A Place to Sit Down

This is the whole short story. Image Credit: Southern Spaces

I got off the ship in New York with one less leg than I had when I boarded two years prior. One less finger too. To be more specific, it was my right leg and the little finger on my right hand. I was lucky that the Army cared enough to give me at least some crutches and some money to pay for a cab. The trick was that I had to send the crutches back in a few months because of how many boys were coming back with no legs. With a twenty-pound bag on my back, I hopped down to the corner and hailed a cab to take me to the train station.

I’ve never been a big fan of the cities. I don’t mind much the dirtiness and the vastness, you get the same thing from the plains and farms. What I mind is the noise and the weight. The noise of the city is the beeping and screaming. The beeping is the constant drones, the mindless utterings that come from mundane, everyday things. There is the man beeping because his coffee spilled, and the dripping of his coffee on the sidewalk is beeping. The sliding of car tires on slicked roads is beeping, and so is the opening and closing of doors and bells ringing. The screaming is the outcry of the city, another thing absent in the place I come from. The trains scream as they pass through the city, the sirens of cops and firefighters scream, the forgotten homeless man on the corner screams.

The weight is simple because the weight is just that. There is no size to the plains, only the expanse. The expanse is not heavy, it’s as light as air and more free too. Life grows from the range, the only verticality is that of the wheat and house. I don’t fear noise like I fear weight. The weight of the city comes from its material, its texture, its facade. Nothing grows from the city besides the flower from the dirt filled crevices on the sidewalk. That, I guess, is a sign that cities are not entirely irredeemable.

I think about using the weight of the city as a blanket to help me sleep on the train. Nothing can really put me to bed, nothing but the forest can anymore. I had become so accustomed to roughing it in the woods that I couldn’t sleep at the barracks anymore. Sometimes my insomnia would get to such a point that I would get out in the middle of the night and sleep in the dirt because even that was better than the bed.

After my leg was blown off, I couldn’t sleep at all because I had to spend so much time in the hospital. I had to spend days and nights listening to beeping and screaming, only these beeps and screams were really there. The man in the bed next to me had it much worse than me. He had been going up north when a bomb went off and he was crushed by his own truck. Both of his legs were left on the road and the rest of him landed on scalding metal debris. Whenever the curtain between us was moved, I would sometimes catch glimpses of his back. I had never seen more red and black in my life, and there were more ridges than mountains. The worst thing to ever happen to him was the doctors saving his life. He would scream all day and all night for the doctors to kill him. He would beg for them to put a gun to his head and shoot him. What made it all worse was that he hated The Beatles, and that’s all the doctors would play on the radio. One time he said that he would open up the hospital to the enemy if that’s what it would take for him to die, whether by the enemy soldiers or by execution for treason. But that never happened. After three months in the hospital—everyday of which was spent screaming—they put him on a boat back to New York. I heard talk about a month later that he rolled his wheelchair in front of the train as soon as he got the chance, and that the last song he was forced to listen to was “Yesterday.”

But during that explosion, while I felt my leg leave my body along with my finger, I had the best sleep of my life. It may be because the bomb killed my senses for a while and there were no noises to hear and no weight to feel. In that moment, I felt entirely weightless. I flew ten thousand feet in the air and landed on a cloud, my eyes closed and all my remaining limbs outstretched. I dreamt that I was a bomb exploding and sending another man into the sky, giving another this pleasure of floating. When my timer ticked down I woke up screaming with the shellshocked field medic holding what remained of my leg like he was going to put it back.

The train screams and I press my head against the window. I wrap myself in the city and think of sleeping. I can’t. The man across the aisle stares at me, or more accurately, where I’m not. His young kid tells him it’s rude to stare and goes back to his comic book. I can tell it’s a Marvel comic: Captain America’s got a communist by the throat. About five minutes into the ride, I lift my leg up onto the seat and lay down, then stuff my crutches underneath. The man finds this grotesque. I think he just doesn’t like looking at what can be gone so fast, that might make losing it a possibility. He squeezes his right thigh and finally closes his eyes. I look at him a little closer and see he’s not much older than draft age, he’s only a year or two older than me. He’s young.

