Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  He remembered the sun and the dirt road, and giant banyan trees on both sides. He and Peanut were at the front of the company with their headphones on, listening for clicks as they swept the road in slow arcs. Peanut’s walk was weird, off-balance. He stumbled forward and the ground exploded and things went black. Aaron woke up to Peanut screaming and rolling in the dirt with no legs. Big Boy tried to drag Peanut behind the jeep, but he got picked off, and then Aaron watched the company shot down one by one as they tried to save him—Dash and Gorey and on and on. Aaron tried to yell it was a trap, but no sound came out. The snipers shot Peanut last and it was quiet again. He remembered the hard tree roots pressing into his back, and the heaviness in his eyes. Stay awake, he thought, stay awake stay awake.

  But that day seemed far away to Aaron as he watched the hospital fan turn. Happening to people he used to know, distant like the body attached to his head. Things were OK. The only thing that wasn’t, that nagged at him through the haze, was the thought of Lacy out there not knowing that his heart was still beating and hers to keep.

  * * *

  “Morning, Private,” Maureen said gruffly. She busied herself between his legs. “We switched you over last night. No more strong stuff, just old-fashioned Tylenol now. You’ll be feeling more,” she said, wiping him down there with a moist towel. “You’ll tell me if you gotta go number two? You’ll help and call us when you get that feeling?”

  “Can I have your pen?” His face burned. “And paper?” She paused. Then she came around his left side and turned a page on her clipboard and settled it below Aaron’s hand. He gripped the pen, aching at its cumbersomeness. He raised his head as best he could and wrote Dear Lacy. Maureen sighed at the childish scrawl. Aaron’s eyes watered.

  “How’d you think you’d do that with your right arm in a cast, huh?” she scolded. “You’re a hero. No crying like a baby. Give it time.”

  “How am I supposed to write home,” he snapped, “to let her know I’m alive?”

  “Private Warner,” a voice boomed. A square-jawed officer stood at the foot of the bed. “Major Colin Hanford. Don’t worry about contacting your parents. My staff notified them by phone that you’re alive and receiving the honor that brings me here today. The United States Army has awarded the Purple Heart to you and Private William Gorey of your company—”

  “Gorey’s alive?” he rasped.

  “He’s doing fine. I’d present you with the medal today, but we’re holding a ceremony here at the hospital soon. Stay tuned.”

  “What’d they say?” Aaron asked. The officer furrowed his brow. “My parents?”

  “They said ‘thank you’ and—they said ‘thank you for calling.’ Rest up.”

  Aaron tried to sleep after the major left, but Maureen was right. He was sensing everything. Lysol and rotten smells. He was itchy under the casts and pain throbbed in his core, jangling a thousand new points in his hips. The once quiet air teemed with breathing. “Hey,” a voice called, “welcome to Special Surgery.” Aaron glanced sideways and saw a freckled ginger waving at him with a thumbless hand. Nineteen, tops. He scanned the room and counted maybe a dozen beds, bodies in traction or threaded with tubes. “They had you doped up for weeks,” said the voice. “I’m Rob.” And Aaron, who had always made friends as easy as breathing, pretended not to hear. Panic flooded his veins until gradually it subsided, leaving behind a cold residue. A whisper of nothingness ahead.

  In the afternoon Maureen said she had a surprise for him. Aaron shut his eyes and pondered how he ever could have mistaken her—an old bottle blond with ham-hock arms—for Lacy. “OK, look,” she said, returning a moment later. A black typewriter sat on a stool beside his bed. “Now you can write your girl and keep busy till the casts come off and we get you walking again.” She guided Aaron’s free hand to the keyboard, but he couldn’t reach, so she moved the stool and stacked books under the machine, but the keys were always just past his fingertips. “Mother of God,” she grumbled. “Hang on.” She came back and handed Aaron a chopstick. “You got it? Hit S for me? Do it,” she ordered. “Now L? Hit return? There you go.” She loaded a sheet of paper. “Call me when you’re done and I’ll mail it out.”

