Everything Else in the Universe

by Tracy Holczer

  An older man sat at the wooden bar hunched over a half-empty glass of beer; another man stood behind the bar polishing a silver shaker. To the right of the entryway was a meeting room of sorts with three round tables and folding chairs stacked against the wood-paneled wall in the corner.

  “What can I do for you?” the man behind the bar asked. He had receding brown hair and brown eyes, a wide nose and a straight line for a mouth. He was so ordinary-looking, his features sliding into each other without the slightest fanfare, that Lucy was sure she’d forget his face as soon as she looked away. Just like the people on television commercials.

  “A couple of veterans we know sent us your way,” Milo said. He dug around in his rucksack and took out the sketch. “We found this helmet buried near Penitencia Creek and were told that’s a symbol of the Dirty Thirty, first airmen to serve in Vietnam. We hoped you might have some in your membership. Or at least someone who might know someone.”

  “If you have a bulletin board, we thought we could leave the sketch up,” Lucy said.

  The barman turned his forgettable eyes toward Lucy. “Is that so?”

  “There were some pictures with the helmet. And a Purple Heart. We’d like to reunite them with the family,” Lucy said.

  “Did you hear that, Louis? They want us to help.”

  Louis had a thin layer of hair over the top of his otherwise bald head. His nose was large and red and covered in purple veins. “We don’t allow Vietnam veterans at this post,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Lucy said.

  “We don’t want ’em here,” the forgettable man said.

  Lucy’s mouth popped open, and she looked at Milo. “Why?” she said.

  “They’re a bunch of drug addicts. Unpatriotic bums. You watch the news, you’ll see what I mean,” the forgettable man said. “You’re just kids. You wouldn’t know.”

  Milo balled his fists, clenched his jaw. Lucy wondered if he might start to shake the way Dad had when he stepped off the plane. She reached out to put a hand on his arm, the way she’d seen Uncle G do so many times as a means of comfort. Then she turned back to the men.

  “For your information, Milo’s dad is serving in Vietnam, and my dad just got home,” Lucy said. “The sign outside says you’re supposed to be concerned with enhancing the lives of servicemen and their families. SERVICEMEN and their FAMILIES.”

  The two men looked at each other, raised eyebrows, probably not expecting Lucy’s outburst.

  “What makes you better than my dad?” Milo said. “This was his second tour. He’s been in the army since he turned eighteen. He learned how to fly a chopper so he could risk his life every day to save the lives of other men. What did you do, huh?”

  Louis’s back went straight as he turned in his stool to face Milo. There were stains on the old man’s T-shirt. “I was on the beach at Normandy. Ask your daddy what that means.”

  “I can’t,” Milo said. “Lucy just told you. He’s in Vietnam.”

  Louis’s face softened the smallest bit. Or it could have been Lucy’s imagination. “Go on, now. You aren’t going to find any help here.”

  Lucy was outraged and humiliated. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” was all she managed, even though she wanted to say a whole lot more. Including swears.

  “You know who should be ashamed of themselves?” The barman suddenly raised his voice.

  “That’s enough, Lloyd. They’re just kids,” Louis said.

  Lloyd slammed down the silver shaker he’d been holding. “You ask your dad about all those innocent lives over there. You ask him about the fragmentation bombs and the napalm.”

  “Best you go now,” Louis said.

  Milo stormed off, then turned at the door. “At least my dad didn’t blow up a bunch of babies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki!”

  Lucy ran to catch up as Milo slammed outside. “Wait!”

  Milo paced back and forth in front of his bike, then stopped. “What about the next address?”

  “What?”

  “The next address. The Veterans of Foreign Wars. We need to go there, too.”

  “Milo, I don’t think—”

  “We need to go!”

  Milo hopped on his bike and pedaled off in the wrong direction.

  “You’re going the wrong way! Just . . . follow me.”

