Jonnah Z. Kennedy - Lewd Louie, or Letters from Toodles lyrics

Lewd Louie's real name was lost in the Toodles post-office bombing. To this day, no one knows what his mother called him, what his maiden name was. Some people said it might've been Stevenson, or something to that effect. If he had any friends or any family back home, they never bothered to write to the section leader, Billy Mandrake, asking about him, confirming any details about his life. As far as most people could a**ume, Lewd was f**ed in the head. A complete invalid of the highest degree. There was no other way to put it, especially when you'd heard him playing hooky with himself in the corner every night for three years, getting lashed by Mandrake, screaming, “Get your a** back in the cot!” Course, Louie didn't ever get back in the cot. As a result, section 974 was always a little behind when it came to getting into formation. The little bits of sleep you got in those chaotic times was cherished. We had ours robbed from us. No one's saying that we didn't like Louie, I mean, when he wasn't inseminating all over the walls of the tent, he could be a pretty good talking companion. For instance, when we were moving up the river towards Toodles, Lewd got to telling this story about a dog he used to have. “It weren't mine,” He'd start it. “It just came on in my yard and take the biggest crap you ever seen in your whole entire life. My old lady didn't like it much and she made me clean it up. The first time he did it, picked it up, I didn't think about it, and picked up with my raw hand. It was real warm.” Already, at this point in the story, people listening in were getting very uncomfortable. Some of us theorized that Lewd liked making people uncomfortable, saying that he thrived on it. “He wouldn't say things like that if he had any sort of decency in him,” Yellow Eddie would say, chewing on sunflower seeds. “I mean, I get that he's not right in the head and all, but sh**, it takes some kind of lack of a filter or something to just go on like that all through your life.” He'd spit out a wad of chewed shells, tossed another handful in. Yellow, if you couldn't have guessed, was a chink by his mother and American by his father. His real name was Wang. “Didn't his mama ever whack him up?” She had in fact, and Lewd had a story about it. “She used to beat me real bad,” he'd giggle. “I used to think it was a game or something that we played. I'd run raw around the house, and she'd catch me and whack me on the a** a little, and I'd go running along again, hollering.” Lewd had a story for everything. “While I was squishing the sh** around in my hand, I remember the little doggy just stared at me, panting and such, big eyes like bu*tons. He was a cute sonofab**h, and because I didn't have none collar, I decided I ought to try and keep him. Course, second I went for him, he dashed his little a** back where he came, yapping about. I didn't let it worry me too much--from that moment on, he was mine.” Most people didn't stop his stories though, even when they got real bad like the one about the prostitute; in that one, he cried his eyeballs out and screamed just about every word in it because it hurt him so bad. We had to move our position immediately after he'd gone quiet, because we knew we'd been heard. No, we didn't stop him because, more often than not, it was better than the noise of the woods. They weren't natural noises. They were mechanic, infernal. You could look at a tree and hear something like steel working within it, like the fibers of the woods were made of some type of metal. You could look at the ground, and feel it growl as somewhere, far away, tank treads rolled over it. Birds screamed machine-gun fire. The night's were even worse. Night was when cities were turned to dust, so that in the morning it would be as though they'd never been there at all. At night, you could hear people losing their presence of existence, their screams annihilated by whistling bombs being dropped on them. Maybe that was only a dream. “I used to go out on the porch every day and wait for the little doggy to come take a sh** on the gra**, and then I'd run over to catch him. He was always faster than me. Sometimes I tripped and fell right into his extras,” he'd giggle remembering it. You could see it on his big, dumb invalid face, he was relishing it. “I started to bring out little toys and such to try and lure him, balls and stuff. I'd throw out this old tennis ball I had, and that got his attention real early. He'd be right in the middle of relieving himself, and I'd whack him on the back. He'd look at the ball all suspicious like, and then run after it, tearing it up.” Where we were going, the day Louie told his dog story , was to plant ourselves outside of a town that would eventually be ripped right out of the fabric of history. It was called Toodles or something like that, but in German. Our job was to mark the most vulnerable positions, where the impact zone would be the greatest, then we were to secure the borders of the entrances (and thus, exits) of the town with a low fence of barbed wire so that anyone who tried to run out would trip or