Me and Leon

 

Me and Leon

 

God of mercy and compassion look with pity upon me

Father let me call thee Father, tis thy child returns to thee

Jesus Lord I ask for mercy, let me not implore in vain

All my sins I now detest them, never will I sin again

G.B. Pergolosi d. 1736

 

   There were many ways to climb into the cold, boreal forests of the Catskills, some easier than others. Freddie and Leon always took the hardest, steepest, rockiest trails there were because that’s what the Army would have wanted, even though it hurt Freddie’s legs now and sucked his lungs dry. He had asthma, arthritis, age. Once “Fabulous” Freddie was a mess. “Sucks getting old,” he thought, but in a sick kind of way it helped seeing Leon wear down too. They’d enjoyed a fellowship of shared suffering that had been the Army for two years, and many years of pleasant hiking since.

   It had been tough lately, though. Watching Kabul go down in trillion dollar flames brought back bad memories for Freddie, and nightmares. He’d been snapping at people, not cruelly but reactively, apologizing afterward. That’s how he knew he needed to grab Leon and head for the high country, with its fragrant balsam firs and emerald moss. A man could scream his outrage there, but only to himself and his god, because sound didn’t travel in the taiga. It just soaked into the evergreens and became lichen. That was life in ‘the green zone.’

   The walk up was spectacular in its own pedestrian sense, immersed in the afternoon glow of birch and beech at peak foliage. Sunlight sparkled off a brook that ran along the trail and reflected back onto glacial stones along the way. Halfway up the mountain Fred stopped to pee, stepping a few paces off the path before unzipping behind a fallen tree in case a stray female wandered by. He didn’t mind peeing in front of Leon, or any other veteran, for that matter. They shared the same heritage of bad food, dirty water, diarrhea, vomit, piss, and shit. That was life in the Army.

   As Fred was finishing he was surprised to see a dark haired man in a thick moustache and purple coat rush by, hands buried in his puffy pockets. “Afternoon,” Fred called out as he zipped up, but the man either didn’t hear or didn’t care. “Well, definitely not a veteran, Leon,” he said, pointing to the purple man’s shoes as they disappeared beyond a boulder. “Loafers! He’ll be lucky if he only breaks an ankle! My god, you see the strangest things on the trails sometimes. He’s moving at a pretty good pace though, faster than us anyway. Maybe he is a veteran. Looks like a Navy lawyer, right? Hoo-ahh, Navy!” and they laughed.

   At about the two hour mark the trail took a sharp turn up and to the right, where the white birch died and a forest of dark green pine erupted in glorious explosions of calm. You could almost draw a quiet crayon line across the mountains at 4,000 feet, with green above and gold below. Rocks, roots, and mud, it all vanished in a sudden rush of wind, with cold and wet descending, as they entered into a lavishly painted heaven of luminescent greens and twisted, brown krummholz, the pained, praying trees that could heal a hurting man’s soul with their eternal sacrifice high above the fleeting hardwoods in their xanthic autumn castles.

   The two friends took their time along the undulating half-mile tunnel, whispering confessions in the mist before emerging into a small clearing dominated by an old fire tower at the summit. A sharp throb was wrapping itself around Freddie’s knees and burrowing into his hips. “C’est la guerre…” he muttered. Just as they cleared the woods a metallic shiver ran down the legs of the tower, followed by a heart-stopping scream. Looking up into a brilliant sun, Fred could make out a dark blob dangling from the structure high above, wriggling and thrashing with sounds no human should ever have to make.  “Jesus, Leon, that’s the purple  guy…” and he threw off his light pack and climbed, up and around the ten landings of tower, gusts growing stronger at every turn until, with nowhere left to go, he came face to upside-down face with the man from the trail. Huge gashes on his cheeks and chin poured blood down the man’s tortured face, soaking into his hair and pooling under his mustache. Both lips were split and his front teeth smashed, filling his mouth with blood and sputum. The man was choking to death on his own life as tears of pain peeled off in the wind.

   War had taught Freddie to expect the unexpected, the absolute worst, but this was different, even beyond war, somehow. How was this even possible? It made no sense. His mind raced for reasons, and he found himself yelling for answers. He was searching for ropes, props, or a cell phone, thinking the fool was pulling some kind of internet stunt, but there were none. Carefully following the body up to where it stopped, he could see that the man must have been standing on one of the tower’s steel beams when he slipped. His foot, wrapped in paisley and brown leather, had saved him. It got wedged into a corner of the structure as the rest of his body pivoted downward, shin bones snapping and snagging on one of the braces. The leg keeping him aloft was attached by nothing more than straining polyester tendons and broken bone. Leon stared up from the empty red picnic table, frozen.

