The Post-War Dream

1

Throughout the years Hollis has observed them among his dreams, watching from a distance as they foraged under a blackened sky. After a time he understood that they, like him, had sensed the flux of earth, yet were undaunted: having journeyed perhaps twenty miles in almost fifty days, a procession of cows — nomadic Herefords and Jerseys — grazed onward, wobbling over a moonlit prairie, bulky heads lowered; their hooves crunched sandstone and pumice, and their excreta, hardening behind them, marked the slender trail in uneven circles — testaments to how far they had come, symbols of presence, like the burned-out and rusting wheelless cars they encountered within unkempt pastures of bluebonnets and high brittle grass, or the gutted houses abandoned on good soil (porches collapsing, doors gone, the wind sneaking through busted panes into dim interiors), or any number of fading signposts passed along the way, those many things fashioned by man-made design and then left again and again as the herd proceeded, weaving blindly ahead for no other reason than it must.

And there, too, he has infrequently witnessed the approach of other languid creatures: half-naked human figures emerging whenever the recurring cows failed to manifest, hundreds of pale bodies cutting through the landscape, angling across the same nighttime terrain but traveling in the opposite direction. That serpentine formation of listless souls wound back into the darkness — the shapes of children, men and women, mothers cradling infants, the elderly — coming from where the cows had been headed, drawing nearer while never quite reaching him. But it was the gas mask each one wore which disturbed him the most — such cumbersome equipment obscuring their faces, too large for the heads of small children and practically consuming the entire bodies of the infants, giving the group a uniform, superficial appearance not unlike that of cattle. Even so, he perceived their determined movements as a kind of miserable retreat, a retrogression toward the past and, indeed, toward the living — where, upon arriving at their destination, he imagined the masks would be cast aside and all of them would inhale freely once more.

Yet every step of their bare feet was now preceded by labored breath, a collective exhalation delivered in unison and released as a muted, staccato gasp through chemical air filters — while their paper-thin skin contracted around pronounced rib cages, and many of their arms hung like broken branches at their sides. As the ragged column advanced steadily in the moonlight, he realized the physical condition of the people had deteriorated badly since he'd first seen them decades ago. Their clothing was either reduced to shreds or had fallen away, their ankles and feet were covered with sores, their hair was so long that it ran the length of their backsides, and the men's thick beards jutted from beneath their masks. In that stream of pale, dirty bodies only their protruding bones shone clearly as they marched one after the other.

“Where are you going?” he had once asked them without speaking. “What is it you're looking for? What do you want?”

Later on, after having grown accustomed to their rare visitations, he offered the men cigarettes, the women Dixie cups filled with apple juice, the children Halloween candy from an orange plastic pumpkin (“Please, you must be hungry — here, have something to drink — have some juice — please, help yourself — please — ”), but his gestures went unacknowledged, his voice remained unheard. They, as usual, strayed well beyond his grasp, moving resolutely on the trail, somehow receding even while approaching.

However fast he walked, Hollis was never able to catch up with them. For years he tried without any success, his life evolving from youth to retirement while the processions continued to elude him. But as was always the case, those irregular dreams dissolved with his sudden waking, and he opened his eyes in bedrooms steeped by shadows — his body shuddering as if it had retained something unwholesome from the land of his visions and carried it then into the imperturbable, calm world he has made for himself.

2

Now in the waning months of the twentieth century, snow fell last evening without warning, drifting from above as if the heavens had been wrung in the hands of God, spilling down upon an unsuspecting desert, covering all which lay exposed below the dark-gray clouds. Waking well after mid-night — an open hardback of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six resting against his chin, a coffee cup half filled with Glenfiddich sitting nearby on the floor — Hollis was comfortable inside his house, stretched across the living-room couch and kept snug by a beige terry-cloth bathrobe. Lifting the novel, he began reading where he had left off, although his attention wasn't really held by the writing; his eyes scanned paragraphs, failing to absorb sentences, until, at last, he set the book aside, turning his gaze elsewhere as the Glenfiddich was absently retrieved, the liquor seeping warmly past his lips. On the other side of the living room the front curtains were drawn, revealing the picture window and what existed just beyond it: a torrent of snowflakes wavering to the earth, some pattering at the glass like moths before dissolving into clear drops of moisture. Presently, he was standing there in his bathrobe, resting a palm against the window, sensing the cold while buffered by efficient central heating. There, also, he caught a glimpse of himself as an obscure, diaphanous man reflected on the glass; his transposed image was cast amongst the wide residential street — the adjacent and similarly designed homes, the xeriscaped lawns — backlit by a table lamp but also illumed in that frozen vapor which brightened the night, that curious downpouring which smothered the gravel-laden property and changed his Suburban Half-Ton LS from sandalwood metallic to an almost solid white. He realized, then, that the outside cold had somehow managed to bypass the insulated flesh and blood of his left leg — needling into the marrow of his once torn-apart thigh, reviving the ancient injury caused by a North Korean's bullet that had ripped into his leg, striking him while his M1 returned fire; the throbbing, indefinite pain had been felt by him since, but only in the bleakest of winter months, sometimes giving him a slight limp as if to summon his previous incarnation: a young private in the U.S. Army, a rifleman at the outset of a half-forgotten war.

By daybreak, however, the blizzard had reached its end, and soon sunlight vanquished those low-hanging, thick clouds. When a hard blue sky proclaimed the storm's departure, the neighborhood became a glaring sight to behold; the morning's rays were made radiant in the glossy ice patches embracing asphalt and in the immaculate snowfall blanketing yards. Then Hollis was at the window once again, standing there as if he hadn't ever left the living room. The Glenfiddich had been replaced with decaf, the coffee cup steaming while he squinted to perceive the ghostly reflection in front of him; cast discernibly now on the glass of the window, his chest's silver, coarse hairs looked golden, his forehead's rugged creases appeared less defined. He had slept less than four hours, having fallen asleep at about the time he would normally be waking up. Even so, his body felt rested, his thoughts lucid, the previous night's swift accumulation having enlivened him somehow; he was — as his wife, Debra, remained in their bed — fully awake and eager to venture into that bleak, muted scenery. But beforehand, Hollis decided, he would spend a few minutes at the computer — coffee cup on a coaster, an index finger pushing the keyboard buttons — typing a short addendum to the prologue section of his fledgling autobiography, lest he forget later on.

“Whenever something strikes you,” Debra had reminded him, “be sure you take note of it. Anything at all. You'll see, little details help create the best picture of someone.”

But he worried that the little details of his life weren't at all interesting.

“Nonsense,” she ‘d responded. “Everyone is interesting, and everyone has a story to tell. If you think on it long enough, you'll see how amazing your life has been up to this point. Look, you've gone from Tokyo to Tucson, and a bunch of places in between. Now that's something to write about.”

“I'm not sure everyone is interesting, Deb. I mean, what if I discover how incredibly dull I am, or how meaningless?”

“You won't, dear. Trust me.”

It had been Debra's idea that he should chronicle his life, an exercise which she believed could preoccupy the downtime of retirement and, she hoped, would foster some much-needed reflection on his part. Toward that end, she purchased a refurbished Mac and checked out several books from the library that she thought might motivate him (Fulton J. Sheen's Life of Christ, Sam Walton: Made in America, and Chuck Yeager's autobiography). As a young man, Hollis had considered becoming a writer (having immersed himself early on in the writings of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck), but following his military duty, he found serious literary fiction less and less appealing for some reason — perhaps because of the subject matter's growing ambiguity and the unheroic nature of the characters, the increasing emphasis on the human condition's darker extremes. These days, however, his tastes were allied with the works of writers like Clive Cussler and John Grisham, heavily plotted but entertaining novels which more often than not didn't get finished before they were due back at the library; so while he appreciated Debra's gesture, the nonfiction books she stacked near the Mac received the slightest of considerations — the chapters flipped through, a paragraph or two perused at random, a bookmark stuck indiscriminately in the pages to give the false impression of a reading well under way.

But when beginning the process of addressing his own history, Hollis found the breadth of his life almost impossible to envision; it was, for him, like those casually regarded library books Debra had left for him — observed as fragments, equivocal in its significance, lacking a sustained coherence. Naturally there was childhood, teenage years, the war, marriage, work, and now retirement; yet it seemed so fleeting and generally unspecific, as if none of it added up correctly to the number of years he had actually spent alive. An apple born without a core, he concluded. A tree thriving without roots. And, as such, he didn't know how his story should commence, or what words he should choose in order to accurately describe it.

“You're making this too hard on yourself,” Debra had told him one night, upon learning almost nothing had been written during the two or three evenings he had spent sequestered in the home office. “Just keep it simple, and keep it honest.” She encouraged him to write for her, to describe the Hollis she didn't truly know, the Hollis who existed before they met: the small-town boy, the soldier engaged in frontline combat, the local hero. He should write about the war, write about Korea, write about that period of his life which continued to remain somewhat of a mystery to her — simply because he never liked discussing what he had once jokingly called the pre-Debrazoic era, shrugging his military service off as something he'd rather not revisit in a million years. “Who knows, it might become the first of your many books to come. Could even end up a major bestseller, you never know. Now wouldn't that be something?”

When she said this, Hollis recoiled his head and stared at her with disbelief.

“Hollywood might want to turn it into a movie,” she said, her voice as sincere as her expression. “Stuff like that happens more than you think.”

Hollis seemed unconvinced, but he nodded in agreement nonetheless. “That's all good and fine,” he said, “except I'm way out of my league here, Deb. I don't know how to get the ball rolling.”

She suggested he begin with lists, abbreviated outlines describing people or events which initially popped into his mind, various moments from the past and the present: “Like case studies, I guess, and you're the scientist. I don't think it has to be too complicated, though. One or two things, a couple of lines here and there about what someone does, their jobs, hobbies, things of that nature. Or if they're dead, something essential you remember about them. That'd at least be a start, right?”

“That's true.”

So he had returned to the office, resuming his place in front of the computer, and let his index finger hover a moment over the keyboard before finally tapping the letter S, though it would take almost an entire week to fill half a page with the most minuscule of beginnings.

Subject number: 01 Name: Hollis Adams Sex: Male Race: Caucasian Age: 68 Height: 6 feet, 1 inch Weight: 212 pounds, give or take

Overweight but not fat, muscular where it counts. Long face. Thinning gray hair still manages to cover entire scalp. Wore bifocals for over twenty years until having corrective laser surgery a while back. Scar on left inner thigh, result of wound while serving in Korea with the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Likes a drink on any occasion, doesn't smoke. Good at a lot of things but not great at anything. No notable talents. Coupled with wife Debra (65) for almost fifty years now. No children. Spent majority of life living and working in Arcadia, California. Born in Minnesota. Currently retired at Nine Springs, Arizona. Former director of production and sales for Dusenbury-Soper Lumber Company. Hobbies include gardening, fishing, flea markets, and golfing. Sometimes sits in on the Friday afternoon painting class at the Funtivities Center. Needs to get in better shape. Played basketball and six-man football in high school. In tenth grade, won a Civics Award. Lifelong Democrat until voting for Ronald Reagan's reelection. Voted against Bill Clinton in favor of George Bush. Voted for Clinton's reelection. Doesn't really follow politics anymore. Tries to enjoy life. Likes that the house continues to feel new. Enjoys working in the garden. Still hasn't gotten used to the Arizona summers yet. Has to watch blood pressure. Has considered medical hair restoration at some point.

And this morning, after having steered clear of his autobiography for nearly a year, he fired up the Mac long enough to revise that opening description of himself, adding a single line at the end: Looks fifteen years younger when seen on the living room window at sunup with fresh snow on the ground.

Hollis now dressed beside the bed he shared with Debra, quietly putting on thermal underwear, woolen socks, jeans, and a green flannel shirt. Wrapped in a comforter that she had gathered around herself, her head partly concealed beneath an orthopedic pillow, Debra was motionless — tufts of short, gray-blond hair sticking out from one end of the pillow, a lax arm jutting beyond the comforter to his barren side of the mattress — and wasn't disturbed when he sat at the bed's edge to slip his leather winter boots on, keeping still below her cave of sponge rubber. Of late he had been getting up several hours before she stirred, and with all their years of living together, she no longer had to be awake for him to hear her. She could speak to him even now, as he dressed himself, without saying a word, without being aware of herself; for they had had such conversations many times in the past.

“Hollis?” she would ask, and he would answer her, half whispering for no reason, while vaguely aware of the pungent, somewhat sickly aroma permeating the bedroom — the smell of morning breath, of hours spent resting behind closed doors and windows.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice would be flat, raspy, sounding as if she inhabited that murky realm which barely separated consciousness and sleep.

“Think I'll take a drive,” he said, pulling the right boot on.

She would ask the time.

“It's almost seven,” he said, pulling the left boot on.

She would ask if it was still snowing.

“No, it's finished. We've got sun.”

“That's good,” she would say, apparently relieved; and then she would ask: “Aren't you cold?”

He told her he was fine. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “You need the rest.”

He reached for the hand of her exposed arm, wriggling the fingers tenderly but so as not to bother her, then he curled her fingers into a half fist and slid the arm back underneath the comforter.

“Maybe for a little longer,” she would say, her voice growing fainter. “It feels so warm here — ”

He rose unsteadily, plodded across the room, and entered the large walk-in closet, seeking an article of outerwear he'd had no use for since retiring to southern Arizona: his old duvet jacket. Located on a top shelf, discovered inside a plastic storage box which also contained sweaters and a quilt, the jacket was in much better condition than he ‘d remembered it being (the innumerable camping trips having done little to depress its down lining or tarnish its waterproof urethane-laminate fabric). When he finally exited the closet — appearing as a heavily padded version of his already stocky self, the cobalt-colored jacket fitting tightly and reeking of mothballs — he could have sworn he heard Debra say something below the pillow, perhaps encouraging him to be careful, to be mindful of ice.

“Don't worry,” he whispered, zipping up the jacket. “I'll be home in a bit.”

At that moment, Hollis remembered when Debra had once injured herself while skiing at Big Bear, spraining an ankle and bruising the left cheek of her buttocks. As she had said herself, gravity was increasingly unkind to her. The hurt ankle had doubled, the skin expanding in hues of purple, red, blue, and black — and for more than a week she couldn't walk without severe pain. During her recuperation, she had lounged about in sweatpants, sometimes hopping from room to room of their old California home with the wounded leg dangling above the carpet (her arms swinging as she went, grinning all the while as if glimpsing herself objectively and enjoying the absurdity of her precarious, bouncing body); yet she never really complained or sought any sympathy. And now Hollis paused to stare at her shrouded form in their bed, feeling pleased that she had stayed by his side for so long. I'm lucky to have gotten this far with you, he thought. Such an even-tempered and reliable woman, accommodating but also her own person. Still, she had had her moments of ennui, although she had not been prone to prolonged depressions, or unrealistic in her expectations of him, or someone who harbored regrets. She was, he knew, exactly the sort of woman he had wanted to marry — a friend as much as a wife, a lover who could regard his mundanity not as a drawback but as a reassuring, steadfast influence.

With both of them bundled in their respective duvets, Hollis turned himself, promptly leaving her, passing through the preset warmth of their home and toward the sobering chill which awaited him. That was how, on this crisp morning, he found himself brushing snow from the Suburban's hood, roof, and windows, using a flattened disposable coffee cup to scrape frost off the windshield while the vehicle idled in the driveway (its internal heat billowing from the exhaust pipe and thawing a portion of concrete, just as visible gusts of breath floated from his mouth); but not before he almost lost his footing twice on the front porch, or tugged with bare hands to free the stuck driver's-side door — the ice cracking loose, reminding him of wood splintering when the door swung open.

Minutes later, the Suburban eased backward onto the street; proceeding with the speed of a geriatric jogger, he steered it down inactive thoroughfares which were, at places, ivory and sleek — Sagebrush Avenue, Yucca Street, Pinon Way — gliding between medians of evenly spaced saguaros (the stately cacti snowcapped and humbled by the storm, soon to be humiliated further by large Santa Claus hats and Christmas lights) and narrow side lanes reserved for golf carts instead of bicycles. Ultimately, he navigated the perimeter of the expansive golf courses which were designed to encompass many of the newer homes — golf courses which, on this day, summoned the frozen lakes of his Minnesota childhood (lean and agile at fourteen, hunting Big Portage Lake's banks, center-fire bolt-action Winchester ready for ruffed grouse or deer). Then how unoccupied Nine Springs felt, how forsaken this isolated desert community looked: not another resident, it seemed, had yet braved the pristine winterland — no early-morning golfers, or power walkers, or pickup trucks delivering the Arizona Daily Star. No one else was compelled to navigate the perilous streets, or to risk the dangers of traversing slick sidewalks — no one else, that is, except Hollis and, as he came to realize, one other foolhardy soul.

3

It wasn't difficult for Hollis to relish the lifelessness of Nine Springs, savoring the illusion of having the entire city to himself. Without snow and ice present, he would have gladly increased the Suburban's speed, disregarding stop signs, blaring the horn for the pleasure of it. He would, if the city had actually been his and his alone, have swerved from the street, violating the curb and sidewalk, aiming his wheels directly for the greens. As it was, though, the stop signs were heeded, the brake pedal getting tapped lightly while he rolled the vehicle to a standstill — where, absent of anyone else in front of or behind him, he paused long enough to survey the nearby golf course grounds. Still, if he hadn't noticed a red-clad figure writhing out there on the ninth hole green (a solitary form striving to gain footing in the snow, like an upturned turtle within a scarlet hooded parka, galoshes kicking, arms flailing beneath the blue sky), he could have easily believed himself to be the last person here.

But Hollis wasn't sure if it was, in fact, another person he was seeing, or, as had been the case after coming home from Korea, he was once more being visited by an apparition of himself: that disquieting doppelganger appearing when least expected, presenting itself in the strangest of places — seated at a dinner table, stretched out on the gravel shoulder of a desolate county road, crouched silently among the harvested rows of a cotton field — as if to show Hollis what his outcome might have been had he made different choices in his life. Those unusual, fleeting encounters with himself had occurred regularly for quite a while — from late ‘50 through the winter of ‘51 — yet he had never dared mention them to anyone else, largely because he feared his sanity might get called into question.

At some point following his military discharge, Hollis had begun hearing about the troubles of ex-cavalrymen, various accounts regarding fellow soldiers whose behavior had turned erratic. decorated hero jumps in front of train, one newspaper article stated; other articles related stories of veterans who had thrown bedroom furniture from apartment windows, wandered naked around a busy town square while weeping aloud, attacked their own family members for reasons as minor as letting the teapot whistle for too long or forgetting to set out a butter knife when breakfast was served. His own mental state, however, hadn't really concerned him at first. His nerves, he had convinced himself, weren't shot, nor was he wracked by sleeplessness or plagued with flashbacks of the things he had experienced during battle. In truth, he had to drink just to fall asleep — and drink he did, the rounds commencing by the afternoon and continuing well past midnight, where he soon became a familiar face in all but two of the seven beer taverns which catered to his hometown of Critchfield, Minnesota.

For more than a month Hollis had stayed drunk, doing so once he had been officially welcomed back, paraded down Ripley Avenue in a chariot-red convertible led by the town's sole fire engine, smiling at those lining the sidewalks to greet him with enthusiastic waves (people who had given him little attention just months earlier, faces he had seen throughout his childhood but who had never really spoken to him). “Local hero Hollis,” he was called for a while, and with such an honorific title attached to his name, the twenty-year-old had an endless quantity of free liquor placed before him. Even a local tavern owner had told him, “Any fella that's done the tough job for this country won't be paying for his drinks here, at least until the war is finished with. It's on us, son. Drink up, you've earned it.”

And so Hollis had begun swallowing his fill — starting off the days with four or five Schell beers, concluding the nights with a combination of gin and a pinch of DDT commonly known as a Mickey Slim — until his legs could barely guide him a few blocks to the two-story Craftsman-style house he shared with his mother, Eden, and stepfather, Rich. Sometimes he passed out on the lawn or across the steps of the front porch, only to be helped inside by his increasingly wary mother. But usually he managed on his own, limping past the doorway, dragging himself up the stairs and into the musty-smelling bedroom which had always been his sanctuary; collapsing upon the twin mattress while still dressed (facedown, a shoe touching the floor in order to keep the room from spinning), he fell asleep beside a wall decorated with the triangular banners of his high-school football team, snoring as sunshine brightened the curtains and the smoky aroma of bacon frying wafted upstairs.

This debilitating ritual might have continued much longer had there not been the singular visitation of his immovable counterpart; for one morning after a particularly reckless night of breakneck drinking, Hollis had raised his throbbing head from the pillow and, blinking awake amid the subdued natural light of his room, beheld his duplicate standing at the foot of the bed. With eyes bloodshot and difficult to focus, it took a moment for him to comprehend what he was seeing, and seconds passed in a befuddled silence. Then like someone surfacing from the coldest of waters, his lips parted with an inaudible gasp just as his pupils dilated. He inhaled, breathing a sharp, pervasive scent resembling sulfur. As if the odor acted as a kind of smelling salt, he shuddered and, rising up on his elbows, began to fully grasp the uncanniness of the situation.

“What is this?” Hollis had uttered, except no reply was forthcoming. But hearing his mother talking downstairs — her high-pitched voice resonating while she spoke on the telephone — was enough to convince him that he wasn't dreaming. “This a joke?” he mumbled, addressing his double with trepidation. As his confusion transformed into fear, there was an increasingly quavering aura to the apparition: while seemingly stock-still, it began conveying a sort of elusive but persistent motion, not unlike the spinning blades of a fan. Nevertheless, it had a manufactured, artificial bearing, like a mannequin posed within a window display. The arms hung rigidly at its sides, and, mirroring Hollis in almost every way, it wore the same faded blue jeans, tan leisure shoes with rubber soles, bright blue Windbreaker, white T-shirt; the two exceptions being that, for whatever reasons, no silver-plated wristwatch was worn and its facial hair was thicker than the day's worth of stubble on Hollis's boyish face.

Before the shock had completely sunk in, the doppelganger went away, vanishing at the moment Hollis blinked his eyes. Still, the unpleasant smell lingered for a while, and sitting breathless on his bed, glancing from one end of the room to the other with his heart racing, he worried that his screws were coming loose. The nonstop carousing, he was sure, had finally taken its toll. Presuming such errant behavior was the main cause for the hallucination, he vowed to himself to cut back on his drinking (no more Mickey Slims, just the occasional beer), to spend more evenings at home (helping clear the dinner table and doing dishes, enjoying programs on the Zenith tube radio upon finishing the nightly chores), and, most important, to seek at least a modicum of guidance from the Lord (Wednesday and Sunday services would be heeded, the Holy Bible would be kept by his bedside but rarely, if ever, studied); and he promptly set about doing these things without any great struggle, easing the mind of his worried mother and pleasing her with how effortlessly he had righted himself.

