Brief Encounters with the Enemy Page 9

  Her face was flushed and healthy. Her black hair was blown across her forehead and mouth. If her hair was fake, it didn’t act fake.

  I stumbled from the car. I wobbled. I belched. I was reminded of the hot dog I’d eaten.

  No, I could not do it again.

  “Come on,” she said, “Kingdom Coming!”

  “Let’s sit on the bench for a minute,” I implored.

  We sat in the shade and I leaned forward on my elbows, fearing I might puke.

  “I thought you liked roller coasters,” she said.

  After a while I felt her hand rest on my bare shoulder. It was a very light touch, almost incidental, but it had a reviving quality. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll come back later.”

  We meandered through the park as I tried to gather my bearings. The park was getting crowded. Every once in a while, I would hear someone calling “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!” And I wondered what they thought of me walking around with a Jewish girl.

  “You know everyone,” Zlottie said.

  I knew everyone and she knew no one. All her life in this city and no one called her name.

  As we passed by the arcade, an old guy in the booth said, “Why don’t you try to win something for your girlfriend?”

  I appreciated the word “girlfriend,” so I gave him five dollars for three chances to make one basket. I missed all three because the ball was rubbery and the basket was steel. I gave him five more dollars, and this time I won a small stuffed purple bird with plastic eyes.

  I gave it to Zlottie.

  “That’s ugly,” she said.

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  “Give it to a little girl,” Zlottie told the guy in the booth.

  He took it from her. “She’s a tough lady to please,” he said.

  I walked on, disheartened. When we turned the corner, there was Kingdom Coming again, looming above us with its six loops and its mile-long course.

  “Are you ready, Nick?” she said. “All you can ride!”

  “Sure,” I said, “I’m ready,” but I wasn’t ready. “How about we go in here first?” And I pulled her into the entrance of one of those old-time rowboat rides that goes down a dark tunnel populated by plastic gnomes who gaze out at you from nooks and crannies. It had scared me as a boy, then it had bored me, and now it revealed itself to be what it was intended for: a place of romantic possibility.

  This was the destination everything had been leading toward. This was the place and the moment.

  “It looks dumb,” Zlottie said.

  “It’s not dumb,” I said, “it’s sexy.”

  Zlottie got in and grabbed the oars, but they were nailed to the sides. “I can’t paddle?” she said.

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  Through the tunnel we floated. It wasn’t very dark, and it smelled like mildew and urine. The gnomes looked at me in their overalls and cowboy hats.

  “I feel so sexy,” Zlottie said sarcastically. She laughed. In the tunnel, it sounded like fifteen Zlotties laughing.

  I sighed. I brooded. I said finally, “I’d like to be more than just friends, Zlottie.”

  “More than just friends?” She repeated. She peered at me curiously in the dim light.

  “Can we be more than just friends?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, “I have lots of people who are more than just friends.” She started naming names, a long list of names, men and women, all Jewish-sounding. I got the sense that she didn’t understand what I meant by the word “friend.” She probably didn’t understand what I meant by the word “more.” Or “just” or “want.”

  “Do you know what I mean?” I interrupted. “Do you know what I’m asking you?”

  She squinted her black eyes at me.

  It was so daunting. Everything was daunting, everything was a task. Even defining the word “friend” was a task. Even that took effort. Never mind a kiss. Never mind the first time I tried to put my hand up her long black blanket of a skirt. It was exhausting to think about. It made me want to fall asleep in the rowboat. In ten years, I’d lost my zest for roller coasters. In ten more years, who knew what other changes I’d undergo, what other passions I’d lose. I’d be thirty-six years old, still trying to fit into jeans and tank tops. But I’d be the district manager.

  We floated on. The gnomes grinned at me. If the paddles had worked, I would have used them to smash the gnomes one by one. I shifted in my seat with aggravation, and as I did, the rowboat rocked hard, side to side, as if it might upend and toss me into the putrid water. I put my hand out to steady myself, but instead I accidentally caught Zlottie’s wrist, and suddenly I was pulling her close to me, not thinking just doing, putting my naked arms around her shoulders, and kissing her on her lips. And damn if she didn’t respond by putting her tongue right in my mouth as if she’d been waiting all along to do just that. She put her tongue in my mouth and one hand on my leg, so high up my leg that if she went one more inch higher, it wouldn’t be my leg anymore. She might never have been outside Bildman’s shop, but she knew what to do.

  We held each other close, body against body, no counter-top between us, and I ran my fingers through her hair. It was fake hair all right, no doubt about it, stiff and synthetic in my fingers like the bristles of a brush, and it smelled faintly chemical.

  “I’ve always loved your hair,” I whispered. And we floated in our little rowboat out into the sunshine.

  The line to Kingdom Coming wrapped three times around the fence. We held hands and stood close and waited. Every ten minutes we’d hear the sound of the wheels rumbling, and then the train would come flying past our faces like it was shooting up to the moon. Each time Zlottie would gasp with glee and I would tremble with horror.

