The bus drops him at the Texaco. Mrs. Boydstun stands outside smoking a cigarette and leaning against her Buick.
“So skinny. You get my letters?”
“You sent some?”
“First of the month, rain or shine.”
“What’d they say?”
She shrugs. “New stoplight. Stibnite mine closed.”
Her hair is neat and her eyes are bright but when she walks toward the diner he notices something off: one leg is a half second slower than it should be.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “My dad had the same. Look: your dog died. I gave her to Charlie Goss in New Meadows. He said she went easy.”
Athena drowsing by the library fire. He’s too exhausted to cry. “She was old.”
“She was.”
They sit in a booth and order eggs and Mrs. Boydstun lights a second cigarette. The waitress wears lunettes on a chain around her neck. Her apron is shockingly white. She says, “They brainwash you? They’re saying some of you boys went and became turncoats.”
Mrs. Boydstun taps her cigarette into the ashtray. “Just bring the coffee, Helen.”
Knives of sunlight flash off the lake. Boats motor back and forth, unzipping the water. At the service station a shirtless man with a deep tan watches an attendant pump gas into his Cadillac. Impossible that such things have been going on all these months.
Mrs. Boydstun watches him. He understands that people will want to hear something, but not the truth: they’ll want a story of perseverance and pluck, good overcoming evil, a homecoming song about a hero who brought light into dark places. Beside him the waitress is clearing a table: three of the plates still have food on them.
Mrs. Boydstun says, “You kill anybody over there?”
“No.”
“Not a one?”
The eggs come sunny-side up. He pierces one with the tines of his fork and the yolk bleeds out, glistening obscenely.
“That’s good,” she says. “That’s for the best.”
The house is the same: the ceramic children, a Jesus suffering on every wall. The same mulberry curtains, the same junipers beneath which Athena crawled on the coldest nights. Mrs. Boydstun pours a drink.
“Cribbage, honey?”
“I think I’ll lie down.”
“Of course. You take your time.”
In the dresser drawer the Playwood Plastic soldiers slumber in their tin box. Soldier 401 marches uphill with his rifle. Soldier 410 kneels behind his anti-tank gun. He gets into the same brass bed he slept in as a boy but the mattress is too soft and the day keeps getting brighter. Eventually he hears Mrs. Boydstun go out and he creeps down the stairs and unlatches every door in the house. He needs them unlocked at the least, open at best. Then he tiptoes into the kitchen, finds a loaf of bread, tears it in half, puts one half beneath his pillow, and divides the other between his pockets. Just in case.
He sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He is not quite twenty years old.
Pastor White gets him a job with the county highway department. In the golden days of fall, tamaracks blazing yellow on the mountainsides, Zeno works with a road crew of older men pulling a motor grader with a Caterpillar RD6 crawler, filling in mud holes or graveling over washouts, improving the roads to the even smaller towns that lie even deeper in the mountains. When winter arrives, he requests the most solitary job on offer: driving an old hardtop army Autocar rotary snowplow. Its three big spiral blades send snow over the windshield in a kind of reverse avalanche—a skyward spout that, over the course of a night, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, tends to hypnotize him. It’s a strange and lonely business: the wipers generally do little more than smear frost across the glass, and the heater works about twenty percent of the time, and the defroster is a caged fan mounted on the dashboard, and he has to drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a rag soaked in spirits, wiping the inside of the glass to keep it clear.
Every Sunday he sends a letter to a British veterans organization, seeking the whereabouts of a lance corporal named Rex Browning.
Time passes. The snow melts, falls again, a sawmill burns, is rebuilt again, the highway crew rocks over washouts, shores up bridges, and rain or rockfall washes them out, and they rebuild them again. Then it’s winter and the rotary plow throws its mesmeric curtain of snow over the truck cab. Cars are always freezing up or going off the roads, sliding into the slush or mud, and he’s always hauling them back up: chain, tackle, reverse.
Things occasionally go haywire with Mrs. Boydstun. Her moods seesaw. She forgets what she is supposed to buy at the store. She trips over nothing; she tries to put on lipstick but trails it back along one cheek. In the summer of 1955, Zeno drives her to Boise and a doctor diagnoses her with Huntington’s chorea. The doctor tells him to watch for slips in her speech or for involuntary jerking movements. Mrs. Boydstun lights a cigarette and says, “You watch your mouth.”
He writes to the British Commonwealth Forces Korea. He writes to a recovery unit at the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. He writes to every person named Rex Browning in England. What replies come back are conscientious but inconclusive. Prisoner of war, no known status, we regret we have no further information at this time. Rex’s unit? He doesn’t know. Commanding officer? He doesn’t know. He has a name. He has East London. He wants to write: He fluttered his hand over his mouth when he yawned. He had a collarbone I wanted to put my teeth on. He told me that archaeologists have found the inscription ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive. ΚΑΛΟΣΟΠΑΙΣ, καλός ὁ παῖς, “the boy is beautiful.”
