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SUNY at Stony Brook
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Site Designed by Melissa Bishop/DoIT Last Modified 03/10/2003 09:31:58 AM EST
© K.E. Phillips
K. E. Phillips
Dad took us to Storytown when I was seven, so you must've been five. To Storytown U.S.A., where there was an Old West ghost town kept in law and order by Marshal Bill McKay. Marshal Bill McKay looked authentic, with chaps and hat and a heavy gun. He deputized every kid there, even the girls, right before two banditos robbed the Ghostown Bank, and we finger-shot them off the roof of the livery stable. Marshal Bill Mckay held the stolen bag of gold above his head and whipped his pint-sized posse into a frenzy of justice. Later we fingered our tin Deputy stars in the Red Garter Saloon, had sasperillas and Buffalo Burgers. It was you who spotted the banditos having beers at the bar, having a conversation that banditos wouldn't have.
I think I'll get the Plymouth.
I like a Mercury, myself.
Oh sure, but the wife wants a Plymouth.
And it was you, who said, They're fakes. You who knew that banditos don't buy Plymouths, aren't afraid of wives.
Dad said, Don't tell me you thought you could kill them with your finger.
You're smarter than that.
He looked at you, your eyes about to spill, and he said, Grow up, Speck.
He said the same thing in Jungleland, with its piped-in monkey screeches and mechanical crocodiles. There was a twenty-foot ape in there that grunted and pounded at its chest with ham-huge fists that never quite connected. All the more terrifying for its robotic twitching. There were purple hippos with bollard teeth that hissed out of the swamp below the plank walk, and life-sized cement elephants with tiny eyes that watched without blinking. You peed yourself in Jungleland.
When we were kids, you'd be Jesse James, you'd be Geronimo, but even you wouldn't be a Communist. Not the way Dad said it, spat it out hard and evil. But that never meant we didn't want to play war.
Me, I fell between the cracks. I wore my uniform in Lakenheath, England, patrolling a moist British airbase with a German Shepherd named Nelson. Not much for personality, Nelson. He was no more man's best friend than my .45. I had four years of warm pints and cricket. I had soccer matches against the RAF and New Year's Eve at the London Palladium. I wanted to learn how to fly, but my soles never left off slapping wet pavement. The only action I saw was with snaggle-toothed British girls. The only thing I learned was a list of curt German words for operating the dog. My nights were long still nights. Safe nights, not like yours.
For a while I felt cheated. This was before the television started serving up mud and meat and blood for dinner. This was a long time before Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic and the rest of them made their horror movies. This was when you sent me a letter that said, Dear Turncoat, This place reminds me of Storytown.
I damn near missed you when I went to get you in Albany. I was looking for John Wayne, for a sharp leatherneck sergeant with a distinctive limp. I only found you because I recognized that Stetson, that sweat-banded soiled Stetson. You were dragging along like you'd chewed your own leg off, the Purple Heart deep in your duffel bag with the dirty underwear. And your face, when you took the hat off, your face looked like hurt itself. Your eye was so hot on that damaged side, flicking and rotating between red ridges and white valleys.
Dad came to sit you in a chair and smile upon his younger son, his Commie-killing hero. He meant to give you a few turns down at the VFW. Dad with his huge voice that rattled us when we were his, rattles my house still. He'll boom and brag the pictures off the wall, tosses a story up for the ante and expects anyone with balls to make a bid.
He launched off with the big one, with D-Day, when his feet were wet but never cold, when he wallowed and flopped up onto the Continent and took what was maybe his first breath. He had a stretch of sand, a strategy, and strapping thick Krauts raised on knockwurst and dark beer. From you he wanted hooches and burrows, Bouncing Bettys and confirmed kills. Tell me the truth, he said, Are we losing over there? Sometimes it seems like we're losing over there. How can big corn-fed American boys get whipped by rice-eating rats?
Where's that medal? he said. Bring out the medal.
So you dug for it, you dropped it in his lap like a bad report card and retreated to my guest room. You step-thumped up the stairs and never said good-bye.
Dad said, Well, let him alone then. Pick a scab and you'll get a scar.
He held the medal up and appraised it like a jeweler. He said, I'll have to stop saying that, won't I?
