#john kendall

[dndhistory]

281. John Kendall - Endless Quest #15: Under Dragon's Wing (1984)

The 15th book in the Endless Quest series follows the main character, Treon, a prince of a besieged kingdom as he goes out with his elven tutor Rynath to find some help to regain the safety of the kingdom of Grendopolan and defeat the armies of the Crimson Wizard.

As you can see from the title, Dragons come into it as well. in fact as you start off you reach a town where a mysterious woman gives you the option to buy either a book of spells or a ring with a dragon on it. Pretty much whatever you choose you will be able to access both which will give you access to dragons, good ones, bad ones or even turn the player into a dragon. After this the book takes the form of a kind of strategic adventure where you have to pick and choose how to confront the Crimson Wizard's army and how you defend your family. Your choices determine the ending.

With a cover by Elmore, which is unfortunately not an original one, being cropped from the cover of The Best of Dragon Magazine Vol. 3, it's still a fun little book. Little is known of John Kendall, the author as well, although he did contribute to TSR's Fantasy Forest series of gamebooks.

[tuxedo-birds]

Gray Currawong (Strepera versicolor)

© John Kendall

[transbirds]

Pink-throated Twinspot (Hypargos margaritatus)

© John Kendall

[dreamsthatglitter-xo]

Review: Plan B for Utopia

Review: Plan B for Utopia

On Thursday, we (a coach load of first year dance students) went on a trip to Deda, Derby to see Plan B for Utopia by Joan Clevillé Dance. Here’s a summary of what it’s about and my thoughts after seeing it. I’m starting with a review of this performance as it was the most recent thing I saw, but there are a few more performances I’ve seen in the past few weeks that I hope to post about very soon…

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[madartlab]

Mad Quickies: The Star-Spangled Edition

Mad Quickies: The Star-Spangled Edition

Happy Independence Day, you people in America. Apologies to everyone else. I have some red-white-and-blue items—and a whole lot of Captain America—mixed in with the rest of your links today just because who doesn’t love a theme. Let’s pretend that we’re not all going to hell in a hand basket [whatever that is] and explode some dangerous fire materials, eat some questionable snacks and drink an…

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[ifyouonlynews]

Man Shot By SWAT Team After Calling 911 To Report A Fugitive

Man Shot By SWAT Team After Calling 911 To Report A Fugitive

When citizens call authorities to make a report, the last thing they expect is to suffer an injury from those same police. Unfortunately that’s exactly what happened to a Washington man. He called 911 last month to report seeing a fugitive and got a bullet wound courtesy of the Vancouver SWAT team.

The man, who doesn’t want to be identified, called 911 after spotting 59-year-old fugitive John…

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[thelifepartners]

John Kendall

Acacia

Photo by yeweni

It was late and I was twirling my wedding ring on the table, debating whether I should call Charlotte or if I should wait for her to call me when the phone rang and my mother told me that Acacia was dead. “She drowned,” she said, quite casually as I sank into my chair. “Is that the right term? I don’t know. Anyway, she was on a hike or something and she got stuck in quicksand and drowned.” My mother never really liked Acacia, and didn’t spend much time eulogizing her. She went on to tell me about my rambunctious nieces and my father’s back pain but all I could think of was the last time I saw Acacia, or what felt like the last time I saw her. We were in my muddied white Honda, on its last limbs, and had just pulled into Santa Barbara—I remember the sun was discoloring the sky like a fruit left out too long. We were low on gas and hadn’t spoken all day; at that point we just couldn’t stand each other. She filled up the car while I went inside. I took a piss and bought some snacks, a bottled water for myself and one—reluctantly—for her. I was standing in line, staring at some gaudy gas station painting of a falcon when I heard my car’s engine start. I turned around just in time to see her pull out of the gas station and disappear down the street. Watching the dust clouds dissolve, I actually just laughed. I felt relieved. I paid for the snacks and the two waters—I still bought her that water—and sat on the curb outside. It had been almost two months on the road, starting in bliss and slowly deteriorating into misery.  The actual last time I saw her, we bumped into each other at the O’Hare airport on our way to connecting flights. I had spent the five years since she deserted me hating her and desperately hating that that was how I felt. I told her it was good to see her and she said the same. She didn’t apologize for stealing my car and leaving me in some gas station in the middle of nowhere after three years together—the third year being condensed into that last two months on the road. She didn’t say the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” or “I love you” or anything. She kept it in her glossy, azure eyes. I asked her where she was going and she smiled, looking around and squirming in her spot on the ground. We hugged and inadvertently kissed and, as if it was tradition, did not say goodbye. After my mother hung up, leaving me with the news of Acacia’s death, I started the second draft of this story. The first draft was written as it happened and then it was called Directionless (Acacia’s suggestion). It was in the glove box—black with my ink, red with hers—when she drove off, leaving me at that gas station in Santa Barbara. It’s with her now. Her parents named her after a tree and she spent her life (her lives) trying to uproot herself. She is survived by the following: Let’s leave, she said. I opened my eyes to see Acacia sitting impatiently on her knees next to me. “What time is it?” I asked, shifting on my mattress, looking for my clock. She said “Three-thirty, let’s leave.” I sat up, bracing myself on my elbows. Acacia had this wild look in her eyes. In the dark of the room, with the reflected glow of the moon, it was all I could really make out. “What?” “Let’s leave. Right now. Pack a few things and we’ll just get in your car and go.” My eyes adjusted to the light. Acacia’s plump cheeks had a vermilion glow, paired with an ecstatic, unhinged smile. She brushed her blonde hair out of her freckled face and readjusted her smile. I reminded her that I couldn’t go, that I had at work in the morning and class afterwards. She put her hands to my cheeks and leaned in closer. “You’re not getting me, John. Let’s leave.” I stared into her eyes. They were full of so much resolve and elation that it was nearly leaking out in tears. I suddenly knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t proposing the kind of midnight escapade that a bored insomniac might venture on, but the exodus of a resolute with nothing to lose. “Okay,” I said. We wrapped our arms around each other and kissed passionately. Then, our lips separated and we looked into each other’s eyes. My heart felt like a sky with a sun in it for the first time. I dumped my textbooks out of my bag and filled it with a random assortment of clothes picked out in the dark. I grabbed my camera, my journal, a handful of pens and my toothbrush. Acacia loaded a separate bag with food. We packed quickly and quietly so as to not wake my roommate. Finally, with my shoes barely on, I snatched my keys and sunglasses from the counter, and closed my eyes to take a quick mental inventory of what else I needed or wanted to take. “Ready?” Acacia asked, her hand firmly wrapped around the door handle. I held up a patient finger and went back into my room. I dug around my dresser and pulled out my grandmother’s engagement ring. It was foolish of me to bring it, but if Acacia would stay with me after turning down two proposals, a third attempt would at least be a charming running joke. “Ready,” I said. Acacia opened the door and we left.

