Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  Standing on the ground above the ditch were thirty or forty uniformed police officers. Nearly half of these had pulled their pistols from their holsters. An officer in the center Francis could not see yelled something in Korean and the men in the ditch began to drop their shovels and climb out and stand, breathing hard and sweating, in front of the police. The sun was in their eyes, many of them squinting, and Francis could see boys fourteen, fifteen years old, standing beside men who could be their fathers or uncles or grandfathers. Another shout in Korean, and all three hundred boys and men turned to face the ditch they’d just dug. From where he sat behind the wheel beside Captain Hunt, Francis’s heart a high hum in his chest, he could see three shovels leaning against the opposite wall of the ditch, left there with the hopes of returning shortly to work. And before Francis could turn away or shut his eyes, the first policeman stepped forward, raised his side arm, and shot a boy in the back of his neck. There was a spray of blood from the boy’s throat, and his body collapsed like an empty sack, Francis throwing up half into his lap, half onto the ground. But with the sound of his own retching came dozens and dozens of pistol reports, the click and rewind of Captain Hunt’s Retina, clicking and rewinding, clicking and rewinding, and Francis despised him, but not nearly as much as he despised himself for sitting there wiping his mouth and glancing toward the ditch once again. Fewer than half the men, maybe a hundred, still stood, their shoulders hunched, many of them having soiled themselves. There was more Korean shouting, then the surviving Bodos climbed down into the ditch and began pulling bodies one on top of the other before grabbing shovels, many of which they had to jerk from under the newly dead, then they climbed over the mound of dirt on the opposite side of the ditch and began to shovel it in.

  “Fuck it, Brandt. Think of it as a turkey shoot.”

  These were Captain Hunt’s actual words, but in Francis’s dreams over the years he does not allow—as Francis did in life—the good captain to just leave it there. Instead Francis engages him in debate. But it is the older Francis doing it, the one who survived the war and went on to college and became a reader and a teacher, a man who for years and years drank too much until he quit though he would never use the term cold turkey. He avoided that word whenever he could, and while as a kid he’d enjoyed its stringy, salty meat, he’s never eaten it since. In his dreams he convinces Captain Hunt that what they are doing is morally obscene, that they’re American soldiers, goddamnit. Americans.

  But there is no convincing Captain Hunt, no dissuading the other American officers sitting in other Jeeps either, and so in some dreams Francis is the one grabbing his M2 carbine in the backseat. He is the one sprinting toward the ditch and firing at the South Korean police until they all lie dead on the ground, their Bodo captives turning to him, grateful and alive. Or, in other dreams, Francis is aiming his weapon at the SKPs, squeezing the trigger, and nothing happens and he has to fight them by hand and he always loses. More than once he is tossed into the ditch of the dead, and more bodies fall onto him, smothering him, then there are the scrapes of shovels and the taste of cool dirt in his mouth and throat and he tries to open his eyes but he cannot.

  For sixty-two years, his dreams have returned him to that day in July under the South Korean sun, and his dream-mind has always made things different for him. But not this morning’s. Today he woke from a dream of what precisely happened—no changes, no wish fulfillment. Simply what happened. Which is that young Francis William Brandt was a passive witness to, and therefore an active participant in, a massacre.

  Francis clicks on the flames beneath the water kettle. He glances at the wall clock above the microwave. Two twenty-two. Devon should be here soon. On the table he’s laid out today’s lesson: Language Arts and Writing, Part I. Its focus is on grammar, mechanics, and punctuation, and the national GED website provided a sample letter purposely riddled with errors. It’s a letter to a finance company written by a young man just graduated from college and hoping to land his first job. An hour ago Francis wasn’t sure he should use it. In the letter, the young man (Jonathan Penn) lists all his academic and extracurricular achievements, including chess and varsity rowing, even volunteering for a hunger relief mission to Africa. Francis wondered about the logic of this kind of letter. Were the GED people in Washington hoping to inspire their high school dropouts to greater things? Or did it occur to them that perhaps most of the young men and women having to take the GED test had already given up on achieving very much? Why rub it in their faces?

