Cementville

by Paulette Livers

  He pulls a chair to his mother’s side.

  “I am glad you’re here,” she says. Her face is immeasurably older, this woman who is not yet fifty. She had been almost pretty, with a buxom figure, the kind French painters loved to paint a century ago. He had never thought about whether his mother was smart, whether she expected things of herself. She might have hoped to get out of here, build a life somewhere else. Once he left home, he had not thought much about any of them. “It means a lot to all the family,” his mother was telling him. “You coming back. How long will you stay?”

  “I don’t know, Mama. Long as you need me, I guess.”

  “Careful what you’re saying,” she says, almost with a laugh.

  And then Levon is standing above them, looking at them with those flat, blank eyes. “Yeah, careful what you’re saying, little brother.”

  “Levon, honey, fetch me a glass of water, will you? I expect it’s time for me to take my pills.” Arlene’s voice turns into a whine around Levon, as if she must become helpless to temper his cruelty in advance, to keep him from running her over. It was a habit that developed when he was still an adolescent. Levon purses his thick lips at their mother now and Byard, unsettled, wants to hit something.

  “How many of those have you had, Mama?” he says when Levon has gone for the water.

  “However many it takes.” Arlene pats his hand.

  SEVEN

  In the Pontiac’s plush interior and hush of sealed windows Harlan’s father drives them, like sophomores on a first date, to the barn dance where “Old Joe Clark” and “Soldier’s Joy” threaten to burst the boards of Judge Hume’s black barn. The Judge is magnanimous in his hosting, standing in his white seersucker at the flung-wide barn door, greeting his fawning guests. He has personally paid for an eight-piece band this year, bragging that some of the musicians were Grand Ole Opry regulars. It is an annual event, the highlight of summer, the place where all the townspeople are welcome and for one night can pretend there are no divisions among them. Country farmer and town lawyer, cement worker and shopkeeper, all are there for the square dancing and music, for the lime sherbet punch and mixed nuts and fancy pastel mints. The nuns at Holy Ghost School have always eyed the dance with suspicion, its concurrence with the summer solstice feeling a mite chummy with pagan brouhaha for their comfort.

  The Judge stops the music and drags Harlan to the stage. The microphone squawks and squeals as Judge Freeman Hume pontificates to a crowd itching for the quadrille.

  “Our hometown hero has been back with us for near a month now—”

  He bumbles on, but no one is listening. He is talking about things they want to forget, the young men they are all too aware are not among them, the ones who are not here milling about and flirting with pretty young women, but should be. The people here tonight, the living, breathing people, are grateful to the Judge for throwing this party, but right now they just want him to shut the hell up. The humming and prickling energy of the room finally force Freeman Hume to cut short his oration and the band strikes up with “Turkey in the Straw.”

  All the girls have come prepared to dance by the light of the moon, as Lila promised, smiling faces with white teeth, bright for their anointed beaus. Will they all get to dance, with so many of their young men gone? They know all the square steps and two steps the caller calls. Harlan cannot seem to remember. He sits trying to tap his one cooperative foot and apologizes to Analisa that although he cannot dance, she should; after all, they are at a dance.

  But she sticks by him in her new eyelet peasant blouse and seems to want to dance right out of her chair next to him, squirming in her white skin that smells like paper narcissus. The copper of her POW bracelets clinks up and down her white arms. A few other girls wear one of the memorial bands bearing the name of a missing or captured soldier, but Analisa is the only girl wearing five. She shakes them like a tribal talisman when she moves, and she bares her teeth at all the swirling couples. She has snared the catch, the decorated and paraded Lieutenant Harlan O’Brien. For her, he is not a broken man.

  When she gazes sideways at his tapping toe, lets her eye travel up the long leg to that soldier’s profile, she sees not a death mask but rather the square jaw set to stand the tests of time and matrimony and the childbearing bed.

