The Post-War Dream

by Cullin Mitch

  Which was why Hollis steered clear of McCreedy, avoiding his overbearing proximity ever since they had all gathered on a Yokohama pier, refusing to meet his dark blue eyes once they were finally secured below deck. The two had brushed shoulders twice, and both times Hollis had kept his stare either aimed forward or at the floor, simply nodding after McCreedy said, “Pardon me, friend.” And while he recognized the inexplicable allure of McCreedy's personality, Hollis was also mystified by the admiration it evoked; for he, too, was drawn to this slightly younger man, casting discreet glances whenever that Texan drawl reverberated, watching at a distance and hoping to remain inconspicuous. He couldn't deny or begin to understand the attraction for such a swaggering, cocksure private — someone who, had the circumstances been otherwise, might have gone unnoticed had Hollis passed him on the street. But he refused to believe it was McCreedy's good looks which made him so appealing — the broad shoulders, the above-average height, the golden-blond Mohawk haircut, the muscular forearms. No, he eventually concluded, it was something else — something primal and unique, something, possibly, which he had always lacked.

  Yet try as he might, Hollis could not escape McCreedy's unwanted attention, that vexatious need to make contact with everyone around him. And so when half awake upon his cot — two days after the wavering voyage began, resting despite the ship's continual turbulence — Hollis stirred to the sound of a throat clearing above him, and before lifting his eyelids, he heard that familiar lengthened tone asking, “Well — how on earth did you end up here?” His vision was fuzzy at the second his eyes shot open, but soon he distinguished the imposing figure looming over him, noticing first a thin wisp of grayish smoke floating between him and McCreedy. “Sure didn't mean to spook you,” said McCreedy, a cigarette bouncing in a corner of his mouth, staring down at Hollis with an amused expression.

  “That's okay,” replied Hollis — rising on his elbows, looking somewhat apprehensive — and noticed, then, that McCreedy was holding his notepad, the pages parted to the drawing of Hollis on the moon.

  “You'd be the man on the moon, right? It's Hollis, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I'm Bill.”

  “Yeah, I knew that.”

  “Guess I shouldn't be snooping, ‘cept your book was on the floor so I couldn't help myself. Hope you don't mind none.”

  “It's fine,” Hollis lied, resenting what felt like a calculated invasion of his privacy.

  A short silence followed as McCreedy glanced again through the pages, smiling to himself.

  “You some kind of artist?”

  “No, not at all. It's only something I do to pass the hours.”

  “I hear that.” McCreedy flipped the notepad shut, casually tossing it on the cot once Hollis had sat upright and swung his feet to the floor. “Say, you don't got a spare smoke I could bum?”

  “I don't, sorry.”

  “No problem. Never hurts to ask a buddy, right?”

  “Sure.”

  Instead of that being the end of it, McCreedy lowered himself to the cot, taking a seat beside Hollis, saying, “What's your story, then?”

  The question caught Hollis off guard, perplexing him. He hesitated, staring ahead, thinking: My story? But it seemed there wasn't much to relate. He had been raised in a small midwestern town, an awkward and solitary boy. He liked hunting and fishing by himself. He had always been bookish, had few friends, and spent most of his free time under his widowed mother's complacent but watchful eye, keeping Eden company during the tough years which followed his father's malingering death from TB. After high school he had worked several part-time jobs to help make ends meet — a short-order cook, a salesman for a Ford dealership, a gas station attendant, a cashier at the local five-and-ten — each business located on one of the four corners where the two main streets in Critchfield intersected. Five months prior to his enlistment, Eden unexpectedly remarried, bringing Rich into their home — a wine-bloated, needlessly quarrelsome little man Hollis immediately resented — a retired banker who, in turn, had found his bride's sullen, uncommunicative son rather impossible to like. With Rich's arrival, the house took on an oppressive quality, becoming an environment which, for Hollis, could no longer accommodate anything except the man's selfish, bullying whims — just the meals his stepfather enjoyed eating, the opera or classical music on the radio and nothing else, the disruptive childish tantrums which passed without apology and were only allowed with impunity for Rich; and, sometimes, when Eden wasn't present, the man delighted in taunting Hollis — throwing a cloth napkin at his face, flicking his earlobes with a finger after he had drunk too much — stating that he wasn't really very bright, that he was a full-grown brat who needed to grow up. Hollis always reacted to such unkindness with passive outrage, responding in his own discreet manner — often spitting in his stepfather's food before the man came to the dinner table, or running the bristles of Rich's toothbrush around the inside rim of the toilet bowl. As the acrimony increased — fueled by Hollis's jealousy toward this relative stranger now sharing Eden's bed, and Rich's assertion that his adult stepson was too old to live at home — Hollis, taking what little money he had saved, packed a suitcase and, on the cusp of his twentieth birthday, ran away from home one morning, Eden crying silently on the front porch as her son walked resolutely out of view.