be seriously wounded, and could not get too far away from the town. In many ways, it was a cheat, But it was good for the numbers. “Eventually, the little doggy started to come to play and sh**. One day, my old lady came out and scrutinized me rolling around in the dirt with the little doggy, wrestling. She asked me later when we'd gotten it, and well, I just told we'd been having it for a bunch of months. She shook her head. She told me, really stern, ‘He's got to go, we can't have none dog.' I just wanted to cry. There's none reason why a boy shouldn't have a dog, and that's what I thought. I told her that, and she just told me, ‘We don't have none dog.' It's not fair to take away a boy's simple pleasures like that, my thinking. I didn't listen to her, and I kept on going out to play with my little doggy. I could tell, the little doggy loved me in the way that only puppies can love you. I think he might've been some kind of terrier.” Louie took a momentary pause to listen. He liked the sounds of the woods. Rather, he was the only one who could really hear the sounds of the woods. We all surmised that Louie probably didn't even have an idea that there was any war going on at all, that, he might've thought he was just on a big, long nature walk. A part of us decided that, it was probably best he kept on thinking that. A pause for Louie was a pause for us all, is the point. Mandrake took the opportunity to pa** around the flask. We all took a swig. We kept whiskey around because the fire gave you a little something to live for again, “A pep in your step!” Mandrake would rejoice. Half the time, he wasn't sober. The other thing that whiskey did was remind us how far away we were from reality. On the radio sometimes, they would talk about how over in the States, there was a prohibition going on. Some of the other sections had sworn off drinking as a result, saying it was the only American of us to do so. They were a rarity. “We're about six more miles, due east,” Mandrake would say. “With a little fire in your joints now, we might just make it.” Of course we would. We always made it. Always. When we got to walking again, Yellow Eddie would remind Louie that he'd been on about something. “Oh yeah!” “So kept on playing with my little doggy, every day. When I went back to school, all I could think about all day was my little doggy, and when I got off the bus, he'd be waiting for me on the sidewalk, tongue just bulging right out of his mouth. I'd run up to him, he'd come sprinting up at me, and I'd catch him in my arms. Boy, I did love that little doggy. One day, when it was real cold, I brought him inside with me and let him sit by the fire. He was just astounded by it, loved it. He yapped at me, telling me all sorts of things, till my old lady woke up from a nap she'd been embarked upon, ran into the den, and screamed, ‘WHY'S THAT AWFUL CREATURE DOING IN MY HOUSE?' I tried to tell her he didn't like none screaming, but she just kicked him, kicked him right into the fire.” Silence again. Every Lewd story had a turn like this, a literal kicker. We all knew it was coming; in every one of them, though, it was a in a different place. “That poor little doggy howled and howled, the fire just eating him up. I stuck my hands right in it, snatch ed him out and threw a blanket on him. He wouldn't be still though, and the blanket caught on fire. My old lady kept on screaming and kicked him again, looking all around the room for something to stop it all. I was just stunned, watching my little doggy be burnt up like that. Then BANG.” We all jumped at the sound of it. It echoed off the trees, birds scattered. That was the end of it. That's how Louie liked it, to end things with bangs. The prostitute story had ended with the BANG of a door; the story about his old lady beating his a** ended with her BANGing his a** with her bare hand; another story about a dream he had ended with the BANG of gunfire. As it were, the story had just long enough for us to reach the town of Toodles. It was quaint and we liked the view. Hardly ten square miles, the town sat at the low apex of a deep valley. It could not have been more than ten square miles. There was a water mill along the river, and a schoolhouse next to the post office; there was a main street where, presently, much business was happening. A church whose white spire pierced the sky, sat at the center of the town. The spot we chose sat a ways up the steppes of the valley. The tent was set up, a can of cold beans was opened. A map was unrolled, and we all, the seven of us, gathered around it. Mandrake made note of the perimeter in red pencil. At nightfall we would lay the barbed wire. After a long survey of the small, secluded country of Toodles, he made note of it's areas that would have the most impact. He made estimations, he drew flight paths on a map, he marked impact zones. It was a quiet and macabre art which we admired while pa**ing the can of beans among each other, spoonful by spoonful until it was empty. We discarded it, built a latrine, and slept. Birds in the distance sputtered; twilight premiered only to close, bringing a soft open to early evening. Mandrake