What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  And I’ll help them out a little bit this time: I take off my beanie and tuck it into my waistline, brush my hair out. Flex my jaw so as to enunciate the ten-dollar Latinate words I’m ready to throw into the conversation to convince the cop that I’m just an innocent passerby, which I’m not. But I can’t pass up this chance to play diplomat.

  Hey, the rent-a-cop wants to say, Put your beanie back on your head and be the scumbag you were acting like seconds ago, but I smile and beat him to the punch. “I’m glad I was able to get all the expletives out of my system before I inform the authorities of my illegal detainment. Holding someone hostage against his will, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Don’t let him get you down,” I hear, a familiar voice.

  Superior Firepower jumps to attention. “Hello, sir.”

  I nod at Uncle Rich, roll my eyes as in, But of course I find you here at the Pat Tillman benefit, Uncle. And of course you’ve barely broken a sweat in your jogging shorts. Of course.

  “Oh,” I say, “I haven’t heard anything but flak out of Officer Superior Firepower. Blanks, dud rounds.”

  My uncle says, “How are you, Lyle?”

  “We thank you, sir, for joining us this morning.”

  “My pleasure. My honor to honor the kid.”

  I roll my eyes yet again as in, But of course Lyle loves his war heroes: Tillman of today, my uncle of yesteryear. Almaden is just filled to the brim with real men. The memory of Tillman, my barely winded uncle and Sergeant Superior Firepower are holding down the fort.

  “Make the force yet?” my uncle asks.

  “I can answer that,” I say.

  “Not yet, sir. I’m a reserve at the De Anza Junior College Police Department and a weekend volunteer at the police range in Sacramento. I clean the rounds and dispose of the targets.”

  “That’s a two-hour drive, Lyle.”

  Lyle smiles and nods, as if it’s a sacrifice of the Tillman caliber. I can’t help but break this clown down. “That’s a long ways to go,” I say, “to pick up peanut shells at a ballpark.”

  “Well, good for you, Lyle. Don’t mind this guy.” My uncle grips my shoulder a little too hard, and I buck it a little too easily. “He has a tendency to get ahead of himself. Wherever he finds himself.”

  “Oh yes, sir,” says Lyle.

  “Why don’t you teach me how to slow down, sir?”

  “Let’s go,” says my uncle, and what the hell, I go, right past Sergeant Superior Firepower, who’s confused as a walrus on skates, down to the track and around it, past the rows of booths, nod politely at the approaching cop who—fantastic!—nods back, slow-pedal through the safe and silly suburbs to be instructed on whatever’s important about life in this place.

  31

  The Battle for Tillman

  THE BATTLE FOR TILLMAN continues on the rickety dock of my uncle’s man-made lake, a four-hundred-dollar imported fishing pole each between our knees, naked feet in the water with no straw to dumbly chew on, no raft with any river to conquer, no runaway slave to nobly go to Hell for. Our lines look like crazy string ending at the red and white bobbers ten yards in front of us, and the water’s so shallow we can see the fluorescent gobs of Powerbait on the hooks. Not that it matters, but we haven’t had even the slightest bite, though my uncle insists he stocked the lake with black bass and trout.

  I recite:

  “Not that it matters, not that my heart’s cry

  is potent to deflect our common doom—”

  “No poetry, nephew.”

  “Even sexy Millay?”

  “Even her. Whoever the hell she is.”

  “Excepting the artificial lake and synthetic fish,” I say, “this hour is like an authentic Norman Rockwell painting.”

  My uncle says, “You know, he grew up right down the street from me.”

  “Tillman?”

  “What a beautiful kid. An idealist.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “They took the poor guy’s idealism and ran with it like a football.”

  “I watched him score six touchdowns in one game back in ’ninety-four. That was the bravest effort I’ve ever seen on the high school gridiron. Didn’t come off the field for four quarters. We named the stadium after him.”

  “Yeah. Probably rename the town of Almaden Tillman before the decade’s done.”

  My uncle pours a shot of unidentified liquor he’s pulled out of his makeshift tackle box. Not that it matters, but I sometimes wonder why my uncle didn’t throw down for a roving barkeep on his property to satiate his palate and a leopard-spot liver. I don’t wonder, however, where all the hired help went or why I haven’t been inside his house since moving here: we have a symbiotic relationship on that basis: he hasn’t been inside mine—which is really his—either.

  He hands me a shot. I watch a dust cloud twirl lazily across the north entrance and then a car cutting through it. Glittering silver, long and thin like a shark, the four-door sedan accelerates down the winding path. I look over at my uncle, who can’t miss the car, the only other sign of life on his property. When it slows to a stop at the southern porch of the estate, my uncle tenses up and says, “To Pat.”

  My Aunt Lanell climbs out of the driver’s seat, walks around the car, up the porch, into the house.

  When my parents split back in the late eighties, my uncle used to pick me up from school and take me to the San José Bees games. I can’t remember a single player because he’d talk for seven innings straight about his life: how he couldn’t connect with his daughter, how the deathless pressure of business seemed regressive after the theater of war, how it was the wife of a CEO who held everything together. The drag on those conversations was so heavy at that age that afterward, in bed, I’d have attacks of melancholy akin to hearing a eulogy that hits more than a nerve, that’s so accurate and hard on the heart you can’t breath. That gets beyond the corpse and reaches the people in the room who aren’t yet dead.

