The first place he entered was the drugstore where, seated up at the counter, he saw the girl he knew he wanted to spend everything on – all the money he’d saved, the time he’d accumulated, the love he’d never been able to give away. Her name was Irene and she was in her last year at high school. Her parents wanted her to go to college like her brothers and sister but luckily she was more excited by the idea of getting married and having kids. It wasn’t that she was unintelligent or anything like that. She was smart enough to have gone through college without any trouble. In all the summer jobs she’d had, she’d been the first to be praised and given promotion. She just wanted the real things instead of studying. And she’d always known that. Even when she was a child, she said to him, she always knew what she wanted.
He told her that finding her was a miracle. Their life together was going to be like the dream he’d had a long time ago: of all the traditional, old-fashioned things that go with a married life, including the part about how they live happily ever after.
He was ready to put down roots that would anchor a solid family life for at least five generations. He was feeling strong enough to last that long himself.
She wanted children as much as he did; she understood procreation to be a sign of success. Everything was decided between them with such speed that many members of her family didn’t have time to get to the wedding. Irene didn’t care. ‘We can have all the parties later,’ she said.
*
No one had told her how painful childbirth would be nor how exhausting the chores of motherhood could become. Repeated achievement diminished her urge to complain. Instead, she simply demanded extra help.
His idea was that someone else should take care of the children, since they were what had caused all the changes. She said no: she’d look after the kids and he could hire somebody to cook, clean, wash, iron and vacuum. She wasn’t going to become a bad mother just because he couldn’t boil water without some woman standing at his elbow, telling him how. The kids were the most important part of the family. If it weren’t for them, she’d probably let Raymond Saddler have her great-great-grandfather’s land without putting up a fight.
‘What land?’ he asked.
‘Oh, it’s such a long story. It started with Aunt Posie – my great-aunt Posie.’
That was how – when they’d already been married for over two years and she was expecting her third child – Irene let him know that if she had had her rights, she’d have an inheritance to pass on to their children. A long-dead ancestress named Aunt Posie had been cheated out of her family share by her own brother and by the time her descendants could prove that it should have gone to her, everything had landed up with some cousins named Saddler, who weren’t about to give anything back to anybody, not till Hell froze over and probably not even then.
The now distant quarrel in his own family was replaced by the dispute with her cousins. There always had to be something that wasn’t right. You couldn’t escape from it. The last time he’d tried to get out of a family mess, it wasn’t long before he’d ended up in a war.
*
The man in the bed opened his eyes and couldn’t figure out where he was. No sound came to him. The quiet was as deep as if time had stopped. He could see the color of the sky, which seemed to indicate a kind of twilight. It might have been late afternoon or early morning: it was hard to tell. He couldn’t be sure of anything. He thought that he might have lost his mind.
‘Lost your mind?’ his father used to shout at him. ‘Well, go back and get it.’ His father had spent a lot of time yelling at him but he’d also taught him things: how to hunt, how to shoot and how to kill animals. When the military trained him to kill people, nobody had had to shout at him. The principle was the same and he was already an expert.
He closed his eyes and he disappeared.
Sometime later he was awake, looking at a window and still not knowing what time it was or even what city he was in. Or which country.
Doctors and nurses came to his bed. They stuck needles and thermometers into him. They held his wrist and put the stethoscope on him, took measurements and wrote down the numbers in notebooks or on papers held in a clipboard. Apparently they planned to do something with him. He was washed but not fed. They never gave him anything to eat, yet he wasn’t hungry. How could that be?
They’d stuck pins and little tubes all over him. He lay there in the bed like a large devil-doll. The thought came to him that he wasn’t the real one: he was standing in for the original, whose name was …
He began to feel frightened. A nurse came to the side of his bed.
‘Take it easy, hon,’ she said. ‘What can I get you?’
Out in the hallway a conversation stopped. Then, a woman’s voice said, ‘Hey, he’s talking.’
‘What name are you writing down there?’ he asked.
‘Your name is Oliver Sherman.’
It sounded slightly familiar but not right.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure. It says right here.’ She gestured towards the information board at the foot of the bed.
When she’d gone, he thought that he’d crawl down to the end of the bed and take a look for himself. But as soon as it dawned on him that he’d have to start untaping all the little plastic pipes they’d put on him, he realized that he was too tired to make it. He went to sleep again instead.
His name wasn’t Oliver Sherman. It turned out that – in a combined effort of military and hospital bureaucracies – most of the information about him had been reversed, including his name, which was really Sherman Oliver. But for quite a while he thought of himself the other way around. And sometimes he’d imagine himself with the name Sherman Oaks because that sounded like something he’d heard before, maybe a kind of tree.
He began to think that he’d died and gone to a place where you lived on until they decided to move you to some other form of afterlife: from medical to legal, scientific, chemical, horticultural. One day he thought That’s it, we’re going to be put into pots and grown into something else. That’s why they’re studying us.
