by James King
Marcy took inventory of the items in her carriage. Apples, pears, bags of prepackaged romaine salad, whole grain bread, eggs, skim milk, yogurt. What would Mike’s reaction be when she walked in carrying bags of wholesomeness?
“Ma’am?”
The cashier was waiting for Marcy to begin loading her groceries onto the belt. Marcy glanced back at the woman directly behind her, who offered a tight smile that said, I don’t know about you, but I happen to be in a hurry.
Would Mike even thank her?
Would Mike ever admit to what he had done? To Colleen? To his kids?
And would April ever be able to understand how she felt right now, at this moment, trying to keep the worst-case scenarios at bay while she shopped—shopped!—for the brother who left her as soon as he possibly could?
“Ma’am? You ready or what?”
Now Marcy was aware of all the beeps around her as items in the aisles next to hers were scanned. She heard the murmur of conversation, the sudden call-outs in Spanish, the crying of a child. It was the crying child that got to her.
“Excuse me,” Marcy said to the woman behind her as she started backing up, pulling the grocery carriage.
“What? What are you doing?”
“Excuse me, need to get by.”
The woman frowned as if Marcy had just peed on her leg.
“Why not just go through?” the woman asked.
Good point, Marcy thought. But Marcy was determined.
“Don’t worry, your plastic surgeon will wait,” she said.
The woman inhaled sharply as Marcy all but pushed her out of the way. Marcy then walked the aisles of Dominick’s, returning each item in her cart to the appropriate shelf or bin. By the time she had finished, the crying child was gone.
It wasn’t until she was halfway back to the hotel that she realized she didn’t have her cell phone. She stepped on the gas.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Even though by most measures it wasn’t much of a scuffle, Bill Warrington judged it to be one of the more satisfying fights he’d ever been in. All right, it wasn’t really a fight. It was a mugging. A near mugging, actually. But it would have been real mugging if he hadn’t taken action, if he hadn’t fought back. But fight back he did. Got in a good jab, too.
Maybe it was the mountains that surrounded the city that reminded Bill of Korea. Strange how one minute he remembered what he was trying to do and who he was trying to find and then, the next minute, the next second, not so sure. The mountains threw him off. Korea? Colorado? He had to admit he was confused. Like the incident that had started the fight in the first place. He had been crossing the street looking for Marcy . . . no, April . . . and there on the other side was Clare. He was sure of it, even as he knew it could not be true. The staggering possibility, however remote, had made it impossible for him to move. He was sure it was her. The way she had given her head a shake as she walked, moving the strands away from her face as her hair billowed out behind her—how could it be anyone else? He’d reached his hand out in front of him, as if to touch, caress, and he saw the dark spots and the swollen knuckles and he was jerked back to . . . Utah! Yes, Utah.
So it couldn’t possibly be Clare, any more than those bent fingers and yellow nails were his. But they were his, so why couldn’t it be Clare? Things were upside down in this goddamned crazy world. Maybe he was a young man having a nightmare instead of an old man reliving a dream.
That’s when the gook had suddenly started talking to him, his breath foul enough to kill a horse. “You can’t stand here, mister,” he said. No trace of an accent, Bill noticed. Pretty goddamned smart. “Let me help you. You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
Bill heard car horns and a few shouted obscenities, but he was focused on the drunk gook. Or if he wasn’t drunk, he had been drunk not too long ago. Maybe he was on his way to get drunk . . . or drunker. Maybe he needed money to get drunk. He wasn’t about to fool Bill. Bill knew gooks. And Bill sure as hell knew drunks.
“Lemme help, lemme help,” the man said, and now he was starting to sound more like he should. That’s the thing: They’d nod and smile and say yes yes yes but all the while they are wondering how they can rip your heart out. He’d seen it. He knew. Some of his buddies fell for the smiling, the subservient posturing, the irresistible stuff they said they had for the GI to buy. Women to buy. Cheap, velly cheap. They’d draw the sailor or GI or marine or flyboy into an alley, promising porn or liquor or a young girl, and then kick the crap out of the fool, leaving him with little more than his boxers and his balls. Bill never fell for it. His buddies should have known better.
Bill started walking. One foot in front of the other. Just start walking. He made it to the sidewalk and stopped. He looked around him, searching for a familiar building or landmark.
“Where you going, man?”
The gook again. Flies on turds, these guys, trying to sound cool, sound American. Bill knew the game.
But the question still knocked him off track. Where was he trying to go? For a moment he was thinking, Back to my unit, back to my barracks. But that wasn’t right, couldn’t be right. He looked at his hands again.
He was nothing but an old man. But at least he wasn’t like this guy behind him: drunk, homeless. Kicked around every day like the old dog he’d probably eaten yesterday for lunch.
Dog—that was it! Greyhound. That’s where he was going.
Bill looked around him for the sign. The sign of the dog. The Greyhound dog: elongated, leaping. There it was: right above him. He was here.
“Are you lost, man? Whatcha lookin’ for?”
Bill needed to get away from this guy. Clare was waiting.
“Wait, man, maybe I can help.”
