by Brock Clarke
But our sweet babies don’t want to know this, any of this. So, instead, we say, “We are the kind of people, who when we get home, before we do anything else, put on our pointy boots and parade around the Public Square.” And then, finally, we cram our round-toed boot feet into our pointy boots, and go do that.
IT IS HARD-SLEDDING getting to the Public Square. For one, it’s snowing, again, again, and there is nowhere left to put the snow—the snowbanks are too high already—and so the walks are unshoveled, the roads unplowed. For another, our pointy boots have shit for traction and we slip and fall, a lot, as we walk. By the time we all get to the Public Square, we are soaked and sore from all the falling. Cold, too. Because all we have on is our travel camo pants and jackets, our berets, and, of course, our pointy boots, which are at least waterproof, and good thing, too, because they’re completely buried in the snow. It is dark, after six o’clock. The county office building windows are dark; everyone has gone home. On the corner of State and Lewis, the bail bonds office has an illuminated Western Union sign in the window, but otherwise the place is dark, too. The guys in the halfway house are nowhere to be seen. It’s possible that the halfway house has closed. It’s possible that they’ve joined up, too, that the Army is where the halfway house guys are sent when a halfway house closes. The Bon-Ton is no longer the Bon-Ton, is no longer anything, but the city has decorated its front windows with white blinking Christmas lights. The streetlight poles are wrapped with green garlands and red bows. The statue of the Revolutionary War general is buried up to his waist in snow, the falling snow piling up on his plumed hat. Other than him, we are the only ones on the Square. It is not we how pictured it, not how we remembered it. For that matter, we’re not sure how we pictured ourselves, how we remembered ourselves. We do a quick head count and find that we’re not all here, not even close.
“Where the hell is everyone?” we ask. But we know. We can see them putting the silver stars on top of their Christmas trees; we can see them holding their sweet babies real tight; we can hear their babies calling them by name, each and every one of them.
“Those bastards,” one of us says.
“Those bitches,” another one of us says.
“This is ridiculous,” the third of us says.
“Maybe we should just go home,” the fourth of us says.
“Our poor babies,” the fifth of us says.
“Our poor sweet babies,” the sixth of us says.
“Poor Sanders,” the last of us says, and then we remember why we can’t go home. His funeral is at nine in the morning. We can picture it: his sweet baby and baby will be there, trying to be brave, trying not to cry while the chaplain conveys the thanks of the president and prays to God for the state of Sanders’s immortal soul. We’ll be there, too, wearing our pointy boots. Because we promised Sanders, right before he died. He said, “When you lay me to rest, will you please wear your pointy boots?” We promised we would. But first, we need to do what we’ve come here to do. We have fifteen hours to parade around the Public Square in our pointy boots, fifteen hours to forget what happened to Sanders, so we can help bury him.
“Are we ready?” we ask each other. And then we start parading around the Public Square. We walk slowly at first, take tiny steps, because of the footing. But then we start going faster. We don’t mean to. It’s the blinking Christmas lights: they blink too fast, and when we look at them, they make us walk too fast, too. Right in front of the Bon-Ton, after only one lap around the Public Square, we slip, and fall on our backs, and because it’s impossible not to laugh when someone slips and falls in the snow, we laugh. Then we remember laughing at Sanders and we stop laughing. Then we remember when we stopped laughing at Sanders and looked around. There was the mother, lying on the dirt floor, faceup, the way Sanders had left her. There was the son lying there, facedown and to the side, still weeping, still looking at Sanders, who was still grabbing his crotch with one hand and holding his rifle with the other. But Sanders wasn’t looking at the son, or the mother, or at us. His eyes were closed, his face pinched in concentration. We knew what he was doing: he was trying to picture the day we’d paraded around the Public Square in our pointy boots; he was trying to replace the picture of what he’d just done with the picture of us, our boots, the Square, us parading around it, people watching us, us feeling so good. We knew that’s what he was doing, because we did the same thing: we closed our eyes and tried to picture it, tried to remember it. We tried so hard. But the harder we tried to picture the boots, the Public Square, the office workers and bail bondsmen and halfway house guys, the farther away all of that was. All we could see was the mother, Sanders kneeling over her, us laughing; Sanders getting up and waddling over to the son, us laughing even harder. Go away, we told the memory we didn’t want. Please come back, we told the one we did. Please come back, we begged our pointy boots. But they didn’t.
We opened our eyes. Sanders was lying on the ground next to the son. They were both crying now—the son, because he didn’t know what was going to happen, Sanders, because he did.
“I’m sorry,” Sanders said.
“I am, too,” each of us said.
