by Tom Franklin
“I can’t eat,” he says.
“Well, you wait right here. I’m going down the street, get me some eggs and shit. I’ll be right back.”
She leaves. Ackerman waits. Then he has to force himself to wait some more. Then he has to force himself to rise. There is a small writing desk against the wall opposite the door. Ackerman walks to the desk and takes his wallet out of his back pocket. He takes the bills out of the wallet. Most of them are hundreds. He decides to count them. Twenty, thirty. Then he decides to stop. He sets them on the desk, places an ashtray on top of them. He takes out his ATM card and three of his four credit cards. He places the credit cards next to the money. He puts his wallet in his pocket. He lays the bank card on a sheet of motel stationery, and with a cheap motel pen writes, “The PIN number is 1955.” It is the year Wallace Stevens died. But he does not tell her that.
He stands over the desk, staring down at the cards, the money, the sentence he has written. He looks up at the mirror and sees an old man, unshaven, mad-eyed, and broken. He closes his eyes and sees her, naked again and drying herself with the white towel. He opens his eyes and sees her again. It will only get worse. He turns and leaves.
*
After she is gone, Ackerman spends three days in the darkness of another motel room. He hangs the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside doorknob and leaves it there. He keeps the blinds closed. He never turns on the television, never watches the war. He lies on his back, eyes open, and stares at the ceiling.
For the first day, his mind races, circles, keens. Then it slows, pauses over old griefs. He remembers his hard, thin-lipped father, all bitterness, resentment, and fear, and his mother, the shrewdness and persistence with which she worked to save him from the hardscrabble family farm in the pine barrens outside Nacogdoches, the sadness and pride with which she saw him off at the station the morning he, her scholarship boy, caught the bus for Houston and Rice, the morning she gave him up to a world beyond her knowing. After that, it was Iowa and the writing program and jobs in Michigan, North Carolina, Kansas, and, finally, Arkansas. The professional pilgrimages of the professor-poet.
Until his mother died, Ackerman loved her without qualification. And her love for him was obvious—pure and permanent. After his father’s death, Ackerman had moved his mother into the house with him in Lafayette. She lived six more years, and during that time he married and divorced three women. After the second divorce, he had spent a month in Harbor Vista. When he was released, his mother was waiting for him. The house was fine, the world in order. Somehow, from her wheelchair, she had managed. He wrote a poem about it, about her month and his. One of his few purely narrative poems. It was in Poetry. It was in Best American. It made his mother proud. When she died, two years ago, the book that held that poem was beside her bed in her room in his house. He was proud of that. He had done right by his mother. How many men could honestly say that?
Remembering that is almost enough to cause him to rise and re-enter the world. He does, in fact, rise and shower. But under the shock of water he sees that he is a weak, selfish man who has been loved, truly loved, by no one, by no woman, other than his own mother. He is a joke of a man who thinks he is a poet. No more. He leaves the shower without either turning the water off or drying himself. He returns to his bed, wet and whimpering, and gives himself again to wretchedness and night. Early the next morning, paralyzed by self-pity, he pisses himself.
On the morning of the fourth day, the motel manager knocks on the door and says that he just wants to make sure everything’s all right. Ackerman says nothing. The manager knocks again. Then he opens the door and steps into the room. Ackerman can see only the shadow of a man in a shaft of light. He waits. The shadow turns its head and speaks. “You got thirty minutes. You’re not gone then, I’m calling the police.”
When the man is gone, Ackerman gets out of bed. He looks down at himself. Naked. Where to now? Kerbala, he thinks. The mosque, the tomb of the great Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet. But he knows he is still in Tucumcari.
Outside the door, pissed-stained in hard desert heat, Ackerman stands for long moments in the glare of a desperate sun, willing his eyes to see. Everything is cruel and white. He crosses the potholed parking lot and stops at the edge of the ruins of the empty motel pool. There, alone and far from Eden, he prays for Tamika Jones.
