Second Skin Read online

  ‘That’s good,’ Lillian had said when I’d told her about the posting. ‘Safe.’ When I looked unconvinced, she’d added, ‘Hemingway drove an ambulance in World War One and he came home alive.’

  I should be fighting, I thought. I said, ‘What’s Hemingway got to do with it?’

  ‘He saw the same things. An ammunition factory blew up in Milan. He carried out the bodies.’

  I said, ‘Didn’t he kill himself with a shotgun?’

  She looked worried. ‘That was later. Much.’

  Later.

  I had a pistol in my desk drawer. Why wait?

  My head was on fire, the hooker said. How did she know?

  I had all ten toes. Lillian had counted them as we lay in bed my first night home. I had all ten fingers. Lillian had counted them too. I had my feet and my legs, my hands and arms, stronger because I’d worked out with free weights in the ship gym. I had my dick, thank God. The organs in my belly pumped, cycled, and cleaned like beautiful machines. But did I have my head?

  I opened the top desk drawer. My SIG 9mm lay on a green oilcloth rag. When I rented the office, I imagined sliding the drawer open as another man sat across from me. The oilcloth would keep the SIG from rattling. The man would suspect nothing as I lifted it and pulled the trigger.

  That was a joke. My hands shook even when I was alone – especially then. And no one had sat across the desk from me except Felicity the hooker and, a few times, Farouk Bashandi who came to complain about the lack of business at Sahara Sandwiches. He’d fitted out an empty building with grills and picnic tables. A sign by the highway side showed a man eating a pita sandwich while riding a camel. In its day, the building was a Skinner Milk House. Back then, the Skinner family owned the largest dairy in Northeast Florida and they made a fortune by selling milk directly instead of through grocery stores. But shopping habits changed, and the Interstate drained traffic from our stretch of highway, leaving the building to crumble. ‘The rent was cheap,’ Farouk said. ‘Can you believe it?’ He’d imagined happy families eating falafel and gyros at the outdoor tables he’d fitted with umbrellas. The stinking air and the boarded windows across the highway on a restaurant called Chopstick Charlie’s hadn’t worried him.

  I lifted the SIG from the drawer. It felt as heavy and cold in my hand as a chunk of bone, more solid than the liquid center of the earth.

  I’d never shot it or any other gun off range. In training, I’d put holes through paper targets and blasted plastic manikins, I’d spotted man-shaped shadows through a night vision scope, and I’d learned to compensate for wind and gravity so an enemy would die as hard at a quarter-mile as he would at point-blank range. I’d played simulation games and watched hundreds of hours of videos meant to desensitize us so that, when we faced real blood and violence, we would charge in as if they were all we’d ever wanted. But I’d never picked up a gun really intending to kill a man.

  First time for everything. I held the barrel to my chin. If I pushed hard enough, I could shove the barrel through to blood and bone without pulling the trigger.

  The phone rang and my heart jumped. My heart had no right to do that. I’d suffered no physical trauma of that kind. I’d just stuffed together the pieces of other men after the blood had drained into the earth and the adrenaline had lifted like steam into the hard dry sky. If anything, my heart should stand still. When the phone rang, I should lie on the floor behind my desk like a dead man.

  It rang again. I put the pistol back on the oilcloth and closed the drawer. I breathed in, out, in. ‘Hello?’

  ‘That’s not how you’re supposed to answer.’ Lillian. She meant well.

  I breathed in. ‘Johnny Bellefleur.’

  ‘Better,’ she said. ‘But with enthusiasm.’

  I breathed. ‘It’s fake in my ears.’

  ‘Make it real.’

  Nothing was real. ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘No business?’

  ‘The hooker came in. She said I could screw her if I gave her a cigarette.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Actually, she was pretty good.’

  ‘Not funny.’

  ‘I guess not. What’s up there?’

  ‘Let’s eat dinner out tonight,’ she said.

  ‘You all right?’ She didn’t sound it.

  ‘I’m fine. Everything’s good. We’ll talk tonight.’

