by James Shields
First published in Hawaii Review, Volume One, Winter 1973
This is the General Purpose Medium on a hill just north of Mere et l’Enfant, under the shelter of which Jonnie McKean used to live. That was McKean’s cot, up front there, near the center pole.
A guy with matted hair parts the canvas flaps and says, “did you hear? Bayonet been sapped...Jonnie McKean is dead, man...”
Rain water flows down the center aisle, between the wooden cots, lapping at McKean’s duffel. At first the gunners and loaders and drivers in a huddle at the rear of the tent do not speak, do not look up. Then Ivory Lee Harris flaps his cards against the ammo crate and says, “what Fletcher want with Jonnie McKean?”
And somebody else says, “McKean still in Singapore...say, who dealt this shit?”
And somebody else, “how about we get some of McKean’s Platoon Sergeant-E-7-type money into this here game?”
And somebody, “McKean ain’t around...must be over to the Club.”
And, “ain’t McKean still on R and R?...look here, catch that ace, somebody, before it float to the sea...”
“Can’t you hear me?” says the guy with matted hair, a tent flap in each hand. “Jonnie McKean is...”
Jonnie McKean is dead.
* * * * *
This is Jonnie McKean rolling socks at Fort Quisling, New Jersey.
Go ahead and lay them side-on-side, Jonnie. Smooth them down. Roll. And tuck. Now put them in the top drawer of your foot locker, next to the picture of you and Elladine in Child’s on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City.
“Look here, Home,” says Albert Church, the thin man perched on the end of
McKean’s bunk, “you coming or not?”
Jonnie rolls, then tucks.
Jonnie McKean is a model trainee. They call him that because when they say, “shoot, McKean,” he will take up any one of a half-dozen weapons and fire it “Expert.” And when they say, “throw, McKean,” he will put a grenade out fifty meters or more and lay it in somebody’s pocket. And when they say, “run, McKean,” he will snug-up his big brown boots and run the mile in six minutes flat.
A “model trainee.”
“Look here, Home,” says Albert Church, “how about we go into Brown’s Mills, drink some, greeze, maybe scare us up a old woman?...I won’t axe you but three or four more times...”
“No, Albert,” says Jonnie McKean, “I think I’ll just roll these here socks.”
* * * * *
This is Jonnie McKean and his loader, Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein, out on Landing Zone Bayonet, a short while before the sapping. You can see the big 106 Recoilless Rifle still mounted on the gun jeep there to the right. And then the coils of concertina wire.
The men take up a sandbag in each hand and hustle across to their perimeter emplacement. They pack the bags down.
McKean sings his favorite song. “...there I go, there I go, there I-uh go...”
And Peanuts reflects on something he read once in the Nutley Sun. “...what I mean is, do they really take a man’s ears? take a man’s balls even? them gooks I mean...”
“...pretty baby,” sings McKean, “you are the soul who snaps my control...”
In the distance, there, a full company of infantry is spread over the chopper pad. The prelude to an airmobile insertion. Big, shiny slicks rock and clap over that sector of the perimeter. The concertina wire heaves. Trip flares burst into light. The door-gunners—snobs, elitists—lean out of the slicks and make faces at the infantrymen—paddy-pounders, grunts—on the pad below.
Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein shapes a sandbag with the flat of his entrenching tool, pressing his dialectic. “...but how can they do shit like that? take a man’s ears, a man’s...I mean, how can they do shit like that?”
“...such a funny thing but ever-time you near me,” goes McKean’s version of Moody’s Mood for Love, “I never kin behave...”
* * * * *
This is the brownstone in North Sixth Street where Jonnie and Elladine McKean rented a two-room flat in 1951. They sit in the tiny kitchen. Plans are made over coffee and donuts from Lester’s place.
Elladine will maintain the apartment while Jonnie is in Korea, they decide.
“But I don’t want you here all alone,” protests Jonnie, “and mama say her door always be open...”
“So you can have a place to come home to,” says Elladine, deciding, taking a big hand, “I will maintain the apartment while you far away...”
There’s Jonnie, later that afternoon, climbing up the dark stairway with the Newark Star-Ledger under his arm. Little Geneva Crowningburg says, “Mista McClean, kin you fix my Griselda? Ronnie Ray went and bust her all up.” She tugs at Jonnie’s baggy green pants.
Jonnie cradles the broken doll. It’s about as big as his hand.
“Please, Mista McClean?”
