Cementville (15 page)

She had been with so many men. She and Suong counted them at first, a silly contest between girls, something to make it not real. The sisters compared the men's private parts and giggled, foolish children playing dangerous games.

Then the first girl was murdered; things changed. Soon Suong and Giang rarely spoke when they brushed past each other in the brothel's hallway, terror a knife between them. During the black period, between Suong's leaving and the coming of Jimmy Smith, opium helped Giang to lay still, to stop measuring days or nights. Opium made the men into not men, more like bed clothing grown too heavy to fling aside.

Sometimes she wishes she had not said yes, if yes was what she said, to Harlan O'Brien. Another in a string of a thousand yeses the opium once allowed her to give away. Sometimes she imagines her husband's truck swerving in the dark road in the middle of the night, and sometimes she wishes she could be an opium eater again.

But then Jimmy climbs into her bed and she melts into his scarred backside where she has rubbed jasmine oil. She murmurs bawdy phrases of the poetry that women such as her have always whispered to their men; a lyric vanishes into the angel wings of his shoulder blades, and she disappears in there with it.

This time, waiting here for Harlan O'Brien to come, she knows she cannot leave her husband.

* * *

I
DON'T BELIEVE YOU,
H
ARLAN
says when Giang tells him tonight that she cannot meet him anymore, that she can no longer walk with him by the river.

They lay by the water on a soft bed of storm-tossed leaves, corpses starved for each other's clinging, and what had been a closely guarded seed in their blackest corners swells and grows to a writhing choking vine. They couple fiercely at the edge of the river, drifting out upon its surface, their bodies rising and falling together, white and yellow intertwined. At the easternmost bank, the limbs of a downed elm grasp the lovers in a terrible embrace.

In the dream, he studies his hands as if they do not belong to him. Black and rotted, they belong with the left foot somewhere on the other side of the so-called peaceful ocean. He had heard stories of the Poles carrying boxes to the graves of loved ones lost in the Second World War. Through English sheep pastures they bore boxes of Polish soil to sprinkle on the hundreds of unnamed graves, marked only by white crosses.

Is there a person somewhere in that far land to sprinkle his blackened foot? They will know it by its scar, sickle moon-shaped and curving along the arch, from where he ran across a broken bottle when he was ten. Will some kind stranger sprinkle his foot with the soil of his homeland?

For his anguish and his sudden fever his mother wrings a cold towel, soothes his forehead. Such is the nightmare that awakens Harlan O'Brien from his first deep sleep in three years.

* * *

A
ND SUCH BEGINS THE NIGHTMARE
from which Giang will not awaken. She watches him walk away from her, and she turns to the river's gloomy murmur and closes her eyes. She sees Suong floating among the debris of the ragged people below the brothel window. Her sister's gown billows around her, a dirty sail filled with water. This waking dream allows Giang the knowledge that Suong is dead, flung out that night like so much refuse. A red ribbon, a garrote of blood, circles around her sister's neck and blends with the river's mud.

Giang opens her eyes and her lips part to say the word. “
Vang
,” she tells the water. Then, “Yes,” because this is an American river.

She does not feel the blow from behind, does not even have the chance to say to her assailant,
Cam o'n ban. Thank you
.

PART II

The land mourns. Joy is withered away. Sun and moon darken, and when the stars withdraw their shining, the menace shall run up your walls and through your windows like a thief. Your old will dream dreams and your young will see visions, wonder in heavens and earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke. This day is near in the valley of decisions
.

—
P
ROPHETS:
J
OEL
REDUX

S
O MANY HAVE COME BACK
. T
HE DEAD, THE WOUNDED, THE
incarcerated. The insane. People remark how the blacks are acting odd—and wonder privately whether the riots in the big cities could possibly spread out here, infecting our peace—because the women too are not the same, their quiet natures flavored now with a rare new anger. Then too there are the strangers streaming into town, trying to take all our jobs at the new paper plant. People are fractious.

A man took a walk on the moon the other day, “a giant leap for mankind,” he called it. But we walk around our own town like we don't know the place, as if body snatchers might have snuck in overnight and replaced all of us with replicas. There are black wreaths on too many doors, broad ribbons of yellow plastic around oaks in almost every yard.
Come home, come home
, the yellow ones say.
Go back
, say the black ones,
go back to where you came from and send my real baby home to me
.

Mothers do not take their eyes off their children now. No use in arguing. Jimmy Smith's war bride is dead. A killer is on the loose and people look in the eyes of neighbors they've known all their lives, and they wonder. Everybody on the street is a stranger.

People talk. When did that one get here? I wouldn't let my sister or daughter out of the house with him. Heard they beat a fellow after the graveyard shift the other morning, dragged him off into a field and left him there. Argument over a lunchbox or something. Warning
words scribbled across his forehead, words you wouldn't want your mother to see. Poolroom squabbles turn into blood matches.

The Bible's Lamentations have got nothing on us: The Lord was as an enemy; He hath swallowed up Israel and hath increased in us mourning and lamentation. Our gates are sunk into the ground. The children and the sucklings swoon and their souls are poured out onto their mothers' bosoms.

