The Outer Cape Read online

  “Please, take these kids out of this house,” she says. “I need a friggin’ break.”

  “Where do you want me to take them?” Robert asks.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. Anywhere. I’m losing my mind.”

  “Okay, calm down. I’ll take them to the movies.”

  “Not some R-rated movie, either. Last time Andrew had nightmares.”

  “Well, I refuse to pay money to see a bunch of cartoons whacking each other off.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a cartoon, Robert.”

  “I’ll check what’s playing.”

  * * *

  The boys sit in the backseat during the ride to the theater, battling for head room in order to see the handheld video-game screen one or the other taps at furiously.

  The two films playing at the Cape Cinema Double are Ernest Goes to Camp, which is about some yokel, a grown man who, as the title aptly states, goes to camp, and the other is Full Metal Jacket, which, according to the Herald, is supposedly one of the most accurate depictions of the Vietnam War. After reading that review three weeks ago, Robert has been eager to see the film, but Irene hates violent movies, especially war movies—she had vomited a quarter of the way through Apocalypse Now.

  Not that Robert had been in the war.

  Close enough, he tells himself.

  One night, when he was seventeen years old, his father had given him a choice. He was standing in the hallway, in his grass-stained baseball uniform, with his sweaty ball cap under his arm. His father stood and turned and looked at him.

  “Score?”

  “Seven-two.”

  “Did you win?”

  “No.”

  His father didn’t care for baseball, said that if one of your greats of all time was a three-hundred-pound sack of fat who could barely run the bases without coughing up a lung, then you couldn’t call yourself a sport.

  “Get cleaned up,” he had said. “We need to talk about your future.”

  Robert nodded and jogged upstairs.

  In the shower, he got the water so hot it scorched his skin until he was numb all over. His younger brother, Brian, was out with friends, drinking cheap beer and flirting with girls. Red had no faith Brian would end up anything other than a cog. He didn’t have brains, or discipline, or a sense of timing. “You got your mother’s genes,” he had said more than once, and Brian would grin, not understanding his father meant to insult him. Robert, on the other hand, wasn’t allowed to leave the house unless his father said so, and always it was to play sports or help out at a job site.

  Robert’s sister, Maureen, was standing in the doorway of her room with a towel wrapped around her breasts and her hair bunched up under a shower cap. She’d been growing her hair for the past year, and when it was down, it went nearly to her thighs. She was tall and lithe and moved through the house like a force no one knew how to rein in. Robert envied her. The scented candles she had burning were unable to cover the ripe odor of weed sneaking into the hallway from behind her bedroom door.

  “Leave any hot water for me?” she said.

  “I can smell it in the hall,” Robert said.

  “You look like a lobster,” she said and got closer and put her hands on him and gripped his arms. “I’m going to crack you open and eat you all up.” She nibbled at his skin and grinned mischievously as he pushed her away. When the bathroom door shut and the lock was applied, he heard her start to sing something, something, how did it go, that song she was always singing back then?

  “The way I see it,” his father started as soon as Robert pulled the chair under him at the kitchen table. The two were separated by the corner at the table’s head and side, which still had the scratches from the stray kitten Brian brought home a decade ago. He had found it in the woods one Sunday, lost, frightened, and had brought it home and kept it with him through the night. She had slept docilely, occasionally pawing behind her ear, and he had thought she’d be a welcome addition to the family. But after being fed, she clawed up the furniture and pooped on the rug and made her last stand there on the table’s edge, hanging on as his father tried to wrench it loose. Then, frustrated by its pathetic cries, he had squeezed her stomach until her paws hung over the edge of the table, limp, like wet leaves from a tree branch. He had looked at the children and his wife and the mess on the floor and table and said, “Most strays get much worse.” Then he took the kitten’s body, yet unnamed, out in back to the brush pile, tossing her there like a sack of grass clippings. In the middle of the night, Robert had woken to use the bathroom and, through the hall window, saw his mother in the backyard, shovel in her hands, digging a hole.

