Sparta (49 page)

Molinos, Hang in there. Hope they serve up something good in the chow hall. Next year, this time, you'll be home. Have a good one. Semper Fi, Farrell.

Turner had news about Dail:

So now she's not allowed in the living room unless Abbott is there. So she goes into his bedroom and cranks up the music. We can all hear her while we're in the living room watching TV. It's wild. And now when she sees us she pushes out her tits. In case we aren't aware of them.

Conrad wrote back:

Try teaching her Scrabble. I think there's a special “Scrabble for Strippers.”

He heard from Anderson, who had decided to hang in there with the job.

I'll be goddamm if I quit a job just because other guys are assholes,
was what he had actually written. He was spending Christmas with his family.
Looking forward to it, LT
.

Conrad answered:

Sounds very good. Me, too, spending Christmas with my family. Have a good one.

Conrad dreaded going into the stores and buying presents. The crowds and the noise, the loud, pealing music and the artificial cheer. He put it off, but on the twenty-fourth he put on his parka and set off to Bloomingdale's. He took the subway down to Fifty-ninth Street and walked east.

The streets were packed with drifting out-of-towners, inattentive, slow, gawking. Those who weren't tourists were New Yorkers, walking fast and talking on cell phones. Conrad wouldn't use his on the street; it was too distracting. You wouldn't know what was happening around you if you were yammering about the football game. These people strode along, talking loudly, preoccupied, heedless.

The traffic was near gridlock, cars and trucks jamming the avenues, honking and impatient. Everyone in the world with a few days and a few dollars to spend had converged on the city. Conrad heard people talking in French, Swedish, Japanese, Polish. He hated being jostled, hated it when tourists stopped in front of him on the sidewalk or slowed suddenly or bumped into him.

Chill,
he told himself.
It's Christmas. It's their sidewalk, too.

On Madison he saw a family of tourists, apparently overwhelmed by the city. They were fair and solid—maybe from Scandinavia, or Iowa. The parents wore muted colors, dull parkas and loose jeans, clunky running shoes. The father held up a map, frowning. Two daughters stood near him, one five or six, holding her mother's hand, the other nine or ten, already chunky. She wore tight jeans and a red parka, and she carried a pink plastic purse looped over the shoulder. Her hair was shoulder length, with heavy bangs. She was gazing into the crowd, frowning faintly. Someone walked quickly past them, between her and her mother. The girl moved sideways, staring at a store window. She meant to move back to her mother, but it was Conrad she bumped into, leaning familiarly against his thigh.

“Whoa,” Conrad said, taking her by the shoulders.

She looked up at him, startled.

“Your mom's right there,” Conrad said, and the whole family's gaze suddenly converged on him, a stranger holding their daughter. The mother opened her mouth to speak. But Conrad was smiling, and just as everyone realized the possible risk, they recognized that there was no actual risk. In fact, the opposite: their daughter had stepped into the hands of a man who would protect her. Watching their faces shift into relief gave Conrad a lift. The little girl moved awkwardly back to her mom, who folded her under her arm.

“Thanks,” the mom said, smiling primly—they were Midwestern after all.

Conrad nodded.

The husband said, “Can I ask you something? Where is Thirty-fourth Street from here? We're looking for the Empire State Building.”

Conrad took the map. “Here's where we are.” He was pleased to do this. “Here's the Empire State Building.”

“Great, thanks,” the man said, nodding.

Conrad nodded back. “Have a good time.” As he spoke, his cell phone rang. He turned away to look at it. The caller was his CO, Captain Glover. He moved out of the thronging stream, over to the side of a huge office building. He clicked on the phone.

“Afternoon, sir.” Conrad straightened his shoulders. A deliveryman pushed past him, a short Latino man in a white uniform, carrying a take-out bag. Conrad frowned, listening. “What did you say, sir?” He put his hand over the other ear. He listened again and then asked, “When did it happen, sir?”

