The Recruiter
Beth Meko
Staff Sergeant Lucas March swiped at his brow with the dish towel the girl had offered him, moved his hand from his sweat-slick neck to the top of his fresh buzz cut, and balled his hands into fists next to his hat on the table. He kept his voice amiable as he outlined the benefits of the Army to Claire, who looked with barely disguised boredom at the pamphlet on the table. It featured an exuberant young man soaring underneath a yellow parachute in the sunshine.
The kitchen smelled of onions and something just starting to go bad, maybe a potato somewhere in the pantry. Faded curtains rustled above the open window over the sink as rain battered the screen and tin roof. The girl was taking forever to read each paper and she had asked twice now if she could change her mind once she signed the papers. Most of them asked that. He had indicated yes with a confident nod, then directed her attention to a new pamphlet. It had been hard work getting this home visit and he wasn’t about to ruin his chances now.
This time of year, he spent the afternoons winding his way down country highways to the area high schools, prowling the hallways in his duty uniform, hunting down the promising ones and picking off stray ones smoking under the bleachers, trying to get them interested in the military. They all knew him by now. “Hey March!” the kids would call, saluting him or grabbing for his hat, and he would grab some of the boys he knew by name, rough their hair up a little.
He was under constant pressure to meet quota for the month. “They’re out there, like little fishies in the stream,” his new commander would say. “Just go and put your net out. It’s not hard.” The new commander had all kinds of metaphors comparing the kids to animals—little lost lambs, pups, ducklings. March avoided hanging around the recruiting station as much as possible these days.
Holding back a sigh, he opened his mouth to tell an anecdote about a female recruit who was making a success of herself in wheeled vehicle mechanics, but before he could get out the first word, a loud knock rattled the front door and Claire jumped up to answer it. March heard the sounds of Claire’s voice and a higher one answering, and then the girl returned with a skinny kid of ten or eleven who stood staring at the recruiter, blinking away drops of water that ran from his shaggy hair. His jeans, much too long for him, puddled around his feet, dripping onto the chipped linoleum. Claire introduced him as Alan, her neighbor.
“My mom locked me out again,” Alan said. He gazed at March’s outstretched hand but made no move to shake it, as his arms were drawn into his shirt sleeves. “I’m not sure when she’ll be back. You break the law or something, Claire?”
Claire replied it was none of his business.
“Miss Vincent is thinking about joining the Army. You want to be a soldier when you grow up, boy?” March asked. He had perfected his tone: friendly, demanding.
The kid reared back in an exaggerated display of horror. “No way,” he replied. “I don’t want to kill no one. Blood makes me throw up.”
March’s lips tightened and warmth spread on his cheeks. He rubbed the back of his neck in brisk motions with his fist.
Alan asked if he could get some tea, and Claire told him he knew where to find it. “Just sit down and be quiet if you know what’s good for you,” she said. “My dad’ll be home soon and you know he don’t like seeing you around much. Not since he caught you playing with the power tools in the garage.”
Untangling his arms from his shirt, Alan swiped at his nose with a soggy sleeve and stomped to the cabinets to retrieve a glass.
“Like I was saying,” March said. “More and more women are joining up these days, and they’re outshining the men in areas like mechanics and information technology. With your mechanical scores, I guarantee you, once you enlist it will be nothing but upward mobility from that point on.” He started to go into the Army’s promise to pay for college, a speech he had memorized by heart.
Alan had sat down at the end of the table and was turning his glass around in circles, leaving big water spots on the table. “No, I would never be in the military,” he said with the air of someone who had considered it deep into the night. “You have to kill people, and wade through blood and guts a foot deep. I couldn’t do that, because blood makes me throw up.” He made a gagging sound to demonstrate, and mimed catching the results in his glass.
“Gross,” Claire said. She had started picking at her thumb with her index finger, collecting flakes of nail polish in a neat pile beside the pamphlets. It was the kind with glitter or sparkles, or whatever they called it.
March turned to face the boy. “Young man,” he said. “I don’t know where you got all that about blood and guts and what-not, but you know what, I’ll tell you--” he dabbed at his forehead with the musty-smelling towel and checked his watch--”I joined up in the service just out of high school. Been in the service over 20 years now and the most blood I’ve seen was during the military blood drive, when they took a pint or so from my veins.”
He repeated that often, although it wasn’t entirely the truth. Well, OK, it wasn’t at all the truth. For one, he hadn’t gotten all that nervous about giving blood, although he didn’t know anyone who exactly liked having a needle jammed in their arm. For another, the smell of old coins or rust still turned his stomach because it always brought back that stench of blood that was always there in the aftermath of an explosion. He had puked the first time a bomb had detonated near him during his first tour in Iraq, the blood and gasoline stench filling his head like a gelatinous liquid. He’d just been a kid, after all. But over time the memory didn’t bother him as much. The horror had been replaced by something mechanical that would stir and shuffle, and then go silent.
