Eating Memories (17 page)

“Thank you, sir, no. A problem has come up.”

“What problem?”

Glick stands just inside the door, in perspective a small man, like a man at the wrong end of a telescope. “Some people have broken into the contaminated food dump, sir.”

“Wasn’t it guarded?”

“They beat the guards. They were hungry.”

Leeds looks down at his plate. He wonders if Glick has eaten breakfast, or if he is simply refusing to eat. “How contaminated was the food, Colonel?”

“Very, sir.”

The governor picks up his empty plate and takes it to the sink. There was not that much Spam, not that much pineapple. Mary is still playing with her food. Her hands are crimped from holding the trowel, and she moves them as if they hurt her.

“Shoot them, Colonel.”

The colonel blinks. His eyes are the only part of him that has moved. “Sir?”

“Firing squad, Colonel. It will teach a lesson to the others and be a blessing for the condemned. You’ve seen enough slow death, I think.”

“Yes, sir,” Glick says doubtfully.

“Well, I have, too.”

The colonel salutes and opens the door.

“Colonel Glick?”

He turns. “Yes?”

“Will you ask Flagstaff to send us something?”

“Yes,”, he says. “I already have.”

“What did they say?”

“That they had their own problems.”

“Did you tell them we have people starving? Can’t you beg them, Colonel?”

There was the can’t again, Leeds thinks. CAN’T YOU DO ANYTHING RIGHT?

The colonel looks away. “I have, sir. Believe me.”

Leeds takes a deep breath. The colonel swivels on his heel and marches out into the grey day.

When breakfast is over, Mary goes back to the garden. Leeds cleans the kitchen and returns to his office. At noon he goes out to get Mary for lunch and finds that Glick has been waiting for him.

“Completed, sir,” he says in a soft voice, as if he is afraid that God might hear. There is a strange tension in his motionless face.

“How many?” Leeds asks.

“Forty-two.”

The governor closes his eyes.
Chuck. Chuck.
Some sounds humans get used to, repetitive sounds, some single-note tones. Hear a sound enough and it becomes, in effect, silence. But the noise that the trowel makes in the earth is one Leeds knows he will always notice.

“See that the bodies are buried.”

“Not burned, sir?”

“No,” he says harshly. Enough have gone that way. “Not . . .”

He stops cold, his mouth still ajar. Behind the colonel’s back a spot in the western sky is catching flame. The glow brightens until Leeds can no longer look straight at it.

The colonel, his face creased in bewilderment, slowly turns. The soldiers on the road freeze in place.

“The sun,” Glick says with soft wonder.

Only the sun. It has pierced the clouds and laid a brassy benediction on the far mountains. Leeds’s body unkinks. His knees go soft. In a moment he sits down on the steps.

Next to him Glick stand transfixed. The soldiers at their jeep burst into cheers. And in the yard, the sunlight turning her hair aflame, the burning woman still digs.

“Glick.”

The colonel hastily wipes tears from his eyes.

“I’ve been going over the supplies.”

The sun has shattered Glick’s mask and Leeds can read the colonel’s face easily now. There is awe there, but over that are annoyance and incomprehension. He looks like a man who, upon finding the stone rolled away and Jesus’s grave empty, has been asked about the time.

“If we stay here without airdrops, we’ll all die eventually. I want you to get the wounded into the trucks. The uninjured can walk. I want you to take the people off the mountain. Take them north to Flagstaff. They’ll have to share once the problem’s in their laps. I know they’re getting supplies from Utah.”

“Sir?”

“Get it together now, Colonel. I want you to leave in two days. No later. It’ll be a long haul, but there’s water on the way. And get me a jeep. You don’t need to put much gas in it. A quarter-tank will do. Mary and I will be going back to Phoenix.”

Glick sits down heavily on the steps as if an invisible stranger has knocked him off his feet. He stares out where Mary still digs, her back to the glory of the light.

Above the governor’s head the clouds are breaking up and scudding east, leaving the sky the deep, clear, unbelievable color of blue enamel.

Glick is still staring hard at Mary. He looks frightened. “It would be illegal for me to evacuate, sir. You’re the governor.”

Leeds doesn’t quite manage a laugh, but he gets out a dry chuckle. The colonel turns his head sharply toward him, a look of hurt on his face.

