This story originally appeared in Weight of the Sun, a short story collection published by Ooligan Press and is reprinted here by permission of the author. 

 

The chopper carrying the wounded soldier came down out of the dark sky, the rising clatter of its blades and the flash of its lights like an anxious star with a last-minute message. When they pulled his stretcher out, his eyes had the bewildered look of a man who had been mistakenly put into someone else’s broken body.
 
Lillian Ocampo would not have heard the soldier’s voice had it not been for two circumstances. The first was that he was the only casualty that night. If they’d been busier, he might have been triaged into the “expectant” category and set aside until the frantic surgeons and nurses had gotten to others who could be saved. In that case, he would have died earlier. The second was that with his Asian looks and in his bloodied camouflage uniform, he might have been mistaken for an enemy soldier. But the chopper medic, who said that he had once gotten very drunk in the Morning Star Bar with the wounded man, made sure that the hospital staff knew he was “one of our guys.” Hearing this, Lillian assumed that he was from one of the special units, maybe the Mike Force, a rare creature from the war’s shadows.

The surgeon removed the sharp pieces of metal that lay warming in the depths of the soldier’s compact body and cut away ruined tissue and organs, the destroyed, useless parts of him that had died first. He sutured back together what still lived, put an I.V. into the largest vein in his left ankle, and rolled him into the recovery area. There, he was left under Lillian’s care.

“Last one, short-timer,” the surgical nurse said to Lillian.  

Lillian would be leaving the next afternoon, after two tours in-country. In twenty-four hours she’d be flying east, high over the Pacific. For her, it was the last night of the war.

Through the spare hours of darkness the soldier was so still Lillian couldn’t be sure he was alive. The pressure of his blood, his breath and warmth were bleeding out of him into the cracks between the walls, the floors, and the ceiling.

“I need to tell you something,” he whispered an hour later, startling her.  It was as though a piece of statuary had bent toward her out of graveyard stillness and spoken softly. Then coughs shook his chest and he was silent, exhausted from the drugs and the effort.

“Don’t talk. You need to rest,” she replied, looking into his delicately shadowed face. She wondered if he suspected how little time he had left.

On the gurney, Isaiah fell back through the years of his life to the summer of his eighth year. He remembered traveling east from Sacramento, the rise and fall of the road, the way the pines speared through the earth’s flesh toward the empty sky, and how the white granite boulders looked like big, crooked teeth. Then there were days of bright light that hurt his eyes, and heat that lingered through the slow insect-filled nights. He pictured his father’s face with its high forehead and the straight, light brown hair that sometimes fell over his right eye.  His father’s features were so much lighter and sharper than his mother’s dark, soft-planed Filipina face had been. Her absence hurt the insides of his chest and stomach, a pain as sharp as the time he had cut his hand with one of his father’s knives. When they crossed the thick, brown Sabine River between Texas and Louisiana, his father told Isaiah that he would be staying with some people while his father worked. He said Isaiah must behave himself—not shame him.

In New Orleans, his father took him to an apartment where a woman and a man lived. They were Americans. He barely understood what the woman an was saying except that her name was Gladys. He had never heard a Louisiana accent. His father gave Gladys an envelope with some money inside, embraced Isaiah, and told him that he would be back soon. Isaiah cried desperately not to be left behind, but his father went down the creaking stairs to his car and drove away.

Isaiah wanted to like Gladys. She had light hair and brown eyes the color of honey. This woman was shorter and heavier than his mother. He wanted her to smile, to say something silly that would make them both laugh as his mother had before the divorce. Her husband was a small, thin man with thick black hair combed straight back from his face, and he said very little.

Gladys took Isaiah into a large bedroom. There was an empty crib near the wall farthest from the windows. She pointed to it and told him that was where he would sleep. Out of politeness he did not tell her he was too old to sleep in a baby’s bed. When he walked over to the crib and touched the small, almost new comforter, she struck his hand away. “Don’t you ever put your black hand on that! That was my baby’s. I don’t want to see you touch it, do you hear me?”

