The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 10

  Dust. Fucking dust got into everything. Food, boots, socks, hair, the folds of your clothes, the crack of your ass. Every. Fucking. Thing. When Littlefield tried to draw—dragging a balky gel pen across the shitty college-ruled notepaper he’d bought at the PX—the dust powdered the ink and caused the tip of the pen to skip. When he jerked off at night, the grit in the creases of his palms rubbed him raw. When he ran in the morning with Mary hopping three-legged at his side, they sucked in dust, the two of them, until she drooled in shades of brown and he spat mud.

  And when, as now, he went to the open-air gym to get on the rowing machine and sweat some of the dirt out of his pores, he found that grime had coated the rail and clogged the fan, so that the sled moved sluggishly and the cord pulled in jerks and jitters and the whole apparatus squealed like a rat getting fucked by an elk.

  He let go of the bar. It snapped back, flopped left and right, and rattled against the rowing machine’s frame and foot plates. As he stood, the bar knocked against his shin. It didn’t hurt, but he hollered at it anyway, called it a motherfucking cocksucker, picked it up, hauled it back, flung it away. For a second he had his hands on a pair of kettlebells. If he picked them up, he’d launch them into the wall of the adjacent tent. He knew this, saw it in his mind’s eye like a prophesy. If the weights shattered the fluorescent tube that hung against the tent wall, if they splintered the dumb-ass hand-lettered sign that hung beneath the light—This Is A BITCH-FREE Zone, Bitch—he’d still feel no better. In fact, he’d feel like an asshole, and that in turn would only make him angrier.

  Lunging forward, he took hold of the kettlebells and hefted them. He was ready for it, the broken lamp and the cracked sign and the whole tantrum—but then, hearing Evans call out in his Tennessee twang, he dropped the weights.

  “What’s your malfunction, dude? Heard you way the fuck over there. Mary came running with her tail tucked, crying like sixty.”

  “Fuck off, Evans.”

  “Brought you your mail, asshole.” Evans was carrying a smallish cardboard box. He shook it. Something rattled inside. “You’re fucking welcome.”

  Littlefield yanked the package out of Evan’s hands. The return address was Corinne’s. Jackpot.

  Sitting on a taped-up crate that served as a weight bench, pinning the box between his knees, he tore at the packing tape. The cardboard gave way first. He stretched the tape on one side and split the cardboard on the other and made an opening big enough to get his hand through. He plucked out a wadded-up twist of kraft paper. Underneath it, there were pencils in a hinged tin, a spiral-bound sketchbook in an acetate sleeve, and a Staedtler eraser in a blister pack. Jack-fucking-pot.

  There might be more, but Evans stood by, squinting into the package and absentmindedly pinching the end of his dick through his trousers. Littlefield looked him up and down, eyes to crotch to eyes, and he unhanded his junk and tucked his fists into his armpits.

  “Who’s it from?” Evans said.

  “My sister.”

  Evans took a seat on the weight bench. “The hot one?”

  “I only have one sister.”

  “Right.” Evans drummed his fingers on his knees. “I saw her picture that time.”

  “What?” As if shielding Corinne herself from Evans’s eyes, Littlefield folded his arms across the box. “When? Where?”

  “Facebook, dude, where else? She’s hot.”

  Littlefield narrowed his eyes. “Dude. You put my sister in your spank bank?”

  “Second or third string. I might could take another look, actually.”

  “She’s married.”

  “So?”

  “If you Facebook-stalk my sister, I will block you,” Littlefield said.

  “Motherfucker. I’ve seen you wash your asshole in the shower, but I can’t look at your damn Facebook page? That’s fuckin’—”

  Littlefield raised his hand. “Hold up. Why are you watching me in the shower?”

  “It’s impossible not to. You got a whole fuckin’ routine. Neck, pits, chest, then your back and legs. After all that you go for the crotch and crack. You get all loving and tender on that shit. You hum a little love song and everything.”

  “That is seriously fucked up.”

  “Sheet far. You’re the one making love to your own booty hole.”

  For a long moment, Littlefield blinked numbly at Evans. There didn’t seem to be anything worth saying.

