Behold

by Barker, Clive

  Today Mata’s expression was solemn. She pulled a newspaper out from under the seat and placed it on Edward’s lap. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Edward had assumed it was because of his brothers and his father, but the way her breathing hitched now and new tears started, he knew there was more. Something he’d been dreading.

  “What is it?” He turned the paper over and read the headline. He couldn’t breathe.

  Amelia Earhart Missing in South Pacific.

  “She can’t be gone. Not her.” Mata’s hand slipped into his. “She probably had some trouble and had to land somewhere. They say her radio was acting up.”

  Edward’s heart pounded in his chest.

  Arnie had asked him on the day of the funeral if he’d seen anything that last night of guard duty. He’d waited in his hospital bed until a nurse took Pa to the washroom. Whispered it in his strange, slurring voice so Pa wouldn’t hear. Edward said no.

  How could he explain to Arnie about the strange shivering thing he’d seen plop down from under Roy’s truck? The worm-like shadow he thought he saw inching up the wheel strut of the Earhart plane, drawn to the gleaming hulk of the plane like filings to a magnet. Only one of the little devils. The other waiting back at the farm for its wayward mate who would never return. How when he blinked, the creature flickered and was gone.

  “She’s probably just a little lost,” Edward said to Mata without conviction.

  “Her husband says he won’t give up. He’ll keep looking even if they call off the search.” Mata wiped her eyes and leaned against his shoulder. “He’ll find her.”

  Edward folded the newspaper and looked down at Mata’s hand, at her long, graceful fingers. He hoped she’d accept his mother’s ring. It wasn’t going to be easy, running the farm and looking after Pa and Arnie. Not the most romantic future for a woman with her spirit. A woman who dreamed of flight. But she was strong, practical, determined. And she didn’t believe life dealt you anything resembling luck, good or bad.

  ***

  Arnie learned about the search for Amelia Earhart from the nurse who came to adjust his hospital bed. Pa lay in the bed next to his, head turned away from Arnie as he slept.

  It was the news of Pa’s stroke that had sent Roy and Frank hurtling down the road in their truck. When word of his father, and his brothers’ accident, reached Arnie, he jumped on his Indian motorcycle and raced to the hospital.

  There was a strange pull when the bike took the corners, but Arnie ignored it. At the ‘T’ junction by the water tower he hit the brake. The bike kept surging forward, down the ditch at full speed, and up the other side into the cattle fence.

  In the hospital, Pa woke up.

  Arnie wanted to tell him the news of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. He could feel his hands twitch, forming words his Pa would never have understood, but only the left hand moved. His right arm ended in a bandaged stump. Arnie opened his mouth to speak, to say something about his grief, their losses. To tell Pa he’d been right. The Hammers didn’t fit with machines at all. But he stopped, knowing it would only upset Pa to hear his son’s voice.

  Pa’s mouth pulled down on one side, skin slack, eyes bright with anger, fear, and loss. Just like the creature that haunted the darkness when Arnie closed his eyes. A bubble of spit rose from between Pa’s lips and burst. Doctors claimed frustration was common is cases like his, but he would be able to speak again if he practiced, though likely with some impediment. They also claimed Arnie would be able to walk again, and learn how to write with his left hand. Arnie was tired of the doctors’ claims.

  He closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep. If he slept he’d have the nightmare, or was it a memory? It was hard to tell . . .

  He opened his eyes to the sun—blazing down, nearly blinding him—and a burning pain in his hand. He tried to move his crushed fingers, tried to curl them into a fist. The whole hand had blackened and swelled as it filled with blood. The motorbike pinned his legs to the ground and the cattle fence twisted around him, tearing clothing and pieces of flesh. The air was thick with the smell of gas.

  He opened his mouth and called for help, his throat caught on the words and he ended up coughing.

  A movement beside his head. Long, serpent-like, sun reflecting on the dark scales of its hide. He knew if he turned to look, it would disappear, so he let his gaze go soft. Let what was in front of him blur.

