New American Stories

THE ARMS AND LEGS OF THE LAKE by Mary Gaitskill

Jim Smith was riding the train to Syracuse, New York, to see his foster mother for Mother’s Day. He felt good and he did not feel good. Near Penn Station, he’d gone to a bar with a green shamrock on it for good luck. Inside, it was dark and smelled like beer and rotten meat in a freezer — nasty but also good because of the closed-door feeling; Jim liked the closed-door feeling. A big white bartender slapped the bar with a rag and talked to a blobby-looking white customer with a wide red mouth. A television showed girl after girl. When Jim said he’d just gotten back from Iraq, the bartender poured him a free whiskey. “For your service,” he’d said.

Jim looked out the train window at the water going by and thought about his white foster father, the good one. “You never hurt a little animal,” his good foster had said. “That is the lowest, most chicken thing anybody can do, to hurt a little animal who can’t fight back. If you do that, if you hurt a little animal, no one will ever respect you or even like you.” There had been green grass all around, and a big tree with a striped cat in it. Down the street, ducks had walked through the wet grass. He’d thrown some rocks at them, and his foster father had gotten mad.

“For your service,” said the bartender, and poured him another one, dark and golden in its glass. Then he went down to the other end and talked to the blob with the red mouth, leaving Jim alone with the TV girls and their TV light flashing on the bar in staccato bursts. Sudden flashing on darkness; time to tune that out, thought Jim. Time to tune in to humanity. He looked at Red Mouth Blob.

“He’s a gentle guy,” said Blob. “Measured. Not the kind who flies off the handle. But when it comes down, he will get down. He will get down there and he will bump with you. He will bump with you, and if need be, he will bump on you.” The bartender laughed and hit the bar with his rag.

Bump on you. Bumpety-bump. The truck bumped along the road. He was sitting next to Paulie, a young blondie from Minnesota who wasn’t wearing his old Vietnam-style vest. Between low sand-colored buildings, white-hot sky swam in the sweat dripping from his eyelashes. There was the smell of garbage and shit. A river of sewage flowed in the street and kids were jumping around in it. A woman looked up at him from the street and he could feel the authority of her eyes as far down as he could feel, in an eyeless, faceless place inside him, where her look was the touch of an omnipotent hand. “Did you see that woman?” he said to Paulie. “She look like she should be wearing jewels and riding down the Tigris in a gold boat.” “That one?” said Paulie. “Her? She’s just hajji with pussy.” And then the explosion threw them out of the truck. There was Paulie, sitting up, with blood geysering out his neck, until he fell over backward with no head on him. Then darkness came, pouring over everything.

The bartender hit the bar with his rag and came back down the bar to pour him another drink.

He looked around the car of the train. Right across from him there was a man with thin lips and white finicky hands drinking soda from a can. Just up front from that there was a thick-bodied woman, gray, like somebody drew her with a pencil, reading a book. Behind him was blond hair and a feminine forehead with fine eyebrows and half ovals of eyeglass visible over the frayed seat. Beyond that, more foreheads moved in postures of eating or typing or staring out the window. Out the window was the shining water, with trees and mountains gently stirring in it. She had looked at them and they had blown up. Where was she now?

“Excuse me.” The man with thin lips was talking to him. “Excuse me,” he said again.

—

“Excuse me,” said Bill Groffman. “You just got back from Iraq?”

“How did you know?” the guy replied.

“I got back myself six months ago. I saw your jacket and shoes.”

“All right,” said the guy, like to express excitement, but with his voice flat and the punctuation wrong. He got up to shake Bill’s hand, then got confused and went for a high five that he messed up. He was a little guy, tiny really, with the voice of a woman. Old, maybe forty, and obviously a total fuckup — who could mess up a high five?

“Where were you?” asked Bill.

“Baghdad,” said the guy, blatting the word out this time. “Where they pulled down Saddam Hussein. They pulled—”

“What’d you do there?”

“Supply. Stocking the shelves, doin’ the orders, you know. Went out on some convoys, be sure everything get where it supposed to go. You there?”

“Name it — Ramadi, Fallujah, up to Baquba, Balad. Down to Nasiriyah, Hillah. And Baghdad.”

“They pulled down the statue…pulled it down. Everybody saw it on TV. Tell me, brother, can you — what is this body of water out the window here?”

“This is the Hudson River.”

“It is? I thought it was the Great Lakes.”

“No, my man. The Great Lakes is Michigan and Illinois. Unless you’re in Canada.”

“But see, I thought we were in Illinois.” He weaved his head back and forth, back and forth. “But I was not good in geography. I was good in MATH.” He blatted out the word math as if it were the same as Baghdad.

—

But he was not thinking about Baghdad now. He was tuned in to the blond forehead behind him, and it was tuned in to him; it was focused on Jim. He could feel it very clearly, though its focus was confused. He looked at its reflection in the window. The forehead was attached to a small pointy face with a tiny mouth and eyeglass eyes, a narrow chest with tits on it, and long hands that were turning a piece of paper like a page. She was looking down and turning the pages of something, but still, her blond forehead was coming at him. It did not have authority; it was looking to him for authority. It was harmless, vaguely interesting, nervous, and cute.