WHAT WAR WILL DO
by Suzanne Kingsbury
They chose to ignore the war. To decide it was not happening and to talk nothing of it nor to make heroes of their men nor to doom them to victimhood. Ansley Park, Georgia, was suspended in time, in the gray middle of unmade history and they wished it to remain that way. The “real” wars, one and two, had passed. Armageddon had shot straight at the heart of the world and, by some miracle, missed, and no tragedy so large would arrive again. Their backyards were safe, their children protected by a government fighting the Reds. All was as it should be, fifteen minutes down Peachtree Road to downtown Atlanta, a city alive with promise, in a summer without news, before the Bay of Pigs, the shooting of Kennedy, the Vietnam War; Martin Luther King Jr. was still a boy and there were no VW vans hauling naked teenagers to upstate New York with peace signs painted on their cheeks and acid on their tongues.
The men too old or educated or ill to fight called the forgotten war in Korea a “conflict” and the soldiers who fought it did not speak of the shivering high-altitude nights in the mountainsides or the e-tools for digging where they defecated. They did not speak of the soldiers shot and falling wide-eyed before them nor the buttressing wind of the Bell 47s descending like insects nor the wounds themselves, crimson and puss-ridden, and how they lied to their fellow soldiers before their bodies went slack and weighted in their arms. They promised to write their loved ones back home, in the event of the man’s death, but they could not bring themselves to write. Once back, they never spoke of the way they had missed home, during silent gut-wrenching nights of guard-watch, wanting to taste home, smell it, swallow it.
The women did not talk about the men when they finally arrived back, their souls blocked and barbed, their wide, vapid stares out den windows, returning to a memory none wanted them to share, their rote lovemaking and terrifying swollen cries at midnight when dreams plagued them and they walked in sleep or fought or crouched down, ducking in their boxer shorts, extolling commands no wife understood, or wanted to.
Katherine Fine’s fiancé, Siskell Gentry, had gone and had not come back. She drifted through town without mentioning it. It was said he’d been discharged and had not returned. The information was relayed in clandestine phone calls one to the other, across fences, one woman hanging laundry mentioned it to another. Two girls Katherine’s age, whose boyfriends were at Tulane, talked of it while sunning poolside on cushioned chaise longue chairs at Ansley Golf Club, the cerulean pool water carrying the news, and all who heard told boyfriends and best friends and sisters and mothers and the mothers told the daughters, who said they’d heard it already.
Siskell had not wanted to ask Katherine to marry him before he left. He said it was not fair, and he’d turned his face from her. They stood in October wind in blowing rain, holding hands, she in trench coat with lifted collar and he in only his T-shirt and denims, water dripping from his hair down his face. He told her he loved her and would not keep her trapped in deference to him. He would not look at her.
The ring she wore on her left ring finger had been her mother’s engagement ring. Taking it off her right hand had demanded much effort. When it finally came loose, it lay inert in her upturned palm. Kiss it, she told him. He eyed her for some time before he picked it up and kissed it with his eyes closed as if in prayer. Drawing her left hand to him, he put the ring there. The next morning she had a jeweler shave off a slender slice of it so it fit her better. Before he left, she made love to him with the ring in her mouth, passing it back and forth between them.
She’d kept the baby and lost it in the seventh month. He’d been gone six already. The do
ctor had told her she had almost no chance of losing it. She lost it anyway.
Grief and its absence remained—the empty, stagnant feeling of useless misery, the bloody dress skirt and its stain. She let the dress hang in the middle of her closet, and she kept the closet open to look at it, her accomplice. She stayed in bed four days, started vague letters to him and crumpled them and started again. Two sentences. Three. She never wrote of the baby. She never wept.
Siskell and Katherine weren’t like the others. Trivialities did not become them and his presence stripped her of pleasantries, made her brutally honest, her marrow exposed. She could afford this frankness with no one else.
When first she met him, she was seventeen and he was nineteen, already done with high school, a carpenter’s apprentice working on her father’s house, a silent boy who watched her come and go. She came to stand by him while he worked and talked to him.
