Hold It 'Til It Hurts Read online

  Before drifting off, he listened to his message from Janice, to see if maybe she’d changed her mind about Dale. “I’m just calling to see how you’re doing,” she said. “Wish you were here so we could go to the quarry. I went once without you and it wasn’t the same. If I go, it’s not the same as when you and I go. I know why us is you and me, not I. I’ve finally figured all that out: I and me, who and whom. I’m in a night class at Shippensburg taking English. I want my baby to be smart …” He hung up at the first mention of the baby, whom, until then, he’d managed to forget.

  A heated conversation woke him in the middle of the night. He heard Wages grumbling and Bethany say “infection.” A moment later the light came on, and Bethany tiptoed into the room wearing the 49ers cap she wore whenever it rained. Had it been raining? Was that why his face was so wet? This was the worst hangover he’d ever had. She pushed an ottoman close to the pallet Achilles had made on the floor and sat down. Her voice apologetic, she said, “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got to take care of this. Kyle told me you refused to go to the hospital. You know, those cuts could become infected. We need to clean them properly and bandage you up. Is that okay?”

  Achilles nodded, noticing that someone had slipped a pillow under his head and covered him with a blanket. His legs were stiff, his head thumping. He was momentarily confused. Feeling as if he was going to cry, he immediately sat up, hoping that would forestall any tears. “Nothing hurts, but if you want.”

  “I want.” Bethany gave him a big smile. Her face was cherubic, the ever-red cheeks setting off the bright green eyes. She led him by the hand to the bathroom and sat him on the toilet. When she leaned forward to get a closer look at his cuts, her hair fell into her face and her breasts swung forward in her shirt.

  She tucked her loose hair under her cap and went to work. Her fingers were cool and dry, her hands steady. When had anyone last touched him like this? He remembered the sixty-day shots and how he’d always hoped to get a woman, any woman, as the nurse. Bethany smelled like baby powder, her breath like almonds. His arms went limp as she bandaged his hands. When she reached for his ear, he felt her body heat as her heavy breast grazed his shoulder and pressed against his neck. Achilles would have taken a beating every day to come home to this.

  Wages loitered in the hall, muttering. The bathroom was too small for all three of them. It was a tiny room with a shower instead of a tub and a medicine cabinet the size of a shoebox, a room so small, in fact, that Bethany stood with one foot in the hall.

  “Be useful and get me some more alcohol,” said Bethany, glaring at her husband. “And a cup of water.” Wages left with a grunt. Bethany caught Achilles’s eyes with her own. “You know he doesn’t believe you. I asked him how he could let this happen to a friend. So he’s grumpy.”

  “It was just a misunderstanding,” said Achilles.

  “Even I don’t believe that. But, thank you,” she said. “He’s trying to stay up all night and party like a rock star and still go to work. He wants to live like he’s twenty-one again. I know you boys like to stay up late and all, and that’s okay. But whatever this is,” she motioned at his face and the bandages, “I appreciate your keeping him out of it. He’s not alone anymore, and he’s quick to react.” She leaned in, now close enough that her breath tickled his earlobe, “You know his temper, so thank you.”

  Achilles nodded, though he disagreed. Wages always had one chambered, but that wasn’t a temper.

  “First your father, and now this. Poor Achilles. You have it so hard.” She clamped her hand over her mouth. “I forgot I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

  “It’s okay,” said Achilles. Coming from her it sounded nice, not like pity.

  Wages returned with the water.

  Bethany looked through her red nursing bag and pulled out two brown glass bottles. “One to help you sleep, and one for the pain you’re going to feel in the morning, and you’re going to feel pain.” She gave him two pills and the water. After he swallowed, she said, “Lift your tongue and say ahh.”

  Achilles obeyed.

  “Shit, Beth, he’s not a chemo kid,” said Wages.

  Bethany shot Wages a look.

  “Sorry,” said Wages, throwing his hands up like she’d drawn a gun on him.

