The Post-War Dream

11

Before her chemotherapy began, Debra had made up her mind: she wasn't going to start treatment with any reservations or the slightest amount of dread, nor would she deceive herself by pretending the chemo wasn't destined to underscore the magnitude of her illness (surely quelling whatever sense of control she had had over her own fate, at times producing vast feelings of discouragement). So, she had decided, there wouldn't be an internal struggle against what was about to occur; rather, she had accepted the therapy as an essential step toward recovering her health, while also relying on a practical-to-a-fault, no-nonsense mental inclination which — she reassured herself — was befitting of a West Texas woman. “You should know by now, we're pros at separating the meat from the bone,” she ‘d told Hollis. “We've got bullshit scrapers embedded in our souls.” That pragmatic side of her was key, for she believed it gave her a better opportunity to rise above the vagaries of her situation and tolerate the fact that her life was evolving in a manner which she could have never predicted. Moreover, she wouldn't allow herself to entertain hysterics — not even when she recognized twinges of panic or anxiety in Hollis — because she knew the treatment was inevitable and that she must be wholly resigned to its assault on both the disease and her body. As such, she had understood beforehand that the chemo was, in the very least, a wayward ally of sorts, albeit a horribly toxic and draining one.

Then while sitting for hours on end at the Arizona Cancer Center — relaxing in an open, brightly lit space, tended to by a small staff of attentive clinical and research nurses — she and Hollis had been relieved that the Patient Treatment Suite wasn't like the place they had secretly imagined. Without saying so, they had each shared a similar fantasy of a sterile yet archaic ward, a cramped environment lined with stretchers which were partitioned off by white plastic curtains — where stoic nurses strolled from patient to patient, filling out charts as the very ill grew sicker following the administration of chemotherapy. But, in truth, the cancer center had four modern treatment areas (three with reclining lounge chairs and a television mounted on a wall, one with stretcher beds for those who wished to rest throughout the therapy). Instead of voicing discomfort or writhing from pain, the other patients around Debra passed the hours in relative peaceful-ness — eating potato chips and pizza slices and hamburgers, watching afternoon talk shows, listening through headphones to portable CD players, flipping the pages of newspapers or magazines, talking and playing board games with family members, napping — while the drugs went into their arms as if dripping from a leaky spigot, the chemicals burned up their perfectly good veins, and the IV bags hung above every seat.

It was, for Debra, like a large communal living room, or a weigh station occupied by people who were replenishing themselves amid the dubious journey none of them had asked to embark upon; although what was evident to her during the first rounds of chemo — what she could easily discern from her lounge chair — was that while all of them were there together, many had been on the journey longer than she had (her husband didn't need to help her to and from her seat, the nurses hadn't yet begun searching her arms for undamaged veins in which to stick the IV needle). Still, there was something calming about the suite, boring even. The drugs, too, weren't much of an ordeal; she had assumed she would feel the chemo entering her system, except, as it happened, she felt nothing whatsoever — other than the slight prick of the needle breaching her skin.

And so — with Hollis sitting beside her, his chin tilted upward at the television — she read a Nero Wolfe mystery novel, or worked crossword puzzles. In those weeks when chemo brain finally hampered her ability to concentrate on words, she would choose a chair near the wide, expansive windows, surveying the mountains and sky, often studying the patients and staff who came and went across the center's parking lot. She and Hollis also took walks, bringing the portable IV along with them as they stopped at the nurses’ station to chat, or headed down the hallways, or, on occasion, paused inside the clinic's quiet, simple, and usually empty chapel (the two rarely ever speaking there, preferring instead to keep silent beneath the vaulted silt-cast ceiling, the stained-glass window, a cascade of bells). Yet after months of chemo, Debra had never lost sight of the fact that the twenty-nine other chairs in the suite displayed the various shapes of men and women who were praying for the same outcome; as a result, she knew she wasn't alone, and from that understanding she had gleaned a modicum of solace. For just like her, they had left their daily routines behind, and, once a given round of treatment was done, they could again resume a fairly normal existence.

Hollis, too, had been mindful of the patients which filled the suite with Debra — several he had grown fond of encountering, others he recognized but hardly acknowledged. More striking to him, however, was the diversity of the continually changing group. Aside from retired, middle-aged, or university material — male or female — there were white and black patients, mainland Chinese and Mexican locals, a Japanese housewife and a Saudi Arabian graduate student. A handful of different languages were spoken in that room, a cross section of the world had somehow found its way into the desert and past the sliding doors of the cancer center. But over time — as Debra's illness progressed, as the chemo only slowed its advance — new patients began appearing in the places where familiar bodies had previously sat; then it felt like a lethal game of musical chairs was being played out, one in which the names of the winners and losers weren't divulged. Yet few, if any, it seemed, would be spared the ravages of the disease; fewer and fewer were bound to circumvent its wrath, and so everyone, he now believes, will have their lives altered at some point by the infernal lottery of cancer.

Even so, there were no conversations of possible death at the Patient Treatment Suite, no end-of-life issues brought up during commercial breaks or between bites of food, as if an implicit vow to avoid the subject had been sworn by the patients, their families and friends, and the nurses. The treatment alone reinforced the idea that cancer wasn't an automatic death sentence, and as long as therapy continued, both the afflicted and their loved ones might survive with the disease for months, sometimes years (the end result — that final act where the chemo had either succeeded in eliminating the disease or failed altogether — was more akin to an abstract concept than a certainty). In this way, death refused an obvious personification; it wouldn't hang about in the form of an archaic, lingering, black-hooded specter, nor would its onset produce crucifix-like stigmata upon the flesh of the doomed. Instead, it was a kind of death which had an intangible presence, manifesting by degrees rather than all at once — covertly building upon itself like a creeping paralysis, spreading here and there — with the telltale signs becoming cumulative and, to those expecting its imminence, undeniable.

Now without the advantage of much hindsight, Debra's cancer months had already relegated a number of the recently deceased to memory, acquaintances met early on at Gilda's Club — five or six faceless women to Hollis — which his wife mentioned only after each had passed away. “We lost Dianne this week,” she'd tell him, saying so in a direct, unemotional tone — as effortless and nonchalant as if she had just uttered, “We're out of toilet paper again.” Since Debra began attending the meetings, the club had also lost a Rebecca, an Alice, a Martha, a Kelly, and — because Debra always referred to her by her full name — one Tina Archuleta. With the exception of Tina Archuleta, the women died from complications brought on by their advanced ovarian cancer (bowel obstructions, fluid collecting in the lungs, tumors pressing on key organs). Ms. Archuleta, on the other hand, was a stage-I survivor who had been free of the disease for six years; a seemingly healthy, muscular woman, an avid cyclist and jogger, she frequented the meetings whenever possible, encouraging newcomers to “thank Mother God and surrender yourself and the temple of clay you live in to Her care,” while giving everyone a good look at the overly enthusiastic, beatific face of remission.

But it was Tina Archuleta's unexpected demise which altered Debra's normally impassive response to such losses, dismaying Hollis with a sly grin even as she somberly explained that Tina had been killed in an off-road accident (thrown from an open Jeep when the vehicle lost control, her body sent tumbling down a prickly pear — covered hillside before coming to rest at the rocky edge of an arroyo). “It's pretty tragic,” Debra said, shaking her head. “I guess her temple of clay got busted to pieces.”

They were driving back to Nine Springs from Tucson, and Hollis — right hand on the steering wheel, left hand turning the radio dial to his favorite country station — glanced at her, discerning then from her expression that it was sarcasm he had heard and not simply a bad choice of words. “That's awful,” he said, returning his stare to the road. “Why'd you say that?”

She shook her head again, as if she wasn't so pleased with herself. “Who knows what's gotten into me,” she said, maintaining the same somber tone yet doing nothing to suppress her grin. “I think I'm in shock. It must be shock. At least she's with Mother God now.”

“Stop it. Why are you talking like that? Why are you smiling?”

She shrugged her eyebrows once, and with that the slight grin disappeared for a moment — only to reemerge seconds later as a full-blown smirk: “You know, we all die someday of something, dear. It's not like getting past cancer means you'll live forever. But promise me one thing, will you?”

Somewhat hesitantly, he answered, “What is it?”

“Considering everything I've gone through with this disease — it doesn't matter if I get flattened by a bus or crushed under a boulder — you better make sure my obituary says ovarian cancer is what did me in, okay?” She half chuckled at her own request, but her levity was unnerving to Hollis.

“Deb, don't talk like that,” he immediately responded. His forward gaze drifted across an abandoned strip mall and the parking lot of a Tony Roma's. “And please stop smiling. It isn't funny.”

This is how you're coping, he had thought afterward. This is how you're dealing with what's happening to you, and us. She would tell him again and again that Gilda's Club had been a blessing, that its support had lifted her from the melancholy and haze of her ordeal (even as her cancer remained, even as the treatments had failed to bring beneficial results). The other Gilda's Club members she joined every week — those who were sharing her fears and sickness — had instilled the importance of positioning one's self to be a survivor; they had, in fact, added color to her life under the bleakest of circumstances — not just with humor, or counseling, or reliable information, but also in a more literal fashion: she was advised to avoid muted shades, encouraged to wear clothing which was vibrant, warm, and positive.

Then gone were the gray sweatpants, the black sweaters; gone, too, were the black ceramic dinner plates, and the light-gray bedroom walls and ceiling (a color she had originally picked for their room, a color Hollis had blotted out over the course of a weekend by covering it beneath a thick, smooth veneer of pale yellow). Soon the bedside table was lined with a row of small, brown-tinted bottles, each containing a different oil and scent which — according to the aromatherapist who had visited Gilda's Club one week — were excellent for activating the olfactory nerve cells in the nasal cavity, sending impulses to the limbic system (the part of the brain commonly associated with emotions and memory), as well as relieving various physical maladies by stimulating the immune, circulatory, and nervous systems. At any given hour, the bedroom became fragrant with eucalyptus and wintergreen (aiding congestion relief), jasmine (calming depression), lavender (reducing anxiety and improving sleep), citrus (elevating mood and increasing mental sharpness), peppermint (helping with digestion while reducing nausea), rosemary (easing pain and providing muscle relaxation), or the single best oil for evoking a surge of happiness: cherry. At last, Debra would take it upon herself to symbolize happiness with her own hand, using Hollis's paints and brushes, climbing a stepladder in order to design a bluebird on the bedroom ceiling — its wings widened amid a flat yellow sky, its arrow-like beak aimed at the doorway. “It's our bluebird of happiness,” she had told him while lowering herself from the stepladder, blue paint spattered on her fingers. “Everyone should have one, don't you think?”

“Of course,” he answered. “Of course,” he repeated, his voice suddenly trembling, watching as the bluebird became diffused with the welling of tears and seemed to flutter above him.

The spade acts as a snowplow, clearing the precarious spaces between golden barrels, succulents, and old man cereus. The funneling system which Hollis designed along the rooftop gutters — a series of black plastic tubing and sheet-metal rivulets — is hampered by blockages of ice. Below the funneling system — close to where he is working — the fifty-gallon tub which normally collects rain during the summer monsoon season now contains slush, as does the five-gallon bucket he uses for retrieving water from the tub to irrigate his flowering plants (scarlet betony, yellow bells, columbine). The trailing rosemary near the back patio is nowhere to be seen — lost beneath a melting stratum of white — yet a single cottontail rabbit sniffs at the ground there, unconcerned by Hollis's proximity while it searches for something to gnaw on. Taking a break to stare beyond his property, Hollis is aware of the rabbit but gives it little notice, for he has previously encountered more impressive kinds of free-roaming wildlife behind the house — a covey of quail, solitary coyotes, a pack of javelinas, a hawk, and an owl.

As no walls or fences enclose the yards of Nine Springs, he can peer into neighboring gardens, observing the mini-oases growing around his own refuge — backyards which, in warmer months, showcase bougainvillea and cape honeysuckle vines, wide-spreading palo verdes and hybrid mesquites for cool summer shade, creosote bushes, prickly pears, cholla cacti, and red yuccas whose clusters of bright flowers entice both hummingbirds and butterflies; he can, when surrounded by such subtle desert shapes and colors, perceive this gated community as a kind of barren paradise, a well-deserved reward for almost forty years of service to the Dusenbury-Soper Lumber Company (that majority of his lifetime spent overseeing cutting rights, production, and processing in Pennsylvania and, then, Southern California).

In truth, Hollis's thoughts concerning Nine Springs rarely waver, nor do his concerns usually align with Lon's mixed feelings about the place; he has never been able to equate his retirement here with some exclusive theme park for the aged, a present-day dystopia built from antiquated, homogenous ideals. Instead, he feels the community is not so different from the valued destinations of his youth, holiday retreats like Palm Springs or Lake Tahoe — unique getaways which allowed couples to leave the steady drone of urban motion and, for a brief period, find peace in wide-open, slower-paced environs; without such halcyon alternatives made available, he believes many decent people might find their twilight years to be somewhat less fruitful.

Debra, too, had sought contentment here, while also embracing the motto of “living with cancer” as a personal mantra. Shrugging off the cruel timing of her illness — the late stage of her disease, the exhaustion of chemotherapy, her declining health — she, like Hollis, was still determined to enjoy what was supposed to have been prolonged recompense for those laborious, gainful decades. As she saw it, his retirement signaled her retirement, at least to some extent; so it wouldn't be all pain and sickness for her, nor did she continue to play the role of a restive and childless San Gabriel Valley homemaker, or that of a part-time sales associate at Mervyn's. Rather, she quietly redefined herself upon leaving California, seeking an appropriate analogue to her husband's almost daily rounds of golf, finding her answer inside the meeting rooms of the Funtivities Center — where she attended a weekly lecture series on the religions of the world, engaged in several lively debates regarding current events, and learned how to research the genealogy of her family tree.

Immediately following her surgery and prior to becoming too weak to participate, Debra often passed entire days at the Funtivities Center: mornings practicing tai chi, afternoons doing ceramics, and, for a short while, evenings rehearsing with the Ol’ Settlers Drama League (the effects of chemo at last preventing her from performing as Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town, or realizing the dream of tackling Rosie DeLeon in Bye Bye Birdie). And although she had once fostered a desire to raise her own children — a desire left unfulfilled due to the double-edged revelation that her body had been overloaded with androgens and her husband's sperm were abnormally shaped — Debra tended to herself at Nine Springs in the manner which, Hollis imagines, she might have done for a child raised under her supervision: balanced meals, regular exercise, hours devoted to reading or studying, and plenty of extracurricular distractions to keep negative influences and ennui at bay. Nevertheless, with the disease's progression, she couldn't help but view her premenopausal infertility — the abundance of male hormones complicating her system, the irregular periods, the difficulty she had had ovulating — as being, in hindsight, a clear warning for what lay ahead.

Yet only after Dr. Langford's diagnosis did Debra learn about the studies which suggested a connection between ovarian cancer and never having children. Still, she had remembered sensing minor pangs while ovulating, that mid-cycle sensation her gynecologist at the time had called Mittelschmerz — that moment when a single egg expanded, bursting beside the ovary, awaiting either fertilization or to be flushed away with menstruation. Not until her cancer was discovered, though, would she consider the damage inherent to such a routine, commonplace function: for with every egg which ruptured near the ovary came a division of cells — a shifting, a multiplying, a regrouping along the surface lining to seal the gap; and it was that mechanical, automatic dividing and subsequent repair which could allow rogue cells to go astray, producing the microscopic starting point for cancerous beginnings.

“You know what I really hate, what I really can't stomach?” she'd said to Hollis, as they paced the hallways of the cancer center. “It's knowing my body is operating on its own internal clock. Early on it decides I shouldn't have a baby. Then it decides to change my hair color. Then it decides to wrinkle me all over. Now it wants to kill me, and there isn't a damn thing I can do to reset it, or make it stop tick-tocking my life away. That really pisses me off.”

But at least she had her mind, he countered. At least she could control her thoughts, in spite of what her body was doing.

“You're right,” she said. “I guess I can still evolve in a positive direction, even if the rest of me is rapidly decaying. So if nothing else, my brain is on my side.”

“Me and your brain,” he reminded her.

“Forgive me. I stand corrected.”

A fairly recent development in Debra's ongoing evolution was the avoidance of beef and fatty foods, relying instead on a diet of soy products, organic vegetables, chicken breasts, and brown rice. This conversion began when she watched a CNN special report about mad cow disease; soon afterward, while she was asleep in their bed, the disturbing images of infected, spasmodic cattle and humans repeated in her mind, jolting her awake beside Hollis.

“No more beef,” she had announced, nudging him with an elbow: “Hey, no more beef. We can't eat it anymore.”

“What is it?” he said, only half conscious.

“Bovine spongiform encephalopathy.”

“What are you saying?”

“It's cannibalization. They're using meat in stock feed. They're feeding them to themselves.”

“I don't understand.”

“Cows are eating cows, and we're eating the cows that do that, and it's coming back to haunt us. People are dying because of it, and they don't know why for sure. But it's pretty obvious, we ‘re paying a price for toying with nature. Stuff like this always happens when we go against the natural order of things, right? So, please, promise me — no more beef.”

“Okay,” he mumbled, “I promise — no more beef.”

Later Hollis wouldn't confess to the steakhouse dinners which he and Lon consumed during their swap-meet pilgrimages, nor did he point out to Debra that their dormant sex life had been reinvigorated by purely unnatural means: a small 100-milligram pill taken before intercourse, increasing blood flow into his penis, providing an erection which lasted for more than three hours. Although such a laboratory-designed gift wasn't enjoyed without a few minor side effects, including shortness of breath, flushing of the face, and a slightly upset stomach. The drug also brought temporary changes to his color vision, casting their lovemaking in a blue-green tinge (“Viagra vision,” was Lon's nickname for the condition — as he, too, had endured that aquamarine, swimming, goggles-like sensation). The side effects, however, never prevented Hollis from using the pill, and — until she was rushed into surgery — he and Debra had attempted sex on a weekly basis upon arriving at Nine Springs. Then, as opposed to her younger self, she made few excuses whenever the old urge had arisen in him — a headache wasn't claimed, cloying shyness wasn't feigned now that age had banished her modesty.

But if Viagra had sexual side effects, so did ovarian cancer — related surgery. Except no one had addressed the sexual component for Debra — none of the doctors or nurses had brought up postoperative issues involving vaginal dryness and atrophy from a loss of estrogen, or the possibility that the quality of her sex life would change dramatically. Nor was she prepared to exit the hospital with more than a complete hysterectomy and, weeks thereafter, discover that her libido had somehow also been removed. Perhaps, she had explained to Hollis, her lack of sexual interest resulted from a combination of stress, chemo, and an altered body image: not to mention the pain which accompanied intercourse, or the scar which defined her pale-white abdomen, or — as she would ultimately conclude — the fact that the organs she had always identified with her womanhood were forever gone.

“You're still beautiful to me,” he told her, reaching for her breasts. “You're still the most beautiful woman I've ever known.”

“Well, I better be,” she said, giving his hands free rein, closing her eyes when his lips pressed against her neck.

Yet following her surgery, in the moments succeeding their halfhearted attempts at intercourse, Hollis sensed her dissatisfaction — not so much from the lazy aftermath of sex, or from the heightened pleasure their bodies had endeavored to reach; rather, it was a vague reproach, a kind of indirect longing for something he couldn't know, an absence, expressed with the shifting of her figure, how she had turned her back to him, sighing or yawning prior to napping, the sheets becoming a warm membrane which then separated their skin. Once they were finished — wads of Kleenex dotting the carpet, the K-Y personal lubricant set aside — silence frequently overtook her; on occasion, however, she spoke, saying things which seemed out of context to his lingering ardor: “It's double coupons at Safeway this Thursday, don't let me forget.”

“I won't.”

He felt he hadn't touched her, hadn't touched her at all.

“And remind me to call Viv to get her sand tart recipe. It'd be a nice treat for the drama league's potluck next month.”

“Okay.”

Or, lately, she summoned people and places which rarely entered his thoughts, evoking memories of their old ranch-style home in Arcadia, wondering if the new Taiwanese owners were taking good care of its gardens: “Do they have birds-of-paradise in Taipei?” Maybe her deceased family members were discussed, maybe a trifle concerning her only sibling: “Jackie's a mess. She phoned this morning, looks like Fred is off the wagon.” Or she didn't turn from him at all, although she avoided his gaze — propping herself up with pillows instead, taking an aromatherapy bottle from the bedside table, a vexed expression crossing her face while she inhaled the cherry oil which conjured the cough drops her father had sucked like candy: “How strange. Daddy keeps popping into my head these days, and I'm not sure why. I guess I keep thinking he never had anything like this, you know. Just that same old house, pretty much those same rooms from start to finish. I wish him and Mother had settled somewhere else. It might've been a lot better for them, if they'd had something like this to look forward to. I think Daddy would've appreciated the desert, don't you think?”

“Probably,” Hollis said, the cherry-oil scent filling the space between them, his deceased father-in-law then appearing in a haze of cigarette smoke (Marlboro fuming at the man's chapped lips, crossword puzzle book folded across the lap of faded jeans). “Can't see why ol’ T.J. wouldn't.”

And Hollis knew that Debra, too, was remembering the man exactly as he was envisioning him — alone in the living room of a West Texas farmhouse, sitting upright on the right end of the couch, empty Lone Star cans by his slipper-covered feet, a cluttered TV tray before him, the Magnavox flickering several feet away with the volume set low. The No. 2 pencil held by his liver-spotted hand slowly deciphered the puzzle — jotting an answer, or erasing a wrongly chosen word — but presently the pencil stopped moving and the man's head slumped forward, eyes shutting while a cigarette continued to be savored, his thoughts propelling him elsewhere for a little while; then her father shuddered once and coughed, startling himself. Raising his head and eyelids, exhaling more grayish vapor, he returned from whatever daydreams were just experienced to the stagnant room where his body resided, the pencil soon resuming its methodical work.

12

At the outset of their first proper meeting, Hollis had readily perceived his future father-in-law as a recondite, intractable soul. Just prior to being introduced in the large backyard of Debra's family farm — an isolated homestead named What Rocks, buffered by thirty acres of land, surrounded by cotton fields and, beyond, the limitless sweep of West Texas plains — he watched the man loitering among brittle, yellow grass. Not wearing any pants but clad with a plaid bathrobe which didn't fully conceal a white undershirt, black dress socks, and red slippers, Debra's father watered a lone mesquite from a green hose which snaked through the grass to where he was standing and had been lifted up between his pale, hairless legs, hoisting the rear hem of the bathrobe; the tree in front of him was gray and looked barren save for a number of empty Dr Pepper bottles someone had slipped over branch ends (the durable bottles often set in motion by the fast winds coming off the plains, clanking hard against one another at times like a primitive wind chime — yet never shattering).

“Nobody around here calls me sir anymore,” the man would soon tell Hollis, crimping the hose while extending his free hand. “Mostly they call me T.J., so you call me T.J., all right?” And that brief overture revealed more than Hollis had expected: for the words were flavored with midday alcohol and stale tobacco, spoken lazily by a mild-mannered, clean-shaven face harboring an unkempt head of thinning brown hair; the surprising firmness of the simultaneous handshake had loosened the man's robe, displaying the inelegance of a lean body impregnated by a hefty beer gut and the garden hose pressed against the crotch of baby-blue boxer shorts.

“Pleased to know you, T.J. — ”

“Said you're Hollis then?”

“Yes, Hollis — Hollis Adams.”

Nodding slightly, and with a degree of wryness, T.J. said, “Well, that's fine — nice making your acquaintance, Hollis — Hollis Adams,” resuming his watering, showing no concern that his bathrobe had now completely unfastened.

In truth, not everyone had called him T.J.; to his two daughters he would forever be Daddy, to his wife, Ida, he was Father (she was Mother to him), while others knew him redundantly as Junior Jr.: the enterprising son and heir apparent of Junior, a rancher who had inherited his own father's thriving cattle ranch — more than eight hundred head of cattle by 1926, about twelve hundred head by 1929 — until the black blizzards of the dust bowl years rained long-term ecological and social devastation on the Panhandle, that protracted drought abetting the near-simultaneous collapse of the American economy. When, finally, there was no more feed for the starving cattle, no more grazing found on the dirt-swallowed prairie, Junior reluctantly sold his entire herd to the government slaughter program, taking $15 per head for young cows, $10 per head for old cows. Thereafter, he paid all his ranch hands and employees a decent parting wage, temporarily closing shop — he assured them — in full expectation of better days on the horizon. Still, the dusters continued rolling across the plains, along with countless bankruptcies and foreclosures; fearing he could lose everything, Junior divided the ranch into nine parcels, selling most of his property at a loss while keeping thirty acres and the stately Victorian family home T.J.'s grandfather had had built. But that sacrifice didn't prevent him from cursing such bad fortune, from assailing the sandstorm consuming his diminished land — bounding outside as his wife and son sat mystified at the dinner table, shouting obscenities in the midst of the blinding abrasive swirl — and, overcome by hopelessness, dropping on his knees while pressing the barrel of a Colt revolver against his jawbone; the resounding crack-shot then echoed back from where he had come, surpassing the wind's low hum, signaling his departure to the grit-tainted rooms and hallways of a lonesome, darkened house which hadn't been graced with sunlight or sky for nearly a week.

But in its heyday, the huge, neglected three-story house — erected on a grassy hill overlooking the plains, a crumbling monument to the decorous age of cattle barons — and its run-down bunkhouses had provided shelter for more than thirty people, although by the time Hollis arrived there in early 1951, the sole occupants of What Rocks were T.J. and his family (the individualistic foursome having plenty of space in which to carve out their own territory, navigating around one another with a curious mixture of intimacy and disregard). Adopting Queen Anne styling — the exterior consisting of brick, sandstone, and marble, the interior fashioned with mahogany and oak mantels, coffered ceilings, cornices, and parquet floors — the house was already a grand anachronism when compared to the newer, efficiently sized homes springing up in nearby towns and distant cities. As such, at least half of the interior wasn't utilized — the doors of some rooms kept shut year-round, several passageways dulled by unbroken, thickening dust layers. Behind a given entrance could be a gloomy, musty, vacant bedroom which needed mousetraps and a fresh coat of paint, and yet the adjacent living quarters might be bright, clean, furnished, with the wood floors shining.

Eventually, as both daughters married and moved away, less than a third of the What Rocks house became used (most of the ground floor, a bathroom on the second floor). While Ida maintained a regular workweek at the county courthouse, T.J. found it harder and harder to venture past the gates of the property, shunning the weekly domino games he had once enjoyed in town, arranging front-door delivery for his beer, gin, cigarettes, cough drops, crossword puzzle books. Subsequently, he was no longer encountered anywhere, not appearing at Ida's side when she repeatedly won elections as county treasurer, or attending the funeral services for departed friends. Some of those who had known him throughout the years began discussing T.J. discreetly, exaggerating him in a manner which made children wary of the imposing residence outside of town, the eerie hilltop house where the human spook named Junior Jr. crept at night. He would, in fact, creep out the remainder of his life inside the vacuous home, growing old faster, it seemed, than his peers, sometimes mumbling continually but addressing no one — often crossing from one room into the next with eyelids half open, as if he were trapped within a dream he couldn't escape.

