by Don Bajema
The next morning I woke up and found my father sitting with several adults and two Military Police. My mother was at the stove making coffee and voices were very low. I walked down the hallway and out the screen door. No car was parked in front of the Airstream. It was quiet as a tomb. One of the kids standing in a knot in front of the shining silver home waved me over secretly.
“Did ya hear what happened to Joyce?”
My heart hit a huge beat and froze as she said, “Last night she got killed in her dad’s car. He hit a tree. David broke his arm and his leg and he’s in the hospital. So’s his mom. His dad is in jail.”
None of the kids on that base ever went to Sunday school again. And our parents never even mentioned it.
THE WIVES TOOK TURNS
The wife of a shell-shock victim in the trailer park is usually young, and a long way from home. Exhausted, often publicly abused and battered, she tries to keep alive enough spiritually to love some of her several kids as much as possible. Which is not easy. The father’s influence over her first son is poisonous. She watches her son agonize, from infancy on, as he is taught to reject the substance of her affection. Affection has no place on a battlefield. If she interferes, she is punished for weakening the boy.
Despite her efforts, including the beatings she must endure when she takes a stand in the boy’s interest, she loses contact with him as he struggles to catch up on the trail of his father’s violent footsteps. She watches helplessly as her son gradually develops a deep seething rage, which takes the place of the love he feels, but is forced to deny her. A confusing rage that will be submerged, yet extended to his sisters, and eventually to all women. If she has a second son, he will be lost to her even quicker than the first.
She turns to her daughter, whom she finds struggling not to repeat her mother’s bleak existence. They argue constantly, confused by the need they have for each other, and the self-loathing they feel as their love becomes a mockery in this world ruled by the Army. Eventually the wife accepts her fate, shuffling within the trailer in a semi-stupor of silent compliant slavery. She is heartbroken as she watches the blind desperation of her daughter grow into a perverted attraction for men with the same essential qualities as her own brother and father, beginning her journey toward her own enslavement, and perpetuating the cycle.
In childhood the siblings develop a lifelong communion of fear. They are kept apart by the associations of submerged horror and forgotten cruelty. They are bound by their blood and the memory of their flickering souls, long ago extinguished in the airless childhood of those trailers.
They are afraid to see their mother take another beating. Afraid to take another beating themselves. Afraid of the temporary quiet that in a moment can explode in another unpredictable scene of Father’s hysterical, blind, hallucinating, medicated panic. Afraid of the catatonia that fills the low ceiling of the trailer like a storm cloud. They creep around, watching Father as he sits on the edge of his bed in the dark, far end of the tunnel, saying nothing, hearing nothing, responding to nothing.
The trailer stinks of terror when Father begins his sixteen-hour confession, filled with the struggling revelations of his broken soul. He tortures his wife with his self-deprecations. Why is she so afraid? Because she knows that in any instant she will see the flip side of her husband’s illness. The deprecations will become accusations, the confessions will become denials, the denials will become rationalizations. His rumbling voice will storm in the close confines of the metal tube, and threats and weird plots will hiss into his wife’s face. Father will change from a pliant and hopeful invalid into a monster of cold, hard, hopeless cruelty. Father will make the dependents suffer. Then the military man will make the wife and children feel a little bit of the fear and pain and rage that is at the heart of his regimented insane world. They’ll learn well — because he’ll teach them.
The wife will take her turn, in her own desperate need. You’ll see her in a scarf, hiding the lumpy cheeks and jawline. Almost glamorous in her sunglasses hiding her bloody eyes. She goes to the hospital to arrange an appointment with the base doctor, the highest in command. She tells him she can’t take any more, and asks if they can please take her husband back on the ward. Sometimes they do. But usually the request has to come from her husband or his superior officer, because this is an important decision, a man’s decision.
