Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (18 page)

I glanced around the table, taking inventory: a fireman, a five-foot-seven duck, two bug-eyed monsters (one purple and tentacled, one green and furry) and one Conan the Barbarian. “Hey Mike,” I called to Callahan, “introduce me and Finn around and we’ll swap stories.” Callahan nodded and opened his mouth, but the Doc put a beer in front of it. “I bear beer, bear,” he announced, and another groan arose.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll start the ball rollin’ myself. Howdy folks, I’m Jake. This here’s Mickey Finn.” Various hellos came from the group, and a pretzel landed in my drink.

“I’ve heard of you, Mr. Finn, said the shepherd, grinning. “They say you’re hell to drink with.”

Obviously the shepherd hadn’t heard about this Mickey Finn, and I glanced at Finn to see how he’d take it. I needn’t have worried-apparently he had been hanging around Callahan’s Place long enough.

“You’ll make me feel sheepish, sir,” he said with a straight face, “if you take my name too litter-ally. Very baa-adly indeed, for I would feign have fun with a fine Finn fan.”

Callahan and I guffawed, and Doc Webster’s jaw dropped. “LordGod,” the Doc expostulated, “I’m going to hang up my puns, I swear.”

“A hypocritic oath,” said the duck, and the Doc heaved a bag of beer nuts at him. “Duck, duck, the Doc,” Callahan and I crowed together, and the table broke up.

“Look Jake,” said the shepherd when the commotion had died down, “what you said about swapping stories sounds good to me. As we introduce ourselves, let’s explain what brought us here to Callahan’s. I know some of you boys must have stories I’d like to hear-nobody seems to come here without a reason. What do you say?”

We all looked around. “Suits.” “Okay by me.” “Why not?” There was no apparent reluctance—Callahan’s is the place you went to first because you needed to talk about your troubles-and the first time is always the hardest. “Fine,” said the shepherd. “I guess I ought to start.” He took a glass, filled it up and wetted his whistle. He was about my age, with odd streaks of white hair on either temple that combined with his classical shepherd’s garb made him look like a young Homer. His features were handsome and his build excellent, but I noted with surprise that his left earlobe was missing. There was a scar on his right shoulder, nearly hidden by a deep tan, that looked like it had been put there with a crosscut saw. .

“My name is Tony Telasco,” he said when he had swallowed. “I give lectures and slide shows and make speeches, and sometimes I go to jail, but I used to do a lot of things before I came to Callahan’s. I was a transcendental meditator for awhile, staring at my navel. Before that I was a junkie, and before that I was a drunk and before that I was a killer. That was right after I was a kid.

“See, the thing I really am is a Viet Nam veteran.”

There were low whistles and exclamations all around.

I was in my first year of college (Tony went on) when I got that magic piece of paper from my draft board. Business Ad majors just weren’t getting deferments, and so I had the classic three choices: go to jail, Canada, or Viet Nam.

Which wasn’t a lot of choice. Make no mistake, I was -scared spitless of Viet Nam-I watched television. But I was scared and ashamed to go to jail, and scared and incompetent to emigrate. To be brought into a strange country to fight would be tough, but to move into one myself and make a living with no skills and no degree looked impossible to me.

So Nam seemed to be the lesser of three evils. I never made a moral decision about the war, never questioned whether going there was the right thing to do. It was the easiest. Oh, I knew a few guys who went to Canada, but I never really understood them-I liked America. And I knew one fellow in my English class who went to jail for refusing to step forward-but his third day there they found him on the end of his bedsheet, a few inches off the floor, his cellmate apparently asleep.

And so I found myself in the Army. Basic was tough, but tolerable; I’d always liked physical exercise, and I was in pretty good shape to start with. It was a lot rougher on my mind.

The best friend I made in Basic was a guy named Steve McConnell, from California. Steve was a good joe, the kind of guy really good to have with you in a rugged situation like Basic. He had a knack for pointing out the idiocies of military life, and a huge capacity for enjoying them. King of a dry sense of humor-he didn’t laugh out loud, in fact he hardly ever laughed aloud, but he was perpetually amused by things that drove me crazy. Like me, he’d sort of dirfted into the Army, but the more he thought about the idea, the less he liked it. Neither did I, but I didn’t see anything I could do about it. We spent hours peeling potatoes together, discussing war and women and the Army and women and the Communist Menace in Southeast Asia and women and our D.I. Steve was an independent thinker-he didn’t hang out with the other blacks in our outfit, who had cliqued up in selfprotection. That can be tough for a black man in the U.S. Army, but Steve cut his own path, and chose his brothers by other criteria than the shade they were painted. I don’t know why he and I were so tight-I don’t know what his criteria were-but somehow we were so close I got the idea I really knew him, understood where he was at.

