Exley (30 page)

“I hear you're pissed off,” Mr. S. said. I still didn't understand what he was talking about. He put his mouth to the megaphone and said into it,
“ABOUT WHAT AMERICA HAS DONE TO ME AND YOUR DAD.”

“Oh,” I said, because I remembered yelling something like that to Mr. S. at the VA hospital. Suddenly, I felt like an even bigger doofus than before. I wanted to give Mr. S. back his sign, but I didn't know how to do that without making him mad or hurting his feelings or something else I hadn't even thought of yet. Mr. S. had lowered the megaphone, and I could see his face. He smacked his lips a few times and then stared at me. For the first time, Mr. S. seemed to me like someone who could hurt someone
else. I wondered if he was the one who had given J. her scar. For the first time, I was scared of him. But I just couldn't stop myself from lowering and raising the sign. It was like the sign was doing it on its own.

“Here they come,” Mr. S. said. I turned away from him and saw two people walking toward us. They were both dressed head-to-toe in camo—even their ski hats were camo, even their boots. I thought they were soldiers at first, but when they got closer I saw that they weren't. One was a woman. Her cheeks were round and fiery red; her gray hair peeked out from under her ski hat. She was holding a cardboard sign with the words
NO MORE WAR
written on it in red marker, with a green peace symbol underneath. The other protester was a man. He had a long gray beard, and his mustache looked wet, like his nose had been running into it. As he walked, he was yelling,
“NO MORE WAR
,” into his bullhorn. When they got close enough, I could see that she was also chanting,
“NO MORE WAR
,” but not into a bullhorn, so I couldn't hear her. I bet she couldn't even hear herself.

“We heard your bullhorn and came right over,” the guy with the bullhorn said, although not through the bullhorn, which he'd holstered. The holster was a big brown piece of leather with a wide bottom. It looked like something Robin Hood would drink out of. It was held in place by an orange power cord around the guy's waist. Instead of a normal belt buckle, the cord was held in place by its prongs and holes. There were other brown leather holsters of different sizes attached to the cord, spaced a few inches apart. One was holding a thermos. One was holding a cell phone. One was holding something in tinfoil. Maybe it was a sandwich.

“Would you look at those holsters,” Mr. S. said.

“Well, I made them myself,” the guy said, obviously so proud. He seemed like he was about to tell us all about how he'd made them and why, when the woman sighed. I'd heard Mother sigh like that, when my dad was about to say something she'd probably heard before, something that came right out of
A Fan's Notes
. I wondered if she was the guy's wife. I wondered how many times she'd heard about his holsters. Anyway, she interrupted him and said to Mr. S., “Did that happen to you . . .”

“Iraq,” he said. “It happened to me in Iraq.” Mr. S.'s voice was calm when he said this. No one had said anything to me yet. As far as I could
tell, the two of them hadn't even noticed me standing there, raising and lowering and raising my sign. That no one noticed me doing it made me feel even more stupid than when I couldn't stop myself from doing it. I put the point of the stick on the ground between my legs and rested the sign against my stomach.

“We're proud of you,” the woman said. “We feel it's important you know that.”

“OK,” Mr. S. said.

“This”—and here she tapped her sign with the hand that wasn't holding it—“this doesn't mean we're not proud of you.”

“Thank you,” Mr. S. said. His voice still sounded calm. When he said, “Thank you,” it sounded like he really meant it.

“We know you didn't want to be there any more than we want you to,” she said.

“But I volunteered,” Mr. S. said.

“You didn't think you were volunteering for . . .” The woman didn't finish her sentence. She didn't need to. She looked sadly at Mr. S., at his wheelchair, at his stumps, which weren't even covered by a blanket. He was wearing sweatpants; the legs had been cut off and tied up with rubber bands.

“What
did
I think I was volunteering for, then?” Mr. S. asked.

Then the woman didn't look sad anymore. She looked disappointed, like Mr. S. wasn't the person she thought he was. She looked at Mr. S. the way Mother looked at me when I lied to her about going with my dad to the zoo.

“Why are you even here?” she asked.

“Because of junior here,” Mr. S. said. He pointed his megaphone in my direction. “He thinks his dad has been . . . what was it again?”

