by J. G Hayes
A few gulls screeched overhead. He felt no connection to them.
There were birds by the thousands on the island, but no gulls.
Charlie sat down on the sand, watching the sun splinter the white caps far out, where the sky and sun and sea become one glow—‘Tyler Land,’ Charlie called this luminous place on the horizon, blue and white and vague, where anything could happen. He pulled his knees up, grabbed onto them. Between here and the horizon lay a few islands, the Harbor Islands. Fresh hope jolted through him. Perhaps one of them looked like The Island, would seem more like The Island, and thus make him recall something of what had happened. He decided he’d go out there and explore. Soon.
The May morning sun was warm. There would be a chilly sea breeze later this afternoon—he’d be sleeping then—and the temperature would plunge ten to fifteen degrees in one hour. Ladies trudging up Broadway with their shopping in tow would walk head down, their noses reddening in the raw wind.
The weather on The Island was always changing, for it lay between the swirling trade winds moving the sky above, and the South Pacific current stirring the ocean below and around. But the temperature was always between eighty and eighty-five, even at night. Perfect.
The Island was in the shape of a teardrop (sideways), as if something were crying for what The Island had become after the shelling. The Island was surrounded by pink-and-lime-colored coral, which made it accessible only by plane or copter. From the air The Island was a series of rings: the pink coral; the turquoise water; the white beach; the neon-green slopes; and the innermost circle, the jungle hilltop, crowded with palm and coconut trees. The beach was pockmarked with craters, the only damage the bombs could really do to the sand, but the rest of The Island was scarred with barren slopes and catastrophes of tangled, rotting foliage where the fires that followed any shelling had run through the hitherto uncivilized vegetation. One spot near the smooth crest of the hill, about the size of a football field, had escaped the shelling.
I should write this all down, Charlie thought, everything I do remember.
The gulls swooping overhead cried and Charlie thought of Tyler’s eyes, soft blue. Big blue, and open and tender.
He laid down on the sand, stretching out. He opened his eyes and stared up at the sky. Cornflower blue, but too hard, too blazing. Not soft enough. Not tender. Benign, but not tender. Just blue with everything behind it. Its vastness made it nothing. Tyler’s eyes were bigger.
He found himself tracing his finger beside him in the sand. He turned his head, and saw that he’d started to write HONOR. He finished the word. Then he rolled over onto his stomach and wrote a few more words beneath the first. TRUTH. COURAGE. FAITHFULNESS. SEMPER FI DELIS.
Some of the guys in town had joined the Marines because of the Corps’ reputation, its physical toughness, the well-known rigors of basic training. Charlie was more attracted—he’d told no one this—to a kind of spiritual toughness, a moral asceticism. It had always been this way with him. My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure, the words of Sir Galahad, was his favorite line from childhood literature, something that had become a mantra. He joined the altar boys at Gate of Heaven Church looking for the same sort of thing. He’d taken up smoking and made it profuse the summer he was sixteen, only so he could give it up the following Lent. He looked for such challenges, longed to writhe for a noble cause. If the causes seemed few and far between, that made his quest more sacred.
He had fallen in love with the moral code of the Corps, its demand for Honor, Truth, Loyalty, Integrity, Sacrifice. Boot camp was nothing; he kept his heart on his ideal.
Tyler had his own honor. This hadn’t been apparent at first. Charlie had been shocked to discover Tyler had little respect for the Corps, for any kind of structure.
“I jes joined up to get the hell out o’ Stimpson,” he said matter-of-factly when Charlie, looking for a soul mate, first questioned him about it on New Guinea. He had avoided Tyler after that until they pulled the same detail on The Island. Then, they had been the only two left behind when the front advanced.
