I picked myself to live.
I was close to the end of the line. The barracks, I thought they were barracks, creaked in the blowing sand fifty yards away. Sand scoured my face, but I didn’t even squint. I learned that the first time I was here. Don’t squint. Don’t relax. Don’t step forward. Don’t talk unless you’re talked to. Let your eyeballs dry out. Stand tall.
I don’t know how many times I’d dreamed about the line when this guy I’m telling you about got his. The sergeant was stalking the line towards me, and I was praying he would stop before he got to me, or walk by, not pause in front of me.
He did once.
“What are you thinking about?” he had asked. His face pushed up under my chin, his breath puffed on my neck.
“Lots of things sir.” My voice didn’t crack. There was no way to know what would be a good answer. He never behaved the same way twice. He was a maniac sometimes, or as reasonable as a judge others, or indifferent, or caring. He changed constantly. Sometimes his voice varied. He spoke in an accent, or hoarse, or falsetto. But his face never changed. It was creased and leathery, an odd shade of brown, not really Chicano or Negro. Something else. And his uniform was always the same, sky blue with a wide black stripe down the sleeves and legs. He might as well have been wearing a black hooded robe though, and carried a scythe, since that is who he was. He didn’t though. The uniform was blue and the boots were brown, and he took long heavy strides in them, for a small man.
He almost always carried something. Once it was a machine gun, the kind I used to see in World War II movies. A Sgt. Rock machine gun. Another time it was a spear, and another time an Eskimo skinning knife. Today it was a little stick, like a straw you’d stick in a malted milk. He pressed it against my chest above my heart.
“Name two,” he said.
“I was thinking how I wished you wouldn’t stop in front of me sir, and I was thinking it is too hot here.” I tried not to lean backwards from the pressure of the stick on my chest, and to do that I had to lean into it, which struck me as exactly like moving into a punch.
He laughed. He did laugh a lot, but it hardly ever meant anything. He laughed the way some people say “um.” It just filled time while he thought of something to say.
“Good answers.” He pulled the stick away and I had to catch myself from falling forward. He turned and walked. That’s the first time I saw the patch on his shoulder. Since then I tried to study it whenever he went by. The patch is gray with a black border, and on the field of gray is the fraction 1/1,000 in black. That’s the other reason I know this is not just a dream. The patch I mean.
That’s what happened when he stopped in front of me, but the time I was telling you about, the time he stopped in front of the guy three men down, he wasn’t carrying anything. Around his lower legs, though, he wore what looked like skinny shin guards, and coming out of the top of each of the guards was an eighteen inch long sabre, curved slightly away from him so when he walked the points wouldn’t stab him. They looked sort of weird sticking up like that, like something you might see on an insect’s leg.
The sergeant started screaming at him. He spit when he screamed, so that at the end his chin shone with the glisten of his saliva. He yelled like a television preacher preaches, putting emphasis in odd places and dragging out some syllables. It all seemed like gibberish these things he yelled, and part of the time I couldn’t tell if he was yelling at the guy, or yelling at himself, or just yelling for the hell of it. I thought for a second maybe that he was even crying.
Then, abruptly, he threw his knee into the abdomen of the man, and the sabre slid in as easily as a boat into harbor. It made a ripping noise, a small one, when it tore his shirt, and then a kind of sloppy wet sound. The guy doubled over the sergeant’s knee and spazzed out for a few seconds, like an epileptic having a seizure, and then he was still. The sergeant had been supporting him by the armpits and he let him down on his back and pulled the blade out. His pant leg was black with blood, and when he walked by me his shoe squished just like he’d accidently stepped in a puddle.
It’s kind of funny. When something happens in a movie, like a guy gets kicked in the nuts, lots of people double over, like they got kicked themselves. Not me. I feel the kick in my foot. People all around me are moaning like they got booted, and I’m thinking how it feels to do the kicking. So this guy down the line gets gored with a mutant shin guard and instead of thinking how bad that’d feel to have happen to me, I’m thinking what it would feel like to do it. Funny, huh?
I saw the guy’s face staring up into the blind sky. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye for a long time, and that’s why I know I can die here, because I saw the same face on the street outside of my apartment the next morning. He’d been hit by a car and his back was twisted around funny, like a busted toy, so that his knees were against the asphalt as if he were kneeling, but his upper torso was on its back on the sidewalk. I had walked out of the door, on my way to the plant, still distracted from the dream, just in time to hear the car hit him. He didn’t make a sound, but the car tires shrieked like a banshee and the driver was out in a second saying it wasn’t his fault; the man was a jaywalker.
I stood there. It was the same guy as from the dream laying in the street. He blinked slowly once, and his lips parted, not to speak but to let a last breath out. The driver was still yelling, and a handful of people stopped to look at him, but no one bent to touch the dead man. For a moment I panicked when I thought the driver might be the sergeant, but he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged fellow, really beefy. His shirt was untucked in the back so it flopped off his big butt as he twirled around assuring everyone in earshot he was innocent. I backed up though when I saw his tatoo, a little one, on his forearm, a black circle around a gray field with a black 1/1,000 in the middle.
I saw that tatoo and my breath kind of froze in my throat, and I ran away just like I’d killed the guy.
Couldn’t work worth a damn. Made lots of mistakes. Couple of the fellows covered for me when I did, because I had for them before. I thought about the dream all the time. I wondered if the dead man had had the same dream the night before, and he knew he died in it. I wondered if he woke up that morning and washed his face, and put on his tie, and kissed his wife goodbye, and patted his kids on the head knowing that it was over.
It’s kind of odd, you know, being afraid of a dream since you can’t do anything about it, though Lord knows I tried. I mean this is going to sound like I just did nothing, like I was a wimp letting this dream push me around, but it wasn’t like that at all. I tried all the time, every night, to not dream. I stayed away from rich food, thinking that might do the trick, but it didn’t. And then I tried dreaming other dreams, dreams I used to have, but they wouldn’t come. So I ended up just letting them do what they wanted because I had no choice.
All the first dreams I stood in the line and he inspected, and paused, walked on, and paused, and killed. Sometimes with just his bare hands. I tried to guess who would go next. Once, way down the line, he reached up to a man’s throat and stood there for ten minutes choking him to death. I could see the hair on the sergeant’s arms, and the muscles underneath straining. And I remember other faces turned to look, like I was, but no one stepped out; they took peeks, so I’d see the face, a flash of eyes, and then I wouldn’t.
It happened slowly. The wind moaned past us, notes rising and falling. Individual grains of sand bounced off my shirt. The sergeant was far away, but I could see those muscles tight under his skin as if I stood beside him. My forearm muscles clenched until they ached from it.