Late in the Standoff

Late in the Standoff by Tracy Daugherty

FOR TED LEESON AND BETTY CAMPBELL

Acknowledgments

My warmest thanks to Marjorie Sandor, Ehud Havazelet, Keith Scribner, Marshall Terry, Robin Whitaker, and the SMU Press family: Keith Gregory, George Ann Ratchford, and Kathryn Lang.

“The Standoff” originally appeared, in slightly different form, as “Late in the Standoff” in the Chattahoochie Review. “City Codes” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Story Behind the Story, edited by Andrea Barrett and Pete Turchi. I’m grateful to the editors for permission to reprint.

Lamplighter

Wallpaper the color of lemonade. Sarah liked it especially now in winter, when you wouldn’t drink real lemonade because of the cold. The walls reminded you of summer, of firefly-nights and frog leg barbecues, big glass pitchers of lemonade filled with sugar as thick as the Milky Way.

Here in Oklahoma, in her grandma’s house, she slept in the front bedroom. The bed was soft and high, the comforter the dark green of strawberry leaves. Moonlight through slats in the window blinds striped the scuffed oak floor like flashlight beams. Just outside the bedroom door, big as a bear, was an old Crosley radio that didn’t work anymore. It had scared her when she was littler. Her grandma had told her voices used to rise from it, the voices of singers, of funnymen, heroes, and presidents warning of war. In summer, when Sarah couldn’t sleep after the thrill of a cookout in the park across the street, she’d creep out of bed and sit in front of the Crosley. She put her ear to the speaker. It felt like a sponge. What if it soaked up her voice? She’d go through life croaking for food, for love, and no one would understand her. She thought she heard, inside the speaker, a lonely whisper, air inside a beach shell, a president’s ghost sighing, “Fear … fear itself …” She’d run back to bed and shiver till she fell asleep.

Last summer, just after her ninth birthday, the dial fell off the radio, a round plastic knob. The Crosley was dead, once and for all. No more lonesome whispers. Yesterday, when she and her mom drove up from West Texas, unloaded the car, and carried their bags to their rooms, she was surprised to see that the radio looked smaller than she remembered. She gave it a thump with the corner of her bag as she sashayed past into the front room.

Her grandma hugged her mother. “Any word from Bo?” Grandma asked. Everyone knew that Sarah’s father, Grandma’s youngest son, was her favorite.

“He’s been assigned to the Chorwon Valley,” Sarah’s mother said. “This came yesterday.” From her purse she took a letter she’d received from Sarah’s dad. She read aloud:

We’ve left Pusan. On our way up from the harbor we were told to watch for landmines. Narrow roads. The towns had all been bombed. No one’s left in the valley except for the Number One Boys: Korean kids. The army hires them to carry its equipment. The kids say the dust here is full of parasites that will probably give us worms.

On a happier note, Cardinal Spellman is supposed to chopper in on Christmas, to say mass. There’s a rumor, too, that Vice President Nixon will show up, but I’m betting he’ll stay in Tokyo drinking whisky with the bigwigs. It was nine degrees this morning. The shell holes on the hillsides froze. Their rims were crusted with ice. I stayed in the tent all day, by the oil stove, wrapped in a poncho, crumbling cocoa cakes into hot water. I shaved three times, just to have something to do. We keep expecting the Chinese to attack us, but so far it’s a waiting game.

I like the guys in my outfit. Fellow draftees. We’ve hung tin cans on the perimeter wire — our version of decorating a tree. It kills me that I can’t be with you and Sarah on Christmas day. Say hello to Mom for me. When this little skirmish is over, I swear, this time, I’ll make the drilling business work. I know the oil patch will bless us someday, and we’ll scoot out of that trailer house and find a nice new home. All my love

Sarah’s mother pressed first one hand, then the other, to her lips.

“Your daddy’s a brave man,” Grandma said to Sarah.

“Yes ma’am.”

This morning, slumped over coffee and the remains of her breakfast, Sarah’s mother dabbed at her eyes with a shredded blue tissue. She was far away, the way she always seemed to be these days, but Grandma worked hard to cheer her up. She’d made a towering breakfast, stacks and stacks of hotcakes, with lots of melted butter and maple syrup. Now Grandma wondered aloud if it would snow on Christmas eve, just two days away, and promised she’d take Sarah and her mother shopping later for presents and a tree.

At Mr. Leery’s Discount Emporium, next to the bowling alley downtown, Sarah bought her mom a music box, black lacquer with white roses decoupaged on top. Its tune was a song her dad sang. Something about a pony. She hid it behind her back, so her mother wouldn’t see it until Grandma helped her pay for it, and it was safely hidden in the paper bag Mr. Leery had handed her.

Mr. Leery was tall and very kind. He was Pop’s friend. Three years ago, Pop, Sarah’s granddad, had died of emphysema. His lungs were weak because he’d been gassed in southern France during the First World War. Above the bed he’d shared with Grandma was a framed citation honoring his military service: a sketch of a woman in a white, billowing robe, waving the stars and stripes over Pop’s full name, Dee Eugene Olin. One July Fourth, when the town’s families had gathered on Main Street to watch fireworks, Mr. Leery told Sarah he’d never fought in a war (he was a few years older than Sarah’s father), but he knew Pop had been amazingly brave.

“How do you know?” Sarah had asked.

“Because he doesn’t talk much about the fighting,” Mr. Leery said. “The ones who brag all the time — I don’t trust them. They’ve still got something to prove. But the brave ones, the ones who’ve already proven themselves, well, they don’t need to keep yakking about it.”

On weekdays, in midsummer, Pop used to take Sarah and Blackie, his golden retriever, to the rodeo arena, on the edge of town. It was Pop’s job to paint signs on the walls above the bleachers: ads for arthritis pills, foot powders, muscle relaxers. “Whatever ails you,” Pop said. “I slap the cure up here, so everyone will buy it and get better.” Sometimes, on his lunch break, Mr. Leery came to keep Pop company while Sarah chased Blackie around the arena. Mr. Leery brought doggie treats, and for Sarah, a handful of apple taffy candy. Later, at home, Grandma would complain that Sarah had gotten filthy running around unsupervised, and besides that, she was so full of candy she wouldn’t eat dinner. Pop just grinned at Grandma and smooched her cheek until she slapped him away, playfully.

After Pop died, Mr. Leery made a point of stopping by Grandma’s house each day to see if she needed anything. “He got me through the roughest time,” Grandma told Sarah. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”

His store smelled of perfumes, lotions, and soap. Light fixtures, all for sale, lined the wall behind the cash register — globes and squares and frosted glass shades. Sometimes, Mr. Leery let Sarah turn all the fixtures on. They were linked together to one big plug. She’d stick it in the socket and light flew all around her, yellow, orange, white. The moment always made her laugh. She could feel the warmth of dozens of bulbs. Next door, when someone bowled a strike, the thunder of pins shook the wall, and the lights rattled, a crazy-quilt of bright and dark across the floor.

Today the lights were off. Customers crowded near Mr. Leery’s newest display, a row of television sets, six of them, made of slick red wood, each one as big as her daddy’s backyard tool bench. They were all tuned to the same station. Over and over, Sarah heard the same words. Korea. Cease-fire. Hope. She squeezed between her mother and her grandma, gripping the sack with the music box in it. Her mother was about to cry again. In gold, in cursive, the word Crosley stretched beneath one of the flashing gray screens.