The Post-War Dream Read online

  Yet Hollis had no intention of discussing what was, in reality, the actual turning point—that December morning in which he stirred awake, bloodshot and hungover, and momentarily glimpsed the ghost of his own image: a duplicate Hollis standing at the end of his bed, arms hung rigidly at its sides, mirroring him in almost every way, with the same faded blue jeans, tan leisure shoes with rubber soles, bright blue Windbreaker, white T-shirt. No, he couldn't bring himself to tell Debra at last about the recurring specter now known as Max, how it frightened him away from binge drinking and continued to materialize in front of him throughout the years—at grocery stores, on city streets, among golf course greens—eventually growing older and more decrepit than its tangible counterpart, disappearing for prolonged periods only to reappear when least expected, as if to remind him who he was really meant to be: a figment cut adrift into the world without a person or a purpose to ground him.

  Nevertheless, anything seemed probable once Hollis had become accustomed to the disquieting presence of his other self, little else would strike him as too fantastic or implausible from then on. A blizzard of frogs was no more unexpected than a lightning storm. A plague of flesh-eating locusts could have swept across Critchfield, devouring the entire town in minutes, and he wouldn't have blinked an eye. The next-door neighbor's Labrador retriever could have started whispering to him with Jack Benny's voice, the lengthy branches of sinister oak trees could have snatched unsuspecting children into the air as they were walking to school, gusts of wind could have tightened around the necks of Lions Club members like invisible nooses—and none of it would have fazed or startled him all that much; the mundane and the illogical, he had decided, were composed of identical properties.

  But it wasn't important for Debra to learn that part of the story, especially now. Instead, Hollis spoke of a more relevant curiosity, mentioning another unforeseen entity which had made its way into Critchfield, seeking him out after his sobriety began: transported hundreds of miles—coming from the Panhandle of Texas to his home in Minnesota—ultimately landing inside the foyer on a snowy afternoon and staying there until, a short while later, he fetched it casually off the floor. What was lifted by his fingers instantly produced the kind of confusion and trepidation he felt when first encountering his doppelgänger. He held a brown postcard-size envelope addressed to Mr. Hollis Adams and forwarded to him from the naval hospital in Oakland, with a handwritten return address reading: Bill McCreedy, County Road 14, Claude, Texas.

  How can this be? Hollis thought, the envelope shaking in his hand. No, no, it isn't possible. Because he knew Creed was truly gone; he had witnessed those various facets of death—all possessing a distinct aura of completeness, each an unquestionable moment of terrible truth—and in less than the passing of a second, he had seen Creed eradicated with his own eyes, an image which was indelibly carved into his memory, something which couldn't be altered. Then he wondered if there might not be a second Creed revealing himself, just as there was now a second Hollis appearing before him from time to time—a creature or spook bearing similar characteristics yet seemingly inhuman. Much to his relief that didn't prove to be the case, although it was a second Bill McCreedy who had found him—or, rather, the original Bill McCreedy, as he quickly realized upon tearing open the envelope—one who had pre-dated the man he had met in the army, and, as it happened, who was also partly responsible for the creation of that Creed he had known and so disliked.

  Within the envelope was a Christmas card depicting the black silhouettes of the Three Wise Men riding camels under a starry sky; inside the card was the printed sentiment of may the lord be with you during his blessed season—along with a folded piece of yellow paper containing a dollar and a short letter:

  Dear Son,

  The McCreedy Family hopes this finds you in improved health & doing well, and that you're enjoying the holidays in the comfort of your kin.

  We apologize for not writing you any sooner, but we weren't sure how to reach you until last week. As I'm sure you can understand, things have been difficult here. The service for our beloved son & brother Bill went very nice, and our faith & community has done much to tend to our grief. We draw great strength in knowing Billy's serving with the Lord, but not a day goes by that doesn't keep him square in our thoughts & prayers. We miss him so badly. Needless to say, you're in all our thoughts & prayers, too. Billy always spoke highly of you in his letters home. The sacrifice you made in trying to protect him means more to us than you can imagine.

  Please know that should you find yourself passing our way, you're always welcome to stay a spell with us. We'd enjoy getting to meet you, so consider it an open invite. Until then, if you catch a moment drop us a line and tell us how you're holding up. We'd appreciate hearing from you.

  Yours, in the Lord,

  Bill Sr., Florence, and Edgar McCreedy

  P.S. The one buck isn't much, but we thought you might like a little walking around money for the holidays.

  For every Bill Jr.—Hollis found himself thinking after finishing the letter—there ‘s a Bill Sr. He returned the card and letter to the envelope, slipping both it and the dollar into a back pocket. Already the surprise of receiving such a letter had vanished, replaced by the appeasing notion of at last having a connection outside of Critchfield. It didn't matter if it was McCreedy's family or not, just so long as Creed wasn't involved. It didn't matter if everyone regarded his war wound as a heroic sacrifice or a badge of honor. What did matter, though, was that now he had somewhere else to go, someplace new where he'd be welcomed by strangers as a friend. Prayers don't always get answered, he realized, but occasionally they do; and if the Lord was inclined to move in mysterious ways—so, too, would he.

