Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (73 page)

“You feeling better, Hattie? Your son yesterday told me you weren’t exactly up to par.” She craned her neck to see what she could inside, but Ma stood firm at the doorway. Mrs. Winfried sniffed the air again like some rodent.

“I’m feeling fine today, thanks. Something I can do for you, Mrs. Winfried?”

The old bat sniffed again, this time harder.

“Smells different in here. Like Lysol. A whole lot of Lysol. You were aware of that bad smell in here yesterday, weren’t you Hattie? Gilbert said something about your septic tank?”

The women behind Mrs. Winfried jockeyed for a look inside, but Ma didn’t budge. ”It’s been taken care of, Mrs. Winfried. If you’ll pardon me, we was just having our dinner. Is there anything else?”

There probably was, but Ma shut the door before Mrs. Winfried could think of it. Still smiling, Ma carried a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes and set it before me ”Your appetite comin’ back, is it, Gilbert?”

I managed to return her smile. Scooping a whole mess of potatoes into my plate, I had some difficulty with what I had to say next.

“Pass me the salt, please, would you, Gran’ma?”

Gram and me, we won’t be visitin’ the McDonalds any time soon. That’s okay, ’cause she seems to enjoy eating them same bugs she attracts. But it’s like I told you earlier. I love my Gran’ma. Really, I do love that old woman.

Or what’s left of her.

The Old Man and the Dead

MORT CASTLE

I

In our time there was a man who wrote as well and truly as anyone ever did. He wrote about courage and endurance and sadness and war and bullfighting and boxing and men in love and men without women. He wrote about scars and wounds that never heal.

Often, he wrote about death. He had seen much death. He had killed. Often, he wrote well and truly about death. Sometimes. Not always.

Sometimes he could not.

II

May 1961

Mayo Clinic

Rochester, Minnesota

“Are you a Stein? Are you a Berg?” he asked.

“Are you an antiSemite?” the psychiatrist asked.

“No.” He thought. “Maybe. I don’t know. I used to be, I think. It was in fashion. It was all right until that son of a bitch Hitler.”

“Why did you ask that?” the psychiatrist asked.

The old man took off his glasses. He was not really an old man, only 61, but often he thought of himself as an old man and truly, he looked like an old man, although his blood pressure was in control and his diabetes remained borderline. His face had scars. His eyes were sad. He looked like an old man who had been in wars.

He pinched his nose above the bridge. He wondered if he were doing it to look tired and worn. It was hard to know now when he was being himself and when he was being what the world expected him to be. That was how it was when all the world knew you and all the world knows you if you have been in
Life
and
Esquire
.

“It’s I don’t think a Jew would understand. Maybe a Jew couldn’t.”

The old man laughed then but it had nothing funny to it. He sounded like he had been socked a good one. “
Nu?
Is that what a Jew would say?
Nu?
No, not a Jew. Not a communist. Nor an empiricist. I’ll tell you who else. The existentialists. Those wise guys sons of bitches. Oh, they get ink these days, don’t they? Sit in the cafes and drink the good wine and the good dark coffee and smoke the bad cigarettes and think they’ve discovered it all. Nothingness. That is what they think they’ve discovered. How do you like it now, Gentlemen? “They are wrong. Yes. They are wrong.”

“How so?”

“There is something. It’s not pretty. It’s not nice. You have to be drunk to talk about it, drunk or shellshocked, and then you usually can’t talk about it. But there is something.”

III

The poet Bill Wantling wrote of him: “He explored the
pues y nada
and the
pues y nada.”

So then so. What do you know of it Mr. Poet Wantling? What do you know of it?

F____ you all. I obscenity in the face of the collective wisdom. I obscenity in the face of the collective wisdoms. I obscenity in the mother’s milk that suckled the collective wisdoms. I obscenity in the too-easy mythos of all the collective wisdoms and in the face of my young, ignorant, unknowing self that led me to proclaim my personal mantra of ignorance,
the pues y nada y pues y nada y pues y nada pues y nada…
In the face of Buddha. In the face of Mohammed. In the face of the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob.

In the face of that poor skinny dreamer who died on the cross. Really, when it came down to it, he had some good moves in there. He didn’t go out bad. He was tough. Give him that. Tough like Stan Ketchel, but he had no countermoves. Just this sweet, simple, sad-ass faith. Sad-ass because, what little he understood, no, from what I have seen, he had it bassackwards.

IV

“Goddamn it. F___ you. F___ you twice. I’ve won the big one. The goddamn Nobel. I’m the one. The heavyweight champ, no middleweight. I
can
be
who
I want to be. I’ve earned that.”

“Who is it you want to be?”

“
Mr. Papa.
I’m damned good for that. Mr. Papa. That is how I call myself. That is how Mary calls me. They call me ‘Mr. Papa’ in Idaho and Cuba and
Paris Review
. The little girls whose tight dancer bottoms I pinch, the little girls I call ‘daughter,’ the lovely little girls, and A. E. and Carlos and Coop and Marlene,
Papa
or
Mr. Papa
, that’s how they call me.

