Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  * * *

  Afghanistan, deployment #3, made Iraq look like a trip to Cedar Point amusement park. Afghanistan was an ugly, cruel divot in brutal mountains. During a major operation in Marjah, he found the bones of a toddler in a field. They were wrapped in a shawl, not buried, but very old. Like the body had been out there all winter. They looked like seashells. He couldn’t figure out why these people hadn’t buried their dead. Maybe they didn’t get a chance. Maybe the child was alive when someone put her out there. He’d get in arguments with this Evangelical kid from Georgia, Specialist Brody Van Maanen, who wanted him to leave Team Catholic. They talked a lot about God, about the morality of war. Dan asked him what he would do with the farmer who told them the Taliban had forced him to plant an IED they’d found. The Taliban threatened to kill his whole family if he didn’t do it. “What do you do with that? Where’s the moral true north on that one?”

  Brody looked at him like he was an idiot. “Well, the farmer’s not a Christian, dumbass.”

  That night, trying to kill some tedium, he watched Rudy sketch by the light of a small reading lamp. He remembered it was a full moon because the moon had never looked bigger than it did in Afghanistan. So big you could see the ruins on the surface.

  Rudy drew comic book sketches, one-image stories with no dialogue and no title. Black-and-white drawings of Titusville, Nicaragua, Afghanistan. He would soon do an impressive rendering of Vicky’s Diner after he visited, and his sketch of the train tracks running over Oil Creek in Titusville captured that minor view of the world down to the riverside grit.

  “If only you had some stories to tell,” Dan said.

  Rudy scrubbed a pencil eraser furiously against his notepad, getting that gunky buildup of graphite and rubber strands. Dan was so bored. His mom had sent him a crop of new books, but he was burned out on reading. Instead, he threw rocks into a pot he’d set between their bunks.

  “That’s the idea, though. The whole story’s in the one image.”

  “I realized the other day,” said Dan. “That I stopped praying. I haven’t prayed in like a year.”

  Rudy flicked some eraser gunk from his sketch with the back of his hand. “You been at this too long, Sergeant. Prayer’s not like an active thing. It doesn’t work like you check it off like a duty. My mom says prayer is, you know, ambient. The spiritual are always doing it.” He looked up at Dan. “Why? You feel like you need to pray for something? You jerking off too much?”

  He wanted to tell him about Hailey. He wanted to tell him about Greg Coyle and Iraq. That panic wasn’t urgent but it was there. Like when a phone rings and rings and no one moves to pick it up.

  Finally, he said, “Brody really is obnoxious, isn’t he.”

  Rudy continued shading in a mountain. “I’ll say this: I’m definitely jerking off too much.”

  * * *

  After he got out of the army for good, Hailey tried to get in touch with him. She sent bombardments of e-mails and Facebook messages. She asked if he needed help because of the injury. When he didn’t reply she eventually gave up. Then she wrote to tell him that she’d gotten a new patient at Eastern Star. A stroke and other accumulating health problems had convinced Mrs. Bingham’s four children that it was time. Dan couldn’t figure why he responded to this message and not the others, but he sent back his best wishes. Mrs. Bingham wasn’t all there anymore, Hailey replied, but she’d asked after him a few times. Out of her nearly fifty years of teaching, she still remembered Dan Eaton as one of her favorite students. He should come visit her, Hailey said. She’d get such a thrill out of it. Dan told her maybe the next time he was in town. Another message arrived. Again, Hailey said Mrs. Bingham would love to see him. And I’d love to see you too, she wrote. He ignored it. It wasn’t until she wrote that Bingham didn’t have that much time left that she hit that central cortex of guilt and grief and nostalgia that commands people to face the things they’d rather not. So with most of the muscle fibers of his being protesting about walking among these graves and ghosts, he did it anyway.

  “Well, Mr. Eaton, hello,” said Mrs. Bingham, rheumy eyes popping from sleep to joy in an instant. “You came.”

  “He came,” said Hailey.

  “It’s great to see you, Mrs. Bingham.”

  “Mad Anthony Wayne,” she said. “One of the best Wayne presentations I ever had.”

  Gone was the elocution-school way of speaking, replaced by a slow and precise slur. Her hair was now bone white and so thin he could make out the moles on her scalp. She looked gaunt; her face an unhealthy plum, the blood looking congealed beneath the skin, and the right side drooped so the eye, lips, and cheek seemed in the process of sinking into quicksand. She took his hand in both of hers, the fingers pointed off like the gnarled knots of a tree branch.

  “I’ll also say . . .” She patted his hand and drew a deep, laborious breath. “I was surprised how well you did when you were doing all that extra research on Simon Girty.”

  He felt his blush as he laughed.

  “She won’t stop giving me hell about that,” said Hailey. “I told her I did all the writing on my own—how am I supposed to help it if you suddenly got interested in Simon Girty?”

  “You’re so wonderful to come see me,” said Mrs. Bingham, still holding his hand. “I keep telling Hailey my mind is not what it used to be—I used to be able to tell you any important date in the last five hundred years of Western civilization. I used to be able to do all the presidents and vice presidents. I could even tell you what my children’s names were most of the time—” This mined another laugh from them. “But I still remember every student I loved and every one that was an awful little shit.”