Yet decades before T.J. died, Hollis had recognized something of himself in his reclusive father-in-law, had, in his own way, experienced similar lapses which likely summoned a disparate mix of mental imagery: the vast cotton fields T.J. had helped farm since the dusters subsided and the maze of two-lane backroads running for hundreds of miles through endless, un-ambivalent prairie — interwoven with lush, dense tropical islands abruptly seared black and left smoldering by the contrivances of warfare; the inability to reconcile such polarized worlds had irrevocably shaped him, Hollis was positive. But only after T.J.'s passing did Debra, too, begin to contemplate that lurking disparity, suspecting then that his visions must have gradually consumed him like an incurable malady while, at the same time, he had quietly resisted them without much success. So, in hindsight, she concluded he had started drinking to moor himself to the present — among the clutter of the living room, on the couch, with the TV rarely turned off — doing so to lose consciousness of the widespread battles which had urged him from his small town, enticing him overseas with the kind of heroic possibilities which could rouse those who truly longed for peace: your country needs you, the posters on Main Street had importuned; and T.J. answered the call, leaving his young wife and daughters behind, going westward in his Rambler, sporting new blue jeans and shined leather boots, inhaling exhaust and cigarette smoke as the flatlands stretched out ahead and ultimately guided him to the ocean.

As the Second World War approached its atomic conclusion and T.J. returned to What Rocks upon receiving the Purple Heart (a bullet having torn away the top joint of his right thumb, a minor injury in light of the graver wounds sustained by many he had served with), his earlier borderline alcoholism soon became a full-time vocation. Yet he pretty much limited his drinking to the living-room couch, the TV tray functioning like a desk and holding the few items he required. On occasion Hollis had drank beside him there — the two men sucking cough drops, sipping from Lone Star cans — but while both were veterans, the fifteen years between them, as well as T.J.'s uneasiness with small talk, made any casual rapport difficult. Still, Hollis had wanted to somehow engage his father-in-law like a confidant, to ask, “Just how awful was it over there? Was it as terrible for you as it was for me?”

Except they never would speak of their wartime experiences, would never utter more than what was required in the moment — the television usually prompting their unsustained remarks, laughs, nods of agreement, or halfhearted cheers. Nothing stirred up the man's ire. Nothing provoked debate or notable commentary. The closest they ever came to sharing an insightful exchange occurred while watching a network documentary about Martin Luther King Jr., the black-and-white program flickering through a bluish, fuzzy glow. “You know, King was an amazing man,” Hollis had remarked at the start of a commercial break, attempting to gain his father-in-law's perspective.

“Yep,” T.J. replied without hesitation, eyes fixed on the screen. He took a thoughtful drink from his beer can, then added: “There's one nigger who had something going for him.”

All the same, Hollis — like Debra — had viewed him as a tolerant man, not as someone inclined toward hatred; T.J.'s head had often shook at what the nightly news reported — the Tet offensive, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — resigned sighs escaping like a kettle's first shuddering gasp. Before secluding himself at the big house, he frequently drove down to Nigger Town, playing Chicken Foot well past midnight, nursing gin and orange juice with grizzled black men who were fated to pause in front of his unsealed coffin (put to rest late one March, months after his failing liver had become a pitiful filter, his dribbling urine turning redder than wine). When seeing him inside the casket — rosacea-tainted skin retouched by the embalmer's garish palette, eyes now permanently shut, arms placed at his sides, wearing a brown polyester dress suit — it was impossible to glimpse a handsome sailor upon that emaciated, inanimate form. During the war, however, he was an attractive man in uniform, bearing a superficial resemblance to Tyrone Power — although his luck wasn't as good as his looks: separated from his naval unit while fighting the Japanese on the island of Tinian, forced to take refuge with frontline marines, witnessing innumerable variations of death in the southwest Pacific which, later on, he avoided talking about, hoping instead to dismiss it all from his mind even as he never could. Those final weeks of his life unfolded at the V.A. hospital in Amarillo, where — after seeing a news report about HIV-tainted blood reserves — T.J. refused any transfusions out of fear he might contract AIDS, pleading instead for cigarettes while remaining oblivious to the fact that he was already a dying man.

Shortly following his passing, Hollis and Debra assumed the chores Ida didn't have the will to perform, entering the guest bedroom where T.J. had slept alone (an untidy sanctuary near the living room, down the hallway and, seemingly, a long distance from the much larger bedroom he ‘d previously shared with his wife). On a brisk spring afternoon, they packed his belongings, dusted the furniture, polished the floor, washed and folded the linen. Then they tackled his mothball-steeped closet, sorting through clothing — what to keep or throw away, what to donate — climbing atop a stool in order to retrieve cardboard boxes stored well beyond their reach. One box held homemade fishing tackles, one was stuffed with issues of Life. Another box contained hundreds of photographs and negatives, most bound by rubber bands yet given a rough chronology; there were various shots of T.J. as a ranch kid, as a high-school quarterback, as a farmer, as a smirking entrepreneur in a community not yet made anxious by combat reports (sharply dressed outside his Ford dealership, his gas station, his Bobcat Bite diner — the businesses he divested himself of at the end of the war); portraits of him wearing his navy attire, the spotless uniform appearing as white and smooth as his skin; images of him at a port tavern, hoisting a beer bottle, laughing.

And there, finally, there: her father huddled with tougher-looking men — marines — on a beach somewhere, crouching together, posing like a football team above the opposing dead. What breathless shock seized Debra then, as if she'd stumbled into frigid water but was unable to cry out, when contemplating a Japanese soldier's severed head clutched by her own father's hand, a hand which had held her hands and had stroked her hair; the boyish soldier's face was savaged on the left side, a rent eyelid hanging over a hollow Asian socket, the black hair coiled around the same fingers which had gently patted her shoulders. “This didn't happen,” she said, abruptly tearing the picture in half. “We didn't see this.” How could Hollis have told her such human desecration was commonplace for the victors of battle — that he, too, had also stood above the fallen, his rifle aimed toward the lifeless? Instead, he kept quiet as the picture was torn again and again — the bits fluttering, sprinkling about the floor. Better, then, for her to collect the pieces without hesitation, depositing them in the trash — better returning that particular box to the highest closet shelf, shutting the door, and not dwelling anymore on what she couldn't fathom. “We didn't see that,” she repeated, and, as her father had also done, never spoke of it further.

But while Debra refrained from disagreeing with her mother's or younger sister's postmortem resentment concerning T.J.'s alcoholism, in time she concluded that it was her father's right to have anesthetized those assaulting memories; he earned the privilege, and none of them should have expressed reproof for his indolent excursions out of the living room — bare feet shuffling along the floorboards, taking slow, deliberate steps toward the kitchen, going to where another cold Lone Star could be fetched. In hindsight, she wished she had shown deference as he had ambled past her like a purposeful sleepwalker, understanding him as one in need of forgetting so thoroughly he'd rather drink himself to death than remember. Even so, she ‘d always loved him very much — she whispered this to herself at his funeral and knew it was true. She had grown into an adult alongside his calm intemperance, had gone from his little girl to Hollis's wife while he inhabited the sagging couch; she had accepted his vague presence since childhood, had maybe sensed his days melding into the manifold of dreams — where his decades of casual dying, to her now, somehow felt like a cloud's broad shadow winding across an unbearable terrain, dissipating by degrees until at long last it was nothing more.

Debra was next to him, propped up in bed, as Hollis lay there with his hands folded behind his neck. Her eyes were blankly staring forward, the bottle of cherry oil held below her nostrils. He was looking at the yellow ceiling, squinting, while discerning something else altogether: that big hilltop house on the West Texas plains — an ominous, creaking silhouette rising high beneath moonlight, a black hole shaken by itinerant winds, doors and windows boarded, panes shattered — abandoned and, at last, truly haunted since Ida had died, his mother-in-law succumbing to pneumonia some ten years ago.

“Come to think of it,” he said, turning his head to her, “I'm not so sure your dad would've liked Nine Springs. I mean, I suspect he wasn't meant to leave Texas, don't you?”

Debra glanced at him with an expression of such melancholy on her tired face that Hollis thought tears were imminent, but she was only readying herself for a yawn. “Who can really say,” she said, her mouth gaping. “You could be right, I guess.”

“Oh, what do I know anyway. It isn't like I think about him all that often these days.”

Hollis had never imagined he would find himself off in an exclusive desert community recalling the life of his late father-in-law, or remembering the solitary Victorian house which had remained standing after the majority of its former residents were deceased. Yet whenever pondering his own life, however briefly, he had assumed his demise would come well ahead of Debra's end — although he hadn't given much thought to how she would survive without him. There were, of course, stock investments, his life insurance, and their considerable savings. The vague supposition lurking somewhere deep in his mind was that she would be able to take care of herself, just like her widowed mother did following T.J.'s passing. In any case, it seemed, for him, the natural order of things: wives rarely preceded their husbands to the cemetery. His mother, too, had buried two husbands by her seventy-third birthday, spending her final years in a Critchfield retirement home while keeping herself busy with bingo and origami. And where Debra had grown up, the men were always inclined to go before-hand — from drinking, heart failure, mental decline, hard living — and, existing beyond their spouses, the widows banded together, becoming attentive to their friendships and Jesus. Rugged cowboys and stoic farmers aside, West Texas was, in truth, a land governed by strong, independent women. But then again, he ‘d reminded himself, ovarian cancer wasn't part of Debra's gene pool; her disease was a fluke, the sole exception to the rule, and he couldn't have foreseen or ever conceded the possibility that he might now outlive her.

She tightened the cherry oil's lid, setting the bottle on the bedside table, and, without hesitation, picked a different aromatherapy bottle, shaking it for a few seconds before unscrewing the top. Then, as she began inhaling from the bottle, it was sleep-improving lavender replacing the lingering scent of cherry. “What about Bill?” she suddenly asked, between sniffs.

Hollis rested his right hand against his forehead. “Who?” he said, glancing furtively at her.

“Bill McCreedy. Do you think about him at all anymore?”

For a time nothing was said. Debra kept inhaling and exhaling, and he stared at her, taken aback by the question. His expression was so unlike his usual attempts to force a smile that he seemed like a separate person. “I don't know,” he said, his voice almost a gasp. “I don't.”

“You don't know? Really?”

He nodded, a look of utter consternation on his face: “I suppose I think of him. What about you?”

“Not so often,” she answered, frankly. “Only sometimes.”

“Me, too,” he lied. “Not so often.”

And that was that. Debra put her hand to her mouth and yawned once more. Presently the room would fall dark — the pillows adjusted, the lavender scent then diminishing with the increasing tenor of Debra's snoring, the sheets bunched around her shoulders. But sleep would elude Hollis for a while. Instead, he tried to picture what it was Debra saw whenever her memory invoked McCreedy — but, despite his best efforts, little was revealed to him. How many years had it been — he found himself wondering — since they had last spoke of Creed? Ten, fifteen years? And why were the long dead recurring to her now? Gripped with anxiety, Hollis gazed into the pitch of the room until the darkness surrounding him made his body shudder and eyes close. A distant scent came to him there, a pleasant mingling of odors which weren't within reach or distilled in bedside bottles of oil — apples and pears and muddy earth and tall, fragrant reeds, transporting him elsewhere, sending him far from where he lay with his wife; and, too, while aware of her sonorous breathing, he was observing a broad river coursing near groves of apple and pear trees. He was, in those tugging moments just prior to sleep, somewhere else — somewhere he had never wanted to visit again, a valley where the rushing, shifting water now symbolized only loss and the transience of living.

13

There was, on that quiet August night, no light save for what came from the stars above, or from the sporadic bursting of flares discharged into the sky. The moon didn't rise over the craggy Sobaek Mountains to cast its reflective glimmer across the brown waters of the Naktong River. Yet crickets were heard among the meadows and reeds, and the river made a low, continuous murmur as it moved between fruit groves, elevated pastures, crooked hillsides (winding toward the sea, cutting a two-hundred-foot-wide scar which halved South Korea into eastern and western portions). In a nearby apple orchard, the rows of shadowy trees were — when viewed at the magic hour of dusk — like a postcard image from home, a welcome sight for American soldiers who had grown sick of seeing rice paddy after rice paddy after rice paddy.

Earlier Hollis had wandered beyond the orchard and away from the two-man listening post he was supposed to share with Bill McCreedy, holding his M1 in front of him while patrolling the eastern shore. He continued down a narrow dirt path until arriving at the high grass and tall reeds which grew abundantly by the water's edge — then he pushed inside the dense overgrowth, his encroachment silencing the crickets around him. A few feet past the screen of reeds the currents burbled and the other side of the river appeared blacker than the heavens. He crouched, letting the overgrowth envelop him. As the crickets resumed trilling, he kept his body still while slowly pivoting his head this way and that, resisting any urge to stand up, or urinate, or stretch his arms. Sweat began dripping from his helmet, wetting his ears and eyes and mouth, tasted by his tongue. Shortly he felt tired, and, eventually, very tired. However, he managed to stay awake and didn't move himself an inch, listening for the slightest alteration of sound, blindly peering out — at the path which had brought him there, at the field of rice stalks behind him, mostly in the direction of the terrain across the river — certain all the while that unseen enemy counterparts were doing the exact same thing on the western shoreline of the Naktong.

Before long Hollis knew sunlight would breach the darkness, allowing him to emerge through the reeds. He would trek back along the dirt path, regrouping with the rest of the night patrols and scouts; the weary, nervous men glancing about — the river, the paddies, the brightening hillsides — rifles gripped as they returned to the defensive line which had been dug along the Naktong's eastern banks, crawling into foxholes, briefly finding much-needed sleep beside or within the illusory tranquillity of the apple orchard. But, for now, the night remained present, and while his body was rigid — his senses on high alert — his thoughts strayed restlessly during his watch, defying what he had chosen as his own personal combat mantra: let memories fade, let instinct take over. Yet how effortless it was for a willful thought of not thinking to become deposed by more potent thoughts somehow born of themselves, flashing his mind elsewhere, manifesting recent scenes which already seemed like fragments from a previous lifetime.

Thirteen days, Hollis calculated, since they retreated from No Gun Ri in summer rain and fog, soon pursued like bandits by North Korean tanks. Thirteen days, almost fourteen, during which mortar fire struck along slippery roads, and mud guided jeeps and ambulances toward ditches; the cavalrymen fled southward on foot or in trucks, exchanging rounds with advancing enemy units, setting fire to every village or hut they happened upon, carrying the wounded and, sometimes, leaving their dead to spoil. Thirteen days of constant fear and persistent inhumanity, distinguished by hills and valleys strewn with the corpses of strangers and fellow soldiers — by vultures descending through swarms of flies to pick at rotting flesh. Only such repeated carnage could distance No Gun Ri, surpassing those who were killed beneath the bridge and temporarily absolving those who had killed them so flagrantly. And why, he wondered, should it have mattered anymore? Why did he care? For the score had been quickly settled in the duration of thirteen miserable days, thirteen uneasy nights.

But on this peaceful, moonless night nothing hinted at what the troops had endured to reach the provisional safety of the Naktong, having crossed the river more than a week ago, demoralized and fatigued — machine gunners, riflemen, recoilless riflemen, mortarmen, scouts, clerks — digging in for the final battle which was drawing closer by the hour. There would be no more pulling back in daylight, no more cowering behind the veil of nightfall while flares erupted in the skies like meager red, white, and green fireworks, and artillery shells exploded the ground and men from out of nowhere, and the North Koreans raced after them as if they were easy game. The horrors which had recently befallen the regiment had, at some point, ceased to unnerve Hollis; betraying a casualness now and a detachment whenever stepping through the configurations of mortally wounded, he scarcely noticed the irretrievable forms marking the earth. His long legs maneuvered forward without reservation; his once darting, blinking eyes had turned into a squinting, encompassing gaze — as if he had been fighting in Korea for years instead of weeks. Then, for Hollis, the greatest horror of all was how mundane death ultimately began to feel — becoming an almost non-event, a commonplace occurrence which was less unique than simply picking apples off an apple tree.

He was not alone in this regard. Few, if any, among the survivors had made it to the Naktong lacking a hard, remorseless thousand-mile stare. Each soldier had witnessed his share of the unimaginable, each man contained a mental catalog of both heroic and repugnant deeds. They had all been left frozen at the sight of familiar faces torn apart, riflemen or gunners or medics speaking aloud and then, a second later, having no head or chest or recognizable shape. But they had also heard tales of exceptional bravery: the three F Company men who had taken cover on a railroad embankment, using four rocket shells and a single bazooka to destroy a North Korean tank — or the solitary H Company commander who, following the annihilation of his platoon, stayed put under fire and single-handedly phoned in the artillery coordinates of approaching tanks.

Yet valiant and nightmarish acts were often the same. When Private Mark Neiman was fatally wounded by an incoming mortar round but continued writhing hopelessly in shock — fingers trembling toward the mangled, grisly stumps where legs had been — it was McCreedy who ran to him and eliminated the private's agony, doing what a nearby officer couldn't bring himself to do, mercifully pressing his rifle barrel against Neiman's forehead, squeezing the trigger. Afterward, McCreedy frowned at the private, as if annoyed by him. He straddled Neiman's remains, stooping to claim a dog tag before feeling inside pockets containing no more than half a pack of cigarettes and matches. While another mortar round sent men scrambling, McCreedy finished lighting up one of Neiman's cigarettes, savoring it for himself. Unharmed by the ensuing explosion — the mortar having overshot its intended targets, striking a rice field to their rear — he slowly walked away, tapping the ground with the butt of his rifle as he went. “Smokes left for the still breathing,” would then become his maxim, although only he was willing to risk life or limb to pat down bloody uniforms, procuring cigarettes from just-killed comrades: those kids who had never once expected the sudden civil war which would soon end their lives, or who had never really known anything about the divided country where their limp, ragged bodies would be lifted onto stretchers and shipped home in coffins.

Like the rest, Hollis had known little concerning the history of Korea and its people, yet in spite of that, he believed he understood the fiber of the country too well. It was, to him, an ambiguous land, a contrary region which accommodated the absurdities of war. Nowhere else could he imagine birthday gifts being delivered by the army postal service to besieged foxholes — chocolate cakes with cherries, handmade cards, corn whiskey masked by mason jars which also contained preserved fruits, all sent from the States, somehow arriving even when needed supplies couldn't reach the front — or white-garbed refugees rushing toward the Americans who were there to help them and, depending on the moment, either would be allowed safe passage or get gunned down. So what was then gleaned seemed nonsensical, devoid of clear reason other than a kind of tactical logic he didn't always comprehend.

But the intensely surreal two weeks at war did teach him an undeniable lesson regarding the spurious nature of first impressions: the serenest-looking valley or flower-rich hillside might possibly be the most dangerous area to cross through, harboring enemy snipers or probes. And, too, he had caught the distant shrill of birds, had angled his gaze upward, spotting four sparrow hawks gliding far above him which, upon second glance, had transformed into air force jets flying northwest on a four-plane mission. He had loitered along the edge of a grassy field at dawn, surveying endless clumps of clothing and discarded belongings left behind by refugees, and with morning's expanding sunlight was amazed when the clothing began shuddering to life — the disheartened men and women, the old people, the hungry children gradually rising from the thick grass like phantoms, here and there, before resuming the southward journey as a mass procession of white.

That lesson, however, had gone unrealized for many refugees, the unfortunate ones who — rather than submit to a violent, opposing army of their own kind — perished while counting on the benevolence of their mercurial American protectors. Had the moon graced the sky, Hollis could have stared downstream from where he hid, making out the contorted outlines of girders, a heap of mangled steel which had formed a bridge over the river but was destroyed after the U.S. Army had reached the Naktong's eastern shore, blown up with charges in order to prevent the North Korean troops from coming across; in an instant the blasts had jolted the bridge, flipping it sideways, twisting girders and propelling lengths of steel through the air. Now the skeletal ruins littered the banks yet bore no traces of the human toll accompanying its destruction — the refugees who had packed the bridge from one end to the other, unaware of the charges set on the supports and roadway, never expecting the deafening explosions which would then swallow their bodies and oxen and luggage, hurling them all to the passive waters below. A bridge, after all, was supposed to be a bridge.

Let memories fade, let instinct take over.

Finally, a subtle gradation of hues began separating the eastern mountains from the night, but it would be a while yet until Hollis could leave his position. Concealed among the reeds and near the rice stalks, conscious of every flutter of movement, he was well attuned to his surroundings — the varying tempo of the crickets, the steady flow of the river, the natural plops and gurgles and crunches around him — expecting the sudden, inevitable emergence of North Korean infiltrators: for the recent dry spell had lowered the Naktong by several feet, creating shallow places where the enemy might wade safely through the water. Nevertheless, since they had dug in along the eastern shore, the fighting had settled into a lull, disrupted periodically by skirmishes from the western side of the river. And with the daily rattle of cicadas, the restless downtime meant letters could be written and received, and home could be missed again (the girlfriends, the parents, the friends, and the food, especially the food).

But for Hollis there wasn't anything back home he recalled fondly or found himself missing. His father was deceased. His mother was content with her new husband; she had no idea he was in the army, let alone fighting the North Koreans, although he believed he should inform her just so the news of his conceivable death wouldn't be of such a great shock. While others wrote loved ones, he, too, had tried writing his mother a letter — ex-cept he didn't know how to begin or what to tell her. Pages were torn, crumpled up. In frustration he drew pictures, sketching the apple orchard, the mountain ridges, the rice stalks. At times he eavesdropped on the conversations of those sitting nearby, taking note of familiar sayings which were uttered like grand epiphanies, jotting them down instead of writing his mother, adding a few lines he had heard or read elsewhere: In God we trust, time flies, rest in peace, peace be with you, peace on earth, good will toward men, one for all and all for one, home sweet home, God bless our home, don't tread on me, give me liberty or give me death, all or nothing, you can't take it with you, all men are created equal, for God and country, what's worth doing is worth doing well, don't give up the ship, don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes, remember the Alamo, remember the Maine, remember Pearl Harbor, our Country right or wrong, hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, put your trust in God and keep your powder dry, abandon hope all ye who enter here, to err is human to forgive divine, make hay while the sun shines, Pike's Peak or bust, e pluribus unum, amen.

While out on patrol or manning a listening post, Hollis sometimes whispered the lines to himself, memorizing the expressions like a prayer. And although the Naktong front was exposed, he always felt a real sense of security after reciting the litany, using it for his own charm — the way others wore crosses around necks, or kept photographs of mothers and girlfriends, or carried lucky pennies in pockets. In fact, nothing usually happened when he uttered the words — no mortar shells came his way, no one came under fire, and the war seemed to be somewhere else. Still, casualties happened, some men were killed or wounded in the brief exchanges across the river, but otherwise the lull prevailed without a major attack. In midday heat the men found shade, relaxing together throughout the uneasy afternoons, and prior to sundown there were card games and long conversations which invariably ran the gamut from God to the Stars and Stripes pinup of August's Miss Morale.

It was during the afternoon card games that McCreedy routinely brought up sex, using any unrelated topic or offhand comment as a segue for what was a group preoccupation. What the military needed to do, McCreedy once suggested, was enlist a unit of Tokyo mama-sans, putting them on active duty inside the foxholes, a little something what'd help release the tension of combat. The men laughed, and one said, “I'd murder every single son bitch here for a lick of poontang,” and somebody else chimed in, saying, “Damn, man, you know it's been too long when the mud starts looking good, know what I mean?” Cards were dealt, bets made, cigarettes bartered. The topic changed in due course, evolving from pussy to sports cars, from sports cars to football — then, invariably, circling back to sex again. The cards were shuffled.

And through the laughter and small talk, it was McCreedy's stealthy eyes which landed on Hollis (never sitting with the group, always close by yet never joining the conversation), glaring at him coldly while talking or cracking jokes, letting him know that he wasn't really one of them; and Hollis didn't flinch, didn't look down but rather met the stare and held it, as if to say: I've already seen too much, you don't impress me anymore. Since No Gun Ri they had avoided each other's company or conversation, and since Schubert was killed McCreedy's gaze had turned toward Hollis, perhaps, at first, imploring his friendship and then, perhaps, admonishing the indifference he was sensing while also dissembling an overall amiability which didn't exist in the depths of him. But when assigned to a two-man listening post, whatever mutual dislike was quietly fostered could no longer be kept at a respectable distance.

Located several yards from the apple orchard, adjacent to a rice paddy, the listening post was built entirely of sandbags — with a large, dying pine tree used for the rear barrier, the base of its trunk reinforced by more sandbags. Sequestered in the cramped space for three nights, the two men hardly spoke, both keeping silent while monitoring the river. Then last evening, having paused to urinate, Hollis arrived at the listening post following McCreedy, and discovered him sitting there — a hand on his rifle, a hand on the sound-power phone — using a sandbag for a cushion. “What, you're still alive?” McCreedy said, not looking too pleased.

“Sorry,” answered Hollis, stepping over his boots.

“Ain't nothing to be sorry about,” he said, with a sardonic smile. “Anyhow, you might as well get in on the bet some of us got running. I'm wagering my tinned biscuits that tomorrow night the gooks will come across the river for us. Tyler and Sims are betting their chocolate bars it's tonight, and ol’ Parsons has put his toilet paper on the line that we'll get evacuated before the gooks can start anything serious. What you say, you in?”

“I'll think about it.”

“Don't think too long. Clock's ticking.”

Hollis looked out at the wild grass and reeds. His stare crossed the river; he scanned the Naktong's western side, letting his gaze travel the shoreline. Green strands of waterweed rippled off the banks like ribbons, waving along the brown undulating surface. Soon McCreedy had risen, propping himself next to Hollis, gazing beyond the sandbags, bitterly saying, “Damn river has gone down again. Wonder how shallow the stupid thing is by now.”

“Can't say for certain,” said Hollis, “but it's pretty shallow. On this side the water is probably waist high, but on the other side I've heard it's deeper.”

McCreedy sighed needlessly as Hollis spoke, then responded with: “Sure, sure, you're a real reliable source of information, aren't you? I suppose you've waded that river dozens of times yourself, you fuckin’ pecker-wood.”

Even after everything they had been through at the front — when cynicism, sarcasm, and profanity had flavored the collective tongue — Hollis was taken aback by the harshness of McCreedy's words. He kept silent for a few seconds, still staring ahead before glancing at the smirking, brutish face hovering beside him, saying, “That's what I heard, all right? I couldn't care less if you believe it or not.” Just then he wanted to be anywhere else but near McCreedy. “Honestly, I really don't give a damn!” Without thinking, he turned around, moving unsteadily to leave the post. Except his exit wasn't allowed, at least not yet: for he was promptly grabbed from behind and, loosing hold of his rifle, thrown sideways against the sandbags — where McCreedy managed, while wearing the same smirk, to deftly pin his shoulders back with clenching fingers and an arm bracing his chest. “Let go,” was all Hollis could muster, his heart racing, his body incapable of resisting the weight pushing into him. “You'd better let go.”

McCreedy sighed a couple of times, deeply, finally saying, “You're one queer customer, you know it?” Hollis blinked impassively, barely suppressing the fear and anger he was feeling, and lowered his gaze. “How come you don't like me, huh?” The smirk became a straight, tapering line; he brought a hand under Hollis's chin and forced his head up until they were eye to eye: “I thought we was buddies, right? What'd Creed ever do to you?”

Then, for once, Hollis registered something like hurt in McCreedy's voice, a perplexed tone betraying vulnerability. But there was nothing he wished to explain, nor had he completely grasped his inherent aversion for McCreedy. He thought: You expect me to laugh at your dumb jokes when I don't want to laugh. You want me to agree with you when I don't agree with you. You decided I was your friend when I didn't want to know you. I always hear you talking, and you talk too loud and too damn much. I've seen the things you've done. You put pennies on the dead. You have no shame or regrets about anything, and I just don't like you. You're not worth fighting for. “What the hell difference does it make?” he said, shaking himself free at the very moment McCreedy eased the bracing arm off of him. “Let go of me!”

