THE RAW, DEFIANT NOVEL OF THE SIXTIES




THE SECRET






An Oratorical Novel 
by JAMES DROUGHT


Some books speak to their generation:
In the Forties, Ayn Rand's controversial The Fountainhead; in the Fifties, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; more recently Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  Each of these books made a powerful statement; and each of them was sought out and recognized by its own generation.

In the same fashion, James Drought's The Secret is being read on every campus across the Nation.  Word of mouth has spread the news of this book by a young American who is unafraid to say it.  Copies of the first privately-printed edition have been passed from hand to hand until they are worn out.

James Drought omits nothing in this slashing novel: The sleeping dogs he attacks range from big business and the military establishment to greed and apathy in private life, from our religion, morals and sexual attitudes to our dreams.

Uncomfortably powerful... a good, hard look at life and country, as real and disconcerting as the subject.  Mr. Drought has a piece of knowledge born of his vision, paid in blood.

			St. Louis Post Dispatch


"I am much impressed by this... It is more a testament than a novel... very powerful."

			Paul Pickrel, THE YALE REVIEW




All characters are fictitious











Copyright, 1963 by James W. Drought
Copyright renewal, 1990 by Lorna Carlson Drought,          J. Henry Drought, Sara Drought Nebel, W. Alexander Drought, Carrie Drought

CHAPTER 1

	It is no small discovery, this one, this hard center of a smoldering gamey life, earth, world, universe, God; and I dedicate it to no mean personalities, just a splendid son, a winsome wife and a perfect daughter, all who live under my leaky umbrella in this most inclement of climates, this Year of Our Lord, 1960.  But first --- before I reveal my find --- a bit about myself, my search, my acquaintances, my deeds, successes, failures and horrors, my life and my times, my thoughts and my conclusions, and then at long last my discovery, of course, and how I came to know it, and what it means.  You will not have to wait a great while, but you will wait a little, so resign yourself.  First I must acquaint you with the history of my search.
	On the sunny edge of Chicago, where I grew up, I began to realize that people had a crimp in their heads, a deadly furrow displacing something uncommon and substituting that common indentation called space or nothing or lunacy, which kept people from understanding anything.  For instance, they were never jarred, as I was, by lies and ugliness and the useless maudlin million products made to their rooting taste, instead they enjoyed them much, took the goods to themselves, hugging tight as if what they held was in their own likeness --- false, ugly, useless and filled with cheap sentiment, exactly like themselves.  But is this so surprising, I asked myself.  No.  How can the common man have a knowledge that is uncommon? ---of course, the answer is he cannot.  Can the barnyard goose go wild with the first wind in fall, can he spread his stumpy wings and climb out of his grubby pen?  Can the dog leave his cow-bones suddenly and go into the brush to tear down his game running?  Can the egg-laying chicken, or the chicken-laying rooster, suddenly turn into a fighting cock with a whipping kick, a fierce heart, a dying courage, a willing instinct to be great at all costs and rip feathers, skin and flesh from a jaunty similar competitor?  Of course not.
	Domestics don't take the large strides leaping from what is to what will be, these explorations are taken by the more daring, born that way and unable to be another, and it is only after the thing is done that the great and common tide comes tumbling after, unthinking, seeking only a way already proven easier, or more practical, and there is never any understanding or thought, never any consideration of the idea, the ecstatic dive into the future, that first great step, because if the common could understand they too would become distinctive for they could consider alternatives to everything, having truly understood the alternative to one thing.  But they cannot because they are after all common, and no one can ask ---for instance --- the common gnarly-rooted hedge to burst into peonies, nor the thistle to shine like an orange poppy, because the hedge and thistle are common and concerned only with survival and growth while the peony, the poppy, deliberately construct themselves with an eye toward exaggeration and beauty.  There is a great difference between selecting green and selecting from all available colors.  In the former there is no mistake possible, in the latter there can be failure as well as success.
	But any leader must be found correct by the history which pursues him or he dies out as an experimenter not on the right track.  He is judged in time by whether or not the hordes follow; and I don't say this is fair, but I do say it is true.  There are sometimes mistakes made when a daring experimenter has actually found the right way but the horde denies it and thunders ahead in the wrong direction, or may even pick the lesser leader and follow his mediocre trail into the future granting him fame or fortune or power, while his superior dies on that unfollowed lovely path that was the best one all along.  So goes the endless circle of history chasing its own tail, going nowhere but around and around in unreasonable curves because the various species progress and regress only by chance, although the superior among them continue to offer amazing alternatives.
	I felt no contempt for people, nor did I think I was better off, or anything of the kind.  (When a hundred men are cast into a sea who cares if ninety-nine of them go down immediately, while one, a better swimmer, glides effortlessly into the choppy waves before succumbing with desperate, heroic, cunning efforts failing to keep him alive?  If all men flail until they drown, who cares?)  The fact that I liked people, though, didn't keep me from noticing that what I could do and see and understand they could not.
	I grew up west of Chicago along the Salt Creek (the longest creek in the world, by God), where I caught soft-shelled crabs and then baited my hook with their bellies to catch bass and bullheads, while some of my friends unfortunately carried home their crabs like misers and denied themselves the chance for fish.  I set snares for the elusive pheasant as it pranced a few feet through brush only to shove its lovely ringed neck into my wire loop, I found its pencil-line trails poking through the yellow weeds to water, I looped the wire correctly, fastened it securely; while most of my friends could not.  I adapted to the clumsy hurtling rabbit and caught him too, I steel-trapped the muskrat and more spectacularly the mink, and I didn't find it difficult.  I found most difficult the very idea I had to accept that my friends could not do these things well, and although I made many excuses for them, soon I had to cease blaming fate and put the blame on their clumsiness, and afterward I could do nothing but smile with boredom as they discussed their theories on how to fish, snare and trap, urging me to try some so they could see if any worked.  I shot squirrels out of trees, and I had to admit I was a better shot, either because of a gifted eye, a steadier hand, a determination, or what, but more did fall to the ground, brother, when I shot than fell when my friends fired away hitting limbs, leaves and ticking houses, swearing that something was wrong with their goddamn sights, their sleeve caught, something was in their eyes, the gun was bent, etc., so I couldn't ignore their clumsiness and my skill for long.  I caught catfish, possum, coon, trout, and all the others, occasionally a dove, pigeon, a buck and once on a weekend a deer with an arrow, and another time a bear with three arrows.  I was the best hunter of all that I knew, and my friends recognized it, too, complimenting me on it with smiles and many shakes of their less confident hands.
	We were then, at least, still related by our devotion to similar interests, or to put it more truthfully my broader range of interests in part coincided with their total interests.  There were so many things I never could talk to them about.  For instance, after thinking about our differences --- and this is the first thing the uncommon man is rudely made to do, for his vast differences cannot be ignored --- I concluded that all skill is based on an intuitive ability to know instantly what comes next.  I think this intuition is the great separator between those of us who are used meanly by fate and those of us who are able to excel to the point where we can control our own future.  It is something men are born with or without, and there is nothing that can be done about it, except to reveal whether or not they have it.  The clumsy man can yearn and try and seek and work and study and reason and worry and revise, but he will never be anything but clumsy although his labor may produce competence.  The man who knows what to do and what to look for --- I like to call him a glider, because he seems to skim through life growing unhappy at only what he finds around him and never with himself --- may not know why or where or how, but he does know what, and this is enough, he sees something not seen, he understands something not understood, he can do things that aren't usually done, and all speculation takes place by others, who after observing the amazing performance try mightily to understand it, the better to reduce it to their own level.
	Only idiots contemplate themselves, trying to discover genius of one sort or another.  The real genius, I'm afraid, is brought quickly and painfully to the conclusion he is unique by the very events of his life, those tumultuous times when he knew, he saw, he understood, and he could have done the right thing, but was stopped by those who neither knew, saw or understood anything, or by the times when he succeeded gloriously in doing the proper thing, but no one was profound enough to recognize his victory, no hands applauded, no one recalled it; and, bewildered, he had to watch his great effort pass unnoticed into the past awaiting resurrection by some great soul of the future, or awaiting nothing at all but destruction.

CHAPTER 2

	I remember when the woman nextdoor hung herself.  One morning there was the shocking sight, the purple face, popping eyes, the strangely bent head, the hanging body all baggy and dead, right in the center of the picture window.  Where on a table had stood the huge porcelain lamp covered by the big window-wide lampshade, the woman had stood, then had kicked the table out from under her, swinging by one of the drapery strings from her tinkling chandelier.  I was walking by to school when I saw it through the glass all posed, for the entertainment of pedestrians, upon the window stage as if a masque presented as a last offering to the street, and I went home saying Ma, Mrs. Johnson's in her window, dead, and although there was disbelief my folks soon saw it for themselves, my Old Man phoning in a hurry, my Ma maintaining The very idea, she could have heen more private about it, what will the child think when he grows up and becomes a man, for heaven's sake; and all over the neighborhood word ran that Mrs. Johnson had hung herself right in the window.  Was it a warning of some kind from the old widow?  People were always reporting her to the police because she played her music too loud, and my Ma said that when the police broke down the locked door to get to the gently swinging figure they found the radio, the phonograph and a player-piano all going in a mad loud band.  From the outside, where I stood waiting, it had sounded like a parade coming with all its colors down the street.
	Oh how she must have hated people --- that old widow Johnson --- but she had the best flowers on the block, some blooming it seemed every day until snow covered them, and then some in bloom already when the snow first ran away.  She would snip them all before they wilted and pile them near the alley, burning them when they dried, throwing a greenish smoke over the whole neighborhood.  When the police came they thought her death might have been a trick and they asked if anyone disliked her.  They were told everyone did; at one time or another she had spilled her bitterness on all.  But when an officer asked me I told him I thought she was okay because she kept the witches away, which is what I believed always lying in my room late at night: no witches or monsters or tigers would come near because they were all afraid of Mrs. Johnson.  The reporters came, too, and I told my story until Ma grabbed me, but the next day the papers had it all wrong, saying Mrs. Johnson was "deranged" and had hung herself in "despair" adding she had been "a lonely old woman."  You can see how much they missed the point of the piano, the radio, the phonograph and all, and why she had picked the spot in front of the picture window.  I often thought she had planned it as her grand finale, a last screw you on her wrinkled old lips as she swung to and fro, never to be tucked off to a hospital where the people in white could tell her what to do, never to have to lie still while some insane neighbor-lady spooned broth into her mouth, never to have to sit watching the weeds rise above her beloved roses, never to weakly try to stop some helpful soul from shoveling the snow from her portion of the main sidewalk --- whenever someone had tried that she would scream If I want my walk shoveled I'll do it myself, so mind your own business!
	Since she had no relatives living, the neighborhood was well on its way to planning a nice funeral --- with her money --- and had picked a parlor, had even listed hostesses for each of three days, when along came a grim-faced lawyer who said it was Mrs. Johnson's wish that she be cremated and her remains scattered over "my land," which was her 50 x 90 lot.  This was the clincher for the neighbors and they no longer tried to do anything for her, avoiding even the mention of her name.  When a young couple bought the house, tore out the shrubs and flower-beds, so they could get some air, and then put in creeping bent all over to turn the lot green with no relief and very neat, the neighborhood breathed easier, sinking into its common convictions with more confidence because it found no one rejecting it anymore.
	For about a year I could uncover no substitute for old Mrs. Johnson, however, no unyielding mind strong enough or certain enough, no gnarled grip like hers on what was hers, and everyone appeared tame compared with this wild widow, hacking away at her flowers to burn them in private before they wilted in plain sight.  I missed her, and if I hadn't outgrown my belief in witches I might have missed her more, since there was nothing on our block any longer for witches and demons and monsters to be afraid of.  They could have wiped us all out if they had only tried, for Mrs. Johnson, our true mother, hateful, selfish and unpleasantly bitter because she was older like most mothers than those younger, because she could not forget that her children on the street had a chance to get singled out in the future, while she had neither chance nor future --- Mrs.  Johnson was gone, she could no longer lash out at the things that threatened her, and therefore threatened us, we were now all motherless on the street and exposed with no totally vicious champion to protect us to her death.
	I, for one, felt orphaned, while the rest of the street relaxed, finding it no longer necessary to suffer the dominance of that "deranged" mad woman.  I could do nothing about it, no change in course was open to me, so in spite of Mrs. Johnson's death I simply went on, doing the things I was supposed to do --- at least for awhile, until I lost my religion.

