Shower of Fear

Kevin flew into Baltimore on a stressful flight from Dallas at about 5 in the afternoon. The roads in Maryland curved around, with woods and greenery on either side of them. He made sure he would be able to get to his hotel downtown, not far from the airport, but there was a horrific accident on the interstate that filled the shuttle passengers with stress. The shuttle driver himself didn’t seem to flinch, but that was his job; he drove right by it like it was an everyday thing. Downtown, cars seemed to be driving too fast, too aggressively, for Kevin’s taste. He was eager to check in to the hotel, drop his bags off, and take a shower before the evening’s activities.

His plan was to go to a reunion of his battalion in Vietnam, of people he’d known maybe 45 years ago. They were a wild bunch of guys, but they got together periodically to relive their war years, and they usually drank like crazy. The reunion was his plan for the evening, though he planned on skipping the heavy drinking part, to ensure his own survival, and call it an early night. In the morning, a friend of the family, Will Murphy, had agreed to come downtown for breakfast at about ten. Then he’d turn around and head back to Texas. That was it. He was in Baltimore basically overnight.

In Texas they’d warned him that Baltimore had a lot of crime. In fact several friends had mentioned that, and one had warned him to be careful. So before he left he took an old wallet, one he had gotten in Vietnam, and put it in his back pocket; he put his money in his front pocket. This was a trick he’d picked up in Paris one time many years back, that assumed pickpockets or robbers would go for the back one. He felt silly, making compromises to fear, when in fact he’d been in Vietnam for years; having survived a war, he should be able to survive Baltimore.

He couldn’t really tell by looking at it, but it seemed there was a pretty high level of fear here, that he didn’t really experience in Texas. Texas was dangerous, yes, everyone was armed, and half of them were crazy, but here everyone seemed to be afraid, no matter who they were. People looked at him quickly, or looked away; they were in a state of alert, but not direct communication. He’d gotten this impression just from the shuttle and what little interaction he’d had before he checked in.

He took the wallets out of his pants and got ready for the shower. In the shower, as often happened, his war years all came back to him. One night his battalion had been attacked by raining missiles that had landed randomly around their encampment and killed several of his buddies. It was a very long day and a half, in which he’d gotten some sleep, but was so afraid that he rarely slept well, that night or any night after that. And Kevin had only been a radio dispatcher, for the most part out of the worst of the action, not in as much danger as everyone else. But it had still damaged him, left him permanently afraid of things like hail or even falling walnuts. In the shower, occasionally, it would come back to him, and once, back in his drinking days, he’d collapsed in the shower and almost died. It was soon after that that he’d given up drinking altogether. But he came to the reunions regularly. Rather than trying to forget everything, as some of his mates had tried, he purposely relived it, as much as he could, even if it took a plane flight and a weekend to do it. He got it out of his system.

He walked to the reunion dinner, which was at a hotel near his, downtown. People looked away from him as he walked in the streets; it was already getting dark. One old guy asked him for money under his breath, more or less. Kevin stopped and gave him a dollar, and the guy seemed genuinely surprised that anyone would recognize his humanity; people for the most part had ignored him, except for the police of course, who probably would have run him out of there if they’d had a chance. The guy himself seemed to be living in fear, almost as if by standing there he too could be victimized, by someone, anyone, especially if they thought he had anything.

Kevin slowly became more aware of a number of guys like this; they’d come downtown, out of money, out of options, probably feeding off the tourist trade or the Orioles game in one way or the other, criminal in some cases, and probably not, in others; just begging was not necessarily against the law. One guy, though, shuffled past him, mumbling something about cocaine. Kevin knew that if he’d stopped this guy, he’d probably end up seeing the whole city, as the guy took him around, at his expense, trying to get him whatever he needed. Kevin said nothing though. His days of doing that kind of stuff were over; he wanted nothing to do with this. He watched all the people carefully, though. He saw some, dressed in orange and black for the game, or others, just dressed up, wandering around downtown going from restaurant to bar or to the Inner Harbor. Many seemed to be tourists like him; sometimes, you couldn’t tell. The large seagulls at the inner harbor flew back and forth, watching for scraps; the inner harbor smelled like the sea, but it was doubtful that any fish had made it in that far. The seagulls were after tourist food.

At the reunion dinner, he sat with Dave, a guy he didn’t know too well, who was actually from Baltimore. He had to admit to Dave that it was a pretty city, with old buildings, the smell of the sea, old boats in the harbor, crab cakes everywhere, a kind of rustic charm to it. Dave accepted the compliments, and gave him some advice. He was all too aware of the fears people carried around, of just the feeling of having to watch out, downtown, stay out where everyone can see you, and get out of there before it got too late. Dave took all the public transport, which was actually pretty good, he said, and allowed him to go places without parking, which was important. But he said it was a world of its own, and there was fear everywhere. He told about the Lincicum line, and the Howard line, and how there always seemed to be more guys at the bus stop than actually got on the bus, because those were places where you could stand around, and decide what to do next, and not get run out of downtown for having nowhere to go. Kevin admitted that this was new to him; even public transport itself was unheard of, pretty much, in his part of Texas.

