The Second Occupation
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“I know it’s too soon to be feeling stir crazy,” Alva said, over dessert. “But I wish we could at least open a window.”
“Me, too. But they’ll be keeping a close watch on the house, and we shouldn’t take the chance.”
“I guess there’s always TV,” she said, getting up to clear the table. He helped with the dishes, and then they moved to the couch to finish off the bottle.
“We could watch the pilot episode of that new Swedish detective series,” he said. “Or even Part II of Ivan the Terrible. We’ve been putting it off so long, maybe now’s the time.”
“Yes, we could. Or we could get the binoculars and watch the Flynn family sneaking around.”
“I see your taste tonight runs to reality TV. Okay, I’ll go hunt up a second pair.”
“I was kidding, dear.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been oppositional at times today,” she said. “And I’m sorry. Because I agree with you. We should ignore them, and just pretend that it’s too cold to go outside. Indoor games, that’s what we need.”
“I’m all for that. But seriously, we could review footage from the security cameras. Just for curiosity’s sake. Might be interesting.”
She smiled and clinked glasses with him. “I’m game. For a little while, anyway.”
But they never got around to it. They ended up on the sofa in front of the TV, watching Mr. Skeffington for the third or fourth time, on the classic movie channel. When the wine was gone, Jens suggested some Armagnac, and Alva readily agreed, so he went upstairs to get the bottle and snifters. Standing at the sliding doors, peering into the house, was the boy, Jackson, dimly illuminated by a candle burning in a holder at his feet. Jens walked up to the window, driven by an impulse he couldn’t explain, and stood staring into the boy’s eyes, who tried holding his gaze for a few seconds, then gave it up, turned his back and walked to the deck railing.
After a moment’s hesitation, Jens closed the curtains, then fetched the bottle and glasses and poured a healthy dram into each one. Leaving the glasses on the counter, he climbed up to the master bedroom and saw the girl, Wendy, doing her candlelight vigil at the sliding doors. Without looking at her, he drew the curtains, then went down to the first floor den and found Mrs. Flynn standing there. Again, he closed the curtains, refusing to make eye contact.
Ascending to the main level, he got the glasses and carried them down to the family room. He didn’t say anything to Alva about the watchers at the windows. Alva seemed worn out from the stress of the day, and accepted the snifter with a grateful nod. As always, she fell asleep before the movie was over, and he had to wake her up to take her to bed. He read for more than a hour, but still wasn’t drowsy, so he took a sleeping pill.
The Occupation, Day Two, arrived with lowering clouds and a slow, soaking rain that lasted until late afternoon. Jens opened the curtains on the main level, but not even the candle was left to mark the boy’s vigil. As they were having coffee, a wet raven landed on the deck railing and scarfed up some discarded piece of a bun left, presumably, by the Occupiers during their afternoon revel of the day before, then flew off. They said nothing to each other about the rain, but there was no question that their spirits had risen.
It was sometime around nine thirty when Alva, who’d been standing at the window, noticed a movement next to their magnificent beech tree. At first she thought it was an animal, possibly a feral pig. But, after training the binoculars she saw that it was Carl Flynn, emerging from behind the tree on his hands and knees. She called Jens to the window, and they both watched the man struggle to his feet, holding on to the tree for support, almost unrecognizable, so covered was he from head to toe with the stubborn, clayey, rust-colored mud of the Mid-Atlantic. Looking confused and disoriented, he pointed himself toward the orange tent, some hundred yards away, and began to walk unsteadily toward it, his arms held out for balance.
“So that’s why he wasn’t at the windows last night,” Jens said.
“Were they?” she asked.
“In all their guilt-tripping glory, with candles, yet, while he was out there in the woods getting stinking.”
“Only the second day, and already he’s checking out? Doesn’t bode well for the Flynn family, does it?”
“It could still be an act. We can’t afford to underestimate him.”
“That desperation he was talking about yesterday? I’m beginning to smell it, now. Maybe we were wrong about these people, Jens.”
“We might have demonized them a bit. But even if they are what they seem to be...”
“I know. Yet I can’t help feeling sorry for his family. Him, too. I want them to lose as much as you do. But we shouldn’t wish them ill.”
“Of course not.”
Later that morning, Jens noticed their garden hose stretched tight across the yard. Apparently the family was taking turns showering behind the tent. After some minutes Carl Flynn came around to the front, a towel wrapped around his waist, and flopped wearily down on a camp stool. He had a phone to his ear, probably re-dialing all three of their numbers, and looked sick, angry and frustrated.
