Conrad went on through the room and out into the hall. The floor was sticky. In the hall an old woman lay crumpled on the floor in a swirl of skirts. In a small adjoining room on the right was an old man slumped in his wheelchair at a desk. Before him was an open book, spattered with blood. Down the hallway, on the left, was a door into a small, dim bedroom. A young girl, ten or eleven, lay curled on the bed, her arms wrapped tightly around a little boy in striped pajamas. Her body was curved around his, chin tucked over his head. Her eyes were half open, and her hair lay thickly across her mouth, full of blood.
Conrad stood in front of the children. The girl was gone, he couldn’t look at her, but the little boy seemed fine, untouched, clean. He had the feeling that the little boy was all right, that he was pretending to be asleep. Conrad leaned over him and spoke.
“You okay?” The boy wouldn’t know the words, but they were what came out. The boy didn’t move. Conrad could hear the sounds of the town, a few chickens, traffic, at a distance. Voices. He reached out and touched the boy’s arm, plucking it from the locked embrace of the girl; he lifted the soft, limp limb. It seemed light at first but then death heavy, and in lifting the arm, Conrad disturbed something and the boy’s head lolled horribly backward to show a dark red glistening maw gaping in the neck. Conrad gently lowered the arm again, seeing a dry patch as the body shifted. The stripes on the pajamas had once been blue and white. They were now black and red.
He went all the way through the house to the back door. He stepped into the yard, crouched down on the smoothly swept sand, and vomited over and over. The taste of metal came up sharp in his throat.
The yard was marked by a line of pebbles. Beyond this were tall bushes on which clothes were hung out to dry. The points of the branches poked up into the fabric. The clothes would be there forever, he thought. Who would bring them in? The bile came up against the back of his tongue, coating his teeth.
* * *
He stood staring at Ollie while the waves broke over him in his mind. He turned and sat down again, throwing himself back against the sofa as though he were making a point.
The thing, the fucking problem, was all this time, this empty time spreading out ahead of him. He held the beer bottle loosely in his fingers. He knew how it would feel to throw it hard enough to smash it. If he smashed it on the coffee table, the glass top would shatter, too, and the sound of it—the glass shrapnel and the fucking family memorabilia inside flying scattershot through the air—would be like an explosion of everything. Not enough, though.
7
Marshall and Jenny came out to Katonah from New York on the same train, arriving just before dinner. Jenny walked in through the back door, dropped her bag, and shouted for Conrad. He came in from the porch, through the library. When he appeared, she threw her arms around him.
“Yowie! You’re really home,” she said, and pulled away to look at him.
Jenny was three years younger than Conrad, slight and pretty. Her face was long and narrow, and she had light blue eyes, delicate features, and smooth, pale skin. Her dark hair was fine and shiny, cropped short. She had a sunny smile and perfect straight-edged teeth.
She looked the same, except somehow she’d become surprisingly hip, Conrad thought: tight bright-orange top, wide tan pants, a loose jacket. Stylish. When he first went away, she’d looked like a student, in sweats and cargo pants. When had she gotten so cool? When had she started wearing big orange earrings?
“I can’t believe you’re really here.” She grinned at him, her hands still gripping his shoulders. The thing about Jenny was that she was hands-on.
“I really am.” Conrad grinned back. He willed himself not to shake off her hands. It was just his sister. But he didn’t like being grabbed. And it was going to be like this, moment by moment. He smiled at her. This was his family. He had to be here. It was great. It was like prison, the seconds ticking away.
At dinner, Lydia gave Conrad the update on Jenny as though he’d never met her.
“Your sister is doing brilliantly at work,” Lydia said.
“Big surprise,” Conrad said. Jenny always did brilliantly.
One afternoon, when Conrad was in his teens, he and Roddy Blodgett had been babysitters for Jenny and Ollie. They mixed a foul drink made of whatever they found in the kitchen—milk, Coke, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, orange juice. They filled a glass with it and called Jenny in.
