The farmhouse had aged, its white clapboards needing a fresh coat of paint, the front steps sagging from the weight of time and weather. Branches of the oak tree he had climbed as a boy poked at the upstairs windows, as if looking for a fight. There was a newer car in the driveway, a brown Buick, but Johnson knew his parents still owned the house because of the tulips his mother cultivated every spring in the little garden that surrounded the porch like a moat. It was Sunday morning, and he waited for them to go to church. He held his breath as they emerged, gray haired and frailer, his father’s jowls touching the collar of his shirt, the flesh on his mother’s upper arms sagging, as if gravity were trying to pull them into their graves.
Tears ran rivulets into his cheeks. He had prepared himself for this, for his return to Ohio, but despite the warnings from his head, his heart had fed on the warm honeysuckle of memory, which contrary to everything else, did not age, except for himself. He wondered briefly whether he was a memory caught in the folds of time, or perhaps a ghost. Maybe he was not real, nor Maggie, nor anything that had happened once he had left Ohio. But the barrier between the world before him, where time had moved along, and his, did not seem to have a beginning or an end, as thin as air but as impenetrable as a boulder.
What had his parents thought when he had not written them or called upon arriving in Montana? Did they call the police, urge them to contact the station in Helena? Had his father driven out to Helena himself, visiting restaurants, hotels, and bars, describing his tall, muscular son with the slightly crooked nose, his hazel eyes and dimples, a boy who looked like any other boy but who was theirs and was missing; had there been a report filed? Had they given up, or had they not even tried, fearing he had become one of the lost men, who had returned from the war but had not stopped fighting, the drip of alcohol into the bloodstream the only anesthetic for spiritual casualty.
He watched the Buick back out of the driveway before scrambling for the rear of the house. Outside the door, a broken planter stood, one that had once held sunflowers. It seemed strange that his parents, so meticulous that they replaced or repainted all outdoor ornaments every season, had left it to disintegrate, slabs of faded terra cotta that had fallen outward like petals and mixed with dirt and stone to form its own curious layer of earth. He lifted the circular bottom plate and found the back door key in a wormy crater underneath. He wondered if they had left the key there, if they had not the heart to close the door on him.
The smell of coffee and his mother’s perfume still lingered in the kitchen. He pressed his palm on the stone countertop, feeling sick from the scent. The sickness was in his heart, not his stomach, a cloud with hammers that drummed over his chest and made the back of his neck sweat. He inhaled the traces of gardenia and honeysuckle, hoping he’d pass out and wake up, his paper on Beowulf on the table, a half-filled coffee mug, his life still before him. But he would have to go back further than that, before the war, when he was still a boy, still normal.
But he was home now. Maybe he was still normal. Perhaps it had all been a strange dream. But the kitchen was different—new cabinets and appliances—an oven in the wall, a refrigerator with two long vertical doors, one of which had a lever sticking out of it. He pulled the lever, and then pushed it back, jumping when cold, square boulders tumbled out. He squatted and picked them up, feeling them melt on his palm. Ice cubes. Had he broken the refrigerator? He pushed the lever again. More ice tumbled out. A refrigerator that dispensed ice cubes. It was like everything that had changed when he was gone, so inconsequential, so significantly massive.
Still, he was home now. Perhaps it would all end. He needed to know for sure. He scooped up the new ice and put it in a paper towel with the old ice, numbing the pinky finger of his left hand. Then, with his right hand, he reached for the butcher block, pulling out his mother’s butcher’s knife. In the back yard, he found a mostly level stump, a tree that possibly had been diseased, too close to the Johnson home, and therefore removed. He knelt and folded the fingers of his left hand into a tight fist, except for his pinky, which he extended as far from the others as possible. Then he lined up the butcher’s knife with his pinky and drew back, closing his eyes.
