The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Elroy would be deployed to Kuwait and to Bishkek and down south to Helmand Province in Afghanistan. As he would remove his helmet to scratch under the armored nape pad, a bit of his ear would fly away from his head, and only then would he hear the sniper shot that nearly killed him. He would fire his weapon again at two more men trying to rappel from inside an apartment building, men hanging from green extension cords tied to the wood shutters of a fourth-story room where the blue laundry flapped. The two men would fall to the street. He would never see their faces. A spotter from Army Special Forces would confirm their deaths. He would fire on a woman who was firing on him, and both would miss. He would fly to Riga and back to Kuwait. To Riga and thence to Bagram. To New Mexico and back to Kunduz. He would lust for the world. He would take the boy Janis to Jurmala, to the Latvian beach. The boy’s slight bones would work beneath his pink flesh while he swam, and from shore Elroy would scan the perimeter twenty miles distant in all seaward and landward directions for signs of bodily threat to his only kin.

  * * *

  • • •

  “JANIS,” HE CALLED, “not so far.” The boy kept on swimming but no farther out, parallel to shore now as if he had heard his father and was complying.

  Tall, sun-dazzled, electric white, in cheap short trunks, weak with fatigue from his travels, Elroy stood knee-deep in the water, his feet numb. He dared go no deeper for the cold. Young as the boy was, he knew cold; it fazed him but didn’t deter him. At home he often had to shower in it. He paddled with strength. Elroy’s pride in him was a stab to the ribs of perfect pain. A teenager had come by with an instant camera and sold Elroy their picture. He couldn’t bear to look at it; he had stashed it in his pants on the beach; he would have to give it away.

  The water was broad, clean, brown at bottom, nearly inaudible in its movements though it formed the arm of a great sea. The extent of its shallows could not be known from shore.

  The boy’s hair stuck to his skull like a cap. He seemed to recede.

  Elroy, cupping his mouth, barked, “Too far.”

  The boy now turned not back toward shore but farther out. The head invisible as the splashes grew higher behind the body. The kicking feet seemed to learn a new power.

  All at once Elroy saw the threat, the willful boy himself, and ran, the water impeding him, the shallows shortly giving way to rib-deep shocking cold. A spirit took him over, a surge in the blood. He dove. He swam, poorly and hard. He shouted after the boy, who under his newfound power had become only a disturbance of the water, a tiny bomb.

  The boy was escaping him. The boy was leaving him behind.

  His wind gave out. He kept on swimming. The boy, having heard or having given up his escape, stopped swimming and treaded water. Elroy reached him, the small head bobbing, the limbs below motoring with ease. “You’ll come when I call,” Elroy said, but no sound escaped: he was sucking air. The boy grinned. A shallow appeared a few strokes away. They swam to it. Elroy’s feet found the sand below. The water came to his shoulders.

  “Come here,” he shouted. He wept with rage. The trustful boy swam right to him, gripping Elroy’s shoulder as if to climb it.

  Elroy, twisting, caught the boy’s approaching head like a ball that had been passed to him and thrust it below the surface. He held it there.

  The other body seemed to struggle.

  The taste on his lips, though of seawater, was strangely sweet.

  The small feet brushed his legs like fishtails. If he wrapped a leg around the trunk, the body would stay submerged.

  No one who had not already seen would see.

  He bit his lip. The water on his tongue was like food.

  The sunlight made the water’s surface a foil sheet that blinded him. His left hand arose and wiped his eyes.

  His right hand did not let go the head—he did not tell it to let go—but the sphere it held out of sight slipped away.

  The body beneath the water had freed itself. The surface broke; Janis emerged, gasping.

  In a moment the boy found a higher shallow and stood, drawing his breath in deep methodical pulls like a rower, watching Elroy with his direct, habitual, unquiet look that asked and calculated and theorized—and yet already knew.

  All this must be in the nature of things, it said. None of us is protected, I understand. A wave will come that knocks us off our feet.