The governor lays a hand on the colonel’s arm. He has never before touched him. Leeds remembers being at a governors’ conference a long, long time ago, and he remembers what the governor of Arkansas told him about military coups.
Never happen in the States,
the squat governor had said.
First time they want appropriations, they’re going to want to go to Congress, and the coup will be over.

American military officers, Leeds knows, need civilian demands. “This is an order, Colonel. Get the people to Flagstaff and surrender to the mayor there.”

Glick gets to his feet without saluting and wanders away, his hands in his pockets.

The next morning there is a jeep waiting in front of the cabin. Glick has loaded it with supplies.

“I gave you a half-tank,” the colonel says. “That will get you into the worst part of Phoenix and get you most of the way out, if you wish. There are clothes packed in plastic. If you want to leave, drive out of the area as far as the gas will take you, then ditch the jeep. You can walk the rest of the way.”

Leeds looks at the flashlight, the cartons of food, the water. Glick has given them too much. The supplies are an excess, so much so that he feels the peculiar guilt of the wealthy.

He goes into the house without saying a word and wakes Mary up. He helps her dress.

When she is dressed, she is frantic. The trowel is not on the nightstand. She pulls the blankets off and looks under the bed. He follows her as she darts from one room to another, hummingbird-quick. A small noise, a sort of whine, is coming from her throat. Leeds tries to stop her, but she flutters and spins out of his hands. “Mary,” he says. “Mary.” She’s not listening.

With a bang she is out of the door, sprinting past a startled Glick. In the sun-dried mud of the yard she finds the trowel. She snatches it up and holds it to her breast, curling her body around it.

“Come on, Mary,” Leeds says gently.

She is breathing hard with fright. Her eyes are round and animal-blank.

“Come on,” he whispers.

He takes her to the jeep. Glick holds out his hand. “Good luck, Governor.”

“Good luck,” Leeds replies. There should be more to say.

Glick closes the door for him and steps back. Leeds starts the engine and, at a sudden urge, puts his hand out to the colonel again. Instead of taking it, the colonel salutes. It is good, snappy salute, managed the way salutes used to be.

Ten miles down the mountain at the checkpoint, the soldiers wave them through. Forty miles after that they drive past the first of the abandoned, undamaged houses. The radiation buzzer goes off with a hysterical, electronic whoop, startling Leeds so much he nearly runs off the road. Quickly he reaches down and jerks the wire from the unit.

He looks furtively at Mary. His wife is sitting against her door, the trowel still cradled in her arms. Her gaze is riveted forward, and he wonders how much of this she understands.

“Twelve forty-three, Mary,” he says. “They’d have been in school. That’s where we’ll check.”

Ten miles later they get into the first of the damage, the first of the stench. Hell, Leeds decides, must smell of burnt insulation.

It’s more difficult finding his way than he had imagined.

Into the worst of it, he can’t find the road at all. He realizes he has gone too far when he sees their bank building rising unaccountably from the rubble. In an hour or so, he believes, by the scattering of red bricks and the charred floor of what might have been a gymnasium, he has found Carolyn’s middle school.

From that landmark, he drives, in fits and starts, southwest. The east wing of the high school is in ruins, but, miraculously, the west wing still stands, its windows like mouths of splintered teeth. Nothing, not even birds, moves there.

He shuts off the engine. It is very quiet. The sun catches the sparkles of mica in the dusty, dun stone. Except for the limitless blue of the sky, the world is the color of disaster.

Carolyn never had a chance, but Jerry and Jimmy might have. Leeds is nor sure where their classrooms were. He hopes they were in the east wing where it would have been quick, and not in the west where they might have lingered.

When children are afraid, fathers should always be there.

Grief hits like the incapacitating ache of angina. It is only much later that he realizes that Mary is weeping. The trowel has dropped, forgotten, to her lap.

“Should we go see?” she asks.

Leeds is surprised by her voice. It is almost, but not quite, the way he remembers it.

He looks at the stark skeleton of the school and shudders. After all this time he doesn’t have the courage to go further. He doesn’t want to know what secrets lurk for him behind the quiet, blasted stone. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Can we go home now?”

Leeds watches the wind weave mists of dust across the ruins. “No.”

He starts up the engine. Turning the jeep in a difficult three-corner turn, he heads back the way they came.

“They’re dead,” she says.

“Yes.”

He sees the tightness leave her as abruptly as his grief had come on. Her back unhinges. She slumps. The trowel drops to the floor and she doesn’t pick it up.

