Pure Products of America    
by Dennis Humphrey

No one /  to witness /  and adjust, no one to drive the car
~William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie"             

I’m sorry about Vic and all—I really am.  I think about him all the time it seems, late nights as I watch the tracers draw wavy lines in the night over Baghdad, moon-dust dry afternoons when objects in the hazy bright distance seem like biblical-age reflections on rippling water, until the smoke from the trash fires colors the sunset a scorched orange, day after day after day.  So this is where western civilization started.

But I was going to tell you about Vic.

That night before I left the states, I had just thought about how much I missed him, how strange it felt to be there at his house with him away as I finished pulling out the hide-a-bed in his living room.  I sat down on the sagging edge of it, and the worn springs creaked and twanged an off-key minor chord. Wendy stood in the doorway that led back through a short hallway from the living room to the master bedroom.  She wore a lavender cotton nightshirt, the hem of which fell about mid-way down her thighs. 

“Oh, hey Wendy,” I said.  “Didn’t see you there.”

She pressed the left side of her body against the doorframe, gripping it with her left hand as her right fiddled with the silver, megaphone-shaped charm she wore on a slender chain around her neck.  “Ready for bed?”

Her voice reminded me, as it always has, of the cool soothing tones of a dove, calling in the quiet of a deepening dusk.  Her right leg was bent slightly at the knee, which she rocked gently from side to side, and her head was canted over so it rested against the doorframe.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “You didn’t want to watch any more TV, did you?”

She tilted her head to the other side and glanced up at the wobbling orbits of the unbalanced ceiling fan, her mouth forming a thoughtful pout.  “No,” she cooed with a slow shake of her head.

The drone of cicadas rose and fell through the silence as I sat, looking at her.  Her glance moved down from the ceiling to me, and she smiled.  “Iraq, huh?  Guess we won’t be seeing each other for a while.  When’s your report date?”

I hadn’t seen her or Vic in over a year, so it seemed an odd distinction.  “1700 tomorrow.” I said. “I figure I’ll drive the rest of the way to Fort Hood in the morning.  Then we wait for our plane.”   

She nodded, pouting up at the gyrating ceiling fan again.  My unit had been given one last week of leave before going over, and somehow I’d ended up there at Vic’s. I guess when Wendy heard I’d be passing through on my way to deploy, she insisted I stop over rather than getting a hotel room or even worse, trying to drive straight through to Ft. Hood. “Vic’s been gone to Afghanistan for six months,” she murmured.  “Still has six to go.”

I watched her as she continued to finger her charm, continued to rock her knee from side to side to the soft pulse of the cicadas outside.  

*

Vic is one of the most stubborn people I know, a man of absolutes for whom there are no gray areas, for whom the gap between wrong and right is as broad and unbridgeable as the gulf between the rich man in hell and Lazarus, not the one raised from the dead, the one from the parable—in Luke, I think.  Even more, I have never in my life known anyone more determined to be good, and that, I think, is the cruelest barb. Once, when I made some deer chili, he asked me how I got the gamy taste out of the meat.  When I told him I had soaked the meat in beer, he wouldn’t speak to me for more than a week because he had once vowed on the memory of a dead friend never to consume alcohol.  That was Vic. 

*

During our sophomore year of college, the year before he and Wendy tied the knot in a breezy outdoor ceremony on Petit Jean Mountain, Vic and I shared an apartment just off campus.  As an unofficial third roommate, Wendy didn’t contribute toward the rent, and in fact such an arrangement would have been unacceptable to the landlords, who were content to look the other way so long as her status remained unofficial.  She did contribute in whatever ways she thought she could.  For instance, whenever there were some light chores to be done, she never failed to offer to help.  Usually when she offered to pitch in, we would tell her no, thank you, and she would feel she’d done her duty in offering.

One day, when Vic wasn’t home, she came bouncing in from cheerleader practice, still flush with school spirit and the jog home, I guess, and dabbing sweat from the fine nape hairs beneath her red clover honey ponytail. I was standing at the kitchen sink contemplating the stack of dirty dishes.  “Need some help, QT?” she cooed.  My name is Quincy Tupper.  Most people call me Tup, and Wendy was the only one I let call me QT.  I liked the way she said it.  The only ones who ever called me Quincy were my parents and Vic.

