freak like me

Snafu was sick and now he is returning.

I stumbled as I tried to march. I wanted to keep pace with the other men or I wanted them all to make it to their foxholes. To have them all get on the line, dig in, fire off. Hit something, kill everyone, get angry.

If they could do that, maybe this would be the last batch of soft boots, tender green boots, to come to the aid of the ones choked in dust, hate, and laid upon by flies with blood.

Lot of men die without ever reaching the line—any line. Line in the sand, first line of defense, first line of offense, line of shattered trees, line through the bodies made by bullets. The line the shell draws around it’s crater.

I was sick. I saw men die when they were taken off the line with the strange attentiveness of the detached healers. I saw many more men die on the line. Those men died of stupid. On their part, on their buddies part. On what some dumbass with no brains has to order that’s stupid. A bullet is stupid, a shell is stupid. Asking how men die is stupid.

How do men march? None of us want to go where we’re marching. We all want to be there but no one wants to get shot or filthy. I wasn’t a sick old man alive and stumbling when they took me off the line, but I am now after they’ve healed me up. I was a all-terrain marching automaton, my cocksure attitude keeping me steady like an extra leg. Well, I’m stumbling now. They got me well and now I’m stumbling because I don’t want to die or get filthy like a goddamn stupid idiot.

Men who are well live until they are shredded by nimble fingers like pork.

Rotted long shredded pork is what waits for me. Thick cloying and delicious feast of plenty for the souls of boys trapped in bloated flies digging in laying the sdees sowing their seeds souls of virgins who were only just a few months hoping for the touch of woman hoping to get a man to help or to kill confusing killers for men and slinking down into the mud just torn up old bodies its not mud its bodies old bodies rising with the sun as virginal slow stupid bloat blies whose only enemy was the DDT that slid off their fat bodies stealing stolen fat bodies as they washed in their own blood.

Somebody stumbles and topples over stupid squelch for a stupid boot the sound of him hitting the bodies is the same sound my boot makes as he is a boot falling in the mud as surely as I march. I march until I am not sick not well and not a dead man neither just a mean irritated bastard irrited by soft skin and my soft skin is irritatted. Soft skin and tender green boots, trying to sneak into the mud early protesting the sqeulch out too stupid too boot to fear the squelch in. Only takes a little to make a living man little bits of life that have dared to return to me only takes a little life to make a living man. After a little while on a cot with some warm food, warm water.

It is a veterens task to klill boots so slowly their bodies don’t notice they are dead and stay on the line their souls stay inside their corpse wriggling under the surface of their rotting skin like the bloat flies their souls are flies. Washed in DDt washed in coral dust and blood and rain. Taking no signals to leave from the rot, forming friendships with the heads of headless men. Shaking hands with the hands of limbless men, and going for walks with them. They kill. Suited well to hell, forming bonds of that of a warrior, ancient and long dead, so fucking dead, they kill and mean and cruel is a way of hell or war, not thought or evil, but good.

My mind flutters like I got a lot going on, though I don’t. Like a cat going for a fresh catch of fish. Kindness immaterial to my ultimate end, cruelty and meanness to my ultimate end. There are men who feed me gently and some are my enemy. There are men who like the irritated fishmonger will swat me away and throw the fish away and if the bits are choice has no bearing on my stomach my stomach which is too soft to eat now.

A living man marching has a full canteen, a living man could rest a bit, we are dying and I try to kill the boots slowly a living man could adjust his rifle. A living man could band together wuth the succulent tasy boots and get them blown to pieces. Kill them all at once instead of slowly. Chummed together like bait for that big white angel of death the pale carnivore beast and its beastly rider. The pale horse that has eaten the trees down to dead stumps grazed, grazed and grazed, again. Turned the lawn to deep-cut paths that et at the remaining root beds so nothing will grow on this everwidening road of war again. Ever. Nothing will ever grow here again. It eats and trods relentless nothing will grow here again. I will not grow again as it’s teeth cut me down its lips curling back a snarl as it grazes and grazes and no matter I am flesh and bone the pale omnipotent omnivore spares no prey that the sneaks between it’s teeth. The war horse is prey but no prey exists that will spit out the flesh that sneaks into his mouth. It will crush and swallow easier than oats and blades of grass. Nothing grows here again. The boots will find no purchase no lawn to march on. And if the pale horse had not walked in a spiral channeling the blood squeezed from trampled bodies channeling all the blood and water and two-beer rations and enemy wine all that muck-thick dripping to the center of the spiral, they would have been all washed to sea. Shocking hope of life killed by salt.

I would not mind becoming the rider. A pale pony would do and would not I a silly target make? This isn’t the civil war or the war of frontiers. The place where everything that moves is dead. Poor dead pony, poor dead horse of war. Even death gets no respite in this one. It emerges and stands up again as fumes as things flung by shelling. It excretes like my own ass rivers of shit. Rivers of shit that only became an issue when they dragged my yammering dead body off the line out of my hole my grave and drag me back into the sickness called living.

Sleep, rest, warmth, dry.

