Home again, though I can’t seem to break off. The D-20 is for requisition and the B-20 is for back order and the Service Order is for the copy machine and the T-sheet is for time off and the PTO sheet is for paid time off and the P-sheet is for parts order and the O-sheet is for order in stock. I’ve seen this episode a thousand times. I know all the dialogue by heart. Helen called again, and her voice is . . . She hopes I’ll call her back, hopes I’m still talking to the counselor woman at the VA. The box says that in seven and one-half minutes my sirloin steak will be perfect. Yet I know the mashed potatoes will be icy in the middle. It will take a precise balance of extra microwave and stirring to get them just warm enough to eat without completely ruining the steak. I realize about six minutes in that I am going to kill myself. At seven minutes, I determine that I will not die with the guilt of making anyone feel bad. I must start writing my notes.
The potatoes are not done. The extra minute ruins the sirloin.
Father—
I cannot begin to describe how sorry. My action is against everything you believe, and I know. . . . I think of your lifetime behind the desk, in the office. Honor and strength and poise—and you never once complained. I love and envy you. I am not strong. I am not obliged. I am not . . .
Jesus Christ, the shows are on.
You must adore digital cable. The search options have revolutionized me and everybody. Technology marches, no matter. You can be groped inside the hot metal gut of a troop carrier, or you can see things die and see pieces of dead things. I promise you it will not affect the remote control. Though I forgot to write down the name of the pop singer, with digital cable I can see into the future, and I will find her. This is amazing. She will come back.
Supervisor yelled at me today. So close I could smell his cologne. He barked that I wasn’t “into it” the way I needed to be. Sandalwood. In consequence, I couldn’t finish my first note, to my father. What if everyone counted on someone else to locate the clerical errors? he demanded. What if everyone produced reports whose pages crinkled because of a stupid copy jam? What if the whole damn order of things broke down?
Before he escorted me into his office, I was thinking about the salty taste of frayed baseball glove. After the Little League coach lets you on the team but still won’t play you—save once, two innings in right field—things get quiet. In the corner of the dugout, wrapped in chainlink, your cleats sucking into mud and mangled seed husks, sometimes you chew on the leather strips that welt your glove. Dad realized things real early, and he showed me how to field with two hands, how to keep my elbow up when I was batting, and above all how to always run over and back up the throw on any given play. We knotted my hair under my ball cap. He said hustle was supreme, beyond even talent or background. I was going to revise my note to him from those principles of ambition, of compassion. I want him to know that I believed in them, that I learned.
Inside the supervisor’s office is an L-shaped hardwood desk and a plastic Ficus benjamina in a dark wicker pot. He has no windows, but he does have three titanium-white walls and a white drop ceiling and fluorescent overheads and one glass wall that faces the general office. On the wall behind his desk is a diploma for business administration, alongside a membership certificate for Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and a Kiwanis Club award and a Young Entrepreneurs Intramural Softball group photo.
As he screamed, I stared past him, to those certificates—at least, until he yelled the words “copy machine,” at which point I made the mistake of snapping focus. I then remembered my baseball glove and realized how fucked everything was. He says they’re also going to check and see who’s doing what online and deal with that, pronto. He left the mini blinds open, and the office could see everything. I thought of Helen, who, when she worked here, would have been waiting for me in the break area. I guess he saw my eyes start to water, because he eased his tone, said something about everybody’s respecting my time in the service and all, etc. This prattle allowed me to again focus on the certificates. I have got to finish my notes immediately. I have got to finish my notes.
She called four times. She’s coming into town this week and really wants to see me and says I need to stop worrying. Her box-dye auburn hair is dry to touch. Her eyelids sag and have tiny folds. I wonder if I should add her to my list of notes. Dad, Mom, Carla and Ray, and Helen. Maybe. What can I say? Can I say that she shouldn’t worry about those road-to-nowhere veins on her legs? That I feel like I’m breathing under the ocean when she’s around? I don’t know. Just call me back, she says. The shows are on in seven minutes, and I’ve got a broccoli and cheddar that must sit for 120 additional seconds before the cellophane can even be removed.
