After he enlisted, Achilles’s father took him out alone. They cleaned up the rifles and marched through the wood behind the house, stalking silently. It was deer season. Three days of hard rain followed by a freeze had left the ground too hard and leaves too brittle for them to stalk quietly. So they’d waited for another light rain to soften the earth. The early October air was brisk and the ground right, firm but not too hard, making it easy to move stealthily through the leaves, the only sound that of their legs occasionally rubbing together. They wore bulky, water-resistant hunting bibs, waddling to avoid making unnecessary noise. Trekking single file, they hugged the shadows of the pines, avoiding the open areas where the sun fell though the bare limbs of the fallow white ash and beech. Only ten minutes from the house, the tree line stopped abruptly at a new chain-link fence with No Trespassing signs posted on it and, beyond it, a row of concrete slabs lined up like a giant hand of solitaire. His father kicked the fence, cursing. His nose was red from the cold, and congested, so the curse sounded more like a quack. Turning to Achilles, he said, as if it were his fault, “I’m sorry, son. Bad intel.” He pointed to a young tree on the other side of the fence, a few branches distorted from growing around a metal post. “That’s my damned tree. Look what they’ve done to it.”
They turned back, his father no longer stalking but stomping through the brush, his polyester legs sawing the air, his upstretched arms balancing his rifle across his shoulders. Walking like that, with his head down to watch the ground and his hands up, he looked like a recaptured POW being marched back to camp, his mind preoccupied with dreams of freedom. Did people in Iraq hunt? Did hunters in Iraq wear camouflage that so closely resembled military garb? Achilles wondered if he could really shoot someone. At the house, his father exchanged the rifles for wire clippers and bolt cutters, and led Achilles back to the fence, where they spent the next few hours cutting the fence down. “I guess this is why we haven’t seen any deer running through here lately,” was his father’s only explanation.
Why did he care about deer running across their land? Only the week before, he’d stopped Troy from shooting a six-point buck in the driveway because it wasn’t right to kill them when their natural habitat was being destroyed. Shooting a deer in your yard just ain’t hunting.
It started to drizzle, but they continued working until they had detached the fence along the entire length of the property. As they worked, his father reviewed the advice he’d shared over the years: the night sky is brightest along a river, slow steps and shadows are the next best thing to camouflage, and defeat starts in the mind. Afterwards, he set up some cans and bottles for target practice, choosing a low berm far from the tree line. Shooting a tree isn’t hunting. After that, his father walked him back to the house, his arm around Achilles’s shoulder, telling stories about his days as a Yellow Jacket.
Overalls still on, they went to the VFW. Achilles had only been in the VFW to use the bathroom during the Fourth of July picnics, and each time he did he went the long way around the dimly lit bar so that he could run his fingers over the sawdust-coated shuffleboard table and, if no one was playing, slide a few of the weights around; then he would stab the dart board a few times, right in the center; finally he’d sink the cue ball, winning the big match in his mind, and emerge from the dank wood-paneled bar into the sunlight, hands aloft like a champion. He’d imagined being outside the VFW door at eleven fifty-nine at the end of his twentieth year. When the clock struck midnight, he would go in and play shuffleboard and pool, darts even, while drinking boilermakers—canned PBR with a shot of Jack tossed in. It was an image that meant freedom, but that night it felt like anything but.
His father held the door for him. “Let’s have a cold one, or two, or six.”
Their eyes met as he edged through the door, squeezing past his father’s large frame. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Go on in, son. You’re old enough for war, you’re old enough to have a drink with your old man, I fucking say! When y’all get back, your photos go on the wall with ours!”
When he stepped inside, the customers roared like Achilles was a gladiator entering the coliseum. Some sang old army cadences, some chanted his name. But for the next hour, Achilles fidgeted anxiously as the regulars kept him pinned into his booth, shaking his hand and buying him beers. He appreciated the attention, but the nicer they acted, the more he felt like a visitor, and the more he felt like a visitor, the more he thought about where he was going. That scared him. He was going home that night, but home didn’t feel like home anymore. In his head until then it was always the house at the end of a stretch of slick black asphalt with no dividing line, no lights, no lane reflectors, and a dense tree stand hugging both sides. There was no other traffic on this road. It was always dark, the sky gray, the air wet. It was a straight road that vanished into the distance. Had it curved or rippled, that would have been okay. But in his mind, straight as a rifle barrel. The only landmark was his parents’ home, which up until then had been the terminus, but now felt like a way station because now this road stretched well beyond that house and faded into the horizon where it merged with the night, becoming one undifferentiated question.
So he nodded at the regulars and drank the beers and watched men play pool while, in his mind, that road kept stretching farther and farther out into the distance until a warmth set in, a tingling in his fingers and numbness in tongue as the alcohol went to work and for one split second he thought that he understood why they all drank so much. Jake with the bum arm; Harry the barkeep and his garage full of porno magazines; Terry, who carried pictures of his dead dogs instead of his children in his wallet: each had a road in his head, and they were scared to know where it led.
