Black Maps

by Jauss, David

  “If this is about that stupid car…”

  “No. Really, I just wanted to call. I thought you’d want to hear what happened.”

  “Now why would I want to hear about that woman sitting in your worthless car?”

  “I don’t know,” Larry said. And now that he thought about it, he didn’t know why he’d wanted to call and tell her. It all seemed so stupid now. Of course she wouldn’t care. And why should he care?

  In the background he heard his son say “Grandma” and suddenly he had to sit down. The last words Randy had said to him before he and Karen got on the bus were, “Grandma’s gonna take me to the zoo.”

  Larry sat there, staring across the kitchen table at the sink where Karen used to give Randy a bath when he was a baby. He felt very tired all of a sudden. He wanted to put his head down on the table and go to sleep.

  Then Karen said, “Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “How’s Randy?”

  “He’s fine. He’s made friends with the neighbor’s little four-year-old, and he’s been playing with him all day in his sandbox.”

  “Tell him I’ll build him a sandbox in the backyard if he wants.”

  “I told you, Larry. I’m not changing my mind.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was just thinking about when he comes to visit. You know, on weekends or whatever.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what you meant. Listen, do you want to talk with him for a minute?”

  Larry was quiet. Then he said, “No, I guess not.”

  “Are you all right?” Karen asked.

  Larry stood and looked out the window at the garage. Then he said, “I’ve been working on the car. You should see it. It’s looking pretty good. I hung the new drive shaft and split the door posts the weekend you left, then last week I finished bending the new side panels and installed the window frames.”

  “Larry,” she said.

  “It took me forever to run the wires from front to back,” he went on. “Over fifty wires in all. But everything’s electric now: the locks, the windows, you name it. And I just finished installing the extensions on the gas lines, brake lines, and exhaust. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been worth it. I’m just about ready for the paint job. I’ve decided on a royal blue Corvette finish. I tell you, it’s gonna be beautiful, Karen, really beautiful.”

  “Larry, I’m not going to listen to this.”

  “I’ll take you for a ride in it when it’s finished,” he went on. “You’ll be the first one in it, you and Randy.”

  “Larry, I mean it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m sorry.” Then they were silent for a long moment.

  Finally, Karen said, “When will you understand? Even if you had done all of that, it wouldn’t mean anything to me. I don’t know why it’s so important to you. Why can’t you just let it go?”

  “What do you mean, if I had done it?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, his voice rising. “Why don’t you tell me.”

  Karen sighed. “I don’t want to sit here and fight with you, Larry. Randy’s right here, and so’s my mom.”

  “If you don’t think I’ve been working on that car, you’re wrong,” he said. “Dead wrong.”

  “Okay. Okay. You’ve been working on it.”

  “Not just working on it, I’m damn near finished with it.”

  “I said okay. Don’t get mad.”

  “I’m not mad. Who said I was mad?”

  “Okay, you’re not mad. You’re not mad, and the limo’s almost done. And I’ve changed my silly little mind and I’m not going to file for divorce after all.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way.”

  “Why not? That’s how you talk to me.”

  “You know what?” he said, pacing beside the table now. “You think you know everything. You think you’re so smart. Well, you don’t know shit. You understand? Not even shit.”

  “Larry, listen to yourself. You sound like—”

  “You listen to yourself!” he shouted, then hung up the phone so hard it rang.

  He stood there a moment, trembling, then went to the refrigerator and opened it. He stared inside for several minutes, not seeing anything, before he finally closed the door and went out to the garage. It was dark outside, and it’d be hard to work, even with utility lights, but he had to get busy. He had wasted too much time already. It was still terribly hot, and the weathermen were saying the heat might not break for another week, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He took off his shirt, gripped the rear bumper, and pulled the back half of the Cadillac about six feet away from the front half. Then he began to align the frame, pausing every now and then to towel the sweat from his face and arms.

