Criminals (15 page)

For years I looked for him. If I denied him in school, I have kept faith with him since. Now that I have children I see that his condition was more serious than we thought. His stealing, setting fires. It may be that, just as our teachers said, he was headed for one of the jails that are the estate of such boys. Ruin. If he lived to be ruined. But something told me, when I was grown, that his father did not kill him, as I sometimes dreamed he had, and that he himself did not hurt anyone, that he was not in jail. That he went on and lived, found pleasures that no one refused him. Maybe his temper cooled, maybe he enlisted in the army—no, not Vietnam, no, he might have had a record that would have kept him out of the service. No, he lived. He straightened out, found his work. Or if he was the criminal they said he would be, a year came when he broke free, fought his way out of his earlier self, and in a face he saw one day, found me, the one who would love him forever.

the war poem

I
n the last weeks of waiting for the opening shots of Desert Storm, Wally wrote a poem, the best he had ever written. It was 1991 and at that time the word “run-up” was new; no one was used to a waiting period before a scheduled war, like the overture to an opera. Carrying a “No War” sign to vigils beside the road for six months had left him giving angry drivers the finger and filled him with despair, but he was twenty-seven at the time, he had a girlfriend, a good job as a reporter, and a notebook of poems, and he put the despair into a poem.

Once he had some money saved he was going to leave the paper and write full time. He wasn't going to accept anything from his family. His girlfriend Janine, who was working at the paper as a temp while she learned Italian for her audition with the opera, said they could give it to her instead. She made the opera chorus, and during her performances Wally would take his press pass and stand backstage. It was a period when they both said they were overcommitted and overworked, they said they were poor, they said they were prisoners of the state. But looking back later Wally saw the time as full of a benign rushing—at twilight to antiwar meetings and opera rehearsals, at midnight to the half-darkened offices of the newspaper—and full of
costumed dancing, the rumble of timpani, poems read aloud, exhilarating denunciations. Endless pitchers set down in wet rings, endless corkscrews sunk and pulled. Friends of his who could duel all night over who had dug deepest for background on Kuwait, friends of hers who could sing “Casta Diva” as easily as they sang along with Alice in Chains. They all agreed that Janine, in her villager's apron and puff sleeves, had a better mezzo than the guest soprano.

The poem Wally wrote in this period was about Elton, Oklahoma. The town of Elton was his own invention. He had checked directories at the paper and there was no such place. He worked on the poem in a trance of excitement: he had never been in Oklahoma, but as the town took shape in his mind he poured into it everything the planned war had aroused in him, every feeling for boys in towns around the country who were about to take part in a ground war, boys the age he had been a very few years before when he was sitting around a bong with his friends studying for the SAT, but boys who would deploy—word dropped into the news every night like salt—and then as intently and fairly as they might observe hunting season, go out to kill their counterparts, and who, being from a small town asleep in farmland, might know by name the stonecutter who would carve 1-9-9-1 into their headstones. In fact the thought of his own snug safety, in contrast to the risk these boys faced in carrying out their orders, shamed Wally, and out of that came the poem, a thing of some form, as he was proud to discover in the exhaustion of finishing it, but even more a thing of feeling.

He sent the poem to his friend Gustav, who had quit his job writing copy for the Auto Section and moved to the East Coast. Gustav had never really been a fit at the paper. He had come up to Auto after an editor got talking to him in the mailroom—though Gustav wasn't really a talker, more the kind of mild guy you bitched to in the cafeteria. He would rub his eyes, put down his carton of milk to listen. He was younger than the rest of them but he could not stay up late, and because of that he had rarely joined in the gatherings after work. If he drank two beers he fell asleep at the bar. In truth he was too gloomy for their company, too preoccupied with the care of his younger
brothers while his mother was in and out of the hospital. Wally had met the brothers when he went over to watch a game with Gus. Over the afternoon he had noticed that if you talked during a game in that house no one answered. The wallpaper gave off the mother's smoke. Eventually the four of them picked up and moved back east so the mother could be near family, but once they were back in her old neighborhood in New Jersey, she died. His brothers finished high school and Gustav decided to stay where he was and get a teaching certificate. Even though he had written for a newspaper, the program required him to take a composition course, and there his instructor took a shine to something he wrote about cars. Through her offices Gustav got Wally's poem into the hands of an editor, and it was accepted at a literary magazine.