He stops for the night in one of the undamaged houses in a high-rad zone. They eat a silent dinner. Mary goes in and lies down on the strange bed.

They’ll die here, surrounded by someone else’s things. When night falls he comes in and sits beside her, holding her hand in the night. She is sleeping soundly for the first time in months.

As he keeps watch he notices a pale glow coating the sill. It is the returning moon. He pictures the silvered blanket it is casting over the graves of their children.

He should be brave enough, and able enough to find their bodies, but everyone has his limitations. He simply can’t.

Their entire lives have been structures of can’t.

JIMMY, CAN’T YOU CLEAN THAT ROOM?

DADDY, CAN’T YOU LOAN ME . . . ? CAN’T YOU BUY ME . . . ? CAN’T YOU TAKE ME . . . ?
CAN’T YOU GIVE ME . . . ?

He had come at last to look, too late to be of use. Now he clutches his inconclusive answers. Of all the can’ts that ever were, he realizes, only one has meaning.

Can’t you forgive us?
he asks.

Author’s Note:
I have to admit that I love this little story all the way from the pun of the title to the quiet resolution. It says something about sin and redemption, of course; something I didn’t know that I even believed until I had the story finished. I love it for the voice (“limp-dick .25”) and its throwaway humor.

I mean, if you’re a normal person with a normal sense of right and wrong, how do you live with the guilt of murder?

He thinks he’ll go crazy killing the Cambodian again, but as soon as he feels the weight of the borrowed .25 automatic in his pocket he’s forgotten about losing his mind and he’s back in the swing of things. His heart’s going a mile a minute, faster than it had ever gone on meth, even faster than the foot-to-the-floor acceleration of good snow.

Here it is again, two in the morning of a cool Tuesday night, and he’s jittery and sweating like a maniac. Roger always promised a holdup would be like the best blow job he’d ever had, and Jerry’s starting to wonder when the feel-good part starts.

The streets are moist and empty. No cars are juicing up at the gas pumps. No losers are standing around the pay phones trying to get dates.

Jerry hits the glass doors of the 7-Eleven with his shoulder, and when they don’t open, he panics.

He fumbles around a moment before he realizes he needs to pull, not push. By the time he gets the doors open and enters the fluorescent glare of the store, he’s sure the guy behind the counter has figured out what’s happening. He’ll have dialed 911 and’ll be shouting “HOLD UP!” into the phone line. Listening on the other end will be a standing army of a thousand or so cops. Not just any cops, but
Dallas
cops with non-regulation .357s on their belts and murder in their eyes. They’ll all pile into their squad cars and head on down to Columbia Avenue where the action is, where silly little Jerry with his limp dick borrowed .25 is holding up a 7-Eleven because Roger thinks it’s a good idea.

Jerry peeks around the movie rental rack and over a stack of 12-pack Cokes. The guy behind the counter is smiling at him.

“Hello. Hello,” the clerk says cheerfully. “How are you this evening?”

Jerry’s tongue’s Super-Glued to the roof of his mouth and there’s no way to unstick it to answer. He just looks blankly at the clerk. The guy’s small and skinny and dark. He has a smooth, innocent face and tiny stick wrists. His hands are toylike. They’re little kid’s hands.

Jerry stares at a bag of Brach’s mints, thinking that maybe he should just forget the whole damned thing, just buy that fucking bag of mints and get out. Only he doesn’t have the dollar fifty-nine.

When Jerry doesn’t respond, the clerk points towards the rack. “If you can’t sleep, you should rent a movie.
Fire in The Clouds.
All customers like
Fire in The Clouds.
Space station goes ka-boom.”

Ka-boom, Jerry’s thinking nervously. Ka-boom.

“We got the newest Crawler movie, too,” the guy’s saying. “Very scary.” The guy laughs a clear high tenor laugh, a laugh like a bird’s song.

Jerry finally pulls the gun from his pocket, and the guy stops laughing. His dark eyes get wide.

“Gimme the money,” Jerry says, hoping the clerk doesn’t notice the adolescent crack in his voice.

“Sure, sure.” The guy’s scared now. Jerry can feel fear coming off him like heat from a Dearborn heater.

“Come on!” Jerry snaps.

The guy’s fooling around with the cash register like he’s forgotten how it works and he can’t get the damned thing open.

“Goddam it, come on!” Jerry shouts in a ka-boom voice, and all of a sudden time starts to slow down like a VCR that’s inching forward from PAUSE.

