Save the Enemy

by Arin Greenwood

  Nor do I know how to get us to the Postal Museum, for that matter. I don’t have a car; I don’t know where Dad’s car is. If I did, I’d still have to find his keys. The subway will shut down at midnight, so if we can get there, we still probably can’t get home. I don’t even have money for a stupid damn taxi.

  This is all so impossible. I feel tears start. I’ve always cried easily, and often. Weirdly Dad used to tell me my “extreme vulnerability” would somehow make me a “better warrior” (??!!) if I needed to be one, because “stifling emotions leads to repression, which leads to delayed reactions” or something.

  But I will my tears back, and it almost kind of works. Ben doesn’t need me to fall apart. For Pete’s sake, I don’t need me to fall apart. Wait: an idea.

  Ben and I walk to Lee’s. I see Pete through the window. He waves. Ben and I go in. Pete steps down from the small stage. He seems really happy to see us. I am trying not to cry again.

  “This is Pete,” I tell my brother as we lurk by the door.

  “Pete Ashburn,” Pete says, holding out his hand. What teenager shakes hands? Not my brother, that’s for sure, I think, until Ben holds out his chubby, dirty, moist palm.

  He says in this bizarrely assured voice, “Ben Trask. I believe we met outside my house this afternoon.”

  Pete walks us to the back of the restaurant, which is cheerful and plain, with yellow walls and wood tables. There he introduces us to Lee, who looks nothing like a Confederate soldier, so far as my ideas of what Confederate soldiers look like. She’s about five feet tall with a muumuu and greyish blondish hair. When Pete introduces us, she hugs me and tries to hug my brother, who ducks.

  “You kids want food?” she asks.

  “Yes,” my brother says as I’m explaining, nervously and apologetically, that we came to ask a favor.

  “Sure,” says Pete. “Sure, Zoey.”

  I take Pete aside and tell him I need a ride to the city but he shouldn’t ask why. I’m hoping he asks why so I can unburden myself. But he doesn’t. He smiles at me with this sort of loopy-looking smile. “Okay,” he says, and goes to pack up his guitar as my brother eats a hamburger. Lee sits with him.

  I stand back and watch for a moment. It looks like Lee’s doing all the right things to make someone comfortable, which are all the things that make my brother uncomfortable. She’s trying to make eye contact, she’s talking a lot, most likely asking him to tell her about how he’s feeling about the hamburger or whatnot. I walk over and sit down with them while Pete is off doing whatever he needs to do before we get going.

  “Are you from the South?” I ask Lee.

  “Guam,” she says.

  I’m trying to remember if Guam had any role in the Civil War—trying to think of how in the hell I am going to save my father tonight—when Pete returns.

  “Let’s go,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder and keeping it there as we walk a couple of blocks toward the waterfront on King Street, past the new age bookstore, past the store that sells homemade dog treats, past the restaurant that sells $15 peanut butter, jelly, and bacon sandwiches. The peanut butter, of course, is churned in-house.

  We get in the brown Volvo and drive into the city. I don’t know where by the museum we are supposed to meet, other than on Columbus.

  Pete stops near Union Station. I ask him to wait for me in the circle just in front of the train station and tell my brother to wait in the car, but he hops out and comes with me anyway. I’m glad he’s there, even though I’m not.

  DC is a big city in some ways (high crime rate; expensive) but it’s empty at this time of night near the Postal Museum, which for all I know may also be empty during the day. Are people so into postage that they’d go to a museum about it?

  “The Pony Express was originally a private mail service,” my brother says. It just makes me think of Dad and how much he would love a return to an all-private mail service.

  The museum is a huge white marble building, with ornate columns and inspiring inscriptions engraved along the roof (they’re lit up so as to be visible at night), like this one:

  “It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.”—Herodotus, Histories

  I wish I had a horse, I catch myself thinking, for a moment, distracted.

