by Leah Hampton
Back in high school, when he was looking to enlist, he had mumbled along with a navy recruiter, but Boggs was secretly afraid of water, so he hesitated signing up. Eventually, after he graduated, he visited some family down south, and his cousin’s wife took him onto an air force base in Louisiana. Gears clicked in Boggs’s brain when he saw the place. As they passed through the gate, he was reminded of the lofty cities he’d seen in old sci-fi pictures. Personnel bustled around meaningfully, without the sinister, egotistical energy of the grunts he’d seen elsewhere. He liked the way everybody was dressed, too. In the other branches, men only wore nice colors for important events, but the air force was all crisp blues. Sky-blue shirts, soft and inviting. And sleek jackets of an unfamiliar hue, somewhere between azure and navy, a color he wrongly identified as indigo. It was a fine, clean color. Even the mechanics looked like they had snap. No jeeps tooted around, either. Just sleek black autos and bona fide airplanes.
When they left through the back gate, his cousin’s wife asked what he’d thought. Boggs said he thought everybody in the air force must sure be rich. That made her laugh. His cousin’s wife was a captain. She had even spent time in Europe. Boggs joined at nineteen thinking he’d do six years in the same long, slow peacetime she’d enjoyed. He figured he’d escape Kentucky for the world, keep dirt and heat and fear at bay, safe in all that indigo.
A year later he was hosing off bombers in Desert Storm. The experience, everything about that detail vibrated inside him, like the muscle memory in his forearms after mowing a big lawn. He could scarcely remember speaking to anyone the entire year.
After ’91, they put him on temporary duty at Wurtsmith to help shut it down, then a couple more flight lines, all over the map, for three-year stints after he reenlisted. Most recently, they had stationed him at Minot, North Dakota. There Boggs learned how to document his knowledge of jet engines and train other technicians. Minot was where he met Cedarman.
The first time he saw Cedarman, Boggs thought the man was a doll or an old church painting. The tech sergeant was indigo and smooth corners. Clean. Everything that had drawn Boggs to the service. Nothing, no cloud or dark mountain or heat, hung over Cedarman. He seemed totally unencumbered.
Cedarman was training to be an engineer, taking college classes in his off hours. When he checked out his tools every morning, he rubbed and studied each one until they were impossibly polished, and they stayed that way for him, no matter how dusty their work got. Cedarman supervised a small team of avionics technicians, senior airmen, and staff sergeants, the future tech sergeant Boggs among them. His job, he said, was to upgrade their tinkering skills to something the air force could use and to get himself promoted to master sergeant as fast as possible.
Cedarman and Boggs talked over and over about how the wires inside a cockpit were nerves driving the bird’s reactions. Everything connected; solutions might be complicated, but the problems were always simple. Boggs was taller, Cedarman a few years older. Cedarman sometimes spoke to his chest or shoulders. Neither of them seemed to mind.
At Minot, the work was delicate and held his interest. Boggs was afraid of heights and had no aspirations to be a pilot. But Cedarman’s explanations made sense to him, and he liked the idea of checking and rechecking a machine, putting it in the air, seeing the plane conquer the earth without having to go up there himself. It was enough that he could get something off the ground.
The other enlisted men at Minot complained of boredom, but Boggs liked the quiet, liked the detail. More than anything, he liked the flatness. North Dakota felt safe. He could see what was coming at him, everything out in the open. When he was off duty, he sometimes drove for hours, picking a direction and timing himself to see how far away he could keep the horizon, and for how long.
There were no fights or crashes at Minot. The weather was never a surprise, either, even when storms blew in. He could watch rain or snow tumble from afar and pass over him. Boggs widened his shoulders to this predictability. He breathed easy in the vastness. In winter, the whiteness of the plains in the snow reminded him of fresh paper and new bedsheets.