***

By the time the sun showed itself in the sky we were well acquainted with the morning and had made it out of the city with the road fading behind us like a dream upon waking. Neither of us could sit still. We cranked up the music and sang along, finding deep meanings to pop songs. We rolled down the windows and hung halfway out of the car, the wind in our hair like lovers fingers. It was exactly what we’d wanted. It was the American dream. Our dream. There was a brief moment where I realized what I was forfeiting: I was a year away from a Masters in creative writing, a decent-paying job at the Learning Resource Center on campus, an internship at a publishing firm, an apartment with a deck and a view. I suddenly realized I was leaving my roommate in the lurch. I had bills to pay, responsibilities. What was I doing out there on the road? My mother would be worried about me. My friends would think I was kidnapped or lost or something. I should turn around and get back to my life. Then Acacia kissed me, and, as if they were crumbs on the floor, she swept up all my concerns, all my ties to the stagnant life I was leaving, and put them in the rearview mirror. That first night we stopped at a motel, somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. After purchasing a bottle of champagne with a crumpled ten dollar bill, we stumbled into the motel lobby, giggling like drunken teenagers, and asked for a room. We got a standard nondescript motel room: walls, a bed, a nightstand, a lamp, a clunky TV, a bathroom with a toilet, sink and shower, tan walls and a dull, checkered carpet. “This place is kind of a dump,” I said, tossing my bag on the floor. “No it’s not,” Acacia replied, hopping onto the bed. She leaned back on her elbows and looked around the room. “I mean, look at this crimson, floriated wallpaper. These sleek and smooth, off-white sheets and golden, embossed blankets. These handcrafted, auburn-colored nightstands. God, this carpet! It’s like grass in my toes.” She looked up at me with the tip of her tongue in her teeth. “You’re right,” I said, sitting down on the bed next to her. “It’s a palace.” I leaned in and kissed her. We popped open the champagne and the cork bounced off of two walls. We drank straight from the bottle, spilling some on the bed as we danced in our underwear to music in our heads. When we made love that night, it was more passionate, more erotic and harmonious than it had ever been, like honeymoon sex is romanticized to be. We fell asleep with our limbs entangled and our sweaty skin clung together like we were different colored cubes of clay, constellated as one. In the morning, when the air of our motel room seemed to be going stale, we grabbed our things, got in the car, and left. Acacia drove that morning and I wrote my first portion of Directionless, starting with the scene of her waking me up, saying Let’s get out of here.

***

“Where are we going?” I asked on that second day, with one hand casually wrapped around the steering wheel, the other resting on her thigh. Acacia looked at me and then the road. “Where do you want to go?” she replied. I thought about it, then said, “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to go on a big road trip but I’ve never really had any place in particular to go.” She picked my hand off her leg, kissed it and clutched it in her fingers. “Well let’s go there then.” “Okay.” I glimpsed at her. “Where is that?” She cleared her throat and sat up on her knees. “Where you don’t know where you want to go. That’s where we’re going.” “And how will we know when we get there?” “Because you’ll realize that’s where you wanted to go.” I pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead. “Where do you want to go?” I asked. She rested her head on my shoulder and hummed curiously. “That way,” she said, pointing beyond the windshield. I chuckled. She kissed me on the neck and I turned up the radio.

Photo by jermlac

As the days went on the rearview mirror sagged with all the roads and towns reflected in it. We just drove, stopping here and there, but never any one place for very long. We lost count of how many days we had been on the road and squinted our eyes, blurring our vision whenever we’d pass road signs that told us where we were or where we were going. Being nowhere we were everywhere. We went north, east, west, even south. We once ended up in a town we’d already been in, but that was okay. We loved the fluidity and the uncertainty of it all. 

Then, passing some anonymous milepost, time just kind of died—and as if incapable of dealing with the loss, the dashboard clock broke—bequeathing to us the circumvolutions of the sun and moon. We drifted through America, somewhere outside of time and space, and with each mile, with each nameless town and scenic lake, arid desert expanse or regal mountain range, everything we passed, everything in the red glow of the car’s taillights faded. Some nights we slept in dingy motels; others we slept in the car, parked on the side of the highway, parked in the woods, on mountains overlooking cities, in lots with signs that alleged No Overnight Parking. We gave strangers’ names when talking to people. We read books aloud to one another and stopped to see movies we hadn’t heard of. We made paper airplanes out of parking tickets and clouds awed at the shapes we would make. We took naps in libraries with half-finished plots as pillows. We drank cheap liquor and bummed cigarettes from lonely people with imprisoned stories. We took pictures of ourselves and left them clipped behind windshield wipers or hung them on park trees with notes written to the passersby that happen upon them. And when the car would break down we’d get it repaired, stranded in nameless towns for a few days, and we’d frequent the same eateries so that by the time the car was ready the moon-faced waitresses would know our orders and call us by our pseudonyms. Every place we stopped we took something and left something. We became a little bit of the town or city we were in and we left a little bit of ourselves for the place to imbue. We sought out second-hand stores, looking for the fragments people left behind. We’d donate whatever book we’d just finished reading, or whichever cassette tape we’d memorized, and take something back in return. Sometimes it was a book or author, artist or album we knew. Other times we would just snag something that looked interesting and see what it fostered. At one musky-smelling shop in a town in the mountains Acacia bought a painting of an old couple sitting on their front porch. It was kind of an Edward Hopper rip-off but Acacia really liked it. She leant our names to the couple and narrated their story to me as she drove, while I sat in the passenger seat and wrote down the scene of us talking to the homeless man with the grizzly bear’s voice who had been sure I was his son. Acacia was very adamant on getting something new and returning something we were done with. She wanted to live a hundred lives. Sometimes, though, I would get the horrible, nagging idea that I was just a part of one of those lives. I was her boyfriend who she wouldn’t marry. I was her man and I had a car. I remember writing down the line, She wanted to live a hundred lives and I was just a part of one of them but I scribbled it out, redacting it with the noisy, black etching of the pen she took from that visitor center with the elk bust. Acacia was my proofreader and my editor, but there were things going through my head that didn’t need to go through our story. So rather than dwell on my fears and apprehensions—which really just derailed the plot of our story—I sketched our adventures and the shedding of our ostentatious selves. “Only ostentatious people use the word ostentatious,” she said as she scribbled with her red pen.

***

Acacia plopped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind her, rainwater dripping off her bonded blonde hair. I glanced over my shoulder at the gas pump display and watched the numbers spin and rise. I wrote: “How are we affording all of this?” John said. Staring at the sentence, I clicked my pen and put it behind my ear. “Acacia,” I said. “How can we afford all of this?” She gave me a quizzical look. “What do you mean?” “I mean, it’s been what, two, three weeks? How do we still have money? I was a poor college student with a crappy job and hardly any savings. Do you still have unspent tuition money or something?” Acacia looked straight ahead at the steering wheel. “Huh,” she said. “We should be broke by now.” We both glanced back at the gas pump and watched the numbers rise and rise. “I don’t know,” she said, and the numbers stopped with an audible clunk. She exited the car to return the gas nozzle to the pump. I listened to the rain pittering and pattering on the roof of the car and removed my pen from behind my ear. I tapped the end of it against my notepad, playing our conversation over in my head. I wrote it down as a scene, hoping it would clarify the issue. Acacia opened the door and got in the driver’s seat. I ripped the page out of my notepad, crumpling the scene up and threw it in the backseat where, maybe, it would make more sense.

