No Heroes (11 page)

Harley told me her mother's last name, which I vaguely recognized. Essentially, he was letting me know that his girlfriend was a solid middle-of-the-road Caudill, neither inbred nor rich, either of which is highly suspect. Her only indiscretion was having married a man from Martin County who left her after she bore his triplets, one of whom died shortly after birth. People used her as an example of the sort of cosmic penalty that is inflicted for marrying out of the county. There are no coincidences here. Everything is governed by cause and effect.

Harley was still talking. His girlfriend did everything for him.

“I don't even have to light a cigarette, Chris. She lights it and puts it in my mouth for me. She's got something to eat any time of the day or night. She won't let me take a bath. She just warshes me off cleaner than I've ever been. Dries me, too.”

“You look clean,” I said.

“Son, when we're out she don't look at nobody else. She clings to me like a monkey. She's fat and ugly but I don't care.

Harley had recently moved ten miles away from Haldeman across the county line. It was foreign territory to him, like Montana or New York for me. He felt the same as I did about the changes in the county. Our hometown was nothing but dirt and houses.

“Ain't it awful how they done Morehead,” he said. “I'd not live here for ten dollars a day. They've got Main Street bent like a bobby pin. And son, Haldeman's gone, just gone. It's like our backyard got took away.”

Our agreement on loss made perfect sense to Harley. It meant nothing that I had traveled half a million miles to his ten, that we both quit drinking, that we hadn't seen each other in many years. All that mattered was having grown up together. No one can ever know a Haldeman boy like another Haldeman boy. I admired his car for a while.

“Shoot,” he said, “I just got my license two months ago. Had to borrow a car to take it in, and got it on my first try. First try, son! You got anywhere you need to go? I'll drive you wherever. It don't matter how far or how long it takes. I got gas and everything. You just tell me where to point this rig. I'll take care of the rest.”

I realized that Harley wanted to return years of favors to people who drove him around the county. His glee was palpable. The old Pinto looked like it would barely get out of a driveway, but in eastern Kentucky, a car's appearance could be extremely deceiving, evidenced by my Malibu. I didn't have the heart to show my car to him. It would feel too much like bragging, and I wanted Harley to enjoy his own satisfaction.

I declined his offer to go somewhere.

“That's all right,” Harley said. “We'll set and smoke. Only I forgot you quit. Well, I'll smoke double then.”

He lit two cigarettes and smoked them simultaneously while recalling various car wrecks, two of which I was in as a teenager. There was a time when several of us boys got drunk and deliberately wrecked cars for the fun of it. I remembered getting stoned on pot with him shortly before I left Kentucky the first time. Harley was astonished at my decision, and said, “There's nowhere in the world I'd rather live than Haldeman.”

He told me of driving to visit his brother in Huntington, West Virginia, three hours away. Everyone warned him against such an undertaking—his family, his friends, the various counselors who'd attempted to look after him, even the police. No one believed in Harley. I realized that Sandra had lied in class because no one had taught her to believe in herself. I thought of Eugene's periodic despair over deserting his county for college. My own efforts at self-belief wavered constantly.

I asked Harley if he'd been scared of the trip to Huntington.

“Shit fire and save matches,” he said. “I've got a car and a map and a set of eyeballs. Drove right there. Stopped once for gas. Never made a wrong turn but the one time and I was right by my brother's house when I done it.”

He finished a cigarette, and contemplated the second one still burning in his other hand.

“You seem like you're doing good,” I said.

“I'm happy as a whore in a pecker patch.”

He hit me in the arm and laughed. Abruptly he looked down, as if talking to his lap.

“Son, I had no idea what a man could do if he wasn't in the habit of drinking.”

“What made you quit?” I said.

“Thought I was going to die of it. What happened was I had me a hangover that went for a week. Never got no better. I couldn't eat or sleep. Every water I took came right back. They was puke bags laying thick around my bed. So I just decided I was done with it. I didn't want to die. Not before I got my license, anyhow. You sure you don't want me to drive you somewhere.”

“Okay,” I said, “drive me around the block.”

He very carefully put his foot on the brake, turned the key, and slid the automatic shifter to reverse. He looked both ways twice. He checked his mirrors, placed his right arm on the back of my seat, peered over his shoulder, and eased into the street. A cop drove by, one of the few in town, and Harley waved.

“He don't know what to think,” Harley said. “I've knowed him a long time.”

He executed a perfect reverse turn, shifted gears, and began moving forward at five miles per hour. I was reminded of teaching Rita to drive on these very roads a decade back. She still drove like Harley did now—shoulders high, neck pronged forward, hands tense on the wheel, staring straight ahead. My sons told me that on long trips, they remind her to breathe. I understood why Harley's girlfriend lit cigarettes for him in the car.

We circled the block at a funereal pace. Harley held the wheel with his hands clenched tight. We saw one car the entire drive and Harley became extremely tense, veins rising like cords on his forearms. He didn't relax until the car went by in the opposite direction. He triple-checked the mirror to guarantee clearance.

