Pain can be a bucket of gasoline-smelling water hurled into the face, the concrete floor that bites into the knees, the hemp knotted into the wrists behind the squared wood post, the wrenched muscles in the arms, the Nazi flag coming back into focus against a urine yellow cinder-block wall, then once again the gears turning dully on a hand-crank generator, gaining speed now, starting to hum now, whining louder through the metal casing as the current strikes my genitals just like an iron fist, soaring upward into the loins, mashing the kidneys, seizing an area deep in the colon like electric pliers.
I was sure the voice coming out of my mouth was not my own. It was a savage sound, ripped out of the viscera, loud as cymbals clapped on the ears, degrading, eventually weak and plaintive, the descending tremolo like that of an animal with its leg in a steel trap.
A redheaded, crew-cut, porcine man in a black Grateful Dead T-shirt, with white skin, a furrowed neck, and deep-set, lime green eyes, sat forward on a folding chair, pumping his chubby arms furiously on the handles of the generator. Then he stopped and stared at one of his palms.
'I got a blister on me hand,' he said.
'Ease it up, Will. You're gonna lose him again,' the man with the silver beard said.
'It ain't Will's fault. All the sod's got to do is flap 'is fouking 'ole for us,' the man at the generator said.
'Electricity's funny, Will. It settles in a place like water. Maybe it's his heart next,' the man with the beard said.
Will Buchalter was shirtless, booted in hobnails. His upper torso tapered down inside his olive, military-style dungarees like the carved trunk of a hardwood tree. His armpits were shaved and powdered, and, just above his rib cage, there were strips of sinew that wrinkled and fanned back like pieces of knotted cord from the sides of his breasts. He sat with one muscular buttock propped on a battered desk, his legs crossed, his face bemused, lost in thought under the brim of his Panama hat.
'What about it, Dave?' he asked.
My head hung forward, the sweat and water streaming out of my hair.
'Answer the man, you dumb fouk,' the porcine man in the black T-shirt said, and lifted my chin erect with a wood baton. His skin was as white as milk.
'Don't hurt his face again, Freddy,' Buchalter said.
'I say leave off with the technology, Will,' the man called Freddy answered. 'I say consider 'is nails. I could play a lovely tune with 'em.'
Will Buchalter squatted down in front of me and pushed his hat to the back of his head. A bright line of gold hair grew out of his pants into his navel.
'You've got stainless-steel cojones, Dave,' he said. 'But you're going through all this pain to prevent us from having what's ours. That makes no sense for anybody.'
He slipped a folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted my nose and mouth with it. Then he motioned the other two men out of the room. When they opened the door I smelled grease, engine oil, the musty odor of rubber tires.
'Freddy and Hatch aren't the sharpest guys on the block, Dave. But armies and revolutions get built out of what's available,' Buchalter said. His eyes glanced down at my loosened trousers. He picked up one of the generator's wires and sucked wistfully on a canine tooth. 'I promise you you'll walk out of it. We have nothing to gain by hurting you anymore or killing you. Not if you give us what we want.'
A bloody clot dripped off the end of my tongue onto my chin.
'Go ahead, Dave,' he said.
But the words wouldn't come.
'You're worried about the Negro?' he said. 'We'll let him go, too. I promise I won't let Freddy get out of control like that again, either. He's just a little peculiar sometimes. When he was a kid some wogs took a liking to him in the back room of a pub, you know what I mean?'
He placed his palm across my forehead, as though he were gauging my temperature, then pressed my head gently back into the post. His eyes studied mine.
'It's almost light outside,' he said. 'You can have a shower and hot food, you can sleep, you can have China white to get rid of the pain, you can have a man's love, too, Dave.'
He brought his face closer to mine and smiled lopsidedly.
'It's all a matter of personal inclination, Dave. I don't mean to offend,' he said. He looked at the smear of blood and saliva across his squared handkerchief, folded it, and slipped it back into his pocket. Then the light in his eyes refocused, as though he were capturing an elusive thought. 'We're going to take back our cities. We're driving the rodents back into the sewers. It's a new beginning, Dave, a second American Revolution. You can be proud of your race and country again. It's going to be a wonderful era.'
He shifted his weight and settled himself more comfortably on one knee, like a football coach about to address his players. He grinned.
'Come on, admit it, wouldn't you like to get rid of them all, blow them off the streets, chase them back into their holes, paint their whole end of town with roach paste?' he said. He winked and poked one finger playfully in my ribs.
'I apologize, it's a bad time for jokes,' he said. 'Before we go on, though, I need to tell you something. In your house you said some ugly things to me. I was angry at the time, but I realize you were afraid and your only recourse was to try to hurt and manipulate me. But it's all right now. It makes our bond stronger. It's pain that fuses men's souls together. We're brothers-in-arms, Dave, whether you choose to think so or not.'