—

When Bill was gone, he realized that nobody at home would understand what was happening. He realized it, and he accepted it. You talk to a little boy in broken English and Arabic, make a joke about the chicken or the egg — you light up a car screaming through a checkpoint and blow out a little girl’s brains. You saw it as a threat at the time — and maybe the next time it would be. People could understand this fact — but this was not a fact. What was it? The guy who put a gun in his mouth and shot himself in the portable shitter, buddies who lost hands and legs, little kids dancing around cars with rotting corpses inside, shouting, “Bush! God Is Great! Bush!”—anybody could understand these events as information. But these events were not information. What were they? He tried to think what they were and felt like a small thing with a big thing inside it, about to break the thing that held it. He looked out the window for relief. There was a marsh going by, with soft green plants growing out of black water, and a pink house showing between some trees. House stood for home, but home was no relief. Or not enough. When he came home, his wife told him that the dog he’d had since he was sixteen was missing. Jack had been missing for weeks and she hadn’t told him. At least six times when they’d been on the phone and he’d asked, “How’s Jack?” she’d said, “He’s good.”

“Hey,” said the little guy. “You sure this a river?”

“Positive.”

Positive. She said she didn’t tell him about Jack because he had only a few weeks left and she wanted him to stay positive. Which was right. They both agreed it was important to stay positive. And so she’d said, “He’s good,” and she’d said it convincingly, naturally. He hadn’t known she was such a good liar.

“The reason I’m asking is, it looks too big to be a river. A lake is always going to be bigger than a river. I remember that from school. The river leads to the lake; the river is the arms and legs of the lake. Only thing bigger than the lake is the ocean. Like it says in the Bible, you know what I’m saying?”

Bill didn’t answer because the smell of shit and garbage was up in his nose. The feel of sand was on his skin, and he had to try not to scratch it, or rub it in public like this crazy ass would surely do. Funny: The crazy ass — he should have some idea of what it was like, even if he was just supply. But even if he did, Bill didn’t want to discuss it with him. All the joy you felt to be going home; how once you got home you couldn’t feel it anymore. Like his buddy whose forearm had been blown off, who still felt his missing arm twitch — except it was the reverse of that. The joy was there, almost like he could see it. But he couldn’t feel it all the way. He could make love to his wife, but only if he turned her over. He could tell it bothered her, and he didn’t know how to explain why it had to be that way. Even when they lay down to sleep, he could relax only if she turned with her back to him and stayed like that all night.

“But that don’t look like the arm or the leg. That look like the lake. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Bill looked out the window and put on his headset. It was Ghostface Killah, and he turned up the volume — not to hear better, but to get his mind away from the smell and the feeling of sand.

—

Like it says in the Bible, you know what I’m sayin’? The white guy across the aisle laughed when he heard that, a thick, joyless chuckle. Puerile, thought Jennifer Marsh. Like a high school kid. Probably racist, too. Jennifer had marched against the war. She didn’t know any soldiers; she had never talked to any. But she was moved to hear this guy, just back from war, talking so poetically about rivers and lakes. I should reach out to him, she thought. I should show support. I’ll get up and go to the snack car for potato chips, and on the way back, I’ll catch his eye.

The idea stirred Jennifer, and made her a little afraid. Afraid that he would look at her, a middle-aged white woman, and instantly feel her to be weak, artificially delicate, a liar. But I’m not weak, thought Jennifer. I’ve fought to get where I am. I haven’t lied much. Her gaze touched the narrow oval shape of the soldier’s close-cropped head, noticing the quick, reactive way it turned from aisle to window and back. Sensitive, thought Jennifer; delicate, and naturally so. She felt moved again; when the soldier had stood to shake hands with the guy across the aisle, his body had been slim and wiry under the ill-fitting clothes. He looked strong, but his strength was wiry and tensile — the strength of a fragile person made to be strong by circumstance. His voice was strange, and he blurted out certain words with the harshness of a sensitive person trying to survive the abrading force of the world.

—

See me comin’ (blaow!) start runnin’ and (blaow! blaow!)…Phantom limb, phantom joy. Music from the past came up behind Ghost’s words; longing, hopeful music. Many guys have come to you…His son, Scott, had been three when he left; now he was nearly five, healthy, good-looking, smart, everything you would want. He looked up at his father as if he were somebody on TV, a hero, who could make everything right. Which would’ve been great if it were true….With a line that wasn’t true…“Are you going to find Jack tonight, Daddy?” asked Scott. “Can we go out and find him tonight?”…And you passed them by…

—

“The lake is bigger — but wait. You talkin’ ’bout the ocean?”

Jennifer’s indignation grew. The soldier’s fellow across the aisle was deliberately ignoring him and so, stoically adjusting to being ignored, he was talking to himself, mimicking the voice of a child talking to an adult, then the adult talking back. “The ocean is bigger than the lake,” said the adult. “The ocean is bigger than anything.”

