The Floatplane Notebooks (18 page)

William who was Walker and Caroline's last born went out every morning to check his rabbit boxes. Zuba the second field hand a black man got him started on all that built boxes for him spent time with him until William began to fret getting tired of Zuba's attention. Sometimes William would bring the rabbits home live in a potato sack and kill them against the smokehouse. He'd hold a rabbit by its hind legs whirl it round and round over his head and then bang its head against the corner of the smokehouse. Zuba would come out it would be very early in the morning and fuss at him take the rabbit away from him and give it a rabbit punch because the rabbit would not be dead yet. To kill it William's way took many bangs against the corner of the smokehouse.

William began to bring things home and keep them alive which was uncommon except in the normal case of a possum which would be kept in a barrel and fed good food for a few weeks. Then he'd be killed cleaned cooked and eaten.

When the possum barrel was empty and William came home with a rabbit in his sack sometimes he would put the rabbit in the possum barrel and late at night he would come out of the house get the rabbit take it behind the smokehouse and do something to it. Once Caroline found a rabbit dead with its front teeth pulled.

Then William gave up his rabbit boxes altogether and began to bring home larger trapped animals. Walker beat him for skinning a fox while it was alive.

Then William moved into town and after the sun was up one morning and the family was in the field he rode into the yard in a wagon pulled by a mule. He got down off the wagon looked around took something heavy in a big tow sack up out of the wagon walked the few steps with it to the smokehouse placed it on the ground then pushed it with his hands up underneath the edge of the smokehouse as far as it would go. He then pushed it farther with his feet. He stood and fetched a hoe from the corncrib and with the blade end of the hoe pushed the sack and whatever was in it farther under the smokehouse.

Ross was returning by the pond from the corn field. He stopped and watched.

William got in the wagon and left.

Ross walked into the yard squatted and looked under the smokehouse went into the kitchen then returned to the field.

That night two wagonloads of men rode into the yard. They carried pine torches for light. William and a black woman were with them. They swarmed to the smokehouse door and pulled Zuba out. The black woman stood back. Zuba was the field hand once a slave freed after the war who lived in the
smokehouse and worked for food only. They tied his hands behind his back and set him on the back porch steps. Several of them then pushed into the smokehouse then back out and around behind it. William stood back. One squatted put his hand to the ground bent over lowered his torch and then called to the others. Walker Caroline Vera Ross and Helen stood on the back porch watching. Walker held a lantern. He set it on the porch. Zuba looked up at him the flame reflecting against his wet face.

They dragged the sack out and pulled back its lip. There was hair the color of yellow flowers.

One of the men screamed and dropped to his knees as if hit by a sledge hammer. He got to his feet and ran at Zuba jumped on him hitting pounding with his fists making flat pounding sounds of skin against skin. Zuba tried to turn away. Several of them pulled the man off finally. Another man wearing a black coat asked Walker to bring out a table. Walker stood there. Caroline held his arm.

Ross dug at his thumb nails with his middle fingernails. Blood came.

The man with the black coat went into the kitchen and came out with a small table. The torches cast shadows against the kitchen the house the smokehouse. The man in the black coat asked for a Bible. William went inside and brought one out stopped on the porch and spoke to Caroline and Walker explaining. The man placed the Bible on the table and asked William to place his hand on it. He asked questions and William talked. Two others talked and then the black woman. The man said Zuba was guilty of murder. As three men came to get him Zuba fell back against the steps moving as if he
were trying to go through them and into the ground. Walker almost seventy stooped pale weak started down the steps. He moved among them trying to stop them then pulled at the man wearing the black coat pulling the coat off the man's shoulder exposing a suspender strap over a white shirt. The man pulled away and Walker was at last held back by two boys.

They dragged Zuba to and up into the wagon. The man in the black coat asked Walker for rope but Walker didn't move or talk. A man started to cut a rein from the horses at the wagon. William pointed toward the pond and said The wisteria vine. A single strand hung from a tree. Children used it to swing out over the pond and drop in. In a crowd the men all moved to that strand of vine pulling Zuba sitting in the middle of the wagon the torches moving together bouncing fire. Walker called his family inside where they all went except for William.

