S.L. Wallach

Another Day for the Monkeys

When the phone rings he figures it’s trouble. No one ever calls with good news. He waits four rings, would wait forever if he thought that it would do more than buy some time. The last person I want to talk to, he thinks, is someone who wants to talk to me.

He reads the caller ID and picks up. You shouldn’t be calling, he tells his mother. You shouldn’t tie up the landline. It’s for emergencies.

What emergencies? she replies. I’m right here. If you have an emergency, you tell me. Or you press the button on your cellphone. Simple! This is the quietest corner of Vermont. Stop worrying about emergencies. Now, how’s your life going? How come you never come to see us?

Chili Pepper, his mother once called him, both for his red hair and his hot temper, and it had stuck through school and basic and into the sandy barracks of al-Tanf, where it became Chili or sometimes just Chills, because he had such a steady hand. Now she calls him Chandler, a name he’s almost forgotten. His mother believes that she could skip the past two years by pretending everything is the same. Just put it behind you, she likes to say.

He tugs his fingers through his hair, as close to grooming as he gets these days. They come away feeling greasy, the way they did when he’d hold a bag of the PX’s lard-fried potatoes or onion rings, dipping into it as fast as he could chew. Or maybe the slickness is another thing he imagines. He tries to remember when he last washed his hair, which hangs limp as clover against his neck. Sometimes he worries that the color will wash right out. It could happen, he tells himself. One day you are a whole man, the next something is missing.

Having weighed which of his mother’s questions to answer, he says, Everything’s fine.

He doesn’t have to tell his story. People already know it. “Local Soldier Survives Attack,” the headline in the town newspaper ran. IED? people say in greeting him, as if ready to exchange their own memories of unexpected explosions, maimed limbs, charred uniforms that become the smell of autumn. It wasn’t an IED, but he never bothers to explain.

A few people tell him he’s lucky, considering. Coming from one of the guys at the VA—the one who gets thunderclap headaches when the shrapnel still in his brain shifts or the one whose eyes constantly dart from one corner to another because every shadow could mean an ambush—that’s OK with him. But not when he gets a call from some soft-skinned acquaintance who watched “The Covenant” on YouTube and thinks they’ve shared an experience. Or, worse, from a high-school girlfriend who hints that she’d like to stop by to see him, without understanding what seeing him would mean.

It isn’t just that things happen, though that’s what his mother had also said. Things happen. In the military welcome center, she’d patted his shoulders in a not-quite hug, far from the hail-hero clasp for which he’d braced himself. Put all that behind you, she’d said. You’re home now. Things happen. It doesn’t matter.

But it must matter, right? In the townhouse he now can afford, he lies on his belly for hours underneath the dining room table, peering through the sliding glass door at the buckled drifts of snow that give way to nothingness, seeing everything as desert.

You only think you remember, his friend Ned told him. It was over too quickly, before it could imprint.

Ned served as a medic with another platoon. They’d enlisted together on a whim, tired of clerking at Target and sleeping in their teenage bedrooms, their salaries not enough to cover both rent and the eight balls they bought to snort in short lines on their drive to work. When they stopped at the Marine recruiting office in Manchester, they were jumped up on coke and bravado. If the CIA could train capuchins to fight in Iraq, we can rock ’n roll ’em in Afghanistan, Ned told the recruiter. Isn’t that right, Chandler? The recruiter looked doubtful but called a week later, his voice a staticky boom through the phone’s speaker. Got you a date for your physical. You have a number for the guy you came in with? His phone’s disconnected. It wasn’t. Overcome by second thoughts, Ned had recorded a new voicemail greeting: The number you’ve reached has been changed . . . to an unlisted number. Chandler said he’d let Ned know.

Hunched on his sofa twenty-six months later, Chandler would tell Ned how he remembered that the medic wanted to add morphine to the drip before loading him into the Medevac for extraction. Come on, buddy, the medic said, after carefully tweezing out Chandler’s earplugs. Going to be a bumpy ride—you don’t want to be thrashing around. Come on, buddy. Just a little, for the trip. If you fall asleep, I’ll wake you when we land. How’s that? And he did, even though Chandler kept telling him to fuck off.

