“You ought to go grab the little lady for this one,” said Earl when “Stand by Your Man” came on. The song was over by the time he found Ines, but they went out on the dance floor anyway, shuffling in the sawdust to “That’s Easy for You to Say” by Junior Brown, her ear pressed to his chest and her hand on his face. She’d been doing that all day, in lieu of speaking.
“Baby, your heart beats so slow. You’re always so calm.”
The DJ dimmed the lights.
She told him about all the people she had met: high school friends, teachers, neighbors. “They all loved Troy so much. I wish I could have met him. He sounds like he was great. You already knew that. He came to New Orleans to look for you.” She kissed him and frowned. “You smell like smoke.”
“I smoked a cigarette,” snapped Achilles. “The truth is out.”
Ines stepped back, her hand still on his face. “Maybe you should dance with your mom.”
“What’s that mean?”
Ines waved to his mom, who waved back.
“Mom doesn’t dance, but I’ll ask her.”
His mother’s smile grew as he neared. “You’re finally getting your hero’s welcome.”
“You don’t want to dance, do you?”
“Always.”
While they were on the floor, the record skipped as the DJ cut the song short to play “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”
“Achilles, thank you.”
Her voice was barely audible above the sound of the entire bar singing along to the song—“Cowboys like smoky old poolrooms.” Her hair was now nearly all white, and she moved slowly, shuffling more than dancing. “Ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Achilles, you know you couldn’t have done any more than you did.”
“Yes, Mom.” He stopped dancing and backed away from his mother, leveling his eyes to meet hers.
“He chose his own path, you have to choose yours.”
“Mom, come on.”
“I don’t expect you to stay home. I’m serious, Achilles. She’s a keeper.” She gripped him tighter when he tried to pull back. “I’m telling you this right now, while everyone is looking and you can’t walk away.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“He wrote me often. He said he was glad you were there. He said he wouldn’t have made it without you.” She hummed a few bars. “What was his tattoo?”
“Mom inside a heart.”
The mood lightened when someone fired up Hank Williams Jr.’s “Family Tradition” on the jukebox. The bar erupted in song. Voices washed in from the parking lot, passing drivers honked their horns, and even kids yawned the chorus, sucking on pencils and straws as if they were cigarettes, acting out the song as if it was a dress rehearsal, and he remembered those kids dressed as superheroes yelling, “Fly school shit!”
They arrived home long after midnight. As the limousine climbed the driveway, his mother said, “I wish we had done this for your father.”
“Had a limousine?” asked Achilles.
Ines shook her head knowingly.
“Had everyone together like this.” His mother burped, grinning shyly. “Excuse me.”
She had been rocking back and forth with the motions of the car, but only now did he realize that his mother was drunk, a first. Tipsy as she was, she refused his help up the porch stairs, extending her arm to Ines instead. “Men think we can’t do anything without them, but we have to let them think that. They have such frail egos, it would be cruel to tell them otherwise.”
Achilles stepped aside to let them pass, and as his mom went by, she pinched his cheeks. “That doesn’t apply to you of course. You’re a good boy. I always knew that. You were always different. Always sensitive.”
The cars that had followed them from the VFW parked. Janice and Dale were there, and his aunt on his father’s side. Achilles held the door for them all, delaying his entry, hoping his mom’s mood would pass, a wish he knew was hopeless when he heard, “Who’s cooking breakfast? Not me!” followed by the crash of pots and pans and the banging of drawers. A shiver went up his spine when he heard what sounded like the silverware drawer being dumped into the sink.
“She’s a keeper, that Ines,” whispered his aunt as she nudged Achilles with her elbow.
At the VFW, he saw Janice talking to Ines. It seemed like a friendly conversation, which surprised him. No cursing from Janice and no sneering from Ines. Janice was chunkier these days, but in all the right places. He had expected her to look pale and insignificant next to Ines, to appear mumbly and shy, but there in the kitchen she was bright and cheery and whatever she was whispering had Ines in stitches. For a moment they both looked at him, and he turned away. Someone clapped him on the shoulder. Dale. They shook hands.
