T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

He passed Mabel again, who had wheeled up the makeshift ramp built off the back porch and rolled by with a tray of sodas and water on her lap. Unaware of being watched, there was not even a hint of a smile on her face. He passed Margaret seated at the desk in the family room, writing in a large book, taking notes as a weeping woman seated across from her spoke. Margaret barely waved, as if she didn’t recognize him. She looked tired, her hair rough at the roots, a few streaks of gray showing at her temple. Was that gray hair or dust? He couldn’t tell. Only Mrs. D managed a smile for Achilles, but not a nice one, saying, it seemed, Your face. Darling, haven’t you grown beyond this rugged look?

When he caught up with her in the kitchen and asked if they could talk, Ines drew aside the blinds. Only a few feet from the window people stood waiting in line for the phone bank.

“Sure, Achilles. What do you want to talk about? What’s on your mind?”

The two little girls screamed by, waving their doll parts overhead. The queue billowed and in their wake resettled into a looser, lighter, chattier arrangement.

“Can I help?”

She asked him to carry a few boxes, wheel an old lady home, move a few more boxes, and each time he finished, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Conroy.”

As the sun set, people bunked where they could, in the yard, in the garage, in the basement. Achilles followed Ines up the stairs to the maid’s quarters in which she now slept, having given her bedroom to a young family with children. She stopped him at the landing, a purgatory in view of both the room above and the hall below.

“Where can I sleep, then?”

“At the condo. Isn’t that where all your stuff is?” said Ines.

“You can’t stay here alone with all these people.”

“I don’t need your protection from these people. I don’t need a soldier.”

“You can’t be—”

“Achilles,” Ines said, cutting him off, “I don’t need a soldier. I need a man. You can’t always be in soldier mode.” She handed him a business card. “If you want to soldier, see these people, they came by looking for local guides.”

“Can we talk? Please?” he whispered.

A stranger at the base of the stairs called up to them, “Is everything all right, Ms. Ines?”

He looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, tall and thin with a beer belly. He had the light skin and green eyes common among so many local men, or Creoles as they called themselves. His hair was slicked back, his shirt tucked in, and pants rolled up neatly and evenly on each leg. He probably thought himself a lady’s man. “Mind your own business, asshole,” said Achilles. “Or do you want to come up here and find out for yourself?” Achilles held his arms out in invitation, itching to beat him black, and then blue.

“Achilles!”

“Okay, is everything all right, Ms. Ines? ” said Achilles.

“Yes. Thank you, Raymond,” she called down, and stormed upstairs, Achilles behind her keeping cadence.

When they were in the maid’s quarters, he shut the door behind him. “Raymond? Raymond?”

“Who’s Kevin Wexler?” she asked.

“That’s different,” said Achilles.

“Very. Very different. He probably doesn’t sneak out after you fall asleep and come back to treat you like a dog.”

If that was what this was about, he had it handled. Like Wages said, a woman would always forgive you if she loved you. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“That’s different, then,” said Ines. “That changes everything. Do you want to fuck me in the ass again now, or should I close my eyes first?”

“Let me explain,” said Achilles. As he tried to think of something to say, the sound of the girls playing drifted through the window only to be drowned out by a helicopter, that wobbling noise soon giving way to the vibrato of a small plane.

“I’ll help you.” One by one, finger by finger, she enumerated his sins, starting with the first and greatest: There was no obituary for Kevin Wexler, no information on Kevin Wexler at any morgues, or viewing or services for Kevin Wexler at any funeral homes anywhere in Atlanta. Then there was the matter of his despondency, remove, and callous behavior in Atlanta. You hit a man for no reason. Then there was sneaking out in the middle of the night and using Sammy as cover. Sammy wouldn’t admit anything, but she knew he was lying. Achilles smiled to himself at the revelation that Sammy could be trusted. He’d do something special for the kid the next time he saw him, if there was a next time. She demanded to know about the scratches on his arms. He said he was mugged. She demanded to know why he slipped out in the middle of the night. He said he went to see off a friend who was in town for Wexler’s funeral. She demanded to know why couldn’t she go too, if that was the case.

For that he had no answer.

“Don’t you get it? My mother didn’t evacuate. Achilles, I went to Atlanta to be with you, to support you. Don’t think I didn’t trust you. I didn’t want to check up on you, but you were acting strange, and you sounded funny, so I was looking for ways to help you bear the loss of your friend. But I should have been clued in by that phone call you got. Your grieving voice sounds exactly like your lying voice.”

My grieving voice sounds like my lying voice. This felt true to him, revelatory even, like an apt description of his life from the outside looking in, but not an insult. It certainly wasn’t a reason for complaint.

But it was the crux, the center of Ines’s frustration. In the end, they’d had rough sex, but she hadn’t used the safe word. There’d been no obituary, but she didn’t doubt that someone had died (no one would lie about that). She even admitted, reluctantly, that Sammy, though a bad liar, was never prouder than when covering for Achilles.

“He grins, screws his mouth to the side, looks down, rocks back and forth, and babbles about the May weather. Sometimes I ask him what you did just to amuse myself. But this,” she points to him, her hands grazing his wounds, the sticky fingers skipping across his skin. “This, Achilles, is too much. Can’t you see that? It’s like a regression. You’ve got that hulking, brooding war thing going on again and I don’t know why. I don’t know when you’re joking anymore, or who you are since that trip to Atlanta. I feel like we’ve just met for the first time and you’re not the person I’ve known.”

But he is that person, isn’t he? The medivan volunteer-blood-donor-progessive-liberal-bleeding-heart soldier. The person who cares about social justice and fairness and equity. It’s her list, but he insists that he is that person, the person she thinks he is, and then it hits him full on, like being barely missed, just barely, and knowing it, the way it wakes you in the middle of the night for confirmation, it hits him, that he is really that person to her, that Ines was never slumming. Just like he thought she was someone else, she was only dating the person she thought he was, the person he had to be.

“That is me!” He is that person he insisted, reciting her list and banging the wall to punctuate each word. This is the first time he has raised his voice at her. Ines has backed across the room, eyes wide, eying him suspiciously, an unrecognizable look on her face, one he has never seen before but if pressed would describe as a mixture of fear and disgust. Was this the same way Bethany looked that minute before Wages grabbed her? He felt like those kids who charged headlong up the water tower and once up there freaked and froze, terrified of that one misstep on the way down.

To Achilles, she said, “I’m sorry. There are many soldier modes.” She pointed to the dent he made when he punched the wall. “This just isn’t the one I need now. Maybe you should call those people who need guides.” He leaned in to kiss her, but she turned away.