When the war was over, Grant clipped his hair close and made the long ride out to the flats where the railway ran east-west. He left in the night with the moon near full, taking a horse nobody would much miss if it failed to come back. There was no hurry. The sun and train were hours away, the packed dirt full of hoarded August heat. Stars jumped where the heat met a night breeze. Hoppers beat themselves against his legs and the horse’s flank. He had an early apple in the pannier and ate it all but the seeds and stem, which he spit into the weeds. Once he’d spotted the tracks he followed them west to the empty station house and dismounted. He freed up his bag and shouldered it and turned to the old horse.
Hi! Go on home!
The horse was still. Grant made to lunge at him and he backed off a few steps and turned to browsing in the grass.
Go on! Grant said. He took off his hat and swatted at the horse and kicked him gently in the ribs. The horse shied and let out a disgruntled squeal. He rolled his head and let out a snort and turned around north. After an interval he walked off without looking back.
This had been a town called Grissom, but nobody lived in it now. When Grant was a boy two Mexicans had been hanged here for stealing horses. This was long after such things were decreed by courts, but the men had no local family and not much English, and no one who knew of their crimes objected to the punishment. That they were guilty was beyond doubt. They were found on the range asleep near the stolen horses, with their Winchesters lashed to the riggings. Grant was not sure where they’d been hanged, he’d been told the low rung on the water tower, but he did remember that for some time nobody bothered to cut down their bodies. Not long after this the last inhabitants of Grissom quit the town for good.
There was some doubt that the train would stop at all. Grant had sent a letter saying he would be here to meet it, but he had not requested a reply. If the train came, he planned to get on it and ride it as far as it took him, and if it didn’t he would go back to the ranch and resume work as if nothing had happened. His parents and brother would know what he had tried to do but wouldn’t be inclined to mention it.
As it happened somebody was already waiting, an old man wearing a crisp new suit and clutching a shabby carpetbag. His jaw worked with an involuntary motion, but he regarded Grant with clear eyes that followed him as he walked to the only other bench on the tiny platform. The bench shifted under him then steadied. Above hung a sign with GRISSOM painted clearly on it. The windows of the station house behind him were covered by bare boards. Across the tracks stood a silo with its elevator in ruins at its foot, and behind it in the indeterminate distance rose a solitary table of earth, disfigured by an irregular rocky outcrop the wind had spared, that could have served as a stage where giants performed for travelers of the ancient past.
Grant took off his hat and looked over at the old man. The old man had been watching. Now he looked away.
Since the victory over Japan Grant had given this journey a great deal of thought. He had pictured himself much as he was right now, seated and calmly awaiting his train. He had imagined the rocking motion the train would make, and the swaying of his fellow passengers with it and the soundless slosh of his breakfast coffee in the dining car. Less clear in his mind was what he might do when he got off. He supposed there would be work wherever he went and people who could tell him how to get it. His only certain intent was to reach the Atlantic Ocean and walk barefoot into it, his shoes and socks behind him on the beach. Beyond that imagination failed him.
Something moved in his peripheral vision and he looked up to find the old man coming toward him, holding his bag close as if somebody might take it.
Time? the man said.
Grant had no watch. He said he didn’t know. This didn’t seem to satisfy the old man, but he asked nothing further and remained standing between the benches, as if to return was more than he could manage. A strong wind passed like a ghost train through the station and both men touched their hands to their hats. Light began to gather as if pulled by the wind. Grant offered the man a seat on his bench.
‘Bliged, said the man.
He was on his way to Chicago, he said, to visit with a son and the son’s wife and children. But the visit filled him with dread. He could not remember the name of his son’s wife, nor the names of his grandchildren or even how many of them there were. He feared that he wouldn’t recognize them at the station and that they would turn him away. And the ride in his son’s car to their home outside the city: he’d seen pictures of the thousands of cars that raced along the highways and worried about an accident. Grant didn’t know what to tell him. These seemed like valid fears. He asked the man where he lived.
Oh, right ‘round here.
Grissom?
The old man frowned without meeting Grant’s eyes. Not no more, he said.
Some time later the train came into view in the distance. It came slowly and didn’t seem to get any larger as it approached, so that when it stopped before them it appeared a small thing to Grant, powerless to bring them any significant distance. Its doors fell open but no one emerged to usher them inside. Grant stood up and asked the old man if he’d like a hand with his bag, but the man ignored Grant’s question and made his own way onto the train and disappeared.
