Something Rich and Strange

by Ron Rash

  That Saturday I’d never seen him so animated. He paced manically in front of us, grinning.

  “It’s radical, boys,” he said, “but one hundred percent foolproof.”

  “Enlighten us,” Matt said.

  “One of my buddies in Charlotte called last night. He ran into a guy we went to high school with, a real dumbass who sawed off his fingers in shop class. Not all of each finger, just the top joints. The thing is, it wasn’t that big a deal. You hardly noticed after a while. I mean, it wasn’t like girls wanted to throw up when they looked at his hand. Hell, I think it made him more popular with girls. They felt sorry for him so voted the fucker homecoming king. He even played on the baseball team. Here’s the kicker, though. He’s so dumb he volunteers to go, but they don’t let him because he won’t be able to handle a rifle well enough. All I’ve got to do is slice off some finger joints and I’m 4F the rest of my life.”

  “Don’t even talk this bullshit,” Matt said, and nodded at me. “Look at the kid here, he’s already about to faint.”

  “If you want something to faint about, kid,” Jason said, “let me tell you about my cousin who got killed in Nam last winter, though killed is putting it nicely. He took a direct mortar hit. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again, so they kept the casket closed at the viewing. Anyway, the next morning before the funeral, my uncle gets it into his head he has to see the body and my father goes to the funeral home to stop him. He takes me with him, maybe figures he’ll need me to help wrestle my uncle out of there. When we get there the undertaker comes jabbering that he couldn’t stop him, that my uncle has jimmied the coffin open. So we go in the back room where the coffin is and my uncle is holding something up, or I guess I should say part of something . . .”

  “Don’t tell anymore,” Matt said. “The kid’s got his own cousin over there.”

  “You don’t want to hear it,” Jason asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Still think I’m bullshitting about doing it?” Jason asked, “or having cause to?”

  “No, man,” Matt said. “I’ve joked with you some. You know, it’s a way of dealing with bad shit like this. You’re right, they may come after my ass in a year, but fucking maiming yourself, that’s not acting crazy, it is crazy. Even if you could actually do it, what if they found out it was on purpose? Hell, they might take you anyway, or put you in Leavenworth.”

  “You think I’m going to chop them off in front of those assholes?” Jason said. “It will look like an accident, but I may need you to help me, Mr. Pre-Med.”

  “Sure thing,” Matt said. “I can see it on my application. Medical Experience: Chopped off fingers for draft dodger. Yeah, that’ll get me into Bowman Gray.”

  “I’m just talking about afterward, so I won’t bleed to death,” Jason said. “The whole point of not serving is so I won’t die.”

  “Stop talking this bullshit,” Matt said.

  “I’m going to do it tomorrow,” Jason said. “You boys just wait and see.”

  I didn’t sleep well that night, waking before dawn. In the dark, even the worst things seemed possible. I thought of what I’d seen on TV, soldiers and civilians on stretchers, some missing limbs, some blind, some dead, worst of all the monks who sat perfectly still as they transformed into pyramids of fire. I could report Jason to Mr. Watkins, or even ask my parents what to do, but this seemed something they had no part in. Or just stay home. Yet that seemed wrong as well. But then the morning sun revealed the same window that had always been there, the same bureau and mirror. Revealed my world and what was possible in it. He won’t do it, I told myself, it’s just talk. When my aunt came by at 8:15, I was ready.

  I went down the Stagecoach Saloon steps, Jason and Matt already undressing. As we changed into our outfits, I noticed a blue backpack beside Jason’s locker.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “What would you do if I said a hatchet?” Jason asked.

  When I didn’t respond he grinned.

  “Courage is what’s in there,” he answered. “At least half a bottle of it still is.”

  We walked down the tracks to our hideout, the backpack dangling from Jason’s shoulder. Things I’d paid no mind to other mornings, the smell of creosote on the wooden cross-ties, how sun and dew created bright shivers on the steel rails, I noticed now. I was lagging behind. Matt waited for me while Jason walked on.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” Matt said softly. “Even if he was serious, he’ll chicken out.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “He’s just trying to mess with our heads.”

  Once we were in the woods, Jason opened the backpack and took out the half-filled bottle, Beefeater on the label.

  “We’ll have one successful robbery this summer,” Jason said, “rob Uncle Sam of a soldier to zip up in a body bag.”

  He unscrewed the cap and lifted two white pills from his front pocket. He shoved them in his mouth and drank until bubbles rose inside the glass. Jason shuddered and lowered the bottle. For a few minutes he just stood there. Then he set the bottle down, took out a pocketknife, and cut the rawhide strips tethering the holsters to his legs.

  “Keep them in your pocket for tourniquets,” he said, offering the strips to Matt. “Once the wheel rim takes the fingers off, I’ll need them on my wrists.”

  “No way,” Matt said.

  “What about you, kid?” Jason asked, his voice slurring. “You too chickenshit to help me?”

