T. Johnson: Hold It 'Til It Hurts

The sun had set and a strong southern wind hummed through the trees. The sky was shot through with stars and the moon was so bright that when it passed between the clouds, the windows twinkled and the fresh white paint sparkled. They had helped their father repaint the house when they were home on leave only a few months before. Troy had worked on the walls, painting in hurried, broad strokes. Achilles, as always, was assigned to the trim because, his father said, only he had patience for it. It was short work. They only had to cover four walls holding together five rooms: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. The front door was in the center of the house and opened into the living room. To the left of the living room was the kitchen and then a short hallway leading to the bedroom the brothers shared as well as the only bathroom. To the right of the living room was their parents’ bedroom. The one-story ranch looked larger than Achilles remembered it. They stood for a moment, taking it in. The living room was dim. Troy pointed to their parent’s bedroom, which was well lit. “That must be where they’re hiding.”

“They sure aren’t hidden too well,” said Achilles.

“Probably don’t want us to be too surprised.”

“Right,” said Achilles. He smelled food and hoped his aunt Rose had made baked spaghetti with hot dogs. He scanned the cars again. As far as he could tell, Janice’s wasn’t there.

Before going in they slammed the trunk and doors, kicked dirt and gravel, stomped on the porch. Just before he opened the door, Troy said, “Remember, act surprised.”

Achilles nodded, standing tall. They wore desert BDUs and all their medals — peacocked, they called it — Infantry badges, Airborne wings, the whole bit. Achilles felt a sense of relief, like he had come up for air. Troy was bringing home a Bronze Star for saving Wexler’s snatch, but Achilles was bringing home Troy.

Aunt Betsy, their father’s only sibling, and her husband sat on the love seat, their two sons on the couch. Red, white, and blue streamers were strung from corner to corner. ACHILLES and TROY were spelled out in winking, glittering, purple-and-gold letters. The ceiling was literally covered with balloons, each one individually taped up, and a large American flag covered one wall.

“Wow,” said Troy, throwing his hands in the air. “This is nice.”

“Yeah,” said Achilles, putting on his biggest smile. “We didn’t expect this.”

Aunt Betsy’s face moved from concern to alarm as they peered around the room. “You don’t know, do you? Oh God! You don’t know.”

They didn’t know. Discharge papers in hand, the brothers had made several last-minutes adjustments to their final itinerary: spending a morning in Heidelberg; stopping off to see Merriweather, who was en route to Walter Reed; flying through Okinawa to see a friend from jump school. They didn’t know their erratic agenda kept them one day ahead of the news that had shadowed them since Kabul. They didn’t know — they couldn’t — that two hours after they flew out of Bagram AFB, word reached the XO, who sent it on to the chaplain; or that the evening after they flew out of Turkmenistan, a messenger arrived in the barracks where they had billeted the previous night and scared the holy-living-Motor-City-shit, yes, all one word, out of poor Lance Corporal Jason Conrad, who didn’t believe it was a mistake and couldn’t be consoled until he had called his mom in Brewster-Douglass; or that the next morning, while they were dressing for the funeral, a green sedan with government plates would park in the driveway and two E5s in class As would regretfully inform them that their father had died in an unforeseeable accident.

Aunt Betsy was correct: they knew nothing. Balloons and streamers, flags and flowers — at that moment all they knew was that the house was decorated for a party, but everyone was dressed for a wake. Aunt Betsy shepherded them across the living room to their parents’ room, the three long steps feeling like three thousand with her all the way muttering, “Oh dear.” Between the overhead lights and the lamps from which the shades had been removed, their parents’ room, usually dim, was as bright as a crime scene. Their mother knelt in the middle of the floor, surrounded by boxes and piles of papers and old photographs, the stack closest to her topped by two large blue envelopes. Her eyes dull as stones, before she even spoke, Achilles knew their luck had run aground and silently cursed Troy for squandering it.

Their mother stood and wiped her hands on her pant legs as if shedding dust that only she could see. One deep breath in. And out. Another. “Your father was involved in a head-on collision. With a rig. He was giving a coworker a ride home. Laura Goman.” She said the name as if they would recognize it. “They died instantly.”

Their friends from the squad maintained a series of complex and contradictory unspoken agreements: today is better than tomorrow, so do it tomorrow; honor the past but don’t live in it, and listen without interruption whenever it’s mentioned, but don’t encourage it as a topic of conversation; and firstly, never ask permission or apologize; then, most importantly — Be there. So Achilles didn’t feel guilty about showing up at his friend’s door at four a.m. Surely Wages expected this after they talked.

Wages lived in New Orleans’s Mid-City neighborhood, at the corner of Carrollton and Banks, in a sagging rust-colored duplex across the street from a Catholic school surrounded by enough barbed-wire fencing to pass for a jail. “Look for the house with the scowl,” he’d instructed, and indeed the black metal awnings tilted toward each other like the furrowed eyebrows of someone who didn’t want to be disturbed.

The house had two front doors but one long front porch with a single set of stairs in the middle. On the neighbor’s side of the porch: a clear plastic bag stuffed with balled-up diapers, a broken skateboard, a food can filled with cigarette butts. The wood around the windows was pitted and chipped, the paint on the siding peeling badly, which, given the color — shades of red, burgundy, and garnet, the colors of corrosion — created the impression that the entire house was a ship abandoned at sea, and now surrendering to the waters. When he’d helped his father repaint their house — or was it now his mother’s? — his father had even hired someone to repoint the chimney. Compared to Wages’s home, their house sparkled like a palace. Achilles felt awkward about seeing his friend’s house in this condition.

The screen door was pitted with rusted metal and had pebbled glass slats that pivoted like Venetian blinds. Achilles rapped gently on the door frame, pressing his palm against the nearby slats so they wouldn’t rattle. He heard music coming from within the house, but it could have been the neighbors. He didn’t want to wake anyone unnecessarily. He knew Wages’s wife Bethany, a nurse, worked odd hours. Wages, on the other hand, like most of them, barely slept.

Achilles had liked Wages from the moment they met. Wages was a skinny six feet, but unnaturally strong. He was the guy who never complained or wilted under the hundred-pound pack, the guy who never dropped it, but slid out of the straps and set it in the sand as smoothly as slipping off a sweater. Carrying that pack was like carrying a man on your back all fucking day, and Achilles soon discovered he wasn’t up to the task. He could do it but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like how the tight straps felt like walking around in a full nelson. He didn’t like how the deep ruts it wore into his shoulders always itched or how his feet calcified as his arches fell under the extra weight, so that even now they hurt all the time, especially when it rained and his legs stiffened like pencils glued to rocks and he walked like he was wading through water. Most importantly, he hadn’t liked becoming so used to an unnatural burden that he felt naked without it. Not Wages. He did push-ups with that pack on and one-armed pull-ups without it, even though he was thin as the wind.