Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Page A

idea,” I said.
    â€œMove it.”
    â€œThey’ll be naked as jaybirds.”
    â€œMove it.
Now
.”
    A couple of wars later, of course, attacks on officers by their own men got raised to a kind of art form—I know all about it, I like to read the tourists’ newspapers—but this was 1918 and the concept was still in its infancy. I certainly didn’t display much finesse as I pulled out my Colt revolver and in a pioneering effort shot Mallery through the heart. It was all pretty crude.
    And then, damn, who should happen by but the CO himself, crusty old Colonel Horrocks, his eyes bulging with disbelief. He told me I was arrested. He said I’d hang. But by then I was fed up. I was fed up with gas scares and Alvin Platt getting his arm blown off. I was fed up with being an American infantry private and an honorary Bolshevik, fed up with greedy hookers and gonorrhea and the whole dumb, bloody, smelly war. So I ran. That’s right: ran, retreated, quit the western front.
    Unfortunately, I picked the wrong direction. I’d meant to make my way into Chateau-Thierry and hide out in the cathouses till the Mallery situation blew over, but instead I found myself heading toward Deutschland itself, oh, yes, straight for the enemy line. Stupid, stupid.
    When I saw my error, I threw up my hands.
    And screamed.
    â€œ
Kamerad! Kamerad!”
    Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines never fought in the Second Battle of the Marne. He never helped his regiment drive the Heinies back eight miles, capture four thousand of the Kaiser’s best troops, and kill God knows how many more. This private missed it all, because the Boche hit him with everything they had. Machine-gun fire, grapeshot, rifle bullets, shrapnel. A potato masher detonated. A mustard shell went off. Name: unknown. Address: unknown. Complexion: charred. Eye color: no eyes. Hair: burned off. Weeks later, when they scraped me off the Marne floodplain, it was obvious I was a prime candidate for the Arlington program. Lucky for me, Colonel Horrocks got killed at Soissons. He’d have voted me down.
    As I said, I read the newspapers. I keep up. That’s how I learned about my father. One week after they put me in this box, Harry Hines cheated at seven-card stud and was bludgeoned to death by the loser with a ball peen hammer. It made the front page of the
Centre County Democrat.
    It’s raining. The old people hoist their umbrellas; the fifth graders glom onto their teacher; the cub scouts march away like a platoon of midgets. Am I angry about
my
life? For many years, yes, I was furious, but then the eighties rolled around, mine and the century’s, and I realized I’d be dead by now anyway. So I won’t leave you with any bitter thoughts. I’ll leave you with a pretty song.
    Listen.
    Â 
The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille, parlez-vous?
The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille
,
She can zig-zig-zig like a spinning wheel
,
Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?
    Â 
    My keeper remains, facing east.

Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower
    B EING G OD , I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in
Homo sapiens sapiens
. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.
    I’ve always thought of Myself as a kind of parent. God the Father and all that. But an effective mom, dad, or Supreme Being is not necessarily a permissive mom, dad, or Supreme Being. Spare the rod, and you’ll spoil the species. Sometimes it’s best to be strict.
    Was I too strict with Daniel Nimrod? Did I judge the man too harshly? My angels don’t think so; they believe his overbearing vanity—Nimrod the enfant terrible of American real estate, slapping his name on everything from Atlantic City casinos to San Francisco