by Cullin Mitch
Maybe, Hollis decided, it wasn't William Levitt's vision Lon was calling terrible. Maybe, he thought, the mess wasn't the sprawl of suburbia; rather, it was, perhaps, the inapprehensible sight Lon had witnessed as a young sailor aboard the observer ship USS Mount McKinley (Baker Day in the Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946, at 0835 hours, nine miles from zeropoint), the subject of which had been mentioned from time to time since meeting on the golf course, discussed beneath the punishing sun, brought up by an inebriated Lon without prompting but addressed in a detached, guarded manner as if it were the gravest of secrets: because what Lon had seen on the deck of the Mount McKinley, what had erupted before him in an instant — pure white, brilliant, awe-inspiring — was the first post — World War II nuclear disaster, unleashed by an underwater atomic bomb which shot a massive column of ocean water nearly a mile into the Pacific sky, decimating a fleet of abandoned battleships which were deliberately positioned at the zeropoint (“target vessels,” Lon had called them, “thrown about and sunk like toy boats”).
In truth, the human eye wasn't capable of processing the entire phenomenon, nor had there been appropriate definitions available beforehand to explain it. As a result, two months following the bomb test, scientists organized a conference — reviewing the data from Bikini Atoll, analyzing military film footage — whereupon a vocabulary of thirty expressions was developed, including terms such as “cauliflower cloud,” “dome,” “base surge.” For Lon, however, the recollection of the detonation seemed crystal clear: the monstrous dome which rose immediately before him on that day — geysering among the target fleet and blanketing the ships all at once — stretched upward and upward, briefly usurping the natural firmament during its white, expansive birth. In fact, the explosion was so incredible — so immense, so much greater in scope than anything his mind had expected — that it left Lon gazing openmouthed, even as others around him could not suppress their loud gasps or ecstatic shouts of delight. No intelligible thoughts seized him, and he was moved to the point of tears; for it looked as if creation itself was at play, as if he were glimpsing the beginnings of a new world: mutable mountain ranges swirled within that dome, snowcapped peaks shimmered in the light of a second sun.
At the very moment the explosion propelled millions of tons of saltwater toward the heavens, an enormous crater fractured the ocean floor, extending two hundred feet deep; as surrounding water filled the gap, the ocean lifted and fell for several moments, and a series of huge waves were set into motion — swelling and churning and sweeping forward, abruptly rocking the observer ships. The largest waves known to mankind were created that morning, rivaled only by those which came with the eruption of the island of Krakatoa in 1883. My lord, Lon found himself thinking as the high waves approached, someone made a mistake, someone miscalculated. About forty seconds after the blast an otherworldly, demonic roar swept over the Mount McKinley, inciting a newsman to shout, “Why doesn't the captain get us out of here?” But already the massive column of water had begun to collapse, settling into a circular cloud of radioactive material, carrying its lethal spray, mist, air downwind for more than seven miles. With the column's disintegration, a heavy fog — like bank of steam, some two thousand feet high, rolled across the target fleet, enshrouding the ships.
Three and a half miles away from zeropoint, on the recently evacuated island of Bikini, coconut trees swayed violently when the shock wave jolted the deserted island at a rate of 3,500 miles per hour. And standing not far from Lon on the Mount McKinley — snaggletoothed, dark-skinned, compact, wearing Marine Corps utilities (khaki trousers and shirt, black navy-issue shoes and no socks) — was His Majesty King Juda of the people of Rongerik, formerly of Bikini, observing the spectacle without amazement while others beside him grimaced or smiled, watching impassively as his tropical kingdom was laid to waste and, Lon realized in hindsight, seemingly no longer shocked by anything white men could do to him, or his people, or his beloved islands, or themselves.
“It was an awful sight,” Lon had once told Hollis, “and it was so beautiful, too. I've never been able to reconcile that disparity. You've never seen anything like it. Trust me, the movie footage doesn't do it justice. You couldn't even begin to understand what it was like to see something that unimaginable unless you were there.”
