by April Smith
“That advice sure comes in handy with my new little artist friend from Venice,” he mused, not wanting to let it go.
“You have an artist friend?”
“Very friendly,” Poppy insisted. “But she dropped me because she wanted a younger guy. Can you believe that?”
Poppy laid a hand towel on the sink and carefully set out the double-edged razor that screwed open, a shoehorn, and the black leather brush that strapped into the palm of his hand, with which he curry-combed his immaculate white crewcut.
I watched sulkily.
A few weeks before, at midnight, the supervisors had rounded up the new agents and led us to a room lit only by candles. We stood in a silent circle, sweating it out. They pulled that stuff all the time: We know, and you don’t. A supervisor wearing black stepped to the center of the circle and ceremoniously drew a dagger from his belt. A second supervisor was handing out sealed envelopes. There was an ominous pause. Now what? Kill your partner? As the dagger passed from hand to hand, we were allowed to open our envelopes—and cheers and shouts filled the room. It had been the Bureau’s memorable way of letting us know our first field assignments.
“I’ve been assigned to Los Angeles,” I told Poppy finally.
He did not acknowledge the joy of having me close to home. “Do whatever it takes to get on the bank robbery squad,” he advised. “Hottest spot in town.”
“I know.” I took a very deep breath. “The only problem is, my boyfriend has been assigned to Miami, so we don’t know what to do.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
I broke into a great big smile. “Yes, his name is Steve.”
“Do I have to meet this cracker?”
I had not yet understood that the more I wanted love from Poppy, the more he would withhold it.
“Steve is not a cracker. He’s very intelligent.”
“What about common sense?”
“He has that, too.”
As a lieutenant with the Long Beach police department, Poppy had liaisoned with the Bureau on hundreds of bank heists. Now he was hanging his full-dress lieutenant’s uniform on the rod that passed for a closet.
“Is that what you’re going to wear to the graduation?”
I couldn’t help it. I was touched.
“Damn right. Show those FBI bastards where you come from,” he said.
When we arrived on campus, he was curious about everything.
“Why do they have a bust of Jefferson? When did you say these buildings were built?”
He took pictures of the brick corridors. He took a shot of the grass where our groundhog lived. He stood a long time by the wall commemorating FBI service martyrs. He read every one of their plaques.
“Those are the real heroes,” he whispered reverentially, too awed to encroach upon their dignity with a photo flash.
The Academy had shed its austerity to become a college campus on visiting day, where awkwardness and pride prevailed. We who wore the uniform (same old tactical pants and polo shirts) beamed at one another in fraternal spirit. Traffic in the hallways puddled and slowed. You could no longer charge around the corners, there were too many soft-bellied moms and dads wearing bad clothes. Civilians. I felt a sloppy love for all of them—these were my people now, whose freedom I would soon swear to give my life to protect.
Out of the dark, frigid motel room, out now in the mix, I was able to recover the sense of myself that had been growing steadily those past fourteen weeks, and here it was: I had been inducted into the elite. The brothers and sisters with whom I had shared the crucible were at that moment closer than blood. We had secret ceremonies and hidden powers those innocent visitors crowding the steamy glass atrium for coffee and cookies knew nothing about. All of them—including Poppy—were outside the cult. I was glad of it. I forgave them for it. And I was filled with happiness.
“Here he is!” I exclaimed as Steve Crawford, ramrod straight and youthfully muscled beneath the tight polo shirt, emerged from the crowd. I introduced him as “my boyfriend,” which sounded soft and girlish and out of sync in that military environment.
Steve and I smiled at each other encouragingly. I had tried to prep him, but my convoluted descriptions of Poppy’s hot-and-cold behavior only made him totally uptight, afraid to step on a land mine. As a result, Steve drew up tall and presented as a locked-jaw FBI newbie—exactly the kind of condescending fed who rolled over Poppy on the job.
I noticed I had stopped breathing when they shook hands.
“My folks don’t get here until tomorrow. Let me treat you to dinner, Lieutenant Grey,” Steve offered.