  There. The creature. Tomte.

  A shudder contracted its flesh as it writhed in slow undulations. Right across the middle was flat, and in places the skin split so Arnie could see its insides. Flickering sparks of stolen electric impulse lit up the creature’s innards. It had one eye, blood-red, and it stared at Arnie, unblinking, accusing. Arnie could feel its anguish vibrating in the air—at the loss of its other, its mate who had slipped into a shining steel machine and flew away, stripping the one left behind of everything but emptiness and rage.

  Despite its injuries, the creature slithered toward him in shuddering contractions. Arnie studied the organs—or nerves or veins—that sent cold bursts of light along the rift in its oil black skin. An ignition that failed to catch.

  He waited until the creature was close enough, then reached out with his good hand. A shock of static burst through him when he touched it. The creature made a low buzzing hum he could feel right up his arm and into his chest. His fingers, so deft at fixing things, sank into the shivering wet mess, located a strand, thin as a number fourteen wire. His fingers numbed as the creature sent small charges of electricity into him, but he followed the strand to where it fastened to the whole—rooted behind the creature’s glaring red eye.

  With one quick movement Arnie pinched and twisted, severing the strand from the whole. As the creature’s writhing slowed, the sparks extinguished, one by one, until finally it burnt out, leaving nothing but a dusty black husk.

  A WARE THAT WILL NOT KEEP

  John F.D. Taff

  Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover

  Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

  Reveillé

  A.E. Housman

  Phil stopped on the sidewalk in front of the modest brick bungalow, inhaled the air the house seemed to exhale. Inside, atop a bed so big it made him look like a child, his Grandpa Lev lay dying. The old man’s death seeped through the pores of the structure, rolled over the lawn like a miasma, hung in a heavy cloud over the roof as if the structure respired with the same labored, gray exhalations his grandfather breathed.

  Grandpa Lev had cancer, which had started in his lungs but had quickly burrowed into his bone marrow. Perhaps a year to live, he was told; a painful year. There had been tears all around, but none from Grandpa Lev. Phil had seen simple acceptance in his grandfather’s demeanor, but something else, too, something deep; as smooth and familiar as a worry stone rubbed in cracked hands for many years. Something Phil was sure no one else saw.

  Grandpa Lev was a Polish Jew of the old-school persuasion, whose alumni included Lot and Job, the ones who accepted all God threw at them and more with a weary meh and a determination to press on.

  So Phil knew that look.

  It was acceptance.

  The old man’s face held the look of someone who had just been told to finally pay the bill . . . a large bill that had been hanging unpaid for some time accruing interest. It was the face of someone who accepted that, but who was also rueful of the price.

  Phil knew that his grandfather would tell him what that price was here, today.

  Shivering, he walked to the porch, used a key to let himself in.

  ***

  Inside, his grandfather’s possessions looked dull, drained of color, objects in a sepia-toned picture. It was as if they, too, were slowly dying, fading.

  Phil turned toward the glow of late afternoon light that slanted down the narrow staircase, warm with golds and oranges and delicate greens. The light played on the dozens of framed photos that hung on both sides of these walls, giving a fitful life to the dead. Relatives that
had come to this country, many of them, most of them on a wave of shock and pain and death that continued to resonate in their family, in their country . . . in their faith.

  Phil climbed the steps slowly, feeling the weight of their scrutiny.

  Grandpa Lev’s room was a strange combination of Old World and high-tech. Dark, heavy wood furniture sat cheek-and-jowl by exotic medical equipment, beeping devices on poles, blinking boxes squatting atop his grandmother’s linen chest. Tubes and wires ran across the floor, met at the bed.

  The old man caught sight of his grandson over the shoulder of the nurse, who was adjusting a line from one of the hanging bags of fluids, down to where it entered, by needle, the back of his grandfather’s heavily veined hand.

  A smile broke out on his grandfather’s face, bright enough to push away the denser shadows hanging over the bed.

