Homecoming

Mezil called no one when he landed, as he’d been instructed.

He spent the night at a roadside motel outside Hartford, waking every half hour to street sounds and a red vacancy sign blinking through the thin drapes, then rolling before dawn on the first of three buses home, dressed in civilian clothes. The instructions had arrived the day before he left Saigon, typewritten, no signature, no return address except Covington, CT. Mezil read it a dozen times, lying in his bunk, and understood none of it. Yet here he was, arriving in the morning, dressed not as a soldier, and limiting his contact with others. In fact he’d spoken only one word since landing at Bradley, and that was to the motel clerk, a kid Mezil’s age who had signed him in and handed him the key, and then looked at Mezil in his uniform—whippet-thin Mezil, whose uniform hung on him like an older brother’s suit handed down too soon—and asked him a question.

The sun was up by the time he reached Covington. He stepped out, lugging a duffel bag as long as Mezil himself and twice as wide, into a cold weekday morning in November.

Walk home from the station alone.

Another easy one, as it turned out. He’d forgotten how small Covington was. Small enough to walk edge to edge in forty-five minutes, and small enough that the people he saw as he left the station should’ve recognized him. Should’ve, maybe, offered him a ride home, or at least joined him for a block or two. Wasn’t that Rosecki’s mom coming out of Dale’s Pharmacy across the street? And wasn’t that Mr. Garvey, his shop teacher in high school, waiting at the stop light in the same rusted orange pick-up truck he’d used to drive Mezil to the doctor after Mezil passed out from turpentine fumes and cracked his head on the floor? (How many fingers, Mezil, and Mezil said he thought maybe eleven or twelve, and Mr. Garvey said, Well which one is it, eleven or twelve?) They seemed to sneak glances at him now, only for their eyes to skate over him when he turned back to look, and what madness was that?

But it was all madness now, and he didn’t know what to make of it, any of it. Maybe he looked different, unrecognizable. Maybe he wasn’t really there.

He turned a corner, lowering his head as he moved past a young girl in ripped bell-bottom jeans and a Red Sox cap, straddling a bike.

“Mezil,” she said, clear and bright as day. It was only then, Mezil’s soul jumping clear through his body, that he realized with how much certainty he’d become convinced that he was dead.

“You grew,” he said.

“Well, I worked at it.” She cocked her head, sizing him up, which made him want to look away.

“How’s Mookie?” Though Mezil and her brother had been born two days apart, Mezil had drawn 45, the other boy 310.

“Dumb,” she said. “Wrecked his moped a couple weeks back and broke his wrist.”

“Same, then.” Mezil looked around, rubbed his mostly nonexistent whiskers. Then, turning back to the girl: “Not sure you’re supposed to talk to me.”

“Yeah I know.” She pulled down the brim of the cap, which almost made him smile. She appraised him again, and he tried not to think of what she was imagining, what measure he was falling short of for this thirteen-year-old girl with whom he’d played endless games of Battleship and Sorry! on Saturday mornings, waiting for Mookie to wake the hell up.

She lifted her shoulders and gripped the handlebars, and with the faintest smile said, “Now as you were, Mezil.” And she took off down the street into the wind, ponytail bobbing, before he could think to answer.

* * *

But he can’t be a soldier, is what Mezil’s mother had said to his father.

That was after Roger Mudd pre-empted Mayberry R.F.D and they’d all watched Mezil’s number come up on a blue capsule, after Mezil said what does it mean and his father said well, and then they all dispersed for a while to their different secret places to make sense of it all, Mezil’s being his bedroom closet with a copy of the inaugural issue of From Beyond the Unknown, featuring the Turtle-Men from Mars. It was after he listened to the entire Revolver album, twice. It was after the lights went out and his parents went to bed, when Mezil listened through the thin walls of the house as they discussed what would become of their only son.

He’ll be okay, from Mezil’s father, who didn’t sound to Mezil as if he totally believed it.

Can he even lift a gun? from his mother, which, okay might’ve stung a bit, except that Mezil had been wondering the same thing.

He’ll learn.

And if he doesn’t? If he’s the worst soldier who ever lived? Then what?

This was something Mezil hadn’t even considered himself until that moment. Mezil’s father said only, He’ll make it back.

But as it turned out, Mezil wasn’t the worst solder who ever lived, or even the worst soldier in his squad.

That was Boone.

