The Militant

The Militant

By Douglas Armament

Shooting brings us highs and lows

As any soldier surely knows

That cannot hope for sudden cure

And nurses answer that’s for sure

Rounds of mortar pulsed over the hill into territory the gunners could not see. The streaks of orange whistled and disappeared before the distant explosions came. Mycroft beckoned to his superior that he would break now. Eliot replaced him at the gun-side. In the mountains Afghans hid in caves, careful and well maintained by the supplies designed to keep them for years if the fighters remained undiscovered. White approached Eliot and offered a cigarette. Eliot lit both and they smoked without speaking as the gun kept up a sporadic firing. White left for the tank stationed behind them higher on the hill from which visuals penetrated deeper down the valley ahead. Bishop coiled a series of electrical cables and laid them in a green box near the Sargent’s Hummer. He stepped into a tent at the rear of the vehicle for a sandwich and a glass of coke with ice before returning to lift the box he had filled. Too heavy for him, he called Eliot over and the two of them got it into the big truck. White came out of the latrine and sat in the shade of the Hummer with her feet up on a pile of camouflage. Eliot moved her pistol to the side and extracted it and wiped it of dust. She sat down, too, tired with the heat, weary with standing and watching. 
       An Afghan crawled up the back of the hill near them unobserved. He carried an explosive device of enormous power. Proceeding slowly, cautiously, he waiting frequently for signs of having been heard. Twice he made a noise and stopped for fifteen minutes at a time to listen. When he got to the top he stood up to run towards the soldiers and their vehicles. He tripped and fell. The explosion tore the side of the Hummer away and the napping Sargent too. He woke up in heaven. The Afghan disappeared. White ran over to the vehicle and tried to help her superior but she knew that he was gone. Eliot kept her station by the Howitzer. She held her eye on the spot where she had heard the roar, her drawn gun ready. Bishop stayed in the latrine until he felt safe and all noise had subsided. The Howitzer kept up its occasional blasts. Far away in the caves the hiding Afghans waited for something.

In Her Warmth (cont’d)

In Her Warmth  (cont’d)

I tell the following story as one among many that might have done as well to indicate how a bad spirit may effect long pain on a group of people and qualify life to pieces. Janettel Pierce and Jason Simplot married officially after six years of partnering. They already owned the rights to a child of seven years who came with them Sundays to church where he sang in a choir for small persons. His voice sweet, high, dulcet, had caught the attention of the adult choral director at the university. That sir made it his business to drop in now and then on this couple to encourage them to provide vocal lessons for the boy in order to prepare him for a future in song and possibly opera. These two guardians agreed for the most part that such a career would meet both their expectations of secure life for him as well as their hopes for his reputation (and theirs, of course).

When it became clear after three years of study and tutorage that Winston would have to remove to a school far away for more advanced instruction, they began to entertain second thoughts. The husband did, at least, and the wife, feeling the weight of losing from her sight a child she had only begun to mould and form, began to turn taciturn and sleepless. He, the husband caring for her equanimity, expressed some flippant concern for their peace and household comfort. She, favoring her own position in the matter, called him a nuisance and a labor. Not to be outdone, he returned the compliment and fairly soon thereafter the two each began to carry on a secret affair with the choral master and found themselves feeling less inclined to spend quality time with either the other partner or the child in question. So ended a perfectly promising relationship. The child left the practice of singing behind altogether and now works for the Ford Company installing radios on an assembly line out of Windsor. The choral master teaches still at the university and the female half of the bickering partnership has begun to take piano lessons at the age of thirty-seven.     

In Her Warmth

In Her Warmth

       By Dipsomaniac Dougy Dodo

                        poke your finger on a thorn

                        pierce the foreskin of your horn

                        pinch the tender tender corn

                        peel the skin of a sunburn

Pricks irritate us all. They act as a corrosive. Fleetingly, they drive us to attempt some sort of retaliation, or even revenge. They establish goodwill between no two objects, two subjects, two organisms, or two partners. Here is a story to illustrate each of these dwillings. A chair and a mouse sat opposite one another, unaware, for the most part, of each other’s presence. The chair sate, willing something, unable to speak. She sent out bright messages to the surrounding air calling to the molecular world to interact: to swim near; to flond the paint chips; to ruffle the waist of corduroy about the seat; to sift dust into the still new crack by the back rest; to light up her corner of the living room with blue swell. She attempted to move over a little so the rocker might find space near her, but her arthritis seemed stronger today and it interfered enough that she decided to make the move a little later. Music dafted the corner by the outside door over which draped green viands of plastic, since a holiday season had arrived. A saxophone bellowed, bells shook, two tambourines played in harmony “The Rising of St Eustace.” Much preparation had been made in the kitchen. The chair took in all these particulars, especially absorbing the flavors of the wine-mouse, the cake extraordinare, and the various meat dishes steaming over the element. On this particular, festive Saturday. A door banged often, people leaving and coming as they did with friends to taste things or goods to deliver or bring away. A cold day, the draft had begun to affect the chair, and she shivered.