How could a man with so much in his head, with so much energy and light, be erased?
A half-dozen times over the coming winters, he’s leaning over a frozen engine out on the Long Valley Road, or unhooking a chain, when a man will brush his elbow, or fit a hand into the space between his bottom rib and the crest of his pelvis, and they’ll go into a garage or climb into the cab of the Autocar in the foggy dark and grapple each other. One particular ranch hand contrives to make this happen several times, as though deliberately driving his car into a snowbank. But by spring the man is gone with no word, and Zeno never sees him again.
Amanda Corddry, the highway department dispatcher, asks him about various girls in town—how about Jessica from the Shell station? Lizzie at the diner?—and he cannot avoid a date. He wears a necktie; the women are unfailingly nice; some have been warned about the supposed perfidy of indoctrinated POWs in Korea; none understand his long silences. He tries to use his fork and knife in a masculine way, cross his legs in a masculine way; he talks about baseball and boat engines; still he suspects he does everything wrong.
One night, waves of confusion crashing over him, he almost tells Mrs. Boydstun. She’s having a good day, her hair brushed and her eyes clear, two loaves of raisin bread in the oven, and it’s a commercial break on the television, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, then Vanquish headache medicine, and Zeno clears his throat.
“You know, after Papa died, when I—”
She gets up and turns down the volume. Silence blares in the room as bright as a sun.
“I’m not—” he tries again, and she shuts her eyes, as though bracing for a blow. In front of him a jeep tears in half. Gun barrels flash. Blewitt swats flies and collects them in a tin. Men scrape carbonized corn from the bottom of a pot.
“Spit it out, Zeno.”
“It’s nothing. Your program is back on now.”
The doctor suggests jigsaw puzzles to maintain Mrs. Boydstun’s fine-motor skills, so he orders a new one every week from Lakeport Drug, and becomes accustomed to finding the little pieces all over the house: in the basins of sinks, stuck to the bottom of his shoe, in the dustpan when he sweeps the kitchen. A splotch of cloud, a segment of the Titanic’s smokestack, a section of a cowboy’s bandanna. Inside a terror creeps: that things will be like this forever, that this will be all there ever is. Breakfast, work, supper, dishes, a half-completed jigsaw of the Hollywood sign on the dining table, forty of its pieces on the floor. Life. Then the cold dark.
Traffic increases on the road up from Boise, and most of the county plowing shifts to night. He pursues the beams of his headlights through the dark, beating back the snow, and some mornings, at the end of his shift, rather than go directly home, he parks in front of the library and lingers between the shelves.
There’s a new librarian now, Mrs. Raney, who mostly lets him be. At first Zeno sticks to National Geographic magazines: macaws, Inuits, camel trains, the photographs stirring some latent restlessness inside. He inches his way into History: the Phoenicians, the Sumerians, the Jōmon period of Japan. He drifts past the little collection of Greeks and Romans—the Iliad, a few plays by Sophocles, no sign of a lemon-yellow copy of The Odyssey—but cannot bring himself to pull anything off the shelf.
Occasionally he gathers the courage to share tidbits of what he has read with Mrs. Boydstun: ostrich hunting in ancient Libya, tomb painting in Tarquinia. “The Mycenaeans revered spirals,” he says one night. “They painted them on wine cups and masonry and gravestones, on the armored breastplates of their kings. But no one knows why.”
From Mrs. Boydstun’s nostrils gush twin columns of smoke. She sets down her glass of Old Forester and pokes through her puzzle pieces. “Why,” she says, “would anyone ever want to know about that?”
Out the kitchen window curtains of snow blow through the dusk.
21 December, 1970
Dear Zeno,
What an absolute miracle to receive three letters from you all at once. The bureau must have misfiled them for years. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you made it out. I searched for reports on the releases from the camp, but as you know, so much of that was buried, and I was working on reorienting myself to the living. I am elated that you found me.
I’m still mucking about with ancient texts—rummaging in the dusty bones of the dead languages like the old classics master I didn’t want to become. It’s even worse now, if you can believe it. I study lost books, books that no longer exist, examining papyri dug out of rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus. Even been to Egypt. Appalling sunburn.
Years pass in a blink now. Hillary and I will be hosting a bit of a function for my birthday in May. I know it’s a terribly long way, but you could pay a visit if you’re able? A holiday of sorts. We could scribble some Greek with paper and pen rather than stick and mud. Whatever you decide, I remain,
Your trusty friend,
Rex