30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  The Poll

  AT THE YMCA pool thirty miles from the house they’re renting in Maine, only pool within eighty miles from them that has handicapped facilities, wife in the water doing exercises to relieve some of the symptoms of her disease (holding on to the handicapped-stairway rail and kicking her legs in the water, holding on to the pool’s edge and stepping up and down), swimming instructor in the far lane across from them teaching some kids on his swim team (“Your head’s going too far out of the water, you only need this tiny part of your mouth above it to breathe,” and demonstrates without putting his face in), lifeguard jumping off his perch and walking to the pool’s deep end (probably to caution some boys who have been horsing around or at least making lots of noise and cannonballing into the water too hard), little girl on the bench at the shallow end where he is (maybe waiting for her brother or sister to get out of the water or for one of her parents to pick her up at the pool; “Don’t wait in the lobby,” they might have told her, “stay in the swimming area where the lifeguard and other people are”), she must have been in the pool and then dressed for she’s now shivering, maybe she’s getting chilled because her clothes are wet where she didn’t dry herself completely, and her hair too (you can’t really dry your hair with a towel, and she probably didn’t want to use a hair dryer for about fifteen minutes, if she came with one, or the Y would loan one to her as they do to his wife when she forgets hers), and she’s sitting by an open door (it’s unusual the door’s open but it’s hot, sticky, and sunny today and the air-conditioning might not be working or at least up to par), he should say something (“Excuse me, young lady, but why don’t you move over to your right a little and out of the draft; then you won’t be so cold”), she’s drawing and writing on a pad attached to a clipboard, it seems, maybe a story with pictures, which is something his younger daughter loves doing and maybe most kids their age, around eight. She looks up and sees him looking at her and smiles, timidly, and continues to and he smiles back and looks away as he always does when he smiles at a kid he doesn’t know; he thinks it’d look peculiar, if not to her then to someone around he didn’t know, for an adult not to, for all sorts of reasons. Suddenly, he doesn’t specifically know where it comes from, no special look or action of hers, he doesn’t think; not the clothes or the way her body’s positioned or that her hair isn’t brushed or combed or that she’s shivering, or yes, of course, the look, her smile, and how someone can do something like this after a child smiles, but it just comes, the thought: How can anyone kill a child anytime but especially out of racial or religious or ethnic reasons or that the state ordered me to or anything like that, a child you don’t know or just know from around your area, gun one down, tear her from her parents or him from his and throw him into a pit and shoot him or into a room to gas her or beat her over the head with a gun butt or club till she’s dead or slit her throat or throttle her or rape her repeatedly and many men raping her along with you till she’s dead or just sniping at her from a quarter mile away with a very powerful scope? What kind of argument—he’s thinking about people who aren’t insane—could be used to justify such an act? There are no arguments for it. He means the killers or potential ones might be giving them, or think they are, but there isn’t an argument for it that holds. He knows this is nothing new, what he’s thinking, though when he’s thought of it before it was always, How could anyone kill my kid? But it suddenly hits him with this one as it never had, using this shivering girl as an example, he’s thinking, and the shivering must have had something to do with it. But let’s say someone’s told by his commanding officer to shoot all the kids hiding from them in buildings and basements of some town, how could he—anyone—possibly do it, shoot one? All she’d have to do, if this was one of the kids caught, is smile as she smiled at him before, or any kind of smile, a nervous or frightened or pleading one, and how could the shooter shoot? How could the shooter do anything but say—and again, if he wasn’t insane or mentally disabled, but he wouldn’t be in the army if he was anything like that, or a country’s legitimate army and not just a bunch of men thrown together into some military group and given weapons to kill every civilian not of their religion or nationality and so on—This is crazy and wrong, there is absolutely no reason or cause or justification or anything to kill or do anything bad to this girl or to any kid. I shouldn’t even yell at her except for something like getting her to duck to avoid a sniper’s bullet. She’s totally innocent, that’s all—or she’s not so innocent in some ways; she could be a thief and a conniver and so on—but she’s a child and that’s enough not to kill her. Whatever I’m involved in, she’s not, and whether she smiled or