You don't know what you're talking about, Hollis had wanted to say but refrained, hoping instead Lon might manage to hear the voice of silence. I've seen things just as awful if not worse, he thought. Smaller-scale indicators of the apocalypse, lacking the impersonal grandeur, the sublime aspects, the disquieting majesty of a single nuclear explosion beheld from afar. No, he thought, I've stood before macro destruction, the slow-moving, close-range, tangible mechanisms of human annihilation — and none of it, regardless of how he had tried recasting it in his head, offered a remote hint of paradoxical beauty or unexpected reverence.
“Yep,” Lon had said, “it was something else, and I'm surprised I haven't paid for it yet. God knows plenty already have. I knew a guy there who ended up having a malignant tumor removed from his thyroid, and another one who died of a rare kind of adenocarcinoma, and another from chronic leukemia, not to mention all the ones who got colon and liver cancer, or lost their entire immune systems, or that bunch of others who became sterile. But, you know, I've been lucky so far, pretty damn lucky. Doesn't matter much now, though. Not many remember all that stuff these days, no one talks about it anymore. But I'm fairly certain I saw the very beginning of our undoing — that exact second when the world started losing its mind for good.”
Realizing his wordless communication had failed to pass between them, Hollis had simply nodded, casting his eyes to the concrete ground. Fifty-three years ago for you, he calculated. Forty-nine for me.
10
The place where Hollis's cactus garden now grows was once square, lifeless, about five yards of hard earth. Whenever wind swept through the backyard, small brownish gusts rose from it and blew out over the swimming pool, like the futile encroachment of a miniature desert. While still setting up the house, they would go there, he and Debra, to ponder the garden they had talked about building with mostly wildflowers, some rocks, maybe a prickly pear or two. They would go there even at night — often in the night, so that they could avoid the summer sun — when the concrete was tolerable to their bare feet and the dirt patch before them was dissipating the heat it had absorbed during the day.
Debra would recline on a deck chair set away from the future garden. Hollis, shirtless and wearing Bermuda shorts, would remain standing while considering the possibilities; it was always he, never Debra, who strolled the concrete perimeter of the patch, where — upon reaching the other side, the dirt between them like a void — he would offer his thoughts: “I'm thinking we can fill it in with gravel, but only when we get everything planted. How about that?” A shrug of indifference would bounce from her shoulders, as if her mind was on something else. He would nod his head in response, suddenly unsure of what, just seconds ago, had seemed like a decent idea. Soon enough, though, Debra would forgo any involvement in the garden planning, encouraging him instead to landscape the area as he saw fit, while also freeing herself to decorate their new home without his input.
“I've spent the better part of my life watering flowers,” she explained one evening, having begged out of surveying the empty patch yet again. “It's a lot of work, you know. And now that you've got plenty of time on your hands, I believe you should assume that duty for a spell. You'll see, it'll do you good getting plenty of sunshine, getting your hands a little muddied. Anyway, I think you're more suited for desert botany than I am, wouldn't you agree?”
He gave her a sort of agitated look, at once amused and perplexed. “Really? How do you figure?”
“Well, you're certainly pricklier than me, and nowadays your belly strikes me as fairly succulent.”
“Oh,” he said, wrinkling his brow and glancing down at his broad, inflamed stomach. “I guess so.”
Then, f
or him, developing the garden became a singular preoccupation, if not a somewhat protracted affair; its progress was labored over in the cooler morning hours, its design revised from day to day: no gravel, no flowers, nothing which required an inordinate amount of watering, but rather something indigenous, something which might thrive by itself should he eventually fall ill or become too enfeebled to maintain its care. At the kitchen window, Debra would spy him out there, crouched on his haunches, finally cracking the dirt with a spade and digging narrow, shallow holes for the eight tiny barrel cacti he had bought at Super Wal-Mart. His gloved hands — which she knew were thick, rough, and calloused from his lumber-industry years — would reach for a single two-inch-wide barrel, carefully extracting it from its temporary planter, balancing it gingerly on his palm and sliding it upright into a hole.
