Then a languid voice said: “Hello, there! What do you know about it?”
I looked up and saw the sombre, scarred face of the mysterious Corporal half-in and half-out of the shadows. There was nothing to do but offer him a drink for I had the bottle in my hand, and he was looking at it. He thanked me curtly, half emptied the little bottle in one gulp and returned it to me. “Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez,” he said sighing. “That’s old stuff. Do you like it, sir?”
I said: “Very much indeed. What a great man Villon must have been. Who else could have used such debased language to such effect? Who else could have taken thieves’ patter—which is always ugly—and turned it into beautiful poetry?”
“You understand it, eh?” he asked, with a half laugh.
“I can’t say that I do,” I said, “but it certainly makes poetry.”
“Yes, I know".
“Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez. You might as well try to make poetry out of something like this: ‘I don’t care if you run some come-to-Jesus racket, or shoot craps . . .’ Who are you? What’s the idea? It’s a hell of a long time since they allowed you to wear a beard in the Army.”
“War correspondent,” I said. “My name is Kersh. You might as well finish this.”
He emptied the little bottle and said: “Thanks, Mr. Kersh. My name is Cuckoo.”
He threw himself down beside me, striking the deck like a sack of wet sand. “Yeahp . . . I think I will sit down,” he said. Then he took my little book in his frightfully scarred right hand, flapped it against his knee, and then gave it back to me. “Hasardeur de dez!” he said, in an outlandish accent.
“You read Villon, I see,” I said.
“No, I don’t. I’m not much of a reader.”
“But you speak French?”
“So what?”
“Where did you learn it?” I asked.
“In France.”
“On your way home now?”
“I guess so.”
“You’re not sorry, I daresay.”
“No, I guess not.”
“You were in France?”
“Holland.”
“In the army long?”
“Quite a while.”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure. It’s alright, I guess. Where are you from?”
“London,” I said.
He said, “I’ve been there.”
“And where do you come from?” I asked.
“What? . . . Me? . . . Oh, from New York, I guess.”
“And how did you like London?” I asked.
“It’s improved.”
“Improved? I was afraid you’d seen it at a disadvantage, what with the bombing, and all that,” I said.
“Oh, London’s alright, I guess.”
“You should have been there before the war, Corporal Cuckoo.”
“I was there before the war.”
“You must have been very young then,” I said.
Corporal Cuckoo replied: “Not so damn young.”
I said: “I’m a war correspondent, and newspaper man, and so I have the right to ask impertinent questions. I might, you know, write a piece about you for my paper. What sort of name is Cuckoo? I’ve never heard it before.”
For the sake of appearances I had taken out a notebook and pencil. The corporal said: “My name isn’t really Cuckoo. It’s a French name, originally—Le Cocu. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Somewhat embarrassed, I replied: “Well, if I remember rightly, a man who is cocu is a man whose wife has been unfaithful to him.”
“That’s right.”
“Have you any family?”
“No.”
“But you have been married?” I asked.
“Plenty.”
“What do you intend to do when you get back to the States, Corporal Cuckoo?”
He said: “Grow flowers, and keep bees and chickens.”
“All alone?”
“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“Flowers, bees and chickens! . . . What kind of flowers?” I asked.
“Roses,” he said, without hesitation. Then he added: “Maybe a little later on I’ll go south.”
“What on earth for?” I asked.
“Turpentine.”
Corporal Cuckoo, I thought, must be insane. Thinking of this, it occurred to me that his brain might have been deranged by the wound that had left that awful scar on his head. I said: “They seem to have cut you a bit, Corporal Cuckoo.”
“Yes, sir, a little bit here and there,” he said, chuckling. “Yeahp, I’ve taken plenty in my time.”
“So I should think, Corporal. The first time I saw you I was under the impression that you’d got caught up in some machinery, or something of the sort.”
“What do you mean, machinery?”
“Oh, no offense, Corporal, but those wounds on your head and face and neck haven’t the appearance of wounds such as you might get from any weapon of modern warfare—”
“Who said they were?” said Corporal Cuckoo, roughly. Then he filled his lungs with air, and blew out a great breath which ended in an exclamation: “Phoo—wow! What was that stuff you gave me to drink?”
“Good Scotch. Why?”
“It’s good alright. I didn’t ought to drink it. I’ve laid off the hard stuff for God knows how many years. It goes to my head. I didn’t ought to touch it.”
“Nobody asked you to empty a twelve-ounce ginger ale bottle full of Scotch in two drinks,” I said resentfully.
“I’m sorry, mister. When we get to New York, I’ll buy you a whole bottle, if you like,” said Corporal Cuckoo, squinting as if his eyes hurt and running his fingers along the awful crevasse of that scar in his head.
I said: “That was a nasty one you got, up there.”
“What? This?” he said, carelessly striking the scar with the flat of a hard hand. “This? Nasty one? I’ll say it was a nasty one. Why, some of my brains came out. And look here—” He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled up his singlet with his left hand, while he opened and lit a battered Zippo with his right. “Take a look at that.”
I cried out in astonishment. I had never seen a living body so incredibly mauled and mutilated. In the vacillating light of the flame I saw black shadows bobbing and weaving in a sort of blasted wilderness of crags, chasms, canyons, and pits. His torso was like a place laid waste by the wrath of God—burst asunder from below, scorched from above, shattered by thunderbolts, crushed by landslides, ravaged by hurricanes. Most of his ribs, on the left-hand side, must have been smashed into fragments no bigger than the last joint of a finger by some tremendously heavy object. The bones, miraculously, had knit together again, so that there was a circle of hard bony knobs rimming a deep indentation; in that light it reminded me of one of the dead volcanos on the moon. Just under the sternum there was a dark hole, nearly three inches long, about half an inch wide, and hideously deep. I have seen such scars in the big muscles of a man’s thigh—but never in the region of the breastbone. “Good God, man, you must have been torn in two and put together again!” I said. Corporal Cuckoo merely laughed, and held his lighter so that I could see his body from stomach to hips. Between the strong muscles, just under the liver, there was an old scar into which, old and healed as it was, you might have laid three fingers. Cutting across this, another scar, more than half as deep but more than twelve inches long, curved away downwards towards the groin on the left. Another appalling scar came up from somewhere below the buckle of his belt and ended in a deep triangular hole in the region of the diaphragm. And there were other scars—but the lighter went out, and Corporal Cuckoo buttoned up his shirt.