—

He hadn’t meant to look for Jack; the dog was getting old, and if he hadn’t come back after two weeks, he must be dead or somewhere far away. But Wanda had done the right thing and put up xeroxed flyers all over their town, plus a town over in every direction. He saw Jack’s big bony-headed face every time he went to the post office or the grocery store, to the gas station, pharmacy, smoke shop, office supply, department store, you name it. Even driving along back roads where people went for walks, he glimpsed Jack’s torn, flapping face stapled to trees and telephone poles. Even though the pictures showed Jack as a mature dog, he kept seeing him the way he was when he got him for Christmas nine years before: a tiny little terrier, all snout and paws and will to chew shit up. He greeted Bill every day when he came home from school; he slept on his bed every night. When Scott was born, he slept in front of the crib, guarding it.

—

Jennifer tried to imagine what this man’s life was like, what had led him to where he was now. Gray, grim pictures came half-formed to her mind: a little boy growing up in a concrete housing project with a blind face of malicious brick; the boy looking out the window, up at the night sky, kneeling before the television, mesmerized by visions of heroism, goodness, and triumph. The boy grown older, sitting in a metal chair in a shadowless room of pitiless light, waiting to sign something, talk to somebody, to become someone of value.

—

The first time he went out to find Jack, he let Scott go with him. But Scott didn’t know how to be quiet, or listen to orders; he would suddenly yell something or dart off, and once Bill got so mad that he thought he’d knock the kid’s head off. So he started going out alone — late, after Scott and Wanda were in bed. They lived on a road with only a few houses on it across from a stubbly field and a broken, deserted farm. There was no crime and everybody acted like there could never be any. But just to be sure, he took the Beretta Wanda had bought for protection. At first, he carried it in his pocket with the safety on. Then he carried it in his hand.

—

Jennifer grieved; she thought, I can’t help. I can’t understand. But I can show support. This man has been damaged by the war, but still he is profound. He will not scorn my support because I’m white. As if he had heard, the soldier turned around in his seat and smiled. Jennifer was startled by his face — hairy, with bleary eyes, his mouth sly and cynical with pain.

“My name’s Jim,” the soldier said. “Glad to meet you.”

Jennifer shook his proffered hand.

“Where you headed today?” he asked.

“Syracuse. For work.”

“Yeah?” He smiled. His smile was complicated — light on top, oily and dark below. “What kind of work?”

“I’m giving a talk at a journalism school — I edit a women’s magazine.”

“Yeah? An editor?”

His smile was mocking after all, but it was the sad mocking men do when the woman has something and they don’t. There was no real force behind it.

“I heard you talk about being in Iraq,” she said.

“Yeah, uh-huh.” He nodded emphatically, then looked out the window as if distracted.

“What was it like?”

He looked out the window, paused, and began to recite: “They smile and they say you okay / Then they turn around and they bite / With the arrow that fly in the day / And the knife in the neck at night.”

“Did you make that up? Just now?”

“Yes, I did.” He smiled again, still mocking, but now complicitous, too.

“That’s good. It’s better than a lot of what I read.”

—

Did you make that up? Just now? Stupid, stupid woman, stupider than the drunk nigger she was talking to. Carter Brown, the conductor, came down the aisle, wishing he had a stick to knock off some heads with, not that they were worth knocking off really. That kind of white woman — would she never cease to exist? You could predict it: Put her in a car full of people, including black people who were sober and sane, hell, black people with PhDs, and she would glue herself, big-eyed and serious, to the one pitiful fool in the bunch. He reached the squawk box and snatched up the mouthpiece.

“To whoever’s been smoking in the lavatory, this message is for you,” he said into it. “If you continue to smoke in the lavatory, we will, believe me, find out who you are, and when we do, we will put you off the train. We will put you off, where you will stand on the platform and smoke until the next train comes sometime tomorrow. Have a nice day.”

Not that the sane and sober would talk to her, it being obvious what she was — another white jackass looking for the truth in other people’s misery. He went back down the aisle, hoping against hope that she would be the smoker and that he would get to put her off the train.

—

“Did you talk to the Iraqis?” she asked.

“Sure. I talked to them. I talked mostly to kids. I’d tell ’em to get educated, become a teacher. Or a lawyer.”

“You speak their language?”

“No, no, I don’t. But I still could talk to ’em. They could understand.”

“What were they like?”

“They were like people anywhere. Some of them good, some not.”

“Did any of them seem angry?”

“Angry?” His eyes changed on that word, but she wasn’t sure how.

“Angry at us. For tearing up the country and killing them.”

—

She thinks she’s the moral one, and she talks this way to a soldier back from hell?

Mr. Perkins, sitting behind, could hear the conversation, and it filled him with anger. Yes, the man was obviously not playing with a full deck. No, the war had not been conducted wisely, and, no, there were no WMD. But anyone, anyone who knew what war was should be respected by those who didn’t. Perkins knew. It was long ago, but still he knew: The faces of the dead were before him. They were far away, but he had known them. He had put his hands on their corpses, taken their personal effects: Schmidt, Heinrich, PFC, 354th Fortress Artillery…Zivilberuf: Oberlehrer. He remembered that one because of those papers he’d kept. God knows where they were now, probably in a shoe box in the basement, mixed up with letters, random photos of forgotten people, bills and tax statements that never got thrown out. Schmidt, Heinrich. His first up-close kill. He’d thought the guy looked like a schoolteacher, and, by Christ, he had been. That’s why he’d kept the papers — for luck.

