Carry Me Home (18 page)

“Oh, Hank, I think Jimmy needs more time. He’s still weak.”

Dad, he ignores Ma and says to Jimmy, “Son, I know you’ve been through hell and back, but the war is over, and somehow you have to get back to living. This getting drunk every night isn’t helping either. You need to get back to work. You need to have a reason to get up in the morning.”

Jimmy, he drops his fork onto his plate. He looks mad and sad at the same time, but he don’t say a thing.

“Tomorrow morning, Jimmy, you come back to work.”

Without saying no more, Dad gets up and leaves for the Skelly, and Ma hurries back to the stove to get Jimmy some more scrambled eggs that Jimmy don’t eat.

Chapter 21

W
hen Jimmy was gone, it felt like the whole house, walls and floors and everything, was holding its breath waiting for him to come back. Now he’s home, and it feels like the house is still holding its breath.

Jimmy goes back to work, but he still goes to the Ten Pin every night to get drunk. He drags me along with him on nights I ain’t gotta work, and I watch out for him and Floyd and help ’em both get home. Mary, she don’t come to fetch Floyd no more, ’cause she moved back home with her folks and her sisters. She says she ain’t coming back ’til Floyd stops getting drunk every night.

“I think Floyd gets mean to her when he’s drinking,” Eva Leigh says to me real quiet-like one night at the Ten Pin.

“Floyd, he wouldn’t go hitting on no girl.”

“I don’t think he hits her either, but I think he says mean things. And I know he’s been breaking things around the house.”

I look across the place at Floyd, who is singing with Jimmy and the jukebox, and I pick at my pants.

That same night, that Bottoms Conner, he starts pestering Eva Leigh. He don’t grab her arm or call her bad names like he done to Ruby Leigh that time, but he keeps hanging around her counter and trying to make her laugh at his jokes about peckers and hosing. When closing time comes, I tell Jimmy I gotta walk Eva Leigh home in case that Bottoms tries following her. “Ruby Leigh is going home with that GI over there, and I don’t want Eva Leigh walking home by herself,” I say. Jimmy thumps me on the back and he says, “You’re a good man, Earwig.” Jimmy says he’ll walk home with me and Eva Leigh too, even though he’s so drunk I don’t know if he’s gonna be able to walk at all.

Floyd’s daddy comes to give Floyd a lift home. He asks us if we want a ride, but Jimmy says he thinks he could use some fresh air. Floyd’s skinny dad has the damnedest time getting Floyd to the car, so I give him a hand. Floyd’s dad looks sad. Real sad.

Jimmy, he is wobbly, but he can still walk if I let him lean into me now and then. Outside, it feels warm for winter, them snowflakes falling softer than a whisper. There ain’t a noise anywhere except the soft squishing sounds of snow under our shoes.

“Why don’t you boys come up for coffee? It looks like somebody here could use some.”

“You got cocoa?” I ask, after Eva pays the sitter-girl and she leaves, and Eva Leigh says she does.

Jimmy falls down on Eva Leigh’s wored-out chair and lights a cigarette. He’s singing a bit of “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

Eva Leigh, she gives Jimmy a cup of coffee. It’s made from old grounds, she tells him, and Jimmy says, “After what I drank in the camps, this will taste like heaven to me.”

“What did you drink in the camps, Jimmy?” I ask, ’cause I think that’s something maybe Jimmy can talk about without getting slammed in the clink. Jimmy’s hand starts shaking, and Eva Leigh takes his cup from him so he don’t get burned.

“Jimmy,” I say. “I’m sorry I asked. I know you ain’t suppose to be talking about them camps. I shouldn’t a asked you nothing.”

“It’s okay, Earl,” Eva says. “It’s not like Jimmy has to be afraid of you or me repeating anything he says.” And I tell her no, sirree, he ain’t gotta worry about that, ’cause we’re both real good at keeping secrets.