“Here, Jen,” Conrad told her. “Drink this.” He was the oldest. He was showing off for Roddy.
“What is it?” Jenny asked warily.
“It’s good,” Conrad assured her. “Just drink it. Drink.”
Jenny took the glass. Looking at him over the rim, she began to swallow. He thought she’d stop after the first sip, but she went on. She drank it all, steadily, watching him, her eyes challenging beneath the ragged arch of her bangs. He heard the soft, compressive clenching of her throat as she swallowed. When she finished, she set down the empty glass, still watching him.
“Ahh. Dee-licious.” She smacked her lips.
She was ten or eleven then. It was a clear fuck you.
Conrad and Roddy had laughed like hyenas, shouting and punching each other’s shoulders as though they were laughing at her. But really they were laughing out of admiration. She’d won; they knew it.
“So,” Conrad asked Jenny, “how are things with Jock?”
Jock Sawyer was the boyfriend. He was from Atlanta, which meant that he had unfortunate taste in sports teams, but otherwise Conrad liked him. He was tall and thin, with a bony forehead and a slightly protruding mouth. His eyes were ice blue, and his hair was at best ginger-colored: Jenny hotly denied that it was red. Jock was in medical school at Columbia. He and Jenny were both insanely smart and competitive; they rode racing bikes and ran mini-marathons.
“Good,” Jenny said, nodding. “I think very good. How are things with Claire?”
Conrad shook his head. “Not sure. Haven’t seen her yet.”
“Is she coming out?”
“No,” he said. “I’m going into New York next week to see her.”
This was what he’d told his mother; he hoped it was true. He still hadn’t called Claire, though he was going to. Apparently he was putting it off.
He asked Jenny, “So, the job is good?”
“She’s already been promoted,” Lydia said.
“Already! What’s your rank?” asked Conrad.
“Rank beginner,” Jenny said. “No one even knows I work there.”
“Not true!” Lydia said. “She’s doing very well.”
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Okay, yeah, I’ll be taking over the firm soon.”
“Tell about the new account,” Lydia said.
“Well, that is kind of cool,” Jenny admitted. “They asked me to work on a new account. It’s an international company with some really good designers.”
“They love your sister,” Lydia declared. “They love her.”
“We get it, Mom,” Ollie said.
The others laughed. Conrad laughed with them, but it was like watching a movie. After a moment Jenny turned to him.
“So, Con, tell. What was it like?”
They all wanted something. They all wanted to draw him home, into their world, and they all wanted to enter his world, but in a safe way. They wanted funny stories and brave ones, scary ones only if they were bearable. They wanted their hearts wrung, but in a tolerable way. They wanted to learn that his world was safe, or, if not safe, that it was livable after all. They wanted to hear stories here, from the safety of the kitchen table, and who could blame them? Why would he impose on them what he knew? Why bring the black bloom of explosions into their eyes? Make them hear the sounds he had heard coming from human beings?
But there were stories he could tell them. He could offer parts of his world. He told them about Johannson and Boccatto and the mink farm.
Marines worked in pairs; they all had buddies. Johannson and Boccatto were buddies and partners, membe
rs of second squad, third fire team. Johannson was from Wisconsin and Boccatto from Jersey City. They were both young, nineteen or twenty.
Johannson was skinny, and so pale he was nearly blue. Cloud-blue eyes, blue-white skin, colorless hair. He closed his mouth tightly after he spoke, as if he were sealing something in. A long face and sunken cheeks. Big jug ears that stuck out like cabbage leaves, veiny and pale.
Johannson’s plan, after finishing in the Corps, was to start a mink farm back home. It was all he thought about. He said mink coats were recession-proof: there were always rich people, and they always wanted coats. He talked about it all the time, how he was going to go about it. He knew what kind of cages you used for minks, how you bred them, what you fed them. He wanted Boccatto to go in on it with him, move out to Wisconsin.
