Dirty Love (24 page)

U
P AGAINST THE FENCE,
the mixed yarrow have gotten out of hand. They’ve ranged too freely and shoved everything to the side: the asters droop to the left and right; the day lilies, taller than the asters, look like they’re holding their own, but the flat heads of the yarrow—rose and ivory and apricot—surround them like approaching thugs; only the white phlox seems free of them. Three years ago Beth planted them closer to the deck, and they began to bloom again only days ago, clusters of tiny white flowers that from the kitchen window look to Francis like the heads of intelligent beings nodding in assent to something quite reasonable.

If only things had ever been reasonable. Though his life has been, hasn’t it? Except for having been a drunk, he has lived it reasonably. He has filled it with reasonable things and people, including his wife Elizabeth, whose death, while unexpected, was reasonable too. But he’s begun his ninth decade now, and as his own death draws nearer, something he does not fear, his dreams have become more vivid. In this morning’s offering, he is once again nineteen years old on a July afternoon sitting behind the wheel of the captain’s jeep just outside Pusan. Captain Hunt has folded down the windshield and is resting his elbows on the hood so that he can better steady his camera, a Retina 35-millimeter Kodak made in Germany. Francis has lingered on that many times over the years, the word
retina
, our lens of witness running directly to the brain. And of course he’s had to confront the word
witness
as well.

For weeks it had rained, but then it was July and there came a break in the summer monsoons, and all along the ridge above the ditch, the sun glinted wetly off a stand of Korean pines, their branches gnarled and stingy. Down in the ditch three hundred members of the Bodo League were shoveling dirt out onto one long mound, still moist and dark. They wore the white cotton clothes of farmers and peasants for that’s what most of them were. Many years later, Francis would learn they’d been promised good jobs if they joined the Bodo League, that they had no idea of its leftist leanings, of its supposed alliance with the north.

Standing on the ground above the ditch were thirty or forty uniformed police officers. Nearly half of these had pulled their pistols from their holsters. An officer in the center Francis could not see yelled something in Korean and the men in the ditch began to drop their shovels and climb out and stand, breathing hard and sweating, in front of the police. The sun was in their eyes, many of them squinting, and Francis could see boys fourteen, fifteen years old, standing beside men who could be their fathers or uncles or grandfathers. Another shout in Korean, and all three hundred boys and men turned to face the ditch they’d just dug. From where he sat behind the wheel beside Captain Hunt, Francis’s heart a high hum in his chest, he could see three shovels leaning against the opposite wall of the ditch, left there with the hopes of returning shortly to work. And before Francis could turn away or shut his eyes, the first policeman stepped forward, raised his side arm, and shot a boy in the back of his neck. There was a spray of blood from the boy’s throat, and his body collapsed like an empty sack, Francis throwing up half into his lap, half onto the ground. But with the sound of his own retching came dozens and dozens of pistol reports, the click and rewind of Captain Hunt’s Retina, clicking and rewinding, clicking and rewinding, and Francis despised him, but not nearly as much as he despised himself for sitting there wiping his mouth and glancing toward the ditch once again. Fewer than half the men, maybe a hundred, still stood, their shoulders hunched, many of them having soiled themselves. There was more Korean shouting, then the surviving Bodos climbed down into the ditch and began pulling bodies one on top of the other before grabbing shovels, many of which they had to jerk from under the newly dead, then they climbed over the mound of dirt on the opposite side of the ditch and began to shovel it in.

“Fuck it, Brandt. Think of it as a turkey shoot.”

These were Captain Hunt’s actual words, but in Francis’s dreams over the years he does not allow—as Francis did in life—the good captain to just leave it there. Instead Francis engages him in debate. But it is the older Francis doing it, the one who survived the war and went on to college and became a reader and a teacher, a man who for years and years drank too much until he quit though he would never use the term
cold turkey
. He avoided that word whenever he could, and while as a kid he’d enjoyed its stringy, salty meat, he’s never eaten it since. In his dreams he convinces Captain Hunt that what they are doing is morally obscene, that they’re American soldiers, goddamnit.
Americans
.