Grant followed with neither reluctance nor eagerness, mounting the three steps because it was what he had anticipated doing. Though the day was now bright, the car was dark. A few passengers sat in grimy pools of light cast through soiled windows, while unoccupied seats remained shadowed by heavy opaque curtains. The passengers were asleep. Grant walked to the center of the car, raised his bag to the overhead rack, then thought better and set it down on a nearby seat. He slid in after it. No pull was visible for the curtain so he grabbed two handfuls of fabric and pushed them aside. Already the train had begun to move. He watched the strange butte roll out of view, then brought his bag onto his lap as if he might open it. But there was nothing inside that he needed and he put it back.
He fell asleep. He sensed the braking of the train and the passage of people in the aisle. Around him more curtains were opening and whispered conversations grew louder. He felt a hand touch his shoulder and opened his eyes to find the conductor standing over him, one hand holding his tickets and punch and the other in his change pocket. He asked how far Grant was going.
Where’s it headed to?
Chicago.
Okay, Grant told him, and paid. Then he fell back to sleep.
When he next woke the sun was high over a miniature range of hills with cattle walking on them, and a heavy man of about sixty sat beside him. The man had one hand in Grant’s bag, which Grant had left open when he paid the conductor. Now the hand withdrew.
Where’re you headed, soldier?
Grant met his eyes, which were small and hard like plum stones. Chicago, he said.
You ought to know better than to leave your belongings unguarded beside you like that. You may find them made off with.
Grant zipped the bag shut and pushed it under the seat with his calves resting against it. The older man settled himself, stretching his body out, shoving both feet beneath the seat in front and nudging each shoe off using the toe of the opposite foot. With his creased wool trousers and starched shirt mussed by travel, he carried the air of a modest businessman, of monotonous work reluctantly done. An occasional tic wrinkled his nose and mouth. He was ewe-necked, with a large head that nodded like a daisy when he talked. He had not taken his eyes off Grant.
Been on the Pacific coast, have you? Back from where?
Grant glanced out the window. A motte of tall leaning cotton-woods passed, cupping a cluster of what could have been broken tombstones. Though he’d just woke up, he felt played out. He would have been riding line right now, seeking fence to fix. Instead his brother Max was likely doing it. About now they would all be acting like Grant had never been.
Okinawa, he said as the graveyard hove out of sight. Peleliu.
The man nodded. Not Iwo, huh?
No.
Ever eat dog?
No, Grant said.
The man was laughing. Damn good thing, he said. These boys come back saying they ate dog as if it’s a admirable thing. God damn. He stuck out a bent hand, the knuckles tough and enlarged like knots in a branch. Sam Kroch, he said, high at the end like a question, so that Grant did not immediately know it was his name the man was speaking.
Grant Person, Grant said presently and shook the hand.
You a farm boy, son? You have got a sunpecked look to you.
Yessir.
You going home? Indiana? Illinois?
Indiana.
So you’re a hero back home, are you. Look at you, all in one piece. Some of these boys come back all tied up together like a pot roast. You get yourself shot?
The wound grew hot at the question, the one thing Grant had as evidence if he needed it. He had suffered it when a neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land and mired herself in mud. Grant pulled her out and she bolted, jerking the rope from his hands. The rope whipped around his calf and cut a channel through his trousers and into the flesh. This was four years ago. Scarred white and without hair, it could pass for a bullet wound if it had to.
I took one in the leg at Peleliu, he said. Healed up good. He cleared his throat. I still favor it some, he said.
Kroch laughed as if at a clever joke. I don’t doubt that, he said, not a bit. And he tipped his head back still smiling and went to sleep.
* * *
For a short time there were six of them, all boys. The oldest was called Edwin. He was eight the winter Grant was seven, naturally broader in the shoulders and face and taller due to his age. This was at the onset of the Depression, and of all the children only Edwin seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. Under it he grew serious and sure, like a person expected to take control of the outfit at any moment if necessary, which in fact he was. At seven Grant was still thought of as a child, his horsemanship a form of play, not work, his assigned tasks around the place chores as opposed to duties. The others truly were children: Thornton was slow even for a four-year-old; Robert, at two and a half, was his playmate and protector. Max could barely walk yet and Wesley, a newborn, was already sick. In which way he was sick was initially unclear. He was declared to be colicky and cried evenings for many hours before sleep. He refused the breast. When Grant thought about this time, which was not often, he remembered Max sucking greedily, his shod feet dangling off their mother’s chair, while Wesley lay silent and watchful nearby in the bassinet. Wesley was born too small and never grew significantly.
