Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  A person can develop a taste for losing, perhaps undertaking a righteous vendetta just to watch good intentions subvert. This is how rationalists come to take marriage vows or plant bombs for the revolution. It’s how a sane guy like Willoughby had come to conceive a bloody revenge on his old platoon sergeant. Discovering by chance the sergeant’s name and location, discovering by chance this pistol, Willoughby wasn’t sure if fortune had blessed him or was priming him for a last letdown. The trap of mixed feelings that had snagged him for years was threatening every second. Yet despite his fears and better judgment, he was determined to get the job done.

  Jerome and Brendan were at the Coast Guard station prepping Barfly’s hull for repainting when Willoughby came into view. Looking oddly pleased, Jerome introduced his son, who shook Willoughby’s hand warily, a friend of his father being no friend of his. “We met last night,” Brendan said.

  The boy wore goggles and a plastic surgical mask that left a blue outline of powdered bottom paint around his eyes and mouth when removed. “You look like a monkey,” Willoughby said.

  Brendan frowned. “In a good way,” Jerome interjected.

  “Just kidding,” Willoughby said.

  “It’s cool.” Brendan wiped his face self-consciously. In his hand he held the sandpaper block, caked blue.

  “Hard work, huh?”

  “Gotta be done.” The boy replaced his goggles and mask and crawled back under Barfly. He sanded the hull with long strokes. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his father and Willoughby cross the gravel yard to Jerome’s truck.

  Jerome said to Willoughby, “Don’t know much about kids, do ya? They don’t dig put-downs.”

  “I didn’t mean — ”

  “I expect an educated man to know better.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” The pistol jammed in his pants made Willoughby feel silly, like a child too old for a toy.

  “No big thing. But Bren’s fourteen, a touchy age. With kids? Never compare ’em, never put ’em down. That’s my one rule.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good. Now talk.”

  Willoughby blinked. “The letter you wrote last year — to Sergeant Parker?”

  “He never wrote back.” Jerome spat out his gum. “Don’t be weird. Just say it.”

  “You tried to kill me. I know it was you.”

  “Not my idea. I let it happen.”

  “Same same.”

  “Probably.”

  “You wrecked my career and my life. In case you cared.”

  “You recovered all right.”

  Willoughby felt his blood rise. He glanced across to Brendan, on his knees sanding Barfly’s keel. “Parker lost both legs.”

  “That was a goof-up. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “He lost his fucking legs!”

  “I wrote him a letter. What else can I do?”

  “You never wrote me.”

  “Not true. I wrote it but couldn’t mail it. No address. You’re not drawin’ bennies like him.”

  “For a frag? I don’t want their money.”

  “Send it to me.”

  Willoughby shook his head. “And here we stand. Chatting.”

  “What else you got in mind?”

  “Oh,” scanning the boatyard, “it’d be interesting to see you dead.”

  “You don’t mean that. It’s been a long time.”

  “Why? I just wanna know why.”

  “Why not?”

  “No! That’s not an answer. That is not an answer!”

  “At the time, sure it was. Another body, so what?”

  “What about unity? Christ, what about law?”

  “You were an asshole. Nobody liked you.”

  “I was your commanding officer and you wasted me!”

  “For the reasons I said. Look,” Jerome went on mildly, “chalk it up to this: We were kids.”

  “I was twenty-three! Not a kid. You neither, so don’t hide behind that.” Willoughby’s words sounded all wrong to him, as if planned, with a point to make.

  “I’m not hidin’. I’m standin’ right here.”

  “Telling yourself you’re older now, you’re wiser — just a kid back then, you’d do different now. Well, it won’t wash! What you did counts.” This was worse: like a death bed monologue that tries even the patience of loved ones. “You can’t change the past,” Willoughby concluded feebly.

  “Never said I wanted to. I’d do it the same way again.”

  The shock of Jerome’s words stabilized Willoughby, jarred him from his inquisitor pose and reinstated his true befuddlement. “Then I guess,” he almost laughed, “I shouldn’t expect an apology.” It was slipping away, the killer vendetta that in the dreaming had made him so happy. He wished Jerome would provoke him somehow, to keep the dream alive.

