THE ARMY YOU HAVE
The aquifer dries up and there is no money to dig a new well. The bank in Las Cruces takes the land. Justin’s parents and four siblings pack up and move into town. His father settles for a midnight shift desk clerk job at a motel near the Greyhound station. His mother gets a job at a call center handling customer complaints for a vacation timeshare company in Florida. His grandmother helps take care of the kids after school and during the summer.
A year after Grandma Maida passes, Justin, the oldest of the kids, turns eighteen and joins the army. He is sent to Iraq. He is somewhere near Baghdad in a Humvee without armor plating when an IED takes his left leg. He spends a year in the army hospital in Bethesda. His parents can’t get there. Justin isn’t right when he gets home. His prosthesis is painful and he uses a cane. He can only sleep a couple hours at a time. Sometimes he wakes up screaming. His brothers say they don’t mind, but it scares little Ada, who is only eight.
***
Justin’s detached prosthetic leg is on the passenger seat next to his cane and some sandwiches his mother made for him. He is driving from New Mexico to Maryland to visit a buddy in the army hospital in Bethesda, the guy who saved his life with a makeshift tourniquet. He drinks Red Bulls and Mountain Dews to stay awake for the first fifteen hours of the drive. He spends the night in the truck outside a Walmart, sleeping for six hours. The next day, after another fourteen hours of driving, he gets to the hospital parking lot. He turns off the truck and slumps forward. The steering wheel feels soft on his forehead as he falls asleep. An MP wakes him with a tap on the truck window, checks his military ID, and leaves him alone. The clerk at the hospital information desk tells Justin that his buddy was flown to Salt Lake City for rehab the day before.
***
Just twenty-nine minutes away, the former Secretary of Defense watches the head chef at the City Club in downtown D.C. hustle around the kitchen preparing the gourmet meal. The former Secretary is the lunch speaker. His very long memoir has just been published, five months after he was forced out of the cabinet. The club members are expected to buy copies of his book after his speech.
The former Secretary walks onstage and squints into the lights. He thanks the club members for their kind invitation to speak to them about his new book. The forks, knives, and soup spoons clank as he drones on.
A young man limps toward the front of the room. He leans on a cane.
“Mr. Secretary, request permission to speak,” the young man calls out toward the podium.
“Who are you?” the former Secretary of Defense says as he sneers over his reading glasses.
“Request permission to speak, sir,” the young man shouts.
The former Secretary of Defense glances at the man, a boy really, and then at the security guard near the American flag at the front of the room.
As the security guard approaches, the man pulls up his pants exposing a titanium left leg. He whacks the metal leg with the cane as he continues shouting.
“Sir, if you’d properly armor plated our Humvees, you could’ve saved the army the money they’re spending now on titanium limbs.”
The man is still shouting as he is escorted from the dining room. “Lives and limbs, sir. You didn’t consider the lives and the limbs of the soldiers, did you? You are a coward, sir.”
The former Secretary of Defense glowers and repeats his familiar refrain. “You go to war with the army you have.”
***
The club’s huge lobby is festooned with expensive art, eerie red velvet wall coverings and oversized chandeliers. Justin sits on a velour couch and catches his breath. The security guard apologizes and introduces himself. “My name’s Reggie.”
“Justin.”
Reggie says that he, too, is an Iraq veteran. “That was one fucked-up situation over there. Hell on earth, man, hell on earth,” he says. He looks around and finds a bottle of water for Justin on the reception table.
Justin thanks him for the water and gets up to leave. The men embrace for a moment the way men do, not too close, double pat on the back.
“Welcome home, bro. It ain’t perfect, but at least there’s no mortar fire,” Reggie says.
Both men can hear the sound of muffled applause rising and then falling in the dining room.
***
At the opposite end of the lobby from where Justin and Reggie sit, the former Secretary has taken a seat at a table stacked high with books. He sips some water from a crystal glass, flashes a manufactured grin and checks his heavy gold Rolex.
The club manager gestures in the direction of the book table and calls out to the obedient patrons, “Right this way ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary is available to sign copies of his book.”
MY AMMY
On Friday, Doctor Benson tells Eddie the headaches are not migraines. Eddie is a cancer survivor, so he asks the doctor if they could be caused by a tumor.
That night Eddie looks through his important papers and makes sure everything is in order. His ex-wife is out of the picture. She’s married to the guy who was Eddie’s best man. So, the alma mater gets it all.
On Tuesday, Doctor Benson tells Eddie that, yes, there are inoperable tumors in his brain.