He’d turned and thrown the first punch only after he felt a hand on his shoulder, but he missed wide and nearly lost his balance. The gook broke his fall, holding on to his right arm with both hands. Bill knew the drill. First the arm, then the legs got kicked out from underneath you, next thing you knew you were on your back. Chink meat. No thinking needed here, just action. He cocked his left arm and let fly.
From the gook’s yell of surprise, Bill knew he’d connected. So why was he on the ground? Must’ve slipped at that point and knocked his head. He was sitting, and he touched his finger to a spot on his forehead that suddenly seemed on fire. He brought his hand away and saw blood on his fingers.
As the ringing subsided, he heard people yelling, “Leave him alone” and “Get outta here.” Bill thought at first they were yelling at him, but then he heard his assailant cry out, “I was trying to help him, motherfuckers!”
People were helping Bill to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Do you need help?”
“Is there someone we can call?”
Bill felt dizzy. All these questions, all these people. He needed to focus. “I’m fine,” he muttered, even though he wasn’t sure he would be able to keep his knees from buckling. “I’m fine.”
Someone put something against his forehead. A handkerchief.
“You’re bleeding. We should get you to a hospital. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
“Hospital, no,” Bill said. “I’m okay. Just let me . . .”
Someone—several people—led him to a bus stop bench and helped him sit. Out of the noise of the traffic and the people talking to him, he heard a girl’s voice cry out.
“Grandpa!”
He was looking in Clare’s face—no, not Clare’s . . . April’s. She was crying and asking what happened and then she was talking to the strangers and one of the strangers said the bleeding had stopped and April was saying thank you and she thought everything would be okay and no it wasn’t necessary to call the police or an ambulance. A man’s voice asked if she was sure and she said she was sure and Bill had closed his eyes until he felt her in front of him.
“Grandpa, you absolutely scared the shit out of me,” April said.
Bill wanted to laugh,
but a flash of pain across his forehead made him wince.
“Where did you go?” April continued. “You dropped me at Amtrak but never showed up. I finally realized you might be here, but then I got here and you weren’t. Then I walk out here to find you bleeding and everything. What is going on with you?”
Bill wondered if this would be his last coherent thought, this realization that he was sitting at a dirty bus stop; that he didn’t even know the name of the city he was in; that he was not with Clare or with Mike or with Nick or with Marcy; that he was about to break yet another promise, this one to his granddaughter, who was now begging him to say something, to open his eyes.
Bill hadn’t realized he’d closed them. A hot wave—an ocean of pins and tacks and broken bottles—scraped across his forehead, across his temples, and across the back of his head. The pain actually felt pretty good; cleansing, in a way. He waited to be lifted up, he expected to be lifted up so that he could look down on the scene: an old man, a young girl, indifferent life bustling about and around them. Up and up he would go, he knew, until their two figures became small and melted like snow as he rose higher and higher into white.
CHAPTER THIRTY
April guessed she’d been in the zone Keith Spinelli and his buddies talk about when they talk about sports. He was in the zone, man, one of them would say, as if some stupid athlete had walked on water. It used to bug her, listening to that crap as she took books out of her locker or sat in the lunchroom. Get a life, she’d think.
But now she would give just about anything to be listening to that drivel, to be watching Heather get all gaga over some stupid boy talking about the zone with Keith Spinelli, to be anywhere but the Salt Lake City Amtrak station.
The thing about being in the zone, April thought, is that you remember it all, but you don’t remember actually doing it until it’s all over: how she found her grandfather sitting on the sidewalk in front of the bus station, with people huddled around him while he held a blood-soaked handkerchief to his forehead and noisily refused all medical attention, practically wrestling the handkerchief away from him to make sure he wasn’t still bleeding, walking him back to the Amtrak station, her grandfather babbling away, making no sense, no sense at all. And here they were, sitting side by side on the plastic chairs, waiting for the train that April knew, with growing certainty, they could not get on.
The businessman was gone. The mother and her kids were still there, though. The woman, arms around her sleeping maniacs, gave April a sympathetic smile. April smiled back but then turned away. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth, if she said a single word, she would never stop crying.
Her grandfather sat quietly, staring off into space. A zombie. She wanted him to talk to her, but she was afraid that he’d start jabbering, loudly, about nothing. Maybe he’d wake the kids; maybe the mother would feel compelled to offer advice again. Everyone, it seemed to April, felt it was their civic duty to tell a teenager how to live. And she noticed it was usually from the perspective of regret. As if messing up their own lives gave them the right to advise others on how to run theirs.
She decided that when she became an adult, she wasn’t going to try to solve world hunger or join some lying politician’s campaign or try to figure out how to make blacks and whites and Arabs and Jews—freaking men and women, for that matter—get along. No, she was going to do the world a favor and just mind her own damn business.
Kind of like the ticket guy. He didn’t say anything, didn’t ask anything, when April returned with her grandfather. A sweet job, when you think about it. People ask for tickets, you give them their tickets. No questions. The train is either full, or not. Nothing to think about. No decisions to make.
You want to go where? Fine. That’ll be fifty dollars. Have a nice day.
