It was a three–hour drive between the VA hospital in Morrisburg and the small town Jimmy had grown up in. It had been a much longer drive for earlier generations of vets, before the Interstate highway had been built. Jimmy had made that three–hour drive regularly since the Army had brought him back to the States. He’d make that drive again in a month for his follow–up appointment, and then he assumed he’d never have to go there again. He liked that thought.
When Jimmy parked in front of his parents’ house, he saw the curtains of the living–room window fall back into place. He knew it was his mother, watching for him. He braced himself for more hovering from her and more pretense from his father that Jimmy was the same as the boy who had left that house for the Army four years earlier.
His mother was waiting just inside the front door. When she saw her two–armed boy, her face lit up.
“Jimmy!” she said. “Darling!” She hugged him.
He put his right arm around her and then, awkwardly, carefully, the other arm, the fake one.
His mother laughed. “Now you can hug me with both arms again. Isn’t it wonderful?”
She stepped away, and Jimmy’s father came forward. He was a tall man, and he reached down to grab Jimmy’s hand, which he squeezed hard and shook vigorously. “Son!” he said too loudly.
He dropped Jimmy’s hand and reached out with his left. “Come on, son, let’s give that new hand a tryout.”
Reluctantly, Jimmy responded. He took his father’s left hand with the new left hand. Without conscious thought, he responded to the firm squeeze and the vigorous shake.
His father’s eyes widened in surprise at the strength of the arm and the hand. He let go quickly and stepped backward. “That’s a strong hand you’ve got there! Hell, it’s better than your old one.” He laughed loudly. “Maybe you should always shake hands with your left from now one.”
Better than my real hand? Jimmy thought. Fuck that.
His parents led the way to the kitchen. His father said over his shoulder, “Would you like a beer, son? I bet you could twist the cap off a regular beer bottle with that new hand of yours.”
“Yeah, I’d like a beer,” Jimmy said. “I know where the opener is.”
In the kitchen, he took the cold bottle his father handed him and set it down on the counter. Using only his right hand, while the left arm hung straight down by his side, he opened a drawer and took out a bottle opener. He crouched and held the bottle tightly between his thighs and then used the bottle opener and his right hand to pop the cap off. He straightened, put the open bottle on the counter, put the cap down on the counter, put the opener back in the drawer, and then picked up the bottle and raised it to his mouth. It was the way he had been opening beer bottles since he’d returned from the war with one arm missing.
His father had watched the procedure silently. He seemed about to say something but caught himself. Then he said, “Let’s go into the living room.” For a change, his voice was not loud.
Jimmy settled himself at the far right end of the couch. It had been his favorite place to sit for as long as he could remember.
His father dropped heavily into the armchair facing Jimmy.
Jimmy sipped his beer. His father didn’t have a drink of any kind, which was unfortunate, because Jimmy knew that meant there was to be a conversation. Jimmy had hoped to escape to his bedroom upstairs and close the door, but he could see that wasn’t going to happen. He wondered what this conversation would be about.
Jimmy’s father said, “Your Uncle Carl is coming over. He should be here in a few minutes.”
Jimmy groaned audibly. Carl was his father’s older brother. He was taller and louder than Jimmy’s father, and he was almost always put in charge of the most unpleasant lectures about what Jimmy should do with his life. He lived a mile away — too close, in Jimmy’s opinion, by about a thousand miles.
He heard the front door open, and then he heard Carl’s booming voice and heavy tread. A moment later, Carl was in the living room, filling the place with his physical presence and his loudness.
“Stan!” Carl shouted at his younger brother, who shrank in the armchair.
Satisfied, Carl turned to his nephew. “Jimmy!”
Remembering combat, Jimmy thought, I’ve killed louder men than you. They were louder while they were dying, anyway. He raised his beer bottle in his uncle’s direction and grunted.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Carl said. “About the future.”
Jimmy grunted again and drank some beer. This was going to be a two–beer conversation. Maybe three.
Carl sat down at the opposite end of the couch and half turned to his right so that he faced Jimmy. “Get me a beer,” he said. He was facing Jimmy, but he was talking to Jimmy’s father, who jumped to his feet immediately and hurried off to the kitchen.
