Kids and Their Epics

This short story will have mentions of war and potential derogatory language.

I sneak a look at Sawyer Thompson from across the room, where he polishes the apple Nurse gave him with his grey cloth handkerchief. In the bed next to me, Brendon is watching eagerly, waiting for the same thing I am. Sawyer does this same routine every day; he scrubs his red apple until it shines under the ward’s stifling white lights, then keeps polishing it with such vigour that he eventually drops it. The apple tumbles off the creased linen blankets covering Sawyer’s weak knees and rolls under the bed, where it will stay until Nurse comes back and we let her know another apple has gone. I wonder why Sawyer thinks he has to polish the apple before he eats it, because I know it would save everyone a lot of headache if he just took a bite out of it the second he got it. I don’t think Brendon minds, though - Sawyer can do no wrong, in his eyes. He once compared Sawyer and his apple routine to Mr. Bean, as though he thought the old man had any real purpose for doing it. I’ve never seen Mr. Bean but I know Brendon likes him, so I usually pretend I find Sawyer Thompson and his apple amusing too.

Brendon looks over at me before beckoning with his finger. It looks like he’s about to whisper something and I lean over dutifully, though the space between our beds is far too wide for my ear to reach his mouth. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because the only other person who shares our room is Sawyer Thompson, and if Nurse is to be believed he hasn’t heard a full sentence clearly since the Great War.

“I think Sawyer’s going to be transferred out soon,” Brendon says, his big brown eyes widening with the weight of the news. “I heard the nurses talking about him when they came in last night. Said he won’t be here much longer.”

“You weren’t asleep?” Feeling a little put out, I scrunched up the blanket around my knees and released it. “I asked you if you were awake and you didn’t say anything.” I knew Brendon had been sent a huge box of chocolates by his girlfriend and I wanted to ask if he could share.

“I was pretending, silly.” Brendon gingerly slides himself closer, as if that would give this conversation any semblance of privacy. His crisply starched hospital pyjamas crinkle at the elbows when he does this, and I’m reminded of the pyjamas I came in with. They had little teddy bears on them, like Paddington, but the nurses took them away. Brendon said he used to have his own pyjamas too, navy blue with Superman on them, but he didn’t get to keep them either. “Don’t be mad, Ted, come on. Listen, if they move Sawyer out, they’re gonna replace him with someone new. Can you imagine that?”

“But why would they move Sawyer out?” I frown, taking another fistful of the blanket. “He’s supposed to stay here long-term like us. I thought that’s what Nurse said.”

Brendon shrugs. “Maybe he’s getting better. But look, can you imagine this room without Sawyer? I think I’d miss him a lot. What if they replace him with someone awful?”

Instead of replying, I glance back at Sawyer and scrunch up my eyes to see if there are any signs he’s been getting better. Sawyer Thompson is as old and rickety as the sun, an unconventional war hero that’s all skin and bones and sunken eyes that creak when he looks around. He still drops his apple every day, and his days as a soldier have left his hearing practically shot. To me, he even looks a little more gaunt than he did yesterday, like he hasn’t been eating. But maybe there are still things Brendon can see that I can’t. I think about what it would be like to wake up and not see Sawyer Thompson polish his apple. It’s strange, even I’ll admit.

“I hope they don’t move him.” Brendon sounds sad now. He pulls back from where we’re leaned over the gap between our beds but still manages to feign nonchalance when he repeats his earlier statement. “I think I’d miss him.”

“Yeah.” Brendon’s been here far longer than I have, and he and Sawyer Thompson must have shared this room for years. I might not have that kind of history with Sawyer, but even I can understand that. It’d be like if they transferred Brendon out without telling me. “Yeah, it’d be weird without him.”

“You think he’d visit us if he left?”

I don’t know, but I nod anyway. Sometimes I remember Sawyer Thompson might have kids somewhere, kids like me and Brendon. I think he might want to forget about us if he left for good, focus on his own little boys instead of the ones he met at the hospital, but I don’t say that. Obviously.

“Yeah. Yeah, he’d visit.”

*

“Tell us about the army again, Sawyer. My dad wrote me Friday and said he drove a tank! Can you imagine that?” Brendon sits up eagerly on the edge of his bed, grinning roguishly. “Did you man the tanks too, Sawyer? What was it like? Boy, wish I could drive one. Don’t ya, Ted?”

Brendon loves it when Sawyer talks – about anything really, but most of all about Sawyer’s war stories. His dad writes him every week from the army, telling him about the Germans’ white bunny jackets and how all the men had Snickers for dinner one night in the trenches. It’s as much a routine as Sawyer’s apple to watch Brendon eagerly strip the muddy pieces of paper from their yellowed envelope, eyes large and ravenous as he pores over his father’s latest fairy tales.

