Lydia (20 page)

Our barrage line ended fairly soon, and we emerged from the fire not fifty yards from the German first line, now occupied by our boys. Possibly the most unlikely piece of luck we had that whole day was no one from our side shot us when we walked out of the smoke. Agatha stayed beside me all the way to the trench.

Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t truly Agatha, not even in the spiritual sense. It was my mind saving me the only way it knew how, by going insane.

***

That night, the Cameronians relieved us, and we dropped back behind the lines. Over the decades, there’s been vicious talk about the British throwing Canadians, Australians, Irish, and other non-British troops into first waves. I’m not certain if these complaints are true or whining, but I do know the Cameronians died in greater droves than the rest of us. Almost every push began with a Cameronian slaughter, so it was a surprise for them to relieve us instead of the other way round.

When what little was left of our company gathered in a bombed-out village, I decided the time had come to tell Bill what I thought.

“Shad’s debt is paid,” I said. “He no longer has to wipe your bottom
.”

Bill was heating coffee water over a campfire he’d made from scrap lumber and books. He had recovered his composure—by that I mean he’d reverted to the shallow braggart of his youth.

“There wasn’t no terms of calling off the debt,” he said. “Shad knows the rules.”

I looked over to Shad, who sat with his legs out and his back against the wall of a house. I think it was a house. The wall was all was left.

“Don’t you consider that you’ve paid the debt?” I asked.

Shad shrugged. He was too worn to talk. I was still operating at a heightened sense of alarm. It takes me longer to come down off a battle than it did others.

“He saved your hide out there,” I said to Bill. “Can’t you show appreciation?”

“One has nothing to do with the other,” Bill said.

“You won’t think that next time you’ve froze up in a crater.”

Bill’s laugh was semi-hysterical. “There’s never going to be a next time—not for me.”

“How you plan to manage that?” I asked.

Shad spoke with closed eyes. I think he was more beat down by the experience than we’d supposed. “We did not die this time. There will always be a next time, until we do.”

“Not for me.” Bill stirred coffee into boiling water, cowboy-style. “A man would be crazy to go over the top into that firestorm. I’m no coward, but neither am I crazy.”

Shad and I considered this statement. Of course you had to be suicidal to go over, but enlisted men had no choice. If we obeyed orders, the Boche killed us, and if we didn’t obey orders, our own army killed us. There was no middle ground.

“How you planning to decline the next attack?” I asked.

Shad opened his eyes to look at Bill in the firelight. I think he was genuinely curious to hear the answer. If a man could choose to no longer go into battle, we both were interested in how it was pulled off.

“I don’t know the answer yet,” Bill said. “I only know I’m done with charging hell.”

Just then, a little bowlegged lieutenant from Toronto showed up and gave me a letter. “This came right before the push. I had no time to find you. Figured now would be soon enough if you survived.”

I recognized the handwriting. “It’s from my Agatha.”

“She ain’t your Agatha,” Bill said. “She’s my sister.”

I tore open the letter and read by firelight the words which I will now recite from memory:

Oleander—You must be expecting this letter, so here it is. You know how disappointed I am that you would rather run off to France than be with me. You have broken my heart by your callousness. I can no longer plan my future around us. I must pick up the pieces of my life.

Thusly, I have married Frank Lesley. He is in training to assume the presidency of Daddy’s bank. You were my first choice but you abandoned me and I cannot forgive you that. I trust you will have the good manners never to return to Billings. Agatha Ann Lesley.

There was a P.S.

P.S. Bill informed me of your dalliance with the red woman of ill repute. You can go back to her when you tire of your European vacation.

I screamed like an animal. “You told her about Swamp Fox.”

Bill was all innocence. “Told who?”

“Agatha.” Blinded by tears and rage, I felt for my rifle. “You told her, after making me go to that woman.”

“Of course I told her,” Bill said. “She’s my sister. I can’t hide from my sister that her fiancé wallowed with a syphilitic whore.”

