These Heroic, Happy Dead Read online

  “At what?” asked the coatless man.

  “Ruth,” the amputee said.

  We all watched an elderly fellow stand up from the toilet and lurch across the room. When he reached the pay phone, he grabbed the receiver and, without dialing a number, said, “Nurse? There’s blood in my stool. Hello?”

  The coatless man clutched his hair. “Throwing hammers,” he said.

  “Weren’t no ax handy,” said the amputee.

  —

  His name was Lee Boyle. He’d been infantry, a sergeant first class, and he’d been around. When, by and by, we got to talking about the wars, you could feel all the other stories crowding the one Lee wanted to tell—all the lurid impressions through which Lee had to reach in order to grasp the memory he needed. After he tried to tell me about his legs—it had happened after he’d finished active duty, moved to Vermont with Ruth, joined the national guard, and volunteered for one last, low-risk hurrah—I tried to tell him about my face.

  While I was trying to tell him, Lee said, “Hold on. You mean that debacle at the mosque?”

  “Debacle,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  “You were there?”

  “Sort of. I was outside. I wasn’t inside.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “So what happened to the guys who were inside?”

  “Some copped. Some were court-martialed.”

  “But is it right? What they say they did?”

  I shrugged. “I was outside.”

  After a while, the door opened and Ray appeared. He stood there like a gunslinger poised to draw.

  It was Lee.

  —

  I was asleep, slumped against the wall, when the sound of my name, pronounced as a question, began to penetrate the dream. McPherson? McPherson? Ray was reading from his clipboard. “Follow me,” he said. “Or stay here, I don’t give a shit.”

  We went down the hall to a wide-open room partitioned into cubicles. In one of the cubicles a hefty, frizzy-haired secretary was watching her computer and eating from a bag. Not far from her desk I spotted the drive-through-style window—the side of it from which paperwork was passed rather than received. The secretary brought over some files and the Ziploc with my wallet, phone, and cigarettes. “Sign and date here and here,” she said, leaving two Cheeto-orange smudges on the page.

  “What about my rifle?” I asked.

  “Your what, now?” said Ray.

  “That’s evidence, baby,” the secretary cooed.

  Ray pinched his nose. “ ‘Baby,’ Donna?” he said.

  A revolving door delivered me into the night. A blueness was creeping into the black. The heaping white powder beneath which the parking lot was buried looked as fake and inviting as grassy hills seen from very, very far away.

  Under one of the lamps sat a brown, windowless van. Thick gray clouds hacked out of the pipe. I could hear people arguing in there, a man and a woman. The van reversed out of its space and stopped in front of me. At the wheel was an unhappy, good-looking girl in a hunting jacket. Lee Boyle sat in the passenger seat.

  “Get in,” he said.

  —

  The back of the van had been stripped down to a bare metal hull. In the center sat Lee’s chair. The foam cushions were warm, molded to Lee’s shape. I had to wiggle around, press hard, to make them accommodate my own. It felt a little funny, like sticking your hand in another guy’s mitt right after he’d played a game. No one spoke as we headed out of town; it was clear enough, though, how Ruth felt about Lee having paid my bail. She gripped the wheel like she was wringing it dry. At one point, Lee grumbled, “They’re my checks,” and Ruth said, “Your checks? Your checks? That’s…” She shook her head.

  We turned onto an unplowed lane that dropped into the tamarack and pine. A frozen stream paralleled the way, boulder tops and branches jutting through the ice. Now and then, we’d pass a yard full of tarp-covered crap, crap left out to rot or rust.

  Lee and Ruth’s place was deep in the woods, a single-story rambler with vinyl siding and a Gadsden flag hanging from the gutter. Ruth parked in the garage, beside a dirt bike with dry mud sprayed across its fender. I held the chair steady while Lee eased himself out of the van. (I had this notion you weren’t supposed to help them much.) Ruth handed Lee a jumble of keys, and Lee unlocked the door. That was a thing of theirs, I gathered, him being the one to unlock the door.

  “Plug it in!” Lee hollered as he wheeled inside.

  Ruth groaned. “Jesus, Lee, can’t we skip it?”

  “We have a guest. Plug it in.”

