The Train of Small Mercies (9 page)

“How about this,” she said again. Her eyes eventually drifted past them, and when they went to the railroad tracks she said to Roy, “Oh, did you know that the funeral train is going to pass right by?” She pointed out past the edge of their yard, where there were a few more weathered lawn chairs, to the gravel-lined tracks. Beyond the tracks was an expanse of woods, spindly pine trees mostly, half of which were bare.

“There are a lot of people who'd loved to have a view like that today,” Roy offered. He looked over to the neighbor's yard for comparison. A good part of it was taken up with liriope, and there were clothes drying on the line, rippling in the breeze like ghosts.

“It's all so terrible,” Ellie said. Roy thought that if he didn't reply, she might have no choice but to leave them alone. He nodded once quickly, then glanced back over to the tracks.

“Well, I'll let you talk, then,” she said, and she squeezed Jamie's shoulder before excusing herself.

Roy opened a page of his notebook and took in Jamie's face for the first time. There was a watery sharpness to the lines of his jaw now, and he was broader through the shoulders. His hair was growing out from his military cut. Even Jamie's hands looked bigger, meatier.

“So, thanks for agreeing to talk to me,” Roy said.

Jamie's sly grin had faded, and for the first time he appeared to Roy the way he had back in high school. Handsome, confident, unimpressed by everything around him.

“So how's Claire?” Jamie said, in a voice meant to convey his indifference.

“Oh, you know, I really wouldn't know,” Roy said, and tried to make a laughing sound. “I haven't talked to her in over two years, probably. Yeah. After high school, we just kind of fell out of touch, really. You get into different colleges, and it's just harder to keep up. And, too, you get into college, and, well, you're different, you know? Or maybe it's just that you're older. I don't know if she's the same girl anymore. Maybe.”

“War tends to change you a little bit. Look at the great change I got.”

Roy looked at Jamie's leg—or at what wasn't there. Jamie was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, and the leg ended just a few inches past the cuff. It was perfectly rounded off—like a watermelon, Roy thought. He had seen this type of injury before, but not up close. He could see the purple traces of scars from the amputation surgery, but they were disappearing already. In most ways, the leg looked as if it had never extended any farther.

“I really am sorry about that, Jamie,” Roy said. “I know that must be really difficult. I just can't imagine.”

“I guess a missing leg makes a newspaper story around here.”

“Oh, I don't think we were thinking of it like that. Not at all. But what do you think? Can I turn this on?” He held the little microphone between them, and he was embarrassed to see that his hand was shaking slightly. Jamie stared at it for a moment, and it reminded him of all the times he had passed Murphy in the hallway—Murphy keeping his head down, always averting his eyes. Murphy couldn't have weighed any more than Claire back then. Murphy the pencil. Now here he was these years later, but who had the upper hand? Jamie glanced out beyond the fence and could feel that old resentment toward him once more.

“Sure.”

“So here's how it works,” Roy said. “If there's anything you don't want to answer, just say so. Otherwise, we'll say that everything you say is all on the record. Which just means that would be part of what I could consider using for the article. Quotes.”

“So college has changed you, too, you're saying. You mean you're not still that All-American listener? That's what Claire used to say about you. What a good listener you were.”

“Yeah, that was me,” Roy said. “The man on the sidelines.”

“I guess you knew a lot about me through Claire.”

“Not really,” Roy said. “Sock hops. Proms. Doesn't that feel like a long time ago to you?”

“Yep.” Jamie swatted at something buzzing near him.

“We were talking about changing. Besides the injury, how would you say that being in Vietnam has changed you? Or do you think it did at all? Or maybe you feel like it's too early to know.”

Roy leaned over the tape recorder to make sure the cogs were spinning.

“I wrote Claire when I was over there,” Jamie said, “even though I'd heard she had a boyfriend. She wrote me two letters back. The first one was all about the classes she was taking, her sorority, how hard she was studying. Like I was some kind of pen pal or something. Guys around me are getting sexy pictures of their girlfriends, letters about how they're waiting for them to come home. I guess I was kind of hoping for something more than reports from Biology 101 and English Literature.”

