“Whadaya say?” asked Ethan. “I could talk to Grant about it—he’s got a soft spot for me. He says I remind him of his brother.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I told Ethan. If anything, hearing him suggest it made my decision easier to make.
“Then you’ve gotta dump her,” said Ethan, which was easy for him to say—he’d dumped Roxanne like she was a piece of junk mail on his doorstep, and it didn’t disturb his microseconds of sleep in the least.
But Paula wasn’t Roxanne. Roxanne had been fake even before she found out she really was fake. Paula, however, was brutally, painfully real. Saying good-bye to her, and all that went with her, was too difficult to manage.
“Could you teach me how?” I asked Ethan.
He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “What’s to teach? You look into her eyes, tell her you like her as a friend, and it’s Sayonara, señorita.”
I heaved a heavy sigh. This was perhaps the easiest of all the things that lay ahead of me. If I couldn’t handle this, how could I handle anything? How could I lead Grant’s brigade? Did they know what a sniveling weakling I was?
“Don’t worry about it,” offered Ethan. “In two more months, you’re going to look at her and find her totally repulsive. Believe me, I know.”
I left to do the deed the next day.
It was late afternoon when I approached the compound gate. The gate was never locked, but there was always someone on guard to keep track of all comings and goings. It was a job assigned to an adult, just in case some quick talking and diplomacy was needed to turn away an unwanted visitor.
Today’s guard was Pastor Bob, who used to preach long-winded sermons on love, peace, and everlasting flames. I wondered what he did these days.
The week before, as we’d been setting fence posts in concrete together, I had asked him, “Do they have preachers where we come from?”
He had frowned in thought and answered, “Of a sort.”
Then I had asked him if he still believed the things he’d spent the last twenty years preaching. I don’t think he liked the question.
“We make adjustments,” he had said, which would have been fine if he were a tailor, hemming my pants. I wondered how much of those beliefs had to be adjusted to make room for our new world order. I wondered if mine ever could—because in spite of my years dozing through sermons and Sunday school, I had developed some rudimentary moral compass, demagnetized though it might have been.
Now, as I approached Pastor Bob at the gate, he looked worried, as though I might once again step on his spiritual hemline. When I showed him my training glove and told him that I was just going out for some target practice, his shoulders dropped in relief, and he was more than happy to pass me through.
As soon as the compound was out of view, I hid my glove beneath some bushes, slipped on Paula’s cap, and headed toward her house to fulfill my mission of pain.
“You’re back!” said Paula, greeting me at the door. I could tell how glad she was to see me, but there was a touch of discomfort in her voice. A hurt that she was trying to hide. “How’s your aunt?” she asked.
“Oh, better,” I said, almost forgetting the lie I had told her. “I’m sorry I didn’t call—I forgot my phone charger.”
“It’s okay,” she said, though it really wasn’t. “We said we wouldn’t cling, right? You don’t have to call me every five minutes.”
Her dog, Mookie, was growling and snarling like a hell-hound as I stepped into the house.
Mr. and Mrs. Quinn peered out of the living room. “Hello, Jason,” said Mrs. Quinn over the snarls. “You should have called—we would have had you over for dinner.”
“Next time,” I said, knowing full well there would be no next time.
The dog began to howl between snarls, and it finally occurred to me that it no longer understood my scent.
“Stop that, Mookie!” said Mrs. Quinn.
Mr. Quinn came over and shook my hand in that father-of-the-girlfriend sort of way. “Jason, I’ve been meaning to ask you—is your family involved with that retreat they’re building in the woods?”
I should have been ready for the question, because Paula had warned me about her father. He was an optometrist who dreamed of being a private eye. I realized I was about to be scrutinized beneath one of his finely ground lenses. “We’ve been away,” I said, dodging the question.
“Dad, I told you, it’s just a summer camp, okay?” I saw it myself.” Paula grabbed her backpack and tried to shepherd me out of the door.
“I’m just curious,” said Mr. Quinn. He might have pushed harder, but Mookie let loose a barking conniption that distracted him long enough for Paula to drag me out.
“Wait a minute—where are we going?”
“It’s bingo night,” she informed me as we headed toward the street.
“You play bingo?”
“No, but I babysit for people who do. I figured you’d rather walk with me than be interrogated by my dad.” And then she grinned. “Although the thought of leaving you there had crossed my mind.”
I grinned as well, but the smile fell away as I remember what I had come here to do. As we walked in the deepening twilight, I kept playing over and over in my head what I was going to say, how I was going to say it, and how I could keep from hating myself. All the while, she kept stealing glances at me, considering my face.
“What is it?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m crazy, but you look . . . different, somehow.”
It was now or never. I took her cap off my head, clutched it in my hands, and prepared to hand it back to her, with my sincerest apologies for being an asshole.
“It’s your hair,” she said. “That’s what’s different. It looks sort of brighter . . . thicker. What did you do to it?”
“Not much . . . ,” I said.
She reached out and touched it. “It feels so soft. New shampoo?”
“Uh . . . special treatment.”
“I like it.”
