When he’s finished, Beverly asks him in a shaky voice, “Nobody died that day, Derek?”
“Nobody.”
He sits up. Perched on the table’s edge, with the blanket floating in a loose bunting around his shoulders, the sergeant flexes and relaxes his long bare toes.
“Nobody died, Bev. That’s why I got the tattoo — it was a miracle day. Amazing fucking grace, you know? Fifty pounds of explosives detonate, and we all make it back to the FOB alive.”
Beverly smooths a wrinkle in a square of gauze, tracing the path of what was, the last time she looked, the Diyala River.
“Nobody died. I lost a chunk of my hearing, but I just listen harder now.”
His face is beaming. “I love telling that story. You’re looking at the proof of a miracle. My tattoo, it should hang in a church.”
Then he slides toward her and cups one big hand behind her head. He sinks his fingers through the gray roots of her hair and holds her face there. It’s a strange gesture, more gruff than romantic, his little unconscious parody of how she feels toward him, maybe — it makes her think, of all things, of a mother bear cuffing its cub. He digs his fingers into her left cheek.
“Thank you, Beverly.” Zeiger talks in a telephone whisper, as if their connection is about to be cut off at any moment by some maniacal, monitoring operator. “You can’t even imagine what you’ve done for me here—”
For what is certainly too long an interval Beverly lets her head rest against his neck.
“Oh, you’re very welcome,” she says into a muzzle of skin.
What happens next is nothing anyone could properly call a kiss; she turns in to him, and his lips go slack against her mouth; when this happens, whatever tension remains in him seems to flood into her. She fights down a choking sensation and turns her head, reaches for his hand.
“Beverly—”
“Don’t worry. Look at that snow coming down. Time’s up.”
“Beverly, listen—”
“You’ll be fine, Derek. I don’t think those bruises will come back. But if they do, you come back, too. I’m not going anywhere, okay? I’ll be waiting right here.”
Several months after her last encounter with Derek, the phone rings. It’s Janet, and just like that they are on speaking terms again. Janet invites her out to Sulko, and one morning Beverly finds herself standing in front of her nieces’ class as a special guest for Careers Day. Little girls in violet vests sit patiently on the carpet. Their drawings shimmer on a corkboard wall near the window, bright shingles fluttering under pins. Beverly demonstrates a massage on a child volunteer, and the other students gather in a circle and dutifully grasp one another’s shoulders. She’s amazed to see how fearlessly they touch each other, pure pleasure flowing from tiny hands to shoulders without any of the circuit breakers that are bound to come later. The class runs into the lunch hour, but during the Q&A even her nieces are too shy to ask a question. At last, at the teacher’s violent, whispered encouragement, one loopy-looking kid with pigtails the bright orange of cooked carrots raises her hand.
“What do you like the most about your job?”
“Oh, that’s an easy one!” Beverly summons a smile for the girl. “Helping.”
Most days, she doubts she helped the sergeant at all. She thinks it’s far more likely that she aggravated his condition, or postponed a breakdown. But a picture comes to her of Zeiger walking down the street into vivid light, the tattoo moving with his muscles. She wants to believe that this is possible — that he lifted the gauze to find the welts healed and the tattoo settling into a new shape. Not even in her fantasy can she guess what it might look like. In her wildest imaginings, Zeiger finds both things — a story he can carry, and a true one.
The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis
The scarecrow that we found lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to country men and women. They lived in hick states, the I states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was my impression from TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I could never remember (my picture of scarecrow country was ripped directly from the 7-Grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly, and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist, too, copying its homework).
A scarecrow did not belong in our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, homeless women with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was covered by a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a bunch of spray-painted dicks. Cops leaned against the cement walls, not straw guards.
We were city boys. We lived in these truly shitbox apartments. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broom in a Bermuda shirt, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled that one. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.
“Hey, you guys.” I swallowed. “Look—” And I pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a striped sweater that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. Gus got to the kid first.
“You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll. It’s got straw inside it.”
“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo. And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. The scarecrow regarded its innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.
I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw. Long strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Chlorophyll greens and yellows. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside him, I wondered — how long had it been inside him? I scanned his sweater for a rip, a cold, eel-like feeling thrashing in my own belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a foreign soldier watching blood spill from his head with an expression of extraordinary tranquillity. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes fluttered and shut. Then, without warning, the story changed, and the footage sprang away to the trees of a new country under an ammonia-blue sky. I’d sat there with jam leaking into my mouth, feeling suddenly unable to swallow — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting the soldier’s face dissolve into that calm?