Minister Without Portfolio by Michael Winter Page B

into flattened rags.

19
    John came home and dancing broke out at three in the morning—a spontaneous call for a taxi to deliver a forty-ouncer. Silvia woke up at dawn with the kids, exhausted and accepting, and said they wanted to go skating. It was Saturday. Henry fell into a car with a bag of cheese sandwiches on his lap, a car that drove to Dead Man’s Pond. Martha was driving as she hadn’t been drinking. John held an open jar of green olives between his knees, shoving his fingers into the wide mouth, trying to fish them out and hand the olives over to any mouth that would open. You mean, he said, you put up with all of us all night long completely sober? It was trying, Martha said. The jar was empty when they got to the pond and John poured the brine out on the snow. Henry helped shovel off the pond, hungover, and just lay there next to the aluminum shovel with John Hynes still drinking American cans of pilsner as there was some brewery strike across the country. It felt like anything he looked at was made of aluminum. They watched the women in their white leather skates flash in the dull sunlight. We used to do this, John said, with hockey sticks.
    With Tender Morris in goal.
    Tender Morris, John said, was a loyal man.
    A deep sadness crept into Henry’s shoulders as he realized his own tendencies made him a shit. A shit but hell he was doing the best he could.
    Tender accompanied them when they hit the red light district approved without paperwork by the generals. He oversaw things. Tender Morris loved the army life though he did not partake in the tender vittles.
    Martha overheard them. He loved it more than he loved civilian life.
    They made a bonfire. It was heartening to see Martha’s friends circle around her and include her in the social gatherings to make sure she was not alone. She was distracted and liked to laugh and was game for anything that came up. Henry counted off three fingers. But it was almost like she was religious or had some secret pact where she had to live a righteous life
    She’s involved, Henry realized, in some impossible truth. Tender has been dead, what, three months. It was something else in her that was giving off a physical manifestation. Sometimes you see loyalty in the air like that. When things are hard you adjust the dial on your emotions and learn new, complicated emotions that work over the scar tissue of torment and allow the face and hands to convey a manner of grace. Thanks be to god for that.
    Martha, skating backwards—trusting the surface. After his breakup with Nora, Henry’s friends had taken care of him and now that Tender Morris was gone they were doing the same for Martha. That was obvious. But what suddenly occurred to Henry was that his friends were impatient with him, urging him to pursue a scenario with Martha. He thought this was a privateinstinct but he understood now the visible traces of intent in the air. They had allowed Martha and Henry to leave that party together at Christmas. The knowledge of this stalled him. What was romantic about an arranged marriage? But he liked looking at her mouth. She has this fine hair down from her navel and she was self-conscious about it. Tender had an idea of airbrushed beauty. Tender, in Afghanistan, had once discussed his perfect woman while they played crib. But what about Martha, Henry had said. Martha’s going to get fat, he said. It was a quick remark that blurted out of Tender and ran against all the grain of what seemed to exist on the ground between the two of them. And that struck Henry as a hard and salient fact, and it worried him, that all the beauty in the world could be ground down by emphatic, cruel statements like that. It made him feel loyal to the things he’d already done with Martha Groves, if Tender felt this way. But perhaps ten percent of a man’s thoughts run this way—can you still blame him for them? Henry was alone, but he’d seen Martha in all the