  17

  The turning of the year was to mark a brand-new beginning. As Hollis told Debra, 1951 was to be a time for serious change, a time for him to make a clean go of things, disregarding much of what had previously shaped his life. That fresh start began early on the morning of January 2, when he rose in bed, brushing sleep off his eyelids, having become awake to what he thought was the sound of somebody crossing by the foot of his bed, walking quickly from the room and shutting the door behind. Sitting there, he listened for movement in the hall, but instead heard only birds just beyond the bay window. After a while he climbed to his feet and navigated the semi-darkness, presently dressing himself in front of the window where the pale outside light illuminated the curtains. Prior to sleeping he had washed, slicking and patting his hair, and he had also laid out the clothing he intended to wear the following morning—clean socks and underwear, a white cotton undershirt, gabardine slacks, a lightweight lumber jacket, and a green sweater he now pulled over his head. Then it was him crossing by the foot of his bed, holding the small brown suitcase he had packed the night before, walking resolutely from the room and quietly shutting the door behind.

  Moments later, Hollis went gingerly through the almost silent downstairs, going past the doorway of his mother and stepfather's bedroom, catching their mismatched but equally voluminous snores coming from within, as the floorboards creaked beneath him despite efforts to step lightly. In the living room he noticed the Zenith radio had been left on—humming faintly with electricity, its orange light glowing—and an unfinished newspaper remained on the seat of Rich's black leather armchair (the same armchair where his stepfather would soon suffer a stroke, dying alone while listening to a broadcast of Toscanini conducting La Traviata, a newspaper across the man's lap like a blanket). When he pulled open the front door, sunlight poured into the foyer; ahead of him, in the yard, clumps of snow mingled with fallen leaves and the stems of dry grass. Whistling to himself, he bustled forward, hurrying down the porch steps, forgetting to lock the door before he went.

  The train station was six blocks away—six blocks on a freezing January morning, lugging the suitcase at his side, now ambling down residential streets that were, except for the birds above and his own tuneless whistling, as hushed and inactive as the h
ouse Hollis had just left. But he hadn't departed angrily or without an explanation about where he was headed; rather, he'd made his intentions known to his mother: he would pay his respects at Bill McCreedy's grave in Claude, Texas, visiting with his fallen comrade's family at their invitation, and, in roughly a week, he planned on returning home; this much his mother understood, this, she felt, was a good enough reason for him to leave. So he could have something to eat during the train ride, Eden filled a brown paper bag with saltine crackers, three hard-boiled eggs, three peanut butter sandwiches, and two thick slices of pound cake. In his wallet was the twenty dollars she had given him for the trip, along with the cash he had saved by doing odd jobs for the First Methodist Church (sweeping snow, clearing ice from gutters, sorting through clothing donations, organizing cardboard boxes in the cluttered basement). The money could get him there and back, providing he didn't overstay, yet already he was hoping the week in Claude might stretch into two weeks or more; for also inside his wallet was another letter sent from Texas, an answer sent by Florence McCreedy in reply to his request to pay a visit, telling him the McCreedy family would be sure to meet his train and, of course, he could stay with them for as long as he wished.

  However, Hollis didn't realize his trip would last indefinitely—a lifelong journey impelling him from Minnesota to Texas to Pennsylvania to California to the Arizona desert—nor did he foresee returning briefly to Critchfield some eight months later, summoned home again by his mother so that he could stand beside her in August and watch Rich's casket get lowered into the ground. On that morning, though, Critchfield was already well behind him—relegated to the past, each footstep he took pushing it further back in time—even before he entered the warmth of the local train station and hurried to buy a one-way ticket. While he stood at the ticket counter, a hand reaching for his wallet, his stomach fluttered with anticipation when he uttered where he was headed. The bespectacled woman manning the counter cocked a drawn-on eyebrow after he spoke, repeating the destination as if it wasn't meant to be taken seriously. “That's right,” he said. “That's the place,” and the future, it then seemed to him, bore the name of Claude.

  Inside his assigned coach, only a few of the seats were occupied, taken up by people who, like Hollis, appeared to be traveling without company—a sleeping black soldier, an elderly woman whose stunted legs didn't quite reach the floor, a fat man with a cane sandwiched between his thighs, a platinum-haired young lady resting her head against pulled window curtains. The passenger car was unusually quiet, and everyone was spread apart, keeping to themselves and contained in their own thoughts. But Hollis welcomed the lack of interaction, preferring instead to watch the scenery once it began shifting and unfolding. By his own estimation, the trip to Texas was to be a long one, almost a full two days, and he wouldn't arrive in Claude until late at night. As the train lurched from the station, he eased into the green plush seat, and then, like a coil relieved of a great weight, his body was suddenly unencumbered, making it possible for him to drift off.

  I'm a free man, Hollis thought, and closed his eyes. He had equated his leaving Critchfield as an act of self-determination, a necessary escape—yet, just then, an acute feeling of solitude rumbled about in his mind, dropping his stomach. Is this what comes with wanting freedom? Weighing the differences of being lonely and being alone, he decided the mastery of the latter could surely trump the former. For he was, indeed, alone—traveling by himself, bound for an unfamiliar destination—but now as sleep tugged at him, he refused to acknowledge the true loneliness he had always harbored; by doing so he could maybe go anywhere he pleased, whenever he pleased, and he might be less inclined to rely again on the static comfort of his hometown.

