The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (61 page)

“I said, that’s enough.” Jane puts up her hand as if to ward him off but the battlefield names keep rolling out on a current of rage and it is too much. It’s just too much.

“You know you were fucking him, you bitch, and all the time … Don’t you see where I was?”

“Just stop!” It’s his health that angers her, the strong arms and firm jaw and the forearms like blades; there are dumbbells crossed on the side table and a metal triangle hangs above the bed. This old man is so strong that he can go on forever. He can shout on and on unless somebody stops him. “Shut up.”

He is raging at a world of people she can’t see and never was, people that she
won’t see and can’t help and it is terrible. “That’s all you know, Sergeant.” Then, “Shut up, you unfaithful bitch. Shut up or they’ll shave all your hair and rape you to death for being a collaborator. They’ll lock you up.”

She shouts back, “Shut up or they’ll lock you up!”

This is how he silences her. “I was locked up. Who do you think killed Vic?”

“Who
are
you?”

“You weren’t there, Sergeant. None of you were, so you don’t know what became of us. What do you know about it?”

Jane throws back her head like a horse that’s been spooked; eyes wide, whites showing all the way around. “Oh, stop it. Just
don’t!
”

“What do you know about Vic?” The eyes the old man turns toward her are like milk glass, shining and opaque. There’s a chance that he still doesn’t know that Jane is here. It doesn’t matter whether she’s here or not or who she is or even whether she’s listening. The harangue is etched into his mind. “You didn’t crawl through shit and you didn’t see your buddy’s face blown off or your best friend’s belly torn up by a grenade. You didn’t see anything, you little bitch,” he says. So he does see her. And now that he sees her his face splits open and she looks into the agony. He is crying for both of them. “You careless, careless bitch.”

The pain is so obvious and so powerful that her voice shakes. “I’m so sorry it hurts!”

“Who did this to us? Whose fault is it then?”

Trembling, she backs away. “I’ll go get somebody.”

“Don’t! I’m not finished with you.”

“I’m only trying to help.”

“Shit on that. Shit on your help.” The old soldier rolls his head from side to side on the pillow, looking here, there, nowhere, tossing hopelessly like a child who’s never been rocked. He is struggling. “Don’t go.” Words back up in his throat and he strangles on them.

I said, let me in!

“I’ll get a doctor.”

His face writhes in a series of conflicting expressions. “Fuck that shit. Get out!”

“They’ll give you a shot.”

“You bitch, you’re just like all the rest of them.” The old veteran is so filled with grief and hatred that the words come out in puffs like exploding shells. “Alana, the kids. Now go away.”

Jane is stumbling backward to the door when his expression changes. There is a stir at her back. It’s more than a shadow, she thinks, but can’t be sure. There is something new in the room. Whatever it is, it keeps her in place while the old man’s words blur with pain and stop being speech. He groans aloud. She tries again, “Please let me get someone.”

“Just go away! Take the kids and get out of here.” He can hardly breathe. “Get out before you get hurt.”

Trapped in the bed like that, how could he … Still she’s afraid. Her voice trembles. “Just don’t hurt my grandmother.”

“You have no idea what I can do.”

“Nurse! The bell, Mr. ah.”

“That’s classified!”

“
OK, OK
.” Shaking, she advances. “Ah. Don’t hurt me, I’m just going to reach over here and ring the …”

“No! You have no idea what I can do.”

“I’m only trying to help!”

“Stay back!” The force of his hatred overturns her, “You have no idea what I can do to you!”

“You did it,” she murmurs, frozen in place. “You killed Vic.”

“I did. I kill everything I love!” The rest comes out in a spray—his story, Jane guesses, but so distorted by resentment that she can’t make it out—a dozen voices fill the room: allies and enemies, traitors, everyone, the story that came before everything else in his life comes tumbling out so fast that nobody in this life could sort it out, and as he rambles, shadows begin rolling into the room. He rasps, “Yes I killed him, and I’ll kill you too.”

At her back something moves and she wheels, startled, and looks into its face. He looks so
nice
. “Who are you?”

“I’ll kill everyone who …” But the furious old soldier sees it too. He bares his teeth, thundering: “Go away!”

But the gnashing, outraged old man can’t frighten the young one no matter how loud he shouts. The young soldier is smiling, fresh-faced and handsome and easy in the fatigues, with his combat boots hanging down from laces knotted around his neck, hitting the dogtags that dangle from a chain until they clink. The muddy helmet swings from one hand. With the other, he makes a cross on his lips as the old man in the bed goes on railing:

“It serves him right, you know. God damned Vic …”

“What?” she cries.

“It serves you right.”

This nice young man; she asks, “What did you do to him?”

Shh.
The newcomer shakes his head and without speaking he tells her,
Shh. You don’t need to know.

“Who are you?” she asks. Then she knows. It’s Vic, he is this patient’s long-dead victim and now he’s come back to confront the man who murdered him all those years ago. She turns to the young soldier. “Oh, Vic. Poor Vic!”

The old man sits bolt upright. “You called?”

“Vic?” She turns from one to the other. The profile, the eyes … She covers her mouth and points at the veteran in the bed. “You’re Vic!”

“This is all your fault!” The milk glass eyes snap wide. His voice overflows the room and roars down the hall. “You brought him, you bitch. Get out.”

Jane hears footsteps approaching—the nurse, orderlies—but she says, “Oh my God, I’m sorry.” She doesn’t know why she’s crying, but she is.

