Nebraska (10 page)

How can he explain his hunger, his great yearning? The Corporal crashes wildly through the forest, crying with a voice not his own. He cuts his biceps and calves with a sharpened stick and paints the trees with his blood. At night, in anguish, he yowls for her and, as a sign of his misery, chips out his teeth with rocks.

He makes traps for the soldiers—straw pits, rope nooses, bamboo spears. He pushes spotted leopards into their camps. When the company is out on patrol, he rips apart packs and boxes and tents, looking for his possessions. The Corporal despairs of ever getting them back, of the witch ever letting him go.

Captain St. Jones and his company are caught, up to their mouths in swamp water, their weapons high overhead in the moonlight. A picket fence of water-spray spurts up from machine-gun fire as the soldiers drop to the swamp bottom or plunge over into high reeds and cattails. Cartridges jam, gun actions go rigid, hand grenades fly wildly awry. Her work. Captain St. Jones pulls himself up from the swamp, cautiously rolls onto a path, and limpingly sprints away.

He is jogging through jungle many hours later when one leg gets caught in a vine and Kenya spins crazily over the cow path, a rope looped around his right arm and neck. The skin has been peeled from his face.

Here there is peace. Here, in the swamp, there are no signs of the Captain or his patrol. The Corporal sleeps on green moss
that is dappled with sunlight. He opens his mouth for rainwater. Canaries sing, deer forage daintily, monkeys screech and trapeze in the treetops, a parrot nibbles at a peanut the Corporal pinches between his fingertips.

St. Jones stops to read his compass and then slaps reeds aside to push to the east. And then, yes, the putrid smell. He presses more rapidly toward it and drops to his knees by the evil body of the deer. He swipes away horseflies and jams his hand into a soup of maggots. Withers collapse at his pressure, a snake pours itself out of the open mouth. And then Captain St. Jones owns them again: the gold watch, the expensive camera, and the important red coat. He wraps his great arms around them and rolls happily on the ground.

Around the swamp, the native people make a pole corral and, with spades and dams and nightwork, a deep moat that all hope will keep the boogeyman in. Ceremonies are performed on the banks opposite his camping place. In them the one-eyed boogeyman emerges from the jungle, painted in blood, in a rain cape of weeds, and a witch doctor's hand is placed on the heads of pretty maidens until the boogeyman agrees on one. And then the girl is weighted with stones and guided into the creek water as mothers pray that the green army and the boogeyman will stay away from their village.

A helicopter passes overhead, and the Captain rushes out into the burning open, swooping his arms up, crying for help, pitching rocks at its underbelly as it yaws and speeds away. He goes back to the elephant and eats with the jackals until his belly aches, and then he scoops up his possessions, wiping his mouth on the lettering of the silk coat. The Captain perceives a greater
darkness and looks up at the sun. Only a slice of it is apparent as the moon nears eclipse.

His sign. The Captain looks for a parrot and sees one in a treetop to the west. He wrenches his way through weeds and high grass until he comes upon green water and a pole corral. He splashes deeply into the creek and then dips underwater to pass his hands over the shapes of pretty girls lolling among the carp and eels, crab traps of stones at their hips. The green water irons out over him, and then he bursts up from the bottom, blowing air, and raises up his sword. “Yes!” shouts Captain St. Jones.

Hush. There the giant is, sleeping, his huge back rounded, the great sword at his side, glinting silver light. The Corporal spies his worshiped coat, the powerful lettering, the green dragon and the golden torch of its breath. He slides into the creek from his island and swims across underwater, coming up with a gasp when he strokes into a holy girl and her leg oozes away.

And yet the Captain sleeps. The Corporal creeps up onto the hot sand and attempts to pick up the coat. He can't budge it—the weight is like an iron car, or as though the earth's gravity has been changed just for it. The Corporal slinks closer and clasps the great sword, then jumps up in the increasing darkness and hacks at the Captain's head, splitting it from crown to ear.

One roar of pain and the Corporal knows he has killed a giant bear. St. Jones is laughing at the Corporal's ignorance as he swaggers out of the jungle, the gold watch on his wrist, the expensive camera strapped around his neck. “Caught me sleeping, did you, boy? Only wish I got a snapshot of you to send it to your witch.” The Captain easily picks up the coat and painstakingly brushes away the sand. “And now you can give me the sword.”

“You'll kill me,” the Corporal says.

The Captain glimpses something on the island and snaps his fingers. “Quickly.”

