Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  Carolyn Winston curled in the loveseat across from the library window. Dogs lay strewn around the room; when Mrs. Winston turned a book page their ears pricked in unison, giving the impression of a single ticking mechanism.

  Her grandniece had gone to open the solarium door for Mr. Winston. He returned with her, his leather portfolio under one arm and his precious vase, good as new, under the other. A wolfhound blocked his way and he kicked it, prompting an argument with his wife that distracted them from a flicker of movement beyond the window sheers. Araby sidled to the curtain cord and yanked it with a flourish.

  “What do you see, dear?”

  “Ghosts.”

  The old woman said to her husband, “Did you hear, John? Araby sees ghosts too. I’m not the only one.”

  He snorted angrily. Dogs grinned at him. He wished he had a flamethrower like he’d seen on the four o’clock movie. A dog would burn better than a Jap, all that hair. Japs have no hair, same as Cubans. “You’re both feeble,” he said.

  His wife’s smile wasn’t sincere. Her husband’s antics of late, his bursts of vigor and twisted lucidity, had thrown off her long-established routine of grudging last stands against life’s slide of decay and corruption. He was eighty-nine and by God ought to act it, she thought. For herself, the last thing she wanted at age eighty was to cope with some confounded miracle of youthful rebirth.

  Araby stayed at the window where, not two feet before her, the sweet dull face of Johnwayne Locke gazed from beneath his cowboy hat expectantly trusting in mercy. Araby gave away nothing, how she touched her hair might have been primping her reflection. Then her eyes flashed into his, a queen pronouncing him spared, while his own lowered in fealty as she drew shut the window sheers. The crack of gunshots changed things.

  Johnwayne yelped and took off running. The hounds erupted, sicked by Mrs. Winston on the hightailing figure. She fetched the shotgun from the umbrella stand and took position outside the solarium, Araby beside her with a flashlight, thrilled for the change of pace. More gunshots sounded from the beach. Mrs. Winston gave an answering blast of her own. Johnwayne was gone in the night.

  Willoughby stood behind Jerome. The pistol was cold against his skin under his shirt. Jerome blew harp to the strumming guitar. The bonfire burned and waves broke over the sand. The crowd around the whales had thinned.

  Willoughby had his wish. Quit now, there’d be no excuse. He could put the gun to the back of Jerome’s head. He could do that. In his life he’d killed three people, confirmed: a boy, a woman by mistake, an NVA regular. If winners made morals, each was a pointless murder; one more shouldn’t matter. Put the gun to his head. Do it. The flames would receive the mess.

  Jerome paused in his playing, slowly turned and looked up at Willoughby standing behind him, then turned back around and blew a lingering tremolo. In that moment he let memory come, fixed his eyes on the heart of the fire and unblinkingly saw it again, the clamor, the heat, the boredom, the killing. He barely saw Willoughby at all, that was the strange part. Willoughby was a blip in Jerome’s war experience, distinguishable from other losses only for his having been zapped at base camp and not in a fight, but otherwise just one more name that vanished. Two days later the platoon got another LT, no better but cooler than Willyboy. None of the soldiers regretted the fragging: Two days’ reprieve was success enough. Willyboy had to go. He was bad news, the men had persuaded their sergeant. The guy had got people hurt. Jerome had walked away without comment on the men’s earnest proposal. Do it would have been no clearer.

  Someone yelled in protest. Mac Donner, false teeth agleam, was excising a whale’s jawbone with a knife and gypsum saw. The blood was black on the moonlit sand. Lois shoved Donner away. Jerome, seeing her for the first time tonight, thought she looked wild and ugly. He couldn’t imagine he’d desired this woman, or any woman anywhere for that matter. Donner giggled, “My mom’s a nature buff,” as the whale beside him convulsed.

  “It’s alive, you prick!” Lois said.

  “Be dead soon.”

  “It’s alive now!”

  Willoughby walked over and fired two bullets into the whale’s brain. The gun’s report bounced off the dunes. He fired once more. “It’s dead now.”

