Hard Time Killing Floor Blues

At the S.R.O. on the edge of the bluff, Webster wedged his foot in the heavy old door. On the other side of it Liebgott had put all his now-even-more-negligible weight and an equivalent force in raw fury. “Bastard,” he shouted. “You god damn son of a bitch, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Down the hall an elderly man shuffled out of his bedsit and peered through the thick shadows at the source of the commotion. “So sorry, sir,” Webster said. “Old war buddies, you know…”

Liebgott made like he was going to open the door but then he slammed it again on Webster’s foot. It hurt like hell. Maybe something in there was broken. The leather sure was straining around the laces. Inside the room the light was coming in on the worn hardwoods and from somewhere the strange delicacy of music.

The old man peered over Webster’s shoulder. “You was over there, Joey?”

From inside the room came a familiar wordless scream of frustration. Then, “Fucking hell!”

“We served in Europe,” said Webster spitefully. “101st Airborne.”

“I’ve been wondering what was wrong with him,” said the old man. Then he patted Webster’s back with a crepe-papery hand, and projected his voice so that Liebgott might hear it: “Thank you boys for your service.”

“Thank you, sir.”

In the bitter silence Webster heard the record player spinning deepest blues. Then Liebgott said, “With all due respect, fuck off, Mr. O’Malley.”

It did not begin like this. Actually it had begun in New York. Nixon had sent him a letter. It was 1949 and it had been five years since the first jump. People were getting together at the Yale Club. I know it might offend your delicate sensibilities to so much as set foot in there, Nixon had written, but we’d be glad to have you.

Webster had come down on the train from Portland. He’d needed to go see his editor anyway. He had gotten the gig with the Post after the war and then after college, and he had had a doctor friend write a letter attesting it was of the highest import that he live by the seaside, because of numerous respiratory ailments brought on by exposure to mustard gas, this of course being not necessarily true. There were too many people in New York and being there he was always jumpy. At home in Maine he woke up and made coffee and stared at the sea for twenty minutes (he set an egg timer) and then he felt better and he could write. The dreams weren’t bad if you had medicine. The leg hurt sometimes when it rained or was particularly cold. Sometimes other boys from Easy wrote him and said they were coming through and he met them on the wharf in town and they laughed and told stories. Most of those boys were at the Yale Club. It was summer and warm inside and they drank beer and gin and sweat through their suits.

He’d pulled a chair up to Toye and Guarnere. Toye had a prosthetic and a very dapper cane but Guarnere used a wheelchair. They hadn’t seen each other since the crossroads and Toye eventually confessed that he'd thought Webster had been dead until someone had told him otherwise recently. After a while Captain Nixon came over and crouched, knees cracking. “Boys.”

“Sir.”

Nixon clapped Webster’s back. The most shocking thing about the whole endeavor was that he was drinking club soda. He later heard from Winters that this didn’t last long, which wasn’t surprising. “You boys don’t have to call me that anymore.”

Webster wasn't sure he could do that. He knew Nixon’s first name was Lewis but it didn’t really look like it fit on his face.

“We heard you married again,” said Toye, raising a lazy toast with the bottom of his beer bottle.

“Hmm,” Nixon said, thoughtfully rubbing the back of his neck. Webster later heard from Winters that this didn’t last long either. This was one of those things that probably seemed incredibly obvious except to the people in it.

Conversation turned away quickly from the subject of romance. The four of them cased the smoky room for gossip. “Heffron’s not here,” Guarnere noticed eventually.

“He came through Maine six months ago for work,” Webster said. “Slept on my couch. Snores like the devil. But Roe’s not here.”

“He wrote me,” said Toye. “Couldn’t get away. But you know who’s not here?”

“Who?”

Toye’s brow contorted into one of its more fanciful formations. “Probably the first person y’all should’ve noticed hasn’t graced us with his presence.”

Webster picked his head up and looked around. He had been waiting all night, pretending he wasn’t waiting, perhaps not even quite realizing he was waiting, for this person to come through the door and violently take the piss out of him.

“Ah,” said Nixon. “Joe Liebgott.”

“Ding ding ding.”

“Web, you know where he is?”

He had drunk just the right amount not to be defensive. Why would I know where he is? “He went back out to California. He got on a train right off the boat, you remember.”

“You heard from him?”

Why would I have heard from him? Webster shook his head. “Not a peep.”

The next morning, on the subway, he stood in a corner by the door and eventually he realized his knee was bouncing madly. Even when he noticed it and tried to make it stop it didn’t stop. It put a kind of warm hurt-current up through the old injury. He got off a stop too soon and walked to the offices of the Post. Outside the brightness off the mirrored buildings stirred his hangover like a wooden spoon.

His editor had gone to Europe in the last war and was a sympathetic man Webster sometimes thought might be addicted to morphine. He was usually drinking sherry. For a while they talked politics, and then they talked pitches, and then that worked its way around to an idea which was perhaps a very bad one. “Had a little get together last night,” Webster said. “Some of the boys from the Airborne.”

The editor refreshed Webster’s sherry though he’d only managed one suffering sip. “Bit of nostalgia with the good old boys?”

So nostalgia was what they were calling it these days…

“There was an interesting no-show,” Webster said.

If you really wanted to get into it, it didn’t even begin there. It began as with all things: with the great destroyer and creator, the thresher, the potato ricer, the killing line in the slaughterhouse… He had many euphemisms for it now. Basically like the fishermen on the ships coming into Portland Harbor grabbing and slicing and gutting and tossing the cold little silver bodies into crates to be sold. Webster had stopped eating meat shortly after coming home, which many of his neighbors found incomprehensible and abhorrent, especially for somebody living on the Maine coast who would not even touch fish. He thought about writing to Doc Roe and asking him if he had a similar visceral reaction to the sight of meat now, having seen so much of it, but that seemed callous. He himself had seen a lot less than Doc. Chiefly of course he had seen his own.

They were meat in that thing. They were like a deer that had been sleeping in the fields that the great harvesting machinery went over and sliced to ribbons. Sometimes he had felt like he had about two brain cells on and one of them was producing toxic amounts of adrenaline and one was reciting choice lines of Wilfred Owen. (What passing bells for those who die as cattle?) Now there was a lot he couldn’t remember too cleanly. Getting wounded was quite clear, somehow. Sometimes he could watch it happen over again as through a veil of clear water. Not as clear but audible sometimes like a distant transmission on AM radio bands from the great wilderness of the cosmos was an indelible memory of the mountains, the vivid lake in the hazy valley, the algaed blur of a prolonged drunkenness, and the fine resort room, since stripped of most of its valuables by several companies’ worth of wine-drunk and vengeful looters, where he and Joe Liebgott fucked in the en-suite bathtub.

This was another instance of being meat. There was running water and they were clean now. They had done this before under circumstances that could not quite be captured by memory even then. It was just physical, or that was what he was telling himself all the time. Of course war was all physical. You would have thought they got enough of it.

Memory was like a broken mirror sometimes scattering reflective silver shards across the floor. He picked one up and looked into it, and then he dropped it and it broke still further.

Liebgott was hot as hell. He was one raw nerve. Being shut up here in the most beautiful place on earth, having been a killer many times over, understanding soon one would have to be a killer again, have to put the tight killer mask and the red killer gloves back on again, might do that to a man. Certainly it was getting there doing it to Webster, which was why he couldn’t quite manage to stop drinking. Liebgott seemed to resent some key things, like that Webster was bigger and had more chest hair, but this couldn’t be helped, and anyway he couldn’t have resented it much, given what happened.

These days Webster remembered it like the skin flicks in the all-night theaters in the North End that he and his fraternity brothers at Harvard had gone to see on occasion in the early forties — hazy, fragmented — and yet it was only the second most memorable occurrence of that clear and strange and terrible day, when they had driven up together into the sharp spring hills.

While Webster was in New York, he went around the V.A. and cajoled the pretty girl at the counter into looking up Liebgott’s address. It was given as a post office box in San Francisco. So he went to San Francisco, where the early summer air was crisp and cool, and stayed in Oakland with a Harvard friend, Mischa, who was pursuing a masters degree at Berkeley, writing strange poetry, and smoking truckloads of marijuana. On the night Webster first arrived he was offered a tiny square of paper that Mischa said would cause visions if he would just allow it to dissolve on his tongue, which he refused. In the morning, he borrowed Mischa’s car and drove across the bay.

Before this he had never been to California. It struck him that California was very new. It was more spread out and far apart. Everything was big and clean. On the bridge over the bay he could see the prison island in the great sound, and the container ships spotting across the water like bright beads. The clouds moved overhead quickly changing color on the water, and the city rolled steeply down into the deep gray sea.

He waited at the central post office for two days like a private detective, chain-smoking in sunglasses and a hat on the bench at the trolley stop outside. For lunch he went to a Greek diner and drank coffee and ate stuffed grape leaves and eventually he found a secondhand bookstore on the next corner and bought a paperback copy of Manhattan Transfer. In the late afternoon of the second day he was beginning to wonder if he ought to be more diligent about these methods, and he went to the pay telephone booth inside the post office to put in a call to the local V.A. office, and while the operator was patching him through he looked up and around the lobby and there was Liebgott, in profile, standing by his unlocked P.O. box, reading an official-looking letter with an extremely furrowed brow. It took Webster a moment to recognize him, because he was in civilian clothes, which were two different shades of weak, pale gray, like they had been washed in the same dingy water, but it was certainly him by the smooth abstract brand of the scar from the crossroads on the side of his neck. He was quite thin. The late golden light through the doors drew his face in dramatic shadow.

