The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to, that’s all. We have to be careful now. That thing cost us a fortune.”

  “No more champagne and oysters.”

  “We’ll be all right.”

  “I know it,” she said.

  “You do? How come?”

  She put her hand in his beard and scratched it. “Ain’t we all right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s keep on going.”

  “All right. Elroy, time to make tracks.”

  “Wait,” Elroy said.

  “Come on. Those aren’t even our clothes.”

  “But wait.”

  “What’s this silly street address you put!” she said, reading the card.

  “I had to think fast.”

  “You sweet beast.” She was smiling and crying in the modest perplexing way she did sometimes after sex that didn’t betray her feelings but made them more confounding to him. “Have you ever even been to Alamogordo?”

  “I figured he’d know all the street names down here.”

  “Elroy Heflin, come on,” she said, touching her eyes on her coat sleeve.

  “But wait,” the boy said.

  Louisa asked him, “What is it makes the sun shine?”

  “Love, I know,” Elroy said. “But wait. I like the machine.”

  “Up with you,” Tilly said.

  “And what do you like about it?” Louisa asked.

  “Up you come.”

  Elroy said, “I like how it keeps on going.”

  Tilly bought a roll of dimes from the luncheonette cashier, and the three of them went back downtown where he’d seen a public library and they sifted other newspapers there, and he and Louisa took turns at the lobby pay phone chasing leads in the want ads.

  At night they built a fire in the desert and made a grill from rocks and two tire irons and cooked hominy on it with stewed tomatoes mixed in. Elroy asked for green chile but they didn’t have any. All three lowered their heads. Louisa gave thanks for the fire. Tilly gave thanks for Louisa and for Elroy by name. Elroy gave thanks for chile.

  Tilly said, “We don’t have chile. Say thanks for what’s here. Not what isn’t.”

  Louisa said, “For—?”

  “Let him think.”

  “For?” Louisa said.

  The fire spat. No hint of breeze. The smoke drifted about them like a net underwater.

  Louisa said, “I could look at a fire forever.”

  Tilly said, “Me too.”

  Elroy said firmly, “For my eyes, amen.”

  “Good,” Tilly said.

  “Very good,” Louisa said.

  Later, so the boy could have something to spike up his hominy, Tilly pocketed a bottle of Tabasco from the luncheonette of the truck stop where they took their showers. Elroy demanded the shower every day in determined tones he didn’t otherwise use. They went along with it despite the expense. They closed and locked the shower room door and undressed, and Elroy went into the shower making yips of shock and bravery, then stood right under the stream with his eyes closed raising his arms and clenching his teeth while Tilly and Louisa briskly soaped themselves.

  Nudity was nothing to Elroy. Tilly was not so bold. Even the language put him out. Before Louisa, he’d never known a woman to say aloud the words for a lady’s parts. Nor a man, excepting the dirty versions.

  “Vagina,” she said, toweling off and pointing.

  “Hush. Men don’t like that word.”

  “Uterus.”

  “Stop. I know what it means. I never heard a person say it out loud is all.”

  She didn’t believe him, though when she pointed at herself his normally frank eyes went cagey. She asked, “What do you call the equipment on a cow at calving time?”

  “Once a Hereford cow started crying on the meadow at night. You could hear her from the house,” Tilly said. He shivered, waiting for her to finish with the towel. Elroy had already got back into his socks and underpants. “When I was a little boy. An old man had to go call the vet. On the phone he said, ‘Come quick, her back end fell out.’”

  “No!”

  “It’s right enough, isn’t it?”

  She laughed and said, “What old man called the vet? I thought you grew up in a city.”

  He stood with his penis and testicles hanging out, in front of a woman and a child. He was embarrassed, yet he discovered he wasn’t ashamed.

  “Who called?” she said.

  “I don’t remember. Some old man.” His father had called. Tilly nearly said so. The old silver head had glowed in the dark of the hall by the phone.

  “Who called?” Elroy mimicked.

  “The vet came and pushed it right back up inside and stitched her,” Tilly said. “He didn’t have to call it anything.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT LAST TILLY FOUND WORK driving for a wildcatter. They trained him to spin chains on the drill pipe too. His timing with the chains was excellent right away, and the other men on the derrick liked him.

  They came from all over, no two from the same state. One of them said Tilly wasn’t going to be a bona fide chain hand until he lost some of a finger. Tilly unlaced his boot with his grease-black hands and took off the boot and sock and showed the chain hands his wedge foot and said, “That do?” The men applauded. Two of them got on their knees to appreciate the foot and nodded at it. They showed their own stub fingers, waggling them like a lady with a new ring. At quitting time, the men drank at one or another bar. The one from Wyoming passed around a box of miniature plum cakes made for them by his daughter, Sophie, an ample seducer, in steel-toe boots, whom more than one of the men had known in secret. After an hour, all the men went home. Only an hour. The work was heavy and they prized their sleep. Not since the Calamus Comets high school basketball team had Tilly so well lost himself in a gang.

