Don't Cry: Stories (17 page)

She waited a long time to tell Megan because she was afraid of being sneered at. She waited a long time to tell Susan because she was afraid Susan would talk about the astral plane. But she didn’t.

she just said, “I’ve heard people who had abusive childhoods say they survived because they had a good experience with an adult outside the family. Even one, even if it was tiny.”

Bea opened her eyes. Before her were clouds, vast and white, their soft clefts bruised with lilac and pale gray. She wiped her eyes with her little peanut napkin. She leaned back in her seat. Good night, Mama. Closing her eyes, she remembered the sudden warmth and heaviness as Megan sat on the edge of the guest bed in the dark. She remembered her singing “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from The Mikado, her voice off-key but still piercing in the dark. She sang and then bent down, and her nightgown fell open slightly as she kissed her mother good night. Beatrice crumpled the peanut napkin with an unconscious hand as she began to dream a dream that began with that kiss.

Jim Smith was riding the train to Syracuse, New York, to see his foster mother for Mother’s Day. He felt good and he did not feel good. Near Penn Station, he’d gone to a bar with a green shamrock on it for good luck. Inside, it was dark and smelled like beer and rotten meat in a freezer—nasty but also good because of the closed-door feeling; Jim liked the closed-door feeling. A big white bartender slapped the bar with a rag and talked to a blobby-looking white customer with a wide red mouth. A television, showed girl after girl. When Jim said he’d just gotten back from Iraq, the bartender poured him a free whiskey. “For your service,”, he’d said.

Jim looked out the train window at the water going by and thought about his white foster father, the good one. “You never hurt a little animal,” his good foster had said. “That is the lowest, most chicken thing anybody can do, to hurt a little animal who can’t fight back. If you do that, if you hurt a little animal, no one will ever respect you or even like you.” There had been green grass all around, and a big tree with a striped cat in it. Down the street, ducks had walked through the wet grass. He’d thrown some rocks at them, and his foster father had gotten mad.

“For your service,” said the bartender, and poured him another one, dark and golden in its glass. Then he went down to the other

end and talked to the blob with the red mouth, leaving Jim alone with the TV girls and their TV light flashing on the bar in staccato bursts. Sudden flashing on darkness; time to tune that out, thought Jim. Time to tune in to humanity: He looked at Red Mouth Blob.

“He’s a gentle guy,” said Blob. “Measured. Not the kind who flies off the handle. But when it comes down, he will get down. He will get down there and he will bump with you. He will bump with you, and if need be, he will bump on you.” The bartender laughed and hit the bar with his rag.

Bump on you. Bumpety-bump. The truck bumped along the road. He was sitting next to Paulie, a young blondie from Minnesota who wasn’t wearing his old Vietnam-style vest. Between low sand-colored buildings, white-hot sky swam in the sweat dripping from his eyelashes. There was the smell of garbage and shit. A river of sewage flowed in the street and kids were jumping around in it. A woman looked up at him from the street and he could feel the authority of her eyes as far down as he could feel, in an eyeless, faceless place inside him, where her look was the touch of an omnipotent hand. “Did you see that woman?” he said to Paulie. “She look like she should be wearing jewels and riding down the Tigris in a gold boat.” “That one?” said Paulie. “Her? She’s just hajji with pussy.” And then the explosion threw them out of the truck. There was Paulie, sitting up, with blood geysering out his neck, until he fell over backward with no head on him. Then darkness came, pouring over everything.

The bartender hit the bar with his rag and came back down the bar to pour him another drink.

He looked around the car of the train. Right across from him there was a man with thin lips and white finicky hands drinking soda from a can. Just up front from that there was a thick-bodied woman, gray, like somebody drew her with a pencil, reading a book.

Behind him was blond hair and a feminine forehead with fine eyebrows and half ovals of eyeglass visible over the frayed seat. Beyond that, more foreheads moved in postures of eating or typing or staring out the window. Out the window was the shining water, with trees and mountains gently stirring in it. She had looked at them and they had blown up. Where was she now?

“Excuse me.” The man with thin lips was talking to him. “Excuse me,” he said again.

“Excuse me,” said Bill Groffman. "You just got back from Iraq?” “How did you know?” the guy replied.

