Threading her fingers through his hair, she said, “I love you, Steven, and it is truly a wonderment.”
“I’ve felt so damned used up for so long, and here you come along and—wham, I’ve got all this, I don’t know, this tentative hope, like maybe I can make everything all right again. It’s scary.”
“I don’t think you’re scared of anything.”
His hand slid along the swell of her hip and settled there.
An outrageous urge exploded through her. To tell him she would stay if he would. Tell him their love was all there was. All there needed to be. Why not? Why not grab this happiness for the time it might last? But she didn’t, for it was much more complicated than that. Young people had the luxury of thinking that way. People like her and Steven did not because they had come to understand consequences.
“In ’Nam, everyone believed in something, you know? We had this prayer we said, every time it got quiet, just before all hell would bust loose. You get to where you can tell when death’s about to rain down. It’s in the air. A smell, an absence of sound, of life, a feeling…Christ, even a taste, brackish and nasty on your tongue. Or maybe that’s just your own fear. Anyway, when that happened I’d ask for only one thing. I never got over being amazed when He let me have it. Makes me think now I should have made a list of stuff I wanted.” He chuckled but sounded uneasy.
Out of the blue she remembered all the times she and Reudell had gotten down on their knees with a list of things they wanted to ask of the Lord. Praying them off like the two of them were the only ones in the world with needs. And such petty ones at that. “We just ask that it rains on the soybean crop. We just ask the well doesn’t go dry. We just ask the cattle don’t come down with the bangs. We just ask and ask and ask some more.” The word “just” inserted to make it seem like only a small request easily granted.
And all that time they were on their knees, all those young men were dying in Southeast Asia, Steven over there risking his life, and she and Reudell praying it would rain on their soybean crop.
Loosening her fist in Steven’s hair, she rubbed his head gently. “Your prayer, what was it?” An errant finger of sunlight drew a halo around his pale hair, and she experienced an intense gratitude that he had lived through the horror of war.
He repeated the prayer softly. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die... When I die... Please let me die. Please God, don’t let me die.”
As if embarrassed, he cleared his throat and chuckled. “Wonder He could figure out what I really wanted, huh?”
Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and trickled over her face. “Shadow said you don’t think you can die, and that’s why you do the things you do.”
“Huh. Well, I guess he’s right. But I changed my mind.”
“Oh, when? Why?”
He stirred, turned to lie beside her so he could look into her eyes. Ran a thumb up the line of her jaw and cupped the side of her face. “Once you have something to lose, why, then’s when you know for the first time that you can actually die. Cruel, isn’t it? But exhilarating at the same time.”
Warmth and joy rushed through her, making her want to sing, to whoop and shout, to laugh and cry, all at once. “I do love you, Steven.”
“Yeah, ain’t that something? Makes every day a challenge. An offering.”
Sometimes she wasn’t sure she understood him at all, but when he moved to gather her close she put her arms around his neck, feeling as she never had before, believed she never would. This most precious gift of love exalted her, raised her above and beyond fear and guilt. And despite all her vows to the contrary, she thanked his God deep within her heart, and took Steven inside herself with a bright and clean reverence.
Later they dressed, wandered away from the clearing, in an unspoken agreement to spend this final day alone together. Away from the others. Holding hands like young lovers, they strolled through the woods, across the meadows, circled back again, stopping once in a while to sit in the shade, pluck flowers. And all the while talking, laughing together.
“We could stay together,” he said more than once.
“Yes, I know,” she replied each time.
Finally, she told him, “I’ll write sometime, if you’ll let me know where you are.”
“What will he think?”
“He?” Surprised, as if she didn’t know.
“Your husband. You are going back to him.”
“Yes.”
“I wish I understood why.”
“To show him, and the others and myself, that I can survive as a real person, and not as they would have me be. It would be easy to exist in a different place, having thrown off my shackles. If it weren’t for the guilt I feel, that is. I have to prove I can do it there. I have to show them the world is not evil, and they should at least take a look before it’s too late. How can I have learned such a wonderful thing and not at least try to share it?”
