Something began to take shape dimly at the back of his mind. He turned the empty bottle over in his hands, then pulled his arm back and hurled it by the neck. He could not see it fly, but he thought he could hear it ringing for a few seconds, the whispering friction of air on glass, until it was blotted out by the water. When he glanced over, Abigail was the clearest object in the near distance, her white winter jacket catching the scant trickle of light offered by the night sky. And this seemed to be enough; for now, her pale and heatless luster was sufficient to draw him, to allow himself to be drawn, to incite something real or imagined in his blood. “Abby,” he said, moving toward her, feeling some vestigial pull when he spoke the name, the two rudimentary syllables that had once been so common on his lips. She looked at him as he drew near. Veiled by the dark, the hard specificity of the lines etched upon her face by recent days were all but erased.
“Why did you come today?” she said then before he could continue. Finally asking. Her tone was not harsh, not accusatory, but quietly demanding, deliberate.
He faltered. “I don’t know,” he answered, thinking of the terrible slackness on Levi’s muddied face after he had fallen, the empty face looming under the beam of the flashlight like a moon in the dirt. He amended, “I can’t really explain.”
“Try.”
He let out a breath of frustration. “ I wish I could tell you.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t. If you knew, you’d understand.”
She was quiet, seeming to respect this response enough not to push again.
Then a softness fell into his voice. “But I did want to see you.” He believed this now, though it might not have seemed true to him earlier. They stood side by side as he struggled to gather the effort to conquer his own resistance. And then, hastily, he put his arm around her in a way that he had not done since high school. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him, almost roughly, and could feel through her thick jacket the once-familiar shape of her waist as she shivered against the wind. She did not resist, and he pulled her closer.
“You know,” she said distantly, “even though the way he went was terrible, how sudden it was, I still prefer it over the way you went. Just going silent for no reason, like you just checked out without telling me.”
There was something pliant in her voice now, despite its distance. And with Abigail pressed to his side, Mark thought he could detect the current of his fate shifting again, merging now with hers and with the Gorskis’. Without even thinking he began to plot a future, one that seemed to unfurl before him upon the remainder of his life: he would learn to love Abigail again; he would father Zacharias’s baby as his own; he would attend electrical school and buy them a house. He would make himself useful and productive. In his mind this was less a decision than a hard, lifelong indenture that he would accept without resistance, even gratefully.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Are you?” she asked vaguely.
And with what seemed both impulse and a summoning of will, he pulled her to him full-on in the dark, then pressed his mouth blindly to hers, kissing her with a fervor that was hard and passionless and bitter, almost bludgeoning. She responded at first in kind, pressing back with empty abandon, but moments later he felt her mouth breaking up under his, suddenly going shapeless with grief. Even as he realized it was useless he clenched the back of her neck and continued to hold her to him, stubbornly, until she tore herself away in tears, grieving at last, her sobs ragged and guttural and bearing no resemblance to her crying during their fights long ago. There was nothing to say and he said nothing as she turned from him, as she retreated into the darkness, her sobbing figure going dim, then disappearing.
In the distance behind him, the door of the truck banged shut. The wind was skating hard over the surface of the water, agitating it into a jagged roil, and the river seemed wide and long and turbulent with life, destined to run and accumulate in endless and unthinking self-perpetuation. And Mark stood on its bank, quietly breathing. He saw nothing floating on the water now, no corpses, no specters. He saw only water drowning in water, minute perturbations collecting on a mass scale.
Overhead the stars looked on. Clustered along a galactic belt they now appeared not static but lazily adrift in everchanging configuration, in a refusal to be schematized. And Mark thought, without believing, how each of those trillion dots had its own set of planets, its own revolving worlds. Without believing he thought of all the obscure forms of life that must be springing from their soil; he imagined shadowy figures standing on alien riverbanks in alien Pittsburghs, each bearing the terrible weight of some tiny murder — crimes and lives and lineages as ephemeral as a dream disintegrating with consciousness. He held to this thought, trying to siphon from it a breath of solace, but the image was too tenuous to sustain. As he stood by in the dark, his imagined counterparts seemed to recede from plausibility, to dwindle into the night, until finally there was only the river and the wind and the weight of Levi Gorski’s murder, close and deafening and undeniable.
When Johnny Came Shuffling Home
by K.C. Constantine
McKees Rocks
Johnny Giumba graduated from high school on June 6, 1944, the same day the Allies invaded Normandy. A week later, he enlisted in the army, determined to kill Nips or Nazis — didn’t matter which. All he needed was a gun and bullets. Everybody he knew said we needed to get them before they got us. Johnny agreed, at first. But then he remembered Pearl Harbor and he thought, they already got us, didn’t they?
After basic training, he boarded a troop ship to England with an M1 Garand slung over his shoulder, just like everybody else aboard ship who wasn’t a non-commissioned officer. But after training for a month in England, when he finally landed in France at the end of September, his first sergeant ordered everyone in his platoon to turn in their M-1s. Then they were all issued M1 carbines. Johnny didn’t understand. Carbines were for the NCOs: staff sergeants, technical sergeants, master sergeants. Except for the NCOs in his platoon, nobody else was even a private first class.
His first sergeant told them not to worry about what kind of weapon they were carrying. The only Germans they were going to see would either be captured, wounded, or dead. They wouldn’t have to shoot any of them. Then the first sergeant told them they were being reassigned to Graves Registration.
Johnny had never heard of Graves Registration. Neither had anyone else. He wanted to know what it was.
Don’t worry, his first sergeant said. You’ll find out soon enough.
His squad leader told them they were going to need their full field transport packs. Since all they’d done in France was stand around and wait, all they had to do was pick up their packs and put them on. Johnny wanted to know where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.
We’ll find out when we get there, his squad leader told him. There’s a truck coming for us, he said. Other than that I don’t know any more than you do.
They climbed into the back of the truck just as it was starting to rain. It rained the whole two hours the truck kept moving, never once getting up to more than twenty miles an hour. Sometimes the mud was up over the axles. Once they had to get out and push. Johnny and two of the others slipped and fell to their knees in the muck, and then got showered with mud as the tires finally got traction.