The King is Dead

Later that week he came to her door in his Custom, carrying flowers and wearing a dry smile. He’d spent fifteen minutes at the florist’s, but now, as he rang the bell and waited, the flowers looked strange to him, like glass, and he could hardly remember what they were called or see their colors. Blue, light blue, red, bled. Nicole came to the door and he bore down for an instant, taking in her smile and scent and skin. She greeted him warmly and invited him in while she found a vase, but he came no more than a few feet over the threshold; the house was so small, he barely fit into it. She kept talking to him as she walked back to the kitchen: This is terribly sweet of you. I haven’t had flowers in here since I moved in. I know I have a vase, somewhere, I’ll have to rinse it out. You don’t mind waiting, I hope.—She trimmed an errant leaf off one of the stems. There, she said, and turned around to find him nowhere. She laughed and called, Walter?

I’m here, he said from the other room.

All right, make yourself comfortable, said Nicole. I’ll be with you in a moment. And thank you for these, they’re beautiful.—She could hear nothing from the next room, and she imagined him standing politely, just inside the door, patient, still, and willing to wait.

He took her out and took care of her. She didn’t have to think about anything except how to be winning and pretty, and that she could do. At the table he spoke some, playing with the cuff of his white shirt. He gave up a little bit of family history, a word or two about his time in the service, and how he’d come to Memphis afterward.

She was judging him gently as he spoke. He knew things and had a thousand secrets to tell or not to tell. His hands were clean and strong: they had been purified by war, whatever war had been. He was older, and he was lovely, in his way. Do you like him, your Governor? she asked.

She’d expected a simple affirmative, but Walter Selby paused a little, as if the question was entirely new to him; and he smiled to himself, thinking about words of praise and what they were worth. Like would be misleading, he said at last. No one likes anyone when anyone is governing. But he’s a brilliant man. His job is to make the state prosper, and he does well on that account.—Walter looked around the dining room and then leaned in, and Nicole leaned in to listen. But I’ll tell you how he does it, he said softly. Not too many people know this. Every night our Governor goes down into a dark room in his basement, lights a black candle, swishes some whiskey around in an ivory bowl, and waits for the Devil to come whisper in his ear. And the Devil tells him everything he needs to know for the next day.—He wagged his finger. Now, that’s a secret. That’s how it’s done.

He sat back and smiled, and Nicole smiled too, but more thinly. You’re joking, she said.

He’s a complicated man, said Walter.

She lowered her eyes and let her mouth go soft from relief. I suppose he would have to be, she said. The question is, what does the Devil want in return?

Oh, said Walter, Old Scratch won’t ever go wanting for a pleasure ground, as long as he’s got the State of Tennessee.

You’re a cynic, said Nicole.

I’m hopelessly in love with a slovenly queen, but she scorns my affections; when I try to dress her in suitable robes or better set her table she turns her haughty back. Sometimes I sulk to cover my shame. Then morning comes and I try her again.

That’s sweet, said Nicole, and she smiled as if she’d swallowed the sun.

The conversation wandered from there: back to his time on the campaign, forward to Memphis, back to Charleston and her schoolgirl days, her parents, Emily left behind. In the minutes the table vanished, the restaurant dissolved, the city pitched away all its pettiness. He asked her about the radio station; he’d met the owner once during the Governor’s campaign. Oh, it’s very interesting, really, she said. I don’t quite understand it all yet. I don’t know much about music, except for the Hit Parade; but something’s going on that’s got all the fellows at the station excited, and you wouldn’t believe the sorts of people who come through.

What are they like?

Wild men, she said, laughing. Just wild men. They come up out of the swamps, they come down from the trees, and they never say anything but they yell it at the top of their lungs. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. My job is to be very nice and friendly and try to make sure they don’t burn the place down. She reached for her wineglass, and a small silver bracelet slipped out from under the cuff of her sweater and glittered in the candlelight as it dangled from her white wrist. It’s like they’re fighting a war.—She grimaced.—I’m sorry. That must sound to you like a very silly thing to say.

