Private First Class Jackson, second squad, had begun moving slowly into the crowd when a girl in a red dress came running through it and threw herself on him. She jumped into his arms and wrapped her legs around his hips like a monkey. It was somehow electrifying and obscene, with the small children drifting past. Jackson staggered at the impact, but recovered. He put his arms around her and began turning slowly. Her red dress flared out around her in a rippling circle.
Everyone in the platoon knew who the women were. They all knew names, pictures, stories. The beefy girl kissing Haskell was someone he actually hardly knew, a sort of long-distance girlfriend. They’d gotten to know each other while he was in-country; they’d never even fucked. It got like that, though, people sending hot emails back and forth to people they barely knew back home. All that testosterone had to go somewhere, speeding out onto the Internet.
Jackson’s girlfriend, Helena, the girl in the red dress, had been a cheerleader back home in Oklahoma, and Jackson was always talking about how strong and flexible she was. Jackson ate coffee powder for energy when they went out on patrol, and when he got stoked, you couldn’t shut him up.
“Cheerleaders, man,” he’d say, shaking his head. “You have no fucking idea. They can do anything. Twist into pretzels. Yes!” He squeezed his eyes shut. “They bend themselves all around like acrobats.”
After that, “cheerleader” became code for anyone who could do something extraordinary. Bad guys, Ali Babas—which was what you called bad guys—Marines, anyone. And here was the cheerleader herself, doing a flying fuck-jump like a monkey as proof. Jackson was proud of it; that’s why he was swinging her in that circle, her dress flaring. He wanted everyone to see it.
In-country they talked about women all the time, on patrol in the Humvee, on security, back at the outpost, laughing and lying and sweating and swearing. Once, Jackson had impersonated Helena in a dance contest. He came out from behind a curtain wearing an orange towel and white socks, waving pom-poms made out of white paper he’d gotten from the mess hall. They’d all cheered while he kicked, raising his knees and grinning.
Usually Conrad wasn’t part of those things: as an officer, he kept apart. There was a lot he didn’t want to see, stuff he left to the sergeant. But the men had invited him to the dance contest. “The cheerleader,” Jackson had shouted, waggling his eyebrows, swinging his hips inside the orange towel. “Take it off,” they’d yelled back. “Take it all off!”
Now Conrad snaked through the crowd, pushing gently past Vasquez: he and his wife had found each other. They stood embracing, locked into each other’s shapes. They were nearly the same height, and they seemed fitted together, eyes closed. They were silent, and Conrad looked away to give them privacy.
He was glad Claire hadn’t come. He wouldn’t know how to greet her. How could he not kiss her? For two years at college they’d spent nearly every night together. But while he was in-country, they’d broken up, or sort of broken up. Maybe they’d broken up before he left. He didn’t know where they were. Were they now supposed to shake hands when they met? When he next saw her, he didn’t want it to be in public.
Where were his parents? He tried to raise their faces in his mind. Had he seen them without knowing?
Now he saw his father making his way through the crowd. Marshall raised his hand awkwardly to bat at a white balloon that drifted across his face: WELCOME TOMMY. Behind him was Lydia. They were both smiling. Of course, once Conrad saw them, they were utterly familiar: tall and lanky, both slightly gawky.
When Marshall reached Conrad, he put his arms around his son. They hugged, shoulder to shoulder. Conrad was surprised by his father’s body. It seemed thin and insubstantial: Had it changed, or had he? Compared with the solid, muscular density of Marines, Marshall seemed almost frail. It was not the way he’d ever thought of his father. Conrad turned, and Lydia moved into him, putting her arms completely around him, and he felt the thump of her sob against his chest.
When she drew away, there were tears in her eyes and she was laughing. She said, “I had the craziest idea. I was afraid I wouldn’t recognize you. I couldn’t call up your whole face, only parts of it.”
The crowd was swirling around them, ebullient. Jackson came over to them, his arm around the Monkey. He stood apart, waiting politely to be seen.
“Jackson,” said Conrad.
