Zachary Tyler Vickers
An infidel drops from the ceiling of a roached office and mistakes us for the government. He opens Private Gusto's jugular with a switchblade. Gusto's throat makes change for a hundred in pennies. I miscounted the tiles during my sweep. "Hello, operator?" he chokes while I'm on my knees, trying to gather all of his spare change and stuff it back in.
One of us tackles the infidel and dazes him with a punch to the ear.
Intel reported government WMDs in a gutted copier, maybe a lead-lined filing cabinet. We find a conference room piled with torched bodies. We take pictures with them, move jaws like ventriloquist dummies. We kick their legs like they're giddy. Morale is cheap and expensive. "Show some respect," one of us says. "They're not called dummies, they're called figures." At the water cooler, I try to scrub off what I tried to stuff back into Gusto.
The infidel, turns out, is AWOL Utley—the treasonous, traitor expat scumbag.
"I prefer Jeffersonian," Utley corrects.
"You butchered Gusto!" I say.
"Sincerest apologies and sympathies, but the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of both patriots and tyrants, to paraphrase," AWOL Utley says. We give him a waterboarding for that until his cheek capillaries firework. "I know what you think of me," he says. "I'm an ex-Clemson adjunct, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. But how are these infidels any different than us? We were merely children asserting individuation against our parent government, England. Now, we're the Godparent."
"In Godparent we trust!" Commander says and sheathes his knife in AWOL Utley's skull.
I dig two graves. Gusto's body is carried to Christ and a mother. Private Kirkpatrick asks, "Who's that second grave for, Terenzetti?" Distant mortars belch, vomiting their glorious infidel hell. Smoke and rot carve our initials in the humidity. There's a pushing-out on my heart I've lost patience for. I dig until I figure I've reached sufficient depth, then roll the traitor in. I don't fill it in. The hole isn't big enough. Utley's legs stick out.
We sweep underground crypts for WMDs. Hello! one of us yells down a corridor and I hear Operator? return from another. The marbled walls drip. I wash my hands in the trickle. "Gusto?" I whisper. Ahead, a dog stands. Op-er-at-or? its tongue pants. I follow it. Eventually, the crypt opens. A fire snaps beside a tent. The room is full of marble sculptures and gold leaf-framed oil paintings and china. Some rich wife prays, and a male in an ornate military uniform sits at a piano. The soft thuds of his hands spider across the broken keys like a finger tapping the chorus of a memory I have yet to make. I approach, ready. "My father hit a note and my brothers and sisters and I would hide," he says. "He'd seek us when it stopped ringing. I did it with my sons, too. Please, spare my children." The soldier hits a key and a single note struggles from its damp bowels. Two boys jump from the tent and run down another corridor, hide. I think of Sis for the first time in months, forget her just as quick.
"You're a General," I say.
"I was," the General says and coughs. "Not much of the government remains now."
I plumb my bayonet to his temple. "Tell me," I say. "What was it like to be a boy?"
"You tell me. Aren't you one?"
"I don't remember!" I sob. "Give me a memory!"
"I have already told you about hide-and-seek," he says. "What more could you want?"
"More," I say. "But that's a good one, yes."
I trade my bayonet for his memory—a quick, sparkling gash. I trade it for his wife's prayer. Her mouth makes change for a hundred in pennies. Their legs twitch. I follow the piano note down a corridor. I do not sterilize the blade in between.
We look through a leveled village. I cough and wash my hands raw and pink in a bay choked with fetid mussels and severed legs from those dumped in after the missile strike. Then I get this triangular pain my thigh, like empathy. My foot snores.
Stuck in my quad is a bullet.
"Incoming!" Commander hollers.
Bullets begin to whiz past. Molotov cocktails throw shards of beautiful glass and fire.
Commander gives his shrill order.
"This is it!" I yell, limping forward, silver angels whistling past my face. "This is it!"
I'm on disability, nursing a third beer, waiting to die. There's a forefather in my cough. I've got a fleshy asterisk scar on my quad. Stairs take winded minutes. My sister drives from Boston once a month to vacuum the curtains and cheer me as I pedal a stationary bike and hack, saying she's so proud. It's the worst kind of pain you can imagine.
She grabs me by the scruff and examines my forehead. "The heck you do?" Sis asks.
The heck I did was lie in bed, minding my own goddamn business, staring at the ceiling where mice scratch because of the severed legs always stacking behind my eyelids. Then somebody drove over the pothole outside. I stood right up on my mattress and the ceiling fan clocked me. The knot above my eyebrow carries a heartbeat.
