Swimming to the Island
Mark Jacobs
Cyrus Miller had not had a good night's sleep in a couple of weeks, meaning Lorraine was refusing to let him sleep in her bed. They had an arrangement, meaning he slept on the couch on the nights she chose to be alone. The arrangement was wearing thin, meaning his bum hip was getting worse at about the same rate that Lorraine's mood was going downhill. Something had to give. That meant him.
Lorraine was hollering coffee from her room. It was her habit to get up at noon, avoiding the morning’s long shadows. A while back she had been married to a fireman who got killed on the job. The settlement and the insurance money kept her out of the poorhouse but did not do much for her ambition. Not that he was a model citizen in that department.
The smart thing would be to holler back that he was already on the coffee thing, but he felt a tender sense of discouragement that kept him from being smart, just then. By the time he carried coffee and toast with jelly to her on a tray she had forgotten she wanted it. She looked inviting and kind of sexy, lying there. He never minded the gray hair. In fact, he had talked her out of dying it after an experiment in brown turned out to be a red disaster. She'd looked like a scarecrow in search of a bird sacrifice.
"What are you looking at, old man?"
"You."
"What kind of jelly is that?"
"Grape."
That's all she ever wanted was grape, although he got tired of slathering on the same old purple paste every morning.
"So what are you going to do about your problem, Cyrus?"
She was talking about his unemployment. He had one more check coming. After that, he had no idea what was going to happen. Who wanted to hire a man, well leathered by time, who a bad hip and a shaky work history?
"Cane and Brace is hiring. I'm going there this morning."
"What's the job?"
"Forklift operator. I can handle that standing on my head."
"Don't come back without a solution."
Well, shit. The woman was being more highhanded than she had any right to be, grinding his face in his failure. If he had known her a little less well, he would have said something about Vietnam, a.k.a. service to his country and hers. He held off.
Eleven Viet Cong kills. He grew up hunting. Squirrels and pheasants, deer and rabbits, you name it. Shooting short men in black pajamas was a lot harder, of course. For starters, they shot back. Also, they knew how to move in the jungle, whereas Cyrus was not well adjusted to the environment.
Showering, soaping, he thought about Vietnam. What happened there, what went down, all these years later it was an island. The island was in the middle of a lake. The lake was big. He had no boat, anymore, to motor out there, and did not have the strength to swim. Let it be what it had become, that was the wise choice. He had more immediate problems.
He kept his bike in the garage alongside Lorraine's Chevy. There was just enough room to walk it out without scraping the car. He was concentrating. He would never hear the end of it if he dinged her door. So Murphy standing there in the driveway startled him.
“Hey, Cyrus.”
“Glynda ain’t here.”
Glynda was Lorraine’s daughter. Murphy had put her in the hospital not long ago. He was the kind of guy that got away with anything he felt like doing, including beating a woman. Too damned good looking for his own good or anybody else’s.
“Never mind Glynda. Where you headed, Cyrus?”
“Vietnam.”
“It’s supposed to snow. Why don’t you take Lorraine’s car?”
Now there was a concept. He would take Lorraine’s car if it didn’t involve more humiliation that he had the stomach for, but Murphy didn’t need to know that. Cyrus swung the leg with the bad hip over the saddle and sat the bike. Normally he felt good on the machine. A Harley was a Harley. November, snow, wind; that took away some of the pleasure.
“I got a proposition for you,” Murphy said.
“What kind of proposition?”
“It’s a marketing opportunity. Sales and distribution.”
He claimed to have in his house four pounds of Mexican weed of a quality to make the angels of the highest heavens weep crystal tears.
“I’ve got friends, Cyrus. A network, right? So do you.”
For a moment that lasted a little longer than it ought to, Cyrus considered it. It would solve his cash-flow problem, and Murphy was right, he had a customer base with an open mind. Something saved him, though, from going along. Age, an instinct in the gut, an image of Lorraine’s cold fish eye, he wasn’t sure. Murphy went away pretending to be pissed, and Cyrus rode out to the Cane & Brace plant. They were located out in the country, and by the time he pulled into the factory lot he was half frozen from riding into the wind.