In my head I start to daydream about these two. How’d he get out of it? A few years ago, he would’ve been fresh out of high school. Maybe: here he is, this kid just out of school, no plans for college so he’s sure he’s gonna get shipped over. Maybe he’d make a good soldier but he’s not built for killing, and death is too much of a reality. So maybe he’s got a high school love. Maybe it was an accident, maybe they wanted one together, but I think the kid was his plan for getting out. Now, the guy and the kid are here just on their own, no mother. Maybe she’s at home, maybe she left, maybe she died.

I open my eyes and the two are sleeping. We’re stopped at a station somewhere outside Manhattan. Still the city. I feel disgusting. The kid is resting his head on his dad’s lap and he had let his comic fall to the ground. The dad is leaning his head back and has got his hand around his kid. I don’t say anything but I think to myself that I’m sorry. Captain America’s got me by the throat and chokes me back to daydreaming.

I’ll get a good thought going: This man is a college graduate with a loving wife who’s waiting for him outside the city. They’ve got another wanted kid on the way. He’s started his life early and got out of the war because of love, and love’s got a way of taking you out. That’s why he’s sleeping so soundly, there’s no bombs in his head. To him flying isn’t a pleasure. He’d much rather be two feet on the ground. The only bomb he’s got is one that’s loaded with good news because his kid’s happy with his new comic and had a good day at school. His bomb’s an atom bomb and his life’s exploding with love.

I open my eyes again and they’re gone. We’re at another station elsewhere in the state. They are replaced with a mean-looking man and a meaner-looking woman, both well into their old ages. The old man packs himself like a box, closing his arms into his sides and tucking his head into his chest. The woman tucks her bag underneath the seat and rests her head on her husband’s shoulder. Neither of them ever pay much attention to my leg. As she moves her bag, I notice that the kid’s comic book is still on the ground.

I say something to myself, arguing whether or not I should do anything. The comic looks new. That poor kid. I curse loudly, startling the old woman and she gives me a dirty look. I shuffle off the seat, take my crutches, and snatch the comic off the ground. The bell of the train rings as I hop onto the platform.

The cold wind drifts through the empty station. I didn’t notice when I was in the city, but it’s that two week period of the year where all the leaves are colored. There’s a light dusting of snow, the kind that comes down and fills the gaps but nothing higher. The midday sky is a color not quite blue or grey, something in between. The sun is just a dash of yellow behind the thin layer of clouds, looking at it still hurts. For a second I forget what I’m trying to do and sway in the wind.

One of the station workers looks at me kind of funny and I keep moving. It’s only after the train gets moving again that I realize the weight that was previously on my back is no longer there, and that I have left my bag. I turn back and watch it go west. Well, it was never of any help anyway. Most of the weight was a change of clothes, but I’m fine in my boot, long-sleeve, and field jacket. Now the bag can enjoy the sights of the Midwestern fall.

I take my crutches and comic and barrel through the small station until I get to the parking lot. At the very end of the lot, there’s the boy and the man getting into their car. They traveled so far so quick. Within just a minute, the car pulls out of the lot and heads down the lonely road. My leg tells me that I’m not gonna catch up to them. The empty station tells me I can’t go anywhere else. The wind pushes me down the road.

This little stretch of country I find myself in is just a bite out of the whole world. As I walk the long narrow road, one side lined with colorful trees and the other side with a wide open range for farming, I see that it was not any different overseas. Over there, we would be in the thick of it and then find ourselves in a rice paddy then right back into the jungle. Everywhere you go there’s men in fields next to fields of trees. It’s true for even the deserts, cities, oceans. Just swap the trees for dunes, steal, and waves. I can’t tell how far I am from the city or my destination, I didn’t sleep on the train but it felt like blinking took me an hour into the future. Even if I was just a few minutes from my house, I probably couldn’t separate here from there.