I was a good patient. I was the good insane and told them ever so sweetly to let me go fight with my buddies like a good boy, a good boy who will be a man should. My eyes hard and my voice gruff and my face clean. Waif-thin and hungry. Fed by little more than wafers but hungry, putting weight on and recovering quickly because I am still just a boy, but a hungry, mewling kitten. So fucking hungry. They healed me, bastards, and now my belly is soft and growing and warm and the horse snarls at me as I walk aimlessly where I should go herded like a sheep weak as a meadow freash and smelling good like the flowers a wild girl rips for her daily crown. Hungry and wanting to be out of that place, everyday I thought of my buddies on the line and them so., where do you think they at? Moving forward and I would nod and think of them as fumes and flies swelling up towards the sky to fall again as rain.

I stumble again and catch my reflecting in an oily puddle. Not really me just slime shine slick shimmer but my hand brushes my smooth shaved cheek slick with sweat and the vague imbuement of clean which has yet to be chased from my bone marrow. My buddies would not be smooth and stumbling like this, they would have beards and eyes that sliced through corpses desperate to kill a living corpse sliced through scenery of corpses desperate to see the shadow of the reaper the horse or his rider moving in the ghosts of trees.

They would not touch themselves as they would have no selves to touch. A dead man can be taken apart and it’s just s common to care as to not mind at all, all these corpses and so few haunt more than flies. No selves to touch, no men to haunt. War has plucked them neatly from the civilalization their bodies were made in and replaced the thin line everyone has between them and the world with mud made of the essentials of life: blood, dust, rain, flies, oil, and DDT. Clean blades, unclean hands. Clean teeth, unclean mouths. Clean claws, picking clean jaws. Clean jaws, making unclean claws. Unless it is a point which must be used to kill, there is no point at all.

I am marching and I stumble and fall into marching. The rifle is to kill not to do foolish things like carry easily. My boots aren’t green. They are to kill. My sweat dries on my face and aren’t I salty? I lack the filth of a corpse but the spiral down to death, near death, is an easier path the more it’s tread. The more you spiral, you spiral, spiral. I lack the filth of a corpse and my face is smooth but experience as such has transitioned to a training and I take on the abilities of corpse carried cross mud by boots that just keep going unstoppable in their solemnity. What can kill can now again kill.

I find my foxhole. There are many like it. There are many that are like it. Hole hole hole hole hole hole hole hole hole. This one has my Sledgehammer in it. I quit stumbling, I march no longer neither. Why was I bothering kill boots slowly anyway? My death incomplete. I find my foxhole and peer into it with all the curiousity of the cat. There are guts in there, I know it, but I check to be sure. I jump down, graceful as a dead cat. Alive cat.

“Who is this clown?” asks the clown.

Sledgehammer smiles wide. His teeth have tasted his whole world and he ate it all up.

“Hey, Sledgehammer, how you doing?”

“Pretty good. How’bout you, Corporal?” sledgehammer makes as if he’s going to stand at some point eventually. I dont look around but I look all over him. I look him all over like he’s nestled in the casket and im just curious about his death.

“Can’t complain.”

“You sure can’t.” Sledgehammer thumbs at the little green bag that holds his pocket bible. Taps its, thumping on it with his fingers lightly like he’s trying to get the heart beating on a mouse. His eyes look at me all tender and clean like a rinsed spring onion. Slicing me like the blade, loving me like the handle.

He rises and turns his hands on me and sets me down in the foxhole, posing my resistence to the mud as insistence not to rest. And I must rest. I must die, and sledgehammer is a good man a good boy who is going to kill me so so slow. So slow I dont notice it and no one ever will and I will stay on the line forever. My only-rained-on pants get soaked with the muck clogging the bottom of the hole.

Bag down, I arch my back away from the grimy wall of our hole as Sledgehammer presses my helmet back against it with his hand. Checking me over for injuries—anything that might save my life—and finding none.

He sets himself down in the hole my lap creates in the hole I made his sorry ass dig and reaches his hands around me to touch my back, my sides, my chest and legs and arms and neck.

His pants, unlike mine, do not soak up the grimy water of their hole because his pants are grimy mud. He’s fixing this in me, as he has fixed the hole. He contributes to the detritus as he is a dead man. He contributes to it as he kills. He contributes to it as he gathers rot. Me and our hole leech off him eager to gorge on how he swells and leaks and fires and cuts. When he has finally fallen and the flies have carried off all that can hang loose on a corpse, carried it off to the sky to fall. He will lay down and hit the ground rotten yellow bones brittle and flaking. The grim hunger of the grubs and worms will take over from the lackadaiscial murder of flies and biting leeches.

He runs his hands over me reminiscent of a healer: a healer who loves me like I’m proof of god’s desire for their mission. But he draws the healing from my body and makes me dead again. My back which I had arched from the wall goes slack as he soils it and my reunion ends in laying against the wall with my butt soaking up the worst of my disgust. Worst of my poison. Worst of my buddies. When his hands leave my body to supoort him as he hovers over me like a big slow red fog of flies, he brings the wall closer to something like hell. Like war. Faith healing, faith suffocating. His pocket bible weighs heavy in his clothes, a burden on the threads, and thumping harder than his gentle heart. He believes I can die and he has the power. He believes he has the ability and skill to kill me. He has the training, and I can die thanks to his ministrations. I believe and my belief grows as he runs his hands over me, as he descends on me. He kills me at every part of my body until I am dead again.

