A Man of His Own

by Susan Wilson

  Words instead of tears were a good thing. Pax pushed himself off Rick and sat, his tail still swishing against the floor, his jaws open with the excitement of reunion, and his eyes on Rick’s face. His ears, though, were turned back, listening for Keller.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Keller really doesn’t want to meet this Rick Stanton, this other claimant to Pax’s loyalty. It was easier for him to have no face to imagine, no wheelchair-bound casualty of the same war he and Pax had emerged from intact. After nearly half a year in Germany with the occupation forces, Keller and Pax had finally accumulated the points needed for redeployment back to the United States. Keller had taken the dog to the retraining center and convinced the authorities that he should be the one to work with Pax. His excellent record of dog handling, and the earlier recommendation that he stay at the Front Royal Dog Training and Reception Center as a trainer worked in his favor and he was granted his wish. Besides his own dog, Keller was assigned to work with other dogs there for rehabilitation. Lots of playtime, lots of long, sauntering walks, no full-body crawl, no hunting down the enemy, no small-arms fire, no aggression against strangers. Keller was amazed at how these animals adapted to new circumstances, as if able to compartmentalize everything they had learned earlier. Better than some veterans he knew, who woke in the night in a sweat and had no tolerance for noise.

  Keller had expected that the hardest thing for Pax would be to accept being touched or handled by others, to revert from being his one-man-dog to a dog it was safe for anyone to be around. He was a little disappointed at how easily Pax slid from war dog to pet. If Pax had retained his hostility to strangers, he might have been rejected for rehoming. And it would have been so easy to take him for himself. But Pax, surprisingly, seemed to understand that the threats and dangers he’d been trained to locate no longer existed. The edict came down: His people wanted him and he was rehabilitated. Discharged with honor from the U.S. Army, Pax needed to go home.

  When Francesca had written that it would be impossible to leave her husband to collect the dog, Keller, on the verge of his own honorable discharge, volunteered to deliver the dog to the Stantons. Lucky for Keller, Rod Barlow was still involved, and he got the CO to agree to let Keller make the trip, highly unusual as it was. The CO was no fool; he knew that Keller was too attached to this Dogs For Defense volunteer. “Go, but don’t think for one minute that they’ll change their minds.”

  “I won’t. I don’t.” But he’d rehearsed his plea aloud all the way from the retraining center. I really think that the best thing for this dog is to remain with me. I’m thinking about joining the police force, and he’d make a great police dog. He’s too well trained to be a pet dog again. He needs stimulation. He needs. I need. I can’t let him go.

  Every mile of the journey from Virginia to Massachusetts, Keller fought against the temptation to simply change routes and disappear into the vast country that he and his comrades had defended. Only feeble honor kept Keller from doing it.

  “Come meet my husband.” Francesca steps into the hallway and Keller, empty leash in his hand, has no other choice but to go into the house and follow her down the corridor to the room where Pax has gone, his nose and ears homing in on his target precisely like they honed in on the enemy.

  The room has been converted from a den into a hospital room. The drapes look less like something meant for a quiet retreat and more like a remnant of the blackout rules, heavy and drawn against the late-afternoon sun. On one wall, built-in shelving above a cupboard holds a set of encyclopedias and a tattered dictionary, but the rest of the room is furnished with the antiseptic materiel of illness and barren of homely comfort. Stateside, Keller has visited many a wounded friend, and this room smells as if it is inside a VA hospital, not inside a modest home in a neighborhood in peacetime America.

  “Sir.” Keller extends his hand and then balks, impulsively throwing up a salute as if belatedly realizing that Stanton’s battlefield promotion was to staff sergeant. He feels foolish; both of them are civilians now, all honors and ranks behind them. The salute was meant only to compensate for the fact that Rick Stanton wouldn’t be shaking hands ever again.

  Stanton says nothing. Not looking at either Keller or his wife, he is focused entirely on the dog.

  “Darling, Corporal Nicholson brought Pax back to us.” Francesca’s tone is cajoling, and Keller feels slightly embarrassed for her. Stanton continues to ignore them both.