And then there is night in the late afternoon. The moon overtakes the sun and all is still. Jungle animals cower, the green waters cease, and the Corporal swings the great sword overhead with a strength that is more than his own. He hears a wild howl as the blade cuts through jungle air, and then he hears the Captain scream with agony as his hot blood splashes over the Corporal, as the earth pounds with his great collapse.

And then light seeps down through the treetops and the witch is stooping over Captain St. Jones, unstrapping the camera, working the gold watch off his wrist, pressing her nose into the all-important red coat. Caws and screeches and yipes rise up from the island as she rapidly zips on the coat and pulls the corpse into green water that swallows up the Captain. His body grows black with eels.

The Corporal had expected a metamorphosis once the coat was put on, but the witch is no prettier, no more appealing, and just as poor as she's always been. She keeps patting the material and peering at herself in the water, so pleased with herself that she can pay little attention to the Corporal as he swims back to his island in a downpour.

The Corporal wears a green uniform and an eye patch when he appears on the opposite bank. The native people speak in whispers, and when the Corporal looks up, they hear the wopping noise and the high whine of an engine. The pretty girls are taken away and the witch doctor makes a ceremony of wiping off his paint. The Corporal sits there patiently, awaiting the helicopter's approach, the peace accords, another place.

True Romance

I
t was still night out and my husband was shaving at the kitchen sink so he could hear the morning farm report and I was peeling bacon into the skillet. I hardly slept a wink with Gina acting up, and that croupy cough of hers. I must've walked five miles. Half of Ivan's face was hanging in the circle mirror, the razor was scraping the soap from his cheek, and pigs weren't dollaring like they ought to. And that was when the phone rang and it was Annette, my very best friend, giving me the woeful news.

Ivan squeaked his thumb on the glass to spy the temperature—still cold—then wiped his face with a paper towel, staring at me with puzzlement as I made known my shock and surprise. I took the phone away from my ear and said, “Honey? Something's killed one of the cows!”

He rushed over to the phone and got to talking to Annette's husband, Slick. Slick saw it coming from work—Slick's mainly on night shift; the Caterpillar plant. Our section of the county is on a party line: the snoops were getting their usual earful. I turned out the fire under the skillet. His appetite would be spoiled. Ivan and Slick went over the same ground again; I poured coffee and sugar and stirred a spoon around in a cup, just as blue as I could be, and when Ivan hung up, I handed the cup to him.

He said, “I could almost understand it if they took the meat, but Slick says it looks like it was just plain ripped apart.”

I walked the telephone back to the living room and switched on every single light. Ivan wasn't saying anything. I opened my robe and gave Gina the left nipple, which wasn't so standing-out and sore, and I sat in the big chair under a shawl. I got the feeling that eyes were on me.

Ivan stood in the doorway in his underpants and Nebraska sweatshirt, looking just like he did in high school. I said, “I'm just sick about the cow.”

He said, “You pay your bills, you try and live simple, you pray to the Lord for guidance, but Satan can still find a loophole, can't he? He'll trip you up every time.”

“Just the idea of it is giving me the willies,” I said.

Ivan put his coffee cup on the floor and snapped on his gray coveralls. He sat against the high chair. “I guess I'll give the sheriff a call and then go look at the damage.”

“I want to go with you, okay?”

The man from the rendering plant swerved a winch truck up the pasture until the swinging chain cradle was over the cow. His tires skidded green swipes on grass that was otherwise white with frost. I scrunched up in the pickup with the heater going to beat the band and Gina asleep on the seat. Ivan slumped in the sheriff's car and swore out a complaint. The man from the rendering plant threw some hydraulic levers and the engine revved to unspool some cable, making the cradle clang against the bumper.

I'd never seen the fields so pretty in March. Every acre was green winter wheat or plowed earth or sandhills the color of camels. The lagoon was as black and sleek as a grand piano.

Gina squinched her face up and then discovered a knuckle to chew as the truck engine raced again; and when the renderer hoisted the cow up, a whole stream of stuff poured out of her
and dumped on the ground like boots. I slaughtered one or two in my time. I could tell which organs were missing.

Ivan made his weary way up the hill on grass that was greasy with blood, then squatted to look at footprints that were all walked over by cattle. The man from the plant said something and Ivan said something back, calling him Dale, and then Ivan slammed the pickup door behind him. He wiped the fog from inside the windshield with his softball cap. “You didn't bring coffee, did you?”

I shook my head as he blew on his fingers. He asked, “What good are ya, then?” but he was smiling. He said, “I'm glad our insurance is paid up.”

