The Unicorn Anthology.indb

by Peter S. Beagle

  So many years to live.

  Troy pulled open the file cabinet in the corner of the room that served as his home office and ran his fingers across a series of manila folders marked with names. He pulled out one at random.

  It turned out to be that of Warren Nance, the RTO whose life he had saved with the emergency tracheotomy. That is to say, the one Doug Siddens had saved using Troy’s hands. Clippings dropped out onto the floor, covering the threadbare spots his landlord described as “a little wear and tear.” He sat down cross-legged and glanced at them as he put them back in the folder.

  Warren was a realtor these days. The first clipping was a Yellow Pages ad for his business, describing it as the largest in the Texas panhandle. A pamphlet of houses-for-sale listed Warren’s name as agent more than two dozen times. The third item, a newspaper clipping, praised him for a large donation to help people with speech impediments.

  A dozen files in Troy’s cabinet told similar tales. Sgt. Morris was now an assistant county superintendent of schools. Crazy Vic Naughton, now clean-cut and much heftier than he had been in Vietnam, was a sports commentator for a television station.

  The one thing the files did not contain was direct correspondence, save for a Christmas card or two. Troy had seldom attempted to contact old buddies; he had abandoned the effort altogether after the incident with Leroy Holcomb’s mother. As happened throughout the veteran community, the connections he had established in Vietnam disintegrated within the milieu of the World, no matter how intense those ties had been in the jungle.

  It worked both ways. Troy had received scores of letters during late ’69 and early ’70. All from guys still In Country. He barely heard from those men once they arrived stateside. As the saying in ’Nam went: “There it is.” And there it was. Soldiers sitting in the elephant grass watching the gunships rumble by overhead needed to hold in their hands replies from someone who made it back, just to have written proof that it was possible to make it back. Once they came home themselves, they didn’t want to be reminded of the war. Now, with North Vietnam the victor, the silence was even more entrenched. Troy saw no reason to disrupt the quiet, and many reasons not to.

  But still he kept the files. The other drawer contained only seven, but they were inches thick, filled with all the information he could collect on Leroy, on Doug, on Arturo and the others who had died beside him. This morning that drawer remained locked. He was thinking about the men who had lived. The other survivors.

  They were making something of themselves.

  Here he sat. He didn’t even have a savings account. He was employed as a short order cook at Denny’s, a job he had had for two months and one he would probably quit before another two months had gone by. Where his buddies had found focus, he had found dissipation, his efforts spread too thin in too many directions.

  Too many chances. Those other men knew the Grim Reaper would catch them sooner rather than later, so they got down to business before their youth and energy raced away. Troy was missing that urgency.

  On the other side of the wall he heard the reverberation of feet landing on the floor beside the bed and padding into the bathroom. The toilet flushed. The shower nozzle spat fitfully into life, and a soprano voice rose in song above the din of the spray and the groan of the plumbing: “Carry On my Wayward Son” by Kansas.

  A hint of a smile played at the edges of Troy’s lips. Troy let the folder in his hands close. He cleared the floor, stowed the materials in the file cabinet, and locked the drawer. Before sitting back down, he lowered his briefs and tossed them on the couch.

  Maybe he could make some sort of progress after all.

  Hardly had the thought coalesced in his mind than his chest began to itch. He scratched reflexively, fingernails tracing the outline of the unicorn. No. He would not let anyone surface. This was his moment. With a firm act of will, he drew his hand away, brought his attention back to the sound of faucets being shut off in the bathroom. The doorway to the bedroom seemed to grow larger and larger until his girl friend emerged wrapping a towel around her glossy brunette mane, her bare skin rosy from the effect of the hot water.

  Scanning his naked body with an appreciative eye, she migrated forward with the boldness that had originally lured him into their relationship. He clasped her wrists, easing her down beside him and patiently thwarting her attempts to fondle him.

  “Lydia, do you love me?”

