The Truth

Chapter 1: In which the enemy appears on my flank & I find myself in an untenable defense position

When Colonel Arthur O'Bower caught me between his wife and their bedroom ceiling, his first reaction was to blow, through the pair of horns he'd just been given, a blast of fury in which fragments of Charge, Sick Call and Retreat each fought for and failed to get the upper hand. This brass-lipped blat was much, much louder than the thunderstorm that had kept me from hearing him double-time out of the downpour and into his leased California split-level.

The hideous noise at once seduced my interest from the other seduction, then in progress. I made a spur-of-the-moment estimate of the immediate terrain from an observation post hastily set up behind the siliconical right breast of Mrs. O'Bower but my field of view was limited by a large, pink and erect nipple that, at such close range, had the symmetrical bulk and seeming capacity of a railroad water tank. The last reverberations of the colonel's monstrous fine bellow were still cracking dishes in the kitchen below. The colonel himself, the color of his anger-choked face almost matching his mauve eye patch (it was Thursday: Mauve Eye Patch Day), had come to stunned attention in midstairs, immobilized by the sight of a hostile force horizontally and fluidly deployed across his line of advance. It was a tactical situation neglected by every classic authority on warfare, from Sun Tzu to Joseph Alsop.

Mrs. O'Bower, however, was a German Cold War bride who, before her marriage, had worked her way through Abnormal School in one of Hamburg's more predatory precincts; thus she knew when, if not how, to seize an initiative. The method she chose in this instance was to beat her sweaty fists on that sweatier drum, my head. "Rape!" she yelled. "Oh--he's!--Oh--ray--ping--me!--Arr-r-rr-rrr--te-e-EE!--Oh!--Rape!--HELP!" Every syllable was in sync with a crack on my cranium, and she was also trying to heave me off her damp belly with an intensification of the wriggles she had recently been making in lubricous delight.

She couldn't budge me. I, like the colonel, was stiff with shock--and in more ways than one. Immovable, the next best thing to a corpse, I continued to hold the high ground.

Little hailstones bounced like unbuttered popcorn off the window screens. Thunder used the O'Bower roof as an alley down which to bowl a ten-strike. And Mrs. O'Bower, desperate to unfreeze our three-character tableau whatever the consequences, and eager to betray any secret I'd shared with her if the melting process could be hastened by the betrayal, finally did a fast shuffle and trumped her ace in the hole. "Oh, Arr-r-rr-rrr-te-e-EE!" she screeched at the trench-coated, one-eyed, wet statue on the stairs. "He killed your lovely sweet geese, too, Artie! He murdered them all, he told me!--Rape!--Oh, Arr-r-rr-rrr-te-e-EE, your poor--RAPE!--darling dear old sweetie g-e-ee-eee-eeee-s-ss-sss-SSSS--!" It was the hiss of a thousand cobras, striking--or a hundred hungry, angry ganders, all set to peck me to death.

The colonel went into action then, by God. His----

Chapter 2: In which the film is stopped while the ladies in the audience who are still fully clothed remove their hats & I remove the colonel's gaggle

--love for those snake-necked, snickersnee-billed, bibulous, bulbous, egged-on, ill-tempered, uncivilized, regurgitant, wicked, wet-arsed, ruthless and unrepentant waddlers was a wonderful and terrible thing, certainly passing the love of women, war and wealth, and damned near passing the O'Bower self-esteem. The only emotion that could ever have superseded the colonel's abyssal adoration of his paddle-footed potential pâtés de foie gras was the one that had already done so--a seething, no-quarter hate for their anonymous killer. I had been present, four days previously, when he'd arrived at the scene of the crime in a commandeered half-track; and I'd heard him, as he straddled the central cadaver in a circle of slain birds, his bloodshot eyeball bulging heavenward as if even God were suspect, atavistically swear to extract an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a human liver for the livers of his done-in anseres domestici. This last hunk of Homo sapiens, it was made clear, would be ripped hot and palpitating from the criminal's living body, but not until the colonel had spent a couple of weeks goose-stepping back and forth across that particular body's threshold of pain.

Now, because I'd talked too much to a pneumatic and peroxided Hun who lacked the brains to lock a door or two before indulging in a spot of amorous dalliance with a recent acquaintance, Colonel O'Bower had learned the identity of the wretch who had gigged his gaggle into the Eternal Goose Grease forever, the hypocrite, the dissembler, the smiler with the poisoned mash. Yes, here--sprawled the length of the former Rosa Sineschpiener's moist torso, doing yet another nefarious deed in the colonel's own bed, in the colonel's own imported wife--lay the dissembling, hypocritical, lascivious slayer on whom the hellish O'Bower vengeance would be wreaked.

Me.

•••

Description

(Write legibly, in ink, using only one side of the subject)

Name? Beaudin P. Black.

Age? 24.

Height? 6' 1".

Weight? 183 lbs.

Eyes? Blue.

Hair? Brown.

Visible scars? None. Slightly broken nose, though.

Others? Area of lower left calf and Achilles' tendon shows damage caused by fragments of Viet Cong anti-personnel mine.

Physical peculiarities? Minor limp, left leg, resulting from above.

Present occupation? Screwing Mrs. O'Bower.

Never mind that, just answer the question. Oh. Sorry. I'm a civilian. Have been since noon today.

Lucky you. Yeah.

Former occupation? S/Sgt., U.S. Army. Gooseboy to you-know-who.

Future plans? Staying alive in that contagious ward, the world. But right now the prospects don't look too good.

•••

The sequence of events leading up to the hair-raising confrontation interrupted above began when, with a year of my Army service still to go, I was(A few bars of background music, please, professor)transported from Fort Benjamin F. Butler, within spitting distance of New Orleans, to Middle High Germany as a light-duty replacement, recommended for clerical work, in the 14th Q. M. C. Regiment (Armored), Colonel Arthur O'Bower, U.S.M.A. '43, commanding.

The 14th had set up shop in a former SS recreation center near Bad Gasthausam-Schmuck, a woodsy, watery, lethargic spot far enough from the East German border as not to worry the unwarlike Russians overmuch, but not far enough from the scatological delights of Hamburg as to allow randy NATO sailors on shore leave a complete take-over of that great port's amusing facilities.

Save for a cadre of crafty, alcoholic Regular Army misfits, the 14th was composed of draftees serving their time. These cheerful incompetents spent 90 percent of each month either on 48-hour passes or sacked out in barracks, staring at Danish nudist pinups as they lied about what they'd done on the weekend just whooped through, meanwhile conserving their bodily energy for the weekend to come. The remaining ten percent of their waking hours was devoted to finagling money that would be stashed away with the purpose of filling a future 15-or 30-day leave with memorable physical fun. The enlisted men of the 14th liked to leg it over the Alps to Rome on these orgiastic outings; and while marking time, they liked to hipper off for Hamburg every Saturday noon. Until shortly before I reported to the regiment, his men were always staggering into Colonel O'Bower there, and always in the most shockingly debauched places. It had been from one such nadir of love that, by the dawn's early light, the colonel led forth Fräulein Rosa Sineschpiener, to make her his fluidly-compliant-in-four-languages bride. "Well, ennyways," said a fifth-hitch lush who was temporarily a corporal, "ennyways, the fuckin' cooze took the fuckin' Ole Man's fuckin' mind often his ge-fuckin'-eese for a coupla fuckin' weeks."

The raising of gross-livered geese, begun as the harmless avocation of a colonel at loose ends, had somewhere along the way become a fanatic's obsession. Schizo-phrenic extremism was a component (continued on page 244) The Truth (continued from page 104) part of the O'Bower character and, in tandem with an uncontrollable temper, it had galloped him toward the semi-exile of Bad Gasthaus, whose Disney-outlandish, ersatz fairy-tale houses, risen from the rubble that naughty Yank/limey bombs had made, were again being kissed by the ripple-lipped Schmuck. Colonel O'Bower, striding grimly along the river's bank, going from his wife to his geese, or vice versa, must have realized that command of the 14th Q. M. C. Regiment (Armored) was, for a career soldier, the end of the military line. Or perhaps he realized nothing of the kind--which is a conclusion I reached after nearly a year of acting as the O'Bower gooseboy, when I was able to observe him every single gander-scented day, supplementing this with the facts and rumors I collected by keeping my mouth shut and my ears open to the garrulities of the H. Q. Co. mess.

At the start, he'd been that anomaly, a rich boy who wanted to go to the Military Academy. In the early summer of 1943, he was a newly minted West Point shavetail; in the late spring of 1945, he was, thanks to attrition, the acting C. O. of a Regimental Combat Team, a major whose fruit salad was garnished with a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. He returned to the United States in 1947 as a light colonel, promptly married one of the richest, and definitely the ugliest, young women in Illinois, and was ordered to Washington as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A bird colonel's eagles came with the assignment. Everything was gold braid and glitter. The future could only be a series of sunbursts.

But--(A bit of foreboding music here, professor)on a November afternoon in 1949, a sunburst(Imploded!)when he interrupted a minor interservice disagreement in a rear admiral's office by knocking a Navy captain arsey-versey straight into a 1"=1' scale model of the Bonhomme Richard, which smashed the artifact into dry flotsam, then concluded the discussion by kicking the admiral himself smack through the closed office door. The story never leaked to the newspapers, but muffled thunders were heard in several arcane Pentagon nooks. The Navy wanted Colonel O'Bower swung from the nearest yardarm. The Army, half angry, half amused, stalled and harrumphed, then harrumphed and stalled some more.

