The Red Curtain

I looked at the loathsome husk in the chair with the skeletal fingers drumming away, with military precision, in time with the furious rain rapping outside. His face was long, gaunt, and drawn; even in the gloom, the skin was deeply wrinkled and flaky. Sunken deep in their sockets, his eyes glowed like a grey pair of wisps. Tall and wide, a giant; he had kept well-fed and strong while growing stiff as a coffin, and his jaw was as sharp and wide as ever, like my father’s, like mine. That was the only thing we had alike. Though receding and thin, the strands of his silver hair were well greased and slicked back into a neat, regulation style.

“Good evening, Buddy. My dear boy,” he grumbled in a frail, gravelly voice. “I knew if any Jackson would come, it would be only our bravest and best. How are you, Sergeant?”

I was tired. Always tired. So tired that if I stopped moving, if I stopped thinking, and judging, and hating every moment, every step, every face, I would fall into an eternal sleep, filled with blood-soaked dreams. How was I? I traded every skip in my step for a regulation march, dreaming about my chance to prove myself. To do my Grandpa, the great General Warner T. Jackson proud. To be called a man by the legendary soldier.

Only to find that soldier never lived.

The words ‘4F-Unfit for Duty’ had been seared on my mind since I read them on Warner T. Jackson’s file in the Captain’s office. I begged the captain to let me read it, traded him every cigarette I had and would have, just to see all of Grandpa Warner’s war stories in an official report. The report handed to me wouldn’t hold against a broken fan. I was furious with the private who fetched the wrong file, but when I searched myself there was no other Warner T. Jackson on record. It was simply a single sheet of poisonous paper. Correct family, correct address, even a picture, all above the words: ‘4F – Unfit for Duty.’

He never enlisted, never fought, and never killed. He died, nevertheless, then and there.

I was angry. I no longer remembered what it was like not to be. I went to war for glory, as promised, to become a better man than my father and one worthy of that sacred pantheon of fighting Jacksons. All I was given for trying to do them proud was three years of torture, degradation, humiliation, defeat, and objectification. I became a bag of meat and blood, shooting other bags of meat and blood.

How was I? I was already dead. He need not ask how that feels.

“Did you laugh?” I pulled out my Colt .45. “Did you laugh when I went off to war?”

The drumming finally stopped. Beyond the hammering rain, there was only our breathing and the audible crater left by my simple question. The trigger nestled under my finger. Then I heard the stiff air sift through his cracked teeth. He clutched each arm of the chair and he hoisted himself up to his full height. His shadowy figure appeared like a hideous apparition: a demonic combination of Ebenezer Scrooge and Frankenstein’s Monster. But he was no abomination, only a coward.

With stilted steps he came slowly towards me, his arms fixed by his side with no pretense of affection.  

Shambling past me toward the decanter, he poured two glasses. I just stared at it. His arm grew weary. Just as he began to withdraw the glass, I snatched it and gulped it down in one swallow. Bitter, snot-textured bourbon; the bastard had watered it down. What remained untarnished left a punishing after taste that guttered into the back of my throat like bile, though once down it burned with a decent warmth. He sipped at his and made no visible reaction to it, but lack of pain did not mean pleasure.

Shaking his head, he sighed deeply and said. “No, Buddy. I did not laugh. I was never prouder. You went to fight in a noble war, you fought bravely, and became a man.”

“Shut up. You don’t know a damn thing. Not about war, about bravery, or what makes a man.” His head sank into his chest when I raised the gun. “You were never in the shit,” I spat. “You just dealt it. All I ever heard from you was the value of valour and honour and gallantry, and how great you were against the Nazis. Pa never listened or fought, so you crushed him down into the dirt like you were John Wayne stomping a worm. And you let me root for you.”

“Now, there’s a difference there you need to understand, my boy,” he interjected. “Your father was a yella-belly wuss. He was.” He said the words like he always did, forgetting my father was his son. Somehow exhausted, he wandered back and collapsed into his chair. He went on, and on, and on, “Korea, the commies, even Vietnam, that maggot did nothing. He could have, but he was too much of a selfish sissy to stand up and do his part. But I still did my part!” he protested desperately, “I got good, strong boys into the fight in my stead and they came out men.”

“Except they didn’t.”

He was a glassy-eyed old fool, alone save for the ghosts of imagined patriots.

“You know, I wish you did laugh,” I said. “I wish telling me all that showy bullshit about the magnificence of war was a lark. I wish degrading Pa until he had one way out was just fucking hysterical to you. And I wish sending me and all the other kids to that Hell was all just some sick, practical joke. I really do wish that.”

He raised his hand at me wearily as if he had had enough when he had not been through anything. Not yet. He was not allowed to be weary.

“Please, Buddy. It’s over. You’re back now,” he croaked.

“No, I’m going to tell you why you should have fucking laughed.” I stormed up to him and put the barrel of my gun against his brow, as soft as a rotten fruit. He quivered under its weight. “I wish you laughed purely so I knew you didn’t believe you were one of us. You’re nothing but a coward, a hypocrite, and a murderer.”

His fingernails clawed into his seat like a drowning cat. His joints crackled and the wood groaned. His eyes clamped shut and he sobbed from the deepest depths of his throat. He cried. It may have been the only brave thing he had ever done.