  We moved a few steps. We waited. We held hands. We moved a few more steps.

  Eventually she had to pee, though she hadn’t drunk a thing. I watched her ass swish away in that black skirt.

  The second she was out of sight, I heard someone calling my name. “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!”

  Who could it be but Pink again, pushing that same stroller with that same baby, still sound asleep and its face smeared with jelly. He was wearing another enormous watch, this one with diamonds, and he shook my hand hard, with deep feeling, as if he hadn’t just seen me. He looked at me with half-sad, half-high eyes. “Did you hear what happened to Joey Joey?” he said.

  “That’s old news, Pink,” I said.

  “He’s dead,” he said. “He got killed.”

  He said something else I think, a couple other things, but I couldn’t hear too well because the roller coaster was coming over my head with everyone screaming, and it drowned out the sound. All I could make out were Pink’s lips moving inside his face, thin lips and bad teeth, jelly in the corners of his mouth. When the roller coaster was past us, he held out his hand again and we shook. He did all the shaking.

  “See you around sometime, Nick,” he said, and he wheeled his little baby away.

  I stood there for a while. Not thinking anything, just standing there. And then I took out my BlackBerry and I checked my email. I don’t like checking my email on my day off. My inbox was empty anyway.

  “The line moved up, mister,” someone said behind me, and I saw that the line had moved up.

  I turned off my BlackBerry and put it in my pocket, but once it was in my pocket, I took it right back out and turned it on and started typing. “I regret to inform,” I wrote in the subject line.

  I wrote about how I had just received the tragic news that Joey Joey had been killed in the line of duty. I wrote in business-speak because that’s the way you have to do this when you’re an assistant manager. I wrote some nice things about Joey Joey, about how he was a good worker, about how he was going to be missed. I ended it by saying, “Condolences to all the associates.”

  When I was done, I didn’t read it over, I just sent it out. I sent it to every one of my contacts. Five hundred people I sent it to, including the
district manager. Sure enough, half a minute later it came right back to me. “Fwd: I regret to inform.”

  “It’s our turn, Nick!” Zlottie was saying. She was standing next to me, looping her arm through my arm, and guiding me up the stairs to where Kingdom Coming sat waiting.

  We took our seat in a shiny new soft black car. All the kids were chattering in anticipation, and all the grown-ups were chattering too. An attendant came by to secure us with the thickest restraining bar I’d ever seen and which clicked into place with a mechanical precision.

  “Are you ready, Nick?” Zlottie said.

  “Sure am,” I said, and a few seconds later I could feel the contraption engage and the vibrations begin, and then the entire train, with all fifty-some people aboard, slowly started to crawl up that very first slope, as if we were merely setting off on a placid and uneventful journey.

  A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY

  To get to the hill you have to first take the path. The path is narrow and steep and lined with trees that are so dark they could be purple, and so dense it feels as though you’re walking alongside a brick wall. You can’t see in and you hope that no one can see out.

  The first time I went up the path, it was terrifying. I could barely take a full breath, let alone put one foot in front of the other. If I’d had to run, I wouldn’t have remembered how. Besides, I was loaded down with fifty pounds of equipment that clanged and banged with every step. I might as well have been carrying a refrigerator on my back. But after the first month, the fear dissipated and the path started to become fascinating, even charming. I was able to appreciate the “beauty of the surroundings”—as the brochure had said—even the trees that I was constantly bumping against. “What kind of trees are these?” I asked out loud. I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to get everything there was to get out of this experience.

  “Christmas trees,” someone answered back. He was being funny, of course, and everyone laughed, even though we were missing Christmas.

  The sergeant wanted to know what was funny. We told him nothing was funny, sir. He said that that was true—nothing was funny, that if you could get shot in the face at any moment, then nothing could be funny.

  So we were quiet again, the fifty of us, we were fearful again, but that didn’t last too long, because fear can’t persist unless you have at least a little evidence to sustain it. Fascination can’t persist either. What can persist, however, is boredom. I had come all this way hoping for something groundbreaking to happen, and nothing had happened. Now twelve months had passed, and tomorrow I was flying back home.

  That’s what I was thinking about when I walked up the path for the last time.

  I was also thinking about Becky. “Ooh,” she had said when I told her the news. “You’re going on an adventure, Luke!” She’d clapped her hands like a little girl. “I sure am,” I said.

  We’d run into each other in the lobby. She was coming down with a cigarette and I was going up with a sandwich. I hadn’t seen her since the afternoon I’d tried to casually ask her out and she’d said no, point-blank. “Do you want to get some ice cream?” I had said. I’d known her since high school, and the Mister Softee truck was parked right outside.

  “No, thanks,” she’d told me. “I’m on a diet.” I couldn’t tell if that was an excuse. Her body looked fine to me.

  Six months later, though, she was all smiles, standing close to me in the lobby and batting her eyelashes as the other office workers came and went around us in a big wave of suits.

