“How does anybody survive tattoos like that?” she said. “His neck and throat look like a chunk of sewer pipe.”
I couldn’t resist and turned my head. The man’s arms were too short for his torso, his throat tattooed with wraparound dragons, his dark hair greased and combed straight back, his biker vest and low-rider faded jeans and stomp-ass combat boots a message to the unwary. He swept up both Orchid with her purple-and-green hair and drooping eyelid, and Lindsey Lou with her pigtails and cowgirl clothes, as though they were collectibles he had won at a carnival.
He was a man I had never wanted to see again.
Jo Anne and I went into the cafeteria. The tables were crowded, with children running between them, the air filled with the smell of onions and chili and tamales and Spanish rice.
“That guy is staring at us,” Jo Anne said.
“Don’t look at him.”
“You know him?”
“No. Let’s get in line. You want a soda?”
“He’s coming over,” she said.
I pretended to wave at a union woman setting up a microphone on a stage, hiding my face behind my arm. Then I realized who I was waving to. “That’s Dolores Huerta,” I said.
“Who?” Jo Anne asked.
“Dolores Huerta. She cofounded the UFW with Cesar Chavez.”
“Hey, Broussard!” the man from the school bus called out.
We were trapped in the line. He was now just a few feet from us. I tried to keep my eyes on Dolores Huerta. Then he was inches away. His odor was a combination of garlic and beer and hair tonic and machine oil and maybe an attempt at soap and water; he was a man who carried his environment with him.
“Broussard, right?”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“You heard me. You’re Broussard?”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t remember me? I changed that much?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Jimmy Doyle. Seventh Division, Alpha Company, second platoon.” He leaned close to my ear and whispered, “Nine years ago, chasing nook and shooting gook.”
“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.”
“Summer 1953. You and that other kid from Texas were always together. See one, see the other.”
“Wish I could help you.”
“What is this, man? You blowing me off?”
“No, sir.”
He looked at Jo Anne. “He’s pulling my leg, right?”
“He’s not a leg-puller,” she said.
He took a comb from his back pocket and clawed it with two hands through the thickness of his hair, then examined the comb and returned it to his pocket, not once looking at me. “I think you’re calling me a liar, Mac.”
“Nope.”
He huffed air out of his nose. “What was the name of that kid? He was KIA or got grabbed the night the gooks broke through on us. It was a funny name. Like a sword or blood or something.”
“We’ve got to say good night, buddy,” I said.
“I got it,” he said. “It was Saber. Goofball Saber Bledsoe.”
“We’ve got to move along, Doyle,” I said. “That’s your name? Doyle, right? Nice meeting you.”
He surveyed the room, his face like a wax replica that had started to melt, his thoughts veiled. “Okay,” he said, as though he had just completed a conversation with himself.
“Okay, what?” I said.
“I give up.” He looked at Jo Anne. “Enjoy your evening, pretty lady. Your guy is a lucky man. Watch out for him. He’s a card.” He walked away and squeezed Lindsey Lou and Orchid against his hips, swinging them in the air.
“You never saw him before?” Jo Anne said.
“I might have.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“He’s buds with Marvin. At best, he’s hunting on the game reserve.”
“What was that army stuff?” she asked.
“Who wants to find out? His tats are a nightmare.”
She looked at me strangely. I thought I heard bugles in the hills, and wondered if they would ever cease. Through the back windows of the cafeteria, I could see electricity flaring on the horizon, like faraway artillery pieces silently lighting the bottom of the sky. I wanted the floor to split apart and swallow me alive and deliver me to a mythic garden between the Tigris and Euphrates when the world was only one day old and hung with fruit that had never been touched.
A boom of thunder rattled the windows, and a rush of wind slammed a side door into the wall and filled the room with the bright, cold smell of the storm. A solitary man was standing outside, his hooded slicker striped with rain. He pointed his finger at me and mouthed the word “you,” as would a medieval inquisitor.
I went after him, into the ferocity of the night, the dust blowing, the snowcaps in the mountains turning to tinfoil, the parked gas-guzzlers and battered pickups shuddering with the velocity of the wind. The hooded man was gone. I wondered if I had become delusional.
I went back into the cafeteria, my clothes drenched, unable to explain my behavior to Jo Anne. “Don’t worry about it, Aaron,” she said, placing her hand on my arm. “Maybe he was someone who wandered in from the highway.”
But there was no mistaking the apprehension in her eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
I DID NOT STAY over with Jo Anne. I not only felt embarrassed about chasing the man in the parking lot, I felt dishonest, even cowardly, about my encounter with the man named Jimmy Doyle. I was much like my father regarding those who seemed insatiable when it came to yesterday’s box score. I never knew anyone who despised war more than he. His best friend, a boy with whom he grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, was killed at my father’s side in a trench on the morning of November 11, 1918, the day the doughboys thought the war was over. My father would leave the room, even a bar, the center of his addiction and the love and ruination of his life, when his friends’ conversation turned to wars, past and present. He bore his friends no animus for their innocence, but he hated the Krupps and DuPonts of the world and the politicians who became teary-eyed and saccharine as they waved the flag and sent others to die in the wars they caused.