  Hailey faux scolded her. “Mrs. Bingham.”

  “No, you’re not supposed to say that when you’re teaching, but middle schoolers can be some supreme turds, and I remember every one of them. But I also remember all my favorites, and you two were on that list. Daniel likely at the top.”

  “Don’t play favorites,” Hailey warned. “Only one of us here feeds you.”

  Mrs. Bingham worked at taking her breath. “Hailey tells me you work in Titusville.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Edwin Drake and the town that started the oil boom. Bet you get a kick out of that.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ve read every book written about it at this point.”

  “What are you reading right now? I just got this wonderful book—” She pointed to her bedside: 1491. “It’s about the Americas before European discovery with all this new research.” She let go of his hand to raise both of hers and indicate the ecstasy of a great read. “Oh, it’s just fascinating. Hailey reads to me because my eyes get tired. What did you say you’re reading?”

  “I’ve actually been rereading some Ohio stuff. Andrew Clayton and this historian Rob Harper.”

  “Oh!” She put a hand over her heart. “My life was worth it. End it all now, dear.” She closed her eyes. “Put the pillow over my face.”

  “Stop,” said Hailey. Then to Dan, “She always says that. When it’s meat loaf night she says that.”

  When she opened her eyes again, it seemed like more of a task. Her breath came with such difficulty.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Daniel. That’s so much to be proud of. So much pride. You know my husband was headed to the Pacific when Harry Truman dropped the two atom bombs. I always said, you can mourn the devastation, you can mourn all the loss, but I would still thank him for it to this day. That kept my man out of combat, so he could come home and meet me.”

  She took a tissue from her bedside and held it with only the tips of her fingers, delicately, as if feeling a ball of skin.

  “I’m so proud of all of you who served. Though it doesn’t surprise me, I’ll say. I had you pegged for some kind of hero back when you were in my class. You were a good, decent boy on his way to becoming a good, decent man.”

  How he’d come to hate this part of it: the gulf between how people thought
of him and how he felt about what he’d done. It brought all the dread back in one vivid constellation: Wiman, his lip pregnant with dip, as he threw an old man to the ground and shattered his arm; Daniel Imana grabbing an ANA soldier and forcing him through a door, telling him to get the fuck in there because these men were their human shields, and some booby trap bomb ripped this guy’s entire chest out; backing over an Afghan hut in an MRAP and later finding a whole family inside. What happened after their Humvee was hit on Highway 1, and he crawled out with his M4 ready. He could put that stuff away better than most—except when people got starry-eyed and dreamy about, as Homer put it, where men win glory.

  He put his hand on Mrs. Bingham’s to steer her away from heroes. “I’m glad I got this chance. And I think you know you were my favorite teacher by about a mile if it was a footrace.”

  Her eyes slipped closed and back open. “Oh. Well. When you’re in the storm of it, you’re mostly just hoping that you’re not screwing up all the kids too bad.”

  Toward the end of seventh grade, when Hailey stopped coming over and all the boys had started to feel the itch of impending summer, the class reached the industrial boom part of Ohio history—a unit far less exciting than frontier gore—so Mrs. Bingham told the story of her family, beginning when a German immigrant named Heinrich Mundt arrived in Ohio in 1877 to soon become a fiery organizer for the Knights of Labor at the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company. She showed them an ancient copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, with a quote from her grandmother, Ada: “If the police try to break up the strike, the women will charge first. And then the men will come and kill every policeman that comes out here.”

  “Which gives you an idea of what my grandmother was like,” she’d said.

  She led the class on a tour of the Great War, Prohibition, the labor disputes that rocked the industrial Midwest, how her father was run over by a train after stumbling onto the tracks while drunk on the eve of Pearl Harbor. How her widowed mother moved the family to Toledo and found work at the Willys-Overland Motors Plant building a vehicle called the Jeep that helped the Allies fight and win two wars at the same time. Forty-five years old with four children, she went to work six days a week welding together pieces of a vehicle that would roll into Berlin four years later.

  “My own life and times aren’t quite as interesting,” she said. “But when I say that my mother was my hero, I do not say it lightly. There were many times when she could have given up, when it might have gotten too hard for anyone, but she shut up and then put up, as they say. So that’s my family’s story, that’s my Buckeye blood, but let me say one more thing. I tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.”

  Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.

  * * *

  They left Mrs. Bingham to fall back asleep.

  Before changing out of her scrubs, Hailey poked her head into a few rooms, brought ice water for one resident, elevated a swollen ankle for another. She moved with that graceful, Haileyed confidence he remembered only now that he saw it again. When she was twelve her mother was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone in her leg. For two years while her parents were absorbed with tests, treatments, two surgeries, and many rounds of chemo, Hailey took over the household responsibilities. She’d make dinner and clean most nights, pack lunch for her two younger brothers, coordinate rides to school and all social outings, and pay bills with her dad’s checkbook. They were a tough family. Her dad used to say to Dan that if he had to get stranded on a desert island with one person, “It would be my daughter. She was born with steel-toed boots and knows how to put one foot in front of the other.” She could do it all: sports, school, partying, helping to save her mother’s life with her calm and collected takeover of the home front. “Triple-threat Kowalczyk. The strong carry on,” as Lisa used to say.