***

About a month into the trip I lazily squinted my eyes as we entered a city and I accidentally saw a sign welcoming us to Osage, Iowa. We stopped there for two days but didn’t find anything particularly exciting. Our last day we decided to get the oil changed in the car and as we waited—there was an abnormally long wait—we went to a nearby library. I sat down on a couch while Acacia went through the aisles. She came back with a book of short stories by an author named Jake Holland. She opened it up and I lay my head on her shoulder. As she read silently I hummed a borrowed melody from a These Crystal Black Wolves song recently rotated in our car stereo, amending my own lyrics: Acacia, Acacia, a tree floating in air / your bare roots as wings / catching wind in your leafed hair. They were trite lyrics, yeah, but they made her smile. Distracted from her read she silenced my mumbled song with a kiss and I fell asleep on her shoulder. I woke up when Acacia left me and went up to the register. Blinking my tiredness away, I watched as she talked to the elderly woman behind the counter. She came back and sat next to me, crossing her arms, annoyed that she couldn’t easily become a member and take the book with her. I kissed her on the neck—her skin was hot—and she told me to lean forward. “What?” I said and again she insisted. She put the book behind me, coughing as she ripped pages out of it. “What are you doing?” She quickly stuffed a handful of pages up her shirt and secured them in her pants. “Be cool,” she said. She kissed me to reinforce her command and stood up. I felt a little nauseous, watching the elderly woman behind the counter across from me. She hadn’t noticed anything and didn’t look up as Acacia returned the eviscerated book to its shelf. She came back to me, walking in short hurried steps, took my hand and we quickly headed toward the door. “Hang on a minute,” the tall, grimacing library security guard said, I had written later that night. “We were just leaving,” Acacia said in an innocent-sounding tone. “We’ve had a lot of thefts recently. I’d like the two of you to please empty your pockets and raise your arms.” Acacia and John looked at each other and complied. The security guard held out a plastic wand and waved it around John’s body. John glanced at Acacia and could see a few sentences peaking out from between her shirt and pants. “You can put your arms down,” he said to John, and then turned to Acacia with a tired scowl. She smiled and he held out his wand, waving it over her arms, her legs and her torso. It beeped at her stomach, and he gave her a look. “What do you have under your shirt, miss?” he asked. Acacia looked at John, then the guard. “My naked stomach?” “I’m going to need you to lift your shirt up.” John and Acacia were caught. They knew it, but then, suddenly! there was a loud noise as someone dropped an encyclopedia volume and the guard looked off in the direction of the sound. John grabbed Acacia’s hand and they bolted past the guard. “Hey!” he shouted but they were already to the door. They burst through the entrance and down the steps, the cool afternoon air caressing their skin. They ran, laughing, and looked back only once to see the library guard stopped, trying to catch his breath. We drove in silence for a while. Acacia held her prison-broke pages, I the steering wheel. Maybe it was the writer in me, maybe it was the moralist, but I was mad at her for tearing out that story. She could be so impulsive and careless sometimes, and there was nothing I could ever do about it. Anything that I might try to do would just make her more so. “Would you like to hear it?” she asked, holding the pages out over the center console moat between us. I glanced at her and sighed. “Well, we can’t deface a book for nothing, right?” She exhaled through her nose. I kept my eyes on the road but could see the face she made: tight lips, low eyebrows, and eyes slightly squinted, a little guilt in them, a little indignation. Then she cleared her throat, positioned the pages and started: “Peregrines, by Jake Holland.” Acacia was a good reader. A great reader. I was always entertained by the stories she read me. She put a lot of energy and character into her recitations; when she would read portions of Directionless she would read her lines like a timid actress struggling to find the essence of Acacia. But when she read Peregrines aloud she was more alive than I’d ever heard her. Her voice lent a honey taste to the air and her tones moved in undulations as if tracing the peaks and troughs of the mountains we passed. She in the passenger seat was like a stage actor in the Globe Theatre, making big gesticulations to animate the story and its characters. And when the story ended, sometime later, I realized that I was in my car, driving with her across the country, with countless miles and days weighing down our rearview mirror. “I really, really liked that story,” I said. She smiled and I kissed her on the head. “I think I’m in love with it,” she said. “Except for the ending. I’m iffy on the ending.” I liked the ending, I guess. It was a little confusing but I didn’t think too much about it. Regardless of whether I got it or not, though, I still liked it. We splurged for a motel that night and after writing the day’s scenes—the chapter would be called Peregrines—adding in a grand escape from the library, I climbed under the sheets with Acacia. She read Peregrines aloud again and I listened, stroking the tips of my fingers along the landscape of her naked, nacred skin, and again, as she read, I dissolved and disappeared into the story.

***

At the next town we broke our give-and-take cycle. Acacia held onto her peregrine pages but we got a cassette tape full of new melodies and lyrics to learn. We stayed in a motel again and with the elation of that short story lingering in my stomach and my grandmother’s ring in my breast pocket, I couldn’t sleep, so I watched Acacia doze. Her hair had darkened; it was an almost tree bark brown, and her freckles in her cheeks were like toast crumbs in butter. I took the ring out of my pocket and slid it on her finger. Maybe if I left it there and she woke up with it she’d see how it looked on her and realize that was what she wanted. It was a nice thought, but I knew she’d see it as soil to imprison her roots in the ground and would slide it off her finger and delicately give it back to me. In the morning I convinced her to stay in town for another day. At the diner where we had breakfast, an elderly couple recommended a lake for us to walk to—John and Acacia held hands under the table and smiled at each other as the couple across from them acted out the roles of their future selves—but offered two different routes to get there, each one arguably better than the other. We packed a picnic lunch and hiked out toward the lake. We debated, and then argued about which route to take since both of them seemed to have their plusses. I gave in and we took Acacia’s favored path. It was a beautiful day with the sun bathing in the lake and a cooling wind tickling our skin. After lunch I lay my head down in Acacia’s lap and asked her to read Peregrines again. I listened to the story while I traced the wrinkles in the palm of her free hand. I began to drift off as she read, but when the story ended I found myself in a strange place. “I don’t remember it ending like that,” I said. “Well, yeah, I changed the ending,” she said, running her fingers through my hair. I sat up and her hand fell to the ground. “You can’t just change the ending. It’s a story. It’s Jake Holland’s short story. He wrote it like that.” “Well, I didn’t really like the ending.” “So you just changed it?” “Yeah, what’s the big deal?” “The big deal is…” I sighed. She clutched her pilfered pages to her breast. “Nothing. Never mind.” “No, seriously. What’s the big deal? What’s so wrong with me having my own ending to the story?” “Well, Jake Holland wrote it that way. I mean, it’s copywritten and everything. It’s not a choose-your-own-adventure story.” “Everything is a choose-your-own-adventure story. Aren’t we on a choose-your-own-adventure story? Or does this have a specific ending that we can’t avoid?” “What? Where is this coming from? We’re talking about ethics not philosophy. What, do you want to debate the chaos theory or something?” She scoffed. I gave her a look and turned my gaze to the lake where the sun was getting out to dry off. “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s just go, okay?” She shrugged and maybe rolled her eyes. I packed up our things. We walked back to town in silence, and I wondered which of her hundred lives she was living and if it was ending soon.