He did a good job at Minot, and Cedarman helped him get promoted from staff sergeant. Tech sergeants did less grimy work, which was a good thing at the right time, it turned out. When the twin towers fell, the whole unit was rushed to a huge base in Florida for eventual deployment to Bagram. Afghanistan meant working amid sirens and sleepless terror. At his current rank, Boggs would, at least, be inside a hangar when the bombs fell.
Next week, they would be corralled at Cherry Point before their maintenance squadron rejoined the air expeditionary wing. No one knew how long they’d be there or what Afghanistan would be like. He wondered how the planes would look flying over the Himalayas, if the mountains would scowl at him there the way they did here in Kentucky. He hoped someone there would keep him company, keep him from detaching his body from his brain again the way he had in Desert Storm.
Whether he loved Cedarman or whether he felt something like love for him was a problem Boggs hadn’t yet worked out. He seemed like neither partner nor friend, but like an extension of Boggs’s own body, a finer limb that had long ago come unglued from his own torso. He did not know how to make meaning from that. Cedarman, whose deployment orders were still pending, remained a tangle of warm wires. Though everyone in his outfit seemed to have decided he and Cedarman did indeed love each other, nobody asked or told. Their comrades left them alone, and the two men consulted no one—especially not each other. There was loveliness in the way Cedarman looked at him, and often impatience. But Boggs had never learned to extract or refine lovely things, and anyway, he was leaving. So he stilled and hushed and left the wires alone, raw and pure, inside himself. To preserve them, he reasoned, for later, when he was back in an open space with a longer, clearer view.
The Tupperware dish appeared on the table in front of him, and Boggs’s mother doled out two glops of divinity salad for him and his father.
“Miss Judy’s,” she said.
Boggs noted the name; Miss Judy had been his teacher down at the school once. She had ratted him out to his daddy a number of times for fidgeting in class or tussling with other children, and she had been the catalyst for a string of harsh beatings when he was nine. She made pretty good desserts.
His mother turned to the counter and began cubing meat for a stew she was taking to church. His father sat with him at the table, reading the paper and ignoring Miss Judy’s treat. The slop in the old man’s bowl sat idle and sweated beads of fragrant pineapple water. Boggs ate slowly, sucking each chalky marshmallow one at a time. The sweetness hurt his teeth, and he wished for a cup of coffee to cut the flavor. His father finished reading and folded the newspaper neatly. He raised his spoon in one hand and stared into the divinity.
“This war,” he said as he tapped the newsprint with a middle finger, “will be long.” His spoon clinked in his bowl. “On that point I disagree with your Mr. Rumsfeld.”
“He ain’t mine,” said Boggs. “Hell.”
“They’re saying we’ll go to Iraq next.” The old man pronounced it “eye-rack,” which made his son’s mouth twitch. “A place you’ll know.”
Boggs thought back to his brief experience in the Gulf twelve years before. He had barely been an airman then, doing little more than gawping at F-15s. He had actually been stationed in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, but it didn’t matter; he never left the base. He rarely even left barracks if he wasn’t on duty. The heat unnerved him, much as it had his whole life, but the desert was worse than Kentucky summers. The sun burned huge and malignant; it cracked the paint off planes, pulled sand around the way the moon pulls tides. Boggs shut his brain down in that heat and stayed mentally absent for days, weeks at a time.
“I don’t know much about Iraq”—he took care to pronounce it “ee-rock”—“except I don’t want to go.”
“Ancient land,” said his father. “Eden.” His mother continued chopping meat with her back to them, b
ut they could both tell she was listening. “Place is full of struggle.”
Boggs wanted to laugh or cough or interrupt. He wanted to break the meniscus his father always pulled over a room. When the old man spoke to anyone too long, they’d shift sideways, one foot creeping out from the film of dread around him, waiting to escape. He was just a postman, but everybody in town feared his daddy. The house rarely had visitors.
Boggs could think of nothing to say; it didn’t seem worth explaining that Iraq was a whole other war that hadn’t even started yet. There would be no convincing his father of simple geography when he was pondering some larger notion. The hard light in the kitchen stunned his wits. Evening gloomed outside.