Eddie decides it is time to change up his routine on Wednesday morning. He doesn’t use the same cereal bowl and spoon for his raisin bran that he has used every day for the past 15 years. He finds an old photo album and spends a few hours looking through childhood pictures of himself and his cousin Mike at a beach, at a ball game. Mike was like the older brother Eddie never had.
Eddie puts the photo album into the large garbage pail beside the kitchen table along with the envelope filled with his elementary school report cards. He dumps a box of bowling and golf trophies on top.
There is a love letter from a girl named Vicky that he knew in high school. He has saved that letter for fifty years in a Japanese lacquer box painted with black and gold designs. Vicky was killed in a car accident on her twentieth birthday. Eddie lights the stove, sets the letter on fire and watches it burn in the kitchen sink.
***
On Thursday, Eddie rides the subway to Coney Island. Walking along the boardwalk to the aquarium, he devours a sausage and pepper hero. He inhales the salt air by the harbor seal tank. He buys some treats and tosses them to a seal that’s staring at him with the same expression his dog Pal wore when begging at the dinner table. Eddie had read somewhere that a few seals had escaped into the ocean during Hurricane Sandy.
On the subway home, a skinny young woman carrying a baby panhandles him.
“Please sir, for the baby,” she says.
All he has is five dollars. He hands it to her.
“God bless you,” she whispers and moves on down the car. The baby stares at him over her mother’s shoulder as they walk away.
***
On Saturday, Eddie goes to church. He recalls when he was a kid at Mass on summer Sunday mornings, hands folded tightly, feeling the perspiration drip along his spine under his dress shirt. The white metal oscillating fans whirred on shelves just below each of the Stations of the Cross wood carvings.
Eddie gets in line for confession. When it’s his turn, he kneels in the dark booth and blesses himself.
“Can I do penance for a sin I haven’t committed yet?” he asks the priest.
***
On Sunday, Eddie pays cash for an Amtrak ticket to Miami, the only way he can travel without a trace. Thirty hours later, he takes a taxi to a house not far from his cousin Mike’s. Carrying a small overnight bag he won in a raffle at the American Legion Veteran’s Day party ten years ago, he walks slowly to Mike’s gate and rings the buzzer. The gate opens and he walks up the long driveway toward the Spanish-style mansion.
Mike is at the front door. He gives Eddie a long, tight hug. “Been too long, Eddie. Too long.”
Mike shows Eddie to the upstairs guest bedroom. They stop in the hallway to admire framed family photographs on the wall. Eddie points at a black and white picture of the two of them playing touch football. They’re about twelve years old.
“Our famous zig-zag-zig play,” Mike says.
“Always good for a touchdown.” Eddie says. “The pump fake was the key.”
“That and my gazelle-like speed,” Mike says.
Eddie gives Mike a shove. “And your modesty.”
Next to the football photo is another picture of them standing side-by-side in military uniforms in front of their grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. Their confident facial expressions are the type soldiers use to put their family members’ minds at ease. Eddie spent the war behind a desk in Saigon. Mike was a sniper, a very good one.
From an upstairs balcony, Eddie sees Mike’s deep sea fishing boat docked in a slip right behind the house. The name of the boat, “My Ammy,” is painted on the transom in fancy script.
In his bedroom later, Eddie unpacks the pistol, the silencer, and the ammunition he brought with him from home that he took from the Japanese lacquer box painted with black and gold designs.
***
The cousins eat chicken parmigiana on the patio looking out at the boats and the other homes along the waterway. They talk about the old days, the holidays spent at their grandmother’s house. Rooms full of food and relatives, all eating and drinking and singing “Torna a Surriento” and “‘O Sole Mio.”
After the gelato, Eddie explains to Mike why he is here.
Mike cannot speak.
“I could do it myself, Mike, but that would mean someone would have to find me, have to clean up the mess, you know,” says Eddie.
“I read in the paper about people whose tumors just go away all of a sudden, they live twenty more years. They got some stuff in Mexico, makes ‘em disappear. I read about it last week. Swear to God,” says Mike.
“No, Mike, I’ve seen three different doctors. They all say the same thing.”
***
The next evening, Eddie climbs onto the diving platform attached to the stern of Mike’s boat. The air is warm, the moon a sliver. The ocean is calm even though they are ten miles offshore. Eddie takes off his bathing suit and stands naked with his back to Mike. He fastens the line around his left ankle. It is attached to a bucket filled with cement. He makes the sign of the cross and says, “Okay.”
Mike points the gun at the back of Eddie’s head.