CHAPTER 3

	I used to serve seven o'clock mass every morning at a big brick church on a corner where everybody went to forget and pray for forgiveness; and I used to wonder about the people I saw at the communion rail --- after all, I knew what kind of people they were.  Mr. Lavek was a crook contractor, for instance, who built "El Rancho" houses and sold them for $10,500 while everybody knew they would fall apart in a few years, come tumbling down around families strapped by a big mortgage and lots of kids.  Yet every morning there Mr. Lavek would be at the rail with his mouth wide open, his eyes rolling, his tongue hanging out for the Sacred Host.  One morning, Father Souchek and I were giving communion at the rail to one pink mouth after another, when I thought I noticed something funny.
	As the people came up, all reverent with their hands folded tightly, and knelt down on the leather cushion, there was this big, wild hiss of air that came out each time damn loud with a whoosh.  I tried not to laugh, not while holding the brass plate under their chins while they looked up all holy at Father Souchek, but it started me to thinking for the rest of the mass, and by the time we were finished I had it all figured out.  I told Father Souchek about it in the sacristy.
	"You notice how the cushion hisses when the people kneel on it?" I asked.
	"Yes, son," he said.  "It will have to be fixed."
	"No, not fixed," I said.  "I got this idea here are these people falling on their knees like something big is about to come off, and all they end up doing is putting out this great big hiss of air."
	Right away he thought I was criticizing when really I thought this was something humble and fine to happen m a brick church that didn't look much different from a factory, a miracle or something, a sign from God, a piece of truth shot from the Holy Spirit; but not Father Souchek.  I suppose, though, here he had given up women and everything and had his fingers blessed not just so he could help people hiss at God.  He gave me a shocked look and then turned away to finish locking up the Sacred Hosts and put the key in his pocket.  I always liked Father Souchek but he seemed to take everything the wrong way.
	"Let's walk out by my garden," he said.  When we got out there he pointed to his radishes and carrots.  "Don't they look fine?"
	I didn't say anything, just waited like I was supposed to for Father Souchek to set me straight, to give me a wrench back to correctness, save my soul from the hellfire he saw already licking my feet, scare away my devil, call back the angels and put me back happily into the flock.  The earnest look on his face told me plainly that I had stepped out of line and that he would do me the favor of kicking me back into place before it was too late.
	"Son," Father Souchek said finally, looking right in my face, "the Holy Eucharist is a living symbol."  He paused to make sure he had my attention.  "A living symbol of Christ, do you understand that?"  I nodded my head, but I didn't exactly know what a symbol was.  "And when the people take the host why they are filled with Christ, the living Christ.  Son, the Holy Eucharist is a marvelous gift given us by God, and to mock it would be a most grievous sin."
	I nodded my head again, and he went on a little, repeating the same thing, before he let me get on my bike.  When I got home I went to the dictionary the Old Man had brought home from the printshop where he worked, and I looked up what symbol meant so I could understand Father Souchek better.
	"Symbol," the dictionary said, " (sim'bul), n. 1. an emblem. 2. in writing or printing, a conventional sign, as a letter or abbreviation, used in mathematics, physics, music etc. to represent operations, quantities, elements, sounds, etc."
	As soon as I caught on religion was covered under etc., I thought I knew what Father Souchek meant.  In communion the people were eating a sort of abbreviated Jesus who was really alive, and since as I said before I knew what kind of people they were, all of a sudden I had it, I knew what it all meant, and it was something far, far better than even Mrs. Johnson.  When Jesus was here full-size 1,943 years ago, I thought, the people went and murdered him, people just like us.  Now in communion what we're all doing is "sim'bul-iz-ing" by eating him up how people like us killed him back then.  By eating him up I was reminding myself I was the kind who stuck him up on that cross.  You know, I thought this was something really great, and I felt good about it.  I even thought up a couple other good ways we could "sim'bul-ize" what we did before and what we'd do again, if we had the chance.  Wouldn't it be fine if all of us would pick up a rock on the way to church and then as we went in we could wing it at old Jesus on the cross?  Or there could be a little statue of him at the door so that every time we walked in we could spit on him.  Or we could all curse him in a litany desecrating his goodness, we could shake our fists in a chorus of hate, reminding ourselves exactly what we are.
	But the next morning when I told Father Souchek what I had been thinking, he got angry red and puffed all up.  He shouted about how people who eat Jesus are really filled up with Jesus and they are all good and all holy while they are almost like eating something dehydrated, I supposed he meant.  He wouldn't even look at me but whirled around in his vestments and pushed me through the doorway, nudging me with his big belly until we got to the foot of the altar in front of the kneeling crowd.  I kept trying to figure out why anybody could be all gcod and all holy after eating up Jesus, and I was confused by the mix-up, when about midway through the Mass old Father Souchek let this big fat fart, right up there on the holy altar with the tabernacle open and his hand poked through the silk curtains, reaching for the Sacred Host.  When he turned around I could see his face get red and he muffed some of the Latin.  The fart had been so loud even the nuns in the first row must have heard it, and he knew, boy, was his face red.  I thought here he takes the host every morning, and he's a priest, and he sure isn't all good, he's not any different from the rest of us.  The only trouble was I started thinking about the saints, and the Virgin Mary, and even about Jesus himself.  I had never thought about them before, but as soon as I did I knew they weren't any different from the rest of us either.  So right there at the foot of the altar with my hand covering my nose and trying not to look at poor Father Souchek, I lost my religion in an instant and I let out the laughter I had always felt.  I laughed all the way home on my bike, thinking about how I had been fooled by all this Jesus business and how I was never going to be fooled again.
	But when I got home I started thinking about how strong Jesus must have been --- if he was a human being just like me --- to go forty days without food, sweat blood, and then hang all day on a cross with nails banged through his wrists.  I had to admit this was one fine, holy, heck of a feat to accomplish without any help from God or heaven or anybody else, and I hoped when I grew up I would have as much guts as Jesus.

CHAPTER 4

	Although I went to that strange school where all the lies were passed out, provided by our town to keep the young in line, I stepped off the straight and narrow here, too.  I got my real education from Charlie, a twisted but knowledgeable old man who had difficulty talking and could say only a few words at a time.  I found Charlie a mile away from home one day on my ever-widening paper route, (which I had increased from thirty-five to one-hundred-and-twenty-eight deliveries, in only five months).
	He was slumped in a porch chair when I passed by on my bike --- a mangled misshapen mass of muscles all pulling in the wrong directions, making his head twitch down to one side --- and his arms waved wildly in the air at me, his mouth curling uncontrollably and then acking and spitting, his voice all graveled and garbled, struck me with:
	"Aarghh, eyyy! ... Wait ugh ... min --- ute! EYYY! .... Papuh,ughh ... pap-HUH!  HERE!"
	I turned and rode back, watching him struggle to release himself from the chair.  He had slight control over one leg and none over the other, which he had to drag and push and pull with those great hairy arms of his, built up by half a century of pushing on crutches, so it took him a minute to even sit up and then it was an agony later that he finally stood and undulated (which is the only way I can describe his ducking, weaving forward motion) slowly, painfully to the head of the steps where he stilled himself, his head resting crazily on one shoulder and his mouth grinning, his big black eyes boring ahead beneath his black hair slicked down carefully by his mother but falling in a few strings over his flat wide forehead and thick black brows.  He waved one hand unsteadily, more dipping his head under it than bringing his hand to his head, smoothing the hairs in place as well as he could, the open-mouthed imbecilic grin remaining, as he knew I was waiting now for him to say what he wanted and the most difficult thing in his nightmare of a broken, twisted backbone was to talk, to say anything at all, let alone reduce his amazing, intricate and infinitely shaded thoughts to the minimum of words that his back allowed to tumble out of his slobbering mouth.
	"Yahhh ... argh ... I'mah ... agguu ... Sharlieeee", he said, and he thumped his wide flat chest with one great hairy hand so that the sound thunked at least a hundred feet past me.  He continued smiling, although he must have known the monstrous ugliness he struck me with, and all that could have saved him was his confidence that if he could only get me to stay, if I would only have the patience to understand those tortured few words sieved through his scrambled voice box, that I would be entertained, surprised, instructed, delighted, confused, expanded, informed, and all else, so that my over-taxed attention would be repaid for its intent effort.  Yet, Charlie must have failed a thousand times to stop someone passing for every successful convert he made to relieve the intense boredom of his imprisoned and gagged mind that continually exploded through the pinhole which led to his mouth.
	Behind him at the screen appeared an old lady with the saddest face, as if she had watched her baby son in the convulsions of death one day and then had been forced to see these convulsions continue, day after day, for years, decades, as that misshapen offspring of her flesh conducted his grim battle against paralysis, immobility, blindness, deafness --- there was no act so small that he could depend on his ability to conduct it; for instance, one morning his mother told me Charlie could not have visitors because he was unable to open his mouth.  Sometimes, he won such a victory that he was able to walk the eight blocks downtown to talk with the merchants and sweep out Mr. Lavek's office --- which was his job --- although what would have taken a normal person an hour took him four, and this would be his greatest day.
	"Ayeee, argh, Papuh!"  Charlie smilingly groaned to his mother, as spit slid from his mouth forcing him to bring that great fist up again and strike himself to wipe his chin.
	Mrs. Opie Gates addressed me with her softer smile, but like her son admitting nothing was extra-ordinary about the scene --- an admission would lead to madness and solitude.  "He wants you to begin leaving the paper," she said.  And when I had nodded my head and had written down name and address, and when Charlie had strangled out some more sounds, she added, "Would you like some lemonade?"  I said sure, and I came up on the porch and sat talking with them, Mrs. Gates translating everything Charlie said, although he could hear us perfectly.
	Like all men of knowledge the passive act of accumulation was his only easy one, and able to hear he listened to speeches, the radio, music; and able to see he read damn near everything and had taught himself six languages, while he could offer almost nothing of his reflections based on the giant heap of his vast accumulations wealthy man, who was allowed to spend very little, a weathered book that could transmit one word per page although taken whole it was a masterpiece, a genius reduced to sign language of extreme simplicity, this was Charlie, my tutor, all there was to American education, knowledge but no expression, facts unrelated, a tongue-tied system trying to dispence the hoard of the ages behind it, an epic past remembered by a child, and only by this can you imagine the frustration, the aching desire, the fantastic nightmare, the monstrous waiting that a child of the times like me must go through to tear his precious heritage from your almost sealed mouthpiece, the stricken, misshapen, grotesque and defeating cripple that is SCHOOL, or what we have of it.
		"Yahhh ... ooorgh ... yice dayeee ... anduh sunnyeeee," moaned Charlie, which his mother translated as "It's a fine, sunny day, so dry and warm --- it makes Charlie feel so much better, and for that matter, all of us, to have such a clear cloudless day."  And while she explained this, he grinned happily, vigorously nodding his huge head and patting his leg with his open hand.  "Aargh!" he added, as if congratulating the two of us for our understanding.  He pointed vaguely at the sky, then, continuing his smile said, ". . . Ta ... sun ... aargh... ardly know ... think . . . 'ploding there."
	"The sun is exploding?" I asked.
	The vigorous nod came once again, incorporating not only his head but his shoulders and a flap of his hands.
	"You'll find," said his pleased mother, "that if you listen hard you can grow to understand him."
	Charlie grinned wildly and rocked happily and nodded again.
	Each day I stopped, circling back from my route and delivering Charlie's paper last, so that we could talk on the porch that summer, sipping his mother's lemonade and laughing at things the paper said (since Charlie took exceptional delight in pointing out how one report contradicted another in the same day's paper, or how a single report contradicted itself, or how even in a paragraph a sentence drew a conclusion opposite to the one suggested by the previous facts), and most days he would have his mother mark books ahead of time and bring them out after my arrival so he could point with his crutch to pages and get his opinions across to me with a series of excerpts drawn from many different sources.  Although he never cared to have me speculate on titles and tried to hurry me to the marked passages, I noticed all the strange names.  One day there would be Stendhal, Machiavelli, the Notebooks of Leonardo, Michaelangelo's poetry, and others as Charlie grooved out a few facts about the idea of nation-states.  The next book might be Leaves of Grass, so Whitman could make the previous thoughts relative to the strivings of my own country, and then would come an especially vicious piece of satire from Adam's Democracy, written just after Whitman and describing the inane corruption of the Grant and Hayes administrations.  It is a great thing to suddenly be struck at the age of twelve that it is not enough to simply be President, but that there have been good ones and bad ones, and that the Presidency is little more than an opportunity, which itself is so rigged that it takes a desperate attempt, good fortune, great shrewdness and capacity to be a decent leader, let alone to move oneself and the country a few steps higher in accomplishment.  "Everything ... believes ... it ... blooms ... the first time," Charlie explained, as he pointed out the many great democracies which preceded ours: the Greek, English, Iroquois, Incan, among others --- surely all with limitations, he would add; then when he saw my proud smile, he would point out our own limitations: limited control of land by our vast public, and ownership by a few of our total industrial capacity.  All that could be said for us was our size.
	The most fascinating thing he pointed out to me was that while it exalted man, democracy at the same time was based on a distrust of human motives.  "The... Founding ... Fathers," Charlie mumbled, "were . . . arrrgh..... trying to protect pee... pee ... pee-PUL. . . FROM pee-PUL!"  He chuckled happily at the effect this had on me, pointing with his crutch to various pages on the porch floor.  "Read ... Heyuh!" he advised, and then moaned as some special pain struck him.  (The gist of what he showed me was that the structure of our democracy had been devised to keep any human being or group from gaining too much power over the whole, because --- as the framers of the Constitution freely admitted --- all human beings were potentially corrupt and tended to mistreat others to their own advantage.  As a matter of fact, it was the assumption that any man mainly would strive for his own advantage that was expected to make democracy work.  There were no goals held by all, Charlie said, in a democracy, there were only conflicts, and out of these arose goals held by no single group, but supposedly good for all.  In other words, the democratic form of government was nothing more than a concrete political expression of the natural conflict that arises in any group of humans.  If we have any single view of life, Charlie explained, here in America it is a belief that no truth can be contained in a single head, that truth only arises out of the fusion that results when many sincere men meet head on with singularly limited beliefs and engage in combat --- the truth, or the ideal, is the combat itself, dramatizing life which is also a combat, mankind which is combative, and giving rise to compromise actions which are best for the population as a whole.)
	"I ... spose ... yorrrr wond'ring ... arrgh . . . how mistakes 'r made then . . . . RIGHT!" Charlie asked, his crutch coming to a halt.
	Although I wasn't wondering anything in particular, I nodded my head and smiled.
	Charlie claimed that sometimes a good idea lost simply because it was championed by a weak man, and that this was how "mistakes" were made in a democracy, more a result of inaction than of action, more a result of "seeing the other fellow's point" than a result of "not seeing it," more a result of one man trying to be all things to all men than of trying to be his own man.  (The more closely each man limits his fight to purely his own interests, in other words, the better democracy works; however, only so long as all men fight hard for their own interests.  It is a symphony, where all the instruments must speak definitely in their own voices to make the music that expresses the orchestral voice of all, while not one really can be heard; it is a man-made political system based on the theory that the total is greater than any part, and greater than the sum of any or all parts, that what arises out of the interaction of groups is greater than what arises out of any single group, and out of the sum of any groups; it is a nation greater than its total people and the total of their ideas.
	(Charlie liked to compare it with a play by Shakespeare, where all the characters are distinctive and certain and exciting, but each is different, and none can be said to speak the truth.  Each has beliefs that are in conflict with the other's, and only the crescendo, the play itself, which expresses the greatness of the conflict, becomes a single work of truth, unified, all inclusive, yet with a message of its own which stands for life itself, a representation of existence, which is the nearest thing to truth we know, a description of reality, a mirror image of the world, greater than any of its parts and greater than the sum.)
	"Isn't . . . the ... high ... point ... uv-every ... play ... the . . . conflict?" Charlie asked.  (Isn't the message the resolution of this conflict?  Doesn't every actor say his lines as if they are the only ones in the play, while he knows they are not?  And after all this can't the play fail, offering nothing?  Yes, but it can succeed, too, offering a reminder of life itself.)  It is the same with government, Charlie said, and I believed him.
	Then came the wars, the inhuman arguments to death, the conflicts resulting in mass murder, the wrecking, the destruction, the wounds, the torture, the sadism --- this was conflict, too, and all that arose from it was smoke, the decomposing stink of bodies all stiff and gruesomely piled in staggering hills of flesh.  Was this not a conflict, an expression too of life?  And if so was it not death that was being expressed?  Could death be the expression of life?  Could life be a will to death?  Well, if so nobody was saying it at the time: instead all --- Charlie included --- pretended, and I listened, that this was the common war to end wars once again, that we were on the side of right, the others on the wrong, that we waved God's banner, that we (one group) were in the fold of truth, while the enemy depended on lies --- ours was the cause of humanity, the others were anti-humans.  All of a sudden we threw it all up and sang that those of us in one hemisphere were godlike, the others were offspring of the devil, and it seemed true enough, listening to the radio, reading the newspapers, and even after it was over with, inspecting the ovens and hanging the culprits.