  “Look at me,” his father said.

  Robert moved his eyes from the scratches in the table and followed his father’s sun-reddened neck to his thinning, gingery hair and back down the slope of his forehead to the tiny crease between his eyes, where he kept his gaze.

  “The way I see it,” his father continued, “is you have two choices. Either you get into Notre Dame or you sign up for the army. I won’t pay for a school I don’t respect and the army needs strong boys who can’t find a place in traditional sport.”

  Robert had argued then about his shoes and equipment, the Pennsylvania basketball his father bought him that always lost air after a few dribbles, the cleat-less cleats he wore for baseball, and the holes in his socks that helped to breed a terrible foot fungus that he battled all through football season. After the Thanksgiving Day game that year, he spent a week lying on his bed with his feet propped in the air by the A–B and G–H entries of the encyclopedia set no one in the house had ever read. His mother rubbed liniment oil between his toes, letting the fungus cook like a frying steak until it was dry and peeling.

  “Which would you prefer?” his father asked now.

  “School,” Robert said.

  “You’re not as stupid as you look, you know that?”

  His father gave him the application and told him to fill it out and said he would mail it the following Monday.

  “Make sure your handwriting is clean and your grammar’s correct. The way those gooks are fighting us over there, you’ll wind up dead if you don’t get in.”

  College had been a fearless time, at first. He excelled in statistics, advanced calculus, and courses in pre-law and finance management. The language of his professors was exact. But he could not grasp the writings of Saint Augustine or the nineteenth-century impressionists. They spoke to him about a kind of love in something he had yet to comprehend, if he ever would at all. Sitting in his dorm room, with his roommate, Frank, writing in a notebook at his desk, Robert read, “What, then, is my God? What, I ask, unless the Lord God? Who is Lord but the Lord? Or who is God but our God?” He flung the book across the room. Frank shot up out of his chair.

  “For fuck’s sake, man,” Frank said.

  “Exactly,” Robert said.

  In high school, he had trained himself to run and dive and hit. He needed to feel that aggression again. So he joined the rugby club, first as a lock, then as a fly-half. He bulldozed over the other players. His legs were cut and thighs bruised. That night, at the captain’s house on the top of the hill near the lake, he stood in the loud cry of hairy beasts shouting “Oy!” and crushing beer cans against their foreheads, while girls slid topless down the hill toward the lake, and John Bonham beat the hell out of “Moby Dick,” and sensed a kind of peace that never came with prayer or study.

  He was part of a tribe, fearless and unaccountable.

  In early November, during a game against Michigan, he broke his wrist on another player’s kneecap during a scrum. His hand limp, he lost his balance and rolled over to protect his wrist. Then the player on the other team drove the metal spike on the sole of his shoe into Robert’s leg. When the other player ripped his foot away, it tore the skin back like a thin peel of apple.

  The following week, the team brought over girls from Saint Mary’s. They gathered on the beach at St. Joseph’s Lake drinking fr
om kegs they’d rolled down hills and set up in the light from church candles. Robert made out with a tall, blond girl named Brittany. She played with the curls in his hair and let him put his fingers inside her. Someone finally got a stereo hooked up in the boat house. It was 1969—“Crystal Blue Persuasion,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Get Back”—every song a dream or a warning. Even before his injury, Robert couldn’t dance on two legs, let alone one. Brittany found someone who could. By the time he realized he was drunk and alone, the cops raided the party. Slowed by the pain in his leg, Robert was caught and brought up for dismissal for disorderly conduct unbecoming of a student of Catholic values.

  He was disciplined with academic leave for the spring. But he wouldn’t go home. He stayed in South Bend washing dishes at Corby’s. Why be afraid? he thought. Fear of the draft was spurring crying jags from bull-necked boys, fights between men young and old, survivors of the last war and the soon-to-be-dead, protests through the pedestrian suburbs of South Bend.