For the life of him he could not remember what it was the company manufactured, but it didn’t matter. Forty minutes after he knocked on the door of the personnel woman, he was standing in a storeroom being handed a hard hat and goggles by a black guy with attitude and a fake diamond the size of a golf ball in his ear. Cyrus was lucky. A forklift operator had quit that morning, and they were pushing to make some kind of deadline.
He had stretched it a little, talking about his experience with internal combustion, but the machine they led him to was not all that complicated. He spent a pleasant few hours moving merchandise – it was all in big crates, and the crates were on pallets – from point A to point B. He was thinking how comfortable it was going to be, getting a regular paycheck again. Lorraine, as the saying went, would be thrilled.
It made no sense that a bad hip would affect how his foot moved and reacted. In retrospect he could not decide whether it was the leg or absentmindedness that led to his downfall; not his downfall, technically, but the merchandises’, which led to his. Did it matter? He knew a millisecond before it came to pass that his forks were going to snag on the bottom of a pallet and the pallet was going to come loose from a stack on the shelf and cause a chain reaction, bringing crashing down thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of Cane & Brace products, whatever they were, to the cement floor.
There was an inch crust of snow on the saddle of his bike when he made his limping way to the parking lot. He had not been in a strong position to ask for the five hours’ pay they owed him. Let it go; he did.
Luckily the snow had stopped coming down. Why he rode to Lorraine’s daughter’s apartment in Troy was one of those mysteries that did not yield their secrets when shaken. Glynda was distracted by her kids, and being pregnant didn’t help her focus or her mood. It was almost certainly Murphy’s baby, a handicap from birth if ever one was. In the kitchen, while Glynda made PB&J sandwiches for her girls, Cyrus poured them a glass of milk.
“I’m thinking of marrying your mother,” he told her.
“You ask Lorraine her opinion?”
“I’m asking you.”
“You getting Social Security, Cyrus?”
“Nope. I never got enough years in the system.”
“So that’s what Lorraine is, right? She’s your own private Social Security.”
“Is that how she’s going to see it?”
Glynda shook her head in disgust. She was a fine and foxy lady. The bruises from the tune up Murphy laid on her were fading or gone. If the girls weren’t there, Cyrus might seek a little comfort in her happy harbor. Not that previous tries had gotten him anywhere. She loved white wine. The bottle of Lake Niagara he’d picked up was looking like a bad investment.
That night at Lorraine’s he made no mention of the Cane & Brake incident. Why give her a tactical advantage when she was already ahead? But she got the story out of him with one of her hypnosis tricks while they were eating a bucket of KFC; he was susceptible. He expected contempt, and no mercy, but when she heard what happened she broke up. She shrieked with good-natured laughter and waved a chicken leg at him, original recipe, a magic wand relieving him of responsibility. If it hadn't been for Glynda's crack about Social Security he might have popped the overdue question.
He was glad he hadn't when Lorraine made it clear this was a sleep-on-the-couch night. He spent the dark hours lonesome and miserable. The TV bugged him so he switched it off and then felt abandoned. The cold that had penetrated his bones, riding back to Troy, was permanent, and he lay on his back feeling the same tender discouragement he had felt waking up that morning. Worse, in a way, because he was one day older, one less day left to figure things out. He thought about Priscilla. He'd heard through a friend that his ex-wife was doing really well in Denver. Her newest husband, a contractor, had built them a kick-ass McMansion with a view of the Rockies. Knowing Priscilla, she was keeping a list of every fabulous thing that happened on every fabulous day of her life. It was her told-you-so-Cyrus list.
All this for a veteran of a foreign war.
