Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  “Motorized?” he asked.

  He shrugged. He folded the paper and put it in his pocket and got back to work on the DVD player. The woman was just about to pick the color yellow when the game show was interrupted by breaking news: every branch of the military had been ordered to join the marines on high alert—the navy, the army, the air force, the coast guard, and branches I’d never heard of. There were maps with arrows, and the peninsula was highlighted. The experts were all in agreement; even the experts who used to disagree now agreed. Everything made sense. There was a sexy reporter interviewing soldiers at their base.

  “We could be attacked without warning,” she said. “Right here and now.” Her eyes were dewy, her lips were thick. She wore a flak jacket and a helmet from under which flowed long brown hair.

  “Do you miss your family?” she asked one of the soldiers.

  “Yes, I do, ma’am,” the soldier said.

  Roberto came and sat beside me on the sofa.

  “But I have to do what I have to do,” the soldier said. He had blond hair, blue eyes, an upturned nose. If not for his twang, he could have been a California surfer. Night-vision goggles were propped on his forehead.

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Any day now,” the reporter said, turning to us.

  “Any day now,” Roberto repeated. The sentiment seemed poignant. I draped my arm around his enormous shoulders. I was in a forgiving mood.

  “Let’s go get a DVD,” I said.

  Outside, the cobbler was closing up for the night. He was trying to pull the grate down over the shopwindow but was having trouble because he was old and fat. Roberto ran to his aid as if rescuing a child from the water’s edge. “Wait! Wait! Stop! Stop!” He reached up with wide forearms, and in an instant the gate came crashing down onto the boiling sidewalk.

  “Ah, you good man,” the cobbler said.

  At the video store we browsed the titles. We agreed, finally, on one of those funny buddy road movies. Then Roberto picked a porno that he said he was going to watch alone. And then he picked his favorite gangster movie with Tyler McCoy.

  I paid for all three.

  Back at the apartment, there were about forty flies walking over everything, including the dishes.

  “Maybe you should close the window,” I suggested.

  He complied, trapping the heat and trapping the flies. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out some bread and cheese and tuna fish and put them on the counter where the flies were. He took out a jar of mayonnaise, and while his back was turned, the flies landed on the bread and cheese and tuna fish. When he was done making the sandwiches, he put one on a plate where the flies had been and handed it to me. He sat down on the sofa bed and pressed play. The trailers ran and the sofa sagged. After that, the movie with Tyler McCoy began. I pressed pause.

  “I thought we were going to watch the other one,” I said. “The buddy one.”

  “Let’s watch this one first.”

  “I’ve seen it three times,” I said.

  “So what,” he said, “I’ve seen it three hundred times.” This was no exaggeration.

  He pressed play, and so began Tyler McCoy’s rags-to-riches story through violent and immoral means. When the characters spoke, Roberto spoke, every word, soundlessly mouthing in perfect unison.

  He pressed pause. “Why aren’t you eating your sandwich?” he asked.

  “I think I saw a fly land on it,” I admitted.

  With irritation he said, “You are opulent,” and he took the sandwich from me and bit into it, a huge, obvious bite so that I could see the food in his mouth. “And I am indigent.”

  Which was true. I’d had a DVD player for ten years.

  On the Fourth of July, Roberto and I drove downtown to see the parade. There was nowhere to park, and we had to walk twenty minutes up a hill in 105-degree heat. The turnout was extraordinary. The largest ever, people were saying. Other people were saying that each year the turnout should be the largest ever and that people shouldn’t wait for a war to become patriots. “I keep my flag out year-round,” one man said. “And you can pass by my house anytime to see if I’m telling the truth.” The fountain was going, though we were supposed to be conserving water, and the parks people had somehow managed to get it to rise and fall in alternating colors of red, white, and blue. Up and down it went, hypnotically. Roberto and I stood shoulder to shoulder, transfixed by the spectacle. Children played along the edge, and parents screamed at them not to drink the water because it was poisonous.

