The General Zapped an Angel Read online

  Dedication

  For Rachel and Paul:

  Greetings

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface by Mark Harris

  The General Zapped an Angel

  The Mouse

  The Vision of Milty Boil

  The Mohawk

  The Wound

  Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal

  The Interval

  The Movie House

  The Insects

  About the Author

  Also by Howard Fast

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  by Mark Harris

  In 1950, Joseph McCarthy tried to silence Howard Fast. It was a fool’s errand. Called to testify before the House Un-­American Activities Committee, Fast refused to name names, served three months in prison for contempt of Congress, and had to resort for some time to a pseudonym to survive the blacklist. It was scarcely a speed bump in a career of astonishing variety and prolificity. Fast was a novelist, an essayist, a poet, a playwright, a young adult author before that was even a named genre (his April Morning was a staple of middle school curricula for decades), a biographer, an autobiographer, and, as this volume attests, a short story writer. Something like one hundred books bore his name (or one of his aliases). His first novel was published in 1933, when he was eighteen, and his pace barely abated for the next seventy years. Even in prison, Fast didn’t take a break; he started what would become one of his most famous novels, Spartacus, self-­publishing it to great success upon his release. He wrote—­including, during the blacklist years, for the Daily Worker—­like it was a job and a calling. And he wore his politics on his sleeve.

  By the time this delightful, imaginative, irate collection was published in 1970, those politics had evolved, but not mellowed. Fast was no longer a Communist, having become disillusioned with Stalin in the early 1950s, but his rage at American militarism, greed, and profiteering did not abate, and it resounds through these nine stories like a hand pounded on a breakfast table over strong black coffee and the morning paper. This collection offers a mix of sci-­fi, fantasy, horror, and dystopian black comedy, a combination of moods that emerged from a political moment when U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was the subject of daily household argument, and from a cultural moment when Star Trek had recently merged speculative fiction with liberal social consciousness and brought the results into American homes.

  Fast leapt genres, tones, and styles to suit his interests. In the title story, an American general in Vietnam who began his assaultive career by killing puppies works his way up to shooting an actual angel out of the sky; it’s a savage portrayal of military swagger and heedlessness, the prose equivalent of a satirical protest song. “Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal” features a guest appearance by the devil, who—­Fast would have it no other way—­naturally self-­identifies as a conservative. In “The Mouse,” visitors from another planet land their small flying saucer in a suburban yard, imbue a mouse with the consciousness of a human, and leave him in suicidal despair, the only rational response to a world that, for the first time, he now understands.

  The stories in The General Zapped an Angel are not subtle, fussed-­over pieces of prose. Straightforward and blunt, most of them read like a good day’s (or a good few days’) work, written in plain English to get the point across. Fast did not suffer from writer’s block or a lack of ideas. His 2003 New York Times obituary quotes him as saying, “The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.” It didn’t take much to get him started—­these pieces are, for the most part, a whim or a wince or a grin or a grimace at the state of the world spun into brisk narrative. But cumulatively, they offer readers a powerful, plaintive kind of undertow: they have the feel of religious parables, recognizably Jewish in their rhythm and their stretchiness, their shrugging joke structure and their moral rigor, their humor and their outrage. Their sense of futility feels bone-­deep, the product of a life’s contemplation of mankind racing toward the edge of a cliff.

  Because many of these stories are the product of their historical moment, it’s jolting to see that their subject matter is anything but quaint. One can’t exactly laugh off “The Wound,” in which nuclear weapons are reimagined as the latest (and last) tool of oilmen looking for a new way to dislodge deposits beneath the earth’s surface—­it’s a heart’s cry that is no less resonant today than it was half a century ago. (Does anyone doubt what Fast would have to say about fracking?)

  And in at least one case, Fast appears to have had the assistance of a time machine. “The Vision of Milty Boil” tells the story of a powerful New York City real estate tycoon—­a man obsessed with amassing power and wealth who, despite being derided as an idiot by the skeptics around him, proceeds to remake the cityscape in ways systematically designed to make himself larger and everybody else smaller. In this mordantly funny little masterpiece, bedrooms, buildings, even humanity itself can all be tailored to soothe the insecurity and enhance the vanity of a man who absolutely does not want to be seen as small. Fast follows Milty into the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond, finally crafting an epitaph that is perfect for him and just as apt for us. Like many of the stories in The General Zapped an Angel, it’s a nightmare that eventually releases us back into our own reality with the snap of a bitter little joke. And there is particular pleasure in unearthing it fifty years after it last occupied Fast’s mind.

  To read these stories is to open a time capsule prepared by a man who could not have imagined what the world would become and yet, as often as not, managed to take a pretty impressive guess.

  The General Zapped an Angel

  When news leaked out of Viet Nam that Old Hell and Hardtack Mackenzie had shot down an angel, every newspaper in the world dug into its morgue for the background and biography of this hard-bitten old warrior.

