37. Evil

When I fantasized about Sara, the  woman whose voice I met on the telephone, and the two of us going trout fishing in the Poconos, I had the face of a particular woman in mind.  Her name was Grace.  Amazing Grace, as I always think of her.  I met her in a small town near Scranton, Pennsylvania.  The name of the city and the hospital don’t matter. It happened a long time ago.  But before I arrived there, I was assigned to the lowest circle of Hell.

By the end of the 1970’s I‘d been shot at and beaten up a few times on my assignment in Kenya.  I even had a machete thrown at me, but I survived everything without a scratch.  I got very pissed at the guy who threw the machete and I ran after him.  I beat the crap out of him.  He was so emaciated; it was easy to knock him down.  Then I kicked him. Two, maybe three times.  Maybe more.   I heard something break, it must have been his rib.  Only later did I realize we were both experiencing hell.  He, from his beating, and me as I watched myself do something terrible that I would not have believed myself capable.   But I was able to amend my deed somewhat by bringing him back to the facility to have the nurse look at him.  She asked what had happened to the man. 

“Met the Enemy,” was all I said. 

You never know what you’ll do in combat or under fire. Not all evil is premeditated.  There’s a kind of evil that just happens, or so we think. 

The following year, on a snowy, foggy morning half a world away,  I stood waiting with my fellow passengers in the lobby of a small airport that might have been mistaken for a rural bus station.   Fifteen minutes later Flight 29 to Washington tried to climb up off the airport’s snow covered runway.   The plane hadn’t been de-iced.  It would be a short flight.


Looking for a different version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, I came across this. It ain't perfect, but performed in a subway, who could complain?