The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney

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СКАЧАТЬ tonight, as he wanders back along the curb in the quarter-light, one of the apartments (the until-recently-vacant place four units down) has its door thrown open. From that door issues the music from a crackling Don Ho album. “Tiny Bubbles,” unmistakably. He can hear, too, the low murmur of conversation.

      Percy steps back onto the grass, cutting a wide arc so he can see without being seen. He edges up to get an angle, and inside he can see a man about his age, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, white pants, and white shoes, all topped off by a white yacht cap with its life-preserver patch on the front. The man is behind a bamboo bar no more than four feet long. There are three stools in front of the bar, and on each stool is one of Percy’s female neighbors, each sitting insouciantly with a martini in the hand and a cigarette in the mouth. The man seems to be carrying on a conversation with each of them at the same time, effortlessly. And, as it turns out, to be talking to him as well.

      “Care to join us, bub?” the voice bellows from the apartment.

      Percy steps to the doorway, feeling his shy smile creeping across his face.

      “Thank you,” Percy says, receding into the darkness. “But no.”

      For weeks after that, Percy avoids direct contact but can’t help making sidewise arcing walks to his own unit that take him out onto the grass, in the settling darkness, with well-timed glances into the man’s doorway. Always, three women occupy the three stools, and Percy is always amazed that it seems a rotation of many of the women from his complex—old ladies, frumpy grandmothers now transformed by the simple act of this man’s arch hospitality. Percy avoids contact until one night when there is a commanding rap on his own door. When he opens it, it is none other than the man himself, standing in his doorway with two umbrella-adorned drinks in what appear to be coconut-shell cups.

      “Hi, Percy!” he says.

      Percy just gapes as the man forces one of the drinks into his hand.

      “Call me Cap’n Irv, ’cause everybody does,” he says. “The ladies told me your name. Let me tell you, you’d be wise to stop in to my little place some one of these nights. Ladies need some companionship and there aren’t too many of us—men—around here. At least any worth a damn.”

      Percy nods. “You built a bar in your unit.”

      “I owned a tavern for thirty years. I guess behind a bar is where I’m most at ease. You can guess the name of the place—“Cap’n Irv’s.” That’s what I’ve gone by all those years.”

      “Were you actually a captain?”

      “In a different way. Not of a ship. I can’t even swim! No. Back in the First War. Artillery. I can tell that you were there, too.”

      “Indeed.”

      “You were gassed.”

      “Yes.”

      “I hear you at night, when you’re out walking. I know that cough”

      “Yes.”

      “There are so damn few of us, left at this age, and all these damned women. I’m seventy-six. I don’t feel half that.”

      Percy takes a sip from the drink. It’s very sugary, and he has never been one for sweets.

      “I’m just letting you know you’re always welcome at Cap’n Irv’s anytime. In fact, I could use a man like you.”

      Percy knows he won’t go away until the drinks are done, so he puts the coconut shell to his lips and sucks it all down. He hands the empty cup to Cap’n Irv.

      “Thank you,” Percy says. “I most certainly will consider that.”

      Afterward, in his apartment, Percy sits in his chair feeling in his head the swirl of the drink, for he has never been much of a drinker.

       8. The eventful morning in which he is both delivered and condemned

      Those who’ve gotten the worst of the gas are laid out in the field hospital, nothing more than an open field set far from the trenches. Percy is on his back. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, small relief, and tries hard just to keep breathing. All around him he can hear the grasping of boys who, like himself, have gotten it badly. The eyes burn beyond anything he could have imagined, just as he had heard the officers describe the effect in their briefings; he is enraged at himself for not having put on his gas mask, even if there had been no order to do so. He knows, from seeing other soldiers gassed, that right now there is nothing anyone can do for him, even as his lungs shrink down like slowly burning paper.

      “Phosgene,” he hears one of the officers saying. It is a new and different kind of gas than the chlorine they had expected. Nobody knows what happens after.

      On the fourth day he is on his way back to England. He and the others, eyes still covered by gauze wrapping, walk in a chain, each man with his right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front of him. They are loaded onto lorries to a temporary military hospital far from the front lines. Within a week of the battle, when the eye gauzes are removed and he tests his dim and squinting vision, he is put on a ship back across the Channel.

      He is delivered to Oakwood Hospital, Rotherham, where he is surrounded by boys who have been wounded, many far worse—lost limbs, complete blindness, deep shrapnel wounds. He hears that virtually all the boys of Accrington, the Pals, are dead. Percy feels guilty in that there is not a scratch on him, only the deep burn under the ribs. Everyone is exceedingly cheerful, the ward clamorous with the laughter and badinage. In the newspapers there are long columns of the dead, organized by regiment. His neighbors, the Walker brothers—Fred, Ernest, and Charles—have all died. Sixty thousand British men have died on that single day. Wesley is listed, the date of death actually two days after. Percy feels none of that euphoria of escape that resounds around him.

       9. Some adjustments as they relate to the efficacy of one’s own bodily capabilities

      His wife looks at him always with a face of perpetual surprise, even after five years. The face he first saw at the hospital the night of her stroke, his uncertainty matched by her own mild but frozen-quizzical countenance, which has never changed. They’re in Florida now, 1959, so much cheaper than the North, year-round grass to cut. Summers were difficult at first, but with the fans going all the time it became tolerable, the hot nights softened, the white-heated days somehow embracing. A little bungalow with burned-up grass and scraggly orange trees in the back.

      They have no friends here, never tried. He has intuited in these years that she can’t stand to be looked at, can’t stand to be the person she now is, fettered inside the slack corporeal reality. Percy understands. They live in nearly complete quiet, even as the explosions in his head seem to have risen, coming back more often after the younger years in which he thought they were eradicated. He wakes up coughing, night after night. He wakes up from a drowning depth that frightens him, yet is always familiar, and not the only fear he truly feels in the spooling days of these late-middle years. He doesn’t want to think of that creeping gas, that lunar battlefield. He doesn’t want to think of his dwindling time. He doesn’t want to think about Martha dying, but he likewise doesn’t want to think about what will become of her if he is gone.

       10. A decision ventured, without excessive or foolish delay

      The convention of the event is that one accedes to the invitations that come one’s way. Mrs. СКАЧАТЬ