The Circle
by Martha Rose
August 20, 2009
They say that the Circle was once a racetrack, or that once a year it was used as a racetrack. It’s hard to get good stories out of them. They’re old men who hijack the corners of grocery stores, where the free newspapers are. It’s gotten to the point where the manager has given up and installed some benches and a coffee machine so that the old men wil be comfortable and won’t swear so much. But they swear just as much as they did before. If you’re stupid enough to ask them a question, they’ll tell you that the whole fucking Circle used to be a racetrack. Or, at least, it’d been a racetrack once a year for those faggots on their fancy bikes. This was fifty years ago, they’d say, before they put in the highway.
By now the Circle is an anomaly. Every other street you know runs straight north or south, or if it wants to be fancy, it runs at an angle or curves now and then. The miracle of The Circle is that it runs in a circle, maybe a little oblong but circular nonetheless. Someone had the bright idea of dividing it into half, one side being the West Circle and the other side the East, as if there could be differences in a circle. What it became instead was its own creation, a neighborhood within a neighborhood, just before the city becomes the suburbs. You only come across it if you’re looking for it, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for you’re already lost and don’t know where you are. It’s just off the main roads, about a square mile of old and expensive houses, trees blocking out the sun, side streets crisscrossing or merging at odd angles, and all the while that single curving road, closing in on itself and throwing into disorder what you used to think of as an orderly, predictable city.
Paul picked up a newspaper and made the mistake of listening, even stopping to listen as the spry old man told the same story for the fourth time. “They used to ride that fucking Circle once a year. For cash. You’d got all these bastard professionals out there, and a bunch of amateurs having a good time. Well, one year they didn’t have enough to pave the road. There were potholes all over the place! One of the big pros fell and broke his arm. Nobody gave a shit. But then we found out some of the locals had fallen too, and all because of those damned potholes. That was the end of that. Never had the race since. This was before the highway came through –”
Another old man, this one fat and immobile, spoke up out of nowhere. “My aunt’s house had to move because of that highway.”
Someone else joined in. “It did?”
“It was right in the way of the on-ramp. So they picked it up and moved it.”
“They wouldn’t do that now. They’d tear the damn thing down and write her a check.”
“You’re right. Things are fucking simple now. I hate it.”
Paul stopped listening, afraid that someone would talk to him, and he left. As he walked down the street, back toward the Circle, he ate the sandwich he had just bought at the deli counter. When he was finished, he let the plastic wrapping fall gently from his left hand down to the sidewalk below. Someone else could clean it up for once. He was on break. He wiped his hands on his jeans, made a right turn, crossed some train tracks and came up to the nursing home where he worked. He avoided the main entrance, which was a long U-shaped driveway where sometimes he’d see an ambulance waiting outside, but instead he had a key to a back door, so he wouldn’t have to shuffle past the clerks, security guards, and miscellaneous residents who seemed to resent the outside world that hung so closely beyond the automatic sliding doors. It was quieter coming through the back way and less dramatic.
Paul made his way to the staff room he shared with the other custodians. It was possible, from the back entrance, to get there using mostly a series of basement passages and restricted areas, so that he could pretty much avoid having to walk through any area where he might run into residents, only occasionally crossing a hallway as he walked from one staff room to another. When he got to his locker, he put on his practical, sterile uniform and proceeded to clean his section.
Over the summer months, the home had gone through a serious renovation, adding a second building to accommodate the ever-growing number of applicants. Where the old building looked like a medical or office facility, straight up and down and tinted windows, the new building was designed to look homier, like a five-story bed and breakfast with windowed gables that may or may not be attached to rooms and a New England style clocktower which seemed a little out of place here in the Midwest. In the end, it probably looked too homey, like it was some sort of trap, but so long as the place didn’t look like a morgue or an insane asylum, it really didn’t matter. What mattered was that the place needed to expand and actually had the resources to do so. No other business in the area, even in this fairly well-to-do neighborhood, had the money to expand. Banks charged extra service fees, libraries hikes up the overdue fines, lousy storefront restaurants shut down and nothing came to replace them, but the nursing home kept on growing. It’s almost as if people wanted to be there. You used to go to nursing homes to die. Now you go to forget that there ever was such a thing as death.