   “The empty picnic table!” Freddie realized. “He didn’t come here to hike...” The thought hit him like a bullet, and he found himself staring at the dangling man, who had managed to loop an arm over one of the horizontal supports, taking pressure off the sickening pain in his leg.

   “Did you just try to kill yourself?” The man was sobbing now, pitiful racks that ran through his straining neck and the shivering arms that were desperate to hang on. “Shhhh, hey, it’s okay, you can tell me. I’ve been there. I’m going to help you. But I need to know: did you just try to jump from here?” The purple man nodded ever so slightly. His hands were slick with blood that was starting to freeze. “Please…” The word gurgled out in a thick, red bubble. There was no way to loosen the mangled limb from its position without losing all the rest of him. It would take at least two hours to get to the bottom of the mountain and then god knows how many more before a team could make its way up in the dark. Hypothermia and shock would set in well before that. Fred kept poking his head out between the supports, careful to keep from being blown out himself, searching his mind, his past, the tower, anything, and then he saw it…

    He and Leon, along with the rest of 2^nd squad, were patrolling through a rice paddy, just another shitty day in hell, usually quiet in the scorching afternoons, but on this day the field exploded in ambush. Freddie was on point, ten meters out front, when bullets tore through his legs and hips, crumpling him into the water. Weighed down by weapons, gear and ammo, with machine gun fire shredding the air above, PFC Frederick Kurtz found himself about to drown in absolutely filthy, stinking brown water, surrounded by one of his least favorite foods, rice. “What would Uncle Ben say about this? Would they change their box for me, maybe put my name and likeness on it somewhere? ‘He died for this rice so that you could eat it in peace.’” Blood loss does funny things to a man’s mind. Fred imagined he heard the playful sounds of children splashing nearby, along with far off commands, explosions, gunfire, and finally bliss as he felt his body lifting from the water in death, with Leon’s smooth church voice singing one of the old, old hymns…  

   And then he was back again, stumbling down the tower through a screeching wind,  running for the dark splotch beneath the body, hoping, praying, yes, thank you Lord, reaching for the gun, checking the bore for debris, clearing the slide, hearing the screams again, knowing the arms had failed, inspecting the chamber, releasing the receiver, flicking the safety off, ‘click,’ ‘click’, ‘click,’ ‘click’, the training kicking in just as it was designed to do, asphyxiating rational thought, reducing life to the automatic movements of cells, building blocks of military life, another scream, a firm grip and a wide stance, more cries from the heavens, “shhhh,” align the purple mass within the sight picture, Leon on the cross, forgive them father for they do know what they do, break his legs, exhale, hold, squeeze like a lover, ignore the screams, enjoy the recoil, squeeze again, hear the ‘bang,’ feel the recoil, hear the ‘bang,’ feel the recoil, ‘bang,’ ‘bang,’ ‘bang’ seven times it went, and then the ringing in the ears like a concussion, and the sight of the purple man swaying peacefully in the wind, bloody hands reaching earthward in the eternal pull of regret. Without thinking he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. ‘Click.’ And again. ‘Click.’

   Dropping the magazine Fred glanced at the empty chamber, faded sunlight swirling through the smoking barrel, and slowly returned the gun to the ground where he’d found it. Seventy-eight year old deli clerk Frederick Kurtz had just committed a criminal act of mercy, something that nineteen year old PFC Kurtz could not do for his best friend on a terrible day in Da Nang. North Vietnamese rockets targeted the airfield, immolating a truck full of soldiers heading home from 13 months in combat. Frederick had just clambered out of to use a shitter before boarding the plane when explosions tore into the crawling convoy. There was only one survivor from Freddie’s vehicle. His arms and legs were gone, ears and nose burned off, face just a blackened smear of teeth and one stunned eye, moving slowly across the horrified faces. No words were needed. It was a promise they’d all made to each other beyond the wire, but here in the rear, surrounded by a multitude of innocent witnesses, it was different. Freddie was still pulling his pants up as he got to the truck, but medics were already working on him. Pvt. Leon Jackson would live to spend the rest of his long, painful life in an endless series of filthy VA hospitals. 

   Freddie sighed. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, and he grabbed the heavy walking stick from its place by the table. “We got some decisions to make, buddy. Let’s take the long way.” He paused to look at Leon. “I’d have done the same for you if I could, you know that, right?”

   He waited in silence as Leon stared off into the distance. Hearing no reply, Frederick cursed, and tossed the stick aside. “Fuck you, Leon! You think I can’t find another one?  There’s ten-thousand of ‘em just like you out there!” and he limped into the late afternoon darkness of his own shadow, alone.