I found the rifle, with its bayonet still attached, leaning against the wall there next to Shad. I spoke quietly. “You don’t have call to interfere.”

Shad looked from the bayonet to me. “I owe you, same as I owe him.”

“Don’t forget that.”

During this exchange, my vision cleared enough to see Bill on the far side of the fire. He was sipping coffee from a tin cup. He must of seen me go for the rifle, but unlike in the crater, he showed no signs of terror.

He grinned. “Nobody made you do anything.”

I roared and charged around the fire.

Bill simply stood his ground, cup in hand, stupid grin on his face. I think my attack paralyzed him. Maybe. Or maybe he knew I’d never bayonet an unarmed man, no matter what a foul enemy he was. Whatever the cause, Bill did not flinch.

I stopped, my bayonet tip against his windpipe.

He stared, unblinking, into my eyes. “You are not strong enough to kill me.”

I stared back into his eyes, watching the fire flicker across his pupils. I prayed for the strength of purpose to stick him, knowing already I didn’t have it. If I hadn’t spoken to Shad, or if I hadn’t had to run around the fire instead of taking him head on—I don’t know. All I know is, once I hesitated, it was too late.

Bill said, “You don’t deserve Agatha.”

I flung my rifle away. He was right.

***

I shut down from that time till well after the Armistice. It wasn’t that I turned suicidal soldier like others who received a letter saying their sweetheart had married a coward. I stopped feeling. Too much death, too much gore, gas, lice, and rats feeding on cadavers—without Agatha to connect me to civilization, I stopped being human. Wasn’t any grand trick. It’s easier not to be human in those conditions. The rest of the war was going through the motions.

Bill got himself advanced to sergeant and transferred twenty miles behind the line, where he groomed General Currie’s horse. Bill didn’t mind leaving his slave, Shad, for the duration. He figured they would start where they left off soon as the carnage ended.

I didn’t die, of course. No suspense in that. I did take a cush wound during the Courcelette show. A splinter of iron from a sausage bomb tore up my thigh and into the hip bone. It wasn’t drastic enough to quit me of the war, but it got infected, and I spent a year in a convalescent hospital—a former Catholic abbey—in Ireland. My time there would have been soft if I hadn’t been located in a huge hall full of moaning, screaming, dying, or bored-stupid military men.

Except for the occasional leave, Shad lived through the entire war on the front lines. He’s the only one I know of from our original Second Division who didn’t die, transfer back, or save themselves by a wound. No one from First Division made it beginning to end.

I got back to the front December 1917, about when the Americans started showing up, two years after the
Lusitania
. The Yanks came along lately, but if they hadn’t, Lord knows how long the politicians would have let that war go. Those villains could have ended it anytime, only both sides were so blown up with patriotism and bloodlust, they never considered stopping. By 1918, no one was left who recalled why the war commenced. The trench troops hated the general staff and the politicians a lot more than they hated Germans.

They kept us fighting and killing right up through the morning of the last day, long after the final lines had been drawn. I fought in World War II also—

“Hold on, Hoss,” Lydia said. “Are you going to drag me through another war?”

Oly closed his one eye and focused the other on Lydia until she calmed down, then he continued:

I fought in World War II also, and the two wars had no point in common. Men came back from the second knowing they’d accomplished something important. Those who survived the Great War were bitter, on account of being used. The boys that died died for no reason.

“That’s a harsh way of wording it,” Lydia said.

Oly said, “No reason.”

Lydia made a maintenance checklist for Shannon. She was only going for three days, mere weeks after a ten-year absence, but you’d think Lydia was embarking on an expedition to the South Pole.

“The asparagus fern will need twelve ounces of filtered water on Saturday, and the philodendron gets four ounces and a sprinkling of the blue fertilizer Sunday morning. Do you know what I mean by a sprinkling?”

Without looking up from her book, Shannon made a right-handed sprinkling motion. She was lying on the old couch, leftover from the time when I lived there, under her favorite pink blanket, reading
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
,
and occasionally sampling a store-bought cupcake or homemade iced tea from the end table beyond her propped-sideways couch cushion.

