A Secret of Men (Part 3 of 3)

When the kid finished the first sandwich, he took a sip of his tea with his better hand, moving it slowly through his mouth over his wounds.  After a while, he asked the man: “Why are you here?”

“... Suppose I thought you’d like a familiar face.”

“Can you tell me anything?”  The kid took another small sip of tea.  

“Those sores in your mouth will dry up a lot quicker with that other concoction.”  He took a drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke upward.  “Answers are for the suits.  I can’t tell you anything.  Even if I wanted to…. Which I do.”

The kid opened the other sandwich.  When he struggled to bite completely down, he unscrewed the flask with his teeth and smelled the bitter black liquid.  “What is this?” 

The man shrugged.  “A barracks elixir.  If it has a name, I don’t know it.”   

When the man heard him choke down a few gulps, for the second time in those sixteen years, he spoke to God on benevolent terms.  

The man took his pocket-watch, opened it, and then put it inside his pocket.  “I spoke to Grein’s brother, Riley, yesterday.”

“I know him.  I speak to him all the time.”

A drag and upward exhale.  “It’s nice to see how well he’s doing in spite of everything.”

“Yeah….”  The kid choked down another bite of the sandwich before hastily wrapping it back up.  Then he took another slug of the black stuff and gagged.  After another minute, he said:  “I didn’t steal any of those scraps from Mr. Yamatovich.  And I have nothing to do with the PBK.  I know that they make those IEDs with animal parts and stuff.”  

“They know.”

“Bullshit.”

“If they had any inkling of reason to believe you were PBK, you wouldn’t’ve been here nearly as long as you were.  They just know that you might know some of them.”

“I also know people who write with their left hand.”

“Being smart won’t help.”  When the kid said nothing, the man checked his pocket-watch again.  He took a deep breath and reached into his satchel and took out the two-page letter from the kid’s mother and passed it through the bars.  

The kid opened the letter, trembing.  His throat had clenched and he slowly eked out: “No.”  The man closed his eyes and breathed-in.  “... No.”

“Son?”  He ratted his face and buried it into his knees.  “Robert, this doesn’t mean anything.  I asked Heinrich to get these from your mother.”

He looked the man in the eyes.  “I know what this is…. You… PRICK!”  He went back into the fetal position and sobbed quietly. 

The man buried his face into his hands and cursed himself.  And it is gone.  The thin veneer that separates one from everything else.  Man sees himself not as a supreme being but a contraption of a novice deity.  Man is no longer any different from any other machine that breaks down when a gear slips loose.  A knowledge of the preciousness of life that will never be utilized.  What the young man thought when he entered Mr. Finnegan’s that morning, which had miraculously remained standing.  Facedown on the floor, a thin piece of glass sticking out of the back of his skull, no other mark on his body.  He doesn’t notice the two Constables enter.  He looks down at the small glint like a miraculously obvious answer to a question he cannot put into words and didn’t know he had.  He says nothing when the younger Constable takes him by the collar of his shirt and pins him to the wall.  And nothing to the older one that inspects the sack and waves the jar of pig fat around, smiling like a kid who won an egg hunt.  He is charged with pillaging, treason, and domestic terrorism.

The kid had dropped the flask on the floor and it pooled to the drain at the center of the cell.  The man wanted nothing more than to leave, but didn’t.  The kid began to quiet down after about fifteen minutes.  When he turned over to the man, his upside arm drooped under his ribs and he hadn’t noticed.  He frantically shot his head back and forth looking for it, and when he found it, he pulled it out with his other arm, then began to chuckle.  After a bit more time, the man opened the cell door and picked up the flask and cap, then the letter.  He shook out the dregs of the concoction into the fire.  When he saw the kid was still watching, he sat back down and read the letter to him.  When he looked up from it, his eyes were closed, stomach bile dripped from his lips, and he was still. 

The man took the kettle that was still steaming and carefully poured the boiling watering into the flask.  He screwed the lid back on and shook the flask around and left it on top of his satchel.  When he walked over to the barracks, each of the six sawbuck tables were taken so he went inside, sat at his bunk, and pretended to read a chapbook he’d purchased in Winton as he counted to 1500, until Cpl. Oxen asked him if he could talk.

The man placed the chapbook facedown on his lap and stood up.  “What?”

Oxen removed his hat, slid closer so they were speaking within an inch of each other, and said: “I am not trying to undermine you, but I understand if you would feel uncomfortable carrying out tomorrow’s order.  I could.”  The man pretended to consider this, before politely declining.  “... I imagine this is quite difficult, sir.”  The man said he knew that when he joined and said he was sure he would be fine.  

Oxen seemed to accept this and got up and began to walk away, before the man said “I gave him a bit of that liquor that Private Flint has stored in that old barrel.  I know it’s against protocol, but I wanted to treat a man to his last drink.”  He could tell that what he had said bothered Oxen, but Oxen just said that was fair enough, and left him to himself.  The man continued counting from where he left off, and then went back to the holding cells.  He took the flask from his chair and poured the warm water down the drain, then he called for the doctor, who concluded that the kid choked on his own vomit.  The doctor had never met the man before, and quipped: “What else can you expect from ‘em?  Like insulin to a diabetic.” before having two conscripts carry him out with the flea-bitten blanket from the bed. 

When his C.O. arrived in the morning, he told him he was getting demoted to a Corporal, and put him in charge of breaking the news to the kid’s mother.  He said he would.  When he was leaving the barracks, he saw Flint pouring his concoction into a gully, under the eye of the Acting-Sergeant.  Instead of going to the school, he went to Heinrich’s home.  Like before, he thought of what he would say, but couldn’t think of anything.  The two-bedroom bungalow that was there last time he visited had been replaced with a two-floor brick home.  As the man made himself up the drive, Heinrich saw him through the kitchen window.  When Heinrich opened the door, the man heard cries from a nephew he would never speak to.  Heinrich met him halfway.  “What now?”

The man looked upon him with the same stoic expression he tried to pull off while in the PBK.  “He’s dead.”
    “... And?”

“She’d rather hear it from you than me.”

“... Okay.  Is that it?” 

“... Yep.”

“I’ll get to it then.”  He turned and walked back up the drive and shut the door without looking back.

He began to walk back down the drive until he saw the rough outlines of the girls come out of a side door. Oversized sun hats. Baskets in each hand. There was a garden beside the house he’d failed to notice. He watched as one of them pulled a few potatoes from the ground before detaching the best ones and dropping them into her basket one-by-one. He couldn’t make out what they were saying from where he was, but, right as he heard Heinrich tapping on the glass at him, one of them shouted something while brandishing a malformed potato, causing the other to fall backwards on the thick grass, holding her stomach in laughter.