Cementville (16 page)

He told her about flying out on a medevac, the way the nurses made him lay on a stretcher. He yelled at them, he remembers the yelling, telling them he wasn't some Section 8 nut job, and the way they looked at him with their wet, tired eyes. They told him they didn't think he was crazy, that everybody on the plane had to be on a stretcher. So Billy had lain in the back of that hospital.
Yeah
, he told Mo,
those C-141s are like a big-box hospital with wings
—all the way across the ocean. He was back there with some bad cases. One guy had both legs gone, both arms. Another one's eyeballs fried straight out of his head, stone blind. Burns all over his face, breathing through a plastic tube. Rows and rows of them.
Then there was me
. Mo didn't get the joke when he told her that if they'd had Dr. Frankenstein on board he could have assembled one good whole body out of all the parts that were somewhat intact. Nobody talked. All the way to Los Angeles.

His sister must have asked him what he remembered most about the place, because now he is thinking of the flies. Flies over there big enough to carry off a chicken leg.
Imagine what three or four hundred of them working together might do
, he told her. That's what he said to a thirteen-year-old girl. Her face got all blurry and not like the face he knew, but he couldn't stop himself, and he said,
Oh, yeah, and I guess you don't forget the smell of the bodies
. Billy and his friends called it hamburger meat.
Hey
, somebody would say,
sure was a lot of hamburger meat out on the road today
. Because that's what it reminded you of, when they'd been laying out there in the sun and the heat for six, eight days.

He hadn't meant to tell her about the dream, how over and over again when he closed his eyes, he found himself captured during a night patrol. The gooks always took him to what everybody called the Hanoi Hilton. And in the dream, when he got to the prison, his
little sister was already there.
They had you there in the room next to mine, and whenever they came in to question me, they would start working on you. Trying to make me talk through your screaming
.

She must have asked him about the black guy. The one with the bad heart.
Oh, DeAngelo
, Billy said.
DeAngelo Blessing was his name
. He was Billy's friend. DeAngelo wasn't afraid of gooks, and Billy was. Billy wasn't afraid of snakes, and DeAngelo was. They had worked out a system to save each other's ass. He had no recollection what the fight between them had been about.

And maybe Mo said something then like,
Was it worth it?
Or was he glad he went? Glad. After that about the road meat and the torture and the flies? Glad to be part of defending his country? she had said. Who feeds these kids that kind of bullshit? Billy wonders, watching the doves peck devotedly at the seeds.
They're not going to be able to recall this one with pride, the way they've talked themselves into for every other war
, he told her, as if she would know what he meant. They're not going to know what to do with this one. Not for a long time.

That was when he looked up and saw his father standing in the kitchen doorway. How long had he been listening with that disappointed, unmoving face? Billy had stood up from the picnic table and flung the rifle over his shoulder and walked toward the ridge.

A
GRASSHOPPER CLICKS AN ARC
in front of him, and Billy thinks of Paco snapping his teeth at empty air, the dog forgetful that already and always he would never catch the voracious things, but never failing to try anyway. Maybe Billy should check with Levon Ferguson, see about that bloodhound bitch that was about to whelp. Maybe one in the litter has Billy's name on it. A little girl this time, maybe. Say what you want about Levon—and Billy wouldn't trust him any further than he can throw him—but the man knows hunting dogs.