In the morning, any benefit from Lorraine's enjoyment of the Cane & Brace accident was gone. She was crabby, calling for her coffee. What possessed him to put black cherry jelly on her toast? Evidently he was falling apart. He packed a kit bag and rode out to his daughter's. Kimberly lived on the other side of Vischer Ferry on a country road in a white house that belonged on a post card. Kerry, her husband, was supervisor at a power plant. Their two kids wore clean clothes every day of the week and played soccer. They got A's in school and chirped like robins when they called him Grandpa.
Kim was in the back yard turning over black dirt in her compost pile with a shovel. She was tall and lanky, with her mother's dark hair. Her arms and their elbows were a work of art. She kissed him.
"Haven't seen you around here much, Dad."
"Yeah, well, sorry about that, honey. I've been busy trying to turn up a job.”
"How's Lorraine?"
Cyrus did not deserve the supernatural maturity with which his only child had handled the fiasco of her parents' marriage back when she was a kid. The nasty gene had skipped a generation. She did not much care for Lorraine but never made him feel rotten about it.
"Lorraine is getting old,” he said. “Guess I'm catching up."
"You hungry?"
For Kim’s food, definitely. He took the shovel and finished turning over the dirt while she made him soup. Real soup, not some thin colorful goo from a can. With bread she'd baked that morning. Amazing. She knew something was up but did not press him, and when the moment came to invite him to stay, she did. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his toothbrush. He smiled.
It was a big house, and he had his own room on the second floor overlooking the yard and some woods that had a contented look, as though they were okay with being a bunch of trees and did not aspire to be clouds, or planets. His room was a nest, and for three days he burrowed into it. He did not call Lorraine. When he did come out, the kids lavished cheerful warmth on him. Kerry was reasonable about the situation. His mouth puckered when he saw Cyrus, but hey, he could have been an ass and wasn't. Cyrus was tired in the morning, exhausted all day, and sad at night. He watched the weather turn gray. Worry lines creased the sky, and a V of delayed geese seemed to struggle through the clouds.
He left Kim's home the morning he heard them whispering in the hall. It was not an argument, just an intense conversation, and Cyrus knew it was about him. Kimberly was loving and quiet as she said goodbye.
"Are you going back to Lorraine?"
"Going to Vietnam."
It was the same thing he'd said to Murphy, and it was odd both times. Kim did not know what to make of it or him. He did not look to see how much cash she pressed into his hand. He choked off a whimper and tucked the money into the pocket of his jeans. She kissed him. He kissed her back.
It was early for a pit stop, but the snow was flying straight at him and he was a target on the bike, so he pulled into the lot at Grimaldi's Tavern. The bartender who brought him a beer had a Patriots sweatshirt not quite big enough to hold her belly. She did not want to have to hold a conversation with him, and he let her off the hook. He drank his beer slowly. It tasted like summer, which threw him off.
The guy who came in and sat at the bar a couple stools down from Cyrus had a Fourth Infantry tattoo on the back of his hand.
"That your bike?" he asked Cyrus.
Cyrus nodded. "Snow bury it?"
"Not yet."
He was as old as Cyrus but lean and healthy. The silver ponytail looked like it belonged right where it was. There was something pure about him, something internally gleaming. His voice was reassuring, like thunder rumbling a long way off while you were at a picnic drinking wine, raising your head from the lap of a woman who enjoyed your stories. Cyrus told him he'd been 22nd Infantry and the conversation could only go one way. Bat, that was the guy's name or what he went by.
When the subject of combat came up, Cyrus told him he had eleven VC kills notched in the book of military history, or words to that effect. Bat shook his head, not disputing his facts just rejecting the whole idea of running around Southeast Asia with an M-16 and a set of coordinates on a map. The man was definitely cool, which had its effect on what Cyrus said next.
"What I just said? About those eleven VC? It was bullshit."
Bat ordered them another draft, and Cyrus wondered how much money Kim had slipped him. The wad felt fat in his pocket. Bat did not seem upset or surprised that Cyrus had lied to him.
"I think I did shoot one Viet Cong soldier," Cyrus said. "Remember that Agent Orange stuff?"