  Lois stared at him. Those attending other whales backed away. Jerome watched it all sluggishly, his world swirling, a chivalrous impulse to protect and defend canceled out by the urge to leave Lois dangling and himself to sit. He saw Matthew fluttering worriedly at the perimeter. He saw a teenage kid step up to Lois and tell her with graceful authority, “Maybe it’s best.” Mac Donner resumed his work, cursing gristle and bone.

  Willoughby shot a second whale. Cartridges leapt from the chamber like crickets. Matthew implored him to stop. Willoughby pushed by him and fired into the next whale, popped out the ammo clip and replaced it with another. A well dressed gentleman with a Swiss Army knife extracted a tooth from the second dead whale. A girl asked if he’d cut one out for her. People called them names. Others got in line.

  Willoughby fired twice more, then moved on.

  Jerome by the fire called, “Give the cherry a go.” Willoughby turned to Ollie Newberry trailing him and offered him the pistol. Ollie, feeling Lois’s gaze like a distant sun, scorching one side of him and freezing the other, answered her earlier slights against him with one squeeze of the trigger. The pistol kicked in his hand.

  “Again.”

  He fired again. Blood from the first hole spattered his leg. He touched it with a finger, recoiling at once without knowing why. He held the gun out to Willoughby like something slimy. “This is not right.” His hand that had shot the animal hung steady in the air, it being too late or too soon to tremble.

  “I agree,” Jerome said, taking the gun. A vehicle was coming down the beach, blue lights flashing. Jerome pumped three rounds into the fifth whale in a gesture of unity or contempt, Willoughby wasn’t sure. Then Jerome, swaying with drink, tossed the gun in the ocean, where it landed this side of the surf.

  Police Chief Rickert and Del Locke were in the vehicle. Rickert wore a pajama top. “What the hell happened?” Versions came in a torrent. “These fish protected or something?”

  “They’re whales!” Lois said. “Mammals. Practically human.”

  “What’re you doing here? House afire and still the party girl.” She took this unflinchingly.

  Matthew volunteered, “These whales were dying in agony. I could tell.”

  “A mercy killing,” Willoughby said.

  Rickert sighed. “Where’s the gun?” It was established the gun was missing. The shooters were beckoned. Ollie stayed put; no one moved to finger him. Willoughby and Jerome gave their names to Del, who was scrawling a list. Matthew — he and Willoughby holding Jerome between them — insisted on giving his name also. “An accessory, thank you.” Del, noting Lois was on the whales’ side, and remembering her mocking him at Mantra’s Cafe, resolved to lose the list later.

  Another vehicle approached. Carolyn Winston had driven her Jeep around from Oceanside Road. She parked and strode to the nearest whale. She wore workboots and a sweater over a long kimono and stroked the carcass like a healer. “It happened in 1954.” Her voice was Boston-patrician, fat in the vowels. “Three humpbacks, absolute giants. Beautiful creatures, truly they were.” She blew her nose into a handkerchief. “Forgive me. I’m a sentimental old witch.”

  “Ma’am,” Chief Rickert began gravely, “these fish have been executed.”

  “A sad business. I put a horse down last month.” She patted Rickert’s arm. “You did the right thing, Thomas. It’s what they wanted. Why? It’s not ours to know. All we can do is dispose of them with dignity and press on with our lives. In ’54,” she said, “we let them rot where they lay, and I daresay it was a poor idea. You have hoists and things, surely. Perhaps you could chop them up first.”

  Bloody to the elbows, Mac Donner waved h
is trophy jawbone. “Done my part, lady.”

  “So you have. Oh, and Thomas,” she turned to Rickert, “we’ve got prowlers again. God knows we’ve nothing worth stealing, but I fear the dogs may maul someone.”

  “I’ll have a car come around.”

  She scanned the group. “So many! You’d think the Martians had landed. Lois, you too?” Lois Cochran was the Winstons’ cleaning lady. “Dear, we’ve a problem I must speak to you about later. You know Araby, that terrific girl staying with us? The silly thing wants a dinner party Saturday. And with poor Mrs. Locke so shaky these days — ”

  Lois cut in, “Tell me tomorrow,” disappointing Del, who’d turned at the mention of his mother, the Winstons’ cook.

  “That’d be fine, dear.”

  “Classy,” Jerome slurred to no one when the old woman drove away. He waded into the waves and vomited, rinsing his mouth with seawater. He was urinating when a large wave knocked him down.