The doves are joined at the stand of thistles by three crows, darkly comical in their shiny black suits, compared to the doves' soft
colors and gentle demeanor. One of the crows scratches at a low hillock on the ground, and Billy remembers suddenly that this is the site of the O'Briens' sawmill. Lem's father operated the mill in these woods in the thirties, forties, on into the fifties. It was said that the wood for framing the new church came from this forest. The skeleton uprights and roof trusses of the old mill's open-air pavilion stand guard over the clearing. Billy spots the long, low tracks of the power train that carried cedar logs to the saw blade. He remembers watching men shove logs toward the blade, and how he cringed with fear that one of the workers would lose a hand or an arm, that the spinning wheel of the blade would jump the track and take on a will of its own, and fly off to carry out its mayhem all over the county. If you weren't careful, even now you could stumble on the half-buried wheels and rusting gears of the steam tractor that powered the operation; you could find in the weeds the rotting piles of hickory slag, shaggy bark riddled with curving trails of beetles. The crow was pecking and digging in the conical heap of sawdust Billy had kicked and wallowed in as a boy; it's now a low, breast-shaped mound, hairy with dry wild grass. When Billy was younger, he and Willis and Lem O'Brien would crank up the tractor now and then. Cut a few boards, maybe build a playhouse for some neighbor kids, or repair a decrepit outbuilding. Nostalgia, mostly. Lumber is a thing gotten cheaper these days from some far off, manmade forest, single species of trees planted in sterile rows. Birds dare not live, much less sing, amidst such bald fakery.

A rustling at the east corner of the clearing cuts through the quilted silence, and the doves take wing, chirring softly toward a grove of locusts. Billy creeps around the perimeter of the glade, just inside the darkling edge of the woods. It is a man, crouching over the spring that bubbles from the roots of a sycamore. Billy watches the man lie down on the leafy ground and drink, his mouth directly kissing the water like an animal.

It is Harlan O'Brien. There is nearly ten years between them. When Billy wasn't yet eight, Harlan had gone away to West Point.
Billy's parents are longtime friends of Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien and have allowed no gossip or innuendos of murder in their home. Such nonsense is the bailiwick of ignorant folk in whom his mother has never put much stock. Katherine Juell is still the outsider, a citified stranger to the natives.

But there is talk aplenty in town. At Pekkar's Alley, Billy has heard them wondering why an arrest hasn't been made. He does not remember people being so restless and, well, mean. Are they bored, he wonders, so many laid off from the cement plant? Resentful of the unfulfilled promise of more jobs at the new paper products factory? Some of the guys, when they get liquored up, say outright that they are tired of pretending they don't know there was something going on between the dead Vietnamese woman and this big-deal hero.

When Harlan's head makes a slow swivel, the younger man flinches. The eyes too are those of an animal. Billy pushes the Remington further behind him and clears the phlegm gathering in his throat.

“Dove hunting,” Billy says, and pauses. “My dad talked to your dad. It's all right.” He remembers the lieutenant riding through town at the Memorial Day parade, mounted on Uncle Judge's black mare, Harlan peering out through narrowed slits of eyes at all the confetti floating down around him. Billy hadn't had difficulty imagining what it reminded Harlan O'Brien of: ashes. The way, over there, the air filled with gray flecks of burning buildings and flesh.

“I was so thirsty.” Harlan struggles to his feet now, or his foot, and Billy salutes. But Harlan swats a hand through the air and stares at the ground. The two men begin to walk in the listless and aimless way people will when time has appeared to stop. They don't converse about being back here, about how they'd both rolled into town that day with the seven dead. Seven—a mere handful when you thought about it, compared to the mounds and mounds of bodies they both had seen. Billy and Harlan do not discuss these things as they cross the same land they tramped separately as boys. There is no clapping of shoulders, no hail fellow well met, no nostalgic
sighs. Periodic need for statement, rendition, interpretation arises and is dispensed with by utterance of a few small words that drift to the ground like brittle, stubborn leaves from a water oak, always the last to let go. For a long while, neither speaks. Then Harlan.

“Mother said you'd gotten back. When was that?”

“May. Same day as you,” Billy says. “I was with the guys on the bus. Behind all the funeral cars.” He tries for a mordant chuckle but lets it peter out when it becomes obvious that the lieutenant doesn't share his sense of—well, he could hardly call it humor anymore. Irony, is that what you called it? Not that Billy saw it as ironic that Harlan had come home alive. Harlan O'Brien was the mythical quarterback of the Holy Ghost Shamrocks, who led the football team to the triple A championship in '57, the handsome and aloof heartthrob stared after by every girl in town.

But Billy himself? Any god who'd seen fit to spare him was a fucking sphinx.

“I heard Carl's home,” the lieutenant says.