No action, pro or con, had been taken when the colonel escorted his hideous heiress wife to the Army-Navy football game, where Mrs. O'Bower, although swathed in the most expensive furs, managed to catch a chill that shivered into pneumonia. Within a week, despite all the uniformed medical cunning available at Walter Reed Hospital, plus the spate of civilian specialists summoned from their gaudy Atlantic Supermetropolis practices, she was as dead as Croesus' daughter. Her grieving husband had to be forcibly restrained from strangling the trio of physicians who had supervised her ultimate agonies.

Colonel O'Bower's superiors, sympathizing with his sorrow and perhaps appreciative of the unexpected increase of his personal wealth, let him off with nothing worse than a reprimand for his careless handling of explosive Naval personnel. At the outbreak of war in Korea, however, the swiftness and secrecy with which he was airlifted from a clean desk in miasmic Washington to a dirty regimental C. P. in the miasmic Pusan perimeter surprised even the generals who'd planned the transfer. Speed and subterfuge had been necessary, of course. If the Navy had had the scoop that a kicker of rear admirals' rears was in flight across the Pacific, orders would undoubtedly have been issued from Pearl Harbor to blow the lubberly bastard's plane out of the air and blame it on the Russians, or maybe the Red Chinese.

The O'Bower performance in Korea was, for the most part, that of an 88mm fieldpiece in a 75mm war. By the time the two sides set up light housekeeping at Panmunjom, he'd lost an eye in a fire fight outside Seoul and a frostbitten toe near the Yalu River. The former got him a compensatory cluster for his D. S. C. The latter didn't even get him a Purple Heart. When the cease-fire finally brought the fighting to an end, he was a temporary brigadier general, commanding a nondescript force of reconnaissance groups and assault teams that, due to the front-line tenacity of the teeming Chinese, had very little terrain in which to reconnoiter and no urge at all to assault it. And the frozen eagles that clung to his shoulders on his 1953 homecoming were the same ones he'd taken to the Far East with him. The brigadier's stars stayed in Asia.

Various reasons were given for Colonel O'Bower's remaining in grade, especially in view of his original fast start from the blocks. For instance, I heard that MacArthur had been opposed to anyone not named MacArthur rising so high, so young--and the colonel was then in his early 30s. But, as Doug of the Shades had been relieved by Harry, the Kitten on the Keys, back in 1951, this version was like a cobweb sieve full of heavy water.

Two other rumored incidents struck me as being more germane to the matter. Brigadier General (Temp.) O'Bower, it was reported, had once requested, through channels, that every tenth man in a certain R. O. K. division be shot for cowardice, after the unit had fallen back a few miles in disorder. The request was refused, reasonably enough, whereupon O'Bower, flecks of froth at the corners of his mouth, personally oversaw the mounting of a machine gun on a jeep and was on the point of attending to the job himself when he was dissuaded by a delegation consisting of most of his command's field-grade officers. Their dissuasion took the form of sitting on O'Bower until a platoon of MPs could reach the scene. Before dark, that same day, he was en route to an R & R camp for Top Brass, a well-staffed hotel in rural Japan. What he was suffering from, presumably, was a virulent strain of Combat Fatigue. After a month of mysterious but intimate injections and Little One-Sided Conversations with self-effacing psychiatrists, interspersed by sessions with exquisitely adjustable girl bath attendants, he was returned to his ever-lovin' troops--his torso still pink from parboiling, his brain apparently still unwashed and a latent physical interest in A-to-Ampersand Sex aroused, God help us! forevermore.

The second supposed incident took place shortly before the dancers lined up for the Panmunjom Polka. One night O'Bower, flailing through the tenth round of a losing bout with insomnia, decided that his G-3--a competent but highly strung colonel a dozen years older than himself--had engineered the rejection of the O'Bower R. O. K. Decimation Project; and by the time dawn had made up its mind to break once more over an undeserving world, the vengeance of a wronged Arthur O'Bower was roaring inescapably clown the pike. The War went, neatly folded, into his footlocker, while he devoted all bat the four hours each night he spent with his nodding acquaintance, sleep, in transforming the G-3's life into a mirror image of hell, until, at the end of six weeks, the last of his victim's high strings snapped. The poor tormented fellow heisted a weapons carrier, gunned it all out to the front lines, sped howling down a mined road between a bone-weary brace of our defense perimeters, miraculously failed to blow himself up on a mine and, ten seconds later, died with a pound of lead from Russian-made, Chinese-operated submachine guns tipping his mortal scale toward Jesus. From the brace of perimeters, the remnant of a mauled American battalion stopped making deadly noises to watch with astonished interest what it correctly assumed to be the suicide of some nut of a chicken colonel.

The Going-Forth-By-Day of his G-3 may not have been inscribed on Colonel O'Bower's Form 67-3, but word got around, for all that--indeed, word did get around. During the next 15 years, the only occasions on which he saw the interior of the Pentagon were when, between Assignments, he visited more tractable, chairborne friends. These Assignments, it was clear, were chosen to keep him either out of the country or out of sight, and mischief, in the boondocks, such as:

(A little traveling music, professor, if you don't mind)

12 Grim Months of Muskeg and Mosquitoes on the Alaskan Peninsula.

2. The Staff College,in whose boring classrooms he developed a knack of sleeping with his eye open.

3. 36 Months as Military Attaché with the U.S. Embassy in the Largest and most Violent of the Junta-Ruled Latin-American Democracies,where the army officers who ran the show had, as a curtain raiser, settled the debts they owed their political backers by propping them against walls to serve as targets in the marksmanship training of recruits. This endearingly simple solution to a double problem filled Colonel O'Bower's heart with a warm glow of admiration--as it did the hearts of the blanqueador lobbyists, moonlighting as deputies in the new government, who grew rich selling whitewash for red-stained walls. Soon the colonel and the members of the junta were getting on famously together. O'Bower was also getting a great patriotic boot out of the continuous head and spirit busting in the capital, facilitated as it was by foreign-aid U.S. Army MP truncheons, wielded by cloddish soldiers and riot police in foreign-aid U.S. Army uniforms dyed black, who clanked along the potholed boulevards from atrocity to atrocity in U.S. Army tanks supplied, as might be expected, through the kindness of U.S. foreign aid.

4. A session at the command and general-staff school where, lulled by the instructors' droning voices, he refitted his technique for open-eyed sacking out.

5. A year with a field-training team attached to the Turkish Military Establishment,interrupted frequently and at length by field studies of Istanbul bawdry.

6. A posting to Fort Boston C. Mudd, on Florida's south east coast,as G-2 on the commanding general's staff. Colonel O'Bower's ordinarily closed fists, relaxed by the languorous ambiance, handed over nearly $100,000 for a luxuriously outfitted cabin cruiser that might've had that subsurface type, Captain Nemo, licking his envious sybarite chops. The colonel liked to tale anywhere from two to ten permissive young crew-women on weekend cruises, with himself as the only male aboard, during which the jolly fellow dreamed up all sorts of exotic games and goodies for his supple and gluttonous crew.

But then, alas! there came the Monday morning when the master of the vessel failed to answer reveille at Fort Boston C. Mudd. Late on Tuesday afternoon, a Navy helicopter located the abandoned cabin cruiser, drifting with lazy disinterest in the direction of the Sargasso Sea; and an hour later, as the chopper snarled past a small, uninhabited key, the pilot, a virginal ensign, stared in awe at four frantic and naked girls, waving lithe arms at him with considerable urgency from the tiny beach below. Standing broadside to this luscious line, eying their bras and bikinis of sunburned flesh with the aplomb of an officer inspecting crack troops, was Colonel Arthur O'Bower--dressed to the nines in sharkskin loafers, permanent-crease russet slacks, a white T-shirt, a blazer broadly striped in green and yellow, and a dashing yachtsman's cap of midnight blue. The grounds, the ensign noticed after he'd landed, had not been policed; bedding, empty bottles and items of bar equipment were scattered over the hot sand. The blushing ensign also thought that the colonel acted as though he indulged in this sort of thing with some naked women every weekend--as he certainly had, but without as yet hitting the front pages.

The situation might not have come about if the most unseaworthy of the young ladies hadn't felt squeamish after a night of continuously heaving herself around in this berth or that, the motion augmented by slow ocean swells. Colonel O'Bower obligingly hove to off the tiny key; and before long, he had persuaded all four young ladies to compete in a naked swimming race to the key's minute beach. The winner was to get $100 and First Dry-Land Go at their ruttish skipper, who, when he'd loaded the cabin cruiser's dinghy with blankets and cushions and buckets of ice cubes and some bottles of Jack Daniel's best, favored his good eye by rowing to starboard of the contestants. But after he and his wet-bottomed beauties had scampered ashore, had liquored up, lounged in the sun, entwined themselves together in several curious and interesting ways and indulged in some astonishing group-therapy activities, the colonel was able to lift his head from where it had been nestling, between the cloudless sky and a succulent set of ischial tuberosities, just long enough to learn that he'd forgotten to drop the cabin cruiser's anchor and had failed to haul the dinghy high enough tip on the beach. As a result, the former was almost below the eastern horizon and the latter had vanished completely. The sea horse and his reddening fillies were marooned.