Their mother’s name was Asta. Their father was called John. He was raised in the north of England and collected her from her home in Iceland during the first war. She had kept house with her mother there while her father raised sheep, and now in America she kept house and bore sons while her husband raised sheep. Growing up Grant never heard a single word of Icelandic from her and few of anything else. Nevertheless her English was good. Although she would not have been called beautiful, she stood apart from other women in the clarity and fullness of her features and by her great height, nearly six feet. She was feared and respected by the ranch men, most of whom were not as tall. Among those who feared her was John, who was short and talkative and boastful and whose strange skills, such as carving toys out of pinewood and playing the fiddle, distracted him from ranch work, at which he was mediocre at best. Away from Asta he seemed to blame her for his ineptitude. He could often be heard wondering what good she had done him, with all of her supposed sheep smarts. In her presence he would blame the shiftlessness and disobedience of the boys, once they were old enough to blame. Asta ignored him and continued to provide him with sons. She knew as well as he did the worth, on a ranch, of six boys.
On Christmas night 1929 they ate dinner together alone, without the hands. This uncharacteristic family privacy made them all uncomfortable and they struggled for things to say. Wesley nursed weakly for a short time, then once laid down began to cry, and the sound seemed to unhinge Asta, who held her knife and fork tightly but didn’t touch them to her food. When John told her to go quiet him, Edwin got up from the table, went to the bassinet and whispered in the baby’s ear. In minutes he was asleep.
The following morning Wesley woke congested in the nose and throat and spent the day facedown on their mother’s lap, expelling mucus. Two days later he began to turn gray, then dull purple in blotches, and his fingers went cold and stiff. The following afternoon his head began to bulge at the fontanel. He stopped crying. That night he fell into a coma and he died under the doctor’s care in the late morning of January 1.
Grant dreamed that a gentle horse, a blood bay, had entered the house and knelt before the bassinet, and tiny Wesley had climbed onto its red back and ridden away into the night. That afternoon he went to his mother where she lay next to the baby’s still body and told her what he had dreamed, and without turning over to face him she reached back and slapped him hard enough to knock him down. In the morning they buried the baby in a wind-scraped corner of the starveout. John enclosed the grave with fence, leaving ample room around it as if he knew what was to come.
* * *
While Kroch was sleeping, Grant tried to imagine what life in Indiana might have been like had he actually lived there. He expected it was gentler, with more time for sleep. The animals were healthy and tractable and crops always brought a good price. The train was nearly to Minnesota now and night was falling. Passengers filled the compartment. The look of them made Grant glad Kroch had chosen him. It was not uncommon during the war to see women alone or alone with children, but the women in this car were accompanied and all the solitary travelers were men. The men varied in age and appearance but all had the eyes of outlaws, or so it seemed to Grant. They carried bought bags with few signs of use, as if they were only props for some private performance. Activity in towns they passed looked staged, and of course with his first lie Grant had become an actor. This was not a simple matter of making up a story and telling it to whomever he encountered. It was himself he was inventing, a version of him who had spent years in the company of other young men and had known the drudge and racket of war.
But he hadn’t. He had lived in increasing solitude without reference to anyone. He had gone among the men back home without making an impression and he had never paid his own looks or talk any mind. He could vanish in the creases of land and not be thought of at all. Now suddenly he was traveling in a landscape of eyes, and he wondered for the first time what he had done to himself, wondered if the part of him he had hidden from the world could ever be found.
He was able to sleep with his heels clinched tight against his bag for safekeeping. When he woke it was to a scene of straight flat paved roads and cars that waited at intersections for the train to go by. Towns flashed past until they ran together, and this was the city. Passengers woke as if by a sixth sense. Kroch was among them, his clear eyes on Grant.
There she is, son, he said.
Grant looked out to make sure he meant Chicago and not some specific structure. A sign read UNION STATION. I reckon my daddy’s here to meet me, he said.
Maybe I ought to wait around and see that. A hero’s welcome.
Grant reached out and steadied himself against the seat in front, quelling nausea. The train was slowing. I ain’t any kind of hero, he said.
Kroch was laughing. The way you tell that story, I believe it.
I don’t follow, Grant said without looking.
Kroch was close now, right up at his ear. You have got to convince yourself before you can convince other people, boy. You don’t even say your name like you mean it.
Grant felt him retreat, felt his body rise from the seat. He turned fast and found Kroch in the aisle peering down at him.
It’s my name, Grant said. People turned.
A smile discovered Kroch’s face and warped it. Okay, Grant Person. Now you sound like a honest man.
The train moaned and stopped. Kroch kept his balance like a steel beam. People got up all at once, but Kroch was ahead of them, down the stairs and across the filthy platform.
* * *
He followed the other passengers through heavy glass doors into a room of stupendous size crammed tight with the sounds of footsteps and their echoes. It was like a cathedral where you worshiped by walking. He stood with his eyes shut while people arced around him from behind. He wondered if they would crush one another to death if obstructed, as sheep were known to do. His bag, bumped by passersby, tugged at his hand like a leashed dog.
He found a place on a long high-backed bench and caught his breath. In time a man and woman and child sat down nearby and he looked toward the woman and said, I want to get a train to New York City.