I despised the memories that lived inside me. I learned early in life that human beings are capable of inflicting pain on one another in ways that are unthinkable. I’m talking about a level of cruelty that has no peer among animals or the creatures of the sea. Once you witness it or, worse, participate in it, it takes on a life of its own, much like a virus finding a host. It burrows into your soul; it robs you of your sleep and clouds your days. Weevils feed at your heart, and innocence and joy become the province of others. You live in quiet desperation and wake each morning with an anvil upon your chest.
If there are those who would argue with this depiction, I suggest they ask a man with the thousand-yard stare what kind of images he is viewing on the other side of his eyes.
I thought about all these things when I went to bed that night, as though picking reptiles one by one out of a basket and letting them strike my face before replacing them in the basket. I woke at four a.m. and saw Cotton smoking on his bunk in the dark, and wondered if he was chasing Waffen-SS through the catacombs, stenciling their blood with his grease gun above the tombs of Paul and Peter. I saw Spud walk to the latrine in his skivvies, his flip-flops slapping. I heard the snoring of America’s undesirables up and down the row of bunks, then Spud’s flip-flops as he headed back to his bunk and possibly his dreams about the prostitutes he had to pay to sing in his ear.
I slept for another two hours, then sat on the edge of my bunk, shivering in the coldness of the dawn, aching for Jo Anne’s touch, wanting to smell her hair and kiss her hand and look into her eyes. I shaved and brushed my teeth and put on my clothes and went out the front door into the fog and the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves and the coffee Chen Jen was boiling down at the dining hall.
Then I saw Jo Anne walking toward me in the fog. I was sure I was losing my mind.
* * *
SHE WAS WEARING a cute cap and a pink gingham dress and a charcoal-gray suede jacket and robin’s-egg-blue tennis shoes without socks, as though she had pulled her clothes at random from a series of driers in a washateria. A thermos hung from one hand and a metal lunch box painted with the faces of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans hung from the other. “What’s going on, big boy?”
“What are you doing here?” I answered.
“Thought you’d like to take a ride.”
“Where?”
“My house. I have a present for you.”
“What’s going on, Jo Anne?”
She tossed me the thermos. It was heavy, and I barely caught it. “I’m going to straighten you out,” she said. “What do you think about that, Buster Brown?”
A dense white fog was rolling on the stream that ran through the center of Mr. Lowry’s property. I could smell the German browns and brook trout spawning inside the fog. They were the only trout that spawned in the fall, and the cold, fecund odor was of a singular kind, like a conduit into creation, the iridescent spray off the boulders so mysterious and lovely and improbable that I wondered if it was borrowed from a rainbow. Or maybe that was just the way I thought about things when I was with Jo Anne.
She opened the driver’s door of her car and threw the lunch box on the seat. “Daydreaming?” she said.
“What’s in the lunch box?”
“A scrambled-egg sandwich.”
She started the engine but didn’t put the transmission into gear. She ran her nails through the back of my hair. “You trust my driving?”
“Sure.”
“How about in other things?”
“Yes, I trust you in all things.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I had no idea what Jo Anne was up to. We drove down the dirt road through the fog and rumbled across the cattle guard. In a half hour we were at her house. The sun was orange, the wind cold, the sky blue. I had already eaten the sandwich and drunk half the coffee in the thermos. “Thanks for the breakfast,” I said.
“De nada,” she said, cutting the engine.
We went inside. Plyboard was still nailed across the back windows that were probably broken by Darrel. “What happened to the glazier?” I asked.
“He said he’ll get here when he gets here.”
Somehow the cavalier remark of the glazier made me angrier than the probability that Darrel Vickers had vandalized Jo Anne’s house.
“You have a number for this fellow?” I said.
“Get in the house and shut up,” she replied.
* * *
AFTER WE WERE inside, she locked the door and pulled down the shades. “Marvin and the school-bus gang have a way of showing up when they’re out of money,” she said.
“How about Henri?”
“He knows better than to come around.” She went into the sunporch. A painted canvas rested on her easel. “I don’t know how good this is or if you’ll be offended. But this is what I see when I look at you.”
I had never had anyone draw or paint me. Nor was I ever enthusiastic about having my photograph taken, not even for high school or college albums. Now I was looking at myself through someone else’s eyes rather than a camera lens. My face looked bladed, as though there were a sharpness in my soul, yet my expression was uncertain, perhaps expectant or distracted by a presence the viewer could not see.
In the background, a guitar was propped against a modest table with a portable typewriter on it, similar to the Smith Corona I had carried in my duffel for two years. A candle inserted in the neck of a wine bottle was burning on the table, the dried wax on the bottle like pieces of string tied with a series of knots. The mystery of the painting was not me, at least not directly. It was the candle flame that cast shadows on the back wall. The shadows were like the bars of a prison, only slanted.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.
“It’s a great compliment that you would paint me, Jo Anne.”
“What do you see there?”
