Springtime Death Worship While Baby Waits for the Water to Break
Jane is one of the friends who finds tales for me. She is a ‘Plain-Jane’, wholesome hyper-fox who lets my hungry eyes linger, flirts with me occasionally, and generally plays along as a foil to my foolishness, in exchange for my willingness to ‘interview’ friends of hers who have sagas to relate that no other journalist is willing to countenance as a story. What she gets from this deal, at her end, is some weird “spectacular-theory” sort of boost, a combination of vicarious mediation and whiffs of possible fame, perhaps.The whole point of my work, of course, is precisely the stories that frequently don’t qualify as news until they pass through my blender---like the Marcus Dixon case.
Yesterday, Jane awaited my arrival with a beautiful woman of a certain age, very large diamond, new Birkenstocks, designer outfitting from head to toe. I noted real wrinkles, all nips and tucks and additions apparently forewsworn in favor of what nature provided at this point in her journey---a lean and leathery fifty-something beauty as honed as her nattily painted fingers and toes.
Jane and I chatted a bit, about the election forecasts of all her Republican friends, this and that, and this GOP stalwart nodded approvingly, though without availing herself of the eye I made available for catching, calf-crossed legs swinging loosely as she waited. When Jane asked, just slightly portentous, “shall we begin?” even though this old belle still did not meet my gaze, her voice was as bright and real as her lacquered digits when she assented, “Please!”
Her cell phone trilled immediatedly, like a flight of electronic birds, and she jumped headlong into a conversation about readying everything to go to the hostpiatl. “We just put on comfortable shoes and get ready to wait,” I heard---before she challenged, tough without being mean, “you got a better plan?”
My pal raised her eyebrows and explained that her friend’s daughter-in-law’s water had yet to break, for her third child---which was the worrisome part, late deliveries common for first babies---in spite of being a week overdue, and she felt certain that the obstetrician would induce labor before the announced deadline of dawn, Sunday. I pondered the proximity of the full moon as Jane continued that her compadre’s husband, a logical man, couldn’t see the sense of camping in the waiting room when, on paper anyway, a higher authority than even his imperious wife had countermanded her thinking. Jane, meanwhile, explained that we would soon be hearing about Ms. Well-Coiffed-Lacquer-Toes’ Husband’s brother. “It’s so sad,” she assured me.
With the cutting trill of a drawling drill, Ms. WCLT punctuated Jane’s announcement with an “all right then, you do that!” and drawn out “bye,” that lingered in the air long after she disconnected. She then turned and mostly looked me in the eye to ask, “Now where were we?”
At which point, Jane offered, “You were going to tell him about Martin.”
“Oh, yes!!” and again the accent was like psychic soul food. “You know, he’s been very popular in the schools---like Metropolitan Christian Academy,” and Ms. WCLT paused a moment to consider, “and others, too.” She related a tale of a Vietnam War veteran who had passed through the crucible of a suburban Hanoi POW existence, five years, after the B-52 in which he worked as a communications specialist had it’s wing shot off in 1969.
The tribulations of this existence included solitary confinement in cells the sizes of coffins, in which the rats would sample ears and other protrusions if someone slept soundly enough, and in which the insect biomass approximated the mammalian at any given moment. I did not even ponder for a second an intervention about responsibility, reaping, sewing, and other countermeasures against the self-centered celebration of ignorance inherent in her assessment. From her perspective, and from my perspective, the situation was a tragedy, though the pathos and the measure of the madness of the tale resulted from polar oppositions in our respective views.
The hideousness of “the hole” at the Ho-Chi-Minh Hilton was not in doubt, in any event. “The worst thing, of course,” she continued, as if she were about to suggest that ripe fruit were tastier than rotten, “was that Jane Fonda.” I opened up wide and listened hard. “You know she was always going over there, and whenever she did, they’d play her speeches and show her movies 24 hours a day, can you imagine?” I never saw “Barbarella”, but I had nursed a silent grudge against the estimable Ms. Fonda ever since she stole The Old Gringo away from me, just as I was close to manufacturing a miraculous break by gaining an option on Fuentes’ book. So I nodded sympathetically.