  I heard Ruth rummaging around, bumping into stuff and cursing. Then, all of a sudden, the room came alive with frenetic blinking colors.

  “Ain’t it something?” said Lee.

  It was something. There was more light than tree, every limb wrapped and rewrapped, alternating to a different pace and pattern.

  “Had enough?” Ruth asked.

  She was by the wall, hand on a switch. When she flipped it on, the ambient light of the ceiling lamp diluted the spectacle. Right where Ruth stood I spotted a small gash in the Sheetrock—and, on the floor, among bits of drywall embedded in the carpet hairs, a long-handled framing hammer. Noticing me notice the hammer, Ruth scooped it up and brought it to a cluttered bookcase without any books.

  “Of course, he insisted on the biggest one,” she said, waving at the Christmas tree. It was the first time Ruth had addressed me, but she did it with odd familiarity, as if I knew already that insisting on the biggest one was classic Lee. “I said not in a million years is it gonna fit. And voilà! It don’t fit.”

  Ruth was right. The tree, by generous measure, was taller than the house, its top six inches bent at a right angle along the ceiling tile.

  “Voilà my ass,” cried Lee. “Look at that trunk. Go on, take a look at it. If they’d cut the trunk proper, where they’re supposed to, it would’ve fit perfect. They left too much on, is the only issue with the tree.”

  They both turned to me, and I squatted low, to get a better view.

  “Lot of trunk there,” I said.

  “That’s what I been trying to tell her,” said Lee.

  —

  Mostly, what the bookcase held instead of books were photographs of Lee with legs. An active, outdoorsy Lee. Lee overseas, Lee in nature, Lee on the dirt bike. Legs in every one. Legs, and also, in a lot of them, Ruth. A lusty, vigorous Ruth. A Ruth in possession of some feral tomboyish power transmitting through the eyes. One picture—taken at a lake, from up high, as if the photographer had been standing on an elevated dock—showed Ruth in shorts and a bikini top straddling a Jet Ski. Lee sat behind her, clinging to her waist. They were both laughing. They were laughing because that was a time in their lives during which the reversal of conventional Jet Ski positions could be funny.

  I considered the Ruth on the sofa. She’d shed her hunting jacket and was wearing a plain white T-shirt. A bruise on her bicep bloomed like a ceiling stain. Sure, her husband had thrown a framing hammer at her arm; she’d just given a bondsman a lien against her house; and a stranger with a face scar was standing in her living room. She had every right to look fatigued. But still. Glancing from the bookcase to the sofa, sofa to bookcase, I felt like Ray trying to reconcile the genuine article with the info on his clipboard.

  Lee returned from the kitchen with three cans of beer in his lap. He lobbed me one on his way to the couch, handed off another to Ruth. In exchange, she relinquished the remotes. I saw now that their TV sat on top of a different TV—the bottom one just had a mohair throw draped over it. Lee turned them both on. The top TV had picture but no sound; the sound came from the bottom TV, along with a bright salt-and-pepper square glowing in the mohair. His beer wedged between his stumps, Lee worked the remotes, one in each hand, jabbing as he clicked.

  A pack of menthols lay on the coffee table. It had a glass surface, the table, and underneath the glass a bed of sand with buffed pebbles and seashells. R
uth gave the pack a shake, listening to hear if it was empty, which it was. I offered one of mine. When I held the lighter to its tip, the heat of that small flame seemed to thaw Ruth out a little.

  “So,” she said, “who’s Lilly?”

  Lee made a noise.

  “What?” said Ruth. “It’s a secret? If it’s such a secret, why’d he get her name tattooed on his goddamn neck?”

  “She’s my fiancée,” I said.

  “Engaged?” Lee said.

  “Basically. Almost. I’m gonna propose when I get up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “Lake Champlain. Her parents got a place on the water. She’s been staying with them for a while.”

  Something about this sounded off. “Her mother’s trying to convince her to leave me,” I explained.

  Lee returned his attention to the TVs; Ruth put her feet on the table. “Kinda sounds like she already has,” she said.

  “Anyway,” said Lee, “we’ll bring you to the bus station in the morning.”

  —

  Ruth left the den and returned with a stack of bedding. “The couch folds out,” she said. “Lee, did you use that extra toothbrush I got you?”

