Sparta

by Roxana Robinson

  He jogged lightly down the short slope of the driveway, out through the stone pillars, then turned onto the hard-packed dirt road. There were old sugar maples along the road at the bottom of the lawn; after that, the woods drew close on either side. The trees formed a soft green canopy overhead. He ran south, down the long slant of North Salem Road, past the tangle of wild grapevines scribbled around a stand of hickory trees, past a white-fenced horse pasture. He turned onto Mount Holly, heading down toward the reservoir. He had to wait to cross Route 35, jogging in place; it was already humming with fast commuter traffic. Once across, he was back on a narrow dirt road again.

  Rounding that corner was his favorite moment of the run: the sudden widening view of the reservoir, the great green space, glowing, breathing, full of light and movement, calm and silent. It always came as a surprise, the shock of spaciousness. At that moment he was aware of himself, his own strength, the way he could run steadily and easily for miles. And he was aware of the beauty before him, the miraculous presence of the water shimmering in the light.

  The road became paved across the top of the dam. Along the road on the reservoir side were two small Italianate pumping stations, like fortified medieval towers. The reservoir system had been created for New York City in the early twentieth century, and the dams were built by stoneworkers brought from Italy. Conrad wondered if the engineers’ plans had actually called for miniature Renaissance towers with architectural detail—blind arches, rusticated stone foundations, tiled roofs—or whether the stoneworkers had simply made the towers look the way they knew towers should look. The diminutive structures altered the perspective: against their tiny battlements, the reservoir looked hundreds of miles long.

  On the other side of the road was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. It was that high to prevent suicides, he thought. He measured himself against it mentally—where to put his hands, the toeholds, how to swing himself up and over. Below it was the sheer stone wall of the dam, dizzying rows of cut stone, perfectly aligned and set, a two-hundred-foot curving drop to the woods and bottomland. Far below was the narrow creek, meandering quietly through the reeds as though it had no connection to the massive masonry wall above it, the billions of gallons of water retained.

  The reservoir lay quiet and glassy, a light-struck reach, glittering, flat, and cool in the early-morning sun, a kind of miracle. A small pock on the water’s elastic fabric, small rocking circles measuring outward: a fish, rising. Beneath the green surface was a dim world of secret flashing creatures.

  He ran across the dam and then on, keeping to the edge of the reservoir, the road curving along the little bays and inlets, fringed by leafy woods. Then it turned away from the water, past a farm with Black Angus cattle grazing quietly in a sloping meadow, and out to the hard road again. He ran east for a couple of miles on a narrow paved road cut between steep banks, commuters hurtling past on their way to the train station. The houses were old and set back from the road, surrounded by lawns and trees. Between them were woods. The smells of the summer earth came to him as his feet hammered out their message on the road. Dogs barked as he went past. Even here, along the paved road, the tall trees reached together in a cool green clasp overhead. He turned north, then back west along Route 35. He hated that. It was the worst part of the run, heading into traffic, the cars roaring toward him, each one like an attack vehicle. His heart was pounding by the time he could turn off the main road and onto North Salem.

  Now he was on a dirt road again, hard-packed under his feet, the smooth humped curve of it sloping into ditches on either side, the woods beyond. Squirrels clattering through the branches, a deer following him with her eyes, motionless but for the nervous flick of her white tail. A possum waddling furtively over a stone wall. The woods were thin here, the understory eaten by deer. Tumbledown stone walls meandered through the trees, marking the old fields and pastures. The last half mile was a slow rise back past the wild grapevines, past the barn and lawn, leading to the short, steep stretch of the driveway. He sprinted the last twenty yards up to the house, everything inside him full and thrumming, heart and lungs, every part working. He came to a stop under the willows and walked around in slow circles. The gravel crunched under his feet. The air was still cool and fresh.

  Lydia went into the city after breakfast; Conrad drove her to the station so he could use her car. He came home by the back way, taking the road across the reservoir. It was different, crossing the dam in a car. It was nothing. The water was flat and affectless, the light indifferent. You could barely see over the parapet.

