Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  “Hey, mister,” the woman said as I passed. “Is the strike still on?”

  “No,” I said, “it’s over.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Hey, mister,” the man called, “when’s the strike going to be over?”

  It was dusk, and I didn’t know what to do. I turned left and then left again. Was I going in a circle? I thought about how the cooks would be starting their shift at the restaurant. A car pulled up beside me. “Would you like a ride?” a friendly voice asked. I looked in the window and saw Ned Frost’s bearded face smiling up at me. “Were you going to walk the whole way?” he asked. Then incredulously: “You weren’t going to walk the whole way!”

  There was a young man about my age sitting in the passenger seat.

  “I was,” I said.

  Ned guffawed. “Young legs.” Was there subtext in that? “We’re heading your way,” he said, “and we’ve got two empty seats.”

  The young man got out to let me in the back. He glanced at me with a mixture of shell shock and glumness. He was tall and thin with a tie that he’d tied too short. He had razor nicks on his neck. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled.

  Ned sped off. I marveled at the amount of distance a car could cover in such a short time. In two minutes I was back in familiar territory. I listened to the conversation going on in the front seat, but whatever was being discussed was sparse and hushed. I thought about telling Ned that he could let me out, that I could make it the rest of the way, but my legs hung from my torso like concrete poles. Soon we arrived at the young man’s home. They exchanged some words about the next day’s work, and then the young man got out and I took the front seat. We watched him walk to his building and waited until he let himself in. I wondered if Ned Frost was looking at his ass. “He’s not going to work out,” he said with genuine disappointment, driving off. “It’s too bad, but he just doesn’t have the patience for it. Cartography is a job of patience, really.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  At this, Ned laughed heartily, taking his hands off the steering wheel and rubbing his palms together. Then he was silent, brooding. He drove slowly. Finally, he said, “I was actually thinking about calling to see whether you’d be interested in working in the office again.” He stopped at the light and said deliberately, “There is work. You know how to do the work. The work is what speaks.”

  I wondered, if I accepted his offer, whether he would still give me letters; I wondered if the letters were worth it for the job; I wondered if he expected me to sleep with him. He spoke with great enthusiasm about all the upcoming projects, and by the time we had arrived at my apartment building, I had agreed to take the job. I would start the following week, and Ned Frost would drive me to and from work as long as the strike lasted. He even offered to pay me more money. “There is money. The money is what speaks.”

  We got out of the car in front of my stoop, and Ned opened the trunk. He took out a few brochures. “Your maps,” he said.

  I peered at them under the feeble streetlight. They were for various things like an art fair and a business district. I ran my hand over the glossy covers and then flipped through until I found colorful images of my work.

  “Nice, huh?” he said.

  “Nice,” I said. I handed them back.

  “No, no, take them, Rex,” Ned said. “Keep them. They’re yours.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and put them in my pocket.

  “See you Monday,” he said.

  “See you Monday,” I said.

  We shook hands, and then I grabbed Ned Frost by his jacket and pushed him. Not hard, but enough to startle him and send him stumbling backward. There was a pause as he caught his breath and righted himself, and then I grabbed his jacket again, but this time I pulled him. For being so overweight he was surprisingly light, as if made of air, and I think his feet might have even come off the ground. His bearded face was inches from mine and I could smell his breath. I pitched him from side to side, as if rocking a boat for fun, and when I let go, he went off spinning toward the ground, grunting as he landed. A small notebook and pen came out of his pocket and rolled out into the empty street. This made me feel sad, and I went and picked them up and brought them back to him. “Here you go,” I said.

  He was on all fours breathing hard, the white breath coming out in bursts from his mouth and nose. I set the notebook and pen down beside him and waited until he had brought himself to a standing position. He brushed off his pants. His tweed jacket had torn in the armpit, and I wondered if he’d notice that before he wore it again, or if someone would point it out to him at work. He stooped down and picked up his pen and pad and put them back in his pocket. Once he had oriented himself, he got back in his car without looking at me. I watched him sit there for a while collecting himself, and then he drove off down the street.