When the story reached the Officers Club at Fort Boston C. Mudd, a great deal of envy was expressed about the way the colonel had been amusing himself on recent weekends. Nevertheless, arguments arose as to why he hadn't shielded his companions' breasts, buttocks and bellies from the voyeurism of the sun by a judicious sharing of his own gaudy garments; and these disputes ended, more often than not, with all parties agreeing that a clothing issue would have been thoughtful, medicinal, the act of a gentleman and the bounden duty of any man holding a commission in the Armed Forces of the United States of America. U.S. Army officers, it would seem, still contain traces of what first began to die at Crécy, long ago.

A moribund vestige of chivalry lurked in the Topmost Brass of Fort Boston C. Mudd, as well; for after Colonel O'Bower had spent Wednesday unnecessarily in the Post Hospital, Thursday in buying back his cabin cruiser at an outrageous price from some amateur salvagers and Friday arranging to put the craft in the nautical equivalent of dead storage, on Saturday morning, he was checked into a C-133 Cargomaster as a high-priority passenger, on his way to

7. A 12-Month Stint in the Womanless Wastes of Greenland,presumably as Our Man in Thule for the Inspector General's office, although he had nothing to inspect but rocks or snow, depending on the season.

The arctic ice quickly thawed out of the colonel, however, during

8. A second three years as Military Attaché in a Central-American backwater,where yet another medal-hung junta, with a phenomenal aptitude for violence, kept the dirty, dark, devout and illiterate citizenry moaning under a rusty iron thumb. Again, the colonel found himself in rapport with the hard cases who called the tunes, in spite of the tunes being mostly dirges. As a matter of fact, one rumor was that during an evening spent mixing the local brandy with Japanese champagne, he told the junta's president--a captain of marines (in a country that had no navy), who still held onto a side-line job as comparison shopper for a chain of brothels (the country had thousands of those)--that Ire was tempted to resign his commission, buy as much as one fourth of the land area that was then so gently administered by the comparison-shopping marine and his cronies (inducting, of course, one fourth of the thousands of brothels), and then settle down to live the Arthur O'Bower version of the Really Good Life.

But he didn't. No sooner had the last second of his 36 months ticked by, when he was deposited in

9. Vietnam,where the blind, leading the blind, had drawn over half a million Americans into a gigantic quicksand, cunningly disguised as a rice paddy. Here, the colonel's combat record in the booby-trapped Mekong Delta was as notable as it had been on Korea's mortared hills. Not only enemy soldiers but every Vietnamese man, woman and child was fair game; and every village, every hut, was available for arson. So Colonel O'Bower had a very pleasant time, until--

Well, until he gave an on-the-record interview to a New York Times correspondent who, incidentally, was a one-man dovecot when it came to U.S. Involvement in Vietnam. The colonel was quoted as saying that if we wanted to win the war quickly, we should start by shooting every fifth soldier in the South Vietnamese army, up to and including the goddamned gook generals. The government of goddamned gook generals that happened to be in power in Saigon that week screamed bloody murder, of course; and soon Colonel Arthur O'Bower, unassigned, was Stateside again, at

10. Fort Antonio López De Santa Ana, a few miles inland from the seaside resort of Vista de Hideputa, between Los Angeles and the Mexican border. The colonel occupied himself by netting mariposas de amor occasionally, in and around that moth-eaten naturalists' paradise, Tijuana.

He'd passed several months in this Nabokovian pursuit when the Army, in sheer desperation, shipped him to

11. The quartermaster subsistence school,gave him 24 weeks of Subsistence Technology courses, then shuttled him off to

12. West Germanyand the 14th Q. M. C. Regiment (Armored). He'd been C. O. of this outfit for two years and was badly in need of a (OK, professor, drop the drums and pick up the horns for honking)brand-new gooseboy when his remaining eye, keen as a falcon's, fell on a chunk of meat freshly arrived, one Pfc. Beaudin P. Black.

(A rattle of asterisks, professor, to accompany a quickstep)

****************************

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**************************(!!)

(Thank you, professor, thank you very much)

I'd no more than clumped my bags and gear in the barracks when the Charge of Quarters yelled at me to report to Colonel O'Bower on the double; and I wasn't halfway through my salute when the colonel demanded: "Know anything about geese, soldier?"

"No, sir." I finished my salute, which he didn't bother to return. "Except that when they hang high, it's supposed to mean----"

"Honk high," he snapped. " 'Hang high' is a corruption. Goddamned world's full of corruption these days. Know that, soldier?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

The single, burning eye glared at my throat. "I need a C. Q. for some damned fine geese, understand? But I don't want a corrupt one. Last damned goose-C. Q. came damned close to corruption, damn him. You corrupt, soldier?"

"No, sir. Not yet, anyway."

"Hell of a thing, corruption. Shameful." He was rippling through my Army records, which someone had brought to his desk. "Wounded in Vietnam, hey? Good. At--at--at--ah, the hell with it. Never could pronounce those goddamned gook names." He was glaring at my throat again. "What I want, soldier, is an incorruptible goose-C. Q. who's seen combat. Clears the mind, combat does. A wound does, too." Under a tent of close-cropped iron-gray hair, the leathery harmony of the colonel's handsome, weathered face was marred only by a green eye patch (it was Monday: Green Eye Patch Day); yet this blended so beautifully with his bloodshot eyeball that I had wistful thoughts of Christmas. Colonel O'Bower was a little man--five feet, nine inches tall and weighing in at 140 pounds, say--but there have been some mighty tough runts running around in history, and the colonel was as tough as they came, with the temper of a hungry shrew and the charm of a starved wolverine.

"I repeat, sir," I said, "I don't know a thing about geese."

"You will, goddamn it. Staff sergeant's rating comes with the assignment."

"Sir," I said hopelessly, "I mean it, sir. I don't think I can----"

"Attention, soldier!" The colonel's eye could've burned through asbestos, his voice cut sheet steel. "Staff sergeants can do goddamned near everything. That's why they're staff sergeants, goddamn 'em. Report to me at fourteen hundred hours. At Goosequarters. Adjutant'll brief you how to get there." My papers were thrown into his Out basket. "That's all, sergeant. Dismiss!"

Goosequarters had a complement of exactly a gross of geese, and the entire 144 of them took a dislike to me the moment I trailed Colonel O'Bower through the gate of their wire-fenced compound. This area would've sufficed for twice as many of the low-slung honkers and hissers whose nebulous brains sent their obese bodies flap-footing around the colonel as soon as he was on the goosy side of the chicken wire. One hundred and forty-four thick necks stretched toward him in longing. From a palpitating gross of overstuffed gullets issued tremulous honks of love. Colonel O'Bower, struggling to reach the center of the compound, was splashed by wave after foamy wave of adoring geese. He was in a strange form of ecstasy himself, embarrassingly so; he could feel, for a while, like God. The Old Testament God, of course. Just before He gave the heave-ho to Adam and poor Eve.

On the shore of this undulant expanse wobbled a couple of grotesquely globular ganders, too ponderous or too lethargic to buck the crush of worshipers surrounding their deity. This bloated duo had turned its quartet of red-rimmed peepers on me and was muttering something nasty in Goose. I didn't yet understand the language, but it was easy to sense what the two fat wretches had on their shriveled-pecan minds.

A big, concrete-lined pond was full of water pumped from the River Schmuck, but its shallow murkiness, as I shortly learned, couldn't be cleared by any amount of draining and bottom scraping. A rectangular shed served Goose-quarters as a dormitory on winter nights and, if the swollen creatures had been up to snuff, might've been used as a house of assignation on titillating spring evenings. But in the O'Bower gaggle, food had replaced sex; and any egg, fertilized or not, would've been gulped clown by the nearest gourmandizing gander, probably before the female realized that she'd given birth.

Those ravenous ruffians would eat anything--alive, dead or inanimate. Every blade of grass, every bone-dry weed in the compound had long since gone through their insatiable guts. One of my chores was to dump into several troughs the special grain-and-water mash that had made them what they were. This revolting mess wasn't all they got, though--by no means. Another of my chores was to grab each goose as it staggered from a communal trough, then shove more great soggy wads of mash as far down its throat as my arm would reach, until the albino-cobra neck was packed solid from breastbone to bill. This frosting on gluttony's cake was laid on at sunrise and in the late afternoon, every day, Sundays and holidays included--rain, snow or revulsion notwithstanding. In eight months, I had only one 48-hour pass. The hatred of the geese for me was clear, cold and continuous; but as my year as gooseboy crept along the calendar, their hate was equaled, and then surpassed, by my own. In fact, I often was tempted to--

But No!

--No, I can't--Can't go into detail about--about that terrible--T-e-r-r-i-b-l-e year (let it be enough to say that i bought some poison during my single 48-hour pass and although it was many months later and we were in another country before i put the stuff to good use, hamburg's a great town to buy war-surplus poisons in if you have the right connections and your eyes are blue, both of them that is).

My term of Army service had a mere 95 days remaining when the 14th Q. M. C. Regiment (Armored) unexpectedly got a new commanding officer and I got an unexpected rabbit punch from fate. Colonel O'Bower's self-written travel orders had him proceeding home to the Zone of the Interior via surface transportation, accompanied by his wife, his gross of geese and--damn the Old Man's solitary, seething eye!--by S/Sgt. Beaudin P. Black, the incorruptible gooseboy (who'd planned to be discharged in West Germany, then barrel around Europe for half a year, slowly decompressing in a fast little Porsche).