CHAPTER 5

	My cousin's name was Melvin and he was a marine who died at Guadalcanal; another cousin's name was Ralph and he was a soldier who came home so busted up he spent the next six years in and out of veterans' hospitals before dying of his wounds in middle age --- a death that was a blessing, as Ma said, and the family agreed with her.  My older brother died by drowning when the Lexington aircraft carrier sank in the Pacific, and a cousin named George, younger than Ralph and Melvin, was a paratrooper who dropped on Normandy during D-day minus one, and was cut in two by machinegun fire before he could take a step, although a quarter of a million men followed him in boats the next day and slowly and grimly avenged his death and all the others.  I cannot glorify their heroism because I do not deserve to; more years must pass, perhaps a Centennial will be held and the scholars will give speeches, for all the blood will have been forgotten.  All I can remember is Melvin's wife crying, her remarriage that seemed so sad, my brother's clothes coming out of his closet and being given to me, Ralph's grim face in the hospital-always Sunday in the hospital during visiting hours, the echoing halls, the purple bathrobes and the tired grey faces of the vets, the visiting wives and the children afraid to laugh, the lonely lack of things to do as the adults smiled and said things while being careful to say nothing because there was nothing to say.
	The war was announced on the radio, December 7, 1941, a Sunday set aside for church, the show, a drive in the suburbs, cold-meat sandwiches at night and Jack Benny's radio show.  The previous Sunday we had driven out to Grandma's for picnic lunch and much laughter by the barbecue pit, while Uncle Walter showed us kids how he could click his false teeth, push them out clicking from his lips like a duckbill jabbering, until Grandma told him to stop it, and my aunt slapped his face.  I remember there were hamburgers left over, and Uncle Lee had made a boat which he wheeled out of the garage to show us, and my cousin Donna took off with the boy next door to neck down by the park, or at least that's what her mother, my aunt, accused her of when she came back.  But on the next Sunday, we went nowhere, and just sat by the radio listening to the news that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor, a dirty sneaky attack while we weren't looking because we were talking with their ambassadors about peace in Washington, D.C.  My Mother cried and she hugged my Bro, while my Dad said over and over "It's hard to believe ... It' hard to believe."  From then on there was war, and I knew nothing else.
	The newspapers gave the battle reports, quoting "heavy losses" on Bataan; there were maps of New Guinea with multi-colors and ours was always contracting, and then always expanding; the Philippines were "lost" then "regained"; Europe was all grey, except for some black at Cherbourg which spreading across the Rhine like spilled ink, oozing toward Berlin.  The movies praised the killing, and I never thought of disagreeing when the pilots "came home" with their bomber groups "short," or as wreckage flamed down on the screen to bury itself and some man on their side or ours.  I worshipped the commandos, the rangers, because they were taught judo and could kill quickly with one of their million tricks; I liked the hotrod fighter pilots who made a game of killing and even kept score --- with the man making the most points seen in the newsreels, sent home to Washington for a medal; I hated the japs, shown killing and raping white women, strung up with officer's belts, their flesh as snowy as chicken-breasts; I hated Nazis who slaughtered the benevolent French Freedom Fighters; and the Italians seemed ludicrous, unworthy even of consideration, let alone hate.  I saw the movies where the japs dragged Marines out for torture in the night, making them cry out to buddies who couldn't go to their aid, and I died a little too with revulsion at the squint-eyed sadism, which could not be condoned but must be destroyed.  I cheered the sight through open bomb-bay doors of incendiaries like falling hay scattering over Hamburg, Berlin, and all those other cities.  The radio told of attacks and gloated when our losses were less than tbeirs, which I gloated about too, studying the little maps and the steadily advancing blots.  There were stamps offered in the Sunday papers, containing heroes like Colin Kelly and General Wainwright, spitfires and P-47s, B24s and B17s and Mosquito bombers, while some showed fire and smoke and attacking Marines and soldiers and were labeled GUADALCANAL and TARAWA and CORREGIDOR.  There were reports of japs being burned alive by flame-throwers, and of napalm bombs hurled over terrain in Italy which fried Nazi troops.  There were movies of the London Raids with the crumbling buildings and rubble-filled streets, and later there were the same movies of Berlin, plus the grotesque pictures of living skeletons being led out of concentration camps, and the piles of bones, bodies, and the lampshades made from human skin.
	There were photographs of headless men, bleeding men, legless men, dying babies, Monte Cassino destroyed, released prisoners blinded by torture; there were reports of pillaging by us, civilians just girls pulled out and raped until dead by Allied armies.  Then there was the Atomic attack on a Japanese city, and then another one, burning to bits everything, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, half the people, buildings, streets, along with some war plants.  There were the full-page pictures in Life of Mussolini and his mistress hanging by their feet in Rome, their faces all bloody, their clothes ripped open.  Then came the War Trials in Nurenberg and Tokyo, and the hangings.
	Kill, kill, or be killed.  Destroy or be destroyed.  There was nothing else to be considered for four years, as I was reading the newspapers for the first time, going to movies for the first time, listening to the radio for the first time.  Kill and how to it. Be killed and how it is done.  Capture and kill; be captured and die.  Blow everything to bits; be blown to bits --- and pray to God we win.

CHAPTER 6

	Meanwhile the homefront was carrying on business as usual, as if the world were schizophrenic and one face killed, the other smiled and sold and prayed and married and had children and bought homes and invested in a future that would come about only if the other face killed sufficiently.  It was as if a farm were being fertilized by dead bodies, or as if a hungry nation were eating its corpses.
	The smiling face at home that masked that of the contorted killer never changed.  It had its weddings, its dean clothes and a bath, its green lawns and houses, its families and friends, its smooth, warm and comfortable nest of congeniality and conversation, its parties and dances, its Saturday dinner out at the inn, its church and school and its shopping district with well-lighted stores, its cash and its ethics on the counter of commerce such as "pay your debts," "you get what you pay for," "a penny saved is a penny earned," "put something away for a rainy day" and "a friend in need is a friend indeed."  It was a counter-top world that excluded death, fate and anger, or at least reduced them to the point where they could be ignored; it was a mask drawn with friendship and cooperation and love and decency; and only when there was a war could it be discovered to be false, a simple expediency to handle needs, a truce declared between some men for the purpose of uniting to kill some others and perpetuate themselves.  It was no different from the den-rules by which the wolf-pack abides when it is home in the cave, opposite to the lust for killing that the pack engages in when away on the prowl --- the two-faced essence of man which results in a sensible arrangement (cooperation) to attain a goal (killing), and during the war it was all exposed and accepted without remorse by the children, although the adults must have trembled at this peek at the truth this gave the young because, after all, the values caused by the arrangement and the desires expressed in the goal are in total opposition and cannot be explained or justified or even accepted without the risk of collapse.
	(For the young it is like seeing a lovely lady, refined by a fine family, slip out one night in all her silk finery and walk into a woods erect and noble, where suddenly she crouches, rips a bird to pieces and eats it raw, shits in a hole and then kills another refined lady whom she meets at an appointed spot.  On seeing this lovely lady the next morning, listening to her music, smiling and conversing nobly, it is impossible for the children not to change their opinion, the weak tearing their hair at ruined illusions, the strong holding their breath at the revealed source of monstrous power in one so lovely.  But since most children are weak, the uncles must fear that the truth will be spoken to the fine lady, who can be fine only so long as she ignores her night-forays, for she will collapse at the truth, her reputation ruined, the illusion torn away, and all that will be left to her is the fierce life she has so successfully hidden up to this time.  After all, a few of the uncles hope she will forget her evenings so well, so thoroughly, that she will not engage in them, although more practical uncles say this is folly.  But the children have seen, and nothing can change that; they remain tranced by the dual personality of the motherland, or they hate her, or they stand in awe at he previously hidden strength --- but no matter what, her beau has a new meaning to them, and they never forget it.)
	During World War Two my country lived this schizophrene life, sending its sons out to kill on the one hand, while seeing to its own comforts on the other and pretending its way of life at home was plenty worth dying for.
	My Old Man and all my uncles were deferred during the war and they didn't have to go because they were a little too old, because there was something wrong with their health, or because --- like my Old Man --- they engineered, or they sold, or they were too skilled, and they couldn't be replaced easily.  My Uncle Homer made $45,000 in just one year, selling small motors, and while he just barely had been making enough money to live on before the war, after it was over he had the biggest house in Elgin, Illinois, and became the man everyone envied.  His daughters were the best-dressed girls at Elgin High and his wife had one of the first Thunderbirds and won the golf championship at an exclusive country club for four years straight in the Fifties.  (In 1960, Homer ran for Congress from his district and won on a platform to decrease government spending and let people take care of themselves, as he claimed he had once done, rising from an illiterate farm boy with no future and through his own efforts becoming the richest man in Elgin.)  I always did like Homer, especially when he would drive up during the war, lift open his trunk and give the Old Man a case of Scotch, and then hand Ma ten cartons of Luckies, and then to me a whole carton of Hershey bars.  He had everything in that trunk, from imported liquor to pre-war real rubber golf balls, and on one lucky day he gave my Old Man a C-card so we could get all the gasoline we wanted.  "If you ever need anything, just see old Homer," my Old Man would joke.  And Homer would just nod his head and smile.  But later Ma would tell the Old Man that it certainly must be true, because Homer was rapidly becoming the richest man in the Old Man's whole family.
	Sometimes I wondered about it all, the people at home, the war a long way off, the young men at the front, dying.  I thought that people at home should be more concerned.  There were the little grocery stores where smiling owners passed black-market meat to their favorites without stamps, while their wives passed sugar and butter furtively, and both talked proudly of sons at the front, of battles and medals and luck, of letters stained with mud and flown out of the jungles to them at home, even as they slid an extra sack of sugar into another mother's brown shopping bag.  There was the priest praying at the foot of the altar for "God to keep our boys safe and bring them back to us all victorious and whole" ---a mockery of all that was religion, but especially ironic when the collection-plate was passed as usual, not for the boys (that was the government's job) but for a new altar, or for the building of the new church, or brazenly "for Father's anniversary," once openly "for Father's Christmas table," and it wasn't unusual for those chauvanistic prayers to be followed by a priestly burp.  There were the defense plants, which had to offer high wages to attract workers, who then labored long hours, for "victory" they said but really for "overtime" pay sometimes even multiplied by two when the wife also went to work, hoarding the wages into "defense bonds" which offered the best rate of interest on the original investment.  And there were many industries, spurred on not by the war but by the chance to make big profits, so obvious because when the President suggested that even industrialists and workers be drafted and be paid "a soldiers wage," they screamed in unison that this was against "all that America stood for," and that if they weren't allowed to make huge sums of money on the war then war would be fought for nothing --- so the President backed down.