“They won’t, you know. Accept it, I mean. So why not just remain free?”
“Because I won’t be truly free until they all know I am. I knew I couldn’t explain it. If I understood it better I guess I could tell you what I mean. Everything, everybody, all I’ve ever known is there. It’s home. A place that needs to know me. The me I truly am.”
He stood, pulled her up from their place under a hickory tree. “It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is what happened to us, what set us both on a new path. And I guess it’s pretty dumb to try to analyze it. Hey, wanta go swimming? It’s hotter than blue blazes out here. I’ll race you.”
Fingering the snap at his waistband, he ran off toward the creek, letting out a rebel yell that echoed back off the mountains like a gang of invisible banshees. Laughing, she ran after him.
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow they would say all that was left to say and part. Memory of this glorious day and those few that had gone before would have to suffice, maybe for a lifetime. That and the knowing that everything would be fine for both of them. If they had done nothing else for each other, they had made the future possible.
That evening the four of them lay around the campfire, in a darkness that fell like a gauzy curtain. Shadow rose, began to fiddle with the lantern.
“Leave it,” Lefty ordered.
“Ain’t gone sit in the dark, man.” His black-man mode affected the velvety tone.
Steven sensed something bad was coming but felt helpless to stop it. Maybe it was time he let go the need to care for these two misfits.
“I said, you little black shit, leave it.”
“I ain’t no damn nigger you can mistreat.” The softness of his words only made the statement more threatening.
Shadow finished lighting the lantern and hung it on a tree. “You just resent me ’cause I didn’t fight in your damn war.”
“Bullshit! It the woman come between us all, and now just lookit what happened. You don’t ever talk back to me before, now just lookit. Goddamned women are all the same.”
“You Cajun swamp runner. Just ’cause your old lady run off with some queer with an earring in his ear and a ponytail flopping on his butt don’t mean all women is trouble. This is between me and you. Got nothing to do with her.” He swung an arm toward Liz.
Raising to the tips of his toes, Lefty stuck out his chest and bumped Shadow enough to send him stumbling backward.
In one smooth movement, Steven came off the ground and inserted himself between the two men. He’d meant to stay out of it, thinking they’d yell a while and subside, but this was different and they were about to come to blows. The Cajun would turn around twice and mop up the place. And he might not stop with Shadow.
“Come on, you two. That’s enough. Let’s sit down and discuss this, clear the air. We don’t want to fight.”
Lefty bobbed his head at Steven, though his eyes still shouted fight. “Yassah, boss. Whatever you say, boss. We always listen to you. Me and the little black boy here.”
Shadow scrabbled t
o crawl over Steven to get at Lefty.
“Okay. Enough.” Steven shouted and shoved him off. “Or should I turn you both loose and let you kill each other?”
Lefty locked gazes with him for a long, tense moment. Of the two, Steven knew he’d have a harder time subduing the angry Cajun and someone would get hurt. Though he backed off, Lefty wasn’t yet ready to let it go.
“You pulled me outa there, saved my life, and that made you a hero. Why, man? I needed to die. You should’ve left me there.” He hit his chest so hard the thud echoed. “And what do I get for it? This, just this. A goddamned heart that won’t stop beating. So some worthless woman could kick me in the balls, and you—you could do this to me. Well, go on, leave me for this, this... She fix you good, sooner ’n later. See if she don’t.”
Steven said nothing, but in the lantern’s light, Liz saw the skin around his mouth tighten and etch rigid lines to the corners of his eyes. She wanted to touch him, ease the tension, make him smile again in the way he had that could fracture her heart. But she didn’t. Instead, she squinted at them each in turn, thinking that even in the midst of their anger they already looked unreal, as if their images were vanishing from her memory. She experienced a moment of panic. That must never happen, especially not with Steven.
