| Pray For War by Tim Foley |
| Tim Foley's story, Pray For
War, has been awarded first place in the first annual Arthur
Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction. Tim lives and writes in Chicago
and teaches at Adlai Stevenson High School. In May of 2003, he received
an MFA from Roosevelt University in Chicago. We're very pleased to
present Pray For War. October, 1971 Mary is not the only one who comes to me in dreams. In some, our father is there. In others, it is his ghost who is tracking me through the fields, through the sea, the sky, the jungle, the city. Our mother, too, is able to cross the meridian between the living and the dead, as well as the one which exists between health and lacerating sickness. She is never ill, though, never frail. There are others, too--so many others, all speaking, murmuring the same message over and over again in languages which are mine and yet not my own. Find her, they repeat endlessly. Find her and all will be well. The dream always ends with me finding her--that is the one constant besides my desire. In the most recent, I am working demolition with a crew of strangers, gutting an old hotel. I think they are strangers, although they could be boys from my hometown, friends from basic training, maybe even the men I killed in the war. It doesn’t matter. They work with their backs toward me; they are faceless. The pneumatic chisel shudders in my hands--reminding me of an automatic rifle--and gouges chunks out of the wall I am working on, covering me in thick, silty dust. I have barely enough time to realize that the chisel bit has disappeared into darkness--empty space has opened like a well--before a center section collapses at my feet in a stone waterfall. I step through the fissure, into the shadows cast by our halogen work lamps, realizing at once that this is not what should be. This room should not be here; it should be an access tunnel. Nor should the wallpaper, the table, the Corningware bowl, and the freshly-husked ears of corn. There is a sudden flap of birds’ wings and when it fades, she is there, stepping forward, brushing aside memory and loss and demolition dust as I fold her against me. “John,” she says, pressing her cheek and her body--a woman’s body now--into mine. “Where have you been?” “She usually hangs out around fifty-second and Broadway,” Walker says to me as we leave the Redwood Bar, heading uptown. “I’m pretty sure she sleeps there, but I don’t know if she’s...” He looks over at me, brushing a clump of oily hair out of his eye with his palm, and returns his gaze to the sidewalk squares moving past his feet. He does not continue. “If she’s what,” I say, putting my hand out, stopping him so I can see his face, give him my best You don’t want to say the wrong thing stare. He hasn’t shown me anything yet, and I still need to keep him under my thumb. He can barely meet my eyes. His flick from side to side, erratically; he’s mildly drunk or stoned or scared I’m a cop. “If she’s got a place of her own or not.” “When was the last time you saw her?” I start walking again, trying to pay attention to him and remain aware of what’s going on around us at the same time. So many things can happen if you’re not paying attention. “It was late last week, I think. Maybe.” “Maybe?” “No, yeah. It was. Late last week.” He catches the toe of his sneaker--one of those old-fashioned canvas high-tops--on the front of his belled-out jeans, trips slightly, and then looks back down to see what he’s just stumbled over. “Shit.” Tripwire, I think. Claymore. Is it an ambush? For an instant, the concrete and glass of Manhattan blur into green foliage; palm trees and tiger grass, a place I left behind. Before I can think to stop it, the city has returned to me. These days, the war is a temporary distraction, single frames in the reel. It, too, will come to pass--where were we when she said that to me? The kitchen? The fields? “What?” Walker says, holding a hand up to his ear. “I don’t hear so good lately. I think I’m coming down with an ear infection or something.” As he says this, he pokes his index finger into his ear and wiggles it around, hoping to what, I don’t know. Jar something loose, maybe. “You said something about throwing a pass.” “I said, ‘This, too, shall come to pass.’” I do not mention that I am unaware I said it out loud. “It’s from the Bible. Mar used to say it to me.” “Mar?” “My sister. The girl you’re taking me to see.” “Right, right. Crazy Mary.” I give him another hard stare. His face twitches. “Like in the song. Maybe. Sorry.” “Just show me where she is.” He nods rapidly and sets off again, shoving his hands into his thrift-store pockets as though the temperature’s suddenly dropped twenty degrees. Mary and I grew up in the middle of an ocean of corn, in the middle of the country, just past the middle of the century. Our mother’s death was the demarcation line of our youth; before her cancer, our father was merely mean. When she was gone, Mary found religion, and our father became distant, which in many ways was worse. A large part of our time, after she died, was spent away from the man in