Quartet for the End of Time (31 page)

It was clear at a glance that any job or promise of a job in Johnstown had evaporated long ago—but since they had come so far and had nowhere else in particular to go, the Cadons, and Douglas along with them, set up camp, too. The old rides—though they had long since rusted shut—made as good a foundation as any for makeshift homes; some men even claimed the empty swinging chairs of Ferris wheels for their beds, fashioning ladders out of scrap metal to enable them to clamber into them at night. In many ways, life in Camp McCloskey, as the settlement came to be known (in honor of the town's mayor, who had first issued the veterans an invitation to his town), was not so very different than it had been in Camp Marks.

McCloskey had not foreseen the number of veterans who would take him up on his offer, and in response to the flood of men who did—who continued to pour in, even long after Douglas and the Cadons arrived— he organized a special committee that solicited money and food from local and national corporations, in an effort to at least keep everyone fed. But it was impossible to keep up with the demand, and soon McCloskey
urged those veterans who, like the Cadons, had arrived long after the last jobs in Johnstown had been filled, to move on.

Most, however—having nowhere else to go, and no way to get there, even if they had—stayed.

A profound hopelessness settled over the camp. The days slid by, one dissolving into the next. Even Waters was now encouraging his men, from Washington (where he was searching out a permanent headquarters for the BEF) to “go home.” Just until December, he promised, when Congress reconvened. But December sounded as remote to many of the veterans, by then, as 1945.

For them, Johnstown began to feel like the end of the line.

—

A
ROUND THAT TIME
,
A GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR CAME TO THE CAMP
. He was a big man who walked a dog, and the dog and he held a curious resemblance to one another. They hadn't been in the camp long before everyone knew them as “the cousins”; the word spread through the camp quickly: The cousins are coming. The man carried a thick book under his arm and consulted it from time to time, but nobody knew for what purpose, and some suggested that it wasn't to any purpose at all. That it was just a big empty book the man carried. Just something to poke his nose in from time to time and make the men nervous as hell.

You reckon they got us all figgered in there, or what? asked Mick.

Sure, they got you figgered, Cecil said. Had you figgered in '17, they sure as hell got you figgered now.

They can figger this, said Mick, and gestured in the cousins' direction.

Oh, hold on, now, brother, said Cecil, but not in his usual tone.

B
Y THE TIME THE
cousins arrived at the Cadons' camp everyone had their honorable discharge and their bonus ticket laid out and smoothed flat before them. Douglas had his father's out in front of him. He had carried it with him ever since, after the riots in July,
he'd been released and his father had not. His father had pressed it into his hands at that time and told him to look after it and after himself. If the bonus came through and he wasn't around to do it himself, he told Douglas to take that ticket, cash it in for what it was worth, and send for his mother. Then, just like they'd planned (his father had said) the two of them should buy that little plot of land for themselves—in Virginia, or Tennessee—and not worry after him one bit. He would find them wherever they were (Douglas's father had said)—and just as quick as he was able.

Douglas had kept the ticket in his front shirt pocket ever since, and though he never did take it out to look at it, it gave him pleasure just to know it was there. It gave him even more pleasure to unfold it and smooth it out now, and read again what was promised there. It made it seem real again—which it hadn't in a long time. Like they weren't just— like the Oliver brothers—swinging their fists at the empty air.

T
HEY WERE JUST KIDS
— the Olivers—nine or ten years old, but they used to box together, regular, back at Camp Marks. Somehow (though neither one of them, as far as Douglas could recall, had ever won a match) they always managed to draw a crowd.

It was their father, Mr. Oliver, who organized the fights. A tall man, with a melted ear. Douglas remembered him in particular. He had always found his attention drifting, for some reason—when he was supposed to have been watching the fight—toward that central swirl of melted skin on the side of Mr. Oliver's head. It used to glisten under the glare of the sun; still hot-looking.