“How about I wash and you rinse?”

Her left eyebrow raised into a high arch, and the left corner of her mouth crept upward into a half grin. “Nah, let’s both wash and rinse.”  She dropped her towel and nudged me over with her hip to make room for herself at the sink, so she could dip her hands down into the scalding hot water of the washing side of the twin basin kitchen sink, grasping the same plate I was holding, rubbing her hands over it and over my hands in the soapy water.  Then she pulled the plate and my hands with it up and over to the cool water in the rinse side, and she plunged them in.

“Ooh!”  She smiled, and the freckled bridge of her nose crinkled the way it always did.  “Gives me shivers.” 

Back in junior high, I remember times I’d gone over to Wendy’s house.  They had an indoor pool, unheated, and the lack of direct sunlight to warm the water kept the pool’s temperature at around seventy degrees.  Next to the pool was a hot tub, in which we’d steep ourselves until we couldn’t stand the heat.  Then we’d climb out, our groggy, steaming bodies so relaxed we could barely move, and we’d dive into the cold water of the pool. Every muscle would contract, and the grogginess would explode into chilling exhilaration.  Her father hated that we did that, convinced that one of us would eventually get a cramp and drown, almost certainly causing him to be sued.  Therefore, we could do it only when her parents were not at home, which they liked even less for the same reasons.  Once when Wendy and I were going from hot tub to pool and back, we heard her father’s pickup rumble into the yard. 

“Come on,” she said, grabbing me by the hand and leading me, dripping wet, into the house, grabbing our clothes from the bench beside the hot tub as we went.  Like cornered rats, we had no choice but to flee into her room.  We heard her parents come in as we pulled our clothes on over our wet swimsuits, trying to be quiet.  I was terrified, but she was giggling, her freckled nose crinkled up as she smiled.  Still, when we heard her father’s voice coming down the hall, she whispered “Uh-oh.”  Casting about herself for a moment, she grabbed a couple of schoolbooks, spread them open on the bed, and pulled me down onto the bed beside her.

When her father opened the door, she looked up and smiled, “Hi daddy,” she cooed.

When he saw me on his daughter’s bed with her, her father roared, “What makes you think you have any business..!” He seemed none too pleased, and I had to wonder how Wendy thought this plan was going to make our already bad situation any better.

“But, daddy, QT was just helping me study.”

It almost worked.  Wendy’s father was fanatical about Wendy’s accomplishments, as opposed to my father who hardly noticed mine.  If Wendy came home with a B, if she didn’t score in double digits in the basketball game, if she didn’t qualify for state at the cheerleading competition, there would be hours of studying/practicing/rehearsing.  Wendy was fully capable of making straight A’s on her own, but it must have been difficult being under such pressure to excel at everything at once.  I knew he knew I was making A’s without ever really studying, a fact that I still think kept him from liking me very much, so as he considered the possibility I was showing her my secrets to academic success, he seemed to soften, until he noticed something else. 

“Wait a minute.  Why is your hair wet if you’re just studying?  You’ve been in the pool!” 

I was ejected from the room. Her mother took me gently by one arm. 

“You’d better get along home,” she said in a soothing tone, more pigeon- than dove-like, pulling me down the hall to the front door, her nose crinkling as she smiled. I looked back to see Wendy huddled in one corner of her bed, her balled fists held tightly against the sides of her head like a losing boxer as her father towered over her roaring, roaring.

*

We had just put our hands back into the hot soapy water to grasp another plate, when Wendy looked out the window over the kitchen sink and said, “Hey, isn’t that Dr. Moony?” 

I looked out to see Dr. Moony in the apartment complex parking lot, trying to stuff a full sized mattress into the dumpster.  She was dressed in the only thing I’d ever seen her wear, an ill-fitting dress with a white pleated skirt and a blue, sailor-style top, and from a distance her waddling form bore more than a little resemblance to Donald Duck.  The dress seemed to be cut for a taller and slimmer woman, making it both too large and too small, so she always reminded me of a chubby child who was trying on her anorexic mother’s clothes.  Both the skirt and the mattress bore what appeared to be dark wine stains on them, which I took to be a clue to at least one contributing factor to her behavior at the time. As I watched, Dr. Moony climbed up on the dumpster and started jumping up and down on the mattress to stuff it further down inside.  She climbed back down with more agility than I would have granted her, and casting a quick look around like a small wild animal on the watch for predators, she scurried for the shelter of her apartment building.

