Flanders (7 page)

Yours in great anticipation; and I mean what I said about Pa, I really do.

Travis Lee

* * *

MAY 7, THE REST AREA

Dear Bobby,

Hide this letter from Ma. Hope you hid the last one as well, or she’ll be pressing you to tell her the outcome of my excursion.

The day of the last letter, LeBlanc was waiting for me at the pavilion. We stopped by the blue-light tent to pick up some army-issue rubbers, then we double-timed it—me in the new boots he carved me—all the long miles to town.

The walking was easy, the day overcast and damp. The air smelled of rain and flowers and flourishing late spring. I drank the air and let LeBlanc jabber.

He’s an interesting fellow, LeBlanc is. A person of strong opinions. Irish should be occasionally shot, he says, to keep the population down. “Otherwise they’ll overrun the countryside like a buncha goddamned rabbits and start one of their shitting famines.”

As part of their ordination, Catholic priests’ nuts should be surgically removed. “They took an oath, eh? So what’s the use to them? Maybe that’ll keep their hands out of kids’ pants.”

“Huh. Seems you know all about this, LeBlanc. You were raised up Catholic?”

Right quick, he says, “Stanhope, fuck you and your goddamned ugly sister.”

While we passed a stone wall—one that sprouted some of Riddell’s meadowsweet from its crevasses and was polka-dotted with orange lichens—LeBlanc told me that horses should be kept out of war. On that opinion, I agreed.

“I hate to hear them scream,” he told me. “I hate the way they keep trying to run when their legs are broken in two and flopping or when their guts are dangling out. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I’ve heard them cry, eh? They cry like a baby or something. Times I’ve sat right down and cried with them.”

“I don’t have a sister,” I told him.

He said, “Shithead. Say, you’re a country boy. You ever have a horse?”

“Lord knows I rode and broke enough.”

“No, asshole. I mean did
you
ever have one? Your own horse.”

I shrugged. “Had a meaner-than-cat-dirt Shetland pony when I was too young to know any better. Throwed me once, and then kicked me for good measure. When I got up, damned if he didn’t kick me down again. Then I got me a real sweet little quarter horse dun mare. Gave her to my brother when I left for school. He rides her once in a while, just to keep her gentle.”

“Horses are better than we are,” he says.

I think about it a while. I consider the Shetland pony. I think about my little mare. I say, “I know.”

Well, Bobby, it took us a whole hour of walking to get to that one-bar, two-whore town. The line into the whorehouse was three blocks long. Three companies including my own were there. From his station at the end of the line, Rudolph Pickering watched LeBlanc and me walk up.

“Whores any good?” LeBlanc asked.

Pickering took a swig out of his wine bottle. “Pranging tarts is always good. A religious experience,” he said. “How’s the wound, Yank?”

One place ahead of Pickering, Marrs turned around. “Don’t tell no one you seen me, now. I got me a nice piece at home. Pretty as a rose and a churchgoer. You, Yank? You got yourself something like Miss Lillie Langtry? Have some brandy. Makes the waiting easier.”

I took the bottle. “Hear tell she fucks around.”

Marrs’s eyes widened.

“Miss Lillie Langtry,” I explained to his evident relief. It appeared to me that Pickering and Marrs had been hitting the bottle pretty good.

“So. The whores worth the wait?” LeBlanc asked.

Pickering abruptly shrieked, “Your piece is a churchgoer, is she, Marrs? My cock’s Church of England.”

Several men up, someone started to tell a joke, his voice rising over the general mumble: “That reminds me! So ... so ... Oh, yes. I have it now. A priest goes into confession with a parrot on his shoulder, and the penitent says ...”

Loud cries of “Heard it!” and “Oh, bugger off! Bad joke from the start.”

“I haven’t heard it,” I said, but no one was paying attention.

Three more men joined the line. LeBlanc stuck his hands in his pockets and bounced on his toes. “Take shitting hours, this.”

