Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  Jo winces.

  “Sorry. Anyway, Janis—my roommate—got really sick with something, I didn’t know what. She was burning up, and I didn’t know what to do, so I leaned against the wall beside her mattress and started telling her stories. She had a forty-ouncer under the mattress and I knew it was there and she wouldn’t know because she was pretty delirious, so I started drinking it to pass the time, and while I did the stories kept coming. Every story I could think of from when I was a little girl and even a few I made up. I knew Janis wasn’t hearing me, and I just kept telling them anyway. Stories, all night long, and it was a long night, I’ll tell you. Thumbelina. Cinderella. Jack and the Beanstalk. People like us who got lucky. Stories where the good, poor people won in the end. That’s when I realized I hadn’t felt like a good person for a long time. I knew if I could just get my hands on some magic beans…just one break and I’d be a better person.

  “In the morning, the bottle was empty and Janis was dead. I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t called the hospital because it hadn’t occurred to me she was that sick, and anyway, people like us didn’t go to hospitals. I didn’t know if she had family, didn’t know anything. The rent was way past due and the landlord had been by, oh, felt like every fifteen minutes over the last few days. I had the shakes and needed something to drink but I thought maybe I’d make myself a coffee and just think about what to do. No food in the place but I scraped some instant out of the jar and lit the gas, but I was shaking so much I dropped the jar and it knocked the eviction notice off the counter into the flame and I watched in a kind of dream when it lifted up and caught the pile of flyers.”

  They reach a pullout, a place wide enough for trucks to pass, and Buddy spins the truck around so it’s facing back the way they came. The air is grey with fine dust, the trees, close on either side, covered with it. Pink’s breath comes in gasps. He wants to run, but he’s shaking too hard.

  “Why the fuck did you do that?”

  Buddy’s palm whacks the steering wheel. He turns, lips in a sneer. “You guys really piss me off.”

  Pink’s hand reaches for the door handle.

  “You just sit tight and listen to me. You owe it to me.”

  Pink doesn’t know why he owes this guy anything, but he’s not about to argue, and there’s nowhere to run. The engine settles, clicking sounds. It’s hot in the truck, and the dust as it falls is choking.

  “When I did my tour it was neighbours helping neighbours, fighting the Communists. That’s what we were doing. But mostly I joined up because of my friend, Jerry. Summers at Curlew Lake, our families went every year and there would be Jerry each summer, up from Boise. When he wrote he’d joined the Marines, I joined, too. Surprised? There was more of us than you’d think. Wanted to do some good in the world, fighting the Commies. I’d seen the TV news, I knew what was going on over there. I looked around and there were too many of these hippies—” he looks at Pink, who can’t seem to take his eyes off the square jaw, the shadow of stubble there, watching the lips move “—just messing up the place.”

  He reaches across and flips down the glove compartment, pulling out a pack of Export ‘A’ while Pink shrinks against the seat. Maybe if he just listens, the guy will settle down. There’s nowhere to run anyway, the narrow trees a cage around them. “I was in school, man,” he says, his voice a croak. Maybe he should just keep quiet.

  Buddy lights a cigarette, the cab filling with blue smoke that wafts out the half-open windows. “I had some stupid idea I’d meet up with Jerry and we’d go over together, but nothing like that ever happened. Boot camp was hell but it was exciting, too. All of us, waiting to see action, charged up with the thought of it. Some guys who were drafted wanted out, pretended to be pansies, and maybe some of them were, I don’t know. But the guys I was with: semper fi. I was the only Canadian. They thought that was great.”

  Pink tries not to cough, but the smoke is choking him. He rolls down the window all the way, afraid he might faint, or throw up.

  “Listen to me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You better be.”

  Pink coughs, then stifles it.

