Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (26 page)

“After that, I used to lie in the hole, not firing anymore, just waiting, praying they would come. In the attack, I was always in the first wave. I won’t try to tell you what it was like then, killing them with the bayonet. It was like something, anything that had suddenly stopped being terrible. Yes, it was the opposite of terrible, but it was stronger. Because when it was terrible, I had to quiet it, hold it back. Now I gave over to it. Not at first, I was too afraid, but finally I gave over to it completely. I had to, you see, since it was real. You can understand that, that it was really happening, a fantastic and incredible thing was happening. Before the attack I strained like a leashed dog, do you know what that means? to kill violently? To butcher something and know what you’re doing while you’re doing it? It’s unreal isn’t it. Yes, of course. A kind of insane drunkenness. It was unreal to me too. But I couldn’t keep it that way, unreal and terrible. I thought I would go mad before the attack, my whole head throbbed, my hands shaking with impatience. To butcher them, cut them open. Not just the stomach, but the throat and the face, to crush in the face with the rifle butt. It was real, you understand, real, and I was doing it.

“But you can’t see it can you? No, you won’t see it. I know that. You see something else, like fear and death, or courage, or something you can see on paper. But you
could
see if you only listened, if you really got the meaning there, behind the words, the feeling: not just to ‘take life’ but really to take an alive thing in your hand and cut it in half. It’s behind the words, you see, the thing I’m talking about, the real thing, is behind the words.

“I’ll tell you this; I didn’t need the bayonet. I used it, why shouldn’t I? There was no secret about what it was for. The others knew. But they were fools, they didn’t believe it, even after it happened.
They didn’t know what they were doing.
Of course I used it. I would have torn a face apart with my mouth. But I used the bayonet. We all had them, since training, everyone knew about it. I had mine, and that’s how I killed them. And nothing else mattered. Nothing. Of course I had to get there. I had to get there without being killed. But that was only annoying, tantalizing sometimes. There was no danger. I shut that out completely so as not to spoil it. And I was careful, you see, but I was also fast. I had to get there, but I had to get there quickly.

“One morning there were two attacks on a hill outside S. and I was decorated for leading a charge while wounded. I didn’t know, you understand. I was shot in both legs. After it was over, I saw I was wounded and I couldn’t stand up. During the attack I had been running. The surgeon said it was impossible. Later I even showed him the citation. He never believed it of course.”

And he was done. The boy finished as simply and quietly as he had begun, having only once or twice shown any emotion about what he was saying. Now he sat back with his chin on his chest, his eyes soft, offlooking down across the floor, not in wanting or even anticipation of anything from his father beside him.

And Beauvais felt no need to speak, felt nothing for the moment. Then, ‘Of course,’ he said to himself, ‘the boy’s getting it off his chest.’

Beauvais returned to his job the next day, to one of the large
abattoirs
on the edge of the city where he worked as a cutter.

He had to get there early, for the whole day’s work of the
abattoir
began in his section. So when he stepped off the bus, the morning still hung gray and wet around the open square where only the yellow arc lamps shone.

Flat, black, far back off one side of the open square sat the
abattoir,
so great and dismal, an uncertain form in the half night when Beauvais crossed the square.

White lights burned through the mist from the Café du Sang des Bêtes on the corner, and Beauvais went inside. A dozen or so workers were standing around having a glass of coffee at the bar, or a hot wine.

“Tiens!”
someone cried.

“Here he is now.”

They greeted Beauvais noisily, moved toward him, old Fouché waving a newspaper.

It was a local morning paper, and on the fourth page they had found a little item about Beauvais’ son, saying that he had been repatriated and was convalescing. It gave Beauvais’ name and address, and said that the boy had been decorated for bravery, and the item ended quoting the following citation, furnished by the War Minister’s Office, which old Fouché now read aloud for what must have been the sixth time that morning:

“ ‘During the action of the morning of the 19th, Private Gerard Beauvais distinguished himself and his unit by pressing forward in attack, under heavy fire, despite severe leg wounds, leading a courageous and successful bayonet charge on a vital enemy gun emplacement, and personally destroying three of its crew in the subsequent action.

