"LAST BRIGHT COOKIE" (FICTION)

Last Bright Cookie 

A short story by Dean Metcalf

(Part 1 of 2)

     I know nothing of myself or of the world except this clear

rippling water, flowing right to left like a slow unaerated

waterfall tilted onto its side. Now a boat wells toward me from

the darkness behind the stream, merging with the stream and

undulating, hula‑like, with it. It is a large wooden boat, with

plenty of space on the plank deck for families to roll out their

woven straw sleeping mats and to stroll about. The people are

dark‑skinned, with black hair and large dark eyes that notice

me, but offer no reaction beyond acceptance that I belong among

them.

Most wear a simple, multicolored body wrap which extends

from waist to ankle on the men and from breast to ankle on the

women. Someone shouts, and the boat begins to move with the

stream. It seems to be inside the stream.

     Night. I am aboard as the boat comes alongside a high cliff. Small people, some carrying torches whose light transforms the eroded cliff‑face into a vibrating corduroy of light and shadow, run up a gangplank from the base of the cliff to the deck. Niños. Ah. Language, at least, is beginning to return. 

     The children carry baskets piled with food: hands of short thick bananas, hot cobs of corn, skewers of roasted meat and dried red peppers, slices of ripe yellow mango and pieces of broken white cocoanut meat. The colors of the food flicker like neon seen through night rain.

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     I grow angry at the fragments of my life dancing on the fluid screen. I want my nickelodeon memory to break open and utter my name, to locate the pictures in my past. But memory goes its own way. A bell rings; the waves of its pealing resonate in frequency with the rippling of the water. The boat shudders. Niños scurry among the sleepy passengers, trying for one last sale, then run down the plank, torches bobbing away into the dark. The boat fades from sight behind the stream.     

     Receding torchlight coalesces into the fire in a rough red brick fireplace in a small wood frame house. The hearth fire undulates with the surface of the stream, and is liquid like it. The pumpkin‑flesh color of the walls makes them seem to stretch to meet the fingers of orange flamelight as a cat will arch its back to meet a human hand. Something beckons from the left. The stream joins the appeal for movement, a polite usher saying "this way, please." The left wall ends in a post. From a nail in the post hangs a carpenter's tool belt, and it is that which beckons. The belt is even more familiar to me than the fireplace, the wall, the post.

     The belt itself is of faded green nylon webbing; tired threads hang from chafed places. One group of frayed threads hangs in such an attitude as to conjure before me the boneless, wizened stump of the arm of a derelict Japanese veteran, still wearing the remnants of his World War II uniform, holding out a tin cup with his one hand in a crowded pedestrian underpass. Yokohama, my memory says, but does not explain. 

     My hands close, twist in opposite directions, twist back.  They are remembering the latching of that belt around me. The leather pouches, once rough, are worn to a dark mottled shine. Dim outlines of hand‑tooled flowers show through the worn shine of the near nail pouch. Who tooled those flowers for me? A claw hammer, its long hickory handle bronzed from sweat and sun and beeswax, hangs from a latigo loop on the wearer’s right side. A combination square rests in a scabbard opposite. Half‑inch cold chisel, drift punch, nail set, awl, razor knife, tape measure: each in its leather home. Mis manos conocen cada uno... son mis hierros: my hands know every one...they're my tools.

     A man's dark‑haired hand and forearm reach around the post, unhook the belt, take it away. Es mi brazo, that's my arm. The  hand and forearm reach back around the post and hang another, similar, belt on the nail. Now the hand and forearm are bloody. This belt, weighted with dusty green canvas pouches, hangs ponderously from thick canvas suspenders. Two pouches hold canteens. One holds a small mili­tary first aid kit. Six pouches hold ammunition magazines for an M14 rifle, the rifle the gringos used after the M1 Garand and before the M16, that deadly black plastic toy that's now all over latinoamérica. The bayonet is in its stiff olive drab scabbard that's supposed to sharpen the blade being sheathed and unsheathed, but doesn't. ¿Cómo conozco éso? How do I know that? I ask, still searching for some stray artifact that will transform itself into a mirror of my past.

     There is a flitting vision of men walking with rifles through waist‑high grass. I'm one of them, snikking the ring of my bayonet’s hilt home over my rifle’s flash suppressor as a harsh voice says, "That's it, that's what I like, lemme see some steel on the end of it." The vision is gone before I can track my identity in it.

