Every few hours the questions rise to her lips: Sybil, am I the only one left? Do you pilot a flying graveyard with one soul left on board? But she cannot bring herself to ask.
Her father is only waiting. He is waiting for everything to be safe. Then he will open the door.
LAKEPORT, IDAHO
1953–1970
Zeno
The bus drops him at the Texaco. Mrs. Boydstun stands outside smoking a cigarette and leaning against her Buick.
“So skinny. You get my letters?”
“You sent some?”
“First of the month, rain or shine.”
“What’d they say?”
She shrugs. “New stoplight. Stibnite mine closed.”
Her hair is neat and her eyes are bright but when she walks toward the diner he notices something off: one leg is a half second slower than it should be.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “My dad had the same. Look: your dog died. I gave her to Charlie Goss in New Meadows. He said she went easy.”
Athena drowsing by the library fire. He’s too exhausted to cry. “She was old.”
“She was.”
They sit in a booth and order eggs and Mrs. Boydstun lights a second cigarette. The waitress wears lunettes on a chain around her neck. Her apron is shockingly white. She says, “They brainwash you? They’re saying some of you boys went and became turncoats.”
Mrs. Boydstun taps her cigarette into the ashtray. “Just bring the coffee, Helen.”
Knives of sunlight flash off the lake. Boats motor back and forth, unzipping the water. At the service station a shirtless man with a deep tan watches an attendant pump gas into his Cadillac. Impossible that such things have been going on all these months.
Mrs. Boydstun watches him. He understands that people will want to hear something, but not the truth: they’ll want a story of perseverance and pluck, good overcoming evil, a homecoming song about a hero who brought light into dark places. Beside him the waitress is clearing a table: three of the plates still have food on them.
Mrs. Boydstun says, “You kill anybody over there?”
“No.”
“Not a one?”
The eggs come sunny-side up. He pierces one with the tines of his fork and the yolk bleeds out, glistening obscenely.
“That’s good,” she says. “That’s for the best.”
The house is the same: the ceramic children, a Jesus suffering on every wall. The same mulberry curtains, the same junipers beneath which Athena crawled on the coldest nights. Mrs. Boydstun pours a drink.
“Cribbage, honey?”
“I think I’ll lie down.”
“Of course. You take your time.”
In the dresser drawer the Playwood Plastic soldiers slumber in their tin box. Soldier 401 marches uphill with his rifle. Soldier 410 kneels behind his anti-tank gun. He gets into the same brass bed he slept in as a boy but the mattress is too soft and the day keeps getting brighter. Eventually he hears Mrs. Boydstun go out and he creeps down the stairs and unlatches every door in the house. He needs them unlocked at the least, open at best. Then he tiptoes into the kitchen, finds a loaf of bread, tears it in half, puts one half beneath his pillow, and divides the other between his pockets. Just in case.
He sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He is not quite twenty years old.
* * *
Pastor White gets him a job with the county highway department. In the golden days of fall, tamaracks blazing yellow on the mountainsides, Zeno works with a road crew of older men pulling a motor grader with a Caterpillar RD6 crawler, filling in mud holes or graveling over washouts, improving the roads to the even smaller towns that lie even deeper in the mountains. When winter arrives, he requests the most solitary job on offer: driving an old hardtop army Autocar rotary snowplow. Its three big spiral blades send snow over the windshield in a kind of reverse avalanche—a skyward spout that, over the course of a night, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, tends to hypnotize him. It’s a strange and lonely business: the wipers generally do little more than smear frost across the glass, and the heater works about twenty percent of the time, and the defroster is a caged fan mounted on the dashboard, and he has to drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a rag soaked in spirits, wiping the inside of the glass to keep it clear.
Every Sunday he sends a letter to a British veterans organization, seeking the whereabouts of a lance corporal named Rex Browning.
* * *
Time passes. The snow melts, falls again, a sawmill burns, is rebuilt again, the highway crew rocks over washouts, shores up bridges, and rain or rockfall washes them out, and they rebuild them again. Then it’s winter and the rotary plow throws its mesmeric curtain of snow over the truck cab. Cars are always freezing up or going off the roads, sliding into the slush or mud, and he’s always hauling them back up: chain, tackle, reverse.