The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “I let some people down,” he said. “There was a lot I could have done for them, and I didn’t do any of it.”

  “So why’d they pay you?”

  He did not set right her use of “pay” and only answered, “There was no one else the money belonged to. That doesn’t mean I deserve it.” She had tucked the withdrawn foot with its shapely be-ringed toes under her, and he wanted the foot back but didn’t ask for it. “An envelope came in the mail. There was a cashier’s check in it.”

  “That’s bigger than a regular check or what?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t cash it. It was yellow, the check.” His naked wedge foot lay before him on the bedsheets like a creature from another land. “I kept the check a long time in the breast pocket of my winter coat, like maybe I’d forget it there. Then there was a day in East Haven, in Connecticut, where I was learning to walk again. I didn’t have any cigarettes left, and my money clip was back in the room where I was living. Only about an eighth of a mile away but I could have told you exactly how many steps at the time. Then it came to me I had the coat on, so I had the check. And I always kept my ID in the front pocket of my pants. And I was standing in front of a corner store, and I could see the cigarettes through the window behind the cashier, and there was a savings bank across the street. So I went into the bank and showed my ID and filled out the card for an account. Then I gave the teller the check and asked for twenty dollars of it, and she said she could never advance money on a check that size. I said how about five dollars, and she said it would take two weeks to clear it, and I took the check back and went into the lobby. Then I felt a shot or a stab under my ribs in the back, but there was nothing there. I got out the check and folded it a few times and pressed the little trapdoor button on the ashtray in the lobby and I stuffed the check in there with the butts and I walked out.”

  “And you don’t reckon it would be right to call these people and ask them to cut you another check? Is that what you’re saying? After you let them down and then you done that way with the check they sent?”

  “The people I let down are dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s just a company holding the money. I’m sure I could get another check. But I don’t want it,” he said. “Unless. Well, that’s what I want to ask you.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong girl about money. The last check I saw was in Robert Lee, Texas, three years ago.”

  Tilly said, “What if I got another check and cashed it and bought this place?”

  “That’s crazy. Why?”

  “What do you mean why? So we could stay on it is why.”

  She said with a dismissing wave, “You’d have to show regular income to get the mortgage.”

  He said, “There wouldn’t be any need of a mortgage.”

  “You’d have to keep cattle. It’s the only way to get enough revenue out of a spread this size to make it. We tried everything else.”

  “I could keep cattle. Like—we could.”

  “And you’d have to learn about keeping cattle. It ain’t nothing like the truck driving you done before.”

  “I might know some already about cattle keeping.”

  They sat listening awhile to the wind snapping the tarp that covered the window.

  She said, “The Lord is asking you a question.”

  “You too.”

  “No, he isn’t,” she said. “It’s your money.”

  “Not if I don’t use it.”

  She sat up rigid against the carved and darkly lacquered headboard of the bed in which Bobby Heflin had been born and said, “This is your mistake, or it isn’t. Don’t make me share it with you.”

  Tilly said, “You said it was evil to own property. I guess it wasn’t evil when your friend owned property and he let you stay here. And you fucked him for his trouble.”

  Louisa got up and put on her underclothes and pulled up her long knee socks and got into her dress and one of the men’s heavy sweaters she wore about the house and stood in the corner with arms crossed low over her stomach and regarded him.

  Tilly said, “You’ll share Bobby’s mistake but not mine. Why’s that?”

  She stood right next to the door but stayed in the room as if to prove she refused to be wounded.

  “You want to walk out and sleep in one of the other rooms,” he said. “Go ahead. Why don’t you do it?”

  “I deserve some of this,” she said. “Not all of it. I reckon I’ll stand and listen till you’re finished.”

  “All right. Do you want to live here?”

  “Not so much I’d be willing to have you look at me every day like you’re doing now. You’ll say later, I didn’t want to cash that filthy check but I done it for her sake.”

  “Does that mean no?”

  “It means what I said. And I’m not going to ask you to apologize for the mean thing you let slip a minute ago. Even Elroy can say he’s sorry, but you can’t, so I won’t ask. I reckon that was your beast talking and not the rest of you. But Sergeant, you ought to know by now it isn’t true what you said about me and Bobby. And I don’t want you to suggest it again.”

  Tilly said, “I still have to make a decision whether to get that money and buy the spread.”

  She got out of her clothes again and sat in the bed and went back to brushing her hair.

  He said, “I’m coming up to your side of the bed now, all right?”

  “That’s fine, but please don’t touch me while I’m angry.”

  He crawled to the head of the bed and punched the pillow and slid his naked shameful body under the sheet which smelled of her, and she sat inches from him but outside the sheet as if she had already receded into the world of visions where people lost to us can be seen and even smelled but never touched.

  “I hate money,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “I won’t do it,” he said. “That’s my decision. We’ll have to go someplace else.”

  She tied up her hair and got under the sheet and said, “All right, you can touch me now if you want to.”