I suppose it helps that the home is right on the Circle, parked on the very edge. It sat at the northeast corner, just before the railroad tracks. At the southwest corner of the Circle, a large Catholic church stands guard. A few blocks to the east, a public high school attracts a lot of kids, even though most of the families in the Circle send their children to private institutions. Finally, a major road to the west makes for a wall of traffic. The people on the outside don’t exactly understand the people on the inside. It’s a foreign country in there, with slightly different rules of etiquette and demeanor. Past the railroad tracks, words behaved differently. It wasn’t any easier or harder to be make people angry in the Circle than it was in the outside world, but you had to know the rules to know the people, and vice versa. Without the rules, it was easy to get confused and angry.
So whenever Paul passed by a window overlooking the Circle, he glanced out and reaffirmed his suspicion that the Circle was populated with nothing but assholes. He got no respect here and didn’t know why. What he did know was that if he were ever going to be arrested, or hit by a car, or stabbed to death by a total stranger, it would happen here, in the Circle, because he just couldn’t figure out the rules.
Most of his cleaning was done away from the residents, in stairwells or staff areas, because his boss felt that Paul wouldn’t get along with the residents. It wasn’t that Paul would pick any fights or even that Paul had a nasty personality. He was just a big, quiet guy who kept to himself, and because of that, everyone who didn’t know him thought he was up to something. It didn’t help matters that he was black. Most of the nursing and custodial staff were black, so it wasn’t like he stood out, but Black meant something in this neighborhood. The Circle was anxiously European, to the point where people distinguished between Swedish, Irish and Polish. Anyone middle-Eastern was simply mistaken for Greek. If you ever pressed anyone on the issue, he’d tell you that race meant nothing to him, but if you used the right language, you could start talking to him about certain neighborhoods on the other side of the city, and then he’d start telling you about how certain people from certain neighborhoods should take better care of their children, should stop blaming the outside world for their problems and should, above all things, cooperate more with police. So when the residents spot a person from a certain neighborhood mopping the floors around them, they can’t help but think. What put everything over the edge was the unavoidable fact that Paul was male. The residents were still chivalrous enough to treat the black women with condescension and kindness, but when it came to men, any black male, from president to pauper, was two steps removed from a thief. And if he was big . . .
It was decided that Paul should stay out of the way. The only public area Paul cleaned was a small alcove with a few chairs and couches facing a TV in the corner. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as the larger media rooms on the lower floors, which were all about bringing people together. This was just a convenient spot where some of the less alert or mobile residents could watch something in uninterrupted stillness. The people who came to this spot were the ones who had a hard time getting anywhere else. They hobbled over or were wheeled over. They sat and they watched. The tiled floor made it easier to clean up spills. Paul usually mopped up quietly as the TV droned in the background and various workers shuffled back and forth. There was only one resident who ever spoke to him. His name was Smith. Paul didn’t know if it was his first or last name, but the man had introduced himself as Smith and that was that. Smith was skinny and almost emaciated, with poor enough hearing so that sometimes it didn’t matter what you were saying so long as you were talking. But he was sharp. Sometimes Paul wondered what the old man was doing in the home to begin with, and he was never able to figure out why Smith hung out in the corner instead of all the places that were filled with people who could listen to Smith and talk back reasonably. All they did here was mumble incoherently about long dead relatives that Smith had never heard of to begin with. Paul chalked it up to the Circle and only spoke when he was spoken to.
“Hey Paul,” Smith said.
“How’re you doing?” Paul answered.
“Just fine.” The man could’ve been dying of a bullet wound, but he’d still be just fine. Most of the time the conversation ended there, so that Paul could carefully maintain the area around the wheelchairs and splayed limbs. Paul’s shift started early in the morning, but typically he clean Smith’s alcove last, sometime in the mid-afternoon, when the only thing on the TV were light, harmless talk shows hosted by vaguely mannish women. One day Smith asked, “Do you see her?”
“Who?” Paul asked.
“Her!” Smith yelled. “The host!” He pointed manically at the TV, where the host made random jokes as a celebrity chef stuffed a turkey.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know she’s a dyke?”
Paul couldn’t help but start laughing. Smith didn’t seem to mind. “I kinda know,” Paul said. “I think I read it somewhere.”
“I had no fucking idea!” Smith said. “I had to find out from one of the nurses. I’m not saying I had the hots for her or anything, I’ve got a problem with her nose, but I was disappointed. At this time of day, she’s really all I got.”
