Charlie Johnson in the Flames Read online

  Magda poured them vodka and they drank by the pots simmering on the stove, under a red light, and Jacek said something to her in Polish. Magda looked at Charlie – gaunt, unshaven, a shirt-tail sticking out, and a stain of vomit on his trouser leg – and said, ‘We have a case of post-traumatic stress disorder.’ She pronounced the syllables with ironic distinctness, as if to distance herself most of the way, but not entirely, from these American notions. Charlie smiled.

  ‘I don’t see it like that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t want to go home.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I’m not ready,’ he replied.

  ‘So we will get you ready,’ she said. On that basis, he could see, she could have him here without betraying his wife. Charlie thought he deserved praise for such intuition about the way women’s ethical principles worked.

  Magda drank her vodka and then disappeared into another room, reappearing with some cotton wool, adhesive and disinfectant. ‘For your hands.’ He patted his pockets, looking for something, and realised that he had left the Navy pills at the hotel. So here he was, the man he impersonated sometimes but really disliked, the helpless guy. It dawned on him that Etta had been right as usual, he was worse than he thought. But it was too late for Etta now.

  FIVE

  M agda cut the dressings off his hands and examined the wounds carefully in the light over the kitchen table. The pads of the fingers and the base of both palms were the worst. Charlie looked at the suppurating red zones without interest, but she bent over, sniffed them and made a face. She gripped his hands tightly to hold them still and cleaned each sore with a Q-tip dipped into disinfectant. It hurt and he felt like a kid sitting there across from her watching the intent way she worked. She was a fine-looking woman, Charlie thought, especially the nape of her neck, from the collar of her checked shirt up to the wisps of brown hair that hung down from her hair clip. Charlie wanted to lean forward and kiss her, startle her with the force of his lips against hers. This was not a great idea, with his best and truest friend sitting with a drink in his hands, watching them both from across the room. It was a bad sign to be so susceptible. He was just a bundle of longing, he thought, and it was disreputable to be so. She applied some ointment to the burns and then re-wrapped both hands in bandages. She even took his temperature, and when she took the thermometer away from his lips she said that if he was still like that in the morning she would call the doctor.

  Charlie said he needed another vodka, and so they sat around the kitchen table, drinking without a word. The silence was all he needed, Charlie thought, as he listened to the wind at the windows and felt the noble Wyborowa lighting him up inside.

  They installed him in the upstairs bed of one of their absent sons, away at college, and Jacek undid Charlie’s shirt and helped him pull his trousers off. When Charlie was alone, staring up at low clouds scudding across a skylight above his bed, his hands swollen now and hurting, he thought he might stay here a long time.

  When he woke it was mid-afternoon, and there was a carpet of snow on the skylight. Snow in April on the flat Baltic plain was unusual, so he stood at the window and felt lucky. What a great place, he thought. He had trouble pulling on his trousers and his shirt, and his hands were as sore as before, but he didn’t think he had a fever.

  Downstairs, it was quiet. All the objects seemed to stand separately in their own circle of light: Jacek’s Timberland boots, muddy and worn, by the front door, and her slippers next to them; on the table in the kitchen, potatoes in a bowl; in the sink, two dishes which had held soup, in the room where the TV was, a T-shirt, hers, across the couch. Charlie touched it and heard through the half-open door of the room opposite Magda say, ‘Charlie?’ and caught sight of Jacek’s bare foot as it tapped their bedroom door shut.

  Charlie went back into the kitchen, got the door of the fridge open with his elbow, and managed to get a pint of milk to his lips. He drank all of it and turned and stood looking out at the snow blanketing the Lada. It was bad to be in the way, Charlie thought, but he didn’t know where else to go, so he stood there, leaning against the sink, watching the snow fall.

  It was a while before they appeared. Magda was in a blue striped dressing gown, and she smelt good as she brushed by him. She took his hands in hers and turned them palms up, not opening the bandages, just looking at his arms carefully to see if the infection was spreading.

  ‘Were you ever a nurse?’ Charlie asked. She shook her head.

