Sarah Jane Read online

  My legs don’t want to work either, but I can crawl, so I do that and get to him. Just like before, his mouth is moving and I don’t hear anything. Then I realize that I don’t hear anything at all, just this roar in my ears.

  The leg’s completely gone below the knee, the rest connected only by flaps of skin. I’m thinking how it looks like fringe on old fake-buckskin jackets and holding his hand when he stiffens, blinks, and stops breathing.

  Had to be an RPG. So where are they? Why would they fire and not come on in?

  Strange how much of your world goes away when you can’t hear. I had a nose full of bleach and nothing in my ears but ocean.

  But when you’re down, in the absence of active fire you stay down. Wait it out. Assess. That had been drilled into me.

  Lots more bleach and ocean and smoke, then I felt vibrations from the ground behind me. Footfalls. Very close. A foot poked at me, moments later pushed under and kicked up, withdrew. I was breathing as shallowly as possible. Three toes of a bare foot showed at the edge of my vision. Stopped there. Kicked at my head. I could no longer see the foot then, but shortly felt whoever it was tugging hard at my boot. Down there, probably kneeling, trying to get the boot off.

  I had to take this chance, along with the chance that there was only the one of them. Sheath knife in hand, I did the quickest sit-up of my life and thrust—blindly, by feel, where I thought he would be. He was small. And sitting, not kneeling. The knife struck him squarely in the throat. Driven by air bursting from a ruptured trachea, blood spray covered me. His face never once changed. His hands were still on my boot as he fell.

  He may have been all of twelve or thirteen.

  He could be fodder, of course. In the cities they recruited them that young and younger. But it was just as possible that he’d simply come upon an abandoned weapon and taken it. I waited some more and when no one else showed up, I embraced the latter.

  Most of a full day went by, they tell me. All of it for me a bleed, a blur: dark leeching out from the bright center, zigzags of blindness, flashes, flares, empty spaces. Firmly believed myself to be heading back to the compound, keeping the sun to my left, but the sun kept moving, the sun was everywhere, right, left, full ahead, behind.

  Another patrol came across me by accident. I asked if they were here to take me home. When they asked where’s home, I couldn’t remember. We had chickens, I told them.

  Memory of the site, of where we’d been, was gone. I relayed what I could, and a team went back out to where they picked me up. Eventually they found the vehicle, but both bodies were gone. Oscar’s tags turned up in my pocket. I had no memory of taking them.

  2.

  Close to a year later, not long before I met up with Bullhead, I’m cooking in this resort that’s fitted out like a hunting lodge, with dark beams where no beams had gone before and walls of untreated wood that make it look like splinters are hanging off but even the splinters are sheathed in clear varnish. It’s mid-July, so hot the sweat lifts off you before you know it’s there. College boy Erik the Red has placed a breakfast order so vast that I have to look out to see if this could really be for a single person. The man’s sitting at the corner table in Erik’s station, alone all right, thumping at the glass to attract the attention of a squirrel outside among the shrubs, mostly sage and rosemary. Suit coat’s too big, regulation white shirt, ambiguously blue tie with some pattern I can’t make out from here. Last time he saw a barber was during cold weather. Something that looks like the love child of a lunchbox and a plastic briefcase in the chair beside him. Man might weigh a hundred-and-ten soaking wet and he’s ordered enough food for three.

  I go back through the kitchen doors, throw eggs in the blender for the omelet, grab pancake batter from the cooler, check on the bacon bin to be sure it’s well stocked. ’Ski looks over to tell me he’s got to leave early today for an appointment with the immigration service. ’Ski’s Russian, came in as a student, now his visa’s expired and he’s angling to stay. “Why’re you telling me?” I ask. “Go tell Lizard.” Day-shift manager, Tony Lasardo. “I’m telling you because you’re the only one who gives a shit,” ’Ski says. Man should get immigration points for nailing American vernacular.