Eva, she sits down on the sofa by me. Her eyes is all soft as they look at Jimmy.

Jimmy, he pulls out a cigarette, but when he goes to light it, his hands are shaking so bad that he can’t strike the match. Eva leans over, and she takes the Ten Pin book of matches from him and lights it.

“Strange how that scared feeling stays with you long after the danger’s gone,” Eva Leigh says. Jimmy looks up at her and his eyes are red from Schlitz. He stares at Eva for a long time, right in her eyes. And then those drunken eyes, which ain’t quite so sunken and raccooned anymore, they get shiny like there is tears rising up somewhere behind ’em.

“Dad says to try to get back here, but I don’t know how,” he says.

Eva Leigh, she’s got her hands cupped around Jimmy’s coffee mug. “I think you just put one foot in front of the other, Jimmy. You go through your days, scared or not, the best you can. That fear, it’s like a guard dog. It’s been on guard so long that it doesn’t know how to not be anymore. So if you sit still and wait for that fear to settle down, you’re going to be waiting your whole life. But if you keep walking through your days, doing the best you can, breathing when you forget to, and reminding yourself that things are different now, then in time that fear starts to settle down. It’s simple, but it isn’t easy.” Eva Leigh hands his coffee cup back to him.

Jimmy nods and sips his coffee. Nobody says nothing.

Before we leave, Eva Leigh rubs the side of Jimmy’s arm a little. She don’t say nothing, but she smiles without showing her teeth, and Jimmy does the same.

On the way home, it’s still snowing. Them teeny flakes looking almost like streaks of rain under the streetlights. Jimmy, he scoops up a handful of snow from the bank along the sidewalk and, without saying nothing, he throws it at me. That snowball crushes against my coat and falls in clumps. So I get snow and cup it into a snowball too, and I throw it back. Before you know it, me and Jimmy is running down that sidewalk throwing snowballs at each other. Jumping over the banks and ducking behind parked cars, and laughing and cussing and having a real good time.

Chapter 22

W
ell, someone sure looks spiffy tonight,” Ma says when Jimmy comes to the supper table wearing Old Spice and his nice blue shirt. “You going somewhere special?”

Jimmy pulls out his chair and sits down. He don’t even wait for Dad to sit down before he starts spearing them chicken pieces, looking for a thigh. “What? Can’t a guy look decent when he goes to the Ten Pin with his brother?” he says. One of Ma’s eyebrows lifts up as she looks at Dad, but she don’t say nothing.

Jimmy and me walk to the Ten Pin. Jimmy says the walking, even that little ways, is helping his legs get stronger. We walk with our hands stuffed in our pockets and our chins tipped down into our collars ’cause the wind is whipping.

“How long have you known Eva?” Jimmy asks me.

“Long time, I guess.”

“I remember Luke Leigh,” Jimmy says. “A real hotheaded, arrogant son of a bitch. Never could stand him. He was mean to her, huh?”

“He sure was. She used to come into the store all banged up.”

“I wonder why she didn’t leave him and go back home?”

“Well, her ma said she made her bed, so she’s gotta sleep in it. That’s what Ruby Leigh said. I told her I woulda just stopped making the goddamn bed then, if I was Eva Leigh.”

Jimmy laughs.

“Ruby Leigh, she said it didn’t matter anyway. She said the home Eva Leigh come from, it weren’t no better than living with Luke. She said it was worse, even.”

“Does she leave with guys after work like Ruby?” Jimmy asks. He ain’t smoking, but still he’s got smoke puffing outta his mouth, just like me, on accounta it’s so cold.

“She sure does,” I tell Jimmy. “She leaves with me. Why you asking so many questions about Eva Leigh?”

“No reason,” Jimmy says, but I don’t believe him.

“You sweet on her?”

“Nah,” he says, but I still don’t believe him.

That night we walk Eva Leigh home after work. And the next night too. Both nights Eva Leigh invites us up to her apartment.