Webster turned back toward the receiver and hung up the phone, trying to memorize a split-second’s image. When he dared to turn back around again Liebgott was gone. Webster went out of the booth and out of the post office and saw him turning left at the end of the street. His heart was beating fast. He got in Mischa’s car — there was a horrible second when he thought it wouldn't start — cased the block for cops, pulled a tight U just in time to see Liebgott pass in front of him through the intersection behind the wheel of a stately pea-green Ford. Webster followed.

It was like this city had been built standing straight up once then somebody had sat on the edge of it and everything had started sliding, a little more everyday, so that nobody really noticed it until the entire city was drastically steep and it was too late to do anything about it. The brakes squealed on Mischa’s car which made Webster feel like a shit P.I. He supposed that being a journalist usually felt like this, if the story was good. Maybe not exactly like this, but like something: just ahead, ever ahead, there was a golden kernel of truth, which could not yet be known.

The green Ford pulled around back of a row of shops, and Webster pulled over in the front, tried to cover his face with Manhattan Transfer, put the radio off, put the windows down. After a few moments Liebgott came out from the alley and went into the first shop, which was an outdoor supply store. The bell rang when he opened the door and the man behind the counter looked up with happy recognition. He and Liebgott shook hands, and then they spoke intently, Liebgott leaning over the counter, his narrow back shifting under his gray shirt. Cash was distributed from Liebgott’s wallet and the man unearthed from beneath the counter three boxes of ammunition for a .44 rifle, which he proceeded to wrap in butcher paper as though they were baked goods. Thus acquired they shook hands again and Liebgott left. Webster put his face back in the book, and a few moments later watched in the rear view as the pea green Ford winnowed back out of the alley.

They drove across town. It was getting to be the time of day when folks got out of work and the streets were busy with men in suits and girls in poodle skirts and even some girls in pants. Webster let some cars get between them to preempt suspicion and as such almost missed the next place Liebgott stopped, which was a record store on the edge of a poorer district. The tall black girl shopkeeper also shook Liebgott’s hand and produced something for him from behind the counter, though this was just a vinyl recording of Son House doing “Dead Letter Blues” and the morning’s newspaper. Webster reflected that a legitimate P.I. might be able to read lips. He imagined that they were arguing about music, about which Liebgott had always had opinions, chiefly that Jewish and black people had come up with all the good music that had ever existed. The shop girl was trying to sell him on an unmarked recording about which she was gesturing expansively and Liebgott opened his wallet and gestured expansively and the girl laughed and conceded and put the record back under the counter again. He paid and they shook hands again and then he turned to the door and Webster feigned extreme interest in whatever was across the street and thanked god that everyone in San Francisco seemed to have the same junky Packard that Mischa did.

They moved on. The sun was low. Liebgott stopped quickly at a liquor store and came out with a fifth of cheap scotch, and then they moved on again.

The late day drew shades of red and gold across the city. The rows of white and pastel houses, regimented into even blocks, lowered and tightened like teeth or used blanks in a watercolor palette. Outside a restaurant people laughed and outside a tobacco shop a cadre of old Italian men played cards. Living in Maine had attuned Webster to the sense of the ocean and he could smell the salt as they climbed a hill and turned into a wealthier neighborhood. The houses here were Mediterranean-looking with roofs of nested clay tiles, stucco painted white, sitting on big and well maintained lots between which one might catch the sight of the sea, like the pale shock of a woman’s upper thigh as she fixed her stocking. Soon enough the colorless eye of the sun would touch to it and set it ablaze but the color now was black and still except close to shore where seams of white showed in it. The houses were rich enough that maybe nobody lived in them. If anybody did they never lifted a finger.

The pea green Ford rolled through a stop sign and pulled over at the next corner. Webster turned right away from the water and parked halfway down the block. Throwing caution to the winds, he got out, shut the car door quietly, half-ran to the corner, keeping low, crouched behind a low stone wall and hedge of boxwoods, peered around. In the green car, cradling the fifth of scotch in his lap, Liebgott was watching up at the stately home across the street.

It was going to be difficult to explain what he was doing if anyone came along. It was difficult enough to explain what he was doing to himself. He studied the house in attempt to memorize it quickly. It was number 533, Sea Cliff Avenue by the sign on the corner, and columns flanked the red door. On the second floor a few circular windows vaguely resembled portholes. The grass and the palms in the yard had been well kept.

A dog barked somewhere close, and he startled, nearly losing his balance. One of the chains broke in his brain and set the whole mess of training and battleground and other wartime specifics leaking so that his heart rate stepped on the gas. He was trying to calm himself down when he heard the engine of the pea green Ford turn over and like the grunt he had been all those years ago he ran hunched against enemy fire back down the street toward a position of cover, and he got in Mischa’s Packard and pulled a squealing U just in time to see Liebgott’s car make a right at the end of the next block.

Behind them to the west the light touched the water and set a fine spill of colors without names upon the city like a bath of radiation. Webster followed Liebgott along the edge of the Presidio toward an older and seedier neighborhood at the edge of a bluff above the Golden Gate, to the decaying Victorian mansion with the sign out front that said ROOMS BY THE WEEK, to the dark hallway, to the room, to the door.

The door, which Webster’s foot was still in. The old man made a damning gesture as though it were a magic spell. “Sorry, sir,” Webster said again.

“You boys better work it out by the time I’m back,” Mr. O’Malley said. “I’m going to get an egg cream.”

He went down the dark hall into the light and disappeared down the stairs. In the fragile quietude Webster could tell it was Lead Belly on the stereo. Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me…

“Why didn’t you come to the reunion,” said Webster. His foot didn’t hurt anymore; it was pretty much numb, and adrenaline buzzed his brain. Proximity like this to the other guys hadn’t made him feel like he was at war again. Leave it to Liebgott’s bare aura to possess transporting power. “We missed you.”

“Aw,” said Liebgott acidly, “did you?”

“Yes, of course, Lieb, come on and let me in.”

The door swung open — all Webster saw was the bed and the windows — and Liebgott stepped out, directly into Webster’s personal space, so that he stumbled back and almost fell over a raised wrinkle in the ancient carpet. He recovered in time to watch Liebgott slam the door to his room and square himself in front of it like a dragon defending a horde of treasure. Close up it was apparent to see there was even less of him now than there had been then, even when they had just come out of the woods and had been starving. The bones of his collar were sharp inside his shirt and there were deep shadows like old stains under his eyes. That old feral beauty was about him and yet tarnished like an object in a museum. It was still there only less bright.

“Everybody says hello,” said Webster pathetically.

“You can tell everybody I said fuck you.”

“They’ll be glad to hear it.”

They clocked each other like boxers in a prizefighting ring while the crowd screamed mercilessly for blood. He watched Liebgott make an account of him and weigh his odds. He had a good enough poker face that it was impossible to tell what the sum was.

“You look even scrawnier,” Webster said.

“You look even WASPier.”

“Yeah, well, I got my damn degree. What’s your excuse?”

“Everything tastes like ash,” Liebgott said. The pocket of his shirt sagged in the shape of a cigarette carton, and he took one out and stuck it to his lower lip. “You got some piece you wanna say or something?”

“No. I just thought, you know, maybe we could catch up…”

Liebgott’s eyes and brow narrowed as though he were innately suspicious of such a proposition. “Catch up?”

“It’s been years,” Webster said. “Did your neighbor say egg cream?”

“We’re not going to the diner. O’Malley is about the worst gossip in Frisco and I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Webster didn’t quite understand. “He didn’t know you were in the war?”

“Well.” Liebgott’s mouth twisted. “Now everybody knows.”

“Wait, do you not tell anybody…”

Liebgott rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said, brushing past Webster down the narrow hall. They went loudly down the creaky stairs and then back out into the humming twilight. They set off down the narrow streets away from the water, into a district of warehouses and empty storefronts.

“How long have you lived here,” said Webster, figuring it was probably better to start with this bullshit. From the outside the rickety boardinghouse looked like it would be better off condemned. Liebgott was probably the youngest thing living there by a handful of decades. The dust was probably older than him.

“Couple years,” said Liebgott. “Did you pull out this small talk bullshit at your fancy reunion?”

Webster laughed. “We mostly talked about women and compared wounds. I hardly remember after a point.”

“So I didn’t miss much.”

“You missed seeing everybody in a suit,” said Webster, “and you missed a detailed conversation about the latest prosthetic technology… and you missed Captain Nixon drinking club soda.”

“Wow,” said Liebgott, “that sounds fuckin depressing.”

Webster hadn’t really realized that it had been until Liebgott said it. Hearing everybody talk about their wives and kids had driven him back to the bar again and again, though, tellingly, it had also driven those married fathers among the company back to the bar again and again.

It wouldn’t do to admit Liebgott was right. “Everybody misses you, Lieb,” Webster said. “They want to see you next time.”

“You can tell them they had better come to California and follow my car all day if they want to see me,” Liebgott shot back. “You think I didn’t notice you? I thought you were… I don’t know, CIA or something. I had my rifle behind the door.”

Webster filed this away to mull over later. CIA? “If it’s the plane ticket, we’d all chip in to help you buy it, and I’m sure you could stay with Nixon — ”

“Jesus, Web,” said Liebgott, “you sure are like a dog with a goddamn human femur.”

