The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  She breathed—the stiff white wool dress, originally her grandmother’s, itching terribly. The door was ajar. The door was ajar, yet she took a step and closed it.

  He followed her, all the time fumbling at the stays as though trying to pluck a mis-sown pea from the dirt.

  She pressed herself to the back of the door, willing it to let her out, asking it to forgive her for being such a fool, praying it would spare her.

  He had spent his life in a cloud of pollen, chaff, and the steaming excrement and offal of livestock; yet his sinuses throbbed as though in torment as they absorbed the perspiration from her scalp and the egg white and cocoa butter she had used to set her hair. Who would have thought a woman’s hair could hold so many pins? Her ear was felted like the leaf of an eggplant.

  Down to her kidneys a corset snugly contained her, a second set of ribs, transverse on the outside.

  In the pasture, a pack of feral dogs found the litter of kittens he had drowned that morning in the horses’ watering trough and buried in the snow. The dogs could be heard shattering the ice scrim of the snow and yipping.

  She told him, “You have to pull the bows first. Then the hooks underneath.” Whichever of her womenfolk had cinched the corset bows had tied them on themselves in double knots the size of a newborn’s knuckle. He rifled the bureau and found a pencil, but it was dull, and in four swipes of his pocket knife he shaved a point onto the pencil and introduced the point between the silk ribbon knots and prized them open.

  Her face still pressed to the door, she told him to douse the lamp, and when he did, she stepped out of the dress and the corset, leaving them on the floor, and turned, her arm covering her breasts. She went to sit on the bed, ducking so as not to hit her head on the upper bunk. She wore only her stockings and her underpants. She had gone red everywhere. Her belly glowed in the vent of moonlight that radiated from the snow outside, and her midriff bore the impression of the corset stays. She twisted her mouth into an implacable smile, but lost it.

  He came toward her in the dark, shuffling off his jacket. He slouched out of his suspenders and unbuttoned his shirt, neglecting his tie until the shirt came off, and packed the shirt and tie in the bureau. He bent artlessly, stepped out of his trousers, steadied himself on the wall, and removed his sodden socks.

  He had gone hungry in his childhood, and now he could not distinguish the pang in his gut from the pang he had known as a boy, the need for oats in the morning after he had gone to bed without supper. His father would give him an apple at lunch and the boy would eat even the seeds.

  Now his body was wracked from his sore feet to his searing inner organs to his brain swelling against the sides of its case. And he saw her holding herself under her armpits, covering, the long thumbs up around the shoulders.

  Somehow she was roasting, although it was manifestly very cold, as the wind from outside rippled the curtains in the draft. She bent double and removed one stocking, then the other, sitting on the lower bunk, the relics of boyhood all around. He had wept once, talking with her decades ago outside a dance, explaining that Harold, his goose, had died.

  She held out her stockings, meantime covering her front with the other arm, and asked him to put them away. In the vent of light, his silver hair swirled around the spot where the plates of the skull had fused when they had stopped growing. His long back showed its bones when he bent low and removed his drawers. He stood again and put them away. She watched him approach. The darkness cloaked his face so he seemed to be watching her with the back of his head. He was a predatory monster with its front on backward and its tail pointing the way for its face to follow. He approached, wicked, nude, and shivering. He made to cover his thing with his hands, and he sat next to her on the bed.

  She unfastened the buttons in her drawers and lay naked on the bed redolent of him, a smell like the smell of the parlor when her father had finished his bath. A repellent smell like too-rich cake.

  The hair on Frade’s front side made a “T” across the top of his chest and down the middle, leaving the flanks bare.

  He turned and lay on top of her, his small mouth closed. His wet and frigid feet smelled of mildew.

  He craned to face the whitewashed wall, stained yellow in splotches from the grease in his hair over many years. Her body where it touched him stuck to his like paste. She had covered herself everywhere with powder. Where he didn’t touch her, she radiated heat like a stove.

  She said, “Frade.”

  She wanted to say, “Tell me you’re an honest man.”

  A sound rose in her throat that she tried to form into the question, “Are you an honest man?” but came out only as a little sob like a chair creaking.