  The room is so still that Keller can hear the tinny sound of a radio playing in another house and, from a tree in the backyard, a raucous jay warning off a crow.

  “Sir, I asked your wife—”

  “Don’t.” Her tone isn’t cajoling now; it is razor-sharp and a warning. She shifts her shoulders back, deflecting his attempt to ask that her husband give up the only thing he loves.

  Which means that he is the one who must give up Pax.

  Rick Stanton finally looks at him. “Nicholson. Thank you.”

  “He’s one in a million, sir.” He’s going to be unmanned if he doesn’t leave this room right now. He needs to turn around and walk out of this house and get into the secondhand car he’s bought with his savings and drive away. He needs to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. But Keller remains where he is, waiting for dismissal. Waiting for the moment when he’ll have the strength to leave behind the only creature that he’s ever loved, and that, he’s certain, has ever loved him. A bitterness fills his mouth like a suffocating lump, forcing him to swallow, leaving him speechless. Only once has he ever felt this kind of pain, and to equate the death of one’s parents with the return of a dog to its rightful owners seems wrongheaded, but that’s how Keller feels. His parents are shadowy figures, remembered only vaguely; this dog has been by his side every moment for three years. What they have endured together isn’t something that time will diminish. Privation, danger, terror, and courage. These will not fade.

  “Corporal Nicholson, can I offer you something? A cup of coffee? You must be hungry; it’s well after lunchtime.” Francesca puts a hand on his arm, gives it a slight tug. She wants him out of here before he can say anything more.

  “We ate on the road. We’re fine.” We.

  “All right. Thank you again,” she says, the hostess ready for the party to end.

  “The thing is, he’s my dog.” The words come, flavored by the bitterness he feels.

  Pax lifts his head from Rick’s lap. He casts a sideways glance at Keller, then back to Francesca. His tail is no longer wagging. Rick’s hand slips to hold the dog’s collar, as if he’s afraid Keller will order the dog away and the dog will go. But Keller has no stomach for a heartless demonstration of loyalty that he and Pax would inflict on this couple. And, right now, he’s not sure that Pax would obey him. The dog looks like he’s found heaven in Rick Stanton’s immobile lap.

  Francesca suddenly puts herself between Keller and Stanton. Her green eyes fix on him, her hand rises, and she points a finger at him. “No. Pax is our dog. Rick’s dog. That was the agreement. We are very grateful to you for keeping him safe, but you need to leave.”

  “Wait.” Rick pushes himself against the back of the wheelchair, sitting fully upright. For the first time, Keller notices that one side of his face bears the smooth scars of healed burns. His right ear is twisted, as if it had partially melted. “Fran, would you mind leaving us alone for a moment?”

  She drops her hand, and her shoulders shift again. She steps away. “Fine. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Stanton lets go of the dog’s collar. “Why don’t you take Pax out? As you say, it was a long trip, and I’m sure he needs to go. Right, Nicholson?”

  Keller nods.

  “Pax, come.”

  All three wait to see if the dog will obey her. The dog looks from man to man.

  “Go ahead, Pax.” Rick and Keller speak together and the dog follows Francesca out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Sometimes, in the last few sec
onds of sleep, when the night’s dreamscape still feels real, Rick Stanton can forget that he is no longer the man whose waking dreams had come very close to being fulfilled. He wakes always to the truth that his once-within-grasp dreams are now and forever reduced to memories. Memories of almost succeeding. Of not quite. Close but forever just out of reach.

  Not just the dream of pitching in the majors but all the rest of what he had wanted—expected—to achieve in his life. He made it to the majors, and would have been in the starting rotation the spring after the war. He married a beautiful woman, and he would have treated her to a good life, a life of travel, a nice house, and a family. Rick Stanton wakes up to the reality that he is useless as a man, a provider, and a burden on this woman who never lets him see her struggle to cope. He is more or less locked up in this tiny room, living out his life, calling out to her to help him with the most humbling of tasks. She has become his nurse. She smiles and tells him jokes, and tries so hard to pretend that she’s happy. In return, he has become difficult. Snappish. Frustrated by the effort of the simplest of tasks, he has turned gratitude for her help into resentment. She pulls his blanket up and he shoves it away. She strokes his hair back and he looks away from her. Rick wishes that she would storm out on him, allow him the dignity of getting angry with him. Her patience is wearing on his.

