William Kennedy - Roscoe

Roscoe, unable to sleep any more this morning, rises from his bed and stands amid his possessions, almost all he has in the world — an overflowing bookcase, overflowing desk, overflowing closet, overflowing bar, plus the evidence that he exists amid a population outside his mind: photos on the walls of himself with Al Smith, FDR, Jimmy Walker, Harry Truman, Bing Crosby, Connie Boswell, Jock Whitney, Earl Sande, Sophie Tucker, Patsy, Elisha, and Veronica; above the mantel the cockfighting painting Patsy gave him after Flora wouldn’t let it hang in his own house; over the sofa, a Falstaff poster heralding a London production of Henry IV, Part One, a gift from Elisha.

Roscoe’s pain, he discovers as he moves, is worsening. It comes but no longer goes, and he realizes that, once freed of today’s obligations, he must attend to it. It is a nonspecific malaise in stomach and chest that he’s had since his blunt trauma in the car accident. It occupies the same area as his wound by gunshot during the Great War, and because of this Roscoe believes the pain is self-generated: You are doing this to yourself, you idiot.

In the past when he’s said this, the pain has diminished, then vanished; but not now. He speculates that this pain may be rising from powerful forces of fraudulence far beneath the shallow hysteria that usually creates Roscoe’s phantom pain, then banishes it when it’s recognized. This could be a new element in his soul that is resistant to unconscious reason. An alternative explanation is that the pain is genuine, and so weird that it may be fatal.

Fatal.

The endgame of the immense life that lives in Roscoe’s brain? What will the unfinished world do without him? He asked himself this in 1918, when his first blunt trauma was imposed upon him — The one that should have killed you, Ros. Now you’ve got another chance to do yourself.