I spent the agonizing voyage aboard the Edward Teach, an Army transport that had once been part of the Confederate Navy, in a dark, dank, damnable stern hold next to the tub's churning screws, up to my crotch in geese. For 13 days, I never saw daylight. In the meantime, I was being pecked black and blue by the shadowy hissing bastards, as I fought to breathe air saturated with pungent goose guano and rancid spilled mash. The gaggle lost weight on the ship. So did I.

More weight was lost, by man and birds, on the next stage of their trip, due to the constant jiggling of the hulking trailer trucks, especially adapted for poultry, that toted a stunned Goosequarters and a deafened goose-C. Q. across the face of America the Beautiful, from a Hoboken dock to Fort Antonio López de Santa Ana. Here, the colonel, who'd flown ahead with his Frau, had already set up Goosequarters West on an acre of land midway between the Army post and Vista de Hideputa.

As the skinny gaggle, travel-numbed, began to stumble down the ramps from the trucks, Colonel O'Bower's eye patch (it was Friday: Red Eye Patch Day) seemed pale against the apoplectic suffusion of his phiz. "Fatten 'em up, sergeant, goddamn you!" he snarled at me. "Goddamned quick, too, or your hide'll hang on my wall. And you god-better-damned believe it!"

I believed it; you can bet your life I believed it. I'd seen Colonel O'Bower in irrational action too often not to trust absolutely that he'd carry out every last threat of violence he uttered. To tell the truth, I was downright afraid of the man.

I'm still afraid of him.

I always will be afraid of him(--for I've scarcely touched on the grisly things that I'd heard he'd done or had actually seen him do. Perhaps mention some of them later. Or perhaps I won't, depending).

Anyway, I fattened up his gaggle in a hurry. Also, because the colonel couldn't hang around Goosequarters the way he had in Bad Gasthaus-am-Schmuck, I regained a few pounds myself. This new unavailability of the colonel was a good thing, in a way, for I could now devote all my time to putting more meat on the bones of my charges. In another way, though, it was a bad thing, for it also allowed my charges to devote all their time to pecking more meat off the bones of S/Sgt, Black. Along with their redoubled depreciations on my body and soul, to make it worse, many of the gaggle had a fresh trick of vomiting whatever I stuffed them with, thus forcing me, for my hide's sake, to scoop up handfuls of the regurgitated slop and shove it down their throats again. The Pikes Peak of our mutual loathing swelled to an Everest.

In another, more portentous way, the duty-ordained separation of the colonel from his geese was a bad thing, for his place was gradually taken over by a blondined bit of ball-bearing sockets and joints fleshed out here and there with silicone: Rosa Sineschpiener O'Bower, a displaced person of sorts.

While I'd been stuck in West Germany, our separate occupations commonly kept her in her bed and me out of mine, so our acquaintance was at best a nodding one. She'd been happy on her back in Bad Gasthaus, serving under the colonel in the former SS Kommandant's house; but in Southern California, with Arr-r-rr-rrr-te-e-EE on the go somewhere, 12 hours a day, she was a mighty sad ex-joybaby. During her first stop-off at Goosequarters West, she laid her emotional cards face up on the table with care, although a trifle obliquely, sighting that she didn't, couldn't properly Enjoy (lingering over the word) the split-level rancherito that the colonel had leased for them in Vista de Hideputa--an overpriced, underdesigned pile set uncertainly against the base of a fast-eroding hillock, whose picture windows offered a dull view of the dull Pacific reaches. Her life, she murmured, had become as empty as the seascape. My private Black Chamber decoded this message as meaning: I am not getting laid enough stop regards rosa.

Considering her background, Mrs. O'Bower had good reason to be bored. To an old Hamburg hand, proximity to the ocean meant sailors and, on a secondary level, GIs--loaded with loot, on the prowl and kookie for hooky, whatever the price, method or receptacle used--but the only sailor in Vista de Hideputa was a retired vice-admiral, half paralyzed and thoroughly dotty. Nor were the brutal and licentious soldiery much in evidence, either. Indeed, the one officer stationed at Fort Antonio López de Santa Ana who could afford the astronomical cost of a leased place in town was Colonel Arthur O'Bower. Ordinary generals, colonels and majors, too poor for such extraordinary avocations as goose gorging and marriage to inmates of European joy houses, practiced a grim economy by keeping their families in Government-provided houses on the post, with occasional blowouts at Knott's Berry Farm. The swarm of bachelor captains and lieutenants in the Officers Club had nothing to do after dark except belt clown tax-free booze and dream of being shipped Where The Action Was--a recruiting center, say, in downtown Manhattan. As for the enlisted men, they spent their weekends and wads in Olde Tijuana, where Ladies of Ancient Spanish Lineage could be found whose insistence on the social amenities had reached such a peak of refinement that, were a $20 bank note offered them, they would invariably back down--but invariably into a socially amenable position: back-down.

Each morning, Colonel O'Bower's driver picked him up for an 8:30 delivery to his office on the post, and that was the last his lonely wife saw of him until after dark. She soon, with a Hun's inbred love of routine, fell into a daily pattern of her own. After waving goodbye to the colonel, she would sit at the uncleared breakfast table, smoke a 100-mm cigarette or two, gaze disconsolately at the disconsolate Pacific, sip cold coffee, think about sex and how lonely she was, sigh every so often and, now and again, wipe away an incipient tear. Then, tear-fueled and sigh-propelled, she'd bathe, douse herself with cologne, slip into as few clothes as possible and go for a drive in the creamy Ford Thunderbird that had been a leased-housewarming present from her husband. The breakfast dishes were left until later. The colonel, like many rich men who are prodigal with large sums but miserly with small, had several money-saving idiosyncrasies, among which was an unwillingness to hire a live-in cook-housekeeper. A cleaning woman who came on Mondays was as far as die colonel'd go in the domestic-servant line. His wife, therefore, had to keep things tidy six clays out of seven.

I was annoyed when Mrs. O'Bower began hanging around. The gaggle was then working me over with a vivacity engendered by the salt-sea-and-sagebrush air. I didn't cotton to a stranger kibitzing the job; and Mrs. O'Bower was, to all intents and purposes, a stranger. But she was also a high-octane Hun, showing no signs of the wear and tear of her recent profession. To glance at her invitationally constructed framework was to set the old Primal Urge to twitching his whiskers. As the colonel's gooseboy, I'd had about as much to do with women as an octogenarian museum guard in a room full of Renoir nudes; i.e., I was reduced to wishful thinking and damned little of that.

My annoyance gradually faded, to be replaced by the low-keyed sympathy that one pawn can extend to another or a thwarted gooseboy extend to an unused bedgirl; and this, in turn, was abruptly transformed into a kind of loving non-love. This ultimate change came one morning while the horrible geese were giving me a rougher time than usual. Rosa Sineschpiener O'Bower strode into the fray with the self-confidence of a Prussian field marshal. "********************************!" she spat. (Asterisks have here been substituted for a German expletive 32 letters long, its meaning unknown to me, that sounded like a one-A.m. free-for-all in the parlor of a Hamburg sporting house.) Then, h'isting her skirt (hardly necessary, it being a micromini), she landed a Gestapotive kick in the ringleading gander's slats. The evil bird wobbled out of range, groggily swearing in Goose. "Ach, these devils!" Rosa snarled. "I wish they were dead in a mass grave, these ******************************** Bögel!"

On her next visit, she appeared in suede boots, reaching to mid-thigh, with hard, pointed toes superbly suitable for goose kicking, and which shortly thereafter had sent five more obstreperous ganders off to sick bay. She punctuated each act of mayhem with fervent repetitions of her wish that the ****************************** birds were dead.

I was charmed by this unforeseen aspect of Rosa's character, to the extent that I briefly went oft my nut. "Hey, you know what?" I babbled. "I'd like to kill the whole tick-ridden lot of 'em. Me, Staff Sergeant Beaudin P. Black, ASN 32161733. And I've got the stuff to do it with, too. Poison. Greenish-colored, kind of. Satisfaction guaranteed. Bought it in Hamburg."

"Natürlich," Rosa muttered thoughtfully. "Where else would one buy it?" She stared at the geese for a while, frowning, then stared awhile at my midsection (I liked to work stripped to the waist, and then some). The frown was removed. An odd, Hunnish smile spread across her face. "Yes, why don't you poison them, these ******************************** Bögel, these devil-Dänse?" site asked in a whisper. She brought her mouth close to my ear, in order to be heard above the gaggle's resentful honks and hisses. "And tell me about it afterward." Her nose nuzzled my ear. "In bed." She nibbled my earlobe. "My bed." She ran her tongue over my cheek. "When he's not home." She nibbled my lower lip. "I'll let you know when." She nibbled my upper lip. "After they're in their mass grave, I mean." Somehow, she was nibbling my tongue. "Those Hamburg poisons, they're the world's best." And now her hands were--"Just like you, sweetie sergeant, wonderful." My God! her hands were--"Wunderbar!" And then she was gone.

So was I, utterly gone. In less than a minute, I'd grown a Third Leg; and the days of those hell-geese were numbered. I decided that, whatever Rosa S. O'Bower's faults might be, at leasther villainies were hammer'd out offlowers.