“I'm just sick about it,” I said.

Ivan put the truck in gear and drove it past the feeding cattle, giving them a look-over. “I gotta get my sugar beets in.”

I thought: the cow's heart, and the female things.

Around noon Annette came over in Slick's Trans Am and we ate pecan rolls hot from the oven as she got the romance magazines out of her grocery bag and began reading me the really good stories. Gina played on the carpet next to my chair. You have to watch the little booger every second because she'll put in her mouth what most people wouldn't step on. Annette was four months pregnant but it hardly showed—just the top snap of her jeans was undone—and I was full of uncertainty about the outcome. Our daytime visits give us the opportunity to speak candidly about things like miscarriages or the ways in which we are ironing out our problems with our husbands, but on this occasion Annette was giggling about some goofy woman who couldn't figure out why marriage turned good men into monsters, and I got the ugly feeling that I was being looked at by a Peeping Tom.

Annette put the magazine in her lap and rapidly flipped pages to get to the part where the story was continued, and I gingerly picked Gina up and, without saying a peep to Annette, walked across the carpet and spun around. Annette giggled again and said, “Do you suppose this actually happened?” and I said yes, pulling my little girl tight against me. Annette said, “Doesn't she just crack you
up
?” and I just kept peering out the window. I couldn't stop myself.

That night I took another stroll around the property and then poured diet cola into a glass at the kitchen sink, satisfying my thirst. I could see the light of the sixty-watt bulb in the barn, and the cows standing up to the fence and rubbing their throats and chins. The wire gets shaggy with the stuff; looks just like orange doll hair. Ivan got on the intercom and his voice was puny, like it was trapped in a paper cup. “Come on out and help me, will you, Riva?”

“Right out,” is what I said.

I tucked another blanket around Gina in the baby crib and clomped outside in Ivan's rubber boots. They jingled as I crossed the barnyard. The cattle stared at me. One of the steers got up on a lady and triumphed for a while, but she walked away and he dropped. My flashlight speared whenever I bumped it.

Ivan was kneeling on straw, shoving his arm in a rubber glove. An alarm clock was on the sill. His softball cap was off, and his long brown hair was flying wild as he squatted beside the side-laying cow. Her tail whisked a board, so he tied it to her leg with twine. She was swollen wide with the calf. My husband reached up inside her and the cow lifted her head indignantly, then settled down and chewed her tongue. Ivan said, “P.U., cow! You stink!” He was in her up to his biceps, seemed like.

“You going to cut her?”

He shook his head as he snagged the glove off and plunked it down in a water bucket. “Dang calf s kaput!” He glared at his medicine box and said, “How many is that? Four out of eight? I might as well give it up.”

I swayed the flashlight beam along the barn. Window. Apron. Pitchfork. Rope. Lug wrench. Sickle. Baling wire. And another four-paned window that was so streaked with pigeon goop it might as well've been slats. But it was there that the light caught a glint of an eye and my heart stopped. I stepped closer to persuade myself it wasn't just an apparition, and what I saw abruptly disappeared.

Ivan ground the tractor ignition and got the thing going, then raced it backward into the barn, not shutting the engine down but slapping it out of gear and hopping down to the ground. He said, “Swing that flashlight down on this cow's contraption, will ya, Riva?” and there was some messy tugging and wrestling as he yanked the calf's legs out and attached them to the tractor hitch with wire. He jumped up to the spring seat and jerked into granny, creeping forward with his gaze on the cow. She groaned with agony and more leg appeared and then the shut-eyed calf head. My husband crawled the tractor forward more and the calf came out in a surge. I suctioned gunk out of its throat with a bulb syringe and squirted it into the straw but the calf didn't quiver or pant; she was patient as meat and her tongue spilled onto the paint tarp.

Ivan scowled and sank to his knees by the calf. The mother cow struggled up and sniffed the calf and began licking off its nose in the way she'd been taught, but even she gave up in a second or two and hung her head low with grief.

“Do you know what killed it?”

Ivan just gaped and said, “You explain it.” He got up and plunged his arms into the water bucket. He smeared water on his face.

I crouched down and saw that the calf was somehow split open and all her insides were pulled out.

After the sheriff and the man from the rendering plant paid their visits, the night was just about shot. Ivan completed his cold-weather chores, upsetting the cattle with his earliness, and I pored over Annette's romance magazines, gaining support from each disappointment.

Ivan and I got some sleep and even Gina cooperated by being good as can be. Ivan arose at noon but he was cranky and understandably depressed about our calamities, so I switched off
All My Children
and suggested we go over to Slick's place and wake him up and party.

