Last Notes from Home (26 page)

So Rex, at least surfacely ungrieved, went back to the Y and Duffy’s Tavern and his furloughed pals and his girls and his late-night revels at Rickahdickahdoo’s on Stone Street.

As I address myself to forty years ago, I don’t remember for what offense (could Don Juan remember his conquests?) the high school principal, Bill Hewitt, opened the door for my prolonged sabbatical in the autumn of 1944, four or five months after the Princess came to her untimely end. What I do know is that it must have been a lugubrious offense indeed. Hewitt was ordinarily satisfied that the student take a note home to Mums and from her return with a note to the effect that one’s behavior would assuredly improve; if it were a somewhat more unhappy dereliction one might have to return with Mums in tow; and when Hewitt ordered one to return with one’s father it was so serious as to be, as they say nowadays, the pits.

“No note, no Mama,” I recall his saying. “I want your father in here with you, and I frankly don’t care if I ever see your face again until I see you with Earl. For some reason I abruptly find myself too inarticulate to explain the rules to you, Exley, and perhaps Earl will have better luck detailing them for you than I’ve had. In fact, I’m quite confident Earl will.”

Of course Hewitt knew damn well that in Earl’s case, as a lineman for the Niagara Mohawk, having to come to school with me would cost him a day’s pay, no small thing for a man with a wife and four children (three now that the Brigadier was fighting in the Pacific) to feed, and this at the tail end of the Depression economy. What Hewitt hadn’t bargained for was the morbid romanticism which so obsessed me in those years, dreaming of Scoglitti and Anzio and the Carroceto Creek and Campoleone and Kwajalein and Tarawa and, since the Princess’s death, Saipan and Leyte and Omaha Red Beach and Bastogne, that I owned such a majestic contempt for the pedestrian world of plane geometry and translating the campaigns of Caesar that, quite honestly, I simply refused to tell my father that Hewitt wanted to see him. Moreover, as I write it occurs to me that had I not had a twin sister who would eventually, more from fear of my failing all my courses than any malice on her part, for my sister was without wickedness, tell my father I’d been going to the Y instead of school, I might have continued running and jumping and bombing until the summer recess and ended not only a high school all-star but playing in the NBA, such was the fury of my dedication at the Y. It was the inappropriately mad enthusiasm an adolescent employs to obliterate the guilt of one day’s missed school becoming two, then three, then a week, then yet another, and now abruptly a month of unlearned geometric relationships and Latin syntax. And all the while above me, rather fittingly like the Oriental water torture, the ceaseless slap, slap, slap of the strange cuckolded Llewellyn Rexford Bean.

And of course, as was my sister, the Brigadier was always with me, and I can’t tell which bedeviled me more, the unjustified suspicion that from kindergarten on my sister, being in the same grade, had always ratted on me at home or the palpably envious possibility that as I missed day after day of school and went swoosh and swoosh and swoosh, while above me the wretched Rex tried with all the desperation at his disposal to jog the Princess from his soul (how could he have when across all these years I can see her as vividly as if she stood before me now?), the Brigadier, over yonder there in the wide Pacific, might even at that moment have one of those slimy slant-eyed little Nips in his gunsights. Neither bedevilment, as it happened, was warranted.

In the first case, my sister was one of those grotesquely irritating people born utterly free of envy, malice, or the capacity to ridicule. In all the years we were growing up I can’t once recall saying that someone was a jerk or a prick or a fag without her responding “He’s okay when you get to know him,” or “I think he’s nice,” or, that most grating of all responses,
“He’s a human being, too, you know,”
replies that with their implied remonstrances all but sent me round the bend in agitation. If one cannot enlist one’s twin sister in his more cynical, hateful, and ultimately unmanly visions of the cosmos, who the hell can one enlist? I suspected wrongly that the paranoia which in my late twenties would lead to mental hospitalization could be blamed in no small part on a much too intimate sibling proximity. Of course, I turned that proximity into a rivalry that never existed save in my sick fantasies. Now I know that except for an inadvertant slip of the tongue at supper my sister never told or even suggested to my parents just how nasty a guy I was—and I was
bad
—until that fateful day when, out of what must have been for her this terrible trepidation that I’d fail everything, she at last told my father I’d been out of school for a month and going to the Y. It was for this that I’d blow her away, pathetic luckless girl.

For what I must have put her through that month—when I wasn’t cleaning the Brigadier’s guns and cultivating both my left hand and my friendship with Rex—if s a miracle she didn’t end up in the loony bin (for she did survive, though only God knows how) in lieu of me. Whenever, at supper, the subject came round to how we were doing at school, I’d catch my sister’s eyes, let my own droop crazily cross-eyed to the bridge of my nose, let my upper teeth come over and bite furiously Dracula-like into my lower lip, all the while with my flattened right hand making razorlike slashing motions at my Adam’s apple, indicating with a horrifying finality that should she breathe a word I’d steal into her bedroom that very night, bury my cuspids in her lily white neck, and drain every blessed drop of blood from her body, do this even while she dreamed of high school fullbacks and senior proms and white picket fences and whatever in the hell it was that fourteen-year-old maidens dreamed of.

