The first sound was always the bed.
Springs, then the headboard against the plaster. Little Joe knew the order the way other boys knew the planets. Springs. Wall. Then his father’s breath, forced out hard, like a man who’d been punched.
He was eight. He had learned to wake up before the scream. He knew it was coming before he heard it.
Sliding out from under the blanket, he crossed the floor without stepping on the board by the radiator, the one that cracked like a rifle shot. He tucked himself into the corner between the dresser and the wall, knees up, back to the plaster. He did not turn on the lamp.
He’d turned it on once, the winter he was six. He’d carried it into the hall, cord trailing, wanting to help. His father had come off the bed toward the light and filled the doorway. His hands were open and reaching, his eyes wide and looking straight through Little Joe at something behind him. His mother got between them.
Nobody talked about it after. Little Joe didn’t need anybody to. The dark was safer, so he stayed in it.
Down the hall, the scream came.
At first, it wasn’t a word. It was a sound from deep in a chest, the sound a man makes when the cold has gotten into him and won’t leave. Then the words came, and they were always the same.
“They’re on the ridge. They’re on the ridge! Eddie, get up. Get up. Get up.”
Little Joe pulled his knees tighter.
He didn’t know who Eddie was. Eddie only lived at night. In the daytime there was no Eddie, no ridge, and nothing his father ever said about Korea except “It was cold.” He said it the way other men said, “It was a long time ago,” as if that ended it.
The house was always hot. His father kept the thermostat at seventy-eight from October to April. His mother wore summer dresses in January and cracked the kitchen window open when he wasn’t looking. Neighbor kids came over and asked why it was so hot in there. Little Joe said his father liked it that way. He didn’t know any other answer.
“Bugles,” his father shouted. “Hear ’em? Hear ’em?“
Little Joe heard nothing. Just the furnace ticking and a car going by, its headlights sliding across the ceiling and down the far wall.
Then his mother’s voice. Low and even, the voice she used to coax the dog out from under the porch.
“Joe. Joe, it’s the house. You’re in the house.”
“Eddie’s down.”
“It’s Cumberland, Joe. It’s 1964. It’s me. It’s Peg.”
“I can’t feel my hands.”
“Your hands are fine. Here. Here are your hands. Feel that? That’s the blanket. That’s the pillow. That’s me.”
She counted things for him. Little Joe had figured out that part. She named what was in the room, one item at a time, a fence of ordinary things between his father and wherever he was. The dresser. The window. The picture of the lake. Little Joe’s room.
Little Joe counted with her, whispering into his knees.
Dresser. Window. Lake. Little Joe.
Some nights it worked fast. Some nights it took until the sky went gray. Tonight it was slow. His father kept going back. Little Joe could hear him go back, his voice drop, then climb again, as if he kept getting dragged down a slope he was trying to climb.
“I left him.” That one came quieter. That was the worst one. “I left him there. I couldn’t carry him. I couldn’t carry him.”
His mother didn’t answer that one. She never did. Little Joe figured there was nothing in the room to name for it.
Little Joe knew about the toes.
He’d seen them at Goosewing Beach the summer before. His father never took off his socks, even on the sand. But a wave came in higher than the rest, soaked him to the shin, and he peeled off the wet sock without thinking. Little Joe saw the foot. Three toes where five should have been. The skin was smooth and shiny at the ends, like candle wax that had dripped and set.
His father caught him looking. He put the wet sock back on, sand and all, and walked back to the blanket. He didn’t go near the water for the rest of the day.
That fall, in the back of the hall closet, behind the Christmas boxes, Little Joe found a cigar box with a rubber band around it. Inside were a few medals he didn’t understand, a folded map with Japanese or Chinese writing he couldn’t read, and one photograph.
Two young men in parkas, hoods pushed back. Frost in their eyebrows. Frost on their lips. One was his father, thinner and younger than Little Joe had ever seen him, grinning as if somebody had just told a dirty joke. The other was a boy with big ears, a cigarette hanging on his lower lip, and his arm around his father’s neck.
On the back, in pencil: Eddie & me. Chosen. Dec ’50.
Little Joe put it all back exactly the way he’d found it, rubber band and all. He never told anyone. But now Eddie had a face, and at night, in the corner, Little Joe could see him. Big ears. The cigarette. Lying in the snow on a ridge, not getting up.
Toward four, it stopped.
It didn’t wind down. It just stopped, like a radio when you pull the plug. Little Joe heard the bed creak once more, softer. He heard his mother say something he couldn’t make out.
Then nothing.
He waited a long time before he went back to bed. He lay on top of the blanket. Sweating from the heat, he told himself.
In the morning, his father was at the kitchen table in a white T-shirt, both hands around his coffee. He held it the way he always did, fingers laced around the mug, as if it were the only warm thing left in the world. His face was shaved, and his hair was combed. The radio was on low. The Yankees had lost again.
“Morning, stiff.”
“Morning.”
His mother put eggs in front of Little Joe. Her eyes were red at the edges. She touched the back of his neck as she passed, quick, the way you’d check a stove to see if it was hot.
“Sleep okay?” his father asked.
Little Joe looked at him. At the combed hair and the clean T-shirt and the hands around the mug. He thought about the ridge, and the bugles, and a boy with big ears in the snow.
“Yeah,” Little Joe said. “Slept fine.”
His father nodded and looked back at his coffee. For a second, maybe less, something passed over his face. Little Joe saw it. Maybe his father knew he saw it.
Neither of them said anything. That was the deal. Little Joe didn’t remember agreeing to it, but he kept it anyway.
Once, only once, Little Joe asked.
It was spring. They were raking leaves the snow had pinned down all winter, and his father stopped to light the pile. Little Joe said, without planning to, “When did the war end?”
His father dropped the match. He looked at the rake for a while.
“Fifty-three,” he said. “July.” Then, after a moment, “Except it didn’t. Not really. They never signed anything. Nobody won. It just stopped.”
He went back to raking. Little Joe went back to raking. That was all.
But Little Joe thought about it for a long time. A war that never ended. It just stopped, like the screaming did at four in the morning. Not over. Just waiting for the demons to come again.
The next time the springs went, then the wall, Little Joe didn’t go to the corner.
He went into the hall instead, stepping over the board by the radiator, with no lamp. He sat on the floor outside his parents’ door, back against the wood, knees pulled up, the way he’d seen soldiers sit in the pictures in Life magazine.
On the other side of the door, his father was on the ridge again. His mother was trying to wake him and convince him he was in the room.
Naming all the familiar things.
Little Joe didn’t go in. He knew better. He just sat in the dark and kept his eyes open, facing the stairs, the front door, and the black windows at the end of the hall.
Somebody had to stay awake.
Somebody had to watch the ridge.
Dresser, he whispered. Window. Lake. Little Joe.
Eddie.
He stayed there until the sky went gray and the screaming stopped. It was all he could do.
Leave a Reply