Annette saw I was out of sorts right away, and she generously agreed to make our supper. She could see through me like glass. At two we watched
General Hospital
,
which was getting crazier by the week according to Annette—she thought they'd be off in outer space next, but I said they were just keeping up with this wild and woolly world we live in. Once our story was over, we made a pork roast and boiled potatoes with chives and garlic butter, which proved to be a big hit. Our husbands worked through the remaining light of day, crawling over Slick's farm machinery, each with wrenches in his pockets and grease on his skin like war paint.

Annette said, “You're doing all right for yourself, aren't you, Riva.”

“I could say the same for you, you know.”

Here I ought to explain that Annette went steady with Ivan in our sophomore year, and I suspect she's always regretted giving him to me. If I'm any judge of character, her thoughts were on that subject as we stood at the counter and Slick and Ivan came in for supper and cleaned up in the washroom that's
off the kitchen. Annette then had the gall to say, “Slick and me are going through what you and Ivan were a couple of months ago.”

Oh no you're not! I wanted to say, but I didn't even give her the courtesy of a reply.

“You got everything straightened out, though, didn't you?”

I said, “Our problems were a blessing in disguise.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

“Our marriage is as full of love and vitality as any girl could wish for.”

Her eyes were even a little misty. “I'm so happy for you, Rival”

And she was; you could tell she wasn't pretending like she was during some of our rocky spots in the past.

Slick dipped his tongue in a spoon that he lifted from a saucepan and went out of his way to compliment Annette—unlike at least one husband I could mention. Ivan pushed down the spring gizmo on the toaster and got the feeling back in his fingers by working them over the toaster slots. My husband said in that put-down way of his, “Slick was saying it could be UFOs.”

“I got an open mind on the subject,” said Slick, and Ivan did his snickering thing.

I asked if we could please change the topic of conversation to something a little more pleasant.

Ivan gave me his angry smile. “Such as what? Relationships?”

Slick and Annette were in rare form that night, but Ivan was pretty much of a poop until Slick gave him a number. Ivan bogarted the joint and Slick rolled up another, and by the time Annette and I got the dishes into the sink, the men were swap-
ping a roach on the living-room floor and tooling Gina's playthings around. Annette opened the newspaper to the place that showed which dopey program was on the TV that evening. Slick asked if Ivan planted the marijuana seeds he gave us and Ivan shrugged. Which meant no. Slick commenced tickling Annette. She scooched back against the sofa and fought him off, slapping at his paws and pleading for help. She screamed, “Slick! You're gonna make me pee on myself !”

Ivan clicked through the channels but he was so stoned all he could say was, “What
is
that?”

Annette giggled but got out,
"Creature from the Black Lagoon!"

I plopped Gina on top of her daddy's stomach and passed around a roach that was pinched with a hairpin. I asked Ivan, “Are you really ripped?” and Ivan shrugged. Which meant yes.

The movie was a real shot in the arm for our crew. My husband rested his pestered head in my lap and I rearranged his long hair. There was a close-up of the creature and I got such a case of the stares from looking at it you'd think I was making a photograph.

Ivan shifted to frown at me. “How come you're not saying anything?”

And I could only reply, “I'm just really ripped.”

Days passed without event, and I could persuade myself that the creature had gone off to greener pastures. However, one evening when Ivan was attending a meeting of the parish council, my consternation only grew stronger. Gina and I got home from the grocery store and I parked the pickup close by the feed lot so I could hear if she squalled as I was forking out silage. Hunger was making the cattle ornery. They straggled over and jostled each other, resting their long jaws on each other's shoul-
ders, bawling
mom
in the night. The calves lurched and stared as I closed the gate behind me. I collared my face from the cold and as I was getting into the truck, a cry like you hear at a slaughterhouse flew up from the lagoon.

I thought, I ought to ignore it, or I ought to go to the phone, but I figured what I really ought to do is make certain that I was seeing everything right, that I wasn't making things up.

Famous last words!

I snuggled Gina in the baby crib and went out along the pasture road, looking at the eight-o'clock night that was closing in all around me. I glided down over a hill and a stray calf flung its tail in my headlights as its tiny mind chugged through its options. A yard away its mother was on her side and swollen up big as two hay bales. I got out into the spring cold and inspected the cow even though I knew she was a goner, and then I looked at the woods and the moonlighted lagoon and I could make out just enough of a blacker image to put two and two together and see that it was the creature dragging cow guts through the grass.