Anger
Vin had been expecting to dream of being Winston Churchill again. Instead, he becomes aware of himself this time in a bar called Owlsville, observing the world from the body of a man named Bucky Wright. Bucky is twenty years old, the oldest son of a mill worker, and is finally away from the shit after two years of being in it. It takes Vin a moment to realize that “the shit” means combat in the Pacific, and that Bucky expects to go back. Vin wonders why Bucky is on leave, but the question evokes a sensation like a thick callous scraping against seared skin and Vin quickly lets go of it.
Matt Deaumont, a thirty-year-old high school teacher who is 4F because of a heart arrhythmia, sits across the table from Bucky, who is picking at a cracked pad of skin between his thumb and index finger and watching tiny points of blood dilate into being before swiping them away.
“Bucky, you have to tell somebody what’s going on.” Matt leans forward, his beer forgotten. His hands, both palms down on the surface of the table, are large and soft. Matt is too sensitive, too concerned about every damn person.
Bucky shakes his head, says, “I don’t have words.”
Matt says, “When you go back, you’ll be carrying our prayers with you.”
“I might not go back.” Bucky says it like a question.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want to, and I don’t know if they want me.”
Matt sits back. “How do you mean?”
Inside Bucky, a smoldering pressure crowds at Vin, pushing and burning. Bucky lifts his head. “Look, let’s walk.”
With the prospect of being outside and moving, the pressure slackens. In some ways, Bucky’s mind is more habitable than Winston’s had been. Winston’s had been barbed at every turn, swept by sudden flurries of jagged associations. Bucky’s is a quiet forest at night, with a predator hidden in the trees.
Matt is a little afraid. Bucky surges out of his chair, a large young man whose uncoiling limbs are strung with active, ropy muscles that are still thickening toward their full weight.
“Where do you want to go?” Matt asks, his brown eyes squinting up.
“Just out. Just move around.”
“Alright. How about we walk down the trail to the bluff?”
It’s early afternoon, the sunlight soaked through by shadows that are falling from high gray clouds. There’s a damp and spicy smell of cedar and fir, and a cool breeze with a trace of sea salt. Bucky looks up at the sky. He wants to remember how all this feels.
He pulls his cigarettes from a jacket pocket and puts one between his lips, then folds the pack away. All the cigarettes you’d ever want here, and so much of nothing happening.
He can’t bring himself to light a match though. He can’t see far enough into the trees to know whether anyone is watching. He knows he’s safe here, but even in daylight a match is bright and sudden and draws attention.
Matt comes out, denim jacket draped over one shoulder, fingers hooked under the wooly collar. He notices Bucky has a cigarette in his mouth and digs in his jacket for his fancy Elgin lighter. He knocks it open and strikes a spark, holds it for Bucky.
“I’m going to leave my coat in the truck,” he says, the coat dangling from his hooked fingers like the skin of a man. Matt’s about a foot shorter than Bucky, solidly built and always neatly put together. Bucky knows it was a big disappointment to Matt to be rejected. Matt’s the kind of guy who looks like he belongs in the army. Those guys aren’t special though. Bucky’s seen enough of their insides.
The trail leads straight to the coast, then bends and winds along the bluff’s edge. Bucky hears Matt’s truck door squeak and bang shut.
Then there’s a thing happening when they start walking. They’re both trying to get up in front a little, trying to get their shoulder to be the lead shoulder. That’s how it seems to Bucky. Finally, he lets out a laugh. Who the hell cares, he thinks, and lets Matt lead.
It’s a few minutes before Matt starts talking. Soft sound of their feet in the dirt. “You know, your dad asked me to talk to you.” Matt seems a little on defense. Maybe because Bucky laughed at him.
Truth be told though, Bucky’s a little surprised. If his dad had something to say, why didn’t he talk to Bucky himself, man-to-man? Matt adds, “I kind of feel responsible to do that. Not just because he asked, but from respect, too.”
So, first Matt’s taking the lead on the trail, and then he has a message from Bucky’s dad, and now he’s feeling responsible. This is all really something. Bucky isn’t sure where all of this is coming from.
