“Well then, where does that leave you?” Denton asked. His cheeks and forehead were redder than usual, and he spoke with impatience, through a purple and white mouthful of meat and potato.
“I’m one hundred four. He’s three hundred forty-one,” said the other twin, his face full of dismay at the consequences of his slow trip through the birth canal.
“Bad luck for you,” Bill Midland said. “Can’t you say something like you can’t be separated from your twin and you should have the same number?”
“They’d probably give us both one hundred four,” said Boothe-Snype 341.
“Maybe they’d give you the average of the two.” Midland looked pleased with his solution.
“Could be worse, could be worse,” said Denton, laying a large and reassuring hand on Boothe-Snype 104’s shoulder. “You’ve got three more years of two-S, don’t you? This will all be over by then. Or at least you’ll have time to figure out something else. Too bad they did away with the graduate deferments; otherwise I’d say you’re completely in the clear. As it is, I think you’ll be just fine, not as fortunate as your brother there, but just fine.”
“That makes me think of that song,” Bill Midland said. “You know the one I mean? ‘Fortunate Son’? I heard it’s about David Eisenhower.”
“I don’t know it,” Denton said. “How does it go?”
Conducting himself with little twitches of his knife and fork, Midland sang in his glee club baritone, “It ain’t me. It ain’t me. I ain’t no senator’s son.” He cut off and reached for his wineglass, blushing because, as it happened, the Boothe-Snypes’ father was a senator.
“Poor taste, that,” said Denton. “Eisenhower will do his duty. That’s more than I can say for these so-called musicians sitting around and whining.”
“I was watching the draw in Eliot,” Boothe-Snype 341 said, “and a guy got pulled fifth and put his foot through the television. Cut his ankle up. We all had to go find somewhere else to watch.”
Denton nodded. “Long-haired type?”
“Not really. Just a guy.” The Boothe-Snype shrugged.
“No good going around making scenes,” Denton said with finality. “You have to accept your duty and do it with honor.”
“That’s easy to say when you’re out of the running, though, isn’t it?” Fenn suggested.
“Pardon?” said Denton, disbelieving, a forkful of beef arrested on its way to his mouth.
“All I mean is that since you’ve never had to sit in front of a television and wait to see if you’re going to be sent off to defend some jungle from a particular system of government, I don’t think you’re in any position to judge.” As he spoke, Fenn lifted and turned the remains of his game hen with delicate maneuvers of his silver, probing for any last morsels.
Denton’s big, robust face turned a sweaty shade of tomato. “And you? Are you packing your bags for Canada? Or did you get a nice high number?”
Fenn set his knife and fork on the edge of his plate and dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “My birthday is September fourteenth,” he said.
Activity at the table ceased. Winn stared across at Fenn. Fenn met his eyes and then looked away. The others had remembered Winn now, too, and were glancing back and forth between him and Fenn and then at one another.
“Well, well,” said Denton, leaning back in his chair and surveying the boys and the ruins of lunch with the air of a satisfied khan. “The alpha and the omega. Together at one table.”
“But you’re taking your two-S,” Winn said. “You still have two years after this one.”
“No. I’ll go when I get called up.”
“God, why?” blurted Bill Midland, agog.
“Don’t be stupid, Fenn,” Winn said. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t like all this squirming that goes on. Begging the doctors, begging the draft boards, pulling strings, running to Canada. I don’t blame guys for wanting to get out, but I don’t have it in me. My number came up. I intend to do as I’m intended to do.”
“That’s insane,” Winn exclaimed before anyone else could speak. He was surprised at his own vehemence. He pointed at Fenn. “It’s one thing to dodge, but it’s another to turn up your nose at your deferment. Two-S is meant for people like you. You can’t just go. At least get into ROTC or something, Fenn, really. You don’t know what it’ll be like. You want to be in the mud with a bunch of guys who would have killed for three years of two-S? You don’t have to be a hero. Be reasonable. For your own sake.”
“I have to say,” Denton put in, “I agree with Van Meter. Deferments exist for a reason—a good reason—and you should take advantage. Think of your mother. No sense in throwing everything away for … for some kind of gesture you’ll regret as soon as you get over there. Probably sooner. But then it’ll be too late. Christ, carrot-top, you’ll be a sitting duck.”