His scream hurt him more than the pain; high, then low-pitched, like an animal crouched in the shadows of its life as death closed from the corners and softly kissed light to darkness. He staggered around the yard, holding his hand in the flimsy paper towel, wetting Maggie’s father’s flannel shirt with warm, sticky blood. When the white-hot sensation that traveled from his fingers to his teeth became recognizable as pain, rather than an altered state of existence, he stumbled back to the house and to get paper towels from the kitchen. He was never much of a planner. He sat on the steps outside the back door and unthreaded the shoelace from one of the logging boots and looped it around what remained of his pinky, pulling tight. He pulled until the remaining skin, just below where his mid-joint had been, began to close inward toward the bone. But the blood was everywhere, the step, his shirt and hands, splashed on the tops of his boots, one loose and laceless.
The pinky. It remained on the stump in a pool of blood. He scooped it into a bloody towel and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he took off the flannel shirt and mopped up the stump and the steps before wrapping the rest of the paper towels into the shirt and heading inside. He sat at the table, shaking. What had he done? The familiar contours of the wooden seat, the squeaking of the legs, leaned against his heart, and he could not stop the tears from tumbling down his cheeks. Here, he had sat eating dinner every day of his life—pot roast and chicken pot pie and beef stew and mashed potatoes. Here, he sat in December 1941 and announced to his parents he was enlisting in the Army. They had been returning from church, in the older, green Buick, and the first thing they noticed was crying. People crying in the streets downtown, huddled under their mufflers and woolen caps, wandering through space like empty wrappers. They huddled in small groups, their faces broken, before dispersing again into pairs of twos and threes.
“Turn on the radio, Harv.” Johnson’s mother touched his father’s shoulder in the front seat.
The voice of the disc jockey filled the car. Japanese warplanes have attacked Pearl Harbor…more than two thousand Americans killed.
He was young, and there wasn’t much to think about, in terms of consequences. He was young and didn’t know what lay ahead, which was the beauty of being young—so many risks taken before one has the sense to realize the dangers. He was young and going to fight.
“Of course,” his father merely had said after Johnson stated his intentions at dessert, after his mother served the tapioca. He pushed back in his chair and patting his stomach, bulbous like an onion over his slacks. “It’s the honorable thing to do. The American thing to do.”
“Harv.” His mother dropped her spoon. Her face, broad and unassuming, had knit itself into lines of worry as she had prepared dinner. It had permitted the minimal movement required for her to consume food, but now the tension in it had snapped completely. Her eyes bulged from her face, her mouth hung open, her bottom lip was wet and flecked with tapioca. “He could get killed. He could get hurt. We might never see him again.”
“Mom, I’ll be all right,” Johnson said. “Don’t cry, now.”
“Well, the thing is, Helen, they gonna draft him eventually, anyway.” His father lit a cigarette and pushed the pack across the table to Johnson. “Here, you’re a man now, Calvin.”
“Thanks, Dad.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes and fumbled with the matches so his father would not know he’d been smoking since he was a junior, behind the football field and the barn and the drugstore.
“When I was in the war, our replacements were terrible.” Calvin’s father talked, cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. “Could barely aim a weapon. And they got killed as soon as they stepped off the convoys. If Calvin enlists early, he’ll get better training. He’ll have a better chance now than later.”
“A better chance to live?” His mother pushed back her chair and stood up. She leaned over and snapped the cigarette in Calvin’s mouth. “That’s what we’re talking about? Improving my son’s chances of living?”
She hurried from the dining room, the back door slamming behind her. Calvin put the broken cigarette in his father’s ashtray and didn’t ask for another.
“She’ll be all right.” His father exhaled. He looked thoughtfully into the distance. Or perhaps he had indigestion. “This is a new ball game, with the Japs attacking. And we’ll all need to make sacrifices. You’re doing the right thing, fighting the right fight. I’m proud of you, son.”
His father had not been terribly proud of him up to that point. He did not get a scholarship to Ohio State. He did not get the grades for anywhere else. He knew his father wanted him to join him at the police force, but the precinct at Bowling Green suffered from a severe lack of adventure to a boy who’d not been anywhere except for Yosemite the summer he was fourteen.
