Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (40 page)

“Well, sir, you are out of your goddamn mind.”

“The body's outside in Hangar F,” said Mackenzie. “I put a guard over it, sir.”

The two-star general followed the three-star general as he stalked to Hangar F, where the three-star general looked at the body, poked it with his toe, poked it with his finger, felt the feathers, felt the hair, and then said:

“God damn it to hell, Mackenzie, do you know what you got here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got an angel—that's what the hell you got here.”

“Yes, sir, that's the way it would seem.”

“God damn you, Mackenzie, I always had a feeling that I should have put my foot down instead of letting you zoom up and down out there in those gunships zapping VCs. My God almighty, you're supposed to be a grown man with some sense instead of some dumb kid who wants to make a score zapping Charlie, and if you hadn't been out there in that gunship this would never have happened. Now what in hell am I supposed to do? We got a lousy enough press on this war. How am I going to explain a dead angel?”

“Maybe we don't explain it, sir. I mean, there it is. It happened. The damn thing's dead, isn't it? Let's bury it. Isn't that what a soldier does—buries his dead, tightens his belt a notch, and goes on from there?”

“So we bury it, huh, Mackenzie?”

“Yes, sir. We bury it.”

“You're a horse's ass, Mackenzie. How long since someone told you that? That's the trouble with being a general in this goddamn army—no one ever gets to tell you what a horse's ass you are. You got dignity.”

“No, sir. You're not being fair, sir,” Mackenzie protested. “I'm trying to help. I'm trying to be creative in this trying situation.”

“You get a gold star for being creative, Mackenzie. Yes, sir, General—that's what you get. Every marine at Quen-to knows you shot down an angel. Your helicopter pilot and crew know it, which means that by now everyone on this base knows it—because anything that happens here, I know it last—and those snotnose reporters on the base, they know it, not to mention the goddamn chaplains, and you want to bury it. Bless your heart.”

The three-star general's name was Drummond, and when he got back to his office, his aide said to him excitedly:

“General Drummond, sir, there's a committee of chaplains, sir, who insist on seeing you, and they're very up-tight about something, and I know how you feel about chaplains, but this seems to be something special, and I think you ought to see them.”

“I'll see them.” General Drummond sighed.

There were four chaplains, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, an Episcopalian, and a Lutheran. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian chaplains had wanted to be a part of the delegation, but the priest, who was a Paulist, said that if they were to bring in five Protestants, he wanted a Jesuit as reenforcement, while the rabbi, who was Reform, agreed that against five Protestants an Orthodox rabbi ought to join the Jesuit. The result was a compromise, and they agreed to allow the priest, Father Peter O'Malley, to talk for the group. Father O'Malley came directly to the point:

“Our information is, General, that General Mackenzie has shot down one of God's holy angels. Is that or is that not so?”

“I'm afraid it's so,” Drummond admitted.

There was a long moment of silence while the collective clergy gathered its wits, its faith, its courage, and its astonishment, and then Father O'Malley asked slowly and ominously:

“And what have you done with the body of this holy creature, if indeed it has a body?”

“It has a body—a very substantial body. In fact, it's as large as a young elephant, twenty feet tall. It's lying in Hangar F, under guard.”

Father O'Malley shook his head in horror, looked at his Protestant colleagues, and then passed over them to the rabbi and said to him:

“What are your thoughts, Rabbi Bernstein?”

Since Rabbi Bernstein represented the oldest faith that was concerned with angels, the other deferred to him.

“I think we ought to look upon it immediately,” the rabbi said.

“I agree,” said Father O'Malley.

The other clergy joined in this agreement, and they repaired to Hangar F, a journey not without difficulty, for by now the press had come to focus on the story, and the general and the clergy ran a sort of gauntlet of pleading questions as they made their way on foot to Hangar F. The guards there barred the press, and the clergy entered with General Drummond and General Mackenzie and a half a dozen other staff officers. The angel was uncovered, and the men made a circle around the great, beautiful thing, and then for almost five minutes there was silence.

Father O'Malley broke the silence. “God forgive us,” he said.

