Rough God Goes Riding (from Alone with The Owl, New Rivers Press) ------------------------------- Contact Alan Davis

(© 2000 by Alan Davis) Other stories in Alone with the Owl have appeared in ACM, Ascent, The Chattahoochee Review, The Cream City Review, The Great River Review, Image, North Dakota Quarterly, The Quarterly, San Jose Studies and South Dakota Review. The author is grateful to the editors of these publications.

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I moved to St. Cloud to get an education and stayed, working as a housepainter, until duty called. My great-grandfather had served in the Great War, my grandfather had served in the Good War and my father had gone to another one. It was my turn. They sent me straight to a theater of operation, a place where my ancestors once lived. It had a name nobody in my company, even the lieutenant, knew how to pronounce

Our barracks had concertina wire and guard towers. It was like we were prisoners and not liberators. The sergeant said, cocking his hat like a gun and placing his hand on a shoulder of Carol, "These people need our help, because we're Americans and they're not." He dismissed us, then called us back to pass out leaflets that promised a free Florida vacation to anyone who volunteered for another year of overseas duty.

From the tiny slit next to my bunk I could see the church spire in the village, could see cupolas and bell towers. Sometimes I glimpsed skiffs slicing through the faraway blue water. The shelling had stopped when we arrived because we'd let everyone know we'd kick butt if it didn't. I would stare from the slit through its shatterproof mesh and wonder what the place was like. If I strained my eyes, I could see what looked like an amusement park with roller coaster tracks snaking through the hills and bright lights sparkling after dark. "That's the fleshpot of the peninsula," the lieutenant said. "That's where The Queen of England lives." He showed me a photograph.

It was months before I saw the place for myself. Behind the concertina wire, we were protected from the villagers. They no longer bombed one another, but half the countryside was booby-trapped and unspent shells littered the land. We were kept busy with calisthenics and maneuvers, with language lessons and weapons training. I had a facility for language acquisition that surprised me; my Fosdek became not fluent but serviceable. Maybe it was racial memory. "Anyway," the lieutenant told me, "everybody knows some English." Most nights, it was lights-out and straight off to bed, all of us too exhausted for anything else. We got the occasional beer, the occasional beefsteak barbecue. Once, a band was brought in with trumpets, saxophones, and cornets, with tubas and a bass drum. But social intercourse was strictly controlled. As for the constant stream of refugees who stumbled past the gatehouse on the road near the messhall, they looked like barbarians to me, all right.

I wasn't meant to be a soldier. I didn't like dismantling, oiling, and reassembling the light machine gun for target practice. We sprayed better than six hundred rounds a minute into straw-filled dummies meant to resemble various factions from the local population. "Shoot the fuckers," the sergeant told us. "You're Americans, and they're not."

I took a liking to Carol. There was a high infectious laugh and a whimsical way of biting on one nail when she looked at me. We would eat our beefsteaks and talk. We were both from the Midwest, and felt a little funny around people from other places. We never put it quite that way, of course, but I took Carol for a kindred spirit, an innocent like me, until I noticed the way her eyes tightened around the sniper scope. She would blast target after target with cheerleader relish, and lick her lips with satisfaction. She was so good they made her Delta Force; she scored one hundred percent hits at six hundred and fifty yards and better than ninety percent at eleven hundred yards.

I did all right myself and one day the lieutenant pulled me aside and set up special lessons for me on the shooting range with a 9mm semi-automatic. "I've got my eye on you," he said. "You know how to be secret. You're picking up the lingo faster than anyone else is. You're agent material." I learned how to mix ordinary household chemicals to make bombs that could level a city block. "This is like candle and blood, dude," the sergeant told me one night. "You're becoming one of the elect. Did you re-up for that Florida vacation yet?" They taught me how to be a killer, worked me to the limits of my endurance. "You'll be grateful out in the world." They let me grow back my hair, intensified my language- immersion program. I wasn't supposed to talk in anything but Fosdek so that I would feel more comfortable outside the wire.

I wrote letters home and mailed them every day. But the letters were never answered. All any of us received were advertising brochures, contest announcements, political newsletters from local representatives, invitations to join record clubs or to buy special-edition ceramic-ware embossed with patriotic imagery.