She’d been too hard on the clerk, she decided. She’d been a smart-ass. The guy was just doing his job. Until he said, “Well, aren’t you something?” That, April thought, was unnecessary.
And yet—aren’t you something?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am something, April thought now, sitting next to her near-comatose grandfather. I am clueless. I am an idiot. I am a moron. What else could I be, traveling across the country with someone I knew was losing it? A singer in a band? Who’s kidding who? My voice belongs at the top of my TITS list.
Her grandfather’s eyes were open but vacant. April wanted to wave her hands in front to see if he’d blink, but worried about drawing the attention of the mother. He was breathing heavily. The cut on his forehead was a scabby brownish red. He needed to brush his teeth.
She took the tickets out of her pocket. California Zephyr. “Don’t move, Grandpa,” she said. “Okay?”
The request was unnecessary. Her grandfather made no sign that he’d even heard her.
The clerk was reading the paper. April wondered if it was a different one or if he read the same news over and over until the end of his shift.
“I need to exchange tickets,” she said. “Please,” she added.
He lowered the paper and looked at her as if he hadn’t noticed her until that very moment. He then folded the newspaper noisily, the crinkling reminding April of boots against snow, walking home. “Well, the young traveler returns. How nice to see you again. You say you need to exchange these tickets?”
“Yes. I need to exchange them for tickets to Ohio.”
“Ohio?”
“Ohio.”
“Wow. Instead of desperately needing to go to California—Emeryville—you now desperately need to get to Ohio?” He blew out his cheeks. “Talk about your U-turns.”
“Can you please just exchange these tickets?”
“No, I can’t just exchange these tickets.”
“Why not?”
“It costs more to get to Ohio from here than it does to California. You do know where Ohio is, don’t you?”
April reminded herself that the guy was just doing his job.
“I grew up there.”
“You grew up there? So . . . you’re all grown up, is that it?”
One more comment, April thought. Just one more comment and I’m going to grab this guy’s collar, pull him close, and punch him in the face.
April pushed the tickets she had, along with her grandfather’s credit card, to the clerk.
“Can you just exchange these for tickets to Cleveland? Put the difference on this card.”
The clerk didn’t look at her.
“Please,” April said.
He swiped. Waited. Swiped again. He grunted as he squinted at the readout.
“Won’t take it,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Says ‘declined.’ ”
“Why?”
“My guess is you exceeded the limit. Lots of people think they can just keep charging and charging, until this happens.”
April felt a trickle of sweat slither down her right side. She’d never bothered asking her grandfather about limits. Never thought about it as she checked into hotels, paid for meals.
“Do you—or should I say your grandfather—have a different card?”
April felt hot. Her eyes stung. Why does everything out of this guy’s mouth have to be a dig? What had she done to him? It wasn’t her fault this loser was stuck in a loser job.
“Is there a problem here?”
Her grandfather’s eyes were clear and they were focused on the ticket clerk. He was standing straight. Apart from the scab and bruise on his forehead—which, April noticed, seemed to be getting bigger and bluer by the second—her grandfather seemed perfectly fine. In charge.
“No, Grandpa,” April said. “Please go back and sit down. I’m just—”
“What’s the problem?” her grandfather asked, still looking at the clerk. April noticed the slight rise in volume. The clerk had better not try any smart-ass response: her grandfather might turn into GI Joe again.
“I’m trying to exchange your tickets, but your credit card got rejected.”
“Exchange? What exchange?”
“The young lady wants to exchange the tickets for Ohio. I tried . . .”
April cringed as her grandfather turned to her. She tried to speak, but her throat went Sahara.
“You have the tickets to Seattle?” he asked April.
April nodded. She hoped the clerk wouldn’t correct her grandfather. “Grandpa, I think we need—”
“No way,” he said, his voice flat, final. “Who are you, Moses? Coming all this way but not going in, God be damned?”
April thought she heard the ticket seller gasp.
“No granddaughter of mine is going to be a quitter.”
“Grandpa, this isn’t about me. It’s about—”
“It’s about quitting, that’s what it’s about. And you’re not going to quit, you hear me? I will not allow it.”
April knew from his eyes that he wasn’t talking to her. She didn’t know which son, or maybe her mother, or which war buddy he was talking to, but it wasn’t her.
“Okay, Grandpa. Okay.”
He was talking nonstop all the way back to their seats. But at least he wasn’t screaming. The woman with the children was watching. April ignored her.
“Can’t go through life not doing what you know you should do. When I knew I’d be drafted, I knew I should enroll in officer school. But I didn’t. Didn’t think I had the stuff, even though I knew I did. So what happened? Froze my damn ass off in the trenches.”
His language was getting worse and the mother was smiling, but it was making April uncomfortable. She needed to distract him.
“Grandpa, why is it so important that all three be there?” she asked, uncertain herself as to where the question came from. “You told me—and sometimes when you don’t know you’re talking—that you want all to be there. Where? And who? Are you talking about my mom and Uncle Mike and Uncle Nick?”
He seemed not to understand the question. But then he nodded.
“Why is that so important, Grandpa?”
