Mother Night

43: St. George and the Dragon ...

The door of my ratty attic had been torn off its hinges, had disappeared entirely. In its place the janitor had tacked a pup-tent of mine, and over the pup-tent a zigzag of boards. He had written on the zigzag boards, in gold radiator paint that reflected the light of my match:

'Nobody and nothing inside.'

Be that as it may, somebody had since ripped a bottom corner of the canvas free of its tacks, giving my ratty attic a small, triangular flap-door, like a tepee.

I crawled in.

The light switch in my attic did not respond, either. What light there was came through the few unbroken window panes. The broken panes had been replaced with wads of paper, rags, clothes and bedding. Night winds whistled around these wads. What light there was, was blue.

I looked out through the back windows by the stove, looked down into the foreshortened enchantment of the little private park below, the little Eden formed of joined back yards. No one was playing in it now.

There was no one in it to cry, as I should have liked someone to cry:

'Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeee.'

There was a stir, a rustle in the shadows of my attic. I imagined it to be the rustle of a rat

I was wrong.

It was the rustle of Bernard B. O'Hare, the man who had captured me so long ago. It was the stir of my own personal Fury, the man who perceived his noblest aspect in his loathing and hounding of me.

I do not mean to slander him by associating the sound he made with the sound of a rat. I do not think of O'Hare as a rat, though his actions with regard to me had the same nagging irrelevance as the rats' scrabbling passions in my attic walls. I didn't really know O'Hare, and I didn't want to know him. The fact of his having put me under arrest in Germany was a fact of submicroscopic interest to me. He wasn't my nemesis. My game was up long before O'Hare took me into custody. To me, O'Hare was simply one more gatherer of wind-blown trash in the tracks of war,

O'Hare had a far more exciting view of what we were to each other. When drunk, at any rate, he thought of himself as St George and of me as the dragon.

When I first saw him in the shadows of my attic, he was seated on a galvanized bucket turned upside down. He was in the uniform of the American Legion. He had a quart of whisky with him. He had apparently been waiting for me a long time, drinking and smoking the while. He was drunk, but he had kept his uniform neat. His tie was straight His cap was on and set at the proper angle. The uniform was important to him, was supposed to be important to me, too.

'Know who I am?' he said. 'Yes,' I said.

'I'm not as young as I was once,' he said. 'Haven't changed much, have I?'

'No,' I said. I've described him earlier in this account as having looked like a lean young wolf. When I saw him in my attic, he looked unhealthy-pale and stringy and hot-eyed. He had become less wolf than coyote, I thought His post-war years had not been years of merry blooming.

'Expecting me?' he said.

'You told me I could,' I said. I had to be polite and careful with him, I supposed correctly that he meant to hurt me. The fact that he was in a very neat uniform, and that he was smaller and much lighter than me, suggested that he had a weapon on him somewhere — most likely a gun.

He now got off the bucket, showing me, in his ramshackle rising, how drunk he was. He knocked the bucket over in the process.

He grinned. 'Ever have nightmares about me, Campbell?' he said.

'Often,' I said. It was a lie, of course.

'Surprised I didn't bring anybody with me?' he said.

'Yes,' I said.

'Plenty of people wanted to come along,' he said. 'There was a whole bunch wanted to come down with me from Boston. And after I got to New York this afternoon, I went into a bar and got talking to some strangers, and they asked if they could come along, too.'

'Um,' I said.

'And you know what I said to them?' he asked me.

'Nope,' I said.

'I said to them, "Sorry, boys — but this is a party just for Campbell and me. That's the way it's got to be just the two of us, face to face,"' he said.

'Um,' I said.

'"This thing's been a building over the years," I told 'em,' said O'Hare. '"It's in the stars — " I told 'em, "in the stars that Howard Campbell and me meet again after all these years." Don't you feel that way?' he asked me.

'What way?' I said.

'It's in the stars,' he said. 'We had to meet like this, right here in this very room, and neither one of us could have avoided it if we'd tried.'

'Possibly,' I said.

'Just when you think there Isn't any point to life — ' he said, 'then, all of a sudden, you realize you are being aimed right straight at something.'

'I know what you mean,' I said.

He swayed, steadied himself. 'You know what I do for a living?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'Dispatcher for frozen-custard trucks,' he said.