That same evening, I sat clown at a typewriter in the deserted H. Q. Co. Message Center and wrote myself a letter:

Dear Beau--I don't think that the human race is quite ready for love yet, and i don't think the lower animals are quite yet ready for the human race. This makes me sad, not glad, because of my genes, my dreams and my attitudes. I am apolitical. I have no beard. I refuse to see sex through a dog's eyes. I have been honorably wounded in my country's service. I am scratching, scratching, scratching at the window of the world. I don't mind the devil having a compass, but why must the needle always point at me? I am not magnetic. I am not the north. But, hoping for an early reply, I certainly am

Your old friend, Beaudin P. Black

The project would be carried out. And it was carried out. (Time for a snappy dirge, proffy, baby.) Carried out letter-perfect.

Yes, letter-perfect--God help me....

One thousand years spent hunkered down on a hot plate in hell would be less long-drawn-out and painful than the 48 hours I sweated through after Colonel O'Bower roared up in that commandeered half-track to confront his slaughtered darlings. To my own dying day, I'll shudder at the thought of those ghastly hours. The colonel opened the ball with a scream of malevolent grief that might've seared the throat of an insane puma. He leaped from the half-track with such force as to leave the vehicle rocking on its treads behind him. He cradled limp necks in his arms and cuddled ruffled cadavers in his lap until larruping fury finally overcame all his futile lachrymosities. He then sprang to his feet, flailed roundhouse swings at the universe, damned the republic, cursed the Deity and topped things off by chewing out the cosmos. For a second act, he pounded his fists against his temples and, as the curtain came clown, was beating his head so hard against the trunk of a eucalyptus that the poor tree's roots squeaked. "Death!" he howled. "Hell! Vengeance! Blood! Murder! God! Gore! Damn! Vengeance! Christ! Hell! Blood! Death! R-E-V-E-N-G-E!!!" I was so scared that my sphincter muscle almost Did The Dirty to me, an embarrassment that hadn't happened since Victor Charlie was trying to mortar me to death in Vietnam. When the colonel, still ranting, had rumbled off in the half-track on his way to alert the world, I sagged on the chicken-wire fence, as close to a swoon as any sickly Victorian ingénue ever came without losing her amateur standing.

It never occurred to Colonel O'Bower, strangely enough, to suspect his incorruptible gooseboy. I suppose I was too close to home, too obvious--a regular Purloined Letter on the hoof. He did a fantastic amount of telephoning, however, and it wasn't long before some less grief-stricken, more suspicious fellows arrived in response to his summons. These included the Provost Marshal, every MP stationed at Fort Antonio López de Santa Ana, the Vista de Hideputa police, a troop of California State Police, the local chapter (Owen Lattimore Post No. 57) of the FBI, all the CIA men within 75 square miles who dared to cut classes that day and a couple of Mexican customs inspectors who'd heard the colonel's ravings as far south as Tijuana and had driven up to see what all the ruido was about. There were more narrow-eyed, nosy theoreticians poking around the scene of the crime than there were dead geese; and when they weren't poking around, they were grilling me in relays.

They got nowhere. Nowhere at all.

A childhood, an adolescence and a coming of age experienced in the lurching America that lived where the bean-stock called World War Two ended had made me adept at holding the high ground long before I dug in and held my slit trench on Rosa S. O'Bower's high, hot hips. As for the heinous mass murder, my story, my attitude and, to a certain extent, my accent was: I din see nuttin' I din hear nuttin' I din know nuttin' but my tender heart wuz broke. Geez who coulda done a ting like dat tuh dem priddy boids and dat nice coinel huh? Neither the common, garden variety of uniformed fuzz nor the fancier hardy perennials in narrow ties and Italian-cut suits could brainwash me clean of a phrase tattooed on my cerebellum: Boys I'm Innocent. The lawmen, civil and martial, gave up on me, finally, perhaps with an assist from a lieutenant of MPs. This lieutenant had nearly died, aged 15, when a jagged sliver of a goose's wishbone lodged in his throat; he thus took a dim view of the goddamned birds, dead or alive. "Well, now, hell," he said in an east-Texas drawl, "the sergeant here's gittin' his discharge this week, and he's been a rarht fine sojer. Got hisse'f the Bronze Star. Puhpul Heart. Real clean reco'd, too. No Bad-Time anywheres. Way I look at it, now, if he was goin' to zap the buggers, he'd've done it mebbe nahn, ten months ago, jes' to git the critters out of his hair. Why wait till rarht now, hey, Black?"

"Yeah, that's for sure, lieutenant," I said. "Why wait until rarht now?"

(All rarht, professor, in a few minutes you can blend some fragments of "Charge," "Sick Call" and "Retreat" together and then tootle off home. Don't trip over the trombone on your way out.)

Colonel O'Bower was now too preoccupied with getting his gaggle underground and brooding on the refined tortures he intended to inflict on the captured killer to bother about my imminent departure, let alone be aware of it. Indeed, I neither spoke to him nor saw him during the brief period that remained until I got off the Army hook. The moment he lost his geese, of course, he lost all interest in his gooseboy. This was agreeable to me. I went on with what I was doing, which was nothing. I'd liquidated my military duty when I liquidated the personnel of Goosequarters West, so I was at liberty to prepare myself for an out-of-uniform world that I'd practically forgotten. I'd laid in a suit, along with some other items of civilian clothing and accessories, and bought a secondhand Mercedes 300SL straight off the dealer's floor, on the single Saturday evening that I'd spent in Vista de Hideputa. I was so excited at soon being free of the Army that it never crossed my mind that I'd be free of Colonel O'Bower as well. Gone from my memory, too, were the carnal possibilities that the colonel's lady had so recently whispered into odd corners of my face.

On Thursday, I came belching out of the H. Q. Co. mess hall after noon chow with my final GI meal in my belly and my discharge papers in my pocket. I was heading back to barracks, intending to get into my new suit and then get the hell away from khaki country, when Colonel O'Bower's jeep driver, a corporal, ran after me and handed me an envelope. "The Ole Man's Kraut gimme this for ya," he said. "I'd of give it to ya sooner, but I was in town all the mornin' tryin' ta get laid. Son of a bitch, it's hard enough on a holiday Satday night, but on a normal nothin' mornin'--aw, sheeeeet!"

Inside the envelope was a one-line note. This afternoon is when jünf oclocf. N/ "Where's the Old Man now?" I asked the corporal.

"Him? Ah, he druv up to L. A. early. Gonna buy himself some more of them geese at this goose ranch up there in that San Ferando Valley or some such name. Took his own heap, too, thank the sweet Christ, so now me, I'm gonna sack out till it's Satday night and time for Tiawanna."

My intention had been to check into a Los Angeles hotel before dark; instead, off I went, then, to the split-level love-away and a frittered, form-fitting time. I wonder if the colonel had only known, a few form-fitting hours later, that what I was doing to his wife was not the cuckolding he assumed it to be, but merely a demonstration of the New Therapy in action, might not his----

Chapter 3: In which the film resumes, the lady removes her lover, the gentlemen remove the veneer of civilization & I remove my parts to other parts

--present and future villainies, too, have been hammer'd out of flowers?

Fat chance.

Only a fool like Beaudin P. Black--his fingers, wits and eardrums numb from that constant scratching, scratching, scratching at the window of the world--could ask himself such a foolish question (see Appendix A).

I have had questions equally foolish answered time and again (see Appendix B), look you, by a Tremendous Voice from a Swirling Cloud, at Whose rumbled NO! the earth shook.

For the villainies of Colonel Arthur O'Bower were, are and forever will be of a steel most excruciatingly milled, steel infinitely harder than any diamond, Sheffield-plus steel, Swedish-extra, the Ultimate Steel, sufficiently strong to shatter the descending hammer on impact, to wrinkle and crack the anvil below in 30 cast-iron ways, and to reduce the eggshell body of ex-S/Sgt. Black to atoms or antimatter.

And now this pocket-sized, ultragalactic-steel monster was going intoAction! (See Appendix D.)(ohdearohdear)(oh ... well) (See Appendix C.)

Appendix A: Challenge

Fear, the fear, clear goddess, sing, the sheer fear of Black's fool son, Beaudin,Jellying him into jiggles there on the stained, mussed and soggyBed of fierce Revengeides, Obowerus, wowser of heroes,Even as on the chassis of slithery, watertank-nippledRosê, replete, he rode shotgun. Also, sweet alto, please tell usWhich of the three involv'd will survive this eyeball-to-eyeballShowdown: Revengeides, the damp nymph, or tall Beaudin, Black's son?Meanwhile, should Zeus interrupt, simply ignore him. Sing louder.Better yet, don't sing. YELL. You'll have to, with all that thunder.Hera can upstage Zeus, but he hates it when one of the Muses....

Appendix B: Response

The California Disturbance:

An Eyewitness Account

Greek Refugee saw all

"Shocking," She claims

By our own correspondent

Vista De Hideputa, Calif., April 25 (Special to the Helicon, Ohio, "Well-spring")--Mrs. Calliope A. Oeagros, age undisclosed, the widow of the late Thracian entrepreneur, was on the scene at 40 Proprio Tinto St. early yesterday evening when Col. Art R. Oberon, U. S. A., discovered his wife Rosalie in a compromising position with Buddin B. Blake. A two-year draftee, Blake had been discharged as a sergeant a few hours before.

According to Mrs. Oeagros, who has been on a world tour ever since King Constantine II was forced into exile by disaffected Greek army elements, she and her companion, Sir Geoffrey Mon-mouth, Camelot's Ambassador to the UN, made a forced landing after they found themselves in a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence.