“Don’t turn from your duty,” his father said. “The Lord judges our fight against godlessness. We must finish what we started there, in His name.” He jabbed his spoon into the bowl a few times, shook his head. “Backwards place, the Middle East.”
Boggs rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. The old, hot sludge that sloshed in him whenever his parents talked Religion began to ooze through his veins.
“Yeah?” he said. “Is that right.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked the chair onto its back legs. He chucked his head in the direction of the main road. “As opposed to the sanctified peace they got down there at the Piggly Wiggly? I don’t see how Over There is any more backwards there than Right. Here.” Boggs tapped his foot to mark the last two words.
“But you love backwards places, I guess.” He pitched forward in his chair. “Anyway, long or short, I’ll be there, not you.”
He pulled his feet toward himself, and they made a papery sound on the worn linoleum. Pride swelled in his guts. Boggs was old enough, finally, to answer back.
“You don’t know shit about it,” he said to his father.
A shock cracked across Boggs’s cheek. His head jerked to the left, then swung back with a snap. He turned into the pain and saw his mother standing over him, her jaw twisted sideways. She held a butcher knife above him and was arcing it in a grim follow-through. Its cheap steel glowed under the kitchen light. She had slapped him with the flat side of the blade.
His hand crept to his face to check for blood, his eyes fixed on her. The sting of the knife’s tip was humming near his ear. Though there would be a welt when he left in the morning, his mother had not broken skin.
“You quit your sass and mind your daddy,” she said. Her eyes were like brackish water. “You been hateful and sassing since you got here.”
Boggs turned his head from her and rubbed his cheek again. He pushed back against the smallness coming over him. He tightened his arms against his rib cage for ballast.
“Momma, I’m thirty-two.”
It was all he could think to say. He checked himself for blood once more, rubbed his hand on his gray T-shirt. “Goddamn.”
“Don’t.” She raised the knife in a quick fist, and her son flinched. She lowered her hand and turned back to cutting meat.
Across the table, his father had bowed his head and risen from his chair.
“Son,” he said slowly, “you’ve got the devil in you.”
A cold tingle rippled across Boggs’s hairline. The kitchen walls bowed and distorted around him, like he was stuck inside a convex mirror. He panicked now because he didn’t know what time it was. He might have to suffocate like this for hours, until he could go, until he could get out, away from them, and he didn’t know how to count those hours.
Boggs tensed his neck around his voice box to tamp down any shake or squeak. “The hell kind of holy roller shit are you talking now?”
His father spoke over him and cut off the end of his question. His voice was hard, but he did not stir or shout. His body was rigid.
“It’s a devil that’s got you. Always has. You’ve had a wickedness since you were a boy.”
His mother grunted agreement.
“Disrespectful,” she said. “Always hiding in there. Strange.” She poked her knife toward his tiny room. “Didn’t even have a kiss for his momma when he walked up. Just as stubborn and strange…”
His father shut his eyelids, which were paper-thin and mazed with purple lines.
“I pray the discipline of your service casts out the darkness in you and brings you to the light of the savior. I pray for that every night.”
Boggs stood. He crumpled his paper napkin in his fist and drew himself up to his full height. Whatever happened in Afghanistan, whatever he hated or feared there, would still cost less than this. He had no reply, so he cursed again.
“Goddamn. Hell with it,” he said, and turned to leave.
A sharp thud shattered the gloom. Boggs froze. The table rattled as his father slammed his hands down two more times. The old man’s palms were stretched out, and the veins of his forearms popped livid. The house vibrated with his blows. The static in the air cut against Boggs’s skin, made it itch.
His mother cowered by the stove. The old man gripped the back of his chair and swung his head toward his wife. Soft, softer than he usually said things, his father said, “Lost.”
His daddy leaned back toward his son.
“He’s been lost to us a long time, Mother.”
His daddy swayed over the chair. He appeared ageless now, unchanged, just as he had been in Boggs’s boyhood. Out the back window of the kitchen hung the hills, close, unrelenting, bringing on night, early and black.