“Fact is,” March said, “being in the military doesn’t always involve conflict. You’ve got more chance of dying here. Look around, people are just dying left and right. Right and left. Car wrecks, plane crashes. Dog attacks, electrocution, elevators falling, school shootings, hell, it’s endless. A damn…tornado could just come and swoop you up, happens often enough. Doesn’t have to be a disaster, either.” His voice had grown high and shaky around the edges, and his mind flashed on the flask of whiskey he kept underneath the seat of his car, parked out in the steep driveway. “A tree could just fall on your car and there you are dead. Things’ll maim and kill you at any opportunity.” He moved to swipe at his head with the rag, missed it, and realized his hands were trembling. “Don’t have to go into the Army to worry about that.” He cleared his throat, the sound like a thunderclap in the still room.
Claire and Alan stared at him. March shuffled his papers around, stopped, and shuffled them again. He felt about ready to suffocate from how hot it was. Hot as horse piss on Derby day, one of the guys in his unit had liked to say. They all liked to make up sayings for how godawful hot it had been out in the desert. Hot as Satan’s balls stuffed into a wool sock. “Claire, I have a page here with just a few questions I have to ask, and if we can do that we’re halfway toward getting you to your physical--”
“Claire, don’t do it,” the boy said.
They both looked at him. The boy winced, hunching his shoulders inward.
March had a sudden impulse to lunge across the table and grab the boy by the neck, and the intensity of the urge worried him. His son’s face, nose askew and blood gushing out of his puffed lip, flashed in his mind. His wife had tried to pull him off and ended up with a dislocated shoulder. I’m not a wife beater, he kept swearing up and down to the nervous-looking nurse behind the desk at the emergency room, getting louder and higher and the nurse nodding faster as if they were part of some ridiculous marionette show until a security guard had come to escort him out.
What had it been about? He couldn’t remember, although he knew the boy had always had a habit of mouthing off. Maybe he’d had it coming to him. His wife hadn’t pressed charges, but then again she had never come back from her sister’s after that incident either. He hadn’t seen his son in two years now. He heard the boy had dropped out of trade school and gotten a job as a prison guard at the state penitentiary.
It was just aggression, he guessed. He wondered if his old man had felt the same way. Boy, he’s going to get it now, the old man would say as he came in half-lit and climbed the stairs. It always sounded as if he were speaking of some other boy far away who was asking for it, but then there he would be at the bedroom door, the top of his head gleaming under the bare lightbulb as he reached to untuck his shirt, always going for the belt, always saying the same thing--Boy…
March thumbed through the papers in front of him, found the one he needed, and pulled it from the stack, spreading it smooth with his fingers as he pushed it to Claire. He cleared his throat. “Now these questions have to do with your family history, any health problems, any disturbances in the old noggin—"Claire laughed at this—"and other things of that nature.”
For a few minutes there was no sound in the room except for the scratch of pen on paper and the lessening rain striking against the roof and windows. Checking his watch again, March let his mind wander again to the flask underneath the seat of his car. There wasn’t much left in it, he was afraid, definitely not for the night. If he finished up here soon enough he might be able to hit up that little package store after the curve in the road right before you hit town, the one next to the old boarded up car wash. The girl was sure taking her sweet time filling out the forms though, gazing and squinting at each question before answering.
Then March heard a drumbeat coming from the other end of the table and the table legs started to vibrate, then shake, against his own leg. Alan was tapping the surface with his fingers and jouncing his leg up and down. The boy put his forehead down against the cool laminate. An ice cube cracked in his tea glass and he jumped upright and looked down at it, very hard. Then he put his head back until the top of it touched the chair’s rickety back, and he whistled a little. “Hoo boy, it’s hot in here,” he said, just wanting to hear the sound of his own voice, March supposed. No one answered. “Hoo boy.” And, “Boy, was it something, with my uncle. Back when he was in the war.”
Claire absently told the boy he’d best shut up. She was peering down at the paper as if it were requesting some ridiculous piece of information from her.
Boy just wouldn’t shut his crumb catcher. OK, then, let him talk. March took his elbow off the table and turned toward the kid. “A war, huh,” he said. “He from around here? I may know him if he’s an Army man.”
“From over Salem way. Name’s Alan too. Al Ridgeman.”
March knew the name, or a Ridgeman, anyway. They’d been private first class together back in the early days, when he was stationed near Baghdad. Looking at the boy now he thought he could see a resemblance, the thin bladelike nose that the boy kept rubbing at, the same vague insolence at the edges of their eyes. He hadn’t liked Ridgeman much. Something off in the guy, never stopped running his mouth. Had a squawking kind of laugh like a chicken caught in a wire fence. March had only been around Ridgeman a couple months or so. He recalled that Ridgeman had been discharged with an injury, maybe his foot. Lots of guys around that time had gone home injured. “Name sounds familiar,” March said.
