Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  Brian finally, softly, said, “You never know. Maybe this was what he needed. To have me come, to have someone with him who’d been there. Sometimes a secret loses its power when it’s no longer a secret.”

  Then she looked up. Slowly she shook her head and said, “I’d like to think so. But you don’t know Oliver. Sorry to say that, but it’s true.” Her eyes were filmed, either distance summoned or she was holding tears: both.

  “All right,” he said. “A man you know in war is not the whole man. Some would argue otherwise but they would not have been to war.”

  Then he paused again and she felt the weight of him in the room and wanted him to leave and didn’t want him to go, not yet. Unsure of how to place this new sense of her husband against all she’d ever known of him; even the silent man since his return.

  Brian stood and said, “You see, something like that happens to all of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say, I’d take that drink now. If the offer’s still open.”

  “Of course. But…”

  “Why? I guess I have my own story to tell.”

  She was quiet a moment, then stood. She said, “I don’t know how much more I can stand but let me make us both drinks, and I’ll do my best. Gin and tonic?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “No,” she said. “You won’t.” And took her glass to the sink and went to the sideboard in the other room and poured out two drinks, this time almost even amounts of gin and tonic, carried them back to the kitchen and cracked out the last ice cubes and floated them into the glasses where they crackled. She left the drinks on the counter and refilled the trays and placed them carefully back in the freezer. Willing the tremble out of her hands. But thinking there was a very good chance ice would be wanted later this afternoon. Or evening.

  She handed a glass to him. He was slouched back now in his chair, a leg crossed over the other knee. Again smoking. She wanted one of his cigarettes but didn’t ask, only returned to her chair and sat with her knees together and took a swallow of the drink and then held the sweating glass between both hands. She met his eyes and thought again they’d changed, receded someway, even as they seemed ever more fresh.

  She said, “All right. But this has to be the last story.” She paused as a rill of laughter filled her throat. She said, “I don’t think I can take much more.”

  He looked away and stubbed out his smoke and took a swallow, easily, but glanced at her. Then he said, “I’ll do my best to keep it short. This was the fall of ’45. We were the conquering army. Brings out the best and worst of men, is what I saw. But during that time, the entire population was under our control. I saw officers almost on a whim it seemed send whole groups of male prisoners off to the new camps, the Allied prisoner of war camps. Schoolteachers, scared old mayors, certainly there were bad men, Nazis trying to hide out, among them. Which was what was supposed to happen. Other times an officer would interview a group of the same sort of men and make a choice, tell them to just go home and get things right best they could. But mostly, nothing was sorted out yet. And our job was to help sort them out, one by one. Until the next stage of the plan was determined. So, well, there was a share of abuse that went on. Or maybe just payback. It’s so hard to say, even now. Although, and this is my story, a thing I witnessed, there were plenty of times it was clear, even while it was happening. But there is no judge, no jury. Except how a man feels.”

  “I’m not a man,” she said. “But I’m a fair judge, I think.”

  “I don’t need you to judge. I’m only telling what I saw. The people, they still had nothing. There was some rebuilding but not much. Makeshift schools were opening for the kids. But there was nothing even close to normal life—maybe it was even less normal than how people had lived during the war. Because we ran everything, the Americans and the Brits and also, east of there, the Russians—now we heard stories about them and maybe that made us feel better about how we were dealing with it all. Or maybe that was just hindsight, or maybe just bullshit at the time. Pardon my French. But the local people, they were still living very hard. And there were plenty among us happy to see them that way. For obvious reasons.

  “But here’s my story. One afternoon a convoy of trucks pulled up—this was a regular thing by then, the roads repaired and that was how we all got our supplies. And one of those trucks was loaded with tins of gasoline, to fuel all the other vehicles, the jeeps and like that. Well, one of those tins had a leak, a slow drip, and one of the boys of the town had discovered it and he’d got a bottle from somewhere and was knelt down under the truck, hiding best he could as he filled the bottle. Fuel of any kind was precious—meaning almost none existed in the town. Even wood from the countryside was scarce. People had no way to cook except what we allotted. Which was little. That was all part of keeping control. I know, seems like if we’d been more generous it would’ve showed them how wrong they’d been but that was not the way it worked, those early days.

