The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  The spirit of meat was death, okay, but when the people from the church had given Louisa an old rooster the other day she knew what to do with it. And the boy Elroy must grow in spite of the corruption that surrounded us everywhere. Elroy had her cooking spoon and was licking it while he formed a shaky structure out of the kindling on the floor, realizing a vision he alone could see. She liked the way the boy climbed her skirts. She wanted him to be strong. He hadn’t chosen to be born into a dying world. It wasn’t for her to make decisions that shrank his bones or made him weak. Some of the others had claimed a mineral supplement could provide all the nonplant nutrition a growing child needed, so they shouldn’t even have to resort to milk. This was when they were debating whether one of the guys should go work in the world for cash or whether they should sell the last of the cows. There had been talk of gleaning the material for the supplement from the rocks thereabout on the ranch.

  Elroy was in his body a constituent of this place; he was made of the plants grown on it and belonged here; and she believed in the love they’d all built together; but look, she wasn’t insane. Let the boy play with the rocks, he shouldn’t have to eat them. Anyway, the church lady had already butchered this rooster by the time she drove out with the other groceries that would keep. Corn meal, powdered milk. What with they had no electric anymore, Louisa would have to can the meat, and did she know how to do that?

  Of course she did. Who didn’t know how to can? At first she ate only a morsel of the meat, to remind herself that not one of us was pure, we all had a beast inside. Then a small jar of it every few days because she didn’t want to get weak. The boy’s portion she chewed to a mash, then kissed the boy and spat some of it between his lips. He’d never eaten meat before. But she had come to terms with her decision. She needed to show him it was not a corruption to eat another creature’s flesh if your hunger was pure. The boy had laughed. Everything was a game. Climb the skirt and get a kiss of rooster and climb down and swallow and climb back up.

  She knew that there had been somebody called the Volunteer back when Bobby was a killer. And they’d eaten strange birds in Australia and probably murdered babies in Vietnam, and in a hundred other ways had not kept their bodies pure. Also that the Volunteer was a scary-looking fellow. Now, here he sat in the flesh and didn’t look one bit like the half-naked soldier in the beach pictures. She meant, clearly he was the same person, but boy, was he changed. To be honest he looked much scarier now than in the pictures. His eyes, she meant. He looked at her and she looked at him. He said the corn and meat things were real good, thanks. Tacos, she repeated.

  Was it true what she’d heard, that his eyes came open in his sleep? And that none of the boys told him, and to see if they could insert stuff in his dreams they’d hung in front of his open, sleeping eyes a magazine cartoon of a devil roasting people in the fires of hell? And then in the morning the boys asked him how he slept, and he said real good, and they asked if he had dreams, and he said no, nothing?

  He said no, that was a trick they’d played on Bobby. Though come to think, maybe his own eyes came open too in his sleep and they’d played the same trick on him. He couldn’t know, could he?

  Also, she remembered the Volunteer was an Iowa farm boy.

  But no, not a farm, he said fatefully and without calculation. He came from the city of Davenport, down on the floodplain. His name was Tilly, Dwight. And at that moment he killed and burned at last the residual boy he had come here prepared to revive, the person Bobby knew, and scattered the remains. She said she was pleased to meet him, Tilly, Dwight. Her bare neck and clavicles were red with sun. And thereafter, so long as she was liking him, she called him Dwight. Most others he would come to know used the last name instead. When she was remote from him or uncertain she called him the sergeant, and when he said he was out of the service now, he was free of his past, so why did she have to call him that?, she said because she never wanted to forget that he was a killer.

  He had never entered an adobe house before that first day. It was dim and hard in all its surfaces like a cave and very old. The rough-hewn timbers in the ceiling were strong and dry. The place made for sound habitation, and he couldn’t fathom what had possessed Bobby to let the exterior dilapidate so. The bank required she keep the packed earth floors clean of mess or toys in case a buyer should come. The world’s law said the bank now owned the whole Heflin spread from the leaves of the mesquite to the rocks ten miles underground, so the bank was entitled to sell it, which they were trying to do for the outrageous sum of seventy-seven thousand dollars. Some fool would finance it at 9 percent over thirty years and end up paying three times that much—but look. It was obviously an ego poison for anybody to imagine himself the owner of a piece of land. If the bank owned it now, let them take the poison. People belonged to places, not the other way around. If you needed in the world’s way to speak of a name that rightfully belonged on the deed, that name could only be Elroy P. Heflin. Because he was born right in this room and had never slept a night off the place in his life.

  Tilly slept that first night on a cot in one of the spare rooms. From the second night onward, he slept in Louisa’s bed with her.

  The world had required that the boy have a name. The law required a name. They called him Heflin, not after Bobby but after the place to which three generations of Heflins before Bobby had lent their name and which they had left him according to the world’s law. And it was beautiful, to a lot of them, most of the time anyway, that nobody, really nobody, could have said for sure which of the guys was Elroy’s father. They were all the same pinkish color more or less. And the puppy piles of screwing, everybody screwing everybody else, God, it was paradise. They were making something. They had chosen love. Right here in this short life, not waiting for the next one, which was how they’d all come to agree that what they were doing wasn’t really about Jesus, as at first it had seemed. Even the guys could screw among themselves. That took a long time for the guys to get used to. Was it clean? Was it only a confusion of the beast? Maybe. But the way to treat our beast is with mercy.