Enter my schizophrenia, a schizophrenia damn near as hopeless as that which English writers have claimed to be the very essence of the British malaise. Whereas on the one hand I insisted—absolutely demanded—the right to do my own thing, to be utterly free to choose what was good for me (certainly not biology and world history), to cherish and coddle, a la the English, my own eccentricity, on the other hand I brought the militant discipline required to maintain the disastrous notion of Empire to my daily practices at the Y and my nightly cleaning of the Brigadier’s guns. The Brigadier had worked (A&P bag boy), horse-traded, and damn near worn himself out acquiring that collection. On his induction into the service it was the only thing I’d sworn—as solemn as the Eagle scout I’d been—to look after.

And what a collection it was, guns that would be worth a fortune on today’s market. In handguns alone, the Brigadier had a Model 1911 Colt .45 automatic, a toggle-action 9mm Luger, a Walther P38; that little sidearm jewel carried by Italian officers, a 7.65mm Beretta, and, among rifles too numerous to mention (twelve-gauge Browning shotgun, .22-caliber Winchester pump long rifle, that kind of nothing stuff), an original .30-06 Browning automatic; the M-i, a lightweight beauty which had cut nearly four pounds from the BAR; and my lovely lovely favorite, a Model 98 .30-06 Mauser, topped with a Moss-berg 8A scope. In expert hands, the Mauser will of course take down an elephant, and if one has never heard the report of this gun—it’ll set tremors shimmering in the windows across the street—one does not know the true sound of guns.

Regarding my unjustified bedevilment in the second case, the Brigadier never fired a shot in anger during World War II and would not get into the earnest business of killing until Korea when, as I’ve elsewhere said, he’d write me that he’d reached the point he could laugh when he saw Chinese troops stacked up like cordwood. Other than his immediate superior, the guy giving him orders (the most memorable enemy to most servicemen), the Brigadier never got a glimpse of the antagonist in what Archie calls the Big One. And hence my daily ritual, buoyant with envy of and chagrin at him for slaughtering the heathen while I kept moving farther and farther and farther out from the left side, was all so much nonsense. Each night, with my Hoppes cleaner, my Birchwood blueing, my rod and pack, my spotless rags, I had that collection not only ready to join Jenny’s Indian chums at the Carroceto Creek but so gleaming that the meanest mother sumbitch Texas top sergeant would, on inspecting it, have promoted me two grades on the spot.

Nor were my dreams confined to killing alien grunts. Even as my texts lay by my bed unopened and unread, those books I so dutifully carried to the Y each morning, the Saturday matinees grew more imaginative and with them so did I. Eventually I became Wild Bill Donovan’s top OSS guy, the one they parachuted into the Black Forest of Deutschland, the Italian Alps, the very heart of Tokyo, my feet heavy with hiking boots, my disassembled Mauser and Mossberg scope in my rucksack with the ham-and-cheese sandwiches and thermos of black coffee. Yes, believe unequivocally in my grim-visaged sincerity when I say that at one time or another I had them all—I mean all, Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, Mussolini, Admiral Yamamoto, General Hideki Tojo—in the spiderwebbing cross hairs of that Mossberg 8A scope.

One night my father said, “How’s school going with you, Fred?”

“Good, great.”

Silence.

“How can it be going great when you haven’t been there for a month?”

An excruciating pause.

In a voice that signaled ultimate anger. “Get away from this table. Upstairs. I don’t want to look at you.”

From my mother a genuinely mind-boggling piece of foolishness. “Don’t you want him to finish his supper?”

“/
want him out of my sight.”

Of course I had no choice but to blow my sister away. Assuredly she had been dutifully and fairly though ominously admonished. And the worst of it was I’d have to do it that night while my father was out on what we in the Thompson Park area ever so solemnly called Night Patrol. At the outset of the war, the old man—he was thirty-six in 1941—and the other men in the neighborhood, as men did from all the wards in Watertown, went nightly to the Elks Club on Stone Street where, abetted by an instructor, a projector, and slides, they learned to identify the various aircraft of the Luftwaffe and the Japanese Imperial Air Force. In this way they could take their rotating four-hour shifts and on their assigned nightly watches intently scan the dark forboding skies of Watertown for the Nip and the Kraut. As I had no way of knowing that Mr. Ball, our neighbor, had for business reasons changed shifts with my father and that therefore my father would be in the house, I went blissfully on, with excruciatingly demented fastidiousness cleaning the Mauser and the scope. Prepared at length, I studiously put a .30-06 cartridge into the chamber and yet another into the magazine.

