The Post-War Dream Read online

  The events of five months earlier seemed like they belonged to another lifetime. Still, Hollis would oblige Bill Sr.'s request because, at that moment, it felt as if he had no other choice but to do so. He leaned forward, bringing his stare to the dashboard, saying, “I don't know.” Dust coated everything—the dash, the steering wheel, the seat; unsettled motes of dust floated between and around them like minuscule constellations, as both Hollis and Bill Sr. held their respective gazes within the truck. “I don't know,” he repeated, searching for the proper starting point. “It's not anything I've talked about before.” But already a confident voice he didn't recognize was whispering inside his head, urging him on—some separate part making itself known, speaking to him with an increasing volume and, in due course, speaking from him in a straightforward, deliberate manner.

  Then Hollis would talk of that fateful morning at the Naktong; he would relate an account which wasn't entirely familiar to him yet was plausible enough, revising and editing as he went. He and Creed had had a peaceful night at the two-man listening post. Pressing their shoulders against sandbags, they had swapped cigarettes at dusk and talked in low voices about insignificant things, the way friends tend to do—people they missed back home in the States, food they looked forward to eating again, mostly small talk Hollis couldn't now begin to recall. With darkness their conversation had drifted toward silence, both holding positions on either side of the post, monitoring the night, entranced by the purring of crickets and the steady burbling of the river. A few times they had heard rustling in the nearby wild grass and reeds, but it always proved to be nothing more than the invisible hand of nature. By first light the air had become cooler and smelled sweeter than it had throughout the uneventful night. In the calm morning the crickets grew quieter, and the hillsides were turning green and golden. It was almost time for them to leave, to return to camp on a trail which ran along the edge of an apple orchard. Beside a dying pine tree at the rear of the listening post, he and Creed had stood up to urinate, putting the trunk of the tree between themselves and the river, half shielding their bodies there. But no sooner had they unfastened their pants when Creed saw something glinting beyond Hollis, several yards away in the reeds and reflected by sunlight. Perhaps, at that moment, Creed had shouted a warning, although Hollis couldn't say for certain. However, he remembered Creed pushing him violently aside at the very instant a loud crack erupted within the reeds, and he remembered looking up from the ground as Creed staggered back into the trunk, bleeding at his neck. After that, Hollis told Bill Sr., his mind was a jumble, a mess of black spaces and frozen seconds. Of course, later on, what had then transpired was pieced together and made plain: he had pursued the sniper on the banks of the river, had chased the gook bastard and killed him—but not before also getting shot, not before feeling the same burning sting which had taken Bill McCreedy Jr. from the world.

  “He saved my life,” Hollis said miserably, “and I couldn't save him. Everyone said I'd been a hero, even though it's not anything I'm proud of. The real hero was your son, sir, and I can't stand how I'm here now and he isn't, doesn't seem right some way. What keeps me going is not letting myself forget I owe the rest of my days to him. So I've got a duty to keep my head above water and let my life from here on out serve as an honor to his memory—and that's what I'm intending to do, that's pretty much all I can tell you, sir.”

  Bill Sr. raised his head. He brought his stare to the driver window, lost in thought. After a while he said, “I appreciate it, son,” sounding as if the wind had been knocked from him.

  Except what was just said might as well have fallen on deaf ears; for Hollis, too, had raised his head, glancing toward the passenger window—his attention immediately caught by two indistinct figures standing far off in a sloping back field, a pair of black shapes framed with blue, loitering where the flat horizon of the field cut a line underneath the sky. With a blink of his eyes, the taller shape standing to the right vanished from sight. But the other figure remained slumped to one side as if it were on the verge of toppling, both arms outstretched like Jesus nailed to the cross. You're only a scarecrow, Hollis told himself. Only a stupid scarecrow—that's what you really are.