  That night Frankie and I were eating pizza when the basketball game was interrupted by a local news report telling us that the bus strike was over. The state supreme court had ordered the drivers back to work immediately, contract or no contract. There was a clip of the mayor saying that he felt great relief that the city would finally get itself back on its feet.

  “The drivers,” Frankie said, “the drivers … they … got screwed!”

  Then the basketball game came on again.

  On Monday the buses were up and running. I woke early to the sound of a diesel engine just below my window. I got dressed and went downstairs to see for myself. Fifteen minutes later, sure enough, a bus came rolling around the corner and stopped and opened its doors for me. “This ride’s on us,” read a sign taped over the fare box. The driver looked as if the sign might as well have been hanging around his neck. The bus was full with everyone trying to get to work. I found a seat in the back and looked out the window as the bus crawled past the playground and the laundromat and the Buy ’n’ Save. We made a right turn, stopped to pick up some more passengers, and then headed onto the thoroughfare. I had nowhere to go, of course, but for a moment it felt as if I were free.

  PARANOIA

  When April arrived, it started to get warm and everyone said that the war was definitely going to happen soon and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. The diplomats were flying home, the flags were coming out, and the call-ups were about to begin. Walking across the bridge, I would sometimes see freight trains lumbering by, loaded top to bottom with tanks or jeeps, once even the wings of airplanes, heading out west or down south. Some line had been crossed, something said or done, something irrevocable on our side or on the enemy’s, from which there was no longer any possibility of turning back. I hadn’t been following matters that closely, so I had missed exactly when things had taken a turn. Nevertheless, everyone was saying that the war was going to happen soon and so I said it too.

  Then May came and it got hot and Roberto broke his nose and asked me if I would come visit him in the hospital. “Blood everywhere,” he told me over the phone. Apparently he had been lifting weights at the gym when one of his buddies, in order to emphasize some conversational point he was making, feinted like a boxer and swung at Roberto’s face. The buddy had meant merely to pantomime the punch, but with his arms heavy-light from having just bench-pressed three hundred pounds, he had lost the ability to gauge distance, strength, or speed, and he cracked Roberto right in the nose. I wanted to question the details of the story because Roberto was subject to hyperbole, and also because I was selfish and didn’t want to make the trip across town, but I was the closest thing to family that Roberto had, and on the telephone he did sound like he had a sock stuffed down his throat and up his nose.

  To make matters worse, my car happened to be in the shop, and according to the bus map, I had to catch three buses I’d never heard of. So what should have taken me twenty minutes was going to take an hour and a half. Sitting in the back of the J-23B with the air-conditioning barely working, I stared out the window as we crawled through residential neighborhoods whose houses were all hung w
ith flags. There was no breeze, and the flags hung limply. Some of the homes displayed the MIA and POW flags from bygone wars, and every so often there’d be a sign stuck in a window that said PEACE or NO WAR or something to that effect, but those were few and far between, and for the most part everyone was on the same page. Ten minutes into the ride, I was sweating heavily; rivulets ran from my armpits down my sides and collected in the elastic of my underwear. This is what it must feel like for soldiers on the transport heading to battle, I thought. I was wearing shorts and my thighs adhered to the bus seat so that whenever I shifted, my skin peeled away from the plastic. The other passengers were old hands and obviously knew what was in store for them because they’d come equipped with things to fan themselves, things like newspapers and magazines and even a flattened cereal box. Out of the corner of my eye, the rapid motion resembled birds alighting. Twenty-five minutes into the ride, I retrieved a discarded supermarket circular from under the seat in from of me and tried to use it as a fan, but the paper was too thin and kept flopping over and I wasn’t able to generate any current. I folded it four times and then gave up and tossed it back under the seat where I’d found it. A woman looked at me with disapproval. She was waving a book in front of her face.