But what had once been considered an illusory by-product of too much alcohol soon became a recurring enigma, troubling Hollis during his comparatively sober periods. In the months after his return from Korea, not a week passed when he didn't briefly spot his double — facing him at the opposite end of a grocery-store aisle, on a street corner, at the foot of his bed again — always accompanied by that acidic, distinctive odor. Each evanescent meeting brought lessening degrees of surprise, even as Hollis had repeatedly asserted underneath his breath, “Leave me alone. You get the heck out of here.”

“I'm sorry, what was that, dear?” Eden sometimes asked him. “What'd you say?”

“Nothing,” he replied, glaring toward a doorway, or down the hallway, or across the living room. “Nothing,” he said, while also thinking: Go on, you don't scare me anymore.

From December of one year to February of the next, the same apparition plagued him, the same face and stance — although his twin's hair had grown progressively bushy and wild, its bearded face ruddy and unwashed, the clothing wrinkled and soiled in places; with Hollis's fastidious attention to personal hygiene and general tidiness, the similarities were becoming less obvious. Max was what he finally christened the thing; Max, he called it, because the name sounded benign to him — because he had stopped recognizing the mirror image of himself whenever encountering it. As the physical condition of Max declined further, so, too, did the regularity of its unwelcome appearances. By the spring of ‘51, once he started working on a farm in West Texas, the visitations were few and far between (about every other month, observed from greater distances); and later on, during the decades he had spent living in Southern California, it was recognized only a handful of times — usually as Hollis drove San Gabriel Valley boulevards, perceived momentarily along sidewalks as a run-down, hunched form — leaving him with the distinct impression of having glimpsed a childhood acquaintance who no longer had any significant role in his life.

Yet Max's proximity returned two years ago, startling Hollis twice within the week he and Debra had moved into their Nine Springs home (materializing in the garage, waiting in the kitchen). Thereafter, it limited itself to the golf course greens, emerging every so often among the group of men Hollis joined for organized tournaments or informal competitions. Regarding Max from a short distance, he remained calm, refusing to let it affect his game, never addressing it outright or feeling haunted anymore by its grim presence. Whereas before Max had remained unflinching, he had since noticed some faint movements — possibly a twitch of the hands, maybe a slight turn of the head. Moreover, his formerly perfect double had transformed into a mass of wrinkles, a haggard and pitiable creature, like a wax effigy of an elderly vagrant. Perhaps for that reason, he fostered a certain amount of empathy toward his old likeness; it looked as if it had traveled through hell just to stand near him again. Harboring a begrudging tenderness for his own body, he felt sad about what had ultimately become of Max.

Now parking the Suburban in a golf cart lane, the hazard lights blinking, Hollis went from the vehicle and started trudging forward. Between him and the ninth hole, a large black crow flitted about, shooting its beak into the snow with pistonlike speed, working its way slowly toward the fallen figure, but when Hollis approached — his boots breaching the frigid layer, his tracks fashioning a curving trail — it screamed once at him and promptly took flight; the bird circled high overhead, following as Hollis veered through a sodden sand trap and angled for the ninth hole. The dull ache in his left thigh sharpened, further hindering his progress. Up ahead, the struggling figure had become listless — legs, arms, and body inert — and by the time Hollis reached him, the individual seemed resigned to his plight.

“Hey, you all right? You okay there?”

Leaning over him, rubbing his bare hands together, Hollis recognized familiar green eyes darting inside the red hood, gazing first at the firmament above — scanning the heavens, giving a sidelong look at the sun — before fixing on Hollis while, at the same instant, a sigh of frustration was expressed.

“Goddamnit,” his buddy Lon said, both annoyed and heartened that someone had chanced upon his predicament. “Goddamn — ” Puffing with exasperation, Lon arched his big head back, closing his eyes for a few seconds. Digging his heels into the snow, he began rocking his massive chest back and forth, evidently trying to gain enough momentum to flip himself. “Son of a bitch — ” Lon's chubby, flushed face grimaced. His galoshes pounded the ground, throwing a spattering of slush into the air. “Oh, fuck — ”

“Just hold on,” Hollis said, the rotund sight of his friend bringing to mind some toppled snowman or, perhaps, a distressed Santa Claus. “Here — ”

Poor Lon, Hollis thought. Poor guy: cursing, sighing, bitching, but forcing a grin once Hollis proffered his hands and — fingers clutching Lon's black mitts, legs braced to keep himself from also falling (the ache in his left thigh contracted to a dime-size circle of pain and, all at once, briefly abated) — helped him sit up, then kneel, then stand on the spot where he had apparently slipped backward.

Not yet sure of his balance, Lon remained standing there for a while, his arms hanging straight at his sides. “Thanks,” he muttered, without sounding grateful. He glanced at Hollis with a bemused expression — his face was rosy and damp, thin strands of silver hair were plastered on his forehead.

“Could've sworn I was the last man on earth,” Hollis said, swatting clumps of snow off Lon's wet backside. “Guess I was wrong.”

“Yep,” Lon said, “you were wrong.” Then brushing the hair away from his forehead with a mitt, he asked, “So how's Debra holding up today?”

“Well, she's never liked snow, but she's doing okay, I guess.”

“That's good to hear.”

For a while they loitered there, the two of them staring at a ridge of cumulus which canvassed the Catalina Mountains’ summit, until Hollis said, “You know, I should've figured you'd wander into this mess.”

“Really?”

“Seems like you'd want to see it before it melts away.”

But unlike Hollis, Lon hadn't come to observe the transformed golf courses, the greens gone white. No, he insisted, doctor's orders had him walking at dawn, doing his usual route — from hole one to hole eighteen, hole eighteen to hole one, and home by the time his wife, Jane, finished cooking breakfast: “I couldn't care less about the snow. Doesn't mean a thing. It's just snow, you know.”

“Mm,” Hollis said, cupping his hands at his mouth and exhaling into them.

But Hollis knew the snow meant something more to Lon; he knew as much last evening when Lon had phoned, gleefully saying, “Hey, you and Debra go to your window and look. It's hell freezing over, it's the beginning of the end.” And soon Hollis was peering through parted kitchen curtains as he made chocolate pudding for Debra, surprised to discover the backyard had already become an otherworldly place; his cactus garden had grown fluffy, the swimming pool was a snowy lair.

“My goodness,” Debra had called from the living room, sounding tired and miserable, “have you seen what's going on outside?”

“Yes,” Hollis had replied, transfixed by what was raining into the backyard, altering the view which he had grown accustomed to enjoying. Even at night the cacti were apparent, the beds showcased in the broad beams of two floodlights, and he had always liked that his garden was visible from the kitchen and dining-room windows. For some reason, he found its nearness comforting. Often he would sit at the dining table for prolonged periods, drinking coffee while staring at the various things he had cultivated. Time evaporated during those meditative breaks, as it did last night when he had first glimpsed the snowfall. After a while he glanced at the stove clock, then he pivoted and walked from the kitchen, leaving the pudding to chill in the refrigerator, going to where Debra lingered wearily in front of the television (the TV Guide near her face, an index finger scanning a page, her body emitting a faint odor which hinted at sickness). Without acknowledging his presence, she shook her head, frowning: “Can you believe it? A week ago you were wearing shorts.” But he had assumed a smiling, sympathetic face, taking her into his arms from behind and holding her gently — the way one might handle something delicate and rare.

Later, while they watched a rerun of Law amp; Order, Debra had shivered and said, “Lord, I've always hated this kind of weather.” She was snuggled against him on the couch, draped in the same comforter she would eventually carry to their bed. “Pudding on a night like this,” she complained. “Doesn't seem quite right.”

Not right, Hollis had thought, when sun-washed vistas and mesas were promised in the sales brochure (astonishing views, sparkling air: The morning's dawn another perfect day), when the panoramic splendor of the Catalina Mountains loomed beautifully beyond the aquamarine waters of outdoor hot tubs. Then this morning — standing beside Lon on the buried golf course, gazing at the white expanse ahead of him — he truly felt displaced from where he actually stood, somehow removed from this region of cacti, diamondback rattlesnakes, and desert.

An insubstantial breeze roamed around, whisking up crystalline particles and spiraling them into sunlight as a shimmering, refracted mist. Yet it was a dry onshore wind Hollis was suddenly sensing, blowing cold from Siberia and southward along the Sea of Japan. Hidden beneath the layer of snow, he imagined, were the artifacts of warfare, a scattering of personal and military-designated debris. Like memories best forgotten, he thought. Like blank spaces in an old photo album where once images had existed. But how many discarded objects had been left behind as the troops concluded their tours of duty? What else had remained in that country where a heavy snowfall persisted, covering the hills and the mountains, sedating the hard fighting until, eventually, the storm had ceased?

4

Last week, while sitting at the kitchen table, Debra had said to Hollis, “Will you, please, tell me about us.” She had, under completely different circumstances, said something similar many months before as they strolled around the block one evening after dinner. By then he had stopped writing every night, had been unwilling to face those earlier years, specifically those few weeks he had spent fighting in Korea. There was a lot he just wasn't comfortable recalling, he had told her, and although he was doing his best to do so, it would probably take some time.

“Then skip the war for now,” she had suggested. “Why don't you write about us instead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, everyone likes a love story, right?”

“I guess.”

“So write a love story, how we met and fell for each other, all that stuff.”

“Who'd want to read that?”

“Christ, Hollis, I would.”

“I don't know, Deb. You know, I'm sure I could write a little bit about my time in Japan.”

“Okay, do that — and then you should write a Hollis and Debra epic. Tell me some things I might not know about us, and you, and how you view our life — because I'd really like to hear your take on our story. It'd likely do us some good, anyway.”

“Maybe, we'll see.”

But, to date, the book project had ground to a halt. With just over six pages completed, none of the self-assessment or introspection Debra had wanted was offered; nor was there an inkling of a wartime saga or a love story in progress — nothing at all which came remotely close to shedding any new light on their relationship, or his military service. He had, at least, begun an opening chapter for his autobiography — a chapter entitled “Where I Went amp; How I Got There” — in which he managed to write the following: Japan.You probably will figure out I'm writing all of this as things come to me and because sometimes I think of certain memories when I am in the middle of writing on something else. It has been three weeks since I wrote anything here, but today Japan popped into my head and what I mean by “Japan” is not the Japan of now. I don't know too much about what the country is like these days. No, it is the Japan of nearly fifty years ago, the Japan I knew for a small time as a soldier before getting myself shipped over to Korea. It was the U.S.-occupied Japan I experienced. Anyway, I can tell you I never intended to write a word on my military service, because it was a whole other life for me and doesn't seem worth the trouble of dwelling on. But a while back my wife said I had traveled from Tokyo to Tucson, and she said I was fortunate to have seen quite a few other places in between those two T's. Her saying that got me thinking of Japan again and I had the urge to set my thoughts down for her to read someday and so I will try to remember my days in Tokyo, 1950. Funny, it sure doesn't feel like I was ever really there, but I really was. At the time I was a kid of twenty, and in a flash I had gone from a hick American town to the streets of the largest city in Asia if not the world. I can't say there is a bunch to tell about the place. It's not like anything extraordinary happened while I was there on account of us not being at war yet. But I will write down what I can remember because it involved my early life and my wife wants to know.

While Hollis went on to describe post-war Tokyo in some basic detail — the poverty of a defeated and compliant people, a city in the bustling throes of reconstruction, the pleasure districts frequented by American troops at night, the little walkways lined by the large glowing red lanterns and the cloth banners of bars and eating houses — it wasn't the busy streets of Japan his memory readily gravitated toward. Instead, his thoughts always jumped ahead to places and people he couldn't yet invoke with written words; and when he found himself reliving that part of his past — when he reluctantly turned his mind to that brief but jarring period of his youth — it was never the battle-scarred terrain of Korea he first envisioned. Rather, he recalled the coast of Japan's southern tip and the Osumi Strait, where a convoy of four transport ships pitched upon breaking waves, forging through heavy gray sheets of rain and white, frothy spray (the iron hulls rocking, the bows crashing into the ocean before rising upward once more as navy flags continued slapping against the wind). Somewhere ahead loomed the lighthouse on Cape Sata, and beyond that — dotted here and there with tiny islands, the choppy waters swelling even higher — was the East China Sea.

Then it was the stench of vomit Hollis remembered, a disgorging fume hanging below deck, mingling with the body odors and cigarette smoke of the troops; the fresh-faced men were all crammed together within the dank, submerged quarters — breathing the stagnant air, uniforms wrinkled and stained by sweat — everyone swaying to the gyrations of the ship, some resting on cots, many sitting against partitions, while others waited in line for the head so they could retch out whatever else was left inside their churning stomachs. Soon the convoy would change course, angling northward, heading for the southern coast of Korea; but until their destination was reached, the troops were kept sequestered in their turbulent limbo, passing the hours with conversation or card games, or attempting to write letters home, or reading again those letters from loved ones which had been brought on board like precious cargo.

But Hollis had no letters to safeguard, nor had he written anyone or received a single missive since leaving Critchfield. There wasn't a hand-wringing girlfriend awaiting his return, not even a childhood friend anxious for news about him. The closest person in his life at that point had been his mother, and he hadn't yet felt the desire to inform her of his enlistment (she had last seen him walking from the house on an overcast morning, holding a suitcase, telling her only that he would be in touch once he settled elsewhere and found steady employment). Although he didn't comprehend it fully, he was — as the communal rabble loitered nearby, few giving him much attention while he remained on his fold-down cot and apart from the casual gatherings of his fellow cavalrymen — a silent, inexpressive individual, alone on the journey and without another soul for an intimate.

To kill time, Hollis filled several pages of a small notepad, fashioning detailed drawings which summoned less confining environs. A decrepit two-story farmhouse overlooking a lush valley. Two deer pausing at the edge of a creek — a doe with its snout reaching toward the water, an alert buck with its neck and head poised upright. A bowling ball floating through the atmosphere of interstellar space, drifting between twinkling stars and the bright glow of a distant sun. Finally, he sketched himself far beyond the ship's stifling quarters, placing his uniformed likeness on the moon's imaginary surface — where his ungracefully lean, tall body, his dark stubble of a crew cut, his long, gawky face took shape among craggy lunar boulders (the wide peeking eyes, dagger-sharp antennae, and skeletal fingers of tiny alien creatures made half visible behind each large rock); he gazed nervously from the page, his M1 clutched and ready, his mouth as round as the letter O, with a caption scribbled above him which asked: how on earth did I end up here?

Yet even his drawings couldn't completely vanquish the caged-in, bustling reality of his surroundings, and periodically Hollis would set his pen and notepad aside, shutting his eyes so that sleep might guide him ashore. During those restful periods, his thoughts sometimes puzzled over the Korean peninsula, that Japanese stronghold before World War II now divided bitterly into northern and southern regions, whose separate governments were at odds with each other (Moscow having armed the north, Washington having done the same for the south): the communist North Korean army had at last pressed forward in a violent bid to unify the country; this was obviously a troubling turn of events for Douglas MacArthur's supreme commandership, causing the great general to deem the situation as being critical, an emergency which required the use of peacetime soldiers stationed in occupied Japan, as well as the need to extend all enlistment for twelve months, and, then, to herd hundreds of men aboard transports, and — with the sea lanes assaulted by thirty-foot waves, the typhoon weather nearly doubling the length of what was usually a three-day voyage — to send the troops sailing from Yokohama on a direct course toward frontline skirmishes.

More often than not, Hollis disregarded his uncertain thoughts of international police action and likely combat, eavesdropping instead on those close at hand, listening with eyes shut to a cacophony of voices — the bad jokes, the raucous laughter, the crass innuendoes — like a discordant choir accompanying the ship's creaking, metallic gyrations. The majority of them were younger men, most no older than eighteen or nineteen, while some had just barely reached seventeen, joining up after their parents had consented by signing the recruitment forms. Hollis, however, was already twenty, and although the age difference was minor, he felt displaced and out of rhythm with the quick, adolescent banter of his peers; they appeared, to him, like unruly kids left to fend for themselves, or perhaps wild things banded together by necessity and somehow holding one another in check.

“Look at that peckerwood, just look at him go.”

“Goddamn, man, that ain't right.”

“I fold, damn.”

“Yep, I hear you. I fold.”

“Hey, which one of your rotten crotches didn't ante?”

“Don't look at me.”

“This is bullshit. Who didn't ante?”

One blustering voice was interchangeable with another — all their voices cut from the same cloth yet remaining singular — like the uniforms they wore, like the equipment they toted, like the similar rankings they were assigned and the robotic drills which were now performed as second nature; with rarely an exception, every soul huddled in the foul belly of the ship, including Hollis, was a trained rifleman for the army personnel parlance, each classified to an identical set of numbers. Except the faces and bodies were different, some more so than others, and among them was a particular oddity: a Chinese American private from Seattle named Schubert Tang — two of the darkest eyes Hollis had ever seen, coarse black hair cropped short, shiest kid in the battalion but a skillful poker player, wire thin and delicate, with almost a girlish appearance — whose three older brothers had served before him in the Second World War.

So while the men horsed around, or suffered from seasickness, or bantered with the tacky obscenities of soldiers, only a couple of them stood out perfectly in Hollis's memory — one of whom was Schubert, a Browning Automatic Rifleman, that solitary Asian in a den of mostly white faces. At the outset of the crossing, it became apparent that Schubert was very intelligent and very friendly, if not also rather quiet, and who, in spite of being Chinese, would have made excellent officer material in the future. But he looked like the youngest of them all, much closer to fourteen than his actual eighteen years — with smooth, unblemished skin which, to the amazement of some, had never felt the touch of a shaving razor. Moreover, it was Schubert who understood where they were going, who knew a lot about that place called Korea, who had even been able to locate it on a map well before the rumblings of civil war had begun. In the middle of playing cards, questions were thrown at him concerning the country, especially since many, including Hollis, had assumed the differences between the Chinese and the Koreans were negligible; and as he spoke, answering and then elaborating on what had been asked, the game would be put on hold for a spell — every-one listening to him, sometimes straining to hear him because his voice was so soft, then ribbing him afterward that only a North Korean spy could possess such information.

But with every question asked, Schubert would become unusually talkative, offering long explanations which were given in painstaking detail. He told them it was okay to think of Korea as a bridge for China and Japan, but that the country also had its own rich history which stretched back five thousand years. The nation, he said, was born after a god named Hwanung, who descended from Heaven and turned a bear into a beautiful woman; the woman eventually gave birth to Hwanung's son, and it was that son who, as an adult, ended up building the capital of Korea. Subsequently, as the hours passed with the chaotic, metronome-like sway of the ship, more would be gleaned from Schubert. He told of the Korean king who, in 1420, created a phonetic language for his people, using eleven vowels and seventeen consonants, forming the written language of Hangul. The same king invented the sundial and water clocks. Yet while he painted an alluring picture of that strange, unknown land, Schubert didn't avoid those recent junctures in history which, as a result, had set them sailing across the Sea of Japan: the annexation of Korea by the Japanese in 1910, the nation then humbled into a mere colony, a territory which remained under Japanese control until the Pacific War ended some thirty-five years later. And though he could go on endlessly and in great detail about where they were headed, the men did nothing to interrupt him, preferring instead to listen carefully to the shy Chinese kid from Seattle, perhaps regarding him as one who, by the sheer virtue of his otherness, might somehow hold the key to their survival.

There was, however, a soldier from Texas who truly stood above the rest — at least it seemed as such to Hollis — and whose gregarious presence was difficult to resist or shun. His name was Bill McCreedy, although he often referred to himself in the third person, saying things like “Boy, Creed sure wishes he could hunker down on a hamburger,” and “Scoot on over, give ol’ Creed a place to sit.”

From his cot, Hollis spied McCreedy making the rounds, pausing to borrow a cigarette off someone, striking up conversations with those who crossed his path, or leaning for a while against a bulkhead and, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, coolly surveying the groupings of fellow privates as if they were under his stern command. But he was well regarded by pretty much everyone; in fact, McCreedy had an affable yet dominating nature which attracted others to him, and whomever he spoke with was given the distinct impression they were, at that moment, his closest buddy. Moreover, he knew how to take the lead in any situation — playing poker, shooting the breeze, undertaking various work details — assuming the role of team captain without really trying, smiling as he barked out instructions or orders which were never questioned. His very aura suggested not only power and cunning but, like those who seemed destined for grander heights, an innate ability to get things accomplished his way, doing so with an effortless grin and a benign pat on the back.

Which was why Hollis steered clear of McCreedy, avoiding his overbearing proximity ever since they had all gathered on a Yokohama pier, refusing to meet his dark blue eyes once they were finally secured below deck. The two had brushed shoulders twice, and both times Hollis had kept his stare either aimed forward or at the floor, simply nodding after McCreedy said, “Pardon me, friend.” And while he recognized the inexplicable allure of McCreedy's personality, Hollis was also mystified by the admiration it evoked; for he, too, was drawn to this slightly younger man, casting discreet glances whenever that Texan drawl reverberated, watching at a distance and hoping to remain inconspicuous. He couldn't deny or begin to understand the attraction for such a swaggering, cocksure private — someone who, had the circumstances been otherwise, might have gone unnoticed had Hollis passed him on the street. But he refused to believe it was McCreedy's good looks which made him so appealing — the broad shoulders, the above-average height, the golden-blond Mohawk haircut, the muscular forearms. No, he eventually concluded, it was something else — something primal and unique, something, possibly, which he had always lacked.

Yet try as he might, Hollis could not escape McCreedy's unwanted attention, that vexatious need to make contact with everyone around him. And so when half awake upon his cot — two days after the wavering voyage began, resting despite the ship's continual turbulence — Hollis stirred to the sound of a throat clearing above him, and before lifting his eyelids, he heard that familiar lengthened tone asking, “Well — how on earth did you end up here?” His vision was fuzzy at the second his eyes shot open, but soon he distinguished the imposing figure looming over him, noticing first a thin wisp of grayish smoke floating between him and McCreedy. “Sure didn't mean to spook you,” said McCreedy, a cigarette bouncing in a corner of his mouth, staring down at Hollis with an amused expression.

“That's okay,” replied Hollis — rising on his elbows, looking somewhat apprehensive — and noticed, then, that McCreedy was holding his notepad, the pages parted to the drawing of Hollis on the moon.

“You'd be the man on the moon, right? It's Hollis, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Bill.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“Guess I shouldn't be snooping, ‘cept your book was on the floor so I couldn't help myself. Hope you don't mind none.”

“It's fine,” Hollis lied, resenting what felt like a calculated invasion of his privacy.

A short silence followed as McCreedy glanced again through the pages, smiling to himself.

“You some kind of artist?”

