Interference & Other Stories (7 page)

She couldn't remember how he'd first touched her. Had he put his arms around her before or after he'd told her? Which one of them moved first? Had she sought comfort from him? Did he hold her head to his chest, a habit of his that she felt infantilized her, and was that why she turned away and leaned into the tree? He had stayed there with her until she was ready to go inside, not speaking, not touching her. What she remembered was that the way he had held her, and let her go, and stood by in silence, was not at all the way she would have imagined things should be, but that it had sufficed. She had turned to the tree, leaned her forehead into the trunk, and wept. When the anger took over, she grabbed the thick trunk and wailed, trying over and over to shake the tree but it wouldn't budge. Soon she had her arms around it, like a fighter tying up an opponent to catch a breath, and then she slid to the ground and sat there hugging the tree with her arms and legs, convinced that if she let go she would hurtle from the earth into nothing but the purest pain.

And then her menses had returned. At first she hadn't been aware of it, subsumed in grief and melded to the tree, but soon it was wet and warm and undeniable, although she could, and did, choose to ignore it. She continued crying, scraping her cheeks and forehead on the bark, until she felt her equilibrium returning; she fought it, not ready yet to turn back to the world where brothers die, preferring her own disappearance into the roaring white water of grief. But no more tears would come.

Instead, as she rose and turned to her husband, who had stood there, who had stood by her there, and with profound reluctance prepared to shoulder her identity again, the early October wind came up without warning and shook the yellowing tree so that it pitched and rocked and yellow leaves were blown from it and flew off sideways until they stuck to a fence or wall.

Whether a tree can speak or not is not the issue, she tried to tell her husband later on. What she'd heard then, in the loud whisperings of the maple's windblown crown, was the knowledge that each single moment is essential to every other, that if it were not, then no one, ever, would have to die. What she understood then, that the fact of dying proves the necessity of each and every moment to every other that has ever existed or ever will exist, filled her with such peace that her brother's death, which hurt more than anything she had ever known, became acceptable to her. She tried, over the next several weeks, to make her husband understand until one evening he finally turned to her and said, “Enough. I'm thick. Okay? I just don't get it. Save your breath.”

 

In his room the boy was on his knees and drawing on a piece of posterboard with an orange crayon. When he pressed too hard and broke it, he said, “Good!” in a voice that was not yet his own. Peeling back the paper wrapper, exposing the jagged edge, he said it again, “Good!” And he bore down with the crayon—sharp dark lines now over the lighter pebbled orange. He thought this might be fire he was drawing. If he had to say—if someone, a grown-up, would ask him in the grown-up singing voice that always prompted him to answer—he would have said, “Fire,” wishing for them to go away and, as if he had paid them, satisfied them somehow, they would.

The brown crayon. Then the yellow one. The black crayon was in pieces. He picked up one so rounded, paperless, and slick it might have been a jellybean. “Good!” he said. It should have black on it but not too much.

As he worked on his picture, he was thinking. Just as he brought things to his room to know them, to interrogate them—horse chestnuts, certain rocks, an elbow of pipe, a spiky partly opened milkweed pod—he brought what happened, what he had observed. His four-year-old self had a pocket in it. Yellow and red will make a better orange than orange. Those are not flames. Those are ears. Green all around is important. He thought while the picture became. He became, wholly, the boy who was making this picture.

 

“Happens sometimes. Can't tell until you go to start the bugger up again. Sometimes the ignition wires get brittle so when you hook them up again you find out they're shot.” The mechanic lowered the hood, then dropped it. Bang. He walked toward Russell, wiping his hands on a rag. “Take about an hour. You can wait inside or come back. Up to you.”

Having to wait was irritating and returned Russell to the argument with his wife. The grimy tubular steel chair in the office was uncomfortable. It occurred to him that this was almost a religious difference, if there could be such a thing between non-believers. He had married a fellow atheist and found himself in a mixed marriage. The irony didn't wake his sense of humor, though; on the contrary, he felt a wave of panic pass through him, the perception of how complicated and beyond governing was this thing called marriage.

He had no patience for what seemed to him to be her facile, hippie wisdom. He'd seen this delusion before, the first time during a rocket attack in the Central Highlands. Ordnance flying everywhere: screaming shells, screaming soldiers. And one of them, a kid named Scott, sitting on the tarmac on the edge of the compound babbling about transcending fear. Raving. Laughing at death. Making life thus inconsequential. Bullshit. It was a dodge, that's what it was. Despair with a happy face stuck on it. He lived, the kid, rotated out. He should have been busted, the little prick.

So if she needed to make believe she'd grasped something fucking ineffable, fine; but he had no intention of being drawn in or letting her warp the boy for that matter.

He looked out the window across the station at the traffic going by. A lot of trucks this time of day. He remembered Roger in his arms just moments after he was born, and how he had hummed “Old Man River” to him in his deepest voice, surprising himself, not knowing he was going to do it, with his chin against the infant's skull. Pouring into this act all his sorrow, joy, grief, anger: aggregates of that same ghost he had given up in drunken song, from the bottom of illness, in the moan of the love bed, so many times before, but now at last his own to give, this ghost that could only be known in transmission, that did not depend on the words of the song, but only on the love with which he shaped each vowel in his deepest belly-voice.

The mechanic was there in the doorway. “She's ready. What's the trouble with the other one?” He nodded toward the Taurus Russell had arrived in.

“That one? Nothing. Company car.”

The mechanic frowned. “I thought you come to pick her up.”

“I did. I did. I'm wondering if you have an old tire and a length of chain. Or a good strong rope would probably do the trick.”

“You're shittin' me, right? You want to tow it home with a piece of rope?”

“Why not? It's not far.”