“I’m so-so-sorry a-a-a-about your brother,” said Dale. “He was a good guy.” He rushed the last part out without a stutter.
“Thank you, Dale,” said Achilles. “And congratulations.”
Dale turned to where Ines and Janice were talking. Achilles hadn’t noticed the papoose Janice wore. “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Dale with a wink, patting his stomach. “Little D got me off the g-g-g beer. But fuck, he cries.”
Even at that late hour the crowd continued to grow, more people stopping by to eat or bring food, including Janice’s brothers. They were bigger than Achilles remembered. Burly, bearded men with full-sleeve tattoos and chain wallets. Although only a few years older than him, they looked ancient. They brought a braided dog collar with them as a gift. Achilles placed it on the mantel next to the urns. When they learned that Ines was from New Orleans, they expressed their condolences. “It’s a tore-up business they’re doing you.”
There hadn’t been that many people in the house since his eighth birthday party. People were spread across the kitchen and the living room. Someone turned on the news, and the first story was about New Orleans. In fits and spurts they return, from Houston and DC and Atlanta, by car and boat and taxi and on foot, the native New Orleanians are coming home, but many say not fast enough. A hush fell over the living room.
Achilles’s mom apologized and offered to turn it off, but Ines was glad to see it, to know that it was news, and even more, “I’m glad they’re evacuees now, not refugees.” The screen door banging behind her, Janice went out front to smoke a cigarette. At the VFW, she and Dale had looked so content, so happy. She had slipped out her breast to feed the baby like it was the most natural thing in the world. (It was enormous, and he wished Merri or Wages or someone else was there to gawk for him.) And when Dale whispered in her ear, she smiled that big smile of hers and looked so beautiful, as she did right then in the front yard smoking that cigarette in the moonlight, her dress just short enough that if the light were right he could have seen her little hearts. Achilles followed her outside. They smoked one in silence. She offered him another and he accepted.
“Ines seems nice,” said Janice.
“I guess you want those letters back?”
“Those are yours,” she said.
“Good. I wasn’t going to give them to you.”
“She seems real nice,” said Janice.
“She’s smart too.”
“All that matters is that she treats you well after all you’ve been through. And that you treat her well too.”
Achilles felt as if he was seeing her for the first time tonight, as if he’d been happy with her but hadn’t known it. “You like being a mother?”
“Best thing ever happened to me.”
He thought for a minute that he loved her. “I ‘preciate them letters.”
She coughed and glanced around to see if anyone was listening. “Don’t start that now.”
He handed her his locket, but she refused it. “I want to give you something to remember me by.”
“A thank-you would be enough.”
“Thank you,”
said Achilles.
“Finally! You’re welcome,” she said, blushing. “I’m going back inside.”
“You sure about the locket?” asked Achilles.
Janice gently kissed him on the cheek. “You never forget the ones who break your heart,” she said, and slipped back into the house.
Dawn was breaking as everyone left. Ines and his mother sat on the back porch, their chairs so close their knees touched. Janice and his aunt had cleaned up before they left. The only thing that remained on the table was the funeral program. Troy’s funeral program said “The Word Is Your Salvation.” Wages’s program said “Trust in the Word.” His father’s program said “The Word is Life.” Everyone had their party line, the manner of speaking in which they invested themselves, became real, and set themselves apart. He’d witnessed it with Bryant who, within a few days, went from moaning to saying stuff like, “Where’s Darkwater when you need them?” Ines was the same, professing what she couldn’t actually live because she didn’t look it, saying at every turn, I’m black, no really, listen. I am. That’s all it was, words spoken like an incantation, the power in not caring, or trying not to care. There is no God but M16, and I am his messenger. Had Hausman asked about Goddamnistan six months ago, Achilles would have quoted Merri, saying, “Suit up and put some fucker on the maggot diet.”