In the heart of his amnesia—which Charlie would peer into many times a day, and see about as far as if he were staring into an anvil— there seemed a disquiet, as if he had done some bad thing, or was failing now to do some required, vital nobleness. This was what made the amnesia intolerable, why he must know. Even if it was, as the doctor suggested, something utterly horrible. But how could it be any worse than what he’d seen on New Guinea? Okinawa? And God knew he’d never forget those sights, try as he might. The body pieces thick with worms, the way Jim Guinan’s head imploded right next to him when they were under fire, and Jim about to say something—
But what if it was something sublime? Something too good for words?
He was on the verge, he felt. The several Island recollections were turning into color, and blooming, expanding, like The Island’s dinner-plate jungle blossoms that would open at night, sticky with fragrance. Thick with insects, glorious things. Metallic blue dragonflies, foot-wide moths spangled like coleus plants—
He rose up from the sand. “Let me write everything down,” he said aloud. The gulls screeched back.
He took the side streets on the way up to the stationers on Broadway, where he bought a thick white notepad and a fountain pen. Bookish people, the smiling clerks didn’t know him and gave him a moment’s peace. The bag was crisp as the woman at the counter folded it over and handed it to him. Its crinkled crispness seemed pregnant with delight, possibility.
He passed the hardware store one block down from the stationer’s. He stopped. Turn back. His conscious mind saw no reason for going back; but the colors did not live in the conscious part of his mind. He turned around, sauntered back, as if someone might be watching him. Patriotic bunting filled the corners of the hardware store’s plate-glass windows, beneath which were displays of four different sizes of vaguely ominous standing hammers; a sheath of rakes; spring cleaning supplies; stacked cans of paint in a pyramid; garden fertilizer—
Paint—
“Charlie!” he heard from across Broadway, just as he ducked into the store, bells tinkling on the door as he closed it. The gray wooden floorboards creaked as he advanced to the farthest righthand aisle, over which a red sign with black lettering proclaimed PAINT DEPARTMENT. The sign was hanging from the ceiling on thick hemp string and it fluttered back and forth in the ceiling fan’s breeze. He turned the aisle’s corner with a racing heart. He took a deep breath like he was going into battle. Two large displays of paint samples, hundreds of them, lined the left aisle. The whites occupied the first rows, then these slid into off whites, then creams, then yellows—then yellows into greens—yellows and greens—
He reached for a sample card in the yellow-green row. It didn’t matter that his large scarred fingers were trembling. Each gleaming white card contained five swatches of slightly varying color, laid out from top to bottom. Beneath each sample color was a number, then a name. His eyes riveted upon each one, one at a time—he couldn’t rush this. His heart was pounding so strongly he could see his gray sweatshirt fluttering with each beat.
Number 3271 was Light Chartreuse. It was close, but just a little too yellow. The next one down—he had to bring his other hand up to stop his trembling now—was closer, and something sizzled inside him. The shelves grew vapory and Charlie could almost see, from the corner of his eye, Tyler at the end of the aisle, caked in mud, feathers in his blond hair, waving him on … but still it wasn’t quite it.
The next sample down was too flat, not liquidy enough.
Number 3275, Whisper Green, was the identical color of the light that would filter through the jade and palm trees that formed a canopy forty feet above the jungle floor. The color glowed, vibrated, throbbed as Charlie studied it. A throb that he could see now ran through things, his heart, the pulsing of the moths as they sipped the flower nectar, the thing inside Tyler—
A bead of sweat rolled off his nose and fell
onto his shaking right index finger. Tyler’s face burst through the mist at the end of the aisle, more colorful than Charlie had remembered it before: the hair yellow as a sun in a child’s crayoned drawing, the eyes robin’s-egg blue, the smiling teeth flashing white, swirls of mud disguising, then blending with the white flesh, the feathers in Tyler’s hair black and white, the olive boxer shorts barely staying up on the flat stomach, a ribbon of downy hair trickling down from the navel—but his face—his face, so happy, so joyous, what… what… he was beckoning to him from the end of the aisle, to follow, to come and join in something, to see something—
I followed him! I did; he waved to me and I came! We went… went farther into the jungle. We were playing this game, a game Tyler played as a kid… .We got to the pond. The light over the pond—the way it glowed—
“Charlie! Charlie!”
