Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (6 page)

Later, after dinner, the wind calmed down and she saw the lieutenant in the distance, chopping at the air with his saber. He was wearing a cleaner uniform shirt, one with a second row of buttons and gold piping along the sleeves. His saber glinted with fierce aluminum light until he sheathed it.

“I come with news,” he said, huffing into the empty chair next to Alta, “of unquestionable badness.” He didn't wait for a reply. “Things are heating up. Two Confederate regiments are on their way here right now, to join the two that've already arrived. You can't stay here. You need to leave while it's still quiet.”

“Too late for that,” Alta said. “I don't have anywhere to go.”

“Nowhere? No family or friends in nearby towns?”

“I've been relocated for the last time.”

His eyes wandered and stuttered across Alta's face. “Life,” he said, and sighed. She thought he was going to pursue this further, but that was all he said. Alta was excited by the imminence of the enemy and by the lieutenant's heavy breathing, which seemed to parallel each other and coiled into Alta's mind. The day was warmly lucid and soon there'd be horses galloping to the sound of artillery and drums. How gallant everyone would be, weeping as they fired at the enemy, figuring out how best to describe the bleak night wind in their next letter home. Alta said, “Have you heard any news of my men?”

“They're in Buford's outfit, right?”

“Buford, yes. Those are the ones.”

The lieutenant nodded. “That's the reason I'm here, actually.” He crossed and uncrossed his arms with a crackling of joints. “They were captured, Alta. Yesterday. They were undermanned, caught out in the open, and they got snagged. Could be good news for them. They're done fighting for a while. They probably have a better chance of survival.”

“Men,” Alta said. “You make promises you can't keep, and keep promises you never made. You create a lot of noise but it adds up to barely a sneeze.”

She saw from the lieutenant's reaction that this was a fine, an agreeable retort. He put his hand on her leg and the weight of it made her feel like something he could handily dispatch. She didn't mind the feeling.

“I've got another precious trinket I'd like you to look after.” He unfastened the middle button on his jacket and reached in for an enormous ebony-colored nut. “It's heirloom-grade,” he said. “Very rare. I trust you'll know how to care for it.”

She took it from him and ran her fingers over the smooth outer shell. Briefly she had the urge to shout, “It's just a nut!” and burn away the pretense of the game they were playing, but the urge passed, and she let it. “This means you'll be back?”

The lieutenant stood up. “I promise,” he said, smiling. He saluted her with two fingers, unsheathed his saber, said, “Onward!” and was off.

Later on, she heard cannon fire in the distance. It was a festive, unthreatening sound. As it moved closer and boomed louder, she tried to locate it on the battlefield, beyond the high grass. But it turned out that the sound was coming from behind her, on the other side of the apartment building. Closer, another boom, an accompanying hiss, and then the sound of wheels on asphalt as the garbage truck advanced north to grab another Dumpster.

A
lta was among the war-wounded and war-weary. They huddled over puzzle pieces in the activity room, turning them over one by one. “Border first,” Fenn was saying. “Inside last.” The puzzle was a picture of a lake at dawn, colorful sailboats rigged to a dock. Alta watched the puzzle come together in clusters, first the border, then the boats, then the water, then the sky. Everyone gasped hungrily from barely agape mouths.

She left before the puzzle was finished. She followed the vacuum stroke marks down the hallway carpet, which was the same nerve-racking palm-leaf pattern as the carpet in her apartment. The vacuum marks usually led her to the cafeteria, but today they veered left into the multipurpose room, and so did she. The room was brightly lit and filled with residents sitting in rows. Onstage, holding a microphone, was Mr. Santos, the head of In the Pines. Bald, red-faced, and thin, he reminded Alta of a talking digestive organ. Standing next to him were four little girls in hoop dresses.

“What would you like us to know about you?” Mr. Santos asked one of them. He pointed the microphone toward the girl and she said, “I love my school.”

“And what do you love about it?” Mr. Santos asked.