He can be just like the boys I used to go to school with, who played with make-believe guns and shouted “enemy attack!” whenever girls went past. I could never really get into it like they did. I was the kid that jumped when the seagulls swooped in too low, sandwich crushed into a clammy ball beneath my palms to prevent the aviary onslaught. Besides, Sawyer makes the spoils of war clear enough, with his terrible calloused fingers and rheumy eyes. But I think Brendon thinks it’s heroic to go to war, to go out in a blaze of glory – he’s slightly vain like that. Sometimes I even catch him checking out his reflection obsessively in the dinner tray around his apple crumble, tugging his sandy curls into place while his ice cream melts. I know he also has a girlfriend over in Manhattan, though, so that might be why he’s so self-conscious. She might come and visit someday.

Sawyer makes an exasperated kind of noise, something between a grunt and a breath. Somewhere under his bed is a fresh apple from this morning’s breakfast. He looks around furtively before sliding a pack of cigarettes out from beneath his pillow; he’s not supposed to smoke in the ward but he doesn’t seem to care, not even when Nurse threatens to stop giving him dinner. Apparently, he’s been smoking since he was twelve, and has no plans to stop anytime soon.

“All you boys think about ‘s fighting.” After fumbling with a lighter for a few seconds he takes a sulky drag on the cigarette, looking very much like an old movie star before he collapses into a fit of coughing. It’s hard to believe Sawyer once fought on the battlefield, and his cough’s only getting worse these days. He can’t even take a few steps without wheezing. I try to imagine him with rippling muscles, wiping sweat from his forehead after taking out enemies. The image doesn’t take. “Can’t you ask ‘bout something else? All you damn kids want to do is go to war.”

I didn’t think this was very fair, since I never asked and I don’t know much about the war anyway. Still, when Brendon turns to me and says cheekily, “Come on, Sawyer, we’re gonna die of boredom over here. Ted wants to know too, don’t you, Ted?” I have to say yes, because if I don’t back him up I’d be a lousy cadet.

“Damn kids,” Sawyer says again and shakes his head, but he doesn’t seem particularly offended beyond the usual. “You’re asking fer it.”

Brendon tuts. “I’m not scared.”

“Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Brendon. You’re lucky you didn’t hafter enlist. ‘S not just big men throwing guns around, boy. God does it haunt you forever.”

“I’m not scared.” Brendon repeats staunchly, pulling a face. Sawyer grunts again, coughs, sucks on his cigarette.

“Stubborn ass. Young and stupid, that’s what you are.” The old man grumbles, but eventually concedes.

This sharp back-and-forth is routine too. Brendon and Sawyer bicker like father and disobedient son, always going at each other. I doubt Sawyer minds, though, and Brendon clearly thinks the world of him. Between the old man in the hospital bed and his real old man out fighting Nazis, Brendon’s a real soldier fanatic. I’ve thought about teasing him when he goes all agape at Sawyer’s stories, but I think back to my old school and worry he might try to pummel me. Brendon doesn’t seem like the type, but I’m not very strong, so I don’t think I should take any chances.

Still, whatever Sawyer says, I believe Brendon when he says he isn’t scared. He’s braver than me, that’s for sure, but that might just come with the territory of being older. He certainly knows a lot more than I do, not just because he’s sixteen and I’m still eleven, though he gets a funny look whenever I ask him what the word Terminal means. It’s plastered in stark black letters outside our ward, big and peeling and daunting. Old Sawyer Thompson never answered me either, but I never knew if that was because he couldn’t hear me or if he was purposefully keeping quiet. I stopped asking after a while, because from the looks of it, it can’t mean anything good.

But Brendon did all sorts of amazing things, when he was still out there. He outran three rottweilers clutching a pack of strip-bacon just for a dare, and though he was admitted before he could get his license there’s still a stick-shift waiting for him in his dad’s garage. He told me in the strictest confidence he’d already snuck out with it, and scraped a huge rip in the paint right along its side before the police caught up to him. There was so much more to Brendon than the obvious teenage angst and slapstick grin, this profound physical need to be out in a place of action and excitement. You could practically see it in his eyes, some star-studded alternate reality that lay dormant in his lanky body, ready to flip the switch and morph into this fatally reckless but incredibly dashing superhero. The illusion was so strong I tended to imagine it too; Brendon pulling orphaned children out from under teetering chunks of debris while flashing his men a broad smile. Brendon, single-handedly evacuating a village before an enemy attack. Once or twice I almost caught the allure myself, a deadly whiff of military fever; Seargent Teddy, throwing up a single arm to block a bomb blast and coming away without a single scratch, the other soldiers scrambling over to whoop and clap me on the back. Boy, Ted, nothing you can’t survive.

*

Sawyer gives us all a scare one night, waking up in such a violent fit of coughing that his whole body shakes and his bed rattles. I shoot upright, but my eyes can’t connect with anything for all it’s so dark. Brendon is the first to react, nearly falling out of his bed as he yells for Nurse. Once my eyes adjust to the pitch black, I can make out the bare outline of Sawyer shuddering opposite me. The tremendous commotion Brendon is creating only seems to upset him more – his eyes are popping in the most terrifying way, gasping as if he’s reliving his days in the military. A shrill of panic rushes through me.

