The Last Stoic (9 page)

The diggers, all except the
flogged man, returned to their work. 

Gus looked questioningly at the
legionary.  The soldier in turn glanced back toward Marcus, who had returned to
the shade of the mastic tree.  Gus followed his gaze and understood.  He waved
off the legionary and strode toward Marcus in his compact, efficient way.  At
the legionary’s behest, four men rushed over to carry the casualty from the
work site and ferry him back toward the encampment.  After several moments of
glaring over the remaining labourers, he was again satisfied with the work
rate.  Marcus could hear his laughing above the resumed noise.

Gus, standing a pace from Marcus,
was laughing too, mirthlessly.

“First job site?  I thought you
looked a little green.  You look green now.”

Marcus didn’t say anything.

“Don’t worry, our financier has
hundreds like him.  We have a casualty allowance.  One or two a week per
overseer.  He’ll be ok.  A couple of weeks in the infirmary and he’ll heal over
and be back to work.  It doesn’t pay to kill them, but you need to set an example. 
Best to pick the biggest and strongest to really get the message across. 
Motivation.”

Marcus smiled weakly.  Gus
studied him a while longer.  Marcus could feel the colour rise to his cheeks as
he remembered his daydreams just before the lashing.  He felt compelled to say
something.

 “Yes, it’s true,” he said
finally, “we must make it clear who’s the Roman.”

Patrick spent his last twenty dollars on a bottle of Wild
Turkey
and a
thirty minute phone card.  The bourbon, obscured by its paper bag, was already
more than half empty while the phone card remained in his jacket pocket,
unused. 

Where the hell am I?  What am I
doing here?

From the moment of his arrival in
the city, Patrick had spent his time scouring the streets for any trace of his
quarry.  He’d been through every neighbourhood, through every major
intersection, through the downtown and the suburbs, he’d tried the phone
operators and the utilities, but had turned up nothing.  On this day, he found
himself on a park bench half a block from a pair of busy cross streets,
consoling himself just as his father would have done:  bemoaning his bad luck
and consuming a good deal of liquor. 

Patrick Sr. had a lot to say
about his family’s tainted Irish luck.  A Patrick Considine had come ashore
from the blighted, emerald isle in 1741, escaping the first great famine of
1740.  And for a while the Considines managed to stay ahead of Fortuna.  That
first Considine pioneer did well for himself, as the new nation was born and
took shape, eventually establishing a dry goods business in the bustling Ohio
valley.  His son changed his surname to Constantine, a name considered better
for business, and married into a prominent English family.  By the turn of the
nineteenth century a Constantine owned several coal mines in Pennsylvania,
another Constantine owned a shoe factory in Cleveland, and another was making
prescient investments in some of the new railroad projects springing up all
across the heartland.  By the time of the Civil War, the Constantine family was
known throughout the Union as a family of wealth, power and prestige – a clan
to be reckoned with.

Where did it all go wrong?  Was
it the turmoil of the Civil War?  Poor business decisions made by the family
elders?  Or was it, as whispered by some in the family long ago, the eccentric
Fingal Constantine’s decision to take a young Iroquois woman as a wife,
bringing scandal and disgrace.  Patrick Jr. knew from painful experience not to
mention the so-called “squaw” in his father’s presence, or risk a blow to the
head.  The rumour was so mysterious that Patrick Jr. accepted from an early age
that Fingal’s mistake had to be the catalyst for the woes of later
generations.  There must be powerful black magic, he reasoned, in a shame so
vile that it is literally unspeakable.

Whatever the cause, the
Constantines had fallen far.  The coal mines were exhausted and auctioned off
for a pittance.  The shoe factory, now a teetering, hollow shell at the city’s
sooty edge, awaiting demolition, went under when the cheaper imports began
arriving.  The shares in the railroads were sold prematurely and the profits
squandered.  Nothing was left except the military traditions, but even those
were dwindling, with Constantine men no longer making the officer class, never
dreaming of one day making lieutenant, let alone captain, aspiring no higher
than common grunts.   Patrick Sr., the last regimental son, struggled to get by
on the meager disability provided by the army.  He was addicted to rye and ginger
and Patrick’s Xbox, playing Halo III for stretches of eight consecutive, bleary
hours, falling asleep each night in a stupor and waking in the middle of the
night, bathed in sweat, trembling from the self-loathing and other torments
known only to him.