“What the…Ow!”  I had forgotten that my hands were in the hot water.Wendy was looking at me, her hands balled into fists, which she held close to the sides of her face, like a losing boxer, as she laughed.

I had first met Dr. Moony on the first day of Sociology 101 earlier that same semester.  She was new to the school, and from the first day, something seemed odd—not that it’s unusual for professors to seem odd, but this was unprecedented.  Ten minutes after the start of the period, she still hadn’t said a word. She sat, dwarfed by the desk between her and the class, kicking her fat, pink feet, which didn’t quite reach the floor. Her hands absently patted her round belly to some rhythm we weren’t privileged to hear, and occasionally she mumbled to herself and then giggled in spasmodic little squeaks as though all of it were really just too much.

Vic leaned over to me and whispered, “I know we have to wait fifteen minutes before leaving if the professor isn’t here, but how long do we wait for one who’s not all there?”

I tried by main force of will to hold back the laugh that burbled up from my convulsing diaphragm.  I mean, really, I would have thought the embarrassment alone would have been enough to deter me. I bit my lip, I held my breath, and I almost succeeded in keeping the laugh repressed, but I made the mistake of glancing at Vic, who was losing his battle against his own laugh.  When we saw each other’s faces, the fight was over and the laughs escaped.  Dr. Moony’s laugh increased proportionally, causing ours to increase, which caused hers to increase, and before long, we had all three progressed to full belly laughs.  Others in the classroom had joined the laughter along the way, but not all.  Several students squirmed in their seats, eyeing us with expressions from puzzled anxiety to open contempt.  One girl fled the room in tears.  Of course, not all of the classes were that strange, though there was some strangeness infused though every recollection I have of her.  As a sociological experiment, she once proposed we do a mock government in class; she assigned us all official-sounding but abstract bureaucratic titles like Secretary of Justice and Minister of Culture, and then said, “Okay, go! Start governing!”  After we sat looking at each other for the rest of the period wondering what we were supposed to do, she concluded by saying, “See? See? Do you see?”

As Wendy and I watched out the window over the sink, Dr. Moony made three more trips to the dumpster, depositing several bulging trash bags, and a battered suitcase cocooned in what looked like an entire roll of duct tape.

“Hey, QT,” Wendy said in an excited whisper. “Let’s go take a closer look.”

I knew better.  I mean, of course I knew better.  I always did, but then, so did she. 

*

But I was going to tell you about Vic. I’d first met Vic in the seventh grade, and through most of junior high and high school, we had been nearly inseparable.  We stayed at each other’s houses so often that it came to seem like we shared two homes, with two very different atmospheres.  My house was the failed pilot for a 1950’s sitcom, with unimaginative writers and unremarkable characters, and subject to that era’s standards for censorship concerning sexuality and violence, though somehow lacking in the desperately cheerful togetherness of those TV families.  Oh, there was desperation, but it felt far from cheerful or together, drained as it was of anything like passionate feeling.  The cold, depthless images still flicker in my mind.  I even remember them in black and white.

I remember Vic’s house somewhat differently.  I recall one night at Vic’s, his mother and stepfather were “at it again.”  Vic and I were in the family room watching WTBS when it was the extent of cable, and the shouting started in the other room.  When the shouting became punctuated by thumps and crashes, we went into the kitchen to investigate, and we ducked just in time to avoid a broken coffee cup, which whistled over our heads and embedded itself in the wall.  Vic’s mother, the intended target of the cup, stood nearby with a stack of dinner plates cradled in the crook of one arm.  She was flinging them, Frisbee-style, rapid fire, in the general direction of the hallway, from which the coffee cup had come.    