Looking down at Isaiah, she pointed to the space underneath the crib, where the polished floor disappeared into the shadows. “You’ll sleep down there.” His hand stung where she’d struck him, and his eyes filled with tears.

“You start bawling and I’ll give you something to cry about,” she said.

On his second afternoon beneath the crib, Isaiah could not resist the allure of the light shining through a perfume bottle on the dresser. He crossed the polished floor, pausing to look at the patterns on the rug at the foot of the large bed. Then he went up to the dresser, marveling at how much its neatly arranged, silver-handled brush and comb, and the perfectly aligned row of white jars with wide, gold lids resembled his mother’s.

He did not hear the conversation in the next room stop nor the bedroom door open. When he looked up, Gladys was standing above and behind him, her light hair hanging loose at her shoulders. He started to explain about his mother’s things, about the way the glass perfume bottle bent the light. He saw her right arm rise in a long arc, heard a thin, whispering sound. A leather belt struck his shoulders and slashed sideways against his bare legs. He couldn’t force the words past the stinging pain. He knew he had to get back into the shadowy space beneath the crib. Her hair flew out around her head and she screamed at him from above, “Don’t you ever touch my things! Stupid black monkey!”

From where he lay sobbing, Isaiah heard her go back into the kitchen.  He heard her outraged voice, then all of them laughing. After that, he was never allowed out from under the crib except to go to the bathroom, to school, or to eat his meals. He never understood why she thought he was black when anyone could see that he was actually light brown.

In the early evenings, he would lie on the cool wood surface and feel the way the last light filtering through the white curtains seemed to make one side of his face glow. He would look up at the wooden slats that held the small mattress and imagine that he was standing with his back against one wall, facing another.  He pictured Gladys’ pale baby floating, still and breathless, on the other side of the soft wall before him. All that he had to do was climb up the shadowy ladder formed by the slats into the darkness above. If he could get to the top of the wall, he could ask the baby why she had left her mother. He could bring her back with him so Gladys would be happy and be kind to him. Maybe she would even tell his father to come and get him because she had her own child back.
 
Lillian checked the wounded soldier’s I.V. before going out to have a cigarette. Looking at him, she wondered if he was what her brother, Antonio, might have grown into had it not been for the head-on collision seven years before, the lives of Antonio and his three friends smashed and scattered into the pre-dawn darkness of an otherwise deserted, two-lane highway. Lillian saw again the stillness of her father’s face and heard the sound of her mother’s screams, as though a furious wind had possessed her. She remembered sitting, stunned and dry-eyed, in the creaking pew during the funeral mass at Saint Michael’s, beneath the luminous gaze of the saints and angels. 

Lillian stood just outside the ward entrance, the red glow of her cigarette a tiny beacon in the dark. She kept thinking about how good it would be to take the edge off the night with a tall, iced glass of rum and Coke—something to blur the face of the soldier on the gurney, to make it a part of the great bruise of the other faces and bodies on her memory. She could not help wondering what must be going through the soldier’s mind. Perhaps he was remembering some pretty stateside girl, the childhood smell of his mother’s perfume, or a day beside a lake with his father.
            
Isaiah floated back across the years to the last Saturday at the end of his first month with Gladys. His father had taken him to spend the night with him on the fishing boat where he lived. Below deck, he showed him the tiny galley where he cooked rice and chicken for both of them. He took him to the dark engine compartment that smelled of gas and oil. Then he led him into the wheelhouse, stood him on a stool, and let him play with the wheel. Beyond the glass window of the wheelhouse, deep green islands broke the distant line between the brown water and the cloudless sky. Isaiah wanted his father to start the boat’s engine, to steer them through the shadowed channels between the islands, far toward the distant crack of the horizon. And when they got to end of the sky and the world, they would pry apart the soft edges of the horizon and escape into whatever lay beyond.

“I want to live with you,” he said, turning to his father.

“What am I supposed to do with you when we go out to fish? It’s real dangerous, kid.” Then his father pulled him close and said in an almost sad voice, “I want you in school. You’re going to have a better life than me if I can help it.”

