by Andre Dubus
‘He was a mean little fart from Baltimore. Nobody harassed him about his name. He took whatever was left of his squad to that box, and all but two of them bought it. Then I was running with a flamethrower on my back. If you can call that running.’
‘Where did you get the flamethrower?’
‘The guy with it was next to me, and he was dead. So I put it on and moved out.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It was easier than Brimmer’s because he had knocked out the one on their left. I had more fresh air than he did.’
‘Not much.’
‘I can remember doing it, but it’s like somebody told me I did it, and that’s why I remember. The way it can be after a bad drunk. I don’t remember what I felt just before, or what I thought. I remember getting the flamethrower off him and onto me, and that should have taken a while, but it doesn’t seem like it. I remember running, but I don’t remember hearing anything, not with all those weapons firing, and I don’t remember getting there. I was there, and then I burned them. They must have made sounds, but I only remember the smell.’
‘Was that when you were wounded?’
‘No. That was the next day.’
‘I wish I had been there.’
‘No you don’t. The Navy dropped us in deep water—’
‘I know.’
‘Dead troops bobbing in it and lying on the reef and the beach. Fuck Tarawa.’
He opened his eyes to the sun, and squinted away from it at the sky. A hawk glided toward the earth, veered away, and climbed west over the ridge.
‘You reflected the sun this morning,’ he said. ‘That’s how I saw you.’
‘My watch.’
He looked at the chrome band on Phil’s wrist.
‘Goddamn it, leave that civilian shit at home and get one from supply.’
‘It’s in my room.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Okay, Captain.’
He closed his eyes, listening to Phil’s breathing. The sun on his face woke him, and he stiffened and pressed his palms against the ground, then knew where he was. Phil was gone. He stood, wiping sweat from his eyes; Phil leaned against the back of the jeep, eating a plum.
‘Have some fruit.’
Harry took a peach from the pack and stood beside him.
‘Do you want to swap ridges?’ Phil said.
‘Not unless you do.’
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Mine’s like home now.’
‘We’ll probably get back here around six. Thirty minutes to the camp to sign out. Then about forty.’
‘Plenty of time. I make it in under three hours. ’Course, there’s always the Jesus factor.’
‘Like getting a deer.’
‘If we do, I’ll help you clean it.’
‘And rake it home with you.’
‘Right.’
‘All set?’
‘Need my hogleg.’
He took the rifle from the back seat and slung it from his shoulder.
‘How do you like the .308?’ Phil said.
‘It’s good.’
‘Have you zeroed it in?’
‘Not this year.’
They walked into the valley and up the hard, cracked earth of the stream bed to the pine trees, and stood in their shade.
‘I like the smell of pine,’ Harry said. ‘Up there I can smell the ocean. Did you see it this morning, when the sun came up?’
‘Beautiful.’
‘Now we get the sunset. Ready?’
‘I’m off.’
‘Take care, then.’
‘You too.’
They turned from each other and Harry walked out of the trees, into the sunlight, then he lengthened his stride toward the ridge.
Sorrowful Mysteries
WHEN GERRY FONTENOT is five, Six, and seven years old, he likes to ride in the car with his parents. It is a grey 1938 Chevrolet and it has a ration stamp on the windshield. Since the war started when Gerry was five, his father has gone to work on a bicycle, and rarely drives the car except to Sunday Mass, and to go hunting and fishing. Gerry fishes with him, from the bank of the bayou. They fish with bamboo poles, corks, sinkers, and worms, and catch perch and catfish. His father wears a .22 revolver at his side, for cottonmouths. In the fall Gerry goes hunting with him, crouches beside him in ditches bordering fields, and when the doves fly, his father stands and fires the twelve-gauge pump, and Gerry marks where the birds fall, then runs out into the field where they lie, and gathers them. They are soft and warm as he runs with them, back to his father. This is in southern Louisiana, and twice he and his father see an open truck filled with German prisoners, going to work in the sugar cane fields.