“No, not at all. It's only something I do to pass the hours.”

“I hear that.” McCreedy flipped the notepad shut, casually tossing it on the cot once Hollis had sat upright and swung his feet to the floor. “Say, you don't got a spare smoke I could bum?”

“I don't, sorry.”

“No problem. Never hurts to ask a buddy, right?”

“Sure.”

Instead of that being the end of it, McCreedy lowered himself to the cot, taking a seat beside Hollis, saying, “What's your story, then?”

The question caught Hollis off guard, perplexing him. He hesitated, staring ahead, thinking: My story? But it seemed there wasn't much to relate. He had been raised in a small midwestern town, an awkward and solitary boy. He liked hunting and fishing by himself. He had always been bookish, had few friends, and spent most of his free time under his widowed mother's complacent but watchful eye, keeping Eden company during the tough years which followed his father's malingering death from TB. After high school he had worked several part-time jobs to help make ends meet — a short-order cook, a salesman for a Ford dealership, a gas station attendant, a cashier at the local five-and-ten — each business located on one of the four corners where the two main streets in Critchfield intersected. Five months prior to his enlistment, Eden unexpectedly remarried, bringing Rich into their home — a wine-bloated, needlessly quarrelsome little man Hollis immediately resented — a retired banker who, in turn, had found his bride's sullen, uncommunicative son rather impossible to like. With Rich's arrival, the house took on an oppressive quality, becoming an environment which, for Hollis, could no longer accommodate anything except the man's selfish, bullying whims — just the meals his stepfather enjoyed eating, the opera or classical music on the radio and nothing else, the disruptive childish tantrums which passed without apology and were only allowed with impunity for Rich; and, sometimes, when Eden wasn't present, the man delighted in taunting Hollis — throwing a cloth napkin at his face, flicking his earlobes with a finger after he had drunk too much — stating that he wasn't really very bright, that he was a full-grown brat who needed to grow up. Hollis always reacted to such unkindness with passive outrage, responding in his own discreet manner — often spitting in his stepfather's food before the man came to the dinner table, or running the bristles of Rich's toothbrush around the inside rim of the toilet bowl. As the acrimony increased — fueled by Hollis's jealousy toward this relative stranger now sharing Eden's bed, and Rich's assertion that his adult stepson was too old to live at home — Hollis, taking what little money he had saved, packed a suitcase and, on the cusp of his twentieth birthday, ran away from home one morning, Eden crying silently on the front porch as her son walked resolutely out of view.

“Don't really have a story,” Hollis said.

“This fella says he ain't got a story,” said McCreedy, as if talking to someone else. “Now that's a first. A man without no story to tell. You might just be my favorite person on this damn boat, Hollis.”

And from that point on, McCreedy made it a habit to stop by Hollis's cot while doing his usual rounds, sitting down for a while and asking questions which Hollis felt uncomfortable answering.

“Hey, Hollis, tell me what your girl's like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your girl, what's she like? You got her picture?”

“I don't have a girl.”

McCreedy squinted, cocking an eyebrow. He shook his head, saying, “Ain't buying that for a second. What, you worried ol’ Creed will try and steal her away from you?”

“I'm being honest. There isn't any girl.”

“Not even a little Shin-ju-koo honey going?”

“No.”

“Well, what the hell's wrong with you? Horndog after it, boy. Life's far too short. Here, have a peek at this.” McCreedy dug into a pocket, retrieving a slightly bent black-and-white photograph which he placed in Hollis's left hand. “That's my girl,” he said, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.”

Hollis lifted the photograph, inspecting it closely. What he saw brought a smirk to his face: the foreground was out of focus, showing the indistinct image of a dark-haired girl, her arms hanging at her sides, her cloudy features difficult to perceive; in contrast, the background — a wide field of high wild grass — was plainly visible.

“Don't get me wrong,” McCreedy continued, his voice reanimating. “I mean, I've also got a gaggle of kobitos in Tokyo — but that one there, she's the real deal, my true gal pal. The rest don't really mean much when it really boils down to it. You know, I go to them others so I'll maintain my sanity while I'm away, if you follow. That one, though, nothing compares to her, God's honest truth.”

“I bet she's pretty.”

“Hell, yeah, she's pretty,” said McCreedy, extracting the photograph from Hollis's fingers. “That's the mother of my children, someday.”

The more Hollis got to know him — the more he learned about him, the more they talked to each other — the less bothersome the private from Claude, Texas, seemed. He had, in the course of the trip, chatted with several privates on the ship, except none were as friendly to him as McCreedy.

“Normally, I'd keep that picture to myself,” McCreedy told him, “but I get this feeling you're different. It's not that I ain't proud or nothing, just don't want these goons getting all worked up over what's mine, if you know what I mean. Some things just got to be treated with respect, if you follow, and I'm sure you do. Can't say the same for the rest of this bunch. But that's why I like you, Hollis. You got respect for the decent things, right? I could see it the moment I seen you. You and me, we're a lot alike that way. It's like we got the same birthmark or something, you follow? Anyway, we've got class, and that's what matters, wouldn't you agree?”

“Sure,” Hollis said, nodding.

“We're too smart for this outfit, ain't that right?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“It's an undeniable fact.”

Soon enough, Hollis would better discern the duality of McCreedy's personality, the two extreme and incongruous sides which were bridged by an irrepressible smile. And he would experience firsthand McCreedy's warmheartedness, as well as the sociable private's unexpected tendencies toward cruelty and violence. Only after leaving Korea, however, would he consider McCreedy as both an unwitting benefactor of the fortuitous outcome of his civilian life and the enigmatic symbol of his greatest shame. Then, at last, Hollis would also begin to comprehend his own paradoxical traits, his instinctive ability to appear as one kind of person and, just as easily, to behave as another. But four decades would pass before this realization fully took root, blossoming during the dawn of his retirement and springing forth on a sunny day while he cultivated his cactus garden; and months prior to that curious snowfall, he had stood alone in the backyard, gazing at what thrived under his constant attention, surprising himself there with a single word propelled from his mouth without forethought, evoking a name he hadn't uttered aloud for years and whispering it as if revealing a secret to the prickly pears.

“Creed.”

5

“Where there is cactus,” Hollis had told Debra last night, “there are sometimes snowflakes, too.”

Even at this very moment — working here in the backyard, stooping beside his garden (a normally arid patch of earth running between the swimming pool and his tiki hut) — Hollis knows there will be days like today which require a heavy jacket. Now bending forward with a spade in one hand, he endeavors to blow snow from tangled, barbed spines — his breath streaming through the garden like meager fog, grazing icicle-encased needles, dissipating past him amidst opuntia tunicata, mammillarias, and Texas pride. Then he is amazed by where he and Debra had ended up, what was meant to be their hard-earned detachment; how, finally, they had fled to the Sonoran Desert from an increasingly overpopulated Los Angeles suburb, and found themselves residing behind the high walls of a master-planned resort for active adults: an exclusive community of championship golf courses, gentle slopes, and seven distinctive floor plans (The Laredo, The Lariat, The Montana, Ponderosa, Durango, Cheyenne, Santa Fe) with fifty exterior design choices, all pretty much alike.

The tiki hut beyond the pool, however, was Hollis's own creation, something he designed just for himself. And while Debra couldn't stand the sight of the place, normally refusing to ever join him inside of it, she also understood that its construction was, in reality, a small price to pay for acquiring those interior flourishes she believed were essential to their house: she got the expensive no-wax sheet-vinyl flooring, the porcelain bathtub and ceramic tile surrounds, the single-lever chrome faucets, the oak-front cabinets; and, in return, Hollis got to build his little hut — handcrafted kiln-dried cypress wood, leak-proof thatched roof made of palm leaves, big enough inside for a hammock and two deck chairs, the ceiling fitted with a three-speed fan. It is a place where he and his buddy Lon could sip beer in hotter weather, nursing Tecate or Corona while they practiced golf swings, plotting certain victories at the weekly tournaments. So Debra had allowed him that hideaway, his backyard retreat — and if the majority of his drinking was done there (if he and Lon weren't too boisterous, if he shaved his back hair prior to lounging about in swimming trunks), then she never protested; she left him alone to split six-packs on summer afternoons and evenings. Truth be known, he has often felt more at home within his hut than within the house.

Lon, too, had once preferred spending long hours in Hollis's backyard, disregarding the upkeep of his own perennial garden and forgoing the thrice-a-week calisthenics class which his wife had expected him to take with her. On many of those summer afternoons, he would already be waiting at the hut, having already claimed a deck chair for himself, exclaiming as Hollis came outside: “You're running late, damnit. It's almost beer thirty. You better hurry.”

“What are you drinking?”

“Everything, except water.”

“Sounds about right to me.”

It's not difficult for Hollis to envision his friend reclining nearby — snoring in the hammock with a beer can gripped by a dangling hand, or tanning himself away from the shadows of the thatched enclosure — although the hut has now become an empty, inhospitable haven; the roof is weighed down with thawing clumps of snow, water drips steadily from the palm leaves like rainfall. While the place had been intended as a whimsical symbol of Hollis's sunny leisure years, in its current state the hut appears more suitable for the black cloud which had unfurled over him and Debra some twenty-six months ago; for no sooner had they settled in Nine Springs — building the hut, landscaping the garden, completing the interior touches to the house — than Hollis received a phone call while Debra was out shopping at Costco Wholesale, hearing what at first sounded like a teenage girl's voice on the other end of the line: “Hi, this is Dr. Taylor from the Tucson Medical Center. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to reach Debra Adams. Is she available?”

He hesitated before answering, glancing toward the kitchen windows — observing the hot, bright midday sunlight reflected on the still water of the swimming pool, the sight of it underscoring the cool, unlit room he was standing in. “Debra isn't home right now,” he said, absently coiling the phone cord around two fingers. “She'll be back in a couple of hours, give or take.”

“Am I speaking with her husband?”

“Yes, that's me.”

“Mr. Adams, I'm Dr. Taylor from the Tucson Medical Center.”

“I know, you already said that.”

As he pushed the receiver harder against his ear, the cord grew tighter on his fingers. What followed was at once surprising and, somehow, expected: the doctor requested that both he and Debra come to her office the next day, the meeting already scheduled for four in the afternoon. “Can you and your wife make it at that time, Mr. Adams? It's possible to meet earlier if it's more convenient.”

“What's all this about?”

“I think it's probably best if we discuss everything in person, and with Mrs. Adams present, all right?”

He resented the matter-of-fact tone of her voice, how her words hinted at something tragic yet revealed nothing whatsoever. “It's serious, isn't it?” he asked.

“We'll discuss everything tomorrow, all right? So I've got your appointment down for four o'clock — ”

“Can't we talk about it now? Is there anything wrong with my wife?”

But the doctor would not elaborate any further, telling him simply that it was important to remain calm, and concluding with, “We ‘ll talk tomorrow. Four o'clock. Your wife knows where my office is.”

“Okay.”

“I'll expect you both then.”

“Okay.”

And as Hollis hung up the receiver, he thought he recognized a distant noise like the gentle evocation of wind chimes; it was, at that moment, as if he had stirred from a pleasant dream, only to realize the ground was collapsing beneath his feet. When Debra returned from shopping, carrying four grocery bags inside and setting them down in the foyer so she could close the front door, he was waiting at the dining-room table, his hands resting in his lap, his eyes following her busy movements even as he remained still. He addressed her from across the room, and without looking toward him she replied, “What is it?”

“Come here for a second, would you?”

“Hold on, let me get the groceries into the kitchen.”

“You can leave them there, I'll take care of it in a minute. Just come sit beside me first, okay? Your doctor called.”

Debra paused at the front door, her back to him, her hurried activity brought to a halt. “Dr. Taylor called?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“A little while ago.”

“Was it about the sonogram?”

“I think so. She didn't really tell me anything. She wants us in her office tomorrow afternoon, at four. That's all I could get out of her.”

“I see.”

But she didn't turn to him. Instead, she remained facing the door, saying nothing else until Hollis stood and crossed the dining room into the foyer. He rested his hands on her shoulders and pulled her back to his chest.

“Did you hear the other side of the mountain is on fire?” she asked, tilting her head against his chin. “The Tucson foothills are covered in smoke. I drove home with the windows rolled up and the AC off because of it. It's awful. The radio said they're losing cabins in Summerhaven. My hair smells like smoke, huh?”

“It doesn't.”

“I probably should shower anyway. That smell is stuck in my nostrils. Will you unpack the groceries?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

Debra eased free of his mild hold, and — running fingers through her hair, releasing a prolonged sigh — she went from him without having once looked his way. Hollis started collecting the groceries; he hoisted the bags with both hands and trudged into the kitchen, lifting and then lowering the bags to a countertop — where, as he began removing plastic-wrapped bulk items (Lean Cuisines, Healthy Choice entrees, StarKist tuna cans). He suspected Debra was likely pondering those very things he had already considered while waiting at the dining table: Why did Dr. Taylor want them both there? What exactly was going on? And why had Debra's annual physical required a transvaginal sonogram and a CT scan, in addition to the usual pap smear and standard checkup?

The new doctor was younger than Debra's former California physician in Arcadia, and, as well, the woman specialized in internal medicine. “Maybe that's why she's so thorough,” Debra had told him after receiving her exam. “She's certainly a breed apart from old Dr. Baker, that's for sure. Seriously, Hollis, I haven't felt that poked and probed since our honeymoon, I mean it.”

“You sure it's not something else, Deb?” Hollis had asked. They were reclining near the swimming pool at dusk, seated in matching green deck chairs. “Sounds like an awful lot of trouble. I've had hundreds of physicals but never got sent to a radiologist.”

“Well, your plumbing isn't as complicated as mine is, dear.”

“Just doesn't sound right to me, all those tests.”

“You know, it's my fault to begin with. I asked for a gallbladder exam and I guess she decided to give me the whole shebang. Could've done without that barium drink though. It's like I've been snacking on chalk.”

Other concerns also had been at play, minor worries which soon felt greater than previously imagined. Upon settling in Arizona, Debra's weight had begun to increase, despite the fact that she exercised regularly, ate smaller portions, and refused fatty foods; the weight gain was most noticeable along her abdomen — ”fluid weight,” she had called it, “sort of like feeling waterlogged” — and she was convinced it had something to do with her gallbladder (a common source of discomfort for her throughout the years, the gallstones routinely getting purged with a fast which relied on a lemon juice and olive oil concoction). Then there was copious sweating, saturating her skin when she relaxed within their air-conditioned home and making her hair wringing wet, yet dismissed as a side effect of the hellish Sonoran weather while also seeming uncharacteristic for such a dry climate (the perspiration normally evaporating cleanly from Hollis's neck and forehead as he worked in his garden). Lastly, she had complained of an overall blahness, a general malaise since departing California; this indefinite ill-being, however, wasn't too terribly surprising, especially when put in the context of a stressful move, some weight gain, brutal desert heat, and gallstones needing to be passed. Nevertheless, it was difficult to perceive her as anything other than healthy.

But immediately following Debra's physical, Hollis couldn't shake that lurking fear of something possibly being amiss with her, although he never voiced those thoughts aloud — channeling his bothersome ruminations into gardening and a morning round of golf, while she continued operating in her upbeat manner, going about her errands and chores without a hint of despair. Even with Dr. Taylor's phone call, the typical pattern of their day didn't lend itself to panic. They ate dinner as always, saying very little during the meal. They watched TV together, saying very little during the commercial breaks. They went to bed together, briefly hugging and kissing before killing the lights. Neither one dared mention the imminent appointment, lest the conversation feed whatever irrational thoughts were brewing between them; yet their respective silences spoke volumes, and Hollis couldn't keep himself from gripping her hand for a second when they sat down to eat, or snuggling her against him while they watched TV, or enveloping her in his arms once the bedroom had become dark.

It was a restless night, to be sure. Hollis fell in and out of sleep, nodding off only to be stirred awake by Debra's gyrations, the sheets tugged this way and that, the pillow readjusted. “Are you all right?” he finally asked, rubbing a palm on her shoulder blade.

“I'm fine,” was her terse reply.

“You want a melatonin?”

“No, it won't help. I already took one.”

He slid a hand down the curves of her nightgown, stopping just above her plisse-covered abdomen, his palm pressing flat as his fingers fanned out. Prior to falling asleep again, he imagined he had the power to rid her body of whatever might be harming it. And as sleep resumed, he believed that that power had been effectively conjured, drawing the suspected ailment from her stomach, transferring it fully into his palm — where his hand entrapped it in a fist, and brought it to dangle over the edge of the bed, and, with fingers uncurling, sent it sailing to the floor. Sometime later, he woke to the sounds of her sniffling, her nasal passages emitting deep, punctuated inhalations.

“Deb?”

He felt her shift in the sheets, her body turning toward him. “You smell it?” she asked, and with that he realized she wasn't crying.

“What?”

“Can't you smell it?”

He lifted his head, sniffing the air. “Yes,” he said, detecting a burning, somewhat aromatic odor.

“You know, I left the living-room windows cracked,” she said, climbing from bed. “I'll go close them. I think the winds must've changed direction, or else the fires have gotten worse.”

“Let's hope not,” he said, a smoky, charred flavor materializing in his mouth like an aftertaste.

The next morning, they drank their coffee in the kitchen, sharing sections of a newspaper which placed the Catalina Mountains wildfires on the front page. But they didn't need to look any farther than their own backyard to understand how far the fires had spread overnight; for now a murky, whitish haze drifted where glaring sunlight and clear skies normally prevailed — floating among the gardens, hanging above the swimming pool area — recalling the Los Angeles smog they had left behind (a widening ring of pollution which skirted the wealthy beach enclaves and, instead, traveled inland to Riverside and the less affluent cities of San Bernardino County). The accompanying smokehouse aroma, too, had increased since dawn, tainting everything, mingling with the strong coffee, mixing with the frying pan's sizzling combination of eggs, chopped onions, diced ham, and chipotle sauce.

In due time, they entered that gauzy, scorched-smelling atmosphere, driving the thirty miles to Tucson as a classic-country radio station played. Hollis drummed his fingertips on the Suburban's steering wheel. Debra silently stared from the passenger window. Yet both were aware all the while of the plume of gray-black smoke rising like a mushroom cloud from the distant mountaintop, the desert landscape around them subdued and dull in color. With each mile the haze became more pervasive, as did their mutual, unspoken nervousness regarding the appointment. Then it seemed like the Suburban was being propelled forward by the smoke — the thickening vapor directing them beyond Oro Valley and the west end of the mountain range, speeding them past the Tucson Mall before ushering them across the parking lot of the medical center — and dissipating at last in Dr. Taylor's narrow examining room but still inhaled when the young doctor appeared wearing a long, thin face (longer and thinner than Debra remembered the woman's face being, somehow longer and thinner than faces ever were), saying right away the news wasn't good, explaining without a moment of hesitation, “You have ovarian cancer.”

Hearing those words, Hollis sensed himself shrinking on the chair, becoming drawn up, shriveled, numb, blank — then momentarily deaf. He glanced at Debra who, in the same instant, glanced at him. But whereas Hollis felt stunned and immobilized by Dr. Taylor's diagnosis, Debra never lost her composure; rather, her intent eyes shot to the doctor, her head nodding confidently when she asked, “Okay, so what do I do now?” And with that, Dr. Taylor directed their immediate course of action: while sitting in the examining room, Debra was handed the doctor's cell phone and instructed to call her gynecologist to set up an emergency appointment; shortly thereafter, she and Hollis were sent racing to the nearby University Medical Center, where they retrieved her sonogram and CT-scan axial images from the radiologist; then they sped to the southwest side of town, entering the gynecologist's office twelve minutes ahead of schedule.

Dr. Langford, the gynecologist, was a no-nonsense, heavyset redhead, a woman who — as Debra had described her to Hollis — would have made a good detective on Law amp; Order; furthermore, she was also a gynecologist and surgeon, her expertise highlighted by the fairly prominent Phoenix medical family in which she had been raised. Behind her desk at St. Mary's Hospital, Dr. Langford studied Debra's axial images for a minute, lifting each one to the fluorescent light above her, expressing no emotion as Hollis and Debra sat on the other side of the desk holding hands. “Well, these seem straightforward enough,” Dr. Langford concluded, peering through her bifocals. “It looks like we're dealing with ovarian cancer.”

Hollis's stomach dropped. Debra released his hand and leaned forward, asking, “How bad is it?”

Dr. Langford shrugged and set the axial images down on her desktop. “Without the written report or an MRI scan, it's difficult to say for sure. What these show me, however, is that the tumors are clustered on the ovaries like clumps of salt, or like fistfuls of sand grains. Everything else — kidney, spleen, liver, pancreas — these appear unremarkable.”

“Unremarkable? Is that good?” Hollis asked.

“That's good,” Dr. Langford said. “As for mesenteric cancer, we won't know what we're really dealing with or what can be done about it unless we get inside you and see. To be totally fair, I can't accurately call it ovarian cancer until we take a look at it and pathology confirms it — and that's what I highly recommend we do.”

“All right,” Debra said emphatically, as if she were acquiescing to something no more complicated than a back rub. “Let's do that.”

“Okay,” Hollis mumbled, unsure then of everything which had just been said, hearing his own mouth speak but feeling apart from the situation. In hindsight, there was much he would forget about, much during those weeks which had flashed by him like an incomprehensible blur — various reports, laboratory data, medical jargon. Yet even now, he remains aware of his complete and utter helplessness throughout, watching when Debra was wheeled on a gurney into surgery, half smiling while she joked, “If I die on the table, put ‘She wasn't ready’ on my tombstone,” and fighting tears once the gurney had rolled beyond swinging metal doors. And, too, he came to understand the havoc the disease had created within his wife, how it had managed to spread into the peritoneum — to the uterus, the lymph glands, the bladder, the gallbladder — how surgery could eliminate 95 percent of the cancer, while the remaining 5 percent was inoperable (hundreds of microscopic tumors continuing to ravage the serous membrane of her abdomen, seeking a home, some building a thriving colony on the delicate surface of her bowel).

“Stage-III–C ovarian cancer grade two,” was Dr. Langford's ultimate determination, revealed in the hours following Debra's operation. “Abdominal implants more than two centimeters in diameter and positive retroperitoneal or inguinal nodes.”

“I don't understand,” Hollis had said. “It isn't making sense.”

“Papillary serous cystadenocarcinoma,” the doctor replied. “That's the cancer your wife has.”

“I still don't understand. What does it mean?”

But amidst that growing confusion, as he had felt overwhelmed by cryptic terminology or frightened by the possibility of losing the person he loved the most, Hollis brought his mind to the short-lived gray area — the fleeting period between not knowing for certain and knowing too well (after Dr. Taylor's diagnosis and prior to Dr. Langford's surgery) — when he and Debra had left Tucson at dusk and drove back to Nine Springs, and he told her while they went, “It'll be fine, you'll see. We'll survive this.”