The latter cartridge was reserved for me. The execution of one’s sister would require nothing less than that afterward I do the decent, obligatory thing and commit the American rural version of the time-honored Japanese hara-kiri, lie down on my bed, put the barrel into my mouth, and activate the trigger with my big toe, which I’d already practiced’ sans cartridges, any number of times. After what seemed an eternity I heard her drawing her bath (it was fitting that she die cleansed and, hopefully, at peace with her Maker), thinking that if I could only make it another half hour until she got to her bedroom and before her vanity had begun that endlessly infernal brushing of her hair, I had it made. Now suddenly, hearing the bathroom door open and close, then the one to her bedroom do the same, I knew it was time. Placing myself, legs apart and set, at the far end of the Brigadier’s and my bedroom, the Mauser’s brilliantly polished stock braced snugly to my shoulder, the cross hairs of the 8 A scope zeroed in at the estimated point her monstrously freckled face would enter the room, I called her name.

“What?”

“Come ‘ere.”

“Fat chance.”

“I ain’t mad.
Seriously.
Look, I just want to talk about the assignments I’ve missed.”

“Fat chance.”

“Seriously.”

“I had to tell Dad. Mr. Hewitt told me you’d been out of school so long that if I didn’t you had no chance of passing, plus which he himself was coming up here tomorrow night and tell Dad.
Brother,
I can see that. All I did was spare you a real hiding.”

“Look, I’m not even thinkin’ about that. That’s all in the past. Gone with the wind. Just my schoolwork.
Honest.
¹
’

So she came, impetuous ingenuous girl, the door hesitantly opened, into the room in her flannel nightgown she stepped, her hairbrush still held innocently in her lax right hand. Then the tip of her laughably freckled though patrician nose came smack into the spiderwebbing and
BRRRRAAAAAaaaaaammmmmm.
The jolly freckles on her face dissolved and vaporized into nothingness, her hands went clutchingly to her throat, the hairbrush clacked to the floor, and she slid ever so slowly and histrionically down the door casing to the floor, going
ugh, ugh, ugh.

“Bye-bye, you squealing rat.”

“
What in Christ’
s name was that?”

Having taken two steps toward my bed to complete my untidy Oriental ritual, and having realized—oh, malevolent fate!—that it was the voice of my father, I literally dropped the Mauser to the floor and by the time he’d turned into the bedroom, having taken the staircase in three preposterous leaps, the old lady right at his heels, I was already, in horrifyingly frightened self-vindication, bellowing,
“She’s fakin’ it, for Chris
t’
s sake! It’s only a blank cartridge, for
Christ’s
sake! A fucking blank cartridge!”

One can only judge the genuine extent of my fear by understanding that in my house in those prehistoric days using the word
fuck
was a more serious offense than shooting my sister.

“She’s in shock,” I heard my father say to my mother. “Draw some cold water in the bathtub. Then come back here.”

When my mother returned and had her cradled in her arms and she had at last stopped choking and gone to hysterical tears, the old man, with a finicky deliberation that did not bode well for Master Frederick Earl Exley, walked slowly to the middle of the room, picked up the Mauser, and threw it right through the glass of both the inner and the storm windows. Then, with equal gravity, all the Brigadier’s beautiful guns went, one after another, through the broken windows and out and down onto the hard fall frosted yard between our and Mr. Ball’s houses.

That collection got sold the next day, the money banked against the Brigadier’s return, and it goes without saying that on his next leave I paid all over again. But the Brigadier hadn’t the heart for his business. He got halfway through slapping the shit out of me, bouncing me off the bedroom walls, when he abruptly stopped and doubled over with laughter.

“You goddamn fool. You fucking jerk. Had you ever stuck that Mauser in your mouth the velocity would have given you a concussion bad enough to kill you. And the powder is so old in those blank cartridges half of it wouldn’t have burned until it reached the inside of your mouth. You know what a hot fudge sundae would taste like after that?

Like uncooked dandelion greens, that’s what. I mean, what a fucking jerk. To think I ever gave you a key to the gun case in the first place! That’s what kills me—how fucking stupid I was!”

Prior to this incident my mother’s
you just wait till your father gets home
had been a standard joke in our house. No matter how elaborately or with what urgent intricate melodrama my mother related our misdeeds, my father, looking up from his breaded pork chops, would only say, “I hope you booted him in the ass” or, “What do you want from me?” or more humiliating than anything for my mother, he’d find the story droll and begin to chuckle. Now of course he had no choice.

As he had me by the shoulder dragging me down the stairs, my pain-in-the-ass sister, to the end as incapable of vengeance as any other of the base impulses—the “even Fred’s okay when you get to know him” syndrome—kept calling through her tears, “Don’t hurt him, Dad.
Please don’t hurt him.
He was only kidding.” Hence what business my father had with me was done openhandedly, in the cold hard yard next to the forlorn pile of shimmering guns, my noble ghoul of a sister spared me a couple well-deserved broken ribs, and I hadn’t even the satisfaction of having my torso taped so that, on my return to school, I couldn’t for the guys in the shower make up some grand adventure of what had happened to me in the Black Forest during my month’s sabbatical.