Quartet for the End of Time (33 page)

It was from this direction that Douglas's father, all that winter, also arrived. Transformed: a winged thing in Douglas's heart. Indeed, over the course of that winter, for Douglas and the rest, the entire Bonus Army was transformed in this way, to become something more than it was. Hardly—or, at any rate, purely—real anymore, it took root in the most fragile and remote corners of their minds. After a while, it hardly seemed to have to do with them anymore at all. It was as though (thought Douglas, as he climbed aboard a Washington-bound train one early May morning with—except for Cecil—the rest of the Cadons; as the train lurched and continued unconsciously along its known route, ignorant of the weight he and the rest of the men—their expectations, both personal and shared—added to its load) he had dreamed it all up. That he had dreamed the promise itself: the emptiness upon which it was based—and upon which, consequently, they rode. Yes, everything was still to come, he thought. There was nothing certain at all, and the future—at that moment—was just as distant as it had been or would be at any other. He felt that quite certainly, as he climbed aboard. Felt—as the air began to stir against the conflicting forward motion of the train and then to howl through the open door—how the promise—the desire at its root, which was desperate and primordial; as instinctive as a fish or a bird, which steers itself by some internal compass ever northward in the spring, or southward in the fall—and the emptiness were one; how they could not be separated, and that their union was in fact
the only union.
The very substance—or lack thereof—upon which all dreams, waking or not, are
founded, and therefore the single source of all things certain and uncertain in this world: past, present, and yet to come.

—

T
HERE WERE ALREADY NINE MEN IN THE CAR BY THE TIME THE FOUR
of them—Mick, Smoke, Douglas, and Curly—clambered aboard. That made, as one old man pointed out to them then, the unlucky number, thirteen. He had one blind eye, the lid swollen shut, and his good eye blinked and blazed as they came on board. It almost seemed to glow in the dark as he counted them. Then it flashed: One of you all's got to go.

Aw, said another man. He had his hat pulled down low, to cover his eyes. There's fourteen, he said. You just can't see the one hid behind your busted eye.

This made some of the men laugh. Then another man cut in, saying how it was he knew for a fact that the number thirteen was lucky to some, and that luck and most things like it were all in the way that you looked at the thing. This was discussed for some time until the blind man, his one eye still blazing, raised himself to his feet and began to shout.

This train is going to start moving, he said, and if one or more of you is not off it I am going to have to throw you off myself.

Finally, a man who looked too old to have fought in France—perhaps he was a veteran of the Civil War, or of the War of Independence, or of the Indian Wars; perhaps he was a thousand years old, and had seen every battle the country had ever fought from the time the first man encountered its shores, and stood dumbstruck and wondering— mumbled, Well, hell, that's all right, I can understand how you feel, and exited the train.

That made everyone shut up fast, and no one said anything for a while. Douglas didn't know for sure, but he thought it likely that every one of them, including the blind man, was thinking the same thing he was then. Wishing suddenly, like he was, that it had been him to say,
Well, hell, and find another car to board somewhere, and all the way up the line he kept a lookout for the man who had given up his place; who had reminded him, he realized (too late, only after he was gone) of his father—if his father had grown, in less than a single year, into an old man. And also of Cecil. At least the way Cecil had looked in that last month when all of a sudden the flesh fell off his bones and he was hardly recognizable anymore. He got scared thinking about that. About the way that the old man had looked like his father in some ways and like Cecil in others: about how he had recognized him right away, but only realized it too late. So that it was certain (so surely had he recognized him when at last he did) that the images in your mind don't just disappear, but stay with you, always—no matter how much it seems that you come to forget. Also, it got him thinking about the way his father would have changed in all the time that had passed since he had last seen him, which seemed now like such a long time. Not quite so much as he might, briefly, have imagined—but changed nonetheless. Just as he, Douglas, had also changed—because he felt very certain he had.

