Vestigial Limbs by Catherine Courcy

Johnny walks down the dock to the end and peers over the edge into the murky green water. The ocean’s fucking supposed to be blue, he thinks, looking up at the clear sky. For two years straight, in the desert, he had carried around a postcard of coastal Maine in his wallet, creased. The post card showed a rocky strip of land pushing up against steel blue waves. There was a lighthouse, and on the back on the post card there was a smiling red lobster in the corner—“Lobster Land!” it exclaimed. Johnny remembers how in the angry heat and sand the thought of a lobster dinner seemed like some sort of oasis. He couldn’t remember why, he had never even eaten lobster before he moved here, but damn, a lobster dinner in that desert might have saved him.

He reaches into the pocket of his blue jeans and pulls out the much abused leather wallet. From it he removes the post card, now mostly faded, and brushes off several grains of sand. His favorite thing about Maine is how there is an ocean and no sand, best of both worlds he thinks. Jonesey, who was from New England, had given him the post card one day in the middle of the desert. They had sat hunched next to each other with sun burnt eyes and Jonesey had described to him how sweet the ocean actually was, and the thought of fog had been a balm to Johnny’s fried brain.

A woody scraping sound brings Johnny back to the real Maine and he looks up to see a man rowing a dinghy in. Johnny knows he should leave because he isn’t supposed to be on this dock—it’s one of the private ones—but he doesn’t give a fuck. The man is about fifteen or so years older than Johnny—middle aged—and wears a red wool jacket to ward off the chilly March and a Red Sox cap. Johnny walks over to the boat and nods a greeting to the man. The man doesn’t notice. Johnny tries again.

“Awful weather we’re having, huh?” He looks out across the harbor and the crystal clear sky.

The man looks up at him this time. “What’s that?” He looks around. “What are you talking about there? This is about a nice a day as you’re ever gonna get around here.” He shakes his head and goes back to piling up his gear on the dock and tying up the dinghy properly.

Johnny stands there in silence. He doesn’t want to explain that he hates the sun. The man in the red jacket however, seems to expect more conversation from him.

“You from around here? I haven’t seen you at the club ever… You visiting?”

“Oh no, I just moved here.”

“Oh. Well, just so you know, this is a private dock. For the Yacht Club.”

Rich bastard, Johnny thinks. “Yes well, I was thinking of joining, you see. Checking out the premises.” Johnny puts on what he imagined was his most charming, I’m-a-rich-person-too smile and waits.

The man only pauses for a second before throwing out his hand: “Chase Gordon, nice to meet you…?”

“Johnny Stable.” And Johnny goes though the tricky process of maneuvering his left hand into the grip of the man’s right hand. As he does this, Johnny takes some delight in watching Chase Gordon’s eyes travel from the awkward handshake to the limp right sleeve of his jacket to his eyes and hurriedly dodge away.

“Well nice to meet you Johnny,” he says over the clumsy handshake. “How about a tour of the club then?” he asks as they start to walk up the ramp to the land.

Johnny falters. “Umh. I’ll have to pass. I’ve got to go…”

“Alright, well if you want a tour sometime look me up.” His eyes travel to the limp right sleeve again. “So what brings you to Blue Hill, kid?”

Johnny resents being called a kid. He answers, “Kuwait.”

Chase Gordon from the yacht club just says Oh and then Goodbye as they reach the parking lot.

Johnny drives with difficulty the pickup truck he is borrowing from his uncle in Boston. He still hasn’t mastered moving his left hand over his body to shift and steering with one arm and sometimes he just feels ridiculous. He goes to the only restaurant in Blue Hill, which is more of a breakfast and lunch café kind of place than a restaurant. He sits at a table and orders pancakes and bacon and eggs from a waitress who looks real hot and like she is nineteen. She has a name tag on that says “Julia” and she smiles at him after he orders this and says,

“Hope you’re not watching you’re cholesterol.” She giggles, real cute, and he can see fierce dimples.

“Umh no…” and he offers a tentative smile. As she walks away he watches her apron strings sway back and forth over her ass.