  18

  On the following Sunday, Hollis and the McCreedys had a late lunch in picnic fashion among the deceased, a newly adopted weekly ritual which the family, especially Florence, felt was necessary. They ate outside during the afternoon, shortly after church, and the weather was nicer than usual, warm enough for coats to be unbuttoned once Sunday worship was behind them. Yet the Baptist church had been different than any church Hollis had previously attended; the service wasn't conducted inside a proper building but, rather, beside a dry riverbed at the bottom of the Caprock canyon, presented under a large revival tent–like structure lacking walls and covered by a corrugated-metal roof which was held up with slender wooden poles; instead of pews there were rows of long weathered benches, instead of a seasoned, soft-spoken minister there was an agitated boyish preacher with yellow bloodshot eyes—shaking his arms in front of the congregation, a Bible gripped in one hand, pacing like a caged lion and wagging his tongue, wearing a blue suit which was a size too big for him, spitting as a man possessed while he gesticulated, telling them they were no better than stray cattle! But Jesus had died a horrible death so they might be delivered from the slaughterhouse of damnation! Jesus, the preacher screamed, was greedy for their unworthy souls! The Lord couldn't care less about their spoiled flesh, but He would die again and again if only to redeem their wanton, sinful souls: “An eternity of Hell fire awaits you who are ripe with the taint of Satan's lure and choose not to heed His word lest you abandon the reckless pleasures of this here diseased world! Oh, heed His word! Redeem yourself, or perish!”

  Redeem yourself, or perish.

  Hollis's brain had begun to ache, throbbing somewhere deep within his forehead as the boy preacher shouted his wrathful message. By the time the service was finished, the pain had spread, becoming more unbearable, coursing with the pulse of his heartbeat and pounding along the cords of his sockets; it was an acute and near-blinding sensation which stayed with him while he rode in the backseat of the McCreedys’ Ford automobile, sitting beside Edgar and massaging his temples with the points of his thumbs. Florence sat up front, rigidly and silently, arms cradling a wicker picnic basket which pressed down against the folded baby-blue quilt on her lap; next to her, Bill Sr. drove northward, taking them straight through Claude without stopping. Beyond the windows was mostly a clear sky marred only by the presence of a small wayward cloud which, to Hollis, resembled a question mark. Presently a white gravel road appeared on the right side of the highway and Bill Sr. turned onto it, driving toward a fenced-in property, then he bumped the car across a cattle-guard entrance and beneath an arching iron gateway which read claude cemetery. For a while the car continued on the gravel avenue—winding amid tombstones and empty plots—traveling farther into a cemetery which was flat and barren save for patches of brittle grass. The surrounding fields were no less desolate—to the east was a wide-open pasture of nothing but dark brown soil and to the west, just past the highway, was identical terrain with the questioning cloud now floating over it.

  Soon they were walking above the dead—Bill Sr., as always, leading the way, Edgar trailing his father closely with the blue quilt sandwiched underneath an arm, Hollis following the boy and squinting from the pain inside his skull, Florence at the rear carrying the picnic basket—crossing a trodden path which cut directly between family plots where the unseen heads of the buried lined the trail on one side, the entombed feet of the deceased bordered the other. All at once Hollis felt shaky, felt his hands tremble, could feel the color draining out of his face—and the inexplicable pain was expanding, reaching into his chest, his gut. “About there,” Bill Sr. said, staring forward but, Hollis understood, addressing him. “Had us a pretty nice gravemarker done, ‘cept that fool engraver got the name spelled wrong—so we had him come and fetch it l
ast week to put it right.”

  “Oh, there he is,” Florence said in a pleased manner which sounded no different than had she greeted Creed at the train station. “There's my boy.”

  As if the path had been designed only to lead them there, they approached a mound of bulging dirt at the place where the trail ended, set apart from the rest of the graves and obviously a recent addition to the cemetery—for the dirt was not yet level with the earth, nor had any grass been planted upon it; although a few dark green weeds were sprouting on the unmarked rectangular grave, immediately getting yanked by the hands of Bill Sr. and flung aside. With the weeds discarded, all that adorned the dirt was a bouquet of fresh pink carnations, left there by someone who had dug a hole at the top of the mound so the flowers could splay upright as in a vase. Then while Edgar readied the quilt on the nearby ground, and Florence began unpacking the basket, Hollis and Bill Sr. stood at the foot of Creed's grave, looking down and, for Hollis, peering through the compressed layers of dirt to discern what lay below inside a simple black coffin—but seeing just a void of blackness instead.