Thursday night we talk about the crazy things we did when we was kids. Friday night we talk about music, and Eva Leigh plays songs on Ruby Leigh’s phonograph. When Jimmy sees she’s got a Louis Prima album, he lets out a holler and puts on “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” He makes Eva Leigh dance even though she ain’t never done the jitterbug before. Jimmy shows both of us the steps. Eva Leigh catches on real fast, but me, my feet just tangle like fish line.

Saturday morning Ma says, “You boys sure have been coming home late. You two aren’t up to any mischief, are you?”

“No, ma’am,” I say, “we ain’t up to no mischief. We’s just been stopping over at Eva Leigh’s after work. We walk her home, then we have coffee and cocoa. Jimmy taught Eva Leigh to do the jitterbug.” Jimmy, he kicks me under the table so I shut up, even though I don’t know why I gotta.

“Eva Leigh?” Ma’s boomerang eyebrows crawl halfway up her forehead. “She’s a widow. And she’s got a child.”

“Ma,” I say, “what’s wrong with girls who is left alone with a kid on accounta their man gets dead in the war? That don’t mean she’s the kinda girl a guy should stay away from, then, does it?”

Ma’s eyes get all big and blinky. “Well, I, I . . .”

“Pass the ham there, Earl,” Dad says, then he asks Ma if she remembered to renew the newspaper like he asked her to. Jimmy, he just grins down at his plate.

That night, Jimmy ain’t sitting at the bar with Floyd. He’s got a stool parked right up to the counter where Eva Leigh is working. “Looks like Jimmy’s moving in on your girlfriend, Earwig,” Skeeter says.

When I get my break, I don’t go to the counter to talk to Eva Leigh like I usually do. I go to the bar and I order a Coca-Cola. Ruby Leigh, she plunks the bottle on the bar and flips her head in the direction of the rental counter. “Those two are getting pretty cozy.” She almost sings them words.

“You think Eva Leigh will still be my friend, even if her and Jimmy get to be sweethearts?” I ask.

Ruby Leigh, she reaches across the bar and she taps my hand. Her hand’s still damp from washing glasses. “Oh, Earwig. Hearts aren’t like glasses you can only pour so much beer into. They’re as big as the sky, and a lot of people can fit into them. You’re her best friend. Nothing’s going to change that. You filled up the spot in her heart where a friend should be, but she’s still got an empty place in her heart where Luke used to be. Jimmy’s just going to fill up that spot, that’s all.”

That night, Ruby Leigh, she is going home with John, and me and Jimmy, we is walking Eva Leigh home. Jimmy don’t say much while we is walking. “You were pretty quiet tonight, Jimmy. You all right?” Eva Leigh asks as we’re rounding the barber shop.

“Sure,” Jimmy says. He says it the same way he says it when Ma asks.

Eva Leigh, she sounds just like Ma too, when she says, “Maybe you’re just tired. You’ve been keeping some pretty late hours.”

Eva Leigh pours coffee into cups for her and Jimmy. She is out of cocoa, so I drink half a Coca-Cola left in the icebox, even though it ain’t got no fizzles left.

I’m tired ’cause I been up late since Thursday night, so when I sit down and Eva Leigh puts on slow, quiet music, I start to slink down into the chair and my eyes go droopy.

Next thing I know my brain is waked up, but my eyes is still sleepy-shut. I can hear Jimmy and Eva Leigh talking. They is sitting on the couch. I can tell ’cause their voices are coming from over there.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know,” Eva Leigh is saying, and she sounds a little pissed, even though she ain’t yelling. I think maybe she ain’t yelling ’cause she don’t wanna wake me up.