It strikes Billy that Uncle Carl and Harlan would have grown up together, about the same age, here on their fathers' neighboring farms. He cannot imagine the two having anything in common, Harlan O'Brien being a war hero, and Uncle Carl being a certified loony with papers to prove it.

“Sure enough,” Billy says and laughs nervously again. He needs to get control of himself. They walk.

“Back before, a lot of folks would pile their kids in the car after Mass on Sundays, go out visiting,” the lieutenant says suddenly. “Go see their old people who lived deep in the hollers. I remember my Aunt Fern—she was my grandmother's sister—hobbling out onto the porch, shading her eyes with both hands. Uncle Bud right behind her, both of them wobbly stacks of bones. You got the feeling they were waiting for you. The way they gathered you in their arms.”

Harlan falls silent again, and Billy is too stunned by this long string of words to speak. The few times Harlan has come into Pekkar's, he sits at the bar nursing a bourbon straight up for an hour or
more without speaking to a soul. People tried to get friendly with him when he first got home. Lately they steer clear.

The two of them continue to footslog across one stream after another, and Billy becomes aware that he has taken on Harlan's halting gait, his back straight and stiff. Limp arms swing at their sides, counterweights to the ponderous ballast of some unspeakable apprehension, stones rattling in both their heads.

“Or we could hit the new toll road, making a clear shot all the way to Louisville. Whatever road you picked there was sure to be a haul of cousins at the end of it waiting for Sunday company, or people that weren't cousins, but might as well be,” Harlan says. “We always stopped in at your granddad's place on the way home. And there Carl would be.”

So that's it, Billy thinks, Carl is what inspired this ramble.

“Old Carl,” Billy says, hoping Harlan has not finished. He wants to know why,
really
why, his uncle went away.

“Carl always had some new project, something he was building, some new animal he was raising. Fancy chickens. Peacocks. Goats. Chinchillas, of all things. He even talked his father into letting him get a pair of Percherons. There would always be a handful of other kids from town who had walked to the Juell farm, late on a Sunday afternoon. I swear, I believe those kids would have walked twice as far to get to spend time with Carl. Best entertainment around.”

“Did everybody know he was nuts back then?” Billy says, and instantly regrets it. There is a slight hesitation in Harlan's pace next to him. Billy can feel the man looking at him, feel his own blood rush to his face. He continues to stare at the ground in front of him, aware he has made some sort of grave error.

“For most of us, Carl Juell was as close as we were going to get to an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, without ever leaving home. You know what a bagworm is?”

Billy nods. “Sure. Bunch of them hanging on the cedars right now.” He looks around to confirm that he knows what he's talking about and plucks one from a tree, fingers its intricate brown sac of shingled twigs.

“We could sit for an interminable time, watching Carl cut those bags open with his pocket knife and pop those things into his mouth,” Harlan says, and when Billy grimaces and throws the moth case aside, Harlan laughs. “We'd help him gather eggs—Carl knew how to blow an egg dry without breaking the shell, poke a pinhole on either end with a good-sized needle—and he'd hide a couple of empties in his mother's egg basket for a joke. I once saw him tie himself by a single foot to a tree branch hanging out over the river. He scooped water in his hand as he swung, then let the water fall through his fingers like liquid pearls.”

This is a Carl Billy does not know. A Carl before his and Willis's mother had passed. Before Willis had left for Korea. Before Carl's and Willis's daddy went into the barn and hung himself. Before they found Roy Stubblefleld with his head caved in.

Billy had heard versions of the story, outlandish tales that had reached the proportion of myth by the time he was in high school, the way kids will make up a story in the absence of the truth. He could remember being at the homes of friends, overhearing the adults talking, whispering usually, in another room, the women making the little sucking sounds with their tongues over their teeth, the sounds of nonjudging judgment that serves mostly to distance the lucky from the judged. While his friends bragged about imagined exploits with girls, Billy would be listening to see if the adults would talk about what had happened to Carl, if they would let their guard down enough for him to get the real story, or some semblance of it. What he wanted was something along the lines of relief from the uncertainty surrounding his uncle, the fate he sometimes worries might be also closing in on him, a hereditary curse.