It worried him to think of it; of how, should he ever see his father again, there would be some things recognizable about him, and some things that would not be—but that he would never be so unrecognizable to Douglas, nor he—Douglas—so unrecognizable to his father, that they'd fail to know each other. He would never be able to simply turn away, even if that was what he wanted. No, he would never be able to pretend he didn't see his father, if his father appeared; to pretend there was another man he was looking for instead—a man who hadn't changed at all. No, his father would be recognizable to him in an instant—but that instant, as with the old man on the train, might come too late. He might just as easily be the thirteenth man on some train car some night as any other man—which Douglas might realize only after he was gone. He might allow him to disembark. Might not cry out after him, or offer to accompany him into the night, or say, You're all right in here, let me be the thirteenth man, and substitute himself, until it was too late. It seemed (Douglas thought then, sadly,
to himself) that time moved at such a pace—always at odds with the mind—that you might never come to recognize anything for what it was, or at least not at the precise moment in time when it was, indeed, that thing.

—

R
OOSEVELT WAS NOT A
B
ONUS
M
AN
,
AND NEVER HAD BEEN
. D
ESPITE
this, Waters was confident the bill would pass that spring. And, indeed, things looked very good for the army at first. Arriving veterans were directed to camps set up just outside the city, where—at the government's expense—they were provided with a roof over their heads, an army-issue cot, and three square meals a day.

Even those who, from the start, opposed the “safe distance” the camps proposed between themselves and the Hill did not complain as they drifted to sleep in their beds at night, or lined up for a meal. Douglas regretted the distance for a different reason. It was hardly likely, he reasoned—so far away from the city—that his path might cross with Sutton's now. But it wasn't otherwise all that bad a deal. And besides, as many of the men happily maintained, if the President was willing to feed and house the army, he would surely be willing, sooner or later, to give in to their other demands. A scattered few, however, believed that just the opposite was true. The onetime bandit—Arizona—whom Douglas met around that time was one of those.

You never get anything free, the bandit would say, and he should've known. He was wanted in three states—and it wasn't (he told them) for standing in line. If the BEF veterans were willing to stand in line now, they all might just as well give up and go home, he said. He himself might just as well go back to Arizona (which was the closest thing to home he had, and how he got his name) and get himself hanged. But still, as he said all this, he didn't get out of line, and neither did the rest of them, and very slowly it inched forward, and the closer he got, the more Douglas could feel the emptiness in his belly. It got hotter and hotter, until he thought he was going to burn up from the inside, and
when he got to the front and held out his cup and it got filled up, he thought he might bust before he got a chance to sit down and eat, and it wasn't until he had taken a bite or two that he remembered enough to be embarrassed at how hungrily he ate. He slowed down a bit then, or tried to; tried to pretend that each bite was going to be the last, but it didn't change the fact—whether he ate fast or slow—that after only a few bites more all the food was gone, and the bandit—he seemed to read his mind—said, We've been fooled again. You can see that now, can't ye?

But later that same day they were visited by the President's wife, who led them in singing “There's a Long, Long, Trail a-Winding,” and sure enough nearly all of them, the bandit included, sang along. It made the bandit sick to think of it later—to recall how all those men had waggled their heads and said, Why, yes, ma'am, when the President's wife had asked if they were all just as happy as could be—and Douglas always wondered if that was because the bandit had waggled his head right along with them: Douglas had seen it with his own eyes. If it was because he suspected that, on account of it, he really wasn't any different from the rest.

Much later, just to irritate him, Douglas would whistle that same tune under his breath, and it would without fail cause the bandit to curse and that for some reason always gave Douglas some satisfaction. And there never was any consequence to it, his riling the bandit like that, because a moment later, as it always was with the bandit, the whole thing would be forgotten. You see, the bandit, he would fire off at the least provocation, but the next moment it was like nothing had ever even happened at all. One time, when Douglas mentioned this, the bandit got to thinking seriously on it and told Douglas that he hadn't always been like that but he figured that he had been at least since Verdun. That after that, whenever his blood rose to a certain temperature, it stopped up the circuits of his brain and there'd be a short fuse and he'd go a bit blank, and that was why he did try his best to keep calm, and, the way he said it, it was obvious he thought he had
made a success of it. And why not? He couldn't ever recollect any different, and Douglas didn't tell him.