“Even Fidel. I’m Mr. Papa to Fidel. I call him
Sen~or Beisbol.
Do you know, he’s got a hell of a slider, Fidel. How do you like it now, Mr. Doctor?
Mr.
Papa.”

“
Mr. Papa?
No, I don’t like it. I don’t like the word games you play with me, nor do I think your ‘Mr. Papa’ role belongs in this office. You’re here so we can
help
you.”

“
What’s
on second! Who’s on first. I like them, you know. Abbott and Costello. They could teach that sissy Capote a thing or two about word dance. Who’s on first? How do you like it now, Gentlemen? Oh, yes, they could teach Mr. James Jones a little. Thinks he’s Captain Steel Balls now. Thinks he’s ready to go against the champ. Mailer, the loudmouth Hebe. Uris, even
Uris,
for God’s sake, the original Hollywood pissant. Before they take me on, any of them, let them do a prelim with Abbott and Costello. Who’s on first? That is good.”

“
Verdad?”

“
Si’. Verdad.”

“Call me
Adam
…”

“
Adam?
Oh,
Mr. Papa, Mr. Nobel Prize,
that is just too pretty. How do
you
like it now, thrown right back at you? You see, I can talk your talk. Let us have a pretension contest. Call me ‘Ishmael.’ Now do we wait for God to call you his beloved son in whom he is well pleased?”

The old man sighed. He looked very sad, as though he wanted to kill himself. He had put himself on his honor to his personal physician and his wife that he would not kill himself, and honor was very important to him, but he looked like he wanted to kill himself.

The old man said, “No. Adam. Adam Nichols. That was the one who was truly me in the stories.”

“I thought it was Nick Adams in…”

“
Those
were the stories I let them publish. There were other stories I wrote about me when I used to be Adam Nichols. Some of those stories no one would have published. Believe me. Maybe
Weird Tales
. Some magazine for boys who don’t yet know about f___ing.

“Those stories, they were the real stories.”

V


A DANCE WITH A NUN

Adam Nichols had the bed next to his friend Rinelli in the attic of the villa that had been taken over for a hospital and with the war so far off they usually could not even hear it it was not too bad. It was a small room, the only one for patients all the way up there, and so just the two of them had the room. When you opened the window, there was usually a pleasant breeze that cleared away the smell of dead flesh.

Adam would have been hurting plenty but every time the pain came they gave him morphine and so it wasn’t so bad. He had been shot in the calf and the hip and near to the spine and the doctor had to do a lot of cutting. The doctor told him he would be fine. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to telemark when he skied, but he would be all right, without even a limp.

The doctor told him about a concert violinist who’d lost his left hand. He told him about a gallery painter who’d been blinded in both eyes. He told him about an ordinary fellow who’d lost both testicles. The doctor said Adam had reason to count his blessings. He was trying to cheer Adam up. Hell, the doctor said, trying to show he was a regular guy who would swear, there were lots had it worse, plenty worse.

Rinelli had it worse. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that. A machine gun got Rinelli in the stomach and in the legs and in between. The machine-gun really hemstitched him. They changed his bandages every hour or so but there was always a thick wetness coming right through the blanket.

Adam Nichols thought Rinelli was going to die because Rinelli said he didn’t feel badly at all and they weren’t giving him morphine or anything much else really. Another thing was Rinelli laughed and joked a great deal. Frequently, Rinelli said he was feeling “swell”; that was an American word Adam had taught him and Rinelli liked it a lot.

Rinelli joked plenty with Sister Katherine, one of the nurses. He teased the hell out of her. She was an American nun and very young and very pretty with sweet blue eyes that made Adam think of the girls with Dutch bobs and round collars who wore silly hats who you saw in the CocaCola advertisements. When he first saw her, Rinelli said to Adam Nichols in Italian, “What a waste. What a shame. Isn’t she a great girl? Just swell.”

There was also a much older nun there called Sister Anne. She was a chief nurse and this was not her first war. Nobody joked with her even if he was going to die. What Rinelli said about her was that when she was a child she decided to be a bitch and because she wasn’t British, the only thing left was for her to be a nun. Sister Anne had a profile as flat as the blade of a shovel. Adam told Rinelli he’d put his money on Sister Anne in a twentyrounder with Jack Johnson. She had to have a harder coconut than any nigger.

Frequently, it was Sister Katherine who gave Adam his morphine shot. With her help, he had to roll onto his side so she could jab the hypodermic into his buttock. That was usually when Rinelli would start teasing.

“Sister Katherine,” Rinelli might say, “when you are finished looking at Corporal Nichols’s backside, would you be interested in seeing mine?”

Sister Katherine would blush very nicely then and do something so young and sweet with her mouth that it was all you could do not to just squeeze her. But then Rinelli would get to laughing and you’d see the bubbles in the puddle on the blanket over his belly, and that wasn’t any too nice.