Martin and Bull

By Robert Funderburk

"Brent, you should try to forget about the things that happened in the war."
"Why?" He rolled off the couch and walked into the kitchen. "We had a good time over there." Taking an ice tray from the refrigerator, he broke it open in the sink and tossed several cubes into his glass, then filled it from the square bottle on the table. "Three hots and a cot. What more does a man need? That and all the free ammunition you could ever want."
"Let's talk about it, then."
"Well, there was this little shack on the beach. An old lady ran it, and she made the best food you----"
"I mean about the war," Anne interrupted. "Maybe you need to get it out of your system." 
"I don't think I can."
"Was it that awful?"
"No worse than any other war." He pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, staring at the amber amber liquid in his glass. "I just can't seem to remember much about the fire fights . . . and the mortars coming in on us. That part of it."
Anne gave him a strange look, thinking she was about to learn something of war.
"All the noise . . . the small-arms fire, the grenades, and especially the mortars." Brent blinked and shook his head as though trying to bring his thoughts together. "It makes you kind of... goofy afterwards. Your skin feels thick, like there's not much feeling left in it. Things kind of blur together . . . no sharp outlines on anything." He took a sip from his glass. "Everything is just kind of . . . dead feeling. Nothing seems real anymore." His eyes sparked with sudden recognition. "People do strange things in combat. Maybe that's why. Nothing seems real anymore. It's like all the nerves in your body are beaten and dulled by the noise and shock waves . . . and thinking that any breath could be your last."
Anne noticed the strange gleam in her brother's eyes. "Maybe you'd better not talk about it Brent."
"No! I think I'm figuring something out here," he said almost savagely. "It's like your own body is giving you anesthesia so you can go through it." He nodded his head slowly. "And then it wears off, and you wake up and can't remember very much about what happened. Everything is vague . . . and cloudy. . . almost like it never really happened at all. And the next day your memory slips a little and even more of it is gone."
Brent began nodding his head again. "I believe that's the answer. The mind puts some kind of shield up to protect you from things that are beyond bearing, and then afterwards it takes the memory away . . . or most of it."
"That's pretty elegant stuff, Brent, " Anne said. He seldom showed his command of the language, and it always amazed Anne when he let his guard down and spoke with such simple yet precise insight. "How are you doing in your journalism class?"
"Good." He saw the frown on his sister's face. "Okay. I'm making an A . . . and I guess I'm kind of enjoying it. The professor wants me to make it my major."
"Do it, then."
"Maybe I will." Brent got up and returned to the couch, sitting down on the arm next to Anne's chair. "I had good friends over there. Guys I could depend on."
"You think Sam's not your friend anymore since you're back home?"
"No. We've been through too much together. He'll always be my best friend." Brent looked off into the distance. "I'm glad he's happy now. Got his job back at the dairy science building out at LSU. Always puttering around his house fixing something, making things look better. Got his life all straightened out."
"Good for him." Anne shivered again.
Brent went to the kitchen, returned with a box of matches, and lit the small space heater in the living area. "That ought to warm you up." He put the matches away and returned to his seat on the arm of the couch.
Anne stared at the blue-and-yellow flames in the grates of the heater. "Maybe if you'd been able to run track this year, things would have been better."
"Coach said I could get my scholarship back next year. All I have to do is run a nine-eight in the hundred."
"That ought to be easy enough. You ran better than that in high school, didn't you?"
"Got to be in shape, though. And the doctor says I can't start working out for at least six more months after the surgery next week."
Anne glanced at her brother's black eye patch. "When your eye gets well, I think you ought to consider keeping the patch. Makes you look like a buccaneer."
"Yeah," Brent said, a trace of a smile flickering across his face. "I'm thinking about getting a cutlass and a parrot to go with it. What do you think?"
"The cutlass... maybe." Anne tilted her head to one side, sizing him up. "I'd skip the parrot, though . . . too messy." She crossed her arms, slight wrinkling of the brow. Brent, don’t you think you’re indulging in a bit too much of that liquid skull-buster.
Brent rattled the ice in his glass, then took a sip. “Nah. I only drink ‘til the blue elephants start dancing."
Anne’s eyes twinkled with silent laughter. Then she took her brother’s face in both hands, her face grown quiet. “I love you, you little heathen.”
“Wait a minute! I resent being called little.”
"I just want to travel around for a while, Daddy." Brent sat in Lane's study, his duffel bag resting on the floor next to his chair. "See some of the country."
Lane gazed at his son, wearing sun-faded Levi's and an army fatigue shirt with the sleeves cut off. "I thought you might want to go to summer school. Catch up on the year you got behind when you were in the service."
Brent stared at a picture of Lane and two friends standing on the beach at Guadalcanal. "I don't think I could handle sitting in a classroom all summer."
"Where you heading?"
Shrugging, Brent said, "I don't really know for sure. Just that I'm not going west."
"Why's that?"
"Last time I headed west," he said with a wry smile, "I ended up with little men in black pajamas trying to kill me."
Lane laughed. He had seen Brent's sense of humor returning in the past few weeks, and it gave him comfort that his son was on his way back. "You're kind of restless, are you?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"I did something like you're doing once. It was the summer before my senior year in high school."
Brent's face lighted with interest. "Oh yeah. Where did you go?"
"West. I told Daddy I just had to see some of the country, so I hopped a freight train just outside of Sweetwater."
Brent crossed his legs and sat back in his chair, enjoying a side of his father he had never seen before.
"I saw some of the county, all right. At first it was a real adventure. Places I'd never been, things I'd never seen, people different from anybody I'd ever known." Lane rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. "Then one August day I was hitchhiking, still heading west. Must have been a hundred and ten in the shade. I had a black eye and a sore jaw from a fellow who tried to rob me in a juke joint the night before."