  Lucy climbed on her bike, unsteady. She’d had no idea other veterans felt that way. And if this was how veterans of other wars felt about Vietnam, then why did Mac and Cheese send them there in the first place? Lucy felt herself go all jangly again, her earlier sense of homeostasis completely gone.

  Onetwothreefourfive-sixseveneightnineten.

  Milo looked like a bull ready to charge. If he could have stomped his foot and stabbed someone with his horns, he would have.

  “Why do you want to go there? What if the same thing happens?”

  “It’s important to know who’s on your side and who isn’t,” Milo said.

  As Lucy pedaled, passing several of the houses where they’d delivered that day, waving to the small children she knew in their yards, Lucy dared to hope that things might be different at the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

  It was not different.

  They were nicer about it, but they didn’t let Lucy and Milo hang their sign.

  By the time Milo walked down the cracked front steps of the VFW, he was eerily still and quiet, like an unexploded bomb. Then he threw his bike to the ground, picked it up and threw it down again. One of the bungee cords snapped, and the empty meatball cooler dropped onto the grass. He kicked it like a football.

  Without a word, Milo got onto his bike and pedaled away, his big red T-shirt billowing out behind him.

  “Milo, I can’t take both . . .” Lucy called after him.

  But he never even slowed down.

  15

  ten thousand things

  Because Lucy was a whiz at bungees, she was able to strap the two coolers one on top of the other. She had to pedal slowly, and avoid all the potholes and bumps along the way, as well as peer around the side of the whole contraption because it was too tall to see over. It took forever.

  Lucy tried not to be mad at Milo. He’d clearly had an emotional breakdown. She fully understood why such a thing had occurred. But he’d also left her behind—left her alone to manage bungee cords and meatball coolers and then her family once she got back to the Pink Kitchen Deli—so she couldn’t help herself.

  While Lucy had been gone, Gia had put up flyers all over the front windows of the deli:

  PICNIC FOR PEACE! SATURDAY, SEPT 4

  HAPPY HOLLOW PARK

  7:00 PM

  COME DANCE UNDER THE STARS

  LET THE POWER OF LOVE

  OVERCOME

  THE LOVE OF POWER!

  “Dad’s just finishing up at work, and he’ll give us a ride home,” Gia said when Lucy walked in. The rest of her family had gone. “Oh, and you missed it!”

  “What?”

  “Papo got the last dollar he needed for his trip to Alaska!”

  Papo was busy behind the counter, wrapping up the last of the Italian sausages in their freezer bags. “To Alaska!” he shouted, and rang the bell a bunch of times. Josh raised both fists in the air in solidarity.

  “But we weren’t even open” was all Lucy could say, heartbroken to have missed such an event.

  “Papo let in Mrs. Bartolo for a chat, and she insisted on paying for some cannoli. When she dropped a dollar into the tip jar, Papo rang the bell and announced that was it! The final dollar for his trip to Alaska. So then he gave the cannoli to Mrs. Bartolo for free after all. It was worth the hairnet, let me tell you,” Gia said.

  Lucy was suddenly overcome with feelings of pent-up anger, frustration and sadness. She’d done everything she was told, whether she wanted to or not, since movi
ng to San Jose. She’d delivered meatballs, spent time at Uncle G’s when she wanted to be home, talked to her grandma every single Wednesday night and never complained about any of it. Gia never helped. With anything. And when she did, she always whined about it. I won’t wear a hairnet! We should be paid fair wages! That’s going to ruin my nail polish!

  Why did Gia get to see history being made while Lucy was out sweating in the sun delivering meatballs and being rejected by World War II veterans who should have known better than to be mean to children?

  “It’s not fair!” Lucy shouted into Gia’s startled face.

  Then she slammed out the heavy glass door and pedaled as fast as she could. Pedaled all the way home, even though Josh had called after her, and it was mostly uphill and only four o’clock, and Mom said Lucy shouldn’t come home until five. So what? It was her house, too. She had every right to be there and was tired of feeling like she was a box of shirts, moved so easily from place to place.