  Bethany patted Achilles’s arm. Her hand lingered as she said, “Forgive me. I get into the work zone.” She stood. “That should do it. Get some rest, on the couch, on the couch.” She repeated herself until Achilles nodded in agreement. “We’re right in the next room if you need anything.”

  “Yeah, like you have a nightmare, or the Boogie Man comes, or some shit,” said Wages. “You have more bandages than the Invisible Man.”

  He did. Half of his skull was swathed in gauze, as well as most of both hands, and his entire right arm was one cottony limb. Wincing at the pain in his ankle as he stood, he gimped his way back to his pallet on the floor, and was just about settled in when Bethany called out, “Are you on the couch?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Just checking.” Her voice hung in the air like perfume. His skin was icy-hot everywhere she had touched him. He drifted off to sleep imagining himself in the photos. Achilles and Bethany at Disneyland, the steeple of the Enchanted Castle rising high above them in the background. Achilles and Bethany at Niagara Falls, sipping hot chocolate dotted with marshmallows, while Rex, their lazy yellow Labrador, rests at their feet. Achilles and Bethany on a riverboat, the paddle pushing them to their destiny, roiling water behind, while ahead, a river as smooth as glass. Achilles and Bethany at the Elvis Chapel in Vegas. Janice objects, but it’s too late because Janice already had a baby. Bethany was having his, and Janice shouldn’t begrudge him that. She was pregnant for Dale for chrissakes, a stuttering, tobacco-swallowing mechanic too lazy to chase down any deer he doesn’t drop on the first shot. But Janice is upset anyway, very, dark lines streaking down her face like she’s a melting candle. Her crying tilts into a choking sob. Achilles puts a finger to his lips. “You’ll wake Bethany. Shhh.”

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS A MONTH BEFORE THANKSGIVING, TWO WEEKS AFTER HE’D ARRIVED in New Orleans, one week after the night at the camelback. He wouldn’t involve his friend, no matter how often Wages asked about the fight. Achilles had finally admitted he was ambushed in the boardinghouse, though he couldn’t remember its location. Nonetheless, Wages had put the word out. A few days before, Wexler and Merriweather had both called Achilles and left messages about “bringing the thunder.” That’s the kind of friends they were. They would have all insisted on being there, prosthetics and all, when Achilles went to Ready Pawn to take out a loan on his locket and buy an eight-round Mossberg with a clean black barrel and polished oak stock. They would have insisted on helping Achilles remove the dowel rod so that he could chamber four extra rounds. They would have helped Achilles pack the Mossberg in a big duffle on top of enough cardboard to lend the bag an innocuous shape, and cut a hole in the outside pocket so that he could fire it without opening the bag. They would have been in the car with him the night Achilles parked down the street from the green camelback and said aloud to himself, “No one is strutting out that back door. I’m going to show these motherfuckers what a real shotgun is.”

  In the past few days, he’d slept often, eaten seldom, and thought much about this moment. Parked two blocks away from the green camelback, he visualized the inside of the house, and ran through the plan: He knocks on the back door. Blow opens it and finds his face mounted on the barrel like a silencer, aka the muzzle muffler. Lex answers his questions about Troy and returns his watch, or gets Blow’s head in his lap. In and out in less than five minutes and back at the quarry tomorrow night, though what he’d do there he didn’t know.

  Immediately after the fight he’d been upset that he had tried to kill a man and felt nothing. As O’Ree once said, “There’s a difference between getting blood on your snout and developing a taste for it.” Having been shot at more than he shot, Achilles won
dered if it was possible to develop a taste for something you’d never had. Every evening some Afghan assholes tossed a few potshots at camp, the bullets usually falling several yards short of the wall. The Americans shot back, and of course there were the two firefights, but he never knew if he actually hit anyone. You just shot until they stopped shooting back. It wasn’t like hunting, where you tracked the quarry down, bagged it, and ate it.