  Two p.m., after lunch rush, my shift’s done, and I decide to swing by the arts and crafts festival downtown near the college. They close off the streets and let them fill with booths of jewelry, paintings, tie-dye clothing, lawn sculptures, blown glass and ceramics, boutique soap and dehydrated soup, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, kitsch and tchotchke of every sort. The streets fill with people too—though, hot as it is, along with the stands of port-a-potties there ought to be hose-down stations.

  Squint hard, you can imagine you’re back in the bazaars that were everywhere over in sandworld. Different languages and different smells but the same bustle, same clogs and clots of people, same too much.

  Something always follows me home. Soap dish shaped like a bear paw, wall hangers in the form of beckoning fingers, a tiny ceramic wombat. Once in a great while, an item goes immediately into use. Most remain where they touch ground, on table tops, shelves and random surfaces. A few lead immigrant lives, migrating from place to place until at length they fade into the general population.

  Speaking of which, population, today at the festival it consists of young women about to fall off the front of their canted shoes, well-groomed guys in plaid shorts and expensive leather slip-ons without socks, prides of fiftyish women in flowery blouses and perfect hair with a million urgent things to say to one another, couples strolling behind trophy dogs, children of every age swarming as though chum has been scattered.

  Flip-flops slap out rhythms, voices rise and fall, there’s the scent of perfumes and colognes, grilled meat, burned sugar, hot pavement and sweat, as moments sink into memory vaults of minds and cameras.

  Afterward I stop at one of many trendy shops for overpriced coffee, so I’m late getting home, which just now is a one-room apartment elevated to something grander, in the ad if not in fact, by virtue of being a separate building. The house it once stood behind in order to serve as storage, workshop or secondary residence is gone. A pool of crisply browned grass and weeds stretches wanly toward the street.

  Rarely hungry after ten hours of smelling food and breathing fire, I put my new spoon rest in the sink where someday soap and water will happen upon it, grab the apple with the fewest brown spots from the bowl, and make for the great outdoors, into my favorite time of day, darkness closing shell-like from above and below.

  Often when I’m out of an evening walking, I look into windows as I pass and catch glimpses of shows on TVs inside. What I see there is wildly unrelated, fragments of movies, of sitcoms and detective series, reruns of Get Smart, nature and history documentaries, that nonetheless get strung together in my mind as I shuttle between windows, the amalgam ever so much more interesting than what’s actually taking place in those TVs and living rooms.

  Tonight’s show could be about a paralyzed man, a veteran, who works as a sit-down comic at the hippest bar in town, solving mysteries in his spare time while raising a rare species of bird that will save the world from giant tomato worms by singing to them. In between, he thinks and squints a lot.

  Another thing I do out walking is watch the gait and carriage of fellow pedestrians. The fascination with body language that I picked up back at the Cracker Barn, for what people signal beneath the facades they present, persists. This twentyish man in cargo shorts and knock-off cross trainers, for instance, whose head seems to move independently of his body. Or how a young woman wearing a plain summer dress brings her right foot around in a slight arc. The elderly gentleman replacing his self-dialogue with a bright smile, as though a switch has been thrown, as we approach one another.

  Stories there. Lives. Worlds.

  Back home (I always feel the word home should be indicated by quotation marks, italics, extra spaces for b
reath) I grind a couple handfuls of Blue Mountain, pour hot water into the French press and, when the time comes, push on the plunger as though I’ve just shouted Fire in the hole.

  The coffee’s dark, deeply rich and layered, mysterious. “Smells like good dirt, like newly turned earth,” my friend Vickie (née Victor) used to say, “and tastes like it’s left Earth behind for a better place.” Vickie never for a moment believed there was a better place, but that sounded dead on.

  I read as I drink my coffee, do fifty pushups, and eat two apples. The pushups stayed with me from basic and from weeks of hanging out with nothing to do in-country. Apples were kind of what I lived on back then. I’d once heard a musician explaining how he survived on the road. Eat a lumberjack’s breakfast and nothing but a bunch of apples the rest of the day, he said.