  “That boy was caught. With his bottle of stolen gasoline. They hauled him up to the building being used as a holding area and I was there, inside. I was filling out some papers that were overdue. Anyway, that’s where it started for me. These three doughs, I knew them but not well, hauled him in and set the bottle of gas on the desk and they had him terrified already. He wasn’t maybe ten or twelve. It was hard to tell—the children were all small for their age. Anyway, they put him nose to the wall and the one guy, Decker was his name, he took charge, and told the boy to keep his nose against that wall but otherwise not to touch it. While they figured out what to do with him. Then they talked and talked. How he was a thief and also how he must’ve been planning a bomb or something like that. To make from the bottle of gas. And how they should just shoot him and be done with him. All the while the kid stood there, nose to the wall. He didn’t have any shoes and his trousers were too big for him and hitched up by a belt also too big for him and his shirt was old. A shirt that had many owners before it came to him. And he kept saying over and over how he just wanted some fuel for his mother to cook with and how sorry he was and every time he spoke Decker would step in and swat the back of his head and ask if they’d asked him to talk. Which they had and it confused the boy even more, although his English wasn’t bad—by then most of the kids about town had a fair grasp of English. And Decker would tell him to get his nose back against the wall. And talk to his buddies about should they just shoot the kid now.

  “I was done with my paperwork and watching all this and I believed, I truly believed, those guys were just scaring the kid and, maybe also thinking he needed scaring. Because while there was less of it, there was still strange things happening, a guy killed here or there—that sort of thing. None of us had forgotten the stories we’d heard about how the kids had been trained to keep the fight going, after the surrender. So maybe I thought the kid was learning something. I don’t know. But I didn’t say or do anything. Because I didn’t see what was coming—I don’t think any of us did.

  “Then Decker stepped forward and grabbed the kid by the back of the neck and hauled him out into the street. His buddies followed and I did too. Decker was blown right up in the kid’s face, telling him he should make a run for it, that was his best chance. If he could make it to the woods, they’d let him go. The woods were just a ditch and some birch and evergreens beyond but we all knew what he was saying. And the kid had sweated right through the back of his shirt, moving foot to foot, then trying to stand still. Trying to figure out what Decker really wanted him to do. Which I don’t think, to this day, any one of us, at that moment knew. Then Decker told him You gotta run boy. You gotta run. And the kid pooped his pants. Stood there hunched over and crying and holding himself while the back of his pants stained and we all smelled it and Decker backed off a step and said Screw this and reached out and slapped the back of the boy’s head. Then he, Decker, turned and walked away. And the kid heard those footsteps sucking in the mud and he took off running. But it was a ba
d and ragged run, as if it would be a miracle if he could even make the ditch, let alone those puny woods. And I watched him go and thought There was none of that had to happen, when one of the other guys lifted his rifle and shot the kid. Just like that. And the guy, the shooter, looked at the boy lying there in the mud and lit up a smoke and looked over at us and said, What? One less bad rabbit to breed, is what I see. So. My story. I could tell more but won’t.”

  Sometime during this telling he’d looked down again at the floor and when he was done he looked up and saw her across from him. Her face ruined and wet with silent tears, eyes wide upon him, her hands clutching her drink red and white as if she’d shatter the glass if she but could.

  “Oh, Jeezum,” he said and stood. He walked over to her and said, “It just happened, Ruth. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  He reached down and cupped her face, his hands running over her wet cheeks. Then he lifted out an index finger and began to wipe away her tears and she slowly rose out of the chair and came against him. Her body shuddering.

