The Volunteer Read online

  The boy told the woman in Latvian she could leave now—the phrase Evija used when excusing him from the dinner table. But Elroy wanted the woman to tell him what to do. “Don’t you have anything to give me?” he asked.

  The woman admonished the boy, and the boy nodded. And when Elroy asked, the boy interpreted in a whisper that she was saying Janis must not forget to take care of the papers stored in his bag.

  Elroy watched the woman leave. He felt a warm thing on the top of his leg. It was the boy’s left hand. With the other hand, the boy was paging through the menu as he looked at the pictures of the food. Elroy cancelled the livers, and they left without eating.

  They took a bus to the airport. He strapped Janis into his seat on the flight to Hamburg.

  From New Mexico Elroy had brought a coloring book and a crayon. The boy wrapped his fingers around the crayon just so, while Elroy schooled him on how to press lightly so as to conserve wax. And yet, within moments, the crayon snapped in the boy’s fist. And the boy glanced up with fear in his shaking mouth, as though he was about to be whipped.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN HAMBURG, fresh off the plane, Elroy took the boy to a men’s room stall and stuffed his coat pocket with money.

  “I didn’t mean to break the crayon,” Janis said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Where do you keep my watch?” Elroy drilled, resealing the worn tape that patched the boy’s coat. Elroy needed a moment to think things through. He needed ten minutes, fifteen. He would have to buy a book about how to parent. He would have to draw up a grocery list, like cereal, health insurance, antihistamines. The boy had an allergy to dander, and the condo was covered everywhere with the fur of Elroy’s father’s dog. Elroy needed a moment offstage, without the boy watching, so later he could give the impression he knew what the fuck he was doing. He needed a pad of paper and a pencil.

  “I keep the watch in my pants pocket,” the boy replied. “I’m sorry.”

  Elroy said, “Say you’re sorry again and I’ll give you something to be sorry about.”

  The boy looked up, his clothed haunches suspended in the toilet seat.

  “Go ahead and cry,” Elroy said. “What time do I come to get you?”

  Janis showed a thumb and index finger. He said, “Two.”

  Elroy exited the stall. He told the boy to lock it. He heard a scuffle, and the sliding of the latch. He left the men’s room, mindful to keep a moderate pace amid the mad clatter of Europeans racing toward him, overtaking him on either side. The corridor reeked of burned cooking grease. He paced away, trailing his bag and the boy’s toward Terminal 2. The dented wheels of the smaller bag infuriated him by persistently tipping the bag on its side. He dragged the heavy thing wrong side up. Then he hoisted it by its sissy bar, which would not retract. He blew five minutes just looking for a clock, all while getting farther from the bathroom where the boy waited.

  In order to think, Elroy needed to buy a pencil. He blew another ten minutes in Terminal 2 looking for a stationery store. When he found it he realized he had, for reasons hidden from himself, left all of his money with the boy. Why had he left the boy with so much money? He didn’t know. And now the cashier, who would have accepted dollars if Elroy had had any, would not let him make such a trifling purchase with a credit card. The airport intercom said something in German, like There was a kindergarten at one of the C gates. Elroy was executing a plan, evidently of his own devising, and yet he did not know its objective. His connection to London would begin boarding in three minutes. It was already well past two o’clock. He turned back toward the bathroom in Terminal 1, planning to get a little money from the boy, buy the pencil, buy some paper, sit a moment, think, go back again, fetch the boy, and make it to the gate in time for the final boarding call. He would need to draw up an agenda, like day care, catechism classes, haircut. What could he possibly have intended by leaving the boy with all of his cash? The intercom said something in English, like In Terminal 1 there was a lost-and-found. Something in the lost-and-found. He paused, listening.

  With low inexorable thumps, an escalator drew arriving passengers down beneath the floor.

  He turned. Back toward the London gate, the bags dragging. Like a boat that comes about though its anchor has dropped. The wind takes it. Water all around. You need a while before you come to see you’re pointed the wrong way.

