Across the River and Into the Trees

CHAPTER II

BUT he was not a boy. He was fifty and a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States and to pass a physical examination that he had to take the day before he came down to Venice for this shoot, he had taken enough mannitol hexanitrate to, well he did not quite know what to—to pass, he said to himself.

The surgeon had been quite skeptical. But he noted the readings after taking them twice.

“You know, Dick,” he said. “It isn’t indicated; in fact it is definitely contra-indicated in increased intra-ocular and intra-cranial pressure.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” the shoot­er, who was not a shooter, then, except potentially, and was a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States, reduced from being a general officer, said.

“I have known you a long time, Colonel. Or maybe it just seems a long time,” the surgeon told him.

“It’s been a long time,” the Colonel said.

“We sound like song writers,” the surgeon said. “But don’t you ever run into anything, or let any sparks strike you, when you’re really souped up on nitroglycerin. They ought to make you drag a chain like a high-octane truck.”

“Wasn’t my cardiograph O.K.?” the Colonel asked.

“Your cardiograph was wonderful, Colonel. It could have been that of a man of twenty-five. It might have been that of a boy of nineteen.”

“Then what are you talking about?” the Colonel asked.

That much mannitol hexanitrate produced a certain amount of nausea, sometimes, and he was anxious for the interview to terminate. He was also anxious to lie down and take a seconal. I ought to write the manual of minor tactics for the heavy pressure platoon, he thought. Wish I could tell him that. Why don’t I just throw my­self on the mercy of the court? You never do, he told himself. You always plead them non-guilty.

“How many times have you been hit in the head?” the surgeon asked him.

“You know,” the Colonel told him. “It’s in my 201.”

“How many times have you been hit on the head?”

“Oh Christ.” Then he said, “You are asking for the army or as my physician?”

“As your physician. You didn’t think I’d try to wind your clock, did you?”

“No, Wes. I’m sorry. Just what was it you wanted to know?”

“Concussions.”

“Real ones?”

“Any time you were cold …