Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Your ad,” I said.

When Mud left the tent I decided I’d better go to Lano.

I went out. The east wind tells the west wind when to blow, I thought, polishing as I passed Dr. Mud. He was by the Lister bag. It made me a little nervous to see him near our drinking water. “Ah, Mud,” I said, “the thirsty man drinks deepest.”

“A hungry man is no judge of food,” he said back, quick as a shot.

Sinister bastard, I thought.

Outside Lano’s compound one of his supernumerary Pakistanis stood guard. He carried no rifle but in each hand he held a grenade from which the pin had already been pulled. His famine-thin thumbs strained against the safety device to depress it.

“I’m invited,” I said.

He shook his head and looked troubled.

“I’m American. I go inside, yes? The Generalissimo Lano awaits.”

He didn’t understand.

“A hungry man is no judge of food. North wind blows south wind,” I told him Easternly.

He looked helplessly at the grenades in his hands. He was, I knew, ordered to throw them at anyone who tried to get past the gate.

I whistled “Yankee Doodle” and he smiled suddenly in recognition. “Foh Jul,” he said happily, “Foh Jul.” He motioned me inside.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “don’t wave.”

I had never been inside before (none of us had) and did not see immediately where I was supposed to go. From outside Lano’s electrified fence the compound looks pretty much like the one I am in myself, but once inside I noticed some subtle differences. For one thing, there were flowers. Not the exotic man-eaters that grew in such abundance elsewhere in this steamy jungle, but gentle, familiar ones, homey ones. They grew along both sides of a tree-lined path that wound up the mountain. I climbed the path for about a quarter of a mile and then heard voices. I knew I must be going in the right direction and walked faster. Suddenly the path leveled off and I came into a clearing. About fifteen yards away were the thirty- three other Americans in Lano’s army.

Lano, on a high platform exactly like the one at the drill field where the men did their calisthenics each morning, saw me and waved.

“What’s happening?” I asked a thin soldier in a shabby Class A American uniform.

“We’re celebrating the Fourth,” he answered glumly. “Only he does all the drinking.”

“Attention,” Lano called out through a megaphone and raised a canteen cup. “Attention there! I propose a very important, very special sentimental toasts to the memory of the great General Washington. Proclaim liberty throughout the land.” He leaned forward and drank. “Happy Fourth July to all,” he said, smiling. He put down the cup and placed his hands on the railing. “Celebration over. Back to your stations at once,” he shouted abruptly. “And don’t forget,” he said, pointing to a tent. just below and to the side of the platform, “you saw yourselves how your General Lano shares with you disfortune and hardship, as he will share with you the prizes of the victory. Tell the others. Dismissed!” The soldiers turned and began to walk off uncertainly. “Go back the way you came,” Lano roared from the platform. “Follow the flowers down.”

I was walking beside Rohnspeece when I heard my name shouted in Lano’s deep voice through the megaphone. “Boswells,” he called again. I looked back at him over my shoulder. “I dismissed only the soldiers. My aides cannot yet go,” he said. Rohnspeece looked at me admiringly as I walked back toward the platform.

Lano rested his arms along the railing and leaned down toward me, smiling. He seemed very pleased. Raising his megaphone again he spoke into it in a normal voice. “What’s the matter,” he said, “don’t you want to be my aide no more?”

“I want to go back.”

“Only deep wounded can be moved. My planes bring in equipment, take out deep wounded heroes.” He laughed. “Relax,” he said, “it’s not a bad war. I fight for freedom. You free man yourself, you understand good cause.” He climbed down from the platform. “Hey, Boswells, when I win, you fix me up with big-shot pals?”

“Lano, I told you. I only said that to get you to take me in. I don’t know any big shots.”

“Sure you do. You know me. I make world’s first international revolution. Everybody come.” He slapped me across the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, “I show you my operation here.”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

“No, no, not that. Something special. My operation. Big military secret. Come on. Special day, Fourth July. Sentimental occasion for Lano. Live Wilmington, Delaware, three year. Seen Du Pont firework display. Beautiful, beautiful. See that, think, America the beautiful. Some day Lano make international revolution, Du Pont do the firework.”

With his arm across my shoulders he led me off across the field and into the woods. In a few minutes we struck another path and started to climb again. “You don’t know what Lano got back here,” he whispered. “Only Dr. Mud see this. Now you. Special. Very sentimental.”

I had come a long way in my life. There had been a time when I had responded to the bizarre without understanding it, feeling only the need to be curious, to remember it, as though anything truly outlandish were a kind of signpost, an indication of a sort of clumsy, cloudy truth. I can remember as a kid in school during the war being visited by a private named Pressman. He came to us several times. Needing a platform, he used our classroom and told us endlessly of his pathetic life in the army, apologizing, laughing at the jokes the other soldiers played on him, losing the thread of his story in his own roared laughter, shouting above it like some comedian who has lost control of his audience, “But wait a minute, wait a minute,” taking it or some new shame up again, recounting humiliation like a braggart in reverse, but mixing it all up somehow with a kind of civics and endorsing everything, everything — the Pledge of Allegiance, our penny milk program, the Second Front, casualty lists— insisting in a crazy, personal grammar on the fitness of everything that happened in the world. Pressman was insane. His desperation, his clumsy, Jewish being, his self- hatred had brought him finally into a mad agreement with everything that forced him down. Forever short- sheeted, a man with frogs in his beds, he came to accept all insults, to convert them into proofs of justice and the wisdom of power.

I used to stare fondly at the Pressmans of the world, primitives holding their insanity as a sign from God. Now I know better. Pressman’s nuttiness was just the self trying to get out. Death gives us nerve. I am calmer now; I see pain everywhere.

“Not far now,” Lano said. “What a surprise for you. There. Look!”

I looked in the direction Lano was pointing and saw — a ranch house. A ranch house! There, high on a mountain, hidden by the pines, in still unmapped Los Farronentes, Q. R., two miles from the tents, the quiescent bivouac of the world’s first international revolution, a ranch house. Landscaped with a patio, a barbecue pit, picture windows. A carport, for Christ’s sake! I could not have been more surprised if he’d shown me a full-scale replica of the Taj Mahal and informed me that he used it as an outhouse. What simple things were at the core of our revolutions, finally! What little content to our discontent! And how unmysterious the world mysteriously was! Dr. Mud sinister? Don’t make me laugh.

“Lano,” I said, “I want to get out of here. Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. The next plane, Lano, the next plane. Lano, do you hear me? The next plane.”

“How about that?” he asked, excited. “Beautiful. Like in Wilmington, Delaware. I had it built to specification. Everything to specification. Four bedroom. Sunken living room, three bathroom, full basement. Half bath downstair off pine-paneled rumpus room.”