Brief Encounters with the Enemy (2 page)

There were no basketball games on television, so Frankie and I sat around eating orange chicken while he regaled me with
stories about an old girlfriend that he had been madly in love with but had failed to marry because he couldn’t stop drinking.

“Black,” he said. “She was … black.” Then he paused. “I like brown skin.” He shrugged. The matter was out of his control.

We channel-surfed for a while. I kept hoping he’d stop on the spring break swimsuit movie, but all he did when we came around to it was say, “Bullshit.” We watched a bit of the local news coverage of the strike, in which the same three video clips were aired repeatedly: the transit chairman in a suit and tie, calmly laying out his side of the story, which seemed fair enough; a group of picketers dressed in hats and scarves and gloves, standing in an empty parking lot, chanting wildly as they waved their signs; and finally, a man-on-the-street interview with a soldier who’d just been called up and who said, looking directly into the camera, “I understand you want more money, but now isn’t the time.” The anchorman, who’d been delivering the news in the city for fifty years and looked near death, said that the day’s negotiations had ended “acrimoniously.”

“What’s that mean?” I asked Frankie.

“What?”

“ ‘Acrimonious,’ what’s it mean?”

But he had landed on an old black-and-white foreign movie. “I know this!” he shouted. “I know this!”

I had never seen the film, and since it was half over and since it was foreign, I had no idea what was going on and didn’t care enough to try to figure it out. I kept waiting for Frankie to switch over to something else, but he never did, so
I just sat there quietly while it played. When we got to the end, with the main character sobbing and crawling around drunkenly on his hands and knees, I snorted derisively and turned to Frankie, who was staring at the screen with tears in his eyes.

“He … he did it … to himself. To himself!”

Then, with all the energy he had, Frankie pushed himself to a standing position, unzipped his pants, and grabbed ahold of his pot. “Pardon me,” he said.

On the twenty-eighth day of the strike, I decided I couldn’t stand my confinement any longer. Early that morning I set off with a small bag of food to walk as far as I could. I crossed through the underpass quickly, without incident, and out of the neighborhood. The city, unfortunately, had not been designed for walking, and there would come times when I’d find myself trying to circumvent a freeway, or circling back from a dead-end street, or going for long stretches without a sidewalk. The air was chilly, but the sky was bright, and I could feel that spring was nearing. I kept the pace brisk and lively. But after about an hour, my energy began to wane. I pressed on, trying to ignore the nagging awareness that I would have to retrace every one of the steps I was now taking. I walked through parks and neighborhoods and shopping centers, many of which I had never seen or known existed. There were people out, but the city felt more vacant than usual. After the factories had closed, anybody who had the means picked up and moved away, leaving the city with empty smokestacks and the second oldest population in the country. What was I still doing here? I was too young to inhabit the ends of the earth.
Several cars passed me going the other way, and I considered sticking my thumb out and hitching a ride back home, but I wasn’t sure if people did that anymore.

I walked along the boulevard that divided the east side of the city from the west side, and I passed the restaurant I had worked in as a short-order cook. It wasn’t open yet for business, but the windows were already fogged with steam from the kitchen. An American flag hung in the front window next to a sign advertising half-price brick-oven pizza on Thursday nights. I remembered vividly the grueling twelve-hour shifts, the beer reward at the end of the night, the pretty waitresses, the black cooks who had gotten addicted to crack. If we wanted a meal, we had to pay for it, so I would surreptitiously cook myself food and then eat it while hiding in the bathroom stall, sitting on the toilet. At the time I thought that I had managed to even the playing field.

Two hours after I had begun my journey, I realized I was lost. I turned back the way I came, but the way I came could no longer be discerned. There were four streets curving and winding their way toward me. I chose one and followed it for ten minutes until I was certain it was the wrong one, and then I turned back around. But now I was faced with four more streets, each one looking identical and vaguely familiar. I passed through a wealthy, tree-lined neighborhood with curb-side mailboxes into a neighborhood that was not so wealthy but still had trees. I walked along railroad tracks for a while. The sun was starting to drop and it was getting colder. My feet and legs ached and I wanted to sit, but to sit at a time like this felt irresponsible. Beside me were woods, and beyond them I could make out the river. This was the true boulevard
of the city that for decades had brought coal in and taken goods out. The glory years. If I waited long enough, I’d probably see a gunship float past.

I came into a neighborhood that looked like it had been abandoned. The whole place was gray and rotting and lacking any trace of life. I sat down on the steps of a two-story brick house with an addition covered in aluminum siding, and the moment I did, a wiry woman appeared on the porch across the way and looked at me. She was wearing a nightgown that she clutched around her. An old man in pajamas came and stood at her side. I took out my lunch and ate it while I watched them confer.

“There ain’t no one living in there now,” the woman said.

“That’s okay,” I said.

They conferred again.

“Hey, mister.”

“What?”

“There ain’t no one in there now.”

“I heard you the first time,” I said.

They looked startled. The man took a step forward like he wouldn’t stand for that kind of talk. I got up and stretched my legs. My feet felt swollen. I moved on.

“Hey, mister,” the woman said as I passed. “Is the strike still on?”

“No,” I said, “it’s over.”

“What’d he say?”

“Hey, mister,” the man called, “when’s the strike going to be over?”

It was dusk, and I didn’t know what to do. I turned left and then left again. Was I going in a circle? I thought about how the cooks would be starting their shift at the restaurant. A car pulled up beside me. “Would you like a ride?” a friendly voice asked. I looked in the window and saw Ned Frost’s bearded face smiling up at me. “Were you going to walk the whole way?” he asked. Then incredulously: “You weren’t going to
walk the whole way
!”

There was a young man about my age sitting in the passenger seat.

“I was,” I said.

