Airships (19 page)

“Rainbow days,” lied Fish. “The women were so pretty they slept right in the bed with me and the wife. She forgave me everything. It was just like stroking puppies, all of them the color of a goldfish.”

“Can that boat
hold
the two of 'em?” said Smokey.

“As long as it keeps goin' it can,” said Ulrich, who featured himself a scientist.

“Oliver got him a babe,” said another liar.

“I guess we're all old enough to see fools run their course,” said old Dan. Dan was a liar who bored even the pier crowd. He lied about having met great men and what they said. He claimed he had met Winston Churchill. He claimed he was on friendly terms with George Wallace.

“You'd give your right one to have a chance with Oliver's woman, indifferent of face as she is,” said Sergeant Fish.

“When the motor ever gives out, the whole thing will sink,” said Ulrich.

They watched awhile. Then they all went home and slept.

It makes me sick when we kill them or ride horses over them. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.

One day I rode up on a fellow in blue and we were both out of ammunition. He was trying to draw his saber and I was so outraged I slapped him right off his horse. The horseman behind me cheered. He said I'd broken the man's neck. I was horrified. Oh, life, life—you kill what you love. I have seen such handsome faces with their mouths open, their necks open to the Pennsylvania sun. I love stealing for forage and food, but I hate this murdering business that goes along with it.

Some nights I amble in near the fire to take a cup with the boys, but they chase me away. I don't scold, but in my mind there are the words: All right, have your way in this twinkling mortal world.

Our Jeb Stuart is never tired. You could wake him with a message any time of night and he's awake on the instant. He's such a bull. They called him “Beauty” at West Point. We're fighting and killing all his old classmates and even his father-in-law, General Philip St. George Cooke. Jeb wrote about
this man once when he failed to join the Confederacy: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.”

Gee, he can use the word, Jeb can. I was with him through the ostrich feathers in his hat and the early harassments, when we had nothing but shotguns and pretty horses. He was always a fool at running around his enemy. I was with him when we rode down a lane around a confused Yank picket, risking the Miniés. But he's a good family man too, they say.

I was with him when he first went around McClellan and scouted Porter's wing. That's when I fell in love with burning and looting. We threw ourselves on railroad cars and wagons, we collected carbines, uniforms and cow steaks that we roasted on sticks over the embers of the rails. Jeb passed right by when I was chewing my beef and dipping water out of the great tank. He had his banjo man and his dancing nigger with him. Jeb has terrific body odor along with his mud-spattered boots, but it rather draws than repels, like the musk of a woman.

When we were celebrating in Richmond, even I was escorted by a woman out into the shadows and this is why I say this. She surrendered to me, her hoop skirt was around her eyebrows, her white nakedness lying under me if I wanted it, and I suppose I did, because I went laboring at her, head full of smoke and unreason. I left her with her dress over her face like a tent and have no clear notion of what her face was like, though my acquaintance Ruppert Longstreet told me in daylight she was a troll.

That was when young Pelham set fire to the Yank boat in the James with his one Napoleon cannon. We whipped a warship from the shore. Pelham was a genius about artillery. I loved that too.

It's killing close up that bothers me. Once a blue-suited man on the ground was holding his hands out after his horse fell over. This was at Manassas. He seemed to be unclear about whether this was an actual event; he seemed to be asking for directions back to his place in a stunned friendly
way. My horse, Pardon Me, was rearing way high and I couldn't put the muzzle of my shotgun at him. Then Jeb rode in, plumes shivering. He slashed the man deep in the shoulder with his saber. The man knelt down, closing his eyes as if to pray. Jeb rode next to me. What a body odor he had. On his horse, he said:

“Finish that poor Christian off, soldier.”

My horse settled down and I blew the man over. Pardon Me reared at the shot and tore away in his own race down a vacant meadow—fortunate for me, since I never had to look at the carnage but only thought of holding on.