"Tripped," I say.
"Your rehab will help," she says, running a finger over the lampshade, Gusto's surprised face. I rub my sockets, the legs stack. It's like I've got splinters in my lungs. "You really got to do something about that awful beard," she says. The TV is selling something called the Tushion. Sis blows her dusty fingertip like a birthday candle. She's got this seriousness about her when she does this, wishful thinking. "Is today the day?" she asks.
I take a long slow sip from my beer. "Today is not the day," I say.
A car thumps by.
"Who the hell do I call about that goddamn pothole?" I bark.
Sis watches me wheeze, my sallowness absent in my white knuckles death-gripping the bike's handlebars. "Just," she says, her voice scratching, a mouse in her throat. I cough and the forehead knot pulses, my heart gimping along in a different time zone.
"Today is not the day, Sis," I repeat, catching my breath again.
We watch TV. She asks what the dogs look like over there. I tell her a dog is a dog no matter where it is. She thinks my leg scar was the decision of rearview mirror shrapnel. On TV, a computer simulation timelapses a butt's sag over twenty years, which the Tushion rejuvenates. Sis laughs at the infomercial—the kind of laugh that makes you consider God. I could fit her in my pocket and feed her crumbs. I could strangle her to purple gurgle.
She pokes her butt, "Someday I'm going to need the Tushion."
"You won't," I say. "You're not supposed to grow up on me."
"I'm sorry," Sis says, touching my cheek, "but I already did."
"Speak up?" the Department of Transportation person says.
"This goddamn pothole!" I whisper, my throat coughed raw.
"Let me put you on hold for one moment," she says. "I'm just the operator."
"Hello, operator?" I say. The forehead knot has become a smear of mustard.
"Hello," she says. Then Muzak.
The fridge ice maker drops a fresh batch and my ears sweat. The drain sounds like the final lurch of the General's rich wife—she hunches over the sink, flickering her tongue as she empties her insides. I chew ice until I'm deaf with my insides.
"The asphalt failure will be mended in approximately six months," a DoT worker says.
"Six months?" I say. "I'm going to stuff you into that fucking pothole!"
"It's illegal for citizens to repair city property, sir," the DoT worker says.
I limp to Ralph Varick's, coughing the heads off beers, dry-heaving, murmuring, and chewing the Gusto out of my fingernails, hairs scrubbed clean off my hands. Ralph has a knife sheathed in his forehead, then he doesn't. The barstools look like legs: hairy, feminine, birth-marked, veiny, freckled. Next thing, I'm sitting up, swiping at the air, and my high school gym coach is on the stool beside me with two cups of coffee.
"It's eleven in the morning, Mr. Terenzetti," Coach says.
The General sits at the bar piano, a sucking slit in his temple. I sit beside him. A couple small figures whimper and crab walk behind an arcade game. I step on the pedal and hit the particular note, chasing them away, again and again. I look at the General and the General doesn't flinch. "What're you doing?" Coach asks, touching my shoulder. I sock his jaw. But he's bigger, Greco-Roman. He gets me in a chokehold. Yes! My windpipe pinches off, a warm green garden hose. I open my arms to embrace it. Then Coach lets go.
"Why won't he come off?" I say. My hands newborn colt pink and wrinkled in the sink. A hot Krazy Straw worms through my brain, soldering ideas. "Whom?" Rick asks, blocking the movie theater bathroom door. He's an ex-coworker down at the microchip plant where we manufactured silicon wafers. We played racquetball on Thursdays. His grammar abandons him when his adrenaline amps. Close games, he'd be sucking wind, hands on knees, "I seen the ball hit the line. You got to redo that shot, Matt. I could care less what you think." The lobby's all husks of bodies untubed from government steamrollers set loose on a crowd with nowhere to go. My thigh tingles, the only thing that sleeps. There's a charred skeleton in my bathtub. Gusto paces the attic, saying, "Hello, Operator?" The kid with the broke neck sings, "Blue plate special, hissy fit, cold turkey, whoops-a-daisy!" whenever I open my closet. I step over the woman on my living room floor holding her swaddled infant being pulled apart by dogs. The General's kids always crab walk away from me. I cough. The mirror steams.
Someone in the hallway says something to Rick.
"You all got to use another!" he says. "He's not good! He's not feeling good!"
One morning, the legs keep falling and falling. This blackness is a different kind of vacancy—sonar bouncing around an afterthought. My neck wires spark when I blink. Mice snore in the ceiling, a mower floods blocks away. I hack copper fluid, feeling my way to the kitchen. Sour glue smell of the wallpaper. I call Ralph and he drives me to the ER.