  The large-scale architecture and inspiring quotations suggest someone cares about philately—a lot of someones if this big building means anything about a nation’s enthusiasm for stamps. But there’s no one here now. My brother and I walk around the building once, the whole time my hands positioned into a “knife” so I can execute an open-hand strike if I need to. Please note that I’ve never used an open-hand strike in the wild, as it were—just against Dad, about forty gazillion times, before I hit puberty. I hope that my open hands remember how to strike after so many years lying fallow. But, thinking about it, I seem to recall Dad said I should always try to kick someone in the knee before even attempting the open-hand strike, though … Or maybe below the knee. Or behind it.

  I move my hands back into my jacket pockets.

  “You don’t know where exactly the drop-off spot is?” I ask Ben. He says he doesn’t. I tell him it would be great if he could get Mom to be more precise from now on. He says he will try, very seriously, my literal little brother, in one of Dad’s old V-necks and a pair of dress pants with a streak of something on the leg.

  On our second go-around, as we’ve turned the corner off North Capitol Street around to the poorly lit backside of the building, I hear a voice right behind me, a somewhat high-pitched, nasally voice—like the speaker is congested—and something poking into my back.

  “You have the J-File?”

  I start to turn around. “Don’t move,” the voice warns. This would not be a scary-sounding voice without the circumstances. With the circumstances, it’s freaking terrifying. My heart starts beating two million beats per minute. This time, maybe literally.

  “Where is my father?” I ask. I can feel adrenaline pumping through me. I might pee my pants. I finger the handle of my tote bag, with my wallet and keys and a book—I always have a book with me, but did I really think I’d have some time to enjoy a little The Sun Also Rises tonight?—inside of it. “Is he here?”

  “Where is the J-File?”

  “It’s been destroyed,” I say. “Please, where is my Dad? If you let me talk to him, I might be able to help you.”

  There is a hesitation. The man is likely trying to decide what he should do next. He has no way of knowing if the J-File has been destroyed. For that matter, I have no way of knowing if it has been destroyed. My brother telling me that my dead mother told him so in a dream is not really admissible in court, from what I understand of the American legal system. And how do we know Mom even really knows, for that matter? She is, after all, dead. Oh, Mom. Mom. Moms should be alive, protecting their brilliant children. Their naughty and useless ones, too, I hope.

  “You have one week to make this right,” the man says in my ear. I still can’t see what he looks like. I haven’t turned around, out of boot-quaking fear. But then he makes a sudden move and grabs my brother’s arm. Whatever was shoved into my back is gone.

  “We’ll hold onto him until we have the file,” the man says.

  “Don’t touch him!” I say, whipping around and looking straight at the man who’s gripping my brother’s upper arm.

  The man does not look like a kidnapper. He looks like a lobbyist, a somewhat overweight white guy in his forties, in a khaki suit. This is the guy they sent to deal with us? “They”?

  My father’s jiu-Dadsu training does not kick in, at least not in the way I expect. I don’t flip the guy over my shoulder and onto his back. (Frankly that move would have been a stretch.) But something kicks in. Literally. It’s my foot, s
mashing into the man’s knee, and as it happens I slip into a nearly meditative state. My heart slows. My breathing calms. My mind calms. Time stands still. I haven’t felt like this since I was a kid, practicing the same moves over and over and over until I stopped having to think; my body just knew what to do.

  The guy with the gun doesn’t stand still, though. He tries to move away. Without having to decide to do it, I become aware of myself kicking him in the other knee, then the first knee again. My tote bag is thwapping on my side. Again, without being conscious that I am about to do it, I yank the tote off my shoulder, and spin it into the guy’s face. This I become aware of: my hardback copy of The Sun Also Rises has come in handy.

  “Ow!” The man yelps.

  He lets go of my brother and bends forward a little, wincing. I kick him again, this time in the crotch. Dad told me that the crotch isn’t such a great place to go for while engaging in self-defense, because while it’s sensitive, it’s also fairly well-protected (when I was young enough to be getting this instruction, I wasn’t even scandalized by Dad saying things like “the crotch is sensitive, but don’t go for it while you’re trying to take a man down”).