There was a circle of amens, and then more silence, and finally Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, said:

“It could conceivably be a natural phenomenon.”

Father O'Malley looked at him wordlessly, and Rabbi Bernstein softened the blow with the observation that even God and His holy angels could be considered as not apart from nature, whereupon Pastor Yager, the Lutheran, objected to a pantheistic viewpoint at a time like this, and Father O'Malley snapped:

“The devil with this theological nonsense! The plain fact of the matter is that we are standing in front of one of God's holy angels, which we in our animal-like sinfulness have slain. What penance we must do is more to the point.”

“Penance is your field, gentlemen,” said General Drummond. “I have the problem of a war, the press, and this body.”

“This body, as you call it,” said Father O'Malley, “obviously should be sent to the Vatican—immediately, if you ask me.”

“Oh, ho!” snorted Whitcomb. “The Vatican! No discussion, no exchange of opinion—oh, no, just ship it off to the Vatican where it can be hidden in some secret dungeon with any other evidence of God's divine favor—”

“Come now, come now,” said Rabbi Bernstein soothingly. “We are witness to something very great and holy, and we should not argue as to where this holy thing of God belongs. I think it is obvious that it belongs in Jerusalem.”

While this theological discussion raged, it occurred to General Clayborne Mackenzie that his own bridges needed mending, and he stepped outside to where the press—swollen by now to almost the entire press corps in Viet Nam—waited, and of course they grabbed him.

“Is it true, General?”

“Is what true?”

“Did you shoot down an angel?”

“Yes, I did,” the old warrior stated forthrightly.

“For heaven's sake, why?” asked a woman photographer.

“It was a mistake,” said Old Hell and Hardtack modestly.

“You mean you didn't see it?” asked another voice.

“No, sir. Peripheral, if you know what I mean. I was in the gunship zapping Charlie, and bang—there it was.”

The press was skeptical. A dozen questions came, all to the point of how he knew that it was an angel.

“You don't ask why a river's a river or a donkey's a donkey,” Mackenzie said bluntly. “Anyway, we have professional opinion inside.”

Inside, the professional opinion was divided and angry. All were agreed that the angel was a sign—but what kind of sign was another matter entirely. Pastor Yager held that it was a sign for peace, calling for an immediate cease-fire. Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, held, however, that it was merely a condemnation of indiscriminate zapping, while the rabbi and the priest held that it was a sign—period. Drummond said that sooner or later the press must be allowed in and that the network men must be permitted to put the dead angel on television. Whitcomb and the rabbi agreed. O'Malley and Yager demurred. General Robert L. Robert of the Engineer Corps arrived with secret information that the whole thing was a put-on by the Russians and that the angel was a robot, but when they attempted to cut the flesh to see whether the angel bled or not, the skin proved to be impenetrable.

At that moment the angel stirred, just a trifle, yet enough to make the clergy and brass gathered around him leap back to give him room—for that gigantic twenty-foot form, weighing better than half a ton, was one thing dead and something else entirely alive. The angel's biceps were as thick around as a man's body, and his great, beautiful head was mounted on a neck almost two feet in diameter. Even the clerics were sufficiently hazy on angelology to be at all certain that even an angel might not resent being shot down. As he stirred a second time, the men around him moved even farther away, and some of the brass nervously loosened their sidearms.

“If this holy creature is alive,” Rabbi Bernstein said bravely, “then he will have neither hate nor anger toward us. His nature is of love and forgiveness. Don't you agree with me, Father O'Malley?”

If only because the Protestant ministers were visibly dubious, Father O'Malley agreed. “By all means. Oh, yes.”

“Just how the hell do you know?” demanded General Drummond, loosening his sidearm. “That thing has the strength of a bulldozer.”

Not to be outdone by a combination of Catholic and Jew, Whitcomb stepped forward bravely and faced Drummond and said, “That ‘thing,' as you call it, sir, is one of the Almighty's blessed angels, and you would do better to see to your immortal soul than to your side-arm.”