his own fields, which we always suspected he cared for more than us. Often at night, he would step across the lane, walking the end row, touching the stalks with only the tips of his fingers, caressing them, feeling them in a way I never could, the way he held our mother in the hospital. He had tilled the soil, planted the seeds, watered the shoots, and protected them as best he could from the permutation of all possible calamities--crows, drought, hail, blight. That was his gift. I don’t know how he did it, but he kept the birds off and the soil damp. There had been seasons when I had wandered into other fields where the dirt was hard and full of clods, but ours was as moist as a chocolate cake fresh from the oven. He had dipped his hands into that earth, and from it, things grew forth. By the time I left for the Army, I wouldn’t even ask him to pass me the TV Guide. I was afraid, somehow, that his touch had faded after mom’s death, that his unshakable grief could spread like a sickness. The best thing about the corn fields was that they provided Mary and me a place to disappear. We could slip into those rows like spirits, vanish without a trace except for maybe a few footprints or a bent leaf here or there. If you go barefoot, you’re less likely to leave a noticeable print--this was something I learned before the war, before discovering the barefooted bodies in the jungle. The first time she mentioned New York to me, Mary and I were sitting in the corn, although since it was late spring, the tiny shoots offered little in the way of concealment. It was distance we were after, and the two of us were on the back hill, the one farthest from the house. Father was in one of his moods--he and our mother had been arguing since early that morning, probably about money, though it could have just as easily been about any other thing. The man wasn’t choosy. Some days, Mary and I headed there automatically, independently of each other without discussing it. Although we left for school together in the morning, the high schoolers were let out earlier, and I would go to our place first. More often than not, Mary would arrive later on, always checking to make sure we were really alone. On this particular afternoon--this was the spring before the cancer--I was sixteen and halfway through high school. We were paging through Mary’s social studies book, imagining the places we’d go if we ever got the chance. I told her Paris. I was in love with the pictures of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame I had seen in books of my own. When I asked her where she’d go, she flipped the book shut and pointed to the picture of the Statue of Liberty on the cover. New York, she said. My teacher said that’s where everyone went who was trying to get away from problems in their homeland. I nodded solemnly; she was right. The Facts: 1. The French gave the United States the Statue of Liberty. 2. Vietnam was a French colony. 3. Gustav Eiffel designed both the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. 4. Mary is in New York; I was in Vietnam. Often, as our patrol was forced to take emergency shelter in the grass fields--this was elephant grass--tall and thick enough so that even the rotor wash of the gunships couldn’t batten it down--and even now, as I range the streets of this island, I consider these things, trying to fit them like variables into an equation, solving for the unknown, the solution that will bring me to her. Once, Mary had her portable Philco with her, tuned to the doo-wop station out of Decatur. “Earth Angel” came on--part of a back-to-back Platters set. “Dance with me, John,” she said, standing and brushing off her skirt. “Come on.” “I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound disinterested. The truth was that I had only danced with one other girl besides our mother. “Please?” I stood up, put my hand on her hip, and my left hand up flat like I was taking an oath. She laughed, realizing right away that I had no idea. “You’re supposed to hold the person,” she said, pressing into me, lacing her fingers through my own. “Not keep them away.” “I know. Right.” She looked up at me, smiling and biting her lip at the same time. “And then you step forward.” I kicked her foot. “You step between my legs. I step back.” I knocked her foot again; she pulled me closer. I stepped forward; she didn’t step back. For a long moment, we stood that way--as close as we had ever been. I could feel every single inch of my body, and hers against it. “And then you turn,” she said, softly, not moving. The song ended. “Twilight Time” came on. Mary placed her hand in the small of my back and stepped between my legs. “Here,” she spoke into my chest. “I’ll lead.” When we make it up to Fifty-Second, Walker steps off the curb without looking both ways, right into the path of a gypsy cab. I have barely enough time to snag the hood of his sweatshirt and yank him back, but it is enough. The cabbie blasts the horn and accelerates around the corner so fast his tires scream into the night air. Walker coughs a few times, spits into a sewer grate, and rubs his neck where the