Homefront

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “What the hell!”

  —will be left in a Dumpster behind the gas station.

  Donny cuts across the way with his arms held over his head, one of them dangling silver and blue cans.

  “I look out and you’re gone and I don’t know how I’m goin’ to get home!” He laughs. “Damn, girl, I thought you left me. Thought I was goin’ to have to call Lionel and tell him to fire you.” He winks and gets in the car and I finish up and pull back onto the road.

  “You saw that man?” he says.

  “Mm.”

  He salutes. “That’s me. Donny Donaldson. Airborne. Vietnam,” he says. “Doctor Donaldson. I took care of ‘em. You know.” He holds out his arm and pushes up his sleeve and uses an invisible needle to push an invisible injection into a shockingly dark blue vein. “Gave ‘em morphine when they needed it. Saved their lives. Some of ‘em young, younger than you, for sure. Eighteen, one of ‘em. Can’t remember his name. I try, nights, but I just can’t. ‘N’ somethin’. Nesbitt. Nelson. Nur—Nur-somethin’. Don’t know. Don’t know, don’t know, and you’d think I’d…” He draws a set of stripes in the fog on his window. “I come back here, and…”

  I ask because I think he wants me to. “What?”

  “Never came home,” he says. “Not here. No one saw Donny, no one was there, didn’t…” He trails off and pokes at his can. “Bullshit!” He leans close to the window and his hair leaves squiggled lines on the glass. “Hurry up. I don’t feel like talkin’.”

  It takes about a minute to reach his house. At the curb he says, “Come in with me.”

  “I can’t. I have to get the car back.”

  “So what? Get the car back. Then come on over in your own car. Have a beer.”

  “Thanks, but I have to get home. And your wife…”

  “What ‘bout my wife?”

  “Well, I mean—she must want to see you, because you said that she’s—anyway, it’s dark out, and everything.”

  “So what if it’s dark?”

  “I should get home, is all.”

  “She’d love you,” he says. “I want you to meet you. Aw! Hear that, what I just—sometimes, I just don’t—what it was, what I meant to say, ‘s that I want you… to meet her.”

  “Sorry. Really. I can’t.”

  Donny rubs his feet together to break off some of the dried clay. “Well. Another time.”

  “Mm.”

  “You’re an angel. Now, don’t look at me that way. You are. A beautiful angel.” He digs in his pocket. “How much?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Well,” he says, “I don’t remember right now how much that is. Whyn’t you just tell me, goddamn it?”

  “Thirteen,” I say, and that heat comes back to my eyes, so I pretend to scratch them. “I mean, fourteen. It’s fourteen. Because of the stop—dollar for the stop.”

  “A damn dollar for a stop? Charlie don’t charge a dollar. What the hell’s goin’ on, over there? I got to talk to Lionel about this.” He hands me a twenty. “Keep it this time.” He wipes the window with his sleeve and looks out at his house. One room, the one with the largest window—living room, probably—shows light behind the curtain. The rest of the house is dark. He pushes open the door and gets out, leading with the beer. “Careful out there, y’hear?”

  Lenny takes ownership of the cab with a football team’s jacket slung over his arm and, “How’d you enjoy that joint? Don’t even pretend to be miss perfect, ‘cause I know you kept it and smoked it. I shoulda charged you for the damn thing,” before getting in the car. He opens the window to yell, “Next time fill the damn thing up all the way, goddamn it! I’m bringin’ it back in the mornin’ a quarter tank gone.”

  As soon as I’m through the door I ask Shellie to turn on the news, and I watch it while she collects her money and Lionel’s money and the government’s money. I leave with fifty-one dollars and fifteen minutes of a news fix, just enough to assure me Jake is safe. His unit wasn’t part of the air strike.

  I try not to divide fifty-one by twelve, try to fight the instinct to calculate the day’s earnings, but I can’t help it. On the way home I don’t stop at the drive-through coffee shop for my day-end treat, and I don’t stare out at the glimmer of the lights reflecting on the black, rippled surface of the river. Four twenty-five an hour is what I’m thinking. I take the roads by rote, stop reflexively at stop signs and red lights, brake for a loose dog without flinching and toss the bills in the air and watch them fall on the floor, flutter to rest under the emergency brake handle, make a star on the passenger seat.