But there is no convincing Captain Hunt, no dissuading the other American officers sitting in other Jeeps either, and so in some dreams Francis is the one grabbing his M2 carbine in the backseat. He is the one sprinting toward the ditch and firing at the South Korean police until they all lie dead on the ground, their Bodo captives turning to him, grateful and alive. Or, in other dreams, Francis is aiming his weapon at the SKPs, squeezing the trigger, and nothing happens and he has to fight them by hand and he always loses. More than once he is tossed into the ditch of the dead, and more bodies fall onto him, smothering him, then there are the scrapes of shovels and the taste of cool dirt in his mouth and throat and he tries to open his eyes but he cannot.

For sixty-two years, his dreams have returned him to that day in July under the South Korean sun, and his dream-mind has always made things different for him. But not this morning’s. Today he woke from a dream of what precisely happened—no changes, no wish fulfillment. Simply what happened. Which is that young Francis William Brandt was a passive witness to, and therefore an active participant in, a massacre.

Francis clicks on the flames beneath the water kettle. He glances at the wall clock above the microwave. Two twenty-two. Devon should be here soon. On the table he’s laid out today’s lesson: Language Arts and Writing, Part I. Its focus is on grammar, mechanics, and punctuation, and the national GED website provided a sample letter purposely riddled with errors. It’s a letter to a finance company written by a young man just graduated from college and hoping to land his first job. An hour ago Francis wasn’t sure he should use it. In the letter, the young man (Jonathan Penn) lists all his academic and extracurricular achievements, including chess and varsity rowing, even volunteering for a hunger relief mission to Africa. Francis wondered about the logic of this kind of letter. Were the GED people in Washington hoping to inspire their high school dropouts to greater things? Or did it occur to them that perhaps most of the young men and women having to take the GED test had already given up on achieving very much? Why rub it in their faces?

Francis thought of writing his own test letter, but it had always pained him to make mistakes, and he could not bring himself to do it. Correcting errors had been one of the primary joys of his teaching all those years. While his colleagues on a Friday afternoon groaned about the stack of essays that needed to be graded over their weekend, Francis looked forward to them. Maybe because he and Beth had never had children of their own. That may have been part of it; except for an occasional dinner party or afternoon of domestic errands, there never seemed to be anything very pressing to get to, and Francis looked forward to sitting in his upholstered chair in the living room, a two-inch stack of student essays on the lamp table beside him, next to that a cup of black coffee. He’d take his sharpened blue pencil between his fingers—never red; too admonishing—and he’d lift the first clipped or folded-together paper off the stack, and it was as if he were about to open a homemade gift from one of the hundred and ten kids he stood in front of five days a week.

His colleagues would scoff at this, Rita Flaherty especially, who was six feet tall and wore heels. She favored purple skirts and purple sweaters and in her forties had let her hair go completely gray. She drank too much wine at night, lost her husband young, swore too much in the teachers’ lounge—“Bullshit, Mary, that Ramirez kid would shoot you in your fucking sleep.” She called Francis Frank because she thought Francis was too soft for him, a veteran of the Korean War, and at six feet five he was the only teacher or administrator taller than she, something she seemed grateful to him for, so once over a cold lunch at the Formica table in that windowless room, he’d told her what he felt about each essay a student wrote for his class, even the cynical ones, the ones that seemed written with one hand while the other was giving him and this school the finger, that these typed words were essentially gifts from inside them.

“Oh, Frank,
please
. One in three hundred of these kids really gives a shit and you know that’s true.”

He did not know that, and he told her so. But she waved him off and wiped egg salad from the corner of her mouth and stood to leave, always in a hurry, this tall purple-wearing, foulmouthed woman Francis missed more than any of the others. She retired two years after he did and last he’d heard she was living alone in a retirement community down in Tampa.