His boys—Jonas and Ike, they were called—were pretty evenly matched, though Jonas was older and had a good four inches on Ike. Ike, though, despite being shorter, was solid, and probably the stronger of the two. Also, he had a broad grin and knew how to use it. Jonas was more solemn, but there was something fierce about him, too—a little desperate—which made you want to watch him. Made you want him to win.

The crowd got so thick sometimes that you couldn't even see the
fight. It had to be shouted down to you—relayed along the crowd—so that it often arrived conflicted and confused. He's up. No. He's down, he's down. It was sometimes unclear how much of the information eventually received in the more remote corners of the crowd reflected the actual progress of the fight, and how much the progress of its communication. But then it didn't matter, because each fight always ended up the same way, in a draw. Mr. Oliver would suddenly be there in the ring, gripping in his right hand the fist of solemn Jonas, and in his left the fist of grinning Ike. It got to be that you could pretty much count on it. Douglas could not remember a single time when a fight had ended any other way. But people bet on one or the other boy all the same, and instead of serving to decrease interest in the fights, the crowd around them only continued to grow, and every time, just like the last, Mr. Oliver would stand in the middle at the end of the fight and hold up the fists of each son and say, “Draw.”

The crowd would just go wild. Not because they wanted it to have ended that way but because more than anything they didn't. So each time that man stood up there and announced that it had ended that way it fed their desire that it should not have ended that way. Douglas remembered how his father and he had shouted first for one boy and then for the other—his father changing his mind halfway through the fight when the mood hit him, because he never wagered, and Douglas following his cue—and how, when it ended and the two boys' hands were raised in a draw, his father would whistle a long, low note and turn to grin at Douglas and say, Well, what do you make of that, boy? I thought that time, Ol' Jonas, he really had a chance. And then they would move off, and the crowd would disperse around them, and Douglas would nod his head as if he, too, had been surprised.

S
O THE COUSINS MADE
their way, finally, over to the Cadons' camp and inspected their papers, both man and dog with small, dark eyes, short noses, and drooping chins jutted out in identical fashion.

Shaking his, the man opened up his big black book and made a note; then he shook his chin some more. Douglas could see Cecil sort of inch
his way over to see if he couldn't get a look at that book, but before he got close the cousin snapped it shut, then looked at Douglas and said, You don't look hardly old enough to be
born
in '17, son—let alone to have carried a gun—and Douglas said, That's right, I ain't. These are my daddy's papers—I'm just holding on to them for him.

Where's your daddy then? the cousin said. If he ain't here.

Douglas shrugged. He didn't want to say. But the cousin glared at him and finally he said, He got locked up a few weeks back.

The cousin grinned.

Wasn't his fault, Douglas said.

Oh, sure, the cousin said. I know what that means. His eyes got darker. Red, eh? He left his mouth open just a little after he said it, so that his bottom teeth showed. They were small and spread apart evenly, so that they looked loose.

Douglas shook his head and Mick and Cecil and even Curly shook theirs. Only Smoke continued to stare hard at the cousins in an impassive way as though nothing had been said. As if the cousins themselves, like everything else, were just a puff of smoke on the breeze that would soon drift by.

No, sir, Douglas said. He sure isn't. None of us is. We're Waters's men.

The cousin snorted. The dog started sniffing the ground but the man soon yanked his nose up in the air and the two of them trained their gaze on Douglas again, then on each of the Cadons, before, at last, they turned to go.

I could write you up, the big man said over his shoulder as he turned. I won't this time. But you remember that. And the rest of you, too, he warned. I know the tricks that get played. I bet half of you ain't ever laid eyes on France; just takes one look, I can see how it is.

Then he and the dog lumbered on to the next camp.

Cecil looked at Douglas. That ain't right, he said. I'm telling you, son, it ain't right. But you best remember what the man said. If I was you, I wouldn't show that ticket—not to no one, no more.

Douglas nodded. Slowly, he began to fold up his father's ticket again.