  At home, Chancey’s food bowl is empty. I fill it. Slime layers the bottom of his water dish. I rinse it and pour him fresh water. I close the curtains. Rinse my travel mug for morning and set it beside the coffee pot. Straighten throw rugs. Slide the left corner of the oversized chair an inch forward because it isn’t in line with the rug. Turn on the news, and it is a brown morning and four are reported dead from a firefight. Look at the machine for a blinking message light. The window displays a rectangular, red ‘0’.

  Hum-de-fucking-dum.

  ________

  Sleep doesn’t come. One in the morning and the room is television-blue and my legs make shadows like waves under the comforter. Chancey lies curled between my feet, a furry raft. I flip over and he readjusts. I flip again and he jumps down and waits on the floor, watches me punch my pillow into shape and jerks at the high-pitched squeal of the television turning off.

  I turn it back on and make sure nothing happened in the seconds it was off and find a volume that isn’t too loud, but that I don’t have to strain to hear.

  ________

  Blankets tangle down at my feet and I hold his shirt close with one hand, eyes closed tight, and I think so hard the pressure pounds my ears like wind. Trying too hard, trying too hard, and it never works that way. “Just relax,” he would whisper with a soft touch and then go back to it until, indeed relaxed, I finished. But this is different. This is…if I could just separate, split myself in two, or lose my mind entirely, I could do it. If, if, if.

  I stuff his shirt under his pillow and pull up the blankets, cold now, and press the volume button.

  “…saying ‘No’ to any hostage negotiations. And in Minnesota, truckers driving, on average, ten miles over the speed limit. See how this could affect…”

  MARCH 26, WEDNESDAY

  March 26

  Jake,

  I hate this fucking war. I hate the President and I hate congress and I want each of them to wonder if it’s possible that the one person they think they couldn’t live without died an hour ago. No, three hours. And all that time, those three hours, they’ll have gone on with life as usual and with no idea they should be mourning. (It’s strange, you know, to think that you could die and I could not know. How could I not know?)

  It’s just today. I don’t feel like this every day.

  But you can’t know that.

  So I guess I won’t send this one, either

  eijgjklkjlskljsfd

  March 26

  Jake,

  Hi! How are you?

  Okay. So I lied. I’m writing.

  Chancey and I are great! We watch the news together at night and he snacks on the Christmas tree during the day (I’m working toward taking it down). Driving is the same as ever…some good money days (someone needed a ride to the airport yesterday, so I brought home $100), and some bad (the day before: $51). I’m still thinking about quitting, so I hope the offer you made before you left was serious. I might need your money!

  I see Army men walking around, every now and then, and every time I do, it’s like…it’s…I don’t know if you can know what it’s like; you won’t until you see a brunette girl about five feet tall wearing an orange t-shirt like mine, jeans like mine, and sandals like mine.

  Somehow, I don’t think that’ll happen where you are. But it’s nice to think I see you!

  I hope you’re doing well! Six months won’t be so l
ong, really, if we just take it easy.

  Sorry this is short, but I just got back from work and you know how tired I am when I come home.

  More soon!

  Love love love,

  Mia

  A dense cloud cover darkens the stairwell and the automatic lights are hours from their timed lighting, so the passageway is quiet, as if abandoned, and I feel like a ghost or an intruder. Halfway to the ground-floor mailboxes, I smell a thick spice, curry maybe, and something clanks behind number three’s door—a spoon in a pot?—and then there is chopping, chopping, something on a block, and humming that matches the smell of whatever it is she’s cooking. And then there is another—familiar—odor.

  Just one would be all right. Just one cigarette after all that writing, or to celebrate sleep, maybe. I’ve been good, and a joint doesn’t count.

  I knock on the door.