  At home, Conrad drove the Volvo into the garage and turned off the engine. He sat for a moment in the shadowy silence, listening to the engine tick. Against the cobwebby wall was an old sawhorse, a snow shovel, stacked cardboard cartons. A two-by-four leaned against the wall beside a rake. Unlike a barn, a garage was meaningless space, a narrow backwater for the slow tidal drift of junk.

  He opened the car door. It was stiff, and the hinges creaked drily. He shouldn’t be driving around in his mother’s old car. He should have his own. He’d had a car in college but sold it when he went into the Marines. He could buy another; he had combat pay. Even Ollie had a secondhand Toyota.

  Inside, he went upstairs to his room.

  He checked his cell phone: Claire had called twice. He checked his email: a couple of messages from his men, who were now scattered. Some of them were back in Iraq. The platoon had a new commander and had been deployed to a base near Hit, in Anbar Province. Bradley was there, and Gomez and Molinos. They had minimal Internet access, but periodically Conrad sent everyone a blast, just to check in. Today he’d gotten mail from some of the guys who were still there and some who were home.

  Bradley wrote him from Hit.

  Morning LT. Thought you would like to know what’s going on: you’ll be pleased to hear that we have had no IEDs since yesterday, and also I just received a shitload of comics, a lot of good ones. Some school got hold of my name, I guess. Or who knows? Maybe they came from God. Where they have put us here, it makes Sparta look like the Bel-Air. Got to go, Semper Fi. CPL Bradley.

  Bradley was from Iowa. He had sandy-colored hair, a wide, low brow, sleepy blue eyes, and some goddamn itch. Iraq made him itch everywhere, and it drove him nuts. He couldn’t stop scratching, mostly his balls. His favorite pastime was reading comics, any kind. He knew every character and every story line. The other guys tried to come up with ones he didn’t know, but no one had ever done it. The Super Heroes were his favorites, but he read Archie, too, anything, even the surreal modern ones.

  Conrad wrote back:

  Morning, Bradley. How you doing? Glad to hear about the comics, and sorry to hear the quarters are not so good. I’m up in Westchester now, trying to keep in shape. I’ll get you some comics when I go into town. Little Lulu, right? Hang in there. Semper Fi. Farrell.

  He couldn’t tell the men he missed them—an officer didn’t say that—but he did miss them.

  Another message from Anderson, his sunburned seatmate on the plane. Anderson was through his EAS, end of active service, and back in Minnesota. Anderson was good-natured and generous, and everyone liked him.

  Hello, LT, how’s it going? Just checking in. Not much happening here. I’ve been swimming in the lake every day, and every time I go in I think of the wading pool we built at Sparta. I think, now I’m in a real lake! And no one’s fucking shooting mortars at me! I can’t believe it’s for real. It all seems like that. I mean that it’s for real. Know what I mean? Okay, over for now, LT. Paul Anderson. (Weird not to write CPL anymore.)

  Anderson had once boosted—thrown, really—Molinos over a wall single-handed during a firefight in Ramadi. They were trying to get into a courtyard. All the houses had walls along the street, then a courtyard inside. The door to the street was metal. It could be kicked in or shot up, but if you were trying not to make so much noise or if a sniper was aiming at the door, you went over the wall, and they needed someone over the wall right then.
Anderson was pumped, battle-high, and he threw Molinos over like a football.

  Anderson was quiet. They called him the Swede, though he’d told them again and again that he was Norwegian. They called him the Swede, and because he was quiet he stopped correcting him. He was a good kid, always ready, willing. He never complained, though his hands had been badly burned by an IED in Haditha. He’d been sent to Germany for treatment, and when he came back, his hands were still wrapped in bandages. When those came off, his hands were red and boiled-looking, swollen and shiny with scar tissue. They were stiff and clumsy, like mitts. He could barely bend his fingers and hardly clean his rifle. The hands looked painful, as if they were about to burst, but Anderson never complained and never asked for help.

  Conrad wrote him back:

  Hey, Anderson. It’s good to hear from you. Glad to hear about you and the lake. I’m running every morning. It’s about eight miles, but it seems less because it’s not 130 degrees out here. Can’t get used to that. I know what you mean about everything seeming not real, but it will get better. You got the dog team going yet? Keep in touch. Semper Fi.

