The Portable Veblen

10 WAR CASH

At the VA the next week, in the ward at bedside, Paul read through the records of Sergeant Major Warren Smith. His daughters had called again for news.

SGM Smith had suffered burns over 30 percent of his body after he rushed into a burning building hit by a missile to rescue Afghan children screaming in terror from the roof. He had succeeded in reaching the children and dropping them into a safety net held by troops on the ground, but just before he could jump, a bullet grazed the back of his head. The building was fully engulfed in flames but a helicopter plucked him up and carried him to safety. He was transported to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in Germany, a top organ donation site for troops who did not survive there, where he remained in a coma for one week. Smith, however, survived, and no organs were bequeathed. He was found to have slight neurological weakness on his left side, slight memory loss and mood lability, but appeared to be on the road to recovery.

Eventually he came home into the care of his family. His burns healed, he regained full use of his limbs, but before long the family insisted he was no longer the man they once knew. It seemed a likely case of PTSD. A notation suggested the family seek counseling to adjust to Smith’s trauma and personality changes.

He’d had an MRI, an EEG, blood panels, occupational and physical therapy, and counseling. An ophthalmologist corrected his lenses. In the fall, Smith had apparently attempted suicide by opening a car door in a moving vehicle. The family thought participation in a trial would be good for his morale. There was a new notation showing that Smith had been assigned to psychiatric treatment with Dr. Burt Wallman.

A tug on his coat brought Paul’s attention to the man’s troubled face. “Hey, buddy,” Paul said. “You have two really nice daughters. You’re a lucky guy.”

“There’s a war machine,” Smith said, in his gravelly voice. “And you wanna put me in it.”

It took Paul a moment to respond.

“Oh, you mean the CURS, the simulator?”

“You’re gonna put me in the war machine!”

— said Smith, who was apt to slow down in the middle of a thought with his tongue too dry to say it. There were many days he’d forgotten, wigs of days, hairpieces sitting on time, and there were secret warm joys hidden somewhere he could no longer find them. He was aware of his service and his injury and the recovery plan, but there was something else they weren’t saying. There was a decal over everything.

The bones began to rub through the skin when you were down too long. He felt the bones coming through in his hips.

Every day he heard his wife’s off-kilter gait, the way she put her left leg down different from the right because of a bicycle accident she’d had as a child that had shortened her leg. Then she’d rub his arm first to let him know she had arrived.

“I know when you’re coming!” he’d cry out.

Always she’d launch into her talk, which he knew she put together ahead of the visit because she wasn’t a big talker like this, so she was making up her mind to fill the space, to stimulate him, which the doctor recommended. She’d begin to stimulate him with news of the girls. She’d talked to Sarah last night. At Hayward, Sarah was preparing for a business degree. Sarah wasn’t interested in business, she wanted to be an artist. Why was she taking business? Every time Mary mentioned it he roared. He did not like to hear about Sarah in business. So then she would stimulate him with Alexa, who sang last night in the choir, and she had a recording of it, though she knew he wasn’t as much for music as he used to be. They had asked for money at the door on a donation basis of course because so many of the kids came from poor homes, but almost everyone had paid the admission and the chorus raised more than six hundred dollars. And they would soon make T-shirts for a sale. If they raised enough they could tour the Ukraine over the summer, because the Ukraine had invited them to sing, and he began to kick at his sheets and roar because he’d seen the Ukraine, and the Ukraine was nothing but a bunch of crooks and piracy and drunks, and there was nothing good to come of singing in the Ukraine, nothing at all!

