Killing Time in Savannah

by Sonya Huber

 
In the Savannah airport, I sit with only time to kill, waiting for a plane.

They round a corner in three ragged rows. They are boys in colored and logo-covered t-shirts, worn threadbare with repeated washings like rocks on the shore. Each boy clutches a large manila envelope. The envelopes have become creased and dog-eared and scuffed and folded in the magic way that everything touched by a little boy’s hands becomes worn, used, imprinted and loved. I see these envelopes and think of chewed cuticles, calluses and suntanned fingers.

The boys are led by a commanding officer, impossibly neat in his razor-sharp ironed pants, his crisp folded green cap. He stands between the boys and me as they make a wide and wobbling curve to the left, coming to rest in front of an airline ticket counter. He steers them as you might guide a seventh-grade cross-country team, standing at a corner to point the way to the finish line, watching for stragglers.

As the group wheels past, I notice the boys’ hair: longish and cowlicked. They are so new as soldiers, and I realize I am watching their first moments in the military. They clutch duffle bags of every shape and size: orange, dark blue, vinyl brown. Their shoulders curve and hitch as they shuffle in civilian posture. The commanding officer stands twenty feet from the ticket counter, facing his boys in rows.

Now, in this pause, I could walk behind the officer, in full view of the boys. I consider the wordless actions available to me. Peace sign? Silly and attacking. I could lift my shirt, flash these boys for a little one-woman wordless USO act. Maybe one boy would shake his head and say, “Oh, I had forgotten: Anything can happen. Anything will.” Maybe—I don’t know how—he would hand in his manila envelope, buy a ticket home.

But this is not a peep-show. Truth is, I’m more their mom than their girlfriend now. As they stand at ragged attention, I watch them with an overpowering urge of another kind. I wish to grab them each in my small arms and smell the place at the back of their necks, at the nape, where that mysterious, cut-grass, creek-water, little-boy-smell comes from, as I have done to my own son so many times, breathing that elixir of youth and wonder. I used to be scared of boys, then I found myself growing a penis—or providing a parking space for one to grow—and then the real love of men had to start.

And these boys, not yet men, stand at attention.

The commanding officer is not cruel. There’s something in his hushed, respectful voice that refuses to belittle his charges, and I have such gratitude for that. He outlines a plan for boarding their busses to Fort Stewart. He fathers them here in this airport, with the method of parenting as old as humans: I use this bit of love so you will do what I want. But I am glad he is not cruel.
       He asks a muted question I can’t hear.
      “Yes sir,” they answer, sweet and low like the surf, blurred and hesitant.
      Go back, boys. I refuse to give you up. Your mothers want back the smell at the nape of your neck.
      “Yes sir,” they burble, they shush, become one body, reborn.