He went outside to see what his mom and Ines were talking about. From the looks on their faces, it was something private. His mom asked, “Is it okay if Ines hears this?” She studied his face. “You opened it, didn’t you?”
Achilles nodded his agreement. “I already opened it and everything.”
He excused himself and went back inside. If they knew what was in the envelope and he didn’t, wouldn’t that make them even, restore balance? Wages said the warrior suffered for what he had seen, what he knew. Achilles’s burden was also his gift to them: Troy’s other life, emaciated and drugged, in exchange for their knowledge of his adoption. But by the time he was inside, he discarded this idea, crouching beneath the window to listen.
“I always wanted him. I was his godmother, and I was there the day he was born. Cecile, his mom, was my best friend. Her family had disowned her for marrying a white man before she married Achilles’s father. I knew them. They were good people, just from a different time. I babysat him all the time. He was with me the night they died. I already knew him like my own. I had him over here all the time. Still took almost a year to work the paperwork out. We couldn’t have kids, you know. We tried, but it never worked. Then he was there, like a gift. It was just a matter of making it legal. Troy was different. One day Bill comes home, says, ‘We have to take this kid. We have to.’ The way he says it. Well, I sign the paperwork, but I never ask to see the original birth certificate. I don’t want to. I exchange that for one condition: he can never tell Troy what’s in there either. Because Achilles was already here, and I didn’t want him to feel displaced.”
She went on to say more about his birth parents. By the time she was finished, Achilles was dizzy, his face hot. His parents were Cecile Octavia and Charles Richard Drew. He was born on March 2, 1983, not May 3, as he’d always thought. He wasn’t a Taurus. His parents died in an automobile accident less than three miles from where he grew up. Killed by a drunk driver. They weren’t street people. His real name was David Drew. He wasn’t Achilles.
These revelations so stunned him that he didn’t hear their chair legs scraping the deck, or the door, or his mother and Ines enter the kitchen to find him hunched over beside the window.
“Oh no,” said his mother, as Achilles slipped by her and out the door. He walked into the woods and through the culvert under the highway, officially entering Pennsylvania, and into the wooded hollow his father called Winter’s Last Bowl, a shady grove, the snow’s last refuge, sometimes glowing until late May. To make room for new houses, the trees had been cleared over the years, so what snow remained turned to mush and by spring was a mosquito nest. Had his father felt as if he was being gentrified?
He sat at the edge of the culvert to watch the sun finish rising. He had planned to take Wages’s hat, and Troy’s boots, and Teddy Ruxpin, and bury them all at the old asylum near the water tower, but he had left empty-handed. He looked back at the house, and it seemed so far away, everything felt as if it was all so far behind him, as if it had happened to another person.
His mom had mailed notices to Wexler, Merriweather, Dixon, and the others. God, how he’d wanted to see them, but he knew they wouldn’t show. The night they’d pledged revenge, they’d made another promise, spurred by Wages saying, “Remember me like this!” He clambered atop the Bradley to scan the ridge below, scaly as a reptilian spine. He stood there, binocs in one hand, M4 in the other, goggles off, red-faced and raccoon eyes smiling. Achilles preferred to remember him at City Park, feeding ducks and pigeons alike; Wexler hanging his head out of the chopper, mouth open, eating the sky, grinning to beat the band; Merriweather, teary-eyed, bouncing a little girl on his knee; Dixon wearing that balaclava with face holes in the back so you never knew if he was coming or going; Ramirez sweating over those mixtapes—should John Legend be followed by Marvin Gaye or that old Jeffrey Osborne joint?—his father snipping that fence; Troy at the kitchen table that night, thinking he was in a foster home, one moment asking how long they’d be there, the next yelling, Daddy, stop! If he had loved them any more, they would have held hands.
He found Ines in his room wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and packing. “Reagan?” he asked, attempting a joke. The nearest major airport was named after a president of whom Ines was not fond.
“I don’t know.” She shook her bag over the bed, dumping her belongings out, then starting repacking.
He took a deep breath. “I want you to stay. Or take me with you.”
