Quartet for the End of Time (35 page)

He left at night, just after they had dispensed to him (in honor of his departure—which, now that the decision to part did not rest solely on their shoulders, they honestly regretted) the greater portion of the meal. Taking with him, with his small, deft fingers, from the lining of Hadley's coat, three whole silver dollars—the existence of which neither the bandit nor Douglas had ever suspected. In order that he might report his grievance the next morning, Hadley first had to admit, of course, to the hidden coins having existed at all, and once this was divulged, the bandit and Douglas were torn as to how to feel about the whole thing. They were furious with Hadley, first of all, for having kept his secret from them—then at the midget for having discovered it ahead of them. But they also felt relieved: it was, in the end, another man's self-interest, and not their own, that had been revealed in this way, and—finally—they were visited by doubt that the three dollars to which Hadley referred had ever existed at all.

And not even a circus to join, Hadley (whom Douglas and the bandit did not, in the end, forsake) would grumble after that, time and again.

No, it was he who forsook them, too. One day when they were preparing, as they had been for some weeks, to follow the rumor of planting jobs farther north, Hadley announced he would just as soon, that morning, stay behind. As he said it he had in his eye the same look Cecil had had in his when he'd offered up his portion of the meal, so Douglas knew there was no point arguing. It was the sort of look a plant gets when it settles itself into new soil. They respected that, and did not ask any questions, and the next day, when they left him—the bandit and Douglas alone now, just as the bandit had once wished—as they waved over their shoulders at Hadley and made their way down the road—he stood straight as a stalk in the breeze, shifting only very
slightly, and they knew it would not be in this lifetime when, if ever, they saw him again.

—

I
T WAS LATE
M
AY BEFORE
D
OUGLAS AND THE BANDIT MANAGED TO
work their way up to Washington again, to where Waters's men had gathered, for a second season now, in the government camps outside the city. As in the previous spring, the camps had been appointed comfortably enough; they were greeted with hot coffee, an army cot, and—best of all—the promise of three square meals a day. Nothing tasted sweeter—nor, Douglas figured, was ever likely to—than that first hot meal, which was served up to him and the bandit immediately upon their arrival. They hadn't had a full meal like that in coming on two weeks.

The bandit gritted his teeth, but sure enough he ate and drank his share—it was, of course, the only logical thing to do. That night, though, lying in the army barracks, he whispered to Douglas: They're trying to buy us out, don't you see that, kid? We've each got a ticket in our pocket worth near a thousand dollars. Some of us more! And still they think they can buy us off with a cup of coffee!

He whistled through his teeth and propped himself up on an elbow, peering at Douglas through the dim light that streamed in from a lamp in the yard.

It ain't right, he said, I swear it. If your daddy was still alive, I can bet—

But Douglas did not wait to find out what he would bet, and later he could not explain even to himself what happened next, except to say that something sprang loose inside him as the bandit said those words.

The next thing he knew, he had the bandit by the ears and a knee to his throat.

What did you say? It was his own voice that spoke.

The bandit, his eyes wild, tried to answer but could not, because Douglas was pressing against the bony parts of his throat with his knee.
It was a pleasure to feel how fragile it was. To feel the way those bones connected to the bandit's lungs, and his lungs to his brain, and his brain to his heart … and how all of that connected in that moment to Douglas's own knee, which was, in turn … part of a great and complex system about which he knew very little, but was nonetheless part. There could be no doubt, though—despite what existed beyond him, which he did not understand—of the way the pressure of his knee on the bandit's throat corresponded to the bandit's inability to speak or breathe. This correspondence was still further proven a moment later when Douglas partially released the pressure from the bandit's throat and, as a direct result, the bandit began to splutter and speak.

Forgive me, he said.

Douglas rolled off of him and the bandit sprang up, spitting and coughing, while Douglas watched—wondering what had come over him.

Then, for the first time, he understood. Or rather, he felt—in his body—what he had witnessed two years before, the night he had first seen the Indian, John. The violence that had overtaken the Indian that night, which had seemed so mysterious to him then and had since troubled him— as all things do that one suspects one will never understand—was not a thing, he realized at last, to be finally comprehended. And, indeed, even in that moment it was not quite accurate to say that he understood the Indian's violence—but instead that it was a thing he recognized, suddenly, as his own.

The bandit had stopped coughing by then and was settling into sleep. Overcome with remorse, Douglas reached out; he touched him lightly on his thin shoulder.

I'm sorry, he said.

It was true. He had never felt more sorry for anything in all of his life. But the bandit just stared back at him blankly, and Douglas realized he did not even recall what had taken place.

What? the bandit said. A crooked smile on his face.

Douglas shook his head.

Nothing, he said. Let's both go to sleep.

But he could not sleep. He lay awake and for the second time in his life attempted to pray to whatever was still holy in that darkness, that he could rid himself of whatever it was that had, that night, made its home in his body. He felt its presence at that very moment burning in him, and the more he concentrated on ridding himself of whatever it was that burned there, the more it burned. The more he told himself he was not to blame—that it was not actually resident in him, that he could not truly imagine killing a man—the more the images of that death, that thing that he could not imagine, lodged in his brain. The more he resisted them, the more they came, and the more they came, the more there rose in him a pleasure at their arriving there in stubborn opposition to his own demands. He told himself, more and more insistently, that it was not
truly pleasure
that he felt then, in their arrival; that the slight chill that rippled through him as each subsequent image appeared before him— which he himself brought into being before his own eyes—was instead a horror at discovering that which was inconceivable inside him. That it was due only to the great confusion caused by that discovery that he mistook the feeling that came over him then for the thrill of pleasure.