When he left I set the case on my kitchen table. I opened it and looked for a long time, and did not touch, guilty as a peeping tom.
Other people came trickling through. Friends and aunts and cousins. They wouldn't really look at you. They'd say, Happy to be home? with their eyes fixed on the wall behind you. Everybody's Mama told them not to stare, but that hurts more, doesn't it, when they pay such careful attention to the dog or the TV set. When they won't meet your eye and it makes your face itch.
Some of the cousins' kids couldn't help it. One of the little ones studied you like a museum exhibit and said, You look like a pizza. You laughed. He got cracked in the head and spent an hour crying in the kitchen. You snuck him a Coke and loaned him your medal for the rest of the day. You would've let him take it, but his mother gave it back with a dirty look intended for you, directed at the wall.
Our cousin Bill said, It's a shame about the leg.
Like it was something you'd had in your pocket, like your wallet was lost and it might turn up.
And you said, Well, I got another leg. Thank God I didn't lose my hat.
Or your mind, said Bill. Ha ha ha.
I have this stupid vision of you in country. You're stalking through a tall-grass clearing with an M-16, bare-armed in a flak jacket, and that Stetson instead of a helmet. Somehow I think it's when you take the hat off to run a hand through your jungle-sweaty hair, that's when the trouble hits.
They gave you the medal because you lost half a leg, and they were kind enough to replace it with a leg as plastic and unnatural in color as a Flesh Crayola. It didn't bother you nearly as much as it did me. You had
the pegleg pirate routine, shiver me timbers and all that, but you were pounding a million craters in my hardwood floors with that hinged-metal foot. The one pair of boots you had came out only for occasions like bar-hopping or hot asphalt.
I tried, though, I brought you to look gravely down on my pock-marked oak and asked you to wear shoes.
You said, Nope. You wiggled five happy toes.
You could maybe wear a shoe just on the fake foot, I said.
You said, People would look funny at a man with just one shoe.
Do you have any idea how long it took me to refinish those floors?
You said, Walk the plank, matey.
That last summer you brought home the dog, the sort of drooling stupid mutt you can wrestle without fearing for your life. Audie Murphy knew whose dog he was. If there's a range of sound only dogs can hear, there's one they can't. My voice fell in the latter category. He slept on the couch and chewed my gunbelt into rawhide, wandered away deaf when I said his name.
When he was neutered you ceremoniously wired the Purple Heart on his collar with the aluminum name tag. You said, during the presentation, There is no prosthetic for what Audie has lost. He deserves this.
If the pulped floors bothered me, that was a hundred times worse. That incessant ting-ting that marked your wake. Most afternoons it was hushed while you sat shirtless and distant on the front porch, tipped back in your chair, Stetson low.
That Stetson might've been stapled to your head. If memory serves, it was pearl gray when you got it. Dad took you down to Warrensburg to get a graduation present and you picked out the hat and said, How's it look? Dad said, We live in New York State. People don't wear cowboy hats in New York State. How would it look in Texas? you said.
Stupid, said Dad.
I look like the Marlboro Man, you said.
And you liked that, you liked yourself in a yellow duster, with coiled lariat and a blaze-faced chestnut horse, a Marlboro in your mouth, looking wistful out over the plains.
You said, I'll be on the back cover of Time magazine.
Dad said, Well you sure as hell aren't smart or dangerous enough to make the front cover.
You'd trained and turned the brim low to throw a shadow on what you could. I'd watch you when you were getting ready to go out. You'd iron a shirt, dig for the cleanest jeans and buff up those Justins. You'd shave the good side of your face, because not a whisker fought through the other side, and then you'd size yourself up in the mirror. And I guess you thought you were a sorry sight, because you kept snugging that hat lower, lower.
Good foot on the railing, the other one swinging steady as a metronome, Camel in one hand, Coors in the other. You looked like a corrupted cut-up James Dean out there. Audie lolled uninspired beneath your chair, pink tongue waggling, appreciating the kicked-up breeze. He'd chewed on the leg until it looked like a prop from a horror movie.
