by Tawni O'Dell
“How do you know that?”
I realize at some point I’m supposed to jump in and defend my sister’s honor, but she’s always done a much better job of it than I have.
Val has something close to a smirk on his face. For the first time since I’ve seen him again, there seems to be an emotion forming in his eyes. I’m not sure what the emotion is, but the blankness is breaking up.
“I am not a stereotype,” she states.
“You’re a stereotype of a stereotype. You’re a surroundsoundtype.”
“I’ve had enough of this. Here I was, trying to be nice.”
“No, your brother here is trying to be nice. You’re trying to get me interested in your lacy pink panties.”
“Stop it. Okay. I’ve had enough of the panties.”
“Lacy and pink.”
“They are not.”
“Prove it.”
“That’s it. Here, Ivan.”
She hands me the bag.
“I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to get back to work.”
She starts to leave, then turns back.
“I almost forgot. Would you like to have dinner at my house Thursday night?” she asks Val. “Our mom is coming, too.”
“Sure,” he says.
She turns again and makes it the whole way down the steps this time before deciding she’s not done yet. She comes charging back up and gets so close to Val I think she’s going to lick him.
“If you had any class at all or knew anything about women, you’d know it was a compliment to you that I put on this dress. A compliment. Not an insult. Not a way to make fun of you. And definitely not some stupid game, some stupid competition over who can get who to want the other person first. Everything with men is a competition. It’s so boring.”
“Lacy and pink,” he responds.
This time I see authentic frustration on Jolene’s face. I even see her fists begin to clench.
She turns around suddenly, and I’m certain she’s not coming back, but she stops halfway across the yard and starts hopping around as she takes off one shoe, then the other. Next she yanks off her pantyhose like she’s pulling brown taffy off the ends of her feet. She balls them up, turns around, and throws them in the direction of the road, then reaches up under her dress and pulls off her panties.
She marches across the yard, back up the steps, and throws them at Val. They hit him in the face and fall to his feet. He doesn’t flinch. They’re lacy and pink, of course.
He waits until she storms off again, then holds on to the doorjamb and uses his rifle to spear the panties. He flips the gun upright, like the color guard in a parade, and the panties slide down the barrel until they’re resting against his hand holding the trigger.
“I have some shit to do,” he says to me while watching Jolene stomp across the yard in her bare feet, with her pink shoes swinging at her side. “If you want to come in while I’m doing it, you’re welcome to.”
He swings around with a hop and disappears into the shadows. I wait until Jolene pulls out, and I follow him.
He has a fire going in a hole in the wall that used to be a small fireplace. It’s a nice blaze, and I head straight for it.
The room has a card table and one chair in it, and a couch taped in several spots with duct tape. A red-and-white cooler and a blue Wal-Mart bag full of empty baked beans and Chef Boyardee cans sits against one wall. A small pyramid of empty beer cans is stacked neatly in one corner. Old newspapers, crumpled cigarette packs, dirty rags, bits of straw, sticks, string, feathers, and other nesting materials have been swept against the other wall, leaving the main section of floor clean.
He puts Jolene’s panties and the paper bag on the card table.
I feel like I should say something about Jolene but decide I can’t possibly explain her better than she’s just explained herself. I know Val isn’t going to explain anything about either one of them.
I must be smiling, because he asks, “You find this kind of lifestyle amusing?”
“It reminds me of my old place in Florida.”
“Florida?” he says. “When’d you live in Florida?”
“I just came back here eight months ago. I lived there for almost sixteen years.”
He hops over to the cooler using his rifle for balance.
“Why?” he asks, pulling open the lid and reaching inside.
“I don’t know. It’s warm there.”
“It’s a fucking sauna there. You like that kind of heat?”
“Not really.”
He tosses a beer my way. It’s still morning, and for all he knows I’m on duty, but I don’t ask what would make him think I’d want a beer right now. I pop open the can.
“At the time I wanted to get far away from here and go somewhere completely different and someplace that would be easy to live in,” I explain further. “No weather problems. Easy access to alcohol. No more state stores and beer distributors that close at nine. Lots of good-looking girls in bikinis.”
“You bag a lot of good-looking girls in bikinis?”
“Some.”
“Did it make up for the fact that you were living in fucking Florida?”
I laugh. “I guess you don’t like Florida.”
“Never been there.”
I take a seat on the edge of the couch. He sits at the card table where there’s a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I try not to look at his missing leg.
He opens a beer for himself and drinks, staring out the screen door at the mowers and the place where Jolene’s car was.
“You never came back before now?” he asks as he taps out a cigarette and sticks it in his mouth.
“No. How about you?”
“I came back once,” he says, lighting up. “For an afternoon. It didn’t work out, so I left.”
“You were here?”
“Yeah. Once. About a year after I got back to the States.”
“You were here?” I repeat, feeling strangely panicked. “You saw your mom? You went to your house?”
And you didn’t see me? I say to myself, silently.
“I didn’t make it that far.”