“I don't remember,” I mumbled. I picked up my sign so that most of my face was behind it.

“Incapacitated
. He thinks his dad has been incapacitated,” Mr. S. said. “By America.”

The woman smiled at me, and for a second I thought she was going to offer me some nice hot cocoa out of the guy's thermos. “I know it's so
hard,” she said, and then turned back to Mr. S. and smiled at him, too. “For both of you.”

I realized that she thought I was Mr. S.'s son. “My name is really Miller, not junior,” I said.

“That's a nice name,” she said. “Very unusual.”

“No,” Mr. S. said. “He means he's not my son. I'm not his dad. Even though he thinks I've been incapacitated, too.”

“I see,” she said, but you could tell she didn't. She looked at me, then him, then me again, like she was trying to figure out which one of us she could trust.

“I was actually
in
the war,” Mr. S. said.

“What division were you in?” the guy asked. “Were you in Armored?”

“Cavalry.”

“Wow,” the guy said. “Cavalry.” He said this the way I hoped my dad would say,
Wow, Exley
, when he woke up and realized that I'd found Exley. The guy's hand drifted to the holster that was holding the sandwich, or whatever was in the tinfoil, like a soldier's hand might have drifted to his gun. I wondered if the guy might have wanted to go to war himself if he weren't so busy protesting it.

“Steven,” the woman said, like she was warning him.

“Everyone says that we don't know what it's like over there,” Steven said to her. “But I want to know.” Then, to Mr. S.: “Tell us something we might not have heard from someone else.”

Mr. S. thought about this for a while. He absentmindedly tapped the megaphone against the left wheel of his chair. Suddenly, I was as interested as Steven. I wanted to know what Mr. S. had done over there, because I wanted to know what my dad had done. “Well,” he finally said, “one of the things you might not have heard is that when you're interrogating someone, you say that if they don't tell you what you want to know, you'll cut off their heads and then fuck their skulls.”

The woman gasped and then moved toward me with her hands raised. It took me a second to realize what she was going to do: she was going to put her hands over my ears so I wouldn't hear the bad words. It made me think that her kids were lucky to have her as a mother. If she had kids. But
anyway, I already had a mother, and she swore around me. So did my dad. So did everyone. It must have been obvious that I was the kind of kid who wouldn't repeat the bad words no matter how bad they were, no matter how many times I'd heard them, just like I was the kind of kid who you could leave alone at home and not worry that something bad would happen to him. Besides, it was too late for someone to start treating me like a kid. Besides, I wanted to hear what Mr. S. said next. I took a step back from the woman, and then another.

“You always say that?” Steven asked. He sounded skeptical. I don't know of what, exactly. But I was skeptical, too. I tried to imagine my dad saying that, and I just couldn't.

“Pretty much,” Mr. S. said.

“In
English
?”

I could tell that Mr. S. hadn't thought of this before. His eyes sort of went back into his head, like they were searching for whatever was in there that might help him answer Steven's question. “No,” Mr. S. finally said, “not in
English
.”

“Did anyone ever tell you want you wanted to know?”

“No,” Mr. S. said.

“I wouldn't think so,” Steven said.

“You wouldn't think so,” Mr. S. repeated. He was angry now. He put the megaphone to his lips, then changed his mind about that. He handed it to me, and I took it. “What would you think happens when they don't tell us what we need to know? Not even after we threaten to cut off their heads and fuck their skulls? What would you think happens then?”