  I’d get dressed and walk to the park, the yellow-lined path glowing in the midnight moon, sit on the littered rim of the polluted creek bed and, alone, softly cry for my uncle, or myself, or whoever—for the dead fish and crawdads; it didn’t matter—wondering what would hold the world together for another hour.

  Aunt Lanell emerges with an athletic bag, shades over her eyes, hops in the car, speeds off.

  Today I won’t ask my uncle about his family.

  “Here’s to you, Uncle,” I toast, knocking back the shot.

  My uncle looks torn, the frown pushing down on his nose. “Well,” he says, “I guess you’re not on board with the Tillman thing, are you?”

  She’s up over the crest, the dust pushing toward us and then gone. “I guess not.”

  “Why’d you call him poor guy earlier?”

  “Because,” I say, “there’s nothing worse than losing your life for a country that doesn’t deserve it.”

  “I may regret this, but I want to hear your thoughts, nephew.”

  “Way before Tillman died, America had made up its mind that he was a hero. They praised him for bypassing six million bucks to go join the Army Rangers. They were shouting, Look! There’s someone who doesn’t measure everything by money. Who actually puts his ass on the line for his beliefs, volunteers so that we don’t have to. He was the perfect symbol for all those corporate and political big shots who never send their own sons to the wars they sign onto.”

  “He was a hero.”

  “A hero? He died from friendly fire. How can he be a hero?”

  My uncle says nothing, sipping his shot. “I know what you mean.”

  “There’s no side of the issue that’s right. His family was on C-Span with the fucking pink grandmas against the war. Tillman himself wrote a letter to his brother, warning him against joining up.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was common in ’Nam,” he says, “to hear stories about fighter pilots. One I’d admired had to do with how pilots with families would sign off before
a mission. That if they got shot down, the lieutenant would make ’em KIA no matter what.”

  “Not following you.”

  “Well, their wife and children back home would be taken care of. Full benies under that classification.”

  “’Cause if they’re MIA it means they’re still alive?”

  “Yep. There’s a lot that goes on in war that can’t be translated back to this place. I sympathize with what you’re saying, nephew, I really do.”

  This surprises me.

  “Yeah?” “Yeah. So here’s what you’re saying: We’ve got a hero who wasn’t a hero get a medal he didn’t deserve. Great kid, but that’s an aside right now. We’ve got a family refuting the way they’re told about his death, which nullifies the heroism, but not refuting the medal, which is awarded for heroism. We’ve got the pink grandmas on one side and flag-wavers on the other.”

  “That’s right. With enough information, who in their right mind would pick one side or the other of his story? Tillman just added to the things you can’t believe in anymore.”

  “As in this country?”

  “I’ve felt this way for a long time.”

  “This is why you didn’t go to the Point?”

  “Honor, duty, country? I’d have been kicked out my plebian year like Poe. A matter of national security.”

  “You flatter yourself, nephew. You’re not that important.”

  “I mean, how could I sign on as a cadet this late into our story? By 1996? Even back then I had a laymen’s grasp of the horrors committed by this nation. Which is mainly to say who got squashed along the way to easy living.”

  “Yeah, well, someone afforded you the safety of easy living.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just saying one thing. This is the nature of man: you acquire power. Constantly. However much melatonin you’ve got in your skin, whatever tribe you’re from, American, non-American. Until you’ve got so much power you don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Why don’t you give it up then?”

  “It’s not a good spot to be in. Everyone else wants what we’ve got.”

  “They’re already getting it.”

  “Exactly. I’m saying, Uncle, that we’re in decay. We’ve turned the scalpel on ourselves and are picking apart the monster—us—that we’ve created.”

  My uncle goes quiet. The lingering dust in the air makes me think of some far-off place in the Midwest, a family pressed to their living room window, eyes on the storm in the distance. I pour a shot of the mystery liquor, sip it, and wait for a bite, for a word from my uncle, anything.

  “You know,” he says, “I can see one night in particular. My second tour. We were on a hilltop somewhere, calling in air strikes. The sky was so wide open I felt warm almost, enlightened. Who knows, it maybe was nothing, but I remember thinking, I’m on this side with these guys and that’s it. This is the purest, realest, finest moment I will ever have. Well, I been trying to get back to that place for a long time.

  “I went to the rally today because he was one of ours. That’s it, nephew, nothing more. All the stuff you’re saying, while accurate, doesn’t mean a thing to me. I drew my line a long time ago. I haven’t always stayed faithful to it; I guess that’s for me to figure out—to get right some day. But I went to the rally for Tillman, his family, and this country, whatever it is.”

  “Whatever it’s become?” The dust cloud has finally lowered itself to this half-ass dock: I put my nose into my shirtsleeve, look over at my uncle.

  “Yes,” he says, nodding.

  The last answer provides us with real silence, the kind that comes in places that this lake was built to emulate. The water is stiller than a corpse, we’re stiller than the water, two patients etherized upon a table.