—

I
T WAS NOT JUST FOOD THAT WAS ON OFFER THAT SPRING
—
THERE
were jobs, too. At first they went just to the young, unmarried men, but after a while these restrictions were waived and anyone could apply. And plenty did—despite the unflattering rumors that began to circulate soon enough about the conditions in the field.

How's that for equality? a white man shouted one afternoon in the government camp, raising his fist in the air. Now everyone's a slave!

All the black men and the white men cheered together.

To hell with reforestation! someone else shouted.

Everyone cheered again.

Still, though, every job on offer that summer was soon filled. Even Smoke finally signed up and went his own way—leaving Mick and Curly behind.

Curly, see, he couldn't do any work like that, where you needed any wits.

Douglas stayed, too, on the advice of the bandit, who said that surely something better was just about to come along.

When it did, Douglas, too, left Mick and Curly behind. And he never did find out any more about either one of them—or about how Smoke got along up there in the big woods. He felt bad to leave them because he knew that was the way it would go. Sure enough—it did.

T
HEY TRAVELED SOUTH
,
THEN
, he and the bandit, and, before too long—just as the bandit had promised—they'd got themselves jobs at a tobacco farm just outside Stafford, Virginia. It was not the best sort of work, the bandit said—but it sure as hell beat working for the government. They would be up before sunrise every morning and out in the fields. That was, as Douglas soon learned, the best—really the only
halfway decent—time of day. In the heat of a long afternoon when he would feel about ready to drop dead he was so tired and sore, and the sun on him felt like it had burned its way all the way through, so that it wasn't just burning his skin anymore, but his brain and his heart, he would think back to the way the day had begun, and it would seem to him so good that he wished he could, if nothing else, return to those moments after first waking. When they were just rolling out from underneath the blankets and splashing cool water on their faces from the bucket that hung on a post in the yard. To those brief moments when he'd been waiting in line behind the next man, with sleep still lingering, clouding his brain. Just waiting; anticipating the cool water and then actually feeling it, as it splashed over his face.

It would feel as if that moment were right inside him, when he thought of it; that the water had got in through his ear to his brain. In the middle of the day, he would remember the way that his head had felt then, cool and alive. But then the next morning when he was actually standing in line, waiting for the hit of the cold water, for the blood to rush to his brain and for everything to feel like that—fresh and sharp and alive inside him—he would not feel that way at all. More often than not he would feel (save for the desperate, unbearable heat) just like he'd felt when he'd stood in the field and thought longingly of the coolness of the water—even as he lingered behind another man and anticipated its blow.

H
E SPENT THE DAY
crouched behind Jo-Jo Hadley—a big man, nearing sixty, whose skin had turned red as a beet and hardened that way, giving him an odd sort of sheen. He had been working those fields longer than he could remember and, because of it, made up for Douglas's slowness in the field before Douglas caught on. He took some pride in that. In showing Douglas the way it was done.

Like this, see, he'd say, expertly spudding the plant he'd taken from Douglas's fumbling hands. When Douglas got quicker he would grunt his approval and beam up at him, saying, You got it now, son, there's nothing to it, and when he did get the hang of it, it got to be that he could do it—
take the plants from Hadley as they churned toward him, with the passion and endurance of a threshing machine—without thinking of it at all.

Soon everything began to blur together, so that he could no longer tell the difference between the cool mornings and the heat of the day, or between any single step in the process of planting, which had by then become one long, interminable task. Because of this, he could never be sure—then or later—how long it was before he woke one morning with a tingling numbness in his hands. Perhaps only a little more than a week had gone by, but perhaps more time had passed.