The Veteran ©2000 David Boyne

Harry Sears pushed aside his half-eaten breakfast, making a grand spectacle of my arrival at the restaurant. He bellowed, "Well good fucking morning, Mr. Wizard!"

It made no difference that Harry was seventy-one; he remained as loud and derisive as he had been when a twenty-one year old soldier. He liked to call me Mr. Wizard because I held a few patents that brought me a modest income, and because he knew it irritated me.

I looked at Harry's wife, her wheelchair pushed up to the table, and said, "Good morning, Mirth." I felt a twist of emotions from saying the odd name that had become an insult of fate.

"Allow me to purchase a cup of java for the great inventor!" Harry waved his big arm at the waitress passing with a pot of coffee.

I told her, "Just coffee, please."

"That's right," Harry said, reaching out to grab the woman's hip, as she poured my coffee. "He's a busy man. Can't stay long. He's chairing a big meeting in the back room, a big meeting with the Veterans of Fucking Whores."

The waitress refilled Harry's cup and told him to watch his language, which pleased him.

As always, Harry's thick white hair was uncombed, his plaid shirt untucked. I saw that one ear piece of his black frame eyeglasses was now held in place by scotch tape.

When the waitress left, Harry leaned toward his wife, grabbing her wheel chair and raising the pitch of his voice, as a parent might do to get a child's attention. "Hey, Mirth! Mirth. Mr. Wizard is here. Remember Mr. Wizard? Don't you want to say hello, Mirth?"

This was always the worst part for me, when Harry tried to cajole a response from his semi-comatose wife, her head bent to the side, the muscles in her thin neck strained tight. Fifty years ago, for a few unending months, Harry and I had soldiered together. By rights, Harry Sears could have claimed much more from me than five minutes of conversation once a week. But he never did.

"Oh, well. Not one of Mirth's better days! You'll have to excuse her." He grabbed a pack of unfiltered cigarettes off the table. He winked, knowing my dislike for cigarette smoke. "Guess you'll be going now, into the purified air of your Club."

"No rush," I said.

Harry blew smoke at my lie.

Every Saturday I have breakfast in the back room of that restaurant with a group of veterans. Six years ago there had been twenty-one of us, so we had called ourselves the Twenty-One Club. Other than the weekly breakfast, funerals were the Club's only social events. We were down to twelve members. Harry was a member, but had stopped coming to our gatherings three years ago, when Mirth's condition demanded his full-time attendance.

"So, Harry, today's the big anniversary."

"Big anniversary— shit." He inhaled smoke and narrowed his eyes. "Big anniversary? Tell me, Mr. Wizard, what kind of sick shitheads celebrate the anniversary of butchering millions of people?"

I didn't venture an answer.

"For fifty years this world has been going to hell in a hand basket!" Harry said it loud enough for anyone in the place to hear. "Don't you ever wonder what the fuck we fought that war for? Made the world free for democracy, didn't we. I'll tell you this, wars are for making money. The bigger the war, the more money some sons of bitches are making. You and me were in combat. Not one of those pansies in the back room was, were they? They sit on their asses sipping their decafe and reminiscing about the hell they went through to requisition toothpicks for us dumb shits getting blown to pieces at the front."

He made his loud voice go up in a falsetto, imitating a fastidious clerk, "O-o-o! I just hate when I get carbon paper stains on my nice neat uniform!"

Harry was in especially bitter form. I suppose it was to be expected. It was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. He had been at Normandy. I had, too. On June 18, the soldier walking nearest me had stepped on a land mine and been blown apart. Before I passed out, I saw Harry bullying a weary medic over to me. Sometime between passing out and awaking in a hospital three days later, I lost two fingers on my left hand, thirty percent of the hearing in my left ear, a pound of flesh and muscle in my left thigh and a lot of blood. I didn't see Harry again until he came home in the autumn of 1945, boasting he had made it back without so much as a scratch.

I sipped my coffee. When I saw Mirth's head snap up I braced for what was coming. "My radiator is leaking!"

Her voice was harsh and loud. I knew without looking that several diners were staring at us. Mirth began rocking the wheelchair back from the table. "I'm ready to go now!"

Harry casually reached over and put his big arm on the side of the wheelchair. Without glancing at her, he steadied the chair. "The doctors tell me I should still talk to her. The geniuses."

Mirth's illness began a decade ago. Her mind and personality were soon lost, but her body lingered, endlessly deteriorating. At first, Harry's income as a tool and die maker, his GI benefits, his employer's health insurance and the government's Social Security were enough to pay for doctors, therapy, medication, nurses. But on retirement, Harry had to assume full-time care for Mirth.

"My eyes hurt!"

"Mirth, please. Be quiet." He did not look at her, but his voice was softer.

"My radiator is leaking!"

"Please be quiet, Mirth. I want to have a conversation here. Just wait five minutes."