***

A few days later the antenna on the car broke off. We were driving down an orange- and yellow-leafed forest corridor with the trees kowtowing to the wind when it just flew off. It had found a home for itself in that forest corridor. Acacia was singing along to a song on the radio when a horrible static invaded our speakers. Around the same time, the car’s engine started making inventive noises and a crack in the windshield emerged and explored. New towns started to seem familiar. More and more I began to think of home, of what I’d left. Of school, my job, my friends, my family. I don’t think people thought I was dead or anything. They knew me and, more importantly, they knew Acacia. But, I thought and wrote, Would things be the same when we went home? Would we even ever go home? And if we did, would it still be home? I started to feel confined in my dying car. I didn’t write the section of Directionless where we went to the lake. Instead, I wrote a little blurb about us finding a stray dog and taking him with us, naming him Dover, but when I realized I was incorporating a fictional character to a nonfictional story, I scrapped the section. Acacia could tell I was losing my spirit for the trip. Like before, she could recognize my apprehension like it was a mask I’d wear, but unlike before when she’d kiss me to ameliorate my symptoms, it wouldn’t work. I still enjoyed Peregrines and Acacia’s oration of it, for the most part. She crafted her ending with each read. It was a better ending, I could admit that, but it wasn’t the real ending and despite its catharsis I denounced its authenticity. It was just another of Acacia’s idiosyncrasies that has beginning to get on my nerves. One night we were parked on a cul-de-sac. While Acacia slept in the backseat and I tapped my pen against my notepad trying to shake off my writer’s block, I noticed her personalized pages tucked between her arms. I slowly pulled them from her grasp, careful not to wake her. At the header of the pages Jake Holland’s name was crossed out and Acacia’s anagrammed pseudonym was written underneath. Certain words were scribbled over with synonyms written above, and the last whole page was redacted, apart from a sentence here and there, and Acacia’s ending written in the spaces. I went for a walk, taking with me her amended story, my incomplete story, an unfinished bottle of bourbon and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. I found an acceptably comfortable rock to sit down, lit a cigarette and swigged from the bottle as I read over Jake Holland’s story, squinting through Acacia’s squiggled lines to read his ending. I didn’t quite get it, but I guess that didn’t matter since Acacia had replaced it. I lit a second cigarette and had a pull from the bottle. I looked over the pages I’d handwritten, my black inked story of our trip and Acacia’s red ink comments, corrections and remarks. Unrelated to the night’s cold chill, I felt a horrible twinge in my stomach. I didn’t see any reason to finish Directionless. Where was the story even going? I didn’t have an ending in mind, and I didn’t feel like I had any control over it. Jake Holland didn’t even have control over the ending of his story. Instead of lighting a third cigarette I lit Acacia’s story and left it burning next to that rock and the empty bourbon bottle.

***

I woke up in the passenger seat with a pounding headache when Acacia began shuffling around. Immediately, I knew she was looking for her story and I remembered I had destroyed it. I couldn’t look at her. I could sense her sitting on her knees in the backseat examining the clutter, looking for a corner of a page jutting out, perhaps between a dirty t-shirt and a plastic bag. “Have you seen Peregrines?” she asked. “No,” I grumbled, keeping my eyes shut. When I opened them, she was staring at me. “You burned my story,” her eyes said. I opened the glove box to show that I was aiding in the search. Acacia looked around for another minute before sighing and climbed to the front seat. She started the car, put her seat belt on and looked at me. “Ready to go?” she said with a morning smile. “Sure,” I replied, and she kissed me on the forehead before putting the car in drive. We got coffee and muffins for breakfast and drove west through the desert. It wasn’t long—with no radio and no tapes—before the silence got to Acacia and she began reciting Peregrines, word for word. At first, I thought I was dreaming or imagining, then I felt kind of angry, but as she made her way through the story, I was astonished. She had the entire thing memorized, her ending and all, and my drunken, jealous destructiveness couldn’t take that away from her, no matter how much I or anyone could try.

***

We soon reached Arizona and in that first night, as Acacia was driving, I fell asleep and dreamed. I only ever dreamed when I was asleep in the moving car. I dreamed of stillness. I dreamed we were back in New York, that we were the us that continued to exist in the parallel universe where Acacia didn’t wake me up that night. We existed in apartments, in restaurants, at work and at home, in parks and on street sidewalks, in the aisles of bodegas, the corridors of museums, at the houses of family and friends, and none of it was confining. I want to say that in those dreams we were happy, we were just fine with having stayed home, but those somnambulant feelings disappeared like bending roads in the rearview mirror every time the car would park and my eyes would open. That night, though, I dreamt that we were just sitting at home. We were married, she was pregnant, and we enjoyed each other’s company and voices. We sat at our dinner table, me in a suit and tie—grey and gold—she with her hair done up and in a long red dress that matched her lipstick. The waiter took our order and I told Acacia that I loved her. She said that she too loved me and we leaned close together and kissed. Acacia, Acacia / her nacreous skin, her rubricated lips / my love, my ending. I leaned back in my chair and held her hand on the table as the car flipped. My head hit the window and my limbs flailed about as the earth swung around the car. I went in and out of consciousness, light and dark flickering, the roars of metal crushing and cracking in my ears. The car came to a halt with a horrid shriek on its four cat-paw wheels. The dream was gone, leaking out of my head as blood down my cheek. In front of me, the windshield was spider-webbed like a still, static television, as if the feed of our journey had been cut. I looked over at Acacia. Her hands were clenched around the steering wheel and she stared straight ahead, her chest rapidly expanding and contracting. I spoke her name. Acacia. She didn’t respond until I said it again. She turned to look at me with her ghost’s eyes and said, “You’re bleeding.” She put her hand to my forehead where my wound must have been and held it there for a long moment. “Don’t worry, John,” Acacia said, holding his hand. “We’re okay. Everything is going to be alright. I love you.” I heard quick footsteps and suddenly my car door flung open. A man in his thirties was asking me if I was okay and someone at the driver’s side was asking Acacia something similar. I think so, I think I said. I unbuckled and after a quick assessment for broken bones, I got out of the car. Acacia was already standing, next to her stranger, next to the mangled car. Let me go get something to stop the bleeding, my guy said. He ran off towards an uncrashed car, and I walked over to where Acacia was poised like a mannequin with no shop window to stand behind. “We’re okay,” I said, clutching my cut. “We are okay.” I put my free arm around her and squeezed her body as she stood there staring at our wounded car with her eyes frozen and open like headlights not bright enough to see in the dark. We got the car towed into town. I got a few stitches in my forehead but the car needed a new windshield and side mirror; the rest of its damages, the bruises and fractured car bones, weren’t worth fixing. We found a nearby motel. Acacia went straight to the bed and lay down on top of the sheets. I went into the bathroom to pee and look at my stitches. Then I lay down next to her, behind her, she on her side facing the wall. I wanted to say something. I certainly needed to, but I wasn’t sure what, so I put my arms around her and pulled her in close. Then John said something and it fixed everything. “I don’t know what happened,” she said just as I was about to fall asleep. “I was just driving and then we flipped. There wasn’t another car or a dog in the road that I swerved to avoid. There was just the road. It just opened its jaws to swallow us and I jerked the wheel.” I kissed the nape of her neck and stroked the side of her arm. “It’s okay, Acacia,” I said. “It’s not your fault.” She rolled over and looked me in the eyes. She said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what we’re doing out here. I don’t…” “Shhh…it’s okay, sweetie. We’re okay.” “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know what I thought we’d find out here. Let’s just…” She sniffled and I wiped a tear off her cheek with my thumb. “Do you know where we are? Do you know what town we’re in? What state?” I shook my head. “Arizona,” he said. “Well, let’s just stay here. Wherever we are, let’s stay here. What do you think?” I smiled. “Okay,” I said. We kissed and held each other. It wasn’t long before Acacia fell asleep, leaving me wide awake. I took the ring from out of my pocket and slid it onto her finger. It was like a nightlight in that dark motel room and I lay there, staring at it on her finger until I fell asleep. But when I woke up, Acacia was kneeling next to me with that wild look in her eyes, and the ring was on the nightstand beside the bed.