      Esos también son mis hierros: those are my tools too. I wince at my own phrase; it seems appropriate to use the same word, hierros, irons, for tools and for weapons. Everything I know about myself so far says only that I am a workman and a soldier. The similarity between the tool belt and the weapons helt seems to say I could be any workman, any soldier, any time.

     The weapons belt recedes behind the stream.

    

     The sun is directly overhead, a hammered brass cymbal raging about the sky, banishing blue to near the horizon, and further pulverizing the dust of the wide street. Here on the outer edge of the city, only a faint mix of noise from the hordes of Japanese scooters, police whistles, roaring American army trucks, and the cries of black marketeers reaches the fly‑festered ears of the squatting women and feral‑eyed children and rare inert old man who occupy the ammunition-crate shanties defining the street's ragged edge. Artillery crunks in the distance.

     I look at the sky, trying to see something there besides sun. The sky becomes a rectangle of fierce white light. The light extrudes itself into sound, a raucous shriek that hurts my head. The shriek ends in a flutter of green and yellow, and the rectangle is filled by the head of a great horned beast. A woman is laughing. I waken, afloat in sweat, and see her just as she pulls her head back in through the window. It's Agapita; she turns and sees that her laughter has awakened me. "Lo siento, Gordito, no pienso reír a tu dolor... sorry, Gordito, I don't mean to be laughing at your pain. But it was so funny, Claribel stuck her head in the window just as you were waking up...."

     "¿Claribel?"

     "Sí, nuestra vaca... don't you remember our cow?" 

     "¿Y el grito?" I ask, What was the scream? How fine, after swimming through a swamp of dreams, to be conscious at last, speaking my language. Now I can find out who I am.

     Agapita laughs again. I know her by that laugh; it begins down low in her stout brown body and erupts with such force that it snaps her head back. She seems forever laughing at the sky. "No mas que eso chingado perico," she says, "Just that fucking little parrot. Claribel chased him off the window sill.

     "You've had a bad case of malaria, Gordito. You're very weak. You'd better sleep some more." There is a shout from outside; Agapita ducks out the door. I'm too weak to yell after her. Entonces, soy Gordito, so I'm Gordito.     

     With an effort that nauseates me, I roll onto my side and look around the room. Like most of the houses in Jícaro, it is a small, rectangular, one room concrete block building. The walls are painted a bright turquoise green inside and out (I remember the outside, with its lonely valiant row of flowers between the north side of the house and the two muddy ruts of the street); the rough wooden door, standing ajar just now, is crusted with successive layers of fuchsia enamel. The single window is a rectangular hole in the wall. The earth floor is swept. My bed and two three‑legged stools, patas de gallina - chicken feet, as we locals call them ‑ are the only furniture in the room.

     Two rifles lean into the opposite corner. I study them, hoping they will tell me something about myself. So far, all I have to go on are the dreams and Jícaro and Agapita...and now I remember her husband, Hortensio, the wiry, good‑natured cattle farmer with a Clark Gable mustache and face lined beyond his twenty‑four years, and their baby girl, Delfina, who plays with me sometimes in the evenings, whose big eyes haunt me in a way I don't understand. I study the two rifles in the corner as daylight dims. Emecatorce, Aka, I mouth their names: M14 and AK‑47. Zancudos come with evening and whine in my ears; I retreat under the blanket until only my eyes are uncovered. I stare at the rifles. Mierda, they're everywhere. The Russians and gringos pass them out to all us poor hijueputas so we'll kill each other off. They could be anybody's. They don't tell me mierda.

     The fever returns with darkness.

     I'm on the street again, under the brass‑cymbal sun. Dust and sweat mix in a gritty soup I can't keep out of my eyes or from between my teeth. Children come running. I smile, and walking turns to wading as the wave of children breaks around