  “So, my grandson finally comes,” he said in a broken voice. “It only took my dying to get him here.”

  Phil went to the bed a little quicker than he’d intended, fell into his grandfather’s arms like a little boy. He buried his head in the old man’s neck, closed his mouth, bit his lips, willed himself not to cry. He inhaled the scent of his grandfather, that familiar mixture of tobacco and aftershave that Phil had found soothing as a child.

  Now, it was tinged with age, a kind of old man mustiness with something sour and sweetly off-putting underlying the forcibly neutral odors of the medicines that permeated the room.

  Grandpa Lev gave him one more squeeze, kissed his cheek. The old man put a shaking hand to his grandson’s other cheek, patted it gently. Phil cleared his throat, pulled away to stand beside the bed.

  “My grandson,” Lev said, tears glistening in his eyes. “I told you he’d come today, didn’t I?”

  The caretaker nodded, stepped toward the door. Phil and his grandfather listened to her footfalls on the steps, heard the front door open, close, the deadbolt set.

  Lev patted the edge of the bed. “Come, sit. I have a story to tell you while I still have breath.”

  Phil sat carefully so as not to disturb any of the wires or tubes snaking across its length and into his grandfather. “Why don’t you let me close the oxygen tent? It’d be easier for you to talk.”

  “Bah,” Lev said, settling back onto the pillow. “My lungs have little life left. Why waste it on false breath?”

  He cut his eyes at his grandson, took a deep, deep breath as if to make a point.

  Phil could hear it rattle in the dry corrugations of his grandfather’s lungs.

  Lev pressed tissue against his chapped lips. Specks of red soaked into the tissue before his grandfather tossed it into a wastebasket near the bed, already filled with identical pink-stained clumps.

  “So, what is it you called me here to tell me?” Phil asked.

  Lev sighed, closed his eyes.

  “The only person I ever told this was your grandmother, who took it with her when she left.”

  “Then why not just let it go?”

  “Telling you is letting go. After, there’s something you must do. If you love me.”

  Phil took the old man’s hand.

  Lev settled his head onto the pillow, licked his blood-flecked lips.

  “I’ve never spoken much about 1945, no? There’s a reason for that far beyond the reason that should have been enough . . . ”

  ***

  Spring of 1945 was cold in southwest Poland. The sky was a dense, compact gray as low as a ceiling, pressing down on the land with great weight, reverberating like a struck gong from all the violence transpiring beneath it.

  I was 14 years old, not much thinner than I am now. I was dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a manic energy that my flesh could not contain.

  Three months earlier, my family and I had been hauled away by the Germans, hauled away along with our entire village in the middle of a cold, moonless dark. In the commotion, I was separated from them—my parents, my two younger brothers, my baby sister—herded first onto a covered truck with dozens of other men and boys, all stunned into silence. From there, we were loaded into boxcars, perhaps a hundred to a car, taken all night to a camp.

  I wasn’t sure exactly where my family was or, for that matter, where I was. Poland still? Germany? Austria? The name of the camp was on the rough wooden sign over the gate I had passed through, in a language I didn’t speak. I know it wasn’t one of the bigger, more notorious camps—Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Treblinka.

  I was processed into this camp along with what seemed to be only men—from my age all the way up to . . . well, my age now. I was taken in with a group of about fifty others, stripped naked, hosed down by the guards, given a scratchy uniform of grey wool with the Star of David sewn roughly on its breast. My head was shaved, my wrist tattooed with a number. I was fed a sparse, rushed meal of boiled potatoes and a stale heel of bread, then led into a long, low wooden building that was filled from end to end with bunks stacked to the ceiling three-high.

  The place smelled of new wood and sawdust, of dirty bodies and unwashed feet. As bad as it smelled inside, it was better than the smell outside—the flat odor of mud and the bitter reek of ashes coming from a building at the center of camp.

  I was assigned a bunk at the very top. I clambered up there and fell into a deep sleep where my dreams brought no comfort.

