this day, any time that I smell weed, it comes strongly associated with the smell of that foul diarrhea.
When we met later, I gathered from Jude that about the same time I was putting my time in at the grocery store, he was spending summers working on his family’s ranch. I really envied that part of his history—being one with the land, out in the sun. Even now I can see him in my mind’s eye tilling in the dirt, or doing whatever it is people do on ranches. He’d take his shirt off to better soak the sun’s rays into his body. He’d wear a baseball cap because he always wore a baseball cap. Shirt off, cap on, working in the sun. I can envision his strong, tanned arms with their muscles bulging from underneath. Worn out blue jeans and a proper pair of work boots, doing ranch things.
That was one of the only jobs he and I ever had before we signed up for Uncle Sam and swapped the grocery store and the ranch for a military base. In my early days of enlistment I’d spend a lot of my spare time around the base at the armory, usually just to shoot hoops. Long before I got there though, someone decided it would be a good idea to make up the dullness of the armory with the strategic placement of historical artifacts. War things. Black and white photos of past battalions and dual-tip fighter planes. A piece of shrapnel from this battle, and an old landmine from that one. They displayed an old artillery round about the size of my torso.
I didn’t pay attention to much of anything in school, and I figure now that mingling around the armory must have been my first lesson in History. Part museum, part graveyard—a place to hold Mass for all things unholy and God-forsaken. It’s the kind of Mass that will really make you believe in things too. Like, some of the men who mugged me from those black and white photos must have been about as brave as you could make them. How else could you enter into a battlefield where the bullets are as big as the soldiers? Soldiers used to entrench themselves a few hundred yards apart while the other side would roll down great clouds of mustard gas at them and pray that the wind didn’t change directions. And the gas would blister the hell out of whatever it came into contact with—skin, nasal passages, airways, lungs, you name it.
As I continued to hover over the photographs and captions, I was approached by a second lieutenant who playfully slapped at the basketball that I had pinned under my arm. He gave a thoughtful look to the photos that I was studying and nodded his head in understanding and approval. He said, That mustard gas was some real nasty shit. And it was never supposed to kill anybody, not right away anyway. Did you know that? No? The German’s were more devious than that. Ideally, the gas would inflict enough damage to take a soldier out of battle, but not so much damage that it would kill him. You see? That way, not only would the allies be down a soldier, but they would also have to use valuable resources and space to try to keep the inflicted soldiers alive. Infirmaries would be flooded with casualties and the trenches were filled with terrified souls, wondering when the next gas would come. It was brilliant warfare. Psychological. Brutal.
He shook his head grimly as if to acknowledge the aforementioned brutality, and we bowed our heads in an informal moment of silence. He gave me a parting pat on the arm and continued down one of the armory’s halls to his office. He surely didn’t think about it, but, had I been in uniform, the place on my arm where he patted me would display one meager chevron. The symbol of my standing in this army. The definitive proof that, had I been an enlisted man in 1917, I would be the one eating the gas. I would be the one that the enemy wanted to push as agonizingly close to death as possible without actually dying. I would be the one huddled in the wet trenches, waiting for the toll of the bell that warned of an incoming chemical gas attack—waiting for the sulfurous mist to settle in and blister every inch of me, inside and out.
Sadly enough, my rudimentary lesson on early chemical warfare wasn’t what stood out to me most during my tour through the armory. Nope. The thing that haunts me most from that day is the pictures and captions of the World War One trench knife. This thing looked like a fucking ice pick with a brass knuckle grip, but it is the three sides to the blade that will really get you. Now, if someone were to stab you with a knife, the wound would have a level of symmetry to it—a two-sidedness, if you will. A wound like this is relatively easy to stitch and to heal, but adding a third side to the blade complicates the nature of the inflicting wound. It makes it nearly impossible for the wound to clot, and much harder for it to be stitched. If someone gets pricked by one of these blades, they are going to be in a world of hurt. Even if they do manage to survive until the help arrives, that third side creates such a mess that there’s not a lot to be done anyway.
It’s a real rotten utensil, and so you know what happened to it? Some people organized some conventions, and at these conventions they decided to banish weapons like this tri-blade from the battlefield. Imagine that—deciding that a particular weapon is simply too much weapon for combat. I’ve said that I’m no wise guy when it comes to history, but I figure this must be some kind of head scratcher to anyone.
I simply don’t understand those rules. Apparently you can stab a man without wanting to kill him. If that’s the case, then I’d just as rather not stab the man at all. And if I did? Well then I suppose I’d want him dead. It’s no good for him to go off and get healed up and come back to do some stabbing of his own. And when he does come back, what’s keeping him from packing a three bladed treat for me? Is he not going to do that because some conventions held 100 years ago suggested that he shouldn’t? I doubt it. And I certainly aint willing to bet my life on it. He probably thinks Geneva is a brand of shampoo and Hague is a type of sandwich bun. I can only imagine him, or myself, getting in trouble for using a weapon like that—getting in trouble for killing a man, during war, with an unapproved method. Someone will have to explain to me what History makes of that.
The blade I saw in the armory on that day haunted me more than any other artifact before or since. It marked upon me a wound of doubt not easily healed or stitched up. It would be some time before I managed my way out of military duty, but some part of me checked out the day I saw the trench knife. Some part of me was done when I saw the madness in that armory—a decent and regulated mode of annihilation.
Silvio Submission One:
There was a young man who was born into tragedy, and agriculture. For seven generations the Woodlief family had been plagued—not by drought or hail—but by lightning. They were struck in garden tractors and row crop tractors. They were struck when the cab was open and when it was closed. The first generation Woodlief patriarch was fifty-seven years old when his iron spade was struck mid-swing without so much as a cloud in the sky. Twelve years later his son’s push plow was hit, killing him instantly. When they finally found the horse that was pulling the plow, its tail was naught but a singed nub of hair. The young man’s great-great-great-grandfather was smote on his porch while drinking his morning coffee out of a tin mug. The following spring his great-great grandfather was just a young boy climbing a tree when the tree was hit, splitting it nearly in half. He survived that strike, but wasn’t so lucky when, twenty-one years later, he was killed by lightning as he lay irrigation pipe in a light rain storm.
By the time the young man became a young man he was the last of the Woodlief patriarchy. If a cloud in the sky had the slightest shade of gray, he could only be found cowered underneath the dining room table, where his hands covered his ears and he shivered. The fear alone was almost enough to kill him. In his mind’s eye he could see the lurking bolts ricochet from cloud to cloud, discharging and recoiling, just waiting for the opportunity to burn him into the earth. To return him to the dust from whence he came.
When thunderheads got close enough to speak to him, he groveled from below the table like a dog on the fourth of July. And when those flares from the lightning were within sight of the house, it burned onto his retinas the fallen faces of his ancestry. The only Woodlief family tree that mattered consisted of a forked bolt of lightning, and where that bolt met the soil of the earth was the gaunt portrait of our young man.
In his heart he knew that should God really want him dead, there were countless ways for him to do it, but this didn’t keep him from spending
