Not Without You
When Sam was a kid he sat in his living room watching Captain America punching bad guys on TV. Bang! Pow! Bof! Nobody could stop Captain America! Sam's father snored peacefully in the nearby armchair as Captain America and his faithful Howling Commandos saved the day once again.
Because he always did save the day. No matter the situation, Captain America would always win. Even when trapped, even when all seemed lost - somehow or the other, Captain America would always make it through.
"That's impossible!" the nefarious Red Skull exclaimed, as a bullet smashed right through the lock of the prison cell HYDRA had put Captain America in, "Nobody could make that shot!"
But someone had - the incredible Bucky Barnes, sharpshooter extraordinaire! From the base of the castle the Howling Commandos waved up to their fearless leader, who, free at last from his necessarily temporary imprisonment, rushed rapidly to put an end to the Red Skull's latest sinister scheme (this time a laser beam aimed at London) which he stopped, as usual, just in the nick of time.
---
Sam sat on a ratty couch in the rec center of an army base, watching Captain America save the day once again. They were watching "The Great March". Our intrepid hero had successfully infiltrated the HYDRA factory at Krausberg, reuniting at last with his childhood best friend, Bucky Barnes. But the villainous Red Skull had detonated the base, and the two friends raced to escape the fiery blaze of destruction. Upon reaching a burning chasm, the heroic Captain America insisted his friend go first. Bucky arrived on the other side just as the iron beam bridging the expanse crumbled.
"Go on without me!" shouted Captain America, soot falling on his hair.
"No!" cried the loyal Bucky, over the raging flames, "Not without you!"
Riley came in to the room just then and shoved himself into the couch next to Sam.
"Get out of here," Sam said to Riley, "You stink."
"No," said Riley, echoing Bucky's belabored expression, "Not without you!"
For some reason everyone thought this was hilarious. They all began to repeat the phrase with some frequency. If there was any mildly unpleasant task to be done: "You gonna get started?" "No...Not without you!"
Or: "Where are you going?" one might say.
"To take a piss"
"Okay, have fun."
"No... not without you!"
And so forth.
And it was this, that Sam could remember most clearly thinking the day that Riley died. The day he returned to the base all alone. He thought: how can I keep going, without you?
---
But you can learn to live without a person.
---
Sam returned to the U.S.
He drove down the lonely Louisiana roads along the river levees, past the shattered remains of buildings destroyed by floods and storms, past new buildings he had never seen before, looming over him on tall steel stilts, gangly and awkward, towards to the sparkling waters of the gulf, to the end of America, to Delacroix, his home.
It was exactly as he had left it - except for the meagre fact that it was different. Buildings had been rebuilt, others were boarded up. His best friend from elementary school now lived in Salt Lake City. His parents had bought a new TV. His sister had changed their recipe for redfish ever so slightly. The oyster fields where he had gathered oysters in his youth were now nearly empty. Home was a familiar painting, hung slightly askew.
They talked about the same things though. The people here. Fishing and the weather and jazz and baseball. Good old Delacroix. Things that had once been so important to him too. And now? Now he floated over the endless waters of the bayou in his parent's old boat, thinking of blue skies over arid valleys. In the evenings he would toss and turn in his too-soft bed, and he would think: it's 7:00 there and the day is just starting. Over there, people were dying.
And he was here.
Not there.
He was here and they talked about the same things and expected him to answer the same way. Everyone expected him to be the same: the hometown boy who had dreamed of flying. But he didn't dream anymore. In fact, he found it difficult to sleep at all. But he didn't tell them that. Maybe they had grown up together but they weren’t really the same anymore, all these distant uncles and aunties who had once known him as a kid, the reams of friends and friends of friends who had somehow become fully formed adults in his absence. "Have you saved the world yet?" they would ask him, because he had told them once that he would.
What should he tell them?
That he had?
He thought about Afghanistan - the valleys littered with the wreckage of burnt out tanks. The wary suspicious glances of villagers weary of war, as the Coalition Forces marched by with their jeeps and their guns. He thought about Riley – gone in the blink of an eye. He thought about Delacroix and the meagre payout they had received from BP, hardly enough to make a difference for the oysters that were gone.
