Even my father had the same strange dualism about war and people at their worst in the middle of an inferno, and their failure to recognize it later for what it was. He went all the way across France in the Great War, as he called it, a seventeen-year-old marine who would be hit twice and gassed once before his next birthday. But he refused to talk about it in even the most vague or general way. I often wondered what awful thing he carried back with him from France, something that must have lain inside him like a piece of rusted barbed wire.
But he was working an oil job at Texas City when it blew up in 1947 and killed over five hundred people, many of them roughnecks whom he had known for years. A ship carrying fertilizer was burning out in the harbor, and while people watched from the docks and a tug tried to pull it out to the Gulf, the fire dripped into the hold and then the ship exploded in a mushroom flame that rained onto the refineries and chemical plants along the shore. The town went up almost at once — the gas storage tanks, the derricks, the entire Monsanto plant — and blew out store windows as far away as Houston. The men caught in the oil field, where blown wellheads fired geysers of flame into the sky under thousands of pounds of pressure, were burned with heat so great that their ashes or even their scorched bones couldn’t be separated from the debris.
A year later my father and I were cane fishing for bream in some tanks on a stretch of bald prairie about six miles from Texas City, and we walked around a huge, scalloped hole in the earth where a sheet of twisted boiler plate, the size of a garage door, had spun out of the sky like a stray, ugly monument to all that agony back there in the flames. The hole had filled partially with water, tadpoles hovered under the lip of the rusted metal, and salt grass had begun to grow down the eroded banks.
My father rolled a cigarette from his package of Virginia Extra and looked out toward a windmill ginning in the breeze off the Gulf.
“I lost some of the best friends I ever had in that thing, Son,” he said. “There wasn’t any reason for it, either. They could have gotten that fertilizer ship out of there or shut them rigs down and taken everybody out. Those boys didn’t have to die.”
So the madness in war was an area that was sacrosanct, not even to be recognized, and there was no correlation between that and the death of your best friends because of corporate stupidity.
But I lost my point, with that description of the hum in my head back in Angola, that distant echo of a bugle that went even farther back to a hole in Korea. The Benzedrex inhaler had conjured up my old cell in the Block, on a languid Louisiana summer afternoon, with the humidity damp on the walls and the bars, and my cell mate W. J. Posey across from me, wiping the sweat off his naked, tattooed body with a washcloth. We were both stoned on Benzedrex and the paregoric that he had stolen from the infirmary.
“So you killed the son of a bitch,” W. J. said. “A punk like that has it coming. You iced people in Korea that didn’t do nothing to you.”
“He broke the shank off in him when he went down. He bled on the bandstand like an elephant.”
“You’re breaking my knob off. You got two years. Take another drag on ole Sneaky Pete.”
I got out of jail on Tuesday. Buddy was waiting for me at the possessions desk with a crazy grin on his face.
“How did you know what time I was coming out?” I said.
“They always flush you wineheads out about ten in the morning.”
I had hoped Beth would be there, and he must have seen it in my face.
“She couldn’t leave the house,” he said. “Both of the kids swoll up with mumps yesterday.”
“Are you putting me on?” I picked up the brown envelope with my belt, shoestrings, and wallet inside.
“I know you never had them, Zeno. I wouldn’t put you on like that.”
Damn, I thought.
“Figure it this way,” he said. “You could have gone over there one day earlier and had your rocks swell up like a pair of basketballs.”
The woman behind the desk looked up with her mouth open.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“There you go, babe. Let’s boogie on down the street, because your daddy is about to get into a gig again.”
We walked outside into the cold, sunlit day, and the sharp air cut into my lungs. The green trees on the mountains were heavy with snow, and the sky was so clear and deeply blue that I thought I would become lost in it.
“Let’s walk to this place,” Buddy said. “My tires are so bald you can see the air showing through. I didn’t park the car at that angle. It slid sideways through the intersection.”
“What’s this gig?”
“I thought I might clean up my act and get back in the business. A guy I know runs this college joint up in the next block, and he wants to try a piano player to bring in all those fraternity cats and their sweet young girls. Somebody with class, such as myself. Someone to keep them plugged into magic sounds so they won’t bust up the place every night and puke all over his crapper.”
“That sounds good, man.”
“Well, he’s not real sure about me. Thinks I’m crazy. Undependable. I might show up with a hype hanging out of my forehead. Anyway, he asked me to come down this morning and play a few because his wife will be there, and she knows music. Now dig this, man. I used to know her in high school when she was in the band, and she couldn’t tell the difference between a C chord and a snare drum. She was so awful that the bandleader put the tubas in front of her to blow her back into the wall. She used to wear Oxford therapeutic shoes and these glasses that looked like they were made out of the bottoms of Coke bottles. She also had gas all the time. Every two minutes you could hear her burping through her alto sax.”
I was shaking my head and laughing.
“Zeno, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you,” he said.
“Because nobody in the world ever had experiences or knew people like these.”
“All right, you’ll see, partner. Just be prepared to meet humanity’s answer to the goldfish.”
I never did know why Buddy boozed and doped. He could get high in minutes on just himself.
The bar was a beer-and-pizza place with checker-cloth table covers and rows of fraternity steins on the shelves. The contraceptive machine in the men’s room had long since been destroyed, and young, virile Americans had punched out big, ragged holes in the fiberboard partitions. I sat at the bar and had a sandwich and a beer while Buddy played the piano for the owner and his wife, who looked exactly as Buddy had described her. (This is why I could never tell whether he was lying, fantasizing, or telling the truth.) She stared at him a few moments with those huge orbs of color behind her glasses, then began washing glasses in a tin sink.
I watched Buddy play. I had forgotten how really good he was. He started out with “I Found a New Baby,” and he played it the way Mel Powell used to at the Lighthouse in California: a slow, delicate, almost conventional entrance into the melody, then building, the bass growing louder, his right hand working on a fine counterpoint, and finally he was way inside himself and all the wild sounds around him. He didn’t even look the same when he played. A strange physical transformation took over him, the kind you see in people who are always partly out of cadence with the rest of the world until they do the one thing that they’re good at. As I looked at him, with his shoulders bent, his arms working, the eyes flat and withdrawn, I would have never made him for the Buddy I knew the rest of the time.