  Without a tombstone, Hollis found himself thinking the grave could be anyone's grave. It could, the now paralyzing pain in his body suggested, be his own grave. With that, he suddenly doubled over, clasping his stomach. “Son?” Bill Sr. said, except Hollis's ears were deafened by a ringing sound. Hunched in front of the mound, gaze still fixed on the dirt, he opened his mouth to speak, but the pain was too great. “You all right?” Bill Sr.'s hand was at his back, patting the spine of his jacket. “Son?” An unintelligible noise spluttered past Hollis's lips, escaping like a final heaving of breath. He tried to scream; he tried to bellow for the whole of humanity. However, the pain wouldn't release his voice; it shot around within him like a pinball, silencing his cry. The chasm of blackness he had glimpsed far beneath the dirt began bubbling up and poured like water through the soles of his shoes, consuming him as he collapsed headfirst against the mound, eyes rolling back into his skull.

  When Hollis regained consciousness, he was being handled by Bill Sr. and Florence, both of whom were tugging at him from behind, their arms wrapped about his waist and chest. Dirt, mixed with spittle on his lips, had filled his gapped mouth. “Bless your soul,” Florence was telling him, whispering over his shoulder. “This is a lamentable place, it's true—a lamentable place for us all.” As Hollis was pulled to his feet, a thick clump of dirt fell out of his mouth like dung; he coughed a bit, clearing his throat, tasting grit on his tongue while catching his breath—then it felt like he had been exhumed from the grave, somehow resurrected. After Bill Sr. and Florence managed to turn him in their direction, they started brushing dirt off his face and clothing, both of them resting a hand on his right shoulder, neither looking straight at him but saying, “Let's get you something to eat, son,” and “Lordy, figured I'd lost you for good,” as if they had brought Creed back to life in time for lunch.

  “I'm sorry,” Hollis said, realizing the pain had completely vanished, leaving him weak and light-headed. “Please forgive me, don't know what got into me.” His hands weren't shaking anymore, but the blood hadn't yet returned to his face.

  “Shouldn't fret on it,” Florence said, tidying his hair with her fingertips. “These things have a way of creeping up on us.”

  “I got 'im,” Bill Sr. said, maneuvering next to Hollis; he pressed a palm across Hollis's neck and began guiding him forward, walking a short distance to the quilt—”Easy does it”—where he then helped him sit down near the bewildered stare of Edgar.

  “Hey, you okay?” the boy asked, rubbing Hollis's knee.

  “I'm okay,” Hollis mumbled, scanning the quilt, taking in an array of foil-covered plates and napkins and a clear-plastic pitcher of tea. He glanced at Edgar, who was smiling with a concerned expression, and, mussing the boy's hair, he returned the smile.

  “C'mon, let's eat,” Bill Sr. said, clapping his hands together while lowering himself on the quilt.

  But Florence loitered at the grave, stooping to touch the carnations. “Looks like that girl was here,” she said, carefully rearranging the flowers, fanning the stems farther apart.

  “Don't matter no more,” Bill Sr. said, crossing his legs, grasping the ankles of his boots.

  “No, I suppose it don't,” she said, drawing her hand from the flowers before standing upright. “Poor child, that girl's got to live with herself, there's punishment enough I imagine.”

  As Florence turned, moving toward the quilt, the pink flowers shimmered upon the earthen mound, infused with sunlight and swayed by a gentle afternoon breeze; and, for a moment, Hollis sat transfixed at the sight of the carnations fluttering there, his body feeling as weightless as the cloud which had hung alongside the highway—the cloud which now, from his vantage point, had dissipated into almost nothing, forming a faint squiggly line in the sky beyond Creed's burial plot.

  That girl.

  From then on, at the Sunday picnic and in the days to come, Hollis would ponder the girl, contemplating what she might actually look like while never settling upon anything specific; for she remained only as when he had originally glimpsed her on a slightly bent black-and-white photograph, first shown to him within the bowels of a transport ship during that turbulent crossing of the Sea of Japan: a nameless, indistinct dark-haired girl posing in the blurry foreground, arms hanging at her sides, her features difficult to perceive; by contrast, the background of the photograph—a wide-open field of tall wild grass—was plainly visible. “That's my girl,” Creed had explained, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.” Months later and thousands of miles away at the McCreedys’ farm, the photograph was studied once again by Hollis, and from time to time he paused before Creed's bedroom bureau, examining the remote image of the girl yet resisted touching the now-worn photograph with his hands. But he didn't feel comfortable asking the McCreedys about her, nor did it seem appropriate to do so, for Hollis sensed the family's disapproval; more specifically, he sensed Florence's disapproval, as she occasionally made derisive reference to that girl when talking with Bill Sr. at supper: “Passed that girl's mother in town today, carrying on like she owned the place,” or “Heard tell from Alma Branches that that girl was up at the cemetery last week, can you imagine? Too little too late, I say. Can't understand what Billy ever had for her to begin with.”