The new men, a trio from another company, had brought armfuls of bread and cheese. I asked them if they knew the joke about the priest and the parrot. They said they didn’t. They passed food around. Pickering knocked Marrs over the head with a baguette. Marrs dropped theatrically to his ass.

“Goddamned bunch of immature kids,” LeBlanc said. “Hey, Stanhope. I’m going to find better pickings. How’s about you?”

I expected resentment from him when I said, “I’ll stay. I’ve a mind to hear that parrot story,” but he simply shrugged and walked off.

Marrs fell twice trying to get up. Finally, he gave up and sat there on the cobbles, his mouth open. “Fascinating boots, Yank,” he mumbled just before he passed clean out.

By the time I was halfway up the stairs, Pickering and I had finished his bottle. I recall things in flashes: someone yelling, “Queue up, then! Queue up!” and me shouting, “Lord God almighty! Will somebody just for shit’s sake tell me that story about the parrot?” Then me feeling sick at my stomach and trying to find a bathroom. Pickering pulling me back to the stairs.

“Got to poke the tarts, Yank,” he said. “Otherwise, what good is it?”

“What good is it?” I screeched with ill-conceived and fathomless delight. I turned to the puzzled men behind me. “What the hell good is it?”

I think I sort of passed out. In dogged allegiance to the British idea of “queue,” the men behind me grabbed me by my belt and dragged me up the stairs.

When I came to again, Pickering was coming out of a door, buttoning his pants. He grasped me under the arms and hauled me up. I couldn’t find my direction for shit.

“There, Yank,” he was saying. “No, no. Not that way. Girl’s in there.”

I ran into the jamb and banged my nose. Blood gushed.

Seemed like I’d been having a time with my nose lately. “Blighty!” someone laughed.

Pickering’s hands on my shoulders, me walking into the shadowed room. The smells of old, cheap perfume and sweat and sex. There she was, Bobby, lying all spread out. Those thighs of hers just went on and on; pale and lumpy and huge, like cheap cotton-wad mattresses. She had a pretty pink ribbon tied around her throat.

I hollered out, “Heifer!”

The whore seemed confused. Pickering kept asking, “What? What is it you’re trying to tell me, Yank?”

“Heifer with a ribbon!”

“Can’t get your pants down, then, Stanhope? It’s a crown in the box there, chap. Five shillings, or she won’t go.”

The men behind me asking, “What’s it? Can’t get his blue light on? Be a chum, man, and put it on for him.”

Next thing I know, I woke up thinking that I was being smothered. My face was wedged in the Valley of the Shadow between the whore’s sour, marshmallow breasts. My pants were down around my ankles, and I was positioned between those thighs, my pecker aimed more or less in the right direction.

Someone was dragging me off her; me all the time asking, “I come yet? Hey. Did I come?”

“You’ve had time enough for three men, mate. It’s off with you,” a new and very sober voice told me. Then I was rolling down the steps, falling easy and happy and loose-limbed. I ended up at the bottom, my face resting on top of a boot.

“I come yet?” I asked.

The line moved slowly, inexorably. The boot went away. My head dropped to the cobbles. I found myself staring down the sidewalk to the door of the bar where Captain Miller and one of his subalterns were walking out.

Miller came and stood looking down at me. “Stanhope? Your nose is bloodied. Your privates are showing.”

Drunk, but it did not miss my notice that Miller was scrutinizing my pecker. I lunged up and made it all the way to my knees. The army-issue rubber was dangling, a telltale wad weighing its end. I pulled my pants to my waist.

“And I do believe you’re quite drunk.”

“Sir.”

“I say, Stanhope! Have you been with a strumpet?”

“Oh, sir.” Guilt made me heartsick. In my stupor, I figured that finding me whoring had irredeemably hurt his feelings. “Shit. I’m sorry, sir. It’s not like it’s anything pers—”

The swagger stick struck fast as a rattler. It caught me at the base of the throat. Not to hurt, but to stop words.

