The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Just when a sumbitch tells his friends we hadn’t better wait up on old Vollie because he ain’t coming and we’ll have to wait for glory till I can introduce you all godwilling, wouldn’t you know one of us (her name is Sally) come back from selling our honey up at Alamogordo and a stop at the p.o. and says, Bobby, who do you know in New York City? Not a one dead or living, I say. Somebody knows you, she says, look. And wouldn’t it be your own self coming right off the page like I don’t know who else. Like nobody else I reckon. Which is the idea I reckon when you got an old friend. He can be a long time gone away and times change but he come back around the fence and you know him right off, like my roan mare Rita did after I got home from the service. She huffed my hand and gave me a look with her big goober eyes said, Where you been, Bobby Heflin?

  This business of you’re near as Las Cruces but we don’t get to see you up here has me sore. I prayed on it a long time, about why was I sore? I couldn’t figure it. Finally I reckon the Lord’s saying, Boy, you don’t have to figure it to forgive it. Matter of fact, Vollie Frade’s an unscrutable sumbitch anyhow and if you wait till you figure it, you’ll be sore till doomsday. You probably think it’s funny me thinking I need to forgive you about not saying hello our way and staying with us some time and meeting the others here, my friends. We all get sore about our own things. I understand if you’re sore at me about being sore at you (though like I say I am not sore anymore). I hope you’ll forgive me about I was sore at you before, though you didn’t know it.

  We are living alright here in our way. Getting by just about. And I hope you’ll write again soon about all the lot you have to report which we are eager to know. And better than that come show your face and tell us. And better than that come stay. We got all these rooms.

  We are doing our best to love each other. Hard work on the hungry days when we might have gone out prospecting for uranium or hunting the coyotes that eat our cats. It is hard not to kill. Funny thing is my friends know all about you from what I told them about us in jungle school and Oki and them emu-meat days on Coogee Beach and Queenscliff. One of them said, You two been to the bottom of the world and come back on top. They love you like I do. How can they love somebody they never saw but in a photo? When you give yourself over to loving, the need to do it grips you and won’t let go. I wonder if that was Nixon’s secret plan for peace, spread love over the world like allconsuming fire.

  But it only happens one by one. When I don’t think about loving anybody particular I can’t do it. Sometimes all I have to do is concentrate about a person. Like about Sally’s mother. Her mother don’t want her out here with us, but sometimes I concentrate about Sally’s mother and then I love this old bat in Carson City who works part time in the steno pool for the state legislature and hates our guts. Any one person is a grounds for love if you pick him. You have to pick him is the thing. Paper’s run out. I’ll find more by next time and write you back right away. Noroomtosign.Yrs.,BH.

  He put the letter back in the envelope, and the envelope back in the score, and he had already stuck his thumb in the seal of the second envelope and begun to tear it open before he saw it came not from Bobby but from an outfit called Pierson-Blatt Holdings of Springfield, Illinois, and was addressed not to Vollie Frade but to Dwight E. Tilly. It contained not a letter but a cashier’s check made out in his new name for $136,809.27.

  That was how he found out that they’d known all along about the P.O. box, that he had been watched as he was watching, that he had underestimated their reach, that Lorch was capable of playing a bureaucratic joke like having the check sent to the address Vollie had tried to hide from him. And that was how he found out, from the check and the memo attached to it, that there had been a liquidation of an estate, and that was how he found out that his mother had died.

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE TIME Trisha let the two men into the house—Mr. Tilly and the doctor he had brought to examine Hausmann—only a half hour remained before she expected Miss Colt home. Both men were covered in the heavy snow that had delayed them, but they had come as Mr. Tilly had promised, and she felt within herself the old reluctant stirring that meant she ought to have more faith in people: here they were to help someone in need.