  Not that General Clayborne Mackenzie was so old. He had only just passed his fiftieth birthday, and he had plenty of piss and vinegar left in him when he went out to Viet Nam to head up the 55th Cavalry and its two hundred helicopters; and the sight of him sitting in the open door of a gunship, handling a submachine gun like the pro he was, and zapping anything that moved there below—because anything that moved was likely enough to be Charlie—had inspired many a fine color story.

  Correspondents liked to stress the fact that Mackenzie was a “natural fighting man,” with, as they put it, “an instinct for the kill.” In this they were quite right, as the material from the various newspaper morgues proved. When Mackenzie was only six years old, playing in the yard of his North Carolina home, he managed to kill a puppy by beating it to death with a stone, an extraordinary act of courage and perseverance. After that, he was able to earn spending money by killing unwanted puppies and kittens for five cents each. He was an intensely creative child, one of the things that contributed to his subsequent leadership qualities, and not content with drowning the animals, he devised five other methods for destroying the unwanted pets. By nine he was trapping rabbits and rats and had invented a unique yet simple mole trap that caught the moles alive. He enjoyed turning over live moles and mice to neighborhood cats, and often he would invite his little playmates to watch the results. At the age of twelve his father gave him his first gun—and from there on no one who knew young Clayborne Mackenzie doubted either his future career or success.

  After his arrival in Viet Nam, there was no major mission of the 55th that Old Hell and Hardtack did not lead in person. The sight of him blazing away from the gunship became a symbol of the “new war,” and the troops on the ground would
look for him and up at him and cheer him when he appeared. (Sometimes the cheers were earthy, but that is only to be expected in war.) There was nothing Mackenzie loved better than a village full of skulking, treacherous VC, and once he passed over such a village, little was left of it. A young newspaper correspondent compared him to an “avenging angel,” and sometimes when his helicopters were called in to help a group of hard-pressed infantry, he thought of himself in such terms. It was on just such an occasion, when the company of marines holding the outpost at Quen-to were so hard pressed, that the thing happened.

  General Clayborne Mackenzie had led the attack, blazing away, and down came the angel, square into the marine encampment. It took a while for them to realize what they had, and Mackenzie had already returned to base field when the call came from Captain Joe Kelly, who was in command of the marine unit.

  “General, sir,” said Captain Kelly, when Mackenzie had picked up the phone and asked what in hell they wanted, “General Mackenzie, sir, it would seem that you shot down an angel.”

  “Say that again, Captain.”

  “An angel, sir.”

  “A what?”

  “An angel, sir.”

  “And just what in hell is an angel?”

  “Well,” Kelly answered, “I don’t quite know how to answer that, sir. An angel is an angel. One of God’s angels, sir.”

  “Are you out of your goddamn mind, Captain?” Mackenzie roared. “Or are you sucking pot again? So help me God, I warned you potheads that if you didn’t lay off the grass I would see you all in hell!”

  “No, sir,” said Kelly quietly and stubbornly. “We have no pot here.”

  “Well, put on Lieutenant Garcia!” Mackenzie yelled.

  “Lieutenant Garcia.” The voice came meekly.

  “Lieutenant, what the hell is this about an angel?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “It is an angel. When you were over here zapping VC—well, sir, you just went and zapped an angel.”

  “So help me God,” Mackenzie yelled, “I will break every one of you potheads for this! You got a lot of guts, buster, to put on a full general, but nobody puts me on and walks away from it. Just remember that.”

  One thing about Old Hell and Hardtack, when he wanted something done, he didn’t ask for volunteers. He did it himself, and now he went to his helicopter and told Captain Jerry Gates, the pilot:

  “You take me out to that marine encampment at Quen-to and put me right down in the middle of it.”

  “It’s a risky business, General.”

  “It’s your goddamn business to fly this goddamn ship and not to advise me.”

  Twenty minutes later the helicopter settled down into the encampment at Quen-to, and a stony-faced full general faced Captain Kelly and said:

  “Now suppose you just lead me to that damn angel, and God help you if it’s not.”

  But it was; twenty feet long and all of it angel, head to foot. The marines had covered it over with two tarps, and it was their good luck that the VCs either had given up on Quen-to or had simply decided not to fight for a while—because there was not much fight left in the marines, and all the young men could do was to lay in their holes and try not to look at the big body under the two tarps and not to talk about it either; but in spite of how they tried, they kept sneaking glances at it and they kept on whispering about it, and the two of them who pulled off the tarps so that General Mackenzie might see began to cry a little. The general didn’t like that; if there was one thing he did not like, it was soldiers who cried, and he snapped at Kelly:

  “Get these two mothers the hell out of here, and when you assign a detail to me, I want men, not wet-nosed kids.” Then he surveyed the angel, and even he was impressed.

  “It’s a big son of a bitch, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Head to heel, it’s twenty feet. We measured it.”

  “What makes you think it’s an angel?”

  “Well, that’s the way it is,” Kelly said. “It’s an angel. What else is it?”

  General Mackenzie walked around the recumbent form and had to admit the logic in Captain Kelly’s thinking. The thing was white, not flesh-white but snow-white, shaped like a man, naked, and sprawled on its side with two great feathered wings folded under it. Its hair was spun gold and its face was too beautiful to be human.

