Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

“I've spent the better part of my life watering flowers,” she explained one evening, having begged out of surveying the empty patch yet again. “It's a lot of work, you know. And now that you've got plenty of time on your hands, I believe you should assume that duty for a spell. You'll see, it'll do you good getting plenty of sunshine, getting your hands a little muddied. Anyway, I think you're more suited for desert botany than I am, wouldn't you agree?”

He gave her a sort of agitated look, at once amused and perplexed. “Really? How do you figure?”

“Well, you're certainly pricklier than me, and nowadays your belly strikes me as fairly succulent.”

“Oh,” he said, wrinkling his brow and glancing down at his broad, inflamed stomach. “I guess so.”

Then, for him, developing the garden became a singular preoccupation, if not a somewhat protracted affair; its progress was labored over in the cooler morning hours, its design revised from day to day: no gravel, no flowers, nothing which required an inordinate amount of watering, but rather something indigenous, something which might thrive by itself should he eventually fall ill or become too enfeebled to maintain its care. At the kitchen window, Debra would spy him out there, crouched on his haunches, finally cracking the dirt with a spade and digging narrow, shallow holes for the eight tiny barrel cacti he had bought at Super Wal-Mart. His gloved hands — which she knew were thick, rough, and calloused from his lumber-industry years — would reach for a single two-inch-wide barrel, carefully extracting it from its temporary planter, balancing it gingerly on his palm and sliding it upright into a hole.

Those initial plantings rooted successfully, although the landscaping was approached methodically and even now continues as an ongoing project. Hollis marked off sections of the patch, intending each section to display a different variety of cactus, but ultimately the concept was abandoned in favor of naturalistic, scattershot groupings. Then one day — it must have been right after planting the first barrels — his spade unearthed something other than centipedes or grubs or fire ants. The ground was stabbed. The spade pushed deep, striking what felt like a pebble. He made several jabs with the spade, tossing dirt aside, and scooped out a hard olive-green clump covered in soil, which he sifted into his fingers.

“Take a gander at this,” he said, and Debra — sunbathing on a deck chair, her face shadowed beneath a visor cap — opened her eyes, leaning forward as he briefly held his discovery high.

“What is it?”

“It's an army, man,” he said, lowering his hand, contemplating his find for a moment: a small plastic toy soldier, a rifleman with his weapon aimed.

“Good lord,” she said, sounding bothered.

Digging nearby he exhumed a second soldier, then a third and a fourth soldier — until, at last, six plastic figures were scattered about him, filthy and strewn around several holes, like men thrown to the ground by mortar blasts. He said, somberly, “Just look at you — you didn't see it coming at all — you weren't expecting this,” as if he were repeating it to himself. But the soldiers weren't the only toys he had discovered there. Previously he had found several opaque-orange and black-swirled marbles, a purple Hot Wheels cement-mixer truck, as well as a tiny blue sock made for a toddler.

“It isn't right,” he heard Debra say. “Those kind of things shouldn't be in our yard, not way out here.”

Turning his head, he caught sight of her face as she climbed from the deck chair to go inside; it was very serious and very pale, as if she had seen something awful. He then understood her consternation: prior to their house being built, he realized, there must've been another house on the property. Prior to Nine Springs, he thought, another community must've existed there, and someone else had once wandered and slept and played and dreamed on the same plot of land where they now reside. Thereafter, his fingers behaved like God, organizing the soldiers into a crooked formation, righting them on such broken, dusty earth: a firing rifleman, a grenadier, a rifleman using the butt of his weapon to strike at the air, a running rifleman with an M1 carbine, an advancing rifleman with a bayonet on his weapon, a G.I. charging forward with a tommy gun — none of them larger than three inches, each poised yet somehow fighting an unseen battle. As cicadas rattled in mesquite trees, he evoked the soldiers’ names without speaking aloud — Buddy, Jimmy — an index finger swooping down on the toys like a precision-guided missile — George, Mikey, Mark — flicking the plastic helmets — Schubert — knocking the men to the dirt. Standing upright, he gazed at the bodies far below him, as if observing a distant, foreign landscape from a bird's-eye view. You're the boys that didn't make it, he thought. You're the ones that fell in my presence.

“Sorry about that, Schubert,” he said, bending to pick up the soldiers, recalling the Chinese American kid who had idolized McCreedy, laughing at the Texan's jokes when no one else would. “That's rich,” Schubert would say, nervously looking at his feet, grinning uncomfortably as if he assumed everyone else was staring at him. “That's a hoot, that's pretty funny.” Schubert's eyes often shifted to McCreedy while they were on patrol — fixing on the sunburned neckline, that rugged profile — instead of staring ahead or monitoring the hillsides. While there was little age difference, McCreedy seemed older than Schubert, much older; and, as such, he treated the kid like a younger brother, giving him obvious advice (“Remember, keep your head low, otherwise you'll make for an easy target”), admonishing him now and then (“Godamnit, Schubert, don't you piss out in the open like that, you'll get your pecker blasted!”).

Ultimately, though, there was nothing McCreedy could have said or done to keep Schubert Tang alive — not when enemy mortar and machine-gun fire erupted indiscriminately, not after a bullet tore through the kid's skull, and blew away a portion of his nose, and removed most of his right jaw, and threw his teeth and strips of flesh into the air like confetti. As others scrambled for safety, it was McCreedy who rushed to Schubert, promptly rolling the splayed body this way and that — his boots stepping in the kid's waste, creating bloody tracks on an exposed hillside trail — taking a dog tag, retrieving a billfold, wristwatch, and a pack of cigarettes from the corpse; all of it, except the cigarettes, would be given to the division's graves registration unit. Upon leaving the body behind, dropping beside Hollis as machine-gun rounds zipped above them, McCreedy said, “Tough fucking luck,” with hardly a quiver of regret.

But Schubert wasn't the first casualty McCreedy had readied for the medics or the graves registration unit, nor was he the last. Buddy Campbell got hit in the chest, an inch or so from his navel. Fleeing down a hill, George Martinez had both arms blown off by a mortar blast. Jimmy Shurlock was shot in the left eye, and to everyone's amazement burst into laughter shortly before dying. It was a tree which killed Mikey O'Brien, a tree struck by a mortar — the wood splintering apart, jettisoning like bullets, and gouging open O'Brien's stomach. But Mark Neiman took the cake: one second he was sharing a joke about a legless pig, and a second later he was completely legless, writhing on his back, reaching a trembling hand toward the two bubbling, red stumps where his knees, shins, and feet had just been.

In hindsight, it only seemed right that those deaths would have an impact on McCreedy, continually tempering his affable manner and drawing his personality further inward, allowing the more sullen, acerbic parts of his nature to emerge (qualities Hollis had sensed lurking below McCreedy's exterior from the start). Then it was to be a tougher McCreedy marching forward, a colder character with his weapon ready, taking the lead without needing to assert himself, remaining unfazed whenever they happened upon the horrific: bloated, discolored corpses stacked alongside a narrow trail; a dead infant with flies swarming about its face; a woman's head flattened like a crushed grapefruit in the middle of an unpaved road, her long dark hair spread out in the dirt as if it had been combed that way.