Category: Fiction

Fire Mission, by William Mulvihill – 1957 [Unknown artist]

Suddenly he looked up and he was all alone. 
The men in front of him had melted away
as if some giant hand had swept them to the ground,
leaving him alone and vulnerable,
towering above them. 
But he was not alone:
as he struggled to get down to the slushy road
he saw Meringo falling sideways and someone running heavily for the woods. 
The terrible whirring of the shell beat into his ears,
shaking his brain,
paralyzing him. 
He hit the ground, tried to claw his way into it,
praying and cursing in the same breath. 
If someone got killed it would be him for he was slow and stupid –
a stupid, dumb jerk. 
He stopped breathing, this was his last instant on earth:
the shell would land directly on him,
the smooth, metal point splitting his backbone and then exploding. 
He sobbed for he was afraid. 
He wanted to live. 
He wanted to get up and go away to where shells never fell. 
It wasn’t right for him to die here,
to die on this stupid road in the goddam slush
with everybody else in Rear Echelon like the tank guys and Bannion
and the cannoneers and the civilians in France
and that fat, chicken-hearted T/5 back in England
who led them to the train when they got off the boat in Southampton. 
WHERE WAS THAT SONOFABITCH ANYWAY?

The shell exploded and he was deaf and blind and dying.
He never had a chance and it was so terribly sad and it served his mother right.
Then he opened his eyes and saw feet moving around him.
There was the taste of clay in his mouth
and the stench of the powder was so strong that it was hard to breathe.
One by one the other men got up,
brushing the flecks of mud from their clothes.
He quickly did the same.
No one had been hit. (pp. 73-73)

– William Mulvihill –

“FIRE MISSION is a magnificent and moving novel of men at war.  In the winter of 1944, the Allied armies were slugging it out with the Wermacht in the long drive to the Rhine.

“FIRE MISSION is the story of one American artillery battery: four 105 howitzers, and a hundred officers and men – and what happened to them in the last few weeks of a great battle.

“FIRE MISSION is no book of cowards and heroes, but of ordinary soldiers – men who have endured war and found satisfaction in their efficiency as a fighting unit, and pride in themselves as men.”

Juke Box King, by Frank Kane – October, 1959 [Freeman Eliot]

Mitch Corday’s office was a combination of den and office. 
Its knotty pine paneling featured autographed pictures
of the top talent that had headlined the shows,
the floor was covered with a colorful Indian rug. 
Comfortable looking chairs were scattered around the room,
a large desk was placed
so Corday could look out across the desert to the distant blue-black mountains. 

He sat at the desk, his heel hooked on the corner,
watched the cottony white clouds that seemed to hang motionless
in the blue of the sky.
The harsh rock outlines of the mountains were softened by haze.
Corday wondered how the weather was back on State Street
and if he’d ever be able to live in Chicago again after once having lived in Vegas.
The last time he had been there,
the slush was ankle deep in the gutters,
the wind that came off the lake was cold,
cut through him like a knife.
Instead of the white clouds and the blue overhead,
it had been a dark, dreary day with the skies the color of lead

And yet there were times when he wished he had seen
the last of the super-modern pastel-colored buildings,
the neon lights,
the dry air and the blistering sun that spelled Vegas. 
Some day he might go back East. 
There were lots of the boys who never could –
who sat around at night and talked about the old days and the old places
with the sad knowledge that they were now out of bounds. 
Nevada might be willing to overlook certain differences with the law. 
But New York and Chicago and even Miami had long memories. 
And the dry air, the monotony of the perfect weather,
the blistering sun and the wind that dried the perspiration on your body –
all of these were preferable to the even greater monotony
of Sing Sing or Joliet or Alcatraz. 
As long as it had to be a prison, they preferred the gaudier one –
even though in time it might become just as confining. 

Corday started at the knock on the door,
dropped his head from his desk, swiveled around.

“Come in.”

– Frank Kane –

A Theft, by Saul Bellow – 1989 [Amy Hill]

When you were down, busted, blasted, burnt out, dying, you saw the best of Clara.

So it was odd that she also should have become an executive,
highly paid and influential. 
She could make fashionable talk,
she dressed with originality,
she knew at lot at first hand about decadence,
but at any moment she could set aside the “czarina” and become the hayseed,
the dupe of travelling salesmen or grifters who wanted to lure her up to the hayloft. 
In her you might see suddenly a girl from a remote town,
from the vestigial America of one-room schoolhouses,
constables,
covered-dish suppers,
one of the communities bypassed by technology and urban development. 
Her father, remember, was still a vestryman,
and her mother sent checks to TV fundamentalists. 
In a sophisticated boardroom Clara could  be as plain as cornmeal mush,
and in such a mood, when she opened her mouth,
you couldn’t guess whether she would speak or blow bubble gum. 
Yet anybody who had it in mind to get around her was letting himself in for lots of bad news. 

