And if you didn’t know how the path ended up?
Silvio considered this for a minute.
If I didn’t know how it ended up then there wouldn’t be much to offer as far as him taking down that path or not. I’d tell him to go right ahead. As far as some blind man is concerned that path is as good as any other.
What if it ends up bad?
Well, there’s no telling what worse or better path he would have taken. If it ends up bad there’s no telling that down another path it wouldn’t have ended up worse. If you ask me, a blind man knows more about bad luck than just about anybody. They don’t seem like the bunch to bemoan a little misstep here or there.
The old man laughed and said, No, they don’t.
What are you asking me about this anyway? You got a blind man in your life that needs directions?
The old man was still hunched forward in the pew. It’s a parable, he said.
A parable about what?
He said, It just depends on who you think is blind and who you think isn’t.
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I worked through high school at a local grocery store. I was technically hired as a bagger, but I had to do a little bit of everything—bag groceries and stock shelves and sweep aisles, and so on. Basically anything that limited me and my fellow bagger’s contact with the customers, which is fair because this kid Peter had the same gig as me but he mostly was just stoned out of his mind the whole time he was on the clock. He’d light up in the parking lot in his car before his shift, and he’d go back out there on every break. He smelled like mother nature and did every part of the job with an idiot’s smile on his face—always reeking of cheap weed. I think he got the job due to some distant family relation calling in a favor. But honestly, aside from his habit of snacking on the store’s fresh produce, he was a pretty good worker, so long as customers couldn’t smell him and didn’t look into his eyes long enough to appreciate just how bloodshot they were. Drugs never appealed to me, but eight hours of bagging peanut butter and toilet paper and yogurt and eggs and shampoo and fruit snacks and bread and milk can almost drive a man to smoke anything. After a particularly depressing shift I took up Peter’s offer to go to his car. I had no point of reference in terms of how high I was, but he offered up a string of muffled giggles and kept telling me, You’re baked out of your gourd, man. He continued laughing and said that people in there were going to confuse me with one of the cakes in the bakery section. What kind of cake bags groceries? I didn’t know, but I laughed too. When we got back to work it felt like the whole world had gotten itself a coat of molasses. I suspect it took me about thirty minutes to load one bag of canned corn and tomato soup. After a few customers I was approached by my manager and was sure that I was in trouble. I was, but not the kind that I thought. She told me that there had been an accident and I was needed in our produce section. I arrived in produce to find a cart of cleaning supplies waiting for me, as well as a trail of diarrhea leading to the restrooms. Apparently, somebody had shit their pants while looking for some properly ripe bananas. That was maybe the worst thirty minutes of my life up to that point, and though it had nothing to do with the weed, I never smoked pot again. To this day, any time that I smell weed, it comes strongly associated with the smell of that foul diarrhea.
When we met later, I gathered from Jude that about the same time I was putting my time in at the grocery store, he was spending summers working on his family’s ranch. I really envied that part of his history—being one with the land, out in the sun. Even now I can see him in my mind’s eye tilling in the dirt, or doing whatever it is people do on ranches. He’d take his shirt off to better soak the sun’s rays into his body. He’d wear a baseball cap because he always wore a baseball cap. Shirt off, cap on, working in the sun. I can envision his strong, tanned arms with their muscles bulging from underneath. Worn out blue jeans and a proper pair of work boots, doing ranch things.
That was one of the only jobs he and I ever had before we signed up for Uncle Sam and swapped the grocery store and the ranch for a military base. In my early days of enlistment I’d spend a lot of my spare time around the base at the armory, usually just to shoot hoops. Long before I got there though, someone decided it would be a good idea to make up the dullness of the armory with the strategic placement of historical artifacts. War things. Black and white photos of past battalions and dual-tip fighter planes. A piece of shrapnel from this battle, and an old landmine from that one. They displayed an old artillery round about the size of my torso.
I didn’t pay attention to much of anything in school, and I figure now that mingling around the armory must have been my first lesson in History. Part museum, part graveyard—a place to hold Mass for all things unholy and God-forsaken. It’s the kind of Mass that will really make you believe in things too. Like, some of the men who mugged me from those black and white photos must have been about as brave as you could make them. How else could you enter into a battlefield where the bullets are as big as the soldiers? Soldiers used to entrench themselves a few hundred yards apart while the other side would roll down great clouds of mustard gas at them and pray that the wind didn’t change directions. And the gas would blister the hell out of whatever it came into contact with—skin, nasal passages, airways, lungs, you name it.
As I continued to hover over the photographs and captions, I was approached by a second lieutenant who playfully slapped at the basketball that I had pinned under my arm. He gave a thoughtful look to the photos that I was studying and nodded his head in understanding and approval. He said, That mustard gas was some real nasty shit. And it was never supposed to kill anybody, not right away anyway. Did you know that? No? The German’s were more devious than that. Ideally, the gas would inflict enough damage to take a soldier out of battle, but not so much damage that it would kill him. You see? That way, not only would the allies be down a soldier, but they would also have to use valuable resources and space to try to keep the inflicted soldiers alive. Infirmaries would be flooded with casualties and the trenches were filled with terrified souls, wondering when the next gas would come. It was brilliant warfare. Psychological. Brutal.
He shook his head grimly as if to acknowledge the aforementioned brutality, and we bowed our heads in an informal moment of silence. He gave me a parting pat on the arm and continued down one of the armory’s halls to his office. He surely didn’t think about it, but, had I been in uniform, the place on my arm where he patted me would display one meager chevron. The symbol of my standing in this army. The definitive proof that, had I been an enlisted man in 1917, I would be the one eating the gas. I would be the one that the enemy wanted to push as agonizingly close to death as possible without actually dying. I would be the one huddled in the wet trenches, waiting for the toll of the bell that warned of an incoming chemical gas attack—waiting for the sulfurous mist to settle in and blister every inch of me, inside and out.
Sadly enough, my rudimentary lesson on early chemical warfare wasn’t what stood out to me most during my tour through the armory. Nope. The thing that haunts me most from that day is the pictures and captions of the World War One trench knife. This thing looked like a fucking ice pick with a brass knuckle grip, but it is the three sides to the blade that will really get you. Now, if someone were to stab you with a knife, the wound would have a level of symmetry to it—a two-sidedness, if you will. A wound like this is relatively easy to stitch and to heal, but adding a third side to the blade complicates the nature of the inflicting wound. It makes it nearly impossible for the wound to clot, and much harder for it to be stitched. If someone gets pricked by one of these blades, they are going to be in a world of hurt. Even if they do manage to survive until the help arrives, that third side creates such a mess that there’s not a lot to be done anyway.
It’s a real rotten utensil, and so you know what happened to it? Some people organized some conventions, and at these conventions they decided to banish weapons like this tri-blade from the battlefield. Imagine that—deciding that a particular weapon is simply too much weapon for combat. I’ve said that I’m