  “It was already on the floor,” I said. I smiled.

  She shrugged. She didn’t care.

  At every corner, the bus hit a red light, and we’d have to sit idling for sixty seconds, stewing in the pot, and then once the light turned green and the bus made it through the intersection, it would stop again to let passengers on and off, elderly people who took forever, fat people who took forever, a man in a wheelchair who took five minutes, and by the time we arrived at the end of the next block, the light would be turning red again and we’d have to stop and idle and do the whole thing all over. It was abysmal urban planning, humiliating and crushing. I kept urging the bus forward by tensing and twisting and leaning forward like a bowler who imagines his body language can influence the trajectory of the ball once it’s left his hand. My skin peeled. I blamed everyone: the bus, the driver, the passengers. I blamed Roberto for breaking his nose. Then I blamed myself for blaming Roberto. It wasn’t his fault. Nothing was his fault. His nose was just another symptom of his vulnerability, his desperation, a strange man in a strange land, hoping one day to magically transform into an American and have a real life. “I’m already an American,” he’d say indignantly, haughtily, in a clipped and formal way that was supposed to emphasize the fact that he had lost, through extreme effort, all traces of an accent. “I’m an American just like you!” But he wasn’t just like me. He was dark—dark-skinned, dark-haired, black-eyed, from some village that nobody had ever heard of and which he’d left twelve years earlier when his father was awarded a scholarship to study architecture at our university, all expenses paid.

  I had discovered him in the park one afternoon about two weeks after he arrived, thirteen years old, skinny and solitary, unable to speak a word of English, tossing a baseball up in the air. “¿Te gusta jugar al beisbol?” I’d said, because I’d been taking Spanish for two years, though the teacher, despite providing us with an extensive vocabulary and showing us how to conjugate every verb backward and forward, had neglected to teach us how to construct a complete sentence save one: “Do you like to play baseball?” Roberto had gazed at me in confusion, almost terror, until finally he responded, “Sí, me gusta jugar al beisbol.” Four years later, his father graduated with honors and the family’s visa expired, effective immediately. It was time to go back. But Roberto had no interest in going back. So they went back without him, leaving him with eight months of high school to go, alone and illegal, in an apartment that had been emptied of almost everything, including the furniture. I was there the day after they left. It looked like it had been ransacked. He had his bed and his clothes, but that was about it. The closets were open and empty, and the curtains were gone. Standing in the void of a three-bedroom apartment he couldn’t pay for, he tried to act chipper about his prospects at age seventeen. In his newfound independence, he had taken the opportunity to cut out pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger at various stages of his career and paste them on the wall like wallpaper. There was nothing in the refrigerator except a jar of mayonnaise and a can of tuna fish, but it didn’t matter, because he didn’t have any dishes.

  A few blocks from the infamous Maple Tree Heights, I had to transfer to the K-4AB. It was just pulling away when I arrived. I chased after it as it sailed down the street. Some elderly black women passed me pushing shopping carts, and one said, “That’s a shame, honey,” and another said, “That’s how they do you up here.” At the end of the street was a hill with a sharp ascent, and a billboard that read, WELCOME TO MAPLE TREE HEIGHTS. The billboard looked brand-new except for the fact that someone had crawled up and spray-painted, “Don’t come on in here.” Every week there was a report on the news of some unfortunate event, many involving white people who had lost their way and wound up wandering through Maple Tree Heights, where they were set upon and beaten for sport. Most recently a mathematics professor had been whipped with a snakeskin belt. I reflected on how the scrawled message could be interpreted less as implied threat and more as honest warning. It also seemed possible that the message was not being directed outward at all but inward, at those who already lived in Maple Tree Heights and might be contemplating moving to some other part of the city.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning and already muggy, slushy, the air slow-moving. “Hitting ninety today, folks,” the weatherman had said. Everyone was saying that if it was ninety in May, what was it going to be in August. The sky was cloudless, and I could feel the undiluted sun beating straight down on the top of my head. There were various empty buildings surrounding me, and I had the sensation that I was being watched by someone somewhere. I felt exposed in my shorts, my whiteness made manifest by the paleness of my legs. Directly across the street was an Arby’s with an American flag draped across its giant cowboy hat. I should go inside to wait for the bus, I thought. I’ll be safe there. But as soon as I thought this, three black guys about my age came out of the restaurant with their roast-beef-sandwich bags and big boots and baseball caps and stood underneath the hat, smoking and staring at me. I put my hands in my pockets casually and looked up the street as if I were fixated on what was coming. Nothing was coming. The empty air wobbled in the heat. When I glanced back, the guys were still smoking and saying things to one another, low things, conspiratorial things. They had expertly tilted their baseball caps down so that I couldn’t see where precisely they were looking, but I knew they were looking at me. I thought about running, but running implied terror. Or capitulation. For a moment I had a clear picture of myself disoriented, panting, turning in error up into Maple Tree Heights.

