Crossing Over
Page 3
Reassigned to hospital duty to wait out my enlistment, and I feel as if I have no idea where I am. Only that it is not where I was. I pretend to be on specified duties as I wander the floors and grounds. On the fourth floor is a man who lost his bladder to a shrapnel fragment; he wears a plastic bag tied to his waist by a brocade cord. He cheerfully empties the bag twice daily. On the second floor is a man with both legs gone. He operates the hospital’s basement games of chance and has made over thirteen thousand dollars in five months. He has no idea why he is still here but has no desire to leave. A sailor missing half his face has transferred to the psychiatric unit to avoid discharge. There is a man on the sixth floor who happened to be too near a Claymore mine on a particularly bad day, when he lost his right foot, testicles, and penis. A bald priest visits this hospital which is in his parish, extending the warm greetings of the Holy Trinity. I stand alone at windows watching the Pacific’s sheen, pelicans slicing out of the sun. It is the bright calm of North America, the coast of California, the city of San Francisco: arbored streets and hillside parks and the laughter of children, a broad and open light.
There was a time when I kept thinking of floating over a planet and being sucked into its face, like watching a kiss coming. I remember, once before leaving a helicopter the crew chief said They won’t have time to turn around twice out there. He didn’t think anybody heard him. I don’t know why I did. That night I tried to sleep on an ammo chest in one of the harshest storms we knew, assuming it was my last mission. Now I pass time, unaccounted for. In the emergency room I see a black girl with blood on her face, surrounded by white coats. I ride the elevator thinking of swimming in the bay below the hospital, imagining its water might domesticate my skin. Once, I remind myself, I had wanted to say something true about love.
Bus to the downtown terminal, AWOL from the hospital and still in uniform. Cross the street and step over a chain into a parking lot where two overweight whores argue with a man in a yellow hat with white feathers, the three huddled beside a pink Chrysler Imperial. The engine’s running, radio up inside the car: Four Tops. Sugar pie honey bunch. Don’t you know that I love you?
Beyond the parking lot The House of Joy, Cupid’s Corner, Vixen’s, the Adonis Film Club, neon humming and rippling at one-thirty in the afternoon. Walking toward Market Street, a man in an American Legion hat stops me. He’s wearing sunglasses that reflect my face back to me: he nods and extends his hand. Welcome home son he says. All I can see in his face is my face, cautious and older, looking at me as if I’m a stranger. I don’t know you I say.
The Strand Theatre, an old man trussed in an ancient coat and tie inside the smeared box office. Three movies for a dollar and the old man creaks forward with a ticket ripped from a yellow roll.
The theatre’s nearly empty, somebody toward the back smoking reefer. I sit midway down, the movie in progress with Jack Webb in the title role as a marine drill sergeant with redeeming qualities. The scene is emotional, Webb in dress blues at a bar, filled with regret.
I dream heavily, faces washing out or blowing off like leaves edging out of season, singers muted by whatever it is they know but won’t tell me. Now I’m following, calling for them to wait. They turn a corner and I’m alone until they emerge somewhere behind me. I turn back to find them and wake with a start, lace of marijuana still in the theatre. I blink into the screen’s light, stiff-necked. Another movie and Steve McQueen looks to be sixteen: he’s talking about how The Blob is going to eat the whole country. Maybe even the world.
Itried to write letters home. I wanted to talk about what I saw and felt, what it tasted like, the unfortunate things I had learned about human beings. Most of my letters went unfinished. Plain truth seemed fantastic, frankly unbelievable. Or simply brutal without good reasons. Everybody’s life, I told myself, was hard enough already; they had no need to hear how I spent the last years of my boyhood, high-strung with weaponry in a distant jungle. I knew that after the war nothing in my life would feel true for a long time to come, except perhaps my imagination, the private life my imagination might carry, aside from me, beyond me. I was convinced that, in the end, nothing could be explained unless I talked about the smell of rain at night, or the sight of a farmer’s face before his pig flock was mutilated by machine-gun fire, or the single glance into the doorway of a thatch-blaze when I saw the figure inside moving and on fire and knew it was too late, too late, always too late.
Strung up by a hind leg on a
vanquished year, wind stiff around my neck
and disappearing up there in the leaves.
Never thought I’d feel old
but that’s the chance you take, blowing
the pipes clear, the one clean line
burning your hands.
Blood under the bridge.
Forget it someone says, touching my shoulder.
You’re home now.
It’s springtime.
Richard Currey is the author of two story collections and two novels, a body of work accorded numerous honors including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (in both fiction and poetry), the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Special Citation of the Hemingway Foundation, the Pratt Library of Baltimore’s “Face to Face” Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Daugherty Award in the Humanities from the State of West Virginia. His fiction has been widely anthologized, appearing in O. Henry and Best American Short Story collections, performed on stage at Symphony Space in New York and on National Public Radio, and translated into 11 languages. A West Virginia native, Currey now lives in the Washington, D.C. area.