Those initial plantings rooted successfully, although the landscaping was approached methodically and even now continues as an ongoing project. Hollis marked off sections of the patch, intending each section to display a different variety of cactus, but ultimately the concept was abandoned in favor of naturalistic, scattershot groupings. Then one day — it must have been right after planting the first barrels — his spade unearthed something other than centipedes or grubs or fire ants. The ground was stabbed. The spade pushed deep, striking what felt like a pebble. He made several jabs with the spade, tossing dirt aside, and scooped out a hard olive-green clump covered in soil, which he sifted into his fingers.
“Take a gander at this,” he said, and Debra — sunbathing on a deck chair, her face shadowed beneath a visor cap — opened her eyes, leaning forward as he briefly held his discovery high.
“What is it?”
“It's an army, man,” he said, lowering his hand, contemplating his find for a moment: a small plastic toy soldier, a rifleman with his weapon aimed.
“Good lord,” she said, sounding bothered.
Digging nearby he exhumed a second soldier, then a third and a fourth soldier — until, at last, six plastic figures were scattered about him, filthy and strewn around several holes, like men thrown to the ground by mortar blasts. He said, somberly, “Just look at you — you didn't see it coming at all — you weren't expecting this,” as if he were repeating it to himself. But the soldiers weren't the only toys he had discovered there. Previously he had found several opaque-orange and black-swirled marbles, a purple Hot Wheels cement-mixer truck, as well as a tiny blue sock made for a toddler.
“It isn't right,” he heard Debra say. “Those kind of things shouldn't be in our yard, not way out here.”
Turning his head, he caught sight of her face as she climbed from the deck chair to go inside; it was very serious and very pale, as if she had seen something awful. He then understood her consternation: prior to their house being built, he realized, there must've been another house on the property. Prior to Nine Springs, he thought, another community must've existed there, and someone else had once wandered and slept and played and dreamed on the same plot of land where they now reside. Thereafter, his fingers behaved like God, organizing the soldiers into a crooked formation, righting them on such broken, dusty earth: a firing rifleman, a grenadier, a rifleman using the butt of his weapon to strike at the air, a running rifleman with an M1 carbine, an advancing rifleman with a bayonet on his weapon, a G.I. charging forward with a tommy gun — none of them larger than three inches, each poised yet somehow fighting an unseen battle. As cicadas rattled in mesquite trees, he evoked the soldiers’ names without speaking aloud — Buddy, Jimmy — an index finger swooping down on the toys like a precision-guided missile — George, Mikey, Mark — flicking the plastic helmets — Schubert — knocking the men to the dirt. Standing upright, he gazed at the bodies far below him, as if observing a distant, foreign landscape from a bird's-eye view. You're the boys that didn't make it, he thought. You're the ones that fell in my presence.
“Sorry about that, Schubert,” he said, bending to pick up the soldiers, recalling the Chinese American kid who had idolized McCreedy, laughing at the Texan's jokes when no one else would. “That's rich,” Schubert would say, nervously looking at his feet, grinning uncomfortably as if he assumed everyone else was staring at him. “That's a hoot, that's pretty funny.” Schubert's eyes often shifted to McCreedy while they were on patrol — fixing on the sunburned neckline, that rugged profile — instead of staring ahead or monitoring the hillsides. While there was little age difference, McCreedy seemed older than Schubert, much older; and, as such, he treated the kid like a younger brother, giving him obvious advice (“Remember, keep your head low, otherwise you'll make for an easy target”), admonishing him now and then (“Godamnit, Schubert, don't you piss out in the open like that, you'll get your pecker blasted!”).
Ultimately, though, there was nothing McCreedy could have said or done to keep Schubert Tang alive — not when enemy mortar and machine-gun fire erupted indiscriminately, not after a bullet tore through the kid's skull, and blew away a portion of his nose, and removed most of his right jaw, and threw his teeth and strips of flesh into the air like confetti. As others scrambled for safety, it was McCreedy who rushed to Schubert, promptly rolling the splayed body this way and that — his boots stepping in the kid's waste, creating bloody tracks on an exposed hillside trail — taking a dog tag, retrieving a billfold, wristwatch, and a pack of cigarettes from the corpse; all of it, except the cigarettes, would be given to the division's graves registration unit. Upon leaving the body behind, dropping beside Hollis as machine-gun rounds zipped above them, McCreedy said, “Tough fucking luck,” with hardly a quiver of regret.
