Repo Men (10 page)

I was impressed and disgusted at the same time. “And people get paid for this?”

“Pretty damned well. Anyway, he said to imagine that you took a cat and put it in a box, along with a radioactive device that randomly decayed and released a deadly poison gas. Half the time, the material would decay and release the gas, and the other half it wouldn’t. But the thing is random, and since the box is closed, there is no way for the scientist to know when the poison is released, and when it isn’t. That means there is no way for the scientist to know if the cat, inside that box, is still alive, or if it’s dead.”

“What about the screaming? Wouldn’t it scream?”

“Soundproofed. Thick walls. No way to know. And since there is no way to know if the cat is alive or dead, then until he opens the box, the cat has to be both.”

I said, “Both what?”

“Alive and dead.”

“At the same time?” I asked incredulously.

“Exactly.”

I processed it for a minute, maybe more, trying to wrap my head around the answer. But it didn’t make sense. How can anything be alive and dead at the same time?

“That’s gotta be the most fucked-up thing I ever heard,” I told him.

“Yep,” said Bill Braxton, and then we were silent, for a good five minutes. I couldn’t shake it, though. Something was bothering me.

“What happened to the cat?” I finally asked, breaking the stillness of the bunks.

Bill sighed, and I could see him turning over in his bunk, his back to me. He was done educating those who refused to learn. “There is no cat,” he said. “There never was. Forget it. Go to sleep.”

It was years ago, but some days I still think about Bill. About that story. About the cat and the box. And I wonder, where did I fit into that equation? Sometimes I like to think I was the poison—dealing out justice as I saw fit, handing out death on engraved invitations. Other days, I think I was the box. Holding it all together, keeping the experiment in place.

But most days—these days—I know I’m the cat. Scratching and clawing and screaming to get out, even as I lick my paws, curl up into a ball, and drift off to a nice, comfortable nap.

Jake Freivald was with us in that bunk, and he told some stories we hadn’t heard during boot camp. “Back in New York,” he said—which is always how he started his sentences, leading one to believe that he was from Manhattan as opposed to the upstate two-outhouse town where his family owned one of the last remaining private dairy farms in the Northeast—“I took two bullets in the back trying to steal a pumpkin off some old guy’s front stoop. Right ’round Halloween, I ran up, snatched the big ol’ thing, and took off running, and soon there’s screaming and yelling and I’m still running, and I hear this bang, but I’m okay, only there’s this powerful itch running up and down my back, and soon the itch is a sting…Next thing I know, I wake up in a hospital, the cops are all around me, and I’m answering questions for the next ten hours.”

“What’d you do?” asked Harold. “What’d you tell ’em?”

“I lied,” Jake said plainly. “If I said that I’d taken the pumpkin, they woulda given him a slap on the wrist, protecting his property and all that. So I told ’em I was doing trick or treat, house to house for candy, and that he just freaked out on me.” He laughed then, like a child remembering his first trip to a theme park. “Guy got six years.”

For the two months I was stationed in Italy, I rarely heard any actual Italian. As far as I could tell, they were just as happy speaking English as we were, and I didn’t give the matter a moment’s thought. Of course, the fact that I never left the warm, comforting bosom of the U.S. military might have helped in that regard.

Even when I managed to get off base, the Marines were there. It was as if we’d already invaded the southern half of the country, knocking off all the spaghetti eaters and installing ourselves in their place. Instead of Guiseppe the chef, we just threw in Tony from the Bronx and called it six of one, half a dozen of the other. Somehow, the military had managed to Americanize the entirety of Italy before I’d gotten there, so whatever cultural lessons I might have learned during my stay were prematurely obliterated by a government eager to make its fighting men feel at home.

I did come across one Italian fellow, though, who had managed to remain native on native soil. There was a convenience store, sort of a smalltown grocer, just a few clicks outside of town, and they were the only place for miles to carry anything other than American cigarettes. On the base, you could feel free to choke yourself on all the Winstons and Camels you could buy at the canteen, but Jake wouldn’t light up anything other than a brand produced in the country in which he was stationed. “If I’m going all the way around the world,” he used to say, “then my lungs are taking the trip with me.”