Sometimes the husband discovers the wife’s visit and then the wife is hospitalized for a couple of days. The children remain buried under sheets in their bunks, forcing themselves to sleep with high temperatures, unable to set their feet on their father’s linoleum floor. They dream of dinosaurs mating in blood and mud under black skies as their drunken father careens against the thin trailer walls muttering, “What did I do — oh baby — what did I do to you? I’m sorry — I’m so sorry. You BITCH! You CASTRATING whore.”
Normally the doctor just feigns a sympathetic voice and tells the wife the old story. How her husband is in bad shape from the war, and that she just can’t understand what he has been through. How much he needs her support, and that he’ll be better when he gets back his confidence in himself and the world again. The doctor might even read her husband’s war record, and he embellishes it a little. The confused wife wants to believe that her husband is a war hero, that somehow all this slaughter is not in vain. She makes an effort to believe the lie that his sacrifice somehow belittles her own. She starts feeling proud of her man, and guilty about complaining after all he’s been through.
Slowly she reaches for her handbag, as she begins to see the image of the young man she married. She walks down the steps of the hospital, adjusts her scarf and sunglasses, and fights bravely the flow of her tears.
She returns home, chilled to the bone in her cold nervous sweat, seeing an old photograph of her husband before her eyes — the farmboy from Lawrence, Kansas, with the funny grin, the 4H president from Tacoma, or the football hero from Amarillo. She’ll decide to face another day, and another night. Besides, where could she go with all those kids?
Epitaph
She walks onto the trailer stair and grabs the cold metal handle. Her breath gasps in her throat as she steps into the dark, into the tomb, into the stench of Jim Beam and beer. She hears a voice like the growl of a dog, somewhere in the darkest corner: “Where the fuck have you been?”
NAVAJO
I had the front seat to myself, windows down, hot air exploding in loud gusts propelling little tornados of paper and dirt around me. The landscape was hot as hell and repeated itself over and over and over.
She was sleeping — taking the back seat on one hip, jet-black hair blasting in the wind, swirling around her head, all over her face. She was so tired she couldn’t feel a thing. With her Navajo eyes closed, she looked Japanese, beautiful as all get out.
The car I was driving was exactly the kind I had always hoped to drive — a real gas-guzzler, with a broken headlight, oversize tires in the rear, and a mass of tangled wires hanging under the dashboard, rumbling along the absolutely abandoned highway. Nothing worked except the gas gauge, and it read empty.
Her dog was thirsty. I twisted over the back seat and felt around with my free hand until I was scratching behind the dog’s long, pointed ear. We approached a Texaco station with a faded Pegasus heading forty-five degrees skyward on a round tin shield.
The car growled as I downshifted. The gravel from the roadside rose in a dusty cloud. I drove past the station, slowed down to around sixty and spun a bootlegger turn back into my own dust cloud, filling the windows with brown grit. The girl rocked against the back seat, still sound asleep. The dog tried to get his footing and thumped into the front seat twice. I idled the car into the station’s garage and parked it in the empty shade. The dust cloud blew slowly down the road outside. I sat there in the dark, adjusting my eyes and feeling the cool air, thinking of the sun, blinding hot outside of the tin shac
k, and my wife.
I opened the car door and kissed the air loudly a couple of times until the dizzy dog pressed unsteady front paws on the greasy concrete. The dog followed me around until I found a bucket and filled it with water. The dog drank in sloppy loud slaps.
I went around the corner of the shack and took a long piss. The car door latch opened and slammed shut. Her voice was cooing to her dog. I began to make out her words. “Where’d he go? Huh? Where’d he go?”
I shook off the last drops and buttoned my pants. She wound around the corner, pulling her waist-length black hair off the side of her face. She rubbed one eye with a small silver-ringed fist, breathed in and out deeply, put her hands in the back of her jeans and settled her weight on one leg, getting her balance in her rough-out boots.
“Where are we?” she demanded with a smile.
I shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Good. The less you know the better.”
“That’s what they tell me.” Her teeth gleamed behind dry lips.