  At last Aaron began the task he’d pined for from the moment he returned to the living. But after all the waiting, his mind felt blank. Each keystroke was a shaky effort. An hour and three near drops of the chopstick later, he had typed:

  dear lacy, im alive in hispital in saigon. im ok, ten fingers and roes.

  write me at address on envelope. your loving aaron

  “Done?” Maureen asked later, on a round past his bed. She pulled the page from the typewriter. “This is it?” He nodded. “Well,” she muttered, “I’ll get it out today.”

  Aaron fell back on his pillow and rested his neck, sore from craning as he poked at the keys. He thought of their letters in the fall, toppling over each other in the mail. How he’d written her every day and found a place where he was still alive, where he could redraw the outline of himself that was breaking into dots. But the terror he’d been outrunning had finally caught up to him. A mummy trapped in a bed. He knew it in the cold sweats that woke him up at night. He was different now.

  He would lie in the darkness and think of who he once was. Because of all the things that returned to him—his mind, pain, shame at being wiped like a baby—the fire inside had not. He remembered the kid who left his redneck town and fought his way to UT, who pledged Sigma Nu with the rich sons of Dallas and Houston, who entertained them and drank with them and maybe someday would work with them and be rich too. He thought of the hours of study, politics, history, grinding toward grad school and, the minute the war was over, the foreign service. The intense new study when the deferment rules changed and he went premed, two years of bio and chem in one so he could apply by senior year and never risk getting sent to the jungle. Topped off by the Monday last spring, when he went to the post office after no response from ten med schools, not even rejections, and learned that a shipment of mail was lost right around the time he sent his applications. All that work, to save his own life, flushed down the drain by the US mail. He remembered the cold rage at his luck. The world laughing at him. He saw it all in a flash that day at the postal counter—how he would graduate and be drafted and rather die than give his dad the satisfaction of hearing he dodged.

  Aaron revisited these places at night, as he lay in the wheezing dark of Special Surgery. He marveled at the kid he used to be and mourned the flame that had burned in him. He thought of the escapes he’d imagined just a few years ago, and the dirtier trick the world had played on him—coming inside his mind and extinguishing it, so there was nobody left to escape. Aaron Warner. Not missing like a thing to be found, but dead.

  Then one morning he got his first letter in months. Lacy’s handwriting was bigger and bolder than before. Right when I gave up on miracles, she wrote, your letter comes? Do you know I blew a fuse on the army switchboard looking for you? Do you know I thought of you every night, and cried and dreamed your dream—the two of us, diplomat and scientist, saving the world? I have a list of questions a mile long, Aaron! What happened? When are you coming home? What can I do? Please tell me what I can do!

  Your Truest Love, she signed it, Aaron would remember until the day he died.

  He didn’t wipe away the tears. He let them run down his face in joy, and fear. Maybe he had no fire or a family who cared if he lived or died, but he had Lacy. He couldn’t lose the one good thing in his life. If she still wanted the diplomat, he’d have to fake it. Anything Lacy wouldn’t want, the broken, unworthy things inside him, she didn’t need to know and he wouldn’t write them down. i have to keep this short, Aaron typed in his next letter, with the chopstixk and all. we hit a mine, company mostly dead, im in casts but will walk and be fine, pls tell me aboit you, how is school?

  And with this they resumed their pattern of daily letters, hers in pages of chatty script and his in a few terse lines. Lacy wrote that she
was leaving her program to teach at a private school in Houston, which was a good thing in its own way, and did Aaron think a lot about the day he was injured? i lost my partner on that mission, he typed a few days later. Aaron didn’t mention his recurring dream of Peanut screaming get my legs! or the guilt he bore, knowing Peanut had been snorting heroin cut with Saigon’s garbage ever since he tripped that first dud a while back, but having no idea what to do about it. so, Aaron typed in closing, leaving the phd? before you get your patent? good for you but good how?

