by Scott Snyder
“Sir?” Behind us, the sprinklers started up, ticking graceful arcs of water over the lawn.
“My daughter, Lexington. Lex. She was born with her kidneys gummed up. The last few years she’s started having health problems, real ones. I don’t want to get into it. Believe me, it’s heart-breaking stuff. You know what dialysis is? That’s the second half of your job. To drive her up to the hospital in Albany three times a week to get her blood cleaned.”
Take the girl to get her blood cleaned. I liked the way that sounded. It had a vaguely heroic quality to it, and I began to forget my disappointment over not getting to work with the cadets.
“Hey, be nice to her,” he said, looking down at his boots. “All this dialysis stuff depresses the hell out of her. It’s made her into an introvert. She’s shy—I mean, she doesn’t have any friends.”
“When do I start?” I said.
“Hell, today,” said Sergeant Brill. “Right now.”
At eleven o’clock that morning, after filling out forms in the office, I set out with Lexington in one of the camp’s vans. How my life had changed since dawn! I now had on a uniform: a tan shirt with little buttoned flaps on the shoulders, tan army pants, and shiny black boots. I felt like playing my new horn right there in the van, felt like shouting over my shoulder to Lexington that she shouldn’t worry because she was in good hands, but she gave no sign of even noticing me; she sat in the back row with her head leaned against the window.
Though Lexington was twenty-one, she looked about four years younger. She was small, hardly taller than five feet, and while she had hips and breasts, there was still a newness, an awkwardness really, to the curves and flarings of her body. She had dark kinky hair with miniature curls, and that first day in the bus she wore Chap Stick with flecks of sparkle in it. The steroids she took made her face overly plump, but in an appealing, pillowy way. Whether Lex had actually stopped aging because of her kidney problems or was simply a late bloomer, I couldn’t tell, but there was something both weary and innocent in her face that I found myself immediately drawn to.
Another drill sergeant, a black man named Williams, rode in the passenger seat. He wore tight, wire-rim glasses, and had neatly trimmed his mustache to look like a perfect third eyebrow beneath his nose. Williams was along to make sure I did my job.
“So, where are you from?” he said as we passed a stand where people sold pumpkins and bunches of fresh corn.
“I’m from all over,” I said. “I played the trumpet for a long time. I was a jazz musician.” I said this very loudly so that Lexington might hear.
“Cool beans,” he said. We drove a while longer and Williams told me about his childhood, growing up “on the streets,” how hard it had been. The landscape was beautiful. Oak and birch and poplar trees. The sun flashing through the branches. Lex looked so pretty in back. Suddenly Williams paused and turned to me.
“What’s that noise?” he said. “Do you hear a whistling?”
“What noise?” I said, though I knew very well what noise.
“I think…It’s coming from you. From your face.”
“Oh, that. Some of the bones behind my nose are a little out of place. The wind can get in there sometimes.”
Williams scrutinized my face. “Do you box?”
“No.”
“You get in a fight? That why they sent you here?”
I noticed Lexington watching me from the backseat.
“I had an accident when I was a kid,” I said. “It was a stupid thing. There are lots of little bones behind your face that you can knock loose pretty easily. The sphenoid bone. The ethmoid. It’s a fragile system.”
Williams leaned over and looked up into my nose. “Well, that’s a seriously loud whistle you got going on in there. It sounds like a kazoo, you know? Like someone honking on a kazoo.”
I glanced at Lex and saw that she was still watching.
“Can you hear it yourself?” Williams asked, still peering up into my nose. “It’s like toooot. Tooooot.”
I rolled up my window.
Williams tried to get me to talk about myself some more, about what had landed me at About Face, but after I dodged his questions a couple of times, he grew bored and turned on the radio. The rest of the drive was uneventful. Lex kept to herself.
When we reached the city limits, I got off the highway and followed the blue H signs to the hospital. I parked as close as I could get to the entrance. Lex climbed to her feet and came toward me down the aisle.