Someone was shaking him—
Tyler’s face was more reluctant to flee this time. It faded in degrees until it became something else, some jowly head in front of him jabbering away.
“Tyler!” Charlie called, and he heard his voice break, but someone was still shaking him—
“CHARLIE! CHARLIE!”
“What!” Charlie screamed at the new face, and the eyes popped in front of him. Quickly it was Mr. Hogan, Denny Hogan’s father. Charlie and Denny had played ball together for years and Mr. Hogan had never missed a game, as he always said.
“What’s the matter with you?” Mr. Hogan cried back. His fat hands were still on Charlie’s shoulders. “It’s me, Charlie! Dan Hogan! What’s the matter with you?”
Charlie noticed two or three shoppers and one clerk gathered at the aisle’s end, where Tyler had just been, drawn by Charlie’s outburst.
“M-Mr. Hogan,” Charlie panted, his words threaded on a string of disappointment impossible to hide. He noticed the large invasive eyes, the swollen face, the trace of doughnut powder on the left side of Mr. Hogan’s mouth.
“Yeah. Yeah,” Mr. Hogan answered. He took his hands away, then hitched up his pants, sliding off his swollen belly. “Jeez—what are you doing, Charlie? Did I startle you or something?” Mr. Hogan stared openly into Charlie’s hands, at the paint samples. Charlie shoved them into his pants pocket.
“Yeah,” he answered, gulping. “I was thinking about something. You … you shouldn’t mind me, Mr. Hogan. I get in my own little world now. Sometimes.” He paused, swallowed, then went on desperately, “I just remembered something I’d forgotten … Tyler. My friend Tyler. We were on this island together. The color, when we were in the jungle, the sun would come through—”
“No problem, son,” Mr. Hogan smiled. He turned and glared at the onlookers until they looked away and shuffled off. He turned back to Charlie. He put a fatherly arm across Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie felt himself stiffen.
“I heard about your amnesia,” Mr. Hogan murmured confidentially, his tongue discovering, then licking away, the doughnut powder at the corner of his mouth. “So tell me what happened over there.”
“Huh?”
“What kind of action did you see?” Mr. Hogan wet his bottom lip anxiously.
“Action?”
“A lot of the fellas my age that were in the Great War say what we went through in the trenches was worse than anything you guys faced. Much worse, ten times worse.” Charlie could see the beginning of a snarl on Mr. Hogan’s face.
Charlie turned away and faced the wall of samples again. The colors burst out at him like machine-gun fire. Not only the greens and yellows, the blues of Tyler’s eyes in different jungle lights—but everything now. There was one the color of Tyler’s skin by day, another the exact shade of Tyler’s glimmering, lightly hairy flesh in the milky moonlight—the unsunburned flesh. A wave of heat washed over Charlie. He started shaking. Some vast fissure inside him began to expand. The blues, the greens, the pond at midnight, the water shimmering green in the liquidy moonlight, Tyler facing him up to his knees in the mirror water, staring, then both of them rolling together in the water, the moonlight dappling, changing the colors of Tyler’s flesh, and then the reds leapt out at him, the roses and pinks, subtle changes in the side-by-side samples from lips to mouths to tongues to the blemish below Tyler’s back, every color a memory with the bright pink moonlight of the jungle filtering down—
He remembered. He heard a sound and didn’t realize at first that it was himself, gasping—
Mr. Hogan was tugging on the sleeve of Charlie’s jacket.
“You got yourself a few medals, I seen it in the paper,” Mr. Hogan was saying, almost sneering. He leaned in closer, his eyes glistening and carnivorous.
“I … I … ,” Charlie panted.
“So what was it?” Mr. Hogan snarled. “Hand-to-hand combat? Like we had? Any bayonets involved?”
He came in closer still, his breath redolent with coffee and cigarettes. His eyeteeth were slightly pointed.