She wore a pink dress with frills and a hat with fake flowers on it, and her hand went to her child’s shoulder and then her husband’s.
What? the man said turning. You said what?
I want to get the train to New York.
The man was holding a cigar, rolling it in his hand. Well, you go to New York, soldier. It isn’t any of my business. He brought out a silver guillotine from his coat and sliced the cigar end clean off. The cut end dropped to the floor.
Where? Grant asked him.
What!, now with the cigar between his teeth. The child, a boy, was staring.
Where do I get the train?
The man snorted, then pointed, shaking his head as if to fling Grant free of it. The woman stood, pulled her son from his seat, walked to her husband’s opposite side and sat down.
The man lit his cigar. Well? he said.
* * *
There was a train leaving on the hour. He bought a ticket and was shown where to go to get on. While waiting he came across a machine that dispensed sandwiches and he put his coins into it. The carousel turned and he opened a door, then he thought better of his choice and quickly shut it. But the next door he tried wouldn’t give, and neither would the first one when he tried it again.
Nearby two doors yawned into light and he could see cars moving on a street. He went out. The city looked like it did in pictures, except lived in, with buildings faded or crumbling from use and the cars nudging around one another with the scattershot instinct of insects. The order of city streets now seemed an illusion, like the smooth contours of rough land viewed from a distance. In each direction traffic lights changed abruptly, flashing red and then green between the buildings. A taxi stopped before him and a man dashed toward it and climbed in. Grant watched the taxi pull away. He was hungry.
The train stopped frequently at stations and sometimes stood still in lush countryside for no apparent reason. When it moved it moved slowly. Grant’s compartment was full. He washed himself in a rural station bathroom and changed his clothes. When he learned the price of food in the dining car he tried to abstain from regular meals, but at times hunger overtook him and he ate without concern for money or manners. The men and women who shared his table didn’t speak to him and he offered nothing to their conversation. He listened while they talked about Atlantic City. Men spent entire days making sand castles there, they said. One could witness a seven-foot shark in a glass tank and a horse that jumped from a great height into the ocean. This last seemed hard to believe. His fellow diners asked their waiter if he knew the city, and when he said he did they asked him if there really was a beach for coloreds and special entertainment for them as well. The waiter said that indeed there was, it was the hottest spot on the coast. One woman in the group occasionally met Grant’s eyes with a kind look, and he thought of her soft features and long neck as he went to sleep that night.
* * *
By the time the train reached the station, Grant understood that he didn’t want to be in New York after all. He considered the cars and lights he’d seen in Chicago and the thought made him very tired. For a while he sat on a bench much like the one he’d sat on there, and he closed his eyes and daydreamed about home. The routine that milled his days was absent utterly, like a cycle of weather going on halfway around the world. He wished he had a horse to ride. He would find the beach, and the horse would test itself on the shifting sand like a horse in a storybook. It would shy at first from the advancing water, then master itself and crash through the tide, leaving prints that washed away behind it. When he opened his eyes he watched his dining companions pass without noticing him. Once they had disappeared he made his way to a ticket window and asked how to get to Atlantic City.
He was told he would have to get a bus at Grand Central.
Which way? he said.
But when he went outside and saw the whole of New York he forgot the directions he’d been given. He watched travelers motion to taxis and tuck themselves inside and the taxis fold into the flow of cars. He took his money from his bag and counted it.
How much? he asked when he got in. The driver told him and Grant considered getting back out, but the driver was shrewd enough to have already started moving. Anyway he’d made his decision and ought to stick to it.
At Grand Central Terminal he paid all but three of his dollars for a ticket. The bus took him out of the city and along a busy road where identical housefronts crowded together like men lined up at a bar. They were traveling south, so he looked left in the hope of seeing the ocean. He couldn’t. Soon they turned away from the evening sun, and sand began to appear along the road. Everything inside the bus turned to gold. Where the bus stopped he saw the backs of tall buildings and between them a mass of people walking. He heard the odd cacophony of a big band and smelled fried food. On the other side of a packed parking lot rose a flight of wooden steps. He went to them and climbed them and found himself on a wide wooden boardwalk, where people laughed and clutched one another falling down drunk in fine clothes, and publicly embraced in the backs of carts towed by running men, and pushed in and out of penny arcades and theaters and bars. Beyond all this was a cloudless purple sky that grew darker as it descended to the horizon. The horizon was flat and absolute, the authentic edge of the world. This at last was the ocean.
* * *
He sat shoeless mere inches out of reach of the ocean’s tongue, eating from a paper plate of pierogies. He had wanted meat but ended up buying the first thing he laid eyes on. Beside him his lemonade was already empty. He had two dollars and ten cents left and all his clothes were foul and wrinkled.