Harry blew smoke out his nose. "We used to have a couple hours, almost every day, the first years. We would talk." He stared at the ashtray, as if experiencing the memory of talking with his wife. "You want to know what one of the doctors said to me? He said, Mr. Sears, re-al-i-ty—" Harry disdainfully drew out the word, "For your wife, re-al-i-ty is like watching clothes tumbling in a dryer." Harry looked at me. "Honest to Christ, that's what he said."

He made his voice pretentious. "Now, a-hem, Mr. Sears, your wife is watching laundry spinning in a dryer. And, a-hem, sometimes a red shirt or a green sock gets stuck to the glass. She sees it, but then its gone back in the spinning."

He snuffed his cigarette in an ashtray, shaking his head. "Clothes in a fucking dryer."

I looked down at my hands. I don't know why the memory came, but I was thinking how, in the sweet Spring of 1946, I had gotten very drunk, along with a dozen other recently discharged veterans, at Harry Sear's stag party. We had all slept at his newly purchased house, where, the next morning, hung over and bleary, we had attended his wedding. I remember how I thought that Harry had done quite well for himself, marrying this handsome, healthy girl of twenty with the cheerful smile and fitting name. I remember how she brightened each time she looked at Harry. And now, through all the years, I saw myself, felt myself, kissing the new bride. I could even smell again the warm faded scent of her perfume, like crushed flowers.

I was half-aware that Harry was delivering one of his bitter tirades, but I was staring at his wife. She was quiet now, not rocking the wheel chair. Her eyes were open but her head was hanging, as if too heavy for the stretched muscles of her thin neck. Her hands lay in her lap, the wrists bent inward, the fingers pressed into the thumbs and the skin a raw red. I could not keep from seeing a grotesque resemblance to lobster claws.

Harry banged a big fist down on the table. I came back to awareness, but with the strange memory of kissing his bride, fifty years ago, still influencing me. I could not keep from smiling.

"What the hell are you grinning at?"

"A memory, Harry. A private memory."

To this day I don't know what caused my sudden decision. But the moment after the idea flashed before me, I knew it was what I wanted to do, what I should have done long ago. "Have dinner with me tonight, Harry."

Harry must have been as shocked by my invitation as I was. He looked away.

"The Benson Hotel has great steaks. I'll get a room for after dinner. We can talk in privacy and damage a bottle of good scotch."

"Got to stay with Mirth." He fumbled with the pack of cigarettes.

"Get someone to look after her. It's just for the evening."

"Yeah, who? The insurance don't cover home nursing. I do the nursing. And I'm better at it than those lazy slouches."

"Harry, I would—"

"You know, we live in the same house? Same house we got married in."

The mention of his wedding, coming so soon after my memory of kissing Mirth when she was a bride, jolted me. It took me a moment to realize that Harry was just making a clumsy change of subject.

"Just five blocks from here. Remember it? Got married there. Had the reception there. Our honeymoon was the goddamn down payment!"

"Put the change under my pillow! I want to go now!"

Mirth's harsh voice made my shoulders go up in reflex.

Harry leaned toward her. "Okay, Mirth, okay. Just let me finish my coffee and we'll go."

"My eyes hurt!" Then she said, the way someone might rush through a prayer in church, "I want to go now. Is it two thirty-five? I want to go now. Check the oil. I want to go now. My eyes hurt."

"Harry, have dinner with me," I said.

"Ah, I can never get away."

He only shrugged as he made the statement, but there was bone deep weariness in his voice.

"I want to go now! Check the oil!"

Harry got up and readied her wheelchair. As I stood I could hear laughter from the back room. I wanted to go there, to take my place at the tables the waitresses had pushed together for the Twenty-One Club, but I couldn't turn away.

"Harry, I'm arranging for a nurse to come to your house tonight. No arguments. I'm taking care of it. You're having dinner with me, Harry. It's goddamn D-Day."

He spun the wheelchair away from the table. He stared hard at me, his eyes never blinking. "Okay, Mr. Wizard. You spring for the nurse. And I'll eat your steak and drink your booze. And we can bore the crap out of each other."


I waited in the lobby of the Benson for an hour past our dinner reservation, then went to a phone and called Harry's number.

When a woman answered, I was startled. "Is this Harry Sears' number?"

"Yes, but Mr. Sears is not in. May I take a message for him?"

"Oh, you must be the nurse?"

"Yes. Who is this?"

I told her my name. "I arranged for your help, with the agency, this afternoon."

"Oh, I see."

"I have a dinner engagement with Mr. Sears. Could you tell me when he may have left?"

Harry had left the house two hours ago, when the cab I had arranged arrived to pick him up. He had told the nurse he would not be back until very late.

"I told Mr. Sears my instructions from the agency were to attend to Mrs. Sears overnight. I came prepared."