“What is the reason?” asked Fenn.
“What?”
“The reason deferments exist.”
“We’ve been through this, Fenn,” Denton said, taking an indulgent, paternal tone. “It’s to keep men like you from getting cut down before their time. There’s no sense in it. It’s a waste. Take my advice. Take the two-S. At least for a year. If you feel the same way after a year, then go. I wash my hands.” He lifted his voluminous white napkin from his lap and scrubbed his lips.
Fenn spoke in a wry echo of Denton’s false patience. “Thank you, Mr. Denton. I’ll take that into consideration. But I believe I drew number one for a reason.”
“What?” said Denton. “Why? Because of God and that?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“Fenn,” said Winn, “don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re sounding stupider and stupider.”
Fenn seemed calm, almost sad. “Oh, I don’t know, Winn. I think you’d like the military. There are lots of rules, and you always know where you stand.”
Winn said, “Why do you want to be in the Ophidian anyway, if you might not even last this year? What’s the point in punching?”
“Well, you invited me to lunch, and I was available, and I’ve been taught that it’s rude to turn down an invitation when you’re not otherwise engaged.”
Bill Midland snorted. The velvet curtain was flung aside and the waiter appeared, shouldering a silver tray of cakes and tarts. “Something sweet?” he said.
THE DOCTOR, a man of about forty, swung through the door. He was tall and lean and moved in smooth, rapid glides, like a water bug. His sparse blond hair was combed without vanity straight back from a hairline in deep recession. Only a narrow, downy peninsula survived between two long incursions of forehead. “Ah, Mr. Vanmeter,” he said, glancing at the chart in his hand and pronouncing the name as one word with a Germanic emphasis on the first syllable. “You fell off your bike.” He offered a brief smile, a quick flex of the mouth. Above the crenellation of pens in the breast pocket of his lab coat, “DR. FINLAY” was embroidered in blue script.
“Van Meter,” Winn said. “I didn’t fall. I was hit by a golf cart.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the doctor said, taking two long glides toward Winn and wiggling the knobs of his stethoscope into his large ears.
“There’s no need for a checkup,” Winn said, twisting around to fend him off. The paper on the exam table stuck to his thighs and crinkled loudly. “You can go ahead and stitch me up.”
“Mmmhmm, just routine. Breathe in.”
Winn filled and emptied his lungs, followed a bright light with his eyes, admitted a thermometer into his mouth, allowed the dank, bristly caves of his ears and nostrils to be illuminated and observed, and watched with detachment as his tennis shoes kicked feebly in response to the tapping of a rubber mallet.
At last the doctor peeled Otis’s handkerchief back from Winn’s shin and lightly touched the edges of the crescent-shaped wound. “Mmmhmm. Yes, yes,” he said to himself. Without another word he turned and vanished out the door, reappearing twenty seconds lat
er with a rolling metal tray laden with sharp silver instruments that gleamed maliciously in the light. The doctor busied himself at the sink: washing his hands, opening and closing drawers, pulling out packets of gauze, wiggling his long fingers into surgical gloves he plucked from a box. So deft and rapid was his routine that he appeared to have three or four arms; Winn wondered if he might juggle tangerines or spin a plate atop a wand at the same time he stitched up the wound.
“Been a busy summer?” Winn asked, trying to fight off the first ripples of queasiness as the doctor slid the needle of a syringe through the rubber seal in the lid of a small glass vial and pulled back the plunger.
“Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, yes.” Dr. Finlay propelled himself across the floor on a wheeled stool and coasted to a stop beside Winn’s leg. “This may sting.” He swabbed briskly with a square of gauze that left behind a trail of fire. “All right now, a little prick,” he said, lowering the needle to the edge of the wound. He punctured the skin. Winn watched him depress the plunger ever so slightly. A drop of blood appeared at the site of the injection, and the doctor wiped it away. “And another one,” he said, his voice sounding far away as he moved the needle to a new spot. “And another one.”
