Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 19:46:45 -0500
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: Creative Camp
Scroll to the asterisks in the left margin, if you wish. I absolutely
guarantee you will be back to see where they came from.
The reader is responsible for the contents of the title page.
Creative Camp -- 23
(M/b, mast.)
by
Feather Touch
Chapt. 23
That was a bon-bon. I didn't even review it once, assuming a few
little crunchies won't hurt the reader any more than the chunks in chunky
peanut butter or the lumps in country mashed potatoes. It was actually
kind of fun to write. Let you solve your own problems. Frolic and play
like the impressionist; life is a cathedral in its haloes, or lilies by the
thousands. Imagine how you could turn them out, once you trained your
fist. The sketch, a day or two, and all nice and tidy in a week. Dozens.
Hundreds. I was wrong about their not working hard, and stand corrected.
As they aged, all became monumental journeymen, ills and woes
subjugated to that gift of work which sours one's pillow at three in the
morning. Again, the parallel is exact. I am one hundred percent disabled,
yet in an odd way. As Degas blindness gave him an essential aspect to his
sight, my weakness gives me the unlimited hours to refine my far weaker
sight.
My disability is one hundred percent because I can't stand an hour,
nor walk more than a few blocks, under any circumstances. When you can't go
to the doctor, you're disabled indeed, and this would be the case, in the
States. Here we live a hundred years ago, and the prince can usually find
a place to sit, even in the grocery store. By the way, which note, I've
actually had a little go at shopping for myself in recent months. Gave it
up again when someone was out of something. I'm paraphrasing my
illustriousancestor when I say the writer shall not shop. He said the poet
shall not dign. He was as right as I am.
All told, not auspicious for functioning in the normal world. I
have the same malady as the golfer who's allowed the cart, Martin, I think
his name is. I can get around, lively as a kid, for a few minutes, then
it's shut down time, and, as a lot of lung damage went along with the
phlebitis, shortness of breath goes along with wobbly, but sexy, legs. In
a classic lemons into lemonade situation, being an invalid led me to
developing a writing system that I can work at in total comfort for thirty
hours at a time, and often do. Anyone who has read me call Jeff
Pfeffercorn, Freddie, along with assorted boo-boos, will be sympathetic
when they picture themselves working with ten point Times New Roman twenty
hours or more at a sitting.
I think the most interesting thing about The Impressionist, and
other painters, is how often they are, in fact, illustrators. Let me
illustrate. At one point Monet wants to make a massive painting, fifteen
feet high and thirty feed wide. The whole project is stalled because Degas
won't show up. The painter has other models, a huge production surrounding
his tableau, and yet so much an illustrator is he, he cannot proceed
without a particular face in a particular position. If he were an artist,
couldn't he have rendered his offering gazing at a blank wall? I'm not
denying the beauty of some of their work, I am just questioning who is the
real artist.
Out of all the programs I've seen on art, one painting truly
impressed me. A Picasso. Not the communist Jackie schmo, his father.
Pigeons in a doorway. Even on television I was able to look into it. The
legacy of The Impressionists was the abstractionists, when mud became paint
and tossing paid the liquor bills. Ninety nine point nine percent of it is
portrayed by a young Paul Newman in "What A Way to Go."
I get none of those luxuries. Since writing is ten times as
difficult as painting, I get one tenth the time to hang out. Ten thousand
words a week is an impossible goal in creative fiction, and I drift past
it, embarrassed because I can double it at will. Do seven thousand words
over a lazy weekend, with time to watch both the impressionists
presentation, and The History Channel's review of the break out after
D-Day. (Speaking of which, is tomorrow, or the next day, and, on the
fiftieth anniversary of which, in 1994, I last set foot in Brownsville, and
thus the USA.)
Don't worry, just because the last chapter was almost all sex, I'm
not going to make this one nearly all rough and tumble. As I mentioned a
few chapters ago, we do want to tidy this bird up for a final clearance.
Since "Ropeyarn" already exists as a completed ms, I'm going to
fulfill my promise and yarn on for you youngsters; boy bands, viva. After
that, I've got an even better one. I call it "Re-Writing Pvt. Ryan."
The story starts out the same, but when they're assigned to find the
sole surviving son, it turns out Hanks' character is a marathoner; not only
that, but a lot of his fellow athletes are in his brigade. He gathers six
or eight together, they each cut their boots down, and strip down to their
shorts and training shirts. Carry only a knife and canteen. And off they
go.
On open ground, the can cover 26 miles in under three hours. They
can dodge through the hedgerows for hours. They create massive confusion,
and live off whatever they can scavenge. They bait they enemy, often
attacking with captured weapons, forcing a waste of ammo, always an extreme
priority in a slug fest, and gather intelligence. In my script, they'd
have the surviving private on his way home half way through the second day,
and the rest of the film would be a dissertation on the combat feasibility
of small super squads. To show how war is, the film would end when the
last runner was finally killed, or captured. I like it. All I need is a
few haylofts and a boys' school, and it will practically write itself.
I had another idea over the weekend. Again, I remind readers to
they are responsible for the title page of this work. The idea is
trailers.
Now you think for a moment or two about trailers, not house
trailers, small ones. Like you might haul a boat on. Think about them,
and think about the last place you'd think they belong. Go ahead, pretend
you're king, I do it all the time, and think your hardest about where a
fairly common trailer doesn't belong, yet does.
I'm already teasing you with Brad's mysterious backpack, and once is
enough, and it's a genuine plot device, anyway. No, this time I'll pop it
right out for your edification and consideration. The trailers belong in
NASCAR. A Vince version. You could only have half the cars, what, maybe
fifteen, and a top speed of around 140 mph. The signs would be for the
sponsors. It would be a two-fold race. First, outright victory, and,
second, to be among the last signs standing, at the end.
Biography of Dennis Franz. Guess Erique LaSalle will be next.
Liberals are so like animals, intellectually. They drink water from tiny
bottles, they tell us to simplify because stress kills, and they make
heroes out of two recalcitrant polygons who rarely fail to radiate a miasma
ten or twenty feet in all directions, almost all the time. It is precisely
the surly ignorance played by these characters that causes half the evils
on earth, from asthma attacks to all-out war. And I'm not making a value
judgment here, so much as warning you.
If you picture Europe, as only one example, today, without the wars
of the last century, what is now teeming would have collapsed long ago.
All through history. If man had been born essentially mellow, peaceful,
and cooperative, the population of the globe would be ten to twenty times
what it is. There's a family named Nickerson on Cape Cod. From two
immigrants, fifty thousand descendents, and that was twenty years ago. My
own family goes eight to twenty one, in a single generation. Allowing for
phenomena like Italy, which is shrinking, we can pretty easily come up with
war as a social imperative, and better than starvation only in that it's a
hell of a lot of fun, half the time. (Versus starvation, which never is.)
My personal feeling is it would be better to use warlike energy and
resources to rearrange our society in a durable and fair way. Reclaim the
wastelands, bury the power lines, clean up the mess. See, instead of
bouncing around in space, if we can reach a population of one billion
Americans (in the commonly used sense when written by an Anglo American),
and do it in thirty five years. I want a land in which an orange costs
fifty dollars, because it is of no worthwhile nutritional value. If land
is suitable only for cattle, then cattle it is, but if the land can grow
potatoes, beets, carrots and the like, then guess what's going to be on
special down at Safeway.
I want a fast prohibition on new SUVs. Since these vehicles have a
significant military value, the government should buy them and mothball
them for use as needed.
I want seventy percent of mall space turned over to what they call
here helpage centesr. Got a problem, go to the mall. Imagine the average
American mall with seventy percent of its parking lot turned into parkland;
daycare, senior care, all that good socialistic stuff from soup kitchen to
hearing aid repair, all under one roof, unlimited access (actually,
partially limited access) for all to the point someone worse off than I am
could motor to work in bed, and motor home. (Certain hours, with
restrictions.)
Centralized in this manner, with outlying bands of small sshs's
(small school/home school), you get a glimpse of a concept that is the only
light though you try a hundred other tunnels. If you think it's an
oncoming train, then kyag-b.