But his mother, he had not wanted her pride, only her love. She sat outside in the small gazebo he and his father had built the summer before. It was cold and she did not have a coat. He sat opposite her on the round bench inside the gazebo as the air whipped through the sleeves of her dress, blew up her apron.
“You don’t have to go.” She looked at him, and what she was saying with her eyes was I don’t want you to go.
“There’s no other choice,” he answered. “Our country needs me.”
“I need you, Calvin. Your father.” She wove her hands together. She always wove them together after finishing half of her desert, as if she was not allowed, did not deserve, any more than she had already taken.
“Mom, you can’t say that. If Pastor Smith heard you…”
“I don’t care about what the pastor hears or doesn’t hear. You’re our only child, Calvin. Now. There was one before you…but we lost him before he entered this world. I never told you because we didn’t see the point in burdening you with it, but I’m not going to lose another.”
“I don’t see what other choice I have,” he repeated. He rose and wrapped his arms around her. She felt stiff, empty, like a turkey carcass after Thanksgiving. “I’ll be all right.”
Now, at the table, he wondered if there had been another choice. Perhaps he could have gone to Canada, or to Mexico. Maybe none of this would have happened. He could have returned a few years after the war, gotten a job, gotten married. Had children. Made his mother happy. She had only wanted his love, and he couldn’t even give that to her. He put his head on the table and cried, his nose clogged and runny, his eyes swelling like golf balls underneath his lids. He’d done nothing in his life, given his parents nothing to be proud of, no solace for their sacrifice of raising him, of loving him. He wished he were dead. At least they would have closure.
He walked through the house to his old bedroom, noting the new furniture, a new piece of sewing work that lay in jumbles of yarn and needles on the table by his mother’s easy chair. Was she making a sweater for his father? A scarf? He looked at the photographs on the mantel of the fireplace—in color! They were his parents, but they were not. Their brilliant flesh tones and bright fabrics and blue skies leered at him, courtesy of the miracle of Kodak. They were people who were childless, who smiled at the camera, but their eyes belied the emptiness of those who had lost, whose eyes you could not look at for long for fear that you would fall into that deep well with them, unable to return, instead looking awkwardly into your lemonade or scotch and scratching your neck, wondering where your wife had gone. He picked one up, relieved it was not dusty, that the requirements of the household were not being neglected by his mother, that a prolonged depression had not let everything go the way of the planter. He put the picture back. These were not his parents. They were people who had simply gotten old.
Shit. His room was as he had left it. He sucked in his breath so that he would not begin to cry again. On his desk lay unopened letters. Their envelopes were yellowed, and he took them in his hands, feeling the weight of years on their delicate fabrics. His pulse quickened when he saw the return addresses, New York, NY, but then his hopes dipped when he saw the postmarks, 1947 and 1948.
Dear Calvin, the first began. I hope you’ve been taking care of yourself. Fall in New York is lovely! The energy, the bustle of the taxis and subways, the awfully smart people at parties, interesting classes—it was as if New York were gift-wrapped just for me.
I think of you often and miss you. I can’t quite explain what there was between us, but I can feel its absence. Will you come to New York to visit? Yours, Kate.
He folded the letter back into the envelope and opened the second. How long had they lain like this, along with his parent’s hopes for his return, on the desk?
There were three more letters from New York, before it appeared she had given up. But he had not. Twenty years, more, had been taken from him, and he deserved to get them back. He deserved another chance. Or did he? The rules that had existed in this room, this house, this earth, before he left for war—the passage of time, the guarantee of death—seemed a fallacy. He did not know what the rules were anymore. They were his to make. He would find her in New York, at least try—a day, a week, maybe longer—before trying to find Stanley. But he was down to his last few dollars from Maggie, enough to get on a bus. He would figure out how to get around in New York once he got there, eat trash if he had to.
