“ She’ll do anything I tell her to do,” he said. “Crazy bitch is wild. We’ll team up on her, turn her every way but loose.”
I didn’t know what to say.
We drove across town to a dead-end street in the old Tannery district. It was a bad block, and the address I had wasn’t the best house on it. It was a little square box of a house, with some of the window panes broken and weeds poking up through the litter on the front lawn. The paint job was so far gone it was hard to say what color it was.
“ Better Homes and Gardens,” Walbeck said. “I can see why he likes to spend the night at my place, the son of a bitch.”
“ That’s his car,” I said, pointing to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a crumpled fender and a busted taillight.
“ He parked that piece of shit on my street? You’d think he would have been ashamed.”
He led the way, marched right up to the front door. He put a hand on the butt of his service revolver and made a fist of the other. “Police!” be bellowed, as he pounded on the door. Then, before anyone could open it, he drew back his foot and kicked it in.
The shotgun blast picked him up and blew him back onto the front porch.
I was standing to the side when the gun went off, and I already had my own revolver drawn. The weasel- faced little guy in the broken-down armchair had triggered both barrels, and I didn’t give him time to reload. I put three slugs in his chest, and they told me later that two of them got the heart and the third didn’t miss it by much. He was dead before the shots quit echoing.
I knelt down beside my partner. He was still breathing, but he’s taken a double load of buckshot and he was on his way out. But it was important to tell him this before he was gone.
“ I’m the one,” I said. “I’ve been dicking your wife for months, you dumb shit. It was fun, putting one over on you, but finally we both got sick of having you around.”
I was looking at his eyes as I spoke, and he got it, he took it in. But he didn’t hang on to it for long. A moment later his eyes glazed and he was gone.
For a long moment the room was silent, but for the crackling of the fire and an impressive rumbling from the bowels of the old man dozing over his book. “There’s a metaphor,” the doctor said. “Life is just one long dream, punctuated by the occasional fart.”
“ That’s quite a story, Policeman,” the soldier said. “Quite a story to tell on yourself.”
“ It happened a long time ago,” the policeman said.
“ And you set the whole thing up. Who was the man with the shotgun?”
“ He was wanted in three states,” the policeman said, “for robbery and murder, and he’d sworn he would never be taken alive. One of my snitches told me where he was holed up.”
“ And the rest of it was your doing,” the priest said.
The policeman nodded. “Mea culpa, Priest. The call I made before we rolled was to the station, to let them know we were investigating a tip on a fugitive. I let the perp gun down Walbeck, and then I took him out before he could do the same for me.”
“ And made sure to tell your partner what had happened.”
“ I wanted him to know,” the policeman said.
“ And it was true, what you said? You’d been with his wife for months?”
“ For a few months, yes. Not as long as he’d been suspicious of her. His suspicions were groundless at first, but I was intrigued, and filled with some sort of righteous indignation at the way he was treating her. I’d have been less outraged, I’m sure, if I hadn’t deep down wanted to have her myself.”
“ And how long did you have her, Policeman?”
“ When I set up her husband,” he said, “I thought I’d wait a decent interval and marry the woman. But over the next several weeks I came to see why Walbeck cheated on her. It turned out the woman was a pain in the ass. The affair ran its course and ended, and she married someone else.”
“ And you didn’t worry she would let slip how you’d arranged her husband’s death?”
“ She never knew,” the policeman said. “As far as she was concerned, it was a death in the line of duty. He got a medal awarded posthumously and she got a generous widow’s pension.”
“ Because she was such a generous widow,” the doctor suggested. “Did the old fellow fart again?”
“ I think that was the fire.”
“ I think it was the man himself,” the doctor said. “And what did you get, Policeman? A citation for bravery?”
“ A commendation,” the policeman said, “and a promotion not long thereafter.”
“ Virtue rewarded. And the other lady? Joanie Jellin, the convict’s wife?”
“ I consoled her,” the policeman admitted. “And once again came to appreciate my late partner’s point of view. The woman did kindle the flames of lust. But I just spent a few afternoons with her and bowed out of the picture.”
“ No keeping her company on conjugal visits?”
“ None of that, no.”
“ The flames of lust,” the soldier said, echoing the phrase the policeman had used. “They cast a nasty yellow glow, don’t they? Lust ruled your partner, ran his life and ran him out of it, but wasn’t it lust that drove all the parties in your story? You, certainly, and both of the women.”
“ It was the story that came to mind,” the policeman said, “when the conversation turned to lust.”
“ Lust,” the soldier mused. “Is it always about the sexual impulse? What about the lust for power? The lust for gold?”
“ Metaphor,” the priest said. “If I am said to have a lust for gold, the man who so defines me is saying that my desire for gold has the urgency of a sexual urge, that I yearn for it and seek after it in a lustful manner.
“ And what of blood lust?” The soldier cleaned the dottle from his pipe, filled the bowl from his calfskin pouch, struck a wooden match and lit his pipe. “Is that a metaphor, or is it indeed sexual? I can think of an incident that suggests the latter.” He drew on his pipe. “I wonder if I should recount it. It’s not my story, not even in the sense that the priest’s story was his. That was told to him by one of the tale’s principals. Mine came to me by a less direct route.”
They considered this in silence, a silence broken at length by a low rumbling from the hearthside.
“ Was that another fart?” the doctor wondered. “No, I believe it was a snore. The old man’s a whole impolite orchestra, isn’t he?” He sighed. “Tell your story, Soldier.”
I believe it was Robert E. Lee (said the soldier) who expressed the thought that it was just as well war was so horrible, or else we would like it too much. But it seems to me that we already like it to a considerable degree. Who doesn’t recall George Patton proclaiming his love for combat. “God help me, I love it!” he cried.
Or at least George C. Scott did, in his portrayal of Patton. Was that accurate, or do we owe some Hollywood screenwriter for the creation of this myth?
I’m not sure it matters. It’s clear Patton loved it, whether he ever said so or not. And, while it’s quite appropriate that he was played by Scott rather than, say, Alan Alda, I’m sure the man was not entirely lacking in sensitivity. He may have loved war, but he was very likely aware that he shouldn’t.
But people do, don’t they? Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many wars. They seem to retain their popularity down through the centuries, and for all that they grow ever more horrible, we do go on having them. Old men make wars, we are occasionally told, and young men have to fight them. The implication is that older men, safely lodged behind desks, feel free to make decisions that cost the unwilling lives of the young.
But does anyone genuinely think there would be fewer wars fought if younger men were their nations’ leaders? The reverse, I think, is far more likely. The young are more reckless, with others’ lives as well as their own. And it is indeed they who fight the wars, and die in them, because they are often so eager to do so.
I am not wholly without experience here. I saw combat in one war, and ordered men about in others. War is awful, certainly, but it is also quite wonderful. The two words once had the same meaning, did you know that? Awful and wonderful. The former we reserve now for that which we regard as especially bad, the latter for what seems especially good, yet they both have the same root meaning. Full of awe, full of wonder.