Night came sooner here, so back at home his mother was likely cooking supper for the men. By now they would have stopped wondering about him. Less than a week ago the house had been emptier at night than Grant could bear. Now, without him, it was emptier still.
He would not have thought it possible for an entire family to go wrong. They had been strong and abundant and lived in a valley that seemed theirs alone: when anyone entered, the dust they raised was visible for miles, and even unexpected visitors could be met on the road. Home was sacrosanct, permanent and unbreachable. In retrospect this seemed a childish way of thinking. Families die out, even the hardiest lines. No blood can resist bad luck.
Robert was the second to die. He turned six on the same June day in 1933 that Edwin turned twelve. That month a man just hired had fallen drunk off the back of a truck and for several weeks afterward walked with a crutch. The boys were poking fun out in front of the house, with Grant dramatizing the fall and Thornton looking on from under a shade tree, laughing appreciatively in his strange husky voice. Robert impersonated the remorseful hired man stuttering apologies and jerking his crutch about, using as a prop the shotgun he’d been hunting pheasants with earlier in the day. He had forgotten to engage the safety and when the stock struck his boot top something caught the trigger and a barrel discharged under his arm and nearly took it off his body. No one appeared at the noise. There were a lot of people on the ranch in those days and a lot of reasons to fire a shotgun.
Robert didn’t fall, not yet. His shirt swallowed up blood like a patch of dry ground and quickly turned black. He held the shot arm with the opposite hand and dropped to his knees.
Thornton had continued to laugh after the shot but now he perceived something amiss and fell silent. Grant ran to Robert, who had pitched onto his side. He took the boy’s gray face in his hands, telling him stay still, don’t move. Then he ran to the barn screaming to his father to come hurry, grabbed a rotted wool sack and balled it up as he ran back to Robert’s side. Robert had his eyes shut and his dry lips together. Grant shoved the sack under the bleeding arm and pressed it there to stop the flow. If this hurt Robert he made no sign. Bits of grease wool were poking from the sack and lapping up the blood and shrinking to slick strands with it. The shotgun lay in the dirt nearby and Grant snaked out a foot and kicked it away. Thornton sat blubbering in the shade. Their father arrived cursing, and Edwin behind him with a face that seemed already to have considered the possibility of such an incident and fully accepted its inevitability. Unlike their father, Edwin was not surprised.
And neither was their mother, when John returned in the truck with Robert’s body to bury it. They had aimed for the hospital in Ashton but Robert died on the way. John didn’t stop at the house, only drove across the bare dirt of the starveout to the corner where Wesley lay, and waited for Asta and the boys to follow.
She was not seen to cry then or ever again that Grant could recall, not even when Edwin shot himself in the stand of lodgepole they harvested from the hillside or when the soldier came to inform her that Thornton had perished at sea. The years those incidents spanned were compressed in Grant’s memory like frayed patches on a coiled rope. Certainly there were other things in between, his childhood adventures and schooling and the reckless driving of gravel roads, but these recollections faded quickly in the intense tragic light and made his short life seem worthless and futile. When he thought of his mother her face bore the stoic glare she had adopted, a figurehead’s face of the sort a person might contrive for staring into a wild wind, as if it was possible to find the source.
Night fell and the noises behind him died. The ocean crept up toward where he sat, and he moved himself back. When it approached a second time he stood and turned toward the city. The sand was treacherous, with broken bits of shell and rotting crabs that he could see in the light from the moon and from the buildings ahead. A sign was posted at the base of the steps that read SHOES MUST BE WORN ON BOARDWALK. He sat down and put his on. A group of young men passed behind him singing. On a bench a man was kissing a woman. After a moment Grant took his shoes off again and climbed back down into the sand. The boardwalk was built on wooden pilings that created a sheltered space, and he ducked his head and situated himself in it, with a mound of sand as a pillow and his bag close beside him. He fell asleep to the sound of footsteps overhead.
* * *
It had to be noon, or nearly so. The traffic on the boardwalk was a relentless rumble and the air hot even here in the shade. He came out into daylight. People in various states of undress sunned themselves and leapt in the surf. Women’s arms and legs were bare, and men walking along the water’s edge held them close. A tall Negro was building a sand castle and had already finished one just beside it. Grant recognized the completed castle, from pictures he’d seen, as the Roman Coliseum. As he watched, two men approached the Negro and dropped money into a nearby paper cup, and he responded with a nod, not taking his eyes from the work. It seemed to Grant that the war’s end had driven people to forget who they were and where their lives were leading, to relinquish their money and secrets as if now there would be an unlimited supply. He wondered what the day of the week was—he had forgotten—and if it mattered to anyone.
