Hystopia: A Novel (11 page)

Singleton listened while Wendy, having heard the stories a hundred times (no wonder she’d joined the Corps!), tried to locate something new. There was nothing but lies, Singleton thought, when a man began talking about combat. The truth of what had really happened was beyond words. In the truly mad, like wheelchair guy out there in the yard, the haze of lies was thick and serene. Amputees had a hard time with their stories. The listener knew the story would end with a blast of some sort, a flying sensation through the air, a gaping disbelief as the man groped around to locate his missing legs. The listener was always ahead of the game when it came to a wheelchair guy. (And maybe that was why enfolding didn’t work on them. Maybe the story they had was trapped in the missing arms, lost like some shadow memory of feeling that kept coming back again and again, mirroring the leg, or arm, or hand.)

What bothered Singleton, as Wendy’s father spoke on about his internment, the forced march to Dresden, the escape during the bombings in a firestorm unleashed by his own troops, was the old man’s voice. It seemed to say: I’m going to go deep into the memory and give you my war and my experience and then I’m going to come to a full stop, maybe dab away the tears, and you’re going to say, Man, sir, that’s heavy, and then in turn, as part of the deal, you’re going to have to tell me
your
story. You’re going to ante up with some words, and the words must convey a sense, at least, that you’re down there in the memory of some hidden truth you’ll never divulge: but you’ll give me a chance to find it, because we went over and saw something that no one else has seen except for other grunts.

In the old man’s voice was the older-vet-talks-to-younger-vet tone, and it occurred to Singleton that there was a generation gap that he might put to use. Maybe, when it was his turn to speak, he could signal to Wendy to say they had to go.

Now the old man was speaking in tight phrases. He was running away. He made a run for it. The guards were lost in the chase. He somehow got out of Berlin. Then he was in the countryside. He hid out. He burgled a few homes. He slept in haylofts. He met friendly peasant types. A month he spent on the lam until he came upon an American unit …

Singleton had his foot on Wendy’s leg and was moving it up along her shin. He couldn’t see much of her face. She had her elbows on the table and was running her spoon around the rim of her empty cup.

The story would end, Singleton guessed, just as suddenly as it began. It would come to a dead stop. The poetry would flutter away and the old man would sit silently, shaking his head at the enormity of his memory. (There was always a head-shake at the end of a war story.) Then he’d say, Jesus Christ, didn’t mean to go on like that. At which point protocol would require that Singleton ask some question that would direct the story back to the Black Forest.

How many were in your unit?

Did you go on a recon?

What’s your theory on the weak link in the chain of command? Or something else that felt detailed, a baton into the hand of a sprinter, so that the old guy would go back around and get closer to the truth of the matter, the big fuckup. No matter what, every grunt had the sensation of having made a grievous error. Maybe it came from being too gung-ho in the moment. Perhaps the error was a misreading of the landscape due to low light. A quick reaction, putting a round through the forehead of your buddy, who had been coming through the dark night to share a cigarette. Maybe it was a fear so deep that it sent you raging into a village to decapitate an old man who had simply been harvesting rice …

What had brought this example to mind from the myriad of possible examples? Jesus Christ, had he gone in there himself? Had he done such a thing? Was that the evil bullshit enfolded in him? The fuzzball in his head, free-floating. Theory had it they wouldn’t enfold the fantastically evil shit. The evil shit had to be presented to the law, or left external (no treatment!). Reenacting truly evil shit (they said) would only leave you with more shit, so it was unlikely that in some secret facility they were making men reenact atrocities in rigged villages with actors leaning over rice bags, or babies stabbed like Christmas hams on the end of bayonets in the Korean War style; no, no, one had to trust that at some level the web of institutional presumption wouldn’t go that far.

Wendy was nudging him gently in the shin, and her father was now finishing up, saying, Christ, did I go on like that? He was rubbing tears from his eyes. The kitchen was nearly dark, a window of lavender light over the sink. Time wasn’t exactly still. But it was stiller than usual and both men felt the weight of the story pushing against the one that Singleton might tell, if he could. The old man’s story sat like the giant boulder of copper that had been found in the Kewana Peninsula and was shipped at great cost down to the St. Lawrence Seaway. It sank to the bottom of the lake. That’s what seemed to be sitting between them, a large mass of some metal alloyed in the heat of history, now gone.