“Well, it wasn’t the same without you.”

Liebgott cocked an eyebrow which said, that’s your problem, pal. Then he said, “Here.”

“Where?”

“Oh my god. Here.” He threw a skinny arm across Webster’s chest. “The bar. On your right.”

It was almost unrecognizable as a public establishment of any kind due to its very darkness. The windows were low and narrow and shrouded in black curtains. It almost felt as though Winters had told him, Webster, take Liebgott and go clear that bunker. As he would have then he let Liebgott lead the way. Age before beauty. Good idea in the long run, because the bartender recognized Liebgott and put a bottle of whiskey and a fingerprinted, chipped tumbler on the end of the bar just at the sight of him. Then a second, when Liebgott twitched his head regretfully in Webster’s direction. These things in hand they went to the darkest back corner table, where one might watch the door and the bar without being seen, like participants in an extramarital affair or otherwise like Wild West villains.

“You don’t want to be seen with me,” Webster said, jesting, but not really.

Liebgott sloshed whiskey messily into the two tumblers. “I sure as hell don’t.”

“Why not?”

“There are only two reasons two men have a drink together around here.”

Webster understood instantly what they were and that both of them applied. It didn’t do to talk about the second one yet, or possibly ever. “You really don’t tell anybody you were over there?”

“Not a fuckin word. And don’t you dare say shit!”

“Jesus. I won’t. But — ”

Liebgott waited for him to finish the thought. He was not famously very patient, so he must have really wanted to hear it so he could get pissed over it.

“I mean, hero of the Battle of the Bulge…”

“Oh, excuse me, were you there?”

“Jesus Christ, not this again!”

“We were basically just Kraut target practice in the forest. All the real fighting happened at Elsenborn Ridge, apparently.”

“Who says?”

“Life Magazine and all that fucking bullshit.” Liebgott shrugged. “We froze our asses off. I’m glad you weren’t there, you would have been insufferable.”

Webster refreshed his glass of whiskey. “You really don’t want to talk about it, huh?”

“What?”

“You must really want to change the subject, for you to finally admit you’re glad I wasn’t there. Wow, you’ve grown up, asshole.”

Webster recognized the facial expression that meant steam was about to start coming out Liebgott’s ears. Nuclear fission, code red critical. Funny how you could share very close quarters with someone for two and a half years and then not see them for another four and still understand them reflexively. Webster braced for impact like he was jumping out of a plane all over again. But all Liebgott did was refresh his own glass of whiskey.

This was a bad chess game between dipsomaniacal idiots, Webster realized with extreme clarity.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Liebgott said with forced evenness, “and if you tell people, all they ever want to do is talk about it.”

“We’re talking about it right now.”

“That’s different, I don’t have to explain anything to you, and besides I wish I wasn’t.”

“Really?”

Liebgott put his head in his hands long-sufferingly. “Fuck off,” he moaned. “Did you not get enough wistful reminiscence with the rest of the guys?”

“Well, it was a great night, Lieb, but I didn’t get the repeated kicks to the balls that I guess I really count on you for.”

“Hmm,” Liebgott said. He didn’t look away from Webster as he finished the rest of the whiskey in his tumbler. His eyes were heavy in the jagged face and inside the limp collar of the gray shirt his long throat moved. “Masochist,” he said at last, setting the glass with a thump on the table.

Webster clinked his empty glass against Liebgott’s. “Takes one to know one.”

Another round was poured and swallowed. Then another. Somebody went up to the jukebox in the front of the bar and put on Sinatra doing “That Old Black Magic,” so that Liebgott shaped his first three fingers into a pistol and set it assuredly to his temple.

“When we were over there,” it felt like a good idea to say, it was the booze on an empty stomach, and the jet lag, and the dulcet tones of Ol’ Blue Eyes, “it seemed like hardly anything got to you.”

Liebgott was eyeing the person who had put Sinatra on the jukebox with unadulterated contempt. He cut Webster a sideways glance that might have advised more prudent men to tread carefully.

“It made you a damn good soldier.”

This surprised him, though he endeavored not to show it. He chewed on it for a while, and this time when he went for his cigarettes he offered one to Webster. “We aren’t soldiers anymore,” he said.

“We aren’t?”

Liebgott shook his head. “Maybe that’s the problem,” he said. “We’re something else now.”

Drunk, swimming in the bare moonlight, they walked back to the S.R.O. on the bluff through the silent streets. Webster was going on and on about sleeping in his car and Liebgott was going on and on about how Webster sure as hell wasn’t coming upstairs, except next thing they were at the door to Liebgott's room, still having this conversation as he drunkenly wrestled with the key in the lock.

The room was small and bare and dark but for the rime of moonlight on the floor and the sound of the ocean echoing in the cold, sterile whitewash. The lightswitch by the door was broken so Liebgott put on the desk lamp, which threw gold light and stark shadow over the necessaries: plywood furniture, hotplate with coffeepot, crate of records and turntable, stack of bright paperbacks, open closet spilling muted tones, Rebecca poster hung crookedly, the bed which was made neatly with hospital corners, the .44 rifle propped against the lintel by the door, as Liebgott had promised, and an entire wall papered nearly top to bottom with newspaper clippings of varying age and size. Select among the clippings were connected by neat graphite lines that had been drawn against a yardstick or otherwise marked with symbols or scribbled notes.

“What are you lookin at,” said Liebgott in the lead-in-to-starting-a-fight tone.

Webster now slightly better understood the earlier situation at the door. “This is a nice place,” he said, turning toward the windows. Across the street, below the bluff, the light was on the water.

“Fuck off.”

“It’s a nice view.”

“Don’t fuckin humor me,” Liebgott said. “You come out here, you follow me all day, like some kind of psycho killer, I can handle that, but do not fuckin humor me.”

It had always been like this. Like he cut six inches off the fuse just by being. The spark went racing right to the payload. “You want me to tell you I think you’ve gone fucking insane, and I think you're punishing yourself, but I can’t tell why, or for what, because you’ve never had any remorse about anything we did?”

God damn him, Liebgott did not even look surprised. “Better!” he announced delightedly. “What else?”

“I think you’re taking the easy way out of it all. It’s funny, because I don’t think you’re a coward.”

“How nice of you to say, Web.”

“Well I mean it.”

It was like the split second when you first jumped out of the plane and you were just falling before the chute opened, except it went on and on and on.

“It about killed me that you weren’t there,” Webster went on. “I think you need it.”

“I can get drunk and smoke cigars on my own.”

“But aren’t you lonely?”

The fine bones tightened in Liebgott’s jaw. “No,” he lied. It was the kind of lie where maybe he didn’t even know he was lying. It was a bone-deep, self-told, indelible lie.

“Hmm,” said Webster.

“Fuck you. I can’t assuage any of your fuckin guilt for you.”

“Is that why you think I’m here?”

“Why the fuck else would you be here.”

Their eyes met. He wondered what Liebgott could see in his own. In Liebgott’s there was just enough hope that there could be another answer to this question — like a raindrop, or a single match — that Webster kissed him.

The sheets of Liebgott’s bed were thin and rough and cold as the bed linens at Toccoa. There was a tin of Vaseline under a loose floorboard in a sanctum which also held a dirty magazine and a few old letters; it wasn’t much, but it was better than whatever they had used when they had done this before, which was mostly spit, if Webster could correctly remember. They did it quickly and without much talking, except Liebgott said, sounding ripped open, “Jesus, David.”

They were reduced to each other’s first names which otherwise they never said. “Yeah,” Webster managed. “Joe.”

Thank god, he was thinking, somewhere, somehow. Thank god, I still can. The trouble he had not even realized he had feared was not in the physical particulars but in something else which was bigger and held everything else inside it. His mind produced a parachute. They were held aloft together on the winds until they hit the ground.

It was hard to stay awake until Liebgott fell asleep, especially because Webster suspected Liebgott was also trying to stay awake until he himself fell asleep. Beneath the bluff the white noise of the sea might be soothed into the comforting lullaby tone of bombs far away. Once Liebgott did fall asleep it was even more of a trial to get up. The bed was warm and the room was cool and the moon was bright like a broken egg on the floor. Eventually he reminded himself of his twenty minute allotted limit for aimless meditation, which by now surely had been surpassed, and got to his feet, trying to be light-footed upon the creaky floorboards. Liebgott stirred and made a protesting sound he would have been humiliated by had he been fully conscious. Webster shushed him, which he would have been humiliated by had this not been a matter of extreme investigative import. The light came across Liebgott’s bare back like a white-blue blanket and he reached and touched it. The skin was very soft, or his hands were very rough. He wrapped his hand around Liebgott’s narrow shoulder and squeezed. Then he went to the clippings on the wall. They mostly had to do with a Navy technology facility that had been open since before the war on the charmingly-monikered Treasure Island, which had been constructed in the middle of the bay for a 1939 World’s Fair exhibition. A few other clippings cited European scientists who had been invited to the facility to do special classified research and development work on projects pertaining to communications and radar as well as nuclear and biological decontamination.

