The Sentimentalists

by Johanna Skibsrud

With a lurch, Napoleon feels suddenly such a strong and physical desire to follow that same course that he moves toward Owen and he too begins to fall. But then, abruptly, he receives a kick in his side, and Tiny is there, dragging him up from the ground. He realizes – with the impact of the boot, which his body has stalled – his own relative stillness. He gets up, no longer recognizing Owen.

  In a high-pitched voice Bean says: “That motherfucker would have killed me,” but Napoleon is uncertain who Bean is referring to. He sees him wet his lips. “Alright,” Bean says, looking directly at Napoleon now. “Not the kids. But everything else,” and although Napoleon is again uncertain of the meaning, or the object of what Bean has said, he feels also a tremendous relief, to which the words seem in some way to correspond.

  They move. Tiny and Looch carry the dead man, and the kids remain, making that sound. A high, ringing note.

  They set the village on fire.

  Once, as they are moving through it, half of it burning, Napoleon bumps into Hill. Hill has his head down. He says, “Watch it.”

  Napoleon hasn’t seen Teddy anywhere, but he must have seen him, just without realizing it was Teddy he’d seen.

  And where is Hill?

  And where is Owen, now?

  A matter of minutes. Half of an hour at most.

  For a third time that day they move over that ground. Away from the village, where there is no village now, and past the hooch, the last one to be burned. Napoleon doesn’t wonder about the children, who are nowhere to be seen. He is only happy that they’re gone.

  Tiny and Looch carry the dead man, which makes the return journey slow.

  Several days pass. Napoleon doesn’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to him; not to Teddy, not to Hill.

  He thinks about shooting himself in the leg. He thinks about that all the time. When would be the best time to do it? At night? During a march, making it appear accidental?

  Should he perhaps do it now?

  Should he do it now?

  Because he could. He could do it. But how do it? What part of the leg would be safest for the hit, without being, perhaps, too safe?

  He could pull his gun out now. He could shoot himself now.

  Then, on maybe the fourth day (the second day since they’ve returned to the base), he goes to the chaplain. “Father, something is wrong. I don’t feel right.”

  The chaplain is a young guy, nice enough.

  “Sit down,” and Napoleon looks around him for a chair and sits down in the one that squeaks.

  The chaplain speaks as though into balloons, which float up, empty, and disconnected from anything. It’s raining. It is always fucking raining. Then Napoleon starts to cry and says “Do something, dammit!” and even lays his hand briefly on the chaplain’s white shoulder. Then he quickly removes it. And realizes he’s sworn. “You’ve got to do something.”

  Quieter, by way of apology.

  That’s how he ends up in the KIAC shed, sorting those bags. For a while the squad sticks around, so he still sees Teddy and Hill and that’s when he gathers what he does, and shares it with them. They get high, and look at porn together, and Hill complains, and each day Napoleon collects a few more photographs. But pretty soon Teddy and Hill stop coming because they say it’s too dangerous to let the other guys see them with Napoleon. They shrug their shoulders and say sorry.

  “You’re screwed, man,” Teddy tells him. “You watch your back. I’m serious.”

  “Shit,” Napoleon says. “I know.”

  At night he sleeps with his rifle, so that when he wakes up the shape of it is marked on his side.

  The last time he sees them, Teddy says: “Why the fucking chaplain, man? That guy’s a prick.”

  “I don’t know,” Napoleon says, and passes a thin half-smoked joint to Hill. “I don’t know. Who the fuck else?”

  “That was a real dickhead move,” Teddy says. “You should have talked to me first. You should have listened to me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Napoleon says, and for a moment he wishes he could feel angry at being spoken to like that, by Teddy, who is his friend. But then he thinks that’s funny: to still think of people that way. Of the way they were or were not supposed to act toward you, or anyone else. Friends, or not friends.

  Fuck that. Plus, he doesn’t have the energy to be angry, or care.

  “Oh yeah?” Napoleon says. “What would you have suggested?”

  “I would’ve told you to keep your fucking mouth shut,” Teddy says. “If you want my opinion, Owen was looking for trouble, and now so are you.”

