And we got mad.
Some folks gave a listen to us. Some fed us. And the chief of police looked the other way when we built the saddest junk-pile testaments to this damned Depression you ever saw, right within view of the Capitol building, of the White House, right there in the shadow of the Washington Monument. For true.
But there were them others who wanted us gone. As of yesterday.
That afternoon in Washington, D.C., one man lay dead and another dying. The city, it was turned mightily on its head. But General MacArthur was ready for whatever might come. And he was dressed to the military nines. I hear tell he sent one of his aides back to Fort Myer to fetch his polished riding boots. For true. The general was ready to vanquish his foes with all the horses and all the men and all the Goddamned firepower he could muster. Forgetting exactly who those foes actually were.
I was one. And Odell was another. And there was Shorty with all his medals, crawling on the ground like a thrice-kicked dog. All this came back to me when that son of a bitch MacArthur got his insubordinate ass whipped by Truman in ’51 and I remembered it again when I wrote the son of a bitch to tell him why he’d best not think of running for president the next year. That he wouldn’t get the veteran vote — at least not the World War I veteran vote, because there was a hell of a lot of us doughboys still around in ’52 and we had real good memories about how he turned the American army against its own during the bloody summer of ’32.
I also reminded him what me and Odell saw in the middle of that wide Pennsylvania esplanade while his troops was pushing us all farther and farther south.
He was sitting in his limousine and talking to the reporters and photographers.
“Point down to the troops, General,” the photographers said, trying to pose him.
And he grinned and obediently pointed.
“Now give us a salute, General.”
No grin. Just a face of utmost seriousness for the cameras. And the salute.
“Now get out and stand beside your horse.”
Someone fetched the general’s horse. Standing next to his mount, he soaked up every ounce of that limelight for the cameras. It was probably the best day he ever had, in my humble Cajun opinion, until 1944 when he sloshed through the water on his triumphant “return” to Leyte, with his speech all typed out nice and proper and ready to be delivered to the grateful Filipinos.
Odell used to ask me, years later, about my hatred of that corncob-pipe-smoking Napoleon, when the two of us were settled back down, him with his Vera and all those “chillren,” and me with my Peggy, who dared to take a chance on a forty-three-year-old confirmed bachelor with a little shrapnel still left in his ass and an itch to go off and fight in this new world war — an itch that was never going to get itself scratched. And I’d remind him that when the historians got out their pens, and the Hoovers (I’m also referring to that Commie-obsessed FBI squirrel) and Deputy Chief of Staff Moseley and Major Patton (Eisenhower, I think, was always embarrassed over the orders he had to follow on that sad day) got all their Communist-uprising bullshit knocked down by the truth of who it was who actually lived in those crowded mud-caked camps during those rainy weeks of June and July, 1932—when all was said and done and everybody knew the whole truth, folks would be reminded that it was Douglas MacArthur who deliberately disobeyed the president’s order not to send his avenging army across the 11th Street Drawbridge and upon the boggy fields of Anacostia that night. It was Douglas MacArthur who ignored a presidential order for the purpose of his own bastard glory. Sound a little familiar, don’t it?
Camp Marks. Where Odell and me had hardly any time at all to stuff what little clothes we had into our beat-up grips, and tuck away our official discharge papers and our meager souvenirs from our occupation of a land that belonged to us by right of American citizenship.
We retreated alongside the thousands of other impoverished veterans of the War to End All Wars, and their wives and their children. And the stories began to circulate about the boy who wasn’t allowed back into his soon-to-be-ignited hovel to get his pet rabbit, of the Negro bayoneted in the foot for evacuating too slowly, of the babies hospitalized from the gas, of the woman who wasn’t permitted to pick up all of the things that had spilled from her gunnysack and a moment later everything she owned was trod under a cavalry horse’s heavy hoof.
It seemed like Belgium all over again. Except that unlike the Flemish facing the invading Germans, we’d hardly offered up any resistance at all. And when it was over, where was our Herbert Hoover, the man who had headed the Belgian relief effort? Why, hunkered down in the White House, that’s where! No longer the brave humanitarian. Just a frightened, cowering little man, sorely inconvenienced by the audacity of our presence. They say we’d made him a prisoner in that place, and that in the end, we’d kept him from getting hisself re-elected.
President Hoover must have stood at his window and watched Washington burn, just as Odell and I watched the flames from the hills above Anacostia, surrounded by the huddling mothers putting wet cloths to the tear-gas-stung eyes of their whimpering babies.
This was the America I had fought for?
Yet I knew in my optimistic heart that better days were coming. Because there was one thing that struck the heart of every visitor to Camp Marks that summer. It was the presence of all them American flags. Every state’s bivouac had its own Stars and Stripes, you see. Men marched with them held aloft, waved them, saluted them on every occasion. And in the smoking aftermath of the attack upon the camp, there was one flag upon a pole that stood alone, untouched, rippling through the smoke of that night’s terrible fires. All was smoldering, jagged rubble around it. Yet the flag was still there.
For true.
1933 LETTING GO IN MISSOURI
“When did you know?”
“’Seems like I’ve wanted to be an iceman as far back as I can remember. I think about the times when I was a kid and Ma and Polly and me were living at the Broussard place just a few blocks east of here. There’d be these hot summer days when the landlady would forget to take the ice card out of the window from the time before. And the iceman, he’d see the card and climb those two flights of stairs with that dribbling, fifty-pound block of ice on his back, and Mrs. Broussard would realize her error and make her hundred-and-one apologies, but he’d be damned if he was gonna play Sisyphus’s cousin and haul that ice all the way back down to his wagon, so you know what he did?”
“Chucked it out the window?”
“Raised the sash and pushed it right out.”
“That sounds like a reason not to want to become an iceman.”
“There’s an upside to the story. That big block of ice — it would hit the concrete in the courtyard below and shatter. And the kids in the neighborhood, they’d hear the noise and all come running over to grab up those frozen chunks to cool themselves off with. I wanted to be the guy who made all the kids happy. What time is it?”
Ralph Morris looked at his wristwatch. “Ten till.”
Garth Kordel clucked his tongue in wonderment. “Did you have any idea so many people would show up?”
Ralph shook his head. “Let’s get out of the car. I feel like a federal agent on stakeout.”
The two men, both in their mid-thirties, stepped out of Ralph’s Ford Deuce coupe. Ralph leaned back, planted a foot on the running board, and lit up. Garth took in the gathering crowd. It was mostly men, a few women, even a kid or two in tow. A man and little boy walked by.