  One way or another Trisha was going to get fired for this, but she knew it was right to let them in. She showed the doctor, a deaf man she had to address face-to-face so he could read her lips, toward the mothballed dresses in the closet. He said she’d better stay outside, a full examination would have to be performed. And though Trisha protested the patient spoke no English, the doctor said that was all right; and though Trisha insisted she gave him a sponge bath semiweekly and was not a prude, the doctor said sternly to stay outside. And Trisha went back to the sitting room where Mr. Tilly was standing patiently as a stone, and she said, “You’re so kind. You’re both so kind to help him.”

  * * *

  • • •

  WHAT WOULD COME NEXT? Vollie had no idea.

  He told the girl to get into the kitchen and stay there. She said she was perfectly strong enough to assist in moving Mr. Hausmann if they should need to evacuate him for treatment, and besides he weighed hardly anything.

  “Get into the kitchen,” Vollie interrupted. “Don’t come out.” And even then she returned such a repellent expression of trust that the hair on his arms inside his coat sleeves stood up and he snapped as if to a yard dog trying to come inside, “Git away!” And no sooner had she squeezed around the immense roll of sailcloth that nearly blocked the entrance to the kitchen than a barely muffled explosive crack came from the farther reaches of the hall. Then a second, just as loud.

  His manners responded before any of the rest of him. The internal voice of a parent admonishing. He knew it to be admonishment before he understood the offense. Some things we did inside, and others we did out of doors, and to fire a round from a gun even with a suppressor screwed on the muzzle was like cursing inside the house, was rude.

  And rudeness was what, for a fraction of a second, he told himself the girl was responding to as she darted out of the kitchen. His hands and feet began to twitch as he stood there not stopping her. The girl raced by him, high-stepping like a heron through marsh weeds, heading down the hall as Van Aken came back the other way. “What did you do?” she demanded.

  Van Aken’s smoothly moving and untroubled arm rose to push her out of the way.

  The girl, suddenly in an acquisition of absurd and useless resolve, planted her feet on either side of the cramped hall, radiant with certainty. “You stay right there,” she said.

  In the dim hall, Vollie saw the pistol in Van Aken’s hand, saw him point it, threatening, saw the girl absurdly refuse to move.

  And Vollie stood by unspeaking. The girl needed to be grabbed and thrown. Yet in the microsecond in which he could have grabbed and thrown her, he instead stood there telling himself he didn’t know what was happening.

  And he dwelt within the jammed-up mind that was like the Hog Butcher in need of oil, unable to fire. And he could have done something and didn’t. And was supposed to, and could have, and didn’t. “Mr. Tilly,” the girl had already shouted, “you have to stop him!”

  And a light had already flashed, an orange light. A flash and a crack. And the girl had already spun around and bent double, blood in her sweater, her skirt pleats, everything so fast it might have happened at once except there was a sequence to it, and Vollie saw the breath-sucked hurt in the girl’s face, and the fear, as she fell on the hall floor amid the stacked newspapers in her blood-wet shining shoes.

  She was an adolescent in high checkered stockings, a wool sweater with a stripe across the chest and up the shoulders, and blood soaked the fabric, and the knees splayed behind the inert form. And the sequence of the three cracks had already begun to replay in Vollie’s mind. Two eighth notes. A long pause. And a half note. Or did the last only seem a half note
because otherwise the measure would go unfinished? That something was not finished. That the rhythmic structure was off. Or the time signature. That somewhere there had been a misreading of notations. That perhaps he had misread. Each shot a crack of demon speed, a not unfamiliar sound but a wrong sound because indoors. Somebody upstairs stamped the floor to shush the racket. And the girl’s eyes had already gone blank, the lifeless form unstrung, and the blood was falling out of her into the floorboards. A forever silence intervened, except it could only have lasted a few seconds, before Van Aken came back toward him stepping over the dead girl’s pooling blood, which was wicking into the newspapers. Van Aken had already dropped the pistol. And Vollie had already gone back to the door and locked it and stood before it blocking Van Aken’s way. And Van Aken said, “Why have you locked the door?” And Vollie didn’t move or speak. And Van Aken had already retrieved the pistol, all his motions smooth, unstudied, certain, automatic, had returned to where Vollie stood barring his way out of the house, and had already fired a shot at the floor—all of it already accomplished before Vollie’s laggard mind unjammed and he finally asked, “What the hell is going on?”

