The Road Back Home
The Road Back Hone (A Novelette)
Copyright© by Dennis L. Siluk
Front cover illustration by author
All inside illustrations by the author
1
(Journal notes from the Vietnam War era, October, 1971/March, 1972)
“Funny,” says my mother. I shrug my shoulders, and she smiles, we are sitting at the kitchen table, I had just returned from the war in Vietnam. “You’ll want to see the bedroom attic, I haven’t done a thing up there since you went off to war,” she says.
“Nothing,” I reply, getting up from the table and looking out the kitchen window into the park area. My heart is beating fast as I catch the smell of the cool October breeze seeping thorough the loose window sill: I look where the garage used to be, it’s not there, I look about.
“I see some things have change, you got rid of the garage!” I mention in passing. My grandpa is in the living room watching television, it is 1971.
“Yes, oh yes, the garage is in the backyard now, didn’t you see it?!” suggests my mother.
“Really I say,” acknowledging I wasn’t very observant, almost apologetically; but I’m really just tired of talking. “Your brother’s coming over to see you soon,” she adds to the conversation.
I am standing in the archway to the dinning room, I see grandpa sitting in the armchair, and place my hands on the side of the open archway, I see his black mantel clock ticking away on the dinning room chest of drawers.
“How do you like your attic room,” asks my mother, after having given me sheets and blankets to put on the bed.
“Oh, I guess its fine, seems kind of small,” I say hesitatingly.
My mother chuckles, “It has been a long while since you’ve used it, but it’s just the same size it’s always been.”
“Yes, I see that it is,” I concur, but I had an idea it was if not bigger, better constructed—the bed anyways, I’m bigger and broader I guess, it doesn’t look like it can hold me somehow—
I smile. “I don’t know how long you can stay; grandpa likes it quiet nowadays, but surely for a few weeks until you find a place of your own.” It is grandpa’s house we were all raised in.
I feel inside my Army Green Dress pocket and check to see if my Savings Bonds are there, and in my pants pocket to see if my $1300-dollars is still there, and in my shirt pocket for my pack of Lucky Strikes, I pull the pack out, and a take a cigarette from the pack and smoke it now.
I breathe the smoke into my lungs, and seemingly push it down into my stomach—and exhale and I seem to be better almost instantly. I smell grandpa’s smoke from his cigar all the way into the kitchen.
He looks at me, turns around, “Where the goddamn hell you come from!” he says. But of course he doesn’t mean to be sarcastic, it is just his disposition—as it always has been, he is proud of me being in the Army—a soldier in a war, like him in WWI, matter-of-fact, that is the only thing he is proud of me for, other than that, I’m a bum to him, always have been. He apparently rationed out his cussing words today, they usually come in streams of mumbles, long streams, I used to get three or four of those streams at one time and this is nothing in comparison. He takes in a long sucking drag of that wet tipped cigar of his, shaking his head as if to say: I hope he’s not going to stay here and make noise like he used to do.
I say nothing, and cannot help smiling that he should make such grimaces out of it. There are a lot of things I did as a kid I do not do anymore— that’s a fact. But Grandpa can’t see up the line but evidently, I lost no difference before him. To him I’m still like that kid he knew and didn’t seem to want to know.
Quietly I glance at the clock in the kitchen, above the archway; I have to step back a few feet. I have only been in the house a few hours, yet it feels like I’ve already been back a few months. For my part, I’d like to go and find an apartment and not bother anyone but I realize I must stay here for a week or so, perhaps even as long as a month, but I have this feeling I will be out of here sooner than later. I hear my grandpa cussing under his breath some more, “He hasn’t lost his old ways,” I tell my mother, and not in no whisper like I used to do, but loud enough for everyone to hear. It doesn’t bother me anymore to say what I have to say.
Finally I move towards the kitchen table, fetch my coat, ask my mother to borrow me her car, “Aren’t you going to stay for lunch?” she asks.
“I have to go see a few people, sign up for unemployment checks, in case I can’t find a job, they’ll pay me for six months $145-dollars a week,” I tell her, “Then I got to find a car and a job.”
She walks me to the pantry back doorway, gives me her car keys, “It’s slippery out there,” she tells me, “be careful,” Minnesota weather is seldom perfect, if not wet, snowy, if not snowy, too hot or too cold.
“Don’t worry; I’ll be back with the car in one piece,” I tell her, but I know it’s not the car she is worried about.
I kiss her on the cheek—she patiently waits by the screened-in door, watches me get into her car, I tell myself: two years in the Army, almost one in the war in Vietnam under rocket fire, and now she is worried about me driving around the neighbourhood. I mean, what harm could come to me at home, here in this Midwestern city, where nothing happens out of the ordinary. I look up at her as I pull the car out of its parking space. She appears to be at peace, she leans on the side of the door. A brief pain befalls me, I don’t really like being back, strange it seems, but her face I like her face, in all the whole world, her face is the only thing I like, to her I was still the clumsy youngster that might come to some harm.
The moment has now passed I am driving around the neighbourhood, I am no youngster anymore, I still have my uniform on, I am three blocks away from the corner bars, those two bars I nearly lived at while at home before my Army days. I fling a right, and stop at one of the bar doors, I am a few steps away from them, I hurry out, almost eager to come into contact with my old neighbourhood comrades.