“Well, Uncle Al got shot in the leg, damn near ripped it off. All the tendons and bones and things were hanging out and he just about bled to death. He was just laying there in the desert and covered with blood, his and the other people’s, for about a week. Can’t imagine how that would be. People’s heads and legs and guts laying around there all over him, and no food or water. Can’t really imagine what that would be like.” He shook his head in admiration.
“Hot damn, boy,” March said, almost in wonder. “Don’t want to break it to you, but that just never happened at all. Not the way you’re telling it.”
“But it did, my daddy told me, and Uncle Al told him. And here’s the good part,” Alan said. “Uncle Al found a camel just happened to be there alive. Thought about eating it but decided it was more important to get where he was going. So he got up on it and rode, about twenty miles or so til he came to an Army hospital.”
Claire barked with disbelief and reached out to swat the kid, but he ducked.
“Sounds like you’re making up tales to me,” March said. “I’ll be damned if you aren’t telling some tales, you or your daddy. Suspect it’s something you made up in your own mind.”
Alan kept talking. “Gets worse though. They fixed up his leg for him and sent him home. But he was scaring everybody. Just laid in bed muttering to himself. Got so they would lock him in the basement at night ‘cause he would go for the guns. He asked them to do it.”
“Jesus,” Claire said. She had abandoned the nail peeling and was now chewing on a grubby thumbnail.
“Got so he would scream at people and stuff, and one time at the grocery store, the Bluebird down on Clark Street, he shot up a bunch of cauliflower.”
“Shot up a bunch of cauliflower, did he,” March said, and Claire said, “Like into his veins?” and snorted with laughter.
“He was just wandering like he had been doing, stumbling on his busted leg, and an onion or something happened to drop near him. Guess he thought it was a grenade. So out comes his gun from his pocket.”
“Thought you said they locked the guns away from him?” Claire asked.
“This was way after that,” the boy said, waving his hand. “So out comes his gun from his pocket and bam. He just started screaming and shooting. Everyone in that store ducked behind shelves and stuff because they thought he was gonna kill them all. By the time he was done the whole vegetable section was wrecked. When they led him out he had pieces of cauliflower all over him, like little pieces of brains.” Alan looked thrilled at the image.
“That’s some imagination you’ve got on you, boy,” March said. “Nothing like that’s ever happened at the Bluebird. Something like that happened, it’d be all over the news and people’d still be talking about it. I’d sure as hell have heard about it down at the station.”
“Shot them vegetables up though,” Alan insisted. “My daddy told me. He was sent to a crazy house for a while. Got out a while back and now he’s doing good as can be expected. Has his spells though. A week’ll go by where he’s just pacing up and down the street most days. Won’t take no help from anyone. When he’s like that you go up to him and he starts walking at you real fast, shouting about how he doesn’t owe you anything. Still wearing his Army hat.”
“Crazy Al is your uncle?” Claire said in amazement. March sat silent, fingers tapping the edge of the table. He had never seen this man, himself. But then, he didn’t spend much time downtown now that the recruiting station had been moved over next to the mall. If it was Ridgeman, well, that was a damn shame for him. Combat could do a lot to any man, God knew it, and frankly Ridgeman didn’t seem to be screwed on too tight in the first place. Some men just weren’t meant for the armed service.
The rain had let up and sun was slanting into the room. Thinking again of the bottle under the car seat and the little store at the bend in the road, March felt the sweat start to soak the back of his shirt. He jumped as Claire burst out laughing. “Did pushups for me and my friends one time, no reason at all. Stood up and said, ‘hooah!’” She put her head in her arms, narrow shoulders shaking with laughter.
“Sounds enough like him. My daddy always says, he’d rather collect trash than be in the military if that’s what it comes to,” Alan said.
March felt the heat rising in his face until he thought it would start steaming out of his pores. His hands were a pair of lead balls resting on the table, and he kept his whole body very still. “My uncle fought in a war too. His daddy, too, and mine. My grandpa, and probably his daddy as well. My son wanted with all his heart to join, but he’s Type 1 diabetic. It’s one of the most honorable things you can do in this world, to defend your country.”
“That’s not what my daddy says.”
“Your daddy must not be much of a man.” It was out before he could take it back. His voice was like a blade.
Alan’s ears had turned red and his eyes had taken on a loose and darting look. “Ain’t no Army man.” He looked out the small dusty window with the curtains stirring in the breeze and then back at March. “Ain’t no lyin’ stinkin’ Army man.”
Claire told the kid just to go. “Swear to God. You don’t have any sense about you.”