On the boardwalk he bought a breakfast of sausage and eggs and toast for one dollar and ate it standing up, under a colorful umbrella. He walked as far as the boardwalk would take him, peering down each extravagant pier through its gaudy archway, to the massive halls and costumed people passing handbills, and food stands and games of chance. Graceful dirty gulls swooped in loose formation around small children, who tossed bread in the air for them to catch.
Walking back he stopped before a small crowd of people playing ball and ring-tossing games, at a little concession that also included a burnt-out frypit and griddle and a shabby parrot on a perch. One game involved throwing a baseball over the wooden counter and into a shallow basket with a convex bottom. In another game players tried to yoke a milk bottle with a wooden ring. Both games were cheats. The ball reliably bounced out of the basket every time and the rings were too small.
But the parrot was interesting. One foot was tied to its perch with string. The parrot tottered back and forth on the perch, two steps one way and two the other, as far as it could go in either direction. It did this compulsively, silently.
Give him a coin, the proprietor said. He was ropy looking, with a crooked nose and a frayed straw hat, and his black eyes, which rapidly blinked, were like the parrot’s.
Go ahead, he said. Give him a coin, see what he does.
Grant placed a penny on the counter in front of the parrot.
It’ll take at least a nickel, the parrot man said. As if in agreement the parrot made a strangled sound, like a squawk.
Grant replaced the penny with a nickel. The parrot grabbed the nickel in its beak, flapped its wings and flew to the rim of a tall glass container standing behind the perch. The string went nearly taut. Having steadied itself the parrot dropped the coin. It landed with a dull sound on a pile of nickels, dimes and quarters at the bottom of the container. Then the parrot returned to the perch. Behind Grant someone applauded.
Hey, is that something else? the parrot man said.
Ain’t it supposed to talk? Grant asked him.
The parrot man glared. He’s supposed to do exactly what he just did.
Parrots are supposed to talk.
Well, this one does exactly what I tell him to, mister. He’s supposed to fly over there and drop that nickel and that’s exactly what he did.
Grant gave this some thought. All right then, he said, and deciding he’d been duped like everybody else, moved on.
He bought dinner. This left him with thirty cents. The afternoon passed and he considered that he might skip supper and sleep again on the sand, but what then in the morning? He went back to the parrot man and asked him if he had any work. Nobody else was at the stand.
The parrot man blinked. Do I look like I got any work for you, mister?
I just got here. I don’t have any money.
What do I care? the parrot man said, but then, Where do you come from anyway?
As if to balance against future lies, Grant told him about Eleven, the nearest town to the ranch. It was no home town but it came close enough.
You fought the war?
Yes.
The parrot man nodded. I was a cook over in France. Boy, I don’t ever want to pick up a fry pan again.
How about that cooking spot? Grant said, an idea beginning to form. The parrot paced, occasionally opening and closing its beak.
What about it? It’s ruined.
What if I clean it up and try and get a little extra business going?
The parrot man frowned. I’m going to get myself some skee-ball for over there, he said.
Well up until then, Grant said. I’ll clean it up free. You don’t have to pay me nothing until I get it working. I’ll take whatever you can give me, I don’t want for much.
You’re staying someplace respectable, right? The skin seemed over-tight across the parrot man’s face, a chart of all the fretting he’d done in his life.
I got a room, Grant lied.
The parrot man paused to take somebody’s money. For a minute he appeared to have forgotten Grant. Then he held out a bill and said, You go get something to scour it with and come back here. Tomorrow morning I’ll get the truck to bring the food. You know how to cook, don’t you?
Grant put the bill in his pocket. Sure.
All right, the parrot man said. He looked more worried now, as if he thought he’d made a mistake. Grant smiled at him but the parrot man took it wrong and scowled.
There was not much in the way of rooms. As he walked west the rates dropped. When they got low enough he walked north until he found a landlady who would let him wait until the next day to start paying. She was heavy and old with a pale expressionless face like a reflection in a china plate, and she sat in a wooden folding chair behind a grimy linoleum counter. A scratched glass bowl was sitting on the counter with a handlettered sign: DO NOT HAND ME YOUR MONEY PUT IT IN THE CUP. From an open door behind her issued the sound of a radio. She dropped a key into the glass bowl and Grant took it out. He had better pay two nights tomorrow night, she said, or she would send her husband up to kick him out. Grant told her he understood.
She leaned forward ever slightly and said in a low voice, This place is full of niggers. They will steal the fillings out of your teeth.
Yes, ma’am, said Grant.
The lobby was painted with what might once have been a cheerful yellow but had been corrupted by water stains and the husks of dead insects. A low table had old magazines on it and there was a dry astringent smell as if hundreds of newspapers were stored nearby.
