Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Pepe’s best, though, was this: he swiped a fly out of the air and put it into a glass filled with water. He turned the glass upside down on his palm and the fly floated up to the bottom of the glass.

“The fly is drowning,” he said with the voice of a man twice his size, looking sad, his wiseass expression shining through.

“That’s a fact,” I said, watching the fly struggling, trying to claw through the glass, moving slower and slower.

When the fly stopped struggling, Pepe said, “Poor fly. Drowned while minding his own business. I feel terrible at the brutal things I can do.”

Everyone laughed. Pepe turned the glass right side up. When the fly floated to the top, he touched it with his finger and the sopping fly stuck to it. He put the fly on the bar top, where it lay in a little puddle of water. Pepe shook his head sadly and stared at the tiny corpse.

“Pobrecito.” He shrugged and tapped an ash from his cigarette onto it. “At least I can give it a proper burial, eh?”

“Yes, you owe him that!” someone who’d seen the trick insisted.

Pepe nodded. “More, please. More ashes for the fly.”

We all flicked ashes on the fly until a little gray burial mound heaped over it.

The fly buried, Pepe suggested we fill up our glasses and drink a toast to the fallen aviator. We all did. “You know,” Pepe said, “I feel terrible about this. If it were in my power, I would take back what I’ve done. I would restore life to this innocent bug.” Pepe looked seriously into the distance as if communing with God. His face brightened suddenly and he said, “I will!” He bent down and put his face close to the miniature grave and gently blew away the ashes a little at a time. “Come, little one; come back to life.” The fly’s wings rustled in Pepe’s breath. He picked it up by one wing, set it on his palm, and softly blew air at it for a few minutes. Everyone who hadn’t seen this routine stared, amazed. It moved, by God! It stood up, Jesus! It cleaned itself for a few seconds, buzzed its wings experimentally, and flew away.

When the Casino closed at about two in the morning, Frank and I often walked with Pepe back to his place on the road at the entrance to the village. Pepe had his own little open-air bar there, which his wife, Incarna, usually handled while he tended the Casino. Frank and I got into an argument one night on the way to Pepe’s and lingered outside the Casino, yelling about something. It was one of those arguments that no one can remember the next day. The local cop, Rudolfo, and a Guardia came over to us, smiling. I had grown accustomed to the Guardia Civil, the state police, who seemed to be everywhere, though at first I was wary of them. They looked menacing in their long green capes and patent leather hats. They packed Walther 9mm pistols and sawed-off shotguns under the capes. The Guardia Civil had the power of summary justice, meaning they could blow you away with impunity if you fucked up and called Franco a queer. They didn’t do it often, but they could. The Guardia joined us as we argued while at the same time tactfully moving us to the edge of town.

Standing near a streetlight on the main road, I saw the Guardia’s pistol peeking out from his cape and asked him what kind it was, noticing I had no trouble speaking Spanish when I was drunk enough. He smiled, pulled it out of his holster, and held it up. “A Walther PPK,” he said.

“Standard issue?” I said, reaching out and snatching it from him. It got very quiet as I inspected the Guardia’s pistol. Rudolfo stared at me, his eyes wide. “Robert,” he said, “you should not grab a Guardia’s gun. It…it is not polite.”

“Huh?” I looked at the Guardia and saw the worried look on his face. I still didn’t understand my transgression, but I handed back his pistol saying, “Nice piece. Same one James Bond uses.”

On the way back to Frank’s, he explained to me that I was an asshole who had come “that close” to getting shot.

I didn’t just hang out and drink in Almonaster. I wanted to be a writer, and living in Spain, not having to work, was a good time to give it a try. So, in addition to drinking, I worked on a short story about a band of primitives who discover a fundamental method for time travel. When I finished the story, we found out that Bill Smith and his wife, Emmy, were in Portugal. We all decided to go visit for the Fourth of July.

The Smiths had rented a place overlooking the Mediterranean. Bill, a genial, freckle-faced Huckleberry Finn-looking guy who I remembered as a terrific cheater in Monopoly at Penn, was now a writer. That they were staying on the coast in a big house was just how I expected writers to live.