  Eventually, Evans cleared his throat and nodded toward the box. “What’d she send you, anyway? Red Vines? I could eat the shit out of some Red Vines.”

  Littlefield still had nothing to say.

  Evans sighed. He glanced away, sighed again, and turned back. He poked at the torn edge of the cardboard. “Gummi bears? Swedish fish?”

  “Okay,” Littlefield said. “I’m out.” He stood up and backed away. He shook the box. “Thanks for bringing me this, though, you fuckin’ freak.”

  “If you talk to your sister,” Evans said, tugging his earlobe, “ask her to send Red Vines.”

  “I’m leaving in thirty-eight days, dumb fuck. I’m not asking anybody to send me anything. And if you mention my sister again, so help me.”

  As he walked, Littlefield dug around in the box. There was a note. He stopped to read it. John Carter had a job with a tour company. Andrei was in Atlanta all the time. Mama was choosing an opera for spring, and the house on Montagu was full of weird music. All of that took a few sentences. For most of the rest of the page Corinne wrote about their father and listed all the specialists he’d seen and all the tests they’d run on him. No one knew why he’d collapsed on his birthday, and Corinne was afraid no one ever would.

  Once he got home, he thought, he’d tolerate zero fucking-around on this medical shit. If he had to drag the old man by the ear from one hospital to another, all the way to Johns Hopkins or the Mayo fucking Clinic, that’s what he’d do. He wasn’t even halfway ready to be the ranking male of the Littlefield family.

  Mary trotted over and leapt up to greet him. He scratched her ears and scuffed her chest with the back of his hand. Stuffing Corinne’s note into the box, he went on. Even hobbling on three legs, Mary was faster than he was. She loped in circles around him, her tongue lolling out across the ridge of her yellow teeth.

  The wind was up. Dust eddied around Littlefield’s feet and clung to the hair on his legs. He could taste it on his tongue, too. Everywhere on base there were buckets filled with bottled water and signs that read HYDRATE OR DIE. He passed a bucket, grabbed a bottle, cracked it open, chugged.

  He went to the chapel. Wind whipped the canvas and strummed the guy-wires. Littlefield opened the door a crack. The place was, as he’d hoped, empty of people. Mary stuck her nose in, then pushed through. He went after her.

  Except for a meager yellow bulb burning above the altar, the space was dark. About a hundred folding chairs sat in tight rows. Everything else was plywood: bulkheads, deck, dais, pulpit, even the cross and altar. Everything makeshift, grimy, ugly as fuck.

  He sat directly under the light, his back against the altar. He set aside his water bottle and unpacked the box. Underneath the things he’d already seen—the sketchbook, the graphite pencils, the eraser—there were other supplies. Colored pencils—awesome. Dual-tipped markers—outstanding. A pair of double-holed sharpeners—crucial. Hard and soft pastels—useless.

  He sharpened an HB pencil. The rasp of the wood against the blade was a beautiful sound. He opened the sketchbook. It wasn’t terribly large—just eight by five, and only a hundred sheets—but it felt nicely heavy in his hands. The page was so white that he hesitated to touch it. He lifted the book to his chin and blew across the surface of the paper, scattering some grains of dust that had already gathered.

  He told Mary to sit, and she did. It was the closest she could come, anyway, with her one wonky leg sticking out at an angle. Her mouth hung open with her tongue flopped over on one side. A string of drool puddled on the dais at her
feet. She might not look intelligent, but she did at least look happy.

  With his first mark on the page, he outlined the slope of her head, neck, and back. He looked at what he’d drawn, meager as it was, and hated it. He reached for the eraser.

  The hatch flew open. A bearded man stumbled in, puffing and grunting, slapping himself and flapping his canvas jacket, scuffing his boots on the deck. It was the reporter, La Flamme. The hatch thwacked shut behind him. Startled, Mary leapt to her feet and hid behind the pulpit. A growl rumbled low in her belly.

  “Oh,” La Flamme said. “I didn’t know anyone was—” Head cocked, eyes narrowed, he came down the aisle. “I remember you. But your name— Litton? Linton?”

