The Temporary

A story by Keith Croes

Dennis held on, just held on through some kind of an attack, a roiling conviction that he'd lived the moment before or was meant to live it now, clutching the horseshoe bar, waiting for his first drink of the day. It came in crashing cold-sweat surges that gave way in each trembling retreat to a loathsome certainty that his mind had slipped anchor. Tom the bartender brought the drink, seemed a part of it as if he'd always been a part of it as if he were meant to be a part of it, and Dennis sipped and it settled, settled into the odd sense that the physical substance of the room was gagging.

The old man walked unnoticed into this disturbance and sat next to Dennis, the night seeping from his black overcoat and dark-gray hat.

"Oh." A surprised ejaculation deep and rich and real over the television's whiny audio. The man rose, doffed his overcoat and hung it between others on the pegs behind him. His hat went on top. He sat down again.

Dennis looked in the direction of the TV. At least half the seats around the bar were empty. He had enough money for three drinks and a buck for Tom. He didn't want company and was vaguely aware that he had some. The room retched with a lethal sadness.

...Threatt lobs to Erving at center court. The Kings tie up the lane. Erving shoots -- an 18-footer! Nothing but net!

The words were barely audible. What's the score? Who's playing? The old man seemed to condense at his left elbow, going from dark cloud to musty concrete. Dennis felt his glance. Tom walked over.

"Oh, let's see. I'll have a beer, please."

Tom leaned on the bar. "Budweiser, Miller, Genesee, Heineken, Michelob, Stroh's, Pabst, or would you like a draught?"

"Yes, a draught, please."

"Michelob, Pabst or Miller Lite?"

"Miller Lite?"

It was a question, but Tom nodded and strode toward the cooler where the mugs were kept.

Settling in, setting up like hardening plaster, the old man became just another piece of furniture and Dennis ignored him, turning inward. There was something he'd missed, something valuable and left behind. It was there somewhere, some kind of understanding he should be able to take away from the convulsive power of that storm within him. He felt the thing yet beneath his surface, a simmering, stalking ferocity. With courage bordering on masochism, he tried to resurrect the terrible feeling of destiny, that everyone and everything about the place had a reason, the people in their precise positions, the muffled audio of the television, that every detail was part of it, as it should be, as it was meant to be.

The voice carried through to him.

"You're a basketball fan?"

...It's the same old story. The Sixers came on strong early, but the second quarter has belonged to Sacramento. And the big surprise for the Kings is Higgins, drafted out of North Carolina...

Dennis shrugged and drew a mouthful of icy scotch as Tom placed the beer on a coaster in front of the old man.

"I'm Mark."

At the mention of the name Dennis felt a deep stillness. The bar crystallized, coming into focus as the quiet room that it was, with its fake Tiffany lamps and rows of shiny bottles and murmuring conversations. He searched the old man's face, which seemed a world-weary battering ram, strong and wise but cold somehow, and familiar, as it should be, as it was meant to be.

"Dennis."

"What do you do, Dennis?"

"Computer technician."

The man wore a gray suit and a maroon tie. He could've been fifty; he could've been seventy. He seemed uncomfortable in the suit. Dennis stared at the TV and his fingers, steady now under the peripheral attention of the stranger, sought a cigarette out of the pack. In the flickering glow of his lighter, he noticed a thin, wavering scar extending from beneath the man's right ear and down his neck, disappearing under the white collar of his shirt.

...Foul goes to Williams. Barkley gets one and one. He's had some trouble at the line lately. He makes the first. The second misses. That's three for four. Rogers takes it out for the Kings...

Dennis watched Tom waving a bar towel near the cash register, entertaining his girlfriend and a girlfriend of hers.

"Are you married?"

Dennis hesitated. "Separated."

"Any children?"

"Yeah. A boy."

"How old?"

He didn't answer.

"You're a vet."

At that moment Dennis had been thinking of a dead Vietnamese boy he had once pulled from a ditch and tossed on a litter. The image had never before entered his mind that he could recall. He stared at his cigarette.

"Were you in Vietnam?"

"Sure was." He looked again at Tom, thinking maybe he would buy a six-pack of beer and leave.

"Army?"

"Marines."

"When?"

"Sixty-six, '67."

"Do you mind talking about it?"

Dennis shrugged. "Most's been said."

"It was a nasty little war, remarkable in some ways, but no worse than others, I suppose."

Dennis would've laughed at that strange, pretentious little observation had there not been a solemnity in the voice that cut him off. He pondered on it. "I think World War II was probably worse. For some."

"Were you wounded?"

"A couple times. Never bad enough to come home."

"Do you feel you have come home?"

Dennis looked toward the man. "I was just glad to get out of there. Most people would rather not think about Vietnam, I guess. But it doesn't bother me. Who can blame them?"

