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issue 6
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| Fire and Ice |
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|by Eric Stepp-Bolling
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"Give me the key, Captain. I want that key, and I want it now!"
When the early morning fog nestled around the Cajon Hills somewhere in February and each hilltop became an island in an ocean of white, I would see myself island hopping from Allen Tinley's ranch style house with a front yard of granite boulders to Susie Longstreth's Spanish fortress with its red-tiled roof and high arched windows. Buried in that living sea lay a treasure of orange groves and silent houses on silent streets. Below lived friends from school and little league, from church and cub scouts all submerged beneath those February dreams, all drowned from my reality. So it was that only Roger tempted me below. Roger, with a siren's voice, a summer smile in winter, and appetite for dreams, persuaded me to dive into his vaporous waters.
Remembering Roger Ozmund in those early years, I recall the pieces more accurately than the whole. He was skinny, but everyone was. His white-blonde hair could blind you in a good sun, and he had an arm which gunned over-ripe navels indiscriminately. Roger rarely took sides and never experienced defeat. He led because it seemed natural for him, and I followed because it seemed unnatural for me to do anything else. Still Roger didn't have what you would call close friends, but with everyone's respect and admiration (both through intimidation and by example) perhaps that was enough. I came as close to knowing Roger as anyone which might have been the same as knowing Lazarus before he was raised from the dead. Those who have had visions have difficulty remembering how life was seen through ordinary eyes.
Spring came quickly and early to the Cajon Hills with yellow mustard blooming among green rye grass and light rain polishing the first of the shiny new scrub oak leaves. Early spring meant early summer. When June arrived we clustered like pigeons around our desks awaiting release and the Icarus call to the sun. With the final bell of the year, we fled the school yard vowing never to return until September. Roger was eternal summer and we lived forever in those days of long shadows and short nights.
The first incident which was to change both our lives occurred in August of that year. An unexpected Santa Ana wind blew fierce dry heat into the valley. Roger and I had decided for the recreation park pool a good two miles across back lots and through several orange groves when I stumbled onto a magnifying glass someone had evidently lost. Thrusting the glass triumphantly into the air to show Roger, I suggested we burn a few ants or beetles. This I knew would intrigue him for Roger held a certain fascination for fire. Suddenly, Roger grabbed my arm, twisting it behind my back.
"Uncle, uncle!" I yelled thinking he had flown into a wrestling mood. He added more pressure and lifted me onto my toes. "God, Roger, that hurts!"
With his free hand he pried my fingers open and the magnifying glass dropped to the ground. Then before releasing his lock, he shoved me up and forward, my body heaving into the air then landing awkwardly in the dirt. Uncontrolled tears welled in my eyes. "Why didn't you just ask?" I said.
He had picked up the glass and was examining it carefully. "This is mine," he said and broke into laughter which sounded soft and pliable -- certainly not the laughter of a victor gloating over his victim. He held the glass up to the sun. "This is mine! " he shouted again, then took flight toward Pinion Peak.
Roger may have been the better fighter, but I was the better runner. I followed discretely.
Pinion Peak stood out among the other hilltops because housing construction hadn't crushed the brown sage and lone pinion pine which grew on the flat granite stone of the crest. The opulence of Spring had been transformed into the beggars' browns and grays. Just beneath where the tumbling rock ended and our orange grove began, a thin, dusty trail snaked its way to the top. The was crowned with several huge boulders and the remnants of Castle Rock, our sanctuary and Olympus.
Roger raced up the narrow path. I caught glimpses of him from beneath the broad orange leaves. I wanted him to think he had made it to safety. In my hands I rolled together two hard green navels, the ones which stung for hours and left rich, blue bruises. I cut across the back slopes just out of sight, slipping from boulder to bush to boulder. The hot Santa Ana blew in my face, but I kept up a rabbit-pace never allowing the distance between us to either diminish or lengthen until a sudden sharp pain struck just below my left knee threw me off balance. I stumbled into sage brush, but managed to keep my eye on Roger. I could see him now, kneeling in the dry mustard weeds examining his newly won trophy. The thought of Roger with my glass angered me so that I nearly forgot the pain in my leg.
