Last Notes from Home

Contents

Part One
:
Pilgrimage

Part Two
:
Interment and New Beginnings

Part Three
:
In the Days Before I Shot My Sister

Part Four
:
Blowjob

Part Five
:
M
arriage and Resurrection

PART ONE

Pilgrimage

1

At seven in the morning I go to Oahu. What was going to be a few jolly days of imbibing and, hopefully, copulating with heartbreakingly beautiful Eurasian girls (I was obsessed with loin fantasies of Tahitian nymphets) has turned into a death watch. My elder brother, Bill, with whom I was one day hoping to spend these larksome days, is dying of cancer, a malignancy that began in the caecum—a pouch or “blind gut” lying between the large and small intestines. Because cancer of the caecum, I am told by a top local thoracic surgeon, has such a high incidence of cure, I can only assume the Brigadier let it go until the pain was beyond enduring. The Brigadier, I should here append, was always,
always,
a hard head.

Although years ago I laid on him the cognomen of the Brigadier, Bill is only a full colonel. The Brigadier is a joke we had. Just graduated from Watertown High School, he entered the military at seventeen in February 1944. He served in three wars. He was much decorated, over the years being awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Joint Services Commendation Medal, and two Purple Hearts. He rose steadily from the rank of private, and I used to chide him that he’d never know repose until he got his brigadier’s star. Although in response Bill invariably grumbled
“Shee-it,”
he never denied it.

Convinced at length, however, that the footwork involved in promotion above the rank of full bird was more arduous and devious than he cared to cope with, that as a high school graduate competing with his West Point-VMI-Citadel brethren he would, for brigadier, be “passed over” for the first time (if one is twice passed over one’s retirement is, at least tacitly, demanded), he decided to take his retirement in Honolulu where he is assigned to the 500th Military Intelligence Group, the army’s top secret intelligence unit for the entire Pacific.

His plans were to remain permanently on Oahu with his army brat wife, the daughter of another colonel, and his fifteen-year-old son. The Brigadier owns a three-hundred-thousand-dollar home in Kailua, a Honolulu suburb on the northeast shore of Oahu much favored by the military. As nearly as I can determine, he was hiring out to a real estate firm to supplement his ample colonel’s pension. He would sell property part time, sit at the edge of his kidney-shaped pool sunning himself, drink chilled Olympia (oh-lee) beer from the can, and call back the days of sacrifice and slaughter, of cannon and carnage, of madness, cowardice, and heroism. Although I ever so elegantly disapproved of it all—and the Brigadier damn well knew it (a lot he gave a shit!)—and there were times when I actually wondered how we could have issued from the same old lady’s loins within three years of one another, I yet had hoped that on his retirement I might spend a year with him at the patio of that blue pool and that together we might relate the story of his life. The Brigadier served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and I thought his tale might tell us something of the mid-twentieth-century American nightmare.

Alas, the Brigadier and I shall never—at least together—tell the story of his life.

The Brigadier was not sick. Rather, he was very sick and did not know it. The physical examination for the retiring military is scrupulous. Should a disease or injury incurred during one’s term of service be detected, it may mean the difference between one’s being retired at full or half pay. There is an ironic eye-expanding joke, doubtless apocryphal, among career soldiers that doctors always find something “wrong” with officers above the rank of brigadier and that they are thus always retired at full pay. In my brother’s case, and though he wasn’t really a brigadier, the joke did not apply. After the quacks kept calling him back for further X rays, they finally cut on him last November, took a peek, closed him back up, stitched him, and put him on the new cancer-controlling drugs. That was when the telephone wires between my hometown, Alexandria Bay, New York, a St. Lawrence River village just north of Watertown where I grew up, and Honolulu began crackling.

I can hear the word cancer (my father died of lung lesions at forty) spoken sibilantly the length of a football field. Still, I did not at first grasp the details or realize the full import of what was happening. At the time I was locked up in an upstairs study of my mother’s house in Alexandria Bay, “the Bay,” absorbed in writing
Pages from a Cold Island,
and as November became December, then January, the calls between the old lady and my sister-in-law became alarmingly frequent. Lifting my fingers from my typewriter keys, my ears cocked tensely, my breathing suspended, I could hear the old lady in her downstairs bedroom talking across the continent and halfway across the Pacific. In the early days she said oh and oh and oh as if she were being made to understand the situation. Then as the days passed she said
oh
and
oh
and
oh
as if in thrall to the desolation of the Brigadier’s predicament. And always now I heard that demonic word cancer.