  Getting Pax back has been the chief goal they’ve shared, besides keeping nonhealing wounds clean. Having him here was their holy grail, if only to have something else to think about besides his schedule at the VA hospital or whether it was finally time for another pain pill. They’d been made to wait, and the wait had become the ballast keeping their rocky boat from capsizing. “When Pax gets home,” they said to each other, implying that things would improve. There was never any finish to that phrase, no complementing fantasy of a sudden return to health, or magic moment when they would look over the dog’s beloved head and smile at each other like they used to. “When Pax gets home” was sufficient unto itself as the dog spent additional months in occupied Germany, while he was in the retraining center, while they waited for someone to bring their dog home.

  Keller Nicholson has brought Pax home and, with him, an attachment that is so obvious, Rick can nearly smell it. They should never have let Pax’s army handler bring him home. It isn’t doing anyone any good. Not Nicholson, not Pax, and certainly not them. Like so many who come to visit, Keller looks past Rick and fixes his gaze on the thick drapes, or the shelf of encyclopedias. Anywhere but at him. Rick is glad that he insisted that Francesca get him up and into his wheelchair. It’s bad enough being helpless, but being in that bed just exacerbates the impression that he’s an invalid. Which he is, but not one who can’t grasp at a last shred of self-esteem when another man is present. A fellow veteran. A subordinate, a mere corporal to his battle-won staff sergeant’s stripes. “Sit down, Corporal.”

  There is a kitchen chair that serves as the guest chair in this tiny room filled with the paraphernalia of his physical needs. It’s modern tubular steel, with a padded vinyl seat and back in a hideous turquoise-and-orange pattern that defies definition. There is a little tear in the vinyl and a fluff of stuffing pokes out. Keller pulls the chair away from the wall and sits opposite Rick. Now he is looking directly at him, and Rick looks for the pity that most visitors can’t hide. To his surprise, Rick doesn’t identify pity in those deep-set brown eyes; he sees something else entirely. Keller looks at Rick not with pity or sympathy, but with anger.

  “I want him. He’s been with me a long time. We’re a team. He’s not a pet any longer.” The brown eyes widen and the pupils dilate until the brown is occluded by the black. His mouth is a tense line, his hands fisted on his knees. “I’ll pay you for him.”

  It is so refreshing that Rick nearly laughs. Finally, someone who won’t mince around just because he’s a one-armed paraplegic former ballplayer. “Well, you can’t have him. And there’s no amount of money in the world that could buy him from me.”

  Keller gets to his feet so suddenly that the chair tips over with a crash. “I owe him my life. I can’t just leave him behind.”

  “Nicholson, we know he means a lot to you, but you have to understand what he means to me.” In the world of his prewaking dreams, Rick often runs. He feels the air on his face and he feels the dirt beneath his feet. He doesn’t know if he’s running from or toward something. Right now, seeing this other man’s distress, Rick wishes uselessly for the ability to run away from this scene. “You think that you need him, but I need him. I’ve had everything taken; he’s what’s left.”

  There is no change in Keller’s expression, no softening into empathy, no lessening of the anger. “The only good thing I’ve ever had in my life is this dog. I don’t have a wife, or a home, a family, a job. He’s it, my life.”

  Rick knows that if Francesca hears the crash of chair against floor, she’ll be back in the room in moments. He doesn’t want her in here, and he doesn’t want Pax in here, either, until they settle this. He doesn’t want to see the dog choose Keller. Even while the dog’s head was in his lap, Rick was painfully aware that he didn’t have the dog’s full attention and that when Keller entered the room, the dog relaxed, a softening of the excited tension in his shoulders, a lighter sigh.

  Rick shifts a little in his chair. The place above where his spinal cord was severed is sore and he’s afraid that Francesca is going to have to tend yet another break in his fragile skin. He needs to be lifted back into bed, to be rolled over so that she can salve it. “You have no job? No home to go to?”