  A few days before the sale of the land closed, the night the church man from the bank came with a pot roast and broke the news they’d finally have to leave, Tilly and Louisa lay in bed again in the dark, sweating from their exertions. She was holding his hand. He wanted to cut the hand off and give it to her.

  The boy in the dark outside the worn door of the bedroom could be heard stirring. Then the boy said, “Sir? Water?”

  Tilly put on his skivvies and got up and put the dipper in the bucket and brought the dipper to the boy, and the boy took it in his little paws while Tilly hovered over the handle and the boy drank about half the dipper and fell dead away asleep. Perhaps he had never really woken up. Tilly put the dipper to his own mouth and drank the rest. It was the boy’s home water. A tang like pennies. The boy might forget this taste, but if it ever touched his mouth again time would swallow him whole.

  Later that week they drove into Las Cruces, and Elroy was never on his home place again.

  12

  They slept on the vinyl bench seats of the Electra, parked in the lot of a Lutheran church in Las Cruces.

  The boy sat up in the night behind the wheel and said, “Where’m I at?”

  Tilly and Louisa lay in the back under their coats tightly spoonwise along the deep seat. She had not woken up. He waited unmoving to hear the quilt rustle and the vinyl squeak of the boy lying back down. The wind kicked up, and stopped. Tilly lay his head on her neck again and descended through disjoint wakeful dreams—of barns, a shed, a sty, of the grinder worked by hand and screwed to a vertical timber within the barn that cracked corn for the hens. A clapboard house decayed and slanting, its chimney collapsed. Then of Coke box houses on low stilts with thatched straw for roofs, crushed or napalmed, black smoke pouring up like a waterfall inverted.


  In the front seat, the boy said clearly, to no one, “This ain’t real.”

  Tilly sat up careful not to wake Louisa and pulled the lock in the rear door and got out stocking footed in the mercury-vapor light of the empty lot. He tugged from his jeans pocket the ring with its two remaining keys, to the Electra’s ignition and its door locks. The frigid wind kicked up again. He unlocked the driver’s-side door and opened it. The boy sat saucer-eyed and querulous, daring him to pass off this evident dream world as the true world after an apocalypse that had left people without cots or even cookstoves to sleep by, and the only light in the outdoors a high green lamp that made men into ghouls.

  Tilly said, “Come here.”

  Elroy suffered himself to be picked up within the wrappings of quilt. A bleary hum of distant highway traffic. The child’s milky night breath, and the stink of the man’s night sweat in his several days’ clothes. The cold desert night capped in low cloud.

  Tilly crouched through the rear door and pressed the quilt with the boy into the cavity between Louisa’s knotted arms and lap. Elroy fussed and situated himself, sprawling. There was no room on the seat for a third. Tilly took his slicker coat, which had belonged to one of the other men, and climbed in the front and pushed up the armrest and wrapped himself with the slicker. He stuffed his toes into the warm fold of the seat where the boy had been lying, and gradually the chill left them. He lay facing the exposed underbelly of the heater core under the passenger dash. Shards of snow tinked against the steel roof. He listened to Louisa’s and Elroy’s snuffly but easeful breathing, the boy’s breath out of time with the woman’s but their sounds mixed, the elemental animal sounds, the air from one mingling with the air sucked into the other—listened to the two of them but did not see them, saw only the inert surfaces of the interior of the car and the glowing green-misted windows and his own approximate shape in its slicker shroud. Three people in the dark together, one apart from the other two. Like the lieutenant in the adjacent tunnel chamber in the dark when he and Wakefield had heard the lieutenant crying.

  In the morning, they drove to a truck stop on the edge of town. They unpacked fresh flannel shirts and underwear and went inside and paid for a five-minute shower. They were all three lean and they fit snugly in one stall, but the shower head was a cannon. The boy cowered from it. Tilly baffled the current with his hands so the water would come down on the boy with less violence while Louisa quickly worked the knots from the boy’s hair. They shared the foxed old towel that came with the stall and they dressed. At the luncheonette counter of the truck stop they ate rye toast with raspberry jam and eggs and Cream of Wheat. Tilly and Louisa drank their coffee looking at the television. Elroy had never seen television and looked at it with an air of hostile impatience as though it were a salesman come to the door at mealtime. The show concerned two deliverymen in jumpsuits launched into outer space by mistake.

  Tilly paid the bill, and Louisa wished him luck, and he left on his own and drove downtown to the Motor Vehicle Department and showed his New York State driver’s license and filled out the forms to transfer it to the New Mexico State chauffeur’s license required for all forms of commercial driving. He took the written test and passed it. Then he took the driving test and passed it too. After he read aloud the line of letters on the eye chart, the clerk said, “Okay, pard. You win.”

  The license would be valid for one year and expired on the last day of his birth month and cost $3.25. The clerk asked his date of birth. Tilly looked at the old license and showed it and said his date of birth was November 14, 1948. The clerk asked where he lived. Tilly said he’d lately moved. The clerk said that was all right, where was he living now? And Tilly told him to put down “no fixed address.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “All right. Put down One Hundred Louisa Street, Alamogordo, New Mexico.”