  “I’ll be straight with you, Willyboy. I’m sorry for Parker. For you, I’m sorry for the situation we had and that you couldn’t handle it.”

  “I should kill you. I should kill you dead.” But the pistol in Willoughby’s trousers mocked him, its barrel fittingly aimed at his balls.

  “We’re past that, I thought.”

  “We’re just getting there.” Then Willoughby told him, “I lost my leg.” Jerome glanced down. “The left one, below the knee. Wanna see?”

  “Not necessary.”

  “You sure? It’s real persuasive.” Willoughby’s tone had found its old edge. Withholding the true extent of his injury had been a point of pride. Now the secret seemed hardly worth keeping, much less worth killing for. The trauma he’d founded his life upon had proved a triviality, a goof-up. Amazingly, he wasn’t much bothered to know this; the futility of avenging himself was the first good reason to do it. Like Dad had done with his gas and his La-Z-Boy, though his revenge, with its chilly note and show-off style, reeked of hopeful spite. Willoughby would do it for nought.

  He gazed to the town around them, to distant storefronts and zombie pedestrians, to the bluejeaned youth in the surgical mask trying so hard to not hear this. Willoughby savored the moment as cowards do, glad to have no choice at last.

  A van with ladders strapped on top pulled up beside them. Jerome hollered at the man at the wheel, “I told you tonight!” He glanced guiltily back at Brendan.

  The driver of the van rolled down his window. “Your man is flyin’ out at four. You called me on this, Jer. You deal with him!”

  Jerome drew Willoughby away from the van, his voice a whisper of conspiracy. “Think you could help Bren finish up here maybe, as a favor? I got business — for my brother.”

  “Do you realize I hate your guts? Has that sunk in?”

  “And now we move on. Like friends.” The guy in the van honked his horn. Jerome had begun to look frantic, a condition entirely due to his son’s nearby presence. Willoughby was saying, “I need the truth. I need you and me to sit down and discuss this shit — where you ain’t gonna dodge it or dance around it, and where you sure as hell ain’t gonna joke about it!”

  “Willyboy — ”

  “Willoughby.”

  “Willoughby. From personal experience: Best leave it alone.”

  “That’s not an option for me.”

  Almost to himself Jerome complained wearily, “I fuckin’ went through this last year.” Another horn honk returned him to the problem at hand: Robby’s bail. He hustled Willoughby back over to Barfly.

  Brendan saw them coming. He knew all about his father’s drug past; he assumed Willoughby was part of that past and hated him for bringing it back. He sanded furiously as they approached, his heart breaking at Jerome’s obvious lie. “Man over there’s got a remodelin’ job for me. I’m goin’ with him now, make him an estimate.” “And I finish this by myself?”

  “Quittin’ time.” Jerome gave Willoughby his truck keys. �
��Can you help clean up here and drive Bren home? I’ll owe ya.”

  Willoughby regarded him with dismay. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

  Willoughby and Brendan stowed the sanding gear under a tarp. On the way home in Jerome’s truck, Brendan glanced at Willoughby’s feet on the pedals, the left one especially. “It’s automatic. We’re safe.”

  Brendan said, “I’ve never seen you around before.”

  “You haven’t missed much.” The remark surprised Brendan, who’d expected something slippery; it alerted him to dialogue posed on two levels, like talking to a girl almost. As they conversed, he found Willoughby indirectly candid, vague details of his Virginia farm life overlaying an implied confession that his life was stuck in neutral. Brendan responded in kind to this honesty, admitting he sometimes felt the same way. He blamed the condition on love and on Penscot Island’s dinkiness. He blamed the new girl he’d met in school, Araby Munro, and his trait she most harped on: his roots.

  “If a girl calls you provincial, how bad is that?”

  “Pretty bad. It’s a snobby word.”

  “She is a snob. I sorta like it.”

  “That’s fortunate. Because it won’t change.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m a snob. I used to think I was better than everybody. Caused me real trouble. Problem is, I still think it. People don’t change, is the moral of the story.”

  “I don’t believe that at all.”

  “God bless you, kid.”