  I nodded and looked at Matt’s watch. Five minutes until the train would be here. Jason lifted the bottle and didn’t stop drinking until it was empty. He held his stomach a few moments like he might throw up but didn’t. He raked his right index finger across the left palm.

  “That quick and it’s done,” Jason said, and pulled his pistols from their holsters, flung them to the ground. “Won’t be using my trigger fingers anymore, here or anywhere else.”

  “You’re drunk and crazy,” Matt said.

  “Yea, I guess I am drunk and that acid, man, it just detonated. ‘’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.’”

  Jason looked upward, then twirled around and lost his balance. He tumbled onto the ground, rose to his knees and saluted us, before keeling back over.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “I’ll stay with him,” Matt said. “I don’t think he’ll be moving for a while, but just in case you’d better stop the train before it gets near here.”

  I left the woods and stepped onto the track. As the train came into view, wood and steel vibrated under my feet. The whistle blew. I jogged up the track waving for the train to stop, but I was just an outlaw taking his cue too soon. Mack, the engineer, blew the whistle again. I was close enough to see his face leaning out the cab window. He looked pissed-off and he wasn’t slowing down. I jumped into the ditch and the engine rumbled past.

  I looked ahead and saw Jason running out of the woods, Matt trailing. Jason lay down by the tracks and stretched his arms, clamping both hands on the rail. Mack grabbed the handbrake but it was too late.

  Jason’s hands clung to the rail when the left front wheel rolled over them.

  That’s how I wrote the scene’s conclusion years later, then added a couple of paragraphs about an older narrator recalling the event. A standard initiation story, nothing especially new but done well enough for Esquire to publish.

  What actually occurred was that I didn’t see Jason’s hands, just that his arms stretched toward the track. Then he was rolling into the ditch, forearms tucked inside the curl of his body. Matt and I scrambled into the ditch beside him. Jason screamed for a few moments, fetuslike until he slowly uncoiled and began laughing hysterically.

  “You dumb fuckers thought I’d really do it,” he gasped.

  “Asshole,” Matt said, and walked back into the woods.

  Jason turned toward the train and raised his hands.

  “Don’t shoot, I’m unarmed,”
he shouted, and started laughing again.

  Mack shouted back that Jason was good as fired. Passengers gawked out windows as the train wheels began turning again. Donald stood sad-faced on a top step, white hat held against his chest as though mourning our perfidy.

  Back at the hideout, Matt lifted the empty bottle.

  “Water?”

  “Yep,” Jason answered.

  “And the acid?”

  “Two aspirin,” Jason said. “Water and two aspirin, boys. That’s all the props I needed. Now what do you say about my acting ability?”

  “The stuff about your cousin and uncle,” Matt said. “That part of the performance too?”

  “Of course,” Jason nodded. “You have to create a believable scenario.”

  “The draft notice?” I asked.

  “No, kid, that’s all too real, but I figure if I can convince you two that I’m crazy I can convince them. This was my rehearsal.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Matt said again. “One of us could have gotten hurt because of your prank. We could lose a day’s pay too.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jason said. “I’m going to turn myself in right now, tell them all of it was my doing. They won’t do anything to you when they know that.”

  Jason stuffed the pistols back in his holsters and picked up his backpack.

  “Hey, I was just having a little fun,” he said.

  “I hope I never see that son-of-a-bitch again,” Matt said when Jason had left. “How about you?”

  “That would suit me fine.”

  But four decades later in Denver I did see Jason again, the cowboy hat replaced with a VFW ball cap.

  “Remember me?” he asked. “We used to be outlaws together.”

  I didn’t at first, but as he continued to talk a younger, recognizable face emerged from the folds and creases.

  “It’s a good story,” Jason said, nodding at the Esquire he clutched. “You got the details right.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You exaggerate, of course, make characters better or worse than in real life.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know I was an asshole.”

  I pointed at the hat. “You end up over there?”

  “Yeah, you guys were easier to fool than the army,” Jason said. “Of course, the induction center didn’t provide me a train to freak them out with.”

  “Well, at least you came back.”

  “I did that,” Jason said.

  “My cousin, he didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, I truly am,” Jason said, and after a few moments. “What about Matt? You ever see him after that summer?”

  “No.”

  “I always wondered if he got sent over there. I looked for him on the wall. His name wasn’t on there so maybe he got into med school. I guess I could find out on the internet. When you were writing that story, did you ever do a search on us?”

  “I couldn’t remember your last names,” I answered. “But I don’t think I would have anyway. Like I said, it’s fiction.”

  Jason had rolled up the magazine. It resembled a runner’s baton as he tapped it against his leg. The bookstore was almost empty now, just the owner and two teenagers browsing the sci-fi section.

  “When I dream it isn’t fiction,” Jason said, “for me or for them.”

  “Them?”

  “Yeah, them,” Jason said, stashing the magazine in his back pocket. “You remember who Lieutenant Calley was?”

  “I remember.”

  “Come with me,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  From a shelf marked MILITARY, Jason took down a book and opened it to a page of black-and-white photographs. The top two photos were of Calley, but below was one of eight nameless soldiers, helmets off, arms draped around each other.