“ ‘Apart from individual merit, such a display of ardent will and valor by a private soldier serves to inspire fellow troops to acts above and beyond the call of duty, and stands in the finest tradition of the Service.’ ”

“Voilà, un homme!”
said someone warmly.

“He’s his father’s son,” they all agreed.

Fouche cut out the item with his pocket knife and gave it to Beauvais. They all stayed at the café a little longer than usual. Most of those who were drinking hot wine had a second glass.

The men left the café and crossed the square in a loose body, but by the time they were halfway down the broad approach to the
abattoir,
they had fallen apart into talking about war, football, and the price of food, mostly meat.

Beauvais walked with old Fouche the head cutter and two men from waste disposal. Ahead now, they could see them moving, far back along the great dismal side of the building where already the boxcars sat, in unloading.

“Back not a moment too soon,” said Fouche, “sixteen carloads from the north this morning.”

In the dank vastness of the
abattoir,
under the gray vaulted skylight, the men crisscrossed to their departments, parting with a wave of the hand or an obscene jest.

At the lockers Beauvais hung up his coat and jacket, put on the great leather apron and his high rubber boots.

On the way to the racks he stopped at the sharpener’s corner.

“I’ve been saving it for you,” said the sharpener, who had been drinking hot wine at the café, and now passed over to Beauvais a thin curved blade, so whet that its edge died away in a sheen of light.

“Give me a keen edge,” said Beauvais, “they say we’ll have our hands full this morning.”

“Try it,” said the other, baring the black curls of his forearm.

Swiftly, Beauvais’ hand swept the edge down and back, and across the forearm the hairs fell cleanly away in a narrow swath.

“Haven’t lost the touch I see,” said the sharpner.

“Nor you,” said Beauvais, “it’s a needle and a razor.”

In the cutter’s section it was a great morning for Beauvais. Everyone stopped round to welcome him back, asking about his son, wanting to see the clipping.

Finally he stuck the clipping on the high end of his cutting rack so he wouldn’t spoil it, getting it in and out of his pocket with wet hands.

White steam rose thick from the rack, the sloshing floor, and the heavy soaked apron. Beauvais worked steadily. And while his eyes may have shone with their joy, his hands were none the slower for it and held the deftness of twenty years experience.

“Here now,” cried old Fouche in a bluff humor from the next rack, “we’re not at the beach today. There’s work here.” He nudged one of the handlers standing alongside, “Never send a cutter on vacation to the Riviera,” he said coarsely. “Martinis give an unsteady hand and the sunshine weakens their eye.” They all laughed, Beauvais the heartiest. He was the best among them.

The handlers rolled them in on a wide flat cart, the bleating sheep, struggling a little under the thongs.

Lying on the rack, stomach up, they were perfectly still, the heads hanging over backwards, stretching the throat up in a gentle white arch.

Beauvais passed down the line, taking them one at a time, quickly, silently, the left hand firm on the lower jaw stretching the throat a little more, arching it up just so, and the right hand slipping in the long blade below the ear, deep into the throat, bringing it around in a swift clean slice to the other ear. He cut the throat as smooth and quick as a surgeon would lance a tiny boil, laying the whole of it open with such speed and grace that for one gaping instant there was no wetness, only the great hollow redness of the wound, and scarcely had the hot steaming blood surged up and over his apron when the blade was sliding like a razor in cream cheese thru the white throat of the next. And the crimson heads dropped limp as he went, left hanging by the threads of a muscle as so many broken flowers while the racked bodies rocked in the convulsion of trying to expel all their blood in one big spurt.

By the time Beauvais reached the end of the rack, his feet were sloshing above the ankles in blood, the hot, rarefied pungence of it rising with its steam to cloud over the whole rack and dim the eyes of the men in the cutting section.

Then they were done, till the steam died away. And Beauvais looked over to where two or three of the others paused against the wall by Fouché’s rack for a cigarette.

“Swim on over,” called Fouche, “he’s just back from Monte Carlo,” he said, nudging someone beside him in the same old joke.