“Die, you bastard.” Propped on trembling arms he snarls at the young man, “Finish it!”

The air in the room shimmers. There is a decision hanging fire.

Not now.

“Die, God damn you. Go ahead and get it over with!”

Jane wheels to protect the young soldier—Vic? But he shakes his head.
No
. In the next second, he is gone.

“Get out!”

As the head nurse comes into the room. “Victor Earhart, you stop that! You stop abusing people around here! I’m sorry,” she says to Jane. “He has a history.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bitch, you bitch. You get the fuck out!”

“Don’t worry,” she says to Jane, “he does that to everybody, he just drives people away.” With the heel of her hand she straight arms the old veteran, pushing him down on the pillow. “Keep it down, Vic, or I’ll have to give you a shot.”

Vic?

“Shut up, Vic, she’s going.”

Vic.

“Go away.” He is howling now. “Go away, God damn you, go!”

“I am!” Sobbing, she runs. Jane retreats to Gram’s room, to nice Gram who has been stripped of her possessions, her flesh, of all the old, bad complications, so the sweetness is the only thing left. And the pain, she sees now. The pain.

“Oh,” Gram says, extending her arms to Jane. Her smile turns on with the force of a thousand halogen lamps. “Oh, how nice!”

“Oh, Gram.” Jane advances with her arms out, she can hug Gram and even though Gram has lost her powers, she can still make it all right. In the next second she realizes her grandmother isn’t looking at her. The old lady’s thin arms fan out in a welcoming hug and her face lights up, but it isn’t her granddaughter she’s reaching for and it isn’t Mom. It isn’t anybody in this world, Jane understands. Gram is reaching for somebody else.

Turning, she sees that the shadows have followed her out of the old veteran’s room and gathered in Gram’s nice place, and with them, the new force that came into the building today to effect—not revenge, a rescue? Young Vic is standing here in Gram’s room in his fatigues with boots around his neck and the helmet dangling. He’s taken off his dogtags and he carries them in the other hand. Grinning, he tosses them to Gram.

Across the hall, the old veteran starts. “Who killed Vic?” Old man, old man! He can’t shut up. Now he’ll never shut up.

I came for you. Come with me?

“Oh Gram, please don’t …”

With that smile blazing, she does.

—
Infinity Plus One
, 2001

Incursions

Lives go to pieces incrementally, not all at once, although it may take some of us a while to notice. Man wakes up in the middle of an empty field with his arms swinging; his heart is doing cartwheels while his head struggles to catch up.
Over
, he thinks, with the hammer behind his eyes thudding against his frontal bone: dawning terror, followed by recognition.
My life is over.

His head jerks and hits plastic. Oh. Dream. I’m on the train. He unfolds his crumpled ticket and holds it up for the waiting conductor. Get hold of yourself, Travers. You’re not crossing the Styx or anything, you’re going to the city for a meeting.

But he can’t stop the sound of the mallet pounding inside his skull, unless it’s the thunder of his own blood: Duh. Duh-duh-duh-duh. Duh.

Travers clutches his Nokia and cell phones home. “I’m on the train.”

The woman keyboarding next to him growls, “We know.”

“Can you hear me? I’m on the train.”

There may be sound at the other end but it isn’t loud enough to make out.

“Sandra? It’s me, Dave. Can you hear me?” He raises his voice, in case. He really means, do you love me, but he’s afraid to ask.

Around Travers, the regulars reading newspapers or tap-tapping on notebooks and PDAs frown and clear their throats. The passenger shouting into his cell phone is disrupting the flow. They all have their habits and know each other on sight. They are easy here because they do this every day; they muse or work or sleep on the train and time disappears, whereas Travers is new and every second has an edge. He doesn’t
do
like they do, he is uncoordinated and gauche; he’s talking too loud. He should learn to keep his head down and his elbows close to his sides.

It isn’t Dave’s fault; he doesn’t know. Dave Travers isn’t your ordinary commuter. In fact, he hasn’t been to the city since he took Sandra to the World Trade Center on their anniversary, the year before the fall. He doesn’t fit in with the regulars on this morning milk run; he isn’t a broker or a banker or a lawyer who chose to commute so the kids could grow up in a town with grass, he’s a junior college professor doing everything within his power to bring himself up in the world. He’s only teaching college because his folks said he was too smart to work at Kmart and he can’t think of anything else to do.

He’s never wanted to teach. He doesn’t like it and he hates his middle aged night-schoolers with their moist, uncomprehending stares. He hates not being any better than he is. It’s not as though he ever will be, either, except in one respect. Unlike most people, he knows it. Still there are changes he can make.

He has a meeting in New York today, a travel agency interviewing possible on-site people they can post to Mexican Hat to lead their Monument Valley tours, tailor made for a guy who is sick of his life. At least that’s what Travers tells himself. He does, after all, know a little something about the West, having read about it for years. What’s it really like in Mexican Hat? Would Sandra like it there? He doesn’t know. All he knows is that they both need a change.

“Sandra?” He’s calling her all the way from this train, roving charges and all that implies, and so far she hasn’t even said hello. “I know you’re there Sandra, can you hear me!”

Around him the regulars look up, annoyed.

He just can’t go on the way he is. He taps the phone and says, louder: “Can you hear me?”

Six passengers chorus, “If we can hear you, they can hear you.”