“Call me when you get there”

by Adam Hofbauer

The front office receptionist pointed to the space between the laser copier and a filing cabinet. Grier’s son Nathan was sitting with his Spiderman backpack on his knees, staring into space and silently weeping. She looked at him and said nothing. She wore her loose-fitting polo shirt and khaki pants, her braided leather belt, the ‘Gettysburg Historical Tour’s logo printed on her badge above her name. As she appeared above him, Nathan stopped crying and stood up. The dean of students emerged from her office and directed them in. She talked about ‘the incident’. The boy Nathan had attacked bore visible nail marks arounds his collar bone, she said. They were lucky the parents weren’t pressing charges. Grier nodded, “Yes ma’am, I know, I know.” The dean went on about the high standards of the charter school and the impossibility of something like this happening again. Grier nodded, “Yes ma’am, of course, you don’t need to worry. Yes, I know how serious it is.” The school just didn’t have the resources to support such high needs, the dean explained. It was important that Nathan and his mother knew this. Grier said yes, they already both knew this. “Don’t worry,” she said, pulling Nathan up to go. “This is the last time.”

“Don’t worry,” came the voice of Nathan’s father, Big Nathan, from the speaker phone on the desk. “I’ll talk to him.”

“We tried you off the meds,” Grier said in the car. “I have to schedule an appointment with Dr. Gheta.” It was dad’s weekend with him, but Big Nathan wouldn’t be by for four hours. That was the length of two full battlefield tours, and Little Nathan was going to have to sit at the back of the bus and read his Naruto books and be very quiet and very, very good.

“I swear,” Grier said, regretting the words even as she said them, “You can get kicked out of that school but if you get me fired I’m sending you to live with your dad.”

Nathan sniffled beside her, “Don’t put me back on the Adderall. Please don’t make me go back on the Adderall.”

Grier listened to him whimper. She drove with one hand and texted her bus driver with the other. She was lucky. That day she was with Helena, who had an eight year old of her own. ‘With Nathan,’ she wrote. ‘Has to stay with me today.’

Grier pulled Nathan through the back door of the gift shop.  She keyed her badge number into the thing that took her picture. Nathan went over and collected her walkie from the rack of chargers and brought it to her. Second shift started after lunch and went all evening through the Haunted Battlefield tour. Grier’s deal had been if Nathan made it until Halloween without her having to pick him up early for getting in trouble, he would get his Fortnite password back. As she pulled him through the back rooms of the gift shop, the other tour guides told him how big he looked and complimented Grier on him. His father was going to let him play whatever video game he wanted all weekend, Grier thought. Then he would come home to her on Sunday night, under slept and defiant. He hadn’t hit her since the school year started. But when he did, it was always after coming home from Big Nathan’s.

Grier’s shift supervisor greeted her, then noticed the boy and narrowed his eyes. It was the first time this school year, but it had happened enough when Nathan was in first grade that he had more than once levied the possible consequences in Grier’s direction.

  Grier’s phone beeped with a text. It was Big Nathan. ‘Ok, he wrote back, his only response so far to Grier’s letting him know he’d have to pick Little Nathan up from her work that evening.

“As long as your driver is ok with it,” the shift supervisor said as Grier went for her bus, her son behind her.  

          “And you can see by the four legs on the ground of General Longstreet‘s horse that he survived the battle,” Grier pointed out as the bus turned a corner and came into view of another of the park’s many mounted memorials. There was a legend that if the rider’s horse was sculpted with two hooves in the air, he had died in combat. A single raised hoof meant an injury. Four hooves planted on the pedestal meant they had come out unscathed. Grier didn’t believe the myth. There were plenty of statues that contradicted it. But the management encouraged them to use it as a little motif on the tours. People thought it was fun.

          “But if Longstreet had been able to discourage Pickett,” a man sitting in front of her suggested. He turned in his seat to face the rest of the passengers on the top deck, continuing on about how Longstreet had warned Pickett about the casualties. “Some people say if Picket had listened, well. Who knows. We might be telling a vey different story.”

          “Sir,” Grier said, straight to him, mouth away from her lav mic. “Can you face forward please?”

