Little Bastards in Springtime (44 page)

I can tell she’s starting to crumple, that she’s filling up with the old despair. I squeeze my eyes shut and force words out that need to be forced out. “Mama, listen to me for a second. Three things. One, I am sorry. Two, I love you. Three, we will see each other again, soon.”

I hang up quickly, slide down the wall to the floor, sit there trying to get my breath back. I’m still sitting when Big Red comes by and drags me to the restaurant. He asks me short sharp questions while he sits opposite me and I eat as fast and messily as a starving kid in one of the world’s stinking slums. He doesn’t seem to mind how I eat, he doesn’t seem to mind much. He’s looking into my eyes with his laser beams.

“You’re carrying something heavy in your unconscious mind, Jevrem. What is it?”

“What?” I ask him, since he’s looking at me like he’s expecting a response.

“Like rocks under water, completely invisible, people bury traumatic experiences so well they’re completely unaware of them. Except they keep capsizing as they try to paddle along the river of life.”

“Okay,” I say.

“For example, you killed someone,” he says, sipping from a huge glass of water that’s mostly ice.

“No,” I say slowly, feeling my face burn. “No, I didn’t.”

Big Red smiles like a fisherman who feels a tug on his line. He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring me down with those light-beams of his.

“Did I kill someone?” I repeat, trying to understand the question.

“You said that you killed someone.”

“I did? No, I didn’t say that.”

“You spoke in your sleep, Jevrem, over and over again, as hundreds of miles sped past. You called out names, you sounded distressed. You killed someone—two people, maybe?”

Big Red is crazy, all the sunlight has fried his brain. I feel
annoyed, I turn away, I try to get up. But he reaches over and pins my hands to the table. He’s surprisingly determined for a man of few words and surprisingly strong for a fat person who went skinny.

“It’s okay, you can tell me,” he says, and I know I don’t have a choice.

“I was a motherfucker,” I say. “I admit it, I terrorized totally clueless Canadian citizens in their houses. I feel bad about that, I really do, spreading that shit around. It wasn’t fair on them, they have no idea about the world out there and how totally ignorant and lucky their lives are.”

“No, no, there’s something more. Someone named Konstantin?”

I can’t breathe. The room keeps fading in and out. Because he’s right. It’s true. There is something else.

“Yes,” I say. “You’re right.”

“Who?”

“Who?”

I stare at a little gaggle that’s formed at the buffet, how they’re edging slowly around the salad bar.

“Who, Jevrem?”

“Who what?” I’m confused. I don’t understand what he wants from me.

Big Red leans forward in the booth. He pats my cheek with a heavy, warm hand.

“Jevrem, look at me.”

I try to look at him, but I can’t focus. He’s a blurry mass. My eyes are drawn away and up, and I’m looking at the corner of the room, high up, where the wall meets the ceiling. I can’t pull myself away from that spot, though there’s nothing there
but dingy shadows and dusty spiderwebs. Then I’m up in that corner, in a tight ball. I am the spider and my web trembles around me.

“Stay with me. Here, on your chair,” Big Red commands.

I’m in the chair again and wonder what the hell we’re talking about, and where all the food went. My plates are empty, I feel nauseated. Big Red pats my cheek again, he wants me to say something. In the next booth, two kids are jumping up and down on the seat while their parents eat pie. This is why truckers have a separate section for eating, I guess, though Big Red doesn’t seem to mind.

“Two kids. Konstantin and Galib, they were friends,” I say.

“What happened?”

“They were hit by a shell. Nezira was screaming, do something, do something. So I went up to them and crouched down next to them. Konstantin was mangled, so was Galib, there was blood everywhere. Konstantin was crying, help, help. I picked up a paving stone with both hands, I raised it over my head. I really wanted to do something, to make it all go away.”

“And what happened then?”

I look at Big Red but can’t hear what he’s saying. His mouth is moving, but there is no sound. I am sitting in silence. Suddenly I see it playing in front of my eyes like a movie. There I am, this skinny kid with bony wrists and mushroom cut, kneeling over a child who’s been thrown to the ground, who has blood seeping out of him, whose eyes don’t see anything anymore, with a paving stone held high over my head with two hands. I look determined and cringing at the same time, I’m biting my lip, I’m gritting my teeth. You can see my jaw muscles tensing, you can see my eyes squinting, I’m getting ready for the impact, for
the blood to spray, for Konstantin’s final cry to ring in my ears forever. I command myself to bring the paving stone down hard on Konstantin’s head … but nothing happens. I stay frozen like this for a moment, then lower the stone and burst into tears.