Paul remembered a time in-between girlfriends, when he sat up late at night and wished he had access to the Internet. “I know the feeling,” he said. Smith and Paul had been friends ever since.
This particular day, though, Smith wasn’t talking. He shifted in his seat like there was something to say, but nothing came out. Paul washed the floor a couple of times, waiting for Smith to speak up. He knew whatever the man had to say would be good, and he was willing to leave work a little late to be able to hear it. It took awhile, but it came.
“Paul?” Smith said.
“You doing all right?”
“I’m just fine. Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“I, um . . . I have relatives . . . and they’re in a bit of a spot. I don’t know why I should help them but it’s family. It might turn out good for you, too. I really don’t know. But would you be interested in something like that?”
“What is it?”
“I really can’t say. I mean, the people here act like they’re fucked up . . .” He pointed to man who had fallen in his wheelchair, his head resting on his chest. “But you really don’t know what they hear and what they don’t. It might turn out damn well for you, if you get through it, and if anyone can, you can.”
“Are you all right?” Paul asked.
“I’m just fine,” Smith answered. “Let me give you a number. You seem like a good kid. A quiet kid. If you don’t like what you hear, all you have to do is not say a goddamned thing. I don’t want to put you in a spot, but it could be good for you. Are you interested?”
Paul didn’t know what to say.
“Let me give you the number. Do you have a pen on you? And paper?”
“Yeah, sure.” Paul walked to the nearest nurse’s station, which was half-disguised as an office. He took a pen and a Post-It note and brought it back to Smith.
“You’re looking for Joel Robinson,” he said, and he wrote Joel Robinson on the note. Then he wrote the number, which must’ve been for a cell phone, because Paul couldn’t recognize the area code. Joel must move around a lot. If Joel was a relative like Smith said, maybe this made the old man Smith Robinson, a funny sort of name. Or maybe Smith’s daughter married into the Robinsons. Or maybe Joel was a middle man. Or maybe Smith was playing a joke, and when Paul called the number, a pack of elderly women would screech at him and tell him to go fuck himself. Smtih handed Paul the note and smiled uncertainly. “You have a good evening,” Smith said.
“You too,” Paul said. It was time he went home. To get there, Paul wished he could use the railroad that was less than a block away, but instead he had to go to a bus stop clear on the other side of the Circle. From work, he walked down a diagonal street which cut right through the middle of the neighborhood, passing a public grammar school and two small Protestant churches. It always felt like he was trespassing. Everyone was comfortable but him. No matter what time of day it was, someone was walking a dog, and most of the dogs were small and white. Once, Paul came up behind a young man walking two white dogs, and across the street an old man walked a white dog, and when they all got to an intersection, they saw a middle-aged man walking another white dog a kitty corner away. The dog on the opposite corner got all excited and ran into the middle of the intersection, yipping ferociously at all the other little white dogs. The dog’s owner, who at any time could’ve pulled on the leash, followed his dog out onto the street and stood there, complacently, as if there were no way a car could mow down him or his little white dog. And while this all took place, nobody said a word. The only things talking were the dogs. The men just smiled and nodded at each other like they did this every other week. Paul didn’t get it, but he only had to put up with it long enough to get to the bus stop and then to the long road for home.
The next day, approaching the mid-afternoon, Paul cleaned up the TV area and came up to Smith, who stared into nothing and grinned. “I called the number you gave me,” Paul said.
“Good. How did it go?”
“He gave me an address.”
“I knew you’d do all right.”
“Where is it?” Paul took out a piece of paper with an address written on it. Smith looked at the paper and didn’t have to think about it much.
“It’s close by. Just take the Circle away from here . . . when you walk out the front door, make a right until you get to the Circle, then make a left . . . it’ll be one of the first streets you run into. Make a left and follow the numbers.”
“What is this about?”
“I don’t know enough to tell you anything,” Smith said. “All I know is that the Robinsons . . . are looking for a strong, reliable young man. And they’ve got money. That’s all I know.”
“Is this some kind of bullshit?” Paul asked.
“It’s all bullshit,” Smith answered. “The whole family’s bullshit. But it’s not that kind of bullshit. I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re the only guy I trust here, Paul.”
“Well, thank you.” Paul kept on cleaning the place even though it didn’t need cleaning. He wanted more information. “They don’t want to meet until seven o’clock,” he said. “What is there to do around here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to go wandering around. Is there any place I can go?”