  ‘Elizabeth called.’

  ‘That’s ingenious of her,’ Charlie said, making a face.

  ‘We said you might be here for a few days.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Charlie said, wanting to put his head on her shoulder. This whole desire to lay his head any where that was soft and female was getting out of control. He smiled and she smiled back.

  ‘The doctor is coming in half an hour. You need antibiotics.’

  ‘I need an alibi.’ She moved away and filled the kettle at the sink, looking out at the snow, affectionately, like someone who loved exactly this view and the way the snow had softened and then obliterated the world outside.

  Why explain? He didn’t want to go home, and since Magda didn’t know his wife and his child, she didn’t have to know why.

  Jacek, also in a dressing gown, padded in, feet bare, sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his face. When she placed tea in front of him he cupped it with his hands, looking out at the snow. She stood by the win dow at the kitchen sink and Charlie thought that the way they were together, just then, silently watching the snow fall, looking out at their garden, was the closest approximation of happiness he had seen for a long time. He also thought that it had nothing to do with him, and that he shouldn’t be here. They would be happier without him.

  Etta had called too. She had been talking to the insurance people, Jacek said, and they weren’t happy about it but the camera left behind in the valley would be covered. She’d had to make up some story, but they had bought it. Charlie knew that was $35,000 that Jacek didn’t have to worry about, although since Jacek had an animate relationship with his cameras, he was probably going to miss it anyway.

  ‘She is the best there is,’ Jacek said, meaning Etta, and Charlie nodded, not saying anything when Jacek added that she had told him she was going to take a few weeks off.

  The doctor drove into the yard in a late model four-wheel drive. He had a shiny bald head and brought the cold and the snow into the house with him. He and Jacek and Magda spoke Polish as he unwrapped Charlie’s dressings on the kitchen table, like a bloody package of fish. Charlie sat mutely through it all, having his temperature taken, while they spoke about him, and antibiotics were taken out of the briefcase and left on the table. He looked down at his naked, swollen and red hands and listened to the sound of their voices and felt tired and confused. The doctor had a vodka, and Magda and Jacek had one too, and when Charlie’s turn came, they gave him a glass of water and three separate pills to take instead. ‘But I want a drink,’ Charlie said, to which Magda replied, with the doctor nodding his assent, that if he didn’t do exactly what he was told he would be in the burns unit for a month and might lose his hands. Charlie knew this couldn’t be true, but it was discouraging nonetheless. Before he could muster any resistance, they had him upstairs in bed, and to Charlie’s surprise, the doctor had taken an IV drip out of his case. ‘Is that for me?’ ‘Who else?’ Jacek said as the doctor bade him bare his arm to introduce the drip line. So he was sick, Charlie thought, sick enough to stay here for ever. It seemed like a dispensation, and as Charlie fell asleep, under the cold canopy of snow over the skylight, he felt that he might never return to his old life again.

  He woke the next morning to the bright stab of late morning sun, knowing he had dreamed of the woman on fire. Nothing definite in the way of an image, just the physical sense of her holding on to him, a strange feeling, full of desire, at her pressing her body against his and the flame leaping between them. With the differe
nce that none of it had hurt, and as they fell together, he had felt her breasts against his chest. It was strange to be lying on a bed so far away wanting someone and wishing he could whisper her name.

  He could smell coffee downstairs, so he sat up and pulled out his IV line. He tried to put on his trousers, but he couldn’t do up his buttons. So he went downstairs with one of Jacek’s dressing gowns held closed around himself with his elbows. Magda was working at the kitchen table with a manuscript and a dictionary, and when she saw him she got up and tied the dressing gown cord around his waist and generally straightened him up. He felt unshaven and a mess and tried to turn away when she was close so she wouldn’t have to smell his breath. This was getting ridiculous, he thought, but when he went to the coffee on the stove, he couldn’t pour or lift or do anything. He turned and looked at her and shrugged and she came and put a cup to his lips and wiped away a drip on his chin, when he had finished. ‘Back to bed,’ she said, and he did as he was told. He even put back his IV line, feeling subdued and obedient.