Harold couldn’t understand why anyone would want to inhale noxious gases into his lungs, but he didn’t understand a lot of what Jake did. Unlike Jake and myself, Harold Hennenson would not have made a good Bio-Repo man—you have to lose respect for your own body long before you can lose respect for everyone else’s.

The store wasn’t large—six aisles at most, with nary a slushie machine in sight—but each shelf was packed with sundries, shoved in at any and all angles, fighting for space like rockers in the front row of a concert. A single cash register sat on a rickety desk out in front, complete with push-button
NO SALE
signs and a drawer that got stuck on its tracks three times out of ten.

The fellow who owned the joint was an ex-Navy boy named Sketch who was at least six-five, no more than a hundred and eighty pounds, and sported three tufts of red hair sprouting out of his otherwise bald head. He looked like one of those birds you see in nature specials, the ones where you call your stoned buddies into the room and laugh for hours at God’s fucked-up sense of humor. Sketch had served four years with the military, most of it stationed in the Mediterranean, and was the only survivor of a submarine accident that had claimed the lives of ninety-eight comrades. Someone had left a torpedo tube open and flooded, a strict no-no when trolling through shallow depths, even during practice maneuvers. Two hours later, when a practice target had come into range, there was no way to know that a porpoise had somehow managed to get itself stuck inside the tube, and no way to know that the active-fire torpedo warhead would explode upon impact, sending bits of dolphin and human alike floating through the open sea.

Sketch doesn’t even
drink
water anymore.

Despite his parental approach to the matter of cigarettes, Harold joined Jake and me on our weekly sojourns to the store, mostly to hear Sketch tell stories of his days with the Navy. The submarine accident wasn’t the tall man’s only brush with death, not by a long shot. He’d nearly been decapitated once when a rigging line had snapped and swung a two-ton mast directly at his noggin, escaping from that only because he had lost his footing on the slippery deck and gone down a second before he was to meet his maker. Back at basic training in Maryland, he’d been shot at by a jealous husband who didn’t understand that his wife needed more loving than his bimonthly drunken lovefests could provide, and three months after
that
, he was attacked by the knife-wielding
new
lover of the wife who didn’t want any competition hanging around his conquest.

“You ever see any combat, Sketch?” asked Jake one time.

“You don’t call that combat?”

“No, no,” said Jake, “I mean
real
combat.”

Sketch just laughed and rung up the pack of cigarettes on the old German register.

But about that Italian guy: He used to own the store. It was called Sputini, and Sketch was cool enough to keep the name after he bought the place. He was also cool enough to let the guy hang out on the property, day in and day out, rocking back and forth on an old hammock he’d set up on the front porch. Every time we went into Sputini for some cigarettes, we’d give a curt nod to the little old man swinging on his hammock, eyeing us up and down, like we were his entertainment for the day.

The third or fourth time we went, he finally perked up. “Your head is too big for that hat,” he said as I walked by, his body practically creaking as he rose to a seated position.

“Excuse me?”

He spoke carefully, enunciating every English syllable with remarkable clarity. “Your head…is too big…for that hat.”

Without another thought, I reached up, pulled my standard-issue Marine cap off my head, smoothed out the hair beneath, and threw it in his lap. He inspected it for a moment, his dark fingers running across the olive fabric, then popped the hat open and placed it atop his own head. It fit quite nicely, and without another word, he lay back down in his hammock and went to sleep.

I caught hell for losing that cap, but it didn’t matter. From then on, Antonio—that was the Italian guy’s name—was my best pal, and he repeatedly informed me when my uniform was too tight, too loose, or would simply fit him better. I tried to engage him in conversation a few times to get a sense of who he was, of why he would hang around a place that was no longer his and presumably no longer held any meaning for him, but I never got any further than hello before he started in on his fashion criticisms. Sketch told me he’d bought Antonio out for fifty thousand dollars American plus an old analog color television that only pulled in religious programming from the Vatican. Antonio blew the fifty grand in a month on failed jai-alai wagers in northern Spain, then came back to Italy and set up shop outside his old place of business. Now he just swings, watches the Pope on TV, and talks folks out of their clothing.

