Meeks (7 page)

Finton bowed slightly. “It is yours to occupy any hour of the day."

Ben smiled shyly. It was an unbelievably comfortable chair. Finton began to play. The walls of the room had been painted a dark, deep green, Finton's drawings hung in gallery columns. The oiled-wood desk, Finton's neatly hanging sweater, his corduroy slippers, the stamped spines of his books. Ben started to feel better. The open window let in the evening breeze, the scent of rosemary and lavender growing in the window box came and went. Finton played one of the classical movements, music borne of the days that preceded them, the heartbreaking times that had preceded them, days so dense with tragedy that they might live five hundred of these easy years yet never understand.

Ben studied a photograph propped on the windowsill. Finton standing in a beautiful pale suit, his polished shoes smooth as black stones in the bright, short grass. Finton held a rifle casually in his right hand, the barrel angled at the green earth. Ben could see the shapes of other men in the background.

"Where's this?"

Finton continued to play. “Afternoon hunt. Listening Party."

"You've been to a Listening Party?"

"Last of the season. The very best."

"And you didn't . . . you didn't find a wife?"

"Nope."

Ben sat in worried silence.
Even a stone can find love at a Listening Party.
A man lucky enough to make the guest list might easily relax into the conviction that he was as good as married.

"Don't worry,” said Finton. “I didn't want to meet any-one, but I'm sure you will."

Ben stared at the photograph, suddenly desired a change of subject. A pair of patrolling boots stood in the corner. “Were you a soldier?"

"Ancient history,” said Finton. “So was my father, and his father, and so on. I thought I'd learn something interesting."

"Me, too."

"All we ever did was play cards in the mud and make ourselves crazy, listening, listening, listening. . . ."

"Where were you?"

"Upper Ridge Patrol."

"Me, too. Like my father. But after Upper Ridge, he volunteered for Advance Coastal."

"Highest casualties."

"He went down with his ship."

"Fathers,” said Finton, as if in disbelief, and shook his head.

"And did yours . . . ?"

"Come back? He did. And in exchange for his service, he was offered the vaunted post of Dog Inspector, for life. Uncomplaining to the end, he spent his final years in close communion with the balls of dogs, the best balls of the best dogs—policemen's dogs. Cheek and jowl!” said Finton and laughed, which struck Ben as inappropriate under the circumstances (the discussion of the memory of one's own father), but he was in no mood to argue with a new friend. He watched Finton's back as he played. One way or another, he would soon have a fine pale suit. He imagined himself standing in Finton's room, buttoning and unbuttoning a beautiful jacket. “What do you think?” he might ask. “Very sharp,” Finton would answer sagely, looking up from one of his books.

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The world was once pure: animals tilted their perfectly formed heads to listen to the workings of the great clock, the churn of the crystalline waters over the sunlit rocks. All was well. Then a twig snapped. Something was coming. It was I. I was traveling in my characteristic way: lumbering, unstoppable, crashing through the fragile woods.

We had been on patrol all summer without encountering any sign of the enemy, much less the Enemy himself, and I had come almost to enjoy our missions along the Upper Ridge, from which we had command of the entire countryside, the broad black harbor fading into open sea at one end and contracting into the fat vein of the city port at the other. We marched in silence. I wandered among my own thoughts. I was thinking about the gloomy lane of old poplars that lead to my grandfather's house, the rusted iron pots that hung ominously from the ceiling—my senses took note of the contrasting lightness of our combat-issue tin cups, the clatter of them bouncing on our packs as we trudged along the ridge without stealth (another memory rescued by association!). If Ben has a son of his own one day, I'll take my turn at playing the wild-haired old man living in a shack outside the city, obsessing over the Enemy, hoarding food against the Enemy, sorting bullet casings in the pitch black of cabin night, waiting for the Enemy to come at last, just as my own grandfather did.

The river slogged far below us and out toward sea. To think that I had spent most of my life in the city gazing across the water to this very spot, contemplating the silhouettes of these major and then-distant trees: the tall pine shadows planted in ruthless lines long ago by the settlers—those mysterious beloveds, those incomparable villains.
Who were they, who were they?

