Brief Encounters with the Enemy (14 page)

Poof
.

The boy fell right where he stood, he fell straight down as if he were melting into the ground in a puddle of blood. Once he’d fallen, he didn’t stir. Only the man was moving now, struggling to push himself up, but it was obvious that he had no strength. Eventually he stopped altogether and just lay on the ground as if he were napping. The pool of blood spread out and ran into the high grass.

I stood there for a while. It was beginning to get dark. It was 7:53. Back home, it was the other 7:53. A few minutes later, the prairie was immersed in a dark gray light and I could
hardly see anything. The only sound was the buzzing of the flies.

I turned and went back down the hill, the last time I’d be going down the hill, and then I went across the bridge and along the path. My gun and backpack banged against the solid wall of trees. It was almost completely dark, and in the dark I could hear my father saying, over and over, “What have you been doing, Luke? What have you been doing for the last two or three hours?”

Nothing. I’ve done nothing.

The next day we flew back home in style, just like we’d been promised.

It was cool weather when I returned. Cool, breezy, overcast, but no rain. I had departed in cool weather too. So in some ways it was as if nothing had changed.

What had changed was that I was a hero, coming home to great fanfare—me and one thousand other guys. We were lucky to have been included in the first wave back. This was when the news was fresh, when everyone was excited. Just like that, the war had ended. No one had seen it coming and everyone was thankful. The diplomacy had been a success, the enemy had capitulated, and all the terms of the settlement were in our favor. Everyone said it had been worth it. Everyone said they’d do it all over again.

Underneath a gray and cloudy sky, the boulevard was lined with ten thousand people who had come out to greet us, ten thousand people screaming their heads off like we were a rock
band being pulled by in a flatbed truck. “We love you,” they shouted generally. “We love you too,” we shouted back. We smelled like sweat and mildew and fatigue. Some of us smelled like vomit. It had been a long trip home: a boat, a train, a plane. On the final flight we’d had to hold our duffel bags on our laps with the air vents blowing warm air on the tops of our heads, but no one complained, no one said a word, we were all happy to have made it out alive.

My mother had said she’d come out to cheer for me. She’d bought a big sign custom-made at Walmart.
WELCOME HOME JAKE
, it read. She showed it to me later, unfurling it on top of her bed because her place was small and there was nowhere else to put it. She was surprised I hadn’t been able to pick it out of the crowd. I was touched, but she was disappointed. “I was so sure you’d see it!” I tried to let her down easy. “It was a sea of people, Ma,” I said. A sea of flags and signs and waving hands. The fact was, I hadn’t even thought to look for her. I’d forgotten about her, actually. Instead, I’d been searching the crowd for Molly. It had been eighteen months since I’d seen her. Eighteen months of emails filled with declarations of love, declarations of what might have been and what might be. We knew our relationship would probably never amount to anything, but still we dreamed. Fifteen thousand miles away from each other, we waxed poetic and romantic, and sometimes we sent naked pictures. The last email I’d received had been three days earlier, four-thirty in the morning Molly’s time, letting me know that she was coming to the homecoming, honey, that she wouldn’t miss it for the world, that she was bringing Lola. Lola wouldn’t miss it for the world. And by the way, she’d attached a drawing she’d made that night, that
very night, three people in watercolor, presumably the three of us, all pinks and purples and shadows. The girls wore skirts and I wore camouflage. What did I think? she wanted to know. It wasn’t what I had dressed like, but it was well done. “It’s beautiful,” I wrote back.

“Do you really mean that?” she responded. She had confidence issues.

As the flatbed truck moved slowly down the boulevard, I jostled with the other guys for that prime position front and center. Every so often I would think I’d hear her in the crowd, yelling, “Jake, Jake,” and I’d wave my arms in the direction of her voice, and I’d jump up and down as if I’d won a big prize. But there was no one yelling “Jake, Jake,” they were yelling “Hey, hey” to all of us. Still, I stood front and center. “Come on, Jake,” the guys said. “Give someone else a chance.” But I was selfish and wouldn’t budge. I’d earned the right. I’d trained harder, marched longer, fought better. The guys would have said so themselves. Plus I’d saved a few of their lives along the way. But the peace was upon us now. “It’s every man for himself,” I told them. It was a wonder how quickly the sense of camaraderie could evaporate.

