Getting Off

NINETEEN

Hedgemont, North Carolina.

There was no bus station as such. The bus stopped at a convenience store with a pair of gas pumps out front. She got off, and the bus driver climbed down after her and retrieved her suitcase from the luggage compartment.

“Bet you’re glad to be gettin’ home,” he said.

He was a pleasant fellow, heartier than his passengers, and she saw no reason to disabuse him of the notion that Hedgemont was home to her, and that she was glad to be here. It wasn’t hard to guess how he’d jumped to that conclusion. If it wasn’t your home, what on earth would bring you here?

Alvin Kirkaby was here.

That was reason enough. Alvin Kirkaby, a corporal in the infantry, had shared a bed with her before his unit was transferred to Iraq. She remembered his name and rank, and not a great deal more about him. He’d been wearing his uniform when she spotted him in a bar just down the street from her apartment. She’d been living in Chelsea at the time, and the bar drew a mixed crowd, half straight and half gay, and she’d have assumed he was gay — like, a uniform in a Chelsea bar? — but when their eyes locked she knew otherwise. God knows what he’d seen in her eyes, but it had been enough to make him dump his companions and head straight over to her.

Cocksure, that was the word for him. He approached her with complete confidence, knowing she found him attractive, knowing she’d take him home with her. And he was right, of course, and his assurance was attractive in and of itself.

In more ways than one. It would make the sex better, and it would make the aftermath positively delicious. All that confidence, all that certainty, and the next thing he knew he’d be dead meat. It would mean leaving her apartment and moving on, but that was all right. She was getting tired of Chelsea.

In his uniform, he’d been generically attractive. Military haircut, face clean-shaven, broad shoulders, athletic physique. Out of it, his body turned out to be everything she could have wanted, and in bed he gave a good account of himself. He wasn’t the most imaginative lover she’d been with, or the most experienced, but ardor and stamina made up for anything that might have been lacking.

Earlier, she’d had a look at his wallet when he paid for a round of drinks. Nice thick wad of bills in there. Hardly enough for a retirement fund, but it was always nice to turn a profit. Pleasure was all the better when you made it pay.

Then, while he lay beside her smoking a cigarette, he told her how he’d be shipping out the next day. To Iraq, where he’d be in combat. He’d been there once already, this would be his second tour of duty over there, and he became a little less cocksure when he talked about it.

So much for that. Once he was over there he was on his own, but she could make sure he lived long enough to go serve his country. She let him go to sleep, and woke him in time for morning sex, and after a shave and a shower she sent him off to be a soldier.

She knew all about that. “You’re my little soldier,” her father had told her.

So when she drew up a list, he’d been on it. Alvin Kirkaby. Surprising, really, that she’d remembered the name, but somehow it had stayed lodged in her memory and she’d been able to dredge it up. Alvin Kirkaby. Corporal Alvin Kirkaby.

That was then.

Now he was Sgt. Alvin Kirkaby, United States Army (Ret.) He’d been promoted, and he’d been discharged, and he wasn’t a soldier anymore.

And he was on her list.

She could have asked directions at the convenience store. But this was a small town, just a dot on the map, and the less contact she had with people, the better off she’d be. Earlier, at an Internet café just two blocks from Washington’s Union Station, she’d asked Google Maps for directions to 24A Maple Street, and she had the printout in her purse. She didn’t even need it anymore, she’d studied it enough on the train and two buses she’d been on since then, but she took it out anyway and unfolded it and looked it over. Then she picked up her suitcase and started walking.

She’d expected a house, a modest older home, with a couple of broken-down cars on the lawn and, in the driveway, a rusted-out pickup with a gun rack. What she found was a house trailer, the first of four strung in a row, 24A and B and C and D. No pickup, with or without a gun rack. No cars on the lawn, and in fact no lawn; the trailers nestled within a near-forest of scrub pine, and the fallen needles carpeted the ground.

One car, a Hyundai hatchback with a dented front fender, stood alongside the trailer.

Home Sweet Home, she thought.

She’d have phoned, but she’d been unable to find a phone listed for him, or indeed for anyone at 24A Maple Street. And maybe that was just as well, because what would she have said? Hi, you won’t remember me, but I gave you a bon voyage blow job the morning before you shipped out. I can’t remember what year it was, so there may have been a few tours of duty since then for you, and a few blow jobs, too, but—

But what, pray tell?

Better to just show up and play it by ear. She had no idea what to say in person, but she figured she’d come up with something. And he didn’t have to remember her, or welcome her with open arms, or do anything, really, but let her in the front door. She could take it from there.

Wrong again.

The woman who came to the door looked as though she’d been bearing up bravely ever since the day she was born. That would have been some thirty-five years ago, and they hadn’t been easy years, and she wore her long-suffering look as if it affirmed her identity.

A wife? A girlfriend? No wedding ring, and this woman didn’t look like anybody’s girlfriend. Too young to be Alvin’s mother. Jesus, was it even the right house?

She opened her mouth to say something, not sure what she should say, but the woman stopped her by holding her forefinger to her lips.

“My brother’s sleeping,” she said.

Thus answering an unasked question. This was Alvin’s sister, worn down by life, and now sharing a trailer in the back of beyond with her brother.

Provided this was the right address. Just because this woebegone lady had a brother didn’t mean it was the man on her list.

So she whispered back, “Alvin Kirkaby?”

A nod.

“I used to know him. Years ago, I don’t even know if he’d remember me, but I happened to find this address for him, and I was—”

What? In the neighborhood? The only way anyone wound up in this particular neighborhood was by getting lost and being unable to find their way home. She let the sentence trail off unfinished, and the sister nodded, as if it all made perfect sense to her.