“If I just had me some light,” says Jonnie, “I’d fix this here quick as you could say, ‘ketch a tiger by the toe, if he holler...’ ”
Little Geneva Crowningburg sits at Jonnie’s feet. She smiles for the first time.
* * * * *
Here’s one of Resting and Recuperating Jonnie McKean poolside at the Seven Palms in Singapore. Big McKean in red trunks and dark glasses sips a tall drink and listens to his stomach rumble. He considers the evening meal: “I ain’t had no Eyetalian food in a long time...now what did Elladine call that rolled beef with the string?...brijuty?”
A slim Malay girl splashes and twitters in the green water. She waves a tan palm at Jonnie McKean.
Cool McKean ogles the beautiful Malay in the white bathing suit and thinks, “yeah, I’ll take me a ride up to Gino’s, later, and get me some of that brijuty.”
Now McKean notices that with concentration he can see right through the beautiful
Malay’s wet cotton suit. He adjusts his Polaroids.
* * * * *
This is Jonnie, pen-in-hand, re-enlisting for the last time. Captain Bruce Willians, the lab technician turned infantry officer, stands behind him. The small sweaty man with the camera is the Brigade Historian.
“Sergeant McKean,” says the Historian, “what are your retirement plans? for the record.”
“Well,” says grinning McKean, “I got only a year and a half to go now, and it’s been tough...the Army’s put me here, and then put me there...”
“Your plans, Sergeant McKean?”
“I think I’ll open a little club, back home in Newark. A good clean place where a man could take his woman of a Saturday night. Have a drink, hear some music. It’ll be called Jonnie McKean’s Melody Lounge. I plan to...”
“Thanks a lot, sarge.”
Captain Willians puts his arm around short-timer McKean and the Brigade Historian takes their picture. For the record.
* * * * *
This is one of Jonnie and Elladine McKean at the corner of McCarter Highway and Third Avenue. Across the busy highway—across Third Avenue from Michael Pici’s Expressway Shell service station—is a vacant lot. Jonnie and Elladine came here often to inspect the vacant lot.
The ’47 Buick—there, the one with the fox tails and mud flaps—is full of Puerto Ricans who wonder how they might get a dollar’s worth of Super Shell out of Michael Pici without giving him a dollar. Now the Puerto Ricans make their way up Pici’s asphalt driveway. They drag a flat spare tire boosted earlier in the day off the many-times humiliated Henry J parked forever at the corner of Mulberry and Market Streets.
Jonnie and Elladinc cross McCarter Highway and stand in their vacant lot. They wade in its overgrowth, kick its empty wine bottles and beer cans.
“Cinderblocks,” says Jonnie McKean, turning a rusted potato masher, “that’s all it take...a little paint...I could do the work my-own-self.”
“How about Tick Tock Spot?” says Elladine. She examines a Ripple bottle against the grey sky. “I like that. Tick Tock Spot.”
Now six Puerto Ricans flop a dead spare tire at Michael Pici’s feet. Pici looks skyward, mouth open, palms upturned and quivering. It’s the Italian “I don’t believe it” gesture.
The small dark men loom at his elbows. They move their hands rapidly, importuning.
“No,” says Jonnie McKean, tossing aside the potato masher, “Jonnie McKean’s Melody Lounge, and that’s that.”
The Puerto Ricans drag and kick the thready spare back to their ’47 Buick with the pom-pom fringe and the hood-mounted halcyon. Pici had been firm. Now he stands in his asphalt driveway giving the Italian “go-the-fuck-back-where-you-came-from” gesture.
The Puerto Ricans gather behind their silent car and begin to inch it back down Third Avenue, toward the river.
“But I like the name Tick Tock,” says Elladine, “bring the people in of a Saturday night...”
“That’s all been taken care of...Jonnie McKean’s Melody Lounge.”
The driveway bell sounds, and Michael Pici lumbers toward a ’46 Chrysler with a hand-painted green roof. He wipes his hands in an oily rag.
* * * * *
Here’s a good look at Landing Zone Bayonet from outside the perimeter, just before it was sapped. These small men in tan shorts are the sappers. They don’t wear shirts because they will soon have to slither through the barbed concertina wire that surrounds Landing Zone Bayonet.
The sappers smoke pot under a banana tree and watch McKean and Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein lift the 106 Recoilless Rifle off the gun jeep. They watch McKean and Peanuts line up rounds of ammo, and hustle sandbags to their emplacement. They circulate a fresh joint, and whisper the imminent sapping of Landing Zone Bayonet.