  For they would have many children—she pictures it—and he would be a man of God. Not that he would wear his god on his sleeve, all preachy and holier than thou. He is nothing like the cheap and predictable pups slinging their stuck-up girls around to the tune of “Star of the County Down.” Finally it is the “Spanish Waltz” that lets the pretty girl convince her man to usher her around the room in simple circles, Analisa’s skirt a swirling cloud that makes his peg leg seem to float.

  * * *

  LILA O’BRIEN GLOWS BEHIND THE punchbowl, seeing her mutilated boy dance. Truthfully, she has worried; she has heard his anguished cries in the night, how many times over these four weeks since he came home to them. She had wiped his brow when he didn’t know who she was. Tomorrow she will drag out the family albums in the quiet of the afternoon and remind herself: This is indeed her boy. This is no stranger come home from war. The men will catch her dabbing an eye when they come in for early supper and to get out of the unceasing rain.

  Mr. O’Brien will mumble, Are you all right, Mother? so softly she can’t be certain he has said anything at all.

  * * *

  THIS IS THE SIGHT BEHIND Harlan’s curtained eyelids each night, the scene of a long-running play: He carries on his back the legless girl, her purple stumps smooth as eggplants. She is ageless. The years of thumping across a dirt floor fall from her when she shrieks with laughter. They are getting out. Carrying the child is a favor to the girl’s mother, who’d been so kind to his unit in the Duc Duc Resettlement Village. Washing laundry. Offering a hot meal.

  They laugh through water swirling hip deep where they are joined like one human sprouting from his pair of strong legs, amphibious. Little boats crowd around them through the flood and the girl waves to her brother, who hangs from the bow of a sampan like a monkey clinging to its mother. In the mist above hangs a canopy of trees, verdant mosquito netting. Lieutenant O’Brien hears a swarm of choppers whump across the sky in the distance.

  Harlan feels through the water with his bare feet—the legless girl carries his boots high over her head. Her arms are strong. He praises her for keeping them dry. He steps gingerly through the water, sensitive to anything that should not be there.

  But he cannot contain, for all his care, the concussive blare that sends his stumped-off girl flying from him. In that long silence when everything is aloft, he sees flash by—not his life at home, the sad or smiling faces of his mother and father, his room under the eaves of their red tin roof—but the tumbling procession of the dead in the here and now, their arms and legs waving in a kind of whole-body sign language as if they would communicate with him, beckon him to join them, until Lieutenant O’Brien does land in a hillside wash already corpse-crammed. Their bloated skins have taken on a uniform gray, and it is no longer possible to separate yellow from white. A tangle of limbs, arms seeking a mate to pray with. He is webbed in.

  A tree bends over him, its roots clinging impossibly to a scrawny ledge. From the nearest limb hangs another limb, the fingers of which graze his cheek as if trying to soothe him. He can almost hear a voice saying, Shhh, shhh.

  It is a match being struck. His nostrils fill with the smell of kerosene. He calls out a single word that might save him: No, he says out loud in their language. And he thinks he hears them respond with the word for savage or it could be the word for no—are they mocking his poor accent?—and he is being pulled from the ditch screaming for the foot that refuses to come with him.

  He knows he is the one screaming, that the pitch and wail belong to him, and it is comforting to own the howling, given the cold desertion of the left foot. The lyrics accompanying his screams go like so: This is my body / this is the arm / this
is the neck / the trunk the thigh the calf / the no-foot.

  He feels better, having figured out a name for it and where its absence fits. They drag him, toss him like a rag doll onto a truck bed. He thrashes his head this way and that, searching for his precious charge. There, at the edge of a ruined mango orchard, two lovely eggplants peek from the mud. The laces of his boots wrap themselves around and around her mad-apple knees in love knots.

  * * *

  AT THE SOUND (always a light sleeper—she has “nerves”) Lila O’Brien’s eyes burst open as if spring-loaded. Propped on a bird-elbow, she lifts a corner of the curtain by her side of the bed and spies the erect tin soldier crunching lopsided down the gravel road. In the dark, it is her son.