“I’ll be right here when you’re done inside,” I said as she passed.
“It takes three hours,” she said. Her eyes were as green as limes. “You should go walk around town.”
“What would you recommend seeing?” I said to Lex.
She gave a tired smile. “Anything but the hospital,” she said, and then left the van.
I watched Lex cross the parking lot. At one point a car pulled out of a spot in front of her, and even though it didn’t come close to hitting her, she gave a little frightened jump, then stopped in her tracks. The car paused and the driver waved her across his path, but she insisted he go first.
“Nervous little thing,” said Williams. “So skittish.”
I thought about what Brill had said about her not having any friends. Things had been the same way for me at her age. I’d had a hard time of it, and watching her stand there alone and frightened in the parking lot, I felt my affection for Lex bloom.
She glanced over at me as the car finished its K-turn, and I waved and gave her my warmest grin. She smiled a tight-lipped, friendly smile, but even as she did, she crossed her arms over her chest, as though protecting her heart from me.
When I was ten, a bullet came screaming down out of the sky and slammed into the top of my head. I was on my way to school, walking through the field behind the schoolyard. My book bag was on my back, my hair was combed and still wet from the shower. I was already late, but I didn’t care. Because the day before, a girl I liked had passed me a note—Stephanie Leroux, I still remember her name. The note said that tomorrow she’d pass me a romance note, and so on that morning I was taking my time getting to school, enjoying my own anticipation. The day was perfect. Warm, with a glowing blue sky.
I remember hearing a faint static in the atmosphere, a kind of electric crackle. The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, staring up at the clouds with a metal pebble lodged and cooling in my skull.
I learned later that there had been a race nearby, a charity marathon, and that the man in charge had mistakenly fired an actual bullet into the air to get things started. He came to the hospital almost every day I was there and cried into the rumpled edge of my bed. The woman who won the race also came by once, and gave me a trophy with a man on top, a man painted gold holding a ring of laurels over his head like a shield.
The doctors said that I was lucky, that if the bullet had been falling even a fraction faster, it would have pierced my skull, instead of sticking in the bone, and likely caused serious brain damage, if not death. As it was, the injury, while painful, wasn’t all that serious. “It’s that thick skull of yours that saved you,” said one doctor. He chuckled, then gave me a little punch in the arm. I had a seam of staples down the front of my head. Metal wires ran through my face like whiskers.
I was in the hospital only a month and a half, but when I left, I found that I was afraid to go outside. I developed an irrational fear of lightning—I thought I could sense it coiled in the air all the time, even on sunny days—and if I had to travel anywhere uncovered, I’d start to shake and sweat and stutter. My parents walked me around town day after day to help, but nothing changed. Children picked on me at school because of my jumpiness and my new white hair. They called me “skunk,” even after I dyed the white patch brown. They beat me up. I became afraid. My parents bought me a trumpet, which I played alone in my room. I was left back once, then twice. After that I left school altogether.
It’s funny how a hit like that can be
all it takes to knock you off course. Hardly more than a tap or nudge, and suddenly you find that you’ve become someone entirely new, some dark version of yourself you never thought possible. One minute you’re a boy with promise, you’re an honors student, you have friends, a future; and the next you’re twenty-nine and living in the basement of your cousin’s house. Where has your chance at happiness gone? You don’t know. Whenever people talk about how the neighborhood has gone downhill, it feels like they’re talking about you.
I worked at my father’s comic book store. I delivered tanks of carbonated water for a soda company. I played the trumpet around town for extra money. I landscaped. I worked at a warehouse where they used pig fat to make fireplace logs that could burn all day. At night, I often traveled to Albany and drove up and down the fanciest streets, the ones with the most expensive houses, and watched the lighted windows slide by through the darkness like trays displaying all the things I didn’t have. Now and then I thought about stealing, about hurting people, but more often I wanted to be the one to catch someone else doing things like that. As I drove, I often fantasized about spotting some catastrophe I could prevent—spying a prowler creeping through the hedge; catching sight of the fire just now starting in the kitchen of that house. I wanted to be there to save someone else from the kind of disaster that had happened to me, because I felt that if I did, maybe I’d get another chance at things. Maybe someone would help steer me back to where I was supposed to be.