After McClellan placed himself back on the York, we slipped through Maryland and here we are in Pennsylvania. We go spying and cavorting and looting. I'm wearing out. Pardon Me, I think, feels the lunacy even in this smooth countryside. We're too far from home. We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore. We're just bandits and maniacal. The gleam in the men's eyes tells this. Everyone is getting crazier on the craziness of being simply too far from home for decent return. It is like Ruth in the alien corn, or a troop of men given wings over the terrain they cherished and taken by the wind to trees they do not know.

Jeb leads us. Some days he has the sneer of Satan himself.

Nothing but bad news comes up from home, when it comes.

Lee is valiant but always too few.

All the great bullies I used to see out front are dead or wounded past use.

The truth is, not a one of us except Jeb Stuart believes in anything any longer. The man himself the exception. There is nobody who does not believe in Jeb Stuart. Oh, the zany purposeful eyes, the haggard gleam, the feet of his lean horse high in the air, his rotting flannel shirt under the old soiled grays, and his heroic body odor! He makes one want to be a Christian. I wish I could be one. I'm afraid the only things I count on are chance and safety.

The other night I got my nerve up and asked for him in
his tent. When I went in, he had his head on the field desk, dead asleep. The quill was still in his hand. I took up the letter. It was to his wife, Flora. A daguerreotype of her lay next to the paper. It was still wet from Jeb's tears. At the beginning of the letter there was small talk about finding her the black silk she'd always wanted near Gettysburg. Then it continued: “After the shameful defeat at Gettysburg,” etc.

I was shocked. I always thought we won at Gettysburg. All the fellows I knew thought we had won. Further, he said:

“The only thing that keeps me going on my mission is the sacred inalienable right of the Confederacy to be the Confederacy, Christ Our Lord, and the memory of your hot hairy jumping nexus when I return.”

I placed the letter back on the table. This motion woke him.

I was incredulous that he knew my first name. He looked as if he had not slept a second.

The stories were true.

“Corporal Deed Ainsworth,” he said.

“Sorry to wake you, General.”

“Your grievance?” he said.

“No one is my friend,” I mumbled.

“Because the Creator made you strange, my man. I never met a chap more loyal in the saddle than you. God made us different and we should love His differences as well as His likenesses.”

“I'd like to kiss you, General,” I said.

“Oh, no. He made me abhor that. Take to your good sleep, my man. We surprise the railroad tomorrow.”

“Our raids still entertain you?” I asked.

“Not so much. But I believe our course has been written. We'll kill ten and lose two. Our old Bobbie Lee will smile when we send the nigger back to him with the message. I'll do hell for Lee's smile.”

The nigger came in the tent about then. He was high-falutin, never hardly glanced at me. They had a magnificent bay waiting for the letters. Two soldiers came in and took an
armload of missives from General Stuart's trunk, pressing them into the saddlebags. The nigger, in civilian clothes, finally looked at me.

“Who dis?” he said.

“Corporal Deed Ainsworth; shake hands,” said General Stuart.

I have a glass shop in Biloxi. I never shook hands with any nigger. Yet the moment constrained me to. He was Jeb's best minstrel. He played the guitar better than anything one might want to hear, and the banjo. His voice singing “All Hail the Power” was the only feeling I ever had to fall on my knees and pray. But now he was going back down South as a rider with the messages.

“Ain't shaking hands with no nancy,” said the nigger. “They say he lay down with a Choctaw chief in Mississip, say he lick a heathen all over his feathers.”

“You're getting opinions for a nigger, George,” said Jeb, standing. “I don't believe Our Lord has room for another nigger's thoughts. You are tiring God when you use your mouth, George.”

“Yessuh,” said George.

“Do you want to apologize to Corporal Ainsworth?”

“I real sorry. I don't know what I say,” the nigger said to me. “General Jeb taught me how to talk and sometimes I justs go on talking to try it out.”

“Ah, my brother George,” Jeb suddenly erupted.

He rushed to the nigger and threw his arms around him. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced the black man in the manner of my dreams of how he might embrace me.