"A juke joint?"
"Yep," Lane admitted with a nod. "Anyway right out of the blue I thought about sitting down to supper at our farm in Sweetwater. I could taste the iced tea, the corn and squash and fried okra, and I could almost hear Mama singing 'Rock of Ages' while she was taking a blackberry pie out of the oven."
"And you headed for Mississippi," Brent finished the story for his father.
"And I headed for Mississippi." Lane repeated. "It was something I guess I needed to get out of my system."
"And I thought everything you ever did in your life was sensible."
"Not by a long shot." Lane gazed into Brent's intelligent, thoughtful eyes. "It took three years in the South Pacific to make me grow up some."
"Do you remember much about the battles you were in, Daddy?" Brent felt a slight burning in his palms, the way he sometimes had during a fire fight.
Lane's eyes focused on something in the air above Brent's head. "Not a whole lot. Everything was always kind of fuzzy after it was over." He nodded slowly. "Almost like it never happened . . . like a dream."
Brent nodded, trying to keep his face calm.
"Friends... that's what I remember most."
Brent stood up. "Well, I guess I'd better get on the road. I've already told everybody good-bye."
"Okay." Lane got out of his chair.
With an awkward motion, Brent stuck out his had. "Well, I'll see you, then."
As Lane reached for his hand, Brent stepped forward and put his arms around his father. Lane hugged him, patting him on the back.
"Don't stay gone too long, son."
"I won't."
As Brent turned to leave, Lane said, "Hold on a minute." When Brent turned around, Lane tossed his car keys to him. "I think you'll like this better than the bus."
Brent looked stunned. "These are the keys to your Ford. You love that old car."
Lane nodded. "That's right."
"I'll take good care of it."
"I hope so . . . It's yours now."
Heading east on Highway 190, Brent glanced to his right at the blue-green waters of the Gulf, sparkling in the June sunshine. Palm trees lined the beach. On the north side of the highway, long sloping lawns led up to white-columned homes with gazebos and gray-painted front porches.
The '39 Ford coupe purred like a sewing machine, its engine tuned to perfection, its shiny black paint and chrome gleaming as though he had just driven it out of the showroom. Brent remembered his father teaching him to drive in the “stick-shift" automobile; he called back memories of Saturday night dates and Sunday afternoon rides down the River Road during his high school and college days.
After passing the old Biloxi Lighthouse that split the highway north and south, Brent drove a few more miles and turned into a parking lot. Walking along a boardwalk toward the Gulf, he opened a glass door and entered a restaurant with pine flooring and wooden tables covered with red-and-white checked cloths.
"You're a little early, sugar. We don't start serving lunch for another fifteen minutes." Short and in her thirties with a round sunny face, the waitress wore a black dress and a white name tag with "Odette" in red letters.
"Can I get a glass of tea while I wait?"
Odette gave him a coy smile. "You could probably get the title to my car if you hang around till I get off work."
Brent grinned back at her. "I already have a car, Odette, but I don't have any iced tea." He turned and walked toward one of the tables next to a long expanse of windows looking out onto the gentle swells of the Gulf.
Two minutes later Odette set a tall glass of tea in front of him and leaned against the table. "You some kind of soldier?" she asked, eyeing the twin chevrons on the sleeves of his fatigue shirt.
Brent spooned sugar into the tea and stirred it, ice making small music against the glass. "Not anymore."
"That where you got your eye hurt?"
Nodding, Brent gazed out at three pelicans flying low over the smooth surface of the water.
Odette proved to be persistent. "How'd it happen?"
"Vietnam."
"What's that?"
Brent turned toward her, saw that she was completely serious, and laughed. "It's a little country on the other side o the world."
"Are we fightin' a war over there or something?"
"If we're not," Brent answered, a grin still on his face, "somebody's sure wasting a lot of bullets."
"Probably ain't got no business being there in the first place." Odette plucked a pencil from behind her ear and flipped her ticket pad to an empty page. "Just like them federal troops didn't have no business being in Montgomery."
"You mean when people up there were attacking the Freedom Riders?" Brent grabbed a menu leaning against the napkin holder and flipped it open.
"Yeah. Governor Wallace knows how to run his state, but that Kennedy just won't let well enough alone." Odette shook her head sadly as though she could see the world she had grown up in passing slowly away. "He better keep them troops ready, too."
"Why's that?"
"Gonna be trouble this summer. They already startin' to act up over in Birmingham. She glanced over her shoulder toward the front door. "It's that Martin Luther King, you know. Always stirrin' things up."
"Sounds like something I'd like to see."
Odette gave him a skeptical frown. "Hey, you ain't one of them civil rights people, are you?"
Brent shook his head.
"Where you from?"
I was born up in Sweetwater." Brent knew the method for putting him above suspicion. "Guess I'll have the fried shrimp and hush puppies."
Odette scribbled on her pad. "Oh well," she said, a look of relief on her face, "I didn't think you was faking that accent . . . but you never know."
Winking and glancing around the restaurant, Brent said, "You never really do... do you?"
After three days on the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama, Brent headed north. He felt rested and refreshed by the sun and the cool waters of the Gulf. The war seemed to be gradually flaking off like dry skin after a sunburn, the memories now fading into an even deeper dimness. He felt himself rising out of the darkness.
Heading up Highway 31, he reached Montgomery at noon, stopping for lunch at a roadside cafe. Then, after a brief visit to the White House of the Confederacy, he continued north on 31 toward Birmingham. Driving into the city in the early afternoon, Brent felt a sense of unease, a kind of restlessness in the sultry and oppressive atmosphere. People bunched on street corners; others wore stoic masks behind their car windshields.
From his vantage point high atop Red Mountain, Vulcan, the largest cast-iron statue in the world, gazed down on Schloss Furnaces. Named after the god of fire and of metalworking in Roman mythology, the people of Birmingham thought it a fitting tribute to their iron and steel industry. Glancing at the distant statue, Brent suddenly felt a sense of foreboding, its glowing presence above the city calling to mind the title of a book he and seen recently, The Fire Next Time.