zipper caught his throat. “Thanks,” he says, and coughs again. “That cab would have pasted me.” He touches his throat again and looks at his fingers. “Is it bleeding? Does it look bad?” “It’s a little red, but it’s not bleeding. You’ll make it.” “Damn,” he says, readjusting his his sweatshirt, his coat, putting things back in order. “I thought your whole life was supposed to flash in front of your eyes or something. What a bunch of bullshit.” He looks genuinely disappointed. “Tell me about it,” I say, wondering how many of the dying men I’ve seen in my life have mentioned this exact same thing. He goes to step in the street again, but pulls his foot back--the gesture reminds me of someone testing the temperature in a swimming pool with their big toe, which reminds me of someone checking a suspiciously leafy bit of ground for a tripwire. If you step directly down on it, it won’t go off--lateral motion is what does it. “Let’s just wait for the light,” he tells me. Our mother died in the dry, brittle heat of midsummer. By September, things began to come apart for the three of us. Our roots, weakened from holding on under strain, began to give way. More and more often, when Mary and I walked the rows (on weekends, usually, as school had started again for her), we found more and more downed stalks on the ground. When the fall harvest began, a murder of crows had settled in by the back hill. At night, their raspy voices kept me awake. I pictured them gathering at the crop line off in the distance, a living sea of dark feathers, claws and beaks, and I kept an eye on the bloated harvest moon, waiting for it to be blotted out one night by thousands of crows taking flight. The tension between the crops and the crows manifested itself inside our house as well. The long hours we spent--especially our father and I--in the fields wore us razor thin, and we were all prone to snapping since the funeral. Mary the most of all, as she was the woman of the house, assuming Mother’s position--one which placed her in opposition to our father. In the wake of our grief and the fading season, we stopped speaking in normal tones. Instead, we stomped through the house with our boots on, leaving wide swaths of mud on the linoleum that we scraped at and mopped away Saturday afternoons. Soon, the only noises within those walls were the clocking of bootheels, the clanking of dishes, and the bursts of shouting that broke out whenever two of us were in a room together. Mary and I were no longer in league against our father; at times, even, we were at odds with one another. She began reading Mother’s bible fanatically, seeking comfort in its yellowed verses. I couldn’t look at the thing after watching our father write her name on the inside front cover, along with the date she died, in his blocklike rube’s script. When my draft notice arrived in the mail, Mary began staying up late. From my room, I could hear her moving around downstairs--the quiet shuffle of her feet, the flutter of wispy pages, and her own soft murmuring as she worked her way through the good book or prayed without ceasing or whatever it was she did. I couldn’t sleep. Images of my life in the army kept me awake, a constant thought-movie that projected itself on my bedroom ceiling night after night. I knew that more than likely, I’d end up in Vietnam, a country I’d only recently discovered on a map. Possibly I’d die there, and my remains would be shipped back to the States to be buried at Arlington, where the green grass--always well-tended--stretched out even farther than our own fields. “Let’s see if she’s hanging around somewhere on the street,” Walker says, “because I don’t really want to check the alleys.” “You sure?” I hold up half of a $20 bill. He has the other half tucked away somewhere; I gave it to him at the Redwood. “I’ve been straight with you, man. There’s just all kinds of trouble in there. Junkies, speed freaks, whatever. Winos. Bums. Piss and shit and rotting garbage. I don’t even go down there in the daytime.” He has a point; the alleys are dangerous. It’s another world back there--one that exists behind the city lights. “Or I could mug you,” I say, and instantly regret it. His eyes narrow; he’s wondering if he’s been stupid by believing my story. “I’m sorry. I’m kidding. Bad joke.” There is an instant where I think he might bolt. He flicks his eyes over his shoulder like he’s checking an escape route. “How about that other half?” he asks. I shake my head, sorry, no can do. “When we find her.” “What if we don’t?” He points at a Led Zeppelin poster in the front window of a record store. “What if she’s buying a stairway to heaven?” I shrug my shoulders while keeping my hands in my pockets. “Then I don’t know what.” Mary graduated from high school at about the same time I was having my Ranger tabs sewn onto my uniform sleeves. She sent me a picture someone--our father, maybe, or one of her friends--must have snapped on the Instamatic. She has her robe open in the front--it looks hot in the photo--and her mortarboard and mother’s bible cradled in her arm. This is the photo I showed to Walker; it’s all I have