          In the two years since passing the test to become a tour guide, Grier had been presented with a multiverse of speculative Civil Wars. There were the alternate outcomes for the battle itself, as specific as the movements of individual regiments and as broad as complete rerouting of the Union army. There was a whole sub-genre of imagined outcomes for Pickett’s Charge alone. Men came with their dreams of a ‘Lost Cause’, the failure of the great aristocracy and some imagined noble south. They came in full battle dress, endlessly reenacting the final moments of a past that was ever further out of reach. But for others, the outcomes of the war seemed irrelevant, the movement of men simply a mechanism for playing out some greater act of imagining. Grier had studied for six months to pass that test. She had worked then alternating shifts at the steak house attached to the Holiday Inn two exits down the highway, the other waitresses drilling her with flash cards on every smoke break until she breathed history like fire. She had known passing wouldn’t even guarantee her the job. Big Nathan still insinuated she was benefitting from affirmative action. So no, she wanted to say to men who dreamed of what may have been with their eyes turned to the tour groups like they were in charge. What happened happened, and I can’t be bothered with anything else.

          When Grier returned from the second tour, Big Nathan’s SUV was waiting in the parking lot. Helena emerged from the bus with Little Nathan asleep in her arms. She handed him over to Grier, who led him slide down the side of her as he gradually woke up. Grier held his hand and walked him to his father. She heard the door unlock from the outside. She couldn’t see Big Nathan through the tinted windows, and she opened the door with one hand and helped the boy up into the seat. Big Nathan sat there in his wraparound aviators, wearing his black company t shirt, ‘Sound and Fury Audio Solutions,’ printed in hazard tape yellow across the chest. Grier waved to him across the dashboard and then the door closed behind her son. Grier waved, sure that they could see her, though she couldn’t see them, and watched the SUV as it vanished past the stone walls of the rebel cemetery.

There were just a few people gathered for the ghost tour. A man by himself, an older couple, a woman and her teenaged son. Grier walked backwards for forty five minutes through the dark and talked about ghosts. She was disappointed there were no little kids on the tour, because she liked to spook them with stories of decapitations by cannon shot and low moans in blue fields. The part of her mind not occupied by the spirits of Picket’s Charge made simple but sustaining promises. The taste of her end of day cigarette. The apartment all to herself. Saturday morning coffee. When the tour was over, the couple went off into the gift shop. The woman and the teenaged son went to their car, laughing together about something. Grier went into the gift shop to deposit her walkie and clock out. The man was still there, standing by the door, as if he was waiting for someone. Grier asked him, “Any questions?”

          He shrugged. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

          She looked back at him. She had not really seen his face until now. He wore a dress shirt but no tie.  She thought he looked about her age. She wondered where he had come from and where he was going. She pulled her hair out of the tie she kept it in. The wind across the open deck of the buses meant that it really only stayed out of her eyes and mouth if she totally restrained it in a thankless bun, which kept it stiff and defiant for hours afterward.

“Yes,” she said, “Ghosts all day. You?

           He laughed, “I didn’t before now,” looking into the trees, as if Grier’s tour had released something he had not otherwise considered. He shivered and put his hands into his pockets, then made a face before pulling out what appeared to be his tie, which he played with for a second before returning to his pocket.

            “Are you on your way through?” she asked him. She pulled her hair up behind the crown of her neck with the palm of one hand and he looked at her.

            “I’m here for a job interview,” he said. “At the elementary school.”

            She wanted to ask him which one, but she already knew. “The charter,” she said as she pulled down her hair, smiling despite herself as touched her shoulders. She stopped and reached for her cigarettes, then paused as she thumbed the soft pack out of her back pocket, wondering what he might think of her.

            “You know it?” he asked her. She couldn’t place his accent. His voice seemed born far away but completed nearby. 

            “My son goes there. Are you a teacher?”

            “A psychologist. Actually, I saw you today.”

            “Did you?”

            “I was waiting in the office. You were on your way out of the Dean’s office.”

            “Dean Dalloway. Not my biggest fan right now.”

            “Sorry to hear that.”

She laughed. It was the weekend. She wanted there to be roller rinks so she could more realistically imagine herself in one.

            “Well,” he said.

            “Well.”

            “I’m leaving in the morning.” He rolled up one of his shirt sleeves and tucked the cuff against his forearm, just below the elbow.

