by J. G Hayes
Jesus Christ, I said after that, watching him get dressed.
What?
I knew that too, I said, pointing. How you always put your shirt on first when you’re getting dressed. How you always put your shirt on first, even before your socks or underwear or anything when you’re getting dressed. I knew that, I swear.
He smiled. What a smile.
Course you did, he said.
He had a little training kit and he took some ointment out of it and a Band-Aid and put it on the cut on my forehead.
When we got out to the parking lot, we walked right over to his truck, this big black truck. I was laughing.
What’s so funny ? he said, laughing too.
I knew this was your truck, I said, patting the hood.
Course you did, he smiled. I’ll follow you.
We got back to my place. I’d left the AC on so it was nice and cool. I was so nervous kinda I forgot to show him how that candy dish rattled on the empty shelf when the subway went by, and I used to show everybody that. Well, there’d be a time for that, later.
First thing he did was pull down the shade. I remembered that too, how he always did that. I used to forget half the time to do that and he’d laugh at me, I remembered that now too.
I got something for you, he said. He smiled. He reached into his back pants pocket and pulled out a Superman comic. It was all curled up like.
I know you like these, he said. Sorry it got all curled up. I know you like to keep them fresh, like. In that box under your bed.
I didn’t even ask him how he knew, I knew I was about to find out, I could feel it comin’ like.
We were standing in front of each other beside my bed. He took his shirt off, then he took mine off. Then he took my hands in his.
He smiled, and when he smiled like that it hit me, I finally remembered. My mouth opened a little.
I knew you’d think of it, he said. He could see it in my eyes that I remembered.
Our future, I said. I know you from our future.
He smiled, nodded.
It was true. In my head I could see like a big doorway, which was now, my life at this minute now, and some things you could see behind it like, and some things you could see in front of it. Stars light-years away, and clouds going over the ocean at night, and springs, lots and lots of springs.
The Golden Apples of the Sun
Water, shimmery when they were in it. Moons in it at night, many of them, bubbling across the pond’s surface like floats—whereas by day there was just the one sun reflected.
“I like your socks,” the nurse smiled at Charlie. Charlie looked at them. Yellow and brown argyle they were.
“Th-thanks.”
“You can go in now.”
“WELL THEN—how’ve you been?”
“Okay.”
“It’s been … what? Two weeks?” The Veterans Administration doctor shuffled through some papers on his gray metal desk, then looked up at Charlie with small black eyes.
“Three weeks.”
“This is our second visit?”
“Third.”
“Right, third. Okay.” The doctor began scribbling with a noisy scratching pen. A clock clacked on the green wall behind Charlie.
“Ahh … okay. Shell shock? Nerves gone wrong, anxiety? Was that it?”
“Ahh, no. Ahh … amnesia.”
“Right right right.” The doctor snorted a laugh. “Hard to read my own writing.” He squinted at some papers. “Well. Okay. Um … remembering anymore? Since the last time?”
“Here and there. Not … not really. Maybe a little.”
“Remember everything since you’ve been back?”
“Oh yeah.” Charlie nodded, rubbed his chin.
“And your childhood? Everything before the war?”
This was the third time Charlie had answered this man’s same questions. He nodded again.
“So it’s just … what can’t you remember, exactly?” The doctor leaned back in his chair. There was a loud squeak.
“My time on this one island.”
“Uh-huh. Do you remember anything about the island?”
“Some things. I remember going to the island. I remember—”
This was hard to explain. I remember colors. I remember greens and yellows, the way the light came through the jungle green and yellow. Dappled. Dappling. I remember Tyler’s eyes, the light blue of them. I remember Tyler waving me on, into the jungle. We both had feathers in our hair. I don’t know why.
“The Golden Apples of the Sun,” Charlie said.
“Excuse me?” the doctor leaned forward.
“It’s a poem; it’s a line from a poem,” Charlie answered. “You … don’t know it then.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“My grandfather …” Charlie shifted and this time it was his chair that squeaked. “He brought me up. My father died before I… when I was very young. Ma and me moved in with Grandpa. He was a longshoreman, my father’s father. He’d been a schoolmaster in Ireland. He came over here because … he had to come over here, and the only work he could find was down at the docks.”
