Cementville (7 page)

“Wake up and listen to me, Maria Louise.” Her mother is using her I-don't-mean-maybe voice. “It isn't just Donnie. This thing is going to crush that poor town. A bunch of the boys from his unit are gone.”

She does sit up then, asks her mother to repeat what she just said.

“Seven boys from right there in town. Fire Support Base Blacksnake was overrun. The bodies are to arrive home sometime early Saturday. Funerals throughout the week. We won't know when Donnie's is until Monday. I feel sure it'll be published in the
Picayune
.”

MaLou had run with these guys every summer. Some she considered friends. Some of them she had even kept in touch with. She knew who had gotten married and which one had surprised them all by becoming a dad last fall. FSB Blacksnake was their last known location, a hillside supply base people said was at best foolishly located, at worst a death trap. There is a name she is afraid to say. But, “Boyd?” she says, holding her breath.
Defenseless
was the word he had used to describe the base in his last letter. Wide open to the enemy.

Across the phone line comes the whispery shuffling of newspaper. MaLou can hear her mother's lips softly going over the words as she reads to herself.

“Read it out loud, Mother.”

“. . . 138th Field Artillery unit, which was attached to Battery C in support of the 101st Airborne division stationed at Phu Bai—is that how you say it? Phu Bai?—took heavy casualties as North Vietnamese overran—oh, MaLou, don't make me do this.”

“The names, Mom.”

“Let's see. Brandon Lee Miller, Mitchell Kidwell—oh, there's Donnie—Donald Raphael Goins III, Malcolm T. Spalding, Boyd
Farber Jr.—isn't that the boy who was sweet on you in high school?—Charles Gordon, and Richard Welch. That's it. Seven.”

MaLou breathes, clears her throat, and tries to sort out from the jumble in her head what to say. This is exactly what was not supposed to happen.

“I don't care how you do it, but you are getting your patootie to the bus station at four thirty tomorrow morning. I'm down in my back again,” her mother tells her. “You're the only person we have to represent our side of the family. Your Aunt Martha is going to need you.”

N
OW HERE
M
ARIA
L
OUISE
G
OINS
sits, fifteen minutes into the five-hour bus ride from Cincinnati to Cementville, snugged up-close and personal next to a man she definitely wishes she had never laid eyes on. She knew the second he boarded the bus that he was going to do it, fold himself into the seat next to hers. She pretends to read the paperback she brought for the trip as he slips out of a thin jacket. Exactly what it is the stranger smells of takes a while to discern. Ritz crackers soaked in turpentine? Oil-based house paint and waterless hand cleaner? No, it's the greasy dirt floor of Uncle Rafe's garage. Specifically, it is the deep pit dug in the center of his shop, where her uncle slides daily on a little wheeled trolley under the belly of whatever wreck he's disassembling. MaLou is almost certain she can smell on the man in the seat next to her the exact concoction of yellow clay dust mingling with the fluorescent green antifreeze leaking from a crack in Uncle Rafe's plastic dishpan. The stranger seems to occupy less space in the seat than she does. She had her eyes fixed on her book when he sat down, so she can't be sure how tall he is. She looks out of the side of her face at the length of hip joint to knee and decides maybe he is taller than she thought, that's a long thighbone there, and skinny too. And his fingernails. Lined with black grime. Must be a mechanic of some sort. She can only hope he won't try to strike up a conversation.

As a proscription against such a notion she cranes her head to the window, propping it against the cold glass, and closes her eyes. The man rifles through a filthy backpack and produces—judging from the soft crinkling paper sounds, for her eyes are shut tight—a homemade sandwich that must be wrapped in wax paper. Her nostrils flare a bit as they take in the smell of peanut butter and banana.

She feels a tentative tap on the sleeve of her jacket and opens one eye. But she must be mistaken, because no, apparently he did not tap at all. The man is not offering her half his peanut butter and banana sandwich. Staring straight ahead, he chews politely with his lips closed, no smacking, which she'd almost expected. MaLou watches him lift the sandwich to his mouth, a gesture she would not have thought could contain diffidence, and imagines touching the rough knuckles, brushing a finger over the pale fluff of hair curling over the back of his hand. She tries to drift off.

