Ash Wednesday Page 2

  “Harper, take your sister in the other room.”

  “Why?”

  His grandmother gave him a sharp look. “Are we not going to church?” he asked softly.

  “Maybe not,” she said, looking at me.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” he cheered and grabbed his and his sister’s bowls and put them both in the sink. “Hot-diggity, dog-diggity, boom whatcha do ta me,” he shouted at his sister, and then grabbed her hand and dragged her into the other room, chattering to her the whole time about the benefits of blowing off church.

  “Uh, look, here’s the deal,” I said the millisecond we were alone, opening up the army file I had tucked under my arm. “Your son Private Kevin Anderson was shot and killed last night outside the base in an altercation that occurred in the parking lot of the Paradise Bar. His body is being held at the Medical Center, where the exact time of death, complete medical outline, and profile of any criminality are waiting for you.” I was doing good, looking down at Kevin’s folder and occasionally back up at her. “Kevin is owed a military funeral provided for by the U.S. Army. Other benefits and outstanding information will be given to you with the body. It is army priority and policy to inform the next of kin at the earliest possible conven . . . opportunity. And uh . . . that’s my job today.” All that crap jettisoned out of my mouth. I’ve been living with the army long enough that their whole mumbo-jumbo vocabulary comes pretty easy to me, even when I’m swishing my mouth around like a coke fiend.

  There was a long silence as this woman looked me square in the eyes. I tried to sit still.

  “Do you do this all the time?” she asked, with no visible reaction to the information I just gave her.

  “No, it’s no one’s job. It rotates. This month the responsibility falls to my lieutenant, who in turn assigned it to me. In fairness, however, I should explain this is not supposed to be my job.” I checked my nose again and took a sip of tomato juice. The juice was warm and gnarly-tasting. The refrigerator must’ve been on the fritz. “I’m awfully sorry,” I added. I was feeling a tiny bit better.

  “Are you on drugs?” she asked me.

  My whole body tightened as if I were about to have a seizure. I shook my head no.

  “Are you on drugs?” she asked again.

  “Yes.” I nodded meekly.

  “Is my son really dead?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE,” she shrieked, and threw the bottle of tomato juice at my head. It bounced off the table and rolled onto the floor without breaking. Violence is so tame in real life. The cap had fallen off, and there was tomato juice everywhere. The mess would take forever to clean up. Quietly, the two children crept up the hall behind their grandmother, grabbing her leg and the bottom of her parka.

  “What’s wrong, Grandma?” Harper asked, looking at me.

  “Get out of my house,” she said, this time quietly and sternly. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I wanted to tell her I understood how she felt—I never wanted to be in the army, it was a whim that’d turned into two and a half years of drinking. I was better than this. This was the worst day of my life.

  My father had committed suicide, and the life I was supposed to be living had died with him. I promised myself that if I lived till tomorrow, and if my nose didn’t fall off my face, I would change. The first thing I’d do is get Christy back, and she’d help me figure out a way to make all this better.

  Kevin’s mother walked over to the door and opened it for me to leave. With the file still in my hand, I moved over to the door and went to step out. I turned around to tell her one more time how I was sorry, and she bitch-slapped me hard on the side of my head. My nose started to bleed. I stepped out, pushing open the screen door. The cold air numbed my throbbing face.

  “Hey, you,” she called out, pissed-off tears welling up in her eyes. I turned around. “What’s your name?” she yelled through the screen.

  “What?” I said, still holding my nose. Any second, I was gonna start sobbing.

  “You never told me your name. You never even introduced yourself.”

  “James,” I said. “Staff Sergeant James Heartsock Junior.” My father would’ve been so disappointed in me.

  “Well, Jimmy Heartsock, I will never forget you.”

  Introducing Christy Ann Walker

  The cold air snapped in my lungs as I walked across the gravel-pitted asphalt, bit my lip, and took that long step up onto the Adirondack Trailways bus.

  O my holy, everliving, and gracious God, please help me.