A restless night in a cheap motel, a big breakfast of smoked ham and eggs and buttered grits, and Brent found himself ready to see the town. He walked past the "Heaviest Corner on Earth," named after a group of skyscrapers built there shortly after the turn of the century, visited the old ironworks, then quickly lost interest in the history of Birmingham.

As he was returning to his car, Brent heard the sound of people shouting and a deep undertone of murmuring. A block away he found them marching along the street in the hot sunshine, their faces dark and glistening with sweat . . . and shining with hope. Martin Luther King led the group of men, women, and schoolchildren carrying signs proclaiming freedom and equal rights for all Americans.

Along the sidewalks, men and women outraged at the marchers, their expressions ranging from mild interest to tight-lipped disapproval. Policemen on foot and in patrol cars kept narrow-eyed watch on the procession.
Brent thought the whole thing was fascinating. As he watched from the sidewalk, a dark-skinned man with gray hair and an expression of pure joy walked past carrying a big brown Bible. He turned his smile on Brent.
Then the march ground to a halt, something up front out of sight delaying it. For no reason he could think of, Brent found himself stepping to the edge of the sidewalk next to the man with the dark suit and the bright smile.
"Y'all look like you're having a good time today," Brent said, surveying the crowd. "Some of us is," the man said, glancing at the sidewalk lookers and the policemen, "and some of us ain't."
Brent stuck out his hand. "I'm Brent Temple."
Pastor Buford Scott," he said, his teeth white in the dark face. "Mt. Zion Baptist Church." 
Suddenly the sound of screaming and hoarse shouting rose from the front of the procession. As Brent watched, the people turned back against the line of march, fleeing something that pressed in on them. Men, women, and children gave way before the onslaught of uniformed men wearing helmets. Plastic face shields, glinting in the sunlight, hid their faces. In their black-gloved hands, they carried nightsticks and cattle prods.
"Looks like our fun's about over," Buford said, his voice freighted with resignation. He seemed unafraid, only weighed down by the years.
"I don't think y'all are doing anything so bad."
Buford turned his age-washed eyes on Brent. "I expect you don't. Only trouble is you ain't Bull Conner."
"Who's that?"
"Chief of Police here in Birmingham."
"Why do they call him 'Bull'?"
"You stick around here much longer, son," Buford said, glancing at the line of policemen advancing through the crowd, "you liable to find out." He turned toward the middle of the street. "Guess I'd better try to get some of these children out of the way 'fore they gets hurt."
Suddenly, a nightstick thudded across Buford's back, sending him to his knees. Brent leaped from the curb, reaching down to help him stand up. He felt something grip the back of his neck, pulling him upward. He whirled around, crouched in a defensive position. Instinctively, he considered the best way to disable the policeman facing him. Then he fought against the training that almost took over.
"Don't take on more than you can handle, sonny boy," the policeman growled. He had already summoned help with an unseen gesture.
"You be leavin' now, Mr. Temple," Buford groaned. "No sense in you gettin' in trouble over this."
As Brent turned again to help Buford up, he felt a sharp, thudding pain against the side of his head, then fell to his knees. Gloved hands wrestled his arms behind his back, cuffing his wrists together. In a daze, he felt himself dragged away.
His vision blurry, he saw Buford shoved along next to him, helpless in the hands of two burly policemen. Water splashing against his face sharpened his senses. In a haze of sunlight, he saw firemen turning high-pressure hoses on the crowd. Men in dark coveralls waded in, leading German shepherds on short leather leashes.
The common cell had been designed for twenty men. The day Brent was shoved into it along with Pastor Buford Scott, it held forty-two. A heavy metal table with built-in benches stood in the middle of the floor, its legs sunk into the bare concrete. Several benches extended from the block walls. The place smelled of unwashed bodies and fear. Shouts rang down the long halls. Off in the distance a radio not quite tuned to the station played "Blowin' in the Wind."