The rest of this gets hazy. Wind blew what appeared to be white smoke in my direction and I heard the crackle of dry sage brush igniting. I wanted to yell something at Roger, something clever and spiteful, but the words tripped over my tongue and the landscape around me began to spin in slow unsteady circles. Another step and I collapsed, grabbing my calf which had somehow now grown to twice its normal size. I could barely lift my jeans over my swollen leg, but when I did, I noticed two puncture marks in the dark purple still oozing venom from the rattler. I couldn't believe how dumb I'd been, and hadn't even heard the snake's warning. It was my own fault, but all I could do now was sit beside the sage brush and groggily watch the world of smoke and flame descend upon me. Roger had discovered the secret power of the white light, and I listened to his soft, easy laugh while my world darkened around me.
When I awoke, the white walls of the hospital room still echoed that familiar laugh.
"You're awake. About time sleeping beauty."
It was Rog.
"Your mom went to get a bite. She said she'd like to try the broiled rattler." His eyes lit up with silent laughter. "Guess we showed that snake who was boss."
I looked at the heavy wrappings around my leg. Then the laughter went out of Roger's eyes for one brief moment and something, maybe fear, swept into them. Only for a moment.
I suppose he saw me struggling under the waves of burn pains; my arms too, wrapped in gauze and coarse bandages, alternately itched and stung to the extent I was in constant motion across the bed.
"Fire purifies the spirit," he said with a wink. "Don't struggle against the pain. Accept it."
"Who gave you that line of crap?" I said.
Roger moved a step closer, crossing his arms in front of him. Under the long flannel sleeves the edges of white bandages could be seen. He had obviously been the one to pull me out of the fire, but I didn't want to think about that now. I didn't want to think about anything except the fire that still burned my arms and chest and had crept into the darkness somewhere within me.
Then Roger grew serious. "My father once told me about the bubonic plague, the black death, that killed off two-thirds of the people in Europe. No one knew what caused it then. . . that was hundreds of years ago. People would begin to feel sick to their stomachs, so they wouldn't eat. After a while, they just starved to death. Most of the priests thought God was punishing them for their sins. Then someone discovered if everything was burned -- buildings, crops, clothing, bodies, everything -- the black death went away. The fire purified the sins of man and the righteous survived."
"Hell of a story, Roger." My leg throbbed with the venom I held. I knew that if the two pains merged I would go insane. "You put the tourniquet on too, I suppose."
Roger gave a typical Roger shrug as if that both clarified and muddied the situation.
"Well you can deep the goddamn magnifying glass." I said in my best high-and-mighty voice.
"Oh, I buried that in the orange grove."
My eyes went to his.
"It possessed me, Billy-boy. Inside the glass, there was Satan and he tempted me with his flames. I had to give it up."
Roger's frozen smile drew cold sweat from under my arms. As far as I was concerned, my debt to Roger was paid in full. . . paid with the knowledge of where Prometheus hid his wand of fire.
I can hear the cocking of a 45. It is distinct. A pleasant and definite sound like the snapping of dried eucalyptus twigs beneath my hiking boots. Sounds and smells bridge time; they link the present with the past, the ephemeral with the eternal. The clicking of a 45 sidearm is reality in a world of illusions.
I never told the police what lay buried in the soft earth of Thompson's grove. I never told anyone for that matter except maybe God once or twice in a confessional prayer.
What lay buried, of course, was a good deal of our early friendship.
Roger's family moved to El Adobe, a small town some twenty miles from where I called home. We saw each other from time to time when his family returned for one occasion or another, but as the years passed, new friends were made and Rog became a memory of the golden past.
In the fall of '73 I enrolled at MSU with a track scholarship, thanks in part to my state high school victories in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. An influx of veterans swelled freshmen enrollment easing the anathema of Vietnam. ROTC, so recently ostracized, made a return, and I, to escape one label, joined, replacing it with another. I couldn't claim a misguided sense of patriotism, rather it drew me with a certain fascination. For the most part, ROTC stocked itself with pimple-faced freshmen who saw flag-waving as an honest-to-God duty, right up there with jerking off. I saw it as a diversion from the truth.
