Strawberry Fields

by Hilary Plum

  No reply.

  I took long walks, by the reservoirs but also downtown to the old mills and the canals, stagnant this season, shopping carts shining in the turbid water. Christmas lights shown from an occasional window, the rest vacant or boarded up.

  I arrived at the local bar each day just before or just after the mailman. I had one beer and sat too long, though no one minded, and I think if I’d ordered a second the bartender, fortyish and sweetly disproportionate, skinny with big fake boobs, wouldn’t have charged me. I could be wrong.

  I should have said something to Modigliani about our five—this is how I thought of them, that they had one family in life, another in death, here we were—something to mark the occasion: the end of their war. But what? If he had an appropriate sentiment he didn’t offer it. I laid their photos out on my bed; I put them away.

  On Christmas day we visited my grandmother: still spry, widowed four years before. Pineapple upside-down cake sat already in squares on small plates when we arrived. How was it that over many decades her parents and her husband had each died the week of Christmas? She was always the first to mention this, which was in its way a relief. On the small fake tree crystal ornaments tinkled with any movement—the enthusiasm of her small dog, any step across the room toward the jar of mint chocolates—and this noise, a peculiar family hymn, had traveled with me from childhood till now. Within a few years all the veterans of World War II would, like my grandfather, be dead, their war passing from memory into myth.

  Before his death he had collected and typed up his letters home, which spanned his time in training through a year in the European theater. Each child and grandchild had received a bound copy. I had begun reading mine, then seemed to have mislaid it in one of my many moves, though I liked to think I was someone who might have an enduring core of possessions. There was probably another copy in this house, if I wished to find it. Although, after all, the war had been only a few years of his life. And other than a few reconnaissance photographs—an avid amateur, he’d thought up a new way to take photos from artillery observation planes, in the one I knew best Dresden still smoldered, spire of the devastated cathedral in the foreground, around it roofs and walls everywhere destroyed, definition softened by smoke and ash—as far as I could tell his role was of no consequence to history.

  Edie

  I was the one who looked after the dogs.

  The dogs showed up like strays and lurked like strays, but two had plump bellies and one a shine that fur can only be brushed to. It was my suspicion that folks were saving on doggy daycare, leading their pups down to the encampment when they went off to work and maybe not bothering to pick them up again. Figuring that’s the sort of people we were, we’d love what others scorned, fork over our wages to any open palm, feed any open mouth, sponge-bathe a stranger while singing songs of freedom.

  I had arrived at the encampment on its third day. At that time I was out of temp work and couch-crashing in Queens, a borough I had previously admired from afar. I’m going to the protest, I told my host, my friend is how I used to think of her, and she said: You’ll fit in there. She revised that to: I wish I could come, and she picked up a toy dump truck, metonym for her responsibilities as well as the reason couch-crashers weren’t her thing now, not like back when, fresh out of college, we’d all been different people, according to memory. It’s good for America, she said. But what is America good for? the part of me that was overly influenced by her seven-year-old asked, not aloud. We hugged and I left, my backpack hitting the crucifix that hung in my opinion too near the coat rack, and I considered apologizing for all the jokes I’d made about her being my host, body of Christ, bread of heaven. But I never knew what her kids would repeat to her, so I took refuge in silence.

  I’d tried one such joke out on the security guard at the last office where I’d worked reception, and it had gone very quietly.

  I was good at that job but they hadn’t renewed me.

  I had worn, I want to attest, inarguable lipstick.

  Every time someone asked me what brought me to the protest I said something different and true.

  I love men in uniform, I said, and exhibited the welts from the last round of plastic handcuffs.

  I love men in suits, I declared while pointing behind whichever journalist or civically minded tourist questioned me toward the few bankers who through arrogance or miscalculation walked right by our camp, in a sort of crisp scurry, not looking back at us in the manner of heroes on TV shows who know they’re being followed, or alternatively looking with open disgust, their cell phones to their ears, as though this made their faces invisible. When they walk fast, I said, it really brings out the ass.

  Later I said: I love the dogs.

  Around me people made signs that I stood under or near.

  I had good rapport with a girl who worked at a nearby corner store—we had both announced on meeting that the other looked just like someone she used to know, which was true on my part though I could not have said who, and I assume Alanza too (this was her name) was not lying. She let us use the bathroom and gave away merchandise that would have been chucked, well-aged plastic-wrapped muffins, that sort of thing, blistered hot dogs. The hot dogs were for the dogs. Due to their superior arts of persuasion Bighead and Beagle-mix ate the most.

  A fellow protestor had taken to visiting me and the dogs a few times a day, with what I believed to be romantic intentions. Yet I admit that there was a great deal of kindness in that place, kindness I hadn’t been fool enough to expect, so why should I introduce labels and through them the death of community?

  What are their names? he asked, scratching the ears of the one whose ears everyone scratched, the Soft-Eared One.

  They’re not mine to name, I said.

  I believe he liked this answer, and treated it as a sort of overture, in exchange for which (though should I not have critiqued this economy?) he offered me, next time, a book.