“I don’t understand.”
He finishes his beer, crushes the can, and tosses it at the pile of cans in the corner. It hits near the top and balances there.
He starts to get up to get another one out of the cooler. I hurry to get it for him. He gives me a glance of disappointment and annoyance. I stop midway from crossing the room, realizing he thinks I’m getting it for him because I think he can’t do it on account of his leg. I think about sitting down again. I think about getting it for him anyway. I stand rooted to the middle of the sagging floorboards.
“Just get the fucking beer,” he growls at me.
I give him one and sit down. He falls silent again, and I watch him drink and smoke.
He’s not old. He’d be in his fifties now, and some men are definitely old in their fifties, but he has the ageless quality about him that most miners used to have: guys who never seemed young when they were young or old when they were old, their appearance and general deterioration seeming to have nothing to do with the passage of time and their place on the time line.
I start to fidget on the couch. I want to know about the day he came back. I want to know what he meant when he said he didn’t make it that far. I want to know why he didn’t come and see us. But I’m afraid to ask. I don’t want to antagonize him. I feel he might kick me out at any minute.
“I tried to come back,” he says, staring out the door again and taking a final drag off his first cigarette, then tossing the butt into an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can he’s using as an ashtray, “but I didn’t feel right being here anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I left, I was a stupid kid who had never been farther than Centresburg. When I came back, I was only twenty-two, but I was an old man already. I’d been on the other side of the world and lived in a jungle. I left a part of my body in t
hat jungle. I killed people in that jungle. People. Not squirrels. People.”
He takes a long swallow of beer, lights another cigarette, and clears his throat.
“I came back to the same place and the same people. Nothing had changed here, but I had changed a shitload. It was worse than being a stranger.”
“But you’re here now.”
“Yeah, I’m here now because of some asinine promise I made an old lady over thirty years ago,” he answers me irately. “I saw Zo the day I came back. I had to drive by her place on the way out of town, and she was down at the road getting the mail out of her mailbox. She invited me up on the porch for a beer. I told her I was leaving for good, and she made me promise I’d come back for her funeral if I didn’t make it back sooner. She even made me promise to subscribe to that fucking excuse for a newspaper for the rest of my life so I’d be able to see her obituary when it ran. It’s pretty damn weird when you think about it. That was over thirty years ago. She was only in her forties and already talking to me about her death like it might happen any day, and if it did, it was no big deal.
“Yeah, I’m here now,” he finishes, “but only for a few days. That’s all.”
“You’re not staying?”
“Did you hear what I said? I don’t belong here anymore.”
“Yes you do,” I blurt out.
He pauses in his drinking, smoking, and staring out the door to fix me with the kind of look he used to give me when my chattering presence in his backyard began to wear on him.
“This is where you’re from,” I keep going. “You always belong where you’re from. It’s the one thing that can’t be taken away from you.
“You can lose a job. You can lose a woman. You can lose a bet. You can lose a war. You can lose a leg. You can lose your sanity. You can lose your memory.” I come to the end of my list, almost short of breath.
“But you can’t lose the place you’re from,” I finish. “It’s always there. The land and the sky. It’s always yours. No one can turn you away as long as you can say, ‘This is where I’m from.’ ”
“You talking to me or you?” he asks.
I fall silent. Val’s the next one to speak. I think the topic’s been dropped, but he returns to it.
“I’ve seen people turned away from the place they’re from. I’ve seen them slaughtered for the simple reason that they wanted to stay in the place they’re from.”
“Sure. I know,” I tell him. “Look at my dad. He didn’t want to leave his home, but it was destroyed and there was nothing left there for him anymore. So he left, but he took a piece of it with him. Every time he told a story about it, every time I saw him look at his portrait of the czar, he was back there in his mind. I know he was.
“The people you’re talking about who were killed were killed because of outside influences. They didn’t kill each other. If anything it proves exactly what I’m saying: Some people would rather die than leave their home.”
He nods, still staring out the door.
“Your dad told me once Americans don’t live through wars; they send men off to fight in them. It was an important difference to him. I told him I understood what he meant, but I didn’t until I was in ’Nam. Then it was clear what he was saying. He meant, no matter what we like to tell ourselves over here, we can’t understand what other cultures feel who have wars fought in their own backyards. War is a rape, and we’ve never been raped. We’ve been spit at a couple times. Nothing more. We pick and choose when we’re going to fight. Sometimes we try and stop a rape. Other times we’re part of one. But we always have the luxury of choice.”
He takes a swallow of beer.
“And that’s one big fucking luxury.”
I nod my agreement.
“Your dad didn’t talk much, but when he did, he always had something to say.”
I nod my agreement again.
“So what’d you and Zo talk about the day you came back?”
“She did most of the talking.”
“Did you talk about me?”
“I asked her if the Zoschenko kid was still a pain in the ass, and she said you were.”
A trace of a smile plays across his lips. It’s there so briefly it could almost be mistaken for a slight grimace of pain or a nervous tic.