  The sun was straight overhead, but the heat felt as if it were coming from down below, from the asphalt, emanating up through my shoes and legs and out through my scalp. I had brought along a container of sunblock, SPF 45, which I kept applying to my face and neck every few minutes. Roberto looked at me in fascination and amusement. His nose was almost healed except for a small red mark that ran along the bridge and which he kept rubbing because he was self-conscious.

  “Does my nose look big?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I lied.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the emcee said, and a band started up, all trumpets and drums and tubas playing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” People swayed and sang, and Roberto used the heartfelt moment as an opportunity to make his first payment. “To the best friend,” he announced, holding a pile of crumpled bills. “To the greatest friend in the whole world.” He handed over the fistful of dollars like he was pouring gold coins into my hands. “Count,” he said.

  I counted twenty dollars.

  He displayed the sheet of paper with the Dr. Scholl’s logo and his now updated balance sheet. He had crossed out “I O Dean $200.00” and replaced it with “I O Dean $180.00, RD,” dated “July 4th.”

  I used some of the money to treat us to two foot-longs, and I was about to treat us to two more when an altercation broke out near the fountain. People pushed to get to the action, and Roberto and I pushed too, and the emcee said not to push. The crowd surged forward, and when the wall of people opened, I could see parade-goers shouting and pointing at a small ragtag group of protesters holding signs that said WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER and things of that nature.

  We jeered at them, and they jeered back. “You’re all fools,” they screamed.

  “It’s the Fourth of July, for crying out loud,” a woman next to me yelled back. Her face was pink, possibly burning, and she looked close to tears. “Isn’t anything sacred to you people?”

  Roberto cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Faggots!”

  People laughed.

  “Hey,” I hissed at Roberto. “That word’s not called for!”

  Some of the parade-goers began splashing the protesters with blue water from the fountain, and soon the police arrived to separate everyone and escort the protesters to a special section at the other end of the park. The band struck up the national anthem. We put our hands over our hearts as veterans from previous wars began marching past, starting with World War II. There were only a few of these, and they ambled by slowly, looking confused and displaced, their uniforms baggy like diapers and draped with medals that glinted in the sun. Their children and grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren helped them along and did the waving for them. People applauded, but the applause seemed to disorient the veterans. “Thank you,” Roberto called, “thank you for all you’ve done!”

  As the wars progressed, the soldiers got younger, until we arrived at the youngest, the new recruits. By the time they appeared, I was exhausted from the heat and the clapping. I felt like I was being immersed in boiling water, and I was sure I had a terrible burn on the back of my neck. Still, I mustered the energy and pounded my hands harder than I had up to that point. This was bon voyage for the new recruits—they were marching from the parade straight to the train depot. “Last stop, the peninsula,” the emcee said. The crowd went wild. Roberto and I clapped harder yet. The soldiers came marching down in lines of twenty. Line after line.
Ten minutes of lines. A mass of bodies larger than the crowd watching. They were decked out in the latest gear, everything streamlined and advanced: goggles and helmets, tool belts and boots, lights and antennas. They resembled astronauts with automatic weapons.

  “To the moon!” I yelled. It had a nice ring to it.

  “To the moon!” Roberto yelled.

  And then I saw a familiar face. I couldn’t place the face, but I knew that I knew it. I knew it vaguely. The man was tall and frail, and the helmet looked too large for his head, more like a bonnet than a helmet, and with each step it bobbled and appeared in danger of slipping off. He fumbled with the strap, trying to tighten it and keep pace at the same time. Sweat poured down his face as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool. He seemed on the verge of collapse.

  “I know that man,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Roberto shouted.

  The man reached into one of the many pockets on his jacket and withdrew a handkerchief. In one clean motion, he brought the handkerchief down across his dripping face. Then he turned and looked at me. The man I didn’t know.

  “Hey,” I called. I smiled and waved.

  He squinted. He seemed to be looking at me and then beyond me. The attitude of haughty disdain that he’d had that day at the bus stop had been replaced by a look of fatigue and befuddlement. I wondered if Quincy and Troy were with him, and I scrutinized the lines of marching soldiers. An instant later, the man I didn’t know had passed, and all I could see was his back, with his enormous pack weighed down by the essentials and an antenna sticking out.