  “My dad was a war hero. Distinguished himself on the battlefield during World War II. That’s what I wanted to do. Like him, you know? But when we got there, there was no battlefield. Just a lot of jungle and people who all looked the same: you couldn’t tell the allies from the enemy. We burned down a village once because they’d been helping the NVA, feeding them. Damn gooks. Then they’re crying because those squalid damn huts are gone. And because their cows were shot up, but that was just a bit of sport and serves ’em right since they were feeding the enemy. You gotta scare them or they’ll just keep doing it. It’s a war, for Christ sakes. They knew the rules. Half the time out there I don’t even know where I am. You just have to hope your C.O. knows where you are, and that’s all there is to it.

  “Except one time we found our C.O. just outside camp. He was stabbed about fifty times and his lips were sewn shut. Guess what was inside.”

  Pink doesn’t want to guess. Buddy stares at him from under the baseball cap.

  “Fucking gooks. I’ve heard all that bullshit about U.S. atrocities, but I never saw anything like that. Used to threaten to cut their ears off. Vietnamese have this thing about ears. Won’t go to heaven without all their parts. Heard some guys collected them, but I never saw it. Meanwhile our guys are getting blown into a million pieces.” He raises his voice. “I’ll tell you what I did see, though.”

  “I looked around and I saw the place like I was taking a snapshot, you know? Click: there’s Janis, and the bottle on its side, and the circles of dirt around the light switches illuminated in the flicker of burning paper, and then the kitchen curtains went up and the air turned orange and grey, made me think of a war zone or something. The smoke drove me out. I stumbled out into the alley and just kept going.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “Well, she was dead. There was nothing more I could do for her, and nobody I could call that I knew about. Although I suppose everyone has somebody. A mother. A sister. I think the landlord had her name, if she gave her real name. I don’t even know what it was. It’s a fear though, isn’t it? That you die, and there’s nobody to identify the remains.

  “I guess I was running, thinking about that, about who would care if I kicked off, who would notify my— my sister. It’s the last thing I remember thinking.”

  “I saw a couple of guys put themselves in danger to get a medic for a little kid who was sick. Those gooks were glad we were there, the good ones, that is. What if we hadn’t been there? Where would they be?” He doesn’t want an answer; his voice has begun to shake. “Met these two guys coming off a landing pad with a poncho full of something, asking where to put it. Inside was something that looked like ground meat. He’d been alive that morning, probably joking with his friends. Somebody would have to tell his family.” Pink can tell that Buddy, staring through the windshield, is seeing the contents of the poncho. “I just told them where to take him. What else could I do?

  “It was eleven months but it felt like a lifetime. No sleep, counting days by the big red horse pill you had to take for malaria. Jungle rot every-fucking-where. I lost thirty-five pounds.

  “This one reporter shadowed our unit for about three days. ‘It’s a people’s war,’ this idiot said. ‘You can’t win it because you’ll always be outside it.’ We told him to go find some Commies to sleep with. Jesus. He hadn’t seen the things we’d seen. Jesus. Wanted to kill that fucker, just for being so fucking self-righteous.”

  Buddy’s voice has dropped an octave, and it sounds hollow. “Every sound wakes me up. The dog farts, I’m up and swinging. I can smell blood from a cut on the other side of the room. I smell diesel, I want to puke.”

  Pink’s palms are sweaty, and he shifts in his seat. “Sounds bad, man,” he says. He means it. The pain in the cab is palpable.

  “What do you know about bad
?” Now the jaw is thrust out, two inches from Pink’s own. Pink can see the blood vessels in the whites of his eyes, hot breath. “You don’t know nothing, hippie.” Pink holds his gaze, afraid to look away. He feels as if he might be having a heart attack, and this frightens him more than the face in his. Breathe, he tells himself. They stay like that for one beat, two. Then: “Freedom isn’t free. There is always a price to pay.”

  Buddy sits back, exhaling, as if exhausted.

  “That’s what’s so fucking ironic. Your kind runs up here to get out of fighting for your country, and I leave mine to fight for yours.”

  “What happened?”

