Things Come Apart (Part 2)

    Everett picked up the morning paper after a long walk, and sat down on the bench just outside his hotel to read it. The front page headline was about a Sergeant that got beat to death up in Fort Totten. People were getting pretty anxious about soldiers these days, the article said. This was the tri-state area, not the front. He got a page and a half in before he got bored of reading. Instead he watched the people come and go from Pat’s Original Diner across the street, idly wishing he had a cigarette.

    The day was getting steadily warmer and a few daffodils had already unfolded their yellow petal hands and turned their trumpet faces up towards the sun. He was sure by this time in Chattanooga the narcissus and the redbuds would be almost past, and it would be good and warm. But then when he thought about it again, he wasn’t sure. It had been a long time since Chattanooga, and his memories were a little hazy.

    The hotel manager passed behind him with a push broom, taking the dead leaves and cobwebs off the concrete porch with a woosh, and Everett jumped. Then he realized, smiled at the man. No need for that. This wasn’t any Fort Totten.

     Trenton had been home enough for two years but it felt now like a coat a size too small: familiar, but a bit tight and uncomfortable.

    Well nine days was still enough time. And he resolved himself to talk to Martha today. It wouldn’t matter where he wound up, as long as he had her.

            Ten a.m. rolled around, the time her shift would start, and he smoothed his shirt, checked his shave, and moseyed over at ten past ten. She was there tying her apron on with a hello smile and before he could even get settled there was a cup of coffee down in front of him.

            There were hardly any other people in the diner, just a few old men finishing up an early brunch, and Everett. So he was happy as a clam when she came down near him to wipe down the counter and the coffee pots.

    “So,” Martha said as she wiped the counter down, “Headed home soon?”

    “Don’t know,” Everett replied. He warmed his hands on the cup of coffee. “Soon I suppose.”

    “I never did ask where home was for you,” she said.

    “Hard question. A little of everywhere. Cincinatti at first, then Hoboken. Tennessee in the summers. But I left to find better work. Wound up here for a few years ‘til the draft came.”

    “Are you stayin’ in the area then?”

    “Doubt it. Not much work anymore that another guy won’t do cheaper. Probably go to Tennessee again.”

    “Well.” She folded the dishrag neatly in fourths and put it under the counter. “You got family down there? I bet they miss you.”

    “Not much family to miss me, actually.”

    “I’m sorry,” she frowned a little and the space between her eyebrows puckered. She was genuinely sorry. “But you’ve got a home there?”

    “My uncle’s got a place I can rent.”

    “I’ve never been to Tennessee,” she mused. “Never been much of any place, besides New York, and out in the country here. What’s it like?”

    “Chattanooga?” He wanted to tell her in poems and he wished he were good with words like a painter was with oils. He had imagines in his mind of the two of them nestled snug on that westbound train to Pittsburgh, with misty, green, sun-spangled Tennessee waiting at the end of the dream. “Well it’s just about the most beautiful place there is this time of year. Warm, like a northern summer, green trees and green river and flowers just as far as you can see.”

    “Oh it sounds wonderful.”

    “You’d like it, I’d wager,” he said hopefully.

    “You think?”

    “I know you would,” he said.

    “Martha, my dear!” a man settled one seat away and reached over the counter for her hand as she passed by him. “You look lovely. First thing I thought when I walked in.”

    “Well you certainly are charming today, Fred.” She kept her hand just out of his reach and half squinted at him. “It’s been a while. Hm. Club sandwich extra mayo and a baked potato.”

    Fred laughed. “Magical Martha. Yes, just that please.” He leaned across the counter as she went to put the order through the cook’s window and said, “When are you gonna let me take you away from all this grease and scullery work?”

    She gave him a look. “Keep flattering, Fred, but it won’t get you that club sandwich for free.”

    Everett tried never to get angry, but it happened more often than he’d like. He didn’t remember it being always so, but for a while now, since the war, he had felt it flipping like a switch, suddenly burning up in him. Whenever it happened he’d set his jaw and count ten deep breaths in and out through his nose.

    He was counting them out just then, staring hard at Fred who was gladly accepting a cup of coffee from Martha.

    Everett’s Martha.

    Normally after he got to ten breaths the switch flipped back down and he felt some kind of control over his feelings. But he still very much wanted to punch that man in the face.