“I have no doubt, dear,” she had said, gazing ahead at a reddish-orange-hued horizon masked behind a veil of smoke. “In fact, I'm positive of it.”

Several minutes later, Debra requested he stop at a roadside Circle K, where she purchased a six-pack of Tecate and a bag of gummy worms. Arriving home, she surprised Hollis by avoiding the house altogether, preferring instead to walk the perimeter of their property, leading him along the gravel pathway which guided them into the backyard. Soon they sat inside his unlit tiki hut as if in hiding, drinking beer and savoring the nighttime. She had never shown an interest in the hut before — nor had she done so since — but on that evening she seemed to regard it just like he often had: as a kind of a refuge from the larger world, a place devoid of fear or complications.

“This is nice,” she said, angling to one side in order to pat his right knee. “I think I can see why you like it out here.”

“Gives you a whole different feeling, right?”

“I'd say so,” she said, her obscured form readjusting, moving upright on the deck chair.

And for a while they stayed there — finishing the gummy worms and Tecate, their fingers eventually interlaced — breathing the carbon-laden air, observing the jagged line of fire snaking across the far-off, imperceptible mountaintop and appearing like a savage fissure in what was usually a starry sky.

6

The long scar on Debra's body starts at her pubic bone — running about ten inches in length, its design zigzagging a bit — and concludes right below her belly button. But whereas the scar had previously looked inflamed and swollen, it is now considerably less raw and broad, appearing whiter than the rest of her abdomen's skin. Much to her annoyance, though, the hair which had been shaved away prior to the incision being made has never grown back, likely stunted — she decided — by the eventual rounds of chemotherapy which had shed every single strand of her body's hair. Regardless, Hollis has become strangely fond of the scar — fixing his eyes upon it whenever Debra undressed near him, occasionally bestowing it with a quick kiss — as if that injured tissue was a sort of cellular medal: an emblematic reminder of a hard-fought battle, one in which the war itself had never achieved an uneasy truce.

“We're almost twins,” he'd told her once when they were in bed, bringing his left leg from under the sheets, pulling the knee toward his stomach while he traced a finger along his old war wound — a crooked, slender trail of discolored skin, a former gash which had cleaved the inner thigh to just above the kneecap.

“Almost,” she said, regarding his wound briefly before returning her stare to the pages of a Sue Grafton mystery.

Yet Hollis can't quite forget his shock when first seeing her incision — the flesh all tender and red, the ragged seam stapled together — or hearing Dr. Langford's pragmatic voice telling him, “It's important you realize your wife has a disease that will probably shorten her life,” while Debra recuperated from surgery. During her entire hospital stay he had kept a vigil beside her bed, half awake on a cot for four nights, listening to her labored breathing as air escaped around a drainage tube which had been inserted through her left nostril, taking note of what she wouldn't fully recall later on — the machine monitoring the draining of her body fluids, an IV bag sending drop after drop after drop into her veins, the electrical hum of an inactive hospital past midnight. Exhaustion overtook him on the third night, and he promptly submerged into the landscape of familiar dreams — that slow procession of cattle, then that formation of wandering, listless people — only to be jolted back by a handful of flung ice cubes grazing his neck, chest, shoulders.

“You'll wake the dead, Hollis,” Debra said, lowering her head to the pillow, gripping a clear plastic drinking cup. “Lord, you're snoring something awful.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, turning himself toward her, blinking lazily while she fished an ice cube from the cup and deposited it in her mouth. She chuckled for a second, closing her eyes, sucking the ice with cheeks drawn in, the cup still held tightly.

Now and again, the morphine played its tricks, sending her straight to sleep and, just as effortlessly, waking her — where she gazed about the room as if lost, as if she had suddenly been revived from a prolonged coma, sometimes addressing him with lucid words, sometimes uttering nonsense he didn't always comprehend (“It's in the drawer — better take care of it, okay?”); even so, she administered the drug herself, pumping it into the IV at those few moments when the pain rose to a level of recognition. The daytime hours at the hospital, aside from the day of the operation, were uniform, uneventful: they managed walks up and down the corridors, the IV bag and tubes in tow; they watched TV; they enjoyed small talk, avoiding the topic of cancer if possible; they slept within reach of each other, as had been done without fail since their honeymoon.

They were sent home on the fifth day, departing St. Mary's with a prescription for pain pills and their own uncertainty about what lay ahead. But upon returning to Nine Springs, Debra soon realized she didn't need the pain pills after all, simply because there wasn't any continual ache left to drug; in fact, other than the initial discomfort immediately following surgery, she suffered most in the minute or so that it took for the drainage tube to be removed — pulled from her stomach through her chest, through her throat, through her nostril, making her cough and gag. Eventually, it struck Hollis as being odd that the cancer hadn't immediately manifested in a clear-cut manner — no wasting away, no feebleness, no cinematic swift demise — odd, too, that the obvious signs of infirmity Debra had displayed were brought on by what was meant to help her: the surgery and, subsequently, the side effects of chemotherapy.

However, the presence of the cancer itself remained elusive, even as it continued to mutate, increase, and spread like dust motes transported in an afternoon breeze. Under such circumstances, though, she often conveyed greater energy on her worst days than Hollis did on his best days — driving herself to the library, shopping for wigs and eyeliner, refusing to let him do her laundry or fold her clothing. “I'm fine,” she told him. “I'm not an invalid, you know.” As if to underscore her resolve, Debra wouldn't allow herself an ounce of self-pity or a tearful outburst, although Hollis had succumbed to both emotional states on four occasions, always reserving his solitary breakdowns for his garden and the confines of his tiki hut.

Perhaps it was the absence of tangible death which bolstered Debra, to the point where she decided her sister in Texas shouldn't learn of the illness unless, of course, all her options had been exhausted and the endgame became imminent. But her innate fortitude was also tempered by the situation's undeniable gravity, not to mention the chemotherapy, and everything else she had researched at the library or was told about stage-III ovarian cancer. She knew, for example, the prognosis was far from good: seven of every ten cases were diagnosed after the cancer had already spread beyond the ovary; with stage III only one out of four women survived beyond five years. But — as Dr. Langford had repeatedly suggested — there was at least reason to believe Debra might join that 25 percent grouping.

Even so, nothing Dr. Langford said seemed real to Hollis, none of it seemed possible. The data and medical jargon, the new expressions and unheard-of treatments, the frightening odds of survival — all of it felt like some elaborate hoax at their expense, and a very cruel joke. There were a few other things which nagged his mind, things he was too ashamed to admit, not the least of which was his own ignorance about the purpose, exact physical location, and function of a woman's ovaries. So during one of Debra's library excursions, Hollis joined her on the ride, claiming he needed to do research for his autobiography. But rather than find books relating to Korean history, it was a long-out-of-print hardcover with a plain maroon cover which preoccupied his time, keeping him seated at a table away from where Debra read; when a page was turned, he glanced around to make sure she wasn't coming toward him, and then, discreetly, resumed studying the book he cradled against a forearm, hunched low over the text as if he were guarding answers to a test.

It was, in fact, the sole book found on the computer catalog which corresponded to the keywords “ovaries” and “female reproduction” — although the title raised an eyebrow, for it was called The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex, written quasi-anonymously by Dr. A. Willy, Dr. L. Vander, Dr. O. Fisher, and other authorities, published in 1950, with its almost bare cover using bold white letters to state: an important contribution to the cause of sexual enlightenment featuring a unique and unprecedented series of illustrations representing every aspect of sex. Nevertheless, the book provided the information he had sought, doing so with a graphic series of antiquated drawings which looked more like 1950s science fiction than science fact. Spermatoza enlarged a thousand times. Fibrous coverings of testicles and epididymis. Sperm damaged by distilled-water irrigation. Sperm paralyzed by vinegar irrigation. Breast of a virgin. Breast of a woman who has had children. Menstrual blood in uterus due to obstruction. Six causes of painful menstruation. And then, on page 59, a woman's pelvic and sex organs shown in a transparent body, with the following page displaying a cross-sectioned ovary.

While staring at the ovary drawings, Hollis thought: So this is what you look like. This is what you are, and this is where you were hiding inside Deb.

Then he couldn't help but smile, especially as the book and its drawings were published the year before he had met and fallen in love with Debra. Those intricate drawings of male and female forms — the colorful sex organs, the facsimiles of naked and dissected bodies from a different era — belonged to their generation, striking him as lost representations of his and Debra's younger, healthier shapes and body parts. Only later, after leaving the library and heading home, did something else tug at his mind, a notion of humans as little more than cells in a larger social superorganism; and, as such, it stood to reason that individuals, like cells, might outgrow their usefulness, eventually withering and dying off. Maybe, he wondered, it was a myth about our evolutionary instincts being fully geared toward the survival of ourselves and our own kin — because if that were truly the case there wouldn't be cancer swarming within so many people as a preset, intrinsic suicide program. But if you remove the human disposition for war and destruction, he imagined, our cells would have no choice except to mirror such a change; they would adapt, evolve accordingly, shunning any self-destructive impulses. There would be, under those circumstances, a real end to sickness and human misery.

“We're the cure for cancer,” he suddenly told Debra on the drive home. “People are.”

“What?”

“We hold the cure — the human race, I mean. We need to change how we behave. I think it's important to reprogram ourselves, don't you? I mean, if we reprogram our way of thinking and behaving I'm certain we'll reprogram our cells, too?”

“Hon, I don't know what on earth you're talking about.”

“I'm just trying to figure how we can get out of this mess we ‘re in. And I'm thinking maybe if we alter our evolutionary patterns as a society — if we do that, in a positive direction — it seems like our cells will follow along.”

“That's all well and good,” she said, “but that kind of evolution takes a long time, more time than I've been given, dear. More time than any of us have. It's a nice idea, though.”

“I prefer to consider it a concept,” he said. “A new concept, not really just an idea.”

“Well, you better write it down then, put it in your book.”

“You know, honestly, I feel like I'm onto something here. I believe it might be the key to solving this problem for the world, Deb.”

“You never know,” she said, grinning to herself.

“At least it's something, right?”

But soon another new concept came into play — the notion of living with cancer as opposed to dying from it. A bizarre definition for living, Hollis felt. How better, though, to provide the hopeless with hope than with a useful oxymoron. And so it was hope he clung to, as surely as it was hope which fueled Debra's determination. And, too, it was a kind of singular belief in herself as an individual — as someone apart from those also suffering with the disease — which gave her focus. Shrugging off Dr. Langford's advice, she had little interest in looking into organizations such as the Well-ness Community or Gilda's Club, in having her sickness treated like an analogue for the ovarian cancer of others. This was her fight, her life; she would manage.

“Who wants to be with a bunch of sick bald women anyway?” she balked, after Hollis mentioned he thought the support group named for comedienne Gilda Radner sounded encouraging. “Trust me, I don't need another thing to remind me I've got ovarian cancer. The chemo is bad enough.”

“You're right,” he said. “The chemo is bad enough.” So was the disease, he thinks now. So was the leaden, oppressive feeling which had consumed his gut — like holding his breath for months, like waiting for the other shoe to drop — and only relieved by a single refrain, those words Dr. Langford had spoken without expression: “We're not looking at a cure, just control. But there's still hope.”

Now scooping away the slush which has settled among the cacti, Hollis can feel the pull of better months; tending to his garden here — discarding what the cold night had dropped upon it — he can bring to mind more recent days, when the sun blazed high, the ground burned hot underfoot, and his skin was of a darker tint. Then he smiles at what presents itself to him: a commemorative American Legion National Convention pineapple-shaped decanter, a 1962 Southern Comfort turquoise-and-gold jigger measure, two vintage Fabulous Las Vegas shot glasses — all curios purchased by Lon while on their monthly pilgrimages into Tucson, intended for use and displayed inside the hut, each item having been found the previous summer at the Tanque Verde Swap Meet.

“How much you think it cost me?”

“I don't know. Five bucks?”

“Are you kidding? The guy wanted seven, but I got it for four.”

The swap-meet ritual became a kind of game, one in which the individual spending cap was twenty dollars (not including the steakhouse dinner which was always eaten prior to starting the return drive to Nine Springs). Parting ways, they had an hour and a half before rendezvousing again at the front entrance; during that time, both of them hunted rare deals to take home to their wives — antique picture frames, custom-made lampshades, collectable wall plates — with the month's winner determined by whatever was deemed the best buy for the least amount spent (the loser, then, required to pick up the dinner tab). Regardless of whether Hollis won a given month's hunt or not, he knew early on he had already discovered the greatest bargain the swap meet offered — something he didn't have to haggle over, something he couldn't carry home or claim as a victory purchase: a fifteen-minute, $6 massage from the expert hands of a blind Taiwanese masseur. So while Lon shopped elsewhere — exploring the dirt lanes of the swap meet, rummaging through milk crates — Hollis took a seat in Ah-Chun's little booth, waiting for his chance to stretch across the table.

Hollis had encountered Ah-Chun last May, when he observed the blind masseur sweeping the mat-covered floor around a massage table — tanned feet embraced by well-worn sandals, long gray-white hair tied into a pony-tail, taut weathered skin covering a skull which looked large in relation to the small body it sat upon — whisking bits of trash, creating a pile the man couldn't possibly see. Frank Sinatra's recording of “Send In the Clowns” began playing from the swap-meet loudspeakers, and Ah-Chun paused, clutching at the broom handle, apparently moved by the melancholy and defeat expressed in the song. Wearing a white smock which was big on his slight, compact frame, the man remained completely motionless for a moment, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Then Hollis noticed the cardboard sign propped against the booth, its handwritten message fashioned by a black Magic Marker, stating: TRUE BODY RUB, NO COMPARISON!

$4 ten minute / $6 fifteen minute / $8 twenty minute

RELAX BY GREAT BLIND MASSEUR ALL WAY FROM TAIPEI

That roughly made advertisement was enticing enough to lure Hollis onto the man's table — where, for ten glorious minutes, his skin and muscles were pulled, tugged, pounded, loosened. The following June he paid the fifteen-minute price, and those extra five minutes lulled him into a sublime, tranquil sleep which, after waking, left his body invigorated and limber for perhaps the first time since Debra's illness was discovered. It wasn't until July, however, that Hollis actually made an effort to learn about the blind man, asking his name and talking to him as one might do with a barber.

“How do you say it? Ash-hen?”

“Ah-Chun — ”

“At-ch-ung.”

“Ah-Chun — ”

“Ak-chun — like action?”

“No, is Ah-Chun — my name very easy, you see, not hard. Ah-Chun — ”

“Ah-shun — ”

“Maybe — it's closer — ”

Straining to comprehend the man's broken English, listening intently while pliant hands pressed against his spine, Hollis discovered Ah-Chun, like himself, had migrated to Southern California decades ago, and, as it happened, they had lived a few miles apart in neighboring San Gabriel Valley cities (Arcadia for Hollis and Debra, Rosemead for Ah-Chun and a now deceased wife).

“So how'd you end up way out here, Ah-Chun? What brought you to the Old Pueblo?”

He explained that his oldest daughter worked in Tucson for Raytheon Missile Systems. Another daughter was a university professor in Michigan — in Lansing — but the weather there was too cold for him. “I like hot,” he said.

“Makes two of us,” Hollis said, as Ah-Chun's fingertips changed course and slid toward the curves of his shoulder blades. “I've got a home out at the Nine Springs development.”

With that Ah-Chun's hands paused. “It's Nine Springs where you living now?” he said. “Someone really call it that?”

“Yeah, just north of here, past Oro Valley.”

The hands began moving again, and Ah-Chun spoke from above, mentioning that, in Chinese legend, another nine springs also existed, functioning as a gateway to the underworld. “Except no one wants to go there too long, you see.” Because, he said, agitated spirits occupied that nether region in limbo, seeking justice for whatever wrongs might have contributed to their deaths, and wouldn't leave until recompense was made on their behalf.

“How about that,” Hollis said. “And it's called Nine Springs, too?”

“Maybe not really same,” Ah-Chun answered. “For me Huang Quan — something like Yellow Springs, you know — so not really same.”

“That's good.”

“Yes, yes, very good, I think.”

But no sooner had Hollis become well acquainted with Ah-Chun than the heat of summer abated, as did the monthly swap-meet adventures. In late August, he entered Ah-Chun's booth for a final time — except the man never knew he was waiting there, nor did Hollis have an opportunity to rest upon the table (four customers were already ahead of him, each paying for an $8 rub). He took a seat on a foldout chair anyway, using his allotted massage minutes to finish a Diet Pepsi, watching as Ah-Chun was hunched beside the table — meandering digits at the corpulent, freckled neck of a young woman, faint Chinese utterances half whispered beyond understanding.

The vast, passive woman on the table seemed almost unaware of Ah-Chun's presence, and the man's mumbled speech was consumed by the evening crowds, the music and announcements piped from loudspeakers, the hawkers proclaiming specials, Tucson's tongue like a family's incomprehensible argument: Hispanic and Anglo voices melding — a cacophony of tones, though somehow not unpleasant, soaring upward above everything; it was that flow of language, life's currency, which Hollis believed Ah-Chun savored the most. Previously, the man had mentioned that his daughter's wishes to drive him were usually declined, and instead he opted to walk the sidewalks and the streets, to wander among the din of people. He also enjoyed riding transit buses, the portable table crossing the city with him to then stand inside the booth. The only blind man, Ah-Chun had proudly pointed out, offering his services at the weekend swap meet — the only blind Taiwanese man, he was positive, to caress and grasp local skin.

Ah-Chun quickly gyrated his fists between lax shoulder blades, warming flesh, and the woman on the table exhaled deeply, saying, “Mmmm — oh, that's good — yes — ” How odd, Hollis suddenly thought, that one could give such pleasure to a woman he wouldn't ever know, an intimacy shared as teenagers, couples, and baby strollers streamed past his booth. “Right there — yes,” the woman said limply, and never revealed more of herself than those short responses. How strange, an elderly man probably older than her father and prowling hands along her surface for cash — hands like a calming wind she could feel but wouldn't contemplate, hands which had traveled an ocean and throughout the years to relieve her body, pummeling rhythmically against her while something in Mandarin was spoken underneath his breath. Then how alien it must have been for Ah-Chun — ending up in a desert where dryness weathered faces, the ebbing fever of August hung like a vaporous gauze of wool, yet he couldn't discern the many phallic-shaped saguaros or accurately envision the island he had abandoned so long ago.

Still, the man ambled surely from bus to bus — slender cane tapping the ground, folding massage table held at his side — venturing twice a week to his booth, touching multiple forms which didn't usually address him with interest or wonder aloud about where his life had originated, where specifically he had gained the gift of softening hard muscles and pacifying tendons. But if asked, he explained as best he could, mentioning the narrow roads of the Taipei night market, the cheap tile walkways fractured by buried asphalt and, in spots, cupping puddles of rainwater. Hard to comprehend, he would still say, “Always work for me — I work there since I was small,” and perhaps a body would find his story unusual, saying as Hollis once had, “Tell me more.”

Then Ah-Chun's memory crossed the Pacific again, returning home; he inhaled the swap meet, steeping his nostrils with what lingered there — that carnival fragrance transporting him, placing him as a boy near the snake shops, the snake wine, the pickled snakes, the snakes hanging lengthwise at storefronts. About fifty years ago, it had been revealed, he was an apprentice masseur kneading bodies in front of a snake shop, pouring snake oil on shoulder blades and spines. Or maybe it was yesterday, he had said and chuckled — swallowing humidity, breathing a fusion of rain, fish, blood, noodles — hearing water slither into drains, flip-flops on the march, voices haggling; he could smell and recall it easily, could draw its vicinity there.

Now the woman emitted a faint moan as Ah-Chun wriggled an elbow on her thigh, then the two of them sighed together — she with eyelids shut, he with eyes wide open; although he wore sunglasses, even at dusk, and gazed in no particular direction, nor, Hollis imagined, did he often cast his mind toward the land which he had left behind for a better life in the United States, remembering it without any tangible clarity. The woman, too, was blind in her own manner; she couldn't conceive of Ah-Chun awaking from darkness into darkness and, thereafter, continuing outside like a somnambulist. She couldn't picture him shuffling on sidewalks until he slowed, his legs aching, or envisage him sleeping at bus stops, stirring confused amidst an abrupt fuming of exhaust, coughing and briefly unsure if he was conscious. No, Hollis thought, why should she care what it's like to come from someplace distant, a far-off homeland, settling in a remote desert, but not perceiving, either, where you've been and where you are — yet somehow finding yourself existing in both.

In spite of that, Ah-Chun's hands kept roaming, investigating, getting the lay of familiar terrain, the way the blind journey inside their apartments extending nimble, grasping fingers always ahead of themselves as if expecting surprises. And gradually the woman fell asleep while the drifting crowds floated through the evening; soon the booths and radiant avenues of the swap meet would turn vacuous. Until then, Ah-Chun continued mumbling to himself; perhaps he felt his own body desiring to stay longer — and from the sinews of that woman, perhaps he could touch the shapes of his past, understanding that today's skin was no different than yesterday's skin. In darkness, he had once told Hollis, a man can belong almost anyplace.

“That's true,” Hollis had replied, shutting his eyes on the table. “You're right,” he had muttered, before losing himself in an unprolonged though hardly insubstantial summer dream; for he was also beckoned elsewhere — departing once while stretched out there, slowly pressed back through time and across the Pacific — as fingertips urged him onward, as the warm elasticity of his skin, soothed in the evening, answered Ah-Chun's guiding touch.

7

There were pennies in every pocket of Private Bill McCreedy's olive fatigues, five pennies per pocket, treasured like amulets which could ward off bad luck — pressed by durable cloth lining, protecting his skin — as if, hopefully, the copper or steel-covered-in-zinc cents might deflect gook bullets. He liked bragging about the pennies to the other men who served alongside him, smirking while mentioning the importance of his American-minted trinkets and patting his pockets as he spoke: “These babies keep me more rooted than anything. They keep me reminded of why I'm here, what I'm fighting for.” But even if he had never said a word, the significance he attached to the coins would have been hard to miss: before falling asleep at the bivouac spot southwest of P'ohang, the pennies were removed and counted and deposited inside a tin drinking cup; after stirring in that humid countryside — encircled mostly by teenage boys, half awake and scratching at their mosquito bites, lowering their feet to the green plastic groundsheets — the pennies were counted again, divided up into tiny stacks of five, and then, mumbling the Lord's Prayer, McCreedy slipped the stacks, one at a time, inside each pocket. Four of the pennies nearest his heart — he had told Hollis and the others — were engraved with the birth years of those waiting for him back home in the States (his mother, his father, his kid brother, and his young girlfriend), while the fifth penny commemorated the year in which he was born.