Ned guffawed. “Young legs.” Was there subtext in that? “We’re heading your way,” he said, “and we’ve got two empty seats.”

The young man got out to let me in the back. He glanced at me with a mixture of shell shock and glumness. He was tall and thin with a tie that he’d tied too short. He had razor nicks on his neck. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled.

Ned sped off. I marveled at the amount of distance a car could cover in such a short time. In two minutes I was back in familiar territory. I listened to the conversation going on in the front seat, but whatever was being discussed was sparse and hushed. I thought about telling Ned that he could let me out, that I could make it the rest of the way, but my legs hung from my torso like concrete poles. Soon we arrived at the young man’s home. They exchanged some words about the next day’s work, and then the young man got out and I took the front seat. We watched him walk to his building and waited until he let himself in. I wondered if Ned Frost was looking at his ass. “He’s not going to work out,” he said with genuine
disappointment, driving off. “It’s too bad, but he just doesn’t have the patience for it. Cartography is a job of patience, really.”

“That’s true,” I said.

At this, Ned laughed heartily, taking his hands off the steering wheel and rubbing his palms together. Then he was silent, brooding. He drove slowly. Finally, he said, “I was actually thinking about calling to see whether you’d be interested in working in the office again.” He stopped at the light and said deliberately, “There is work. You know how to do the work. The work is what speaks.”

I wondered, if I accepted his offer, whether he would still give me letters; I wondered if the letters were worth it for the job; I wondered if he expected me to sleep with him. He spoke with great enthusiasm about all the upcoming projects, and by the time we had arrived at my apartment building, I had agreed to take the job. I would start the following week, and Ned Frost would drive me to and from work as long as the strike lasted. He even offered to pay me more money. “There is money. The money is what speaks.”

We got out of the car in front of my stoop, and Ned opened the trunk. He took out a few brochures. “Your maps,” he said.

I peered at them under the feeble streetlight. They were for various things like an art fair and a business district. I ran my hand over the glossy covers and then flipped through until I found colorful images of my work.

“Nice, huh?” he said.

“Nice,” I said. I handed them back.

“No, no, take them, Rex,” Ned said. “Keep them. They’re yours.”

“Thanks,” I said, and put them in my pocket.

“See you Monday,” he said.

“See you Monday,” I said.

We shook hands, and then I grabbed Ned Frost by his jacket and pushed him. Not hard, but enough to startle him and send him stumbling backward. There was a pause as he caught his breath and righted himself, and then I grabbed his jacket again, but this time I pulled him. For being so overweight he was surprisingly light, as if made of air, and I think his feet might have even come off the ground. His bearded face was inches from mine and I could smell his breath. I pitched him from side to side, as if rocking a boat for fun, and when I let go, he went off spinning toward the ground, grunting as he landed. A small notebook and pen came out of his pocket and rolled out into the empty street. This made me feel sad, and I went and picked them up and brought them back to him. “Here you go,” I said.

He was on all fours breathing hard, the white breath coming out in bursts from his mouth and nose. I set the notebook and pen down beside him and waited until he had brought himself to a standing position. He brushed off his pants. His tweed jacket had torn in the armpit, and I wondered if he’d notice that before he wore it again, or if someone would point it out to him at work. He stooped down and picked up his pen and pad and put them back in his pocket. Once he had oriented himself, he got back in his car without looking at me. I watched him sit there for a while collecting himself, and then he drove off down the street.

That night Frankie and I were eating pizza when the basketball game was interrupted by a local news report telling us
that the bus strike was over. The state supreme court had ordered the drivers back to work immediately, contract or no contract. There was a clip of the mayor saying that he felt great relief that the city would finally get itself back on its feet.

“The drivers,” Frankie said, “the drivers … they … got screwed!”

Then the basketball game came on again.

On Monday the buses were up and running. I woke early to the sound of a diesel engine just below my window. I got dressed and went downstairs to see for myself. Fifteen minutes later, sure enough, a bus came rolling around the corner and stopped and opened its doors for me. “This ride’s on us,” read a sign taped over the fare box. The driver looked as if the sign might as well have been hanging around his neck. The bus was full with everyone trying to get to work. I found a seat in the back and looked out the window as the bus crawled past the playground and the laundromat and the Buy ’n’ Save. We made a right turn, stopped to pick up some more passengers, and then headed onto the thoroughfare. I had nowhere to go, of course, but for a moment it felt as if I were free.

When April arrived, it started to get warm and everyone said that the war was definitely going to happen soon and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. The diplomats were flying home, the flags were coming out, and the call-ups were about to begin. Walking across the bridge, I would sometimes see freight trains lumbering by, loaded top to bottom with tanks or jeeps, once even the wings of airplanes, heading out west or down south. Some line had been crossed, something said or done, something irrevocable on our side or on the enemy’s, from which there was no longer any possibility of turning back. I hadn’t been following matters that closely, so I had missed exactly when things had taken a turn. Nevertheless, everyone was saying that the war was going to happen soon and so I said it too.

Then May came and it got hot and Roberto broke his nose
and asked me if I would come visit him in the hospital. “Blood everywhere,” he told me over the phone. Apparently he had been lifting weights at the gym when one of his buddies, in order to emphasize some conversational point he was making, feinted like a boxer and swung at Roberto’s face. The buddy had meant merely to pantomime the punch, but with his arms heavy-light from having just bench-pressed three hundred pounds, he had lost the ability to gauge distance, strength, or speed, and he cracked Roberto right in the nose. I wanted to question the details of the story because Roberto was subject to hyperbole, and also because I was selfish and didn’t want to make the trip across town, but I was the closest thing to family that Roberto had, and on the telephone he did sound like he had a sock stuffed down his throat and up his nose.