“I have an extra apple.”

She jumps at the sound, fakes a startle, pretending to have been asleep. She inhales audibly and sits erect as if shaking off an unpleasant dream, her eyelids flickering in an exaggerated manner.

“Sorry. I thought you were awake.” The stranger leans deferentially in his seat away from her as if trying to respect MaLou's personal space.

“Oh, no problem,” she says. “I need to wake up anyway. I don't want to miss my stop. Do you know where we are?”

“We not five miles back passed Walton.”

At least four hours to go.

He reaches a hand over her side of the armrest and she flinches. But when she looks down, a small green apple settles in her lap, the kind she and Donnie collected as kids. They had ranged far and wide over the countryside, exploring abandoned farmhouses where daffodils or peonies bloomed faithfully in the spring as if they expected their people to come back. Sometimes she and her cousin came upon whole orchards, deserted and spooky, laden with fruit. MaLou picks up the apple in her lap. Black wormholes speckle its surface. She
pictures the young man next to her gathering apples on the side of the road this morning in the gray dawn. But it is May, apple season months away.

“Thanks,” she says, biting in with relish, surprised at the disappearance of proper reserve. She is hungry. She is on a Greyhound bus at five thirty in the morning. Who is she kidding about reserve? Peanut butter and banana would have gone good with this. “Where'd you get these?”

“My landlady. She calls them October apples. Stores them in her cellar, each wrapped in its own little paper collar.”

“I didn't know you could make them last so long.”

“Oh, she's a wizard all right.” They sit in silence for a while. “Where you headed?” he says.

“Funeral.”

“Aren't we all.” He finishes off a second apple and wraps both cores in the wax paper from his sandwich. “Say, you're not on your way to Cementville, are you?”

“Cousin,” she says, nodding, too surprised to lie, and what good would it do anyway?—they will be getting off the bus at the same place. Her heart might as well be lodged in her ears, as loud as it's banging there inside her. A desolation she doesn't want to feel and an odd attraction to this raggedy traveler skirmish for her attention.

He holds out the open lunch sack and she drops her apple core in.

“Brother,” he says.

MaLou isn't ready for this conversation. For all her familiarity with catastrophe—indeed, she has lately become concerned at the way she nearly craves the tragedies of strangers—she does not hanker to hear another story of family loss in this war.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers and leans her head toward the window and lets herself drift again. But the stranger doesn't seem to mind this, and when he starts talking, she doesn't mind either. She is in that half-present hovering state, one foot on this side, one on the other. MaLou doesn't open her eyes, listening like a child playing possum. His voice is the way she remembers her father's, soothing
with that backcountry lilt; he could be singing, for all the melody in it. It's doleful, that honey accent, mountain-thick—
dulcet
is the word. But she suspects he somehow knows her secret, that she is a promiscuous borrower from the stories of other people's calamities.

“Daniel,” he says. “He hadn't even started high school, last time I saw him. He's the first of us to do that. Graduate high school. And boy, don't you know a week later that government letter arrives.”

MaLou sits up, checks her soft drink can to see if there's anything left. “He wasn't in the Guard unit with the others?”

He shakes his head ruefully. “Guard's filled up with everybody who's somebody. People like us get the draft, pure and simple.”

At Christmas dinner her uncle had talked about the National Guard, how it had gotten more difficult to get in. People saw it as an honorable way to serve your country without getting blown up for nothing in Vietnam. Donnie and Boyd and the others were in their third year in the Guard when word came that the unit was heading to Texas for intensive training, and shipping out in a matter of weeks. Uncle Rafe wasn't sure which was worse, the sense of betrayal or the complete and utter bewilderment. Some of the parents had all piled together into Buck Farber's real estate van and driven to the capitol to protest. The governor couldn't see them, but they crowded into their congressman's office and gave him what for. “And what for?” Rafe had ended the story, his face red, as he attacked the Christmas turkey with his carving knife. “Nothing.” It was the first holiday meal their only son had ever missed. Aunt Martha had to remind Rafe they hadn't yet said the grace.