  When he finished aligning the frame, he took an imprint of the end of the frame section, then stood and stretched his aching back. There was nothing else he could do now. He’d take the imprint to Hawker’s the first thing in the morning, so they could begin building the frame extensions he needed. On his way back from Hawker’s, he’d stop at Eriksen’s Welding Supply and buy welding rods—about twenty pounds should do it—then swing by Vern’s Sheet Metal to see about renting their break to bend the side panels. Hawker should have the extensions for him by the end of the week, so if he worked steadily he could be done welding the frame by the weekend. Then the next step would be installing the drive shaft. That was the trickiest part, according to the tour guide at the limousine factory, because the longer the drive shaft was, the greater the amount of torque it had to bear. Larry was planning to add at least one more hanger bearing, but still he was worried that the shaft would vibrate or even twist out of its supports. Several times he had imagined driving down the highway with Karen and Randy, the three of them talking and laughing as if nothing had ever been wrong between them, when all of a sudden the shaft would lurch out of the hanger bearings with a sound like the end of the world. Whenever this thought had come to him, he had forced himself to think of something else. But now he stood there between the two halves of the Cadillac and watched the shaft drag beneath the swerving car, spewing sparks.

  The next morning, Larry was too exhausted to take the imprint down to Hawker’s. He didn’t even have the energy to watch TV, so he just lay on the couch and stared out the window. Birds flew by, lighting on the branches of the sycamore, and squirrels chattered and chased each other in the yard. He watched all this for a while, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He was wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t been born. Who would be living in this house, looking out the window? Who would Karen have married? And what would her son be like? The more he thought, the more he felt insubstantial, as if he had only been dreaming all these years that he existed. He looked around the room, and everything seemed simultaneously familiar and strange. He remembered how once, when he was a child, he had lain on the floor of his bedroom and imagined that the ceiling was the floor of an upside-down house and he was somehow stuck on the ceiling. Nothing was different—there was the same light fixture, the same posters on the walls, the same bed and carpet—but everything had changed.

  Now he lay on the couch, watching the dust swirling in the light slanting through the window. It looked like snow. He watched it fall for a long time, wondering if it would ever stop. It didn’t. It kept falling, but as it fell out of the light, it disappeared.

  Then he held his hand up to the light and turned it back and forth. I’m here, he thought. I’m alive and I’m here.

  Later that morning, the doorbell rang. It was Elizabeth’s mother, her face a knot of worry. “I’m afraid she’s in your car again, Mr. Watkins, and I can’t get her out.”

  Larry was dizzy from standing suddenly after lying down so long, and he hung onto the doorjamb. In the bright sunlight, the old lady’s wrinkled face looked as if it had been burned, and it occurred to him that that’s what aging was: a gradual kind of fire that ate your flesh. He sh
ivered, even though the air coming through the screen door was oppressively hot.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, and took a step back down the stairs. “If this isn’t a good time…”

  Then Larry realized he had been staring at her for some time without speaking. “Excuse me,” he apologized. “I just woke up, and I’m a little groggy. I’ll be happy to help you.”

  He slipped on his tennis shoes and followed the old woman out to the garage where, as before, Elizabeth was sitting in the back seat with her purse on her lap. But this time she wasn’t just jabbering; she was singing. Larry couldn’t recognize the song, if it was a song. He remembered how Randy would make up nonsense songs, and it occurred to him that children—and maybe retarded people, too—didn’t know that words existed. Maybe they thought words were only sounds, meaningless noises people made back and forth, to pass the day. Or maybe it was the other way around and they thought every sound was a word. And maybe they were right, maybe every sound was a word, and they weren’t speaking nonsense after all.

  Elizabeth’s mother said, “I’ve tried everything, but I can’t get her to budge. She can be very stubborn, you know.”

  Larry opened the door and said, “Elizabeth. It’s time for you to go home.” She stopped singing for a second and looked at him, then opened her purse a crack and peeked in. Then she smiled and started singing again.

  Her mother shook her head. “Who knows what all she’s got in that purse this time. Yesterday I found my missing bottle of perfume in there, and her toothbrush, and a pair of socks. I’d been looking for that perfume for a week.”

  Larry turned to her. “When was the last time you took her somewhere? You know, on a trip.”