I thanked her and hung up. When I turned to cross the lobby I saw Harry coming through the main doors. It was obvious he had been drinking. I put my arm around his wide shoulders and steered him toward the hotel's restaurant, happy to nod sympathetically as he complained about immigrant cab drivers who refused to speak English.

We sat at a corner table, eating slowly but not saying much. We had never been friends while growing up. Yet, we had lived in the same neighborhood, walked in the same streets, gone to the same schools. Harry was working at a gas station, the same job he had through high school, when he was drafted. Only a week earlier, I had left college to enlist. I remembered my family discussing the letter Harry Sears' father had written to the newspaper. Harry's father, a low-level officer in the Carpenter's Union, had demanded to know why the mayor's two draft-age, unskilled sons had been appointed to draft-exempt managerial jobs in the city's ship yards, when the sons of working people were "being stuffed into the meat grinder overseas".

Harry had come back from the war to a transformed, prospering nation of inflated wages, swollen expectations, and a new mania for credit-based consumerism. The GI Bill paid for Harry to learn the tool and die trade, but could not teach him how to grab hold of the galloping prosperity. He drank. He quit or was fired from job after job, taking two steps back for each one forward. Then, after several miscarriages, Mirth had a child, a boy that lived only eight months. I remember the funeral, how Mirth had dropped a handful of dirt onto the tiny coffin. Harry had grabbed a shovel from a grave digger and filled the grave himself. Later, I would hear about the bankruptcy that left Harry with only his house and his tools, and more objects, in lawyers and creditors, for his bitter scorn.

After dinner we went to the room I had taken for the night. I poured the scotch and we stood by the window and looked down four stories into the dark street.

"To life," I said, making the first half of the toast we always made in the Twenty-One Club. We drank and I refilled our glasses. Harry completed the Club's toast, "To death."

We sat in chairs drawn up to the big window. I wanted the scotch to make Harry pliable, open to the proposition I was going to make. But at the same time I watched for signs of the alcohol making him intractable. I should have watched more for what the scotch would do to me.

We began to talk with an openness that was unexpected. After a few drinks I no longer felt surprised by the revealing statements Harry and I made.

"Everyone is dead." Harry waved his glass at me. "You're the only one left. And you always hated my guts."

When I didn't dispute him, he laughed.

"You've still got Mirth," I said.

"No." He rolled his glass between the palms of his hands. "No. She's dead, too." He emptied his glass, then held it beneath the lamp, the light softly fragmenting in the thick glass. "The thing I miss... is just talking. You don't know, no one knows, but Mirth and me always talked. Talked about everything. No matter how tough things got, no matter how bad my luck was coming. We talked about everything. She knew what I thought... about things..."

He set the glass down, and refilled it, but said no more. That seemed the best opening I would get to say what was on my mind, to implement the plan I had made that morning in the restaurant.

"Harry, I've got something on my mind. Now, hear me out. I just want you to think about this. We'll talk it over after you've thought about it."

He was looking hard at me but I didn't waver. "I've done well with some of my patents. I have more than enough money to care for my family."

"What of it?" His eyes were unblinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

"I want to arrange nursing care for Mirth." I waited for a reaction, but he only looked down at the glass in his hands. "Think about this, Harry. Think about it. We don't have to talk about details now. We'll get together and hash it all out. There are apartments near the VA hospital. There are good visiting nurse firms. You can even rent out your house, for some income. But we'll talk about all that later."

He tilted his glass at me, then drained it, and immediately reached for the bottle. "Sure," he said. "Sure."

It was four in the morning when we stood on the sidewalk. The doorman waved a cab over for us. Harry looked at me, squinting. "I've been more in my life than a worn out drunk. I was young. Was strong. I survived their stinking meat grinder."

I stepped over to the cab and put three ten dollar bills in the driver's hand and told him Harry's address. The doorman opened the cab door but Harry turned and grabbed me with both hands.

"Do you remember that nothing village? A pile of stones, that's all it was. Didn't even have to fight for it. Krauts ran out and we walked right in."

I was trying to move Harry toward the cab. The sober part of me didn't like how Harry and I were providing the doorman with a comic show: two stumbling, drunken old men carrying on about the Germans, the World War.

"You don't remember?" Harry pressed against me. "You were walking on my left," he said. Then he looked aside, as if he could see his own memory happening there on the sidewalk. "That shit Dunstan was ahead of us. Lieutenant David Dunstan. He got it the very next day."

I put my hands on Harry's shoulders and pushed him back. "I remember it now, Harry," I said. And I did. David Dunstan had been my roommate in college. We had enlisted together.

"It's the girl that I can't forget," Harry said. He shook his head and looked down at the sidewalk. "Came out of nowhere. Just a whore. But she had flowers in her hair. Black hair. Threw herself on me, kissed me right on the mouth. I love you, she said it in English. She was crying and laughing."

