Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘It’s too early to be senility,’ she went on. ‘I know what it is: what you see here is a veteran of peace.’ She laughed wildly and then said, ‘When I was fourteen, I never missed a word in that part. I could have played any of the other parts, too.’

  ‘She should have been the main character.’

  ‘I was supposed to tell Caesar’s wife that the warning dream she’d had was nothing to worry about. I was one of the conspirators and we all wanted Caesar to go to work that morning so we could stab him – all of us: big assassination scene. We had special plastic daggers loaded with fake blood. When you hit somebody with them, the blade telescoped back into the handle and all this thick, red liquid came pouring out – so realistic. People gasped. During the performance some of the parents in the audience were almost screaming. The dress rehearsal was even better, but we got carried away: we all just kept stabbing and stabbing – it was so much fun. Definitely the highlight of the production. Caesar finally had to say, “Cut it out. I’m dead enough.”’

  ‘Like a fox in the hen coop,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Oh, you know that’s something I heard on the radio: they don’t do that out of viciousness. A fox is made to strike a flock of birds in the open, while they’re getting ready to take off into the air. So, his biology makes him hit as many as he can, just to make sure he gets at least one. He keeps on going until the birds have flown away. But if they’re cooped up and can’t escape, in that case he kills all of them, even though he can’t take away more than a couple. See, it isn’t his fault. It’s his nature. In a way, you could say it’s the farmer who’s to blame for putting the chickens into those unnatural surroundings.’

  ‘It isn’t the fox’s fault,’ Hagen said.

  ‘Yes, sugar. That’s what I said. Animals don’t have a sense of morals. They only have instincts. Eat up your peas, precious.’

  ‘I hate peas.’

  ‘Not hate. Dislike intensely.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘You may not like them, but they like you. They’re just dying to get into that little tummy to do you some good. Come on, now.’

  ‘Why do I have to?’

  ‘They’re so good for you. You want me to spoonfeed you like a baby? OK, open up. And it’s down the little red lane they go.’

  Hagen chewed and then renewed his complaints. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I ate all the rest of them and everything else, too. Why do I have to finish these?’

  She reached over and began to squeeze and tickle him, chanting, ‘Why, oh why, oh why, can’t I look in my ear with my eye? I’m sure I could do it, if I put my mind to it: you never can tell till you try.’

  Hagen started to laugh.

  Sherman dropped his eyes and stared at the edge of the table. He’d been despising her and now suddenly he knew that he wasn’t good enough for her. He also realized that all the child’s complaints and her persuasion were part of a game. The boy was now eating whatever food had been left on the plate and he was having a good time. It was seduction. This was how you learned to do it. This was how far back it had to go, otherwise whenever people disagreed with you, you just did what had been done to you: knocked them across the room.

  *

  During the day he went for long walks in order to get out of Irene’s way. The cleaning woman, Addie, didn’t like him; that was another reason why he couldn’t hang around the house. If he’d come at a different time of year, he’d have offered to chop wood or undertake some similar task to show that he was trying to help out and not just freeload. But now he wasn’t able to do much of anything except invite Franklin out at night and pay for the drinks. He did that. He was doing it every night.

  The summer was almost at an end, which meant that the season of vacation and parties was over, but there were a few dates coming up when Franklin and Irene had issued invitations or were invited out themselves. Big parties were easy; they could ask Sherman along. If they had to go out to anything with a few friends or to have one or two couples in for a sit-down meal, Irene would offer Sherman the choice of meeting some new people and he could say that he thought he’d go see a movie that night.

  The one successful celebration at which he was included was their barbecue in the back yard. Even then, Irene said to Franklin afterwards, ‘Mrs Anderson asked him, “And what do you do, Mr Oliver?” and he said, “Oh, nothing much. I’m just a vet.” And then she said, “Oh, maybe you can tell me what I should do for my dachshund, Bismarck. He’s having back troubles again and Dr Dalmers is out of town.” God, I didn’t listen to the rest of it. I thought: he got himself into it, he can get himself out. And anyway, she’s right. It’s years ago now: it’s time he moved on to something else. He wasn’t even very badly wounded, was he?’

  ‘Head wounds are always bad,’ Franklin said.

  *

  One morning after Franklin had left for work, Sherman lit up a cigarette. From the next room, where she’d moved with a stack of plates, Irene said, ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke, Sherman. We don’t smoke in this house.’

  ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘No shit.’

  ‘That’s a quarter,’ Hagen said. ‘A whole quarter.’

  Portia brought a large glass jar to him. Inside there were a few pennies, nickles and dimes. He recognized it from the time when Franklin had paid for Irene saying ‘God’.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Is this for me?’

  ‘It’s the cuss box.’

  ‘Well, I never seen one of them before.’

  Both children refused to smile back. The one called Portia unscrewed the lid and held the jar out to him.

  He put his hand into his pocket, found a quarter and dropped it into the jar. ‘What are you going to do with all that money?’

  Portia said, ‘We take it to church.’

  ‘It’s for the children in foreign countries,’ Hagen added.