Her thoughts intruded on the action, and she didn’t notice what Steven was doing until Lefty shouted. Steven had gone down on his knees, searched through his tattered pack, tossing the odds and ends of his life in all directions. Finally he came up with a small black box, pawed it open, spilling out papers and several pieces of what looked like jewelry of some kind, which he tossed into the fire.
“What’s a hero, anyway?” he shouted. You tell me, Lefty. I ain’t no hero, and you know it. The real heroes died.”
She’d never heard such pathos in his voice, not even at his worst, but before she could attempt to console him, Shadow lunged at the fire, scratched the smoldering pieces out into the dirt and smothered little tendrils of smoke and fire coming off them.
“You can’t throw away your medals, man. Don’t do that. You earned ’em, you almost died. Think what this country did to you, man. The least they owed you was these. Look at this, man. ‘For bravery above and beyond the call of duty.’ How many of us can be brave beyond what anyone expects, least of all ourselves? Lookit this—Silver Star, Bronze Star, Medal of Honor. A Medal of Honor, man, don’t belong in no fire.”
Lefty had gone stone silent, remained out of reach like he was someplace else.
Still kneeling in the dirt, Steven dragged in a ragged breath. On legs that trembled, she went to him, laid a hand on his shoulder. The heat of his anger fled and the muscles relaxed under her touch. Crazily, he began to shake and she thought he was crying.
“You know what I wanted to do?” he asked, and she knew then that he was laughing. “I had every intention of going right straight to D.C. after they let me out of the hospital and cramming those right up Nixon’s ass.”
“Oh, shoot, no,” Shadow murmured. “What stopped you?”
“Jennie. Jennie came along and stopped me, and I somehow never got around to it after that.”
Nobody said anything. Wood popped and crackled and an errant breeze shifted smoke over them, then away again. Lefty coughed.
“She said I was the craziest bastard she ever knew, and then she walked. Well, not really walked. She drove her old man’s Cadillac right out across that goddamned Texas prairie, headed back to Coleman fucking Colorado, and left me laying around the shack we called home, counting my fingers and toes and my goddamned medals.”
“Well, Christ, man,” Lefty bellowed. “You sure are one close-mouthed son of a bitch. How long we been riding together? Five, six years? Hell, who knows? And not once did you say about how this woman done such a thing to you. Hell, we coulda talked. I tole you about my Joelle, the bitch, and not once ever did you come back with, ‘Hey, sure, ole buddy, same thing happened to me once.’ How come? That just about makes me mad, ole son.”
“Well, shit. Just about everything makes you mad, don’t it?” Steven said.
Everyone sort of laughed, if you could call it that, and they all settled down around the fire. Steven gathered up the papers he’d spilled out, and Shadow wiped at the medals with the tail of his shirt. Liz felt almost as if they didn’t know she was there. A camaraderie had redeveloped, yet within its perimeter lurked the promise of parting. It was like they were going to get everything cleared away before saying goodbye. All of them, not just her and Steven. She felt it, wondered if they did, wondered if it was just her imagination because she so wanted Steven to break away from this drifting life, from Lefty’s influence.
No matter. She intended to let them get everything said and done without interference, and she sensed it was going to be a long, long night.
Chapter Sixteen
Gaze glued to the medals Shadow had dragged from the hot coals, Liz was vaguely aware of the patient silence of Lefty and Steven. Like a ceremony, Shadow lined each one up on the edge of a blanket, precisely and with reverence. Their expressions of awe masked any thoughts they might have had. It was as if they had turned themselves inward, closed off their minds to the outside world, and traveled to some other place.
At long last, Steven touched a finger tip to the Medal of Honor and broke the silence. “I don't even remember what I did to earn this. The whole time in ’Nam was a vivid memory of death and blood, killing and dying. I came back to life hiking out across the western plains. The frags in my back still ached like a son of a bitch. It’s an awful feeling to know you have no home, no one to go home to. Forces you to concentrate on all the ills of the world, most especially how they affect you.