me like hip‑deep surf. Little hands pull at my trousers and fingers; one quick, practiced hand tries to break my watchband, but can't. "Hey you, fuck you, you give me money!" one boy shouts, his voice a miniature thunderclap. The others chirp harshly and claw at me with the urgency of children hungry enough to be desperate but not yet starved into that near catatonia where only the eyes can demand. My notebook squirts from a hip pocket. I turn, bend over to grab it away from the three children already fighting over it in the dust of the street. My appoint­ment book and the business cards of the USAID officer and the WBAI reporter fall out of my shirt pocket. As I reach for them a hand, darting like a hawk's beak, snatches the fountain pen from the other shirt pocket. Gotta get flap pockets. I panic, reach down with both hands. They push from behind and jerk me down from the front. I'm on my back, defending my soft parts with feet and hands. Sticks and rocks come at my eyes. A circle of small fierce faces blots out the sun. As vision fades, the face of one of the smallest children becomes the face of an infant slung on its mother's back, the mother one of too many pith‑helmeted soldiers coming through the coils of razor wire on the perimeter, short dark people with short AK‑47s with short bayonets coming through the concertina to kill me and Ski and Rabbit and DeMine and the handful of others left out here to rot, coming through the wire, so many of them that the very earth, the red muddy earth glowing horribly in the white light of the drifting parachute flares, coming through the wire, the earth like a carcass teeming with pulpy maggots methodically converting its past into their future, coming through the wire, and they're on top of the corner machine gun bunker now and Ski gets up from beside me to start for the bunker as the bunker erupts from a grenade and then a rocket, sparks trailing, hisses across the compound and Ski is standing beside me, his body quizzical because it can't see because his head is gone, and I think how odd, the twin crimson fountains spurted by his final heartbeats from the severed carotid arteries, and Glover screams and crumples beside me and Ski's body decides to give it up and falls on me and I'm still firing my rifle on full automatic, short bursts, there are more of them than I have ammo for, save a long burst for the end of the magazine ‑ keepembusywhileIreloadfast....      

     The bolt locks back after the last brass casing tinkles onto the pile of its smoking brothers. 

          Now is a valley in time.

     What name shall I give to this valley?

     Mm.

     Reloading Valley, I guess.

     It's nice and cool here.

     Cool, and quiet.

     Things move slow.    

     I don't know. You have to understand. I am nineteen, and this is the last moment of my life. You have to wait. You have to understand that I don't know what time is doing now. You have to understand that what time is doing now in Reloading Valley is its Long Gone Boogie and its Forever Minuet. Time is doing Always and Never at the same time, and it is doing them to me, here in Reloading Valley, the last moment of my life. It can't be told. You are stuck here with me in Reloading Valley while I tell it.

     I hunker.

     Reloading, my vision drops to my rifle's receiver.

     All is slow.

     All is slow, and gleams.

     Metals gleam.

     The smooth blued steel of the bolt, the long grooves in the receiver where the bolt's locking lugs and roller travel, the bright chrome flange at the entrance to the chamber, the copper-jacketed bullets, brighter brass cartridge casings - all these metals seem to glow with a radioactive light from within.

     This instant folds back on itself, scrambling upstream in time like a climber clawing the ice on a slope that ends just below him at a thousand-foot cliff. It is as if my life, knowing it is about to end, has decided to stretch this last moment into the sixty years or so that I won't get to see and hear and smell and touch. A little place, a fine warm nest for me, is bounded by the lip of my helmet, the collar of my flak jacket, my own face and shoulders and arms engaged around my rifle, and the rifle itself and the low sandbag parapet it rests across. My hand ‑ this is all in the same instant, now, the same tiny cove in space and time where what I must do saves me from having to look at the humans who are walking this way to eat my last bright cookie of time ‑ my hand reaches under the rifle and grabs the empty magazine. Thumb releases latch. Hand opens, lets fall magazine on sandbag, grabs another. Its weight says it's full. My happiness is extreme: I am not out of ammo. The flare­light lets me see down through the rifle's receiver, glinting facets of grey steel grooves, as the loaded magazine comes up from below and snaps in. The top two cartridges shine for me like God's own golden torpedoes, the instant stretching as the bolt, sliding forward, peels off the top cartridge and pushes it into the chamber, copper pointed 7.62mm bullet first, brass casing behind, hardened steel bolt clings home and rolls to the right, locking. This, the expanded instant lets me think, is why I'm here. This is what my stepfather knew, my uncle, their fathers: mechanical perfection and maleness, the hard, lightly oiled, amoral, monstrously beautiful fit of a live car­tridge seating in its clean‑machine chamber and the bolt locking home behind it.

     I beg:

     Please go away O please go away. Okay. Take this place this awful place. I don't want this place honest it's yours anyway. Take it, and just let ME go away. I'll never come back. Honest.