The local castle was close to the village. One cold day the captain took the company there for some R and R. I needed it. I was waking up every night screaming. Besides, there was a man in my platoon, T-Bo Malloy, a weightlifter with a body like concrete, who caught me talking to Carol. He let me know she was off-limits unless he gave the word. "I'm kind of like, you know, her bodyguard?" he said. "Don't take it personal, but you're becoming the sort of person she's not allowed to associate with."

At the castle, set on a slope and tilted at an almost impossible angle, the captain paid our zlotnys for us and ordered us to stay in a group, but Carol and I managed to get lost while the others walked the parapets, sighted from the battlements, took snapshots of the turrets, the drawbridge and the dungeon. Carol and I ended up holding hands and fooling around in the dim light of a winding stairwell which led to the chapel. Touching the thick, wily hair on one of her arms sent the blood. "I can't kill anybody," I confessed to her. "I'm not made that way. I belong back in St. Cloud."

She told me I looked a little like the boyfriend she had back home. "Only he's not my boyfriend anymore," she said.

On the bus back to the barracks, an army surplus job that rocked on rough road, T-Bo was beside himself, flexing his gigantic biceps. He sat next to me, his immensity forcing me against the window. I tried to ignore him, stared at the villages, now overhung by dark clouds. The cold, northeasterly bora wind rapped against the glass. Gaunt-faced starving children in rags waved at me. I wondered what their parents could be thinking, wrapping them in nothing when the wind was so cold. I wanted to throw them a candy bar or something, but the window was screwed shut.

T-Bo squeezed my wrist. "You son-of-a-bitch," he said. "You know I could break every bone in your body and the lieutenant would look the other way. You know that, don't you? Don't contaminate that girl."

"Contaminate?" I said, loud enough to attract attention.

"That's two strikes," he whispered. "One more, you're done."

Back at the barracks, the pace of training accelerated and before I knew it spring had arrived. It was like there was a glass curtain between me and the rest of the company. And T-Bo was always in the picture, between the regular troops and me. "I've fixed it for you," he said to me once. "I've arranged things. Trust me." By then, the bora wind was a distant memory. The lieutenant made me an official infiltrator, provided me with papers, put me in civvies, gave me some currency, dollars, zlotnys, I could never keep them straight - and sent me to live in the village.

My fear of getting found out or shot followed me everywhere; I carried my 9mm strapped to an ankle under a cuff of my workpants. I didn't think I could shoot anyone, even with my training, because I was a nice guy, American through and through. But the villagers were nothing like the fun-loving folk I had imagined from my narrow bunk. Some of them were miners with smudged faces who probably never saw daylight and who stayed as drunk as they could manage. Some were in the trades, counted every zlotny and kept their eyes on me until I was out of sight. I got along best with the farmers who came into town twice a week to get drunk. My father is a farmer, and they're all alike, talking weather and maintaining a barren kind of dignity. I also got along with the laborers who made their money climbing up and down the mountains, working as mules for employers they refused to name. In the taverns, they would listen ferociously to pop muzica.

By bribing a tradesman, I got a job in a sort of kiosk near the harbor, on a shell-pocked road that also happened to be the road from the barracks. Soldiers passed all the time. Carol stopped once to buy a snack, but there was no giveaway recognition in her eyes or in mine. Refugees, carrying everything they owned on their backs, stopped and begged for crumbs. I resented them for not dying.

I lived there almost a year. I even had a woman for a while, one who had lost fingers on her hands. Then she disappeared and I forgot about her. I was paying my own way. I had a room over a barbershop. Of course, I also had the barbershop wired and reported on a regular basis to the lieutenant. I began to feel guilty about my double life; I found myself identifying with the rough pleasures and bitter views of the villagers. It was great to smoke a cigarette with them in a coffeehouse now and then without feeling like a criminal, the way I did back in St. Cloud where so many people believe that destiny is a thing we can control, that life is like clay that can be molded, that the right vitamins can make you never get sick.

In the village, we drank sodny by the gallon, hated almost everyone and didn't disguise it. Why should we? It felt great to say, "I hate those bastards," something I had never said before in my life. "Stinking Americans," I'd mutter under my breath. I saw what life was. I'd listen maliciously to local tales of gun-running refugees raped and stoned to death, of villagers with the wrong blood in their veins who had to be beaten until they left town once and for all. It was like the Old West. "They're in the forbidden village now, the one down the highway," I was told. "Where The Queen of England lives. If you ever go there, take some dynamite with you. Blow some of those fucking cunts to kingdom come."