  “One minute,” she says, and after a second or two opens the door. Two brown braids, hanging from underneath a yellow scarf tied around her head, fall just to her shoulders. “My upstairs neighbor,” she sings, hands held in front of her, palms up, touching nothing. Two cats, one black and one gray, sit at her feet like statues with tails curled around their hind legs. Behind her in the kitchen, a mosaic of foods in cubes on the counter.

  I sneeze from the curry.

  The gray cat creeps toward the door and she nudges it back with her foot. “I am Safia,” she says.

  “Mia.”

  She waits and I stand in the hallway. Cigarette smoke snakes through the air from somewhere inside.

  “Is there something…?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I say. “I just—I was making sure you had your cats. I was the one—”

  “You knocked on my door!” She bends to pet the black cat with her wrist. “Frankie. Always breaks free!”

  “Well—okay. I mean, good. Frankie is here.”

  “Yes,” she says, “but he gets no more treats.” She stands again and waits again and sniffs and rubs her wrist under her nose. She steps back and waves and says, “Thank you,” and closes her door.

  I take the stairs down and leave my letter to Jake on the shelf for outgoing mail.

  Back in my living room, the message light blinks ‘1’.

  Jake.

  I sit at the desk, but I can’t, so I stand, leaning close to the machine to miss nothing.

  “Mia,” says the voice that isn’t Jake’s. “Donny. Donaldson…You home? Issa weekend. Saturday. I need a ride.” The sound of a lighter lighting, an inhale, an exhale. “I don’t need a ride. . .Where are you?. . .I, uh…no one gave me your number. I got it from the book. Remembered your name from that card…You know, that…your ID, on the dashboard. Anyhow…I won’t call again…But I wanted to tell you. Party tonight. You know where…Come over. Bring friends…Or don’t. This is Donny. Bye.”

  I press the delete button. It doesn’t register. I push it again.

  “To delete all messages, press the ‘delete’ button again.”

  I press it again.

  “All messages deleted.” A steady red ‘0’.

  Something glimmers, sparkles, takes my attention away from the desk. Balls. Four of them, silver, dangle from stiff branches the color of rust. The rest have fallen. Slipped off when dried needles snapped. Batted down by Chancey and soccer-kicked around the apartment until they were lost to the dark spaces under furniture. A single light strand droops between boughs. The tree leans left and the skirt is a bundled mess of fake velvet. Chancey sleeps curled around the stand.

  Across town there is a party. A strange house filled with strangers, secret smiles and private jokes. No phone—not mine—to wait for, and watching TV would be considered poor form.

  I put on a different pair of jeans, clean and smelling of a fabric softener, and brush my hair and draw on a layer of lipstick. I look in the mirror and wipe it off, but it stains, in a nice way, I suppose; like my lips, if lips could be, are flushed. I turn on the TV to watch a little, just a little, with an equally little drink, and not a strong one. Not too strong. I bring it to the living room and sit down, and on the screen a sun as perfect and white as a hole punched from paper balances atop the sharp point of a mountaintop.

  “Another morning here,” says a man’s voice from behind the image, “and another day for things to go extraordinarily well, or to go horribly, horribly wrong. With each sunrise there is new promise, but that can be a promise of something good or, as we know too well, Janie and Tom, it can be an omen. Yes. A promise of another kind, of something terrible to come.” A red filter covers the sun in blood. “After last night, we could sure use a good day. An intense battle raging for five hours, both in the air and on the ground, losing a reported twenty-five soldiers and marines, and killing approximately one hundred of theirs. And, as you know, Janie and Tom, that’s the highest death count we’ve had on our side in one day since the start of the war.” Janie says they’ll get back to him after these messages, but his voice carries on in my head: Your soldier—that’s right, yours!—could be one of the dead. Tune in at six to find out if you’re today’s winner of an elegant trumpeted service and a brand new, gen-you-ine American flag courtesy of the American Honor Guard! I wonder if they have a board marked up with tally lines, “their side” and “our side,” each soldier a Roman numeral one. Jake. I. William. I.

