Heavy Poodles

HEAVY POODLES

By Ian Fraser

Copyright Ian Fraser 2011

Published at Smashwords

I enjoy parades – even though they make my skin crawl. Perhaps we’re hard-wired to appreciate the pomp and ceremony of public rituals, the synchronized movements. I don’t know. But there’s still nothing quite like the deep whoomph whoomph whoomph sound as a big bass drum starts up somewhere down the street. Long before your ears get it, your nose hairs feel the tickling vibrations – as do the short hairs on back of your head. These days my hearing isn’t what it used to be. It takes a moment for the drum noise to make the transition from being a sensation underfoot to me actually hearing it. I don’t care.

Carl and I have made it to our mid-nineties. We’re alive and old; in the bigger scheme of things, the trivia of a fractional delay between the external world and my ears is the least of our concerns.

The two of us are at the weekly local parade; the crowds around us are loving it, they’re cheering and applauding. Their fervor adds to my gooseflesh; it’s part of what’s unfolding.

I know Carl has similar conflicted views on the parade. From the goofy grin that’s appearing and disappearing on his face, you’d think he was retarded. He’s blind, so he can’t see the flags or the excitement of the people; the smart cut of the uniforms; the shine of braid and buttons; the determined set in the jaws of the marchers. Carl cocks his head and looks my way; reflected in his dark glasses, the black shirts of the mercenaries tick by like cogs in a factory assembly line.

I begin to ask what’s wrong – and then I understand: it’s the screams from the distant fenced-off area for protesters, the ‘free-speech zone.’ Policemen are shooting electrified darts – Tasers – into the people; a nun and two students are writhing. No one in the crowd can hear it. Later there’d be broken bones for the students, and the nun would be dead.

Carl pats my shoulder, trying to calm me. It’s a sign of old age: my emotions are close to the surface. He’s right of course. We’re too weak and too old to change anything, let alone prevent what’s coming. All we can do is continue what we’re doing, live below the radar.

We extricate ourselves from the crowd and slowly make our way up the road back toward our house. I’m carrying the bag of vegetables, some beans and fruit. We’d been doing the weekly shopping when the gathering crowd caught our attention and we paused to watch as the parade began.

Carl is my friend. He likes to say his blindness made him a better person. I keep away from that topic; it’s not my place to disabuse him of whatever notions that keep him content in a life of perpetual darkness. If the positions were reversed, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to cope half as well as him. So I don’t confront Carl on his delusional bullshit – any more than he calls me on mine.

Carl thinks I don’t hear him sometimes crying late at night, but I do. He has dreams about the old days, of the war, and the other place. It’s as if he and I are either side of the same coin; his fears are about the past, and mine are of the future that rolls toward us like storm clouds over a lake.

I can feel the subversion of my will by my age and frailty; in my head a tiny voice suggests how easy it would be to give up; make the wrong move next month during the police raid. They’ll open fire. We’ll die.

Despite what I say to Carl, I think about the past. It’s hard not to. The war fucked us up, and afterwards, it fucked up everything else – and precious little is in history books or movies. Carl and I watched that Private Ryan film; we decided that Steven Spielberg could suck our mutual dicks for all the truth he managed to portray.

History was always written by the victors. And history is a lie.

*

Right on schedule, Carl frowned, turning his head in the direction of the approaching U-Haul truck. Like always, we were sitting out on the porch, a window hitched open so Carl could listen to the TV inside set to CNN, its volume down so low that apart from occasional murmurs, I couldn’t hear anything – but somehow Carl got every word.

The truck pulled up and turned into the driveway of the house across the road; an extraordinary amount of people spilled out of it and began unloading their furniture. It was a Mexican family, we could hear them calling back and forth as they carried tables and chairs inside in a steady stream. I gave Carl a running commentary on the process.

Is the kid there? said Carl. I looked and saw the teenager who’d be dead in a few weeks time.

Yeah, I said. He’s still carrying stuff. He’ll come over in a while and ask about where the local supermarkets are.

Carl grunted. What if we pretended to be the local old grumpy guys? Carl mused. Would it change anything telling him to fuck off?

I doubt it, I said. Remember, we don’t want to end up like they will. I nodded at the people moving boxes. From nowhere, an image popped into my head: heavy rain drops hitting water. What’s that about?

I filed the thought. Carl was sighing. There’s got to be a reason, a purpose.