Isaiah remembered how, the next morning, his astonished father had found him sleeping on the floor against a bulkhead, his small body curled around the upright of the small galley table.

Isaiah grew to regard the time beneath the crib as a part of the new, foreign world he had entered. He imagined other children, all over the city, lying alone beneath their beds. Sometimes, when the light was right, he could make himself as clear as the glass perfume bottle on the dresser. He would float into the intersection of light and glass and fly upward through the thin film of space. Flying west through the cool air above the mountains, he would dive down to the rust-colored house where they used to live and would hang in the air above the yard where the wind snapped the white sheets on the clothesline and made the pale green leaves hiss in the tall trees.

No one was ever there. The only sound was of the wind blowing into the open back door of the house, an invisible current pushing the red-checked curtains out of the front windows, like tongues thrusting out of silently screaming mouths. He would float a few feet above the middle of the windy yard and call his father and mother in a voice as thin as the wind. But the only sound would be that of the wind in the trees. Then he would wake up, beneath the crib, weeping silently for fear of waking Gladys.

In his second month at Saint Joseph’s school, the teacher sent Isaiah and seven other students to the blackboard to solve addition problems. When they returned to their seats one boy remained at the blackboard, unable to provide an answer to his problem. The teacher walked, tight-faced, up to the boy and told him to hold out his right hand and make a small fist, knuckles up. She struck his knuckles five times with a wooden ruler. Isaiah’s insides winced with each crack.  

That afternoon, nuns formed them into two lines and escorted them into the great nave, flanked by rows of dark columns. Isaiah stood on the endless stone floor and looked up into the soaring lines of the arched ceiling far above him. He looked up at a stained glass window and saw Gladys. The light streamed through her face. She was swinging her belt high above her head, except this one was bright and silvery. A wind that he could not feel blew her light brown hair back, away from her face. She was wearing a short maroon dress that showed her strong, pale legs, the left one trailing behind her as though she were running. Her right foot was planted on the muscled back of a dark man who was lying face down, struggling to rise. And then he knew why the nuns were showing him this place:  they were revealing his present and his future He was the one with the dark, anguished face, the straining muscles in his arms. Gladys the one with the large, iridescent bird’s wings, her face radiant. After that, Isaiah  avoided eye contact with the teacher. In class, he was silent, face tilted down as if, through the force of concentration, he could push himself into the ink marks and scratches that obscured the worn wood surface of his desk. He was frightened of the way  the knotted, black rope at the waist of her habit swung in unison with her smooth, silent stride. He learned to mouth the words of the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary.” He was terrified of being found ignorant, of being beaten across the knuckles by the tall woman in black. In the schoolyard, he hid among the shouting, running swirls of his classmates. The words “stupid black monkey” echoed in his head, and he came to yearn for the close, quiet safety beneath the crib.

When Lillian went to check on the young soldier, his eyes were closed and his breathing shallow. She put the end of her stethoscope against his chest, listening for his pulse. It was there, but soft and erratic. She wondered if it had been this way for Antonio in his last moments. She recalled how, before her enlistment, when she was still drinking, she would often lie on her bed, her face beneath the aroma of her own hair, skin, and breath, trying in her mind to enter the thin space of her brother’s last moments.

Isaiah remembered the Saturday morning, nearly a year after his arrival, when Gladys told him to dress himself and go into the living room. His small, packed suitcase stood waiting on the carpet beside the oak coffee table. He stood off the red Persian rug, in the small, bare space between the blue couch and the plump, cloth-covered easy chair. The gleam of the polished hardwood floor beneath his shoes comforted him. He felt as though he were standing on a cool sheet of reflected light. He could hear someone washing dishes in the kitchen. To Isaiah, the clatter was the sound of something fierce and dangerous that could turn on him without warning.  He stood very still in the well-ordered space of the room, put time aside, and let himself fade into the light streaming through the cream-colored curtains.