Wally subscribed to the journal immediately, and not sure the first issue that came would be the one with his poem in it, he ran his hands over the cover design of green and brown camouflage, seeing with a mild disappointment that the whole issue was devoted to the war. But there was his poem, lying in its own sunlight on the white page, fresh as a town in farmland—and there, just below the title “Elton, Oklahoma,” lay the name Gus Horn.

Gustav called him the same day. The editor had made a mistake. The poem had arrived in an envelope with his, Gustav's, return address on it. Not really the editor: a student volunteer had made the mistake, but like Gustav, the editor was abject, and had given his word that it would be corrected prominently in the next issue. But there was no next issue; the magazine folded.

That such a mistake could have happened, and be saved forever in print! It was a punch in the gut. The second poem Wally had published in six years of trying was not to bring him a single reader. For several weeks before the demise of the magazine, he called Gustav every few days to find out what was being done to get the word out quickly about the mistake. Finally Gustav, in a voice of despair, told him that not only was nobody calling him back, but the magazine's phone was out of service and the fact was that nobody was in the building any more.

For Wally, the muddy camouflage colors of this event—for it was an event, no matter how Janine might characterize it when she tired of his depression—seeped into the next couple of years. A few more poems came to him, and then without any farewell he stopped expecting them. He grew more wary on the one hand and on the other freer in his habits, often drinking late with his coworkers and going home in a pugnacious mood. He lost Janine.

When he passed thirty he came out of this phase and into a time of expanding his goals. After a few more years at the paper covering union disputes with local industry he took his father's advice and applied to law school, got in, and did well in his courses. By the time he was in practice, his girlfriends were enough younger, enough used to war, that there was no point in bringing up a time when he had grabbed his head in both hands as a poem came to him almost whole. He couldn't even picture Gustav clearly, and there was no one except Janine—and that was a long shot—who remembered the matter. There was no way to show anyone the thing in print anyway, in part because although thousands had met their deaths in that war, almost every soldier who left the US to fight it had come back alive.

Some years later, he was going to New York to interview for a job. He was doing well in a respected practice in town; he had married and divorced, he had a new girlfriend with whom he was thinking of buying a house if he didn't care for the offer from New York. Planning his trip, he decided to track down Gustav Horn. Gus. The group of them at the paper had bestowed the name Gustav on Gus Horn in much the same way Wally had named his town Elton. Without any protest Gus had allowed the name to become his. If you called and asked for Gustav in the old days, you heard the mother say in her cracked voice, “Gus, I mean Gus
tav,
it's for you.” Wally couldn't remember if his given name had been August or just Gus.

It was easy to find Gustav, because he had not moved from where he had lived at the time Wally had been in touch with him every few days about the poem. He had the same phone number. He was glad to hear from Wally after years—was it twelve, thirteen?—and gave directions to his apartment in Jersey City. He was teaching the fifth grade.

The woman who answered Gustav's door shook Wally's hand with a strong grip. “This is Benilda,” said Gustav, coming around her to give Wally a bear hug, as people had done in Seattle in the days when they were all working at the paper. Now it was the new century and there was less of that. Gustav had gone bald. “Benilda,” said Wally, checking for a wedding ring. There it was. Benilda had long hair, dense and black, held back from her face with clips.

They took him into the living room where a dark-haired three- or four-year-old child, a boy, was sitting on the floor with a book. The child looked up at Wally for a moment with what resembled polite respect. Wally felt a power coming from Benilda directly at him as he looked at the child, a foreignness, some assumption that was going to trip him up if he wasn't careful. “And who have we here?” he said.