  Seven

  Katey

  The sun rose beyond her left shoulder like a blood blister through the morning fog as she drove to the sister’s house outside Amherst near Shutesbury. Her eyes seemed filled with grit. Luna had advised that her real name was Harriet. Her brother-in-law, Kevin, was on a dig in Colorado so it was just Laurie and the little boy, Scott. Katey listened to all of this and wondered how quickly she could get away and then where she would actually go. She was sore and cramped and very tired. Some time since she’d ceased wanting to cry and had turned up the radio as Luna had slept hunched against the door while Katey watched the white center lines of the interstate lane flip past in a metronomic daze.

  She stumbled through greetings and ate a bowl of cereal. The little boy sat across from her, watching her until she glanced at him and then he’d look away. And again. Even so young, there was a lupine quality to his features, his jaw and eyes. The sisters were talking in the minor code of sorority, of family, of people and places common to both of them. She was too tired to care. There was a faint smell of sour milk and Luna’s sister wore white-and-blue-striped bell-bottoms and a peasant blouse with bright embroidery along the yoke, her breasts swinging free against the fabric.

  She slept in a twin bed in a small room lined with makeshift bookcases, with an old desk pushed up against the single window that had an old-fashioned storm window fitted on the outside and the space between the two windows was filled with spiderwebs and dead flies, the glass smudged and streaked with years of weather. The room smelled faintly of damp, of old books, of mouse droppings. She woke sticky in sweat, the blanket pushed back, the sheet twisted about her, a moment of panic not knowing where she was. She’d had this happen before but only until her familiar room resolved around her—this time the panic was longer and only receded enough to propel her from the bed and back into her jeans.

  It was late afternoon and she was alone in the house. Her truck was in the drive and the yellow Volvo station wagon that had been there that morning was gone. She walked out to the truck and carried in her suitcase and then showered, the first time since the motel in Portland, standing in the hot steam; lathered for the second time, she stood in mute shock as she realized Portland had only been the night before last. It seemed this could not possibly be right. Her skin felt as if it had been pulled off of her and badly put back on. She was still sore and her thighs ached. She dressed and went outside, around behind the house.

  There was a weedy lawn with the flush of new growth and then an old barbwire fence and a hillside pasture grown up with bull thistles and circular clumps of lowbush junipers. Up the hillside was a stand of large trees. She worked her way through the fence, snagging the back of her T-shirt, and then climbed the hill in a slow measured pace, watching to see if there were cattle or some other livestock but saw only songbirds flitting away from her and out of the grove of trees three crows swooped, dipping and crying at her as she came close.

  The trees were oaks, which she knew from their lobed leaves. No oaks grew where she was from, being above the northern limit of their range. These were big trees, the bark rough and thickly ribbed, the trees as large as some sugar maples, great crowns high overhead, swaying with the breeze that cooled her shirt against her. She lay down in the thin grass under the trees, on her back, watching the treetops and sky above.

  When she’d showered she’d washed dried blood from her pubis and inner thighs. Her underwear was clotted and she’d balled it into the bottom of her suitcase. She lay watching the treetops sway and her ribcage clenched about her heart and she was heaving, trying to draw air into her lungs and she thought she should sit up but couldn’t move, as if she was struck against the earth. And she thought He did that to me. It wasn’t anything she wanted and realized some part of her had been thinking all night and throughout her sleeping that perhaps it had been her fault, that she’d looked at him when he stood naked across the campfire and there must’ve been some openness to her looking, some curiosity that could have been seen as desire or intent, that some way he’d felt she’d wanted him to come to her but now, under the arch of the trees, the fluttering and gentle soft rasping of the leaves against one another, she knew this wasn’t true. For all the times she’d imagined that moment, that eventuality, all the times her body had contrived with her mind to approximate that event, there had never been the least sense that she would seek or want or desire this sort of breakage of her. And knowing this she understood she was indeed broken. Had been broken and in some awful dreadful way knew then also that she always would be broken. And she rolled over then and spread her arms wide and dug her fingers through the grass stems and into the earth, the roots of grass, the crumbly soil, the old sharp husks of acorns that scraped her fingertips, the minute scamper of ants along her hands; all these things so familiar and yet so distant and strange, more breakage, and she began to cry. Not a whimper of tears but a heaving sobbing upon the body of the earth. Some clear part of her wanting the earth to take her in. To absorb and absolve her. And the earth, it seemed, refused her.