"Were you ever afraid you wouldn't make it?"

He looked down at his drink. He had never figured out a way to bullshit about Vietnam and early on had adopted the strategy of telling the truth to anybody dumb enough to ask.

"I was the biggest coward in my outfit. I cried every night. I used to shit myself." The man nodded and lifted the mug to his lips. Dennis shook his head wonderingly, both because he was still alive and because he was still talking to the man. Something kept him in his seat, pulled at him. There was something the man needed, something they could give each other, a reason for all this. "Yeah, I thought I was dead a couple times."

"Did you ever make yourself any promises? Did you ever say to yourself, God, get me out of this and I'll do such and such?"

Dennis laughed sharply. "Yeah, once. I promised myself I'd have a family, bring some goodness and life into the world."

The two sat quietly. Tom wandered over and Dennis pointed toward his glass, which was half-filled with ice cubes at the moment. When the bartender returned, the old man shoved some bills toward him across the bar, aiming to pay for the new drink.

"Thanks," Dennis said.

"How long have you been separated?"

"Six months."

The old man shifted on his stool. "How did you keep from going insane over there?"

"I don't know if we did." He paused. "Look, you've heard this all before..."

The old man shook his head. "It's different for everyone."

Dennis smiled. "We played jokes. I bunked for a while with a black guy named Weaver. I hated blacks when I first went in, but Weaver was the funniest, bravest man I ever met. There was another guy, Snake, who used to bitch and moan all the time. Weaver took Snake's toothbrush once and rubbed it all over his balls, brushed his pubic hair with it, then put it back. Later on, Snake was brushing his teeth and Weaver and I started laughing, the kind of laughing where you can't stop. Snake kept looking over at us with the toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and saying, 'What? What? What are you guys laughing at?'" He paused and rubbed a clear path with his thumb through the cold sweat on his glass. "Weaver and Snake didn't make it. Both of them took it. Man, there were so many heroes."

"Were you a hero?"

"We were Marines -- doing the job, you know? Doing the job. I saw stuff every day that deserved a Medal of Honor. But heroes die. God doesn't do heroes any special favors."

The old man finished the last of his beer and backed off the stool. "Maybe not." He stood and collected his change, fitting the bills into a black wallet. He had big, rough hands and was a larger man than Dennis had realized.

"Have you ever been in?"

The man put on his hat and stopped with one arm in his overcoat. "Yes, I've been in. Good night." Pressing his hat tight to his head, he nodded to Dennis on his way out the door.

Thick-flaked snow dropped through the light of the high mercury-vapor lamp as if it existed nowhere else but above the parking lot, giving the heady illusion that the ground was rising. Dennis cut a trail to his car, shoved a heavy armful from the windshield and rear window and snaked through the traffic and wet streets, wipers slashing, to his apartment complex.

There were no pictures on the walls and no curtains on the windows, only blinds, which he kept closed most of the time. He'd done about as much with the place in six months as someone could do who started with next to nothing, had a revolving credit account at two department stores, a Visa card, paid $500 a month in child support and made $34,000 a year.

The couch, the coffee table, the bed, the dresser, the lamps, the end tables, the dining room set, the television, everything was a monthly payment after monthly payment.

But Sheila was having no picnic, either. He heated a frozen dinner and ate it in front of the television, the dull ache rising in his chest, turning a familiar rerun of M*A*S*H into an irritating, incomprehensible squawk.

If only Sheila hadn't sometimes, sometimes removed her mask, hadn't shown him the tender little girl. If only his son Paul hadn't found his lap the most natural place in the world to be, hadn't landed there so many evenings before so many bedtimes wearing soft pajamas, his fine blond hair damp and smelling of shampoo.

It was finished. Over and done with. Fucked up beyond repair. Tears welled as he dumped the plastic tray in the trash can and tripped blindly down the hall to the bedroom, groping his way onto the bed. A baby bawling in its own shit, he thought, and for a moment the sobbing was almost laughter.

The heaving subsided quickly, replaced by a shuddering emptiness, and he lifted one arm and pulled open the drawer of the end table, exposing the .45 in its worn, black holster next to the phone book.

He hadn't seen the woman sit down next to him. The bar was busy and suddenly she was just there, long dark hair and cream skin at the edge of his vision, the fingers of her right hand resting lightly at the base of a mug of beer.

He watched from the corner of his eye. She wore a light sweater that bore a green-and-white sawtooth pattern. The people to her left ignored her, the man nearest her facing away, the back of his corduroy jacket forming a beige wall.

Her glance played over the people in their various groupings and poses on the opposite side of the horseshoe bar.