He goes on errands with his mother. He goes to grocery stores, dime stores, drugstores, and shopping for school clothes in the fall, and Easter clothes in the spring, and to the beauty parlor, where he likes to sit and watch the women. Twice a week he goes with her to the colored section, where they leave and pick up the week’s washing and ironing. His mother washes at home too: the bedclothes, socks, underwear, towels, and whatever else does not have to be ironed. She washes these in a wringer washing machine; he likes watching her feed the clothes into the wringer, and the way they come out flattened and drop into the basket. She hangs them on the clothesline in the backyard, and Gerry stands at the basket and hands them to her so she will not have to stoop. On rainy days she dries them inside on racks, which in winter she places in front of space heaters. She listens to the weather forecasts on the radio, and most of the time is able to wash on clear days.
The Negro woman washes the clothes that must be ironed, or starched and ironed. In front of the woman’s unpainted wooden house, Gerry’s mother presses the horn, and the large woman comes out and takes the basket from the back seat. Next day, at the sound of the horn, she brings out the basket. It is filled with ironed, folded skirts and blouses, and across its top lie dresses and shirts on hangers. Gerry opens the window his mother has told him to close as they approached the colored section with its dusty roads. He smells the clean, ironed clothes, pastels and prints, and his father’s white and pale blue, and he looks at the rutted dirt road, the unpainted wood and rusted screens of the houses, old cars in front of them and tire swings hanging from trees over the worn and packed dirt yards, dozens of barefoot, dusty children stopping their play to watch him and his mother in the car, and the old slippers and dress the Negro woman wears, and he breathes her smell of sweat, looks at her black and brown hand crossing him to take the dollar from his mother’s fingers.
On Fridays in spring and summer, Leonard comes to mow the lawn. He is a Negro, and has eight children, and Gerry sees him only once between fall and spring, when he comes on Christmas Eve, and Gerry’s father and mother give him toys and clothes that Gerry and his three older sisters have outgrown, a bottle of bourbon, one of the fruit cakes Gerry’s mother makes at Christmas, and five dollars. Leonard receives these at the back door, where on Fridays, in spring and summer, he is paid and fed. The Fontenots eat dinner at noon, and Gerry’s mother serves Leonard a plate and a glass of iced tea with leaves from the mint she grows under the faucet behind the house. She calls him from the back steps, and he comes, wiping his brow with a bandanna, and takes his dinner to the shade of a sycamore tree. From his place at the dining room table, Gerry watches him sit on the grass and take off his straw hat; he eats, then rolls a cigarette. When he has smoked, he brings his plate and glass to the back door, knocks, and hands them to who-ever answers. His glass is a jelly glass, his plate blue china, and his knife and fork stainless steel. From Friday to Friday the knife and fork lie at one side of a drawer, beside the compartments that hold silver; the glass is nearly out of reach, at the back of the second shelf in the cupboard for glasses; the plate rests under serving bowls in the china cupboard. Gerry’s mother has told him and his sisters not to use them, they are Leonard’s, and from Friday to Friday, they sit, and from fall to spring, and finally forever when one ye
ar Gerry is strong enough to push the lawn mower for his allowance, and Leonard comes only when Gerry’s father calls him every Christmas Eve.
Before that, when he is eight, Gerry has stopped going on errands with his mother. On Saturday afternoons he walks or, on rainy days, rides the bus to town with neighborhood boys, to the movie theater where they watch westerns and the weekly chapter of a serial. He stands in line on the sidewalk, holding his quarter that will buy a ticket, a bag of popcorn, and, on the way home, an ice-cream soda. Opposite his line, to the right of the theater as you face it, are the Negro boys. Gerry does not look at them. Or not directly: he glances, he listens, as a few years later he will do with girls when he goes to movies that draw them. The Negroes enter through the door marked Colored, where he supposes a Negro woman sells tickets, then climb the stairs to the balcony, and Gerry wonders whether someone sells them popcorn and candy and drinks up there, or imagines them smelling all the bags of popcorn in the dark beneath them. Then he watches the cartoon and previews of next Saturday’s movie, and he likes them but is waiting for the chapter of the serial whose characters he and his friends have played in their yards all week; they have worked out several escapes for the trapped hero and, as always, they are wrong. He has eaten his popcorn when the credits for the movie appear, then a tall man rides a beautiful black or white or palomino horse across the screen. The movie is black and white, but a palomino looks as golden and lovely as the ones he has seen in parades. Sitting in the dark, he is aware of his friends on both sides of him only as feelings coincident with his own: the excitement of becoming the Cisco Kid, Durango Kid, Red Ryder, the strongest and best-looking, the most courageous and good, the fastest with horse and fists and gun. Then it is over, the lights are on, he turns to his friends, flesh again, stands to leave, then remembers the Negroes. He blinks up at them standing at the balcony wall, looking down at the white boys pressed together in the aisle, moving slowly out of the theater. Sometimes his eyes meet those of a Negro boy, and Gerry smiles; only one ever smiles back.