So Mary changed the subject with that hitch in her voice. She brought news of the house. She was proud of herself for contacting a locksmith at last to fix the front door, which had been sticking for so long, did he remember how it used to stick? Well, it had gotten worse and she’d tried graphite and even tried watering the clay soil around the front porch because remember how that used to help? The soil would swell and lift the door and all would be fine again for a while, but even that didn’t help anymore so the locksmith came with a plane saw and removed just one sixteenth of an inch off the top of the door and now it worked beautifully, and now he knew rage, because he’d expressly told her never to plane off any of the door, never, never! There would be a gap and air would get in. It would be cold in winter, and once you take something away you can never get it back. He’d turned his eyes to her, because all while she’d talked he’d kept them on a certain vent on the wall but there was something terrible about her now, she had her hanky ready, an old bandana. He looked at her wiping her eyes with the bandana that he believed to be the one she’d worn when they planted their first garden, a ravishing peasant on the steppes. But now she used it for her running nose and that was the ugly traffic of life, even a potato was cute when it was young, but look what happened and how it grew eyes and darkened and a foul black liquid came from it when it sat in a sack. He was trapped!

She lifted her recorder and pressed PLAY. He heard the scraping of chair legs and the clearing of throats and a program fanning air, and “Gloria” they sang, a wave of young voices as rippling as the wind in a hayfield. Clapping came loud and startling, the device had been buried in applause, and he covered his ears. They sang again. They sang, “‘Come on, people! / Come on, children! / Come on down to the Glory River…’” He knew this song. He thought of small-town stages and tributes of patience… “‘Save the people! / Save the children!’” Music hurt now, and he groaned.

Mary spoke again, her voice strong like metal, for that was her role now, to be as strong as metal. To hear that note of patience in her voice, that note of forbearing, made him want to cover his ears and yell. She said, “Warren, I’ve decided to rent the garage, Warren, because we need the money for the girls,” and it had been a long battle between them and now she would do it anyway, and he said, “No!” because she was taking advantage, and she said, “You know, I’ve asked a lot of people and everybody agrees it would be a smart thing to do; you can always rent to students where we live, which is the nice thing being near the college and we can get fifteen hundred dollars a month for it after it’s fixed up—”

“What about the boat! What about my Sea Ray!” He was tearing at his bedclothes and the IV stand went down and the man with the big arms was pinning him down again and everybody was so patient with the patient. She was in a support group and he knew what they said in support groups, they said, Look out for number one. That was the thing they said. She even laughed about it at first, because it was sickening. But now she was contaminated. Someone here told her about the support group. They sent men’s wives to support groups to learn how to stimulate them and to understand that they had to take care of number one, which was piss.

He itched in his bed, and called it a trough. He craved sun on his skin, or the fresh air tickling the hairs on his arms, or the warm glow of a real lightbulb by his bed. He missed the grease on his fingers after a taco and tuning the radio to get rid of the buzz. He heard water pouring from a spigot in the earth, washing the streets, bubbling up the best of life from the mantle and spewed away at a train stop, the witchery of men and stopwatches. The windows of mayhem had opened unto him. What could be counted on was nothing. He had been too proud of his bricks in the pile by the house. And who ever knew! All those wicked wishes. WAR CASH was how he saw the sign at the car wash, it was imbedded everywhere—

A scream came unbidden from his neck.

• • •

“ALL RIGHT, THEN. Let go now,” Paul said, because Smith had gripped his wrist and it burned as it had when Justin had no mercy and pinned him down. He heard the indifferent rotation of the ceiling fans, the hum of monitors, and his own shallow breath. Across the ward a male nurse changed an IV bag on a stand, oblivious to the assault. His blood was not pumping to his hand, his hand was dead. “That’s… enough.”

“You all right over there?” called the male nurse.

Paul’s heart was racing because a window had opened through Smith to all of the unexpressed ruin in the room, and he’d have to close the window soon or else be overwhelmed by it. His arm was slick with the sweat of the man’s hand, and now Smith’s nails were digging in.

“Let go!”

A call would be made to the Smiths that afternoon, laying out their choices.

“Getting your strength back, are you?” It was the male nurse, prying Smith away, wrapping him in an embrace like a straitjacket. “There we go. There we go. Look at that strength you’re gaining.”

Paul had a welt with puncture wounds, like an animal bite. The skin was broken in dark crescents. He fled to the sink to douse it with antiseptic, and rinsed his arm in cold water until it had no feeling in it at all.