp. Mount Auburn stopped for me as I picked up a handful of the rifles by the muzzles.

The old man finally let out something.

“It's a secesh!” he shouted.

Only a couple looked back. I noticed a crock of whiskey on a stool where the brave ones were reloading to shoot at Captain Swain again. I jumped off Mount Auburn and went in the back door of the staff house. I kicked the old man through the half-open door and pulled Mount Auburn into the room with me, got his big sweaty withers inside. When I looked around I saw their captain standing up and trying to get out his horse pistol. He was about my age, maybe twenty-five, and he had spectacles. My piece was already cocked and I shot him square in the chest. He backed up and died in another little off-room behind his desk. A woman ran out of the room. She threw open the front door and bullets smacked into the space all around her. She shut the door. A couple of bullets broke wood.

“Lay down,” I said.

She had a little Derringer double-shot pistol hanging in her hand. The old man was lying flat on the floor behind the desk with me.

The woman was a painted type, lips like blood. “Get down,” I told her. She was ugly, just lips, tan hair, and a huge
bottom under a petticoat. I wondered what she was going to try with the little pistol. She lay down flat on the floor. I asked her to throw me the pistol. She wouldn't. Then she wormed it across to us behind the big desk. She looked me over, her face grimy from the floor. She had no underwear and her petticoat was hiked up around her middle. The old man and I were looking at her organ.

“Wha? War again?” she said. “I thought we already won.”

The woman and the old man laid themselves out like a carpet. I knew the blueboys thought they had me down and were about ready to come in. I was in that position at Chancellorsville. There should be about six fools, I thought. I made it to the open window. Then I moved into the window. With the repeater, I killed four, and the other two limped off. Some histrionic plumehead was raising his saber up and down on the top of a pyramid of crossties. I shot him just for fun. Then I brought up another repeater and sprayed the yard.

This brought on a silence. Nothing was moving. Nobody was shooting. I knew what they were about to do. I had five minutes to live, until they brought the cannon up. It would be canister or the straight big ball. Then the firing started again. The bullets were nicking the wall in back of me. I saw Mount Auburn behind the desk. He was just standing there, my friend, my legs. Christ, how could I have forgotten him? “Roll down, Auburn!” I shouted. He lay down quick. He lay down behind the thick oak desk alongside the slut and the old man.

Then what do you think? With nothing to do but have patience until they got the cannon up, somebody's hero came in the back door with a flambeau and a pistol, his eyes closed, shooting everywhere. Mount Auburn whinnied. The moron had shot Auburn. This man I overmurdered. I hit him four times in the face, and his torch flew out the back door with one of the bullets.

I was looking at the hole in Auburn when the roof of the house disappeared. It was a canister blast. The sound was deafening. Auburn was hurting but he was keeping it in. His
breaths were deeper, the huge bold eyes waiting on me. I had done a lead-out once before on a corporal who was shot in the buttocks. He screamed the whole time, but he lives now, with a trifling scar on his arse, now the war is over. You put your stiletto very hard to one side of the hole until you feel metal—the bullet—and then you twist. The bullet comes out of the hole by this coiling motion and may even jump up in your hand.

So it was with the lead in Auburn's flank. It hopped right out. The thing to do then is get a sanitary piece of paper and stuff it into the wound. I took a leaf from the middle of the pile of stationery on the captain's table, spun it, and rammed it down.

Auburn never made a complaint. It was I who was mad. I mean, angry beyond myself.

When I went out the front door with the two repeaters, firing and levering, through a dream of revenge—fire from my right hand and fire from my left—the cannoneers did not expect it. I knocked down five of them. Then I knelt and started shooting to kill. I let the maimed go by. But I saw the little team of blue screeching and trying to shoot me, and I killed four of them. Then they all ran off.

There was nothing to shoot at.

I turned around and walked back toward the shack I'd been in. The roof was blown off. The roof was in the backyard lying on the toilet. A Yank with a broken leg had squirmed out from under it.

“Don't kill me,” he said.

“Lay still and leave me alone,” I said. “I won't kill you.”

Mount Auburn had got out of the house and was standing with no expression in the bare dirt. I saw the paper sticking out of his wound. He made an alarmed sound. I turned. The Yank with a broken leg had found that slut's double-barreled Derringer. I suppose she threw it up in the air about the time the roof was blown over.

He shot at me with both barrels. One shot hit my boot and the other hit me right in the chin, but did nothing. It had been misloaded or maybe it wasn't ever a good pistol to begin with. The bullet hit me and just fell off.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “Come here, Auburn,” I called to the big horse. “Hurt him.”

I went back in the house while Mount Auburn ran back and forth over the Yank. I cast aside some of the rafters and paper in search of the old man and the slut. They were unscathed. They were under the big desk in a carnal act. I was out of ammunition or I would have slaughtered them too. I went out to the yard and called Mount Auburn off the Yank, who was hollering and running on one leg.

By the time the old man and the slut got through, I had reloaded. They came out the back slot that used to be the door.

“Tell me something. Tell me something wise!” I screamed.

He was a much braver man than I'd seen when I'd seen him in the shade of the tree.

“Tell me
something
. Tell me
something wise
!” I screamed.

“There is no wisdom, Johnny Reb,” the old man said. “There's only tomorrow if you're lucky. Don't kill us. Let us have tomorrow.”

I spared them. They wandered out through the corpses into the plowed rows. I couldn't see them very far because of the dirty moon. I was petting Mount Auburn when Jeb and fifteen others of the cavalry rode up. Jeb has the great beard to hide his weak chin and his basic ugliness. He's shy. I'm standing here and we've got this whole depot to plunder and burn. So he starts being chums with me. Damned if I don't think he was jealous.