  The days march by and extraordinary things happen all around us. Small miracles, haphazard events, bursts of joy, revelations. An old man painfully gets to his knees to stroke the dying cat he found on his patio. A shy child hears live music for the first time and dances. Thousands of fireflies in the Smoky Mountains blink their tail lights every one at the same time. We hunker down in our daily lives, in the shelter of routines and assumptions. We miss so much.

  “I carry my country inside myself, I am my country. Like in the song: This world has never been my home.”

  I was cooking in a diner some five hundred miles, three months, and seven change-of-plans from the resort, Eric the Red, and squirrels. He came in one night out of nowhere with his entourage, posse, peeps, homies, minions, take your pick, your pick being dependent on when you were born, where you grew up, your politics, disposition, a slew or a mess of other things. Frankly, not one of the troop lined up with him looked as though he or she belonged any damned where.

  But there they were at the door, backlit by streetlights, posing for a moment (or so it seemed) before coming in.

  Some kind of actor, I knew that much from the general chatter. A painter turned performance artist, as it turned out. And that night he rode, a sidekick told me, the horse of silence, communicating in a made-up sign language somehow as beautiful as it was dorky. “Horse, huh?” I said. “Then I’ll have to be careful where I step.” “Hey, the hell with silence,” the horse’s rider said.

  It was a week or so later he said that about carrying his country around. We were in my crappy, cagelike apartment getting ready to go out and leave the roaches, mice and mosquitoes to their respective tasks, and we’d been talking, not a clue how that would ever come up between us as a topic of conversation, politics. He said he had none.

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  He knew as little about my past as I knew of his. Nothing at all about the so-called service to my country for which soldiers were always getting thanked in TV shows and movies.

  “You have to have some sense of what’s right,” I went on, “of what needs to be worked for, fought for.”

  “In the world I see, working for things doesn’t make much difference. How things are, that gets sneaked in from below when you’re not looking. Or it just fucking crashes down from five stories up.”

  Grim, and not much room for gray. But in truth, at the time not a far cry from the world I saw too.

  He pulled on a work boot, one of those weird yellow-orange lumps from Target and dollar stores. “Groucho Marx said he wasn’t crazy about reality but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.”

  That’s when he told me about being his own country and not of this world.

  For some time I avoided attending Olin’s performances (“Born Colin, never liked that damn C, so I let it go”), figuring with what went on back home and with my stay in the desert I’d had more than my fill of weird. When I finally relented and sat through one, nothing came up that wasn’t familiar from the day-to-day. Sign language. The elaborately smiling face above a body weighed down by sadness. A soundless tuba player with puffing cheeks. Lengthy free-associative talks about what the moon did on its weekends or how Who and Whynot shoulda been bigger stars. The sorrowful angel who comes to earth to save us and turns imperceptibly, so slowly and subtly that you don’t realize until it has happened, into a devil.

  Servers knew him as a regular. Olin was vegetarian (“One of my few virtues, or perhaps simply pretension”) and the diner’s owner was Greek, with hummus and tabouli always at hand. A match. Vegetarians being about as common as Beemers in our part of town, my fellow workers found the practice mystifying.

  Three months after Olin and I met, the owner died, and with no one in the family interested in taking the helm, Silver’s went up for sale. Some guy from uptown arrived with a gaggle of fleshly echoes tiptoeing in his wake. Words like gentrification and going upscale didn’t get said aloud, but they were there, tugged above the crew like cartoon thought balloons. I took one look, took a walk, went looking.

  Fats at Step Up told me he made a great soup. The shelter opened every evening at six and served a meal. Fats was rail thin. Everyone called me Curly, he told me, till my hair fell out. Hard to be sure whether or not he meant that as a joke.