       A mouse saw the discomfort and said to himself that help would not be wasted on her. He set to work, and before long had taken, bit by bit, a set of scarves, gloves, mittens, caps, leggings, towels and various implements of warmth over to the suffering object and covered her with so many layers that soon she glowed warm and happy. In the process of this mission, though, the mouse stepped upon the top rung, in getting up a red pair of knickers stolen from the eleven-year-old Cindy’s room, right onto a sliver fresh from the cat’s sharpening of claws. The sliver stung and bothered the mouse so that before long she left the vicinity of the chair feeling hard done by. The chair tried to speak and explain, but the music being turned up quite loudly, the mouse did not hear. So, they parted company and in her warmth the chair felt lonely.

       A microbe of indeterminate age swam up the side of the sink in a neat, pink bathroom and saw that he was not alone. Nearby, another living organism busied herself with her toilette, careful not to drop her parings and follicles on the shiny porcelain surface. She hoarded these and placed them in a neat pile to be later discarded in the waste. When the first individual noticed the preparations and had watched for some time, he sidled up to the second and spoke to her with invitation in his tone.

       “Dear, may I give you a hand with whatever you are up to?” he kindly inquired, smiling reassurance that he meant her no harm. Hardly had he given out his intentions of helpful willingness than the other person turned and frowned and asked him to move over. The space needed no one else to crowd it.

       “But, I wish only to help. I’m feeling rather too solitary and could use a little company!” The water dripped above them and the gurgling in the pipes reminded them of the tenuousness of their brief sojourn on the planet. He would not take no for an answer and began to gather up the bits of nail and hair in order to cart them away. She, miffed and offended at his persistence, stepped over to him and poked him with a small pin that she carried for just these times. He winced, stopped, dropped what he held, and hit her twice over the brow before retreating into he dark hole from which he had originated. There, he planned a fitting response and soon the two found themselves engaged in a quarrel that their offspring carried on as a feud between the two families for many generations afterwards, until a marriage between three of their children brought about a temporary truce and the two sides eventually forgot the business that initially set them against each other.

(To be continued)

Dear Audience,

If you are curious about these stories and where they come from, you need to know that I wrote them over the last ten or so years. They are my answer to earlier of my writings that did not satisfy me, stories still Realist in habit and motivated by the idea that a narrative and its characters were meant, in one way or another, to teach others something. These stories do not privilege the author, either deliberately or accidentally, via a strategy or as the result of training. The attempt in them is to make the reader laugh at, and sometimes respect, the one who imagines them, knowing that the one who writes them is also laughing at, and sometimes respecting, the one who writes them.
          I am the product of literate (sort of) parents, an evangelical Christian church and culture, an older brother who fought in very interesting ways to corner all the attention available to a child, and younger siblings who longed from day one to be not Mennonites but Pentecostals. I speak English, High German, Low German, and know a little French, the French learned out of necessity (though gratefully) in preparation for my doctoral degree. These stories reflect a pre-evangelical Mennonite past that did not believe in or think of believing in a personal relationship with God, but thought of people as simply creatures, the products of God, so all that life brought about in them, including humour, toothaches, sexual and imaginative excitement, social obligations, visits from friends and enemies and the oddity of the variation of the make-ups of human natures, all were reflections of a God 'Who' was not a judge but some 'non-thing' to not think about but of 'Whom' to be in awe.

Douglas Reimer

Kneel and Pray

Kneel and Pray

       Black Stream More Rye

                        If thy tongue offend thee, cut it off.

                        If thy mind can’t see, slice and cauterize.

                        If thy head regard thee, turn away.

                        And if thy thing offend thee, kneel and pray.

   

Petrol scarce in all this country, we took to our bicycles when the last of the fuel ran out and pedaled the rest of the way to Pretoria. Peter Dussendorf, our guide the last two months, seemed precariously loaded, with his carbine slung in a holder beside the frame in front of him--much as a Chilean outrider would have his mounted on his nag--for quick access. A lion does not wait on ceremony. He carried Marne’s pack as well as his own, my box of samples sat bulkily over his rear tire, a large bag holding all our combined clothing had a place over his front tire, and another smaller satchel found a spot over his sprockets, in a triangle of the frame.

       Marne and I felt free to explore as we went and to continue our research. She gathered evidence about the shifting influences of weather, going north, on the population density of the Congolese Red Dwarf Hydrangea. I had less ambitious aims, but nevertheless, studied plant life and its variant abundance for the University of Leads. That academy might not use the material, but it paid me a sabbatical to follow my instincts in these matters. We had decided on this portion of South Africa because of the remoteness of the region. No farmsteads had changed its natural evolution. The ecological cycle here was pristine, unadulterated by chemical sprays, motorized traffic, massive hydro projects, and the like. Our perspective would be as close as can be achieved to the one that savages and nature must have enjoyed, I say with some irony, before the advent of the Dutch into these regions.