“You stayed and won it, Howard, all on your own?” he says.

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“There's lots of dead Christians on the ground,” he said.
“You've got blood all over your shirt. You're a stout fellow, aren't you?”

“You remember what you said to me when you came back and I was holding Black Answer's head in my hands when he'd been shot out from under me?”

“I recall the time but not what I said,” said Jeb Stuart.

“You said, ‘Use your weeping on people, not on animals,'” I said.

“I think I'd hold by that,” said Stuart.

“You shit! What are we doing killing people in Pennsylvania?” I screamed.

“Showing them that we can, Captain Howard!”

They arrested me and I was taken back (by the nightways) to a detention room in North Carolina. But that was easy to break out of.

I rode my horse, another steed that knew me, named Vermont Nose.

I made it across the Mason-Dixon.

Then I went down with Grant when he had them at Cold Harbor and in the Wilderness. My uniform was blue.

I did not care if it was violet.

I knew how Stuart moved. We were equal Virginia boys. All I needed was twenty cavalry.

I saw him on the road, still dashing around and stroking his beard.

“Stuarrrrrrrrt!” I yelled.

He trotted over on his big gray horse.

“Don't I know this voice?” he said.

“It's Howard,” I said.

“But I sent you away. What uniform are you wearing?”

“Of your enemy,” I said.

They had furnished me with a shotgun. But I preferred the old Colt. I shot him right in the brow, so that not another thought would pass about me or about himself or about the South, before death. I knew I was killing a man with wife and children.

I never looked at what the body did on its big horse.

Then Booth shot Lincoln, issuing in the graft of the Grant administration.

I am dying from emphysema in a Miami hotel, from a twenty-five-year routine of cigars and whiskey. I can't raise my arm without gasping.

I know I am not going to make it through 1901. I am the old guy in a blue uniform. I want a woman to lie down for me. I am still functional. I believe we must eradicate all the old soldiers and all their assemblies. My lusts surpass my frame. I don't dare show my pale ribs on the beach. I hire a woman who breast-feeds me and lets me moil over her body. I've got twenty thousand left in the till from the Feds.

The only friends of the human sort I have are the ghosts that I killed. They speak when I am really drunk.

“Welcome,” they say. Then I enter a large gray hall, and Stuart comes up.

“Awwww!” he groans. “Treason.”

“That's right,” I say.

In 1900 they had a convention of Confederate veterans at the hotel, this lonely tall thing on the barbarous waves. I was well into my third stewed mango, wearing my grays merely to be decorous. I heard a group of old coots of about my age hissing at a nearby table. It became clear that I was the object of distaste.

I stood up.

“What is it?” I asked them.

I was answered by a bearded high-mannered coot struck half dead by Parkinson's disease. He was nodding like a reed in wind. He rose in his colonel's cape. Beside him his cane clattered to the floor.

“I say I saw you in the road, dog. I'm a Virginian, and I saw it by these good eyes. You killed Jeb Stuart.
You
! Your presence is a mockery to us of the Old Cause.”

“Leave me alone, you old toy,” I said.

I raised my freckled fists. His companions brought him down.

When the convention left, I dressed in my grays again and walked to the beach. Presently Charlie came out of the little corral over the dune, walking Mount Auburn's grandchild. If President Grant lied to me, I don't want to know. I have proof positive that it came from a Pennsylvania farm in the region where we foraged and ambushed.

It was an exquisitely shouldered red horse, the good look in its eye.

Charlie let me have the rein and I led the animal down to the hard sand next to the water. It took me some time to mount. My overcoat fell over his withers.

“You need any help, Captain Howard?” Charlie asked.

“I don't need a goddamned thing except privacy,” I said.

There was nothing on the beach, only the waves, the hard sand, and the spray. The beauty I sat on ran to the verge of his heartburst. I had never given the horse a name. I suppose I was waiting for him to say what he wanted, to talk.

But Christ is his name, this muscle and heart striding under me.

The other day we cornered a man, a lout named Reggy John. It was in a barn near the Kansas and Missouri border. The weather was freezing and moist. John was unarmed and covered with cow manure. We had shotguns, but I saw this creature under the straw and took pity on him. I told the guys to lay their guns down. In a stall was his supposed sweetheart, tied underneath a bull with rope, all naked. One of the boys had blown off the latch of the stall so the bull was wandering about among us with the woman under him. The bull seemed to be tranquil, having had his last desire with the woman.

Sheriff Folger lost his reason and grabbed the pitchfork from the wall and stuck it in the bull's eyes. We forgot the criminal and kept to the sides of the barn, watching the bull with gore spewing from its sockets. The woman underneath him was awakened by the jumping. The bull twisted so in its death that the ropes were loosened and the beast could kick her in the head. He did it in his throes, kicked her out of bondage entirely. We couldn't stand any more. Sergeant Leet shot the thing in the brain with his shotgun. It was at peace.

We were all hungry after the big hunt. Under Leet's direction, three of the privates skinned the bull, three others started the fire. One made coffee, two brought in potatoes and the kettle, and a corporal brought in a sack full of onions and cabbages from the farmer's house, to boil with the potatoes. The farmer came along. We sent him back for salt and pepper. We hadn't eaten anything substantial in five days. The farmer was smiling. He wanted to introduce us to his wife and children. The barn was getting warmer and warmer.
When the farmer opened the door, I saw the snow was coming down in big tumbling flakes. The degree was zero.