Every morning I tell myself that things will turn around, that today will be a new start. I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and say, “Ready. Set. Go.”
Though most of the cadets at About Face wanted to improve themselves, there were some, a handful, who went out of their way to be as bad as possible. A few were in gangs and had cryptic tattoos branded on their arms and necks. Some had relatives in prison, so their desire to end up there made at least a bit of sense. But others just seemed to enjoy being cruel. There wasn’t much room for them to do wrong, but they liked to throw their weight around. They teased and tried to injure other boys, some much bigger than themselves. They went around jabbing erections at each other, and at the drill sergeants. One cadet, a boy named Unger, refused to march in step; he’d stagger this way and that like a drunk, or shove the boy ahead of him and try to topple the whole line. Another, a Spaniard from New York City, kept hitting other boys in the groin with his belt, even after Brill punished him with fifteen-, sixteen-, even eighteen-mile marches around the grounds. The one that worried me most, though, was a local boy named Haden McCrae.
McCrae didn’t act out the way the other boys did; he didn’t fight or misbehave, but there was a lazy, unworried way about him that troubled all the drill sergeants. He always looked at us in a sleepy, heavy-lidded manner—he looked at us like he’d seen it all before. It was this calmness in the face of authority that made him so popular with the other cadets. This and the fact that at sixteen, McCrae had pulled an old man from his car, robbed him, and kicked him in the head until he was near death. Now, at almost eighteen, he was one of the oldest boys at the camp. McCrae was tall and lanky and pale, his face covered with thick, brown smears of freckle. His hair, before being shaved when he arrived at About Face, had been bright orange, and I could always spot his head from far off, glowing like a hot coal among the others.
Most of the grounds at About Face had an air of the military about them: everything sheared flat and laid out at right angles, as though plotted on a grid of crossed sabers. But below the camp lay thick woods, woods that suggested play and joy and mischief. The pine trees stood in bunches, their branches grown together in dark, tangled canopies. The tunnel-like paths beneath them twisted and wound this way and that, past other kinds of trees—gnarled maples and birch trees with papery bark that unraveled in long, teasing curls. There were jags of rock to hide behind, patches of canary grass high as my waist. And the woods had a downward tilt to them—they sloped down from the camp in a way that implied decline, a kind of crumbling collapse toward Lake Deed, which lay below, and which was black and miles around and always fringed with a foamy white discharge. There were deep currents in the lake, too. If you watched it closely for a long time, you could detect a slow churning motion, a sluggish kind of spinning.
I had my first encounter with McCrae at Lake Deed.
This land below About Face was to be used to expand the camp. Sergeant Brill hoped to get a permit from the state to raze most of the trees by next year, and he often punished the camp’s worst cadets, like McCrae, by forcing them to help clear the walkway leading down through the trees to the lake. When I wasn’t on trumpet or driving Lex to the hospital, Sergeant Brill had me do menial things around the camp—help dolly boxes of food from the supply trucks into the canteen closet, or restock the bathrooms. But sometimes when he sent cadets down to the lake he had me go with the other drill sergeants “to have an extra set of eyes around,” as he said. So I tagged along and watched drill sergeants like Williams tie the cadets together by their waists with a leash-like metal cable and then march them through the locked fencing at the back of the camp and down into the woods. I followed them through the trees and hovered at the edge of the group, looking for any kind of acting out. There was an after-school camp for wealthy children somewhere on the other side of the water, and though we never saw them out on the lake itself, on still days we could hear those other children playing on their beach—the yelps, the laughter, the gasps brought on by the sting of cold water. I often caught McCrae staring out over the dark, spinning expanse in the direction of those voices. And with such hatred in his eyes! Like if he had a second’s chance he’d split their heads open one by one, like pieces of firewood.
