TEST QUESTION: WHO IS HARLEY?
I'm Harley. Harley is me. I speak of myself in the third person sometimes. I think because I can't really nail it down any more, can't say "I" without laughing sometimes. I'm not just being an asshole here, in other words. Anyway, Harley. He works in Buildings and Maintenance at Western Living Magazine. They put up with his little thingies, his silences, his strangeness. There's a heavy old military presence throughout the staff. They think he's Regular Army, a regular guy like them. "Hell of a game last night," they say, and he nods, even though he hates sports. There's a picture of GWB above the Manager's desk. "That's my man up there," he says with true veneration. He used to be a cop, a vice creep. When Harley first interviewed he said, "You smell like you been drinkin." "Not this morning," Harley told him. "Not all day while you're here," he was warned. The others are carpenters who furnish the place with fine wooden tables and captain's chairs and all the varnished redwood benches that line the halls. The Wise Old Man of the Village is a guy named Bear, a crusty old Sioux you'd trust with your life. He's on the AA lookout and spots Harley for a Pilgrim right away. He leaves the Big Book around where Harley'll see it, puts little gifts in his cubby, like bags of loose tobacco and papers, a Gideon, a charm of some sort he got in the Bad Lands where he learned his Medicine. Harley takes these things but he can find no use for them. That satisfies Bear.
Listen. I'm not crazy. I just needed to get out. So first I faked a seizure, only it was for real.
There's a chick named Julie who gives him her number. He calls her up one night and says all that about the seizures. Then he tells her how Father Truth just stood there when it happened. He dropped his precious phone, his Power Object. It wouldn't break, but it sounded like it should. Everything was suddenly so fragile. The softness of the girl's skull, how it opened like a melon. It seemed amazing that all these fragile things could go on for so long. When you saw how they split open, shattered, splintered and flew in all directions. There was a swath of blood across the front of the truck that looked like a swift gesture of old style abstract art. That's all he said to her. Then he was embarrassed and hung up. Next day they had lunch together in the patio and talked about other things. She had the most beautiful hair he had ever seen.
Funny what you notice. An elaborately monogrammed handkerchief that the poorest of the poor wipes his brow with, wipes the tears away with. Did he know her? It didn't matter. She was of his people and these huge men in armored cars who brazened on through raising weapons and flags were not. Or the other guy, a brother. How many brothers did she have? Two, she had said. So this wasn't one, he was too old. The oldest was Father Truth. But he was Father Truth, and very much older than the boy. Well … not long ago, really not so very long ago, he'd been running to the edge of the high dive and two guys sitting below were watching. "Come on, let's see a nice jackknife there, dude," and so Harley had perversely bounced off, grasped his knees and rolled like a ball into the unbelievably hard and cold water way below. He heard, "Ah, pussy!" even though one ear was plugged, and when the other guy shouted, "No, it's for real!" and dove in after him.
Julie said, "Do you want to come over tonight?"
"Maybe not," he told her.
He started running. Every night after work. He ran for an hour or so, all around the neighborhood, even on the grounds of the VA. When he saw Cremer he just nodded.
"I know you; you know me," Cremer said to him with his goofy smile. "We're cool, right? Family, right?"
"Yeah, we're cool," he told him. Family. Hospitalers.
The old CO cackled with a sound of squashed bubble-wrap. "Father of lies, dwell with me in Paradise," he said, and he nodded his head like an oil derrick.
* * *
"I know you're drinkin at lunch," Baldwin, the Manager, said.
"I have a beer sometimes, Mister Bald One," Harley said. It always came out sounding like that. Bald One. Funny thing, though, he was bald. Didn't seem to piss him off, though, or he just wasn't saying. More interested in Harley's little problem, which is known as Substance Abuse by his medicine small M.
"No, you're not having a beer. You're having three. I know alkies. I'm still a cop. Was in for my twenty. Booze, narcotics, whores, the whole bit. That doesn't go away. I can smell it. Bear knows, too. Talk to him."
* * *
There was a guard at the gate today, there's never a guard; it was a big black guy with a silver ear ring, I hate that.
"You sure you belong here?" he asked.
"Would I have a card?"
"Easy to obtain those, you got the connections."