A pale heat sneaks over MaLou's left shoulder; the sun is coming up. The bus glides southwesterly. The stranger's head has dropped back onto the headrest and in this naked moment when his eyes are closed and hers are open she examines his features. The shock of persimmon hair over his forehead. It is longer than that of other young men she has known. It curls softly around his neck like the tail of a fox kit. The profile dominated by a cliff of a brow, the fine orange hairs curly above deep eye sockets. She has not been able to
gain the color of his irises yet, but given that fair skin, she imagines them close to the cerulean of her Aunt Martha's morning glories, the ones that climbed the porch rail in late summer, big as salad plates. MaLou shifts slightly toward him.

“He was cleaning fish behind Mama's trailer,” he says. “Daniel. I had tied a few things in a pillowcase and was heading out. Didn't see him there at the edge of the woods. He called out to me, ‘Where you off to, Byard?' I said, ‘I'll be back directly, little brother.'”

“Where
were
you going?” That hunger is up in her now. MaLou would swallow his story whole.

“Where any draft-age man with half a brain in his noggin was going. Canada.”

“You've been on the run all this time?”

“Going on five years. Take a look at the regular Army these days. It's pretty much the poor kids and the coloreds, and them few that enlist of their own free will. I don't know why I'm blabbing on like this to you. You could be Selective Service for all I know, hunting my sorry ass down.” He does not sound as if this is a prospect that truly worries him.

“And you came home for your brother's funeral.” She watches the tiny throb in his neck, willing him to speak again. He nods, his eyes still closed.

“Mama got ahold of me. I had taken a little place in the Bow Valley. Fellow that runs a hunting lodge let me get my mail there and use his telephone from time to time.”

“You aren't afraid? Of being arrested?”

Her traveling companion surveys the sleeping forms up and down the aisle of the bus. MaLou is wedged in the corner, the back of her head pressed against the window glass, and now it is she who is protecting the space he needs to empty his grief. His hands rest in his lap, palms open as if in supplication. He turns to her. His eyes are blue.

“You sure you're not SS?” he says and smiles broadly. He rolls up the leg of his jeans. His knee is a mangled lump of purple, red, and white.

“My God, what happened? You didn't—you didn't have someone do that to you, did you?” She had heard the stories, young men literally shooting themselves in the foot.

“I didn't want to be killed in some stupid war, but no, I am not crazy enough to request something like this. This pretty thing came by tripping over the edge of a mountain.”

“You don't think the draft board will be looking for you? Won't some patriotic kook be waiting for you to come home now?” MaLou had seen an article about a guy who came back from Toronto when his own father died. The FBI arrested him at the funeral.

The stranger, whose name she now knows is Byard, taps a finger to his temple. “Psychogenic fugue state,” he says, grinning. “I got me papers that say so. Up in Saskatchewan, see, you don't have to be anybody special to avail yourself of a doctor.”

“Fugue state—what's that mean? You've been out wandering?”

“That's the idea. Stranger in a strange land, don't even know his own name.” His face clouds over.

“What was he like? Your brother?”

“Hmm. Well, Mama always said if she didn't have any more babies, she'd always have a child in Daniel. I'm not saying he was a retard. Just slow. Teachers held him back in first grade. I remember Mama crying after they summoned her to the school for a meeting. They said he was classifiable as a moron. Wanted to see about shipping him off to Eastern State. But Mama pitched a fit and said over her dead body, and they let it drop. After that they passed him on through the grades whether he'd learnt anything or not. You would of thought that would steer the draft board away from him, but you would of been wrong.” Byard's jaw is working hard and MaLou cannot stop looking at the tendons straining across it. The journalist in her isn't ready to rest. She needs to change the subject for a bit or she will lose him to his grief and anger, those twinned emotions so rich in story. There might be a way to use this later.