Nurse rushes into the room, accompanied by a quarry of other aids I’ve never seen before. Backup, Brendon calls them. They wheel Sawyer out of the room before I can even blink. Brendon’s not supposed to be out of bed but he scrambles after Nurse before she can disappear with the others, shouting over the squeal of wheels. I tumble out of bed too but they’re all gone by the time I hit the floor. Reeling, I dither by my bed, feeling dizzy and a bit sick with nerves. The tiles are freezing beneath my bare feet. I can’t remember the last time I was out of bed. What do I do? Brendon will come back, surely, but I couldn’t bear being alone in the dark.

Shuffling a few steps forward, I catch a bitter whiff of smoke stealing into the ugly, antiseptic sting of the ward. My sight still isn’t great and I have to rub my arms to calm myself down, but I can just catch the shape of the stubbed-out cigarette butt on the ashtray by Sawyer’s bed.

After a mind-numbing eternity, Brendon returns to the ward. He’s clearly shaken but he puts his arm around me when he sees me holed up in my bed, body hunched into foetal position. I know I look a real coward, a silly little kid, but it doesn’t feel right to copy Brendon’s affected carefree air like I usually do before injections.

“S’ alright, Ted, they’re taking care of him. It was just the smoking,” he says. In the harsh cut of light from the doorway, Brendon’s face is deathly pale, like one of those French Renaissance paintings. “That’s what Nurse said. His lungs got irritated. He’s not supposed to smoke, I knew that.” He frowns, raising a fist to scrub at his face quickly. “I should’ve told him to stop.”

“It’s not your fault.” I say, because it’s not. I knew too. Maybe I should’ve said something to Sawyer, though I doubt he’d listen to me. “Is he…is he alright?”

“ ’Course he’s alright,” Brendon says fiercely. “It’s Sawyer, he’s tough as nails. They’re just gonna treat him and he’ll be back tomorrow, just wait and see.”

He stares me right in the eyes and I stare back, gripped by the shoulders. The savage conviction he speaks with casts a glamour over me, spelling me into a trancelike state where all I can do is nod, hypnotised. Up, down, up down. Through the haze of vindictive magic, I see Brendon at the frontlines, violently shaking a discouraged soldier. Pull yourself together, man! Yes, sir. You got it, sir. “Right.”

True to Brendon’s word, Sawyer is back in the ward come morning. Nurse scolds him thoroughly, shaking him down for any other hidden stashes of cigarettes. Sawyer dutifully hands them over, not even pushing back like he normally does. Something’s changed about him – his eyes, for one, glossy and fixated on some memory so distant it must’ve occurred before the 1900s. Where he’d once had a mischievous quality round the mouth, an immovable half-smirk which he’d famously used to sweet talk girls at the bar and put Brendon in his place, his jaw now hangs slack as if two vertical pillars had been inserted on either side of his tongue. He’s unresponsive when Brendon prods him, moving only to polish his apple with a wizened hand. He doesn’t say anything for the rest of the day, until Nurse calls for lights out.

Click.

“Sawyer?” Brendon looks over at him anxiously. Sawyer doesn’t hear him, I think. He shakes his ancient head slowly, back and forth, eyes adrift with an uncomfortable, opiated absence.

“Don’t go there,” he mumbles, so soft I can barely hear it. I crane my neck forward so I can make his words out better. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Brendon does too. “Don’t go there, man, you’ll never make it…”

“Who’s he talking to? I don’t understand,” I whisper to Brendon, but he won’t even look at me. His mouth has disappeared into a very thin line, a taut and irritable twist that’s so uncharacteristically severe on his babyish face that it somehow projects him forward years into adulthood. He’s upset with Sawyer, anyone can see, though exactly why I can’t say – it’s almost as if the old man’s perfunctory state has angered him in some way, a feckless match striking some strange white fury in the pith of his body.

My lack of proper sight in the ill-illuminated room gives me sudden shifting visions of Sawyer, his form beginning to change and morph before my very eyes. One moment he looks like a figure from Brendon’s idyllic canon, the next his old cranky, esoteric self. It’s hard to imagine what Brendon must see in Sawyer, but this must be it; blink again and he’s some variant of a real Odysseus, an illustrious and immortal Classical being trussed up in the wrinkled Trojan horse of a silver-haired elderly. Young Sawyer, heroic Sawyer, Sawyer in the hospital bed. The comparisons are drastic, and the longer I look the less real he seems to me. Which version of him is the reality, Brendon’s or mine?

Next to me, I hear the aggravated sound of Brendon flopping over in his bed, huffing angrily into his pillow. Unsettled, I pull my blanket over my shoulders and reluctantly follow suit, wondering if he’ll have gotten over it by the morning. Knowing him, he probably will have. It’s Brendon, after all, and he idolises Sawyer. When the sun rises, Sawyer will polish his apple again, and all will be forgotten.