First I see Ace, the big dude from the neighbourhood, a little on the nitwit side of life, but big as a gorilla, and strong, about ten-years my senior. His eyes are red, he is half lit up with booze, but that is merely because the day is young, and he will have to have a nap, then like old times he’ll drink all the way through the night, it’s not anything serious. And there is Doug, he isn’t his old-self, he looks down, and Tom T., he’s always drunk, fighting with his wife—“It’s been ages,” I say to them, “since I last saw you guys…”
“Hello!” Ace says heartily to me, “nothing like having you back again, eh?” he says out loud, looking at the boys around the bar.
A few of the guys look on, mumbling something incomprehensible; Bill K., is mystified, hugs me, and buys me a drink. I notice an old High School buddy, he’s in a wheelchair, he lifts himself up to see if it is really me, and he tries to wave, “He had a motorcycle accident,” says Bill. Someone put a quarter in the jukebox, playing a song by Olivia Newton John. I look over at my High School buddy: I see he still has his legs. I go say hello, offer him a beer, and he takes my offer. He asks me to light him a cigarette, and I do. Everyone seems rough, however well it is meant.
Once outside I begin to breathe again, street lights have just gone on, too late to do much else. I seem funny, as if there should be something wrong with me, everyone who comes out of war, has something wrong with them I tell myself, but me. I don’t even have stories worth telling, I tell myself, and if I tell them to civilians, how on earth would they understand anyhow, so why tell them. But all this gives me some relief.
• •
It is odd; my comrades are no longer in sight, a little unreal. For a long time everything was matter-of-fact, and laid out for me, I’m not sure if I can even talk the same way civilians talk. It all is quite sudden and remarkably strange, as if I’m coming out of a fag. —But I am here, nonetheless, and I am here to stay for a while, out of the frying pan you could say.
There are still cobblestone streets, many smooth with asphalt, even some now with cement, almost the way I left it, nothing drastic here has changed, no suffering or ducking in anticipation of a rocket coming in—I though I found myself jumping into the gutter downtown today when a truck backfired, like in war. Everything seems to be intact, birds flying all about. Dogs howling: I even hear music coming out of houses, curtains slightly pulled back, I can see televisions inside, and the updates on the Vietnam War are on the news. A family is seated around a television; everybody has somebody they know in Vietnam, or in the Armed Services going to Vietnam or coming back from Vietnam or in Vietnam. I seem to be breathing fast as the city’s lights gleam off cars; I almost had forgotten such things existed. I drive across the Robert Street Bridge; the Mississippi River under me, the moon’s light is reflected onto the river, life seems mind-boggling still.
I park the car, walk up the stairs to our home on Cayuga Street, mother is asleep, I can hear her snoring, and grandpa must be too, he’s not in the front room watching television, but then it’s pretty late, I feel a tinge funny coming in so late.
In my attic bedroom, I sit on the edge of my bed, the sheets are cool, I stretch, I don’t undress just take off my dress green jacket, slowly I put that part of the uniform to the side of my bed on the floor, take my shoes lay back. I hardly recognize a thing; I am pulling off my socks with my toes. It is all overwhelming, it’s all over now I tell myself, I am home, and the day has ended, I am here.
2
Post Traumatic Stress
The following morning I take a walk around the neighbourhood, still got my uniform on. Late in the morning I run into Tachney, he was at the 611th Ordnance with me when we got rocketed one day. And we talk together, but just a few words, he starts to stutter some. As he stares into my eyes and then into nothingness, he jumps to one side, as if a rocket is coming in, it’s a train whistle; the railroad yard is but two blocks away. I myself crouch down likewise. The unmistakable sound of the rocket coming in is similar, at least to our minds it is, they couldn’t tell the difference right away. We were both mystified and I kind of laughed out of tension. But I know Tachney was traumatized one morning after we had gotten hit, and a rocket landed two feet from him, and it was the only one that didn’t go off that morning, and he was medically withdrawn from the unit and brought to Japan for Post Traumatic Stress. He had undergone I heard electric shock to bring him out of his cocoon, what they had called his catatonic state.
Now Tachney is looking forlorn, squatting in a strange position, he has not come back yet apparently from where his mind has shifted to, and my guess is he is reliving that morning all over again. I deeply regret seeing him, talking to him, I should just have waved to him from a distance, just seeing me, brought on this episode—so he says after he regains his composure.
“It’s a thing Chick!” says Tachney, “best wishes for your future but we can never talk again.” All those days in Vietnam we all lived just to get out of there and come home, and to what, a fragmented mind? I leave him as he is, and assure him, I’ll never stop to talk to him again, just wave if I see him—out of respect.
• •
Jerry and Betty Hino’s House
I stop at Jerry Hino’s house (by Oakland Cemetery, off Jackson and Cayuga Streets) Betty his wife is cooking for their mixed family of fourteen kids, Jerry is playing cards with Ace and his brother Jim, and Doug is there, as well as John L., and now me, everyone’s drinking.
“Just thought I’d drop by Jerry—see what you-all been up to,” I say.