  * * *

  • • •

  JANIS SAT in a little room, an office someplace in the airport. Three kindly Germans surrounded him, their voices soft. Hot chocolate on the desk. He knew he was in Germany, so these must be Germans. And of Germans he knew exactly one thing, a saying he had heard from his mother’s actor friend in Riga: A German may appear to be a good fellow, but better to hang him.

  Do not be fooled by their chocolate.

  Go ahead and cry, his father had said. And Janis had let himself cry.

  Everything the Germans were telling him sounded like a question, the tone coming up sort of sweet and menacing at the end. Like, “Flik flik, bok bok, ACK ACK ACK?” He considered it best not to respond. Most of the grief he had met in life, such as Kit Kats withheld and isolation in the bedroom before dark while others could stay awake together as long as they chose, had come to him because he had talked.

  Germany was in Europe. Latvia, his mother’s country, was also in Europe. He had two homes: Riga with his mother and America with his father, though Janis had never visited there. Germany must fall somewhere in between. His mother was on vacation and so was he, but “vacation” seemed the wrong word in his case because his father’s house, where he was going, also counted as his own house.

  Papa will come. By suppertime. Any minute now. So Janis should save room. He wouldn’t eat any solid thing they gave him. Per Papa’s instructions, he had stayed in the bathroom stall until the little hand of his father’s watch had reached the two. Then he had waited a little while longer. Then he had stuffed the watch into his pants and gone back to the place where they had got off the plane. And waited. Papa was not there. So Janis had missed some aspect of their scheme. However, the coming of supper was an unchangeable law that neither he nor his father could get around even if they had wanted to. Papa would have to come by suppertime. Things were very bad, but supper would make them all right again.

  Janis longed for the coloring book. His father had taken it back and put it in his bag. The book had no captions and, in this respect, was excellent. He could not quite read yet and disliked feeling he was missing out on something. The book appeared to tell of a boy who feeds and tames a fox and is rewarded with the animal’s friendship. The book had no title, so Janis could come up with one of his own along with names for the people in it.

  He took a sip of the hot chocolate while the Germans conferred. He didn’t want to cry anymore, but he was allowed. It was one of his father’s instructions that he was allowed to cry.

  * * *

  • • •

  TWO HOURS LATER, Elroy landed in London. He deplaned, walked to the perimeter of the airport, and boarded a bus that drove on the wrong side. He had met another of the world wonders—driving on the left. You kind of don’t believe in it until you see it. Like the women he had watched float through the street in Kunduz, curtained in blue from cap to toes, a lace visor where the eyes should go. His platoon leader had warned them: Keep your head down. You weren’t supposed to look. But Kunduz had been a Star Wars planet. Like, How do I process this, a kid like me?

  Elroy got off the bus after a couple of stops, sneaked to the back of an apartment complex, and pitched the wicked little bag into a Dumpster. Then he figured out he could go back to the correct side of the street—see, everything went backward; maybe you do it wrong first so you can do it right later—and yes, another bus came and returned him to the airport.

  Heathrow, Terminal 5. A bright, oblong construction of glass and steel between aspha
lt runways. Ticketing. Bag check. A placard at security expressly forbade, among other items, crossbows, machetes, pliers, firearms, lighters shaped like firearms, harpoons, and catapults.

  He surrendered what he had to the conveyor belt and the screening cavern, and stepped through the metal detector, shoulders low, breathing deep. But the machine flunked him, cheeping, and a jowly attendant led him to secondary screening—asking, Did he have a pacemaker, a cobalt hip, a plate in his head?—and pointed him to the glass booth of a trace-detection portal.

  Elroy breathed deep. Sometimes you went the wrong way to go the right way again. Like once, in the street of a vacant neighborhood in Kunduz, he saw a mound in the earth where the dirt lay neatly disarranged, and he got on his knees and blew on it, and he saw the pressure plate, and he stood up fast. Nobody else around. And before he knew it, he’d said, “Fuck it,” and kicked the thing. Yet it didn’t blow. Like God was saying, “I want you to live, you shit.” And for a whole day Elroy feared nothing.

  From all directions, jets in the portal walls spat air at him while the machine sniffed the chamber for cocaine, PCP, smack, methamphetamine; also for TNT, C-4, and Semtex.