Eddie’s heart pounds. His arms hang limp. A bead of sweat slides from his forehead past his temple and is absorbed into his hair. The rope tied tightly around his ankle cuts off the circulation to his foot. The bucket of cement at the other end of the rope sits silently beside him on the diving platform. A seagull lands a few yards from the stern of the boat and bobs gently in the ocean. Eddie’s calves cramp. His stomach gurgles once, then twice.
Without turning his head, he says, “It’s okay, Mike, go ahead.”
They stand like statues. The boat creaks. Up on the flying bridge, a metal fitting on the flag rope clangs against the aluminum flagpole like a sad, muted bell.
As Eddie stares straight ahead, Mike points the gun toward the water and fires.
Eddie turns around and says, “I understand.” He unties the bucket of cement from his ankle and puts his bathing suit back on. He takes the gun from Mike and drops it into the water and watches it sink, then he pushes the bucket of cement off the diving platform.
***
Mike starts the boat and steers it back toward the lights of Miami. A harbor seal swims alongside them for a few hundred yards.
Eddie asks Mike to stop the boat. Then he climbs back out onto the diving platform. The harbor seal swims up close and Eddie gets down on his knees. Eddie says, “What are you doing down here? Go home, this water’s too warm for you.” The harbor seal lingers, then swims in a tight circle. It flaps a flipper on the water, splashing Eddie, and then swims away.
BEYOND THE BREAKERS
Your father dies in his sleep at the assisted living facility in the summer of 2012. He is 87 and a widower. You fly from Los Angeles to New York and arrange everything. All of his friends and other relatives are dead or in Florida, too old to travel. You collect his belongings, among them a gold watch he always wore.
At the National Cemetery, a marine reads a proclamation and gives you a folded flag while a recording of “Taps” is played on the speaker system. The headstone is yet to be prepared. You tell yourself you will come back and visit the grave in a few weeks. Four weeks pass and you receive the official notice that your father’s headstone is in place, engraved with his navy rank, relevant Pacific Theater World War II dates, and the inscription you provided. You tell yourself you will visit the grave soon, the next time you are in New York, that there is no reason to make a special trip when things at work are the way they are this time of year.
***
Your father used to tell you his war stories. He said that in Shanghai in 1945, friendly Chinese aristocrats hosted weekly parties for the U.S. Navy officers at their estates. The officers drank expensive wine and ate lavish dinners. After the dinners, they smoked the hosts’ expensive cigars. The Americans spoke to their hosts of the Ivy League campuses to which they would return after the Japanese surrender. There were big bands in chandeliered ballrooms filled with sparkling Chinese girls in expensive French dresses.
***
In Brooklyn in 1962, you sat on a beach blanket squinting toward the ocean off Coney Island. You could see your father swimming parallel to the beach, way beyond the breakers. His pace was slow and deliberate, like the aircraft carrier on which he served. He swam back and forth for what seemed like hours. You worried that the rip tide would take him. Your mother sat under the umbrella in a sand chair with her back to the ocean. She told you not to worry, he was a good swimmer, he was in the navy. Later that summer, the two of you toured his old aircraft carrier when it was moored in New York.
***
He never told you that in Shanghai in 1962, there was a teenage Chinese girl named Emily who was a student at the new Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages. She recited her English lessons at night in her bedroom off the kitchen in the apartment she shared with her mother. She wore a locket around her neck with a tiny photograph inside. In the top drawer of her desk was an envelope bearing a Princeton return address with a 1947 postmark. She was eventually able to read the note inside.
***
In late December 2012, you arrive on the redeye from LAX to JFK. Ninety minutes later, you are driving the rental car through the snowy deserted National Cemetery. The only other visitor you see stands looking down at a gravestone. It’s a small woman wearing a red winter coat. She has brushed the snow away from the front of the gravestone and is standing on brown frozen grass.
You pull the scrap of paper from your coat pocket with the row and section number of your father’s grave. One knuckle is bleeding from a scrape against the pocket zipper. As you get closer to her, it is clear that the small woman in the red winter coat is standing at your father’s grave. She is crying. Your heart beats against your rib cage. The woman tries to smile. It is more of a grimace. She wipes tears from her eyes. She removes her mitten and extends her shivering hand. Your hand is warm but also shivering.
In a fake leather booth at the diner not far from the National Cemetery, you strain to hear Emily’s soft voice. Her facial features are a blend of east and west. She speaks English with a British accent. She removes the locket on the gold chain that she wears around her neck. Inside it is a photograph of your father at age twenty in navy dress whites.
You study Emily’s lonely expression, sip your coffee, and push an egg-white omelet around your plate. You tell yourself you will visit her the next time work takes you to Shanghai. But you don’t tell her.