I was working nights then, trying to escape the heat of the day. It was one of those sticky thick days that are tough to wade through. I dragged out on the porch with my hair rooster-ridged from sleep, and sat scratching on the steps. I talked to the Stetson, I said, Get any sleep last night?
Because when I came home at midnight, you were usually up watching ads for Ginsu knives and paint strippers between Mesquite Rodeo and late movies. As bull riding went, you liked Lane Frost. As for movies, black and white or Technicolor. It didn't matter, B-movies or Oscar-hogs.
Dad was disgusted. He said, Help him look for a job. Don't let him loaf around your house like that. And get rid of those Hippies, don't let him hang around with those sleazy bastards.
All right, I told him, I'll ground him for a week. I'll confine him to his room and take away phone privileges.
Goddammit, he said, I'm serious. Give him a hand here.
I said, I am. I'm feeding him. He eats a lot.
You took a swig of beer and tipped the can to the dog, said, Want some grog, Audie?
Stop giving him beer, I said. He's getting fat. He'll get cirrhosis.
Audie beat his meaty tail on the floor, did everything a dog can do in the way of nodding. Even your dog had problems, even he was an alcoholic just by association.
What were you watching last night? I said.
The Chase, you said. You should see Marlon Brando. He's a fat pig.
You side-eyed me and said, You're a skinny pig, Turncoat.
You had a sad-clown smile. There was that one scar that came down from the corner of your mouth, that dragged down even when you laughed.
Bullshit, Brando, I said. Why don't you go down to the VA and get checked out? They'll give you something to sleep.
It's not sleeping, you said. It's waking up.
You have dreams, I said, that you remember?
But you'd had enough of that line, so you had one of your headaches. You slid the Stetson down and pressed your chin to your chest, let the leg grind to a halt. You dropped the cigarette in the cigarette graveyard beside your lawn chair and left it to smoke itself to the end. I put an ashtray out there for you, and you still scattered little corpse-butts all over.
I said, You'll end up burning this house to the ground.
It's insured, you said. I'll make you rich. You said this through tight teeth, cradled your head like you were holding the A-bomb.
Audie heaved up and shuffled down the steps, squeezed under the porch to dig out a cool nap-hole. I let the screen door clap loud behind me, applause for your performance.
Dad said, What about girls? Does he ever bring a woman home?
No, I said. He doesn't look like Robert Redford, you know.
You don't think he's a fag, do you? With all those longhairs?
They go down to Albany sometimes, I said. He gets some female companionship down there.
Whores, said Dad. He said this like he meant Why didn't I think of that?
He said, That's good.
I turned the TV up so I could hear it getting ready for work. The anchorman, the life-sized Ken doll, was talking about doe-eyed gaunt Ethiopians, about Reagan and Russians. It's hard to believe, when you see
his wheat-toothed grin, that things like starving Africans and arms races exist on his planet. I get the feeling he's in a bunker with six-foot cement walls and ten years' worth of food. But he at least played at
sympathy when he said the veterans had a case against the government, detailed their tumors and deformed babies.
I came to the door, already sweating in my bulletproof vest. I said, Hear that? You should get in on that, go down to the VA. They don't care, you said. They'll just give me a pat on the head and some pills.
That's right, I said. I forget about your aversion to drugs.
Inside, the weatherman said it wouldn't cool off soon. He apologized as if he were personally responsible.
The Biker Gang rolled down the road, stick legs pumping pedals, playing cards poked in their spokes. They sent sly glances your way. One lifted a cautious hand and you saluted him. He grinned. They liked you the way boys like Dracula and Frankenstein. You were the neighborhood bogeyman, they'd never speak to you, but they thought they knew where you'd been and what you'd done. Their enemies died dramatic choking deaths, then got up and went home to supper. Their parents could preach all day about
baby-killing and politics and peace, but boys respect a warrior.
When I left for the station the Hairbags would start showing. Lean and long-haired, they'd drape themselves all over my porch. They were pale as hell, nocturnal as far as I knew. During the day they wouldn't set a sandal on my street, but during my shift they pinched and passed sweet-burning joints around with you. I knew them by offenses -- the poacher, the klepto, the wife-beater. One of them I arrested for chasing his neighbor around her trailer with a rifle. Another for throwing tires off his roof at passing cars.