  “Littlefield.” He put aside the sketchbook and got to his feet.

  “Right,” La Flamme said. “You picked up Lube Job’s body.”

  They shook hands. La Flamme glanced around, and his gaze fell on the drawing supplies. “You too, huh?”

  “Taking it up again after a long break. Trying to get unfucked.”

  “Can I see?”

  “I was just about to erase it and start over.”

  La Flamme sat on the dais and flipped open the sketchbook. One line on one page. That was all. “Huh. I’d say you must be pretty fucking fucked.”

  “Are you actually a reporter?” Littlefield said.

  As if by way of answer, La Flamme reached for Littlefield’s pencil. He turned the sketchbook to a clean page. With a few light strokes of the pencil tip, he sketched in a slender, slope-shouldered body and an egg-shaped head. Pressing more heavily, making darker lines, he added boots with their tongues slouching out, rumpled trousers, a T-shirt, a camera hanging on a strap. The figure reminded Littlefield of something he’d seen somewhere. As La Flamme roughed in the facial features, it became clear. He was drawing a character named J, the protagonist—antihero? narrator? witness?—of an old comic called Terrorstan. Littlefield had followed it in the free weekly paper in Charleston, and later he’d bought the paperbound collection.

  “You drew Terrorstan?” Littlefield said. He watched J’s face emerge—the crooked nose, the lopsided wedge of a mouth, the cleft chin—and compared the features to La Flamme’s. Even allowing for the beard, even considering the translation from person to toon, J didn’t look much like Jimmy. “Are you J? Is J you?”

  “Well, you know…” La Flamme hatched in a flattop and stippled in a three-day beard. He puffed air across the page to chase away the dust and flakes of graphite, then handed Littlefield the sketchbook and pencil. “All fiction is memoir. All memoir is fiction.”

  “And what about that paper?” Littlefield said. “The Hilo something?”

  “You need credentials to get access. Every week they send me a list of stories and I pick one and send back a pocket cartoon. In exchange I get credentials.”

  Littlefield laid the sketchbook on the dais. The drawing was perfect. No erasures. No wobbly lines. It had taken five minutes, tops.

  “It’s the smell,” he said. “That’s why I need to get unfucked. The smell.”

  La Flamme sniffed the air. “I don’t smell anything.”

  “It’s on me, on us. It gets on our clothes. Our skin. You can’t get rid of it.”

  After a moment’s thought, La Flamme seemed to understand. He nodded, a grimacing sort of nod.

  “For a while, I thought I had it figured out,” Littlefield said. “Cops put Vicks VapoRub under their noses, but I couldn’t get any, so I just started keeping a cough drop going all the time.”

  “And?”

  “Tongue went numb. I couldn’t taste salt, but I could still smell the fucking decomp.”

  Behind La Flamme, Mary moved around inside the pulpit and knocked against the plywood panels. La Flamme wheeled around. Mary stared at him for a moment and then receded.

  “Has that dog always been there?” La Flamme said.

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Good to know. I have a— My head is kind of—” La Flamme twiddled his fingers alongside his temple. “I guess I should stop worrying. So far everything’s turned out to be real. Even the impossible shit’s totally real, somehow.” He cleared his throat. “Reminds me. I just about forgot why I came in here.”

  He dug around in his jacket’s inner pockets until he found a thick pen with a filigreed silver barrel. When he tugged off the cap and unscrewed the nib, a fat little joint dropped out. With a disposable lighter from his hip pocket, he lit the joint and swallowed a deep hit of smoke.

  “Dude, you came to the chapel to smoke that?”

  Shrugging, La Flamme said, “I’m an atheist. Want some?”

  “Fuck it.” Littlefield sat next to La Flamme and took the joint. “I’ve only got thirty-eight days left.”

  “Are you guys allowed to have pets now?”

  “We’re training her to be a cadaver dog.”

  Cocking his head, narrowing his eyes, La Flamme said, “‘Training.’ Uh-huh.”