On the way home, his father stopped the truck on the side of the road and said, “I know why you did it. Thank you. You were always the cautious one, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” His father patted his head, and Achilles loved him so much he would have cried right then if he wasn’t afraid it would ruin the moment.
His father belched. “When your mother flaps her gums about where you’ve been, what do you say?”
“Out with Dad.”
But all she said was, “I hope he fed you.”
That night the family went to Lawrence’s Steakhouse, a chain restaurant with wheelbarrows and old bicycles hanging from the ceiling, and walls covered with old photographs and posters advertising long-forgotten products. They went to Lawrence’s once or twice a year, usually for a festive occasion, but tonight they ate in silence, everyone except Troy pushing their food around on their plates until his mom asked again if they had everything on the list. Achilles and Troy sat on one side of the booth, their parents on the other side, with the list on the table between them. Achilles and Troy nodded. Black shoe polish, small squares of paper, pencils, foot powder, foot cream, eight pairs of black socks, for starters: it was a long list, but they had everything. And stamps? asked their father. Yes, they had those too. Their father nodded solemnly, “During your first week they’re as good as cigarettes in prison. You might even be able to trade them for KP duty.”
He returned to his food, chewing slowly. They rarely ate out, but their father made an exception for Lawrence’s because their filet was, “The best filet your mother didn’t cook. The only time I’ll eat it made by someone else.” He said this repeatedly, even though their mother never cooked filet, or any other cut of steak. After the belt on the bandsaw snapped back and hit him in the face, breaking his cheekbone and four teeth, their father refused to have an implant made because he discovered that his workers didn’t have dental coverage under the new owner’s insurance plans. The mill closed down shortly thereafter, and his new insurance plan through the school didn’t include dental at all. So he ate his steak very slowly, working the left side of his mouth, his chin up so that no one could miss the scar on his cheek he wore like a war wound, his gaze wandering off as if he were thinking back to his own preparations for basic training.
&nbs
p; He’d been adamant that they never join the military. On more than one occasion he told them that it was the randomness that nearly drove him mad in Vietnam, asking them to imagine if the Wizard had given brains to the Cowardly Lion and courage to the Tin Man. The cowardly private who hides if he hears a rooster crow triggers a booby trap and the brave officer leading every charge never gets a scratch. The next week, it was reversed. You’ll try to crack the code but there is none. In a large-scale armed conflict, there’s no relationship between how a man lives and how a man dies. He’d adamantly repeated this after Troy came home on 9/11 threatening to do something about this terrorism crap, but when the enlistment contracts showed up on the fridge a year later, affixed by the Lacrosse Club magnet and covering the family Christmas photo, their father limited his comments to practical advice like, “Change your underwear frequently and your socks even more frequently.” Achilles, who until then had limited his comments to “the army doesn’t take virgins,” said nothing.
That night’s advice was, “Keep your head down. You’ve done something wrong if the drill sergeant knows your name. I mean it, Troy.”
Troy stared at his father with a mouthful of food, giving him a look that said, Just wait. They had been clashing all month, all summer really, ever since Troy graduated and demanded his adoption paperwork. Troy later said he only wanted to piss off their father. But really, both boys were ready to go somewhere.
Between meeting Janice at the quarry, his English class at Shippensburg Community College, and his part-time job at the lumberyard, Achilles was bored to tears, literally, one afternoon the drops collecting in the bottom of his goggles, blurring the edges of the two-by-ten he was ripping and then dotting the sawdust and woodchips along the rim of the table saw after he pulled off the safety glasses thinking he felt blood on his cheek.
His supervisor Kent, who had once worked for Achilles’s father, rushed over and hustled Achilles to the eye-wash station, reminding him to wear eye protection always; he could be blinded in a second. Blinded! Could Achilles imagine that? A young boy like him without any vision, nothing to see, no future, no women, nothing of the world to be? It didn’t sound fair, but it could happen. Kent had seen it. Could Achilles imagine that? Achilles could, which was exactly why he found himself in tears over the forty-fifth piece of wood that day, one more in a long line of lumber that had started his junior year in high school and had no foreseeable end in sight. Troy was threatening to go away to college, but all Achilles could see was one eternal line of timber. The world ended where 1-80 intersected with 1-74, just dropped off, and so when Troy stuck his DD Form 4/1 on the refrigerator without a word, Achilles went straight into Hagerstown and signed up. Here was a chance to serve country and family.
“Talk Troy out of it,” his mom had said, cradling Achilles’s face in her hands but holding his attention with her eyes.
“O.K. I’ll try.”
Three hours later, wearing the smug grin he’d worn all the way home, Achilles stuck his contract on the refrigerator next to Troy’s and said, “Check that, bitch!”
“I’m gonna take a dump. Want to join me?” said Troy.
Their mother ripped the contracts in half and called the recruiter. Their father took Achilles aside and said, “It’s good that you’re going with him, but it would have been better if you had talked him out of it. You have no idea what you’ve signed up for.”