"Ah, who are you talking to?” someone called out.

"
No one
,” I answered immediately.

"You looked like you were talking to someone,” said my fellow soldier, smirking.

"Just thinking,” I said. “You should try it sometime."

We lashed things more tightly to our packs and marched on—I went back to the life-saving slog of remembering. My father brought his father to our house every Sunday for dinner. My grandfather swore that his wife, my grandmother, whom he had always disdained as a “deep thinker,” had chosen to retire early to the Sheds. My mother regarded him coldly, politely, as he spun his lies; she kept his glass full of the rancid gum liquor he loved, and he was soon fumigating my face with his tirades against the Enemy, whose men were “as lithe as cats” and whose women were “as brawny as men.” He leered at me, listing in his chair: “Now, listen. This is serious. There you are—finger on the trigger—facing the Enemy. But, wait—what are you going to do? ‘Cause, is it a man or a woman? What do you think?” I would stare silently into the food on my plate, brace myself for what the old menace would forge next in the furnace of his rotten mouth, into which he loved to shove the hot plum and cream my mother brought to him. “And, see, that's just it—why are you thinking? Don't think, Son. Just shoot it.” I touched the handle of my knife, intending to kill him with it when I was bigger and stronger.

He had once shown me a stash of the Old Money, which he kept under the floorboards his cabin. “Just in case,” he said and clamped his hand over my mouth. I could feel his callous palm against my lips, smell the pipe tobacco and old-fashioned soap on his fingers: “Keep our secret"—and I had. What a marvel . . . the massive pull of the continuity of civilized life.

The trail dipped lower into the dangerous valley; instinctively, I softened my footfall. All the native creatures of my brain (hopes, dreams, worries, expectations) crouched like hunted animals at the edge of a clearing. We marched in silence, listened.

Autumn came: the ground turned soft and gold in the sunlight; the trees were beautifully black and skeletal in the cold rain. Around a damp, smoky campfire, we helped each other to picture life in the city. Soldiers longed for holiday cake, for the spectacle of Independence Day, now, by our reckoning, under way. They made lewd wagers about the quality and quantity of young women still at large in the city.

But the longer I spent in the Enemy's Territory, the more I preferred to be alone, to sit quietly among the trees, awed by the beauty of the copper-black twigs against the powder-blue sky. At first, I attacked these unacceptable feelings with logic: the Enemy was trying to get a foothold in my thoughts. I reminded myself daily how much I detested his filthy customs, his sneaky nature, his simple-minded, worshipful attitude toward the trees, toward the animals of the world, an attitude that grants the unthinking routines of beasts something of a human characteristic. I reminded myself that the Enemy would love nothing more than to kick in the door of my family's house and murder us one by one, to shove aside our butchered bodies and take down the dinner plates, throw the cutlery into a heap on the table, raid our cupboards, tell his blood-weaned sons a long black lie about how
my
land and
my
city and
my
house had come to be theirs, the house they had stolen, the house in which they were now taking their ease and telling their tall tales, until the true story of my life was replaced by the Enemy's. My wife, our son, our life, our joys and sorrows . . . all of it forgotten, forever.

I hated the violence an enemy necessitated in my heart, when I felt that we were a people devoted to other people, to family life. When I opened my pack, I sometimes feared I would find my wife's head, sawed crudely from her body by the Enemy and snuck into my possession, as a way of destroying my mind. Or I feared I would stumble upon the body of my son, impaled on a broken branch along the ridge, or that I would wake to find that all of my fellow soldiers had been quietly knifed in their sleep.

I had always been able to summon scenes of incredible brutality effortlessly, and though I attributed these scenes to the Enemy, it struck me now that these scenes were entirely mine. In my daydreams, the Enemy thirsted for my blood, sacrificed his brothers, his sisters, his own children, in gruesome and ruthless military tactics—the unbelievable bloodlust of an enemy I had never seen. And an unseen enemy the mind must construct entirely from itself, from the raw material of its own desires and fantasies. I frightened myself.

