MUMBLYPEG / K'REANS

    Mumblypeg

    The boys in the project would get together and play mumblypeg with our pocket knives. Whoever among us had a knife would open it. If it had more than one blade, you’d open the longest blade to have a better chance of sticking it in the scrubby lawn between the long, low wooden buidings of the Navy Homes. We’d compare knives for balance, and decide on the best one.

      You’d start low on the body, usually at the knee so the

knife would make a half turn. You’d place the point on your knee, and put the tip of your index finger on the end of the handle. Then you’d flip your hand out so the knife rotated as it fell to the lawn. If you got it right, the knife would turn just enough to stick in the grass. If it stuck but then fell over, it didn’t count. If you were good, your touch was light enough to keep from drawing blood when your rotating hand pressed the point into the skin on top of your knee. But if it drew blood, well, hey.

       Red spots or no, you had to stick it. If you did, you moved up to the hip. If not, you waited for another turn. The winner was the kid who got to the top of his body first: knee, hip, fingertip, wrist, elbow, shoulder, chin. Sometimes you’d even throw in nose and forehead. If there was enough time before dark, we’d do both sides of the body, adding extra points along both arms. It became an art, our bodies becoming launching pads for the knife, our hands learning its balance, just the right amount of pressure and rotation needed from each height to stick the knife in the grass.

K’reans

     We were playing war out in the housing project yard,

Darrell and I and a few other boys whose families lived in the parallel, five-apartment wooden structures. It was 1950 or ’51.

     We were choosing up sides: You guys be Japs, we’ll be ‘Mericans. Wait, somebody said. Aren’t we fightin’ somebody else now? Krauts, right? You be Krauts. No, somebody else. I forget.

     I’ll ask Mom, I said. I ran for the kitchen door of our apartment, the middle one in row 32. I hit the screen door on the run. I still remember the combined smells of dust and rust as my face rushed toward the screen. It had one of those long black coil springs to keep it closed; it slammed shut behind me.

     Mom was in the kitchen. She was pissed. “Son, how many times have I told you not to slam that screen door?”

     I had more important things on my mind. “Mom! Who’re we fightin’ now? Is it Japs, ‘r Germans?”

     “Neither one, son. We’re fighting Koreans now.” Our older brother Lance was in high school at the time, soon to graduate. That had to have been on her mind, as Vietnam would be on her mind ten years later when Darrell and I came of military age.

     But none of that was on my mind. “Thanks, Mom!” I yelped, and again hit the screen door on the run. It slammed shut behind me, and I heard her scolding “Ronald Dean!”  follow me across the yard as I returned, courier bearing important information, to my huddled playmates.

     “K’reans,” I said between gulps of breath. “Mom says we’re fightin’ K’reans now.”

     Puzzled looks. Some faint glimmers in boys’ faces who had heard the word begin to replace Japs and Krauts and Germans in their parents’ conversations.

     “Don’t matter. That’s who we’re fightin’”

     “You guys be K’reans. We’ll be ‘Mericans.”

MY BEER YEARS (POEM)

                         My Beer Years

                              by Dean Metcalf

I came upon a man who was sawing the earth in two.

"Whatcha doin'?" I asked.

"Aw... makin' a beer glass for some guy. You're the one, huh?"

"I'm the one. How's it goin'?"

"Aw... pretty good. Gotta cut it in two here, then hollow

the bottom part out with that shovel there. You'll

notice, I made the cut a little high."

"Yeah, I been lookin' for ya since North Africa."

He grinned. "Well," he said, "I was there durin' the war, an'

I always wanted to get to France. Besides, this way

you get more beer."

"Can you fill it?"

"They got this new process ‑ gonna turn all the oceans an'

rivers 'n' all that into beer. Figure to have some left over

for the others. They c'n fill it all right. Can you drink it?"

"Gonna try like hell. How soon'll it be ready?"

"Thirsty, huh? Tell ya what ‑ I need the overtime. I'll work

straight through ‑ should finish up here by midnight ‑ an' then

I'll talk to the plumber. He wants tomorrow off anyway. He'll open the floodgates soon as I'm done. That way,

you c'n start first thing in the mornin'."

First thing in the morning, I started. I grabbed Australia

in my left hand and South America in my right hand and tilted

the world and drank in long, oceanic pulls, sucking the sky in through my nostrils between swallows.

It was dry inside China when my gut muscles started to relax. India, and the pain in my back subsided.

As the level slid down the Southern Hemisphere with Antarctica keeping the dregs nice and cool, my face felt

warm, my brain was numb, and my eyes were clouds.