A man fashioned a noose out of the vine and a belt and placed it around Zuba's neck. Then another man whipped the horses so that the wagon was pulled from beneath Zuba and they all watched his legs flail so that he turned around and around and around. Afterwards several remained cut him down went to the back door of the house talked to Walker dug a grave in the woods near the family graveyard finishing deep in the night and buried him after roosters were crowing.

I dreamed I saw Mark walk out of this ward, on out that door. He was wearing a flight suit. And across the room, that stupid asshole that keeps saying I'm going to die, he said they had money on it—that I won't going to make it.

There's a leg and arm been knocked out—knocked off—but there's a good, alive great big peach pit in me somewhere, about the size of a baseball, that ain't going nowhere. And the doctor told me I was going to make it. He said all my vital signs are strong, but there's a head-wound problem, giving me paralysis, and a talking problem.

I don't remember what happened, but some of them have been in and told me. Starnes come by a couple of days ago… or, I can't remember his name, and told me that Hux and Mattherson and Hickman were all killed. He looked pretty shook. Hux. Hux is toughest to think about. Hux was my buddy.

If I could talk I'd tell that son of a bitch across the way to
keep his goddamn mouth shut and I'd get somebody to set his fucking mattress on fire. There's plenty of guys in here would do it. Burn his ass up. Ass his burn up. Something.

What is odd is that I ain't felt a lot of pain yet, except my ear mainly. It's all numb—the ends of my leg and arm. My head. The doctor told me I'd get some odd sensations. I do grip things with my left hand—the one that's gone. I grip. I look down there, like I'll look down there right now. I look down there and see where the bandages end. And beyond that in the air I grip with my hand. I grip onto something. Anything that I want to think about, I grip onto. Usually it's a cold metal bar and I can feel the cold in my hand. And I read the newspaper in my head. It'll come up in my mind and I read it but it don't make no sense. I can't stop it from happening, and there are all kinds of things I can't remember.

What I wish is there was some way I could grab my dick, which thank God is all there.

It was the realest dream I've ever had. Mark just walking, stopping, looking up at that light, walking out the door with jerkhead over there mouthing off.

God knows I could've died. And I'd end up at the graveyard. It's in my papers and I wrote it to Bliss in a letter and talked to her about it, and told the others. Bliss would make them do it. Whatever there was of me left would be in the graveyard.

We picked pieces of bodies off a fence one time. I got a piece we couldn't tell was a big elbow or a little knee.

What a dicked-up thing. It's like what Hux wrote on his helmet—
SHIT HAPPENS
. What I'm glad about is I got my brain, mostly. I can think, but you get shrapnel in your head, man.
Lead head. Now whatever used to be there to pull the words out of my head and stick them in my mouth to spit out—whatever that was—is gone. Adios. So I get the words and stick them in a wheelbarrow and start walking forward with them and they roll over this cliff into nothing, into thin air, and if it's the doctor listening, he's okay; he carries a piece of paper with “yes” on one end, “no” on the other end, and “maybe” in the middle. And I can look at the word I want. He says it's good I'm continent. That means I can shit and piss on my own. Lucky me. A cow bends her back when she pisses, curved like a new moon.

I get a hard on in the night and want to jack off, but I can't.

Rhonda ain't going to be happy just jacking me off. And she ain't going to stand for me just sitting around, shitting in a pan. I know that. We'll have to figure out something. But whatever we figure out, I feel it in my bones that she'll skip.

One thing, I ain't going to be in the field again. I ain't going to eat no more C-rations; see nobody blown up with red and blue insides hanging out; ain't going to see no more leeches; and neither one of my tattoos got blown away.

The worst thing is not being able to talk. I'd rather be blind, and get around, than like I am now. I'd rather be anything but dead than the way I am right now, except if I couldn't think straight. I can't think straight, exactly, all the time. But that don't bother me. You don't have quite so much to think about if you can't go nowhere.

I'm getting letters from everybody, and Aunt Esther has got them writing from the church. The Red Cross volunteer who brings them to me is about the same age as Bliss and
she's from Tennessee and the way she talks, her accent—she's mighty good looking too—makes my blood run hot.