Between them, out from the racks the concrete floor sloped down to a great red flooded gutter trough. Beauvais started across, slipping a little, stepping out so as not to slosh it, slowly, deep on his boots, the smell of it coming up on the steam.

He stamped his dripping feet when he was across, kicked them against the wall, leaving a splotch of red and dark splatters.

Fouché reached out, touched his arm lightly, preferred a cigarette.
“Bienvenue,”
he said to Beauvais, and there was an odd warmth in his voice.

Beauvais stood with them, but closer to the wall, the blood tide lapping at his boots.

“I haven’t noticed Louis around,” he said carefully, leaning back, “and the boys from disposal. They seem late in getting around with the brooms this morning.”

“I
T IS FANTASTIC,”
said Monsieur Pommard from his chair at the ticket gate. He hesitated, cigarette paper at his lips, wishing certainly, to augment this. “It is truly fantastic,” he said, and switched his tongue back and forth over the gummed edge, moving his head as he did so, a little unnecessarily. “Do you know that I am actually sick?” and he touched, on his jacket, an old brass button where his heart might have been.

A taller man, in like uniform, stood sullenly, watched the outgoing train, only thinking under the passing rush of noise that
it was really too bright here,
that, in fact, he could see the dirt in the pores on the back of his hand. His eyes traced the track, low set between sweeps of clean concrete, all cast a sterile rose green from the overhung fluorescence. One could change at Etoile, he thought, and seeing how the few people on this platform stood so well dressed, oddly at leisure for the hour—and all, or as it seemed, so near to where the first-class carriage would stop, thought again, it would take longer certainly, but one could change at Etoile.

And he saw then that the
portillon automatique
to their left, the electro-pneumatic gate which admitted or shut out transferring passengers automatically, was so freshly painted it looked wet.

“I said to my wife,” M. Pommard went on, “‘in the first place, if she is not French, why should she prepare a French dish?’ Tell me that.” And this time, he offered it up with his eyes and in such complete faith that the other man, even he, must come back quickly, and be there, so as not to spoil it entirely.

“Probably she wished to make a good impression,” he replied, thinking, there it is then, the needle is threaded again.

“Certainly,” said M. Pommard, his gratitude too tacit now, even to be assumed, “her intentions were well, I’m sure of that, but all the samel And consider this: my cousin, a man of affairs, a very important business in Lyon. It is not as though he gets to Paris every day, on the contrary. A well established man you understand, I’m sure he was sick, I’m sure of that.”

The other nodded, only taking it up conversationally, “Yes, those things happen.” And even now they were cleaning the tiles here. These lights, like an American toilet, he thought.

“But can you imagine it,” M. Pommard pressed, impatient perhaps with the other man’s youth, his brief service with the Company, “a
fondue
made with Camembert? And with all the mold no doubt!”

“Yes, it could be dangerous, a thing like that.” A most important station, they said, not large but exclusive. The rich and the poor; he hated most especially, he believed, the very rich.

“There you are then,” said M. Pommard and seemed on the verge of standing, “realize this: a child at the table, my daughter, less than six, a baby really. For myself it makes no difference, on the contrary, I have a strong constitution. During the war, as a soldier,” and he touched absently, not as he had his heart, a bit of red on black lapel, “we ate everything.” And as he opened his gate and began to punch the tickets, he told, aside the line of incoming passengers, how once he had eaten of a putrified horse, or some such, an uncooked chicken perhaps. As he did this, laughing to himself sometimes, he handled the tickets expertly, not too fast, but very careful, often holding them to the light, just to see perhaps if they had not been twice punched already, and once, when a well dressed woman stopped to ask about some train connection or other, he directed her with firmness and authority.

Here the younger man watched, trying to be apart, disdainful even, but was, in fact, only a little embarrassed. His uniform was shabby, and there was some dirt on the back of his hand.

“You will change at Odeon for the direction of St. Cloud,” M. Pommard was saying, when there was a commotion behind the
portillon automatique
on their left, some running on steps, and this heavy steel door, just closing as the lights of the train appeared at the far end of the platform, was caught and held back by a man on the other side who wedged his body into the narrowing opening and squeezed thru.