  “Oh, once in a while I take her with me to the grocery store. And every other Sunday we go to church. But otherwise—well, you can see how much trouble she can be, and I’m not strong enough to make her behave.”

  “Yes,” Larry said, “I can see that.” Then he looked in at Elizabeth and said, “Where’re you headed today?” Elizabeth babbled excitedly and clapped her hands. “No kidding?” Larry said. “Me, too.” Then he climbed into the front seat and took the wheel in his hands.

  “Mr. Watkins?” the old lady said, clasping the collar of her dress with a bony hand.

  “Don’t worry,” he answered. “I’ll have her back before lunchtime.”

  Every morning after that, Elizabeth spent a few hours in the car, and each day her purse got a little fuller until finally she couldn’t close it anymore. Eventually, Larry began to get up before she did, and he’d be waiting in the limo when she crossed the street, chattering and waggling her arms. She’d sit in the back and he’d sit behind the wheel, watching her in the rearview mirror as she bounced up and down on the seat and pointed out the window at the world passing by. For hours at a time, he didn’t think about Karen or Randy or the threatening letters from the bank and the electric company. He was not happy, but he was not unhappy either. He was Elizabeth’s chauffeur, nothing more, and he just sat there, his mind empty. And it wasn’t until after they’d finished their drive and he’d helped her across the street to her house that he would come back to who and where he was. When that happened, he’d stand there a minute, in her yard or in the street or on his steps, before he could bear to enter his empty house.

  Toward the middle of August, a man came to serve divorce papers on Larry. He started up the walk, then heard strange noises coming from the garage. Crossing the yard to the driveway, he saw the rear end of a car sticking out of the garage. As he reached the door, he saw that the car had been sawn in half and there were two people sitting in it. “What the hell?” he said. Then he called out Larry’s name, but Larry didn’t seem to notice; he just kept looking out the windshield at the garage wall. He was silent, but the woman in the back seat was jabbering in some strange language the process server couldn’t understand. But Larry seemed to understand. He nodded as she spoke, said something back to her, then turned the wheel carefully to the left, as if rounding a dangerous curve.

  FREEZE

  At first Freeze Harris thought Nam was a crazy nightmare, an upside-down place where you were supposed to do everything that was forbidden back in the world, but after a while it was the world that seemed unreal. Cutting ears off dead NVA had become routine; stocking shelves at Kroger’s seemed something he’d only dreamed. Then, on a mission in the Iron Triangle, Freeze stepped on a Bouncing Betty that didn’t go off and nothing seemed real anymore. It was like he’d stepped out of Nam when he stepped on the mine. And now he wasn’t anywhere.

  The day after Freeze stepped on the mine, the new brown-bar reported for duty. His name was Reynolds, and from the moment he arrived at Lai Khe, he had it in for Freeze. Freeze had just come in off the line that morning, and he was stumbling drunk outside the bunny club, wearing only his bush hat, sunglasses, and Jockey shorts. He had a bottle of Carling Black Label in one hand and a fragmentation grenade in the other. He was standing there, swaying back and forth, when Reynolds came up to him, his jungle fatigues starched and razor-creased, and stuck his square, government-issue jaw into Freeze’s face. “What the fuck are you doing, soldier?”

  Freeze looked at the brown bar on Reynolds’ collar and saluted with the grenade. “Drinking, sir. Beer, sir.”

  “I’m not blind, Private. I’m talking about the frag.”

  Freeze looked at the grenade. He had pulled the pin after his first six-pack. If he let go of the firing lever, he’d have only four and a half seconds to make out his will. I, Mick Harris, being of unsound mind and body … He laughed.

  There were red blotches on the lieutenant’s white face now. “What’s so funny, hand job?”

  Freeze laughed again. He closed his eyes, woozy, and shrugged his shoulders. “You,” he said. “Me.”

  Reynolds stiffened. “I’m ordering you to dispose of that frag immediately and safely.”

  “Can’t,” Freeze said. “Beer tastes like piss without it.” He raised the bottle to his lips.