“...come let us visit out there,” sings McKean, “in that new Promised Land...”
It’s hard to see the chopper pad from this angle because of the triplestacks of concertina wire, but you can see the cluster of hovering slicks.
“...maybe there, we can find,” goes Jonnie McKean, “a good place to use this loving state of mind...”
One sapper holds up a leather pouch for the others to see. He attaches it to his waist with a length of vine. He holds up an elk-handled knife for the others to see.
“...I’m so tired of being without,” sings McKean, “and never knowing what love’s about...”
* * * * *
This is Elladine McKean, 19, of North Sixth Street, Newark, New Jersey. Tall, delicate, and nice. She is dying in the arms of one Asa Babel, night orderly at St. Barnabas Hospital. Babel wraps Elladine in some wrinkled sheets of the day’s Star-Ledger, and says, “some joker just kicked her out of a old Caddy and then drove off...she’s cut bad...” Babel begins to cry. His hands are purple with newsprint.
Now Elladine is dead, Dr. C. C. Jones presiding. The crowd admires her blue velvet dress, speculating, pressing forward.
When they caught Travis Huntsberry beside a violated parking meter down on Market Street a week later, he just put aside his can opener and his cap full of coins, and said: “she was my woman, see?...then I found her out to Lester’s Tick Tock Diner doing head-jobs in a phone booth, see?...nickel and diming, see?...so I took this bottle in my right hand, see?...and I split it, see?...and I got that velvet dress of hers in my left hand, see?...”
PFC Jonnie McKean received the details during a ten minute interview with the Pusan representative of the American Red Cross.
* * * * *
Here’s Jonnie McKean just a minute or so before he took a half-pound of hot, whirling shrapnel. He washes in his steel pot. Lathers. He begins to coax razor bumps from his plump cheeks.
Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein sits in the gun jeep scribbling a letter to his mother. A letter from Landing Zone Bayonet to Nutley, New Jersey.
If you look beyond Peanuts and well into the concertina, you will see the sappers guiding their satchels of Chi-Com grenades through the coils and under the barbs and trip wires and around the dangling beer cans. They are on their way to a giggly, uproarious daylight sap.
Don’t look for rifles. Sappers don’t carry any. Might as well throw your gun down a sump as give it to a sapper.
McKean rinses, relathers. He begins again his painful coaxing. Peanuts hooks his little feet in the steering wheel and touches the pencil point to his tongue.
* * * * *
McKean comes in the front door of the two-room flat in North Sixth Street. He snaps on the light.
There’s the TV. And the convertible sofa. The tiny kitchen is dark.
“I’m home,” he says.
* * * * *
This is Jonnie McKean only a week or so ago working over the breech mechanism of his 106 mm Recoilless Rifle. That’s an oiled tee-shirt, the green thing in his left hand. He has a bit of steel wool in the right.
Jonnie sings, “there I go, there I go, there I-uh go...”
Captain Bruce Willians walks with dignity from the Orderly Room, polishing an apple on his sleeve. This is the same fastidious little man from Little Cloud, Iowa, who, bored with lab work, activated his National Guard commission and wound up in charge of the perimeter security of Hill 35. He fills a day munching apples, and wondering why he commands only Jonnie McKean and his platoon of gun jeeps, and not a hard-charging, ass-kicking line company.
“...there’s music all around me,” goes Jonnie, “crazy music—music that keeps calling me so very close to you, turns me to a slave...”
“Hey, McKean.”
“Hey, sir. Howzit? and ain’t it a fine day?”
“I just got a call from Division TOC,” says Willians, a sputtering fountain of apple bits, “they want me to detail a gun and crew out to Landing Zone Bayonet...like, to beef-up their perimeter...”
McKean works the oiled tee-shirt. “Push-come-to-shove,” he says, “Bayonet be needing a good gun and crew...”
McKean clangs the breech shut. He moves out along the slim black barrel, steel wool held high in his right hand.
“I can give them Ivory Lee Harris and Peanuts,” says McKean, “and the number two gun...Bayonet be squared away...”
“You don’t understand, McKean, I want you out there, personal. This is important. Division Tactical Operations Center, after all...”
McKean wipes the apple decorations off his 106.
“Long time since I been detailed anywhere, sir...”
“This isn’t a detail, McKean. One does not ‘detail’ a Platoon Sergeant E-7. You’re just doing me a special favor.”
McKean studies a diamond of rust near the muzzle. Grinds it off. Wipes the spot down.
“...you have your best gun and your best crewman and yourself ready to move at 0630 hours tomorrow...”