"Weed killer on steroids."
"Exactly. They had my unit guarding ten thousand barrels of that shit out near an airfield. Like somebody was going to steal it, I don't know."
Cyrus could find no explanation for the unusual happiness he felt, which was dry and high and sparkly. Maybe it was a sense of peace, strange because it was so unfamiliar.
"You want some wings?" Bat asked him.
They ate volcanic Buffalo wings and had another beer and Cyrus explained how a VC unit had approached the fence behind which he and his buddies were guarding the high-priced chemicals of death. Cyrus was the first man to react. He shot in the dark and heard an alien scream. That was it.
“I started lying about Vietnam in nineteen seventy one, I think it was.”
Bat told him, “We all lie about it.”
“Me, more than most. I’d get pissed in some bar and start bragging on how many VC I’d shot. Number kept going up. I have no idea why it stopped at eleven, but that’s where it’s been for a long time. I guess it’s over.”
Bat shrugged. “Sooner or later, everything is.”
There was no way Cyrus could bring himself to say goodbye to Bat, so when he got up and went to the restroom Cyrus took a twenty from his wallet, laid it on the bar, and left.
The snow was falling more slowly than it had. It was wetter, and the flakes were thicker. The mid-day beer and his encounter with Bat had left Cyrus in a sober mood, and he piloted the bike carefully, headlight on because he was invisible to drivers going in both directions. As he came up on an underpass, a blast of snowy wind blinded him and he pulled over. He parked the bike well off the highway and stood in the shelter of the underpass out of the wind, hands in his pockets.
He did not make a conscious decision to wait out the weather but felt no inclination to drive into the teeth of the storm again. On the side of the road where he had parked, the ground ran uphill steeply. Half way up, the woods began. On the margin of the woods, in plain view, a dead deer lay on its side. It had been dead for a while. All four legs were splayed stiff. Five crows were hopping around in the snow and on the carcass, picking at it. They kept switching spots, lifting their heads and scanning. One dug its claws into a stiffened leg and buried its beak in the joint.
So there it was. In the smoky swirl of gray, flakes of snow like so many unspeakable words, piling up. Birds doing what they were supposed to do. A deer whose last moment was a terrible lurch from hurt. The muffled highway whine of cars whose drivers were thinking about other things. It had the hard beauty of finality. Many things converged. Everything he had done and been done. What he remembered, and what he had forgotten. The creatures of his dreams and their orphan children. Mistakes and compensations, a parade of alley cats with suspicious eyes. He felt a kind of sealing going on, the holes in his heart and his head covering over to protect him.
He pulled the wad of cash from his pocket. The bills were fifties, not twenties. Kim had staked him a grand.
When the wind died down the snow let up, and he rode to Lorraine’s. The day was pretty much over, and he was still calm. A red slit on the west horizon bubbled like lava.
There was a light on in Lorraine’s living room. She was watching TV. He thought he saw cigarette smoke, but that might be his imagination. He lifted the garage door and hunted up the shovel.
There were three, maybe four inches of snow on the walk. He went at the job systematically, starting at the porch steps and working out. It felt good. He stopped now and then for a breather, and because his hip hurt.
Toward the end, he happened to turn around. There stood Lorraine, outlined in the window, holding the blind out the better to see. Cyrus was fluent in her body language. A little surprise, that was what she was registering, and a little more amusement.
He lifted the shovel and waved it in her direction. That saved the complications of goodbye. He returned the shovel to the garage. He sat on the bike and started the engine. A Harley was a Harley. No sweeter sound in the universe. He went down Lorraine’s street with exaggerated care. The city plow had been through, but as the night came on the temperature was dropping and he had to worry about black ice.
Fort Lauderdale. To the best of his knowledge, it did not snow that far south in Florida. The name had popped into his mind and stuck there. He hardly needed a map. Point south and keep going. Slow, of course. Real slow until he got past the snow and any chance of snow. Then the plan was open it up.