devoured the scene while eating peaches, watching the lights burn out in the town in the seat of the valley. As was his habit, he had not slept in three days. It was quiet work, the laying of the barbed wire. As usual, we'd waited until nightfall to begin the project. We broke up into teams of two, each with two rolls of wire and a trolley of posts which had to be staked into the ground by hand as best we could manage. Mandrake had infiltrated the town not long after nightfall, armed with a backpack of C4, and slipped into the basement, through a small window, of the post office from which he communicated to us through walkie talkie. He took upon himself the task of occasionally reading a letter or opening a package which he would describe as best he could figure. Mandrake, for the many talents he possessed, could understand only basic German. The letters, as he read them, were either about love or hatred, war or peace, about how fat someone was getting or how sickly they themselves looked; fear and loathing. There was no happiness in Mandrake's world, only sorrow and worry. One letter he read was directly about the very job we were undertaking. “Ain't this interesting,” said Mandrake. “Besorgniserregend, sehr lästig, the Americans are absolutely decimating every city they come across, so it seems. There is no pattern to it at all. Herr, I do not claim to sympathize with the Jews, but I am beginning to feel much like them. Just yesterday, I read in the paper that the city my cousin lived in, with his whole entire family, was flattened right out of existence. The way the paper described it, there seemed to be no intention, of course, there was of note the ma**ive bombs which had never been seen by any soldier in any direction. All officials are baffled at the ludicrous obsession the Americans have with their bombs, getting bigger it seems with each construction. Soon, soon they will have a bomb large enough to destroy a whole nation! Worrisome, very worrisome.” If only they'd known. The whole undertaking of laying the barbed wire took only a couple of hours, and there was time to sleep. When we'd returned to the camp, we each crashed onto our cots, our bodies exhuasted, our minds awake for the spectacle we would see in the morning. There was nothing out of the ordinary, Except for the quiet, It was a strange thing the way there was not a disturbance in the whole world to be found, even the woods had muted. Sleep was easy. In the morning, as we were beginning to pack up our things, Louie seemed somber. As far as any of us could tell, he'd been awake for much longer than the rest of us. He'd gone out and sat on a stump next to a fallen tree. He stared out at the light as it came over the mountains, shining down onto Toodles. Toodles, now entrapped in a noose of barbed wire. When Yellow went to take a leak, he asked Louie what he saw. Louie said plainly, “All the little people getting up,” In his head, he was making up another BANG story. Yellow took his leak, and told Louie to take his before we headed out. “There's no stopping any time between here and there, “ There being the next town--something starting with a D. “I don't have to go though,” He said. “Well try,” Yellow pressed and went back inside the tent. “I have to take a sh**,” Lewd said to Toodles. Louie took his sh**. He took it all the way down to Toodles, where one imagines he encountered a terrified towns-person or two, not prepared for the sight of a U.S. private. One imagines that he was directed to the nearest bathroom, or as best could be made out. English is the child of German. One imagines that, as the plans are coming over the mountains, big bombers, Louie is stepping inside some shop, or even the post office, squatting down on a German toilet called a Frankenfurtt, and relieving himself. One imagines him playing with himself when he hears the first bomb drop. “Where the hell is Louie?” Mandrake is frantic. “Last I saw him, he went to go take a leak,” Yellow says calmly, dragging on a cigarette. “They're about to start,” Mandrake says, frantic. “Where do you think he is?” Big Ray asks. Distantly, we can hear the first bombs going off. Screams. “Oh f**,” Mandrake says and starts sprinting down the hill towards the town, where the first fire has just erupted at the post-office. The whole world of Toodles was fire and ash and screams and thunder and blood. Somewhere in the town, Mandrake was breaking down walls with Louie on his back, probably moaning about how he couldn't breathe from all the smoke. In honesty, we weren't all that afraid for him. Mandrake, Drunken, encouraging Mandrake, Always made it out alive. Always. Except this time. Mandrake didn't even get to the edge of the town before he pa**ed out and got trampled by all the running people, All the running, dying people, Corpses all piled on top of each other as the bombs kept raining down on them. The whole town was torn apart, piece by piece it seemed. It didn't look chaotic from way up on the hill. It had a certain pattern to it: all the destruction was moving out from the center, where the library had bad. Towers of smoke were already staining the rather blue