Page 142 of Nash Falls
“Woodstock.” His expression bittersweet, he added, “We heard all ’bout that festival, man. Hendrix playin’ his white Fender Stratocaster, upside down, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, the Grateful Dead, the goddamn Who. We woulda loved to have been there instead of Nam.”
He handed the photo back, but his eyes told Nash that Shock was still back in 1969, for better or worse.
“I want you to keep the picture, Shock,” he said, passing it back.
“What? Why?”
“It’s part ofyourhistory. And Dad would have wanted you to have it.”
Shock nodded. “You know who you look like now?” He tapped the image of Tiberius Q. Nash on the photo.
“I don’t think anyone can really be him,” replied Nash.
“You don’t have to be him, Walter. You just got to be you. But havin’ some of your old man in you ain’t a bad thing, especially where you headed now.”
Nash then decided to broach a subject that had perplexed him for decades. “I heard him call you the N-word, Shock. More than once. Didn’t that… bother you?”
Shock looked off for a moment, then drew a breath, straightened up to his full height, and looked at Nash. “Let me tell you somethin’ ’bout your daddy. My second Purple I caught a round from a Vietcong sniper. In and out, but it hit somethin’ bad and I was bleedin’ out like a muther. Your father covered me with his body and still managed to shoot the dude out the tree. On the chopper ride to the field hospital he was right there next to me. Keepin’ me alive as much as the medics were. They only had one bag ’a plasma on the chopper to put in me and that wasn’t nearly enough. I was dyin’, but your daddy said not to worry, that he was gonna give me his blood when we got to the field hospital, even though he’d recently taken a round in his leg and still wasn’t all the way healed yet. So’s we got to the hospital. And let me tell you, the U.S. Army back then was not known for its progressive stance on race. The doc on duty, I found out later, was some KKK asshole from Arkansas. He flat-out refused to let a white man donate blood to a colored, and they had no colored blood to give me, he said. And without that, yours truly was leavin’ this world. And you know what your daddy did?”
“What?”
“He pulled his .45, held it against the doc’s head, took out a fucken grenade and held it in his other hand, and said we was both niggas with nigga blood in our veins and that if they didn’t put his blood in me, he was gonna spillwhiteblood all over the floor, startin’ with the Klan doc.”
“My God, what happened?” asked Nash.
“Never got a transfusion faster in my whole damn life.” He suddenly shivered, like Shock was actually reliving the memory ratherthan simply recalling it. “Your daddy’s blood saved me, Walter. And because of what he done, I will always have a part of your father in me. And that is a damn honor.”
“Was he written up for that? Or court-martialed even? But, wait, he couldn’t have been. He stayed in the military and got an honorable discharge.”
“He probably woulda ended up in the stockade, but everybody in that place was too damn scared to report him.”
“God, Shock.”
“Your daddy risked jackin’ his military careerandlosin’ his liberty by doin’ what he done for me. Man walked the talk so’s this here colored boy could live.”
“But to not give blood to a wounded soldier regardless of their race?”
“Nam was one messed-up place, Walter. All the grunts were on drugs—shit, the Army gave ’em to us to keep us fightin’ harder and longer. And mor’n half the docs and nurses was takin’ ’em, too. See, when you get dropped into a world that ain’t really a world, but just shit and chaos every minute of every day with violent death tacked on? You need crap to get you through it, and the pills and the powder and the juice did the trick, at least for a little bit. But then if you ain’t in reality to begin with, what’s the fucken difference?” Shock paused and closed and then opened his eyes and let out a long breath. “But I always knew where your daddy was comin’ from. And he the only white man I truly felt that ’bout. And it wasn’t just Nam. You think where we grew up in Mississippi was some hotbed of racial equality? By the time I was sixteen your daddy had saved my ass probably half a dozen times from crazy, liquored-up white boys with guns who figgered I’d breathed long enough on this earth. And he almost got hisself killed in the process. So after all that, I didn’t care what he called me. And it was a two-way street, ’causeIsavedhisbutt in Nam. So I called him anythin’ I wanted to and I damn sure did, includin’ a fuckenidiotfor how he dealt with you.”
His eyes glistening, Nash said, “Thank you for telling me, Shock.”
“Now let metellyou one more thing, and it’s important. Real important.”
Nash looked at the man, all attention.
“I trained you as best I could in the time I had. You can take out ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the guys out there, Walter, and I’m not exaggeratin’ ’cause that shit don’t help nobody. But the one-tenth? Theywillbe a problem for you. And the one-tenth is what somebody like Victoria Steers will be bringin’ to the party. So here’s what you got to do when you got them comin’ at you.” Shock paused, no doubt for emphasis. “You got to use everythin’ at your disposal, Walter. Anythin’ you can reach that can be a weapon, you go for it. And here’s the other thing: Some of these dudes are, well, for want of a better term,honorable warriors. They conduct themselves a certain way even when they tryin’ to kill you.”
“How does that help me, knowing that?” said Nash.
“Here’s how. The last thingyouwant to be is honorable. No bowin’ and shit like that. No quarter. It might give you the second you need to walk away. So what I’m tellin’ you, Walter, is to cheat your ass off to win. Ain’t nobody gonna hold it against you. You hear me? You do what you got to do and to hell with everythin’ else. Promise me?”
Struck by the man’s heartfelt tone and intensity, and his voice full of emotion, he said, “I promise, Shock.”
“Now, there’s somethin’ else you need to consider. It ain’t nothing physical. It’s up here,” he added, touching his temple.
“I’ve worked on my mind sets, observation, and situational awareness, and I lost my humanity when I found out Maggie was dead. I can kill someone, Shock,trustme.”
“Ain’t talkin’ ’bout that.” Shock looked at him so intently Nash’s pulse quickened. “Thing is, you never know when you might get snatched,” he said. “And Steers won’t be messin’ ’round if she the one doin’ the snatchin’. That woman will torture your ass like it ain’t nothin’. And when it comes to torture, ain’t nobody got nothin’ on them muthers.”