  In this case I see a clear shot, even with the baggy pants. Then, when this lobbyist attacker leans forward, dropping something—I can’t see what—I elbow him in the head. It’s like I’m watching a movie of myself doing this; I cheer myself on in my head, using enthusiastic rah-rah language I’d never use in real life. “Go Zoey! Kick his ass!”

  He backs up, trips over a step, and falls down, cracking his skull loud enough for me to hear. I wince. Then I kick him in the neck, hard, then scoot around to kick him in the crotch for good measure. He lies on the marble, barely moaning, not moving.

  “Who are you?” I shout at him. “Where is my father? What is the J-File, you asshole? Who is we?”

  The man doesn’t respond. He keeps moaning a little bit but is otherwise still. His pants have torn in the crotch. I can see his red shorts underneath the khakis. This makes me almost pity him. Almost.

  “Answer me! Answer me! Who are you and where is my father? What is the J-File? WHO ARE YOU?” I shout. I also keep kicking him. Probably not smart. The man stops moaning. He stops moving, except for his chest rising and falling a little bit. I can hear police sirens. Someone may have heard me shouting. They may have seen the man grab my brother—or me kick the man.

  “We have to go,” I tell my brother.

  “Check his pockets first,” my brother says.

  He wheezes a little, despite not having exerted himself much. Ben never had to undergo prepubescent warrior training with Dad. We all figured he’d be able to reason his way out of any dangerous situation. He’s the least animalistic of all of us. The most human: rationality being the mark of humanity. And completely without physical skills.

  I try to reach into the lobbyist’s pants pocket, where I assume his wallet will be. Nothing in his front pockets. I can’t get into his back pockets the way he’s lying, and he’s too heavy to move. One of the blazer pockets yields an electronic cigarette. One of my teachers puffs on one all through class so I’ve come to be familiar with this new, and not yet FDA-approved, technology. I reach into the other pocket. There’s a business card. For a P.F. Greenawalt, “Political Consultant,” with an address in Georgetown.

  “Let’s go,” I say to my brother, who is bending down on the ground, near. He stands up, holding something. He lifts it up and shows me.

  “We might need his gun,” Ben says. I go to snatch it from him, but I don’t know how to safely snatch a gun.

  “Give it to me,” I say, holding out my hand. He hands it over. I put the cold, black piece of machinery in my tote bag and grab Ben’s hand, then drop it when he pulls away. We run back to the brown Volvo. My heart goes back to pounding.

  WAFFLE TIME

  Chapter Five

  “You guys okay?” Pete asks when my brother and I get back into the car.

  I don’t wait for my brother to respond. I’m shaking and nearly in tears, and am also the tiniest bit exhilarated. And still not quite ready to share all this with Pete.

  “We’re fine,” I say.

  “You guys want some waffles?” He turns around to look my brother in the eye. “My treat.”

  We drive off back toward Virginia. We go to an all-night diner in Del Ray, a cute neighborhood about a mile from Old Town. There is a good custard shop there that Dad and I walked Roscoe to a few times. On our walk we’d run into a cat named Harold, whose owner walks him on a leash. Harold loves dogs. He sniffed Roscoe. The custard was delicious.

  This time we don’t run into Harold the cat. It’s about one in the morning. I realize it’s a school night, but worrying about getting enough sleep seems kind of plebeian at the moment. I just beat someone up. There’s a momentary nausea. I just beat someone up.

  Ben, Pete, and I sit at the Formica countertop. Ben gets waffles and fried chicken. Pete gets waffles, fried chicken, and a chocolate milkshake. I have pancakes with goopy strawberry slop on top. I don’t think I’m hungry, but then I eat the whole stack. The sugar rush + coming down from the whole PM Columbus incident + having a gun with me + not knowing where my dad is + not knowing what Ben’s notebook is + finding Pete exceptionally adorable = me a little frazzled.

  I obsess about these various things while Pete asks Ben about school and life and the Federal Reserve. Ben tells Pete that Del Ray was one of the DC area’s first “commuting suburbs,” built in the early 1900s, and that waffles originated in ancient Greece. After we eat, Pete drives us back to the house.