  “Should we toss our lines out again?” I ask.

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “Getting a new start on a bite.”

  “Nephew, you only have so many new starts in this life before you have to live with it.”

  That strikes me as being true.

  “Listen,” he says. “I understand your crisis.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s like you live in this moon zone without gravity. Floating from position to position.”

  “Eclectic is the new chic word.”

  “That’s just a cryptic fancy way of saying everything. You believe in and want and can understand and are not concerned at all about everything.”

  “I’ve been taught that all people are good and bad, equally generous and desirous.”

  “What does that really mean, nephew?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe that I’m a hyperempathist or something.”

  “Hyperempathists have no allegiance.”

  “There isn’t anyone whose shoes I can’t imagine being in.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can really fill them.”

  “Let me put it this way: I view some guy from Sunnyvale in the same way I view some cat from Istanbul. I don’t have any more or any less love for one person than the other.”

  “Yeah. Because you can. Which means you’re allowed to. You therefore have no functional loyalty. And don’t give me any of that loyalty to the truth crap. The key word is functional. You and people like you are living in a dream. You just can’t imagine the fact that you have enemies in the world. Well, you’ve got them, bud, a lot of them. This place is so safe you can pretend you’re at a cultural smorgasbord.”

  “I feel you, Uncle. Only I’m not pretending. Good or bad, this is my inheritance. I really am honest to God this way. And so are a million others of my generation. We don’t hate anyone. We’re detestable,” I say, “but we aren’t stupid.”

  The light wind around us fails to muffle the heavy whistle of our breathing. My uncle looks up at the northwest entrance, then over at me. “Says who?”

  Just then I see a ripple in the water, oxygen tickling the surface, and whisper, “Hey, Uncle, sshhh, I think we got one,” but he’s up and gone, heading back to his empty estate at the prospect I offer of no prospects, his bottle of mystery liquor swinging and spilling over his hand, blind to the four-hundred-dollar pole pulled splashing into the clear water of the fake lake by a real bite, our first and last, dragged down and out into the deep by a fake fish we’ll never catch to kill and fry—or even handle to release and save.

  32

  At Work I Have Nothing to Do

  AT WORK I have nothing to do today but take a dozen defunct roller chairs and three scarred coffee tables to a Goodwill in Sunnyvale (“Get a receipt!” shouts Chinaski) and then unscrew a few file cabinets from the wall in the old San Carlos office. I finish up before noon, bypass Chinaski, and call the big boss man.

  “Take the rest of the day off.”

  He sounds buzzed already through the static of the phone. “Uncle, I can help with something else.”

  “Nothing else for you, nephew. Go rest your back.”

  At the guesthouse, Tali has left the message CALL ME on a note under the door. Before I even walk toward the kitchen counter, the phone rings. I know who it is. Almost don’t answer because of this knowledge, but anything to break up my weekday evenings.

  I pick up the phone and hear: “Get dressed, little brother.”

  “For what?”

  “Job interview.”

  “Got a job, remember? Two weeks ago you harassed our uncle into giving me one.”

  “Listen. You have too much time off. This job would be on weekends and a few days during the week.”

  “Do you ever ask questions, sister?”

  “Look. I had to make some calls just to get the interview today. You’ve got to be there at three.”

  I almost ask, How’d you know I had a half-day? but I know the answer. Who wants to be reminded that a relation is checking up with your employer, another relation, like a probation officer?

  “They’re located at 137 Tully. Cross-street Capitol.”

  “That’s East San Jo.”


  “Right.”

  I catch the bus out without incident. That’s rather nice. Just for fun, or for torture, I count thirteen Starbucks on the way over, big ones, baby ones, all with customers spilling out the door. So much for strength in diversity. From the stop, it’s a short walk. One block down and I’ll be there. I pass another Starbucks hidden by the draping branches of some white-barked birch trees and decide in the shade of the cool elms along the street that it’s best not to think about the world, about myself, about myself in connection to the world.

  Hell, I just walk on, whistle it out, hum “Nowhere Man” by the Beatles, then a bluegrass jam I’d picked up called, “I Am the Man of Constant Sorrow,” another tune entitled, “Thanks a Lot,” by some Pacific Northwest country chick named Neko Case, play some soccer with an acorn from a wide-bodied oak whose apogee branch reaches clear across the street, fire a long-range shot into the leaf-and litter-strewn gutter (“Goooooooooooooooooaaaaaalllllllllllllll!”), and lift my arms into the chill air, eyes on the brown tinted windows of the commercial buildings. According to the addresses on the map, the people I’m seeking for help are in the offices of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the National Organization of Women.

  I make my way over, spot the NOW unit and its mongrel American flag of rainbow stripes and a peace sign superimposed over the fifty stars outside the door, enter.

  Immediately, I get slapped with a greeting: “We’re not interested.”

  She’s a thin-necked teal-eyed Nordic, teeth aligned like the rings dangling from her nose. I got the feeling that if she grew her prickly red flattop out to bob length, removed the fake African accouterments, and smiled, her world would turn upside down, and we could talk civilly. Maybe even flirtatiously.