“Suit yourself,” said McCreedy, drumming fingertips on Hollis's neck, “ ‘cept I won't be watching out for you once the shit hits the fan, okay?” Then, patting the fingers to the stuffed breast pocket of Hollis's shirt, he added: “Anyway, if you're deserting me here, I'd best get a little compensation, otherwise I'll have to report you, and we don't want that, do we?” He gave Hollis a sly wink, extracting a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket and, the smirk reemerging, transferred it to his own shirt pocket. “I guess we're almost even — ”

By then Hollis was sweating heavily, his skin glistening in the twilight. Slipping around McCreedy, he stooped for his rifle, taking it with a trembling hand, and kept going, aware of the hard stare trailing him. At last escaping the listening post, he felt his hot heart pumping underneath the fatigues — as if his chest had absorbed some of the sweltering, radiant heat of the bright summer day and was releasing it back into the night. He continued along a narrow dirt path — away from the listening post, beyond the orchard — until arriving at the high grass and tall reeds which now camouflaged him. Once cloaked at the river's edge, he grew mad at himself for having been bullied so easily, for not standing his ground any better than he had done. Thereafter, he entertained fantasies of killing McCreedy, of lobbing a grenade at the listening post or demanding his cigarettes be returned before opening fire. But the long night eventually mellowed his anger, subduing it with immediate concerns: the possibility of enemy attack, his own survival.

How baffling, Hollis later considered, that that brief confrontation at the listening post had upset him more than the grand-scale violence and ruin he had witnessed since No Gun Ri. How vexing that such an insignificant yet personal affront could outrage him more than the sight of an infant being shot in its mother's arm, or of a fellow Garryowen blown apart. Except, he reminded himself, nothing made much sense there. Everything was misplaced, thrown out of kilter. Nothing there was exactly as it should be — and he had ended up in the middle of it, cast alone among crickets, mindful of the river and the nearby listening post he could no longer see.

The dawn preamble had commenced fading the stars, and at first light, faint yellow and blue, gave vague form to the reeds and grass, the shorelines and trees. Hollis inhaled the air, which felt cooler and smelled sweeter than it had during the interminable night. Already the crickets were lessening their volume, the chirps punctuated by longer and longer intervals of silence; soon the morning became extremely calm — the water flowed almost noiselessly, the whir of insects and the occasional rustle of nocturnal creatures had ceased — although the environment alongside the river was still dangerous, more so now with sunrise. The canopy of darkness turned luminous, and overhead the cloudless, transparent sky was tinged with color. Then glowing cloud billows began swirling up behind the mountain ranges, and the sloping hillsides were becoming green and golden.

Hollis brushed aside the reeds in front of his face, peering cautiously round him. But it wasn't the western shore ultimately drawing his attention, nor that of a solitary crow gliding downward to the rice paddy, releasing a caw which was echoed by something else unseen; rather, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, just up the trail from where he had come last night. Turning his head, he let the reeds sway back into place, adjusting his stare with the wavering of stems.

The listening post was now visible — some twenty yards away, much closer than Hollis had estimated — and McCreedy had emerged past its sandbags and dirt, M1 in hand, scrutinizing the area while half circling the dying pine tree, putting the grayish trunk between his body and the Naktong, shielding himself there. Upon leaning the rifle against the tree, McCreedy undid his pants, tugging his penis out through the fly, and, as the sun angled a ray within inches of his boots, started urinating on the ground, exposing himself in the way he had once warned Schubert never to do (yet he was nothing if not cavalier regarding his own safety, unflinching in the belief that the pennies in his pockets would keep him secure). When finished, he didn't fasten his pants, but instead left his dribbling penis open to view while fishing a cigarette from a pocket, eyes darting here and there, careful not to let his guard lapse and, perhaps, also searching for the whereabouts of Hollis. Behind him sunlight crept along the river, stunning the banks.

Then with McCreedy's exhalation of smoke, the previous evening's anger and humiliation stirred inside Hollis like bile. No damn good, he thought. Worthless. Lifting the semiautomatic, easing the barrel through the reeds, he fixed the sights — the smoldering cigarette, the head in profile, the muscular neck — taking careful aim: McCreedy's right hand slid into his fly, bringing his penis with it, doing so while lowering himself, back pressed against the tree, legs set akimbo; puffing on the cigarette, the heedful gaze now cast toward the crotch of his uniform, McCreedy's right hand squirmed around within the pants, making a wrenching motion which bulged and gyrated beneath the fabric. Hollis, too, suddenly felt an unexpected charge of arousal mixing incongruously with his desire for revenge, the extreme sensation becoming heightened with the spasmodic jolting of McCreedy's boots, the acceleration of motion underneath the uniform — even while he steadied the rifle, finding McCreedy weaker and more assailable than he had ever seen him previously. You'd never know what hit you, he told himself. You'd be gone like that.

And as if it had been impelled from his own mind, a single shot burst forward, terminating the morning calm and stunning the hearing in Hollis's left ear; then, simultaneously, down the length of the rifle he saw McCreedy transfigured into the autonomous, undeniable world of the dead: the round struck him at the neck, ripping apart a jugular vein — splitting bark after passing through him, cracking the trunk of the pine tree — and briefly jettisoned blood up and out like a geyser, giving the illusion of McCreedy's head having just exploded, accompanied by a fine red mist which shimmered for a moment in the air before dissipating into the cascading sunlight. With his head violently jerked to one side and the neck partially severed, the weight of McCreedy's helmet pulled him over, slumping his left shoulder and torso to the ground, raising his bent right knee a few inches — his hand now motionless inside his blood-soaked pants, his boots no longer twitching with pleasure.

Indistinct voices began yelling from the apple orchard. A whistle blew on a hillside. Serves you right, Hollis might have thought, had McCreedy's impromptu demise not confounded him so, robbing his breath, making him senseless. You weren't really that special, you had it coming. But his finger hadn't been at the trigger; he hadn't fired, nor had he truly planned on vengeance: he simply wanted his cigarettes returned. In his left temple, a pulse started pounding against his brain. “In God we trust,” he whispered with the lowest of sound, regaining himself, apprehending then that the lethal shot had been discharged within feet of where he was hiding: “time flies, rest in peace, peace be with you, peace on earth.” Someone tore through the overgrowth several meters behind him, a hunched figure obscured by reeds and bolting for the shore. “Good will toward men, one for all and all for one — ”

What happened immediately thereafter would forever exist in Hollis's memory as a mostly bleared, unfocused event, meshed with sparse flashes of clarity. Without thinking twice, he scrambled from the reeds, uttering words which didn't reach the air, and, McCreedy's tilted corpse burned like an after-image, rushed along the bank, chasing a small figure in a mustard-drab uniform. His boots twisted in sand, across rocks and stones — that much he remembered — yet he couldn't recall if he had fired first, knocking the North Korean soldier to the sand, or if, in fact, the boy had tripped and, with Hollis drawing near, the M1 poised, rolled over, squeezing off a haphazard shot which still hit its intended target. Regardless, they had quickly exchanged fire, striking each other at close range: five rounds from the semiautomatic M1, a single round from a Japanese-made bolt-action rifle. And then, in what had seemed like the fleeting passage of mere seconds, it was all finished; the war had concluded for him, McCreedy, and a young North Korean whose name or short-lived history he would never know.

Subsequently, Hollis scoffed while watching cowboy movies or TV police dramas, frowning whenever a character was struck by a bullet and seized their chest, staggering dramatically, grimacing, and, all of the sudden, collapsing. His personal understanding of being shot was quite different; for he had remained standing on the bank, staring at the dying sniper who lay faceup at his feet, the Japanese-made rifle cast aside. Where did you come from? he wondered. Why didn't I hear you any earlier, or you me? The boy gasped like a stranded fish trying to breathe and oozed red foam between quivering lips and then, producing a slight gurgling noise, stopped living: the brown eyes reflected the sky; the face was round, smooth, hairless; although stained with blood, the mouth and chin were untouched; the coarse black hair was groomed, cropped short; there was a mole on the right cheek, a mole on the left earlobe; the hands were slender, the fingers long and unadorned, the fingernails dirty; the torso was a mess, the uniform oily and glistening with sanguine fluid — the five shots having struck millimeters apart, punching a fist-size hole in the narrow chest; the boy appeared younger than twenty, older than fifteen.

Fueled by adrenaline and panting hard, Hollis glanced at the Japanese rifle and noticed his left leg, saw the blood cascading from a massive gash in his fatigues, wetting everything below his knee. “Son of a bitch,” he said, his voice less enraged than irritated. “Goddamnit.” Like a waterfall, he thought. Like a crimson waterfall, pooling in the sand around his boot. But he didn't stagger about on the bank or use a hand to cover his injury, nor did he panic or feel anything other than numbness; instead, he promptly used the rifle like a crutch, pushing its butt into the ground and gripping its barrel for support as he sat himself in front of the boy, extending his sodden leg outward, waiting to be helped. Presently, he lay down on the sand, filling his view with a pure expanse of blue ether, and all at once his body grew perceptibly lighter — a point of fraction, as if an unknowable part of himself had risen up, escaping the riverside, choosing to stay in Korea even while the rest of him was bound to be rescued.

With his consciousness now ebbing, he heard a burst of machine-gun fire from the apple orchard and a single explosion somewhere else, perhaps across the river. He had the impression that major combat was resuming, although he didn't trust his ears anymore. “In God we trust,” he began again, “times flies,” but was unable to continue. Later, when he reflected on it, the conclusion of the incident seemed anticlimactic to him, because he was strangely at peace, somewhat relieved; the resentment and anger he had harbored toward McCreedy had been eradicated — and rather than transfer those emotions to the boy, it was an odd kind of gratitude he experienced instead, especially since he had survived circumstances which should have easily killed him. Then just as a wounded animal or insect might die quietly in its own environment, so had the boy. But Hollis had never belonged there, and, as such, he wouldn't allow himself to expire beside the Naktong; he wouldn't rot on the shore or get sent floating downstream: two lives may have been claimed at dawn, yet his life was about to begin anew; that was how he felt. Conceiving this to be his outcome, he closed his eyes. He heard the sound of multiple footsteps approaching, pounding the rocks and pebbles and sand — and, he knew, they were coming to save him, to carry him away from the river and, hopefully, ship him home alive.

14

When did Hollis awake again, buoyed in a sanctuary of whiteness? When did he open his eyes again, perceiving his surroundings through a drug-laced filter, believing then that everything charitable in the world — every-thing benevolent, clean, and restoring — was pure white? And how often had he woke, straining his groggy mind for answers he had already been told? No, he hadn't gone to heaven, nor was he somewhere in Korea: “I can't be dead, right?”

“Far from it, dear,” she had said, hovering above him like an angel in her spotless white attire — an indistinct navy nurse resting gloved hands upon his body. “You're at Yokosuka,” she ‘d revealed, her soft voice saturated with comfort, assurance. “You're safe now.” She had bathed him that night, dabbing and wiping his skin with a sponge. She had shaved his chin, throat, and cheeks; she had made his skin glow. With the aid of a corpsman, she had put white pajamas on him, and then she had rolled him in a wheelchair to a ward with wooden floors and white walls, bringing him to a bunk amid a row of other bunks — where wounded soldiers slept, their uniforms now pajamas. He had wanted to know her name, her full name; she had repeated it more than once — yet he had still forgotten it and her face, remembering only the white of her clothing and the soothing touch of her covered hands. After administering his painkillers and tucking him in, she had asked if he wanted anything. “Milk,” he'd heard himself say — and she had obliged, leaving him and, minutes later, returning with a tall glass of milk which grew warm on his bedside table, staying there because he had already drifted off again, falling asleep in white sheets. But what was her name? And how long — he wondered now — since he had arrived at the hospital in Japan?

His mind worked backward from that first night. He had been awake when the ambulance brought him to Naval Hospital Yokosuka, half conscious while a pair of Japanese orderlies pushed him on a gurney, sailing him down corridors which seemed endless. Sometime before that, he had stirred elsewhere — not at the naval hospital, not anywhere he had recognized — glancing around at what looked like a vision of hell, a living tableau of infirmity: a large, open ward packed with cots and men, everyone draped in brown blankets. The ward reeked of sickness, of blood and urine and human waste. A moaning, anguished cacophony of voices called for a medic, the same plea echoed from cot to cot. Then he comprehended his own pain, surging underneath the blanket that covered him, pulsing within his body like a fever. Pulling the blanket up to his chest, he saw that the left pants leg of his uniform had been cut away at the hip; the flesh between his left thigh and kneecap was bandaged thickly, a watermelon-size dressing sprouting tubes which coiled past the foot of the cot and disappeared. He tried wriggling his toes, but nothing moved. “Medic!” he shouted, the pain suddenly overtaking him. “Medic — ” and then he was gone once more.

A hand had slapped his face and he came to, his body aching horribly. “Stay awake, private,” someone was telling him. “You stay with us, all righty?” He wasn't dead; this wasn't heaven. He was being carried on a stretcher, taken up a ramp and brought inside a cargo plane, where the hold was lined with rack after rack of stretcher cases, where those who could walk — heads bandaged, arms wrapped — had to settle for benches, their shoulders pressed against one another.

“Come on, kid! Stay with us! You're doing fine!”

Someone had slapped him. There was the odor of feces.

“Oh, for Christ's sake, this one here shit his self!”

A medic put a blanket over him. His throat was dry. Where was he then? Canvas bulkheads, dark and bloodstained — racks of injured soldiers: an ambulance bouncing along a dirt roadway, jostling its occupants while heading to an aid station. He was sweating but felt cold, and he had soiled himself. With each hard bump of the ambulance, the pain shot through him, becoming so much larger and more consuming than his wound, rushing to every single nerve. Someone screamed out for morphine. Someone groaned, lowly cursing the driver. Someone grabbed his wrist, poking a needle into a vein. As the pain subsided, a warm sensation filled his extremities, relaxing him.

“He's lost a lot of blood — ”

The initial dose of morphine had worn off. He was so thirsty. Two men were transporting him on a stretcher, running across the apple orchard by the Naktong. Sunlight burned his forehead, as blinding hot as the pain which coursed in heightened, spasmodic waves. They passed a sergeant he had only spoken to a couple of times, the man's pace then quickening as he jogged alongside the stretcher for a moment, leaning a tanned, grubby face toward him, saying, “Got to hang in there, Adams. Can't go belly-up until after you get to Yokosuka. Them nurses are so damn beautiful — you'll be thanking that gook who did this to you, no kiddin’. Just hang in there — ”

And so Hollis had somehow hung in there, delivered from the waking nightmare of Korea to the bright, airy confines of a U.S. Naval Hospital which hadn't yet been given an official dedication ceremony (the public works operating on twenty-four-hour shifts, remodeling and converting additional buildings, creating further ward space for a patient census which would soon triple). In time, his mind would regain its full lucidity, his memory becoming less piecemeal. The pain medication was decreased; the pain itself still flaring up when he or a corpsman or a nurse tried lifting his bad leg. But with each nurse who stopped at his bedside — same white uniform, same accommodating manner — he attempted without success to recall which one had bathed him on that first night, had wiped his body with a sponge, scrubbing places where no woman other than his own mother had ever cleaned: Nurse McGill, Nurse Hayward, Nurse Christian, Nurse —?

Subsequently, he had been washed by corpsmen or Japanese male orderlies, yet it was the invigorating touch of that particular nurse which he longed to feel. And if recollections of McCreedy's final seconds ever flashed across his mind — or the corpse of the boy he had killed beside the Naktong — Hollis banished such images by letting better thoughts of the nurse's gloved hands preoccupy him at night, his fingertips acting as her fingertips while he slid them between his legs: the breathless, viscid aftershock of orgasm producing immediate disgust and regret, a potent kind of self-loathing which lingered through the daylight hours, often turning his face red whenever any of the nurses conversed with him, causing him to avert his gaze and, too, making it impossible to simply ask who it was that had tended him upon his arrival at Yokosuka. Instead, he said very little, appearing painfully shy, and feared that his uncontrollable blushing might actually betray the embarrassing truth behind his shame.

For a while, one day at the naval hospital was much like the next, and he had only to rest and eat and heal, his needs met by the small staff of nurses, corpsmen, and doctors who busily roamed the ward — checking wounds, emptying bedpans, offering magazines and small talk. From his bottom bunk, he watched the comings and goings, aware of the new patients helped into the double-and triple-deck bunks which had previously been unused: some had slight injuries, a little shrapnel embedded in a thigh, calf, shoulder; some had shattered jaws and cheekbones, a Penrose drain inserted at their necks, their mouths wired shut; some were the worst of the worst, having bugged out at the front, escaping combat by shooting themselves in the foot or hand; some were bandaged head to toe; some didn't have arms or legs, or legs and arms. As the main military objective of the hospital was a prompt turnaround, many of the patients would be sent back to the battlefield once their wounds had mended, but those who were the most seriously injured would also leave Yokosuka, allowing extra room for incoming patients by completing their recovery at stateside naval hospitals.

Hollis belonged to the latter category, for that single shot from a Japanese-built rifle had rendered him useless, something he finally understood at Yokosuka when the bandages were changed — the gauze unfurling down the length of his left thigh, slowly displaying the extent of his injury and its repair. What he had imagined as a dime-shaped perforation was, in fact, a seventeen-inch scar after surgery was completed, with a sizable gash indenting a portion of his thigh so deeply that it looked as if the skin had collapsed into a cavernous sinkhole of discolored flesh. At some future point, he was told by a nurse, the indention would decrease, the scar would thin out. Another forecast came from a pair of young doctors — Dr. Golding and Dr. Buchman — who sat in chairs on either side of his bunk. Both similar-behaving, deadpan-voiced men leafed through files and sheets of notes while they took turns speaking, concluding a prolonged rehabilitation was in store for him, a period in which Hollis would have to use a wheelchair, then crutches, then a cane, then — if all went well — his own two feet.

“They should have you up and walking by Thanksgiving,” Dr. Golding assured him, nodding at Dr. Buchman. “You'll be in good hands.”

“Very good hands,” Dr. Buchman concurred, nodding at Dr. Golding.

“That's right, very good hands,” Dr. Golding agreed, nodding at Hollis.

“You got lucky, private.”

“Very lucky.”

But it was a high-strung, energetic corpsman nicknamed Sparky — a third-class petty officer, a wiry reservist, a choir director back in the States, somewhat of a dandy — who let Hollis know how lucky he had really been, lucky because he hadn't lost his leg: “Take it from me, I've seen plenty of boys brought here lacking all kinds of body parts, and they were still in better shape than you are.” In fact, Sparky had taken an interest in several of the quieter patients — ”the sweet ones,” he called them — and managed to learn about their individual conditions in detail, doting on them even when the attention wasn't required or wanted, eventually gaining their trust with an overly generous dispensation of barbiturates and a relentless sense of humor. For the patients whose faces and eyes were bandaged, Sparky delighted in teasing them, joking about the only two older nurses on the ward — veterans of World War II, women who had seen their share of the wounded — commenting to the men whenever one of the gray-haired nurses walked by, saying things like, “Oh my goodness, too bad you can't see this knockout. She's a vision of perfection. She'd make Elizabeth Taylor feel like Eleanor Roosevelt.”

It was Sparky, not the doctors or nurses, who first informed Hollis about his fate prior to arriving at Yokosuka — how his left femoral artery had been severed by the bullet and was ligated by doctors in Korea, his left foot having become cold and pale and lacking a detectable pulse, the drop of capillary circulation indicated by a delayed return of color upon a release of pressure from the skin; with edema also occurring, a couple of days had lapsed before it was decided the leg could be saved. “You came close to showing up here with just one boot, but you were probably too far gone to realize it.” Sparky discreetly pressed a painkiller against his palm. “Anyway, you really must do me a favor. While you're triumphantly tap-dancing again at Carnegie Hall, please remember me, would you?”

“That pretty much goes without saying,” replied Hollis, grinning.

“Good boy,” said Sparky, patting him on the shoulder. “We're all so proud of you.”

Hollis popped the barbiturate, chased it with a sip of water, and sank into the pillow — giving a sideways glance as Sparky about-faced on the heels of polished black shoes and flitted away, whistling happily between the rows of bunks, heading for another sweet one to comfort. Presently, while shadows crept along the floorboards and evening approached, he felt the induced fog settle across his slackened body like an ethereal weight, tiring him with ease. Hell of a way to quit smoking, was his last thought — and then he slept some more, not moving an inch, free of dreams or nightmares or any memories which bound him to such an ungaugeable present.

Later on, he was woken in darkness by a heaving cough, a throat being cleared. Overhead came a raspy voice, the Southern drawl of someone talking, mumbling from the top bunk which, hours before, hadn't been occupied. “Did you stop to think?” the voice asked, the tone languid and sluggish, medicated. “Did you stop to think to ask why it was we was fighting for? Did you stop to think to ask that? What'd it got to do with us? Did you stop and did you think?” But he hadn't heard the corpsmen bring in a new patient, hadn't sensed the rattling or shifting of the bunk as someone was made to lay above him. “Did you? Me neither. I didn't.”

The voice went on and on, repeating itself with alternating degrees of volume — a faint whisper, a sudden exclamation waking others.

“Will you shut up!” somebody cried from the adjacent bunks.

“Did you?”

“We aren't supposed to ask why,” somebody else responded nearby, “so shut the hell up!”

“Me neither. I didn't stop to think to ask. You didn't neither. You didn't stop to think to ask why neither. Did you?”

As the voice persisted, Hollis caught the strains of less disquieting creatures, hearing the purring of crickets just beyond the ward windows, communicating within the groupings of abundant weeds sheltering them. And if he believed it was possible to silence his noisy bedfellow with words, he might have brought up the insects and the weeds, mentioning how they never engaged in the wars of men. Perhaps, he wondered, that was why they were allowed to come back throughout the ages. People weren't afforded those kind of perfect rebirths. Individuals who died during war weren't destined to return as the exact same thing, thriving once more in the exact same place. Then he strained to perceive a vision of his own life long after his involvement in the war had ended — and, instead, saw the insects nestled inside the weeds, their shapes quivering securely among the hardy shoots, having claimed a home in an impossible world. It was a version of this sort of existence he would seek for himself, a methodical, consistent, and unburdened type of continuation — avoiding wearisome complications, unnecessary pain and, without doubt, steering clear of battles in which the outcome was uncertain or defied logic. He would take a page from the little things, from the things taken for granted and trampled underfoot. No, he wouldn't be reborn as the same old Hollis, but he would strive to be a more sensible, more prudent Hollis anyway — someone who would grow content with himself and his given surroundings, a man who believed he was done with war and pointless death.

“You do realize the war to end all wars wasn't,” Lon once said, when lounging by Hollis's swimming pool one evening. “Think we're always doomed to repeat ourselves? Are we just that pitiful?”

“Probably,” Hollis answered. Except, he thought, whatever comes along next won't be my war. It won't have anything to do with me. He'd paid his dues in the contextual name of freedom nearly five decades ago, and he had left Korea changed and resolved — becoming indifferent to what later loomed in Vietnam and elsewhere, having already recast the much earlier “war to end all wars” as a regrettable starting point rather than an emphatic, universally acknowledged conclusion.

“Sure, people go in circles,” Lon said, sighing as he spoke. “The important lessons keep getting taught, no one learns though, I guess.”

“You've got a real firm grasp on the obvious,” Hollis said, scratching at his navel. “Tell me something I don't know, could you?”

Still, there had been another battle Hollis never quite anticipated facing, that most enduring of wars — as sweeping, widespread, and illogical as any which were waged in his lifetime; yet it was a taciturn offensive, routinely countered on a microscopic level, where the defending generals and corporals and lieutenants wore white coats and aqua green or light blue uniforms, and the randomly chosen, ill-prepared foot soldiers often dropped hard and irrevocably at the front lines; their deaths were now so numerous that a towering monument etched with their names would, most likely, climb beyond the moon. But this, too, wasn't to be his war, not truly; it was Debra's time at the front, it was her fight — and the best he could do was aid her, standing by as a reliable ally, fearing all the while that her defeat would also serve as his defeat.

Nonetheless, luck had always been at their side. When the 1994 North-ridge earthquake jolted Los Angeles, their Arcadia house was badly shaken yet escaped any serious damage, nor were they affected by the L.A. riots of 1992 — watching the neighboring violence unfold on television like a cheap action movie, remaining safe in the suburbs while police helicopters raced across the sky. They had evaded freeway accidents by milliseconds, and they had also hiked along an Eaton Canyon trail which, on the very next day, was submerged by a flash flood, the rapid waters then sweeping a Hispanic family of four to an untimely end. As a couple, they were first spared from harm in the early 1960s, somehow avoiding injury after their Chrysler got caught between club-wielding members of the American Nazi Party — who were parading through the streets of Monterey Park to demonstrate against interracial marriage — and an angry gathering of civil-rights protesters which had lined the sidewalks to confront the white-supremacist marchers: rocks sailed back and forth above the Chrysler, vehicles in front and behind them had windshields smashed, a bystander was struck by a brick, and yet, as would happen again and again, they miraculously weathered the turmoil without receiving as much as a scratch. They were, as Debra usually commented whenever tragedy had narrowly avoided them, blessed with an abundance of good fortune.

So we will survive this, Hollis had told himself. In order to have a future together, he had needed to survive the Korean conflict, and, in turn, she was obligated to draw out that future together by overcoming her cancer. You have no choice, he thought. If I could survive getting shot to find you, you must survive this to keep us from being apart. Defeat isn't an option, even should the battle lines remain.

Although now the harsh August of his military past risked being rivaled by the heartbreaking August of his sedate present — this last August, almost two years since Debra was diagnosed — when the medical options had dwindled down to the possibility of a single clinical trial, after a fourth and final round of chemo had proven less effective than the first round. But the end of chemo didn't crush Debra's spirit; rather, an expression of acceptance passed across her face, some small relief taken from the understanding that she would no longer have to endure the harrowing side effects of treatment — the chemicals burning through her veins, the low white cell blood counts and the numbness and the fatigue, the secondary ailments inherent to fighting off the disease. And there was, too, that final thread of hope, a phase-II clinical trial aimed at inhibiting the growth of blood vessels which supply tumors with blood.

“It's what is known as an antiangiogenesis drug,” Dr. Langford had told Debra and Hollis.

“What does that mean?” Hollis asked.

Seated behind her desk, Dr. Langford moved her center of gravity forward as she calmly spoke, bringing her elbows to rest upon papers and folders, clasping her hands together: “Well, basically, antiangiogenesis agents get in the way of the cancer, interrupting its growth. Of course, we won't know how well it'll work until we've given it a shot — the tumors might not shrink at all, or, best case, the growths could be stopped from spreading. Who knows. The good news is you won't experience the debilitating side effects that characterize chemotherapy. However, a few risks are still involved — ”

“I don't care about risks,” Debra said. “Believe me, there isn't a risk I wouldn't take right now.”

Hollis's hands clutched the chair arms. “What sort of risks?” he asked, sounding unusually sharp.

Blood clots leading to a stroke — Dr. Langford stated matter-of-factly, eyes fixing on Debra — or fatal bleeding in the lungs. “The fact is, there's about a twenty percent chance of this drug resulting in your death. Should clotting occur, though — and should a lethal break or rupture transpire — it'll happen quickly. You won't have much warning, and you'll feel little if any pain.”

“Fair enough.” Debra gave a slow but confident nod. “I can live with that,” these last words producing a lingering, incongruous smirk on her face.