I was as surprised as anyone when he finally made his stand.

There comes a day, see, when they line you up on a godawful cold February morning and truck up a couple of coffin-sized cartons. The D.I.‘s are clearly more pretentious than usual, projecting the air that something sacred is about to happen. By Army standards they’re right.

What happens is, you get to the head of the line and throw out your hands and one huge mother of a sergeant flings a rifle at you as hard as he can-you’ve been Issued Your Rifle, and mister, God have mercy on you if you drop it, or fumble your catch and let part of it touch the ground. Worse than calling it a “gun.” A few guys do catch copper-plated hell for having fingers too frozen to clutch, and you spend your time on line furiously flexing your fingers and praying to God you won’t blow it.

Steve was right in front of me in line, and curiously withdrawn; I couldn’t get a rise out of him with even the sourest joke. I chalked it up to the cold and the solemnity of the occasion, and I guess I was part right.

All at once it was his turn and the big sergeant selected a rifle and pressed it to his chest and straightarmed it with a bit extra oomph because he was from Alabama and I prayed Steve would field it okay and he just simply sidestepped.

It was just like that: one rushing second and then time stopped. Steve pulled to his left and the rifle cartwheeled past him and struck earth barrel-first, sank a motherloving three inches into the mud, the stock brushing my knee. All around the parade gound people stopped cursing and joking and stared, stared at that damned M-1 quivering in the mud like a branch planted by an idiot, stared and waited for the sky to fall.

The big sergeant got redder than February wind could account for and swelled up like a toad, groping for an obscenity that could contain his fury. As he found it, Steve spoke up in the mildest voice I ever heard.

“I’m sorry, sergeant,” he said, “but I can’t take that rifle.”

The sergeant came to life; verbal insubordination was easier to comprehend and deal with than that rifle jutting impossibly from the mud.

“Shut up and pick up your goddamned rifle, nigger,” he roared, “or you’ll have it for breakfast.”

Steve blinked, shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t do her. That thing kills people and I just can’t take it from you.”

The sergeant hauled out his service .45 and aimed it at Steve’s navel. “This thing kills too, private. Pick up that rifle.”

I looked at Steve, paralyzed by his crazy stunt. He was plainly scared to death, and I was as sure as he that he was about to die. Pick it up, Steve, I prayed. You don’t have to use it now, just pick the goddamned thing up.

“Sergeant,” he said finally, “you can make me pick it up, but you can’t ever make me use it. Not even with that automatic. So what’s the point?”

The sergeant glared at him a long moment, then holstered his .45 and waved over a couple of corporals. “Take this goddamn nigger to the guardhouse,” he snarled, and bent over the carton again. Before I had time to think he heaved a rifle at me, and I made a perfect catch. “Next!” he bellowed, and the line moved foreard. I found myself in barracks, looking at my new rifle and wondering why Steve had done such a crazy thing.

I went off to Nam soon after that-tried to get word to Steve in the stockade, but it couldn’t be done. He got left behind with the rest of America, and I found myself in a jungle full of unfriendly strangers. It was bad-real bad -and I began to think a lot about Steve and the choice he had made. I couldn’t tell the people I was fighting from the people I was fighting for, and the official policy of “kill what moves” didn’t satisfy me.

At first. Then one day a twelve-year-old boy as cute as Dondi took off my left earlobe with a machete while I got some Krations out of my pack for him. The kid would have taken off my head instead of my ear, but a pretty tight buddy of mine, Sean Reilly, shot him in the belly while he was winding up.

“Christ, Tony,” Sean said when he’d made sure the kid was dead, “you know the word: never turn your back on a Gook. “

I was too busy with my bleeding ear to reply, but I was coming to agree with him. Just as Nam had been easier than jail, catching the rifle easier than refusing to, killing Gooks was easier than discussing political philosophy with them.