The clerk drops his hand down, drops it down, oh God Jerry sees the hand go down, and he knows the guy’s going for a gun, some big-ass over-and-under twelve-gauge.

There should be time because everything’s going so slow. There should be time enough to reach over the counter to stop him. But it’s like God’s smiled over Jerry and said, “Hey, Jerry, you got a string hanging off you, man,” and God pulls what you thought was just a loose thread and all of a sudden your whole sweater’s coming apart.

Jerry’s whole evening’s unravelling at the seams
—
and all in slow-mo.

He watches the clerk’s hand go down down down while his own hand comes up up up. For a few centuries or so Jerry figures he’s not going to make it. The suspense is killing him, so to speak. And then all of a sudden, before he knows it, there’s his arm out and the pistol pointed and the trigger pulled back and everything. All at once. Just like that.

Ka-boom.

The explosion from that wussy .25 sounds like the end of the world. The Cambodian’s side is squirting blood, but a .25 isn’t a Dallas Police .357, or a hidden under the counter shotgun. A .25 never stopped anything in its tracks. The Cambodian’s got hold of something and he’s bringing it up, anyway. Jerry shoots again, shattering a giant bottle of pickles. He fires a third time and hits the clerk, but it’s too late. The hand’s already free from the counter and Jerry knows that he’s never going to make it to the door.

The Cambodian’s fine-boned fist pops up over the counter.

There’s a key ring in it.

Open-mouthed, the clerk shows him the key ring and then kind of slides to the linoleum, leaving a smear of blood on the counter near the Cricket lighters and the tiny roll-up astrology charts.

It gets real quiet. Jerry can see the blue smoke from the gun hovering in a layer in the air like smoke through a late-night bar. The store smells of cordite and blood and dill pickles.

Jerry looks over the counter and sees that the Cambodian is lying in a pool of brine and gore trying his best to breathe. Not much is happening in his nose and mouth but blood, though. The blood has little bubbles in it like the guy’s a carbonated Cherry Coke somebody’s shaken up.

Clunk. The little pea-shooter .25 drops right out of Jerry’s numb fingers. His mouth is going a mile a minute, driven by a kind of agonized, nightmare helplessness. “Oh Jesus Oh Jesus Oh Jesus.”

The clerk’s chest is making a sound like someone drawing the last of a double thick shake through a straw. If only the guy would close his eyes, Jerry thinks. If only the guy would stop looking at him like that, like he’s confused as to why Jerry shot him and he’s terrified to die.

“I didn’t mean it!” Jerry screams, forgetting about the Dallas Police, forgetting about the money, forgetting about anything but how the blood’s running out of the holes he, himself, silly Jerry Walker, desperado extraordinaire, has made in this convenience store clerk.

He runs around the counter and kneels by the guy’s side, trying to push the blood back in and hoping that he’s not transfusing him with pickle juice. He supposes not. The guy looks kind of peaceful now. He’s staring at Jerry like he’s appreciative or maybe like all is forgiven.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Jerry’s saying to him helpfully and Jerry starts to think that maybe the clerk’s not as bad as he looks, that maybe they can sew him back up at Parkland. Then, just before he starts screaming for real, screaming so hard and so long that that’s the way a cop darting in for a piss will find him, Jerry notices the guy’s not breathing.

* * *

Jerry hates transitions. He hates their breath-snatching, bowel-wrenching abruptness. Blip, he’s looking down at the dead Cambodian. Blip, he’s back in the prison clinic staring up at the ceiling. His face is wet and he realizes he’s been crying again.

The chin strap’s holding him down so Jerry can’t move his head. He slides his eyes right as far as he can and sees that Dunlap hasn’t budged. He’s sitting exactly the way Jerry saw him before the memory-mode transition ten minutes ago. The director’s hunched over the monitor in his velour sweat suit with the intensity of a fat, turquoise vulture regarding a dead cow.

It’s a while before Jerry can find his voice. His eyes are rolled to the side so hard that they’re beginning to ache. “We get a good take that time?” he asks.

“Um,” Dunlap grunts. The director reaches out and fiddles with the controls on his ten-inch TV. On the screen Jerry can see himself. The candy-ass .25’s coming out of his coat pocket.

Quickly, before the pain of that sight can smack him good, Jerry shuts his eyes. He shuts them very, very briefly. In that instant the image of the dead Cambodian has time to float up from the darkness.

