Innocence (fiction)

“The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Look, Mommy, a real soldier!”

John Paluczak tripped over the threshold as he came into the convenience store out of the hot Panhandle sun, his pack knocking into the newspaper stand. The little boy pointed at him, brown eyes wide in hero worship. John felt himself go red with shame, but he forced a smile. It felt like a grimace.

“Hush, Kyle,” said the boy’s mother. “Don’t be rude.” She smiled at John. “Thanks for your service.”

John ducked his head at her. “No problem, ma’am.”

To avoid them and the old woman behind the counter who peered at him through the glass case of pasteles, he went through the candy aisles toward the back of the store, shoulders hunched. He felt the boy watching him.

He needed something to drink before the bus came, but that would have to wait until his heart stopped pounding so hard.

If only the boy knew John wasn’t a hero. He was a coward. The heroes were his friends who died that day outside Kandahar while he was taking a leak.

John went into a long, dark-paneled hallway that led to the bathrooms. It was part of an older building that somebody’d made it into a sort of museum. The walls were covered with photos in glass frames.

A burly trucker in a blue ball cap came out of the men’s, adjusting his belt. He and John nodded to each other. John looked at the photos, making believe he was interested to avoid the guy. He moved from the bright, sharp color pictures of the latest local bullriders, homecoming queens and football players to where all the pictures showed soldiers, some squatting, others standing, rifles at the ready.

John closed his eyes. The attack had come suddenly. He’d been around back of the tents and after a week of no action the explosions made him jump. He heard his buddies yelling amid the noise and grabbed his rifle and ran. By the time he got there—it had been only seconds—all that was left were bloody body parts and bloody fragments of cloth.

The insurgents were already far down the road. They must’ve thrown the grenades without stopping. John fired and ran after the truck, screaming, then stood panting in the settling dust.

Those were his friends. His brothers. He checked each shattered form, but everyone was dead.

John passed along the wall of photos, breathing quickly, feeling the adrenaline of that day fill his veins. Now every photo showed soldiers, moving back in time from Afghanistan to Kuwait to Granada, Panama, Somalia, a jump to Vietnam, Korea, the Second World War, the First… Each photo had writing beneath it, some printed on a computer, then on a typewriter with its uneven letters, then handwritten in block letters or in cursive, all carefully legible. Names, dates, places. Young faces, tight mouths, wary eyes.

As he moved from color photos to black and white to faded sepia, John knew all these young men were dead now. The pounding in his head grew stronger. So many lives. So many deaths. And he was still here.

He bent, making sure he examined each picture. It seemed important, like he owed these men something. After all, he was the survivor.

The young eyes stared back at him so that he was afraid to turn and walk away. He was being reviewed before all those young accusing faces, reviewed and found lacking.

John started to shake and his feet dragged on the cracked linoleum. He came to the end of the hall. He dropped his bag on the floor and sank down on his heels, resting his back in the corner and his elbows on his knees. He bit his wrist to keep from crying out.

He jarred a photo with his elbow, the last photo at the bottom of the wall. Carefully he straightened the frame, then looked again. This wasn’t a photo of soldiers. This picture was old, black and white but still sharp, as if it had been put away, protected from the sun. It showed a tree, a big one, a live oak, spreading its branches on a hill and silhouetted against a pale sky.

Three things hung from the tree. Two looked like long, smooth, heavy fruit, heavy as long ripe pears. The third wasn’t smooth. It was spiky as a dead bird hit by a car and left by the side of the road.

John gasped and fell back. He knew what the hanging things were.

This photo also had writing beneath it, handwriting in ink that had faded to brown, but the writing was clear, an old man’s careful handwriting, an old man who’d been a banker or bookkeeper or storekeeper who had to keep records for the decades to come. The ink started dark and went pale before the writer dipped his pen again. John could even make out where the steel nib had scratched the paper. He leaned forward and read.

“I joined the posse and we tracked the horse thieves from where they stole Sam Granger’s stock north of Marionburg. We caught them on the hill south of Eldridge’s place, across the wash from Comanche Lookout. Two of them didn’t put up a fight. They were old desperadoes and knew their time had come. The third was a boy, not more than eighteen. He said he was on his way to Lubbock to settle a debt and he taken up with those two on the trail a mile back. He didn’t know they stole those horses. The desperadoes backed him. I spoke up for the boy, as did Martens, but the others in the posse outvoted us. They said dead men tell no tales. Please God, I couldn’t go against the posse. We hanged all three. Martens and I came back and took this photograph as a record. That was August 15, 1896. I saved it all these years.”

There was an old man’s signature beneath, and a date: “By my hand, dated this Thursday, August 17th, the Year of Our Lord 1921. Thomas P. McElroy, Jr.”

John’s throat closed on a sob. He reached out to the photo and touched the boy’s shoulder through the glass, the boy who’d had no more value than a bird hit by a car and left by the side of the road. He’d been in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time, and was dead and dust. The way John should be.