Yes, he knew, and obviously this black man knew — and how could she know, this “editor” with her dainty, reedy voice? More anger came up in him, making him want to get up and chastise this fool woman for all to hear. But he was heavy with age and its complexity, and anyway, he knew she just didn’t know better. As an educated professional, she ought to know better, but obviously she didn’t. She talked and talked, just like his daughter used to do about Vietnam, when she was a seventeen-year-old child.

—

“Angry?” said the soldier. “No. Not like you.”

She said, “What do you mean? I’m not angry.”

The soldier wagged his finger slowly, as if admonishing a child. “The thing you need to know is, those people know war. They know war for a long time. So not angry, no. Not like you think about angry.”

“But they didn’t—”

The finger wagged again. “Correct. They don’t want this war. But they know….See. They make a life. The shepherd drives his animals with the convoy. The woman carries water while they shoot. Yes, some, they hate — that’s the knife in the neck. But some smile. Some send down their good food. Some appreciate the work we do with the kids, the schools….”

—

He could walk for hours, every now and then calling the dog and stopping to listen. He walked across the field and into the woods and finally into the deserted farm. When he walked, he didn’t think of Iraq always. He thought of Jack when he was a pup, of wrestling with him, of giving him baths, of biking with the dog running alongside, long, glistening tongue hanging out. He thought of how patient Jack was when Scott was a baby, how he would let the child pull on his ears and grab his loose skin with tiny baby fists.

But the feeling of Iraq was always underneath, dark and liquid, and pressing up against the skin of every other thing, sometimes bursting through: a woman’s screaming mouth so wide, it blotted her face; great piles of sheep heads, skinned, boiled, covered in flies; the Humvee so thick with flies, they got in your mouth; somebody he couldn’t remember eating a piece of cake with fresh offal on his boot; his own booted foot poking out the doorless Humvee and traveling over endless gray ground. In the shadows of the field and the woods and the deserted farm, these things took up as much space as his wife and his child, the memories of his dog. Sometimes they took up more space. When that happened, he took the safety off the gun.

Like, an angry, cripple, man, don’t push me! Ghost’s voice and the old music ran parallel but never touched, even though Ghost tried to blend his voice with the old words. Sad to put them together, but somehow it made sense. Bill took off his headset and turned back toward the guy across from him, feeling bad for ignoring him. But he was busy talking to the older blonde behind him. And she seemed very interested to hear him.

—

“And the time I went out on the convoy? See, they got respect, at least those I rode with. ’Cause they didn’t fire on people unless they know for a fact they shot at us. Not everybody over there was like that. Some of ’em ride along shooting out the window like at the buffalo.”

“But how could you tell who was shooting?” asked Jennifer. “I hear you can’t tell.”

“We could observe. We could observe from a distance for however long it took, five, sometimes maybe even ten minutes. If it was a child, or somebody like that, we would hold fire. If it was an enemy…”

—

If it was an enemy, thought Bill Groffman, he would be splattered into pieces by ten people firing at once. If it was an enemy, he would be dropped with a single shot. If it was an enemy, she would be cut in half, her face gazing at the sky in shock, her arms spread in amazement as to where her legs might’ve gone. If it was an enemy, his or her body would be run over by trucks until they were dried skin with dried guts squashed out, scummed-over eyes staring up at the convoy driving by. Oooh, that’s gotta hurt!

—

“Still,” said Jennifer. “I don’t see how they could not be mad about us being there.”

—

Oooh, that’s gotta hurt! Six months ago, he would not have been able to hold back. He would’ve gotten into it with this woman, shut her up, scared the shit out of her. The war was stupid, okay. It was probably for oil. But it was also something else. Something you could not say easily with words. There was enemy shooting at you and then there was the thing you could say with words. There was dead squashed enemy and there was the thing you could say with words. There was joking at squashed bodies and nothing else to be said.

—

“Here,” said Jim. “Let me ask you something now.”

“Okay,” said Jennifer.

“Do you ever feel guilty?”

“What?”

“Do. You. Ever. Feel. Guilty.” He smiled.

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“I didn’t ask about everybody. I asked ’bout you.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I feel guilty.”

“Good. Because guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt can instruct you; you can learn from guilt. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.” She felt something, but she didn’t know if it was manipulated or real.

He smiled. “So here’s what I want to say. Guilt, you can live with. But you can’t live with regret. Can’t learn from it, can’t live with it. So don’t ever feel regret.”

—

The thing was, Perkins could not really understand this man, either. He didn’t know if it was because he had forgotten, or because war was different now, or because the man was black, or because…Well, the man was not right, that was obvious. But you heard things about a lot of them that didn’t seem right. You supported them, absolutely; you wanted to be proud; what happened after Vietnam should never be allowed to happen again — but then you read someplace that they didn’t care about killing civilians, that it was like video games to them. Stuff about raping young girls, killing their families, doing sex-type things with prisoners, taking pictures of it — and then you’d read somebody sneering that “the Greatest Generation” couldn’t even fire their guns, while these new guys, they liked to kill.

—

“Now I have another question. Is that okay?”

“Yeah.”

“When you look out that window, what do you see?”

Jennifer looked and thought; even though he was crazy, she wanted to give a good answer. “Trees,” she said. “Sky. Water. Plants, earth.”