“You boys had best get on out of here for awhile,” she said with the same matter-of-fact tone with which she might have told us to wash up for dinner, never once breaking the steady rhythm with which she launched the plates down the hall.  As we crawled on all fours through the kitchen toward the dining room on our way to the front door, we passed the refrigerator, beside which dwelt the Laser Pig.      

Laser Pig, Vic’s pet guinea pig, was so named because of his cherry-red eyes, which stood out in bright contrast to his short yellow fur.  Unlike most guinea pigs I’d ever seen, which were portly little creatures with stubby legs on which they dragged themselves on round bellies, Laser Pig was streamlined with slender legs, on which he stood and trotted like a miniature capybara.  Too active for a life of confinement, Laser Pig had escaped his cage and had taken up residence in the gap between the cupboards and the fridge. Whenever anyone opened the fridge, Laser Pig would trot out and holler, “Gweak, gweeeak!” until the opener of the fridge tossed him a lettuce leaf or a carrot.  Then Laser Pig would scoot backward into his gap, and the sound of munching and satisfied gweaking could be heard from the dark recess.

As Vic and I crawled by, Laser Pig’s red eyes glimmered out at me from his dark crevice, and he gweaked once, perhaps warning us, perhaps scolding us for being caught out in the open when such a ruckus was taking place.

My parents moved to New Mexico during my junior year of high school, and by the time I returned so I could go to college with my old friends, Vic and Wendy were practically engaged.  While in New Mexico, I had become practically engaged myself, and I had become even more practically disengaged.  Naturally, it never occurred to me that Vic and Wendy would really go through with it, not even as I stood at the edge of the bluff near the lodge at Petit Jean State Park, not even as the music from the reception drifted out from the lodge to me on the same wind that had made her white tulle veil and train float up around her in a diaphanous dance during the outdoor ceremony.  I’d been bumped down the line of rented, prom-style tuxedos from the best man slot by some stray that Vic had picked up during the eighteen months I’d been in New Mexico.  He was some middle-aged drifter to whom Vic had been kind when they had worked together planting seedlings in the burnt wastelands of the paper company’s clearcuts, inspiring in him the sort of desperate puppy-dog devotion Vic often inspired in his strays.  I don’t even remember his name, but Vic made him best man.  Still, as one of the groomsmen, tradition demanded that I be inside trying to nail one of the bridesmaids.  In the procession I had led Wendy’s cousin Kari on my arm, and I have to admit she looked about as good as a woman can look in sea-foam green.  Instead I was on the bluff, looking down on the hazy valley, somehow convinced that some part of the story was far from over.

*

I had actually known Wendy for longer than I’d known Vic, and up until my departure for New Mexico, I’d spent a great deal more time with her than Vic had.  One summer back in high school, I spent an entire day helping her install new seats and a new stereo in the old GTO her father had bought for her.  I spent most of that time upside-down with my head under the dash, the passenger seat jammed into the small of my back, my neck kinked at an unnatural angle, trying connect the maddening mass of wires to make the stereo work.  I felt her slide into the driver’s seat as I twisted what I hoped were the last two wires together. 

“How’s it going down there?” she cooed. All I could see of her from my position under the dash were her legs, from where her feet, one daintily hooked behind the other, rested on the floor mat beside me to where the hem of her red and white cheerleader skirt fell just above the smooth curves of her bending knees.

“Almost got it, I think.”

She shifted herself sideways in the seat, and lay curled on her side so she could peek down under the dash at me. “Can I help?”

“You can turn on the radio to see if it works now.”

She leaned forward over me, the tiny silver megaphone dangling as she turned the knob on the radio.  She glanced down and smiled to catch me glancing up.  When “Funkytown” blared out of the speakers at full volume, my head bounced off the underside of the dash, and she laughed between the fists she held up on either side of her face. 

*

I remember that Wendy decided the most inconspicuous way for us to approach the dumpster to get a closer look at Dr. Moony’s suitcase was for me to take out the trash, a plan brilliant in its simplicity, although I don’t know how inconspicuous it was for me to be followed to the dumpster by a bouncy, giggly, strawberry blonde in a blue and gold cheerleader uniform. 

“What’s in the case?” she whispered, looking around to see if anyone was watching.