It might have been an hour before he heard footsteps on the stairs. And then his father was standing beside him. Gladys and her husband stood ranged before them, silently waiting for his father to give them the final white envelope of money. When he and his father turned to go, Isaiah did not say goodbye nor look back at them.

He often spent his time alone in the fields and orchards of California where his father lived and worked. But even among the rows of trees, or the under the open skies of the Santa Clara Valley, he knew that something waited, just beyond the edge of his vision, a cruel and hissing shadow from his childhood, a creature that could do more than simply cut his flesh. It could be the edge of sarcasm in a teacher’s voice over a poorly answered question or a girl’s laughter over the way he wore his clothes. In high school, Isaiah was the only boy who did not go to his senior prom. The space and the solitude worked its way into him, making him a quiet, watchful boy.

He spent a year at the local state college. By then he had grown in height and his shoulders had broadened. Women began to look at him. Isaiah held them off with his formality and good manners, his unwillingness to be drawn into personal conversations. One afternoon, as he sat at a small cafeteria table reading Big Two Hearted River, he looked up to see a young woman sitting across from him. She had amber-colored eyes and thick blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. Without taking her eyes off his, she asked, “You read Hemingway?” She could have had no idea of the terror that rose up in him and bound him to his seat. He never went back to the cafeteria. 

At the end of the semester, Isaiah enlisted in the army. He was glad to escape to the sparseness of the barracks.  He disappeared into a world of foot and wall lockers, of rows of bunk beds standing on the uncompromising, waxed floors of squad bays, their hard surfaces echoing the brief, clear shouts of NCOs. It was a womanless world of steel helmets, rucksacks, and polished combat boots.

In the winter, after basic and advanced infantry training, they sent Isaiah east, to the harsh atmosphere of the airborne school at Fort Benning. It was a vast place echoing with the sound of a thousand boots running in unison, one-hundred-and-twenty beats per minute, in the frosty, early morning air of Georgia. He was taught to push himself into the dark, one-hundred knot slipstream that waited beyond the open door of a plane, to fall away from the diminishing sound of engines toward the black earth’s rising curve. Isaiah would look up at the green palm of his open parachute canopy, holding him between the starlit sky and the smell of the earth, and feel a strange kind of safety.

He volunteered for the Special Forces in 1964 and left for Vietnam in June of 1965. He was patient with the thick, hot grasp of the night. He did not mind the endless waiting in the shadows. He gladly folded himself into their soft edges and drifted along their contours. Isaiah thought he had found what he was looking for. He thought that right up to the moment he heard the faint sound, high above and behind him, in the forest. That sound seemed so familiar that he resisted the impulse to dive for cover. It was like the whisper of a forgotten friend. In the instant before the sharp crack of the explosion, he realized he had spent his life walking toward the exact spot where he had paused. It was as if Gladys had carried him there, and there she had pinned him.

As he floated up, out of the anesthesia’s embrace, he saw Lillian’s brown face, her knowing eyes pulling gently at him, the way someone might awaken a lover. In that instant, he realized that she had not come in anger or retribution, and he began to weep quietly.
 
Lillian looked into wounded man’s dark eyes, knowing that he would be the last man she would see die in the war. In that moment, he became all the men and boys who had come under her hands. In him she saw their suffering and lost dreams, their eternally frozen strength and terror. He was all their grieving families. She would have done anything to hover above him, to force breath back through his parted mouth and calm the stumbling rhythm of his heart. Then, quite simply, the soldier was gone.

Lillian was left standing beside him, her arms braced on the edge of the gurney, weeping as a river of broken lives flowed through her, a river that had its source in her brother’s death.

And so she went home.  

Lillian often found herself going into the large, old sanctuary at Saint Michael’s when she felt the urge for a drink.  She would sit in the front pew and stare at the Italian Renaissance-style painting of Saint Michael, known as The Protector. It gave her peace to look into that calm, beautiful face, to see his light hair swept back by the rush of his flight. She loved the certainty in his eyes and the strength of his sword arm, raised high above his head. Lillian imagined the cringing figure beneath his right foot to be the vanquished demon of her own past.