  When he lowered it, the lieutenant had disappeared. Freeze looked around but didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he’d never been there. Maybe he’d imagined it all. He took another long drink from the bottle, concentrating on his sweaty fingers gripping the firing lever. His hand was starting to go numb. It was almost like it was dissolving, disappearing. When he finished his drink, he looked at his hand. It was still there.

  As he tilted the bottle back to take another drink, he heard someone say, “Here’s the son of a bitch.” He squinted toward the voice. The brown-bar was back, a sneer on his face. There was another face too, but this one was grinning. It was an MP. He had a harelip that made his grin look like it was splitting his face. Freeze imagined his face cracking like an egg and laughed.

  Then the MP lunged at Freeze, grabbing his hand and twisting it behind his back. The sudden pain made Freeze groan and drop the beer in his other hand. While he looked down at the bottle foaming on the red dirt, the MP pried his fingers open. Then the pain was gone and Freeze looked up. The MP stuck the grenade in Freeze’s face and grinned. “My turn to play with this,” he said.

  Reynolds said, “Cut that shit. Just toss the frag out on the perimeter, then take this soldier to the stockade and let him sleep it off. I’ll deal with him in the morning.” Then he turned and strode away.

  Frigging brown-bar, Freeze thought, and imagined him stepping on a mine and blowing into a hundred pieces.

  Only later, after the harelip had hauled him to the stockade and asked him his name, company, platoon, and squad, did Freeze find out that the brown-bar was his new platoon leader. “Your ass is gonna be grass come morning,” the MP said, laughing. “Reynolds, he’s your new LT.” But Freeze didn’t care. What could the bastard do to him? Send him to Nam? All he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and dream. When he woke up, everything would be clear again, everything would be back to normal.

  But the next morning he felt worse. He’d been dreaming about a mummy
he’d seen in a museum when he was a kid. The mummy was the color of caramel, and in his dream he’d broken off one of its toes and taken a bite. Then a gum-chewing guard woke him, and for a moment he thought the guard had taken a bite too. “Feeling all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, Private?” another voice said, and Freeze turned toward it: Reynolds, grinning.

  The lieutenant tossed some wrinkled fatigues onto Freeze’s cot. “Get up and get dressed,” he said. “You’ve got a party to go to, and you’re the guest of honor.” Then he told Freeze that he and Konieczny were to report to the privies by 0700 for shit-burning detail.

  Freeze sat up slowly, his head heavy and aching. “Konieczny?” he said.

  Konieczny was the big, red-haired recruit just off the bus from Bien Hoa. It was bad enough to put him in the stockade, but to treat him like that twink Konieczny … He’d spent ten months in-country—ten fucking months—and he’d walked point for the first three. Nobody in his company had walked point that long, and they gave him a badge just for having survived. And now this new brown-bar was treating him like a goddamn twink.

  “That’s right. Since he’s a new recruit, I thought you could teach him some of the finer points of shit-burning. Now chop-chop,” Reynolds said, then turned and left.

  “You heard the man,” the guard said, then went back to chewing his gum.

  Freeze watched the guard chew. Eat death, he thought, and smiled to himself. Chew that gristle down.

  He tried to stand then, but his head was pounding so hard he sat back on the cot with a moan. He stayed there, dizzy, for a moment, then stood slowly and dressed. Each movement made his head throb.

  When Freeze finished tying his boots, the guard escorted him back to barracks. Though it was still early, it was already so hot that Freeze’s shirt had soaked through by the time they got there. The guard said, “Enjoy your party,” and left. Freeze opened the screen door and went inside. It wasn’t much cooler in the hootch. All the men were shirtless, but their chests were still wet with sweat. Some of them had pulled their footlockers out into the middle of the wooden plank floor and were sitting on them playing cards and drinking Cokes or smoking joints. A few were lying on their racks reading magazines or letters. Others were talking and laughing about some photograph they were passing around. When they looked up and saw Freeze, they went quiet for a moment. Then Jackson put down his cards and said, “You okay, man?”