“Will you promise me something?” Sanders said. “When you lay me to rest, will you please wear your pointy boots?”
“We will,” we said, and then without saying another word, we aimed our guns at him, and one by one—Carson, Marocco, Smoot, Mayfair, Penfield, Rovazzo, Zyzk, Palmer, Reese, Appleton, Exley, Scarano, Loomis, Olearzyck—we shot him, and then we shot the son, too. Then we closed our eyes again. But we saw the same thing as before, except that there was another Sanders and another son, and they were both dead, and we’d killed them.
“Are you still seeing it?” we ask. But of course we know the answer. We lie there, in the snow, waiting to see whether one of us, any of us, will get up, brush off our pointy boots, and try again.
The Misunderstandings
The misunderstandings started on a Wednesday, a not-so-unusual early February Wednesday when I was supposed to make dinner, but time had gotten away from me, somehow, again, even though I had so much of it—even so, it was already six o’clock and I hadn’t yet introduced the pot to the burner, and the kids were staggering around and moaning theatrically about their big hunger. Katherine, our eight-year-old, was doing her best to distend her stomach, because at school her class had just finished a unit on People Less Fortunate Than Us, and so she knew all about the poor Somali children and their highly preventable famine, and she also had learned the Somali word for “please,” and so she was lurching around with her little stomach as far out it could go saying, “Please, please,” in the manner of a Somali kid who was starving to death—which is to say, pathetically, in a way that could either break your heart or step on your last nerve, depending on how many times your heart had already been broken and how hardened it had become—and as I turned around to ask Katherine if she knew the Somali words for “shut up,” I accidentally struck my six-year-old son, Sam, in the head with the pot I was holding, and since the pot was filled with water, it had more heft than an empty pot, and I’ll admit that it might have hurt some if it struck you, unexpectedly, in the side of the head and if you were a six-year-old boy with a low threshold for pain in the first place. Sam dropped immediately to the floor and started wailing—incomprehensibly at first, then making a little bit more sense with each wail, until I finally understood that he wanted to go to the hospital for stitches (there was a bump on the side of his head, a good-sized one, but no cut or blood; I checked) and Katherine was still moaning, “Please, please,” in Somali, and into the middle of this depraved scene, after a long day at work, walked Sharon, my wife, and she took one look at us and said, “Jesus, let’s just go out to eat.”
We went. We went to a Mexican place, Tegucigalpa’s, that had just opened up in the old train depot. We hadn’t been there before, so we assumed it was in the main part of the depot—the lobby or the concourse—and that it was large. It wasn’t;
it was in the old barbershop and was much smaller than we’d imagined. I mean, it was really small: three booths along the east and west walls, and then two small tables at the north and south poles and then a bigger table in the middle. We sat at the bigger, middle table (it was the only one empty) and, logistically speaking, we were at the very center of the room, at the center of attention, if you will, as if we were on a theater-in-the-round, which might explain the first misunderstanding that then led to all the subsequent misunderstandings.
So it was small. It was also quiet. One of those hushed, intimate places. That’s why people went there, it was clear, for the quiet and the intimacy. Even though the married owners, who were also the servers and cooks, were dressed in gaudy his-and-her matador outfits—even so, there was a dignity about the place, about the other diners, who were speaking softly, so softly, so that even if, say, a husband and wife were talking about how the husband had been fired and couldn’t find another job and what a lazy bum he was and how the hell were they going to pay the mortgage, etc., etc., you wouldn’t know it, because they were talking about it softly, under their breath, with dignity.
That’s not the way Sharon talked about it. She asked the question loudly, shouting practically—“Did you look for a job today?”—although, to be fair, she had to raise her voice to be heard over the kids, who were really making a racket. Because they wanted to sit in a booth, not the table we were at. They were demanding to sit at the booth, and I was grateful for this at first, because I could ignore Sharon’s question. I hadn’t, in fact, looked for a job—not that day, nor the day before, and so on—so as to deal with the kids. I said, “There are people sitting in the booths. They were here first. Besides, this table is fine.”
“But they have chips,” Katherine whined (you know how they whine). “In the booths, they get chips.”
It was true that the people in the booths had chips and we did not, and I was about to explain to Katherine that it had nothing to do with the booths qua booths, the booths were not blessed with chips while the tables went without, that everyone got them and that we had just sat down, after all, and we’d be getting our chips in due time. But before I could explain all this, Sam yelled, “Chips!” He really belted this out; for such a little kid, he could make an awful lot of noise, and the one time we tried to bring him to Saint Mary’s for Christmas mass, he was yelling so loudly that no one could hear the pipe organ, and we never went back, which was fine, really, since we don’t believe in God, which ended up being part of one of the subsequent misunderstandings.