left. When I was shipping out for basic training, she gave me a tiny New Testament. It had a glossy, marbled-ivory cardstock cover and onionskin pages with Jesus’ words highlighted in red. I kept it with me; it was something to read at night. It fell out of my pocket somewhere in the A Shau valley; I was either jumping into or out of a helicopter, no doubt in too much of a hurry to stop and pick it up. I’ve often wondered if anyone found it later--there was a lot of religion out in indian country. There were guys with crosses on their dogtag chains, stars of David, crucifixes and scripture inked onto their their helmet covers and across the backs of their flak jackets, guys tucking bibles in every free pocket of their fatigues, holy pictures, rosaries, 35 mm canisters of holy water dipped out of the Church of St. Paul in Saigon, you name it. Fortunately, her photo arrived not long after her New Testament went missing. I fastened it inside my flak vest with one of our mother’s silver hair clips (Mary had the other one), and figured I was double lucky, nothing could touch me. Walker recognized her immediately--in fact, he snapped his fingers and pointed at the picture like a parody of someone recognizing something. “I do know her,” is what he said. “She’s older now, though.” He swirled the beer around in his glass and watched the whirlpool flatten out. “I’m trying to think of where it was.” What are the odds, I thought. After all this time. “Her name is Mary,” I said as he finished the last of his beer and I motioned for two more. He chewed his lower lip before he spoke again. “Yeah, that’s her name, too. Mary.” He made a fist with his left hand and rubbed his chin with the knuckles. “Or at least the name she’s going by, anyway.” “You’ve talked to her?” “Once or twice. We happened to be in the same place at the same time. You know how it is, man.” I said nothing, but I tried to make the expression on my face match the one on his, which made me feel sincere. “Tell me more,” I said, putting her picture away--touching it carefully by the edges and placing it back in my inside pocket where it would be safe. I spent my first tour in-country as a door gunner on a Huey, firing blindly into the jungle, never knowing what I’d hit, or even if I hit anything at all. We ran resupply, medevac, air support, insertion and extraction, air assault, whatever was needed. It was a nomad division, hopping from firebase to firebase--Harriet to Baker to Peter Pan to Irene, Hue City, and China Beach. Mary wrote me frequently, and I looked forward to her letters, even though they were becoming progressively more fundamentalist in tone. Her handwriting, which was once a perfect Palmer script, had turned into thick, passionate pencil slashes, broken up only by increasing references to GOD THE FATHER and JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD. As far as she was concerned, war was wrong, killing was a sin, and I was an agent of an army of darkness; she included pages of scripture to support her argument, and by the way, our father wasn’t doing so well. He had had a few minor strokes. When my time was up, I signed on for another tour--as a ranger this time, which meant time stateside at ranger school. In between, I went to Tokyo and then home. While our father had lost weight, Mary had put on some farm muscles, and at some point had taken to wearing our mother’s clothes. What struck me even more, though, was that she had on her wedding ring. I remembered when she was in the hospital, it had seemed as large as a pipe washer on her emaciated finger. On my sister, it was a perfect fit, and she had adopted Mother’s unconscious habit of rubbing it with her thumb. Oh my god, I thought. She’s married him. Somehow, Mary and our father made me feel like a barely tolerable guest. The two of them had closed ranks without me, although they didn’t seem to be on the best of terms, either. I heard them arguing on more than one occasion--about money, mostly, and where it was going to come from, arguments which echoed childhood memories. Mary was peeling some carrots into a bowl when I asked her about the money I’d been sending home. “It’s here,” she said, cutting off a dry patch. “Where here? In the bank?” “In the sideboard.” “What?” She cut the last carrot in two, primly wiped her hands on her apron--mother’s apron--opened the top drawer of the sideboard, and took out a stack of red-white-and-blue airmail envelopes which were held together with a rubber band. Not one had been opened. “The wages of sin is death, John,” she said, holding them out to me. When I didn’t take them, she set the bundle down next to the bowl and went back to peeling the carrots. I grabbed her wrist to make her stop. “Why don’t you just take the money and leave?” I asked. “Go somewhere else? He doesn’t need you, Mary. He’s making you crazy.” “How dare you tell me what to do. I belong here,” she said, looking away from me, out the window. At the fields. “And this, too, shall come to pass.” “Mary--” I squeezed harder. Did I know I was? I kept picturing her at the supper table, touching his mouth with the corner of