The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Nevertheless, he required a witness. Lorch and the others in the outfit didn’t qualify as people from before. The witness had to come not only from before the clearing but from before the tunnel. He neither comprehended this nor doubted it.

  There was a boy in him, plain for all to see in boot camp, in Okinawa, receding deeper inside with every day of that first tour. After the tunnel it was obvious no one else could see the boy. They saw a man, a vagrant, and crossed the street, or they saw a marine or a truck driver or Tilly or they didn’t notice anybody at all. But down below, the residual boy continued to abide and fester. He must be killed and the remains burned up and scattered. And a witness was needed at the execution or else the whole thing might never have happened. In isolation you could never know for sure what you had lived for real and what you had lived only in the cavern of your mind.

  If there was anybody from before whom he trusted to tell about the tunnel and about the new man, it could only be Bobby Heflin, safely off in New Mexico, out of whom he had made a ghost brother. So Vollie wrote him a letter:

  Hey there citizen,

  Well I got out of the service. That second enlistment seemed to take longer. I kept yours of 4/20/70 on me a long time planning to write. Some of that time I had no opportunity. Some I did I guess. A bus lately brought me a couple hours’ drive distant of your parcel out there. Boy it was goodlooking country like you described. I should have stopped to say hey but I didn’t. And well there’s an awful lot to report but I gotta go.

  Your friend,

  Vollie Frade

  p.s. I’ll write again soon.

  First, he would wait for a response. For the return address, he rented a post office box. No one else but Bobby would know the box existed. The office was in Manhattan on the fourth floor of a former dress factory on the Lower East Side, far enough from his delivery route and distant enough from the subway as not to tempt him to check it more than once a month, first Saturdays, early in the morning while the service counters remained shuttered. On the sallow walls, people had written their names. They had written telephone exchanges and numbers, slurs, riddles, services offered, obscenities, anatomical sketches, intentions—names high up and near the floor, faces in dark pencil, faint faces etched in the plaster with sometimes a name beneath the face identifying it. The other floors were home to squatters or were vacant. The windows of the sorting room behind the bank of mailboxes looked over the East River. And through the aperture in the door of his own mailbox he could see clear out of the sorting-room windows—he could see planes in the distance over Brooklyn—because only sunlight ever filled the box when he checked it. He didn’t even have to work the lock to satisfy himself the box was empty.

  After a while the true hope of the box revealed itself, not to hold a letter addressed to Vollie Frade but to stay empty and attest that no such person remained in the world to receive his correspondence there.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ICEMAN brings the men and boys on the court damaged product from the warehouse, half-gallon cartons of Neapolitan and butter pecan that have been nicked with the edge of the forklift and made unsalable. They eat it right away before it melts, and they go on playing afterward, stomach-sick but cooler and full of sugar to burn. Because he seldom laughs, the men sometimes call him the Good Humor Man—as speedy Josip is called Leadfoot, and the boy Jerome is called Blanco because he’s black as a wet tire.

  Omar, the vendor of newspapers and flowers, has his fingers taloned in the chain link of the cage and shouts: Marlon’s sisters are looking for him. He better get home on the double.

  The boy finishes the game first and begs a ride toward home with the Iceman in his Electra, which is looking deadly cool these days. Marlon’s secondary talent is for buffing chrome and waxing, and the men from the court pay him to detail their rides. He treats these vehicles not quite as his own property, more as younger siblings he has to protect from corrupting elements in the neighborhood.

  The Electra is coming down the avenue now, a black, sharp, sentient creature that turns the heads of the boys on the street. An older model but clean, modern. Nothing personal. Nothing that’s trying to impress. The hardtop version not the convertible, with long, straight brightwork nose to tail and skirts that cover the rear wheels. Steel and glass. Basic and hard. You don’t need to own it, you just want to be the one who gets to service it. Get up close and study its ways. A car so cool it could drive itself.