Along this long road towards whatever town was at the end, many cars and trucks pass me by. It’s not like I’m looking for a ride or anything, but I would like a little bit of care to where I’m walking. I can’t blame them though, this road’s got no sidewalk and I doubt many people walk along the side anyway. At this point, I’m closer to the drainage ditch than the road. One of my crutches keeps getting stuck in little notches in the asphalt. It looks like it’s been a long time since whatever local government took notice to the roads. I know that’s true because of the maybe millions of potholes I’ve counted up to this point.

By the looks of it, the county’s economy is based in the farms in the area. It’s not quite late yet and all the farms are still populated. Men in the fields dig up their crops, I think it’s cabbage. They’ve got these real shiny tools that shine in even the little sunlight there is. They’re down on their knees or bent at ninety-degrees chopping at the ground, ripping the cabbage from the dirt. In the farm I have to my right, there’s about twenty men moving across the field like a wave washing up on the shore. They’re in this abstract shape that flows and sometimes grows over itself. I imagine what a bird might see: this sweeping motion, reflecting its own sunlight, cutting up heads of cabbage. It’s nearing the end of the harvesting season, sometimes a gust of cool wintery air comes through the prairie. It’s still fall though.

I get about two miles from the station and arrive at a sign that tells me there’s only three miles left until town. I can see, kind of way in the distance, this little town I’m looking for. I don’t actually know what I’m looking for. I lean against the closest telephone pole and start looking around. I never saw their car pull into one of the dirt roads to the farms, it must have gone straight to town. I wonder if the kid’s realized he’s lost his comic book by now. I mean, there’s not much else to do in the farmlands if you’re a kid. Maybe turn on the radio? I pull the comic out of my pocket.

Captain America and the communist. Looking at these two men fighting, I see now they’re just boys. Captain America is a kid filled with serum and idealism, and his opponent just doesn’t have the serum. What’s a communist got to do with the state of the world besides being in it? I could ask the same to the superhero.

There was a friend of mine in the jungle who was a communist. He liked to smoke cigarettes and drink beer and The Rolling Stones like the rest of us. It’s not like he was hiding his ideas either. One time, he had a local guy tattoo the hammer and sickle on his chest, and the next day someone stole his shirt and the captain saw him. The captain took him to a cattle farm that same day. He took the branding iron and shoved it red-hot over the tattoo, so then he had some writing in another language instead of a symbol. I was told that it meant “property of” and then whoever the owner was.

Anyway, about two weeks after that whole ordeal, we were getting ready to load into the truck that was gonna take us away from this village we were beating. We had exhausted all their fun and money so we had to keep moving. Me and the communist were sitting at this cafe and getting some coffee. I asked him why he came over if he was a communist. He told me there wasn’t any choice. He didn’t have the money to dodge and wasn’t too keen on going to jail because he would end up over there anyway. He figured that if he was gonna get sent overseas, that he would at least get some kicks out of it and pull the trigger the least he could. That was true, I had only seen him fire his rifle twice before: once to scare away some creature in the night and the second to see if he could hit a beer can from fifty yards while drunk. The third time would be on that same day, when a local across the street from the cafe came out of his building with a pistol. He shot and killed one of the soldiers as soon as he opened the door. The communist immediately pulled out his gun and shot the guy in the throat, but at the same time the man shot him in the head. I think “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was playing on our radio.

They lit the local up with bullets, but it was my friend’s bullet that killed him. His holey remains were left for the other residents to clean up. We took the communist and did whatever you do with dead soldiers. I think Vikings used to send their dead off in a boat on fire. You can’t light a steel ship on fire. Instead, his mother received him in a box draped in an American flag. That’s not what he wanted. He told me one time that he wanted his coffin to be made of some weak wood and not covered in anything, and the coffin would break under the weight of the dirt.

In thinking about all this, I didn’t realize I had kept moving another mile. I check my pocket and the comic is still there. It’s getting later in the day, there’s still a while to go. On these crutches and one leg I feel like my own telephone pole. What if I could conduct all that electricity through myself and spit it out the other side. Would that be my next job in the world? There’s not much you can do with one leg, not where I’m from. There’s one thing most people who lose a limb do if they live in the country, and that’s move to the city. In the city, you can sit at a desk. If you live out in the fields, all you can do is join the previous generations in watching the television. Maybe tell a war tale.