  A green light flashed, and the portal opened in front. A new attendant led him to a backscatter X-ray. He stood before a wall, hands raised, palms out, while a raster of radiation scanned the length of him. At the controls, a cheerless Caribbean woman with gold crowning her incisors could not determine his fault and let him go.

  In the afternoon autumn light, he sat in a file of Naugahyde chairs by the bank of windows. A color had gone out of the light this week: yellow, it seemed. All over Europe, the depleted light identical. And it had transported him back to an era of leaf piles, of cottonwood leaves stuck in the waistband of his underpants. Mountains heaped and demolished.

  Jumbo jets faced the terminal windows like orcas nosing at the wall of an aquarium. The haze parted. The light squarely struck Elroy’s shaved face. He bathed his neck in it, raising his chin and turning. A lattice of white steel overhead.

  By the gate a sign in blocky brass letters said a hamlet had stood here once, called Hitherowe, Hetherow, Hetherowfeyld. A heath with a row of houses on it. Heathrow. Scrub oak and gorse in sandy soil, where the kids played amid the vegetation and rubbish until Mother called them in for tea.

  He boarded, took his seat, and the plane tore through the atmosphere.

  * * *

  • • •

  A WHILE LATER, the Germans were trying to get Janis to do something, but he didn’t know what. One of the men took off his own tie and put it on the table, asking Janis a question and pointing to him. Then the man took off his jacket too, and emptied the pockets: cigarettes, ATM receipts. Smiling, open eyes, like, See? Sort of a demonstration.

  They were going to make him disrobe? He didn’t know how to prevent them. A rule from his mother went, No one gets to take your clothes off you, or take anything away from you that you have. One of the Germans put her hand on Janis’s hat, and he let her take it off, exposing his ragged hair, but he could not keep from crying. He was racked with hunger. They ought to feel awful about what they were trying to do to him. They made him stand up and they took off his coat. Anything might happen now. She laid his coat on the table and searched his pockets. They let him watch. They found a Kit Kat wrapper. Gum. And 263 U.S. dollars folded in half.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE GREAT CIRCLE ROUTE WESTWARD over the Arctic.

  Gravity pressed on the plane. Yet the pressure beneath the racing wings, together with the deflection against the flaps in the plane’s trailing edges, lifted it up, so that its passengers hovered in the air, in a vessel weighing 830,000 pounds.

  Elroy watched a glacier pour ice into the ocean. God crowded the world with wonders so you wouldn’t forget what he told you to do. Elroy didn’t know if he’d forgotten or remembered.

  He transferred at Boston Logan and landed in Albuquerque—the fourth landing in the same day, although it had lasted thirty hours so far. The chamisa pollen caught in his nose and broke his heart. Mucus drained from his sinuses.

  He had reserved a subcompact car online, but Hertz had overbooked his model, so he was given a Mustang convertible. He drove it north, with the top down, on the straightaway interstate through the valley of the Rio Grande, pointing his face straight up at the stars, which had occupied the same places over the East. He dared the car to veer out of its lane.

  West of Santa Fe, he headed into the Jemez range, the thin air insufficient for his breathing, the roads black. At last he found a low adobe wall running the length of three city blocks—he was navigating by feel, almost by remembered smell, like a hound—and met a gate, at one in the morning Mountain Standard Time. He hadn’t eaten since the plane from London, and his longing for food registered as a physical panic. His breath moved shallow and quick. His spine went rigid.

  A guard sat at the gate in a lighted cabin doing a sudoku. He asked Elroy, in the rapid-fire English of native New Mexicans, whom he had come to see.

  “But I find nothing here from Mr. Tilly that he is expecting you,” the guard said to his clipboard. He required a special note from the condo owner to ring after ten o’clock.

  “Come on, man,” Elroy said. “I was here three days ago.” He produced a packet of collection agency envelopes he had stashed in his bag earlier in the week, all addressed to him here, none yet opened. The guard scrutinized them.

  The gate receded into the adobe wall, and Elroy eased the convertible into the compound. Hooded lights, rock gardens, low-slung stucco homes. He walked under the vigas of the porch and knocked.