How distant the Panhandle of Texas must have felt to McCreedy — the cotton rows surrounding the family farm, the red-stone gashes of the Caprock canyons, the wide-open spaces which comprised the high, dry plains; how remote and dreamlike it all must have seemed when first riding by truck among South Korea's lush, mountainous scenery: the soldiers having caught glimpses of an impoverished countryside — village shacks tilting at the edge of hazy fields which were dotted with half-naked laborers, bone-thin dogs roving in packs on the roadway, sullen Korean faces watching as the military trucks rolled past — while far beyond the mountains, a hundred or so miles away, fellow soldiers were already dying beside the banks of a fast-flowing river, some drowning, too, when crossing the rushing stream to escape an onslaught of North Korean troops. For McCreedy, however, it wasn't yet the grim reality of battle which had immediately repulsed him, nor was it the possibility of a violent end which initially troubled his mind; instead, it was the ceaseless stench rising from the fields which wrinkled his brow, the noxious odor of human excrement combined with ash and used as fertilizer.

“This place is shit,” he ‘d shouted while en route to the bivouac at dusk, waving a hand in front of his face as if he were shooing a fly.

“You got that right,” another soldier responded, answering him from the midst of the identical shapes riding there.

Staring out at the darkening landscape, McCreedy had clamped the hand over his nose, holding it there as the vehicle proceeded — the bodies around him swaying or lifting with the bumps and turns in the road, the pennies sliding inside his pockets as they were all carried into the night. But if Korea was, to him, a foul land where its primitive people appeared unwelcoming — its water often contaminated, its mosquitoes surpassing the enemy troops in staging attacks — he at least found comfort in the little things, like writing letters to send home, counting his pennies, playing poker for match-sticks or cigarettes, and proudly speaking the password which had allowed entry through the bivouac perimeter: “Texas, sir! Texas!”

Hollis, on the other hand, didn't share his outspoken comrade's disdain for where they had been sent. In fact, he was quietly captivated by such a peculiar locale, a territory and culture so different from what had defined his life that he felt somehow transformed within its borders. To his mind, the southern part of Korea was like an imaginary place, a fiction, only to be discovered on the pages of novels, or spotted momentarily in grainy news-reel footage; yet presently the divided country unfolded — vividly, completely, replete with shades of green and blue and gray — and, as well, he was enveloped wholly by its otherness after a South Korean train soon transported the 2nd Battalion from bivouac to the war front (his rucksack destined for a march along winding trails, his darting eyes shadowed beneath a steel helmet and surveying the hillsides, his lungs breathing the heavy summer air when eventually moving deeper and deeper into that exotic, deceptively serene world).

Still, Hollis could agree with McCreedy that Korea was nothing like Japan, a nation which, by comparison, was more developed, more complacent in defeat, and, without question, cleaner. In parts of Tokyo, there was at least something resembling the leisure many of the soldiers had enjoyed back in the States; there were Japanese big bands playing American music at Ginza nightspots, and taxi dancers wearing evening dresses, and cheap beer. The Japanese, it seemed, were also more refined by nature than the dirt-poor Koreans, and because they had never suffered decades of subjugation and violent occupation, they lacked the hard, untrusting collective traits of a long-ago broken, scarred people. That being the case, Hollis fostered a greater feeling of sympathy for the Koreans than he did for the Japanese (the Koreans were, after all, really warring with themselves and not directly against the United States of America), while McCreedy — shaking his head beside Hollis during the twenty-hour train trip, scowling on his wooden seat at the shirtless women toiling in fields beyond the cramped passenger car — did little to conceal the contempt he felt for those he regarded as subhuman by default: “Like a bunch of pigs wallowing about in their own filth.” And, he believed, their impossible language was coarse, distraught in tone, sounding like a wounded heifer echoing its pain. Furthermore, they lacked the fundamental and essential understanding of a Christian God, of the Lord's sacrifice.

“Honestly, Creed wouldn't fuck a single one of them, even if I wanted to — unless Christ himself ordered me to.”

“I wouldn't either,” Hollis had replied, sketching in his notepad and not paying much attention to his comrade's grumbling, pondering instead the warning their captain had recently made clear to each carload of soldiers: the enemy might be hiding among Korean refugees from the north, blending in without uniform, disguised as civilians.

McCreedy glanced down at Hollis's drawing. “There you go,” he said, nodding resolutely at what he saw. A shaggy gorilla was taking shape on the notepad, standing at the center of a bean field, holding a banana in one fist and a hand grenade in the other; the caption above it read: what kind of guerrilla are you? “You see, we're on the same page. We're like two sides of the same coin.”

“Maybe.”

Later on — once the steam engine had climbed the Autumn Wind Pass, chugging for Yongdong County and the front line — McCreedy stood in the aisle of the passenger car, his body rocking with the train's movements, and said, “Hey, you all give me your ears for a sec, will you?” At that moment conversations ceased, every set of eyes fixed on him, and, relishing the sudden attention with a grin, he held out his tin drinking cup, pivoting so all could see it. “Let Creed show you a little something about these folks we're fighting against and these folks we're helping out here. Let me give you a little insight about just how their kind of mentality operates.” He produced three of his pennies, explaining that the Koreans named their newborns by dropping spare change into an empty can, the resulting clanking noises determining a child's lifelong moniker. “Goes like this, right? Listen closely, if you can.” He shook the pennies from his hand, sprinkling them into the cup. “Park-Clink-Kim,” he announced, bringing a few hoots and a smattering of laughter which were subdued beneath the train's continual rumbling. He sprinkled the pennies again: one after another after another. “That'd be a Clink-Kim-Park.” Again. “And that's Park-Park-Clink.”

Almost everyone, it seemed, was delighted by McCreedy's joke — everyone, that is, except Hollis, who, shifting his gaze to the window, ignored McCreedy's gleaming stare and recurring wink (“Now who's got a smoke or two for ol’ Creed?”) and beheld a rice paddy shimmering under the sun, then thatch huts, then a swift blur of oxcarts on a dirt road near the railroad tracks, belonging to what he suspected was a weary group of battle-fleeing refugees. Before long the voices of McCreedy and the other soldiers grew fainter to him, and the sound of the train became all embracing. In the distance, where sunlight reflected off more rice paddies, he saw the silhouette of a girl leaning against a parked bicycle and supporting herself on crutches.

When the 2nd Battalion began disembarking a few miles behind the Yong-dong front — filing onto the station platform, bringing C rations and full canteens, slouching under the weight of rucksacks, sporting eight-round M1 ammunition clips on cartridge belts — the soldiers they had come to replace stood waiting there, greeting the new arrivals without as much as a smile, posed haphazardly like a living tableau which depicted the aftermath of battle. It was as if they were being met by future visions of themselves, an opaque mirror image casting a grim reflection of what lay ahead. Stepping from the train in relatively clean uniforms, bright eyed and green, the young men of the 2nd Battalion were taken aback by their counterparts from the 24th Infantry Division: boys like themselves yet somehow made older than their years and now worse for wear — some bandaged about the head and arms, some on stretchers, most in grubby fatigues — each stubbled face looking beaten; but once the passenger cars were emptied, those tired expressions quickly betrayed varying degrees of relief as the men slowly ambled forward and started boarding the train.

“Here, pal, take this,” a limping infantryman said, pausing long enough to fix a brown-eyed gaze on Hollis while pressing a fresh pack of Chesterfields against his palm. “I'm finished,” he explained, moving on toward the train, his uniform dusty and frayed at the collar, his black hair matted and unwashed. “I've quit,” he said, without glancing back. “I'm done.” Tightening his grip on the pack, Hollis watched the infantryman recede, gradually losing sight of him amid the crowd readying for the return journey.

In hindsight, Hollis couldn't remember exactly when it was he began smoking (definitely not while stationed in Japan, undoubtedly after arriving in Korea), but he would never forget the morning he quit — just a couple of weeks later while dug in at the Naktong River, on his last day at the front. Nevertheless, he always associated that encounter with the infantryman as the beginning of an earnest, short-lived nicotine habit, soon hoarding his C-ration cigarettes at the bivouac near P'ohang, treasuring the packs where previously he had given them away. Moreover, there was smoke hanging in his memory, plenty of it — gray-white smoke sucked deep into his chest, regurgitated through his mouth and nose — as prevalent to his recollections as the grit which swirled about the cavalrymen, irritating their eyes, sneaking down the muzzles of their M1s.

Mixing with the summer heat, dust and cigarette smoke reigned behind the Yongdong lines, saturating the regimental command post, drifting above the 2nd Battalion while they took positions and established security posts; it wafted, too, beneath the moonlight when a patrol flank spotted the figures of northern refugees approaching, the white-clad shapes emerging like ghosts on a darkened road: the rumors of enemy infiltrators hiding among the civilians was enough to prompt fire from the jittery patrol flank, the rounds missing the refugees but successful in stopping the advance — the panicked villagers about-facing with heavy loads on their backs, reversing with their children or babies, scrambling backward into the night. And, in turn, it was to be the lighting of a cigarette which brought the regiment's first casualty, the fatal shots ringing through blackness and hitting a lieutenant when he struck a match before dawn, discharged from the semiautomatics of his own men (nervous Easy Company soldiers, inexperienced riflemen who jumped quickly at every sound).

Sometimes in the smoke-laden mornings, McCreedy's pennies were shown again to the jittery men who had returned from night patrol, those disquieted soldiers who sat tiredly beside one another, thoughtlessly nursing their cigarettes, saying very little while McCreedy tried bolstering their spirits by grinning his usual grin, smiling as if he possessed the answers to every problem: the pennies were stacked on his right elbow, balancing there until — with a deft movement of his arm — they fell away from his skin, floating for a millisecond, only to be caught by the swift-grabbing fingers of his right hand. Hollis had seen the coin tricks at least two dozen times; he had seen McCreedy's pennies rolled along gyrating knuckles, disappearing in fists, materializing soon thereafter like two round holes on someone else's forehead. Hollis had also heard more than once the usual spiel which marked the conclusion of McCreedy's display, memorizing the harangue in spite of wanting to forget it.

“I think some of you could use a dose of perspective,” McCreedy always began, holding out a bulging prophylactic, the condom stuffed with pennies and dangling beneath his grip like a half-full water balloon. “Do yourself a favor and have a look at this here. This baby is pretty special, let me tell you. What I keep in here is my Indian Head cents, five percent zinc, ninety-five percent copper, minted by our own U.S. Treasury. This whole bunch was collected together by my grandpa. Seems kind of worthless, I guess, except they don't do these no more. Now, what sets this particular batch apart is every last one hails from the exact same year — that'd be 1876, and that'd also be the same year General Custer took that unfortunate tumble at Little Bighorn.” He pulled a single cent from the condom, pinching it between a thumb and forefinger, turning the coin in the sunlight so that the front engraving, a Native American in a feathered headdress, and the reverse side, a circular wreath bound by three arrows, could be glimpsed. “So take a good look at it,” he said, handing the penny to whoever was closest to him. “Have at it, go ahead, pass it on around, would you?”

The significance wasn't lost on any of the cavalrymen, nor did anyone appear dismayed while McCreedy went on to remind them that they were now the military descendants of a singular legacy: they belonged, after all, to the 7th Cavalry; they were also soldiers of the Garryowen regiment, named so after the Gaelic drinking song chosen by the 7th Cavalry's infamous lieutenant colonel — George Armstrong Custer — and still whistled or played on occasion by cavalrymen. As fresh recruits back in the States, they had each been given a pamphlet which glorified the 7th Cavalry's history as formidable Indian fighters, the cover adorned with a horseshoe-and-saber shield; their orientation had also included screenings of They Died with Their Boots On, in which Errol Flynn portrayed the fated commander, the film depicting the Battle of Little Bighorn and the massacre of Custer and his troops by Sioux Indians.

“Just don't ever lose sight of that,” McCreedy said, his voice taking on a serious, melodramatic tone. “When you're feeling low or unsure of what's going on in this godforsaken country, you just remember you belong to the great Seventh Cavalry, and your role, like them what served ahead of us, is to clean the land of ignorant hostiles and pave the way to a better world. It's a true calling, I believe. It's our chance to settle an old score on behalf of those two hundred brave brothers that lost their lives to the savages at Little Bighorn.”

However, it was apparent very few of the men, aside from Schubert Tang, actually had much regard for McCreedy (how they rolled their eyes or shook their heads behind his back, making fun of his pennies and loud, annoying big talk whenever he wasn't around), although he was tolerated out of necessity and, to a greater degree, because he was the single most intimidating, unpredictable one among them. Even so, it amazed Hollis that soft-spoken, introverted Schubert had — since coming off the transport ship onto Korean soil — followed McCreedy like a devoted puppy, and, as a result, was offered a fair amount of kindness and respect, in spite of Schubert belonging to what McCreedy called the Mud Races.

The unlikely bond formed by the two happened early on at the bivouac near P'ohang, when four soldiers from another company gathered around Schubert as he walked alone to the mess tent, taunting him for being a gook, asking him what the hell gave him the nerve to join a white man's army. It was the sudden arrival of McCreedy — putting himself between Schubert and the soldiers, towering over all of them — who shut the foursome up with an extended, jabbing index finger, explaining he would thrash anyone who dared suggest that someone born and raised in the United States of America was a gook, especially if that someone was of Chink descent and was still willing to risk his life against the communist threat perpetuated by his own genetic background. The soldiers found themselves lacking the collective or individual wherewithal to respond, and thinking better of further provoking the wild-eyed Texan by uttering another word, they slinked sheepishly away like bullied children. From then on, Schubert and McCreedy were almost inseparable, eating together, playing cards together, swapping stories, loaning each other cigarettes or matches: the outspoken bigot and the only Asian in the group had become the best of friends. So however Hollis wanted to feel about McCreedy, there now appeared in his inward sight the image of a man at once brave and impossible to gauge.

While Bill McCreedy might have deliberately gone out of his way to be a kind of parody of himself, a one-dimensional hick archetype which had already become a common caricature in any number of B movies or war magazines, he would remain, to Hollis, a tangible person who had actually existed at one time. With that Mohawk which drew the scorn of their platoon sergeant, the expressive sunburned face shining beneath the dimmest of lights, he wasn't unsociable or withdrawn like Hollis, and so, by nature, he relished the lowbrow chatter which probably tempered his own fears — talk of women, tall tales from childhood, the mindless jests, general bull-shitting — the rite of strengthening ties with the brotherhood of soldiers. Yet for all his contempt and swagger and annoying bluster, McCreedy wasn't compassionless or incapable of conveying a genuine Christian demeanor, although, upon reflection, Hollis could only recall one other incident in which he saw McCreedy behave as the Lord would have done.

It was on a desolate road leading from Yongdong, where fleeing villagers and townspeople streamed southward to escape the fighting, the long procession repeatedly sent dashing to the roadsides when retreating U.S. Army vehicles barreled past them. Disoriented by the thick dust spun high by military tires, an elderly monk lost control of his bicycle and swerved into the path of a speeding jeep, his peddling left leg struck by the bumper, his body then thrown over the hood — airborne for a second, his gray robe fluttering, landing with a dull thud behind the braking jeep — as the bicycle continued wobbling forward without him. In the upheaval of dust and halting vehicles and startled onlookers, the monk was crushed beneath the front wheel of another jeep, his certain end occurring at the exact moment that the second jeep's horn briefly rang out. The bicycle, miraculously intact, veered several yards beyond the accident, crashing, at last, on the other side of the road — the contents of its saddle baskets dumped beside a sloping embankment, scattered near the boots of a twelve-man reconnaissance patrol from the 2nd Battalion. While horrified refugees on both sides of the road froze in their tracks, and the caravan of army vehicles rolled to a stop, a sudden quiet overtook the clamor, punctuated only by McCreedy's enraged voice rising among the reconnaissance patrol, shouting, “Son of a bitch!”

Before the dust swirling about the accident had fully dissipated, McCreedy lifted the bicycle, promptly turning it around. With his rifle slung across his back, he straddled the seat, and, shaking his head in disgust, proceeded to ride the short distance to where the monk's slack body was already being dragged from underneath the jeep. But it wasn't the stunned-looking young driver — wiping grime and sweat off his brow with a handkerchief, telling everyone, “Didn't even see him; it's like he dropped out of the sky or something” — who ultimately lowered himself to the body, nor was the monk held by the hands of the white-clad refugees who soon came running from both sides of the road, gawking at the tragedy in hushed voices; instead, it was McCreedy who cradled the old man, bending close to his shaved scalp, briefly uttering something into a bloodied ear, doing so as Hollis watched from afar, a cigarette fuming at his lips, the smoke curling upward into the brim of his helmet.

The monk's killing was, in fact, the first fatality they were to encounter during the conflict, and, in a way, it would be the most benign of all the deaths they were ultimately destined to witness. Yet many years since then, Hollis found himself wondering what it was McCreedy had spoken to the corpse, though at the time he had assumed it was a prayer, perhaps a blessing intended for the monk's departing soul. Or maybe — he considered when revisiting the accident in his mind — the words weren't as ecumenical or holy as he had imagined, maybe McCreedy had kept it simple, base, and impersonal: “Too fucking bad for you, buddy. Tough break.” He would, of course, never really know, and, as such, he finally concluded that whatever had been said was irrelevant: the act of rushing to the accident — lifting that battered body, holding the dead man while others did nothing — was the meaningful part of the memory, if only because it served to remind him that McCreedy was, after all, a contradiction of sorts and, therefore, more human than Hollis had eventually wanted to believe.

And so on that road leading from Yongdong, McCreedy stayed for a while with the monk's body — shaking his head again and again, glancing up at the bicycle he left propped against the jeep and the driver who stood beside it with his eyes down. Before trudging forward to get a better look, Hollis finished his cigarette, blowing a final exhalation of smoke at a blue sky which was unfurling beyond fading currents of dust; just then the sun broke through that brownish filter, casting its rays to the ground, illuminating those items which had been in the bicycle's baskets and were now several feet away from the red cloth which had safeguarded them, two bundles wrapped in fishing wire: a packet of flat, slender lengths of polished metal; another packet of narrow, unfinished planks of wood; the metal and wood being of equal size — approximately twelve inches long and two inches wide, fifteen to twenty pieces per bundle — with hanja characters meticulously carved or etched lengthwise upon each one. A few metal pieces glinted brightly in the increasing sunlight, catching Hollis's attention and blunting his sight for a moment when he flicked the cigarette butt at them.

“Is he a goner?” someone in the patrol asked.

“If he isn't,” someone else replied, “he's about to be.”

Then while McCreedy held the monk, Hollis knelt in front of the old man's possessions, inspecting the bundle of metal pieces which glimmered back at him and reflected his ruddy face. Presently, he reached for the wooden planks, studying the ornate, scroll-like writing, the characters filled in with black ink — messages which would forever be impossible for him to fathom, as cryptic to his memory now as the words he once saw imparted into a fallen monk's ear.

8

“Wood and metal? What on earth is that going to do to me?” Debra had wondered, upon learning that her chemotherapy infusions were to be a mixture of two drugs: Taxol, derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, and carboplatin, from the valuable metal class used to create jewelry. “I'll probably become a robotic tin man with an ax.”

“Surely a tin woman,” Dr. Langford said. “But right now I wouldn't worry too much about that.”

Then the autumn after her five-month therapy had commenced was passed in waiting, the slow, indeterminate days initially marked by the long strands of her hair discovered all over the house; sometimes the hairs ended up in unforeseen places — plastered on the TV screen, resting at the bottom of a coffee mug, hanging from the front doorknob — until, as an act of empowering herself, she decided to take control and buzz-trim her head to a fine quarter-inch stubble. “If it's going to happen anyway,” she said, “why prolong the agony of it?” But soon the velveteen stubble also began shedding, dotting their sheets and pillows like benign, identically made splinters. In a further attempt at empowerment, she eventually stripped off whatever was left of her hair with a lint roller, emerging from the bathroom balder than she had been at birth, her eyebrows, too, no longer existing on her face. She stood before Hollis in an untied terry-cloth robe, her naked body lacking a single pubic hair (the absence of which, she realized soon enough, hampered her ability to use the toilet without making a mess — the thick, curling pubes having previously funneled the urine flow into a well-aimed stream). “Just call me Mrs. Clean,” she told him, clutching the hair-matted lint roller in one hand, concealing her self-consciousness with a grin, even as he appeared mortified by just how thoroughly the job had been done.

“My lord,” Hollis said, rising from where he had sat at the foot of their bed, walking gingerly toward her, his gaze traveling the circumference of her oval-shaped head.

“Well, what do you think?”

“I don't know,” he said. “You look like you, but not like you.” He extended a palm outward, bringing it to her tender scalp, letting it glide about on the smooth surface. “You look like a blank canvas, Deb.”

“If only that were true,” she replied, and at that moment a shiver shot through her body, producing goose pimples on her bare shoulders and arms, as if to signal the premature arrival of the dry, brisk winter months. Then the colder season found her coughing and sneezing more than ever before: surely a weakened immune system, she and Hollis had concluded; for a while, each abrupt wheeze from her mouth or nose — every single hack or sudden nasal eruption — was accompanied by an uncontrollable release of urine, to the point where Debra began relying on what she liked to refer to as adult diapers. “Never saw myself as the depending-on-Depends type,” she'd told Hollis at Costco, after he had lowered two bulk-size packages of the moisture-absorbing undergarments into their shopping cart.

Since they hadn't yet formed any close acquaintances at Nine Springs, no one sought them out during that first winter, and, for the most part, the weeks between Debra's treatments were spent in relative solitude. Hollis whiled away the hours by doing landscaping in the backyard, cooking their meals, and strolling the aisles of Home Depot or Costco. There was also his increasingly questionable, slow-going autobiography, resumed now and then whenever Debra had urged him to keep writing, given the working title of The Hardest of the Hard: A Young Soldier's Story of Adversity amp; Courage Under Fire; but with only a few pages completed, there wasn't yet the heroic wartime tale or narrative structure he had envisioned — that account of glorified half-truths he intended to composite from the published fictional accounts of others while omitting much of what he had actually seen or done in Korea. However, it was a return to drawing and painting which gave him the kind of immediate satisfaction writing just didn't provide, rekindling a hobby which had been dormant for decades and allowing him the opportunity to engage in an honest form of creative expression.

So on Friday afternoons, Hollis attended the two-hour Painting Your Life class at the local Funtivities Center, where — for a $58 monthly enrollment fee — he was supplied with colored pens, pastels, oil paints, watercolors, brushes, and large sheets of white construction paper. With a single assignment given at the start of every session (Compose a dream you've had — Depict your favorite place — Make a self-portrait — Sketch something you like to eat) and offering a minimal amount of instruction, the classes were reserved, meditative affairs set around four circular tables which could each seat five to eight participants. Under the roving presence of the soft-spoken and diminutive Mrs. Ambrose, a retired art-history adjunct professor from the University of Arizona, Hollis completed every assignment in less than an hour, always excusing himself before those around him had finished their pieces (his weekly creation carried across the parking lot in one hand, rolled up tightly as he headed for the Suburban, destined to be placed on a garage cabinet shelf).

