down for a while and asking questions which Hollis felt uncomfortable answering.
“Hey, Hollis, tell me what your girl's like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your girl, what's she like? You got her picture?”
“I don't have a girl.”
McCreedy squinted, cocking an eyebrow. He shook his head, saying, “Ain't buying that for a second. What, you worried ol’ Creed will try and steal her away from you?”
“I'm being honest. There isn't any girl.”
“Not even a little Shin-ju-koo honey going?”
“No.”
“Well, what the hell's wrong with you? Horndog after it, boy. Life's far too short. Here, have a peek at this.” McCreedy dug into a pocket, retrieving a slightly bent black-and-white photograph which he placed in Hollis's left hand. “That's my girl,” he said, the animated clip of his voice becoming solemn. “She's waiting back home in Claude, missing me like tomorrow ain't ever coming.”
Hollis lifted the photograph, inspecting it closely. What he saw brought a smirk to his face: the foreground was out of focus, showing the indistinct image of a dark-haired girl, her arms hanging at her sides, her cloudy features difficult to perceive; in contrast, the background — a wide field of high wild grass — was plainly visible.
“Don't get me wrong,” McCreedy continued, his voice reanimating. “I mean, I've also got a gaggle of kobitos in Tokyo — but that one there, she's the real deal, my true gal pal. The rest don't really mean much when it really boils down to it. You know, I go to them others so I'll maintain my sanity while I'm away, if you follow. That one, though, nothing compares to her, God's honest truth.”
“I bet she's pretty.”
“Hell, yeah, she's pretty,” said McCreedy, extracting the photograph from Hollis's fingers. “That's the mother of my children, someday.”
The more Hollis got to know him — the more he learned about him, the more they talked to each other — the less bothersome the private from Claude, Texas, seemed. He had, in the course of the trip, chatted with several privates on the ship, except none were as friendly to him as McCreedy.
“Normally, I'd keep that picture to myself,” McCreedy told him, “but I get this feeling you're different. It's not that I ain't proud or nothing, just don't want these goons getting all worked up over what's mine, if you know what I mean. Some things just got to be treated with respect, if you follow, and I'm sure you do. Can't say the same for the rest of this bunch. But that's why I like you, Hollis. You got respect for the decent things, right? I could see it the moment I seen you. You and me, we're a lot alike that way. It's like we got the same birthmark or something, you follow? Anyway, we've got class, and that's what matters, wouldn't you agree?”
“Sure,” Hollis said, nodding.
“We're too smart for this outfit, ain't that right?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“It's an undeniable fact.”
Soon enough, Hollis would better discern the duality of McCreedy's personality, the two extreme and incongruous sides which were bridged by an irrepressible smile. And he would experience firsthand McCreedy's warmheartedness, as well as the sociable private's unexpected tendencies toward cruelty and violence. Only after leaving Korea, however, would he consider McCreedy as both an unwitting benefactor of the fortuitous outcome of his civilian life and the enigmatic symbol of his greatest shame. Then, at last, Hollis would also begin to comprehend his own paradoxical traits, his instinctive ability to appear as one kind of person and, just as easily, to behave as another. But four decades would pass before this realization fully took root, blossoming during the dawn of his retirement and springing forth on a sunny day while he cultivated his cactus garden; and months prior to that curious snowfall, he had stood alone in the backyard, gazing at what thrived under his constant attention, surprising himself there with a single word propelled from his mouth without forethought, evoking a name he hadn't uttered aloud for years and whispering it as if revealing a secret to the prickly pears.
“Creed.”
5
“Where there is cactus,” Hollis had told Debra last night, “there are sometimes snowflakes, too.”
Even at this very moment — working here in the backyard, stooping beside his garden (a normally arid patch of earth running between the swimming pool and his tiki hut) — Hollis knows there will be days like today which require a heavy jacket. Now bending forward with a spade in one hand, he endeavors to blow snow from tangled, barbed spines — his breath streaming through the garden like meager fog, grazing icicle-encased needles, dissipating past him amidst opuntia tunicata, mammillarias, and Texas pride. Then he is amazed by where he and Debra had ended up, what was meant to be their hard-earned detachment; how, finally, they had fled to the Sonoran Desert from an increasingly overpopulated Los Angeles suburb, and found themselves residing behind the high walls of a master-planned resort for active adults: an exclusive community of championship golf courses, gentle slopes, and seven distinctive floor plans (The Laredo, The Lariat, The Montana, Ponderosa, Durango, Cheyenne, Santa Fe) with fifty exterior design choices, all pretty much alike.
The tiki hut beyond the pool, however, was Hollis's own creation, something he designed just for himself. And while Debra couldn't stand the sight of the place, normally refusing to ever join him inside of it, she also understood that its construction was, in reality, a small price to pay for acquiring those interior flourishes she believed were essential to their house: she got the expensive no-wax sheet-vinyl flooring, the porcelain bathtub and ceramic tile surrounds, the single-lever chrome faucets, the oak-front cabinets; and, in return, Hollis got to build his little hut — handcrafted kiln-dried cypress wood, leak-proof thatched roof made of palm leaves, big enough inside for a hammock and two deck chairs, the ceiling fitted with a three-speed fan. It is a place where he and his buddy Lon could sip beer in hotter weather, nursing Tecate or Corona while they practiced golf swings, plotting certain victories at the weekly tournaments. So Debra had allowed him that hideaway, his backyard retreat — and if the majority of his drinking was done there (if he and Lon weren't too boisterous, if he shaved his back hair prior to lounging about in swimming trunks), then she never protested; she left him alone to split six-packs on summer afternoons and evenings. Truth be known, he has often felt more at home within his hut than within the house.
Lon, too, had once preferred spending long hours in Hollis's backyard, disregarding the upkeep of his own perennial garden and forgoing the thrice-a-week calisthenics class which his wife had expected him to take with her. On many of those summer afternoons, he would already be waiting at the hut, having already claimed a deck chair for himself, exclaiming as Hollis came outside: “You're running late, damnit. It's almost beer thirty. You better hurry.”
“What are you drinking?”
“Everything, except water.”
“Sounds about right to me.”
It's not difficult for Hollis to envision his friend reclining nearby — snoring in the hammock with a beer can gripped by a dangling hand, or tanning himself away from the shadows of the thatched enclosure — although the hut has now become an empty, inhospitable haven; the roof is weighed down with thawing clumps of snow, water drips steadily from the palm leaves like rainfall. While the place had been intended as a whimsical symbol of Hollis's sunny leisure years, in its current state the hut appears more suitable for the black cloud which had unfurled over him and Debra some twenty-six months ago; for no sooner had they settled in Nine Springs — building the hut, landscaping the garden, completing the interior touches to the house — than Hollis received a phone call while Debra was out shopping at Costco Wholesale, hearing what at first sounded like a teenage girl's voice on the other end of the line: “Hi, this is Dr. Taylor from the Tucson Medical Center. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to reach Debra Adams. Is she available?”
He hesitated before answering, glancing toward the kitchen windows — observing the hot, bright midday sunlight reflected on the still water of the swimming pool, the sight of it underscoring the cool, unlit room he was