A sour layer of cold sweat sprang out on Winn’s forehead, but he also felt overheated. He wondered if he had gotten sunburned sometime during this godforsaken morning.
“One more,” the doctor said from a great distance. Winn looked down and saw the needle pierce his flesh before it dissolved into white sparks and flares. “Oops, spoke too soon. One last prick,” came the doctor’s voice through a shimmering darkness as Winn fell sideways out of the world.
Thirteen · A Centaur
Livia walked a few steps ahead of Francis, across dunes and through sharp grasses, her skin sticky and chafing, her whole self reeking. The smell was a potent cocktail of salt water, kitchen sponge, and death. They were looking for a path from the beach out to a road where Dicky Sr. could come and pick them up. Livia’s phone had been destroyed when, panicked after the explosion, she had run into the ocean, but Francis’s had survived. Even his sunglasses had emerged intact, if smudged. They paused to watch a Jeep jostle over the sand with a stretcher propped like a surfboard against its roll bar, one paramedic riding shotgun and the other crouched in the back. In the distance, the lights of a waiting ambulance blinked silently.
“He’ll be fine, won’t he?” Francis asked.
“I hope so,” Livia said. “For your sake.”
“I don’t see how this was my fault.”
“I’ll walk you through it. You hit the whale with an axe. The whale exploded.”
“How was I supposed to know that would happen? They gave me the axe. They said I could.”
After the initial chaos, after Livia had come back out of the water, she found a crowd standing in a circle, looking at someone on the ground. Sidling in, she saw that the object of their attention was the man in yellow foul-weather gear, the one who had been standing atop the whale when Francis dropped his axe. He was lying on the sand with a shard of bone sticking out of his shoulder like a pin from a butterfly, and he pointed a finger at Francis and said, You did this. But Francis had denied it, saying he hadn’t done anything; he was just another innocent bystander.
“When you see a bloated raccoon on the side of the road,” Livia said, stepping over a dune fence, “do you run over and pop it with a fork?”
“Sorry if I don’t know everything about stupid fucking whales,” said Francis. “Everyone was cutting it up anyway. If not me, someone else would have hit the sweet spot. If you think about it, I kind of released it from all that pressure.”
Huge clumps of meat and blubber had been strewn across the sand. The whale’s outsize organs and all its piping and wiring and insulation were on display—lungs like hot-air balloons, bones of dinosaurian dimensions, a meaty colossus of a heart. Great pale ropes of intestine lay scattered like joke snakes sprung from a can. The impaled man had a long gray beard trimmed square at its bottom, and his face was contorted in rabbitlike agony, his large front teeth gripping his lower lip and his small, dark eyes darting over the circle of faces looking down on him. A woman Livia took to be his wife knelt beside him, her hands fluttering helplessly around the bone. Once accused, Francis had pulled Livia forward by the wrist.
“I swear it wasn’t me,” he said. “Ask this girl. Just ask her.”
Livia had studied the dour, spattered faces. For the most part they looked like locals, not summer people. One blond woman in a bloodied Lilly Pulitzer dress stood holding the hands of two small, tearful boys, but otherwise the faces were creased and weathered, toughened by long winters on the island. She had intended to cover for Francis, more for her own sake than his, but lying to these people, grim and weary as the crew of some wrecked ship, seemed unconscionable. She hesitated for just a little too long. The man’s wife stood up. She was a short, hunched person with a gray cloche of hair and stuck-out chin.
“You’re going to jail,” she told Francis.
“There’s a misunderstanding,” he said.
“What misunderstanding? Look what you did to Samuel. Look at him!”
“It just blew up! I didn’t do anything. He’s wrong. It just blew!”
His voice rose above the low grumble of the crowd, which had begun to stir and close ranks. Samuel’s wife looked around, almost sly, gauging the allegiance of the others, and then, one eye squinted shut, lips folded in a turtle smile, she faked a quick jab, her fist stopping just short of Francis’s jaw. Francis stepped back from the fist and onto the rubber boot of the man behind him, which the man quickly reclaimed. Francis stumbled sideways, grabbing at Livia for balance.
