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In 1938, Dad, you
kept it from us, but in 1938 Grandad left for the old country after the death of his wife and other setbacks, not the least of which were the crop failures and the bad years of the Depression. You were twelve. You were taken out of school. You had to work. Grandad didn't get back 'til 1947. He was only supposed to be gone for the winter, but he didn't come back for almost nine years. He said he got caught in the war, but looking back on it, that couldn't have been the whole story, could it...?
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You know what I was like
when you and Mom and Dad came home. You must have been able to hear us from outside: Sebastian wailing in alarm, not knowing what was going on, sorely disappointed at the wild humour gone awry; me pulling at the doors in a raw panic I couldn't control.
Mom got the key and slid it under the glass door, trying to get me to listen and pick up the key and turn the lock. I was blind, beyond reason. All I knew was fear, the room had turned evil and dark. I was afraid I would die at any moment. I screamed and stamped around, senseless, flailing at dread's black hands gripping me from behind, squeezing my ribcage and making me suffocate.
The sight of familiar people behind the tinted, ornate panes of glass only made things worse. As my breath came in sobs, my heart weak and useless as rotten cabbage, I grabbed a heavy ashtray from an end table and ran it at the door.
The crashing of glass made Sebastian wail even more. Mom reached in, undid the lock, and then stood in the room not knowing which of her sons to comfort first. She picked up Seb, fearing the worst inside his shorts. You marched into the room- I remember the crack and crunch of your shoes on the broken glass. I can see myself, standing there weeping, rubbing my eyes. I knew you were there, looking at me.
You slapped me, hard, with an open palm. It made me punch myself in the eye with one of my balled, rubbing fists. The snap of it shocked my mother, standing with her back to us, and made me stop crying. I looked up, not seeing you, not seeing anything through the tears.
You slapped my face.
The sound of it echoes through me now.
No one had ever done it before, no one has since. I give it to you. It's yours.
It was the begining of my adulthood, and here I sit now beside you.
She stood atop
a baking 1970 Impala, a classic family sedan, the type that reminded Robin of earlier days when fathers had confidence in the future and drove big, gas-guzzling boats with flaring, arrogant fins. He clambered into the rear of the car; it still had a back seat. As Norma shifted on the roof above him, he had the uneasy feeling the the four-high stack of cars was swaying with their weight.
"Look," said Norma quietly. "It just goes and goes."
Robin liked the way he could hear her, though out of sight, in the vast quiet of the car cemetery. There was a faint hum of breeze through the windows of the sedan. He looked out the back, laying his cheek on the metal as he would have if Dad were driving the car somewhere, to the beach on a sunny day with the wind parting his hair. The view was something, he had to admit. All those motoring miles, all those miles and firm hands upon the wheel. The sun wasn't too high, the morning still comfortable. He forgot to try to see where the imported section might be and gazed, lost, out over the decades of road machines.
The calm penetrated Robin's body. Norma clambered down from the roof, causing a perceptible sway. She struggled at the window for a second, dangling over the twenty-foot drop before managing to swing in beside him. Robin, watching her, thought he might reach out and make sure she entered without mishap, then stopped himself. She was strong and determined in the way she moved, in every way about her.
He reached and caressed her hair. "You gave me a fright, there."
"When?"
"Climbing in. I thought you might fall."
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Sebastian sat holding
a beer can, hunched forward in a lawn chair on his parent's sundeck. His father sat where he always did, drinking a beer. Though it was not late in the day, the air was gloomy with the threat of rain.
"I don't know, Dad, you gotta figure...I'm gonna stay away for awhile, let him think about it. He's a h**l of a guy. Just screwed up right now, you know. Weird. At the same time they're giving him some kind of award. Best of something. Best History Teacher in The World, or something like that. You gotta know he'd either screw up totally or be the absolute best."
He stopped, slugging his beer. "You should be proud of him. You should. I should. Mom is, I'm sure. It's just that...I don't know."
After the things
you'd seen, almost nothing would have surprised you. Almost every possibility you could think of filled you with dread. He motioned for you to close the door. You noticed boxes of explosives under the eating table, the wires leading out a window. The three shrunken men sat with their heads bowed. Quartzmann handed you the gun.
"You must be with us."
"I am with you."
"Not yet."
Outside, the two soldiers had thrown what little gear there was into the half-track. The roar of its starting filled the heavy silence. You'd almost forgotten what a motor sounded like. For weeks you'd only heard the voices of Quartzmann and the soldiers, the sound of shovels and picks, the muffled shuffling of the slaves' slippered feet on the ground. Quartzmann picked up his duffel bag and pulled a bottle from it. Clear liquid swilled inside and despite the motor rumbling nearby you could hear its gentle tinkle, its easy whispering voice against the sides of the glass.
Quartzmann handed over the bottle. You tore away the cork and belted some down without even smelling. It was hard, minty tasting, strange to you, but there was no mistaking that bite. You gulped. Quartzmann grabbed the bottle away and the cork from your fingers.
"More when we go, my friend."
He moved to the door, then paused as he corked the bottle. He looked for the last time at the condemned men, then at you. His expression was hard, you hadn't seen that side of him, but you'd sensed it. You had real fear along with the burning down your oesophagus and in your gut.
Then Quartzmann was gone and the job was clear: kill these guys and get a ticket out of here and liquid refreshments provided. The dynamite wired to explode at your feet hardly even figured into the equation.
For a few minutes
, fighting the terrors, he missed the comic irony of the situation, then allowed himself to consider it and forced a mirthful chuckle at his goose-bumps, shortness of breath and irritating tightness of scalp and throat. Then he knew with sadness that this was the only time he could remember actually having given of himself in any relationship. The revelation made him smile, then grieve. He developed a tear in one eye. It rolled down, was replaced by another, and then the other eye welled and saw little through the curtain of salt. He sobbed quietly, concerned at waking Norma, but consumed now only with grieving. He turned and laid his face to the tent wall, collecting tear water at his little place in the sleeping bag.
Unable to stop, Robin cried for himself for awhile, mourning the loss of so many years. Then he wept for the tears of the little boy he knew had suffered such anguish within these walls. He cried for his father and the dog and the dying grandmother and the drunken grandfather. He cried for all the things these people never had and never would have and then he cried again for himself. Weeping profusely face down, he knew he was making a considerable mess of things: the bag, the tent. He imagined his tears soaking down to the time-scoured wooden planking of the loft, soaking still throught the fibres, down the walls, into the flooring and to the ground. A seeping leachate of tears, flowing in a steady river down to the soil and spreading out, around the abandoned barn, through the long-forsaken foundations of the earlier buildings.
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