Lark and Termite (8 page)

Stronger than he looks. Let him sit quiet if he will. Let him sit.

The smashed air swirls all around him and the straps of the chair let him lean forward just enough to touch the window with his forehead. Colors and shapes surface through the pocked glass. The yellow form of the bus sits like a loaf shaped blob on pulsing blacktop. The black tilts toward him in a sidelong square and the hot tar surface seethes in the heat, whining deep in his head like an insect he hears through a pin. He breathes Lark’s name inside himself where only she can hear and the hard black shape lies down. Now he stays still and waits for the bus to move.

Termite, Lark says.

I’m going back in, Lark says.

The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.

North Chungchong Province, South Korea

JULY 26, 1950

Corporal Robert Leavitt

24th Infantry Division

You’ll be safe here.
Leavitt turns toward the tunnel and thinks the words the instant he hears the planes, but he’s at the edge of the crowd with the boy in one clinched arm when the sky opens up. He’s shouting to run for the tunnels in English and faultless Korean, to run for the cover of the railroad bridges, but no one hears over the
ack-ack
of multiple fusillade raining down on them. There are three planes or four, American F-80 jets whose swooping first pass cuts down straight rows of women and old men with kids in their arms. The strafing has them in a death grid as precise as a checkerboard, and the column of hundreds scatters. His men, lined up single file to the left of the Koreans, have the best chance; most run away from the tracks, but some sprint for the trench of the creek bed on the other side. Refugees hemmed in by the press of the crowd die first; they die on the tracks and the gravel, they die in the creek. Others crouch against the sloping banks in shallow water until the planes pull off to circle for another pass. The unencumbered, most of them men, run for the fields and distant foothills. Those with children, and the women—nearly all the women have children, one or two or three, and some a babe in arms—follow him, racing for the cover of the double railway bridge just ahead. The children are screaming. Leavitt is running with them. He’s thrown down his rifle and he’s holding the girl, lifting her off her feet; he has her in one arm and the boy in the other; she grips the old woman against her, dragging her; Leavitt is carrying them all. They make the cover of the tunnel as the planes open up again, flying a final pass before they lift away. Standing with his back to the tunnel entrance, shielding them from the crowd surging in all around them, he sets the girl on her feet and looks her in the face. She’s not injured; none of them are. They’re safe; he can leave them here. In the din of wailing and uproar, they’re silent. More and more refugees pour in behind them, shoving and screaming, bleeding. The girl looks at him, motionless, her stunned eyes flaring.

“You’ll be safe here,” Leavitt tells her in Korean, “stay low, move in deeper.” He gestures to the girl, the sister. She had to be the sister, her pelvis no wider than Leavitt’s two hands. He gives her the boy and pushes them after the old woman, but she stands there, frozen. Instinctively, he shields her with his stance and repeats the order. He has to get back to his men, see who’s left, find Tompkins and the radio. Command is disorganized and communication faulty; directly engaged forces may interpret the strafing as evidence there are infiltrators among the refugees. Leavitt knows it was another bloody mistake born of inept confusion and he’s furious, he’s turning away to find Tompkins and radio command, he’s about to turn away.

When he’s hit he falls to his knees like a man in awe, doesn’t feel himself take the girl with him, pitching forward to cover her with his body. She throws the child from her as she goes down; Leavitt sees the boy fly from them in slow, pillowed suspension but feels only the disjunct lurching of his own body as the bullets make impact. Flames rip into his legs and hips like staccato blades and explode in one burst. They’ve shot him from behind, the stupid fools, his own men or the jumpy troops dug in farther back, fanned out in their trenches at two-hundred-yard intervals. Spooked by noise, panicked, reading the ricochet of their own rifle fire off the scarred concrete walls of the tunnels, they’ve shot the hell out of him, the fucking idiots, the babies. Tompkins has the radio. Fucking Tompkins, revved up full tilt twenty-four hours a day like the war is a barroom brawl and now where is he?
Cease firing! This is not enemy! Repeat. This is not enemy!
The words bleed through like interference, hurled fast and hard through his head in Tompkins’ angry voice. There’s shouting, screaming, crescendos of wailing, a wall of sound.