For the medic’s persistence Chandler gives thanks on a regular basis. It’s why he has a prosthetic foot, not a prosthetic leg. He’d been alert enough to refuse an immediate below-the-knee amputation, which the combat surgeon insisted would create a better stump. The surgeon called him son, not buddy, though they couldn’t have been more than ten years apart.

A nurse had told him that the surgeon complained about how long it would take to clear the boot fragments and gravel from the wound. As if this kid thinks he’s the only one who caught it today, the surgeon had said, and we’ll just see if there’s enough tissue left for wound closure. Chandler, a morphine pump in his fist as he waited for the flight to Landstuhl, nodded at her.

They’d have taken your leg for sure if you’d been out, Ned said. Did you know it’s a war crime to shoot a medic?

I wasn’t a medic and I didn’t get shot at, Chandler said. I got blown up. It could happen to anyone.

It could happen to anyone—he was starting to sound like his mother.

His mother’s voice chirps through the phone. Would you like a chicken pot pie for dinner? Won’t be any trouble to drop one off. You’re almost on my way.

Anyplace could be on her way, even a place between town and nowhere. He thinks about chicken pot pie as the lesser of two evils: If he says yes, that will be nice, she’ll drop it off promptly at six, still warm; if he says no, he isn’t feeling all that hungry, she’ll stop by anyway, no way for him to tell when. While I’m running my errands, she’ll say. Sometimes, he watches for her, not in eagerness but to pass the time, having run out of things to keep his mind busy. He always wonders how she manages that transformation: from the stoop-shouldered woman who trudges up his driveway, weighed down by whatever bags or boxes she has with her, to the purposeful and determined parent who sets his oven on timed bake.

Anything you need? she adds. You OK on your pills?

The pharmacy delivers, he says.

True in a way. Ned, who works as a pharmacy assistant, delivers, and only to him—and only so Chandler can sign the controlled-substance form and collect the $1,500 Ned pays him for the 120 Xanax tabs and 90 caps of Zydone prescribed by Chandler’s VA doctors every month and resold by Ned from a shaded bench across the street from the high school. Between that and disability pay, Chandler can cover his mortgage, utilities, car payments, food, and the recreational substances he prefers. Which is why he says yes to the chicken pot pie, adding that he’ll be grateful for extra biscuits and a half-gallon of green tea from the cash market. Since she’ll be in town, what with her errands and all.

That gives him five hours. Ned gets off in three. Plenty of time.

He’d been discharged with a Symes amputation and a folder of medical forms and spec sheets on prosthetic feet. The last was from his physical therapist, who had sounded envious, like a party guest who’d arrived after all the cake was gone. Did Chandler want energy storing or solid ankle? Dynamic response, perhaps with split-toe design? Would he be dancing? Golfing? Skiing? Playing tennis? Did he appreciate how lucky he was to have all these choices? All sorts of models made of carbon-fiber composites or high-tech plastics, most with fully articulated motion, nothing like the standard-issue prosthesis he’d worn during his week of in-patient physical therapy. Ned drove him to the VA for his fittings, then waited in his Outback, where he smoked a blunt and listened to wind move the leaves, imagining he heard sand blowing against glass, against canvas, into his ears and mouth, into the wounds of the people in his care. By the time Chandler graduated to a cane and that only for balance, Ned had sold Chandler’s remaining fentanyl patches, pocketing enough to buy each of them a used snowmobile—a Ski-Doo for Chandler, an Arctic Cat for himself.

Got hand controls, man, Ned said. You’ll zoom.

Chandler had left his prosthesis on the floor this morning, as he often did. When he wears it he feels obligated to do something, to be productive, to be like the men in the rehab video who played basketball and went running, who checked themselves out in a mirror and looked proud before heading outside to who-knew-where but somewhere important.