Then came a promise from Dr. Langford, a straightforward agreement made to the sickest of her patients: at the point the disease became unstoppable and nothing more could be done to prolong the patient's life in a meaningful manner, she would say so without hesitation. “Except we're not quite there yet,” she said, lifting her chin slightly and running a hand up over her throat. “Not yet.” Even so, Dr. Langford wanted Debra to begin considering end-of-life decisions, to ask herself what she wanted to do with whatever time she had left. “In other words, do you want to spend your time receiving therapies with a low rate of response but documented rates of toxicity? Or, instead, would you like to take a trip, go visit somewhere you've always wanted to see, or perhaps accomplish something special? One doesn't necessarily exclude the other, mind you. But it's important thinking along those lines — while you can.”

“I understand,” Debra said. “I understand,” she repeated.

As for Hollis, Dr. Langford suggested he look into attending a class on caregiving at Gilda's Club, as it would likely come in handy. “It's not an easy role to play,” she told him. “Also, you must take care of yourself, continue doing the activities you like — don't let yourself feel guilty for allowing yourself to enjoy life during this difficult period. It's okay, and I'm telling you it's okay. You've got absolutely every right to do some things just for yourself, and that'll give you the capacity of taking better care of Debra when and if it should come to that.”

Hollis averted his eyes and sat stiffly and awkwardly. Why are you saying these things? he thought. Why are you telling us this now?

“He worries too much,” he heard Debra say, her voice suddenly breaking, and felt the warmth of her hand briefly squeeze against his wrist before retracting.

“I know he does,” Dr. Langford said, pushing a box of Kleenex across her desk.

His hands began shaking, his eyes started welling. Debra sniffled beside him, but he wouldn't glance up. He refused to acknowledge her tears, because she wasn't supposed to weep; she didn't do that: she was the stronger of them, he had always told himself. Nor would he recognize those other tears forming around Dr. Langford's eyes, brushed away by the doctor's fingertips as Debra both chuckled and wept, saying, “Damnit, doctors aren't supposed to cry. That's not right.”

Dr. Langford chuckled too, even as the tears continued. “Oh, lord,” she said, breathing deeply and then exhaling. “The day I quit crying is the day I really should stop being called a doctor.”

Both women laughed, each one reaching for a Kleenex. It isn't funny, Hollis wanted to say; instead, he forced a smile, his hands shaking uncontrollably but imperceptibly, and gazed at the woven gray patterns infused throughout the industrial carpeting around his shoes — a perfectly flat, cold expanse of fabric, befitting an office where the illusion of hope was kept in check by a less ideal reality. But the faint trembling of his hands wouldn't cease — not while he wrung them together, or hugged Dr. Langford goodbye, or drove off into the desert toward Nine Springs with Debra staring out the passenger window, lost in thought as her palms slid on her jeans. His hands shook in the driveway, when opening the passenger-side door, helping Debra rise to her feet, unlocking the house; they shook inside the entry-way — in the living room, in the bedroom, in the bathroom — while holding the unused vial of pain pills left over from Debra's surgery, the safety cap slipping his grasp and falling into the sink, his unsteady fingers pinching two pills and bringing them to his mouth.

As Debra watched television in the living room, Hollis stretched out for a nap, resting on their bed, staring at the yellow ceiling. He awaited the forgotten sensation to wash over him — that escape from unimaginable pain, that medicated reprieve he had relied upon so long ago — and soon his nerves settled, the trembling soothed by the medication as he began to drift. Shutting his eyes, he reached down, touching his left leg through his pants, pushing at the area where he had once been shot; but he felt nothing there which summoned his old injury, just hard bone and skin belonging to a badly scarred leg which had carried him into retirement and, for almost as far back as he could remember, had pressed against his wife every night — such an unassuming yet intimate mingling of their bodies, so comforting and, until now, so easily taken for granted.

15

Debra would not get better. “They've done all they can do for me, dear.” A final clinical trial, a few more drugs, with each subsequent exam or test confirming results which her withering appearance had already telegraphed: no signs of improvement, if anything a continued decline. But, her tired voice assured Hollis, she would be fine regardless of the likely outcome, and, as well, she insisted he must be fine, too. Yet following restless, anxiety-filled nights in which even medication couldn't induce slumber, her mood was erratic and depressed, the nails on her fingers chewed down to the flesh. And that once oval face was ravaged not just by sickness but also from a lack of sleep — the hollow cheeks, the deep-set eyes, the drawn lips devoid of color. Now alone in his garden, Hollis wonders if he hadn't done enough to save her, to find different solutions or investigate radical alternatives, making an effort to suggest other treatment options. Maybe he should've spoken up in Dr. Langford's office, pressing the doctor harder — rather than sitting passively by, unsure of what to do next, senseless from the continual bad news while Debra did most of the talking; yes, he should have pounded his fists on the doctor's table, confronting the woman: “This bullshit isn't good enough for us, and it isn't working! We need to cure my wife!” Except that kind of behavior would have only added to the stress and futility of the situation. No, he is convinced, there was reason for temperate, rational, straightforward talk: it kept them from immediately panicking when, in truth, they should have been hurling chairs at walls and cursing God at the top of their lungs.

Then last Wednesday Debra raised her head at the kitchen table and spoke almost as a whisper, so that Hollis paused and looked at her, his fork stopping midair between his open mouth and a large serving of barbecue-grilled portobello mushrooms. “Tell me about us,” she'd said; but her quiet voice had reached him with the clarity of a scream, and he had, in that moment, grasped both the direct and indirect meaning of what she uttered — her hushed request underlined by an expression which, as it appeared on her face, conveyed two different states: a pensive, half-formed grin; sad, gently blinking, smiling eyes. “Will you, please, tell me about us.”

“Of course,” Hollis answered, setting his fork aside. It didn't matter that only a few bites of his dinner had been swallowed, or that he had bothered to prepare the meal for them, or that he was, in fact, quite hungry; none of that mattered at all, especially when Debra — sitting directly across from him, her plate untouched and the food still steaming — could no longer share with him the illusion of having an abundance of time. Instead, her mind had gone searching backward of late, retreating into the past more frequently: perhaps, Hollis worried, because her present and her future had begun to merge, narrowing in so as to become nonexistent. With whatever future remaining for her close at hand, she had nowhere else to go but back to where those left-behind years felt tangible yet distant, and, to some degree, infinite. And while Hollis wished to think otherwise, there possibly could be no next year for Debra, no welcoming of the new century, no slow amble into old age for her; this was likely her future, the last of their future together, and the past now held more hope and promise than what might soon lie ahead.

Such an eminent feeling stemmed from yet another turn in Debra's failing health which, after so many months of trying to keep despair away, cast something of a portentous shade upon the optimism they had sought to maintain; it certainly marred Hollis's faith in her chances of, eventually, overcoming the disease. For even with the antiangiogenesis clinical trial under way, she became conscious of her midsection thickening, swollen and distended and hard, a severe bloating in her abdomen which, she knew, was an indicator of tumors blocking the lymphatic system from draining fluid. “At least I know how I'd look pregnant,” she half joked, staring at herself naked in the full-length bedroom mirror, her normally rapid-fire tone labored by a shortness of breath. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

“I don't think that's very funny,” Hollis said, moving next to her, studying her reflection as if that other version of herself was glimpsed in a fun-house mirror — the scarred stomach jutting bizarrely outward, supported in her palms where it curved downward from the navel, conjuring up the bloated, malnourished third-world children he had sometimes seen on late-night television commercials.

“I don't really think it's funny either,” she snapped.

“Ascites” was what Dr. Langford called the condition, although Debra was already positive of the name before the doctor confirmed its onset (derived from the Greek word askos — Dr. Langford had gone on to explain — meaning bag or sac): a further sign of advanced ovarian cancer, that point when the disease had infiltrated the lymphatic system and had grown well beyond the ovary — often leading to bowel obstructions, pain and pressure, nausea and vomiting, difficulty eating, sometimes requiring a nasogastric tube or gastrostomy tube to be surgically placed through the abdomen and into the stomach. But until the clinical trial was finished, any kind of surgery was to be avoided, and, instead, the excess fluid was removed like gasoline siphoned out of a car, temporarily alleviating the pressure while also robbing her body of much-needed protein and nutrients.

Within five weeks, Debra's stomach had been drained three times at an outpatient clinic, a thin cannula tube depositing between two to three liters of fluid inside a plastic drainage bag. Each of the paracentesis sessions brought on an increased loss of muscle mass — a visible physical depletion, sagging skin and pronounced bone structure — which caused her to look more haggard than ever before, more wasted away and enfeebled; the quick transformation bowed her body, making her stooped, somehow smaller, seemingly fragile and years older than Hollis. Her walk had become a hunched shuffle, her movements sluggish and wavering. She required assistance when going from the house to the Suburban, the Suburban to the clinics, the clinics to Dr. Langford's office. She couldn't grocery shop anymore, or run errands on her own — the frustration of which was sometimes expressed with tears, the occasional throwing of a drinking cup or a pen or a paperback. And as Halloween approached, she lamented the lack of children in Nine Springs, what would be the complete absence of trick-or-treaters on their street, because — as she noted — her appearance wasn't too far from the Wicked Witch of the West. “I bet I'd scare the living daylights out of them,” she'd commented. “Wouldn't even need a costume or any makeup. I'm just plain spooky.”

But last Wednesday morning was when Hollis realized their continually reduced optimism had already evaporated into thin air, coming shortly after Debra had finished the third paracentesis session and was informed by a young outpatient-clinic physician — not by Dr. Langford, not by anyone she had dealt with much during her cancer — that the ascites couldn't be managed any longer without causing serious problems. She would, naturally, collect fluid again in her abdomen yet receive no relief (to treat it further would only make her sicker faster, not to treat it would only make her sicker). Moreover, the clinical trial hadn't produced a single encouraging result, although it was an ongoing effort. All things being normal, they might have experienced a feeling of profound grief, of unfathomable fear, as if a kind of sword of Damocles had been hung above her head. Except they were accustomed to repeated setbacks, having forgotten what it was like to expect a breakthrough. “Oh well,” she had said at the clinic, shrugging indifferently. “It is what it is. That's life — at least what's left of mine anyway.”

“Stop that,” Hollis reproached her. “You're still here.”

“True enough,” she said.

Even so, the moment of Debra's defeat was now unquestionable, expressed symbolically that afternoon in front of their house when Hollis helped her step gradually down from the Suburban to the driveway. But rather than slip her arm through his arm, allowing herself to be guided forward like an invalid, she shook free of him, a look of simmering anger upon her face — eyebrows bunched, lips contracted — and mustering a brief rebound of vigor, she ambled quickly behind the Suburban, as Hollis followed, saying, “What is it? What's wrong?”

And there beneath such a blue, cloudless sky — the sun blazing across rock gardens, tile rooftop shingles, glinting off parked vehicles — Debra peeled a ribbon-shaped, teal-colored Ovarian Cancer Awareness sticker from the Suburban's tailgate. Muttering furiously under her breath, inhaling and exhaling in punctuated gasps, she pushed around Hollis, shuffling up the driveway, as he watched bewildered: lifting her hand, she slapped the sticker hard against the garage door, affixing it crookedly, before taking herself on into the house. Still, Hollis remained by the Suburban, his eyes flitting from the garage door to the ground to the house, and, unable yet to move, he felt himself grow cold in the sunshine. Afterward, he found her seated at the kitchen table, holding a paperback mystery, reading with the same furious look on her face. Nothing, then, would be spoken, nothing said for over an hour — nothing mentioned at all until, raising her head a while later at the table, she spoke to him almost in a whisper, so that he paused and looked at her, his fork stopping midair between his open mouth and a large serving of barbecue-grilled portobello mushrooms.

Tell me about us.

“Well, now, let's see, what can I tell you about us.” Without fully standing upright, Hollis changed chairs at the table, seating himself beside Debra — near enough to stroke her shoulder, to gaze at her gaunt, hawklike profile while she slid her plate away, then folded her hands upon the table-top, then glanced at him intently and nodded once, letting him know she was ready for him to proceed. “Where should I start?” he asked, searching his memory, sifting through their life together, glimpsing random scenes which sprang out of nowhere — lighting fireworks on his sister-in-law's lawn, skinny-dipping among cattle at a West Texas watering hole, buying snow cones somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas when hauling their few possessions to California — as if he were flipping the pages of an old photo album. “It's odd thinking about it, but I'd sort of seen you before we actually met,” he told her with a calm, steady voice. “I'd caught sight of you from another side of the globe, during Korea, over in a country you hadn't even been to — and I didn't know we were destined for each other, didn't have a notion we'd meet one day like we did.” He wiped sweat from his forehead while speaking. Two flies buzzed against the kitchen window; the ceiling fan whirred high above a platter of veggie kabobs which had been brought to the table from the outside grill; the yellow Hawaiian shirt and tan Bermuda shorts he wore were stained and damp in places with perspiration. In four days there would be snow on the ground. “But I guess you were like a ghost to me until we became acquainted.” He hesitated, frowning at his choice of words. Debra, however, was grinning, appearing duly interested, somewhat pleased. “I mean, I'd first seen you, except I hadn't really seen you, if that makes any sense.” Everything was suddenly dim around him, the kitchen engulfed by shadows which covered the floor like black, stagnant water, and, just then, he realized it was getting dark a little too early. “So, what can I tell you about us?” he said, rubbing and patting her shoulder as dusk set in, aware more than ever of how good it had always been to simply touch her.

From Hollis's perspective, their story had begun prior to its true beginning, the wheels already set into motion elsewhere upon his return stateside: those remaining few months of 1950 — late September through late October — at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where he recuperated on an orthopedic bed which was equipped with traction gear, weights, and trapeze bars. The bed frame had been welded down, and his mornings were spent, much to his own initial amusement, with his ass literally in a sling, his body gyrating about while he grasped the overhead bars, methodically exercising his chest, arms, legs. The ward he recovered in was long, sanitary, like a high-end barracks. Windows were propped open for fresh air on nicer days, and at night there was central heating. His wound was redressed at sunrise, medication prepared and distributed between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., followed by sick call (the checking of temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure — the vital-sign log updated for the doctor's rounds). The linen was changed regularly, the floors mopped with a heavy disinfectant which saturated everything with an unrelenting medicinal smell. Morning meals were served twice (7:15 a.m., 11:30 a.m.). At exactly 1 p.m. the ward was darkened for a rest hour — no talking, no exercising, just rest. He was washed daily, lightly scrubbed from head to toe, and never in his life had he felt so clean and yet, at the same time, so defective.

But Hollis didn't become dispirited, for in that spit-and-polished ward were forty other injured soldiers like him — only a couple of which he had seen or met beforehand in Japan — each with an orthopedic bed like his and a hanging chart displaying a name, a status, a condition. He saw these men, and, in their faces, he saw himself — straining as they reached for their own trapeze bars, necks tightening to show veins, struggling while lifting their bodies upright, like a patch of similarly designed but unsynchronized oil-well pumps, rising and falling at different intervals. They laughed at their ineptness, their weakness, or groaned profanities, darting aloof, self-conscious glances around even when no one was paying attention. Sometimes, after lights-out at night, the nurses let them listen to the radio on low volume. Or if a radio wasn't allowed, they whispered in the darkness, talking to one another for hours. And all the while nurses came and went, bringing cups of water whenever corpsmen weren't available, frequently dispensing pain pills upon gaining permission to do so from a doctor.

Sooner than was expected, though, Hollis's rehabilitation took him from the bed during afternoons, assisted at first by a corpsman or a nurse, so that he could limp along hallways, transported by crutches, his wounded leg responding a little at a time to the process of building up strength and mobility again. Holding clipboards and meal trays, often carting medical equipment and gurneys, hospital staff hurried about in deliberate fashion — alone, or in pairs, or in groups — moving assuredly through the hallways as if the world was theirs; they exited and entered private rooms, leaving the doors ajar and transistor radios playing inside. Within the hallways it was still possible to glimpse the most damaged of the men beyond those half-open doors, covered in their beds, appendages missing, heads bandaged yet showing black holes where mouths and nostrils existed, plastic cups of milk or orange juice at their bedsides. And urging himself forward — keeping close to the walls, taking step by agonizing step and sometimes navigating around stalled wheelchairs — was Hollis. He proceeded slowly but purpose-fully,as well he might: for every step brought him closer to home, every small, aching effort hastened his release — the bad leg successfully raised and placed ahead of the better leg meant his days as a soldier were almost over. In the near future, the moment would arrive when he could limp briskly off the hospital grounds, putting the military and the war behind without as much as a wave goodbye; that, more than anything, kept him on his feet whenever the pain felt too great for standing.

Then how unanticipated it was, Hollis realized, that the hometown he had previously decided wasn't worth revisiting should now feel so missed. Already letters were delivered to him from Critchfield, sent mostly by people whom he couldn't immediately recall — the woman who ran the local florist shop, a bar owner, a high-school student whose older brother had once bullied him for a nickel — all wishing a speedy recovery, explaining how incredibly proud they were of him. Never before in his life had an outpouring of random kindness come his way, nor had he ever received letters from much of anyone, let alone letters of praise. In less than a year, it seemed, he had shaken loose the skin of an awkward town loner to become Critchfield's current war hero, achieving the distinction without fully understanding that he was, indeed, perceived as such.

Only later would Hollis learn of the photograph which had appeared in The Critchfield Gazette, taken by the day-nurse supervisor while he rested in his orthopedic bed, mildly narcotized and not yet capable of standing on his own; rugged, large, pale hands decorously laid a Purple Heart upon his blanket-covered stomach as if the medal were a tiny wreath — and he stared up at the tall, imposing figure of Captain Z. L. Trendon, his pupils completely dilated below an immaculately uniformed, silver-haired man who, looming above him like one accustomed to the pulpit, spoke with a deep, tremulous voice: “In the name of the President of the United States and as authorized by reference A of your citation, you — PFC Hollis J. Adams — are hereby awarded the Purple Heart Medal for wounds received in action against the enemy on the eleventh of August 1950 in the Korean theater of operations.”

“Hold it a sec,” the nurse supervisor said, hoisting the camera. “Oh, yes, right there, that's it — ”

The captain became suddenly inanimate, gazing down at Hollis with an unflinching, benevolent expression, staying perfectly frozen while the camera took aim, clicking and flashing twice. “Good job, son,” the captain said, springing back into motion and firmly clutching Hollis's pliable right fingers; afterward, the man promptly about-faced, striding out into the middle of the ward — where he stopped for a moment, surveying the injured in their beds, saying loudly so everyone in the ward could hear, “God bless every single one of you.” With that, the captain flexed his shoulders and sauntered toward the far doors, clasping his hands behind his back — the nurse supervisor jogging ahead of him to hold the doors open, the camera dangling at her side.

But the photograph wasn't intended as a personal memento; it was, in fact, destined for the offices of the local Critchfield newspaper, along with a copy of the Purple Heart citation and a short press release specifying his bravery at the Naktong River. Had Hollis's mother and stepfather not been officially informed of his wounded status early on — or had he not seen fit to have his medal sent home for safekeeping with a brief note attached (I'm okay, Don't worry. I'll be home soon. H.A.) — they would have first heard of his overseas military service and injury when one of them stooped to retrieve the Gazette from the porch steps, a front-page headline proclaiming: local boy awarded purple heart, act of heroism under fire quells enemy sniper.

Then, in turn, it would be Hollis's mother, Eden, who was slow to respond, eventually sending him a clipping of the newspaper article with a brief note, simply stating: Glad you're doing okay and you're safe. Keep me informed. Your bedroom is ready whenever you are. Love, Mom. Thereafter, she began sending weekly notes — each missive a little longer than the previous one — with the notes soon evolving into full-blown letters, often accompanied by a package containing homemade chocolate chip cookies, or sand tarts, or shelled pecans. Eden wouldn't, however, travel to see him at the hospital, nor did he ever ask her to visit. He suspected she was waiting for him to come to her, staying put as a silent protest against the son who had run off, departing angrily from her life, joining the army without making any effort to inform her of where he had gone. But she continued writing every week, and he was always quick with his replies. Their letters grew less stilted — the sentences becoming more demonstrative, the general tone warmer — yet were careful to avoid the hurt feelings or irritations both harbored; in this manner they overlooked whatever resentment lingered between them, an indirect healing which would be repeated again and again throughout the years, reconciling their relationship via long distance while never actually speaking their minds.

When Eden's first note finally reached him, Hollis was already maneuvering on his feet, albeit with a single crutch; he had, by then, received half a dozen letters from Critchfield citizens, and, over the course of several evenings, he had responded to them all, thanking each person for their kind thoughts, concern, and encouraging words. But it wasn't until he studied the newspaper article — the black-and-white photograph, the three columns of journalistic hyperbole — that he realized something was amiss, that somehow the truth had been altered without really being changed. The written account explained the event correctly — a sniper had killed a fellow soldier, and Hollis had, after also being shot, killed the sniper on the banks of the Naktong while in hot pursuit. Aside from a number of false adjectives (eagle-eyed, valiant, stouthearted), nothing else in the article had been totally distorted. Although the hours and minutes leading up to the shootings, or the actual deaths themselves, were lacking from the story; instead, the moment was reshaped with surface details which conveyed a cinematic sweep — close-range gunfire, beads of sweat, grim determination — rather than the eerie stillness of that fateful morning, the mutual dislike fostered between two Garryowens, a stolen pack of cigarettes, and a fallen Korean boy with a Japanese rifle.

Nonetheless, Hollis wouldn't explain otherwise, nor would he do much to downplay his role as a minor war hero of sorts; for he had killed a communist sniper, he had been wounded, he had possibly prevented other soldiers from being shot at that morning — it made no difference to the townfolk of Critchfield if he was or wasn't highly decorated for his actions. To those who wrote him, his role was subconsciously envisioned in Technicolor, befitting the likes of Audie Murphy. Ultimately, his mind adjusted itself to accommodate how he was now regarded. Compared to the surreal, entangled facts of Korea, the superficial yet grand revisions were much easier to adopt and live with, and, as it happened, the revisions then functioned like a glowing portal which had appeared in front of him, shining white light across its threshold, beckoning him to pass through to find something better for himself. These assumed three-quarter truths, he would tell himself, weren't exactly lies.

16

On Halloween Day 1950, Hollis was given a brand-new regulation uniform to wear, cab fare for the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Oakland, and, as a parting gift bestowed upon him by the nursing staff, a mahogany cane to use on his trip home. With whatever few possessions he had acquired shipped on ahead, he clutched only at the cane, limping out of the hospital before dawn, moving toward a waiting Yellow Cab. Seconds later, the naval hospital slid from view, and he found himself emerging into another world — a land of dim urban streets, of brick buildings and unlit storefronts. In the gaps between the buildings he stole glimpses of a waning, reddish moon which sank for the horizon line; its faint glow was in contrast to the opalescence which had started washing over the streets and parked cars. These Bay Area mornings, it had seemed to him, always arrived quickly, as if a curtain were being lifted. So dawn had already begun, heralded by the warbling of birds greeting him when he climbed slowly from the cab; the darkness which had, minutes earlier, engulfed him at the hospital was being eaten away by the sun.

Even as Hollis loitered by the front entrance of the Greyhound depot the sidewalk was beginning to brighten around him. On the other side of the street an angle of golden light suddenly sliced against a brownstone and voided the blinking green neon of a motel sign. Down the sidewalk ahead of him the shapes of taller buildings loomed in places where just moments before black space had been visible. But there were no other people to be seen, although he had unconsciously expected the downtown section of Oakland to be active. Nonetheless, a blue sky would soon awaken the city, and, as well, he didn't feel inclined to sit alone inside the depot for two hours until his bus departed. Yet he was unfamiliar with the downtown, unsure of how exactly to kill the meantime; however, his restless state of mind wouldn't let him stand there for too long. He scanned the buildings across the street for somewhere to go, but now that he was at last a free man nothing readily presented itself to him; the stores were still closed, the sidewalks remained deserted.

Then for the first time in months, Hollis began walking without direction or purpose, the cane tapping beside him as he limped on. All at once two trucks and a cab and a bus came rumbling past on the street, but along the sidewalk — where the darkness was rising inch by inch — no one else moved except himself. His shoes were glossy with a coat of polish and in the quiet morning he could hear his soles squeaking against the pavement. He kept walking — crossing a street, turning a corner, crossing another street — as if attempting to escape the sound of his own footsteps, and at one point a vivid sensation of having previously wandered those downtown Oakland sidewalks came to him: not as a memory of a similar experience, but, rather, it was that very same moment in time being somehow revisited by him now. Naturally, he understood that he had never before walked there; yet, for a while, the heightened paramnesia pressed at his consciousness, and he found himself recalling that morning with a kind of hindsight even as it was still unfolding around him.

But only with the actual hindsight of forty-nine years would Hollis decide it was pure chance and not a form of pre-destiny which had sent him in the right direction — taking him several blocks away from the Greyhound depot, off the main thoroughfare and into a narrow alley-like avenue, bringing him to the massive driftwood-made entry of the Zombie Cantina. Even at that early hour an open for business placard had been hung crookedly on the cantina's door near a large wooden effigy of an Easter Island deity; ukulele music could be heard playing inside, enticing him to step gingerly beyond the entrance — and then standing just inside the murky doorway, letting his eyes adjust before limping forward, he saw a tropical oasis faded in through the opaqueness. Exotic orchids covered the ceiling rafters, drooping directly above a red-carpeted path lined on either side by small palm trees, marantas, calatheas, and dozens of colorful anthuriums.

Drawn toward the music, Hollis followed the winding red carpet, passing themed dining sections — Malayan, South Seas, African — and yet encountered no one until reaching the grog bar at the end of the path. A Seeburg jukebox pulsated against a wall of bamboo, and stacking glasses behind a bar decorated with miniature Japanese fishing boats, carved wooden tribal masks, native spears and shields was a tall, thin elderly man sporting a gray handlebar mustache, wearing a Panama hat and a white duck suit, looking more befitting to a yacht than a cocktail lounge; his nimble fingers were in constant motion — straightening various bottles of rum so that the labels showed, wiping the counter at the same time — seemingly oblivious to the only patron in the establishment, but finally speaking when Hollis took a seat at the bar, saying with his back turned, “Can't serve you anything good until six, unless you're wanting java or a cup of water. If it's something stronger, you'll have to wait about ten minutes. So what'll it be then?”

“Not sure,” Hollis said, setting the cane on an adjacent stool. “What do you recommend?”

The old man dropped from sight, stooping below the bar. “I'll tell you in ten minutes,” he said, his voice mingling with the clanking of silverware. “Sit tight.”

At six o'clock sharp the cocktails began to materialize as if borne of liquid alchemy, strange and beautiful concoctions Hollis had never previously tasted, one coming right after the other — measured, shaken, poured, and conjured by the cordial barkeeper — landing in front of him in tiki-shaped glasses, garnished with tiny blue or orange Japanese parasols, presented to him with names as unique as the drinks themselves: Pagan Love, South Sea Cooler, Planter's Punch, Dead Man's Delight. Once the alcohol had kicked in, making Hollis more effusive than he had been in ages, it was another name which rolled proudly out of the old man's mouth, revealing himself to be Skipper Ken, the Zombie Cantina's owner, explaining, too, that he was also a foremost authority on rum drinks and had visited practically all the islands of the West Indies. Everything which adorned the bar, he told Hollis, had been collected on his many travels — except, of course, the jukebox and much of the furniture.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Skipper Ken,” Hollis said, reaching over the bar to grasp the old man's hand.