"Ain't you in a fine mess?" Buford sat on the floor next to Brent.
"I probably should have been in a place like this years ago." Gingerly rubbing the knot behind his right ear, Brent said, "My life was gettin' kinda dull anyway. This is just what I needed to spice it up a little."
Buford gazed around the crowded cell, then an infectious laugh rolled up out of his belly. Some of the other men laughed along with him even though they had no idea what it was all about. "My, my, my," Buford said, shaking his head.
"What's wrong?" Brent asked.
"The Good Lawd sho' got a sense of humor sticking you in here wid' de like of us."
"You think God did this?"
Buford's eyes twinkled merrily. "Sho' I do. My Bible says that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God. If you wudn't a righteous man, you sho' wouldn't been out in dat street trying to help me."
Brent sensed that Buford was perfectly content sitting on a concrete floor in a smelly, crowded jail cell. He remembered that same quiet contentment in Sam, even during those last hours just before going out on mission into VC-occupied jungles. "Maybe I'm not as righteous as you think."
Buford's eyes searched Brent's. "You got a good heart, son. I can see that much."
"You think that's why they stuck me in this jail . . . because I've got a good heart?"
Buford smiled again. "You joking about it, but they's more truth to that than you think." He looked off into the distance. "You take ol' Paul. He was treated real good by the leaders of Israel long as he was giving Christians a hard time. But after Jesus changed his heart that day on the road to Damascus . . . and he started lovin' folks instead of hatin' 'em, look what happened to him then . . . he was beat, stoned, put in jail, shipwrecked, and snakebit."
But he ran his race . . . and he finished his course," Brent added, surprised at his own words. Although he could not explain it, he felt a sudden lifting of the heaviness in his heart. The anger he had carried around for years, the heartache of lost love, the bitterness over his wounded eye; all the pain and the cares and burdens seemed to be lifting, vanishing into the stale, sultry air of the Birmingham jail.
That's it! Brent thought with sudden realization as though a veil had been pulled aside. God doesn't expect miracles from us. We don't have to be perfect to come to Jesus. He just wants us to come as we are . . . give Him our whole life . . . and He'll take care of everything else. And we don't have to see the heavens split open or hear choirs of angels singing to be saved. All we have to do is believe Jesus . . . and finish our race.
"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." The verse seemed to speak itself in Brent's mind. All the years I've heard that, now I really know what it means. It's so simple! When Brent came back from his own thoughts, he saw Buford gazing into his eyes.
"You already got Jesus in your heart, son," Buford said. "God just spoke to me about that.  
Now you need to tell somebody out loud."
Brent nodded his head.
"Will I do?" Buford grinned. "I ain't much," he glanced around the cell, "but then the pickin"s is kind slim right now."
"You'll do just fine."
Buford motioned with his hand and several of the men walked over and stood next to Brent.
Tears slipped down Brent's cheeks unnoticed. He became faintly aware of soothing warmth slowly building in his right eye. Kneeling on the concrete floor, he bowed his head, feeling callused, work-hardened hands placed on his shoulders as he began to pray.

****

Robert Funderburk, SSgt, AF18701241, USAFR, (1965-1971); has had seventeen novels published, forty poems in literary journals, one short story in Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, and one poetry chapbook. He was born by coal oil lamplight in a farmhouse near Liberty, Mississippi; graduated from LSU, and is a retired parole officer. Robert taught four and five year olds in Sunday School for the past twenty years, and currently lives with his wife, Barbara, on a fifty-acre wilderness in Olive Branch, Louisiana.