“I don’t know, go to the library. It’s right across the tracks.”
“What about something to eat?”
“I hear the grocery store has some good sandwiches.”
“I mean something to eat.”
“Go to the diner. It’s right by the library.”
““Is it good?” Paul asked.
“It’s food,” Smith answered. “Paul?”
“What?”
“What are you worried about?”
“Nobody’s told me what I’m doing tonight. And I don’t like hanging out in this neighborhood unless I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“Trust me, Paul,” Smith said. “It’ll work out. If you go tonight and you like what you see, it’ll work out. If you don’t, that’s okay too. Just keep quiet about it, that’s all. I’m sure they’ll be able to find somebody else.”
“Somebody else for what?”
“I really don’t know.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Well what did I tell you?” Smith said. “The whole family’s bullshit.”
When Paul got off of work, he crossed the tracks and spent some time in the library. He still felt uncomfortable, but knew that no one could touch him so long as he kept to himself. A few people close to where he sat lazily surfed the Internet on public computers. He could probably kill time quicker on the Internet, but he was willing to bet he needed a card for that. He didn’t want the trouble. Paul flipped through magazines instead and watched the clock. At six thirty, he walked a few doors down to the diner, where he sat right up at the counter because he was by himself and didn’t want a table or a booth. The service was good, the meal decent, so he left an adequate tip and walked away, burping now and then as he tried to remember Smith’s directions. He knew he’d gotten it right when, as he passed house after ornate house, somebody shouted to him from a porch. “Paul?”
Paul stopped. “Yeah?”
“Come on up. We talked on the phone. I’m Joel.” Joel wore a black T-shirt that was tucked into gray trousers. The man smiled broadly and kindly, like he was about to steal Paul’s wallet.
“How are you doing, Paul?”
“I’m doing just fine,” Paul said. He walked up to Joel’s porch and shook Joel’s hand. “My father-in-law told me some good things about you.”
“Well,” Paul said, thinking of the falsest thing he could say. “I hope so.”
“Isn’t that right?” Joel answered. He laughed loudly, opened the front door, put his hand on the small of Paul’s back and pushed Paul into his house. The first thing Paul saw was a skinny, red-headed woman who seemed to have frozen up in the living room. “This is my wife,” Joel said. Everyone nodded at each other. “Let me take you upstairs.”
They went to a room which, in another decade, would’ve been a study, but now it was just an extra room. There were two expensive chairs and needlessly elaborate table. A half-filled bookshelf stuck out from a corner, while random pictures decorated the walls. “Sit down, Paul,” Joel said. “Make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”
“No thanks,” Paul said. “I just had dinner.”
“All right. Sit down, then.”
Paul sat down. It was a comfortable chair. Joel walked to the opposite chair and, instead of sitting, laid his hands on the back of the chair. “I’m glad you came,” Joel said. “This is really about my son. He’s the one who should talk to you. Let me get him for you.”
“ . . . Okay.”
Joel walked out of the room, and the only sound Paul heard was a stern voice yelling, “Rory!” Joel only had to yell it twice before something came stomping in Joel’s direction. There were a few mumblings, then the door opened and a kid about Paul’s age shuffled through the door. Rory wore khaki shorts and a dark blue polo shirt, untucked. He sat down in the chair opposite Paul. “So you’re Paul?”
“I’m Paul.”
“I’m really glad you came, Paul. Pops said you were all right.” Rory wasn’t nearly as good as his father or grandfather, but he had the same deceiving pleasantness. “I’m sorry, do you want something to drink?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re right.” Rory sat down. “You want to know why you’re here. It really is something of a delicate situation, and I just want to make sure we’re both on the same page. Nothing that either of us says here needs to leave here.”
“Okay.” Nothing leaves the Circle.
“Let me tell you where I’m coming from . . . I’m going to the army.” Rory paused to let it sink in. He leaned over and rested his elbows on his knees.
Paul felt obliged to say something. “Oh, well . . . that’s pretty good. I knew a couple of guys who joined the army right out of high school. I never found out what happened to them, but it seems like the kind of place that can really screw your head on straight.”
“If that’s your kind of thing. But Paul . . .” Paul flinched at the mention of his own name. “If it’s not your thing, it doesn’t do anybody any good.”