  “Don't really have a story,” Hollis said.

  “This fella says he ain't got a story,” said McCreedy, as if talking to someone else. “Now that's a first. A man without no story to tell. You might just be my favorite person on this damn boat, Hollis.”

  And from that point on, McCreedy made it a habit to stop by Hollis's cot while doing his usual rounds, sitting down for a while and asking questions which Hollis felt uncomfortable answering.

  “Hey, Hollis, tell me what your girl's like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your girl, what's she like? You got her picture?”

  “I don't have a girl.”

  McCreedy squinted, cocking an eyebrow. He shook his head, saying, “Ain't buying that for a second. What, you worried ol’ Creed will try and steal her away from you?”

  “I'm being honest. There isn't any girl.”

  “Not even a little Shin-ju-koo honey going?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what the hell's wrong with you? Horndog after it, boy. Life's far too short. Here, have a peek at this.” McCreedy dug into a pocket, retrieving a slightly bent black-and-white photograph which he placed in Hollis's left hand. “That's my girl,” he said, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.”

  Hollis lifted the photograph, inspecting it closely. What he saw brought a smirk to his face: the foreground was out of focus, showing the indistinct image of a dark-haired girl, her arms hanging at her sides, her cloudy features difficult to perceive; in contrast, the background — a wide field of high wild grass — was plainly visible.

  “Don't get me wrong,” McCreedy continued, his voice reanimating. “I mean, I've also got a gaggle of kobitos in Tokyo — but that one there, she's the real deal, my true gal pal. The rest don't really mean much when it really boils down to it. You know, I go to them others so I'll maintain my sanity while I'm away, if you follow. That one, though, nothing compares to her, God's honest truth.”

  “I bet she's pretty.”

  “Hell, yeah, she's pretty,” said McCreedy, extracting the photograph from Hollis's fingers. “That's the mother of my children, someday.”

  The more Hollis got to know him — the more he learned about him, the more they talked to each other — the less bothersome the private from Claude, Texas, seemed. He had, in the course of the trip, chatted with several privates on the ship, except none were as friendly to him as McCreedy.

  “Normally, I'd keep that picture to myself,” McCreedy told him, “but I get this feeling you're different. It's not that I ain't proud or nothing, just don't wa
nt these goons getting all worked up over what's mine, if you know what I mean. Some things just got to be treated with respect, if you follow, and I'm sure you do. Can't say the same for the rest of this bunch. But that's why I like you, Hollis. You got respect for the decent things, right? I could see it the moment I seen you. You and me, we're a lot alike that way. It's like we got the same birthmark or something, you follow? Anyway, we've got class, and that's what matters, wouldn't you agree?”

  “Sure,” Hollis said, nodding.

  “We're too smart for this outfit, ain't that right?”

  “I guess so. Sure.”

  “It's an undeniable fact.”

