The Missouri Review

Louis Simpson 5 BASIC BLUES / Louis Simpson Three comrades . . . there are always three. The one with his cap cocked rakishly tosses a coin, and they're off. But it's hopeless. Ever since Pearl Harbor all the women have been hidden away as though by magic. The length of Main Street, and Market, and Figueroa . . . They keep walking past houses with lawns and trees. In an area where there are benches they sit and gaze at the grass being watered and the names of flowers and trees: Pyracantha, Golden Rain Tree, Ceniza. A vagrant breeze rustles the leaves and they become aware that time is passing. They take the bus back to town. By now it is the middle of the afternoon, the light on concrete is glittering, the heat rising in waves. They hold another sidewalk conference and decide to settle for the movie. It's time to return to the depot and the ride back . . . looking at fields, small trees, houses like wooden boxes, a church with "Praise the Lord." 6 THEMISSOURIREVIEW They've been travelling for hours. When the bus brakes for a stop the sleepers stir, and someone asks, "What time is it?" The streets are dark and desolate. O, all the wars in Germany and Russia will not make them grieve like a Shell station, and Lone Star Bar, and the Hotel Davy Crockett. Louis Simpson 7 ON THE LEDGE / Louis Simpson I can see the coast coming near . . . one of our planes, a Thunderbolt, plunging down and up again. Seconds later we heard the rattle of machine guns. That night we lay among hedgerows. The night was black. There was thrashing in a hedgerow, a burst of firing . . . in the morning, a dead cow. A plane droned overhead . . . one of theirs, diesel, with a rhythmic sound. Then the bombs came whistling down. We were strung out on an embankment side by side in a straight line, like infantry in World War One waiting for the whistle to blow. The Germans knew we were there and were firing everything they had, bullets passing right above. I knew that in a moment the order would come. There is a page in Dostoievsky about a man being given the choice to die, or to stand on a ledge through all eternity . . . alive and breathing the air, looking at the trees, and sky . . . the wings of a butterfly as it drifts from stem to stem. 8 THEMISSOURIREVIEW But men who have stepped off the ledge know all that there is to know: who survived the Bloody Angle, Verdun, the first day on the Somme. As it turned out, we didn't have to. Instead, they used Typhoons. They flew over our heads, firing rockets on the German positions. So it was easy. We just strolled over the embankment, and down the other side, and across an open field. Yet, like the man on the ledge, I still haven't moved . . . watching an ant climb a blade of grass and climb back down. Louis Simpson 9 A BOWER OF ROSES / Louis Simpson The mixture of smells— of Algerian tobacco, wine barrels, and urine— I'll never forget it, he thought, if I live to be a hundred. And the whores in every street, and like flies in the bars . . . Some of them looked familiar: there was a Simone Simone, a Veronica. And some were original, like the two who stood on a corner, a brunette with hair like ink and a platinum blonde, holding a Great Dane on a leash. "A monster," said Margot. "Those two give me the shivers." The other girls were of the same opinion. One said, "And, after all, think what a dog like that must cost to feed." This was conclusive. They stared out at the street— there was nothing more to be said. When they gave him a pass at the hospital he would make for the bar in Rue Sainte Apolline Margot frequented. Sitting in a corner as though she had been waiting . . . Like the sweetheart on a postcard gazing from a bower of roses . . . "Je t'attends toujours." 10 THEMISSOURIREVIEW For ten thousand francs she would let him stay the night...