Jackson was short, with a long head and fleshy ears. He had low, beetling brows and gleaming blue eyes, skin mildly pitted with acne.
“LT, I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Helena,” Jackson said formally.
“Hello, Lieutenant Farrell.” Helena smiled at him. She had a very red mouth, loose dark ringlets, a small cleft in her chin. “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Glad to meet you, too, Helena.”
Conrad nodded politely, not mentioning that he’d heard about her as well. It was strange seeing her in the flesh, lipstick smudges on her teeth, strands of dark hair clinging to her damp throat. Strange to see this physical manifestation of Jackson’s other life. His new life, under this darkening California sky, a small evening wind rustling the leaves overhead. Strange to think that this was the last time he would see Jackson in this way. The balance had already shifted: Jackson’s arm was around the Monkey. His allegiance was now to her, or to whoever came after her. He’d never again be under Conrad’s command.
The last four years were being dismantled around him, subsiding, melting away in a silent cascade. Their shared life was over: from now on, for the rest of their lives, they would share only a past, never the present. It was as though Jackson himself were vanishing before his eyes. Though what they shared would always be there. Part of their life was fluid, part fixed.
“All right, Jackson. Have a good evening.”
“You, too, sir,” said Jackson.
Conrad thought of the Monkey’s legs wrapped around Jackson’s waist, that graphic, flamboyant welcome, the public declaration of a different life. He thought of Claire. Everything was breaking up and changing.
As Conrad turned back, he saw Anderson, ten feet away. He was talking to his parents, his arm around his girlfriend.
“Excuse me one moment,” Conrad said to his parents. “I want to say goodbye to someone.”
Anderson saw him coming over.
“Hey, LT,” he said. “Like you to meet my mom and dad, Chuck and Nita Anderson. And my girlfriend, Sue-Ann Hanson.” Everyone smiled. Sue-Ann was fat but pretty, with liquid blue eyes and springy blond hair.
Conrad shook hands with the parents. “Your son is a good guy,” he told Nita.
Nita was short and stocky, with short gray hair, small features in a wide face. She wore baggy khaki pants, some kind of striped sweater. She beamed at Conrad.
“Well, we think so,” Nita said. “We have always thought so.”
Chuck Anderson wore a loose short-sleeved jersey with a diamond pattern across the chest. He had a wide, colorless mouth and wore square gold-rimmed glasses.
“Hear you had some pretty exciting things going on over there.” Chuck looked at Conrad from under his thatchy eyebrows.
Conrad tried to remember—was he an accountant or a lawyer? Something like that. They lived in a small town outside Minneapolis.
Conrad clapped Anderson on the shoulder. “This guy,” he said, “did some exciting stuff. As exciting as anything that happened in the whole country.”
Nita and Chuck both looked at Anderson, who grinned and shook his head.
“You’re a hero,” Sue-Ann said, turning to Anderson. She had pressed herself against his side. Her dress was royal blue, scoop-necked, wide pleats tight against her big legs. She was brimming with excitement. The fact that Anderson was here, that his body was next to hers, that the future lay before them, nearly made her wriggle with delight.
Anderson shook his head again.
“So, now, the dogsled?” Conrad asked.
“Coming soon,” Anderson said.
�
�Dogsled?” Sue-Ann asked. She looked at Anderson, then at Conrad.
Anderson squeezed her shoulders but didn’t look at her.
“Okay,” Conrad said, “I’ve got to go. It was nice meeting you,” he said to Chuck and Nita. He nodded to Sue-Ann. “Keep in touch,” he said to Anderson. “Semper Fi.”
“Thanks, LT.” Anderson nodded. “I’ll see you.”
Conrad made his way back through the crowd, nodding and smiling. He reached his parents.
“Sorry for that,” he said. “So. Where we headed?”
3
“We’ve got reservations at a place in Oceanside,” Marshall said.
“It’s an Italian seafood place,” said Lydia. “We figured you wouldn’t have had much of either over there, Italian food or seafood.”