He parked and I reminded myself to breathe. Harley was grinning in a new way that was also an old way, draining years from his face, erasing the marks of alcohol, cigarettes, bad food, incarceration. He was not a forty-five-year-old alcoholic on the mend, and I wasn't his neighbor who left for work and came back home. We were two Haldeman boys on the loose. Anything might happen. If we spent the night in the pokey, we'd laugh in the morning. If we wrecked the car, we'd cover it up with bushes and walk home through the woods. I was proud of Harley, and happy for him, but if you're a man in eastern Kentucky, you can't go around saying you love other men. We communicated through our cars, our fists, and the ancient go-between of women.

I hit him in the shoulder.

“You're a good driver,” I said. “I bet you could go anywhere you wanted to. Farther than West Virginia even.”

“You reckon?”

“I know it.”

I opened the door and placed a boot on the cement.

“Chris,” he said.

I turned my head three-quarters. His grin had faded and the years returned, but he was still Harley. He looked hard at me. I didn't know what was coming. It might be anything—an offer to smoke a joint or drink some whiskey, a request for a loan, a punch in the face.

“Haldeman was nice, wasn't it,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I got to where I had to leave there.”

“I know, Harley. Me, too.”

“Sometimes I miss it.”

I left the car and hurried away and hid behind a tree. I leaned around it like I had a hundred times with Harley as a boy in the woods. He lifted his chin in a wave. His hands were on the wheel, a cigarette in his mouth. He shifted the car into gear. He slowly backed the car into the street, stopping every five feet to check both ways.

I understood why people were afraid of him heading to Huntington on his own. I also understood how the liberty of departure gave him confidence. In Morehead, Harley drove the way everyone expected him to drive, but I suspected he had driven differently on his way to West Virginia. Like me, he had to leave to defy expectations. If Sandra left the hills, I felt sure she'd look up words she didn't know.

I have a chance to go to the camp where my wife is. I volunteer to go but the day before I arrive, they evacuated my wife. I am the only person in the war who volunteered for concentration camp.

Plaszow is where my worst is. Whatever bad happened to me physically happened there. And it was bad for many reasons. It was the same city I was born in. People who used to be my friends treat me not so good. There was a gallows, a whipping place, and a shooting place. Each a different type of punishment. I didn't know for what you got beaten, for what you got hung, for what you got shot. I wasn't interested. They shaved us. A very short crew cut. But to give us a little oomph, they shaved a stripe down the middle of the crew cut. You could recognize a prisoner right away.

Shooting people was a daily occurrence. I was working on an electric pole one day and it was a desolated part of the camp, on the outskirts. A beautiful day. The countryside is lush. I was working and I saw this car, a Mercedes, stop and a very elegant lady came out of it with a German officer. They walked with a little girl. It was often the case, some of the very pretty women, Jewish women, wound up with the German officers. She had a nice fur coat. I didn't see her face. She took a walk with him and he shot the girl and then he shot her. He drove the car away. I continue working on the electric pole.

They put me in with a group of electricians from Kraków and they don't like me. They sent me into the worst places, for instance, to fix things for the commander of the camp. He is Goeth, a complete lunatic. He rides a white horse with his lover to the camp at sunrise. A beautiful woman with long hair. He had these stallions, riding around the camp. He is from Vienna. Very tall, a beautiful man. Looks like something out of an Aryan opera. Something not quite earthly. He has two dogs running with him all the time, killers these dogs.

Goeth loved to shoot people for any kind of reason. He would go to the women's camp where they peeled potatoes and he would say, ladies, please do your work, and he'd go around this mound of potatoes, and say, this is a beautiful child, this is a beautiful child. She doesn't deserve this. She deserves better. So he shot her. After the war, Goeth's defense is he had to be cruel to stay in command because if Berlin knew he was soft on the Jews, they would replace him. To save Jews, he had to be harsh.

He has a magnificent little villa on top of the camp, and a lot of Hungarian girls working for him. There's a whole operation going on. He has a beautiful garden with elegant lights and a piano. Best wines, best liquor, classical music all the time. I love it when the electricians send me to the villa because the girls give me food. The electricians are sending me there because Goeth is crazy and might shoot me, but I'm getting food. I want to go there. They think I'm the crazy one, not Goeth!

The electric iron doesn't work and I can't fix it. Time is done with it. The light is coming from the ceiling and a shadow is in my eyes. I turn around, and Goeth was standing over me. He said, does it work?

The only thing I can do is make believe. I push this wire in, put the screws in the thing. Nothing explodes. Suddenly it works for a minute. I am saved.

I had the pleasure to look into his eyes and if I ever saw the Devil looking at me, it was him because his eyes were as cold as steel. I had this heavy iron. I could have certainly hurt him badly. I could have hit him at least twice. He was hanged after the war, but I could have killed him. Death was liberating for him. You cannot hurt or demean somebody who's dead. Him and Hitler should have been sentenced to life in prison under the same conditions as me.

It was terrible, because you never knew from day to day what was the next for us. Everybody was for themselves. I got used to it, everybody gets used to it when you have to. It was not so terrible anymore. The food was not so bad but a lot of people froze to death.