Webster made a mental note to find back editions of the San Francisco paper of record at the public library. Then he went to the milk crate of record albums on the floor, which contained almost exclusively blues and jazz and klezmer LPs, apart from a badly worn shellac recording of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night which was possibly older than both of them combined. On the makeshift desk beside the turntable there was a letter, postmarked just two days previous, from the California Department of Veterans’ Affairs in Sacramento. The return address was given as a Doctor Carlton Smith. Webster picked up the letter and saw the words results of your psychological evaluation and decided not to read the rest. Then he put Liebgott’s robe on and went down the hall to piss, and then he got back in the bed and somehow, truly unclear how something like this could happen, Liebgott got into his arms, like they were magnets, like neither of them were trying, which perhaps they weren’t. This was just what had happened then, what was happening again now. Outside the sea rained fearsome munitions upon the bluff; it stood firm; they slept.

After the killing on the mountain they all went their separate ways to get drunk. Webster went to the lake, which wasn’t quite as good as the sea for forgetting. Scotch was better than everything combined, so that it took him a while to find the hotel where he was billeted in the cold spring night.

Liebgott was sitting in the hall, like a dead man or a broken rag doll against the old wallpaper and the plush red carpet. He was neither quite asleep nor awake. At first Webster feared the worst, because there was blood all down his face and his shirt, but it was just that his nose was broken. They tussled for a while in the en-suite bathroom, slipping on blood and towels on the floor, whilst Webster tried to sit Liebgott down and set the break, which was already reaching deep thundercloudish bruises out under his eyes. Finally they ended up sitting in the bathtub together, inadvisably working on another bottle of scotch. “If you won’t let me do it,” Webster said, “you’ve got to do it yourself.”

“What the fuck are you talking about.”

“Your fucking nose, idiot.”

Liebgott touched it, and laughed, probably because the booze had taken away most of the pain but not the weirdness. It was about twice the size of usual which was saying something. “I don’t even remember what the fucker said,” Liebgott confessed.

“Who?”

“I don’t fucking know. Mean left hook.”

Webster put his cheek against the cool tile and closed his eyes. Behind them, an old disheveled man was running up toward the last rags of snow. The colors bright as a child’s watercolor box.

“Web,” said Liebgott. “David.”

He opened his eyes. He hoped his expression conveyed, don’t fucking talk about it. It was a moot point because Liebgott had just wanted a witness to his setting of his own broken nose, which he did without a sound except for the cracking, and then he spat a vicious gob of blood into the tub, and then he put his bloody mouth against Webster’s mouth.

Webster parried like a fencer. Liebgott backed off and they squared like boxers, breathing hard. There was a fine ruby jewel sitting in Liebgott’s left nostril. His face settled into a kind of incorrigibly smug expression of victory when Webster, entirely without meaning to, touched his tongue to his lower lip to see if there was blood there.

In the morning they were quite sick, sticky, and things kept hitting Webster over the head all day, things like, for example, the crease of Liebgott’s ass and thigh, his ribs, his underarm hair, his skin against the white ceramic, his face in the meadow as he drew the bead, his face when Sisk pulled the trigger, as the whole company ran in all their gear in the spring sun over the high passes.

It did not begin like this. In Landsberg, after the fistfight, in which he almost drowned Liebgott in two inches of mud, not on purpose but just because he wouldn’t quit, and because they were both so drunk, and because the events of the day had broken off yet another piece of whatever part of Webster was capable of knowing peace and tenderness, and he did not want to know, and could not even truly fathom, what the events of the day had done to Liebgott — after all this, they were sitting together against the garden wall. Rags of snow in the furrowed dirt. The people in this town had tended this place while just up the hill —

He unfurled his hands from fists. The blood rushing back into his fingers burned and ached. Beside him Liebgott put his own hand over his mouth and yelled into it.

Next thing they were holding each other tightly. Next thing Liebgott’s cock was in his mouth and Liebgott’s filthy trembling hands were in his hair. Grief, he figured later, made people do crazy fucking things, and anyway in the morning he hardly remembered it, would’ve called it done, except that it kept happening.

The light of day was literally warm but metaphorically cold, and it took a long time to seep into the tiny room and over the bed in which they were tangled together, because the windows faced west. Liebgott got up when it first touched him and put a pot of coffee on the hotplate and the Son House record on the turntable. While it brewed he put his robe on and disappeared down the hall and came back with his hair wet, by which time Webster had gotten dressed and was perusing the current issue of Amazing Stories at the top of Liebgott’s stack of paperbacks.

The coffee didn’t taste much better than the stuff they had once made in their helmets, but it was hot and the morning was sticky-cool. When Liebgott passed him a well-dented tin mug they clocked each other like rivals at a watering hole. The more things change, et cetera. He wasn’t sure if it was worth throwing this kind of hat in the ring, but he couldn’t let it stand anymore. “What’s all this,” he said, gesturing around at the room.

Liebgott was sitting on the floor by the crate of LPs with the previous day’s newspaper. “What’s it look like.”

Webster shook his head. Basically it looked like Liebgott had turned his brain inside out, with all the tearing and the rage and the dark lines, but he couldn’t very well say that. Could not very well confess he thought he knew what the inside of Liebgott’s brain looked like.

“It’s research,” Liebgott said magnanimously.

“Research for what?”

“A story.”

“A story for what publication?”

He looked up acidly from the paper on the floor. “A story for my fucking self. God damn.”

“What’s it about?”

He thought he knew, he was even pretty sure he knew, but sometimes you had to hear it from someone else. Liebgott checked the clock perched crookedly on the desk by the record player, which was five minutes slow, by Webster’s watch. “What did I tell you literally eight hours ago?”

“That I had the best cock this side of the continental divide?”

Liebgott’s upper lip twitched. He seemed to be deciding whether or not to make this a fight. “Not to fucking humor me,” he corrected.

“Well, I meant it when I said it looked like you’ve gone insane.”

“I know what it looks like.”

“Then why don’t you tell me what it is?”

Liebgott closed the newspaper neatly, and then he started the record player going again from the beginning of the side. I got a letter this morning, what do you reckon it read… He swallowed the rest of his coffee too fast to taste it and then he found his cigarettes and lit one. Webster recognized ritual preparations. At last he said, “The Pentagon is bringing over Kraut scientists to build missiles to nuke the Soviets and rockets to send us to the moon.”

Webster supposed it could have been worse. Still, it was pretty bad. Like all the things that had fallen out of his head over there had been patched up with torn pages from Amazing Stories. “Why do you think that?”

“Jesus. Is this Twenty fuckin Questions?”

“Lieb, if you want people to take accusations like this seriously you’re going to have to get used to telling them why — you think they’re bringing Nazi scientists here? To the United States?”

“To San Francisco,” Liebgott qualified. “I know they are.”

“But — ”

“You don’t have to believe me.” He folded his arms over his chest. “I didn’t expect you to.”

Maybe he should have left it, but instead Webster said, “What’s the Naval Technical Training Center.”

Liebgott cocked a brow. His mouth was tight. “Old Navy processing facility,” he said. “They used to do experiments on queers in the old psych ward.”

“What do they do now?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Nobody knows doesn’t automatically mean harboring Nazis!”

Liebgott stood and turned the record player off and the sound slid and slowed to a stop. “I have to go to work,” he said, not quite looking at Webster. “You can entertain yourself, right?”

“Yeah — when do you get off?”

Liebgott looked at him with cold exasperation and as such Webster understood the double entendre. “That depends,” Liebgott said.

Something twisted. God damn if he didn’t want it again already badly. “Well, Lieb, don’t you think — ”

The narrow shoulder that slammed brusquely into his as Liebgott slipped past him toward the milk crates in which he had stowed neatly folded clean clothes might have told Webster something, had his self-preservation instinct not been annihilated.

“ — don’t you think, if you won’t tell anybody, if you won’t come be with the rest of us, maybe you ought to talk to someone at the V.A.?”

“About what?”

“Listen, I went, and they said, maybe you have — they call it Combat Stress Reaction.”

Liebgott had crouched on the floor to unearth more threadbare clothing in varying shades of gray, and at the sound of the diagnosis he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The buttons of his spine were in a fine array under the worn fabric of his robe.

Now Webster was wishing he had read the letter from the psychiatrist. “They can give you stuff,” he said, trying to tread lightly, or maybe not, “you know, pills…”

“Pills.”

“Yeah. I mean, it helps you sleep. Maybe it could help you with, you know, the food thing.”

Liebgott stood, knees cracking. He untied the belt of his robe and Webster looked away toward the water in the windows. It felt like something different in the light of day. Perhaps this contributed to the air of arctic coldness in Liebgott’s voice when he said, “I don’t need help.”

“Really? Because I mean it, Lieb, you look like a stray dog.”

“I have it under control,” Liebgott said evenly. God help him, he sounded like he believed himself. “Do you?”

Once Liebgott had left for work, Webster went down the street to the diner he had mentioned the evening previous. The waitress was young and pretty and paid him special attention and he thought he should probably ask her about Liebgott, but instead he settled for being a poor journalist and adhering to Liebgott’s insane wishes. What was the sense in not wanting beautiful girls to know you were a veteran and you’d been wounded serving your country? He’d seen Liebgott flirt — he’d been the object of Liebgott's flirting. He was fucking ruthless.

He ate pancakes and drank more coffee and then he went back to Mischa’s car and drove back across the city and half across the bay to Treasure Island. Much of the land was a public park. The naval facility, which was new and low and whitewashed, was behind a tall fence. He walked around the perimeter to a security station and said he was a veteran and a journalist and could he take a look around? The officer stationed there declined and in fact after that an unmarked car tailed him while he walked on the neat, freshly paved roads back to where he had parked.