Behind Rory, the door opened and Joel peeked in. Rory pretended not to notice. Joel disappeared and closed the door. “What do you mean?” Paul asked. “There’s no draft on, is there?”
“No. No draft.”
“Is your family making you?”
“No . . . they’re the reason you’re here.”
They’re the reason you’re here. “What’s going on?” Paul asked.
“I enlisted.”
“So you want to be in the army.”
“No.”
“Why did you enlist?”
“It was . . . just, a thing. Like a joke. Or a dare. I was with friends. Really, my dad would be able to explain this better, but he wanted me to do it myself.”
What the fuck was the matter with these people? Paul could only barely imagine it, this little rich shit enlisting as a joke. Or a dare. Drunk or high off his ass as the sun comes up, surrounded by his asshole friends. Someone sees a recruitment office and dares someone to enlist. For fifty bucks, and fifty bucks was money to Paul but it probably means nothing to them. In-between the vodka, Red Bull, meth and foreign beer, Rory is the man for the job. He walks out of the army office laughing. It only dawns on him later what he did.
“Ysee, I enlisted.” Rory wanted badly to explain himself, but every time he opened his mouth, he realized who he was and what he sounded like. “I mean, I panicked when I remebered what I did, and maybe at that point I could still have gotten out of it, but then I started thinking too much. That maybe this was a good thing. Like you said, maybe it could screw my head on straight. And I’d be doing some good, helping my country, shooting bad guys, saving Third World countries. I’d be like a missionary or something, but with a gun. I’d be a real fucking American, the kind that people ask to march in parades. So I got myself in a little too deep. By the time my family found out, I’d signed too many papers. It was either the army or jail.”
“So why am I here?” Paul asked.
“My family has plans for me. I’m engaged, yknow. She’s a sweet girl. She’ll make a good wife. And I’ve got a job lined which could be a really good career if I don’t fuck it up. The end of it is, I can’t join the army. I’m not allowed.”
Paul waited for the punchline. Rory couldn’t sit anymore. He stood up, walked behind his chair and held it tightly, like a shield.
“I’m at the point where I can’t get off the list – quotas and all that. But I have an uncle who knows a guy. What they can do is take out my paperwork and replace it with someone else’s. Instead of one name, another name. Instead of one person, another person.”
“You want me to join the army.”
“Pops said you were a good guy.”
“I’m sorry, I’m leaving.” Paul stood up and walked for the door. Rory’s eyes widened. He was afraid. “I’m not saying a damn word of this to anybody,” Paul said, “but I’m leaving.” Rory took off for the door so he could block Paul’s way and grab him by the shoulders.
“Whoa, hold on there,” Rory said. Paul was about four inches taller than Rory. Paul looked down for a second and imagined how easy it would be to beat the little shit to a bloody pulp. But then the father would call the cops and say that Paul was a thief gone mad. There was no guarantee that Paul was getting out of here alive. “Whoa,” Rory said, “I’m not asking you to do this for nothing. Sit back down. Hear me out. Let me explain.”
“Why should I sit down?”
“Fifty thousand dollars. Upfront. The second you agree.”
Paul walked away from the door. This had to be a mistake. You’d think that a family with that kind of money could’ve found a better way out of their problem. You’d think that a family with money like that wouldn’t let Smith rot in a nursing home. But if he could see that kind of money, maybe he wouldn’t have to ask so many questions. “Explain it to me.”
“There’s not much to explain. We’ve got the paperwork all ready. You just have to fill out some forms. Someone we know will substitute the records, and you’re good to go. For every year you stay, so long as you don’t go AWOL or shoot your commanding officer, so long as you keep your mouth shut and your head screwed on tight, we are prepared to offer you fifty thousand dollars. Per year. In addition to whatever the government gives you. Tax free. Under the table. Fifty thousand a year.”
“This isn’t the kind of contract,” Paul said, “that’ll hold up in court. What did you say about upfront?”