Mark Jacobs
Cyrus Miller had not had a good night's sleep in a couple of weeks, meaning Lorraine was refusing to let him sleep in her bed. They had an arrangement, meaning he slept on the couch on the nights she chose to be alone. The arrangement was wearing thin, meaning his bum hip was getting worse at about the same rate that Lorraine's mood was going downhill. Something had to give. That meant him.
Lorraine was hollering coffee from her room. It was her habit to get up at noon, avoiding the morning’s long shadows. A while back she had been married to a fireman who got killed on the job. The settlement and the insurance money kept her out of the poorhouse but did not do much for her ambition. Not that he was a model citizen in that department.
The smart thing would be to holler back that he was already on the coffee thing, but he felt a tender sense of discouragement that kept him from being smart, just then. By the time he carried coffee and toast with jelly to her on a tray she had forgotten she wanted it. She looked inviting and kind of sexy, lying there. He never minded the gray hair. In fact, he had talked her out of dying it after an experiment in brown turned out to be a red disaster. She'd looked like a scarecrow in search of a bird sacrifice.
"What are you looking at, old man?"
"You."
"What kind of jelly is that?"
"Grape."
That's all she ever wanted was grape, although he got tired of slathering on the same old purple paste every morning.
"So what are you going to do about your problem, Cyrus?"
She was talking about his unemployment. He had one more check coming. After that, he had no idea what was going to happen. Who wanted to hire a man, well leathered by time, who a bad hip and a shaky work history?
"Cane and Brace is hiring. I'm going there this morning."
"What's the job?"
"Forklift operator. I can handle that standing on my head."
"Don't come back without a solution."
Well, shit. The woman was being more highhanded than she had any right to be, grinding his face in his failure. If he had known her a little less well, he would have said something about Vietnam, a.k.a. service to his country and hers. He held off.
Eleven Viet Cong kills. He grew up hunting. Squirrels and pheasants, deer and rabbits, you name it. Shooting short men in black pajamas was a lot harder, of course. For starters, they shot back. Also, they knew how to move in the jungle, whereas Cyrus was not well adjusted to the environment.
Showering, soaping, he thought about Vietnam. What happened there, what went down, all these years later it was an island. The island was in the middle of a lake. The lake was big. He had no boat, anymore, to motor out there, and did not have the strength to swim. Let it be what it had become, that was the wise choice. He had more immediate problems.
He kept his bike in the garage alongside Lorraine's Chevy. There was just enough room to walk it out without scraping the car. He was concentrating. He would never hear the end of it if he dinged her door. So Murphy standing there in the driveway startled him.
“Hey, Cyrus.”
“Glynda ain’t here.”
Glynda was Lorraine’s daughter. Murphy had put her in the hospital not long ago. He was the kind of guy that got away with anything he felt like doing, including beating a woman. Too damned good looking for his own good or anybody else’s.
“Never mind Glynda. Where you headed, Cyrus?”
“Vietnam.”
“It’s supposed to snow. Why don’t you take Lorraine’s car?”
Now there was a concept. He would take Lorraine’s car if it didn’t involve more humiliation that he had the stomach for, but Murphy didn’t need to know that. Cyrus swung the leg with the bad hip over the saddle and sat the bike. Normally he felt good on the machine. A Harley was a Harley. November, snow, wind; that took away some of the pleasure.
“I got a proposition for you,” Murphy said.
“What kind of proposition?”
“It’s a marketing opportunity. Sales and distribution.”
He claimed to have in his house four pounds of Mexican weed of a quality to make the angels of the highest heavens weep crystal tears.
“I’ve got friends, Cyrus. A network, right? So do you.”
For a moment that lasted a little longer than it ought to, Cyrus considered it. It would solve his cash-flow problem, and Murphy was right, he had a customer base with an open mind. Something saved him, though, from going along. Age, an instinct in the gut, an image of Lorraine’s cold fish eye, he wasn’t sure. Murphy went away pretending to be pissed, and Cyrus rode out to the Cane & Brace plant. They were located out in the country, and by the time he pulled into the factory lot he was half frozen from riding into the wind.