                              ©1973, 2012 Dean Metcalf

                              530 Amigo Road

                              Soquel, CA 95073    [ADDRESS AND

(408)476 8323      PHONE # OF LONG AGO; NO LONGER VALID]

Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle

Dream: Panther, Wife, Rifle

Most of my dreams are in color. Sometimes they're extravagant with color, especially with the bright crimson of arterial blood. This dream is black and white, but not the black and white and grays of a photograph. The blacks are deep, iridescent, jet black; the whites are brilliant flashes. Annie and I are at our home, which in the dream is where a high plain meets the foothills of mountains. The place is wild. The mountains which loom behind us are no Ozarks or Smokies or Adirondacks; they are Canadian Rockies, only wilder: great, jagged masses of obsidian and ice, with trees as gnarled as they would have to be to live there. The plain sweeps away to infinite distance in a way that is as severe as the mountains: in all that great sweep of land, no sheltering grove of trees, no comforting hollows, no music of flowing water, no human hearthfires. But our house: large, airy, open, warm, bright with sunlight pouring in. Outside, a cold wind sweeps across the plain, swirls around the mountains. I am wearing a certain kind of shirt, a work shirt that is very well made, either of soft-tanned leather or some good quality wool. It fits just right. It makes me comfortable against the wind. I have a coat that is good and serviceable and goes well with the shirt and would get me into a decent restaurant without the snooty waiter scraping his eyes down my body. My pants are jet black: an unfaded version of those Frisko jeans I used to wear as a fisherman. Their deep black color is laced with streaks of white, the way my pants get when I've been working with sheetrock. The black throws off glinty blueblack highlights; the white streaks dazzle like new snow in sunlight. It's day inside the house, night outside - deepest, blackest imaginable night - slashed often, and violently, by white lightning. The lightning seems intent on reminding us that it is great bolts of electricity. There are wild animals and domestic animals. There is an antelope with antlers which give off intense sparks generated by creatures that are like fireflies, but whose light is greater, more electric than fireflies. Our domestic animals are around: chickens, ducks, dogs, cats. None of them is a fighter or protector; they tend to be on the cuddly side. Our domestic animals, and ourselves, are being threatened by the wild animals. The great windy plain, the looming mountains seethe with threatening movements of wild animals. Our spaniel is especially afraid. Now comes a panther, a great black beast whose obsidian coat is part of the night, whose scream is part of the wind, who gives off violent sparks of light from its long white fangs and from its blueblack fur; these sparks are kin to the lightning that splits the night. Annie is loading the rifle, a Winchester bolt-action .30-06 like the one I killed my second buck with. She is ready, she does not shrink back, she is willing to fight the panther. As she loads the rifle, the dream deliberately places the long phallic rifle, held in her left hand with barrel angled down, directly in front of her crotch, like some gun ad from Soldier of Fortune magazine or one of those posters we see in back of plumbing shops with a bikinied babe holding a big pipe wrench or power drill nestled in her crotch. In the dream, it doesn't seem nasty; it seems right. As she loads the rifle, there is the further explicit feeling of her sliding the male cartridge into the rifle's female chamber, where she holds the rifle across her crotch. She gets the rifle loaded, but doesn't know what to do next. The panther charges, all loping obsidian blackness and lightning-animated power, screaming with the force of the wind across the plain. She hands me the rifle. I aim, fire. The muzzle flash merges with the lightning. The panther explodes, disintegrating as its scream returns to the wind, its blackness to the night, its power to the lightning. 

ROAD KILL (POEM)

                                    Road Kill

                                                                                                                             

If there is a perfect month,

October’s the one:

driving north on Highway 82 from Joseph

colors cascade from the asphalt westward -

orange and red undulation of leaves on the brush

in the roadside ditch,

cottonwoods just beyond, a row of

sturdy whispering sentinels, leaves deciding

between green and gold.

Behind them a mown field of straw

         the color of straw.

Beyond that field, the violent thrust of Mount Joseph’s

big shoulders, his coat of dark blue-green fir and spruce

punctuated, all the way to the snowy ridge,

by lemon-yellow spires

         of tamarack.

Autumn air coming in the pickup window

is a continuous kiss.

Just north of McLaran Lane, a skunk has been killed

along the center line.

It is a beautiful skunk, a large one, still intact

except for the crushed head. Its two broad stripes

glisten white against the glistening obsidian

of the rest of the body.

I drive this road every day, so witness, over the following week,

the incremental crushing

         and reddening

         and flattening

         and, finally, the reduction to a stain on the highway

of what was lately a breathing, waddling

life.

Is there a crime

named for this – this hurrying past a life

recently ended  – some juridical or

linguistic cousin of negligent homicide?