  Anderson used to talk about that dogsledding race in Alaska. He talked about it in-country, where 80 degrees was a cool early-morning temperature and the idea of snow was like the idea of deep space. The guys had teased him about going from 120 degrees above to 120 below.

  “Hey, Anderson,” Carleton once asked, “what’s your deal? Don’t you do temperate zones? What about a place where the weather is nice? Ever heard of that? Nice weather?”

  “You’ve never been on a dogsled, Carleton,” Anderson said, shaking his head. “I’m sorry for you, man.”

  Conrad wondered how Anderson’s hands were, and if you could go in a race like that with hands like mitts. Anderson swore his hands were okay, though they didn’t look okay, and Conrad was pretty sure he was lying.

  Conrad answered all the emails. Some of his officer friends were back home, but most of them were still in-country. His best friend, Bruce O’Connell, the leader of their sister platoon in Ramadi, was in Afghanistan. He was up in the mountains somewhere and rarely got to use the Internet. Today he’d written:

  Dingo Three Actual: How’s it going back home? I bet you’re wishing you were here with the rest of us, freezing your ass off and hiking up mountains after dushman. Eat your heart out, bro, only heroes are here, all the weenies were sent home. We are a million fucking miles from nowhere. Wish you were with us.

  Conrad wrote him back:

  Dogbite One Actual, things are tough here too. Can’t decide how late to sleep in the morning. Wish I were there with you freezing your ass off. I miss the camel spiders. Let me know how things go. I’ll tell you it’s pretty weird being back. Semper Fi. Farrell.

  He liked hearing from O’Connell and he liked hearing from his men. Until the GMAT review book arrived, his main focus was exercise, run in the morning, PT in the late afternoon. The thing was to keep to a regimen.

  After lunch, he drove down to the commercial strip in Casden. The car dealers were clustered along one section. Shiny cars were drawn up along the road below festive strings of fluttering pennants. Conrad drove into the first car lot he came to, which was Japanese. He wasn’t sure he wanted Japanese, but he liked the idea of small and efficient.

  Snub-nosed cars were drawn up in a row facing the road. Behind them stood the showroom, with a strange swooping roof and a vast plate-glass wall.

  Conrad parked the Volvo and got out. The pavement was dense black, fresh and oily beneath his shoes. Did they repave the lot every few months? He wondered how much that added to the sticker price. He pushed through the heavy glass doors. Three cars were parked on the red carpet. Indoors, polished and immaculate, the cars looked like sculptures, like art, not transportation. You were meant to feel like a genius for finding a car that was beautiful and exciting as well as useful.

  Conrad stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at a silver sedan. The sloping windshield reflected the bright, watery stars of the ceiling lights. Its outline was smooth and blurred, like water pouring over stones. He thought of a Humvee, huge, heavy, squat, the color of mud. This was like a toy, glittering, small, playful.

  A salesman materialized beside him.

  “Afternoon,” the man said, smiling. He was tall and pear-shaped, with a round face and thinning brown hair. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt, and a narrow striped tie was clipped onto his shirt above the belly.

  Conrad nodded. “Afternoon.”

  “I’m Jim Harkness. What can I help you with?” He had bad teeth and a murderer’s smile.

  “Oh, nothing right now,” Conrad said, nodding, his gaze drifting across the cars. “I’m just looking around.”

  “This right here? This is a great car.” Jim Harkness put a proprietary hand on the sleek fender.

  “Yeah,” Conrad said.

  “Looking for something sporty?” asked Jim.

  “I don’t really know,” Conrad said.

  Jim put his hands in his pockets and jingled something. “This one is sporty,” he said. “Handles well, good on the highway. Nice acceleration.”

  “What’s the mileage?” asked Conrad. He didn’t care.

  “Not bad,” said Jim. He leaned back on his heels. “Twenty-one in the city, thirty-two on the road.” He rose slightly on his toes. “Great audio system.”