“If I feel dampness on my star cactus when I come home, you’re grounded for the summer,” Lydia said.

“Don’t worry,” Shannon said. “I’m good at not watering plants.”

“I will telephone from Salt Lake and Las Vegas, on the off chance Brandy Epstein may come sniffing around.”

Shannon finally looked up. “I’m supposed to wait by the phone?”

“Roger, that ingenious boy, taught me how to check messages from afar on my answering machine. If by some miracle you should leave the house in the next three days, record any vital information there. I will retrieve it and call Brandy, pretending to be up at Sam’s ranch. What is that hideous garment you have on?”

Shannon lifted the blanket to look down at the Denver Broncos jersey—number 7, several sizes too big, holes in both armpits—that hung on her body. She seemed to be seeing it for the first time.

“I found it in Hank’s closet.”

Lydia blinked against the idea of Shannon in Hank’s clothes. Torn between despair and anger, she chose anger.

“Hank did not give you permission to wear his shirt. And why are you lying under a blanket, eating bonbons in the middle of the day? You’re not Marie Antoinette.”

Shannon held out a cupcake as an offering. “This isn’t a bonbon. It’s Dolly Madison.”

Lydia more or less exploded. “The sun is shining. Flowers are blooming. And you are stretched out like a beached otter. A pregnant beached otter. They sleep on warm rocks on their backs with their tits to the sky. Totally useless beasts. And you’re one of them.”

As a matter of fact, sleeping on a warm rock with her tits to the sky sounded pretty good to Shannon. She had been satisfied on the couch, under her special blankie, with food and a book. She hadn’t felt satisfied that often of late, and she wasn’t in any hurry to throw away her peace of mind.

“That’s me,” she said. “The useless beast.”

Lydia snatched the blanket off Shannon, like a magician snatching a tablecloth out from under a full set of dinnerware.

“
Hey
,” Shannon squealed.

“Don’t you pull that self-pity bunk on me.” Lydia literally kicked the couch.

“I was lying here perfectly content,” Shannon said. “There’s no self-pity in being content.”

“There is for you. You’re content because you think you have no hope, so you may as well eat and read your life away.”

Shannon was surprised at Lydia’s insight. For all her raving and criticizing, every now and then Lydia nailed one. Contentment through lack of hope was exactly what Shannon was thinking at the store when she bought the Dolly Madisons.

“I want you up, off your ass,” Lydia said, using more force than usual.

“You mean right now or in general?” Shannon said.

“Right now.”

Shannon dutifully shuffled to her feet. Lydia’s snatching away the blanket had exposed the men’s boxer shorts Shannon was wearing along with the football jersey. The boxer shorts had been inherited from a boyfriend who left in a hurry a couple of years ago, and Shannon only wore them when there wasn’t much chance of being seen.

“Do you have the faintest idea how I feel when I look at you?” Lydia said.

Shannon’s posture wasn’t up to snuff, but otherwise she felt like a recruit being verbally reamed by a drill sergeant.

“You’re not yet thirty,” Lydia barked. “Healthy, financially secure, fairly beautiful, in your own idiosyncratic way. You have advantages the rest of the world’s women are willing to die for, and you are wasting them on self-pity and mood eating.” Lydia looked Shannon up and down like she was sweatpants on the sale rack. “You’ve got everything I once had and lost.”

“I don’t think that’s my fault.”

Lydia’s hands formed fists. Shannon thought her grandmother might strike her. Instead Lydia visibly pulled herself together. “Listen carefully, Shannon.”

Shannon nodded but did not speak.

“When you reach a certain age, you are going to look back at the past, and you are going to think,
If I’d only known then what I know now
.”

“I already think that.”

“I shall now give you the benefit of the wisdom coming from someone who does know now what you should have known then, which is now.” Lydia placed her hands on Shannon’s shoulders. “The time has come for you to take action.”