While he waits for his breakfast he reads the local paper which is tiny and doesn’t say anything bad, just gives the menu for school lunches and town sport teams and fishing news. He knows he should start looking for a job soon—he only has one more month of sick leave before he gets formally discharged—but he isn’t ready to think about that yet. Instead he reads that the Blue Hill Badgers Softball team has some real good prospects for the up-coming season. Their starting pitcher had injured her shoulder, but the rest of the team was shaping up real good. Johnny thinks he sees a girl that looks like Julia in the team picture. When she comes back to refill his coffee she sees him looking at the photo and she blushes and says it’s a terrible picture of her. He thinks it’s cute, but doesn’t say anything. She tells him she plays left field, she’s not real good at the whole athletic thing, and he says that’s alright.

After breakfast Johnny buys some frozen pizzas, potatoes, beer, and the macaroni and cheese that comes in a box from the overpriced grocery store in town. Sometimes when he goes grocery shopping he gets distracted walking down the aisles, forgetting not to marvel at the rows and shelves of delicious food. Sometimes all the food makes him elated, sometimes all of it just makes him feel desperate. Today it infuriates him.

At the checkout he lays his items on the conveyer belt with his left hand and when he is given the receipt to sign he scowls as he awkwardly holds the pen in his left hand. He notices the cashier staring at the remainder of his right arm and so he looks her square in the eye and stretches a smile real wide and says, “I’m not very good at this whole left handed business. Just can’t seem to get used to it!” His voice sounds empty and cold and the cashier looks at her feet. He gives a sincere chuckle at her discomfort.

In his house he spends the day watching soaps and sleeping. He opens up one of the beers around two and is almost in awe at his freedom to do so. In the desert, there had been very little beer. There had been very little of everything except for the sand and the heat which seeped into every crevice of your body and made you pay.

Sometimes in his small rented house here he feels restless. He doesn’t really understand how he came to be here. How he could have been that desert one moment and then at 25 River Street, Blue Hill Maine, 04614 in the next. How did he get from there to here or here to there? It confuses him that not that long ago, strangers had shot at him on a regular basis. Shot bullets. Trying to kill him. And now he is drinking a beer at two in the afternoon on a moderately comfortable couch and the only difference between then and now is just a bit of flesh. He can’t wrap his mind around how the fuck he actually ended up in this post card town, and so he fidgets.

At night he tosses and turns in his sleep and when he dreams he usually has both of his arms. Sometimes in these dreams he sits up straight in bed, awake, and even though he recognizes the room he is in as Blue Hill life, it is as though the actual physical places are blurring into each other, and the desert is coming to Maine, or maybe Maine has come to the desert. He walks out his front door and with bare feet feels grass between his toes and bends down to pick up dark rich soil, get it under his fingernails. He touches everything to make sure there is no sand or oily heat hiding here in Maine.

In the morning he wakes when the sun filters through his east bedroom window, hours before normal people wake up. He lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. He has heard about some amputees who can still feel their missing limbs. With his left hand he pushes down hard into the mattress, he feels it. Then he imagines his rights hand, and arm, and tries with all the power of his nerves and will to push it into the mattress. He can feel nothing. He sighs, not surprised, he does this every morning, and gets up to piss. Then he returns to his bed and pulls sheets up to his neck and tries to sleep again but can’t shut his eyes.

When his alarm finally goes off he is relieved to be able to get up. Eating cereal with one hand and reading the Sunday comics, Johnny is irritated that he is always so eager to leave his bed in the morning, despite the fact that he is just as impatient when he is officially awake, dressed. There is always a sensation of discomfort barely perceptible at the edge of his consciousness… urging him to move on.

At ten the telephone rings and his uncle is calling to say hello. His uncle asks Johnny why he isn’t in church and Johnny says he doesn’t go anymore. Johnny knows that his uncle only makes this ritualistic-Sunday-morning-hello call because his aunt makes him, and he feels morally obligated to check up on Johnny, maybe. Johnny cements a frown onto his face. His uncle asks how’s he been, is it the Maine of his dreams and so on, and Johnny says fine and yes of course. Johnny doesn’t say much of anything because he hates how hard his uncle tries.

He thanks his uncle for the truck and when his uncle asks if he will come down for Easter Johnny says no probably not. After he hangs up he violently flicks off the phone with one real finger and one imaginary finger.

He spends his day giving the comics a detailed reading, purchasing lotto tickets and mostly wondering how the hell his uncle ever let him join the goddamn army in the first place. At one point in the afternoon he finds himself walking the nearby pebbled beach and realizes he doesn’t remember how he got there.