  On July 1, just as he tied the apron around his waist to start his shift, he heard the dates being called on the radio in the kitchen. Someone turned up the volume. Robert stood brave against the numbers. Everyone was trying to avoid Vietnam; he had decided to embrace the fuck show. “Call it,” he said, catching from the corners of his eyes the turning heads at the bar. “Don’t provoke the sons of bitches,” someone said. But, by urging his number to be called, he felt the opposite had happened. He had shielded himself from the massacre with his own insanity. “Whatever,” Robert said, and, as he turned to start on the dishes, he heard the announcer call his number. He paused in the kitchen doorway to catch his breath, then turned on the water and started washing the large plates first, then the smaller ones, then the beer mugs and glasses. Walking back to his room in snow on the other side of the lake, he passed two priests with their hands clasped in front of them, solemn in the eyes. He stopped by a bench, put his hand on the cold wood, and vomited.

  In the morning he called home and explained to his father what had happened in South Bend and why he thought the army would be good for him.

  The call was short.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” his father said.

  “When I return, I’ll do better,” Robert said.

  “If you return,” his father had said and hung up.

  Vietnam was a death sentence. Robert knew it even then. If you made it home in one piece—or most of your pieces—the person you used to be was gone. Once back in the world, Jake Cunningham lingered near the football field and smoked cigarettes. He’d been two years ahead of Robert in high school, played linebacker, had a knockout for a girlfriend. He had gotten into dope over there and had a bullet graze his ear. Now he was part deaf. All his fame had disappeared. Then he disappeared.

  Robert’s injury had healed fully by the time his group finished basic training and was preparing to get their assignments overseas. He had already written his brother and sister and told them how he loved them and that he hoped they loved him, too, and that he didn’t have any regrets (which was a lie). He did not say everything he wanted to say because there was still a part of him that believed he would not be killed—the same part that had embraced the show. He sealed the envelope and asked one of the sergeants to send it if something were to happen to him. The sergeant said that if something were to happen to him it would only be a result of not paying attention during training (which was also a lie).

  Robert was easily the worst shot in his class, if he was even able to put together his rifle in time to get a shot off during marksmanship training. He often had his rifle in pieces like a sad child unable to fit together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. You needed a certain kind of grace and rhythm to assemble a weapon used to blow people apart. And when he finally did get the thing built, his shots missed left and right and high. His drill sergeant was keen to say that ammo was a much more important commodity than life, before ordering Robert to give him fifty push-ups, which he gave and gave, day in and day out. So many, that by the time basic was over, his chest was the size of an ape’s and he’d added three inches of solid muscle to his biceps. Because of his size, Robert was a nightmare in a barroom brawl, though at that size, putting together his rifle had become near impossible.

  The day Robert’s troop was given their assignments, they took a knee in the barracks and waited with violent restraint. He remembered the sounds of heavy breathing, cracked knuckles, and a dripping faucet in the adjacent latrines. No one moved when their name was called and they were given their posts. Already Robert had begun to design a more complete kind of afterlife than the one he was taught in catechism school, one where he had his pick of beautiful women and there was plenty of beer and he could watch movies and play sports and never get old, which he thought was an advantage to dying young.

  Then he heard the executive officer say, “Robert W. Kelly, Stuttgart, Germany,” and with his giant hand, he covered his face and spread his fingers, as though donning a torn mask.

  Later someone asked him if his head hurt from the bag of horseshoes he’d been hit with. Someone else took a dump in his footlocker. Not until many years later did Robert think about those young men, with whom he had gone through training. By then he couldn’t remember most of their names or faces. But he remembered their eyes when they were told where they were going, and this is what truly scared him, not their lean, trembling bodies but the roomful of eyes.