“I got back myself six months ago. I saw your jacket and shoes. “All right,” said the guy, like to express excitement, but with his voice flat and the punctuation wrong. He got up to shake Bill’s hand, then got confused and went for a high five that he messed up. He was a little guy, tiny really, with the voice of a woman. Old, maybe forty, and obviously a total fuckup—who could mess up a high five?

“Where were you?” asked Bill.

“Baghdad,” said the guy, blatting the word out this time. “Where they pulled down Saddam Hussein. They pulled—”

“ What’d you do there?”

“Supply. Stocking the shelves, doin’ the orders, you know. Went out on some convoys, be sure everything get where it supposed to go. You there?”

“Name it—Ramadi, Fallujah, up to Baquba, Balad. Down to Nasiriyah, Hillah. And Baghdad.”

“They pulled down the statue ... pulled it down. Everybody saw it on TV. Tell me, brother, can you—what is this body of water out the window here?”

“This is the Hudson River.”

“It is? I thought it was the Great Lakes.”

“No, my man. The Great Lakes is Michigan and Illinois. Unless you’re in Canada.”

“But see, I thought we were in Illinois.” He weaved his head back and forth, back and forth. “But I was not good in geography. I was good in MATH.” He blatted out the word math as if it were the same as Baghdad.

But he was not thinking about Baghdad now. He was tuned in to the blond forehead behind him, and it was tuned in to him; it was focused on Jim. He could feel it very clearly, though its focus was confused. He looked at its reflection in the window. The forehead was attached to a small pointy face with a tiny mouth and eyeglass eyes, a narrow chest with tits on it, and long hands that were turning a piece of paper like a page. She was looking down and turning the pages of something, but still, her blond forehead was coming at him. It did not have authority; it was looking to him for authority. It was harmless, vaguely interesting, nervous, and cute.

When Bill was gone, he realized that nobody at home would understand what was happening. He realized it, and he accepted it. You talk to a little boy in broken English and Arabic, make a joke about the chicken or the egg—you light up a car screaming through a checkpoint and blow out a little girl’s brains. You saw it as a threat at the time—and maybe the next time it would be. People could understand this fact—but this was not a fact. What was it? The guy who put a gun in his mouth and shot himself in the portable shifter, buddies who lost hands and legs, little kids dancing around cars with rotting corpses inside, shouting, "Bush! God Is Great! Bush!”—anybody could understand these events as information. But these events were not information. What were they? He tried to think what they were and felt like a small thing with a big thing inside it, about to break the thing that held it. He looked out the window for relief. There was a marsh going by, with soft green plants growing out of black water, and a pink house showing between some trees. House stood for home, but home was no relief. Or not enough. When he came home, his wife told him that the dog he’d had since he was sixteen was missing. Jack had been missing for weeks and she hadn’t told him. At least six times when they’d been on the phone and he’d asked, “How’s Jack?” she’d said, “He’s good.”

“Hey,” said the little guy. “You sure this a river?”

“Positive.”

Positive. She said she didn’t tell him about Jack because he had only a few weeks left and she wanted him to stay positive. Which was right. They both agreed it was important to stay positive. And so she’d said, “He’s good,” and she’d said it convincingly, naturally He hadn’t known she was such a good liar.

“The reason I’m asking is, it looks too big to be a river. A lake is always going to be bigger than a river. I remember that from school. The river leads to the lake; the river is the arms and legs of the lake. Only thing bigger than the lake is the ocean. Like it says in the Bible, you know what I’m saying?”

Bill didn’t answer because the smell of shit and garbage was up in his nose. The feel of sand was on his skin, and he had to try not to scratch it, or rub it in public like this crazy ass would surely do. Funny. The crazy ass—he should have some idea of what it was like, even if he was just supply But even if he did, Bill didn’t want to discuss it with him. All the joy you felt to be going home; how

once you got home you couldn’t feel it anymore. Like his buddy whose forearm had been blown off, who still felt his missing arm twitch—except it was the reverse of that. The joy was there, almost like he could see it. But he couldn’t feel it all the way He could make love to his wife, but only if he turned her over. He could tell it bothered her, and he didn’t know how to explain why it had to be that way Even when they lay down to sleep, he could relax only if she turned with her back to him and stayed like that all night.