  Then a shock of pain.

  At first she didn’t feel it. And then she did. But between not feeling the pain and feeling it, between fearing she would die and knowing her long death had started, she had time to say to herself, Time will tell.

  20

  During the second week of February 2014, on the day Elroy completed final outprocessing and was free of the army at last, he flew in a C-117 from Bagram to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, then to Frankfurt where he picked up a commercial flight to Heathrow. During the layover at Heathrow he hid in a toilet stall crying until the final boarding announcement of his flight to Dallas/Fort Worth.

  From there he flew to Albuquerque, where he took the Rail Runner train to the depot in Santa Fe, then a bus toward Los Alamos that dropped him at the turnoff to Tilly’s condo complex.

  He hiked up the washboard road to the entrance. The guard within the glass cabin looked up from his puzzle and inquired as to the nature of Elroy’s request. It was midday, but fluorescent light filled every corner of the terrarium where the big man sat consulting his clipboards. He found nothing on the access control spreadsheet that a Mr. Tilly wished his current residence to be disclosed.

  “What, he moved?” Elroy asked.

  But the guard had not said that. And he found nothing on the sheet that a yes or no should be given out regarding conclusions such as what the gentleman was suggesting.

  Elroy walked back down the washboard road. When he reached the highway, he unpacked his phone and sat on his ACU rucksack in the rumble strips of the highway shoulder. His cellular plan had lapsed while he was deployed, but he turned on the phone and stabbed at its screen as if to provoke it into giving him a signal. He put the phone away. No cars passed. No buildings were visible in either direction. Snow was falling on the Jemez peaks. Purple pinweed bloomed among the rocks. The rest of the desert was MultiCam-colored like his rucksack. Already his boots were cloaked in homelike dust.

  He stood and headed back toward the complex, this time eschewing the road and circling through the piñon. He heaved the rucksack over a barbed wire cattle fence and climbed a tree near the fence and jumped down to the other side. He climbed a butte. Then he descended through dense leafless aspen woods. When the woods ended he was standing on the slope above the rear of the complex, but the entirety of the perimeter visible from here was protected by a high stuccoed wall he would have needed equipment to scale. Inside it, the passive solar windows of a hundred adjoined, single-story homes faced the canyon to the south, each opening through a sliding door on a concrete patio big enough only for a single chaise lounge. On some of the patios a potted yucca grew from a clay pot but otherwise nothing visible within the perimeter was alive. The perfume of fabric softener sheets in the exhaust of a dryer came from somewhere within the walls. A woman laughed. He thought he heard a measure of piano being played, but no. A TV commercial for Storm Squad 3—the most trusted weather team in New Mexico. He couldn’t distinguish which of the identical red steel roofs was or had been Tilly’s. He continued around the complex wall but found no gap in it.

  Then he unpacked his pocket knife and a Chocolate Supreme Protein Whey Power Bar, and he hid his rucksack amid the khaki landscaping of the complex
perimeter and walked back toward the town. He didn’t eat the power bar. He was still fasting. It only protected him from the fear of going hungry. He felt it against his leg and imagined opening and smelling it. The crinkle, the cocoa powder bouquet. He would keep the fast until he got wherever he decided was home and then would eat the full proper meal for the time zone at that time of day. Then the body would know where on earth it was.

  A few miles outside White Rock, a gas station had added a burrito canteen with a placard on the door advertising free wi-fi. The interior smelled of power steering fluid and carne adovada. He asked the stoner-eyed and dough-faced young Anglo clerk at the register for the wi-fi password. The clerk pressed to his chest the phone receiver he was using and said he didn’t know what Elroy was talking about. Elroy turned to the Mexican girl cleaning out the steam table behind the sneeze guard and asked her in Spanish for the password, and she gave it to him. He asked if there was any carne adovada left, but she said she’d already put everything away. He asked if there were any cold carnitas or chicken, and she sopped a towel in the basin of the steam table and wrung the towel over a bucket and said firmly without looking up that she’d already put everything away.