  * * *

  —

  Fitz’s beat-up Ford Falcon was in front of the house. It was a soft butter yellow and had a bunch of dents, the silver metal showing through the paint.

  Lucy stood on the front porch and stared at their door. Did she just barge in? Would barging in make Dad feel even more like she needed to go stay with Grandma and Grandpa? Was it possible to barge in to your own house?

  Why did she need to worry all the time, anyway, and second-guess every single thought? And other people’s thoughts? Why couldn’t she just say the things that came into her head, like Gia?

  Lucy pushed the front door open and stomped down the creaky hall into the living room, where Fitz sat in front of Dad on a stool, about to wrap gauze around Dad’s stump, which Lucy had never seen before. The end of the stump was red and seemed swollen, the jagged scar puckered and angry-looking. Dad grimaced in pain, eyes closed.

  “What’s the matter?” Lucy said, before she could stop herself.

  Dad’s eyes flew open, probably thinking she was Mom come home from work. “Out of here, right now!”

  “But—”

  “Out!” Dad said, turning away from her and putting a protective hand over his stump.

  Lucy, being stunned for the second time in one day, turned around and stiffly walked outside without a single word. She sat on the porch step and put her chin in her hands, too wrung out to cry. Numb. The way her arm felt when she’d slept on it wrong, only it was her whole body.

  Then she began to tremble—a regular five, maybe, on the Richter scale.

  Lucy wrapped her arms around her knees and rode out the trembles while she watched some kids kicking a ball around in the street. There was no rhyme or reason to their game. She tried to figure it out, to give her mind something to do, but if they were playing with rules, she had no idea what they were. She recognized Billy Shoemaker from around the corner, even though he’d buzz-cut his blond hair, and a few of his friends that lived in the other direction. Maybe seven in all. They looked like they were being simultaneously attacked by a swarm of gnats—ducking and swatting—and trying to kill each other with the ball. They tackled, kicked and chased each other with it.

  It was positively baffling.

  As Lucy’s horrendous luck would have it, the ball came flying in her direction, rolling right up to her feet. A perfect opportunity for the boys to harass and tease her about her knock-knees and her tightly wound braids, just like they did all year. And if they did, she decided right then and there, she would walk into the house with their ball and pop it with a screwdriver from the junk drawer in the kitchen.

  “Rossi!” Billy shouted, hand shading his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Come on! You any good at Crazy Kick Ball Tag? If you play, the teams will be even.”

  Lucy sat there, stunned for the third time, but stood up anyway. “What are the rules?”

  “We make them up as we go along.”

  Lucy walked over to the group of boys who had teased her this year, holding the ball. She could feel the heat of the asphalt through the thin soles of her Keds.

  “Evans, you switch. Lucy’s on my team,” Billy said.

  The boys all whined, but did as they were told. “You just want her because she has a good arm,” Evans said.

  It was true. Lucy had always been one of the first kids picked for teams during physical education class. The only time she was ever picked for anything, her arm being better than her temperament, apparently.

  Billy Shoemaker waggled his eyebrows at her, which reminded Lucy of Milo, and thinking of Milo just made her angry all over again.

  Lucy threw the ball at Billy, hard, in the stomach. “Did I win?”

  “Ooof” was all he said. But he said it with a smile, while the other boys made all sorts of goofy sounds, “Aw, man!” and “Whoa,” and “Don’t mess with the Bossy Rossi!”

  Crazy Kick Ball Tag was a vicious game. And there were gnats after all, hence the flailing around. The trick was remembering each of the made-up rules, which kept getting added as kids were tagged. You got knocked out if you couldn’t recite all the rules in the right order.