I'd love to try that machine I mentioned a while ago, the super
polygraph. To see if it detects any sign of ga-ga. My grandfather was
plain old senile for twenty or thirty years. Lived into his nineties, a
very definite reason I smoke. Anyhow, I have this by-now exactly
four-hundred-page manuscript working, and I guess there are a dozen or so
characters, at this point telling stories to each other that run two or
three deep, and dealing with one and all in ten point type, because I can't
spend twenty hours at a stretch looking at anything else, and still finding
time to wonder if there are any loose bricks in the wall..
I love the middle of a long novel. The giant second act, where
almost nothing can suddenly count a hundred pages, and a little more, a
hundred more. That's why I want to do "Re-Writing Pvt. Ryan." Even though
I've posted something approaching 300,000 words on the Net, I don't recall
moving a character more than a hundred feet, excepting Blissy and Charles
hot-rodding around as the story begins.
You know what? I can practically smell the cordite, and have
actually smelled cordite on numerous occasions, so I'm raring to go, and,
in the meantime, at that sublime state of the artist in which he is working
diligently on his next offering as he toys with the forgone conclusion at
hand. Thoreau said he could never finish a good book, because half way
through he'd be about doing what the book suggested. I don't feel that
way, at all. Creative Camp is a great little home, and, besides, if David
can't figure out where to file this, where in the world is he going to put
a war story?
I wonder if a working definition of god would be a fantasy supported
by evidence?
Well, I've given the military a bold new combat vector, ideally
suited to many of the scenarios we're likely to be involved in over the
years. I guess I'd call them Extreme Teams, if no one else is using it.
And it would take a pretty obtuse god to ignore NASCAR, and auto racing, in
general. I'm sure if Vince wants to buy my trailer act, he'll find someone
to open for. (Make a production number out of cleaning the track of
debris, before the real racers come out. The winning trailers can be used
to pick up the debris of the loosing teams.)
Well, Dennis the Cop is famous for his jittery agitation. I think
I'll try something else, being as how the cities are crawling with jittery
agitation, or is that just something I made up to get inside your head
because maybe you're not big city like you might think, and maybe, just
maybe, it's the writers I go to for my soul, because it sure ain't in no
bottle, something I know off having done my share of looking, and, just to
be sure we don't end up, like, you know, through some misunderstanding, or
the other, confused and therefore, through misunderstanding, like I just
said, giving me credit for anything, where anything comes to mean nothing,
being as how it's the big city and all, when each and every last,
individual particle of anything you might even one day remotely call credit
is due, solely and only, to my writers, because anybody could act what they
write, and that comes down to the whole case in a nutshell, come hell or
high water. You know what I mean, Vern?
Honest to god, it's worth all the practice just to be able to slap
Hollywood around. Sure, it's shooting fish in a barrel, but as long as
they're herring, who cares? (Imagine dietary laws that forbid lobster,
steamers, shrimp and scallops, and lets them eat miserable, oily-bait
herring. Jews must be the ultimate bad pickers in the whole sordid history
of culture and religion. Well, it couldn't have happened to a nicer
people. I know I've repeated a few things from the Harvard letter, but I
don't think I've told the story of the high school students in Jerusalem.
Some of them are in their fifties. Still going to high school, at
government expense, as grandfathers.
The biggest cemetery in the world, orthodox bobbing-boys that tell
their cousins to fight, while they pray, and sixty year old high school
students. What a place to lead the world, already. Tolerate them if you
will, but remember that my comments on population control, vis a vee
combat, are based on the realities of a vastly simpler time. There is no
guarantee out hyper complex infrastructure would gladly tolerate dramatic
shifts and convolutions, however cleverly they may be litigated..
Besides the mysteries I try to pose for my readers, I do have one in
my own life. How come I've been using Office XP for over two months? It
was just released last week. I mean there's Becky and Leo and Pat and the
whole TechTV crew going nuts over this thing, and I've written a hundred
thousand words on it. I sent my computer into the shop for an upgrade,
and, voila, I'm in heaven. I would guess it's at least ten times as stable
as my previous setup. Flawless, and beautiful, especially at three a.m.
The kittens are old enough to be real, five or six days, so we can
empty the teapot by reporting two jet black ones, my favorite, though Maine
Coons are pretty damn things, too. Speaking of cats, I saw a cat show a
couple of years ago. They've bred the Persian from its classical Egyptian
form into a fat-faced freak whose eyes water constantly because it can't
close them. That's a little jab for anyone stupid enough not to see where
you're headed with your elephant kids.
A good king is a good plan. I outlined one in "The Pirates" fifteen
years ago, and stand by it today. I was wrong in one detail only. I
predicted a crash in '89, and remain convinced it would have occurred, once
and for all, but for Microsoft. A classic case of Who Knew?
We're still here, which is the third great miracle of our era, the
first being the Battle of Midway and the second being the sinking of the
Bismark, but it's a miracle of duration. It is not endless. Technologies
plateaus, often aggressively. Think of most streets and roads. We still
drive over them at twenty to forty miles an hour, hardly double the speed
of a good Roman horse and cart, and almost identical to the speeds of our
ancestors almost a century ago.
Wide-open factories stuff inventory pipelines at the first small
drop in orders. The devices of the revolution, themselves, comes closer
every day toward an ideal of a three hundred dollar laptop, rugged, long
lasting, and loaded with features and ports. These machines are being
built, today, and are dropping below the two thousand dollar bar. They
will sell, as mentioned, in the two billion range. Nothing else will sell,
at all. How many of us need servers? never mind the fact that if we do, we
can buy used ones that will last fifty years.
Everything in this book is dedicated to what comes next. Tech
plateaus, as autos did at about 120 horsepower, and as all other appliances
have. Specialty markets are minute. The Corvette is a good example. All
these "Airport" type gizmos are for late-night television. They
demonstrate well, but when you use them in the real and crowded world and
you quickly learn why Sears does not sell them.
Guys my age can think back to the patent medicine craze of the turn
of the last century. It was just a few drops of alcohol and opium, or a
little cocaine, but you'd have thought every medicine wagon was carrying
chalices and arcs. Now it's MP3, DVD burning, and a whole bunch of zippy
stuff of very little value, or no value at all. For example, the other day
they tested MP3 versus CD, versus the new, enriched DVD music format. The
rated the sound quality as approximately equal. Build a scaffold and hang
them all. The reason they tested equal is they were listening over a set
of headphones, probably driven with all of five watts. If they'd put the
formats in a good home or car stereo, thee would have been a total
difference, but they're out there moving the merch and won't go into sordid
details such as that all this format is is a little opium in a pint of
cheap grain alcohol. Again, I wonder how many marriages have been ruined
by el jocko putting big bucks on the card for a system that's hard to use,
and sounds lousy even if you luck out on the tech side.
This is why you need a king. You can't trust anybody else. TechTV
was practically a full-time shill for the ugly Shrek movie, and there have
been enough promotions for the techy cheese-ball edition of Pearl Harbor to
dry out an old salt like myself. My father wonders why anyone on earth
would give a hoot about what I have to say. The irony in this is that he
can't complete the thought, because if he did he'd add: You never went to
Harvard. You didn't get good grades. The irony comes from the fact that
he hates everything to do with the ivy league. Of course, these days
another irony comes into play, in fact, to such an extent, it more a
hard-ball truth than an irony. It can be exemplified by Iridium. Think
how many Princeton brains contributed to that fiasco. Hundred of others,
ranging all the way, way down to the XFL, vitally threatening our very
existence. My credentials are unsurpassed, period.
There are five concepts of technology ranging from all out effort at
r and d, to a total cancellation of research so that the products developed
can be distributed at minimum cost. I am very close to this latter
philosophy. An all-but flat earther. Drugs, for example. How can you
kill and disable millions, day to day, messing around with the fabulously
expensive search for the golden pill. Even if the drug companies succeed,
no economic model supports a vastly increased aged population, any more
than an elephant can support a pyramid.
Glad to see the word `clone/' on the television screen. Flat earth
though I walk, I believe strongly in this science. I have no problem, at
all, with a day when you can get a perfect child; one that won't go bald,
has a good brain and healthy, lean, happy, long-lived body. Is free of
allergies and deformities. Is of human size. I embody all these
characteristics, my disability coming from trauma, not predisposition, and,
in fact, my very resilience an obvious asset. For this reason I attached
self-licked stamps to the manuscript, and also licked the stamps for the
envelope, which, for you philatelists, was a first-day-of-the-millennia
cancellation on several dollars worth of Belezian stamps. I think I wrote
Clone, Harvard, Clone with the royal right hand.