  The reverberant sound. Then a curse and a moan. The acrid smoke smell. But no flash he could see, Van Aken had aimed the pistol so low. Vollie lost his balance. Van Aken pushed him aside and opened the door and left and shut the door behind him.

  The curse and moan might have come from Vollie’s own throat, and a weird intuition regarding his foot overtook him; it probably had nothing to do with the present and came instead from a moment of remembered fear, but he had to test the intuition anyway.

  Vollie sent his foot a message with his mind but then spoke it aloud, “I’ll stomp my foot, and if I hear it then it’s still there.”

  He couldn’t hear the stomp. Perhaps the pistol crack had deafened him. However, he had heard the message spoken aloud. He was still more or less standing. The person upstairs banged on the radiator and he heard the pipes ring. That was when he fell down.

  10

  He got up.

  He opened the door. His foot smoldered. Smoke rose from what remained of the exploded leather toe cap. He gripped the doorjamb. He stabbed his smoking shoe in the snow. He felt nothing. The girl within was dead. Blood everywhere on the floor. He felt nothing. He steadied his hips and sunk both feet in the snow. He turned and grasped the door. He pulled it shut.

  After that night, he never saw any of those people from New York again and he never went back there.

  He tottered to the Electra on the next block, dragging the hot foot behind him. He torqued his ankle to engage the clutch with the heel and started the engine.

  He drove home and combed his keys in the window light and put the house key in the lock and went into the dark rooms. He filled a laundry bag with underwear, socks, rolled-up T-shirts, his toothbrush and razor, the Kinderszenen, a jar of pickled eggs, canned tuna, and a pair of shoes that didn’t fit in the bag so he dumped them on the floor and tied it. By the time he had driven himself to a Veterans Administration hospital in Connecticut, the leg with the lamed foot at the end of it was electrified from within by hot wires that ran as far up as his hip. He got the leg out the door, but when he put his weight on it everything went white.

  He came to in the snowy parking lot. All about him spun. He had vomited but had managed not to foul his clothes.

  When he got to the intake desk, the orderly was eating a sandwich of baloney and mayonnaise from a lunch box that had a sticker on it reading EAT THE APPLE, FUCK THE CORPS; and another reading, PROPERTY OF THE 2/9 MARINES. “What happened to you?” the orderly said.

  “Two-nine were at Khe Sanh, weren’t they?”

  “Before my time, thank Jesus.”

  “You never knew a grunt in the two-nine named Espinoza? Little guy.”

  “Can’t say I did,” the orderly said. “What was his job?”

  “I don’t know. He was a grunt. He filled a lot of sandbags. Little fellow. Sort of an attitude, like, I know better.”

  The orderly touched his head and tilted it as though listening for a distant sound. “No. Nothing in the file.”

  “Well,” Vollie said.

  The orderly leaned over the tile counter that shone in the fluorescent light and he looked closer at Vollie’s foot.

  “Two-nine,” Vollie said. “Hell in a Helmet.”

  “That’s us. You want me to get somebody to look at that foot for you?”

  “All right.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Somebody shot it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT FIRST THEY TOOK the two smallest toes. Then some of the vascular system around the wound became compromised, and before long they took a little more of the forefoot to stave the infection. Then he got a case of osteomyelitis, and they had to take another toe.