He must surely have known before applying for the Occupation license that failure was almost a certainty, Jens thought, watching him with the keenest interest through the binoculars, yet it seemed to be sinking in only now, as he sat there with his fat, hairy stomach drooped over the towel, his hungover stare brooding on the house looming larger and more unattainable than ever, while the clock on his legal trespass slowly counted down to permanent exile. Jens watched him turn off the phone and hold it for a moment in his lap, his mouth working angrily, then he reared back and threw it into the trees. Feeling as if he were eavesdropping, Jens lowered the binoculars and retreated to his office.
Alva had been busying herself, post-breakfast, with a blackberry cobbler that now, after forty minutes in the oven, was permeating the whole house with an odor so dense with buttery goodness that each time she inhaled, the tension of the last thirty hours seemed to give way to the warmest feeling of pure relief she could remember.
She was still thinking about her main course for dinner, and was leaning toward meatloaf, a dish she loved yet hadn’t made in years. This thing isn’t over yet, she reminded herself. We could still lose everything. A pang of guilt at the thought of the family camped out in the rain made her wonder if, after all, the cobbler had been a good idea. She hoped the smell wouldn’t escape to the deck. But of course it would: she was running the exhaust fan. Well, too late now. And didn’t she have the right to cook what she wanted in her own house, just as they had the right to their Occupation?
Yes, she’d have meatloaf tonight, with roasted green beans, mashed potatoes and carrot salad, an old-fashioned dinner by candlelight. And she would draw the dining room curtains, too, to spare both the occupiers and the occupied any painful reminders, for the duration of the meal, of the world as it was.
Sometime after lunch, the Flynn family gathered on the deck outside the kitchen/dining room, seating themselves in a semi-circle around the sliding glass doors. They were clean now, wearing fresh clothes, and their hair was brushed out. They were each carrying a stack of heavy white paper and a magic marker, and as soon as they were comfortably arranged in their chairs began to write. Mrs. Flynn was the first to finish hers, and held it in front of her so that Alva could read the large letters: “Charity Begins at Home.” Carl was next: “The true measure of a man’s wealth is how much he has freely given to those in need.” Wendy: “And Jesus said: If thou wilt be perfect, go and and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Jackson: “This may be your last chance to become the most generous person in the world. Surprise yourself!”
Each would hold up his or her sign for a minute or so, then drop it and begin work on another. Alva never stopped working, but always managed to glance toward the window long enough to read whatever sign was being displayed, feeling the same obligation to at least read it as she did when stopped in traffic in the city, and a panhandler was making the rounds up and down the median strip, holding up his hand-lettered plea for help, even if she rarely gave them money.
When Jens came up from his office to get a glass of water, he sniffed appreciatively at the cobbler, now cooling on the counter, but only glanced briefly toward the window. While drawing his water from the refrigerator tap, he spoke to Alva in an undertone.
“You’re too nice to the people who’d like to toss us out on the street. I’d have drawn the curtains and been done with it.”
“I’ll close them during dinner. But it can’t do any harm to let them have their say until then. Time is running out for the Flynns. I wonder how hard it was to get the Occupation license. Did they have to pay for it?”
“Since when does the government not charge for licenses? Or make you stand in line forever to get it? I think Joel said it’s a hundred bucks.”
“They should have saved it for a rainy day.”
“Yes, and I should have locked the front gate two nights ago. We’ve all learned something, haven’t we?” When she didn’t answer, he persisted: “Haven’t we?”
“I suppose so.”
“And what have you learned?”
“Me? That in sixty-two years I’ve accomplished nothing of any consequence. Not for other people, not for the Earth, not even for you.”
He put his arms around her. “Oh yes you have. I wouldn’t have lasted a day without you.”
“Children,” she said, gripping him hard, her head on his shoulder. “Why didn’t we?”
“We didn’t want any. Or they didn’t want us. Do you regret it?”
“Sometimes.”
They drifted into their private spaces as the afternoon lengthened. The last time she looked toward the window, the entire family had written two words on each placard and held them up in a row: “PLEASE DON’T-SHUT US-OUT OF-YOUR HEARTS.”
“Goddamn it,” she said aloud, and slamming her knife down on the cutting board, she came out from behind the counter, stalked across the room and pulled the curtains closed. “That’s enough of that.” If they’d just written, “Please help, whatever you can spare, God bless,” instead of this sanctimonious treacle to justify their claim jumping, she probably would have given them something. But no, not even that gesture of kindness was possible. Once she opened the door to give them the check... Jens was right. It was better this way, out of sight and mind.
All through Alva’s lovingly prepared meal, the occupiers sang hymns on the deck, their voices muted by the double-paned glass, a softly strange intrusion on “Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard.” If what Jens called the Flynn family’s “moral sophistry” couldn’t altogether taint the occasion, it certainly excused the indulgence of a bottle of Côte-Rôtie and a really terrific Demi-Sec Riesling to accompany the cobbler and ice cream, after which they could admit to softened feelings toward the “determined little bunch” haunting their deck.
