SPIDER AND FLY

Spider and Fly

     I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.

     I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.      

     I lived alone. The kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down. 

     Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry   several times larger and more powerful than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs out of the web. 

     The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings. 

     The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand. 

     The world's time - that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve-light double-hung window - began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The forcefield generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neo-mechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off the segmented head and thorax, its translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.      

     I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing of the fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent. 

     "There it is," I said. "Vietnam." 

THE CORNER OF THE OLD MAN'S DYING (POEM)

                          Time Passing                        
(The Corner of the Old Man's Dying)
                              by Dean Metcalf
                                     ©1970, 2013


As I was swingin' down the street
ebullient, bloody-knuckled, easy
I elbowed past an old man,
bent over his cane, eyes rolled
to peer from beneath his hatbrim,
shuffling toward whatever it was
I hurried toward.

Now, nothing in my swagger
should have let that old man speak to me.

But something in his stumbling
screamed at me:

as I was striding by
a tiny blue-flamed glance
flickered from his eye

(his whole life had
     shriveled to a mote there)

and that glance visited the room
next door to the room where words
are born, then heliarced itself
from his brain to mine
saying something that,
had it passed through
the room where words are born,
would have been this:

"I see,
in your striding,
the man I was.

Do you see
who you'll be
in my shuffle?"

MAN AND PISTOL

Man and Pistol

     One evening at Chu Lai I got off radio watch and went behind the tents to the little illegal club we'd built for ourselves. Every man there was drunk. Minutes after I'd leaned my elbow on the plank we used for a bar, grabbed the church key that was always handy and popped open a can of beer, Sergeant Williams, who was standing about five feet from me, pulled out his .45 semiautomatic pistol and worked the slide. It slammed home, steel on brass on steel.

     There was a sharp scuffling sound of bootsoles leaving rough lumber, then a collective oof! of the breath being knocked out of everyone but Williams and me as they hit belly-down on the shipping pallets we'd laid as a floor. Williams was so drunk he could barely stand. He waved the pistol, now loaded, cocked, and off safety, from side to side. Since I was standing directly in front of him, it was pointed mostly at me. 

     Several things became jarringly clear to me. The first was that I was looking my own immediate violent death in the face. The second was that it was entirely up to me to resolve the situation, because I was the only sober person there. The third thing was that if I made a mistake about how to relate to Williams...see realization number one. 

     I studied him as though my life depended on understanding him, since it did. He did not seem particularly angry; he did not seem about to shoot. At least, not on purpose or at anyone in particular. He was just a normally harmless guy with a loaded pistol and something to prove. He did seem to have so little physical control of himself that, since his finger was on the trigger and the safety was off, an accidental discharge was highly likely, especially if he were bumped. Or challenged.

     He seemed...well, lonely. He seemed to want attention. Military outfits are like all societies; they have their cliques, their insiders and outsiders. Williams was a Sergeant, but no one respected him very much. He wasn't particularly good at his job, or brave, or funny. He didn't stand out in any way or have any special claim to anyone's loyalty. He didn't have any close friends. I remember one time when he tried to be friendly. He was sitting on the ground outside our tent, drinking with Martin Luther Ealy. Ealy was a laughing, generous man, a 250pound cook from New Orleans who was particularly proud of his black heritage. Sgt. Williams draped his arm around Ealy's powerful shoulders and said, in all sincerity, "Y'know, Ealy, for a nigger, you're a pretty good guy." Ealy convulsed with sobs, having chosen that reaction instead of killing Williams.

     Suddenly Williams seemed at once dangerous and pathetic to me. This guy wants respect, I thought. He pulled his weapon because he couldn't get respect or attention any other way.

     I began to talk to him, with one elbow leaning on the bar in as casual a pose as I could manage, but with my nerves firing as if I had two fingers plugged into a wall socket. The pistol's muzzle was three or four feet from my gut. This was the M1911A1 .45 caliber semiautomatic, with which I’d qualified on the firing range, becoming familiar with its heavy recoil. I’d been told it leaves an exit wound the size of a man’s fist, by at least one man who had inflicted such a wound.

     I asked him how things had been going, how things were back home. He began to talk a little, still waving the pistol, not all over the place, but just back and forth in front of him as he reeled, which meant mostly at me, since I was so close. His concentration, such as he had, was on the cigar stub he was puffing. When he mentioned something, I would ask his opinion about it. I was very respectful. 

     I began to admire his pistol. My first tentative compliments seemed to please him, so I committed in that direction: "A very fine weapon, yessir, a very fine piece. You must take mighty good care of it. Can I see it?" 

     He proudly handed me the pistol, muzzle still towards me. I slowly turned it to point at a spot on the floor where no one was lying, let the hammer down tenderly, slipped the magazine out, and cleared the chamber. There was a sucking sound of air re-entering lungs as Marines began scraping themselves off the pallets.