For the life of him he could not remember what it was the company manufactured, but it didn’t matter. Forty minutes after he knocked on the door of the personnel woman, he was standing in a storeroom being handed a hard hat and goggles by a black guy with attitude and a fake diamond the size of a golf ball in his ear. Cyrus was lucky. A forklift operator had quit that morning, and they were pushing to make some kind of deadline.
He had stretched it a little, talking about his experience with internal combustion, but the machine they led him to was not all that complicated. He spent a pleasant few hours moving merchandise – it was all in big crates, and the crates were on pallets – from point A to point B. He was thinking how comfortable it was going to be, getting a regular paycheck again. Lorraine, as the saying went, would be thrilled.
It made no sense that a bad hip would affect how his foot moved and reacted. In retrospect he could not decide whether it was the leg or absentmindedness that led to his downfall; not his downfall, technically, but the merchandises’, which led to his. Did it matter? He knew a millisecond before it came to pass that his forks were going to snag on the bottom of a pallet and the pallet was going to come loose from a stack on the shelf and cause a chain reaction, bringing crashing down thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of Cane & Brace products, whatever they were, to the cement floor.
There was an inch crust of snow on the saddle of his bike when he made his limping way to the parking lot. He had not been in a strong position to ask for the five hours’ pay they owed him. Let it go; he did.
Luckily the snow had stopped coming down. Why he rode to Lorraine’s daughter’s apartment in Troy was one of those mysteries that did not yield their secrets when shaken. Glynda was distracted by her kids, and being pregnant didn’t help her focus or her mood. It was almost certainly Murphy’s baby, a handicap from birth if ever one was. In the kitchen, while Glynda made PB&J sandwiches for her girls, Cyrus poured them a glass of milk.
“I’m thinking of marrying your mother,” he told her.
“You ask Lorraine her opinion?”
“I’m asking you.”
“You getting Social Security, Cyrus?”
“Nope. I never got enough years in the system.”
“So that’s what Lorraine is, right? She’s your own private Social Security.”
“Is that how she’s going to see it?”
Glynda shook her head in disgust. She was a fine and foxy lady. The bruises from the tune up Murphy laid on her were fading or gone. If the girls weren’t there, Cyrus might seek a little comfort in her happy harbor. Not that previous tries had gotten him anywhere. She loved white wine. The bottle of Lake Niagara he’d picked up was looking like a bad investment.
That night at Lorraine’s he made no mention of the Cane & Brake incident. Why give her a tactical advantage when she was already ahead? But she got the story out of him with one of her hypnosis tricks while they were eating a bucket of KFC; he was susceptible. He expected contempt, and no mercy, but when she heard what happened she broke up. She shrieked with good-natured laughter and waved a chicken leg at him, original recipe, a magic wand relieving him of responsibility. If it hadn't been for Glynda's crack about Social Security he might have popped the overdue question.
He was glad he hadn't when Lorraine made it clear this was a sleep-on-the-couch night. He spent the dark hours lonesome and miserable. The TV bugged him so he switched it off and then felt abandoned. The cold that had penetrated his bones, riding back to Troy, was permanent, and he lay on his back feeling the same tender discouragement he had felt waking up that morning. Worse, in a way, because he was one day older, one less day left to figure things out. He thought about Priscilla. He'd heard through a friend that his ex-wife was doing really well in Denver. Her newest husband, a contractor, had built them a kick-ass McMansion with a view of the Rockies. Knowing Priscilla, she was keeping a list of every fabulous thing that happened on every fabulous day of her life. It was her told-you-so-Cyrus list.
All this for a veteran of a foreign war.