His parents waited while Conrad went into the barracks to change out of his cammies. When he came back, they began making their way slowly through the family groups.
The Marines in their cammies, the families in bright clothes, the signs and flags and balloons, the shrill calls, the children yelling and racing—all of it seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to Conrad, possible and not possible, as though he were trying to live two lives at once.
He was among people for whom there was no dark undertow. Here there were no sudden black boiling clouds, no exploding vehicles. There would be no crack of an AK-47, no smell of burning flesh. Here the air was mild, the landscape quiet. No one would round a corner to find something lying on the street, ripped open and gasping, ruby-colored, terrible. These wives and children and parents, with their cameras and rental cars and balloons, were exempt from all that.
Somewhere, on streets Conrad knew well, those things did exist. Those huge sounds (too great to be called sounds, really, they were more like whole days, or years, like weather systems, obliterating everything, taking over the air, your breath, your body) were still being heard. He felt as though those sounds were here, too, somehow, only they’d been blotted out, muted—as though they were all around, but now he couldn’t hear them. How could they not exist here? He felt he was derelict in his duty by not hearing them.
They were moving slowly toward the parking lot. The evening air was warm and buoyant, light and alive, hinting at the unseen Pacific with its briny tingle, its sweep and movement. Long streaks of light from the sunset still filled the western horizon. Above them the sodium lights had turned the landscape dim and shadowy. Sounds seemed amplified: footsteps on the paved pathways, nearby voices.
The skyline of cartoon figures was behind them, the first sharp thrill of the reunion was over. Tired mothers called to rebellious children, Come over here, I told you to stay next to me; returning fathers were quick to back up their wives, Listen to your mother, you do what she tells you; fathers were asking reluctant children for a kiss, Come on, now, sweetie, look at Daddy. Look at Daddy. Mothers were quick to back up their husbands, Honey, look at Daddy. Give Daddy a kiss.
The parking lot was full. The cars were in neat rows, their smooth, rounded shapes gleaming under the arc lights. People moved among them, opening doors, setting off the little pinging bells. The lights made radiant tents of the interiors. Children were buckled, protesting, into car seats. Trunks were opened and shut. The men were dispersing, vanishing into the night. Conrad felt a zigzag of reflexive anxiety—but they’d been dismissed. Dispersal was correct. They were home now. Not in his care, not under his command.
“Where’d we leave the car?” Marshall stopped to scan the row. “Do you remember?”
“At the end of a row, near a trash basket,” Lydia said. “I dropped something in it. But I don’t remember which row.” They walked haphazardly toward the cars.
“It’s over to the right somewhere,” Marshall said.
“I don’t even remember what it looks like,” Lydia said. “Is it red?”
“Silver.” Marshall raised his arm, pointing the key toward the cars like a magic wand. He clicked forcefully. Nothing happened. He pointed in the opposite direction. “Go!” he commanded.
Two rows away, a small black car chirped and blinked its lights.
“Thank you!” Marshall said. “I mean, it’s black.”
His parents thought it was funny, their running dispute with technology. Conrad found it baffling. It was like arguing with language. Why not just use it?
“How did people find their cars before clickers?” Lydia asked.
“There were fewer people,” Marshall said, “fewer cars.”
He unlocked the car, and Conrad threw his bag into the trunk and climbed in back. Lydia opened the front door, then shut it. She opened the back door.
“I’m going to sit with you. I just want to be next to you for a while.”
She climbed in beside him. The back was cramped, and they sat very close. Lydia turned to look at him. She said nothing, smiling a little. She shook her head, then looked away, her eyes glittering. He could feel her tenderness. Marshall looked at Conrad for a moment in the rearview mirror. He could feel their gratitude that he was back, their gratitude at the end of the fear they’d lived with: the car was thick with it. But there was nothing he could say about being alive. You were alive or you were not. It was too close for you to look at.
The cars were all leaving, backing out carefully and getting in one another’s way, forming a glacially slow parade.
“This will take all night,” Marshall announced.
“It doesn’t matter.” Lydia smiled at Conrad, then looked away, out her own window.