       I will briefly digress for the sake of the exposition of this story that treats of plants and their histories. Technology thinkers—McLuhan and Rathsford and that bunch—had it entirely right when they announced the man-centered future of the world, one determined not by nature but by the eyes that see and consciously record that world. They knew, did these critics of technology, that the past with its naive hour by hour living, its great restfulness, and its innate freedom, constituted mankind’s ‘once upon a time.’ Now, in our current moment, was the age of inwardlookingness. Forever that quality--soul searching--would be our destiny. Right as the theorists of our modern psyches are about what cannot anymore be, Marne and I nevertheless capture that earlier human simplicity as well as can be done today, in the work we do in these remote places of the world. But my digression concerns the Dutch.

       The Dutch are a backward race. They live on hog's fat and bacon. Meat-eaters, they exist mainly south of the tropics in lands that allow for ease of livelihood. Never offer a Dutchman options for he will take the one that requires the least of him. A typical Dutchman sleeps till ten and retires again at ten a dozen hours later, taking at least two lengthy naps in between. He is awake at most ten hours of the day. That leaves him fourteen hours for sleep, which he claims, in any conversation whatever, that he absolutely requires for, being heavy of frame, he burns a great deal of caloric energy and so counts on, for his very survival, a lengthy daily slowing down of the metabolism. Failure to do so, his argument insists, risks quick and irreversible slimming, a slimming resulting in extreme weight loss and a dangerous reduction of body size.

       The Dutch baby their boys. Dutch men may as well as not be women for all their virility. Oh, they shoot, yell, carouse, whine, rant, haggle, ride, heckle and race with the best of the world's males, but their hearts are weak and fickle. (Forgive me, Marne; I do not mean to imply that all females suffer from such imperfection, but generally speaking, women do, you must admit, derive from a genetic stock less likely to attack a wild beast or tackle a mountain peak then their male counterparts, wouldn’t you say?)

As I was suggesting, the Dutch need no special introduction for their ways are universally understood. Their laziness and weakness of body and spirit are nothing to their craven lustiness. They tend toward sexual prodigality to such an degree, if I may be so candid, as to throw a grown Englishman, who allows himself to contemplate it, to the ground and trod on him without cessation for two and a quarter hours. They harbor no end of yearning for the forbidden. Mark. They imagine anal practices of such kinds and intensities as to make a normal human blush and writhe in shame. They participate in genital handlings and manipulations of such unheard of variety and directness that the civilized mind swoons to comprehend it in its least surprising limits (de Sade, before he became a Marquis, was a Von de Sade with parents of the most common Friesian descent, all, himself included, devout church members and pious). Dutch men engage in mutual kissing and fondling with such public brashness that the unfortunate observer may readily witness these Gomorahaic inclinations simply by glancing out of the kitchen window toward the main road or even out of the bathroom casement into the alley behind.

Dutch women, and especially the females of Brüüg, near the German border, publicly expose their breasts and shamelessly play with them as they read the daily papers in cafés and roadside cafeterias and bars. A single drink will utterly undermine any pretense a young Dutch woman may have had to modesty and restraint. I myself have been in attendance when an attractive blonde Dutch maid, apparently demure and coy, shy and reticent, entered a dråånkenhüt and ordered an åpfelweene and before she had half consumed it, began to bend her neck this way and that, eyes strong and haughty, searching for any nearby male on whom to perpetrate the immediate release of urges natural to all the women of her race and which, though they may not inevitably appear in clarity and in full view, rage just beneath the surface of their outward beings.

When I consider, as I have just done, their laziness, weakness, and bestial carnality, I have only begun to lay out the categories of Dutch salatiousness and provided only a few brief samples of the sorts of excessiveness inherent in her breast. They make a mockery of religious zeal, they sodomize at will, they compulsively gamble (already from the age of four years when they are first left alone to wander the streets of their cities), they eat with a careless insatiateness to make an elephant appear dainty, and they lie with cordiality and cleverness. Only the most educated might hope to escape their subterfuges. They steal vigorously. They back bite and betray. They gossip, incessantly and with whomever they manage to inveigle to pay heed to their vilenesses. They whisper behind their pastors’ backs about the lasciviousness of the pastors' wives, wives who seek for carnal coupling the moment their reverent husbands leave the house of a morning. They attack all that is virtuous without regard to position, rank, influence, status, social standing, or fame. They constitute simply the most reprehensible of earth's creatures and I do not mind if I never encounter one again.

But to return to the matter at hand. As I was saying, the project we are on has some scientific merit. It will help humanity, God willing, to understand the world of plants as it once happily existed. I hope in all sincerity to contribute modestly to world knowledge, knowledge intended to bolster the pleasure of those few left who revere the purity and pacific beatitude of the past.