Something was breathing on his neck. It filtered in though the hole in the back of his head where the animal brain attached sometimes like a parasite. Still. There was another moment of near panic when the car struggled to start. Once it did, he drove too fast. His heart was slamming against the cage of ribs and he took the first exit off the highway in the city and pulled into a random driveway and put his forehead against the steering wheel. He thought of the ocean.

He knew what Liebgott would say: you don’t protect something that isn’t potentially dangerous. He also understood classification and the importance thereof. At war they had had ways of getting around that, most of which were named Lewis Nixon and VAT 69. These were different times and they were civilians now. He thought of the ocean. He drew his heart to the room at night, the moon, the water… Eventually a portly woman in an apron came out from the house looking like she might crack a shotgun in his direction and he left the driveway and drove back across the city.

His hands were shaking, so he stopped at another diner and had more coffee. This waitress was pretty too, tall, dark hair sticking to her neck and her red cheek in the sweaty heat from the kitchen. After she came over a few times to check on him he asked if she’d sit down. She looked into the kitchen window and checked for orders up but then she did, with a wry grace, as if men asked her to do this all the time, which they probably did. “Naomi,” said Webster, reading the nameplate pin above the breast of her white blouse.

“That’s me,” said Naomi. Her wry grace might also be called a kind of sardonic delicacy. She reminded him, horrifyingly, of someone else he knew. “Who are you?”

“David Webster.”

“I haven’t seen you in here before, David Webster.”

“I’m visiting,” he told her. “I live in Maine.”

Her smile spread slowly like butter melting on a hot skillet. “What are you doing all the way out here?”

“I don’t know. Reconnaissance.”

“Recon!” Her eyebrows leapt toward her hairline. “So you were a soldier.”

“Maybe I just have a nice vocabulary.”

She snorted a boyish laugh through her nose. “You were a soldier. I can tell.”

“How?”

“My brother was.”

He noted the past tense. She must have seen the shape of his face change.

“Missing in action,” she said, “at the Battle of Tarawa. I know what that means. I’m no fool. But we did see him in ‘42 when he came home for a while on leave. And he was always using these army kinds of words to describe normal kinds of things. I think maybe he was worried we weren’t taking him seriously enough.”

“Were you?”

“I surely thought I was. Anyway, no use crying over — ”

The kitchen bell rung and a blue plate of corn beef hash was placed unceremoniously in the kitchen window. Naomi got to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said.

Webster watched her deliver the plate to an old man with liver spots at the end of the bar, resting her pale hand against his shoulder, and then she came back, kitten heels clacking on the old orange tile. “We don’t have to talk about these sorts of things,” she said. “What kind of recon mission are you on?”

“Came to find my friend.”

Evidently she thought he was making a different kind of euphemism. “Did you find her?”

“Him. My old war buddy. Yes.”

“And?”

“Dunno yet.”

It was true. Besides he couldn’t very well tell her, we made love with each other last night.

She nodded. She knew something of war and of men. “What else?”

“Well, Naomi, do you live in town?”

“Richmond district born and raised.”

“You know a library that has old newspapers?”

“Ah,” she said. “That kind of reconnaissance.”

“I’m a journalist,” he confessed.

“It’s all coalescing. Sure, back up toward the Presidio, on Clement Street.”

“What’s your favorite paper?”

“We always read the Gazette. That’s more working people, union people kind of news, you know.”

He wondered if she was trying to tell him she was a communist. He would probably figure it out when he read the paper she was talking about.

“Can I ask you one more silly thing?”

“You can ask me any silly thing you want, David,” she said. “But I might slap you if it’s too silly.”

“Duly noted.”

“What is it?”

“Do you know anything about the navy base on Treasure Island?”

Her face went through a cavalcade of delighted expressions each one more delightful than the last and finally settling on the sort of countenance he imagined might be on her face watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. “That kind of writer!” she exclaimed. “You should have told me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, I’m off tomorrow and I can show you to this place up the coast where normal rules of gravity don’t apply. Or — wait, actually, not a half hour’s walk from here, there’s this old mansion built by an eccentric heiress — ”

“I’m not… some kind of science fiction writer.”

“Well, that navy base has been the best science fiction in the city since it opened in ‘39.”

“Maybe you wanna slap me,” Webster said. “Sounds like that was a silly question.”

“I mean, sometimes those things are rooted in a semblance of fact. You go around the Castro, maybe you find some boys who say they were in psych experiments there. I think whenever people don’t know something, or they only know a little, well the mind is a beautiful storyteller.”

“That’s a nice way to say it.”

She shrugged and leaned across the table toward him, so that her knuckle touched his coffee mug. She was going to tell him something he already knew, but she had to tell him anyway, because it was what people did, like saying bless you, or I’m sorry for your loss: “A lot of people need answers for things that maybe have none.”

The library was old. It had the look of the old California missions. It had been built of brick before the dangers of building with such a material in a country ripe for earthquakes had been fully apparent. The outside looked crooked and dark; inside the silence was colored velvet. Webster went to the circulation desk, where sat the third pretty girl of the day, diligently stamping returns. This girl was so beautiful that it looked as though she had to have existed before, in Ancient Greek times or something, where probably all the great masters had carved portraits of her as various goddesses. Webster’s liberal arts education forced him to consider the stately agelessness of her beauty as the diametric opposite of, say, Liebgott’s, which was so new and strange that it could never have existed before. Liebgott might have been alive in Ancient Greek times as a satyr or a faun, and in interim eons he had probably been something like a coyote. The beauty of his person’s face could only exist in times as new and strange, times when people split atoms and otherwise competed to develop a machine that might destroy all life in a single charge.

Anyway, this girl was something else. So was her voice: “Are you okay?” she said.

He realized his face was doing something bad. “Too long in the sun,” he said, though it was only noon, and rather overcast.

“Want to sit down? It’s cool over in the stacks…”

She came out from behind her desk and took his arm. He had never liked being treated like an invalid when he was one but circumstances were different now. “I’m alright,” he said. “Thanks. Do you have old newspapers?”

“I really think maybe you ought to — ”

“It’s just been a really, pardon me, fucked up couple of days.”

She sat him down at a carrell like his old one in the stacks in the library at Harvard and returned in a few minutes with a glass of water and an encyclopedic tome. “Have you had anything to eat today?” she said. “Sometimes my sister gets faint — ”

“It’s nothing — honestly it’s nothing. I was thinking about history.”

“You looked like you’d seen somebody get killed.”

“Ha. Well. No. Not today.”

Her hand rested briefly against his shoulder. This would have been a lucky day for most men, he supposed. If he had been a different kind of person he could have gotten a couple of dates out of these last few hours. But instead he just let the librarian say what she was going to say, which was, “The book has records of newspapers for the past few decades. They’re real fragile so if you want them I’ve got to go down to the basement and get them for you. So you just make a list of the ones you want and bring it to me, alright?”

“Alright.”

“And you holler for me if something’s wrong.”

“I will. What should I holler?”

“You can just say, librarian!”

“But what’s your name?”

“Oh. It’s Catherine.”

“Okay, Catherine. Thanks.”

She left, trailing her hand over his shoulders. He looked through the book and in an hour or so he had a list of articles he wanted to see which he brought to Catherine downstairs. She brought the papers up to him in another few minutes with another glass of water. “Are you feeling better?”

How to say, I was never feeling bad, or maybe I always feel bad and I just can’t tell…

The papers were old and thin. Some of them had been published while he was still in high school, others while he was training at Toccoa, others while he was in France, in the hospital, in Germany, in the Alps, back at Harvard, at his parents’ place in Boston… The oldest papers, from the late thirties, Catherine instructed him to handle with a pair of fine white gloves like the sort women like her had once worn in the process of assembling bombs, lest the ink run at the contact of the oils in one’s fingers. Some of the clippings Webster recognized from their positions of honor on the walls of Liebgott’s room at the S.R.O., but seeing them in their original context next to columns on action in the Pacific and in Europe lent the proceedings a whiff of journalistic legitimacy. As he had done at Harvard, cobbling together sources by the midnight oil in the distant dusty stacks, attuning the inner ear for ghosts and the endless rattling percussion of the old radiators, he began to winnow a story out of the glut of information.

Nobody ever wanted to come out and tell a story outright. Every really good story that had ever existed was more like the low melody in a piece of music that you wouldn’t hear unless you were really trying. This low melody undergirded the story everyone else was listening to and made it make sense and sound good, and part of its power was that it might fly under the radar enough to never be heard on its own. If you finally listened close enough to hear, the rest of the song started sounding cheap and simple, now that the smoke and mirrors were exposed. The job of a journalist was not simply to amplify this melody but to weave a new melody around the truth that was just as beautiful. But before you could do such a thing you had to make sure you were hearing it right.

The facts would have to be declared. The city had built the island in ‘39 with intent to develop it into an airfield after the World’s Fair was over, but war was closing in, and eventually the Navy took matters into their own hands and overstayed their lease. They were effectively squatting on the city’s land but no one could say anything about it, being as it was by this time 1942, the press having gone dead yellow, Pearl Harbor having been flattened, war having been declared in duplicate, and thousands of young men a day pouring into the city to be processed and shipped to the western theater over the edge of the world.