I mentioned the Pennsylvania Babies some-odd pages back. Most
readers plowing along in formation will know this story, but it is
important enough to repeat, anyhow.
These were semi-abandon children. I guess the practical side of the
story is that German people were big, and their families rigidly
autocratic. When girls bot pregnant, probably from stiff old dad, in many
cases, they had their babies in the barn. Now a farm is a noisy place, and
a crying infant, covered with straw, could be concealed. The mother would
feed the child enough to keep it alive. When these babies were discovered,
even had their time in the loft amounted to only a few days or weeks, they
were permanently and totally disabled; in fact, could never even be
toilet-trained.
That settles all arguments of nature over nurture, and nullifies any
moral or spiritual aspect to the matter. Nurture is nearly one-hundred
percent, and a healthy baby born to a modern family will probably get
enough nurture to turn him or her autistic, the relentless disability
caused primarily by over-nurture as well as utter neglect.
From an intellectual viewpoint, I would posit that significant
cloning has already taken place. I have over twenty first cousins and have
never detected a particle of difference between them. They all hate Nixon
and love whales. I doubt the bio people will do as poorly as the psycho
people, and, for sure, they can do no worse..
I had a letter from a reader this morning saying he can't even find
Creative Camp on Nifty. I've never looked. I think they have a fee-based
service, maybe that's so you can search by author. I guess I should take
an interest, but doing so would detract from work at the tail of the
manuscript. No one can publish what isn't written, and if Nifty turns out
to be a façade, rather than a pyramid, well, I've got a friend panting
to set me up a Website, and I guess I could tease into it from ASSTR. I
still get high downloads from a story I posted with them last Christmas,
and reader mail. Richard writes again to say he has found this work. He
admits to being a new user. Any other problems?
This brings up a fundamental defect of liberalism. The National
Archive. Under liberals it has become very inclusive. The wondrous,
round-eyed notion that every story should be preserved. So the stories
arrive by the semi-truck load, every day.
The conservative would take one percent of the stories, then
carefully index and store them. The liberals give you 47 years to pay down
that pizza you charged last week. Conservatives would give you one year.
By the same logic, it is possible Nifty throws everything out there, which
is very much why I chose it, but unless you catch a work on the fly, it's
out of the park. Anyhow, at the moment it gives me a nice chance to drift
along of a morning without having to write another long sex scene. More
chip shots, though god knows I don't need the practice.
I kind of like my Signs of Destruction concept. Limit the speeds to
about 140 mph. Cars skewed to safety, over speed, in their design. Higher
skill set required than in conventional racing. Once a winning group
becomes obvious, the also-rans go after each other's sign trailers in a
WWF-class display of tacky destruction. No pit stops would be needed as
the event wouldn't be more than a hundred miles. I think I like it. A
combination of Mummer's parade, NASCAR type racing, and a demolition derby.
I doubt there's check is in the offing, but, at the same time, my
mainstream inventory is extensive, so an open supply line might bring
substantive results. Meantime, I get to write a big clunky novel, just the
way I feel like writing it, knowing I'm not offending anyone, because no
one is reading.
A fringe benefit of having writing as one's art is the empowerment
to whine, and call it work. The temptation to do this is so strong it
might be called an imperative, and, since I live a life that is idyllic to
points right of the decimal, I whine about you. For example, these witless
Ricochet ads with the weird old people half out of a Dracula movie. Then
they say, "Contact us to find out if Ricochet is available in your area."
The ads should, rather, emphasis ramping, and instead of weirdoes roaring
around in Cobras, they should show projections of when the service is
expected to reach various locations, and provide a scaling up vector; i.e.,
sell positions, pre value added.
Amazon's getting into computers. I guess next they'll be selling me
cats. The peasant mind is a sad thing; its lack of understanding is
undaunted by mountains of evidence. Bezos is trying to do in six or eight
years what it took Sears over a hundred to accomplish, and Walton, with
Sears and other identical models, over fifty. His cost of filling an order
was recently fourteen percent, when the industry average is nine. I was in
a losing business once, for three long years. The more business I wrote,
the more money I lost. Plus, measuring anything from a business
standpoint, over the last twelve or thirteen years, is exactly like
measuring your fuel mileage and engine temperature while you're coasting
down the Grapevine. Sir William of Redmond is a gravitational force, and
when he passes, things are going to settle, unless you find another comet.
That's my business. As a god, what else would I ride? And you've
got to do Pecos Pete one better. He had to lasso a tornado, and you get to
go after something you know is bigger and badder than any panhandle
twister, with prolonged and total destruction if you let it get away.
I'm sorry to see Jay Leno laming out. Of course, the wonder was
that he kept such incredible standards all through the late Nineties, and
even into last year. I don't see Jimmy Brogan (or his super cute
sidekick), so my theory is that he left, and with him the savvier three and
four tier jokes that distinguished the show from all others. I sometimes
daydream about being put in with a writing team like that; "Married with
Children," "The Golden Girls," "Home Improvement," and the tiny handful of
well written shows. Could I contribute a line a week, a gag a month? My
instinct is definitely not, but I don't sit down and think of a funny
story, I start telling the story, and it gets funny as I go. Therefore,
working on a template, who knows? My guess is any hip high school kid
could whip my butt, but stretch him out over four hundred pages, and I do
not think we'd be keeping company.
So the X-Box changing the world. It should be declared the standard
and given two years in the market to address durability issues. Then there
should be a shift in the paradigms of intellectual property and state run
businesses as we make an all out effort to ramp it harder and faster than
anything in history, subsidize the hell out of it, and get this
environmentally friendly, stay in your neighborhood device into as many
hands as possible as fast as possible. Never mind the Play station, et al.
Convert their factories to the common format. I'll write "grow Pedro" for
the project, and, along with the external display laptop, we'll have a pair
of two-billion-units-sold-in-ten-years products, and an entirely better
world, for the effort.
Flash. The Vatican has just forbidden e-confessions and
e-absolutions. No gambling with your soul on the Net. To further
encourage abstinence, I'm assuring you, you don't have one to begin with.
You have your knowledge, and your ability to work, and your dedication to
the long term best interest of mankind. The only soul you posses is rented
to you by some church or cult, at ten percent of your earnings. The larger
the soul this group rents you, the harder you work to pay for it.
Look at any cathedral. When I see one, I weep for the animals.
Look at the so-called art in these old tombs to insanity. You see better
on a Wheaties box [Wheaties is not in the spell checker? Where did these
guys grow up?].
These people were profoundly ignorant, in lock-step to various
churches which managed to take almost everything, and delay human progress
a century in a decade. Even if one takes the position, somewhat extreme,
that the church is the only thing between modern life and a practical
version of utopia, he or she can find ample evidence, in the Mideast,
alone. Their faith-based provocations keep me unsafe to hold any political
power, because the temptation to detonate a series of hydrogen bombs, thus
rendering the land truly holy, would be irresistible. A wise man should
tell you to keep anyone with an itchy thumb away from red buttons,
especially when said thumber sees the wailing wall as the ground zero of
five thousand years..
The medium is no message at all. For example, some poor guy's
talking to Call For Help trying to build traffic on his Matrix website.
Son, there are millions of websites. Why would anyone want to visit yours?
That's the only answer is, but they've been talking search engines for five
minutes. They do it nicely, but silicone spin is the name of the game.
Now they're going to tackle Net publishing. Another "Ricochet" commercial.
Would you read an interactive novel? Question of the day. Well, not one
of mine, you wouldn't have anything left to act with, much less interact.
As for Net novels, since you are, I guess it's duh'uh, you would. I've
read the equivalent of several novels and find the format super. Nifty is
like Belize. It's going to reach a critical mass, then kaboom.
E-Lietarture.org is the organization under discussion. Gimmicky. Looks
like operas written by women sound.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
I'm developing a yen to have a shot at "Re-writing Pvt. Ryan" right
on the spot. As I recall, all my characters to date are in happy
situations; readers apparently don't exist, so I don't have to worry about
the peanut gallery.
. . .
"Re-Writing Private Ryan."