That’s the kind of retirement a man can envy.

The Union has a pension plan, though I have stopped trying to receive my checks. It’s a fair plan, from what I remember, with a number of benefits thrown in that are clearly over and above the usual accountant-and-janitor-type pensions. New skin grafts, for example, should liver spots become a problem, are available at very reasonable rates from the Union supply house, as are most major artiforg implantations. The loan percentages, I hear, are quite competitive, very few reaching into the thirties, almost none into the forties. They probably would have had a nice deal on a heart for me had I gotten myself into cardiac trouble
after
retiring, but since my ticker fizzled out while I was on the job, the post-retirement medical benefits of my profession hadn’t yet fully kicked in. I understand this is somewhat backward in relation to the rest of the world, but the Union cadre never cared much about social standards.

The Marines were supposed to have a nice pension plan, too, but I signed away any benefits that might have been coming my way when I hooked up with the Union. It seems they only let you play the part of retired killer once.

Let me tell you about our sergeant: Tyrell Ignakowski, informally known as Tig, a short, squat, beefy rock of a man who kept his hair cropped, his reach long, and his sense of tact someplace even bloodhounds would have difficulty finding. If you were doing something wrong, Tig would let you know it at six hundred decibels—that instant, that moment, even if your mother, your best girl, and a photographer from
Stars and Stripes
were standing next to you.
Especially
if they were standing next to you.

Tig wasn’t afraid to humiliate his soldiers in order to break them into shape. In fact, that was the linchpin of his theory, that the concept of “molding” a soldier was an anachronism and didn’t hold in today’s military. “Maybe back in the day, when we were fightin’ the Krauts,” he told me, “maybe then you could take a soldier and push him gently this way and push him gently that way, press him into the proper mold.” Form him into military Play-Doh, as it were.

“Kids these days,” he continued, “can’t be molded. By the time they hit fifteen, sixteen, they ain’t a piece of clay no more. They’ve set, they’ve hardened, and pushing and pulling don’t help any more than it would on a vase that’s already been through the kiln for ten hours. Whatever they are, they are. Only way to work ’em into a team is to shatter whatever it is they’ve become, mix them hardened fragments all around, then crazy glue the whole mess back together however you see fit. You break ’em into small enough pieces, you can make ’em into damn near anything you want.”

This is all you need to know about my relationship with Tig:

One day in the desert, long after training and long before they’d send me home again, I was in a foul mood, tossing rocks out into the open sand. I hadn’t heard from Beth in weeks, and the last few letters I’d sent down to San Diego came back with R
ETURN
T
O
S
ENDER
stamped on the front. Just like the fucking song, which somehow made it even worse.

So there I was, tossing stones, not trying to hit anything, just skimming the sand, as if I were back in San Diego, standing next to my girl, staring out over the wide Pacific.

Tig approached from behind; I could feel him there. Despite his height disadvantage, he had a definite presence, a way of asserting himself without physicality. Some of the guys called him Sergeant Limburger, because you knew he was coming from a mile off. But it wasn’t a smell; it was a feel.

After watching me for a while, he said, “You’re not trying to hit anything.”

“Nossir,” I replied. “I’m just throwing rocks, sir.”

He gingerly pulled the last stone from my hand and sat me down on the warm ground below. Kneeling into a crouch, his face came close to mine. “Son, throwing rocks at nothing is like humping the air. If you want to masturbate, set up a target. If you really want to get with it, set your sights on the bad men.”

I nodded, not fully appreciating his advice at the time. Yet I understood that he was trying to assist me in something or other. “Thank you, sir,” I said. “Thank you for helping me.”