  Lacy wrote that the pay was generous, and believe it or not she wasn’t one of those girls burning bras at Miss America, and even with her degrees maybe she wondered about living on her own, not in her mom’s house or some man’s, so good in that way, a new challenge. welcome to the wirkforce, Aaron typed, you will be a great teacher. so much i want to tell you when im out of my casts. But Aaron didn’t put into words his strongest desire, to be enveloped in her safety. To have someone take care of him, plug the hole inside and love him. Aaron had always sensed Lacy’s safety. Not just her soon-to-be-generous pay, but her background. The stationery with her initials on top, her brother’s Stingray, or the way she wrote—a way no one did from an average farm, so Aaron knew what kind of business her family must have owned.

  When will you be out of your cast? Lacy wrote. soon a week or two, he typed, im excited to walk. He didn’t tell her the former running back might have a limp. She wrote how wonderful it was that he’d come home intact and have a future, didn’t he think? Aaron knew the truth about the future but couldn’t share it: that it was a myth once you looked chaos in the eyes, saw a dozen men die taking a Vietcong road, only to find the next day it’s been replanted with Australian mines. Things didn’t move forward. Destruction in circles, yes, but no future. Still, when he dreamed of himself lying on the roots of a banyan tree, a helpless child in an enemy land, someone did reach out her hands to lift him up. It was Lacy.

  when i come home, Aaron typed, i want to meet you.

  * * *

  Albino raisin. It was his first thought when the doctor sawed off his casts and exposed his shriveled limbs. “Daylight’s wasting,” Maureen said as soon as he was free, working a pair of scrubs up his legs in no time. “Got to get you on your way.” She swung him around, angled crutches under his armpits, and hoisted him to his feet. Aaron gasped and fell back onto the bed, clutching his hips in shock. “Oh, Mr. Baby.” Maureen sighed. “Fine. A pain pill to tide you over, but we’re going for a walk today. We are winning this war. You’re not going home in a box, and not in a chair either if I have any say. You’re a lucky one, so set an example.”

  Lucky. For weeks this was her refrain on their walks around the hospital, no matter what Aaron lobbed at her. He had no filter. At first he yelled it was a sick joke, and he could barely feel his legs so what the hell were they doing? “You’re lucky you got them at all,” she would mutter, balancing him with a squeeze to his stringy biceps. But the more weight he put on his legs, the more he felt things inside them, odd pressures, objects that he bellowed at Maureen for the doctors to remove. “You’re a survivor,” she said, unfazed. “Those pins are a point of pride to some men.” Aaron was left to distract himself from his woes. He focused his mind on the heat of Maureen’s body and her smell, of talcum and old-woman sweat. On many walks he yearned for his casts again, and all they had kept at bay—the proximity and contact.

  Do you wear perfume? he wrote Lacy when he was strong enough to sit up and use a pen. Other parts of him were sitting up too, and he sorely wished she’d sent that photo of herself before he got blown up. I wear Chanel No. 5, she replied a few days later, do you like it? That was all she wrote. Her first and only short letter. Aaron checked the envelope to be sure, and his heart nearly stopped. Inside he found a sweet-smelling picture of Lacy Adams. Black hair to her shoulders, curled out at the bottom. Smoky eyes with a hint of defiance, full lips and cheeks, but the cheekbones—almost a Mexican shape going on in her face. For the rest of the day Aaron looked at her, and kissed her, and put her away and repeated it again, waiting for cover of night.

  The next morning, as Aaron studied the photo with exciting new memories, Maureen led Major Hanford into the ward. “Amazing,” he said, approaching Aaron’s bed with a smile. “A new man, Private Warner. Healed and on your feet, I hear.”

  “Soon, sir.”

  “Very soon. Next week is the Purple Heart ceremony. Two public affairs officers will be there to take your photo and get some background information.”

  “My photo?” Aaron asked.

  “There are naysayers back home, Private,” the major explained, “saying this battle isn’t worth the price, and we don’t have what it takes. What better way to change hearts and minds than a story like yours? A young man broken head to toe, who survives to stand for God and country.”

  “We’re winning this war,” Maureen interjected.

  “With men like Warner we are.” The major looked Aaron over. “And when you get back home? Have you thought about it?”

  “I’m just thinking about my next walk,” Aaron said.