Once, during the cadets’ lunch hour, I saw McCrae, still attached to the others by the leash, fidgeting with something by the edge of the water. The other three drill sergeants were eating their lunches and talking nearby, and though I wasn’t supposed to address the cadets myself, I went over.
“McCrae, what are you up to?” I said in a friendly tone. I never spoke harshly to the cadets. I figured that maybe if I seemed relaxed around them, they might open up to me.
McCrae stood up, but when he glanced over his shoulder and saw who I was, he kept his back to me. I could see that he had something in his hands. “The music man,” he said. He had started the cadets calling me “music man.”
“Hey, music man,” said Cadet Spitz, sitting on a rock by the shore. “You got some bird shit in your hair.”
I reached up to feel my head before realizing that he was talking about my patch of white hair. The cadets laughed, the cable between them shaking. Spitz looked at McCrae as though for approval, but McCrae stood facing the lake.
“Funny, Spitz,” I said. “Hey, McCrae. What’s in your hands there, buddy?”
“Nothing to worry about, music man,” he said, his back still to me. The water lapped at the shore.
“McCrae. Do me a favor and show me your hands,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another drill sergeant approaching. I wanted to handle this before he took over.
“Come on now, music man,” said McCrae. “Let’s not start acting like a drill sergeant.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, growing angry.
“It means we all know you were assigned to this job. It’s no secret. Cadet Granz over there thinks they sent you here because you’re one of those special retards who, you know, can do some things real good, like count or play a instrument. No offense. But I’m of the mind that you did something wrong to end up here, just like us. So what’s the story?”
“My story is I’m here to serve my community, McCrae. And as an official drill sergeant I’m ordering you to turn around! Right now!”
McCrae laughed. “Okay, okay. Don’t get all riled up.”
“McCrae!” shouted the other drill sergeant. “Shut up and turn around!” He grabbed McCrae and spun him around.
McCrae let something flap up out of his
hands. It rushed at me, beating its wings against my chest and neck. I grabbed it, and saw that it was a baby loon. How McCrae had managed to catch the bird, I don’t know. Attached to its leg was a luggage tag, one of the slips we tied to the cadets’ duffels when we shipped them in or out. Cunt, it read in McCrae’s lefty handwriting.
“Empty your pockets, McCrae,” said the drill sergeant.
McCrae pulled his pockets inside out and a dozen little pieces of paper fluttered to the ground. Ass rape, said one. Big diseased cock, said another.
“That’s the end of lunch, then,” said the drill sergeant. Then he addressed the other cadets. “Drop what you’re eating and get back to work.” The boys sighed and swore under their breath, then got to their feet and started working again. As the other drill sergeant pushed him past me, McCrae shot me a sad look, a look that said he was disappointed in me, as though I’d let him down somehow. I looked at the loon, the tag still attached to its leg. I pictured it landing on the other side of the lake, on the beach where the children from the other camp were playing; I pictured it landing right in some little girl’s hands.
“Nunce” is short for enunciate, which is what people used to say I did best on horn: stepping hard and clear on each note in a commanding, declarative way. But this is a style no one wants to play alongside. It’s the style of someone who learned to play alone, not in a band like most people. I’m no good at call-and-response. How I play is like someone talking loudly to himself, yelling at himself.
Each morning at five fifty I took my place beneath the flagpole, dew still beading the grass, the occasional low fog stewing around my ankles, and waited there until it was time to play reveille. I listened to the rope gently bell against the flagpole. I watched a golden outline materialize around the distant treetops. And then, right at six o’clock, I emptied myself into that horn. Sometimes I rang loud enough to knock the birds from the trees. At night, I returned to the spot and played taps the same way.