Abruptly, a shutter falls. Sounds diminish and recede. What and why does it matter. Like an invited guest, he pulls deep inside, poured through himself like water. Colors flash past as though he really sees them, but these colors can’t be real, they’re too vivid and pulsing, turning in and out of one another like cells dividing. He hurtles through them, pummeled by his own heart. He’s dreaming but he’s intensely awake. If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it’s not so bad. They were so afraid and enraged, all the armies of boys and men: if the brass could only bottle this and give the troops a taste, they’d have a lot of heroes. He moves forward, glimpsing his jumbled past amid jagged vestiges of the present, all of it intermingled as though equally important and alive. Nothing is peripheral; it’s sensual, simultaneous. His chest floods with warmth and he sees his mother on the floor of the grocery in Philly her eyes blank and still before he shut them. He’s touching his mother’s face but he sees the Korean girl looking at him, waiting for him in the crowd on the tracks. The sightless boy on her back tilts his head, listening to the sky.
Mother may I, mother me.
Words he said to Lola when she tried to pull rank, be the older woman who advised and directed, who liked him to ask how to touch her. He already knew and was touching her. Her eyes as she watched him, blue, bright with tears. The dark, nearly black eyes of the Korean girl, drawing him into the crowd to give him the boy. The images distort, detach from meaning like puzzle pieces with heightened colors. The colors loosen, coalesce into glowing brilliance, pull him into shards of light that are fine as rain. He’s flying in bright silence. The light grows whiter and hotter, unbearably hot.

Then, like a parcel dumped off a truck, he’s in the tunnel, cold and sweating. The heat and light are in his head and the pain shifts, yawns, opens wide and tugs at him like a mouth. There are scattered bursts of fire. American forces are shooting sporadically to keep everyone inside, keep them from fleeing or retrieving the injured, as though the refugees are an enemy force trying to regroup. The troops are panicked or confused and there’s no command. Leavitt holds still; the pain is a firewall threatening to break. He must be spine shot; that’s why he’s torn up but can’t feel the depth of the pain unless he tries to move. He reaches down, relieved he has sensation in his hands, feels the drenched, slippery fabric of his trousers. It’s as though he’s touching wet sandbags. He feels for his service revolver and touches his empty holster. Frantically, he feels for the hard snub nose of the gun and finds it under his dead thigh; he has it in his fingers when the pain breaks through.

He thinks he screams, but it’s the women screaming, and the children. He’s back outside with the boy and the sky is full of noise, throttling up, homing in on them. There are four planes, he’s certain now, he sees them clearly. Red tracers of fire shoot down in arcs, crackling electrically like comic-book images as he strides powerfully into the tunnel with the Korean girl and her brother in his arms. He knows this isn’t happening; he’s only enduring it to revise it; he’s inside an altered version of what happened, inside his own wavering memory.
You’ll be safe here, stay low, move in deeper.
The words echo back to him as he receives the girl’s searing gaze. He gives her the boy and urges them forward, deeper in. The arched stone mouth of the railway tunnel seems to open endlessly beyond them and he gestures again to the girl, the sister, his arm opening out: Go in here, stay low, near the tunnel walls. Had he said that? It was true. Safer near the walls if there was errant fire. The scene repeats in his head: he gives her the boy, pushes them in after the old woman. He can’t get past the final image, when he urges them inside. He brought them here to leave them; he was wrong. He has to get out now and take them with him. He’d fallen forward; someone has moved him. He’s on his back, like an insect too awkward to move. He hears the girl speaking, whispering in a rush. She’s near him, telling him to be still, to wait, but she’s wrong. They have to get out now. The pain throbs. Out: the word beats in his pulse. He’s got to convince the girl to help him. He needs to think, but he can’t hold on or hold still. He feels himself sliding, falling.

Lola’s embrace receives him. The feel of her rises around him, dark and wide like a river they’re moving in. It’s a familiar fantasy, especially at night: he pretends he’s with her. He doesn’t have to pretend now. The tunnel disappears and he forgets he’s injured, forgets how urgently he needs to survive, to be conscious, how little time there is. It’s night now, he tells Lola, whispering. He’s touching her, he’s made it back, and then it’s a sex dream, swirling into the instant she was pregnant, opening like a vortex that pulls them both all the way into her. It’s warm here, safe. She knew, she’d told him, immediately. Pregnant felt like nothing else. Not tired exactly, not sick or nervous, but edgy, distinct. Focused tight, in sync, like when you’ve hit a phrase in a song just right and it lays itself out through your throat, moving from you across the lights into faces you can’t see in the dark, faces whose eyes you feel play across you. Like a unit on alert, he’d said, and she laughed. Yeah, that was it. Ready, waiting. Perfect? he’d asked. Perfect didn’t matter, wasn’t that kind of question. Inevitable? Evi-
dently,
she told him, fucking college boy. The hell, he said. Course you will, she assured him, after the service, the GI Bill will send you, and I will. That so? he’d teased. She turns away from him in utter silence as though he’s asked the wrong question; she disappears into a quiet that stills all sound.