“So you want to get into the game, eh?” he asks as if I had never left the neighbourhood—Ace gives me a smirk, “I’m losing,” he adds. Everyone looks comfortable at the kitchen table, Betty hugs me.
“How many cards do you want?” asks Jim to Ace. I draw in closer. Ace leans over to show me his cards. It’s kind of cosy in the kitchen, Betty trying to move about, around everyone, making a kettle full of soup, as normally she does, putting great chucks of meat into the kettle, everyone is munching on potato chips and popcorn, drinking a bottle of wine and two cases of beer by the refrigerator, one half empty.
“See—see,” says Don, I got you!” He’s got a full-house; Queens high, three queens to be exact. He’s bloated from booze, he’ll die in a few years I tell myself, the biggest drunk in the neighbourhood. His hand is shaking, and not from the excitement of winning: he yells jubilantly, takes the dollars and change in the kitty, about twenty-dollars; it’ll do for the evenings drinking plus some.
Ace sees a few girls coming down the block, sticks his head out the kitchen window, does a few catcalls, he’s that way, weird, and at times funny, if he doesn’t get mad that is, and booze can set him off into shifting moods. Betty looks at Jerry, “Don’t you start in now,” she warns him. “Ace,” says Jim, “Let’s get back to business.” Jim doesn’t like to lose.
Ace now shows a sign of maturity, and business, interest in the game, and drinking. Betty turns the radio up, she likes to listen to Elvis, he’s singing his recent hit, ‘Suspicious Minds…’ I like it, but the ending goes on forever.
Jerry gets up, pinches Betty’s behind, grabs two beers, hands me one, his face is already distorted from the morning drinking. “Good stuff,” he says. He looks at my uniform, my ribbons, smiles, his shirt is unbuttoned, he is sweating, he’s a about my height five food eight inches, but way over weight, I’m a hundred and fifty pounds, he has a hundred pounds on me, and ten-years, maybe twelve. He rolls up his sleeves sits back down, drinks his bottle of Hamm’s beer down, Hamm’s is really an old German beer, or was created from a German immigrant to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1865—he manufactured it in Swede Hollow.
Jerry is getting drunk, looks like a tired bull glaring at his cards, and Jim’s looking at Ace, casually, “I need to take a nap,” says Jerry, “you guys play cards I’ll be down by noon, and eat, okay Betty?” says Jerry. “Can I sleep on the couch?” asks Ace.
“Go home and sleep,” says Betty, “this isn’t a hotel.” Betty puts up a lot with Jerry’s friends, but this is too much for her. He gets ready to get up, then says, “Oh well, one more beer, and grabs a beer, and drinks it down, and falls to sleep right there in the chair, and everyone goes on playing cards without him, it is just Jim, Doug, Don, and John playing now.
Cindy comes into the kitchen, she’s Betty’s oldest, she’s fourteen year old, “My gosh—” she says, “it’s Chick,” and she hugs me, fiercely. I had once protected her from three guys wanting to pick her up, when she was twelve years old from a strange carload of kids, I told them to beat it or else.
“Don’t come unglued over Chick’s Army uniform,” says Betty to Cindy, with a chuckle.
A grey cloud of cigarette smoke circulates the room, as the drunken faces of the men hovers back and forth among the cards and smoke laden air—Jim don’t car for Ace, and he likes to fight when he’s drunk, and Doug and John H., just want free drinks, and Ace is busy snoring and irritating Jim, and Betty looks ready to kick everyone out, and Don is mumbling and half asleep himself.
There are no deadly enemies here, but I can tell when its time to go—when the drunken minds of men want to dig someone a common grave, because the irritation of the booze is seeping into their heads deep, very deep, knee-deep like mud. On the other hand, they haven’t sunk so badly as last I knew them. They are all soaked deep with booze like sponges full of water.
It all reminded me of a night we got hit with rockets, and out of the one-hundred and sixty-men in the company area, only eleven of us were sober enough to go out on patrol to see where the enemy was, the rest were drunk in bed or behind sandbags. The old Negro First Sergeant went from bed to bed yelling, “Get your asses up, we are getting rocketed,” and some of the men just burst out laughing, high on dope. Some got up out of their beds, and fell backwards landing square back onto their beds, and their heads crashing into the back of the wooden hut, had it been brick, they’d been in the hospital, heads knocking themselves out cold; not able to even recognize the First Sergeant; the First Sergeant lived with a Vietnamese whore in his little hutch, a distance away from the company area, us regular soldiers, privates and corporals lived in the company area.
• •
Jim is smiling, trying to wake Ace up, I think he wants to fight, he gets a phone all from his wife, she’s hot, the best looking gal in the neighbourhood and she knows it, and Jim, Jerry’s brother, knows it. “You leaving Chick,” says Jim, maybe he wants to fight with me, he likes to fight, and beer is dripping out of Ace’s mouth as he wakes up. “Here,” says Jim, to Ace, “drink your bloody beer up, don’t waste it, I paid for most of it, you leach.” At last Ace manages to free himself from his sleep, he’s a foot taller than Jim, and a hundred pounds heavier, but Ace is like a kid. I stand by merely to see what is going to take place, in a half dozen words, Jim cusses Ace out wanting to fight, and it brings me back to Vietnam again, when I fought the Crusher, a Sergeant that lived in our four man hut, he also was double my size and strength, and picked me up and threw me against a wall, while in a drunken rage, he should not have stopped there, because I avenged myself right then and there, I stood in a still grin, and hardened my fists, and with a straight kick and elbow to the ribs and bellows of rage I attacked, he didn’t expect a thing from me, and I struck him in the face and gut, and between the legs—there was no more pacifying gestures to him, as he expected, he shakes his head in disbelief, as if this is not suppose to be happening to him, that is the real puzzle, but he simply absorbs everything I do to him—he is stunned but no more than stunned, we end up outside of the hut somehow, on a little wooden platform, I swing and he retreats, I dodge everything he throws at me, with those heavy muscular arms of his wiz by me like projectiles, like hammers. And across his face I dig my finger nails into his flesh with a jump in the air, and bashing in his face as I land, his face looks like it is cut up with glass, drowning in his stinking blood. No one in the hut, interferes, his face is bleeding fast, he now gets properly mad, so he claims, and tries a hook to my jaw, but again I bash his ribs and groin and then we are both pulled back by our comrades in arms.
“Got to go Jim,” I say out loud enough to distract him from wanting to fight Ace for the moment. He knows I did that purposely. “Yup, see you around,” he says with a glare. And I leave, I guess I was in a way rather looking forward to seeing a fight, have a little fun, but I’m a little more docile than I used to be.
3
Six Weeks Later
Most all I got is Army cloths, a grey overcoat, I’ve never used, or wore, and green socks with holes in them, black shoes and boots, fatigue army green pants (that’s trousers I mean) and shirts—that is about it, almost everything, hats and my dress greens, not much else. The clothes I had before I went into the Army don’t fit me any more.
“And what now…” I mumble, ask myself.
“Look for work,” my mother says, “that’s the only way to keep the pot boiling.” She’s blunt about it.
“I found one,” I tell my mother and take two of my unemployment checks and buy new cloths. I’ll start a job as a machinist apprentice—that interests her some.
“Know what that is?” I say to her.
“No,” she says, “what is it?”
And do you now, I have to tell her—“It just occurred to me, I don’t rightly know for sure,” and we both laugh.
I am obviously in love with the new idea, a counsellor at the Employment Office found the job for me, and say the owner will get a tax break of $2500-dollars a month for hiring a war veteran.
I buy three pairs of working pants, with my last check. I’m beaming with pleasure that I’ve found such a job, the owner is an old man, and there are four other workers in the small shop. I work through my first Christmas, and then in February—there about—I buy my second novel, my first one I read just before I went into the Army, out of San Francisco, this one called “The Persian Boy,” by Mary Renault, is about Alexander the Great, never knew he was bisexual, until now, but I’ll not keep this job much longer, matter-of-fact, I’ll lose it before I finish the novel.
The old man is teaching me trigonometry, I’m learning it but not fast enough for his liking, and I’m not liking being scorned, I’m full of rage with the old man, and I take all my tools and throw them everywhichway, nearly hit the old man and the other four workers, the foreman grabs me gently, “Be careful,” I tell him, he let’s go. It’s all strange to me; this is the first time in a long time I’ve let lose like this, where I’m not able to harness my temper. My mind seemed to have been looking at a blank wall.
I’m asking questions now in my mind: how did all this war stuff come about? I mean it is a no-crisis war for America, yet we are in it, likened to WWI; it doesn’t concern us. Life was different before I went to war. And I won’t find the answers in this workshop.
And there I am again, sitting in my mother’s kitchen gazing out the window. I’ve learned I can do that for hours. I can see winter has frozen in everything, like it used to do. Blue and grey twilight shadows are creeping in, crossing my eyes. I fell dejected, what good came out of all this? Next week, or next month I’ll look for a new job, tomorrow I’ll go back down to the Employment Office and sign up for the rest of my unemployment checks, I have about four-months on them.
• •
Spring of 1972
Mother’s Pork Steak/and Larry’s Garage
I sniff real fried pork steak as I arrive at my mother’s place; I had moved out since, and now live in the garage, made into an apartment at a friends, in the neighbourhood, Larry Lund’s. I sniffed the fried pork steak again as I opened up the screened-in pantry door, and walked into the kitchen, mother was frying the pork steak as she often did before I went into the Army, she has invited me over, and my brother Mike is sitting at the kitchen table, my nostrils smell the real fat in the iron pan, consoles me somehow. Mother is chewing on a piece as she’s cooking. Mike lives in one of the three apartments at Larry’s house, with his wife Carol.
“Peggy came down from North Dakota,” Mike tells me, “stop on over later, meet her, she’s a nice looking gal.” I’m twenty-three years old and she’s seventeen, Carol I know doesn’t like me, she thinks I’m a drunk and a scoundrel, she’s half right.
“I’ll be glad to,” I tell my brother.
As I enter Mike’s apartment, Peggy is there, sitting at the table with Carol, and Mike is watching television, and Carol reluctantly introduces her to me. As a soldier I never did talk about trivialities or for that matter talk much at all. I liked to look at her though, she had a French look about her, dark eyes and nice figure, long dark hair. The two were conversing freely until I came. I try to listen more than talk, and then join my brother in the television room; he’s watching football, boring. All this kind of needless talk sounds stupid to me, as does football. She asks me a question, at this moment I just don’t care to answer I walk away from the table again, then later on join them, ask Peggy on the side, “Let’s go to my place and have a few drinks?”
“My sister says you’re dangerous.”
“She’s half right,” I tell her, “but not entirely, you really have nothing to fear with me, other than a good evening.”
She leaves the apartment with me, and her sister does not relish it, but what can she say.
We date off and on for the following week, and this one evening I prop my arms around her and forget everything around me, so clearly do I see her naked and making love to me, such tender looks she gives me, and I seem to her a little beastly, too much so. “Stop,” she says, and I stop. “We really got to get to know each other Chick, better first!”
I neither here her or see anything now, I lose myself into some memories—“Get out of her and don’t bother to come back!” I tell her. Between us there is a dead silence.
“I like you Chick,” she tells me. She’s looking at me from the sofa bed. Sweat breaks out on me, my forehead, and hands, and there I sit, just as if I was absent-minded. She’s left, and I question myself, how could I so have forgotten myself? But to be frank and honest, I hardly know how else to go about things. There is anger in me over doing what I did, embarrassment perhaps. Anger against all those people who think too highly of themselves—I call them monsters in the sly. I spit on the floor: hell with her I think. I tell myself, she’s not my sort; to hell with them all.
This neighbourhood I need to leave it I tell myself, it’s become my whole world again. Before I went into the Army I had a new life in San Francisco, I had escaped Minnesota, now after the Army, I’m back here again; but I no longer feel confined to this part of the world.
“It’s true,” Larry says to me, “a lot of us here in the neighbourhood live through you,” having crisscrossed the United States prior to San Francisco, and the Army. He laughs and walks off.
4
Conclusion to Part One
I suppose in my mind I had went to war, to Vietnam, for my country with enthusiasm on my lips—and here I was, returned in silence, now with my country in my heart, and I didn’t want to hear in any way about Vietnam, especially from those who had only walked to the train station, or bus station and said their fair wells to us soldiers, and then drove back home to a comfortable house. I don’t know what I wanted, what I was looking for after Vietnam, I didn’t have the words then, but I felt I’d learn the words later on. For the time being, I just wanted practical things in my life. In time I would go to what would be called “Bookish stuff,” to college. I had no wish to stay ignorant any longer.
¡ Part Two
Months Later (1972-’73)
1
As the weeks went by—now being home for several months, how a government can give you a license to kill one day, someplace in the world, and when you come back home, take it away, and mortify it as horrid—in Vietnam it wasn’t important how you killed the enemy, just go off and do it. This was the difference in my mind that mattered here. Since I’ve been home, nothing has gone smoothly, so it seems. I’m thinking about moving up to Erie, Pennsylvania, just to get out of here. I’m thinking of going to college, but my progress is slow in everything I do. In Vietnam nearly no rules applied to us, here there are more rules than—enough to make you suffocate. But I think a scholar sounds better than a soldier, I was thinking of going back into the Army also—you know, go to school, and get paid on the job for doing what I already have been trained to do. And they’ll pay the damn bill for school either way, I like that.
If I had my choice, I’d not let this government, govern us anymore, its donkey’s leading lions, how on earth can they take charge of the whole world, and the whole U.S., Army and being the principal authorities, and now that I’m back expect me to give them any credence to what they say, we know more than they. I’ve never protested with the others, thought I could make a difference, always gave them thumbs up. I want to make them reason this war out, knock them on the head. I have medals to show everyone but I don’t show them. I was a superb soldier, but they don’t care, to them I was a baby killer, that’s what I hear from their mouths.
I light a cigarette up, sit back in my new apartment, it is summer in Minnesota, renting out Larry’s backroom apartment, my brother is still living in the front one and his wife Carol, and Larry’s upstairs with his wife Jennie. It takes a man a while to be suitable for peace, once in a war. That’s all I can say. I’m not really fit for anything at this moment but soldiering.
• •
Bill K., a Vietnam War Veteran
I am on my way to visit Bill, he was in Vietnam like me, and he understands me, he’s been home now for awhile, the sun is bright, and the boulevards are full of blooming trees, I breath in the nice warm fresh air, the door to Bill’s house is ajar, I look in, his wife is gone, he’s sitting in the kitchen his palms holding up his head, cosy within and wrapped around his chin. I walk over beside him, I look about he’s all alone, “I’m happy to see you,” he says, “grab two beers out of the freg,” he tells me, and I do, taking an opener and popping the cap off the top of the bottles, then give him one and I take the other.
“To better days,” he says and we hit each other’s bottle and drink the beers half empty. A dog is running about in the backyard, chained up to a tree.
“They both came over today and we talked,” Bill says.
“Who’s they, and talked about what?” I ask.
Then at this juncture the whole story comes out like a flood:
“When I was away in the Army, Judy was seeing somebody,” his heart is racing, he’s sweating just telling me the story, but he goes on, he has to tell someone, “I could understand if it was somebody else, but she saw him more than once and she says because he looks so much like me, they carried on for awhile.”
With a vague glance at me, he wants to insure I am with him on this story, and taking it in as he is, seriously.
“It was overwhelming when she told me who it was, and he was right there with her in front of me, but she said she still loved me nonetheless.”
I look at him; evidently he didn’t suspect this person of all persons. “But she knew someone would tell me sooner or later so they both have to tell me, but why him? And then just like nothing, it came out of her, she said in no simple way, ‘It’s your brother.”’
She had an affair with his brother, I myself would never have thought of that, I knew Terry well, and they looked much like one another.
“She said she never thought of anyone but me, even when she was with him…” Bill tells me, and furthermore “Terry simply reminded her of me.”
I just stood there for the longest time in silence, not knowing what to say. As I looked at Bill, he seemed to be thinking it all can’t be true. He looked helpless, as if he said what he had to say, but none of it had yet sunk into his skull. I think he wants to murder someone, but he can’t, both are too dear to him. He has some powerful constraint I tell myself.
He pushes his beer away, he looks like stone, sits back in the chair, and Bill just shakes and shakes his head. I turn about and softly leave the kitchen, not much I can do, I try to tread soundless, as he stares out the window, outside the dog barks, running back and forth, if only this day could be like yesterday, when he didn’t know. Things were much simpler in Vietnam, you had to worry about keeping yourself alive, but all was well beyond that.
And then I’m gone. —
2
Hard to Sleep
I lie with a pillow under my stomach and one under my head and one under my feet, I like pillows, my arm is under the pillow that’s under my head, and I find myself drifting into dream land, I can control to a certain degree my dreams—I mean, I can differentiate within them, reality and non-reality, and we are under attack now, I’m with twelve other guys on the back of a five-ton truck, a spark of consciousness hovers over me like a halo, and the sounds of rockets nearing, I jump to the floor of the five-ton with my helmet on and hands covering my face—somewhere within the chambers of my brain, I know where I am at, but the alarm is still there, the bombs are going off all around the truck, and I feel the truck stop on the dirt road, look up and all eleven solders, new recruits in Vietnam are frozen like stone statues, and I yell at the driver, “Get this f…ing truck moving we’re a sitting target, they got us zeroed in!” Swiftly he puts the truck in gear and takes off again; I think he thinks it is safer to stand still—the fool.
I can’t fall to sleep, and I want to, slowly I find way back to full consciousness, and my eyes open up wide, my phone is ringing, perhaps that woke me up. I answer the phone, it’s my mother, and I’m almost out of breath, “Are you alright?” she asks.
“Ah…, yes, just a slight nightmare,” I tell her, and chuckle; actually I’m relieved, this entire dream is getting to be pretty old stuff. I search for a cigarette, light it, “Are you coming over for dinner?” she asks. “Grandpa has some left over sausage and chicken from Sunday dinner,” it is Monday now.
“Why, of course!” I tell her, “be over there as soon as I get myself proper.”
• •
Grandpa, and Mr. and Mrs. Stanley
Grandpa Anton Siluk
There the old lady sits, Mrs. Stanley, in a chair by her kitchen window, she’s my mother and grandfather’s neighbour, she’s as old as grandpa now—eighty or so, her husband died when I was about thirteen—she looks weary, mother is getting dinner ready, that sausage from Sunday dinner, and left over chicken, it’s always better a day old grandpa says. I’m pacing in the backyard thinking, my hands are clasped, Mr. Stanley had went to WWI also, like grandpa, I never thought of it before, too young when Mr. Stanley was living I suppose, but I understand now how this little woman must have felt, we are different—Mr. Stanley and I, different kind of soldiers, different than WWII soldiers, we went to war where the beasts of war were not threading America, nor the life of every child in America like in WWII. Perhaps it has occurred to her, this Vietnam war is like her husband’s war, nonsense, run by immature adults—old men that should the Vietcong come over to America they’d be the first ones to run for shelter and not know what to do, I’d know what to do, I’d tell them to get out of my way—these old men, go hide and don’t get in my way, I got to take charge here, kill if necessary. Their words of wisdom run nauseatingly over my hot blood. I turned my face slowly to her window; her elbow was on the sill. Mother is waving at me to come to dinner from the pantry window.
I wonder if her husband ever told her his horror stores. It just accrued to me, the three Vietcong we caught, entangled into our barbed wire along the perimeter of our encampment, and everyone—I mean the new recruits—was talking among them of what to do with them, they were the primary guards for that section. Half an hour they talked, and I watched from a distance. They tried to call the captain, and the captain’s XO, tried to call the Colonial to figure out what to do—“Why not just shoot them!” I said, and they said “We’re American’s we can’t do that.”
By that time they got orders—actually they never did get the orders told to them, the enemy was out of the wire, had escaped, and the next day, they blew up the Air Force ammo dump where one man was killed, they knew exactly where everything was—that is, the incoming rockets, that was the paper they were fooling around with while entangled in the wire, deciding if they should light it on fire or not. And the night after that, those same three threw a hand grenade into our company area—or had someone do it for them, and stole a fuel truck.
Now I stand her before Mrs. Stanley, and she must be thinking because she like me and her husband never could understand that we should fight a war just to have something to do, because our neighbour four-thousand miles away can’t fight his way out of a wet bag.
As I walk into the house, mother says “Your food is ready, but you seem so restless nowadays.”
“Yes,” I tell her “I’ve changed some…” but she adds that I seem more mature, thank goodness for something I tell myself.
3
Recollections of Augsburg, Germany, and a Dear John Letter
A train whistles, I look towards it from my grandfather’s lilac bushes in the backyard, it is fall again, 1973, I’m looking at the empty lot—in particular, I played a lot of baseball in that lot as a kid, and drank in it, and got drunk in it as a teenager, and as I look at the lot, I find myself drifting back to Augsburg, Germany, just before I went to Vietnam I’m at Reese Compound, at the 1/36th Artillery, it’s spring there also, and there is a lukewarm wind brushing across my face, I’m laying against a big tree, it is lunch time, I’m attacked to the Military Police, I’m in uniform, the old WWII tops of the buildings are red with brick like shingles, they amaze me. I find nowadays, my army life, army days seem to creep into my mind too often for my liking. I try to shake the thought off of going back into them but I can’t, and now I remember Chris, a German Jew, I dated back in 1970—she wrote me a Dear John letter in Vietnam, a few months after I left Germany; I do succeed well in coming back to the present day, my mind turns back to the empty lot again, baseball, and running up and down Indian’s Hill playing a type of Lone Ranger.
“What are you doing out there?” my mother yells from the screened-in back porch door.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Same here,” she replies, “want to go garage-sailing?” she asks. That means going to them garage sales, and although I don’t mind, I’d rather dream on. I look at her, “No,” I say, a little red in the face, I want to say yes but I can’t.
“Okay,” she says. I nod to confirm my no. I look at the house, I remember how my mother and my brother and I exchanged postage stamps, then I got into pennies, and Grandpa would let me go through his box of pennies he kept in his bedroom and on by the mantel clock. I guess life all turned out a little different than I had planned, somewhat different I should say, I always wanted to be a soldier, for some odd reason even though I was testy to my Drill Sergeants in Basic Training while down at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back I 1969, I’d sneak off and get drunk at the Enlisted Men’s Club (EMC), off limits to new recruits, but it never bothered me to test the limits in those days.
Why, I even remember the times us guys in the neighbourhood all went fishing down at Sucker Greek, caught those bony sunfish, I loved to eat so well, matter-of-fact, I could eat a half dozen of them at one time, some the size of my hands, some the size of my palms.
“What now?” I ask myself. I remember Sergeant Morgan, he flew to Saigon with me, I thought he was being discharged from the Army like me, and at the last minute, when we both went out together and got drunk at the base EM club, he said to me, “Would you care to know what I’ve done? (He hesitated, I shook my head okay) I reenlisted, Corporal Evens, I didn’t want to tell anyone, but I got Hawaii for a duty station. I thought about it for a long while, and figured I didn’t know what else other than Army life, so I did it.”
I looked at him strangely, kind of shrugged my shoulders as if to say ‘so what,’ I suppose he expected me to say “You’re crazy!” but I didn’t it sounded logical, or at least practical to me, for him anyhow, and perhaps for me, but I wasn’t ready for it.
I turn to my left, look at Cayuga Street, where my grandfather’s house was next to, the sky’s heavy with sagging grey clouds I noticed, it is going to rain, the wind is picking up, summer storms in Minnesota can be dangerous, lots of tornados, I like them though, life troubles me some, I feel cheerless with this new found freedom. This weedy and dirty plot of land called the empty lot is childless, but full of memories for me. Is this really the area I call home? When there’s a whole world out there, this hideous grey street next to the lot, called Cayuga Street, with holes in it and wild drunks that drive on it. It is no longer all this to me, just old memories, and not all that old at that. Nothing here has changed, but I have. I remember when Big Ace bought me my fist case of beer, and when I had my first cigarette, my brother kind of persuaded me, more at manipulated me somehow, so I’d not tell on him, he was hiding in the bushes over yonder. And I hit Richard Zackary, our neighbour to the back, so hard over a bat, I knocked him out and clear into a bunch of bushes, he was hospitalized, and his father called me a gorilla to my mother, I was fourteen then.
I see my mother peering out through the living room window; she’s got her sweater on, she’s going to do some of that garage-sailing, as she calls it.
Funny, all these memories are dissolving faster than I expected, while in the barracks in Germany, and Alabama, I thought about home, now the thrill and brightness and glamour of being home is no longer there, there is an unnameable feeling taking its place. Perhaps I have lived more life than this old neighbourhood offers me now, and I’m scaffolding at it some. Perhaps the years in the Army and San Francisco, and crisscrossing the country I’ve burnt the bridges to want to say back home, good questions I’ll have to answer sooner or later, I look towards my mother, “Wait up, I’ll join you,” I yell, she’s opening her car door. Garage sailing sounds better than these memories right now.
