What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (9 page)

On Monday, a group of kids were selling the bumper stickers at school, so I bought another one and put it on my art portfolio. Jesse saw it as soon as I came into class and made a sort of snorting noise.

“What?” I said.

“Huge political statement,” he said, trying to get comfortable on his stool with the artificial leg.

“That’s what Ben said,” I admitted. “But you have to do something. I can’t go to demonstrations. I’m too young to drive.”

“And you would want to … why?” he asked.

That kind of surprised me. “Because something that gives people permanent nightmares can’t be something we ought to be doing,” I said.

“Leave my fucking dreams out of this!” he snapped at me, glaring.

I sucked my breath in—he looked so mad all of a sudden. “I didn’t mean
your
dreams,” I said hastily. I didn’t know he
had
dreams, although I expect he must. Anybody would. I wasn’t sure I could explain what I did mean, but he looked too mad to listen to me anyway.

“No, of course not.” Now he sounded sarcastic and mean. “I’m not the only headcase you know.”

“Actually, you’re not!”

“
Peace now
,” he said in a whiny voice. “You have no clue what it’s about, none, do you?”

“I know you got hurt,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say to him. It was like he’d suddenly turned into somebody totally different. His face was tight, and there was that tic beside his eye that looked as if something under his skin was trying to get out.

“You don’t know shit!” He grabbed a black marker and scrawled it all over the bumper sticker on my portfolio.

“I know people have to take a side for what they believe in!” I pulled my portfolio away from him. I could feel myself tearing up and I bit down on my lip to try to stop it.

Jesse pounded his fist on the art table, rattling it. “No, I don’t!” He was loud, and everyone swiveled around to stare at us. “It’s none of your business! Or theirs! I’m not your goddamn anti-war poster boy! And tell the VFW to go to hell too! I’m not going to be their tame hero! Leave me alone! All of you, just leave me the fuck alone!” He was shouting now, so angry he was spitting his words in my face. “Leave me the fuck alone!” he yelled again, and kicked his stool away with his good leg. It slammed against the next table. His portfolio slid off our table onto the floor, all his sketches falling out of it.

Mr. Petrillo flew across the room. “Jesse!”

“You leave me alone, too!” Jesse shoved past him and lurched around the tables, stepping on his drawings. He yanked the classroom door open and slammed it against the wall so hard the windows rattled. He turned around and threw the marker back in the room before he left.

“Oh. My. God,” a girl in the corner said. There were a couple of uncertain snickers from the other tables.

“That was scary.”

“Jesus, Arnaz, you always have that effect on guys?” someone said to me.

Someone else laughed. My face was burning.

“Jesse has … issues, obviously,” Mr. Petrillo said. He looked pretty shook up himself. “Let’s just leave him to deal with them, and … I’ll be back in a moment. Please work on your self-portraits while I’m gone.”

I picked up Jesse’s portfolio and collected the sketches that were scattered on the floor. A couple of them were torn or had footprints on them. There were a lot of them that were just mazes, in all different colors, harsh angular patterns that were really kind of pretty but sad at the same time. His self-portrait had mazes all around his head, too, stiff dark ones that blended with his hair. I slid them back in the portfolio and tied the top. I wondered what I should do with it and I wanted to cry.

The noise in the classroom slowly picked up again.

“That dude’s just crazy.”

“You think Petrillo’s gone to get the cops?”

“Man, I would. That dude needs to be in the psych ward.”

Lily, on the other hand, said it wasn’t unusual when I told her about it. “PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. It can manifest as rage.” Her mom is a psychologist. “You get it from trauma. Not just from wars—anybody can get it. Rape victims, for instance. Or people who’ve been in floods, or anything really heavy.”

“I guess that would be Jesse,” I said. “I’ve still got his portfolio. Should I just give it to Mr. Petrillo, or should I take it to him? I really want to see if he’s okay.”

“Mmm.” Lily bit her lip—channeling her mom, I think. “Take it to him, but not by yourself. And wait and see if he comes back to school first. If he doesn’t, I’ll go with you.”

8

I thought about Jesse all this week, but he didn’t come back to school. And then on Sunday, Father Weatherford came bustling up to the youth group after Mass with the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

“We’re going to put our little church on the map this year, my friends.” He beamed at us. “
We
are going to have a Las Posadas walk at Christmas, followed by a live nativity!”

We all looked at each other as if our collective doom had been announced. Noah Michalski pointed his finger down his throat behind Father Weatherford’s back and made gagging faces.

Las Posadas means “the inns” in Spanish. It’s a big procession where Mary and Joseph go around knocking on neighborhood doors and getting turned away, and finally, at the house that lets them in, there’s a big party. Father Weatherford is going to make a pageant of it, and march us down Ayala Avenue to the church, where we’ll end up with a live nativity and a cast of thousands.

“I have the cast all worked out,” he said. “Angie, you’re going to be our Mary. And …” He let his eye wander over the rest of us, then held up one finger as if he’d just thought of it. “And Noah, you will be our Joseph!”

This was clearly Father Weatherford’s idea for bringing the stray lamb back to the fold, since Noah hardly ever comes to church. It was just his bad luck his mother dragged him along that morning.

I tried to think of how to say
I’d rather be crucified
in a way that wouldn’t offend Father Weatherford, and I could tell that Noah was, too, but by then Father was doling out supporting roles as innkeepers and magi, and the usual cast of shepherds and angels. I have never seen anyone look so thrilled over a terrible idea. “I’ve made arrangements for live animals—sheep and camels and a donkey for Mary to ride!”

Noah honked in my ear and flapped his hands over his head like donkey ears.

“Shut
up
!” I stomped on his foot.