To which Drummond yelled, “Just who the hell do you think you are talking to, mister—just—”

At that moment the angel sat up, and the men around him leaped away to widen the circle. Several drew their sidearms; others whispered whatever prayers they could remember. The angel, whose eyes were as blue as the skies over Viet Nam when the monsoon is gone and the sun shines through the washed air, paid almost no attention to them at first. He opened one wing and then the other, and his great wings almost filled the hangar. He flexed one arm and then the other, and then he stood up.

On his feet, he glanced around him, his blue eyes moving steadily from one to another, and when he did not find what he sought, he walked to the great sliding doors of Hangar F and spread them open with a single motion. To the snapping of steel regulators and the grinding of stripped gears, the doors parted—revealing to the crowd outside, newsmen, officers, soldiers, and civilians, the mighty, twenty-foot-high, shining form of the angel.

No one moved. The sight of the angel, bent forward slightly, his splendid wings half-spread, not for flight but to balance him, held them hypnotically fixed, and the angel himself moved his eyes from face to face, finding finally what he sought—none other than Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie.

As in those Western films where the moment of “truth,” as they call it, is at hand, where sheriff and badman stand face to face, their hands twitching over their guns—as the crowd melts away from the two marked men in those films, so did the crowd melt away from around Mackenzie until he stood alone—as alone as any man on earth.

The angel took a long, hard look at Mackenzie, and then the angel sighed and shook his head. The crowd parted for him as he walked past Mackenzie and down the field—where, squarely in the middle of Runway Number 1, he spread his mighty wings and took off, the way an eagle leaps from his perch into the sky, or—as some reporters put it—as a dove flies gently.

16
The Price

F
rank Blunt himself told the story of how, at the age of seven, he bought off a larger, older boy who had threatened to beat him up. The larger boy, interviewed many years later, had some trouble recalling the incident, but he said that it seemed to him, if his memory was at all dependable, that Frank Blunt had beaten up his five-year-old sister and had appropriated a bar of candy in her possession. Frank Blunt's second cousin, Lucy, offered the acid comment that the dollar which bought off the larger boy had been appropriated from Frank's mother's purse; and three more men whose memories had been jogged offered the information that Frank had covered his investment by selling protection to the smallest kids at twenty-five cents a kid. Be that as it may; it was a long time ago. The important factor was that it illustrated those two qualities which contributed so much to Frank Blunt's subsequent success: his gift for appropriation and his ability to make a deal if the price was right.

The story that he got out of secondary school by purchasing the answers to the final exam is probably apocryphal and concocted out of spleen. No one ever accused Frank Blunt of being stupid. This account is probably vestigial from the fact that he bought his way out of an expulsion from college by paying off the dean with a cool two thousand dollars, no mean sum in those days. As with so many of the stories about Frank Blunt, the facts are hard to come by, and the nastiest of the many rumors pertaining to the incident is that Frank had established a profitable business as a pimp, taking his cut of the earnings of half a dozen unhappy young women whom he had skillfully directed into the oldest profession. Another rumor held that he had set up a mechanism for obtaining tests in advance of the testing date and peddling them very profitably. But this too could not be proved, and all that was actually known was his purchase of the dean. It is also a matter of record that when he finally left college in his junior year—a matter of choice—he had a nest egg of about fifty thousand dollars. This was in 1916. A year later he bought his way out of the draft for World War I in circumstances that still remain obscure.

Two years later he bought State Senator Hiram Gillard for an unspecified price, and was thereby able to place four contracts for public works with kickbacks that netted him the tidy sum of half a million dollars—very nice money indeed in 1919. In 1920, when Frank Blunt was twenty-four years old, he purchased four city councilmen and levied his service charge on fourteen million dollars' worth of sewer construction. His kickback amounted to a cool million dollars.

By 1930 he was said to be worth ten million dollars, but it was the beginning of a muckraking period and he was swept up in the big public utility scandals and indicted on four counts of bribery and seven of fraud. Frank Blunt was never one to count small change, and at least half of his ten-million-dollar fortune went into the purchase of two federal judges, three prosecutors, five assistant prosecutors, two congressmen, and one juryman—on the basis that if you are going to fix a jury, it's pointless to buy more than one good man.