When they moved a man named Beech into the ward, the idea of trees and gardens became additionally confused. He told Beech, ‘I think we’re all going to be grown in pots, so we can be planted.’
Beech said, ‘That’s for sure. That’s what’s waiting for every one of us. They plant us six feet deep and we don’t send up no flowers. We just stay put.’
At night the war came back: he went through everything again. And then, after a few months, it left him. He couldn’t remember at all for a while. When it began again, the recollections played themselves out in all kinds of different ways. In one version he rescued Franklin instead of the other way around; in the next, a woman called him into the field to help her and then made love to him while the gunfire started up all around them; and in another, his father came into the firing zone to save him and he refused to be moved – he told him to go away and, as he did, his father lifted up his head and was caught by a stray shot. He remembered crawling out to safety by himself, laboriously. And also staying there, burrowing down into the ground.
He would never have believed that he was making these things up. And to have a doctor hint that he might be engineering fake memories for himself was infuriating. In fact, when a clean-cut numbskull in a white coat suggested as much, he leaned forward and simply told the man: ‘Say that again and I’ll kill you.’ Then he asked, ‘What are you here for, anyway?’ And he followed the question with a string of obscenities that wouldn’t have upset a child – not even a maiden aunt. But the doctor stopped writing notes and Sherman knew that that was because after his outburst, they only needed one word on the paper: violent.
What wasn’t violent? Men, women, water, fire, earth; all the seasons of the year, even the ones that seemed the sweetest. Anything that had movement had the potential. Whatever was living was bound into the pattern. It was like what the Bible said: there was a time for everything. When the
time for violence came around, violence was what you did.
The doctors and nurses were supposed to be making him well. But what was the point? They were the ones who had the say. He didn’t want to survive unless he could come back as the one in charge. For the rest of his life he wanted to feel the way he felt when he was squeezing the trigger.
Nothing else was like it: the perfect moment when you hit the target. At first it was tin cans, then groundhogs, which they called whistling pigs; and in the hunting season deer, wild turkey, grouse. He’d thought that when he went into the service, life would be like that. Sometimes it was, but mostly you didn’t see much. You aimed at a place, not a person. Now he had nothing to aim for, not even a place.
Most of the time, when he was thinking the right way around, memory was like the tide coming back into a stretch of mud flats: stirring everything up again, raising the decaying, rotting material from its bed to where it could flow freely, flooding through every new, clean and cherished place and making it too begin to rot.
When he wasn’t thinking the right way around, it was worse. Sometimes he thought that they’d fixed him up the way he should be but they’d put him back into the wrong person. And he wanted to get out.
He lost a couple of years. It was surprising how fast it could happen; you close your eyes, you blink and there you are: in another place and it’s later. It’s later than you think. Who used to say that? Someone he knew once – maybe somebody in his family.
He hung around the bars. One day he drank himself into such a state that the next day the only thing in his head was: Why am I here? Why do I have to go on with this, year after year? It’s going to take so long to get to the end. If somebody could show me where the exit door is, I’d go through it right now.
Later in the day he recalled the reason why he was there: because some guy had saved his life – Frank somebody. What was his name? And what was he doing now? Where did he live?
He began to ask around. It took him a long time until he got all the information assembled, knew where to go and bought himself a bus ticket. Before buying the ticket, he took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it into the air for a decision, catching it and slapping it down against the back of his left hand.
When he got off the bus, there was no way to go on to where Franklin lived unless you hired a car. He took out the coin again and spun it high into the air.
He walked. After a couple of hours a farmer stopped to offer him a ride.
They drove up into high land, over a mountain and down, into rich bottom land, across a couple of hills and down again.
The farmer let him off by a big oak tree where the road forked.
He felt good as he walked the rest of the way. He kept thinking: This is fine-looking country. I wouldn’t mind living here.
He arrived in the late afternoon, not long after Franklin had come home from work.
He went around to the back and pushed the button next to the screen door.
Franklin was standing inside, only a few feet away and looking out through the screen. He didn’t recognize the man on the other side, although he knew that it must be a stranger standing there, otherwise the man would have called out: it was easy to see that the family was at home.
Franklin stepped up to the screen and said, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ Sherman answered.
‘Are you looking for me?’
‘If your name’s Franklin Page. I recognize you, too. I’m Sherman Oliver.’
‘Oh?’
‘The man you rescued. You know. In Korea.’
‘Jesus,’ Franklin said. He opened the door.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to see somebody from the past.’
‘Come on in.’
‘So I tossed a coin.’
‘Come on. You’ll let the flies in.’
Sherman stepped through the doorway and into a space where coats hung from hooks and rubber boots stood in pairs on the linoleum floor. Straight ahead was the kitchen. ‘So,’ he mumbled, ‘just thought I’d look you up.’
When two of the children raced into the kitchen, followed by Irene, Sherman stood completely rigid. He’d pictured Franklin living alone, not having moved on to another life or other people. He’d thought of him as being a kind of mirror-image of himself. The first sight of him, through the meshes of the screen and standing in the same attitude as himself, had seemed to correspond to that idea. Now everything was changed.
