Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

“That's okay,” replied Hollis — rising on his elbows, looking somewhat apprehensive — and noticed, then, that McCreedy was holding his notepad, the pages parted to the drawing of Hollis on the moon.

“You'd be the man on the moon, right? It's Hollis, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Bill.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“Guess I shouldn't be snooping, ‘cept your book was on the floor so I couldn't help myself. Hope you don't mind none.”

“It's fine,” Hollis lied, resenting what felt like a calculated invasion of his privacy.

A short silence followed as McCreedy glanced again through the pages, smiling to himself.

“You some kind of artist?”

“No, not at all. It's only something I do to pass the hours.”

“I hear that.” McCreedy flipped the notepad shut, casually tossing it on the cot once Hollis had sat upright and swung his feet to the floor. “Say, you don't got a spare smoke I could bum?”

“I don't, sorry.”

“No problem. Never hurts to ask a buddy, right?”

“Sure.”

Instead of that being the end of it, McCreedy lowered himself to the cot, taking a seat beside Hollis, saying, “What's your story, then?”

The question caught Hollis off guard, perplexing him. He hesitated, staring ahead, thinking: My story? But it seemed there wasn't much to relate. He had been raised in a small midwestern town, an awkward and solitary boy. He liked hunting and fishing by himself. He had always been bookish, had few friends, and spent most of his free time under his widowed mother's complacent but watchful eye, keeping Eden company during the tough years which followed his father's malingering death from TB. After high school he had worked several part-time jobs to help make ends meet — a short-order cook, a salesman for a Ford dealership, a gas station attendant, a cashier at the local five-and-ten — each business located on one of the four corners where the two main streets in Critchfield intersected. Five months prior to his enlistment, Eden unexpectedly remarried, bringing Rich into their home — a wine-bloated, needlessly quarrelsome little man Hollis immediately resented — a retired banker who, in turn, had found his bride's sullen, uncommunicative son rather impossible to like. With Rich's arrival, the house took on an oppressive quality, becoming an environment which, for Hollis, could no longer accommodate anything except the man's selfish, bullying whims — just the meals his stepfather enjoyed eating, the opera or classical music on the radio and nothing else, the disruptive childish tantrums which passed without apology and were only allowed with impunity for Rich; and, sometimes, when Eden wasn't present, the man delighted in taunting Hollis — throwing a cloth napkin at his face, flicking his earlobes with a finger after he had drunk too much — stating that he wasn't really very bright, that he was a full-grown brat who needed to grow up. Hollis always reacted to such unkindness with passive outrage, responding in his own discreet manner — often spitting in his stepfather's food before the man came to the dinner table, or running the bristles of Rich's toothbrush around the inside rim of the toilet bowl. As the acrimony increased — fueled by Hollis's jealousy toward this relative stranger now sharing Eden's bed, and Rich's assertion that his adult stepson was too old to live at home — Hollis, taking what little money he had saved, packed a suitcase and, on the cusp of his twentieth birthday, ran away from home one morning, Eden crying silently on the front porch as her son walked resolutely out of view.

“Don't really have a story,” Hollis said.

“This fella says he ain't got a story,” said McCreedy, as if talking to someone else. “Now that's a first. A man without no story to tell. You might just be my favorite person on this damn boat, Hollis.”

And from that point on, McCreedy made it a habit to stop by Hollis's cot while doing his usual rounds, sitting down for a while and asking questions which Hollis felt uncomfortable answering.

“Hey, Hollis, tell me what your girl's like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your girl, what's she like? You got her picture?”

“I don't have a girl.”

McCreedy squinted, cocking an eyebrow. He shook his head, saying, “Ain't buying that for a second. What, you worried ol’ Creed will try and steal her away from you?”

“I'm being honest. There isn't any girl.”

“Not even a little Shin-ju-koo honey going?”

“No.”

“Well, what the hell's wrong with you? Horndog after it, boy. Life's far too short. Here, have a peek at this.” McCreedy dug into a pocket, retrieving a slightly bent black-and-white photograph which he placed in Hollis's left hand. “That's my girl,” he said, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.”

Hollis lifted the photograph, inspecting it closely. What he saw brought a smirk to his face: the foreground was out of focus, showing the indistinct image of a dark-haired girl, her arms hanging at her sides, her cloudy features difficult to perceive; in contrast, the background — a wide field of high wild grass — was plainly visible.

“Don't get me wrong,” McCreedy continued, his voice reanimating. “I mean, I've also got a gaggle of kobitos in Tokyo — but that one there, she's the real deal, my true gal pal. The rest don't really mean much when it really boils down to it. You know, I go to them others so I'll maintain my sanity while I'm away, if you follow. That one, though, nothing compares to her, God's honest truth.”

“I bet she's pretty.”

“Hell, yeah, she's pretty,” said McCreedy, extracting the photograph from Hollis's fingers. “That's the mother of my children, someday.”

The more Hollis got to know him — the more he learned about him, the more they talked to each other — the less bothersome the private from Claude, Texas, seemed. He had, in the course of the trip, chatted with several privates on the ship, except none were as friendly to him as McCreedy.

“Normally, I'd keep that picture to myself,” McCreedy told him, “but I get this feeling you're different. It's not that I ain't proud or nothing, just don't want these goons getting all worked up over what's mine, if you know what I mean. Some things just got to be treated with respect, if you follow, and I'm sure you do. Can't say the same for the rest of this bunch. But that's why I like you, Hollis. You got respect for the decent things, right? I could see it the moment I seen you. You and me, we're a lot alike that way. It's like we got the same birthmark or something, you follow? Anyway, we've got class, and that's what matters, wouldn't you agree?”

“Sure,” Hollis said, nodding.

“We're too smart for this outfit, ain't that right?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“It's an undeniable fact.”

Soon enough, Hollis would better discern the duality of McCreedy's personality, the two extreme and incongruous sides which were bridged by an irrepressible smile. And he would experience firsthand McCreedy's warmheartedness, as well as the sociable private's unexpected tendencies toward cruelty and violence. Only after leaving Korea, however, would he consider McCreedy as both an unwitting benefactor of the fortuitous outcome of his civilian life and the enigmatic symbol of his greatest shame. Then, at last, Hollis would also begin to comprehend his own paradoxical traits, his instinctive ability to appear as one kind of person and, just as easily, to behave as another. But four decades would pass before this realization fully took root, blossoming during the dawn of his retirement and springing forth on a sunny day while he cultivated his cactus garden; and months prior to that curious snowfall, he had stood alone in the backyard, gazing at what thrived under his constant attention, surprising himself there with a single word propelled from his mouth without forethought, evoking a name he hadn't uttered aloud for years and whispering it as if revealing a secret to the prickly pears.