Boone at least looked like a soldier. He was big, half a foot taller than Mezil, and as thick as a defensive lineman. Blond-haired and blue-eyed with a peach-fuzz blond beard, he was saved from being too good-looking by an asymmetrical face—the left ear hanging down a little low, something not quite right happening with the spacing of his eyes, a broken nose that had been reset without much attention to detail or aesthetics. Early on, the word everyone used to describe him, a word no one would have thought to use about Mezil, was solid. They meant not only his physique but his demeanor. They meant he looked rugged, reliable, brave, probably a little dumb, obedient, and plain-spoken, all qualities held in high regard. Country Boy, they called him, because they all had to have nicknames, and everyone including Mezil assumed that’s what he was.

But Boone was none of those things. He wasn’t even a country boy. He’d grown up in West Orange, New Jersey, the son of a great bearded giant who ran a flower shop called Rose & Thorn. By the time he was drafted, Boone had never thrown a football or hit a baseball in his life, but he could name all hundred and fifty species of roses. He could recite Rilke’s Duino Elegies in the original German by heart, though he understood no German. He was nearsighted. He was gentle like his father, and sensitive, and unguarded. He hated violence, as a matter of basic temperament rather than principle. He was, most damningly, soft.

Of course, they’d all been soft. Wherever they’d been raised, whatever nicknames they’d adopted or had chosen for themselves, however far their souls had traveled and whatever damage sustained on the road from then to now. Even Fragman, who slept with a finger tucked through a grenade pin and kept a pet rat the size of a housecat, and Big Todd, who’d greeted Mezil on his first day by showing him a cigar box filled with human tongues—These weren’t all mine, but I feel like I need them anyway— had been soft once, or so Mezil wanted to believe. It was just that PFC Boone didn’t seem likely to live long enough to harden himself. He was a terrible shot. He had a maddening tendency to wander off course when they were out on patrol. He was a compulsive daydreamer. He was clumsy, distracted, heavy-footed, and forgetful. If there were a secret checklist for the least desirable qualities in a soldier (and Mezil felt sure there was just such a checklist), then PFC Boone would have had every box checked, with a few extra items jotted on the back of the list, furiously underlined.

“Two months,” Fragman pronounced one July morning, a couple weeks after Boone arrived.

“Two months for what?” Mezil asked.

“The Ghost,” he said.

Behind Boone’s back, the others had taken to calling him Ghost, because in their minds, he was already gone. In Vietnam there was always a Ghost, and in their unit, it was Boone. Two months meant two months until he got his head blown off by a sniper, or stepped on a punji stick and developed sepsis, or tripped a landmine. Wanting nothing to do with the dead, they avoided him at meals, stopped smoking with him, stopped asking him questions, stopped answering questions beyond grunts and monosyllables. There was no malice in it. Some of them had been in-country for months and were counting their days. All of them, even Mezil, had lived through battles, or things that weren’t battles but worse, things that had no name they’d ever learned. They all carried memories of places and stories in which they’d played no role, Quảng Ngãi and My Lai and Huế and A Shau Valley, which through the retelling or the careful non-telling had become as real as their own memories, so that when Big Todd spoke of the fog burning away from the Song Ve Valley despite never having set foot there, never having spoken to anyone who had set foot there, they all understood, because they all remembered it too, they all could feel on their skin the coolness of the vanishing fog and hear the shorebirds from the distant surf of the South China Sea. Boone, somehow, didn’t remember, and the rest of them had forgotten what it was like to not remember. A Ghost with only his own memories was no use to any of them.

Mezil understood all of this. He understood that Boone was a threat to his, Mezil’s, mental and physical well-being, and that he had to keep his distance from Boone like the others, the same way he’d keep his distance from a nest of bamboo pit vipers.

The problem was that he liked Boone.

The problem was that for no reason he could understand, he found Boone—graceless, inappropriate, goofy, not-long-for-this-world Boone—kind of wonderful.

 “I’d like to talk about robots now,” Boone would say, at one in the morning, turning to face Mezil’s bunk. “I have some reservations.”

And Mezil would tell him to fuck off. Because it was one in the morning, and because he already knew everything there was to know, by now, about Boone’s reservations about robots.

Or: “I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of Hamlet.”

Or: “I think I should tell you now about my father’s beard.”

Or: “I have a theory about golems. Not the one I told you already, but a different one.”

It was always like that. Always late at night, always something Boone had been thinking about, worrying about, chewing over, and he just thought Mezil needed to hear. Not that Mezil wanted to hear, but that he needed to hear, or at least Boone needed to tell him. And always Mezil said the same thing: Fuck off, Boone. Even if a part of him was curious, too, about the thousand-year-old wild dog rose that grew in Germany, or worried that the North Star wouldn’t be the North Star in 13,000 years because there would be another North Star by then, he’d keep it to himself, he’d pretend to fall back asleep. Boone would continue talking anyway, and Mezil would eventually fall asleep for real, to Boone’s voice. Was there, maybe, a part of him that liked falling asleep to Boone’s voice? That took comfort in it? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why Boone had picked him in the first place, other than the proximity of their bunks.