Willians tosses the apple core away and marches back to the Orderly Room. Sweat shows in dark patches on his back.
Jonnie McKean oils the green tee-shirt.
“O baby,” he sings, “you make me feel so good, let me take you by the hand...”
In the distance, there, Captain Bruce Willians takes an apple out of the Orderly Room’s Panasonic refrigerator. He laughs at the conversation of his Personnel Specialists.
* * * * *
Here’s Jonnie McKean coming in the front door of Leroy’s Cozy Corner down on Springfield Avenue. The men at the bar do not look up from their beers and hard-boiled eggs, do not speak.
“Hiya, Jonnie,” says Leroy at last, wiping his hands in the long white apron.
“Hiya, Leroy,” says Jonnie McKean, “long time, no see.”
” ’nother beer,” calls Bond Henry Turner, “these eggs sure do make a man thirsty.”
* * * * *
This is Landing Zone Bayonet with the first three Chi-Coms in the act of exploding. Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein begins to tumble toward the 106 emplacement, his feet still hooked in the steering wheel, the Nutley letter still in his hand. And Jonnie McKean, a startled look on his face, is going down slow. He drips great balls of lather.
A door gunner in the slick hovering overhead watches the perimeter position being sapped and screams into his throat mike. He doesn’t know what the fuck to shoot at.
Now Peanuts settles in a heap near the gun. Three more Chi-Com grenades detonate, one still in the hand of a puzzled sapper. Jonnie McKean closes his eyes.
The sapper with the leather pouch and the elk-handled knife giggles, and moves toward Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein.
Down on the chopper pad the grunts have heard the explosions. One turns to another and says, “is this mother being sapped?”
* * * * *
This is lean Jonnie McKean fresh from Korea. He stands in the vacant lot at the corner of McCarter Highway and Third Avenue—the one just across from the Expressway Shell service station run by Esperanza Dominguez and her two smiling sons.
Winter in Newark, and the sky is low and grey. The wind coming off the river is cold. Jonnie McKean, alone, bends and picks up a crusted wine bottle.
The driveway bell sounds in the winter afternoon. Esperanza and her boys come out of the office smiling and wiping their hands in green rags. They surround a ’51 Kaiser.
The cold wind comes in low off the river, tugs at Jonnie McKean’s cap.
* * * * *
There’s Jonnie McKean on his knees, trembling. Dying. There’s dead Peanuts with his steering wheel, his letter.
The sappcr with the leather pouch runs in small circles, laughing, crying. He decorates the long barrel of the 106 with pieces of dead Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein.
In the background you can see the grunts pounding up the road from the chopper pad. They lock magazines in their black rifles. They are business-like.
One sapper continues to poke around in the rubble of Jonnie McKean’s gun emplacement, laughing, crying. He is looking for his right hand.
The pouch-man wipes his elk-handled knife in an oily green tee-shirt.
Jonnie McKean flops forward into some empty burlap sandbags. A small cloud of red dust marks his passing.
* * * * *
Here’s Elladine peering into the old refrigerator in North Sixth Street.
“Jonnie McKean,” she calls in mock anger, “did you eat up all that pie by your-own-self?”
Jonnie sinks down into the big easy chair. He hides behind his newspaper.
* * * * *
Here’s a good shot of Landing Zone Bayonet with the sappers staked out hand and foot in the old dirt road.
The grunts cover beatific McKean with a poncho. But nobody will go near Richard “Peanuts” Rottenstein. Nobody will go near the small pieces of him drying to parchment on the long, graceful barrel of the 106.
The grunts crank up the battered gun jeep and roll it slowly back and forth over the sappers. An officer tells them to “knock it off.”
Rain falls over Jonnie McKean’s poncho.
* * * * *
And here’s one of Jonnie McKean with a beautiful Malay girl dining at Gino’s on Orchard Road in Singapore. The withered Chinese at the cash register is Gino.
“Yeah, girl,” says Jonnie McKean over his red wine, “I’m gonna retire in about ten months from now—that means quit, see?—then I’m gonna build me a little place back home in Newark. You ever been to Newark, girl?”
She giggles and takes his meaty hand. Her breasts are dark, in a bower of filmy pastels.
Jonnie McKean is hungry, and he says to Gino, “brijuty! brijuty!...say, what the hell kind of Eye-talian are you anyway?”
Gino screws up his face and scratches his head with a pencil.
The beautiful Malay laughs, and squeezes Jonnie McKean’s big hand.