  Then I heard my name being called. “Dean!” I heard. “Goddamn, Dean!”

  When I looked back at the three guys, I saw that they were smiling and that I knew them, two of them; we had played together on the football team in high school. And here they came from underneath the Arby’s hat, laughing, yelling, their bags of roast-beef sandwiches in one hand, their cigarettes in the other. “Goddamn, Dean,” they said. “How long’s it been?” There was some initial awkwardness as we tried to coordinate the hand slapping and the hugging and the sandwiches and the cigarettes, but eventually we managed to greet one another properly.

  I introduced myself to the one I didn’t know.

  “What’s up, my man?” he said. He looked skeptical.

  “We thought you were the police,” Quincy said.

  This made everyone laugh. The man I didn’t know laughed bitterly, and I laughed out of relief at this fortunate turn of events. Troy blew smoke out of his nose, and Quincy blew it out of his mouth, and I wanted to ask for a cigarette, because I was eager to fortify our bond and because I only smoke when I can smoke for free. The man I didn’t know removed a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Then he took out his sandwich and bit into it, and I co
uld smell the roast beef, which in the heat made me queasy.

  “What are you doing all the way out here, Dean?” Quincy wanted to know. “This here is no-man’s-land.”

  “I’m waiting for the bus,” I said. “I’m on my way to see Robbie.”

  “Robbie?”

  “Robbie Díaz?”

  “Spanish Robbie?”

  “Goddamn, man!”

  “How’s Robbie?”

  “He broke his nose.”

  “That ain’t cool.”

  “Tell him I said what’s up.”

  “Bus?” said the man I didn’t know. “There ain’t no bus here.”

  I pointed to the sign above my head.

  “There ain’t no bus here,” he repeated. He was the kind of person who offered the minimum amount of information possible.

  “Bus stop is over there,” Quincy said. He pointed up the street to an abandoned building with broken windows and a sign that said TEXTILES Something-or-other, INC. The words had eroded.

  “Hey, Troy,” I said. “How about letting me have one of those cigarettes?”

  Troy aimed his pack in my direction, and out popped a cigarette halfway. A surge of nostalgia and tenderness coursed through me for our old football games. I put the cigarette to my lips with great anticipation, but Troy’s matches were moist or stale, and each time I struck one, it would flare up for a second and then fizzle out. After the third miss, I asked the man I didn’t know if I could use his lighter. He handed it to me grudgingly. It had a picture of an American flag on it. When I flicked the lighter, the flag fluttered as if waving in the wind.

  “Let me see that,” Quincy said, and we passed the lighter around, flicking it on and off, marveling at the trick, until the man I didn’t know said not to waste any more fluid.

  “I was just thinking about getting me a tattoo like that,” Troy announced. “Right here.” He pulled up his shirt to reveal a saggy and swollen stomach. “Here to here.” He outlined the image like a teacher standing at a chalkboard. “Here’s where the flagpole goes.” He indicated his belly button.