The crowd moved past him in floods, drifting and pushing, inattentive. A young bike messenger in spandex biking pants and a red helmet wheeled his bike up to a parking meter. Anderson had gone to his uncle's barn with a deer rifle in the middle of the night. Conrad pictured the barn, damp and cold, full of shadows. The messenger took the chain from his bag and crouched down to padlock the bike to the meter.

“Fucking hell, sir,” Conrad said. “Anderson.” He paused. “That's really bad news, sir. I'd been in touch with him. I knew he was having some trouble, but he never let on that things were this bad. It sounded as though things were getting better. I thought he was doing fine.”

“I'm really sorry to have to give you this news, Farrell,” Glover said. “I'm sorry. It's really bad. Christmas. Christ.”

There was silence. The bike messenger snapped the padlock shut. He took off his helmet.

“All right,” Conrad said. “Thanks. I'll tell the others, sir.”

When Conrad clicked off, the messenger was taking the front wheel off the frame. It would be a pain in the ass to carry the wheel around, Conrad thought. Anderson opening the door into the cold, dark barn. The silence of the barn at night, the glow from a bare bulb on an overhead beam. Two days before Christmas.

It felt like a kick to the chest.

He kept moving down the sidewalk, through the Christmas crowds, past the steady jingling of the Salvation Army bells. On the corner was a woman in a bonnet, singing with a man, both wearing the Salvation Army uniform. Conrad was seeing the burning Humvee in Haditha, the bright flames engulfing it. The noise was too great to be noise, and the heat was a separate universe. Conrad was shouting and grabbing for Anderson, who was in the thick of the flames. Anderson was trying to wrench open the door with his bare hands, and Carleton was inside, screaming.

*   *   *

He took the train to Katonah later that afternoon. The car was nearly full, but he found a seat by the window. The trip started in darkness as the train slid swiftly beneath the streets of Manhattan. Later the cars rose up to the surface, rattling past the towers of Harlem, on through the outer regions beyond the city, where the buildings were lower and farther apart, the cars and lights fewer as the train passed from urban density to suburban sprawl and finally to the open countryside.

As the light faded, the train's big glass windows became opaque and reflective, and it became harder to see into the darkness. It had snowed earlier in the week, and a light covering was still on the ground. As the train rattled through the countryside, Conrad leaned close to the window, nearly resting his forehead on the glass. The snow glowed faintly in the dimness, a pale, lambent carpet, smooth and undulating, that lay below the dark houses and trees and the gray sky.

He had told no one his arrival time, and there was no one to meet him. He walked up the concrete stairs alone, relieved to have a few more minutes of silence, invisibility.

Katonah taxis were haphazard operations, cars driven by private operators who had other lives. In the evening, around commuter time, there were always some cabs around, waiting. At midday during the week, often there were none. That day there were several in the parking lot, hoping for a late fare on Christmas Eve. Conrad climbed into a big old American sedan with a loose, coughing engine. The door shut with a solid clunk.

The driver was a heavyset woman in her forties, with a brown, impassive face and long black glossy hair. She looked at him in the mirror. The radio was on low, someone singing.

“North Salem Road,” he told her.

“North Sale Road?” she repeated. Her accent was very thick.

“Just drive east on thirty-five,” he said. “I'll show you where to turn off.”

She nodded and put the car in reverse. The engine made a gargling sound, like a big motorboat idling. They headed out of the little lot, then out of the village. Conrad thought the woman looked familiar: had she driven him home before? He wondered if she was married to one of the landscape guys who roared around the lawns during the summer. She looked older than they were, though. He wondered how long she'd been in the States. They were mostly illegal, the Latin Americans here. The men lined up by the railroad station in the mornings, waiting for a contractor to come by with a pickup truck and give them a day's work. They did all the landscaping. They built stone walls, put in pools, dug gardens, clipped hedges, mowed lawns. All over Westchester, dark faces in every yard. His mother talked about it, distressed by the way they were treated.

The taxi came up the little rise on 22 and stopped at the light at 35. The traffic was heavy, everyone hurrying to get home for Christmas Eve. The road was clear, but there was a thin dusting of snow on the ground. The woods crowded along the road, tall and dim, rising up into the shadowy sky. It was nearly dark.