“But that don’t look like the arm or the leg. That look like the lake. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Bill looked out the window and put on his headset. It was Ghostface Killah, and he turned up the volume—not to hear better, but to get his mind away from the smell and the feeling of sand.

Like it says in the Bible, you know what I’m sayin > The white guy across the aisle laughed when he heard that, a thick, joyless chuckle. Puerile, thought Jennifer Marsh. Like a high school kid. Probably racist, too. Jennifer had marched against the war. She didn’t know any soldiers; she had never talked to any. But she was moved to hear this guy just back from war, talking so poetically about rivers and lakes. I should reach out to him, she thought. I should show support. I’ll get up and go to the snack car for potato chips, and on the way back, I’ll catch his eye.

The idea stirred Jennifer, and made her a little afraid. Afraid that he would look at her, a middle-aged white woman, and instantly feel her to be weak, artificially delicate, a liar. But I’m not weak, thought Jennifer. I’ve fought to get where I am. I haven’t lied much. Her gaze touched the narrow oval shape of the soldier’s close-cropped head, noticing the quick, reactive way it turned from aisle to window and back. Sensitive, thought Jennifer; deli-

cate, and naturally so. She felt moved again; when the soldier had stood to shake hands with the guy across the aisle, his body had been slim and wiry under the ill-fitting clothes. He looked strong, but his strength was wiry and tensile—the strength of a fragile person made to be strong by circumstance. His voice was strange, and he blurted out certain words with the harshness of a sensitive person trying to survive the abrading force of the world.

Sec me comiri (blaow!) start runnin and (blaow! blaow!) ... Phantom limb, phantom joy. Music from the past came up behind Ghost’s words; longing, hopeful music. Many guys have come to you... His son, Scott,
^:
had been three when he left; now he was nearly five, healthy, good-looking, smart, everything you would want. He looked up at his father as if he were somebody on TV, a hero, who could make everything right. Which would’ve been great if it were true. . . t| With a line that wasn't true . . .“Are you going to find Jack tonight, Daddy?” asked Scott. “Can we go out and find him tonight?”.1. And you passed them by...

“The lake is bigger—but wait. You talkin’ ’bout the ocean?”

Jennifer’s indignation grew. The soldier’s fellow across the aisle was deliberately ignoring him and so, stoically adjusting to being ignored, he was talking to himself, mimicking the voice of a child talking to an adult, then the adult talking back. “The ocean is bigger than the lake,” said the adult. “The ocean is bigger than anything.”

He hadn’t meant to look for Jack; the dog was getting old, and if he hadn’t come back after two weeks, he must be dead or somewhere far away. But Wanda had done the right thing and put up xeroxed flyers all over their town, plus a town over in every direction. He saw Jack’s big bony-headed face every time he went to the post office or the grocery store, to the gas station, pharmacy, smoke shop, office supply, department store, you name it. Even driving along back roads where people went for walks, he glimpsed Jack s torn, flapping face stapled to trees and telephone poles. Even though the pictures showed Jack as a mature dog, he kept seeing him the way he was when he got him for Christmas nine years before: a tiny little terrier, all snout and paws and will to chew shit up. He greeted Bill every day when he came home from school; he slept on his bed every night. When Scott was born, he slept in front of the crib, guarding it.

Jennifer tried to imagine what this man’s life was like, what had led him to where he was now. Gray, grim pictures came half-formed to her mind: a little boy growing up in a concrete housing project with a blind face of malicious brick; the boy looking out the window, up at the night sky, kneeling before the television, mesmerized by visions of heroism, goodness, and triumph. The boy grown older, sitting in a metal chair in a shadowless room of pitiless light, wait-ing to sign something, talk to somebody, to become someone of value.

The first time he went out to find Jack, he let Scott go with him.

But Scott didn’t know how to be quiet, or listen to orders; he

would suddenly yell something or dart off, and once Bill got so mad that he thought he’d knock the kid’s head off. So he started going out alone—late, after Scott and Wanda were in bed. They lived on a road with only a few houses on it across from a stubbly I field and a broken, deserted farm. There was no crime and every- I body acted like there could never be any. But just to be sure, he took the Beretta Wanda had bought for protection. At first, he carried it in his pocket with the safety on. Then he carried it in his hand.