um, another thing i've been writing. dang, i haven't written in such a long time. i don't know where this will go. i hope you will read it.
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It’s been about ten years since I’ve retired from Delta; the
anniversary comes around every May, cause they send me something wacky and
useless, like a commemorative, tortoiseshell inkwell pen that never actually
works, in the mail every year right about this time. My wife and I traveled the
world post-Delta for about four years before I broke my knee, and so we went
home to New York where I confined myself to my self-pity for six months,
watching the world come and go while I cried silently at my irrevocably aging
body.
I gulped
coffee; I gulped whiskey.
My wife
died. The kids came around to say goodbye, but then they left. As they wrapped
up and hopped onto their flights a week after the funeral, I sat down on the
threadbare coverlet of the bed I had shared with my wife for thirty-five years
and covered my face in my hands and wept. I stared out into the blank,
answerless face of the moon, its silvery glow shining above the skyline and
into the window, and I whispered to her from where I sat, “I’m sorry. I’m so
sorry.”
I stayed awake the whole night and
promised my wife and I that I would pick myself back up and find meaning again.
These days, I pour drinks at a
24-hour, hole-in-the-wall bar down a few blocks from where I live. I’ve met
some strange people, and they always make the best conversation, but they all
seem to somehow wrap themselves up at around midnight to go quietly hiccup their
way home. Few late-nighters and even fewer fights.
So when Phil, whose beard has
inched its way down his chin for two consecutive years, slams his last shot
glass down and quietly exits, I wipe down the counter and head to the back
where I usually watch pirated movies on the desktop computer in the office
until sunrise. Then Mark comes in and says, “Hey, Teddy, how was last night?”
before I smile, say good, and then grab my coat and walk the two blocks back
home to where I will nap for a few hours. It’s a slow, pleasant life.
However, for the past two days, a lady has
consistently showed up at three o’ clock in the morning to ask for a bourbon
and coke. She will sit at the bar, typing away at a laptop computer, very
serious, sometimes even moody, as she sips on her drink and then leaves an hour
later. She always looks like she came directly from her office job, with her
very tight suit and skirt, tie loosened, her long, black hair wavy from being
in a bun all day. I can tell something is troubling her, but I only know that
because she is stonily silent and nothing else. She never cries, she never
speaks (except, “Bourbon and coke, sir, thank you,” every night, in that
high-pitched voice, like it was recorded on tape).
I’ve wanted to emerge from the back
office to try and make conversation with her, but her stoicism intimidates me. When
I look at her, her life story charges through my imagination; I imagine her growing
up in Northern California, graduating from Columbia, and now journaling for the
Times while intentionally avoiding boyfriends and husbands and male attention.
When we were sons in the 1960’s looking for the best honeys to marry, the
prettiest girls were always too busy with accounting/journalism/nursing school
to love a battle-worn kid from Wellington, Texas scarred by terrifying scenes
of bullets through skulls and friends painfully dying in the jungles. My wife
was a nurse during the war. She understood.
“Bourbon and coke, sir, thank you.”
“May I ask you your name, madam?”
She looked up at me from her laptop
computer, her brown eyes very wide. “Essie. Short for Esther.” Her face didn’t
soften a bit.
I extended a hand, tingling from
the encroaching Parkinson’s, and shook her soft, young hand. “Teddy.” I turned
around to quickly shake together her drink and pour it into a glass.
“Thank you.” She gulped half of it
when she took the glass from my hand, then practically slammed it onto the
counter and furiously ran her fingers across the keyboard of her computer while
the wrinkle between her brows deepened.
“Can I ask you something, dear?”
She looked up.
“What is bothering you?”
“Nothing,” she said much too
quickly, then slapped her hand over her mouth, as if shocked by what had just
come out of her mouth. The tears then began falling thick and fast. Her shoulders
shook with her efforts to collect herself, but she turned away from me, bending
over, sobbing uncontrollably.
“No, no, stop!” she angrily scolded
herself, and my heart broke at the sight of someone so young suppressing
something so vital to human existence as emotion.
“Essie,” I groaned as I tried my
hardest to run around the counter, my knee protesting. “Essie, dear, please.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, rubbing
her hands over her tear-stained cheeks, “I don’t mean to act this way.”
“Can I tell you something?” I
asked. She nodded feebly. I sat down.
Wellington, Texas was really a very
small town. There was one church, and it was Baptist, so I guess that meant
that everyone in town was a Baptist; and I suppose when the oil company that
owned the town brought in the new pastor, a Pentecostal minister from British
Columbia, everyone in town became Pentecostal. The kids could hope to become
like their cattle rancher daddys or head off to college, then come back to
teach high school physics or run for mayor. Not until the war did us kids leave
the plains.
My friend Aaron and I had recently
graduated from high school the summer of 1965, and we had been chasing his
dad’s cattle one afternoon with the truck when Aida Palmer came running after
us over the hill, looking distraught and waving a yellowy letter in her hand.
