Memorial Day by Michael Bible

      A girl in a yellow dress twirled a small baton then blew her whistle and the parade began. Two black fire trucks followed the girl, sirens moaning. Next, on horseback rode twelve men with curling waxed mustaches dressed in stiff crimson robes and blue powdered wigs. Arabian satin with silver tassels draped the men’s calico horses. Behind them a drill team in wedding dresses started a maneuver, spinning rifles with fixed bayonets high into the sun, moving their veils aside to catch them. Behind the drill team nude chamber musicians played the 1812 overture. Then a long flatbed truck passed with schoolgirls reenacting Normandy. The front hatch of their duck boat squeaked up and down as the schoolgirls fell limp onto the sand, fake guns rattling, their pigtails flapping out beneath their helmets. Then came the animals. A small heard of buffalo painted white, lions and tigers pulling empty Amish buggies, black children riding drugged elephants, a dozen peacocks in full plumage roaming free.

From afar the parade seemed to move and stand still at the same time, one spectacle after the next, languid and mysterious. It began somewhere in the hills and flowed into the valley through the maze of suburbs then back up again into the hills on the other side as far as the eye could see. The people woke that morning and saw the parade at a distance, not knowing what it was until it was upon them. Then the peacocks landed in their yards, then the girl in the yellow dress with her baton would round the corner, and then the black fire trucks, sirens screaming, lights ablaze. The people poured out into their yards, crowds formed, fathers lifted children on their shoulders. Carpenters stopped mid hammer, birds looked on from power lines, dogs began to howl.

Bill Lewis was the only one who wasn’t watching the parade. He sat alone at the edge of is bed in his robe. He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His face was unshaven, his hair was thinning. An old cracked coffee mug sat under the facet. He filled it with the gin he kept in the cabinet and took a drink. He walked downstairs. The house was full of empty beer bottles, some of them makeshift ashtrays full of cigarette butts. The pictures titled on the wall. In one cleared-out corner near a window he’d made a little place to sit.  An empty liquor box and a metal folding chair. He sat there now and lit a hand rolled cigarette. Outside, a mirrored boxcar passed. Low moaning voices were singing inside it.

Bill got up from the chair and went into the kitchen kicking trash as he went. He tried a light switch and the bulb popped.  He got a beer from the fridge. He walked down the hall to the front door and opened it. It was a clear spring day after weeks of rain. He walked out on the stoop and spat, then waved to his neighbors, the Paterson’s, a retired couple from up north. They were sitting in lawn chairs behind a card table full of cookies and brownies and cakes, pitchers of lemonade in Dixie cups placed in even rows.

“Bill, it’s a parade!” Mr. Paterson said. He was wearing a straw hat, tiny flags poked out of the top of it.

“Looks like it,” Bill said.

“Do you want some cookies, dear?” Mrs. Paterson said.

Bill held up his beer, “I’m good, thanks.”

A gang of midgets dressed as former presidents was passing by. A tiny square headed Nixon waving “v’s,” a little Abe Lincoln with a law book, a baby Truman with a bomb, and a fat little Taft. Bill staggered up to the midget Lincoln.

“Well?” Bill said.

“Four score and seven years ago,” Lincoln said.

“What?” Bill asked Nixon.

He said, “I am not a crook!” and waved his miniature “v’s” in the air.

Bill walked back inside and sat down in the folding chair and finished his beer.  He threw the can on the floor, and walked toward the stairs. He tried fixing a tilted picture but it fell back crooked. Through the open front door he saw the Nursing Home Marching Band passing by with an old man in a wheel chair playing tuba, a bunch of grannies on the drum line.

He walked upstairs to get ready. He walked into his daughter’s room. The animals of her wallpaper stood frozen in the darkness. A thick layer of dust grayed her mirror. He opened the closet. His uniform hung there draped in plastic beside her dresses. On a shelf was a thin leather case. He took his bathrobe off and folded it and put it on the bed. Light crept in through the cracks in the shutters. Outside, Bill heard the sound of sirens and remembered her. He thought of the night, how the blue police lights filled the woods beside the highway. The smell of pine. Her tiny shoe amongst the  broken glass. How the day she was born she fit inside his hands. He laid his uniform on the bed.

 He fastened the cufflinks of the white shirt and put the red jacket on and the silver breastplate and the golden sash over them. There was a small bit of dust on one of the tall leather boots. He wet his finger and polished it before putting it on. His hat was made of soft white velvet and lined with pink plumes. He’d sewn every stitch of it. He went to the closet and took the leather case out and put it on the bed beside the hat. Then he put his hat on, careful to snug the strap below his chin. He put the case under his arm and walked downstairs and out the open door.

He sat the case down on the stoop and took a tiny key out and opened it. He put his white gloves on and held the contraption in his hands. It was weighted on each end with diamonds the size of baby’s fists. The shaft was titanium lined with gold and accented with twisting silver bands that had taken him weeks to perfect. He took a cloth out from the leather case and polished it. The sun was dying now in the west, down under the hills but not yet under the horizon, redness broke up over the mountains and spilled onto the valley below. He threw the baton from one hand to the other. Then he twirled it once and caught it. A blue convertible passed by with a 600-pound beauty queen smoking cigarettes. He waved to her, then at the Patersons again.

“Joining the parade?” Mrs. Paterson said.

  Bill said nothing.

“What ya got there? That’s a pretty baton,” Mr. Paterson said.

  A huge orange hot air balloon passed by floating no more than ten feet off the ground. In the basket was a man dressed in a white military uniform. His medals clinked in the wind.

Bill bent his knees and went up once with the baton but did not release it. He bent down again, and with all his strength he threw the diamond-ended baton high into the sunlight. Its arch was slow and it caught the dying sun and brightness shot out in all directions. In those seconds the baton was spinning high in the air the world was wild and beautiful and full of languor orbiting around it.

Later, it was said the light from the baton could be seen all throughout the valley and even in some of the towns beyond the hills. It stopped the parade. The light was golden and luminous. It reflected white in the dark center of a crow’s eye. It drew things toward it. It held gravity.

 Bill opened his eyes and heard the girl in the yellow dress blow her whistle up ahead, starting the parade moving again as the baton spun back into his hands.

He took his place and marched on.