But there was no mistaking the apprehension in her eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
I DID NOT STAY over with Jo Anne. I not only felt embarrassed about chasing the man in the parking lot, I felt dishonest, even cowardly, about my encounter with the man named Jimmy Doyle. I was much like my father regarding those who seemed insatiable when it came to yesterday’s box score. I never knew anyone who despised war more than he. His best friend, a boy with whom he grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, was killed at my father’s side in a trench on the morning of November 11, 1918, the day the doughboys thought the war was over. My father would leave the room, even a bar, the center of his addiction and the love and ruination of his life, when his friends’ conversation turned to wars, past and present. He bore his friends no animus for their innocence, but he hated the Krupps and DuPonts of the world and the politicians who became teary-eyed and saccharine as they waved the flag and sent others to die in the wars they caused.
I despised the memories that lived inside me. I learned early in life that human beings are capable of inflicting pain on one another in ways that are unthinkable. I’m talking about a level of cruelty that has no peer among animals or the creatures of the sea. Once you witness it or, worse, participate in it, it takes on a life of its own, much like a virus finding a host. It burrows into your soul; it robs you of your sleep and clouds your days. Weevils feed at your heart, and innocence and joy become the province of others. You live in quiet desperation and wake each morning with an anvil upon your chest.
If there are those who would argue with this depiction, I suggest they ask a man with the thousand-yard stare what kind of images he is viewing on the other side of his eyes.
I thought about all these things when I went to bed that night, as though picking reptiles one by one out of a basket and letting them strike my face before replacing them in the basket. I woke at four a.m. and saw Cotton smoking on his bunk in the dark, and wondered if he was chasing Waffen-SS through the catacombs, stenciling their blood with his grease gun above the tombs of Paul and Peter. I saw Spud walk to the latrine in his skivvies, his flip-flops slapping. I heard the snoring of America’s undesirables up and down the row of bunks, then Spud’s flip-flops as he headed back to his bunk and possibly his dreams about the prostitutes he had to pay to sing in his ear.
I slept for another two hours, then sat on the edge of my bunk, shivering in the coldness of the dawn, aching for Jo Anne’s touch, wanting to smell her hair and kiss her hand and look into her eyes. I shaved and brushed my teeth and put on my clothes and went out the front door into the fog and the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves and the coffee Chen Jen was boiling down at the dining hall.
Then I saw Jo Anne walking toward me in the fog. I was sure I was losing my mind.
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SHE WAS WEARING a cute cap and a pink gingham dress and a charcoal-gray suede jacket and robin’s-egg-blue tennis shoes without socks, as though she had pulled her clothes at random from a series of driers in a washateria. A thermos hung from one hand and a metal lunch box painted with the faces of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans hung from the other. “What’s going on, big boy?”
“What are you doing here?” I answered.
“Thought you’d like to take a ride.”
“Where?”
“My house. I have a present for you.”
“What’s going on, Jo Anne?”
She tossed me the thermos. It was heavy, and I barely caught it. “I’m going to straighten you out,” she said. “What do you think about that, Buster Brown?”
A dense white fog was rolling on the stream that ran through the center of Mr. Lowry’s property. I could smell the German browns and brook trout spawning inside the fog. They were the only trout that spawned in the fall, and the cold, fecund odor was of a singular kind, like a conduit into creation, the iridescent spray off the boulders so mysterious and lovely and improbable that I wondered if it was borrowed from a rainbow. Or maybe that was just the way I thought about things when I was with Jo Anne.
She opened the driver’s door of her car and threw the lunch box on the seat. “Daydreaming?” she said.
“What’s in the lunch box?”
“A scrambled-egg sandwich.”
She started the engine but didn’t put the transmission into gear. She ran her nails through the back of my hair. “You trust my driving?”
“Sure.”
“How about in other things?”
“Yes, I trust you in all things.”
“We’ll see about that.”
I had no idea what Jo Anne was up to. We drove down the dirt road through the fog and rumbled across the cattle guard. In a half hour we were at her house. The sun was orange, the wind cold, the sky blue. I had already eaten the sandwich and drunk half the coffee in the thermos. “Thanks for the breakfast,” I said.
“De nada,” she said, cutting the engine.
We went inside. Plyboard was still nailed across the back windows that were probably broken by Darrel. “What happened to the glazier?” I asked.
“He said he’ll get here when he gets here.”