  “Complete the mission, right, Private? See you next week.”

  The major wasn’t the only one talking to Aaron about his plans. Hardly a day went by that Maureen didn’t remind him of how many soldiers never left, or never left the same, so how would he use his second chance? Lacy set in on him too. Are you going back to school when you get home? she asked once. He ignored it. But letter after letter she kept at it with the questions, in passing at first, until she pressed right on the button. Did he need more school to take the foreign service exam? He’d mentioned med school once—did he want to be a doctor in the service? I’m thinking about a lot of things for when I get back, Aaron wrote eventually. But he only thought of one thing, truly, one devouring numbness that he couldn’t tell her about, that whispered, we’ll all be dead soon, and no one, not even Lacy, could tell him a single thing he could do with his life now that would matter in the least.

  One afternoon Aaron got two letters, the usual from Lacy and another from Ernest Warner, stamped in Midland, Texas, a week before. He opened the letter from his dad—the first one he’d gotten since he deployed. Dear Private Warner, he’d written, We didn’t expect to hear you’d be coming back, the way this war is going, but we are so very glad you’re alive and we salute you. There’s a job waiting for you here in Midland if you want it. Two veterans working side by side could make a real go of it, swapping stories and making money. Keep in touch.

  He opened Lacy’s next. Her voice seemed different, sad maybe. She was graduating two weeks from Thursday, she wrote, but she hadn’t told her family. What’s the point? Days like that never turn out to be what you imagine, anyway, as happy or the big deal you want. But she’d be thinking of him when she turned her tassel, like she had been all year.

  Aaron felt a vague stirring inside him, almost forgotten, to get up and go and do.

  By the morning of the ceremony, he could walk for ten minutes and stand in place for fifteen. He dressed himself slowly but without assistance. When Aaron was ready, Maureen nodded soberly and escorted him without touching to the hospital courtyard. Aaron stepped into the sunlight and thought of Gorey, the only other guy left who was there that day, and wondered where he redeployed and if he was still alive. Aaron lined up with a bunch of strangers. Somebody talked into a megaphone about sacrifice, and the major went down the row and pinned medals to their chests. Aaron stood up as straight as the rods in his legs. The PR men took photos. One of them asked Aaron, what was the first thing he was going to do when he got back to the USA?

  “A surprise,” Aaron said. “You can print that.”

  * * *

  The speeches were over. Graduation had wound down to a blur of names. Lacy stood in cap and gown, waiting at the edge of the stage to be called. She thought of school ending, her world changing, and smiled tightly to control the doubts flickering within—whether she should have fough
t harder to stay in the program, or if her dreams were too big to begin with. At the sound of her name, she held her breath and crossed the stage. Professor Wallace took her hand a moment before presenting her diploma. “A tremendous mind,” he said, smiling wistfully. Lacy opened her mouth, trying to find a sound for all the mixed-up thoughts running through her brain, when she got a nudge from behind. It was the next guy’s turn.

  She descended the stage and wandered through the hubbub. Soon the families would go to lunch, laughing and quibbling together. She would go to her dorm and pack. A man waved at Lacy—for a second she thought she knew him—and asked her to take a picture. Lacy counseled three generations to move in closer, and snapped a photo. She felt so old that morning looking in the mirror, going on twenty-four, but handing the camera back she had a premonition of how long life could be. It struck her that the grudge that had separated her from her family the past few years had become something definite. A milestone missed. And it turned out Lacy wasn’t as good at congratulating herself as she hoped.

  Wallace found her in the crowd and asked when she was leaving for Houston. Tomorrow she’d be out of his hair forever, she replied with a faint smile. As he said goodbye, Lacy noticed someone behind him, watching. A tall, handsome man, gaunt-faced, in jeans and a white T-shirt. His golden hair buzzed down to chick fluff and his square jaw covered in stubble. His blue eyes never strayed, and when Wallace left he started toward her. She caught a slight limp in his stride and knew for sure. It was the impossible, standing before her. The love she read about in books. She was flooded with care and relief at a vigil ended. And desire.