  When Lee, too absorbed in whatever we were watching to hear, showed no response, Ruth shouted, “Lee! The extra toothbrush I bought you! Did you use it?”

  “To clean the .22 with,” Lee said.

  Ruth closed her eyes and appeared to perform a breathing exercise. When she opened her eyes, she told me, “I guess you’ll have to use your finger.”

  As soon as she was gone, Lee switched off the TVs. I was surprised. I’d thought he’d really been interested.

  “Get your coat,” he said.

  A wooden walkway, raised on stilts above the snow, led around the house to a shed near the propane tank. Lee brought out from his parka the cord with the keys. He wheeled alongside the shed, undid a heavy padlock, and opened her up.

  “There’s a lantern,” he told me.

  I found it and turned it on. A rack mounted to the shed’s rear wall held at least a dozen rifles. There were a couple shotguns, the .22 Lee had mentioned, and some badder stuff, including a tricked-out Bushmaster not unlike my own. All manner of hardware crowded the side walls. Most of it was for metalworking: lathe, torches, grinders, and the like. The contraption that occupied the center of the shed appeared to be the product of these tools.

  I held up the lantern by its pail handle.

  It was a sled, of sorts. A square metal frame rigged to four cross-country skis. After I’d dragged it out I found that the wheels of Lee’s chair each fit snugly into a halved length of piping bolted to the steel. A set of bicycle handlebars had a bell attached to them; once he was situated, Lee gave it a ring.

  “The skis were Ruth’s,” he said. “She used to be a big winter-sports person.”

  “What’s the plan?” I said.

  Lee gazed up at the early glow kindling above. It was almost dawn. “There’s some rope in there,” he said. “We’ll need that. Also, get us each a gun.”

  —

  The snow around the house had been compacted enough to where I could take a few good strides, hop on the back of Lee’s sled, and coast with him for a stretch, like you do a shopping cart. I had the Bushmaster slung on my back, and Lee had a pump-action shotgun in one hand. We were a couple of bandits on a cash-laden stagecoach—although, in truth, we didn’t really need the guns. Lee’d said game sometimes hung around where we were going and it’d be a pity to find ourselves unarmed if a brood of grouse or a deer or fox showed up. I hoped they would.

  At a tree with a strip of pink tape tied on its lowest branch, we turned into the woods. The snow here was untraveled, and almost right away the skis slammed to a halt.

  “Rope!” barked Lee.

  By lashing one end around the frame, holding the other over my shoulder, and really leaning in, I could pull him forward. Soon, though, I had to stop and rest.

  Lee rang the bell. “Giddyup!”

  “You son of a bitch,” I wheezed.

  It was maybe twenty minutes later—I was drenched in sweat, charging blindly—that Lee cried, “OK! Get some momentum and don’t stop!”

  I looked up and saw the clearing through the trees, a vast backdrop of light behind all those trunks and boughs. We were at the top of a rise that sloped down to it. I made for the drop. When the line went slack, I stepped aside, gathered it up, and tossed it on Lee’s lap as he went flying past.

  —

  The clearing turned out to be a lake. It was sizable, with a meandering shoreline that receded into bays and inlets, a wooden dock extending from the shore, small mounds of snow heaped around the pilings. Lee had glided out a ways, into the open, free of the trees that crowded the banks. When I reached him, he was tilting his face toward a warmth coming from the sky. There were colors up there now, wild ones.

  “This lake is how come we moved out here,” Lee said.

  “It’s pretty,” I said. “No Champlain, but pretty.”

  Lee nodded. “It’s how come we moved out here.”

  —

  The lights were on, tree off. The den was warm and smelled of bacon. Ruth was in the kitchen, working a skillet. She had a cigarette in her other hand and was leaning back from the grease. She looked up, saw that Lee wasn’t with me. I unslung the Bushmaster.

  “He wanted to be alone,” I said.

  Ruth said nothing. I sat down at a square Formica table next to the refrigerator. As Ruth cut and stirred and whipped and flipped, the light grew in the kitchen, through a window above the sink. Suddenly, it was day.

  Ruth placed in front of me a steaming mug and a plate.

  “There’s plenty,” she said.

  Hungry as I was, I had to take a moment to admire what she’d done. What she’d done was cut shapes out of the toast—circles, stars, crescent moons—and then fried eggs inside of the holes. I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Lilly makes good eggs too.”