  “Are you bein’ sarcastic? Because I know I’m ignorant to think that way — you know, that people can learn and grow and stuff.”

  Willoughby looked over. “It’s an expression. God bless you. It means Here’s to ya, go for it. It means you’re not ignorant.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The boy’s gravity took Willoughby aback. At Brendan’s age he’d daydreamed countless tragic scenarios to lend himself the same dark air; that one worse than any he’d dreamed had come true didn’t make Willoughby feel any less of a lightweight. Brendan rather awed him, likewise the whole idea of Sergeant Cochran’s kid here beside him. A child in the care of a child, he thought. He drove through town toward Brendan’s house. He imagined he was the boy’s big brother. He imagined he was his father. “You know,” he said carefully, “I don’t think it’s right that your dad ditched you like that. Who the hell am I, right?”

  “He’s unreliable when he’s into business.”

  “You sound used to it.”

  “I was before. Guess I will be again.” Brendan knew the routine. His wife drowning, his brother in jail — Jerome just needed a reason. With the booze and dope would return meanness and the long road down. His voice cracked as he ordered, “Stop here.” Willoughby parked. The boy’s face had flushed.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Not your fault.” Then Brendan said, “I wish you’d get your drugs off someone else.”

  “Come again?”

  “I know that guy was my dad’s connection. And I know you’re his customer.” Brendan climbed out. He was more afraid than mad. His dad had hit him just over a year ago. But that wasn’t what scared him — it was the scene later, the blubbered apology and the vows to reform. Seeing his dad like that was the worst thing he’d ever been through, the worst thing he’d ever forgiven. It wouldn’t be easier next time, or the next.

  “You got it wrong,” Willoughby started to say before Brendan slammed his door.

  A car pulled up behind them, Lois Cochran’s station wagon, The Lois System stenciled on the side. Willoughby heard Anna’s auntish exclamations of how tall Brendan had got, how handsome. He scrunched in the seat and eyed the rearview mirror in dread, the gun in his trousers, so long forgotten, now prodding him like an insult. He saw hugging and smiles in the mirror. A watching ghost, he envied the lively undercurrent and grew sick at its sight and feel. He got out of the truck and quickly tossed the keys to Brendan. “Ladies,” he mumbled.

  “Lieutenant Claire,” Anna said, smiling. Sun had pinkened her nose and cheeks.

  “Where’s Jerome?” Lois said.

  Brendan lied, “He’s got a remodelin’ job. He’s out makin’ an estimate. You were a lieutenant?” he asked Willoughby.

  “I was.”

  “And my dad?”

  “Your dad was my platoon sergeant.”

  “You were his boss in the war?”

  Willoughby felt the women listening. “Technically. But your dad was the actual guy. Look,” he said, “I gotta go. Good luck with your girlfriend.” He wanted to say something to salvage the boy’s opinion of him, but the women’s presence spooked him to silence. He hurried away down the lane. The pistol had slipped below his waistband. To prevent it slipping down his pant leg he had to waddle awkwardly, like a man who’d messed himself.

  Back at his boarding house he hauled the gun out in relief and threw it on his bunk. The weapon bounced off and clattered to the floor. No cause for alarm; it wasn’t loaded. Willoughby had only carried it with him as a woman on a racy whim might venture into public without underwear. To see what it felt like, what came to mind. To see if it’s true what some people say, that anticipation is all.

  Eighteen

  Beneath his dim exterior, Johnwayne Locke possessed charm not entirely guileless. He brought Araby Munro field blossoms and chewing gum, sand dollars, baked cookies, and seaglass. He gave her an eight-by-ten glossy of the actor John Wayne, and following her rides he’d bathe her pony in warm water and Beagle Oil and curry its flanks to a gleam.

  From the stables Johnwayne watched Araby and Mrs. Winston ride into the apple grove beyond the garden, the old woman perched on her bay gelding like a rajah on an elephant. The veterinarian had just taken the dogs to town for shots and flea baths, the animals piling into his van like yappy tourists — so the coast was clear. The boy dropped his pitchfork and went up the back walk toward the house. He hesitated in the shade of the arborvitae trees outside the solarium. Inside, he saw that the skylight broken by Mr. Winston had been replaced. The sun burned in the new pane as if framed there special. Johnwayne bowed his head as he passed under it, shamed by the clear clean light.