  Not at all convincing.

  She said, ‘I love you.’

  I spent the rest of the afternoon at my desk, glancing from my gun drawer to my phone. The phone never rang, but I also didn’t open the drawer. I tried taking my mind elsewhere, to circumstances that made me happy: Lillian on the beach, Lillian on our bed, Lillian in the woods – the shadows of green loblolly bay leaves falling on her skin, unbothered by stinging insects, snakes, and wild pigs, this being my fantasy, not theirs.

  A truck horn blasted outside and tires screeched. I eyed the rays of sun through the glass door. All happy dreams come to an end. I had trained to account for glint and glare and the warping optical effects of a setting sun. On the range, I could hit a target in the fading light at a hundred yards, two hundred if I got lucky. With a few adjustments, I could point an M72 at a building or another ship and put a hole in the side big enough to crawl through. I could do it all, and I should have done it all. That’s what my papers said.

  But I’d known plenty of fully trained and desensitized men who in actual battle had snapped their wrists up and fired over the heads of the enemy instead of assuming the burden of ending another man’s life. Was I made like that too? That would also be a burden – knowing that face-to-face with a killer I would surrender to his killing hands rather than kill. The history of battle, as far back as histories were written, said both were heroic: kill or be killed, either way you were brave. The only cowardice was running away. I hadn’t run from battle, but I hadn’t run into it. I’d stood at my table on the ship and packed meat, bones, and organs into bags.

  The counselors at the VA warned against intrusive thoughts. If the music of the past eighteen months played on an endless loop, I would be in trouble, they said. I needed to keep my head from catching fire.

  They handed me a stack of prescriptions. Xanax, Ambien, and Celexa. Give the Celexa a month or two to do its magic, but beware of suicidal thoughts – usually not a side effect for men my age. Come back for more meds if none of these worked.

  At home, I’d dropped the prescriptions in the kitchen garbage.

  Lillian had said I was an idiot.

  I’d said, ‘This is news?’

  ‘When going over the side of the bridge looks better than crossing to the other end, you need help,’ she’d told me.

  ‘Which of your writers said that?’

  ‘I said it.’

  ‘Sounds like bullshit.’

  ‘Fine,’ she’d said. ‘Kill yourself.’

  That had made me laugh, and then she’d laughed too. The side of the bridge looked like a spot of shadowy gravity, and I suspected I would always feel its pull, but I had taken her hand and we’d climbed the stairs to our bedroom. There were better and worse gravities to give in to. As we lay in bed afterward, she looked at me, worried, and I smiled at her, but she said, ‘You’re not waving but drowning.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Stevie Smith. British poet.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

  At five-thirty, I turned off my computer and locked the SIG in the drawer. Safe for another day. Unless I hit traffic, I would get home in time to walk the dog before Lillian arrived.

  But then Farouk Bashandi came through the door carrying two white paper bags, which he set on my desk before dropping into the chair across from me. He said, ‘For you and Lillian.’ The bags smelled of garlic and fried meat.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Shawarma, hummus, tzatziki, and I put in some grape leaves. You eat it tonight, or you can freeze it, all but the hummus and tzatziki.’ He was a short man, balding, heavy at the
middle but not yet fat, with a moustache that he had a nervous habit of fingering.

  ‘You’re a good man,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got to sell this stuff.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Who will buy it? No customers. The whore comes for cigarettes and food. I make her lunch. She says she has no money for it.’ He laughed, but his face also reddened. ‘She says she would let me do her on the counter, except she never would do it with an Iraqi. I tell her I’m Egyptian. She tells me I look Iraqi. I kick her out of my restaurant.’

  ‘You’re a good man,’ I said again. ‘The food smells great.’

  ‘Your business is finding people, is that right?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘if anyone ever hires me.’

  ‘Do me a favor and find me some customers,’ he said. Old joke already.