  “Yeah, well – too bad,” Napoleon says.

  “Yeah. Too bad.”

  The joint has gone out. It’s on Hill again. He sucks on it and there’s a little sip, a popping sound as the burnt-out end bit gets pulled back into the butt of the joint, and goes out. There’s not enough in there to light it up again so Hill just holds it, very delicately between his two fingers, even though in a moment he will just get up and squash it in the mud.

  “Well, you got yourself into some real trouble now,” Teddy says. Again. “I don’t envy you that. It’s just lucky for you you’re not coming out with us again. Guys say you really coloured things up.”

  He looks at Napoleon briefly, then shrugs, and raises his hands as if to say, “I can’t help you now.” But the gesture is silly. Everyone knows it, and no one is blaming him. There’s nothing that Teddy can do.

  Only a short time later, there’s a court hearing in which Napoleon testifies. One time, just before he is escorted by another officer to the stand, Napoleon passes Bean in the hall.

  “You really fucked up, soldier,” Bean says. “You really fucked up.”

  Napoleon is only happy that Bean doesn’t mention his brother. Maybe he doesn’t know about Clark. About how far Clark can throw a grenade. But he doesn’t care about that. He would just rather not have his brother mentioned.

  In the extremity of it, in fact, his not caring, Napoleon is startled by the prospect of never caring for anything again.

  This is somewhat a relief. It will be an easier life than the one he’s expected.

  During this time he tries not to think at all. Not about Owen. Not about anything. And every time his mind wanders, to that threshold, teasingly close to the door, he pulls it back into a far corner, and sits it blankly down again. It’s true. He wants the hell out; wants it so bad, like he’s never wanted anything. It’s not even a feeling he wants it so bad. Even when he’s up there on the stand, answering those questions, he’s not listening to his own voice, but instead thinking, could I say something so bad? Could they send me home if I did?

  He wonders what it would take, but somehow is compelled (in the same way that he was compelled to keep his gun from his leg) to answer the questions correctly; to be polite. To nod, sit down, to leave the stand when asked.

  And when he thinks of being sent home it’s not to a place he imagines being sent. He does not picture his mother or his father, welcoming him. There are no socks, no corridors, no arms folding. He doesn’t imagine the one or two girls he might like to have greet him, if he could. Or think about his mother’s kitchen, or his bed. He doesn’t imagine the town, the theatre, the park, the car – all those things that over the months he’s been away he’s recreated so vividly in his mind. No. He just imagines not being here. That’s it. There is no place on earth that he thinks of to replace it.

  Sometimes, though, he thinks of Owen’s boat, and that is the closest he comes to thinking about Owen. How they had promised it to one another, semi-buried in foxholes one night, in an interminable rain. How the boat got mixed up with all the other stories that Owen would tell, and which Napoleon more frequently requested – about his mother’s and grandmother’s ghosts – because of the way they made him laugh, and made Owen’s eyes light up even if he couldn’t see them, half teasing, half mean, saying, “You don’t fucking believe me?” But also because of the way that, when Owen spoke of them, they became – no longer make
-believe spectres of some other, imaginary, world – real and physical companions, in the way that his own mother did, when he imagined her in the heat, padding toward him down an invisible hall.

  On several occasions, Owen has carefully described the principle of it to Napoleon, drawing diagrams in the mud, so that he might better understand. The way the volume of water displaced at both the stern and the bow of the boat, for example, should correspond equally to the weight of the waves on the hull, in order that it absorb the resulting pressure of its own momentum; the small hills and holes in the water, that is, which the vessel itself has caused.

  No there is no place that Napoleon imagines for himself, and even the boat is not a boat, and not even an idea, now. Just as Owen is no longer Owen, and even his ghosts are, if there could be such a thing, non-ghosts, now. And there are. That’s it. He’s surrounded by them. Non-ghosts, non-thoughts, non-words, non-people. Even himself. Now less the sum of his parts. Yes, it seems, in fact, that there are more of these empty spaces in the world than there are things with which to fill them. More things that are not than that are. No wonder that the cracks show. Yes. There are too many empty spaces in the world, and he is one of them.