***

A balding, bearded man at the automotive shop told me that it would take a few days for our replacement windshield to arrive. It was relieving but ultimately insignificant news. We’d get to stay in that Arizona town, but only for a bit before we’d hit the road again. Acacia and I went to diners and secondhand stores; we ate boring food and flipped through beleaguered LP cases. She picked out everything. I didn’t really have any opinions of this or that, which infuriated her. We got into a fight at a garage sale when I told her to stop haggling over prices and we ended up walking back to our motel room on different sides of the street. As Acacia showered I sat on the edge of the bed thinking about how sour we’d become. When she emerged, drying her brown hair, I suggested we go out to a real restaurant and get a nice meal, maybe even dress up. She sat down next to me, her body wrapped in a towel I knew she was going to steal, and agreed. I found a wrinkled and gray collared shirt buried in my duffle bag and Acacia put on a green and yellow sundress. We went to a place called Sully’s, where she ordered a dry martini and I an iced whiskey. We took turns sighing, our mouths empty of anything to say. We ordered food and I stared and stared at my second drink. I was the ice in the glass and she was the water sweating off the sides. “Let’s go home,” I said. Acacia looked up at me. “We don’t have a home anymore, John.” “Fine, well then let’s make one.” She sat back in her chair. “When’s this going to end, Acacia? How is it going to end? Do you think that we’ll just be nomads for the rest of our lives? What are we going to do when the car finally dies, huh? Then what?” “We could steal a new one,” she said with a simper. I scoffed and took a sip of my whiskey. I knew she was kidding but I preferred to take her seriously. John smirked, knowing she was just kidding. “I love road trips,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to do. But when people go on road trips they have a planned destination. They are going somewhere. We are going nowhere.” Refusing to respond, Acacia took a sip of her second martini. “How did you think this was going to end?” I said, leaning aggressively forward. The waiter brought us our food and asked if we needed anything else. I told him no. “Huh, Acacia, how did you think this was going to end? We’d drive into the sunset and live where the sun sleeps? Or we’d just forever exist in this ambulatory never-ending story?” “Ambulatory? What does that even mean? Why are you so desperate to sound so intelligent all of the time?” I clenched my jaw. “Don’t ignore my question. Answer me.” I noticed a few people looking over at us. “I don’t know,” she said and took a bite of her salad. “No, of course you don’t.” I cut off a piece of my steak and shoved it into my mouth. Acacia smacked her fork down on the table. “Am I clairvoyant?” she said. “Am I supposed to have some cosmological knowledge of how things will turn out? No, so I head into the future risking the outcome. At least I have the guts to do that.” She took a sip of her martini and I finished off my whiskey. I held up the empty glass, gesturing to the waiter. “Yeah, have another,” Acacia said. “Fall into that dreamscape.” “Shut up,” I replied.

***

I slept on the floor that night and she on the bed. I wish I could have told her to sleep in the car, in her home, but it was still in the shop. I hated her so much. I just wanted her to be gone, to be nowhere near me. She’d taken everything from me. My life and even my love for her. Lying there in the motel dark, gritting my teeth at the thought of Acacia, I curled up and clutched my pillow desperately. I may have hated her but it was unmatched by my hatred of that feeling. I wanted to grab her by the wrist, get in the car and backtrack to every little town and city we stopped in, until we found whatever novelty malt shop or used-bookstore I’d left my love for her in. I awoke first in the morning and wrote a scene where we apologized to each other and made up and made love. When Acacia got up I gave her the scene to read and she said she liked it. We smiled at each other and checked out of the motel before heading to the shop to get my battered car, barely speaking to each other despite our ostensible reconciliation.

Photo by Michael Kappel

When we pulled into Santa Monica the sun was discoloring the sky like a fruit left out too long. The tank was low so we pulled into a gas station. I don’t think we had really spoken all day, except maybe for the occasional “Pull over, I need to pee” or “I’m hungry, let’s get food.” Acacia fueled up the car while I went inside. I got the key for the bathroom from the attendant and took a leak. I picked out a bag of chips, some pretzels, a banana and a bottle of water. As the cooler door was closing I thought I ought to get one for Acacia as well so she wouldn’t die of thirst, so I grabbed another water. With the snacks wrapped up in my arms, I got in line behind two other people. Rather than looking out the window at my girl standing in the California sun, I glanced around the room. My eyes landed on a gaudy gas station painting of a bird. It was a falcon, a peregrine falcon. It had these wild, blue eyes and its talons were only loosely grasped onto the branch it held onto. Something struck John then. He looked out the window at Acacia as she returned the gas nozzle to the pump. He shifted the snacks to his left arm and dug into his pants pocket and pulled out his grandmother’s engagement ring. He set it on the painting's frame, resting it against the falcon’s talon and it seemed to meld into the painting. John paid for the snacks and the waters and wished the clerk a “splendid day.” He left the gas station and headed toward the car. Acacia, in the driver’s seat, leaned over and opened the door for him. He climbed into the car, handed her a water and said, “Where to?” She shrugged. “That way?” she said, pointing to no direction in particular. “Sounds good to me,” he replied. They kissed and Acacia started the car. She put it in drive and he rolled down his window to let his unfinished, black-inked pages be taken out with the wind as they pulled out of the gas station and headed down the road.

[thelifepartners]

John Kendall

Ares

Photo by Mark Sardella

I was kneeling in the dirt, my hands clasped together with my cross pressed between my palms, when Private Weber came stumbling out of the trees. I spun around, rifle aimed, thinking he was an enemy soldier, nearly getting one of our heads blown off.

“Flash,” I said in a sharp whisper, my eye against my rifle and aimed at his chest.

“Jesus Christ, O’Connell. Thunder. Thunder!” he said and removed his hand from his holstered pistol. “It’s just me, ya jumpy bastard.”

“Sorry,” I replied, and lowered my rifle. My cross dangled at my shirt, caught behind a button like a child hiding behind a parent’s leg.

“Any sign of Bravo?” he asked, looking around in the dark.

I shook my head, tucked my cross back into my shirt.

“You don’t happen to have any goddamn idea where we are, do ya?” he said, kneeling down next to me—I was just about to stand.

“Not a clue.”

He looked off, muttered “Fuck,” and spit.

“Well, hell,” he said. “At least we got each other. Two targets will give them pause to decide which one to shoot first, yeah?”

He smacked my arm with the back of his hand, winked at me, and stood. I took a moment to roll my eyes without rolling my eyes and got up as well. Guy was a bit of a nut.

We needed to meet up with our company so we headed in the direction we both did our best to figure was east. Thought the company might be east of our position, but I was so catawampus from the jump I don’t think I’d’ve found my way around my childhood home. It certainly didn’t help that it was so dark out, but moving in any direction was better than just sitting there waiting for Germans to stumble upon us.

“I thought there was supposed to be a creek around here,” Weber said. I didn’t respond, though I was thinking the same thing.

It was cool out, and the smell of gun powder was a stench as prevalent as air. Gun shots and the occasional blast were sounding off in the distance. It reminded me of something my father once told me. Said that when war wasn’t war, it was music. I had never really known what to make of that, but I think I was beginning to get an inkling.

“It’s almost like ‘em bugs in the south,” I said, stepping through twigs and leaves.

“What’s that now?” Weber replied.

I looked around the trees ahead of us. Didn’t see much but trees, rocks and the like, so I elaborated.

“Y’ever been to the south, Weber?”

“Can’t say I have, Patrick. Can’t say that I have.”

