Читать книгу Kiss Me, Stranger - Ron Tanner - Страница 7

3. A Dream of My Son as a Sergeant

In my sleep, I see my son with his Squad, all of them painted blue. Then I realize that he’s joined the Revolutionary Militia, not the President’s. When this is over, my son’s Captain is saying, we’re going to live in luxury apartments on the Avenue of the Beloved Saints, have free cable—one hundred eighty-two channels—and everybody’s going to shop groceries from their home terminals. We won’t ever have to go outside again, we’ll live like queen bees!

My son expects the Captain to take a bullet in the neck for a stupid statement like that. The Captain is standing on the roof, waving his arms at the cloudy sky, which looks like a gutted mattress—he’s an easy target for snipers, a good clean shot right through the neck, but he goes on talking, waving those lanky arms, saying any thing to goose and gander the boys.

At twenty, the Captain is the oldest of them, with a fine mustache thick as his thumb and dyed bright blue, like the color of those downy chicks we used to buy the children for Easter. How my dear Lon would love a roasted chick right now! Some of the boys have been trying to catch pigeons but, stupid as they are, pigeons are surprisingly hard to catch—you get close to them, think you’ve got them, little waddling squabs within hands-reach, then, Shazam! (as my Marcel used to say) they’re gone, fluttering a little farther off. Lon wants to shoot one the way his pal Crazy Peter did a week ago, but you shoot one, he’s learned, and nothing’s left. Hunger makes you stupid, he has decided.

Which accounts for Captain’s speech, why he’s brought the boys up to the roof when they should be below raking through the debris for survivors and stragglers. We’ve got the President’s Militia on the run, the Captain says, got ‘em scared. We’re like pestilence, he says, we’re like the wrath of God, we’re like the great steel hand of Tetsujin 28! He means the mighty cartoon robot the boys used to watch on TV. Tetsujin was as tall as a highrise and could fly and he was a lovely blue color like Lon’s Squad, which is probably why the Captain mentions him.

I wish he hadn’t because it gets Lon thinking of his brothers and sisters who used to sprawl alongside him while watching TV, so many of them he felt he was floating in a pool of children. Our house was crowded with PC processors and cases and keyboards and motherboards, all of which Lon’s brothers and sisters couldn’t keep their hands away from, busy little hands, tearing through and taking apart any and everything, curious to know what’s inside, what’s working, what’s this?

They were always asking, What’s this? he recalls.

All that activity at home, all those kids, it was a relief to get away, Lon admits to himself, but now after eight months in the field relief means something very different.

He and his Squad are listening to Captain rant his Captain speech, all of them gathered on the roof, in plain sight of snipers, when up pops a hand grenade tossed from the street: it rolls like a warped tennis ball to Captain’s duct-taped foot—the grenade looks Russian-made, the casing a nice shiny handful of green pot-metal. The Captain glances down at it, blinking his kind twenty-year-old fatherly eyes, he’s got maybe five seconds before he’s blown to bits. Hellofa nice throw, don’t you think? he says, the way he might have complimented a teammate, then he kicks the grenade off the roof and it soars (he was a semi-professional footballer before the war), the rest of the Squad collapses in a panic, folding into the fetal-tuck they were taught in basic training, grip your knees to your chin and wait for the blast. Which doesn’t come.

Life is full of surprises, Lon recalls his Poppi—my Marcel—saying.

Like Lon, Poppi is in the Militia but which one? He’s somewhere on the frontier, which is a horror, Lon has heard. It’s so bad the Captain won‘t tell Lon and the others everything he’s heard because he doesn’t want them to worry, though they worry plenty: we’ve got to keep our eye on the sparrow, the Captain sings to them when they are depressed, keep your eye... dancing around, chucking them under the chin, wagging his finger at them like he was their old man.

Lon’s own old man is no fighter, too kind, too easy. Every night Marcel would turn on a couple of PC screens in the front room, where he and I workshopped equipment, and the children would gather at his feet in the blue-green light to hear him tell stories, some scary, some funny, his voice like warm water running over them. Lon’s thirteen brothers and sisters would fall asleep before Marcel was finished, then he and I and Lon would carry them up to their pallets, one after the other, precious cargo, little gremlins, their tiny hands still at last, their pony breaths galloping through cartoon dreams which Lon now wishes for every night.

The Captain leads them down the bombed-out stairwell. They are strung at intervals, automatics ready. They have to be careful where they step because none of them has boots. When the Revolutionary Militia Recruiters came to their school nearly a year ago, to sign up everybody over fourteen, they were the handsomest people Lon had ever seen, with their shiny automatic rifles and their newly cut bright-blue fatigues with silver buttons and sky-blue berets. Nice haircuts too, some colored in checks of red and yellow, the RM flag. And knee-high leather boots with a shine like the Presidential Fountain at high noon. Oh, yeah, Lon wanted to look like that.

Later, after being painted, tattooed, and finger-printed, he felt stupid when he learned he’d have to wear a pot for a helmet and, instead of a jacket, a bright blue sweatshirt whose dye came off on him when he sweated and he’s sweating a lot, you can be sure. For shoes, they taught him how to construct a shiny silver kind of sandal using duct tape and cut-outs from plastic milk cartons. These make a rain-puddle splashing noise whenever he’s trotting across asphalt or concrete. Slip-slap. Slip-slap.

But the RM is winning! Captain insists.