  * * *

  THE LIEUTENANT HAS TAKEN TO walking out at night with the moon in his face. Phantoms rise from the Raggedy Robin roadside and curl like cats round his shuffling limbs. He goes to the place where the dead are buried, stones lined up with truncated elegies etched across their faces (Beloved Son, or Brother Gone Too Soon, or On the Wings of a Dove). Peace might wander here, if it weren’t for the silent crowd straining from behind the stones, open-mawed like overgrown baby birds, insatiable.

  There are seven fresh mounds of dirt, all littered with shriveled mummies of carnations, gladioli, baby’s breath. Atop each temporary marker, tiny American flags—already fading and torn—tremble in the night breeze.

  What do they want from us? he asks the white stones. Their response is but inconsolable bleating. This place the people kept calling home is an ignoble place, scraggly and scrabbly, nothing like he remembered or hoped for. It makes a person want to go off and look for somewhere to practice dying. Having seen the walls of huts fall around screaming babies, having kicked rice bowls into the dirt so that any foolish enough to survive will have nothing, he is past being horrified. It was all about order, the war. In the middle of the unfathomable disorder, there was always the order. The order: They must all be shot, every one.

  This is what the stones tell him: Never again will you rest your head in the warm nest of home, never will you count on the managed life that once lay spread in front of you like a promised picnic. You, fed once on sweet fruit, remembering the way its juices ran down your chin, you will find the seeds and juices burn like ash till the skin melts from your face, napalm makeup. You, whose silent father taught you the art of stalking and hunting, will find you cannot lift a gun. You will writhe in sleep, dreaming of your guts spattering the Milky Way.

  He craves to lie down at night without these apparitions worming their way under his fingernails. Half a blood-red eyeball on the eastern ridge steals a look at Harlan O’Brien. From behind a dewy stand of cedars advancing up the hillside like the mantled Birnam Wood, dawn comes. In the early light, he makes for the river.

  He sees her there on the bank, her ocher reflection. Her hand floats in the water like a separate living thing seen to by a small god she might stow in a pocket. From his distance, Harlan imagines multiple courses of a long meal with her. He sees her placing a blue plum in his mouth, chased with ambrosia, a stream of fruits whose names he does not know. The blade of his unused voice parts the air between them.

  Her name means river, he will learn.

  * * *

  SHE TURNS, STARTLED, LETS DOWN her shoulders. She recognizes him from the barn dance. Their new latest hero, Giang thinks, the one they had all been waiting for. The one who came back alive. She’d seen him across the room at the dance earlier tonight, had read his brokenness and considered: This one could be dangerous.

  In the brothel she had seen many like him. Hybrid animals of wild confusion, looking at once to crawl into her sex and to knife her as the enemy. There were stories of girls found in pieces after their callers left.

  It had been three years, these good years with Jimmy, since she had encountered such a face.

  The moon peeks at her over his shoulder, fashioning for him a kind of nimbus, a hazy crown. Instinctively Giang begins speaking into the vacant face hanging above her, soft words from her own tongue, words he might have learned over there. (That language of poems always works on Jimmy when shadows rip into their bed in the night.) She puts on the blank countenance of a mind reader in an effort to glimpse what this damaged man sees looking down at her: a yellow woman squatting by a river. She rises, and her eyes are level with his chest. He is taller than Jimmy by a head.

  Her smile loosens something inside him. What his face gives back is a grimace, a smile unpracticed.

  They walk the length of the river together for an hour. His stiff prosthesis over rocky ground makes the going slow. When he speaks, Giang knows from the stitched-together phrasing that she is the first person he has talked to about these things. He draws images in the air before her, the same ones she has conjured against loneliness when she despairs of ever seeing home again. In his harsh tongue sprinkled with the sounds of her own language, Harlan O’Brien talks of the emerald forest, of farmers conspiring with the wet soil and a stubborn cow to make the rice grow fat, of children laughing and begging candy.

  For her he is holding back the darker images. The stumps of palms stripped of foliage; the jungle paths swollen with long files of the displaced; the malnourished babies, black hair fermenting to the color of papaya.