  While the Iceman and Marlon are stopped at an intersection, two boys nearly Marlon’s age, on bikes, fly to the car like swallows. The white boy mimes a tapping of the glass. The black one backward-cranks the air. The white one holds up a finger. Marlon looks at the Iceman with a child’s inquiring eyes stuck in the nearly man-size body, and the Iceman indicates by microscopic raising of the chin to go ahead and open the window.

  The white boy on the bike says, “Marlation, a second of your time?”

  The black one says, “Yeah, just a second.”

  The white one says, “Real nice ride.”

  The black one says, “Yeah, can I touch it?”

  “Yo, have some respect,” the white one says.

  The engine purrs, and Marlon says, “What.”

  The white one says, “Can we come over later? Lizzy—”

  “I don’t care if you do or you don’t,” Marlon says.

  “—Lizzy gave me a note for you.”

  The black one says, “Just I want to touch it the one time.”

  The white one says, “Show some respect.”

  The black one cranes below his handlebars, peering through the late-day glare on the flawless glass. He shouts, “Hey, Iceman?”

  “Hello, Maitland,” the man says.

  “Can I touch the hardtop here?”

  The white one says, “Will you stop?”

  Marlon says, “Go way now.”

  The light changes.

  The Iceman says, “He can touch it, Pinker.”

  The white one says, “Don’t let him, he’s a scumbag.”

  “Can I for real?” the black one says, Maitland, his hand hovering. But the Electra pulls away before he dares.

  * * *

  • • •

  TRISHA SAW HIM STANDING at the fence in front of Miss Colt’s house, eyeing the goat in the yard, the swollen books: Marlon.

  He wore boots that didn’t fit him anymore, the laces open. A plaid polyester shirt with snaps down the middle and at the wrists. So many faded magazines crowded the window that there was no risk he would catch her watching. God had made every part of him long and perfect. His big hand lay on the gray gate. What business with Miss Colt had brought him here she could only guess. She aimed all her powers through the glass in telepathic effort, willing him to step inside the gate. Willing him to knock and find her inside, though she was alone in here, except for Mr. Hausmann, and it would never do, never, to be alone, alone with Marlon, in a house full of every kind of infuriating garbage. Though Mr. Hausmann was there, yes, and while he did not exactly qualify as a chaperone, she might still hold up her head in public and say she had not really been alone with Marlon if Mr. Hausmann was in the room the whole time.

  The snap on the cuff of Marlon’s hand that lay on the gate had come undone.

  He turned and shambled away up the street.

  The spot where Marlon had stood outside the gate was without form and void. The goat lay down in the grass. She did not move a single joint or breathe. Someone had set fire to her brains.

  Then, as though reconsidering, he shambled back. He took a step inside the gate at the edge of the shallow yard, where a concrete trough was filled to the brim with dirt and abounded with yellowing weeds. He stood immobilized again reading the sign that said, Please not sit on flowers.

  The moment called for something he didn’t seem to have but maybe she did. Mayb
e she could find it in herself and give it to him. What was the name of that thing? The name was nerve. She went to the door and opened it.

  “Hey, baby,” he called.

  “The lady of the house is not at home,” Trisha said.

  “I figured.”

  “She’s away reading her Bible.”

  “I know it. Wednesdays.”

  “Her mistranslated fraud Bible. You’ll have to come back later, or you could wait outside. But it might be a long time before she comes back. You can’t come in, she wouldn’t have it.”

  He approached the steps and sat uncertainly. Trisha stood over him, looking at the blue-brown clouds like heavenly battleships getting ready to blow each other to bits, then down at his collar, the discoloring at the collar’s fold, and considered the best way a person might address the stain, whether with soaking, a brush, lemon juice, vinegar; the possibilities for removing his oils from the garment were endless.