March waved a hand. “No need for that.” His voice ricocheted around the room, hard and pleasant. “Been raining mighty hard and I’m sure the kid doesn’t want to get any more soaked than he already is. Doesn’t want to get any more water in his shoes, I bet.” He turned from the boy with finality, rifling through the papers again. “The Army wouldn’t take the likes of you, that’s all I’m going to say.”
Alan looked pinned in his chair, his eyes big and captured but defiant all the same.
“I apologize,” March said. He was talking to Claire. He picked out a pen from the case, gripped it in both his hands, turned it a few times and released it with a clatter. He could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, warmth spilling across his cheeks and down to his collar. The thought of the bottle under the seat hit him like a wave and for a minute he considered excusing himself to go out to the car. The feeling passed.
Claire was finally the one to break the silence. “I’m finished,” she said.
“What was that?” His voice sounded sharper than he meant.
“I’m finished,” she said, “with the questionnaire.” She was holding it out to him, looking worried.
March grabbed the papers and flipped through them, pointing out places where she had forgotten to initial or check. Neither of them noticed Alan had left the table until they heard the squeal and gasp of the storm door, followed by a bang as he slammed the heavy front door behind him.
~ ~ ~
Gravel gnawed under the tires as March edged his Buick out of the driveway and started down the meandering road back toward town. The hills looked swollen with a hazy mist against the yellow sky, and past the long expanses of cow and horse pastures with houses and barns dotted here and there, wisps of remaining rain clouds absentmindedly caressed the horizon on their way out. The fresh, wet breeze was a relief in his throat. He rested a hand on the case full of paperwork in the passenger seat. The girl had scheduled a physical in Richmond two weeks from that day.
“Got your girl, did ya,” he knew his commander would say when he handed him the papers back at the station, his meaty jaws bouncing around on a sandwich or bearing down on some stale peanuts he’d gotten from the snack machine. Guy was always eating. “Keep this up we’re gonna make mission not just here but for the whole region as well. Keep it up, m’boy.”
March just felt tired. Sometimes he wondered why he hadn’t just retired instead of taking on recruiting command three years after coming home. Recruiting was a young man’s job. These extra years of service bumped up his pension, but he wasn’t sure it was worth it. Hell, as it was he felt old before his time already.
But it filled the time. Filled all the hours and left none to laze around with nothing to do but drink himself into a stupor. Or almost none, anyway.
As soon as he was out of sight, he reached under the seat and retrieved the flask of Jim Beam, keeping the wheel secure with a wrist while he unscrewed the cap. Lying stinking Army man, huh. Kid no doubt got that from his daddy, who chances were good didn’t know the half about making sacrifices for something. Shame about Ridgeman, but he was probably the best of the bunch for it, all be told.
Swerving to miss a pothole, March nearly ran off the road and then sat for a minute, taking a deep swig from the bottle. A pint of blood, huh. He reached under his pant leg and scratched the part where his boot had partially melted into his calf when an IED had exploded outside his tank during his third tour. A red-purple bulge ran down his leg like a winding snake. He rarely looked at it. The scars might as well be a large mole, an oddity of his body only he knew of, some kind of birthmark. People thanked him for his service but they didn’t really know what had gone on there, and that was fine. He wasn’t sure he could tell them about it even if they asked. A pint or so, that’s what they wanted to hear, nice and clean like that. His hands were heavy on the wheel.
He saw the house before he saw the boy sitting in front of it. It was small and wooden with a front porch that drooped. A deep crack running along the length of the big window in front had been fixed with long strips of unraveling black tape. The yard surrounding the house was a semicircle of wispy, dry grass and naked dirt right up at the edge of the woods. Around the house were discarded parts of greasy engines that someone might still be tinkering with, an abandoned rusty carcass of an old VW Beetle nearly swallowed by weeds, a basketball deflated to an orange pulp, a gray tennis shoe squashed in the middle peeking out of the tall grass. The boy, Alan, sat on the front stoop with his face turned down, poking at something in the mud.
March turned into the place in the yard where old tire marks had flattened the grass in two rows. The boy snapped his head up to face him, mouth turning large and surprised when he recognized the driver of the car. March shut off the engine and sat looking at the boy, who jumped from his perch and seemed ready to bolt.
He thought he might go rough the boy up, maybe give him a shake to scare him, but he just pointed a finger at him out the car window. He cocked it at the boy and pulled it like he would a trigger, jerked his hand up and did it again, twice. He felt a sick cruelty arise within him that bubbled up as a laugh. The kid just stood there, stick dangling from his hand, his mouth wet and open like a wound.
“Pow,” he said in a low voice. Still laughing, he started the car back up and wheeled it around onto the road. Driving back his hands felt slick on the wheel and surprisingly light, but he thought he could feel the tension building again all the same. He reached underneath the seat twice more during the twenty minutes back to town.
