Men are being hit all around him, instantaneously, and he goes down, the great pack slamming on top of him as if in emphasis. The machine-gun fire is hard and steady, and he can hear the bullets humming just above him. Ahead, the front lines have been brought down completely. The ones of them still alive are trying to drag themselves back. His own face pressing the mud, he still sees their wild eyes. If there is shouting, it does not register. A shell comes down not twenty feet from him, but it makes a weak bang—a seeming dud, no concussion, no hail of dirt or hot shrapnel. He is completely frozen in his indecision. To turn back, unwounded, will have consequences; he’s heard no order to pull back and to do so on one’s own is to return to a firing squad. But ahead, the bodies are toppled like a long chain. He watches the wounded, coming back, crawling, terrified. Everyone is shouting, but he understands none of it. He turns to locate Wesley, but he cannot make out any shape in the suddenly rising fog. And it is only then that he realizes he is enveloped in the gas.
6. The thing in which one finds some long-embedded fact
At his mid-fifties, his breathing has become the metronomic, a register above unconscious effort. The lungs, shrunken by the gas to about half their capacity, benefit from his work, the outdoors. He has left the mill to earn what he can cutting grass, shoveling snow, fixing roofs, attending to the gardens of more wealthy people in the more monied towns. Their English Gardener. He is sometimes introduced that way. This is Percy, my English Gardener, often followed by a giggle—he is, in some way, quaint to these people, with his clipped talk and his clipped hair and starched white trousers and shirt.
Martha works at the phone company now, in Information, the second shift. She took the work because the mill had become too much for Percy with its dank recesses and veils of dust. He works more hours now, out in the air, but the money is less and the seasons can conspire against him. So his wife also works, and makes no complaint, but after days outdoors he comes home and cooks for himself and sits reading, missing his wife.
In the evenings, after days in the sun, his fair skin is hot with the warmth of his burn. The muscles have the easy ache of a day working in fresh air, and it is late in the day especially that, alone, he must consciously think through the push and pull of inhalation and expiration. It’s when he is tired that the breathing is most labored, most begrudging.
They have a dog now, a Corgi named Pierre. Pierre spends most nights curled on his small hooked rug, staring at Percy as he rustles through the newspaper. The dog’s shallow pants are like an accompaniment to his own deep draws. The dog also seems wary of the newspaper itself, although Percy has never used a newspaper as discipline. When Percy finishes his reading and folds the newspaper over, the dog often scurries out of the room.
Most nights, Martha calls Percy at the beginning of her nine o’clock break, the ritual of the brief chat. But tonight it’s ten o’clock and Percy can feel those low butterflies that come with a missed call, even though he knows she sometimes has to work through the break if someone has called out sick, or if it’s an especially busy night—holidays and so forth.
“You want to . . . ?” he says to Pierre. The dog peeks around from the corner. It is likewise their habit that he takes Pierre for a walk as soon as he has hung up with Martha. Pierre is looking nervous. But Percy wants the phone call. He breathes more deeply, trying to settle himself. If he finishes his sentence, if he says the word, walk, Pierre will become so agitated that if the walk doesn’t commence forthwith, the dog will urinate on the floor within moments.
“Ring,” he says to the phone.
“Do you . . . ?” he says to Pierre, the dog’s ears pricked at attention, his ears searching for the leash. Percy knows he shouldn’t be teasing the dog like that.
The phone finally rings. Only a half-hour from the end of her shift.
“Hallo,” Percy says, a hint of annoyance seeping into his voice.
“Percy?”
“Yes . . . who’s this?”
“Percy, it’s Eleanor. Well, something’s happened. Martha’s had a stroke, dear.”
7. The fascinating glimpse into the life of a mature gentleman much unlike himself
After his morning walk on the palm-lined golf course, it is Percy’s habit to return to his apartment, draw the shades, turn the air-conditioning unit on High Cool, and sit watching television, often with the sound off. Nothing on television interests him all that much. But other than the regimented segments of time in which he prepares meals, attends to his hygiene, or keeps his household in basic working order, it seems now, even as time grows ever smaller, that it is a fundamental struggle to simply bridge those hours. Nothing awaits him, particularly.
In the evening, when the sun drops and there is the notion of cooling in this tropical haze, Percy will loose himself from the four walls and go for another walk, in the dusk. The cocktail hour has arrived, and through many lighted windows he can see people, alone as he is, sitting in their chairs with tumblers in their hands, staring at the pale glow of the television. Another night falls on the lives of the people of Ocean Breeze.
But 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