by test
Coming towards us, headlights shimmered from a convoy of green military vehicles. Following the lead jeep were troop trucks, smaller trucks towing artillery, several armored half-tracks, and a medical truck, regular Army stirred up from Fort Polk by Panama.
"Pastor says all this turmoil's the start of the Last Days. 'Revelation,'" Daddy said, watching the last of the convoy. He wiped his nose with a handkerchief. "Maybe you can get on at another hardware?"
"Could we just drop the job talk?" Daddy looked away and tugged at his ear. "Thank you," I said. Soon we reached the elevated interstate between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. Cypress knees jutted from the water, but the water was frozen white as far as we could see. Around the tree trunks, little ice waves looked like bunched-up visqueen. Bright sun glinted off the ice as if it was chrome.
"You ever seen this frozen, Daddy?"
"Never. I can't recall it ever being froze."
A white egret glided over the road, and I saw Daddy watch it as we left it behind.
"Winona would've loved to seen this," Daddy said. "She always wanted to see a real winter. Look at there."
A bateau with two men in it was slowly sawing a path, the boat rising up
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onto the surface then breaking through. One of the men had on a droopy toboggan cap the color of a roadside conea high-visibility Santa.
"You know how hard your mother worked to make last Christmas like the old ones?" Daddy said. "She told me she wouldn't get to see another Christmas." Daddy kept looking out the side window, the bald spot on the back of his head tanned from working in his yard."
I think it made her happy," I said.
He nodded. "You know," he said, and tapped a knuckle on the window, "we'll probably never see this again."
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I tried to get Momma not to do too much her last Christmas, three months before she died, but she wasn't having any of that. She baked pies and made her green-jello, whipped-cream, pecan dish. On Christmas morning, her smile cut through the swollen cortisone skin, her wit sharp in spite of the drugs that sometimes dulled her. After lunch we ate her special dessert, then Daddy and Conlee, Jeb's wife, went for a walk while we sorted through old Christmas photos.
"Look at this one," Teddy said. He held out a photo of Jeb and me wearing jet pilot helmets, large tin cans strapped to our backs, a big football in Jeb's arms. I was about twelve, Jeb three.
"Steve Canyon," I said.
"Did you always carry that ball?" Teddy asked Jeb.
"Until your dad went to Vietnam. I never would've played basketball if the war hadn't started."
Teddy unhooked my tape measure from my belt. Already he had the start of a moustache, but he also had something I hadn't noticedJeb's smirk. I took back the tape.
"You always wear that thing, Dad?" Teddy asked.
"Always," I said. "Protects me from jerks at the store. Whenever somebody gives me a hard time, I stretch this tape out in front of their nose," I stretched it, "and say, 'I got this much patience left for you,' then press the button." The tape snapped back in. Teddy laughed, but Jeb shook his head and picked up another photo.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing," Jeb said.
"No, I know that expression. What is it?"
Jeb nudged his glasses up his nose. "Do you get in some customer's face every day?"
"What do you think?"
"I think you talk a lot about telling people off."
"So?"
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"I'm just saying. You asked."
"Y'all cool it," Teddy said. He drilled me with a look, then put on the headphones I'd given him. I got up to let myself get level again, but when I stood Jeb started tapping his thumb on his thigh, the smirk painted on his face.
"You got something else to say?" I asked.
"You don't want to hear it."
"I'm listening."
He glanced at Teddy who was nodding to a beat. "I don't think it's good for Teddy to always hear you talking like you do about work."
"They're funny stories, Jeb."
"No, they're stories about how bad assed you are."
"Of course you could do better at my job."
"I could be more diplomatic."
"When's the last time you worked in the real world?"
"I deal with students every day. I don't push things in their faces."
"Come sell hardware a week before you start preaching."
"You've got a bad attitude, Bob."
"And you know every damn thing about every damn thing, Jeb."
Momma's rasping snore stopped me. She slumped in her recliner, her chin dropped forward near her chest. My eyes met Jeb's, and he looked down.
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"Jeb told me a lady astronaut who lives there's gonna be on the next space shuttie," Daddy said, pointing to a large bayfront house. The houses at that end of Jeb's street, especially the ones on the bay side, were fancy, but the closer we got to Jeb's the smaller they got, the houses on his side looking more like nice weekend getaway camps, the kind people had at False River and Old River near Baton Rouge. "If Jeb would've got his degree in chemical engineering, he'd be living next to the bay," Daddy said. "That's his there."