One night Mezil found on his pillow the torn-out bottom square of a box of C-Rations (ham and lima beans), on which Boone had drawn a surprisingly good three-panel comic strip about a pair of soldiers named Meeks and Basil. In the strip, Basil, oversized and hunch-shouldered and prone to daydreaming, is about to step on a punji stick trap when he’s saved by the wiry, courageous Meeks, in the process sending them both tumbling down a comically big hill into the brush, where they land in a heap of tangled limbs. Well that was a close one, says Basil in the last panel, sitting atop Meeks, oblivious to the nest of vipers waking up beside them both. Mezil tore the strip to pieces and tossed the pieces on Boone’s bunk.

Next day there was another in its place. And the next day, another. Always it was Basil getting into some ridiculous scrape, his head in the clouds, mostly unaware of the danger even after it had passed, like Mr. Magoo, while the ever-resourceful and ever-courageous Meeks kept him out of harm’s way.

In one strip, at the end, the two of them sit apart in a field under a jungle of stars, Basil on the left and Meeks on the right, their heads tilted up to watch a Huey copter glide past in the dark.

Thanks, Meeks, says the bubble over Basil’s head.

Fuck off, Basil, says the bubble over Meeks’s head.

Mezil stopped throwing them away. But he never acknowledged them, either. They worried him, like everything worried him, and he fought against his own instincts toward kindness and light. He and Boone weren’t friends. They couldn’t be friends, because Mezil wanted to survive, wanted to go back home to Covington, wanted to be upstairs in his bedroom with From Beyond the Unknown. He could see it when he closed his eyes. It wasn’t much, as visions went, and he hoped that its smallness kept it in reach. He could safeguard that much. He could protect something as small as that. But no more than that. There wasn’t room in the vision for Boone.

And then Boone would say, “My father’s beard,” and quietly hand Mezil a drawing of a disembodied beard.

Once, Mezil slipped. He said something about meeting up for a beer when they made it back home. Boone shrugged it off quietly and changed the subject. And it occurred to Mezil, then, that maybe Boone wasn’t so oblivious. That maybe the reason he talked to Mezil the way he did was that he knew he was a Ghost, and he didn’t want all he had and all he was to be lost with him. Maybe that’s all it was.

Mezil walked by Harry’s Bait and Tackle as somewhere behind him a car backfired. He turned off the main road and slipped down a side street painted with orange and yellow leaves, keeping his head down.

He was thinking of how Boone had confided one night that he had a suspicion he couldn’t quite shake. Because of a dream, he said. In the dream, they were sending him home from Vietnam. The catch was that he had to leave behind a copy of himself. That’s just how it worked, in Boone’s dream, if you wanted to go home. He could go back to West Orange and the flower shop and his father and his books, and he could try to build some humble little life for himself there. But there would always be this other Boone he’d left behind. And this other Boone, the left-behind Boone, would never know. He’d never remember or suspect that he was only a copy, that it was his job to stay and fight, and lose faith, and get dysentery, and question his purpose, and see horrible things, and maybe do horrible things. This other Boone would have trouble remembering who he was before. With each passing day, his memories would degrade a little more, until finally he’d have no recollection at all of who he’d been. He’d be too far removed from the real Boone, the original Boone, to even be considered Boone anymore. And someday, a week or a month or a year down the road, this other Boone, this degraded copy, would die. All so the real Boone could move on with his quiet, safe little life. That’s the bargain, Boone told Mezil, that you’re asked to take when you want to go home. And Mezil said, blinking at him in the dark, forgetting that he was pretending to be asleep: So, you have a terrible suspicion you’d take the bargain. And Boone said, No. I have a terrible suspicion the real Boone did.

What was it like to kill someone over there? That’s what the motel clerk had asked.

Mezil had thought about it, tried to make sense of the question. When he opened his mouth to speak, he had no idea what he was about to say, and it was only one word, and the word was Easy.

He lifted his head, now, as he came to his parents’ street. Not his street anymore. His parents’ street. He reached into his pocket and unfolded the instructions. The wind rattled the paper as he read the last line.

Come to the Tavern at Eight. And be ready.

Ready. What could that even mean? What could they want that he, Mezil, could possibly give them?