CHAPTER 7

	But through our efforts and the massive mistakes of our enemies we won the war at last without crippling every young man among us, and soon the troops were marching home to find the top jobs already filled by those who had stayed behind; and although the crowds stood cheering, their pockets bulging with profits, the troops found their girls looking guilty at least and if not that then married or in love with someone else, the more patriotic ones at most having the good sense to pick nearby soldiers when giving up far-away ones.  As in any return, from Odysseus to Johnny American, the embattled boys found themselves deposed; in the absence they had been replaced as workers, lovers, fathers, voters, leaders, land-owners, capital-holders, profit-makers; in business, at home, and in the government they found no power and no profits had been held in trust for them, and the pitifully small bonuses they were awarded could have been made in just a few months' time by any aircraft worker --- and had been made, over and over again.  A nation that feared a depression coming on, now that the "war boom" was over, told the vets they could get cheap "loans" if they bought houses and primed the profits of contractors already rich on government contracts during the war, or they could get some money if they promised to pay most of it to schools which had already grown fat on educational programs for the Services during the war and now wanted to grow fatter and expand holdings by buying up farms and stocks and bonds and all tax free, or the vets were offered free medical care for wounds they had suffered during battle and free insurance in case they died of these wounds or got hit by a car before they resumed their lives, since the government did not want a lot of vet-less families dependent on it for welfare.
	It was a very instructional picture for the young people my age to see: the nation opened its hungry arms to the veterans who survived and it pointed out immediately how the returning men could help out those who had stayed behind.  The medals were really all made of brass, and I for one realized those poor sonsabitches --- many of them heroes --- were being taken for suckers by the very people whose pockets already were lined with war bonds growing in interest.
	Even the surplus --- the equipment, clothing and vehicles --- which would have been given to the troops had the war continued, was snatched out of their hands when the war stopped and was sold to the highest bidder, or the friendliest conniver, and then was sold back in many cases to the vets themselves, now civilians, at a profit! it was pathetic to see them, their faces beaming, when they recognized equipment once issued to thern in the Pacific, Africa or Europe, as they lined up in front of Surplus Stores to buy from the fat and sweating 50-year-olds, who had bought the stuff for next to nothing from the govemment.
	The country was maintaining, as usual, business at a profit, and if there had been an opportunity would have stripped the corpses of clothing and auctioned it off to the highest bidder.  Grotesque as it was, it showed how the vets retumed home, owning nothing, forced to buy whatever they needed or wanted from those who had purchased it for much less during the war with money made by making and selling weapons to the troops.  Money made during the war and invested, doubled, tripled and went on multiplying itself, as the investments were in turn sold at higher prices to the vets: land, houses, farms, business, stocks of all kinds.  No man who had worn a uniform was exempted from this exploitation; upon their return they found themselves powerless, stripped of capital and ownership which they hadn't the time to gain, fleeced even as the parades saluted them, and before they could even put away their medals they discovered they had to start from scratch as if the war had never happened, while the others rode high on capital and investments the war had allowed them to make.
	(My cousin, Swede, who fought four years up through Africa, Sicily, Italy and across Europe, came home to Higgins, Illinois, to his wife and three children, and found he had accomplished nothing for himself; it was almost like coming home defeated.  He needed land, but an acre which was valued at $500 in 1941 was worth $2500 in 1946.  Working in a gas station and tending bar at night he saved $2500 in one year, but by this time the chunk of land he wanted had gone up in price to $3000, so he had to work three more months before he could buy the land and build his house on mortgage.  Still, when he was finished he had only his house and a job at the gas station, and --- including the war --- six years had gone by.  The man who owned the gas station had graduated with Swede from Higgins High in 1940, but staying in the town as a 4-F he now owned not only the station, but an oil distribution business and a 300-acre subdivision starting at the edge of town on a farm he had bought for $400 an acre when the old folks went bankrupt and couldn't pay a note.  Oscar was a generous man, and he took Swede into his business, for a price of course.  From 1947 through 1957, Swede paid $2000 a year from his salary to buy stock in the gas station and oil business, ending up a half-partner; however, in order to do this he had to work there steadily for a decade at the modest salary Oscar paid, and also manage the business.  Swede, a tireless two-hundred pounder, who is always smiling, has doubled the worth of the business and is continuing to raise it in value, while Oscar has withdrawn physically from the premises and no longer has to work, but has an apartment in Chicago and a house in Bermuda.  While Swede runs the oil business and fills Oscar's pocket with half the profits, another vet does the same with the subdivision, now containing 2500 units and still steadily growing as it annexes farms on all sides.  Swede once told me, sitting on Betty's new furniture in the living room of the same house he built in 1947 that Oscar is now worth roughly three-quarters of a million dollars, with investments in a dozen different industries.  "And he deserves it, too," said Betty.  "He's been mighty good to us." Swede, as I remember, nodded his head vigorously.)

CHAPTER 8

	Well, what did all this mean to me, a kid taking in the sweet cream cliches at the time he was watching all this take place in the Forties, a wet-behind-the-ears neophyte waiting to be told what was what about life, my country, my elders and the past-a pair of ears, eyes, and a brain willing to be exposed.  You can imagine how noxious the school's sweet dreams were, trying to fill me with "honesty is the best policy," "George Washington never told a lie," "America, the land of the free," "Any young lad has a chance to be President," "This is the land of equal opportunity," "The law guarantees justice to all," and numerous other homilies of crap like this.  I wouldn't have minded if these little messages had been proposed to me as ideals rather than realities, but when I was asked to observe them at work in the great nation outside the school window, all I could see was Mr. Kucera, who lived up our block, a 65-year-old toolmaker, who couldn't expect to last more than a few more years, and he was furtively stacking tires in his garage so that no matter how long the war went on his '36 Chevy, which he drove the four blocks to and from the train station, would always have wheels.  Whenever I didn't have anything to do I would hang around his garage, and if he happened to be home and saw me he would come out wild as an old Rhino and accuse me of stealing his crabapples!  I would just grin at him, never using the word "hoarder" but less crudely asking him why he kept his garage locked when his car was always outside.  "To protect myself from little thieves like you," he would cry, falling into the trap because then I would ask what he had in there that he was afraid of losing if it weren't his car, and he would sputter like his Chevy and chase me off with a broom or his rake or whatever he found handy.
	I could respect nothing I saw, and I only became worried when I was told I should respect everything.  I saw people like Mr. Kucera acting like pack-rats.  I saw people like Uncle Homer buying on the black market.  I saw older boys going off to a war where they either killed or were killed.  I saw people working like crazy in defense plants to make extra money.  I saw realtors, bankers, contractors and store-owners making and spending more money, driving bigger cars, moving into larger houses.  I saw that most of the population was devoted to taking money away somehow from most of the population, and that there were only a few people on top who got really rich and didn't lose their money right away to someone else.  I saw the politicians waving their arms at rallies every few vears while everyone smiled at them, and my Old Man said you couldn't believe a word that came out of their mouths except that they wanted to be elected.  I saw the priest planting his victory garden, accepting canned hams and a bottle of booze now and then, and I heard him ask for money like everyone else only he did it on Sunday while the others rested.  And I saw the teachers at the bottom of the heap with no money, no power, and some of them moaning that they couldn't even buy books --- these same teachers who were asking me to think of my neighbors as democratic, benevolent, responsible, charitable souls when I knew my neighbors were the opposite, all pecking at the country and each other in a determined fight to see who could get the most; and I got a little angry at being asked to rejoice about my environment, my country, when I could see on every side that it was out to screw me for the benefit of those very few who had made it to the top.  First, it tried to telI me lies in its school.  Then when I got older it planned, if the war was still on, to send me into the army like others before me and maybe get me killed while it was paying me a whopping $58 a month.  Then it planned to hold a few minor opportunities in front of my nose so I would work like hell, make a little money and spend it fast so the big guys who owned all the stock could make a killing and so I would end up with nothing and have to work harder, make more money and spend it also.  I expected someone to tell me how to protect myself, rather than telling me how well off I was supposed to be.  And, as far as freedom, I couldn't get excited about it: freedom to speak, when I didn't have anything to say; freedom to worship when I didn't want to worship anything or anyone; and freedom of the press when I never saw anything in the newspapers that rang true anyway, and in fact I thought the only reason they were needed was so the merchants had a place for ads and so the politicians could talk to reporters and tell all about how wonderful they were, and the country too, and how well off everybody was.
	Still, I had some beliefs, although they weren't the ones I was supposed to have according to the schools.  I thought that the country wasn't much good.  I thought that the people weren't much good either, because they didn't know any better.  I thought that the people surrounded themselves with lies and couldn't tell the truth if they wanted to because they didn't know what it was and nobody ever told them.  (After all, even a man like Charlie with all his knowledge and torturing himself to speak out, had to look a little absurd after the Big War, talking about how conflict was truth.)  I thought that most people couldn't do the right thing if they had to, because they didn't know how.  It was obvious, too, that they were scared shitless of each other, trying to kill each other, or fleece each other, and that's no way to live.
	I thought the bald-eagle was perfect as the symbol of our country --- no kidding, I thought it was something fine and good --- the scavenger, the killer, the winged shadow hovering above waiting to dive with its claws first.  It was a good image for the U.S.  It was our good luck, and our misfortune, our mother and our killer, our provider and our thief, our friend and our enemy, our ideal and our nightmare; it was our big chance and our certain tragedy, it said we could be, do, say, try anything, and then it made sure we couldn't, it was what promised to make us all rich and what kept us poor.  It was continually offering us possibilities but none of which we could choose, it was telling us a truth and then showing us it lied, it appeared to be noble but proved to be a savage, it was a woman who turned into a monster.  It was anything we wanted it to be, but never at the right time and never for us, it promised freedom but withheld the necessary food and shelter before freedom was possible, it needed workers but it couldn't use anything worthwhile that they did, it was huge but if you lacked the means to travel it squeezed you in a cage --- it was anything and everything, so much more than anyone could see or say, truly a screaming, diving eagle, beautiful when it was high in the sky but terrifying when it raked you with one great shadowy claw; and it was more powerful than any one person, no matter who they were, because it was always wheeling suddenly and slashing a powerful figure it had previously allowed to rise on a whim, and conversely it was always allowing some idiot to climb the highest rocks while it dove down on greater men and forced them to remain flat on the sand.