“I see. So what you can’t remember is—”
“Wait. He’d come home dirty at night and tired, exhausted. He was an old man doing a young man’s work. He’d be blue from the cold in the winter, white from heat exhaustion in the summer. He’d take his bath and put on clean clothes, every night. Then take out his poetry book. It had a cracked leather binding, green. Like a moss green. He’d sit down at the kitchen table after supper and light a tallow candle, and read his poetry, out loud. He’d try to get Ma interested but she wasn’t, not at all. The line I just said was from one of the poems he used to read. I don’t remember it all, but it was about longing, about … I think it was about trying to find—”
“Do you remember leaving the island?” the doctor interrupted, stealing a glance at the clock over Charlie’s shoulder.
“Ahh … no.”
“And from that island you went to …”
“Okinawa.”
“Oh. You didn’t … you weren’t hospitalized then? After the island?”
“No.”
“So it’s just … what island was it?”
“I don’t think it had a name. We called it Two-Seven-Four-Two. Just a speck on the map that we had to officially occupy. “
“How many of you were there?”
“Seven at first. Then just two of us, after we advanced.”
“So it’s just your time on that island you’re blacking out?”
“Yeah. Some of it I remember but … not that much.”
“Uh-huh.” The doctor scratched his nose with his pen.
“But what I do remember is getting more … it’s getting stronger. More … vivid. The stuff I do remember, I remember more of it, the … the colors of it.”
“Are you working yet?”
The colors were everything, the colors and the Golden Apples of the Sun, and the doctor was skipping over them.
“No.” I can’t work yet. I’m in this world more and more, this green-and-yellow world.
“That might be a good thing for you, you know. I’m not sure amnesia is always bad. Something horrible must have happened to you there, or you saw something that just … you just don’t want to remember, it was so bad. You see, we block out what we don’t want to remember. It’s what we call a defense mechanism.” The doctor said the last two words slowly and loudly—just like the first two times Charlie had been here. He’d be telling him to move on next, to forget about the past.
“I think you should think about your future, concentrate on the future. Get a job, maybe get married. Look forward instead of backward.” The doctor was avoiding Charlie’s eyes and spinning a red pen in his thin yellow fingers.
Charlie shifted in his metal chair.
“What if it was something beautiful that happened?”
The doctor smiled and shut his eyes.
“I wouldn’t think so
,” he said. He folded his hands upon his desk. Charlie studied the highly waxed linoleum floor. It was seldom he felt like talking, and now, discouraged, the mood had passed.
“So … we’ll say, another three weeks, McLeod?”
“It’s McKenna.”
“Oh! It is?” The doctor sat up with another chair squeak and did more paper shuffling. “Oh, right. My mistake; sorry. McKenna then. Say three weeks from today? Say ten-thirty?”
CHARLIE LIKED SITTING in the kitchen all night long. The dependability of the thing. Its utter uneventfulness. The old brass ceiling fan swirled ten feet overhead, making a chilly clink once every rotation. Sometimes he could isolate one blade, fluttering above him. From there it was nothing to imagine these were the copter’s blades, and he and Tyler were being set down on the island again. This was especially true at sunrise, when the light that washed into the kitchen seemed vapory, tropical. Without even squinting he could see himself and Tyler, running through the jungle, feathers in their hair and mud caking their bodies; or sometimes just Tyler, standing ahead of him, turning around and waving him on, deeper into the jungle, into its slanting shafts of yellow-and-green light.
Tyler had discovered the pond on their third morning alone on the island. They had already fallen into a routine. Charlie would waken to a dreamland of calling birds and Tyler staring at him from across the tent, like a dog waiting.
“I’ll be back terrectly, if it’s jes the same to you,” he’d say. Then he’d roll out of his cot wearing khaki boxers, put on his boots, grab a towel, and leave.
The third morning Tyler was gone for almost an hour. Charlie had gotten up, gone outside to relieve himself, then gone back to a half-sleep, still worn out from the terrors of New Guinea.