My observation from the apartment window was correct.  The suitcase was wrapped in several layers of duct tape.  “I can’t get it open without a knife.”

“Well, let’s take it upstairs then, before someone sees us.”

That made me look around, and as I cast a glance toward the dark windows of Dr. Moony’s second floor apartment, I would swear I saw a twin glint of light, like the reflection off her glasses, maybe. Before I could mention it to Wendy, she was bounding toward our apartment in that peculiar cheerleader gait that’s designed to make their ponytails and skirts swish in an appropriately jaunty manner, and I was shuffling after her with the heavy suitcase, trying to figure out if that were really Dr. Mooney’s high-pitched, squeaky laughter I heard or if it were just the chirping call of a mockingbird—or maybe the ghost of Laser Pig. 

*

As I recall, Laser Pig came to an ignoble end.  When Vic left for college, his mother had insisted that he capture the Laser Pig and take him with him, after cleaning all the accumulated guinea pig feces from behind the fridge as well.  Although pets were strictly forbidden in the dorms, we managed to keep him hidden in our room nearly our entire freshman year without arousing suspicion.  Even Wendy, who thought he looked just a little too much like a rat scurrying about the laundry-littered floor of our dorm room, seemed to find a sort of pleasure in the idea that having him there represented an act of defiance against an authority that also prohibited on her own presence in our room after ten o’ clock at night and before noon, not that the prohibition kept her away.  In fact, it seemed to make her all the more keen on staying, in spite of, or perhaps because of the elaborate cat-and-mouse games we had to play to sneak her in and out, or to the community bathroom, where she would do her business while Vic and I each watched one of the two doors.  I remember more than once feeling my pulse quicken as the sound of voices approached down the hall, Wendy laughing between the fists she held up by the sides of her face, Vic rushing out to see who was coming and, if necessary create a diversion while I hustled Wendy into hiding.  Now that I think of it, Vic was the only one of us who didn’t seem to relish the thrill of it.  Even though she was his fiancée, I don’t believe he ever reconciled himself to the fact that he had to cover it up.  Still, he covered it up, for her sake, and the more pleasure she seemed to take from it, the more his brow would furrow. 

Once, in a particularly close call, Vic was just around the corner, asking the hall director if that wasn’t pot smoke he smelled coming from some frat boy’s room down another corridor; I was rushing Wendy back to our room from the restroom. I could hear the voices coming closer, the hall director saying he’d check on the pot smoke just as soon as he looked into a report of something wrong in the restroom. In seconds, he’d round the corner and catch us.  We were within arm’s reach of our open dorm room door when Wendy tripped, giggling between her fists, each of which was wrapped around a carrot smuggled out of the cafeteria for the Laser Pig.  Without stopping to think about it, I grabbed her around the waist, picked her up and dove through the door like a secret service agent ushering a president under fire into a limo.  I rotated our bodies in mid-dive so I wouldn’t hurt her by landing on top of her, and as soon as we landed I kicked the door shut. 

“What the hell was that?” I heard the hall director say.

“I left the door to my room open. The wind must have blown it shut.”  Vic was about as skilled a natural liar as I have ever known.  Once, he had me and Wendy both convinced that he had saved the life of the local theater manager’s son by coaxing him down from the top of the marquee, from which the distraught boy was threatening to jump.  He said the theater manager had rewarded him with free admission for life for him and up to two guests at a time.  After he broke down laughing and admitted it was all a story, Wendy and I, of course, claimed we had known it all along.  For weeks after that, I had to remind myself that we really didn’t have free admission.  Some might consider such tall tales at odds with Vic’s unrelenting moral compass. 

In many ways, the absolute nature of Vic’s morality transcended conventional morals.  If he considered some rule or law to be unjust, he felt it to be his duty to break it; thus his lack of moral problems with keeping a pet or sneaking his fiancée into his room.  I happened to know, however, that he detested this sort of dishonesty—the sort that sought to avoid consequences or responsibility.

As we listened to Vic and the hall director, Wendy and I lay on the floor atop the scattered laundry, she still on top, trying not to giggle.