For the next five days, I anticipate

approaching the spot, holding my breath, then

inhale, as long and as deeply as I can, the cloud of

pungent skunk molecules, that I may carry forward, beyond

that skunk’s death, some part of its sweet waddling life

with mine.

                                                               Dean Metcalf

                                                               ©November 2, 2007 

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. 

DREAM: DANCE OF THE ARROWS

Dream: Dance of the Arrows

I'm standing alone in the center of a wide, barren plain that stretches to the horizon in every direction. The sky is clear, and sits like a hemispheric blue cap over the plain. I look at the horizon, follow it around. It is featureless... but wait: there is a solitary figure, a speck on the horizon. That figure and I are the only visual interruptions of the universe bounded by earth and sky. I'm invigorated by the feeling of spaciousness, but recognize that I must be watchful. Sure enough: the figure on the horizon is an archer. He draws a powerful bow. Alarm, my warrior's antennae say. The archer shoots an arrow into the sky. The arrow's trajectory says that it is perfectly aimed at me. The arrow disappears from sight, but I must track its flight. I do so by moving my head as though my initial observations had actually programmed the arrow's trajectory into my nervous system. I track the arrow forward, from the point where it disappears in the sky until it reappears, a deadly dot in the blue, now on its way down to kill me. I jump around. I try to dodge it. But it never wavers: no matter how I move, I feel the tingle of its anticipated penetration just below my navel. The arrow swoops toward me, visually accelerating in the way I've seen machine-gun tracers appear to speed up as they come nearer, after having seemed to be moving quite slowly toward me as I observed them from a distance; or the way the ground swoops up toward a parachutist during the last seconds of fall. Just before the arrow hits me, I make one final, quick sidestep. The arrow's feathers brush my belly; it thunks into the earth. Alarm. I look up. Comes another. Again I am able to dodge it only at the last instant. Again the feathers brush my abdomen. Again the arrow stabs the ground at my feet. There is an infinite succession of them. I have figured out that the arrows, while seeming to remain perfectly aimed at my center, never waver in flight, no matter how I jump and dodge. This, I learn, is because the arrow simply knows where I will be when it arrives three and a half feet off the ground, and is aimed there. So my jumping about as the arrow descends is irrelevant. I learn that, with each shot, I am given one, and only one, chance to save my life. This is what Japanese martial artists call suki, or "opening": that tiny window in time - often far less than a second - when an opponent's attention is interrupted or distracted, when only an instinctive, forceful, and unhesitatingly intentional motion will be quick enough and sure enough to enter the opening. So I must watch each arrow as it leaps out of the sky to kill me, and I must wait. I must let it come. As the arrows continue to come and I tire from exertion and fear, I must force myself to relax so that in dodging one arrow I don't overexert and fail to recover in time for the next. Each time, I must wait, closing out the fear that tries like a pack of howling dogs to crowd my mind, to panic me. I must wait until the steel of the broadhead is about to puncture my belly. Then I must perfectly - without protest, without excuses, without appeal to fairness or justice, without asking for help -execute the one quick movement I'm allowed for dodging that arrow. Then I must forget that arrow, allowing no thought of relief or victory or pride in accomplishment, and be ready for the next. The arrows come in a perfect rhythm. So my sidesteps adopt the same rhythm, thereby becoming, of necessity, a dance. I'm never released from the mortal urgency of the situation, but it begins to strike me as funny. At the end of the dream, I'm still dodging the arrows, which never relent in accuracy or intention. But I'm laughing, as at something in a Chaplin movie, funny but urgent, as I dance my dance of survival.

A MANCHILD OF AN TAN

An Tan

     An Tan was the nearest village to our base at Chu Lai. Now and then a junior officer would organize an afternoon liberty detail, and we'd round up whoever wasn't on duty, jump in a six-by, and head for the ville. It wasn't that great, just a little Vietnamese town with hot dusty streets - or muddy, during the monsoon season. But, except for five days of R&R which each of us got once during his 13 month tour, this was about all we had to cut the drudgery of life in the compound, and the nights of sentry duty in our machine gun bunkers on the perimeter which alternated between sheer drudgery and moments of surreal terror.

     Word had come down: don't even think about trying anything with the women. The village mayor was unusually strict about prostitution, and for some reason, he'd been able to make it stick. But at least we could buy Cokes and "33" beer, though we were pretty leery of them because we'd heard rumors of VC putting broken glass in drinks sold to GI's. We'd stand around filtering Coke and beer through our teeth, hoping to catch any broken glass in our lips instead of our throats. Sometimes they even had ice. 

