He found Campbell’s soups odious in the extreme, more risky to consume than a Coke with a rat in the bottle. He found himself sometimes longing for the fine and light linen of yesteryear — white suits and handmade doilies. He found his relatives no more boring a lot than anyone else finds his. He found salvation in loss. He found cheer in the lugubrious carrying-on of patients who thought themselves incorrectly to be dying.
He found photographs of landscape pretentious. He found altar architecture rude. He found fresh-faced waitresses the most likely to spit in food about to be served. He found no difficulty, in principle, in pederasty, though he found no impulse for it in himself.
He found coloring with crayons an art form worthy of adults. He found fast cars on TV somehow more offensive than fast cars in person. He found reptiles of all forms pitiful. He found expensive tools harder to lose than cheap tools, to his surprise. He found telephone solicitation not so much annoying as vaguely rakish, if not prurient. He found pretty certain kinds of … of nothing.
He found himself a pallbearer at his own funeral, and the strongest of the six. He found himself less moved by his demise than anyone. He found, when touching the expensive, pointless, fake-brass coffin, that he had made the largest mistake of his life in allowing himself to be put in it. He found no solace in regret, but he regretted not willing himself, unembalmed, into a simple wooden box made not by a funereal concern but by a cabinetmaker. He found this sentiment repulsively common, but he found it to be true, deep, and his.
He found himself, once dead, able to relive his life with free editorial rein. He found the possibilities for revision endless. He found he had no interest in changing a thing. He found it easier to conceive of an alteration for the worse than one for the better. Dead, he found his clothes better fitting and longer wearing. He found this both reasonable, most reasonable, and odd.
General Rancidity
GENERAL RANCIDITY RAN THE obstacle course and the whorehouse. He ran away from nothing. He ran to weight on furlough. He ran headlong into marriage. He ran aground once in a ten-foot dinghy in a foot of water, disposing himself toward a career in the infantry.
He ran religious seekers out of his unit, and out of the Army if he could. “Bullets and Jesus do not mix” ran his slogan on this policy. The devout consequently ran scared before him, scattering like small fish before the large pagan shadow that General Rancidity was.
He ran underground raffles for military contraband, profits running into the thousands. He ran the flag up on his base personally. He ran into a woman with a jeep. He carried her fireman-style to the infirmary. Of the expression “Still waters run deep,” General Rancidity said, “Blanks. Still water just sits there.” He was much more fond of the expression “Fell off a turnip truck.” He wanted no one accusing him of having fallen off a turnip truck. Consequently, he ran a tight ship.
He ran into difficulties, over time, with his friends — they ran off and left him. He was resigned to it: with familiarity, his turdy behavior around and his ungracious treatment of his friends increased until the general index of rancidity in his character exceeded the practical limits that people, even soldiers, were designed, or desired, to put up with. Only the truly rancid themselves could run with General Rancidity for long, and the truly rancid were rare.
One day General Rancidity, running late, ran low on gas and in fact ran out. No one would stop and pick him up. Thousands of lower-ranking men passed him on the roadside, running afoul of military as well as human protocol. General Rancidity’s blood ran more than hot.
He ran for a period toward the officers’ club, where he ran up a giant tab, to have a drink before initiating procedures to court-martial the entire base. Luck was running low, or high, depending upon your affection for General Rancidity: he was run over by the woman he had run into and carried fireman-style to the infirmary. She hit and ran.
General Rancidity’s obituary ran to less than twenty-five words, the result of a twenty-five-words-or-less contest run by his best surviving friends:
General Rancidity and the turnip truck he rode in on ran off the edge of the earth last Thursday, rancid turnips, rancid general, and all.
Spirits on base were running high, most high, and weather fair, and all schedules on time, and all probabilities true. Soldiers, and small schools of fish in the golf-course water hazards, ran over shoal and dale, rejoicing, relieved, relying on the base without General Rancidity to most happily, most trottingly, run itself.
Mr. Nefarious
MR. NEFARIOUS SMILED, AND only when smiling was he able to do anything else. When smiling he could also do nothing, but when not smiling he could do nothing but not smile. He smiled as he scissored tiny stray threads from his clothes, smiled marveling at how many stray threads there were, almost… well, enough that you wondered how many non-stray threads were in position holding the garment together rather than … straying off, hanging off and out of seams like … flopping around on his clothes, loose cannons on the deck of haberdashery; he smiled and snipped and snipped and there was no end, logically — he kept cutting, smiling, cut a pair of pants to pieces.
He smiled phoning a girl who was in no sense his girlfriend, or anyone’s girlfriend; in fact, if you asked anyone who knew her, say even a tall woodsman type of fellow in his woodshop or on his horse how to get to this girl’s house, he was supposed to know because she had been supposed to be his (the woodsman’s) girlfriend once but of course wasn’t, only in her mind was she, for two minutes, he (the woodsman) said, “We went out four times and she wanted to get married,” and if Mr. Nefarious asked how to get to her house of the woodsman who had declined the fifth date on grounds of risk, the woodsman would say, Sure you want to go to her house? And Mr. Nefarious would smile and say, Not her house, I’m looking for that girl lives near her house, and actually both Mr. Nefarious and the woodsman would be smiling at this point, but Mr. Nefarious would smile longer, which would irritate the woodsman, and decide to phone the woman instead of risk going to her house — the tall practical fellow who could rip trees in his spare time was right.
So phoning her he smiled but when she did not answer he smiled and hung up.
Tossing a tennis ball for his dog he could smile for a quarter of an hour, all the dog and the ball could take, the dog fat and the ball a tennis ball, made for clay courts, made for concrete courts, not made for ivory and saliva courts.
He could look at bilge water and smile.
He smiled rarely at his mother.
The girl whose house the woodsman recommended they avoid reminded him of his mother, when she, the girl, smiled. When his mother smiled, she, his mother, reminded him of his childhood. When it came to his childhood there was no smiling. It seemed to him an era as humanly distant and crude as the Cro-Magnon’s. If he said something stank in this era of cave dwelling, his mother corrected him: it didn’t stink, it smelled. Okay, he’d assent, something smells, Mom, upon which she’d instruct him: “Look on your upper lip!” with a superior sneering tone that stopped him in his childhood tracks. That’s the way it was in this life? Nothing stank, it smelled, and it was always, if you smelled it, on your own lip. Even though it was his own, this motherhood struck him as odd.
Once, he had invited a girl to swim in the family pool after school, and they had spent a fine afternoon of it together, the girl barely constrained by her two-piece and the young Mr. Nefarious dog-paddling his nose into her breasts, occasionally sinking from the cumbersome weight and bulk of his teenage tumescence, rescued each time by the girl, who breathed life back into him with a peck of a kiss and released him to paddle upstream some more. When his mother uncovered this tryst she prohibited any more on the grounds that they had been unchaperoned (obviously, the young Mr. Nefarious thought to himself), and that, therefore, the neighbors would talk.