Freebird

by John Raymond

  When the tortillas were ready, the arrangement of the bowls on the table achieving a perfect picture of bounty, Ben gently helped his dad into his seat, and without any preliminaries or prayers, the family commenced building their tacos. Warm tortillas circled the table and flopped onto plates; spoons flashed in bowls. Beans as mortar, next meat, next cheese, next the batting of cabbage and onion sprinkles. They all had their own methods of construction.

  The quiet was welcome and hearty at first, nothing about whores or organized slaughter to distract them from the eating pleasure, but soon it became prolonged and awkward. Anne and Aaron filled the space by talking about the provenance of the beans, and Ben’s dad groused about the spice level, but nothing caught. How sad, Ben thought, if they were already at the end of their news. How badly he yearned to break through and acknowledge the moving reality they were sharing, this rare miracle of togetherness. If only the clean, loving silence of the desert could descend on them and allow them to feel the brevity of their time on earth. He was still searching for the right way of expressing himself when Aaron, pinched perhaps by the same feelings, opened the way.

  “So, Uncle Ben,” he said, catching the corner of Ben’s eye, “you went straight into the army after high school, is that right?”

  The question sounded casual enough, but the topic had obviously been on Aaron’s mind. Ben could sense an unfinished argument between Aaron and his mom somewhere in the background, and it occurred to him he was possibly being used as a proxy of some kind, but he didn’t care. He was just glad to have a topic. And maybe his nephew, on the cusp of leaving home, actually had an interest in the nature of human will and destiny. Ben had some definite ideas to share on that topic, if anyone cared.

  “The navy,” Ben said. “SEALs are navy. But yeah, right in.”

  “And you always knew you wanted to go.”

  “I wanted to join the SEALs, yeah. I’d come to that conclusion through my reading and thinking at about your age.”

  “Why?”

  Ben built himself another taco, weighing his words, sensing an opportunity before him—a rare chance to speak to his family with some profundity, possibly even on multiple registers at once. He could speak to Anne, for instance, with a measure of confession in his voice, a nuance of apology, insinuating that he’d possibly been wrong in certain presumptions over the years and that he was almost ready to acknowledge that fact. Not quite, but he was getting there. He could speak to his father, meanwhile, in a voice of gratitude. Everything he’d done was to honor him, and if he’d made mistakes it was only in an effort to understand and protect his legacy. And he could speak to his nephew in a tone of wisdom and inspiration. This is my story; learn from it what you can. You are stepping into a world full of danger, so beware. Three elegantly separate, customized meanings, one for each listener. But mostly, he had to admit, the words would be for Anne.

  “I wanted a test,” he said. “I wanted to go out and do the hardest thing possible. I wanted to see how heavy a load I could take. That’s just me, though. I had the idea it’d be good for the soul.”

  “Good for the soul?” Anne said, mildly incredulous.

  “I wanted to sacrifice something,” he said sincerely. “Does that sound so weird?”

  “Kind of weird,” Anne said. “Yeah.”

  “It might sound weird in this day and age,” he said, turning to Aaron, “to sacrifice anything. Most people don’t give a fuck. It’s all just me, me, me, all the time, fuck the rest of the world. Who gives a shit where my shoes come from, you know? Who cares about that kid in the factory in Pakistan? Just give me my shoes. Shit, that kid would take the shoes, too, if he could. Just dumb luck, really. But that’s not how I ever wanted to be. I didn’t want the shoes. I wanted to give something up. I wanted to give up as much as I could to secure the safety of my family, and my country, and all the people I loved. I don’t know if that’s what I ended up doing, but that was the goal. I wanted to serve.” He took a swig of beer, letting the words hit their respective targets. “That’s how they get you, by the way,” he added. “Your good intentions.”

  “‘Good intentions,’” Anne echoed.

  “That’s what I said,” Ben said.

  “And you feel like it worked out?” Aaron said, meeting his uncle’s sincerity with his own. “Your service?”