"It was a driving, drenching rain," Mrs. Oeagros, who prefers to be described as a "rich refugee." said. "The thunderclaps were positively Olympian. The noise was so frightful that Geoff and I forgot our manners and sought shelter in the nearest house, which we thought to be unoccupied.

"When I realized what was transpiring inside that house, though, I regretted that we had not remained aloft, despite the definite possibility of disaster.

"The sight that met my eyes in the master bedroom of that house, where we had intended to divest ourselves of our rain-soaked outer garments, was shocking in the extreme. In my country, the middle-class people do not behave in such an outrageous fashion. Nor do they in the United States, or so I am informed."

Asked to elaborate on her statements, Mrs. Oeagros said: "This woman--a pretty, hard-faced blonde, vaguely foreign--was lying on her back on the bed without a stitch on. On top of her lay a young man, also without a stitch on. If they were not engaged in improper physical activity at the moment, they must have been engaged in an improper physical act in the immediate past, to judge from the condition of the bed. One can always judge by the condition of the bed. I will admit, however, that I could not see these two people as clearly as I would have preferred.

"The room was darker than ordinarily it would have been at that hour of the day, due to the raging storm outside. No lamps had been lit, to my knowledge, anywhere in the house.

"The husband of the woman, who put in an appearance shortly after we did, undoubtedly remained standing on the staircase because he suspected that he might be in the wrong house. He seemed a forlorn, uncertain little fellow and I could not avoid feeling sorry for him. He is below the average in height, you see, whereas the younger man struck me as being much taller.

"Then Geoff, who adores history and battles and is continuously reading or writing or talking about them, remarked that the little chap was a colonel. My sympathies forthwith were extended to the other man, although it is difficult to be sympathetic to anyone, male or female, involved in such a shocking situation.

"But I strongly disapprove of all colonels, as a direct result of the harsh treatment some Hellenes holding that rank gave to dear, innocent Constantine, God bless him.

"This young man, hardly more than a boy, evidently was allowing his entire mass to press down on the woman, for she was screaming, in a panic-stricken, choked voice, for her husband to assist her. She was also calling upon all the strength she could muster to strike the young man about the head. The young man, needless to say, appeared to be 'petrified' from fright.

"An interesting side light to the affair is that at one point I honestly believed I heard the young man addressing me, using a nickname that I have not heard since I was a schoolgirl--'Goddess.'

"Possibly I am incorrect in this assumption, for one is inclined to misunderstand or misinterpret words or phrases absorbed in moments of high moral drama--as may have been the case in this instance.

"On the heels of my aural confusion, the colonel chose to ascend the remaining stairs in great haste, then directed his steps toward the bedroom. His----"

Mrs. Oeagros, still shaken by her experience and disinclined to continue, begged her companion to resume the narrative thread. Sir Geoffrey, an amateur historian and the author of several novels in addition to his UN responsibilities and numerous other interests, gladly acceded to her request.

"Than fruysshed kynge Oboure thorow the portis of his corseynte," he said, "a knyght of corage wetily arayed, and a noble manne of armys, redyng to threst unto sir Beaudyn that the brayne and the blode myghte be clevid on his swerde."

Turning to Mrs. Oeagros, Sir Geoffrey inquired: " 'Ow's that fer openers, Callie gel?"

"Knyghtly spokyn, parfoy, fayre Geoff," she replied.

"I busse youre ankelis bothe, swete godesse, from my herte-roote," Sir Geoffrey said, and gallantly proceeded to do so.

He thereupon resumed his account: "But biforn kynge Oboure coulde entyr upon the bate, his ladye la belle Rose Sansépine did heve hire fayre hyppis en haut wythe freyshynned powere and in a manere of grete cunnyng. Than hire queynte smoote sir Beaudyn swich a buffyt that his nekke-bone was putte far from hire pappis soote and his conyng was from its derk hous out-snatched. His----"

Appendix C: Summation

In the country of the blind, there is more than enough rheum for eyewitness accounts by stupid people who can't see the wood for the trees.

In the country of the stupid, an appendix is a small blind sac, an outpouching of the cecum that no longer serves any useful purpose. Occasionally, when one bursts, a nasty mess is left in the back of the book.

Appendix D: The true, unexpurgated, notarized denouement, here appended to the appendices for the first time on any stage

My personal account of the events in question is, by great bad luck, that of a participant, a skinwitness, as it were; and thus may be considered accurate and trustworthy in spite of being, to the narrator, tremendously painful. For all that, a precise restatement of what happened ought to have as much therapeutic value for me as the coupling (preinterruption) had for my treacherous partner. So, painful or not, I intend to get what's left of the story off my chest. I'll take up the yarn where I dropped it, on the chest of Mrs. O'Bower.

When her plaintive, palpably inaccurate, screeching alarm dock wound down, its terminal tick--a breathless, hissed "g-e-ee-eee-eeee-s-ss-sss-SSSS!"--jerked the trigger of the sawed-off human shotgun on the stairs. The muzzle emitted a deadly white-hot flame. A vengeful roar startled, then overwhelmed, the omnipotent, omnipresent thunder. Cordite's cruel, acrid stink permeated the master bedroom. And a load of buck-and-ball ammunition burst from the barrel in the person of Colonel Arthur O'Bower, on a collision course with Beaudin P. Black's naked, defenseless hide.

The colonel whizzed through the doorway so fast that, by the law of relativity, I should've seen him as a trench-coated, speed-of-light blur; yet he might've been approaching me in slow motion, for in my memory certain areas of O'Bower stand out in very sharp focus:

1. His face, for instance--a murderous, contorted mask.

2. His right hand--raising a heavy silver candlestick it'd snatched from a table beside the door.

3. His left hand--from which a pair of handcuffs dangled.

The problem of the handcuffs was stated and solved in a millisecond. He'd gotten into the habit of toting them around, awaiting the day when he could clap them onto the dastard who'd put the quietus on Goosequarters West; now he'd hauled them from his trench-coat pocket while his other hand was latching onto the bottom-weighted candlestick. Q. E. D.

I knew that a blow from this candlestick, practically guaranteed to fracture my skull, would be but the first and mildest of the torments he had in store for me--after I'd been handcuffed, gagged and brought back, none too tenderly, to a throbbing consciousness--but I was no more capable of defensive or evasive action than a fledgling paralyzed by a viper's deepfreeze eye. Maybe Rosa's industrious fists had already put me on the road to total anesthetization.

Whether they had or not, it was Rosa's industrious midsection that kept me from total annihilation. The stored-up energy that might have been wasted piecemeal on ten minor hip-heaves was now expended on a last-ditch ceilingward snap of her pelvis. This magnificent volcanic bump and grind blew me bang out of my slit trench on the high ground, and I went tumbling down her smooth but precipitous eastern slope to a new and indefensible position. This lay in open terrain on the enemy side of Sineschpiener Ridge, lacked facilities for either cover or concealment and had no tactical value whatsoever against Colonel O'Bower's onrushing steam-roller advance. I was a pushover for obliteration, failing an act of God.

Well, God works in such mysterious ways that He's not invariably on the side of the biggest battalions, including a few outsize outfits in which every man from C. O. to conscript was so fanatic a Christian that his scrotum gave off a dry, rustling sound. Perhaps the fact that mine didn't rustle helped save me on that devilish, deluged evening in Vista de Hideputa.

War, according to Dr. Hemingstein, is the province of chance. On this occasion, I guess I'd been voted an honorary citizen of the province--the ballot boxes having been stuffed by Rosa's overtime buttocks. And, although Clausewitz didn't comment on the paradox, an attacking force can have too much momentum. An advance of 50 miles will mean victory; of 100, disaster. A Great General's troops may be racing ahead like madmen, but the G. G. knows when to blow the whistle on them. He wants to be sure that the rapid forward movement doesn't become a stampede. It isn't that he's worried about having his supply lines cut; he's more concerned with how he's treated in the history books. You can bet your polished boots that the supply lines will be cut later; but an army whose momentum has swept it far beyond its objective eventually runs out of gas, breath and the power of positive thinking. It then has a tendency to be thrown off balance and into a state of panic by the weakest kind of counterattack--seven kids with slingshots, for example.

I can't recall a single general in history who let his army (a) go rumbling a sleeper-jump beyond its assigned objective because the objective (b) wasn't where it was supposed to be in the first place. Colonel Arthur O'Bower did, though, in his master bedroom.

Which is perhaps why he never made general permanently.

And which is certainly why his objective--Fort Beaudin P. Black--is still manned and active, instead of being a charred, unremembered patch somewhere on this round of solar ball-ammunition, the earth.

Sliding off Sineschpiener Ridge, with no place to go but Perdition (and by fast boat, at that), I decided I might as well go down fighting. After all, it's better to die on your love-matted abdomen than live on your concrete-chafed knees--although in the short doleful life that the revengeful colonel would be racking up for me, a few moments of knee-living might offer a pleasant change from the contorted attitudes I'd be in the rest of the time. So I wrapped the flag around me, boys, and jes' kep" rollin' along. Down from Rosa. Away from Rosa. Across the sweaty sheets. Toward the edge of the bed.

I readied this line of departure simultaneously with Colonel O'Bower, my rib cage and his thigh meeting in a mighty clash that cracked the bedstead and split the mattress straight down the middle. A couple of spring coils promptly popped free and poked into Rosa, one catching her between the shoulder blades and the other pricking her arse (to be precise: the left buttock, three and a quarter inches west of center). Understandably, she yelped.