Mother—
How difficult for you. Chocolate milk on the yellow sofa? Sabotaged cotillion? But you taught me so much. I’m sorry I was. I am proud at least that you would be proud of my home. Perhaps you can . . .
Heart-red, quivering sun on white talc sand. Crimped emerald blade of fern. Chocolaty plowed earth. Ice sheet blinding, sunlit snow traversed by knotted tree shadow. Salty gray ocean smashes rocky shore in fall.
The phone on my desk rings. I pray it is Helen. I answer, and our West Coast rep screams that I was supposed to get a boxful of promos to Brendel’s, then asks where the hell they are. I tell him that I sent them two-day; he yells at me and calls me a dumb asshole for not overnighting. I tell him that the Employee Handbook says No Overnight Packages Are to Be Sent unless either (A) an error has been made by the supplier’s (our) end of things, thus causing a delay in shipment, or (B) the recipient provides his or her personal shipping account code for forward billing. He tells me that I should fuck the Employee Handbook, because as I very well know, Brendel’s sells approximately 29 percent of all of our merchandise to all of the United-fucking-States, and that if product sales and revenue and placement like that are not important enough for overnight promos, he’ll suck my dick. We fall silent. Seconds later he says, Well, you get my point anyway, Evie, then tells me he’s calling my supervisor and hangs up.
These phrases are no kind of note for Helen. I’d been looking at the nature photos on my screen saver, desperate to list something pure.
On the way into work, the gravelly sound beneath my car broke into a roar. The front end shook, and the gas pedal mudded. I made it into the lot, hazards flashing, and told my supervisor I had to take my car to the dealership service shop immediately. (Only the dealership service shop requires annual certification of every mechanic.) He said that this was not a company problem and that I had to do it on my own time. I called him Sir and reminded him that the dealership service shop would not be open on my own time until Saturday, and that I was sure the car wouldn’t make it that long. He told me that I should look for a ride from a co-worker. Or rent a car.
I had to sit down. I had to sit down as he took the last of the coffee from our station and then walked away, leaving the empty pot spitting on the machine. I could almost feel myself on the shoulder of the tar-stinking road, choking on the emissions of commuters, all of them able to get home and watch the shows. I can’t stomach the hot smells of anyone else’s car. I won’t ride in someone else’s baby-seated, taco-wrappered, cola-ringed, faded-upholstery, dust-caked vehicle. And my rent is due and my cable bill is due and my phone bill is due and my insurance is due and my water bill is due and my gas bill is due and my electricity bill is due and I have to get to my VA appointment and I have to buy some dinners, and there’s just no way. No way I can let my goddamn car die before I’m through writing my notes.
After a nap and a Swiffer and a brief hang-up on Helen’s answering machine, I turned on the oven. I enjoy “rooster” sandwiches, though without the tomato or lettuce that they always slop on at restaurants. Breaded chicken patties on a white hamburger bun, with cheese, a seep of mayonnaise, mustard, and maybe ketchup, are mine. I realized as I sucked in the gas blast that I was missing the season finale. I ran to the television while the oven hissed. Hit myself in the stomach, then be
low. It was already six minutes into the half-hour program! I ran back to turn off the gas, waved my hands around to chase the excess. Hit myself again. Bun crumbs on the linoleum had to be wiped. I turned the oven back on, preheated, put the patties on a nonstick tray, and slid it in.
At the climax of the program, the phone rang. I couldn’t answer. Helen told the machine she was coming into town and wants to talk about how she screwed up both our lives and wants to change that and to please take a deep breath, and did I ever think about her suggestion that I get a cat? and . . . I realized that I would be dead before she gets here, and more directly that these were my final finales. I pressed Volume Up on the remote.
