What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay

by Amanda Cockrell

  “For what?”

  “Well, don’t you think maybe he ought to be dating—girls his age?”

  “There aren’t any still in school. Mom, he needs a friend.”

  “Honey, you want to come have a coffee with me? Maybe we could talk.”

  I hate having “discussions” over the telephone, so I said okay and met her at the coffee bar downtown. We got cappuccinos and sat down at a corner table. Mom poked the froth in hers around with her spoon.

  “Four years is a big age gap when you’re fifteen,” she said. “Later, it won’t make much difference, but right now the difference is huge.”

  “Boys my age are idiots,” I muttered.

  “Granted. But still.” Mom sighed. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d encourage you to go out with Noah Michalski, but at least he’s your age.”

  “Mom! He tried to stick his hand up my blouse and then he told everyone I let him do it!”

  “I know. His mother says he’s sorry.”

  “You’ve been talking to his mother about me?”

  “Just in passing!” Mom looked guilty. And obviously she was scraping the bottom of the barrel if she was trying to fix me up with Noah.

  “This is ridiculous. You never worried about my friends before.”

  “Jesse may be a more complicated friend than you think,” Mom said.

  I thought about the mazes he draws around the pictures in his books and on the backs of his binders. But am I supposed to just abandon him because he’s four years older and he makes my mom nervous?

  “An experience like war affects people,” Mom continued. “There are things you just don’t see, but they’re there. It affects things like perception … judgment. I don’t know how stable Jesse is.”

  “He’s perfectly stable!” I said.

  “I’m just not comfortable having you go out with him,” Mom said.

  “I’m not ‘going out’ with him.”

  “How do you know how he feels about you?”

  “He thinks I don’t treat him like a freak, and he knows I don’t gossip about him.”

  “He’s too old for you.”

  “I’m not dating him.”

  We sat there and stared at each other. “Ben called you, didn’t he?” I asked her.

  “He thought I might be concerned.”

  And she paid attention to Ben this time instead of automatically taking the other side. That might be a good sign. But I didn’t say that. “I tell you what,” I offered. “I won’t stop being friends with Jesse, but I promise that if anything at all gets weird, I’ll tell you. Okay?” I left the definition of “weird” open.

  Mom hesitated, then slurped down a mouthful of cappuccino. “That seems reasonable. His mother’s worried, too.”

  “About me? She was nice when we were over there last night. And will you please stop discussing me with everybody’s mother?”

  “I’m not. It wasn’t about you. She’s worried about Jesse hanging around with younger kids and not people his own age.”

  “Then why did she send him back to school? And give him some time. Nobody his own age has a clue where he’s been.”

  “And you do?”

  “No, but I don’t have to. I’m not his girlfriend.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. “As long as you keep it that way.”

  I wondered then just how Mom happened to get married at sixteen. I also sat up straighter and quit poking my finger into the foam on my cappuccino and licking it, like I was someone who was actually mature enough to be friends with somebody older.

  6

  I was so encouraged by Mom actually listening to Ben, even if it was about butting into my life, that I went over to St. Thomas’s on the way home from the coffee shop, thinking that maybe Felix could convince Mom to come back to Ben’s, now that we know what Ben did to make her so mad. People always listen to total strangers when they won’t listen to their families, who have already told them the same thing.

  And if Felix was in a war, like Mom thinks, maybe he could tell her that Jesse isn’t a dangerous nut. Although Felix probably isn’t the best example for that.

  He was in the basement. I smelled ramen noodles cooking as soon as I started down the stairs. Wuffie was right—Father Weatherford must know he’s living here.

  “Hey, Ange.” He smiled up at me. He was sitting in a pile of clothes and sleeping bag on the floor, poking at a rickety saucepan on the hot plate. At least he hadn’t put the noodles on the hot plate still in their foam cup. “I thought you might not come back.”

  “I thought I might not, too,” I admitted.

  “So what brings you our way? Intercession? Offerings? We have a special on indulgences this week.”

  In the Middle Ages, the church used to sell indulgences that cancelled out any sins you might have committed. Sometimes you could even buy them ahead of time. Now that was an idea. But I said, “Intercession. I want you to talk to Mom. I found out why she’s mad at Ben and I want you to tell her to get over it.”

  “That’s tactful,” he said.

  “Well, don’t put it like that when you talk to her.”

  “And why is she mad?”

  I told him, and he said, “I don’t blame her.”

  “You don’t understand. All writers use real stuff. She knows that—she does it herself. She described my naked butt in a poem once. I was two, but still.”

  “How many people saw the poem?”

  “Probably not many. It was in some literary magazine. But when I was in middle school, some moron got hold of it and read it aloud in homeroom.”

  Felix smiled.

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  “No, but you should be able to sympathize with your mom.”

  “She should be able to sympathize with me.”

  “She’s not trying to divorce you,” he pointed out. He stirred the noodles and I was suddenly suspicious again.

  “Are you putting the moves on my mom? Are you the last person I should be asking for help here?”

  “I dunno, Ange. Maybe. I like your mom.”