“I don’t know, Achilles. I feel like I’ve been up for a month straight. I can’t decide anything right now. I’m happy to meet your family. Dreadfully sad, too. Your mother must think I’m crazy. Sometimes I was talking to her and just found myself staring, seeing so many of the little things you do. No matter what, children are like their parents. No matter what.”
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it. What if he and Ines had a boy? Would it be dark like him or light like Ines, playful or sullen, reserved, cool, and withdrawn, or, like his brother, damned near tireless?
“I’m confused about one thing: didn’t you say you identified Troy’s body in Atlanta?”
“I did. I did.”
She shivered. “Oh, Jesus. Achilles … the morgues.”
“I went back for the body, and it was gone. They’d cremated it already.” He told her the entire story, crying through half of it, his words unintelligible even to him. It was as if something twisted in him, something tightly knotted finally broke, and wave after wave of deafening, roaring grief washed over him.
After wiping his face, he smiled weakly. “I’m probably dehydrated.”
“Poor Troy. Poor Achilles.”
“I love you, Ines.” Maybe it was all like stepping into the void and hoping the night catches you. He didn’t know how he expected her to react to these magic words, but it wasn’t what she did next: dropping down to Troy’s bed as if she was exhausted, and groaning. “I know, but it’s not that easy.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Keelies. I don’t know,” said Ines. “Read it to me again, please?”
“What?”
“Your eulogy.”
She pulled the blanket high around her neck. Achilles unfolded the square paper he had been carrying in his wallet since the morgue.
I wet the bed until I was ten, if I had soda with dinner. So every night I drank Coke, I slept on the floor and washed my underwear out in the bathtub the next morning. But I kept asking for soda. Mrs. Tolson, I’m the one who broke your mailbox. I was deathly afraid of guns until twelve. These are things only my brother knew about me. When he died, I felt like most of me died too. Because we
did everything together. But I realize that works both ways, that I have to let you know things about Troy, things that only I know. He was brave, you know that. He stood up to everyone. He never surrendered. He walked right into a minefield and carried one of our buddies out like it was nothing. Like it was a fly ball in the backfield. But here’s the crazy part: he never mentioned it again. Ever. Even that night, when Wexler was being medivaced. We’d walked him to the medivac copter and he’s teary-eyed. Troy had just saved his life hours before, that’s not an exaggeration. Our buddy says, “Thank you, man.” He’s full of thanks, but Troy says, “Never mention it again. Ever.” Later that night, I punched him. I’m sorry. I did. I was so mad. I’m the older one. I was supposed to be protecting him. He could have died. “Are you crazy?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Then why’d you do it?” He said, “Because you are who you make yourself, who you will yourself to be, against the odds. Because if we’d left him there, a part of ourselves would have stayed there forever, we would have died with him. We would have been haunted by it.” Then he kissed me on the forehead. I didn’t want to believe him at the time. In fact, I forgot all about this conversation until recently. But, he was right. The sign in the morgue where I found him reads Mortui Vivis Praecipant—Let the dead teach the living. That’s Troy’s lesson for us all.
If Achilles hadn’t enlisted, would it have been easier to deliver that eulogy? But if he hadn’t gone, Achilles would have forever followed behind his younger brother, maybe even driven the float that carried him through town for his hero’s welcome, making an extra loop around the roundabout in the center of downtown. Troy with his picture up at the VFW. Troy with his Bronze Star, his secrets, his memories, his stories, and no matter how often Achilles said, I know, I understand, I get you, I see it, he would have really been wondering, Did you get to kill anybody? Troy would have worn that look he always had, the smug grin that said, Achilles, you don’t get it at all. Troy would have been a man, and Achilles forever a child. Troy would have had a hero’s welcome, and Achilles would have been among the groupies, the hero worshippers, bearing his younger brother on a litter. It would have driven him mad, yet strangely enough, it was exactly what happened, and seemed somehow fair.
Hold It 'Til It Hurts Page 41