The kettle begins to whine, then shriek. Francis switches off the flames beneath it and fills the carafe of teabags, the steam rising into his face and fogging his glasses. Devon will walk in with a diet drink from the 7-Eleven. She left the house this morning wearing black jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt, red headphones over her ears, that tiny blue stud lodged in her left nostril. Some mornings she also put three or four rings in her right ear and six or seven in her left, but today she’d inserted only one in each, perhaps because she had to work in the restaurant later, Francis didn’t know. There was so much he did not know: what it was she listened to all day and night behind those headphones; why she had the tattoo of a butterfly—deep blue and green with red veins in the wings—just above her right ankle; what she did most weeknights in her room, the door closed, as silent in there as if the room were empty; how it was her father, his nephew Charlie Brandt, could have lived fifty-seven years and still be acting like the reckless and selfish little shit he’d always been.

Because his father, Francis’s older brother George, had given him everything, that’s why, never really made him work for it. Francis pulled off his glasses and began wiping the lenses with the hem of his shirt. His fingers and glasses were a blur, but he didn’t care. This morning’s visit to Pusan had pulled him backwards and now he could feel his brother as if he were standing behind him in the kitchen. George, gone now—twenty-one years, is that right?
Twenty-one?
—yes, because Francis had just turned sixty. Half the cake his colleagues had feted him with the day before was still wrapped in foil on the table in the teachers’ lounge, and Francis had been staring at it as he held the phone pressed to his ear and Beth delivered to him the news. A heart attack at the airport in Cincinnati. George, who’d always worked too long and hard and whose insurance business operated in seven states.

The Depression had shaped George more than it had his younger brother. George had known their father William, for one. In the fall of 1932, the year Francis was born and George turned ten, their father lost his job with two hundred others at Cohen Shoes. He and all the rest knocked on the doors of the other mills in town—Zinger’s Hat Factory, Kaplan’s Soles, a ladies’ comb manufacturing shop down on River Street that years later Francis would work in himself as a twelve-year-old, all the machinery retrofitted to make aluminum rivets that were then trucked up to the Portsmouth and Bath shipyards, building naval destroyers to help destroy Hitler. But those first months of Francis’s life, his father and most of the men he knew had little luck anywhere. That winter a soup kitchen operated by the Young Men’s Christian Association opened its doors on Water Street every day at noon, and even if it was snowing or too cold out, the Brandts would walk down from Washington Square with other families, Francis bundled up and carried by his mother or father or even George, his brother used to tell him.

They’d reach Essex Street, passing one shuttered mill after another, stepping under the iron trestle of the Boston & Maine Railroad. Less than a year later Francis’s father would hop that train in search of work. (Or at least that’s the story that was told forever afterward, that he was looking for work, that he did it for his family.) Perhaps, walking to that free meal with other families, their shame was lessened because they were all in the same situation and the families had chatted on their way downtown. Two months later, William Brandt (his friends called him Billy) would have to sell their house and move to his wife’s mother’s place on Ginty Street, and the four Brandts would share one room, George on a pallet on the floor, their mother and father in the narrow bed, Francis sleeping in the bottom bureau drawer lined with blankets. The house eventually became his, but for most of his eighty-one years, if Francis thought of his young family’s beginnings at all, he did not think of them sharing that bedroom; he saw his father running alongside a rolling, jolting freight car, tossing his cardboard suitcase into an open door, then leaping half-inside, his legs hanging out, his toes hitting one tie after another before he was able to lean in and pull himself up and into the darkness.

And at age ten George went to work. He fired the boiler at the boxboard factory across the river, shoveling coal past its glowing iron doors. In the fall he picked apples in the wild orchard up on Hilldale and sold them out of a cart downtown. At twelve, tall for his age, he got work in the steam room at Cohen’s, a job few wanted but took anyway, steaming leather so it could be stretched for cutting. He did piecework at Fantini’s and ran a sole-stamping machine at Kaplan’s, and once the WPA was in full swing he worked with grown men pouring concrete sidewalks, laying brick walkways and side streets, then helping to build three bridges before the war broke out and he fought in France and Germany and came back in one piece and even then he’d been sending his army pay back home to their mother, this dour superstitious woman who’d raised Francis alone, who became a seamstress downtown and never married again, though Francis remembers a man, Bernie Donovan, Irish like her.