  14

  The following year, after Evija wrote Elroy that she was moving to Spain and he should come and get the boy, Elroy asked Tilly if he could bring Janis from Riga to stay for a while in the condo in Los Alamos, and Tilly said yes, and Elroy flew to Latvia to get the boy, but it didn’t work out, unfortunately. Just, it didn’t work out, you know?

  He crashed awhile on Tilly’s condo sofa and then got orders to redeploy to Kyrgyzstan. Everywhere he went abroad, Riga, Bagram, Bishkek, he slept in structures the Red Army had left behind. It made him proud to be taking territory directly from the adversary instead of fighting some proxy war in a proxy land like Tilly had done. But every deployment took something out of him, a blood price that left him weaker.

  The army promoted him to staff sergeant. He outranked the old man at last, even if army rules, contrary to those of the Marine Corps, required a staff sergeant be addressed only as sergeant—as if he had bettered the old man but nobody could say so.

  Elroy was slowly coming up in the world, but what did he own? Technically, he did still own a little Nissan 4x4 pickup that he had acquired on credit during a previous deployment to tool around the enormous base at Bagram, but he had not found the time to sell it before that deployment ended, and had left it there in a base parking lot. This and other financial miscalculations he had made left him so flat-ass broke that when, at the end of the latest deployment in Kyrgyzstan, he returned to the condo in Los Alamos where Tilly let him stay short times, he had to shave with Tilly’s razor in secret, rinsing just twice so as to hide any wear on the lubricating strip, carefully dabbing the razor dry on his shirt hem and putting it back in the medicine cabinet, which contained no medicine. That was when he figured out Tilly had no health insurance and decided he was going to have to fix this and made some inquiries at the VA.

  * * *

  • • •

  A YEAR LATER, in November 2012, at age forty, Elroy was back in New Mexico on a week’s leave in the middle of yet another deployment, his sixth, casting his eyes around him for a way out of the army, an escape before his brains burned down, before his body failed him or he failed his body, a route that led him not into temptation but delivered him from evil, a way and a place to live and eat, and finding them nowhere.

  The current deployment was again near Bagram, where his pickup had unsurprisingly gone missing from the parking lot in which he had left it years before but where the collection agency that now owned the loan on the pickup still harassed him by phone, email, and text. From Bagram, without Tilly’s knowledge, he had forged certain signatures, and submitted certain VA benefit applications on the old man’s behalf, and arranged online an appointment for Tilly at the Albuquerque VA, and got himself this middeployment leave; then he had come home, and on the morning of the last full day of his leave, had inveigled Tilly into the passenger seat of Tilly’s own Lincoln (on the pretext of needing someone to drive him back from a dental procedure in Albuquerque), and only revealed the true nature of their excursion as they were leaving Santa Fe County, seventy miles from the condo, on Interstate 25.

  “Pull over right now,” Tilly said. “I’m walking home.”

  Elroy drove the Lincoln down the road.

  “I have no quarrel with Agent Orange,” Tilly said. “Nobody dropped Agent Orange on me.”

  “Sir, it don’t matter if they dropped it on you,” Elroy said. “It matters if they could have dropped it on you. These people believe they owe you a benefit. You just have to let them give it to you.”

  The old
man faced the desert racing by the passenger window. The back of his white head seemed about to catch fire. He writhed in the sun-cracked seat of the old car. His drowsy dog, Mavis, fell off his lap. She was a pound rescue, a runty thing with the long snout of a pointer, and regarded Elroy always with a look of penetrating indifference: what I know, it said, I do not even care to disclose.

  The bitch climbed back atop the old man’s lap, wedging her chin between his knees.

  To the window Tilly said, “You want me to say the Marine Corps didn’t drop Agent Orange on me but they could have. What if they couldn’t have but they did anyway? Do they get a benefit, and I pay for it? Turn the car around.”