her napkin. “You murder people, John. You burn their homes. That’s what soldiers do, isn’t it? You’re hurting me!” She tore her arm from my grip and knocked the bowl to the floor. It did not break, and she tripped over it and sat down hard as I lunged at her. “You little shit,” was all I could get out before I stepped on an unseen carrot and lost my own balance. What I meant to say was I’ll kill you. “So you were in the war, right?” Walker asks. “I mean, that is what you said.” “Does it matter? Were you?” He wasn’t; I can tell. Student deferment? Got drugged up and told the draft board he was queer? CO? He shakes his head and looks down. I can’t tell if he’s amused or ashamed. “Shin splints. I can hardly walk some days.” “That’s a new one.” A black guy walks past, bobbing his head to a transistor radio squawking Hendrix--once a paratrooper, supposedly. He’s wearing red-tinted aviator glasses, even though it’s the middle of the night, and reeks of pot. Its bushfire aroma rolls off of him in waves. “So what was that like?” I hate this question. It’s the reason I’ve thrown out all my fatigues, hidden my decorations and dog tags. “I got drafted. I went. Then I went back.” “You re-upped?” I nod. “Did you like it or something? Holy shit.” “What else was I going to do?” “Oh, man. Come on.” He wiggles his finger in his ear again. “I’ll bet you saw some pretty bad shit.” “Yeah,” I say, lamely. He’s right, but I don’t have the words. “And then what?” “I was wounded, so they sent me home.” Where I discovered that it was possible for a man--especially a man in uniform--to be invisible, for people to look right through me, right past me, pretending that neither I nor my clothes existed. “You got shot?” “No.” “Landmine? Was it one of those bouncing Bettys? I read about those in Life.” “I was burned in a fire.” That’s enough for Walker. He stops talking, although I can feel him eyeballing me, looking for the telltale puttylike scars of a burn victim. I don’t have very many. The body I was able to pull on top of me was the one that turned to charcoal. The palm of my left hand, though, is discolored and stiff with scar tissue, as is the center of my chest, where I have a perfect dogtag-shaped brand, except the characters are reversed. In the hospital in Tokyo, one of the nurses would rub antibiotic salve into it, sliding her fingers around my neck. In my morphine dreams, it was Mary. “Keep your eyes open,” Walker says, reminding me again where I am, where I am going. “She could be anywhere around here.” At home, I had trouble sleeping without the war, a common problem, especially without the booze or pot or nightlife in Tokyo and Bangkok. The night Mary and I fought--my last night--I was laying on my too-small mattress, twitching in the shallows of sleep, when I heard something moving out in the corn. Something thrashing, actually; it was the sound of blind, high-speed running through foliage. I recognized it at once. I could also detect a human voice, although I could not decipher its low murmur. Vietminh? Instinctively, I snapped out of bed, reaching for a rifle that was not there, my heart already racing, my mouth dry and tasting like a blown fuse, before I remembered I was back on the farm. As I went downstairs to investigate, the back door clicked, followed by the slaps of Mary’s bare feet on the kitchen floor. She was a mess--mud-splattered and sweaty, her jeans sopping brown at the knees. Her hair was damp and dirty, full of bits of grass and cornhusk, and sticking to a cut on her cheek. Her right palm was also bloody--a ragged puncture that looked like she’d mistakenly caught one of the fence barbs, and I wondered when she’d had her last tetanus booster. The shirt she was wearing--one of my old flannels--was open in the front, and I could see that her chest was smeared across with mud. She sucked in air in huge gasps, and there--illumined in a sliver of thin May moon, I could make out both Mother and Father in her features. She had them both bound within her somehow, and the effect made me incredibly uneasy, as though I was talking to a spirit. “Where have you been?” I asked. “It’s nearly oh three hundred.” She looked at me cooly, her eyes, gleaming chips of obsidian. I reached for her hand and her shirt fell farther open, but she made no move to cover herself up. “What happened to your hand?” “I cut it on the fence by the back hill. Don’t worry about it.” She reached up with her other hand and touched the small cross she wore at the base of her throat. “The Lord will protect me.” “You need a tetanus shot,” I said, pressing the inside of her shirt-tail into her hand. “I told you, the Lord will protect me.” She said it with such ferocity, I thought she was going to strike me, cuff my ear, like our father used to. Instead, she ran her fingers across her chest--revealing a lighter patch--and gently touched my forehead with the first two, rubbing her sweat and the dirt from our fields into the skin. “The Lord will protect you, too, John.” She pressed her thumb to my lips. “I’ve been praying for you, that you would be reborn into the kingdom of heaven, and follow the path