Through a long chargeless summer, her goal was to make him converse back with more than simple, one-word answers. When he did, she found they shared books and secret places along narrow creeks in back of train-tracked woods. He played harmonica, and the places he took her with music were mournful ones where the women swooned and the men caught them and sometimes he made rhythm on his knee with his flat hand and played her cracker-fast songs that made her laugh. He watched her laugh and lifted the harmonica from his mouth to grin and kissed her before she was ready and then she was ready her whole life through and the summer woke up. An electric current ran through it. She dreamed she was naked, running through crowds, heads turning, looking for him to cover her.
Siskell was a black-haired boy, six feet tall, born to a hellion father with India-ink tattoos of navy ships on stormy seas and mermaids with busts big as balloons. He’d gotten the tattoos in the service and later augmented them during prison time for armed robbery. He drank and shot the dogs he gambled on if they fought wrong. Siskell’s father had been seventh of eleven brothers, had married three times and was courting his fourth. His mother lived alone, auburn haired and blue eyed; she’d been a homecoming queen in 1934.
*
Siskell had been sent back to the States from Korea by way of California. He’d jumped ship there and wandered through cobblestone streets, watching boats at bay and listening to the fishermen auctioning the dead silver bodies of emerald-eyed sea creatures. He worked to stand up straight after months in trenches, ducking gunshot, crouching through grassland and woodland, holding insistent memory in his bowels; the recollection of what he’d done in a stark, generic hotel room to an unarmed man was a terrible visceral scene in his mind, the grief and regret a hard, unswallowable lump in his silent throat.
In Golden Gate Park each day, summer jugglers performed for children and storytellers drew circular crowds. Magicians came and spread their tricks on sidewalks. Siskell watched and envied the men their connection with the children. He despaired, believing he lacked talent for relating again to innocence, youth. For long hours, he sat on a bench overlooking the pond. He did not move except to smoke. One dusk he realized he had not eaten for three days.
His first afternoon in San Francisco, he had torn the ribbons from the chest of his uniform, and thrown the uniform in the trash barrel outside the guesthouse. He came back at midnight to find it pressed and hanging from a clothes hanger off the banister leading to his room. The landlady’s name was Grace McEwan, a redhead with fierce green eyes, who smoked and bit her nails. She had been widowed or run off on, the story changed depending on which guest was questioned. He didn’t question anyone. He overheard the other residents talking to the newer guests, their faces open, amiable. His, in the mirror, was unshaven, eyes hooded by lack of sleep. Dead eyes.
Grace McEwan left the uniform hanging from the banister for four days without speaking of it. On the fifth day he came home to find it hanging in his closet. It smelled of laundry soap. When he reached out to touch it, it had the stiff, cardboard feeling of being starched.
Each day he wrote to Katherine. He said he had been doped out on the poetry of her touch and his withdrawal was acute and painful. He needed her. He asked her would she make tenderness inside him once more, kick out the poison he had seen.
He did not send the letters. He addressed and stamped and stacked them and left them on his bureau top.
He was not of Katherine’s social class or breeding, but it had seemed not to matter to Katherine. She was born in the shadow of four older brothers and she wore her hair in a long, golden ponytail and did not let anyone call her Kat or Katy and she had not been a cheerleader nor worn the pins and hats the other girls wore. She was a plain dresser in mostly black and white dresses and he had heard she refused, politely and with shyness, the courting of the attorneys’ sons at Tulane and Duke law schools who knew her father, the county judge, and were her brothers’ friends. Her father’s family had been in the area for generations, held property and prestige, their wings extended to every plantation and city of the South, through the summer homes of Highlands and the Outer Banks. Her mother, a French girl from Alsace, was welcomed courteously by Southerners reverent of European haute culture. She had died of lung cancer the summer Katherine met Siskell.