“The pleasure is mine, son. Now, what should you try next?” Skipper Ken pivoted, facing the shelves of backlit bottles, hands placed on hips while contemplating the next selection. “Let's see — ”

One day, Hollis thought, I'll have me a joint like this — make my own little private cantina somewhere, won't leave it for a minute. One day I'll be Captain Hollis, old and dignified and happy, sailing my very own landlocked ship.

“I'm figuring a Hunchback's Nipple might do the trick. Or maybe a Rusty Hook is what you're needing.”

And soon the final round was poured, and, shortly thereafter, Hollis managed to find his way back to the depot, pouring himself onto a Greyhound bus bound for Minnesota. But he wouldn't remember exiting the Zombie Cantina that morning — forgetting the cane at the bar, staggering along sidewalks which had gained foot traffic since dawn — nor would he recall buying a ticket or taking up two seats as he slumbered for hours on a Silversides coach. Well before noon he was snoring gently with the vibrations of the bus, consumed by a liberating sleep which carried him from the West Coast and far across the desert. Outside the flat midday light dimmed to darker hues, and in the distance storm clouds canvassed mesas, producing sheets of black rain which appeared like vertical streaks of lead rubbed upon paper.

Debra sat in silence, keeping perfectly still while Hollis talked. It was the first she had heard of the Zombie Cantina, although the story didn't surprise her. In the past, he had mentioned his intense need to get drunk after being discharged, yet he mostly avoided the specifics, hardly addressing the consequences of his brief drinking spree even when she had asked him to elaborate. He had, in fact, always shrugged off the alcohol abuse as simply a transitional bump on the return road to civilian life, a fleeting misstep of his youth which wasn't worth dissection. But sitting there beside her at the kitchen table, his voice trembled as he spoke of those days, recounting what she already knew while, without actually elaborating, also shedding some light on the confusion and lack of understanding he maintained for the actions of his younger incarnation; then that which he had always told her was trivial or no longer relevant began, instead, hinting at a man who couldn't help but look back on his life with apprehension, often discovering a stranger occupying the pockets of his memory where fragments of his previous self should have resided.

“That Halloween,” Hollis said, staring at the table, “pretty much set me on a course for a five-week bender, as you well know. The odd thing is, I'd barely touched a drop prior to then, but when I got started I didn't want to stop. Can't say why for sure, I just can't. I guess I was having a difficult readjustment, or likely it was an ill-conceived attempt to stabilize my frazzled nervous system. Don't know why, I don't. I mean, it's sort of like I fell asleep on that bus home and didn't wake up for a month or more. So you can imagine very little is clear in my head about those weeks — very little really, almost nothing at all — until the moment I met you. That's when I woke up, that's how I think of it.”

Hollis paused for a moment, thoughtfully biting at his bottom lip, tugging the skin with his front teeth. The moon shined through the kitchen windows, illuminating the countertops and the no-wax vinyl flooring. Debra shut her eyes, breathing deeply. Then he, too, inhaled deeply, exhaling like a prolonged sigh before continuing. Everything was like a dream, he went on to explain. The minute he carefully maneuvered down the steps of the Greyhound bus — having arrived in Critchfield three days later, bringing himself to the asphalt of his hometown on a cold, overcast November morning — everything felt unreal to him. “I suppose I didn't realize I was big news in ol’ Critchfield, probably only because nothing much of note happened there anyway.” But the trombone-heavy C.S.D. high-school marching band and a crowd of about fifty locals had come to greet him with applause and cheers, at first encircling him with a cacophony of music and hard slaps to his shoulders, then fanning out to give him enough space in which to limp self-consciously toward the weeping, hand-wringing figure of his mother — while a discordant, halting version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” accompanied his lurching, Frankenstein-like gait.

“She had on a pale print dress,” Hollis said, when thinking of his mother, “and her hair had been done up nice, and she was crying. I'd never seen that woman cry for anyone — Eden wasn't a crier — but there she was, crying at the sight of me. She wore face powder and dry rouge, except the tears were making a mess of it. Next thing I know she ‘s hugging me in those big arms of hers, and she's holding me so close I could feel her corset pressing against my uniform. And after that — well, you know — they paraded me straight home, I guess. I got properly paraded after that. That's what they decided to do, for some idiotic reason.”

Led by the town's single fire engine, the mayor of Critchfield drove a chariot-red Olds 98 convertible along the downtown stretch of Ripley Avenue, chauffeuring Hollis and Eden at a top speed of ten miles per hour. “Local hero Hollis,” the mayor shouted, repeatedly honking the horn. From the convertible's backseat, a bewildered Hollis smiled uncomfortably next to his beaming mother, responding in kind to the enthusiastic waves of the people who had braved the chilly weather to stand outside to welcome him — an array of pale, flushed faces he had seen throughout his life but who hadn't much acknowledged him until that morning. Even so, his contentious, tactless stepfather, Rich, was nowhere to be seen — nowhere among the townsfolk who had greeted his bus, nor glimpsed with those who were waving at the passing convertible. But soon enough the well-wishers thinned into empty sidewalks, and then, as if transporting him back in time, the convertible accelerated, parting ways with the fire engine when turning onto a residential street — speeding past Hollis's elementary school, and the First Methodist Church he had attended since childhood, and the familiar yards and brick homes which had always been there — rolling to a complete stop in front of the two-story Craftsman-style house he had previously vowed never to revisit, the property looking no different than the day he had left it, or, indeed, than the day he was born: front window boxes filled with withered flowers, mature trees providing a canopy over the shed-roof dormer.

There was no question, he now told Debra, that his memory had become unreliable over the years, and as a result certain events likely didn't occur in the same manner in which he was relating them to her. Although he recalled with some clarity the oppressive atmosphere which consumed him when he entered the house right behind his mother, seeping into him from all sides within the foyer; and like the swift drumming of a hammer against a nail, whatever fleeting happiness and relief he had felt was immediately leveled, supplanted by an interminable weight in his gut which made him want to twist around and quickly hobble to somewhere else, anywhere else.

“Who knows for sure what I was expecting. I mean, as long as I wasn't fighting North Koreans, I should've been fine and dandy. As long as I was alive and standing on my own two feet and wasn't in the hospital anymore, nothing on earth should've gotten under my skin, especially anything inside that old house, and especially a petty, mean-spirited little guy like Rich. I suppose in my head I'd thought I was going to be someone else when I got back there, a full-grown man and not just a kid anymore, and so I'd react to things maybe differently — except it wasn't quite like that, unfortunately.”

His stepfather — jowly and overweight, a short man with a smattering of gray hair combed neatly on his balding scalp — emerged from the living room folding a newspaper, dressed in his normal attire of black suspenders, black slacks, and a pale blue button-up shirt. Staring at Hollis while avoiding eye contact, Rich spoke in his customary curt way, saying, “Isn't that something, you actually made it in one whole piece. Wouldn't have bet my money on it. But let's not worry your mother sick like that anymore, all right?” There was to be no welcome back, no glad you survived, nor the simple courtesy of a handshake — just the subtle resumption of what had always been a one-sided pissing match.

His mother stiffened. “Now, now,” Eden said, forcing a smile. “Now, now — ”

Then Hollis knew, without a doubt, that he was home again — although an opportunity to say anything wasn't given, for already Rich had shifted his attention to Eden, asking her before she had had a chance to set her purse aside, “What are you cooking me for lunch?”

“Oh, I hadn't thought about it yet,” she answered, glancing nervously at Hollis, then at her husband, fidgeting all the while with her purse strap.

“Well, start thinking about it,” replied Rich, chuckling and grinning smugly.

At that moment Hollis had the urge to slap his stepfather, to strike him hard on the cheek, shutting his mouth. He considered grabbing Rich by the suspenders, peering at him coolly, making it clear that better men than him have had their bodies blown apart and scattered like hay across hillsides. While you were waiting for her to serve you sandwiches — he wanted to tell him — good men were dying near me, and I'm sure I killed much kinder men than you, and I was almost killed, too, and why don't you cook your own damn lunch today. But, instead, he expressed only fatigue, politely excusing himself in order that he might catch a nap, requesting to be awakened later so he could join them for the midday meal Eden was bound to prepare.

As he moved unsteadily along the creaking floorboards of the shadowy main hallway — going past the open doorways of the downstairs bathroom and the unlit domain of Eden and Rich's bedroom — the interior of the house seemed imposing to Hollis. Various framed photographs were displayed on the walls — his deceased father in healthier days, his mother and her four sisters as farm children, a younger but still chubby Rich on a fishing trip, a number of departed or distant relatives whose names had been mostly forgotten by him. The odor of mothballs was as potent as ever. While heading up the worn-down staircase, he became aware of a sudden chill in spots, air pushing from hairline cracks on the wooden stairs, a momentary coldness sensed like the unseen presence of a spirit as he crossed through it; yet that, like everything else there, was nothing new.

How disconcerting it was, then, for Hollis to feel as if he had never been anywhere but at home; the weeks and months serving overseas in Japan and Korea, the violence and murder which was at once epic and tragically intimate — all of that unfolding around him on a broad scale, altering him forever, while day in and day out the rooms, smells, and aura of the Critchfield house had endured. Aside from the shoebox-shaped package which had arrived ahead of him and now waited on his bedroom floor (shipped by the naval hospital, packed with a set of six ceramic Japanese teacups, a parcel of letters, a few articles of clothing), he found himself entering the room where his belongings felt frozen in time: the plaid comforter folded at the foot of the bed, a stack of National Geographic magazines on a writing desk beside a bay window, the white-and-silver-striped wallpaper interrupted here and there by tacked-up pencil drawings of imaginatively rendered spaceships or airplanes of his own design, the Coca-Cola bottle on the night table which contained a small amount of the beverage he had neglected to finish. Then as if the passing of months hadn't transpired, not even a single day or hour or minute, those familiar belongings seemed to be telling him, “Everything has remained as it was — nothing here has changed for you.”

There was, however, the slight discomfort in his leg as Hollis stretched across the mattress, the uniform covering his body, and the memory of distant terrain and people he wished to dismiss from his mind (not wanting to dwell on anything — where he'd been, where he was now). The white ceiling above his bed remained stained with brownish spots, the result of water damage from two springs earlier in which rain had dripped through the attic and wetted his forehead while he slept. “You're home,” he said tiredly, moving his gaze away from the ceiling, focusing on the gray clouds filling the bay window, as though avoiding something, some internal quandary he hadn't expected would arise. And later he thought, his stare returning to the stains on the ceiling: What on earth am I going to do?

Shutting his eyes, Hollis attempted to push aside the emptiness he was feeling within, to banish the dread he associated with the war and, also, with his own hometown; yet now every single thought suddenly involved one or the other, and as those competing ruminations came and went, the urge to fall asleep and never stir again increased. But shortly before sleep took him, another memory rescued his thoughts, presenting itself like a shimmering oasis in the middle of a hopeless landscape — a pleasant ideality of bamboo walls, miniature Japanese fishing boats, wooden tribal masks, tiki idols, and a multitude of colorful drinks served with tiny parasols; such an assuring, comforting vision it proved to be, lingering there when he stirred from his nap, staying with him during lunch, and, as evening loomed, encouraging him to venture outside so that he might find somewhere which could roughly approximate its hospitable imprint.

Debra smiled at the kitchen table — grinning from side to side, momentarily amused at the idea of him searching for a tropical hideout in Minnesota — while Hollis rubbed at his temple with an index finger, saying, “And so it seemed the obvious answer was to drink, and to keep drinking, from the hour I woke up till I couldn't climb off a barstool or walk myself home at night. Obviously, there wasn't a Zombie Cantina, but we had us the Shelter, and the Rattlesnake Inn, and the Tap Room, and lord knows what else. There wasn't any Rusty Hook or Hunchback's Nipple either, I can tell you that, but there was plenty of other stuff I hadn't tried before. My main beverage of choice became the Mickey Slim, probably because it took me somewhere beyond the ether, sent me higher than a kite and as far from myself and Critchfield as any drink could. Getting drunk like that I didn't think or feel anything, at least anything I'd be able to recall the next morning. There ‘s nothing, I guess, like gin and a splash of DDT to zap you into the stratosphere. Also, my injury didn't flare up or bother me when I was hammered, and the only reminder of the war was my uniform — which I wore for as long as possible, because that way no bartender asked if I was of legal drinking age or not. The uniform alone meant I'd earned the right to throw a few back, and it also was my passport to free drinks. There were always those people who wanted to buy me a round or two whenever I had it on. So I suppose it became my drinking uniform, as it were, and it stayed on my body for weeks, except it didn't ever get washed, and it started to get ratty, smelled pretty ripe, stained by everything I'd spilled on it, not just beer or cocktails but also my own vomit and piss, you name it. Except at some point the uniform got to be too much for even me to tolerate, and so I stripped it off and rolled it up into a ball and set it on fire in the backyard trash barrel one bone-cold afternoon — almost buck naked except for a skivvy, poking at the flaming pile with a stick, and wondering if I'd still be getting free drinks without it. And sure enough, a lot of folks were still kind enough to do me the honor. I mean, for a while there I got a lot of mileage out of being the local war hero, I'm sure a lot more than most other guys got back in their hometowns.”

Hollis fell silent, staring at the untouched platter of veggie kabobs at the center of the table. Suddenly at a loss for words, he reached forward, grabbing his glass of beer, and then he leaned back in the chair while taking several thoughtful sips. Debra remained with her eyes closed — although the grin had now shifted into a thin line of cracked, dry lips. Above them, the ceiling fan droned on, its blades vibrating.

“Naturally, the alcohol melted my reserve, made me glare a bit harder at people, made my mouth move faster than my brain,” Hollis said, resuming in a somber tone as if this realization hadn't previously crossed his mind. “You can imagine the problems it caused between me and Rich, and Rich and my mother. I just wasn't a nice drunk, probably because I was too young and wasn't equipped to handle what the stuff did to me, and I didn't know how to stop once I got going, so the idea of moderation wasn't something I'd understood yet. One or two drinks, I was fine. More than two — and there was always more than two — all bets were off. It's probably a good thing I can't remember everything I said and did, because I'm sure I did and said some awful things. I do know Rich got scared of me, and I know he'd told my mother he didn't want me in the house anymore. But he never wanted me there to begin with. Anyway, he told her it was either him or me. To her credit, though, she stuck by me, ignoring his fake ultimatums. I mean, it was her house and her son after all, and I suppose one of the good things was him staying out of my way most of the time, for whatever the reasons. I guess I had him pretty spooked. To be honest, I think I had me spooked, too. But on those nights when I was passed out somewhere — on the floor of some tavern, or on a bench, places like that — my mother managed to get me home and into my bed, and she never, and I mean never, said a word to me about what I was doing to myself. It's sort of like she understood it, or in the very least she didn't fault me for it. Or maybe she just knew I'd eventually come around, and her patience would help bring me to my senses. Who knows for sure.”

Hollis hesitated — nodding to himself while finishing the last of his beer — knowing that what must be imparted now should be carefully weighed before being articulated; there are the facts of the matter, he thought, and then there is the gist of the truth. “The turning point came early that December,” he said, placing the cup in front of him and clasping it, absently rotating it between his palms. “Maybe it's what they call a moment of clarity, I don't know. Or a breakthrough, right? Because after a hard night of drinking, I woke up in my bedroom feeling like death froze over, and as crappy as I felt it dawned on me I didn't want to feel that way anymore. Plus, I really desired a future for myself, some kind of life outside of Critchfield, and I wanted to fall in love, find that woman of my dreams. I didn't want to be the drunk soldier anymore, or the local hero basking like a wild man in the attention — I just wanted to be Hollis again, except I wasn't at all sure who Hollis really was yet. But there was no way I was going to find myself or escape that town if I got loaded all the time. If I'd kept on like I'd been doing, I knew I wasn't going anywhere but to the nuthouse. It's as simple as that. And the really odd thing was, on that day I decided to turn myself around and clean my act up, I realized my leg didn't hurt anymore, my limp had all but gone away. My mother thought it was a miracle, and I suppose I did, too. It was like I'd walked on water, or something amazing like that. I mean, overnight I was a new man. Even ol’ Rich didn't know what to think, especially since he ‘d been telling Mother it was just a matter of time before I got arrested. He seemed sort of disappointed things didn't end up worse for me. So for a while there it was church every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning, and I avoided the bars, and started reading more and contemplating a steady job, considered aiming for the university — and when I prayed, I always prayed for something to come along and guide me forward, some kind of sign to give me an answer and direct me to where I needed to be heading with my life.”

Yet Hollis had no intention of discussing what was, in reality, the actual turning point — that December morning in which he stirred awake, bloodshot and hungover, and momentarily glimpsed the ghost of his own image: a duplicate Hollis standing at the end of his bed, arms hung rigidly at its sides, mirroring him in almost every way, with the same faded blue jeans, tan leisure shoes with rubber soles, bright blue Windbreaker, white T-shirt. No, he couldn't bring himself to tell Debra at last about the recurring specter now known as Max, how it frightened him away from binge drinking and continued to materialize in front of him throughout the years — at grocery stores, on city streets, among golf course greens — eventually growing older and more decrepit than its tangible counterpart, disappearing for prolonged periods only to reappear when least expected, as if to remind him who he was really meant to be: a figment cut adrift into the world without a person or a purpose to ground him.

Nevertheless, anything seemed probable once Hollis had become accustomed to the disquieting presence of his other self, little else would strike him as too fantastic or implausible from then on. A blizzard of frogs was no more unexpected than a lightning storm. A plague of flesh-eating locusts could have swept across Critchfield, devouring the entire town in minutes, and he wouldn't have blinked an eye. The next-door neighbor's Labrador retriever could have started whispering to him with Jack Benny's voice, the lengthy branches of sinister oak trees could have snatched unsuspecting children into the air as they were walking to school, gusts of wind could have tightened around the necks of Lions Club members like invisible nooses — and none of it would have fazed or startled him all that much; the mundane and the illogical, he had decided, were composed of identical properties.

But it wasn't important for Debra to learn that part of the story, especially now. Instead, Hollis spoke of a more relevant curiosity, mentioning another unforeseen entity which had made its way into Critchfield, seeking him out after his sobriety began: transported hundreds of miles — coming from the Panhandle of Texas to his home in Minnesota — ultimately landing inside the foyer on a snowy afternoon and staying there until, a short while later, he fetched it casually off the floor. What was lifted by his fingers instantly produced the kind of confusion and trepidation he felt when first encountering his doppelganger. He held a brown postcard-size envelope addressed to Mr. Hollis Adams and forwarded to him from the naval hospital in Oakland, with a handwritten return address reading: Bill McCreedy, County Road 14, Claude, Texas.

How can this be? Hollis thought, the envelope shaking in his hand. No, no, it isn't possible. Because he knew Creed was truly gone; he had witnessed those various facets of death — all possessing a distinct aura of completeness, each an unquestionable moment of terrible truth — and in less than the passing of a second, he had seen Creed eradicated with his own eyes, an image which was indelibly carved into his memory, something which couldn't be altered. Then he wondered if there might not be a second Creed revealing himself, just as there was now a second Hollis appearing before him from time to time — a creature or spook bearing similar characteristics yet seemingly inhuman. Much to his relief that didn't prove to be the case, although it was a second Bill McCreedy who had found him — or, rather, the original Bill McCreedy, as he quickly realized upon tearing open the envelope — one who had pre-dated the man he had met in the army, and, as it happened, who was also partly responsible for the creation of that Creed he had known and so disliked.

Within the envelope was a Christmas card depicting the black silhouettes of the Three Wise Men riding camels under a starry sky; inside the card was the printed sentiment of may the lord be with you during his blessed season — along with a folded piece of yellow paper containing a dollar and a short letter: Dear Son,The McCreedy Family hopes this finds you in improved health amp; doing well, and that you're enjoying the holidays in the comfort of your kin.We apologize for not writing you any sooner, but we weren't sure how to reach you until last week. As I'm sure you can understand, things have been difficult here. The service for our beloved son amp; brother Bill went very nice, and our faith amp; community has done much to tend to our grief. We draw great strength in knowing Billy's serving with the Lord, but not a day goes by that doesn't keep him square in our thoughts amp; prayers. We miss him so badly. Needless to say, you're in all our thoughts amp; prayers, too. Billy always spoke highly of you in his letters home. The sacrifice you made in trying to protect him means more to us than you can imagine.Please know that should you find yourself passing our way, you're always welcome to stay a spell with us. We'd enjoy getting to meet you, so consider it an open invite. Until then, if you catch a moment drop us a line and tell us how you're holding up. We'd appreciate hearing from you.Yours, in the Lord,Bill Sr., Florence, and Edgar McCreedy

P.S. The one buck isn't much, but we thought you might like a little walking around money for the holidays.

For every Bill Jr. — Hollis found himself thinking after finishing the letter — there ‘s a Bill Sr. He returned the card and letter to the envelope, slipping both it and the dollar into a back pocket. Already the surprise of receiving such a letter had vanished, replaced by the appeasing notion of at last having a connection outside of Critchfield. It didn't matter if it was McCreedy's family or not, just so long as Creed wasn't involved. It didn't matter if everyone regarded his war wound as a heroic sacrifice or a badge of honor. What did matter, though, was that now he had somewhere else to go, someplace new where he'd be welcomed by strangers as a friend. Prayers don't always get answered, he realized, but occasionally they do; and if the Lord was inclined to move in mysterious ways — so, too, would he.

17

The turning of the year was to mark a brand-new beginning. As Hollis told Debra, 1951 was to be a time for serious change, a time for him to make a clean go of things, disregarding much of what had previously shaped his life. That fresh start began early on the morning of January 2, when he rose in bed, brushing sleep off his eyelids, having become awake to what he thought was the sound of somebody crossing by the foot of his bed, walking quickly from the room and shutting the door behind. Sitting there, he listened for movement in the hall, but instead heard only birds just beyond the bay window. After a while he climbed to his feet and navigated the semi-darkness, presently dressing himself in front of the window where the pale outside light illuminated the curtains. Prior to sleeping he had washed, slicking and patting his hair, and he had also laid out the clothing he intended to wear the following morning — clean socks and underwear, a white cotton undershirt, gabardine slacks, a lightweight lumber jacket, and a green sweater he now pulled over his head. Then it was him crossing by the foot of his bed, holding the small brown suitcase he had packed the night before, walking resolutely from the room and quietly shutting the door behind.

Moments later, Hollis went gingerly through the almost silent downstairs, going past the doorway of his mother and stepfather's bedroom, catching their mismatched but equally voluminous snores coming from within, as the floorboards creaked beneath him despite efforts to step lightly. In the living room he noticed the Zenith radio had been left on — humming faintly with electricity, its orange light glowing — and an unfinished newspaper remained on the seat of Rich's black leather armchair (the same armchair where his stepfather would soon suffer a stroke, dying alone while listening to a broadcast of Toscanini conducting La Traviata, a newspaper across the man's lap like a blanket). When he pulled open the front door, sunlight poured into the foyer; ahead of him, in the yard, clumps of snow mingled with fallen leaves and the stems of dry grass. Whistling to himself, he bustled forward, hurrying down the porch steps, forgetting to lock the door before he went.

The train station was six blocks away — six blocks on a freezing January morning, lugging the suitcase at his side, now ambling down residential streets that were, except for the birds above and his own tuneless whistling, as hushed and inactive as the house Hollis had just left. But he hadn't departed angrily or without an explanation about where he was headed; rather, he'd made his intentions known to his mother: he would pay his respects at Bill McCreedy's grave in Claude, Texas, visiting with his fallen comrade's family at their invitation, and, in roughly a week, he planned on returning home; this much his mother understood, this, she felt, was a good enough reason for him to leave. So he could have something to eat during the train ride, Eden filled a brown paper bag with saltine crackers, three hard-boiled eggs, three peanut butter sandwiches, and two thick slices of pound cake. In his wallet was the twenty dollars she had given him for the trip, along with the cash he had saved by doing odd jobs for the First Methodist Church (sweeping snow, clearing ice from gutters, sorting through clothing donations, organizing cardboard boxes in the cluttered basement). The money could get him there and back, providing he didn't overstay, yet already he was hoping the week in Claude might stretch into two weeks or more; for also inside his wallet was another letter sent from Texas, an answer sent by Florence McCreedy in reply to his request to pay a visit, telling him the McCreedy family would be sure to meet his train and, of course, he could stay with them for as long as he wished.

However, Hollis didn't realize his trip would last indefinitely — a lifelong journey impelling him from Minnesota to Texas to Pennsylvania to California to the Arizona desert — nor did he foresee returning briefly to Critchfield some eight months later, summoned home again by his mother so that he could stand beside her in August and watch Rich's casket get lowered into the ground. On that morning, though, Critchfield was already well behind him — relegated to the past, each footstep he took pushing it further back in time — even before he entered the warmth of the local train station and hurried to buy a one-way ticket. While he stood at the ticket counter, a hand reaching for his wallet, his stomach fluttered with anticipation when he uttered where he was headed. The bespectacled woman manning the counter cocked a drawn-on eyebrow after he spoke, repeating the destination as if it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. “That's right,” he said. “That's the place,” and the future, it then seemed to him, bore the name of Claude.

Inside his assigned coach, only a few of the seats were occupied, taken up by people who, like Hollis, appeared to be traveling without company — a sleeping black soldier, an elderly woman whose stunted legs didn't quite reach the floor, a fat man with a cane sandwiched between his thighs, a platinum-haired young lady resting her head against pulled window curtains. The passenger car was unusually quiet, and everyone was spread apart, keeping to themselves and contained in their own thoughts. But Hollis welcomed the lack of interaction, preferring instead to watch the scenery once it began shifting and unfolding. By his own estimation, the trip to Texas was to be a long one, almost a full two days, and he wouldn't arrive in Claude until late at night. As the train lurched from the station, he eased into the green plush seat, and then, like a coil relieved of a great weight, his body was suddenly unencumbered, making it possible for him to drift off.

I'm a free man, Hollis thought, and closed his eyes. He had equated his leaving Critchfield as an act of self-determination, a necessary escape — yet, just then, an acute feeling of solitude rumbled about in his mind, dropping his stomach. Is this what comes with wanting freedom? Weighing the differences of being lonely and being alone, he decided the mastery of the latter could surely trump the former. For he was, indeed, alone — traveling by himself, bound for an unfamiliar destination — but now as sleep tugged at him, he refused to acknowledge the true loneliness he had always harbored; by doing so he could maybe go anywhere he pleased, whenever he pleased, and he might be less inclined to rely again on the static comfort of his hometown.

Sometime afterward, the sound of his own slurping awakened Hollis, and pushing himself upright — hair slightly disheveled, his left cheek temporarily imprinted with the design of the plush seat — he noticed a trail of drool on his sweater. Wiping his chin with the back of a hand, he leaned to one side so that he could gaze out at the landscape racing by. The train was winding among a wooded area, rushing near pine trees which flashed sunlight — bright, hot, and blinding — in the spaces between their shaded trunks; the trees faded, giving way to a sloping meadow and the hulking shapes of grazing black cows which, from his squinting vantage point, looked like burned patches of earth scattered about the field. Throughout the trip the same moment reoccurred: he'd fall asleep for a while, waking every now and then to stare beyond the window — catching a transitory glimpse of bundled figures ice fishing on a frozen lake or, at dusk, the rugged high bluffs of what he assumed was the Mississippi River. As if the train had entered a tunnel which had no end, the night brought little more than complete darkness, although the distant glow of isolated homes and rural communities sometimes floated by like remote clusters of starlight.