He nodded at the last house on the right, a place on stilts with redwood shingles on the sides. A fat Christmas tree blinked behind sliding glass doors, a single-pointed red star on its peak. In the front yard, a plywood alligator with a glowing Rudolph nose lifted Santa in a pirogue. The lot next to Jeb's was empty, marsh grass standing like broom bristles around an iced-over pond in the lot's center Jeb greeted us like we'd been having Christmas at his house forever, exactly like I knew he would. He had these tiny round glasses and a cheesey goatee that made him look like Lenin or some other freak. He hugged Daddy, then me.
"Conlee's gone to the store," he said. "Y'all have to put on the snow chains coming over?" he joked.
"Only the swamp's still iced," I said. Daddy was staring across the street at a seawall being built around a house and at the lot next to it filled with huge
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chunks of concrete. On the side of Jeb's house, a rusty shovel lay on a pile of sand next to a stack of weathered boards. "Nice place," I said.
"The last hurricane washed away everything on that side, but it didn't touch this house," Jeb said. "I got a great deal." He smiled. "It's freezing. Let's go in." He draped his arms over us. "I saw about Exxon on the news. Were you at the store when it blew?"
"Me and Daddy both. Busted the front glass."
Jeb laughed. "The sensational's always chasing you down, isn't it?" he said.
In the living room, with its fireplace and couches, the house seemed bigger than it had outside. Jeb asked if we wanted a beer, and while he was gone, I ran my fingers over the spines of Conlee's law books and Jeb's Vietnam books. Jeb's a chemistry teacher at a small college, but he's a Vietnam buff. For a while he tried to get me to read some novels about it, but I told him living it had been plenty for me. Next to the books was a photo of Momma and Daddy on their wedding day. Momma wore a long-sleeved, forties dress suit that hugged her middle and showed off her tall slimness. At her throat were cauliflower ruffles next to a white corsage. Her blond, wavy hair was parted to the side and lifted from her shoulders. She smiled her slightly buck-toothed smile and held Daddy's hand as the camera caught him speaking, shy but happy in his double-breasted suit. I wished I hadn't come.
"I better get the suitcases," Daddy said, standing in front of the TV watching CNN. Jeb and I told him to sit down.
A gust of wind came from the direction of the bay just as we opened the trunk. Jeb stomped his feet and bent his shoulders. "I can't believe how cold it is," Jeb said. "Last Christmas we were in short sleeves." His face didn't register that mentioning last Christmas made him feel anything. I handed him Daddy's bag.
"Which room am I in?" I said.
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Summer before last, Daddy, Jeb a
nd I got in a big yelling fight. Jeb was in town to do some consulting work, and he and Daddy had ganged up on me saying how I needed to get another job and start thinking how I was going to send Teddy to college. What they were saying didn't piss me off as much as the way they said it, talking to me as if I was a little kid, especially Jeb. I told them both to FUCK OFF and blew out of the house, thinking I was going to leave, but I leaned against my truck to smoke a cigarette and relax. Momma came out after me on her walker.
"You shouldn't be walking this far, Momma," I said, but she kept coming, her face set hard in the blue street light in the front yard.
"What do you think you're doing?" she said. She almost never lost her temper, but I could see her shaking from more than the effort of standing.
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"I'm tired of them giving me crap," I said.
"I don't care what you're tired of. This is a family time."
"I'm sorry."
"No you're not. None of you are. I told them, too. All y'all care about are yourselves or else it wouldn't happen. Grown men acting like children. I'm sick of it."
"I'm sick of them."
"Shut up."
She wavered. I grabbed her arms.
"Sit on the swing," I said.
I helped her over. The chains creaked from her weight. She kept her eyes on the ground.
"Momma?"
"I don't understand y'all. We get together once or twice a year, and we can't have peace. How long do y'all think I have?"
My legs went rubbery. I sat beside her. The night sky was dark and moonless. The radio tower on the road behind the house threw flashes like lightning, showing one thin cloud, pointed like a finger, creeping over.
"Why can't you get along?" she asked.
"Why can't Daddy treat me like he does Jeb? He's never thought I was worth a shit."
"That's not true."
"Nothing I do makes him happy I volunteered for the goddamn Army and all he could say when I came back was 'get a haircut.'"