  The Skype app on his phone searched for the network. He stood in the corner by the door, by the rack of truck trader magazines and catalogs for crystal healing workshops, polarity and chakra balancing, Joyous Journey Reiki Retreats.

  The app failed to locate the network. He reentered the password and waited. The power bar in his pocket was nearly touching his junk. Then the app successfully connected with the network, and he used his remaining Skype credit to dial Tilly’s phone number. A pearl gray Lexus flew by outside in the weak light. The phone gurgled as it rang Tilly’s line.

  But the number he had reached had been disconnected; no further information was available about the number.

  He had not slept since Incirlik. The new moon desert winter night was coming on.

  He tried to think.

  He looked at the catalogs. Depending on the organs under study, the human body’s proper frequency had been found to vary from sixty to seventy-two megahertz. Subadequate frequencies left tissue systems prey to corrupting viruses, bacteria, and fungi. But Sacred Mesa Seminar participants would learn the use of rose oil and selenite crystals, with frequencies in excess of three hundred megahertz, that when applied through energetic smudging or laying on of stones fostered tissue ecosystems inimical to disease. By configuring contemporary breakthroughs in mitochondrial processes with the wisdom of the Aztecs, purified human tissue structures were now achievable. Previous understandings of safe levels of toxins were obsolete. Once purification was achieved it could be maintained through colonic rejuvenation and the right balance of plant-based lipids in the diet. Learning your proper frequencies was the work of a lifetime. That lifetime began again today. You would take the consciousness of a lost ancient people into your mouth. There was a new way based on an old way once forgotten and now recovered by archeologists working in the Yucatan.

  He tried to think. But to think he needed blank paper and pencil, and he had neither.

  Healing was voltage. Oil of lemongrass was crucial for flexible tendons at any age.

  The clerk put his phone to his chest and told Elroy he was blocking the door, and Elroy went back out to the cold highway and headed into White Rock. More snow up on the Jemez. After the bus from Santa Fe, he possessed all of twenty-six dollars. He might have gone back to Santa Fe and spent the night at the St. Elizabeth’s Shelter, but by the time he reached the depot in White Rock the last of the buses had left. His credit cards were maxed out. The final deposit of his salary wouldn’t come into his checking account for another two days.

  Starved for sleep, he walked into a canyon beneath the highway in the dark. He stomped three dried-out junipers clear from their stumps and dragged them over a little wash. He surveyed the desert winter scrub and low grass. Then with his knife he cut some of the chamisa thereabout and crawled up the wash under the junipers and lined the pebbled ground with chamisa and lay down warm from his work. He watched the stars through the reticulate twigs and scales of the juniper tent. He grew cold again.

  He opened the power bar and ate it—and his pancreas, his adrenal glands, whatever the elements of his endocrine system erupted at the breaking of the fast. He chewed and swallowed. Then the food was gone and became a love-ghost haunting his cells, protecting him from nothing, and he fell asleep.

  In the morning, he pissed amid the standing chamisa and walked up the highway toward Los Alamos to the diner Tio Rudy’s and ordered a pitcher of hot water, a cup of coffee, and three sopaipillas, all of which would run $4.25 with the tip. The sopaipillas were simple carbohydrate and fat, a carnival snack rather than a meal, but he could afford them and ate slowly, watching the door that faced the road.

  The diner had wi-fi, and as he drank the water he turned on his phone and opened the ESPN mobile site and watched a two-year-old microdocumentary about Peyton Manning’s fifteenth year in the NFL, with the Denver Broncos, a season Elroy had missed watching while deployed but had followed in the news and returned to by looking at this video in times when his phone had service and he needed somebody to watch and admire: because everybody had written Manning out, everybody said he was finished before he got to Denver that season. He was coming off a devastating neck injury that had ruined him in Indianapolis and should have ended his career. But the surgeons had put his head on straight, and he had come to Denver a new man—though he alone had seemed to know it—and then he started putting up the best numbers of his life.