Fiery Irish pride still burned
hot in the junior Patrick Constantine.  He was aware of his family’s past, just
enough to know that the Constantines once lived in mansions.  And he deeply
resented the fact that he was born in an era when foreclosure on their
shambling bungalow in New Ravenna was an open question every month.  What
happened, he often wondered.  How did we become such losers, when we once had
it all?  We built this country and look at us now.  Foreigners and immigrants
buy our land, take our jobs, whore themselves to us.  For the Constantines, he
thought, it started going downhill when that fur-trapping mental case Fingal
married a red woman.

Patrick Jr. had hitched and
hijacked his way over a thousand miles south hoping to elude the Constantine
curse.  Now, penniless on this park bench, without direction, and without
prospects, he sensed the return of its embrace.  Near the corner of the
intersection, almost directly across the street from Patrick’s park bench, a
man in battle fatigues wearing a camouflage cap sat motionless in a
wheelchair.  A lit cigarette hung precariously from the side of his mouth and
clouds of yellow smoke hovered around the matted, grey hair of his goatee.  
Both of his legs were cut off at the knees.  There was a sign where his shins
should have been, just above a wooden bowl sitting on the pavement, that said,
“Vietnam Vet – Need Money For Food.” 

Patrick Sr. had served in
Vietnam, as an enlisted member of the Second Battalion, Fourteenth Infantry
Regiment - the Golden Dragons.  The spectre of Patrick Jr.’s father lingered
still.

Patrick Jr.’s forebears had
served in the Fourteenth as long as there had been a Fourteenth.  His
grandfather had been a Golden Dragon as well, fighting the Nazis in the
Rhineland during World War Two, achieving the rank of sergeant major.  His
great-great-grandfather had served as a young man in the same regiment at the
turn of the century.  He had seen action as a second lieutenant during the
Spanish-American War, but missed out on World War One, the one conflict in
which the Fourteenth did not participate.  Another prolific Constantine had
been a captain for the Fourteenth when they formed part of the Union forces in
the U.S. Civil War, and he’d seen action at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg.  Patrick’s
grandfather would speak of an ancient relative who fought against the British
forces as a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812, also for the newly
formed Fourteenth regiment.  He claimed that this Constantine was instrumental
in the regiment’s founding, contributing substantial sums of money for its
outfitting.  The Constantines had been associated with the U.S. Army in
general, and with the Fourteenth Regiment in particular, for as long as anyone
could remember.

Patrick looked again across the
street at the veteran sitting in his wheelchair.  A woman clutching to her
chest a large, striped shopping bag of thick paper with rope handles hurried
past the man, taking care to carve a wide path around him.  From the other
direction, a man holding a cell phone to his ear nearly kicked over the old
soldier’s bowl.  In his boozy ill-temper Patrick fumed at the injustice of it,
that a disabled serviceman, like his father, should be treated so shabbily,
reduced to begging on the street like a bum, passed over so consistently and
arrogantly.  That’s why I’ll never join, he thought.  I’m not going to get
kicked around like my old man.

His father, Patrick Sr., had
never achieved a rank higher than sergeant.  He entered the Vietnam War as a
private and emerged as a sergeant unscathed and without distinction.  He stayed
with the regiment throughout the seventies and eighties and even served again
in the Gulf War yet still never advanced, for reasons that were unclear to
everyone, including his son.  Typical of a Constantine, Patrick Sr. was injured
during Operation Desert Storm, an engagement that brought the U.S. military
less than one hundred and fifty combat-related deaths and less than five
hundred additional casualties.  When a jeep he was traveling in overturned, one
of his legs was crushed, his left eye was punctured, and he sustained a severe
concussion.  It seemed like every second man from the regiment had Gulf War
Syndrome.  Whatever happened to him, the man who returned from Iraq wasn’t the
same man that had left in 1990.

Patrick Jr. put the glass neck of
the bottle back to his lips and tipped it, letting the bourbon slide down until
his eyes watered.  The old soldier met his eye and held it for a brief and
awkward moment.  They appraised each other warily, as two wayward coyotes might
during an unexpected encounter far from the pack.  Despite being strangers, the
two men shared a sensation of recognition.  The vet looked away with a subtle
shake of his head.  As he brought the crumpled paper bag back to his lap,
Patrick frowned. 
Did he just shake his head at me?
  He could feel the
warmth rise from his gullet to his temples and he caught his breath.  With a
suddenness that caused a company of pigeons on the ground behind him to take
flight, Patrick got to his feet.  He paced three steps to the right, swiveled,
and then marched three steps back to his bench.  You are begging for spare
change, he seethed.  You have no shins, no feet.  You shake your head at
me
? 
Patrick turned again, ready to strike out across the street and share his
displeasure.  But as he took a step forward, he stared hard at the broken man,
now lighting another cigarette, and saw his father again.  He stopped. 

