CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 5: CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

The hand painted sign hanging on the door of Coontail Collectibles reads: “Closed for Lunch.” The store looks deserted. I knock anyway. Inside, a back room door opens, a matronly proprietress emerges, motions with a forefinger for us to wait, makes her way through the aisles and aisles of antebellum-era thockes and then lets us in. We are joined subsequently by her husband.

“Is there anything in specific y’all was interested in?” she coos.

“Naw, just kind of tire kicking,” I answer. “And trying to get a bead on the store’s etymology.”

“Well,” she replies,” we specialize in Suth’n memorabilia, if that’s what you mean.”

“And some Confederate artifacts as well,” her husband chimes in.

“Indeed,” I say. Pointing at a painting of a Rebel officer in a nest of dozens of Yankees who had taken aim with their rifles at point blank rage, I ask: “What’s this then?”

“That is a battlefield portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest taken at Fallen Timbers,” the husband explains.

“He looks like he’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, he made out all right,” the husband says. “Notice how he has hoisted a Yankee soldier as a shield.”

“The damn Blue Bellies shot their own man and Bedford Forrest made it out unscathed,” his wife adds.

“The Yankee died, but Ol’ Forrest lived to fight again… and again,” the husband finishes.

The Fallen Timbers yarn has the elements of proper Civil War folklore: Southern chivalry, Northern ineptitude, replete with tragi-comic results.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in dogshit,” I say. -30-

THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 4: THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

In a strobing smoke-filled classroom at the Potsdam War Academy, a silhouetted quartet of uniformed men puff cigarettes and fidget and watch a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. The air stings of crackling celluloid, and of the soot of history slowly melting from the heat of a movie projector’s lamp. As the film strip burnishes from age and friction, emulsions decay and nitrates metastasize, mixing with hot balls of dust that float through the tobacco haze like dirty satellites in space. It burns the nostrils and the singes the eyelashes.

In lieu of an orchestra or a proper pipe organ, the soundtrack to the silent film is a perpetual whir of the projector’s motor, a clattering grind of mechanical teeth champing on 16mm sprockets interrupted by a smattering of coughs from the assembled military staff.

A plump adjutant fiddle-fucks around with a flakey phonograph machine. A pair of staff officers, Burgdorf and Maisel, befuddled by the movie they have been forced to watch – an American film which purports to explain the necessity of the Ku Klux Klan in the Age of Reconstruction – squirm from boredom. A fourth viewer, Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, equally impatient with the movie’s plodding plot and maudlin histrionics, taps his creased thighs with his leather field gloves. “If Goebbels made such shit he would be shot,” the Lieutenant quips, and the rest of men chortle. The screening is Rommel’s idea; he commissioned a print because of his interest in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the savage and savvy Confederate General who, after the Civil War, became the Klan’s inaugural Imperial Wizard.

“Schneider! The needle!” Rommel urges, his frustration with the film compounded by the gnawing silences of the malfunctioning phonograph. The portly adjutant prods the phonograph, and strains of Wagner’s Die Walküre jump starts to life.

On the screen, former friends — and now adversarial soldiers — shoot at each other with primitive rifles and then a Title Card reads: “On the battlefield. War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice. True to their promise, the chums meet again.”

The scene cuts, and Griffith’s portrayal of hand-to-hand combat in the American Civil War resumes. A Confederate soldier is shot and drops to terra firma. His “chum” from the North attacks with a fixed bayonet, and just before the inevitable skewering, recognizes his fallen Southern pal, smiles and puts his weapon down.

“Why doesn’t he kill him with the blade?” Maisel asks, his lanky frame bent in a ball of confusion.

“His enemy must be his brother or his cousin, I think,” Burgdorf responds.

Their discourse is interrupted by Rommel. “In war, there is no room for sentimentality,” he argues. “Americans lack the cruel instinct necessary for pure, complete domination.”

Birth Of A Nation continues in background; as strings swell, the compassionate boy is shot and falls over his dead friend. Dying, he caresses his chum’s lifeless body. “The American’s last great conquest was maybe manifest destiny,” Burgdorf says. “Then they got soft.”

“Yes,” Maisel nods. “Maybe nothing was left so they turned on each other.” -30-

THE MICRO-FILM (2006)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 2: THE MICRO-FILM (2006)

I had heard the oral history about some psychic, cerebral and strategic connection between Field Marshall Erwin Rommel and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest – how Rommel had studied Forrest’s battle tactics to the point of actually retracing his predecessor’s steps. At the gates of a Confederate graveyard outside of the Brice’s Crossroads battle site I began to understand just how pushed, damaged and Jungian the folklore really was. At this junction – an intersection fabled to those who know the minutiae of war history, yet largely ignored and consigned to oblivion to the rest of the world — parked in front of a rather ramshackle replica of a cannon, sat a late model Chevrolet Impala SS sedan sporting Texas plates. Because of the generic make and model of the car, and the fact that it was domestic, it appeared to be a rental. Most probably, some Civil War moonie had rented the car in his or her hometown and blasted across Texas, Louisiana, and the Mississippi delta to get a glimpse of the same battlefield that – legend has it – had intrigued Rommel.

As I entered the gates near the graveyard for the confederate dead, I ran into the driver of the Texas rental. True to archetype, he was some mid-40s, mustachioed Civil War zealot/nut in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and leather sandals. My presence startled him, but he instantly recovered from shock to bug-eyed understanding, thinking he had encountered at this, arguably the most esoteric and forgotten battlefield in North America, a fellow traveler, another damaged authority on all matters military… a connoisseur of the conquest, and an enthusiast of eradication… and a friend of Forrest… (I am not sure I would have corrected him had he inquired to that effect…) In his zeal to share, he proffered a roll of 35mm film for my analysis and said: “I have the micro-film for Rommel.” This seeming non sequitur provoked a loud silence. I was stunned. He took my muted response as an appreciation for what he was saying.

“Everybody knows Erwin Rommel came here in the 1930s to study the lay of the land at the greatest American Civil War dark horse victories,” the Hawaiian shirt explained.

As the Teutonic Tropical Texan put his “micro-film” in the pocket of his garish garment, he concluded, “This time the Germans are going to get it right.”

Then he drove off. -30-