This is what I see as I review the scene. I burst into tears and I howl like a little boy, snot flying everywhere, veins in my neck and forehead standing out, my face bright red. Between howls I call for Mama and Papa, I call for them over and over. Then, suddenly, I stand up and walk away, in the direction of my apartment building. I stop crying, I don’t look back, I pay no attention to Nezira, who is still screaming high piercing notes. I stick my hands in my pockets, I kick a bit of rubble in front of me, and if it weren’t so noisy, the screaming, the moaning and begging, the shouting from balconies, the sirens, the shells going thud and boom, the guns going gak-gak-gak, I think it would be possible to hear me whistling.

“I didn’t kill them,” I say to Big Red, looking at my grease-smeared plate. “It’s much worse than that. I fell apart, then I just stood up and walked away.”

Big Red sits there. He seems to be almost asleep, his eyelids are lowered, his eyeballs are moving behind his eyelids, his face has no expression on it at all. I watch all the people at their tables eating yet one more meal in this endless feeding-frenzy called life. Then finally he speaks.

“I’m going to ask you to look at that scene one more time, Jevrem. What do you see?”

I shut my eyes and look again. I see those bloody lumps, how they’re so strange looking, how they hardly look like anything at all, and I see a child kneeling with a rock raised over his head, I see children running around screaming.

“Children,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s it. Just children, all of you, trying to make it through.”

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HERE ARE MOUNTAINS BEFORE YOU GET TO THE
coast. They form a spine down the western edge of the continent, as big as or bigger even than our mountains back home, but they’re smaller around the city of L.A., more like big foothills, I don’t know, Big Red goes on and on about them, about bigger and smaller mountains with oak, pine, and cedar trees, with streams and gorges, waterfalls and small lakes, and about foothills that are grassy not barren, but I can’t pay attention, I can’t even sit up. I have to lie back in the seat, I have to lie down as flat as I possible, I feel tired beyond life and death. Big Red says, it’s okay, you were a child, there was nothing you could have done, it wasn’t your responsibility, it was the adults and those who call themselves leaders who failed to protect you, forgive yourself, let it go. War is a criminal failure of fathering, plain and simple, if you ask me, all the fathers, the presidents, generals, foreign ministers, peace negotiators, men mostly, who make decisions that put their and other people’s children in the line of fire, because there’s always another way, you know that, no matter what anyone tells you. Shitty, immature, selfish dads, that’s the only way to think of them, they should all go to jail forever, the war heroes and the war criminals, the diplomats, negotiators, all of them together. He grumbles on and on, patting my thigh
in a fatherly way with that heavy warm hand of his, putting me to sleep.

I wake to Big Red shaking me. It’s dim, and perfectly still. The truck is parked.

“We’re here,” Big Red says.

“We’re where?”

I look out the window and there in front of me is the glittering ocean, so close I wonder for a moment if Big Red has driven right in. The moon got here before us, and it’s hanging proudly in the southwestern sky like the ocean below is its own clever invention. We climb down from the cab and lean against the bug-smeared grate. We try to light cigarettes in the breeze, we feel salt on our cheeks.

“That salt smell,” Big Red says, and he chuckles. “The ride across the whole country is worth this one moment, every time.”

“Do you need a trucker-helper, or something?” I ask.

“You’ve got a plan,” Big Red says, because he can read my mind. “Stick to it.”

“I do?”

“Somewhere in there you’re feeling your way home.”

“What home?”

“Exactly. That’s the blessing. I’m at home everywhere I go.”

And so it’s goodbye to Big Red too, to his questions, his Zen mind, his sunshiny X-ray eyes. We’re south of L.A. and he’s going farther south still, down to San Diego to deliver to a warehouse on its outskirts. After staring at the water for a while and listening to it roar and sigh, we get back into the truck and drive a few miles before he drops me off in a place called Huntington Beach. Before I slide off my high seat onto the unmoving ground, Big Red hands me a roll of twenties, like the one I left with Eddie. Just take it, he says, as I’m opening my
mouth to say no. Thanks, I say, I climb down and walk to the water without looking back.