He got to his feet, went to the desk, and returned with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast unrolled between his hands. He squatted in front of me again. In the shadow of his hat the spray of blackheads at the corners of his eyes looked like dried scale.
'Dave, the sub we want had the number U-138 on the conning tower. It also had a wreathed sword and a swastika on the tower,' he said. 'Is that the one you found? Can you tell me that much?'
A floor fan vibrated in the silence. I saw him try to suppress the twitch of anger that invaded his face. He put his thumb on a spot south of Grand Isle.
'Is this the last place you saw it?' he asked.
The red, black, and white flag puffed and ruffled against the cinder-block wall in the breeze from the fan.
His hand slipped over the top of my skull like a bowl. I could feel the sweat and water oozing from under his palm.
'You going to be a hard tail on me? Are the Jews and Negroes worth all this?' he said. He slowly oscillated my head, his mouth open, his expression pensive, then wiped his palm on the front of my shirt. 'Do you want me to let Hatch and Freddy play with your hands?'
He waited, then-said, rising to his feet, 'Well, let's have one more spin with army surplus, then it's on to Plan B. Freddy and Hatch don't turn out watchmakers, Dave.'
He walked past the corner of my vision and opened the door.
'It's going to be daylight. I need to get 'ome to me mum, Will,' Freddy said.
'He's right. We're spending too much time on these guys,' the man named Hatch said. 'Look at my pants. The burrhead was swallowing the rag I put in his mouth. When I tried to fix it for him, he kicked me. A boon putting his goddamn foot on a white man.'
'We're not here to fight with the cannibals, Hatch,' Buchalter said. 'Dave's voted for another try at electro-shock therapy. So let's be busy bees and get this behind us.'
I hear the rotary gears gain momentum, then the current surges into my loins again, vibrating, binding the kidneys, lighting the entrails, but this time the pain knows its channels and territory, offers no surprises, and nestles into familiar pockets like an old friend. The hum becomes the steady thropping of helicopter blades, the vibrations nothing more than the predictable shudder of engine noise through the ship's frame. The foreheads of the wounded men piled around me are painted with Mercurochromed M's to indicate the morphine that laces their hearts and nerve endings; in their clothes is the raw odor of blood and feces. The medic is a sweaty Italian kid from Staten Island; his pot is festooned with rubber spiders, a crucifix, a peace symbol, a bottle of mosquito dope. My cheek touches the slick hardness of his stomach as he props me in his arms and says, 'Say good-bye to Shitsville, Lieutenant. You're going home alive in 'sixty-five. Hey, don't make me tie your hands. It's a mess down there, Loot.'
But I'm not worried about the steel teeth embedded in my side and thighs. My comrades and I are in the arms of God and Morpheus and a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston, Texas, who flew the dust-off in through a curtain of automatic weapons fire that sounded like ball peen hammers whanging against the fuselage, and now, with the windows pocked and spiderwebbed, the floor yawing, the hot wind sucking through the doors, the squares of flooded rice plain flashing by like mirrors far below, we can see green waves sliding toward us like a wet embrace and a soft pink sun that rises without thunder from the South China Sea.
Oh, fond thoughts. Until I hear the bucket filling again under a cast-iron tap and the water that stinks of gasoline explodes in my face.
'Time I had a go at 'im, Will,' Freddy said.
Then the door opened again, and I could hear leather soles on the concrete floor. The three men's faces were all fixed on someone behind me.
'Give me another hour and we'll have it resolved,' Buchalter said.
'E's a tight-ass fouker,' Freddy said. 'We give him a reg'lar grapefruit down there.'…
'It's all getting to be more trouble than it's worth, if you ask me,' Hatch said. 'Maybe we should wipe the slate clean.'
The person behind me lit a cigarette with a lighter. The smoke drifted out on the periphery of my vision.
'You want to call it?' Buchalter said.
'AH I ask is ten fouking minutes, one for each finger,' Freddy said. 'It'll come out of 'im loud enough to peel the paint off the stone.'
'I've had a little problem in controlling some people's enthusiasms,' Buchalter said to the person behind me.
'You've got a problem with acting like a bleeding sod sometimes,' Freddy began.
'You're not calling me a sodomist, are you, Freddy?'
'We're doing a piece of work. You shouldn't let your emotions get mixed up in it, Will. That's all I'm trying to get across 'ere,' Freddy said.
I heard the person behind me scrape up a steel ruler that had been lying on a workbench. Then the person touched the crown of my skull with it, idly teased it along my scalp and down the back of my neck.
'I think Dave'll come around,' Buchalter said. 'He just needs to work out some things inside himself first.'
Whoever was behind me bounced the ruler reflectively on my shoulder and pushed a sharp corner into my cheek.