  Soon enough, Hollis would better discern the duality of McCreedy's personality, the two extreme and incongruous sides which were bridged by an irrepressible smile. And he would experience firsthand McCreedy's warmheartedness, as well as the sociable private's unexpected tendencies toward cruelty and violence. Only after leaving Korea, however, would he consider McCreedy as both an unwitting benefactor of the fortuitous outcome of his civilian life and the enigmatic symbol of his greatest shame. Then, at last, Hollis would also begin to comprehend his own paradoxical traits, his instinctive ability to appear as one kind of person and, just as easily, to behave as another. But four decades would pass before this realization fully took root, blossoming during the dawn of his retirement and springing forth on a sunny day while he cultivated his cactus garden; and months prior to that curious snowfall, he had stood alone in the backyard, gazing at what thrived under his constant attention, surprising himself there with a single word propelled from his mouth without forethought, evoking a name he hadn't uttered aloud for years and whispering it as if revealing a secret to the prickly pears.

  “Creed.”

  5

  “Where there is cactus,” Hollis had told Debra last night, “there are sometimes snowflakes, too.”

  Even at this very moment — working here in the backyard, stooping beside his garden (a normally arid patch of earth running between the swimming pool and his tiki hut) — Hollis knows there will be days like today which require a heavy jacket. Now bending forward with a spade in one hand, he endeavors to blow snow from tangled, barbed spines — his breath streaming through the garden like meager fog, grazing icicle-encased needles, dissipating past him amidst opuntia tunicata, mammillarias, and Texas pride. Then he is amazed by where he and Debra had ended up, what was meant to be their hard-earned detachment; how, finally, they had fled to the Sonoran Desert from an increasingly overpopulated Los Angeles suburb, and found themselves residing behind the high walls of a master-planned resort for active adults: an exclusive community of championship golf courses, gentle slopes, and seven distinctive floor plans (The Laredo, The Lariat, The Montana, Ponderosa, Durango, Cheyenne, Santa Fe) with fifty exterior design choices, all pretty much alike.

  The tiki hut beyond the pool, however, was Hollis's own creation, something he designed just for himself. And while Debra couldn't stand the sight of the place, normally refusing to ever join him inside of it, she also understood that its construction was, in reality, a small price to pay for acquiring those interior flourishes she believed were essential to their house: she got the expensive no-wax sheet-vinyl flooring, the porcelain bathtub and ceramic tile surrounds, the single-lever chrome faucets, the oak-front cabinets; and, in return, Hollis got to build his little hut — handcrafted kiln-dried cypress wood, leak-proof thatched roof made of palm leaves, big enough inside for a hammock and two deck chairs, the ceiling fitted with a three-speed fan. It is a place where he and his buddy Lon could sip beer in hotter weather, nursing Tecate or Corona while they practiced golf swings, plotting certain victories at the weekly tournaments. So Debra had allowed him that hideaway, his backyard retreat — and if the majority of his drinking was done there (if he and Lon weren't too boisterous, if he shaved his back hair prior to lounging about in swimming trunks), then she never protested; she left him alone to split six-packs on summer afternoons and evenings. Truth be known, he has often felt more at home within his hut than within the house.

  Lon, too, had once preferred spending long hours in Hollis's backyard, disregarding the upkeep of his own perennial garden and forgoing the thrice-a-week calisthenics class which his wife had expected him to take with her. On many of those summer afternoons, he would already be waiting at the hut, having already claimed a deck chair for himself, exclaiming as Hollis came outside: “You're running late, damnit. It's almost beer thirty. You better hurry.”

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Everything, except water.”

  “Sounds about right to me.”

  It's not difficult for Hollis to envision his friend reclining nearby — snoring in the hammock with a beer can gripped by a dangling hand, or tanning himself away from the shadows of the thatched enclosure — although the hut has now become an empty, inhospitable haven; the roof is weighed down with thawing clumps of snow, water drips steadily from the palm leaves like rainfall. While the place had been intended as a whimsical symbol of Hollis's sunny leisure years, in its current state the hut appears more suitable for the black cloud which had unfurled over him and Debra some twenty-six months ago; for no sooner had they settled in Nine Springs — building the hut, landscaping the garden, completing the interior touches to the house — than Hollis received a phone call while Debra was out shopping at Costco Wholesale, hearing what at first sounded like a teenage girl's voice on the other end of the line: “Hi, this is Dr. Taylor from the Tucson Medical Center. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to reach Debra Adams. Is she available?”