– Saul Bellow –

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Amy Hill’s cover painting for A Theft.  An untitled copy of A Theft – bearing her own (the above) illustration, is tossed from a window above Park Avenue.  A closer view reveals that this illustration appears – ad infinitum? – inside each iteration within the painting. 

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Portrait of Saul Bellow by Thomas Victor.

Dirty Work, by Larry Brown – 1989 [Glennray Tutor]

“I was in a rifle company. 
Joined the marines when I was eighteen. 
I had to go. 
The army was fixing to draft me. 
Back when they had that lottery system, my birthday was number one. 
And hell, I’d already had my physical. 
I was 1-A. 
So I knew I was gone. 
The lady who ran the draft board in town called my mama and told her I had about two weeks to join something if I wanted to, because after that the army would get me. 
So I joined the marines. 
I figured they were the toughest thing going. 
My old man, he … he really resisted me going. 
Both of them did. 
It was getting worse and worse all the time. 
I guess you were over there before I was. 
He was in World War II. 
He stayed in for four years. 
Walked all the way across Europe with the infantry, was wounded once. 
He knew what it was like to have to fight with a rifle. 
He taught me how to shoot. 
We’d hunt squirrels with a .22. 
Shoot em in the head.
“He was in prison for a while. 
A long time ago. 
Twice.

“I was over there within six months. 
Did it smell like something dead the whole time you were over there? 
Same here. 
I thought I’d never get out of there alive. 
I couldn’t sleep for a long time. 
I couldn’t sleep at all without a rifle next to me. 
I was usually always the biggest so I usually always kept the M60. 
Twenty-six pounds. 
I loved that damned gun. 
Kept it clean. 
I could by God shoot it, too.”

– Larry Brown –

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Larry Brown (Photo by Susie James)

The Victim, by Saul Bellow – 1958 (1975) [Barbra Bergman]

In a general way, anyone could see that there was great unfairness
in one man’s having all the comforts of life while another had nothing.
But between man and man, how was this to be dealt with?
Any derelict panhandler or bum might buttonhole you on the street and say,
“The world wasn’t made for you any more than it was for me, was it?”
The error in this was to forget that neither man had made the arrangements,
and so it was perfectly right to say,
“Why pick on me?
I didn’t set this up any more than you did.”
Admittedly there was a wrong, a general wrong.
Allbee, on the other hand, came along and said, “You!” and that was what was so meaningless.
For you might feel that something was owing to the panhandler,
but to be directly blamed was entirely different.

“Why?” Leventhal involuntarily repeated.  He was bewildered.
“Because you’ve got to blame me, that’s why,” said Allbee.
“You won’t assume that it isn’t entirely my fault.
It’s necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get.
It doesn’t enter your mind, does it –
that a man might not be able to help being hammered down?
What do you say?
Maybe he can’t help himself?
No, if a man is down, a man like me, it’s his fault.
If he suffers, he’s being punished.
There’s no evil in life itself.
And do you know what?
It’s a Jewish point of view.
You’ll find it all over the Bible.
God doesn’t make mistakes.
He’s the department of weights and measures.
If you’re okay, he’s okay, too.
That’s what Job’s friends come and say to him.
But I’ll tell you something.
We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing,
and there’s no denying that evil is as real as sunshine.
Take it from me, I know what I’m talking about.
To you the whole thing is that I must deserve what I get.
That leaves your hands clean and it’s unnecessary for you to bother yourself.
Not that I’m asking you to feel sorry for me,
but you sure can’t understand what makes a man drink.”

Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders.
“We have to live today,” he said.
“If you had a son, Harkavy, you’d want him to have a college education.
Who’s going to wait for the Messiah?
They tell a story about a little town in the old country.
It was out of the way,
in a valley,
so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them,
and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long.
A friend of his meets this beggar and he says, ‘How do you like your job, Baruch?’
So he says, ‘It doesn’t pay much, but I think it’s steady work.’”

– Saul Bellow –

Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow – 1969 (1977) [Roy Ellsworth]

And since he had lasted –
survived –
with a sick headache –
he would not quibble over words –
was there an assignment implicit? 
Was he meant to do something?