No one said anything for a while. I don't know what anyone else was thinking. But I was thinking about my dad. I could imagine him now. It was still hard to imagine him saying those words. But it was easy to imagine him standing there after the words hadn't done any good. It was easy to imagine him standing there, with his gun, not knowing what to do next. Out of nowhere the sound of a gun being fired went off in my head, and then I heard a body hitting the ground with a
thump
. For a second I saw myself standing over Petey, V.'s father's dog. Then they disappeared and I saw my dad standing over a guy with a blindfold over his eyes. My dad was holding a gun. The guy on the ground had dark curly
hair and wasn't wearing any shoes. There were a bunch of soldiers with my dad. They all had guns. The soldiers were laughing at something. Probably they were laughing at my dad. I wanted my dad to tell them to stop laughing at him. I wanted my dad to shoot them if they didn't. And then my dad was lying on the ground. I could see the holes in his head and blood coming out the holes. The guy with the curly hair and no shoes was standing over my dad, holding my dad's gun. He wasn't wearing the blindfold anymore. He was laughing at my dad, too. And I wanted my dad to shoot the guy. I wanted my dad to kill him so much. And then I remembered that my dad had pieces of concrete in his head, and not bullets. I tried to reimagine the guy with the curly hair rigging a bomb next to something made of concrete, but before I could do that, the guy was on the ground again. The blindfold was back on. Blood was coming out of the guy's mouth, just like it had come out of Petey's after I had shot him. Then I shook my head, and all that went away and we were there, outside Fort Drum, waiting for Steven to say something.

“That's why I asked,” Steven finally said. “Because I don't know.”

“You don't know is right,” Mr. S. said. “You don't know
shit
.”

After that, everyone was quiet again. Steven was looking at the ground. The woman walked over to him, stood so close that their shoulders touched. “It's OK,” she told him. “It's all right.” I had the feeling that she would have hugged Steven if Mr. S. and I hadn't been standing there. I wondered what was going on with them. I wondered why they were even here protesting. I mean, why these two people in particular were protesting. I bet they had a kid in Iraq, or maybe a kid who'd been killed there. That had to be it. I couldn't imagine someone caring so much about the war either way unless they had some personal reason. Once I figured that out, I didn't want to look at them anymore: it made me too sad. But I didn't want to look at Mr. S., either. I could hear him breathing and breathing through his nose. I remembered the day before, in my dad's hospital room, when I felt mad. I didn't know what I was supposed to feel anymore, so I didn't feel anything except for cold. A big wind roared through the pine trees, and they made scraping sounds against the wire fence.

“You were a moron for volunteering,” the woman finally said to Mr.
S. “But I'm still sorry about what happened to your legs.” That seemed to do something to Mr. S. He slumped down in his chair a little, and I was worried that he was going to slide all the way off and that I'd have to catch him.

“Me, too,” he said. And then he made a kind of animal noise:
“Arrrrrrrr
!” I put my hands over my ears as he made the noise and kept making it. It was the most incredible noise I'd ever heard. It sounded loud and jagged, like the person or thing making the sound had too many teeth. It was so loud that if Mr. S. had used the megaphone, I bet he would have broken it. It was so loud that it seemed like surely someone would hear it and come running to figure out what was going on. But no one came.

“Why are we here?” I finally said. Mr. S. had stopped making the noise by this point. He looked exhausted. His eyes fluttered and I thought he was going to fall asleep in his chair. Steven and the woman were still standing next to each other, arms down, like they didn't know what they were supposed to do with them.

“We're protesting the war,” Steven said.

“No, no,” I said. “Why are we standing right here, in this spot?”

“We're waiting for someone to come out,” Steven said.

“Does anyone ever come out here?”

Steven looked at the woman, who looked at the ground and shook her head. “No,” Steven said. “People only come out the authorized personnel gate.”

“Why aren't we over there?”

“Because we're not authorized to stand there,” Steven said. “If we stand and protest there, we get arrested. If we stand anywhere else and protest, we get arrested. This is the only place we're allowed to protest.”

I thought about that for a moment. Everyone seemed to. Then we heard a car coming toward us. Steven unholstered his megaphone, and the woman raised her sign. I raised mine, too. I handed the megaphone to Mr. S. and he seemed to wake up a little. He raised himself up in his chair and put the megaphone to his lips. But then the car came around the corner, and we could see it wasn't an army vehicle or anything like that. It wasn't anything we could protest against. It was Mother's car. I could
see that from far enough away that it gave me time to duck down behind Mr. S.'s chair. A few seconds later, Mother whooshed past. She was driving fast, for Mother. After she'd gone by us, I stood up again. Everyone was still holding their signs. We all looked in the direction from which Mother had come, and then in the direction she'd gone. There were no other cars coming from either direction.