He smiled. “All of that is there. I see it, too. But that is not all I see.”

“What do you see?”

—

In his head, Bill saw a horror movie. It was one he’d seen a long time ago. It was some kind of fight between good — or maybe it was just normalcy — and evil. Evil had gotten the upper hand, and good was going to lose. “We can’t stop them now!” cried the scientist. But then by mistake the evil people woke up something deeper than evil. They woke things underground called Mogred or some shit, things who knew only destruction and didn’t care who was destroyed; they made the earth come open and humanoid monsters without faces came out the crack. They weren’t on anybody’s side, but because evil had annoyed them by waking them up, they attacked evil.

—

Jim saw trees and shining water. He saw lake water, river water, sewage water. He saw the eyes of God in the water, and they were shining with love. In the eyes of God, even the sewage water in the street was shining. In the eyes of God, a woman came out on the street, moving very quick. She pulled up her robe and walked into the shining sewage and pulled a child out by the hand. She led the child and looked at Jim, and the mouth of God roared.

Outside the train window, the mouth of God was silent. It was silent and it was chewing — it was always chewing. That was okay; it needed to eat to keep the body going. And the eyes of God were always shining with love. And the nose of God — that was something you grabbed at on your way to the chewing mouth. Like those people in the old television movie climbing on the giant presidents.

—

The war was like the crack in the ground that let the Mogred out. The crack in the ground had nothing to do with arguments about smart or stupid, right or wrong. The crack in the ground was even sort of funny, like in the movie with shitty special effects, the monsters pouring out the hole like a football team.

—

Who told anybody they couldn’t shoot their weapons? That’s what Perkins wondered. If the American army couldn’t shoot, who killed all those Germans and Japanese? True: Straight off the ramp, chest-deep in the ocean, fighting its sucking wet muscle toward the shore with machine-gun fire hammering down around you and shells slamming your eardrums, pushing on floating corpses as you got close — you couldn’t see what to shoot at then. They hadn’t been chasing a ragged Third World army with inferior weapons and they hadn’t been wearing body armor. They came out of the ocean into roaring death, men exploding like bloody meat, and all of it sucked into the past before memory could grab on to it or the nerves had time to react. At least that must be why he could not recall most of it as anything but a blur.

—

The war was a crack in the ground, and the Iraqis were the Mogred, pouring out. Then somehow he and his buddies had become Mogred. Then it was nothing but Mogred all around, clawing and killing. Bill glanced at the guy sitting across from him; that was no Mogred. No way.

—

“I can’t tell you what I see,” said Jim. “And what I see you will never see. Because I have been touched by God.” There was a wheel of colors spinning in his mind, gunfire and music playing. A little ragged boy ran down the street, a colored pinwheel in his hand. A ragged little boy tried to crawl away, and was stopped by a bullet. Laughter came out an open window. “You never hurt a little animal,” his foster father said.

Unseeing and unhearing, she stared impassively in his face. “By Jesus, you mean?”

He felt himself smile. “Not by Jesus, no. Lots of people have been touched by Jesus. But I have been touched by God.”

Unfeeling spread through her face like ice, stilling the warmth and movement of her skin. With unfeeling came her authority. “How’d you get to skip Jesus?” she asked.

—

“If I told you that, we would have to be talking all day and all night. And then you’d be like me.” He smiled. Ugliness bled through his smile, the weak, heartbreaking ugliness of the mentally ill. Dear God, could they really have sent this man into combat?

—

When his daughter was a little girl, sometimes she would ask him to tell her a war story, her eyes soft and shining with trust, wanting to hear about men killing one another. But he never told her about killing. He told her about the time he was standing guard one night, when he thought he heard an enemy crawling through the brush to throw a grenade; just before he squeezed the trigger, a puppy came wiggling into the foxhole with him. He told her about the time in Italy, when he and his buddies saw a tiny woman carrying a great jug of water on her head, and he’d said, “Hell, I’m going to help that woman!” He’d stopped her and taken the jug off her head and almost collapsed, it was so heavy; his buddies had fallen about laughing….

—

“Were you in the National Guard?” she asked. “Were you a reservist?”

“Naw,” he said. “I was active duty.”

“Well,” she said. “I really appreciate talking to you. But I have to get back to my work now.”

“All right.” He extended his hand across the seat.

“And thank you for your service,” she said. “Even if I don’t agree with the cause.”

—

This pitiful SOB had been in Iraq? That was one fucked-up piece of information, but it made all the sense in the world, thought Carter Brown as he took the ticket stub down off the overhead. They deliberately went out and got the dumbest, most desperate people for this war — them and kids like his nephew Isaiah who were in the National Guard so they could go to school. Isaiah, who got A report cards all through community college and who would be in a four-year school now if he wasn’t busy being shot at. He tapped the spooky-looking white guy on the shoulder maybe a little too hard to let him know his stop was coming up and — hell, everybody on this train was nuts — the man just about jumped out of his seat.