“I want to do my part here,” Matt says. “You’re doing yours. And I can see that sometimes even just talking might be important. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Bucky grunts. He doesn’t care much for what Matt Deaumont has to say.
The trail is ample. It’s nice to step through the old forest in the quiet and tell himself not to worry.
Matt says, “You seem jumpy.”
“That’s a joke,” Bucky says. He notices birds looping from tree to tree. A gull screeches. It feels like home. He wants to think about how safe he is. He even tells himself it’s a good thing he has some company.
Observing Bucky’s internal conversation, Vin can’t help but try and influence it. “You’re really alright,” he tries to tell Bucky, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect.
The trail comes out near the bluff and they stop walking. It’s a bit windy but neither of them is uncomfortable. Low scrub and yellow grass shelve down in broken degrees toward a rocky shore and then the white, foamy edge of the ocean.
Bucky pulls out his cigarettes again, shakes one loose and offers the pack to Matt, who pulls one out. Matt finds his lighter, lights himself, then holds the flame for Bucky. Smell of naptha while the wind folds the flame over.
“Guy I know,” says Bucky, “told me a story about the invasion of Virginia. You ever hear about that one?” He flicks the butt of his cigarette, sprinkling ash.
Matt shakes his head. Bucky can tell Matt will listen to whatever he has to say, so he decides to give the very long version. It’s a rambling story about how in the early days of the United States, an Egyptian architect by the name of Bin Howzit rowed with a bloodthirsty army across the ocean to conquer the thirteen colonies. Both sides ended up talking it through though and the war was put off, probably forever, because they all had a lot of work to do. Matt listens patiently to the whole crazy thing so Bucky adds some details like descriptions of old houses in Virginia, the yellow fences and turkeys hiding behind cherry trees, just to draw it out. Finally, he gets sick of hearing himself talk.
They smoke for a while, watching the water. It might be the best Bucky has felt since he got back. He flicks away his cigarette butt and starts walking again.
Catching up, Matt says, “Somebody told you that?”
“I know I sound like a cracked egg.”
“Bin Howzit sounds like a name from the funny papers.”
“Guess so.”
Matt says, “It must be nice to be home.” Testing whether he understood why Bucky told that story.
“Guess so,” Bucky says, but low. Matt can barely hear it.
“We’re with you, Bucky. And we’ll be with you when you go back.”
“You know, why don’t you tell me again why my dad asked you to talk to me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it was a good idea. I mean, I’m glad to, but he should talk to you himself.”
After a while their pace slows, both of them thinking about how far they’re willing to go and when they should turn back.
Matt asks, “So, why’d you hit him?”
Bucky stops, shakes his head. He scratches the back of his neck and gets another cigarette. As he waits for Matt to get the lighter, he says, “He was just standing there, Matt.”
Matt, cupping the flame. “Berry’s a kid. Your baby brother. He looks up to you.”
“He’s a baby alright.”
“It’s just . . .” Matt is having a hard time saying something. He shifts his weight and then shifts it back almost like he’s waiting to pee. Bucky doesn’t care.
The gray ocean moves, it’s cold, it should be lifeless but it isn’t. It goes on and on. Bucky shivers. His body wants to run away from that. But he doesn’t run anymore when his body tells him to. That’s not what a man does.
“He was happy to see you,” Matt says.
Bucky looks at the dry grass, almost waist high, just off the trail. “Yeah.” Even if he could say some things, he wouldn’t need Matt Deaumont to hear them.
His kid brother, Berry, had walked up with that cocky grin. He was going to enlist, Bucky could see it in his eyes, and he wanted to brag about it. Bucky was just trying to talk quietly with Maureen, but Berry looked like he knew it all—like he knew what Bucky really wanted with Maureen.
“I bet the Japs are scared of you,” Berry said, finding something stupid right off the bat. Berry always put himself right in it. Their dad would tell him to watch his digits, like it was only a matter of time before Berry lost a finger.