  The front stairs creaked under his weight. He’d never ventured this deep in the house before, and had no idea which room was Araby’s. As if defusing a bomb, he carefully lifted the latch of the first door he came to. The linen closet, sheets and towels in snowy stacks smelling like new stationery. He jammed his hands between the white layers, leaving them gray with stable dirt. This was no game he was playing.

  The next door opened on a room so plainly not Araby’s he reeled at the sight of it. Straightened beyond personality, ready at any time for arrival or exit, it was like a hospital room, a place where patients await a dire prognosis. It was Mr. Winston’s bedroom. The boy felt sick for anyone trapped here.

  Not so the room across the hall. It was a grand disaster, a rude celebration of laundry and magazines, of diet soda cans, facial, foot, hand, and body creams, newspaper entertainment sections, photo albums, shoes, and, exiled to a corner, a neatly stacked parcel of schoolbooks. Everything seemed exploded, Big Banged outward from a double bed clearly the room’s epicenter, stuffed animals splayed upon it as if leveled by the blast. The scene suggested the entropy that is the symptom and destiny of all matter and life, and Johnwayne thrilled to see it, included at last in its process.

  He threw himself on the bed. He could have slept there, his soul yawning languidly. Instead he bounded about the room touching Araby’s things, feeling, breathing, discarding them. Her hairbrush, underwear, a slipper, a postcard, a pencil no doubt bit by her teeth, licked by her tongue — he licked it too, his penis hard as a new-minted nail. In her adjoining bathroom he tasted her toothbrush and pressed his face to her damp towel. He cut his finger on her pink razor and giggled at the bubble of blood. A porcelain-knobbe
d toilet chain hung from an overhead tank. He gave it a yank, but rather than rain rose petals the tank spewed such a torrential flush he clamped his ears at the sound, a honking and clanking like a prison alarm.

  He fled back to the bedroom in terror. A fugitive in a blind alley couldn’t have been more certain of capture. Fight and die, take his secret with him; or surrender to judgment and a life term in solitary — those were his choices and no time to debate, for there Johnwayne was in the mirror over Araby’s dresser, begging to be smashed. He took a perfume bottle off the dresser top. Broken glass and a fragrance of flowers would be his confession. But he stopped.

  Araby was using the John Wayne eight-by-ten photo he’d given her as a protective blotter under her makeup paraphernalia, a thicket of bottles, gauzes, and compacts through which The Duke gazed sullenly upward. Johnwayne swept aside the clutter and freed his idol from this placemat fate. The boy’s panic subsided. He wasn’t angry with Araby. On the contrary, the stains and blemishes on the photograph seemed a perfect mingling of his essence and hers, giving it a life-giving third dimension: length, width, scent. So this, not Araby’s clothes or pillowcase, would be the prize of Johnwayne’s sortie, the thing he’d have and hold in later privacy, tracing with his finger John Wayne’s strong jawline while inhaling Araby’s smell, adoring himself and her as one, true love’s truest sign. He hid the photo under his shirt and started for the door.

  A teddy bear sat on a maple rocker. It had a stiff tail that when wiggled made its head turn and its eyes blink. Johnwayne smiled as he worked it, the dumb bear all the time nodding and blinking. Then the bedroom door opened and Mr. Winston walked in.

  He assumed the boy was a new household servant. Setting down a shopping bag containing his leatherbound memoirs, a blue vase, a 1931 equestrian trophy and a bananawood salad bowl, he barked, “Give it here.”

  Johnwayne gave him the teddy bear.

  The old man examined it — shook it, sniffed it, contemplated its gender, and at last wiggled the tail that turned its head and blinked its eyes, at which his own eyes narrowed in deep scrutiny as if regarding Yorick’s skull. Mr. Winston dropped the bear into his shopping bag. He hesitated as he moved to the door, the curious clarity that lately had plagued him coming over him again. He looked at Johnwayne quizzically. “We shouldn’t be in here, you and me.”