We stood awhile looking out across four hundred miles of glaring desert, ending in heat-wave-rippling, reddish mountains.
“We’re lost, then,” she finally muttered. I knew that was a way of referring to how we felt about each other. I knew not to respond. A minute or two passed.
“Almost lost. We’re heading south. We’ll cross a main road before too long. We can be in those hills tonight, or in some beach parking lot by tomorrow morning.” My words sounded like a speech and I felt embarrassed. I hoped she wouldn’t put me down.
She nodded and said, “Let’s go to the beach.”
She picked up a stone and dented a fresh beer can lying about forty yards away. I didn’t move. She did it again, same beer can. I wiped my nose and covered my smile, in a self-conscious movie-cowboy kind of way.
She leaned under my face and looked up into my eyes, saying in a mocking tone, “I’m magic.”
I told her I knew that already, with the same tone I would use later to ask the ancient man behind the motel office desk if he had a room.
She tossed a stick and the dog chased after it. He brought it back wagging his tail with pride.
She looked at me and said, “Just like you.”
“True love,” I said, sniffing the air.
DOG PARTY
Well a long time ago, when I was young, the other kids and I were pretty much left to ourselves — not much supervision or anything. We were all pretending we were happy, watching Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet but feeling this gnawing loneliness. And this anger. Like it wasn’t supposed to be like this, like we were getting tricked. We were always fighting and our fathers always talked about the war. Until we began to feel like targets or something.
There was a boy living on our street. He had this thing with dogs, ya know? (Pause.) He had an inordinate attraction to them. None of us knew why. We knew he loved them, but still. . . . He was a strange boy with a strange laugh, a fourth grader with bleeding bite marks and scratches all over his arms. We’d see him following an old lady’s cocker spaniel or feeding somebody’s mutt through a fence. Calling and crooning — anybody’s dog. He’d devote his whole weekend to one dog. We’d need another kid to play outfield, or we’d be alone and want to play catch. Nope. He’s got no time. (Girl leaves the stage.) He’d be waiting for Fido. He’d just wait. He was inexhaustible. The dogs knew what was on his mind. They’d hide. The kid knew they knew, and that made it better for him. He’d wait for hours until they made their false move. They’d get hungry and take the bait, or they’d finally give in to the hope against hope that the boy wouldn’t really do it. They were wrong. He was quick. He’d grab them and he’d say, “You fool — I’m going to drown you, Fido.” He called every dog Fido, don’t ask me why.
For a couple of months he did it in secret. But by then we knew he had an odd devotion to dogs. He had witnessed their desperation, he’d watch their losing cause. He weighed each dog’s pain threshold. He knew what they could take, he was impressed. He’d stroke them, hold them in his arms as they shook with fear. He’d whisper to them. Then he’d take them to a big fifty-five-gallon drum that his father brought home from the Army base, and drown them. Normally we used the drums for trash cans. I remember he was always so happy on Wednesdays. The trash trucks emptied the cans on Wednesday. (Sound of trash trucks stops.) He called it “Anything Can Happen Day.”
He’d drag the garden hose to the black drums, greasy pieces of who-the-hell-knows-what floating with lettuce and tomato skins. He’d be talking real softly to these desperate, writhing, wimpering dogs. Somehow he’d get one into the spinning water. You don’t know how long it takes for a Labrador to drown. You don’t measure it in minutes. Eternity is more like it. Eternal moments. They fight like hell. They fight to stay out of hell, swimming that pathetic pointless upright paddle, nose bleeding from the broom handle he used to push them under, pinning them to the bottom. Panic. Wildest eyes you’ll ever see. Then, just when they were on the other side, as soon as their bodies stopped struggling and only twitched, he’d rescue them. He’d pull them out of the barrel. He’d hold them upside down. Pink water draining out of their mouth and nose. Then it looked like a little light would go on behind their eyes. He’d look relieved and he’d start to cry, saying, “See? There it is!” He’d be smiling at them as they began to figure out where they were. He’d lie down beside them on the ground. They’d be too weak to move. He’d pet them and put his arms around them.