  Jason pointed at the second soldier to the left.

  “Recognize me?”

  Except for shorter hair, he looked the same as at Frontier Village. Jason stared at the photograph a few more moments.

  “Three of these guys were dead within a month,” he said. “The Vietnamese say the ghosts of American soldiers who got killed are still over there. They hear them at night entering their villages, even villages that were Viet Cong during the war. They leave food and water out for them.” Jason looked up from the page. “Their doing that, I think it matters.”

  Jason leafed farther into the book, stopped on a page with no photographs. His index finger slid down a few lines and stopped. I read the paragraph.

  “You know my last name now,” Jason said, reshelving the book.

  The teenagers walked toward checkout, a graphic novel in hand as the owner placed a CLOSED sign on the door.

  “After I came back to the states,” Jason said. “I told myself that if the people around me had been through what I’d been through—three of your buddies killed and scared shitless you’re next, then being in a village where any woman or child could have a grenade and all the while your superior ordering you to do it—they would have acted no differently. To see it that way allows you to move on. You got unlucky in a lottery and put in some shit most people are spared. You just followed the script you’d been given.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Jason said after a pause. “It’s always been okay when I am awake. I’ve held down a good job at a radio station almost forty years, and though my wife and I got divorced a while back, we raised two great kids. Both college grads, employed, responsible, I’m blessed that way, even have a grandchild coming. So I handle the daylight fine. But night, it used to be different, because in my dreams I’d be back there. Everything was the same, the same villagers in the same places they’d been before. In the dreams I’d already know what was going to happen, not just that day, but what would happen afterwards—the accounts and testimonies, the hearings, Calley’s court martial, the newspaper articles and TV reports. But even knowing all that, when the order was given, I would do it again. I didn’t have one dream where I didn’t.

  Until one day I was in the vet affairs office and I read your story. That night, I dreamed I was there again, but I had no hands, which meant I couldn’t hold a rifle. I walked among them, even into their huts, and they weren’t afraid, and I wasn’t afraid either because I knew I had no hands to hurt them. And then, as the months passed, I’d dream that though I had no hands, I balanced a bowl of rice between my wrists. I’d go into the huts and crouch, set the bowl carefully on the floor and after they’d each taken a handful of rice, I’d lift it back up and go to the next hut.”

  Jason paused and took the rolled-up magazine from his pocket, held it out between us.

  “I went to the newsstand and bought this copy. I read the story every night for a while, then just a few pages, and then only a few paragraphs. It wasn’t long until I had those paragraphs memorized. I’d lie there in the dark and speak them out loud. Now, two, three nights a week I’m back there, but always without my hands.”

  Jason nodded at the magazine.

  “You can have this if you want.”

  “No,” I said. “You keep it.”

  “Afraid I might forget?”

  His smile did not conceal the challenge in his eyes.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Okay. I’ll keep it then,” Jason said. “Thank you for writing the story the way you did. That’s why I came, to thank you, to tell you it’s helped. I want to believe it’s helped more than just me. I mean, if ghosts enter villages, maybe they enter dreams too.”

  He held out his hand and we shook.

  “If Matt ever shows up at one your signings, wish him well for me.”

  After Jason left, I talked to the bookstore owner a few minutes, then walked back to my hotel. It was only five blocks but I wasn’t used to Denver’s altitude, so I was out of breath when I got there. I had a couple of drinks at the bar, then took the elevator up to my room. The curtains were pulled back and Denver sparkled below. Jason’s home was down there and I wondered if he was already asl
eep. In the darkness beyond the city, jagged mountains rose. On the flight back to Carolina the next morning, I saw them from the passenger window. They were different from the mountains back home. Young, treeless, no hollowed out coves. Snow lay on summits, yet to be softened by time.

  COPYRIGHT NOTICES

  “Hard Times”—first published in Sewanee Review, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out”—first printed in Our State magazine, republished in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “The Ascent”—first published in Tin House, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Night Hawks”—first published in Grist, reprinted in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “The Trusty”—first published in The New Yorker, reprinted in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “Back of Beyond”—first published in Tin House, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Lincolnites”—first published in Smoky Mountain Living, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Into the Gorge”—first published in The Southern Review, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Return”—first published in Mossy Creek Reader, reprinted in Casualties

  “Waiting for the End of the World”—first printed in Oxford American, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Burning Bright”—first published in Ecotone, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars”—first published in Carolina Quarterly, reprinted in Burning Bright

  “Where the Map Ends”—first published in The Atlantic, reprinted in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven”—first published in The Warwick Review (England), reprinted in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes”—first published in The Kenyon Review, republished in Chemistry and Other Stories

  “Falling Star”—first published in Crossroads, republished in Burning Bright

  “The Magic Bus”—first published in Nothing Gold Can Stay

  “Something Rich and Strange”—first published in Shade 2004, reprinted in Nothing Gold Can Stay