  “Hell if I know,” he said, draining the beer. “I can say I’ve seen the best and worst that a man can do out there. I can say that much. And I can say I’ve been tested to the absolute limit, physically and mentally. What I found out wasn’t exactly what I wanted to know, but what the fuck? You can’t go back in time and be any smarter.”

  “I never understood the whole valor thing,” Anne said. Her fingers were covered in hot sauce, and she licked a rivulet off her pinky. “What kind of idea is that? Valor only makes sense as some virtue in the military. Valor.”

  “I’m not talking about valor,” Ben said.

  “And would you do it again?” Aaron said, maintaining sincerity. “Join up again?”

  Ben looked each of his family members in the eyes, ignoring Anne’s arrows of cynicism. “I don’t think I was wrong to go, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “If I made any mistakes, they were honest mistakes. I think I went for good reasons. And if I hadn’t gone, then, well, shit, I wouldn’t know what I know now, and I wouldn’t want that. I’d never want to not know. But now that I know, and I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I have to be true to that, too. So things are different for me now, yeah. I . . . I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t really know.” His gaze had fallen to the table; he was losing his thread.

  “I bet you’ve seen some crazy shit,” Aaron said.

  “That, I’m afraid, is very true.”

  Ben stared at the stray beans on his plate. He could sense Aaron was rapt, and that was gratifying, at least. It made him wonder if possibly Anne hadn’t been poisoning her son’s mind against him all these years after all. Was that conceivable? The hope was enough to keep him at the table, anyway, when his main desire was only to walk to the car and drive back into the silence. But he saw his young nephew so rarely. In a sense, they barely knew each other. And here they were, blood kin, eating tacos and drinking beer in his sister’s dining room. Ben thought he might even sense an understanding growing between them, maybe even a chance to make a real impression on the kid. Had he seen crazy shit? Oh yeah, he’d seen crazy shit. As it happened, he had dozens of excellent, top-secret, shit-crazy, action-adventure stories in his pocket, ready to roll.

  “I probably shouldn’t even tell you about this . . . ,” he said, and proceeded to recount a vintage yarn about the time he’d blown up a Tomahawk missile in the desert of Kuwait. The story commenced on an aircraft carrier on the Indian Ocean. It involved a jump out of a helicopter into the raging waves, a secret contact in the dunes. The demolition of the stray, misfired missile in the sand, followed by a moonlit race back to the water. It was a good story, a test of endurance, with no victims involved, only heroes, and Aaron made plenty of hums and squawks of disbelief all the way through. It would all have been perfect if not for Anne smirking and shaking her head the whole time from her perch off to the side.

  “What’s so funny?” he said as the story drew to a close. “That really happened, you know. That’s the kind of thing we do all the time.”

  “It’s just funny, that’s all,” she said. “What you do.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he said. “People have no idea what we do. Sitting in their fucking SUVs, drinking Starbucks in their heated seats. Taking their orders from Google and motherfucking Facebook. How would they ever know?”

  “No, no, I know,” she said.

  “They think everything’s real under control, but they have no fucking clue.”

  “I’m not arguing. Calm down. All I’m saying is, you did it. You’re an action hero. You became your guy. Arnold. It’s amazing.”

  Ben tore a bite off his taco, his heart sinking. “
I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, though he had a guess. He chewed on the no-longer-so-delicious taco, waiting for the next inevitable lash of criticism to come.

  “You know . . .” She lowered her voice and fogged her eyes and let her mouth fall open: “Ahhh-nold. Your idol.”

  “I never wanted to be Arnold,” he said.

  “You worshipped Arnold. Don’t lie.”

  Ben shook his head. This was another of his sister’s fixed ideas, another imaginary skeleton key to a secret box that didn’t exist. She was wrong, but try telling her that. Aaron, for his part, wasn’t following at all.

  “Schwarzenegger,” Anne explained. “Ben loved him. His whole room was filled with Arnold posters.”

  “I had one poster.”