  “I passed out a few streets over. Smoke inhalation, the booze, hunger. Fear. I sure had no fight left. Someone took me to the hospital, what I should have done with Janis. I guess I wasn’t so far down that I didn’t have enough humanity to cry, but I wouldn’t talk, I just cried and so they probably thought I was a psych case. Which I suppose I was. There was one social worker, Barbara, kept coming back, took me on as a personal project, I guess. When she first asked my name, you know, I couldn’t even remember. Later, when I did remember, I thought: why do I want that old name? It seemed like an opportunity. To start fresh.

  “You changed your name?”

  “Eve. My mother’s name. First thing, when I started the program, I went to ask her permission.”

  “And?”

  “And I couldn’t find her. She’d moved, I guess. No forwarding address. And you know, that wouldn’t have mattered any time in the last twenty years, but now. Now, there’s this hole. I need to say sorry. I need to get her blessing. Whatever her shortcomings—Christ knows, she wasn’t much of a mother sometimes, but she was my mother—I need to look her in the eye. I need us to see each other, you know? I mean, really see each other. I need to hear her say sorry, sorry to me, but that’s not the point. That’s not what the program says.”

  “Like a twelve-step kind of thing?”

  “That’s the one. I can’t quite fathom the Jesus stuff, but the rest of it makes sense.”

  Jo knows, now, why she’s here. Who she is. The photographs in the box. The woman pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse, lights one, exhales through pursed lips, smiles apologetically.

  “And now you need to see Cass.”

  “Now I need to see Cass. See if she’ll forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for what?”

  “Then, when we finally get back and land in San Diego and there’s a bunch of people look just like you jeering at us. Baby killers! They’re shouting. What do they know? It’s a fucking war. I never killed any babies.”

  Knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  “That was bad enough. At least the U.S. vets get benefits when they come home. Medical care. Education. The military looks after its own. Even if a bunch of hippie freaks are spitting at you, you know you did right, and your country recognizes you for it. Canadians? Nothing.”

  Pink musters his words. “It’s not about the soldiers, man. It’s about the war. It’s not personal.” He can see this is a big misunderstanding. Nobody hates these poor guys for having been misguided by the American war machine, he thinks. You have to hate the machine. That’s what they said on campus, especially towards the end. People spitting, yelling at soldiers? “I never saw anything like that,” he says.

  “Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen,” Buddy continues. “I come home and there’s nothing. Not. A. Thing. No homecoming, no benefits, no acknowledgment that I rotted in that stinking jungle for eleven months for a just cause and saw my buddies shot to hell and now I can’t sleep or keep a job or a fucking relationship—” he pauses, takes a breath, says in measured words: “and it’s your fucking fault.” A fist strikes the steering wheel. “Now get the fuck out.”

  “Forgive you for what?”

  The timing is beyond cliché. The trailer door bangs, and Cass lumbers across the gravel, a glance at the Fairlane in the parking lot.

  “Jo?” she calls as she opens the back door. “Everything okay? It’s past closing.”

  “Someone to see you,” says Jo, and gets up, a wave to say she’s leaving.

  “Please stay,” whispers the woman. Pleading.

  “Cantha?”

  Pink doesn’t need to be told twice. As he steps out, thinking the long walk back is preferable to this, he turns to see Buddy emerge from the driver’s side. Holding the rifle. Motioning him back, towards the shadows in the trees behind the truck.

  “Move.”

  Pink moves, Buddy behind him. He can’t see, but he can hear the footfalls behind him as he steps into the shade. He hears a click, raises his hands feeling, ridiculously, like he’s in a bad movie and it should be funny, but it’s not.

  “Turn around.”

  Pink has his back against a large cedar. He can feel the rasp of bark, smell the familiar smell. Backlit by the thin wash of sun from the road behind him, Pink can’t discern the expression under the baseball cap. Behind him, the truck’s image wavers, a mirage. It’s not really there. I’m not really here. Life is a dream.

  “You want to know what it feels like to have a gun pointed in your face?”

  “No.”

  “It feels like this.”

