A Good Man  by D.L. Shellenberger                                                          

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           After I came back from the war, my dad expected me to work the ranch with him. For his sake, I tried for about six months, but farming just wasn’t for me anymore. Besides, being at home only reminded me of who I used to be.

           I got a job as a mechanic at a farm equipment outfit in Bozeman. Two months later, I met Lila Atkins. Being with Lila was the farthest away I could get from where I’d come from, short of going back to Okinawa, and there was no chance of that. Once had been enough. I’d never seen a woman like Lila before. I had only known country women, women who could buck bales and ride a horse as well as any man. Not only was Lila gorgeous—a tall redhead who looked like Rita Hayworth—there was nothing capable and sturdy about her. She was like a piece of fine china, fragile and only brought out for best. She needed me to take care of her. I told myself she was the reason I’d stayed alive. We met in February; the wedding was in June.

            
            When I was courting Lila, I had an idea that her drinking would be our downfall. But part of me still believed all that war hero crap. I thought I could save her. Even though I’d never saved anyone before. Most of the guys in my unit were dead, and I hadn’t been able to do a damned thing about it.

            
            It never occurred to me that Lila might want to take me under with her. We weren’t married more than three months before I became the reason why her life was a mess. She’d get drunk and throw things at me. When she ran out of things to break, she’d take in after me, tooth and nail. The time she chucked an iron statue of a horse I’d won at the state fair’s saddle bronc competition and about took a chunk out of my shoulder, I knew I had to go before she killed me. I didn’t know people had such fury in them. I had never seen that. Not even on Okinawa. Even in battles, guys shot at each other because someone else told them to, or because there was no other choice. Fighting was a sport for Lila, and she was better at it than anyone I’d ever seen. If she could have stayed sober, the Marines could have used her.

            
            I’d had my fill of fighting. I went to have the marriage annulled. Lila begged for another chance, and I almost gave in, until my sister Carrie—older by a year and four days—talked some sense into me.

            
            “Miles, have you gone crazy?” She ran out of the room and came back holding a hand mirror, which she thrust at me. “See all the marks she’s already left? Don’t you know you’re just signing up for more if you go back to her?”

            
            Carrie was the only one who knew that Lila was the reason for all the bruises and cuts and scratches. The rest of the family figured I’d come back from the war scrapping for fights. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them otherwise.

           Once I left Lila, I moved in with Carrie and her family, just until I got back on my feet. Carrie didn’t like me drinking in front of her kids, so instead of going straight out to her place after work, I often stopped by a bar for a quick beer or two. One Thursday evening a woman about my age was the only other customer. I recognized her, not because I’d seen her before, but because the expression on her face matched the way I felt—disappointed, but not exactly giving in. One of her arms was in a sling. While not quite a country woman like my mother and sisters, she looked strong enough. I figured she’d probably fallen off a horse.

            
            Over the next month, I saw her a few more times. I overheard the barkeep calling her Eileen. She always sat on the same barstool and ordered some stiff, grown-up drink.

           She was there one Saturday afternoon. She glanced up at me, then hurriedly took another sip of her drink. She had a pretty good black eye.

            
            I sat down, leaving one barstool between us, and ordered my beer. She looked over at me again, and I tipped my cap to her.

            
            “How are you this evening?” I asked.

           She took her time answering. I figured she was going to ignore me. Without turning to look at me, she said, “About how you’d expect a woman with a black eye would be.”

           I took a big gulp of my beer. “Where’d you get that?”

           This time she turned in her seat to look my way. “What would you say if I told you it was my husband?”

           I took another slug of beer and raised my glass. “Here’s hoping the son-of-a-bitch looks worse than you do,” I said.

           Her good eye narrowed, and she looked away again. I thought she was going to cry. Or hit me. Or run away. “Sorry,” I said quickly. “That was a stupid thing to say.”

           “He should look worse than me, if I had a backbone,” she blurted. “But right after I finish here, I’ll go home to him. And he may be good to me, or seeing me like this may make him mad all over again.”

           The barkeep scurried away. That should have been my cue to leave well enough alone—after all, Lila and I had met in a bar, too—but I slid over to the stool next to hers.

           “Why are you going back there, then?” I kept my voice low. “Man who’d hit a woman isn’t a man.”

           “Yeah, and where am I supposed to go?” she asked. Looking at her up close, it was hard to believe that any man would ever want to hit her. Or think he could get away with it. She was a spunky little thing, with quick, disarming eyes. “I’ve got two little boys waiting at home for me.”

           After that, we still met up a few evenings a week, where she drank her one scotch and soda, wincingly, like it was medicine. It turned out I knew that no-good husband of hers, guy by the name of Brad Mayhew who’d been a year ahead of me in school. I’d always thought he was an asshole, a town kid who looks down on farm kids. It was his dad who owned the grocery store, not him. And now I find out he beats his wife. Oh, yeah, he’s better than me, all right. I offered to talk to him, but Eileen shut down that idea.

           “Please don’t, Miles,” she said. “It’ll just make matters worse.”

