Meeks (16 page)

"No! Don't shoot!” He tried to run, but he was frozen to spot, his legs pooling with cold blood. The bachelor held Ben in his sights and fired, slamming Ben to the ground.

Ben watched the gently sloped hills in the distance: the fog clung to them. An etherizing cotton. Foxes and rabbits and birds felt nothing when they fell, wounded, onto the soft bank of etherizing cotton. Ben felt better, calmer. The hole in his chest pulsed blood. Ben tried to slow his heart, to keep the blood in his veins. Blood was spreading along the fibers of his pale jacket, almost entirely red and wet. There was the tableau of ashen-faced men standing over him, their gray hats pushed back on their heads.

Other men emerged from the fog; one man had a dead bird by the neck. Ben's face felt hot, his feet dirt cold. A man knelt beside him. “You'll be all right, Brother.” The death words, the man was speaking the death words. Ben tried to shake his head.
No, no, no.
“Looks like we've had a bit of an accident,” said the hateful bachelor and smiled.

Ben pressed his cheek against the muddy moss of the ground to cool his head, a place that was becoming unbearable. He could see the house and orchard behind it. The fog rolled forward again, devouring the muddy shoes of the hunters.

When Ben came to again, he was wrapped in a bedsheet; men were hustling him back to the house. He had been dreaming about the sound of the bell of the knife grinder's cart in the rain, when the knife grinder parked his cart at his mother's house and rang his copper bell. Ben loved that sound. When it rained, the knife grinder would pull his cart under the eaves of the house and work behind a little waterfall as the water overflowed the gutters. His mother would take down her heaviest sewing scissors, and the knife grinder would sharpen the blades, pumping the wheel faster and faster, sending yellow and orange sparks shooting into the yard, and his mother would ring the bell in a funny way to cheer Ben up, since he had no father.

Meeks

I was pacing outside the station, as I did most afternoons now, waiting impatiently for Bedge to clear my name and for my life to resume its normal shape, when I saw a figure walking between the fog-washed trees of the park path and approaching the station. He moved nimbly, as the energetic elderly often do, and, without thinking, I hid myself behind the work shed and peeked out in time to see his back: he was wearing a well-tailored black jacket. He pulled open the massive door of the station and went in. The great door swung shut behind him.

I spent some time reconstituting the scene using the particulars: I had only seen his back, but there was something about the small head that reminded me . . . and there was the black jacket. I didn't want to importune Bedge more than I already had, but at last I was persuaded that I had seen what I had seen, and I climbed the steps to the station and yanked at the door. It wouldn't budge.

Had they locked me out? Had I become weak beyond belief? I kicked at the door with all my strength, and I called his name:
Bedge! Bedge!

A long time went by. Bedge finally appeared on the station steps, unrolling his sleeves and buttoning the cuffs. Bedge! I said breathlessly, and he was startled.

What are you doing here, Meeks?

You've found him? Is he inside now?

At last, he said, No, Meeks. It was an actor.

An actor?

I'm interviewing actors for the Independence Day plays, that's all. He's just an actor.

My thoughts fell into disarray; I stared; I was failing to react to circumstances so alien to my hopes.

Bedge sat on the top step. Come have a talk with me, he said.

I settled beside Bedge on the top step; I considered the blows of distant hammers. At the edge of the park, I could see workmen uncoiling and checking lengths of theatrical rope, dredging the shortest lengths in a trough of boiling tar. The air was cool and coppery with the low clouds of autumnal leaves upon the trees.

Bedge put his arm around me. Would you like a mint? he asked.

I said I would, and he handed me a mint. I unwrapped it and inspected the stamped city seal, the iconography of which I'd never been able to decipher, despite a lifetime of study.

Bedge, I said, what does this look like to you? (I saw a human heart crossed by shafts of wheat.)

Bedge tightened his grip on my shoulder and said,
Meeks, Meeks, Meeks

In my experience, this kind of wistful repetition of a word tends to signal a change and is rarely insignificant. Bedge reached over and took my hand, the one that I had injured. How is your hand? he asked.

Much better, I said and flexed it open and closed to show him.

He held my hand tenderly. I had known him for most of my life.

All of these actors are disasters, he confided in me.

I smiled knowingly. I had seen my share of dissolute actors. There was a temporary silence between us, entirely comfortable; I felt my body relax into his. He patted my wounded hand.