  “Don't matter no more,” was Bill Sr.'s weary stock response. “It just don't matter.”

  Then toward the latter part of his visit, with sunlight filtering through the shut drapes, Hollis dressed in front of the bureau early one morning, buttoning up his shirt while looking down at the photograph. As if from nowhere, Edgar appeared beside him, wearing pajamas and not yet fully awake, tapping a middle finger against the edge of the photograph. “Scrunchy,” the boy said, yawning afterward.

  “Scrunchy?” Hollis asked, glancing to Edgar with a somewhat amused, puzzled expression.

  “Scrunchy,” Edgar repeated while turning around. “That's what my brother called her.”

  “Why?”

  Edgar plodded back toward his bed like a sleepwalker, shrugging as he went. “Don't know,” the boy said. “Guess he liked how it sounded.”

  Hollis watched Edgar climb beneath the sheets, promptly vanishing under the pillow so a little extra rest could be had before getting ready for school. “Scrunchy,” Hollis said slowly, savoring the word, trying to comprehend its flavor; his stare moved from the boy, and at last he lifted the photograph off the bureau, bringing her image closer. “Hello, Scrunchy,” he heard himself say, peering into the indecipherable gray-and-black grain of her.

  Except, of course, her name wasn't really Scrunchy—and she wasn't just that girl. Rather, for Hollis, she was destined to become the girl. But other than his own mild curiosity about a face he couldn't quite distinguish, there was nothing in the fuzzy photograph which hinted at the role she was meant to play throughout his li
fe. Still, the curiosity was finally enough for him to probe further, to draw information from the boy he had previously been uncomfortable to seek. Subsequently, during the late afternoons, he accompanied Edgar around the farm when the boy did chores—learning how to milk cows, helping feed livestock—anticipating the right moment in which he might interject some question concerning Scrunchy.

  What Edgar would then tell him, what was imparted as the boy's hands squeezed along teats or scattered hay upon the ground, cast a small amount of light on the girl, yet, at the same time, did much to explain Florence's disapproval of her; for while she had been Creed's sweetheart, a younger high-school student he had dated and planned on marrying someday, Scrunchy hadn't attended her boyfriend's funeral service. And although the girl lived nearby, less than a mile off at her family's large ranch house, she hadn't offered a single word of condolence, nor did she even sign the sympathy card her own mother had left inside the McCreedy mailbox. In fact, the girl had kept mostly to herself since Creed died, rarely spotted anywhere other than the halls of the high school. Edgar had caught sight of her every so often, usually at dusk while he was roaming the farm property or the adjacent fields. He once spotted her riding a Tennessee walking horse along the fringe of the canyon, and twice he spied on her from afar, tracking her like an Indian scout when she strolled alone within an isolated grove of mesquite trees—her body moving slowly among those gray arthritic branches, arms folded across her chest as if to embrace herself.

  Nevertheless, the girl hadn't totally avoided contacting the McCreedys. Several weeks following the funeral, she came by the house on a Saturday, showing up when Florence and Bill Sr. happened to be in town. It was Edgar who opened the front door, taken aback to find her standing there, her lips tightening as she blinked nervously. “This is for your mom and dad, and you, too,” was what she said with a sort of wince in her eyes, handing him a freshly baked peach cobbler, and she didn't say much else except goodbye. However, the cobbler was an empty gesture where Florence was concerned; she wouldn't touch it, didn't want it in her kitchen—even after Edgar and Bill Sr. both sampled a piece, each agreeing it was pretty darn good. But Florence didn't care how delicious the cobbler tasted: that girl wasn't worth the effort it'd take to chew a bite of the stupid thing—and she had never been worthy of Creed; she hadn't truly felt for him as he, apparently, had felt for her. No, she wasn't really her deceased son's special Scrunchy, not by a long shot. She was, instead, a selfish, thoughtless Debra, that's all.