The teacher had stolen the field glasses, his third pair, from a
bent-double corpse he'd found by its smell. In this theater, the officers
ate meat. Their dead bodies were the ranker, a wartime variation on the
experiments of Pavlov. A raucous scent often led to a dead captain, and
the type of plunder that came in useful when one traveled very light and
extremely fast.
Wiping the lenses with some gauze stored in a cigar tube he carried
in his belt, the teacher wriggled up the hedgerow and planted his elbows
for a look-see. He'd circled the Tiger twice, they'd even fired their
eighty-eight at him. Coach never had a whistle like that. Over the speed
of sound, and less than ten feet away. He was glad the shell had moved off
quickly before blowing up a tree.
Something had gone wrong in the German machine. It was not hard to
figure out why. Everyone must be yelling at everyone, the military loved
that shit, and the machine's guns must be hot enough to cook a turkey.
Whatever was going on inside, the tank was sitting in place, smoking gently
as if it were reading the morning paper over a cup of joe. Through the
glasses, the story was the same, except the teacher could see the smoke was
coming from out and under. Likely a broken hydraulic line. Coach was
German and would appreciate the irony of his star runner wearing out the
most modern tank in the world.
The teacher was wondering what to do next. He was a soldier with
two missions, and had undertaken the projects to fulfill a third. Doing
more with the tank vaguely fit the first mission, to raise hell, but had
nothing to do with finding the boy who needed to go home. On the other
hand, this was his third tank, plus the pillbox, plus getting an entire
convoy to open fire and waste some thousand or more rounds on his extremely
fast self, so it might do one no harm to relax for an hour or two. Let the
day warm toward noon. If the tankers showed sign of ambition, there was a
sniper's rifle not two hundred feet away, and he had the dry cotton to
clean the telescopic sight.
How were the others doing? The furious bursts of fire he'd heard
shortly after they'd decamped had grown less intrusive as the morning had
worn on, and it was almost certain he'd missed some incidental reports on
his team mates because he was at the center of an extended din, himself.
Their first day was to be a star probe, looking for a trail they
could follow on the morrow. As predicted, the Germans were practically
itching with sensitivity, so the recon aspect of the mission had given way
to fire fight after fire fight; any communication other than flying feet
against flying bullets, impossible. This would change, once they moved
miles in from the beach, but it surely would be nice to pick up some hint.
It would be weeks before a paperwork trail could be established, and the
brass wanted the private, Omaha, outbound, in three days.
By this time the teacher was watching the tank almost absently. The
smoking fluid seemed to be running out of fresh fuel. It was extremely
unlikely the soldiers inside would even open the hatch, unless it was life
or death. It was that kind of environment.
"Hey, GI."
The teacher froze. He'd taken his salt; couldn't be hallucinating,
even after an exceptionally brisk morning.
"Where you from?"
He was born of the beach, six miles away, and raised in the whistles
and screams of hell. Where could this voice be from?
"You guys just landed. It can't be combat fatigue. Plus, you're
running around in shorts and a training shirt. I mean, it's June, but are
you sure you picked the right place?"
"Didn't I leave this, my last day in class," the teacher groaned to
himself. Thirteen. The particular age of the neophyte wise-guy. Cagney
on every pair of smart lips. Tanks, a pillbox, an armored column, two
finite missions, one abstract mission, a moment's rest, a smoldering Tiger
tank, and an American kid. Politeness had never worked, but it was in the
books, so it might as well be tried.
"What are you doing here?" he asked the voice he judged to be buried
twenty or so feet in the brush.
"Looking for Mr. DeMille. Seems like quite a production; I thought
maybe he could use another extra, or a location scout. I went to school
about twenty miles away; been riding around these parts on my bike since I
was ten, and that was three years ago.
"I know my stuff, and I'm a fresh face. You think you could arrange
an introduction?"
Sometimes they could be cute. He had to admit it. It was largely
an academic aspect of the thing, but he had once known a colleague who had
liked a boy. For a moment he was at a loss as to what to say to the hidden
kid. A few times, early in his student teaching days, he'd been taken in
by a flash of charm or wit, and hadn't, he supposed, fielded the volley as
well as he might have. Since the circumstances of their meeting dictated
some response, he decided to give the boy his best shot.
"Have you done your homework?" he asked.
For a long moment or two there was silence from the bush off to his
right. Then a hiccup, then sobs; half practically killed with laughter,
the other half, sobs, outright. Enough noise to be easy to follow. The
teacher eased through the brush and quickly found the boy, huddled and
still shaking. The child was a miniature of himself; dressed in shorts and
training shirt, but wearing factory running shoes.
The teacher approached within a yard, and came to a stop, still on
his hands and knees. For moments more, emotion washed through the child,
but the sobs finally gave way to giggling, only, which the boy did get
under control. Finally, he dared lift his eyes to the teacher. For just
an instant, the tears won the boy over again, and his eyes were soaked as
he whispered: "Welcome to France."
"Are you hungry or hurt or anything?" the teacher asked the boy.
"No," the child responded, "I'm fine. The spoils of war aren't
always spoiled if you find them right after the battle. I could set up
shop."
"You do know it's not Mr. DeMille, come from Hollywood, don't you?"
"Sure. I was just kidding around. You know, lighten the moment?"
"I guess I was, too," the teacher admitted, setting the boy off once
again.
Finally coming fully to himself, the boy took a real look at his new
companion and yelped in surprise. "You're Mr. Haskins," he exclaimed, his
jaw dropping.
"It sounds as if you've done your homework, after all."
This cracked the boy up all over again. The teacher felt that by
D-Day plus two there might be room for a laugh near the beach, but this kid
seemed to be at some kind of circus. But the `Mister' had been worth a
second chance, so he let the boy play himself out, once again.
"Four silvers. When you were sixteen, twenty...."
"Pretend you hear a bell," the teacher said, cutting the rattle off.
"Yeah," the boy retorted, "the magazines say you're modest. A
school teacher, not even a coach."
"Language is like that," the teacher replied. "The Neanderthals
could probably run reasonably well, but they never got anywhere in twenty
thousand years because the couldn't spell `cat'."
"I biked to where the caves are, in the south, before the Germans
came. They could draw."
"You must have been very young," the teacher said.
"I was ten. Big for my age, being American bred and all. I took it
slow. I know all about growing joints and things. No more than eighty
kilometers a day, unless the wind was behind me. One day I did almost two
hundred."
"How was the ride home?" the teacher asked, kinkily. Athletes liked
to torment each other that way, sort of a club thing.
"I went backward thirty kilometers one day. Had to wait two days
under a big tree. Not much fun, the area I was in is still full of
explosives and gas left over from The Great War. Sit on a log, and you can
end up with a third degree burn, likely to be fatal. I was glad to get
back to this part of the world.
"I take it you didn't spend every night under a tree," the teacher
said.
"No. Just the once on account of the wind. Most nights, I stayed
at rectories. You know. The church." The teacher noted a slight blush
and changed the subject by asking the boy's name.
?Philip Waldo," the boy replied. The teacher groaned, inwardly.
Too much New England in the moniker, for his taste. Then again, the youth
had been away for awhile, and at war for a respectable part of his life.
But the sharp tongues and rapier wits were all but bred into Yankee bones..
Maybe they could find truce in the most massive battle in the history of
the world, but it would be a fragile thing. Meantime, there was a war on.
The teacher briefed the boy on his dual mission and their rendezvous
point, a half a mile south of a prominent silo. At the word `mile,' the
child reached out an touched the teacher. "Welcome to France," he said
again, "I'm glad to see you." The English teacher understood, and settled
beside the boy, holding him and letting him be silent. When Philip spoke
it was about that poor kid, Ryan. The teacher guessed a boy that had been
playing fast and loose under a stringent occupation could probably think of
a nineteen year old as a kid, without straining the language in the least.
A novelist in training, the teacher had done the massive general
reading required of the trade. He knew he had years to live, and years to
practice, before perfecting the almost stupidly difficult craft, but his
start had been fair and true; he had, through athletics, stretched himself
in a grand milieu, through teaching, extended himself years on end at a
very human scale; .
It didn't help. Nor would all the knowledge and experience in
history.
What happened to the teacher was that he didn't fall in love, he was
almost hammered to death by it. His athlete's body became, thirty seconds
after the touch of the boy, as weak as a kitten. He could hardly even
breathe. Thirteen years of teaching, and he'd never met a boy he'd even
liked, particularly. Would have wanted to spend time with, just to chat.