  No answer came. He tried the knob. It gave and let him in.

  * * *

  • • •

  A DAY LATER, Janis was awakened where he slept, on a cot in the airport office, by a man wearing a pilot’s uniform. He introduced himself in Latvian as Kristaps, while the Germans looked on. Latvian to strangers. American only to the ones you know. A system that had stood Janis in good stead before. But he had to conclude that, in Germany, a stranger speaking to him in Latvian presented a special case. The pilot was trying to trick him in some way. Papa will come, eventually.

  Janis went to the concourse with the pilot for some milk and an egg sandwich, and the pilot asked in Latvian, “Where is your mother or father?” Angry, as though Janis had done something wrong.

  And Janis said, blushing, in American, “Can I have mustard?” intending to spoil the wondrous thing on his plate, lest he succumb and eat it.

  “Where is the person who brought you here?” the pilot demanded.

  Why did it feel good to cry? Janis had long wondered what was the matter with him that when he cried, which was feeling bad, it felt good somehow.

  Janis took the top off the sandwich, hoping the white of the egg would be runny, but it had set perfectly; hoping the yolk would be green and hard, but it gave easily when he poked it. His entire being cried out for food.

  He needed to eat. But he also needed Papa to come. And all this was a test of some kind. Papa would come, but only if Janis kept faith and did not eat.

  The pilot cursed him.

  Janis gnawed at the arm of his coat. The pilot got up for coffee. Janis felt his hunger as a throb beneath his sternum and a kind of wind inside his head. He decided on the title for the coloring book. The title would be Joe Loves Foxie, and Foxie Loves Joe Very Much. He opened the little carton of German milk and poured it all over the food on his plate.

  Around midday, they put him in a car.

  They drove an enormous road. There was a big city, with ships and cranes and railroad cars. It was all so beautiful that Janis wondered whether he was in Heaven.

  * * *

  • • •

  MR. TILLY WASN’T really Elroy’s father. He wasn’t even Elroy’s stepfather. He had been Elroy’s legal guardian until he
turned eighteen. Nonetheless, if Elroy should ever get killed, the Casualty Notification Officer tasked with informing his primary next of kin would have to come out here. Whether his mother was living or dead, he didn’t know.

  Toward the living room he made his way in the dark, touching the walls. The cavelike dwelling swallowed every sound. A prehistoric homey smell of an old person’s wool clothes drying. Under his hand on the sofa, sheets and blankets lay stacked: a bed prepared for him.

  He untied his boots. A presence in this home as nowhere else seemed to see him and know, an all-embracing knowledge of what he had done and would do. Someone existed who saw it all and went on watching when each of the others had turned away.

  He washed his face and dried it and came back to the living room. His eyes, seeing not in spite of the darkness but as if by means of it, became attuned to the rug—which he had shipped to the old man at foolish expense from an air base in central Asia—and to a little, second, makeshift bed that had been arranged there: a quilt folded twice to make a mattress, a pillow, an acrylic blanket. Atop the pillow, a box of apple juice with its shrink-wrapped straw affixed.

  Beside him on the sofa he found a remote control, aimed it into the nothing before him, pressed its rubber button. The flickers of a gas fireplace shot up among cast ceramic logs.

  Down through the chasm of the flames—the other world inside the fire—a throng of souls came falling toward him. Altogether toward his face, souls old and young, of every color and time, two by two from the flames, paired souls like two streams coursing, all of them knowing him, but none so much as turned a face to acknowledge he was there.

  Firelight faintly painted the hopping room, creating a small piano with its lid ajar, printed music scattered on a table, a heap of trade magazines, jade and cactus growing amid pebbles in the bottoms of soda bottles. A money tree, a chair in the far corner, a pair of black jeans, a brown wool shirt, a gray windbreaker—the old man’s perpetual outfit of a person ready to disappear in a crowd or thicket. The flickering light made the shirt move. It resolved above the shirt into a white crown like a beacon unlit. A mist condensed and hardened and embodied the clothes and hair. The grizzled head twisted and shook off sleep. The fingers swiped the corners of the eyes. “Elroy,” the voice said simply.