The middles of the patties were uncooked, and strings of chicken slag lodged in my teeth. I ended up throwing most of the rooster away, then waited for the commercials and rushed to the bathroom to vomit. As a child, I learned that you must flush the toilet to get low water before vomiting, to minimize backsplash.
Conversations swirl beyond my partition, but none of them cover the first six minutes of the finale. The clerk with the dirty khakis is kicking the door of the copy machine. I have got to get a two-day package together for Brendel’s before close of business. I have got to finish my notes. I have got to finish my notes.
WILL MACKIN
Kattekoppen
FROM The New Yorker
Logar, Afghanistan
WE WENT THROUGH a number of howitzer liaisons before Levi. His predecessors, none of whose names I remember, were able to build artillery plans in support of our night raids. They were skilled enough to communicate these plans to the soldiers who would fire the howitzers. In fact, any one of them would’ve been perfectly fine as a liaison to a normal organization. But ours was not a normal organization. Sometimes what went on gave normal men pause. And if they paused we’d send them back and demand a replacement. After a few rounds of this, the lieutenant in charge of the howitzer battery said, “Enough.”
Which was understandable, but not acceptable. So on our first night without a mission Hal and I took a walk to the howitzer camp. We set out from the dog cages under a full moon, which seemed to cast X-rays rather than light. Thus the dogs’ ribs were exposed, as was the darkness below the ice on our steep climb uphill. The steel barrels of the howitzer guns were visible as shadows, and the plywood door of the howitzer camp was illuminated as if it were bone. Hal knocked on this door with an ungloved fist.
The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys,” he said.
Hal pushed past him into an empty room. “Get your men in here,” he said.
The room filled with soldiers feigning indifference, but every one of them had ideas about the war. The variety of ideas among soldiers developed into a variety of ideas among units, which necessitated an operational priority scheme. As SEAL Team Six, we were at the top of that scheme. Our ideas about the war were the war. Therefore, we could knock on any unit’s door in the middle of the night, assemble the soldiers in a room, and tell them what was what.
On this night, Hal told them that we needed a goddamn liaison. Then he searched the room for one. Levi’s height—he was by far the tallest man there—made it easy for Hal to point and say, “How about you?”
You put a normal man on the spot like that and he’ll get this look. Levi did not get that look. This may have been, at least partly, because Levi was Dutch, born and raised. Why he had joined the United States Army was anyone’s guess.
“Yes,” Levi answered. “I am available. Howeffer, I have a pregnant wife in Texas, and in two weeks’ time I would like to go there for the burt of my son.”
Hal, with his scar like a frown even when he was smiling, nodded my way. I nodded back.
“We can work that out,” Hal said.
So Levi became our howitzer liaison. He moved into our compound and had his mail delivered to our tactical-operations center. Packages arrived from his mother in Amsterdam. Inside the packages was a variety of Dutch candy.
Levi opened these packages at his desk. He removed the Vlinders and the Stroopwafels, but he always left the licorice Kattekoppen in the box. Apparently, Levi had loved these candies as a kid, and his mother was under the impression that he still loved them. But he didn’t. So he set the Kattekoppen on the shelf by the door, where we kept boxes of unwanted food.
Perhaps “unwanted” is too strong a word. Better to say that no one wanted that particular type of food at that particular time. Everyone knew that a time would come, born of boredom, curiosity, or need, when we would want some Carb Boom, squirrel jerky, or a Clue bar. But until that time, the food sat on the shelf. And the Kattekoppen sat longer than most.
American licorice was red or black. It came in ropes or tubes. Kattekoppen were brown cat heads with bewildered faces. They made me think of a bombing attack I’d been involved in, in Helmand, during a previous deployment. We’d dropped a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb with a delayed fuse on a group of men standing in a circle in a dusty field. The round hit at the center of the circle and buried itself, by design, before the fuse triggered the explosion. The blast killed the men instantly, crushing their hearts and bursting their lungs, then flung their bodies radially. The dead landed on their backs, and a wave of rock and dirt, loosed by the explosion, sailed over them. The dust, however, floated above. As we walked in from our covered positions, it descended slowly. By the time we reached the impact site, it had settled evenly on the dead, shrouding their open eyes and filling their open mouths. Those dusty faces, their uniform expressions of astonishment, were what I thought of when I saw Kattekoppen.
