A Quiet Vendetta (20 page)

Who the hell knew, and who the hell cared?

The car I drove a mile further into the swamplands, and then I watched as it slid effortlessly, silently, gracefully into the everglades, never to surface.

I had my books, and I learned to read them, and I read as if my life depended on it. Hard-earned volumes of wisdom where I found the heart, its workings, the subclavian and vena cava, where I found Da Vinci, Einstein, Michaelangelo, Dillinger, Capone: the many geniuses the world had offered and then greedily taken away. They were my one true possession, all my own, worshipped and tended with care, for they had cost me dearly, both me and the man who had brought them. And my father, too drunk or too bruised to see what was there in front of him most of the time, and my mother, cowed and quiet in his presence, never thought to ask or enquire how I had come by such things. I kept them safe, there beneath my bed, and I walked through every word on every page and then started over again.

Those nights, cool and loose, the sky clear, peppered with stars and constellations I could identify and name, the heat somehow eased by the breeze that came north from the river, feeling alive, anxious . . .

Feeling there was so much I wanted –
needed
– to know.

Later, many years later, when time had unfolded and I had learned so much more of the world beyond my home, I would think these things:

Perhaps if I had been someone, if I had
really
been someone, then these events would not have happened.

Perhaps if I had fought in Vietnam and come home a hero, my breast painted with ribbons, the girls from Montalvo’s Diner crowding my arms as if they could all be enveloped in one fell swoop. And bearing a scar across the cheek, above the eye maybe – visible, but not so visible as to be ugly.

Perhaps if I had walked out through the mud and blood and shit of Da Nang or Quang Ngai or Qui Nhon, shouldering a rucksack heavy with C-Rations, Kool-Aid, salt tablets, ammunition, lucky mascots, a flak jacket rolled tightly between my burden and my spine. Things you could close your eyes and still feel the weight of.

Perhaps if I had been there to carry some wounded comrade through the thigh-deep water of a raining napalm nightmare, the vegetation crumpling around me, falling, dissolving, staggering breathless and burned, my hair scorched to my scalp, my arms bloody with the red sweat of my load.

Perhaps if I had walked a hundred miles to the back-lines, the rear, where the medic tents stood white and clean and filled with the smell of anaesthetic and morphine, where fresh-faced first tour medical students turned their eyes away from the carnage, where I had to stand and bind and weave and amputate and stem the heavy flow of blood from the gutted stomach, the jagged wound, the missing eye, the greenstick fracture leaping from the surface of the skin like some winter-silhouetted teeter-totter . . .

Perhaps if I had lost a finger. A toe. The lobe of an ear.

Perhaps if I could have worn a tee-shirt bearing the legend
IF YOU WEREN’T THERE SHUT THE FUCK UP
, and know that I
had
been there, that I could talk, and possess every right to talk and tell people what it was like – the night, the fear, the ghost-gray image of moving troops, their symmetry, their identities merged one into another and back again as the mud and blood and shit of the war blended their uniqueness into one great slow-motion, breathing, vacant, beyond-questioning machine . . .

Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.

And thus would not have felt empty.

It was I – who wished folks would called me Six or Lineman or Doc, or some other well-earned nickname, a name that people would hear and ask of its origin, and in being told they would understand what a deep and perfect human being I was, flawed, yet brave and bold, and experienced, and rich in something few possessed – it was I who was in some way nothing, and yet so afraid of being nothing I imagined that everything I wanted could be taken from others.

And so I did.

I remembered times I would sit back in the corner of Evangeline’s only diner, Montalvo’s, popping peanut M&Ms, snapping them back against the roof of my mouth and feeling them
thunk
against my teeth, and grinding up their bitty sweetness, and finding the candy shrapnel tucked down inside my gums . . . and it was late evening, and soon Montalvo’s would close, the warm-faced Creole-Irish halfbreed cook whose name I could never recall would turn me out into the depth of the night, wishing me well, laughing in that broken Americanized twang that sounded like no accent I had ever heard, or would ever hear again. He rolled, that man did, rolled across the greasy linoleum floor, rubbing his hands through a greasy towel, wiping the back of his greasy hand across the lower half of his greasy face, and he smelled of fried onions and fried eggs, of fried fries and tobacco. Like a roadhouse on fire. A unique smell that no human being should ever have to carry, but he did, and he carried it effortlessly, the smell a part of him in everything he said and did and thought.