But a couple of his paintings had caught Mrs. Ambrose's attention, bringing her to hover above his shoulders, her bifocals dangling from a silver chain and brushing against his neck. “Oh, I like this, very unusual,” she had said while watching him add a light blue sky to a pastel-based image showing a half-naked man and boy, their heads concealed behind gas masks; and then, two weeks later, she repeated the sentiment when gazing down at a self-portrait which had Hollis surrounded by a purple-crimson background, arms at his side as he stood near a white cow and in front of a blackish tree with bloodred leaves. “Oh, I like this, Mr. Adams. I like what you're doing here — the symbolism of the tree, the colors you've used — figurative while also abstract. Now tell me what you're trying to convey in this?”

Lifting a red pastel he was using from the construction paper, Hollis regarded his self-portrait as if he were viewing it anew. “You know, I can't say for sure,” he said, his words preceded by a faint sigh. “I guess I don't really know. It sort of just came to me, I suppose.”

Mrs. Ambrose raised her bifocals, holding them at her nose like a magnifying glass. “Well, it seems rather personal, don't you think? Perhaps you're addressing something about your childhood, a longing for days gone by.”

“Perhaps that's it,” he said, lowering the red pastel to the paper. “It could be, sure,” and with that he began working again.

Debra, on the other hand, occasionally took tai chi and ceramics classes at the Funtivities Center, although she usually occupied herself with escapist fiction, managing to track down and read the forty-six novels of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series; at the same time, she could not resist owning another escapist collection of sorts: shunning the typical line of chemotherapy wigs, she acquired instead various specialty hairpieces which added an elegant or humorous touch to her otherwise barren appearance (Illusion by Eva Gabor, Encounter by Revlon, Action by Raquel Welch, as well as a blond beehive, and a Princess Leia wig), wearing whichever one suited her mood when heading to the grocery store or into Tucson for treatment. But she quickly grew tired of such novelty items. In the latter half of that winter, she began leaving the wigs at home, deciding to venture outside adorned only with a bandanna or a purple Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, sunglasses, and a charcoal-filtered surgical mask to help protect her lowered immune system; although none of what she wore could hide the lethargy which had finally descended upon her — a deepening lethargy, Hollis believed, not based solely on the effects of the monthly chemo infusions but, rather, because she could also no longer deny a feeling of having been horribly betrayed by her own body.

Thereafter, their days and nights elapsed in quiet uncertainty, both waiting for the next round of treatment or some clear-cut sign that the infusions were working, hoping for a positive outcome to the ordeal, and for the colder months to conclude so they could at last open up the windows on warmer evenings. During one of those chilly nights when they were sitting together on the living-room couch — speaking very little while the fireplace crackled nearby, lost in their own thoughts as the TV played in front of them — Debra suddenly announced she wasn't the same person anymore, that she had become someone far removed from the woman he had married and the woman she had imagined herself as always being, saying this with the softest of voices.

“Why do you think that?” Hollis asked.

“Honestly, take a good look at me,” she said. “Everything about me has changed. I'm not really me, not really me at all. I'm a complete stranger to myself.”

Meeting her eyes, he shook his head; he wished to counter her view of herself, to let her know she wasn't any different, that she was still Deb, that once the cancer and chemo were gone she would feel like her old self again, that none of the physical manifestations of her illness, or its treatment, could ever completely alter her intrinsic qualities — except he wasn't sure if that was the case. In truth, she had changed dramatically during a relatively short period of time: as opposed to her usual energetic, outgoing nature, she'd grown increasingly listless and withdrawn, her movements were sluggish, she often spent more hours sleeping than awake; hairlessness aside, her skin, too, had a shiny, almost translucent veneer; from maintaining an irregular sleeping pattern, dark circles had formed like bruises beneath her eyes, her voice had a languid, detached tone — and mirroring those retirement-home shut-ins unable to tend to their own basic needs, there was sometimes a yielding look in her stare. Hollis placed a hand on her leg and returned his gaze to the television program, saying nothing.

Debra's debility wasn't entirely unexpected or alarming; in fact, Dr. Langford had cautioned them ahead of treatment about what was likely to occur. “Chemo brain,” the doctor had called it, smiling wryly while the term was spoken. “The effect is real, but I can tell you now the medical community doesn't totally understand it.” The cognitive condition was, as Dr. Langford explained, only temporary. “You might experience some forgetfulness — dull thinking, mental fogginess, that kind of impairment — most likely during chemotherapy, although some women have reported it lingering for a while once therapy was completed. What you might notice is a difficulty finding the right words when talking, or an inability to write or phrase sentences as quickly as you're used to. If it becomes a problem, my best advice is to keep your mind engaged. Continue doing work-related tasks, reading, whatever your hobbies are. Don't stop doing what you enjoy, that's the most important thing.”

As it happened, the onset of chemo brain gradually made it impossible for Debra to fully absorb her mystery novels, or stick with the plots of her favorite TV shows, or concentrate while playing a simple game of Skip-Bo. Yet her sense of humor remained, illustrated by the Post-it notes she left scattered around the house — inside the refrigerator (Buy Me Cheesecake Before It's Too Late), beneath the bathroom mirror (It Is a Good Day to Be Bald), at the end of the kitchen counter (Dear, Remove the Enya CD from the Stereo amp; Please Remind Me Again That “Sail Away” Isn't Helping Anyone Feel Better) — and, much to Hollis's amusement, on the breast pocket of her own shirt: Hi, My Name Is Debra. Who Are You? Another saving grace was the absence of several afflictions commonly associated with chemotherapy — nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, loss of appetite — all of which were kept at bay by the antiemetic and antianxiety medication she received just prior to, and then directly following, every round of treatment.

Even so, for five or six days after each infusion, she experienced other side effects which had little or no remedy: fatigue, numbness in her fingertips and toes, difficulty picking up or holding objects, ringing in her ears, aching joints, blistering inside her mouth. Now and again, her limbs behaved spasmodically — her hands twitched violently for a second at the kitchen table, her knees jerked upward while she sat upright — as if her reflexes had been tested by a ghost. These instantaneous fits weren't without consequences: twice in one evening, the table was disrupted from the swift, hard bounce of her knees — a glass of water knocked over, the salad bowls sent wobbling, the plates and silverware made askew with the earthquakelike jolt she had delivered.

“Christ almighty!” she said the second time it occurred, pressing her hands against her legs to keep them anchored.

“It's all right,” Hollis told her, going for the paper towels.

“This is so stupid.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“This is the stupidest thing I've ever known.”

From where he now stood at the counter, Hollis glanced back at her, seeing a quizzical expression appear on her face, observing how, just then, her body trembled almost imperceptibly beside the shaken table. And so, too, there was an ineffable cold, infiltrating her marrow, keeping her bundled in jackets or sweaters throughout the days — even as the heater was set higher than what it should be, even as Hollis sweated indoors and often lounged in shorts and a tank top. Regardless of the heat, the sight of her shivering, the way she kept herself wrapped up, had a contagious influence. Later that night, he enveloped her on the couch, draping her like a blanket of flesh, warming her with his broad chest. But no matter how hot it actually was inside the house, he couldn't avoid her body's insinuation of winter, feeling his internal temperature drop and his blood thicken — like frigid soil shifting underneath a warmer layer of sand — while, at the same time, his brow glistened in the living room, his forehead reflected the flames coursing above the hearth.

That bone-deep, impalpable chill would shudder Hollis awake some weeks afterward, and — absently reaching an arm under the sheets for Debra, bringing his fingers to her side of the bed — he discovered a flat, coarse slab where his wife was expected to be resting. “Deb —?” In the early morning, as their bedroom remained shadowed behind drawn curtains, he explored the rough exterior his hand had settled upon; half conscious and with eyes still shut, his palm slid across rock-hard grooves, miniature plateaus and valleys: like a topography map, he thought while gradually stirring, like a landscape. “Deb —?” Turning his body toward her side of the bed, opening his eyes and blinking within the dim room, he first perceived her orthopedic pillow, observing the empty, curved space which hours earlier had cupped her head. He scanned the bedding, and, rising on an elbow, saw no sign of her sleeping body, or of anything else which hinted at the thing he had touched beneath the comforter. With a degree of apprehension he pulled back the sheets, revealing what appeared to be a shriveled, calcified form — a dark, asymmetrical puddle of a shape, perhaps two inches in height, three feet in length, his palm resting at its approximate center. “Deb —?” he said once more, quickly retracting his hand as if his skin had been grazed by fire.

A bedside lamp soon cast its light on the mattress, illuminating for Hollis a slender, reddish piece of flagstone — taken from a pile he had stacked by the back-porch door, something he had planned to use for the garden walkway — nestled now into the bedding like it had grown there overnight, spotting the sheets with flecks of sand and dirt. The fog of sleep lifted, summoning Debra's groggy voice in his memory, speaking aloud as she had wandered out of the room at dawn, “Can't take this anymore. I'm freezing to death.” But he didn't recall her returning with the flagstone; he didn't feel the sheets being tucked, or yet understand — until after getting up to check on her, calling her name as he wandered down the hallway — she had hoped the flagstone might maintain a warm spot for her when she wasn't in bed.

Finding her awake but curled up on the living-room floor — covered by a heating blanket plugged into a nearby wall outlet, lounging like a cat where sunlight spilled through the window and brightened an area of the carpet — he breathed a dramatic sigh of relief before asking about the flagstone, mentioning the dirt in the sheets, eventually saying, “I don't understand. Why couldn't you use your heating blanket instead?”

She regarded him with confused and somehow questioning eyes and, giving the slightest of nods at his words, shut the mystery paperback she was reading, bookmarking the pages with an index finger, and answered, “That'd be fine, dear, except you forget I need my heating blanket here.”

“I'll buy us another blanket, how's that?”

At this she frowned, saying, “You'd just be wasting money.”

“Why would I be wasting money?”

“You just would.”

She smiled involuntarily but, Hollis believed, she was trying not to sob. Only then did he become seriously concerned for her mental health — that, maybe, a full-blown depression was looming, fueled in part by the haze of chemo brain. And, too, he wondered — while preparing their breakfast, while boiling water for instant oatmeal — if they hadn't isolated themselves in a way which had been counterproductive to the cancer-fighting process. As it was, he had kept his attention on the recognizable characteristics of her outward health — how much or little she ate, how tired or rested she appeared, how much energy she did or didn't have — that her fluctuating mind-set never really entered into his thoughts; she had, after all, always been better than he at keeping her spirits afloat. No, I'm not very good at this, he realized as the kettle began vibrating on the stove. You need someone else to talk to, another voice besides mine.

And later — it was afternoon, the sun was high above the backyard and the heating blanket she wore had been exchanged for a sweatshirt — when he nervously, haltingly brought up the idea of her seeking support (“It could be useful — I mean, if you felt like it would help — or not, I mean, I don't know — ”), she replied without any pause at the dining table, as if she'd been awaiting the moment: “I suspect you're right. I've imagined it might take the edge off things, I guess.” Then upon her face for the first time in weeks spread a genuine look of ease.

“So you've thought about it already?”

“I have.” Between them was a turquoise-colored teapot, steaming with ginseng oolong, a souvenir they had purchased years ago in Santa Fe. She reached forward, taking hold of the pot's handle, and she repeated, pouring tea into his cup as if sealing a deal: “I have, yes.”

“Fine,” he said, spooning brown sugar from a matching turquoise bowl. “Fine,” he said again, swirling the sugar around in his cup.

Soon enough the dining table would be cleared, the cups and bowl and pot and spoons placed inside the dishwasher by Hollis while Debra cradled the telephone against her neck, speaking to Dr. Langford — her right hand gripping a pen and jotting down information, filling several Post-it notes throughout the conversation. On the following Tuesday — having left Nine Springs near noon, driving under an overcast sky — she removed those same notes from her purse, sticking them to the dashboard as Hollis sped the Suburban toward Tucson. As usual, they said scarcely a word during the trip — Debra applying lipstick and eyeliner in the visor mirror, Hollis fiddling with the radio dial — and eventually they stared beyond the windshield, and watched the desert transform, the bare landscape bleeding into a more populous region of dying strip malls and brown-stucco apartment complexes, where, with the Post-it notes heeded, they arrived at their destination seven minutes early.

“Here you go,” Hollis said, when pulling the Suburban along the curb, the passenger door slowly aligning with the front walkway of the Gilda's Club building.

“Isn't quite what I expected,” Debra said, gazing from the side window, noticing a few small drops of rain which had begun hitting the sidewalk.

“Doesn't seem bad.”

“I suppose.”

Dr. Langford had told her the local Gilda's Club provided a homelike setting — a relaxed support environment for those with any type of cancer, offering group counseling sessions and educational workshops — but she hadn't expected it to be located within a converted one-story redbrick house (situated on a residential street, the front yard consisting of tall ocotillos and sizable agaves). For a while, she sat inside the Suburban, the brim of her Diamondback cap pulled discreetly down to her painted eyebrows, watching as a solitary, hunched figure in a hooded clear-plastic parka — it was impossible to tell if the person was a man or a woman, young or old — moved up the walkway with a portable oxygen tank, going like a snail toward the front door in abbreviated, labored steps. No sooner had the figure managed to enter the house when — appearing from nowhere, swooping behind the Suburban like a band of crows — four black umbrellas fluttered across the rearview mirror, startling Hollis for a split second before coming into full view on Debra's side: each held by a quartet of almost identical-appearing hairless, tight-lipped, middle-aged women (monks, was Hollis's immediate impression, a procession of monks), clenching the umbrella handles with both hands as if holding large crucifixes aloft, marching single file to the sidewalk and up the rain-spattered walkway.

“All right,” she said, half sighing, “those look like my people. I guess I shouldn't tarry any longer.”

“Want me to come?”

“No, no, I'm okay,” she said, digging her surgical mask from her purse. “I'll brave it alone. Go do errands, just make sure you're back in an hour. Don't forget to pick up the HEPA filter that's on sale at Home Depot. I put the coupon in your wallet.”

“You sure? I don't mind coming with you. We can finish the errands on the way home.”

“I'm sure,” she said, sliding the mask over her face, affixing the elastic loops around her ears. Then she leaned forward and kissed him, her gauze-covered lips briefly pressing his cheek. “See you in a bit,” were her muffled parting words, and with that she was out of the Suburban, holding her purse against her stomach, wandering away from him without looking back, the leaden movements of her legs conveying a measure of reluctance. He started the engine, but instead of leaving he remained there a little while longer, his stare trailing her into the house, lingering outside once she had entered the place and the front door was shut behind her: how absent of human activity the house suddenly looked — how desolate the empty walkway seemed to him, touched only by droplets which banished dust to the edges of their imperfect circles.

He returned in fifty-four minutes, parking at the exact spot. Already Debra had emerged from the house, loitering on the front porch in the company of two other bald-headed women (all three wearing surgical masks, all three speaking and gesticulating like old friends as the sky continued spitting rain). Impromptu hugs were given when Hollis was noticed, small slips of paper changed hands, and then Debra waved a quick goodbye while crossing to where he waited. Less than an hour had elapsed, yet now — it seemed to him — Debra's entire mood was elevated; her steps toward the Suburban were somehow light and confident, as opposed to the reserved gait which had taken her through the entrance of Gilda's Club.

“So how'd it go?” he asked, taking her purse for her as she climbed in beside him.

“Good,” was her definitive answer.

He waited for her to elaborate further — the door closed, the seat belt was grabbed — but when nothing else was forthcoming, he, too, said, “Good.”

As they headed home that afternoon, the invigorated spirit Debra had shown on the porch of Gilda's Club had faded by the time the Suburban exited Tucson's city limits. Hollis, feeling somewhat excluded from her newfound support, found himself wanting to know what had been discussed inside the house, but seeing her sitting rigid on the seat — the way in which she gazed ahead with an uncommunicative, absorbed demeanor — he decided it was better to hold off asking. And as their mutual silence took on an evasive air and the rain fell harder, an aura of gloom saturated the Suburban's interior — enhanced by the incessant squeaking of the windshield wipers, the blasts of static cutting into the radio signal — until, at last, she glanced at him, saying, “I think we should laugh more. I think it's important we do that, don't you?”

“They say it's the best medicine, right?” He had spoken immediately, eager to vanquish that indefinite sense of melancholy.

“That's right. And I could use the levity, and I think you could, too. We need to laugh at least once a day, okay? Can we do that?”

Can we do that?

He forced a grin, deciphering the true meaning of what she was requesting: You've always been good at making me laugh, he thought. Now you're wanting me to do the same for you. “I'll try,” he said, nodding. “I'll give it a shot.”

Nevertheless, Hollis had no illusions: he knew he wasn't a man with a humorous disposition, someone who could easily produce witty, pointed remarks — like Debra and Lon did — using an illogical, cryptic, sarcastic, or ironic statement to accentuate the underlying heart of a given matter, however grave it might be on the surface. Humor had never lurked in his gene pool; he came from reserved northern stock, stoic people — women who frowned when laughs were warranted, men who looked confused when wry comments were delivered instead of rote punch lines. Yet his desire to amuse wasn't fully muted, although his attempts were often expressed as the inchoate clowning of the unfunny: exterior displays which almost never went deeper than silly faces, farting noises, bad puns, jokes overheard on the golf course but retold without the appropriate context or timing.

“Say, Deb, did you hear what the upset inflatable teacher said to the irresponsible inflatable student in the inflatable school?”

“You've told me that one, dear.”

“I have? Are you sure?”

“Listen, not only have you let me down, you've let yourself down, and you've let the whole school down.”

“Oh, yeah, you've heard it already.”

On some unspoken level Hollis believed humor was a luxury, an idle pursuit, but something not really suited for a planet which was, for the most part, deadly serious and historically devoid of cheap gags. A topical joke, a clever retort, farcical metaphors, oblique satire — these were modern human constructs, offered by those who, perhaps, dodged reality by enticing others to laugh aloud at their nonsensical utterances. As such, a physical act — an exaggerated facial expression of sadness, anger, fear, or a stumbling pratfall in a restaurant — was a lot funnier to him than a smug touch of verbal irony, because the overwrought gyrations of the body just felt more authentic and, therefore, undeniable. That being the case, he was usually funniest when he wasn't trying to be funny at all.

But it was almost a week following the Gilda's Club meeting — after Debra had awakened from a nap on the couch feeling morose again with no prospect of recovery and, subsequently, Hollis ended up standing within their large walk-in closet, having traced her path from the living room to the bedroom by collecting a trail of her discarded clothing and then depositing the sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks, and panties into the laundry hamper — before he made a deliberate effort to bring much-needed humor to his wife's day. Inside the closet, he could hear water hissing through the pipes concealed between the walls, the metallic grind of hot / cold knobs turning as Debra took a warm shower in the adjacent master bathroom; and, from where he stood, his eyes were drawn to an upper shelf, scanning the row of five life-size Styrofoam busts which stared down at him: the nondescript effigies being exactly alike save for a distinct specialty wig setting each one apart.

His long arms reached over the shelf, his fingers grasped the neck of a bust and — applying slight yet firm pressure on the Styrofoam skin, careful so it wouldn't slip from his hands — lowered it toward him. Now he was face-to-face with the disembodied head of what he perceived to be a woman (white skin, long narrow nose, white and pupilless eyeballs, sporting a blond beehive which towered above her pure white forehead). Soon the bust would be returned, placed back on the shelf among its other well-coifed sisters, but, looking now more akin to Debra, absent of the hair which had signified its uniqueness. He quickly made two round-trips from the closet: searching the drawers of his wife ‘s vanity table for lipstick, browsing her coats and jackets hanging beneath the busts, studying his reflection in the vanity-table mirror, positioning himself just beyond the closet's open door and — upon hearing the shower knobs whine, the water's diminishing hiss — clicking off the closet light.

And so in semidarkness he waited, keeping perfectly still as he listened, monitoring Debra's movements through the thin plaster walls. She rattled the sliding shower doors. He envisioned her feet pressing against the fuzzy green bath mat — right foot first, left foot next — patting herself dry with a towel at the same time. Then she was wiping steam from the mirror prior to briefly running the sink. Then she stepped onto the scale — right foot first, left foot next — weighing herself. At last, she exited the bathroom, wandering slowly into the bedroom, the towel wrapped around her chest (covering her breasts and waist, concealing the scar which served as a bitter reminder). But she didn't go straight to the closet; instead, she crossed the room, heading for the window — where, pushing fingertips against her barren crown, she stared at the backyard, eventually cocking her head, and, from Hollis's vantage point, seemed to shift her gaze to the clear, sharp winter sky.

When she did turn, her stare settled on the closet doorway, except he wasn't certain if she immediately saw him or not. Presently, she eased forward, coming toward him, her eyes narrowing and her brow wrinkling, becoming aware of an obscured form loitering within the dim closet — something tall, imposing, yet barely perceptible. She wasn't sure if she was really seeing something or someone there; she would tell Hollis this later, she would explain that the chemo brain played tricks on her — the hazy, unfocused nature of the condition had produced its share of apparitions in recent weeks, half-glimpsed figures seen at the corners of her eyes which vanished whenever she glanced their way, shadows roaming outside and darting past the curtains, fleeting refractions of indistinct living things (Yes, I've seen them, too, he would wish to reveal but didn't. I've seen them for as long as I can remember, he would want to say but decided otherwise).

Now she hesitated in front of the closet, peering ahead, squinting. One arm kept the towel from falling while the other arm stretched for the light switch. But it wasn't her fingers which hit the switch; rather, it was Hollis who cast light on himself, illuminating in an instant what, to his mind, was surely a hysterical vision: a hulking she-beast made even bulkier by a full-length long-hair beaver fur coat — the shawl collar bunched along the neckline, framing Hollis's deliberately dour and absurd face (a thick layer of crimson lipstick shining on his mouth, the beehive wig camouflaging his thinning hair and tilting to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Except Debra didn't react as he had imagined she would; she didn't start at the looming, ridiculous sight of him and then cackle wildly. Instead, a gasp of true horror escaped her, released at the very second her body jolted as if she had received an electrical shock — her arms reflexively flailing outward, her eyes widening — and the towel dropped away from her body, exposing her pale, vulnerable flesh. Fixing him with an unforgiving glare, her entire body began trembling. “Don't you do that!” she yelled, seething at him as her hands curled into fists. “Don't you ever do that to me!”