Marshall called back, “How was the flight home?”
“Good,” said Conrad. “From Germany on, we flew chartered.”
“Nice,” Marshall said, nodding.
Going over, on his first deployment, he’d flown cargo. They’d left San Diego in the middle of the night. He remembered lining up on the runway in the dark, the men humping their ponderous packs in silence. Above them towered the huge C-5, its dark outline barely visible against the night sky. There were no lights.
Inside, the vast cargo bay was cavernous, smelling of oil and metal and canvas. Rows of Humvees, chained to the floor, gleamed faintly in the dim light. The men’s boots rang on the metal floor as they filed past the tarpaulined mounds of equipment, snaking their way to the steep, ladderlike staircase. The passenger capsule was set high against the side of the plane, narrow seats and no windows. The metal seatback hit at the base of his head, and on the floor there wasn’t enough room to put his feet side by side. When the engines started, the noise drowned out everything. Conrad sat beside the thrumming metal wall, motionless and solitary as the sky roared past outside.
Sealed and sightless, high inside the plane, he was cargo. Roaring toward the unknown, fear was with all of them, he knew. Not exactly fear of death—that was a blackout, an abstraction. No one could imagine it. What they feared was mutilation. The exploded body, the missing limbs, the horribly scarred face. The wheelchair beside the Christmas tree. The C-5 roared through the dark sky; they put in earbuds and listened to music; they slept, cramped in the narrow seats.
“Chartered! That’s good,” said Lydia.
“It was great,” Conrad said. “Real seats, real flight attendants, and real meals. And a movie.”
“What did you see?” asked Lydia.
“The Aviator,” Conrad said.
“What is it? We didn’t see it,” Lydia said.
“Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio,” Conrad said. “It’s about Howard Hughes.”
“Any good?” Marshall asked.
Before he could answer, Lydia broke in. “I’ll tell you what you have to see,” she said, “Sideways. It’s wonderful. It’s so funny. About two guys going to the wine country in California and drinking too much. Red wine, it’s all about red wine.”
He hadn’t seen it, of course. The last four years had been a cultural blank. Everyone here had been watching movies and reading books, and he had not. He was Rip Van Winkle. He’d never catch up with the things he missed while
he’d been living in the alternate universe. Even if he saw them, he’d see them in a different context, part of a different year.
When they left the base, they headed into Oceanside. The road was flanked by a bright lineup of national chains—motels and gas stations and fast-food restaurants—but there was a holiday air to it all. The low horizon, the moist air, the palm trees all suggested the presence of the coast. Between the buildings were glimpses of a wild, majestic sunset, scarlet banners melting into the sea, the sea a molten pewter.
The hotel was Spanish Mission–style, two stories high, pink adobe. Heavy wooden beams framed the doorways, with clusters of red chili peppers hanging in the corners. The lobby was pinkish beige: rug, chairs, the hard-looking sofa, the high counter at reception. The girl behind the counter didn’t fit in with the Spanish colonial theme. She was Eastern Bloc, with pale skin, heavy eye shadow, and a scary smile. Her dry bleached-white hair was teased back in a rooster tail.
“Welcome,” she said to Conrad, baring a row of little gray teeth. “Welcome home. Here’s your key.” She slid him the envelope with his computerized plastic card.
“Thanks,” he said.
They were on the second floor. Conrad’s room was next to his parents’. He slotted his key card into the lock and it flashed green. He stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him.
He was alone in the room.
He hadn’t been alone for a long time. He stood still, feeling the air settle around him, hearing the faint singing sound of silence. The room was stuffy, smelling slightly of cleaning fluid.
Against one wall were two double beds with carved and painted wooden headboards. Against another wall stood a painted wooden armoire with double doors. A wide mirror hung over a low bureau: he saw himself standing against the white curtains, the festive headboards. The sunburned face was familiar, but not the rest. He was in civilian clothes—a polo shirt and khakis. He stared at himself. He looked like someone else.
Sparta Page 4