  I cried out after him, “I told you there wasn’t going to be a draft!”

  In August something strange happened: it got cold. In one day, it plummeted from a record high of 107 to 95 degrees. This felt like relief. But after that the temperature kept dropping, until by the middle of the month it was fifty-three. In the beginning of the cold snap, everyone was happy, and then everyone was scared. Everyone was saying that if it was fifty degrees in August, what was it going to be in December.

  Things got busy at work and I didn’t see Roberto for a while. We made plans and I canceled plans, and then we made plans again. He said he really wanted to watch that funny buddy road movie we never got to watch. He said he had my money. All of it. Or almost all of it. I wanted to tell him not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter, but it did matter, and I rationalized that paying me back would help teach him something about responsible American citizenship.

  We finally arranged to meet on Saturday morning at ten o’clock.

  The night before, I was lying in bed, watching the news about some bad things that had happened in Maple Tree Heights, when it was interrupted by a special report: the war had begun. The invasion was being broadcast live, lots of lights and flashes and little bursts of smoke from afar. Rat-a-tat-tat. Instead of troops landing on the peninsula, as we had been led to believe, they were coming down over the mountains. The peninsula strategy had all been a deft misdirection to fool the enemy. Ten thousand feet high, the mountains were. Up one side and down the other, a hundred thousand troops on the move. It was going to take them a week to make the crossing. What was it like, I wondered, to reach the summit?

  I stayed up late, flipping back and forth between channels. The channels all showed the same footage, and all the experts agreed: “Resistance was futile.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the newscaster said, “blink and you might miss this war.”

  In the morning my car was broken again, it wouldn’t start, and I had to walk to Roberto’s. It was freezing. It might as well have been winter. The sun was hidden and the wind blew hard, whipping the flags around. People drove past me and honked in unity.

  When I got to Roberto’s apartment, I was numb. My nose was running and I had to pee. The gate to the cobbler’s was up, but the shop looked unattended. I pounded my hands together and stomped my feet to get the blood going. Five minutes into waiting, I began to suspect that Roberto was about to come around the corner and “surprise” me with another box of electronics. Five minutes after that, I took my chances and shouted up to the window. “Robbie!”

  Immediately the cobbler came out. He looked at me and sucked in the sides of his cheeks.

  “The doorbell doesn’t seem to be working,” I said sarcastically.

  He shook his head. “No talk here,” he said. His eyes were tense and bloodshot, and he puffed hard on his cigarette. Smoke billowed out from all the orifices of his face. Beneath his apron, his stomach protruded, firm and round. “Come in store,” he said. “No good talk out here.”

  I followed him inside. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and sat down at his machine as if he were about to get back to work. I leaned on the counter like a customer.

  “Yesterday,” he said as he rubbed his dirty hands over his face. “Yesterday they come.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. Somehow his dirty hands hadn’t made his face dirty.

  “Who come?” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said. He put his black palms up in defense. “I don’t ask question.”

  “Who come?” I demanded.

  He looked at me with trepidation. Slowly, stumblingly, full of error, he told me that yesterday they come for Roberto, yesterday, middle of day, four car, four car, no warning, all pull up same time, right outside, happen fast, take him way, take him. What I can do? I can do nothing. I am one man. They have law. Hurt me as much as hurt him.

  He hunched his shoulders and he looked aggrieved. He was sorry, he said. “I pray for him now.”

  I believed him.

  “He was nice boy,” he said. “Hard worker. Hurt me too. Oh, boy.” He ran his dirty fingers through his thick hair.

  Then some people came in with their shoes, and he stood up to help them. His pack of cigarettes was on the counter, and I took one and stuck it in my mouth and lit it. He didn’t notice. He didn’t care. My boldness surprised me.