When Johnny feels it is late enough in the day to start drinking without feeling like an alcoholic, he struggles for five minutes to twist off the top of a scotch bottle. He pours himself a glass and speculates as to whether or not alcohol will save him. He doubts he is that lucky. He feels so pathetic and is sad that nothing works right enough.

Drinking the scotch he starts to think back to that morning in Syria. He remembers telling Roberts about how his uncle thought the army was a good idea and how they all ended up here. He remembers being so thirsty and caked in sand and Roberts kept talking about how he could see Jonesey coming. And Roberts and Johnny told stories about Jonesey, the ones that made them laugh. And then the ones that made them feel like they were safe. Johnny kept looking for Jonesey too, it seemed like it had been forever since he had left them, but Johnny never saw him. Only the Iraqis and then shit. And then he remembers trying to fucking aim and thinking, where was Jonesey.

Johnny drains the scotch and searches through his house for a piece of notebook paper. He doesn’t find any so he takes the blank back of a credit card application and sits down at his kitchen table. He stares at the paper for five minutes. He gets up and finds a pen and sits back down again. Before writing on the back of the application, he tests the ballpoint on the edge of the newspaper.

He poses the pen above the blank piece of paper. He thinks of what to write. He thinks and thinks and his brain goes in circles around his thoughts and nothing comes out. He forces the pen down on the paper and all it makes is a dot. He tries a letter, a word, but his mind is reeling in so much self-pity that he can’t concentrate on anything. He puts the pen down and has another scotch. He tries to words again, but now he is so tired from his efforts that he just gives up. He almost screams when he can’t figure out how to rip up the goddamn piece of paper with only one hand, and resorts to stomping on it and kicking it with his boots. He doesn’t feel like a man.

The next day, Johnny sleeps until one in the afternoon. He eats leftover frozen pizza for breakfast and wonders what he is going to do when his uncle asks for his truck back. He looks at ads for used cars in the paper and finally he becomes so edgy that he has to leave, and he drives into town to the café, through a clinging fog. From the doorway of the café, he watches Julia circulating around the tables. She catches his eye as she serves customers and smiles at him like she might have been waiting for him. She shows him her section and sits him at a table by the window. He doesn’t say anything other than Hi.

While waiting for his club sandwich, he looks out the window and watches glistening new SUVs and station wagons drive by, park at the grocery store. He watches mothers get out with children in their arms and make exaggerated gestures of delight to other mothers. He watches a car towing a sailboat by, down to the harbor he supposes. He thinks of Chase Gordon and the yacht club members and thinks fuck them, they got it easy, with all their body parts. Fuck those mothers, they don’t even know what the hell SUV’s are for.

As he watches Julia bustling around her customers, he makes a point of visibly dangling his stump over the table. He looks at the skin tightened over the end of his upper arm and remembers the first time he saw that he was missing the lower two-thirds chunk. It had been in Virginia, or maybe it was still in that tent that kept him out of the desert sun, but either way, the memory is tainted with a morphine bliss, and he recalls the sensation of curiosity at this strange new lack of thing more than anything else. The first anger he remembers feeling was when he went to visit his uncle in Boston and his uncle saw the stump and a look crossed over his face showing Johnny that he was trying real hard to figure out how Johnny was still whole. And he wasn’t succeeding. Johnny had then, for the first time, wondered if maybe he wasn’t quite whole.

At some point Julia comes over to him and asks him how everything is and he is still so stuck on trying to remember which part of himself exactly is missing that he forgets to answer her. While she stands there and waits he sees her and doesn’t know what to say, so he just stares at her. She sees his stump on the table and looks surprised, but then her face calms over.

She looks him in the eye and says, “Ouch. Looks like that hurts.”

He finds himself caught off guard and laughs, honestly. “Yeah.” He winces. “It does.”

She clears his plate and he watches her curves as she walks away. He feels the same way about women as he does about the groceries. There are so many of them in Maine, he finds them everywhere. He forgets if he has told Julia his name. He sits there thinking about her for another ten minutes, envisioning her house and her shampoo and hoping he is no more than seven or eight years older than her. He leaves a large tip.