  Louisa cleaned houses in Las Cruces. She liked to work while the wife was home and to hear what the doctor had had to say about little Peggy’s croup. These were mining executive families. Copper and lead. Rocket propulsion families. It interested her to learn how people cultivated the peace of their homes. The philodendrons and lime trees should be placed in the windows by the piano—not there, just to the right. Yes, there. Meantime think of the anguish these people had to carry. The earth-murder, the orgies of human killing that made possible the peace where they slept. She envied the strength it took to ignore such things.

  An Air Force wife lay on the divan dying of thyroid cancer. But she had dragged herself to the bathroom and put on her face. Taupe hose. A chiffon blouse that matched her earrings. Her name was Marlene. She was writing a collection of poems titled My Choice to Continue. The subject and Marlene herself held Louisa in thrall, and she was desperate to learn what the poems contained.

  “You won’t let me read them,” Louisa said.

  “No.”

  “Please, I want to.”

  “They aren’t finished. And they aren’t good. And I won’t show them until they’re good.” Marlene wore a look of endurance, though her oncologist had promised her case was terminal. A hard look not of accepting but of outlasting. She said, “Get rid of that boot on the mantel. Who put that there?” The boot was an amber vase in the form of a lady’s button-up shoe.

  “I did. It was in the closet,” Louisa said.

  “Pitch it. Why should I have to look at it anymore? You were trying to make things pretty. I understand. . . . Don’t touch the thermostat. It isn’t cold in here. It’s me that’s cold. I won’t be one of these people too proud to wear a blanket.”

  She did not however have a blanket close by. Louisa said, “Let me,” and went away to hide the glass boot and find a quilt.

  “Don’t,” Marlene said.
“I’ll get up in a minute. Come back here. You mustn’t let lazy people make you play gofer.”

  Louisa went back to the living room empty-handed.

  Marlene lay there, shivering. “The boot was a going-away present when we had to leave the base at Vandenberg. Henry practically invented the A-10, and then command transferred us here before we could even see anybody fly it. I’ll get up in a minute.”

  Louisa polished the large mirror that overhung the mantel. She asked what the A-10 was.

  “A jet aircraft. We call it the Thunderbolt. Close-air support, mostly for killing tanks,” Marlene said, breathing shallowly. “If the Soviets send their mechanized divisions through the Fulda Gap—heaven forbid—the Thunderbolts will smash them—and statues of Henry will be—erected in every war college in Europe.”

  Louisa knew perhaps more about the Fulda Gap than Marlene reckoned. “I don’t understand. What would the Russians send tanks into Germany for?”

  “They did last time,” Marlene said.

  “But Europe is planted all over with thermonuclear weapons.”

  “Yes, darling. But we won’t use them. Except to respond to a nuclear attack. If they want to come at us, they’ll use something milder.”

  Louisa was like one of those Christians who prefer not to talk about Jesus with anyone outside of her congregation because she was liable to blurt the terrible truth so few people knew. She had no inclination to persuade. She didn’t want to frighten anybody. But sometimes the truth came out of her like a sneeze. She said, “Right at the start there’s going to be a nuclear exchange, Marlene. Nothing’s going to stop it. It won’t take a day to finish, maybe a couple of hours. A few folks will survive. Then they’ll die from the radiation.”

  Marlene looked at her. She said, “No one’s going to die from radiation except me.”

  Louisa snatched a cashmere throw from the armchair.

  Marlene said, “Don’t.” But Louisa had already covered her up and tucked the throw around her shaking feet.

  “This isn’t warm enough anyway.” Marlene lay beautiful and stark in her weathered skin, her silver rings, conjuring poems full of deadly knowledge under her blue-painted eyelids.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WHAT ARMY EVER CAME IN with swords when they had machine guns?” Louisa asked Tilly later. “These antitank planes, whatever Marlene was talking about, these are toys. Why are we building them? Is it really a public works program? There’s got to be another reason. What are you laughing at?”

  “A little grim.”

  “What?”

  “All you told her about the end of days.”

  She started to laugh—then saw he’d mistaken what she’d said about a nuclear exchange for mere pessimism. “What did you reckon we were doing at the Heflin place,” she said, “praying for peace?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Come on, baby, there ain’t any use. I mean, nobody knows when the end is coming, but it’s coming. We weren’t stupid. We didn’t think we could stop it. If you only had a minute left, what would you fill it with? That was our thinking.”

  Tilly said, “You sound like Bobby.”

  “Fuck you,” she said. “We all sounded like each other. We don’t know just when, obviously. But this here war we’re in is the last war. It’s only having a lull right now.”

  “You believe this.”

  “Who cares if I believe it? It’s true.” She had the desolate look of an eyewitness whose testimony was doubted.

  “If you believed it, how come you guys decided to make a baby?”

  “Well, we didn’t,” she insisted.

  “Well, you did though.”

  “We decided not to.”