But Schubert wasn't the first casualty McCreedy had readied for the medics or the graves registration unit, nor was he the last. Buddy Campbell got hit in the chest, an inch or so from his navel. Fleeing down a hill, George Martinez had both arms blown off by a mortar blast. Jimmy Shurlock was shot in the left eye, and to everyone's amazement burst into laughter shortly before dying. It was a tree which killed Mikey O'Brien, a tree struck by a mortar — the wood splintering apart, jettisoning like bullets, and gouging open O'Brien's stomach. But Mark Neiman took the cake: one second he was sharing a joke about a legless pig, and a second later he was completely legless, writhing on his back, reaching a trembling hand toward the two bubbling, red stumps where his knees, shins, and feet had just been.
In hindsight, it only seemed right that those deaths would have an impact on McCreedy, continually tempering his affable manner and drawing his personality further inward, allowing the more sullen, acerbic parts of his nature to emerge (qualities Hollis had sensed lurking below McCreedy's exterior from the start). Then it was to be a tougher McCreedy marching forward, a colder character with his weapon ready, taking the lead without needing to assert himself, remaining unfazed whenever they happened upon the horrific: bloated, discolored corpses stacked alongside a narrow trail; a dead infant with flies swarming about its face; a woman's head flattened like a crushed grapefruit in the middle of an unpaved road, her long dark hair spread out in the dirt as if it had been combed that way.
“Tough fucking luck. Too bad for you.”
No, no, Hollis thought, don't think about it anymore. Leave it be.
But even after disposing of the toy soldiers — dropping them into a mass grave and covering them with soil, sealing them beneath a small piece of flagstone — he was unable to shake what he had tried for so long to forget. How strange, he considered, that a single day — or an hour, or a minute, or a second — could drastically change the direction and outcome of someone ‘s entire life. One man's sudden misfortune, he knew well enough, might be another man's salvation. He turned his eyes from that piece of flagstone, and surveyed the barren ground on which he stood. Just then, the garden became transformed in his mind, ceasing to be a place of pleasant diversion but, rather, now an expansive grave plot for memories which refused to stay buried.
In all — once the days of 1950 were tallied up and relegated to an increasingly remote past — Hollis ha
d spent less than a month fighting the North Koreans, from the last week of July to early August, with the majority of 7th Cavalry deaths he witnessed occurring while en route to the Naktong River (the 2nd Battalion retreating southward as advancing enemy tanks, snipers, and artillery shells chased them in rain and sun to the base of the Sobaek Mountains). How indescribable his time abroad sometimes felt — how abrupt and hallucinatory — like a blur which had swept through a brief portion of his life, taking him from rural America to urban Japan to the hills and valleys of South Korea, and bringing him back home to Minnesota from what, upon reflection, could have been described as a whirlwind vacation to hell. Yet it was early on — just before Schubert's killing, before McCreedy stopped smiling and began gritting his teeth, while everyone still believed the conflict was to be a short-lived affair — that he experienced his own grim turning point, a moment when, as it would soon happen for McCreedy, the war took on the attributes of a debased and needless game; except, unlike McCreedy, Hollis recoiled from the horrors he glimpsed (averting his stare if possible, hesitating at times to pull the trigger of his M1), attempting to keep himself somehow separate while also perceiving many of his fellow cavalrymen as nothing more than willful children set loose on a massive playground, becoming promiscuous with their weapons and the disposal of human life. Nevertheless, he knew his autobiography would skirt these amoral, vexing aspects of the war, and in some manner, if he got around to actually writing it, he would need to revise certain facts, censoring moments of his own history by deliberate omission, shifting much of the story into a fictional parallel universe just so he could sleep at night.