Through the glass, John felt the warmth of the boy’s shoulder and the claylike resistance of flesh that was still trying to live, but couldn’t. John tried to force a connection through his fingers to the shoulder of that bristling corpse that had been a boy hanged by the neck until he was dead years before John’s father’s father had been born.

“I’m sorry,” John said. “That should be me. I should be the one.” He leaned his head against the glass, staring at the boy’s wide-open eyes, a darker gray in the gray tones of the picture.

With all the power of the dead young men on the walls, John willed his own life through his fingers, through the glass and the photographic paper, into the streams of time and that inert, still-warm shoulder.

“Take me instead,” John whispered. “Take me.”

***

Frank Traynor shivered. He’d just been out in the hot sun, arguing about horses with a lot of riders who’d surrounded him and his two new compadres. He couldn’t make out what the riders wanted, though he knew it was nothing good. Now he was suddenly sitting here alone in this dim hallway.

It’d been hot summer a minute ago, but this place was cold as a witch’s teat.

Frank moved and bumped into a framed picture hanging low on the wall. He reached to straighten it, then hesitated and shivered at more than the chilly air.

It could’ve been a picture of the place he’d just been, on a hilltop under a big live oak. Except there were three hanged men dangling like full sacks from three separate branches, all of them hanging long and smooth and heavy, like long heavy fruit full of juice.

Frank straightened the picture, then rubbed his fingers against his jeans, trying to rub away the tingly feeling.

He got up, stepped over a pack somebody had left on the floor and walked toward the light at the end of the hall, coming out into a brightly lit, colorful place filled with shelves and things on the shelves he didn’t recognize.

Something smelled good. Was it sausages and coffee? His stomach rumbled.

Well, hell. He felt foolish. This was a store.

“Mommy, look! A real cowboy!”

A little boy stood pointing at him, eyes wide, mouth open. The woman beside the boy shook her head, looked at Frank, then smiled uncertainly.

“You really are a real cowboy, aren’t you?” she asked.

He nodded and touched his hat brim politely. “Yes, ma’am, I sure am.”

He looked away because he knew he was staring. His own mother would be scandalized at what this woman was wearing. Her blouse and trousers were so tight they didn’t hide a thing God gave her.

Trying to act like he belonged here—wherever here was—Frank looked around and saw something familiar. He went up to the counter and pointed at the glass case. “I’ll have one of them pasteles, please.”

The old lady behind the counter put one in a bag and he dug into his pocket and dropped a penny in her hand. She looked at him like he was crazy.

“It’s a dollar eighty-nine plus tax,” she said.

“One dollar and eighty-nine cents?” His hand went to the pocket of his shirt and he felt the folded paper of his Pa’s IOU still there. Even if it was cash, he wouldn’t spend it.

The boy’s mamma came up beside him. “I’ll get that for you,” she said. She glanced at him again, then away. “How about a bottle of water? You look thirsty.”

Frank was about to refuse out of pride, but the fastest way to get out of here was to agree. “Yes, ma’am, I appreciate that.” For some reason, he made this woman nervy. Though not as nervy as this place made him.

The old lady handed him the pastry and water in a bag. He touched his hand to his hat. The boy kept staring at him, brown eyes wide.

Frank got out the door and found himself back in the hot sun. He took a long grateful breath.

Dust rose, stirred up by those contraptions that roared past, two lines of them going in opposite directions.

He grinned in delight. They must be those new motorcars. Last winter he saw a picture of one in a newspaper that a bartender in Kansas City was handing around. But the little machine in the picture looked like it would shake apart if it ever got up as much speed as a fast mule.

“Headed south?” Except for the blue cap he wore, the burly man could’ve been Frank’s own Pa from the sunburn on his face to the trodden-down heels of his boots.

“Yes, sir,” Frank said.

The man nodded. “There’s my truck. I can take you far as Lubbock. That be okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Frank said. “I’m on my way to Lubbock. Much obliged.”

Frank looked back as he settled into the unbelievable comfort of the passenger seat. Through the window, he saw the mamma and the little boy come out of the store.

As the driver turned a key and the truck roared into life, Frank nodded to the boy and touched the brim of his hat in farewell.

The boy straightened. Then his hand came up to his forehead in a salute.

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About the Author: Sally Jane Driscoll

Sally Jane Driscoll, Literary Editor of The Savvy Street, holds an M.A. in Publications Design/Creative Writing and Publishing from University of Baltimore, where she taught writing and co-founded the literary quarterly, Passager. She worked as reader/fiction editor for a literary agent who represented popular novelists and is senior copy editor on a medical journal. Her short stories, poetry and articles have appeared in Asimov's, Ellery Queen, Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Capitalism Magazine, The Intellectual Activist, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Lyric, Seventeen, Woman's Day and others.