sky azure. It all seemed very far away. +++ Several games had been played, which is to say that, several hours has pa**ed, before Big Ray finally said we should probably start moving on. “To where?” this guy Rick Bundy asked. He had a big gap between his front teeth. He sat on a stump, picking his fingernails, but was now discriminating Ray. “The next place.” “We don't have any maps, we don't know where we're going.” Yellow, under his breath, “We don't even know where we are anymore.” Most of the surrounding forest had been decimated by the bombing, and in the growing sunset, everything was shadows and soft fire. “Well, we can't keep her for long--they'll be around soon.” They were the Germans. After a moment. “We've got the radio too, we can just tell them what happened. They'll send.” “We gunna go look for the bodies?” Jesse Maybaw said as he came from behind a tree to take a leak. A real leak, not a Louie leak. “Why should we?” “Just asking.” He zipped up his trousers. Yellow, while all this was being said, was staring at his hand of cards still, discerning which one ought to be put down next. He sighed. “I say we move on as well.” “This a vote now?” Bundy said. “Seems to be,” Maybaw said from his place. He was staring at the sunset down in the valley. It was some vote. We all voted to go and we went. As it got close to dark, we radioed the platoon, and they told us to meet them forty miles from the present location within the next two days. They said the struggle was nearly over, “Hang in there!” the Sergeant over the radio said. “The struggle is nearly over!” And it was over, very neatly and without much hubbub. The surrender was broadcast around the world, there were much celebration. There was whiskey, there were balloons, there was music. The woods were once again quiet, only disturbed by their own murmurs. There is a lie, a fallacy, in all this, though. Everyday that I got to cla** back at Cornell, every time I speak with my girlfriend, every time Yellow and I go fishing, there is one thing which has bothered me. Louie did get one letter during the war. It was from someone who'd known him in school, asking how he was and if he was still alive. They'd told them how their lives were going, how they had a brood of kids, because they knew Louie loved kids. They wanted to know if Louie'd been conscripted, or if he was in a home now. They asked if Louie had met any girl yet. Towards the middle of the letter, they started talking about how terrible it was getting over there, how he hadn't had a hot dog in what seemed like years. Do you remember, they wrote. How we used to go get hot dogs on the pier, back in York? Boy, those were good damn hot dogs. They must've been some good hot dogs for him to put him in a letter he'd shipped across the ocean to an invalid. They went on rambling about how things used to be, how things have changed, all that, very meaningful and sympathetic stuff. What caught our attention was near the end of the letter, where they, Louie's old buddy from school, said his mom'd died. They'd pasted, right onto the paper they'd typed it on, the newspaper clipping of the obituary for proof, that they weren't just yanking his leg. NORMA REYNA CARTER--dead at 94, Ernsville, Kansas, thirty miles south of Topeka. Cause of d**h: self-inflicted gunshot wound to neck (presumably). They didn't bother finishing the letter, and there was something angry about it, almost like they'd been beating around the bush the whole time just to tell him that his old lady was dead. It was kind of penal of him. Mandrake had received it about a week before Toodles. It was delivered, by bloody hand, from a boy who was no more than fourteen. On his fatigues, the numbers 943 had been stitched. Mandrake thanked him, and without even offering the boy a cot, went back inside the tent there set up. The boy died right outside--a minor detail. Mandrake had tossed the letter onto the big stack of them he had hidden in a sack near his cot. At night, he took them out to somewhere a couple yards from the tent and, painstakingly by oil lamp, read each of them. The night before the bombing, as we set up the barbed wire around the quaint town of Toodles, he'd taken them and dumped them on the table of the post office. Maybe there was something magnetic about them, mystical, which drew Louie to his d**h, but it's all speculation, really, when you look back on it. Still, you wonder if Louie knew there was still someone in the world who knew about him. You can't say that the guy who wrote to him really cared about him. The best Louie could ever do was to be known about. Another lie. I cared about Louie. Not a whole lot, but you spend enough time with someone, and you start to love them a little bit in the way that you start to love the things that you hate the most, including yourself. It has a lot to do with conditioning, acceptance, and deception. Caring is nothing more than the combination of these feelings so that we don't blow our own brains out. I'd gone to take a leak when I saw his lamp. Quietly, I crept up on him, not really meaning to spook him, but just to given him a jolt. He nearly hollered, and punched