He had been stopping at the bar several times a week and had yet to meet a woman there. But then, he didn't go there to meet women. When their eyes met for an instant, he looked away, took a drink and she spoke.

"My name's Marsha."

He looked into her face and thought of the old man he had met the other night, the strength and wisdom, but hers had a beauty that left him searching for small talk. He had never been good at it and knew that he had just become incapable. There was nothing there -- no words, no wit. Just dread and wonder.

"Dennis." He thought of the dead Vietnamese boy and his eyes closed.

"Ow! Are you okay?"

"No." Tears squeezed from beneath the clamped lids. He choked. "I'm not okay. I've got to go." Stumbling back off the stool, he searched behind him for his coat, found it through a haze and stuck his face in it, pulling it down with him to the floor.

The waves crashed at him, up into madness, the way it had to be, the way it was meant to be, the way it always was. He felt the hands on his upper arms and the ebbing, ebbing, as hot metal in cold water, something pulling at him, drawing something out of him. He opened his eyes and saw hers.

"Come on, I'll drive you home."

"No. I'm fine." He stood and looked down at her. "I'm fine. Really. That was -- " He shook his head softly at first, then harder, like a dog after a bath. " -- strange."

"Let me drive you home."

"No. I'm fine. But I...I better go." Never taking his eyes from hers, he slipped into his coat.

When the zipper was halfway up, she reached out and held both sides of the opening. "Then let me come with you. Take me home."

The journey began lucidly enough. They stepped carefully through a camouflage of harsh shadows in the parking lot, testing across the rutted gravel and ice as if they traversed a mine field. Dennis opened the passenger-side door of his car for her and she kissed him on the way in and laughed a steamy puff in his face.

The engine revved and the radio blasted. He twisted the noise off, snapped up the heater fan, fell back against the seat and looked at her.

"What do you do?"

"I'm a temp, I guess."

"A temp."

"Uh-huh. A temporary. What do you do?"

"I work with computers."

"Oh." She smiled.

He pulled out onto the street and reality slipped away.

The drive became a dream or something like it, a drifting in and out of full awareness. At certain corners or other punctuations of the route, he'd rise to the surface and see her sitting there, comfortable, confident, the trace of a smile washed by streetlights and headlights. Her hand rested on his right thigh. Then, knowing that he was operating the car perfectly well in a way he really didn't care to think about, he'd sink back into the jungle.

He was in Vietnam, in a troop transport on a rough road, not driving but looking out the open tailgate. It was twilight. It was hot. He held his rifle, which he'd recently cleaned. There was oil on his hands. He sat there with the others, just looking, looking out the tailgate. The truck stopped often, its brakes trumpeting.

"Something...is happening to me."

"I know."

The truck rattled on through insect noises that drowned it out, overwhelmed it, and the smells were even louder. He felt her hand leave his leg and he was in a parking space at the apartment complex. The car was dark. It creaked in the cold.

"This is where I live."

"This is where I want to be."

He pushed open the door of his apartment and she followed him in. By the time he closed it, she was in his arms.

"Touch me."

He reached between her legs and lifted her off the floor, somehow managing to hold her in one hand and remove her coat and sweater with the other as he carried her to the bedroom. When he entered her, he sank back down to the jungle, to the rumbling truck, looking, looking. An explosion, the floor tossing them up against the ribbed canvas top. The truck flipping on its side and scraping to a halt. Quiet groaning. A narrow green box of ammunition lodged against his left rib cage. His rectum twitching, his rifle oily in his clutching hands. Staggering out to the road, into the shreds of daylight. A figure approaching, a Vietnamese, running. A spurt of gunfire, then a wide-open roar, squeezing the trigger until his knuckles whitened.

He shot into her and saw the boy fold into the ditch. Then quiet and the smell of burnt powder. The driver was dead. The truck had been hit by a mortar round probably launched from a hundred yards away. They carried the lifeless boy out of the gully and tossed him on a litter. Dennis had made a mistake.

He rolled off of her and stared at the ceiling.

"He was Paul's age."

He turned over on his stomach and she watched for a minute until the racking subsided. "Do you want a massage?" she asked.

He managed a laugh. "Sure."

She straddled him. He saw Snake in the middle of the compound, one arm blown off, raising the other like a kid in school trying to get the teacher's attention.

"Wait. Get -- " He rocked from side to side. " -- get off me."

She lifted herself away from him.

"Touch me."

She touched his leg. Weaver was clawing up over the sandbags.

"Stop!" He rolled to his back. "Touch me." He held out his hand and she touched it. Weaver was low-crawling through the grass. "Stop!" His eyes widened. "What are you?"