Beth Meko
Staff Sergeant Lucas March swiped at his brow with the dish towel the girl had offered him, moved his hand from his sweat-slick neck to the top of his fresh buzz cut, and balled his hands into fists next to his hat on the table. He kept his voice amiable as he outlined the benefits of the Army to Claire, who looked with barely disguised boredom at the pamphlet on the table. It featured an exuberant young man soaring underneath a yellow parachute in the sunshine.
The kitchen smelled of onions and something just starting to go bad, maybe a potato somewhere in the pantry. Faded curtains rustled above the open window over the sink as rain battered the screen and tin roof. The girl was taking forever to read each paper and she had asked twice now if she could change her mind once she signed the papers. Most of them asked that. He had indicated yes with a confident nod, then directed her attention to a new pamphlet. It had been hard work getting this home visit and he wasn’t about to ruin his chances now.
This time of year, he spent the afternoons winding his way down country highways to the area high schools, prowling the hallways in his duty uniform, hunting down the promising ones and picking off stray ones smoking under the bleachers, trying to get them interested in the military. They all knew him by now. “Hey March!” the kids would call, saluting him or grabbing for his hat, and he would grab some of the boys he knew by name, rough their hair up a little.
He was under constant pressure to meet quota for the month. “They’re out there, like little fishies in the stream,” his new commander would say. “Just go and put your net out. It’s not hard.” The new commander had all kinds of metaphors comparing the kids to animals—little lost lambs, pups, ducklings. March avoided hanging around the recruiting station as much as possible these days.
Holding back a sigh, he opened his mouth to tell an anecdote about a female recruit who was making a success of herself in wheeled vehicle mechanics, but before he could get out the first word, a loud knock rattled the front door and Claire jumped up to answer it. March heard the sounds of Claire’s voice and a higher one answering, and then the girl returned with a skinny kid of ten or eleven who stood staring at the recruiter, blinking away drops of water that ran from his shaggy hair. His jeans, much too long for him, puddled around his feet, dripping onto the chipped linoleum. Claire introduced him as Alan, her neighbor.
“My mom locked me out again,” Alan said. He gazed at March’s outstretched hand but made no move to shake it, as his arms were drawn into his shirt sleeves. “I’m not sure when she’ll be back. You break the law or something, Claire?”
Claire replied it was none of his business.
“Miss Vincent is thinking about joining the Army. You want to be a soldier when you grow up, boy?” March asked. He had perfected his tone: friendly, demanding.
The kid reared back in an exaggerated display of horror. “No way,” he replied. “I don’t want to kill no one. Blood makes me throw up.”
March’s lips tightened and warmth spread on his cheeks. He rubbed the back of his neck in brisk motions with his fist.
Alan asked if he could get some tea, and Claire told him he knew where to find it. “Just sit down and be quiet if you know what’s good for you,” she said. “My dad’ll be home soon and you know he don’t like seeing you around much. Not since he caught you playing with the power tools in the garage.”
Untangling his arms from his shirt, Alan swiped at his nose with a soggy sleeve and stomped to the cabinets to retrieve a glass.
“Like I was saying,” March said. “More and more women are joining up these days, and they’re outshining the men in areas like mechanics and information technology. With your mechanical scores, I guarantee you, once you enlist it will be nothing but upward mobility from that point on.” He started to go into the Army’s promise to pay for college, a speech he had memorized by heart.
Alan had sat down at the end of the table and was turning his glass around in circles, leaving big water spots on the table. “No, I would never be in the military,” he said with the air of someone who had considered it deep into the night. “You have to kill people, and wade through blood and guts a foot deep. I couldn’t do that, because blood makes me throw up.” He made a gagging sound to demonstrate, and mimed catching the results in his glass.
“Gross,” Claire said. She had started picking at her thumb with her index finger, collecting flakes of nail polish in a neat pile beside the pamphlets. It was the kind with glitter or sparkles, or whatever they called it.
March turned to face the boy. “Young man,” he said. “I don’t know where you got all that about blood and guts and what-not, but you know what, I’ll tell you--” he dabbed at his forehead with the musty-smelling towel and checked his watch--”I joined up in the service just out of high school. Been in the service over 20 years now and the most blood I’ve seen was during the military blood drive, when they took a pint or so from my veins.”
He repeated that often, although it wasn’t entirely the truth. Well, OK, it wasn’t at all the truth. For one, he hadn’t gotten all that nervous about giving blood, although he didn’t know anyone who exactly liked having a needle jammed in their arm. For another, the smell of old coins or rust still turned his stomach because it always brought back that stench of blood that was always there in the aftermath of an explosion. He had puked the first time a bomb had detonated near him during his first tour in Iraq, the blood and gasoline stench filling his head like a gelatinous liquid. He’d just been a kid, after all. But over time the memory didn’t bother him as much. The horror had been replaced by something mechanical that would stir and shuffle, and then go silent.