  Sometime afterward, the sound of his own slurping awakened Hollis, and pushing himself upright—hair slightly disheveled, his left cheek temporarily imprinted with the design of the plush seat—he noticed a trail of drool on his sweater. Wiping his chin with the back of a hand, he leaned to one side so that he could gaze out at the landscape racing by. The train was winding among a wooded area, rushing near pine trees which flashed sunlight—bright, hot, and blinding—in the spaces between their shaded trunks; the trees faded, giving way to a sloping meadow and the hulking shapes of grazing black cows which, from his squinting vantage point, looked like burned patches of earth scattered about the field. Throughout the trip the same moment reoccurred: he'd fall asleep for a while, waking every now and then to stare beyond the window—catching a transitory glimpse of bundled figures ice fishing on a frozen lake or, at dusk, the rugged high bluffs of what he assumed was the Mississippi River. As if the train had entered a tunnel which had no end, the night brought little more than complete darkness, although the distant glow of isolated homes and rural communities sometimes floated by like remote clusters of starlight.

  The following dawn found Hollis eating a boiled egg while studying an expanse of yellowish, grassy plains which met the horizon. Ten percent earth, he thought, and ninety percent sky. The monotonous terrain was intermittently disrupted by dirt roads and weathered farmhouses and bare pastures divided into curving, near-symmetrical crop rows of loamy soil. From dawn to dusk it was those very plains displayed outside the window, an ocean of flat earth emphasizing the sky, punctuated infrequently with the buildings and signs of junction stops. Periodically he checked his wrist-watch, wondering if the train had yet crossed the Texas border. But with nightfall he knew the city of Claude was fast approaching; and, too, he was relieved to see a change on the other side of the glass, even if what he stared at was pure darkness and his own transparent reflection returning his gaze.

  After the porter strolled through the car announcing Claude as the next stop, Hollis began putting himself in order. Using the darkened window for a mirror, he combed fingers through his unwashed hair, becoming self-conscious, then, of the thick stubble he had let grow on his face. He smoothed wrinkles from his sweater, straightened the neckline. He readied his suitcase, placing it between his feet, and pulled his lumber jacket on. Aside from having stepped off the train to breathe fresh air somewhere in the middle of Kansas, he had rarely left his seat during the entire trip, never visiting the dining car and only going to the toilet if his bladder or bowels started hurting—and now, while the train slowed down, he moved into the aisle with his suitcase, hearing the bones of his legs pop and crackle when he stood upright, discerning a short twinge of pain where he'd been shot.

  But arriving in Claude, as soon as he set foot on the empty platform, Hollis began to worry he might have come to the wrong stop. Just he and two porters departed the train while everyone else had stayed on board. There were no electric signs blinking and illuminating streets, no indication of a downtown or even a city nearby. Everything around the station was still, totally quiet save for crickets, and consumed by the night. The air was sharp and dry, not at all what he had expected the Texas weather to be like, feeling almost as chilly as Critchfield. Pivoting his head one way and then the other, he went along the length of the platform rather slowly, grasping his suitcase by the handle. He stopped at the far end of the platform, beyond which he saw nothing but could hear and feel the wind blowing. Entertaining the notion of getting back on the train, he turned around, and there ahead of him, some several feet away, three people of varying heights came filing from inside the station house: a tall middle-aged man with weathered features and hair combed straight back on his scalp, a compact middle-aged woman with a round head and black teardrop-shaped glasses with rhinestones set in the corners, a gangly teenage boy with severe acne and disproportionately long arms with large hands which hung closer to his knees than his hips—each immediately looking in his direction, all having light auburn hair and pronounced cheekbones, wearing what must have been their Sunday-morning best on a late Wednesday night, and all unmistakably related.

  “We're figurin’ you're Hollis,” the man drawled.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The threesome started toward him in tandem,
although no one smiled as they moved closer, no one appeared overjoyed at the sight of him. Already they weren't the people Hollis was expecting—for he had fostered a Texas-size illusion of a loud, gregarious family decked out in cowboy boots and Stetson hats, patting his shoulders, hugging him like a long-lost brother after greeting his train; he had, on an unconscious level, imagined kinder, more agreeable versions of Creed. But when the man firmly grasped Hollis's hand, his face was austere and determined. “I'm Bill Sr.,” he said, “or Bill,” correcting himself, “and this here is Florence, my wife.”

  “Hello,” Hollis said, nodding once at Bill Sr.; he then nodded once at Florence, whose blue eyes were busy scouring his face, as if searching for something to fix on.

  “We've heard so much about you,” said Florence, her voice restrained, whispery. She managed to stare at him without meeting his gaze, extending a small hand, her fingers becoming lax in his palm, her skin soft and cold like oilcloth. “We're so glad you came, Hollis, but you must be exhausted. That's an awful while to stay cooped up on a train.”