* * *

By seven-thirty Mickey—who’d inherited the Tavern from his mother, widowed at thirty-five with four children, blessed to her great surprise with a natural talent for calculating probabilities and calling the bluff of overconfident drunks at the card table—finally succeeded in getting a healthy fire going. The process was fraught enough with suspense to set off among the fifty or so men and women assembled in the tavern a semi-drunken and profane chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Which was an improvement, anyway, on earlier, mangled versions of “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Barnacle Bill.” Mickey took a bow and someone passed him a pint of beer, which he downed in one long gulp, raising another cheer.

The tavern was dark, as always, not so much an aesthetic choice on Mickey’s part as an economic one, though in this case, by tradition, a few extra bulbs had been left unlit. Supplemental candlelight lent the room a softer, mid-century glow, if the century happened to be the eighteenth rather than twentieth. In the center of the main room they’d cleared all the tables and installed a wooden platform, eight feet to a side, on which sat a single upholstered armchair borrowed from the back room where Mickey used it the rest of the time for midafternoon naps.

More people arrived, some by the front door, but most by the back. They came alone and in groups, couples and old men and war widows, teachers and housewives and postmen and auto mechanics, some of whom knew the inside of Mickey’s better than others. No one under thirty was technically invited or allowed, but security was lax enough that a twelve-year-old girl in ripped bell-bottom jeans and a Red Sox cap could make her way inside and find a spot tucked away in the shadows, and score a root beer in a frosted glass, with only a bit of attitude.

The noise level in the room grew as the hour approached and the last of the stragglers filtered in, shivering against the day and the decade. Mickey’s fire roared on.

At eight o’clock, the door creaked open, and the room fell silent as Mezil, the boy, stepped inside.

He pushed the door closed and then, seemingly defeated, took them all in. It was too dark for him to make out their faces. He looked small and uncertain, but in the tilt of his head, he was defiant, too. For a moment they thought he might turn and disappear through the door into the windy night, and for that moment, he thought the same. But then, he stepped forward and made his way to the chair.

A kind of collective sigh filled the room when he sat down. Everyone shifted, getting comfortable, murmuring quietly but enthusiastically, emptying or refilling their glasses. Meanwhile Mezil sat with his body straight and tense against the padded chair. Waiting for it to begin, perhaps, so that it could end.

The old chief of police, Carver, was the first to break the silence, from the shadows along the back wall. He cleared his throat apologetically, not having many opportunities for public speaking these days, and said, “This was in, I don’t know, fifty-seven or fifty-eight. Found Mezil out behind Mac’s garage when he wasn’t five years old yet. Burying a hamster. Told me he’d seen something sparkling on the hill behind the garage, all the way from his bedroom window. Just junk metal glinting in the sunlight was all it was. But Mezil thought it’d be a nice place, I guess. Anyways he stuffed the rat in a plastic bag and dragged it all the way through town. Set us all chasing after him, you remember.” Some nods at this, and a few affectionate eye rolls. “I yelled at him good and told him he’d have to spend the night in jail for trespassing or such. Just scaring him so he’d use his head next time. Drove him home with the lights flashing, him sobbing like a loon and clutching the plastic shovel he brought with him for Willis—that was the rat’s name. He named the rat Willis. So, anyways, I sent him running back into his house where Faye was waiting for him. Then I guess I went back and finished burying the rat. Figured I had to.”

Next was Rosicky’s mom. She talked about how she’d sit by the window drinking her coffee in the morning after Rosicky left for school, watching the kids pass by the house. And Mezil would do this thing, she said—it wasn’t exactly a dance, at least not like a regular human person dance. More like electrical spasms? He’d jump into the air, spin, jump backward, shoot his arms into the air, freeze, spin again, jump forward, freeze, crouch, spin a third time—like something was jolting him with these little bursts of electric joy. It didn’t happen all the time, she said. Only when no one else was around, and only for that little stretch of sidewalk in front of her house. The rest of the time he was quiet, you could tell he was quiet. You’d never know all that was inside him, said Rosicky’s mom.

Mezil’s mother and father spoke then, about Mezil the Wolf. Mezil went through a phase, at six years old, when he thought he was a wolf. A quiet, solitary boy, he’d always pretended to be other things—an Egyptian mummy swathed in Ace bandages for entire weekends, a willow tree who could communicate only by waving its arms, and who needed maple syrup to survive—so it didn’t seem out of character when he took to howling, and loping around the backyard on all fours, and licking his arms to groom himself. He took to sleeping in his closet surrounded by his pack, a motley collection of stuffed wolves, bears, tigers, and one gray owl with a Band Aid across its left eye. For weeks it went like that. Each night before bed he was allowed outside for an hour, and he spent the time prowling restlessly in the yard, his howl growing more animal-like as the days stretched on, more melancholy. Finally, one night she found him back in his bed, his face tear-streaked, and when she asked him what had happened, he said that they hadn’t come. He said he was supposed to have forty-two teeth and he’d howled every day but they hadn’t come, and so he knew, then, that the rest of it wouldn’t come either, and he would never rejoin his pack, and he would only ever be who and what he was. So, she called Mezil’s father into the bedroom and shut off the light, and the three of them lay together in the bed and howled quietly at the dark and the moon, until they slept.