“Fact is,” March said, “being in the military doesn’t always involve conflict. You’ve got more chance of dying here. Look around, people are just dying left and right. Right and left. Car wrecks, plane crashes. Dog attacks, electrocution, elevators falling, school shootings, hell, it’s endless. A damn…tornado could just come and swoop you up, happens often enough. Doesn’t have to be a disaster, either.” His voice had grown high and shaky around the edges, and his mind flashed on the flask of whiskey he kept underneath the seat of his car, parked out in the steep driveway. “A tree could just fall on your car and there you are dead. Things’ll maim and kill you at any opportunity.” He moved to swipe at his head with the rag, missed it, and realized his hands were trembling. “Don’t have to go into the Army to worry about that.” He cleared his throat, the sound like a thunderclap in the still room.
Claire and Alan stared at him. March shuffled his papers around, stopped, and shuffled them again. He felt about ready to suffocate from how hot it was. Hot as horse piss on Derby day, one of the guys in his unit had liked to say. They all liked to make up sayings for how godawful hot it had been out in the desert. Hot as Satan’s balls stuffed into a wool sock. “Claire, I have a page here with just a few questions I have to ask, and if we can do that we’re halfway toward getting you to your physical--”
“Claire, don’t do it,” the boy said.
They both looked at him. The boy winced, hunching his shoulders inward.
March had a sudden impulse to lunge across the table and grab the boy by the neck, and the intensity of the urge worried him. His son’s face, nose askew and blood gushing out of his puffed lip, flashed in his mind. His wife had tried to pull him off and ended up with a dislocated shoulder. I’m not a wife beater, he kept swearing up and down to the nervous-looking nurse behind the desk at the emergency room, getting louder and higher and the nurse nodding faster as if they were part of some ridiculous marionette show until a security guard had come to escort him out.
What had it been about? He couldn’t remember, although he knew the boy had always had a habit of mouthing off. Maybe he’d had it coming to him. His wife hadn’t pressed charges, but then again she had never come back from her sister’s after that incident either. He hadn’t seen his son in two years now. He heard the boy had dropped out of trade school and gotten a job as a prison guard at the state penitentiary.
It was just aggression, he guessed. He wondered if his old man had felt the same way. Boy, he’s going to get it now, the old man would say as he came in half-lit and climbed the stairs. It always sounded as if he were speaking of some other boy far away who was asking for it, but then there he would be at the bedroom door, the top of his head gleaming under the bare lightbulb as he reached to untuck his shirt, always going for the belt, always saying the same thing--Boy…
March thumbed through the papers in front of him, found the one he needed, and pulled it from the stack, spreading it smooth with his fingers as he pushed it to Claire. He cleared his throat. “Now these questions have to do with your family history, any health problems, any disturbances in the old noggin—"Claire laughed at this—"and other things of that nature.”
For a few minutes there was no sound in the room except for the scratch of pen on paper and the lessening rain striking against the roof and windows. Checking his watch again, March let his mind wander again to the flask underneath the seat of his car. There wasn’t much left in it, he was afraid, definitely not for the night. If he finished up here soon enough he might be able to hit up that little package store after the curve in the road right before you hit town, the one next to the old boarded up car wash. The girl was sure taking her sweet time filling out the forms though, gazing and squinting at each question before answering.
Then March heard a drumbeat coming from the other end of the table and the table legs started to vibrate, then shake, against his own leg. Alan was tapping the surface with his fingers and jouncing his leg up and down. The boy put his forehead down against the cool laminate. An ice cube cracked in his tea glass and he jumped upright and looked down at it, very hard. Then he put his head back until the top of it touched the chair’s rickety back, and he whistled a little. “Hoo boy, it’s hot in here,” he said, just wanting to hear the sound of his own voice, March supposed. No one answered. “Hoo boy.” And, “Boy, was it something, with my uncle. Back when he was in the war.”
Claire absently told the boy he’d best shut up. She was peering down at the paper as if it were requesting some ridiculous piece of information from her.
Boy just wouldn’t shut his crumb catcher. OK, then, let him talk. March took his elbow off the table and turned toward the kid. “A war, huh,” he said. “He from around here? I may know him if he’s an Army man.”
“From over Salem way. Name’s Alan too. Al Ridgeman.”
March knew the name, or a Ridgeman, anyway. They’d been private first class together back in the early days, when he was stationed near Baghdad. Looking at the boy now he thought he could see a resemblance, the thin bladelike nose that the boy kept rubbing at, the same vague insolence at the edges of their eyes. He hadn’t liked Ridgeman much. Something off in the guy, never stopped running his mouth. Had a squawking kind of laugh like a chicken caught in a wire fence. March had only been around Ridgeman a couple months or so. He recalled that Ridgeman had been discharged with an injury, maybe his foot. Lots of guys around that time had gone home injured. “Name sounds familiar,” March said.
