Marian Palaia - Given World

“Tell me the rest,” I say.

“I thought we were talking about Ginger.”

“Not yet. Tell me the rest.”

“After Texas?”

“Yes.”

They didn’t send him to Vietnam, but they held on to him and his bum leg anyway; he still owed them some time. So he went AWOL: came home for a week and then headed, finally, for Alberta. Lived on the rez up there and started back after the amnesty in 1977. Somehow he was included in the all clear.

“Good timing, I guess. Or they just didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

“I’m glad.” Without planning to, I reach for the braid that still goes halfway down his back. His hair is shot through with a few streaks of silver. I tug on it. Lightly.

“You’re a pal,” he says. “Thanks.”

The years come together, not crashing, more like a folding paper fan I brought back from Saigon and forgot to take with me when Annabelle and the boys didn’t have room for me anymore. I am too dumbfounded to even wonder how such a thing could happen, with the years; how it could seem, if only for a moment, as though I have, after all, taken the most practical route (if scenic was a consideration) from point A to point B. It makes no sense.

“When did you find out?”

“About Slim?”

“Yes. That.”

“My uncle wrote me in Canada,” he says. “And then when I got home, there he was, for real, like magic. You always were a clever girl.”

“Not so clever,” I say.

He says something about camouflage, something about pain ponies.

“Pain? Or paint?”

“Whatever,” he says, smiling, and I don’t know why, but also know I don’t need to. “Ponies is ponies,” he says.

He pulls a loose thread from the hem of his shirt, wraps it tight around his finger. “I didn’t go home right away,” he says. “Slim was four already, by the time I got there.”

What? If he was four, that means at one, two, three, he didn’t have his mother or father. But here we both are, so how is that even possible? I try to picture him. It’s easy. I know just what he looked like. How long his hair was. How he never wanted to wear shoes. I can’t imagine a world without him, even though we’ve hardly met.

“Why?”

“They arrested me at the border for some pain pills a buddy gave me. For my leg. One bottle, but they gave me all the time they could get away with.”

“Where did they send you?”

“Leavenworth. Always keep track of your drugs, girl. And you can skip Kansas altogether. It’s as flat as they say.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

I get around — before long is too long — to asking about our son. He tells me Slim has been jumping out of planes about five years now, since he graduated. Smoke jumping. I smell sage, sweetgrass, tinder for the fires that come every other summer, like clockwork.

Now he wants to go to college.

“Away from here,” Darrell says.

I wonder if my mother has anything to do with this. Encouraging him to go away, but to something legitimate. Not to war. Not to the coast to try all the different ways of forgetting. My mother, as I have already said, is no dummy, and maybe Slim is her second chance. Maybe he is all our second chances, and maybe, more likely, I am the only one who really needs one, and including a cast of others just makes me feel less like the Lone Ranger after Tonto has had the good sense to ride off into the sunset.

“College,” I say. “That’s good. That’s—”

“Yeah,” Darrell says. “It’s good. It’s great. But he wants to join the Guard to pay for it.” He clearly hates the idea. The army. “But I can’t tell him what to do. He’s not a kid.”

I think, but not aloud because I know he won’t want to hear it, It’s only weekends, right? I’ve seen the commercials. Weekends and a month in the summer. Something like that. It’s not like he’s joining up . Not like he has to go fight real enemies. It’s not even like we have those anymore. It’s just practice. Killing practice, but no one actually dies.

I think we must all have had enough of war by now, that from now on it will be there — always but only peripherally — like a shadow, to keep us expectant, keep us on our toes. But not real war. Not boys putting on uniforms to go away and not come back. It makes me feel better, to know this.

“Maybe it’ll work out, or there’ll be some other way.”

“Maybe,” he says. This time what he does not say is “He’s yours too, you know,” for which I am grateful, and I imagine it is because he knows I am not planning to fall off the face of the earth again. Like before. Once was enough. I know that. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but it won’t be that.

He looks at me for, it feels like, the first time. “How have you been?” he says.

I have to smile. “Not bad. Getting by.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

He leans into me, and I have to lean back, hard, or fall over.

“So now what?”

“I don’t know. I miss California. The ocean.”

“Just the ocean?”

“And a whole gang of dead folks. Some live ones too, though.”

“Ghosts,” he says.

“All of them?”

“In a way.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“I am.” His shoulder feels so necessary, next to mine. Like a limb I didn’t know I was missing. I don’t know which limb, or what kind of necessary, and it’s okay. He tells me we need our ghosts; we are made of our ghosts.

“I could be starting to figure that out,” I say. “I could be starting any day now.”

“Don’t wait too long,” he says.

I say I won’t.

Something else to figure out, and soon, is what, on earth, I want. And to know if this trip has been worth… all I let slip away. Maybe if I knew the final destination. Or not. Could be that’s the whole point of this exercise, to not really know much of anything, but to feel it, finally, and to live with that.

We wait, still leaning but not quite so hard, not so much like there’s something we’re trying to prove.

Eventually he says, “The ocean isn’t going anywhere.”

I look beyond the sagging fence, the precarious confusion of swings and slides and monkey bars taken finally down by the weather, and the years. I see no hawk, no rabbit, no horse — just that one small mountain range in the distance, still holding its own out there, a reminder that there is such a thing as permanence, or something close to it.

Darrell reaches his long arms out, palms up, toward those mountains. I know what he is doing. He is presenting to me this landlocked, bone-covered, rock-strewn, river-crossed country — and that ridiculous sky. These are extravagant gifts I really do not deserve. But it is just like him, always trying to give me things I don’t deserve.

“What about this?” he says.

“This is good,” I say, and stay where I am, for now. I try as hard as I can to concentrate, to see what he is seeing. What is out there. What is left. What is possible. Still. Or again.

This book would never have been realized or even dreamt of without the benevolence of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I am eternally and deliriously grateful to my teachers, my cohort, and the ones who wandered in, for generous teaching, reading and thoughtful criticism; for believing in me and for making me believe; and for setting the bar so damn high. Special thanks to Yuko Sakata Burtless, Lydia Conklin, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Judith Mitchell, Chris Mohar, Lorrie Moore, Rob Nixon, Jonis Agee, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Hannah Oberman Breindel, Barrett Swanson, Jacques Rancourt, Josh Kalscheur, Vicente M. López Abad and Seth Abramson.