The girl, who couldn't have been older than six, thought about it for a moment, then said, “Everything.” Mr. Santos nodded his bald head and said to the crowd, “Was that delightful? I thought it was delightful.”

Alta sat down next to a friendly-looking man in a wheelchair. He was making notes on a card with a pencil stub.

“What is this?” Alta asked him. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping score,” he said. “Little brown-hair's completely stealing the show. She's incredible. They still have scorecards if you need one.”

“I'm half Canadian,” a blond-haired girl was saying. “I love the winter. I have a snow globe on my shelf that I look at all year and I wish I was tiny enough to live inside it.”

“Aww,” said Mr. Santos and some of the residents in the audience.

“Okay,” the man in the wheelchair said, shaking his head. “That was rehearsed.”

Alta needed to leave—in her mind she was already following the vacuum marks back to her apartment—but she couldn't seem to stand up. Every so often she said to the man in the wheelchair, “I need to hurry along soon.” She watched as each of the young girls sang a song, then talked about how much her grandparents meant to her. Alta wanted to root for a specific girl, but whenever one of them spoke Alta changed her mind. There was something unbearably alive in each of them, alive and rash and scrambling for egress.

Alta felt the same way. She had lain in bed these past few nights, unable to sleep, ears still ringing from the noise of the day. The sound of voices placed atop one another like letters in a mailbox, and atop all of them the lieutenant's. A big, good voice with a theatrical undertow to make it clear he was playing a game. She'd placed the seedpod and the nut on her kitchen windowsill so she could study them while she washed her hands. She knew neither the lieutenant's intent nor her own, but she knew the rules of the game, and for the moment, certainly for now, this was plenty.

Before she'd left her apartment, she taped a note to her patio door, which said
I WILL RETURN ANON
.
She liked the word
anon
. Like a powdered veil, it provided cover for the fear that the lieutenant wasn't coming back. Sitting next to the man in the wheelchair, she said, “I need to leave. I have a good friend, a soldier, who's stopping by. I hate to keep people waiting.”

The man in the wheelchair let out a harried little sigh. “Hand job,” he announced. “That's probably all he's going to have time for.”

Alta had never heard this word before, yet she knew immediately what it meant. She studied him, trying to gauge by his expression what his intent was. He looked aggressively satisfied. “That wasn't necessary,” she said. “You might've given up but some haven't. I haven't.”

“I'm only teasing you,” the man said as Alta stood up to leave. “I bet your soldier has time for all of it.”

“You shouldn't be allowed around children,” Alta told him. “You should try to maybe show a little more . . . valor.”

The man in the wheelchair laughed at his scorecard. “Valor,” he repeated. “Valor's how I ended up in this goddamn thing. From now on it's sniping and petty malice.”

In her apartment, Alta microwaved a freezer pretzel and brought it in a napkin to the patio. She pulled down the note and saw beneath her message, scribbled in faint pencil letters:
ENEMY SIGHTED. BATTLE IMMINENT. PRAY FOR OUR MEN.

On the arm of her patio chair was a red oval leaf. She brought it inside, placed it on the kitchen windowsill beside the others.

T
he wind made barely a sound, Alta realized. Whatever was strained and blown by it—leaves, grass, scarves, flags—did the work. The gusts called to mind a neglected house, a storm door opening and closing, opening and closing.

Everyone made a noise. Her first husband made a glassy noise. Her second and third made humming and rasping noises, respectively. Thinking about the husbands reminded her of the lieutenant, and remembering the lieutenant, who made the most noise of all—a marching-away noise—now reminded her of the man in the wheelchair. Who made a word noise:
Hand job.
From time to time she still waited for the lieutenant on her patio, and this wasn't reasonable, she knew, but who expected her to be reasonable with so much noise?

The Boer War!
Fenn yelled through the wall.
Geometry!

Far away, the battle made a faraway garbage-truck noise. Her men were there. She'd dreamed about them, Vic, Don, George, all charging the enemy with the same rifle. Acting and counteracting.