CHAPTER 9

	About this time I got a dog; and he was vicious, he bit.  I had only to look at him beside me to know why animals have failed to be friends in the past --- including animal men.  Like other dogs he was a combination of hyena and wolf, neither of which has ever been trustworthy, both meat-eaters and both fierce, with their teeth their only tools.  Dogs are dogmatic; they will refrain from killing only so long as they are being fed, and it takes only a few lean days for them to revert, even now, to cracking living bone with those teeth, when no boiled bone is offered.  Fritz was his name and he was bred by Doberman lineage to be loyal to one master whose hand proferred food, reacting to empty hands as if to danger.  If I had not fed him he would have found another master, or have ceased practicing any loyalty except to his stomach, becoming a killer quickly or be would have died, since he hadn't enough hyena in him to efficiently scavenge.
	I only had to look at his sleek head, his grinning jaws, his whip-black body, to know that he would be good only so long as I killed for myself and for him, throwing him scraps from the results of my slaughters in trade for his loyalty.  As long as there are dogs with kind eyes, in other words, we will know that man is a killer so efficient that he has something left over for his best four-footed friend, for it is on scraps that the bargain is sealed or forgotten, not on kindness which as I said Fritz treated as a danger when it came from an empty hand.
	Man can learn a lot from dogs --- about life, about himself, and even about God.
	(Man tamed animals by his efficiency in slaughter, then he tried to tame God the same way, offering raw or burned bodies stripped of fur on altars, but it didn't work; just as man would not accept offerings from dogs in trade for freedom from the collar because dog-bones are not man's idea of dinner so God turned down flesh which was all man had to give, even when man offered flesh of himself as Abraham once did.  It is our whole being the God seems to want and in return for it he throws us the scraps of his good fortune, like we throw bones to our dogs.  When good fortune lags, like our dogs we discontinue our loyalty to God, giving it back to ourselves, and we revert to killing to keep our bellies content, forgetting instantly the goodness once required of us by our God.  "Give us this day our daily bread," we say, or we will get it the only way we know how, by the blood lust that is our ace in the hole, the key to our long survival before we found the filled hand of God, our only tool being a weapon in a swinging fist which the creep of history has judged more efficient than any teeth within large jaws.  We kill with a club and always have since we lost our hair, and like the dog turning upon another we kill ourselves best over arguments about whose share of our own slaughter shall be greater.  Since good fortune is not under our control, no more than the dog can demand his meal from our hands, we either kill or restrain ourselves according to our God's grants.  Like my dog, poor man can be "good" only so long as he is fortunate; when he is unfortunate he must kill or die like a dog.  And his brain is of no more use to him than putting a bigger weapon in his hand, or thinking up new ways of worship --- depending entirely on the fortune of its master, the man, and on the will of the God.)
	Fritz would trail at my heel, he would defend me, he loved me, gave me his devotion, wagged his stumpy tail tenderly and explored my hand with his wet snout.  He even brought me rabbits and pheasant for I trained him as a retriever and he thought these prizes made me happy.  But as I got more interested in other things, I forgot about Fritz, and even skipped his meal now and then.  He soon ran away, and a few weeks later I found him at a country gas station a couple of miles f rom home.
	"He yours?" the owner asked.
	I said he was mine.
	"You oughta see him hunt the fields around here.  I don't give him anything but a burlap bag for a bed outside, but I pity anybody tries to get in here at night.  He thinks this whole area is his own and he's already killed three dogs that tried muscling in.  Just ripped them right up and layed them out pretty as you please."
	When I approached Fritz he growled at me, so I left him there with his bag-bed and his fields full of food.  With his hair all like wire and his red eyes all coarse from drinking swamp-water he frightened me, so I climbed back on my bike and went home without him.
	Like a dog, I got vicious too, when I found there was nothing for me in family, church, or school or country; I know, because I saw the streak spread in me like heat until it took over my head and I too "ripped" somebody up with the fierceness Fritz had displayed, with the same lack of concern, with the same frenzy of any four-footed fellow swinging in on an enemy and never letting up, hitting him four, five times until he bled and then hitting him again and again, feeling the joy of my fist against flesh as all the fire and hate and bitterness and bitches and impatience came steaming out to sock the figure of the enemy that threatened me and each sting I got just made me more stubborn to storm through and bang one more to the body of the bastard until he didn't move.
	I remember one night coming out of the 20th Century Swimming Club in Oak Park, Illinois (which by the way is the world's largest village), after the guy I was with had pushed some slob in the water and then muscled him out of the way when the bastard got sore.  As we walked down the street toward the car this whole slew of guys started trailing us, and when Donnie went up to unlock the door they went right for the tires of the car with their knives.
	"Get the hell away from there you bastards!" Donnie said, hopping around, but it was too late, and by the time I noticed, three tires were cut to ribbons.  There must have been about twenty-five guys there.  "Okay you bastards," Donnie said, we 'll take you four at a time."
	If he had said "two at a time" they might have just laughed and all dived at us, but the insult of "four" fascinated them so they decided to do it our way.  A big curly-headed kid said, "Okay, you guys, form a big ring," to his boys.  "The Bigtimers here are gonna fight us two apiece for fun.  Ain't that right, Wise Guy," he said to Donnie, and Donnie hit him right in the mouth turning his t-shirt to blood.  The kid started crying  --- his mouth was a mess --- but his gang lifted him back outside the ring and four of the biggest bastards I ever saw busted in on Donnie and me.  Well, we knew we were going to have to show the rest that the worst place for any of them to enter was that goddamn ring they had us in, so Donnie and I ripped right in, kicking and gouging with knuckles, elbows and knees whirling.
	When you're in a pit of people like that and you know you can't get out you just enjoy it no matter how much you get hurt.  Every new ache makes you angrier, so you begin kicking for the other guy's thigh and stamping on his spine, or anything to get him before he gets you, put him out of commission so you can even the odds.  In the middle of it with blood all over my face after one guy had booted me, I heard Donnie screaming and I looked over to see one kid had his shoulders pinned while the other was banging at his face all free.  It was the limit of what I could do to roll over and knock them both off him with a flinging body-block, but I made it and dipped one guy in the forehead so hard with my heel he went out on his back without a sound and with his eyes open.
	They were getting ready to send in their third string team when the siren finally made it, and they took off down the street.  Donnie and I dragged ourselves into the car and drove it into an alley with the tires flopping, and then when the cops had gone we babied the Chevy about ten blocks to a park that had a pond.  I remember ducking my head in that cold water and it felt so good finally I just flopped in it on my ass and lay there in about a foot and a half deep with just my chin out, listening to crickets and the sound of the fountain.  Boy, were we beat, but we felt good about giving it to those guys and we could still laugh.
	"Didja see the look on that first bastard's face when I popped him right off," Donnie said, gleefully.  "He thought it was gonna be Queensbury rules or somethin'."
	"Yeah," I said.  "He says 'That Ain't Fair', and there he is with twenty-five guys."
	"Geez I hope that bastard's okay that you kicked in the head," said Donnie.
	"Ahhh-I don't give a shit what happens to him," I said, and I really didn't.  In fact, I remember the disappointment I felt at Donnie's suggestion the bastard might be okay after all.  I wanted to think of him dead, being dragged by his twenty-five friends who sure as hell would wish they'd never tangled with us!
	Another time some guys drove up in two carloads to where I was visiting a girl whose folks worked nights, and they just tramped up through the snow and barged in to take me, knocking down her Christmas tree and smashing all the lights as they dragged me outside.  I suppose there is a special delight in having the odds so overwhelming against your favor that no matter what you do you can't win, so you should by all rights lie down and die when you see all those guys anyway.  But, unless they want to kill you --- and sometimes they do; that's when you should run --- they usually feel a little ridiculous if you face up to them.  That's what happened this night.  "It need all you guys just to take me?" I said, and although they didn't answer but just stood back and waited I knew they were along for the ride with the one guy who used to date this girl.  So I reached for him, saying, "You know what, you bastard, you tore my goddamn shirt," and I beat the shit out of him while the whole gang just stood there and watched, until he said his back hurt and they had to help him to one of the cars.  When I went back inside it took me half an hour to convince this babe I shouldn't clear out, and then it took us another hour or so to clean up the mess and get the Christmas tree presentable again.  But it was worth it, sitting there afterwards, knuckles all skinned.

CHAPTER 10

	I don't know how it was when you were young, but in the Forties on the southwest edge of Chicago life was pretty rough.  All the young hoods were angling to get into the Syndicate and they hung around poolhalls and the bars until they got asked to do something by a pro hood and pretty soon, if they did it okay --- like beat up a druggist or something --- they were in.  So most were on their way in, or in already, and everyone of them wanted to prove something. it got so I couldn't go to a carnival, a dance, a hamburger place, or even to a show without an argument blowing into a fist-fight, and then a big free-for-all among gangs.  A few guys traveled alone, though, and I was one of those, except for when I'd be with Donnie, or Eddie, or one or two others, but we never had a gang and most of the time we fought beside whatever guy we happened to be with.  We didn't mind the fighting.  It helped pass the time.
	Let's face it, people like to whoop it up a little and get in a few bangs for the price of taking some in the belly themselves.  I've been in bars where a shrimp has gone berserk, and I've seen giants throw tantrums, too.  There are no rules; you have to accept that no matter where you are there is some bastard nearby who would like nothing better than to beat out your brains and nail you to the floor with a few quick stomps.  The Forties were the time for it, too; there was almost more fighting going on at home than overseas.  Everybody seemed to be stealing something from somebody, whether it was a little ass, liquor, money, cars, or what, and there were plenty of fights in the bars all over.  The first time I went into a bar at fourteen years old --- I saw one guy try to steal another's change.  He got his hand broken when the other lifted up the hinged part of the bar, put the thief's hand in it and slammed it down.  The hand turned purple and red while everybody crowded around to see it, until the bartender made the guy jam it into a tub of cracked ice.  Mr. Broken-Hand stood behind the bar, laughing, with his hand in the ice, and pretty soon he and the other guy were buying themselves beers.  He stood there for an hour, feeling nothing, lighting bis cigarettes one-handed by holding the matches with his elbow.  I saw a man get killed, too, with a target pistol, but the cops got there so fast I don't remember much about it.  There was a BANG and everybody looked around to see this sad guy grab his gut and fall down by the bar.  I scrammed out of there because I was only fifteen and I didn't want any cops to pick me up as a witness and spot my phony identification card.
	There were a lot of rapes, too.  This pretty blonde gal got strung out with clothesline right in her home up the street from our bouse, and she got banged about four times by some 4-Fers while her husband sweated it out on the Rhine.  When he came back, everybody tried to guess whether or not she told him about it, and then Ma found out she hadn't when Dolly asked her to please not mention it.  I used to wonder how many gals had gotten it and never told their busbands when they came back, or maybe had led some guy on just for company and asked bim home and then couldn't stop him.  I know there was a lot of that stuff going on in Berwyn and Cicero, but I can't speak for the rest of the country.  One night, after hours when everyone was drinking in a darkened bar, I saw a girl get it in a booth while one guy held her arms over the backrest, and then when his buddy was finished they switched places and he got her while the other guy held her.  As I remember, she looked a little drowsy and she held this picture of some guy in her hand, while she mumbled "dead . . . all dead," and I don't think she knew what was going on, although everybody else did.  Another time in a bar on paycheck night across from Western Electric, I saw some guys take a gal's dress and slip off her and stand her up on the bartop in her bra and panties, and then while she cried and while the piano player beat out A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody the guys took her pants down until she started bawling real hard and they let her put them back on.  The Forties were a helluva mess even I got that impression, and there was a lot going on in those days that everybody tries hard to forget now.  When us kids did something small, like knocking over a gas station's set of pumps, or getting in gang fights, we didn't think we were destroying the world.
	(In fact, we didn't think much at all.  A young person thinks of nothing, really, and simply acts any way he is allowed, pushed by the ancient needs and desires programmed into his brain by evolutions of history which have finally led to him.  He feels the running feet, the need for a weapon, he fears the big jaws, he expects a fight, he depends on his muscles, he must survive and fight, he must take care of himself or no one else will, he sees immediately that he is not needed, and into his hands springs the urgent nervous need to build a place, a memorial, a marker, a fort, a vehicle, but something that will prove his presence in a hurry before it is too late.  He craves a young she-thing's thighs and must be taught she is your daughter, he requires her mouth and will stop it if it screams, he wants to win food and female and fame and fortune all at once, and his heart beats faster, his blood is richer, racing to do this, quickly.)
	We did feel that something was being destroyed, but not by us --- by our elders.  Two big bombs descended on the Japs to end the war, and suddenly the old world was as out of date as the carriage business, although filled with buzzingly busy and well-trained carriage-makers.  It was all there, stated clearly by those two explosions, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  From the mid-Forties on, everytime a man killed another in war he killed himself, not psychologically or any unseen crap like that, but truly the killer would be destroyed in time by the radioactive contamination of his murderous act, no matter how heroic.  Life, the world, would be so changed by radiation that it would no longer be the same one that produced him but would become alien, mutant, divergent, creating new conditions in which he could not survive.  The old folks in their humbling way tried hard to ignore the sudden change in times and they carefully acted as if they still lived in that old world of indulgence where what one man did had little relation to all mankind; where a war could be isolated and never felt outside its boundaries; where murder didn't always come home to roost; where cruelty could be endured as a necessity of a civilization that required a few to exploit the many; where man could win small victories over other men and over nature herself without endangering that epic age-old pact by which nature allowed men to exist --- conditions of air, earth and water a billion years in the making, which had brought man into being; where a single act, a single lie, a single man, one pompous indulgence bore no relation to the whole, the world --- the one condition that gave us our individual, precious freedom.  But that world was gone now and a new one replaced it.  One man, one act, personal freedom itself, was dangerous to man-kind, nature, and even the world at large, because of the tremendous power released by man's new tool, the atom.
	I don't say I understood this transition had taken place, but I felt it as everyone did.  Suddenly my country's freedom to do what it wished, the world be damned, was being opposed and by our most learned citizens, who acted as if fighting for our own principles was out of date and that now we must negotiate with every enemy, give and take rather than win or lose.  Victory, physical prowess, combative pride, force, emotion, faith, murder, expansion, power, and a million other words no longer had meaning.  Instead, it appeared, we were being asked to consider our aims in terms of slow progress, intelligence, flexibility, compromise, reason, hope, love, cooperation, consort, and a million other words like this.  We had a ready answer for the few souls who described the struggle in the new mild terms.  They were traitors, cowards, appeasers, and they were trading away everything we thought we had won in the war, and we hated them, expelled them, ridiculed them, jailed them, forced them from positions of trust, and in every way we could we tried to exterminate them as being the real dangers to our personal freedom, so that we could continue to ignore the fact that the world had changed, and so we could live as we always had lived.  Functioning in the old ways, we fought and won a victory over them, we beat them with physical prowess, combative pride, force, emotion, faith and power, and when we won we were more sure of the old ways than ever, although we were soon to find out that by beating the most intelligent among us we had succeeded only in beating ourselves.

