“Oh,” Pronek said. Where was Owen? If Owen broke in now, taking out Brdjanin as he was trying to reach his gun, Pronek would run to the kitchen, grab the woman’s hand, and escape with her. “Come with me,” he would say. “Podji sa mnom.”
“You know when bomb fall on market in Sarajevo?” Brdjanin asked, frowning and refrowning, sweat collecting in the furrows. “They say hundred people die. They all dolls, lutke. Muslims throw bomb on market. Propaganda! Then they put dolls for television, it look bad, like many people killed.”
Pronek’s mother had barely missed the shell. She had just crossed the street when it landed. She wandered back, dazed, and trudged through bloody pulp, torn limbs hanging off the still-standing counters, shell-shocked people slipping on brains. She almost stepped on someone’s heart, she said, but it was a tomato—what a strange thing, she thought, a tomato. She hadn’t seen a tomato for a couple of years.
“I have the friend,” Pronek said, trying to appear disinterested, his heart throttling in his chest, “from Sarajevo. He says the people really died. His parents are in Sarajevo. They saw it.”
“What is he?”
“He is the Bosnian.”
“No, what is he? He is Muslim? He is Muslim. He lie.”
“No, he’s not Muslim. He is from Sarajevo.”
“He is from Sarajevo, he is Muslim. They want Islamic Republic, many mudjahedini.”
Pronek slurped his coffee. The gun lay on the left-hand side, comfortably stretched like a sleeping dog—he wouldn’t have been surprised if the gun scratched its snout with its trigger. Pronek could see the woman’s shadow moving around the kitchen. Brdjanin sighed, and put both of his hands on the table, pounding it slowly as he spoke:
“How long you been here? I been here twenty years. I don’t come from nowhere. I leave my parents, my sister. I come here. Good country, good people. I work in factory, twenty years. But not my country. I die for my country. American die for his country. You die for Ukraine. We all die. Is war.”
Pronek looked out and saw Owen getting around the shovel, the paper and pen still in his hands, almost falling into the hole. Owen looked up at the window, saw Pronek and nodded upward, asking if everything was all right. Pronek quickly looked at Brdjanin, who was looking at his hand, gently hacking the table surface, muttering: “I Serb, no nothing.”
“I must go,” Pronek said. “I must go to work.”
“You go.” Brdjanin shrugged and stroked his beard. “No problem.”
Pronek stood up. Brdjanin put his hand on the gun. Pronek walked toward the door. Brdjanin held the gun casually, no finger near the trigger. Pronek opened the door, Brdjanin behind him. It was the bathroom: a radiator was wheezing, a cat-litter box underneath was full of sandy lumps. As Pronek was turning around, slowly, Brdjanin grasped Pronek’s jacket, his left hand still holding the gun, and looked at him: he was shorter than Pronek, with an exhausted yeasty smell, his eyes were moist green. He had a coffee shadow on the beard around his mouth. Pronek nodded meaninglessly, paralyzed with fear. Brdjanin bowed his head, saying nothing. Pronek could see the woman framed by the kitchen door, watching them. He looked at her, hoping she would come and save him from Brdjanin’s grasp. She would come and embrace him and say it was all okay. But she was not moving, as if she were used to seeing men in a clinch. She had her hands in her robe pockets, but then took out a cigarette and a lighter. She lit the cigarette and Pronek saw the lighter flame flickering with uncanny clarity. She inhaled with a deep sough and tilted her head slightly backward, keeping the smoke in for the longest time, as if she had died an instant before exhaling. Brdjanin was sobbing: squeally gasps ending with stertorous, shy snorts, his shoulders heaving in short leaps, his hand tightening its grip on Pronek’s jacket. Pronek imagined Brdjanin’s gun rising to his temple, the index finger pulling the trigger in slow motion—a loud pop and brains all over Pronek, blood and slime, dripping down. The woman looked down, drained, her bosom rising, patiently not looking up, as if waiting for the two men to disappear.
“It is okay,” Pronek said, and put his hand on Brdjanin’s shoulder. It was sticky and soft, with a few solitary hairs curling randomly. “It will be okay.”