  He hesitated before answering, glancing toward the kitchen windows — observing the hot, bright midday sunlight reflected on the still water of the swimming pool, the sight of it underscoring the cool, unlit room he was standing in. “Debra isn't home right now,” he said, absently coiling the phone cord around two fingers. “She'll be back in a couple of hours, give or take.”

  “Am I speaking with her husband?”

  “Yes, that's me.”

  “Mr. Adams, I'm Dr. Taylor from the Tucson Medical Center.”

  “I know, you already said that.”

  As he pushed the receiver harder against his ear, the cord grew tighter on his fingers. What followed was at once surprising and, somehow, expected: the doctor requested that both he and Debra come to her office the next day, the meeting already scheduled for four in the afternoon. “Can you and your wife make it at that time, Mr. Adams? It's possible to meet earlier if it's more convenient.”

  “What's all this about?”

  “I think it's probably best if we discuss everything in person, and with Mrs. Adams present, all right?”

  He resented the matter-of-fact tone of her voice, how her words hinted at something tragic yet revealed nothing whatsoever. “It's serious, isn't it?” he asked.

  “We'll discuss everything tomorrow, all right? So I've got your appointment down for four o'clock — ”

  “Can't we talk about it now? Is there anything wrong with my wife?”

  But the doctor would not elaborate any further, telling him simply that it was important to remain calm, and concluding with, “We ‘ll talk tomorrow. Four o'clock. Your wife knows where my office is.”

  “Okay.”

  “I'll expect you both then.”

  “Okay.”

  And as Hollis hung up the receiver, he thought he recognized a distant noise like the gentle evocation of wind chimes; it was, at that moment, as if he had stirred from a pleasant dream, only to realize the ground was collapsing beneath his feet. When Debra returned from shopping, carrying four grocery bags inside and setting them down in the foyer so she could close the front door, he was waiting at the dining-room table, his hands resting in his lap, his eyes following her busy movements even as he remained still. He addressed her from across the room, and without looking toward him she replied, “What is it?”

  “Come here for a second, would you?”


  “Hold on, let me get the groceries into the kitchen.”

  “You can leave them there, I'll take care of it in a minute. Just come sit beside me first, okay? Your doctor called.”

  Debra paused at the front door, her back to him, her hurried activity brought to a halt. “Dr. Taylor called?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “A little while ago.”

  “Was it about the sonogram?”

  “I think so. She didn't really tell me anything. She wants us in her office tomorrow afternoon, at four. That's all I could get out of her.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn't turn to him. Instead, she remained facing the door, saying nothing else until Hollis stood and crossed the dining room into the foyer. He rested his hands on her shoulders and pulled her back to his chest.

  “Did you hear the other side of the mountain is on fire?” she asked, tilting her head against his chin. “The Tucson foothills are covered in smoke. I drove home with the windows rolled up and the AC off because of it. It's awful. The radio said they're losing cabins in Summerhaven. My hair smells like smoke, huh?”

  “It doesn't.”

  “I probably should shower anyway. That smell is stuck in my nostrils. Will you unpack the groceries?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  Debra eased free of his mild hold, and — running fingers through her hair, releasing a prolonged sigh — she went from him without having once looked his way. Hollis started collecting the groceries; he hoisted the bags with both hands and trudged into the kitchen, lifting and then lowering the bags to a countertop — where, as he began removing plastic-wrapped bulk items (Lean Cuisines, Healthy Choice entrees, StarKist tuna cans). He suspected Debra was likely pondering those very things he had already considered while waiting at the dining table: Why did Dr. Taylor want them both there? What exactly was going on? And why had Debra's annual physical required a transvaginal sonogram and a CT scan, in addition to the usual pap smear and standard checkup?