But for the time being I was safe, there at the back of the diner, watching the three or four regular kids dance to the jukebox, the two girls, their wide mouths popping the spearmint tang of gum, their rah-rah skirts over firm brown thighs, their flats and ponytails and rubber bands and the men’s wristwatches they wore, and me wondering what it would be like to fuck one of them, wondering what it would be like to dissolve my tongue in that spearmint tang, or maybe to fuck two of them together, to lose my hands beneath those spinning skirts, to touch the very heart of whatever they believed their lives really were.

For now, they were safe.

I believed that if I had read novels I could have talked, but I did not read novels, merely facts from encyclopedias.

To talk of such things would have made it all too obvious that I had no life at all.

Perhaps if I had read those things that were named in my volumes – books called
Flight To Arras, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, To A God Unknown, Narziss and Goldmund, Altona, Men Without Shadows, A Very Easy Death
– names such as these, then perhaps . . .

And if I had known the names of the authors as well it would have been taken for granted that I had read these things, and I would not have mentioned the titles, but merely the names of the characters, and people would listen and know that I knew all these things from the tone of my voice, the expression in my eyes, the way I half-smiled my own thoughts that were nothing but my own.

Perhaps then, only then, could I have possessed something of which to speak.

But I had not, and did not, and never would, I felt.

And so I killed things.

What else could a poor boy do? I watched the tight-thighed girls, their whirling skirts, the way they glanced at me arrogantly, the way they dared each other to
speak to the weird kid in the corner with the M&Ms
when they first started coming here an age ago. They took the dare, one or two of them, and I was shy and pleasant, and I blushed, and they giggled, but now they have grown some and they don’t bother with dares, they just think I’m weird, and they dance all the more with their thighs and their skirts and their peppermint tang.

I hated them for their smooth brown skin. I wondered what their sweat would taste like straight from the skin. Beads like condensation down the glass walls of chilled bottles. Like rain against glass.

I sat alone, there in Montalvo’s Diner, and perhaps the only person who did not think I was weird was the crazy halfbreed cook with the forgotten name who carried a smell that should not have had to be carried by any human being.

He did not worry that I had nothing to say, for I bought my Cokes, popped my M&Ms, sat and looked and breathed and existed.

I did not speak.

I would think to speak, but all I could come up with was ‘Well-uh-I-kinda-killed-some-things-one-time . . .’, but seeing as how that wasn’t really the polite kind of talk folks were looking for, I did not say it.

And, as such, had nothing to say.

Perhaps if I had been caught . . .

Perhaps then, and only then, would I have had something of which to speak.

Sometimes I would challenge myself, dare myself to walk up to one of those girls, those tight-skinned teenage tornadoes, and ask their name, and say ‘Hi, I’m Bill or “Doc” or “Lineman” or “Swamper,” ’ and feel them blush a little, and smile, and say ‘I’m Carol or Janie or Holly-Beth,’ and ask me how I came to be called something such as that. I would shrug noncommittally, as if it didn’t really matter, and tell them it was the war,
back a long time, honey, a long time ago that you wouldn’t want to be hearing about
. And we would dance then, and she would give me gum, play some records I liked maybe, and then later as I walked her home, she would ask me again how I came by my name, and I would tell her, in small, measured emotional phrases, and through the spaces between my words she would feel the depth, the strength, the power of self-control needed for someone to return from such a place and still be able to smile, to laugh, to say ‘Hi’ and dance in Montalvo’s Diner with someone such as herself.

She would fall in love, and I would feel the pressure of her hand in mine, the way her shoulder rubbed the side of my chest as she leaned to stroke my cheek, to kiss my face, to ask me if maybe, somehow, possibly I might consider seeing her again . . .

And I would have said, ‘Sure honey, sure thing,’ and I would have felt her heart leap.