“Well, Uncle Al got shot in the leg, damn near ripped it off. All the tendons and bones and things were hanging out and he just about bled to death. He was just laying there in the desert and covered with blood, his and the other people’s, for about a week. Can’t imagine how that would be. People’s heads and legs and guts laying around there all over him, and no food or water. Can’t really imagine what that would be like.” He shook his head in admiration.
“Hot damn, boy,” March said, almost in wonder. “Don’t want to break it to you, but that just never happened at all. Not the way you’re telling it.”
“But it did, my daddy told me, and Uncle Al told him. And here’s the good part,” Alan said. “Uncle Al found a camel just happened to be there alive. Thought about eating it but decided it was more important to get where he was going. So he got up on it and rode, about twenty miles or so til he came to an Army hospital.”
Claire barked with disbelief and reached out to swat the kid, but he ducked.
“Sounds like you’re making up tales to me,” March said. “I’ll be damned if you aren’t telling some tales, you or your daddy. Suspect it’s something you made up in your own mind.”
Alan kept talking. “Gets worse though. They fixed up his leg for him and sent him home. But he was scaring everybody. Just laid in bed muttering to himself. Got so they would lock him in the basement at night ‘cause he would go for the guns. He asked them to do it.”
“Jesus,” Claire said. She had abandoned the nail peeling and was now chewing on a grubby thumbnail.
“Got so he would scream at people and stuff, and one time at the grocery store, the Bluebird down on Clark Street, he shot up a bunch of cauliflower.”
“Shot up a bunch of cauliflower, did he,” March said, and Claire said, “Like into his veins?” and snorted with laughter.
“He was just wandering like he had been doing, stumbling on his busted leg, and an onion or something happened to drop near him. Guess he thought it was a grenade. So out comes his gun from his pocket.”
“Thought you said they locked the guns away from him?” Claire asked.
“This was way after that,” the boy said, waving his hand. “So out comes his gun from his pocket and bam. He just started screaming and shooting. Everyone in that store ducked behind shelves and stuff because they thought he was gonna kill them all. By the time he was done the whole vegetable section was wrecked. When they led him out he had pieces of cauliflower all over him, like little pieces of brains.” Alan looked thrilled at the image.
“That’s some imagination you’ve got on you, boy,” March said. “Nothing like that’s ever happened at the Bluebird. Something like that happened, it’d be all over the news and people’d still be talking about it. I’d sure as hell have heard about it down at the station.”
“Shot them vegetables up though,” Alan insisted. “My daddy told me. He was sent to a crazy house for a while. Got out a while back and now he’s doing good as can be expected. Has his spells though. A week’ll go by where he’s just pacing up and down the street most days. Won’t take no help from anyone. When he’s like that you go up to him and he starts walking at you real fast, shouting about how he doesn’t owe you anything. Still wearing his Army hat.”
“Crazy Al is your uncle?” Claire said in amazement. March sat silent, fingers tapping the edge of the table. He had never seen this man, himself. But then, he didn’t spend much time downtown now that the recruiting station had been moved over next to the mall. If it was Ridgeman, well, that was a damn shame for him. Combat could do a lot to any man, God knew it, and frankly Ridgeman didn’t seem to be screwed on too tight in the first place. Some men just weren’t meant for the armed service.
The rain had let up and sun was slanting into the room. Thinking again of the bottle under the car seat and the little store at the bend in the road, March felt the sweat start to soak the back of his shirt. He jumped as Claire burst out laughing. “Did pushups for me and my friends one time, no reason at all. Stood up and said, ‘hooah!’” She put her head in her arms, narrow shoulders shaking with laughter.
“Sounds enough like him. My daddy always says, he’d rather collect trash than be in the military if that’s what it comes to,” Alan said.
March felt the heat rising in his face until he thought it would start steaming out of his pores. His hands were a pair of lead balls resting on the table, and he kept his whole body very still. “My uncle fought in a war too. His daddy, too, and mine. My grandpa, and probably his daddy as well. My son wanted with all his heart to join, but he’s Type 1 diabetic. It’s one of the most honorable things you can do in this world, to defend your country.”
“That’s not what my daddy says.”
“Your daddy must not be much of a man.” It was out before he could take it back. His voice was like a blade.
Alan’s ears had turned red and his eyes had taken on a loose and darting look. “Ain’t no Army man.” He looked out the small dusty window with the curtains stirring in the breeze and then back at March. “Ain’t no lyin’ stinkin’ Army man.”
Claire told the kid just to go. “Swear to God. You don’t have any sense about you.”