Don't look so sick about it, Cecil said. It's just—time's all. What it takes. He pressed a hand to Douglas's shoulder. It's going to work out all right, he said. In the end.

Mick let a long breath escape as though he had held it for ten minutes or more. Time, he said. Sure. It ain't likely we're gonna lay our hands on that any more than on anything else, he said. Then he held up his discharge papers and his bonus ticket, pinching them together at the corner so that they fluttered in the breeze and everyone in the little group could see for themselves just how thin they were, and how well, on account of it, the wind blew through them, as if they weighed nothing at all. For a moment Douglas thought Mick was going to let go and have them blow away and be gone, and the rest of them thought maybe he would, too. Maybe even Mick himself believed he would. But then Curly gave a sort of moan. It was just something he did sometimes, so it wasn't connected—not in any particular way—to his father's bonus, or how the wind blew or did not. He would just make a sound like that, all of a sudden, for no perceivable reason at all—high and long like a strangled bird, or something more like the low growl of a stuck badger, sometimes, or a cornered deer. He'd lift up his head so his bare throat was exposed, and you could almost see the noise as it traveled up it. It always gave Douglas the creeps to see it when he did, even though he knew the boy wasn't right in the head and you couldn't blame him for it. But in that moment, the exact moment when Curly made his sound, a sort of fierceness came over Mick's face, and it occurred to Douglas that it was not a thing that a person—not even someone's own father—got used to; the boy being different like that. For a moment or two more Mick let those papers flap in the breeze, but he didn't let them go in the way that everyone—briefly—expected he might, and after a while he folded them up and put them back in his pocket just like the rest of them had done.

It was strange, though. It would have made them sick to see Mick tear that ticket up or to have it float away, but somehow it made them even sicker not to. Everyone, even Curly, detested Mick a little as he tucked his papers carefully away. They hated him and themselves for the
thing—whatever it was—that stopped him from doing what, for a moment, he had wanted so badly to do.

When it was done, Smoke leaned back a little. Even he was relieved. He looked straight at Mick, and then at Douglas, and Cecil, and all of them, even Curly (each for their own private reasons, which they could not have said out loud), bowed their heads, and were ashamed.

—

S
HORTLY AFTER THAT
, M
C
C
LOSKEY HIM SELF SHOWED UP AT THE CAMP
. He was an ex-prizefighter with a cauliflower ear who spoke out of the side of his mouth.

God sent you here and I'm sending you away, he told them.

A few scattered hisses and boos spread through the crowd.

Hey! McCloskey shouted. I'm asking you. I'm telling you nice. That's more than Hoover ever did for you!

But no one was in the mood to make distinctions. The noise grew louder.

All right, then you bums can walk! McCloskey roared. I'll see you get a damned good start! I won't call in any troopers to massacre you, he shouted at them. I'll put hell on you myself!

C
ECIL AND
M
ICK
,
WITH
Smoke observing from under the broad brim of his hat, made the arrangements for the Cadons' departure. There wasn't much to arrange: there was nowhere to go, and no way to get there. But for them, like most of the rest of the men, it didn't much matter. One place, after all, was as good as the next.

For Douglas, though—it was different. And now, as he listened to the Cadons assemble their haphazard plan, and considered the arbitrariness of his own progress and direction, he felt a by-now-familiar panic begin to rise. In vain, he attempted to comfort himself (as he had often been able before) by recalling his father's final words. It didn't matter (his father had said) where he ended up, or how long it took him to get there; his father would find him. Him, and his mother, too. Just as quick as he was able.

But this presumed, Douglas reflected painfully to himself now, he might actually
arrive
somewhere. They were words that were true only, that is, if and when the bonus came through and he didn't—on account of it—have cause to travel anymore, in any direction. If, to the contrary, he allowed himself, as he had so far done, to be blown, first this way, then that, in whatever direction, it seemed unlikely—if not downright impossible—that he might, by chance one day, be blown once more across his father's path.