'Pardon me?' I said.

'Fleet of trucks goes around to factories, beaches, ballgames — anywhere there's people — ' O'Hare seemed to forget all about me for a few seconds, to reflect murkily on the mission of the trucks he dispatched. 'Custard machine's right there on the truck,' he murmured. Two flavors is all — chocolate and vanilla.' His mood was exactly what poor Resi's mood had been when she told me about the ghastly pointlessness of her job at a cigarette-making machine in Dresden.

'When the war ended,' O'Hare said to me, 'I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks.'

'I guess we've all had disappointments,' I said.

He didn't respond to this feeble try at brotherhood. His concern was for himself alone. 'I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter — ' he said. 'There wasn't anything I couldn't be,' he said.

'And then I got married — ' he said, 'and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall'

'Sorry,' I said.

'And I asked myself,' said O'Hare, 'what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What's the point of any of it?'

'Good questions,' I said softly, and I put myself close to a pair of heavy fire-tongs.

'And then somebody sent me a copy of that newspaper with the story of how you were still alive,' said O'Hare, and he relived for me the cruel excitement the story had given him. 'And then it hit me — ' he said, 'why I was alive, and what the main thing was I was supposed to do.'

He took a step toward me, his eyes wide. 'Here I come, Campbell, out of the past'

'How do you do?' I said.

'You know what you are to me, Campbell?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'You're pure evil,' he said. 'You're absolutely pure evil.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'You're right — it is a kind of compliment,' he said. 'Usually a bad man's got some good in him — almost as much good as evil. But you — ' he said, 'you're the pure thing. For all the good there is in you, you might as well be the Devil'

'Maybe I am the Devil,' I said.

'Don't think I haven't thought of that,' he said.

'What do you plan to do to me?' I asked him.

'Take you apart,' he said, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, rolling his shoulders, loosening them. 'When I heard you were alive, I knew it was something I had to do. There wasn't any way out' he said. 'It had to end like this.'

'I don't see why,' I said.

'Then, by God, I'll show you why,' he said. 'I'll show you, by God, I was born just to take you apart, right here and now.' He called me a yellow-belly. He called me a Nazi. And then he called me the most offensive compound word in the English language.

So I broke his good right arm with the fire-tongs.

That is the only violent act I ever committed in what has now been a long, long life. I met O'Hare in single combat, and I beat him. Beating him was easy. O'Hare was so drugged by booze and fantasies of good triumphing over evil that he hadn't expected me to defend myself.

When he realized that he'd been hit, that the dragon meant to give St. George a real tussle, he looked very surprised.

'So that's the way you want to play — ' he said.

And then the agony of a multiple fracture suffused his nervous system, and tears came to his eyes.

'Get out,' I said. 'Or do you want me to break your other arm, and your head, too?' I put the tip of the fire-tongs by his right temple, and I said, 'And I'll take the gun or the knife or whatever it is before you go'

He shook his head. The pain was so awful that he could not speak.

'You're not armed?' I said.

He shook his head again. 'Fair fight,' he said thickly. 'Fair.'

I patted his pockets, and there weren't any weapons on him. St. George had expected to take the dragon apart with his bare hands!

'You poor, silly, drunk, one-armed sonofabitch!' I said. I tore down the tent in my doorway, kicked out the zigzag of boards. I shoved O'Hare through the opening, onto the landing outside.

The railing stopped O'Hare, and he gazed down the stairwell, down a beckoning helix to the patch of sure death below.

'I'm not your destiny, or the Devil, either!' I said. 'Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that's all the glory you deserve!' I said. 'That's all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.'

'There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,' I said, 'but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all lands of ugliness so attractive.

'It's that part of an imbecile,' I said, 'that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.'

Whether it was my words or humiliation or booze or surgical shock that made O'Hare throw up, I do not know. Throw up he did. He flashed the hash down the stairwell from four stories up.

'Clean it up,' I said.

He faced me, his eyes still filled with undiluted hatred. 'I'll get you yet, brother,' he said.

'That may be,' I said. 'But it won't change your destiny of bankruptcies, frozen-custard, too many children, termites, and no cash. If you want to be a soldier in the Legions of God so much,' I told him, 'try the Salvation Army.'

And O'Hare went away.