“I sat there with her for about an hour, and she never once asked me about Vietnam or my leg. Then, right before I’m about to go, she says to me, ‘Did you hear about the new bonus plan the Pentagon has for the military brass?’ And I said, ‘No, I never heard anything about it.’ She said they get to choose two points on their bodies they want to be measured from, and then they get one thousand dollars for every inch.”
The smile returns, and this time he lets it take over his whole face.
“Now, I’m beginning to think this sounds a little strange, but it’s Zo. I can’t really suspect much. She’s sitting there drinking from a yellow coffee mug that says ‘Good things come in small packages’ with baby ducks and rabbits on it, and she’s wearing a pink sweatshirt with an angel on it with big silver wings. It looked really homemade, like one of her Bible-school kids made it for her. And she’s wearing those tan canvas tennis shoes she always wore, with the little socks with white lace around the tops.”
I smile at the memory of her feet.
“She says first they take an air force colonel. He’s a real tall guy. He says he wants to be measured from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. It turns out he’s six foot five. That’s seventy-seven inches. Seventy-seven thousand dollars. The next guy is a navy admiral. He holds his arm straight out from his side and says he wants to be measured from his fingertips to the bottom of his feet. Turns out to be eight feet. Ninety-six inches. That’s ninety-six thousand dollars. Next is an army general. He tells the guy doing the measuring that he wants to be measured from the tip of his dick to his balls.”
“Zo is telling you this?” I marvel.
“I swear it’s true,” he assures me. “Now, when the general says this, the guy doing the measuring looks embarrassed and makes some comment about how he’s sure the general is a well-endowed man, but, ‘We are talking about a thousand dollars an inch, sir. Are you sure that’s what you want measured?’ The general says yes. So the guy tells him to drop his pants, and he bends down to start measuring. Then he stands back up, looking amazed. ‘General,’ he says, ‘Where are your testicles?’ And the general says, ‘In Vietnam.’ ”
We both bust out laughing.
“Zo told you that?” I ask again.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, how did you know Zo in the first place?”
“She was my Sunday-school teacher,” he tells me, and we crack up all over again.
“I have a hard time imagining you in Sunday school.”
“I could belch the twenty-third Psalm.”
Once our laughter subsides, the little house becomes awkwardly silent. I realize, after it’s over, how rarely I ever heard Val laugh in the past. The same was true for myself.
“If you don’t mind, I’ve got some shit to do,” he tells me.
“That’s what you said. You mind if I ask what?”
He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and raises the beer can in my direction.
“This is it,” he says.
I rise to go.
He puts his palms on the table and pushes himself out of the chair. I stop myself from telling him he doesn’t need to get up.
“Is Miss Slag Heap a good cook?” he asks me.
“Yeah, she’s a good cook. She does a lot of it. She has three sons.”
“What about a husband?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
“Divorced? Widowed?”
“Picky.”
“But she had three kids with the guy?”
“She had three kids with three guys,” I correct him. “And she didn’t really have the kids with them. It was more like she had the kids despite them.”
“
The American way,” he says, reaching for the brown paper bag sitting on the edge of the table. “We hurt the people we love and fuck people we should hate.”
He opens it and pulls the framed photo of the J&P company store out of it.
“It’s a picture of—” I begin to explain.
“I know what it is,” he cuts me off.
His eyes gloss over it for a moment before he slides it back into the bag and leaves it on the table.
He puts all his weight on one hand and grabs the rifle he’d left leaning against the wall. With the help of the gun, he reaches the door in three hops. He pushes the screen open and stands in the doorway, a one-legged silhouette against the gray light.
I hold out my hand to him, and he grips it firmly with a dry, callused palm and scarred, battered fingers. It’s the kind of shake that has an incorruptible promise behind it. We shook the day he left to go to war, my small, smooth hand in his big, rough one, both of them marred with scratches and scabs and traces of dirt in the lines of the knuckles and under the nails.
That day he told me he would be back, but in all fairness to the man, he never told me when.
I take a slight detour on the way back to Centresburg and drive past the junkyard. I come around the final curve and see the hill in front of me. The steam is thick today, and active in the wind. It snakes out onto the road like snapping lengths of frayed white ribbons.
There’s a boy on a bike halfway up the hill. He’s lost all the momentum he might have had at the beginning of his climb. He’s standing upright over his seat, his legs pumping in slow motion, the bike leaning low to one side before flipping to the other side after the straining downward push of the sneakered foot on the opposing pedal.
I come up behind him slowly and roll down my window. The burned-sulfur smell from the junkyard fills my truck. I can hear his labored breathing and the sound of his BB gun, slung across his back, hitting the fabric of his raincoat with dry rattles. His face is red and frowning with exertion. The hair at the back of his neck is damp with sweat.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I call out to him.
He glances my way, then quickly goes back to staring straight ahead. I get the feeling this is a necessary form of concentration for him in order to keep the bike moving forward.