Nevertheless, the day came when I pulled a Kattekoppen out of the bag and held it up.
“How’s this taste?” I asked Levi.
“Goot,” he said.
So I popped it in my mouth and chewed, and I found that it did not taste goot. In fact, it tasted like ammonia. I ran outside and spat the chewed-up bits on the snow, but the bad taste remained. Thinking that snow might help, I ate some. When that failed, I ate dirt. But nothing worked.
Others who tried the Kattekoppen didn’t even make it outside. They simply spat their vociferous and obscene rejections right into the trashcan next to Levi’s desk. If these rebukes of his childhood favorite bothered Levi, he never let on. He just sat in his little chair, which was actually a normal chair dwarfed by his abnormal size, and with his wee M16 lying by his side, he drew circles.
In a perfect world, there would be no circles. There would be two points, launch and impact, and between them a flawless arc. But in reality our maps were best guesses, the winds erratic, and every howitzer barrel idiosyncratically bent. Not to mention the imperfect men who operated the howitzers—those who lifted the shells into the breech, who loaded the charges, who programmed the fuses. These men were exhausted, lonesome, and fallible.
So Levi’s circles were graphic depictions of possible error. They described, factoring in the permutation of variables, where the howitzer rounds might fall. He drew them around our most likely targets and, since everything was subject to change, he did so in grease pencil on a laminated map. Every circle contained a potential target, along with a subset of Afghanistan proper, its wild dogs, hobbled goats, ruined castles, and winter stars.
Before a mission, I’d study the contour lines within these circles in order to understand how to navigate the rise and fall of the terrain. Similarly, I’d study the stamps on the packages sent by Levi’s mother.
These stamps paid tribute to the painter Brueghel. Each stamp focused on a particular detail within a particular painting. For example, the image on the stamp featuring Hunters in the Snow was of the hunters and their dogs returning from the hunt. Staggering through knee-deep drifts, they crested a hill that overlooked their tiny village.
Returning from our manhunts through the snowy mountains west of Logar, I felt the weariness of Brueghel’s hunters. Cresting the hill that overlooked our frozen outpost, I saw their village. And, within its fortified boundaries, I watched men go abou
t their daily tasks as if unaware of any higher purpose.
As the time for Levi’s trip home approached, the howitzer lieutenant correctly predicted that rather than work anything out, we’d simply take another of his men to cover Levi’s absence. So he raised the issue with his headquarters. He did so via an e-mail to the 1st Infantry Division’s command sergeant major, requesting an increase in manpower to cover our requirement for a liaison. The lieutenant forwarded us the sergeant major’s response, in which the sergeant major said that the only fucking way he’d even consider this horseshit request was if we provided him with written justification ASAP.
The chances of our providing justification, written or otherwise, to anyone, for anything, were zero. So the night before Levi went home Hal and I paid another visit to the howitzer camp. That night, a blizzard clobbered Logar. I met Hal by the dog cage, as usual. The heavy snowfall had caused us to cancel that night’s mission, and the dogs, which on off nights normally hurled themselves at the chainlink, setting off the entire dog population of Logar, were still. Likewise, Hal was not himself. He shivered, and his scar was barely visible. When we reached the door of the howitzer camp, he had to knock twice.
The lieutenant answered. “Hey, guys. I’m really sorry about all this,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Hal said. He poked his head in and saw a chubby kid playing mahjong on a computer. “We’ll take him.”
“Uh, OK,” the lieutenant said. “But the sergeant major’s going to be pissed.”
“Not my problem,” Hal said.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 26