He pops his eyes open. He’s breathing hard; his voice sounds falsely high-pitched as though he’s been sniffing helium.

“We through? I’m kind of tired today and everything. Please. Aren’t we through?”

Dunlap turns around, his round, nerd face drawn up in a pensive expression. “Still getting some peripheral fuzziness.”

Jerry, knowing what’s coming, starts squirming against the straps as much as he’s able and starts talking fast. “I think I need to be checked out by a doctor or something, you know? I mean, I need to be looked at and stuff. Because I keep dreaming about the Cambodian, you know? Is that normal?”

Dunlap’s bending over the bed repositioning the needles in Jerry’s scalp. His movements are gentle and his hands smell of soap, like a dentist’s.

“I don’t want to do this no more.”

“Please don’t move,” Dunlap says.

“I mean, is that what happens to people in your documentaries?” Jerry asks. “I used to dream about the murder sometimes but now it’s every night. When I’m awake I think I catch glimpses of the Cambodian in the mess hall. At night before I go to sleep I can hear him laughing at the end of the cell block. I’m goddamned losing my mind.”

Dunlap, big-deal director, winner of an Academy Award for Best Documentary, three-time winner at Cannes, doesn’t bother to answer. Jerry’d hate him if only Dunlap weren’t so hard to hate. Dunlap’s a geek. He’s vanilla ice cream. Hating Dunlap is as useful as hating Cream of Wheat.

“Please. Can I go back to my cell now?”

The probe needles are so thin and Dunlap’s so gentle that the repositioning doesn’t really hurt, but Jerry’s crying, anyway. A drop of blood trickles through his hair, down his temple, and into his ear.

Suddenly Dunlap steps pack and glances at the monitor, and his index finger plunges towards the keyboard.

Jerry tries to scream but no sound comes out. IT HURTS TOO MUCH TO GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN, he decides, but somehow he’s in the 7-Eleven, the .25 in his sweaty hand and the Cambodian guy’s staring at him.

This time I won’t kill him,
Jerry thinks; but of course he does.

This time it’ll be different.
But of course it’s not.

* * *

“Dunlap’s playing with your head,” Freddie D. says. They’re in the cell, a couple of hours before lights out, and Freddie D.’s getting some reading time in.

“The shrink thinks after five years I should have come to grips with this shit. He thinks the filming’s going to help me face what I did, you know? But Dunlap’s shitting killing me, FD,” Jerry says, staring at the cracks in the concrete ceiling. “I can’t take it no more. I wish I’d never volunteered. He’s doing weird stuff to my brain, FD. I can feel it.”

“Um,” FD hums. There is a snap and a flutter as a magazine page is turned. “Neural pathways, my man. That’s where it’s all at. I read all about Dunlap in
Time
and
Discover.
He shoot you up with all them neurotransmitters and then he fire electrical impulses to where he think them juicy memories -is. Dunlap’s widening your neural pathways so he can get a good, clear shot of your Murder 1. You being sacrificed for art.”

Jerry is lying down on the top bunk, exhausted by a day of filmmaking. His feet are crossed at the ankles and he’s tapping his right toe against the grimy, green wall. It’s a great and joyous freedom to move his body.

After a moment he rolls his head over and looks at Freddie D. The former embezzler, his shirt open to expose the black diamond shape of his bodybuilder’s pecs, is reading his
Scientific American
and eating one of Jerry’s Snickers bars.

It’s a no-no for Jerry to profit from his crime, so Dunlap doesn’t pay him cash. Instead, he beats off Jerry’s brain and then hands him a bag of candy to use in trade around the prison; the reverse arrangement from that old men use to lure little girls into cars.

“Most memories, they like footpaths through the jungle, man,” FD says, licking the chocolate from his fingers. “But for stuff that gets up next to you and shit, the real traumatic stuff, them footpaths get wider. I figure what you got between you walking in that motherfucking 7- Eleven and the time the police slap them bracelets on you is laid down with an eight-lane superhighway of guilt.”

At the end of the shadowy block of cells, Jerry hears a high, tenor laugh. A bird song sort of laugh. It makes his scalp crawl so bad that the places Dunlap inserted the needles sting. “I been dreaming about the Cambodian every night now.”

“Yeah?” Freddie D. puts the
Scientific American
down and picks up
Newsweek.
“No surprise. You send a thought out, what direction is it going to go? Up the path of least resistance, right up that eight-lane superhighway you got built.”