  “No, sir.” Keller bends to pick up the kitchen chair. He sets it carefully back against the wall where he’d found it. He won’t be detoured from his determination to win this argument by niceties. “But he’ll have a home, you can be sure.”

  “Then what are your plans?”

  Rick can see him thinking about his response, weighing the merits of telling the truth against a plain civil lie. “The thing is, I plan to keep this dog, maybe go into police work. It would be a crime to waste his talents.”

  Rick recognizes the challenge in Keller’s blunt statement. He’s challenging Rick to fight for this dog. A flicker of some vestigial machismo surges in Rick, the urge to take this subordinate and shake him, shake him until he understands that he’s never going to take Pax from him. He feels like he can stand up and grab Keller and beat him to the ground, and he’s boundlessly grateful for the redirection of his simmering anger and resentment. It’s good to feel mad with someone besides himself.

  “Not possible. I won’t let him go.”

  Keller smooths the brim of his new hat, puts his hand on the doorknob. If he chooses to walk out, call the dog, and disappear, there really isn’t anything Rick can do to stop him except cry “thief!” If Pax obeys Nicholson, heeds his orders, then Rick thinks that his heart, already crushed with the heaped losses of career and hope, will break.

  He shifts in his chair again, the sore spot pulsing. Last night, when Francesca tried to shift him from the chair to the bed, she slipped, cracking her knee against the metal bed frame. She smiled and mocked herself, stubbornly refusing to admit that caring for him is difficult. That she isn’t up to the task, that a five-foot-two-inch, hundred-pound woman is capable of lifting a six-foot-something man. “Look, Nicholson, my wife needs help. With me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Keller lifts his hat to his head. He’s said what he plans, and in the next minute he’ll walk out that door and call the dog and the dog will go with him.

  “Wait. Hear me out. I have an idea that might work for all of us.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  After Rick was shipped stateside, we spent nearly a year in Washington, D.C., while Rick was in the Walter Reed General Hospital there. Once he was discharged, we decided that we wanted to go back to the Boston area. There was a good VA hospital there for him to continue with his therapies and we both felt like it was home. It was the place we’d met and married and dreamed our big drea
ms. During those long months at Walter Reed, we focused entirely on getting Rick healed and rehabilitated enough so that I could bring him home. Bringing him home was goal enough; all our other prewar pipe dreams had gone up in smoke.

  My cousin Sid—who’d made it back safe and sound and very nearly untouched by a war spent in England—found us a single-family house to rent in Quincy, not far from the shore at Squantum. I think he imagined that I’d be able to wheel Rick along the shore drive to enjoy the view of the Boston Harbor islands and eat takeout from Ray’s Clam Shack like a normal couple. Of course that didn’t happen. Our days were housebound, my only excursions to the grocery store and his to the hospital, where it seemed like he was continually being admitted because I had a hard time keeping up with the bedsores and the wound that just wouldn’t heal where his arm, his pitching arm, had been blown away.

  The house came with a one-car garage, conjoined to the main building by a glassed-in breezeway. Passing from the house to the garage always felt like being underwater as the light filtered through the glass blocks. The doorways weren’t wide enough to get Rick and his chair through, so he ended up having to endure all weathers as I loaded him into the car from the front walk. We didn’t have a ramp, either, so my biggest challenge was to ease him down the three steps, as if his wheelchair were a giant baby carriage, then anchor my weight against the forward motion of the chair as it rolled down the slope to the sidewalk. My fear was that someday I’d lose control and he’d go careering into the side of the car or, worse, into the street and oncoming traffic.

  When Keller Nicholson brought Pax home to us, we’d been in that rental house a little more than six months. Rick had been hospitalized about five times in that period, and the little house didn’t look appreciably more lived in than it had the day we moved into it. Rick was in what had been the den, and I slept upstairs in the larger of the two bedrooms. The second one, the one that still had nursery wallpaper from the previous tenants, I used to store everything I hadn’t had time to unpack; most of our life together was contained in cardboard boxes with labels that described how life had been: Wedding Presents, Photo Albums, Baseball Equipment.