The dogs would think that the boy had saved them, although they would always have a fear of the green garden hose and the barrel. And on Wednesdays after that summer, the whole street would howl when the trash trucks turned the corner. You could see that the dogs sensed something else. Belief, I guess.
The dogs wanted to believe that the boy had saved them. It was easier than facing what the boy had really done. So they let their memory start from the moment they saw his smiling face. The dogs loved him. Really. They followed him everywhere. If you ever saw him, he’d be with a couple of dogs. All by himself, with a couple of dogs trailing behind him.
I asked the boy, “What did you have to do that for?” He looked at me like I was stupid. He said, “I’m looking for love, something bigger than my life.”
DASHBOARD
“What the fuck should I be trying to write lines for?” He wiped the running nostril awkwardly with the heel of his hand. His drunken eyes focused on the grimy visor over the filthy dashboard. The 1949 Ford truck bounced over a series of potholes. The drunk’s eyelids took a second and a half to raise and lower over his wet red eyes. He turned to the driver. “I can’t even play guitar.” He thought this remark was very funny. He managed a slack smile to show the driver he got his own joke.
“Can’t sing, either. Wish I could, but. . . .” He shook his head with sloppy emphasis, “I can’t.”
His shoulders twisted to his side window. He stuck his head outside the cabin, looking backward down the road. He pulled his head in again, swung himself back around, and faced the dashboard. He stared coldly for a long moment, then examined the floor of the truck cabin, muttering, “I know that fuckin’ bitch.”
Looking into his rearview mirror, the driver caught a long-legged girl stumbling in her blue jeans and red jacket. Her boots kicked up small stones and dust. The driver down-shifted, let up on the gas, backfiring the truck, pressed his sweaty palm on the steering wheel and spun it counterclockwise from ten to two o’clock. The drunk’s weight pressed on his door. Afraid his passenger would fall out, the driver grabbed a handful of sweaty yellow T-shirt and yanked against the centrifugal force.
The driver straightened the wheel, ground the gears into third, saying “Fuck,” and began to accelerate. The truck jumped forward, lost some of its traction on the dirt road and slid from the far right shoulder to the far left. A here-comes-a-rowdy-farm-boy cloud of b
rown dust billowed behind the tailgate. Irrigation ditches sat deep on either side of the road and cattails began waving from side to side in the brown air as the truck continued to gain speed.
The driver punched into fourth gear. The truck did what it had going into third. The accelerator remained flat on the floor. “Stand on the maafucker, Lyle!” the drunk hooted.
Lyle asked the drunk who the girl was. “The biggest slut in El Cajon,” muttered the drunk, his high spirits disturbed by something. “Ya fuck her?” inquired Lyle. “Yeah, sure, once — me an’ about twenty other guys.”
The driver smiled to himself. He straightened his elbows back from the steering wheel, pressed his weight against the back seat and hit the brakes with one serious jolt. The drunk didn’t have a chance. He had been looking at the buttons on his Levi’s. Completely vulnerable, he flew forward. His skull jammed into the corner where the windshield met the dashboard.
During this micro-second, he was thinking clearly. He heard the voice in his head say “dashboard.” His memory provided a total recollection of his aunt’s farm in Oklahoma. He hadn’t seen the place in fifteen years. He remembered her grating voice whining, “Clifford, you be careful on that swing. . . .” He could feel the warm summer wind blowing across his aunt’s front yard. He could feel the gravity and release of the rope swing he was pulling against. He could see the blue sky and his little-boy knees, bare and skinned. He saw a dirty white tape bandage on his left big toe, which he held just a little bit higher than his other dirt-encrusted foot, both pointing directly into the sky. He heard his aunt cough, clear her throat, and finish her warning, “. . . or you’ll just dash your little brains out.”