    A few more customers came in as the clock on the wall chimed twelve thirty and Martha went off to take care of them. She bustled by a few times and Everett tried to clear his throat and attract her attention but she barely paused just to see if he needed anything and sheepishly he ordered a cup of coffee.

    She set it down with a hurried kind of smile, not his personal smile, not the one meant only for him. “Anything else?”

    “No…”

    She turned to go.

    “I was going to ask you though…”

    But the bell over the door tinkled and three new customers sauntered in with hats in hand and she said, “Sorry honey, it’s going to have to wait.”

    Everett glared at Fred who was now reading the paper and Everett felt the switch go back on. He hated Fred. More than anyone or anything in the world, he hated Fred. He’d ruined everything, ruined Everett’s chance, in fact, Everett even felt fine blaming the sudden rush of customers on Fred as though he’d brought them all there like some annoying pied piper, just to interrupt Everett’s conversation.

    But he counted to ten, then ten again and breathed through his nose. He didn’t like being angry. It just came so naturally now.

    He got up quickly and went to the bathroom where he locked the door tightly and splashed cold water on his face to calm himself down. Looking in the mirror with his hands gripping the sink he prodded at the little ball of jealousy inside him but it didn’t want to budge, so he tried replacing it with images of his future. He sat back and watched scenes of him and Martha in their Sunday best walking down to the river on a day in May, where he’d pick flowers off the cherry trees and put the blossoms in her pretty brown hair. She’d laugh at him, and he’d pull her close and kiss her.

    So what did he have to be jealous of? he thought. He smiled at his reflection and tucked a piece of his dark hair back in place. Tonight, he’d ask her, as soon as she was off work. Tonight.

                                                   #

    Trenton at midday was a busy place, with people waking two and fro, chatting with one another, no longer dressed in furs but light jackets and pink dresses, affirming that spring was in the air. There were fine shops and a few young men loitered outside Benjamin’s Clothing Store while birds sang on a newly budded tree branch nearby. The nice thing about Trenton, the pair of now disenfranchised soldiers told one another, was that it was not New York. It was smaller, homier, and familiar. But even as they nodded to each other, neither felt comfortable or at home at all.

    “After a meal,” Stack suggested, “we could get a train back to Camden.”

    “Now why might we do that?”

    Stack shrugged. “Reckon there’s work?”

    Rowe shook his head. “I don’t see there’s rightly anything different about Camden from Trenton.” He pushed past a man in an overcoat who threw a look at being pushed.

    Soon they came to a shoddier section of town, not run down but care worn, where the clothes were not so nice and the autos were not so new. Still they seemed impressive, at least to Stack.

    “Well now,” he whistled. “Lots of autos, now. Bet lots of families got money for death certificates. Army’s bought a lot of autos for ‘em, now.”

    Rowe nodded appraisingly as some rolled past, the drivers utterly unaware the two were even standing there. They walked on. But every block they went they got hungrier, and this made them more irritable, and the idea of booze became a balm they couldn’t do without.

    “Next store we see,” promised Rowe.

    “Yeah, right,” agreed Stack.                    

    It was actually three stores they passed until they settled on one that looked like an easy pinch, and their nerve came mostly, at that point, from hunger and from hangover. Nothing like the hair of the dog that bit you when the dog was whiskey, Rowe told his partner. The general store they found was a good location because it had an alley on one side of it, and the shop had a door that emptied into it. A perfect escape route!

    “Just snatch a bottle while I have him distracted,” Rowe said.

    First went Rowe, striding in, looking normal as he could with his thumbs in his pockets, and when the old shopkeeper with the owl eyes and the thick glasses gave him the eye, Rowe tried to look indignant that he, an upstanding citizen, might be suspect of anything. He strolled to the counter and squinted through the glass, and said, “My good man, could you please tell me what types of chew you carry?”

    The owl-eyed shop keeper began to explain this, first curtly, then in exasperated detail as Rowe asked for it, and in through the front door Stack came creeping.

    Now some liquor was behind the counter and other cheaper bottles were on the far wall. They boys had a good stroke of luck that the far wall ran along and set adjacent to the side door. Stack hid himself behind the shelves of dried cereals and did a quick survey: the side door didn’t look latched, and the liquor would be easy to pick, but he would have to move fast because the side door was next to the counter.

    Rowe had the shopkeeper discussing the advantage of cheroot over chew, and Stack thought it was good a time as any. He grabbed a bottle of malt colored whiskey by the neck, and he ran.