  I brought you a book, he said.

  I’ve read that, I said, which I had.

  Crotchnose was offering his nose firmly and repeatedly to the crotch of a nearby Iraq War veteran, who shooed him off. When Crotchnose turned to the veteran’s lady companion for consolation, I got a look like, why don’t you do something?

  I whistled, but it came out like a catcall. Sorry, I said, and tried again.

  They don’t even have collars, someone observed.

  I had one hot dog saved up, hot dog beats crotch, and deployed it.

  It took almost two weeks for the cops to start in about the dogs, but then it never ended, daily they said they’d call animal control. Fortunately the only thing I’d taught the dogs was to scatter when cops came, a trick that took little skill on my part, dogs by nature hate pepper spray.

  By now between eight and ten were there all day every day. In some quarters it was a cause for concern. I attended to every instance of defecation, which helped stave off complaints. Seemingly following the lead of Big-balls, the dogs agreed among themselves about peeing, almost never pissing on anything problematic. It is funny, I said to the veteran’s companion, how they understand the difference between indoors and outdoors, as a concept beyond simply indoors and outdoors. They would never pee, for instance, on a tent or sleeping bag, or anywhere near the food.

  The Beautiful Shining One was making the rounds, ambassador for the rest.

  One night the veteran was speaking, we sat in a small circle, cold, Bookman having wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and the dogs making themselves useful by sleeping on feet, Bighead stretched thoughtfully over three pairs. The veteran paused and I said, My sister was in Iraq.

  As a journalist, I added, gazing at the place in the circle where the campfire should be, now occupied by the Shining One.

  The veteran said something appropriate but I was otherwise engaged, dissuading Crotchnose from some new arrivals. I don’t know wha
t else I would have said.

  My host came to visit a few times and her eyes went big. Amazing, amazing, she said, touring the camp library, camp dining area, some meeting in progress, and discovering one of her old union reps to loudly embrace. Her boy was scared of dogs so I introduced him only to the Little One. My host had brought three casseroles and I told the boy that our task was to bring the casseroles to the pantry, so the whole camp could share them that night and the dogs lick the dishes. He walked beside me, glancing at Bighead, who stayed polite at my other side.

  One day a banker brought two bags of dog food. From a paper bag he produced a stack of dog dishes and a jug of spring water.

  This doesn’t mean we’re square, I said.

  I’m actually an assistant, he said, I don’t really work in finance.

  I used to be a receptionist, I said, I didn’t really work in just about everything.

  We got to talking.

  Every day the songs were more beautiful, and the speeches were shouted in unison line by line across the park so that lacking mike and amps the hundreds if not thousands could hear, and the speeches were more and more significant, at least that’s what everyone said. Journalists gathered to us, filmmakers, old-time radicals, career activists, gender theorists, high-quality politicians, writers, actors, one by one they addressed the cameras and us. To stand in solidarity, they said. Not to stay, but to visit, I explained to Sweet Soft-eyes, who always sat at the front of the crowd.

  Every week there were poetry readings and the poetry was really improving.

  Bookman finally nailed it, bringing me a Gaddis I’d always meant to get to. Later I read him the highlights and he stroked the head of Old Baldy, whose head no one ever stroked.

  Bighead slept so close in my tent that truly he was on top of me and each night my arm numbed. Would that cause lasting damage?The first time animal control came they took four: the Little One, Sweet Soft-eyes, Old Baldy, and Beagle-mix. No one else could have said who was missing. Though for days people came by and pressed my hands kindly. One journalist saw the worst: that righteous uniformed bitch wrestling the stick-choke-collar on each one in turn and dragging them to her van, Sweet Soft-eyes sitting back on her hind legs to slow herself, me screaming and screaming until the cops held me back. When the van rolled away the cops just let me go. This journalist walked over, travel pack of tissues in hand.

  Did you get all that? I said. Did you see that?

  I whistled and the Shining One appeared, returning from the pantry, where people were often good to her. But Bighead, I never saw Bighead again.

  Alice

  It was a good bar, but I was more or less by myself. A woman leaned over the pool table, skin puckering in her breasts. I was reading a book by a writer I used to like, whose novels were said to have galvanized activists in the ’70s into revolutionary violence. One such activist, known as a builder of bombs, had mentioned the books several times through the decades, noting that he reread the first one almost every year. Yet he always said almost the same thing about it.

  I’d interviewed the writer once, way up in the northeast fishing town where he now lived, but he’d spoken mostly about lobster migration. Despite his success, he’d said, in a tone of too obvious irony, the most money he’d ever made had been from a coffee-table book on funeral parlors. He’d ridden around with a friend early in the ’80s, the friend taking photos, him writing. A portrait of American death that had attained cult status and was regularly reprinted. The friend had died shortly after publication, driving drunk. We wrote the whole book driving drunk, he added.

  The new book—I was a few chapters in—took place in a frontier town that couldn’t be less like the small hills and small harbors where I’d last seen its author. I don’t need to be in the West to write about it, he’d said then, in reply to some question of mine, we were on our third pitcher. But now, the book before me in this solicitously dim light, I thought, well, maybe you do.