“She was the first pretty thing I saw. As I recall, when she came along, I was deep in a conversation with myself about what I would do to get even with every living soul in the universe.” He glanced up, grinned tightly. “And where I wanted to put them, these worthless pieces of pot metal and ribbons. So I didn’t hear the car. But I saw her, like out of a dream, when she pulled up alongside, kept that long, shiny red Cadillac barely rolling. Shades on her eyes, aimed right at me. She’s wearing a dress as gold as butter, with hair like whipped cream, and she lifted those crazy glasses to show me eyes the color of gingerbread.”
Steven laughed and they all joined him.
“Easy to see what your mind was on,” Shadow said.
“Yeah, here she is sitting there in all her womanly glory, and I haven’t fu—had me a woman in recent memory, and all I can think of is food. Fool that I am.”
“Maybe you just forgot, you, what a woman was for, all that time without,” Lefty said. “I can’t figure how she stopped and picked you up. A sorry-looking thing like you was then.”
“Well, she did. Probably thought I was a stray dog, or the closest thing to one she might find in the middle of the desert. What’s truly amazing is that we stayed together nearly two years. We got married in Oklahoma. At one of those mills, you know? No questions asked, no waiting period. Just fork over a few bucks, sign a paper, and you’re hitched. I couldn’t keep a job and she was used to her old man’s money. Turns out she’d just run off for a little excitement in her dull, rich-girl life. Planned to go home when she ran out of dough. And boy, did I give her all the excitement she needed, and then some. Too bad, though, she didn’t return the favor. That little gal was so terrified of sex it was sad, man. Sporting a body sexier than any dream I’d ever had, and her cute innocent little ways. She’d get me all hot and then wouldn’t or couldn’t come across. She wanted it bad till she got it. Know what I mean? I was no kind of man for her to hook up with. Not too patient in that department. Finally it got to where I didn't want it either.” He looked at Liz, a slight smile curling his lips.
Mesmerized by the fire, she felt his gaze light on her and probe deeply. She glanced at him, then away. The expression on his face, it was like looking into his soul, and she couldn’t take much of it.
“I put
up with that just so long,” he continued. “I begged, pleaded, made all kinds of promises I wasn’t about to keep till she did it with me. And by then I wanted her so bad and was so mad at her for making me feel that way, I guess I just forgot myself altogether. I was all over her like some kind of animal. She couldn’t a stopped me if she’d wanted. And I reckon she did, but she took it. I’ll give her that. Took it and hated my guts ever after.”
Shadow stirred, murmured, “That be a bad way to go, man.”
With a rude sound, Steven continued. “Have to give it to her, though. She hung around longer than I had any right to expect. I didn’t touch her any more, but I decided if I couldn’t have sex, I’d have the next best thing. Found me a connection for acid, and weed jazzed with angel dust. I was a friggin’ mess, and it’s a good thing she left when she did. Just got in her daddy’s Cadillac and drove off. Left nothing behind but a trail of red Oklahoma dust. ’Fore she was out of sight I busted out all the windows in that shack, prowled around in my bare feet like some damned caged beast, tracked blood all over the floor. Next morning, I left out. Still not sure if I walked or crawled, but I ended up here in these hills and found me a cave. Moved in. Couldn’t hurt anybody but myself any more.”
Lefty spoke up, sounding almost like his old self. “Jesus, good thing I got you out when I did, huh?”
Steven nodded. “Yeah, good thing you did that, old friend.” He lurched to his feet, slapped his hands together. Liz jumped and returned to the present. In the telling, he’d taken her with him until she could almost imagine his world.
“Hey, how about beers all around?”
Shadow unfolded himself. “I put ’em in the creek when the ice melted. I’ll fetch ’em. Liz, want one?”
It was difficult to picture Steven as the mad stranger he’d spoken of, harder still to pull herself out of his narrative and back to reality, so it took her a moment to reply.
“What? Oh, well, yes, I think I will. Maybe if I try hard enough I can get to like the nasty stuff.”
Once There Were Sad Songs Page 22