I looked at him. When you find out, let me know, hm?

He grinned, showing his teeth. With the dark glasses on he looked creepy; I told him so.

Good, he said.

Across the road, the procession of furniture moving was slowing down. Sure enough, the teenager glanced our way, said something to one of the adults, and began to saunter in our direction. Here he comes, I muttered.

I called him the kid, but now he was closer, I could see dark fuzz on his upper lip. He was probably around seventeen or so – that lame age when bitching about having to shave was one of the pleasures of life.

Excuse me, sir, he said politely, like we knew he would. But would you know of a supermarket nearby?

I told him about the Stop and Shop that was a couple of blocks East. I mentioned the convenience store just up the road, but pointed out that its prices were higher than the supermarket and perhaps should best be kept as a standby for emergencies. All the time I was speaking, I couldn’t help but think of how his face would look with the top of his skull flopped over it like a fringe.

These days, law enforcement opt for hollow point slugs. (Air hates being compressed, so it pushes back, blowing a massively larger hole than the diameter of the bullet itself.) The bullets make things easy for the police – once a limb’s been blown off, their target isn’t going anywhere.

Meanwhile, the kid politely bobbed his head and said thanks, I said don’t mention it, and as he headed back across the street, Carl picked up on my mood. I felt the reassuring pat of his hand. I looked down and through my stupid tears, I saw my hands had made fists. My fists aren’t like they once were; my skin seems paper-thin – as if the bones want to tear through; the knuckles strain whitely through the flesh, my liver spots curving like tattoos on old whores.

I shut my eyes.

Carl and I are two old farts that by rights should be dead if there was any justice in the world – but of course there isn’t. There never was. Justice is a fairy tale.

Back in September 2001, all Carl could talk about was the upcoming attack. It made no difference to him that being blind he wouldn’t be able to see anything; he had some dumb idea about getting to experience it, but I wasn’t letting us anywhere near the area – once they demolished the buildings, the rolling clouds would give lower Manhattan a carcinogenic dose of hi-tech fallout. I managed to talk him out of it eventually, and instead, that day we got up early and sat waiting in front of the TV set for the networks to pick up on it.

In some ways, Carl hasn’t changed. He was always the eager one, volunteering when things came up – opportunities to scout an area and get our heads blown off. He’d give me that look – as if it say ‘you’re going to let a friend go off on his own and do this?’ So we ended up in scrape after scrape, getting through by the skin of our teeth and blind luck.

Carl and I became friends during basic training. We ended up in the same platoon and caught up in the Allies’ final pushes across Europe in ’44 and ’45.

Don’t let anyone tell you the end of the war was a neat series of lines advancing on a map. At almost every step, it was a blood-soaked, blundering stumble-fuck. The enemy was still active; civilians couldn’t be trusted; and adding to this were the covert skirmishes between the Allies, each of us trying to cleanse our areas and force the population to flee into other zones of control so they could end up as someone else’s problem.

I think those who fought in the Pacific had a very different experience of the war from us in Europe. They operated in heat and sweat, hacking through jungles and steaming humidity, coping with mold, fungus, and infections. Europe was the other extreme.

It was always cold. Even during the summer, when the sun was shining, the insides of houses and the shadows were freezing. This didn’t mean you never sweated, but it was a cold sweat that kept making your fingers slippery on the carbine, and then your mind would play tricks, that little voice in your head saying you better wipe your hands because when the shit comes down and some green-jacketed Hitler-loving fuck rears up reaching for the pin on his grenade, your fingers are going to slip.

And instead of killing him and cackling about it later over the fire, you’re going to be The One, the one who’s bought it and died, and everyone will say, like always, ‘well, guess he had it coming,’ and ‘sure there’s always a bullet with your name on it,’ and ‘hey Sarge, can I have his rations coz you’re putting on the pounds and we care about you Sarge, ain’t that right guys?’

And then everyone laughs and two days later no one would remember who The One was – except that he was another stupid shit-head eaten by the Machine for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the platoon, Leibowitz was the one who initially gave a name to what was around us: he called it the Machine. It was a shame when he died, because when the war was over, he said, he had unfinished business in Washington, and from the way his eyes glinted when he said it, you knew there was likely going to be one sorry-looking, wheelchair-bound cripple with a hole in his head on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Increasingly, amidst the bullshit sessions after skirmishes with the enemy and local civilians, the outlines of the Machine took