  Willoughby went to him. Another wave tumbled them both. People watched with sad expressions; it was the end of the party. The men emerged from the sea together. Behind his back Willoughby clutched the pistol he’d stumbled on under the water. Apparently his luck was changing.

  Fourteen

  Furious with Jerome and Matthew for their behavior at the beach, Lois gave Ollie Newberry a lift back to town in a petulant play at finding a better friend. Outside the White Bird Inn he made a pass at her. She laughed him down, her first real laugh today. In thanks for it, she rewarded him with a peck on the cheek and a mother’s words, “Sleep tight.”

  “I would love to kiss your breasts.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Darn.”

  Ollie was a dishwasher at the White Bird. He and his roommate Tim Burrows, an old money beatnik in his ninth year of a year off between his freshman and sophomore year of college, had stayed on after Labor Day to help close up the kitchen for winter. Tim’s bed was rumpled. Clothes he’d worn yesterday were strewn about ready for wear tomorrow. A toothpick stuck from a paperback novel atop Tim’s half of the bureau.

  Ollie undressed nervously, as if for some rite. In bed he pictured the whales, how their dorsals had cut the water this morning, how they’d cavorted like children in the sea around him as he’d hauled Tim’s corpse to the skiff. Ollie pictured the whales on the beach tonight, mutilated for souvenirs. This image, much more than Tim’s rumpled bed, his clothes, or his toothpick, more than his body stiffening in the bow of the boat, made the guy seem finally, truly dead. It’s like what Tim once said to Ollie about losing your virginity, a feat Ollie had yet to accomplish: It takes two times before it feels real. Ollie had seen death two times now. It felt real. That is, it felt like his fault.

  On the beach tonight, Ollie had recoiled from touching the blood of the whale he’d shot. He’d assumed his revulsion was as much to the idea as to the sensation, but in reality it was the blood’s syrupy warmth that had shocked him. Warm-blooded. Not the thin icy stuff fish shed. Warm-blooded, like us. Warm on his trouser leg, on his fingertips. Warm at the back of his throat.

  After a while Ollie did sleep. Sleep was a place where Tim and the whales had never existed. It was a place where Ollie in no way had persuaded Tim — usually their relationship’s mentor, its seasoned know-it-all — that scuba diving at night was something cool that Ollie had done many times and that Tim really ought to try once.

  Fifteen

  In the truck Jerome began to dry-heave, his head out the window like a carsick dog. “Not home,” he groaned. “Brendan’ll kill me. Drop me in a field somewhere, I’ll be okay.” On Matthew’s direction Willoughby continued to Penscot town. Matthew knew he could exact no harsher penalty for Jerome’s relapse than to bring him, like this, to his son.

  They got Jerome out of the truck and guided him toward his house. Jerome’s effort to straighten himself for this walk to the gallows sharpened Willoughby’s wobbly wonder about who was this Brendan character Jerome was ashamed of confronting. As the three men bumbled in the foyer, a brown-haired kid appeared at the top of the stairs and cleared his throat in classic reproval. He wore a T-shirt and cutoff sweats, hands on hips, lips sternly pursed. “Dad,” he said. “You promised.”

  Jerome raised his eyes to his son. “Fucked up.”

  “He hasn’t touched booze in a year,” Matthew told Willoughby.

  “He made up for lost time.” Beach sand had worked under Willoughby’s prosthesis, chafing his stump raw. The pistol wedged under his belt had imprinted its barrel into his groin.

  Brendan came down and took Willoughby’s position beside his father. “Has he puked?” he asked Matthew. “And what, he pissed himself?”

  “Fell in the water,” Willoughby began to explain, but he realized Brendan was ignoring him, that Brendan assumed he was a partner in Jerome’s disgrace and therefore not worthy of address. Suddenly he wanted to plead his case to the boy, tell his side of the story, steal for himself Brendan’s lost respect for his father.