  “So that’s an angel,” Mackenzie said finally.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like hell it is!” Mackenzie snorted. “What I see is a white, Caucasian male, dead of wounds suffered on the field of combat. By the way, where’d I hit him?”

  “We can’t find the wounds, sir.”

  “Now just what the hell do you mean, you can’t find the wounds? I don’t miss. If I shot it, I shot it.”

  “Yes, sir. But we can’t find the wounds. Perhaps its skin is very tough. It might have been the concussion that knocked it down.”

  Used to getting at the truth of things himself, Mackenzie walked up and down the body, going over it carefully. No wounds were visible.

  “Turn the angel over,” Mackenzie said.

  Kelly, who was a good Catholic, hesitated at first; but between a live general and a dead angel, the choice was specified. He called out a detail of marines, and without enthusiasm they managed to turn over the giant body. When Mackenzie complained that mud smears were impairing his inspection, they wiped the angel clean. There were no wounds on this side either.

  “That’s a hell of a note,” Mackenzie muttered, and if Captain Kelly and Lieutenant Garcia had been more familiar with the moods of Old Hell and Hardtack, they would have heard a tremor of uncertainty in his voice. The truth is that Mackenzie was just a little baffled. “Anyway,” he decided, “it’s dead, so wrap it up and put it in the ship.”

  “Sir?”

  “Goddamnit, Kelly, how many times do I have to give you an order? I said, wrap it up and put it in the ship!”

  The marines at Quen-to were relieved as they watched Mackenzie’s gunship disappear in the distance, preferring the company of live VCs to that of a dead angel, but the pilot of the helicopter flew with all the assorted worries of a Southern Fundamentalist.

  “Is that sure enough an angel, sir?” he had asked the general.

  “You mind your eggs and fly the ship, son,” the general replied. An hour ago he would have told the pilot to keep his goddamn nose out of things that didn’t concern him, but the angel had a stultifying effect on the general’s language. It depressed him, and when the three-star general at headquarters said to him, “Are you trying to tell me, Mackenzie, that you shot down an angel?” Mackenzie could only nod his head miserably.

  “Well, sir, you are out of your goddamn mind.”

  “The body’s outside in Hangar F,” said Mackenzie. “I put a guard over it, sir.”

  The two-star general followed the three-star general as he stalked to Hangar F, where the three-star general looked at the body, poked it with his toe, poked it with his finger, felt the feathers, felt the hair, and then said:

  “Goddamnit to hell, Mackenzie, do you know what you got here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You got an angel—that’s what the hell you got here.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s the way it would seem.”

  “God damn you, Mackenzie, I always had a feeling that I should have put my foot down instead of letting you zoom up and down out there in those gunships zapping VCs. My God almighty, you’re supposed to be a grown man with some sense instead of some dumb kid who wants to make a score zapping Charlie, and if you hadn’t been out there in that gunship this would never have happened. Now what in hell am I supposed to do? We got a lousy enough press on this war. How am I going to explain a dead angel?”

  “Maybe we don’t explain it, sir. I mean, there it is. It happened. The damn thing’s dead, isn’t it? Let’s bury it. Isn’t that what a soldier does—buries his dead, tightens his belt a notch, and goes on from there?”


  “So we bury it, huh, Mackenzie?”

  “Yes, sir. We bury it.”

  “You’re a horse’s ass, Mackenzie. How long since someone told you that? That’s the trouble with being a general in this goddamn army—no one ever gets to tell you what a horse’s ass you are. You got dignity.”

  “No, sir. You’re not being fair, sir,” Mackenzie protested. “I’m trying to help. I’m trying to be creative in this trying situation.”

  “You get a gold star for being creative, Mackenzie. Yes, sir, General—that’s what you get. Every marine at Quen-to knows you shot down an angel. Your helicopter pilot and crew know it, which means that by now everyone on this base knows it—because anything that happens here, I know it last—and those snotnose reporters on the base, they know it, not to mention the goddamn chaplains, and you want to bury it. Bless your heart.”

  The three-star general’s name was Drummond, and when he got back to his office, his aide said to him excitedly:

  “General Drummond, sir, there’s a committee of chaplains, sir, who insist on seeing you, and they’re very up tight about something, and I know how you feel about chaplains, but this seems to be something special, and I think you ought to see them.”

  “I’ll see them.” General Drummond sighed.

  There were four chaplains, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, an Episcopalian, and a Lutheran. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian chaplains had wanted to be a part of the delegation, but the priest, who was a Paulist, said that if they were to bring in five Protestants, he wanted a Jesuit as reenforcement, while the rabbi, who was Reform, agreed that against five Protestants an Orthodox rabbi ought to join the Jesuit. The result was a compromise, and they agreed to allow the priest, Father Peter O’Malley, to talk for the group. Father O’Malley came directly to the point:

  “Our information is, General, that General Mackenzie has shot down one of God’s holy angels. Is that or is that not so?”

  “I’m afraid it’s so,” Drummond admitted.

  There was a long moment of silence while the collective clergy gathered its wits, its faith, its courage, and its astonishment, and then Father O’Malley asked slowly and ominously: