Oakes frowns. As a boy growing up in Detroit, near Highland Park, he had been caught with several friends throwing rocks at cars from the Wyoming Street bridge over Interstate 96 and spent one tumultuous year in juvenile hall. He understands the impetus of escape and identifies with this twenty-four-year-old blond white girl from West Virginia in ways that often astonish him. With her sudden and surprising decision to leave the army, Stanley Oakes now sees in Hayley the road not taken. That awareness gnaws at him, at the implacable gristle of regret and insecurity.
Oakes’s expression softens. “Okay, then. Have it your way.” The marvel of military life is unlikely pairings, geographic and ethnic boundaries erased by a cohesive necessity. He slowly nods as the Greyhound bus appears from around the corner on Avenue C and lumbers into the depot’s driveway. He gestures toward the bus with his chin.
“Make ’em pay, champ,” he says gruffly. In this way grown, childless men conceal their emotions and say goodbye to someone they’ve come to love like their own flesh-and-blood daughter.
Hayley retrieves the duffel bag with her left hand and briefly lays her right on the side of her trainer’s cheek. “Thank you, Stanley Oakes. For everything.”
She moves toward the waiting bus driver, who takes her bag and deposits it in the storage compartment under the coach. Hayley pauses on the steps leading up into the bus and turns to offer Oakes a wave.
He nods in appreciation. “When you figure out a better somethin’ to all of this, you be sure to let me know. Never too late, even for old war dogs like me!”
Hayley busts a sly West Virginia grin, and then disappears inside the bus. The doors close soon enough, and a melancholic Oakes stays to watch the bus depart the brick depot.
In the years that followed, before Oakes officially retired from the army, he often thought about the best fighter he ever trained. It was easy to be reminded of Hayley’s achievement. A framed picture of her in the ring with Rivas snapped by the base newspaper’s photographer hung ceremoniously in the fitness center lobby. After a few visits to the bottom desk drawer where he kept a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, Oakes often found himself standing in front of the photo and musing on Hayley’s improbable victory on that savage August night.
But when Oakes finally does leave the army, twelve interminable years on, and moves back north, to Detroit, he thinks less and less often about Hayley Chill and her powder blue eyes. Rarely does he dwell on that golden time, until another decade hence, when one Sunday afternoon he will be caught in gang-related gunplay, as if by a sudden April shower, and takes a .44-caliber round in his chest. As he serenely bleeds out, splayed on the filthy sidewalk just outside a liquor store, Stanley Oakes’s last memory before he closes his eyes forever is of Hayley’s otherworldly smile at the bus’s doorstep.
1
MONROE PEOPLE
The WMATA Metrobus 38B crosses the Potomac on the Francis Scott Key Bridge, turning east on M Street and traversing a fitfully elegant Georgetown. Heading southeast and transitioning onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the city bus crosses Rock Creek and fully engages the brooding, low-slung metropolis that is the nation’s capital. Hayley Chill, wearing a white blouse and ruffled hem cardigan from Dressbarn with dark straight-leg trousers and functional pumps, has claimed a window seat near the front of the bus. Her straw-colored hair has grown out from Fort Hood days, styled on a budget at Diego’s Hair Salon on Q Street. JanSport bag on her lap, she is barely recognizable as the triumphant and bloodied boxer in the ring or subdued soldier in crisp service uniform mustering out of the army. Whatever the metamorphic process she has undergone in the fifteen months since saying goodbye to Stanley Oakes at the Killeen bus depot, it has transformed Hayley Chill into an accurate facsimile of a DC worker bee.
It is 7:08 a.m. in late November and the weather clings stubbornly to Indian summer. Passing sights they’ve seen hundreds of times before, all other passengers on the bus are engrossed by handheld devices or asleep. But Hayley has ridden the 38B only once before, one week earlier, on a test run after signing the lease on a studio apartment just across the Potomac in Rosslyn, Virginia. Despite having grown up only a six-hour drive from Washington, DC, the city and its monuments are entirely new to her. She gazes out the window, gathering impressions of the passing city with the keen attention of a cultural anthropologist.
As the Metrobus eases to the curb at the southeast corner of Farragut Square, its last stop, Hayley disembarks with a dozen other passengers. The familiarity of another workday is etched on the bored faces of those stepping off the bus. Only Hayley moves with a surplus of energy and a brisk, five-minute walk south on Seventeenth Street brings the President’s Park into view. She pauses on the sidewalk to take in the iconic sight. The White House, partially obscured by fern-leaf beech, American elm, and white oak, impresses her as both splendidly grand and surprisingly modest at the same time. She knows the building’s original architect was Irish-born. She has memorized the names of every senior aide and their phone extensions. Somehow she has even ascertained what flavor ice cream the president is said to prefer. Unsurprisingly, Hayley Chill has arrived for her first day of internship at the White House completely and thoroughly prepared.
A gatehouse opposite the EEOB controls entry into the White House complex, and Hayley joins the long queue there. The majority of staffers waiting in line have green badges on lanyards. Many fewer, including Hayley, possess blue badges. The young Park Police officer who performs the initial screening accepts her driver’s license and checks it against her badge. He has warm eyes and a folksy grin.
“West Virginia, huh? I grew up in Lewisburg.” His voice possesses the familiar twang of Hayley’s tribe.
She nods. “Lewisburg. Sure. Nice.”
“Blue badge,” the Park Police officer remarks with surprised regard. He hands her ID back and gestures behind him, toward the White House complex. “Ready for the viper pit?”
Hayley laughs. “I hope so!”
The policeman waves her through the gate. “You have yourself a pleasant day, Ms. Chill.”
She offers her hand. “Hayley, but you already know that.”
He nods, shaking her hand. “Ned.” Hayley continues forward as the line of people waiting for ID check lengthens behind her.
Once cleared through security screening, she and other arriving personnel are waved through an aggressive, final series of barriers and frowning Park Police. As instructed by email, Hayley passes through the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and continues outside, onto West Executive Avenue. Nearly all interns receive green badges, designating their access as being limited to more prosaic confines of the Eisenhower building. Hayley’s blue badge allows her to breeze past the Secret Service agents monitoring access between the EEOB and the White House’s West Wing.
Hayley enters the West Wing through a door on the ground floor. She is older than the typical White House intern by at least five years. Her serious expression is evidence of a life lived without favor or entitlement. Self-delusion is a luxury she could never afford. Even as an eight-year-old sitting on the lap of a Charleston department store Santa reeking of Camel cigarettes and boiled onions, Hayley could tell a fake beard when she saw one. Nor is she unduly overwhelmed here, within these historic walls of the president’s house.