  Francis thought of writing his own test letter, but it had always pained him to make mistakes, and he could not bring himself to do it. Correcting errors had been one of the primary joys of his teaching all those years. While his colleagues on a Friday afternoon groaned about the stack of essays that needed to be graded over their weekend, Francis looked forward to them. Maybe because he and Beth had never had children of their own. That may have been part of it; except for an occasional dinner party or afternoon of domestic errands, there never seemed to be anything very pressing to get to, and Francis looked forward to sitting in his upholstered chair in the living room, a two-inch stack of student essays on the lamp table beside him, next to that a cup of black coffee. He’d take his sharpened blue pencil between his fingers—never red; too admonishing—and he’d lift the first clipped or folded-together paper off the stack, and it was as if he were about to open a homemade gift from one of the hundred and ten kids he stood in front of five days a week.

  His colleagues would scoff at this, Rita Flaherty especially, who was six feet tall and wore heels. She favored purple skirts and purple sweaters and in her forties had let her hair go completely gray. She drank too much wine at night, lost her husband young, swore too much in the teachers’ lounge—“Bullshit, Mary, that Ramirez kid would shoot you in your fucking sleep.” She called Francis Frank because she thought Francis was too soft for him, a veteran of the Korean War, and at six feet five he was the only teacher or administrator taller than she, something she seemed grateful to him for, so once over a cold lunch at the Formica table in that windowless room, he’d told her what he felt about each essay a student wrote for his class, even the cynical ones, the ones that seemed written with one hand while the other was giving him and this school the finger, that these typed words were essentially gifts from inside them.

  “Oh, Frank, please. One in three hundred of these kids really gives a shit and you know that’s true.”

  He did not know that, and he told her so. But she waved him off and wiped egg salad from the corner of her mouth and stood to leave, always in a hurry, this tall purple-wearing, foulmouthed woman Francis missed more than any of the others. She retired two years after he did and last he’d heard she was living alone in a retirement community down in Tampa.

  The kettle begins to whine, then shriek. Francis switches off the flames beneath it and fills the carafe of teabags, the steam rising into his face and fogging his glasses. Devon will walk in with a diet drink from the 7-Eleven. She left the house this morning wearing black jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt, red headphones over her ears, that tiny blue stud lodged in her left nostril. Some mornings she also put three or four rings in her right ear and six or seven in her left, but today she’d inserted only one in each, perhaps because she had to work in the restaurant later, Francis didn’t know. There was so much he did not know: what it was she listened to all day and night behind those headphones; why she had the tattoo of a butterfly—deep blue and green with red veins in the wings—just above her right ankle; what she did most weeknights in her room, the door closed, as silent in there as if the room were empty; how it was her father, his nephew Charlie Brandt, could have lived fifty-seven years and still be acting like the reckless and selfish little shit he’d always been.

  Because his father, Francis’s older brother George, had given him everything, that’s why, never really made him work for it. Francis pulled off his glasses and began wiping the lenses with the hem of his shirt. His fing
ers and glasses were a blur, but he didn’t care. This morning’s visit to Pusan had pulled him backwards and now he could feel his brother as if he were standing behind him in the kitchen. George, gone now—twenty-one years, is that right? Twenty-one?—yes, because Francis had just turned sixty. Half the cake his colleagues had feted him with the day before was still wrapped in foil on the table in the teachers’ lounge, and Francis had been staring at it as he held the phone pressed to his ear and Beth delivered to him the news. A heart attack at the airport in Cincinnati. George, who’d always worked too long and hard and whose insurance business operated in seven states.