  Lucy embraced her newly discovered rage—and her confusion, and her frustration with the unfairness of the world—and took it out on every single one of those boys. She tossed and kicked the ball with perfect aim and fury. They took it easy on her at first—passing the ball gently, keeping their distance—because she was a girl, she supposed. But the first time Lucy decked Bernie Ryan with the ball to his chin, all bets were off. She scraped her knee and sweated through her braids and did the business of kicking each and every boy butt, teammates and opponents alike. It ended up Lucy against all seven of them.

  Of course, Lucy was the last one standing.

  After they all stood around for a while, catching their breath in the warm late-afternoon air and punching each other in the arm, reliving the best moments of the game, Billy said, “Mom’s making a pizza. Wanna come for a slice?”

  But Lucy was smack out of energy, and now shocked for the fourth time in one day. So enough was enough. “Maybe next time.”

  “Oh, there will be a next time,” Bernie Ryan said with a smirk.

  “See you later, Boss!” Billy called.

  Boss. Lucy supposed she could live with that.

  * * *

  —

  The boys went off in a pack; a couple even waved back at her. When she turned around to face the house, Fitz was sitting on the porch step, smoking a cigarette.

  “If Mom catches you smoking around me, you’ll be dead. She’s a health nut,” Lucy said as she sat down beside him.

  “I’ll take her over you any day. I thought that one boy was going to need my services when you were done with him,” Fitz said.

  Lucy was embarrassed. She’d lost her composure out there with those boys. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him.”

  Fitz laughed. His teeth were just as big as he was, and very white. Lucy wondered if extra-white teeth were genetically linked to super-red hair. “I’d hate to see it if you were.”

  She picked up a dried leaf off the step. “Is there something extra wrong with Dad?”

  “He needs to take better care of his stump,” Fitz said. He blew the smoke away from her face.

  “I read the manual you left from cover to cover,” Lucy said, and quoted, “‘The primary function of a prosthetic limb is to reestablish wholeness.’”

  “Very good,” Fitz said. “And what are you doing to reestablish wholeness?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy said. “I’m not missing anything.”

  “Hmmm,” Fitz said, and put the cigarette out in the dirt.

  He really was an extra-large person. Lucy wasn’t sure how he fit into regular clothes, or his car for that matter. The color of his red-brown hair matched the color of the red-brown freckles splotched all over hi
s pale skin. You’d never know, looking at that skin, that it was the middle of the summer.

  “Why did he do that?” Lucy said, wanting to change the subject. “Hide his arm. That’s not like him. This one time he slipped and fell in a pool of spilled water at the hospital and got a gash in his head. He needed nineteen stitches. He couldn’t wait to show me.”

  “Everyone grieves differently,” Fitz said.

  “Grief? No one died.”

  “Grief is just a word for deep sorrow. We can feel deep sorrow for the loss of just about anything, right?”

  “I was deeply sorrowful when I lost my favorite white sweater last year. That’s not the same as when someone dies.”

  “No, it’s not. But it doesn’t mean you can’t grieve the loss of that favorite white sweater.”

  Lucy considered that.

  “Change is hard. Especially the kind of change your dad, you and your mom, your whole family, is going through. You probably had your life all planned out.”

  A strange car pulled into the end of the driveway just then. Mom was in the passenger seat. Lucy assumed the man driving was Mom’s boss, Richard. She laughed at something Richard said. She didn’t see them sitting there.

  “Dad’s alive, and that’s all that matters,” Lucy said, trying to talk herself into it.

  Fitz didn’t respond right away. He picked his cigarette butt out of the dirt and slid it into his pocket. “I tell my amputees that they used to be able to do ten thousand things, and now they can only do nine. That it’s important to remember they can still do nine thousand things.”

  “Exactly,” Lucy said. “You have to get back on the horse. Resilience is the most important thing.”

  “But I also tell them they need to grieve those one thousand things. Not forever. But for a time. And everyone’s time is different. That is resilience, too.”

  Fitz was wrong. Thinking about the bad stuff was what made Lucy create a Homeostasis Extravaganza. It’s what gave her the deep-down need to carry stones in her pockets every day.