I sit next to the embers of a dying fire abandoned hours ago, listen to the waves, steady and powerful, run coarse sand through my fingers, smoke, think about life-changing moments. When the sun rises I watch surfers climb into their suits and throw their boards into the water. I stay on the beach until late afternoon, sleeping, smoking, broiling my skin red, watching the beach people lounging through another day. When I get hungry I find a snack bar and buy three foot-long hot dogs, eat my first meal next to the thundering Pacific with skin stinging and salt in my eyes.

When the sun is a giant pink ball close to the horizon, I walk up to a group of surfer boys drinking around a truck. I ask them if they’ll sell me a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. They stare at me with stone faces and I can see in their eyes that I look strange to them, like a stray, a street kid, a refugee from another time, and I say, my knapsack got stolen but I’ve got money. They look at each other, shrug, ask how much I’m willing to pay. I say, I’ll pay whatever it is you want, and they ask, what’s the accent? I say, I’m from Europe, and they say, that’s cool, that’s tight, that’s real. They hand me a beer and tell me about their trips to England, Germany, Switzerland, France, the hotels, the powdery snow, the girls who put out, the drinking, the motor scooters, gambling, ganja, beaches, sailboats. Yes, yes, I say, that’s it, that was the life, and one of them goes off and comes back with a T-shirt with
Quicksilver
written on it, baggy shorts in blue and grey, a pair of black flip-flops. I give him three of Big Red’s twenties but he shakes his head and smiles a perfect, glistening, American-boy smile, and another boy goes to his car and finds me a baseball cap and a hooded sweatshirt, also dark
blue. I strip down in front of them, letting them jeer and slap each other, point and shout. And then I put on all their gifts to me. I strut, they whistle, and I know I’m in perfect disguise. The surfer boys build a huge hissing bonfire and I sit with them for a while. They joke like crazy boys, talk waves, equipment, girls, blow jobs, ask me questions about skiing in the Alps and surfing off the coast of Spain, Holland, Scotland. Before I leave, they say, stay out of the boneyard, and I say, you’re friendly and generous, not like your a-hole politicians. They laugh, they boo, they stand up and yell,
U.S.A. all the way, U.S.A. all the way.

I find a pay phone and call Ujak Luka’s number, the number that I memorized with Mama’s help. As it rings, I think about Baka’s children, how she built a whole world for them with her bare hands, how they got separated by war, how they ended up on far sides of a foreign continent not speaking to each other. As it rings, I look down at myself, feeling nervous, antsy. I hope that Ujak Luka doesn’t mind that I’m still kind of scrawny, just a kid. I’ll tell him not to worry, I’m fast and ruthless, I get in and out of places like a ghost, I take what’s necessary, I carry heat. After many rings, a kid answers and says hello in a high, steady voice.

I say, “Is … um …” and choke.

“What?” the kid says.

“I want to talk to …” I say. “Is your dad there?”

The child says, “Yes, just a minute,” drops the phone and rushes off shouting, “It’s a man from the old country.”

“Hello, Jevrem?” Ujak Luka’s voice is very familiar, as if I’ve heard it every day of my life.

‡

I
WAIT
on the road by the water, staring at the sailboats and yachts moored to the docks and the tall skinny palm trees that wave in the breeze. The sky is pink, the clouds on the horizon yellow, orange, purple. When Mercs, BMWs, and Jaguars approach, each one has Ujak Luka in it with two of his toughest bodyguards, two of his hottest girls falling all over him. But each car passes me by, leaves me standing like a fool with a forced grin on my face. I pace up and down, I chew my nails, I scratch my sandy scalp. I wait an hour, two hours, and then the sky turns electric blue and some stars come out. I think about taking off up the highway, going all the way to Alaska, over to Russia, back to my torn-up country.

The road is suddenly completely empty. I’m looking for a place sheltered from the accelerating breeze to lie down for the night, feeling pissed off and relieved both at the same time, when a beat-up old VW van races up, stops, and two small girls jump out and run toward me.

“Jevrem,” they call out. “Jevrem.”

It’s Berina and Aisha all over again, at three or four years old, the same fine dark hair down their backs, the same huge eyes and mischievous smiles.