“Well, at night,” I continued, “There’re these bugs, right? Just chirping away like they’re an orchestra or something. ‘ery night. You can just take a step outside and listen to the music they make. It’s kinda like that here, but instead of ‘em grasshoppers chirping, it’s machine guns and rifles and mortars what make the music.” I chuckled to myself for an unannounced moment of strange humor. “I almost feel like if there wasn’t gun fire in the background, I wouldn’t even feel like we was in France.”

Weber laughed. It was a kind of consolation laugh, like he wasn’t exactly paying attention but knew by the intonation of my voice, that I had said something humorous.

“What happened to your rifle?” I asked—I don’t know why I was being so talkative.

Weber suddenly stopped, and his immediacy made me think we was about to get ambushed. I gripped my rifle tighter, crouched and quickly looked around. The look on his face, however—placid and a little ashamed—calmed me back down. He opened his mouth to explain, but then just shook his head, shrugged and said he was goddamn thankful that he had swiped the pistol from a German officer.

“Captain Dieter von Schulmacher,” he said, holding the Luger up.

“That was his name?” I asked as we continued on our haphazard path.

“Fuck if I know,” he replied, and holstered the pistol. “No, that wasn’t his name, but it sure sounds like it could be. Am I right? Hell, Dieter’s probably to Germans what Patrick is to the Irish.”

He chuckled and I could feel him grinning at me with that stupid grin of his. I smiled, though I didn’t exactly find it humorous enough to make any audible affirmation.

“Let me ask you something, Patrick.”

He paused and, as the sound of our feet on crunchy twigs and leaves became the prevalent, proximal sound, I began to wonder if he was waiting for me to give him permission or something.

“Who were you praying to?” he finally asked.

“Who was I praying to?”

“Yeah, when I came upon ya, just now. You were all prostrate and had your cross there in your hands.”

“Weber, I’m Irish with a cross around my neck. Who the hell you think I was praying to?”

Weber laughed, of his own volition and wholeheartedly.

“Okay, okay. So that was a doughy question. Let me have another go at it.” He had another invocative pause that I didn’t take him up on, and said, “What were you praying for?”

I stopped to look back at him, expecting to see a dumb looks on his face, and he used the opportunity to step past me and take the lead.

“What was I praying for?”

“Yeah,” he said, surveying the path in front of us.

“I was praying for the Sox to win the World Series, the hell do you think I was praying for?”

“What, for us? For the war, for America and England and all us bastards?”

I stared at the back of his head for a long while.

“Yeah, I was praying for us, you moron. What’re you thick?”

“Hey, easy now, Patrick, I’m just trying to have a conversation here.” He turned to me. “It’s enough we gotta be out here in this fucking mess. What’s so bad about having a goddamn civilized conversation every once and a while?”

I looked at him, trying to figure out if he was, in fact, a moron; if he thought that we were having a conversation.

“You asked me a question and I gave you its obvious answer. That ain’t a conversation, Weber.”

“No, it ain’t a fucking conversation, O’Connell.” He said my name with this warbled affectation that made me think—along with his persistence of calling everyone by their first name—that he had a strong, fundamental aversion to any sort of nicknamery. “But I’m trying to get one going.”

I decided—not because I was angry or against the idea of a conversation or anything, but just because—to take the lead, and I continued us on our way.

“So, you were praying to God for us?”

“Yep.”

“For our side? For our side to win against the Germans?”

“Yes, Weber. What do you pray for when you pray?”

“I don’t know that I ever have prayed.”

Never had I been so surprised that I was surprised.

“Alright, then. I guess maybe that begins to explain your curiosity.”

“No, no, no, no, Patrick. No, you got me all wrong. I know all about praying. I was just curious about whether or not you prayed to God for our safety, for us to win against the Germans, all that bullshit.”

I stopped, turned, and took a step toward him.

“All that bullshit?”

“Pardon me,” he said, holding up a hand. “I don’t mean to call your beliefs bullshit. We’re having a conversation here. A discourse, or the like.”

I scoffed, but it came out less humorously that I meant it. I looked around at the trees. Just trees everywhere. Trees and darkness. I really had no idea where we were.

“Yeah. Right,” I said and continued walking. I was beginning to grow tired of all of this talk of having a conversation without actually having one.

“Do you think praying to God is going to help us win the war?”

I planted my feet again, said, “What are you on about, Weber?”

He took a few steps toward me.

“I’m asking you if you believe praying to God, to your Catholic Jesus Christ, will help us win the war.”

“Yeah, Weber. That’s why I’m doing it. The hell else would I be doing it for? It’s not as if praying is like whistling a song from the radio to pass the time.”

“Jesus, Patrick, I understand what praying is for. I’m just asking you if you believe it.”

“I just said I did, didn’t I?”

I was beginning to hope even for a troop of German soldiers to come upon us. The immediate threat of death would at least shut Weber up.

“No you didn’t, you just explained to me what praying was.”

I shook my head and turned back toward our assumed path. There was silence for a moment, silence apart from the noises of our footsteps and the background orchestra of war, but it was silence by default. Then, Weber continued.

“Did you know that in Greek mythology people would pray to certain gods during wars and certain gods with take sides?”

“Yeah, I think I remember something like that,” I replied, surprised in myself that I was continuing to humor him and not tell him to shut the hell up.

“I mean, for instance, the Greeks had Athena on their side, in the Trojan War. And Athena, shit, she was the goddess of war. And she was siding with the Greeks.”

“Here I thought Athena was the goddess of wisdom.”

“Yeah, she was that too. But then, the Trojans had Ares, the goddamn godof war, on their side. And, shit, they lost.”

A blast shook the forest around us, lighting it up like a flash of daylight. Webber and I dove to the ground as a tree exploded off to our left, a good twenty-five, thirty feet away. I landed on my stomach knocking a little of the wind out from my lungs, but I managed to maintain my composure. There was another explosion and another flash of light and for a split second I thought I could see the way. The smoke cleared and we looked at each other, Weber grinning like an idiot.

“I guess your guardian angel was looking out for us on that one,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

We got up and continued on. There was an increase in nearby gunfire and I held my rifle up, aimed in front of me. Nothing but unarmed trees.

“So the Trojans had Ares and the Greeks had Athena and the Greeks won. Where is this conversation taking us, Weber?”

“Where it’s taking us is the Greeks and the Trojans had gods to pray to and those gods heard those prayers and either acted on them or didn’t. They chose sides with the ones they felt the most appeased by or just the ones they rooted for. So what I’m asking you is do you think that God will answer your prayers to help us defeat the Germans?”

I stopped and crouched—we had come to the top of a hill—aiming my gun around the surrounding area, just to be certain there weren’t any enemy soldiers in our immediate proximity. Once I was sure of this, I had the opportunity to shift and turn around and look Weber in the eye.

“Look, Weber,” I said. “The Iliad is a fucking story, alright? You think that Zeus and Athena and Ares and all those incestuous morons were real? Were real gods?”

Weber rolled his eyes.

“Look, man. I’m not trying to say Zeus is real, or the Bible is bullshit or anything like that.”

“Watch it,” I said, giving him a hard look.

“I said I was saying it wasn’t bullshit,” he said holding his palms up in defense. “I’m not trying to make an argument for or against the existence of God or Buddha or Ra or any goddamn deity. I’m just curious what you, Patrick O’Connell, believe. That interests me.”

The guy might not have been a skilled conversationalist, fine, but he sure as shit was trying. I had to give him that.

“Yes. Alright? I’m praying because we have God on our side, and I believe that with his help we will defeat the Germans. Ya happy, Weber?”

