Nightshade and Damnations (19 page)

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CORPORAL CUCKOO?

S
everal
thousand
officers and privates of the U. S. Army who fought in Europe in World War II can bear witness to certain basic facts in this otherwise incredible story.

Let me refresh my witnesses’ memories:

The Cunard White Star liner the
Queen Mary
sailed from Greenock, at the mouth of the river Clyde, on July
6
th,
1945
, bound for New York, packed tight with passengers. No one who made that voyage can have forgotten it: there were fourteen thousand men on board, a few ladies, and one dog. The dog was a gentle, intelligent German shepherd, saved from slow and painful death by a young American officer in Holland. I was told that this brave animal, exhausted, and weak with hunger, had tried to jump over a high barbed wire fence, and had got caught in the barbs on the top strand, where it hung for days, unable to go forward or backward. The young officer helped it down, and so the dog fell in love with the man, and the man fell in love with the dog. Pets are not allowed on troopships. Still, the young officer managed to get his dog on board. Rumor has it that his entire company swore that they would not return to the United States without the dog, so that the authorities were persuaded to stretch a point, just for once: this is what Kipling meant when he referred to the power of the do
g
. Everyone who sailed on the
Queen Mary
from Greenock on July
6
,
1945
remembers that dog. It came aboard in a deplorable state, arching its bedraggled back to ease its poor injured stomach, and when you stroked it, you felt its skeleton under the sickly, staring coat. After about three days of affectionate care—half a hundred strong, hungry men begged or stole bits of meat for its sake—the dog began to recover. By July
11
, when the
Queen Mary
docked in New York, the dog was taking a dog’s interest in a soft rubber ball with which several officers were playing on the sun deck.

I bring all this back into memory to prove that I was there, as a war correspondent, on my way to the Pacific. Since I was wearing battledress and a beard, I, also, must have been conspicuous that voyage. And the secret school of illicit crapshooters must remember me with nostalgic affection: I arrived in New York with exactly fifteen cents, and had to borrow five dollars from an amiable Congregationalist minister named John Smith—who also will testify to the fact that I was on board. If further evidence were needed, a lady nurse, Lieutenant Grace Dimichele, of Vermont, took my photograph as we came into port.

But in the excitement of that tremendous moment, when thousands of men were struggling and jostling, laughing and crying, and snapping cameras at the New York skyline which is the most beautiful in the world, I lost Corporal Cuckoo. I have made exhaustive enquiries as to his whereabouts, but that extraordinary man had disappeared like a puff of smoke.

Surely, there must be scores of men who retain some memory of Cuckoo, whom they must have seen hundreds and hundreds of times on the
Queen Mary
,
between July
6
th and July
11
,
1945
.

He was a light-haired man of medium height, but he must have weighed at least a hundred and ninety pounds, for he was ponderously built, and had enormously heavy bones. I beg my fellow passengers to remember, if they can. He had watery eyes of greenish-gray, and limped a little on his right leg. His teeth were powerful—large, square, and slightly protruding; but generally he kept them covered with his thick, curiously wrinkled lips. People in general are unobservant, I know, but no one who saw Corporal Cuckoo could fail to remember his scars. There was a frightful indentation in his skull, between his left eyebrow and his right ear. When I first noticed him, I remembered an axe murder at which I shuddered many years ago when I was a crime reporter. “He must have an extraordinary constitution if he lives to walk around with a scar like that,” I thought. His chin and throat were puckered scar tissue such as marks the place where flesh has been badly burned and well healed. Half of his right ear was missing and close by there was another scar, from cheekbone to mastoid. The back of his right hand appeared to have been hacked with a knife—I counted at least four formidable cuts, all old and white and deep. He conveyed this impression: that a long time ago, a number of people had got together to butcher him with hatchets, sabres, and knives, and that, in spite of their most determined efforts, he had survived. For all his scars were old. Yet the man was young—not more than thirty-five as I guessed.

He filled me with a burning curiosity. One of you
must
remember him! He went about, surly and unsociable, smoking cigarettes which he never took out of his mouth—he smoked them down and spat the ends out only when the fire touched his lips. That, I thought, must be why his eyes are so watery. He moped about, thinking, or brooding. He was particularly addicted to loitering on the stairs and lurking in dark corners. I made tentative enquiries about him around the decks; but just then everyone was passionately interested in an officer who looked like Spencer Tracy. But in the end I found out for myself.

Liquor, also, was prohibited on troopships. Having been warned of this, I took the precaution of smuggling some bottles of whiskey aboard. On the first day out I offered a drink to a captain of Infantry. Before I knew where I was, I had made seventeen new friends who overwhelmed me with affability and asked for my autograph; so that on the second day, having thrown the last of the empty bottles out of the porthole, I was glad to sponge a drink off Mr. Charles Bennett, the playwright, of Hollywood, California. (He, too, if his modesty permits, will bear witness that I am telling the truth.) He gave me a ginger ale bottle full of good Scotch, which I concealed in the blouse of my battledress, not daring to let any of my friends know that I had it. Late in the evening of the third day, I withdrew to a quiet spot where there was a strong enough diffusion of yellow light for me to read by. I intended to struggle again through some of the poems of François Villon, and to refresh myself at intervals with a spot of Mr. Bennett’s Scotch. It was hard to find an unoccupied place beyond locked doors on the
Queen Mary
at that time, but I found one. I was trying to read Villon’s
Ballade of Good Counsel
, which that great poet wrote in medieval underworld slang, which is all but incomprehensible even to erudite Frenchmen who have studied the argot of the period. I repeated the first two lines aloud, hoping to talk some new meaning into them:

Car ou soie porteur de bulles

pipeur ou hasardeur de dez

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?
Thi
s
?” 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.