Outside the fog has morphed into a steady drizzle and he feels clammy in his bones as he walks to his car. In the lot behind the café he sees Julia emerge from a back door, lighting up a cigarette. He thinks she must be cold in her white blouse, and he does his best not to look at her. But she spots him and calls out a goodbye. He turns to her and can see her nipples through her shirt and says goodbye back. He fiddles with his keys and climbs in his truck. He sits there with his head on the steering wheel before turning the car on.

As he drives past the grocery store he sees Julia with her cigarette on the sidewalk, walking slowly. She looks so cold he thinks again. He drives about fifteen yards past her before stopping. Then, before she catches up with him, he drives another ten yards and stops. This time he waits. He wonders what he is doing.

When she catches up with him she looks in the passenger side window and asks What?.

“I thought you might need a ride.”

“I don’t take rides from strangers.”

“My name is Johnny…?”

“Johnny what?”

“Johnny Stable.” He is trying so hard not to look at her nipples. Or to look at them. He can’t tell which. “I just moved here… I live over on River street…”.

“Oh! You’re the army guy! You’re renting out Mrs. O’Brien’s place, right?”

He nods, a little confused that he is “the army guy” but happier now that Julia and her nipples might get into his car.

She flashes him a softball-star smile and hops up into the truck. She says, “Alright. I live just past there, so let’s go.” In the car she chatters about small towns. Explains how you can trust everyone exactly enough. You have to, its how everyone gets by and can just barely stand each other. Not the best system, but at least its some sort of system, etc. etc. He is tuning her out and thinking about the rocky shores and the lack of sand here and wondering if the drizzle and the clouds is the ocean trying to reclaim the land.

As she directs him to her house, he realizes that she is sitting so close to him that he can smell her cigarettes and her shampoo and food from the café lingering on her. She has moved closer to him, and when he looks over at her, he sees she is staring at his stump.

“What.” It’s not a question, but she answers it anyways.

“Well, I’ve never known anyone missing anything before… It’s just so weird. What does it feel like? How did it happen?” There is no mockery in her voice and he sees she is genuinely innocent.

He tells her that it happened in the war, obviously, and that it just feels like there’s nothing there. He doesn’t tell her how well he can remember the feeling of having an entire arm, so well that he keeps forgetting its gone and accidentally tries to use it sometimes.

They pull up to her house slowly and it is getting dusky out, but it’s hard to tell with the drizzle. He looks at her and is disconcerted by how close she is sitting to him. She looks up from his stump and says,

“Yup, this is my house.” All the lights are off inside and she tells him that her mom doesn’t get home from work until late, and it’s just the two of them living there.

He wonders what the fuck that is supposed to mean and his stomach jumps a little and his brain fights hard to stay on. She puts her hand out and pokes his upper right arm. He kind of laughs, because poking is funny. Then she looks him in the eyes and asks if she can touch the end, the part where it looks sore and he says yes, but gently, carefully. She does and it feels like a feather to him. She puts her finger down and he realizes he is so close now that he can see small blackheads on her nose, and freckles, and she looks up so goddamn coyly he thinks, through her eyelashes. So he kisses her. And he thinks that he hasn’t kissed anyone for such a long time that it feels nice in a whole other dimension. It is a slow kiss at first, like they really like each other, but then she moves closer and closer and he can feel breasts through his shirt and she has almost squirmed on top of him in the driver’s seat. By this time, any part of him that would think to resist has been emphatically turned off, and the rest of him knows that this is what he was waiting for and he presses her head harder into his with his left hand. She draws her mouth an inch away from his and tells him to come into her house and he still knows he probably shouldn’t but he takes her hand and follows her up the walkway in the drizzle.

He doesn’t see what the inside of her house looks like just what her tits look like when she takes off her shirt, and what the ceiling of her bedroom looks like while she straddles him. Lying on his back in her bed, he tries, like he does every morning, to lift up his right hand. He tries to caress the small of her back with it, he tries so hard to feel it, but it is gone. When he is coming, strangely he thinks about the nurse who attended him in the desert. She had kissed his forehead goodnight, every night.