The focal point of Liebgott's interest had developed in the interim years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and surrender. He wasn’t alone, judging by the fingerprints on the newsprint pages left by curious readers who hadn’t heeded Catherine’s instructions to read with gloves. When the station was no longer needed for return processing it had been turned over as a training facility for assorted procedures that might eventually become matters of extreme import in a hypothetical hot war with the Soviets. Webster had read the reports from Bikini Atoll as voraciously as the next person: decontamination of the vessels bathed in radioactive fallout was infamously more difficult than had been initially forecasted. A reporter cheerfully declared that solutions for these curious problems were being identified right here in San Francisco! Another writer reported in chipper tones from a welcome party for scientists who had arrived at the base on the Pentagon’s mandate to develop nuclear decontamination protocols. This clipping had appeared in the society pages and indeed it appeared that every well regarded politician and banker in the city had turned out alongside a handful of extremely decorated Naval officers. In the background of a grainy photograph in which a woman in white gloves laughed with her hand on the shoulder of a stern man in a dark suit Webster recognized the house with the porthole windows on Sea Cliff Avenue. The caption gave further specifics: Dr. Erich Wagner and his wife Maria greeted guests.

He got up and collected the papers into a neat pile. His hands were shaking. He left them at the carrell and went downstairs and outside into the beginning of the ending of the day.

A lot of people need answers for things that maybe have none, he heard Naomi remind him in the back of his mind, alongside a great deal of screaming alarm bells left over from school, about the burden of proof and the journalist’s code of ethics, but still he got back in Mischa’s car and drove to the house.

He did not look at his journals from the war, though he still had them. He had left them at his parents’ house, because he had found it difficult to be in the same room with them. Some advisors and professor friends at Harvard had suggested that he type some of it up and get it to literary magazines and the like. In class when they spoke about the war, or even sometimes about war in general, he excused himself to the water fountain and didn’t always come back. In his Modernism class senior year it had been bad enough that the professor had called him in to office hours and suggested a few ways he could cover for his failing attendance. He ended up writing a paper about Otto Dix in somewhat of a fugue state and then crawling out of a hole of prolonged drunkenness to find he had missed two full days of classes. The professor called him in again. He had marked up the paper but hadn't assigned a grade. “David,” said the professor with a fatherly concern, “you had better be dead careful.”

He went and sat by the Charles and watched the scullers on the mirrorlike water in the afternoon light. He read the paper over again; it was damn good, from a prose perspective at least, though some of the arguments were a little disjointed, particularly his vigorous attempts to connect the Nazis’ burning of Dix’s works as entartete kunst to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s scouring the WPA public arts programs for communists.

The journals, as he remembered, were similar attempts to assign meaning and precedent to events that perhaps had none — otherwise whose meaning and precedent were so overwhelmingly obvious as to seem opaque. He unclenched his hands from fists and fixated his bleary vision upon the springs of the bunk above him. Nobody in that room slept for a couple days, it seemed, and when they did there were black dreams. He stared at a blank page for what felt like hours. He saw himself approach the cosmic arbiter, the judge, who was not god, like a child: You mean people can just kill each other out of hate?

The house on Sea Cliff Avenue looked the same as it had the late afternoon previous. Webster parked just past it on the opposite end of the block and waited, leaning against Mischa’s car, watching the water between the houses. The markings of the currents showed against the wind like a pulled thread in a skein of fabric. Eventually a woman walked by pushing a baby carriage. “Excuse me,” he said, “do you know who lives in that house?”

He might have looked like a madman, he realized later. The woman just shrugged and walked onward.

He sat after a while on the trunk of the car in the deep butter light and took his notebook and a pen out from his pocket and proceeded to make some quick observations.

Since returning from the war, where I was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne, I have begun to think of it as a more complex sort of creature than it is often cast in poetry. To be fair, many things are more complex than they are cast in poetry, given the limitations of the medium. But it seems to me that chief among these limitations is that in the reduction of war to metaphor it seems to have been characterized entirely as a destroyer, when indeed it is as much if not more so a creator. War is a kind of evil mother, like maybe some of us had. War creates economic stimulus, as we all happily learned at the beginning of this decade. War provides an impetus for technological developments of which we had not so much as dreamed, as was evidenced in August 1945, and war creates new patterns and path of movement, which is why I am in San Francisco today.

I served in the 101st with a Jewish friend and we were together in today’s West Germany on a quite cold day when some of our unit stumbled upon a concentration camp in the woods. It nearly destroyed us all but not so nearly as those people had been destroyed. I worried that it would destroy my friend, who I had not seen for many years until this week. And while it did dissemble him and chip off parts of him as it chipped off parts of us all it has also created something. I think maybe the only reason he is alive anymore is for vengeance. I know as well as he that spite will carry you onward when nothing else will.

Now he knew he couldn’t show whatever this was to his editor, but he kept writing.

War has its own unique inventions to replace every motivating emotion that has kept you alive til the point of your encounter with it. Resolve is one. Rage is one. Vengeance is certainly one. Paranoia is another to which we have all succumbed at intervals. Myself I feel a need to prove, to whom or what I cannot tell, that I could ever have a still mind again. I don’t remember quite what kept me alive then. It was those people after a point and my rage for them, but that was near the end of the war and there was hardly a target for it any longer except myself.

Living today in the aftermath of war we live inexorably with the things it created for us, at our behest, which of course include a booming economy, a rip-roaring red scare, the atomic bomb, the rumblings of a war with the Soviets, the slightly louder rumblings of war with the Koreans. In this way war has created its own means and its own needs. We, of course, are party to these needs; they inform our own needs, and the central need to not be caught off our guard again, and to do whatever it takes to be sure.

Here we must ask ourselves what is the cost of security. I know I am living proof, and for every living proof there is a better man who is dead proof, that the cost of insecurity is high. But what are we doing now to be safe? Conducting witch hunts and interning Japanese American families and preparing for mutual destruction? Do these make us safer? What is their cost? Have they cost our souls?

He put the pen down in his lap and shook the cramp out of his hand. He might have to burn this, he realized. Sometimes writing he felt like he had at war: something inside him just kept going, wouldn’t stop; he couldn’t understand it, didn’t know how he was still moving, didn’t want to know. He had to bodily reach into his brain with a wrench to turn the bad pump off and turn the Post Voice pump on. Then he turned to a new page and smoothed out the crease at the binding of the paper.

Here in San Francisco there is much excitement about the new research being undertaken at a naval training center on Treasure Island.

He wrote and made notes for a story based on his findings at the library, and after a while he had to stop and shake out his hand and in doing so belatedly noticed that Liebgott had parked halfway down the block behind him and was sitting on the hood of the pea green Ford waiting for Webster to notice. When Webster did Liebgott leaned back against the windshield, trying to look like a pinup girl, and all the machinery in his chest cavity shifted under his t-shirt.

There was a twist and flare of something. It had always been difficult to discern when it came to Liebgott whether it was powerful attraction or a deep urge to hurt him. Both, neither. Something deeper and softer and scarier. Webster went over, and Liebgott put his tongue against his lower lip. “What are you waiting around here for,” Webster asked. “You think he’s just gonna drop a Nazi flag out the window?”

Liebgott pursed his mouth. “Something like that,” he said.

“Are you going — are you trying to become some kind of vigilante assassin?”

“Sounds like a blues band,” Liebgott observed. “Big Dick Webster and the Vigilante Assassins.”

He wished not for the first time that he had gone into the FBI or the CIA or something at the beginning of things and maybe they would have taught him how to stop from blushing. “You think so,” he said.

“Don’t be fuckin coy.”

They turned back together toward the house. There was movement and shadow in the upper windows. They might not have seen it had they not been soldiers.

“I maybe am done killing,” said Liebgott.

Webster had seen him buy three boxes of .44 ammunition not twenty-four hours previous. “Maybe?”

“I can’t decide,” Liebgott said. “Seems unfair to ask somebody else to do it. If you wanna look at it this kind of way, our souls are already damned.”

Webster sure as hell did not want to look at it that way. He did not really want to look at it any kind of way at all. “I thought you were already chosen.”

Liebgott’s brow cocked. “Now after all that I’ve been wondering what exactly we were chosen for.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Someday it’ll come to me,” said Liebgott.

“The paper says it’s just some German guy,” said Webster. “How can you be sure?”

Liebgott gave him the stiff smile he perhaps deserved. Of course he had not had a great answer for the same question when this had happened on the mountaintop, but it hadn’t bothered him, or at least he had pretended it hadn’t so successfully that it had become true. It had not bothered Webster perhaps as much as it ought to have.

“They’re trying to pass a law that says that communists have to register with the government,” Liebgott said, “and they can detain you indefinitely without trial whenever they so choose on suspicion of sedition. So you can bet your ass I’m not waiting until it comes around to me.”

“Alright.”

“Alright?”

Webster shrugged. “I won’t stop you.”

“My hero,” said Liebgott, with venom. “You better take me home and give it to me good.”

For some reason he got obsessed with this stupid thought. His mind swerved into the oncoming traffic of the thought which ran him down and flattened him to bloody mulch. The thought was that obviously Liebgott had to have been doing this with other people. It had been four years. Certainly in that time Webster himself had been doing it with other people, but all those people had been women, which was different. Kind of a weighted thing to ask when you were balls deep in somebody for the second time in two nights, but he asked anyway, and Liebgott kneed him in the kidney, and they ended up on the floor with half the blankets, knocking over a pile of pulp paperbacks and setting the record (Duke Ellington doing “Mood Indigo”) skipping.