            “Sorry to hear that,” she said. She pulled her cigarettes out. He was born far away, she thought. Maybe somewhere that understood for a good cigarette in the wake of the work week.  

             “Are ghost tours the extent of the nightlife around here?” he asked. He repeated the sleeve gesture with the other arm. 

“The extent of the nightlife around here”, she repeated, mimicking his words with an exaggeration of her own, practiced tour guide affect. “Not only do we have great things to do during the day, but we have fabulous nightlife. And you can find it all right here in small-town Gettysburg. The little village with a big world feel.”

Their positions had adjusted just enough that his face had come full into the light, and she looked at him. There was a rough texture on his cheeks, orange parking lights on the remains of a shave. “I guess that depends on where you’re staying,” Grier interrupted herself, catching the silence that she had allowed to spread as she looked at him.

   He said the name of a rental unit a few blocks away. She knew the woman who owned the house. They were neither friends nor strangers. The lady’s kid went to Nathan’s school. There was no reason she couldn’t walk this man there, linger in the doorway. Take for herself a few more bits of time. Except for all the reasons. She admitted that she didn’t really know much about the bars around here. “I usually just eat in,” she said. “With my son, but still.” She finished her cigarette and pulled out the pink plastic Bubble Tape container that she kept her butts in.

“You keep your butts in your pocket,” he said, smiling, gesturing.

She wanted to make a joke about butts. She wanted to tease him about keeping his tie in his pocket. But she just wished him goodnight and went to her car before he could say anything else. Before any other even more absurd thoughts came into her mind, from which she could not return herself. She had already let this happen to her twice. Kind men from far away appearing alone on the end of ghost tours. A salesman from Ontario. A minor league baseball recruiter there to scout the high schools. She had let the scout walk her home and been unable to extricate him for the rest of the weekend. Helena still teased her about the salesman. No, she admitted to herself. She had already learned this lesson twice. But from her car she looked back. The man stood there, against the edge of the visitor’s center. She realized he wasn’t particularly handsome, not in a way that could be communicated to the eye, at least. “Nice meeting you,” she called back, knowing that at the slightest beckoning, he would probably follow. “Hope you get the job.”

Grier remonstrated herself the whole drive home about the potential misreading loaded into her final words to him. “I hope you get the job as in I hope I see you again? I hope you get it as in I don’t actually want to see you again and all I care about is your getting a job?” She realized she hadn’t asked him where he was from. She hadn’t even asked him his name.

The next day, she let him find her.

She wore her brown leather Chelsea boots with the quarter inch heel. She wore her denim jacket with the fur lined collar. Even as she put herself together, she told herself she wasn’t going his direction it on purpose, or finding excuses to do errands that led her past the house where he was staying. She told herself that there wasn’t much of a chance of running into him anyway. But then there he was, standing outside of the Jennie Wade house as she came down Baltimore. She had never seen his face in the daylight before, so she stood for a second, looking at him and observing what he was like when he didn’t think anyone was looking. He was just slightly fat, though naturally so, in a way that somehow suited his face. He seemed to not have shaved, and she determined he was the type of man whose facial hair grew quickly, even as he slept. Those he loved probably bought him shaving kits for his birthdays.

He turned. He seemed to take in the details of her, and then and raised his hand and said, “Hello again.

She said, “I thought you were leaving in the morning.

He said, “I’m running late, I guess.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Oh,” she laughed. She had somehow closed the distance between them, and they stood now a few feet away from each other. He wore a baseball t-shirt with bright red sleeves and the name of an adult kickball league printed on it. He wore blue jeans. He wore remarkably designed sneakers that she guessed he had waited in line for and spent too much money on. “That close?”

“I’m sorry,” he admitted. “Philadelphia. I live in Philadelphia.”    

She told him how he didn’t sound like he was from there. He told her that he was from Spain, though he had not lived there in many years. He explained that the elementary school needed a bilingual psychologist to work with all of the Spanish speaking parents whose kids had behavior plans. She was surprised at this. She wasn’t aware of any Spanish speaking parents. And he answered her matter of factly that there were, a good percentage of the families in Gettysburg being first- or second-generation Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and Hondurans. They had only explained this rationale to him, Dean Dalloway and the principal, in the beginning of the interview, after looking up at him from his resume and unabashedly double taking at the fact that he wasn’t what they had imagined.

