by B. K. Dell
As Caleb rounded the halfway mark, his left shoulder, injured from the blanket party, began to feel like it was being torn from its socket. When he reached twenty he fell back to the deck and coughed up more blood. By twenty-five there was a small pool of blood beneath him. Drops of blood hung from the tip of his nose and his lips.
Trey continued to count the cadence. SSgt Folsom stood watching, stone-faced. Caleb watched the bloodstain beneath him draw closer then farther, larger then smaller. When he reached thirty, having done one-hundred and twenty pushups, his arms gave out and he fell flat into his own mess of blood and sweat.
SSgt Folsom left without saying a word. As soon as the door closed behind him, all the men relaxed from their position of attention. Jackson ran quickly over to Caleb to help him. He grabbed a towel and made an effort to clean Caleb up and get him into bed. Once in bed, Caleb tugged the towel away from Jackson and mumbled something that sounded drunk, “muh he bud ryan uh sluhlevate yeh guild.”
Jackson could only make out the last three words, “…alleviate your guilt.”
***
Caleb’s whole platoon was running along a trail on the side of a rocky ridge. Sweat drenched their shirts from the center of their chests, backs, and armpits before it trickled down to their pants.
Jackson could sense someone coming up next to him on the inside of the trail. He turned and found Caleb staring right at him. Jackson could not interpret the look on his face, so he gave his best impersonation of a drill instructor and asked, “You eye-balling me, recruit?”
Caleb didn’t laugh. His stride was irregular and Jackson could see the inner turmoil escaping through Caleb’s hard face. Caleb was trying to resist the urge to thrust his body into Jackson and drag both of them down the side of the cliff. Jackson sped up to pull away from him, but Caleb ran closer and there was just a thin edge left for Jackson’s feet to fall.
“Is there a problem, Hertz?”
Caleb still said nothing, apparently waiting to speak until his internal struggle was resolved. Finally his face relaxed and he said, half panting, with all the breath he could muster, “Next time have the guts to face me.”
“What?”
“I know it was you, coward.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not an idiot; I can spot a homophobe when I see one.”
It was only then that Jackson realized what he meant. Before Jackson could answer, Caleb took off running faster and moved himself to the front of the pack. Jackson stared after him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Dear Stacy,” was all that he had written so far. Caleb stared at the blank piece of stationery he bought at the PX. The only paper available to them had illustrations of smiling Marines doing different forms of physical training. Caleb could not imagine how he could possibly sum up everything he had such a desperate need to say. He had spent too much time in an environment where his every action was mercilessly judged. He longed to once again feel accepted. He had forgotten what it felt like. He imagined growing old with Stacy, then one day finding all his war letters lovingly preserved in a tin box in the back of their closet. He shed one tear and wrote, “I love you so much.”
Quickly he wiped his face before anyone else saw. Realizing that he was running out of time, a sudden rush of words coursed through his heart:
You were right about everything. Everyone. There are only two types of people: homosexuals and homophobes. I was wrong about Marines. They are boorish and crude. They represent all the worst qualities in men, concentrated in a blinding focus. These men aren’t heroes, but schoolyard bullies. They fear what I am so much that their every action is a thinly veiled attempt to prove that they are heterosexual. They must constantly try to act the most masculine, most brutal, most emotionally calloused, and furthest away from being a freak like me.
The drill instructor here is the worst bully of them all. I am trying to decipher whether he actually believes his own lies about training us or has come to terms with the fact that he just likes making young men (especially gay young men) suffer.
Caleb wrote with passion. The words flowed effortlessly from his pen, but when it came time to sign his name to it, he paused. He hated to see these words on paper. He hated that they had just come from him. He hated to think that the best parts of him – his unwavering trust in the decency of others – might be a casualty in this war. He quickly crumbled the note and stood up to throw it away.
Stacy is wrong. Caleb had to believe in his heart that Stacy was wrong.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caleb Hertz believed in fate – a word he used often without ever really defining what he meant. So when at fourteen years old he spotted a 1987 Ford Ranger pickup pulling a horse trailer with an empty compartment, it was fate. The driver was filling his tank at a Texaco station four miles outside Lake Durham. Caleb snuck into the trailer as the driver stepped inside to pay, and rode across Texas crouched down in the back. The smell was miserable. Caleb tried to relax his eyes to prevent them from focusing on his surroundings – dried horse urine and stray needles of hay. Caleb tried to relax his mind from focusing on the comparable position of his life in general. Was he that same little boy who had pledged to do something great with his life? Would this horse trailer take him to an exciting new beginning, or would it take him to someplace normal?
The next time the driver stopped to refuel, Caleb bailed out of the back and found himself gazing at the Dallas skyline.
That night he saw a homeless man under an overpass along I-35 E, four exits from downtown, near the industrial district. Caleb walked to the next overpass to find himself a place where he could sleep without any company. For the next two nights he did the same thing. The weather was warm and dry, but Caleb had no money for food. When the hunger pains finally grew too intense, he asked a man outside McDonald’s if he had any change. Seeing Caleb’s dirty young face, he took pity on him and gave him enough to buy a value meal. When he handed Caleb the money, the man noticed that the palm outstretched to receive it was covered in scabs and dried blood.