  “Is that where you live?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “We might move again.”

  “Long drive from Alamo. Why didn’t you just go to the MVD up there?”

  “They don’t do the chauffeur’s test up there.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Not on Saturday.”

  “I didn’t know that. Now, this entitles you to operate a motor vehicle for the purpose of transporting persons or property for compensation. You can drive anything you want except a school bus.”

  “All right.”

  “You can drive a Sherman tank. But you want to operate a bus or motor vehicle transporting children for compensation, you got to wait a year and you got to get three responsible persons who know you well to sign a certificate attesting to your good character and habits.”

  “Fine.”

  “All that, you got to file in Albuquerque. You ain’t going to drive schoolchildren in a bus?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Set awhile and we’ll laminate this thing. Then you’ll be a truck-driving son of a gun, like Red Sovine,” he said. “Hold on. You wrote brown for your eyes.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Your eyes are green.”

  “Nossir, they’re brown.”

  “I’m going to put green. You go to the head and look. We’ll have you back in Alamo by suppertime.”

  A while later the clerk called his name, and he went to the counter. The clerk said, “Did you look at a mirror?”

  “Nossir, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  He found Louisa and Elroy in the windowless truck stop laundry room where Elroy sat on the floor, his mouth agape, watching the churning clothes in the porthole glass of the washing machine. Louisa was marking up the front pages of a Las Cruces Sun-News she’d taken from the trash. She always read with a pencil and underlined and wrote yes or maybe in the margin, or wrote lies, shame on you, are we stupid? right on the printed text as if talking over it.

  “Says, ‘Ford offers conditional pardon to draft dodgers and deserters,’” she enunciated. “You got to reaffirm your allegiance to the U.S.A. But then you do two years of a public service job, and they clean your record.”

  He waited for the horsey snort of indignation to follow—he enjoyed all her rhetorical noises, a hiss recognized a stroke of crazy luck; hmm meant she agreed, go on; a hooing like a mourning dove equaled commiseration. But she only let this news hang in the air unremarked upon and looked elsewhere down the page.

  “That article gives you a notion,” he said.

  “As a backup,” she said. “Down the line. If you can’t find anything else.”

  “Let me get this straight.”

  “Absolute and total backup,” she said casually but wouldn’t look at him.

  “I tell them, ‘I’m a pansy. I swear it. I deserted.’ So I can get to sweep the streets for two dollars an hour?”

  She blushed and turned the page.

  “I’m sorry,” Tilly said. “Sarcasm.”

  “Forget it.”

  “You were trying to help.”

  “I think I was trying to do something different. I think I was trying to make believe you was someone else. I think I was trying to make believe you went AWOL on your own.”

  “Is that what the others did?”

  “Or you was 1-A, and we was hiding you. But you ain’t hiding. You’re right there with your killer’s mark on your arm. And I’m here with you. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of myself.”

  “I’ll get something real soon.”

  “What was your draft classification? I don’t even know that. Tell me it was 1-A. Tell me you didn’t have practically no choice at all.”

  “I wasn’t drafted.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “If you go in and sign up, why would they need to draft you?”

  She stuffed the newspaper in the trash among the
clumps of lint and she twisted up her hair and stuck the pencil through the knot. Then she folded her arms and looked at him and looked away and said, “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how Bobby come to call you the Volunteer? Because you signed up on your own free will?”

  Tilly thought a minute. He said, “Yes, that’s why. What did you think it was?”

  “I guess I knew but I didn’t want to know.”

  “I’m not sorry.”

  “I know you ain’t. You never get sorry.”

  “Doesn’t mean I’d do it all again the same way.”

  “I need to think about this.”

  Tilly said, “Well, tell me what you’re thinking about.”

  “I’m thinking if the girls in my high school saw me now.”

  “You look nice. You always look nice.”

  She laughed. Her eyes were remote with misgiving. She said, “Love don’t know any principles at all, does it?”

  Tilly felt a catch in his throat and he coughed to scratch it, but it wouldn’t soften. He turned to the boy on the floor and rasped, “How’d you like that outer space show on the TV?”

  Louisa refolded her arms, watching the boy, addressing the man. “He told me, ‘I don’t believe any of it.’ Them were his words.”

  “They send people into space, Elroy. On top of rockets.”

  “Go on,” Louisa said, “prepare him for the world’s truth.”

  “I like this show,” Elroy said, pointing at the sudsy window.

  “Did you pass?” Louisa asked Tilly.

  “I did.”

  “Let me see it.”

  He showed her the license, and she smiled at the picture, and he said, “Turn that thing over a minute and look at me. What color are my eyes?”

  “Green.”

  “They’re brown.”

  “Go look. They’re green. What does it say here?” She turned the license back over. “Says they’re green. That’s right.”

  “They’re brown. Eyes don’t change color once you’re grown, do they?”

  “Go look.”