  The building where I’d set up business had once housed a tire dealer and before that a little thrift store, but it mostly had stood empty. Lillian’s brother Daniel, who was a cop, talked one of his friends into letting me rent it for the cost of the taxes he paid on the land. I’d Windexed the windows, painted the front, and hung a sign over the door, but my closest neighbors were the boarded-up Chinese restaurant and Farouk’s fast-dying falafel shop. ‘You’re second on my list,’ I said. ‘As soon as I find some for myself.’

  Lillian beat me home, and she and our black lab Percy greeted me together. Lillian had showered and wore a yellow sundress and sandals. She kissed me, but she gave me the same uncertain look that she always gave me since I returned, as if she was checking for visible cracks. I wanted to tell her to stop looking at me like that – I wanted to break through to where we were before I shipped out – but I kept my mouth shut. The distance in her eyes only reflected what she saw in mine, I figured. Besides, she’d talked with the VA counselors too, and they’d told her she was front line and needed to watch me. Still, I pulled her to me, my hand on the bare skin of her back at the top of the sundress, and held her. Percy barked, wanting in on the action, but I held Lillian still.

  THREE

  Stephen Phelps

  Sand and blood. Sand behind the knees, between the legs where thigh touches thigh meets groin. Sand in the mouth. Tiny, tooth-breaking rocks, grit and grind. Sand – one grain only – in my eye, where Felicity flung it, and I’d rather go blind than see you walk away from me – the pain of a grain of sand in the eye, and I’d rather go blind. A funny form of Felicity.

  ‘Not my fault,’ I told her. ‘You overcame me. In spite of yourself. In spite of myself.’

  ‘We could have gone somewhere,’ she said. ‘I would’ve. I have a bed. They make furniture for these things.’

  ‘Not my fault,’ I said. ‘I was overcome. I’m not ashamed.’ An early lesson: Never be ashamed. Shame those who would shame you. I spat out the grains of sand.

  I blinked and blinked but the one grain of sand lodged deep in my eye, and she said, ‘Take me home. I want to go home.’

  FOUR

  Lillian

  Toni Morrison called Jacksonville bad, bad country. The government said it was the murder capital of Florida. The kids in my classes called it Bang ’em Town as if the sound of gunfire was dance music. But to think of it that way, they must have never driven the Wonderwood Expressway in the early evening through the swamp and pine forest, over the Intracoastal Waterway, and into the marsh surrounding the dragon-body winding of Cemetery Creek. They must have never hooked north on to Highway 1A, crossing more wetlands and endless nameless streams, where egrets and blue herons stood knee-deep in the brackish water and giant fish crows perched on the branches of faraway trees. They must have never swung east again past the naval station into the little Mayport shrimping village, where the big, lazy mouth of the St Johns River opened into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Johnny and I ate dinner on the waterside deck at Safe Harbor Seafood Market. On the other side of the railing, shrimp boats – with salt-burnt hulls, spars, working booms, and drying nets – hung to the docks from wrist-thick lines. The car ferry angled across the river, grinding its engines against the current. Brown pelicans dove into the water at the end of the docks. The sun grew orange and huge as it set over the far riverbank.

  A waitress put a basket of shrimp and oysters on our table, but when I reached for it, Johnny took my hand. He’d done that lately – taking hold of me as if I was slipping away.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ Then he nodded toward the river and the setting sun. ‘This is good.’

  He told me once, years ago, that he saw a brown pelican dive into the water and never come up. He said for a soldier with a gun there’s nothing more blinding or dangerous than a setting sun. I wondered now if the river he saw over the Safe Harbor railing looked anything like the river I saw. ‘There’s no place more beautiful than this,’ I said, and he let go of my hand.

  We drank Coronas and, after the shrimp and oysters, ate grouper that the Safe Harbor fleet had just brought ashore, and when the sun dropped below the far riverbank and the sky turned black, Johnny said, ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘A student of mine seems to have disappeared. Counseling thinks she might’ve hurt herself.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nineteen?’

  He drank from his Corona. ‘At that age, it’s her right.’

  ‘To hurt herself?’