Colonel O'Bower bellowed, gobbled and croaked concurrently--a sound that I'd never heard before and, God willing, won't hear again. The slaughterhouse bellow was meant to be Music To Accompany Candlesticks Descending On Heads. The gobble, worthy of a tom-turkey countertenor dodging the ax, was gobbled, because the colonel had discovered too late that my head wasn't where he and the candlestick thought it would be. And the croak, if anything, was a warning to Rosa Sineschpiener O'Bower to look out for descending candlesticks and colonels. In spite of her wanton talents, he saw her now as a frail and lovely woman being despoiled by a Fiend in a Human Suit; and no American officer and gentleman is going to bash a rape victim as a secondary objective, his primary being A. W. O. L.

The darkness kept him from seeing her clothes, which were neatly draped along a chaise longue ten feet from the bed with a care seldom taken by ladies in line for a raping. And the ravisher's garments, arranged with military precision, festooned a chair flanking the doorway opposite the table whence Colonel O'Bower had taken unto himself a weapon. Even if he had spotted his wife's displayed nylon scantinesses, it wouldn't've modulated his behavior; for a basic premise of the crazy O'Bower logic was that, to a dastard monstrous enough to murder a gross of dear old sweetie geese, rape is not only the most minor of vices but a humdrum daily activity to boot. I continued to roll, despite that concussive meeting of femur and ribs. Off the bed's rumpled edge I spun, and CLUNK! lit full length on some topaz wall-to-wall carpeting. This change of base went through without a hitch, mainly because the colonel's carcass was finished with acting like a roadblock. His carcass was then in mid-air.

Unwittingly, making the strategic boo-boo that Clausewitz forgot to mention--of a force too impetuous for its own good--the colonel had let his momentum bear him so ridiculously far beyond his objective that he was thrown off balance en route. The jarring encounter with my Forlorn Hope had begun the ruin of his equilibrium.

Well, Colonel O'Bower may have been caught off balance, but panic failed to strike him. He rectified the over-all situation in mid-air, without particularly improving it; but for the moment, he averted catastrophe by the cloth of his eye patch. Between the take-off and the dead-stick landing, he had to accomplish three things: regain contact with me, wherever I was; avoid any interception of brutal candlestick by wifely flesh; and, with a splash-down impending on Rosa, land on her roiled expanse as lightly as he could. His solution was an Immelmann turn, executed above the lady, that would've snapped my spine but which the conditioned colonel brought off without setting himself up for some osteopathy. If the maneuver wasn't completely successful, blame it on his attempt to collar me with his left hand while his right was averting the candlestick from Rosa.

The O'Bower claws were so eager to clutch my windpipe that they forgot to hang onto the handcuffs. No sooner had I met the topaz carpeting than these dropped--Clunk! Clunk!--on my coccyx, then joined (Clunk!) my obverse (Clunk!) on the floor. At the same instant, the candlestick connected with the headboard, in lieu of Rosa, shivering the timber of the bedpost, gouging a pound of plaster from the wall and bending itself into a 30-degree angle in the process. The impact tore it from the colonel's grasp. It thudded to the carpet on the far side of the bed, even as her husband's body banged down atop Rosa, in roughly the same position I'd lately relinquished. "Bo/o/oo/OOOZ!" said Rosa. She then retired from action--the poor, sodden, squashed, put-upon, silicone Hun.

"Sorry, sweetie, goddamn it," Colonel O'Bower snorted. "Goddamned fortunes of war, baby." He scrambled off his gasping wife to retrieve his goddamned weapon.

This was a mistake; again the objective wasn't where it was supposed to be. A lot of groping was done in the dark before he located the candlestick against the wall under the headboard, curled up and anxious for sleep on a pallet of fallen plaster and mahogany splinters. This protracted search, which was accompanied by a flourish of Anglo-Saxon kettledrum cuss words, gave me an opportunity that I'd thought was lost at this stage of the game. The escape route was open.

I took it.

Latching onto the handcuffs as a souvenir of the occasion, I fought my way to my feet while a thunderclap that shook the house did its best to knock me off them. At its ear-blowing apex, I was grabbing as much of my clothing as the chair would release, and while the heavenly discordance faded, I was scuttling barefooted, bare-arsed, bare-fore and bare-aft, like a blind crab down the stairs. Behind me the flourishing O'Bower's Blasphemous Kettledrum Band shared the marquee with a new rock group of hailstones that was beating, beating, beating at the windows of the room.

In the dark at the bottom of the stairs, I found the front door by instinct; but when I turned the knob, I learned that what Rosa Sineschpiener O'Bower had failed to do when she let in a love-keen acquaintance, the colonel had done when he let in himself--namely, lock the wretched thing. The complaint of a sticking drawer being yanked open in the master bedroom was momentarily amplified over the plink of hailstones. My moth's-antennae fingers, hampered by a pair of darbies and assorted menswear, flickered along the doorjamb seeking the lock, which turned out to be set much lower than locks usually are. The original occupant must've been even a shorter man than the colonel.

But I hadn't the leisure then to compare males of below-average height, not in the infinitesimal space of time that separated Beaudin P. Black and Safety. I had my haberdashery hand on the unlatched lock and my police-state one on the knob, on the point of hurling myself out into the storm's concealment, when the hall was blasted with light so brilliant and atom-bombish that my eyes hurt. And a voice that might've been a 75mm recoilless rifle firing from the next foxhole roared: " 'Ten-HUT!"

The noise nearly imploded everything in my head. My 24 months of Army training, however, picked this occasion to pay off--for the Army. I froze. My arms pressed against my sides. I came to a ramrod attention. Yet I made one concession to my new civilian status; for while my thumbs sought in vain for trouser seams on my naked thighs, I kept the clothes and the handcuffs pressed between my arms and my body.

" 'Bout-HACE!" The recoilless rifle had fired another round.

An about-face isn't as easy to do on bare feet as it is in combat boots, but mine wasn't too bad, considering. At the head of the stairs, Colonel Arthur O'Bower, who'd brought a black-power friend with him, stood at ease, a hellish grin warping his mouth, staring down at me with his companion. I didn't like this black-power friend at all. He was a .45-cal. Colt automatic pistol, U.S. Army Model, which is as black a symbol of power as I care to confront.

"I'd goddamned rather have you unpunctured, goddamn you," the colonel told me sweetly, "but I can't take any god-more-damned chances with a goddamned eel. Which is your goddamned Purple Heart leg, you goddamned rapist bastard of a goose killer?"

Sweat was exuding from my pores, without any help from Rosa for a change. "The--uh--my left leg, sir," I croaked. The condition of my throat would've made a July high noon in Death Valley seem like a dip in the Arctic Ocean.

"I'll even 'em up for you, bloodwise, in a minute, you goddamned broad-banging bugger." Colonel O'Bower shifted his stance from at ease to ready-on-the-firing-line. "No goddamned Purple Heart for this hole, soldier, goddamn you, if you live to be a hundred. Which you won't." His black-power friend drew a bead on my right kneecap. "No, soldier, goddamn you, you ought to live about three goddamned weeks more." He was squeezing the trigger. "If I ribbonate you v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y." The muzzle of the pistol was as steady as a Southern Baptist's faith in hell-fire. "Which I intend to do, you goddamned woman-molesting, exhibitionist, self-exposing goosicide!" He squeezed the trigger past any hope of redemption.

Nothing happened. Except a(c-lick).He hadn't cocked the pistol.

"GODDAMNHELLCHRISTDEATHSHITJESUSBITCH!" yelled the colonel. He seized the top of the .45. When this had been jerked back over the exposed trigger and then slid forward again, a cartridge would be in the chamber and the pistol ready to fire.

Unfortunately for Colonel O'Bower's intentions, I wasn't going to stick around to evaluate his marksmanship. While he was messing with the upper reaches of his automatic, it occurred to me that I had, at the serviceable end of my throwing arm, a pair of unemployed handcuffs. I hadn't played any baseball in the Army, but, I decided, if I wanted to review the marksmanship of the B. P. Black muscles, this was as good a time as any.

Well, it seems that I wanted to.

The colonel was elevating the .45 for a leg shot that would be the Moment of Truth when I slung (a) the handcuffs at him and (b) a depths-of-the-soul prayer at you-know-Who. The Latter, luckily, had been listening. The former, as a result, connected with Colonel O'Bower's forehead--one above his eye patch, clang, one clang above his seeing eye--a double metallic bean ball. From there, they went on, with twin muted thumps, to the thickly padded runner of the third stair down.

Colonel O'Bower's reactions to the beaning were queer. The pistol sank, jerking and fluttering, like a flag being lowered in a stiff breeze, as he drew himself up to a wobbly attention. His shoulders were hunched so high that the eagles on the tabs of his trench coat must've tickled his ear lobes. Then, with his solitary eye--which now resembled a tiny round bowl of spun sugar--glazing across the empty air of the upper hallway, he intoned in an echo-chamber voice: "I-will-follow-you-and-catch-you-god-damn-you-and-I-will-god-well-damned-kill-you-by-damned-degrees-one-fine-day-you-can't-escape the ever-god-lasting-damned-vengeance-of-Arthur-O'Bower-U. S. A.-no-matter-where-you-go-or-attempt-to-god-hide-damn-for-I-will-god-damned-well-root-you-out-from-whatever-pig-sty-you-wallow-in-for-god-damned-sure-and-I-will-show-you-the-god-damned-torments-of-hell-you-god-damned-goosicide-you."