  On one of his last days out in the field, just before he would meet the chaplain, they come across a dead man. A little NVA guy, his head collapsed but his body still firm: bloated up, making him appear larger than he would have been alive.

  Pike says: “Hey, check it out. I could use those boots,” and he bends down and unties them. They can’t get jungle-boots, and some of the guys are worse off than others in the big clodhoppers they wear because their feet are too small – like Pike’s – to fit into any of the more decent pairs.

  The dead man’s boots don’t fit either. “This guy has big fucking feet,” Pike says. “Those can’t have fit him.” Then, because Pike’s passed them over, the other guys all line up and try the boots on. They’re not nice boots, but they’re better than the ones they have and, anyway, a change. All their own boots are out, around them, they look like dead birds. And everyone’s messed-up feet are out, aired for a minute, waiting for a turn. Napoleon’s feet are, it turns out, no worse than anyone’s. They are, all of them, bloody and white, with fungus and stuff that looks rotten. He’s surprised about that, about how his are no worse when he’d thought his were the worst in the world. That there they had been, marching along, together, all of them with the very worst feet in the world.

  The boots fit Napoleon and because they have to keep going, they say, “Fine. Haskell wears them, but we’ll switch off. Looch, you can be next, man,” and they keep going until Napoleon realizes with a sick jerk in his belly that he’s wearing a dead man’s shoes.

  He takes off the boots and walks on without them. He thinks with an almost amused surprise when he takes them off, “Fuck, what do I need these for!” Then he re-wraps his blisters in the rags that he’d covered them in before and keeps going, and he feels better without the dead man’s shoes.

  Later, of course, everyone is angry. He shouldn’t have lost those boots. He looks back on the moment that he took them off and (although disgust still rises in him at the thought of them) he’s able to see their point.

  Pike tells Napoleon that Looch wants to flatten him. Pike says he’ll see what he can do to hold him off. He lowers his voice and says to Napoleon, “I know it’s not your fault. I know you’re crazy now.”

  That’s nice of him, but Pike says he’s not promising anything.

  So Teddy and Hill say they can’t see Napoleon anymore, and pretty soon the squad moves on anyway. They come one more time. “See you,” Napoleon says. “Don’t get fucking killed.” Then he continues to sort through the bags and sleep with his gun until they put him on another squad.

  On another assignment, with new guys, whose names he doesn’t ever learn.

  He doesn’t collect the porn or the candy in that in-between time, after Hill and Teddy don’t come to see him anymore. Sometimes he collects the weed, and then he smokes it and lies in among all those bags, when he’s supposed to be working, and takes the photographs out of his inside pocket and looks at them for a while.

  Then he realizes he’s let his guard down and let too much time slip by and he gets up in a hurry and tears through the bags one after the other, through all the dead-guy things. Missing stuff, no doubt, because he goes through them so quickly.

  But he thinks: If some mother or wife (in Delaware, Washington State, wherever) should come across some porn, or some dope, in her son’s or her husband’s bag – If that’s what it comes down to her knowing, well. That’ll be some comfort, or should be. That is what Napoleon thinks.

  Then he’s put on another assignment and gets shot in the leg. He didn’t even have to do it himself, but now he wishes he had. He wishes he’d put his own bullet through. But thinks, anyway, that he must be very powerful, because he wished so hard, and then it came.

  He lies in the hospital for two weeks and doesn’t think. Or else he thinks but he thinks about nothing, about the way that everything is white.

  The sheets, especially. He loves the way the sheets are white.

  He spends some time, too, wishing he were dying. He thinks he’s powerful enough that if he thinks about dying for enough time then he might die too. But he doesn’t. He keeps living, instead. He looks at those white sheets and he lives.

  He does keep wishing, though. He wishes because if this is his dying, then this whiteness constitutes his end. He can think of nothing more lovely than that; than an end so white.

  He’s on so many drugs, that’s why. He knows that. They come and give them to him, and he looks forward to their coming. He likes the way the drugs make him feel; it’s better than anything. A clean feeling, a wide open, anything feeling, like he felt when he was AWOL, only this time much better because now the feeling is not being pushed forward, shuttled. Through circumstances of the past into circumstances of the future. It just is, self-contained, and outside of everything, and if it had a colour guess what colour it would be?