Jimmy, he ain’t quiet when he answers, though. “Yeah, well, if you really want to know what happened, then you’re the fucking first. The government, my family, folks around here, you’re all the same—nobody wants to fucking hear. It’s get back to work, eat, smile, strut, act like it never happened so everybody can forget and get on with their fucking lives. Nobody seems to give a shit that maybe it ain’t so fucking easy for us.” I ain’t never heared Jimmy cuss in front of a girl before, so hearing him now makes my eyes wanna pop open and gawk at him, but I don’t let ’em.

The couch squeaks, like it does when somebody gets off it, and then I hear Jimmy’s feet, shuffling around like he’s walking in those circles he walks in when he gets skittery. He blows cigarette smoke out hard.

I keep my eyes shut and I tell my eyeballs to stop that damn twitching or Jimmy is gonna see that my brain is waked up and that I’m listening to something I probably ain’t supposed to listen to. I stay real still and try to keep from breathing hard, and I think maybe Eva Leigh is doing the same, ’cause I can’t even tell she’s in the room no more.

“Maybe it ain’t so goddamn easy for me, because no matter how many times I wash, I still feel blood, sticky on my hands. Sure, I eat, but maybe I’m just trying to forget the taste of fucking rats and rotted fish.” Jimmy is almost shouting now, his voice all hoarse and tight. He takes a few gulps of air, like he’s having trouble breathing. “And let me tell you something, Eva, no matter how much perfume a girl’s wearing, I still can’t smell nothing but the stink of death.

“It was fucking nuts over there. One day your heart’s aching from watching dying men suffer, then the next day you’re kicking somebody’s rotten corpse because it’s stinking up the place. It turned us into fucking animals.

“Goddammit . . . grown men crying out for their mothers, to God, to anyone who might come save them. But nobody came. Nobody.”

I open my eyes a teeny bit when Jimmy stops yelling. He is up against the wall, sliding his back down along it. When he reaches the floor, he wraps his arms around his legs tight, like he’s trying to get warm. When Jimmy starts talking again, it’s like he ain’t even talking to Eva Leigh no more. It’s like he ain’t talking to nobody but hisself, or maybe to God. “It was so damn hard, just trying to stay alive. No wonder when the guys were on the Jap freighters and our Navy attacked because they didn’t know U.S. prisoners were aboard, our guys cheered, just waiting for one of those torpedoes to blow the ship to hell, putting an end to it all.

“The sad part was that, after a time, we didn’t even give a shit who died.” Jimmy gets quiet, like he’s thinking on this a bit. Then he says, “Well, except for Cub. It was different when it was him.

“Christ, he was just a little shit. A poor farm boy from Brodhead. His ma was dead, his dad a drunk, his little brother with no one to take care of him but an old neighbor. Cub didn’t have one goddamn reason to smile, but he smiled anyway. The rest of us were walking corpses, but not Cub. Cub could still joke around. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. He made us laugh, and his laugh was all we had to keep us from losing our goddamn minds.

“Floyd was holding him when he died, Cub’s head on his lap. Cub was sick with jungle fever, and just the heat coming from his head was making Floyd sweat. Floyd was begging him not to die. I had his hand. I counted the seconds between his breaths. When I got up to a hundred, I stopped. I knew he wasn’t going to take another one.

“Floyd, he lost it then. He started shaking Cub, cussing at him, calling him a son of a bitch for dying, leaving us in that shithole without him. I moved Cub off of Floyd and folded his hands on his chest. I had to hold Floyd off when I was moving him, because Floyd went crazy. He was swinging at Cub’s dead body. He wanted to beat the shit out of him. It was crazy, but that’s how it was.”

I open my eyes. Jimmy’s got his face tucked down behind his knees now and he’s crying, his whole body’s shaking. I look over at the couch to make sure Eva Leigh’s still there, ’cause I didn’t hear her for a time. She’s there. She’s looking at Jimmy, tears running down her face like rain.

She gets up and she goes to Jimmy. She gets right down on her knees, and she wraps her arms around him and lays her cheek right on the top of his head, and she rocks him like she rocks LJ when he ain’t feeling good.