  He rechecked the bag for the eleventh time, to ensure that the trigger was easily accessible. He would travel through the alleys to the back of the house, not that he was really worried about witnesses in this neighborhood. Even as Achilles sat there, a drunk teetered down the block, listing so severely he had to steady himself against the side of a truck. The bum’s face was pinched and worn, marked with fissures like Bud’s. Bud. Bud had better pray that Nawlins was a big enough city that he never ran into Achilles. He put his hands to the roof of the cab, near the smudge Bud had left, and said, “Hand to God. Hand to God, my ass.” He cringed at the memory of Father Levreau’s hands on his own. Why had he lacked the courage to shake him off, to shun the imposition of faith? Faith, as demanding and unyielding as the pain it was rumored to heal; faith, as costly as despair. Of all the prophets Levreau had mentioned, out of the entire Old Testament starting lineup, Achilles recalled only Jacob and Noah. Jacob he didn’t know, but everyone knew Noah: the man who built a boat in the middle of the desert and left his friends behind to be swallowed by the bitter surf.

  The truck swayed—the drunk was leaning against it, fumbling with his fly. Achilles tapped his horn. It was broken. “Motherfuck, I’m in here!” Losing balance as he tried to wave, the drunk put one hand to the window, leaving a greasy palm print. If ever a city needed a Noah. Achilles slapped the window and the man staggered off, singing. A flock of pigeons launched from a nearby roof. Watching as they scattered, Achilles raised his hands as if holding a shotgun and drew a bead on the bird closest to his car, following its trajectory—a soaring arc of alabaster wings eating the night—and firing just as it lit on a sign that read St. Jude Shelter and Community Kitchen, under which a crowd was organizing itself into a line.

  Achilles smelled it before he saw it. The green camelback was a burned-out shell, the dirt yard cracked, the walls of the adjacent houses scorched. The second-story roof was gone, as was most of the first-floor roof, leaving the house open to the sky. The sidewalls remained, but the front wall had crumbled except for an untouched area two feet around the front doors, where the mailbox hung unscathed, unmarked by soot or flame. He flipped the lid up. Joe, Angela, and Raymond Harper had lived there, along with, in incrementally smaller letters, Angie, April, and Amy. Charred shingles cracked underfoot along the alley. The back wall had fallen completely off and lay on the ground like a loading ramp leading into a trailer. The kitchen, dark as a shadow box, had suffered only smoke damage. A few bottles and the ashtray and the take-out containers and the dishes piled in the sink, all coated in black ash, so familiar a sight that he expected to see Lex seated there, coated too. Achilles put the duffle bag over his shoulder and ventured farther into the house. The stairway lay on the floor like a broken accordion. Achilles climbed the wall to the second floor, his fingers burning and twitching with the memory of the fight, his sore ankle groaning, his anger rising.

  Two of the upstairs doorways were obstructed by a densely packed mass of heavy beams and charred shingles, impassible now, let alone aflame. The third door led into a bedroom furnished with bunk beds as well as a playpen that was a knot of sooty tubing. He almost lost his footing on a squeaky toy, three baby dolls gnarled by the heat, their legs melted together, two of the heads joined at the hair, forming one stiff plastic web. He stomped on it until one head popped off and bounced into the hallway, where it caught the slant of the floor and careened off the edge. He listened closely but didn’t hear it hit the ground. He set the duffle bag down and kicked the body, a Medusa with legs for hair, over the edge; he listened closely, but didn’t hear that touch down either, which really pissed him off.

  Feeling sorry for himself, he catalogued his grievances: How could Troy be so thoughtless? If his mom believed enough to slip crosses into their lockets and keep Bibles tucked around the house, how could she pander to his father’s atheism all those years? And his father, for chrissakes, how could he die before seeing them again and leave Achilles holding this bag of shit? And if you adopted a kid or two, what was the point in forcing the papers on them? People didn’t need to know everything.

  He was back in his car before he remembered the duffle bag, and pounded the dashboard in frustration. He didn’t want to do this anymore. He didn’t want to go back into that house. He knew burned houses. Plenty. He had been in burned houses, searched them, slept in them, ordered them razed and retorched. He had been the one to burn them. He had called down the thunder. He knew that if the right ordnance came knocking, even the stoutest building crumbled like cake. But he didn’t want to go back into that house and wonder again who had been trapped in those rooms. But that was stupid. It wasn’t like Troy could die in a fire: he had survived a minefield.