  Then abruptly one day they say he’s better, and after that they send him home.

  7

  “It was the weather that was the worst,” my father told me. “Sometimes, you’d be on duty, camped out all night, and you just had to sit,” he said, “and sit and sit. And watch. And what the fuck we were watching for half the time I didn’t know. Or –” after thinking a moment he added – “or what the fuck I would do, I didn’t know, but there I was …” He leaned forward in his chair to hug his knees, and let his jaw fall slack, “Sitting there, and then it would rain, you know … They’d just say, You’re here. And then that would be you for the night. Just a steady drizzle all night,” my father said. “It rained all fucking night, and I was cold, Honey, Jesus, my teeth were chattering away in my head, all fucking night long. I hated that sound.”

  A change had come into my father’s voice then. So that it was as though, in those moments, he was no longer speaking to me at all, or even to himself. As though he were speaking, instead, into someone else’s story, at some distance from his own, that had nothing to do with him, or with me, and over which he had very little control.

  It’s strange. To speak to your father, like that: when he doesn’t know that he’s your father. When it happened, as often it did, particularly at the end, it always made me want to shake him, as though he was sleeping. Interrupt him somehow. But instead I always stayed even more still than usual at those times, perhaps even holding my breath. So far was I removed from him, then, and therefore also from myself, that it seemed I hardly existed at all.

  It was a surprise to all of us when Helen arrived at the end of August – having left Sophia with my mother in Orono. She stayed for three days and during that time it was as though we traversed again – as on that interminable drive east from Fargo – an endless and unfamiliar terrain, this time of our own creation. We felt, not the claustrophobia of my father’s truck, then, but its opposite. As though
we inhabited separate and remote corners of his illimitable and still-coveted prairie. As though all things had been levelled; emptied off. As though – if indeed we had thought to send them out – our shouts would have rung nearly soundlessly in our own ears, swallowed up by the unconquerable landscape between us, so long by then left untried.

  On the second day, Helen and I went out to Henry’s garage, behind the government house, and stared together at my father’s boat, where it still rested on the haphazard blocks where Henry and I had raised it. “Well,” Helen said. “It isn’t much, is it?” And by her tone, which did not seem to address the boat, or anything in particular, I could not tell what she meant, and did not ask.

  Then, just before her departure, after leaving Henry at the dock, Helen wandered again up to the house, where my father – with a beer in one hand and a crossword in the other – and I had remained. But even after she had said goodbye, first to one of us, and then the other, she did not go, but lingered instead, and in that time we regarded one another and no one spoke. Then she turned, and started toward the drive.

  It was not until then, until the actual turn, that my father called out. So that, again, Helen paused. And again, for the last time, we three regarded one another. My father at one end of the porch, me at another, and Helen, hovering, already half-turned on the stair.

  “Oh,” my father had called out simply. As though Helen’s final, decisive, step – the moment finally sprung from its hold – had initiated in him an equal and correlative action of his own, and that with that sudden forward burst, into the incontrovertible now that the turn indicated, my father had lurched, equally, in a different direction. Attempting, if not to resist, than at least to pause everything for a little while; unwilling as he was, finally, to give way to the ultimate upsetting of a balance which would have us all very soon dropping away, unmoored, into a future even more imaginary than the past.

  And that note – of apology, of alarm – that had rung out in my father’s voice at that moment, in that final “Oh!” as Helen turned, I recognized to be the same note that had rung out in his voice not long before, when he had questioned me as to my motivation for desiring to know something of him, and of the war. As if he actually did believe that stories were things that you could disassemble, into isolate, removable parts, and hold certain parts closer, and certain parts further away. And that, having always been careful to dismantle himself from the story he had hoped to be ours, he was sorry for the way that he had let himself sometimes slip, despite his best intentions, quietly into our lives. Sorry for the way that he had allowed – without intending it, and in ways he had not anticipated – our world to be the same world that he also inhabited.