He hadn't saved anyone.
In the end, he decided to leave.
---
He had a distant cousin in D.C. who acted as an intermediary to his exodus. The cousin performed his role so thoroughly that not only was an apartment found but through various connections Sam was also secured a job: a security guard at the Museum of American History. It was a living, anyways. The great variety of guests he found extremely interesting, and he whiled away the hours relatively pleasantly chatting with visitors. But unlike in the movies, nothing came alive during the night shifts, and Sam found those long nights at the museum boring and a little bit eerie.
In any case he was at the museum a lot and he often had some time to kill. One day he picked up a book from the museum gift shop.
The book was about Captain America and it was called "Captain America: A Portrait in Letters". He flipped through it idly.
There are no small number of extant letters, the author explained, written by Captain America. Many were written in response to fan mail and they were entirely generic. There was also a few early letters from his USO days, written to his friend Bucky, which said absolutely nothing of consequence. (A fact that is consequential in itself, the author noted and dedicated a chapter to it). But when you came right down to it, the fact of the matter was that Captain America had had few personal correspondences. Thus, the best source of information we have on him is that which was written by others.
---
The book contained a letter written by James Buchanan Barnes.
"It seems," it began, "the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
Barnes went on to describe a sequence of events that, much to Sam's surprise he recognized from the movie, The Great March. Maybe the movie was based on the letter. It was rather movie-like, the letter: a wild and whimsical romp out with the pals as they trekked across enemy territory towards the allied camp, narrated by Bucky Barnes with great aplomb, as if it were a dime serial. But while the movie had spent several looming shots on the misery of the prison camp, this was all glanced over in Bucky's letter. He characterized this time as a "vacation" from the rigours of army living, lamenting the fact that thanks to his good-for-nothing pal Steve, he had had to march straight across Austria without so much a chance for a wink of sleep.
Sam flipped forward in the book: all of Bucky's letters adapted a similar jocular tone.
---
It was all well and good for Captain America, Sam thought. He had arrived just in the nick of time. He had appeared essentially out of nowhere and he had fought HYDRA and defeated HYDRA and then he had died heroically, only a few months before the end of the war.
He hadn't had to come back.
---
There was an entire shelf dedicated to World War 2 history, in the gift shop of the Museum of American History. A great number of these were about Captain America. But wedged in between an analysis of the wartime tactics of Captain America and a book on the Tuskagee Airmen, Sam picked up the memoirs of Howling Commando member Gabriel Jones.
After the war ended, Jones returned to his native Georgia.
He waited in the crowded colored station, sweating under the southern sun and the weight of human bodies, while not far away stood the cool and spacious, nearly empty waiting room for whites.
"How I had longed for home," Jones wrote, "there in the bowels of gothic forests, under unceasing fire of enemy guns. Then at last, my wish came true. I was home. And nothing had changed. Yet everything had changed. I found myself a stranger in my own country."
Sam put down the book and stared at the wall. See, that was it. That was exactly it.
Nothing had changed. Yet everything had changed.
He understood what Jones was talking about: he knew all too well America. Just look at Delacroix and their fight to harvest from leased oyster fields; look at what happened after the oil spill. But he understood also -
Delacroix and the scent of the marshes and sun setting golden over the waters and the people he had grown up with and he was supposed to be there talking to them about boats and clams but he wasn't, because part of him was still in a faraway arid land where they were supposed to be helping people but sometimes he wondered if they were, so after Riley had died all he had wanted to do was leave and live his own damn life according to his own damn conscience and yet here he was, free as the wind and alive when others weren't, and these were good things, freedom and his life and Delacroix his home, so why did he still feel like a stranger, like none of this had anything to do with him? Why couldn't he come home? Why wasn't he satisfied, when he was here and he was alive? What was he supposed to do, in order to feel at home again, to be stop being miserable? Or would this deep dark hole in his stomach last forever? What comes after the war? Does anything come after? Can anything?
But Jones had come home. He had come home after everything and there hadn't been a heroic return. In Europe he had fought for freedom. They had claimed they were fighting for freedom, America had. They had said they were fighting for freedom, a beautiful idealized freedom Jones then failed to find there, in America.