  * * *

  In the pubs and dives and basement card rooms of Stuttgart, Germany, Robert felt free and unaccountable—one and the same in his mind—and he’d fight and fuck and stumble over the snow-covered cobblestones with bruised ribs, scraped knuckles, and a warm heat in his groin, making his way back to the garrison, slipping the guard five bucks, until the MPs were on to him for continuously violating curfew, and, because nobody wanted the job Robert had, the MPs gave him a few knocks in the ear and a demerit that would stay on a record he would later have pulled up for the first and only time, when he was on his way to prison, and this by the state’s attorney, who, being a Vietnam veteran himself, used it against Robert’s lawyer’s plea for leniency.

  Robert spent most of his days working behind a raised school desk, like Bob Cratchit, in an office the size of a Datsun, handing out six-month job notices to soldiers returning from Vietnam. One morning, a man named Reynolds came in and sat down in the chair across from him. His face shined with sweat, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets. Robert had seen others like him, men who needed something to erase the recent past. Robert only had janitor duty at the gymnasium left for this work cycle. Reynolds didn’t look like a janitor. He was bullnecked, muscles strained tight in his white T-shirt, and a torso as strong and thick as a red oak. He looked like he was in the business of destroying things and not cleaning up afterward.

  “You got something else for me, pal?” Reynolds said.

  “I’m looking.” Robert flipped through a file full of blank paper, an act he learned early on, followed by, “Don’t see anything, unless you want my job,” which no soldier did because, to them, what Robert did was a joke.

  Reynolds lit a cigarette. He smoked a quarter of it in one long inhale and flicked the ash on the papers on Robert’s desk.

  “You think you’re lucky, don’t you?” he said, his gaze like a weapon.

  “It’s out of my control,” Robert replied. This, he felt, was the only explanation he could give that wouldn’t further the confrontation.

  “You’re unlucky,” Reynolds shouted. “Hear me?”

  Robert looked at the man. A long, snakelike vein ran from his forehead to his left eye.

  “I killed everything. I killed frogs and gooks and birds and boars. You don’t know how that feels, man. To walk across the earth with all this death around you and see the sky’s just the same sky.”

  Reynolds stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his boot. He took the card from Robert and then spit on his desk and walked out.

  * * *


  Outside the Cape Cinema Double, Robert lets his cigarette go down to his fingers and the slight burn against his nail causes him to flinch and drop the butt in a puddle. The boys are waiting for him to pay the lady at the ticket booth. They kill yellow and blue and red creatures every day, Robert begins to reason. What’s the difference between killing something in a video game and seeing someone get killed in a movie?

  The lobby is filled with children in wet boots chasing after each other, under and over the ropes, until one plump kid no more than six or seven catches his foot on the rope, smacks his face on the ground, and rolls around screaming until his father picks him up by the collar and drags him out of the lobby like a piece of dry cleaning. The madness stops as the rest of the children wait for the four-thirty showing of Ernest Goes to Camp while the fathers sit on benches under the awning outside and smoke. If Hollywood really wanted to know what hell was like, Robert thinks, they’d be in the Cape Cinema Double on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon.

  “Three for the camp movie,” Robert says.

  He pays the lady at the counter and takes the tickets and shuffles the boys over toward the restrooms.

  “Now listen, we’re not going to see that dopey movie, okay?”

  The boys’ eyes grow wide with delight and, possibly, fear. The word “dopey” has some magic effect on their brains, and even though they do want to see Ernest Goes to Camp, they’re now entranced by Robert’s secret plan.

  “We’re going to tell your mother we saw it, but we’re really going to see this other one. It’ll be a lot better, trust me. And there’ll be a camp, too. A boot camp, which isn’t the same, but in this camp you get to shoot guns and say bad words. Doesn’t that sound better?”

  The boys nod like puppets. They don’t fully understand all that has gone into this open disregard for their mother’s wishes. Not that they need to. They’re his boys. If he wants to take them to a war movie, then for fuck’s sake, that’s what he’s going to do.