They lived right on the edge, those lawn guys. It was like being in a revolution, coming here illegally. No language, no green cards, always at risk, in fear but determined to work. People claimed they were taking jobs from Americans, but that was bullshit. Americans wouldn't take those jobs. Those jobs were too menial for people living the American dream, which they did by playing video games and drinking beer. Americans hired these guys to mow their lawns and then complained about illegal aliens. He thought of Ali and the grimy men lined up in the clearing room.

The light changed, and they turned onto 35. Conrad leaned forward. The road narrowed here, rising up the hill and curving along the reservoir. The radio was set to an oldies station: Dusty Springfield was singing, a soulful catch in her voice.

“Just up here,” Conrad said. “Turn left on Mount Holly.”

The woman slowed, waiting for a pause in the traffic. Mount Holly Road was dirt, and once they turned onto it, they were in the country. They bumped slowly along on the narrow lane. The trees met overhead; even in the darkness Conrad could feel them.

“And left onto North Salem, up here,” Conrad told her as they approached the T. It was confusing back here. Mount Holly made a little jog, joining North Salem for a hundred yards, then separating again. Local knowledge. The driver had local knowledge of her own. She knew a village in the south, red dirt and shiny dark leaves, stucco houses with small windows. She would know everything about that village, wherever it was. Here she was on her own. Now it was Dionne Warwick. “Do you know the way to San Jose?” Did she think she could learn a whole American life as though it were hers? Was this her mission? To learn the back roads of Katonah and the musical past of this place, as if she and her parents had grown up here? Or was she putting money away so she could go home?

“This is the house, on the right,” Conrad said as they approached. The house stood on the hillside above the road. It looked festive, all the windows lit and the big sugar maples rising, dark against the ghostly lawn. The cab turned into the driveway and drove up the hill, stopping by the back of the house. Conrad took out his wallet and leaned forward.

“Seven dollar,” the woman said without turning around.

“Gracias,”
Conrad said. He handed her the fare and a five-dollar tip.
“Feliz Navidad.”

The woman looked at him in the mirror, unsmiling. Her black eyes were large and luminous. The overhead light shone down on her face, picking out a pale scar on her right cheek, stretching all the way into the hairline.

“Thank you,” she said, refusing him entry into her language. “Merry Christmas.”

“Okay,” Conrad said, abashed. “Okay. Yeah. You, too.”

He took his bags and got out. It seemed he'd insulted her, implying that she couldn't speak the language of the country she'd chosen. He'd meant to be polite, but he'd been a dick.

He leaned back inside. “Merry Christmas to you, too,
señora
,” he said, “and Happy New Year.”

She glanced at him, suspicious. He smiled, lifting his hand in a wave. She gave him an ambiguous look that turned into a smile. She lifted her hand, and the car moved off down the drive into the darkness.

She was a hero. She had somehow crossed the border concealed in the back of a truck, silent and sweating with fear, or walking, delirious, through the lethal heart of the desert. She'd made her way from that Latin American village or city, wherever it was, to northern Westchester, where she had managed to get a 1962 Chevy and a license to drive people around Katonah. She should have a fucking medal. She should be allowed to decide what language she was addressed in. He thought again of Ali, who was maybe driving a taxi somewhere in a country where they spoke a language foreign to him—and maybe not.

Conrad pushed through the gate. Through the mudroom door he could see the kitchen, all lit up. Lydia was standing at the island, talking to someone out of sight. He dreaded the change that would come over her face; he dreaded being seen.

 

24

Conrad came in through the back door, marshaling his seabag and his bulky bags of presents. Lydia turned, and her face lightened.

“You're here!” she said.

“Hi, Mom.” His chest had gone tight. He smiled at her.

The kitchen was steamy and crowded, full of bags and food and packages. Pots rattled on the stove, something sizzled in a pan, something was roasting in the oven. Murphy lay on a pile of magazines on the island. From the library he heard voices and the TV blaring. The whole house was full.