A week later it got to be more easy.

Sean’s squad had been sent upriver to reconnoiter, while the rest of us got our breath back for the big push. I was on sentry duty with a fellow whose name I misremember-not a bad guy, but he smoked marijuana, and I’d been raised to think that stuff was evil. Anyway this particular day he smoked a couple of joints while we sat there listening to jungle sounds and waiting for relief so we could eat. It made him thirsty, so I offered to spell him while he went to the river for a drink. He slipped into the jungle, walking a little unsteadily.

A minute later I heard him scream.

It was only fifty yards or so to the river, but I came circumspectly, expecting to find him dead and the enemy in strength. But when I poked my rifle through the foliage, there was nobody in sight but him. He was on his knees with his face buried in his hands. Oh Jesus, I thought, what a time to freak out. I started to swear at him, and then I saw what he had seen.

It was Sean, floating lazily against the bank with his fingers and toes dangling from a sort of necklace around his throat and his genitals sewed into his mouth.

A friend, a man who had saved my life, a guy who wanted to be an artist when he got home, carved up like a Christmas turkey by a bunch of slant-eye monkeys-it became much more than easy to kill Gooks.

It became fun.

The rest of my tour passed in a red haze. I remember raping women, I remember clubbing a baby’s skull with a rifle-butt to encourage a V.C.-sympathizer to talk, I remember torturing captured prisoners and enjoying it. I remember a dozen little My Lais, and I remember me in the middle with a smile like a wolf. Fury tasted better than confusion, and this time it was easier to kill than to think.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d come home kill-crazy like that. God knows what happened to the ones that did. But two weeks before I was due to go home I got a letter from a friend-in the States, a supply corporal back at boot camp.

Steve McConnell had died in military prison. He “fell down the stairs” and broke nearly every bone in his body, but it was the ruptured spleen that killed him. There had been no inquiry; the official verdict was “accidental death.” As accidental as Sean’s-except our side did it.

In the time it took me to read that letter I went from kill-crazy all the way to the other kind, and the next morning I took my squad out and tried to die and loused it up and got my second Purple Heart and Silver Star. I never got another chance in Nam; they sent me home from the hospital with some neat embroidery on this seam on my shoulder and a piece of paper that said I was a normal human being again.

Killing myself just didn’t seem as reasonable in the States as it had in Nam somehow, so I tried forgetting instead. For a while booze did the trick, but I couldn’t keep it up; my stomach wouldn’t tolerate the dosage required. Then for a while pot was a real help, but some ways made it worse: visions of spurting blood and Sean’s fingers and Steve boneless like a jello man. So I tried a hit of coke, and that was just fine, and one day a spade who looked a lot like Steve laid some smack on me. Heroin was just what I’d been looking for, and it wasn’t any surprise when I got a Jones, a habit I mean.

But it’s funny … I guess I really didn’t want to kill myself at all. I heard about this transcendental meditation stuff and started hanging around Ananada Marga Yoga Society meetings, and boy, I kicked clean. Instead of getting high on smack, I got high on big bites of bliss, which is cheaper, healthier, legal and a much more satisfactory head all the way around.

It was over a year before I noticed I wasn’t accomplishing anything.

But about that time I got lucky and took my Doctor Webster’s advice and started coming to Callahan’s Place. Things started getting clearer in my head, a lot clearer. Next thing I knew, I was on a stage giving a speech to the V . V .A . W . , and I learned that there are things worth fighting and fighting for-but fighting clean. I started giving talks and joining demonstrations and appearing on T. V .I’ve been arrested four times, had my leg broken by a county cop, and they took my name off the Native Sons Honor Roll in my home town. My father won’t talk to me-yet-and my phone is tapped.

I feel great.

“… and it’s all thanks to you, Mr. Callahan,” Tony finished.

“Shucks, Tony,” Callahan rumbled, “we didn’t do anything for you that you couldn’t have done yourself.”

“You accepted me,” Telasco said simply. “You made me understand that I was just a normal human being who’d been caught up in a nightmare, a nightmare that made him realize he had the makings of a killer ape in him. One night I told you and your customers this whole story and you didn’t stare at me like a mad dog. You told me that I needed a bigger audience.