If Toby’s still alive, we’ll get him back. Uncle Sam won’t leave him out there. I have to believe that.
They tell us not to write about hard things in our letters back home, but they don’t know you, Tammy; you’re as hard as any soldier, behind that dancing laugh of yours.
I’ve been thinking about your play. It sounds terrific, solid, but I’m not so sure you’ve thought through all the implications of this choice of yours.
You say it’s between a “regular Joe” and a no-good killer: all right, I’m with you. But then you make it sound like this regular-type person is really so convinced he’s gonna get into heaven. Now, I don’t claim to know much religious philosophy, Tammy, but isn’t someone who is so sure they got a right to heaven just the sort of person least likely to go there? Does just avoiding bad things make you a good person? Don’t you have to do good things for that? I think you get a lot more power in your third act if old Joe starts to realize that he’s not going to skate through on a fast-ticket to the pearly gates just because he lived his whole life being careful. I think it means something if by being the kind of person who would sacrifice a little to give Mr. Killer a lot he becomes someone who deserves heaven, even as he is renouncing it. You see what I mean? The bind now isn’t “What will I give up for this awful person who doesn’t deserve anything anyway?” but “What kind of person am I, really? Can I enjoy heaven when the only way I get there is after I’ve proven to myself that I don’t deserve it?” You see what I’m getting at? Don’t make the dilemma just about the consequences of where old Joe is headed (because, let’s face it, most of us have seen hell here on earth and purgatory is probably a damn sight better). Make Joe and the rest of us really squirm in our seats. Make him judge himself.
As for what he chooses at the end—depends on how you want it to go. Existentialism would leave him there, trapped in his choice. Theater of the Cruel would make him get on that boat after pushing old Killer into the river, just in case. But, hey, how about some Lawrenceville optimism, Tammy? Maybe that’s another way out, or in.
If I make it back from this, you know I’m yours.
All my love,
Clyde
Tamara looked up and wasn’t too surprised to see Little Sammy jog past her with a fishing pole tossed over one shoulder and a bucket of worms in one hand.
He looked just like he had right before the cops shot him down, except for the small detail that she could see the muddy ground through the outline of his bare feet. At least he couldn’t feel the chill.
“Sammy?” she whispered. He looked around, as though he could hear something but couldn’t tell what. Then a breeze lifted her hair and he broke apart like a dandelion gone to seed. She imagined she smelled the old creek in it, the green, rotting heat of deep summer, the grass crushed beneath her toes, the smooth, dry snick of the cards beneath her fingers back when they had told her that Little Sammy was going to die, and she had said nothing at all.
“Tammy,” Pea called down from the window, “is there something from Dev?”
Tamara glanced down at the other letter that had arrived in the military packet, addressed in that familiar loose, educated handwriting.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, let me read it first, at least.”
Tammy stood up like a toy soldier and climbed the stairs.
Pea was in the window seat, propped up to ease her back. She was swollen with that baby, round as a ripe berry. Just now, Tamara couldn’t stand to look at her. She dropped Dev’s letter on Pea’s chest and turned to go.
“Are you ever planning on telling me what devil has been gnawing on your insides for the last few months?”
Tamara froze. “I’m doing my best.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to talk?”
It wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She left Pea there, so sick and fat and horrible. She left the house without a word and got in Dev’s car and took a drive.
She kept going past River Road, past the new convenience store and grocery and their already-decimated racks of daily papers, past the shuttered windows of the mayor’s house, and then the hasty fence that surrounded the remains of the old church and graveyard. Tamara tried not to look too closely, afraid of the ghosts of a place where so many had died. But soon she cleared the town, and surrounded by the early spring fields of the country, she rolled down the window and took a breath. The warming air smelled faintly of woodsmoke and the dung from the cattle farm nearly five miles over, which reminded them of its presence when the wind was right. The farms were bigger in her part of Virginia, and by this time of year the first shoots would already be stubbling through the earth, but she pulled to the edge of the road and trembled with the sick relief of being, at last, somewhere she understood. She and Clyde had never known a spring together, but Tamara could almost imagine him beside her, his high-cuffed pants showing that strip of ashy skin that dried out under the stage lights, as he rehearsed his lines from Hamlet, that passionate tenor scaring the crows from the corn: “I am thy