Boggs exhaled and longed for cooler air in his lungs. He gritted his teeth and thought of Cedarman—his uniform, his clean tools and careful speech. The vast, snowy plains of North Dakota, then its broad sky, appeared to him, and at long last, he found the word that described how he had always felt there: revealed. Heaven, Boggs decided, must be a wide, quiet pasture of fine and perfect snow.
Boggs wished he could fight the old man, just once. Break off a chair slat and lay into him until he whimpered for mercy. He knew he could do it, mentally at least. But there was no telling how much gristle his daddy kept in reserve. His father could probably still beat him senseless, perhaps even crack his son’s ribs as he had done once twenty years ago. He would need no weapon. The old man’s hands were hard enough on their own, like planks of ash.
“Fine then,” said Boggs, putting up his hands. “Fine. I’m licked. I own it.”
His mother shook pepper into her stew.
The old man stared at his shoes and cupped the top spindles of the chair with his palms.
“I’ll be out of your hair in the morning,” said Boggs. “First light.”
He waited for a response, but none came.
“I ain’t coming back. You hear? You done run the devil out of town.”
He pointed at the door to his room. “And I don’t want those pictures or nothing in there. You can burn all of it. Bunch of junk.”
He backed himself down the hall, swaying his shoulders in broad arcs as he receded. The rusting refrigerator switched itself on as he passed it, and a thrum fluttered through the kitchen. His parents’ movements loosened at the familiar noise of the appliance. His mother continued cooking, and his father eased himself back into his chair and picked up his divinity bowl.
Boggs backed fully into his bedroom. He closed the door, leaned a hand against the frame for a moment, then sat down on the bed. Night finished coming on as he dug out a few supplies from his luggage and plotted the long drive to Cherry Point. His hands fumbled with his road map and pencil, and blood roared in his ears until he gave up. He turned off the tiny table lamp and lay down on his side, on top of the tartan bed cover. He had not bothered to undress; he didn’t want to fight the trembling in his hands.
Eyes open in the shadows, Boggs imagined the cool interior of the waiting airbus that would soon take him away, along with scores of other men from his squadron, and men in thousands. He wondered if he’d ever get back to Minot, and whether Cedarman’s orders had come in yet. Then Boggs pulled his duffel into himself, embraced its indigo canvas with both arms, and bro
ke. His body slackened, his feet curled under him in the darkness, and he broke like a child.
QUEEN
In her memory, the hive sat in the side yard, echoing family rituals and routines. Summer mornings, workers would swarm the basil plant on the porch. They bothered no one—not even Dale, whose deck chair always sat close by.
Maisy could scarcely think of a time she had been stung on her mother’s property. So familiar were the movements and flight paths of all participants that it never occurred to anyone to disturb each other. The spread of acres kept them all satisfied to go their own way, and making room for others rarely interrupted anyone’s foraging. So when Dale texted her about the half-empty hive and the carnage littering the hydrangea bushes, Maisy left work early, pulled her hair up into a ponytail, and barreled down Highway 23 to her mother’s house.
She arrived to find Dale upright and between beers. His face was puffy as usual, his skin splotched red and brown from six decades of abandoned anger. He nodded gently and tugged his baseball cap as Maisy pulled up, then went back to working on the lawn.
“Are they all dead?” she called out as she slammed her car door. Maisy edged toward Dale, but she made sure to stay close to the house. She didn’t want to look for herself. “Where’s the queen?”
Dale shrugged, killed the weed whacker, and staked it into the ground like a ski pole. He didn’t know anything about bees. Dale hadn’t been around yet when they brought the hive home years before, and it was one of the few things he didn’t look after here. He said he didn’t like to mess with a body that didn’t mess with him. In return, the bees left him alone when he dozed near their favorite spot on the porch. Dale’s drunken fogs were protracted, but largely harmless. The bees seemed to respect, even admire, the depth of his hazes.