Far out over the heads of the ten thousand fans, I could see the factories sending up their plumes of smoke into the overcast sky. You couldn’t distinguish the gray smoke from the gray sky. For as long as I’d been gone, the factories hadn’t stopped once. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the smokestacks churned. “I’m going to get a job down there,” one of the guys said. Brad. He wasn’t speaking to me, he was speaking at large. “Good luck,” I told him. He needed luck. It was a fact that half the guys were going down to the factories
first thing in the morning to put in an application. Everyone had a plan, and that was their plan. As for me, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t need one. I was coming home to a good job, secure and with full benefits, teaching sixth-grade history at the best school in the city. Montgomery Prep. On Monday morning I would show up bright and early in my tie and briefcase, as if nothing had changed, as if I’d never left, and I would say, “Good morning, boys and girls …” And they’d want to know all about where I’d been and what I’d done and what I’d seen. But there would be schoolwork to undertake. And schoolwork came first. They’d be studying the Renaissance by now. Or if the substitute teacher had been inept and inefficient, which I suspected she had been, they would have made it only as far as the Middle Ages. Or worse, the Holy Roman Empire. It didn’t matter to me. I was happy to get back to any era.

Eighteen months earlier, I’d had to abandon another class of sixth-graders unexpectedly, unhappily, midterm—Han Dynasty—with only three days’ notice. They’d gathered around and hugged me goodbye. They’d said, “We’re going to miss you, Mr. Mattingly!” I tried to be reassuring, but all I could think about was what terror lay in store for me. Everyone thought I was a hero, teachers included, but the reality was I had no choice in the matter, it was the deal I had struck in exchange for my college degree when I’d had the forethought, two weeks out of high school, to go down to the Career Center and sign up. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, working as a telephone operator for thirty years. The recruiter had told me they’d need me one weekend a month unless there was a war. “But there ain’t going to be no war,” he’d said. He had laughed. We both had laughed. I’d signed on the dotted line
and then gone straight down to Peabody Community College to register for fall classes—all paid in full by that one weekend a month. It had seemed comical back then, the idea of a war. It had seemed antiquated. Three years later it wasn’t antiquated anymore, and three years after that my number had come up. Now this trip down the boulevard, with the flags waving, with the crowd screaming, represented my final remittance.

And suddenly right then and there, standing in the front row behind the police barricade, not more than a dozen feet from me, waving one of those small ninety-nine-cent American flags that you could buy at any supermarket, was Molly. I saw her before she saw me. Her red hair was loose and long, longer than it had been before I’d left, and it was cascading down her shoulders like a lion’s mane. She was wearing a sweater because it was breezy and cool, but there was an extra button unbuttoned that allowed me to see the tops of her breasts. She had small breasts and a big butt, which I liked. “It’s all going to waste,” she’d written me, two months into my deployment. The truth was, we’d hardly ever had sex. Maybe ten times total. Twice in my car and the rest on my futon. She’d regretted all of them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she’d sobbed the last time. She’d put her face in her hands and her hair fell forward. I wasn’t sure if she was sorry about the sex or sorry about being sorry. I’d tried to put my arm around her shoulder to comfort her, but she shrugged me off. She told me she preferred me as her muse, not her lover. I had no idea what that meant. “From now on,” she said as if making a declaration, but didn’t bother to finish the thought. She tried it for a while—muse not lover—but physical affection cannot be forestalled
forever, and eventually she started holding my hand again, and then kissing me, and three weeks before I deployed, she put her hand down my pants. Thirty minutes later she was sobbing. Now here she was, as promised, standing in the crowd, looking intense, concerned, almost despairing. She must have been waiting at least two hours for my return, studying the faces of the floating one thousand. She no doubt had reached the point when she was certain I had passed her by. “Here I am, Molly!” I wanted to shout, but I didn’t say a word.

