Christopher Steiner
He studied the two yellow cards and the slip, rotating the order. Then he took a magnifying glass from the breast pocket of his jacket and studied them again. “Hmm,” he said. “Hmm.”
I signed another card for him and, with a magnifying glass, the ring on his finger glistening, he compared the four. “If someone found your passbook and tried to empty your account, you wouldn’t want us to give your money to someone else.”
He said that he wanted to study the signatures at greater length and if no one with my name had reported a missing passbook — ha ha — he would let me close the account tomorrow.
When I left, I knew I would never get it. A police car parked in front of the bank.
The sky heavy, glistening — a lifeless sky. The temperature in the nineties. “Is God dead?” someone had written on the wall. “I’m just not well,” it said underneath.
“I’ll take the daughter, you take the mother,” Parks said.
Two women silting on the next bench, neither mother nor daughter.
“Where do you want to take them?”
At lunch — we went to a German place on Eighty-sixth Street — he asked how “our friend Rosemary Byrd” was getting along.
I said I didn’t know how she was.
“I’m glad there are no hard feelings, Chris. On my part, I want you to know I bear you no ill will. I want you to know that.”
“I’m thinking about getting married,” I said.
“To whom?” Pinpoints of sweat on his forehead.
“Just thinking about it as an idea. What would be your advice on something like that?”
“If you’re asking seriously — I think you’re putting me on — under the best of circumstances marriage is a difficult proposition. How can you be thinking about it without someone in mind?” His mind on something else. “Living with another person is one of the hardest things there is.”
“Is it hard with your wife?”
He pretended not to hear me. “How did you make out?”
“Make out?”
“In school. You said you were worried that you might not have enough credits to graduate.”
I said it didn’t matter since I was going in the Army anyway. He said if there was something he could do to convince me not to go, if it was in his power, he would do it.
“Is true,” a man in a black suit at the next table was saying, “that in nineteen thirty-six eighty percent of Jews in Germany was Communists. Is true.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t true, Hans,” the other said. “I just said it was a mistake to try to kill them all. A matter of faulty calculation. Don’t make enemies you don’t need to make. A first rule of good business practice is not to make enemies.”
“A matter of faulty calculation. Never start a job you can’t finish.”
“Best to kill people you can trust.”
Parks was staring at my briefcase, saying that the war would go on and on, getting larger and larger, unless something was done to stop it.
I told him about having moved out. He stopped his lecture about the war, said he was interested to know my reasons.
I said I couldn’t stay there anymore.
A policeman, sitting at the bar, was watching us.
He said what I had done was a necessary stage of development. I wanted to keep him talking until the cop left so I asked him if he thought it was worth acting queer to stay out of the Army.
He looked at his watch. “We’ll talk about it another time, Christopher. There are better ways. I have to take off.” Smoothing his hair with his hand, his eyes burning. “Look, if you don’t have a place to stay, I can put you up in the spare room until you find something.”
I said maybe I would come. The cop talking to the bartender, staring, pointing at us.
He paid the check and returned. “I’ll tell Carolyn to make up a bed for you. OK?”
I said it depended on certain other things.
“Whatever you decide,” he said, waving.
I got up to see where he was going, when the cop at the bar grabbed my arm. “What’s his name, the guy you were with? I could swear I’ve seen him somewhere. Isn’t he on television? I have a bet with Happy here. Isn’t he the one that plays the double agent on that new combat series?”
I said I didn’t have to answer his questions and got out in time to see Parks getting into a cab.
I followed him to her aunt’s place. Like old times. Thought of ringing the bell, saying “Surprise” when she answered the door, my fly open. “He thinks, your friend, he’s above it all,” Parks was saying. “There are no atheists in my foxhole,” she said. They were arguing. Parks down in an hour, looking grim, went directly to the subway. I had the idea that he had killed her but when I phoned she answered.
“Curt,” she said. “Curt?” I didn’t talk.
I called a guy who was on the math team with me. Asked him if he could put me up. He said he wouldn’t mind normally but since last week he was living with a girl. He had a key to another place, he said, if I was interested. He couldn’t talk now. She was coming in. To call him back.
A woman in the park accused me of following her, said she was going to call a cop. I knocked her down, ran. Went to a movie to get away. The feature: What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? The place full of queers.
I counted nine of them. They were standing in a row, a vertical column in black uniforms, at motionless attention. A command was given. The first soldier in the line took two running steps to the right and then, pivoting in the air, flung himself face down to the ground. The second soldier took three steps to the right and then executed, with the same remarkable precision, the same complicated movement as the first. The third soldier took four steps to the right … And the fourth. And the fifth. I thought I was watching some kind of exhibition — the bodies about to arrange themselves into words — but I discovered, a bullet knocking off my hat, that they were firing live ammunition at some enemy behind me. “Hey,” I called, “cut it out. I’m a civilian.” Holding up my draft card. The firing continued.
I was surrounded, the trees revealing themselves as soldiers in camouflage. “Throw down your arms and put up your hands, or we’ll come in shooting,” a voice yelled. “We’ll hit you with everything we’ve got.”
“I’m not armed,” I said.
The order came again. “Throw down your arms.”
I looked around to see who it was they might be after, but I saw no one — no one else — soldiers pointing rifles on all sides of me.
“I’m a civilian. There’s been some kind of mistake.”
For a moment I had the sense I had gotten through to them, then the voice came again. “Throw down your arms. Throw down your arms. You must show us, by diminishing your capability, that you want peace.” A bullet blistered by, taking a button off my shirt.
“I want peace. I come in peace.”
“We want deeds, not words,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming from a loudspeaker some distance away. “Yield your arms.” A shot grazed my finger.
I looked in my pockets for something to yield to them — it seemed my only chance. I found an old boy scout knife, one that I had used when I was a kid, grateful that I had it with me. I threw it underhand on the ground in front of me, hoping somebody would notice. “That’s all there is,” I said. “It s not really a weapon.”
“The enemy is trained to fight with all the means at his disposal,” someone said. “It’s in the Manual of Enemy Arms.”
A soldier stepped forward, prodded my knife with his bayonet as though it might be alive, then fired a round of shots into it. At the fourth or fifth shot, the knife exploded.