The following dawn found Hollis eating a boiled egg while studying an expanse of yellowish, grassy plains which met the horizon. Ten percent earth, he thought, and ninety percent sky. The monotonous terrain was intermittently disrupted by dirt roads and weathered farmhouses and bare pastures divided into curving, near-symmetrical crop rows of loamy soil. From dawn to dusk it was those very plains displayed outside the window, an ocean of flat earth emphasizing the sky, punctuated infrequently with the buildings and signs of junction stops. Periodically he checked his wrist-watch, wondering if the train had yet crossed the Texas border. But with nightfall he knew the city of Claude was fast approaching; and, too, he was relieved to see a change on the other side of the glass, even if what he stared at was pure darkness and his own transparent reflection returning his gaze.

After the porter strolled through the car announcing Claude as the next stop, Hollis began putting himself in order. Using the darkened window for a mirror, he combed fingers through his unwashed hair, becoming self-conscious, then, of the thick stubble he had let grow on his face. He smoothed wrinkles from his sweater, straightened the neckline. He readied his suitcase, placing it between his feet, and pulled his lumber jacket on. Aside from having stepped off the train to breathe fresh air somewhere in the middle of Kansas, he had rarely left his seat during the entire trip, never visiting the dining car and only going to the toilet if his bladder or bowels started hurting — and now, while the train slowed down, he moved into the aisle with his suitcase, hearing the bones of his legs pop and crackle when he stood upright, discerning a short twinge of pain where he'd been shot.

But arriving in Claude, as soon as he set foot on the empty platform, Hollis began to worry he might have come to the wrong stop. Just he and two porters departed the train while everyone else had stayed on board. There were no electric signs blinking and illuminating streets, no indication of a downtown or even a city nearby. Everything around the station was still, totally quiet save for crickets, and consumed by the night. The air was sharp and dry, not at all what he had expected the Texas weather to be like, feeling almost as chilly as Critchfield. Pivoting his head one way and then the other, he went along the length of the platform rather slowly, grasping his suitcase by the handle. He stopped at the far end of the platform, beyond which he saw nothing but could hear and feel the wind blowing. Entertaining the notion of getting back on the train, he turned around, and there ahead of him, some several feet away, three people of varying heights came filing from inside the station house: a tall middle-aged man with weathered features and hair combed straight back on his scalp, a compact middle-aged woman with a round head and black teardrop-shaped glasses with rhinestones set in the corners, a gangly teenage boy with severe acne and disproportionately long arms with large hands which hung closer to his knees than his hips — each immediately looking in his direction, all having light auburn hair and pronounced cheekbones, wearing what must have been their Sunday-morning best on a late Wednesday night, and all unmistakably related.

“We're figurin’ you're Hollis,” the man drawled.

“Yes, sir.”

The threesome started toward him in tandem, although no one smiled as they moved closer, no one appeared overjoyed at the sight of him. Already they weren't the people Hollis was expecting — for he had fostered a Texas-size illusion of a loud, gregarious family decked out in cowboy boots and Stetson hats, patting his shoulders, hugging him like a long-lost brother after greeting his train; he had, on an unconscious level, imagined kinder, more agreeable versions of Creed. But when the man firmly grasped Hollis's hand, his face was austere and determined. “I'm Bill Sr.,” he said, “or Bill,” correcting himself, “and this here is Florence, my wife.”

“Hello,” Hollis said, nodding once at Bill Sr.; he then nodded once at Florence, whose blue eyes were busy scouring his face, as if searching for something to fix on.

“We've heard so much about you,” said Florence, her voice restrained, whispery. She managed to stare at him without meeting his gaze, extending a small hand, her fingers becoming lax in his palm, her skin soft and cold like oilcloth. “We're so glad you came, Hollis, but you must be exhausted. That's an awful while to stay cooped up on a train.”

“It wasn't so bad, actually. I slept most of the way.”

The boy was no older than fifteen, and he stood behind his parents like a shadow, keeping his head lowered. “Hollis, you've probably heard some tales on this one here,” Bill Sr. said, stepping aside, making room for the boy before pointing at him. “That's our Edgar.”

“Of course,” Hollis said, feigning recognition, except he wasn't familiar with Edgar, nor had he previously heard anything about him. The boy struck him as nervous, or scared, or painfully shy — it was hard to tell. Like Florence, Edgar couldn't quite meet his eyes; even when Hollis said, “Nice to see you at last,” the boy's lips seemed to move involuntarily, forming the word “Hi,” but hardly uttered a sound. Then Bill Sr. asked if he had any other luggage, and Hollis raised the suitcase, replying, “Just this.”

Bill Sr. took his son by the elbow, urging him forward: “Edgar, help him with his bag, will you?”

“It's okay, really,” Hollis protested, but the boy had already grabbed the suitcase handle, displacing his fingers.

Gently resting a hand on Hollis's arm, Florence said, “Edgar's got it, don't worry. You've had yourself a tiring trip, and you're our guest now. So let's get you settled in, get you something in your belly. Surely you must be starving.”

“Thank you,” Hollis said, feeling suddenly bewildered. “Thank you,” he said again.

Like a disorganized group of soldiers they marched from the platform, Bill Sr. leading the way and Florence taking up the rear directly behind Hollis. When they finally left the building — Bill Sr. pushing open a door at one end of the station so they could follow him into the blustery night — Florence's lilting voice drifted to Hollis, saying, “Welcome to Claude. We want you to feel at home here — it's important you do that for — ” Her sighing tone was cut short with a swift gust of wind and, it seemed, whisked away by the breeze.

But Hollis wouldn't see much of Claude that evening; rather it was an infinite void of darkness which drew his attention, making it impossible to figure out where the land ended and the sky began. And as he was driven farther into the night on a sparsely traveled two-lane highway, away from a smattering of city lights and toward the McCreedys’ farm, a faint rumbling became audible — a sound which increased with every mile, like the mass bellowing of a thousand agonized souls, a lonesome howling he would soon learn was only the West Texas wind crying through the deep, yawning Caprock canyons which lay just beyond the edge of the McCreedys’ property.

With the even light of midday, Hollis was able to get a better sense of his surroundings, to put himself in some context to his new environment when standing alone on the McCreedys’ rickety front porch. The isolated farmhouse was little more than a well-tended wooden shack — box-shaped yet freshly painted white, lacking a proper yard but with a fence enclosing it — dotting a vast prairie which spread out in every direction as a limitless landscape of scrub brush, wild grass, and reddish dirt. Aside from a run-down, slanted barn a few yards off and the spinning blades of a windmill rising up behind its roof like an oversize weather vane, there were no other structures or homes — or the city of Claude — anywhere in sight. But the wind remained a constant companion, if a less tumultuous presence than on the previous night. The slats creaked underfoot while he paced the length of the porch, his soles catching on nails which were slowly freeing themselves, and he peered forward, realizing that all around him, even nearby, were a million patches of earth which had never once felt the influence or weight of a single human being.

How unlikely, it struck Hollis, for him to have awakened there. How circuitous his life had become of late. Then, too, it was as if he had stranded himself on the moon with three strangers who were hard to gauge. Nevertheless, after he had slept contentedly inside their home, what had felt aloof during the first night was more forgivable in the light of the next day. For he had encountered the source of their collective reticence that morning, had caught glimpses from one side of the one-story house to the other. A walnut chifforobe sat in the middle of the living room like an altar, upon which was a folded American flag, three carefully arranged letters and envelopes, a Purple Heart which had been awarded posthumously, a handwritten copy of the Lord's Prayer, and — at the center of it all — a framed portrait of a teenaged Creed, an enlarged black-and-white high-school photograph with a sepia tint and cloudy borders: his chin lifted to accentuate the angle of his jawline, his teeth flashing white and perfect, his thick blond hair slicked back on his scalp, his skin airbrushed into an unblemished surface. Smaller versions of the photograph were scattered throughout the house (on a piano beside a large cross, on a hallway wall beside a dime-store painting of Jesus, on a telephone stand beside a King James Bible), while no photographs of Edgar, or Bill Sr., or Florence were displayed in any room — just that same image of Creed residing within inches of some representation of the Lord.

“Are you redeemed, Hollis?” Florence had asked him earlier, after Edgar had led him to the kitchen for breakfast.

“I believe so,” he answered from where he leaned against the doorway, but somewhere in his mind he thought: No, not really, probably not yet.

“That's nice to hear,” she said in her soft, maternal way, staring down at the stove while frying bacon. “It's getting harder anymore knowing who is or who ain't.”

Crossing back and forth between his mother and Hollis, Edgar had begun arranging five plates, five napkins, five cups, five forks and spoons and butter knives around the kitchen table, of which only four of each would be used. Once everyone sat down to eat scrambled eggs, pork chops, bacon, and toast, the morning prayer was given in complete silence — four pairs of hands clasped before four faces, although only three of the four heads bowed with eyes closed, shifting their bodies toward the unused setting and empty seat where Creed should have been awaiting his breakfast. The surviving McCreedys were, after all, grappling with the loss of either a beloved son or an older brother; they were, Hollis now understood, a family still very much fettered in a state of profound mourning, something they also had expected him to share. Most surely they were people in need of answers in order to assuage the grief, just as he, for less specific reasons, was in need of meaning for his life. That was why they had wished to meet him, he reasoned, and that was why he had decided to travel so far. For them, he was an accessible link to a tragedy which couldn't yet be laid to rest — and, maybe, with him at last present to them there was offered the possibility of acceptance, however meager the detailed truth and circumstances of their son's murder might get parceled.

But if a kind of healing was wanted, perhaps the process had already begun without effort, commencing quietly within the hazy glow of dawn and signaled by the mindful gaze of a boy who, from his bed, spied the broad, snakelike scar on the inner thigh of their guest; for Hollis had slept in the narrow room Creed had occupied with his kid brother, falling asleep on the twin mattress which had previously held the more muscular form of Edgar's military-bound sibling. Now the room had clearly become Edgar's domain with his brother's departure and death, the floor littered by the boy's comic books, battling green army men, model cars, and discarded socks and crumpled overalls. In fact, the room smelled of boy, musty and earthy, like wet dirt. Other than Edgar's clutter, though, there wasn't much else in the room but the two twin beds and a bureau and a chair where Hollis had put his suitcase.

Yet lingering traces of Creed remained evident on the wall above what had been his bed — three triangle-shaped high-school football flags, blue and gold, heralding the Fighting Tigers of Claude as district and regional champs. And on the bureau — in front of which Hollis loitered soon after waking, standing there in just a T-shirt and underwear — was a handful of Indian Head pennies positioned side by side to make the pattern of a cross, along with the tattered, blurry photograph of the girlfriend Creed had claimed he was going to marry someday, and a flat, slender piece of polished metal with hanja characters meticulously carved upon it and which, he had no doubt, had belonged to the monk they had seen run down on that desolate road from Yongdong. As he absently scratched at his scar — glimpsing those few items he had either forgotten about or never imagined seeing again in a place like West Texas — it seemed, to Hollis, as if Creed had recently visited the farm, leaving the good luck charms carried in Korea on the bureau before heading elsewhere — except that wasn't quite the case.

Still, Creed had been to Claude since Hollis last saw him alive, although he arrived within a sealed coffin, never making it back to his bedroom at the farm; his possessions, however, were afforded the courtesy, the military having forwarded them ahead of the body. Then how human those things now appeared, how unrelated to Creed they felt, and what had once seemed so cruel or somehow emblematic — the pennies, a memento stolen off a dead monk, even a girl's unfocused face on the curled paper of a ragged photograph — no longer held much significance when studied in the context of a dim farmhouse bedroom, somewhere far removed from the bloated corpses floating among rice fields or piled beneath bridges. And yet, for Hollis, that was where Creed continued to reside in his memory, that was where his version of Creed belonged — roaming assuredly, furiously below Korean hillsides, a cigarette at his lips, his rifle aimed and ready. No, Hollis couldn't envision such a soldier as ever having lived a life at the remote farm — sleeping where he'd slept, going to school and playing sports, growing up with soft-spoken family members — unless, of course, that person was someone more like himself. He pressed a finger over a penny, sliding it out of the cross pattern and along the top of the bureau. Funny, he thought, that these little things outlasted Bill McCreedy — funny that just this stuff and almost nothing else would find its way home to Texas.

When Hollis turned away from the bureau, he saw Edgar was awake and sitting upright in bed, watching him without expression, thick hair pointing wildly in a dozen directions. “Morning,” Hollis said, navigating around a traffic jam of toy cars on the floor, and then he lowered himself to the edge of Creed's mattress, facing the boy whose bed was less than three feet away. “How'd you sleep? Hope I didn't keep you up by snoring.”

But Edgar didn't answer, nor did he now stare directly at Hollis. Instead, the boy's gaze was fixed on the snaking scar, studying the wound with fascination. “It hurt?” he finally said, pointing casually at Hollis's left thigh.

Spreading his legs apart, Hollis glanced at the scar, rubbing a palm along it. “Not so much anymore. Sometimes it does, if I think about it, but mostly it only itches on occasion.”

“Looks like it hurts.”

Edgar scooted forward in the bed, sliding his bare feet out from under the sheets, bringing himself to the edge of his mattress where, as if the boy were trying to see through darkness, he bent forward to peer at the scar.

“Go ahead,” Hollis said. “Feel it if you like, won't bite you.”

At first Edgar looked like he had no intention of getting any closer to the wound, but presently he moved a hand toward the damaged thigh, gingerly easing fingers against Hollis's skin as if he were testing the heat of a flame. “You knew my brother,” the boy said matter-of-factly, two cold fingertips slowly tracing the route of the crooked scar, producing a multitude of goose pimples on Hollis's left thigh.

“I sure did.”

After a second the boy asked, “Was he your best buddy?”

Unsure of how to answer, Hollis gave an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. He then heard himself say, “Sort of, I suppose,” as his body unexpectedly turned rigid from the boy's touch.

“He was my best buddy, too.” Edgar drew his hand back, quickly retracting it to a bouncing knee covered beneath his plaid pajama bottoms. “Think a fella can have him two best buddies?”

“Don't see why not,” Hollis said, giving another shrug.

“Me neither,” the boy said. “Don't see why not neither.” Then Edgar's mouth thinned a bit before he asked, “You miss him?”

“Yes,” Hollis lied without thinking twice, “I do.”

The boy grinned and then, as he had just done with his hand, quickly retracted the expression as if he wasn't permitted to smile. However, in that brief moment, Hollis spotted something familiar on Edgar's benign face, catching a glimpse of the exact same effortless grin he had seen to the point of contempt in Korea. Yet sitting before the boy, Hollis was surprised to suddenly feel a kind of indirect affection for Creed, an unexpected tenderness and warmth he had never thought possible.

“Anyways, you wasn't snoring,” Edgar said. “If you was I'd have told you to shush. Don't like hearing snoring, that's why I don't do it.”

“Fair enough,” Hollis said, smiling at one corner of his mouth. “I don't like hearing snoring either.”

But later that morning — while Hollis stood alone on the porch, waiting for Bill Sr. to come outside and give him a tour around the property — something else was now puzzling him, something he couldn't really sort out in his head; because during breakfast Bill Sr. and Florence had spoken of how glad they were to have him there, how important it was for them to get to know the young man who had been a friend to their elder son and, as Florence told it, was highly regarded in turn. “You meant the world to our Billy,” she had said, seated at the kitchen table across from him. “Most every letter he sent home had some kind of mention of you, said you were like a second brother to him, said you was someone he'd count on in the worst of it.”

“He got a big cut on his leg,” Edgar piped up, raising his right arm and holding it at the elbow. “ ‘Bout this long as this much of my arm here.”

Like a jag of lightning, Bill Sr. struck his fork against Edgar's plate, admonishing the boy with a chewing mouthful of eggs: “Why don't you shut it and eat your breakfast.” Then as Edgar and his arm slumped, Bill Sr. swallowed hard, thrusting his fork at the center of the table to retrieve another pork chop.

“Please forgive Edgar,” Florence said, shooting the boy a quick sidelong glance which was both stern and motherly. “His mouth ails him of late.” Her glare melted when she shifted again to Hollis, and then she sighed: “Just for the life of me, I can't begin imagining what all you boys endure over in a place like that. Except you was blessed to have each other — you and our Billy — and I take great heart knowing that. We all do, Hollis.”

“That's nearer than right,” Bill Sr. agreed with a sullen voice, hunched over where he sat and poking at the food on his plate.

What was said about the letters was mystifying, although Hollis could tell Florence wasn't lying. He saw the truth expressed upon her pale white face, heard it in her gentle, mellifluous voice. She had no reason to lie to him, whereas Creed apparently had reason to lie to her and Bill Sr. and Edgar. The best Hollis could figure was that, when writing home, Creed had simply substituted him for Schubert Tang — perhaps because Schubert had been Chinese instead of white, a person who, by last name only, might have sounded more like the enemy than a friend. But even that didn't make much sense. Then after Florence's unlikely revelation came another consideration — a horrible possibility lacking any logic to it, a horrible realization squirming and growing inside his brain — calling into question his memory of Creed, as well as what he believed he had understood for certain about his days serving overseas: Maybe Creed hadn't lied. Maybe, instead, he was the one remembering everything wrong. Maybe everything had happened in slightly different ways and the reality was too awful for him to have sustained, lest he fall apart at the painful recollection of it. Maybe the facts had escaped him on the morning he and Creed were both shot, rattled from him on the banks of the Naktong, ebbing further, then, in the weeks of recuperation, medication, and alcohol. Maybe — maybe — he had been nurturing lies without realizing it, fitting them into the places where he was no longer able or willing to access the truth.

And soon enough Hollis would be asked to dig among those grievous places in his mind, surprising himself with what was lurking there and, as the words slipped easily and dispassionately past his lips, with what he then heard himself say. For Bill Sr. would take him away from the farmhouse, just the two of them jostled inside a red pickup truck, bouncing along a rutted dirt road which wound down and through a valley of craggy, barren mesquite trees. When the truck growled along a steep hill, climbing higher, the ghostly mesquites began decreasing in number until they were gone. With the trees behind them, the truck topped the hill and an expanse of open fields flooded into view. That over there, Bill Sr. went on to mutter while he drove, was for cotton; that one, too; that one up yonder, that's where oats will sprout come spring. Hollis looked to his left, to his right, up ahead, nodding all the while. Keeping his eyes toward the horizon, Bill Sr. stopped the truck in the middle of the road, turning off the engine. Hollis glanced woodenly at him, saying nothing.

For a minute, Bill Sr. continued looking beyond the mud-spattered windshield with his face set. Then wetting his lips, he lowered his head, staring only at the center of the steering wheel. “Son,” he said in the gravest of tones, “I don't like askin’ you this, ‘cuz it's been hard on you, I know, and I ain't sayin’ it ain't been — but you got to tell me something, ‘cuz there's something I need knowing and it couldn't rightly get asked in front of Flo and the boy. So I promise you I won't be badgering you again on this while you're here — or ever again, I promise — but I'm needing to know how it happened that Billy got himself killed exactly. We already know when and where he got hit, we already know that. We know about that damn sumbitch sniper. We know you was there, too, and how you got hit bad in the leg and, son, that's a mighty rotten thing you had done to you — glad you got that sumbitch back, better believe it. But that's about all we got reported to us, and I can't stomach not knowing the whole story, ‘cuz it was my boy who got killed and I've got me a right to know more than just two-bit information on pieces of paper. So I'm hoping you can shed a little more light for me — and I won't ask again, I promise you that — I just need knowing for my own sake, ‘cuz it'd make a world of difference to me, and I'd sure sleep a ton better by knowing.”

The events of five months earlier seemed like they belonged to another lifetime. Still, Hollis would oblige Bill Sr.'s request because, at that moment, it felt as if he had no other choice but to do so. He leaned forward, bringing his stare to the dashboard, saying, “I don't know.” Dust coated everything — the dash, the steering wheel, the seat; unsettled motes of dust floated between and around them like minuscule constellations, as both Hollis and Bill Sr. held their respective gazes within the truck. “I don't know,” he repeated, searching for the proper starting point. “It's not anything I've talked about before.” But already a confident voice he didn't recognize was whispering inside his head, urging him on — some separate part making itself known, speaking to him with an increasing volume and, in due course, speaking from him in a straightforward, deliberate manner.

Then Hollis would talk of that fateful morning at the Naktong; he would relate an account which wasn't entirely familiar to him yet was plausible enough, revising and editing as he went. He and Creed had had a peaceful night at the two-man listening post. Pressing their shoulders against sandbags, they had swapped cigarettes at dusk and talked in low voices about insignificant things, the way friends tend to do — people they missed back home in the States, food they looked forward to eating again, mostly small talk Hollis couldn't now begin to recall. With darkness their conversation had drifted toward silence, both holding positions on either side of the post, monitoring the night, entranced by the purring of crickets and the steady burbling of the river. A few times they had heard rustling in the nearby wild grass and reeds, but it always proved to be nothing more than the invisible hand of nature. By first light the air had become cooler and smelled sweeter than it had throughout the uneventful night. In the calm morning the crickets grew quieter, and the hillsides were turning green and golden. It was almost time for them to leave, to return to camp on a trail which ran along the edge of an apple orchard. Beside a dying pine tree at the rear of the listening post, he and Creed had stood up to urinate, putting the trunk of the tree between themselves and the river, half shielding their bodies there. But no sooner had they unfastened their pants when Creed saw something glinting beyond Hollis, several yards away in the reeds and reflected by sunlight. Perhaps, at that moment, Creed had shouted a warning, although Hollis couldn't say for certain. However, he remembered Creed pushing him violently aside at the very instant a loud crack erupted within the reeds, and he remembered looking up from the ground as Creed staggered back into the trunk, bleeding at his neck. After that, Hollis told Bill Sr., his mind was a jumble, a mess of black spaces and frozen seconds. Of course, later on, what had then transpired was pieced together and made plain: he had pursued the sniper on the banks of the river, had chased the gook bastard and killed him — but not before also getting shot, not before feeling the same burning sting which had taken Bill McCreedy Jr. from the world.

“He saved my life,” Hollis said miserably, “and I couldn't save him. Everyone said I'd been a hero, even though it's not anything I'm proud of. The real hero was your son, sir, and I can't stand how I'm here now and he isn't, doesn't seem right some way. What keeps me going is not letting myself forget I owe the rest of my days to him. So I've got a duty to keep my head above water and let my life from here on out serve as an honor to his memory — and that's what I'm intending to do, that's pretty much all I can tell you, sir.”

Bill Sr. raised his head. He brought his stare to the driver window, lost in thought. After a while he said, “I appreciate it, son,” sounding as if the wind had been knocked from him.

Except what was just said might as well have fallen on deaf ears; for Hollis, too, had raised his head, glancing toward the passenger window — his attention immediately caught by two indistinct figures standing far off in a sloping back field, a pair of black shapes framed with blue, loitering where the flat horizon of the field cut a line underneath the sky. With a blink of his eyes, the taller shape standing to the right vanished from sight. But the other figure remained slumped to one side as if it were on the verge of toppling, both arms outstretched like Jesus nailed to the cross. You're only a scarecrow, Hollis told himself. Only a stupid scarecrow — that's what you really are.

18

On the following Sunday, Hollis and the McCreedys had a late lunch in picnic fashion among the deceased, a newly adopted weekly ritual which the family, especially Florence, felt was necessary. They ate outside during the afternoon, shortly after church, and the weather was nicer than usual, warm enough for coats to be unbuttoned once Sunday worship was behind them. Yet the Baptist church had been different than any church Hollis had previously attended; the service wasn't conducted inside a proper building but, rather, beside a dry riverbed at the bottom of the Caprock canyon, presented under a large revival tent — like structure lacking walls and covered by a corrugated-metal roof which was held up with slender wooden poles; instead of pews there were rows of long weathered benches, instead of a seasoned, soft-spoken minister there was an agitated boyish preacher with yellow bloodshot eyes — shaking his arms in front of the congregation, a Bible gripped in one hand, pacing like a caged lion and wagging his tongue, wearing a blue suit which was a size too big for him, spitting as a man possessed while he gesticulated, telling them they were no better than stray cattle! But Jesus had died a horrible death so they might be delivered from the slaughterhouse of damnation! Jesus, the preacher screamed, was greedy for their unworthy souls! The Lord couldn't care less about their spoiled flesh, but He would die again and again if only to redeem their wanton, sinful souls: “An eternity of Hell fire awaits you who are ripe with the taint of Satan's lure and choose not to heed His word lest you abandon the reckless pleasures of this here diseased world! Oh, heed His word! Redeem yourself, or perish!”

Redeem yourself, or perish.

Hollis's brain had begun to ache, throbbing somewhere deep within his forehead as the boy preacher shouted his wrathful message. By the time the service was finished, the pain had spread, becoming more unbearable, coursing with the pulse of his heartbeat and pounding along the cords of his sockets; it was an acute and near-blinding sensation which stayed with him while he rode in the backseat of the McCreedys’ Ford automobile, sitting beside Edgar and massaging his temples with the points of his thumbs. Florence sat up front, rigidly and silently, arms cradling a wicker picnic basket which pressed down against the folded baby-blue quilt on her lap; next to her, Bill Sr. drove northward, taking them straight through Claude without stopping. Beyond the windows was mostly a clear sky marred only by the presence of a small wayward cloud which, to Hollis, resembled a question mark. Presently a white gravel road appeared on the right side of the highway and Bill Sr. turned onto it, driving toward a fenced-in property, then he bumped the car across a cattle-guard entrance and beneath an arching iron gateway which read claude cemetery. For a while the car continued on the gravel avenue — winding amid tombstones and empty plots — traveling farther into a cemetery which was flat and barren save for patches of brittle grass. The surrounding fields were no less desolate — to the east was a wide-open pasture of nothing but dark brown soil and to the west, just past the highway, was identical terrain with the questioning cloud now floating over it.

Soon they were walking above the dead — Bill Sr., as always, leading the way, Edgar trailing his father closely with the blue quilt sandwiched underneath an arm, Hollis following the boy and squinting from the pain inside his skull, Florence at the rear carrying the picnic basket — crossing a trodden path which cut directly between family plots where the unseen heads of the buried lined the trail on one side, the entombed feet of the deceased bordered the other. All at once Hollis felt shaky, felt his hands tremble, could feel the color draining out of his face — and the inexplicable pain was expanding, reaching into his chest, his gut. “About there,” Bill Sr. said, staring forward but, Hollis understood, addressing him. “Had us a pretty nice gravemarker done, ‘cept that fool engraver got the name spelled wrong — so we had him come and fetch it last week to put it right.”

“Oh, there he is,” Florence said in a pleased manner which sounded no different than had she greeted Creed at the train station. “There's my boy.”

As if the path had been designed only to lead them there, they approached a mound of bulging dirt at the place where the trail ended, set apart from the rest of the graves and obviously a recent addition to the cemetery — for the dirt was not yet level with the earth, nor had any grass been planted upon it; although a few dark green weeds were sprouting on the unmarked rectangular grave, immediately getting yanked by the hands of Bill Sr. and flung aside. With the weeds discarded, all that adorned the dirt was a bouquet of fresh pink carnations, left there by someone who had dug a hole at the top of the mound so the flowers could splay upright as in a vase. Then while Edgar readied the quilt on the nearby ground, and Florence began unpacking the basket, Hollis and Bill Sr. stood at the foot of Creed's grave, looking down and, for Hollis, peering through the compressed layers of dirt to discern what lay below inside a simple black coffin — but seeing just a void of blackness instead.