Sis shows up hours later from Boston after all the tests.
"Histoplasmosis," the doctor diagnoses. "Spelunker's Lung. The fungus has spread to your eyes. They've scarred over. You should've come in weeks ago. You're literally coughing spores. I'm afraid the prognosis for reversing the effect is now unlikely."
Crinkle of exam table paper, a scribbling pen, swallowing, snap of latex gloves, a foot tapping, starch in the coat. Fruit smell in Sis's shampoo, her eyes scratching when she wipes the salt away. "Where do you pick up something like that?" Sis asks.
"Have you spent any significant time underground?" the doctor asks.
I look around, "Where's your bedside manner? Say Polo so I can slug you! Marco?"
Sis rests her hand on my knee. Tears rim like brush fires.
"Give me something for the legs," I say. "Please, Jesus."
"Your legs?" the doctor says.
"He was injured in the war," Sis says. "It was a car bomb."
"No," I sob. "I just don't want to see them anymore."
I'm prescribed amphotericin B, methylprednisone, itraconazole, and also Zoloft for the legs. "You may feel tingling in your hands and feet," the doctor says. Of course I do, along with headaches and sweating and insomnia and joint pain. The ambidexterity of symptoms and side effects—how am I supposed to tell if I'm getting better or worse?
"Is today the day?" Sis asks, driving me home. "Please, Matt. Make it today."
"Today is not the day," I say. Then, "It's just landsickness. It's just the lungs."
"There's more than that," she says.
"Well, there's always more," I say.
I'm also prescribed a cane and a seeing eye dog named Rutabaga, but I call him Old Man. Damn thing smells like dead insects, teethes on everything, and is scared of the dark. What a pair we must make. I sleep with the light on or it'll howl until the neighbors call. I listen to infomercials and ride the bike. My thigh unVelcros. I buy bologna, white bread, and beer. Old Man chews my cane. I sit on the porch, sun on my face, a cool breeze pulling my beard east, a Genesee Cream Ale warming in my hand as the dog rolls in the grass. My joints ache. Forty hours feel like forty years, and I think maybe it's about time to retire. I'm powdering my feet when I think: Oh, the hell with all of this. I fill the tub and empty the Zoloft bottle into my mouth. The warm water spills over the tub when I sit. Old Man's nails clatter backward on the tile and he winces. "It's my choice," I say, feeling for his snout. "It's my right to die, Old Man." He licks my hand and I scratch a farewell behind his ears.
Next thing, the goddamn dog is barking and pulling me by my soaked shirt over the edge of the tub and I'm coughing up water and sobbing and that is when I love him. I throw my arms around his neck and say, "Never again, Old Man." He's whimpering and shivering and I kiss the top of his head. "I won't ever do that again to you. I'm sorry."
I shred files three days a week at the microchip plant. Old Man lies across my feet, sighing and gnawing my cane. I buy bread and bologna. I ride the stationary bike. My thigh is a trick birthday candle. The black turns hazy gray. My ears discern bouquets of frequencies, my nose smells things in stereo. The pothole scares hell in and out of me. My beard is a wicker chair. Old Man licks my face like its stitches. I sweat angels into my sheets. Eventually all this formality will be over. I limp to Varick's. Old Man gnaws the stool legs. Ralph unmutes the TV for me. Townies share wallet photos of grandkids, discuss cholesterol levels and the nipple diameters of their wives. The mailman is rumored to wear ladies undergarments. Rick utters ain't if his heart rate exceeds 147 bpm. Sis vacuums the curtains and always gives a penny, never takes. If everyone is made in the likeness of God then what am I?
At Varick's, someone across the bar says, "Fucking stinks."
I tilt my glass as Ralph pours, all the courtesy I can muster, "It's Old Man."
"It's you, friend. Goddamn, Ralph. Since when did you start serving bums?"
"He's a vet, you liberal sons of bitches," Ralph says. He stomps in their direction and says, "Polo! Polo!" I stand. Old Man's claws gather on the hardwood. "Stay, boy," I tell him, and limp toward Ralph's voice. "Marco?" I ask. "Polo!" Ralph says. I square my fist at his voice and feel a weak nose open like a diary. The liberal emits a soft cry as he thuds to the floor. Another stool clatters when the other stands. Old Man barks. "Stay, boy!" I say. The liberals scurry out as Ralph stomps in pursuit, Poloing as I hobble, flailing my fists.
"Be honest, Ralph," I say, "am I that bad?"
"You could stand a hot shower," he says.
"Well, hell," I say.