—

Perkins was relieved to hear her finally become respectful. Even if the guy was half-wrapped. At least liberals had changed since Vietnam. Everyone had changed. His daughter, who used to fight him so hard about Vietnam, supported this war less equivocally than he did. She told him about attending a dinner for a returning soldier who, when he got up to speak, said, “I’m not a hero. I’m a killer. But you need killers like me so that you can go on having all the nice things you have.” Some of the people at the dinner had been disturbed, but not her. She’d thought it was great. She’d thought it was better than platitudes or ideals; she’d thought it was real.

He looked at his watch. When they got to the station, he’d go to the bathroom for another smoke.

—

One night when there was a full moon, out in the field across from the house where his wife and child slept, he remembered his first night in Iraq. He remembered how good he’d felt to be there. There had been a full moon then, too, and its light had made a luminous path on the desert, like something you could walk out of the world on. He remembered thinking, We are going to do something great here. We are going to turn these people’s lives around.

“Your stop, comin’ up.”

Now there was the man across the aisle, talking to himself and nodding. Now there he was in the dark field, holding a loaded gun pointed at nothing. There were all the people criticizing him for not getting a job, for being cold to his wife, for yelling at his son, for spending so much time looking for a dead dog. He put away his iPod, shouldered his pack. They didn’t get it, and he didn’t blame them. But alone in the field or in the woods, looking for his dog, was when he could feel what had happened in Iraq and stand it.

—

The train was pulling into the station; people were getting up with their things; conductors were getting ready to work the doors. The silent soldier stood up with his pack and briefly clasped hands with the crazy soldier. Perkins fingered his packet of cigarettes.

He had been a returning hero; then people forgot the war had ever happened. Then war was evil and people who fought it were stupid grunts who went crazy when they came back. Then people suddenly went, “Hey, the Greatest Generation!” Then just as suddenly, they were the assholes who couldn’t even shoot their weapons. No, not even assholes, just nice boys who didn’t know what was real. These guys now — some people said they were killers, some said heroes, and some said both. What would they be in fifty years?

—

When people got off the train, Jim got up and wandered away, and for a moment Jennifer thought he’d gotten off. But then she saw him wandering toward the back of the car, apparently talking to himself as well as to other people as he went. She tried to pay attention to the short essay she had been working on before her conversation with him. It was by a novelist who was in love with a vegetarian and who had gone to great lengths to pretend that he was even more “vegan” than she was in order to impress her. It was light and funny, and she felt too bitter now to appreciate those things.

—

Coming out of the bathroom, Perkins noticed the couple, the woman first. She was black, and normally he didn’t like black, but she was beautiful and something else besides. Her soft eyes and full presence evoked sex and tenderness equally, and he could not help but hold her casual gaze. Or he would have, if she hadn’t been sitting next to a giant of a man with quick, instinctive eyes.

—

Old white fool look away quick — good. Shouldn’t have looked at all, and wouldn’t if they were anyplace else. Chris put one hand on Lalia’s arm and worked the game on his laptop with the other. He wasn’t mad; old man couldn’t help but look. Lalia was all beauty beside him, shining and real in a world of polluted pale shit. He killed the dude crawling at him in the street, then got the one coming out the window. He moved down her arm and put his hand over hers; her fingers responded as if linked to him. His feelings grew huge. Dudes came rushing at him in the hallway; he capped ’em. He was looking forward to tonight, to the hotel room he’d reserved, the one that was supposed to have a mirror over the bed and a little balcony where they’d drink champagne with strawberries in chocolate. He killed dudes coming out the door; he entered the secret chamber. He wanted it to be something they would always remember. He wanted it to be the way it had been the first time with her.

—

It was humiliating to be old, to shrink before the glowering eyes of a stronger man. But just mildly. He understood the young gorilla — you’d have to protect that woman. He thought of Dody, when she was young, how it was to go out with her; he’d always had to be looking out for trouble, for some idiot wanting to start something. You always had to watch for that if you were with a good-looking female, and it could become automatic. Sometimes it had made him scared and sometimes angry, and the heat of his anger had gotten mixed up with the heat in her eyes, the curves of her small body, the heat she gave off without knowing it. That was all gone now, almost. They still kissed, but not with their tongues, just on the lips. Still, he remembered….

—

It took a long time to get with her, years, but when it finally happened, it was like the song his aunt used to listen to when she sat by the window, her glass of Bacardi and juice tilted and the sunlight coming in, her knees opening her skirt — the song that made him run and hide in the closet the first time he heard it, because it was too much of something, something with no words, but somehow living in the singer’s voice and words, high-voiced sweet-strong words that made him remember his mama, even though everybody said he was too young to remember. If I ever saw a girl / That I needed in this world / You are the one for me…The words were like the poems on cheap cards, like the poems nerds wrote to get A’s in class — but the way this singer said them, they were deep and powerful, and they said things no words could say, things his mama said with her hand, touching his face at night, or his aunt, just brushing against him with her hip….A trapdoor opened; the secret chamber was flooded with dudes wearing masks.

Oh, my little love, yeah…He had her every way, with no holding back, with his shirt over the light to make it soft. She was a quiet lover, but the warm odor that came off her skin was like a moan you could smell, and though she moved like every other woman, she said things with her moves that no other woman said. When they finished, she turned around and pushed the hair off her dazed eyes, and—oh, my little love—took his face in her hands. Nobody ever touched his face, and the move surprised him so that he almost slapped her away. Then he put his hands over hers and let her hold his face.