But the more he insisted upon this, the more he allowed for a logical correspondence between the two emotions to take shape in his mind, and the more certain he was that the feeling was indeed, if not pleasure itself, then so closely akin to it, it was useless to make any distinction. He lay there thinking this, with the fire burning in his stomach so fiercely that even his skin began to burn. He wanted badly to scream; to scrape at his skin until he tore from it whatever fire burned there inside. It was all he could do not to, and the longer he resisted it, the clearer it became to him how it is that men go mad.

It was not, he realized, by allowing the images that at any time appeared before them in their minds—what was
not real
—to get mixed up with what was, but by
refusing
those images; by attempting to preserve some sense of distance from them.

We are all mad (Douglas thought), but most of us know how to get along anyway, and he did not know then whether he wanted to get along or not. If letting all the ugly things into his heart and mind and all the
possibilities of ugliness within himself and everyone else was the way to get along. But he did not want to be like the mad people he encountered sometimes on the road, who did not have a true companion in all the world, even in themselves, and then he felt deeply ashamed of his recent cruelty to the bandit, who was his only friend: how he had been ready, just a moment before, to destroy even that: and he resolved, then, that he would not go mad, and finally—after firmly settling on this decision in his mind—he slept.

—

J
UST AS BEFORE
,
THEY DID NOT KEEP THEIR PROMISE: NOT TO LEAVE
Washington again until they'd exchanged their tickets for the money they were due. As soon as the first good opportunity for work came up, only three weeks later, they took it and were gone. The job didn't promise, as far as Douglas could tell, to be much better, or different, from any of the jobs offered the previous year, which the bandit had scorned, but after shuffling in line for three weeks as though they did not carry the promise of nearly a thousand dollars in their front shirt pockets and were just like any other men, out of work—any money they'd made already spent on liquor or food—they accepted the first government offer that came along.

The job was in Florida; a project which, they were told, could last two, maybe even three years. Those who signed on now would see their pay increase several times over before the project was through. The idea of it alone beat chasing down jobs the length and breadth of the eastern states—even the bandit could see that.

They were shipped first to Fort Jefferson, on the island of Dry Tortugas—then on to the Upper Keys. Fort Jefferson served as a prison, just as it had many years before (most famously it had once housed Samuel Mudd and the rest of the Lincoln conspirators). More than once that first summer the bandit and Douglas had cause to joke to themselves that, though they had been shipped off to prison, by a stroke of luck they had landed in hell.

But it wasn't all bad. Even when there wasn't any work, which there
often was not, they were always fed. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to it, it seemed—when there was work and when there wasn't. It wasn't like farmwork that way, when the thing needed doing until it didn't anymore. Sometimes they'd be working on a stretch of road and when they had got it laid out halfway to nowhere, the foreman would come in and say, Stone says put a hold on this, and everything would stop. If a man had a shovelful of dirt he would drop it and sit down on it wherever it lay and say, I'll put a hold on this, sure, and maybe a week, maybe more, would go by 'til there was approval to move the road ahead a few more miles, and no one knew why, and everyone grumbled, Do they want this damn road or not? but mostly it was good to have the work when it came and to hold off when it did not.

By November there were somewhere near seven hundred men spread between the three camps that spanned two keys—Windley Key to the north, where Douglas and the bandit had been stationed, and then two camps on Matecumbe Key, just to the south. Though they all continued to get fed—and in fact as a direct consequence of it—it wasn't long before the sewers were full to overflowing, and the whole island reeked of veteran shit when the wind was blowing in any direction except directly offshore. By the middle of the month the conditions got so bad the men wrote letters of complaint, which they sent to Washington to be published in the
B.E.F. News.
But nothing was done about it and the fumes got worse—so toxic sometimes that the men tore off the bottoms of their shirts to use as masks while they worked.

By December—the job stalled, going on three weeks—pretty much everyone was of the opinion that the whole thing, from the beginning, had been nothing but a hoax; whoever believed, they said, there was any possibility of turning that godforsaken swamp into a tourist paradise was either a con man or a fool. It was clear, just looking around—at the half-built road that stretched out toward nowhere along that little spit of an island overflowing with shit—that there never had been nor would be any real work or anything else on those islands, and so it could only be true that, as the word went around now, the government had only one thing in mind when it shipped them all down there, and that was to get
the Bonus Army—or whatever was left of it—as far away from Washington as it possibly could.

But when they complained, they didn't get much sympathy—even, or especially, from the BEF. P. C. Farrell, who wrote an “island report” regularly for the
B.E.F. News
, got a note back one day from a veteran in Washington asking him to please not send in any more articles about “vacationers” down in Florida. As far as anyone else was concerned, those who had landed the jobs down South were living high on the government hog. Perhaps, having “got away from it all,” Farrell was told, he had lost touch with the fact that in the rest of the country there was a Depression on. Farrell got boiling mad at that and wrote back, but no more of his reports were ever published, and he received no reply.

But then the Patman Bill, which demanded immediate and full payment of the bonus, passed through the House again, with a resounding majority. Getting past the Senate, and the President himself, who—it was well known—had promised to veto the bill, was another matter. But this did not stop the veterans from feeling—just as they had back in '32—that genuine progress had indeed been made. The day Douglas and the bandit heard the news—it was a Sunday—they hitched a ride down to Key West in order to have a drink and celebrate a little at Josie Russell's Bar. That was where most of them went when they got the least chance. With a dollar in your pocket you could stay all afternoon, if you drank slow. Sit there underneath the portrait of General Custer and admire what a sad son of a bitch he looked—like he'd never stepped foot out of a painting in his whole life—and feel like a real man yourself for a while. Glad that if history was as flat and stuck-up as General Custer looked to be, you didn't have any part of it. That you were instead part of the living, breathing world—even if it smelled like shit most of the time. At least you were a real human being, you thought, and it felt good to think it, and feel that way, even if it was only on account of the rum in your veins.