“They thought I was from Mexico,” he admitted. “Because of my last name.”

They were standing by this point in front of the cemetery for the confederate dead. They had come a half mile away from where they had started.

“I’m Grier,” she said. She reached out to shake his hand.

He took hers in his own, squeezing her fingers with his fingers as he said, “David.”

She nodded, letting her hand slip away from his and thinking, so that’s what it is, as if that brief affirmation of syllables had been waiting her for somewhere, like some account payable, something buried that had never died.

David looked out across the cemetery. He said that he knew by now, having lived in the United States for many years and having become a citizen, the complexities buried in the telling of the American Civil War. He said it that way, in just as many words. American Civil War. She found herself telling him about Big Nathan, who she referred to in so many words as well, who had bought Little Nathan a tiny rebel uniform that summer. Big Nathan was, she explained, a reenactor. He was vice president of an audio company, and he provided sound design for weddings, corporate events and, by contract exclusively with the various parks departments in Gettysburg, the reenactments of historical battles. That summer, he had decided that Little Nathan was old enough to join him in the resurrected forces of the Confederacy. Grier explained that the costume had arrived in the mail with the cuffs severely hemmed, to which Big Nathan had explained that it left him room to grow. His wife, he explained, would be happy to let the hems out over the years. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for Little Nathan.

They had made their way, without speaking of a destination, into the center of the battlefield. Grier never came here on off days. But today she looked at the man who had been listening this whole time and walking beside her, and said, “You had a Civil War. All I know though is that your rebels won.” 

David told her what he knew of the civil war of Spain. How the country had only just begun to rename the monuments to the rebels now seventy years dead. Of backhoes unearthing mass graves in the shadows of highways. He told her of the efforts to identify the bodies in those graves, massacred by the Falangists. She asked him if Falangist was in some way associated with the rebellion and he said yes, it was. “In America,” he said, “You might call them the fascists.”

Grier laughed, “Some of us might. Some of us might not.” The day was warm. She slid her coat off her shoulders and draped it over the crook of one arm.

He went on. He told her of Spain’s largest monument to the rebel general, the Valle de los Caídos with its stone cross towering above a sprawling esplanade. There were still ceremonies there every year on the day of remembrance, but now they honored not the general, but the thousands he had killed. “Well into my childhood,” David said, “The state television stations showed the military parades going through the basilica, the Falangist flag, the military uniforms of the rebels as they would have been in the years of the war.” He explained how, though the military pomp of the ceremony had been diminished, the most recent observation of the general’s death had been accompanied by groups of young men, proudly adorned as if the war had never ended. “Like your reenactors,” he said.  

Grier’s coat hung over David’s arm. She couldn’t remember giving it to him. “You said you hadn’t lived there in years,” she asked him, stopping. “How do you know what it’s like there now?”

  “My parents,” he said with a smile, adding an observation that it felt to him like he still resided there, in Spain. As if no matter where you went in life, you still resided in some way in the place that made you. “Are your parents living?” he asked her.

They had arrived at the top of a hill.  Groups of tourists milled about, taking pictures and drinking water out of plastic bottles. Buses idled against the road, though none of them were from Grier’s company. “This,” she said, “Is Little Round Top.” She pointed to the top of the hill, where a squat circular tower had been erected at the end of a long stone wall. She pointed up and down the slope of the hill, and explained how the Twentieth Main Volunteer Infantry Regiment had enacted a culminating bayonet charge into the Fifteenth Alabama Infantry.

The fields below were dotted with stone markers. “Each of those was paid for by the survivors of their regiments,” she said, preparing to list off the names of each one, and imagining the feat of memory would impress him.  

“What you just did there,” he said. “You put on your tour guide voice. It’s the way you talked on the ghost tour.”

“My parents died,” she said, her voice retreating into its normal register. “I have an older sister. She lives in Pittsburgh.” She counted in her mind the months that had passed since they had seen each other.

They walked for a moment in silence. He sniffed at her jacket, as if catching a scent in the furry lining. “What do you think you would say?” he sked her. “If they let you write your own tours?”