How would you like a role? A part in one of the plays?

I sat in stunned silence. A
part
? I finally managed.

Yes, said Bedge; he stood abruptly and descended the stairs. He looked up at me.

Yes! I said. Anything.

Something in the Lovers Play?

No, thank you, I said, and blushed, yanking reflexively at my immovable cap.

Bedge was suddenly very cheerful—it seemed that he, too, was a victim of the mirth of the holiday season.

The Founders Play, I said. Captain Meeks, I added, emboldened by his good mood.

I sat for a long time on the steps of the police station, stayed long after Bedge had gone back inside to work. I was in very high spirits, almost uncomfortably so. I wished I had someone to whom I could give my good news—such extreme joy, kept to oneself, can be as burdensome as a terrible secret.

Postcards littered the ground at my feet. I used the tip of my boot to pull a few into view. Pictures of the fat black cliffs of remote lands, the tufted crowns of foreign trees leaning far out over the dark water in search of sunlight. Pictures of the gouged-out soft green moss of other peoples’ valleys, vistas, fields. Pictures of the frail, wind-torqued houses in which strangers were living, living horribly. The frowning shepherds in the gray fields wherein the unquarried stone was sleeping—we came for it! We made it live. Reed-thin farmers, skeletal cows, doomed goats, but God is just. This city is weaned on tales of terror, tales of the Enemy's galloping horses, their big-headed and mean cats, their devious smiling dogs, their untrustworthy children, their lonely, fat wives, their tall, competent friends, their homicidal surgeons, their unpredictable soldiers . . . yet the Enemy's world looked like a grave: the degradation of a story causes the degradation of the land, of the body; the wrong words can corrode the living world, verily, verily. I leaned down and sifted through the cards at my feet and picked one, an old-fashioned postcard of the Enemy's Territory: the forest still flush and green with unfamiliar trees, the grid of fishing nets smooth upon the water, the full white sails of anachronistic ships mirroring full-bellied beautiful clouds overhead. This postcard was forbidden, of course; it was, in fact, my job as a policeman to prevent it from being in the park in the first place. Yet, I could only think, How beautiful, how beautiful . . .

My mother had told me a few secrets about the past, about the place from which she had come, stories that she used to whisper to me and to me alone, “And in those days, long ago, in the place whence we came . . .” she used to say. I pocketed the card guiltily, my face hot.

Ben

He had found his mother standing in the front hall of the old house holding a postcard, the front door hanging open; the expression on her face seemed to cast the whole house in a dangerous, alien light. Ben waited, frightened. On the postcard, he could see the rolling white surf and leaning trees of foreign shores. “Your father's not coming home,” she said.

One morning that spring, his mother woke him before dawn and told him to pack.

"We're going to find your father,” she said cheerfully and tousled his hair. “We're going to one of the islands, right to the edge of the sea!"

"Is he there?” Ben felt sick with terror and hope. He could smell the cakes cooling in the baker's window; he could hear the long blast of the ferry's horn.

"We better hurry. Pack your things, Ben."

His mother stood stiffly at the railing on the ferry, peering into the water where the bow sliced it into wakes.

"Is it far away?” asked Ben, but his mother didn't seem to hear him. He watched her carefully, or watched the seabirds hover over the blue-gray water, eyeing the shadows of their victims sliding obliviously. Ben watched them, or he watched the lavender horizon, the widening band of the atmosphere over their destination. The whole azure: happiness assured! His father would be standing on the beach, or ankle deep in the surf.
Ben! My dear! I see you got my postcard.

Ben and his mother walked across a crooked gangway onto shore, the unfamiliar tufts of orange and pale-green flower, the shoreline nests of frothing water. They passed through an open archway into the lobby of the whitewashed hotel. They had walked up a thousand steps, possibly ten thousand, and his mother had dragged a suitcase up the steps behind her, leaving Ben to drag the other, though he was a small boy. Their arms were trembling when they arrived at the front desk. Men soaked in salt water dripped through the lobby, holding sardines bound through the gills on rounds of twine. “That's dinner,” said the smiling woman behind the desk. Ben stood on the veranda and looked out over the water while his mother negotiated, the sharp white waves threshing the surface of the sea.

Ben and his mother unpacked, rested confusedly on the salt-stale cushions of the tourist chairs. Ben put on his bathing suit and waited on the steps.