  “Oh, shit.” I sat down on the bottom stair. “You’re too old for her. And you live in a basement,” I told him. “She’s not going to marry someone who lives in a basement.”

  “That’s okay, I’m not ready for marriage.” He started eating the noodles out of the pot with the wooden spoon.

  “And you also claim you’re St. Felix. You probably aren’t even real.”

  “You think?” He stopped eating and looked as if he was considering that.

  “You’re a monk, aren’t you? You can’t go chasing women.”

  “I’m thinking of leaving the order.”

  I was getting exasperated. I hadn’t seen Felix in a while and I’d forgotten what he was like. I was just trying to rattle him and he was taking it all literally. Talking to him was like talking to one of those toys that’s programmed with certain sentences. They don’t make sense, but sometimes they’re weirdly appropriate. I wondered what Ben would make of him, and if I ought to tell Ben that Mom was seeing someone else and that the someone else was probably crazy. For the life of me, I couldn’t make myself believe that Felix was dangerous.

  “Okay, don’t talk to Mom about Ben,” I said. “But can you tell her not to worry about me being friends with Jesse Francis?”

  “Why is she worried?”

  “She thinks he’s too old for me, and that maybe he’s not stable. But he needs somebody to be friends with.”

  “Yeah. I expect he does,” Felix said.

  “So will you talk to her?”

  “Maybe she’s right.”

  “That’s so unfair!” I glared at him.

  “Ange, there’s more stuff in this universe than you know about. Jesse Francis has probably met some of it.”

  “Like you did?”

  He was quiet after that, not eating, just looking across the room as if there were something there, which there wasn’t.

  “What d
oes everybody think Jesse’s going to do?” I demanded. “Turn into a werewolf when the moon gets full?”

  “Even the man who is pure at heart and says his prayers at night,” Felix said. “Prayers won’t keep some things off you.”

  “Like what?” I insisted.

  He shook his head and started eating again.

  “What?”

  “Stuff that gets in your dreams.”

  He’d closed up, and I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything else. So I went home and took the Todal for a walk, which is what I do when I want to think. The Todal snuffled along, sucking up all the things only dogs can smell, while I thought about Mom and Ben and what on earth I could do about it. Everything I thought of sounded like a bad plot device.

  What makes love last? How can you be in love with someone, and then not? And if you still are, how can you be mad enough to leave them? Mom is always restless, but this is out there even for her. What does she want? What do I want, for that matter? If I find someone to be in love with and marry, and he actually loves me back, what kind of guarantee do I have that it will all work out? That I won’t end up divorced with six children, living on food stamps? I worried that one around in my head till bedtime, but I didn’t get anywhere with it.

  In the middle of the night I was in the jungle somewhere. The air was steaming hot. It was like trying to breathe in a sauna, but it stank. It smelled like a backed-up sewer, overlaid with gasoline. Light kept dropping out of the darkness over the tree line in sharp flashes, freezing everything like a photograph for a few seconds, and each time I could see a man lying just beyond the hole I was crouched in, his eyes stuck open and his feet hanging over the edge. Another explosion shook everything and I woke up in a sweat.

  I just sat there for a minute, shaking. I don’t usually have nightmares, and this one was horrible and nothing like any bad dream I’ve ever had before. Usually I dream the brakes on my bike don’t work and I’m flying down a hill into a tree, or there’s the one where I turn on the lights in the house at night and none of them come on. Nothing like this. I looked at the clock. It was two a.m. My heart was still thumping. I took deep yoga breaths, like Mom does, until it settled down again. I lay down and punched the pillow into a better shape and didn’t wake up again or dream anything else.

  “You look awful,” Lily said the next morning.

  “I was up late.” I didn’t say anything about the dream.

  The dream came back the next night, though, and this time it scared me to death. It was like being in an awful movie, absolutely real and utterly terrifying, because I was somebody else. I was back in the jungle, lying in the shadows along a canal. We were waiting for something.

  “How can you tell VC from civilians?” a voice asked out of the darkness, and another voice said, “If it’s out there, you shoot it. Anything out at night is VC.”

  Mosquitoes were whining in the grass around my head like tiny power tools almost out of human hearing range. A fish jumped in the water. I could see its silvery flip and the ripples spreading out on the black water. Five boats came through the mist on the canal with a faint plop of oars.

  Then the night exploded in gunfire, all lit up by red arcs over the canal and the fire of a burning boat. Men in black pajamas were scrambling across the decks of other boats, firing bullets through the trees. Their shadows danced on the bank like huge monsters. Then their boats went up in a roar of orange flame.

  “We got swimmers, Sarge!” Someone on the bank fired into the canal. A face floated up below me, just black eyes and a wide mouth, hands clawing at the grass. Another shot blasted him into a red lump that sank down through the water again. On the river, one last man was hanging onto his burning boat. He lifted his gun and fired before he went up in flames too. Farther down the bank someone slid through the mud into the water, his arms flailing.

  “Doc!”