Rory walked out of the room and came back with an old backpack he laid in Paul’s lap. It was filled with cash. “Fifty thousand dollars,” Rory said. Paul held up the bills, checking for watermarks and other things he wasn’t sure about. It still didn’t sound like the kind of plan that would come from a reasonable person, but Joel might’ve made his son do the planning. Rory acted like the kind of guy who would make a cockeyed plan like this. He had made a mistake and thought he could get out of it with money. Maybe he could. The only thing more ambitiously cruel than going to war was paying someone else to do it for you. And maybe his Pops was in the nursing home for location’s sake, or as some sort of punishment, and Pops had sent Paul over as a good will offering. He was only an in-law in the end. Who knew what kind of wheeling and dealing went on in this family? The only thing Paul knew for certain was the money in his lap, even if he couldn’t quite tell if it was counterfeit. “Well?” Rory said. “What do you think?”
Paul picked up a bill and felt it between his fingers. “What about a hundred?”
“Hundred?”
“A hundred thousand. Fifty’s all right, but I’m getting shot at.”
“We don’t keep that kind of cash in a vault, Paul. We had to move some investments around to get that backpack ready. Let me see what I can do.” Rory stepped out of the room, like a used car salesman checking with his manager. Paul had the suspicion that every time Rory said we, it meant that someone had paid him a favor. If Paul went through with this – which by now didn’t seem so far-fetched – he was sure that Rory would brag to his friends that he’d been in a tight spot but we had made an arrangement and everything would be okay. Paul zipped up the backpack and put it on the side of his chair. He prepared himself, so that when Rory came in, Paul looked like he had already made up his mind. It had such an effect that Rory stammered a little bit.
“It, uh . . . it looks like I could, um, get you seventy-five a year. Not cash. Not right away. All we got is the fifty right now. But we’ll get you another twenty-five for the first year and after that, seventy-five a year. What do you say?”
“It sounds better is what I’ll say.” Paul stood up. “But I’m still going to have to think about it.”
“Of course. You don’t have to –”
“When do you need a decision?”
“By the end of the week.”
“I’d have to be able to make some arrangments.”
“Shit’s gonna start happening by the end of the week.”
“You’ll get your decision tomorrow.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” They shook hands. Paul wondered if he was Rory’s last chance, or if there were other janitors lined up behind him. The negotiations implied that Rory had nowhere else to go, but then again, maybe the negotiations were part of the show. Rory walked Paul down to the front door and followed him onto the porch, where Joel stood quietly and pretended to stare off into nothing.
Paul wanted to make a stand of some kind. Before stepping off the porch, he turned around and pronounced, “I just want to let you know, I mean, you know I haven’t decided yet. But if I say no, I won’t say a word. I won’t want to see you, talk to you, or remember you. And if I say yes, I would still want to keep as far away from you as I can.”
Rory mumbled something in approval. Joel looked at his son and then at Paul. “Paul,” Joel said. “I know where you’re coming from. I appreciate the sentiment. But if you’re going to say shit like that, say it inside and not out here.” They stood for a few seconds. The weather was quite nice, cool but not too breezy. “You have yourself a good night, Paul.”
“Good night, Joel. Good night, Rory. I’ll let you know tomorrow. I got your number.”
Paul walked as fast as he could off the porch and down the street. It was dark out by now, which only made the neighborhood stranger and more foreign. Children wandered the sidewalks by themselves with impunity, crossing the streets at random unafraid. A few people still walked their dogs, but now the dogs were bigger for some reason. No one was afraid to be outside but Paul. He walked as fast as he could to get out of there, but then he slowed down, for fear of looking like he was doing something wrong. He spent most of his time figuring out just the right pace to keep people from noticing him. Nothing much happened in-between the house and the bus stop, but it worried him all the same.
The next day, Paul continued with his daily routine, not letting anyone know what he’d been up to. When he came to the TV area at the end of his shift, he tried to act like nothing had changed. “Hey Paul,” Smith said.
“How’re you doing?”
“Just fine.” The TV kept on playing and Paul kept on cleaning. “Yknow, Paul?” Smith said. “What have you been thinking about lately?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Paul said, and he paused for a while, coming up with something to say. “I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am. To live in a country like this. With all my . . .” He spotted a large, unidentified brown spot on the floor. He mopped it up. “With all my freedom. And my rights. And luxuries. I figure, there’s got to be a way I can give back. A way that I can come to the service of my country. Do you know what I mean?”
Smith laughed loudly, with pride. It wasn’t something you heard very much in the home. “I know what you mean, Paul. I knew you were a good man. It’s just a feeling I got, but I think you’ll do well.”
Paul stopped to look at all the invalids, who had barely registered the conversation going on around them. “I hope I will,” Paul said. His shift was almost done.