The Good Neighbor by William Kowalski Page A

arrow, musket ball, and sabre. His last wound, the one from which he’d never fully recuperated, had been received in hand-to-hand combat with a Mexican officer. They’d come at each other on foot, screaming like charging bulls. He’d shot at the Mexican and missed. He threw his empty pistol at his head, and missed again. Then, like an amateur, he fumbled with his sword. The Mexican had taken this opportunity to stick his own blade between the Captain’s ribs. The Captain promptly passed out—
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    not from pain, which was something he had never acknowledged, but from the certainty that he was finally, blissfully dead.
    The Captain did not believe in heaven, since he had never re ceived any reliable reports of its existence. He expected, when he awoke, to find that he was in hell, but he was not. He was in Texas. The Mexican officer was nowhere to be seen. The field, in fact, was mostly empty. The Captain was never able to offer him self a reasonable explanation of that day. In fact, he was to puzzle over it for the rest of his life. What had happened to his enemy? Had someone else killed him? Had he himself been left for dead? Had Jesus come while he was unconscious and taken away all the righteous, leaving only the damned?
    It was one of those incidents that might have caused ordinary men to take stock of themselves and perhaps mend their ways, out of sheer gratitude. Not so the Captain. He’d been trying to kill himself ever since puberty, when he’d first taken up soldiering. In truth, he wasn’t much given to introspection. He was aware now only of a dim but familiar disappointment at finding himself still breathing. He’d come close to death so many times that he felt he could salute it by its first name, that he could recognize it from a distance at which, to most men, it would only resemble a faint disturbance in the atmosphere. Like a desired whore, like America itself, death was, to the Captain, almost an unattainable ideal, something he could strive for all his life and never achieve. The irony of that was not lost on him, philosophical ineptitude notwithstanding. He wasn’t a stupid man. It was that he believed the only life that had been well lived was one that ended bloodily, in the service of something greater than oneself.
    Now retired, having reached his mid-forties, it was hard for the Captain to breathe. A military sawbones told him his left lung was partly ruined. Someday it would kill him. He couldn’t raise his left arm above his head. It took him half an hour to get dressed in the mornings. He didn’t care. It was only a body. The rest of him learned to compensate.
    50 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

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    The Captain was born in easternmost Pennsylvania, and he’d al ways intended to return home, buy some land, and grow some sort of crop on it when he became too old to fight, if that was to be his miserable fate. (Suicide was out of the question, unless he’d been defeated in battle.) He was, he often thanked God, of purely English extraction. In those days, the ethnic makeup of that part of the country was different. All the Indians from around there were already dead, of course, or nearly all. And you didn’t have so many of your Eastern Europeans then, not yet—the Poles and the Bohemians and the other miscegenated rabble that would soon in vade the East came over to work the coal mines only later, when the invention of steamships made the trip affordable for anyone who could scrape together a few dollars. In that part of Pennsyl vania you mostly just had your Germans, your Scots, your shanty Irish (as if there were any other kind of Irish, the Captain fre quently opined), and many English. There were a few lingering French, left over from the days when those people had ruled the fur-trapping trade. Some of the Scottish families had already been in the New World long enough to have migrated all over again, from the Ozarks in the South to the Catskills and the Adiron