“You fuckin bastard,” Liebgott said. He looked like somebody had finally set him loose from a cage. “Are we fuckin married?”

This was further enraging. They ended up in a corner against the newspaper clippings and Liebgott’s hands were around his throat and his hands were around Liebgott’s ribs so tightly he could feel Liebgott’s breath in his elbows. Anyway, they could neither of them have been too mad because it kept right on going from where they left off. Liebgott just sat on his cock like he was getting into a hot bath. “Holy hell,” Webster said. “God damn. Joe.”

There was a paperback book wedging a gap between two of Webster’s vertebrae and another pinned open like a dead butterfly by Liebgott’s left knee. “Shut the fuck up,” Liebgott said. He was heaven inside. He made like this was a whole big trial for him but then he shook apart the minute Webster touched him and was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Afterward, he reflected on beauty. Liebgott got up for the cigarettes, knees wobbling, to Webster’s extreme pride, and kicked a book across the floor. Sometimes over there things had seemed very beautiful, like the color of day-old blood or the thin ice in the mornings or a particularly artfully exploded tree. By the time they got to the Alps, beauty had been surgically excised from his mental lexicon. Sometimes it hit him like a ton of bricks but he couldn’t really recognize it and it got classified as one of the simpler things. Eventually it like everything classified as get me a fucking drink.

“What are you thinking about,” said Liebgott, collapsing on his bed. He stuck a cigarette against his lip and stretched out on his back like one of the Venuses in one of the paintings so that when he threw the pack and the matches over toward the corner Webster was sort of hypnotized and couldn’t react fast enough, fumbled, spilled the matches over the floor. Liebgott cackled as though this hadn’t been his exact intention.

Now he sure as hell couldn’t say what he had been thinking. “Remember the bathtub?”

“Somewhat.”

“I woke up and I thought you must’ve hit me, because my mouth was full of blood, but it was your blood.”

Liebgott turned his head and studied him. “Are you going to come up here or what,” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be a fuckin idiot.”

Webster went. He brought the cigarettes and one of the blankets. The bedsprings creaked; the wall was cold where he leaned his bare back against it, and Liebgott put his head on his thigh so he put his hand across Liebgott’s collar.

“That was the worst run we ever had to do,” Liebgott said. Like this Webster could feel his voice inside his chest like the tonal vibrations of the body of a musical instrument. “I thought I was dead and in hell.”

He remembered waking up feeling like a torpedo had been driven through his skull, and Liebgott was drooling blood on his chest. They were obliged to get up quickly and pretend they hadn’t been holding each other.

“I slept with some Radcliffe girls,” Webster confessed.

“Hmm. Hypocrite.”

“I sort of felt bad about it. Honestly I felt like a bit of a cad.”

“Well, women don’t like when you call them girls.”

“It sort of felt like… just running,” Webster said. “Like doing jumping jacks. It made me feel like something was maybe broken.”

Liebgott cocked an eyebrow and Webster smoothed his thumb over it. “I can tell you for sure nothing’s broken.”

“I mean… inside. In my heart, you know. But — ”

He bit his tongue. The rest of it, which could not be said, which could not even really be thought, which was just a feeling, a knowing-without-being-told, a stillness, came out as a kind of huff. But he could tell that Liebgott heard it anyway, because he switched cigarette hands so that he could reach his arm down Webster’s leg and wrap his clammy palm around the old scar.

The scar: Doc Roe had strictly rationed the limited morphine to the worst wounded, so he lay there on his back near delirious with pain staring at the pale white sky, feeling like an unforgivable fucking idiot. Eventually Liebgott’s brutal shadow eclipsed the sun. Doc had wrapped the deep graze in his neck with a compression bandage like a ladies’ ascot, which was sodden with blood. Webster had seen him go down, and then get back up. Another half inch over and he would’ve died a truly unenviable death.

“Alright,” said Liebgott. His eyes were all white and slowly clearing of fear. His own wound might as well have been a god damn mosquito bite for how peripherally he seemed to notice it.

“Alright,” Webster lied. The lie was probably dead fucking obvious in his voice, which was trembling.

Liebgott knelt next to him in the bloody mud and took his med pack out of the pocket of his jacket. His hands were like a butcher’s. There was one syrette of morphine left in there and he pulled the collar of Webster’s fatigues aside and unceremoniously broke the little needle through the skin. By the time he had fully wrung the dose out of the tube and was pinning the used syrette to Webster’s jacket for the nurses’ reference Webster was already floating in interstellar space. He couldn’t necessarily remember what pain felt like anymore and the breeze was like a thousand kisses and even the brimstone smell of blood and sulfur tasted sweet.

“I was saving that for my own death,” Liebgott said. He might’ve grumbled about it, but he was being very gentle. “You better come back to us.”

He nodded. For a moment they were alone on the killing field after the end of the world. Then Liebgott hailed Doc, who put on that holy bluster about his having hoarded syrettes, and they put Webster on the Jeep like a sack of potatoes with the wounded and the dead; somebody clasped his shoulder manfully, and he watched them disappear like ghosts into the smoke. He knew he would come back, and couldn’t fear it then. He missed them with the bone-deep missing — all of them — before they fully faded from view.

The dreams were usually the same when he had them, which was rare now, and might never have happened at all, except he had left his luggage with his medicine in it at Mischa’s across the bay. The setting and personages varied, but otherwise the dream was predictable. It was like a ladies’ pulp novel where the suitor could be a doctor or a banker or a lawyer and the action could be in Los Angeles or New York or Atlanta or Dallas or Denver but otherwise the strictures of the plot were for the most part unchanging. Sometimes he was with Nixon, or memorably a few times with Winters. Sometimes they were all together in the basement room in the house in Hagenau with the Kraut prisoners and sometimes they were together across the river. Sometimes the person he was with was mortally wounded and dying. When he was with Liebgott they were usually in the hotel room in the Alps, or a few times they had been in the shack on the mountain. A few times they had been in a place he’d never been before which was cold and still and he thought he must have somehow stolen that memory of the woods from Liebgott’s mind one of those times they slept near each other. Anyway, now, it was particularly disorienting because the room was this room, at the S.R.O. on the bluff, but there was a bombardment outside, and they were sitting close together against the wall in their muddy, blood-soaked fatigues. He forgot who had told them to hold this position (by its stupidity it was Dike) but there was next to no cover, and his weapon had jammed beyond immediate repair. The old wound at Liebgott's neck was seeping blood like sap out of a tree.

Liebgott must have heard something he didn’t, because he said, “Hold on.” They ducked and covered the backs of their necks with their hands. Debris rained percussively on Webster’s helmet and when he opened his eyes again the room had got smaller by maybe two feet square.

“What’s happening?”

He always said this in the fucking dream because in the dream he never knew what was happening. Somehow he could never remember that this had happened before and in fact that it had happened for a while every time he closed his eyes and worst he could never remember that it wasn’t real.

“I dunno,” said Liebgott. “They’re coming round again.”

They ducked into each other. Liebgott was shaking and he smelled like iron. When they pulled apart Webster’s eyes were drawn inexorably to the scuff in his neck, running black as ink now over his collar and his narrow chest inside his jacket, before he noticed that the room had gotten smaller again.

“Where are we,” he managed. “How did we get here?”

“Don’t fuckin lose it on me, Web.”

Another barrage came and when it passed it left the air thinner. They were pressed close together now out of necessity because the room had closed them into a box barely large enough for their two bodies and it was hot with their breath and blood. “This is it,” Liebgott said, but his voice was garbled because of the blood in his throat, which was slowly drowning him. How could he hear the planes?

This was the thing about the imminence of death. It could be imminent however many times and you never got quite used to it. You also never quite grasped it when it was most imminent. Those instances were quick and lucky, or they weren’t. They were coming round again now overhead and they would not survive another. This is it. His heart was in his mouth. He braced himself and waited for death to come and let them out, but instead he woke up.

The room was still. Liebgott was whole and clean and breathing against his shoulder. Outside, the sea. California, he remembered. His ribs were trying to evict his heart and it wouldn’t go. It was clinging to the walls and screaming. He sat up and heaved and nearly puked on the floor. His skin felt like there were a thousand flies trapped between each of the layers of it and his head was light as air.

An arm across his low belly like a belt. “David,” Liebgott said, half asleep.

He stood and the touch fell away. “It’s alright,” he said.

“No — come on — ”

But he was on his feet, head spinning, dressed as fast as he could, not looking back, and then he was out the door into the dark hall, and the shadow was swallowing, like a living thing, and it seeped in through his nose like gas and wrapped a ghostly fist around his stomach and another around each of his lungs and then his throat —

Outside he ran across the street without looking for traffic, and then he stood at the edge of the sea.

Thank god. It swept over him and washed him clean. He took a deep shuddering breath and then another.

This ocean made the ocean back at home in Maine feel like a kitten. This ocean shaped every known thing. It shattered salt breath over the boulders and bark-stripped logs at the base of the bluff and soon in the great scheme of everything it would wash the rug out from under this city and this country and this continent and this world. It would still be erasing when there was nothing left to erase. The Able and Baker tests at Bikini Atoll had been like flea bites to it. While humanity whiled away its precious hours destroying itself over symbols the sea executed the orders of the moon and gravity, and time went on and on without us, as though we were never here.

Without meaning to, without even trying, but not quite by accident, he wondered what would happen if he jumped.