  “Your dad won’t mind your getting home so late?” Pete asks, tapping the steering wheel as we idle out front. He looks nervous. “You can blame me if you want.”

  “Dad’s not here,” I say. I look down at my hands. Dad’s not here. Dad’s not here. Where is Dad? Not here.

  If Pete asks me about Dad’s whereabouts, I might tell him about the text, the cause of our evening’s misadventures, but he doesn’t, even as I am trying to transmit the question from my head into his. I suppose Pete’s parents probably travel all the time for work. It seems like that’s common around here.

  I should invite him in. Or shouldn’t. I imagine him inside our house, looking at the paintings—mostly ocean scenes my mother picked up at seaside art festivals—and the books, which are mostly German philosophers (like collections of Nietzsche’s mysterious aphorisms, underlined, with a lot of question marks and exclamation points beside them), Ayn Rand novels (also underlined, with markings in the margins that say things like TRUE! and SO TRUE!), a collection of new age and psychic phenomena books (useless thus far), my brother’s economics collection (most with dog-eared pages but no markings), some self-help treatises (Self-Healing for Atheist Widowers and its ilk, largely unread), and then hundreds of random paperbacks that Dad or I brought home over the years (like Dog Care for Dummies, Understanding Goethe in a New World, and a very small book called An Illustrated Guide to Alexandria’s Jewish Civil War Heroes).

  Our furniture is not Old Town style—not that I’ve been inside so many Old Town houses, which I haven’t, because our neighbors are mostly kind of standoffish. But I can see in people’s first-floor windows. So I know they have a lot of carved wood and dusty-pink upholstery. Their paintings tend toward the dark portraits of severe-looking men in military costumes. Our furniture is eclectic. Mom took a lot of pleasure going to yard sales and antique shops, assembling an upscale-flea-market style for our living quarters. She called it “tiki chic,” and always made those annoying scare quotes when she said that, a couple of times a year, usually apropos of nothing.

  With Mom gone, dead, the house looks more straight-up flea market. We might even have actual fleas. I’m not what you might call a neat freak, but compared with Dad or Ben I’m obsessive-compulsive about dust, clutter, mess, pillows askew on the yellow velvet couch, and the two velvet chairs which don’t match the one leather recliner that Dad insisted we get. (Mom object
ed on the grounds that those recliners “read lower class”; Dad called her a “pretentious twit” and kept the recliner.) Our lamps have burned-out bulbs. There are dead flies on the windowsills. Dog hair still creeps out from underneath all the furniture, even though we haven’t had a dog here in months. I need to get on top of taking over the domestic arts in chez nous or else we’re going to become the sorts of people you see on TV, on the shows about people who really, really don’t have their shit together.

  And, as I imagine Pete’s eyes moving from one object to another, my mind’s eye (it probably needs glasses) fixes on the big smear of dust across the shabby white wicker coffee table Mom thought was so “witty” when she brought it home from some trip she’d taken to Fort Lauderdale. I’ve been meaning to dust the table for weeks but haven’t felt up to it.

  “I had a good time tonight,” Pete says before Ben and I get out of the car. He gets close to my face. His breath smells syrupy.

  “Me, too,” I say. I immediately regret saying it. A good time?

  But for all that, I’m extremely grateful that Pete and his brown Volvo were there with us. The night would have been worse without them. I’ve never contemplated syrupy breath before.

  Pete looks at me, with these big brown eyes and thick eyebrows. He’s got on some battered flannel shirt and attractive jeans. I can’t tell if his hair is due for a cut or if he’s had it cut to appear to be overdue for a cut. Either way, it’s appealing. Me, I’m just a nervous girl with bad bangs, bad clothes, a missing father, a highly developed anxious instinct, and a stolen gun in her tote bag.

  “Are you dating my sister?” Ben asks.

  Right, all that and a brother.

  “It’s time for bed,” I say to Ben. “Say goodnight to Pete.”

  “I’m not five,” Ben says, getting out of the car.

  “Don’t forget to brush your teeth,” I call after him. This is theatrical and bossy for no good reason. Ben doesn’t have a key and can’t get into the house without me.