Boccatto was a big, beefy guy, and he thought the whole thing was stupid. “You want to start a rodent farm?” he’d say. “I’m not running a rodent farm. We’ve got enough rats in Jersey City to make coats for everyone in North America.” He had thick lips, a big nose, a shaved head. “Maybe Central, too.” He shook his head. “Plus, you know what, Johannson? No one wants mink coats anymore. They want the fun-fur shit. They want endangered species. Snow leopard. Fucking spirit bear. White tiger. Who wants a fucking mink coat?” He looked around. They were in the mess hall. “Carleton? You want a fucking mink coat?”
Carleton, eating his chow, shook his head.
“What about your mom?” Boccatto asked. “She want a mink coat? She have one?”
Carleton turned to look at him. “We live in Tennessee,” he said. He liked playing the redneck card. “Only one restaurant’s got air-conditioning, where you could wear a mink coat, and we don’t go there. Don’t need a fur coat for drive-through.”
“You see that?” Boccatto said. “You see that, Johannson? No one wants them. You’re behind the fucking fur curve.”
Johannson paid no attention to him. “Dude. Mink is the lightest, softest, and warmest fur there is,” he said. “Except sable, but we’re not doing sable.”
“Hey! We’re not doing mink! We’re not doing anything!” Boccatto said. “We’re not starting a fucking mink farm!”
One night in the mess hall Johannson began talking about the kind of cages you used for mink. Apparently you had to use special ones, large and very strong. Mink had sharp teeth and they were nasty creatures, with a habit of biting the hand that fed them.
While Johannson was explaining about the cages, Boccatto started imitating the minks. He talked in a high, shrill voice, shaking his head and flapping his hands, held up like paws. “No! No! Don’t make me live on that farm! Don’t make me eat those fish! Oh, no, no! Don’t want to do it!”
Everyone started laughing. Boccatto kept it up, getting higher and shriller, the whole mess hall listening and laughing. The face of one of the Iraqi cooks appeared around the corner, then another. Boccatto carried on in his falsetto. The Iraqis stared at him, then at the others.
As explanation, Johannson stood up and mimed putting on a fur coat. As though that explained anything. More kitchen workers came to the doorway, crowding around it. Johannson pulled on larger and heavier coats, frowning at their weight, while Boccatto chanted in his falsetto, waving his paws. The mink, the coat, and the cooks: the mess hall went crazy.
For weeks after that, at every meal, when the Iraqis serving at the chow table saw Boccatto and Johannson, they gave a ceremonial imitation, flapping paws for Boccatto, pulling on coats for Johannson. They nodded at them, saying something in Arabic. And Boccatto and Johannson nodded back, saying, “Salaam alaikum,” because who knew what they were saying, but that was what you always said back. The other Marines, walking past with their loaded plates, called in high, muted falsettos, “Don’ make me eat dat fish!”
That night, sitting around the table, everyone in the family laughed, and Conrad laughed, too, remembering. It was strange to be telling this as though it were a story, and not real life.
He told Ollie and Jenny briefly, too, about being hit by an IED. He knew they wanted to hear it, though there wasn’t much to tell. Being hit wasn’t a story like a firefight; it was an existential occurrence. You were driving along and the world was normal, and then it was black and filled with sound, and you were lost.
He told them that, but he couldn’t tell them about anything else, about the men who were lost, or the sounds, or the feelings of high desperation, because those stories seemed to have no connection to this place: the warm kitchen, the faces glowing in the candlelight, the bright reflections against the dark window. It seemed impossible to tell those stories here.
They told Conrad their own stories, weaving him into the things that had happened while he was away. Jenny told him about last Christmas Eve. The goose had been roasting in the oven and the grease in the pan caught fire, and the fire alarm went off and they couldn’t turn it off, even when they got the tech guy from the security company on the phone and he talked them through it step-by-step. It absolutely wouldn’t turn off, it kept on blasting and blasting, and finally they had to ask him to drive all the way down from some town up in Massachusetts, where he’d gone to his parents’ house for Christmas, and it was snowing, and the roads were worse and worse, and he didn’t get there till nearly midnight but finally managed to get it turned off.