Franklin made the introductions. He showed Sherman to a bathroom where he told him he could freshen up if he wanted to, and then took him back to the kitchen and sat him down at the table. All the time Franklin was talking, the children kept running everywhere.
‘Can we offer you a beer, Mr Oliver?’ Irene asked.
‘Oh, sure. Maybe just one.’
‘Make it Sherman, honey,’ Franklin said. ‘Sherman and Irene.’
One of the children started to wail and grabbed at Irene’s legs. She put a beer down on the table and said, ‘There you are, Sherman.’
He thanked her, without looking up. He still couldn’t believe that she was there. This wasn’t Franklin’s house and Franklin’s life: it was hers. And here she had all these children and she looked just like a girl – like a high-school sweetheart.
She poured out another glass and handed it to Franklin. ‘Aren’t you having one?’ he asked.
‘I’ll wait till later. Sukie’s coming over to get her tomatoes and I’ve got to feed the kids. Why don’t you take Sherman into the living room, where you can hear yourselves think? Pixie, honey, you put that back, now. That isn’t good for you.’
Franklin stood up and motioned Sherman to follow. They moved to the living room, where Sherman’s speech was so slow and stumbling that Franklin – remembering how the last time he’d seen him, Sherman had had part of his head blown in – felt obliged to talk and talk. And he asked Sherman to stay over for ‘a couple of days’, to rest up.
Irene didn’t seem to mind. Sherman didn’t really look like the kind of person she was used to associating with, but she knew how long it could take before a man was able to digest the kind of experience he was likely to meet with under fire. He looked like an old-time prospector: the beat-up hat, the old boots, the beard that wasn’t an intentional, trimmed affair but rather a few weeks’ growth that would be shaved off when the thought occurred to him, and then grown again when he forgot about taking care with his appearance. She knew that he’d been wounded and – even before Franklin explained it to her – she knew who Sherman was. She also knew almost immediately what he was like. But she made him welcome for Franklin’s sake. After feeding the children, putting them to bed and serving a meal for the three of them, she joined the conversation. ‘So,’ she asked. ‘How did you get here?’
‘Walked,’ Sherman said.
‘Walked? But it’s miles.’
‘Well, I lost my license a while back. Took the bus to … um … other side of the mountain, there.’
‘You must be tired.’
‘Not specially. I used to walk a lot. Been through all the national parks. That’s wild country. I liked that.’
‘I’d have liked to do that, too,’ Franklin said. ‘Maybe later, some time. We could go camping with the kids. When they’re a little older.’ He smiled at Irene, who said, ‘You think I can cook and do the laundry for six people out in the Rockies someplace? Oh, that reminds me. Sherman, if you let me have your denim jacket, I can put it into the wash and hang it out on the line with Frank’s dungarees.’
Sherman nodded, his glance sliding away. ‘Sure. Thanks,’ he muttered.
Later that night Franklin took him out for another drink. He’d sized Sherman up as a man who was no good at mixing with other people so, instead of dropping in at one of the places where he might be caught up in talk with acquaintances, he chose a bar he didn’t know well.
Without Irene to help, he found it hard to make Sherman loosen up. The man tended to exude a morose withdrawal from the w
orld until the time when a sarcasm or criticism would come out of him. Franklin reported on the general direction his life had taken since the war; then he got down to the details. The catalogue of events went on and on: talking too much was the form his discomfiture had taken. At last he said, ‘Well, you know about me. I guess just meeting Irene and the kids tells you everything. I had to work like hell to begin with: I went back to school, got through college. I met her after that. She was still in high school but I knew right away, the first time I saw her; she was the girl I was going to marry.’
‘I guess you’ve got it made,’ Sherman said. ‘A wife and kids like we used to talk about. Like we used to dream about.’
‘No, we didn’t. We used to sit around and have bull sessions about how we were going to come back and mount a surprise attack on the White House and hold the president to ransom for millions. And Captain Pauling was going to call on his cousins’ connections and get all the money snuck into Swiss bank accounts for us.’
Sherman jerked back his head and laughed with the first sign of genuine enjoyment he’d shown since his arrival. ‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘You’re right. That’s what we were going to do.’
Franklin laughed too, but he was thinking: This ruined man – did I save him for this? Is he going to be in this condition for the rest of his life?
What tied them together, Franklin thought – the original act – had been a matter of luck. Circumstances pulled a bold action out of his frightened soul and that had made him strong and lessened his fear of being ultimately unworthy. From then on he had something in reserve that could balance everything to come. For ever afterwards he could point to that moment, telling himself: That’s the kind of man I am. He no longer worried about making mistakes because they stopped being so important.
But who could tell what the same deed had done to Sherman? He might feel that he was under an obligation. And he might not like that.
‘And your wife is named Irene, just like the song: “Goodnight, Irene. Goodnight, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreams.”’
Days Like Today Page 6