She rocks him for a long time, then she gets up and she takes his hand and helps him to the sofa. She sits down and pulls him right down beside her, taking his head and tucking it right under her chin. Jimmy, he’s crying and crying, and I ain’t never see’d Jimmy cry like that before, so that makes my tears run like rain too.

Neither of ’em look at me, so I put my eyelids back down.

It seems like forever before Jimmy stops bawling. When he does, he starts to apologize to Eva Leigh for saying them things, but she stops him. “Jimmy, I asked. You hear me?
I asked.
I think I understand some of what you went through, because all my life, up until a year or so ago, I lived in a prison too. I know the pain of holding secrets, and I know the pain that comes with telling them. Still, those secrets have to be told or we’ll never be set free.”

Jimmy sniffs hard, then after a time he says, “When I was on corpse detail, carrying those bodies to the pit, I envied them because they had been set free.

“I remember once, me and Cub we were carrying this guy who died from wet beriberi to the pit. I usually took pit duty with Floyd, but he wasn’t around, so I paired up with Cub.

“The ones who died of starvation or jungle fever, they were easy to carry, light as sparrows, but the ones who died from wet beriberi, they were heavy as hell, their bodies swollen up to two, three hundred pounds. Cub was getting sick from the fever and I knew he was practically on his knees, trying to keep his end of the pole up. I called back to him, ‘Is this fucker heavy enough, or what?’ And that crazy little Cub, he answered back, ‘No shit. What to hell was this fat fuck eating, anyway?’ It struck me so goddamn funny, the irony of a comment like that, that I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. There were guards standing twenty feet away, but still I laughed. I laughed so goddamn hard that I went down on my knees, right along with Cub.

“The minute the body hit the ground, it split open—like they’d do if you bumped them when they were so filled up with fluid—that yellow shit spewing all over until Cub and I were soaked with it, and all we could do was laugh. Laugh and laugh until we cried.”

Jimmy, he takes a big breath. When he starts talking again, he is crying, soft-like.

“After Cub died, I didn’t really have anybody I was close to, except Floyd, and I didn’t know if he was going to make it or not. I guess somewhere inside, I knew I would, but I wasn’t sure about him. I did my best to help him get by. I told him to look up at the sky when he couldn’t stand the sight of sickness and death no more.”

Jimmy sighs. “I told Floyd to think of Mary, and his old man, or anything that would keep him going. That’s what I did. I thought of Earwig and how he needed me. I thought of my folks having to deal with me dying. I thought about all the things I wanted to do before I died.

“I believe it was thinking about Mary and his old man that got Floyd through those first couple years . . . but then he lost his arm from a jungle ulcer.” Jimmy sighs again. “Crissakes, I just can’t believe this. We survived, we got back home, yet here we are, still trying to find a reason to keep living.”

They is quiet for a minute, then Jimmy says maybe he should wake me up and get me home. The couch squeaks, like Jimmy’s getting up, then it stops. I hear Eva Leigh say Jimmy’s name, real soft.

I know them smacking noises are kisses, so I keep my eyes shut tight. I ain’t suppose to gawk when Jimmy’s kissing on a girl.

The smacking gets louder, and I can hear their breaths coming faster, then it stops and Eva Leigh says, “Maybe it’s a good time to wake Earl.”

Jimmy comes over to me and whacks my shoe, saying, “Come on, Earwig, it’s time to head home.”

I make myself jump a bit, like people do when they get woked up fast, and I try to act like I didn’t even know Jimmy was saying them things. Jimmy, he tries to act like he wasn’t saying ’em either, but not Eva Leigh. She comes over to Jimmy and she takes his arm and she turns him so he’s gotta look at her. “It’s okay that you told me,” she says. “I mean that.” For a time, Eva Leigh and Jimmy look at each other, then he reaches out and wraps his arms around her, burying his face in the loopy curls sitting on her shoulder. I can tell they wanna kiss again, but they don’t.