But this was the first misunderstanding. Sam bellowed out, “Chips!” and everyone looked at us when he did so, but he persevered; he kept on shouting it—“Chips! Chips! Chips!” What kind of parents would let their kid do this in a small, intimate restaurant, you might want to know. Didn’t we shush him? Of course we did. We shushed him over and over again. But it did no good. He kept yelling, and our shushing kept getting louder, until the shushing was like yelling itself, and had become part of our table’s generally disruptive noise, and people were staring at us by now, except for those people who were trying to ignore us, which, I grant you, was probably a losing battle.
The chips came (the female owner brought them over, and I thanked her effusively, and she accepted the thanks, begrudgingly, and wouldn’t meet my eyes and practically sprinted away from our table). The chips quieted the kids down some. The other diners stopped looking at us and went back to enjoying their meals, their private conversations. I was glad. For Tegucigalpa’s sake. Because the train depot had been empty for years, and even though it was a lovely old-timey building with a mosaic on the ceiling and soaring arches and buttresses and good gleaming-white tiled floors—even so, the city had let it go absolutely to hell, in the postwar years, until it finally wised up and secured the necessary federal and state grants, redid the whole thing, and then began searching for businesses to rent out space in the refurbished station. Tegucigalpa’s was the first one, and thus far the only one. Everyone wanted it to do well. Because there were so many empty buildings in our city, and you couldn’t throw a stick without hitting an old elementary school with boarded-up windows or a decommissioned church or a house that was about to fall off its ruined foundation into the river, which was already heavily polluted, by the way, even though most of the paper mills and textile factories along it were closed and no longer actively polluting it. Yes, even if Tegucigalpa’s succeeded, then the city still had a long way to go. Nearly everyone we knew had moved south or west, and the local economy was in awful shape; there were no jobs anywhere, and I tried to explain this to Sharon, but quietly, with some sense of decorum, and out of respect for the other diners.
“There are no jobs,” I said. “I didn’t look for jobs today because there aren’t any.”
“Oh, that’s such garbage,” she said. I knew what was coming next. I knew that she’d say that anyone who wanted a job could get one; after all, she’d gotten one, hadn’t she? Even after not working for six years while she raised the kids and with not much experience and a worthless college degree (she’d been a religion major), hadn’t she managed to get a job, a good job as a caseworker in the county office of social services?
“You got the job,” I said, still quietly, but not as quietly as before, and if you were sitting at an adjacent table or the one adjacent to that, you might have heard me. “You got the job because your father got you the job.”
“Steven, don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare say that.”
It’s true; I shouldn’t have said it. This is not something a husband should be saying to his wife, especially an unemployed husband. No, I shouldn’t have said what I’d said, even if her father was a county commissioner, and even though she’d gotten the job without even submitting a regular application. But didn’t she think it was odd that the county would hire someone as a social worker without any prior experience or educational background in social work? These are just some of the things I shouldn’t have said but did.
“I am so sick of you,” she said when I was done, and, boy, was her face red; it always got fiery red when she was furious or embarrassed, and I used to find it lovely and endearing, although I didn’t right then and hadn’t in some time, come to think of it. “I’m so sick of your fat face.”
“Hey,” I said. “That’s not fair,” even though it’s true that I had put on a few pounds out of depression since I’d been fired, which I thought was totally understandable, considering the circumstances. Although I tried not to consider the circumstances too often: because the circumstances were that I’d been fired—I’d been a history, sociology, civics, political science, and geography professor at the local community college—for having an affair with one of my students. My wife knew about this, of course, and had plenty to say on the matter, but that’s more part of the second misunderstanding than the first, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
A booth opened up—we clearly had driven the people away, because their enchiladas with mole sauce weren’t even half-eaten—and the kids saw this and, with their mouths absolutely crammed with chips, they started chanting, “Booth! Booth!” except with their mouths so full, it sounded as though they were chanting “Oof! Oof!”
“We’re not moving to any booth,” I said. “So forget about it.”
“I repeat,” Sharon said, again raising her voice to be heard over the kids, who were still chanting, “Booth,” but double-time and with more desperation. “Your . . . fat . . . face.”
“Just everyone shut the fuck up!” As I screamed this—and I did scream it; there is no sense in arguing otherwise—the male owner of Tegucigalpa’s loomed over me, over us, over our table, his arms across his chest, and clearly he meant business. Yes, he stood there like Judgment himself, and we all sucked in our breath, us and the other customers, and even the kids, who stopped chanting, although they were still cramming chips into their mouths, munch-munch-munching away while we waited to hear his verdict.