“My treat. You two are the star graduates,” my grandfather added resentfully, eyeing us back and forth.
It was early evening when we pulled into Fredericksburg, the sun a fireball behind the hickory trees. We crossed a bridge where flame-tinged water dragged over shallows of black stones.
I had been to town only once, for somebody’s birthday, even though it was just twenty minutes from the Academy. We had so much studying, we rarely left. The Board Room, a cafeteria by day, became a full-on bar at night, in order to minimize the need for outside contact.
The tidy Colonial churches and side-gabled homes in the historic district of Fredericksburg were enchanting—until you got out of the car and staggered through the lifeless heat. All the quaint little stores were closed. Poppy, Steve, and I moved at half speed, but not fast enough to avoid a plaque at the site of a famous five-and-dime store, where, back in the sixties, a young African-American woman had been the first to sit at a white’s-only lunch counter.
My stomach was hurting even before Poppy went into a tirade about “good-for-nothing blacks.” I prayed none of the midwestern tourists, materializing slowly out of the spongy air, could hear his words.
But Steve did.
“If you don’t mind, sir, I don’t appreciate that kind of talk. I have a cousin married to an African-American doctor, and he’s a terrific guy.”
“I used to be like you,” my grandfather replied, “until I was a patrol officer in the worst neighborhood in Los Angeles.”
“We don’t want to hear it, Poppy,” I said.
I was only in my twenties, not far removed from a childhood that had been dominated by his self-important anger. It buffered him from fears and losses too astringent for his macho taste—instead, the acid curled inside my gut. I had become so entwined in his emotions as a child that my role in life had been fixed as the vessel for holding the things that he despised and cast away.
There, on that brick sidewalk in Fredericksburg, Virginia, secretly brushing hands with the first young man for whom I’d had real feelings, I hated my grandfather. I hated to be stuck in this world with him. I felt ridiculous. At the Academy, I was myself, big and three-dimensional and real; now I was stuck on this historic street in someone else’s history, three figures in a sweltering diorama, a shoe-box Colonial miniature like you make in school.
Steve raised an eyebrow and gave a grim shrug. Poppy seemed unaware. He was looking in the window of the Scottish Center, where stuffed cats were wearing kilts. Nothing affects him, I thought bitterly. When I looked again, he had wandered down the street to some god-awful military store. Headless torsos were dressed in U.S. Army uniforms. There was a Life magazine from 1945 featuring Audie L. Murphy.
“See this guy? He did his part.”
Implying that we didn’t?
“Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. forces,” Steve agreed, mustering respect.
Poppy turned away, somehow offended.
I looked at my watch. It was barely 5:30. Time had slowed in the impassive heat.
“I think the restaurant is open now.”
On the advice of a middle-aged Academy librarian, who seemed, in her silk bow-tie blouses and wool skirts, closest to Poppy’s aesthetic, we had chosen La Petite Auberge. Inside, it was cool and dark, the air-conditioning a sensual pleasure. There were silver candle lamps with fluted glass s
hades, white latticework walls, and oil paintings of dogwood trees. Half a dozen well-heeled couples had come in for the early specials. They all knew the waiters; it was, after all, a living small town. Now we were like them—three people seated at a table in a nice French restaurant, none of whom can fathom why they are together.
Steve and I ordered Cokes, which came with lime and lots of ice in a narrow bar glass that contained the sweet carbonation perfectly. The dinner rolls were soft and fluffy white. Things were looking up. Steve’s thigh, hard inside the perfectly creased dress slacks, edged reassuringly close to mine.
Poppy decided the following day would be an excellent time to visit Manassas National Battlefield Park, forty miles away.
I protested. “Tomorrow is graduation.”
“Not until three-thirty in the afternoon, according to the schedule.”
“I have to get ready.”
“How long does it take you to get ready?”
“I want to take the morning off, and pack, and take a shower and—”
“I came all the way out to the other side of the country to find Joseph Grey.”