  “I make a great soup,” he said again. “Oh, and cornmeal muffins every other night.”

  “That’s it?”

  “They like us to keep it simple.”

  Ah, they.

  So we went on keeping it simple, Fats and me, but simple with a difference. Kept the soup, added biscuits and the occasional fruit salad, even red beans and rice.

  Step Up was the fourth job I interviewed for after walking out of the diner. The first was line cook at a semi-swank midtown restaurant, get there at 2 p.m. and stay till midnight dripping sweat onto the grill and stovetop with people yelling at you as you did what you could to resuscitate dodgy fish and prefab sauces. I’d never in my life been desperate enough. After that, I answered a blind ad that turned out to be a school cafeteria of the sloppy joes on Tuesday, fish sticks on Friday persuasion. The third, another cafeteria of quite a different sort, might have been interesting. It was in the home office of a vast alternate-energy corporation, employees only, two hundred or more of them. But the HR guy who caught the interview somehow also caught on to the military background I’d left off my résumé, fellow grunt and all that, where’d you see action, and that was a weight I didn’t want to carry.

  Then the shelter. Step Up.

  Felt like home when I stepped through the door.

  Sometimes Olin would come down to help serve, or to do whatever was needed, he said, but often as not he’d wind up sitting with our patrons, listening to their stories and spinning his own. Keeping his chops up, as he put it.

  What Olin said about himself, you could never tell how much was true, how much dressed up for Sunday. And the people clustered around him like lumps in oatmeal—producers, a short-lived agent or two, other performers, musicians, hangers-on—changed with the seasons. I suppose some were friends, but I could never sort them. Here and there I did garner bits and pieces that seemed real, scraps really, of Olin’s life, like the time he fell off a mountain while hiking. How did it change him, someone asked, had it changed the way he lived. Yeah, I keep low to the ground now, he said.

  Olin’s own frequent comment regarding the fall and much else was “I’m the man with no more past,” after which he’d frown till his eyebrows dipped toward his nose, perform a Gallic-style shrug, and add: “Some old Frenchman.”

  When he disappeared, left me in the park waiting for him as afternoon wore into evening, I really wasn’t all that surprised. I bought bagged popcorn at a nearby convenience store and sat feeding it to pigeons. There got to be fewer and fewer of them, then none, and streetlights came on. Five weeks later I got a postcard with a bathing beauty playing a banjo on the front.

  In Georgia. Crazy beautiful here. Miss you.

  Colin. P.S. I started using the C again.

  3.

  The police
were at the door. And I was sound asleep in someone’s left-behind T-shirt and a pair of panties that had started out pink back about the time of our last recession. That, and hungover from godawful wine out of industrial-size jugs.

  Even the cop in front, and these guys see everything, hit pause when I opened the door. His eyes went from my troll-doll hair to the d EAD b EAT logo on the shirt before getting pulled back up, by force of will, to my face.

  As for me, I’d apparently left behind all my words at last night’s roost, and just leaned against the door frame. Didn’t need words. Didn’t need clothes. Greet visitors in baggy underpants and a see-through T-shirt. How I lived now.

  “Morning, ma’am,” the cop said, “Sergeant Barnes,” as I got a glimpse of his badge and first name Charles on the ID. “Okay if we come in?”

  I moved out of their way. Sergeant Barnes was as underspoken in appearance as in speech, with plain, blunt features and a practiced smile, a senior salesman at Best Buy sort. His partner came across as more the athletic type, wide shoulders, legs apart, low center of gravity. That one didn’t identify himself but handed me his cup of Starbuck’s, saying he hadn’t drunk from it yet and it looked like I needed it more than he did.

  From next door came the sound of raised voices, Susie and Bud’s regular go-to. Most of the time it stayed verbal.

  The coffee donor looked that way.

  Stop fucking with me, Suze.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Thin walls. Never get too lonely round here.”

  There’s that tongue of yours again. Oughta keep that thing in a jar.