She felt the impulse to give him some sort of quick, jokey answer. But then he let the question hang in the air between them, with no indication he was going to fill the space with anything other than her response. So she thought about what she might say, as the tour buses went by in the distance and they went on along the side of the road. She thought about the war, and how it lived now in between fact and imagination. She tried to remember if, on pleasant walks with ephemeral men, she had come this way before.

“The Civil War lasted almost exactly four years,” she said. “The life of the confederacy was even shorter than that, but only by about a month. I was married to Big Nathan for just under three years. The Battle of Gettysburg lasted for two days. The movie ‘Gettysburg’, which you can buy in our gift shop, is four hours and thirty-one minutes long. Our bus tours take about two hours. My commute home is about thirty minutes. It takes me fifteen minutes to tuck my son in for bed. There are two hundred and seventy five words in the Gettysburg address, and they say it took about three minutes for Lincoln to deliver it. A lead minie ball fired from a sixty-nine caliber Springfield Musket could travel nine hundred and fifty feet in less than a second.”

              She stopped and pointed at David’s head with the full length of her arm, her finger directed right into the center of his forehead. She stopped so quickly that his forehead collided with the tip of her finger, which bent just slightly, until gaining enough tension to stop him. They stood there, not so much frozen as arrived at some realization to which neither of them would speak.

She allowed her finger to rest there against his forehead. She knew that if she bent forward, he would support her weight.

“So you’d kind of say everything,” he said. “And also not really anything at all.”

She withdrew her finger. He leaned forward a little, as if he had been trusting his weight into nothing more than the presence of her fingertip. As if she could have led him through garden mazes with the latent heat of her digital capillaries.

She turned, shading her eyes with her hand and trying to determine which direction was east. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think I might just take people to the Holiday Inn where I used to work. I’d introduce them to the women I used to work with. And I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just have them all tell stories and dirty jokes until it was time for everyone to go home.”

At some point as they walked, he admitted that he had the habit of carrying with him a Swiffer wet wipe in a Ziploc bag, which he would use to wipe himself off in what he referred to, without irony, as “stress emergencies.” She asked him how often he did this. Maybe once a week, he replied. More often during the summer. She told him about the winter when Little Nathan was six months old and infected with a tape worm. At the time she was still married, but Big Nathan had been on the road, doing sound somewhere. So she had gone to the grocery store herself to buy a pound of raw hamburger meat. She had held Little Nathan, even littler then, upside down with her hand against his chest and held a ball of meat near his butthole. He had screamed as she waited for the worm to emerge so she could pluck it out with tweezers.

“It was three inches long,” she told David. “I kept it in a little baggie in my jewelry box.”

By now they had come to a bench, far from Little Round Top, beneath a place of trees and paths and ostentatious markers. David sat down and she felt a sudden panic at the negotiation of distance suddenly expected of her. He wasn’t exactly thin, and he had put himself a quarter of the way down the bench, leaving enough space for her to either plop down with their thighs all but pressing against each other, or far away from him at the other end.

“Do people care about the war in Spain?” she asked, so frozen by indecision that she just stood there. “Does it come up in conversation?” 

He looked out across the markers as if her words had made him miss something he otherwise chose to avoid thinking about. “It was decades ago,” he sighed. “Everything that’s happened since then, and yet when Americans visit Barcelona, all they want to talk about is Dali and George Orwell. When I call my dad, he usually just wants to tell me about soccer.”

“Well,” she continued, sitting down next to him, her jeans scraping against his. “I guess what I meant was, do you care?’

He was silent in response, looking towards a far-off barn.

“Those were public works projects,” she informed him. She pointed and let the shift in her posture direct her shoulder into the flat of his arm. “During the late seventeenth century the federal government sent men all over the country to build barns for people. That one still has cannon shot in its walls.” 

“I didn’t take the job,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, having known it in some way already. “And I don’t believe in ghosts.”

He turned to look at her. He draped one arm across the length of the bench behind her. It didn’t touch her. She looked at him, expecting something similar to the last speech a psychologist had given her. About rewards systems and neurodevelopment and behavioral conditioning. “You sound like you’re doing a great job,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. She never fully trusted compliments, and he had no way of knowing if what he said was true. “Would you have taken it if it were a bunch of Spanish kids?” she asked him, not teasing this time. “Like Little Barcelona or something?”