In the morning, any benefit from Lorraine's enjoyment of the Cane & Brace accident was gone. She was crabby, calling for her coffee. What possessed him to put black cherry jelly on her toast? Evidently he was falling apart. He packed a kit bag and rode out to his daughter's. Kimberly lived on the other side of Vischer Ferry on a country road in a white house that belonged on a post card. Kerry, her husband, was supervisor at a power plant. Their two kids wore clean clothes every day of the week and played soccer. They got A's in school and chirped like robins when they called him Grandpa.
Kim was in the back yard turning over black dirt in her compost pile with a shovel. She was tall and lanky, with her mother's dark hair. Her arms and their elbows were a work of art. She kissed him.
"Haven't seen you around here much, Dad."
"Yeah, well, sorry about that, honey. I've been busy trying to turn up a job.”
"How's Lorraine?"
Cyrus did not deserve the supernatural maturity with which his only child had handled the fiasco of her parents' marriage back when she was a kid. The nasty gene had skipped a generation. She did not much care for Lorraine but never made him feel rotten about it.
"Lorraine is getting old,” he said. “Guess I'm catching up."
"You hungry?"
For Kim’s food, definitely. He took the shovel and finished turning over the dirt while she made him soup. Real soup, not some thin colorful goo from a can. With bread she'd baked that morning. Amazing. She knew something was up but did not press him, and when the moment came to invite him to stay, she did. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his toothbrush. He smiled.
It was a big house, and he had his own room on the second floor overlooking the yard and some woods that had a contented look, as though they were okay with being a bunch of trees and did not aspire to be clouds, or planets. His room was a nest, and for three days he burrowed into it. He did not call Lorraine. When he did come out, the kids lavished cheerful warmth on him. Kerry was reasonable about the situation. His mouth puckered when he saw Cyrus, but hey, he could have been an ass and wasn't. Cyrus was tired in the morning, exhausted all day, and sad at night. He watched the weather turn gray. Worry lines creased the sky, and a V of delayed geese seemed to struggle through the clouds.
He left Kim's home the morning he heard them whispering in the hall. It was not an argument, just an intense conversation, and Cyrus knew it was about him. Kimberly was loving and quiet as she said goodbye.
"Are you going back to Lorraine?"
"Going to Vietnam."
It was the same thing he'd said to Murphy, and it was odd both times. Kim did not know what to make of it or him. He did not look to see how much cash she pressed into his hand. He choked off a whimper and tucked the money into the pocket of his jeans. She kissed him. He kissed her back.
It was early for a pit stop, but the snow was flying straight at him and he was a target on the bike, so he pulled into the lot at Grimaldi's Tavern. The bartender who brought him a beer had a Patriots sweatshirt not quite big enough to hold her belly. She did not want to have to hold a conversation with him, and he let her off the hook. He drank his beer slowly. It tasted like summer, which threw him off.
The guy who came in and sat at the bar a couple stools down from Cyrus had a Fourth Infantry tattoo on the back of his hand.
"That your bike?" he asked Cyrus.
Cyrus nodded. "Snow bury it?"
"Not yet."
He was as old as Cyrus but lean and healthy. The silver ponytail looked like it belonged right where it was. There was something pure about him, something internally gleaming. His voice was reassuring, like thunder rumbling a long way off while you were at a picnic drinking wine, raising your head from the lap of a woman who enjoyed your stories. Cyrus told him he'd been 22nd Infantry and the conversation could only go one way. Bat, that was the guy's name or what he went by.
When the subject of combat came up, Cyrus told him he had eleven VC kills notched in the book of military history, or words to that effect. Bat shook his head, not disputing his facts just rejecting the whole idea of running around Southeast Asia with an M-16 and a set of coordinates on a map. The man was definitely cool, which had its effect on what Cyrus said next.
"What I just said? About those eleven VC? It was bullshit."
Bat ordered them another draft, and Cyrus wondered how much money Kim had slipped him. The wad felt fat in his pocket. Bat did not seem upset or surprised that Cyrus had lied to him.
"I think I did shoot one Viet Cong soldier," Cyrus said. "Remember that Agent Orange stuff?"