He waits, willing her back to him, his breathing shallow, and when he feels her move under him again, against him, her belly is huge and tight. The bed is in a meadow but there are shade trees above them, and filtered sun; the trees have grown up to protect and conceal them. They’re naked and fragrant like just-bathed children and she lies back to show him how big she is, how ready to give birth, moving his hands along the hard distended mound of her pregnancy. He can feel the baby move, see a globular shift of head or butt under her tight skin, hard against her dappled belly. A yellow pitcher of summer flowers, lilac and delphinium, turns slowly at the foot of the bed as though eddied on a current. The blue of the flowers drips onto the grass and he understands the meadow is afloat. The hardwood chest of Lola’s Lenox silver service is beside them, suspended in the water despite its weight. The girls at Onslow’s had chipped in to give them a wedding present worthy of a hopeful debutante: a silver-plate service for eight. Lola reaches over carefully with one hand, opens the chest to show him the spoons and knives in their lined trays, the serving pieces in their velvet sleeves. They’d given her a set of perfumes too, small stoppered novelty bottles in a box illustrated with a diagram of the solar system. The little porcelain bottles drift by now, one by one, each bearing a planetary color and an aspect of a face: pink Venus, pale Neptune, jolly yellow moon. Lola doesn’t care, she lets them go. She tells him it was so hard to reach him and they don’t have long. The bed is beginning to move. She lies back and he curves himself into her, holds her as he feels the baby, helpless to turn or move, push from inside her. Water rises over the grass, and the trees dip their leafy branches, pulsing; they’re sighing, groaning, working. He puts his hands on Lola. These are contractions. She’s in labor and she cries out, and the piercing sound cuts them apart.

He’s alone. It was his cry, his voice. His revolver is in his hand. He clutches it tightly but knows he blacked out. Time has passed. Hours. He sees the inverted face of the girl over him, and the face of the boy on her back. She’s waited until dusk and now she’s touching him, moving him, pulling him deeper into the tunnel. The boy clasps her neck from behind with his locked arms, nearly flattened against her as she crouches over Leavitt. Her hands are in Leavitt’s armpits, and her long black hair has come unbound and swings against his throat, enclosing their faces like a moving curtain, dragging the ground. He sees her through it and her eyes are wide with terror. She’s panting with exertion. He’s dead weight.

No, he says,
anyo,
and then more loudly,
Animnida.
She drags him slowly, barely able to move him. The boy’s white shirt, he thinks. Take off the kid’s white shirt and rip it into a flag. Find something to tie it to and get to the tunnel opening at first light. If an American soldier is seen with a flag of surrender, they’ll cease firing and send someone for him. Whoever’s alive will get out, but not unless it happens soon. He tightens his grip on his revolver, shoves it into the waistband of his fatigues, under his shirt.

He tries to think clearly. Tompkins was farther to the rear when the planes opened up. He wouldn’t have run for the tunnels, there wasn’t time; he might have run for the trench shelter of the creek bed and crouched there, shouting into the radio. He must have survived the strafing; Leavitt heard him transmit a cease-fire order,
This is not enemy,
heard him yelling over the scream of the attack, but it made no sense. If there was such an order, the planes ignored it and returned for another pass. They were firing again, strafing survivors of the first hit as refugees poured into the tunnel behind Leavitt. Tompkins was too far down the line to see Leavitt go into the crowd for the girl, see him enter the tunnel, but the tunnel was there and the refugees were inside. Only Tompkins might think Leavitt could be with them, could have helped someone to shelter and been shot to hell when troops emptied their automatics on fleeing civilians. Scared kids with weaponry do evil things, but if Tompkins is alive and conscious, he’ll be looking for Leavitt. The girl pulls him slowly, crouched low. He tries to quiet his breathing, calm his mind so that he can talk to her.

He loses track. Sees the refugees moving beside him before the strafing. He feels Lola near him. He doesn’t want her here as the onslaught unfolds and tries to imagine them in another place and time, in a future, but they slip backward, into their own embrace. Before the baby, before the war, they made their way into her body under the slow turn of her bedroom ceiling fan like they would never get anywhere else.