"Who'd want to get in here?" I'm demanding. I'm ready to get out of the car, ready to start something. He'd have me down in seconds but first I'd bust his lip open. "What's so special? The cafeteria? Maybe the electric pool full of screaming crazies. Ever been in there, Brown? Feels so good the water's always full of cum. I used to have to scoop it up, pour it into milk bottles for Research. 'Thank you,' they say, and toss you a quarter. A quarter! What is this, 1936? Fuckin lames. Hey, want a brew? Give you one for five of your goats, your dogs, your children."
"You go on now," he says. He knows it's gonna be trouble he doesn't need right now, it's the end of his shift. He doesn't need to be filling out no long incident report. And would they believe him he wasn't hassling one of Our Boys here?
"I'm fuckin your sister," I said as I drove through. "Tell them No Man has fucked her. No Man."
* * *
"Go adjust this gal's chair," said Baldwin. "She's over in Business. You know, all the cute ones. That cute little Arab. You'll get along fine."
Her name is Teri Habeeb. He just nods and goes to work only … well, she looks like … He starts chattering away in Arabic. Anything he can think of. A place in Baghdad that had been a bazaar. A neighborhood he knew where he used to visit a certain apartment in mufti. He thought he was in love with the girl there. She was very beautiful. So is Teri. Really stunning. And bubbly and bright but she looks just like the girl would look if she could grow older.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I don't speak it. Not even my mother. Grandma did but … she died when I was real little. I hardly remember her. My father is American."
But he just went on, singing occasionally, singing the song he had learned there. "Burtaqali" it went, over and over and over again, which means orange orange orange (can hear old Bald One, "Oh, yeah, Agent Orange. I was in on that," and you see this guy in an orange trench coat he go BANG-BANG-BANG on the door, "Any Popish in there? Albigensian heretic sumbitch? Holdouts from Montaillou messin with the Persian Myst in the motherfucker fashion?") …"Know that one?" he shrills, he's losing his voice from all that sweet rag croonin. "It was big then. Maybe big for a thousand years."
She pretended to look busy, filing and stuff. He asked her out. She said No.
…where the convoys make a sharp turn and have to slow down. I didn't.
But I told that chick, that journalist, "My second day in Iraq this little six year-old Iraqi girl was run down by some infidel sumbitch. The accident occurred a few inches, say five and three eighths, six, from the border of Iraq and Kuwait. A Pakistani truck driver, contracted by the US's KBR trucking firm – that's for Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is subsidiary of whom? What? Where? Why, Halliburton, hon – well he threw a water bottle to this girl from the window of his truck. She ran out into the road to retrieve it and the poor little thing got hit by another convoy passing in the opposite direction (knew the driver. Knew him extremely up close and personal because he's me; knew him for an alky irresponsible, furthermore given to idiot seizures; asshole agent of that Shaitan nigguh is what, He Who Waits At Crossroads, heh-heh-heh.)
"This event was the first unveiling of the Truth of War for me, or war as the Father of Truth.
"At the scene of the accident, when the Law Givers arrived to began negotiating reparations with the family of the dead girl, almost a hundred people had gathered. You get this interesting nexus of cultures: British soldiers on patrol passing through (your Colonel Lawrence he no longer look so beautiful blond in vanilla milk Shaikh or even kakhi or karkhi the way them Brits pronounce but your clouded day in London Town white dappled on gray, all the rage of the 229th, luv); two Czech wrecker operators come out to retrieve the damaged truck (‘Hey, don't worry, Schweik: lill six year-old cunt kid don't bust up them big mother eighteen wheels, ya tink?'); women who had begun wailing in ritual and real mourning, the girl's father ready to discuss the money his daughter's life was worth – or he'll take dogs, goats, other children – and, Oh yeah, our nice green young men in the uniform of our race, the lot of them centered around the blanketed body of the girl. This is the Body of Truth. This is the Blood of Truth. Tasty, though, ain't it, darlin?"
This is the dish I gave the newsie broad, adding, "Dig though, hon, the skinny from Monsalvat here appended: Know then that a crowd which is excited and absorbed in looking at, listening to, or talking about the same event, readily becomes a mob when some simple line of action is proposed. It does not then take skill in leadership to sway a mob to action. Nor need the leader be possessed of any wisdom in the course of action proposed. All that he must have is an ability to get attention – as he may, if he is big, noisy, ugly or standing on a box."