  “Lilly,” Ruth said.

  When I finished, she brought my plate to the sink. She squirted some soap. She was standing there, looking out the window, her hands in the suds and the faucet running, and she said, “I knew what he was building out there.”

  After a while, I got up and went to the sink and stood next to Ruth. She was still staring out the window. I followed her gaze to see what it was. There in the snow was the path we’d made with the sled. You could see it leading from the house all the way to the tree with the strip of pink tape hanging from its lowest branch. Then it disappeared.

  “He thought I wouldn’t notice they were missing?” Ruth said. “God I used to love to ski.”

  Just then a distant gunshot sent a few birds swooping out of the canopy. Ruth’s reaction was so slight—barely a shudder—I wasn’t sure she’d heard.

  “Sounds like he got something,” I said.

  Ruth didn’t answer. She was looking at that path in the woods.

  My father, when he came to say goodbye, could not keep his eyes off the Jeep in the garage. Hank Rubin had recently removed the top: its open cab, white upholstery, and padded roll bars seemed to promise happy times. The bougainvillea was in bloom. A bit dramatically, as if caching in the lungs one last whiff of the life that used to be his (even though, before Hank moved in and revived the garden, that bougainvillea had always been a scraggly, scentless vine), my father inhaled deeply through his nose.

  “Well, then,” he said. “I guess I better take a leak before I hit the road.”

  It was a six-hour drive to the place where he was going—a town I’d never heard of, outside Sacramento. One of his old army buddies owned a hardware store up there. “Orchard country,” my father called it.

  “Mom doesn’t want you in the house,” I said.

  “I have to take a leak,” my father said.

  “What about the Shell?” I said. “You’ll stop there anyway, won’t you?”

  My father grimaced. He contemplated the house, th
e Jeep, the bougainvillea. “Got a full tank,” he said. “Besides, Kyle, that’s hardly the point.”

  He marched to the flowerbox beneath the kitchen window, then, the one Hank Rubin had installed and planted with perennials. The blinds were up; my father, from inside, would’ve been framed from head to mid-thigh.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Be with you in a minute.”

  After he’d shaken himself, he went to the wooden gate that accessed the back, pulled the string that raised its latch, and disappeared.

  I stood there watching the gate. At some point, the front door opened and my mother stepped out. Noting my father’s truck still parked on the street—the bed loaded with boxes tied down under a paint-spattered drop cloth—she said, “Where is he?”

  “In the back.”

  My mother twitched. “Hank!”

  Before Hank could respond, my father was crossing the lawn at a run. I didn’t understand it until I saw the dog. When he reached his truck, my father yanked open the passenger door and slapped the seat. Lucy, our retriever, was there in a flash. My father slammed the door behind her and hustled to the other side. He turned the key and pumped the pedal. “Come on, come on,” we could see him muttering.

  Eventually, Hank Rubin joined my mother on the landing.

  “What now?” he said.

  My mother sighed. “He’s stealing the dog,” she said. “Trying to, at least.”

  We had to wait a long time before he got the engine started. Nonetheless, he rounded the block with two loud, victorious toots of the horn.

  —

  It was decided, I don’t remember how or by whom, that I would spend the summer with him. And so, one day in early June, after a soporific passage through endless identical trees aligned so uniformly you could look down the grid any which way, diagonally or straight, my mother, who liked the declarative as an expression of awe when confronted with objects of monumental scale, pulled into a gravel drive and said, “That’s a mailbox.”

  The house itself was less impressive. It looked like a giant had squatted on the roof. My father was waiting for us on the porch. I have difficulty reminding myself now that even then he was a young man. He was barely thirty. Today, when I picture my father, what comes most vividly to mind is a disregard for his appearance that I otherwise associate with the geriatric or infirm. The stains and mismatched socks, of course. But also: the crust of toothpaste on his lips, the tail of hastily tucked-in flannel poking out his open fly. Although the sun was behind him and we were parked no more than a couple feet away, my father made a visor with his hand; he ducked and squinted. It was a sort of pantomime, what he was doing—heavy, but he had a point. My mother, who made no move to exit the vehicle, might as well have been across a sea.