During the story, Jenny kept imitating the sound of the siren, Wah! Wah! Wah!, loud and blaring. Everyone laughed except Conrad, who winced: the noise was like a hammer striking his head. Apparently he had a limited tolerance for all this noise and talking, even in his own family.
After the dishes were done, Lydia and Marshall went up to bed. Jenny and Ollie stayed, calling good night to their parents with an air of subdued anticipation, the kind of conspiratorial looks children exchange as their parents withdraw from the field.
The table was covered with after-dinner detritus, an air of modest dissipation: the stained wineglasses, the last, near-empty deep green bottle—when did wine bottlers stop using real corks? now they were plastic—the bright Italian pottery water pitcher, the wicker bread basket, still holding a rounded nub of baguette, pale crumbs littering the patterned mats, softened butter collapsing slightly in its dish, everything sinking into a terminal state, declaring the end of the evening.
Murphy lay on Jenny’s lap, her body still, her eyes alert for leftovers. There was still a plate of cheese, leaking the semiliquid yellow center from its white patterned crust. Murphy stretched out an idle paw, touching the table as though by chance.
“No cheese, Murph.” Jenny stroked her. “You’re not getting up there.” Murphy yawned elaborately, declaring her disinterest. “Remember the time Mom and Dad were upstairs asleep and Murphy went into the dining room in the middle of the night and started walking on the piano keys, and they woke up and thought it was burglars?”
“Burglars playing the piano,” Ollie said, laughing.
“That famous gang of musical thieves,” Conrad said, “known all over Westchester.”
“Very famous, but not, really, all that good on the piano!” Jenny leaned over Murphy, stroking her. “You’re not, Murpho! Sorry!” Murphy closed her eyes.
“And often outdone by that group with the slide guitar and the kazoo,” said Ollie.
This was how they reconnected, through family stories. The time the raccoon got into the kitchen and climbed up the wall of pots and stood on the shelf at the top, peering out between the mixing bowls at Lydia in her nightgown. The time Dad opened his wallet at the tollbooth and there was a bee trapped in it and it flew out and he was stung and started swearing, and the toll collector thought he was swearing at him and threatened to call the police. The time Ollie nearly drowned, bobbing for apples at a Halloween party. But Conrad could feel them waiting for more stories from him. He had more: he told them a Marine joke.
“Two guys are arguing in a bar, a Marine and a sailor, about which is the better service, the Marine Corps or the Navy. The Marine says, ‘We had Iwo Ji
ma.’
“The sailor says, ‘We had the Battle of Midway.’
“The Marine says, ‘Not all Navy. Some of those pilots were Marines. Henderson Field, in Guadalcanal, is named for a Marine pilot killed at Midway.’
“The sailor says, ‘Well, we had John Paul Jones.’
“The Marine says, ‘We were born in Tun Tavern, during the Revolution.’
“The sailor draws himself up and delivers the killer, ‘Here’s the thing: the Navy invented sex.’
“The Marine says, ‘Maybe so. But Marines introduced it to women.’”
Everyone liked that joke; Jenny and Ollie nearly choked.
Then he told them about Carleton.
Carleton was the radio operator for the platoon. He was a solid kid from Nashville, with one thick, dark, bristly eyebrow that went all the way across his face like a caterpillar. His father was a car salesman and his mother had an online cosmetics business. Carleton himself liked snakes. He liked jokes about snakes, and songs with snakes in them. He either had a python at home or he was going to get one, it wasn’t entirely clear which.
When they went out on mounted patrol, Carleton would take caffeine tablets and get stoked, and once they were under way, he started talking about snakes.
“Between a python, boa, and cobra, sir?” he said to Conrad. “I’d take a python, any day.”
“Is that right, Carleton?” Conrad said.
“Cleaner and safer, sir,” Carleton said. “Also big. Largest snake in captivity is a python. Also beautiful. Ball python, sir? One of the great serpent beauties of the world.” He gave a thumbs-up.
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