Eight

One night Randy came home beaten up and went to bed without telling anyone. But when he tried to get some breakfast in the morning, Dave the Poet saw the condition he was in and sent out a shout that drew us all.

"What a marvelous set of bruises," said Penelope. She'd seen all the violence in American movies, but this Chicago event made Capone seem real. She tried to touch his small, blue face, but he turned away in anger.

"Don't touch me," he said, pouting, and stuck his face in the refrigerator.

"What happened, man?" said Dave. "You fall off your trike or something?"

"Eat shit," said Randy, taking a Swanson's roast-beef dinner out of the freezer and putting it on the side of his face. He turned on the stove to preheat.

"Oo, him mad at me," said Dave in his Tweety Bird voice. "Dat not good."

"Let me guess," I said, "you got mugged on the el."

"Nah," he said through a much-changed face. Whatever had happened to him, they'd really done a job. His head wasn't lopsided yet, but it was welted and lumpy. It looked like sandpaper had been rubbed on his skin.

"Hey," said Dave. "Is that my roast-beef dinner? You can't eat that."

"All right, all right," said Randy, and rubbed the frost from the front of the package. Sure enough, in black Magic Marker, the word "Dave" appeared. We believed in sharing up to a certain point, but when it came to food, we were fanatic. If you bought a quart of milk, you wrote your name on it, likewise with TV dinners, which were the principle part of our diet. At any given moment, there might be three to four quarts of milk in the refrigerator, and everyone had his favorite dinners, except for Penelope, of course. She ate real food, but nothing that looked worth eating. Her favorite was liver and onions, but she'd only steam the liver for three or four minutes, and it was almost raw. Dave and I would run gagging to the local Steak 'n' Egger, eat hash browns and toast, and wait for the smell of liver to clear from the apartment.

"Please," Randy begged, "I'm all out right now."

"Shame on you," said Penelope, shaking her finger. "Television dinners for breakfast! You are a bunch of degenerates."

"Tell you what," said Dave. "You tell me about last night, and you can have it."

"Didn't you go out with Anna last night?" I said. "The samurai movies or something?"

"Uh, well . . . ," said Randy.

"Oh my goodness!" said Penelope, holding her face in amazement.

"You got the shit kicked out of you by your own date!" exclaimed Dave in triumph.

It was true. For the last few weeks, he'd been dating a woman named Anna, who was a terror. She was twice his size and walked like a biker. Her masculine presence was made even stronger by the dress she always wore. On another woman it might have been a summer shift, full of air and room. But in the sleeveless dress with roses all over it, she looked like a sofa. Her huge arms were often placed on hips akimbo, which made her look butch and stern, but the face was mild. You expected it to look older, given the rest of her appearance.

Anna did own a motorcycle, only it was a little Honda putt-putt, one cut above a Mo-Ped. She looked like a gorilla humping a coconut on that thing. When they had a date, it was Anna who picked up Randy. She'd sit on the street in front, revving the engine, and he would run down the stairs. Randy always sat behind Anna, arms around her thick waist like a baby holding its mother. It was Randy who wore the only helmet, and off they would go, in a trail of blue exhaust, to get some Japanese food and see Toshiro Mifune cut men in half with his sword.

Anna loved battle. That's why the samurai movies were so appealing. The kill scenes came in swarms, an ecstasy of surgical swordsmanship. There was one about a left-handed swordsman who'd become a free-lance killer because he'd broken the warrior code of honor. Having dishonored himself with his shogun, he was doomed to roam the countryside without patronage or protection, picking up whatever work he could. Randy said you could tell from early in the first reel that this was one bad dude. He comes upon a pilgrim praying at a roadside shrine, and without explanation, cuts off his head. The camera cuts to the head rolling in the dust and its lips are still moving. Then it pans up to the left-handed warrior, and his lips are moving, too, in compulsive horror. He knows he's further damned himself, but he can't help it. After all, he's left-handed. At the end of the movie, the character is so degraded, he squats in the mud outside the house where his little daughter is staying, eating a frog that's hopped toward him in the rain.

"Wonderful!" said Anna after that particular movie. "You must see it."

Anna's favorite, Randy said, was the Blind Bat Swordswoman. It was a metaphor for the heroic condition of women everywhere.

"That's right," said Anna, seated on the couch where Randy had burned a hole. "She's the spirit of vengeance and knowledge."

"And intuition," said Randy eagerly.

"Who's telling this, anyway?" she said, slapping him on the face with a fierce look.

"You are, Anna," he replied.

"The Blind Bat Swordswoman is the wife of a shogun who's being held for ransom. The ransomer offers to release the husband if she will sleep with him, and he's also holding their two children. It is hers alone to save the family, because their lands have been lost and all the warriors and servants dispersed. It is a medieval time of outlaws and itinerant killers, and she goes out on the road, dressed in blue and purple silks, her only protection the small sharp sword she keeps inside a bamboo cane. Along the way, she is blinded by a band of rapists, but this does not deter her. A white horse comes down the road and nuzzles her bleeding face. In the next scene, we see her riding it, looking peaceful and serene. She's blind now, but still in search of her family, and she seems to have special powers."