No, said Walter.

You being a hero and all that, she said, and thought of the word’s possible meanings for the first time when she said it.

He frowned, on familiar ground. They gave me a medal. They could have given it to anyone.

That’s not true, I’m sure, said Nicole, though she wasn’t. You were in the Pacific?

He didn’t want to talk; he wanted to watch her, but she had turned the table back to him, and he felt obliged to take it. The Philippines, he said. Some of the South Sea Islands.

What was it like?

He lowered his eyes. What to tell? The islands were beautiful, he said. Everything was huge and green. I was very young.

Nicole nodded solemnly, because the hour had suddenly become solemn. She had intended no such seriousness, and neither had he; but there it was. Eddy was very impressed with you.

I hardly remember what I did, he said. It was a good long time spent bored and waiting, and a few short moments of absolute terror. When it was over, I didn’t know where I’d been or who I’d hurt. She nodded again and swallowed a question, one she often wanted to ask afterward, always with the same terrible curiosity, a sickening lurch made more shameful for the fact that she felt like she was seeking it. Who did you kill, Walter?

17 (#ulink_60a9b242-dd6d-5d93-8d33-d979ef679113)

He had been eighteen when he joined the Marines, a year behind his brother Donald’s enlistment in the infantry. He had shipped out from San Diego to Honolulu, and he’d gone, as much as anything, because he wanted to get out of the South. There was no reason why he chose the Corps, except that the story of the sea was so distant from the story of his family, and he had an eighteen-year-old’s desire to exploit the distance and impress his dead forebears. A few weeks in training and there he was, waiting in Hawaii to be cast into battle.

There were ten thousand troops on base, all sorts of men, with all sorts of reasons, and many with no reason at all. Walter had never seen such an array, such opposition and jumble: from fair to tan, from soft to savage, from swift to slow. They came and went through the barracks and depots; they rambled along the dry roads, falling in and out of patterns like glass chips in a kaleidoscope, according to ties of time and origin, inclination and impulse. They spent days maintaining their gear, cleaning this and oiling that, and nights lying on immaculate, evenly spaced bunks in their barracks, waiting and boasting, with the smell of the sea all around them, and the long rhythm of the surf as it repeatedly gathered itself and broke against the shore.

Within a few days a set of alliances had formed, gangs among them: Irish from Chicago, the Northwest Loggers, college boys, they found one another and fell in as easily as if they were following orders. Walter was a member of the Austral Gentry, heirs to the manners and the land from the Carolinas to the Mississippi, from the Mason-Dixon Line to the Gulf Coast. There was MacIntire, Hamilton III, Lukas from the hills of Georgia—good boys all.

There was one more fellow, a small, wiry man from the outskirts of New Orleans named Chenier. He was a little bit older than the other men, and he looked older than that, because his skin was rough and dark from standing in the sun, and his nose had been flattened in an adolescent fistfight. He was a Cajun; most of the men on board could hardly understand him through the meal of his accent, and this, too, separated him a little bit from the others. He smiled crookedly, smiled slightly madly, and spoke in a crazy dirty French mumble. During his days in stateside camp a sergeant from Louisiana had dubbed him Coonass, and he carried the name with him, all through his deployments.

Some of the men took in his dark skin, his mumble, and his nickname, and decided he was a Negro, if not in whole then in substantial enough part. Warren from New Hampshire may have been the first to suggest it, one evening while he stood at the base of his bed, peeling wide papery flakes of sunburnt skin from his shoulder. I don’t know about all this work outside, he said. A civilized man doesn’t stand in the sun. The invention of culture was simultaneous with the invention of indoors: palaces, cathedrals, libraries, legislatures.—He made a gesture like a man sprinkling a pinch of salt, and the skin fell from his fingers to the floor.—Where does an evolved man eat? In a dining hall. Where does a wise man lay his lovely wife? In the darkened privacy of his chambers. Oh, the sun is a fearsome thing: the Greeks called him Apollo, the son of Zeus himself. The Egyptians called him … What did the Egyptians call the sun god, Brammer?