  Portia breathed in and began to sing: ‘Remember all God’s children, in far-off distant lands.’ Irene joined in from the next room.

  Hagen was too embarrassed to sing in front of a stranger. Sherman said to him, ‘I guess it might be a good thing for those foreign kids if I did a lot more cussing.’

  Irene came back in to the kitchen. She said, ‘No thank you, Sherman. We can do without that.’ Her voice was noncommittal but she had a set expression on her face. The kids understood straight away. So did Sherman. He cleared his throat and looked around, trying to think of something to say. At last he mumbled, ‘Well, I sure am impressed at what a good boy old Franklin is. There’s hardly any money in there.’

  ‘It’s like Portia said,’ Irene told him. ‘We usually put everything into the collection plate on Sundays.’

  ‘Gee,’ Sherman said.

  The morning after that, he lost his hold on a coffee cup. As it fell, it broke. He whispered, ‘Fuck.’ Irene heard. She said, ‘Mr Oliver, I’m afraid that’s two dollars in the cuss box. Unless,’ she added pointedly, ‘my husband wants to pay for his friend. We don’t really like that kind of language around the children.’

  Sherman threw Franklin a look. Back in the days when they were under fire, Franklin hadn’t worried about what was nice or not. He’d cursed and sworn with the best of them and even gone back to saying ain’t, which everyone in his home town said up to the age of seven or eight, only after that age being straightened out by somebody who was interested in things being nice. Going into battle he’d dropped all the niceties. And then, under the noise and the light, the terror and confusion, the cold and the darkness, he’d have given anything – he’d have given the rest of his life – for one hour of everything being nice, clean, orderly, safe and just like the commercials.

  They weren’t in fear of their lives any longer. Niceness wasn’t something to be aspired to. It wasn’t a necessity of life until it came to represent other things that were missing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sherman said. ‘I guess I just forgot.’

  *

  He could no longer remember w
hat had been in his mind at the beginning or why he’d decided to go in search of Franklin. Maybe if he hadn’t been asked to stay, he’d have started to walk back out of town. Or perhaps he’d have found some place for the night and then gone on. But now he’d been at the house for so long that he couldn’t go. Something had to happen before he could leave.

  Sometimes he felt that Franklin had wronged him; that he’d managed to make him a kind of nothing – an object that had had to be lifted from one place to another: out of the field and into the hospital.

  Sometimes he thought of him as a man who had made a fatherly and brotherly gesture to him in spite of the fact that they were hardly more than strangers. He would have liked to be that kind of man.

  And so, once in a while, he thought of himself becoming Franklin.

  *

  Certain things about Sherman began to worry Franklin: the man’s need to seek sanctuary in bars, his capacity for drink and, when drunk, his favorite phrase for summoning the waitress, which was, ‘Hey you, brainless.’ Still, they’d been through a bad time together and Franklin soon learned to suggest going only to places he’d never been in and wouldn’t mind not going back to. The twilit atmosphere of these saloons began to remind him of the war, where you’d see people’s faces lit up from darkness by flares and airport lighting. And the smoky atmosphere was like other bars and nightclubs he’d been in at that time.

  They were in a place called ‘The Highlife Café’ when Sherman asked what he could do to repay him for his hospitality. Franklin said, ‘Relax, Sherman. You’re a guest. We don’t want anything.’

  ‘But I can’t keep sponging off of your goodwill like this.’

  ‘Cut it out. Do you hear any complaints?’

  ‘It’s so strange to see how you’ve got this whole life, like everything happened someplace else, like it never happened, put it behind you and all. I mean, I know it’s been a long time since, um … I just don’t seem to be able to settle down somehow.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Well, sure. I guess so. If I could find a girl who’d be interested. But most of the ones I see aren’t homemaker types. They’re all looking for a lot of money.’

  ‘Not all of them. Hell, there are as many different kinds of women as men.’

  ‘No. There’s only one kind. Because they all do the same thing. They get married and they have kids. When they’re young, they’re looking forward to it. When they get married, they’re in the middle of it and when they’re old, they’re those grandmothers: always poking their noses in every place. See, that’s all they got.’

  ‘A lot of women go out to work.’

  ‘Only if they have to. They’d rather be married to a man who’s earning enough to let them stay at home. Look after the kids. All that. So on and so forth.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Franklin said.

  When they got back to the house, Sherman sensed from the way Irene was standing – as she watched him come in – that if he didn’t leave her family in peace for a while, she was going to make her husband kick him out.

  He asked Franklin to drop him near the library on his way to work the next day.

  ‘I’m going to need the car,’ she said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be taking the bus, Sherman. But I can show you which stop. I didn’t know you were a reading man.’

  ‘I read books about war. I like to hear what everybody has to say on the subject. I found a very interesting book a couple of years ago called Great Battles of the World, where they took you through it step by step: the technology, the terrain, the weather, the kings and generals. You know, one of the big problems in olden times was being able to see the enemy and not losing sight of where your commander was heading. That’s right. There was one famous battle – I forget which – way back there, where everybody charged forwards for the first few minutes, yelling blue murder and everything and after that they were all blinded by the cloud of dust they’d kicked up. Even the horses couldn’t see anything. It was a mess. It was like they was all in the dark and couldn’t find their way out.’