—

He remembered that when the war ended, the Italians invited the victorious Americans to come see a local company put on an opera. They went for something to see, but it was mostly boring, too hot, everybody smelling bad up in the little balcony, the orchestra looking half-asleep, flies swarming — but then there was this one woman singing. He made his buddies quit horsing around, and they did; they turned away from their jokes and listened to the small figure on the stage below, a dream of love given form by her voice and pouring from her to fill the room. When he and his friend Bill Steed went backstage to meet her, it turned out she was older than they’d thought, and not pretty, with makeup covering a faded black eye. But he still remembered her voice.

—

In the essay Jennifer was editing, the writer claimed that sometimes whom you pretend to be is who you really are. He said that sometimes faking was the realest thing you could do.

“Bitch! What you think you doin’, bitch!”

Her heart jumped; she looked up, to see a huge black man looming over somebody in the seat behind him, yelling curses — oh no, it was him. He was yelling at Jim. A woman stood and grabbed the huge man’s shoulder, saying, “Nuh, nuh, nuh,” a beseeching half word, over and over. She meant no, don’t, but the big man grabbed Jim, lifted him up, and shook him like a doll. The woman shrank back, but she said it more sharply, “Nuh, nuh!” Ignoring her, the man stormed down the aisle to where Jennifer sat, holding Jim up off the ground as if he were nothing. Jim was talking to the man, but words were nothing now. She felt the whole train, alert with fear but distant, some not even looking. She stood up. The man threw Jim, threw his whole body down the aisle of the train. She tried to speak. Jim leapt off the floor with animal speed and put his arms up as if to fight. She could not speak. Next to her, an old man stood. “Ima kill you!” shouted the big man, but he didn’t. He just looked at the old man and said, “He touch my wife’s breast! I look over and see his hand right on it!” Then he looked at her. He looked as if he’d waked suddenly from a dream and was surprised to see her there.

“It’s all right,” said the old man mildly. “You stopped him.”

“It’s not all right,” said the young man, but quietly. “Nothin’ all right.” He turned and walked the other way. “You ruinin’ my vacation,” he said as he went. “Pervert!” He didn’t look at his wife on his way out of the car.

The old man sat down. Jennifer looked at Jim. He was pacing back and forth in the aisle, talking to himself, his face a fierce inward blank.

—

There’s no God, no face, you weak, lying—you lying sack of shit! There is just the woman and the roaring and the world and the pit. Jim fell into the pit, and as he fell, all the people in it screamed things at him. Teachers, foster parents, social workers, kids, parents, all the people he’d ever known standing on ledges in gray crowds, screaming at him as he fell past. He landed hard enough to break his bones. He was under an overpass, standing with his backpack and crying while his father drove away, with his mother yelling in the front seat and his sister crying in the back, looking out with her hands on the window. Paulie sat next to him with no head and blood pouring up. His uncle said, No, I cannot take those children. Paulie fell backward and blood ran from him. Dancing children lay in pieces; guns shot. The woman and the child ran, fell, ran, far away. His foster mother opened the door and let in the warm light of the living room; the bed creaked as she sat and sang to him. The trees shivered; the giant fist slammed the ground; they shivered. The long grass rippled in the machine-gun fire. The pit opened, but Jim stayed on the shivering ground. He did not fall again. His sister came to him and held him in her arms. La la la la la la la la la means / I love you. He closed his eyes and let his sister take him safely into darkness. She could do that because she was already dead. He didn’t know it then. But she was.

—

The door between cars exploded open and they came rolling down the aisle, two conductors and a human bomb, the bomb saying, “And we on our honeymoon! In Niagara Falls! The only reason we even took the train is she’s afraid to fly — and this happens?”

“I know just the one you mean.” The black conductor sighed. “I know just the one.”

“And she’s pregnant!”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get him off,” said the white conductor. “We’ll have the cops come get him. He won’t bother you no more.”

—

Carter had no pleasure in putting the man off the train. He could barely look at his sad, weak-smiling face. He even felt sorry for the blond woman sitting there with her dry, pale eyes way back in her head, looking like she’d been slapped. He got the clanking door open, kicked down the metal steps, handed down the man’s bag, and thought, Cheney should have to fight this war. Bush should have to fight it, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden should fight it. They should be stripped naked on their hands and knees, placed within striking distance of one another, each with one foot chained to the floor. Then give them knives and let them go at it. Stick their damn flags up their asses so they can wave ’em while they fight. “Utica,” he yelled, “this stop, Utica.”

—

He didn’t seem to mind being put off the train; he was even pretty cheerful about it. Jennifer looked out the window to see what happened to him once he got off, and saw him talking to two policemen who stood with folded arms, nodding politely at whatever it was he was saying. She heard the big guy up ahead of her, still going over it. “I heard him talking to you,” he said to someone. “What was he saying?”

“Crazy stuff,” replied a woman. “I was real quiet, hoping he’d go away, but he just kept on talking.”

“Why did he do that?” asked the big man. “I don’t usually do nobody like that, but he—”

“No, you were right,” said the woman. “If you hadn’t done something, the next person he grabbed might’ve been a little girl!”