  The house’s one bathroom was located between the two second-floor bedrooms, and Willoughby used it while Brendan and Matthew got Jerome out of his clothes. Willoughby laid the pistol in the sink. His jeans were too sticky with saltwater to roll up over his prosthesis, so he undid his belt and slid them off. A Velcro wrap secured a fleshtoned prosthesis to his upper calf. The hair on his left thigh was patchy, defoliated, the thigh itself disfigured as if scooped here and there with a razor spoon. Small divots spiraled around his knee, a pinkish archipelago linked by suture scars. As amputations go, better below the knee than above it; as war wounds go, there are much worse — but in either case it was Brendan’s first when he pushed open the bathroom door and saw it. “We need aspirin — what happened to you!” Brendan gaped at the obscenely wagging stump.

  Willoughby blocked with his body Brendan’s view into the sink. Though he felt wretchedly naked, he kept control. The boy’s eyes stayed locked on his stump, an affront at least honest that helped Willoughby find his composure. “From the war,” he said, leaning against the sink as if awaiting a bus.

  “Vietnam? My dad was there.”

  “We served together. Now if you don’t mind — ”

  “He never talks about it.”

  “People are shy.”

  “Was he a fuckup then too?”

  “Actually, he was about the best there was.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “I agree.”

  Brendan apologized. “The door lock’s busted, is why — ”

  “You’re excused. But one thing. My leg here’s sort of private with me. Maybe you could not mention it to your dad or anybody.”

  “Were you scared in Vietnam?”

  “Was I scared?” Willoughby relished the question. “I’m still scared.” Brendan, to judge by his expression as he shut the bathroom door, seemed to relish the answer.

  Willoughby’s face in the mirror above the sink unsettled him to see. It often appeared too boyish when he wanted to be sinister, too vulpine when he felt generally decent; tonight it hardly seemed his own face at all. When had he let his hair grow that long, and did he have something against shaving these days? Where was the Eagle Scout he’d once been? Where was his father’s son?

  The sharp knock on the door nearly spooked him out of his skin. Matthew this time, repeating the call for aspirin. “Just a goddamn minute!”

  Matthew. The dude was different, telling a perfect stranger you’re dying. In fact all three of them — Matthew, Jerome, Brendan — seemed apt archetypes of a kind of groping, unfinished life which his own life regrettably complemented. He’d wandered directionless over gray inner terrain for almost fifteen years. These three at least moved the compass needle, a sort of collective true north on which a man might take his bearings, if, like Willoughby, he was still on the lookout for home.

  Part Two

  Sixteen


  When Anna woke the next morning her sister Lois was out. Gone for coffee and donuts said a note in the kitchen, signed with a red ink heart. Anna went for a walk. The sound of seagulls beckoned her to the waterfront.

  Bluefin Point lay across the harbor. Widow’s walks and high gray gables flattened to the whitewashed barracks of the Coast Guard station at point’s end. Her eye traced the jetties to the harbor mouth where the beacons stood unblinking on this bluebird day.

  The mainland ferry chugged between the beacons out into the sound. Passengers along the rail waved to people on shore, people out of Anna’s view on the far side of the point. She saw that not every passenger participated, and it was to those gazing glumly astern that she started waving, first with one hand, then with the scarf from around her hair. She ran along the water’s edge snapping the scarf in the wind. It was why she’d come to Penscot Island — to say goodbye — and anyone watching could have seen how happy it made her.

  She walked past the ferry dock to the commercial piers, where a dragger was unloading at one of the warehouses. A conveyor ramp had been wheeled against one side. On board a deckhand took cardboard crates passed up from the hold and set them on the conveyor. A radio blared, the music competing with crying seagulls. The fish in the crates were packed in ice from which mist curled in the sunlight.

  Men unloaded the crates on shore. As Anna watched, a new guy came out and began stacking crates onto a dolly. After a moment he dropped the straps of his rubber overalls and took off his shirt. He was a woman. She had trim dark hair and was broad in the waist and shoulders. Her arms and workgloves were starry with fish scales. Anna could see behind the bib of her overalls the flank of a breast showing pink under her T-shirt. What amazed Anna was that the men around the woman paid no mind, her breasts all but hanging out; one guy lit a cigarette and held it to her mouth as she lugged a crate by. He said something to her that made her laugh. Anna laughed too, like a viewer with the TV audience. Someone tuned the radio. At a song about some hot little girl he turned the volume up.