  I was deploying in two weeks, but I tried to make it sound as if it was no big deal. In fact, it was no big deal. Everyone thought that the war was coming to an end. Everyone thought that it was only a matter of time. We’d taken the peninsula and we’d secured the border and we’d advanced to within twenty-five miles of the capital. Any day now, everyone said. My main concern had been that I wouldn’t make it over in time to see any action.

  She said, “You going to keep in touch, Luke?” And she made a pouting face, as if I’d been the one to turn down her invitation for ice cream.

  “You know I will,” I said.

  She had big lips and long lashes. She had a little gray in her hair, but I didn’t care about that. She’d been married and was now divorced. I didn’t care about that either. I’d just hit twenty-seven and was getting soft around the middle. I was hoping to get back in shape. “Push yourself to your physical limits,” the brochure had said.

  She wrote her email address in purple ink on the bottom of my sandwich bag. When she walked off, I took a long look at her ass. She didn’t need a diet.

  In the first couple of months, I made a point of emailing her. We were each allotted fifteen minutes a day at the Internet café, and I sent her updates when I could.

  “What’s going on down there, Luke?” she wanted to know. “Tell me everything.” She ended her emails with “xoxo* * *.”

  “What’s that mean?” I had to ask one of the guys.

  “Hugs and kisses,” he said.

  “But what do the asterisks mean?”

  He didn’t know.

  There wasn’t much to report about what was going on. The enemy had yet to make his appearance. So I told her that we had an Internet café, and a bowling alley, and a Burger King. “They have everything down here,” I wrote.

  It wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t have things like boots. It was the rainy season and it rained every day. To be fair, there were ponchos, but ponchos don’t keep you from slipping and sliding when you’re going along the path on patrol in Skechers. If you got caught in a particularly bad downpour, you might as well be ice-skating, and you’d come back to base at least an hour late. The sergeant would mark this down in his blue book. He’d make sure you saw him marking it down. What happened after that was anyone’s guess. “You get ten of those, you get court-martialed,” the most paranoid among us speculated.

  Boots did finally arrive. This was about three months into our tour. They came from Timberland, no less, donated free of charge so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers. Half the guys sold their boots right off; they sold them to the other half of the guys who could afford to buy them and have two pairs. Then they used the proceeds to purchase things like cigarettes and instant soup. There was a guy named Chaz who wanted to give me twenty-five dollars for my boots. He acted like he was doing me a favor. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. He sat down on my cot and took out his money. “Whaddya say?” He was trying to be chummy about it. He was trying to be down-home. He’d gone to a good college and his parents sent him money every two weeks and we had nothing in common except that we both wanted boots. He was one of those guys who had joined for all the wrong reasons. He had joined not because he believed in anything but because he wanted to put it down on his résumé and jump-start his career.

  I told him, “You’re here for the wrong reasons, Chaz.”

  He said, “What reasons are those?” As if he didn’t know.

  He used phrases like “in the long term” regarding my boots. Twenty years from now, I’d probably see him on television, asking for my vote.

  I emailed Becky to tell her that we’d gotten new boots from Timberland.

  She emailed back:

  But what else is going on? xoxo***

  It wasn’t the rainy season now. It was the hot and dry season. No one needed boots anymore. I made it to the end of the path in fifteen minutes. I could have done it in flip-flops. I could have done it barefoot.

  It was getting close to evening, and things were cooling down a bit, but the flies were buzzing and I was sweating badly because I was dressed as if I were heading into battle. I felt less like a soldier and more like I was going trick-or-treating dressed as a soldier; all I needed was a bag for my candy. Everything about me was superfluous and ridiculous—the boots but also the helmet, the jacket, and the backpack, which rattled on my back like a gumball machine. The gun was unnecessary too, but it was the lightes
t thing on me. That was the contradiction. It was three feet long and looked like it was made of iron, but it felt like plastic. It could have been a squirt gun, except for the fact that it had all sorts of gadgets and meters on it that told you things like the time and the temperature. Plus it could kill a man from a mile away. You hardly even had to pull the trigger. If you put your finger in the proximity of the trigger, it sensed what you wanted to do and it pulled itself. Poof went the bullet, and the gun would vibrate gently, as if you were getting a call on your cell phone.

  The first time I’d ever shot a gun was when my dad had taken me and my sister down to the woods to go hunting. This was about ten years ago, when the war had just started. There were supposed to be things like deer and elk lurking around in those woods. At least that was how it had been when my dad was a kid and his dad had taken him hunting. But times had changed, and the factories were up and running for the war effort, and the woods had been dug through to make way for a new train line. Not only were there no deer or elk, there weren’t even any chipmunks. So instead of teaching us how to hunt, my dad drew a bull’s-eye on the side of a tree using a piece of chalk. Inside the bull’s-eye he drew the face of the enemy. It was a surprisingly good representation, although he exaggerated the nose and eyes and ears for comic effect.

  “This is how you hold it, Luke,” he told me. “This is how you cock it. This is how you aim it.”