Without a tombstone, Hollis found himself thinking the grave could be anyone's grave. It could, the now paralyzing pain in his body suggested, be his own grave. With that, he suddenly doubled over, clasping his stomach. “Son?” Bill Sr. said, except Hollis's ears were deafened by a ringing sound. Hunched in front of the mound, gaze still fixed on the dirt, he opened his mouth to speak, but the pain was too great. “You all right?” Bill Sr.'s hand was at his back, patting the spine of his jacket. “Son?” An unintelligible noise spluttered past Hollis's lips, escaping like a final heaving of breath. He tried to scream; he tried to bellow for the whole of humanity. However, the pain wouldn't release his voice; it shot around within him like a pinball, silencing his cry. The chasm of blackness he had glimpsed far beneath the dirt began bubbling up and poured like water through the soles of his shoes, consuming him as he collapsed headfirst against the mound, eyes rolling back into his skull.

When Hollis regained consciousness, he was being handled by Bill Sr. and Florence, both of whom were tugging at him from behind, their arms wrapped about his waist and chest. Dirt, mixed with spittle on his lips, had filled his gapped mouth. “Bless your soul,” Florence was telling him, whispering over his shoulder. “This is a lamentable place, it's true — a lamentable place for us all.” As Hollis was pulled to his feet, a thick clump of dirt fell out of his mouth like dung; he coughed a bit, clearing his throat, tasting grit on his tongue while catching his breath — then it felt like he had been exhumed from the grave, somehow resurrected. After Bill Sr. and Florence managed to turn him in their direction, they started brushing dirt off his face and clothing, both of them resting a hand on his right shoulder, neither looking straight at him but saying, “Let's get you something to eat, son,” and “Lordy, figured I'd lost you for good,” as if they had brought Creed back to life in time for lunch.

“I'm sorry,” Hollis said, realizing the pain had completely vanished, leaving him weak and light-headed. “Please forgive me, don't know what got into me.” His hands weren't shaking anymore, but the blood hadn't yet returned to his face.

“Shouldn't fret on it,” Florence said, tidying his hair with her fingertips. “These things have a way of creeping up on us.”

“I got 'im,” Bill Sr. said, maneuvering next to Hollis; he pressed a palm across Hollis's neck and began guiding him forward, walking a short distance to the quilt — ”Easy does it” — where he then helped him sit down near the bewildered stare of Edgar.

“Hey, you okay?” the boy asked, rubbing Hollis's knee.

“I'm okay,” Hollis mumbled, scanning the quilt, taking in an array of foil-covered plates and napkins and a clear-plastic pitcher of tea. He glanced at Edgar, who was smiling with a concerned expression, and, mussing the boy's hair, he returned the smile.

“C'mon, let's eat,” Bill Sr. said, clapping his hands together while lowering himself on the quilt.

But Florence loitered at the grave, stooping to touch the carnations. “Looks like that girl was here,” she said, carefully rearranging the flowers, fanning the stems farther apart.

“Don't matter no more,” Bill Sr. said, crossing his legs, grasping the ankles of his boots.

“No, I suppose it don't,” she said, drawing her hand from the flowers before standing upright. “Poor child, that girl's got to live with herself, there's punishment enough I imagine.”

As Florence turned, moving toward the quilt, the pink flowers shimmered upon the earthen mound, infused with sunlight and swayed by a gentle afternoon breeze; and, for a moment, Hollis sat transfixed at the sight of the carnations fluttering there, his body feeling as weightless as the cloud which had hung alongside the highway — the cloud which now, from his vantage point, had dissipated into almost nothing, forming a faint squiggly line in the sky beyond Creed's burial plot.

That girl.

From then on, at the Sunday picnic and in the days to come, Hollis would ponder the girl, contemplating what she might actually look like while never settling upon anything specific; for she remained only as when he had originally glimpsed her on a slightly bent black-and-white photograph, first shown to him within the bowels of a transport ship during that turbulent crossing of the Sea of Japan: a nameless, indistinct dark-haired girl posing in the blurry foreground, arms hanging at her sides, her features difficult to perceive; by contrast, the background of the photograph — a wide-open field of tall wild grass — was plainly visible. “That's my girl,” Creed had explained, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.” Months later and thousands of miles away at the McCreedys’ farm, the photograph was studied once again by Hollis, and from time to time he paused before Creed's bedroom bureau, examining the remote image of the girl yet resisted touching the now-worn photograph with his hands. But he didn't feel comfortable asking the McCreedys about her, nor did it seem appropriate to do so, for Hollis sensed the family's disapproval; more specifically, he sensed Florence's disapproval, as she occasionally made derisive reference to that girl when talking with Bill Sr. at supper: “Passed that girl's mother in town today, carrying on like she owned the place,” or “Heard tell from Alma Branches that that girl was up at the cemetery last week, can you imagine? Too little too late, I say. Can't understand what Billy ever had for her to begin with.”

“Don't matter no more,” was Bill Sr.'s weary stock response. “It just don't matter.”

Then toward the latter part of his visit, with sunlight filtering through the shut drapes, Hollis dressed in front of the bureau early one morning, buttoning up his shirt while looking down at the photograph. As if from nowhere, Edgar appeared beside him, wearing pajamas and not yet fully awake, tapping a middle finger against the edge of the photograph. “Scrunchy,” the boy said, yawning afterward.

“Scrunchy?” Hollis asked, glancing to Edgar with a somewhat amused, puzzled expression.

“Scrunchy,” Edgar repeated while turning around. “That's what my brother called her.”

“Why?”

Edgar plodded back toward his bed like a sleepwalker, shrugging as he went. “Don't know,” the boy said. “Guess he liked how it sounded.”

Hollis watched Edgar climb beneath the sheets, promptly vanishing under the pillow so a little extra rest could be had before getting ready for school. “Scrunchy,” Hollis said slowly, savoring the word, trying to comprehend its flavor; his stare moved from the boy, and at last he lifted the photograph off the bureau, bringing her image closer. “Hello, Scrunchy,” he heard himself say, peering into the indecipherable gray-and-black grain of her.

Except, of course, her name wasn't really Scrunchy — and she wasn't just that girl. Rather, for Hollis, she was destined to become the girl. But other than his own mild curiosity about a face he couldn't quite distinguish, there was nothing in the fuzzy photograph which hinted at the role she was meant to play throughout his life. Still, the curiosity was finally enough for him to probe further, to draw information from the boy he had previously been uncomfortable to seek. Subsequently, during the late afternoons, he accompanied Edgar around the farm when the boy did chores — learning how to milk cows, helping feed livestock — anticipating the right moment in which he might interject some question concerning Scrunchy.

What Edgar would then tell him, what was imparted as the boy's hands squeezed along teats or scattered hay upon the ground, cast a small amount of light on the girl, yet, at the same time, did much to explain Florence's disapproval of her; for while she had been Creed's sweetheart, a younger high-school student he had dated and planned on marrying someday, Scrunchy hadn't attended her boyfriend's funeral service. And although the girl lived nearby, less than a mile off at her family's large ranch house, she hadn't offered a single word of condolence, nor did she even sign the sympathy card her own mother had left inside the McCreedy mailbox. In fact, the girl had kept mostly to herself since Creed died, rarely spotted anywhere other than the halls of the high school. Edgar had caught sight of her every so often, usually at dusk while he was roaming the farm property or the adjacent fields. He once spotted her riding a Tennessee walking horse along the fringe of the canyon, and twice he spied on her from afar, tracking her like an Indian scout when she strolled alone within an isolated grove of mesquite trees — her body moving slowly among those gray arthritic branches, arms folded across her chest as if to embrace herself.

Nevertheless, the girl hadn't totally avoided contacting the McCreedys. Several weeks following the funeral, she came by the house on a Saturday, showing up when Florence and Bill Sr. happened to be in town. It was Edgar who opened the front door, taken aback to find her standing there, her lips tightening as she blinked nervously. “This is for your mom and dad, and you, too,” was what she said with a sort of wince in her eyes, handing him a freshly baked peach cobbler, and she didn't say much else except goodbye. However, the cobbler was an empty gesture where Florence was concerned; she wouldn't touch it, didn't want it in her kitchen — even after Edgar and Bill Sr. both sampled a piece, each agreeing it was pretty darn good. But Florence didn't care how delicious the cobbler tasted: that girl wasn't worth the effort it'd take to chew a bite of the stupid thing — and she had never been worthy of Creed; she hadn't truly felt for him as he, apparently, had felt for her. No, she wasn't really her deceased son's special Scrunchy, not by a long shot. She was, instead, a selfish, thoughtless Debra, that's all.

Now fully permeating the consuming shadows of the Nine Springs kitchen, their past swirled about in the darkness around them, the blades of the ceiling fan stirring it like windblown leaves. “It's tough faulting old Florence,” Hollis told Debra, “because she needed someone tangible to blame, otherwise she'd have been sunk. Her grief was just too great for her to recognize your own level of grief, that you were too heartsick and distraught to see them bury the boy you loved, or that facing her and Bill Sr. and Edgar simply underscored Bill being gone. She couldn't understand it. How could she? Plus, I think anger is a lot easier to live with than sadness — I'm sure of it. I mean, she couldn't attach any meaning to the loss of her son, so you became a bit of a scapegoat for that pain, I suppose. I'm not saying it's right, but sometimes that's what people do. We do it more than we probably realize.”

Sitting at the table, with Hollis by her side, the rest of the story was as clear to Debra as it was to him. But the perspective she had always wanted was his perspective, his version of how they met — that timely encounter when, as dusk concluded, she had wandered from What Rocks to the McCreedy farm and sought him out because she had learned he was staying there: the soldier who had been shot with Creed, the one who had survived and could, hopefully, make her understand why her boyfriend had died. And so he obliged her now as he had done back then; he spoke of that other night long ago, after the chores were done and supper was finished and the McCreedys were all shut inside their bedrooms, and he sat by himself on the porch steps, in the cool winter night, gazing upward at a sky which glimmered brilliantly with more stars — blue, red, white, yellow — than he had recalled seeing before or since.

As Debra had approached the farmhouse — trudging up the dirt drive, unclasping the gate of the front yard — Hollis didn't notice her until sensing something below his line of vision, something or someone emerging toward him in the night. Lowering his head, bringing his stare from the heavens to the earth, he saw a fluttering of white up ahead, a slight billowing of fabric, and then on the concrete walkway he recognized her — for she was the same as in Creed's photograph, indistinct and impossible to define, a girlish representation made alluring by lingering just beyond his perception. But with every step she took, the aperture of his mind brought her into clearer focus, honing her shape and features and outward manner. She wore a heavy beige-colored wool coat, blue jeans, and sneakers, with a white chiffon scarf which was knotted at her neck but rippled out across a shoulder like a wind sock. As she drew closer, he spotted a cheap paperback clutched in one of her hands, the kind found on the revolving racks of dime stores, and he imagined she had cradled the book in her palms, thumbs holding the pages open while she navigated around scrub brush and prickly pears, reading during those last fading minutes of the day.

He raised an arm off his knee, casually waving to her once. “Hi,” was what he then heard himself say, when she had stopped in front of him, standing some three feet from where he sat on the steps. With her face as colorless as the scarf she had on and the dark glossy locks of her hair bathed in the glow of the yellow porch light, she seemed to be frowning at him, her brown eyes assessing him suspiciously. Behind her, in the pitch surrounding the yard, the night loomed as her ally and gave bearing to her diminutive figure.

“You Hollis?” she said in a flat, direct way, asked with a gruff tone which sounded older than her years — one her body would, gradually, see fit to match over time.

“That's right,” he replied.

“You was in that mess over there with Billy?”

“I was. Yes.”

His answers seemed to lessen the frown, although her expression remained determined and willful, unflinching while she loitered on the walkway, staring down at him with the frays of her black hair made iridescent by the casting of soft yellow light. Her stare narrowed as the breeze howled swiftly through the yard for a moment — lifting the scarf, and, like unseen fingers, sweeping her hair from her forehead. Once the breeze had passed, that curious frown was there again, that reserve and somberness, staying put when she introduced herself. “I'm Billy's girl,” she continued, as if Creed were still among the living and waiting for her inside the house. But she didn't intend to bother him long. She merely wanted a few minutes of his evening, just whatever it would take for him to accurately make plain the circumstances of her boyfriend's death; the specifics of which had been mostly hearsay, elaborated about town in hushed, piecemeal fashion and exaggerated like gossip — forming an incomplete picture in her head and heart, puzzling her more than any of the mystery novels she read every week.

“Of course,” Hollis said, a solemn note creeping into his voice. “I understand.” And there and then, he was struck by the girl, captivated for reasons he couldn't quite sort out. It wasn't as though she was a perfect beauty — her cheekbones were too high and broad for the small, round shape of her head, her eyes were too far apart — not nearly as beautiful as what the photograph had repeatedly allowed him to conjure. Yet the force of something inevitable seemed to pound at his gut, prodding him with a need for her while, too, filling him with apprehension as she stood above him. He hadn't, until that evening, bought into the idea of a definitive love which could blossom between two people in an instant. However, if such a love were real, he regarded it as an awful thing, a destructive thing, because with it also came the possibility of real loss, of complete and utter desolation in its absence — a bitter outcome he had no wish to experience.

As his voice initially wavered with his thoughts, Hollis began imparting the only full account of Creed's final minutes Debra would ever hear, a version of the event which, from that point on, she accepted as being true. But during the telling, his voice grew steadily more confident, more vivid; and what was then described about that morning at the Naktong wasn't so different from the tale he had given Bill Sr., save for one dramatic shift: it became Hollis, not Creed, who had seen something reflected by sunlight as they shielded themselves behind the dying pine tree, something glinting among the reeds and hidden several yards away; in a split second, Hollis had jumped toward Creed, attempting to push him down at the very instant a loud crack erupted within the reeds — except, of course, he couldn't have moved fast enough. The resulting moments, he went on to explain, brought no appeasing resolution; no degree of satisfaction was had by single-handedly avenging Creed's murder — pursuing and killing the sniper, also getting badly wounded before it was finished — because he would be forever haunted by the knowledge of having failed to protect his friend.

“Everyone called me a hero,” Hollis said miserably, “though it isn't anything I'm proud of. I mean, a real hero would've reacted a second earlier, he ‘d have caught that first bullet and kept his pal from being shot — that's why I'm hardly a hero. And now I can't stand that I'm here and he isn't, doesn't seem right somehow. So I remind myself I've got a duty to keep my head above water and let my life from here on out serve as an honor to his memory — and that's what I'm intending to do, and that's pretty much it.”

Once Hollis was done talking, Debra appeared poised to speak, but then seemed to prevent herself. Instead, she looked at him, withholding a single trace of emotion, and for a while neither of them spoke. Yet he was completely drawn to the impassiveness of her expression, warmed thoroughly in her strong presence — as though she was absorbing the chilly air between them, heating it inside her delicate body, releasing some of it for him to feel.

“See, you aren't alone,” Hollis finally said. “I'm like you. I lost him, too. We both did.”

“Ain't nearly the same thing,” she said, reversing herself, stepping back. “Anyway, all of us are alone.”

Hollis then felt as if he had not said anything right, not expressed himself well enough to comfort her. After she turned without another word and headed across the yard, he sprang off the steps, unwilling to let her recede from view. “Scrunchy,” he blurted. “You'll always be his Scrunchy.” When she pivoted around to him, suddenly, her pale face — peering forward, hair tousled by the breeze — was like one which had encountered a phantom; and yet she stared at him, there in the night, with acceptance, with vague recognition, and while he extended a hand to her, she smiled discreetly and cautiously, as if benignly accepting an unexpected but desired gift. Then, too, he sensed there was a kind of strange magic in himself, an unrealized ability to heal without speech or considerable effort; he had but to touch her, to press his palm against her palm, and her troubles would subside; in this he would find his meaning, his real salvation.

“I'm Hollis Adams.”

“I know who you are.”

“I know. I know that.”

Again and again, Hollis was destined to reach for her — in the yard, during the nights and days, on long walks among the mesquites — and with every movement of his arms, his hands, his fingers, time began accelerating, whirling effortlessly about them. Soon enough their clothing was cast aside at least once within each of the forgotten, empty bedrooms of the old What Rocks house, their entwined bodies exposed by the dusty rays of light which angled downward through the murky windowpanes and illumed the barren floorboards. But prior to any of those furtive couplings — as their self-imposed states of isolation gave way to a greater want for togetherness — the pieces of the picture had begun taking shape, falling smoothly into place: the Saturdays in Claude, the two of them strolling leisurely on downtown sidewalks or sitting side by side at a Dairy Mart booth — paying little mind to the glancing, disapproving onlookers likely whispering, “The very gall of them two,” and “Poor McCreedy boy ain't even cold in the earth and see how she's going on that a way.”

For a while, the covert animosity was hard for Debra to tolerate, although she didn't harbor regrets about being seen with Hollis — nor did she believe Creed would have resented them. Better, she figured, that Billy's best girl and best army friend were joined at the hip than either one relying on a complete stranger for comfort; in some regard, she told herself, they were adhering to Creed's memory by consoling each other's grief, by also resuming and furthering the kind of relationship he had enjoyed with her but could no longer take part in. Then the passing of judgment she felt around town — the whispers, the snide remarks insinuated within earshot — seemed petty, unwarranted, as if the people of Claude just craved something, anything, to stir their indignant and self-righteous natures. When she went to buy some fabric patterns at Christian Dry Goods, the fat girl behind the counter, a former classmate of Creed's, told her in a hushed, well-intending voice, “You and that fella ought shouldn't be flaunting yourselfs like you do, it don't favor you, dear.” Debra smiled politely, thinking all the while: Trudy, I ain't the one who's six feet under — and I'm nobody's widow yet.

By then the rumors concerning them had spread beyond quiet gossip, and already Hollis had been asked to leave the McCreedy farm. At the supper table one evening, Florence fumed in silence, behaving like he wasn't even there — serving everyone except him, never letting her gaze travel to where he sat — frowning with dismay while Bill Sr. forthrightly said it was probably time for Hollis to head home to Minnesota. Edgar, like his mother, was also frowning, but only because the boy had grown fond of Hollis and would miss having him at the house. “I understand,” Hollis told the McCreedys, rising from his chair, “and I want to thank you all for your kindness. It feels like I've gained a family here.”

“You got yourself a family of your own,” Florence scoffed, talking at her plate. “You belong with them, not us.”

“Mother,” Bill Sr. responded to his wife in a reproving tone.

“That's okay,” Hollis said. “Maybe it's best if I get my things gathered.”

But Hollis wouldn't ready for a trip back to Critchfield, and — after packing his suitcase, stealing the photograph of Debra off the bureau and concealing it in a jacket pocket — he wouldn't return to where the McCreedys ate supper. Instead, he immediately left their house without as much as a goodbye, relying on that stealthy departure he had, of late, repeatedly used while fleeing elsewhere; he then walked a mile or so — slipping between the gaps of barbed-wire fences, wandering through grazing pastures — until arriving at the imposing residence standing out on the plains: the crumbling, half-deserted hilltop house known as What Rocks, a place which — as Debra had previously made known — afforded more than enough space for him should he find himself wanting a bedroom of his own. Still, in order to earn his keep, he would be required to work on the property, taking over the chores her alcoholic father was incapable of getting done, loading a pile of cedar posts in the bed of a pickup, mowing the lawn and tending the backyard gardens, yanking weeds and burrs, any sort of odd job; a small price to pay, he had no doubt, for sleeping under the same roof as that girl, a tiny penance, indeed, for what was given in return at What Rocks during the nights, or afternoons, when the door of an abandoned room would lock behind him and Debra, ushering forth a private world which, in the heat and collision of their bodies, was about as far removed from the McCreedys’ sorrowful existence as anything he could hope to conceive.

So regardless of what Florence might have finally thought of him, Hollis wasn't bothered in the slightest. He didn't care if she was angry and disapproved, or felt betrayed by him and Debra. He didn't care if she would eventually shun their wedding, or, for the rest of her days, speak ill of them to anyone who would listen. He didn't care, and whatever she thought truly didn't matter in the big picture; for he had redeemed himself through love, doing so without any help from her or the Lord. As such, he and Debra, by simply finding each other, had freed themselves to create a new reality together, divining their own singular path which just they were meant to embark upon; that alone, with hindsight, provided an answer as to why it was necessary for Creed to have died before him — why Hollis, too, had found himself thrown amidst the early chaos of a divided Korea, getting wounded beside the Naktong — and, later on, it became his sole reason for ever having made the tedious journey to Claude to begin with.

“And that,” Hollis said at the kitchen table, stroking Debra's liver-spotted hand, “is probably all you need to know about us.”

Except now his magic was failing him, his ability to heal her and, ultimately, himself. Then it wasn't him reaching out for her in the night, but, rather, it was she who moved toward him, pressing fingers to his arm, gripping at his shoulder. She gently spoke his name, saying it as a question, and, seconds later, he was helping her to stand, assisting her; yet it was she who led, guiding him from the kitchen table — from the darkness which had facilitated the past — bringing them squarely into the light of the present. Soon they sat together again, their knees touching, their fingers interlaced, facing each other on the living-room couch.

Debra took a deep breath, appearing quite forlorn as she then said, “There isn't much time left, at least for me. So it's important I have some say on when and how my life ends.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, with an uncomprehending expression.

“I'm saying cancer shouldn't get the last word, even though it's killing me.”

The living-room curtains were open, and suddenly Hollis's eyes shifted to the window where he saw the black of night softened by the bright transparent reflection of the living room.

“It isn't easy for you, I know,” she said. “It isn't fair either.”

“No,” he said, sounding irritated, “it isn't fair.” Our story wasn't supposed to go like this, he thought. This isn't how I wanted it to finish. He shook his head, biting his bottom lip, and continued staring at the window.

Debra sighed tiredly, squeezing his fingers, and said, “Hollis, you need to hear me. It's important what I'm about to say, so please listen.”

And now it was her turn to talk, although she wouldn't be revisiting their past; instead, she addressed the near future like an unapologetic fortune-teller prophesying the details of her own demise, revealing what she — and Hollis — could expect in the weeks ahead. Just that afternoon, while returning from the outpatient clinic in Tucson, she had decided not to pursue any more treatment, because it was obvious the disease hadn't stopped spreading even with the preventative use of chemotherapy agents or, for that matter, other experimental drugs. As such, the cancer cells would keep wrecking havoc, creating a bowel obstruction; there would be nausea and vomiting, an inability to pass gas, and her abdomen would swell in girth, surpassing the discomfort of the current ascites. At the end, whatever remained inside her would be expelled by traveling up the esophagus, moving through her throat and out between her lips as a dark greenish bilelike substance carrying the odor of feces — and her withered body, malnourished in appearance, would begin shutting down. Of course, drops of morphine would ease her through those final hours; she would exit this world within an incoherent fever dream, whispering unintelligibly and incessantly as if speaking in tongues, laboring for air while drifting to and from consciousness — until, with the transitory span of a second, she ceased breathing altogether.

Debra fell silent for a moment; her sunken face, lacking any makeup, seemed much older than it should have looked. Outside, Hollis couldn't see a thing — not the houses across the street, nor the stars above them. Then she said, without urgency, that they had to accept her death was fast approaching, but the last painful act wasn't yet a given; for a brief period remained in which she could trump the concluding onslaught of the disease. She could, with his support and permission, depart a bit prematurely, doing so on her own terms — by her own hand, in the tranquillity of their beautiful home — circumventing the indignity of what otherwise would be, for both of them, an excruciating, almost unbearable endgame.

Debra paused, hoping Hollis might now offer her something, but instead he shook his head with confusion, saying nothing. “Anyway,” she went on, “it's about over for me, except I don't want to waste away any more than I already have — and I don't plan on going through the worst of it — and if you won't help me go then, please, at least give me your blessing so I can do it alone with peace of mind. I want to be aware of myself and where I am at the conclusion of my life — I deserve that, after all, and so do you.”

Hollis felt a jolt deep inside himself when bringing his eyes to her. He felt a tightening in his chest. “Deb, I can't give you my blessing,” he said, his voice breaking, “but I can't say I'd blame you either — because I wouldn't.”

“I know you wouldn't,” she said, resting a hand against his neck. “So that's good enough for me. Thank you.”

His eyes began welling, and when he then tried to speak, the words he most wanted to say confounded him, becoming uttered in part through a stifling, gasping shortness of breath.

“Love you, too,” she responded, pressing dry lips against his chin as he leaned forward to kiss her forehead.

Hugging each other, they both wept for a little while — and afterward, they sat back without talking, the tears dripping off their faces, shaken by the irrevocability of the moment. Then Hollis rose from the couch and went to stand at the window. When Debra finally left the living room for bed, he was still there at the window, staring into the night — as if reluctantly awaiting the snow which would soon fall, somehow already sensing that frigid morning where everything around him would become transformed.

19

And so it was to be that snow, at dawn this morning, which beckoned Hollis and Lon forward while the Suburban's hazard lights blinked near the golf course — while the whole of Nine Springs conveyed a listless existence and fireplaces had begun to tinge the air with a woodsy autumnal flavor. The pair trudged straight across the deeply buried greens as a vision of red and cobalt — Hollis in his metallic-colored duvet jacket, Lon in his scarlet parka — going away from the place where Lon had slipped, both leaving a trail of footprints through a glaring, unbroken white expanse: neither speaking now as the sun reflected off the snow and washed out their sight, neither questioning their slow progression which fractured the pure white earth below a pure blue sky, neither asking why it was that they had felt the need to venture forward on the golf course instead of returning to the temperate comfort of their respective homes. Thick, visible exhalations of breath curled up in front of their rosy-cheeked faces like hot industrial steam, preceding them beside hidden sand traps and icy man-made ponds. Holding hands for support, walking side by side, the two men swallowed the cold and the wind, remaining mindful of each step crushing the snow, aware all the while that if one should suddenly fall the other was likely to get dragged down, too. Yet Hollis couldn't maneuver quite as deftly as Lon, for his left thigh ached somewhere below the scar while his feet had grown numb inside the leather boots. But pressing onward with an increasingly painful limp, Hollis was bolstered by a recollection he had been fortunate enough to have never experienced firsthand — those bitter winters during the Korean civil war, that subzero march southward from the Chosin, exposed skin bonding to metal and bloody palms stripped off by frozen mortar shells, frostbite blackening heels or toes. Then Hollis sensed his winter footwear was absorbing moisture; it seemed his socks were growing damp and squishing around within the boots, although the loss of feeling in his feet prevented him from knowing for sure.

It was Lon, however, who paused to catch a breath, shaking loose the snow caked on his galoshes before removing one of his black mitts. While Hollis blew into his bare hands and rubbed his palms together to generate heat, Lon held the mitt out for him, nodding once but saying nothing. Hollis accepted what was offered, working the wet mitt onto his left hand. Just then a crow's scream broke the morning calm, its harsh call echoing from where the bird circled far overhead and appeared to be monitoring them from up high. As if prompted by the ominous cawing, Lon resumed walking, seizing Hollis's bare hand in his own bare hand, tugging him along. The crow screamed a second time, its uneven circle moving and traveling with the pair.

Farther they went, past the eighteenth hole, farther still — the streets and homes now well behind them, the eastern section of the golf course having been designed to jut into undeveloped desert like an oasis — until reaching the edge of their known world, dead-ending at a chain-link fence where, ahead of them in that no-man's-land beyond Nine Springs, was a grove of orange trees, then sloping terrain, then the distant ranges of the Catalina Mountains. But what summoned them lacked reason; what drew them to the fringes was only revealed when at last beheld, and in its august presence they stood dumbstruck at the fence: a lone Hereford cow was waiting on the other side, standing several yards away beside an orange tree, as if sanctuary from the snowstorm had been sought below the branches — a solitary brown-and-white cow which had seemingly anticipated their approach, facing them with eyes agape, glistening while long pendants of ice dripped from its huge nostrils and underside, staying erect but releasing no breath — lifeless there yet frozen upright in tableau.