  I showed the guy my ticket and wondered if he could tell I was pregnant. I could feel Jimmy’s breath behind me. Don’t go, baby, I heard him whisper. Let’s make love. His fingers, I imagined, gripped my biceps, tugging me, pulling my shoulder around back toward him. I stepped down the aisle, one foot at a time. He hadn’t called; I thought he would have. I couldn’t cry anymore. What would he say, I wondered, when he found out I was carrying our child, when he discovered I was gone?

  Moving down between the rows of seats, I picked one in the middle by the window. The upholstery was a faded blue and green plastic. Fifteen years ago this bus was clean, with vibrant colors. Now, every aspect of it was dull. There were ashtrays that flipped open inside the armrests. I wanted a cigarette. I was dizzy with that desire. Opening my purse, I took out a cold fractured stick of spearmint gum and placed it in my mouth. I could feel Jimmy kissing me, the warmth of his tongue. He liked to approach a kiss from the side, starting with the corner of my lips. I could feel the soft hairs of his mustache, the roughness of his chin, tickling me. My neck would get blotchy and red whenever we made out.

  When we were in a fight, or if I was scared he might leave, I’d take my comforter and a pillow and sleep on the carpet, with my back against the door. Oh, fuck, I’ll miss him forever.

  A man sat beside me, jostling me up and down. I didn’t even look at him. He smelled slightly. I wanted to be alone. The plastic of the seat was hard and cold. My pillow, I thought; I’ve forgotten my pillow. The bus engine made those exhaling sighs, the wheels slowly started to spin, the world that I had known began to inch away, and in that instant I died.

  You are nothing, I chanted to myself, and that made me feel better. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my hair.

  Nothing you will ever do will matter. Your life, and that of everyone on this bus, doesn’t matter any more than the trees outside. Earthworms matter the same as you. All our lives are passing. My child’s life will come and go, as will my grandmother’s. This bus will someday rest among a heap of other buses, and no one will know I sat here. Upon my death, my story will float out into such a mass of stories that my voice will be absorbed unheard. You are nothing. Nothing is important.

  I said this over and over to myself. No awareness of identity existed inside me. For that instant I was dead.

  The pisser is, I’ve died before.

  We pulled out through town. There were still heaps of snow piled along the curbs, black and sooty from car exhaust and other miscellaneous garbage. The traffic signs were shaking in the wind. The whole of Albany was covered in a winter film of grime.

  I had been awake seven hours and still had not smoked.

  The man next to me shuffled in his seat. He was an attractive dark-skinned black man. He did smell slightly, not badly but soft and salty like I’d imagine a desert smells. His skin was a deep midnight black and his hands were strong, laced with wide veins that you could see slightly beating with his blood. He was wearing sunglasses with reflective forest-green lenses. The white February light was beaming intensely on his face but I couldn’t see his eyes at all, just his high cheekbones and images in his glasses of the light moving outside.

  We drove along slowly. The only time that I ever seem calm, and a gentleness eases the scratching under my skin, is when I’m moving. I’m like a baby that way. Some of
my favorite memories were of sitting on the black vinyl bench seat of Jimmy’s Chevy Nova as he drove us to get some videos. In his car there’s nothing to do. There was the hum of the asphalt underneath us and the vibration of the engine. Everything else could wait till we got to the video store.

  The bus stopped briefly at a toll booth and circled onto Interstate 87.

  I took another deep breath, tried to relax my shoulders, turned, and stared out the window. Jimmy’s Nova is silver with two black racing stripes down the center. It was difficult to keep from searching for him. Faintly, I could see my reflection in the glass in front of me. I’d cut my hair and dyed it raven black. It made me look more mature, but underneath I still felt like a teenager. I tried to sit perfectly still and not speak. I made a decision to be silent for the entire journey.