me in the gut for it. “Don't you know we're in a war?” “I get told everyday,” I asked him what's it he had going on. He'd momentarily forgotten all the letters splayed out around him. He confessed. In all, I'd received three letters. The first one was from a year prior to Toodles, my mother being very motherly, telling me how much she missed me. Missed me so much that she cried every night with a bottle of wine in her hand, missed me so much that she wondered what she'd done to piss God off in her adolescence that she would have her child's whole life stripped away from her, missed me so much that she left her tears all over the letter. And she told me she loved me. The second one was from my father, mostly apologizing about my mother, but telling me that, he'd been in war before, and that, it would be alright. These things come to pa**, son, he'd written. All the ugliness, in reality, it's temporary. Just don't let it haunt you: then it sticks to your ribs, eats at you. Don't feel bad for what you do, Just don't be proud of it either. What I'm saying, and you could see where he paused to think; when he continued, his script was trembling. is just don't make a fool of yourself. We raised you better than that kid. You think the war is bad, well, if we hear a single word from the one above you, well, you'll wish you were back in the war then! And he told me he loved me. The last one was as a collaborative piece from my old buddy Christopher A. Cowely and my girlfriend, Jean-Louise Mason. Chris'd himself gotten into Oxford and left me hanging at Cornell, but phoned me just about every day. “Good'ay govnuh,” He'd say to me, all distinguished. He'd then burst into a fit and say in his rough, too American voice: “I'm just yanking you, Yankee doodle!” He'd go on telling me how difficult all his cla**es where, how big of a nose his professors had, how it was all so beautiful, the buildings in England, and when I was going to marry Jean and all. Jean. I won't bore you with the details of Jean, you know Jean. But, she was blonde with brown eyes, and I wanted to have a whole mess of kids with her, one named Paul, one named John, one named Christ, one named Mark, a daughter named Ellen, a daughter-- The first half of the letter was Chris'. He went on and on about this book he'd read about war, and asked me if I'd like to borrow it sometime, maybe write my own, he'd help me edit it, since he knew I was an awful writer. Always have been, always will be. I don't know how the hell you got into Cor-nell, I thought you had to be smart to get in there. Towards the end of his part, he told me he was getting engaged soon and that he hoped I could be around for the wedding. RSVP as soon as possible, mate. I don't have any other choice for a best man, because, well, you're the best…man. It made me happy to know that he wasn't too beat up about it. Or maybe he was. Jean's part was shorter than I'd been expecting. Mostly, she told me how she was holding up, talked about her sister and how she'd be starting middle school in the fall. At the end, she wrote in her quiet script: Some guy asked me on a date yesterday, and I turned him down before he even finished asking me about it. I just thought you should know that. I don't know what it's like for you over there,being alone, without someone to be next to, not next to me I should say, but it's really cold without you on the other side of the bed. I started sleeping with my dog. She gives me kisses until I fall asleep, then she lays on top of my face. I don't know why. I think she's trying to protect me from nightmares--you know how dogs are. Anyway, I love you. She drew a heart next to it. Most of them were like this and in that vain Mandrake told me after I'd read them out loud to him. “That's very sweet, all that,” He said, taking a swig from his flask.It was near empty. “I got a son back home. Staying with my parents. They don't write to me. I told them not,” I asked him why, but he didn't tell me. I figure it was because he couldn't bare it. After we stared at the oil lamp for a while, I left him there without asking any more questions. Went to sleep in my cot, not knowing that, in the morning, he'd be dead and gone. Maybe he kept them for his own, drunken pleasure, needing some way to cope with not hearing from his own family; maybe for the sake of our sanity. It was impossible to walk all the places we walked, see all the things that we saw, and have the words of a family member echoing through your head: I love you, I miss you, I hope you get home safe, Remember when you were just a little baby boy? Now you're all grown up, Gone off to fight in a cruel war, Hope you write back, Hope to hear from you soon. It was better to feel as though you were alone than to know people where waiting on you. It liberated you, exonerating you from the responsibility of surviving. You could die an innocent d**h. Of course, when they received your body, they would always wonder why you never wrote back. And they would bury you, wondering why you never wrote back. And they would remember you, look at your baby pictures burning in the fireplace, and wonder why you never wrote back.