“My chap, my chum. Don't get yourself killed,” said Jeb to George. “Try to look ignorant when you get near the road pickets, same as when I found you and saved you from drink.”

“I loves you too, General Jeb. I ain't touched nothing since you saved me. Promise. I gon look ignorant like you say, tills I get to Richmond. Then I might have me a beer.”

“Even Christ wouldn't deny you that. Ah, my George,
there's a heaven where we'll all prosper together. Even this sissy, Corporal Ainsworth.”

They both looked at me benevolently. I felt below the nigger.

George got on the horse and took off South.

At five the next morning we came out of a stand of birches and all of us flew high over the railroad, shooting down the men. I had two stolen repeaters on my hip in the middle of the rout and let myself off Pardon Me. A poor torn Yank, driven out of the attack, with no arm but a kitchen fork, straggled up to me. We'd burned and killed almost everything else.

Stuart rode by me screaming in his rich bass to mount. The blue cavalry was coming across the fire toward us. The wounded man was stabbing me in the chest with his fork. Jeb took his saber out in the old grand style to cleave the man from me. I drew the pistol on my right hip and put it almost against Jeb's nose when he leaned to me.

“You kill him, I kill you, General,” I said.

There was no time for a puzzled look, but he boomed out: “Are you happy, Corporal Ainsworth? Are you satisfied, my good man Deed?”

I nodded.

“Go with your nature and remember our Savior!” he shouted, last in the retreat.

I have seen it many times, but there is no glory like Jeb Stuart putting spurs in his sorrel and escaping the Minié balls.

They captured me and sent me to Albany prison, where I write this.

I am well fed and wretched.

A gleeful little floorwipe came in the other day to say they'd killed Jeb in Virginia. I don't think there's much reservoir of self left to me now.

This earth will never see his kind again.

I'll never forget the summer old Lardner went up to New York with forged credits as a psychiatrist. He'd been studying in med school with designs of becoming a psychiatrist. Then he got into the modern psychiatric scene, had enough of it, and having no other employment for the summer, he went up to New York all fit out with thick glasses and a mustache and an ailing gnarled hand, which he was of course putting on too. He said people in therapy got close to a shrink with an outstanding defect. He had a few contacts, and before you knew it, he was all set up in his office, five phony pieces of paper on the wall.

Old Lardner, I never knew what his real voice was, he had so many, though I knew he came from Louisiana like me. He loved Northerners—Jew, Navajo and nigger alike. He was a broad soul with no spleen in his back pocket for anybody. Except whiners who knew better. You ought to hear some of the tapes he brought back. He never taped anybody without their knowledge of it.

All of them
liked
to be taped, Lardner said.

It was their creativity.

They went like this:

Patient: I feel ugly all the time. I can't quit cigarettes. The two Great Danes I bought won't mate. I'm starting to cry over sentimental things, songs on the radio. Is it basically wrong for a man to like macramé? I never feel intimate with anybody until we talk about Nixon, how awful he was. My kid looks away when I give him an order. I mean a gentle order. Let me take a breath.

Lardner: Jesus Damn Christ! What an
interesting
case! Your story takes the ticket. This is beyond trouble, Mr., ________________ this is
art
!

Patient: What? My story
art
?

Lardner: Yes. You
are
ugly. But so very important.

Patient: You think so?

And so on.

The next one might go:

Patient: I'm angry, angry, Doctor Lardner.

Lardner: Why?

Patient: Because I'm a woman. I've taken such evil crap over the years.

Lardner: Why?

Patient: I thought you'd want to know
what
.

Lardner: You got the wrong doctor. Down on Fifth Avenue, about a dozen doors away, there's a good
what
doctor. A little more expensive.

Patient: I'm so angry at men everywhere. Nothing will ever cure me of this hatred.

Lardner: You're wasting money on me. I'm a man.

Patient: But with time, you and I might produce a cure for me.

Lardner: Well, we can start with your basic remedy and work out from there. How about a glass of pure gin on the rocks and a hard dick? (
Sounds of fistfight between Lardner and patient
.) You hit my gnarled hand!