“Hey, man, stop the truck,” I yelled over Aaron’s maniacal laughter, and so we
had come to a screeching halt right in front of her before she ran up to the
open window and handed the letter to me. Her lips were very tight. She had
already lost a lot of weight after birthing a stillborn that had kept her from
graduating with us.
Both Aaron and I saw the return
address, and suddenly I could feel the world come to a screeching halt in a
second; the blood drained from my face, and my windpipe sealed shut.
“Do you want me to open it?” Aaron
whispered after what seemed like a year of painful silence, and so I clenched
the letter in my hand and ripped it open. I already knew what it demanded of me
before I even read it.
“I knew it,” Aida murmured, her
voice shaking as I skimmed over the letter’s contents. “I just knew it!” She
began to cry, her sobs growing hysterical, so I had to yank open the door and
climb out to wrap my arms around her small, skinny body while she shook,
gasping for air. Aaron was silent.
“Shhh,” I whispered into her flaxen
hair, and it was a while, the brazen sun setting, before I went home to tell my
parents and my sister that I was to report to boot camp in two weeks.
“Move! Please move, please!”
“Get him outta here!”
“Private, you need to leave!”
“Okay, goddammit!” I had bellowed,
tears streaming down my face, and I charged out of the medical tent into the
pouring rain. The helicopters were descending only a hundred feet away, so I
could feel the torrent of wind and water on my bloodstained face as I screamed
and screamed and screamed into the starless, moonless night. A bullet had
wedged its way into my arm a couple of hours ago during the air raid, and I
could feel the wound throbbing with painful thumps, but I couldn’t think about
it, I couldn’t bring myself to understand or feel or speak. I just screamed.
All around me, medics scooped up
wounded soldiers from helicopters onto stretchers and ran them into the tents.
I stood in the middle of all the chaos until a herd of medics knocked me off my
feet, and so I curled up into a ball in the puddles as the rain pelted my
already-soaked uniform. The mud was in my mouth; I didn’t spit it out. Aaron
was dying.
“Boy, what are you doing down
there?”
I didn’t respond.
“Boy! Someone, get this guy outta
here and into a tent!” I could feel him wrap his thick fingers beneath my
armpits and heave me through the mud and into the tent I had just exited. Time
crawled with cruel reluctance.
“Who is this guy? He was just in
here!”
“I don’t give a fuck!”
“Sir—“
“I DON’T GIVE A FUCK! PUT HIM ON
THE BED!”
I was heaved onto the bed. I
refused to succumb to unconsciousness, so all through the night, screams of the
amputees and groans of the dying haunted me as I lay paralyzed with fear in the
far corner. I could only think about Aaron.
The sun had only just risen when a
pair of exhausted medics finally turned to me. One snapped his fingers in my
face. “Hey, hello? What’s wrong with you?”
I bit my lip to keep from sobbing.
“Do you know Aaron Johns,” I murmured. “Aaron Johns! Please tell me…”
“I—I don’t know—“
“Fuck! Aaron Johns! He has
blonde curly hair!”
“Sir, there are a lot of—“
The other medic, a woman, frowned
and put her finger beneath my chin. “Your face is covered in blood,” she said
with a gentle finality, and I gulped at her touch. I had never seen anything so
beautiful destroyed by fatigue and terror in my life. “Were you shot?” she
asked.
“I—yes...”
“Where?”
“There’s a bullet in my arm,” I said,
wincing, and before I could say anything else, she had already stabbed a needle
into the swollen muscle. They cut my sleeve around the scabbed wound, now oozing
green and white pus, and I groaned breathlessly as they dug something into my
arm and fished around for the bullet. I sobbed for my dead friend.
“Go ahead,” the woman said to the
other man, and she pulled up a stool and slowly wrapped gauze around my bicep.
Her eyes were wide and red; her cheeks were sunken. “It will take a couple of
hours before we’ll allow you to leave,” she said, ripping the gauze and
fastening it into a solid wad.
“You’ve seen the worst,” I said,
and she made eye contact with me. She was beautiful. Aaron was dead.
“We all have,” she said through
tight lips, and she looked down to the ground very quickly, clenching and
unclenching her teeth. “I’ve wondered ever since the first day…what God allows
this?” she said, and finally let go of my arm, wiping the tears that had oozed
out of her eyes. “God, I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”
I was silent. There was nothing I
could say.
“What’s your name?”
“Edward. Teddy, really. Teddy
Sturgess.”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything
for a while. After swallowing hard, she stared at my filthy boot as she said,
“Aaron Johns died at three a.m. He was identified at four-thirty by his
commanding officer. I’m so sorry.”
“How many times do you say something
like that a day?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed, clenching
the blanket on the bed, trying to collect herself. I didn’t know how many more
times my heart could break.
“May I ask you your name, madam?”
She looked up from her wrung hands,
her brown eyes shaking, her face drained of color.
“Emmie. Short for Emilia.”
“I’ll tell you something, Emmie. I’m sorry
too.”