  She tilted her head, humming. “I will if you let go of my hands.”

  “I’m serious.”

  She blanched as the gravity of his tone sank in. “I . . . oh . . .” She hiccupped.

  “I take it that’s a yes?” he said as he released her wrists.

  Head turning aside, arms hugging herself, and cheeks ablaze with uncharacteristic shyness, she nodded. “You weren’t supposed to know, you fucker.” He realized the drops on her face were not drips from her wet hair. “Not until you said it first.”

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  Her nose crinkled, as if she were going to laugh or sneeze. She lay back on the ratty carpet and spread her legs. “You sure I can’t distract you enough to make you forget you said that?”

  “Not a chance,” he said firmly. “Does that mean you’re turning me down?”

  “I’m . . . stalling.” Her features hardened. “I don’t want you to say one thing today, and another tomorrow, Troy. If you mean to follow through, then of course I’ll marry you.”

  The puff of his pent-up breath almost made the walls shake. Shifting forward, he accepted her body’s invitation.

  1983

  “You can’t be doing this,” Lydia said, yanking at the tag on his garment bag.

  “Don’t. You’ll rip it.” As he snapped his briefcase closed, she let go of the tag, spun, and marched to the window of their apartment. The Minneapolis/St. Paul skyline stretched flat beyond her—the nearest mountain a billion miles over the horizon. They had moved here when she landed the hospital job, but after almost two years he still couldn’t get used to the landscape. He wanted geographical features that could daunt the wind, and most especially slow the approach of the summer thunderstorms whose booms reminded him too much of artillery.

  “Darling, we discussed this,” he said. “I’ll be back by suppertime tomorrow. It’s a little late to change plans.”

  “You didn’t even ask what I thought of the idea. You didn’t even think about the budget when you bought the plane ticket.” Lydia tugged the curtain to the side and frowned. “The taxi’s here.” She turned back, meeting him eye to eye, freezing him in place instead of tendering silent permission to pick up his luggage. “What is so important that you have to spend money we don’t have?”

  “We have the money.”

  “Barely. There are other things we could have done with that cash.”

  He sighed and, denying her spell, carried his things to the front door. “This is something I need to do. You act like I’m way out of line.”

  “You’re going all this way for a guy you knew for a few months? Doesn’t that strike you as little obsessive?” She patted her abdomen, highlighting the prominent evidence of pregnancy. “Don’t you think you have bigger priorities at home right now? Christ, Troy, I feel like I’m living with a stranger sometimes. I don’t know you right now. You’re someone else.”

  Troy turned away before she could see his reaction. Her glare drilled a hole through the back of his head as he walked out the doorway, and the wound remained open throughout the ride to the airport, the liftoff, and the climb to cruising altitude. How he wanted to tell her: about the unicorn, about the seven lives he lived besides his own. Everything.

  Even Stu wanted to tell her. That’s who had emerged earlier in the week. Stewart Hutchison, his squad leader after Sgt. Morris had rotated to the safety of rear echelon duty. Stu understood Troy’s needs the way Troy understood his.

  He lowered the lunch tray and tried to write his explanation out in a note. He began by admitting that
he had lied: This trip was not for a funeral. But when it came to speaking of all he had been holding in throughout their relationship, he kept crossing out the sentences, finally giving up when he noticed the woman seated next to him glancing at the paper.

  He wasn’t the person he needed to be in order to write it. Much as Stu tried to cooperate, the words had to be Troy’s and Troy’s alone.

  After a troubled night in a motel room, he reached his exact destination: the stadium bleachers at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He was among the throng gathered for the graduation of the class of ’83. Patiently he waited as the university president announced the names, until he called that of Marti Hutchison, highest honors, Dean’s List.