  He was like that for a week, and the two of them took turns feeding him and he kept apologising and feeling pathetic and unable to focus. The doctor came, and the medications were changed, and there were new fancy burn dressings with bright shining foil, and he slept and woke and watched the flow of the drip and the sun and clouds crossing the skylight above his head. ‘I should be in hospital,’ he said to Jacek. ‘You are. Turn over,’ and he swabbed down Charlie’s back with a sponge. ‘I can tell,’ Jacek added. ‘You cannot stand this much longer.’

  ‘I keep dreaming about her,’ Charlie said.

  Jacek was in the bathroom next door, emptying the basin of water and squeezing out the sponge. He said nothing.

  ‘Maybe we should stop doing this,’ Charlie ventured. ‘The road trips.’

  ‘Magda agrees with you.’

  ‘And you?’

  Jacek came back and sat down on the edge of Charlie’s bed.

  ‘We do this thing together. You are good. I am good. Someone else will do it worse.’

  ‘Why do it at all?’

  Neither said anything. They knew why they did it, but it seemed ridiculous to rehearse the reasons or to evaluate them now that everything had gone wrong and someone had died because of it. You either kept on or you stopped, and neither knew what they would do now. The honest truth was that it didn’t depend on what they said or thought, but on how they would feel, much later, when the assignments were offered, when they watched a situation develop somewhere and felt that desire again, to be there, to be in the middle of it and to be working together.

  They knew what the mistake had been: to trust Benny, whom Charlie had instinctively recognised as a chancer. It always came down to this sort of judgement of a stranger: would he deliver? would he betray? did he have any capacity to improvise if things went into that zone of uncertainty or chaos? Benny had been the mistake, but what kind of mistake was that? The kind nothing can stop you making, and which you would make again. They’d tried to save her; they’d intended none of this; they weren’t responsible for the war; they had been doing their job. End of story.

  Except that it wasn’t. Or wouldn’t be. Or couldn’t be.

  ‘What’s Magda say?’

  ‘That it’s too high a price to pay in order just to feel that you are alive.’

  It was dark now, and the light on Jacek’s face was from the single reading lamp. He was bent over, leaning both palms on his knees, looking nowhere in particular, long thin pale hair falling forward and obscuring half his face. He looked the way he always did, tired and distant, with the possibility of very rapid movement just a second away. But it occurred to Charlie that in all the time they had worked together, he had never asked himself whether Jacek could go on, never wondered whether his friend was feeling the same hollowed-out, desolate feeling inside. For it had been Magda who had made Charlie feel that Jacek must be immune to this desolation. It was strange to think that maybe there was no protection at all against this feeling, not even a woman who would do anything for you.

  ‘Your wife called again,’ Jacek said. ‘Every day in fact.’

  Charlie said nothing. Men, in Charlie’s experience, did not talk about their wives to other men. Not really. Things were said, but nothing that went close. All Charlie knew, for example, was what Magda did and that they had been together ever since Jacek got out of jail for the trick with the garbage can. He had never told Jacek the least thing about Elizabeth, flautist, music teacher, now deputy school principal. It all just seemed irrelevant, an intrusion on the best thing about their relationship, which was that they were hunters together.

  Down in the valley hadn’t been the only time Jacek had saved his life. There had been Karte Seh hospital in Kabul, when Hekmatyar’s incoming was reducing every adobe wall they sheltered behind to dust. Jacek pulled him away and got them into the Jeep and back to the Intercontinental when Charlie would have pushed them into catching a round or worse. And Charlie had returned the compliment in Huambo, when Jacek stepped around the compound wall to film the boy with the scar on his cheek, coming up the street towards them, Rambo on weed, firing and dancing, weapon on his hip, spraying bullets to and fro, hopping and popping on the balls of his feet. He was shooting up the street the way a kid back home would play with a water hose, but it was Jacek’s call – that by turning over just then, the boy wouldn’t play the gun on them. Because the kid knew, hey, this is show-time. I’m on TV. The whole world’s going to see me dance. And so it proved. He just went right past, jiving and jumping, as Jacek turned and pulled the focus tight on the kid’s dilated, bloodshot eyes. Great images. They’d won an award at some film festival. Jacek was concentrating so hard he didn’t see the sniper in the charred upstairs window across the street. The first bullet dropped the kid, and the second one would have dropped Jacek, but Charlie got to him first and yanked him back behind the wall.