“And Martin,” obviously, “he just hated her. I mean it’s not really healthy to hate anybody that much, even if” the one doing the loathing is well within in his rights and all. “He just hated her,” Ms. WCLT shuddered and ejaculated as if from an evil fever. “His closest friend got cancer because of her.” She related that the only other survivor from their crew, much more roughly treated and damaged from the trajectory of ejection at 40,000 feet, despised the awful Ms. Fonda even more than Martin, “and when he died over there, it’s like all his hatred joined up with how Martin already felt.”
This unfortunate did have the fortune, however, not to go totally missing; a fellow from the Pentagon, who ended up being a cousin of both Martin’s and his(the existence of family and neighbor networks in the military is just so wild, this sort of conjunction of blood or other ties showing up again and again among the vets I’ve known), came to claim the body and bring it back for a sunny burial on an Arlington National Cemetery hillside. Five months later, Martin was part of a prisoner exchange, in preparation for Kissinger’s coup in Paris, and he’s been reaching out to young patriots and warning of the perfidies of show-business liberals ever since.
“He never stopped hating Jane Fonda, though, not for one New York minute.” In fact, he had sometimes nearly come to pieces wanting to express his distaste more powerfully than he was capable. Thus had passed the Winter of 2003-2004, apparently, and the current situation that was the proximate cause of our visit, for which, typically, Jane had provided no vetting or advance notice whatsoever.
“They changed his medication in February and made it worse.” Ms. WCLT, in the only sign of nerves during the course of things, chewed on her thumnail for a few seconds, and then said. “You couldn’t even really call them ‘boys!’ as big as they all were. That fifteen year old had to have been over 200 pounds.” At the drawl of the male child plural, my flesh crawled from my nape to my ass, an overwhelming foreboding overcoming my mind.
She conveyed how, beginning around the same time as Martin’s new ‘scrip’, a trio of young fellows had taken to riding All Terrain Vehicles on her brother-in-law’s acreage. “He tried to get Sheriff Hall up there, but do you know they told him that was National Forest land? Of course it wasn’t, but what could he do?” He had more than once warned the young men to cease and desist, of course. “How you gonna talk to kids like that?” though. Martin even gave them the courtesy of a “final warning”.
Then, expecting anothe, r evening when these children would act as if they could trespass with impunity, Martin took his camouflage, and night-vision goggles, along with his semi-automatic shotgun, and sat in ambush in the wet cold until dawn was only a couple of hours distant. When the boys---driven to defeat Morpheus after a night of drinking and dreaming of fornication---roared onto ‘his’ land, Martin put bear-slugs into the brainpans of the two youngsters, the big fifteen year old coming within a few yards of escape before a carefully squeezed salvo butchered his future as well.
Now Martin sits in a Forsyth County Jail, still undergoing “evaluation” while his attorney negotiates bond, and three young miscreants marked March 27th predawn as their last living litany. Ms. WCLT’s voice is still bright, almost chatty, but her eyes are brimming when she finishes. “I’ll always blame Jane Fonda for this, you know?” Before I have a chance, having listened intently and just barely inclined the talk now and again with a quiet question, to say something substantive in response, always a right I exercise at the end of an outing, the flock of fowl in her cell phone break cover again.
It’s her husband, and she was right. This new baby will be here before a new day dawns, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” I keep my counsel, but I can’t help think about my friend Lisa’s middle child, a brilliant Black NCO hoping to survive his own comrades and return from Iraq.
When we measure the damage done, the echoes of evisceration down the generations, how can we account for the children who die in our wars, distant from the front or even chronological proximity to the battles and the carnage? We can’t of course. But the balance sheet is there for us to read, if we will, the always potentially eternal sacrifice, now, of any human legacy in the ledger to the Machievellian machinations of the rich, for war booty, and their continued pride of place at the public trough.