Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

The Senator’s chauffeured Cadillac limousine picked us up, and on the way to Walter Reed I fixed another drink from the portable bar built into the back of the driver’s seat. The Senator didn’t like it, but he confined his objection to

a steady look at the amount of bourbon in my glass. Williams sat silently on the fold-out seat, his back straight and his face turned indifferently to the window; however, I could feel his sense of superiority in the knowledge that I was starting in heavy on the whiskey. That’s all right, motherfucker, I thought. Wes Hardin and I will kick your ass any day in the light-year you want to choose.

Two television newsmen from Houston and Fort Worth were waiting for us by the information desk in the main room of the hospital. They were both young, dressed in narrow-cut suits and knitted neckties and button-down collars, and their hair looked as though it was trimmed every day. They had been leaning against the counter with their cameras hanging loosely in their hands, and when they saw the Senator they snapped into motion and came toward us with their leather soles clicking on the marble floor. Their college-boy faces showed the proper deference and energetic respect, and I thought, Ahhh, there are two young men who will never live within breathing distance of the Fort Worth stockyards.

Three hospital administrators joined us, and we began our tour of the wards holding the Vietnam wounded. I had a fair edge on from the whiskey, but now I wished that I had made a bigger dent in the bottle. The beds, with high metal rails on the sides, stretched out in long rows, and the afternoon sun slanted across the bodies of the men under the sheets. I had made a cynical remark to Williams about the smell of a dressing on a burn, but that was only part of it. The astringent odor of the antiseptic used to scrub the floors mixed with the reek of the bedpans, the sweaty and itching flesh inside the plaster casts, the urine that sometimes dried in the mattress pads of the paraplegics, and the salve oozing from bandages that covered rows of hard stitches. There was another odor in the air, too, one that might be called imaginary, but I could smell the distant rain forests and the sores that formed on men’s bodies from living in wet uniforms and in boots that hardened like iron around the feet. The stench of terror and dried excrement on the buttocks was there, also, and if you wanted to think hard on it you could fill your lungs and catch the sweet-sour gray smell of death.

The Senator shook hands cheerfully from bed to bed, and each time he found a man from Texas he made several banal remarks while the cameras whirred away. A few of the men were bored or irritated at seeing another politician, but the majority of them grinned with their boyish, old men’s faces, propped themselves up on their elbows with cigarettes between their fingers, and listened to the Senator’s thanks about the job they were doing. Only one time did he have trouble, and that was with a Negro Marine who’d had an arm amputated at the shoulder. The Negro’s eyes were bloodshot, and I saw a bottle of paregoric sticking out from under his pillow.

“Don’t thank me for nothing, man,” he said. “When I get out of here you better hide that pink ass behind a wall.”

The cameras stopped whirring, and the Senator smiled and walked to the next bed as though the Negro and his anger were there only as the result of some chance accident not worth considering seriously. Then the cameras started working again, the two newsmen were back to their coverage, and the Marine pulled out his bottle of paregoric and unscrewed the cap by flipping it around with one thumb. His bloodshot eyes continued to stare into the Senator’s back.

At the end of each ward the Senator made a speech, and I wondered how many times he had made it in the same wards during World War II and the Korean War. He had probably changed some of the language to suit the particular cause and geographic conquest involved, but the content must have been the same: The people at home support you boys. We’re proud of the American fighting man and the sacrifices he’s made to defend democracy against Communist aggression. You’ve taken up the standard that can only be held by the brave, and we’re not going to let anyone dishonor that standard. It’s been bought at too dear a price…

And on and on.

As I watched him I remembered sitting in a similar ward in 1953 after the last pieces of splintered lead had been removed from my legs, and listening to a state representative make almost the same speech. I didn’t remember his name, or even what he looked like, but he and the Senator were much alike, because in the intense emotional moment of their delivery they believed they had fought the same battles as the men lying before them, felt the same aching lung-rushing gasp when they were hit, bled into the same dark soil, and had fallen through the same endless morphine deliriums in a battalion aid station.

But the Senator had one better. After all the hackneyed patriotic justifications for losing part of one’s life, he outdid himself:

“I bet you boys aren’t burning your draft cards!”

And they replied in unison, one hundred strong:

“NO SIR!”

The Senator went through the doorway with the three hospital administrators, who all the time had been smiling as though they were showing off a nursery of hothouse plants, and one of the newsmen turned his camera on me.

“Get that goddamn thing out of my face,” I said.

He didn’t hear me over the electric noise of his machine, or he didn’t believe what he’d heard, and he kept the lens pointed at the center of my forehead.

“I mean it, pal. I’ll break it against the wall.”

He lowered his camera slowly with his mouth partly open and stared at me. He didn’t know what he had done wrong, and all the reasons for his presence there in the hospital were evaporating before him. I don’t know what my face looked like then, with the cut on my temple and my slightly swollen eye, but evidently it was enough to make a graduate of the Texas University School of Journalism wince. He dropped his eyes to the camera and began adjusting the lens as though the light had changed in the last ten seconds.

“I had a car accident this week and I don’t want any of the guys at the country club thinking my wife hit me in the head with a shoe,” I said. I laughed and touched him on the arm.

He smiled, and I saw that his pasteboard frame of reference was secure again. He walked into the next ward after the Senator, and I thought, I hope that thirty-thousand-dollar house in the Fort Worth suburbs will be worth it all, buddy.

Later, back in the Cadillac, with the sun steaming off the hood, I poured a half glass of straight bourbon and took two deep swallows. The yellow haze outside was worse now, and the air-conditioning vents were dripping with moisture.

“That Negro soldier should be brought to the attention of his commanding officer,” Williams said.

“He was a Marine,” I said.

“Regardless, there’s no excuse for a remark like that,” he said.

So you’re a propriety man as well, I thought.

“It’s nothing,” the Senator said. “His attitudes will change back to normal with time. I’ve seen many others like him.”

“I didn’t like it,” Williams said.

“Maybe he doesn’t care to be part of the science of prosthesis,” I said. “Provided they can fit something on that stub.”

Williams looked at me steadily with his opaque, pale face. For just a second his fingertips ticked on his thigh. I knew that if I could have looked into his eyes I would have seen flames and grotesque mouths wide with silent screams.