Caleb was about to be a paying customer, so when he stepped into the wonderfully air-conditioned McDonalds, he went straight to the restroom to clean up a bit. He couldn’t do much about his odor, but his face was clean when he got to the counter to order. It was the most delicious Big Mac he had ever tasted in his life.
From that day on, Caleb learned to stand at the corner of an access road and ask motorists for change. He acquired enough handouts to pay for fresh food each day, and discovered that dumpsters were a good place to find things other people did not appreciate. He found a jacket that was two sizes too big, a broken wooden spoon that he thought could be used for protection, and a discarded copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. But his best find of all was the fanny pack in which he carried everything except the jacket. It even had some room left for the only souvenir he’d kept from his former home, a small red flag.
After a full day’s worth of begging he found that he had plenty of money left over. The weather grew colder and Caleb had managed to save up a few hundred dollars which he planned to use to get himself off the streets for good.
The large jacket looked ridiculous on him and it emphasized his youth. He looked like he was a small child playing dress up in his father’s clothes. It was handy, however, for him to use as a blanket at night. His poor blood circulation caused him to shiver even before winter was fully upon him.
Caleb slowly gravitated to the heart of downtown where people leaving services on Sunday were easy targets and a weekly treat for Caleb, until one of the pastors walked up to him and started asking questions. “You look awfully young to be out on the streets.”
“I’m eighteen,” Caleb was quick to lie.
“Eighteen is young,” said the pastor.
Caleb shrugged. He considered turning his back on the pastor and rudely hurrying away. He did not want to surrender what he was discovering to be a prime piece of homeless
real estate, but he feared that the pastor would inquire too much into his age.
“What’s that you got there?”
Caleb was holding a piece of paper and pencil. The pastor recognized it as one of the sheets the church kept behind every pew for new visitors. The pencil was short and yellow, the kind the church left out for people to fill in the sheets.
“Nothing,” Caleb snapped. Figuring that the pastor must have known he had stolen them from the church, he tried hiding them as he turned to walk away.
“It’s okay. I just want to see.” His voice was kind. Harmless. “I just want to take a look.”
Caleb stopped and looked over his shoulder. He turned around and took two steps back toward the pastor. Meekly, he surrendered the paper. When the pastor turned it over, he saw that Caleb had done a pencil sketch on the back.
“This is remarkable,” exclaimed the pastor.
The drawing was obviously the work of a skilled hand. It was the type of skill that indicated Caleb must have once had a clean, dry place to practice and practice, drawing until late at night by electric light in comfort and peace. It was a talent that could never be learned nor sharpened on the streets. The drawing was of the face of the old church building.
The pastor felt a surprise wave of emotion and said, “I want to buy this from you.”
“No,” said Caleb, just because he was stubborn.
The pastor looked at his state, at his fanny pack, not big enough to store the drawing without folding it, and said, “It’s safer with me.”
Caleb nodded, “One hundred dollars.”
The pastor laughed. “You don’t understand the art business. There is a reason why artists are starving…or homeless. I’ll give you ten.”
Caleb had not expected him to haggle. He just thought the pastor wanted to help him and found a way to do it without hurting Caleb’s pride. He knew that he didn’t really care about the drawing. “Twenty,” said Caleb.
The pastor reached into his pocket and brought out his wallet. When he opened it, Caleb could see that there was far more than twenty dollars inside. The pastor pulled out only a five and a ten. “Fifteen dollars and we have a deal.” He extended the bills.
Caleb quickly snatched the money from his hand and swapped it with his sketch. He looked down at his feet, trying to conceal how happy the pastor had made him. There had been people who’d handed him a twenty before; there was even one woman who gave him a fifty; but this fifteen dollars was worth more to him than every dime he had ever begged for put together. Caleb believed that the pastor really wanted to buy his drawing. He really wanted to spend fifteen dollars on it. It wasn’t charity; Caleb made that money.
“I could find you a place to stay tonight.”
“Don’t want it.”
“I didn’t think so,” the pastor said. He asked, “When was the last time you slept in a bed?”
“What good is a bed?”
“Our beds are safe and warm. You would have nothing to fear.”
Caleb wanted to sleep in a bed, but he couldn’t trust the pastor. He felt like he had some sort of agenda. Caleb frowned condescendingly. He said, “But, I don’t fear anything,” and walked away.
The next Sunday he saw the pastor again. He smiled as he walked over to Caleb. He was carrying a medium sized 11”x14” drawing pad, an ebony pencil, and a sharpener. “I got you something.”
“What for?”
“You don’t want it?” the pastor asked coyly.
Caleb didn’t respond. He examined the tools being presented to him.
“I figured you could use it to make signs like ‘Will draw for food’ or ‘Support the local arts, buy me a hamburger.’”
Caleb didn’t smile. “Very funny,” he said and grabbed the tools.
Caleb removed the broken spoon from his fanny pack in order to clear room for his new pencil and sharpener. The pad he kept under his arm at all times when he wasn’t using it. The oversized jacket made it hard to keep the pad tucked securely under his arm when the wind blew and sometimes he would have to run and chase it down. He chased it like it was his most prized possession, which – after the red flag – it was.