  A fat older boy with a tricorn hat made of folded newspapers slalomed down the street on a bicycle, hailing Marlon as he went, to which Marlon raised his chin in close-lipped, uncalculated, frank, coolly authoritative acknowledgment, a new gesture he had picked up somewhere.

  He turned to her his gray eyes, which were underwritten by freckles and blemishes that she could have easily fixed with Noxzema and cold compresses, and said, “I didn’t come to talk to her. I came to talk to you, if that’s cool.”

  Trisha had to think fast. “I could show you inside but only for a minute. It’s important work I do because no one else will do it is why. Don’t you dare take anything. I won’t hesitate to inform the authorities.”

  Shortly they were picking their way through the path of plastic and collectibles, and Marlon was standing over Mr. Hausmann’s body as it lay losing its human qualities.

  “Mostly I wake him and dry him and shave him and like that. He won’t eat much anymore. The other thing I do is I get a straw into his mouth. You start off in life from the moment of birth with the ability to suck even if you’re a total idiot,” Trisha pronounced. “What is it you were hoping to discuss with me?”

  Marlon watched, impressed and appalled at the shriveled tendinous rag that her patient was.

  “Please don’t think I’d ever live like this,” Trisha said. “She doesn’t want me to do anything with her treasures, so called. I’m just here for him while she’s out with her social calls and like that, or studying. And yes, he has a bedpan; and yes, I change it.”

  “Do youse talk?”

  “A little. In Greek. My grandma speaks Greek.”

  “You wonder how far down in there he is,” Marlon said. “Like right behind the eyes, or bottom of the ocean, or other side of the universe? And what’s he thinking about down there?”

  She had not taken Marlon for a philosopher. “Sin,” she said.

  “That look like a sinner to you?”

  “And wishing he made better choices in life so he wouldn’t be alone at the end in a coma bed with strangers looking after him.”

  “Is this what a coma is for real?” Marlon asked.

  “Not yet, technically.”

  “Sometimes I think people don’t have any choices at all,” Marlon said. “Not for real. They’re just naturally a certain way and they’re always going to land up the same place whatever they do.”

  “That’s called Calvinism and it’s a heresy,” Trisha said. “There is a price for everything.”

  “You never heard of bad luck?”

  “Luck is for people who don’t believe God cares what they do. Egon obviously started all over someplace, and either he didn’t come with the people who loved him or he ditched them. You have to go on loving people even if they’re total jerks.”

  Marlon’s lip came out, and he chewed it, and she felt him on the verge of an admission, but because she wanted so badly to hear it and because it was her own nature to sabotage her hopes the moment their accomplishment came into view, she kept on stupidly yammering. “Miss Colt’s family is dead,” she said. “But she’s out at her reading group now, and later they’re going to have cheese sandwiches at Fregel’s.”

  “I don’t get your point.”

  “My point being she made a decision to go on loving people. New people if necessary.”

  “This is love?” Marlon asked, indicating the room with his chin.

  “What’s worse, to treat people not as well as you could have, or to pretend they’re dead?”

  “Put the straw in, I want to see how he does if he has coma.”

  Trisha unwrapped the paper sleeve of the straw and brushed its bent end on the old man’s lips. He did not seem anymore to sleep or to be awake, but to live in a middle ground between. The wizened mouth fluttered, and the jaws unclenched. He sucked air through the straw. She sunk the straw’s other end in a jar of ginger ale, flat. Ginger ale was all he would take without fussing now, and apple sauce thinned with milk.

  Trisha asked Marlon, “Do you want some—I don’t know what she has, Tab?”

  “Caffeine stunts your growth,” Marlon said. “I don’t drink caffeine.”

  “How tall do you want to be?”

  Marlon had an answer. “Six five,” he said.

  Trisha swallowed in awe.

  “I can do it too,” he said. “If I eat right and I’m lucky.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. Tilly.”

  “The Iceman? And you believed him?”

  “Sure.”

  “He just said it, and you said, Sure, I believe it?”