of righteousness for all of your days.” I couldn’t move. I was frozen, a pillar of salt standing on a pressure-sensitive mine. She closed her eyes and moved her thumb down to my chin. Before I knew to stop her, she pressed her lips onto mine, cupping my face in both of her hands. I leaned into her, tasting the salt of her sweat. “That is the kiss of life, which our Lord and Savior bestowed onto Lazarus to wake him from the sleep of death. Arise and walk, John, for you are healed.” She took her hands away and turned to go up the stairs. “Mary,” I said, my voice thick inside my mouth. “What’s out there?” “Nothing, John. Except for the corn. And the crows.” She stepped into the shadows, leaving me in alone in the hallway, her blood and perspiration cooling on my face. I’d like to think that my father and I died at the same time. For some reason, the symmetry appeals to me. I would like to believe that his heart gave out--finally--when I was laying flat on my back in Valley 74, looking up at a column of fire that was like a giant can of red-orange paint being poured over the landscape, incinerating everything, a living, breathing hell. My throat was scorched; when the I-corps found me later, someone wrote the name Harry across my forehead with a magic marker. They told me about it in the hospital. I was the only survivor. “Why’d they call you Harry?” the brunette nurse asked me, tracing my dogtag scar with a salve-tipped finger. “Are these I-corps guys dumbshits, or what?” “Mary,” I said, finally able to use my lips. “I was trying to say Mary.” When my condition stabilized, I was sent to Tokyo again--free at last--where in the space of a week, I received Mary’s last letter, our father’s last letter, and his death notice all in the same week, all postdated in a thick manila envelope, along with my Silver Star. Mary: John, I am going the way of all the earth. Joshua 23.14. I will pray for you. Lo, and I will be with you always, to the end of your days. Father: Mary’s gone, god damn it. She ran away, too. You’re all I have left. Reverend Merkner: I hope this letter finds you safe and well. Unfortunately, my missive carries with it sad tidings. Your father has been called by the Lord to serve in the kingdom of heaven-- As a decorated veteran, Uncle Sugar let me choose where I wanted to land in the States. “Anywhere you want, son,” the desk sergeant said (who was at least twice my age and sported a double chin, the likes of which I had not seen when I was in-country. The collar of my own dress shirt was at least an inch too big). “It’s the least we can do.” He had on a Citadel ring with a red stone that he kept rubbing with his thumb, like my mother. Like Mary. “So what’s it going to be?” I leaned back as best I could in the hard plastic chair and told him the place that had been in my mind since learning that Mary had run away. At first, he cocked an eyebrow at me--it was a long, long way from home, according to my dossier. But then he smiled and told me to take care back in the world. Three days later, I arrived in New York without a home, without a family, in need of another war. Walker jabs his elbow into my arm. “That’s her.” She’s at the end of the block, alone on a bus bench. It’s clear that she owns it. In my mouth, I can taste her sweat. I hand Walker the rest of the twenty. “Here. Thank you. Go back to the Redwood.” He looks at it like he doesn’t know what it is. “Go. Now. Please. I need to talk to her alone.” He snaps the half from my fingers, makes it disappear. “Are you sure?” Fall back. Fall back, god dammit. “Absolutely,” I say, moving away from him. “Mary,” I say, stepping into the streetlamp arc. I sit down on the bench. Her head is hanging down as though it weighs a ton or she is in pain. “Are you all right?” I ask. “Are you hurt?” “Who are you?” she asks. Her words come out slowly. Is she drunk? I can’t smell liquor. “John.” Is it her face? I can’t tell in the shadows. “Is that a fact. You got a cigarette, John?” She rolls her head over to me, and as she moves out of the darkness, I can see that it isn’t her. The resemblance, though is incredible. When she reaches for the cigarette I’m not offering, I get a good look at her hand. Where there should be a scar, there is only smooth skin. I touch her fingertips with my own, remembering a faraway dance. “You’re not my sister,” I say. Her white lipstick gleams. “I could be.” She touches my shoulder. “I could be your sister, if that’s what you want.” This is the beginning of her sales pitch. I lean back on the bench, staring up at the sky and the stars and the tops of the buildings, remembering staring at the sky across the world, wondering what Mary and I would do after I was through in the army. Find her and all will be well. I know it’s only a matter of time before I do. I am a ranger, a pathfinder, a tracker, and she is not. I consider Crazy Mary’s offer. She could be my sister; perhaps that’s close enough. Salvation, from what I know, is a price and a process. I have money--my forty pieces of silver--and time, as the Stones say, is on my side
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