“Shhh” I said.  She looked down at my face and smiled.  She wriggled a little bit, like she was getting more comfortable.  I was far from comfortable.  Something in the mound of clothing was jammed uncomfortably into my back, but I said nothing.  Our faces were no more than an inch apart.  The voices in the hall were like the distant buzzings of insects.  She hovered there above me, not moving her face any closer, but not moving farther away either.  I honestly can’t say how long we stayed that way.  Time, in such cases, reveals itself to be not the mechanism Newtonian laws claim it to be, but something alive, which from time to time may hold its breath or pant with excitement.  I waited for her to move her face closer, waited as the constant distance between us took on an unnatural artificiality I could not bear.  I began a slow, almost imperceptible movement of my own head toward hers.  I hadn’t really moved any closer, just lightened the pressure the weight of my head had exerted on the clothes underneath us.  Wendy relaxed her fists and the carrots dropped to the floor.  When the Laser Pig darted out from under one of the beds to grab a carrot, Wendy let loose a shriek and pushed away.  A key was thrust into the lock, and door opened violently, just as the Laser Pig bolted for the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. 

We were written up twice, once for having a woman in our room and once for having a pet.  Since we were busted, we had to do something with the Laser Pig.  Vic tried to find someone off campus to keep him, but in the end, he simply took him to the pet department of Wal-Mart.  It was the golden age of Wal-Mart, when Sam Walton was still alive, and the manager of the pet department insisted on giving Vic a refund, even after Vic tried to tell him he hadn’t even bought him at Wal-Mart.  For a while, we would go in to visit the Laser Pig whenever we could.  All the other guinea pigs in the cage were babies of the chubby variety of guinea pig that has long fur that looks like it has been slept on wrong.  The fat little things huddled trembling together in the opposite corner of the cage from where the Laser Pig brooded.  Vic would tap on the cage or slip a smuggled lettuce leaf through the bars to try to coax the Laser Pig out of his funk.  It never worked; he always stared straight ahead, hardly twitching a nose.  Each time we visited, one more of the little pigs was gone and the once svelte Laser Pig looked just a little fatter.  After each visit Vic would be quiet for hours and then would go to see Wendy again to scream at her while she grinned between her fists. Then the Laser Pig was gone.  I later learned that the pet department donated him to the biology department of the university for some experiment into aberrant behavior in small mammals.  I never told Vic that part.  I’d like to say it was because I wanted to spare his feelings, but in some way, I think I was more afraid than anything.

I guess it boils down to the old question about free will.  We all want to believe we have it, but the farther I go, the more it seems I’m not in control of much of anything.  Or maybe there is free will, but it doesn’t do us any good.  I saw on a documentary once that the railroad industry loses engineers every year due to collisions with cars at railroad crossings.  It’s not that the engineers die in the accidents.  To a train, a busload of grade school kids is a speedbump.  Picture this: a car on the tracks up ahead; you lay on the horn, but the car doesn’t move; you apply the brake with all your strength as though your strength would help, but two miles of rolling steel keeps pushing you forward, inexorably toward the car.  Once they’ve seen it happen, heard the crunching, rending steel and breaking glass, seen the blood thicken in dust and pea gravel, they often lose their nerve; they feel panicked whenever approaching a railroad crossing.  I see free will that way.  We have enough to see what we really wish we could do, even as massive forces beyond our control push us toward some other fate, whether we like it or not.  We are frustrated engineers of our own runaway existence.

*

But I was going to tell you about Vic. It was funny about Vic.  When we were younger, he was the gentlest, most imperturbable soul I’d ever known.  He had a profound respect for Leonardo Da Vinci, not from his art or scientific discoveries, but from a story Vic once heard of Leonardo purchasing caged birds at the market simply to set them free.  That was Vic.  When I came back from New Mexico to find him and Wendy practically engaged, I noted a subtle change in him.  Seeing him again was like visiting a fondly remembered sunny beach on a rainy day.