"I'm here to help you. But we must go through this." She pressed her palm against his forehead. Weaver squirmed toward Snake, those muscular arms pumping. Assholes and elbows, Dennis thought. That's all he could see of Weaver, fat ass and churning black elbows. The air ripped with rounds spattering through the grass or puffing into the dirt. There was an explosion ahead of Weaver and Snake was gone. Weaver grabbed a severed leg and started dragging it back, but it took Dennis a moment to realize with a choking revulsion that Weaver was dragging back Snake's goddamn severed leg, which was just a split second before Dennis watched the side of Weaver's head disappear.

"Wait." Her lips were making a slow descent toward his chest and he caught a handful of hair. "Wait. Why? Why must I go through this again?"

"The worst is over," she said.

With her dark hair balled in his grip, he saw the thin scar beneath her right ear extending in a wavering line down her neck. He kicked away from her, backing up against the headboard and pulling the covers up over his chest. "What are you?"

She sat up, her face flushed, her legs folded beneath her. "Right now, a woman." She touched her breasts, rolling the nipples against her palms. "Not bad. Takes some getting used to, though."

She glanced upward briefly as if in explanation saying, "He makes me do this -- part of a new job description," then her eyes flared with a cold, mindless light that pinned him to the bed. "There are forces aroused when men wage war, forces that are summoned, that are drawn on when war becomes an inevitable incarnation of the destiny of nations. And there are certain soldiers, participants in the destiny, hurt too deeply to find comfort in this world. I serve the destiny. For you, for now, I am the endless comfort that you earned in battle and cannot find anywhere. Now -- " She leaned forward and kissed his chest. " -- to the beginning."

He was in Vietnam. Night. Then day. He watched himself outside himself, unafraid because he was outside the fear. He watched each moment, each night, each day, exactly as it happened, a bloody ballet danced by hard little men. She was there with him, holding him within her, and he felt the wounds heal even as they happened until the days and nights had scrolled away from the jungle.

"You were there."

"I was there."

"You were at every war?"

"All wars."

The panoply continued. The nights, the days back in the states, sick and febrile, one hapless, isolated incident after another evoking new meaning from his vision of the whole as it passed in front of him. Sheila, random-bar-pick-up Sheila, his faithlessness and inconsolability, her empathy giving way finally to resignation and bitterness. A passion of convenience playing out like bad fishing line through the years, the days, the nights. And accidental Paul, the miracle of his presence unable to stem a growing discontent and depression. It was all as it was meant to be, as it had to be. It was all of the same sad destiny.

"You were there?"

"The war was there. Wait."

He was in his car, pulling into the driveway of the house he and Sheila had rented. It was midday -- a Saturday. Paul was strapped into the passenger seat. The car rolled to a stop and Paul unsnapped the safety belt, stood on the seat and grabbed him, singing, "You're my best dad."

"I can't take this fucking shit!" And suddenly, Paul's arms were around him and he felt the boy's love, as pure and strong as his own. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" And he knew it was true, that he hadn't lost it, that he would have it forever, and a sob roared out of him from a place so deep it seemed to come out of someone else.

And then he was alone in his apartment, working and coming home, night following day, some nights walking to the end table and standing there for a moment before leaving, some nights opening the drawer and looking at the .45 in its holster. And then he was in bed with the woman, the temporary, and they made love and slept.

He dreamed a real dream, he thought, about his hospital room in Saigon --his first Purple Heart -- and the doctor who had treated him, a hell-raising Harvard-trained Irishman with a Fu Manchu mustache. Later he would be reminded of the man by the character Trapper John in the movie, M*A*S*H. It was a good dream in which he shook the doctor's hand and thanked him when he left instead of calling him a fucking asshole.

And as he shook the doctor's hand, the face changed to the old man in the bar, the square jaw, the world-weary eyes. The man was not holding his hand any more, but a broadsword. He wore a golden breastplate and a blood-red cape held across his shoulders by a round clasp at the neck. A shield was strapped to his thick left forearm. He spoke in a rumble of thunderheads.

"There are gods, Dennis. The god of war, who just as readily would have sacrificed you, has delivered you from battle." The old man looked upward. "It's part of our modernization program. Special favors. It helps you guys keep your promises." The cold, mindless eyes returned. "It's not what I do best. But He doesn't like broken promises."

The dream ended with the image of dark clouds pressing against the jagged, frozen heights of a huge mountain, dissipating under a relentless sun, becoming billowy, cottony wisps, then disappearing altogether. Dennis breathed the clean air with a feeling that he'd breathed it before, that he was meant to breathe it now.

In the morning she was gone and he couldn't remember her name. He walked naked into the living room, opened the door a crack and looked out at the bright snow and bare sidewalk. A warmth, a comfort, seemed to drift in with the cold breeze against his skin. He closed the door and leaned against it, smiling at the quiet in his chest.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com