  The Depression had shaped George more than it had his younger brother. George had known their father William, for one. In the fall of 1932, the year Francis was born and George turned ten, their father lost his job with two hundred others at Cohen Shoes. He and all the rest knocked on the doors of the other mills in town—Zinger’s Hat Factory, Kaplan’s Soles, a ladies’ comb manufacturing shop down on River Street that years later Francis would work in himself as a twelve-year-old, all the machinery retrofitted to make aluminum rivets that were then trucked up to the Portsmouth and Bath shipyards, building naval destroyers to help destroy Hitler. But those first months of Francis’s life, his father and most of the men he knew had little luck anywhere. That winter a soup kitchen operated by the Young Men’s Christian Association opened its doors on Water Street every day at noon, and even if it was snowing or too cold out, the Brandts would walk down from Washington Square with other families, Francis bundled up and carried by his mother or father or even George, his brother used to tell him.

  They’d reach Essex Street, passing one shuttered mill after another, stepping under the iron trestle of the Boston & Maine Railroad. Less than a year later Francis’s father would hop that train in search of work. (Or at least that’s the story that was told forever afterward, that he was looking for work, that he did it for his family.) Perhaps, walking to that free meal with other families, their shame was lessened because they were all in the same situation and the families had chatted on their way downtown. Two months later, William Brandt (his friends called him Billy) would have to sell their house and move to his wife’s mother’s place on Ginty Street, and the four Brandts would share one room, George on a pallet on the floor, their mother and father in the narrow bed, Francis sleeping in the bottom bureau drawer lined with blankets. The house eventually became his, but for most of his eighty-one years, if Francis thought of his young family’s beginnings at all, he did not think of them sharing that bedroom; he saw his father running alongside a rolling, jolting freight car, tossing his cardboard suitcase into an open door, then leaping half-inside, his legs hanging out, his toes hitting one tie after another before he was able to lean in and pull himself up and into the darkness.

  And at age ten George went to work. He fired the boiler at the boxboard factory across the river, shoveling coal past its glowing iron doors. In the fall he picked apples in the wild orchard up on Hilldale and sold them out of a cart downtown. At twelve, tall for his age, he got work in the steam room at Cohen’s, a job few wanted but took anyway, steaming leather so it could be stretched for cutting. He did piecework at Fantini’s and ran a sole-stamping machine at Kaplan’s, and once the WPA was in full swing he worked with grown men pouring concrete sidewalks, laying brick walkways and side streets, then helping to build three bridges before the war broke out and he fought in France and Germany and came back in one piece and even then he’d been sending his army pay back home to their mother, this dour superstitious woman who’d raised Francis alone, who became a seamstress downtown and never married again, though Francis remembers a man, Bernie Donovan, Irish like her.

  They’d met in church, this bald man in a black frock coat who would sit with her in one of the two chairs on the porch. They would speak quietly, as if they each had intimate knowledge of a close friend in trouble and they did not wish to be rude. Sometimes he would laugh, but she would not. Perhaps she smiled. It was the only time she was truly pretty. She kept her red hair pulled back and up, and she never wore makeup, her eyebrows thick as a man’s, her eyes a glinting blue, her cheekbones a bit too sharp to be lovely. But it all softened when she smiled, and though he had no gift for telling a story or a joke, Francis worked hard to make that happen. Yet if he tried to impersonate someone—the iceman for one, a tall Italian whose shoulders dipped to the right even when he wasn’t lugging a block of ice—his mother would shake her head at him with a quiet urgency, as if what he was doing was being watched by someone powerful who would surely punish them all.