Jens did the dishes, coining comic verses in praise of Alva’s dinner as she sat before the waning candles, holding the amber liquid in her glass to the light, through which the dim shapes of the Flynns could be seen and heard beyond the curtains. For more than an hour after dinner, their singing continued, and Jens and Alva still sat at the table, drinking and listening in an attitude hovering between ironic contempt and alcohol-induced pity, then pricked up their ears at the first sign of faltering resolve from the carolers.
By now it was after nine and getting dark, and the mosquitoes were undoubtedly feasting, and one could hardly blame them for giving up, or at least regrouping in order to apply repellent. One Flynn, however, did not leave, and it didn’t take a peek through the curtains to guess that the hold-out was Carl Walden. As if to make up for the loss of three voices, his own had grown much louder, drunker, and more ragged, and his repertoire, too, had drastically changed, from pious chestnuts of the Protestant hymnal to such ancient rock-and-roll hits as “Louie, Louie” and “Wild Thing.” A good bit of stomping and banging around accompanied these off-key renditions, and once, the sound of breaking glass, leading Jens to comment that he found this curtained glimpse of the real man “refreshing.”
“It’s like a radio version of ‘The Lost Weekend,’” he said, drawing a guilty laugh from Alva.
“Hope he doesn’t break something else before the night’s over,” she said. “Like his own head.”
“Or our windows.”
“And if he does that, it’s game over, right?”
“For him and his, yes.”
Carl Flynn’s singing had deteriorated to an intermittently rhythmic bellow, the lyrics consisting primarily of curses, alternating with eerily high-pitched sobbing. Their wine was drunk now, the candles burnt down to nubs, and still they sat, frowning and shaking their heads over the roaring cascade of abuse, punctuated by kicks and banging fists, on the chairs, the railings, even the window. It seemed at this point impossible to even consider going down to watch TV, so alarming was this tempest of frustration a few yards away from where they sat, and they stayed put, switching their beverage to water but letting the candles go out.
After a time the voice of Carl Walden Flynn died down, first to a garrulously wordless mumble, then a sniffling, snorting, somehow ursine crying jag. Around ten-thirty, they heard him stumble off the deck, and where he went after that they didn’t know. Sleep came unwillingly, and what did was broken and anxious, but it came, first for Alva, then around two in the morning, for Jens.
Isolated as each was by his and her hangovers — they really shouldn’t have killed that bottle of Riesling — they rolled themselves into hunched mounds of minor suffering and slept far into the morning, getting up only to visit the bathroom, take the analgesic of choice, or refill the trusty bedside glass of water. It was eleven thirty before Jens got up, making his stiff-kneed way to the shower, where he let the hot water run over his head for as long as he could stand it, an effective antidote to his blinding headache only until he turned off the water, when it returned in full force.
Not bothering to shave, he dressed and made coffee, then sat, inertly penitent, on the couch, cradling the cup in both hands. After a few minutes, he got up and opened the curtains. The rain had cleared out overnight, and the sky was a cleansed, imperial blue with small, high clouds and a very hot sun.
He looked at his watch: my goodness, it was five minutes to noon on June 5th, the official end of Occupation Attempt #B-6YJ-223. He thought of waking up Alva, but decided to let her sleep. In five minutes. he would open the door and step out onto his reclaimed deck, and in spite of the headache grinding away behind his eyes, he would... what? Crow his victory? Or stay out of sight and allow the Flynn family to leave the field with a few rags of dignity?
He was refilling his coffee cup at exactly 11:59 a.m. when the first shot sounded. For all of two seconds he thought it was a hunter, scarily close, and probably trespassing, but only that. There followed a human scream — male or female, he couldn’t have said — of such naked, appalling anguish that he knew, even as he rushed to the sliding doors and without hesitation threw them open, he would spend the rest of his life trying to forget it, followed by three more closely spaced shots. He heard himself gasping, then his neck jerked painfully at the more muffled roar of a fifth shot.
All of them, he now knew, had come from inside the orange tent. The coffee cup slipped from his hands and shattered on the ironwood planks. He heard Alva sucking air behind him, but didn’t — couldn’t — move, nor, apparently, could she. Around the tent were strewn clothes, chairs, boots, cameras, mess kits, propane bottles, as if they’d been preparing for the dispiriting task of packing up and leaving the field of battle, but neither sight nor sound of the occupiers themselves relieved the worst fears of the victorious homeowners. For many seconds they stood silently, one in front of the other, a gusting wind giving restful voice to the green hush of their acreage, then, at an ungentle push from Alva, Jens started down the deck stairs and across the yard.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