Winter came. The earth was a white and flawless sheet: the muddy, rutted ground we had patrolled and patrolled suddenly pure, as if never trod upon. It was beautiful. I wandered into the immediate woods to be alone. I propped my rifle in the snow and sat upon an ice-cold rock to rest. The woods were still, bright, and silent—my mind wandered; like a man suddenly unchained from the wall of a prison yard, my mind set out full of life and hope in the direction of its own concerns. I sighed heavily in the winter air, watched the mist of my breath travel. Bright red berries thrived on the black limbs of the snow-capped trees. I tilted my head back to take in the startling heights of the evergreens.

Then I heard the devastating crunch of one of my fellow soldiers approaching. My stomach tightened; I was sick again. I lay my head against my knees in defeat, pretending to sleep; dutifully I chained my mind back to the prison-yard wall. I was sorry to do it, to be forever playing the villain in my own brain. I raised my head and nodded grimly at my friend. “Saw you wander off alone,” he said kindly. “Thought I'd come over.

"This reminds me,” he said settling down on a nearby rock, “of the story of the two brothers who went out to Crippler's Field to hunt.” I confess I was stunned. He must worry that I'm seriously adrift of our mission, I thought, if he's hauling out this old corrective.

I kicked my boot heel against the rock and knocked free the pressed tread of snow. He said, “Do you know Crippler's Field—it's about an hour's walk from the train station, just beyond the city limit? It's where the good hunter died at the hands of his very own brother . . .” I nodded. He went on. Somewhere in the city was my dissatisfied little boy, wishing powerfully for sweets, for me—a boy presumably afflicted by that mix of the wishful and the indifferent so characteristic of the young.

One evening, we were crowded around a low fire on the overhunted ridge. In the cold silence of the wintry woods, we were telling each other familiar tales to pass the time. A light snow was coming down. Men who had families talked about their children. I sometimes talked about Ben in an obligatory way. “He's a good boy,” I'd say in a voice that had become so dead and dispiriting I was amazed it passed muster with the other men. In truth, if I thought of my son that winter, I tended to remember him as a lazy, greedy animal who ate and slept, and then attacked me suddenly with questions: “What does it do, where does it come from, why is it crying, will it fit in my room?"

Of course I used to attack my own father in just the same way. There's a friendly pain that halts self-investigation—but it's only a matter of time before we discover that we can plumb the depths of one another and easily forget that pain in others. When my father came home from the war, he made a show of picking up his old pleasures to reassure us, but I could see that he was a changed and damaged man, and when other ideas got the better of him, he simply walked off to be alone until he could master his feelings. I trailed at a distance, tracking him through the woods. I considered that Ben might someday hunt me in the same way, catching my shadow moving among the trees, forever trying to please me, to see me, to keep me. I felt I would do almost anything to stop him from following me through life—

We heard an alien sound—the animal-expert footfall of an Enemy soldier moving through the ice-glazed darkness beyond our campfire. We stopped talking. We heaped the fire with snow, and we fanned out into the forest. My blood was pounding in my ears as I crept across the eerie luminescence of the snowfield alone.

From the dark ridge, I aimed my rifle into the woods—a cavern of tar-black air even in the moonlit night. Then I spotted them—my enemies crouched among the trees; I watched the white fog of breath leave the black silhouettes of their heads. God, why wouldn't they just leave us
alone,
let us live in peace? I could hear the boots of my commanding officer crunching stealthily through the snow, closer and closer. I knew what he would make me do. I decided to run. I hurried, unseen, down from the ridge and crept along the trampled path. I wanted to be left alone, and to leave others alone. All night I tried to make my way down the other side of the dark ridge, toward the water. I had noticed a ship anchored offshore that morning. Ours? Theirs? Something else entirely? I hardly cared—so long as I could be anywhere else, do anything else.

I woke the next morning in a cave of pines, feeling sick: I was a deserter, a coward. What if the Enemy had bided his time and then slaughtered my fellow soldiers in their sleep, because I had not named him, not called him out? I had fled from the faintest suggestion of the Enemy—his black silhouette, his white phantom breath.