“Everybody’s scared of me,” Bucky had told his brother. “Everybody with any sense.” Which made Maureen look worried.
Berry said, “Tell her how many you killed.”
Some people count but Bucky doesn’t, and he could see that the stupidity of the question, the babyish-ness of it, got to Maureen. Then Matt Deaumont walked by. Calm, safe, thoughtful Matt Deaumont, who Bucky’s mother said all the girls were noticing now that he was one of the few men left in town. Matt Deaumont, who his dad said helped fix the pickup. Maureen was like a lost puppy looking at an open door.
So Bucky hauled off and hit Berry, and pretty hard, because he meant it. Then kicked him a couple of times. That had been too much. He knew right away. He didn’t mean to hurt Berry, just shut him up.
When the dust settled and everyone was gone home, Matt Deaumont came over. He said it was probably tough to take time out from what was happening on the islands. Like “the islands” was a place and he knew where it was. He told Bucky he admired him, asked if he wanted to get a beer and talk.
Why not? Bucky thought. He was going to have to kill time here somehow. “Why do you think you’re safe with me, Matt?” Bucky asks now, in a friendly way.
Matt looks at Bucky, looks away, and then looks back at him again. “What makes you say something like that?”
“Nothing, I guess. Only, I spent most of the last year and a half now trying to kill guys.”
Matt doesn’t say anything. Bucky says, “There are a lot of different ways to do it, and once you put your mind to it you get more ideas. That’s not a thing that you think about here though, is it?”
Matt shakes his head no. Maybe he’s having second thoughts about helping Bucky out.
“No. Because you don’t have to. You just think that you can show up and talk to people. You’re just here, with my girl and my family. And I’m out there, doing that.” Bucky’s smoking a cigarette and watching the ocean.
“You’re wrong. I just want to say, I wanted to talk to you like a friend, a brother.”
“Oh, like, if we had the same dad.”
Matt shakes his head and folds his arms across his chest.
“I didn’t even know you that much, did I, before I left? So why are you talking to me now? Is that a right you get when you steal a guy’s girl?”
“Bucky, I’m not after Maureen. She’s waiting for you.”
“Well, last night, I couldn’t talk to her. And I saw her looking at you. Saw the way she looked.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I’ve hardly said two words to her in the whole year.”
“Which two words were those?”
“You’ve got it wrong.”
“Must have been a pretty good two words. Maybe you can teach them to me?”
“You’ve got it wrong. I admire you. I would never touch her.”
Matt’s eyes are soft because he’s asking for something. His big ears stick out like a hog’s. You shoot a hog. Or you knock it with a sledgehammer if you’re planning to eat the brains. Grab its bristly ankles and twist around while another guy ropes. A hog smells sweet and earthy until it shits itself. The other guy throws the rope over the hanging bar and you both haul away and pull the body up. Some guys use a winch. You get a sharp knife and cut its throat, firm and fast. The blood slings out, crackles when it hits the bucket, then hisses, then gurgles. You drain the hog.
Matt says, “Bucky, you don’t need to take everything on yourself. There’s no end to it.”
Bucky would feel ashamed if he wasn’t so tired of that. He turns back to the trail, so it’s him who sees the thing first, high up in the sky and coming around a point to the north, carried by wind and dropping slowly.
“What’s that?” he says, pointing.
Matt shades his eyes and squints. It’s a gray thing, round, and a triangle of ropes below it extend to a thick point, like a basket. “I don’t know.” A moment later, “Well, it’s a balloon.”
“Yeah. Sure as hell.”
It’s far enough away so it’s difficult to gauge its size. It’s big though, maybe thirty or forty feet across at its center. They can guess where it will probably come down—about four hundred yards north, maybe a hundred yards inland from the trail.
Bucky pulls out another cigarette and asks Matt for a light. Matt hands him the Elgin. After lighting up, Bucky takes a drag and says, “Let’s go,” then flicks away the lit cigarette and starts running up the trail.