“How many Japs did you kill?” he demanded.
The West Broadway Academy of Martial Arts
We’d been driving in Virginia for three hours (seemed like twenty), it was around midnight, and my sneakers were smelly. Sean had the heat on because the top was down and the vents were blowing on my Nikes, making them sweat. I squiggled around in the passenger seat to unstick my flesh and pulled a hard, crispy-cold french fry from under my right thigh. Just then this preacher or something from a Southern church came on the radio, talking about a conference that was coming up soon that he wanted everybody to go to. He said it was the Annual Conference on the Family, and if you went to it you’d find out how to raise your children so they wouldn’t turn out to be homosexuals.
His voice was high and buzzy-whiney like an insect’s, wicked intolerant too, so Sean mumbled, “Get lost, why don’t you” and hit the seek button. But we couldn’t get much on the radio except country music, which we’d never sat through before but decided we didn’t like too much.
Unfortunately this minister guy or whoever he was must’ve been syndicated or something; we pulled him in again farther down the dial, but with a weaker signal. Now his voice was wavery as the signal bent and floated around the hills and hollows like he’d been drowned but was still talking through the water like a goldfish I saw once in a toilet bowl cleaner commercial, and I thought we’ll never make it, we were crazy for thinking this would work and, also, the world’s too big, too goddamn big.
I thought of Grandma Flynn’s story, of how one of her cousins, this Tessie woman, decided to leave her tiny village on the west coast of Ireland and come to America. Tessie got up at dawn, said good-bye, then began the big-ass walk that would take her to the train station twenty miles away. Her journey took her up the mountain that overshadowed their village, and when Tessie reached the top, she saw for the first time in her life a view that extended for mile after mile. My soul to the Divil! she exclaimed. What a big and weary world it is! Then she turned around and went back home and never left again.
But we couldn’t stay; they would’ve killed us. Me, anyways.
A woman’s voice came on next and said “After attending the Conference on the Family, I discovered there were some things I was doing that may have prevented my children from becoming heterosexual, as God intended all children to be. I am now a better mother after attending the Conference.” The woman pronounced it “het-ro-sex-yule.” I’m just saying how she said it. I think it’s unfair to say that the Southern accent makes people sound stupid. I like accents. It shows people have strong character like. The new people coming into Southie got no accents—they sound like newscasters from Anytown, USA, except they pronounce their “R”s even more and they name their kids Noah and Madison and Zoey and look at us as if we’re the aliens.
Then the woman’s voice wavered as country music from somewhere else, running through the hills and hollows, sifted its way through the car’s tinny speakers ’til it sounded like the soundtrack to the woman’s voice. She had more to say.
“After attending the Conference
on the Family, I also know now what to be on the lookout for as far as what my children are being told in school by their teachers” She didn’t sound intolerant like the minister or whoever he was. She just sounded kind of like a zombie. Like a zombie and wicked sad. “In fact, some of us have just led a successful drive in our community to have several teachers, who were telling our children harmful things, removed.”
I turned to look at Sean.
We’d been driving for twelve hours since leaving, hadn’t stopped except for at a Burger King in Maryland, which you really couldn’t count because we did the drive-through, and twice to pee Somewhere, and before that six-packs in New Jersey where Sean said to the crabby old saleslady watching Hollywood Extra! behind the counter, “Hallo, sweet thang” in a Southern accent because he figured after driving so far we must be “Away down South, no?” Sean always did suck at geography.
Headlights from a car heading back to where we just came from sliced across Sean’s face and lit up his water-blue eyes and I could see they were red-edged and they looked hurt by what the woman and the mean minister said. I wanted to hold him and tell him these people didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about—God is love and vice versa (which Sister Claire used to say, I didn’t know for sure but I hoped it was true)—and I opened my mouth to say it but then a soot-draped oil truck roared by, and when it passed us ten seconds later and we could hear again (we were in this convertible), Sean opened his little round mouth and said, “Dick.”