Roy offered a nod of compassion. He understood he wasn't going to get answers to his questions until he let Jamie say everything he wanted to about Claire.

“You probably saw all that coming, didn't you?” Jamie said. “You probably saw it long before I did, Claire finding some slick Joe College after high school.”

“Well, Claire was complicated,” Roy said quickly. He realized his mistake too late and shielded his eyes from the sun, though they were sitting in the shade.

Jamie almost smiled at Murphy's nerve. What Murphy said was true, but Jamie knew it must have brought some satisfaction for Murphy to be the one to say it. Murphy probably
had
spent more time with Claire, in the end. But she had dropped him, too. In most ways, it was like she didn't exist anymore—no one had seen her, no one had heard from her. There was another guy from their high school who had gone off to Vietnam—Barry Yarborough, nose tackle on the football team, always singing Beach Boys songs, his little brother killed in a school bus accident—and as Jamie had heard it, no one knew whether he had been captured or killed, or whether he had simply run off. The last anyone had seen him, according to Sutton, he was with his platoon in Hue. Missing in action. That was how he thought of Claire now.

D
elores would meet her friends and possibly their husbands just a mile from Arch's shop. Until then, Delores would have to entertain Rebecca in out-of-the-way places.

Delores put her sign and Rebecca's pictures in the backseat of their car. Rebecca sat in the passenger seat and clutched her one-eyed doll named Millie. Delores backed them out of the long driveway without knowing where they were going.

“Was that fun?” she asked. “Did you like painting?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said.

“We're good painters, aren't we?” Rebecca nodded. “Your brothers used to like to paint, too. Now if it's not a football or a BB gun, I can't get them to touch it.” In the last six months Delores had lost all inclination to censor herself with Rebecca. She talked about how difficult Rebecca's brothers had become, how intolerant Rebecca's father could be of the things that Delores wanted to do or believed in. She even told Rebecca when she had insisted that Arch sleep on the couch, which on average was about once every couple of months. Once she told Rebecca that deep down her father was a good man, but that he could be oppressive, and then she explained what that word meant. On such occasions Rebecca had learned to arrange her face in some pensive expression, which Delores willed herself to see as sympathetic comprehension. Rebecca had learned to nod at the right moments, say, “Yes,” when Delores finished her thoughts by asking, “So do you see how that would make me feel?”

Delores thumped her fingers against the rubber-covered steering wheel.

“You and I are going to see a train today, sugarplum. Would you like that?”

Rebecca studied her mother. In truth, Rebecca had no particular fondness for trains—or for anything with wheels on it—but to her mother, and she shook her head vigorously.

“Well, good. It's going to be going really fast, and it's not going to stop for us, but we can wave bye-bye to all the people on board, and maybe they'll wave to us. But that's not for a while. Not until after lunch. Meanwhile, we just have to decide what we want to do. Today everything we do is going to be our secret.”

I
n the days since he had been back, Ty, Daniel, and Walt had not asked Michael about his time with his father, since their parents had drummed it into them to treat Michael as if nothing unusual had happened. But they very much wanted to know the story. In the early days of his absence, they knew only that he was missing. From the way their parents shook their heads with concern while saying so little in front of them, the boys came to wonder if they would ever see their friend again. When their mothers said, “We just have to hope,” the boys took that to mean the situation was beyond hope.

By the end of that first week, the tone of discussions had shifted. The rumor was that Michael's father had taken him, and now when the subject of Michael came up at the dinner table, there was a brightness in their parents' voices.

“Sooner or later, they're going to find that father of his,” Ty's mother had said. “And Michael will be just fine.”

“I'll bet Michael has no idea of all the trouble his father is in,” Walt's mother said.

“Michael will be home soon,” Daniel's mother said. “And then his father can get what's coming to him for putting his mother to such worry.”