  I took the long way home. I walked fast and hard. I smoked the cigarette, and the second I exhaled, the cold wind took the smoke. People drove past honking. I came down the hill and over the bridge. At the train tracks I stopped and tried to get my breath. I was wheezing. A small dot appeared way down the line. After a while it became a train. I could hear the rumble. When it drew closer, I could see that it was loaded with long tubular objects, missiles no doubt, twenty feet long, thirty feet, covered with canvas and strapped down with canvas belts. As the train approached, I saw the engineer hanging his head and arm out the window, and I motioned for him to pull the horn as I would have back when I was a kid. A moment later I heard the blast, braa​aaaa​mmmm​m; it was louder than I had remembered, longer too, and then the train passed under the bridge as it headed out west or down south.

  APPETITE

  Things were not going as I had hoped. My sole purpose for interrupting my manager at this late hour on this Monday night was to inquire, respectfully, about an increase in my wage. But the conversation had somehow reversed itself, and now here I was standing awkwardly in the doorway of the restaurant office having to defend my very competency at my job. All through my shift I had entertained and distracted myself by imagining the scene in exacting detail: the gentle (or perhaps the assertive) knock on the office door, the disarming smile, the small talk about the weather, and then the casual introduction to the larger issue at hand, the larger issue that I had come to talk about with all reasonableness; the larger issue being eight to ten. That was how I had planned to say it: “I’m looking to move from eight to ten an hour.” Simply put. Or perhaps, I’d thought, I would say, “I’m looking to move to …” Or “I’m looking to move up to, up from, up toward …” Somewhere I had heard that it’s best to put your goals into clear terms, straightforward terms, and that once those goals had been thus stated, all would follow accordingly. In the rare instance that things did not follow accordingly, the onus was, of course, on you and your own ineptitude. I think I had heard it discussed on television. Or I had read it
somewhere. Or my father had told me. The counsel had seemed wise at the time, and I’d been determined to remember it if ever an occasion presented itself.

  So I stood in the doorway as my manager reclined in his chair with his fingers to his chin, staring up at the dark skylight, where rain was pattering. It had rained every day for a week. They said it was going to rain every day for another week. Fall was always like this in our city. But this fall was worse than others, they said. Soon it would be winter. “Business is bad, Ike,” the manager had told me briskly, effortlessly, as if he had been rehearsing the scene all night long also and was waiting for me to ask so that he could answer and rid himself of the refrain in his head. Not knowing how to respond, I said nothing, one foot crossed uncomfortably in front of the other in what had been, initially, an attempt at bold informality but, as time passed, quickly began to feel like an effeminate posture that would help only in the case against my confidence and assertiveness. And then my manager broke the awful silence by reminding me that two meals were returned by customers that evening. Why had two separate meals been returned, he wanted to know. The clock on his desk read one A.M. I wondered whether, if I had chosen to speak to him earlier that night, he would have been in a different mood, a more conciliatory mood, and would not have dismissed my request so swiftly. Next to the clock were lists of the various ingredients that needed to be ordered; check marks in small boxes indicated the amounts. We dealt in volume: crates, jugs, sacks. The manager’s pen was uncapped. His shirt was white except for a trail of red dots, presumably tomato sauce, running along one sleeve from elbow to shoulder. Or perhaps the dots were blood.

  “A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight, Ike,” my manager said. He stated it as if genuinely interested, philosophically speaking. “A grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of linguine. Why were they returned, Ike?”

  I did not know why, and my face tightened with false concern. I realized that if I did not say something convincing, and say it fast, I would implicate myself by admitting not only that I had made defective, inedible food but that I had so little awareness of my job that I could not even recall why or when such an error had occurred. “I’ll have to look into that” was all I said, as if I had my own underlings to consult. The clock now read 1:03. The manager’s face was round and kind, with puffy cheeks, and in the office light it looked for some reason even kinder than usual. I should change the subject, I thought. And I should uncross my feet so that I don’t look like a supplicant. I should talk about the rain and ask him when he thinks it will stop. It will make him think that I respect his authority. And then I will come back in a week and ask again for a raise—or in two weeks, maybe, not more than three, at some point in the near future, when everything has been forgotten and no meals have been returned and the rain has stopped and I have come up with a good response for when he tells me that business is bad.