CHAPTER 11

	It was odd passing through adolescence in a society that felt traitors had infiltrated it and that sought out these traitors and publicly purged them for undermining the old ways of dog-eat-dog, greed, selfishness, pride, murder and madness, a society that deliberately fired, jailed, put on trial, mocked, tortured and gagged anyone who proposed an end to conflict as a way of life, anyone who suggested it was desirable to compromise and make deals, anyone who admitted they were unsure about America's right to do what it wanted at all costs, who claimed citizenship in the world rather than in our own small country, who reproached us for wanting to kill, exploit, control, seize, advance, capture, dominate, and who instead told us we should pause, be patient, concede, cajole and relinquish.  I only know that I could no longer tell the difference between my elders and my friends.  The animal life of adolescence did not differ in the least from the stalking, hunting animal life of adults.  No change was being required of me before I would be granted entrance into maturity; where I felt a fierce young need to hate, fight and destroy the adult symbols of authority, I found that this was exactly what the adults were already doing.  We were all in the same boiling pot, young and old, and boys like me were taught to reject reason, law and order, patience, peace, cooperation, and were brought up on conspiracy, counter-revolution, force, indignation, and all the other wily means of the late Forties that were used against the few worldly men among us.
	There is nothing so willing to be animal-like as the young human animal --- you have only to let him do as he wishes, which you did, and he thrives on lust, hungrily learning to kill as quickly as possible, crudely practicing cruelty to protect himself.  Cunningly accepting no rules that are not enforced, he goes his own way, accepting nothing but what he can use or eat or screw, knowing nothing but what he absolutely wants to know, rejecting all that does not work, remembering little from the past and concerned only with the present because the future contains his death and he is concerned only with himself.  He goes his own way, not yours, but his, and it is a new one into which he was not guided but which his whims simply led him into, and so although you may think he is lost he may be well ahead of you, unseen, probing his own concerns happily in ways you cannot imagine.  If you --- my elders --- wanted to play at being killers just for fun while never really committing yourselves, you must face the fact that by your example in those nightmarish days you made real killers of us, your sons; and someday, looking around for frightened game, our eyes may turn on you.
	There is no fear like the one you will find if you suddenly remember us in the light of what you have done.  We have absorbed it all as part of our experience and now we face you with our eyes searching, measuring you in the way you have taught us, with no compassion, estimating your prowess in terms of ours as we move in for the kill slowly as in those vague days when we had four feet, a smile recalling the grinning mouthful of teeth.  We sons grew up in the days when the tiger walked the land freely, and now we are strong and have learned all that we know from the tiger.  We follow you, waiting only for the last leash to snap, or for you to drop it, or for the opportunity to bite it to bits, leaving us free to jump upon you, like a young tiger takes an old one, like the young deer replaces an aging leader, like the worst wolf makes his place at the head of the pack by killing the old grey-haired one, like a young bull elephant usurps the old faltering bull, like the apes, the mountain goats, like even the men long ago who took over the wild clans.  Your strength gets weaker every day.  Ours gets stronger.  The result is fixed, a matter only of time.  Soon you will be dead.
	Just as you are vicious, just as my dog Fritz was vicious, well then so I am vicious, and I try to be better at it than anybody around, for if I were not this way I could not survive --- it is the way society has been rigged and not by me, for killers, for animals, for greedy quick souls, for the greasy, the muscled, the crude, the vicious, the shortsighted, the money-hungry, the cruel, the filthy, the lusters, the sensationalists, the cheap, the sentimental, the rabid, the mobsters, the criminals, the haters, the whiners, the bleeders.  When you made it so if a young man was not one of you then he couldn't survive among you, then you made the young man become just as stark, tough, vicious --- a snarling specimen that knew no other way except to be the best of his kind, the quickest, fiercest, killingest animal around; and this is exactly what we became.
	So here we are for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad --- stalking, stalking anything, ourselves, our loves, our enemies, our friends, you!  We have learned all the lessons only too well, all the tricks, the rationales, the excuses, the alibis, the reasons, the prayers, the forgivenesses.  The religions even taught us we would be forgiven for anything, no matter how dreadful, and we take great heart in that, because we are dreaming dreadful things, a wild burning orgiastic blood-bath.  All will go in a screaming, gory fantastic gush of blood and flesh and arms and legs and head, all.
	It beats down deep inside now, this need to strike something, tear it to death.  In my time I have seen four kids kick a man until his body was a bag of crushed bone, because he had called them punks.  I have seen at least one carefully planned gang attack on a streetcar full of people, terrorizing them until they pulled money from their pockets and begged the kids to leave.  I have seen two boys taunt a young wife in an alleyway and when she threatened to scream they told her they would tell what they had seen, her screwing on the couch in mid-day with a salesman from up the street, so she quieted down and soon they led her back home and took their places on that happy bouncing couch.  I have seen kids tear up a classroom with no fear that their names were known.  I have seen them back a teacher into the lavatory and stick his head into the toilet, daring the authorities to throw them out of school because that was what they wanted, because they could not bear to sit through the lies, the weasling history, the exhortation of phony ideals any longer, and they wanted to get outside where their skin could stop crawling, where they could avoid people if they wished, where they could leave or smash the mouths shut when the mouths practiced conceit.  I have seen one gang go berserk on a city street and rip up stores, from one to the next, ending up at the city hall where SHIT was carved into the mayor's desk.  I have seen a cornfield burned, a barn, and even a cow go up in flames bleating before a few sat down to slice the burned flesh off and have an impromptu picnic.  I have seen people thrown into quarries at night, flailing the water and wondering what the kids had against them.  I have seen the kids afterwards stand about and shout curses at the sky trying to make just one lie come true and bring God down on them by daring Him.  I have seen a car pushed so goddamn fast that anything that got in its way would be crushed without a chance.  I have seen a cycle sent riderless right into rock, careening at a wall at ninety miles per hour after it had been stolen, and then wheels flying forty feet up from the flames.  I have seen stink-bombs set off in theatres just for fun of watching the people thrash pushing and screaming to get out.  I have seen police cars ignited with burning brooms hurled through carelessly opened windows.
	And I have seen the blood, always the blood, from faces, arms, scalps, legs, knees, blood, blood, blood, until I began to think red was the color of the world.

CHAPTER 12

	The old folks proposed sports --- work your young anger off in athletics, they said; it is what youngsters have done since America began, and oldsters too; it is a worthy endeavor, healthful, courageous, fun, and it teaches that "good old American characteristic of good sportsmanship."
	I listened, and then I enjoyed the dream of myself hitting a home run in the last of the ninth, three runs behind, two out, the bases loaded, so that amid the roar of the entire nation's throat the Yankees win the pennant on the last day of the season, proving once again it is "the old pros" alone who have honor, an intense confident skill for performing a prescribed game within all the rules and traditions, an intuitive but well-developed and virilent ability to swing a bat in a proper arc, to hit a ball far, to throw to the right base quickly, to speed faster around the marked basepath --- and thus give a fine and self-willed meaning to the greatest game on earth before millions of bellering fans on a splendid summer day amidst the grass all green and the infield dirt well-raked, the tarp ready if it rains and all the colorful signs over which my homerun sails out of the park.  But the bust-up of my dream comes when, just as I am about to tag home with the victorious run, a siren screams its warning, I freeze within a step of the plate, a stunning silence strikes out across the stadium, and within thirty seconds, while everyone quietly counts, the BOMB drops and blows us all to hell.
	When I think of myself frozen there between "victory" and nothing, I can't help but laugh at all those who say, "Save yourself by learning to do one thing well, no matter what it is." I like to call this the Artisan's Error, taking refuge in a well-defined professionalism in order to confuse life with a manmade game, learning some strange dance so well that you can no longer simply walk in out of the rain, confusing truth to mean a score, converting the world into a playing field, assuming that people can be described as players, limiting life to "keeping your eye on the ball," and worst of all teaching that a loss can be recouped by a win on a similar field tomorrow.  What has this to do with Life on Earth within Space for a Time?  Surely you join me in the recognition of this lie that is lived by so many, this inane idiocy that they will fare all right so long as they learn to participate with skill in our national game.  I have one simple message for those of our elders who sit comfortably in the grandstands waiting for us, their sons, to play ball, and this message is You can take your bats and balls and go to hell!
	I played every game there is when I was a kid and I always scored, whether over a line in a net or making it home first and breaking the tape while I stepped on the bag.  I whipped ahead faster, on skates, Keds, or spikes, and nothing in uniform could stop me if they stuck to the rules, but after a shower and a walk outside to wait for the bus or hitch a ride at the stop-sign I soon realized there was no length worth running, no pitch or pass, no scoreboard or average worth a damn in the eyes of that big wide world which has seen it all and either destroys or ignores the contests.  A friend of mine scored three touchdowns on the day his widow-mother finally worked herself to death, and he said he did it for her.  I thought he must be a clown not a hero.  Another friend was leading hitter in the conference but he still couldn't date a girl worth screwing because he was ugly; and if I learned one thing it was that the young white thighs of an early woman open for you only if you say the right things, whether you are first string, second string or fourth string, or better if you are in the stands on Saturday holding her hand, patting her knee, and whispering leg-writhing somethings into her ear, rather than far below playing with a ball.  No other occupation but sport demands more skill, sweat and strength in a moment, and none is more meaningless; it is worthless to the world, unworthy of repetition, unlike music, words or pictures.  Sport is a childish fantasy, and to see it one only has to imagine two children climbing a tree in a race to the top, while the lumberman who will cut the whole tree down watches and waits for the game to be over with.  It is a social entertainment, like two ladies playing croquet when just outside the hedge stalks the tiger within a jungle that is even at that moment beginning its onslaught on the green cut lawn and a few moments later succeeds bringing vines, trees and tiger sweeping over the neatly laid out wickets.  It is two men having lunch and seeing who can spit farthest before the foreman blows his whistle and they must get the hell back in the factory to work.  It is lefthanded or righthanded, but isolated, single, while the world is a swelling tide about to sweep over the south and the north, the field and the players, so that none will know the score or even recall what "score" means.  It is a boxing match that a huge spider watches so that when the bell rings, calling an end to the match and both gladiators head for the showers, the spider eats them up along with the referee, the managers, the audience and the arena, no matter how many scream that it isn't fair to fight after the bell has rung.
	The only athlete worth a damn is one who knows that sport is work for children and ladies, and who plays to give himself a better launch into the outside world, a man who swings his arms only so that his muscles grow and he can take on the jungle web of reality later with more strength, a man who runs only to increase his speed so that later when something is chasing him he can get away, a man who throws a ball to sharpen his aim for the day when his fist releases a rock, a man who practices winning only so that he will build up the habit of trying so that when he attempts to exist in a world that has made this impossible he will not succumb immediately or give up before he has made a small advance, a man who fills himself up with cheers so that when there is nothing but despair he will have something pleasant to remember.  But if a man continues swinging his arms in patterns, racing on a track, throwing a ball, winning and listening to cheers, without ever having left his backyard athletics and stepping out into the world, then he is a child, a fool, a Eunuch who deserves our horror instead of respect because he represents a worship of body, skill and sport without end.  He is a stunted slave who refuses to use his skill for anything of value or permanence but who grows old on the playing fields and retires right to his locker.  He is a phony who practices his duels well but never goes out at dawn for the real thing at twenty paces.  He is a splendid dog growing fat by the fire without a nose for the hunt.  He is a well-oiled amazing machine that runs all right but does nothing.  He is unusable, dispensable, laughable, an idiot with a well-shaped head, the finest cat but afraid of the basement, a glistening gun that won't go off, a long gleaming car going a hundred but with a bent steering wheel that sends it only around the block again and again and again.  He is like the movie-stars during wartime who engaged in great battles against the "enemy" while cameras ground away, like a preacher unworthy of God and scared of the devil, like a clown who never cracks a joke.  No other occupation like the athlete's symbolizes more the state of our country, riding its hobby horse around the carousel while real rustlers steal the nearby cattle.
	In 1948 on a fine summer day at Wrigley Feld, Chicago, I tried out with the New York Giants, met Melvin Ott of lifted foot and mighty swing who was managing then, shook Walker Cooper's hand and batted against --- I forget who --- in practice.  I had been brought there with two other "stars" from my conference, and as we took our cuts Mighty Mel, who himself had been discovered by John McGraw, stood behind the screen calling for curves, sinkers and speed balls, within our hearing, to see what we could do.  I remember I hit some hard groundballs, three clean singles, a double (or possibly a triple) off the green vines in left center and two homers --- one down the leftfield line and one almost due center.  They thought I was a helluva good hitter and I got ushered into Ott's dressing room before the game, where he offered me a coke.
	"You wanta play ball, kid?" he said, a slim smile slitting through the leather around his mouth.
	"Maybe," I said.
	"Whattayuh mean, maybe?  Do yah or don't yah?"
	"With the Giants?"
	"Nah.  Yah got something maybe yah can start in Class B. Maybe Three I."
	"What about school?"
	"Geezus, ya wanta go to school --- whatta yah doing here!"
	"I think I made a mistake," I said.  Here was the Mighty Mel Ott and he was just a clown.
	"Yah better make up your mind, kid."  He walked past me shaking his head.
	I got to see the game free and afterward the scout drove us home.  "Did he say anything to you about a contract?" he asked me.
	"Yeah, but Class B," I said.
	"Geezus, Class B.  You shoulda took it, kid."
	I got a couple other offers, but the shine was already worn off baseball, after meeting Ott, an average man like everybody else, so I enrolled at a cheap school near home called LaGrange Junior College for awhile and then quit that, too, and went to work as a laborer.  The next spring I went in to Wrigley Field to see the Giants and Ott remembered me once I reminded him about last year.
	"Yah ready to play ball now, kid?" he smiled.
	"No," I said, and I wasn't.  "I don't think I'll ever play ball, Mr. Ott."
	"Suit yourself."