She resembled her mother, a quiet girl with clear, unsmirched skin, delicate frame, slender as a sparrow, eyes of deep brown, almost onyx, and scarlet swollen sensual lips she licked more often than was considered proper. She read all the time and in her feathery, see-through voice, she called Siskell nicknames he’d never in the world let anyone else call him. Alone with her, he marveled at her smooth flesh, the veins in her abdomen where they reached her groin, the arch of her foot, alabaster as pearl. She called his name and became a living fever when he loved her.
He knew she had been with another man. His mother wrote to him that Katherine came to the post office each day and each day found no letter from Siskell and rumor went that lack of letters drove her to it. The man was Albert Keys. He managed Lake Lumber. He had dark, wooly hair and a ruddy face. He was good-natured, a friend to most, and they said he was honest.
Albert’s wife had died in a Norfolk Southern crash seven years back and Albert had been raising the boy and girl, ten and eleven, ever since. They were combed and well-kept. On holidays, church women brought them food on platters with small vases of Easter lilies, ironed linen napkins, crystal-cut glasses, and the finest silverware from felt-lined wood boxes, engraved and passed down from generation to generation.
Keys lived on Blackland Road in a house with a long front yard and a screened-in back porch. It was three stories high and a shiny black Chrysler sat in the driveway.
Siskell did not want to go home and see Albert Keys’s house. He wanted Katherine to come to him, live in that simple wood-floor room he was renting and drape her silken, slender arms around him, her golden hair on the pillow at night, her breath sweet. He believed maybe then he would sleep. He wrote her this in a long letter; in a later letter he rescinded, saying she needed purity, someone wholer than he was, braver.
His mother wrote that Katherine’s belly had been big. Now it was small. Some said she had it and gave it away, his mother wrote. Others say she lost it. For long hours he lay in bed thinking of her bearing a child, losing his child. One seemed as painful as the next, though the former was a betrayal and this he could not abide and tried to keep the thought imprisoned within him so she would remain cherished, sacred.
On a Tuesday when he’d been out three weeks, he came back to the letters gone.
Grace McEwan was sitting on the table by the living room window, listening to the radio with a glass of clear liquid in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He leaned against the doorjamb.
“What did you do with them?” he asked her.
She turned her fierce eyes on him.
“Did you read them?” he asked.
She took a sip of her drink. When she was done swallowing, her lips drew back like an irritated mare. She said, “I sent them.” One front tooth lapped over the other. She
wore a green bee-waist dress, buttoned one too low. He could see the pale soft flesh of her pink breasts.
She rose and turned, leaning the smoking cigarette in its pewter ashtray and placing her glass on a wood cork coaster next to it. She came to him. He smelled rose flower musk and hair spray. The radio announcer spoke, and he heard none of it.
Reaching out, she took his hands. Hers were small and cool in his. She drew him towards her and she danced, swaying, her feet making baby steps. He barely moved. She laid her head on his chest and put his arms around her. He rested his cheek against her head and when he closed his eyes, he felt them stinging with tired. She kneaded his back, led him to the couch, spoke to him in a smoky, coaxing voice. She made him malleable. She was big-boned, strong.
She took him sitting up, her skirt about him like a pleated flower and then they were lying down, she on the bottom and he an endless, urgent vessel, emptying. He made hoarse cries and clenched his teeth. At the end, he wept.
Later he slept. He woke with his cheek to her worn velvet couch. He’d pulled his pants up before he slept, but had been too tired to fasten his belt. He did so now.
She was sitting across from him in a broad-backed oak rocker, her bare feet propped on the coffee table and her dress falling between her knees. She was smoking. He felt bashed in the head, hungover, though he had not had liquor since his return. While he slept, she had put on bright red lipstick. He saw she was pretty and, when not fierce, her eyes had the lost look of limbo, hostage.
She leaned over, ashed her cigarette, and rested her chin on her hand, staring at him. “I got a piece of advice for you, soldier.”
He turned his eyes to her and blinked.
“Don’t go back to that girl ruined.”
He watched her.
“It’ll break her so bad, she won’t be right again. Fix yourself first.”