March waved a hand. “No need for that.” His voice ricocheted around the room, hard and pleasant. “Been raining mighty hard and I’m sure the kid doesn’t want to get any more soaked than he already is. Doesn’t want to get any more water in his shoes, I bet.” He turned from the boy with finality, rifling through the papers again. “The Army wouldn’t take the likes of you, that’s all I’m going to say.”
Alan looked pinned in his chair, his eyes big and captured but defiant all the same.
“I apologize,” March said. He was talking to Claire. He picked out a pen from the case, gripped it in both his hands, turned it a few times and released it with a clatter. He could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, warmth spilling across his cheeks and down to his collar. The thought of the bottle under the seat hit him like a wave and for a minute he considered excusing himself to go out to the car. The feeling passed.
Claire was finally the one to break the silence. “I’m finished,” she said.
“What was that?” His voice sounded sharper than he meant.
“I’m finished,” she said, “with the questionnaire.” She was holding it out to him, looking worried.
March grabbed the papers and flipped through them, pointing out places where she had forgotten to initial or check. Neither of them noticed Alan had left the table until they heard the squeal and gasp of the storm door, followed by a bang as he slammed the heavy front door behind him.
~ ~ ~
Gravel gnawed under the tires as March edged his Buick out of the driveway and started down the meandering road back toward town. The hills looked swollen with a hazy mist against the yellow sky, and past the long expanses of cow and horse pastures with houses and barns dotted here and there, wisps of remaining rain clouds absentmindedly caressed the horizon on their way out. The fresh, wet breeze was a relief in his throat. He rested a hand on the case full of paperwork in the passenger seat. The girl had scheduled a physical in Richmond two weeks from that day.
“Got your girl, did ya,” he knew his commander would say when he handed him the papers back at the station, his meaty jaws bouncing around on a sandwich or bearing down on some stale peanuts he’d gotten from the snack machine. Guy was always eating. “Keep this up we’re gonna make mission not just here but for the whole region as well. Keep it up, m’boy.”
March just felt tired. Sometimes he wondered why he hadn’t just retired instead of taking on recruiting command three years after coming home. Recruiting was a young man’s job. These extra years of service bumped up his pension, but he wasn’t sure it was worth it. Hell, as it was he felt old before his time already.
But it filled the time. Filled all the hours and left none to laze around with nothing to do but drink himself into a stupor. Or almost none, anyway.
As soon as he was out of sight, he reached under the seat and retrieved the flask of Jim Beam, keeping the wheel secure with a wrist while he unscrewed the cap. Lying stinking Army man, huh. Kid no doubt got that from his daddy, who chances were good didn’t know the half about making sacrifices for something. Shame about Ridgeman, but he was probably the best of the bunch for it, all be told.
Swerving to miss a pothole, March nearly ran off the road and then sat for a minute, taking a deep swig from the bottle. A pint of blood, huh. He reached under his pant leg and scratched the part where his boot had partially melted into his calf when an IED had exploded outside his tank during his third tour. A red-purple bulge ran down his leg like a winding snake. He rarely looked at it. The scars might as well be a large mole, an oddity of his body only he knew of, some kind of birthmark. People thanked him for his service but they didn’t really know what had gone on there, and that was fine. He wasn’t sure he could tell them about it even if they asked. A pint or so, that’s what they wanted to hear, nice and clean like that. His hands were heavy on the wheel.
He saw the house before he saw the boy sitting in front of it. It was small and wooden with a front porch that drooped. A deep crack running along the length of the big window in front had been fixed with long strips of unraveling black tape. The yard surrounding the house was a semicircle of wispy, dry grass and naked dirt right up at the edge of the woods. Around the house were discarded parts of greasy engines that someone might still be tinkering with, an abandoned rusty carcass of an old VW Beetle nearly swallowed by weeds, a basketball deflated to an orange pulp, a gray tennis shoe squashed in the middle peeking out of the tall grass. The boy, Alan, sat on the front stoop with his face turned down, poking at something in the mud.
March turned into the place in the yard where old tire marks had flattened the grass in two rows. The boy snapped his head up to face him, mouth turning large and surprised when he recognized the driver of the car. March shut off the engine and sat looking at the boy, who jumped from his perch and seemed ready to bolt.
He thought he might go rough the boy up, maybe give him a shake to scare him, but he just pointed a finger at him out the car window. He cocked it at the boy and pulled it like he would a trigger, jerked his hand up and did it again, twice. He felt a sick cruelty arise within him that bubbled up as a laugh. The kid just stood there, stick dangling from his hand, his mouth wet and open like a wound.
“Pow,” he said in a low voice. Still laughing, he started the car back up and wheeled it around onto the road. Driving back his hands felt slick on the wheel and surprisingly light, but he thought he could feel the tension building again all the same. He reached underneath the seat twice more during the twenty minutes back to town.