I remember putting Dr. Moody’s suitcase on the coffee table in our living room, fetched a knife from the kitchen, knelt down beside the coffee table and went to work. Wendy was still bouncing in place as I sawed at the layers of duct tape with a dull steak knife.  I was doubly distracted, by Wendy and by visions of severing one of my digits trying to get the suitcase open.  When the lid of the case opened, Wendy stopped bouncing.  Swaddled in the center of a nest of wadded toilet paper was a human fetus, no bigger than my hand, covered in half-dried blood and amniotic fluid, tiny fists balled under its chin, knees tucked up near the purple stump of its umbilical cord.  Wendy, who was behind me and to my left, knelt beside me and took my left arm. Other than that, neither Wendy nor I moved, or even breathed I think, for I don’t know how long.  Then the front door opened and Vic strode in.

As Vic surveyed the scene, Wendy and I kneeled side by side before the open, duct tape covered suitcase on the coffee table, she grasping my left arm as I held the steak knife in my right hand; his initial reaction was to furrow his brow and squint at us, as though trying to determine whether he were actually seeing what he was seeing.

“W-we saw Dr. Moony throw this in the dumpster” Wendy began.

Dark blood crept into the capillaries in Vic’s face.  Before my return from New Mexico, I’d never seen him that way.  Since my return, I’d seen it more and more.  He slammed the front door, strode toward us, and roared. “What made you think you had any business…” Then he saw what was in the suitcase. The darkness drained visibly from his face, leaving a grayed wax effigy in its place. He looked at us, looked at the case, silently grappling with something in his mind.  He put one hand to his right temple, and wavered for a moment like he might lose his balance; then he shook it off.  One moment passed. Another. Then the fetus moved.

Wendy shrieked, digging her nails into my arm. Vic took a long breath, walked to the phone, and dialed 911.

By the time authorities arrived, the fetus was dead. By the time they took statements, obtained warrants, and entered Dr. Moody’s apartment, it was too late for her too.  Near as we could piece together from the sketchy, off-the-record details we gleaned from the authorities and the apartment manager, they found her curled on her side in her otherwise empty bath tub, her hands clenched together under her chin as though in prayer, knees tucked up close to her chest, clotting red-brown lines of drying blood tracing the path of least resistance from hemorrhages related to her “miscarriage” and from slashes in her wrists to the bath tub drain. Not a stick of furniture was found in the entire apartment, nor was there any explanation.  That was as much as anyone would tell us.  

Vic and I, and I assume all the other students in Sociology 101, got official-looking letters in the mail.  In them, the academic dean apologized profusely for any trauma Dr. Mooney’s death had caused us.  We all were to receive A’s for the course, and were dismissed.  We all took the A and ran, all of us but Vic.  He retook the course the next semester.  Got a B.  That was Vic. 

*

I read somewhere that the cicada is the loudest insect in the world. After seven years of dwelling underground, they crawl out, shed their skins, spread their wings, and sing their mating call into the darkness. I looked up at her in the soft pulse of that song from there on the edge of that hide-a-bed on the night before heading to Ft. Hood en route to Iraq, she still fingering the megaphone charm, still rocking her smooth knee.  I remembered that day on the bluff at Petit Jean, and I knew I had been right. She turned to walk back to the bedroom, hesitating, looking back over her shoulder.  I wondered if she, looking back, saw the past stretched out behind her and behind me into the distance, pushing us forward, just as I saw the future stretched out before her, before me, before Vic, to that bedroom and crossroads that lay beyond.  I hesitated too, just a moment.  It was going to be a shame about Vic, but then, if any of us were ever to get off this train, it would be him.  When I rose from the edge of the hide-a-bed to follow her, Wendy smiled.

“QT?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You got a condom?”

“I, uh, sure.  I got one in my bag somewhere, I think.”

She walked on into the dim interior of the bedroom as I rummaged down into my bag, found my shaving kit and the one condom inside it.  I’d had it forever, it seemed, more as a token of hope than anything else. As I looked at the faded package, the rise and fall of the cicada song drifted off key for a moment.  Just a moment.  I tore the packet open, roughly, half hoping I would tear a hole in the condom in the process. I examined the thin rubber for a moment.  Amazingly tough to be so thin.  I took the pocket knife I also kept in my bag, and I cut a small slit into the reservoir tip of the condom.  It would be undetectable in the dim lighting in the bedroom.  I walked on back to where she was waiting in the semi-darkness.  In the half-light I could see her, a silhouette with her balled fists held tightly against the sides of her head like a losing boxer. 