In summer he and his friends go to town on weekday afternoons to see war movies, or to buy toy guns or baseballs, and when he meets Negroes on the sidewalk, he averts his eyes; but he watches them in department stores, bending over water fountains marked Colored, and when they enter the city buses and walk past him to the rear, he watches them, and during the ride he glances, and listens to their talk and laughter. One hot afternoon when he is twelve, he goes with a friend to deliver the local newspaper in the colored section. He has not been there since riding with his mother, who has not gone for years either; now the city buses stop near his neighborhood, and a Negro woman comes on it and irons the family’s clothes in their kitchen. He goes that afternoon because his friend has challenged him. They have argued: they both have paper routes, and when his friend complained about his, Gerry said it was easy work. Sure, his friend said, you don’t have to hold your breath. You mean when you collect? No, man, when I just ride through. So Gerry finishes his route, then goes with his friend: a bicycle ride of several miles ending, or beginning, at a neighborhood of poor whites, their houses painted but peeling, their screened front porches facing lawns so narrow that only small children can play catch in them; the older boys and girls play tapeball on the blacktop street. Gerry and his friends play that, making a ball of tape around a sock, and hitting with a baseball bat, but they have lawns big enough to contain them. Gerry’s father teaches history at the public high school, and in summer is a recreation director for children in the city park, and some nights in his bed Gerry hears his father and mother worry about money; their voices are weary, and frighten him. But riding down this street, he feels shamefully rich, wants the boys and girls pausing in their game to know he only has a new Schwinn because he saved his money to buy it.
He and his friend jolt over the railroad tracks, and the blacktop ends. Dust is deep in the road. They ride past fields of tall grass and decaying things: broken furniture, space heaters, stoves, cars. Negro children are in the fields. Then they come to the streets of houses, turn onto the first one, a rutted and dusty road, and breathe the smell. It is as tangible as the dust a car raises to Gerry’s face as it bounces past him, its unmuffled exhaust pipe sounding like gunfire, and Gerry feels that he enters the smell, as you enter a cloud of dust; and a hard summer rain, with lightning and thunder, would settle it, and the air would smell of grass and trees. Its base is sour, as though in the heat of summer someone has half-filled a garbage can with milk, then dropped in citrus fruit and cooked rice and vegetables and meat and fish, mattress ticking and a pillow, covered it, and left it for a week in the July sun. In this smell children play in the street and on the lawns that are dirt too, dust, save for strips of crisp-looking yellowish grass in the narrow spaces between houses, and scattered patches near the porches. He remembers the roads and houses and yards from riding with his mother, but not the smell, for even in summer they had rolled up the windows. Or maybe her perfume and cigarettes had fortified the car against the moment the laundry woman would open the back door, or reach through the window for her dollar; but he wonders now if his mother wanted the windows closed only to keep out dust. Women and men sit on the front porches, as Gerry and his friend slowly ride up the road, and his friend throws triangular-folded papers onto the yards, where they skip in rising dust.