He went to his room. It was about six feet by ten with a high ceiling and a narrow mattress bowed in the middle like a phantom boarder was asleep on it. There was a chair and a small table and a tiny closet with three wire hangers inside. A shallow sink had a sliver of soap on the rim and a square mirror above. The walls were stained but not too badly. His window overlooked an alley and a smaller building, and if he leaned to one side and pressed his head to the glass he could see a strip of beach far off to the north. For a while he watched the strip of beach until the shadows of the fancy hotels threw themselves over the sand, obscuring its bathers. Then he lay down on the sunken mattress. It was not uncomfortable but he doubted its strength. He lay gingerly, trying not to move around.
The room was all right, though it had too much in it for its size. He looked up and considered the ceiling, where a specked length of flypaper dangled from a nail. All that empty space up there with no way to use it. He closed his eyes and reviewed his war story. Japan. He pictured palm trees and little flat thatch houses, and the Emperor’s men peering out of them with their rifles.
He should have gone. The local board had considered their deferment applications and told John to send one of the boys, one only. Max was too young to go, though he begged. Thornton had no idea what he was getting into. It ought to have been Grant who went and who was sunk in the South Pacific. But their father kept him, because he didn’t trust Max to work reliably and because Thornton was the kind of help he could easily hire. With Edwin dead he needed to teach someone to run the ranch. Max argued that he could take Thornton’s place, that he could go and call himself Thornton Person and pass for eighteen, but John would have none of it. I won’t have my sons lying, he said, there’s no honor in a lie.
No honor in staying home, Max said.
Grant might have said anything at all but he kept his mouth shut. It is awful quiet around here, Max said to him. Their father did not speak up in his defense.
I got work to do, Grant said and got up from his chair. They were all in the kitchen, the three boys and their mother, her back to them, washing a sinkload of dishes.
Hey Grant! Thornton said. Hey, where you going? We’re just talking. It was intolerable to him that they quarreled and intolerable that their father’s will be questioned. The boys towered above John Person like miraculous crops.
It was never clear why their father mistrusted Max, who was fifteen in 1943 when Thornton was sent away, and who had never once appeared late to do his work or skipped school or engaged in any foolish thing that most boys were forgiven for instantly. But John disliked him. He made no effort to conceal it. Every time he opened his mouth in criticism of Max he would praise Grant before he closed it, and while Grant had no use for this misplaced attention he was powerless to refuse it, the way a thirsty man can’t help drinking bad water. John acknowledged the rivalry that sprang up between them but did nothing to set it right, believing the boys ought to be able to work out their problems themselves.
John often said with apparent disgust that Max took after his mother, and this was true. Like her, Max was competent and self-reliant. She was the braver of their parents, Grant saw now, because she never hesitated to love them and did not stop when they began to die. She once surmised to Grant that she was chosen to lose her children because she was strong enough to withstand it, which gave Grant to wonder if he then was chosen to be lost.
He had let Thornton go because he valued his life over honor, he valued his life over Thornton’s life. He had got what he wanted. He was alive.
He returned to the stand just past dark with a soap bucket and some steel wool pads from a grocer’s. The parrot man was surprised to see him. I thought you’d gone and run off with my dollar, he said. I was feeling like a goddam fool.
Sorry, Grant said, and handed the parrot man the change. The parrot man counted it carefully.
He got to work straightaway, grinding off the blackened crust and the years of grease glued up with dust and sand and salt. There was a basket for dunking potatoes in the hot fat and he toiled at this for hours, gradually exposing the steel mesh until it gleamed. When he looked up it was late and the parrot man was watching him. The parrot was in a cage up on the counter, talking quietly to itself.
What’s it saying? Grant asked.
The parrot man paused to listen. I don’t know if it’s foreign or if it’s something he made up himself. Anyway, I don’t understand a word of it.
Has it got a name?
Who? Him? He crossed his arms over his skinny chest and his eyes grew limpid and sad. You know what, I guess I never call him a goddam thing. I just talk to him. I don’t call him nothing at all.
Grant cleared his throat. I need some money.
The old tight face snapped back into focus. You ain’t cooked a thing yet.
You’ll pay me tomorrow? My landlady needs her money.
The parrot man backed up a step as if he thought he was being tricked. You come in here tomorrow and fire up that frypit, you’ll earn your money.
Grant nodded, satisfied. He and the parrot man swung down the boards that served as an awning and latched them in place over the windows. Then the parrot man locked the door. He took a key off his ring and handed it to Grant. You’d better be in early, he said. I got the truck coming here at six with your supplies, and you got to put up some kind of menu. There’s going to be potatoes and pierogies and the like. You’ll see it when it gets here.
All right.
The parrot man draped a purple cloth flecked with yellow stars over the cage, an artificial night. The parrot was silenced. For a while they stood there, Grant waiting for further instruction. None came. He said goodbye and set off down the boardwalk.