A wild spirit prevailed at he reunion, and sure enough all the old buddies, after dinner and ceremony, retreated to some serious drinking around the city. Some of the guys had planned long and hard for this wild drunk, were well prepared, and had even scouted out the best places. They drank like they never drank elsewhere, hard and seriously, and they watched out for each other in the process. But all of them had been damaged in the war. One, Jones, had told the story of how his teenage daughter had made a loud sound behind him once, accidentally, and he swung around and hit her so hard he’d almost killed her. He was sorry; she was his own daughter, and he had no pent up hostility toward her. But he had pent-up something, and it had come out of him so fast he couldn’t even control it. And most of the guys were like that. In a pinch, you wouldn’t want them snapping on you, in Baltimore or anywhere else. So when the program was over and the drinking showed signs of getting serious, Kevin excused himself and made his way back to his hotel.

Now it was more like eleven, and the night was taking a turn for the serious, even though his hotel was maybe only ten blocks away. Another black guy shuffled by him mumbling, and at a bus stop a white kid asked him for a couple of dollars; he said he’d lost his wallet at the game, and was from the Eastern Shore, and was stranded, and needed to take the bus out to where someone could pick him up.

Kevin, a little angry this time, gave him a couple of bucks, and the guy was grateful. Kevin was angry because basically he didn’t believe the guy. And he didn’t feel like it mattered. So he was from the Eastern Shore – did that make him more trustworthy somehow? All the elements of his story – they could be true; then again, maybe not. His uneasiness ate away at him while he walked.

He was glad to make it back to the hotel without incident. He didn’t know how those old guys from Nam did it, staying out beyond eleven, in this kind of place; maybe they were looking for trouble, looking for a fight, or just wanted to see what would happen. Back in the hotel, he washed it all off with another shower. It didn’t quite make him feel better; in fact, it made him wide awake, and finally, he looked out his window for a long while, way down at the street below - the cars, the people walking the streets at midnight. A town like this, he thought, never sleeps.

In the morning Will Murphy was glad to see him, and they ate crab omelets at some place he had picked out as good, downtown. One thing you had to admit about Baltimore, he told Will, and that is they know how to eat crab. Will was in his eighties, with a big tuft of gray hair, and said he didn’t mind coming downtown, as long as it was morning. It was familiar to him; it was home. He liked the Orioles, and being near Camden Yards, but rarely went to games. He seemed reasonably happy, though he’d outlived his wife, and all his old friends, and even two of his children.

When Kevin mentioned the reunion, though, and all his old war buddies, Will told about his World War Two reunions. Most of those guys, he said, are gone now, even the ones who lived through the war, and they had suffered the same kind of trauma and shock that Kevin and his friend Jones had suffered. They had been in a wide area in Germany, on a large hillside, and Germans came through by the thousands, killing almost everyone. It was just by chance, he said, that he himself had been in a kind of ditch, and looked dead already, and they passed him by. There had been nothing anyone could do; they were vastly outnumbered; they couldn’t save their fellow soldiers, even if they had done anything different. In their reunions, the survivors talked about the randomness of it, how three out of four of them had died that night, and the remaining ones often got together and simply wondered why they were lucky enough to still be alive. They felt guilty, he said, because it was all so random, and there was so little anyone could do for each other.

The morning sun came into the restaurant as people came and went, and the waitress brought out plate after plate of food. She had a slight black eye and a hardened look, but maintained her cheerful disposition. At one point, some guy came into the restaurant at the front, disheveled, hungry looking, and with a single dirty look she sent him on his way. Nothing here for you at this moment, her look said.

Will, lost in thought for a moment, finally leaned a little closer to him and said, basically, that the crazy thing about that war was that on some level, he knew those Germans were just like him. He could have been doing the running through the hillside, killing everyone, but he happened to be face down in a ditch. Or he could be firing his gun down on a whole hillside of enemy soldiers, as he was at some point, instead of being on a hillside, having bullets rain down on him from above, as he had been on another night, or maybe a couple of nights. It was all just the luck of the draw. He’d been on both sides. For some reason, he was still alive, and he had a twinkle in his eye.

His spirit restored Kevin’s faith, to some degree. He still had to get out to the airport, and at the same time Will was doing some errand downtown and catching some bus out to the suburbs. But Will was up for it. He liked Baltimore, and was perfectly happy to stay here the rest of his days.

Going home, Kevin’s flight took him through Austin, instead of Dallas; that was a completely different experience. People were more upbeat, looking forward to a good time, and whatever business they were doing, it was likely a different kind of business than what you’d go to Baltimore for. He was surprised, really, that you could fill up a plane with people going from Baltimore to Austin, but apparently they had no trouble filling the plane. The announcements by the pilot always reminded him of his radio dispatcher days, when he heard some really scary stuff, but the pilot welcomed them and told them everything would be fine. He said the weather was good in Texas, but there was a chance of hail out in the plains. Hail is one thing that made Kevin very nervous; he’d go out of his way to avoid it. But on an airplane, and traveling in general, one had the feeling that it was all out of one’s control. You go where the planes take you, and if you happen to hit some turbulence, well, you just hold on until it gets easier. And once you got out on the highway, it was pretty much a straight shot, wherever you were going, anyway. Just stay awake, and don’t let it get to you. He reached down to his pants, and noticed that the wallet was gone, the one he’d gotten in Vietnam. His first thought was that it had been pickpocketed. But then he remembered; he’d left it by the shower in the hotel. Empty as it was, it was a tip for the housekeepers. And he wasn’t really using it much anyway.

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