  She knows he was in a prison camp. This is the central image around which he hobbles. She is not a stranger to the ways this soldier’s nights and days unfurled in that camp. She hopes sweet opium smoke was there to help him as it did her. She walks the riverbank and feels beside her the swinging arm of another bundle of damaged goods, the cargo traded in any war.

  * * *

  GIANG LOVES HER HUSBAND, AND has told herself this every time she has gone to the river and waited for Lieutenant O’Brien to come through the gray veil of early morning. She has met him for many nights now. She steals out on nights when Jimmy Smith has taken twice the prescribed Phenobarbital, which he seems to do with increasing regularity.

  When she is not with Harlan, the cells of her keen dangerously toward him. It is three weeks since she first met the lieutenant, and since then she has moved through her days as if floating weightlessly through an alien atmosphere, washing Jimmy’s clothes, washing the floor, washing the windows of the small sturdy house Jimmy built for her. Through these windows she can see clear to the river.

  She had been with so many men. She and Suong counted them at first, a silly contest between girls, something to make it not real. The sisters compared the men’s private parts and giggled, foolish children playing dangerous games.

  Then the first girl was murdered; things changed. Soon Suong and Giang rarely spoke when they brushed past each other in the brothel’s hallway, terror a knife between them. During the black period, between Suong’s leaving and the coming of Jimmy Smith, opium helped Giang to lay still, to stop measuring days or nights. Opium made the men into not men, more like bed clothing grown too heavy to fling aside.

  Sometimes she wishes she had not said yes, if yes was what she said, to Harlan O’Brien. Another in a string of a thousand yeses the opium once allowed her to give away. Sometimes she imagines her husband’s truck swerving in the dark road in the middle of the night, and sometimes she wishes she could be an opium eater again.

  But then Jimmy climbs into her bed and she melts into his scarred backside where she has rubbed jasmine oil. She murmurs bawdy phrases of the poetry that women such as her have always whispered to their men; a lyric vanishes into the angel wings of his shoulder blades, and she disappears in there with it.

  This time, waiting here for Harlan O’Brien to come, she knows she cannot leave her husband.

  * * *

  I DON’T BELIEVE YOU, HARLAN says when Giang tells him tonight that she cannot meet him anymore, that she can no longer walk with him by the river.

  They lay by the water on a soft bed of storm-tossed leaves, corpses starved for each other’s clinging, and what had been a closely guarded seed in their blackest corner
s swells and grows to a writhing choking vine. They couple fiercely at the edge of the river, drifting out upon its surface, their bodies rising and falling together, white and yellow intertwined. At the easternmost bank, the limbs of a downed elm grasp the lovers in a terrible embrace.

  In the dream, he studies his hands as if they do not belong to him. Black and rotted, they belong with the left foot somewhere on the other side of the so-called peaceful ocean. He had heard stories of the Poles carrying boxes to the graves of loved ones lost in the Second World War. Through English sheep pastures they bore boxes of Polish soil to sprinkle on the hundreds of unnamed graves, marked only by white crosses.

  Is there a person somewhere in that far land to sprinkle his blackened foot? They will know it by its scar, sickle moon-shaped and curving along the arch, from where he ran across a broken bottle when he was ten. Will some kind stranger sprinkle his foot with the soil of his homeland?

  For his anguish and his sudden fever his mother wrings a cold towel, soothes his forehead. Such is the nightmare that awakens Harlan O’Brien from his first deep sleep in three years.

  * * *

  AND SUCH BEGINS THE NIGHTMARE from which Giang will not awaken. She watches him walk away from her, and she turns to the river’s gloomy murmur and closes her eyes. She sees Suong floating among the debris of the ragged people below the brothel window. Her sister’s gown billows around her, a dirty sail filled with water. This waking dream allows Giang the knowledge that Suong is dead, flung out that night like so much refuse. A red ribbon, a garrote of blood, circles around her sister’s neck and blends with the river’s mud.

  Giang opens her eyes and her lips part to say the word. “Vang,” she tells the water. Then, “Yes,” because this is an American river.

  She does not feel the blow from behind, does not even have the chance to say to her assailant, Cam o’n ban. Thank you.