One Way Ticket
The young, mad fools of my generation went to war without a thought for themselves and a satchel full of pride and blazing hearts that weren’t dimmed in the slightest by the fear of death and the grave. I’m lying here, 68 years old last November, and I’m afraid and I can’t remember my wife’s name. She’s lying in the room across the hall, asleep beneath the coverlets and lace and what not that she collects from the dime store in town. She’s sleeping peacefully, mainly because I’m not lying beside her. I haven’t slept amid all that finery since the ‘60’s. Since she got tired of me lying awake all night and counting the dog tags of the Battered Bastards of the Big Red One.
I remember the snow falling, falling in heaps and all I wanted was a bath and a hot meal and a look at some of them French girls once again on the streets of gay Paris where I left my virginity and my pocket watch. I gave it to a French whore because she fancied it so, and I’ve never regretted it, not one bit. I’ve always had a weakness for pretty women, especially foreign ones with their rouge and their perfume that smells of sin and lilacs. Elizabeth. That’s my wife’s name. She used to love me. She bore me four boys and fixed my supper for going on fifty years now, but I’ve never loved her. I loved that French whore because she didn’t ask me to be anything other than what I was. Hell, she didn’t know but two words of English. Lucky and yes. Damn, if a man don’t need a woman that knows just them two words. I wasn’t about to call her yes, so I just called her Lucky. She was the love of my life.
The scar on my belly feels like so much cloven earth and it still hurts sometimes. At night mostly. I know some of my buddies who lost legs and arms talk about phantom pain. You know, the pain of missing something that isn’t there. I can still feel that SS soldier driving that bayonet into my gut, and I can still see the look in his eyes. The madness of war, at first, and then a kind of sadness. The kind of sadness that you might see on a clown’s face at a carnival or something. The sadness that comes with being a pawn in a grand spectacle that is utterly ridiculous and means nothing and goes nowhere. The kind of spectacle that people will give their last dollar and even their unborn children to see, and then leave with a feeling of having been cheated, but not knowing why.
The artillery shells were the worst. Especially the white phosphorous rounds. A man can live with the constant thought of being shot, or stabbed, but the constant thought of being blown to bits or burning alive eats at a man’s very soul. The not knowing, and the very powerlessness of it all. The not knowing amidst all the others not knowing and freezing and going hungry and missing those pretty French girls and missing their Mamas most of all. War is hell, some say. I say its worse than hell. If a man is in hell, then he’s already arrived at his final destination. He can plant his feet and set his face and burn with the best of them. When a man is in a war, he just waits. Waits for that bullet or that piece of brimstone to start him on his journey. He waits amid the cries and the slaughter and the senseless suffering of men that are dearer to him than most of his own kin. The powerlessness of waiting to die rivals anything that the seven heads of hell ever cooked up for the torture of the unredeemed.
In the morning I’ll have to get up and plow. Plow that damn frozen earth so I can plant taters and what not in the spring and then dig the same damn ground again in the fall. I’m sick of it. I’ve been looking at the backside of that mule now going on thirty years and all I can think of is Lucky. Lucky with her golden brown hair and the twinkle in her eye and the way she said nothing at all but said everything in the process. I miss my youth. I gave it away for a busted up homestead and a broken back and now I’m old. My gout gets to be something awful sometimes and I find myself reading the obituaries every night now before I go to bed. That can’t be good. Reading about death and then dreaming about death and then waking to a living death and the backside of that old gray mule.
I love the smell of gun oil. It tastes like tin and hog grease but it smells like a new day. I took good care of my old M1. I smuggled home a Mauser and a Hitler Youth dagger but I’d give them and a week’s wages for that old M1. The Quartermaster made me turn it in when I got back to the States. I told him to take good care of it for me. Lucille. That’s what I called her. That M1 killed more Germans and I-talians than the cholera but it kept me warm and safe many a night lying in the frost in some god-forsaken foxhole in the middle of the Low Country. I’d kiss that rifle if it was here with me now. I’d sure as shit rather kiss Lucille than I would that hag in there in the other room. Jesus. Where did the time go?
When we hit the beach at Anzio I damn near pissed myself. I probably did piss myself but I was soaked to the gills in seawater and I was too damn scared to be wondering if I’d pissed myself or not. I saw Charlie Trumbull get his head blown off three feet in front of me. I tasted brains and seawater for a week after that. Everything I ate, from C rations to K rations to candy bars tasted like brains and seawater. I’d just spit it out and drink coffee. I didn’t start taking sips from Joe Sweeney’s canteen until after Normandy. By then I wasn’t afraid of death or hell or Jesus or Jeremiah anymore. Once a man sees so much blood and guts and the grease of the war machine gets into his very bones the preaching and pleading of his childhood just kind of slip away. Like so much sand. Like so much seawater.
