Sparta by Roxana Robinson Read Free Book Online

parents. “Your son is a good guy,” he told Nita.
    Nita was short and stocky, with short gray hair, small features in a wide face. She wore baggy khaki pants, some kind of striped sweater. She beamed at Conrad.
    â€œWell, we think so,” Nita said. “We have always thought so.”
    Chuck Anderson wore a loose short-sleeved jersey with a diamond pattern across the chest. He had a wide, colorless mouth and wore square gold-rimmed glasses.
    â€œHear you had some pretty exciting things going on over there.” Chuck looked at Conrad from under his thatchy eyebrows.
    Conrad tried to remember—was he an accountant or a lawyer? Something like that. They lived in a small town outside Minneapolis.
    Conrad clapped Anderson on the shoulder. “This guy,” he said, “did some exciting stuff. As exciting as anything that happened in the whole country.”
    Nita and Chuck both looked at Anderson, who grinned and shook his head.
    â€œYou’re a hero,” Sue-Ann said, turning to Anderson. She had pressed herself against his side. Her dress was royal blue, scoop-necked, wide pleats tight against her big legs. She was brimming with excitement. The fact that Anderson was here, that his body was next to hers, that the future lay before them, nearly made her wriggle with delight.
    Anderson shook his head again.
    â€œSo, now, the dogsled?” Conrad asked.
    â€œComing soon,” Anderson said.
    â€œDogsled?” Sue-Ann asked. She looked at Anderson, then at Conrad.
    Anderson squeezed her shoulders but didn’t look at her.
    â€œOkay,” Conrad said, “I’ve got to go. It was nice meeting you,” he said to Chuck and Nita. He nodded to Sue-Ann. “Keep in touch,” he said to Anderson. “Semper Fi.”
    â€œThanks, LT.” Anderson nodded. “I’ll see you.”
    Conrad made his way back through the crowd, nodding and smiling. He reached his parents.
    â€œSorry for that,” he said. “So. Where we headed?”

 
    3
    â€œWe’ve got reservations at a place in Oceanside,” Marshall said.
    â€œIt’s an Italian seafood place,” said Lydia. “We figured you wouldn’t have had much of either over there, Italian food or seafood.”
    His parents waited while Conrad went into the barracks to change out of his cammies. When he came back, they began making their way slowly through the family groups.
    The Marines in their cammies, the families in bright clothes, the signs and flags and balloons, the shrill calls, the children yelling and racing—all of it seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to Conrad, possible and not possible, as though he were trying to live two lives at once.
    He was among people for whom there was no dark undertow. Here there were no sudden black boiling clouds, no exploding vehicles. There would be no crack of an AK-47, no smell of burning flesh. Here the air was mild, the landscape quiet. No one would round a corner to find something lying on the street, ripped open and gasping, ruby-colored, terrible. These wives and children and parents, with their cameras and rental cars and balloons, were exempt from all that.
    Somewhere, on streets Conrad knew well, those things did exist. Those huge sounds (too great to be called sounds, really, they were more like whole days, or years, like weather systems, obliterating everything, taking over the air, your breath, your body) were still being heard. He felt as though those sounds were here, too, somehow, only they’d been blotted out, muted—as though they were all around, but now he couldn’t hear them. How could they not exist here? He felt he was derelict in his duty by not hearing them.
    They were moving slowly toward the parking lot. The evening air was warm and buoyant, light and alive, hinting at the unseen Pacific with its briny tingle, its sweep and movement. Long streaks of light from the sunset still filled the western horizon.