Our covenant is with a two-faced god of forgiveness and vengeance. Yes, He has led us and brought us into darkness all right. His hand against us is turned all the day. It is hard in times like these to remember that the Lord is good to them that seeketh him.

EIGHT

B
illy Juell leaves his father's house, passes through the broad meadow, and crosses over the wooden stile into Lemuel O'Brien's pasture. The ancient stone wall separating the two farms has long since crumbled into a low, serpentine heap, rambling over the land like the ruined tunnel of an enormous drunken mole. Billy is overdressed in a green camo vest and long sleeves so that perspiration soon pricks the skin of his neck. The sky stretches over the valley white and even like a taut sheet, its bland cloud cover doing nothing to break the summer heat. Three boxes of number seven and a half shot protest with soft rattling against his chest. It is a half hour after dawn, and by the time he reaches the edge of the woods, a rivulet of sweat makes its way down his spine, clear to the waistband of his jeans.

The path through the woods is much the way he remembers it, but narrower, dark and littered now with shards of yellow light that make the trail seem to slither along like some living thing in pain. The quiet swells in his skull, broken by the occasional despondent
hoo-ooh-who-who-who
of a mourning dove calling from the glade
ahead. Reaching the clearing, he stands still in trained reconnoiter, barest movement of eyes and head, the gun hanging stiffly from his shoulder, a Remington 870 that marked his fourteenth birthday. Beneath the cedars at the clearing's edge is a battered paint bucket, a crude bench for watching. Billy situates himself there with a good view of the stand of wild sunflowers and elk thistle where he's seen the doves feeding.

He has been home for a while now and still he and his family circle around one another like strangers thrown together randomly into a boarding house. Early on after he came home, he tried to take most meals with them, but his sister always watches him across the table. He catches her staring as if he is somebody she might recognize but isn't so sure. His mother hovers over him and he is pretty sure his father hates his guts. Willis has all but quit talking to Billy. And once Uncle Carl arrived on the scene Billy can't tolerate being in the house at all.

He's been sleeping late most mornings, and when he wakes he lies upstairs in his bed and waits until all sound fades in the house below and everyone has gone about their day. He makes toast or a bowl of cereal and gets out of there fast. He was glad when old lady Slidell hired him on to keep the grounds at the mansion, but now she's near-dead and he's afraid he won't know what to do with himself in the afternoons, once she croaks. This whole place seems festering with death. Cutting across the hillside a few minutes ago, he could see the cemetery below where the graveyard crew's backhoe still sat beside a new-dug grave. They must be going to plant Jimmy Smith's dead gook wife this morning.

When he rose before the sun today his hope had been that he could steal out before the family stirred, get in a little hunting, try to see if he couldn't find his old self out here. God, what was wrong with him? Talking about finding himself and such—it was that counselor his mother dragged him to at the VA in Louisville. He'd agreed to one visit to get her off his back. Hopefully none of the guys at Pekkar's would find out. Last thing he needs is them
thinking he's spending time with a shrink. Not that he'll ever darken that fucking doctor's or any other's goddamn door again. Anyway, he thought he'd be safe getting out of the house early, and he tiptoed downstairs and filled a Mason jar with water. He slapped a slice of baloney between some bread and put it in a baggy and left the house, closing the door behind him without even a click. He almost screamed when he turned around and there stood Mo, right in his face.
Sorry!
said Mo.
Sheesh!
And the way she looked at him, as if she knew everything about him, all he's done and seen—Billy tried to shake it off, but right there, just like that, the tremor took over his hands and now the day is probably fucked in terms of hitting anything.
Don't be sneaking up on people
, he hissed at her. But then she grabbed his hand and held it in front of her face and when she saw the way it was shaking, she pressed it hard against her chest, staring at him the whole time, as if she was trying to grab something inside his head. He jerked his hand away from her and laughed and said,
You little freak!
And then he rubbed her stupid pixie haircut to cover for how bad he was shaking.

You want to help me with my memoirs?
Mo had said then. She had dragged him over to the picnic table where her papers were spread out, little rock cairns holding them in place.
I'm interviewing people
, she said.
You can be my first one
. Billy shrugged and sat down. Most people in town have been taking one look at him and turning right around and heading in the other direction. He wished somebody would explain to them the difference between an honorable and dishonorable discharge. He hadn't done anything almost every other grunt did at some point over there. Nobody had sure as shit asked to interview him. So,
Shoot
, he said to his sister,
Ask me anything
. And she took the cap off her cartridge pen, all serious, her mouth so bunched in a tight little
o
it nearly broke his heart.

To save his life he cannot remember the questions she asked. Fragments of the things he said rattle around in his head now as he sits in the glade watching the doves feeding on thistle and wild
sunflower heads.
First
, he told her,
people need to get it straight: I was separated
with honor.
The other day Alden Wilder saw me a half a block away and he crossed the street. And him Uncle judge's best friend
.