You should think about going back to school, his mother keeps saying. You could get a scholarship now, I’ll bet.

While he waits for her, he looks at college websites. He starts with the schools in places he’d like to go: University of Hawaii, University of California at Santa Barbara, BU, Tulane. He reads the course offerings at the University of Vermont (Skiing? The physical therapist had asked). Later, while his mother unloads the chicken pot pie and extra biscuits, he plans to be working on the Common App.

He decides to shower and wash his hair, but can’t find shampoo. He almost calls his mother to ask her to bring a bottle, picks up his phone, in fact, and presses the first digits of her number, then remembers how no conversation with his mother is ever so neat, how she would examine him when she arrived and the bag would contain other things he might need, as if that’s all she thinks about: what he might need. As if she still knows him that well. How she’d ask if this counts as an emergency. Instead, he pulls on jeans and a faded flannel shirt. His socks have rubber dots on the bottom, which keep his right foot from slipping as he swings his body through the crutches, the left sock dangling where his foot had been.

He’d done that with his boots once—laced both of them up and got Ned to drive him to a shoe store two towns away to buy a new pair. Well, will you look at that? Ned said to the startled salesman, who sat in front of them holding the empty boot that had slid off so easily. That was when he still wore a fentanyl patch; that day they’d shared a bong as well.

You get out of here, the salesman said, shoving the boot into Chandler’s lap.

Hey, Ned called as they left. He’s a war hero. You disrespected a war hero.

On the way back, they stopped at the VFW post to play cards and get a free hot lunch.

Tell them how you lost your foot, Ned said, as one of the volunteers passed bowls of pineapple upside down cake around the table.

No, you. You do it better.

And Ned did, one of the several versions he’d made up. This time, he told about how Chandler was in the front seat of the Humvee, his hands bracing his M27, ready to pick off whatever moved. About the sudden glint of sunlight on the road just ahead of them and how the medics had to search for the wounds on the survivors’ bodies through sticky, wet uniforms that didn’t cut away easily. The men at their table nodded knowingly and kept their eyes down, watching the dye from the maraschino cherries bleed into the pineapple glaze.

Another day for the monkeys, Ned whispered as he tossed their paper plates into the trash.

Bending over the kitchen sink, Chandler rakes his head with his clippers, blade at a sixteenth of an inch, the way he’d set it the night before he enlisted. It’s the same kind of moment, he thinks, though he knows the whole college-application thing is an act, that what he really wants to do is continue to wait for Ned and the wads of twenties Ned will divide between them. He watches his hair fall around him and thinks of ashes, of dust.

When his mother bustles through the door, she’ll sing out his name: Chaaaand-lerrrr, imitating the E and C tones of the doorbell she won’t bother to press. Today he will be sitting at his computer, the Common App open on the screen and the first sections completed.

Oh, she will exclaim.

Will you read my essays? What do you think of St. Michael’s as a safety? He’ll ask these things as if they matter.

She’ll have second thoughts, tell him to keep the commute in mind, or suggest he talk to his doctor about living on campus. So crowded, she’ll say with her lips set, as if crowds were to blame. But she’ll be thinking of the noises that crowds make: the sudden slamming of a door or the chest-throbbing beat of music played with the bass cranked. The way she used to play Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” so they could dance barefoot through the downstairs rooms, back before he started kindergarten and found out that other children knew the words to “Baby Beluga.” He’ll tell her about possible majors and their projected career paths, and for a few days she’ll believe he’s chosen one and tell people that, yes, Chandler is thinking of college, has a plan. He’ll say that he’ll let her know as soon as acceptance letters arrive, and he’s sure she’ll scoop him into a hug before rushing for the door.

For a few days, at least, he won’t have to worry about the phone. Tomorrow, she’ll leave a macaroni casserole in a thermal bag on his back porch, maybe with a check tucked inside with a note reading “For college applications” in her rounded script. “Didn’t want to interrupt you.”

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