“There’s this little ol’ pond in the jungle,” Tyler had said when he came back. Charlie opened one eye. He noticed Tyler’s hair was wet and freshly combed, and his face cleanly shaven—
“Charlie? Charlie!”
His mother’s voice swept away the vapory jungle air.
“Were you up again all night? You were up again all night, weren’t you?”
He managed a smile as the dream figures fled into the chunky sunbeams.
“Will you please go to bed—please?” She made a noise of upsetment. He focused on her. She was wearing a white flannel nightgown with tiny red rosebuds on it. She hadn’t tied up her battleship-gray hair yet; it flowed down beyond her back. Her wrinkled pink hands were folded across her stomach. Her gray eyes were stretched with worry. Charlie thought she looked like a squirrel sitting on a fence, poised for something calamitous.
“You’re speaking tonight at the Gold Star Mothers’ meeting, remember,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’ll make you some breakfast.”
“Ma, thanks, but I’m not hungry. I … I made some eggs about four this morning.”
“Oh. You can cook now?”
He rose up from the chair and put his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Ma,” he said. He looked around the white and pink kitchen, trying to find something, anything, that wouldn’t fill him with uneasiness. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Ahh, I’m gonna take a walk. Down to the beach.”
Her lifted eyebrows signaled disapproval.
“Did you call your uncle back? You know that’s a fine job, a policeman. Though you could do better too.”
“Ahh, not yet. I’ll call him later.” He made a move toward the hall—
“What would you like for dinner? A nice pork roast? A nice roast beef? I’m going down street later—”
“A-anything.” He smiled.
“Well, what would you like? You were always fond of the pork roast. But if you’re not sleeping nights, pork can lay heavy on the stom—”
“I’m sleeping fine, Ma. No, that sounds good.”
“Which?”
“Ahh … wh-whatever you said.”
“The pork roast?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be fine.”
He fled into his dark bedroom. He slid on a gray sweatshirt, then shut the white bedroom door behind him as he left. Closed doors confounded his mother, he knew, but she wouldn’t question him about it.
He grabbed his brown leather bomber jacket from the front hall closet. Three empty hangers spangled onto the closet floor and putting them back seemed beyond him. He shut the closet door as if it contained a horror.
“I’ll pick them up, Charlie,” his mother called from the kitchen.
As he headed down the stairs of their second-floor flat, he heard his mother’s pinched voice on the phone.
“He’s speaking to the Gold Star Mothers tonight,” she was telling someone. Charlie paused, as if he might get a clue as to who he was now.
“Last week he spoke at a fund-raiser for John McCormick,” she went on, her voice rising. “That’s what happens when you’re a war hero. Everybody wants you. But, Betty … he has these … I don’t know, fits now. Just sits and stares, and doesn’t hear me. It’s got me worried something fierce.”
The front stairs were still steeped in morning shade when Charlie closed the front door behind him. It was like a dark pool of forgetfulness, or some part of the unlit sea, washing up to lap at his door. He didn’t like it.
Then he marveled at how, before the war, right before, he’d passed down these stairs with a bat and glove slung over his shoulder, still a boy, seventeen and off to play ball down across from the beach. Only three years ago.
Everybody wants you.
He had counted exactly seventeen seconds after leaving the front door when he heard a boom from across the street.
“There’s my cousin, the war hero!”
Charlie turned and squinted into the sun, splintering it above the triple-deckers. Franky Duggan was only his second cousin, by marriage, but the spreading fibrous feelers of cousins and second cousins, third cousins removed so many times from a great uncle on Aunt Hannah’s side, were intricately charted, and honored, in town. Franky came trotting across the street, then feigned a few jabs to Charlie’s wide shoulders, like they were boxing. Charlie laughed at this involuntarily. Even greetings between related men had to be draped in a facade of aggression.
