There was, of course, the unspoken idea between them that Latouche should not be found like this. The gossip, the ugliness, the possibility of blemish on his life. Neither said anything for a good while until Coots, finally, spoke up.
“Really it’s a better death than most. He didn’t have to wait for it. More valiant, don’t you think? We’ve got one problem. They won’t believe it.”
“It doesn’t matter. All of him was unbelievable, when you study it.”
“You go call. Can you do the Honda?”
“No problem.”
“I’d like to stay and watch. A few more minutes with him.”
“You’re a good man, Mr. Coots. I really never knew that, by your stuff.”
“I have my vagrant loyalties.”
As he waited, seating himself finally in an ecstasy of relief — so tired, so worse than weary, his right hand in an agony from twisting on the motorbike — he found a Player’s cigarette in his coat and lit it. Nature did nothing more, but the city became louder. Horns, screeches, a ball game, airplanes — it was all obscene.
“Oh yes I saw ‘a death,’ Harry. So Harry—” He stopped.
Coots’s eyes became misted and blind. This was all right, this was fitting.
“But what a gap, Harry. What an awful gap you leave. And I only a watcher.”
Bats Out of Hell Division
WE, IN A RAGGED BOLD LINE ACROSS THEIR EYES, COME ON. SHREDS of the flag leap back from the pole held by Billy, then Ira. We, you’d suspect, my posteritites, are not getting on too well. They have shot hell out of us. More properly we are merely the Bats by now. Our cause is leaking, the fragments of it left around those great burned holes, as if their general put his cigar into the document a few times. Thank you mercilessly, Great Perfecter. But we’re still out there. We gain by inches, then lose by yards. But back by inches over the night, huff, flap, narg. I am on a first-name basis with five who have had their very trigger fingers blown away—c’est rien, mere bagatelle. They mutter, these Cajuns. Something about us their cannon doesn’t like, to put it mildly. By now you must know that half our guns are no good, either.
Estes — as I spy around — gets on without buttocks, just hewn off one sorry cowardly night. Morton lacks hair, too close to the cannon before he decided on retreat. I have become the scribe — not voluntarily, but because all limbs are gone except my writing arm. Benedict, Ruth and the Captain say I am not unsightly, in my tent with the one armhole out of it, not counting the one for my head. I’m a draped man of some charm, says our benign crone of a nurse, Emmaline. Nobody comes forward to our rear like loyal Emmaline, the only woman to see this much this close. She comes up to the foul hospital, carrying a depth of pity. How, we wonder, does she carry on? “I’ve seen everything, boys! These milky old eyes have seen it all!” The only real atheist around, she carries love and helplessness forward in a bucket in either hand. We wonder, surely, whether this is the last woman we’ll ever see. Maybe they use her to make us fight for home, but which way would that work? Better to think she’s part of no plan at all. The best things in life, or whatever you call this, happen like that, even I in my old youth have learned. This marks the very thing, most momentous, I am writing about. It’s over for me but I can’t leave. No. I’d rather just stick here at my niggled work, undismayed by an occasional overshot bomb. I just lean over, disgusted, and think there’s not much left of me to hit. Shrapnel blows through my tent-dress every now and then.
The best thing is that on retreat our boys run the rats and shocked wrens and baby rabbits back to me. Out of my tent shoots my arm. Yummy. The creatures had figured me for a goner. The smoke from the enemy’s prime ribs, T-bones and basted turkeys floats over here at night sometimes, cruelly, damn the wind. In my long glass I can hardly find a human figure over there among the thick and bristling cannon, and when I do find a face, the smirk on it is killing. That is enough. I whisk back to the rear, wheel rapidly under my dress. Wind blows my tent up and I must resemble some fop’s umbrella, rolling in the wheelbarrow. Some of us in that last long entrenchment, I noted, are so narrow against the wind they suffer the advantage of disappearing as targets. One man cuts and eats his own bunions. Corporal Nigg was still in his place, frozen upright, long dead but continuing as the sentry. Who can fire him? Who has time for clerical work? Nigg is present, accounted for, damn you, a soldier’s soldier. So Private Ruth brings my journey in the wheelbarrow to its conclusion back at the tent, puffing. Calamity has provided me with perquisites. Some resent me, as they go off to lose an eye or ear and return to chat, lucky this time.
The charge, our old bread and butter, has withered into the final horror of the field, democracy. It is a good thing we are still grassroot-mean, or there would be no impetus left. Referendums for and against the next charge take a long time, collecting ballots down the line, out in the swamp. Every sniper has an opinion, every mule-lackey, every musician. The vote is always in favor, for we are the Bats Out of Hell Division, even if we are down to less than regiment size. These boys can still stir you. When I know something big’s afoot, I shriek for Ruth, who rolls me up to jump-off with the shock troops. Nobody is disheartened by my appearance. There are men far, far worse off than I, men unblessed with the ability to write and read; men whose salivation has been taken from them by breathing in one ball of fire too many. Oh Jesus, I’d go rolling out there with them if I could. It’s Ruth that holds me back. Otherwise I’d be in the fore, quill high, greeting their cannon — hub to hub they are — a row almost endless of snobs’ nostrils, soon to come alive with smoke and flame: grape, canister, ball, bomb, balls and chain. They greet us even with flying glass. I’ll never forget the lovely day they took nearly my all. In a way I want to revisit it; a sentimental journey, however, this war has no time for. Ruth won’t budge. He has his orders. I, the scribe, have become as important as our general, who is, of no debate, criminally insane just like the rest of them.
Shot to pieces in that rehearsal excursion down to Mexico, the man was buried, but returned out of the very earth once he heard another cracking good one was on. At last, at last! The World War of his dreams. “Thought I’d never live to see it! There is a God, and God is love!” I have license to exaggerate, as I have just done, but many would be horrified to know how little. He is said to have commented on hearing the first news, “Brother against brother! In my lifetime! Can Providence be truly this good?”
He is dead set on having these battles writ down permanently in ink and will most certainly push me on afterward, whatever befalls, into working up his own biography. There is about enough left of him to drape a horse. Once he’s tied on, his voice never stops, and you can hear the wind whistling through him even in the rare interludes of quiet when he has simply blasted away his throat organs. Up and down the line, his raw nagging moans away, overcoming shot and shell; a song eternal, this bawling, in the ears of the ruined but driven. The two colonels and four captains flap around in imitation, one stout captain with a shepherd’s crook in hand. He is likely to pull a malingerer out of the trench by the neck with it, and has often pulled up the dead and scolded them and their families. Audace, avanti, allons mes frères! Captain Haught is from everywhere. He is the one who told me our colors were inspired by the Russians in Crimea and that there is no more suave concord or color pleasing to our Lord than gray trimmed in yellow. No coward or lay-back, he walks straight up at the front of his unit into the very jaws of their hydra and returns at leisure, starched, unspotted, perfectly whole, armed only with the shepherd’s staff. His only flaw is his appetite. It is rumored he has stolen biscuits from corpses right in the middle of an enfilade, and can’t be hurried.