Afterward, he lies next to her and wants to ask her if she is a slut and if that is why she had sex with him, or if she has a stump fetish or something, but he stays quiet. She breathes loudly and smiles and says she thinks he’s a real nice guy. Not many of them in small towns she says, but he might be one. And he wonders what kind of nice guy has sex with some girl who’s last name he doesn’t even know, just that she plays left field for the high school soft ball team. He frowns at himself and sits up in the bed and tells her he should leave and she agrees. She smiles real sweetly at him so he kisses her mouth, but he still gets up and puts on his clothes.

Walking out, he wants to say Thanks, but knows he shouldn’t and just says, “Umh, bye. See you later.” She is still naked in her bedroom when he shuts the door.

At home that night Johnny finds that he is lonely. It has been so long since he was lonely that he is not quite sure what the feeling is at first. He tries television, but the people there all seem so far away, small. He doesn’t know anyone here he realizes, other than Julia and Chase Gordon and Mrs. O’Brien and his uncle in Boston. He calls his uncle and he doesn’t know what to say when his uncle answers the phone so he hangs up. He makes another frozen pizza and watches the soccer channel on mute and falls asleep on the couch.

He knows they’re dreams when he’s dreaming them, but its like he has a photographic memory in his sleep and the blood and sand are etched into his subconscious with acid. And when he sits upright in the middle of night, he swears he can still see the chilly terror in Roberts’ eyes four inches away from his face. He tries to brush away the lingering image with his right hand before he remembers it is not there.

Three days later he goes to the café for an early breakfast because he assumes Julia will be in school then. But after he is already through the door he sees her working and she sees him and he can’t leave then. So he nods to her and sits down at the same table as last time and looks out at the sunny day. When she comes over to take his order she effuses a sense of intimacy and comfort that frightens him and he stiffens up and orders his pancakes and eggs and bacon. He asks shouldn’t she be in school, and she tells him it’s spring break.

He doesn’t say much to her during the meal, other than to ask for more coffee. And she is busy with the customers, but she looks at him a lot, smiles. He thinks maybe he can leave without saying much more, and puts down an excessively high tip. Outside though, she catches him as he nears the truck.

“Hey! Hey. Wait up. So…” She becomes quiet and her shiny lips are just a little parted. He sees that it’s his turn to say something, but he resolutely refuses to speak until she does.

“Well, I guess I was wondering if maybe you wanted to come over tonight?” Her voice wavers and her dimples are gone.

He wonders again where he is. Where is the sand and Jonesey and the blood? Who is this nineteen, maybe, year old girl? Why is this asking him to come to her house, which is really her mom’s house and why would she have sex with him? Is it a game? A test? Why does she act like she knows who is he? Why does she think she can… He stares hard at her, trying to telepathically tell her to get the fuck away from him, but its not working cause she just keeps looking up at him through long eyelashes.

“No. I can’t.” He finally says and watches the comprehension work on her features. “Whatever,” and he waits for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. He gets into the truck and drives away and in his rear-view mirror he can see her standing there still.

He drives the long way to the yacht club and gets out there and walks down onto the private dock. As he passes through the club house he sees a plaque with the names of all the members and finds Chase Gordon’s name just to see what it looks like engraved. There is no one around on the weekdays and he feels relaxed in his trespassing. At the end of the dock he sits down and takes off his boots and socks and puts his feet in the green harbor water. It is icy cold at this time of the year and it doesn’t take long for his feet to go pleasantly numb. He lies back and looks at the blue sky. He keeps his feet in so long he can pretend that they too were sawed off and all he has remaining is his left arm. It gives him a strange lopsided feeling. It makes him laugh. He thinks of Julia in the parking lot watching him drive away and he is sad that he hates her too.

When he gets home he writes a letter, for real this time, with his painful left-hand scrawl.

Jonesey:

I wanted to say Fuck You. I wish I had a better way of saying it, or doing it, but there isn’t any. And I just keep on fucking seeing Roberts in the back of the truck bawling his fucking head off because he can’t figure what the hell happened to the rest of his body, and I keep thinking to myself that fucking Jonesey doesn’t have to sleep with this. Do you goddamn it. Where the hell were you when we were all sitting tight on our asses? Were you getting off with some whore motherfucker? And what the fuck were you doing when they were fucking SAWING my arm off you bastard? Were you getting pissed with the rest of those motherfuckers? I hope you die alone in the middle of the desert and go straight to hell, Jonesey. I hope you’re already there. Just so you fucking know.

Stable