Don Quixote San Diego

I was into the last paragraph of a news story under the headline Attack on Iraq! about this miraculous new kind of long-range war with no American casualties when the living room quietly blossomed around me. I let the Tribune fold into my lap and looked at the sun just touching the tops of nearby houses, lighting orange the bellies of clouds scattered across the western sky.

“Maybe we should mention Ramadan,” I said to Lisa, who sat on the sofa signing Christmas cards in the saffron light.

“You want to send one to the Fraziers?” she said without looking up. She slipped a card into an envelope and put her pen to the next one.

A sensible question, a logical question. A good question. I tried to put it in a practical light. What is there to say anymore? For six years running it’s been something that amounted to “I’m still here,” which may be the reason I no longer get a reply. Not that I need a reply. A reply would be nice. Yes, a good question. But a morning question, not an evening question. Not with the sunlight there on the bookshelf so yellow it almost hummed. Memories were leaking in around the edges, rising rapidly in my mind. My buddy Frazier, fellow PFC in a different kind of war. In that light, yes, the heat and the mud and the cold still amounted to something, the fear and fatigue and anger and frustration. Boredom, and the fear even of that. The first time we came under fire was like the first hit of a powerful drug. Stupefying. The sound of flying metal cutting through the elephant grass, the eruption of automatic weapons as I fumbled to find my own. Shooting blindly, squalling in the mud unable to talk, unable to think because what was coming out of the jungle was unthinkable. Not two feet away Ward’s little troll floated face-up with its bluebead eyes and happy mouth, its pink hair smeared and tangled with blood. I went rigid then, unable to move until air support arrived and turned it around so fast we became dizzy laughing, screaming at the sudden hilarity of burning soldiers fleeing the trees like Keystone Kops. Oh what a shining path was opening up before me! A damnable shining path! I would have followed it into the night had my eyes not been drawn just then to the shadows, the real shadows of the facing houses and the shadowy shape of an old man running, hobbling, bustling painfully toward me. In the time it took to disentangle him from my thoughts of war the man had crossed the street and grabbed one of our garbage cans. He dragged it halfway across the lawn and then, hopping and using one knee for leverage, he boosted it over his head and staggered forward, emerging from the long shadows like some sort of crazy knight edged in gold, sunlight glinting off the hovering can. It was Howard, Harold, something like that. He belonged to the Reeders across the street, a father they no longer trusted to live alone. On his face the same overlaid masks of panic and determination I had seen in the war. I stood up and yelled “NO!” just as he flung the garbage can at our picture window.

Lisa jumped and nearly fell over the back of the sofa. Glass shattered into the room as the can bounced off the sill and dropped into the shrubs next to where the old man had gone down. I rushed forward, shards crunching underfoot, and launched a string of profanities at his old ass sticking out of the bushes. I didn’t care if he was hurt or dead. He pulled himself up and stared at me, horrified.

“Oh damn, oh hell,” he muttered.

I ran outside. “You senile son of a bitch!” The words shot wildly from my mouth, barking off the neighboring houses. He was trembling and huffing for breath. I backed off to calm down. “OK,” I said, stamping around. “Jesus—”

“I’m sorry.” His voice small between mountainous heaves. “I thought—” He closed his eyes and shook his head, like he knew to his shame he didn’t belong there, in that world of normal people and normal things. “I thought it was on fire,” he said, looking straight into my living room at Lisa. “I am so sorry.”

At first I saw only my wife standing there all warm and yellow and agape in the gaping hole where our window had been, but then I saw what the old man must have seen. Encircling Lisa like a corona the remaining fragments of window glowed fiercely with the light of the setting sun. Those milky old eyes had looked at a sunset reflected in my front window and seen a house on fire.

The curtains lifted and rolled with the cool ocean air. Lisa’s expression softened, and in that light she was an icon, a saint. Whatever else I had been ready to throw at the old man left me. All that remained was that look I saw as he and his high-held can came staggering across my lawn. The panic and determination. I’m writing this, Frazier, because I know you remember that look, and I hope you understand, as I do now, how close this came to being a noble act.

Beside me the old man’s headshake settled into the steady reverberation of age and fatigue. Tears collected along the rims of his glasses. “It’s all right,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “It’s just a window.” Then turning to the sun: “Look at that.” The old man wiped his glasses with a palsied handkerchief, then touched it to his eyes. I told him I used to see sunsets like that in Vietnam. “Amazing sunsets,” I said.

We stood watching together as the light faded, then together we watched as Jennifer Reeder came running from her house in blue fleece slippers, a portable phone absently in hand. “What did he do?” she shrieked. “Oh my God what did he do?”

“It was an accident,” I began, knowing that nothing I could say was going to save him. She promised to take care of the window, then led the old man away to some enduring punishment. And why should we expect a better ending? We are human, Frazier, there is no excuse for that.