"Go ahead,” she said, “but be careful."

Ben ran down the beach and into the water; a powerful wave rolled over him, pinning him to the sand, sucking him seaward. He crawled out of the water and collapsed on the crust of dry, white sand; behind him were the charred remains of former beach fires, ash dusted the pale sand. He smelled the narrow, speckled fish cooking, spiked on sharpened sticks stabbed deep into the sand beside small fires, blazes of yellow-orange flower. Beached jellyfish were thick lenses upon the sand. His mother brought him a mango; he peeled away the skin inexpertly; he bit into the sweet sherbet-colored fruit; he scraped the hard pit with his teeth. He buried the pit in the sand and rinsed his hands in the seawater. He followed the paranoid, supercilious crabs from wet rock to wet rock. He stared down the long, narrow, speckled fish that gathered in the tidal pools when the tide went out, the fish all facing forward dourly like parishioners in the cool cathedral space between the jetty rocks.

Local boys ran out of the water holding octopuses away from their bodies, octopus arms clinging to boy arms with fleshy, sucking cups; boys walked out of the water with spears or nets, catching their breath, silver water pouring from their dark, thick hair. They hauled their catches to the hotel porch, where cooks gutted and cleaned the fish while the boys rested in the heat, plucking fruit from the trees that lined the grassy alleys between the houses. Ben looked on enviously. His fear was boyish; the fearlessness of other boys looked holy. The boys crashed back into the water to hunt.

Ben went into the hotel, searching for his mother. He walked through the dining room, past hotel guests squeezing lemon wedges over their grilled fish. He checked their room; everything seemed sad—sad towels, sad bags, sad shoes—after the bright, windy crowds on the beach. He found her on the veranda and stretched out beside her on a wicker couch, resting his head in her lap, and fell asleep listening to waves. He woke to the sound of his mother arguing with a man from the hotel.

"My husband was a casualty of the war. And his widow and his son are entitled to be here."

"No, madam. It is not the same thing."

"My husband—the boy's father—was lost to the war."

"Madam, it was not at the hands of the Enemy."

"Where is this famous Enemy of yours?"

"Madam?"

Ben and his mother packed hastily, boarded the ferry, and stood on the deck, looking toward home. He heard the motor's drone, caught the nauseating smell of burning oil as swells lifted the chugging motor out of the water and made it cough black smoke, the cabin door swinging open and slamming shut, the gray marbleizing lift of the current, the white, foamy lift unevening the ship. The empty horizon unreachable and bland, tilting in the rough water. Ben clung to the railing, feeling sick. He glared at the ferry captain who was smoking and daydreaming in his cramped glass booth, rolling them into wave after wave.

"Mother?"

"Not now, Ben."

Meeks

The gun seemed to be biting or stinging me in the ribs, perhaps because it could detect a change in my heart: I was in love with this world again. I stopped in the shade of a river tree and peered carefully into my coat—there it was, the same as ever, sleeping in its corner.

I went to see my mother, who, naturally, remains underground. Nonetheless, I told her my wonderful news. Mother, I whispered, you are hearing the voice of Captain Meeks. Not your son, Meeks, but the Captain himself. Mother, I'm
in
the play.

I held my breath—perhaps I was waiting, however unconsciously, for some kind of reply. Then again, I suspect my mother had always known this day would come. My head was aching—I tried pointlessly to loosen the police hat's grip with my fingertips. I had never spent an Independence Day without her. We used to sit together on our favorite rock, well removed from the crowds, and wait for the Lovers Play to begin.

This is all real, I would say to her, and I would point to the flat rock upon which we were sitting, and to the ivy at our feet. That, I said, pointing to the stage, is
not
. Mother smiled at my observation; the play commenced. She sat on the flat rock; I stood behind her on my toes, straining to see over the audience, steadying myself by placing my hands on her shoulders. Workers sat in the branches of the great tree and managed the theatrical ropes, lowering the curtain, setting counterfeit storms in motion, lifting actors off their feet so they could appear to ascend or to suddenly drop. I watched a pair of brothers arguing on a high branch, one grabbing at the rope the other was holding, the other shushing his brother furiously. I laughed at this ancillary and unofficial bit of comedy taking place above the main action. Hearing me laugh, my mother reached back and took one of my hands so that she could press it against her cheek.