My first day "in the field" I was escorted by the local commandant, a nice enough Nam vet who lost half a foot on a pungi stake in the Tet offensive.
"Infection," he said tapping his cane against his boot. "Nothing rots quicker than human flesh."
I gave a nod.
"Control your own fate and the rest will take care of itself." he said. "Goddamn it, Bill, I have a chance to see that this generation doesn't make the same mistakes as ours did."
I never asked what mistakes those might have been.
"Now over there is Corporal Ozmund."
I followed his gaze past a row of bleachers to a squad of eight or ten ROTCs in various stages of exhaustion.
"Ozmund leads calisthenics."
Indeed, Roger continued with a set of marine push-ups long after the others had collapsed.
"We all take turns leading something, but Ozmund seems born for the role."
I had to agree. Roger never liked following.
"Report to the corporal and he'll show you the ropes."
Seven years and Rog had grown leaner if that was possible. His muscles, like taut wires, were covered with a minimal stretch of skin. He had grown, of course, but his body allowed for more weight than he carried.
"Corporal Ozmund." I stood behind him, my back to the sun.
"That's right." And he didn't even stop for a breath.
"Roger Ozmund?"
He paused in mid push-up, a smile or grimace breaking the evenness of his face.
"Billy-boy, that you?" He flipped himself over, lifted his legs into the air arching his back and then kipped to his feet, all in one smooth motion.
"Still landing on your feet, Rog?"
He laughed softly and held out his hand.
I took it and for some reason the old Roger warmth flooded into me making me regret the years of abstinence between us.
"As soon as I waste these fairies, I'll meet you in the student union."
That was the first of our meetings. We discussed the changes that seven years had made: politics, religion, war, and women, and our differences became evident in the following weeks. We were polar opposites, and it was only in the area of women that we seemed to reach agreement.
In the field Rog continued to lead, determined to metamorphose marshmallow into rock. By late December the change Roger had envisioned was becoming a reality. His squadron of skinny recruits wielded the beginnings of broad chests and flat stomachs -- in the image of their creator. For what purpose, no one asked. We could deny Roger little.
After a late workout, Roger approached me. "I think you need some more upper body strength. Let's hit the gym."
"Some other time. I've got a report due in Anthro."
"It'll wait."
"No. It's too important."
"Then give it to Link. He'll take care of it."
I waited, not liking this new voice I was hearing. "I'll take care of it myself."
Roger smiled then. He came across the grass and put his arm conspiratorially around my shoulder. "I like you, Bill."
That was all he said and he walked away into the evening shadows. It was the first time he had ever called me Bill.
Winter arrived early and by the first few coffee cups of final's week, accumulated snowfall had made anything but foot-traffic virtually impossible. Even Roger admitted that the combination of poor weather and finals must put a temporary halt to his conditioning program, at least for the rest of the squad. For reasons I am yet unsure of, I found myself jogging with Roger to Mondavie Falls a day before my biology final. The cloudless sky offered moderate temperatures but the new fallen snow nearly doubled our normal thirty minute run. We sweated profusely, the drops gathering in warm defiance against the brisk chill.
"Did you bring anything to eat?" I said.
"Food is an abomination to the gut."
"You didn't bring it or you forgot?"
The perspiration on Roger's moustache had frozen giving him a Dr. Zahvago look.
"I forgot. I didn't think you'd come."
"Why?"
"Finals, snow. . . me."
"You? What do you mean, you?"
"Forget it. Cold's numbed my brain."
I thought he would give that Roger laugh then and the warmth would spread taking a little chill away from the moment. But he didn't. He stood, feet apart, arms dangling awkwardly, as though moments of intimacy and truth were something to be embarrassed about, and I suppose he was.
"Want to try the pond?" he asked at length.
It was my turn to laugh. "It's frozen in case you hadn't noticed."
"That's the point."
Without hesitation he took a step onto the frozen pool below the falls. Typically the Mondavie froze solidly by the middle of February and the pond below the falls was used for ice skating. But it was now only the second week of January and there was no telling how deep the ice had formed. He started to take another step, but lost his footing and fell to his knees.
"I'll go," I said.
"Like hell."