“Sorry — I — it isn't — ”

“Damnit, Hollis!”

In a way, it was Hollis who was the more startled of the two, for he had miscalculated badly, and, as such, he was promptly consumed by embarrassment and an increasing shame — as if he, too, were viewing himself like Debra was at that moment: a suddenly confused man stammering near his naked, sick wife, grimacing under a beehive wig, shoulders slumping beneath a fur coat.

“I didn't mean to — I was only trying — ”

She shook her head while bending to retrieve the towel. Then she faced him again, her head shaking less and less, searching his flustered expression.

“I'm sorry,” he said, steadying his voice, wiping the lipstick from his lips with the back of his hand, unintentionally smearing a crooked trail of red across his chin. “I guess I'm just not very funny today.”

And that, for reasons which were completely lost on Hollis, finally moved her to laughter. “Deb —?” Her fingers clicked off the closet light, her hand pulled the closet door shut; her laughter continued for a while elsewhere as he remained standing there alone, frowning at himself in darkness.

9

So another year with cancer passed for Debra; the once bare surface of her head had gradually been replenished, sprouting fine, short gray-blond hair which never grew very thick or long. But the rounds of chemotherapy were already exhausted — various first-line treatments using Taxol and carboplatin, Doxil, topotecan, carboplatin and Gemzar — allowing for just a single clinical trial as the last resort (the wishful belief in hope dwindling into the marginal territory of miracles). And now an early winter has come — arriving without warning like a presentiment of something inexorable, making the backyard desolate — and Lon, as if not to be outdone by Debra, has also fallen ill with cancer, leaving Hollis wanting for his friend's summer companionship, that gruff humor and intoxicated bombast: the continuous derision regarding the clean streets they drove together, the monotonous homes they tenant, or — as was often the case — the other retired men who had regularly patted their shoulders on the golf course greens.

“Metaphorical fascists, most of them,” Lon had said inside the hut, scratching at an earlobe with the rim of an empty Tecate can.

“How so?” Hollis responded.

“Lord, just take a good look at them sometime. Look how they act so damn smug, how they dress almost identically. Reminds me of ham actors all auditioning for the same lousy part.”

Lon sighed with disgust, shaking his head amid the shadows as Hollis said, “What the hell are you talking about? That's how we dress. It's golfing attire, Lon. What else are we supposed to wear?”

Lon's head-shaking transformed into an emphatic nodding. “Exactly,” he said. “That's my point right there. Hand me a beer, would you?”

In a way, they were like a pair of bothersome teenagers last summer, restless and hardly content, rippling still waters — withered adolescents racing their customized golf carts (Lon's black Humdinger, that prized miniaturized Hummer; Hollis's replica ‘57 Chevy, baby blue with canopy top, bucket seats, and coat frame), speeding on cart lanes, driving by parks where the only children they ever saw were attentive retirees strolling beside a feeble parent. Few streets were spared their wheels, their fateful bleating horns which created such a ruckus beneath the palm tree rows — the clarion call of two men intent on sailing kamikaze golf balls through the air, shooting them at the roofs of uninhabited homes, where the balls landed hard on reddish-tiled shingles and quickly dropped into yards marked with for sale signs.

“How do you think they went, Hollis?” They had parked at the end of a cul-de-sac, bringing themselves to stand several yards away from three recently vacated homes — a Ponderosa, a Cheyenne, a Durango. Lon set a ball on the asphalt, squinting while he considered his target. “Think Alzheimer's caught up with them?”

“Maybe.”

Taking a stance like a pro, Lon readied his hulking body for the shot. “Or a massive coronary?”

“Could be.”

Coiling his knees, hips, and shoulders when turning into his backswing, Lon soon launched the ball neatly from the ground. “Or harboring grand-kids without the association's permission?”

“Beats me,” Hollis said, watching as the ball arched beyond them, curving downward, promptly striking the Cheyenne's roof with a thack — bouncing twice on the shingles, over the roof, out of sight.

“I'm putting my money on Alzheimer's. What about you?”

“I don't know,” Hollis replied. Could easily be a stroke, he thought.

Could be a fractured hip. Could be death absolute — like the rapid demise of fellow golfers who had swung their clubs near them, like Jeff Turman who scored an ace just minutes prior to total heart failure, his final words being, “Oh, boy — man, this really smarts,” before his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed while still clutching his five-iron. Or there was quiet, austere Chris Mayhew — complaining of a migraine during tee time, pressing thumbs against his temple — who had changed his mind about playing, deciding instead to return home; shortly thereafter, his wife found him in the living room while ESPN broadcast sports highlights, seemingly napping on his leather recliner chair but, in fact, quite dead (the migraine having apparently been the first rumblings of a cerebral aneurysm).

“Well, better him than us,” Lon had insisted after Mayhew's funeral, unaware then — relaxing inside the hut, reeking of Coppertone and alcohol — of the disease already consuming his prostate, a malignancy which would inevitably lead to the gland's elimination; it was a rather minor impasse in comparison to the more troubling plight of Debra, a common ordeal for the men of Nine Springs: “A tonsillectomy for the aged,” he would end up calling it. “A real pain in the ass, literally.” But throughout the summer Lon had exuded an able-bodied, robust bearing — always maneuvering to get ahead of Hollis while driving their respective carts, clapping louder than everyone else when Anita Mann, a Peggy Lee impersonator, performed at the Sun-palace Arena (the melody of “Is That All There Is?” stuck in his head for days following the concert, piping from him as an off-tune whistle whenever silence prevailed inside the hut) — then mocking the Grim Reaper with deftly aimed golf balls which pelted homes he envisioned as modern, spacious mausoleums.

At least three evenings a week were spent in the indigo hue of Nine Springs’ Starlight Grill, the pair sitting at the bar and cooling their sunburned foreheads with frigid swipes of dripping Corona beer bottles. They went on those nights when Mr. Tom Kat played his rhythm-laden Casio in the middle of the dance floor, taking requests and reviving the golden hits of yesteryear beneath a slow-turning mirror ball, crooning to the golf-tired patrons as his deep, often faltering voice was aided by repetitive, syncopated electronic beats. Only later in the summer did the small groups of college-age women breach the security gates of the community, appearing at the grill late into the evenings, dressed casually in cutoff jean shorts, tight T-shirts or tank tops; the girls were always accompanied by one or two tough-looking young men who kept themselves sequestered discreetly at corner tables — baseball caps pulled low or with the bills turned backward — watching apathetically as their female friends danced and sang and flirted with much older, more intoxicated men.

“See, look at that, there's the downside of Viagra,” Lon had joked, motioning his beer bottle at one of the girls slinking her way across the dance floor. “Right there in front of us, the inevitable by-product of our reborn hard-ons.”

“What do you mean?” Hollis asked.

“They're whores. We've got whores now.”

“Really?” Hollis said, squinting to peer out at the dance-floor crowd. “I had no idea.”

Another girl sang along to Tom Kat's rendition of “Moon River” — long black hair hanging past her eyes, skinny pale white legs illuminated with the streaking reflections of the mirror ball — as a retiree old enough to be her grandfather recorded her singing into a portable cassette player: the two swayed together on the dance floor, the man holding a microphone at her lips while she lazily wrapped both arms around his wide, hunched shoulders.

“My god, this town is pathetic,” Lon chuckled, shaking his head. “What am I doing here?”

And if the answer hadn't been learned early on, Hollis might have then asked Lon why it was he ever chose Nine Springs to begin with. The serenity of the desert, Lon had already told him when they first met on the driving range, their friendship sealed immediately with the knowledge that they had previously served their country with distinction (Hollis in Korea, Lon before him during the Bikini Atoll atomic tests). Moreover, Lon and his wife, Jane, had picked Nine Springs because of the weather — seven glorious months, two cold months, three months of hell — and to improve Jane's overall health (the dry air did wonders for her rheumatism, keeps her in the pink) and, of course, for the fully stocked pro shop, not to mention the rare chance of having a well-kept putting green twenty-five feet from the back porch. Plus, their only child, Michael, lived nearby in Tucson, running an antique shop with his long-term partner. “My boy's gay — lovely kid, though, really wonderful, and so is his companion, Ben. Anyway, the way I see it is that evolution has had enough of my gene pool — mine and Jane's — and probably for good reason, you know.”

But when it came down to the elegant yet cozy clubhouses, the fitness center, the world-class amenities — Lon couldn't stand any of it, especially after two or three drinks. “Contrary to what we want to believe, it's an America that never really was,” he had said, resting on an adjacent deck chair, lounging with Hollis beside the swimming pool at dusk. “Just a fantasy of something imagined in hindsight, hallucinated by folks desiring safer neighborhoods, tidy lawns, no noise. See, I didn't know I was fighting a war for this kind of outcome, didn't foresee ending up in a modern version of what some developer thought my country was once like. You know, it's like Disneyland — it's a theme park we've invested in, that's all. I mean, you realize there aren't any springs near here. I bet they draw these names from a couple of hats. Oak — Ridge. Saddle — Springs. Nine — Oak. Saddle — Ridge. Nine — Springs. Really, honestly, it should be called Eighteen Holes.”

The words of a Jewish liberal — Hollis had thought — spoken at a Sono-ran oasis populated mostly by Baptists who, like Debra, zealously bought Kleenex, chicken tenders, melatonin, and Saint-John's-wort in bulk; they were the knee-jerk opinions of a cynical man who had more than once referred to himself as the Tin Robot God, because of the large collection of rare 1950s Japanese windup toy robots he had amassed over the years. Still, Hollis pointed out, their kind of escape wasn't anything new; and Lon, too, remembered well enough the suburbs of their younger years, the developments expanding for miles and miles from overcrowded city centers — updated army barracks, voguish, economical, affordable, and available to those returning as boyish veterans from distant battles.

“Fought a war too,” Hollis said. “Glad I'm living anywhere, if you want to know the truth.”

“Fair enough,” Lon said, shrugging his shoulders, his face now darkened by the evening. “I'm sure William Levitt would be proud. That bastard isn't spinning in his grave, I'm positive of that.”

They brought their arms behind their heads. Hollis scanned the sky for stars, but only succeeded in finding the full moon hanging above the desert. Lon farted and, at almost the same instant, sighed to himself before rising to retrieve another beer.

During the course of that summer, the subject of William Levitt had occasionally worked its way into their conversations, invoked by Lon who always uttered the famous housebuilder's name with a disparate mixture of reverence and contempt. But while Hollis and Debra had actually lived in a Levittown during the mid-1950s, Lon and his wife never did; his oldest brother, Joseph, however, had known Levitt, the two having become acquainted as sailors at the end of World War II. “My brother honestly felt that that guy heeded our best wishes, our fundamental needs and desires.” So the story Lon was quick to tell concerning his brother and Levitt — the story he was prone to repeat with increasing degrees of hyperbole — went something like this:

Drunk one night from tequila shots yet clearheaded about what the future required, Levitt was surrounded by other Seabees at a bar, wondering aloud, “What's wanted when this war is done? You want a car. What else? You want that nice house. That's right.” Beg, borrow, or steal the money, he urged them all before the night was finished, and then build and build. “Build for yourself, return to civilian life and build for those like yourselves. Our country is a bountiful pasture, we're so blessed. Go build!” From that night on, Joseph imagined Levitt as an avatar of noble plans, considering him to be someone touched by a great vision — someone who was so much more than a fellow sailor, more than just the industrious child of Russian Jewish immigrants.

After the war a handful of men joined Levitt, among them Lon's brother: converts like Christ's apostles, coming back to a homeland which was desperate for rooftops. They, too, lamented the housing crisis, scouting the countryside for suitable property to develop. Wearing gray flannel suits, they struggled up hillsides and gazed across open fields; they recoiled at the sight of trolley cars being sold as homes in Chicago, the antiquated brown-stones and packed apartment buildings, the undisturbed plains and bucolic meadows. They acquired their own machines to get the job started, burrowing under the land, bulldozing the soil into a uniform flatness; it was Levitt's decree: seventeen thousand new homes built on Long Island, the largest housing project in America; seventeen thousand reasonably priced dwellings, twenty miles from New York City.

“The will of mass production,” Lon has called it. “The General Motors of the housing industry.” And, as it happened, Levitt ruled benevolently as that general of the General Motors of the housing industry, triumphantly sweeping all the pieces from the Monopoly board, catching them and grasping them in a fist, and then sprinkling them like identical box-shaped seeds over the terrain — from Long Island to the outskirts of Philadelphia, turning potato farms into sprawling Levittowns; his homes never once varied, each floor plan design was exactly the same — seven color selections, trees spaced at twenty-eight feet (two and a half trees per house); every home was adorned with a stove, a refrigerator, a Bendix washer, and an Admiral TV.

“You don't have to tell me,” Hollis said. “We were there, we know.”

“How long did you stay?” Lon asked.

“Almost six years in Philadelphia, I guess. Then my job brought us on out to the West Coast.”

“Six years, huh? That long?”

“Really, it wasn't so bad. Pretty ideal for newlyweds, actually. We'd put off any thoughts of starting a family unless we could buy a house of our own. Luckily, we found a Levittowner for around ten grand — before that we were stuck in a cramped little apartment on South Broad Street in Hamilton. In fact, that first house felt like a piece of heaven to us.”

It was, Hollis had believed at the time, appropriate modern living for modern lives. Although the commandments were inflexible and absolute, the deeds unwavering: lawns must be mowed every week, laundry could only be hung on rotary racks and never on clotheslines. But most of the residents flourished adequately and multiplied in number; they had willingly entered Levitt's dream without any reservations and thereafter occupied that dream until it became a pervasive reality, as did their newborn children and, eventually, their children's children; this was William Levitt's vision, Lon asserted, this was the future he bequeathed — subsequent generations would know little else besides variations of that expansive, indistinct world of his. Yet, Hollis interjected, there was one man who had rebelled in his own way, who — amidst the many other ticky-tacky homes of Levittown, Pennsylvania — had taken it upon himself to mount a 16”? 12”? 16” gargoyle statue above his porch awning: the stone-chiseled grotesque existing as a unique expression of singularity, so much so that families from other streets hiked blocks out of their way just to stand on the sidewalk, pointing and marveling at it.

“That man wasn't a Hollis by any chance, was he?”

“It's possible,” Hollis said, grinning in the light of a full moon.

And it was enough to bring laughter, an incredible guffaw bursting from Lon — such a contagious racket was created, instantly penetrating Hollis's woolly belly button, working its way up to his throat: two balding, hysterical Buddhas, sunburned and intoxicated with something other than just beer, two deck chairs shaking with hilarity on a summer's night. Hollis wouldn't conceive of that inevitable frost, that swirling snowfall, winter; he wouldn't yet feel the cold devouring the heat, that swelter which had nourished his garden while he vacationed inside or near his hut. Nor would he be prepared for the laughter to stop, to trickle into an uneasy silence — a hush made more formidable by the nighttime and Lon's then motionless form.

But Hollis had experienced his rowdy friend's sudden silences before, had glimpsed Lon's squinting, insolvable stare in broad daylight (bloodshot eyes peering above rooftops, aimed for a while at the vacuum of blue sky). Those momentary lapses, he concluded, were probably the result of too much beer and too much heat; for the cumulative aftereffect of both alcohol and Arizona sunlight remained potent even when dusk had passed, capable of inducing a lethargic, insensible state at any time. It was a kind of stupor Hollis associated with gratification, a lulling sensation he had also felt in country club sauna rooms (wrapped naked inside a woolen blanket following a good massage, the sweat oozing like sap from dilated pores). And, indeed, Hollis relished the silent minutes — surveying the backyard or gazing toward the sky — thinking nothing whatsoever, his mind free of preoccupation, his body warm and relaxed. Only with Lon's vague mumbling did conversation resume — ”Oh, well. What a life, huh?” — the same words often slurred and spoken as a sigh.

Except the words were different on that summer night, surprising Hollis by how morose they sounded. “Was terrible,” Lon had muttered. “What a mess,” he whispered into the darkness, his beer-saturated voice hinting at something lingering beyond the confines of Nine Springs. Aside from crickets and a breeze rustling in mesquite branches, little else was heard or forthcoming. With the silence continuing, Hollis now discerned an oppressive quality in the air which made it difficult for him to say anything. Instead, he sipped at his beer, turning his attention toward the crickets and the breeze — and the tiny ripples of water spreading out on the illuminated surface of his swimming pool. Then he pondered the words Lon had said, drawing his own conclusions while his friend remained stock-still beside him.

Maybe, Hollis decided, it wasn't William Levitt's vision Lon was calling terrible. Maybe, he thought, the mess wasn't the sprawl of suburbia; rather, it was, perhaps, the inapprehensible sight Lon had witnessed as a young sailor aboard the observer ship USS Mount McKinley (Baker Day in the Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946, at 0835 hours, nine miles from zeropoint), the subject of which had been mentioned from time to time since meeting on the golf course, discussed beneath the punishing sun, brought up by an inebriated Lon without prompting but addressed in a detached, guarded manner as if it were the gravest of secrets: because what Lon had seen on the deck of the Mount McKinley, what had erupted before him in an instant — pure white, brilliant, awe-inspiring — was the first post — World War II nuclear disaster, unleashed by an underwater atomic bomb which shot a massive column of ocean water nearly a mile into the Pacific sky, decimating a fleet of abandoned battleships which were deliberately positioned at the zeropoint (“target vessels,” Lon had called them, “thrown about and sunk like toy boats”).

In truth, the human eye wasn't capable of processing the entire phenomenon, nor had there been appropriate definitions available beforehand to explain it. As a result, two months following the bomb test, scientists organized a conference — reviewing the data from Bikini Atoll, analyzing military film footage — whereupon a vocabulary of thirty expressions was developed, including terms such as “cauliflower cloud,” “dome,” “base surge.” For Lon, however, the recollection of the detonation seemed crystal clear: the monstrous dome which rose immediately before him on that day — geysering among the target fleet and blanketing the ships all at once — stretched upward and upward, briefly usurping the natural firmament during its white, expansive birth. In fact, the explosion was so incredible — so immense, so much greater in scope than anything his mind had expected — that it left Lon gazing openmouthed, even as others around him could not suppress their loud gasps or ecstatic shouts of delight. No intelligible thoughts seized him, and he was moved to the point of tears; for it looked as if creation itself was at play, as if he were glimpsing the beginnings of a new world: mutable mountain ranges swirled within that dome, snowcapped peaks shimmered in the light of a second sun.

At the very moment the explosion propelled millions of tons of saltwater toward the heavens, an enormous crater fractured the ocean floor, extending two hundred feet deep; as surrounding water filled the gap, the ocean lifted and fell for several moments, and a series of huge waves were set into motion — swelling and churning and sweeping forward, abruptly rocking the observer ships. The largest waves known to mankind were created that morning, rivaled only by those which came with the eruption of the island of Krakatoa in 1883. My lord, Lon found himself thinking as the high waves approached, someone made a mistake, someone miscalculated. About forty seconds after the blast an otherworldly, demonic roar swept over the Mount McKinley, inciting a newsman to shout, “Why doesn't the captain get us out of here?” But already the massive column of water had begun to collapse, settling into a circular cloud of radioactive material, carrying its lethal spray, mist, air downwind for more than seven miles. With the column's disintegration, a heavy fog — like bank of steam, some two thousand feet high, rolled across the target fleet, enshrouding the ships.

Three and a half miles away from zeropoint, on the recently evacuated island of Bikini, coconut trees swayed violently when the shock wave jolted the deserted island at a rate of 3,500 miles per hour. And standing not far from Lon on the Mount McKinley — snaggletoothed, dark-skinned, compact, wearing Marine Corps utilities (khaki trousers and shirt, black navy-issue shoes and no socks) — was His Majesty King Juda of the people of Rongerik, formerly of Bikini, observing the spectacle without amazement while others beside him grimaced or smiled, watching impassively as his tropical kingdom was laid to waste and, Lon realized in hindsight, seemingly no longer shocked by anything white men could do to him, or his people, or his beloved islands, or themselves.

“It was an awful sight,” Lon had once told Hollis, “and it was so beautiful, too. I've never been able to reconcile that disparity. You've never seen anything like it. Trust me, the movie footage doesn't do it justice. You couldn't even begin to understand what it was like to see something that unimaginable unless you were there.”

You don't know what you're talking about, Hollis had wanted to say but refrained, hoping instead Lon might manage to hear the voice of silence. I've seen things just as awful if not worse, he thought. Smaller-scale indicators of the apocalypse, lacking the impersonal grandeur, the sublime aspects, the disquieting majesty of a single nuclear explosion beheld from afar. No, he thought, I've stood before macro destruction, the slow-moving, close-range, tangible mechanisms of human annihilation — and none of it, regardless of how he had tried recasting it in his head, offered a remote hint of paradoxical beauty or unexpected reverence.

“Yep,” Lon had said, “it was something else, and I'm surprised I haven't paid for it yet. God knows plenty already have. I knew a guy there who ended up having a malignant tumor removed from his thyroid, and another one who died of a rare kind of adenocarcinoma, and another from chronic leukemia, not to mention all the ones who got colon and liver cancer, or lost their entire immune systems, or that bunch of others who became sterile. But, you know, I've been lucky so far, pretty damn lucky. Doesn't matter much now, though. Not many remember all that stuff these days, no one talks about it anymore. But I'm fairly certain I saw the very beginning of our undoing — that exact second when the world started losing its mind for good.”

Realizing his wordless communication had failed to pass between them, Hollis had simply nodded, casting his eyes to the concrete ground. Fifty-three years ago for you, he calculated. Forty-nine for me.

10

The place where Hollis's cactus garden now grows was once square, lifeless, about five yards of hard earth. Whenever wind swept through the backyard, small brownish gusts rose from it and blew out over the swimming pool, like the futile encroachment of a miniature desert. While still setting up the house, they would go there, he and Debra, to ponder the garden they had talked about building with mostly wildflowers, some rocks, maybe a prickly pear or two. They would go there even at night — often in the night, so that they could avoid the summer sun — when the concrete was tolerable to their bare feet and the dirt patch before them was dissipating the heat it had absorbed during the day.

Debra would recline on a deck chair set away from the future garden. Hollis, shirtless and wearing Bermuda shorts, would remain standing while considering the possibilities; it was always he, never Debra, who strolled the concrete perimeter of the patch, where — upon reaching the other side, the dirt between them like a void — he would offer his thoughts: “I'm thinking we can fill it in with gravel, but only when we get everything planted. How about that?” A shrug of indifference would bounce from her shoulders, as if her mind was on something else. He would nod his head in response, suddenly unsure of what, just seconds ago, had seemed like a decent idea. Soon enough, though, Debra would forgo any involvement in the garden planning, encouraging him instead to landscape the area as he saw fit, while also freeing herself to decorate their new home without his input.