  “You did not!” she said, thrilling to the memory. “You had, like, eight. I remember. And, come on. How many times did you see Terminator?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know exactly how many.”

  “Maybe twelve.”

  “In the theater. What about on video?”

  “I never wanted to be Arnold,” he said to Aaron. “I don’t even know what your mom is talking about. She has some hypothesis she’s working on, but she’s way off base.” How deeply he resented the idea that his life had been spent chasing a Hollywood fantasy, when in fact there had always been real principles, real convictions, involved. Real blood.

  He reached for a new pile of tortillas when out of nowhere, the dagger came: “Whatever. You loved that Nazi. Admit it.”

  Ben was shocked. The word “Nazi” was never uttered aloud within hearing distance of their dad. Even the word “German” was almost forbidden. If the topic of Germany or the Holocaust or even Volkswagen or Mercedes came up, a force field surrounded them, and they picked their way clear as quickly as possible. They’d always been led to understand that he didn’t want to talk about those days. The memories gave him nightmares and made it impossible for him to sleep. Could something have changed that drastically in the past five years? Could some kind of glasnost have descended around his father’s memory of the camps? Ben couldn’t believe that was the case, and when he flashed over to see the expression on his dad’s face, he found he was correct. The only reason Anne had said the heinous word out loud, the only reason she’d brought down the lash so mightily, was because their dad was fast asleep.

  He drove back to the desert the same way he’d come in, winding through the city to Highway 10, heading east, putting the racing electrons behind him, and then, at last, he entered the calm, stark emptiness of the desert land. He never should have gone into the city. All the calming work he’d accomplished had been undone. His mind was again ablaze with terrible thoughts.

  Yes, he’d loved Arnold as a child, it was true. He couldn’t deny that fact. But he hadn’t loved him for the reasons Anne thought. It had never been about the silly glamour, the cheap machismo. He’d never cared about any of that Hollywood crap. What he’d loved about Arnold was only one thing, and that was the incredible willpower the man represented. He’d seen Arnold as the heroic protagonist of the ultimate immigrant story, the ultimate maker of his own American destiny.

  There was no argument. Everything Arnold accomplished had grown from his own body, his own complete mastery over his physical instrument. He’d been born a regular kid in Thal, Austria, the second, unfavored son of a small-town police chief, and he’d been smitten by the promise of American freedom and American strength. Inspired by the American bodybuilders Steve Reeves and Johnny Weissmuller, he’d built himself into a seventime Mr. Olympia, a living icon of his ambition, the Austrian Oak. He’d invented muscles that no one had ever seen before. That selfcreated body had led him to the barbarian roles. Those dumb parts in turn had led him to the action roles, which had led him to the comedy roles, all of which had led him to politics.

  Governor Schwarzenegger. Who could deny that pinnacle of accomplishment? And still, even so many years into his story, everything flowed from the muscle, the superdefinition he’d willed from his meat. Who could argue with that kind of drive? With that kind of man? There had been times Ben had almost wished they would change the U.S. Constitution so that Arnold could become president, if only to complete the incredible story of his rise.

  But now, again, he had to wonder if he’d misread the secret of the world. If he’d seen all the evidence but been mistaken about the big picture. The telling shadow, the puff of smoke—they were in different places than he’d thought. It was possible he had been wrong about everything, Arnold included. It was possible he was nothing but a fool.

  He was tempted to call Anne but figured he was already arguing with her enough in his head. No need to hand over even more talismans for her crowded necklace of judgment. Besides, he knew on the deepest level that she was wrong. Arnold was a Nazi, sure, but not in the way she said. He was a Nazi only in the way that everyone was a Nazi. Her mistake, like Ben’s own, had been assuming that the Nazis were someone else. That they were the bad guys out there in all their villainous forms—the drug dealers, the Communists, the leftist totalitarian thought police, the terrorists. His whole life had been spent searching for Nazis in faraway lands, and, as it turned out, all this time they’d been right there at home, shopping for Cheerios, pumping gas, watching the new Batman installment in their home entertainment modules. They were his fellow citizens of the eternal corporate state. All this time he’d wondered: who were the ones who’d send his family to the ovens? Look around, they were there.