  Manning was called the Sheriff. He had an old boxer’s crushed nose. On the screen in Elroy’s hand, Manning’s remote and fleshy eyes moved behind the quarterback’s face mask, commanding eyes that were in themselves an organ of decision. You felt them telling you what to do. He had become more dominant in old age than before, more self-possessed. He nodded throughout the huddle, nodded approaching the line of scrimmage and scanning the defense, flapping down his outstretched arms to quiet the crowd, raising and lowering a foot to audible, nodded scanning the field east to west, north to south, nodded coming under center, like Everything I see I approved. What I did that worked and what I fucked up. I made it all. I accept the outcome. Manning was also called the Old Sphinx.

  It was half past seven and the last of the sopaipillas had already gone cold when Tilly came through the front door of the diner. Elroy might not have recognized him if the waitress had not called him Dwight when he came in. He resembled a handsome rat, the gray clothes hanging from him. He had lost perhaps fifty pounds.

  When Elroy took his coffee and the last sopaipilla and the plastic honey bear to Tilly’s booth and sat, Tilly glanced about for the waitress, like, Is there no place else this joker can sit?

  “Sir. It’s me,” Elroy said.

  After a moment, the eyes betrayed a sudden recognition—and something else Elroy couldn’t decipher. “Elroy,” the old man said. He cussed and grinned. He looked awful strange grinning with so much weight off him.

  “I hoped I would catch you here,” Elroy said.

  No, it wasn’t the lost weight that made Tilly look strange. It was the helpless grin itself that had overpowered a competing force in his drawn and frazzled face. By and by, however, as if against his will, the face reverted to the familiar watchful one that betrayed nothing of his inner movements. Neither approving nor disapproving but watching, missing nothing. The sphinx of whom Elroy had once aspired to make himself a copy.

  The waitress brought Tilly a pot of coffee with no milk in it. Elroy offered him the last sopaipilla, but Tilly didn’t eat.

  When Elroy asked when Tilly had planned on informing him that he’d moved, Tilly said, “I’m telling you now.”

  “And the phone?”

  “I didn’t like it anymore, having a phone.”

  “What if I needed to get ahold
of you?”

  “Write a letter to the P.O. box. That’s how Bobby Heflin and I would do it.”

  “I done that. Because I knew you didn’t like the phone.”

  When Elroy asked if it would be all right to crash at his place for a while, Tilly hesitated almost imperceptibly before he said, “Of course.”

  He was driving a 2013 Subaru Impreza Premium these days, with ivory leather interior that smelled fresh from the dealership and with a continuously variable transmission: an alarming feature in that Tilly would never be able to service such a transmission on his own. It was a concession not to luxury but to impending helplessness. They drove as far as the highway turnoff to the condo complex, and Elroy jumped out and darted through the piñon and fetched his rucksack.

  They continued to the outskirts of the Bandelier National Monument, where Tilly was evidently reduced to living in a cavernous corrugated metal structure with a rolling overhead door big enough to fit a wrecker inside. The piano stood in the corner by a glowing space heater and under a fluorescent shop light that hung from a chain in the uninsulated roof. On the concrete floor, the rug that Elroy had sent from Kyrgyzstan surrounded the couch from the condo and its brown easy chair thatched with the dog’s white shedding. The rest of the scant utility furnishings Elroy didn’t recognize. The wire shelving units were piled high with boxes comprising many more belongings than he would have thought Tilly owned. A full-size mattress lay on the floor with four pillows and wool blankets. A low bulkhead of cardboard file boxes separated from the rest of the interior a sawbuck table with a desktop computer and a laser printer. The air smelled of dusty electric-coil heat, and the gas generator outside made a racket that shook the walls. The only window was over the dry kitchen sink. Mavis came in with them and scampered to the tidy kitchen in the corner and turned herself three times inside a crate of shredded copy paper and lay down. A woman’s hairbrush, an eyebrow pencil, a spiral bound notebook, a Bible, and two hands of cards lay on the table as though a game that had been interrupted soon would recommence. Tilly stashed all these things in the white steel cupboard that had been a first-aid cabinet. Also on the table a large atlas lay splayed on a page densely printed with rail lines and names and twisting borders. An unfamiliar contour of seacoast. Tilly closed the atlas and tried to stand it up in the shallow cupboard but it didn’t fit.