It is late afternoon, and he can smell cooking too: hot grease and meat, turnip or mustard greens, and he hears talk and laughter from the shaded porches. Everything seems to be dying: cars and houses and tar paper roofs in the weather, grass in the sun; sparse oaks and pines and weeping willows draw children and women with babies to their shade; beneath the hanging tent of a willow, an old man sits with two crawling children wearing diapers, and Gerry remembers Leonard eating in the shade of the sycamore. Gerry’s father still phones Leonard on Christmas Eve, and last year he went home with the electric train Gerry has outgrown, along with toy soldiers and cap pistols and Saturday serials and westerns, a growth that sometimes troubles him: when he was nine and ten and saw that other neighborhood boys stopped going to the Saturday movies when they were twelve or thirteen, he could not understand why something so exciting was suddenly not, and he promised himself that he would always go on Saturdays, although he knew he would not, for the only teenaged boy who did was odd and frightening: he was about eighteen, and in his voice and eyes was the desperation of a boy lying to a teacher, and he tried to sit between Gerry and his friends, and once he did before they could close the gap, and all through the movie he tried to rub Gerry’s thigh, and Gerry whispered Stop it, and pushed at the wrist, the fingers. So he knew a time would come when he would no longer love his heroes and their horses, and it saddened him to know that such love could not survive mere time. It did not, and that is what troubles him, when he wonders if his love of baseball and football and hunting and fishing and bicycles will die too, and wonders what he will love then.
He looks for Leonard as he rides down the road, where some yards are bordered with colored and clear bottles, half-buried with bottoms up to the sun. In others a small rectangle of flowers grows near the porch, and the smell seems to come from the flowers too, and the trees. He wants to enter one of those houses kept darkened with shades drawn against the heat, wants to trace and define that smell, press his nose to beds and sofas and floor and walls, the bosom of a woman, the chest of a man, the hair of a child. Breathing through his mouth, swallowing his nausea, he looks at his friend and sees what he knows is on his face as well: an expression of sustained and pallid horror.
On summer mornings the neighborhood boys play baseball. One of the fathers owns a field behind his house; he has mowed it with a tractor, and built a backstop of two-by-fours and screen, laid out an infield with a pitcher’s mound, and put up foul poles at the edge of the tall weeds that surround the outfield. The boys play every rainless morning except Sunday, when all but the two Protestants go to Mass. They pitch slowly so they can hit the ball, and so the catcher, w
ith only a mask, will not get hurt. But they pitch from a windup, and try to throw curves and knuckleballs, and sometimes they play other neighborhood teams who loan their catcher shin guards and chest protector, then the pitchers throw hard.
One morning a Negro boy rides his bicycle past the field, on the dirt road behind the backstop; he holds a fishing pole across the handlebars, and is going toward the woods beyond left field, and the bayou that runs wide and muddy through the trees. A few long innings later, he comes back without fish, and stops to watch the game. Standing, holding his bicycle, he watches two innings. Then, as Gerry’s team is trotting in to bat, someone calls to the boy: Do you want to play? In the infield and outfield, and near home plate, voices stop. The boy looks at the pause, the silence, then nods, lowers his kickstand, and slowly walks onto the field.
‘You’re with us,’ someone says. ‘What do you play?’
‘I like first.’
That summer, with eight dollars of his paper route money, Gerry has bought a first-baseman’s glove: a Rawlings Trapper, because he liked the way it looked, and felt on his hand, but he is not a good first baseman: he turns his head away from throws that hit the dirt in front of his reaching glove and bounce toward his body, his face. He hands the glove to the boy.
‘Use this. I ought to play second anyway.’
The boy puts his hand in the Trapper, thumps its pocket, turns his wrist back and forth, looking at the leather that is still a new reddish brown. Boys speak their names to him. His is Clay. They give him a place in the batting order, point to the boy he follows.
He is tall, and at the plate he takes a high stride and a long, hard swing. After his first hit, the outfield plays him deeply, at the edge of the weeds that are the boys’ fence, and the infielders back up. At first base he is often clumsy, kneeling for ground balls, stretching before an infielder has thrown so that some balls nearly go past or above him; he is fearless, though, and none of the bouncing throws from third and deep short go past his body. He does not talk to any one boy, but from first he calls to the pitcher: Come babe, come boy; calls to infielders bent for ground balls: Plenty time, plenty time, we got him; and, to hitters when Gerry’s team is at bat: Good eye, good eye. The game ends when the twelve o’clock whistle blows.