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.
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