Now the crowd began to look less like castaways and more like a band of Gothic villagers, armed with flensing knives instead of clubs and torches. Francis sized them up with a shifty, darting glance. Then, as though pulled by a falling weight, his face slid downward into an expression of deep grief.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was me,” he said, looking at Samuel’s wife through lowered lashes. “I am so sorry—I didn’t realize. I should have been more careful. I acted without thinking, and now this poor man is gravely injured. I feel terrible. I don’t know how I’m going to live with this. I just wanted to feel like a part of the island, you know? I just wanted to participate. And now look what I’ve done. I ruin everything I touch. I’m cursed.”
He brushed at the sand that encrusted his cheeks and sniffed. Then he plopped onto the beach, wrapping his arms around his shins and lowering his head to his knees.
“Francis?” Livia said.
He pressed his hands over the top of his head. His voice was muffled. “I deserve to go to jail. I deserve whatever’s coming to me.”
Livia looked at Samuel’s wife, recognizing her to be the arbiter of their fates. The woman narrowed her eyes and looked out to sea like a captain considering a change in course. Finally, gruffly, she said, “Get up, kid. Only a lunatic would have done that on purpose. You’re not a psycho. You’re just a little dumb.”
With the wonderment of a condemned man granted a last-minute reprieve, Francis lifted his chin and gazed up at her. Livia nudged him with her toe, urging him to his feet, and he stood and reached to shake the woman’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been more generous than I could have possibly expected or deserved.”
“Yeah,” Samuel’s wife had said. “Go on and get out of here.” And they had obeyed, trailing away down the beach like two outcasts.
“Still. You got lucky,” Livia said to him as they walked, turning inland, out of sight of the ambulance. “They were ready to string you up.”
He shrugged. “The trick is to be sorrier than anyone could expect you to be. Then they feel bad and want to do something nice for you.”
“Is that what the Buddha would do?”
“I never said I was the Buddha,” Francis said. “The best anyone can do is to try to emulate him. The trying is what matte
rs. I live in a constant state of failure.”
They traversed a narrow, sandy trail and came to a wider track that led through a gathering of beach cottages and eventually joined the road where Dicky Sr. had agreed to pick them up.
“What I don’t get,” Livia said after a long silence, as they stood on the graveled shoulder and peered into the distance for Dicky’s rental car, “is why you would choose that particular religion, when it’s so easy for people to call foul on you. You have to know everyone’s going to wonder why you’re not a vegetarian, why you don’t meditate. You’re supposed to be eliminating desire, but, as a person, you seem pretty willing to indulge all kinds of desires. Why do that to yourself? Why not just say you’re a nihilist and be done with it?”
They were both caked with a fine layer of powdery sand, blown onto them by the persistent wind. Francis glittered in the sun as though sugared. “I like the struggle,” he said, “even if I never make any progress. At least this way I have an aspiration. I’m set in contrast to something. Otherwise, I would just blend into the scenery, and no one would ever have anything to say about me.”
ON THE DRIVE HOME, Winn wanted the windows open in hopes that fresh air might dispel the headache and nausea that had settled in shortly after Dr. Finlay resuscitated him with an acrid packet of smelling salts and stitched up his numb flesh. Biddy’s hair, bobbed in a blunt and practical line at her shoulders, streamed backward and flew around her ears before standing straight up in an electrified coxcomb. The morning breeze had gathered force, and clouds advanced under full sail, more of them than before, merging to block out the sun and then sliding apart in a burst of light.
Some vital part of him had been depleted, if not by his wound alone, then by his fainting spell on the doctor’s table, by Otis scooping him up like a damsel in distress, by Agatha and her wine-red mouth, by all the people in his house sucking lobsters out of their shells. Agatha had been driven from his thoughts, but now her decoys started popping up everywhere, like targets in a shooting range. She was the blond jogger they overtook and the visored driver of the car behind them; she was in a tennis skirt holding the leash of a dog lifting its leg on a stop sign. Again the trees waved him up his driveway with evergreen fans. As it had when he first arrived, the house looked strange, like an impostor house. A Jeep was parked to one side of the driveway, and a white car was stopped near the front door, a bedraggled version of Livia standing beside it and speaking to the driver.
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