  They were all practical. They weren’t about drugs. If a drug helped loosen something overtight, that was okay. But you couldn’t carry water from the acequia for the garden all morning if you were on acid. What would happen was you would spill the water. She told Tilly all this some weeks on, while they were ferrying water from the old rain barrels for the bath they shared. The hand pump on the kitchen sink was too cumbersome for so much water as a bath. The boy followed them dragging a mesquite branch for a pile he was building behind the house. The sun fell all over their bodies and everything else while they hauled the water, and she asked how Tilly kept his balance missing the toes. Practice, he guessed. And she asked if it was his only injury from the war. And before he could tell her that his foot had been injured after he’d returned to the States, but the divot in his back, where she sometimes put the pad of her middle finger as she held him while they screwed, had come from an NVA slug still holed up in his flesh somewhere, he decided to let Louisa make a new past for him. Yes, he said, that was the only one.

  Some of the guys had left some of their clothes, and she gave them to Tilly to wear.

  They had all seven, women and guys, been in their prime. And they could screw and screw even in the middle of the day outside if the wind was low. Then one of the others would come by and say, “May I come in?” That was the language they agreed on. And the most proprietary thing anybody ever said, if the moment wasn’t right, was “Hold on a minute, baby.” Mostly they said, “Yes.” Or they said, “And how.” Or they said, “Oh please, yes.” They were lean and strong. And you know, she’d learned something, that vanity only corrupted you when you hoarded it. Because when you were vain of your family, like she had been vain of Lucy’s white feet and their painted nails, and Conrad’s strong hamstrings, it felt like unstingy love spreading itself out from you to the others and the others to you. If it was wr
ong to find herself pretty, then it was wrong to find Lucy pretty, or Katerina.

  Four women, herself and those two and Sally, who they kept having to hide in the arroyo from the pigs. Now, the sheriff in this county didn’t count as a pig. Bobby had it good with the local law from so many years of Heflins out here. But more than once Nevada state troopers had come snooping around, which had to be a hundred kinds of illegal, trying to capture Sally and drag her back to her mother in Carson City. They all came to a strong understanding about that mother. She was a deep teaching to them in the killing power of love when you point it like a gun at somebody and say, You’re mine. Their own love was a fire in the dark in the desert that drew them all freely around a central heat, a light that sustained them.

  They were all seven of them practical and they tried to be forgiving of the beast we all are in addition to the soul. Everybody knew without saying so that you had to have more women than guys. They had an attitude of, Why pretend? We see how the bulls behave. We have it so good, and we know this is precious and precarious. And we know it’ll end. So let’s keep it and respect it and love each other and forgive the men for sparks of jealousy, or when he rolls over and decides to screw Lucy instead of me. I have a beast too. I have a gun I want to point, to keep something for myself by killing it. I say to myself, This hurts my pride, okay. And also, Lucy has beautiful breasts. Just beautiful, for now. Her glossy flawless skin like a paint in which she’d just come from swimming. And Conrad’s naked ribs, the fresh dense animal hair on his arms and legs. Their limbs working, the ends of the bones showing through the flesh, the muscles doing what they were made for, twisting, gripping. And I get to lie here and watch them. Isn’t that some kind of grace?

  The togetherness they had. You couldn’t have reckoned it unless you were in it. They were practical. They knew we each die severally and alone. But there was love in the meantime. Love to make, you know? Not to wait for. But to build up.

  Louisa was twenty-five now, and her prime lay already behind her. She still liked how she looked. She rubbed herself in coconut oil every day, down to the toes. But for about three years there, they had made heaven on earth with love every day. Nothing that had happened in the unraveling disproved any of this. Times were always going to change. Not to discriminate between the sexes, but men aren’t naturally as open to loving. For example a man could only screw one person at a time, but a woman could take it three ways at once. That wasn’t proof. But why deny the body’s shape, you know? Men have to learn love, and they can do it, but they have to decide to do it.

  They all knew they would break. Let’s do this until we break. She didn’t regret anything. But they were over now. And she often felt powerfully alone. Whether worse than the others she didn’t like to guess. Anyhow it was probably a grace that at the time they broke she was the only one of them who could still nurse Elroy a little, so they all decided she should keep him. With birth control pills and practice pumping, all four women had tried to make milk. A beast of man in him right from the beginning, he’d change his preference among them week to week. They didn’t talk about who was the mother. The mother was Katerina, but they didn’t talk about it. He called them each severally “Ma.” All the men he called “Sir.”

  “Sex is glorious, Dwight Tilly,” Louisa said one night, touching his nakedness, letting him touch hers. He had been crashing at the Heflin house for two months, excoriated by love and a hope for the three of them together—Louisa, Elroy, and himself—that was so far beyond any previous imagining he wanted to ditch his name yet again and let her give him a new one and start over. Instead that was when he became Dwight Tilly for real. She called him by that name, and he believed her. A door closed once and for all behind him. If Bobby came back around and said, I thought your name was Frade . . . But it didn’t matter. He never saw Bobby again.