How strange, Hollis thought, for death to leave the beast standing. But he also understood that death — that trespasser of safe places — was often curious in method: whether it came beneath a bridge, or by a river, or on a golf course, or in a hospital, or beside a tree. Death, he thought, was like the downfalling of snow last night, so quiet and so pacifying, inevitably blanketing all which might hope to remain untouched. So the pain of dying was one thing, he told himself, whereas death itself was something entirely different, something which was benign by nature and not unkind.

“No,” Lon uttered, “no, no, don't understand it, don't get it — how'd we find ourselves here?” His hand flexed and squeezed against Hollis's hand.

“I don't know,” were the words which floated within steam from Hollis, his body shivering. “I don't know,” he repeated, glad for the small bit of warmth Lon's bare hand afforded him. At that moment the crow screamed a warning at close range, making the pair start and glance up to where it sat nearby. Neither had noticed the large bird's arrival, how it had glided noiselessly right above them as a shadow — wings fully expanded, rigid talons slicing the air — to land atop the fence, turning itself around toward them, and perching there now like a sentry, watching with coal-black sockets and darting, questioning movements of its feathered head.

“We need to go,” Lon said, sounding agitated. “I'm suddenly not feeling all that great. Something isn't right.”

“Okay,” Hollis said, meeting the crow's stare, peering into a blackened socket but perceiving a hollowness where an eye should reflect.

“I think I overexerted myself, I think that's it. And I think Jane is probably worrying, so we really better go.”

Cocking its head, the crow thrust its beak forward, bellowing furiously as if ordering them to leave.

“Okay,” Hollis repeated, hesitating long enough to cast his gaze one last time at the poor creature beneath the orange tree: while Lon — refusing to look anymore, pounding the snow with his galoshes — about-faced and tugged on his hand.

“I'm going.”

Hastily they returned upon their own beaten trail, and as Lon led the way among the field of white which was quickly melting under the sun, Hollis soon discerned the figure of someone else in the distance, an inert shape pausing where Lon had fallen earlier on the ninth hole green. The trodden, slushy trail wound back from the desert and brought them closer to the residential lots of the community, the snow ebbing to a grayish muddy surface as sidewalks and asphalt thawed. But the ultraviolet rays thrown off the ice had become excruciating, and with photophobia now hampering their progress instead of the snow, he couldn't quite yet make out who it was they were fast approaching. Perhaps, he thought, it was another person entranced by the aftermath of the snowfall, or possibly an officer from the sheriff ‘s department who had been alerted by the blinking hazard lights of the parked Suburban, or maybe even one of the many groundskeepers investigating the post-storm condition of the golf course; and if the person hadn't been so tall, he would have assumed it was Lon's wife searching for her husband when he had failed to come home.

Since Lon was leading and held a better vantage point, Hollis asked, “Who is it? Can you tell?”

“How's that?” Lon huffed, short of breath, still pulling Hollis by the hand.

“Do you see who it is?”

The figure was a few yards in front of them, marking the spot where their journey had started and, presently, would conclude.

“Who are you talking about?” Lon answered, his labored voice imparting an entire day's worth of exhaustion. “I don't understand who who is.”

Just then Hollis realized what must be loitering on the ninth hole green. “Never mind,” he said, finally recognizing that familiar likeness he had encountered throughout the years — stock-still with arms hanging at its side, expressionless yet vigilant — that time-ravaged twin who wasn't ever meant for this life: a long, unkempt gray beard flowing from its haggard, wrinkled, and stooped body, dressed as always in jeans which had grown ragged and frayed, worn-down leisure shoes, a moth-eaten T-shirt, and a soiled, once bright blue Windbreaker. “I guess I was seeing things, it's nothing.” For a second Hollis wondered if he should not simply head in a different direction, but upon reaching the ninth hole green he let go of Lon's hand and continued forward. Unaware of Max's lingering proximity, Lon accelerated his pace and brushed past the spectral figure, tiredly waving a hand in the air as he proceeded downhill, almost slipping again while hurrying for the sidewalk.

With long, limping strides Hollis walked directly toward his weathered counterpart, fixing on those vacuous eyes which were, somehow, his own eyes. You'll go, he thought. You'll disappear. However, Max didn't fade from sight or vanish in a blink, and Hollis was now closer to it than he had imagined possible; one stayed put while the other charged headlong without hesitation, both on the verge of collision and unwilling to relent. You'll go, you'll disappear: Hollis winced when passing right through himself, but just beforehand he saw the movement of Max's blistered lips, emitting a parched whisper which entered his own lips and exited at the base of his skull. And then it had communicated to him; it had, in their brief merging, addressed him for the first and only time, simply uttering, “Bye.”

Hollis immediately stopped, peering back over his shoulder. Max wasn't there. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a wavering of light where it had stood — then all he could see was snow and land and the crisscrossed trail. Impossible, it can't be, he said to himself and shuddered. No, he was not mistaken, it had spoken. He had heard its parting message and, too, he had felt the word reverberate inside his head. Turning around, he searched for Lon but saw instead the remaining few yards of golf course, the sidewalk beyond, his Suburban parked in the golf lane — and nothing or no one else. The city seemed abandoned, the streets were deserted, and it would have been natural for him to enjoy the solitude, but now he suddenly harbored an immense sadness for himself and everything which lived or had yet to grow beneath the sun; and with that a feeling of complete isolation came upon him, a deep-reaching sensation of also having been abandoned which constricted a knot of desperation in his gut. Here is the sum total of my existence, he thought and resumed limping. This is it for me.

Then somewhere high above the grid patterns of Nine Springs the wind raced like the currents of a river; and the invisible sheets of ether fused within the sky were in perpetual tumult, bending westward then southward while clouds swelled and moved accordingly. The great breaths of the planet blew farther still along the hemisphere and the wind shifted and shifted. Effortlessly buoyed by the rushing waves of air, itself a dark shape gliding horizontally among the flux, a crow circled what lay far below — that insubstantial island with square plots and tiled rooftops and one inhabitant climbing into a sport-utility vehicle — before changing its direction and flying out across a limitless ocean of open desert.

After Hollis eased the Suburban into his driveway, turning the vehicle off, he sat there for a while with the radio on, listening to the local news and then the statewide weather report. A freak winter storm had shut down various stretches of Interstate 10, the generic-sounding broadcaster stated, but tomorrow things would warm up, the skies would be clear from Tucson to Flagstaff. Upon hearing that, he pulled the keys out of the ignition — and if anybody inside the neighboring homes had been looking through windows, they might have spied his bulky form exiting the Suburban, half limping in muddy leather boots and made even bigger by the padded jacket, perhaps wondering where it was he had traveled to on such an unreceptive morning. Yet no one would catch a glimpse of the dread he was harboring within him-self — as he shuffled, carefully, over icy patches on the concrete and moved toward the house.

Once beyond the front door, Hollis entered what seemed to be a timeless but vacuous domain, a place in which past or future concerns were no longer permitted, and where the present was now forever sustained like the drone of an unending chord. He didn't, though, remove the boots, or the jacket, or the mitt on his hand; instead, he went forward, pausing for a time at the gap between the dining and living rooms — like someone contemplating directions when stepping into a maze — with his head pivoting from left to right, right to left, his gaze alternately framing those two dimly cast, static rooms: each fractured by refined beams of angled sunlight, where the rays only brightened either the middle of the dining table or the three canvas-printed orchid photographs hung above the couch, as they would a bowl of fruit in a still life. Among the shadows of the living room were the brown-oak bookcases, the television cabinet, a black steel-coated wall clock, the tempered glass-top coffee table covered with library books — and in the dining room, also shaded, were the glass chandelier-like pendant lamp, the antique clear-lacquered pine chairs, the buffet with top cabinets which held white plates and bowls and cups and pitchers. But in the slow aquatic tumbling of radiant dust motes, everything felt submerged to him, peacefully settled somewhere beneath water; and he was there, too, among wreckage which had, surely, sunk so calmly as to leave so much intact.

Don't forget to breathe.

Before proceeding farther, Hollis exacted his stare, holding it on the living-room clock. He waited until the second hand had cycled the full duration of a minute; at which point he walked directly through the house — tracking dirt across the carpet, the kitchen's vinyl flooring — and headed out the back door to tend his snowbound gardens: calculating and recalculating the hours, the approximate minutes, since he had comforted Debra in his arms, kissing the side of her face as she breathed heavily against him, kissing her when her breathing had grown shallower and, like a subtle, gradual transition into the stillest of sleeps, eventually became unapparent. Ten hours, he estimated. Ten hours and twenty-two minutes, give or take a minute.

At the end, by the time Debra was ready to go — to take the mystery ride, as she had begun saying — there had been almost nothing asked or required of Hollis; she had, using what little remained of her failing health, done all the preparations on her own, researching the best methods available, going about it with the same fixity of purpose which had driven her while making interior-design choices for their home. In businesslike fashion, she determined a mixture of two barbiturate drugs — Seconal (4.5 grams) and Nembutal (3.0 grams) — would not only do the trick but would double the lethal dose; as such, Hollis would be spared the last task of placing a plastic bag over her head once she had fallen asleep — something she felt certain he couldn't actually bring himself to do, something she didn't much like the idea of anyway. Then in accordance with Debra's wishes, a sympathetic Dr. Langford agreed to prescribe the drugs; and, too, the doctor would, when everything was finished, handle the postmortem details — signing the death certificate herself, stating that Debra had died due to complications resulting from ovarian cancer.

The grocery shopping and errands, however, became Hollis's main responsibility, his mission. Without voicing protest, he picked up the prescriptions for her at Walgreens; he also bought what she had listed on a Post-it note — chocolate pudding mix, a bottle of Glenfiddich, Dramamine — items which seemed better suited for a holiday than, as Debra had called it, a self-deliverance. There were other instructions for him as well, another list she had written on a legal pad, several after-life issues they would discuss beforehand: the letter she had recently composed to her younger sister was folded inside the P. D. James hardback on the living-room coffee table — it should be addressed in an envelope and sent via Priority Mail within a week of her passing — while the P. D. James novel should be returned to the library by month's end; her credit cards should be canceled; her clothing and shoes should be donated to Goodwill, her wigs given to Gilda's Club; she didn't want a funeral, or a memorial service, or an obit of any sort placed in a newspaper; most important, her body must be cremated. “That way I can once and for all rid myself of these cancer cells,” she explained. “I want my body purified,” and then Debra wanted the circle of her life completed, asking that her ashes and bits of bone be scattered on the property of the old What Rocks house where she had been born — the closing of a larger circle in which a smaller circle would have already been sealed; for, they both knew without saying it, a death had brought them together and, in turn, it was somehow fitting that a death would draw them apart. The pursuit of happiness, he had begun to understand, didn't come without a heavy price.

And so, last evening, Hollis dutifully heeded the final directive of his mission while snow cascaded outside the kitchen windows. On a serving tray, he gathered and organized those things Debra had needed — a bowl of chocolate pudding, a mug filled with Glenfiddich, one Dramamine pill in a spoon, the plastic vials of Seconal and Nembutal, a cup of green tea, a slice of toasted whole wheat bread — feeling no desire to hurry, running his eyes diligently over the items once everything was in place. When he finally brought the tray to their room — pushing the aromatherapy bottles aside so he could set it on a corner of the bedside table — Debra was propped up in the bed, the orthopedic pillow behind her neck and the comforter bunched about her, seemingly pleased by how well he had put the contents of the tray together. This was the night of her departing, the dwindling minutes of her existence, but she didn't look unhappy. As he sat down on the edge of the mattress, she told him she felt blessed. She was, regardless of the disease, content with herself — and him — and the life they had built. Beneath the comforter and the sheets the lower half of her body was hidden, naked, like a bride nervously anticipating the beginning passion of a honeymoon; where she was going, she had joked, it didn't matter whether she wore clothing or not, and he was inclined to agree with her.

“I guess it's that time,” she said, eventually.

Hollis bowed his head, saying, “I don't think I can do this.”

“It'll be all right,” she said, squeezing his wrist. “We'll both be all right.” Then she added, with the trace of a smile: “We ‘ll survive this one, too.”

For several seconds they stared at each other awkwardly; yet her thin face conveyed no obvious emotion, even as his expression trembled — his mouth curving downward, his eyes wide and scared; his face stayed like that as she ate the toast, and drank the tea, and swallowed the Dramamine pill in order to ward off nausea. She took her meal slowly, silently; afterward, they talked for about an hour, and the severity of his expression lessened as they discussed the unusual weather, the Discovery Channel program she had seen earlier on the Ice Age, various minor topics which steered clear of what would soon transpire. Then they hugged; her cheek was cold but her lips were warm, her breath smelled of tea and sickness.

“I'll miss this,” he said, while embracing her. “I'll miss just talking to you, Deb.”

“You can always talk to me, you know.”

“But it won't be the same.”

“No,” she said, pulling back to look at him, “I guess not.” They gazed at each other a few seconds more — before she nodded resolutely, insisting, “It's time, dear. I'm ready, I really am.”

“Okay,” Hollis said, suddenly numbed. “All right then,” he uttered, rising from the mattress while realizing, in that instant, there was nothing left for them to discuss, nothing left to be said which might alter the outcome of that night. He opened the vials on the tray, shaking out some of the capsules — and then glanced at Debra, very seriously, as she extended a hand to accept the drugs; but he didn't hesitate, nor did she: One at a time the capsules were slipped past her lips, each chased with a swig of Glenfiddich, until there was nothing more to swallow or drink. He promptly gave her the pudding, in which the rest of the dosage had been mixed as a powder, and she ate it quickly, licking chocolate from her lips when finished.

Once the contents of the tray had been mostly consumed, Hollis helped Debra ease down from where she had sat upright, tucking the comforter around her, adjusting the pillow underneath her head. She turned on her side to face him, her eyelids appearing leaden, languidly blinking open, staying shut at longer intervals. Within a couple of minutes, she had already fallen asleep, becoming inactive. But right before sleep fully subdued her, she had said she loved him, and he had responded in kind — massaging her neck, holding her hand, staring directly at her and nowhere else; and when he thought her consciousness had ebbed from this world, she surprised him by speaking again with eyes closed, saying in a voice which had grown impossibly tired and hoarse, “Don't forget to breathe, okay?”

“I won't,” he answered.

“Good,” she mumbled, and was silent thereafter.

And while Debra approached her mystery ride, Hollis undressed completely, climbing into bed beside her, pressing himself against her body — listening as her life dissolved in his arms, as she slowly faltered and ceased. Then her passing, like so much about her, had an effortless quality. She didn't gasp, and her chest didn't heave; no long, labored breaths struggled from her throat. She just proceeded — as if she had crossed from one room to the next, as if she had stepped away for a little while. But the many tears he had wept over the months while fearing this very moment didn't immediately come — nor was he yet shaken by expected waves of panic or overwhelming sadness. He was, upon experiencing what he had dreaded the most, much calmer than he thought possible, relaxed even. Must be shock, he decided. Of course, it hasn't hit me, it hasn't settled in. Or, perhaps, it was because she was with him, resting there; she was slightly warm, and she was present somehow. With her eyes shut and her head on the orthopedic pillow, she could easily have been sleeping. “Deb,” he whispered, taking her compliant right hand into one of his hands. “Deb,” he repeated, awed by the simplicity of her passing, the ease with which she went; yet her dying felt so singular to him, so unique, as if no one else had experienced such a personal loss — the fact that most others had or would couldn't help but amaze him.

Then how appropriate, Hollis thought, for his final act of love to conclude with a touching of hands, just as the first act had begun so long ago. For now they had reached the end of touching, of mutual contact; they had reached the end of shared hours and conversations and togetherness; beneath the painted bluebird on the bedroom ceiling, they had reached the end. Still, for a while, he moved his palms along her face, her arms, her breasts — those actual finishing touches; and with his chest pressed firmly against her spine, he gave her body his heat even as she grew colder and colder. Somewhere else, he imagined, she was readying to be born again. Somewhere else on the planet, far away, a brand-new Debra was bound to arrive at any moment. Even so, he wanted her to remain like this for now, resting under the sheets; he wanted her to stay — a few hours longer, maybe a day — until he was sure she had truly gone from him.

Sometime later, Hollis would take himself from their bed — leaving her behind with the comforter pulled to her neck, the orthopedic pillow covering her head — shutting the bedroom door as if he were respectfully closing the gates of a mausoleum. In the kitchen, he poured himself some of the Glenfiddich — and then, in the living room, he stretched across the couch with drink in hand, grabbing for the Tom Clancy novel he had left open on the coffee table. But while reading he fell asleep, eventually dreaming of animals and people — that recurring procession — while snow continued raining as if the heavens had been wrung in the hands of God, spilling down upon an unsuspecting desert. When waking from his nap — the novel resting against his chin, the half-filled cup of Glenfiddich sitting nearby on the floor — he felt strangely at peace inside the house, comfortable there on the 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 cup of 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. Soon Hollis was standing there in his bathrobe, resting a palm against the window, sensing the cold while buffered by efficient central heating. There, too, 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.

20

Except for the sound of water drip drip dripping from the thatched roof made of palm leaves, it is quiet both inside and outside the tiki hut. Hollis sits there now — in a corner, down on the floor — listening as water drips above him to the earth, dripping, too, around the backyard and off the overhead gutters of the house. Everything is melting, he thinks. Everything melts. An itinerant wind blows across the desert into Nine Springs, but it doesn't stay very long and, instead, dissipates somewhere along the empty, messy streets. Drops patter upon his jacket and seem to be absorbed immediately by the fabric, seeping through to his clothing. He stares up at the leak-proof ceiling. His hair and face are damp but it is dry inside the hut. So the water continues to drip elsewhere, nearby, not touching him and yet, he believes, soaking him all the same. Presently the wind returns, this time with more resolve — howling for a moment, rolling over Nine Springs, shaking palm trees and dazzling the air with fast-swirling currents of fine snow particles and moisture — and then, as if stopped by the flipping of a switch, it isn't there anymore, the airy howl receding and the currents settling in its wake.

Hollis lowers his head. Lon's mitt is on his left hand. His bare right hand is grubby, the fingernails brown with soil. Before going to the hut, the spade had slipped past his fingers, sailing to the ground and throwing mud at his feet. But rather than retrieve the spade, he went from his garden and stood for a while in the middle of the backyard, eventually walking to the edge of the swimming pool. Where previously the pool was covered by a thin layer of ice hidden underneath snow, it had now become a watery surface once more — interspersed with diminishing islands, miniature icebergs growing smaller and smaller and farther away from one another on a chlorine sea.

Standing by the pool, he could see into neighboring yards. He could also glimpse part of the street. Nevertheless, not a single person or vehicle was in sight. He looked at the blue-black mountain range washed out by the bright haze of winter. The arching sunlight reflected off the snow blanketing the desert and cast an intense, blinding glow which enshrouded the horizon, diminishing the view of the mountain even more. He hadn't thought of it previously, but just then he found himself wondering about the unseen forests and wilderness thriving on the other side of the mountain and felt an inexplicable desire to journey there by foot. The wind came and went, varying in intensity, sometimes seeming to roll across the desert with a rumbling like distant thunder. Suddenly he realized that the ground beneath him was shuddering, vibrating with a low intensity — a steady, perpetual energy quietly shaking the land and unnoticed by him until that moment. While subtle and unfluctuating, the vibration possessed a frightening and catastrophic power which, he imagined, originated from the planet's dying core.

All around him, the world was slowly coming unstuck. Cinder blocks and bricks were separating, plaster was cracking, carpet was being tugged toward living-room ceilings. Appliances, televisions, vehicles, animals, children, and entire families were about to be sent upward, gently at first and, then, with the violent speed of a rocket — smashing against overhead light fixtures, or ceiling fans, or skylights, or, in most cases, wafting recklessly like balloons set loose into the sky. If he looked at the garden, he would see cactus uprooting itself, soil and rocks and pebbles ascending as if by magic. The spade he had dropped was already hovering above the porch, encircled by satellites of mud. Soon the signposts of mankind would be jettisoned to the universe, the symbols of presence ejected from a tired, worn-down planet — the cities, the freeways, the airports, the schools, the burned-out and rusting cars, the unkempt pastures of bluebonnets, the high, brittle grass, the gutted houses abandoned on weedy plots, those vast number of commodities fashioned by human design. The great purging was beginning, he told himself. It had begun this morning.

But when turning to gaze at the garden and the house, Hollis saw that nothing had changed, nothing had been raised to the sky. The spade lay exactly where it had fallen. The roots of cacti and succulents were buried under sodden dirt. His feet remained firmly on the ground, the earth had not undone itself or stopped on its axis. The house was stable on the foundation, as always. The rooms were the same rooms, no different than yesterday. No, nothing much had changed — with the exception of one maddening thing: she wasn't there anymore, but yet she was there nonetheless. Something had irrevocably changed for her, and, too, the life he considered to be his own was then altered past recognition. No amount of mental preparation could have truly prepared him for this eventuality. He was, at that second, aware of a widening black space within himself — a profound loneliness he had never experienced, a complete and utter sense of being left alone without another recognizable soul at hand; he had, in the passing of a single morning, entered uncharted territory and, it was understood, the way back home was lost even as their home stood directly in front of him. So, he told himself, better to go elsewhere for a while and put off what the house entailed — his grief, his fears, the phone calls he will have to make. Better going where she rarely ever went, to where he could hide in the shade and wasn't supposed to think about anything.

Inside the tiki hut, Hollis hugs his knees to his chest and stays like that for what feels like an eternity. Later on, he lifts his head and stares again at the water dripping outside from the ends of the thatched roof, thinking: If the water stops dripping right now, she'll return to me. If the water will only stop dripping — all of it, every single drop — then Deb will walk out of the house, calling my name. He tells himself this, with eyes fixed on the droplets which keep forming and plunging, forming and plunging, while knowing in his heart it won't happen. The water continues dripping, and she never calls for him. And he wonders why it has to be, why was she just here earlier as she had always been — the movement of her limbs, the resonance of her singular voice, the warmth of her skin — and yet now she is gone from the world. How could she go?

Still, the love is here; the love they shared is here — it is more tangible than ever. He has that. Yes, I have that. Then, maybe, it is he who has gone away for good — not her — and he has vanished from the world without yet realizing it, somehow existing beyond the fade to black, as if in another reality, as if in an illusion. But where are you this very second? he asks himself, rocking back and forth. Where does someone go when finally gone? And what — he asks aloud — is the meaning in death? However, no answers materialize from his wondering, and yet that void of understanding, in its own vacant manner, provides the ultimate, all-inclusive answer to his questions. So decent people die each and every second of the day without reason, the living are required to forge ahead nonetheless, and that is simply that; the role of living is acted out on a daily basis, an individual's act of dying is a one-time affair — but everyone gets a shot at playing both parts, none are exempted, none are unique, everyone goes on and everyone goes.

Sighing miserably, Hollis presses his palms flat on either side of himself. The dream is over, he concludes. I'm awake. A heavy internal weight has consumed his limbs, mooring him to the floor and making it difficult to stand, but somehow he manages to pull himself up anyway. He staggers in the shadows, bracing himself against the hut's doorframe, the thatched roof jutting beyond him and sprinkling the ground with droplets. Sunlight illuminates the backyard, raining upon the garden beds and the swimming pool and the house. Except, to his confusion, the house appears miles away, although it summons him closer. Their bedroom also beckons — as beloved places do which cannot be experienced as they once had been enjoyed — be-cause she is there, at least for a while. She is waiting.

“All right,” he says, after taking a deep breath, and then steps from the shadows of the hut and into the light of the backyard, heading along a flagstone pathway toward the house. With the brightness stunning his vision, he stumbles on a flagstone slab, his body wobbling off the path, his boots crunching across gravel. Today the sun shines. The desert thaws, the cactus needles glisten with beads of water which mirror the heavens and seem to hold the sky. Tomorrow the temperature will soar at Nine Springs, burning through the day and onto the skin of golfers. There will be warmth, but not for him, not for Debra. “It's okay,” he assures himself, finding his balance, returning to the pathway — squinting now against the sun and reaching his hands outward to grasp at air, weaving blindly ahead for no other reason than he must, pacified by the sudden understanding that all things born are fated to move toward their end.

The two figurative paintings which, respectively, preface each section of The Post-War Dream were created by Peter I. Chang: I. Dwellers (gesso, charcoal, and acrylic on wood panel, 2000); II. Safe Places to Die (acrylic on developed photographic paper, 2000).

Both ovary illustrations — Fig. 29 and Fig. 30 — were originally printed without the artist's name cited in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex, by Dr. A. Willy, Dr. L. Vander, Dr. O. Fisher, and other authorities (New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., Inc., 1950).

“Mitch Cullin, one of this country's most talented young writers, is back with a must-read book… It's a shame that such popular writers as John Grisham easily make it to the top of the bestseller lists, and the Mitch Cullins of the world struggle with much less recognition. Grisham may have sizzling plots, but Cullin's wording is beautiful and inspirational. The research and care he puts into a novel should elevate him to the highest ranks of writers…Watch out for this author. Each book is worth waiting for. A reader doesn't flip through the pages; each one is worth savoring like fine wine or coffee.” — The Oklahoman

“Cullin's brilliantly clear descriptions of both emotions and landscape give this story a near-mystical feel.” — Booklist

“This touching, quintessentially American story of marriage, aging, and the fading Greatest Generation is enhanced by poetic prose, vivid accounts of war, and sympathetic characters whom many of us will find familiar.” — Library Journal

“Mitch Cullin is the kind of writer whom you can savor for the beauty of his prose… As with Cullin's work in general, it is the language that makes the book worth your effort. The fact that he is able to weave such a gripping story as well is a bonus for the reader.” — The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg)

“Cullin has a naturally poetic style, which tends toward revelatory moments and memorable sensory descriptions… The novel ends with a satisfying twist that ultimately renders it a tender-hearted and moving … examination of love and loss.” — The L Magazine

“After Cullin reveals the deep bond binding husband and wife, he summons a devastatingly powerful ending.” — The Palm Beach Post

“Mitch Cullin is a tremendous storyteller and writer… The story is an emotional rollercoaster, so grab your heart and a box of tissues and give it a good read. Cullin's writing will be a gift to you.” — ArmchairInterviews.com

Mitch Cullin is the author of eight books, including A Slight Trick of the Mind, Tideland, and Branches, a novel-in-verse. He divides his time between California's San Gabriel Valley and Tokyo, Japan, and in addition to writing fiction he collaborates on various projects with the artist Peter I. Chang.

Whompyjawed — 1999

Branches — 2000

Tideland — 2000

The Cosmology of Bing — 2001

From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest — 2001

Under Surface — 2002

A Slight Trick of the Mind — 2005

Copyright © 2008 by Mitch Cullin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by

Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto,

an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese / Doubleday edition as follows:

Cullin, Mitch.

The post-war dream: a novel / Mitch Cullin. — 1st ed. p. cm.

1. Older men — Fiction.

2. Korean War, 1950–1953 — Veterans — Fiction.

3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.U319P67 2008

813’.54 — dc22 2007007905

eISBN: 978-0-307-47254-0

www.anchorbooks.com

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