But the universal laws of shared war stories were abrogated when Wendy got up and turned on the lights and the mood shifted and she and her father could see that Singleton was under too much of a burden to speak. Her father understood. For every man in the VFW who told his story fully—albeit according to the rules, waiting for the baton to be passed in the form of a question—there was another man who sat mute.

Singleton gazed into his shot glass and said, “You know, my shit was a different kind of shit, and well, gee, sir, I wouldn’t even know exactly where to begin if I could recall it. I suppose I might start with Tet—and that’s just a guess—and take it from there, but all I can tell you is I was in for a tour of duty.” And then he choked up and let his throat clear, a few tears blurring his eyes. He was conjuring up images he had from news clips and the photos from
Life
magazine.

“Don’t worry, son,” the old man said, putting his hands on Singleton’s shoulders. “We should eat something, right now, pronto, before the rotgut starts to rot the gut.” And that was it. They were all back in the present moment and facing hunger they had put aside to listen to the old man’s story. He scurried around the kitchen, removing a string of franks from the refrigerator, cutting them apart, oiling up a pan and getting them sizzling and then bringing out a bowl of potato salad he had made that afternoon, and Wendy set the table. He said a prayer over the food, and they ate for a few minutes without a word, just the clink of silverware. Then he turned and said, “At least we weren’t yellow-streaked slackers. At least we weren’t that, son. We might’ve had our troubles but we weren’t hiding out in the Red Cross or home at the YMCA, or none of that.”

“No, sir, we weren’t yellow, not at all,” Singleton said.

*   *   *

Pulling out of the driveway, they spotted the Zomboid, moonlight glinting off the spokes of his chair, a cigarette glowing in his mouth. “You’d think he was put there just for us,” Singleton said. “For me and your father. You’d think God would think: Man, I’m not going to put a Nam guy like that next to a Second World War grunt, because it would be too obvious. But God says, Hey, man, it’s just statistically there, man. I had nothing to do with it. You get fifty or whatever vets living in the same area, it’s gonna happen. Don’t blame me, God says. You send them over from Flint and they’re gonna come back to Flint.”

“So long,” the Zomboid was calling. His hand, waving, was clearly visible. Wendy was at the wheel—he was too drunk to drive—and they slipped into the dark streets, past the moldering houses. The little boy was still in the yard, standing in attack mode, pointing his finger into the charge. Everything was navigable thanks to the glow in the east. On the radio Iggy was hollering against the fury of noise in a way that somehow seemed to match the stench of charred wood as it mixed with the faint benzene smell from the canal.

“We have a history,” Wendy said. She turned the radio down. “The guy in the wheelchair and I have a history.”

“What kind of history?”

“We were close when I was in high school. Then his number came up and he went over and came back and we were even closer and then he went back for a second tour.”

“How close,” Singleton said. His heart was pounding, the nut in his head beginning to throb. To go from an old vet, all that talk, everything that wasn’t said and was said, and then to hear this.

“Too close to talk about right now.”

If he had learned anything, it was that she made confessions when she was high. She’d hint at a fact, put something out there between them and let it fester until she was ready to talk. He’d have to be more patient, he thought. But he couldn’t resist and he asked again, how close was close, and as he’d expected, she remained quiet, her fingers curled around the wheel, until she was at her place, parking, and they went upstairs into the apartment and licked a tab and sat, waiting for the high to kick.