One dark night, so drunk I could barely follow my own thoughts, I stumbled into the street when I saw Carol with several of her friends. It was a cloudy night without a moon and I followed at a distance, lonely, making up my mind to approach her. Then I saw her kissing some guy who looked like T-Bo. My thought was this: What would it be like to kill him and rape her? My fellow villagers had told me rape was the best sex you could get. Could I justify raping Carol in the name of national security? Wasn't she a refugee, after all, someone here in my village without permission, spying on us, usurping my job? But somehow I lost her on the streets built atop one another like a winding staircase. I wanted to fall down in the dark and weep. What had they done to me? Where did I belong? I didn't know who I was anymore. Besides, what if we did stop the killing? Wouldn't it just be a matter of time until the villagers received coupons for free Florida vacations? There was something about tribal genocide I had come to admire. At least they cared enough about something to kill each other over it.

Dogs were howling all around me. I kept walking in the dark, aiming for some faraway lights, until I was surrounded by strange structures and realized where I was. It was the forbidden village. Muzica was everywhere, violins in the restaurants, brass bands clanging away under streetlights. Ladies of the evening surrounded me, but they weren't crudely dressed. They wore gray, tailored suits and carried attaché cases. Banners fluttered from the tilted, half-timbered eaves, and a woman with wingtip shoes put an arm around my waist. "You ready for a date, honey?" she said. "No, no, just looking," I said, whereupon a man in a bright gypsy vest stepped in front of me, his hands balled into fists. "Something wrong with her, brother?" he said. "I'm just not in the mood," I answered. He gripped my wrist. I thought he might break a bone. After that, everything blurs together, but I know that I knew that my cover was blown. Still reeling from drink, I made my way from alley to alley, avoiding scattered debris from the war. I went from rooftop to rooftop, keeping to the shadows, putting into practice everything I had learned. Escape was the only motive. I came upon a kind of roller coaster that transported miners to and from the mountains. With the sound of dogs and whistles behind me, I began to climb up the narrow-gauge track straight into the sky until I was high enough to look down at the colored banners and strolling figures of the village that from above promised so much pleasure. The darkness around the village was dotted with the flickering lights of refugee campfires and the occasional flash of munitions. Shots rang out below and the heel of one foot started to sting terribly when a bullet found its mark. The tracks swayed in the wind. It struck me that I was climbing a ladder into the clouds. Attacked by vertigo, I closed my eyes, frozen with fear, until I heard the rumble of guide wheels on the tracks and then saw the roller coaster approaching from below, crawling up the incline. I swung myself over the edge of the tracks and hung from the scaffold. When the open cars were passing above me, I pulled myself up and jumped aboard. Minutes later I flung myself into a farmer's field and went limping along until a convertible approached. I stuck out my thumb and the vehicle stopped. The two women in it had long hair. One of them was The Queen of England. The other was Carol. "Hop in, lover boy," The Queen of England said. Carol looked at me funny, biting a nail. I crunched in between them and we drove along fast, our hair whipping in the wind. Carol loosened up and held my hand. We smoked cigarettes and drank vodka, threw the butts and empty bottles at the refugees who clogged the road. "This is what it's like to be an American!" I screamed. But then The Queen of England pulled a gun on me. "Get out!" she said. "I'm right behind you." She had a Galil Sniping Rifle, the buttstock still folded. She disappeared off into the weeds. A Galil could score a head shot at three hundred meters. The lieutenant clapped me on the back. "Mission accomplished!" he screamed. "We contained the crisis. I can't tell you everything, but you'll definitely get a medal. You ready for that Florida vacation?" I didn't know what to say. Stalling for time, I took out a pocketknife and went to work on the bullet in the heel of my foot. I cut away the sock. Once the wound was bandaged, they gave me a pill and took me back to the barracks.

But something inside me was finished forever.

I never took them up on the vacation in Miami. Now I'm back in St. Cloud, housepainting again, being an American. I did my duty.

Hey, did you do yours?

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