__Last night of his life Dan finishes his shift at 24th evac and slips past watchtowers to Long Binh jail. He carries some Quaaludes and a pocketful of notable weed. Since King got wasted, the brothers over there need serious calm. His regulars he finds that night standing on crates. He looks up to see they’ve wrapped their hands in electrical tape and are working gingerly to roll a string of razor wire inside the tent flap.
Whoa. Is that for folks comin or goin? They look surprised to see him, say, Don’t you got ears, man? He best carry his ass back over the ditch because 720 is fixin to toss the place, the whole camp, talkin strip searches and a whole range of indecency too cruel to abide.
That waft Dan walked through, fresh indeterminate insult in the usual hover of sweat, piss and mud, he recognizes now. Gasoline. LBJ’s gonna burn tonight. He doesn’t care.
They say, Truly, man, this shit is urgent. Just leave what you got and fly. Dan does, and he considers writing Glynnis the truth. That’s no mortar that crushes his skull. Please. More likely the business end of a shovel. Although inside his skull the blow does register as mortar, not blunt but concussive, almost tidal, arriving like a wave or some wind traveled long distance across space and time.
***
vocabulary lesson
In tutorials
with my brilliant student the doctor, taking time off from medicine to write her book of unspeakable truths, I play the village idiot, maybe because I both wanna know and don’t.
—Okay, here on page 79. What the hell? Q’ed?
—Oh that. Game over. Beyond gorked. Think O. Now add a tongue hanging at 5 o’clock.
She looks inclined to demonstrate, but in my head I’ve driven a rental car from the airport, parked, found the right elevator and my own set of images: railed bed, curtained glass walls, my mother’s half-shaven skull, blood in tarry bubbles at the bite of each staple and yellowing with bruise her face, vacant, collapsed.
Q’ed, cruel and exact, I understand as the term I wished to hear each time the door to her room swung open.
peephole²
Your Uncle K asserts
the late ‘70s offered neither a particular nor general moral sense. Not in any city in America.
—I do recall moral despair, he says.
If it’s not too late for introductions, your Uncle K, commentator and helpmate, is my third husband, the one who has so far stuck.
***
“vocabulary lesson” and “peephole” first appeared in Seattle Review, Vol. 2, nos. 2 & 3. Reprinted by permission from author and Seattle Review.
Read more of this in Ensemble Anthology no.1