  I heaved myself up, running low. Someone else dragged the boy out of the water before he drowned. There was a hole in his chest the size of a hand and he was spitting blood along with water. I could hear air bubbling in the wound. His eyes stared at me, horrified. In the dream, I knew what to do. I slapped a pad of gauze and Vaseline on the wound to try to seal it and injected him with a morphine syringe.

  “Dust-off!”

  The medevac chopper came down over the trees, lit up by the burning boats on the water. As it lifted off, another sound wailed through the thick air above it, over the chopper’s rotors, hideous and otherworldly: the sound of a baby crying, distorted by volume and the tree cover. The soundship hovered over the river and then banked, heading upstream. A message followed the wailing in shrill Vietnamese: “Friendly baby, GVN baby, don’t let this happen to your baby! Resist the Viet Cong today!”

  I sat up in bed, tangled in the sheets, with that godawful baby ringing in my ears. I had known what the loudspeaker was saying. How did I know that?

  It was two a.m. again. I was afraid to go to sleep. The only time I drifted off, I dreamed I was sewing up a goat. The goat was anesthetized, on a table, and I was pulling bullets out of it and sewing it up. In my dream, it opened its yellow eyes and looked right at me with those strange sideways pupils, and I woke up in a sweat. After that I got up and turned on all the lights in my room and read A Tale of Two Cities, which was our English assignment and certainly didn’t help much.

  The dreams stayed in my head all day, but I’d figured out where they came from. As soon as school was out, I went over to the church. Felix was upstairs this time, polishing windows.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Cleaning the Virgin here,” he said. He rubbed her face gently with his rag. The baby in her arms beamed out at us. Friendly baby.

  “Get out of my head!”

  He looked puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean the nightmares! And don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it. They’re coming out of your head!” I was so mad I didn’t even stop to think about the fact that that was sort of impossible.

  “I get nightmares all the time,” Felix said quietly. “That’s not news.”

  “Well, you’re giving them to me!” I told him. “I’m having your dreams.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “On a riverbank? Boats on fire? There’s a big helicopter broadcasting in a foreign language and I understand it?”

  “Ah, shit.” He looked white.

  “Sewing up goats? What is that about sewing up goats?”

  “Oh, man.” He dropped the rag on a pew and sat down.

  “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you? That’s what I’m dreaming about, isn’t it?”

  “They trained us on goats. They shot them with M-16s and then we practiced sewing them up again.”

  “That’s awful!”

  “Yeah. You quit feeling sorry for the goats, though, after you scoop up some boy’s guts and tape them to his chest because you can’t stuff them back in since someone’s stepped on them and they’re contaminated.”

  My stomach heaved. “I’m not going to dream about that, am I?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re having my dreams at all, but I guess you are. I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do it on purpose? Because I was asking you questions?”

  “No! Christ, no!” He looked so horrified I felt sorry for him. They were pretty awful dreams; I couldn’t think what it would be like to have them all the time. “You were a medic?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I was in pre-med when my lottery number came up.”

  “Lottery?” Who would want to win a prize like that?

  “There were so many protests about rich kids getting draft deferments for being in college and poor kids going to Nam that the government started a lottery. They drew birthdates, and the guys with the first birthdate drawn, they went first.”

  “What did your family do?”

  “My mom wanted me to go to Canada, but my old man said no way. He put me on a bus for
the induction center.”

  I thought about Jesse’s mom and the way she’d looked at his father. “What was it like?” I asked.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  “I didn’t want to dream about it, either. Did you do this to me to scare me away from Jesse?”

  “I told you, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Well, something did it. Somebody did it.”

  “God moves in mysterious ways,” Felix said.

  “You think God is giving me your dreams?”

  “Well, he cancelled my sainthood. If he can do that, he can do what he wants to. Maybe I’ll get your dreams.”

  “No!” I said. I did not want him poking around in my dreams. Dreams are too personal. Not to mention embarrassing. I’ve had dreams I wouldn’t even tell Lily about.

  “No, I probably won’t,” he agreed. “I’d like to be fifteen again, though. I’d like to have those dreams back.”

  “If you’re St. Felix of Valois, you were studying in an abbey when you were fifteen,” I pointed out.

  “We dream anyway,” he said.

  “What happened after you got drafted?”

  “Goats.” He didn’t seem to have any trouble shifting back and forth between lives. “Boys. Boys with their feet blown off. They took ’em away so fast in the dust-off chopper, I never knew whether they lived or not. Except for sometimes. Sometimes if they died they came back and saw me.”

  “Ghosts?” I had a horrible vision of a soldier with his guts taped to his chest, leaning over Felix’s bed. No wonder he was crazy.

  “Yeah. There’re two or three I see pretty regularly. Kid with a sucking chest wound—the one you dreamed about.”

  “I don’t want to dream about that again,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Are you a doctor now? Did you finish med school when you came home?”

  He shook his head, staring down at the pew. It was old, dark wood, shiny with two hundred years of people’s butts. “I lost my taste for it. I thought I could save the world, you know, and I couldn’t even save some kid who stepped on a booby trap.”

  “What did you do?”

  “This and that. I worked construction some. Cut trail. Planted trees. I stayed home till my old man got tired of me.”