The clown laughs at us and I ask Sledgehammer with my seriousness, “What’s better? Boots or clownshoes?”

“Clownshoes,” Sledgehammer replies without hesitation and I won’t make a man prove himself twice.

A dead man shouldn’t have to prove himself. A dead man tells no tales, no damned lies. I believe the dead the dead man, the dead man who killed me. I believe when he says Clownshoes is dead. I believe the dead man who killed me so well I can now lie safe and easy in my hole within Clownshoes watching the line.

“Clownshoes is better.” I say and it is the truth I feel passing between my lips, lips of a corpse.

“Ecosystems are delicate things. The flies thrived; will they continue to without the bodies? Will the sparrows that eat the flies survive without their massive regeneration?” He crouched down and I with him. “See?” He pointed out and in a pool no less shallow than a bootprint, sqiggly little mites, as pale as dust and fine as gunpowder, holding formation and completing manuvers. “What are those?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. Do you think they were here the whole time?” His curiousity carried fear with it, but I didn’t think it was fear at there being tiny things in mud puddles or fear at not knowing. Fear, I thought, at going to find something out and having certainty the knowing would change his life. Like God was giving him a sign right now to do something awful.

“You wanna know?” I asked. He nodded. “Well, not a bad idea to start small with your education.” I moved to stand up, but he set his hand on my knee so I stayed crouched there with him. “Something up, Sledgehammer?”

He twisted to face me—still crouched, and his right knee came real close to dipping into that puddle he was so interested in. “Snafu.” He’s got my attention, hell knows what he’s saying my name for. “Merriell.”

“What?” I asked, irritated. He says ‘Merriell’ again and I try to get some space only for some reason he gets even more up in mine. I soon find myself on my ass with Sledgehammer clamboring over me and calling my name.

Whatever he was on, we both turned it into a wrestling match pretty quick.

“Eugene!” I get him pinned and he grins up at me like he’s won though again I have him pinned.

“You told me to start small.”

I got off him, helped him up, and wondered how it got in Sledgehammer—Eugene’s mind that I was a veteren in this. “Ain’t we start small on Pavuvu? [eugene going back for snafu because he’s warrior bonded with him] I’m talking bigger than names, but name too, Eugene.”

“Didn’t count?” He theorizes blithely, those thick brows of his arched.

“Did I say it didn’t count?” I’m about to start screaming like a jilted lover and here I was thinking I could get Eugene to fill that role. “Didnt count? I don’t know a girl alive who could come up with a reason why what you did didn’t count—and you know the girls are good at that.”

“Didn’t count,” Eugene reiterates. “That’s what all the guys are saying-“

“Well all the-” I stopped as I couldn’t decide what shade I should be as he had got my head all turned around. “I can play your jilted lover, Eugene.” I can tell the moment I start in on it that this will not be threat Sledgehammer takes seriously. “I’ll show up limpwristed, makeup on, clicking my heels at your momma’s door telling her and your daddy war stories about your damn blowjobs -“

“Hey!”

“Eugene’s so big and strong, he carried my pack as well as his own - ”

“Merriell -“

“War is so hard and I’m helpless at it. My, if Eugene didn’t get me out of trouble. Yeah, no need to worry about your boy. You know how men are: one good hard fuck and they roll over and fall right asleep—waking all rested to kill the day.”

Eugene practically doubles over laughing, which just as well because my little act had summoned over at least one nosey marine. I’m a little distracted making sure this guy moseys off. Eugene lands his hand on my shoulder. “Merriell.”

“What?” I ask, still distraacted by the marine.

He calls my name again and I ask ‘What’ and we do this goofy call and response until I sigh, all put-upon because I am, and reply, “Eugene, what?”

“I’m saying we can start over, Merriell.”

“I’m not starting over anything. We only got war, there’s nothing to start. Nowhere, nohow.”

“Merriell.”

“Eugene.”

“Merriell.”

“Eugene.”

He catches my sarcastic face between his palms like he’s going to kiss me. “Merriell.”

“Eugene.” He is going to kiss me. I hope our audience has moved off because I’m going to let him.

He makes it feel like a first kiss with someone you really care about and you want to discover everything about. I start to accept what he means, he just phrased it wrong is all.

“Wish I’d found you earlier,” I whisper. “Might’ve been nice to have you by my side on Peleliu and Okinawa. I would have liked spending time with you in Pavuvu.” His kiss is chaste but so familiar. He’s so sweet and it’s like there is no worries in this world that could touch us. “You get how this would be worse, don’t you Sledgehammer?”

He pulls away, full of regret. “Yeah, I know Snafu.”

It’s too late for regrets. Everything we did during the war has twisted into a strange childhood. We gorged on death like baby birds, waiting, screaming, helpless in the nest as the corpses flowed like vomit. And now it was our turn to take to the sky—a bonded pair for life—never in one place for too long.