Blood blockage in the brain. Can you believe the good luck in that? I get a arm and a leg blown away and why couldn't that be the side that gets paralyzed? Why not? Six, half a dozen. Seems like a good God could have done that.

Bliss tried to tell me. She was the only one. I wish I
had
gone to Canada. I could be in Canada in a cool breeze, swimming. There are plenty of fools ready to get blown apart for what they believe in about this mess over here. The hell they are. Nobody's ready to get blown apart. The only reason they do it is they know they're not going to get blown apart. I knew better than anything I won't going to get blown apart. I would have bet my life on a butcher block.

Every morning when I wake up I try to remember the day it happened and I can't, so I try to remember one day in my life at home. I get a piece of it, like me and Mark frog-gigging, or hunting at Uncle Hawk's, or playing ball, and I try to remember everything in that piece of day. I put it all together, little piece by little piece. I hold it there and get the pieces together like a puzzle, then I run my fingers smooth over the pieces four or five times and by then breakfast is over—a nigger feeds me—and Miss Clairmont is on the way with a big smile and letters and she takes her time with me, like she's got all day. I want her to take her hair down so bad I don't know what to do. I could eat every inch of her with the half of my mouth that works. Yankee Doodle.

Meredith got his arm and leg blowed off by a tank mine. All we can do is thank God he didn't get killed. Two guys I went to high school with have gotten killed. Sam Bartlett and Alton McAllister. They were good guys, too. I looked up their pictures in the yearbook to see what sports they were in. Sam Bartlett wadn't in the first thing. There was just his name there.

Bliss is beside herself—standing at the window looking for the mailman. Mark sends a postcard or letter everytime he hears from Meredith's doctor.

Rhonda is jumpy. Pregnant, throwing up, and crying at everything. She had to stop singing in her rock-and-roll band and God knows I'm surprised she didn't have an abortion so she could keep singing. Bliss said they shouldn't have gotten married and she was right. Meredith needed to be about forty before he got married.

And Papa has started working on the floatplane again. It
was disassembled and piled in the back of the shop but now he's got it all back together again. The notebooks he's kept going. He's got all the stuff we've heard from Meredith in there. He says the first thing he's going to do when Meredith gets home is give him a ride on the lake. Good luck. He may give him a ride on the lake, but not in the air. He's on his third set of engines and there's no way that damn thing will ever fly. It's too ugly for one thing.

He ought to be spending some time working on Noralee's ass. She's dating a hippie and word was, a couple of years ago, that she had the hots for a nigger. It's like she's just hanging around, soaking up how things are going crazy, especially with all this marching against the war. I sure as hell can't talk to her, and I thank my lucky stars that Taylor ain't but seven—with all this crap going on.

I've got Taylor hitting left-handed like Papa tried to do with Mark and Meredith. He helps me wash the car too. And I got him shooting a rifle.

Me and Bliss had a big fight about him shooting the rifle, but hell, it don't kick. A rifle don't kick.

Bliss is odd that way. I think this whole thing about Meredith and Mark going off to war influenced her somehow. She's touchy about stuff. And now with Meredith getting his arm shot off and all, she's more jumpy than ever.

The flight from ‘Nam seemed like around the world. I was on a stretcher and couldn't sit up. Straight out as the ace of spades. A lot of other guys were on the plane, too. Except most of them could sit up. And sip soup.

This is one goddamn hell of a big mess, and I'll be in one goddamn hell of a big mess for the rest of my life, and I don't know why somebody couldn't have sat down and figured something out over there, beforehand. If they all had to go through this theirselves or either figure out how to stop it, then it would have stopped because nobody is going to choose to go through this kind of goddamned worthless condition. But the Communists won't compromise is what they say. Them little shits are tough. I know that. The oddest thing is seeing a head gone and just a Adam's apple left. We shot one with a pocket full of letters. Hell, I don't know what to think. It pisses me off worse than I can even feel, and if I could talk I couldn't say it, because my
voice could never get loud enough to yell it as loud as I'd want to.