  (Lobsters migrate in queues, he’d told me: single file along the sea floor out into deeper waters. The queues march night and day. Melting arctic ice has disrupted the oceanic current flow and the waters here—he’d waved vaguely—are warming fast. Soon there won’t be lobsters here at all, although that may be, as he noted, a minor concern among the disasters rising sea levels will wreak. We don’t know why they come and go, he’d said, his fingers in arthritic parade across the table toward my forearm. We still don’t know that.)

  That evening in the bar I was hoping for a call back from a right-wing radio host, small station, up in one of those forgotten cities on the plains, nearly Canada. Jonathan—of the five the first to be shot, according to forensic experts—had been involved in a refugee resettlement case. An Iraqi who’d worked as an interpreter for his unit had been killed, not in action but executed, as a collaborator. Hundreds died this way; interpreters were pulled away from US military units and killed right there. When the interpreter was shot, the unit he’d served with the longest had made efforts on behalf of his family, to help allow for their resettlement in the States. No small endeavor—the US opened its borders to very few Iraqis, and the application process took years, when it was not threatened with outright shutdown. This northern city was a City of Asylum, as they’re called, and one of the soldiers hailed from there, so that’s where they started. Petitioning senators and representatives, refugee NGOs, and eventually this radio nutjob had taken up the cause, wanting to give back to those Iraqis who had embraced our war so appropriately that they’d died for their own freedom. Jonathan had written a few letters, offered some sort of recommendation for the wife and kids, and because of his blandly cheerful manner had been the one spoken to by a couple reporters, gone to meet with a senator, then traveled to the northern city itself.

  When she lost her husband the wife was thirty-four, the eldest boy thirteen, then a girl, eight, and a boy, five. They’d come to the US once on the radio host’s invitation, and posted on his website were photos from a poolside barbeque: him in cargo shorts, the sun in everyone’s faces. The widow, in hijab, smiled in the wrong direction. The boy was shirtless and thin, one hand on his sister’s shoulder, the other on his brother’s damp hair. Around the pool was only concrete, if there was grass you couldn’t see it.

  On the screen the Donate Now! button was defunct. Last year the family’s application had finally been denied.

  Where were they now? Returned to Baghdad, fled to Jordan, Syria, fled again? I was determined to find them and determined there would be a story. A story in which Jonathan’s murder would be an aside: instead the travails of the refugees, disappeared from middle-class life into this new fate, homeless, paperless, jobless, in the camps or slums, borrowed rooms or rooftops, how many turned to prostitution or left for oil work in the Gulf. I could see the shape of the story: tragic presence of two off-stage murders; quotidian dissolution and humiliation of a family. It was said that in the course of the war four million Iraqis were displaced. A word that made me think not of the action of war—tent camps, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods—but water overflowing Archimedes’ bathtub: absurd. But this was the verb employed by almost every article, appearing even in the radio host’s transcripts, where it stuck out, an interloper among his usual vocabulary. The widow, Samar, had come on his show. Summer, is what he said and how the transcript spelled it. What do you think of America? Like her husband she spoke good English, her replies fluent and banal. I wanted her to say something of the city on the plains. The windmills across the river and in another state towered slim and white, one could run for miles before they would start to near. Whatever she thought of this large-calved wide-voweled man, his voice booming for hours over the flat land and freezing river, she didn’t say. Jonathan was in the studio with her, according to the host’s introduction, but spoke only once. He was a good man, Jonathan said of the interpreter, I’d have been proud to call him my brother.

  The old front
ier city survives as only a few blocks, some façades still beautiful, others renovated and insincere. Around them the city extends into suburbs, houses on small lots, veins of highway or state routes along which big-box stores and malls have been planted, each year the frontier of development pushing further south and west. To the east the river flows north, a wild sinusoid, its curves almost laughable. Samar and Jonathan had come in summer, but it had been a bad flood year, and parks and golf courses were still lost to mud, plastic bags and assorted detritus adorned the greening trees. The sandbags were gone, the one washed-out bridge mid-repair. From a map I learned that downtown there was a reconstructed Viking ship, in honor of the city’s heritage. Though the pioneers had come by land, of course—no sea had touched this place for more than ten thousand years. The city offered no other tourist destination, no historical sites, seventy miles to the north one Indian museum, that’s all. So Samar and the children might have spent an afternoon here, walked slowly around the boat to make the visit last. Where else could they have gone? My phone rang.

  I brought the phone to my ear, and on the TV high in the bar’s corner a row of local newscasters appeared, hands arranged on the desk in less than natural postures. Cut to a shot of a man in orange, kneeling, head shaved, beside him a figure in black, masked so that only his eyes were, narrowly, revealed. Landscape of sand, periwinkle sky. Was this Syria, was this Iraq? A message to America, the screen read, before cutting back to the studio, eliding the video’s conclusion, the fate of the kneeling journalist I had wished for days to unsee.

  What did you want to know? The voice at my ear was asking, sounding older than its smug public counterpart. Miss?