I can’t take this anymore. We were heroes. Weren’t we? The papers said so. The radio said so. The politicians said so. Even the hag in the other room says so at every goddamn Rook game she plays at. “William got five Purple Hearts and a Silver Star” she says to her hag friends as she doles out the cards. Every year that number of Purple Hearts gets a little larger. By the time I get to be 75 I’m sure I’ll have won the Medal of Honor. I’ll have damn sure earned it too. Too bad about those Purple Hearts. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I have earned a few more Purple Hearts since I came home from the war.
I’m gonna do it. I have two thousand dollars tucked away beneath an old coffee can behind the hog lot. I’ve kept that money for a dreary day through rain, sun, snow and sleet and I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna drive my ass to the airport tomorrow and buy that ticket. One Way, First Class to Paris International Airport. I’m gonna go see Lucky. I’m gonna go see the graves of the men who were the real heroes and take some of the hag’s prize red roses to help them rest a little easier. She won’t miss them. She won’t even miss me. No one will. Not even my kids. I’ll just disappear like a dime store comic book hero and they’ll never see me again. I’ll get lost in Montmarte and get so drunk on good French wine that I’ll see stars again and the flowers in Flanders will welcome me home. I might even smoke some of that Hashish that the Turks sold behind the cafes. Lucky and I will have a grand old time and then we’ll hop a steamer together and sail to the Orient. I always wanted to see the Orient. My brother Jack lost his life there in ’44. Maybe I’ll take some of them roses for him too. Maybe I’ll take a goddamn truckload of roses.
Mama lost her mind when Jack got killed. When she got that letter that said a Jap plane had hit his ship and all hands were lost it flipped a switch in her like a breaker with too much juice on it. Jack was her pride and joy. She struggled through fifteen hours of labor with him and damn near died herself. She always babied him. If there was two biscuits left on the plate she’d give Jack both of them and the last slab of bacon in the house to go in between them. “Jack was a blonde haired blue eyed angel straight from heaven” she’d say. They gave her shock treatments in the State Hospital but she didn’t even budge. She was in a nursing home for thirty years until she died of congestive heart failure. I paid for that nursing home with the sweat of my brow and the best years of my body. She didn’t say two words when I got home from Border duty in ’46. She just stared into space like a soldier that’s been on the front lines for too long. I never knew my Daddy. He lost his mind drinking moonshine and died an early death from the syphilis he got in France during the Great War. I don’t know what was so great about it. They didn’t have to worry about Tiger tanks in the Great War . All they did was sit in the mud and fire old water cooled Lewis guns and drink rot gut homemade gin and get syphilis from Moroccan whores.
Jack wasn’t even my whole brother. Mama had an affair with a man from the Home Guard while Daddy was away in France. I was born in 1917 before he left. Daddy had brown eyes. Mama had brown eyes. I have brown eyes. Daddy died in 1920. Jack was born in 1919. Daddy had syphilis. Jack had blue eyes. I guess that blue eyed fella from the Home Guard had a problem keeping his dick in his pants but we’d always find little presents outside our door every Sunday morning. A bottle of milk, a fried chicken, a pan of cornbread, two dollars, or whatever. During the Depression Mama sewed socks till her fingers bled and ironed shirts on the kitchen table to keep body and soul together. Those “presents” never stopped coming even during the worst of it in ’32. I never knew that fella’s name, but I heard Mama say one time that Jack was the spittin image of his Daddy. She must have really loved him, and I guess he loved her too, or maybe he just felt guilty. He must have had a wife and children of his own. Maybe he was married to a hag too, but I guess he didn’t have any medals to speak of for the war except old Jack. Jack and his goddamned big blue eyes.
The sun is coming up. In a minute that rooster is gonna crow and I’ll have to get up and put the coffee on. I should have already been out there and got the mule hitched up but I guess a little extra time beneath the covers ain’t gonna hurt anybody. Maybe I’ll buy that ticket tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Saturday and I can sneak off without the hag noticing anything but the truck being gone. Hell, she wouldn’t notice anyway. She’s too busy snoring beneath those lace coverlets and satin pillow cases to know I’m alive. I wonder if Lucky will recognize me? Probably not. I’m not the boy I used to be that went to war without a thought for myself and my satchel of pride has been eaten away by the moths of debt, old age and inertia but my heart is still ablaze somewhere down in this old man’s chest next to the shrapnel and the memories of what I used to be and the grit it takes to face one more day behind that old gray mule.
--LC