There had been the odd dozens who read a bit, some who were interesting
because they'd traveled, or had famous relatives. Several boys had seemed
to call from outer space, a vacuum across which they could not communicate
with a classroom teacher. Thinking back, he realized his relationships to
his young male students had perhaps been only ninety-nine percent
disinterest. He sharpened their skills, and let them go to the pictures
where they seemed to belong. His colleagues felt the same, and only
socialized with students they were related to or were somehow connected
with, outside of school.
There had been peace, now there was war. He'd taught boys well,
with professional detachment, now he was in love with one. That was then,
this was now. A flight of Lightnings passed a mile off, whining over the
background waves of war and reminding him just how now.
"Do you want to go swimming?" Philip asked.
The teacher looked at him, startled. The boy grinned, happy at the
reaction. "I'm serious, " he said, "I reconned on my way here. No mines;
I can read the signs like cat and dog. Not even any dead bodies floating
upstream. Come on. The war isn't going anywhere. Don't be misled by the
news reels. They just show the exciting parts. Most of war is sitting
around hoping someone will be along with a fresh pack of cards."
"Well, I don't have any cards," the teacher admitted, half
acquiescing to the strange notion. The boy pivoted and pulled a knapsack
from behind him. "I've got a towel, and soap. And I'm a proper pagan when
I'm bathing or swimming. Do you know what that means?"
"That you only kill your enemy with your bare hands?" the teacher
asked, doing his best not to let Roman candle burning in his breast show in
his eyes. The boy waited for the teacher's thinking wheels to make a
couple of revolutions before remarking that a proper pagan was not
satisfied with bare hands. "Come on," he said aloud. "It's only a few
minutes from here. You'll thank me." With that, Philip stood, extending
his hand. The teacher took the small paw, and stood with the boy. The boy
did not release his hand. "Anybody that sees us will likely want to kill
us, so this is okay, under the circumstances," he said, squeezing the
teacher firmly to show he wasn't about to let it go. As they made their
way along the pathways in the dense foliage of the hedgerow, the boy
pointed out that after the war, they'd have to be more circumspect, toying
with the teacher's hand for emphasis
"Welcome to the Garden of Eden," the child whispered, pulling back a
final shield of heavy brush. "Small, this is Europe, but nice enough, I
suppose."
It was more than nice, it was a beautiful little glade surrounded by
the dense early summer foliage. Above, the trees had been lightly trimmed,
allowing enough sun for lush grass around the small pond, trailing to ferns
and the small forest of undergrowth. The site was crudely damned at one
end to give four feet of depth.
"The water temperature is 71 degrees," the boy said, happy to be
able to use the crude but human Fahrenheit scale. He wondered for a moment
at such enduring fame for such a minor achievement. The Germans who'd
developed high fidelity recording, so their band music could be brought
from the hills to the cities, at reasonable cost, and thus vastly improved
the lot of man, were nameless, outside their small circle, and probably by
now under their headstones of dirt and mud, much of it frozen at well below
zero, Fahrenheit..
Life was strange, and even all-out war was turning out to at least
have one heavenly side. The easy-going, understated American. Philip
guessed that's what oceans and weak neighbors did for a country. They
didn't have to be clicking smart, regimented, and hair-trigger to survive.
Just get up in the morning and whistle away the livelong day. It would be
nice to go home.
A log had been purpose set on stones, other touches here and there,
and, of course, the natural looking pile of boulders that set the outflow
gurgling and held the pond in its place. As they entered the clearing and
looked around, Philip pulled the teacher down to his ear.
"This isn't dereliction of duty," he said. "I know how to track
your Private Ryan, but I must be de-briefed. Further, I am a child caught
in a man's situation, so the interrogation may not be as simple as writing
out a statement for a traffic accident.
"As an officer and a gentleman, you are duty-bound to extract
information in a timely, yes, but also in a sensitive fashion. I estimate
it will take two hours for me to come clean. Once you have accomplished
that mission, you will find that the setting sun will aid us in advancing
in the direction you will find we need to go."
The boy was obviously getting a kick out of spreading his English
wings. The teacher felt empathy for his being bottled up with the
ligatures of European formulese. French was an apparatus language, built
by a machine. English English got bogged down in itself, too; a conclusive
tongue, well designed for world conquest, but hardly the thing with which
to while away a lacy afternoon in the June sunshine when one was surrounded
by green grass, clear water, and at least a hundred dragon flies darting
and swaying about their business.
By acclimation, they went to the log and sat astride the timber,
facing each other.
"Did you like holding hands with me?" the boy asked.
"Yes," the teacher replied.
"Are you married?"
"Yes. Three children."
"Do you know what I want to talk about?" Philip asked.
The teacher's head spun. Of course he did, or, was absolutely sure
he did. Positively, it must be, the way the child's fingers had laced with
his as they'd walked, the almost milking motion to the stroking he'd
managed so subtly yet with such obvious effect. Further evidence was the
state of the boy's penis, and if any further indictor were needed as to
what Philip wanted to talk about, a hint might have been found in his eyes
which traveled repeatedly from the teacher's eyes to the huge bulge in his
track shorts. He finally found something of an answer.
"We're in the middle of a war, son, to wit, the largest military
exercise ever conceived. A number of things could be on your mind."
"What would I do with a mind, at a time like this?" the boy
responded. "It's probably just rat food in a bone box." The teacher made
a quick comparison. Back in class, his unspoken rejoinder would have been
something to the effect that the rats wouldn't have much trouble gaining
access through the big mouth. Christ, it was good to be out of school. He
decided further temporizing would bring down on his own head the
responsibility for an impatient retort, so he put it the best way he could.
"I have a feeling it's a mature subject. Also, something that's
secretive. On top of that, I'm all but sure it's the kind of thing that
might be embarrassing to a neophyte."
"No wonder you went into teaching," Philip responded, "that was
three right, out of three. Keep guessing. Two more bull's-eyes and you'll
be clever enough to make the grade in politics."
"Let's see," the teacher hemmed, "mature, secretive, and
embarrassing, to me, assuming I'm the neophyte. What else would there be?"
He paused for a few moments. He had his answer, but thirteen year olds
liked things done their way, and the game would be spoiled if he were
offhand.
"I can only think of one, at the moment," he replied.
"This bloody war, it just spoils everything," Philip said, letting
in a nice touch of theatrics. Having played out his little histrionic
sketch, he allowed how half a loaf would be better than none and prompted
his older friends to speak out.
"Affection," came the simple answer. This guy had his English down
like a hammer. One word, and the game was over. He couldn't help it,
tears popped right out of his eyes. Suddenly their faces were inches
apart. The teacher's hands went to frame the boy's face. He watched the
tears roll freely, and leaned into the child to lick him clean. "I meant
`love,'" he whispered.
There was that language again. Would this fellow never quit? "Now
he's licking me like a crummy kitten," Philip thought. "Probably a virgin,
and playing me like a puppet." How good that word felt, running through
his brain. Not marionette, a good old Yankee puppet. Mile, Fahrenheit,
puppet. They just made him cry harder. And the captain was probably a
stupid, dumb, bumbling virgin. An American good-guy, with a wife-mate and
two picket fences, both white. On the brighter side, he had said `love.'
"Sorry," the boy mumbled. "It's not the war. It's just things, in
general."
"You've been with a general?" the teacher asked, making a light
attempt to break the ice.
:"Just a cardinal, but he seemed to order god around, so I guess he
was a general in his own mind."
Their eyes met. The kiss began as a tender, nibbling experiment. A
drifter landed half a mile away, probably in from one of the battle wagons.
Its concussion drove their teeth together with an audible click, then there
were no more teeth and their tongues ran wildly against each other.
He did not kiss like a virgin, not after the fireworks went off.
They kissed to the stage of panting. It could have gone so far, on
the spot, there, where they straddled the timber. But the sun had to be
low for the next stage of the mission; it was no time to hurry. Act
impetuous.
Philip had never even been close to love before, now he was its very
center. It was something to linger over. A time to dawdle, if ever there
was one. Six hours, because they were still weeks shy of the longest day
with its stretched sunset and elongated twilight.
"Have you ever been with a young boy?" Philip whispered.
"No," came the answer.