“Is he a relative?” Steve asked genially.
“A dead one. Poppy thinks he has a great-great-uncle who fought for the Union and died in the first battle of Manassas. So he wants to go there.” I rolled my eyes.
“Can’t you find old Joseph on a computer?” Steve suggested.
“A computer is not the same as being present on a field of honor. What is wrong with you?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“No need to be sorry,” I murmured as a waiter in a white dinner jacket offered the appetizers.
I took a glistening bite of a farm-fresh tomato with onions and tarragon.
“How about we drive up to Baltimore and see the Orioles instead?”
“No, ma’am,” Poppy replied. “We are on a mission.”
I groped Steve’s hand under the table. It was damp.
“Sir, you should know that Ana and I are serious.”
“Serious what?” He scraped the bottom of his bowl of mushroom soup.
“We care for each other and we want to get married.”
Poppy shocked me by simply asking, “When?”
It threw us both off. “Well,” said Steve, coloring red, “we don’t know exactly when. We just haven’t set a date. One day, I’ll wake up and I’ll turn to Ana and say, ‘Let’s get married.’”
“So in the meanwhile, you’re shacking up, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, sir—”
“We’re planning to get married in the chapel at the Academy,” I interjected quickly.
“Aren’t you the one who said that soon-to-be Special Agent Crawford has been assigned to Miami and you’ll be in L.A.?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m just a dumb cop, so explain to me. Exactly which bed is it where Special Agent Crawford turns to my granddaughter and says, ‘Let’s get married’? Because I can’t figure anything but a Motel 6 in the middle of Texas.”
“One of us will be reassigned.”
“And that’ll be who?”
“We don’t know who,” I said.
“It’ll be you, that’s who,” said Poppy. “When it comes down to it, he’ll be like any man; he’ll say, ‘My job is more important. You’re only the wife.’”
“So what?” Steve said angrily. “If we love each other.”
“You’d ask me to give up my career?”
“Not give it up.”
“But—what?”
“We’ll work it out,” said Steve.
“How?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.
My mouth had set in that shut-down way. Steve was watching with distaste. He’d never seen that expression on my face. It made me look like Poppy.
And I had never seen the cold, self-centered steel in his character.
“You’re over twenty-one,” my grandfather said. “You can do as you damn well please.”
The morning of graduation, I picked Poppy up at the Days Inn (he was waiting outside—camera in hand, wearing Bermuda shorts, high socks, an FBI T-shirt and FBI cap) and we headed north. It was 10:00 a.m. and already we were drowning in the muggy, listless air.
Avoiding a revisit of last night’s dinner—how we ate quickly and skipped dessert, how it was endured in tense silence except for an argument about which exit Steve’s family should take from the airport—Poppy posed one of his “educational” questions: “What is Bull Run?”
“It refers to an Indian chief whose tribe was massacred by U.S. troops and who tried to run away. They thought he was a coward, but history proves he was outnumbered.”
Poppy was incensed. He liked to run these quizzes to demonstrate my stupidity, but there was a limit.
“Bull Run is a stream!” he shouted. “The rebels were hiding in the woods along the banks of Bull Run and the Yankees were trapped. They couldn’t get across and they couldn’t go back. There were no goddamn Indians in sight. Goddamn it, Annie, don’t they teach anything in school?”
“I guess I was thinking of Sitting Bull.”
“I’ll tell you what’s bull.”
I smiled with evil satisfaction for having provoked him. Manassas had a haunting sound, like a sultry breeze sweeping high dry grass. I knew it was the first major battle of the Civil War, a catastrophic fiasco, which is why I was struggling to maintain respect as we inched through choking traffic at Manassas Mall.
It was ugly.
“Imagine what lies beneath all this crap,” I said.
“What?”
“Bodies. History.”
“The battle was fought over here.” He stabbed impatiently at a map. “Not at the mall. What’s the matter with you? Turn right after the overpass. Battle View Parkway, that has to be it.”