I looked around the area again.

“Well, don’t you think some of the Germans might be praying to God too? I mean, they’re a fairly Christian nation.”

“The fuck do I care what the Germans do when they put their hands together? And what the hell are you on about?”

“I mean, if you’re praying to God, and Captain Dieter von Whateverhausen is praying to God, who’s He going to answer? You’re both His children, ‘m I right?”

I studied him for a long moment, kind of hoping to make him uncomfortable and trying to be certain if I could determine whether he was, in fact, an imbecile.

“Don’t the fact that you have the German’s Luger at your side tell you who God sided with? Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that we haven’t taken it upon ourselves to eradicate the Jews.”

He sighed and furrowed his brow. He seemed almost disappointed by this actualization. The hell did I care though? Frankly, I felt like slapping the shit out of him.

“Okay, so let’s say, for the sake of conversation, that…”

“For the sake of conversation,” I said, somewhat sarcastically at this point.

“Yeah, for the sake of fucking conversation, that you and all the other believers in the whole U.S. of fucking A. prayed to God for the protection of our soldiers and the guidance of our military in this war, and for us to defeat the no good fucking Germans, and…” he paused and held up a finger. “And God answered our prayers. That would mean God is on our side, yeah?”

“Sounds peachy to me.”

I stood and started walking again. Weber followed me.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, okay. But here’s a little glitch in the argument.”

“I can’t wait for this,” I said with an involuntary roll of the eyes.

“Stevens.”

“Stevens?”

I looked back at Weber and he nodded with high-risen eyebrows.

“What, Jack Stevens? In first platoon?”

“Yeah, fucking Jack Stevens in first platoon.”

I stopped and turned to him. Oddly enough, he had piqued my curiosity with this left-turn exhibit.

“What does Stevens have to do with any of this…conversation?”

“Tell me, Patrick. What do you think of Sergeant Jack Stevens in first platoon? I mean, really. What do you think of the guy?”

I stared at Weber for a long while, contemplating my answer. I didn’t particularly like telling anyone in the company how I felt about anyone else in the company unless I thought they were the most upstanding person I had ever met, or at least the next couple in line. Any such otherwise honesty wouldn’t do anybody no good. But just me and Weber—the lunatic he is—lost in the middle of Nowhere, France:

“I hate the fucking son of a bitch,” I said. “Regardless of what I think about him. So. What.”

“So that’s my point,” he shrugged. “Well, that’s the iceberg tip of my point.” He cleared his throat like someone stepping up to a podium to give a speech. “My point is there are people in our army, in our company, maybe sitting in the foxhole next to ya, that are lousy people. People I hate. That other people hate. Just lousy goddamn people. Shit, I’m sure some folks hate me. Fine. So what? Let them. And I’m sure, there are people that, if He ever exercises such a feeling, there are people in our army, or at least in our country, that God hates.”

He looked into my eyes and I could see a strong-fisted intensity in his.

“And if there are people in America who are lowlife pieces of shit, hell-bent, sick sons of bitches that should rot in fiery hell, then, by that standard, there are some Germans that aren’t half bad.”

“Are you fucking nuts?” I said. “I mean, are ya?”

This seemed to anger Weber and he took a few wayward steps in the opposite direction we’d been heading. It was like he was pacing in a study or something.

“Look, you think there aren’t a couple of German soldiers out there that aren’t half bad guys? I’m sure there’s a few Svens and Bjorns and whatever the fuck their names are, that I wouldn’t mind having a beer with.”

“You’ve lost your damn mind. Why are you following me? Why don’t you head on over to Berlin and buy a round for the boys?”

“Jesus, Patrick. Listen to me, will ya? Okay, fine, so I ain’t too straight-lined at getting right to the point, but part of the fun is in the undressing, isn’t it? You don’t want to just jump right to getting sexy.”

I shook my head at him. He was beginning to sound crazy, even for his standards.

“Okay, I’m getting my metaphors all mixed up and sounding like a goddam nut. Humblest of apologies.” He slapped the side of his head and snapped in his ear. I wasn’t feeling too comfortable being his sole babysitter.

“But for saying you want to hang out with the fucking Nazis and play drinking games with ‘em…?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Patrick. I hate the fucking Nazis. I do. I hope they all burn like unoccupied casseroles in hell. I’m talking about the Germans.” He pointed off in the direction we had come from. “You think all of them hate Jews? Hell, I bet Stevens hates the goddamn Jews. The Germans don’t all hate Jews. Okay, take it easy, Patrick. Sure, most of them do, yeah, but some of them are just following orders, right? Haven’t you ever had some back-asswards order you didn’t want to carry out? Hell, some of them probably just got drafted like you and I, only they were ordered to kill Jews while we were ordered to kill Germans.”

“Weber, if you’re trying to get me to sympathize with the goddamn Germans, exercise your lungs somewhere else.” I shook my head and nearly took the Lord’s name. Weber didn’t take my suggestion, just stood there. I was suddenly thirsty, so I took out my canteen and unscrewed the cap.

“And what does your love for all things Deustch have to do with me praying to God?” Boy, was he a nut.

I took a refreshing swig of water and offered some to Weber. He shook his head, remaining silent—maybe he was trying to figure out how his mess of yarn could be made into a ball.

“Sorry, I lost my train of thought,” he said. “It’s difficult, trying to grasp God and all of that shit.”

I sighed. I could see the guy was earnestly trying to have a conversation, to unravel a knot in his mind, and, in that peculiar moment, I felt something like empathy for the crazy son of a bitch.

I sighed and said, “Where is it you’re from, Weber?”

“Colorado Springs. You grew up in, what, Texas, right?”

I nodded.

“I figured you’d be a Baptist boy, being from Texas and all.”

“We ain’t all Baptists in Texas, Weber.”

A light seemed to go on in his eyes, but I jumped in before he could do anything about it.

“So, Weber. Where’s all this religious curiosity and ying-yang, this ‘there’s got to be a little good in every German’ bullshit coming from? Didn’t your parents ever make you go to Sunday school? Or are you just one of ‘em bona fide atheists?”

“No, no. I’m not an atheist. Why would I want to be a lonely goddamned atheist?” He looked off. “I’m just curious, is all. What different people believe in, or how different people believe in the same thing, I find that all sorts of interesting.”

We started walking again, and I felt comfortable having the reigns of the conversation. I was also beginning to wonder about the stability of Weber’s mind, if maybe being out here was making him all jittery and the like. I mean, the guy had a propensity for just going off the rails with his mouth and then never knowing where he was coming from. Edwards told me he once blathered about the damn newspaper industry for an entire breathless hour. Hell, we could be laying down fire, German artillery blasting the shit out of us, and he’d probably be telling some poor sap in his foxhole about how twisted them ad fatsos in New York were.

“What’d your parents raise you?” I asked.

“Didn’t raise me anything, really. Went to church on Christmas with my grandma a few times.”

“That might explain why you ain’t really got a handle on God and all.”

He was silent for a while and the background music’s prevalence was again comforting.

“And let me guess,” Weber said, interrupting the symphony, “You grew up in a Catholic house, went to church, Sunday school, confessed to your priest ‘bout all the times you masturbated. All that shit.”

“That’s an easy guess.”

“Were you an altar boy?”

“Yeah, sure. I was an altar boy.”

I looked back at Weber and was surprised to see this kind of childlike look on his face. I stopped and turned to him. He sighed.