"Sometimes we like to whisper, you know, tell secrets, before
anything happens. Not that you have to.."
"It's okay," the teacher managed.
"It isn't the best part, I guess," the boy said, for the first time
actually thinking about it. "But it makes the best part the best.
"Besides," the boy added, brightening, "it's the safest thing to do.
We can climb that tree and keep an eye on things. Then, when we're ready,
we can come down and take a swim and a nap."
"You go ahead," the teacher said. "I'm going to get a rifle;
there's one just yonder; you find the best way up and a comfortable perch."
The teacher felt a bit ridiculous, realizing the rifle represented a
grasp at masculinity, being in control, and being a soldier and even an
officer. This wouldn't be lost on young Philip, who was no doubt amused at
a thirty five year old combat veteran tied in knots, like a ten year old,
to a boy of thirteen.
The rifle did help, but still it was kids' stuff. Climbing a tree.
Spying. Enjoying the warm, soft summer breeze. The boy had found a perfect
spot, and only about twenty feet up. They could drop back to earth in ten
seconds if a war broke out, yet had a good view of the countryside while
being invisible from any distance. The teacher broke off a small limb and
hung the rifle from its stump. He trained his glasses on his latest
victim, and saw desultory activity around the tank. Apparently a body
being lifted from the hatch; judging from the lack of interest, it must
have been an officer. Probably fragged with his own pistol for acting like
a tyrant to the poor gunners, who had enough on their plates with their
speeding, dodging target. That was real combat. The fellow beside you
could end up your mortal enemy.
In the tree, they came naturally together. The larger male took the
boy in his lap, and hugged him gently, nibbling at the nape of his neck.
The boy wriggled happily and was thrilled at the massive hardness he found,
exactly where it should be. For the moment. And the moment was to be
cherished, perhaps physically; in fact, it seemed a certainty, from where
he sat, but, as importantly, spiritually. To be able to talk, soul to
soul, with a fellow American; articulate strong feeling he was unable to
share with cog-and-gear-train Europeans. .
"You got here too early," the boy said.
"What do you mean?" the teacher asked.
"You should have given the Germans another year. Let them finish
what they started. This way, they won't finish. Some will escape, and I
don't mean Germans. They'll wangle a ship with the diamonds in their
hatbands, leave tens of thousands to die on the beach, and go storming off
to Palestine, where they will execute havoc and create misery by their very
existence. Only now they'll have the ovens to use as clobber sticks.
Their media will render ugly those wonderful oily black herring clouds, and
end up blaming the Germans. All the Germans did was produce a farting
loony who said no to the Slavic way, and no to the Bolsheviks, a hundred
million deep, eyeing the world like an apple.
"It will take a hundred years, and he'll always be a star-gazing
pervert, but he's taken the fight out of the Russians, even now, and, in
the process, managed to stabilize the most ruined economy of all time. One
more year, and, in a pretty good irony, he'd have made the world safe for
democracy. As it is, the cancer has only been tampered with. Delayed. It
will grow back, rooting itself this way and that, until the tentacles are
so swollen with host blood, the host dies. Roosevelt brought them to
Washington; he can win every war he wants, it won't do any good in the long
run. On the bright side, the Anglos do have fifty years, maybe a decade
more, and life will be good while we rule."
The teacher lay comfortably against the summer tree. The boy was
sweet and tender in his lap. Thirteen years in the classroom, hundreds of
essays, many to do with the looming war clouds. None touching where this
boy touched. The truth was so forbidden, not even Charles Lindberg was
allowed to speak it. And fifty or sixty years did seem right. There was a
world of television ahead, new highways that could lead a motorist through
two hours of city traffic in ten minutes. The Lightnings had been
reconnoitering at over four hundred miles an hour, and had a hundred miles
an hour in reserve. New switches were being developed; new chemicals. It
was going to be a splendid party, but it would result in a world crippled
by itself; unable to settle back against a skilled yeoman peasantry when
the urban paper shufflers tilted the very ground and set the file cabinets
tumbling .
After the war, this paradigm would escalate, exponentially,
rendering his homeland a giant, with a giant's vulnerability. The boy was
right. The corpus would be susceptible to insult from any disease that
could cloak itself in a shell, and invade the system. In class, the
teacher was firm with his students. State your case, and get on to the
next one. Philip had stated his as plainly as it could be done. It
appeared he was ready for the next case from the rhythmic surge of his
young body.
"Why don't I take the glasses, climb up to the top, take a look
around, and if the coast is clear, we can go down and take a swim?" Not a
bad suggestion for a late June morning. The teacher pointed out that even
in a big war there couldn't be fighting on every square foot, all day long.
Statistically, they were probably in very little danger. The tank crew
seemed unconcerned. They'd buried whoever it was, but had not marked the
site. If he had to be an officer, he was glad to be an American one where
there was at least a cultural limit to gratuitous bullying and pointless
aggravation. Leadership by committee wasn't possible in emergency
situations, but at other times several heads were better than one, and any
head could pop up with the working drill. He knew the story of the dead
tank would stay with him. Silently, from five hundred yards, it told a
story he'd try one day to write. Meantime, a story he'd never even be able
to whisper was taking an urgent turn.
"Never mind," the teacher said, sliding his hands inside the youth's
training shirt. "We won't be able to meet here, after the war; this tree
will be sawdust, but we're in a backwater for the moment and there's no
reason it won't last a few more hours."
"What if we were in the States," the boy asked, "and you met me at
something like a fair or a company picnic, and we took a long walk
together? What would we do, when we got back?"
"That's a good question," the teacher said, as his fingers played
gently over the magic combination of sinew and butter that made up the
belly of the willing child.. They retrieved the rifle and began their
descent. "If you were an orphan, I could ask my wife to take you in. My
kids would go for you like you had Zenith stamped on your forehead. That's
a brand of television."
"I've read about those. Have you ever seen one?"
The teacher was delighted at the boys true, feral nature. He'd be
sorely disappointed when he had his chance to actually see the Jew slop
purveyed and their heartless exploitation achieved by pandering to the
lowest common denominator with the cheapest thing that wiggled and made
noise, but his interest in the device itself was all healthy young male.
Any interest that didn't involve the loud tooting of horns and thrashing
around in expensive and transient clothing was a leg up, in the teacher's
well-considered book. He gave Philip a precise, based on a receiver he'd
watched in a New York hotel room. They reached the ferns and the teacher
was happy to field questions on channel frequencies, picture size, and
voltage to the cathode ray tube. This boy would be in no danger from Uncle
Milty.
They returned to the log, found it not longer adequate, and so
rolled together off the seat and to the thick grass at the verge of the
pond. This took ten minutes. The teacher had to laugh to himself.
Normally he brooked no interruption in class, but as they rolled slowly
toward the water, the boy kept interrupting with his stories. "Write them
down and publish them," the teacher thought a bit wryly to himself, "and
literacy would skyrocket all over the planet. English would become the
world language in a very few years, indeed."
"I guess I kind of knew special stuff happened for the most diligent
kids," Philip began. "Day trips and nights away from the school. At first
it was They just do the things the Greeks did, and, of course, that made us
younger boys renew our interest in history. What did the Greeks do, that
the Jesuits would do at certain times, and away from the group, with the
best of the school's boys? There was one way to find out.
"When I was pretty high in the class standings, the emphasis shifted
from academics, per se, to grades and deportment. Being nice. Being
friendly and flexible right up until the very moment you chopped someone's
head off, and be doubly so if it was about to happen that the other fellow
was going to chop off your head. Don't be a smart aleck know-it-all. I
was, trying to condense the dangers of Jewry into a single paragraph, but,
you're an American, and can think faster, - but I'd never do it to anyone
else."
In thirteen years as an instructor, the teacher had never been so
profoundly and utterly flattered. The boy dared dance intellectually
naked, a far greater trust than anything to do with his underpants.
"It was kind of a charm school," Philip went on, "like Barbizon in
New York, for models. We didn't walk around with books on our head, but we
were taught to be gracious, the more so under adverse circumstances. The
English imperative, you know, We'll weather the weather, whatever the
weather, whether we like it or not. And they took it literally.
"Storm hikes. Oh, sure, checking the livestock that had been living
safely on the premises for a thousand years. Checking for leading roofs.