  Immediately upon waking the next morning, I started thinking about escape.

  ***

  The guards roused us roughly. There was a short speech from the commandant, concerning the schedule; wake, eat, work, eat, sleep. We were lined up, and guards went back and forth, pulling the old men out, leading them away to the mysterious building with the four huge chimneys. The rest of us were separated into groups and led away to our jobs—building new bunkhouses, digging drainage or latrine ditches, chopping wood or cleaning.

  Me and a couple of boys my age were led to the back of the building that belched grey smoke. Down an incline was a narrow alley with a series of brick stalls filled with ash. Wheelbarrows leaned against the wall next to a dozen makeshift shovels. The enclosed space was so hot it took our breath away. Ash and cinders, still glowing red, swirled in the air.

  Our job was to shovel ash into the wheelbarrows, take the laden barrows back up the incline to the low series of structures that looked like horse stables. We were to offload the ash there, return and refill the wheelbarrows and repeat the circuit.

  We stared at the guard for a second, unsure of what to do.

  “Schnell!” he shouted.

  There was a flurry as we rushed to the barrows, grabbed shovels, clambered to the stalls and began shoveling frantically. In seconds, the air became opaque, filled my lungs with the choking remains of whatever had been burned.

  ***

  Those first few weeks were a blur of shoveling, hefting the barrows of ashes out to the building, emptying them, returning, filling, emptying. There was a small meal of potatoes and bread in the morning before work, a slightly bigger meal of potatoes, milk and bread after work, then to bed.

  Even for someone young and full of energy, the work was exhausting. At the end of the day, my arms and legs ached, my back throbbed, my stomach growled for more food. My nights were thick with sleep, sleep so profound, so deep that dreams seldom reached me, even though I desperately wanted them. Where were my father and mother, my brothers and sister? How were they? Did they miss me? Did they dream about me?

  There were rumors of what was going on, what the Nazis were really doing. But I comforted myself with thoughts of escape, of breaking free from the camp and running, perhaps returning home, perhaps striking off to find my family. I said nothing to anyone those first few weeks, but the desire, the need to escape, to stand up in some way to what was happening to me, to us, burned so bright that it consumed more of my energy than even the shoveling.

  I’d often get screamed at for going too near the gate or the perimeter fence, for playing with the windows in the bunkhouse, for snooping around the big building with
the furnace . . . whose purpose had become chillingly clear. I was even shot at several times for straying where I wasn’t supposed to be.

  The guards took these actions casually, almost off-handedly. They seemed pre-occupied by other thoughts. It was rumored the Americans were coming, the Soviets were coming. That the war was nearly over and soon Berlin would be in flames, if it wasn’t already.

  Someone did notice, though, a rabbi. He occupied the bed at the bottom of my rack, but I’d never spoken to him, other than to mumble an “Excuse me” as I climbed down for breakfast or up to sleep. I certainly didn’t know he was keeping an eye on me.

  As I climbed to my bunk one evening, the rabbi put his hand on my ankle, gave it a tug.

  I looked down, surprised.

  “If you’re thinking of escaping, you maybe shouldn’t be so obvious.”

  I came down to the ground, my face burning.

  “How do you know what I’m thinking, rabbi?”

  “You wear it like a fine suit of clothes and you don’t think it noticeable when the rest of us are dressed so shabbily?” he asked, pulling at his woolen shirt and raising one hoary eyebrow.

  The old man took my hand, patted it, smiled.

  “Give up this madness before they notice. If you try to run, if you try to squeeze through the fence or dig your way out, you will die. They will shoot you inside the fence or another soldier will shoot you outside.”

  I remember feeling real, boiling anger for the first time at an adult, much less a rabbi.

  I pulled my hand from his. “Rabbi, is it better to sit here and wait for them to burn us?”

  God help me, the rabbi’s smile grew broader, but still gentle.

  “What you see as acceptance, I see as acceptance, too . . . in a different way.”

  Those words didn’t fill me with anger. I was already too full with that to hold any more.