“What the hell were you doing in there?” Owen asked curtly, standing at the bottom of the stairs with his hands on his hips. “I almost went in there shooting to save your ass.”
Pronek descended the stairs. The sun was creeping up from behind the building across the street, making the black trees gray. The same squirrel stopped, now upside down, midway down a tree and looked at Pronek. It was skinny and its tail fluff was deflated—it was going to be a long winter.
“Did he take the thing?”
“Yeah,” Pronek said. “But I don’t think he cares.”
“Oh, he’ll have to care, believe you me, he’ll care.”
“There is the woman in there,” Pronek said, wistfully.
“There always is,” Owen said.
Owen patted Pronek on the back, and softly pushed him toward the car. All the weight of Pronek’s body was in his feet now, and his neck hurt, as if it were cracking under his head. They walked slowly, Owen offered him a cigarette and Pronek took it. Owen held the lighter in front of Pronek’s face, and Pronek saw the yellow flame with a blue root, flickering under his breath—he recognized with wearisome detachment that he was alive. He inhaled and said, exhaling:
“I don’t smoke.”
“Now you do,” Owen said.
They drove up Western, past the cemetery wall, past the used car shops—cars glittering in the morning silence, like a timorous army. Owen turned on the radio: Dan Ryan was congested, Kennedy moving slowly, the day was to be partly cloudy, gusty winds, high in the fifties. They turned right on Granville. Pronek felt his muscles tense, a cramp in his fingers, as if they were transforming into talons, clutching the dollar bills Owen had given him.
“I used to know a guy like you in Vietnam,” Owen said. “Never said a fucking word. Kept to himself. He was a sniper, popped them like bottles on a fence. He would sit in a tree camouflaged, for hours, not moving, not making a sound. Guess you get used to it. He’d watch a village, wait for Charlie to crawl out, and then bam! Once we were—”
“You can leave me here,” Pronek said abruptly. “I’m the next block.”
“Sure. Thanks again, man,” Owen said, and pulled up. “I’ll sure call if I have something for you. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Pronek said, and got out of the car. The morning was crisp, with just enough snap in the air to make one’s life simple and sweet. But he was sleepy, with the feeling that he had just spent time with someone who didn’t exist, a feeling that was slowly turning into anger. Way down Broadway, there was a quick shimmer coming off a moving bus windshield. Pronek stood on the corner, letting his eyelids slide down like blinds, gathering strength before walking home. He looked at the Shoney’s being razed, and imagined himself destroying it with a huge hammer, slamming the walls, ripping out pipes, until there was just a pile of rubble. And then he would go on, until there was nothing left.
6
The Soldiers Coming
CHICAGO, APRIL 1997–
MARCH 1998
THE DOLPHINS
So I kissed Pronek’s forehead for good luck and sent him up.
Stage fright made his elbows shiver, but he ascended a long, narrow staircase and stopped at the top. He looked down, visualizing himself tumbling, big head over small heels. He flexed his back, as if appreciating the unbrokenness of his spine. He opened the door that had a picture of a pretty green-and-blue globe—SAVE OUR MOTHER, the poster demanded. He thought of his mother and recalled her sitting with her feet propped on the coffee table, tufts of cotton between her toes, the arches of her feet symmetrical. The office smelled like ocean and pines and perspiration. He walked to the reception desk and a black woman with shorn hair told him to sit down and wait. In the corner there was a wizened palm of an uncertain green color, its flaccid leaves looking down at the pot. He look
ed at his hands, and they appeared bleached.
“My name is John,” the man said, “but everybody calls me JFK.” The Handbook of Good English was on someone’s desk. “Here is fine,” JFK said, and offered him the only chair, squatting in front of him, grasping a clipboard. In a whisper, he asked him why he wanted to work for Greenpeace, and Pronek delivered the mantra he repeated in many an unsuccessful interview: he had communication skills; he liked working with people; he thought this was the right invyromint for him, where he could develop to his full potential. JFK was rocking in his squat, and Pronek imagined pushing him over. A clot of tenebrous panic started forming in his stomach, as he realized he might not get the job, even though he was afraid that he might get the job. “Here is fine,” he repeated to himself. “Here is fine.” It was a demanding job, JFK said, canvassing door to door—he would have to talk to between twenty and forty people per night. Was he sure he could do it? Was he comfortable speaking English?