“I’m not good at self-inventory.”
“You remember when I said you were a strange one?”
“I have to admit that stuck with me.”
“I was wrong. You’re not strange. You’re exemplary. You’re incapable of deliberately doing wrong. It’s not even a virtue with you. I think you were born full of goodness and have always remained that way.”
“Oh, Jo Anne, that means an awful lot to me, but—”
“If you say what I think you’re going to say, I’m going to hit you.”
“That’s definitely not necessary.”
She pushed me down in a chair. “Stay here. I’m going to bring us some more coffee.”
“How about it on the martial arts stuff?” I said at her back.
She ignored me and came back a few minutes later with the coffee on the tray, then put it on the floor and sat down in a straight-backed cane chair and seemed to lose her concentration. “I don’t know how to approach this, Aaron. The man you saw in the hooded slicker? He pointed and said ‘you’?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“Maybe he was telling me I was guilty of something.”
“A total stranger?”
“That’s what I felt.”
“You were in Korea, weren’t you?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“What was your friend’s name? The one who was with you?”
“Saber Bledsoe.”
“He was killed?”
“He was listed as MIA. There were four hundred POWs not accounted for after the war. Maybe they were moved across the Yalu and used in medical experiments. Maybe Saber was one of them.”
“Why are you hiding all this?”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” I said.
“You have to.”
“Wrong.”
“I’m not going to put up with this, Aaron,” she said. “You’re killing yourself, which means you’re killing me.”
I looked at the re-creation of my face on the canvas and the typewriter that never produced a publishable story and the burning candle that consumed itself in order to become a knotty pile of wax and the shadows that became prison bars.
“I didn’t mean to say that, Aaron.”
“Didn’t mean to say what?”
“About you killing me. You’re the only person in my life.”
“That’s not true. People love you.”
“But you’re the one. You know what that means, don’t you? When a woman says it?”
“I’m just the way I am, Jo Anne. There are things I can’t get out of my head. I think I’ll always be like that.”
“What things? The war?”
“It’s what I did in the war. Or rather, what I didn’t do.”
“Then say it.”
The metal band that had been my companion for many years was back in business. I don’t think I have described it adequately. It had a turnscrew on it and was operated by someone I never had the opportunity to see. But he was a master. I felt him turning the screw, crushing my skull, shutting down the flow of blood to my brain. My eyes were jittering.
“Maybe I bugged out.”
“You did what?”
“That means run for the rear. I was running, and an artillery round knocked the breath out of me. Saber was behind me. The Chinese were throwing grenades we called potato mashers. They’d clank them on their helmets to set the fuse, then throw them. But their flamethrowers were exploding the potato mashers before the fuses could. It was like being inside hell. I’d lost my steel pot and my rifle. I got up and started running again. I didn’t go back. I left Saber behind.”
I was weeping now, uncontrollably, my head down, my hands cupped like claws under my thighs.
“Aaron?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Aaron, listen to me.”
I saw her s
hadow on the floor, saw it come toward me and fall across my face and body. I felt her hand touch my head, then stroke my hair. “You’re brave now, and you were brave then. You didn’t desert your friend. You ran from the flames and explosions and probably certain death. You think your friend would have wanted you to do differently?”
I wiped my face on my sleeve. “I apologize.”
“Don’t say that. You’re the most kind and good man I’ve ever known. You don’t know how much you mean to me.”
I looked up at her. Her image was out of shape, her hair hanging forward, her mismatched clothes the most beautiful I had ever seen on a woman. She wrapped her arms around my head and pressed it against her breast and kissed my hair. “I love you, Aaron Holland Broussard. You’d better believe what I say.”
I don’t know how long I held her. But I know it was a very long time.
Chapter Eighteen
WE HAD LUNCH together, and that afternoon she went to work at the hamburger joint and I went back to the bunkhouse. I took my Smith Corona from under my bunk and set it on a small table by a window that gave good light throughout the day. I pulled a chair to the table and sat down and fed a piece of clean typewriter paper into the carriage and began typing. There is no more grand moment in a writer’s life than typing the first sentence of a new book.
“Whatcha doing?” a voice said behind me.
“Hello, Spud,” I replied, folding my hands in my lap. “What’s happenin’?”
He was wearing pressed slacks and a strap undershirt, a shaving mug in his hand, his hair wet and his body still glowing from a hot shower. “I’m going to a movie in town with Maisie and a couple of others. Wanna come along?”
“I’m picking up Jo Anne after she gets off work,” I said. “What happened to your face?”
“Miz Lowry put me to work trimming back her rosebushes.”
I nodded at the page in my typewriter. “I’d better get on it.”
“See you around,” he said. He whistled a tune down the hallway and into the latrine.
An hour later, I looked out the window and saw Wade Benbow’s unmarked car coming down the road. I rolled my paper out of the typewriter and placed it in a manila folder and set on top of it a rodeo buckle I used as a paperweight. I walked out to greet him, my hands in my back pockets, the sun warm on my skin. I wanted to freeze-frame the day and not let it grow one second older.
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