There were a number of reasons
why Patrick Jr. had left home.  His father’s drunken abuse was one.  Not having
anything better to do was another.  But not wanting to join the Fourteenth was
primary.  He told himself it was because he wanted to break the mould; he
wanted to be a musician or a carpenter or something else.  He told himself that
he didn’t want to be pushed around and he didn’t want to end up like that loser
across the street, or like his intolerable father.  But the truth, the main
reason he didn’t enlist and why he ran away, was something else entirely,
something he didn’t admit even to himself.  Patrick Constantine Jr. was afraid.

He was afraid that he wouldn’t be
good enough, that he wouldn’t be able to do the drills, to complete his
training.  He was afraid of going overseas, he was afraid of grenades, and
bombs, and IEDs, and sniper’s bullets, he was afraid of getting shot.  Despite
his bravado, he was afraid of killing someone.  Of course, he had envisioned
the act many times.  He’d imagined what it would be like to shoot his algebra
teacher.  He’d imagined what it would be like to stab the glowering Filipino
that ran the Quick Stop on the corner, near his house.  He’d rehearsed
strangling his father.  And smothering him.  And poisoning him.  But he would
usually feel nauseous to the point of vomiting when the mental images became
too vivid, when the pastiche in his head became to visceral.  He always stepped
back.   

But the thing he feared most,
what usually kept him up at night, was the mysterious, unnamed, unmentioned
malady with its hooks in his father, the debilitating injury that left no
visible scars.  Patrick Sr. had been deprived of more than full mobility and
full eyesight after his last tour of duty in Iraq.  He had witnessed something
awful.  Or, he had done something awful.  Whatever it was, a switch had been
thrown.  Every day the torment threatened to spill out and tar anyone within
his range.  Having for many years indirectly borne through the cloudy prism of
his father’s violence the aftermath of some unknown atrocity perpetrated in a
far-off land, Patrick Jr. was unwilling to risk exposing himself directly to
that same atrocity.  He dreaded facing the consequences in person when they
were already too much to bear even when diluted through someone else. 

Patrick looked upon the disabled
veteran sitting across the street with both disdain and sympathy.  He watched
as the business folk rushed past. 
Why won’t they give him a few dollars? 
Jesus, don’t just sit there like you’re already half in the grave!  They don’t
deserve to walk on the same ground.  Have some pride, some dignity!
  When
he stood up again suddenly and unsteadily, he was unsure of whether his next
act would be one of kindness or violence. 

A battered van pulled up to the
curb not far from where the veteran was sitting.  Emblazoned on the side were
the words
Caritas
and
Community Outreach
.  Patrick watched as a
rangy man with a pony tail bounced out of the van, carrying two bundles.  He
walked past the vet in the wheelchair, crossed the street at the intersection
and then stopped in front of a pair of street people, camped out on the other
corner, sitting on a mass of blankets and cardboard.  The young man undid his
bundles and handed them their contents: sandwiches, juice boxes, and fruit. 
He
walked right past! 

Patrick made his way unevenly
across the street toward the curb.  When he arrived, he was almost speechless,
made inarticulate not only by whiskey but also by indignation.

“Hello there,” the man greeted
him cheerfully.

“What’s wrong with him,” Patrick
managed to ask.

“Sorry?”

“What’s wrong with him,” Patrick
pointed back across the intersection aggressively, “What’s wrong with a man who
lost both his legs defending your freedom.  You walked right past him.”

The social worker’s face
registered understanding and he smiled.

“Oh yes!  Ron.  Do you know him? 
I think I might have something left for him, maybe some hot coffee, if he’d
like it.”

“Something left?  Why didn’t you
see him first?”

“I’m sorry, these people have
nothing.”

“What does he have?!  No pride! 
No dignity!  No legs!”

The old man had now taken notice
of the ruckus.  He was looking over from his place on the other curb, shaking
his head and waving his hand, as if to say, “don’t worry, don’t make a fuss on
my account.”

“Well, he has a disability
pension from VA, and a subsidized apartment.  These folks don’t have even
that.”