Fuck if I know, said Brammer.

Warren peeled at his skin some more. Everything the sun sees, it destroys, starting with a man’s own flesh. Myself, my father, his father, and his father before him, all treated the sun with a healthy respect, and the Warrens have always been the paler for it. Now the Corps asks me to stand in the sun all day, just so my rifle won’t get lonely. Hence, I burn. It is the mark, I say, of a civilized man.—He gazed imperiously around the room. Now, Chenier, for example, doesn’t burn. In fact, Chenier is getting mighty dark. Where you been, Chenier? On your own little Africa campaign?—Laughter all around, and the conversation turned.

Then a unit had been finishing maintenance on a cannon when one of the men spotted a slick of oil beneath it. It was evening; the sun was red on the horizon. Sergeant isn’t going to like that, said a Voice of Fearful Mourning. Somebody’s going to have to stay behind and get it cleaned up.

Let the nigger do it, said a Voice of Young-Old Dudgeon.

He meant Chenier, and Chenier, who was on the other side of a crate of shells and didn’t hear him, accepted the assignment without knowing why it had been left to him, spent an hour on the job, and then ran to the mess, where he sat at a table with two of his battalion mates, who rose pointedly from his presence and took themselves across the room.

Well, an argument went, over boilermakers and under a bitter yellow moon. Coonass was a black man, snuck in by the Department of the Navy under the guise of being white, because Roosevelt wanted to prove his principles. No time better than a war, when great masses of men shifted around the world, and all societies were transformed. Somebody had to be planning it: somebody had to be keeping track, from start to finish. One Negro man in the Marine Corps.

Chenier paid no mind. He’d heard worse, he’d done worse. He was thirty years old, his teeth were still strong enough to bite the head off a penny-a-pound nail, and his hair was still thick; he didn’t care what young men thought. It was just as well they left him more and more alone, to fall back on his tangled inner tongue. He wrote to his wife in Slidell, telling her it wouldn’t be long until the day he climbed back into bed with her, and banged her until the walls shook.

Then there came a Wednesday night when leave appeared, like an alignment of the planets, for Lukas, Hamilton III, and Walter Selby. It was a fine night, a fine fortune, the palms were rustling, the wind was up, and the three men strolled the walks with careless ease. At the motor pool stood Chenier alone, dressed in his immaculate uniform and a sour-smelling aftershave. He nodded hello to the boys and turned back to his obscure thoughts. Hamilton III took the others aside in a spirit of gallantry born out of the tedium of waiting, as surely as his ancestors’ had been born out of the tedium of the fields. Listen here, he said. I don’t care what those boys say. Coonass is a man of honor. Coonass is an upstanding representative of the values and tradition of the United States Marine Corps. And Coonass is going to accompany us on a goddamn drunk.

Walter Selby went to Chenier and made the invitation, and Chenier accepted with a shrug, neither ungrateful nor quite glad.

Where were you going, anyway? Lukas asked him as they started into town.

Don’t know, said Chenier. Just going into town to get a drink, maybe look at the femmes go by.

The femmes, said Hamilton III. That’s good. What kind of femmes do you like?

Chenier said nothing, but he smiled broadly in response, his wide lips curling back immodestly.

We’ll see what we can do, said Hamilton III.

They began at sundown in a bar on a hillside and progressed down toward the water, as if in a dream of drowning. In one dark beery place they became bogged down—Lukas wanted one of the waitresses and insisted on staying until he could proposition her—but in time they moved on. Their faces grew red and their eyes grew wet, ten o’clock came at Lonesome Bob’s, the Best of Honolulu, where they ordered rum and coconut milk and stared at the center of the scarred round wooden table.

I left a girl in Abilene

I left a girl in Abilene

Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen

Waits for me in Abilene.