CHAPTER 13

	Not all performances are sporting, though.  When death dances at the end of the act, it's a far jump from baseball or football, and I know a little about this, too.  After I quit attending a nearby junior college I used to ride out to Stimson airport and watch the mechanics monkey around the single-engined planes, mostly Pipers and Cessnas, and a few Beachcrafts.  It was here I met Skylark, a strange ugly guy who taught me the difference between athletics and a real performance where a man has nothing but a parachute and his guts and where the ground comes driving up a mile-a-minute while everyone screams "No," but they mean "Yes!"
	Skylark was a kind of clown who worked on the planes, gassed them, and even went out and got cokes and food for the mechanics, as if he were some illiterate handyman who didn't know where his next meal was coming from so he wanted to keep his job.  But Skylark was pretty bright in a strange, twisted way --- let's face it, the best performers who defy death aren't normal like you and me; they are weird souls whose actions have no justification.  The audience doesn't care about their performances, and can't tell something good from something phony.  There is no money to be made defying death; and usually, the better the performance, the less remuneration.  The profession, attracts strange individuals who are willing to sacrifice everything for a brief power over the audience, those few minutes when all eyes focus on the center, and at the center is a man like Skylark.
	Skylark wasn't poor, and he didn't have to work at the airport during the off season, but he claimed he liked all the guys so much, that it was his home and they were his only family, which is also why he so eagerly would run off to get them cokes, sandwiches or cigarettes if they needed them.  Then, the next day he would do his dive at the ground from five thousand feet and come so close before his chute opened that he would scare not only the handful of people who paid to watch but even the mechanics who knew him and understood what he could expect from his equipment.  He would just go up in a plane, a red cape arrangement strapped to his back, a chute attached to his belly, with black wrestling tights and a black dyed t-shirt from Sears, and he would dive out into the sky, flour spilling from a canvas bag strapped to his leg which he had previously opened and which traced his headlong descent, the cape billowing to give him control, and he would loop and glide and soar like a leaf, all drawn in the sky by the flour, but meanwhile diving at 174 feet a second, until his 20 or sometimes as much as 30-second count was dead (with him almost dead, too, so close to the ground he would be), and then he would pull open his belly chute, it would stretch out and pop, yanking him to safety sometimes within only a hundred feet of the dirt, and sometimes closer, but always just a short distance away from the handful of slobs who watched him and gave him a buck or two for the thrill, while they said wisely to their girls and their friends, "There's probably some trick to it."
	I was there the day Skylark did go all the way into the ground, as a result of trying to get closer and closer, within limited altitude, and in an instant his wiry body became a bag of bones and dirt, and when I lifted what I took to be his head it separated from the lump of him and I knelt there with Skylark's face in my hands.  I didn't know what I was doing, scraping away the dirt, and suddenly I came to his mouth which seemed to be smiling at me.  You can see why I never forgot him.
	I jumped with him often, and even went on his trips with him.  To pass the time he taught me his cape stunt.  "You just close your eyes and jump and then do your stunts and," he would smile here, "then just pull open your chute and POP it's all over with.  But don't forget to count --- always count."
	When we jumped together he would check the altitude and give me the number sequence on which to rely, and I always trusted him, as I faithfully repeated the instruction to myself out there in the open sky: "one thousand, two thousand LOOP, three thousand TURN, four thousand DIVE, five thousand GLIDE LEFT . . . " and so on, controlling movements by allowing the cape on my back to billow, and then collapsing it --- while the flour marked every move and the descent.  "It's just like drawing," Skylark would say, "and soon you'll get so you hate to quit and pull the chute."  Thank God, I never did reach that point, but I remember there was a strong urge to believe you were flying in a horizontal line, rather than diving vertically, and the wind lulled you into thinking there was all the time in the world while your mouth, like the voice of another at your elbow, some stranger, demanded: "twenty thousand PULL!"  If you wanted to live, you followed your own order and pulled.
	It taught me something for I began to think that life was like the cape stunt.  If you want to live, you have to follow your own orders --- that mouth at your shoulder telling you what to do.  If you let yourself slip for a second and go along with the tide you're swallowed up and you die, and you deserve to die because that's what life is --- following your own orders; and if you stop listening to yourself you're dead, whether you remain above ground or are buried below.  You're dead and nothing makes any difference anymore.  When Skylark died, there it was for me, all "drawn" in the sky with his flour.  One slip and anyone, you, me, Skylark, we're either walking death or a bag of bones, or a body in a box, a cross of crud, a gunnysack of glop, a miracle smashed easily as a mirror, poundfuls of pulp decomposing to pieces; and soon there is nothing left.  We have been gobbled up.
	So it goes.  Death comes at the moment of capitulation-for me, you, Melvin Ott or even Skylark --- the decision to do something too long instead of moving on to other things, which is the way of life, moving on, always moving.  Unfortunately, few people can do something new, and it is easier to join that tide of zombies called the human race, walking toward death on that flat wide road with friends and good cheer and clean sport and a cold beer and a sweet smile, while a very, very few decide to strike out into the wilderness and make a new way, although they don't know any more than the zombies where they're going, and later when these few have hacked their new proposal through the weeds successfully they look up to see the line of zombies suddenly following tbem, and history awards them the title of "leaders" --- they are called "geniuses," "the rare," "the gifted," prophets," and they are hailed by their fellow humans.  They are remembered, revered, rewarded and received back into the thundering horde, and soon historians tell the tale that all such men march a certain way because of so-an-so, and it was a damn lucky thing he pointed the new way out to his brothers.
	But there are many whose ways are just as good, differing only by the fact the horde didn't happen to turn up their new street.  These are the men who hack away, building roads on which will fall no feet, and when they die historians are unaware of their passing, no mention of them appears in the records, diaries, joumals, no rewards come, no recognition.  They are lost forever, and no one knows of their work, which since it is neither used nor reproduced soon vanishes as easily and quietly as the hand of the dead master who created it.
	Yes, it is unjust.  No, it doesn't make sense.  You're right it shouldn't be that way-but it is.  Life has ever been tolerable, only because death is worse, but this doesn't mean life is pretty or legal or neat or just or delicate or regal or sensitive or artistic or anything a human mind would bless.  Life is treacherous, evil, ugly, demanding, a cliff on which walks the individual and the fact that death is a long way below doesn't mean the cliff cares about one man's foothold.  It cannot change its craggy face for the benefit of human beings who live off it, on it and in it like flies off, on and in garbage, so it remains itself, a terror, a tragedy, a storm trumped up to tip a boat, a jungle jangling against a Jew, a herd trampling a lovely idea, an Attila killing his only balladeer without fear that bis soup will suffer.  It is a corporation dismissing its greatest inventors and later making more profits by selling the defective machines of their inferiors, it is a vicious nightmare which doesn't stop at dawn but grows more macabre in the sun, it is a fungus which is a fool on a wild wheeling ball that has no brains, it is like a frothing dog growing fat from many of bis mad killings.  It is a haphazard formless mess of murder and gluttony which lives upon itself, cultivating its own growth.  It can be a game, but only if you imagine a game that can have whatever rules, purpose, competition that the players care to construct, rules that the most powerful players can change with guns or politics, and picture only the survivor being briefly declared the winner and then being destroyed like the loser with the grass covering all and calling the game ended, if there ever was a game at all.  Life is formless except for its own growth which in the long run is a simple repetition of itself with minute changes here and there which tip the balance of power so that one species emerges as dictator, referee, director, chief scorer, priest and policeman, and just as it has got its little contest all explained the balance tips again and another species rises.  From insects to swimmers to crawlers to flyers to milk mammals and man, the balance moves at whim awarding the world to each it then destroys.  It is untameable, unknowable, unbeatable, unlovable, unthinkable and unexplainable --- Life, the living, leaping, lapping mouth that feeds itself upon itself, a monster masticulating upon its members, a snaky web of winners destined to lose to others who themselves will be eaten.  Life, whose only desire is to grow fat faster even if it means outgrowing its earthen rock.  Life, which stretches its tentacle to space and would like to contaminate other rocks, too, called moon, Mars and even Andromeda.  Life, that old lewd lecher, loving only itself.  Where will it go next?  What will be its new way?  Who, its favorites for awhile?  Who, its dinner; who, its host; and where will the banquet be held?  What will be the rules of the game?