Momma ran one hand across the back of the other, then looked at the dry skin there. I put my arm around her shoulder, but she pushed it off. I laid my hands in my lap. I was sick of getting hurt and of hurting everybody Every time one of us looked the other in the eye it was some kind of challenge.
"You have so much anger, Bob. I don't know why What did we do?"
"You didn't do it, Momma."
Momma wiped her hand across her eyes and then across her skirt. She looked at me. Her face was so swollen her cheeks looked like gobs of putty "Don't you know your daddy loves you?" she said.
She touched my face with her hand, hot with the fever she constantly had. It was the same way she touched me to wake me after I got back from Nam, even though I might hit her. But I never did hit her. Even asleep, I always knew it was her hand.
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After dinner Jeb made us some drinks, and we sank into their living room. Daddy sat in an armchair glancing at the soundless TV, while Conlee and Jeb played curly toes with each other on the couch. Jeb asked Daddy to tell about
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coming out on the deck of his ship their first morning in Nagasaki Bay. Daddy rubbed his lips with his fingers awhile before he started, then stumbled a bit telling how they got in at night and had to stay below deck. Then he pictured it.
"So when we come out on deck we was surprised by it, you know, the whole city tore up as far as we could see. We hadn't seen nothing like that. We really didn't even understand it. This petty officer points way down on the water and there set this little boat with five Japs in it, pointing this old cannon up at us. They wasn't saying anything, and we didn't know how to talk to them, so we all just kept looking at each other, us with our big boat and them with their little gun. After a while they rowed off to another ship and then another, all day, nobody messing with them, and them never shooting. Finally they went back to shore."
Daddy told it funny, but I remembered the other story Daddy had told Jeb about his truck ride through Nagasaki, about people sitting on piles of rubble staring, about the shadows of people where there weren't any people, about buildings that looked like they'd been sheared by a giant sickle. I saw the bodies still floating there a week after the bomb, and worse I saw the Japs' faces in that boat and Daddy's face looking at them, all of them sharing the most terrible thing that had ever happened, but none of them knowing how to speak.
I wanted to shake the feeling, so I started a story of mine about this kook who came in the hardware store during Halley's Comet wanting to know if we had repellium, a metal he could cover his windows with to keep comet radiation out. I didn't get very far, though, because Jeb busted in and said, "This isn't one of those stories that ends with you saying, 'Then I told the son-of-a-bitch . . .' is it?" Conlee gave him a kick, but he just smiled. Daddy sat there holding his drink with both hands, looking away at people on TV chipping the Berlin Wall while the fire popped and Bing Crosby sang and the room was way too small.
I saw the black snow falling and Exxon's flames boiling up, and I remembered one day this Chinook chopper passing over, a gigantic net slung under it, filled with dead Vietnamese, their arms and legs sticking out like hair on an insect. The chopper went out over the sea and dumped the net and it splashed and sank into the water. I looked at Daddy sitting there in Jeb's living room, and I wanted to yell, "How do you live with what you saw?" But Daddy just sat there, paper-skinned and bony, his eyes looking through the TV.
"I need to walk," I said.
"It's freezing out there," Daddy said, and I knew he'd say to Conlee and Jeb how fucked up I was. I stepped out into the icy air still buttoning my coat. I lit a cigarette on the go, holding the match in both hands, heard Jeb's voice cracking the cold air, his footsteps hammering to catch me. He grabbed my arm, and I wanted to cock him so hard it'd knock the bullshit out of him, but he grabbed me in a way that told me just to wait.
"Mind if I join you?" he asked.
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"Do what you want." I pulled my arm away. We headed away from the houses, the night so still and cold it was like walking inside an ice cube.
"I shouldn't have said that," Jeb said. "It was a joke. I didn't mean to come off like such an asshole."
"Right."
"Everything's just so weird."
"No shit."
He looked me in the eye and smoothed the whiskers on his chin like he was trying to make them grow. I doubted I'd even talk to him if he wasn't my brother.
"Down here," he said. "There's an old pier."
We walked the waterfront road between empty lots and lots with construction under way until Jeb led me over big jagged slabs of concrete toward the water.
"This used to be a restaurant," he said. "People who stayed during the storm say a wall of water knocked the building off its foundation, then dragged it back out."
The boards groaned when we sat. We hung our legs over the black water, and I reached under and broke off an icicle the size of a railroad spike. A sliver of moon sat in the sky. Across the bay refinery fires burned, sending a smoky fog out to hug the water.