  Stu had had to emerge this week. This was an event the man would certainly have attended had he not been killed in the Tet Offensive. Marti Hutchison had been a toddler when Stu enlisted, an action he had taken partly in order to support his young family. That day at the recruitment office the war had been only a spark no one believed would flare into an inferno. He had never expected to be removed so far from his child; that was not his concept of the right way to do things. A man needed to Be There, as he had said when he learned he had knocked up his high school girl friend and heard her suggest giving the baby up for adoption.

  He was Being Here today. Troy kept his binoculars pointed at the freckled face until she reached the base of the podium and vanished into the sea of caps and gowns. The eyepieces were wet with tears as he lowered the glasses, and it felt like somebody was pushing at his rib cage from the inside. The sensation recalled an occasion when he had sat in a bunker all night, so scared of the incoming ordnance that his heart tried to leap out and hide under the floor slats with the snakes. Or was that something Stu had experienced?

  It wasn’t fear he was feeling now, though. It was pride. He let the emotion cascade through him, yielding fully, allowing his buddy to savor every particle of the joy.

  A memory came to Troy hard and potent, one of those that he and Stu shared directly: Stu was sitting next to him in the shade of a troop carrier, speaking fondly of his wife, who was due to rendezvous with him in the Philippines during a long R&R the sergeant had coming up.

  “Gonna try for a boy.” He grinned. “On purpose, this time.”

  Troy shut his eyes tight, reliving the moment when the claymore wasted his buddy, ten days before that R&R came due. No boy. Perhaps Troy and Lydia’s child could make up for that, though that was not something he could control. At least he had this much. He caught a glimpse of Marti over the heads of several female classmates—she was almost as tall as her father had been. Again came the heat to his eyes and the tightness to his throat.

  “Do you feel it, Stu?” His murmurs were drowned by the din of the names continuing to boom from the loudspeakers, though to his right a grandmother in a hat and veil glanced at his moving lips with puzzlement. “It’s for you, buddy. You gotta be in here, feeling this.”

  Stu felt it, indulged in it, and as a sharp throb hit Troy on the left half of his chest, the dead man slipped back into limbo.

  A peace came over Troy, a faith that he had done what he was supposed to. Because of him, seven men had their own taste of immortality.

  Lydia would rip his hide off him if he went on more trips soon. But there was so much more to do. He still had never been to the California/Oregon border, where Doug Siddens was from, nor to Artie Farina’s old digs in Brooklyn, nor to . . .

  Surely there was some way to balance it all.

  1989

  “Do you ever really feel anything for us?” Lydia asked.

  The abrupt comment made Troy jump. He had been gazing at the clouds out of the windows of their rental suburban tract home, lost to the moment. He always seemed to be lost to the moment.

  Outside, his daughter Kirsten, resplendent in ruffled skirts and pigtails for her final day of kindergarten, swung vigorously to and fro, fingers laced tightly around the chains, calling to him to watch her Go-So-High as he had promised to do when she headed for the back yard. Had that been thirty seconds ago, or several minutes?

  “What do you mean?” He cleared his throat. “Of course I do.”

  “Do you?” Lydia hid her expression by stepping to the stove to remove the boiling tea kettle from the burner. “That’s good.” She said it deadpan, which was worse than overt sarcasm, because it implied a measure of faith still at risk upon the chopping block.

  “What makes you ask such a question?” He wanted to let the subject drop, but somewhere he found the courage to listen to the answer.

  “You let yourself trickle out in a million directions,” Lydia said, reaching into a cabinet for the box of Mountain Thunder. She put two bags in her mug and poured the water. “But it’s not because you don’t know what discipline is. You make trips, you subscribe to all sorts of small newspapers, you make scrapbooks. You even hired a private detective that time—all to find out more about some guys in your past. If that isn’t ambition, I don’t know what is. But you don’t apply yourself to what you’ve got right here.”

  Lydia’s jaw trembled. “It’s like you’re not even you, half the time. You’re a bunch of different people, and none of them are grown up. When you’re in one of those moods, it’s like Kirsten and I don’t count. Are we just background to you?”