    The shopkeeper yelped but Stack was through the door into the stockroom where he tripped on a few boxes in the dark, then fumbled with the door knob and burst into the alley.

    Somewhere up the street a truck backfired and covered the sound of the side door banging open, and Stack took off left down the alley, hopped the trashcans, and disappeared over the back wall.

    Inside, Rowe watched his partner dart by and smiled at the befuddled shopkeeper. “Well, sir, on second thought I won’t be buying any cheroot today.” And he turned and walked out of the building. As soon as he hit the street, he ran, for as he’d predicted the shopkeeper gathered his wits quick enough and followed him put, crying thief, but Rowe was already long since gone.

                                                   #

    The sun was quite warm today, and Sil liked that. It was not so warm that it made the garbage in the alley stink and it was still cool enough to feel pleasant. Outside in the alley people drifted by but Sil didn’t notice them. He liked his world inside the alley, and he only talked to Walton.

    “Now the thing about it is,” he said, “come Memorial Day the sweet corn isn’t ready. Won’t get it til July, that’s when the sweet corn tastes the best. Knee high by the fourth of July. I know you’ll try to tell me somethin’ different now, but you just don’t know what you’re sayin’. Jersey Sweet Corn is mandatory at picnics. Best corn on the cob you can have.” He felt he had to explain these types of things to Walton, because Walton wasn’t originally from New Jersey, he was from Maryland, and people from Maryland had queer ideas about produce sometimes.

    “So we’d have steaks and apple pies, that we did have. Say, are you still sore because I said you should see the doctor?”

    Walton may or may not have made a reply.

    “Well, listen, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, Walt. Sometimes we should, and you’ve been so quiet since Simon … yea. Yeah. I know. I’m quieter now, too.” He was drawing with a stub of pencil in a little notebook Mr. Janson had given him. He was drawing a hillside covered in wire. There was a crater in the middle of the hill. A big, deep, black crater. He didn’t seem to notice much he was drawing.

    “No, I understand it,” he told Walton. “I do.”

    Then he stopped. Old front hogs have a sense, and Sil was no exception, a sense of when something is about to happen. So he stopped, he waited, his ears for that brief half second strained, the fine hairs on his arms stood up, and he held his breath.

    Several things happened in the next moment. From the cross street up ahead and around the corner there was a loud bang! Like a pistol shot, but louder, deeper, and it shook the side of the general store and shook Sil, too. The sound only lasted a moment and made a few people squeal and an automobile driver swear at his car, but it made something curiously different happened to Dan Elmer Silby.

    He saw, or perhaps remembered, a wide open field that was half filled with wheat, and he had a heavy pack and a gun in his hand. He saw a blue sky - not a strip of blue between the roofs of stores but wide, open blue with smoke trailing in red and green streamers. He smelt the smoke and the mud-after-rain, and dead things, and he felt that he was running as hard and as fast as he could. He heard shouts, then a high whine that turned quickly into a scream; he looked to his left and there was Simon beside him, or maybe it wasn’t Simon, and for a moment he was confused if there ever had been a Simon. The someone who was-not-Simon beside him had Walton’s dark hair. And then bang!

    There was no one beside him.

    Then there was an alleyway where the hole in the ground should have been. Sil was shaking. He was crying, too.

    At that same moment the side door of the general store burst open and a man who had been familiar back when Sil lived in the other trenches came out in a hurry, with a bottle of liquor tucked tight under his arm. There were shouts from within the store but Sil couldn’t sort out much more than ‘thief’ awkwardly melding with other syllables, and the somewhat familiar man ran down the alley without taking any notice of Sil and climbed up onto a few trashcans, vaulted the wall, and disappeared.

    Someone else darted across the mouth of the alleyway from the front door and ran down the street with fading footfalls. Mr. Janson shouted behind him, frustrated, high pitched words but they did nothing to bring the thieves back to him, so he gave up and went back inside. The front door slammed.

    Walton murmured something to him.

    “What’s that?” Sil said. “No, I thought I recognized them, the both of them. You say they stole that? I reckon they did.” His face grew dark and he staggered up to his feet. He knew what he needed to do. “No, Sir, Walt, we can’t that happen.”

    Step by step, first slowly then quicker and determined, he inched along the wall to the edge of the alley. Then, for the first time in two years, Sil left the trench.