  Elroy continued driving south under a pink bridge. A gutted mattress spraddled the guardrail. “You know they used it,” he said.

  “Elroy, they used it all over the place. Not everybody fights in a desert. If we took two steps out of the defoliated zone, we were blind. But they never dropped it on my head. Nothing is the matter with me.”

  It was true nothing evident ailed him.

  “This is just money,” Elroy said. “I don’t get you.”

  “Nothing’s just money.”

  “It comes from someplace, we send it someplace else, that’s all. You act like every piece of money has a curse on it.”

  The dog tottered, watching the billboards that pointed to the casinos off the desolate pueblo roads. Tilly reached under her armpit and palmed the white blaze on her chest. She twisted her head and kissed him.

  “If one of your stents all comes loose or you need a bypass before your Medicare kicks in, them bills will clean out whatever it is you got,” Elroy said, temper rising. “Then where will you live?”

  Mavis objected to Elroy’s raising his voice and told him so.

  “Girl, I don’t mean nothing by it,” Elroy said. “But what does your old man have to live on after his mortgage? Is it a thousand dollars a month?”

  The dog wouldn’t say. A click came from the heater core behind the passenger-side dash. Mavis turned to inspect it. The blower motor had not yet kicked in. She pointed her beard at the vent expectantly.

  “Is it eight hundred?” Elroy asked. “Mavis, he ain’t got any sense of financial planning at all.”

  “Who is this talking?” Tilly said. “You come here and you have to use my razor. Don’t you think I notice? And what do you owe on that truck you left in the Hindu Kush? And how do your collection agencies get my number?”

  “Hang up when they call.”

  “How much of your money goes to that woman?” Tilly asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Elroy, you have to draw the line with people.”

  “All right, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I told her no more.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I drew the line, like you said.”

  “Wait a minute. No more cruises, or no more money at all?”

  “She doesn’t get a dime out of me anymore.”

  “What do you mean? How does the boy eat if you don’t pay her? Socialism is over.”

  “I don’t got it, she doesn’t get it, that’s all.”

  “Is that why she doesn’t let you see the boy now?”

  Elroy pulled the arm that controlled the windshield wipers. Fluid splattered the glass, obscuring the road while the wipers wagged. “Yeah,” he said, “can you believe that?”

  The blower came on with a whoosh that smelled of penetrating oil, and the dog snapped at the air.

  Then the means Elroy had sought for trapping the old man came to him. “If you don’t tell me what kind of coverage or assets you got, and you get sick,” he said, “who’s going to pay your bills?”

  To this Tilly made no answer. Elroy had him in a box. The old man would rather have to live forever than die with a debt to his name.

  When they got to the door of the VA, Elroy strapped Mavis into the red nylon vest labeled Service Dog that he had stolen. She threw her head and snapped at the reflective trim as the vest wrapped around her, but he said she didn’t want to have to stay outside in the cold, did she? Did she?

  Behind the plexiglass, the service officer took a thick file from the receptionist. They all went back to the officer’s fluorescent cubicle, where pictures of her children and grandchildren decorated the padded acoustical modular wall padding and an old set of a baby’s fleece pajamas hung from the side of the computer monitor on a miniature hanger. The pajamas were embroidered with the red and yellow insignia of the Tenth Marine Regiment.

  “How do you do, sir?” she said. “Are we in any pain today?”

  “Tenth Regiment,” Tilly said. “Arm of Decision.”

  “Those were my baby boy’s that his abuelita made. He goes to navy nuke school now. His sister’s in that same regiment my husband was in. Would you believe it? We put the pajamas uniform on the wrong one. The regiment dropped the old motto. They’re King of Battle now.”

  “I feel fine. Why don’t you ask the staff sergeant here if he has any pain?”

  Elroy, studying the pajamas from a distance, stood Mavis on his lap and petted the knobby cartilage behind her ears, though the bitch took no perceptible pleasure in it.