“I realized I wasn’t ready to leave Philadelphia,” he said.

“But not so ready to stay that you won’t drive three hours for a job interview,” she corrected him.

He sighed. “It’s not easy to just pick up and leave.”

“No,” she admitted. “But its nice to think about, right?” It was one thing to rewrite the fates of rebel nations. It was perhaps worse, in that moment in which so much was both unspoken and inescapable, to do the same for the paths of her life.

David looked at his phone. He asked her how far they were from where he was staying. She told him and he asked her if she would walk the rest of the way with him. And she thought, I’ll just take him all the back ways. I’ll make a route so circuitous that he never arrives. But she didn’t do this. And at some points as they walked, he asked her about the war, and at some points she asked him about Spain. But she asked nothing about his life now, or the things anchoring him elsewhere. And he asked nothing about Big Nathan, and withheld so much as a word of advice on the side effects of Adderall. Until they came back into view of the way they had begun. Back into town, with people walking everywhere and gift shops and thick, nineteenth century shutters in gleaming twenty first century paint. He had parked in the driveway of the house. He suggested they exchange numbers.

She looked at him as he handed her coat back to her and she said, “David. Why?”

“So I can call you when I get there,” he said.

She let him help put her jacket back on, though she could have done it on her own. “David,” she said, skeptical now, as his hand slid off the denim on her elbow. “Then what?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then didn’t.

Her phone was going in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw it was Big Nathan. “Hold on,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

          She stepped away from David, though not so far that he couldn’t hear what she was saying. It wasn’t a huge deal, her ex husband assured her. Little Nathan just wanted to talk to her. There was the sound of the phone being handed off. “Mom?” Little Nathan asked. “Can we have waffles for dinner on Sunday night?”

              “Of course we can,” she said. “I’ll get the stuff today. Is that everything?”

              “I’m giving the phone back to dad,” her son said. The sound of shuffling repeated.

              Big Nathan’s voice returned, “That’s it? He’s been crying all day. He threw a saltshaker at Donna.”

            “I know how he gets,” Grier said. “Just tell him I’ll see him Sunday.” She put the phone away. She shrugged towards David and said, “I have to get stuff for waffles.” She looked back at him and imagined the look on Big Nathan’s face when he dropped their son off the next night. Seeing some man there, helping her make waffles. This is Dr. David, she’d say, as if that explained everything. 

           David looked back at her, but the expression on his face had changed, as if the intrusion of the larger portions of Grier’s life had altered the temporary alchemy of the day. As if some end point, up til now denied, had manifested itself. “I think we’re out of time,” he said.

Grier looked at David. She turned her thoughts forward, into one of countless possible futures. She thought of how David would text her that night. How she wouldn’t respond, though she would hope he knew this was not the same thing as ignoring him. He would text a few times after that. But she wouldn’t respond then, either. You had to be so careful. You could find such exact and painful words for goodbye and still be mistaken for saying hello. And she knew herself, and how she could get, if she weren’t careful. She saw the men on the tours, still dreaming of all those possible wars and of all the pasts that could have been. And she heard herself, firmly reminding them that there were only the days that had come, and nothing more. And the days went on in her mind. She saw Little Nathan, less little every year, advancing into the pleats of that damn Rebel uniform. She saw herself, a good mother, even if only she saw it. Nathan going months without hitting her, his rage falling out of possibility, like a forgotten locker combination in a powerless house. She saw them together, many years later, on a tour of Spain, laughing together about something of which only the pair of them knew. This version of herself, this possibility, would keep David’s number, and she would see it as she was scrolling through the names of her life, in search of other people and thinking of other things. And then the future became too far off to navigate. A package arriving at his door on some significant birthday. A battlefield postcard. A shaving kit. Maybe someone, not that far away, still thought sometimes of his face.

“Maybe things would have worked out,” Grier said. “If things had gone differently.” 

        David said to her, “They worked out already.” 

All around, the soil was still rich with the nutrients of the men who had fallen there. On the edge of town, there was an American flag hanging from the mast of a cherry picker. Across the street, there was a yard full of cement squirrels. All the people went by in the final crowding of the day.