“Said he knew what I was thinking about his work, how it was not there yet but that life, not study, would give it to him and there was a black burning maw in the earth that ate the spirit of people and spat it back in the image of frozen brick and glass. In short, churches. He also said we did badly at peace and needed catastrophe closer by to stir us to life. These United States had made too many artifices between life, dirt, and blood, and every day we should do a good turn to a poorer person and give this person our flesh, dirt, and blood. In our world people were waiting earnestly for a happy deep-blue square of death.”
“Whoa?” I say.
“He was not a reincarnationist. He was assured of misincarnation, where millions had just missed being born to their correct art and spent their days in sorrow wondering what was wrong. When what was wrong was that they were forced into occupations and beliefs they did not match, unhappily squirming toward their correct skill, even their correct bodily shape and health, and most of all, the fact that they were at one neither with their skills or their loves.”
“He had time to think all this up? Or did he have a teacher? I never heard it, and we chewed the fat for hours over one bottle of single malt, Charlotte—”
“Wilkes said he was born into yet another category, perhaps the worst. That is getting born almost into your right form, almost a painter or almost a happy, loyal son. He squirmed every second, he stared and glared, he lay in cotton fields drunk under the stars in two-thousand-dollar suits. Suits to put a good face on his misbirth. To help his fellows and especially the black children see that you could bear bad luck in style.”
“Please, this is quite enough talking. Have some water, lady. Frankly, old Wilkes, for all the hours we talked, was not that original a man. He was all over the place drunk but at the bottom of it, dull normal dressed up and forever wanting that next drink—”
“No!” Now she was angry. I was baffled why. “He drinks because he was a friend of the poet-philosopher William Blake, but he’s better than Blake, I think. The Misgenitor is the villainous force in this world, he says.”
“I see more sweat on you neck. Could I—”
“God, no! I can’t believe he spent time with you. You hold the money of his uncle in bondage, you with the tongue, and that queer, what? old-timey poet’s suit, if that’s not misborn, you horrible old fuck.”
“Woman, you should—”
“You shut up! You don’t deserve to be in the same room, the same town, on his road. Now he’s just out there lost in the damned fog. Someday his painting will become as natural as rainwater to him. He tries, he hurts himself so badly for it. A mystic in the middle of yahoos.”
Her voice was rising and I heard Louise rising in the back. I was in a state. If she had come out front I’d have swatted her. Privacy reigned here.
“Lady,” I said, “whoever told you you were that interesting? Come in my store. I am not a goddamned ear you work on till it’s callused all over.”
But then God, there’s always a woman. Those death-row-marrying kind. She’d been up for nights and couldn’t do anything but talk like one of those heads guillotined and fallen in a basket. That weird fog creeping outside.
The price you pay for some harmless licking.
Some months later Green was back from another storytellers convention in Tennessee and had not even placed. He did not speak to his common-law wife Louise for a week. He took to drink himself for the first time in his life. You could then hear him cursing in impotent rages through the curtains and back in his domicile connected to the liquor store. He would peep through the curtains or push only his face out through them if he heard a familiar voice at the counter run by his men Tico and Rez, who spoke very little anywhere, any day. The disattached face was red and puffed like the ass of a baboon, fearsome, fearsome and foreign even to customers who thought they knew him. When he heard Wilkes Bell baying for vodka he was way back in his “study” with the book but he was out of the curtains instantly and rushing around the counter in his jockey briefs, tall and gangling, specked by liver spots and sagging teats, sparse white chest hair. Bell was shocked into a long fart and a near blackout. Green dragged him back through the curtains as four other customers watched with a quick sickness. Green drew up a beach chair and pushed the floppy Bell into it.
Then he hauled him and the chair over to his desk to read the Wikipedia.
The No. 76 was an incendiary grenade based on white phosphorus and used during World War II.
The design was the suggestion of the British phosphorus manufacturing firm of Albright and Wilson at a time when the UK faced possible invasion by the Germans. . It would be used by organized resistance units as part of a last-ditch attempt.
It was a glass bottle filled with white phosphorus, benzene, a piece of rubber, and water. Over time the rubber dissolved to create a sticky fluid that would self-ignite when the bottle broke. The grenade could either be thrown by hand or fired from the Northover Projector, a simple mortar; a stronger container was needed for the latter and the two types were color coded. As any breakage of the glass would be dangerous, storage under water was recommended. Like the sticky bomb it did not engender much confidence in its users.
Mark 77 bomb.
The MK-77 is the primary incendiary weapon currently in use by the United States military. Instead of the gasoline and benzene fuel used in napalm, MK-77s use kerosene-based fuel, which has a lower concentration of benzene. The Pentagon has claimed that the MK-77 has less impact on the environment than napalm. The mixture reportedly also claims an oxidizing agent, making it more difficult to put out once ignited.
Use in Iraq and Afghanistan.
MK-77s were used by the U.S. Marine Corps during the first Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Approximately five hundred were dropped, reportedly on Iraqi-constructed oil-filled trenches. They were also used at Tora Bora, Afghanistan.
Green held Bell by the back of the neck, forcing this matter on him. Bell was shaken but he had the vodka open nevertheless and nipped, then raised his head enough to drink from the saving bottle.
“Read, son. You read this and maybe your saint uncle’ll see his forty K even though you drank it up long ago. I saved you by the investment.”
“Why am I reading? What investment?”
“Even in these lame prime-rate times, you’re a lucky-assed loser. And you know damned well what you’re reading. I’m warning you.”
“Please. Get your hand off so I can get drunk enough to read, Goon. Items of fire. Items of fire. Napalm, phosphorous. Where’s the joy here? Your face. You’re drinking?! God, do I look as bad as you? Red ass of an ape?”
“I’m not used to it. But you shut up and read.”
“I will read.”
He read about Greek fire, naptha, and thermite, thermate-TH3. Then he read about the fat bombs project, WWII, proposed against the Japanese whereby these winged creatures attached to incendiaries would fly into wooden homes and castles. Wilkes Bell wore horn-rimmed spectacles, pulling at his sweated yellow collar against his pink tie, his throat well wet and slightly yellow itself. Pondering soft hawk’s face near emaciated. He felt Green at his shoulder not as a sodomist. He drank a long one from the Stolichnaya and wondered what the proper reaction would be to remove this long naked threat from his back. He chanced a look sideways and never completed the word no before Green was fastened on his neck and licking with such force it felt subdermal.