“I am evil,” she said.
“She is Rachel,” JFK said. “She will train you tonight.”
“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse.”
She wore a T-shirt with a tranquil candle below which DAYDREAM NATION was written.
“I am Jozef,” Pronek said. “Nothing in reverse.”
JFK tightened his lips and opened his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows, then vanished. Pronek did not know what to do with his hands—they overlapped over his genitals for a moment, then he deposited them on his hips and stood akimbo, as if reprimanding Rachel.
“Where are you from?” she asked him.
“Bosnia.”
“I am sorry.”
“But I live here now, for five years.”
“I am still sorry.”
“It is not your fault.”
She had short spiky hair, with a crest heaving over her forehead, above her sparkling eyes. Her upper lip, dark cherry red, had the shape of a musketeer mustache. She had a dimple in her chin. She had cheek apples Pronek wanted to touch.
“When you’re done staring at my face, I can show you my tits too.”
“I am sorry,” he said, looking toward a remote corner of the ceiling, where, he noticed, there was absolutely nothing.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I like your face too.”
“Can you turn that shit down?” Rachel snarled.
“It. Is. Radiohead,” Dallas slowly said, as if nobody could speak his language. “Black Star, man. It is awesome. It is rock ’n’ roll.”
“It. Is. Stupid,” Rachel said.
Pronek sat in the back seat, next to Rachel, their thighs rubbing. He furtively glanced at her—her right earlobe was beautiful: the mazy curves inside it were perfect. He imagined himself curled and snug, pinkie-nail-sized, resting at the mouth of the ear funnel, singing a sweet song.
“Did you have rock ’n’ roll in Yugoslavia?” Dallas shouted over Radiohead. The van was the slowest vehicle on the highway, overtaken by coffin-like Cadillacs steered by old ladies sunk in the front seat, passed by garbage trucks with black bags stuck between the rear-end teeth. Monster trucks honked at them furiously.
“Jesus, JFK,” Rachel said. “It’s like you’re pulling us in a Radio Flyer. Step on it.”
“Why are they calling you JFK?” Pronek asked. JFK was a large man, his meaty back spilling over the edges of the seat, hair sprouting from his neck.
“He’s the size of an airport,” Rachel said.
“’Cause my name is John Francis Kirkpatrick.”
“Did you?” Dallas shouted again. His arms were tattooed with dragons licking naked women, some of them singed by flames.
“See, there are many ways to get the money at the door,” Rachel said. “You can appeal to the sexual frustration of suburban housewives, flirting like a crass cowboy, as Dallas does. You . . .”
“Fuck you,” Dallas said.
“Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.
“. . . can exhaust them with facts and moralistic appeals, until they pay you to go away, as JFK does. Or you can look at them with big, beautiful eyes, dazzle them with a smile, then strike like a cobra, as Vince does.”
Vince was sitting in front of Rachel, grasping a small red bag with Chip and Dale pictured on it. Pronek wanted to be nice to Vince, because Vince was black, but didn’t quite know what nice things to say, so he only smiled vaguely.
“I like blues,” he said, finally, but no one responded to his statement: Vince continued looking out the window; Dallas was using his knees as a snare-drum; JFK was slowing down, because half a mile ahead of him, there was a truck with an American flag spreading across its rear end. Only Rachel glanced at him, perplexed, then put her left foot on her right knee, exhibiting her boot sole to Pronek—there was pink chewing gum on the heel.
“Schaumburg is tough,” Rachel said. Pronek looked down a row of houses bending around an empty street. “This town has an ordinance prohibiting straight streets, because they want it to be more interesting, they say, more diversified.”
The houses were identical—pale plastic-blue walls; a white porch; a lattice with a nascent crawler; a figure on the lawn: a dwarf; a black jockey; a Virgin Mary.
“This, my friend, is called devo.”
“Devo,” Pronek repeated. The sky was car-commercial blue, with a lonely plane here and there, like a gnat without a swarm. The air was warm; spring buds on the trees exuded a syrupy smell.