Buchalter kept staring at the person's face, then he said, reading an expression there, 'If that's the way you want it. But I still think Dave can grow.'
I heard the cigarette drop to the floor, a shoe mash it out methodically against the cement; then the door opened and shut again.
Freddy smiled at Hatch. His skin was so white it almost glowed. He shook a pair of pliers loose from a toolbox. Hatch was smiling now, too. They both looked down at me, expectant.
Will Buchalter bit a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb. He crouched down in front of me, removed his Panama hat, and rested it on one knee. His blond hair was as fine as a baby's and grew outward from a bald, spot the size of a half-dollar in the center of his scalp. He lifted up my chin gently with the wood baton.
'Last chance. Don't make me turn it over to them,' he said.
I lifted my eyes to his and felt my lips part dryly.
'What is it, Dave? Say it,' Buchalter said.
My lips felt like bruised rubber; the words were clotted with membrane in my throat.
'It's all right, take your time,' Buchalter said. 'You've had a hard night… Get him a drink of water.'
A moment later Buchalter held a tin cup gingerly to my lips. The water sluiced over my chin and down my throat; I gagged on my chest.
'Dave, I understand your pain. It's the pain of a soldier and a brave man. Just whisper to me. That's all it takes,' Buchalter said.
Hatch was bent down toward me, too, his hands on his knees, his face elfish and merry. Buchalter leaned his ear toward my mouth, waiting. I could see the oil and grain in his skin, the glistening convolutions inside his ear.
I pushed the words out of my chest, felt my lips moving, my eyes blinking with each syllable.
A paleness like the color of bone came into Buchalter's face. One hobnailed boot scratched against the cement as he rose to his feet.
'What'd 'e say?' Freddy asked.
'He said Will was a cunt,' Hatch answered, his grin scissoring through his beard. He and Freddy rocked on the balls of their feet, hardly able to keep their mirth down inside themselves.
Then Hatch said, 'Sorry, Will. We're just laughing at the guy. He hasn't figured out yet who's on his side.'
'That's right, Will,' Freddy said. ''E's a stupid fouk for sure. Go have breakfast. Me and Hatch'll finish it up here.'
But the insult had passed out of Buchalter's face now. He began pulling on a pair of abbreviated gray leather gloves, the kind a race driver might wear, with holes that allowed the ends of the fingers to extend above the webbing. He dried each of his armpits with a towel, then positioned himself in front of me.
'Stand him up,' he said.
'Maybe that's not a good idea, Will,' Freddy said. 'Unless you've given up. Remember what happened out in Idaho. Like an egg breaking, it was.'
'I say tear up his ticket, Will,' Hatch said. 'He's in with Hippo Bimstine. You're gonna trust what he tells you? Rip his ass.'
Then, as though he had given permission for his own anger to feed and stoke and fan itself, Hatch's hands began to shake, his teeth glittered inside his beard, and he wrenched me under one arm and tried to tug me upward against the wood post, his breath whistling in his nostrils.
'You know what's lower than a Jew?' he said. 'An Aryan who works for one. You think you're stand-up, motherfucker? A punk like you couldn't cut a week on Camp J. See how you like the way Will swings.'
Freddy grabbed my other arm, and they raked me upward against the post like a sack of feed. I could feel splinters biting into my forearms, my ankles twisting sideways with my weight.
'Get your fouking head up,' Freddy said.
'Strap his belt around his neck,' Hatch said.
'Step back, both of you,' Buchalter said.
Strands of hair were glued in my eyes, and a foul odor rose from my lap. I heard Buchalter's boots scrape on the cement as he set himself.
'I'm going to hit you only three times, Dave, then we'll talk again,' Buchalter said. 'If you want to stop before then, you just have to tell me.'
'Your juices are about to fly, Mr. Robicheaux,' Freddy said.
Then the three men froze. The Nazi flag rippled along the cinder blocks with pockets of air from the floor fan.
'It's glass breaking,' Freddy said.
'I thought you said the Negro was tucked away,' Buchalter said.
'E was, Will. I locked 'im in the paint closet,' Freddy said.
'The paint closet? It's made of plywood. You retard, there're upholstery knives in there,' Buchalter said.
'Hatch didn't tell me that. Nobody told me that. You quit reaming me, Will,' Freddy said.
But Buchalter wasn't listening now. He ripped Hatch's Luger from a holster that hung above the workbench and moved quickly toward the door behind the post where I was tied, the muscles in his upper torso knotting like rope. But even before he flung the metal door back against the cinder blocks, I heard more glass breaking, cascading in splintered panes to the cement, as though someone were raking it out of window frames with a crowbar; then an electric burglar alarm went off, one with a horn that built to a crescendo like an air-raid siren, followed by more glass breaking, this time a more congealed, grating sound, like automobile windows pocking and folding out of the molding, while automobile alarms bleated and pealed off the cement and corrugated tin roof.