  Francis put his glasses back on. Things are clear again, everything he sees Beth’s. There’s the oak rack of spices hanging above the stove, each of the bottle caps labeled and facing out alphabetically: Anise, Basil, Coriander. There are her reading glasses hanging from their neck straps from a clip magnet on the side of the fridge, beneath that a reminder card for an appointment with the dentist that came and went without her. There is the yellow linen spread on the table. They bought it at a yard sale in South Carolina from an obese blind woman who’d told them that the tiny blue flowers etched into the cloth were hand-sewn and called African blue lilies. That was a good trip, and Francis was grateful to Beth for making him do it, to just get in the car and start driving. Why not? They were both retired. Were they just going to sit in their living room in front of the TV until they died? And Beth was different when they traveled; it was like watching one of her own flowers get more water, fertilizer, and sun, its stem straightening, its leaves opening. She’d sit in the passenger seat beside him, a map or guidebook on her lap, her glasses magnifying her eyes a bit too much, and she’d tell him the names of small towns just off the highway: Mooresville, Hickory, Cary, High Point. She’d read to him all the history she could find, and she’d want to take any exit that looked promising, though most of them looked good to her because of their numbers: 37, 13, 9. Or simply the names of towns, their very sounds. One was Joslin, a soft girl’s name, so they were both expecting to find a central green surrounded by clothing shops and a bookstore, maybe an ice cream parlor, pub, and café. Instead they found a stretch of strip malls and gas stations leading to an industrial park of squat cinderblock buildings surrounded by a high chain-link fence. At the paved entrance Francis turned their car around and headed back for the highway. Beth had shrugged and said, “They need a new name for that place.”

  Francis probably agreed, as he so often did with his wife, whether he agreed with her or not, but that detour to Joslin had done something to him, had flushed some black bird of regret from the brush; it was too much like something else.

  Back on the highway, Beth switched on the audiobook they’d been listening to, one of those novels set in the royal court of France with all its incest and adultery and bloodletting, and as the actor began to read once again, Francis knew what it was: driving into Joslin only to discover what they had was a bit too much like marrying Elizabeth Harrington only to discover what he had, that despite her work at St. Mary’s Hospital nursing the sick and injured, despite her dry wit at the restaurant dinners he would take her to, despite her green eyes that appeared warm and nothing like his mother’s, despite those soft-looking lips that smiled at any of his failed attempts to be funny, despite the way her body fit against his as they danced to a song on the jukebox or once a live jazz band at Benny’s in Boston, despite how much she seemed to admire his choice not to work for his brother in insurance but to teach instead, despite how tenderly they’d made love that very first time, how after she’d held his cheeks and looked into his eyes, hers welling up while he was still inside her, despite all these signs of only good things to come with Beth as his wife, what he had not seen, or had not allowed himself to see, was how critical she was of everything and everyone but herself.

  Last week Devon allowed her mother to visit just long enough to bring her more clothes. Marie stood in his living room taking in Beth’s stack of paperbacks beside
the sofa, her throw blanket draped over the hassock, a pair of her slippers on the floor beside it. His nephew’s wife is so much larger than she’s ever been, her sad and lovely features nearly lost in flesh, and she glanced at him with pity for his transparent grief. He could not say he did not feel grief, this dark empty corridor inside him he seemed to be wandering down alone, but what could he do with this other feeling? That after forty-three years of hearing nearly daily of his shortcomings, it was a welcome respite to be left alone? How could he say that since that sudden January evening of last year, what he felt now was a dumbstruck sense of freedom for which, daily, he felt the need to apologize?

  DEVON IS PAST the strip walking on the edges of lawns. Across the street is the ocean she doesn’t look out at, but right before she left The Whaler she glanced at it because the sun had just broken through the gray and the surf broke on the barrier rocks and she liked how they glistened. She’s thirsty and sweating. Her jeans feel sewn against her legs and crotch, and she just wants to take a shower and why did she tell Francis she’d study for that fucking test?

  In her head plays something soft. It’s that skinny British boy moving his fingers over his piano keys the way Sick would run her hair back away from her face. Devon hits shuffle till it’s the band from Las Vegas, the lead singer skinny too, and he always wears vests and string ties like cowboys and his songs are half-mad, half-sad, like he’s about to do something he’ll always, always regret but he can’t stop himself.