This was unbearable. Without another thought, I launched into my planned speech. “Paula . . . y’see . . . while I was gone I—”
“While you were gone, something really weird happened,” she announced. “I’ve been dying to tell you about it.”
I stuttered for a moment in the wake of my false start. “Wh-what happened?” I asked.
“I was in the mall,” she began, “looking for clothes, when who do I see across the aisle but Ethan’s parents. Turns out they’re buying clothes too.”
“Yeah, so?”
“They’re buying them in the Young Men’s department.”
I swallowed hard and played dumb. “Yeah, so?”
“So,” said Paula, “I hear them talking. He wants to buy one pair of jeans, but she shakes her head and says, ‘They’re too tight for Ethan.’” Paula looked at me with raised eyebrows. “So what do you think of that?”
I slipped my hands into my pockets and picked up the pace. I felt myself beginning to drop into a deep, dark pit. “I think they must have gone nuts,” I told her. “I mean if your kid died like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t go shopping for summer fashions.” She stopped and grabbed me by the arm. “Brace yourself, Jason—I think Ethan might be alive!”
“Don’t be dumb,” I said. “I was at the funeral.”
“Did you check in the coffin?”
“Don’t be sick!”
“All I’m saying is that if you didn’t see him, then you can’t be sure.”
She stopped at a picket fence and opened the gate. “I’m gonna find out what’s going on if it takes all summer.”
I followed her to the front door. “Maybe you don’t want to.”
She looked at me and shook her head. “What are you afraid of?”
We stepped into a house that smelled of potpourri and Lemon Pledge. The living room was filled with antique furniture, and knickknacks arranged so perfectly they could have been glued i
n place. There was a foldout fence that blocked off the immaculate living room from the lethal hands of the toddler who had full run of the rest of the house.
“It’s so nice of you to watch him for me, Priscilla,” said the old woman who answered the door. “He’s with me for a week, don’cha know. Still, I need my bingo to keep me sane.” When she saw me come in behind Paula, she squinted at me dubiously and said, “Is this your brother?”
“A friend,” she responded, “and it’s Paula.”
The woman nodded me a quick and scattered hello, then hurried off, muttering about her misplaced glasses.
The toddler looked up at me, said, “Ga-ga,” then threw a truck at my feet.
“You don’t have to stay,” Paula said.
Still holding her cap in my hands, I said, “I won’t stay for long, but there’s something we need to talk about—I mean really need to talk about.”
I guess my tone of voice finally got through to her. She shooed away the toddler, who continued to drop toys on me. “Something serious?”
I shrugged sadly. “Kind of.”
From the next room came the sound of a drawer slamming. “Priscilla, dear, could you help me find my glasses?”
Paula turned and shouted, “Just a minute, Mrs. Pohl.”
My brain did a violent and unexpected double take.
“Did you say . . . Mrs. Pohl?”
Paula steered herself for whatever blow I was about to deliver. “So what do you have to tell me?”
But breaking up with Paula had suddenly slipped far from my mind as I realized who this old woman must be.
There are some moments in your life when all the forces that shape and define your being come into perfect focus and suddenly everything about your life just falls into place.
This was not one of those moments.
“Excuse me,” I said, and made a beeline for the kitchen.
–14–
REMEMBERING ME
In the brightly lit kitchen, the elderly woman rummaged through cabinets and drawers, searching for glasses that she probably needed glasses to find. I had to ask her the question. Even though I knew it was like poking myself in the eye, just to see if it would hurt, I had to ask.
“Are you related to J.J. Pohl?”
She stopped in mid-rummage and turned her farsighted eyes to me. “J.J. was my son,” she said. “How do you know of him?”
The toddler wandered into the room, and I glanced over to see Paula entering behind him. She seemed more vulnerable and more uncertain than I had ever seen her. By now she must have known that I meant to break up with her. I turned back to the old woman.
“I—uh—heard he was a town hero.”
“Oh, yes, J.J. sure is something—everybody loves J.J.” said Mrs. Pohl, beaming at the thought of him. “He’s in Vietnam, don’cha know, fighting the war.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“Mrs. Pohl,” Paula said gently, “the war’s been over for a long, long time.”
Mrs. Pohl took in the information, reprocessed it, and corrected herself: “Yes . . . yes it has. And they gave J.J. a Medal of Honor when it was over, for what he did!”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“Well,” she began, “a helicopter went down in the jungle. All that fire, and napalm everywhere. He went in, pulled a man out before it blew up, and carried him miles to safety.” Then her face sobered a bit. “Terrible thing to go through all that, just to get sick and die at home a few years later.”
She reached over and tickled the toddler under the chin. “This is my great-grandson—J.J.’s grandson. He’s named after him—aren’t you, Jason?” The toddler cooed, and I shifted uncomfortably.
“He’s a Jason, too,” Paula had to point out.
“Yeah, me and half the country,” I grumbled.
She scowled at me, clueless as to why I had brushed that off.
The old woman smiled. “Would you like to see his medal?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I would.”
“What about bingo,” Paula asked Mrs. Pohl.
“Oh, it’ll still be there.”
As she led us into the spotless living room, Paula turned to me and whispered, “What is it with you?”