“Where you been hiding, stranger?” Franky asked, clapping him on the back. “I never see you down the Club. Hey, looks like you’re putting on some weight again. What are you tippin’ the scales at now? Oh listen, we’re putting together a spring league down at the Point, mostly vets. You interested?” Charlie opened his mouth but Franky fired off, “Oh, Sis wants to know when you’re going to take her to a show or something.” Charlie noticed how the morning sun lit up Franky’s black hair, wet and spicey—fragrant with tonic. He wondered why he would notice this. He kept looking and saw the thick individual combed shafts, how they gleamed in the sun, each one as perfect and defined as the follicle enlargements from a magazine’s hair cream ad. Tyler’s face rose up before him, his blond hair fragrant and swollen with tonic—
“Charlie?”
“Ahh …” Remember the hair, the smell of the hair tonic, that’s a new memory now—
“Hey, you workin’ yet? Big hero like you must have a thousand offers, right? But lookit, we’re desperate for men over at the car barn.” Franky drove a bus from Forest Hills to Downtown and back, ten times a day. Riding all day and getting nowhere, Charlie thought. “They’re even taking non-vets. The pay’s swell, Charlie, so think about it, okay? Gotta run!”
“See ya, Franky,” Charlie muttered, but by the time he had done everything necessary to say these words, Franky was out of earshot.
Desperate for men.
CHARLIE TEETERED at the edge of the Boulevard, three blocks and two unmemorable conversations later. A ship-long silver Buick slowed down to let him cross, then honked twice and pulled over. The back window slid down in jerks.
“Charlie!”
A smiling, white-haired red face emerged from the back seat’s shadowy interior. Cigar smoke pu
ffed out around the face, then vanished as the tang of the sea breeze sliced it away.
“Hey, Congressman,” Charlie said. He shook the out-thrust glad hand, then shoved his hands into his pants pockets. His fingers found the ring. Each time he did this it was a shock. He knew it was always with him; but when he unexpectedly felt it, it never failed to freeze him. Ma, this isn’t my ring, is it? I didn’t have this before the war, did I? It wasn’t Dad’s or anything, was it?
No, Charlie… whose is it? It’s a man’s ring, I can tell you that… . What would you be doing with a man’s ring? Whose is it, Charlie? Don’t you know?
I’m not sure, Ma.
Oh, Charlie! Oh …
For a moment all he saw was a jabbering mouth and a gesticulating, cigar-laden hand, fading into a tropic sunset. He struggled to drag himself back to this nothingness.
“Congressman nuthin’, kid. Call me Dan. Listen, Charlie, we’re all proud, real proud of you for what you did over there. You gave a good accountin’ of yourself.”
Charlie smiled; there was nothing else to do.
“Hey, you ever think of runnin’ for office? You know Joe Shea, the Lord be good to him, his old seat’s gonna be wide open this fall for the state senate. Wide open, and a young war hero like you could waltz in. Charlie, you could waltz in. Christ, he could waltz in, couldn’t he Pinky?” This was directed to the congressman’s chauffeur, a chubby, balding redhead with small, nervous eyes.
“He could waltz in, sure,” Pinky echoed, picking his teeth with his ringed baby finger and scanning the rearview mirror.
“Ahh …” Charlie shrugged. The sun bouncing off the ocean right across the street, the sound of the waves, the smell of it all, was pulling him away.
“You could waltz in,” he heard again. “Call me, will ya? Will ya come and see me? Come and see me.”
Charlie nodded as the Buick rolled off.
You could waltz in.
Desperate for men.
HE LIKED THE BEACH, more than liked it, knew it as home now. It was the only place he could go by day, if he went far enough down, without being bothered. Everyone was busy now after the war and had no time for the beach, except for the old raisin-skinned fishermen. Most of them were solitary and in their own world of the sea and its smell. But more than just the solitude, there was the sea all around, the sound, yes, the way the light was—but more than this, the feel of it, the closeness of it—the way it connected itself to every other part of the sea, every other piece of shore, even on the other side of the world. That had been Tyler’s idea and it was so true, so inviolate, like a math formula. How landlocked Tyler had thought of it … well, that was Tyler. Charlie could close his eyes and it was like being back there, except for the gulls.
