Brock Clarke - Exley

“What are you doing here?” I asked again.

“I want you to see something,” Dr. Pahnee said.

“What?”

But Dr. Pahnee didn’t say. He lit another cigarette and then started staring at me again. Meanwhile, Harold was pleading with me through the window, and not just with his eyes, either. Come on ! I couldn’t hear him say this, but I could read his lips.

But I didn’t come on. Because I knew what there was to learn from school and from Harold. And I’d thought I knew what there was to learn from Dr. Pahnee. But Dr. Pahnee seemed different today, and who knew what he could teach me. He turned and started walking down Washington Street, and I followed.

WE WALKED PAST the VA hospital, and by the time we got to the YMCA, I could hear a band. I could hear trumpets that sounded like sad kazoos. I could hear the rat-a-tat-tatting of drums.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Music,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But what is it? Where are we going ?”

Just then I started to hear crowd noise in front of us, and from behind us, motor sounds. I looked around and saw three buses headed our way. The buses were gray, but other than that, they looked like normal school buses. Inside them were soldiers. They were unlike any bus riders I’d ever seen: not one of them waved to us, or pushed his face against the glass and then leaned back to admire the greasy face print, or puffed out his cheeks, or stuck out his tongue, or stuck up his middle finger, or yelled something you couldn’t quite hear but knew was dirty. These bus riders weren’t like that at all. They just sat there, staring straight ahead, as the buses brought them to the Public Square. When we got there ourselves, they were already filing out of the bus and onto metal risers. There was a big crowd in front of us. They weren’t sitting on risers. They were standing on the grass, in front of and in back of and around the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Some people were holding American flags, but none of them were holding signs and none of them were chanting or singing or anything. I could tell from the backs of their heads that they were either old people (I could see a bunch of bald noggins and blue hairs with the curler marks still visible) or young women. There were a couple of young kids probably still in diapers on a couple of the young women’s shoulders. In front of them there was a band, seated so that I could hear them but couldn’t see them. In front of the band was a podium with a microphone sticking out of it. On the left side of the podium was a table with an American flag tablecloth over it. The table was thin and the flag tablecloth hung way down over the edge. There were soldiers wearing dress uniforms and holding rifles between the band and the podium and table. They hadn’t moved. The band had been playing this entire time. But suddenly the trumpets stopped. The drums were given a few extra sharp raps, and then they stopped, too. A man walked across the stage and then stood behind the podium. He was wearing a minister’s collar. I looked at the table and flag tablecloth again and realized that it wasn’t a table and it wasn’t a tablecloth and there was a dead soldier under the flag and in the coffin. Then I wanted to go back to school. But Dr. Pahnee was standing behind me. He had his hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t let me move.

The minister cleared his throat. He thanked us for coming, which seemed weird. Then he said we were here to lay to rest Captain R. The minister said Captain R. had made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of our country and that he was at peace and with God now. I heard a little cry coming from way up near the coffin. It sounded like a bird crying. The minister tried not to look at where the crying was coming from. He seemed to be looking at something over our shoulders. I turned and looked. The only thing he could be looking at was a building in the shape of a triangle. There was yellow hazard tape around it, because pieces of the building had fallen off and onto the sidewalk. But they’d been falling off for a while now. It was nothing new. I turned back to the minister.

“Please be assured,” the minister said, “that your son, your husband, your father, your brother, your friend, has the thanks of the president and of the entire grateful nation.”

He looked to his right. One of the soldiers wearing dress uniforms put the rifle on his back, then bent over to pick up something. I couldn’t see what it was. I got on my tiptoes but still couldn’t see. Dr. Pahnee took his hands off my shoulders and put them under my armpits and lifted me. From up there, I could see the soldier was holding a folded American flag. He walked over to the front row and bent over again and then I couldn’t see him, even with Dr. Pahnee picking me up. Then the soldier straightened up. He didn’t have the flag anymore. He walked back to his place, and the band started playing. Then it was over. But Dr. Pahnee didn’t put me down. Not even when the crowd started to leave. I could see a kid my age way at the front. He was dressed in clothes like the clothes I wore when I got my picture taken at Sears. He was sitting in a folding chair, and I could see him looking down at the flag. I could see his mother — I guess that’s who it was — sitting down and talking to a group of people. I guess they were telling her they were sorry. She was nodding. She kept reaching with her right hand to stroke the back of the boy’s neck and he kept shaking her hand off by rotating his head and shoulders the way you do when your neck is sore. I looked away from them and toward the soldiers. Not the ones wearing dress uniforms and holding rifles, but the ones who’d come on the bus. I watched them climb down the bleachers and file back into the buses. Most of them were men. Most of them were young. A bunch of them were black, or at least darker than I was. A few of them were old. Maybe my dad’s age. None of them looked scared, or happy, or sad, or angry, or determined, or anything. They just looked like guys who knew they had to get back on the bus.

“Run, you fucking dummies,” I said, because that’s what Exley would have said, what my father would have said, too, before he decided to become one of the dummies. I glanced back and down at Dr. Pahnee to see if he heard me swearing, because I knew he didn’t like it when kids swore. But he didn’t seem to have heard; he was looking off to the right, past the health food store. I looked where Dr. Pahnee was looking, and saw Mother standing there! She wasn’t looking at us; she was looking in the direction of the stage, where the woman and the boy were sitting. But still, I didn’t want her to see me there and not in school. “Put me down,” I whispered. Dr. Pahnee did, and I sort of crouched behind him and hid. From where I was hiding, I watched him watch her, then watch where she was watching, then watch her again. This went on for some time, long after I heard the soldiers’ buses drive away. Finally, Dr. Pahnee said, “You can get up now.” I got up and saw that Mother was gone, and that the Square was mostly empty except for some guys folding and stacking the chairs. “Cha think she was doing here?” he asked me.

“‘Cha’?” I said. Because he didn’t sound like Dr. Pahnee at all. He sounded like my dad, if he sounded like anyone, who sounded like Exley if he sounded like anyone. “‘Cha’?” I said again, and then started laughing. But Dr. Pahnee didn’t seem to think it was funny. He just looked at me the way I’d seen people look at Harold: like he was really going to enjoy punching me in the face. So I stopped laughing and said, “She was probably just here for work.”

“Probably,” he said.

“Do you think she saw us?” I asked. Dr. Pahnee shook his head, reached into his pants pocket, took out a pack of Pall Malls, took a cigarette out of the pack, lit the cigarette, and smoked it. He still didn’t seem like himself, and this weirded me out, and so I asked him, “Do you think I should tell Mother we saw her here?”