The rental car was overheating, so I turned right. Battle View Parkway had no view of the battleground. It was an access route to an industrial development that ended in a cul-de-sac.
“Well that just tears it.”
Poppy folded his arms, as if perversely satisfied by yet another example of the failure of the world to see it his way.
“What I don’t understand is the disrespect.” He shook his head. “Using the sacrifice of our war heroes to name a street that goes nowhere.”
It occurred to me that I had never heard my grandfather admit that he was wrong.
We came upon a split-rail fence that bordered a grassy hillock. The driveway rose and passed a spreading locust. Beneath its canopy, on the near horizon, were framed the crisp black silhouettes of half a dozen cannons. Instantly, my restlessness was stilled. My grandfather removed his FBI cap. The gravity of war seemed to toll the stagnant air, just as it had, hour by hour, the past 130 years. A taste came to the tongue—iron bitterness, like blood.
The car doors slammed and we stood in silence, looking over the rolling countryside, which had once been marked by tree lines, groves, a small white house—each a key location as the advantage of battle whipped from one side to the other like a thrashing snake. Now it was all open fields, and a tractor slowly worked the hay. Small groups of visitors paused here and there. The day was glaring, hazy. An American flag was drooping—limp as the flags that stultifying afternoon, July 21, 1861, when the grass was as high as the chests of seventeen-year-old boys, who fired on their own troops because they couldn’t tell the color of the standards they were carrying.
But that sort of thing was just a stitch in the whole mad carnality of it all, a hideously misjudged engagement, in which nearly five thousand naïve volunteers from both sides were killed or wounded. The red-soaked earth that day was strewn with body parts. In the makeshift hospitals, stacks of arms and legs and hands and feet were described as looking like piles of shucked corn.
The slaughter ended only when the Union retreated in terror, a disintegrating mob stampede. The politicians in Washington, D.C.—the Peter Abbotts of the past century—had promised “a gr
eat and glorious Union victory” in a week.
We paid ten dollars for a computer search for Joseph Grey or Gray, who could not be found. Poppy was in a swoon, taken with every detail he could swallow of the massive hand-to-hand encounter. Heroes abounded.
By then I was impatient with his petty chatter and eager to get back to the base and take an ice-cold shower. It was time.
“You never said what you think of Steve.”
“I didn’t like his eyes.”
“You don’t like his eyes.”
“They’re small.”
“I see.”
“They’ve got that hooded, criminal look.”
I turned toward his stringent profile. “Can I ask you something, Poppy? Are you and I on the same planet?”
“You’re not going to marry that cracker.”
“You can’t stop us.”
“I wish I were that all-powerful,” he said ruefully.
But he was. And I didn’t marry Steve. I met his parents only briefly, after the ceremony. There were polite excuses for us not to get together—too many relatives, not enough time. We never made our announcement. He went to Miami. I went to Los Angeles. We wrote letters. We phoned. In six weeks, it faded to nothing. It never had a chance. Stillborn.
“We have to leave in fifteen minutes,” I told my grandfather, and left him in the gift shop.
Outside, the sounds were vivid—the call of birds and children’s voices shouting “Eee-ha!” as they scrambled over the barrels of the cannons. Fat black gnats flew in my ears and up my nose. And there was the slow, mysterious grinding of cicadas, like a mechanical toy winding and unwinding. Winding and unwinding, like an old lady rocking on a porch.
In the white house in the center of the green battlefield, there had, in fact, lived a lady named Mrs. Judith Carter Henry. Her pretty china dishes were preserved in the museum. Eighty-five years old, a widow, she refused to leave the safety of her bed, even when Union sharpshooters took over the house. The Confederates fired back with howitzers and Mrs. Henry was mortally wounded. Some say she took more than twenty hits. Sources vary.
By then I knew enough about the movement of the battle to see it play out vividly in the still, hot fields. I thought of Poppy, traveling all over the map, California to Colonial Virginia, in search of a hero to heal his wounded heart. Would I ever be that hero in his eyes?