           Just in case Eileen was ready to move, though, I asked Carrie if she would take in her and her kids, and she agreed—as long as I moved out first. (“I’m not running a boarding house here,” said Carrie.) Eileen said she’d go back to her folks in St. Louis before she’d put Carrie out. But there was the matter of her boys already being settled here. They loved their Grandma Mayhew, who took care of them while Eileen worked. Eileen liked her job as a nurse at Bozeman Deaconess and didn’t think she’d like working in a big-city hospital. And eventually, she admitted, there was me. We had a few things in common. We had both been in the war. She’d been an army nurse at the same time I’d been in the Navy.

           Eileen and her boys never moved in with Carrie. When Mayhew pushed Eileen down the cellar stairs in their house, turning her from nurse to patient, Brad’s parents finally intervened. They were sitting with her in her hospital room when Mayhew showed up all apologetic with a big bouquet of flowers.

           “You should have seen Brad’s father,” Eileen told me later. “He usually wouldn’t say shit if it was in his mouth, but he stood up and told Brad he wasn’t welcome here, and when Brad said, ‘She’s my wife; I’ve got a right to be here,’ my father-in-law said, ‘She wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you, get the hell out before I call somebody to haul your sorry ass out of here,’ and Brad’s mother looking all worried but fierce at the same time saying ‘I didn’t raise you to be a criminal.’ Oh, after all those years of them staying out of it, and now they’re standing up for me and my boys.”

           After three days in the hospital, Eileen and her boys moved in with her in-laws. They even paid for her divorce attorney. Soon after Brad ran off to Billings with a new woman. Rumor was her parents had a ranch in Cutbank. After years of making fun of farm kids, he finally married one. That way he’d always have someone to look down on.

           Before I asked Eileen to marry me, I talked to old man Mayhew, and he gave me his blessing. That was nice and all, but he wasn’t the one I wanted to marry. I asked Eileen three times, and she refused every time. Maybe she didn’t figure a mechanic could support her and her boys like a shopkeeper’s son. And anyway, she could support herself on her nurse’s salary. Maybe she was afraid I’d hit her like her ex-husband had.

           Carrie said if I expected Eileen to marry me, I ought to tell her what else we had in common. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Just goes to show that going to war doesn’t take the coward out of the man. I was no hero, not in Lila’s life, or Eileen’s, or anyone else’s. Not even Carrie knew all the mistakes I’d made.

           When I made up my mind to tell Eileen the whole truth about my marriage to Lila, I felt a familiar dread. It took me a while to place it, until I remembered it was like those quiet times during the war we almost believed were permanent. Right before an enemy grenade shattered the peace.

           Eileen and I were sitting on the back steps outside the Mayhews’ house. It was a Saturday night, and we had gone to dinner at the 4-B’s and a picture at the Rialto.

           “You’re so quiet tonight,” Eileen said, squeezing my hand.

           I shrugged and squeezed her hand back. “What do you want to talk about?”

           “Nothing in particular. Sitting here together feels good.”

           After a few minutes of listening to the crickets’ throbbing, I said, “What would you say if I told you my ex-wife used to hit me?”

           Eileen started to laugh as if I was joking. Then she noticed I wasn’t laughing. “Really?” Even in the dark I could tell that her expression was startled and concerned, as if I’d suddenly sprouted a visible wound. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

           I withdrew my hand and hunched over with my elbows on my knees, pretending to study my boots. “Have you ever heard of a woman beating on her husband?”

           Eileen had been facing me, but out of the corner of my eye I saw her look away.

           “That’s what I thought,” I said softly.

           “You thought what?”

           It seemed the night got darker and stiller. My throat was so dry all of a sudden, I didn’t know if I could speak. “That no man would ever stand for a woman hitting him,” I heard myself say.

           I heard Eileen shifting in her chair, and next thing I knew she was kneeling in front of me and reaching for my hands. “I know you were raised not to hit women, and I wouldn’t be here with you if you had.” In the dark her face shone as pale and featureless as a star.

           “So, you’re not going to throw me out?”

           Her hands were warm and smooth on mine. “That makes as much sense as you leaving me because Brad hit me.” Her voice cracked, and as she bent her head, a length of her soft, dark hair veiled her face. “There are just some people in this world who are rotten, Miles, and we had the bad luck to find two of them. That doesn’t make us bad people.”

           I wished I could have Eileen’s certainty, because since the war I hadn’t always been able to sort out the difference between good and bad, friend and enemy. Back on Okinawa, my buddies and I were walking through the jungle when I heard a branch break above. I looked up, hoping it was a squirrel or some other damned animal, knowing it probably wasn’t. Near the top of a tree, a Jap soldier was taking aim. He could have shot the whole works of us before we even knew what hit us. But he didn’t. And I think I know why. He was probably just as sick and tired of all the killing as I was and hoped we’d just keep moving along. It was just pure bad luck that he’d lost his footing and given himself away. We all started shooting, and by the end of it, only the Jap was dead. I’ll never forget the cracking sound his body made when it hit the ground, like a coconut falling from a tree. Only he was a man.

           I felt Eileen’s hands on mine, still warm and so alive. “You think I’m a good man?”

            Eileen tenderly kissed my hands. “The best,” she whispered. “The best.” She had to be getting uncomfortable, still kneeling at my feet. I scooped her up onto my lap, and we held each other for a long time, listening to our breathing and the crickets’ serenade.