His voice was even. “That will do.” And then he called back to the bar, “Sergeant Riddell! I’ve a little lost lamb for you!”

Riddell came out, clucking worriedly. Next thing I remember was sitting with Riddell in the barracks. Except for a pot of brewing tea, we were alone. He was playing McPhearson’s gramophone and waxing poetical about Elgar.

“ ’E’s a beacon of truth, ain’t ’e? Fair knows the heart of it. Pluck and valor and all that. Like Kipling and that poem of ’is. What is it, now?”

I shook my head, and the movement nearly toppled me. My hangover headache had started. “Dunno.”

“ ’Course you do, you all the time reading your poems. A real scholar, like. You must know fair everything.” He cast a soulful look at the ceiling. “ ‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.’ That one. What’s it called, now?”

My lips didn’t move too well. “Dunno.”

“Still, makes it all worth it, don’t you think? I mean about dying and all. ’Spite of what some says. If you can just die for something decent and upstanding. That’s what it’s all about, innit?”

God. Not the usual Brit quirk of speech, but a true question. And what desperation it held. When I looked up, Riddell was crying. I opened my mouth intending to say something comforting, but fell asleep instead. I never heard the rest of the parrot story.

Travis Lee

* * *

MAY 8, THE REST AREA

Dear Bobby,

Strange what you told me. It’s hard imagining those sharp eyes of Pa’s going blind. In his glory days he could flat pick out sin, Bobby. Sins of the flesh and sins of the mind. “You’re thinking up deviltry, boy,” he’d tell me. Omniscient, omnipresent. All of creation hung on his mood. When Pastor Lon preached about God’s terrible ire, it was Pa’s scowl I pictured. I figure if God has each hair of our head numbered, He’s nothing we can hide from. And for me, God was always Pa.

God scared me a lot in those days. They say none of us can know the end, but I used to I think that if Hell existed I wouldn’t get flames: I’d spend eternity hiding inside Ma’s old dark wardrobe, trapped with the stink of mothballs and nervous sweat.

So I got to figure your letter is a lie, Bobby. Pa can’t be going blind from the moonshine. It would break every universal law. You write to tell me he’s got whupped in bars so often that he’s crippled up now. Don’t let him fool you. One day he’ll stop limping and his eyes will go keen. He’ll stand ramrod-straight and he’ll take off his belt. He always wears a big buckle—you ever notice?—the better to bruise with.

I took a walk today past the hospital and saw the shell-shocked: cots of staring men, fingers plucking, always plucking at their lips, all with dazed smiles—men stricken stupid by fear. The company priest, O’Shaughnessy, was with them. He was sitting on a cot, holding a man’s hand. Not talking. Not preaching. Just touching. It was nice, in a way. When he got up, he saw me standing there.

His voice was quiet, not like Pastor Lon’s, who seems to be always working on his Sunday delivery. “Do you have need of me, my son?”

“Not a Catholic, sir.”

“Well, I’ll be here for more than Catholics now, won’t I. You’re the Yank, I take it.”

“Yes, sir.”

We stood close, there in the ward of the lost. The barracks was pungent with the smells of carbolic and rubbing alcohol, but not a wound in sight. O’Shaughnessy had shucked his uniform for a long black papist dress and purple silk scarf. He was wearing a comfortable smile. “Calling me ‘sir’ makes me feel more the officer. I’d prefer ‘Father.’ ”

“Can’t call you that,” I told him. “You got another choice?”

He took my arm and gently steered me outside. The sunlight was dazzling. Birds chattered in the gathered trees. A clear sky, but the wind smelled of coming rain.

The fresh breeze teased the hem of O’Shaughnessy’s skirt, toyed with the ends of his purple scarf. “Thomas, then, if you’ve a mind. Some Protestants have a problem with the ‘Father,’ and calling me by my first name is no offense, to be sure. What faith are you?”