  “How much is it?” Conrad asked. He didn’t like standing in front of the plate-glass wall, which would turn into a million flying knives in an explosion. Outside there was constant movement. Cars, trucks, people.

  “Well,” said Jim reasonably, “it starts at twenty-two.” He paused. “But we can be flexible.” He smiled, showing the teeth. It looked as though a brown fluid were seeping between them. “Flexibility is our middle name.” He laughed, slitting his eyes.

  Conrad said nothing.

  “Come on, let’s go out for a spin. You’ll love the way this car feels.” Jim Harkness jingled his metallic possessions and rose again on his toes.

  Conrad thought of driving with him, turning out onto the strip. Cars coming in constantly from the right, traffic lights every few hundred feet. No maneuvering room, cars pulling up close beside you, tailgating you from behind. His chest felt tight, and he took a deep breath to open it.

  “Not today,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “What’ll you be using the car for?” asked Jim Harkness. “City driving? Commuting? Long distances? I could show you another model that gets better mileage.”

  “Yeah,” Conrad said. “I’m not buying anything right now. I’m just looking. I’m not sure where I’m going to be.” Outside, a van was backing up, making a series of robotic cheeps. The sounds went through him.

  Jim Harkness could feel his withdrawal.

  “Here’s my card,” he said. “It’s got my cell. Anytime you want to talk, give me a call.” He smiled the awful smile. “Some salesmen don’t want you to call them at home, won’t talk at night. Hey!” He raised his shoulders, lordly. “That’s not my way. You want to talk? I’m ready. Call anytime, we can talk about flexible plans, different models, whatever you want.”

  “Thanks,” Conrad said. He put the card in his pocket. “Thanks a lot.”

  He pushed out through the door. On the black pavement he was hit by the unmitigated glare of the sun. The red and white pennants hung slack. Beyond the pavement was the midday traffic on the strip, the sun hitting the cars, bright refracted gleams everywhere. There was too much to focus on. He’d planned to visit three or four places, but when he left the lot, he turned up the steep hill onto Green Lane to head home by the back roads.

  It didn’t actually make sense to buy a car now. If he was taking courses in New York in the fall, he’d just be paying garage fees. The idea of graduate school made something rise up in his chest again. It was infuriating. Shut the fuck up, he wanted to say to himself. What was it? The sense of helplessness was the worst, the feeling that he couldn’t control this.

&n
bsp; He looked in the rearview mirror. There was one car behind him, a small dark red sedan, at four hundred meters. It drove slowly, without gaining. He lost it around curves. As he drove, he checked on it constantly, dropping his eyes to the road, then raising them up to the mirror. He watched the car on the straights. He had no backup here, he was alone. In-country you never traveled alone.

  He watched the car and saw it turn off onto The Narrows Road. Probably a housewife picking up a kid from school. He knew that, but it didn’t change how he felt when he saw the car following him.

  When he arrived home, it was midafternoon and the day seemed flat and old. The cleaning lady’s car was in the driveway. Conrad parked in the garage but didn’t get out of the car. He didn’t want to go inside, though there was nowhere else for him to be. He didn’t want to speak to anyone. He didn’t want to smile at the cleaning lady and say hello to her.

  The cheerful, sloppy Italian woman, Maria, who had cleaned for them during his childhood, was gone. Retired or moved away or something. Now there was an Eastern European woman, thin-lipped and small-eyed, who wore tight, pilled foot-strap pants. She had faded frizzy hair and spoke her own impenetrable language and barely any English. Lydia had introduced him to her, pretending the same kind of friendship she’d had with Maria, whom she’d loved. This woman never smiled; she would never hug any of them, but Lydia acted as though she didn’t know this.

  “Katia, this is my son,” she had said, unconsciously raising her voice, the way people did when they thought you didn’t understand them. Katia nodded secretively, unsmiling, looking from one to the other of them as though assessing the possibilities.

  Wherever Katia was now in the house, she would be disturbing, dragging the vacuum noisily over his foot, leaving the bottle of Windex and a cleaning rag in his bathroom sink, a pile of dirty laundry on the kitchen table. Actually, he didn’t want to be in anyone’s presence right now.