  “Wait, who gave you the ride?” she asked as they climbed into her car. She’d changed into jeans that stretched to their limit against her rear, maybe a size too small, and a sky-blue top with spaghetti straps that exposed the tan of her shoulders and dual cream-white swimsuit lines from a day spent in the sun. Not that she had dressed up, but she looked fresh, and in his ratty beige cargo shorts and a long-sleeved gray baseball shirt (purposely pulled from drawers that morning to prove he didn’t care), Dan felt an ancient self-consciousness that dated back to morning bus rides. Agonizing over freckles and acne and the coils of red hair he couldn’t get to rest properly on his skull. Admittedly, he’d chosen to put in one contact rather than wear his glasses the way she’d encouraged him to back in the seventh grade.

  “Bill Ashcraft, of all people.” And during the drive into town, he told her the story of running into Bill on the road, the visit to Rick’s grave, finding Hansen and Beaufort at the Lincoln, and how that all played out. She laughed, she cringed, she laughed some more.

  “That’s a hell of a night. Not sure how much more adventure you can fit in.”

  “Maybe a round with Vicky’s mechanical claw to see if I can win you a stuffed animal.”

  “We’re not impressed when boys win us stuffed animals anymore.” A fractional tic of her mouth. Amusement and nostalgia in its becoming. “It’s 2013—we got the vote now.”

  That was the moment it came over him. The sense of finally seeing her after all this time. It was a bullet going off in his chest. How hard he’d tried to forget that his heart had always been a loaded weapon with her.

  After he and Hailey broke up and Dan was back in Baghdad, Greg Coyle decided he couldn’t do another tour. Yes, Greg did need the money. His mother was having health problems and wouldn’t be eligible for Medicare for another five years. She couldn’t work, she was living with his wife, and they had a mountain of medical bills. Dan was leaning toward re-upping even though he could feel a darkness following him around, keeping tabs, trying to decide if it should touch him.

  They were back from patrol, stripping off their gear, when Coyle broke the news that he was getting out, that a buddy from home had promised him a job selling equipment for fire trucks. “He says they’ll have me the moment my boots hit American soil.”

  Out came his earplugs. Off came gloves and boots. Dan needed a new pair.

  “Fire truck equipment? You’ll pay your mom’s bills with that?”

  “Shit, that’s probably a medical bankruptcy situation anyway.”

  Off came his elbow pads, kneepads, throat protector, ammo mags. He felt like throwing his gear at Greg’s frosted-blond head, a piece at a time.

  “It’s really Hanna,” he said. “I can’t be away again. I’m missing her whole childhood.”

  Coyle had gone from the self-professed “biggest pussy slayer in the entire U.S. Army” to the most nerve-racked father of the institution. His bunk was wallpapered with pictures of Hanna. He’d taken to building toys out of wire and soda cans, little figurines to show her over Skype.

  “I get you,” said Dan.

  Off came his groin protector. Some guys didn’t wear it, until Badamier’s injury, and they heard he’d have to pee through a catheter the rest of his life.

  “It’s just.” Greg removed his compression bandage and knife and now clutched each in a hand, staring at them. One to open a wound, the other to close it. “It’s just. Man. It’s like I get home and I hold her, and I feel everything. I swear I feel the weight of fucking eternity on me.”

  They had that conversation roughly nine months into the deployment. They were close to going home.

  * * *

  Vicky’s
looked like Vicky’s. Nothing within or without had changed since he’d last ordered a slice of pie there. The few patrons at this hour looked haggard, drawn down. The speckled red plastic material of one of the stools at the counter had burst and a puff of foam protruded. Clawmageddon was OUT OF ORDER. They took a seat in a far back booth, and when the waitress came by with menus they barely needed a glance.

  Hailey asked, “Do you want to see a picture of her?”

  He said of course, and she zipped it up on her iPhone.

  “How old?”

  “She just turned four a month ago.”

  The little girl had a wide nose and slim eyes. A squashed infant’s face that resembled her father’s features, though the skin was much lighter, dosed with Hailey’s pallid Polish ancestry. Curly black hair pushed out from the edges of a tiger costume packaging her head, and she stared at her mother’s camera with slim-eyed mischief, mouth slightly agape as if to ask a question. Maybe all little kids looked sort of the same, but she reminded him of Hanna Coyle.

  “You love it? Being a mom?”

  She bobbed her head and some of the hair piled in a bun spilled; she went about cramming her dark blond back into the hair tie. “I do. I really do. Happened a bit more quickly than I’d planned, but once I was holding her . . . Things I always cared about or thought were important suddenly fell exactly into perspective. You get this feeling like . . .” She finished, snapping the hair tie into place, and puffed out her chest. “Emma Will Rule All of You One Day.”

  “Emma,” he repeated. He handed the phone back. “She’s beautiful.”

  Hailey’s thumb slid across the screen, toggling through a few more images. As if to remind herself.