  “Morphine” came from Morpheus, the god of dreams, and his morphine dreams were so long and sweet and true-seeming despite their taking place nowhere on recognizable earth that he made the hospital people take out the drip. Then followed nights when he couldn’t sleep for the pain, or worse nights when he did sleep and dreamt torture dreams: he was the torturer. And in the first moments of waking, gratitude flooded him for the pain that lodged in the body and seemed the body’s means of killing what had gone wrong to save the rest. The pain was the wage finally of his errors; of his cruelty; of the deaths he had caused; the deaths he had ignored; the deaths he had not forestalled; the deaths he had watched, frozen and mute, allowing them. Not the whole wage, only the beginning. And once he knew he could live in the pain, he knew he should.

  He had to learn to walk again, in a new way, watchful of the pavement as never before. His landlady in the East Haven boardinghouse where they set him up after inpatient treatment showed him how to do it. She was a firm Scot from Ottawa with no medical training, but the VA had been sending her lower-extremity cases since the Second World War. She didn’t believe in physical rehabilitation. She believed in putting the heel on the floor, then putting whatever remained of the rest of the foot on the floor, then commencing likewise with the other heel. She permitted no analgesics beyond coffee. So much as a glassy look at breakfast and she would boot you. He learned a more or less steady gait, but it was also more atomized, each step a distinct act of bringing his body back squarely to the ground. She tailored his socks. She did not believe in reminding the foot of its former appendages by allowing for slack in its clothing.

  Any day the law or Lorch would find him up here, but they didn’t.

  Torture dreams. He did all the worst things he ever saw done and more.

  In the summer, they told him the risk of reinfection had finally passed, and he loaded his belongings into the Electra and drove down from East Haven into New Jersey, then into the Delaware River basin and Pennsylvania, down across the central part of the state where he had never traveled. The highway snaked among dozens of towns each owing whatever prosperity it enjoyed to the manufacture of a consumer good—a cough drop, the bushing on the crank that opened louvered windows—of which item the welcome signs declared the town the world capital. A much longer state than he had imagined, like a western state but forested. Then he hit Ohio and country more like what he knew. Bright, open, even country a glacier had mostly smoothed. Not hilly country but tottering and well drained. Orchards, pastures, small factories and warehouses, rail yards. Out toward Dayton and then into Indiana, the flatter land knew its work more certainly: to grow corn and beans, but the crop looked stunted and unhomelike. At Indianapolis he made an effortful downward turn away from the due-west course that would have brought him into Iowa and he drove instead south toward the city of Effingham in Illinois, where a truck stop advertised bunks and twenty-five-cent showers. The glass coolers inside offered no beer for sale, and he asked the young bunk clerk if this was a dry county, and the clerk didn’t know
what that meant, so Vollie dropped his bag on the bunk and went into the town center where he found a tavern: a museum of deer staring nobly and without bodies from the dark cheap wood paneling, the animal eyes quiet and blank as the eyes of Roman statues over the dim mirrored bar.

  Then, on the snowy television, Dentu-Creme gave you back your smile. And Arrid had something in it that not every spray had, aluminum chlorohydrate. And Wish-Bone Italian was for people who really liked salads.

  His second beer was purchased for him by a certain Clifford from Olney, thus he introduced himself like an Arab or Viking. Vollie said he was Tilly from Davenport. Shortly it became urgent to everybody at the bar that the stranger, Vollie, submit to being taken up in Clifford’s crop duster. Tonight, by God.

  Vollie said, “Maybe another time.”

  “Did you ever go up in a two-seater before?” said the bartender, who had taken the lead in imposing air travel on him.

  Because Vollie had not, he said he had.

  “Where was that, in the service?”

  Because it could now have been anywhere, he said, “In Greece.”

  “I’ll be. Over the islands or the mainland?”

  “It was over Patmos,” Vollie said. He only remembered that the Book of Revelation had come down to St. John while he was on Patmos. While there, an angel with a rainbow on his head gave the saint another little book and he ate it, and it was bitter in his belly later, but sweet as honey while it was in his mouth. Wakefield had loved that story. One time he said, “I’m hungry enough to eat the whole Bible.”

  “Did you fly over the Colossus of Rhodes?” the bartender asked. “I always wanted to see that.”