  Irene said, ‘I guess it’s always sensible to choose a good location. And make sure you don’t have the sun in your eyes.’

  ‘The geography is important. But there’s one thing even more vital than that: choosing your time. If you can pick the right time, you can even make it so it’s the wrong time for the other guy.’

  ‘Strategy,’ Franklin said.

  ‘Strategy and tactics.’

  Irene asked, ‘What’s the difference?’

  Neither of the men could tell her but each one thought the other had the wrong idea. The subject shifted to the tactics and strategy needed to be a successful poker player. Irene started to get ready for bed. Franklin dropped the car keys into the brass bowl on the telephone table.

  Later in the night Sherman heard the two of them talking:

  ‘He’s revolting,’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh, honey. He’s a bit rough and he doesn’t know how to behave in polite company, but otherwise he’s OK. Come on.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ she said. ‘He’s raw, savage, a drunk and creepy. He’s the type that stabs you in the back when you aren’t expecting it.’

  ‘He just hasn’t gotten over it yet.’

  ‘Why not? You did. He’s only hanging around, feeling sorry for himself.’

  ‘Feeling sorry for yourself is the hardest thing of all to fight. You get to thinking that it’s natural, because nobody else is going to. There are a lot of people, you know – a lot who don’t have anybody to love them. And it isn’t easy to live like that: to live without love and to know that the whole of your life is probably going to be that way.’

  ‘You were all right.’

  ‘Because I finally learned to do without it and to stop wanting. That’s the trick. That’s when you attract it.’

  ‘Your family loved you.’

  ‘Let’s don’t talk about my family. Please.’

  ‘Let’s not.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Let’s not, not let’s don’t.’

  There was silence for a while and then some creaks and rustling and a whisper from one of them, it was impossible to tell which one, saying, ‘Let’s do.’

  *

  He joined the library, giving Franklin’s address as his place of residence. He sat down and looked through at least one book every day he went in, although he didn’t often check a book out on his card, as everyone else did, to remove from the building and read at home.

  In the evenings he’d be out with Franklin in the bars or maybe going to a movie on his own.

  Every day at the library he kept seeing the same people. Most of them were older than he was. He assumed that they were on their own, like him. There were three old-maidish ladies and two men, one of whom – a ferocious old codger – owned a surly police dog he used to leave tied to the railings outside. The dog dozed or lay on its belly as if asleep, unless Sherman was nearby, in which case it would raise its lip to show its teeth, and growl low in its throat. The dislike was mutual: a boy he’d known back in school had been chewed up by the same breed of dog and Sherman had never trusted them since.

  He read about the Napoleonic wars. He liked Napoleon. But he also liked the Duke of Wellington. He thought it was interesting that a lot of historical crises threw up great men – one on each side – and that even if you came to the conclusion that one of them was wrong, or had bad ideas, it was usually true that the two were of equal importance. A great man was worthy of a great enemy.

  He mentioned some of his reading to Franklin when they went out at night. Irene was happy to get them both out of the house, as for several days in a row she was going to have meetings with women’s groups of one kind or another.

  ‘If wars was the way they used to be,’ Sherman said, ‘I could have been a general.’

  ‘That’s what we all think. But it’s a special talent. Most of us could be soldiers, or even captains and colonels,
but only a few men know how to organize a battle and keep it running when everything starts turning out crazy.’

  ‘I bet I could.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t. But I think maybe Irene could.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘She always gets what she wants.’

  ‘Must be a nice feeling.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nice for me, too. But I’ll tell you: they say if you know how to play chess, you could lead an army. I mean, if you’re good at it. If you can beat most other people.’

  ‘You’ve changed,’ Sherman said. ‘You’ve been civilized. You’ve settled down.’

  ‘I’ve adapted. Well, you have to.’

  ‘I don’t know. Civilian life – you’ve got to keep telling yourself to behave right. And if you don’t, some tight-assed son of a bitch is going to. Peacetime … You don’t get scared but it’s hard on your mind. Everybody’s so smug and laced up. You know, once they got something going, they all talk to each other, they go visiting each other, they have their little supper parties together, they go for drives and picnics and cookouts. All that kind of thing. And you have to belong to the club.’

  ‘It isn’t that bad.’

  ‘Don’t you remember the way it used to be? Sitting around with the girls? Playing poker. That was better. I miss that. Don’t you?’

  ‘What I’ve got now is better. You’ll find out. It’ll happen to you some day, too.’

  ‘Busted flush, full house, two pairs, royal straight, aces high, deuces wild. Full house – that’s your family: three and a pair.’

  ‘Four. There’s the baby.’

  ‘What I always wanted was a royal flush.’

  ‘You might get it but you wouldn’t be able to use it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that’s the way it works.’

  ‘The game I used to like best was the one called Midnight Baseball.’

  ‘Is that the one where you’re betting blind?’

  ‘Right. The one with the psychology.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it. That’s a fancy name for throwing your money away.’