One after another, people took the floor and told stories. Mezil himself dropped his head, but he listened to them talk. Everyone seemed to have a story, however brief, however glancingly it alighted on Mezil himself. About things he’d said or an impression he’d made, about his awkwardness and his shyness and his touching, oddball decency. From there the conversation turned to the war, not this particular war but The War, endless and capitalized and monolithic. The older men in the room, and many of the women, shared their own stories. They spoke of hiding, and marching, and sitting in boredom, and waiting in trenches, and dreaming of home, and singing and telling jokes, and of killing and seeing those who were killed. They spoke of how it looked—how the world looked—when you came home after all of that, how they were looked at and how they looked at themselves, what it meant to be alive when so many were dead, how terrible it was to still be alive, how terrible to be glad to be alive and coming home, when all they ever wanted was home, all they dreamt of was home, all that ever mattered, for all of them, but also for those they fought and killed, was finding their way home.

When the stories ended, Mezil raised his head. He understood that he’d been wrong. That they weren’t and had never been waiting for him to speak. Nothing was asked of him, nothing demanded. He could stay quiet and it would be okay. They’d understand, and they’d know why he was silent, and it would be okay.

“I’d like to talk,” he said, “about Boone.”

And so, they heard about Country Boy, the Ghost, the worst soldier in Mezil’s unit, the son of a florist from New Jersey. They heard about the hundred and fifty species of roses, and Boone’s reservations about robots, and his two theories about golems, and the adventures of Basil and Meeks. They heard about Boone’s father’s beard. And when there was nothing left but for Mezil to tell it, they heard about the day Boone wandered off course on patrol, and Mezil—thoughtful, decent Mezil, who dragged his hamster Willis across town to bury him, and who danced like a mad dervish on his way to school for no reason except that he was excited to be alive—just let him go. Let him wander off, like a bothersome dog. Because that day he was angry at Boone’s soft and terrible heart, because he wanted to help Boone become a better soldier and stay alive, because he’d overheard the others talking when they thought he was asleep, heard them say the word Ghost. Only they weren’t talking about Boone this time, they were talking about Mezil. So he let Boone disappear behind him. He’ll learn, Mezil thought, and make it back—or he won’t. Mezil couldn’t be responsible. He was responsible for protecting only his one small, fragile space, not the wider space that included Boone or anyone else.

In the morning, they found him. His hands and feet nailed to a tree, his dog tags hanging from the big toe of his right foot. They found his head not far from a village they’d passed through only days before. Of course the villagers denied everything, the problem being that the guilty would deny it, too. Whether what happened was driven by vengeance for Boone’s death, or guilt for their role in it, or whether those things were only justifications for some darker impulse, Mezil never knew. Mezil himself killed only a few of them. But it was Mezil—the others all agreed, afterward—it was quiet, thoughtful, decent Mezil who was the most savage of them all. Someone carved a new nickname into the wall above his bunk, as a tribute. MEZIL THE MERCILESS, in letters six inches high, jagged as shark’s teeth.

He slumped then in his chair, head down, tired and lost in himself. His thin body shook quietly, though he made no sound. Meanwhile, the fire crackled in the hearth and those in the room looked on, waiting. Eventually, the shaking subsided. Mezil’s breathing slowed and his shoulders relaxed. His head fell forward, his eyes drooped. In minutes he was asleep.

“Orderly fashion,” said Mickey.

One by one they approached the sleeping boy. Mothers and fathers, neighbors, teachers and priests, men and women who had lost their own sons or worried for their own sons, they broke free from the shadows and stepped up onto the platform. A few leaned down to whisper things to the sleeping Mezil, confiding secrets, making promises, offering mea culpas. Most said nothing. They touched the top of his sleeping head, or rested a hand on his shoulder, and then walked away.

In the end Mezil’s father came forward with a few other men, and they lifted him out of the chair. They carried him, still asleep, to a back room where a bed had been made up and candles lit. Only once they returned and the door was closed did the singing and the drinking resume. It was still early yet, and the winter would come soon enough.

TOM HOWARD

Tom Howard is the author of Fierce Pretty Things (IU Press, 2019). He received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and his short fiction has appeared most recently in Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Carve, and Booth. He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virgnia.