  ‘To disappear. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  I told him about Sheneel – her intelligence, her appetite for Dickinson’s poems, her disappearance from class, her brother’s worries, the rift between her and her parents. I left out that we danced together in class and that she haunted me like desire.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m hoping you might do it.’

  His face fell. ‘I don’t know what I can do.’

  ‘That’s your job. Finding people.’

  He said, ‘I’m thinking about trying something else.’

  ‘You just started this job.’

  ‘I’ve been doing it two months and no one has called. No one has come in the door. No one.’

  ‘I’m offering you work.’

  ‘This isn’t work.’

  ‘Try?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My brother—’

  ‘He gave me the rental. I appreciate that. I’ve told him I appreciate it.’

  ‘And he got you the license—’

  His face turned hard. ‘I know. But I don’t owe him—’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  He glanced at the dark river. ‘Open a falafel joint?’

  A breeze crossed the water and made my arms and back cold. ‘Sheneel Greene needs help. I think she must. Try to find her.’

  He kept his eyes on the river, as if its dark comforted him in ways I never would. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘She needs help,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  I didn’t. ‘I just do.’

  He had no answer.

  I left him at the table, walked to the exit. He called my name once and fell in behind me. After he paid the bill, we crossed the parking lot in silence – the moon rising in the east, the river water silvering in the moonlight – but before we reached the car, he turned from me and jogged to the rail that separated the lot from the river. He leaned on the rail as if he would climb or dive over.

  I ran to him. ‘You have no right!’

  He nodded at the water. ‘Dolphin.’

  In the silver light, the fin of a single dolphin rose from the surface a hundred feet or so from the docks. ‘Oh,’ I said.

  He pointed downriver. ‘Two more.’

  I stood by him and watched the three fins dip under the surface and, twenty seconds later, re-emerge upriver. When the Greek poet Arion was drowning, a dolphin supposedly saved him, and afterward artists made mosaics and rulers stamped coi
ns that showed him riding the dolphin like a horse, sometimes playing a lyre. During the Renaissance, Salvator Rosa painted him riding side-saddle, the sky behind him as silver and dark as the sky over the St Johns River.

  Before shipping out, Johnny said he’d watched from the deck of the hospital ship as a pod of dolphins herded a shoal of mullets toward shore and massacred them. Johnny said they turned the water as bloody as a battlefield.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  By crossing the river on the car ferry, in less than a half-hour we could be in Fernandina, where Sheneel Greene lived. Instead, we drove back the same way we came.

  After we put Percy into the backyard, we stood together in the bright light of the kitchen. When we first met, Johnny had the tight muscles, lanky torso, and deep suntan of the boys I knew in high school who spent their summers surfing or lifeguarding at the beach – looked just like them except for his Navy haircut and occasional dark seriousness. I desired him from the beginning.

  Now, his hair was growing and curling the way it curled in the pictures he’d shown me from when he was a teenager, but in the hard light his skin looked sweaty and cold. He came to me, but I turned away. ‘No,’ I said – the word he’d said to me at Safe Harbor.

  He went into the backyard with Percy, and I climbed into bed, picturing Sheneel Greene as I closed my eyes.

  During the night, Johnny came to me again, and I took him in the warmth and dream wash of the dark bedroom as though the night and our love were the flowing brown water of the river, and sharks and predator fish swam past, invisible, brushing their hard skins against us.

  FIVE

  Johnny

  In the dark bedroom, I kissed Lillian’s sleep-softened lips, and, thank God, instead of turning away, she rolled me gently on to my back and mounted me. For a while, I found peace in a bright spot of the dark room, and then she rolled off, still panting, a sweaty thigh against my sweaty thigh, and soon she slept again. Most nights, at two or three a.m., I wondered about the wisdom of throwing out the Ambien prescription. Vodka sometimes helped me drift between sleep and waking. Other times, I lay awake and willed my heart to beat harder – willed it to burst – but my heart ignored my will, and it was still beating when the sun rose, and I was sleepless and exhausted.