The letters were opened now; there was no way to undo that, for his parents to know someone had been here. He put them in the back pocket of his jeans. They were his, he told himself, and he shouldn’t feel guilty about coming here and taking them. He opened a drawer and pulled out a folded undershirt, where his mother had always put them, sliding it over his bare chest, then opened the closet and found a sweatshirt, one he used to chop wood in during the late falls. He put the grey fabric against his cheek and felt it wet with his tears before he pushed it to his face to muffle his cries. He was home now. He could wait for his parents to return. They wouldn’t care how he looked, what had happened. They would only care it was him.
But who or what was he? He went into the bathroom and removed the bloody tissue. The bleeding from his stump had stopped, and the pain had receded to a hot, uncomfortable throb. He felt for the pinky in his pocket and took it out, pressing it to the still-open wound. Then he undid the shoelace and wrapped it around both parts, criss-crossing the thread until the pinky was loosely secured on the stump. Carefully, he washed it and wrapped it in toilet paper, flushing the bloody paper towel down the toilet. The waiting began.
He heard a car on the road. He could stand in the living room, mangled hand in his pocket, and wait. Hopefully his father’s heart was still strong. He could tell them—what would he tell them? Perhaps they wouldn’t ask. Perhaps his coming home precluded any explanation for his absence. He could still find Kate and Stanley. There was time for everything. After a few minutes, he heard the turn of the Buick onto the half mile of dirt road to their home, the fat of the rubber tires on gravel.
He held his breath and slowly unraveled the toilet paper. Already he could see that the blood had congealed, that healing was taking place at some accelerated pace. The skin on the edges of his fingers was already beginning to stretch over the bone and muscle and touch the pinky, to connect the two parts.
He was not normal. He had been a Christian in the traditional American sense; reverence for a god that seemed as natural and unquestionable as Santa Claus had been when he was five. There would be nothing in his parent’s Bible—theirs or anyone else’s—that would explain him. And if God did not allow him to exist, then God could not exist for him, either. The chasm that was formerly God’s place in his heart had been filled with cement. He thought of Kate. How could she possibly love a man who was not a man, in body or heart? How could she love a man almost thirty years—to her—gone?
And his parents, how could they understand? How could they parade him around town, their seemingly prodigal son, freak of nature? Or, they simply wouldn’t believe it was him. Or maybe it was he who was scared, to see them so fragile, so aged. So human. He wadded the blood-soaked flannel shirt into a ball and ran down the stairs and, stopping before the mantel and—there was no time for aesthetic debate—took the first picture he saw. It was one he had seen before, knew very well—a black and white of his parents together before he was born. He stuffed it into the bloody hobo bundle of his shirt, hurrying through the house. He closed the back door behind him and dropped the key back onto the circle of earth.
There was nothing he could do now but wait until they’d entered the house from the front before running for his life. The cornfields, still in their spring infancy, could not hide him, nor could the dirt road that caterpillared unobstructed to town. He heard the front door close, a small locust of voices—his mother and father and probably another couple from church they’d invited to brunch and bridge—inhabit the parlor. Then he tore across the back yard, his heels kicking up the earth like a tractor hoe.
He made it to the road when he heard her voice, warbled and weaker than the bell of sound that had rung through the house many years ago.
“Calvin?!? Calvin?!? Wait!”
The toilet paper unraveled from his pinky as he ran, and he grabbed at his hand to keep his hanging digit from dropping to the earth. But, to his surprise, it was almost attached, like a maggot to a piece of meat.
He wanted to turn back and look at her, to take one last mold of her face that he could cast in his mind, and perhaps leave one for her as well, that her son was alive, healthy, and hadn’t aged a day in almost thirty years.
He kept running.