  “I haven’t read in the file anything about your service dog, Mr. Tilly. Do you use him for anxiety issues related to your tour? We might be able to get you some funding for him.” She wore a hundred hair-thin silver bangles on each arm, and a turquoise bodkin in her gray hair, and a brooch of black and white crystals that surrounded the logo of the San Antonio Spurs. Her thumb bore a nibbed rubber thimblelike cap that rapidly snatched the corners of the papers in his file, individuating them, while she cursed the sloppy clerk who had assembled the documents in such shuffled fashion.

  Elroy showed the dog in profile. “Mavis is a she. You know what, I might have met your daughter in Kuwait. Wasn’t the Tenth over there? Or no, I saw them at Manas in Kyrgyzstan.”

  “Thank you for your service, Sergeant. My daughter doesn’t tell me exactly where she is. It’s a game where I have to guess by the color of the sand behind her on the Skype screen.”

  “Will you explain to me please, Mrs. Baca, why I’m here?” Tilly asked.

  “Did your son not tell you? You signed the POA for your benefits representative.”

  “Did I, now?”

  “Yes, you did,” Elroy insisted.

  “And your representative filed the appropriate forms to get you this far. Excuse me.” She opened an Acrobat file on her desktop and scanned it and said to the screen. “You and Sergeant Heflin aren’t specially related?”

  Tilly looked at her. He did not look at Elroy, who scratched the mangled nub of his ear. The part that itched was no longer there.

  “Call him what you like,” Tilly said. “I was his guardian.”

  “Bottom rail’s on top now,” she said.

  “Hell it is,” Elroy said. “I’ll be his subordinate till he dies.”

  “The time will come for us all,” Tilly said. “But not yet.”

  “He wouldn’t let me guardian his dog.”

  “Mrs. Baca, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to make Elroy mad. He’ll say I’m telling it only to make him mad, but that is not quite so. Nobody dropped Agent Orange on me ever.”

  “Sir, that doesn’t matter.”

  “See?” Elroy said.

  “How can a thing not matter if it didn’t happen?”

  “Sir, because we have a law of Congress. The law treats veterans of the conflict in Vietnam not as individuals but as a class. And we have a policy from the secretary of veterans affairs. I ask you two questions. Did you serve in the Republic of Vietnam, regardless of length of that service, between January 9, 1962, and May 7, 1975?”

  “But that’s everybody,” Tilly said. “That’
s the duration.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, I did,” he said.

  “Secondly, has a doctor diagnosed you with any of the conditions on pages four through seven of your pamphlet?”

  “But this is everything that could go wrong with a human at all.”

  “Dioxin is a more dangerous and persistent substance than command realized at the time. If you were there, and you have these illnesses, then you have a presumptive service connection with your illness and we can treat you for it and perhaps compensate you financially depending on your Service Disability percentage.”

  “Who said anything about a disability? Elroy, what have you told these people? I thought this was about insurance.” He regarded the pamphlet before him with disgust. “What is peripheral neuropathy? My pinky tingles and you’ll pay me for it?”

  “Sir, I can’t make you take the government’s money, but I can advise you it’s in your best interest to look carefully at this list and tell me all the conditions here that in your adult life you have been diagnosed with them.”

  “Webbed fingers. Look at this. Imperforate anus.”

  “Sir, those are birth defects in affected children.”

  “All I recognize here is the blockage in one of my arteries, which they told me it’s saturated fats, then it’s genetics, then it’s smoking, and now it’s chemicals that never touched me,” Tilly said. “Also my sugar runs high.”

  Her bangles stopped clinking. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. “Has a medical professional diagnosed you with adult-onset type 2 diabetes mellitus?”

  Tilly sighed.

  She looked at Elroy. She looked at Tilly. “Sir, your next of kin needs to know about these things.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tilly said.

  “To properly arrange your care in an emergency.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes, you agree, or yes, a doctor has diagnosed you with adult-onset type 2 diabetes mellitus?”