McLeod was my partner then. He's a diluted Scot, says his name with such a lilt you have visions of bagpipes and hairy knees poking out from kilts.
But he's no fierce highlander, he just makes the motions, sleeps through his shifts. He reminds me of Nelson.
I stuck to the farm roads that night, windows open, to keep air moving through the Crown Vic. McLeod sleep-talked through the hat on his face.
He said, Carburetor. Then he said, For Christ's sake, Ed.
I'd just Armor-Alled the seats of the cruiser, and he was slipping in slow-motion toward the floor. He said, Catch me.
It was a slow night, just time checks on the radio. Nineteen hundred hours, all units accounted for.
The first call was a shoplifter at the Granville A & P. One of your buddies with bloodshot eyes and greasy snaky hair. He'd stuffed a steak down his jeans and tried to walk out. He held out his arms for the cuffs
and he said, Why don't you arrest your fucking brother, man? He's worse than me. He fills up his leg. It's perfect. That clerk just didn't think I was hung like a moose, man.
He had a stupid pot-giggle. I sat him in the back seat with McLeod. He looked at McLeod and said, Soo-eee.
I said, Shouldn't you be over at my place getting stoned?
I was going, he said. We were gonna have barbecue. You really messed up our night, man. You're a pain in the ass.
He said, Which one of you's adopted?
What? I said.
You can't be from the same gene pool, man. Speck's cool.
He thought for a minute, and snickered, and said, Like, once me and him were at this bar, right, and he's pigging-ha ha ha--he's pigging on chicken wings. So the waitress goes, Where do you put it all? And Speck goes, I got a hollow leg.
The Hairbag roared, said, A hollow leg, man.
He looked at McLeod and said, Soo-ee. He said, Piggie want a donut?
McLeod smacked him in the side of the head. McLeod's fat and a little sensitive about those things.
We had the same parents, I said, but he was raised by pirates.
Oh man, said the Hairbag, Right, ha ha ha, that's good. That's good.
He was leaning against the door, keeping an eye on McLeod. He said, Know what Speck calls barmaids?
No, I said.
Grog-wenches, he said. Grog-wenches, man. I bet you call barmaids Ma'am.
I stopped the car. I pulled onto the shoulder of Route 4 and went around like a chauffeur and opened the Hairbag's door. Yanked him out by the arm and took back my cuffs, turned him loose beside a cornfield.
Go home, I said.
What? he said.
What? said McLeod.
The Hairbag was suddenly sober.
You're stinking up my car, I said. Go home. Go steal some deodorant. Just go.
Well, shit, man. You could at least give me a ride home, said the Hairbag.
Go to Hell, I said.
I drove by the house that night. You and the Hairbags were slung out in a dopey stupor, suffering from the munchies and missing your steaks. You had the Stetson pushed back on your head in a friendly-cowboy way. I turned the halogen light on you and you yanked the hat down, the Hairbags scattered. They were luminescent. I mean, they glowed. They shot around like so many fireflies in my beam and bucked back into the woods. I left you there, sullen and lonely, staring red-faced into my taillights.
There were no more calls until ten thirty-seven. 22:37, I remember that. I woke McLeod up. He fit his hat on his cropped orange head and raised an eyebrow. We like an emergency. We like to press one of those big Crown Vic engines, rock and race over patchy roads, come skidding in to the scene. It breaks up tedious nights.
I said, Gunfire, my place. Probably they're shooting up beer cans in the backyard.
The porch was empty. No lights except for the TV winking in the living room, showing The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly to no one. Clint Eastwood was squinting and grimacing and kicking in a red desert.
Audie was scratching at the kitchen door, fit to pop or pee, so McLeod followed him out into the yard.
I heard him say, Oh Christ.
I heard him say, Sweet Jesus.
These things he said softly. Reverently.
You know how I knew you were dead? The Stetson was missing. You were belly-up to the moon, bare-headed, in my back yard. My old issued revolver was snug in your hand, your hand still soft and warm when I took it away, as if you could have hurt yourself more. I wanted to cover you up, lay a blanket over you because that's what you do with a dead body. But it was so Hell-hot that night, a blanket seemed too warm.