  “I guess I asked him.”

  “Asked him what?”

  “Asked him, did he think I could make six five. And he said—I guess for real what he said was, ‘That what you want?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, how do I do it?’ And he said, ‘Eat.’ And then he thought a bit and he said, ‘But you know you can’t do it from trying, right?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘I hope you make it.’ And I said, ‘Thanks.’”

  Trisha was annoyed at this turn in their discourse toward a neighborhood nobody who had probably, judging by his tattoos, gone to Vietnam to kill and maim for sport. “Marlon?” she asked.

  “What.”

  “Can we both not talk a minute? Like not say anything at all? For a whole minute, timed?”

  “Why?”

  “Stop it with your why. Don’t be that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Facetious.”

  “What way is that?”

  “Fake-face, when I’m trying to be sincere.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She turned her hand, looking at the watch—the watch was the size of an apricot pit, banded to the underside of her wrist—and she said, “Go.”

  She pulled the straw from Mr. Hausmann’s lips. Ginger ale backwashed into the jar. The old man, with nothing to suck on and his breathing even slower, seemed to partake in the experiment with them, the breath his only act, willful but resigned and almost at peace as it often was after a feeding. The eyes hidden beneath the sheer tissue of the lids could be seen in their faint bulge to rotate smoothly toward the wall as though observing another ceremony there.

  In the alley, a dog bayed. Marlon leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching the ceiling, dwelling in time, the separate time that he alone inhabited. His ears and skull. His cabled neck. The long hands she dared not touch lest she die.

  Mr. Hausmann’s guts yowled. He stirred. He wheezed and settled further away inside his person, behind the layers of skin and flesh in which time had invested the essential self, the innocent being that made no choices, that harbored no illusions of choice making—a tree within its bark within a quiet snowstorm, within its final season, creaking here and there where the accumulation weighed it down but otherwise making no sound, and not yet breaking from the weight of th
e snow, the cold roots even now fixing the choiceless being inside the frozen earth, alive without needing to betray any signs of life. The life within remote and waiting for the end.

  “Marlon?” Trisha whispered.

  “Was that a minute already?”

  “You wanted to ask me?”

  He sat on the floor of the cramped room. A jumble of unwieldy limbs. “I’m embarrassed, but I thought you’d know what to do,” he began.

  She knew Mr. Hausmann to be awake and listening. No one else but she could detect the signs.

  “I got this note from Lizzy,” Marlon said.

  “Yes?”

  “And you two are friends.”

  A premonitory horror gripped her. “Yes,” she said.

  “And you and me are sort of friends, right?”

  “You and I, you mean, yes. I thought so,” Trisha said. His innocence was beautiful, holy, obscene, like a naked human body. Everybody knew he would turn into a thief like his mother. But each word he spoke had the disgusting ring of truth.

  “And Lizzy wants to go out just her and me sometime.”

  “She and I,” Trisha corrected helplessly. She grabbed Mr. Hausmann’s hand and squeezed it. Her hand was as white as his. All her blood had gone to her burning face.

  “I don’t really know her,” Marlon said. “But do you think we’d be good together? Her and me?”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE VAGRANT on the post office lobby floor slept within a cloud of reek that held the patrons all in awe. They stood at steel counters licking stamps under handkerchiefs and scarves, breathing shallowly. Their sinuses rang. They scribbled a zip code, glancing at one another. Strangers, but they were in tacit agreement, right? This was no mean funk. A smell to shock and shake you out of yourself. The glances said, Corroborate, please. We’re thunderstruck in the nose, aren’t we? We’re together in this. The figure on the floor a pile of clothes, sexless, ageless: every inch of skin and strand of hair covered, the feet covered, all identifying characteristics covered, the face pushed toward the corner of the tile floor as into a pillow under the inscribed walls, the heavy soiled clothes and blankets rising slowly and falling slowly with labored inaudible respiration. Inside them, a person.