The last time Johnson had been to the bus station in downtown Bowling Green, he had been coming home, from the war, to start his life. That life was now over; it had not ever actually begun. Now life would start again. Kate and Stanley were part of his past, and now perhaps they would be part of his future. But they had never felt like the present. The present was confusion, loneliness. And low on funds. He took the last few dollars of the money Maggie had given him and bought a ticket to New York, a hot dog, a cup of coffee, two packs of cigarettes, and the daily. In the back of the Greyhound he opened the paper and scanned the headlines. Where to start, to find out about the world? The Olympic summer games were being held in Munich. Germany, now a friend to the world? President Richard Nixon announced that 12,000 more soldiers would be withdrawn from Vietnam, from a peak of 543,400 in 1969. Johnson looked at the advertisements. Watches that kept time with quartz crystals. Televisions the size of ovens, with color screens. It was like visiting a foreign country, except he knew the language.
As the bus vibrated to life, he sat up in his seat. His foot slipped, and he bent over, wondering whether he had dropped a section of the newspaper. The glossy cover of primary colors, the arching red and yellow letters, comforted him.
A Superman comic. Some boy, twelve or maybe thirteen, must have left it behind. Johnson opened the pages and settled into reading. He had spent many hours on his own bed as a boy, turning the pages, reading about the man of steel and his nemesis, Lex Luther, the love of his life, Lois Lane. He was fascinated that the forces that pulled on Superman in different directions shared the same initials. He was not smart enough to think further into the implications. Instead, he concentrated on Superman’s strengths. A man who could perform amazing feats, who could not die. Who had no friends, could tell no one, as Clark Kent, of his plight. Could love no one. Was revered as a hero. And was completely misunderstood.
It had been forty years, maybe. And every month, Superman, now more muscular, more handsome in 1972 than ever, saved the world, saved damsels, saved puppies. And he never lived happily ever after with Lois, never retired to his farm or a cabin or a houseboat in Cuba, needing time to himself. He never had a superboy or a supergirl. He kept being super. He was too young to remember his parents, Jor-El and Lara, paying homage to them in his fortress of solitude.
Johnson pulled out the picture of his parents. At the bus station bathroom he liberated it from its bulky frame and slid the black-and-white photo into the wallet he had bought at a bus station in Illinois. He looked so much like his father, the slightly wavy brown hair, the broad forehead and wide-spaced eyes, full lips. It was a face that held gravity, that was weighted with action and with heavy, laborious thoughts moving like damp sand through a straw. His mother’s slightly pointed chin and dimples gave the bottom of his face more playfulness, like a rock formation whose bottom had worn smooth where it met the waterline.
Here, his parents, standing on the shores of Put-In-Bay Island, Ohio, arms linked like lace, were even younger than he. He had not even been born. And as his memory of them faded, they would remain young, their smiles, their eyes aglow with the continued sunrise of their lives.
He returned the picture and wallet to the inner pocket of his leather jacket (bought at an Army Surplus store in Montana), where they brushed against Kate’s letters. How would he find Kate in New York? Would she be married, working in a museum? Would she be happy? Would she be happy to see him? Or had she moved on, like time, leaving him with his own Lex Luther, loneliness, also beginning with an L?
He held the comic tightly in his hands, like it was the Bible, or a fortune cookie. It may as well have been written in Chinese, like the rest of the world. The sun was behind them now, the bus plowing eastward, the orange horizon slipping, impossibly, into the color of typewriter ribbon. He put his hand on the window, making a fist. If his hand went through the glass, it would bleed. The blood would cover the window and the seat and his clothes, enough to kill someone. But not him. If he knew, during the war, that he could never die, would he have fought differently? If they all could not die, what would be the point of the war? What would be the point of anything? Death made so many things possible: domination, fear, gratitude.
Now, he was only scared of living. He leaned his head against the glass and tried to sleep. He was not scared of sleep, of the bus flying off the road and turning over and over, propelling him from the window like a bottle rocket, of the bus bursting into the flames and burning him to ash. He might be happy, perhaps, if those things happened, if he did not survive. He was scared that, no matter how many times he went to sleep, no matter how many times the world faded to black, he was always guaranteed of waking.