Since he could not witness it in the world around him, he fought for it. He became an accomplished lawyer and civil rights activist. He became a father and lived to become an old man, sitting on the porch drinking tea. He returned home and he fought and also he lived, to an advanced old age, at which point he wrote his memoirs, the book which Sam was now reading in a world that was completely different and yet, in some ways, still the same.
He had thought he was alone.
---
After that, he started going to the VA. Each soldier fought their own battle. And yet there, at the VA, he could see he was not alone.
That made it easier, somehow.
---
"It's your bed, right?" he said, to Captain America, under a tree in the national mall, "Your bed, it's too soft."
Which wasn't exactly what he wanted to say. What he wanted to say was: "Oh my God! It's Captain America!" Do you know, he wondered, what you meant to me? To all of us? The first integrated unit. The hero from the cartoons he had watched as a kid, here before him, in the flesh.
But that wasn't really what he wanted to say either.
"And it's like - "
"Lying on a marshmallow," said Captain America. Said Steve Rogers. "I feel like I'm going to sink right into the floor."
And Sam smiled. That was it. That was exactly it.
---
One day Captain America came to his doorstep.
---
In the Captain America cartoon series that Sam had watched as a kid, there was a very special episode that showed the origins of the Howling Commandos. "I'm looking for the best of the best" Captain America announced and so the General paraded him about town introducing him to a series of virtually identical virile men who could all sprint great distances without getting the slightest out of breath, each one capable of increasingly impressive physical feats, who all marched at exactly 120 beats per minute with their hands rigidly at their sides, who about-faced in the three brisk movements as prescribed by the US Army manual. They were flawless specimens of the Soldier Americanus, each one of them.
"Well gee," said Captain America, "These are some great fellas. But they aren't really what I had in mind."
And one by one he returned to the soldiers the General had passed by earlier on their tour - the rowdy Frenchman who had nearly blown up the General's car, the Black man quietly reading books in the corner of the camp, a Brit, a Japanese, and of course, Captain America's quick-talking, smart-aleck Brooklyn pal from back home, Bucky Barnes.
"Whadd'ya say," said Captain America, approaching them one by one, "How'd you like to join my team?"
"You bet!" they said.
The General, however, was not pleased.
"TheseÂ
people?" he exclaimed, after they had all been assembled at base camp, a disorganized mess of non-standard uniforms and mismatched postures. The General's face was red as a tomato and his moustache bristling comedically.
"These are the people who will save America?"
But they were. And they did.
Thus, the episode concluded, no matter your origins, your skin, your race, your creed - you too, can be a hero. You too, can save the day. Captain America, who believed in the great American ideal of democracy, thus created his team based entirely on democratic principles, the same principles which form the basics of democratic society - which is to say, AMERICA, the most beautiful and democratic country in the world. In America, the unlikeliest people can become heroes. It is a country where beggars become billionaires, where anyone can cast off their common beginnings and rise to dizzying heights. What will YOU accomplish, dear viewer? Will you fight for freedom and justice and honour?
Captain America is counting on you!
---
What else could Sam say?
---
"Everyone we know is trying to kill us," said the Black Widow.
"Not everyone," said Sam.
They were not alone.
He invited them inside.
---
He dreamed about it sometimes, afterwards.
He'd be driving down the highway and in the dream he's late to like, a dentist appointment or something, so he's driving pretty fast. He sees his exit up ahead but when he tries to turn...
The steering wheel is gone.
Then he'd look back up to the road and there's a person in front of him and they're gonna die if he doesn't turn the car but he can't.
The wheel is gone; he's out of control.
And the soldier, the terrible assassin from the bridge, is walking towards him. And Sam can't move. The soldier draws nearer. The soldier marches mechanically. Inexorably. Approaching like a glacier. And Sam knows he has to run, he has to move. But he can't.
He's plummeting through the air and Riley's just a little out of reach and if he just goes a little faster and little bit further then maybe he could save him. But he can't.
All he can do is watch.
He can't do anything at all.
---
Except that he can.
There's always a choice.
"You're going after him," he said to Steve in the cemetery.
"You don't have to come with me."
"I know." said Sam. And went with him anyway.