CHAPTER 14

	The world has become no place for little boys playing bat and-ball or kick-the-pigskin or trying to hole a hoop with a hook-shot.  The world is no longer an arena, the people refuse to be performers, and no one gives a damn anymore about the score," about the "winning side" or the super stars.  Victory is impossible, there are no true contests, no skill that can be graded.
	There is only the wind, the water and the dirty world and us, all with an evil smile and intent on the destruction of its members.  There are shrieks, starving moans, the grim groans of those hurt and bleeding.  Life is no longer a game, and death has become too horrible to be called an art.  The old ways are gone forever, in spite of how a few grotesque groups try to rally support for the remnants, yelling YEA TEAM and keeping their box scores like idiots even as the tiger's howl and the jungle's screech draws closer and closer, soon to obliterate our playgrounds with glee.  No YEA ever issues from the throat of this tiger as he devours his victim, and never does he keep score or kill according to rules and regulations.
	I used to play college football with a busting fullback named Pattie, a redheaded block of freckled granite with speed and drive and a love for banging over things like guards and tackles and opposing linebackers.  We used to call him PattiePoo, short for Pattie-the-Pounder, and even the sportswriters picked up the nickname, at first gleefully because they thought it disparaging and then reluctantly when they found out Pattie not only didn't mind his light-weight monicker but liked it and took more pride in it than if it were something crude like "Brick," or "Bullets," or "Horse." (I'm afraid sportswriters are out of it and always will be no matter how hard they try to get close to the players of the game.  The most they can do is learn the rules.)
	Pattie-Poo had the admiration of a sexy little blue-eyed blonde named Mary, a millionairess who had inherited oil wells and would sign some stock over to her current interest so he would collect dividends enough to date her in style.  In the beginning no matter how much she wanted him, and no matter how much the Pounder dismissed her, she kept getting hotter and hotter about him everytime he made a touchdown, or was named to an Honor Team during off-season, and there were times when I think if he had hopped her in the middle of campus with thousands watching she would have given him everything her little ass had and sold all the oil wells just for the shame of being allowed to offer herself to him.
	But Pattie-Poo was more interested in her car than anything else.  It was a long, low convertible Bugatti beauty, all golden steel with whitewalls and red leather seats.  "Who the shit owns this!" he exclaimed when he saw it parked in front of Old Main.  "I do, Patrick," said the lovely Mary, sliding out to give him a glimpse of almond thighs and a flash of pink.  (Her body and her money had been enough to make her queen of any guy before.)  "Geezus, what a beauty," Patti-Poo said.  "Where the shit did you get it?"  He hadn't taken his eyes off the Bugatti.  "Imported," she said.  "You sure are a lucky son-of -a-bitch," said Pattie-Poo, finally glancing at her, but it made no difference.  And then he simply walked away, leaving her there by her car so stunned she looked like all the proud red blood had been sucked away.  I think it was the first thing in her life that hadn't jumped in her shapely lap; and although the loss might have been leavened for her if she had known that Pattie-Poo dismissed the Bugatti, not her, and then only because it was out of reach for the penniless son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, still she had no idea of Pattie's shortsighted desires at the time, and she took his dismissal smack in the pearly teeth all neatly displayed within the splendidly suggestive smile she had given him.  She didn't believe it, so she hopped right in and drove after him, pulling over to the curb near where he walked, smiling again and suggesting, "Want to ride in it, Patrick?"  He was so startled to find the big gold Bug following him that he refused.  "Nah, I gotta go downtown," he said clumsily.  "I'll drive you," said Mary.  "Nah," he answered, "I gotta run, good for the legs."  But when she pleaded, "Come on, Pat, you can drive it;" --- he stood with his mouth open and finally stepped in and took over the wheel.  Within three weeks she had bought him one of his own, and soon the thankful Pattie-Poo relented and gave Mary a good screwing, which was what she wanted in payment, but they both got trapped when she became pregnant through his ignorance, and she forced him to marry her the week after graduation.
	Some friends told me a few years later that old Pattie never got over it when he found that Mary had begun to cheat on him --- which she had to tell him herself or he still wouldn't know --- and he now hits the liquor regularly, is a flunky in her dad's oil business, and can no longer even drive his Bugatti but must have someone with him at all times to handle his spending money, sign his checks and see that he gets home.  Mary, I was told, has become active as an anti-communist, because she thinks the Pinkos have sapped all the strength and virility out of the good old USA, including Pattie.
	(I like to remember Pattie-Poo and Mary as the ideal American couple who know something is wrong, who feel guilty as hell about it, but who don't know quite what to do --- drown in liquor, or in respectability.  There must be a new way found or trouble will come and all is lost, marriage, motherhood, manhood, our country, the world.)
	If life is a contest and the world is a stadium, for what benefit is the game being played?  For God's, if you believe the mystics; only He knows how to keep score.  For No One, admits the Professional, but he claims the contest is good because it purifies the souls of the competitors and reveals their true nature, a view consistent with Hemingway, Kirkegaard, Faulkner and O'Neill.  For the sheer sake of Absurdity, says the Sophisticate, who accepts that there is neither audience nor rules, nor winner, but believes it is impossible to stop anything in process so the game must go on.  For the sake of Relaxation, says the Humanitarian who believes the game should continue although in a changed manner so people can enjoy it without competing with one another.  For the sake of Fame, say some who believe the game is a massive selection process which reveals leadership and bestows power to the strongest and the most intelligent.  For Diversion, say others who believe that as long as humanity has something --- anything, game or what --- to occupy itself with then it cannot take time to totally destroy itself.  The Aristocrats, having succeeded in extricating themselves from the clashing "players," sit perched on the Stadium's fence and say the game is a fitting and proper concern of the masses because it keeps them from realizing they are being enslaved by --- guess who --- the very Aristocrats who say it.
	There are other rationales for The Game, of course, but all thoughts that justify its continuance --- whether stated here or not-are founded on the assumption that the Stadium exists in a vacuum and has no enemies outside itself.  Here in the mid-Twentieth Century, this assumption is so tenderly naive that once mentioned it doesn't even have to be attacked.  In a universe containing billions of suns, one planet's plight is negligible and if it fails to sustain itself and the life upon it, no one throughout the stars will suffer or miss it.  In fact, one planet --- between Mars and Jupiter --- has burst to bits already in our miniscule solar system, causing little or no bad effect on the system itself.  In other words, our earth, Stadium, living space, or whatever name you wish, is not needed by the larger system which allowed it to come into existence, and if we are to survive possible catastrophe and oblivion it is up to us; the system will not save us, in fact it may act in ways injurious to us-which is a far cry from living in a vacuum, because on these dreadful occasions we will have to fight grimly to maintain the very existence of ourselves and our world.

CHAPTER 15

	It was more than a few months after I quit LaGrange Junior College that I went into the woods.
	The woods has always fascinated me; when I had to make money as a kid I had started a trap-line along the Salt Creek set out snares of looped wire on the thin trails down to the water that rabbits had.  They ran right into the nooses and choked themselves to death.  I thought they couldn't have any eyes, because I always put the snares on the same paths but they never learned, just kept running the same way right into the wire loops.  I wondered why they didn't go down to the water a different way.  Even when a choked rabbit blocked the path, the rest of them would just make a little detour around the body --- in the snow it was easy to see their tracks --- and then they would go on the old path again and some would run right into nooses ahead.  What else could I think about something like this, except to admit they were pretty doggone stupid?
	It was wonderful in the woods, though.  The air was always crisp and cool, except for a few days of summer, and in winter the snow stayed fresh for weeks.  When the creek froze, it froze in ridges where the current had fought the freezing right up to the end.  I used to run along the creek, checking the traps and snares, and sometimes I would dive into a snow bank, a pile of leaves or a bunch of bushes and roll around.  I got hard as stone, I suppose because I liked the woods so much; it's great what a complete lack of people will do for a place.  There was nobody there but me.
	There was this girl I would see every once in awhile on a bridge, but she just took it as a short-cut home.  I used to watch her, a little worried that she might see me and come down and ruin everything by knowing I was in the woods.  Sooner or later it had to happen; one day she did see me, and she did come down.  She had a stick in her hand that she kept poking at leaves with and she told me her name.
	"What are you doing here?" she asked me.
	I couldn't think up an answer, so I told her the truth.  "I jus like it here," I said.
	"I like it, too," she said, as if she wanted to cut herself in if it was something good.
	I turned away and walked down along the creek bank, but she followed me so we sat down together, staring across the water.  "Isn't it wonderful the way everything grows here," she said, "so easy and natural?  Sometimes I wish I were a tree, or a bush or even just a little ant, I'd be so happy to live here in the sun."
	I looked at her.  But girls are like that, you know.  Anyway, if she were a tree, she would still expect breakfast for nothing every morning and she would never ask where it came from.  Nobody waits on trees, just on girls --- but she was forgetting this, if she had ever known it at all.  If there was one thing I liked about a tree it was that I knew it didn't expect to be happy, it didn't even know what happy was.  All there was to a tree, I thought, was pull, pull, pull for food and one more day of life to grow bigger.  But when I tried to explain this to the girl she got angry and left.
	As I got older, I left the Salt Creek with my traps and snares, and I began laying out a trapline along the Rock River that runs at the far north edge of Illinois.  Here I got more muskrat, and a few more mink, and even some otter and martin, along with a couple of nice fox.  I'd take them home and string them up from a nail in the basement, and strip them, and send the pelts to Speigels in St. Paul, Minnesota, making about a hundred dollars a month off the traps, but although the money was good I liked trapping because it gave me a chance to live and move in the woods, and there were easily times when I didn't see a human face for three, four days at a stretch, heard no words, said nothing and only opened my mouth to whistle.
	It was good to do all the simple things that a guy never has time to enjoy otherwise, like breathing in the clean cold air until it stings, like feeling a breeze and a flurry of snow, noticing the colors of leaves and the way twigs have fallen, "reading" the trees (you can tell whether the landscape was a field, farm or a woods a hundred years ago by the present shape of the trees; and you can tell how long the present woods has been developing, or how old it is, by the species of trees found in it), and like watching birds play in the air or strut pridefully along a branch, and the noises, sounds, whistles, chattering, all lending to a hum that is the woods itself.  Through this world runs a river, or a creek, all spangled with life and sun and mud rising in a mixture to float in circles on the current; leaves and dead limbs in the fall, all gliding nowhere in a rush, and then winter and the slow stiffening of everything, current, trees, weeds and bushes into frozen shapes that no longer bend or flow or weave but break through brittly with a clatter and fall piecemeal, whether it be an ice-coated stick or a nub of ice swirled up that cracks underfoot; all round a walker the woods snaps, pops, cracks with things going to pieces, but then in spring everything starts all over again, buds, bulbs, greenery and bugs in a teeming thrust to conquer the water, earth and the little space, before succumbing to the weather.
	You learn in the woods that psychiatry makes no sense within the great world; you can accuse no bug or branch or bush of having a destructive wish as it gives up its green and dies cold brown before the diving temperature of late November.  You can accuse nothing of being minded toward its own bitter end; there are no complexes in a woods, no complex self-imposed agonies, no maladjusted, just all being swept unknowingly toward a frozen death, not wanting it, not demanding it, not looking forward to it.  Nothing in the woods tries for the impossible; there are no standards.  What works is right, but nothing works against the weather and the fragile die, the mighty hole up tight, while everything winged leaves.  It is mostly only the progeny that is around come spring, and the next spring it is another generation, then another, and another, a relay race in time rather than in space, the neuroses don't count.  There are neither demons nor devils, just death, silence, and then with a sigh in spring the chatter of summer begins, swells, subsides, ends.  Within the flat world of the woods is that ring-within-a-ring, within-a-ring reality that we all remember somewhere deep in our mental makeup --- the realization that we are all being moved in a gigantic pattern that has nothing to do with our own free will, that we are all both free and slave, both master and machine, artful and ridiculous, proud and absurd, a whole and a piece, distinct and indifferent.
	I learned this when I broke my foot stumbling down a ravine ten miles from anywhere, and came to rest alone in eighteen inches of snow, unable to walk, or get help, or call it quits, or say, "that's all, Charlie, I give up, now let's go get a beer and forget it."  The world closed in, swept over me, and went along fine without me; and I realized that I maintained my place only through asserting myself every instant.
	I dragged branches to me, built a windbreak, a fire, took off my pack and made coffee, heated beans, cleaned everything and put it back carefully, stoked up the fire and then forced myself to sleep.  In the morning, covered with snow that spilled off the blanket when I popped up, I went into motion again, making more coffee on a fire, more beans, and then for a long, long, long time dragging myself through the ditch to find a crutch-shaped sturdy branch, and some flat chips for splints.  It took me twelve days to come back, nibbling a little, drinking a little, making a mile or less and praying for the sight of one house, a road, a car, another whole and well figure that could help, but I must have missed them all until the odds were so overwhelmingly in my favor that I had to stumble onto somebody or make a lie out of all mathematics.  I heard an axe first, stubbing away rhythmically in the night, and I shouted and walked, shouted and walked, shouted and walked it seemed like hours, until I heard the retort "Who's there!" and he found me, took me inside, where his wife fed me, the kids gathered around, and the warmth of his house, his blankets, his Scotch brought me back to consciousness and the dignity of not needing him.
	The woods is a masterful teacher.  If you do not believe that men survive by making war on the world, try getting lost sometime.  A man's only friend is another man --- but unfortunately, not always does he have any friend at all.

CHAPTER 16

	Every small town has its War Dead Memorial, and the sad little sunny towns in Illinois are no exception, so softly quiet and quaint, and then in the middle of the grassy park a big stone with names on it of those who died.  The ones who lived and returned have the American Legion or VFW hall as their Memorial, and they line up every Friday for a fish fry with their families where the neon sign tells them they have served a cause and where downstairs there is a long bar and a few pool tables that indicate what the cause was.  The Legion and VFW clubs supply the only social entertainment in most of these uninspired little towns, along with the churches, and the Farm and Home Bureaus.  All other time passes in front of the television set, with a few breaks for fishing, the "school" play and the one Cinemascope screen, the Sunday Walk and the Saturday Shopping, and the high school basketball and football games.  Dad makes money, Mom cooks and cleans, and the kids date, dance and play sports, and that's it in Illinois, even at the colleges, where the youngsters are taught how to make money, cook, and they get more experience in dating and sports.  If there's one area in the U.S. that hasn't changed since World War II it's the Midwest, remaining calm and fre