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“During the war I had no belief, and I had always disliked the ways of the Orthodox.
I saw that God was not impressed by death.
Hell was his indifference.
But inability to explain is no ground for disbelief.
Not as long as the sense of God persists.
I could wish that it did not persist.
The contradictions are so painful.
No concern for justice?
Nothing of pity?
Is God only the gossip of the living?
Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water,
and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more.
And in our turn we will never be seen again,
once gone through that surface.
But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface.
We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow.
There is no knowledge.
There is longing, suffering, mourning.
These come from need, affection, and love –
the needs of the living creature, because it is a living creature.
There is also strangeness, implicit.
There is also adumbration.
Other states are sensed.
All is not flatly knowable.
There would never have been any inquiry without this adumbration,
there would never have been any knowledge without it.
But I am not life’s examiner, or a connoisseur, and I have nothing to argue.
Surely a man would console, if he could.
But that is not an aim of mine.
Consolers cannot always be truthful.
But very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity.
This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age.
I will say that to me this does not feel elderly.
Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death.
If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care?
There one would receive no further information.
One’s ape restiveness would stop.
I think I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms.
Yes, that is what I should miss.
So then, Dr. Lai, if the moon were advantageous for us metaphysically, I would be completely for it.
As an engineering project, colonizing outer space,
except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing,
is of little real interest to me.
Of course the drive, the will to organize this scientific expedition must be one of those irrational necessities that make up life –
this life we think we can understand.
So I suppose we must jump off, because it is our human fate to do so.
If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first.
Then, when we had an earth of saints, and our hearts were set upon the moon,
we could get in our machines and rise up …”
(236-237)

Margotte had much to say.
She did not notice his silence.

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject,
the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death.
Also, by having been inside death.
By having been given the shovel and told to dig.
By digging beside his digging wife.
When she faltered he tried to help her.
By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her.
But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it.
She was killed, not he.
She had passed the course, and he had not.
The hole deepened, the sand clay and stones of Poland, their birthplace, opened up.
He had just been blinded, he had a stunned face,
and he was unaware that blood was coming from him
till they stripped and he saw it on his clothes.
When they were as naked as children from the womb,
and the hole was supposedly deep enough, the guns began to blast,
and then came a different sound of soil.
The thick fall of soil.
A ton, two tons, thrown in.
A sound of shovel-metal, gritting.
Strangely exceptional, Mr. Sammler had come through the top of this.
It seldom occurred to him to consider it an achievement.
Where was the achievement?  He had clawed his way out.
If he had been at the bottom, he would have suffocated.
If there had been another foot of dirt.
Perhaps others had been buried alive in that ditch.
There was no special merit, there was no wizardry.
There was only suffocation escaped.
And had the war lasted a few months more, he would have died like the rest.
Not a Jew would have avoided death.
As it was, he still had his consciousness, earthliness, human actuality –
got up, breathed his earth gases in and out, drank his coffee,
consumed his share of goods, ate his roll from Zabar’s, put on certain airs –
all human beings put on certain airs – took the bus to Forty-second Street
as if he had an occupation, ran into a black pickpocket.
In short, a living man.
Or one who had been sent back again to the end of the line.
Waiting for something.
Assigned to figure out certain things, to condense, in short views,
some essence of experience, and because of this having a certain wizardry ascribed to him.
There was, in fact, unfinished business.
But how did business finish?
We entered in the middle of the thing and somehow became convinced that we must conclude it.
How? 

– Saul Bellow –

The Coming Triumph of the Free World, by Rick DeMarinis – 1988 [Anne Bascove]

Contents

The Handgun

Disneyland, from Antaeus

Culture Shock

Romance: A Prose Villanelle

Your Story

The Coming Triumph of the Free World (originally titled “Rick DeMarinis to Q”), from The Quarterly

The Swimmer in Hard Light (originally titled “The Swimmer”), from The Malahat Review

The Flowers of Boredom, from The Antioch Review

Pagans, from Harper’s Magazine

Mole, from Harper’s Magazine

Queen (originally titled “Tenderloin”) from Colorado State Review

Your Burden Is Lifted, Love Returns

Red Chair

Medicine Man, from The Atlantic

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“What I am telling you is that there is a great dark …
consensus …
that sweeps things along to their inevitable conclusion. 
There is an intelligence behind it, but, believe me, it is not human. 
It is the intelligence of soil, the thing that lifts trees and flowers out of the ground. 
I am too astonished and thrilled to be frightened by it.”

Lamar saw, even then, that Randy Voss was crazy,
but what he had said made a lasting impression.
And over the years he has come to adopt Voss’s idea as his own.
But it was something he was unable to talk about to anyone else,
not even his wife.
How could you convince anyone that in this industry no single individual,
or group of individuals,
suspects the existence of a vital sub-rosa mechanism
that produces and deploys our beautifully elegant weapons?
How could you say to someone that the process is holistic,
that a headstrong organic magic is at work,
or that a god presides?

(From “The Flowers of Boredom” (first published in Antioch Review, Winter, 1988)

The Healer, by Aharon Appelfeld – 1990 [Anne Bascove] [Revised Post]

(Includes photograph of Aharon Appelfeld, and, advertisement for The Healer.)

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Photo of Aharon Appelfeld by Micha Bar-Am, accompanying Lore Segal’s review of The Healer, from The New York Times Book Review of September 23, 1990.

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Advertisement for The Healer, from The New York Times Book Review of October 21, 1990.