Jesus, Dad, Jimmy thought. But he had his own battles to fight.
Carl continued to look at Jimmy.
Not wanting to be polite, but not wanting to be deliberately rude, either, Jimmy turned partway to his left, toward his uncle. For the first time, he realized that the new arm was resting on the back of the couch. He hadn’t been conscious of putting it there.
That was the way he had often sat on the couch before his loss — pressed against the couch’s right arm, a beer in his right hand, his left arm lying on the back of the couch. But that had been his real arm, not this artificial thing that was now attached to him. He had put it there out of old, unconscious habit. Old habits die hard, he thought. Unlike old arms.
His uncle waited until his subservient younger brother had brought him his beer — poured into a frosted mug that was kept in the freezer — before he began.
Carl took the mug, nodded a curt acknowledgement to his brother, and returned his attention to his nephew. He sipped from the frosted mug and made a face, indicating that the beer wasn’t to his liking. With that ritual over, he spoke.
“So, Jimmy, now that you’re all fixed up, what’s the plan?”
“I plan to get another beer as soon as I finish this one.”
“Don’t be a smartass. What’s your plan for life? You’ve been sitting around your parents’ house ever since you came back from overseas — ”
“From the war, you mean.”
“From overseas. You’ve been sitting around doing nothing. We understood that. You were hurt, and you needed time to heal. But now, just look at you.” Carl patted the hand that lay on the couch’s back.
Jimmy hated the fact that he could feel the pat.
“Now you’re as good as new,” Carl said. “This new arm — it looks like it’s really part of you.”
“No,” Jimmy said. “The arm I had for 23 years, that was part of me. My real arm.”
“It is a real arm,” his uncle said condescendingly. “Don’t be silly. Anyway, you’re all done with the Army now, right? I mean, you’re invalided out, or whatever they call it, right? That happened to a guy I served with.”
“What war was that?” Jimmy asked, knowing that there had been no war 25 years before, and his uncle had spent his time in uniform drinking heavily.
“It happened Stateside. There was some kind of problem with some ammunition, and he got his hand blown off. Man, he was screaming.”
Jimmy remembered screaming. “Yeah.” He remembered not feeling any pain and seeing his arm ending six inches below his shoulder and screaming because of that.
“Anyway, they let him go. He got some kind of disability from them. I had to stay in, so in the end he was the lucky one. So you’re safe now, right? Just like him?”
Jimmy pointed at his left arm. “Because of that thing, my injury is considered minor, and I’m considered healed. I’d be back at the front if I hadn’t just hit four years. I guess I’m the lucky guy, this time around.”
“How much disability do you get?”
“Nothing. In the Army’s eyes, I’m completely healthy.”
“That means you could reenlist. They’d be glad to have y
ou. The Army’s a decent career for a young man like you.”
Someone with no options, you mean, Jimmy thought. “Sure. Maybe I could get my other arm blown off.”
“Okay, so you don’t want to do that. The point is, you’re healthy, and you need to earn a living. You need to get on with life. Hell, you can go back to the plans you had before you enlisted. You were going to go to college and become some kind of engineer, right?”
Jimmy smiled. He had been planning a career in physical education, and he had told his uncle that more than once. “Close enough,” he said.
“Great! There’s always a demand for engineers. And now you can get money for that from the Army, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there you are. You should be applying to a good school right now.”
Jimmy laughed. “Oh, sure, I can just imagine that.” He could imagine himself trying to get around with one arm. He could imagine all the girls who would be freaked out by the one–armed man. “It’s too late for that.”
“So you’re just going to sit around and feel sorry for yourself?”
“For now, yeah.”
“I don’t know, Jimmy. When I was your age, a healthy young man would’ve been ashamed to be a parasite on his parents.”
“Jimmy’s not a parasite,” his father said in a low voice. “He just needs to readjust.”
“You should have hit him more when he was a kid,” Carl said. “Like I told you to.”
Jimmy rose to his feet and put his half–empty beer bottle on the coffee table. “Thanks for all the free advice, Uncle Carl. Say hi to everyone for me.”
“Jimmy, where are you going?” his mother asked.
“It’s not like you’ve got anything to do,” his uncle said.
“Me and my fake arm, we’re gonna find something.”
* * * * *