“Just watch what I do first.”
Rachel touched his elbow tenderly, as if it were the source of his pain. There was a steel ball grinding Pronek’s bowels, and a tingle of paralyzing fear scurrying across his skin to his head, where it stopped to throb. He needed a cigarette. He imagined good Americans opening their doors, hating him for his foreign stupidity, for his silly accent, for his childish grammar errors. He imagined them swinging baseball bats at his elbows and smashing them, bone splinters flying around.
“I hate baseball,” he informed Rachel, but she was already pressing the bell button.
“Hi, I’m Rachel, and this is Joseph. We’re from Greenpeace.” Rachel beamed at the woman, pressing her clipboard against her chest, the Save-the-Whales leaflet facing out. The woman was skinny, her hair wet and hanging in springy curls. She was clasping the collars of her white robe, looking at Rachel, then cautiously glancing at Pronek, as if his presence there were secret.
“How are you today?” Rachel asked her, nodding.
“Who’s that?” a man hollered from somewhere inside the house. The house smelled of something familiar to Pronek—it contained paprika, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He could see a carpet with flat panthers gazing upward at him with their yellow eyes. A huge bowl of brownish popcorn stood on a glass-top table. A python was gulping down a mouse on the TV.
“We are not interested,” the woman said. There was a cavity at the bottom of her neck and a droplet of water in it, slowly sliding down.
“I’m sure you care about the environment,” Rachel said.
“No, thank you.”
“Who the heck is it?” the man yelled again. The woman closed the door and locked it, a wooden hand with flowers painted on it and the word “Welcome” swung first left, then right.
“Let me give you some advice,” Rachel said very quietly, her gaze grazing Pronek’s hip. “Never look inside while you are talking to them and never, never prop yourself on your toes to peek inside. They think you wanna rob them. Look them in the eyes.”
“In the eyes,” Pronek said. “Good.”
The man was in his underwear, with Rudolph-the-Red-Nose-Reindeer slippers—the red nose erected toward them. His shirt was unbuttoned, and Pronek could see the head of an eagle touching the left-nipple circle with its beak. Pronek tried to focus on the man’s droopy eyes, but could not help surveying the man’s whitish underwear with an intermittent yellow stain.
“I’m a hunter,” the man said. “I enjoy killing animals.”
“Many hunters support Greenpeace,” Rachel said.
<
br /> “Well, I ain’t one of them,” the man said. “Now, leave my property.”
“I like your slippers,” she said.
“Thank you. Now get off my fucking property.”
“This is hell. I run out of smiles and kindness quickly.”
“It’s very hard.”
“Do you want to try?”
“No, not yet.”
“You gotta try it at some point.”
“Okay. Not yet.”
Pronek regarded Rachel as she was talking to a pimply Motörhead teenager; or a Catholic lady with her index fingers stuck between the pages of the Bible; or a college boy wearing a baseball hat backward who told them he hated Chomsky. (“Who is that?” Pronek asked.) He watched her lips part—she would expose her lower teeth, tightening her chin, the dimple deepening, while making an important point. She would roll her lips into her mouth, after she had asked for money, waiting for an answer. He tried to imitate the smile she was flashing at a community-college professor who listened to her enthralled, with a pen and a checkbook in his hand, scrawny and bending forward, as if cancer were breaking his back as they spoke. The college professor glimpsed Pronek with the corner of his eye: Pronek was raising his eyebrows, stretching his eyelids and pulling his cheeks back, keeping his teeth close, replicating a Rachel smile.
“Are you okay?” he asked Pronek.
“Yes, I am,” Pronek said, and tidied up his face into a solemn expression.
They stood at the corner of Washtenaw and Hiawatha. Pronek was smoking, self-conscious, the cigarette tasteless. Rachel watched him, her head tilted.
“The important thing is to listen to them. They’ll tell you things, and they’ll give you money for listening.”
“Why do you call yourself evil?”
“E-V-O-L. Love in reverse. It’s a Sonic Youth album, my favorite.”
“I never listened them.”
“Listened to them.”
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