  A storefront operation in a block of shops that had been taken over by churches, St. Jude was sandwiched between First Bethel Apostolic and the Church of the Almighty Congregation, all three names stenciled in cheerful colors as if they merely hawked baked goods or dry cleaning services. He peeked in the window of First Bethel, the single room with industrial carpet installed halfway up the walls and folding chairs striking him as too earnest, too impoverished, to be a sacred space. A service in a converted store couldn’t be the same as mass in a real church like St. Augustine, not that he even knew what that was like. God was blond in this part of town, both storefront churches displaying the same blue-eyed Jesus, like franchisees, the shelter’s sign featuring a sandaled brown-haired man who must have been St. Jude. For a moment, he wondered how they even knew what any of these saints looked like.

  Achilles scanned the line, seeing no sign of Troy or anyone who resembled him. Ignoring the grunts and the half-hearted objections, he pushed his way through the crowd to a door marked Volunteers. Inside, two teenagers sat at a folding table. They were Blow’s age, no older than Troy at his enlistment date.

  “Name?” asked the tall one.

  “Achilles Conroy.”

  “Where’d you serve?” asked the tall one.

  “Korengal,” answered Achilles, wondering why it mattered.

  “Is that federal?” asked the tall one.

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Achilles.

  “Korengal?” muttered an old man he hadn’t noticed before. “I had a cousin there.”

  The teens scanned the sheets spread out before them, meticulously running their fingers along rows and columns as if they expected to find Achilles’s name hidden in one of the little black boxes. “You sure it’s federal? How do you spell it?”

  Achilles spelled it.

  “And where is it?” asked the teen.

  “Afghanistan,” said someone behind him.

  “I knew it,” said the old man, lounging in a corner.

  The tall teen shuffled his papers. “Knew that shit didn’t sound familiar.”

  Achilles turned to see a large-breasted white woman with blond dreadlocks and a red paisley head wrap. She waggled her finger at the teens. “Tsk tsk! Korengal is in Afghanistan, seniors. It’s SAT season.”

  To Achilles: “Were you really in Korengal?”

  “Really.”

  “Doing what?”

  “What else is there to do?”

  Admiration shot across her face. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” said Achilles.

  “How can we help you?”

  “I was looking for somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “A friend,” he said quickly.

  “What’s he look like? We got a lot of somebodies here.”

  He reached for his wallet, but as a precautionary measure he’d left it at home before going t
o the green camelback. “Five eleven, one hundred eighty-five pounds, brown skin, brown hair.” Half of the people in line matched that description. “Light brown skin and green eyes.” That described the short teenager at the volunteer table. The woman nodded, waiting for him to finish, her eyes round as quarters, focused only on him, as if for this moment he was all that mattered. Her face was bright and open, honest. Her heart-shaped lips were glossy and garnet, as radiant as her head wrap. The bright colors, the dreadlocks, the figure—she was perfect, like an anime character.

  “You’re more than welcome to wait,” she said. Her voice was deep and rich, sweet too, like honey and cream. “What’s his name?” When Achilles hesitated, she repeated the question.

  “Troy. Do you know anyone named Lex or Blow?”

  “Sorry. You’re looking for a bunch of folks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good luck, soldier.” She extended her hand. “I’m Ines.”

  “Achilles.”

  “Really?”

  “Who would make that up?” asked Achilles.

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “Were you really in Goddamnistan?”

  “Who would make that up?” asked Achilles.

  “A lot of people.” She nodded knowingly.

  “Not if they were there,” said Achilles.

  “That’s a tautology,” she said.

  The teens snickered. Achilles shrugged it off. He didn’t know what it meant. Did she say Goddamnistan a minute ago? She couldn’t have.

  “You’re serious,” said Ines, facing him squarely. “Okay. Let me guess. You were in a hipster bar, someone insulted your commander-in-chief, and you decked the guy.”

  Achilles shook his head.