  The man next to me took off one of his jackets, dug into the knapsack under his seat, bumped me hard several times, and sat back up with a 40-ounce beer wrapped in a brown paper bag. In between his thumb and forefinger, in green ink, on his black skin, was a tattoo of a half moon. You could barely make it out.

  He muttered inaudibly a few words of what seemed like a prayer of gratitude and opened the beer. It popped and sprayed a mess dripping down onto his lap, but he didn’t care. He casually wiped the spilled beer into his pants.

  He was staring straight ahead, but somehow he felt me observing him. “You going all the way to Manhattan?” he said.

  His voice was higher than I would’ve thought, not delicate or fragile but vulnerable and warm. He was wearing a thick wool cap with wide stitching and a down vest over a canvas jacket. The jacket was zipped right up to his chin; underneath I could see the edge of a beige turtleneck. He had a little scar on his forehead over his right eye. I could see the tops of his scraggly eyebrows sticking out from underneath his glasses. On one of his fingers was a large silver ring that read PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT. His face and body were wide and powerful but also tender and round. He was big, taller than I am. He weighed a lot, you could tell. He had a short cropped mustache, like Jimmy’s, only with a completely different kind of hair. Jimmy’s mustache is a bit wispy. You can’t say that to him, but it’s true.

  “First I’m going to Manhattan,” I said, trying to be curt without being hostile. The light had now moved so it was shining directly in my face.

  “Where you going after that?” he asked.

  “Texas,” I said, my vow of silence abandoned.

  “I won’t bother you if you don’t want to talk,” he went on. “I don’t need to talk, is what I’m saying.” He turned and looked at me. I still couldn’t see his eyes. “If I could change one thing about myself, I would stop speaking entirely.”

  He was quiet. I clicked the ashtray open and closed.

  “Why?” I asked finally. My hands were still cold. I warmed them by pressing them upside down along my neck as if I were choking myself.

  “Well, because I’ve never said anything of any real value in my entire life.” He smiled. “I can yabble on at the mouth, telling people how I feel, asking them how they feel, but it’s just fillin’ the world up with more noise.” He was sitting perfectly still, his hands, centered in his lap, gently holding the beer can.

  I had sex with a black guy once. He was skinny and neurotic, not like this guy at all.

  “It’s nice to be understood,” I said quietly.

  “Thank you,” he replied. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  I poked through my purse and dug out a matchbook and began apprehensively picking my teeth with the corner of the cardboard. I’ve always done that: picked my teeth with an inappropriate object. It’s a habit that annoys Jimmy. He picks his ear and smells his finger. That’s the most peculiar habit I’ve ever seen.

  “If I could, I wouldn’t even think,” I said softly.

  “You’d be like an animal?” He turned to look at me again. All I could see were his green glasses and a mutated reflection of myself.

  “Well, yes—like a good animal. An owl or something.”

  “Owls are good?” he asked.

  I nodded. There was a long pause. He turned away and looked straight ahead. His movements were calm and deliberate. He had beautiful lips.

  “An owl is wise, correct?” he asked.

  “Correct,” I answered. “Wise and good.”

  “I’d be a bear,” he said definitively. “Nobody eats a bear. Top of the food chain.”

  “Nobody eats owls. I don’t think.” I’d never heard of anyone eating an owl. There was another long silence between us. It started to seem as though our conversation had ended.

  I wished I’d had more friends. I don’t know what happened; in high school it seemed like I had so many. The only person I’d been close to in Albany, besides Jimmy, was my old roommate, Chance. She was married now, with a baby son, and our friendship had altered into something I didn’t recognize.

  The bus moved down through New York State. On the right side of the highway you could see old weatherbeaten mountains, the Catskills. Sometimes a gust of wind would hit the side of the bus so hard I could feel it shove us inches over into the next lane. We were passing farm after farm. At the turn of the last century, 80 percent of Americans were involved in agriculture. Now there’s less than 10 percent. Jimmy talks about that all the time. He loves history.

  “Thoughts have value,” the man next to me said, breaking the quiet. “They shape what we do. I wouldn’t give up thinkin’. You never do something without thinking about it first.”