  So he’d been wrong. And Anne had been wrong. Everyone had been wrong. But to give up and seek forgiveness now would be the most cowardly, ridiculous act. What soldier in the world didn’t dream of living out his days under the sweet, tragic cloud of disillusionment and loss? “Durch Nacht und Blut zur Licht,” said the black, red, and white of the German flag. “Through night and blood to light.”

  No, he would not live that lie. He’d understood the risks when he’d walked into the recruitment office. He still believed in evil. He still believed some people needed to die. He would not enter the light at this late date. Driving into the desert darkness, the Nazi moon casting cold light on the mesas, he vowed he would stay in the darkness and the blood. He would stay there fighting all the way to the end.

  6

  The whole grandpa-sitting arrangement Aaron had agreed to try out was still a little vague in his mind. The duties were not entirely clear, and the hours were a bit blurrily defined, but he figured he’d come to understand the requirements once he got started. He was definitely supposed to make lunch for his grandpa, that much he understood, and monitor his pill intake, and if possible do some housecleaning, including the bathroom if necessary. And in exchange for all this attention, he was to receive fifty dollars a day, more if he stayed longer than the minimum five hours. It was better than some jobs he could think of, and, seeing as the opportunity had fallen entirely into his lap, always the best way of acquiring something, he’d agreed. He definitely needed the money, one way or another.

  Whether the commuting time counted toward his hours, he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to ask. He was going to assume it did, which was why he didn’t hurry through his morning routine on his first day on the job. He climbed out of bed, still numb from the thirteen straight hours of immobility, a near record, and stumbled into the empty, sun-drenched kitchen where the dishes were still piled in the sink, no note necessary to tell him he was supposed to move the mess into the dishwasher. He found himself a clean bowl in the cupboard and poured some flax cereal, thinking about the night of dinner with Uncle Ben. What had that been about, anyway?

  Aaron poured another bowl of cereal, ending in an avalanche of flax dust, and when he was finished he put the bowl among the other dirty dishes and found a clean mason jar and drained the orange juice. He fit the mason jar into the dirty dish puzzle and brushed his teeth and hurried off to the car. He didn’t have time for dishes anymore. Already it felt as if he was ru
nning late.

  Traffic was sluggish, but that was all right, assuming he was on the clock. He had no great eagerness for the day waiting for him on the other end. He might even have gone looking for a better job if it weren’t for the family-obligation factor. His mom hadn’t had to tell him that spending time with his aged grandfather was a good idea, whether remunerated or not, though of course she had, more than once. “Get his story,” she’d said. “He’s not going to be around that much longer, and it’s an amazing, important story. You should know it.” “I know, I know,” he’d said. “I’m not kidding,” she’d said. “The things he’s seen . . .” “I know!”

  He regretted the snapping. He hadn’t meant to do that. He wanted to get his grandpa’s story, too, of course, just like everyone else, no matter what his mom and grandpa assumed about his complete American callowness. They thought everyone under twenty years old was as stupid and narcissistic as Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, which said more about their own ignorance than his generation’s. But he also knew the story was basically ungettable anyway, trapped inside his grandpa’s impenetrable skull. He was happy to look for an opportunity to pry it out. But in all his seventeen years, he’d never seen one yet.

  His grandfather’s house was a modest California suburban ranch going to pot. The ceramic roof tiles were starting to slip, the bristly bushes along the front wall had grown to block most of the windows, and the expanse of white pebbles covering the front yard needed a good vacuuming. Walking the path, noting the cobwebs in the cacti, Aaron girded himself for the mausoleal atmosphere waiting inside. Maybe other grandchildren looked forward to spending time with their grandfathers, hanging out with old guys who dispensed folksy wisdom and went fly-fishing or whatever, but not him. The salary he’d be receiving was exactly to compensate for the experience of his grandfather’s gravitational field of boredom.