He is tired of conversation and walking and really wants to move. Four hundred yards isn’t far. He sprints and opens up a distance between himself and Matt. When he gets to a good place to turn off the trail, the balloon has dropped out of sight.
He jumps into the thistly scrub and runs as fast as the uneven ground allows. He jumps small depressions in a rising bank and gets thirty or forty more yards before a wall of brush slows him. He bulls in, cutting his hands on thorny stalks, nearly skewering an eye. It doesn’t matter.
At a clearing near where the balloon came down he stops and waits. He hears Matt thrashing away, more cautious in the brush than he was.
The balloon crashed on a stony stretch where the grass is thin. It’s collapsing down and is half-folded over on itself. A bubble of gas is trying to raise the center, the unsteady wind pushing around the whole thing. It looks like an octopus with floundering arms trying to crawl away from the water. Trying to evolve maybe.
A particularly thick tangle of rope stretches toward the water and ends in a jumble of twine around silvery cylinders, a few broken open. Heavy, yellowing bags are mixed in.
Matt walks up to Bucky’s side. “Do you know what it is?” Matt asks.
“Looks like a bomb to me.”
“How’s that?”
“Japs send them. They fly at high altitude. Can cross the ocean and come down over here to blow up.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a trick.” Matt is catching his breath. “Why wouldn’t it just be a weather balloon? Or something simple?”
“You want to know for sure, maybe you should walk over and take a look.”
Vin can see that Bucky believes he knows what the balloon is. At the start of his medical leave, he had a conversation with a pilot who was also headed home. While the pilot was stacking a tower of scrambled eggs on his plate, Bucky told him where home was.
“Well don’t get too comfortable over there,” the pilot said. He told Bucky the Japs were sending balloon bombs into the jet stream to cross the ocean. Bucky thought it was a stupid idea and that the pilot was probably crazy. But he guessed what the balloon was as soon as he saw it. Something about the way it looked was Japanese, the way they made things.
Vin is frustrated. He wants to have some influence on the dream, to change something.
Matt jumps down from the big rock and walks to the massed debris at the end of the lines. The ropes shift and tug and the balloon struggles, trying to get a little farther inland, to someplace where it might make sense to blow up. Bucky edges down the rock and walks over.
Matt says, “That does look like a bomb.” Bucky can hear the fascination in his voice. As wind blows across the balloon’s ropes, it lifts a fine powder from the broken cylinders.
Bucky is flicking the flint wheel of the Elgin, watching the flame spark out of the corner of his eye.
“I guess the war found us, didn’t it?” Matt says, his voice warm, excited. And Vin sees what Bucky is thinking, and why his thumb is playing with the flint wheel. This is a dream, Vin thinks. Anyway, maybe this guy, Matt, deserves it. Maybe he’s a dangerous person who just seems like a nice guy. He could be. In a dream, Vin can create whatever truth he wants.
Okay, Vin thinks. I’m going to try this. “Throw it,” he thinks, adding weight to a thought Bucky already has. “Throw it. Throw it.”
And just like that, Bucky does. Just like Vin imagined. He almost casually pitches the lit Elgin underhand toward the massive pile of grounded explosives. The lighter arcs up and past Matt. And Vin thinks, oh no.
Then he thinks, maybe the wind will put out the lighter, but he sees the flame land in the perfect center of the pile of parchment bags. It may be that another moment passes in the beautiful sunlight of a warm afternoon on the Pacific coast. Maybe not.
Vin’s eyes are open. Or maybe they’re Bucky’s eyes. And there are thousands of stars above him, looking down. He can’t hear anything. Bucky has had an experience like this twice before over the last year and a half. Shock that left him numb and deaf. This time though, he can’t move his legs and his arms are heavy and wet and he doesn’t want to try to move them. His eyes hurt terribly. There’s pain all over. The small, squirrel-like breaths that he’s able to take are very difficult.
And Bucky thinks, this is the moment. This is the moment I’ve seen other guys go through, where all the love, all of the effort comes to nothing and the eye of the world passes over you without even noticing that you exist, just before the world snuffs you out.