“I can see what you’re thinking of me, especially with all the questions and theories I’m putting forth, but I’m just a curious cat who ain’t afraid of death.” He looked off at the trees and smiled like they seemed surprisingly beautiful to him.

I couldn’t help but let out a little chuckle.

“A curious cat who ain’t afraid of death,” I said with a smirk, but he was still lost in the trees. I looked up there too, just in case there was something I was missing. I suppose there was; there were stars in the sky. I guess I was surprised by that. The idea of seeing something beautiful like stars in the night sky didn’t seem like something I’d see amid the carnage of Europe.

“Sometimes,” he said. “I like to think of God as a parent, but like a parent who’s sent you off to college, you got me? He still loves me, I can know that, but He’s sent me off to make a life of my own, and I don’t hear from Him. He hears about me, oh shit, does He hear about me.” We both kind of chuckled at that. “My professors send Him letters, whether I’m behaving or misbehaving, so He’s mad or He’s proud, whatever His reaction is. But, regardless of how He feels about me, I’ve really only got myself.”

I stared at him, taking this in, while he looked off into the treetops and the stars. I felt sorry for the poor bastard. He seemed so lonely but in a kind of unknowing way. Like he didn’t even know he was lonely, and for some reason, despite that it seemed he was blessed with ignorance, that seemed sadder. But there was also something about his curiosity that I could relate to. Could sympathize with. I could see a searching, a longing in his eyes. The nutcase was just misguided.

“I don’t think of Him like that at all,” I said, and Weber looked at me. “I think of Him as kind, and forgiving, loving. Stern and strict on an occasion or two, yeah, but by your side. On your side. See, Weber, here you make it out like God has abandoned you, but then I see you looking at these trees and…” A bomb went off nearby, tearing a tree into splinters but it only caused us to flinch and a pause in my sentence, a red light on our faces. “I see you looking at these trees and finding God in them. God in beauty. God in everything, if you will.”

He smiled.

“See, now we’re having a conversation.”

“Yeah, Weber, I guess we are.” I paused. “But God’s not in everything. Alright? There’s evil in this world. There are things what have left God’s light. That aim to destroy it. So, to take it back to your original question, to bring this conversation in full circle, I pray because there is evil all around, and I need God’s help, His guidance, to allow me to fight against it, and to win.”

He stood thinking about this and I turned and led us onward.

“So you’re saying that God is choosing sides? That he is picking us, or he’s picking you over the Germans. Over evil.”

“Yeah, Weber, I guess I am.”

“Well, I can’t believe in that. I can’t believe in that kind of blind faith.”

Again, for what I hoped was the last time before we found our company, I turned and faced Weber.

“That’s what believing in God is, Weber. Blind faith. You keep saying you understand but you don’t.”

“That idea doesn’t take into account the Germans that aren’t all bad. Lots of Germans are Christians, you know?”

I scoffed at this.

“God knows what side to pick,” I said.

Weber shook his head.

“I can’t believe that.”

He suddenly took the lead and I, reluctantly at first, followed him.

“Well, then what do you believe, Weber? He just sits on the sidelines, reading the funnies? He just lets us fight it out until one is dead and the other is bruised and bloodied having fought? He just deserts us to kill each other?”

There was a strange break in the background gunfire. Like the end of a song before the next.

“The way I see it,” Weber said, stopping and turning toward me as the explosions picked back up. “God has three positions He could take on war. One, He picks a side, choosing the ones that are the most good and true and faithful, yeah? Two, He picks no sides, knowing that both sides harbor good and bad, sure? Cause both sides are man, whether they are Americans or Germans, made in his image and all. And then three. He picks both sides, for the same reasons that He picks no sides. Impartial, eh?

“But if God were to pick no sides or to pick both sides, one would be the same as the other, both sides having His support, leaving us, us humans, on our own with him or without him. Cause if God’s on our side and the enemy’s side, on account of the few good Christian Germans God ain’t gonna turn a blind eye to, we’ll say for the sake of argument, then we’d be fighting with God’s support against God’s supported.

“Now, just a minute Patrick, let me finish. If He were to pick one side, picking them based on merit, He’d have to ignore certain people, certain good people on the losing team, and He’d have to support certain evil people on the winning team. I mean, shit, I would hate to be God and have to make those kinds of decisions.”

For an instant, Weber seemed equally idiotic as I had recently—briefly—come to see him as intelligent. The paradox of his theological postulation seemed to mirror his own intellect.

“So if God is going to pull any favors for you,” he continued, “Then He just might be pulling favors for the God-fearing German that clasps his cross between his hands.”

I took in a deep breath; it felt somewhat toxic in my lungs.

“Are you trying to tell me, after the last twenty minutes or so we’ve been walking, that my prayers to God are pointless?”

Weber shifted a little as if he’d ingested a bite of undercooked meat.

“I guess so? Yeah. I mean you’re either praying to a generalizing god, or one that won’t answer your prayers.”

I felt like hitting him. I felt like planting a few of his fucking teeth in the dirt and seeing what sort of obnoxious, bent tree grew from the ground.

“Alright, Weber,” I said with finality and a nod. “Good conversation.”

I turned and stormed onward.

“Jesus, Patrick. I’m not trying to get you to apostatize your beliefs or nothing. I’m just trying to have a civilized conversation.”

“Well, go and have it with someone else. Go have it and a laugh with your kraut drinking buddies.” 

“I don’t see anyone else around to have this conversation with, much less one who wears a cross around their neck.”

I decided then and there that I was just gonna ignore him. If I stopped responding to him, he’d eventually get the hint and stop talking. So I trudged on. It seemed to work. He followed in silence. Maybe he realized he’d upset me and felt bad enough for it to shut his mouth for a change.

We continued through the trees and yet, we didn’t come across our company, or anyone for that matter. The symphony of destruction actually got dimmer and I was beginning to wonder if we were even heading in the right direction.

“Alright, I’m sorry, O’Connell,” Weber said, using my last name as if it might be some kind of relatable peace-offering. “I just get a little curious and rambulatory occasionally. Is that even a word? Rambulatory? I feel like it could be. Jesus, my head is a goddamn lumpy stew in this place. Where’s my canteen?”

I stopped and looked around. Nothing but more goddamn trees like we’d been walking in circles for the last twenty, twenty-five minutes. I could hear Weber patting himself down, searching like a moron for his canteen—the damn thing could’ve been taped to his forehead and he’d still need help finding it.

“Look,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, alright?”

I turned to Weber. He had his canteen in one hand, his German pistol in the other—for God knows what reason—and looked up at me with his placid, curious eyes, right as a bullet went through his left eyebrow. It seemed to happen in an instant and an hour at once and it was sometime between the bullet striking him and his body hitting the ground was when my brain registered the sound of the shot.

I dove to the ground. More gun fire raked my ear drums. Bullets whizzed by. They tore limbs off of trees. One struck my pack. My heart pounded like its own warzone and I quickly scanned the dark for the gunman. Shot after shot after shot sounded around me. The horrid, dissonant music of war roaring over me like a lion. My mind raced in a panic and I suddenly saw the flash of a rifle firing and the starlit silhouette of a man wielding it. Then others too.

I took aim with my rifle, set it dead on the uniformed enemy and I fired.

As the butt of my gun heaved against my shoulder and the pulse of the blast concussed my ears, time turned to molasses and I felt, in that moment, what I was sure was the power of God. I was completely terrified and completely at peace as the blast from my rifle sang in my ears. I was full and I was empty, and I couldn’t exactly tell the difference.

Photo by England