  Except in torture visions. Of Bobby or one of the other two, called Conrad and Luther. Jealous visions of these other men she loved collectively more than him, so that he often left their bed and walked in the desert at night and tried to make himself disappear. The jealousy relentless in assault as a pack of dogs chasing him from the house. Disappear. Leave her the ninety-eight dollars he still had saved. Leave the car.

  Then the desert cold bit him and he went back to the house. In the cookstove, piñon fire. Elroy asleep on the cot. Louisa lay beneath a quilt in the next room. He pulled the quilt aside but hesitated to lie down. He wondered if in her sleep, when he touched her, she mistook him for one of the others. She would turn with her small and prematurely wrinkled hand open and pat his beard and scratch it and smile and be nevertheless asleep.

  He said, “Louisa.” The name itself was a torture. The others must have used it too. Used her. Bent her. Picked her up and put her down. Been scratched by her. Called by their names. The perfect round breasts were not his. As the piñon smoke was not his, or the boy or the house. Someone else had licked this rib; had known it was not his but felt it was his; had maybe made a joke, like Baby, I gave God that rib to make you with, and had laughed but felt at night it was true, the rib was part of him. The way as a small boy Vollie had felt it was true that people, like corn, were made of earth and water.

  He wanted to undress and lie in the bed with her naked and spoonwise as was their custom. The door closed on Elroy, the stove, creation. He and Louisa alone in the dark. But if he touched her now he would stick to her. Every part of him that touched her would cleave there. He knew it. And she had made it plain through the private, implicit language of two people together that he was welcome to cleave where he liked, but that when she walked off no part of her would come away. There would just be parts of him stuck to her, and she would bathe and shed them like mud that had dried. While he lay flayed in splotches dying of love.

  One night that autumn Louisa fixed a supper of corn cakes and boiled beans. They gave thanks and ate. Tilly asked the boy what he was building with the tangle of mesquite that abutted the rear of the house and that comprehended an opening at ground level big enough for the boy to enter if he flattened himself and crawled into it on elbows and knees. The boy said, “It’s a cave.”

  “What do you need with a cave?” Tilly asked.

  “To live in after they run us off,” Elroy said.

  Tilly snorted.

  Louisa stiffened.

  Elroy scraped from a jar the last of the peach compote they were using to flavor their corn cakes and showed the empty jar to Louisa, his eyes wide with appeal.

  She got up and picked through the cupboards while Tilly enquired of the boy about the architecture of caves, whether an underground or rock-enclosed element was required, whether a true cave must be discovered or could be built, what sorts of lizards one met in caves, where the flour was kept if the cave lacked a pantry; to all which questions the boy gave ready answer. Louisa came back to the table and said there was no more compote and gave the boy a bit of crushed honeycomb. The boy chewed it and then held forth in detail about how things would end here soon, how his ma should probably think of her own cave and so should Sir.

  Tilly stole a glance at Louisa, who spooned some more beans onto the boy’s plate and put the spoon down and touched her eyes with the back of her wrist and put her hands in her lap.

  Elroy turned to Tilly with a constricted brow seeming to ask for manly counsel. It was only then Tilly registered that Louisa was trying not to cry, and that the boy had recognized it right away and had intended all his answers to make her feel better. Tilly returned to the boy a look that said he had no advice yet to give.

  The boy told Louisa he was sorry.

  She said, “You ain’t got anything to be sorry for, have you?”

  He was sorry because his own cave was only big enough for himself, Elroy said, or she could have stayed with him. He had only the brush to build a boy-size cave and no more.

  That night Tilly closed the bedroom door on Elroy and the stove and l
ay down next to Louisa on the bed. “I haven’t been straight with you,” he said, “about money.”

  Louisa was sitting up, brushing her hair. “You ain’t stole any from me, that’s for sure,” she said. “What do you have, a loan on the Electra? Forget it. They won’t find you here.”

  Tilly slid to the end of the bed and turned to face her and sat cross-legged like a mendicant, and she gave him her foot and whimpered in the way that meant she wished him to rub it forcefully underneath with his thumb, and he took the foot and held on to it with both hands but didn’t press it and said, “I mean there’s some money I think I can have if I want it.”

  She dragged the brush through her hair, inspecting the ends. The hair interested her, the money did not.

  He said, “You aren’t listening.”

  She withdrew her foot and sat at attention wearing an ironic indulgent smile and said, “Ready cash money?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t make it right for me to use it.”

  “Did you cross the law?”

  “No.”

  “But you done something underhanded.”

  “It’s more what I didn’t do.”

  “What happens if you don’t use this money? Who gets it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said it mightn’t be right for you to use it.”

  “I didn’t think so, but now I wonder.”

  She made a low birdlike friendly noise which meant something in her personal idiom that he couldn’t yet distinguish.