Shannon nodded again. It’s not as if she disagreed. “Like what?”

“
What
does not matter one whit. Do you understand? Find a hobby, take a lover. Ride a motorcycle naked. I’ve found public nudity almost always jump-starts the vaporous spirit.”

As Shannon nodded one last time, her lower lip began to quiver. Her greatest fear was weeping in front of Lydia. The fear of weeping was about to make her weep.

“What if I do the wrong thing?” Shannon said.

“The wrong choice beats the holy hell out of no choice. Look at me. No, Shannon, not at the wall. At me.”

Shannon looked at her.

“All my choices have been wrong. Sending Reagan’s dog a poisoned chew toy was wrong, but I had to do something about that leather dick, and it was less wrong than shooting a random bureaucrat or setting myself on fire in front of a TV camera.”

“Those were your choices?”

Lydia released Shannon’s shoulders. “They were all I could see in the heat of the moment. Here’s the deal: 90 percent of the time, whatever you do will turn out to be a mistake, but that’s still better than doing nothing, which is always a mistake. You get one life, Shannon. Don’t waste it on the couch.”

Shannon knew everything Lydia was saying was true, even if she did word it in a way that came out sounding ridiculous. Shannon was fortunate. She did have potential. She could do anything she wanted, only so far, whatever she’d tried doing had ended in ugly, public disaster. Sometimes she thought
potential
meant having the opportunity to fail at an unlimited number of dreams.

Life was a disappointment. Shannon’s eyes went slick, and the tears started to leak. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Of course you don’t know. You never
know
anything. You
think
.
You
feel
.
You
believe
it
probable
.
You hedge every bet. Shannon, you’re never going to live until you cut off all the options but one. You can’t obsess on two things at the same time.”

“I feel like I can’t obsess at all.”

“There. You
feel like
. You don’t
know
squat.”

Shannon reached down and picked up her pink blankie. It’d been the blanket she couldn’t sleep without from the age of one and a half to six. She’d found it in my remembrance drawer recently and reverted to her toddler needs. “When I meet a new guy I’m absolutely certain I can’t live without him, but after a while, he proves me wrong.”

“That’s not obsession. That’s addiction.”

“You think I should join a love addicts support group?”

“I think you should stop thinking and attack. Pick a man, if that’s what you want so much, and chase him down like a wolf after a moose. A wolf will chase a moose for days—weeks even, then, when she sees the chance, she zips in and
rips
out its Achilles tendon. With the moose crippled, the wolf tears out its throat and eats its liver while the moose is still alive.”

Shannon was aghast. “That’s what love is to you?”

“That’s what life is. If you don’t have the enthusiasm and nerve to chase down what you want and rip its throat out with your teeth, you might as well call it quits, put yourself to sleep like a beloved dog who’s so old his quality of life isn’t worth the pain.”

Shannon clutched the pink blankie to her chest. With effort, she brought her breathing and tear ducts back under control. “I want to do what you say, Lydia. I want to badly. I just don’t know how to go about the first step.”

“Like I said, you can start by getting off your ass.”

Shannon glanced down at the couch. “I did that.”

“Then you must decide what you care about. Something must be important enough for you to go on. If you don’t find a good reason to go on, you will live a miserable, fat life.”

Shannon held the blanket to her nose and inhaled the smell of her childhood. “So, what’s important?”

Lydia sighed. “Figure it out, Shannon. I have to go pick up my fossil friend.”

***

Irene Dukakis almost nipped the expedition in the bud before it even began. Irene was one of those assisted-living lawyers you hear about, not a real lawyer, but after being institutionalized, she’d spent so much time researching her rights that she knew the senior-citizen statutes better than any licensed lawyer in the county. Ever since she’d heard Oly was spending the weekend with Lydia, Irene had been working the books, and when Lydia and Roger came to pick up the old guy, Irene was ready.