  So this was what bound them together, faith in each other’s animal instincts. And it got so that they didn’t trust anybody else, or at least Charlie didn’t. But he could see that Jacek had always trusted Magda, and that she was one of the sources of sound judgement, no matter how far away they were from each other. Every night Jacek would stroll away from the camp or the bivouac or the compound or the hotel and Charlie would see him on his cellphone talking to her. Charlie had no such resource at home, and he never called when he was out on the road. Well, he had called a couple of times, but the distances were just too great to bridge, him in some fucked-up dive and her and Annie in the kitchen, standing by the fridge with the magnets holding the school schedule and the photo of the three of them in the Rockies. The lines were bad, and when Elizabeth said, don’t do this again, he hadn’t really disagreed. But that was why he wasn’t going home. Not yet, anyway.

  He had been in love, Charlie knew, and there were photographs to prove it: Elizabeth in the Italian summer dress with the buttons that undid to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath; her looking across the table in the restaurant in Volterra as if there was nobody there but him.

  He no longer believed his own memory, but he could see what it was like from the photographs. There actually was a shot of that half-kilo bag of cherries, soaked with juice, beginning to disintegrate, on the white sheet of that hotel bedroom in the half-light. The ones they had fed each other, smeared on each other, shutters closed, naked and wet at the very beginning of it all. Those cherries and the purple stain they made on her skin. And the cold-eyed photograph taken before. What kind of idiot takes a photograph of something like that, when he has a woman in a hotel room on a summer afternoon? What’s the curatorial impulse? Or worse, what accounts for the sense, from the very beginning, that one day it will be over and he will need proof that it ever took place at all?

  He had never thought that he would lose all of this, that it would seem ruined by what had happened after. Weren’t some things supposed to be safe from ruin? Like being in love for the first time, in a fore
ign hotel, on a summer afternoon? Wasn’t that supposed to remain untrammelled, no matter how badly everything turned out? Weren’t you entitled to remember something like that together, and just feel glad, in your separate ways, that it had been possible? He had no idea how she remembered it, only he was sure it wasn’t the way he did.

  Come to think of it, what did he and Annie remember in common? He could be out there, in some fly-blown billet at night and count through the time change in order to imagine where his daughter might be at that very hour: on the bus home, with her satchel, or coming through the door for a snack, or lying in bed looking up at the Day-Glo stars she’d patched there to watch their fading when the lights were turned out. No, it wasn’t about love, it was about what they had in common. Charlie sat there, Jacek’s weight on the end of the bed, and wondered why it was that when he said to Annie, ‘Don’t you remember?’ she so often didn’t. Some times it was because she had been too young, some times because what she remembered was alto gether out of his field of vision, like the time they had made that sunny afternoon climb up the switchbacks of Mount Assiniboine, half of it with her on his back. She didn’t remember the top, the view that made you want to cue ‘Ode to Joy’ at about 1,000 decibels, and she didn’t remember being carried or how good it felt to be together. Her one memory, she said, had been of that squirrel stealing a nut from her pack during the picnic. What picnic? What squirrel? He’d been sitting beside her and he never even saw it. Charlie knew that it was stupid to fret about this kind of thing, but he couldn’t help it. The whole point of a family was encapsulated in ‘Do you remember that time when?’ In the good old days, he could do that with his own parents. Frank and Mika always gamely joined in, adding embroidery of their own to the tapestry of recollection they made together, though now he had to wonder whether they were humouring him, their one and only. Charlie, thinking like a father now, asked himself what common family memory actually was, what it was that they had been creating together all those years, he, Elizabeth and Annie.