“Why do you do that.”

Liebgott was at his left side in his robe and slippers. There was a bite mark on his neck inside his collar, beneath the bright coin of the scar from the crossroads. Webster turned back to the water.

“Why do I do what.”

“Stare at the fuckin ocean like an old sea captain’s widow.”

“It clears my head.”

Liebgott stood next to him so that their shoulders touched and looked where he was looking at the seam of sea and sky. They stood together in silence for about two minutes until Liebgott said, “It’s not working.”

“Well, it takes time.”

“Does it?”

Webster heard the unsaid: You’ve given it enough time, and it didn’t clear your head of whatever that just was.

“I feel like… people in caveman times must’ve done this. It’s like staring into a campfire. It takes you to this, I don’t know, memory place.”

“Memory place.”

“Yeah, like a memory place where… like, all our ancestors and all their memories are in there.”

He realized he had said the wrong thing only when he could feel the shape that it took in the air. Liebgott had carefully corralled his face into his wartime expression of closed resolve. “I don’t want to go to that place,” he said.

“Joe — ”

“It’s fine.”

“I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

“Nobody ever does,” Liebgott said, “but everybody always says they are.”

It was dawn. Webster knew if he turned the light would be seeping up from the east, over the house, over the city, but over the water it was still dark unto the edge of the visible world.

“I think I might have been there,” Liebgott went on, “in the worst dream.”

Webster steeled himself. It was one of those not-really-wanting-to-but-having-to-know things. “What happens in it?”

“I think you know. What happens in yours?”

“We’re stuck together in this room,” he said for some reason. Something was pulling it out of this throat hand over hand like a scarf in a magician’s show. “And there’s no way out, and it keeps getting smaller.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Tell me yours?”

Liebgott took a steadying kind of breath which was also like the sound of the wind and the water on the bluff below. “I had this one dream in a tile room,” he said. He was trying to keep his voice low so that nobody and nothing could hear but for Webster and the sea. “There was something alive in the grout in the vault, like a golden thread, which was everybody like me who had ever died, and they were staring down at me, and I could feel all their rage. Every drop. Woke up screaming my head off.”

“That’s your worst dream?”

“It happened when we first got back,” Liebgott said. “Scared the living daylights out of my parents.”

“Is that why you’re here on your own?”

“Yep.”

“Do they know — well. Your suspicions?”

Liebgott shrugged. “They said the same thing as you. How about you go see a doctor at the V.A., et cetera. Listen, I know what it is. I know what that place was. I know what that dream means. If I got somebody to shrink my head they would tell me the same fucking thing I already know: you saw these bad things, you did these bad things, something’s broken about your brain. How do I fix it? None of these fucking doctors can tell you that.”

“Well, the medication — ”

“It only fucking works as long as you remember to take it, as you've just thoughtfully demonstrated, thanks Web.”

He kicked a stone over the bluff into the droning fray, where it was swallowed without a mark or a sound.

“You’re doing this for them,” Webster said.

“Who?”

He gestured at the sea. “Them.”

“The sharks? The fuckin whales?”

“Your ancestors!”

“They’re all dead,” Liebgott said plainly. “We got the records. German Jews. Theresienstadt.”

“But — ”

“I heard what they were trying to tell me,” Liebgott said, as though this sort of thing happened all the time, as though it were incredibly simple. “I wonder what they’re trying to tell you.”

A chill filtered down Webster’s spine, like someone had cracked an egg at the base of his neck. It couldn’t stand. He shook it off bodily. “Oh my god,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re psychoanalyzing me!”

Liebgott let out the darkest peal in the octave of his laughter. “I don’t know how else to get this through your thick skull. You don’t have a leg to stand on. You come out here, you follow me to my house, ooh, Lieb, you must be so lonely, do you ever go see a headshrinker? You fuck me six ways to Sunday, we can’t look at each other in the light of day, what else is new? That isn’t the problem. You deal with it how you have to. I deal with it how I have to. You might’ve picked that up at Toccoa.”

All this and yet he flinched in the mouth when Webster’s eyes met his, and he flinched in the brow when Webster said, “I’m worried about you,” as though he were parrying two light blows.

Perhaps in the next great arms race one combatant would develop a bomb capable of shattering the fabric of time. Each detonation of one such bomb would divide reality into at least two tracks. Perhaps such a thing had already been invented, and had just been deployed, and now there were other versions of them in the exact same place at the exact same time choosing whatever was the exact opposite of what Liebgott said, which was, “Don’t waste the energy,” and what Webster said, which was, “Alright, I won’t.”

Time goes on without us…

“I need a cigarette,” Liebgott said, “and then I’m going back to bed, are you coming?”

That damned matchlight was in his eye again. Webster understood that until the dawn came they might each be able to pretend it would not end the way it was already ending. “Come lie down with me,” Liebgott went on. There was an unfamiliar note of pleading in his voice which should have embarrassed him. “Just until it’s light.”

They went back upstairs in the pitchy darkness and in the bedroom Liebgott opened the windows as far as they would go, even though the screens were torn. Then they lay down in the bed together again as though nothing had happened and Liebgott draped himself over Webster like a vampire bat or an avalanche. He did not so much sleep as wander between pale, thin dreams. The mud was frozen in the streets, and the rubble was growing trees, and Duke Ellington was doing “Mood Indigo” in the unmoving square, and there was a swallowing silence about the fog. In the window the sea and sky brightened by syncopated increments into two complementary shades of gray, and sometimes between snatched sleep, like the wartime sleep, he thought of something he would never say, a question he would never ask — every time he fell asleep again he forgot it, and every time he woke up he remembered it anew.

At last like milk or gunfire the light came spilling in upon the floor.

Liebgott was up, limp cigarette in his mouth, putting the coffee pot and a jazz record on, going back easy to his little life, except he was taking great pains to keep his face turned from Webster, because of the tight furrow in his brow. It took Webster several years to realize that he had probably been having the same dream, by which time it was too late to do anything about it, not least because the hull was leaking bad after the storm and there was hardly any fresh water left. Then, like many things at the moment of death, it had seemed overwhelmingly obvious. Anyway, he could hardly have foreseen that it would end like this, and maybe subconsciously he was counting on another chance. He could have been forgiven to have expected such a thing, what with how much they, and consequently their association, had survived against unbelievable odds.

He got up, got dressed, accepted the dented tin mug of coffee and drank it too fast to taste it, tore his eyes from the great gray blanket of the ocean in the window. The fog was a wet chill. Liebgott was by the door. On the turntable was Thelonious Monk. “Take care of yourself,” Webster said.

Liebgott turned to him with surprise. They watched each other in silence as though waiting for a hand signal to direct their movement onward through the heavy brush. As there had been then so was something now all around them at every moment, in the woods and in the abandoned houses watching, so that they should not speak. At last Liebgott shook his head. It was not so much an expression of defeat as of certainty.

He told himself many stories about this moment when it got near the end. The truth was that they shook hands, and then he kissed Liebgott on the cheek where it was hollowest under the bone, where his skin was cool and unshaven, and that he might have said that thing he had dreamed about, if only he could have remembered what it had been. Then he went down onto the silent morning street. The gulls were overhead circling in tasseographic patterns that might have told him something about where all this was going, if he had bothered to learn to listen.

He got in the white Packard parked on the corner. His heart felt like meat, but eventually Cole Porter came on the radio, and he sang along in traffic over the seamless bay, while below and before and ahead and above history went on and on.

Months later, on a Tuesday in the early morning, before the heat descended and settled over the city and the islands, he walked up the street to his mailbox. There was a thick manilla envelope inside, which he sat on the curb to open. Inside he found the manuscript of his article about Treasure Island. Since returning from San Francisco, he had supplemented the story with additional research and interviews with journalists and citizen investigators in Boston, who had reason to believe Nazi scientists had been secretly housed at Fort Strong to work on munitions development. Paperclipped to the pages was a note from his editor, scrawled quickly in red pen:

Webster, this is tremendous — fabulous journalism. What a scoop. The problem is there’s absolutely no way we can publish it right now, unless the entire staff of this paper wants to be dragged in front of HUAC. Let’s revisit when it blows over?

A storm entered his mind through his ear. He thought about tearing the thick ream of pages, but it was his only copy. Instead he put it back in the envelope and rolled it up and put it in his jeans pocket, then he walked down the road toward home, challenging himself not to feel anything at all about it. This was difficult enough that when halfway home he was obliged to kick as hard as he could a stone embedded in the dirt road that would hardly budge and just badly bruised his toenail.

At home he put the manuscript on the kitchen table and then he went out into the backyard. He realized too late that he had forgotten the egg timer. He looked out upon the water and timed his breathing to the sound of the waves.

---

Notes:

this story is dedicated to my roommate meg. i love you!
as for the historical accuracy, liebgott is of course correct. the U.S. government did bring nazi scientists to the U.S. starting in 1945 to work on the atomic bomb and the space race as part of operation paperclip. i could not find any evidence that any were housed at the naval station treasure island, but there were certainly several at fort strong in boston.
the law requiring that communists register with the government is also real. it was passed in 1950.
i must also shout out hitchcock's vertigo, kubrick's dr. strangelove, terry riley's soundtrack for bruce connor's film of the crossroads atomic bomb tests, and all the delta bluesmen and women.
i've done my best to keep this as historically accurate as possible, but do let me know if i've gotten anything wrong. i promise to be receptive.
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