'He's out the door!' Buchalter said.
'The guy who owns this place uses a security service. They're probably already rolling on that alarm,' Hatch said.
'Y'all had a fucking security service into a place where you meet?' Buchalter said.
'How'd anybody know you'd want to use it for an interrogation? I told you to pop the burrhead last night, anyway.'
'Get out there and stop that noise,' Buchalter said.
'The shit's frying in the fire, it is. Time to say cheery-bye and haul it down the road, Will,' Freddy said…
'Can't you rip a wire out of a mechanism? Do I have to do everything myself?' Buchalter said.
'No, I can drive very nicely by meself, thank you. Since that's me van out there, I'll be toggling to me mum's now. I think you've made a bloody fouking mess of it, Will. I think you'd better get your fouking act together,' Freddy said.
The Luger dripped like a toy from Buchalter's huge hand. The smooth, taut skin of his chest was beaded with pinpoints of sweat; his eyes raced with thought.
Freddy unbolted a door at the far end of the room and stepped out into the gray dawn.
'Fuck it, I'm gone, too, Will,' Hatch said. 'Snap one into this guy's brainpan and clean him out of your head… All right, I'm not gonna say anything else. Don't point my own piece at me, man. It ain't my place to tell you what to do.'
Hatch backed away from Buchalter, then paused, chewing on his beard, his eyes trying to measure the psychodrama in Buchalter's face. He unhooked the Nazi flag from the wall and draped it over his arm.
'I'm taking the colors with me,' he said. 'Will, all this stuff tonight don't mean anything. It goes on, man. We're eternal. You know where you can find me and Freddy later. Hey, if you decide to smoke him, lose my piece, okay?'
Then he, too, was gone into the brief slice of gray light between the door and jamb.
Buchalter's thumb moved back and forth along the tip of the Luger's knurled grip. His tongue licked against the back of his teeth; then it made a circle inside his lips. As though he had stepped across a line in his own mind, he slipped the Luger into the top of his trousers and bent his face three inches from mine. He twisted his fingers into my hair and pulled my head back against the post.
'I'm stronger inside than you are, Dave. You can never get away from me, never undo me,' he' said. 'I gave Bootsie a gift to remember me by. Now one for you.'
He tilted his head sideways, his eyes closing like a lover's, his mouth approaching mine. The Luger was hard and stiff against his corded stomach. In the next room the burglar and car alarms screamed against the walls and tin roof.
I sucked all the spittle and blood out of my cheeks and spat it full into his face.
His face went white, then snapped and twitched as though he had been slapped. His skin stretched against his skull and made his brow suddenly simian, his eye sockets like buckshot. He wiped a strand of pink spittle on his hand and stared at his palm stupidly.
But he didn't touch me again. He straightened to his full height with a level of hate and cruelty and portent in his eyes that I had never seen in a human being before, then, working his tropical shirt over one arm, snugging the Luger down tight in his belt, one eye fixed on me like a fist, he went out the door into the gray mist. But I believed I had now seen the face that inmates at Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka and Dachau had looked into.
Five minutes later Zoot Bergeron, his face swollen like a bruised plum, sawed loose the rope and leather straps that bound my wrists, and in the wail of the approaching St. Mary Parish sheriffs cars, we slammed the door back on its hinges and stumbled out into the wet light, into the glistening kiss of a new dawn, into an industrial-rural landscape of fish-packing houses, junkyards, shrimp boats rocking in their berths, S.P. railway tracks, stacks of crisscrossed ties, a red-painted Salvation Army transient shelter among a clump of blue-green pine trees, oil-blackened sandspits, gulls gliding over the copper-colored roll of the bay, two hoboes running breathlessly over the gravel to catch a passing boxcar, the smells of diesel and salt-water, creosote, fish blood dried on a dock, nets stiff with kelp and dead Portuguese men-of-war, flares burning on offshore rigs, freshly poured tar on natural gas pipe, the hot, clean stench of electrical sparks fountaining from an arc welder's torch.
And in the distance, glowing like a chemical flame in the fog, was Morgan City, filled with palm-dotted skid-row streets, sawdust bars, hot pillow joints, roustabouts, hookers, rounders, bouree gamblers, and midnight ramblers. Zoot helped me stand erect, and I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and looked again at the two hoboes who had belly flopped onto the floor of the boxcar and were now rolling smokes as the freight creaked and wobbled down the old Southern Pacific railroad bed. Their toothless, seamed faces were lifted into the salt breeze with an expression of optimism and promise that made me think that perhaps the spirits of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac were still riding those pinging rails. But the scene needed no songwriter or poet to make it real. It was a poem by itself, a softly muted, jaded, heartbreakingly beautiful piece of the country that was forever America and that you knew you could never be without.