THE ZOMBOID
Wendy’s father lived in a Sears house, an original kit that had been delivered on a boxcar complete, ready to be constructed, amid row after row of factory homes. On the way over they had passed houses with melted siding, a yard with the cyclopean eye of an old dryer. Dirty and forlorn, a kid stood in the yard chewing something. As they passed, he stuck one arm out, as if thrusting a sword, his leg bent at a right angle, still chewing as he posed (lead paint, Singleton thought). Then they arrived at her father’s house, exuding a working man’s pride, with a picket fence freshly painted and the only living oak tree on the block. In the yard next door a man in a wheelchair lifted his beer in a gesture of greeting. His legs seemed to have been amputated at the thighs. He had a folded bandana around his long blond hair. He had a face that was ravaged but still beautiful.
“Please don’t pay him any mind,” she said. “It pains me to call him the Zomboid, but that’s what he calls himself and wants us to call him. That’s part of what pains me.”
“Another veteran sitting out his days in his chair,” Singleton said. He returned the salute and then, against his better judgment, went over to say hello.
Freckled and pale, with his arms firmly on the chair’s handles, the man called Zomboid struck the pose of a port gunner and said, “Hey, partner. Rank and fucking serial number.”
“Can’t remember,” Singleton said. There was a worn path — two ruts — around the perimeter of his yard.
“Got anything in the way of a cigarette?”
Singleton held out his pack. Around from the side of the house, a dog barked, choked-sounding, as if pulling against a chain. Down the street, another dog responded, full-throated, and then, barely audible, another one, far away and completely free.
“Arms are shot, too, cowboy.”
Singleton took a cigarette from the pack and placed it between the man’s lips.
“You wanna know what I’m seeing?” The guy’s voice was tight and flat, and seemed to come from somewhere else, ventriloquisticly. “I’m seeing nuclear conflagration after the next, the real Kennedy assassination, which is gonna happen soon, for sure. The ghost of Oswald is at hand, my man, and he’s gonna get it right this time. No fucking maladjusted scope. No blurry vision or submerged subconscious patriotic bullshit making him quiver; no heartbeat interference on the shot because he had too much coffee or whatever. Next guy’s gonna hold his breath and do the backward sniper count thing.”
“OK, buddy, I got you on that,” Singleton said.
“’Bout that light?”
Singleton pulled the Zippo out and scratched a flame.
“Yeah, Oswald’s just the fucking tip, man, of the largest iceberg this country’s gonna hit, man, and I’m not talking the riots and so forth, or any of that shit, man,” the guy in the wheelchair said. “I’m talking about a debasement of the largest kind.”
(Now’s the moment, Singleton thought; there’s going to be a glint of something like recognition and then he’ll pop into the questioning mode: What’s your unit and where were you stationed and how long were you in and all of that.)
“Hold that fucking thing up here.” For all of his limitations — his lack of legs and fully functioning arms — the guy had tremendous agility in his torso. (But how, Singleton thought, did he wheel around without the use of his arms? And didn’t he lift a salute to me?)
“Light me another one so when this one goes out I’ll have something to sustain me.”
He put another cigarette to the guy’s lips and brought out the lighter again.
“I know that lighter, man. I know it. We might’ve seen some action together somewhere. I know you think I’m one more crazy fucker, rambling about my visions and so forth. Give me your story. Give me the whole fucking narrative.”
Singleton resorted to making the enfolded gesture: he made a fist and held it against his temple and took a couple of steps back and did it again.
“Ah, man. I thought so. I saw it right off. Saw it in the way you were standing there like you never saw a guy in a wheelchair before. Said to myself, there’s a guy who saw some bad shit. There’s a man who had the good fortune of having it all tucked inside while I sit here with my body too damaged to qualify for the treatment. When I tried to sign up they told me that if your physical damage is bad enough the mental can’t be worked on. You get a chair and a yard and a dog on a chain. That’s all you get.”
“What’d you see over there?” Singleton said. All I can do, he thought, is kick the can down the road. When you have contact, avoid having to be precise about your own story.
“I saw the five-by-six view from a gunner port and everything else in between. Gooks running through the grass with that squat waddle,” he said. He’d seen water buffalo stampeding under the blade wash. He’d seen the men in hats running under the ribbons of tracer fire. He’d seen the beautiful spin of dust-off smoke pouring up from the canopy. He’d rehabbed in South Haven, the fucking VA unable to secure for him a decent set of wheels. Then — with seething insects, the cicada in the weeds and up in the trees starting to talk directly to each other — he began making a clucking sound with his tongue and Singleton felt the sadness that came from hearing those who were way, way, way beyond help, the ones who turned to vocal tones instead of words.
“You got a day and I’ll tell you the details,” he said, finally.
“I’d like that,” Singleton said.
“Now you’d better go to your old lady.”
“You know her?”
“Like a sister.”
* * *
Wendy’s father greeted him with a meaty handshake, saying, “Come on in. Don’t listen to anything that guy has to say. Wendy’s told me all about you.”
Singleton paused at the screen door. The man — his long hair flaxen in the sunlight — was popping wheelies in his yard, his arms jerking, the metal foot-grills dipping up and down.
“I should’ve warned you about him.”
“I saw him coming a hundred years ago.”
The house had a small parlor with two easy chairs, a plush green couch, and a large television console on which two batters were up to bat, the image of one slightly on the side of the other. Singleton resisted his desire to go and fiddle with the rabbit ears and followed Wendy down the hall and into a clean, well-lit kitchen where her father was preparing coffee. The old guy held the pot with his arthritically clawed hands, all pain, nothing but pain up the arm to the tattoos, smeared with age.
From the start a grunt-to-grunt tension was there, both men sensing, and maybe Wendy, too, the weight of the approaching topic.
“I’m going to go get us a nip,” the old man said when the coffee was gone. He got a bottle of bourbon and poured three shot glasses as tight to the rim as possible, said salud, and drank his down before they could touch glasses. If he had been a different kind of man he would’ve toasted his regiment, or the Black Forest, but instead he’d kept it clean and simple. The old man wasn’t ready yet to go into that and instead circled the conversation back to the Psych Corps and to the system and to the hospitals, saying, “So you’re each on a different case and you can’t talk about it, is that it? You’re sworn not to talk about it, as I understand it. But you’re allowed to speak in generalities. Most of the men I fought with came home and took the weight onto their own shoulders.”
“Yeah, we’re allowed to speak about generalities. And in theory we’re not even supposed to be together,” Singleton said.
In the half-light of late day, Wendy’s face seemed to glow. She arched her brows, grimaced, and then smiled. Her face said: You’re an old man and can’t be expected to grasp the vision behind this huge national project.