As the four boys walked through the tall grass, Daniel looked at Walt, and then both of them looked at Ty. Michael was whistling the melody to “Walk, Don't Run.” When they reached the group of trees they intended to climb, they surveyed the freshly cut grass and stared up at the potential branches on which to perch themselves.

“Here it comes!” Daniel called out. “Here comes the train!”

The boys looked down the tracks.

“Made you look,” Daniel said.

“Hey, I knew it wasn't,” Walt said.

“Hey hey hey,” Ty said. “Don't be such morons.” He spit convincingly, the way his older brother had taught him. “It's hot as hell. We should be swimming.”

“Well, they're not bringing his body by
boat
,” said Daniel. He had a new strategy lately of countering Ty's insults with his own, but this didn't seem to have any discernible effect.

“They're going to bring
your
body by boat,” Ty said. “A tugboat. I was just talking about the heat.”

“Hey, you want to go to the pool later and see Marianne Las-siter?” Walt said.

“Why would I want to see her? With those hairy arms. Her arms are hairier than a gorilla's.”

“Then her bush must be like a jungle,” Daniel said.

“Like you know about her bush,” Ty said.

“I know it's hairy,” Daniel said.

“You don't know crap,” Ty said and flicked Michael on his forearm to make sure he was not the only one incredulous that Daniel could know anything about any girl's privates. “She doesn't even know who you are. You swim in the kiddie pool, anyway.”

“I was just playing around that day,” Daniel said. “I wasn't swimming in it.”

“Michael, we were at the pool the other day,” Ty said, “and Daniel was over there trying to swim laps in the
kiddie
pool with all these moms and their babies all over the place, and the lifeguards told him to get out.”

Michael offered the obliged snicker. He had not been to the pool yet and wondered which of the lifeguards were back from last year.

“Hey, what are we going to do?” Walt asked. “This is boring, just waiting around.” He checked his watch. They were expecting the train to come by at one-fifteen.

“All right, I know what,” Ty said. “I'm going to be Sirhan Sirhan, and someone be Kennedy.”

“I will,” Walt said.

“Okay, Walt's Kennedy in the hotel, and he's coming through the kitchen of that hotel.”

“Who are we?” Daniel asked.

“You be the guys that grabbed Sirhan and wrestled the gun out of his hand. Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson.”

“Who's Rafer Johnson?” Daniel asked.

“Some athlete who won a gold medal in the Olympics,” Ty said.

“Oh. I'm Rosey Grier,” Daniel said. “Michael, you be Rafer Johnson. But other people got shot, too.”

“Well, do you want to be the woman instead?” Ty said. “A woman got shot.”

Daniel pulled his T-shirt out at the chest and sang in a girlish voice,
“I've just been shot in my boobies
.
”

“Shut up,” Ty said. “You're Rosey Grier.” He paced around, trying to conjure up what he had heard Walter Cronkite describe on the evening news that Wednesday.

“Okay, I'm here in the corner,” Ty said, crouching. “You don't see me, though.”

“Hey, we won California,” Walt said. “Whooooo.” He strutted with his arms stretched above him. He then put them down to shake someone's hand. “Thank you, thank you.”

Daniel and Michael walked uncertainly behind him. “Congratulations, Senator,” Daniel said at last.

“Blam!” Sirhan Sirhan had taken fire, and Kennedy collapsed to the ground, clutching his head. “Blam!”

“Who's shooting?” Daniel called out. “Over there! Get him!”

Ty got off another two shots before standing up and running from Daniel. Michael quickly followed. Ty eventually curled his body against himself and froze, holding out his shooting hand while Daniel tackled him and reached for the weapon.

“Get the gun!” Daniel cried. “Johnson, help me. Get the gun.”

Michael climbed on top of the two and grabbed Ty's hand, which was shaped with his pointer finger out and his thumb cocked back as the gun's hammer. When Michael wrestled the gun free, Ty's other fingers sprang to life, trying to reclaim it.