  “I love you both,” he said. “I’m just . . . not good at remembering to say so.”

  Lydia turned away, sipped her tea, and spat the liquid into the sink because it was far too hot. Testily, she waved toward the back yard. “Go push your child. You only have half an hour before you’re supposed to go to that job interview.”

  “Oh. The appointment,” he said. “Almost forgot.”

  “I know.”

  1991

  As Operation Desert Storm progressed and U.S. ground troops poised on the border of Kuwait, Troy grew painfully aware of the frowns of the senior citizens at the park where he walked on afternoons when the temp agency failed to find work for him. Those conservative old men were undoubtedly wondering why someone as young as he wasn’t over there kicking Saddam Hussein’s ass, showing the world that America hadn’t forgotten how to win a war. There was no way to explain the truth to them.

  Just as there was no way to tell Lydia, not after all this time.

  The day the Scud missile went cruising into a Jerusalem apartment building, Lydia emerged from the bathroom holding an empty tube of hair darkener, the brand Reagan had used during his administration. “Do you want me to get the larger size when I go to the store?”

  “What do you mean? You’re the only one who uses that stuff,” he replied.

  She blinked. “Me? I’m not the one going gray.”

  Troy swallowed his answer. No use confronting her. Four years younger than he, she was having a hard enough time dealing with her entry into middle age. She smeared on wrinkle cream every morning. She examined her body in the mirror each night after she undressed, bought new bras with greater support features, wore a one-piece bathing suit instead of a bikini so that the stretch marks below her navel would not show.

  “Hey,” he said consolingly, “it’s all right, you know. It doesn’t matter to me how you look.”

  Slowly she held up the tube to his face, her expression a fluctuating mix of anger and pity. “Troy, Troy, Troy—this isn’t even my hair color. When are you going to stop playing these games?”

  She had said it once too often. “It’s not a game, Lydia.” He choked back, not daring to say more. He regretted saying that much, but he couldn’t let something so important be denigrated that way.

  She tossed the empty tube across the room toward the general vicinity of the waste basket. “Troy, you’re forty-four years old. No matter how well you maintain your looks, let’s face it—you’re getting old. I don’t like it any better than you do, but there it is. I’ve put up with a lot of weird shit from you in thirteen years, but this little fantasy of yours has gone far enough. I think it’s time you saw
a therapist.”

  Troy just looked at her in stony silence. The unicorn reared and snorted, though if it heralded the arrival of one of the guys, the latter held back, letting Troy keep command.

  “No?” Lydia asked. “All right then, try this: You move out. I’ve done what I can. You get help, you make some changes, then maybe you can come back.” She whirled and stalked out of the room the way she had come.

  Troy hung his head. He did not go to the bathroom door, did not try to get her to change her mind, though he knew that was what she was hoping for. She would give him a dozen more chances, if only he would promise to change. But how could he do that? The facts were the facts.

  He dragged himself into the bedroom and began to pack a suitcase—just a few things, so that he could get out of the house. He would arrange to come back for other possessions when Lydia would not be home.

  He did not want to leave. This was yet another casualty in his life, and he was tired of making up for a choice he had made when he was nineteen. When would he be through paying the price?

  1995

  July the fifteenth arrived in a blaze of heat and humidity that recalled the jungle. It was Saturday, one of the special days. He pulled up to the curb outside what had once been his home and honked the horn. Kirsten, a lean and spry eleven-year-old, bounded out to his car with a grin on her face.

  She still idolized him. He gazed at her wistfully as she buckled her seat belts: Flat-chested, a bit under five feet tall, not yet one of those adolescents who had no time for parents. She would remain his girl child for another year or so.

  Troy thought of all those times he had failed to be a good father. He used to fall asleep trying to read her books at bedtime. He would forget to pick her up after school. She always forgave him.

  “Mom says I need to be back by ten,” she reported.