Roland Merullo - A Little Love Story

The food was oily and real and served on big oval plates-eggs and link sausages and potatoes. Janet liked raspberry jam on buttered wheat toast, almost burned. We drank coffee and grapefruit juice and ice water and afterwards shared one piece of warm apple pie because the pie was sitting in a glass case just in our line of vision. By then I did not want to find the place I had driven all that way to see.

When Janet went to the bathroom I started talking to the man on the stool to my left. He was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers cap, and the skin of his cheeks was pitted, and he was eating pancakes, and he told me his name was Peter. There was something wounded and friendly about him. We got onto the subject of children, and he told me he had three of them, two almost-grown boys and a girl. They had lived with their mother for a long time now, but everyone still got along pretty well. I asked him what he liked best about having children, and he thought for a few seconds and said, “It’s the closest you can come to being the other person.” And then, after another couple of seconds, “A lot of times, if you try, you can be who you really should be with them, who you want to be.”

I thought about that. I said I thought there was always a distance between who you are and who you want to be. And then, because it was hurting me to think about those things just then, I tried to make a joke. I said, “I have an appointment with disappointment every day.” It was foolish. I was nervous. I waited for the stupid words to drift away. I asked him how to get to the place we were headed for and he gave very careful directions. When I asked him what it looked like he said, “I’ve never gone out there. I’ve seen enough of things like that. I never wanted to go.”

“Where did you see things like that?”

“I flew fixed-wing propeller planes off carriers, in Vietnam.”

I asked if I could buy him breakfast. It wasn’t because of the Vietnam part, but just because I liked him. He said, “Why?”

“I’m just in a mood to.”

“Alright,” he said, after he’d considered the offer a moment. When I got up to go to the bathroom he took hold of the sleeve of my shirt and held me there. “I don’t talk about this with a lot of people, but if you get Life magazine and look at the issue for April 1970, you’ll see my picture.”

He was perfectly sane and normal, but I had the feeling that if the waitress had been just slightly rude to him one day, by accident even, he might never come back there. April 1970 had made a mark on his life that could not be erased. He seemed to me to be filled to the eyes with all the awful things he had seen, all the friends he had lost, to be swimming along on a sea of suffering that was invisible to everyone else. I liked him.

The bathroom was very small and clean, but the tiles were broken here and there, and powdered soap poured out of the dispenser if you barely touched it. I turned on the water too hard and it splashed right out of the sink and all over the front of my pants. Coming out of the little room, I took a right instead of a left and walked into the kitchen.

When I made it back to the counter at last, Peter thanked me for the breakfast, and when Janet came back he thanked her, too. He reminded me about the Life magazine, and I said I’d be sure to check it out, but I have never done that.

“This town has some odd energy,” Janet said, on the sunny sidewalk. She had been in the bathroom a long time and I worried she was getting sick again already.

“This is the town where the miners were rescued. Over the summer.”

“I saw the ‘God Bless Our Heroes’ sign. I was wondering. That’s not where we’re going, though, is it?”

“Not those heroes, no.”

“Your voice is different today, Jake.”

We drove out of town on a two-lane country highway, past an airport and a two-truck volunteer fire station and a man in a checkered shirt with his hands in his pants pockets, staring at a ten-foot-tall pile of gravel. The land there was woods and farmland, hilly but hard-edged, and you could see the marks of the severe winters on the roof shingles and clapboards. At one point we passed a sign that said:

WELCOME TO SHANKSVILLE

HOME OF THE VIKINGS

A FRIENDLY LITTLE TOWN

ESTABLISHED 1803

Shortly after that we passed a wire fence where someone had tacked up a piece of one-by-ten with FLIGHT 93 MEMORIAL and an arrow painted on it. But I did not think Janet noticed.

Following my friend Peter’s directions, I turned off the highway and we wound along a smaller road lined with fluttering flags. There were streaks of sweat on the steering wheel. We made a right turn onto a steep gravel road called Skyline Drive. Next to that road, outside a house decorated everywhere with stars and stripes, some enterprising folks had set up a gift shop where you could buy souvenirs. We rolled on, over the crest of the hill, and I pulled the truck into a lot where a few other cars had parked and where people had covered the aluminum guardrail with a kind of worshipful graffiti. The land in front of us was desolate land, slanting down and away in stony, weedy slopes with a lot of Queen Anne’s lace growing there, and with sharp-winged brown birds darting back and forth and making shrill cries. I remembered that the site was in fact a filled-in strip mine, but it looked to me like an abandoned cattle ranch where the soil had been too stony and poor to grow meat. Far off to our left, on another hill, sat a rusty strip-mining crane, impossibly big, and there were fences, a farmhouse, the birds squealing, but your eye was drawn straight down the slope to a new chain-link fence that enclosed a more or less rectangular area, several hundred yards long, with a treeline behind. There was an American flag tied to the fence. Janet was looking in that direction.

“You can still see where the trees were burned,” I told her, but it came out in an even newer version of the new voice so that she started looking at me instead of the woods behind the fenced-in area. I tried again. I said, “Let’s go up on this little hill.” But I should have just kept quiet.

You could not get anywhere close to the actual fenced-in site with the burned trees behind it, but on a little rise near the parking lot there was a piece of chain-link, maybe ten feet by twenty feet, that had been erected as a sort of public billboard. Hundreds of people had left things on that scrap of metal, an odd assortment of things: baseball and football caps, rosary beads and medals of saints, Stars of David, crucifixes, a couple of Buddhas, real and plastic flowers, stuffed animals, children’s toys, a T-shirt from a Las Vegas plumbers’ union, flags and flags and flags and not just American, drawings, notes encased in plastic wrap so the rain wouldn’t spoil them-“Let’s Roll” and “God Bless You All” and “For the children who lost a parent, friend, or loved one.” Dollar bills.

I hadn’t wanted to ever come here because I had wanted my own grief and confusion to be private. I did not want anyone making assumptions about what I felt for Giselle, or what she had felt for me. I did not want the newspapers and television to touch even the smallest part of that, not because I believed it was more important or more special or even different from what other men and women and children had felt on that day and afterwards, but because I did not want my feelings cheapened, and the entertainment machine was all about cheapening feelings, about making complicated things simple. That was the whole purpose of it, after making money: to dull the edge of things. Scenes of blown-up discothèques in Haifa one second, and racy commercials for lite beer the next. How could we tolerate it?

Not far from me, a little girl was standing with her father and she said, “These people were good people, Daddy, weren’t they?” But even that was somehow a wrong note.