Then, the second Paula turned her back, I reached over and grabbed the old woman’s glasses, which were sitting on top of the microwave, and hid them deep in my pocket.
They say when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. And now, as I felt the human part of me dying, it was J.J.’s life that was flashing before me.
Above the mantel was a wide wall covered with framed photos of him. J.J. and his family, J.J. with his bride, J.J. with his daughter, who must have been little Jason’s mother. I had thought I would just see a medal—I hadn’t expected to see a shrine.
“He kind of looks like you,” Paula said to me—and then her face paled. There was a picture of J.J., black and white—must have been early sixties. He had a flat-top butch and a broad smile. He must have been around fourteen, and there was no denying that it was me, right down to his smiling teeth. It ripped the wind right out of me—and must have hit Paula even harder. She just stared at the picture. Then she reached over and pushed my hair back off my forehead, to see how I might look with hair that short. She studied my face, then drew her hand back, unable to say a thing. I had always assumed that Paula had backup speech centers in her brain that kicked out clever lines in the thickest of situations. I never thought I’d see her speechless.
There was a lump in my throat as I took in the images before me. It was both horrible and wonderful. There were older pictures of his daughter on the wall, too. Even she looked like me.
Still, Mrs. Pohl had no idea. She reached up and pulled down a small wooden box from the mantel. Inside, on a velvet background, the Medal of Honor was pinned, still shining like new.
“President Nixon himself gave this to J.J.,” she said, then pointed to a picture of Nixon shaking my hand. Paula was still looking back and forth at me and at the pictures, but her investigative instinct finally wrestled back her bewilderment.
“Exactly when did your son die?”
“Over twenty years ago.” She shook her head sadly. “It was that awful, awful flu. It took some good people, it did. I can only thank the Almighty that J.J.’s wife and daughter were halfway across the country, visiting her family. Otherwise they all might be gone.”
“But . . . you mean it wasn’t spiders?”
“Spiders? Well, maybe in the sense that people were dropping like flies, I suppose.”
I felt that pit beneath me grow deeper.
“Most people didn’t know about the epidemic until it was all over,” said Mrs. Pohl. “They kept it awful quiet. Still, I would have liked to have seen him one last time.”
I offered her a smile. “Maybe you will someday.”
She peered at me through her teary, unfocused eyes, unable to make out the details of my features. Then she turned away, put back the medal, and took down a photo album. She sat on the couch, and little Jason, who had torn down the foldout fence to get in the room, climbed up next to her as she opened the album. The kid pointed at a picture. “Ga-ga!” he said.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pohl. “You’re right, that’s Grandpa!”
He looked at me and laughed.
Mrs. Pohl turned the next page, as if she momentarily forgotten we were there.
Paula cleared her throat. “Uh . . . Mrs. Pohl?”
She looked up at us, momentarily startled, and sighed. “You know, I don’t feel much like bingo tonight,” she said. Then she dug into her sweater pocket and held out a roll of dollars bills to Paula.
“Here,” she said, “it’s only right—you came all this way.”
“No, you don’t have to.”
“Please,” said Mrs. Pohl. “I want you to have it.” When Paula didn’t take it, she put it in my hands, and smiled, much happier now than when we had arrived. “Take her to Braum’s, an
d get yourselves a couple of those giant banana splits,” she said. “J.J. just loves banana splits.”
As she turned, I stopped her and said, “Oh, look—here are your glasses! They were on the mantel all along!” I handed them to her. “Here. You’ll be able to see the pictures now.”
“The mantel! Well, doesn’t that just figure.” She turned and headed for the couch. I was gone before she slipped the glasses on.
Paula didn’t say a word to me as I walked her home. But then I didn’t say a word to her, either. It was as if the sudden reality of J.J. Pohl came down between us like a soundproof wall. I wouldn’t break up with her tonight. Even if tonight was the last night we ever saw each other, I refused to say those words.
Something was brewing inside of me now—something about Paula, and J.J. and Grant and my parents—and I knew if I wasn’t careful, I’d have one of those moments where everything comes together. I wasn’t ready for that.
As we neared her house, she stopped me by the curb. “Wait here,” she said.
She went into her garage and came out a minute later, carrying a pick and a shovel. Somehow I didn’t think we were going to use them for banana splits. She handed me the shovel and strode off down the street. I followed.
“What’s this for?”
“First you tell me how a man who died seven years before you were born has your face.”
“He doesn’t have my face—I have his.”
“And maybe you can tell me how you could look me in the eye when Grant was feeding me that garbage about the spiders. I’ll bet you all had a good laugh, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t laugh.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then maybe now you can tell me whether or not Ethan’s alive.”
This pit had no bottom; I knew that now. “I have no idea,” I told her. What did it matter what I said now?
“Well, it’s time we found out,” she announced. “So we’re going to the cemetery and dig up his grave.”
In the cold moonlight, the graveyard was all blue monoliths and long black shadows. You’d think a graveyard would be a terrifying place at night—and it is when you’re standing on the outside. But once you hop over that fence, you realized it’s not much different from the land around it. Except of course for the dead people.