William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

I went over to Tubbs-Bosco and greeted him with a question: “ Zigarette, bitte? ” He smiled, proffered a Lucky Strike, and asked me to sit down beside his whore, whom I glanced at with a certain shock to the system, for she looked very like my Aunt Molly, one of the grand people of the universe. I squinted at her, disbelieving my eyes, and saw she looked not like Molly at all but really like Juliette Levinsky, a blond Jewess of great beauty who was the love of my life for a year or more, and yet this woman was not a blonde; and when I looked at her from another angle she resembled neither Molly nor Juliette. Clearly this face required further scrutiny.

“Have you seen the Meister?” I asked Bosco.

“Not since before the fall,” he said.

“Which fall is that?” I asked.

“Fall? Fall? What do you mean fall?” he asked.

“I mean fall. It’s what you said. Whose fall? What fall are you talking about?”

“That’s my question,” he said.

“The Meister,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that,” Bosco said.

“When did you see him last?”

“Last week. We had a meal together. We both had Heilbutt vom Rost, mit Toast. ”

“What do I care what you ate? Where is he? He’s no longer at the theater.”

“He sold the theater,” Bosco said.

“ Heilbutt vom Rost is my favorite German dish,” I said. “I had it on Good Friday, with Krauterbutter. ”

“The Captain threw you in, of course. You knew that.”

“I suppose I did,” I said.

“I’d have him killed, if I were you,” said Bosco.

“That’s extreme,” I said. “Not my way. I admit I considered it, however.”

“The Captain’s in London,” Bosco said. “Living it up at the Strand and the Ritz, dining out at the Connaught and Brown’s Hotel, shopping on Savile Row, screwing all the girls in Soho. And you call yourself a spy?”

“I never call myself a spy,” I said.

I looked at the whore. She looked like my third-grade teacher, who used to rub herself against the edge of the desk while lecturing us: A beautiful woman. A tall redhead with long blond hair. She was smitten with me. Followed my career all through grammar school. No one quite like her, the sweet little dolly.

“ Heilbutt vom Rost I could go for right now,” I said.

“I can get it for you half price,” Bosco said.

“Where’s Geld?” I asked.

“Geld is where you find him,” Bosco said. “In the Russian zone by this time, I’d venture.”

“You always said he was a double agent.”

“No, I merely suggested that he was a provocateur-killer with a finger in every political honeycomb in Europe. Even his toenails are illegal. He’s a great man. He’s entitled to finger anything or anybody he pleases. You know who the greatest man in the world is?”

“Of course,” I said. “Harry Truman. For dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I never thought so many were undoable.”

“And the second-greatest man in the world?”

“The pilot who bombed Hiroshima. Think of the night sweats and headaches he’s had to put up with ever since.”

“In my opinion,” Bosco said, “there’s only one war, with intermissions.”

“That’s how it should be,” I said. “Let me tell you the greatest bunch of men I ever came across. The glory brigades who landed at Normandy on D Day, pissy with fear, climbing that fucking cliff into the path of those fortified Nazi cock-suckers, soaked to the soul in blood, brine, sand, and shit, choking with putrescible courage and moving ahead into the goddamn vortex of exploding death. Who’s got balls? Those guys had cojones big as combat boots. I arrived two weeks after Normandy, a goddamn latecomer, a slacker, a shitassed mewling little yellowbelly, and I got separated from my outfit for three days with no food or water and then I saw a Nazi, a fat fucking killer of women and children and newborn baby Jews, an asswipe shitface murdering swine of a fucking Nazi prick, and I got him in my sights and shot him through the nose. Then somebody shot at me. It was dusk. I couldn’t see where the shot came from, but obviously he had a Kamerad on his flank, and so I went back into my cave, my earthworks, and laid low. Four days without food by this time, and we piss and moan when we miss a meal. I crawled as far into my earthworks as earth would allow and I heard someone up there walking around calling, “Here, doggie, come on, nice little doggie,” all this with a kraut accent, of course, thinking I’d fall for the old dog-biscuit offer. He probably didn’t even have a dog biscuit. Then it grew silent and I went dead out, probably slept two more days. It might’ve been a month. Who knows how long, or how well, or how deeply, or how significantly, or how richly, or how comfortably we sleep when we’re fucking asleep? We’re asleep, aren’t we? So how the hell are we supposed to know how well, or how deeply, and so on? But to get to the point — are you with me?”

“Dogfood,” said Bosco.

“Good,” I said. “So I came up from the earthworks, crawling out like some goddamn creature of the substructure, some toad of the underground river, some snake of the primeval slime, some cockroach from the cooling ooze of creation. I came up and looked out into the sky and saw it was fucking dawn or fucking twilight, what you will. Another fucking crepuscular moment, let’s call it. And I said to myself, it’s going to be all fucking right in half an hour. But what was going to be all right?”

“There’s a question on the floor,” Bosco said.

“Exactly,” I said. “What is it?”

“Crepuscularity,” he said.

“Of course. So I surveyed the scene as best I could and saw that the Nazi I’d shot through the nose was still there in the distance. I had a perfect vision of how he’d fallen, how his helmet went up on the right ear, how the blood coursed down his ex-nose into his mouth, et cetera. I listened for any telltale sign of that sly fucker with the goddamned dog biscuits and I stayed put but made demarcative notations in my brain of what lay between that Nazi son of a bitch and myself, what approximate distance I had to traverse, for I had already decided, with a form of self-defense made known to me by every cell in my body, that if I did not eat within several minutes I would die.

“I have no stomach for death, especially my own, and so I calculated the hectares, the rods, and the metrical leftovers between the Nazi and me, and I slithered on my belly like a lizard up from the putrid slush, the foul paste, the vomitous phlegm of a slop-jar swamp, and in time I reached my target, of whose freshness I was assured, unless I had been asleep for several days. I took his helmet off, cut off his head and let it roll, sliced his clothing, ripped him up the middle and cut a split steak off his stomach, turned him over and cut two chops off his buttocks, stuck him in the gizzard and ripped him sideways just so he’d remember me, slithered back to my cave with the steak and chops in his helmet, waited till dark, sealed up the cave so no fire would be seen, cut out a chimney for the smoke, then dined on filet of Nazi, chops on the Rhine, and lived to tell the tale.”

The whore looked me in the eye.

“You made steak and chops out of a German soldier?” she inquired.

“Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” I asked her.

“You just said it.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. Whores should be fucked but not heard.”

She signaled to a man at the bar who was a perfect double of the hanged man in the film I’d just seen. Clearly there is a problem of identity here, I thought, as four of the men at the bar (one looking incredibly like the Captain) moved toward our booth and separated me from Bosco and the blond whore forever.