“We can talk outside,” came her whisper, and the finger she’d held to her lips was now pointing to a mismatched pair of lawn chairs huddled together beneath the pines. “I’ll just be a moment.”

“Hope the coffee suits you,” the woman said. “It’s instant.”

It could have been anything, she thought. It had been souped up with powdered non-dairy creamer and a lethal quantity of sugar, and any coffee taste it might have started out with was long gone. She said it was fine.

“It’s a relief to step outside,” the woman said. “I don’t like to leave him, you know.”

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t know? What happened to him?”

She shook her head.

“Roadside bomb.”

“Oh.”

“They thought he was going to die. Shipped him home in pieces, figured he’d be gone in a week or two and they could bury what was left in Arlington. But our people are hard to kill. This place, an uncle left it to me. I was living in one room over in Charlotte, doing data entry for an HMO. Left that and moved down here where I could take care of my brother. My name’s Joanne.”

No idea what name she’d given Alvin, and what difference did it make? “Mine’s Pam,” she said.

“Pam. Why’d you come?”

“To see your brother.”

“Thinking maybe y’all could have a life together? Only life he’s got’s gonna be in that trailer. Only life I got’s taking care of him. They was sure he was gonna die but I’m making sure he lives.”

“I see.”

“Few months ago I’d of said he’d be getting better. Well, that can’t happen. I know that now. All he can do is stay alive, and all I can do is keep him alive. So whatever you had in mind—”

“I don’t know what I had in mind.”

“Thing is, maybe you want to turn around and go right now. Oh, that sounded cold. I didn’t mean it that way. What I’m saying is you might want to spare yourself the pain of looking at him, and he’ll never know you were here. That’d be what I would do, I was you.”

“I came all this way,” she said.

“You want to see him.”

“I do.”

“Well,” Joanne said, and glanced at her wristwatch. “Time I woke him, anyway. If I let him sleep too much during the day I’m just dooming him to a restless night.”

Worse than she’d expected.

She thought she’d prepared herself, but the reality was worse than the images she’d conjured up on the way back to the trailer. She wouldn’t have recognized him as the young corporal she’d slept with in New York. She could barely recognize him as human.

So much of him was gone. One leg ended below the knee, the other at mid-thigh. One arm was off at the shoulder. The other stopped between the elbow and the wrist.

Vivid pink scar tissue covered half his face. His eyes were a clear blue, but only one of them looked at her. The other, she realized, was glass, which struck her as a curiously futile cosmetic touch, like spray-painting a car after a head-on collision.

“This is Pam,” Joanne said. “You and her knew each other in—”

“In New York,” she supplied.

She met his stare, unable to tell if he recognized her. Now that she’d seen him, she wanted to push back the clock five minutes; then, when Joanne gave her an out, she could agree that slipping away was the best course for all concerned. Then retrace her steps to the convenience store, and either catch the next bus or take a shot at hitching a ride, and get the hell away from Hedgemont as quickly as she possibly could.

Because there was no work for her here. It sometimes seemed to her as if she had an important piece of herself missing, in that the rightness or wrongness of killing her lovers didn’t seem to carry any weight with her. Killing was fun, there was no getting around it, and killing men she’d slept with felt appropriate, and that was as much as she had to know.

But to kill this man, this poor maimed creature, could not possibly be appropriate in any way. She’d put him on a list that existed solely in her own mind, and rather than cross him off she could hang a gold star next to his name, or a Congressional Medal of Honor.

She didn’t want to kill him. Quite on the contrary, she wanted to do something for him.

But what? Cook him a meal? Joanne prepared his meals, if you could call them that, and fed them to him through an IV line.

Give him a massage? Joanne performed that function, she’d confided, because it was necessary for his circulation, but he couldn’t feel it, because he couldn’t feel anything below the neck. The blast that took his limbs and his eye had severed his spinal cord. So he couldn’t move anything, not that he had much to move, and couldn’t feel anything, either.

She should leave, she thought. Say hello, say goodbye, and get the hell out.

But somehow she couldn’t.

“Paaaam.”

Her name, or at least the name she’d given him. His voice was low in pitch, raspy, as if dragged abrasively through his scarred throat.

“Yes, she’s right here, Bubba.”

“Paaaam.”

“I’m here, Alvin.”

“You came.” He had breath enough for a single phrase, then had to gather himself for the next one. “ ’S really you.”

“Yes.”

And, haltingly, in three-and four-word bursts, he told her and his sister how much she had meant to him, how her letters had kept his morale up throughout the horror of desert warfare, how he’d longed to return to her, how he’d despaired at her ever being able to find him after his accident.

“You never said, Bubba.”

“Try forget.” A ragged breath, a gathering of verbal forces. “She here now.”

“I’m here now,” she agreed, wondering what else she was supposed to say, and hard put to guess who he thought she was, and what role she played in his personal mythology.

“Sis…”

And he rasped out what he wanted. Some time alone with his Pam. Joanne was hesitant, then agreed it would be a chance for her to get the grocery shopping done, and see to a few other errands she never had a chance to run. You’re here all the time, he told her. You never get a minute to yourself. Take an hour, take two hours. And give him some time alone with his Pam.

It was hard to get the woman out of the trailer. She had to provide instructions for every possible contingency that might crop up during her absence. But finally Joanne was out the door, and they heard the Hyundai pull out and head off down the road.

“She gone.”

“Yes.”

“So who the fuck—” a ragged breath “are you?”