I clicked out the cylinder and counted five, clicked it back in.
McLeod said, Ahh, procedure, you know. You shouldn't mess with the scene.
I thought about shooting him. Even looked at him funny I guess, because he backed a step and casually dropped a hand to his own Glock, like his arm was suddenly tired.
Audie was whining and circling, snuffling, chiming with every step, but he wouldn't quite touch you. I thought about popping him, just to stop the ching-ching-ching. I ended up shooting toward him, not at him you understand, toward him. I had him zagging around the yard like a carnival duck, and then I threw the revolver at him. It hit his ribs with a hollow thunk, like he was all empty and full of air and it seemed very important just then that I feed him. I left McLeod to call you in while I went looking for Alpo.
When I called Dad he said, Well, it was probably one of those Agent Orange tumors. It probably screwed up his brain.
Same as ever, I sit away the afternoons on the porch steps. I keep my scanner on my knee to make a sound. Every so often the scanner clears its throat and rasps something-hundred hours. Every so often it sends someone somewhere to fix a situation.
The Biker Gang comes by and they look steady at me. Their parents all brought me food. They said, It's the government, it's the machine, you should sue. And they handed over soyburgers and home-baked bread. The relatives all brought me food. They said, Don't blame yourself, and held out casseroles and cakes. I feel like a well-fed widow. I have dozens of dishes and I don't know who they belong to.
What makes them think I'd blame myself.
Our cousin Bill, when he came by with lasagna, said your name should go on the Wall the same as everyone else's.
I told him I didn't think it should.
I haven't cleaned out your room. I've poked around some. I found about four ounces of weed. I found a dollar bill, torn in half, with old blackened blood soaked in it. Somewhere someone, dead or alive, has the
other half that matches up to the ragged edges. I found ten library books that were due two years ago, all of them about film history and criticism. Except for one, a weighty tome of cowboy pictures. Beautiful photos that can't be dated, of slit-eyed dusty men riding and branding and roping and thinking. I found every issue of Police Marksman I've been missing and a stack of Playboys that make for much better reading. I took them, and all of your Merle Haggard tapes.
Sometimes I listen to Merle instead of the scanner. He sings,
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee,
We don't take our trips on LSD,
We don't make a party out of lovin',
We like livin' right and being free.
It's a very funny song.
He sings, We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street.
Dad loves this song.
There's a familiar figure slinking down the street, no shirt. I call out to him and he hesitates, comes shuffling up through dead leaves. He sits light on the end of the stairs, ready to bolt. He takes the beer I
offer him, sort of looks in the bottle to see if the poison is visible to the naked eye.
He says, We been looking for Audie Murphy.
I don't expect him to turn up, I say.
Your dog's been gone for four weeks. He got very serious. He got skinnier and skinnier and finally vanished altogether. He wouldn't eat. I bought him every kind of dog food. I bought him a T-bone. I got down on all fours and pretended to eat the food, I said, Mmm-mmm, this is good eats! but Audie was unimpressed. He looked at me like I was a moron and sighed a very human sigh. When his ribs could be counted I took him to a vet, who took out and tested half the blood in the dog, and then delivered a lecture
on animal psychology and the canine mourning process. Which sounded like a crock of shit to me. But Audie kept on chewing your Stetson and sleeping on your bed, and for a while anyway that kept him alive.
The Hairbags tacked lost dog posters on everything in town. They came and asked for a snapshot of him, but we hadn't taken one since he was six weeks old.
Dad and I looked for him, kicked around in the woods for a couple weeks, but you know why dogs go off like that. Dad played scout and kneeled on the ground looking for tracks. He sniffed and squinted and poked at dents in the dirt. We threaded through trees and barbed-wire fences, yelling Audie Murphy Audie Murphy like crazed movie fans. He took the Purple Heart with him. Dad was looking more for that than Audie. He was looking in little holes and crevices that a dog wouldn't fit in.
The Hairbag scratches his white arm. He looks out of place in daylight, puffy-eyed and slow and vulnerable. On his bicep is a bruise-blue tattoo that says Semper Fi. He finishes his beer and hands the bottle over, says, Thanks.
He says, We'll keep looking. Shuffles on down the road.
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