How Roscoe’s First Wound Came to Pass

Roscoe and Patsy join all-volunteer 102nd Engineer Train, 27th Division, of New York National Guard, at Albany in the summer of 1917, mustered into federal service, leave Albany for Manhattan, Spartanburg, Newport News for training through April 1918, board one of six transports in convoy with ten destroyers, cruiser, sub chaser, shot at by German subs, one sub blown out of the water, staging camp at Noyalles-sur-Mer, then Agenville and Candas, where Jerry’s bombs kill seventeen horses of the Engineer Train, Roscoe and Patsy together on the same wagon in the Train, but not hurt, four horses at each end of their new wagon, four men in the middle, each man controlling two horses, Roscoe in the saddle on left horse of lead team as they move, Patsy riding with rear team, moving from nightfall to daybreak on bombed-out roads, through towns in ruins, Saint-Argues, Saint-Omer, German planes always overhead as they near front with ammo and rations, to Cassel, heading for Belgium, Engineers gassed by a long wave, don’t lose that gas mask, no civilians in ruined towns, rain is constant, feet and clothes never dry, water flowing into tents, mud the mattress whose ooze you settle into, Jerry overhead, then with Patsy in a French church for high mass said by Father Skelley from Cohoes, chaplain for the 27th, Train bringing tools and trench irons to infantry to shore up trench walls, plus equipment to Engineers repairing roads so the heavy artillery can pass, battlefield laid out in lines of trenches, front-line trenches, then the approach trenches, and reserve trenches in rear, infantry in each trench, first line pushes forward to the objective, second follows to mop up wounded or straggling Germans and bring back our own wounded, the boys are driving Jerry backward and he’s moving fast, so Train returns to reload and heads up to the line again, hip boots issued, Train shelled by pilot who personally tosses bombs from his cockpit, Roscoe and Patsy meet John McIntyre from Albany, halfback with Patsy on the Arbor Hill Spartans, who’s retrieving dead and wounded, dangerous duty, for the corpses may be booby-trapped, back again to load up ammo, trench irons, rations, barbed wire, sand bags, gravel for trench work, all trenches infested but don’t try to get rid of cooties with creosote, then a break and there’s a big crowd at mass and we move up again, fearing gas more than anything, animal loss heavy, road so badly bombed it’s not a road, sudden shell burst and Patsy’s leg is hit with shrapnel, he’s carried to the rear, barrage from 1 to 4 a.m and it’s as bright as under the electric lights at State and Pearl Streets, everybody waiting for an attack by the Huns, too quiet, we ride all night in cold rain, no food and almost no sleep, our troops massing on front line, 106th Regiment of our 27th doing the main push, so we’re in for overtime, Train is up the line as far as possible and it’s a slaughterhouse, except in a slaughterhouse they kill the cows and here some boys are only half killed, fields covered with so many English, German, Yank dead you walk on them, drive your wagon over their faces, we’re 50 percent dead but others are worse off, and a shell blasts all four of our horses and wagon, Dumas knocked senseless, Weeper Walters blown off his horse and the wagon runs over his arm and hand, horse returns with dead Dumas lying across his back, Sammy Jones’s horse cut in two by a shell, another horse dosed badly with gas, everybody got a whiff, Sammy puked in his gas mask and took it off, God knows what’ll become of him, everybody’s half blind and you don’t move because that spreads the gas in your lungs, only two on the wagon now, Roscoe and Mike Ahearn from Worcester, roads are mined and we’re moving ammo, taking it as far forward as wagons can go, no way to turn back in this rain, this mud, so Roscoe and Mike dig a hole three feet deep beside roofless barn walls, sink four posts with corrugated iron as a roof, a large can for a stove, keep those shoes on or the rats will steal them, enemy planes upstairs so the 106th isn’t budging yet, but the word is that a great drive by Yanks, French, English, and Aussies is about to begin, and here comes the British artillery with its rolling barrage to soften up Jerry, our shells carrying shrapnel, smoke, mustard gas, the first time we’ve used the gas, and then the 106th moves out, heading toward the outworks of the Hindenburg Line, which the Germans think is unbreakable, and maybe it is, one Yank unit moves beyond the point it was supposed to hold and those Yanks are bottled up by a Hun machine-gun nest and waiting, Aussie regiment coming up to help them, and Roscoe thinks of his pals blown apart, shot, gassed, dead of fright or exhausted hearts, and he lies down in the mud and closes his eyes so he can stay awake and, by a mundane miracle, sleeps, or seems to, until a shell explodes the barn wall and Mike Ahearn wakes screaming for his mother, he and Roscoe overrun by a colony of black rats from the blasted barn floor, half a dozen rats crawling on Roscoe, one sucking blood from his neck, and he screams, rolls over, and shakes himself and the rats fall away but not the one on his neck, a goddamn snapping-turtle rat, and Roscoe reels, never having known terror like this, not even from the mustard gas, pure rat terror, and he tries to smack the rat with his rifle but still it clutches his shoulder and his neck, a goddamn warrior rat, don’t shoot it, Roscoe, or you’ll shoot yourself, and Roscoe stands and whirls in a circular frenzy, drops his rifle, squeezes the rat to death, but not before he’s bitten on both hands, and then he runs, done with this war, runs toward the rear, bleeding at the neck, poisoned with rat plague and surely dying, he’ll run to Albany to get well, fuck all rats, double-fuck this army and this war, and he runs, oh how he runs, but without his rat and without his rifle, Roscoe lost in the night, and he turns back toward the barn-that-was — is this the way back? — but all is blackness until a star shell lights up the field and he sees he’s in no man’s land, running toward the German barbed wire, and he’ll get there if he keeps going, and he leaps into a shell hole, drawing fire from a machine gun, probably that goddamn nest everybody wants, and in another star shell’s light he heaves a grenade toward the gun and it blasts back at him, no cigar, Ros, but an Aussie one-pounder finds the nest and that’s that for those Hun sonsabitches, and Roscoe is up again and running low toward his own line, yes, go back and get that rifle, he’s got the direction right this time and the boys see him coming, but what they really see is crazy Jerry coming after them single-handed — Hey, hey! it’s not Jerry, for God’s sake, don’t shoot, it’s only The Roscoe! — but Roscoe in the dark is Jerry on the attack and they shoot Roscoe and he falls at his own line, speaks, and is recognized, and they pull him bleeding into the trench and ask him, Roscoe, what the hell you doin’ out there, tryin’ to get ’em all by yourself? What guts this guy’s got, drawin’ their fire like that, sorry we shot you, buddy, Roscoe bleeding under his tunic and he feels a nonspecific pain in chest and stomach — ratness and a bullet transformed into the malaise of the heroic deserter.