He looked right at me. "All the time I think about her." I went back to the hotel room and lay across the bed, falling asleep with my clothes still on. I dreamed of war. It was a silent dream. I scrambled over piles of rubble, pressed against blackened walls of bombed out buildings. Then I saw Harry. He was kicking open the door of a ruined building. There was a bloody hole in his side. I tried to warn Harry, the hot smell of his blood would attract death. I yelled, but the silence didn't break. He charged through the doorway, firing his silent rifle.

The phone rang twice before I could find it.

"It's me."

"Harry?"

"Yeah."

My head ached and my mouth was thick from dehydration. "Christ. Harry. Where are you?"

"You awake? You listening to me?"

"Yes, yes. I'm awake. Harry, where are you? You got home all right?" There was no answer. "Is everything all right? Harry?"

"I've killed Mirth."

I heard exactly what he said. I stood up in the dark room, hearing Harry's breathing on the line.

"I smothered her."

"Harry, are you at home?"

He didn't answer. I raised my voice, "Are you at home?"

"It's over. It's just over." He sounded far away.

"Harry, I am going to be there as fast as I can. You've got to promise me that you'll just sit tight till I get there. Promise me that, Harry."

He laughed at me.

"Listen, Harry. I don't appreciate this gag of yours. When I get there—"

"I'm waiting." He hung up.

Flooded with anger, I dialed his number. The line was busy.

There was a cab parked outside the hotel. I shoved a twenty at the driver as I got in. I promised more if he would drive fast.

I lost track of my own thoughts until the cab was bouncing through an old neighborhood where disease had stripped the leaves from the dark trees arching over the narrow streets. The driver said, "It's on this block."

"That one." I leaned over the front seat and pointed. Somehow I knew the house, although I had not been there in more than fifteen years.

The driver pulled over. "Want me to wait?"

I didn't answer him. I didn't move. There were no lights on inside the small house.

"Can you call the police?"

My question startled him.

"My friend, inside the house," I said. "He may be ill."

"You want an ambulance then? I can radio my dispatcher. She can phone an ambulance."

"Yes, an ambulance." Finally I moved, pushing open the door. "And please wait."

I got out of the cab and walked across the uncut lawn, the wet grass soaking my pant cuffs. The loose boards groaned when I stepped onto the porch. I swung open the rusted screen door and knocked on the wood door.

I knocked again, waited, then tried the handle. It was unlocked. I eased it open and stepped into the dark house.

"Harry? It's me." I walked into a room to the left and bumped my knee on a sofa. I found a table lamp and turned it on. There were stacks of newspapers along one wall and a cheap clock was ticking on an empty bookshelf. I looked for some sign of the nurse, an overnight bag, or a coat thrown over a chair, but saw nothing.

I went through the kitchen to the back of the house.

"Harry?" I opened a door off the kitchen.

"My eyes hurt!"

She was in her wheelchair, in front of the blue flickering light of an old television. The wheels of the chair were tied with clothesline rope to a heavy desk.

"My radiator is leaking!"

"Mirth. I'm a friend. I'm a friend of Harry's, and yours."

"My radiator is leaking!"

The cords of her slumped neck went tight each time she made one of her loud statements. Her harsh voice sounded awful inside the dark, quiet house.

"I'm ready to go now. I'm ready to go now! Put the change under my pillow."

Having found her, I felt relief, and then anger. I walked briskly through the kitchen, turning on every light I found, frowning at the cobwebs among the plastic flowers in a jar on the wood table. I went back to the front door and stood at the base of the short flight of stairs to the second floor.

"Harry?"

I walked up the stairs. "Harry! I just want to make sure you're all right." I didn't bother to keep the irritation out of my voice. If he wasn't upstairs, passed out drunk, I knew he would be at a bar somewhere, enjoying his malicious laugh at my expense.

At the top of the stairs, in the tiny, dim hallway, I saw three doorways. Only one door was closed.

The bang of the gun was so loud I thought I had been shot. I could not move. I stood there, my ears ringing, until the smell of gunpowder tainted my breathing.

I opened the closed door.

Harry lay across the bed, the gun in his hand pointing up into the ceiling. The bloody spray of skull and brains had splattered across the bed's backboard, some of the dark wetness sliding down as I looked. I looked a long time.

I recognized the gun. It was a German pistol. Like so many soldiers, Harry had brought one back from the war, a souvenir. He had kept it, cleaned and within reach, for fifty years.

I went downstairs. I turned off the television and knelt in front of the wheelchair. Mirth never raised her head as I told her that I would take care of her, that Harry and I had agreed I would take care of her.

When I stepped onto the porch the ambulance was pulling to the curb. As I watched the paramedics getting out I was remembering that, like Harry, I had brought a gun back from the war. It was somewhere in my house, rusted and forgotten.

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