I knew better.  I mean, of course I knew better.  I always did, but then, so did she.  

*

But I was going to tell you about Vic. Two-thirty I was still awake, spooned up behind Wendy, listening to the cicadas, so I heard the car pull up outside.  I didn’t move.  I mean, I couldn’t without waking her.  She was lying on my right arm, which had long since gone numb.  I heard the front door open and close.  I didn’t move.  When the bedroom doorknob began to turn, I felt Wendy move, curl up tighter in my arms.  When the light came on, Vic stood silently, still in his desert camouflage; his initial reaction was to furrow his brow and squint at us, as though trying to determine whether he were actually seeing what he was seeing.  Dark blood crept into the capillaries in Vic’s face. Wendy brought her hands up on either side of her face like a losing boxer. I noticed that Vic hadn’t moved any closer; he was just standing there, looking at us, grappling with something in his mind.  He began to shake visibly.  Every muscle I could see, in his arms, in his neck, in his face, grew tense and bulged.  Then the white of his right eye washed over red, bright cherry red.  As the breath he’d been holding escaped, he mouthed the word “Surprise.”   The dark blood drained from his face, and as it did, it was as though he were a marionette whose strings had just been cut.  He smiled with the right side of his mouth as he sank to the floor.

Wendy sat up, peering between her fists. “Vic?” She rose and ran to him.  “Vic!”

My right arm had been numb so long I couldn’t move it.  It was cold when I touched it, and it felt as though I were touching someone else’s arm. A dead man’s arm. I got up and staggered to Wendy, my right arm dangling, limp.  When I put my working hand on her bare, freckled shoulder, she brushed it off.  She was shaking Vic like she was trying to wake him up.  Vic just smiled, like he used to do when we were kids, and for a moment, it seemed like it might be one of his pranks, like the movie theater manager’s son, but the smile sagged from his face like melting wax, and all that was Vic was gone.

I got dressed, which was not easy with one arm, walked around Wendy and Vic where she cradled him on the bedroom floor, walked around the open hide-a-bed, went out the front door, got in my car, and drove to Ft. Hood.  As I drove with my left hand, the pins and needles sensation of my right arm coming back to life burned half way to Texas.  Although that at least kept me from falling asleep at the wheel, I still have no recollection of most of that trip, other than the burning. The next day I was on a plane.

*

Three months into my tour in Iraq, I go into an Internet café tent after waiting an hour in line.  There’s an e-mail from Wendy. I wait a moment before opening it, my mouth going dry.  I don’t know why.  We‘re limited to 20 minutes on the computers, which are so slow it takes every bit that long just to read and answer a couple e-mails. Her e-mail starts out cheerful enough.  How was I? Was it hot? Was the food any good? Then she writes about Vic. Turns out Vic had an aneurysm caused by a congenital birth defect.  All his life it was there, a hidden enemy in the folds of his brain, waiting for its moment, for the pressure to get just, just right.  Yeah, it sure is a shame about Vic.  She also says she and her new fiancée are planning to get married after her baby comes in about six months.  The cursor blinks at me for what seems like just a moment or two, and then the sound of “Tupper!” ringing above the heads hunched over the rows of terminals tells me my 20 minutes is up. She wants me to know I am invited to the wedding.  I log off and strap my Kevlar back on my head. I tell myself that at least I’ll get to see her cousin Kari in that sea-foam green dress again before I realize I’ll still be in Iraq in six months. I walk through the crunch-crunch-crunch of gravel in the housing pod to my hooch as the growing gloom of a dust storm settles over the FOB. I laugh.  The satellite uplink would probably be down by now anyway due to the acres of Syrian and Iraqi dust passing overhead.  I go into my hooch, drop my Kevlar helmet and body armor on the floor, and sit down in my folding chair to open my footlocker in the dimness of the storm.

I don’t need light. I take out my Bible by feel, take out the zip lock baggie I keep pressed between the pages of the Love chapter in 1^st Corinthians, rocking and rhythmically stroking the baggie’s slick protective plastic skin, inside of which a dried, yellowed, shriveled bit of latex tells me that some part of the story is far from over.