Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“Not a damned house back then,” he said, as if speaking to someone a dozen feet away. “Who was here first? I ask you that, man to man. Who was here first? Sergeant Corpo, that’s who.”

Sooner or later they’d work themselves up and get up some kind of damned petition. Like before. Potentially dangerous. Squatting on public lands. Health hazard. Known to be violent. Get one of their bloody writs, send the sheriff boat around, make a lot of trouble for nothing. Hell, the nearest part of the island to the mainland shore was a good half mile, and with a private channel five feet deep between the island and the shore anyhow.

Would mean losing the beard again, and all the itching when it was growing back in. Sit there in court in a white shirt with all the candy people staring at him, wishing they could snap their fingers and he’d disappear. The Lieutenant would have to handle it again, like the other times. It was hard to follow what he said, and some of it didn’t seem the way Corpo remembered it, but it was good to listen to.

“If it please the court, I would like permission to reconstruct the circumstances which brought Sergeant Walter Corpo to this area. He was a platoon leader in my company in 1944, an infantry combat veteran by then, a young man who had enlisted in December of 1941 after one year and a few months of college. I led a patrol of fifteen men into the small village of Selestat near the Rhine. We were ambushed. Sergeant Corpo took cover by a fountain in the square and gave us covering fire to enable us to withdraw, with little hope of being able to retreat in turn. He was not ordered to cover the retreat. It was his instinctive reaction. We got out with but three casualties and came back with the entire company. Sergeant Corpo was believed dead. It was obvious he had kept firing after being hit several times, gravely.

“A shard of metal, possibly a mortar fragment, had penetrated his skull. A corpsman detected a pulse and had him removed to an aid station, though believing he would soon die. From there he was taken back to a station hospital and then to a general hospital, both installations thinking his chance of survival remote. I believed he had died. I put him in for a posthumous decoration, and he was awarded the Silver Star. The war ended. I returned to law school. After graduation I entered the practice of law here in the city of Broward Beach. In 1948 the Veterans’ Administration got in touch with me and asked me if I would go over to Bay Pines Veterans Hospital near St. Petersburg on a matter regarding Sergeant Walter Corpo. He had asked for me.

“I discussed the case with his doctors. He was in excellent physical health. The brain injury, however, had left him with certain disabilities. Complicated instruction confused him. His attention span was short. He would say exactly what he meant in every circumstance, a trait our culture does not find palatable. They did not consider him dangerous. But they had noticed an increasing unrest in him, an increasing irritability at being forced to live in such close quarters with so many other men. They doubted he could earn a living. But he was eligible to receive a total disability pension. He had no relatives close enough to take any interest in him. Could I be of any help?

“He knew me. He was glad to see me. He was absolutely certain I could get him out of that place. He had saved my life twice. I brought him back here with me. He lived in my home. I had an outboard boat and motor. He had a taste for being alone. He began to spend longer and longer periods on the water. After he was gone for three days I demanded an explanation. He took me to that small mangrove island in the bay, approximately ten acres in area, nameless at that time and now known as Sergeant’s Island. He had, with what must have been incredible effort, hewed a curving channel back through the mangrove to a small hammock of palmetto and cabbage palm, and he had used the outboard motor to wash the channel deep enough to use. He had constructed a crude shelter out of driftwood, tarpaper, tin cans hammered flat, and some battered windows scavenged from the city dump. He said it was what he liked and what he wanted, and he wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.

“I will now present for the consideration of the court, two documents. The first is from the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund giving Sergeant Corpo permission to reside upon that state-owned land until such time as title passes into other hands. The second is also dated in November of 1949 and is signed by the Chairman of the County Commission, and grants Sergeant Corpo all the necessary zoning exceptions applicable.

“Once a month Sergeant Corpo comes to the mainland, picks up his disability check at my home, cashes it at my bank, buys provisions and returns to Sergeant’s Island. Over the years he has considerably improved his cottage. Should he not appear for his check, I would go there at once to see what happened to him. He is in splendid physical condition. He wants merely to be left alone.

“There has been talk of violence. There was one such incident. Seven years ago a pack of teen-age boys came to the erroneous conclusion that Sergeant Corpo was a drunk, and that the cottage might well contain a large supply of whisky. There were five of them. They decided to raid the island. They thought Sergeant Corpo some sort of harmless nut. I could have told them that Sergeant Corpo grew up in the swamplands of Georgia, that when he was twelve and thirteen he would go into those swamps hunting and be gone a week without anyone worrying about his safety. I could have told them how silent and deadly the Sergeant was on night patrol duty.

“They raided him on a Saturday night. He heard them coming. He turned his lanterns out. He went outside, circled them, found their boat and cast it adrift. Then, in the night, he took them one at a time, lashed them to the mangroves with pieces of rope, spacing them far enough apart so they could communicate only by shouting to each other. Then he went back to his cottage and cleaned up all the mess and litter and breakage they had caused. He did a good job. Then he came over here to the city and asked the authorities to come pick up the boys. It was dawn when they gathered them up, cowed and terrified, their faces grotesquely puffed by insect bites, eyes swollen shut. They were of good family, had been in trouble prior to the raid, but to the best of my knowledge, have stayed out of trouble ever since.

“I submit that these petitioners who are making a new attempt to dislodge Sergeant Corpo are expressing not any feeling that he is a public nuisance, but rather a social judgment, and wish to penalize anyone who is unwilling or unable to conform to their particular standards of housing, habit, dress and deportment.

“Your honor, I am reminded of the prim lady who lodged a complaint against the owners of property adjacent to hers on the grounds that it was being put to immoral use as a nudist colony. The officers who investigated were confused by her statement of carryings-on right out in plain sight, having noticed the high wall, the large size of the adjoining grounds, and the remote location of the nudist establishment. When asked what she meant by plain sight, she said, ‘Right from my roof with my husband’s binoculars, you can’t hardly miss it.’

“When the only room left in our society for men such as Sergeant Corpo is inside an institution, it will be time for us to re-examine our goals — and our humanity.”

“Hoooheee, how the Lieutenant does go on,” Corpo said. “And how you this fine morning, Mr. Scallop? Excuse me. Pop you into the sack with all your folks. Get your tribe thinned out some before the mist burns off, and the Sunday damn fools come roaring around here in circles, pulling other damn fools on skis, scaring the fish and stirring up the mud.”