Even before she spoke—because she did, finally, when she was tripping—he understood that she had loved the guy in a carnal way. (No other word, he thought. He hated that word but it was the right one.) He imagined a puppy-dog teenage love, fumbling at first but then smoothed out to delicious first touches and then an understanding. He imagined Old Spice cologne on his shoulder blade, her nose down in there as he kissed the smooth skin behind her ear and then the nape of her neck in the backseat of a car. A young man whose draft number came up, went over and served and came back with his legs gone and his arms not working and a smart-ass new language and a new way of thinking. The new language was the biggest change, he imagined. She had had to confront that vacant look in his eyes and his physical infirmities but those were nothing next to the aberration of his language, the defeat that hovered between his phrases, the tight, edgy bark. Taking advantage of a temporarily clear mind—the kick hadn’t kicked yet—he tried to imagine it from her point of view, as a young woman, seeing him off, maybe even throwing a small party on the beach with a few friends, drinking beer, somber with the fact that in the morning he would be in boot camp. A beautiful young man with long cornsilk hair, almost girlish, and a smile (it was still there) that was loose and sloppy, who came back damaged. When he got back she was finished with nursing school and working at the hospital during the days, hours and hours of serving up medication—not drugs, she had explained, but medicines—and hanging out with the other nurses, smoking in the break room, listening to them gripe, worrying because they had the patients’ lives in their hands (the doctors were blunt, well tanned, always talking about their golf games). One wrong dose, one forgotten IV change, one wrong mark on a clipboard and death might be at hand. But when her boy was discharged from the VA he had stumps where his legs had been, still glossy and wet-looking, and she had tried to nurse him, helping him change the bandages, listening to the pure postwar silence between ranting and raving. Then a line had appeared and that line was a choice, to take care of him and live up to her obligations, the promises she had made to herself and her God (she mentioned that she used to believe, that her mother had been a devout Catholic), in honor of her father (she had mentioned that her father had instilled in her a sense of honor and a sense of humor), or find a way to let him go. It was easy to imagine the whole setup. His high was starting up, but he had a chance to hear himself ask if she wanted to talk about it.

“You want to talk about it?” he said.

Now the ceiling was sparkling with starlight and the moonlight streaming through the window became a rhombus changing shapes and texture, smooth marble one second—he got up and went over to touch—and then quivering and liquid the next. He went back to the bed, navigating through his high, still in control, he thought. When he looked again the moonlight was smoking, steaming. He’d seen that kind of moonlight in Nam. Maybe, maybe not. High or not high.

“I loved him,” she said, touching his shoulder, running her finger along his scar. “He was a sweet boy, just a kid, and then he went and came back and I tried, for a little while, to take care of him. I nursed him until I couldn’t handle it. I wanted him enfolded but of course you know they couldn’t do that. I began to think about men and war, about stupid men and stupid wars, about getting inside somehow and fighting for change…”

“Wow, will you look at that,” he said. The moonlight was striking the floor, vibrating the floorboards, which looked a yard wide, old barn-floor boards, and he heard a mooing sound and the cackle of chickens feeding and smelled the sweet hay as he got up and got his lighter and held it, monolithic in his fingers, with the eagle and etched words: Tet, Tet, Tet. On the bottom of the lighter was the stamp he had studied (he liked to imagine) countless times during the rage of firefights, to keep his mind steadied (he could hear the
chur-chunk
of the stamping tool machine at some factory in Pennsylvania) while Wendy, for her part, in her own high, also looked at it as he rolled it in his fingers, and said, Wow, wow, and studied it in her own way. For an hour, maybe more, they passed the Zippo back and forth.

Zomboid’s real name was Steve Williams.

She remembered his downy lip and his smooth hairless chest.

His fingers along the waistband of her jeans.

A pulse between her legs.

Williams rocking gently. His boy body against her girl body.

His body back from Nam, washboard stomach, wiry arms.

Getting up to make her father breakfast. Her hair in curlers.

Her father’s black lunchbox on the counter, ready to go.

TREE HUNTING

Lumber runners raced to put their claims in. Still do. It was said there were men who could hear a queen pine from a mile away and identify it by the sound of the wind through its needles. I’m one of them, he said.

The man’s name was Hank. He spoke of races to the land office through virgin forest. Tracts so brambly that men came out bleeding. The hardships of the lumber business, the corruption and the glory, stripping an entire state from top to bottom in a few years.