“Yeah!” The big man’s voice sounded relieved. Then he spoke to his wife, loudly enough for Jennifer to hear him several seats away. “Why didn’t you say anything?” he asked.

—

Because he like my brother. I could feel it when he touch me. My brother grab a teacher’s butt in the sixth grade; he do it for attention, it’s not even about the butt. I can’t talk about it here, Chris, with all these people listening; I can feel them, and this is too private. But my brother coulda turned out like this man here. Kids beat on him when he was like six, he had to be in the hospital, and for a long time after, he talked in this whisper voice that you can hardly hear, like he’s talking to himself and to the world in general, talking like a radio with the dial just flipping around, giving out stories that don’t make sense, but all about kicking and punching and killing people. He gets older and anything anybody says to him, he’s like, “Ima punch him! An then do a double backflip and kick him in the nuts! An then in the butt! An then—” It so annoying, and he still doing it when he gets older, only then he talks ’bout how somebody does this or that, he’s gonna pull out a gun and shoot him. He talks like he a killah but he a baby, and everybody knows it. My brother now, he works as a security guard in a art museum, where he sits all day and reads his books and plays his games. But he coulda got hurt real bad — and looked at one way, he talk so stupid, he almost deserves it. But look the other way, Chris. You do that, you see he lives in Imagination, not the world; shit don’t mean for him what it do for us. You see that and you wanna protect him even if he is a damn fool, and also I don’t want you into any trouble over me; our baby is in me, and it is our day. I love you; that’s why I don’t say nothin, Chris—

She put her hand on his arm and felt him withdraw from her without moving. Her heart sank. She looked out the window; they were moving past people’s yards. Two white kids, just babies, were standing in wet yards with their mouths open, looking at the train, one with his fat little legs bare, only wearing shoes and a hoodie. Her heart hurt. Please come back, she said with her hand. I love you. Don’t let this take away our beautiful night.

—

Disgraceful all around, thought Perkins. That they would treat a vet like that, that a vet would act like that. He looked out the window at small homes set in overgrown backyards: broken pieces of machinery sitting in patches of weeds, a swing set, a tied-up dog barking at the train, barbed wire snarled around chain link. A long time ago, he would’ve gone home and told his wife about the guy being put off the train; they would’ve talked about it. Now he probably wouldn’t even mention it to her. They used to talk about everything. Now silence and routine were where he felt her most. He looked out on marshy land, all rumpled mud and pools of brown water with long grasses and rushes standing up. His reflection in the glass floated over it, a silent, impassive face with heavy jowls and a thin, downward mouth. And there, with his face, also floated the face of Heinrich Schmidt, PFC.

—

He didn’t touch that lady’s breast; he touched her shoulder. Maybe the train rocked or something, made his hand move down, but he was just trying to talk to her. The conductor knew that — he told him so — but they’d had to take him off the train anyway. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad. The police said there would be another train, sometime. But there was no lake to look at here. Where you sat down here, there were just train tracks and an old train that didn’t work anymore. He would sit for a while and look at them and then he would call his foster mother. He would tell her there’d been a problem he’d had to solve, a fight to be broken up, and he couldn’t get back on the train. His foster mother had strong hands; she could break up fights, using the belt when she had to. She served food; she rubbed oil into his skin; she washed his back with a warm cloth. She led a horse out of the stable, not her horse, the horse of some women down the road, the one that sometimes his sister, Cora, would ride. She was so scared to get up on it at first, but then she sat on it with her hands up in the air, not even holding on, and they took her picture.

They said Cora died of kidney failure and something that began with a p. They had the letter when he got back to the base. He read the letter and then he sat still a long time. Before he left for Iraq, she’d had her toes cut off, and she said she was going to get better. When she took him to the airport, she walked with a fancy cane that had some kind of silver bird head on it. He couldn’t picture her dead. He could picture Paulie, but not Cora. When he came home, he still thought he might see her at the airport, standing there looking at him like he was an idiot, but still there, with her new cane. He thought he might see her up in Syracuse, riding her horse. Even though he knew he wouldn’t. He thought he might see her on her horse.

Riding her horse across a meadow with flowers in it, riding in a race and winning a prize, everybody cheering, not believing she’d really won, cheering. Then they’d have a barbecue like they used to have, when the second foster father was there, basting the meat with sauce and Jim helping out. The cats walking around, music turned up loud so they could hear it out the window, his foster singing him a dirty song to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.” It was mostly a funny song, so it wasn’t dirty; and his foster always told him not to hurt anything, so it wasn’t bad. Or his other foster father did — he wasn’t sure. He’d tell his foster about lying on the ground and feeling it shiver in terror, watching the grass and the trees shiver. He might tell him about seeing a little boy trying to crawl away and getting shot. Because his foster father had known Jesus. But he did not know the face of God.

Or did he? Softly, Jim sang, Way down south where the trains run fast / A baboon stuck his finger up a monkey’s ass. / The baboon said, Well fuck my soul / Get your fucking finger out of my asshole. A family came down the stairs, little girls running ahead of their mother. They wouldn’t think his sister would win the prize, but she would; she would race on her horse ahead of everybody, her family cheering for her. Not just her foster family, but her real family, Jim’s real family. Like the Iraqis had cheered when they first came into the town. Before they had shot.