I used to think a war tale was boring. Most kids, they want to hear how you killed a guy and then killed more guys and maybe blew something to pieces. That’s not most war tales. Most of the time it’s you got high, your friend did something stupid, your officer embarrassed himself. You get the same material from college. The reason so many war tales are boring is because most war tales don’t make it out of the war. Then you get people making up their own stuff and it all gets exaggerated and blown out of proportion and then it’s not a war tale anymore, it’s a fantasy. A fantasy can be just as boring.

Now I like a good war tale. They’re funny, even if somebody dies in them. They’re funny because it can happen at any moment. One second you’re going up the country and the next your leg is half-a-mile away. That’s just funny to me now. It can be the most gruesome story I’ve ever heard and not a single cell of me will have the idea to laugh, but my brain will chuckle to itself. There’s a ping-pong table in my head, and funny and disturbed are playing against each other with my head as the ball.

I think the thing I miss the most about being there is the radio. It was everything over there. What else do you have to do if you’re sitting around at a base all day, getting shot at from who-knows-where, and with a mysterious pain in a place where it shouldn’t be painful. At a certain point, chatting and chores get boring so you turn on the radio. Sitting around and the radio’s going, playing The Beatles and The Doors. I once listened to Jim Morrison for a whole night singing some craziness about love and hate and killing and America. I can listen to him sing for days on end.

It’s not quite the same back here. A lot of people over here still prefer the fancy men in suits crooning and those shows you turn on where there’s a guy surrounded by fifty women in some costumes dressed like birds. You get into some parts of the country, they still haven’t even accepted jazz. Many people don’t see the world is coming to more changes than they can count. I understand that, I would ignore it all too if I wasn’t pushed into it.

Then I walk into it. I’m in the town now, this one-street town made up of brick buildings and suddenly there’s a sidewalk. I’ve walked into the range of something playing on the radio. I think it’s The Kinks, “You Really Got Me.” It’s playing from this general store to my right. To my left is the same car that I saw the man and the kid get into all that time back.

This is really a slow-moving town. I think everybody lives outside of it, I couldn’t tell you where though. There’s not many cars lining the streets, right now it’s mostly just those of the business-runners. There’s not many businesses either. I can see the general store, a near-empty bar, a barbershop, and a butcher. The rest just fade into brick and fading storefront signs.

Really, this is just another beat-up war town. I can see how opposing armies have moved through here, trampled all the people, stomped on all the beer cans, kicked them down the road. Tanks have rolled, guns have fired, bombs have exploded. The history of another place happened here too. The legs of many men have been fully ripped clean off the rest of them, and the people here are all skin-grafts. I can see where a man has rolled himself in front of a train, where one man drank coffee and another drank his own blood but they both ended up in the same place. Is this what coming back is? Was it already here and I am just now noticing? Will it always be this forever?

A hand tugs on my sleeve and I’m pulled gracefully out of my mind. Suddenly I am twenty pounds lighter. The radio’s playing “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground. I haven’t thought about any of this since I woke up in the hospital. To my right is the kid. I take the comic out of my pocket and gesture for him to take it. He takes a second, he sees my hand has four fingers. Then he slides the comic into his own pocket.

“What happened to your finger?”

“I sat on a bomb.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see if it would blow up.”

The father comes out of the store with a bag of groceries and stops to look at me. He waits only for a few seconds before opening the passenger door of his car for me. I put my crutches in the back seat with his son and they drive me back to the station. He doesn’t talk besides thanking me for my service. I don’t say anything. On the way back, I see that the colorful leaves are starting to fall.

Back at the station, the man buys me a ticket for whatever place comes next. I thank him, he and the boy leave, and I find a bench so I can sit and wait. But sitting becomes tiresome, and I lay my head down on the wood and lift my leg up to the seat. I stuff my crutches beneath the bench and look up at the sky that’s now a range from red to grey. The sun’s going down, my watery eyes too. I can finally do something I haven’t been able to for a long time: sleep.