     There was a spectrum of what we wanted when we visited a village. First, of course, we wanted to get laid. Since that couldn't happen in An Tan, we'd move down the list: something to drink besides warm, heavily chlorinated water; something to eat besides B ration chow; someone to talk to: human contact outside of You got midwatch in the bunker; You got DASC 0800 to noon. 

     I met this kid on one of our trips into An Tan. His mother, who looked ancient but was probably in her thirties, had a little kiosk on the side of a dirt street where she had a piece of plastic stretched over bamboo poles for shade, and sold sodas and beer and mysteriously-wrapped things to eat that most of us never touched. I was standing in the shade swigging a beer when this little guy wandered over and looked up at me.

     The kid was a mess. One eye was radically crossed. He had open sores on his face and body that the flies wouldn't leave alone, and his hair, though cut short, was patchy like that of a dog with mange. His arms and legs were skinny, and his belly was beginning to show that swelling which comes with malnutrition. 

     His mother introduced him to me proudly: "Ong," she said, pointing at him. Actually, the sound was a cross between "ong" and "om". "Hello, Ong," I said, and pointed to my chest. "Dean. My name...Dean." That was the extent of our verbal communication, except that I had learned Vietnamese numbers well enough to bargain with his mother and the other merchants. I found out later that Ong wasn't his name; it was Vietnamese for "man" or "male". His mother had been telling me, with pride, that her child, the one who had taken a liking to me, was a boy. So I spent those liberty afternoons walking around with this kid saying, "C'mon, Manchild," thinking I was calling him by name.

     That first time we met, he took some packet of food from his mother's little store of stuff and approached me with it and a questioning look. We were all accustomed to being inundated by pushy kids and had built up defenses against them. But this little guy was actually very shy, and I could tell he was hungry. I bought it for him. His mother seemed grateful. 

     I had my guard up, twice: once against the hidden grenade or satchel charge which VC had been known to strap to children (or so we were told) who would then walk into a group of GI's and detonate; once against forming an attachment that could only end in separation. 

     The next time we went to An Tan I went over to Ong's mother's kiosk and gave him and her some cans of C ration food I'd stuffed in my pockets. Like a lot of Americans, I would gather up cans of Ham and Lima Beans, or "Ham 'n' Slimeys," bartering or making points with the Vietnamese. In my four years of service I think I met only one American who would actually eat Ham 'n' Slimeys if he didn't absolutely have to. It was the thick layer of congealed grease that greeted you when you opened the can that revolted us. But they seemed popular with the Vietnamese, most of whom were so poor that meat in any form was a luxury.   

     After that, Ong would always know when our truck had come to the village and would run up to it and greet me and grab my hand and drag me back to his mother's stall. Then he began to take me through other streets in the village. At first I thought he was proud of the village, and was showing it off to me. And sometimes I thought that he was proud of me, and was showing me off to the people of the town. 

     One afternoon he took me by the hand and led me away from the center of the village and down some narrow back streets where there were no GI's or even any businesses that catered to us. We got odd looks from people there; I wasn't sure if it was hostility or just surprise. I disengaged my left hand from Ong's and put his hand on the flap of the big cargo pocket on my left trouser leg so he could still feel like he was holding onto me. I swung my rifle around in front of me from where it had been hanging under my right arm by its sling, and cupped its forearm with my left hand. I felt safer now.

     So did Ong. I'd come to realize that the other kids in the village picked on him because of his odd eye and his weakness and who knows what else, and that there were parts of An Tan where he never went, except when I was with him. I could sense a change in him, a hint of gloating, as we passed a group of tough looking boys who glowered at him as he passed with his personal Marine bodyguard.

     Word came down that An Tan would soon be put off limits for liberty. VC activity, or some such. Anyway, we would have one more visit. We were told that if we'd made any acquaintances there, this would be our last chance to say goodbye. I took in some extra food this time, and spent more money than usual at Ong's mother's stall. When the Lieutenant herded us to the six-by to head back to the base, Ong followed me. I knelt down and looked into his one good eye. How do you say goodbye to someone whose language you don't speak at all?

     I just said it the best I could, in English and with my hands: Goodbye, take care of yourself, I won't be seeing you anymore. I climbed over the tailgate as the truck took off.

     I looked back. The truck raised the usual thick cloud of red dust above the street. There was Ong in the dust, running after us. The truck got a slow start out of town because of its low gearing and because there were people in the way. Ong was able to keep up, staying close behind for a long time. We could see his face through the dust. He was crying, screaming, holding his arms up in the air as he ran, reaching for me, pleading for me to pick him up and take him with me. He'd understood goodbye.