Over the next couple of years, Caleb grew accustomed to being homeless. He had stopped considering homelessness as a temporary condition; to him it became a way of life. Caleb had given up on the idea of ever being happy in life, but on nights that weren’t too cold, Caleb’s emotions would approach something close to contentment. The art pad had filled up quickly. He finished reading his Stephen Hawking book for the fourth time and was starting to understand it. His body had grown into the jacket, but at sixteen, he was still a minor. Caleb also started noticing more and more police cruisers in his area, so he headed south.
The south end of downtown Dallas was darker. The roads were narrower and there were more homeless. Most of them pretended not to see Caleb and he pretended not to see them. While searching for a safe place to sleep, Caleb had wandered farther from the heart of the city than he had ever been before. Down the length of an alley, he saw that someone had started a fire in a garbage can and several homeless men had gathered around it. Caleb turned the other way.
“Got any spare change, pardner?” he heard a voice from the shadows.
“I’m homeless, you idiot,” Caleb shouted bitterly and started to walk faster.
“That don’t mean you ain’t got no money. What’s in the fanny pack?” Caleb did not turn around, but he could hear that the man was following him. He grabbed the strap of his fanny pack with his left hand and clutched his drawing pad with his right. Caleb turned his head to see the man. He was tall with broad shoulders. Standing next to Caleb he would look like an adult standing next to a child. He wore a woman’s fur coat, or what was left of it after years of wear and tear on the rough Dallas streets. Caleb wondered how there could have been a woman large enough to require a coat the size of the man following him. He walked at a steady pace, but refused to run, lest he portray fear. The man behind him also refused to run, lest he inspire fear. So went an urban foot race where both runners had the same top speed. It seemed like such a pointless endeavor to Caleb. I’m just going to keep walking until you are no longer behind me, he thought. That was before two other men stepped into the alley right in front of him. Caleb slowed down. The man behind him was able to bridge the distance and suddenly the three men were within an arm’s length from him on all sides.
The man in front of him forcefully grabbed his art pad. He investigated it with a couple of quick flips. He saw drawings of old buildings and churches, the figures of homeless men crouched in alleys, and one portrait of Caleb’s father remarkably drawn only from memory. Judging it to be worthless, the man threw it face down with a laugh. It landed in a stream of dirty rainwater coming out of a drainpipe searching for a gutter.
All three men were bigger, older, and more hardened by life. Caleb wished he still had his broken spoon.
“Give us the pack,” one of them ordered. With putrid emptiness in their eyes, they circled in tighter around young Caleb.
Caleb Hertz never quits. He remembered the words of his astonished teammates on the football field. Caleb sees nothing but the end zone. He saw the end zone past the large men, at the end of the narrow alley, but no conceivable way to get there. He crouched forward, making his center of gravity lower, and plowed his head and both shoulders in-between the men’s dirty homeless coats, attempting to squeeze through. The men seemed to muster no more response than a surprised chuckle as they grabbed him by both arms and lifted him up. He squirmed in angry defiance. His feet kicked out in every direction, making contact with various body parts of the men holding him. Irritated by his thrashing, one of the homeless men removed a hand from Caleb’s arm, drew it back and hit him hard in the gut. The struggling instantly stopped and Caleb was silent for a second before he began to throw up from the pain.
As soon as they heard the vomit percolating in Caleb’s throat, both men let go. He threw up first by t
heir feet and then rushed his way over to the side of the alley and fell to both knees. He could hear the sound of them laughing behind him, but he noticed that they were not anxious to come grab him right away. He quickly reached into his fanny pack and pulled out, not the money – almost a thousand dollars – but the small red flag. As he was still hunched over, he quickly shoved the flag between the drain pipe and the wall.
He thought that he might have a chance to slip by them at that point, but before he could even turn to see a clear way out, he felt a man on each side hoist him up by the arms again. He struggled frantically to get free, but could not break their grip. The third man was still behind Caleb, so he grabbed Caleb by the hair and drew his head back. “Give us the pack, boy,” he ordered loudly near his ear, then shoved Caleb’s head forward.
“Make me,” Caleb said defiantly, then instantly felt the hard blow of a boot stomp down on the center of his spine. He could feel the crunch of the individual disks of his spine as they were yearning to separate from each other. He would have sworn that his spine was broken. The force of the blow, however, had dislodged him from the grips of the men holding him. His body hit the ground with a slight splashing sound. From where he looked up, he could now see the path. A clear path to the end zone! Without knowing or caring about the extent of his injuries, Caleb stood up to run full speed. If his spine was broken he would soon find out. He lunged forward with the full conviction of a man fighting for his life, but his movement was snared before it began. One of the men had a hold of his jacket. It restrained him at both his armpits. They spun him around and told him again, “Just give us the pack, you fool.”
“It’s mine,” he said indignantly. He tried his best under such duress to sound unflappable, but in that moment his voice had an unmistakable quality. It was a quality not usually exhibited in Caleb’s voice, but sometimes came out if he was nervous or frightened – it sounded gay.