“I only wanted to make a man out of you, Buddy,” he whimpered. “Make you more than some sissy in a bookstore like my own boy. And look at you now: you’re a man of principle and conviction. You’re a man of war, Buddy, like those grand old ships.”

“And what happens to those ships, with their two hundred guns, when the battles are over?” I pulled the hammer back, “Laugh.”

He bit his spit-drenched lip and clung to his last pained breaths.

“LAUGH!” I roared.

But the damn fool only wept. His deep-set, steely eyes turned to mush. I really didn’t want to, but I pitied him. I recalled a boy blanketed in a big bomber jacket, sitting on the old man’s knee, enamoured and inspired. Then I saw the choppers dropping Hellfire from above me, friends turning into cackling devils as they cleared fields of farmers, the shadowy demons charging me in the night, and the red rivers running through roads of burning villages. The blood veiled my memory, my every thought, and my vision like a transparently thin red curtain.

But he was right; I was a man of principle.

He needed to admit he was a coward. He needed to feel what he did to Pa. And he needed to truly pull a trigger for once in his life.

I placed the gun into his frail hand, then turned it upward so that the barrel was up under his jaw.

I stepped back.

“Fine. Don’t laugh. Pull the trigger. That’s an order.”

He gawked at me, his lip quivering. I tried to think he was not pitying me, the curtain thickening. It only thinned again when I grasped my knife handle.

“This is really what you want?” he whimpered. “This is the thanks I get?”

I shut my eyes and drew in a deep breath of stale air. The rain beat to the rhythm of a march.

I remembered that massacred village. Snakes finding warmth in spilled guts. Only a handful of that village turned out to be Vietcong.

Yes. This is the thanks you get, old man.  

“Be a man of principle and conviction, Warner. Like me. Be proud,” I grunted.

“I am, my boy,” he sobbed.

“Then pull the fucking trigger.”

His face was drawn, his eyes red and clearly stinging, his entire being emptied.  

His sunken jaw contorted into a grotesque grin. A low, rumbling chuckle quaked through his entire body. Finally, he laughed.

“I am proud of you, my boy,” he rasped, slowly aiming the shaking gun at me. His whole body winced as he pulled the trigger.

To me, it flashed behind that damn red curtain, where it was always hot. I saw ‘Charlie’ coming at me in the night, rifles flaring, bullets swarming like mosquitos. The boiling dark tightened around me. Every breath singed my throat. My mouth tasted of burnt blood. Every string of muscle ached, every patch of skin stung.

There was never any sound behind the curtain.   

Battles were flashes in the perfect dark. Red flashes. Dried leaves, cracked and strewn across the bloodied ground of my remembrance. 'Charlie' charged, ever multiplying shadows firing endlessly from the gloom. My comrades stood fighting as men and fell as flesh. I returned fire; one of them fell on his knees before me. I had my knife in my hand one moment; it was deep in his chest the next.

The gun lay still on the floor. The smell of dried fruit and whiskey was exchanged for wet pennies, and the silence exchanged for the stoic rhythm of rain.

Warner Jackson, the false general, was slumped back in his chair. My knife, upright like a flagpole, in his chest.

My father was his own man. He sold good books. John Wayne had nothing on him.  

Glistening blood crept down his pristine shirt like fresh paint on a white picket fence. His cold, waxy skin suited him. His eyes were white, and his mouth hung ajar; stunned by death’s untimely arrival. If one could call it untimely.

He looked so surprised. There was no parade or twenty-one gun salute. Only me, and the natural consequences of his words and actions. Consequences always came as a shock to cowards.

In spite of the graze on my shoulder, ringing with a faraway pain, I found myself unable to suppress an uncontrollable laugh that convulsed violently through my body. I picked up my gun and pulled out my knife. My sight blurred with giddy tears.

Warner could not even face his end, what he was, or follow an order.

I laughed. I kept laughing for all the years stolen by the corpse that lay in front of me.

The gun felt warm, the knife handle comforting to the touch. The Colt was lighter; seven bullets left. I stopped laughing, overcome by the surreal tranquillity. The rain furiously pinged against the glass. I opened the window to embrace the downpour. With the chilling patter of water on my skin, and the hammering pellets against my jacket, it was like I just drank a cup of tin-tasting coffee and had received my orders for the day.

I stroked the trigger of the gun, and thumbed at the hammer, teetering it back and forth. There was so little to it: he had corrupted my purpose, warped it, and now it was done.  

The pain shot clean through my chest, unbearable for just a moment.

I was numb. The curtain was gone. Exposed, I was splayed on the floor on my stomach, my grip clutched into the crispy velvet carpet.

I could no longer feel the coarse fabric between my fingers, or the itching pain in my chest, or my searing breath. The curtain fell once more, slowly, to the rain’s thunderous applause.

Behind the curtain, I saw my blood-soaked memories fluttering by like a film reel rattling to its final cells, ending with Grandpa Warner, still and honest, slumped back in his chair. I did not know if the world after him would be better. I guessed it wouldn’t be. Still, I just wanted one of them to pay. I needed him to answer for the life he had made for me. That was enough. The applause ended, and the threads darkened and merged until finally set: an impenetrable thick red curtain.  

THE END.