He hangs a tree-shaped air freshener around my neck.
"Tell me what it was like to be a boy, Ralph," I say.
He adds vodka and cinnamon to a cup. "Gravity didn't seem to matter as much," he says.
"You are truly Christ," I say, wiping my nose. "My feet are my heart."
I gargle the vodka/cinnamon while Old Man gnaws my cane. I swallow it.
An exterminator sets mousetraps in the ceiling. I call about the pothole and take the pills. The doctor asks how many fingers. "It's like sign language in the dark," I say. I ride the stationary bike. I shred files. I join a bird watching club for the blind, and spend hours memorizing cassettes of calls that send Old Man tearing to the windows. Sis vacuums the curtains and decides her favorite call is the Piping Plover. "I think I see you," I tell her one day at the table. "What a pretty silhouette you've grown up to be."
"Is today the day?" she asks again.
I turn from her voice, "I made a big mistake. I miscounted the ceiling tiles."
"And?"
"And that's all for today."
Sis tugs my beard back to her, "I've missed you, Matt."
The pothole kabooms and my rivets burst.
"Oh, enough!" Sis yells.
Outside, I hear her drag the spade shovel from the garage, then a soft scissoring as she shovels lawn and pats it into the pothole. Old Man claws the front door. "Come on," I say. "She'll be back." Out back, I feel the sun reflect off the beer can. Old Man gnaws my cane. I think I see his lean shadow among the others. "Where's your ball?" I say.
He sets his head in my lap, chewing a tennis ball. The damp fuzzy thing stinks too much like open mouths. I toss it. He bounds after it across the backyard. It thonks off the fence. His claws rip the grass. Seconds later, he's chewing it in my lap, licking my hands. "Dogs don't like bad people," I say. "You never once growled at me, huh, boy?" He snorts when I scratch his ears. Throw, retrieve, throw, retrieve. The ball bounces off the fence and past me, under the porch. Old Man whimpers. "You big baby," I say. "It's not even dark under there! I'll get the flashlight." I put my weight on the cane and it snaps at the gnawed part. Down I go onto my knees, stabbing a triangular pain into my thigh. Old Man's breath like fetid mussels. He collides with me, the toe-headed dipshit, nipping and panting. This is it. I grab the cane by the broke end and drop the handle over his skull. A shrill yip. He lies down. "Stay, boy," I tell him. He does. I nudge him. "Get up, boy," I say. I unclasp his collar and rub his neck. I whistle some of the birdcalls into his ear. Everything is darkness and shadow. But I see clearly, all of it.
I try to gather him up. I bury my wet scruff in his.
"So that's why," I say, kissing his warm curled lip. "It was all preparation to lose you."
I limp inside, wash my face, sit at the table, and breathe and drink.
Sis returns. "Done," she says, washing at the sink. "Where's Old Man?"
"Lying in the backyard," I say.
She tugs my beard. "It's about time I take care of this, too." The junk drawer opens, the scissors come out. She snips right at the chin, and a great weight drops from me. She retrieves shaving cream and a disposable razor. "Do you remember how we shaved with Dad?" she says. My cheeks cool as she removes fists of wiry hair. "We scraped off shaving cream using razors without blades and stuck pieces of toilet paper to our chins."
The earth moves, the earth moves. I try to keep from spinning off.
"Tell me what I was like as a boy," I say.
"You wore hotel shower caps on vacations and pretended to be an old British nanny," Sis says, working a lather on my throat and cheeks. "You called yourself Mrs. Daffodil." She tells me how I went to her middle school prom with her when nobody asked her, how I always tripped going up stairs, how I hated the feel of denim. She shaves meticulously, rinsing the razor in the sink. The dull blade pulls my hair and she gets impatient with me.
"Stop squirming," she says. "This is what you get."
"I don't even know how you put up with me," I say.
"You're my baby brother," she says.
"But I'm older," I say.
"Old Man!" Sis calls toward the back door. But he doesn't come. She keeps shaving, telling me about how I was scared of the attic, how I hated broccoli. Her fingertips have pruned from the water. There was the Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis until I was twelve—how she was half my size but always had to help me up because of my bad knees. "And you once shot a bullfrog in the ass with a BB gun at Cousin Ryan's. You cried and cried, you felt so bad." She turns my head, touches my smooth cheeks, and pats my face dry.
"Is there more?" I ask.
"There's always more," she says. Her shadow swims in front of me. I lock on it. "Take a look." Then another shadow appears. It moves in the same direction that my head moves. This darker, distant screen. "There you are," Sis says.
"Here I am," I say.