“Not out of here you're not.”

Challenged, Russell felt a surge of anger. It was his car, after all. Even the company car was his, really, since he owned the company. He looked the mechanic up and down. Banty rooster on his own turf. “Give me one good reason.”

“'Cause I won't let you. You'll bang up both these cars but good. And that's if you don't kill yourself and take somebody else down with you. What's the matter with you? You got some kind of death wish?”

He turned and opened the door to a storage closet next to the shelves of motor oil and antifreeze. In the time it took the mechanic to open the lid on a can of hand cleanser and scoop two fingers of it into his palm, Russell got a good look at a large photograph on the inside of the door. Above the picture of a large group of men in combat fatigues was a sign, in stenciled letter, reading:

 

2
^nd
Battalion, 4
^th
Marines

 

There were other regalia as well, but the mechanic closed the door before Russell got much of a look. The strong but pleasant scent of citrus cleaner filled the grimy office.

“You're a bastard,” Russell said.

“I can be.”

“A magnificent bastard—that's what we called you guys.”

“Who's we?”

“Gimlet. Americal. 3
^rd
Battalion, 21
^st
Infantry. Russell Harts-horne.” He put out his hand. “Nhi Ha.”

“Ernie Gagnon.” He took Russell's hand and held on. “So, shall I save your sorry ass or you still want to fight me?” Russell waited for the smile that would defuse this moment; when it came he gave Gagnons hand a quick pump and they both let go.

“So what's the plan?” asked Russell.

 

Beth took her old textbook from the low shelf on the upstairs landing and sat in a creaking white wicker chair by the window. Were all four-year-olds interested in death? Was this a developmental thing? Or was Roger speaking from a chill shadow his uncle's death had cast over their family life? Beth sought the answer to the first question in the heavy maroon volume on her lap. She feared the answer to the second.

Nothing in the index for death. Nothing for mortality. Nothing for mourning. Nothing for grief. Did the authors think none of these things were of any consequence in a child's life? The listing for parent was extensive. There: bereaved parent, page 437. Dry as ashes, the text referred to “the maternal introject” and the danger to a child of “overwhelming affect” resulting from “acute maternal bereavement.”

She refused the guilt that welled up in her and slammed shut the book. Tears came then, this time at the realization that there was nothing to be done, nothing that ought to be done, nothing that could be changed. She cried for Jerry, for his final moments; for Roger who seemed to have perceived her brother's absence, even without really knowing him; for Russell, for whom death, anybody's death, was a kind of failure, a collapse into incoherence; and for herself, facing mystery brotherless.

She heard cars in the driveway and went to the window. A mechanic in coveralls was working a tow truck's lift, lowering the front end of the Toyota to the ground.

 

“No, I told you. No charge.”

“Well, you got my business for a lifetime.”

Gagnon cocked his head and looked at Russell. He kept his hand on the hydraulic lever until the bar, chain, and canvas apron clanked back in place on the truck. “That was my brother,” he said. “My brother's outfit, Fourth Marines. Not mine”

“The stuff in the closet.”

“Yeah. All the stuff he sent me before he didn't come back.”

“I'm sorry.”

Gagnon was climbing into the cab now. “Didn't want to leave you with the wrong impression is all. That wouldn't be right.” He gunned the truck in reverse, swinging into the street. He shifted and took off, acknowledging Russell's raised hand with a quick wave, eyes straight ahead.

 

Roger had watched from his bedroom window where he could see the tow truck turn at the corner and pass from view. He returned to his picture, anxious to finish now. Along the left margin he made a row of mountains. He had never seen real mountains, but in his picture book they seemed like the edge of things, the limit, so he turned his paper to draw another set of jagged peaks along the right-hand side.

Holding his picture in both hands, he sat on the top stair, and he made his way down, sitting on each step, by using his feet. His parents were in the kitchen, hugging, just inside the back door. His mother turned to him; he could see she had been crying.

“What you got there, Big Guy?” his father boomed.

Roger held his picture out in front of him: an animal, orange and black with long lines for legs, stiltlike, resembling an insect, and with saw-toothed jaws depicted full front though the drawing was in profile. A creature horrific and improbable, protected on either side by purple mountains.

“Tiger!” Roger instructed them. Then he dropped his drawing and, leaning forward, arms locked at his sides and ending in fists, he roared at the both of them.

The barber looks up from his customer and nods. Guy touches his right eyebrow with his index finger in a little salute, hangs his jacket and hat on a hook, and turns to a stack of magazines:
Agni, Hudson Review, The New Yorker, New York Review of
Books,
Paris Review, The American Scholar.
No
Field & Stream?
No
Argosy, Popular Mechanics, Maxim, Esquire, GQ?
But the barber's shaking out the striped cape and it's his turn in the chair.

“How goes it?” asks the barber.

“Can't complain,”says Guy.

“Ah! Never complain and never explain,” chirps the barber.

Guy watches him in the mirror, his movements, his assured manner. He looks at the barber's instruments on the marble counter and in various holsters hanging below it.

“So what's it gonna be?”

“Just trim the sides and back. Go easy on the top. There's not a whole lot left up there, y'know?” He grins at the barber in the mirror.

“Hopes dance best on bald men's hair!” says the barber.

“Come again?”

“Hope. You know, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah. And I could use a shave.”

“That's an extra two bucks with the haircut. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy!”

“That's reasonable.”

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

“I never quite thought about it that way,” Guy says and grows wary. Mostly he hopes this isn't one of those barbers who doesn't care if he gets those little hairs all down your neck so you itch the whole rest of the day. He closes his eyes and listens to the scissors do their work.

“Mind if I ask you something?” the barber says.

“No. Go ahead.”

“Well, if there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wild seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?”