The roofs were fine. Checking for flooding. We were on the side of a
velly, five hundred feet above the river. What they were really checking
was our resilience, and, if we held up well, the reward was, to put it
mildly, spectacular. We'd go out nervous wrecks, and come back, soaked to
the skin, and with a grin a mortician couldn't have changed.
"I was lucky. I wasn't the smartest, quite, or the nicest, quite,
but I was the biggest, and fair of form, as a poet might say, so it
happened just before I turned twelve. Guess I had a certain long-legged,
gangly, coltish charm. I sure felt awkward enough.
"It was a dark and stormy morning. One of the older boys, a German,
came to me at breakfast and whispered that I'd be going out on a storm
hike, and who did I want to go with? I was surprised; shocked; I'd
promised myself I wouldn't even start thinking about it for another year.
He laughed when he saw me get all flustered and embarrassed, and whispered
Welcome to the club.
"I chose Brother Henri. We were meant to be all intellectual and
full of character and charm, and I chased after a pair of eyelashes like
they were butterflies leading to edible gold.
"We tramped around for an hour, checking gates and putting out dry
feed and straw. I think he was as nervous as I was. I was only his third
boy, I was American, and I was big for my age. Plus, he was only nineteen,
himself.
"We ended up in the wine cellar, and each had a glass for the cold.
Then he opened a secret door. He'd been up at dawn to build a fire, it was
meant to be auspicious to do this; the monk who built the fire was said to
have the best chance of attracting the boy to the flame, and even though
rising the earliest was a significant challenge, only those who'd been
celibate for seven days were allowed to rise, at all."
The teacher could plainly see why Brother Henri might be nervous
with the stripling. Even a year ago he must have had the long, well
muscled boy legs, and surely the shock of blond hair and the bright blue
eyes had not changed much. The generous mouth, the high cheek bones and
slight overbite that added just of trace of wry puckishness to the sensible
boy face. He was neither glamorous nor indolent in appearance. Pouty was
becoming popular, had started as far back as the Twenties. He wasn't
pouty, nor was he about to vamp and posture. He looked more capable of
breaking a jaw than acting coy. A sold hunk of American male, even if
still, at thirteen, a bit on the rangy side.
"Anyhow," Philip went on, "there was a strange chapel, with a toasty
fire and soft cotton robes. We left our foul weather gear to drip on wine
casks, and entered. He locked the door, hesitantly, indicating with
several nods that I was free to leave any time I wished. That was nice to
know, but strictly academic as those eyelashes would have kept me rooted to
the spot if they'd been growing on a turnip.
"He handed me one of the robes and took another for himself. Then
he turned his back and went to an upholstered bench on the west side,
leaving me to imitate him, at the other bench.
"You must try to begin your flow as mine wanes," was all he said.
I gathered from basics a love that needn't be taught, so when I
heard him finish changing, I waited a couple of minutes, then stood and
faced him. He had stood to face me, and I knew to round my bench, copying
him, and come to him in the middle of the secret chapel. We moved to a
position comfortably in front of the fireplace, and stood about a foot
apart, just looking at each other, not saying a word. After awhile we both
started yawning. That gave us an excuse to move our hands. We'd stifle
our very, very not-sleepy yawns, then touch each others' robes, managing to
apparently accidentally loosen the sashes.
"After four or five times, we stopped pretending. We kept our
fingers on each other, and even looked down. We both had huge tents in our
robes. That's where our hands went, and soon we were uncovered to each
other.
"Brother Henri was tall and slim, weighed about one seventy. At age
nineteen, he'd just recovered from acne, and his face had a rough, craggy
look that made his eyelashes, and the boy that shone behind them, more
tantalizing than anything the Greeks or Romans carved. He was
simultaneously an Erenos and an Erasmus; mature and guiding, spirited and
curious. Later we became close friends, but everything that happened in
the secret chapel happened in silence, save his advice on how we should be
together at the last moments of our play.
"His penis was not circumcised. I'd seen that in the dorms, but
only boys, and never any boners. It was over seven inches, and bent some
to his left. He was very Anglo in background, so I knew he must be pink,
or a little purple, under his skin, like I was. My penis was just growing
to six inches, though it was not as heavy and think as his. Mine goes
almost straight out when I'm standing. I could tell he had never seen a
circumcised boy before, which was understandable because there were only
twenty or so Jews at the school, and the chance was he'd never had one of
them in the short time he'd been there.
"I thought he was beautiful. So mysterious. Was fascinated for the
moment by what he might look like, if I made the tip of him naked by
pulling back a little. I guess I looked okay, too, because I was
completely swollen, and sort of wet and purple on the tip.
"After a few minutes, we shrugged our robes to the floor, and stood
naked in the firelight. He took special care of himself down there, so he
looked like a little boy between his legs and on his chest and everywhere.
I had just a few hairs starting, but they made him very excited because he
knew I could be a full-grown boy with him. Later, I found out there had
been some doubt, but mistakes had been made before, and god had continued
to send more boys, so tolerances were somewhat looser than in the thirteen
hundreds."
This time the Lightnings came directly over the little clearing.
The teacher almost jumped and pushed the boy away, before realizing that
the pilots would have about a half-second glimpse of what could have been
kids wrestling, or a proper couple engaged in improper activities. The
ships were in a gentle left turn. This meant they were not returning for
fuel or ammo. They were patrolling. The thunder of the big engines
diminished almost as fast as it had risen, signifying that nothing
interesting was nearby. The teacher was mildly glad they had recognized
the neighborhood tank as a noncombatant, and ignored it. The insult would
probably have driven the commander to eat his own pistol, so perhaps it was
just as well he'd been shot in a hail of lead. The teacher doubted loss of
blood by the officer brought on an awareness of the difference between
leadership and tyranny. Even if the insight had come, it would have been
too late.
In the interest of time, Philip broke off his tale of the secret
chapel. They had hours together, and he didn't want to rush a single
second with this gallant American track star, suddenly planted in his
hedgerow. With a kiss, he changed the subject, lying so the teacher could
work his fingers gently in around his arm and softly down over he chest and
stomach. It had been a week since he'd even seen his monastery brother;
longer since he'd done anything with anyone. He needed a major change in
subject. Thank goodness it was D-Day, plus.
"You used the wrong strategy, you know," the boy said.
"Who," the teacher asked, by now thoroughly distracted by the boy
who accepted the way he was being touched.
"Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Monty; the lot. The Allies. You
should have made no secret at all of your landing. Let the Germans meet
you. You have overwhelming air superiority, with staging fields
practically within sight of the operational theater, and that's all that
counts, in the long run. If you'd made an open, frontal assault, your
navel guns could have spent two weeks hammering units that were cut off
from any dream of supplies. Mount the turrets on barges, so you could
shoot a mile from the beach.
"The first thing ashore should have been two or three hundred
bulldozers. You could have built a parking lot twenty miles long,
connected to a thousand-yard pier. The way you've done it, Rommel still
has Tigers and even better tanks by the hundreds. You're going to have to
slog all the way to Germany, blowing up a lot of pretty places, and perhaps
fight right through Paris, itself, with no naval support almost the entire
way.
"Adults aren't good at games. They think too much. Nothing simple
will ever do."
"After the last war in these parts," the teacher tried to explain,
"there was considerable fear over getting embroiled in trench warfare. An
endless standoff."
"Mother fucker," the boy said, reflexively using language far ahead
of his time, "how the mother fucking hell are you going to have a mother
fucking standoff when you have fifteen mother fucking thousand mother
fucking planes?"
Indeed, there had been a randomness to the droning of distant
aircraft, only occasionally punctuated by the screams of attack. Like the
boy, the teacher was glad for the serious nature of the dissection of
invasion strategy, because the child's body felt warm, delicious, and
inviting, and the more he fondled the boyish torso, the warmer and more
delicious and more inviting it felt and felt. The situation was getting
desperate. "What about Japan?" he asked.
"Just the opposite. Keep the Slavic morons out; that's the only
concern. Otherwise, just box them in with subs. Slow them down with air
raids. Bide your time. Who cares if it takes six or eight or ten years
for them to get the message? Show them how Malaysia is doing, Hong Kong.
Set up senders for the television things, and drop in receivers. Kill them
with kindness. Drop ten thousand leaflets for every bomb. Send ugly Jews
to negotiate; they can win concessions by dint of their eyeglasses, alone.