So, I’m going to ride a donkey down Ayala Avenue while Noah leads it. It’ll probably buck me off. We’ll stop at any store that Father Weatherford can get to go along with it all, and end up at the nativity set in front of the church, where the sheep and camels will be waiting by the manger. I will produce a baby doll previously hidden under the straw in the manger (at least he doesn’t want it to be produced from under my dress), and the Baby Jesus will be born. I’m not even going to report on the stupid suggestions Noah made about all this.

I was so disgusted, I told Wuffie I would walk home. I went around to the back garden and told Felix about it.

“I’ll die if I have to be in a pageant with that idiot and have a baby.” I sat down on a bench beside where Felix was weeding. The air smelled like sage. “Nobody can talk about anything but sex, but Noah Michalski is the worst. He laughed all the way through Biology while Ms. Knight was explaining how trees pollinate. And my mom would rather I went out with him than Jesse!”

It felt like it did when I used to talk to Felix’s statue, which was weird. But he already knew the backstory, as Ben would say.

“Ah, he’ll grow up,” Felix said now. “He may not even be a bad kid. You might marry him some day.”

I looked horrified.

“Just don’t get in the back seat of a car with him now.”

“I wouldn’t get in the same room with him if I could help it.”

“How’s Jesse?”

“Did Mom tell you to ask me that?” I was immediately suspicious.

“Nah. So how is he?”

“He blew up in art class. He started shouting at me and he threw things.”

“Mm.” Felix ran his hands through the thyme, kind of fluffing it and thinking.

“Lily says he has post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“You bet he does. And how does Lily know so much?”

“Her mom’s a psychologist.”

“Mm,” he said again.

“So what do I do now?”

“Take it easy. Give him space. Does he see a shrink?”

“I think so. He said something about it.”

Felix nodded. “That’s usually good. You get prime nightmares being zipped up in a body bag while you’re still alive, I bet.”

“They do that?”

“Standard procedure now. They found out they can keep ’em alive longer if they don’t lose body heat. They call ’em ‘hot pockets,’ but they’re body bags and everyone knows it. Like taking a nap in your own coffin. If you don’t make it, they just zip it up the rest of the way.”

“That’s horrible!”

“Medically speaking, it’s a good procedure. It’s a shame we didn’t think of it in Nam.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I pay attention. You want to know what happens after they’re taken off the battlefield?”

“Are you okay to talk about it?” I asked.

“Yeah. I was never around for that part of it. Half the time I didn’t know whether the guys I sent on made it or not. Sometimes you’d hear on the radio.” He started to stare off into the distance again, and then he snapped his head around and looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Yeah. I do want to know.” I thought I did. I was pretty sure I did.

“So, once the medevac chopper picks one up, they’ll take him to the hospital in Kandahar. Or her, these days. They’ll do CPR on the way if there isn’t any pulse. No flight medic wants a kid to die in his chopper. One guy told me that if they die in your chopper, they hang around.”

“Hang around?”

“Yeah. And a chopper isn’t very big.”

I thought about being haunted by soldiers you’d tried to save. Like Felix’s dreams, only while you’re awake.

“The ones that make it, they’ll fly them to Germany, and maybe their folks will come over. But they won’t remember it, not if they’re badly hurt. They dope ’em up pretty well. Lots of them don’t really wake up till they’re at Walter Reed in Washington. Then they find out what’s missing.”

I tried to imagine waking up one morning and discovering I had no left leg. Jesse’s parents flew out to Germany, and then back to Washington with him. Mom told me. His mom stayed there in Washington until he came home.

“When they send them home,” Felix said, “there’s rehab, and sometimes they have to go back in. There’s a complication that happens to amputees. The bone that’s left grows all over, into the rest of their leg, into the places where the flesh got damaged. It’s supposed to be rare, but it happens to battle amputees all the time.”

That sounded almost creepier than anything else.

“Your friend dodged that one, it looks like.”

“So how do I talk to him now?”

Felix chuckled. “Carefully?”

“I thought I was. I mean, I have no idea why he blew up. It made me feel awful.”

“What started it?”

“I had a stop-the-war sticker on my binder. He said I was clueless. And the VFW was clueless.”

“Oh. Well, most of us know that one. If you say the war’s all wrong, you’re saying your buds died for nothing. If you say it’s all cool, you have to not notice a lot.”

“That would be hard. But I get to have opinions, don’t I?” I felt kind of resentful. I know I’ve had it easy, and Jesse went through stuff I can’t even imagine, but I don’t take well to being told to suppress my opinions.

“Sure,” Felix said. He ruffled my hair, just a kindly old saint in his fake Mission garden. “It wasn’t about you, kiddo, not really.”

I tried to keep that in mind when Lily and I went to take Jesse’s art portfolio back in the afternoon. Since he hadn’t been to school for a week, I was afraid he wasn’t coming back. I really missed him, and I had this awful image of him in his bedroom, drawing mazes on the walls.

His mother opened the door when we rang the bell.

“Uh. We have Jesse’s art portfolio,” I said when she didn’t say anything. “We thought maybe he’d want it.”

She looked hopeful at that, like she really, really hoped he would. “Come in, girls.” She left us in the living room and we heard her feet pattering down the hall and a tap on his door. We couldn’t hear what he said, but after a minute he came out, kind of blinking like he’d been in a cave. He was wearing shorts, and I could tell Lily was trying not to look at the leg. His hair looked like he hadn’t combed it, and his shirt like he’d slept in it. I bet he had.

“Hi!” I said brightly, feeling like Miss Congeniality. I held out the portfolio.

“Oh.” Jesse looked at it for a few seconds as if it might not be his. Then he took it and he smiled at me. “Thank you.”