  Pink can’t speak, can hardly breathe. The muzzle of the rifle is six inches from his face.

  “Here’s the thing,” Buddy is saying, not moving. “I could shoot you right here.”

  A pause.

  “Couldn’t I?” Shouting.

  “Yes,” agrees Pink.

  “So why shouldn’t I?”

  Why not? Pink scrambles for words. “Because it wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

  “I’d get a shitload of satisfaction.”

  There’s nothing to say to that. A moment feels like an hour. Pink closes his eyes, waits for it. He opens them again.

  The gun lowers. “You’re not worth it,” says Buddy. “That’s the thing.” He spits out the words. “Just another dumb-fuck hippie.”

  Pink realizes his knees are shaking, and that all at once, they’re not going to hold him up. He sinks to the ground, bark scraping as he slides down the tree.

  “I didn’t shoot you, but I could have,” spits Buddy. “Go do something with your fucking useless life.”

  Pink hears the receding footsteps, the sound of the door being opened, closed. He hears the engine come to life, the gears shift, tires crunch. He leans against the tree and listens to the birds, first one, a great distance off. Then another, closer, answering.

  “Cantha?”

  There is an embrace, more a melding of bodies, one tall and skinny, one short and round, but the smile on each face is identical, eyes shut tight against the emotion of the moment. Cass is the first to push away.

  “Where’s Donnie?”

  “Oh, Cass.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s all grown up by now. She’s as old as your waitress, here. A woman.”

  There’s the sound of brakes, a diesel smell. Cass glances at Archie’s rig pulling in, but her eyes fix again on her sister.

  “Where is she?”

  Archie swings down from the cab, pulls his t-shirt down, and fits his ballcap on his head before starting across the lot. To Jo, he looks younger; there’s a spring in his step.

  “A lot has happened.”

  The door swings open, and Archie, grinning, says: “Guess what just happened?

  Cass holds up one hand. “Where is she?”

  “Cass, a baby was just born, a girl. I was there!”

  “I lost her a long time ago, Cass.”

  Jo’s hand is on the handle of the back door when she hears Archie’s voice, full of wonder. Then she hears Cass speak, all twisting pain, in a voice that makes the hair on Jo’s arms stand on end.

  “What kind of a woman loses her baby?”

  Jo

  What kind of a woman loses her baby?

  On both sides of the road are trails. I don
’t know where they go, and I don’t care. Crashing through brush. Crashing through thoughts coming too fast to dodge their rocks and thorns.

  When I finally slow down, my breath comes in ragged gasps. Leaning against a pine, I wrap my arms around it, feel the bark on my cheek. The forest stops whirling; things settle into their places: my shoes on the ground; the scent of the pine tar dripping down the trunk, sticky under my fingers; the chatter of a squirrel somewhere in the branches above.

  My mother. Me. What kind of a woman loses her baby?

  Archie, so full of excitement at the birth he witnessed, at the miracle of it. That’s what he called it: a miracle. It was so unlike Archie, the word in his mouth, I almost wanted to laugh, except for the knife in my chest.

  A miracle. And a birth without sorrow, or regret.

  And what am I supposed to do, now? That’s been the whole problem, all along. I hoped I’d just spend a little time at Cass’s, work a little until I could get a sense of direction. Find my feet, and then get on my way. Leave everything else, all that stuff, behind me. I didn’t expect it to follow me.

  The tree I lean against is a cedar, rough, reddish bark. I look up into its twisted branches, swaying at the top. I could just stay here, under this tree. If only I could just stay here.

  When I bring my head down I see, for the first time, the remains of an old woodpile under a decaying tarp. Then the outline of a cabin emerges from the dusk as I stare. There’s a roof that’s really more moss than roof. Howie’s cabin. The brown paper bag is still in my back pocket. The lines in soft pencil tell me the way to go.

  Pink

  The light is fading by the time I haul myself up from the base of the tree. Buddy tossed my pack out of his truck bed before he took off, and I picked it up from the dirt of the road, everything intact.