Then slowly, persistently, still at that hunched attention, he tilted forward like a truncated, trench-coated tree sawed through at its base. Finally, plumb out of the power of positive thinking, off balance for sure, he pinwheeled arseover-teakettle toward me. The pistol didn't go off during the descent, a courtesy that I appreciated; I'd already absorbed my day's ration of loud noises.

I was polite enough to wait until the plummeting O'Bower stock had checked its downward trend and leveled off between the foot of the stairs and the front door, but I wasn't so polite as to linger while I determined if the colonel were alive or dead. So after noting that, whatever his mortal state, the mauve eye patch hadn't been disturbed and there appeared to be a tremor of the eyelids rimming the spun-sugar eye, I galloped out into the storm. Mother-naked, of course. I didn't bother to shut the door behind me.

So help me, Frigga: (signed) Beaudin P. Black

Witness: (signed) G. Monmouth, Kt., C. R. T.

State of California Country of Vista de Hideputa}ss.

(SEAL)

On This 24th day of April, A. D., 1969, before me, the undersigned, a Notary Public in and for said County and State, personally appeared Beaudin P. Black, known to me to be the person whose name is subscribed to the within Instrument, and acknowledged to me that he executed the same.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and affixed my official seal the day and year in this certificate first above written.

(signed) Calliope A. Oeagros, age undisclosed

Notary Public in and for said County and State. (My Commission will never expire.)

Chapter 4: In Which I Find Myself Cast Naked Upon a Desert Sports Car & Very Soon Indulge in a Primitive Form of Escapism

I'd parked the old Mercedes around the corner, because I didn't want the neighbors to brood about a strange car sitting in front of the O'Bower rancherito while the colonel was off on a business trip; although in a community of five-acre homesites and 1000-foot beach frontages, around the corner is apt to be code for "half a mile away."

It was raining cheetahs and Saint Bernards, and hailstones as big as Nasser's nose were bouncing off my noggin. After frayed webs of lightning had turned the landscape Los Alamos--white, the atmosphere would vibrate to 1,000,000 tons of 16-pound shot let loose at Beaudin P. Duckpin by a team of semipro demons. The hailstones were too big to melt when they'd caromed into immobility, so each mown lawn, each clipped hedge, seemed to be chattering under a light fall of snow. Lights gleamed opaquely from within the few houses I splashed past.

In an intensification of these, the first particular facet that glittered forth from my general fear blinked out the message, in Morse, that I might be arrested for indecent exposure. A Proper Vista de Hideputan would consider it his civic duty to inform the fuzz of a naked man on Proprio Tinto Street. Then a paddy wagon would pay a quiet call on me, having been careful not to startle any sensitive homeowner with a siren's plebeian wail. And after I'd been booked, my loins hidden by a drunk-tank blanket in the interests of modesty, the stupidest detective, third-grade, could easily retrace my dripping steps to the O'Bower loveaway, where he'd find----My God, what would he find?Why, nothing repeat Nothing--for I'd readied the Mercedes now. The fantasy was temporarily stunted, reduced, dissolved.

I slumped against the low-slung heap, physically weak from my run and emotionally limp from the last 30 minutes, letting my overdrawn lungs lay some bread on their debt. Pretty soon, I discovered that the waterlogged coat of my new civilian wardrobe was the only item that I'd snatched from the chair while departing the Field of the Patch of Eye. My other wearables were back in the checkroom of Club O'Bower, an after-hours clip joint with a very rough bouncer.

But the suitcoat was what counted; and none of the absolute necessities in it had fallen out during my precipitate retreat. My money, my wallet and the car keys were all where they should've been. Therefore, having concluded that a motionless stone gathers no two in the bush, I unlocked the Mercedes, got in, got the motor het up in a hurry, and then got out of there at a speed that, in such weather, would have given palpitations to a drunken drag racer. I drove naked, too. It's the only way to travel, as Lady Godiva remarked to the hostler when he helped her off her Percheron.

I swerved the Mercedes around a Coast Highway cloverleaf, aimed her nose north and accelerated. The rain showed no sign of abating, but the output of my fear increased in proportion to the car's speed. The windshield resembled a millrace, and I had an impression of driving under water. My forward vision was, to put it mildly, limited; but there was no oncoming traffic to confuse me. Only a fool like Beaudin P. Black would rip along at 90 in a cloudburst like that. Meanwhile, my fear had topped 100, before resolving itself into a couple of premises and a conclusion, which I'll call

Terror One:

(a) The blow from the handcuffs had killed. Colonel O'Bower; or, if not,

(b) The tumble down the staircase had.

(?) Either way, I was a murderer, and the staircase a mere inanimate accessory after the fact.

This pillowcase of logic came close to smothering me. Hunched over the wheel, peering at the blackness beyond the water-warped headlight beams, I simply couldn't suck in enough air. To roll down the side window was to get no relief; all it did was let the rain in, while my imagination went right on having a high old time. Such as--

Well, by now, Rosa S. O'Bower would've tripped over the corpse. She'd've called the police. An all-points bulletin would've already been broadcast, and every cop in Southern California was at present on a wild hunt for a slightly gimpy, possibly nude young male, white, in a black 1959 Mercedes 300SL. They'd nab me before I ever crossed the Los Angeles county line. A gobbet of Why Bother? set my gorge to bubbling. The temptation to give myself up briefly became so urgent that I took my naked, sore sole off the accelerator. But as the needle of the tachometer wavered lower, I dropped in on a private revival meeting in the parlor of my heart, where I refurbished my courage with a little talk-in-tongues about the Gospel According To

Anti-terror One:

(a) If I had killed the colonel, I'd done it in self-defense.

(b) Rosa would've known about the revenge her husband planned to take on the slayer of his fat, poison-prone pets.

(c) Also, even with the wind knocked out of her, she'd've heard his threats to me.

(d) She'd undoubtably seen him take the .45 automatic from the drawer in the bedroom.

(e) The pistol, in fact, would be in the dead man's hand when the cops burst in.

?

The only rap they could pin on me would be rape or, at worst, manslaughter--and maybe neither one.

There was no point, not after this spate of premises, in driving back to Vista de Hideputa to let the dicks in the back room have another go at erasing my Boys I'm Innocent tattoo. No, sir, if they had a yen to put me through the wringer, they'd have to nab me first. I wouldn't make it easy for them, either; nor would I contribute to their Police Pension Fund after their eventual apology for all the trouble they'd caused me. They'd also have to sweat out the capture of Beaudin P. Black, because from now on, their quarry was going to ride the secondary roads.

At the next junction, a sign said that a terrestrial zero called Bomba Ridge was an indecipherable number of miles down the road to the right. I hadn't the vaguest idea as to what Bomba Ridge was, and I'd've bet that most cops were in the same boat. So I slammed on the brakes, backed up and veered to the right--thataway.

The road to Bomba Ridge was unattractive to begin with, but within a mile the 1921 macadam gave up in disgust and surrendered to the potholes. I had to shift into a crawling first gear to avoid being clobbered by the roof of the car. This undesired drag-arse advance made it easy for a half inch of rain to treat the windshield like a sluice without a sluice gate, and easier still for my fear to break jail and nail me again. This time, I was caught in a one-man submarine and given a bad beating from the battering-ram fists of

Terror Two:

(a) Arthur O'Bower was not a murdered colonel at all.

(b) He was a fiendish little man who had staggered to his feet with a gargantuan headache and

(c) A lethal, irresistible urge to destroy Beaudin P. Black, body and soul (in no special order).

?

It would be Colonel Arthur O'Bower, not the assorted police of California, who'd be hunting me down, from a view to a death. In the morning?

This logic was inescapable. The colonel had told me he'd get me; and, whatever or how numerous his sins might be, he was a man--or monster--of his word. He'd be a sleepless, bloodthirsty, five-foot, nine-inch hellhound, slavering along in my footprints until his fangs were sunk in my throat, in a prelude to his killing me by degrees before casting my cadaver to some piranhas, say, that he'd ordered when his cabin cruiser chugged west through the Panama Canal. A week, a month, a year or a decade might go by, but eventually I'd be torn by those rabid fangs. I knew that Colonel O'Bower's atrocious threats, his hideous promises, would be fulfilled, and his terrible vengeance taken--and this grim knowledge made me giddy. I was, by God, a gone goose--gone infinitely farther than the sum total of ganders among the dearly departed who'd kicked the bucket of poisoned mash in Goosequarters West. And there was no hope of an Anti-Terror Two. Not anymore.

My giddiness went out of control as my mind made my gory prospects more vivid. Eventually, I had to pull over to the side of the road, switch off the ignition and the headlights and sit numbly until the dizzy feeling chose to go away. But it didn't wane; it waxed. So did my imagination. At last, sensibly preferring oblivion to the revolting full-color pictures my personal UHF channels were receiving, I sighed and let myself swirl into blissful noninvolvement.

My final thought, just before a nebulous, cotton-boll Nowhere took me in as a temporary boarder, was: If what's happened to me since noontime is what happens to every well-meaning draftee on the day he completes his military service, then all I can say is--why, there's something malevolently wrong and rapaciously rotten in the Land of the Pilgrims' Pride, and it could be the fault of its funny little cut-rate, comic-opera Army.