Just to her right was Lola, grinning, waving to anyone and everyone, unmoved by her mother’s dilemma. It was all fun and games to her, this parade. Her umbrella was open, even though it wasn’t raining, and she was resting it on her shoulder, twirling it like a little woman. I was stunned at how much taller she’d gotten since I’d seen her last. If it hadn’t been for her own red hair, I wouldn’t have recognized her. She’d been a girl when I left, six years old, interested in girly things, dolls and teddy bears; now she was close to nine and tending toward women’s things. “Here I am, Lola!” I thought about shouting. But no, I didn’t say a word, because standing beside her, which is to say between her and her mother, was her father, tall and thin and gullible. His face was friendly and welcoming and wealthy. He was clean-shaven. He was clueless. He wore a baseball cap that said
U.S.A
. He had one hand around Molly’s waist, squeezing her proprietarily, and with the other hand he waved generously at the passing soldiers. “Thank you! Thank you!” he called. There had been only a handful of times when I’d seen him in the flesh, and every time had left me both despairing and emboldened. His presence brought him out of
the realm of conjecture and into the solid world, where he eventually would be vanquished.

When it came my turn to receive his thanks, I did so, lifting my hand and waving in return. “Thank you! Thank you!” he shouted naïvely. It was then that Molly saw me. Her face registered shock. Her shock turned to relief. The relief turned to love. I smiled at her as I would at any bystander. Then the truck moved past for the last leg home.

The manual said that I’d most likely experience some aftereffects from the war once I got home. But the first thing I had to do was reclaim my efficiency from Fred the subletter. He was clearly disappointed to see me return. There were no accolades forthcoming.

“I wasn’t expecting you” was what he said. He was probably hoping I’d been killed.

He’d taken decent care of the place while I’d been gone, as well he should have. I’d given him a sweet deal. Somehow he’d managed to leave a palm print on the ceiling in the kitchenette, but other than that I could find no wrong. The apartment was smaller than I remembered, and more cramped. I had thought it would feel bigger after eighteen months away. After all, I’d been living on a military base with five hundred other soldiers, sixty-two to a room, twenty-two to a shower. In the middle of the night I’d be awakened by the sound of everyone snoring.

“How was it, Jake?” Fred wanted to know, meaning the war.

I was sure he didn’t care, and I didn’t care to tell him. I offered a cliché: “Fred,” I said, “I’d do it all over again.”

He liked that. “Thank you for your service,” he said.

He gave me the last month’s rent in cash. I wanted to count it in front of him, because I didn’t trust him, but I waited until he left. The sun was starting to set, and it cast shadows in thin gray lines across the apartment. I call it an apartment, but it’s a room, a square room, fifteen by fifteen with a kitchenette off to the side. I sat down at the table that doubles as a desk, and I counted the money. It was all there, in tens and twenties. It made me feel rich. The feeling of wealth helped to mitigate the feeling of claustrophobia. I spread the bills out on the table. It was the same table where I graded my papers and ate my meals and read my newspaper. If I folded the leaf up, it could be a table that sat six for dinner. I couldn’t even fit six people in the apartment. On the wall was a drawing that Molly had made for me, framed and signed, of a man sitting at a table looking at a drawing of a man sitting at a table. “I like to work in meta,” she’d said. It had been done in charcoal and like everything else she did, it was very good. Sitting there staring, I realized that I’d developed a half-shaped, half-conscious idea that when I returned from the war, I’d be returning to a house. Maybe Molly’s house. When you’re fifteen thousand miles away, it’s easy for things to seem possible and attainable. I could have been at her house in twenty minutes. I’d once driven by on a whim, dinnertime, just once, pretending to myself that I had some errand to run in her neighborhood. Her proximity was terrifying and tantalizing. I could have walked right up and rang the doorbell. Instead, I’d parked across the street and sat in the car. I didn’t even turn the radio on. Her house was
grand. It should have been grand, her husband was rich. It had a wraparound porch, it had a balcony off the master bedroom, it had a swing set in the yard. For thirty minutes I sat in the car waiting for something to happen, something like Lola coming out and swinging. Every so often I would catch a glimpse of a figure passing in front of the bay window, but the shade was drawn halfway and I was never certain who it was. Later Molly told me, “Don’t ever do that again.”

But I don’t really mind my apartment, it’s the nicest apartment I’ve ever had, and I’ve had many. We went from apartment to apartment, my mother and I, a succession of apartments, small, big, lousy—roaches, no roaches—on average a new apartment every two years, and one year it was two in one year. That was when times were hard. That was when I was a child. Now I’m an adult with a dishwasher and central air.