That was the right thing. “Gustavo,” said Benilda. She had a pleasant alto voice but a way of looking at her guest steadily as if he were in the middle of some test of manhood.

“Age four,” Gustav added with a grin of delight. Wally looked around at the furniture. Loud curtains and a big saddle-bagged couch of russet leather that took up half the living room. A madonna on the mantel, reflected in a mirror framed with tiles that looked as if they might have been painted by the little boy. Wally smiled. He began to relax.

The fight started when after a heavy dinner of rice and spicy meat and a lot of wine, turning Gus's pale wide face florid as it had when he was young, the new war came up, the Iraq war. Benilda had a grown son and he was over there in a city she named. Wally stayed in close enough touch with a couple of guys at the paper to know that the current protesters were justified in their chanting of the name of that particular place. In one siege, hospitals had been bombed. He knew two photographers who were over there. At the moment the bombs dropped, as in hospitals anywhere, people were on the operating table.

“Bennie, we got some more red in there?”

Benilda set another bottle on the table, and leaning back in his chair Wally began to bring in his rusty writing skills, hearing himself
with some surprise. He could still make a person see it. The sick in their beds, trying to fall asleep. Babies in their isolettes. In the OR, open bellies.

“I am proud of my son,” said Benilda. “
Mijo
, time for you to go to bed.”

The little boy had eaten heartily without speaking during the meal, and did not ask for any dessert or protest his bedtime. He went to Gustav's chair to be kissed, and stopped at Wally's chair to say good night.

“Antonio would never take part in a thing like that. Antonio, her son,” Gus said when they had left the table, and Wally heard in his voice an echo of Benilda's accent, a warning echo, if he had paused to interpret it.

Wally said, “Jesus Christ, Gus.”

“Jesus Christ, what?”

“Are you following this war? Don't you remember? Don't you remember how this all got started?”

“I remember.”

“Where exactly,” said Wally. “Where exactly are you, these days? On the issues, I mean.”

“What do you mean, issues?”

“I mean. I mean, are you on the side of the jackasses who are running these wars?”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I look around me,” said Wally, surveying the table from which Gustav had cleared the smeared plates and the many serving dishes.

“At what?”

“At this, this life you have. Jesus. What do you say to your students? What, fifth grade? Kids, get ready to fight in the Middle East. We'll have a war there for you, too. Be proud! Make your mothers proud!”

“No, I don't say that.”

“Does Antonio come in and speak to your class?”

“Antonio is not in this country,” said Gustav with a politeness that belied the red in his cheeks. He looked at his watch.

“Is it your bedtime?” Wally said.

“Not sure where this is going, buddy.” Gustav was shaking his head in his old easygoing baffled way but with a keener look at Wally from under his thick eyebrows than he would have had in the old days.

Wally downed his wine. “Buddy, is it? Where's the bathroom at?” He had no idea why he added the “at.” Anybody from the secretaries on up saying that at the firm, or using “lay” for “lie,” had to buy coffee. To his embarrassment the tablecloth caught at his knee when he was getting off the chair and he pulled the cloth askew and staggered.

Gus pointed. From the table you could see down the hallway, where one of the three doors had to be the bathroom. He almost collided with Benilda coming out of the kid's room. She steadied him at the elbow. He got a little dizzy peeing and stayed in the bathroom for a few minutes, drying his hands and looking at the tub and the shower curtain with fish and bubbles. There was a kid's washcloth with a lion on it on the side of the tub. When he came back to the table he could see Benilda in the kitchen holding her hair up off her neck with one hand. She let go and the black hair fanned out over her back, almost to the waist. A photograph would have you read that as beauty, or at any rate as something more timeless or complete than it actually was. Wally knew that, he had worked with photographers. From the sink Benilda called to Gus, “Did you show Wally your book?”