And they didn’t. Basic training was a breeze, infantry school a gale, and jump school admittedly a squall, but nothing—no berets, no blue cords, no silver wings—prepared them for the actual devastation on the ground in Afghanistan: the odd children’s sandal amidst the rubble, the leveled towns, rank subterranean jails, marble-eyed refugees, the constant odor of death. Goddamnistan, however, adequately prepared Achilles for the Gulf Coast. They had both been visited, as Merriweather would have put it, by Old Testament–style devastation. “What you alone witness, you alone bear,” Wages once said. Achilles had raised his beer in happy accord but secretly laughed it off, eyeing that African mask on his friend’s mantel with suspicion, as if it were the font of the new Wages’s steady supply of aphorisms. But now, Achilles understood, there being no one to nod when he nodded, whistle when he whistled, sigh when he sighed at the towns completely razed from end to end, every tree naked, every building again a blueprint; yards where trees stooped under great metallic nests, the trunks sometimes hunched as if weary, as if exhausted, surely thinking that now that the waters have receded, they have paid their dues; the lot where the house was nowhere to be seen but a sofa, love seat, and chair remained neatly arranged around the coffee table, as if the occupants had just popped into the kitchen during a commercial break. As he neared New Orleans, law enforcement waved his military ID through roadblocks where civilian volunteers towing boats and campers were turned away. He wondered how Ines had gotten through.
PART 4
LATE FALL 2005
CHAPTER 19
A THIN LAYER OF SLUDGE COVERED THE LOBBY FLOOR, BUT THEIR CONDO had suffered minimal damage, aside from the odor. There was no sign that Ines had been there recently. The surrounding streets hummed along their gutters as if in heavy rain, pooling in some areas. He half walked, half waded to the higher ground in Uptown, which had fared rather well. There was the usual storm damage: missing shingles, trees stripped bare, signs in the street. But most homeowners in that area had boarded up their windows, avoiding the worst of it. The flooding wasn’t as bad either; many roads he could walk instead of wade. Every half-mile he was stopped by Army National Guard troops and subsequently released with a warning to beware looters and snipers. None of the soldiers knew what condition the Delesseppes’ home was in, which was surprising because when Achilles reached it, there were a lot of people in the front yard.
The house had suffered little damage. Most of the roof shingles had been blown away, as had the shutters and part of the porch railing, but at least the house was standing, and it didn’t look like the water had reached high enough to damage the main floor. Mabel was in the yard wearing a big smile on her face, directing everyone to form two lines, one for food and one for the phones. She greeted him with a hug, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her face into his stomach. She looked up at him, dropping the smile like it was a tiring act, but said nothing.
“It’s good to see you, Mabel. Where’s Dudley?”
She squeezed tighter, pressing her face harder against him. Voice muffled, she said, “We got split up. They put me on a handicapped bus and him in a cargo van. He’s gone home.”
Achilles hugged her back, bending to press his cheek against her gray hair. He waited until she let him go, which seemed like a long time, long enough that he melted into the embrace and the now-familiar scent of cocoa butter.
“She’s around the corner.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.
There stood Ines on the side porch handing out cups of juice and water to the people lined up in the yard, graceful as a queen bestowing favors. The line wound around the house and to the garage out back, where Ines had set up a mobile and satellite phone bank. Achilles watched, stunned as always by her grace. Ines laughed with the men, joked with the ladies, and hugged the children. Each time she smiled at someone or grazed their hand, they stood a little taller. Wages had the same touch. Giving that man a fork had been like giving him a hand. A little girl tripped in front of Achilles. He helped her up. She dusted herself off and the doll she was holding, comprised only of the torso and one leg. She held it by the foot, wielding it like a hammer. A few feet away stood another little girl holding the other leg with the foot jammed into the head. She held it by the leg, waving it like a mace. Achilles called her over and handed them each five dollars. The girl who had tripped took hers, but the other glared. “There ain’t no stores open,” she said before snatching the money from his hand. “This won’t even buy a bottle of water.”
Achilles gave her a few more dollars, and when he looked up, Ines was gone, the
screen door rattling in the doorway. He followed. Inside was lit only by candles, but intact. All the paintings and books had been packed up and moved to the attic. Moving from foyer to living room to hall to dining room to kitchen, as he turned each corner, Ines vanished around the next like a ghost.
He passed Mabel again, who had wheeled up the makeshift ramp built off the back porch and rolled by with a tray of sodas and water on her lap. Unaware of being watched, there was not even a hint of a smile on her face. He passed Margaret seated at the desk in the family room, writing in a large book, taking notes as a weeping woman seated across from her spoke. Margaret barely waved, as if she didn’t recognize him. She looked tired, her hair rough at the roots, a few streaks of gray showing at her temple. Was that gray hair or dust? He couldn’t tell. Only Mrs. D managed a smile for Achilles, but not a nice one, saying, it seemed, Your face. Darling, haven’t you grown beyond this rugged look?
When he caught up with her in the kitchen and asked if they could talk, Ines drew aside the blinds. Only a few feet from the window people stood waiting in line for the phone bank.
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