  I. I. I. I. I. I.

  I. I. I. I. I. I.

  I. I. I. I. I. I. I.

  I. I. I. I. I. I.

  Jackasses.

  I finish my drink and follow it with another, stronger. Tie my hair in a ponytail. Change from jeans to Jake’s flannel pants and a T-shirt. Give Chancey water. Sit in front of the TV and watch more news and make another drink. Each one tastes more like orange juice, so I add more vodka, and more vodka, and the treetop leans closer to the floor and the balls hang in a smile. A popular sticker comes to mind, a yellow smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead dripping red. Kids in school, the smokers, would wear them as patches on their jean-jackets when patches and pins were in. I had one, too, ironed onto my jacket’s shoulder like a tattoo. Because cool kids burned things, I would hold the cherry of my cigarette to the bullet hole until, over time, a real hole burned through to denim. “Nice dimension,” Jake said one day during our lunch break, his smoking habit new, the cigarette still awkward in his fingers.

  I leave my glass on the floor and hug the wall on the way down the stairs to apartment three. I rap one, two, three, four tim—

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Mia,” I say.

  “Who’s ‘me’?” says the voice.

  “No,” I say. “Mia. From upstairs.”

  “Ohhh,” he says, and the door opens. He has the hair and complexion of a Viking, an interesting contrast to the thin-stemmed wine glass he holds with graceful fingers. “Hello,” he says. Safia comes up behind him cradling a half-empty fishbowl, the goldfish skimming a thin layer of green and blue rocks. It swims left, sucks at the water, then swims right.

  I ask them for a cigarette. “I would buy my own, but I quit smoking a year ago, and if I buy a new pack, I’ll smoke them all by midnight, and I’m just having a really—”

  “No problem,” he says, and to Safia, “I think they’re on the kitchen table, doll.” She looks at him, then carries the bowl away.

  “Thank you …”

  “Paul.”

  “Mia.”

  “I know.” He smiles.

  Safia reappears with the pack in her hand, one filter poking out. I take it, say, “Thank you both so much,” and ask for a light. Paul gives me one from his pocket and tells me to keep it.

  When I’m inside, home with the cat and my walls, and my door is closed and I’m sitting on the floor beside my drink, I take the first drag, deep. The smoke is thick and rough in my throat and the lightheadedness that comes halfway through mixes with traces of nausea. Chancey crawls out from under the tree and lifts his nose to the smoke, then recoils and leaves the room.

 
Jake wouldn’t like that I’m smoking. Even so—or as a result, what the hell—every drag is better than the last. I blow the smoke at the tree and envelop it in fog, in lake mist, in the cloud that precedes a charging fire. I picture the toxins filling my lungs, damaging the cilia, leaving a black, ashy film on what it took me so long to re-pink. Months of smoking four a day, three a day, to none. Before today, I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in six months.

  Maybe he’ll get shot down this year, and maybe I’ll get cancer.

  The odds have to be weaker against both of us.

  MARCH 29, SATURDAY

  Denise pulls aside the dressing room curtain and waits in a floor-sweeping red gown for me to say something. She reaches behind her neck and gathers her hair in a loose nest. “It’s so expensive, but I just love it.”

  “Are you buying it?” I wonder where she’ll wear it, what plans she has.

  “It’d be silly not to. It’s perfect.” She shakes out her hair. “Aren’t you going to try one?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, come on. I saw a yellow one I think would look stunning.”

  She grabs my wrist with one hand and raises her hem with the other. “This way.” She stops at a rack of satin and sequins and drapes my arm in something yellow, then shoves me into a dressing room and says, “Don’t come out until you have it on.”

  The bench in the dressing room—a closet, really—is a hollow plywood box that creaks when I sit. On the floor: a price tag, a knotted piece of black string, and a white button. I pick up the button and put it in my pocket, then hang the dress on the hook and take off my pants and sit in front of the mirror. The lighting they use drops shadows in dimples in my skin that never show in the mirror at home. The hanger spins and spins around the rod when I yank off the gown. I slide it over my naked legs.