Or maybe not. Maybe I would hold a Coke bottle in my hand, and as they pulled me close I would break the base of the bottle against the wall, and then turn to face Bobby-Sue or Marquita or Sherise or Kimberley, and say, ‘Here, a little of something cool and hard for the pleasure of your company . . . ,’ and grind the glass teeth deep into the solar plexus, through the vagus nerves, and feel them tighten and twitch, dancing like a headless chicken through the scrubbed backlot behind a busted trailer, feeling them close up against the broken shards like the hands of hungry, shit-faced kids, the blood pumping, sweating out through the aperture, glowing over my hands, warming them, filling the pores, finding my prints like narrow channels and filling them . . .

And then lean them against the wall, fuck them in the ass, comb my hair and go home.

Perhaps then, and only then, would there be something of which I could speak.

Before Carryl Chevron I had killed a dog. Before that I had set a cat in a pen with three chickens and watched them run their little hearts out. Before that I killed some other things, but now I cannot remember what they were.

We were all essentially children, and some of us never seemed to be anything else. I understood this, as now I understand many things, and I see now that my own depth of understanding is even greater than I am aware. I know it all comes from the heart, right from the very center of the heart, and I know that if you do not listen to what it has to tell you then it will kill you.

Time rolled onwards like some unspoken darkness, and within it there were sounds and motions that even now I cannot bring myself to recall.

Eisenhower was inaugurated as president.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair in Sing Sing.

Fidel Castro Ruz was jailed after a failed coup.

Rocky Marciano retained his world heavyweight title when he K.O.d Jersey Joe Walcott. My father said he could have done the same. My father was a drunk. A liar. A failure of a man.

I was sixteen years old, and New Orleans was in my blood. St James the Greater, Ougou Feray, the African spirit of war and iron. The driving rhythm of drums and chants and people pouring red wine, rice and beans, meat, rum and soft drinks into a pond, and then those same people writhing in the mud and sharing their special powers by touching bystanders. Serpent and cross in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, and summoning the most powerful of all spirits, loa-Damballah-wédo, the spirited festival of Vyéj Mirak, the Virgin of Miracles, and her voodoo counterpart Ezili, the goddess of love. Washing a bull, applying perfume, dressing it in a cape, and then slaughtering it, its blood collected in a gourd and passed to those possessed by the loa. They drank to feed the spirit. Sacrificing white pigeons to the Petro loa, a spirit that demanded birds and hogs, goats and bulls, sometimes bodies from tombs. All Souls’ Day, Baron Samedi, loa of the dead.

I was sixteen years old. I was almost a man, but still I couldn’t stand and take the beatings my father delivered. Not only to me, but to my mother – she of the graceful, artless, silent hope.

It was the end of 1953.

I think back and images merge and blend together, faces become the same, voices carry a similar tone and timbre, and I find it difficult to place events in their correct chronological sequence. I think of Cuba, my father’s homeland, the things that happened there, and then realize that those things came later, much later. My own past challenges me with forgetfulness, and this scares me, for to forget my past is to forget who I am, how I became such a person, and to forget such things challenges the very reason for living.

Perhaps the saddest thing about my own death will be my life.

Some of us live to remember; some of us live to forget; some of us, even now, make ourselves believe that there is some greater purpose worth working for. Let me tell you, there isn’t. It isn’t complicated, it is almost too simple to be believed. Like faith. Faith in what? Faith in God? Greatest thing God ever did was fool the world into thinking that He existed. Look into a man’s eyes as he dies and you’ll see that there’s nothing there. Just blackness reflecting your own face. It’s that simple.

I will tell you now about the death of my mother. Though it would not come for another four years I will tell you of it now.

Through 1954, through the eras of McCarthy, the Viet Minh occupation of Hanoi and the very inception of the Vietnam War, through the release of Castro and his brother Raul on General Amnesty in May of 1955, through all these things.

Beyond Castro’s departure to Mexico where he organized his exiles into the 26 July Revolutionary Movement, how he led eighty-two men to the north coast of Oriente Province, where they landed at Playa Las Coloradas in December of ’56, how all but twelve survived who retreated to the Sierra Maestra mountains and waged a continuous guerrilla war against the Batista government, how those twelve became eight hundred and scored victory after victory against the dictator in the hot madness of revolution and spilled blood that was as much a part of history as anything that might have happened in Europe . . .