"Weed killer on steroids."
"Exactly. They had my unit guarding ten thousand barrels of that shit out near an airfield. Like somebody was going to steal it, I don't know."
Cyrus could find no explanation for the unusual happiness he felt, which was dry and high and sparkly. Maybe it was a sense of peace, strange because it was so unfamiliar.
"You want some wings?" Bat asked him.
They ate volcanic Buffalo wings and had another beer and Cyrus explained how a VC unit had approached the fence behind which he and his buddies were guarding the high-priced chemicals of death. Cyrus was the first man to react. He shot in the dark and heard an alien scream. That was it.
“I started lying about Vietnam in nineteen seventy one, I think it was.”
Bat told him, “We all lie about it.”
“Me, more than most. I’d get pissed in some bar and start bragging on how many VC I’d shot. Number kept going up. I have no idea why it stopped at eleven, but that’s where it’s been for a long time. I guess it’s over.”
Bat shrugged. “Sooner or later, everything is.”
There was no way Cyrus could bring himself to say goodbye to Bat, so when he got up and went to the restroom Cyrus took a twenty from his wallet, laid it on the bar, and left.
The snow was falling more slowly than it had. It was wetter, and the flakes were thicker. The mid-day beer and his encounter with Bat had left Cyrus in a sober mood, and he piloted the bike carefully, headlight on because he was invisible to drivers going in both directions. As he came up on an underpass, a blast of snowy wind blinded him and he pulled over. He parked the bike well off the highway and stood in the shelter of the underpass out of the wind, hands in his pockets.
He did not make a conscious decision to wait out the weather but felt no inclination to drive into the teeth of the storm again. On the side of the road where he had parked, the ground ran uphill steeply. Half way up, the woods began. On the margin of the woods, in plain view, a dead deer lay on its side. It had been dead for a while. All four legs were splayed stiff. Five crows were hopping around in the snow and on the carcass, picking at it. They kept switching spots, lifting their heads and scanning. One dug its claws into a stiffened leg and buried its beak in the joint.
So there it was. In the smoky swirl of gray, flakes of snow like so many unspeakable words, piling up. Birds doing what they were supposed to do. A deer whose last moment was a terrible lurch from hurt. The muffled highway whine of cars whose drivers were thinking about other things. It had the hard beauty of finality. Many things converged. Everything he had done and been done. What he remembered, and what he had forgotten. The creatures of his dreams and their orphan children. Mistakes and compensations, a parade of alley cats with suspicious eyes. He felt a kind of sealing going on, the holes in his heart and his head covering over to protect him.
He pulled the wad of cash from his pocket. The bills were fifties, not twenties. Kim had staked him a grand.
When the wind died down the snow let up, and he rode to Lorraine’s. The day was pretty much over, and he was still calm. A red slit on the west horizon bubbled like lava.
There was a light on in Lorraine’s living room. She was watching TV. He thought he saw cigarette smoke, but that might be his imagination. He lifted the garage door and hunted up the shovel.
There were three, maybe four inches of snow on the walk. He went at the job systematically, starting at the porch steps and working out. It felt good. He stopped now and then for a breather, and because his hip hurt.
Toward the end, he happened to turn around. There stood Lorraine, outlined in the window, holding the blind out the better to see. Cyrus was fluent in her body language. A little surprise, that was what she was registering, and a little more amusement.
He lifted the shovel and waved it in her direction. That saved the complications of goodbye. He returned the shovel to the garage. He sat on the bike and started the engine. A Harley was a Harley. No sweeter sound in the universe. He went down Lorraine’s street with exaggerated care. The city plow had been through, but as the night came on the temperature was dropping and he had to worry about black ice.
Fort Lauderdale. To the best of his knowledge, it did not snow that far south in Florida. The name had popped into his mind and stuck there. He hardly needed a map. Point south and keep going. Slow, of course. Real slow until he got past the snow and any chance of snow. Then the plan was open it up.
