Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

Linda was in my high-school geography class and my brother was two years ahead. We all drove around in her older brother’s car and argued about whether Mineral Point was the deadest place in Wisconsin or the deadest place on earth. We did our drinking at the turnoff for the abandoned quarry and her brother always said you could do human sacrifice there and nobody would find it for a year and a half. One night after I got my permit he let us have the car and we drove out there thinking about what he’d told us. “I want to show you something,” she said in this low voice once I’d turned off the headlights, then took my head with one hand and leaned me over and kissed me as if she was looking for something really carefully with her mouth and it was all the same to her if she never found it. “Like this,” she whispered a few times, showing me how to make it even better.

“I think I need to show you something else,” she whispered later, and pushed me back again and unbuckled my pants and pulled them down past my hips. She brought her head down to where my pants were. “Where’s your brother?” she asked, like she was making conversation.

“I don’t know,” I said, not even sure how I managed to say that. “What’re you doing ?” I asked her, holding her shoulders and her hair.

She laughed a little and let me go. I could feel the wetness and the cold air. “Mmm,” she said, and the warmth came all around me again.

I didn’t know what to say. “Would you marry me?” I finally called out, with my eyes closed, and she laughed again.

The next time we went back I got protection from my brother and we did everything else. The third time I pushed her up against her door and she started making noises, too.

“Why’d you ask about my brother when we were out here that other night?” I said afterwards, when we were just resting.

“When?” she wanted to know. “With my brother?”

I had my face on her shoulder and she had a foot up on the dash. “No, alone,” I told her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember.” She sighed and shifted around and pulled me with her. The car seat underneath us felt soaked.

“So how’d it go, sport?” my brother asked when I got back. “Don’t even tell me. I can see.”

“So I hear you guys are going steady,” he told me the next day after school.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked, though I was happy to hear it. “Linda wants to know all about you,” he said.

“Why doesn’t she ask me?” I said. She’d given me a wave in geography, then disappeared with her friends at the bell.

“I guess because she wants the truth,” he said.

“So what’d you tell her?” I asked.

“What do you think?” he said. “That she jumped the wrong Foss.”

“What’re you boys talking about?” our mom said, coming into the kitchen. She had a bowl of hard-boiled eggs to slice and she was going to line the bottom of her vegetable pie with them.

“Your son’s talking about his new hobby,” my brother said.

“Sounds like he’s talking about a girl,” our mom told him, shelling the eggs into a bowl.

“Where did you find time to talk to her?” I asked him.

“I like to think I don’t wait for life to come to me,” he said, hefting one of the peeled eggs and dropping it back into the bowl.

“Which one did you just touch?” our mom demanded.

“All of them,” he said. He used both hands to smooth back his hair.

“She’s my girl,” I reminded him. “I’m the one who just told you that,” he said.

“So you are talking about a girl,” our mom said. “What’s her name?”

The cat wandered into the room and nosed at his dish. He sat down and we watched his tail do a few slow curls.

“I guess it’s none of my business,” she finally said to herself after looking back and forth at the two of us.

“Your mom’s funny,” Linda told me the next time we were alone.

“How do you know that ?” I asked her. I put her brother’s keys up under the sun visor so they wouldn’t jingle when we moved around the steering wheel. I had a little pillow she’d brought for the armrest on the door, and the car was making ticking noises in the quiet.

“I have my sources,” she said, smoothing her cheek along mine.

“How often do you see my brother?” I asked.

“Every single minute of every single day,” she murmured. Then she asked if I could do something for her, and explained what it was. While she waited for me to register what she was talking about, she pointed out that one part of me really wanted to, anyway.

It rained for a full day and everything that could come crawling up out of a hole did: mosquitoes, sand flies, black flies, and leeches. Leo went to clean out his mess kit and found a spider in the bowl clenched like a fist. Nothing got put on without first having been shaken and reshaken. Most mornings something fell out and we all did the stamping dance before it got away.

We took to using smoke pots and head nets for the mosquitoes. But then we couldn’t eat. On one side of the trail the ants were so small that the only kind of netting that could keep them out would have also kept out the air. Ticks clustered in the pinch points in our clothes. In one slit trench, what we thought was smoke one morning turned out to be a cloud of fleas. Little pelletlike bugs even got into the C-rations. Cockroaches ate the glue in the field manuals. Termites collapsed the CO’s field table and cot. We were told to splash or make noise when crossing the creek, because the aborigines said it was happy with crocodiles. By that, we were told, they meant lousy with them.

“So noise scares crocodiles?” Leo wanted to know while they were telling us this.

“No, not really,” the guy giving the briefing confessed.

Some guys were so bored and hot that they sat in the water anyway. “I’m hoping one comes by,” Doubek, our radioman, said when we teased him about it. “Crocodile takes a piece of this ass, I got my ticket home.”

Everywhere you went, if you asked somebody how it was going, he said, “Sweatin’ it out, boy. Sweatin’ it out.” After a while that changed to, “Well, it won’t be long now!” Some of the officers thought the guys who said that were serious.

We had reason to be a little shaky in terms of morale when it came to the big picture. All during basic and the long boat ride over, there’d been nothing but bad news from this part of the world: we were told at least we had Rabaul and its naval base, though none of us knew where Rabaul was, and by the time we found out it had surrendered. They showed us a newsreel called Singapore the Impregnable the week before the Japs took it. Darwin was bombed. Jap submarines shelled Newcastle. “Isn’t that in England ?” Leo asked.

“The other Newcastle,” a swabbie told him. We were on deck mid-ocean, lounging near the garbage dump on the stern. “Well, tell the Aussies help is on the way,” Leo said, picking through a crate of wrinkled oranges from the officers’ mess.

Apparently things had looked so bleak that the Aussies figured they’d just give up the northern half of their country, planning to draw their defensive line just above their southern cities. MacArthur supposedly talked them out of it.

Part of his argument, we were told, was that the Japs didn’t even have total control of New Guinea. Though it was only the terrain that left Moresby in our hands. No one could get over the mountains and through the jungle in any kind of fighting shape. All we had holding that side of the island was a Wirraway, two Catalina flying boats, and a Hudson minus its wing. When we came ashore some guys were working on the wing. They had one anti-aircraft gun. In the event of a Jap attack, they said, their orders were to hold out for at least thirty-six hours. When we exclaimed at that, they looked insulted and snapped that Rabaul had only held out for four. The news wasn’t all bad, though: it turned out that if they depressed their anti-aircraft gun to its minimum elevation, they could also use it against landing craft.