  The three crows were back, overhead, circling. Barking against her intrusion. She grew quiet, listening to them. They wouldn’t stop and she grew curious. Perhaps there was a hawk drifting on high thermals that the crows were deviling. Or, likely this time of year, protecting nests. After a bit she rolled over and tried to see the crows through the swollen mass of leaves and limbs and then did—only a pair now, high up but perched across from each other. They seemed to be intent upon her. Slowly she drew herself to a cross-legged position, her head tilted back to watch and as she did both crows flapped off, angling down toward her and then abruptly away, out over the hillside. The sharp hard whips of their wingbeats.

  When the yellow car pulled into the yard below she started, wishing to be left alone. And then saw the crows fleeing over the yard, almost on a plane with her and she wanted to walk down and see the women and the little boy and felt tugged back into life and as she stood, the crows again veered off and away across the valley and it came to her that the earth hadn’t refused her after all. That the crows had beckoned her back.

  She walked down the hill, to see what she would see.

  She sat with Laurie in ancient webbed lawn chairs around the fire pit as the night came down around them, watching the coals of the fire. Luna was with Scott, bathing him and then putting him to bed. Reading him a story until he fell asleep. Katey had felt an odd jolt when they left, as if she wanted the job herself. He’d been a monster of energy as the women worked easy, a bit wary perhaps, making and cooking hamburgers, toasting the buns on the old oven rack that served as a grill, the boy loping out around the yard with an imaginary six-shooter to hand, killing God knew what all and she’d watched him as she drank a can of Narragansett and twisted the lid off a jar of pickle relish, opened the large bag of potato chips. The boy seemed feral and dangerous, half-formed. At one point he’d darted near and said, “I’ve got
a pecker” and pointed his finger at her and then yelled, “Bang! You’re dead!” before racing off toward the corner of the house and she realized he’d said pistol, not pecker. After eating, he’d started it all up again until suddenly he was collapsed against his aunt, a rag doll of a child, dreamy and softened. The back of his neck in the firelight, where he rested his cheek on Luna’s knee, curved and vulnerable. Katey wanted to reach and touch his neck. Then Luna eased him up, his arms around her shoulders, his legs around her waist and off they went.

  Laurie stretched down her arm to the torn-open cardboard carton, extracted two of the three remaining cans of beer, lifted one to her lap and reached the other to Katey and then passed over the church key on its leather lanyard. Katey punched a pair of triangles in the rim of the can, across from each other, handed back the opener and lifted the can and drank. This was exactly her second beer ever, the first an hour ago. Seeing and understanding their poverty, she’d nibbled her hamburger and eaten a handful of the chips, as Luna and Laurie also did, leaving the boy the fifth hamburger and most of the chips. He’d gulped down a can of orange soda and then eaten a package of peanut butter cups. So the beer worked in her, and she was grateful for it, the easing of her mind, the slight and pleasant dislocation from her outraged body.

  Sparks drifted upward, summer stars began to pierce beyond the fireglow.

  Her voice almost drifting in the night, Laurie said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” Katey said. Caught herself and said, “But thanks.”

  They were quiet a bit.

  Then Katey said, “Scott’s a really cute kid.”

  “Men can be real pigs. I know. But they’re also wonderful, all that energy and certainty and forcefulness in what they believe, how intent they are to make the world be what they want it to be. And they all start out as little boys—you can see them.”