“I've spent the better part of my life watering flowers,” she explained one evening, having begged out of surveying the empty patch yet again. “It's a lot of work, you know. And now that you've got plenty of time on your hands, I believe you should assume that duty for a spell. You'll see, it'll do you good getting plenty of sunshine, getting your hands a little muddied. Anyway, I think you're more suited for desert botany than I am, wouldn't you agree?”

He gave her a sort of agitated look, at once amused and perplexed. “Really? How do you figure?”

“Well, you're certainly pricklier than me, and nowadays your belly strikes me as fairly succulent.”

“Oh,” he said, wrinkling his brow and glancing down at his broad, inflamed stomach. “I guess so.”

Then, for him, developing the garden became a singular preoccupation, if not a somewhat protracted affair; its progress was labored over in the cooler morning hours, its design revised from day to day: no gravel, no flowers, nothing which required an inordinate amount of watering, but rather something indigenous, something which might thrive by itself should he eventually fall ill or become too enfeebled to maintain its care. At the kitchen window, Debra would spy him out there, crouched on his haunches, finally cracking the dirt with a spade and digging narrow, shallow holes for the eight tiny barrel cacti he had bought at Super Wal-Mart. His gloved hands — which she knew were thick, rough, and calloused from his lumber-industry years — would reach for a single two-inch-wide barrel, carefully extracting it from its temporary planter, balancing it gingerly on his palm and sliding it upright into a hole.

Those initial plantings rooted successfully, although the landscaping was approached methodically and even now continues as an ongoing project. Hollis marked off sections of the patch, intending each section to display a different variety of cactus, but ultimately the concept was abandoned in favor of naturalistic, scattershot groupings. Then one day — it must have been right after planting the first barrels — his spade unearthed something other than centipedes or grubs or fire ants. The ground was stabbed. The spade pushed deep, striking what felt like a pebble. He made several jabs with the spade, tossing dirt aside, and scooped out a hard olive-green clump covered in soil, which he sifted into his fingers.

“Take a gander at this,” he said, and Debra — sunbathing on a deck chair, her face shadowed beneath a visor cap — opened her eyes, leaning forward as he briefly held his discovery high.

“What is it?”

“It's an army, man,” he said, lowering his hand, contemplating his find for a moment: a small plastic toy soldier, a rifleman with his weapon aimed.

“Good lord,” she said, sounding bothered.

Digging nearby he exhumed a second soldier, then a third and a fourth soldier — until, at last, six plastic figures were scattered about him, filthy and strewn around several holes, like men thrown to the ground by mortar blasts. He said, somberly, “Just look at you — you didn't see it coming at all — you weren't expecting this,” as if he were repeating it to himself. But the soldiers weren't the only toys he had discovered there. Previously he had found several opaque-orange and black-swirled marbles, a purple Hot Wheels cement-mixer truck, as well as a tiny blue sock made for a toddler.

“It isn't right,” he heard Debra say. “Those kind of things shouldn't be in our yard, not way out here.”

Turning his head, he caught sight of her face as she climbed from the deck chair to go inside; it was very serious and very pale, as if she had seen something awful. He then understood her consternation: prior to their house being built, he realized, there must've been another house on the property. Prior to Nine Springs, he thought, another community must've existed there, and someone else had once wandered and slept and played and dreamed on the same plot of land where they now reside. Thereafter, his fingers behaved like God, organizing the soldiers into a crooked formation, righting them on such broken, dusty earth: a firing rifleman, a grenadier, a rifleman using the butt of his weapon to strike at the air, a running rifleman with an M1 carbine, an advancing rifleman with a bayonet on his weapon, a G.I. charging forward with a tommy gun — none of them larger than three inches, each poised yet somehow fighting an unseen battle. As cicadas rattled in mesquite trees, he evoked the soldiers’ names without speaking aloud — Buddy, Jimmy — an index finger swooping down on the toys like a precision-guided missile — George, Mikey, Mark — flicking the plastic helmets — Schubert — knocking the men to the dirt. Standing upright, he gazed at the bodies far below him, as if observing a distant, foreign landscape from a bird's-eye view. You're the boys that didn't make it, he thought. You're the ones that fell in my presence.

“Sorry about that, Schubert,” he said, bending to pick up the soldiers, recalling the Chinese American kid who had idolized McCreedy, laughing at the Texan's jokes when no one else would. “That's rich,” Schubert would say, nervously looking at his feet, grinning uncomfortably as if he assumed everyone else was staring at him. “That's a hoot, that's pretty funny.” Schubert's eyes often shifted to McCreedy while they were on patrol — fixing on the sunburned neckline, that rugged profile — instead of staring ahead or monitoring the hillsides. While there was little age difference, McCreedy seemed older than Schubert, much older; and, as such, he treated the kid like a younger brother, giving him obvious advice (“Remember, keep your head low, otherwise you'll make for an easy target”), admonishing him now and then (“Godamnit, Schubert, don't you piss out in the open like that, you'll get your pecker blasted!”).

Ultimately, though, there was nothing McCreedy could have said or done to keep Schubert Tang alive — not when enemy mortar and machine-gun fire erupted indiscriminately, not after a bullet tore through the kid's skull, and blew away a portion of his nose, and removed most of his right jaw, and threw his teeth and strips of flesh into the air like confetti. As others scrambled for safety, it was McCreedy who rushed to Schubert, promptly rolling the splayed body this way and that — his boots stepping in the kid's waste, creating bloody tracks on an exposed hillside trail — taking a dog tag, retrieving a billfold, wristwatch, and a pack of cigarettes from the corpse; all of it, except the cigarettes, would be given to the division's graves registration unit. Upon leaving the body behind, dropping beside Hollis as machine-gun rounds zipped above them, McCreedy said, “Tough fucking luck,” with hardly a quiver of regret.

But Schubert wasn't the first casualty McCreedy had readied for the medics or the graves registration unit, nor was he the last. Buddy Campbell got hit in the chest, an inch or so from his navel. Fleeing down a hill, George Martinez had both arms blown off by a mortar blast. Jimmy Shurlock was shot in the left eye, and to everyone's amazement burst into laughter shortly before dying. It was a tree which killed Mikey O'Brien, a tree struck by a mortar — the wood splintering apart, jettisoning like bullets, and gouging open O'Brien's stomach. But Mark Neiman took the cake: one second he was sharing a joke about a legless pig, and a second later he was completely legless, writhing on his back, reaching a trembling hand toward the two bubbling, red stumps where his knees, shins, and feet had just been.

In hindsight, it only seemed right that those deaths would have an impact on McCreedy, continually tempering his affable manner and drawing his personality further inward, allowing the more sullen, acerbic parts of his nature to emerge (qualities Hollis had sensed lurking below McCreedy's exterior from the start). Then it was to be a tougher McCreedy marching forward, a colder character with his weapon ready, taking the lead without needing to assert himself, remaining unfazed whenever they happened upon the horrific: bloated, discolored corpses stacked alongside a narrow trail; a dead infant with flies swarming about its face; a woman's head flattened like a crushed grapefruit in the middle of an unpaved road, her long dark hair spread out in the dirt as if it had been combed that way.

“Tough fucking luck. Too bad for you.”

No, no, Hollis thought, don't think about it anymore. Leave it be.

But even after disposing of the toy soldiers — dropping them into a mass grave and covering them with soil, sealing them beneath a small piece of flagstone — he was unable to shake what he had tried for so long to forget. How strange, he considered, that a single day — or an hour, or a minute, or a second — could drastically change the direction and outcome of someone ‘s entire life. One man's sudden misfortune, he knew well enough, might be another man's salvation. He turned his eyes from that piece of flagstone, and surveyed the barren ground on which he stood. Just then, the garden became transformed in his mind, ceasing to be a place of pleasant diversion but, rather, now an expansive grave plot for memories which refused to stay buried.

In all — once the days of 1950 were tallied up and relegated to an increasingly remote past — Hollis had spent less than a month fighting the North Koreans, from the last week of July to early August, with the majority of 7th Cavalry deaths he witnessed occurring while en route to the Naktong River (the 2nd Battalion retreating southward as advancing enemy tanks, snipers, and artillery shells chased them in rain and sun to the base of the Sobaek Mountains). How indescribable his time abroad sometimes felt — how abrupt and hallucinatory — like a blur which had swept through a brief portion of his life, taking him from rural America to urban Japan to the hills and valleys of South Korea, and bringing him back home to Minnesota from what, upon reflection, could have been described as a whirlwind vacation to hell. Yet it was early on — just before Schubert's killing, before McCreedy stopped smiling and began gritting his teeth, while everyone still believed the conflict was to be a short-lived affair — that he experienced his own grim turning point, a moment when, as it would soon happen for McCreedy, the war took on the attributes of a debased and needless game; except, unlike McCreedy, Hollis recoiled from the horrors he glimpsed (averting his stare if possible, hesitating at times to pull the trigger of his M1), attempting to keep himself somehow separate while also perceiving many of his fellow cavalrymen as nothing more than willful children set loose on a massive playground, becoming promiscuous with their weapons and the disposal of human life. Nevertheless, he knew his autobiography would skirt these amoral, vexing aspects of the war, and in some manner, if he got around to actually writing it, he would need to revise certain facts, censoring moments of his own history by deliberate omission, shifting much of the story into a fictional parallel universe just so he could sleep at night.

The maddening reality, however, refused to transform itself in his memory, regardless of how he intended to modify events with the aid of words and a computer. For it was only five days after setting foot on Korean land, during their first full operation at the front, that the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry regiment found itself positioned in the hills above a curving railroad line — the bare tracks beneath them cutting over a small double-arched concrete trestle near the village of No Gun Ri. On that Wednesday, the sun blazed high, enhancing the humidity, reflecting off of rifles and binocular lenses. Cicadas purred within acacia trees. Long-necked herons were spotted at times, flapping across a sky which was dotted with clouds. Down below — close to the trestle, gathered under acacia trees and in the shade beside the railroad embankment — were exhausted, frightened refugees: six hundred or so weary souls (elderly, middle-aged, young, entire families who had been evacuated from the Chu Gok Ri valley), wearing billowing white clothing and walking on rice-straw sandals, hauling livestock while making their way to the village of Hwanggan, but resting now among the cool shadows before proceeding with heavy packs or children on their backs — aware all the while of the Americans scattered around the hills, yet feeling secure in the relative stillness of a bright midday.

Hollis has always had difficulty placing himself there in a hillside foxhole, or accurately remembering what actions he took as the events of July 26 unfolded. In some regard, his recollection was not unlike the perspective of the herons which swooped above everything — the rice paddies, the distant pine groves, the valley, the railroad tracks, the refugees, the Americans — gliding for the jagged slopes of White Horse Mountain. Yet he knows other soldiers blew whistles at the moment three air force planes emerged through the clouds, roaring from the horizon, and sailed low toward the refugees. And he knows, as the refugees paused and gazed upward at the planes, the valley below him suddenly exploded in a deafening thunder — again and again and again, shaking the ground with greater anger than any earthquake he would experience in Southern California — throwing stones and trees and bags and bodies into the sky, blasting limbs apart, tearing clothing away and turning the day to night amid a storm of dust and dirt. Cattle bellowed in chorus with human screams. The wounded briefly moaned for help or gasped last breaths. Then more bombs and rockets fell, machine guns rattled from the planes, as survivors ran in every direction, stunned and panicked — some dragging children, some pressing hands on their ears, some incapable of moving — while pieces of people and livestock crashed hot to the ground.

When the planes retreated, careening beyond the clouds, they left in their wake an appalling aftermath. The tracks running parallel to the embankment had become a twisted, fractured mess of steel, and craters fumed where just previously villagers had rested on rice-straw mats. Shrouded by the heavy smoke which obscured the destruction, the wounded lay dying, either motionless or writhing near burning baggage and smoldering carnage (bits of fingers, severed heads, naked torsos, a dead man's legs pointing straight up at the heavens). Weaving through the mortally injured and the remnants of bodies, its entire brown hide set ablaze, a solitary cow managed to reach the perimeter of that hellish scene — the black smoke unfurling there ahead of it, faintly revealing faraway mountains and blue sky — and heaving a prolonged cry of misery, its legs buckled and it collapsed into a silent, fiery heap.

The refugees fortunate enough to escape the attack had fled for the hillsides, while others found shelter inside the narrow, 200-foot-long passageway of a culvert underneath the railroad, or beneath the twin tunnels of the trestle. But many of those clambering along the hills, striving to find safety, soon ran out of options; when word came through the line to open fire on them, it was McCreedy who, without any hesitation, immediately discharged his M1 after catching a small girl in his sights and, upon striking the child, exclaimed, “Got her!” And though Hollis tells himself no one was murdered by his weapon, at least not on that day, he is fully aware of having aimed his rifle — perhaps at rocks, maybe at those who were already killed — and pulling the trigger. Then what's lodged in his mind isn't so much his participation in the action, but, rather, freeze-frames of memory capturing the untested teenage cavalrymen who stood or knelt closest to him; only days previously they had entered dank Tokyo bars, fondling taxi dancers and requesting sake or beer, yet, with the passing of a week, they were gripping their weapons in Korea and shooting, for the first time in their lives, complete strangers. How quickly they had all adapted — launching mortar shells at defenseless groups of refugees, spraying machine-gun rounds into the culvert and the trestle tunnels, killing villagers even as they understood they were there to fight for them, firing simply because they were ordered to do so.

Presently, the rifles and machine guns led the soldiers from the hillsides, bringing them to where smoke enveloped that confounding terrain, the dark plumes drifting over corpses like souls ascending. Boots pushed at bodies, checking to see if anyone in the air-strike zone had lived, while, at the same time, surviving villagers were being herded together — brought from the hillsides, the surrounding fields, the tracks — and ushered slowly toward the trestle. Either weeping aloud or too stunned to make a sound, parents held their children, just as others helped the wounded ones who couldn't walk; the rifle muzzles and soldiers guided them forward — past ravaged limbs, their feet stumbling on the fallen — sending the villagers into the two cavernous tunnels beneath the bridge. But for the injured ones who had been unable to stand or move forward, they were promptly dispatched with point-blank shots, yet were fortunate enough to receive a swifter death than what would eventually befall those crowded inside the tunnels. The gunfire would sporadically echo there during the afternoon of the twenty-sixth until the morning hours of the twenty-ninth, hundreds of rounds ricocheting from the concrete walls at dusk, the heavy shelling, tracers illuminating the pitch interior at night as meteor-like bullets ripped into huddled figures.

Even after the survivors were crowded into the tunnels, McCreedy continued roaming above them near the tracks, stepping through the smoke with Schubert trailing close behind, ambling casually from corpse to corpse; when Hollis came upon the pair, they were standing on either side of an elderly woman who must have died from fright rather than injury: she lay perfectly intact among the ruin, spine against the ground, eyes fixed wide, legs straight, slender arms outstretched but with her thin fingers curled inward as if they were clutching at air. Without a trace of emotion, McCreedy leaned toward the woman — one hand gripping his rifle, the other hand gliding across her face — and, like magic, an Indian Head penny materialized on each of her eyes, covering her wide brown pupils.

Knitting his brow in bewilderment, Hollis shouldered his rifle as Schubert snickered and said, “Sleep tight.” Then he followed the pair for a while, watching the two bend down here and there, placing Indian Heads on the faces of the dead (the pennies soon dotting the eyes of dismembered children and charred men and mutilated women in what seemed, to Hollis, an irrational attempt to even out history). With the incomprehensible mass killing of the refugees not yet fully processed, it was the behavior of Schubert — enjoying himself beside fresh corpses whose faces superficially mirrored his own features, acting nothing like the shy, thoughtful young man on the transport ship — which initially mortified Hollis; it was as if he were recognizing in the kid the signs of a potent malady which had begun spreading quickly from man to man. Pausing by the blackened, fuming trunk of an acacia, Schubert snickered again while McCreedy poured more pennies out of the bulging prophylactic, replenishing their palms.

“Here you go,” McCreedy said, thrusting the condom at Hollis. “I haven't forgotten about you.”

Hollis hesitated. He half closed his eyes, which were irritated by the smoke, and, very slowly, said, “That's okay. I'll pass.”

McCreedy was stunned. Schubert snickered uncomfortably. They both stared at him with the same perplexed look; then they glanced at each other and, once more, stared at him.

“Now come on,” McCreedy told him, his voice barely masking annoyance. “You can't pass on an opportunity like this. You got an obligation here to fulfill, right? We all do. Come on.”

“It's okay, really,” Hollis said, stepping back from the condom. “I'd just rather not.”

A stern expression surfaced on McCreedy, even as he tried speaking calmly, his tone conveying the kind of urgency which was meant to change another's position: “Look, you better climb on board, son.” He reached forward, pressing a single Indian Head into Hollis's left hand, where it was kept within a fist. “You need to start seeing the bigger picture, or you might not get a place at the table, got it?”

Nothing McCreedy had said made sense, but Hollis still burned with an immense hatred for him; and when walking away to go elsewhere — upon catching the sound of both soldiers whistling beyond him in the veil of smoke, humming the old Gaelic drinking song which George A. Custer had adopted as the 7th Cavalry's marching anthem — he felt sickened by McCreedy and harbored a great sadness for those whose eyes were sealed beneath such cruel pennies. After depositing that single cent on a crooked rail track, hoping it would eventually get crushed flat, Hollis turned around, gazing back to glimpse the murky, receding figures of McCreedy and Schubert (stooping and rising, stooping and rising). Someday — he sensed it at his core but was never able to articulate it clearly to himself — there will be more of your kind than mine. Someday, he was sure, the world will be governed to accommodate the exclusive cupidity, unfounded fears, and willful inanity of people like Bill McCreedy.

Here in the backyard, the cacti now recall melting snowmen, globular and icy shapes thawing as Hollis scoops with the spade — clearing slush, tending an untenable garden which has somewhat relieved his conscience of the massacre he had witnessed: the refugees huddled beneath the railroad trestle at No Gun Ri, the men, women, and children seeking shelter there, but dying instead underneath the large twin arches, falling from bullets fired by his battalion; what horror he's conjured when sometimes shutting his eyes in the garden, like an incubus arising through memorial and continuing onward with him, a thread of regret keeping him beholden and disrupting the tranquillity of his hard-earned retirement.

And, as well, there is that other vision — the listless figures in gas masks, the stray herd of cattle — entering his sleep during the night. Upon arriving at Nine Springs, with the beginning of his newfound leisure, it had come to him more readily, more vividly, as persistent and pervasive as the cancer which had begun to spread unnoticed inside Debra. While the meaning of the cattle had always mystified him, the symbolic procession of restless souls had not: early on, he ‘d recognized them as a manifestation of his own guilt concerning No Gun Ri, a visitation from those who sought resolution or amends for their unjust deaths. Out in the garden they also started coming to him, weaving through his mind, distracting him. Yet the planting of a single cactus could stifle the recurring thoughts; when digging a new hole, when lowering the roots of barrel into the earth and patting down the soil, he saw nothing but life and creation, and, with time, the vision grew less and less troublesome, appearing infrequently at night while becoming nonexistent in his waking hours.

All the same, nobody has heard him address this grievous memory from the war — not Debra or Lon, no one he's ever met. He hasn't spoken of these crimes, of rifles fired at mothers holding babies, villagers digging under corpses as gunfire ricocheted — a wholesale slaughter issued discreetly by the 1st Cavalry Division headquarters, stating that refugees crossing the front lines should perish in case they might be the enemy hiding behind peasant clothing. Except he never saw the enemy at No Gun Ri, simply terrified bodies rushing about below him, screaming from one end of the bridge tunnel to the other, scrambling to avoid the shooting which rained through both sides — until body lay upon body, everything unmoving but blood and the faint, shallow breathing of the mortally wounded (how awful ebbing between man-made arches, how tragic greeting death where safety at last seemed palpable). Yes, he had pointed his rifle, had fired too — although, he feels certain, only the ground and the bridge supports took his bullets; even if, possibly, his bullets had ricocheted into the innocent and caused fatalities, Hollis remains proud of the fact that he didn't directly kill anyone, and, in the intervening years, he has never allowed that belief to waver.

For that matter, he is also proud of his garden, because it has become a remembrance of sorts — as thorny and forbidding, to his mind, as any reliquary. How right, then, for his skin to get punctured on occasion, his own blood dripping into places his fingers can't touch. So he is pleased with his efforts, his mornings spent planting. He doesn't shudder whenever the flesh is pricked, or curse himself; he can accept the pain easily, dutifully in fact, as a tithing offered to this soil where so many spines blossom (now more needles flourish here than bullets expended at No Gun Ri, soon a cactus will exist for each person who died). In fashioning the garden, he has begun to settle his burden, attaching that vexing recollection to something beneficial: a slow transformation which, in time, he prays will alter the darker ruminations — hopefully placating the restless procession within his dreams, the straggling forms signifying his culpability — ushering forth pink spring flowers nestled in the midst of cacti spines instead of the living turned abruptly dead, irrelevant, discarded by history yet present to him still.

At some future point, he believed he would sleep contentedly in his bed and nap warmly inside his hut, untethered from regrets, free to enjoy his days while anticipating flawless golf swings — doing so as the sun nourishes his garden and shines down on this ever-widening, arid development. Then he would never again doubt the choices he has made for himself, even should Lon recline beside him, muttering, “It won't stop, Hollis — won't stop until there's no desert left. Not so long ago this was wilderness — the last spot on earth we would've inhabited.” No, he had planned to avoid any second guessing after the garden is completed; he ‘d already told himself it was meaningless to think much about the past, or to contemplate how these streets and homes and golf courses were simply blueprints in an office somewhere, a design requiring cheap property. He has made himself forget that all of this real estate, not long ago, was once farmland owned by a sole Mexican family (probably a large family, with at least one child who saw fit to bury a handful of toy soldiers in shallow, fortuitous graves), disregarding whatever leftovers are evident at the fringes — orange trees beyond the development, cattle gnawing along the outer limits like exiles from another place in time.

“Look, everyone gets their moment under the sun,” he wanted to tell Lon. “They've had theirs, we're having ours. You know, maybe everything is just exactly as it's meant to be. Have you considered that?”

But while he may wish to think otherwise, Hollis will always be conscious of rarely encountering few colors other than his own pallid blush, his very wrinkled kind. And, too, he can't envision last night's snowfall as anything less than an emblematic one, a paradoxical showering, covering what, in its origin, was meant to be brownish and coarse yet has since been concealed by good roads, consummate planning, gated uniformity — that snow chilling Nine Springs with its inexplicable arrival, hinting at the impermanence of those now sequestered here; how it descended with such assurance, claiming the earth — how, then, it faded almost as quickly, melting away, disappearing into the ground, turning the loamy soil to mud, and offering precious little else before finally departing.