He tried to get to hes feet, the wind knocking him about a bit. Then I was next to him, and with a gentle shove I sent him skidding over the ice.
If I had stopped for a minute, I might have heard the groan beneath me, the slop of water on ice, but blood pumping quickly, rushing through my ears, pounding in my chest was the only sound I could hear. Rog had found his feet, but I was already halfway across. Then I saw it. At first it appeared as whip cracks in the snow and ice. Snow and symmetry fell away. Sharp angles spread black lightning bolts through the thin ice. Roger lurched just behind me. I wanted to yell a warning. I turned but the words never came. They froze in images of fire and smoke and the pungent smell of burning sage. I moved farther away toward the opposite shore, the thin black lines stretching behind and beneath me.
"Bastard!" he shouted, grinning fiercely.
Roger's next stride cracked the ice and his weight carried him quickly into the freezing waters.
It was as though I had planned for this moment. As soon as Roger slipped below the ice, I jumped to where I hoped the gentle current might have taken him. The ice gave way instantly widening the opening already made by Roger, and I slipped in feet first. He was there; his body pinned by a branch or root. Strangely, he didn't struggle. It almost seemed he was waiting for me. He floated puppet-like, bobbing, and waiting, bobbing and waiting. It would have only taken a single thrust with those splendid arms of his before the insubstantial crust above him snapped, yet he chose immobility. I surface, gulped two deep breaths and went for him. His sweatshirt had become intertwined with the claws of the branch, so I stripped him of it. Then I drove him toward the hole where shafts of light streaked eerily through the water. Like a freed fish he suddenly came to life and was out on the ice in seconds. But the edges only broke away in my hands. I couldn't manage a good grip and my hands were well beyond numb. His hand caught mine on the next effort and I felt myself pulled onto jagged ice.
The cold air struck my frozen body, and my lungs gasped awkwardly trying to fill with air, but it felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach and my lungs would not relax. Roger sat to one side, breathing heavily, but evenly. He tried to warm me with brisk hands attempting to stay the inevitable frostbite and hypothermia. When that failed we gripped each other in what might be construed as a passionate hug for survival. Finally, my lungs released and I felt the warm rush of air. Roger broke the hold.
"We've got to run."
I stared, wide-eyed.
"Do you want to die like this?"
His voice almost reached the boundary of hysteria. In all probability Roger had prepared himself for death a thousand times over. But the idea of freezing to death held no possible virtue, no glory. It nearly broke him.
"Come on," he screamed and took off in awkward strides, his uncertain steps a result of feet and legs which felt only the weight above and nothing of the ground below.
I followed as I always did. His shoes left impressions in the new snow and I willed my feet into the same deep prints. Gradually the pain returned. When I saw the highway up ahead I knew we would live. Until then, I hadn't really minded dying.
Roger lost three toes from the frostbite. I lost two.
After college Roger and I separated once again. Not until six years later when I was stationed in Helix, Nebraska, at the Titan II missile site did we come into contact. I held a rank of captain. Under me were members of the 401st, silo ten. Despite the loss of two toes, the Air Force, recovering from a deficit of man power determined eight toes were better than none.
In the winter, Helix became an ice garden, the snow rarely staying longer than a few weeks before a funnel from the Rockies swept it east across the plain states. A soldier traversing the compound had to lean into the teeth of the blizzard in order to maintain balance. That was how I knew it was Roger. He wore captain's bars as though they were a counterbalance and walked stiff and erect, where others skidded by on the frozen tundra. . . a Moses in this wintry desert.
Once inside the officer's mess, some of the stiffness in his shoulders seemed to ease.
"Captain Ozmund," I said, "you walk pretty straight for a man with seven toes."
Roger whirled tightly and for a moment I could see nothing but the cold tundra etched in his face. Then recognition.
"Bill!"
And I was encompassed by arms gripping me in a bear hug that brought back memories of an earlier winter.