Unexpectedly we received a letter from the military surgeon attending the Brigadier at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu. My twin sister is a laboratory technician at the E. J. Noble Hospital here in the Bay. The monies to build the latter were donated by the wag who started Life Savers, the candy with the hole in it, a guy much enamored of our Thousand Islands. My sister gave the letter to our friend, Dr. Bob Burton, and asked his interpretation. Bob’s interpretation was as succinct and hair-curling as masterful poetry. The Brigadier’s case was terminal.

The old lady downstairs has had one stroke, has a bad ticker, high blood pressure, gall bladder trouble, and those various diseases attendant to aging. Thus Frances took her to Bob’s office at the hospital, had him first check her blood pressure, then let Bob explain to her the hard unalterable facts.

From that day on the old lady began to weep a great deal, to wring her hands in anguish, and to make plans to visit Hawaii and for the last time see her eldest. Knowing the old lady’s fear of flying, I did not think the plans would befall. Presently it was February and the entirely unexpected happened, something that was destined to take me from the ivory tower of my upstairs study and force my own confrontation with life’s distressing eventualities, make me leave my cold and eyeless typewriter keys. The Brigadier, momentarily released from Tripler Army Hospital, called from Kailua. He talked at length with my mother, assuring her that everything was okey-dokey, and that the new “wonder” drugs were doing things just short of miraculous. Then he asked to speak to me.

The old lady called and asked me to pick up the upstairs extension. When the Brigadier heard her ring off, he demanded to know if she could hear my voice. I said no and that she did not hear well in any event. Now he spoke to me in the way he always had, with unflagging abruptness, as both Brigadier and older brother. Under no circumstances did he want the old lady, considering her health and her inordinate trepidation of flying, to come to Hawaii. He was being readmitted to the Tripler Army Hospital, he looked ghastly, man, ghastly, ‘like a piece of shit,” and in no way did he want the old lady to see him in that condition.

“Do you know what I’m telling you, kiddo?”

I paused. I said yes. I wet my lips. Yet I paused again, my breathing labored. Taciturn, bewildered, painfully obstinate, I did not know what to say. At great length, and as though my voice were discrete and issuing from some soft-spoken man I did not know, I at last said I wanted to get away from my manuscript for a few days and might come to Oahu for an R & R. Knowing my pompously articulated distaste of the military, the Brigadier—as I hoped he would—got a kick out of my employing the jargon R & R. He laughed, around, I suspect, his ever-present Antonio y Cleopatra cigar. I said I could stay with my boyhood chum Wiley Hampson, with whom I’d started kindergarten and gone all through the Watertown public schools. Wiley had been on Oahu fifteen years, and from what I’d heard from mutual friends was doing well and owned a large pool hall and commercial fishing boats. As though it were a trifling afterthought, I said I’d then be able to get together with the Brigadier to chat and to tip ever so many drinks.

“That might be a good idea.”

From the day of that circumspect conversation I, like the old lady, went on my own walkabout, sans hand wringing and tears, in my thermal hunter’s underwear walking for miles on the Goose Bay Road with my boxer, the Killer. Atop the hill, where the February winds coming off the St. Lawrence whip furiously across the village’s golf course, the gasping cold cut to the marrow and the Killer licked his chops uneasily, his cropped ears lay timidly on his fawn dome, and he looked bewilderedly and beseechingly at me. But still I did not weep. Walking with my tuqued head downward to the icy shoulders of the Goose Bay Road, my face burnt cerise by the cold, I was one day abruptly conscious of something hard, acrid, alien, and ugly in my mouth. I removed my glove, spat into my instantly frigid palm, and realized, astonishingly, that I had been gnashing my teeth so severely I’d loosened a great silver filling from an upper left molar. As if it could somehow be reused, I put the filling in my pocket. Turning swiftly on our heels, the Killer and I—
à
corps perdu
—ran all the way home.