When he reached the stairs down to the street Grant looked back at the game stand. The parrot man still stood in front, the cage on the counter beside him, staring off at the starlit outline of the sea. Grant raised a hand to him but the parrot man never turned.
* * *
The next morning he unpacked the boxes that waited for him and stashed the raw food in the cooler. He dumped several blocks of cut fat into the frypit and fired up the gas. Then he found a grease pencil under the counter and wrote a menu on the back of the supplier’s receipt. He raised the awning and hung his menu on a nail. Fifteen minutes later a man asked him for eggs and potatoes, and he made them and took the man’s money. It was easy. At the day’s end the parrot man tore down the menu and wrote up a new one, with higher prices.
The parrot man allowed him breaks, which he spent exploring the boardwalk. There was a hotel for rich people that looked like a wedding cake and a place where cars of the future could be seen and touched. And of course there was the horse, which as promised leapt into the ocean hourly with a girl on its bare back. The girl wore a bathing suit and smiled all the way down, even as the water came up to engulf her. Grant thought she must be brave and dreamed of meeting her, but he couldn’t imagine how to approach her or what to say if he did. The horse, on the other hand, although it possessed a beauty flying through the air, up close proved old and tired, its coat coarsened by the salt water.
He sent a postcard home. It had a picture of the diving horse on one side and on the other he wrote:
I am well here and have seen many amazing things. There is not a single hill anywhere. You can write me at this address.
And he gave the address of the rooming house. What he had written dissatisfied him, but it was his only postcard and he sent it without giving the matter much thought.
Business was often slow. It seemed there were plenty of other places to get fried food, most of them newer or cleaner-looking or with a larger menu. For this reason Grant’s job did not feel secure. It was obvious the parrot man lacked much sense: it would have been easy to give the stand a coat of paint or pass out handbills or expand the menu, but instead he griped, asking Grant where all the customers were. Grant could only shrug. When idle he leaned against a post and watched the parrot moving back and forth on its perch. The bird seemed perfectly accustomed to this circumscribed life. Sometimes the parrot man allowed Grant to feed it a shred of lettuce, which the parrot accepted silently, champing on it for a minute or so until it was gone and then returning to work. Afterward Grant always lost interest in the bird and turned to face the ocean, another entity with a singular aim. Occasionally the sight of it sent him into a kind of trance, difficult to rouse himself out of. Sometimes he couldn’t understand how people went about their lives in its presence. A thing so drastic, mocking them like that.
* * *
After one September night Grant woke earlier than usual and left his room to sit on the beach and plan or at least imagine what he might do next. Though it was before ten in the morning hundreds of people were out in the cool air, standing on the sand in their street shoes. There were no bathers at this hour. He walked through the crowd listening for clues to their purpose here, but learned only that something was expected to happen, some kind of show, and it would happen out at sea. The presence of these people on what he had come to think of as his beach irritated him and he found their proximity unnerving. Still, he chose a spot and waited.
Pretty soon a dot appeared out on the water and resolved into the shape of a boat. The static of conversation became a thrum and dropped off entirely as more boats bulged onto the horizon and drew into clear view, as if brought by the tide. From newspaper photographs he’d seen, Grant was able to identify these as transports.
It was in one like them that Thornton was killed. The ship had not been attacked but had suffered an explosion on board and sunk. It wasn’t hard to imagine what this must have been like. The death was Grant’s after all and had simply been lent to his idiot brother, who gratefully wrapped it around himself like a poisoned blanket. He imagined Thornton hunkered in his tiny cabin, straining to assemble in his mind all the evidence of danger; the deadened blast and the rushing water and the sudden darkness, the slide of objects from their customary places, and finally the ocean’s blind hungry clench.
Just offshore now, the ships yawned open to frenetic applause, and from the guts of them came soldiers who knelt in the surf and fired upon the onlookers, and got up and ran, heavy with seawater, onto the hard wet sand and fired again. Women screamed and a few fainted dead away. Soldiers pulled up short and theatrically fell, writhing in mock death. And Grant knew genuine pain as the bullets entered him, even as he understood them to be imaginary; they found his heart and pierced it, tore the breath out of his lungs, swept his legs out from under him. They glowed inside him like irons. He was branded from within: the destruction his brothers had claimed was also his, was Max’s and their mother’s and father’s.
He lay contorted in the sand forcing sobs from his body, oblivious to the sympathetic shadows falling across him, to the hands on his arms and back and head. He would not be helped. Instead he wanted to fill this ground with his tears and claim it as his own. He wanted to make himself an impossible promise, one he would sooner die than break but which he knew was already as good as broken, that he was never going to go back.