  “Still, if I could, I’d behave with more spontaneity, not second-guessing myself all the time, you know?”

  “Thank you,” he said again, only this time a little too loudly, and slowly dragging out his speech. Then he was mute again. I still wasn’t sure what he meant.

  We sat for a long while without speaking, as we passed exit after exit on the highway. The bus was about half full. All of a sudden I felt hot and took off my jacket and my sweatshirt. They crackled with static electricity. Cooler now, I sat there in a blank white V-neck T-shirt. I might’ve just had a hot flash. The only real symptom of pregnancy, I noticed, was that I was uncomfortable in any position, for no good reason. Also, things seemed to smell bad, and everything that wasn’t ice cold tasted rotten. I had my shoes off and my arms wrapped around my knees. However I situated myself, it wasn’t right. I wished I’d remembered my pillow.

  Hundreds and thousands of cars were passing purposefully in the opposite direction: red cars, white cars, minivans, sport utility vehicles, cars with kids and personalized license plates, and trucks, massive trucks. Automobiles are the leading cause of death in this country, and still everyone wants a new car.

  The highway felt like a river, winding and weaving along the Hudson, bouncing us along as if we were leaves. We passed gas stations and chain food restaurants, with their billboards advertising happiness. I know the images in magazines and on TV aren’t true representations of the world; I mean, that’s obvious. But I still get this sinking feeling of disappointment, as if it is the world I should see.

  Every five minutes or so the man next to me would take a small, very calm sip of his beer and then rest his hands in his lap. You don’t see that very often—someone sitting peacefully without any extra movement. His head was swaying lightly with the rocking of the bus. I stared at him. He still hadn’t taken off his sunglasses or his knit cap or unzipped his jacket.

  “Are you blind?” I asked.

  “You didn’t notice?” He grinned.

  “No.” I studied his face. I felt like somehow he’d tricked me.

  “Are you blind?” he asked, and laughed a big cocky laugh.

  “No, just self-involved,” I said.

  “Thank you!” He laughed again and slapped his hands hard, twice, against his knees. I put my legs down on the floor in their correct position. For some reason blind people m
ake me self-conscious.

  When I was thirteen my dad made me take this blind girl, Alison, from our church youth group, to Wet ’n’ Wild. It was an amusement park full of water slides and wave pools and hundreds of half-naked teenagers running around with sodas. Not only could Alison not see, she was also extremely short. The two might have been connected—kidney problems, I think—but I was already tall and it added to how awkward I felt around her. I held her hand as we walked around the park, doing all the low-key slides in tandem. She was sweet but a pain in the ass; all she wanted to do was wade in the children’s pool and place her vagina directly over a small bubbling fountain. “This feels fantastic,” she would say loudly. “Oh, my goodness!” she’d exclaim. “Wow, you have to try this!”

  All of a sudden, this businessman sitting in the row in front of me on the Trailways reclined his chair all the way back. I could see his beanie little balding scalp peeking up over the seat arrogantly. I was so uncomfortable I could’ve screamed. Taking my jacket and my sweater, I tried to position them under my legs and against the armrests. I tried to place any item I could to soften the space between me and the edges. Sitting all the way to Texas was never going to happen.

  “Are you very beautiful?” asked the blind man.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I imagine that you are very beautiful.”

  “Why?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being lecherous. I wanted to like him.

  He took a long pause and caressed his mustache with his whole hand. “I just have an image of you in my head, and you’re attractive. I don’t mean to offend you or make you uncomfortable,” he said, in a removed tone, and took a sip from his beer.

  “It’s OK,” I said, and adjusted myself away from him.

  I missed Jimmy. I didn’t want to go to freakin’ Texas. Grandmother was so old now. She was the only one I wanted to see, but I knew it’d be depressing. When I’d speak to her over the phone, all she’d talk to me about was the time she met Eleanor Roosevelt.