She caught them out by the BMW—Lydia, Roger, Oly, and Ellis Gill. Roger was restacking the luggage in the trunk, making room for Oly’s chair. He wished they’d picked Oly up before loading the car. Not that either of them was taking more than an overnight bag—with a leather day pack for him and the fake saddle purse for her—but still, it looked odd to have suitcases in the trunk of a car that wasn’t supposed to leave town.

Ellis was giving Lydia the medication rundown. “The pink one in the morning with a full glass of water, these two at one thirty before his nap. A tablespoon of this—are you listening, Mrs. Elkrunner?”

Lydia said, “What?”

That’s when Irene came flapping out of the double front doors. Her dress was four or five shades of shimmery rayon green, and she wore white gloves. She had on paper overshoes, the kind nurses’ aides wear in intensive care units, over what appeared to be tennies. Her hand was raised in the air, waving a spiral notebook.

Irene started in from twenty yards away. “You can’t take him. If you do, I’ll sue your trousers off, Ellis Gill. I can shut this holding tank down in a heartbeat. You’ll wish you were on the
Titanic
, where it’s safer.”

Ellis’s face dropped a few shades of pink. Lawsuits were his greatest fear as an administrator. He wouldn’t even hire any woman named
Sue
because he was superstitious, like people who are afraid to say
cancer
.

Irene came to a halt, right in front of Oly’s wheelchair. She was panting from the charge across the lawn. “There are protections against your sort in this state,” she said to Lydia in that New Orleans accent that comes across as
Brooklyn meets cracker
.

“What sort is that?” Lydia asked.

Irene turned on Ellis. “This person was in prison not three weeks past. God only knows what deviance she practiced in that hole of hell. You cannot turn my Oleander over to a convict.”

“This is her community service. She’s doing this instead of prison.” Ellis stammered on the
th
’s, which didn’t endear him to Lydia.

Roger stood between Irene and the suitcases tucked way up in the trunk. He said, “I’ll take care of Oly. Don’t you worry about Lydia molesting your boyfriend.”

“Molest, hell,” said Lydia. “Two million dollars would not entice me consort with that Gila monster.”

Irene shook the notebook before Ellis’s eyes. “You cannot take an involuntary commitment off Haven House property without signed permission from his next of kin.”

Ellis said, “Mr. Pedersen has no next of kin.”

Throughout the uproar, Oly maintained his hibernating-turtle personality. He sat in the chair, staring in the general direction of an aspen across the street. Lydia had come to realize the upright-catatonic act was a convenient sham. Pretending he was deaf, dumb, and paralyzed got Oly through most social situations.

“I’m the closest Oly has to a relative,” Irene said. “You must have my say-so, and I won’t give it.”

Lydia’s attention left Oly for Irene. “What makes you related to him?”

Irene drew herself up to her full four feet nine inches of height. “I was the last woman he was with, intimately.”

Lydia said, “I don’t want to know that.”

Roger said, “Oly, you are my role model,” and playfully socked Oly on the shoulder. Oly started to go over sideways, before Roger caught him.

“How long ago? Lydia asked. “Because if it was before the end of World War I, the old boy has been holding out on the oral history.”

“Twenty-two years. Fourth of July,” Irene said.

Lydia immediately thought about herself, as she was prone to do, wondering how old she would be the last time she had sex, wondering if maybe she had already had her last time and didn’t know it. Would it be better to know the last time was the last time, or let it sneak past, always assuming there would be more, until it was too late?

“You haven’t been with a man in twenty-two years?”

Irene gave Lydia a look of exasperation. “Oly hasn’t been with a gal since then. I didn’t say a word about me.”

Meanwhile Roger had been doing the math. “That would mean Oly was seventy-eight when you guys did it.”

Irene said, “Seventy-seven.”

“Either way is impressive,” Roger said.

Irene propped her free hand, the hand not holding the notebook, on Oly’s bald head. “It was nothing to brag about. Oly started something he couldn’t finish.”

Lydia said, “Thank you for sharing.”

Ellis scratched his head above the ear, making his comb-over swirl like a tumbleweed. “That still doesn’t make you next of kin.”