Get one who uses a deep, lazy, grating voice to vanquish, and you might get
unconditional surrender.
Kissing her. Why did he think of that? He was a boy. The notion
flew, because he was all boy. Irresistible, and, with his half-told story
of standing in front of the glowing fire, naked with the nineteen-year-old
male, there was more to him than just kissing.
"Do you want to do what we did?" the boy whispered, sensing the
teacher wanted to hear more of his first fully male adventure.
"Yes," the teacher whispered.
"Turn around. Might as well throw your trainers in the pond for a
wash. Turn around when you're ready."
"Okay."
They separated like duelists. Ten paces. Quickly stripped,
bundling their clothes and tossing them into the pool. Being instinctively
soldiers, both, they left their shoes on; the teacher, his radically cut
down boots, the boy, his size eight track shoes.
Somehow it made him look sexy, the teacher thought as he turned to
look. The long hairless legs rising from the big, dirty footwear topped by
the huge boner, circumcised, and standing straight skyward, now more than a
very full six inches.
The teacher was naturally big, almost nine inches, but the intensity
of the nearby child, combined with the weeks of activity that had left
little time for thought and no time for anything else, seemed to add
another very hot inch to him. He'd never been this big. Never, it felt,
even half this rock hard. Philip also looked abnormally swollen. It was
one hell of a damn good thing there was a pond nearby, and warm hours to
dry off in.
"This is what he did to me because I was circumcised," Philip
explained, taking the teacher's fingers in his own, and guiding them to the
wet flare of swollen purple that jutted hard from his boyish waist.
The ride in had been exciting, even to a former international
athlete. Many things in the teacher's life had seemed to break the limits
of what it must be possible to sense and feel. Thirty-five years and four
silver medals, down the drain. Nothing had ever come close the this
brilliant, urgent boy, the very tip of him. The very tip of him. Their
joining, straining to each other, swollen, hot, so hot, and the slickness
of the contact didn't take off the heat. Weren't fluids meant to? Not at
all. The flame centered where they were wet together, and as Philips
tended gently to their first coupling the wetness of hot heat spread inch
by scalding inch till they were finally clasped by the experienced young
hand, fully joined.
The teacher rested his head on the boy's shoulder, the boy cuddled
his cheek close and listened closely.
"Is this what you did with Brother Henri," the teacher whispered
softly.
"He held us," the boy whispered back. "He was experienced."
"How did you stand?" It was the most exciting quiz he'd ever given.
"With my arms at my side, and his head bent against my should.
That's the real Greek way. Mostly in the heart, the mind and the eye of
the mind and the heart. The ending is a display of love."
"What do you call the ending in France?" the teacher asked.
"Amongst boys, it simply translates sperming. Men talk about
cumming. For the most part, it's a silent ritual; I'm half guessing at
what the words are. That's because they don't have anything to say to each
other, and if they did, they'd have been embarrassed to go that far into
English with an American. They warn their partners with three quick
pinches, then, two, when they're sure. The last one is more a squeeze, and
is entirely unnecessary."
"How long did you and Henri do what you're doing to us?"
"We made it last. He had to teach me, and that broke the rhythm of
how he was touching me.
"Do you want me to show you?"
"You better do something," the man thought, but whispered only a
simple, "Yes."
The boy gently relaxed his hand, fondling his partner for a minute,
then reached for the teacher's right arm. Gently he drew the athlete
between then, slicking the fingers with his wet palm.
"Masturbate both of us," the boy whispered very softly, letting his
hand fall to his side. The child was right. What they were doing together
was as satisfying as it was sensual. No contest was going on. No finish
line. Just his huge penis wetly nestled to the boy's big, boy boner, with
yawns having given way to a steady sweat and panting.
The teacher and student resumed their posture, the taller with his
head bowed to the shoulder of the youth, the youth standing with his head
slightly bent, also, looking down at what the naked man was doing to him.
Both the young males were fighting not to end. As the minutes passed, they
checked themselves by taking turns, sometimes allowing a razor edge to be
dulled by not touching each other, at all.
"I've got to tell you something," Phil whispered.
"What?" the teacher answered.
"When I did this with Henri, he'd get me wet, really wet, not like
now, first, for four times before I got him wet. I want to reverse the
tradition, so the boy can give the man the hottest love.
"I want that because of your medals, because you're here, and
because I'm experienced and this is your first time."
It seemed like an offer of the entire planet. The boys moist hand
against him had been all but unendurable. Accepting the gentle pumping of
that hand in a lave of freshly spent boy sperm would be beyond any possible
earthly experience.
It seemed absurd in a way to say it, but he meant it with every
fiber of his being.
"Thank you."
"Take you hand away," came a whisper with a trace of urgency.
What the child had been doing between them, he was now doing solo to
himself. The teacher, reading his shaking body, and seeing a final
impossible swelling, stared between their sweat-soaked bellies. He was
just fully appreciating the trace of soft girlishness still visible on the
boys stomach when there was a gush like a striking snake. A bolt of hot
boy sperm slapped across his naked chest like a white whip
. The boy stood, cheek locked hard to that of the man, shaking and
grunting, and covering both their stomachs with slick trail after trail of
his watery youthful semen.
As the child shuddered against him, he continued spraying on the
naked athlete. The gap between the males allowed them to watch the
spurting flow as Philip gently stroked at the base of his gouting boner.
Then the small boy's hand slowly did the impossible. It rose on the
pulsing shaft, wetted itself with a hard spurt, and gently, slowly,
tenderly, and quintessentially, boyishly, found the teacher.
"You're just like Henri," the boy groaned as his liquored hand
encircled the man's foreskin. He fondled, finding more sperm fresh on the
man's belly, wetting more, and then, with a modulated loss of patience
unusual in a thirteen year old, pulled down so the big head of his lover
was free. The man's shaking now matched his own, and they dropped to their
knees, their eyes locked with rivets to the waist of the lanky athlete.
Now on their knees, they quickly worked themselves back into their huddle.
"Yours is much whiter than Brother Henri's," the boy whispered,
intimately.
The thought of another male doing what he was doing to the child,
the carnality of the boy and monk, covering each other, their spend easily
distinguished by its color, viscosity and pearlesence. The image brought a
grunt from the teacher, the only sound over his steady athletic panting as
he gushed where Henri had, covered the same softness around the young belly
and the same tender young thighs; the same red, jutting penis and the same
tender sack handing manly from the boy that had sprayed itself all over
him. He covered the child and the child received him everywhere. As the
senior male completed his climax, both males were arching against each
other, and almost wrestling with a hot lust for every tiger spurt.
"Welcome to France," the boy whispered as they settled wetly against
each other, the boy's tender bottom against the tip of the teacher hard
cock.
. . .
That sketches the opening to my story of D-Day. Hope you enjoyed
it. I have been under hostile fire at least eight times, sometimes it's
hard to know in a 155mm battalion, otherwise, I wouldn't have the temerity
to write it, nor, especially, to write half of it on the sixth of June,
fifty-seven years down the road.
Had a nice letter from my dad, today. Wrote back bragging, so he'd
know it was me, about seamlessly constructing a four hundred page novel, as
I wrote it. I think I'm justified in this highly divergent last few
chapters, and if I want to interleave them with a hammer, then maybe skill
at the anvil is part of the writer's craft. What it is not is part of any
bag of tricks.
Brad has an invention, and two secrets. The Yamaha is still sitting
in the shade of the big oak. John is molesting the boy, and the story is
being told, over several nights, by Charles to Blissy and his Irish friend,
Timmy, who seem to giggle more with each evening spent in the non-physical
zone of erotica preferred by the youthful, but nonetheless, Vietnam era,
Charles. As time passes we are learning that there is another secret that
will pull the novel together, however divergent the middle act, and render
it a masterpiece, complete unto itself. If you enjoy reading it one
millionth as much as I enjoy writing it, count yourself lucky.
Since my endings for this work are pat, and just get better with
time, I'm going to make good on my promise to offer a boy band story.
Remember, on a Web novel you do not get the depth of research you are
entitled to in a paid-for work of fiction. For example, in "Pvt. Ryan,"
what kind of tree did they climb? What kind of rifle did the teacher
retrieve? The same thing may be said about the next story. I have no
knowledge, whatever, of what boy bands are up to.
Posted by Thomas@btl.net.
xxx