"She's very strong," said Randy with admiration.

"Soon we discover just how powerful she is," continued Anna, making two fists. "When the next band of outlaws sets upon her, she pulls her sword and kills them all, in spite of her blindness. She can hear and feel them coming at her, and she cuts them to shreds in a killing dance."

"A killing dance?" I said.

"Whirling and turning," said Randy.

"It's beautiful," said Anna.

"And she saves her husband and kids?" I said.

"No," says Randy. "It's a series."

"If she saved them," said Anna, "there would be no quest." She looked through the window at the street below, where her motorcycle was chained to a tree. "Without a quest, there is no life," she declared heroically, slapping the coffee table with the full flat of her hand.

This morning, after Dave and Penelope left, Randy told me what had happened. They'd gotten into a tiff over a movie interpretation, and she'd knocked him down, sat on his stomach, and slapped him black and blue.

"The worst part was," he said, "we were in bed. We'd just made love, but it hadn't worked out very well, and I think she was pissed about that."

"It's nothing to punch somebody over."

"I guess not," he said, gingerly touching a welt on his cheek. "It's just that she makes such strong demands."

"Oh?"

"You see," he said, looking embarrassed, "Anna likes to play these games, We can't just make love; there always has to be a plot of some kind."

"Sounds kinky. Don't tell me -- the Blind Bat Swordswoman?"

"Promise you won't tell?"

"No problem."

"Anna likes me to pretend I'm violent. It really turns her on. She wants me to throw her back on the bed, rip off her clothes, and slap her around."

I was trying to imagine this, but failing.

"So it really wasn't the movie," I said. "She was showing you how she wanted it done."

"She got kind of carried away," he said. "She really got into it."

"Are you going to see her again?"

"This afternoon," he said sheepishly.

I figured we all were crazy, so there was no point now in giving advice. Dave came upstairs with the mail, and in it was a letter from Terry Grubbs dated three months ago, with the return address of South Vietnam.

The letter had been forwarded from my parents' home address, and the envelope looked like it had been around. Inside, the handwriting was what I'd remembered from college, a tiny script belonging only to geniuses or morbid obsessive types to whom detail is everything. He'd been "in country," he wrote, for only a couple weeks when they sent his company out on some heavy missions. He'd been given the job of walking point, so if they got ambushed he'd be the first to get shot, except perhaps the lieutenant, and that would come from behind. On the second day, they took some fire, but they got off easy because only one guy got hit. The problem was, you couldn't see anything until it was too late, and then you were screwed. One night, while sitting ambush, he'd killed three gooks with claymores, which must have been some kind of bomb from the way he described them. He couldn't see them coming, but knew they were there by the smell of woodsmoke on their skin. He pushed the plunger three times, and in the morning they were lying together like dolls with arms and legs missing. Now he knew his father was right. Taxation was purely a waste, since the ordinary taxpayer can't choose who he wants killed or how. Lots of ammunition was being wasted every day, money down the drain. The American people had no idea how right this war could be, nor how poorly it was being run. The grunts were doing all the work, and all the credit went to the lifers, who, by the way, got five of his company killed because they couldn't read a map. They'd ordered one of their own tanks to fire on them. Basic had been good, however. He'd met a captain at Camp Lejeune who'd taken a liking to him and invited him home for dinner. After steaks and beer they'd played war games in the living room, hiding behind the chairs and sofas, and the captain had won. Then he said with tears in his eyes how Terry was going to be his man in Nam. The captain wanted to be assigned there real bad, but had a hunch he wasn't going to make it. Whenever they took fire, he felt bad that the captain wasn't with him. In a firefight the other day, a guy got his leg blown off, and before he knew what he was doing, he picked it up and hopped over to the medic, who freaked out there and then. The medics got blown away all the time, but they were a bunch of stupid COs anyway. When he got out of Nam, he was going to move someplace like Idaho scrub-bush country where even his goddamn mother couldn't find him. The other day, a bunch of them had sat on an embankment downwind from a fire in a field of marijuana, and it was such good shit they could smell their own blood in the air. He felt these horns and spikes coming out his back, like a dinosaur or something. He was ancient, he was leather. He was just plain pissed.

About a week after I got Terry's letter the evening news showed a suspected Viet Cong being shot by a South Vietnamese officer on the streets of Saigon. He had a fragile skull like you see on children, and the officer quickly put a small gun to the temple and fired. The pistol looked so much like a toy, it was surprising how fast he fell, his thin arms tied behind him. He went down like laundry, and everyone watching wondered how it came to be that you could see such things on television. It used to be Sid Caesar making a face at Imogene Coca or Lucille Ball eating a conveyor belt of chocolate candy, and now you couldn't even watch the evening news without turning to stone on the sofa.