- - - -
Darin Strauss' Half a Life,
a nakedly honest, ultimately hopeful
examination of guilt, responsibility, and
living with the past, is getting rave reviews. To mark
the occasion, get your copy today
at a reduced price.
- - - -
Peasley.BY SAM LIPSYTE- - - - This story is from McSweeney's Issue 22 and is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's premise "The man who killed the idea of tanks in England—his afterlife." - - - - The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England sipped tea in his parlor somewhere in England. Pale light trickled through the parlor's leaded windows in that trickling manner of English light as pictured by a person who would not know. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England was an old man now. He passed his days sipping tea in his parlor and staining his mustache with smoke from his briar pipe. His legs, once strong enough to spur his horse at a Boer sniper's nest or leap a boulder to avoid the whirling blades of a Mahdi charge, lay withered beneath the double layer of his tweed trousers and his dear dead wife's favorite shawl. It was difficult to believe it was 1983. How old was he? One hundred and twenty-five? He had lived to see so much, from the fall of the czar to the Austrian paperhanger to the American moon shot, not to mention those urchins with pins through their eyeballs and their so-called music. The Sex Pistols were the best of the lot. Still and all, it would be better to die now. It seemed to him during these days of pale, pictured light that the only thing keeping him out of his coffin was an unanswered question: Why had he killed the idea of tanks in England? There had been reasons and he recalled them quite well, thank you. Tanks were clunky. Tanks were slow. Tanks looked silly compared to, for instance, a mounted regiment of the Scots Guard cresting a hill on a crisp autumn day. Yes, he had been present when Mr. Simms demonstrated his "motor war-car," that boiler on wheels with the revolving Maxim guns. Impressive to a simpleton, perhaps, all those moving parts in the Daimler engine, but at the end of the day ... At the end of the day—what a terrifying phrase that was! The light trickling through the leaded windows was certainly pale. The air, which of course one could not see, was cold. This PiL business was a terrible mistake. Rotten had got it right the first time out. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had got it wrong, stood there that day on the muddy field, snorted in Mr. Simms's expectant face. "Won't do. Won't do at all." Was he supposed to be some seer, then? Nostradamus, a Delphic oracle? How could he predict such intractability, the endless trenches, all that wire, the Boche guns shredding so many tender poets? Surely he should be forgiven for killing the idea of tanks in England. Others, after all, had revived the idea, fetched it from conceptual purgatory. A little late to save the poets, perhaps, but there were too many about anyway. Besides, who is to say they would not have roasted inside those infernal kettles? Then again, with a jump on the job, England might have had a whole fleet of armored poet-preserving machines. (Maybe one would have rolled over Corporal Hitler in No Man's Land, saved everyone a considerable inconvenience.) Still, would it have been worth the price of watching Rupert Brooke die of prostate cancer? It was the American Century, after all, or so the Americans kept proclaiming, and perhaps they had a point. Though not much of a book fancier, The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had always been keen on Yank writers. His favorite was that golden lush from Minnesota. Gatsby was tops. A secret part of him had always wished he could write such a bloody good novel. Or, better yet, be the subject of some short magazine fiction penned by such a blazing talent. But the story of The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England would probably never have occurred to Mr. Fitzgerald. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England had spent most of the so-called Jazz Age pretending he had not killed the idea of tanks in England. It was not much of a story, was it? Then punk rock took off. It could have been that The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England was actually 127 years old. There were no papers pertaining to his birth. A bastard, he was, born in a hedgerow to a chambermaid. His father, the fake earl, had been kind enough to pay for his schooling. The army seemed a natural choice. Charge some Boers, leap a Sudanese boulder, you might dodge certain questions of lineage. You might rise through the ranks until you have won enough medals to be asked your opinion of the idea of tanks in England. Be ready, by God. Now The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England heard the sound of an engine revving out past the garden. He peered out the parlor window. It was that damned Peasley, the groundskeeper, on his new contraption, the mechanized lawnmower. Peasley had eaten up a good deal of the grounds budget with that pretty mechanical toy, which is what Kitchner dubbed the Simms car, come to think of it. So it was not only The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England who killed the idea of tanks in England! Kitchner was a greater order of dolt than Peasley, and that was saying something! The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England could remember when men cut grass with whirling blades on the ends of sticks. What did they call those again? What did they call those sticks with blades on the ends at the end of day again? Now here came Peasley riding high up on his little mower like a modish tank general, some kind of arrogant Total War twit. Confound him. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England let his dear dead wife's shawl slip from his lap. He hobbled out to the garden gate. Peasley chugged by on his mower, waved. "Won't do!" called The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. "Won't do at all!" He noticed Peasley wore some odd plastic muffs on his ears, and so probably had not heard him. "Hello there!" he called, moved past the gate and onto the lawn. Peasley rounded a tree, headed straight away at The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England. Could Peasley be driving with his eyes shut? The idiot looked lost in reverie. The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England stood motionless. His old bones, his rotted legs, felt staked to the earth. What he would not now give for Hal, his old Boer War war mount. Not a kingdom, though. Too late for that. "Peasley! Peasley!" One could not say his life flashed before his eyes. His life had been too long. The lawnmower was too slow, and clunky. He saw things, though, toys from his boyhood, tin lancers and hussars and cuirassiers, the gilt-edged pages of his beloved adventure books. He saw the nibs of examination pens, and the body of the girl who would become the woman who would become his wife, in moonlight. He saw himself and others in uniform, on parade, on maneuvers, and, finally, gut shot on pallets, gurneys. He saw veldt grass and Sudanese sand and trench mud drying on his boots. He saw his mother in her maid's kit and he saw his father, far off in a sun-buzzed meadow, a quail gun in the crook of his arm. He saw the garish pink-and-green sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks, his own palsied hand pawing at the precious vinyl inside. It had been too bloody long, this life, everything hinging on one decision made when he was just a youngish fool with too many ribbons, too much fringe. "Won't do," said The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, and fell to his ruined knees. Peasley, eyes shut, recollecting a childhood fishing trip he had taken with his maternal uncle, a German who had helped develop mustard gas for the Kaiser, drove down upon The Man Who Killed the Idea of Tanks in England, the blades beneath the mower's carriage whirling like—that's it—scythes.
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.