Roger had invaded Helix for readiness inspections. The Air Force knew Roger's forte, preparedness, and he was put to good use. In the first five days of his stay, we scrambled to military alert and experienced no less than three nuclear or conventional attacks from China and the Soviet Union. During the first mock attack, Captain Ozmund determined that fifty percent of our birds were "no-flies." Only ten percent of those no-flies could be linked to mechanical malfunction. The other forty percent malfunctioned due to human error. That simply meant the soldiers at the controls froze when it came to launching. They, of course, had no way of knowing the world as they knew it was not about to come to an end. Four crews were relieved of duty, none in my squadron.
Word spread quickly and in the next two battles only one bird malfunctioned -- mechanical difficulties. It was becoming easier to match keys and push the "strike" button.
Roger's last day was to include a massive first strike by Soviet SS#13 and SS#11 missiles and long range bombers. H.Q. estimated with 95 percent probability that if such an attack occurred, Helix and the surrounding corn fields would explode in a ball of fire and ice. Our last duty to God and country was a retaliatory strike disposing of Russia's eastern defenses around Vladisvostock.
Roger had explained to me the night before that he and I would launch the multiple warhead Titan from silo ten. I did not see the need for such personal interaction, but Roger said he'd never launched one before and wanted the experience of actually turning the key. Regulations did not allow for deviations from standard procedure, I said, but he produced written orders from General Tellenback countermanding any previous standing orders and opening the way for Roger's personal flight of fantasy.
It was that simple. Roger now sits about twenty feet to my right. Time for him has stopped. His uniform, creased to perfection remains unwrinkled. His face follows. The only unnatural angle displayed is the ninety degree bend of Roger's right arm which extends out from his body accusingly toward me. The Colt 45 is decidedly not Air Force issue, but Roger enjoys his little eccentricities, however much this one scares the shit out of me.
"The key, Captain."
Even the words can't crack the stone his face has become. I marvel as much in his physical ability as I do in the absurdity of this situation. Leave it to Roger to have a certain air of the dramatic.
"The key, Captain." He pulls the hammer back with its deliciously distinctive click. "I want it now."
I never hear the bullet rush by and shatter the plastic casing of the emergency extinguisher behind me. A plastic shard embeds itself in my hand. My ears become deafened from the concussion of a 45 fired in such close quarters.
"Put it in the lock, Billy-boy or I'll blow your head off with the next round."
I almost laugh. I can barely hear what he is saying; everything has turned to whispers.
"It wouldn't do you much good then, would it?"
The logic of my response is not appreciated. The second shot starts as a puff of smoke and an instant later my left arm yanks toward the panel. The impact throws me over the chair onto the cold tile of the floor below. Then the warm rush of blood takes away the chill.
Propping myself against a metal cabinet, the room around me swirls in colors of red and white. Roger drops the pistol and speaks very slowly and, I'm sure, quite distinctly, but my hearing is gone and I find it hard to concentrate on his face. Then he motions to me with the key in his left hand. My own key dangles from the chain around my neck. I can see it is covered by a slick red oozing.
The waiting reminds me of Saturday mornings with rain stealing sunshine from the sky and a warm bed urging me back into darkness. I feel my right hand reach the square-shaped metal which rests upon my chest. Roger nods vigorously.
"Why?" I mouth.
There is a silent but fervent explanation. I imagine Roger's words include extremist rhetoric -- death of corruption, the birth of new opportunities, but it, after all, my imagination. My eyelids begin to droop and I force them open. Roger continues to mouth silent syllables. I wonder if he can hear himself speaking. The stone is gone and fire lights his face. Then as though he reads my thoughts, Roger repeatedly mouths two words. After a while I see the meaning etched on some chalkboard in my mind: fire and ice.
So he remembers. Either way will suffice -- fire or ice. Or does he refer to our previous close encounters with death? In the end explanations are of little comfort. Absurdly we fashion the instruments of our own destruction, "Made in the USA." I see through Roger's eyes the gelid shroud of an ice covered pond and I wait for him to see through me the burning brush. We have both died and been reborn. That was the intervention of fate. The responsibility of the world's rebirth rests heavily on Lazarus and me. To deny Roger is to deny fate.
Red and white the room swirls before me. Michaelangelo's Adam reached for his spiritual birth, finger touching the Godhead. Can I do less? Fire and ice. I wonder if I will have the strength to reach the panel.
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