  No one was training Mary for anything—Littlefield had, for no good reason, invented the story on the spot—but still, he couldn’t help feeling defensive. Was it really so hard to believe? When they’d gone after Lyubovich’s leg, Mary had snuffled the ground in concentric circles, eventually taking them to the severed limb. Littlefield had wondered at the time if she’d had some training—as a retriever, say, or as a tracker.

  “I know about dogs,” he told La Flamme. “When I was a kid, I had a Lab mix named Bozo, and—”

  But La Flamme wasn’t listening. He took another toke. Through the smoke, he said, “Smells better than dead guys, huh?”

  In silence, they passed the joint back and forth a few times. When Littlefield waved it away, La Flamme licked his fingers and pinched the end of it to smother the cherry. A thread of smoke curled into the air.

  Littlefield drank some water. Just as they’d passed the joint, they now passed the bottle from hand to hand, taking smaller and smaller sips so that neither of them would be the one to get the last swallow.

  “Terrorstan’s the reason I’m here,” Littlefield said. “Or part of the reason.”

  La Flamme’s lips moved as if he were speaking, but he said nothing.

  “It had heroes in it,” Littlefield said. Panels and pages from the comic floated across his mind’s eye—the smudgy backdrop of distant mountains, the mastodonic bulk of Humvees, the gear-fattened figures of men on patrol. “Rodrigues pulled his buddy out of that ditch. Nasr got his legs blown off and warned away the corpsmen. Taylor saved that Afghan kid. If some skinny farm fucker from Idaho could do something brave, it made me feel like I could, too.”

  La Flamme hung his head and kneaded the back of his neck. He growled low in his throat. In the hollow of the plywood pulpit, Mary whined.

  “But they sent me to Twentynine Stumps, which was so boring I thought I might—” La Flamme was still groaning. Littlefield touched his shoulder. “Are you okay, dude?”

  La Flamme got to his feet and paced halfway up the aisle and back again. “Did you know, since thirty-six hundred B.C., there’s only been two hundred and ninety-two years without war?” He flumped into one of the folding chairs. It skidded back a few inches. “Less than three hundred years out of five and a half fucking thousand.”

  Littlefield waited.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For Terrorstan. I’m sorry. If it brought you here, to this shit—if my comic was even a tiny part of that, I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” Littlefield said. It came out sounding like a question. “I forgive you?”

  When La Flamme got up, his chair tipped backward and its back came to rest, with something approaching delicacy, on the seat of the chair behind it. He retreated down the aisle, staggering as if slightly drunk or extraordinarily stoned, and crashed out through the hatch. At the slapping of the door against the frame, Mary crawled out of the pulpit. Whimpering, her belly puffing and collapsing like a pair of bellows, she looked around. When she saw that she and Littlefield w
ere alone again, she curved herself around the small of his back. Her weight and heat reassured him.

  The new sketchpad still lay open to La Flamme’s drawing. It was good, crazy good. Someone as skilled as La Flamme could make art out of anything—a journalist in a baggy uniform, an eruption of smoke and shrapnel, an Iranian-American teenager lying legless in the dust. Littlefield felt a gnawing in his gut, a deep pain like the knife-twist of real hunger. It came either from the certainty that he’d someday draw as well as La Flamme, or from the fear that he never would. Somehow both things existed at once.

  He drained the water bottle. When he drew it away from his mouth, a fat drop splattered in a ragged oval across the drawing, marring J’s waist and torso. With a yelp of panic, Littlefield wiped the page with the side of his hand, but he managed only to smear the lines.

  He leapt to his feet. He grabbed the sketchbook by its cover, yanked it up from the floor, and hurled it across the chapel. The pages fluttered in the air. The notebook struck the plywood bulkhead with a satisfying whump and dropped like a duck filled with birdshot.

  On four feet and then three, Mary scrambled across the dais and pounced on the sketchbook. She nosed it over and clenched a few pages between her teeth and dragged the thing across the deck toward Littlefield. The pages held for a bit, but soon they started to give way and finally tore free. Mary stumbled and fell, ass over ears, and came to rest, belly up, at Littlefield’s feet. She spat out the pages and gazed up at him in pure doggy joy. For the first time in weeks, he laughed. He laughed until tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.