didn’t smile, just that she’s a kid is reason enough not to shoot her no matter what reason or excuse or whatever some military or political or religious leader or thinker or anyone like that gives me. Nothing like “Well, in eight to ten years she’ll begin producing kids who’ll grow up to shoot your kids and grandkids or she can grow up to shoot them—male or female, just put a gun in their hands and watch them shoot, and the truth is she can even start shooting your kids at the age she is now.” Or “She’s scum, her people have always been scum and don’t deserve to live. They foul everything they touch, they are beneath anything you can imagine the worst living thing’s beneath, they destroy your homes and build their hovels on your land. They do away with your customs and beliefs and impose theirs, their foods stink, their clothes are filth, they have no culture, and there’s vermin in their beards and head hair; they are evil incarnate, people of the devil, the scourges and enemies of our ancestors; they keep us powerless and poor and weak, the world will be thankful when every last one of them is wiped out, you will be rewarded generously and praised effusively for helping to do it, and you may even get your own pathway to heaven for having taken part in the slaughter and extermination.” After hearing any of that, maybe hearing it for years and maybe all of it and since you were very young and from your parents and teachers and the most revered people you know or in your community and so forth, one’s supposed to go out and shoot a kid? Suppose the officer or leader or even your father says, “Do what I say and shoot this girl or we’ll shoot you,” what do you do? Okay, not your father, but the others, what? You run away. Suppose this person or anyone or group that has this authority over you says, “Do what we say and shoot this girl or we’ll not only shoot her but you,” what do you do? You run away and try to find your family, or those members of it who don’t think that way, and help them run away too if they want to. And if you can’t run away or hide? Then you have to die, that’s all, or, rather, take the chance to see if they will shoot you, though of course trying in every possible way to convince them not to and also not to kill the girl. But you cannot shoot a little girl or any child, and no threat or inducement or act of persuasion or anything like that can make you do it, though torture might, but how? Torture, if it got beyond anything you could take, could make you do just about anything, it’d seem. And if they grab your wife or daughter or mother or sister and say, “We’re going to rape and then shoot her unless you shoot that girl” or “We’ll rape and shoot all the women and children in your family no matter how young they are, even if one’s only one, unless you do what we say,” what do you do? You say you can’t and give all sorts of reasons why not and plead and cry and cajole and beg and say, “Shoot me instead, please, shoot, torture, and rape me in place of them, anything you want to do to me do,” even though they don’t need you to tell them they can do whatever they want with you and there’d be no assurance they wouldn’t rape and shoot all of them including that girl after they torture and shoot you, but anyway you wouldn’t see any reason to live after they raped and killed all the people they’d said or just your daughter. What about if someone told you, “That boy has a gun, he’s about to kill me, shoot him”? All right, if the boy’s holding a gun you know is loaded and pointing it close and threatening to shoot and the person you know didn’t do anything to warrant being shot, like threaten to
kill the boy before he had a gun or his sister or mother, then you might have to shoot him, or even a girl in this case, but in the arm or foot, some place that would stop the kid from shooting but have the least chance of being fatal, and only even that if you quickly gauged you couldn’t bring him down any other way. But that’s the only reason he can think of to shoot a kid, when his own life, or maybe not even that but the life of someone he knows very well is being threatened like that. Anyway, it was the smile that brought these thoughts up—all the possible killings, he means, and what he’d do and not do regarding shooting a child and so forth—and her shivering too, he’s almost sure of that, particularly that she drew her shoulders in when she did, and maybe also because it was such a timid smile, though he’s less sure on that score, and perhaps also that she’s around his younger daughter’s age and his older daughter was once that age so he knows how innocent and un-something, not “unevil” or “uncorrupted” but just, well, unmalevolent or something they are for the most part or ninety-nine out of a hundred parts, and he looks at her and she’s busily writing on the pad and she looks up as if sensing he’s looking at her, and he smiles and she looks right down without smiling and continues writing. I’m making her self-conscious, he thinks, and swims over to his wife. He’s been in the water, dunking himself now and then but mostly just standing.