She awoke thinking:
I am losing my mind
. She'd begun saying this aloud before George died. Whenever she couldn't find her keys, or when she forgot to turn off the television. She wanted to get into the habit of saying it so that she'd remember to continue to once she indeed started losing her mind. Saying it aloud, even if it didn't avert things, might at least soften the stupor when it came. Make her sympathetic, the same way a drunk admitting he was drunk lent himself a sorry sort of dignity.

One night, after reading a magazine article about how the brain like any other muscle needed regular exercise, she told George she wanted him to start asking her more questions. This was one of the suggestions in the article.

“About what?” he'd asked. They were in the living room, having a predinner drink. Alta drank a glass of sherry while George sipped an unrefrigerated Coors from its twinkly can.

“Anything,” she said.

He squinted, considering. Though not handsome, his face had a volatile softness that made it interesting to look at. “Name me,” he said, looking at his beer can. “I'm what you get by combining copper and tin.”

Watching him wait for the answer, she tried to remember what it was he'd first said to her, how he'd expressed interest. It wasn't much.
Hello
, maybe. Or,
Hey you
. After Vic she stayed a widow for a few years, but Don came along and then George, and here she was, sitting next to her third husband, her
third
, a couple of spent batteries nestled inside a toy. George sighed while Alta listened. She knew she'd outlive him. She could hear his spirit clawing off as he breathed.

When you combined copper and tin, you got . . . something else. “I have no idea,” she said.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

He patted at his shirt with a napkin. “Spilled a little beer.”

He was going to make her ask for the answer. Though she knew very little about him, she knew him. She knew that he would continue silently sipping his room-warm Coors until she said something.

“Out with it,” she said. “What do you get?”

One final sip. “I am bronze,” he said. “I am the world's first alloy.”

She liked thinking of her men out on the battlefield with the lieutenant. It gave her a tighter stage on which to regard them all. George the last, Don the middle, Vic the first. Vic, who made himself known to her in high school by using masking tape to make a line from his front door, down the sidewalk, around the corner, down another sidewalk, all the way to Alta's house. He was in some of her classes but she'd never noticed him before; after this, she couldn't quit noticing him. He had pale hands and he held his pencil like a fork, poised for when the teacher said something noteworthy. He sneezed and, when Alta said bless you, he nodded. Alta perceived everything about him in that sneeze and nod.

After Vic came Don, then George. Each damaged her fortifications a little, made the next one possible. Sometimes, waiting on her patio for the lieutenant, she felt as if she'd squandered her affection. She had exchanged it for a few shared meals and a shoebox of photographs. Not long after they died, the circuit failed and she was getting married again, and again. Thinking about them now, Vic and Don and George, they were easily drowned out by the advance and retreat, the rustle and thump, of the wind. Where was the lieutenant?

She brought weird-smelling apples and overripe bananas onto the patio and ate them there, throwing the core or the peel into the field when she was done with it. She waited for news. Just when she thought she'd sufficiently lost hope of the lieutenant returning, she saw a distant movement in the grass, a glint of dark color—she would sit up in her chair, crane her neck, and find there was a little more hope to lose.

Sometimes the fruit would get hung up in the high grass, where she could watch them tan and wither for the next few days.

“Casualties,” she'd say when that happened. She might forget where she was, or when it was, but never for long.
There are no new wars
, she'd think, and then she'd think the opposite,
There are only new wars
, and that seemed true as well. She sensed she was growing smaller and smaller, that her own noise was becoming shallower, a murmur.

B
renna, Alta's great-niece, called one afternoon and asked how she was doing. Fine, Alta told her. She asked if Alta would mind if she came over sometime and Alta said no, and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door. She'd been calling from the lobby.

“I won't stay long,” she said before sitting down on the sofa. Brenna had a flushed, pretty, complex face that made her look as if she spoke a different language. “I love what you've done with the place.”

Alta looked around. She hadn't done anything except hang a portrait of a peach-colored seascape that Don had painted. She offered Brenna a cup of coffee and, when Brenna accepted, remembered she no longer had a coffeemaker. She went into the kitchen, microwaved a mug of water, and dropped a tea bag into it.