  They had known they were taking risks. They had all seven held a meeting, cross-legged on the floor by the cookstove. They could respond to their dilemma in only one way if they were to be decent and loving, but not all of them were ready for it, so they slept and came together again the next day and went on deliberating. They kept talking for three more days until they agreed to go together to Mexico, where operations could be had cheap and they would all get sterilized.

  “Oh,” Tilly said. “I guess I knew that.” In fact, what with the two of them hadn’t been using precautions, he’d assumed—but then he couldn’t even think now the outrageous, foolish thing he’d assumed. The hope he’d let flower in the garden of his ignorance.

  “You thought I was on the pill?” she said. But she knew better. She was letting him save face.

  “Yes,” he lied.

  All seven of them had got into Luther’s van and driven to Ciudad Juarez. Everybody was to have it done the same weekend.

  “Two of them lied?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did they do, go into a clinic and fake a limp coming out?”

  “More or less.”

  “You had a pact. And two of them broke it. They lied to your faces.”

  She said, “At least two, yes.” He saw her force herself not to flinch from his questions. But he kept asking, unable to stop now that his ignorance was ruined.

  “That Katerina and one of the men?”

  “At least one, yes.”

  “You didn’t care to know which.”

  “Somebody lied, okay. Should we have made everybody defend themselves? Should we have had a trial?”

  “Why not? If you wanted to get to the bottom of it.”

  “I thought you’d understand,” she said and didn’t hide her disappointment in him.

  They were living in a single-wide trailer within view of the depot where Vollie Frade had first stepped out of a bus under the New Mexico sky bright with formless hope. They had lately been laying by a fixed portion of their monthly wages, and he pretended with her that this money represented only a hedge against future hardships. He never said aloud they might use it someday to put a down payment on a house. He seemed to recognize the anguish it would cause her to admit she might be capable of hoping for such a wickedness, a capitulation, as owning property—in fact a particular little cinder-block ranch house in Rincon that came with an ancient peach tree in the yard and half an acre-foot of water rights for the garden. Louisa had found the place in the foreclosure notices. Who did she think she was? Lusting after property. She had damned the bus traffic that harassed her sleep here and had conspired with this man to better their lot by saving for the mirage of a future, even while she knew only the present existed.

  “We were more important,” she said, “the thing we made was more important than nailing somebody with his mistake. Maybe that was the first crack, and we didn’t admit it. But you know what, I’m glad we didn’t.”

  “How could you ignore a lie like that?”

  “We didn’t ignore it.”

  “You had to decide to do something about it, didn’t you?”

  “We did. We decided to love each other.”

  * * *

  • • •

  LOUISA WAS NEVER HIS. She didn’t need to say it. She radiated it all the time like a tinted light. On the street in Las Cruces a drifter kid asked them for money, his hair matted and stinking, a deathward look in his yellow eyes. He had the square teeth, plumb as piano keys, of someone whose parents had been vain of him once. Louisa said she had no money on her but she would give him a hug. The drifter kid nodded with his whole spine and said, Golly, that would be great. Then he glanced at Tilly standing behind her, and at Elroy climbing Tilly’s flannel jacket, and back up at Tilly, who watched the drifter vividly until he shrank away untouched.

  Louisa didn’t blame Tilly for feeling what he knew wasn’t true, that she was his. Did she blame his severed nerves for telling him he still had toes that stung him although they didn’t exist? He didn’t have her because no one had anyone. We didn’t belong even to ourselves. T
he beast in us ordered us to do a hundred cockamamie things that weren’t possible. Own land. Possess a person. To tame the beast would be to take it away from itself. When the drifter kid shrank from her embrace, she turned and looked at Tilly and later told him she could see him trying to leash the beast inside. Yes, she was grateful not to be the excuse for violence or the object of violence. But a spurt of physical violence couldn’t compare with the way our several beasts savaged us from the inside all day and night when we tried to make them into something other than beasts. He probably thought he’d hidden his beast, but she saw how it fed on his resistance, multiplied his resistance, and threw it back at him.

  “What woman doesn’t want her man to hold his idiot temper?” he asked.

  Whip his temper, more like, she said. Fire guns at it. To do violence to a creature of violence only increased the violence afoot in the world.

  Tilly asked what choice did a person have. He might have known what she would say.

  “All we can do with the beast is to love it,” she said. He had been a killer. He had lusted after the power of America, the tools America had to multiply his killing power. In reality he had been the tool, the multiplier America had used because it was a killer. A much more dangerous killer because America had no balancing power of love as a person has. “You only think you’re holding your temper,” she said.

  “I never raised a hand to you, did I?”

  “Hmm. Course not,” she said, scratching his beard. “But you think I can’t see it?”

  “See what?”

  “The thing you’re like to do every moment. And you think it’s only your power what keeps you from doing it.”

  “Are you saying you think I want to beat you up?”

  “I’m saying—do you really want me to say this? I don’t want to change your mind or anything, or scare you.”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m saying you look around like the whole world is complete and it works, and there’s only one thing the matter with it. And that’s you. And you could make the world perfect if you only took yourself out of it. Like disappeared.”

  Tilly didn’t say anything, and Louisa said, “What.”