4
First Psychology Class/University of Minnesota
It’s 7:00 P.M., I’m at my forth class of night school at the University of Minnesota, in group psychology, an advance course, a hands on course, one you got to express your feeling with the other nineteen-students, and the young pretty professor is seated to the left of me, three seats over. I’m the only one in uniform, or who went to Vietnam, not in uniform anymore, two men are older, with beards, and the others are all women. On my seat I discovered my name was written on a piece of paper in pencil and put onto a chair, each of us students having their own seats for this six week course, I’ve been half drunk these last four sessions, no one seems to be able to tell it though. I don’t say much, not much to say, I suppose I’ve learned that in the Army, just sit and take it all in. But the professor, Maggie something, keeps on me to talk.
This is the middle of the four-hour session, she calls to Carol to talk, then to Barb, and Wally, and then to George, and Cindy, I’m the last—“Well Mr. Evens are you going to talk today?” Silence, “are you dead?” She asks.
She just doesn’t know my mind is not back yet—she doesn’t get it, I thought this would be a distraction, perhaps I started college classes up too early I think.
“No, he’s not saying anything tonight again,” she tells the circle of students, I know them well by now; we all talk during recess periods. I mumble something, “What did you say Mr. Evens,” says the professor to me, my mind is now back in Vietnam, out in the field, it is afternoon and Corporal Smiley and Sergeant Crusher are with me, on our way to a warehouse we are suppose to dismantle, and they are smoking heroin, they ask me if I want some, I keep saying; “No, no, no….” and finely I take a cigarette and cut it open and put in some heroin, and smoke it, we are dancing and singing on top of the warehouse now, like kids, in the middle of the jungle, our M16 rifles too far away from us to grab if the enemy comes. The men laugh, and then we see something from the roof, this rather takes us aback, it looks like two doughnut girls in the distance—that’s short for Red Cross Girls, maybe I’m imagining this, I tell myself, but Crusher and Smiley confirm I’m not, hopping down we rush over to them—they are both tied to steaks, legs spread out and arms—all tied to wooden stakes pressed a foot into the ground, back of their heads clamped tightly into the sand, a layer of skin has been peeled off their arms and chest and thighs, they are dead, and the ants are all over them, and their stomachs are cut open all the way to their crotch, intestines laying exposed to the sky.
“Mr Even’s,” says the Professor, she shakes her head.
“I paid good money for this course,” I say, adding “and so did the Army, and not to talk but to be taught psychology and counselling to learn by you, if I knew anything about it, I’d not be here, so teach and get off my damn back!”
The whole class clapped for me, and she said in a shocking manner, “I guess everyone’s on your side,” I didn’t respond to that, I didn’t think there were sides to this—just sessions.
We all walk out of class side by side. There is bluish-dark splendour in the evening sky—tinted by the moon’s light, I want to get drunker. I look back at the professor; she’s slender a few years older than I, like Chris in Germany, the one that gave me the Dear John letter. I’m about to answer someone, but I don’t I just stop and stare at her as she walks the opposite way to her car, I don’t know why I said what I said to her—I kind of feel bad, nor why I’m looking at her, nor why I come to class drunk. We go on. The night fades as I sit in the bar with my fellow students, and I can hear the night wind blow. I don’t want to go home, it’s all strange, and I can hear the music, its Bobby Vee, he’s singing that old song about a rubber ball, which keeps bouncing back, I hope I can bounce back I tell myself: that’s all I was to the Army, to the Professor, a rubber ball, perhaps that’s all we are to anybody but God and our mothers. I like being alone much more than I ever had before; on the other hand, I’m not sure where I belong quite yet. But I have to belong somewhere and school sounds right for me now, plus the Army will pay me for going, together with living expenses.
Part Three
(1973-’74)
I thought when I had come home, there would be a new and exciting existence for me—ready for me, full of long enjoyable days, and now I just find myself carelessly going from one thing to another. Nothing happening quickly like it was in war. Everything is so slow, takes too much time to get things started. All this plainness makes me restless, civilians don’t understand soldiers, and soldiers don’t understand civilians, we talk and think different. We are all muttering to one another when we talk. I’m always in a state of alarm, thinking I might miss something, and there’s nothing to miss out here. Had I never went in the Army I wonder if I’d ever be thinking like this, especially war?
1
Grand Forks, North Dakota
Had I not been a soldier, what then would I have been, I ask myself? Perhaps a poet, I’ve always liked writing poetry, I like the calm of the river, the soft sounds of the guitar. God knows there is a lot of something in poetry. I’ve been writing poetry myself since I’ve been twelve years old, and have read Robert Bly’s poetry, I like “Silence in the Snow Fields,” the best of his poetry, he’s a Minnesota poet, perhaps I’ll meet him someday, once in a bar, I was invited to his house for a party to meet him by a relative, but I got too drunk. Right now I just want to find some happiness, grab it, and finish some more courses in school. My next curse is in pharmacology.
“Alas; oh, now what…?” I say under my breath contemptuously, as I meet Peggy in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I rode up here with my brother Mike, he’s married to Peggy’s sister, I brought a bottle of tequila with me, Peggy hugs me, I whisper, “Are you going to help me with the tequila?”
“I thought you gave me up?” she replies.
I smile at her and the tension in our faces relaxes, grateful we both are that we don’t hold grudges—but she’s going with some black guy she says, “He’s in Seattle, at the University, next month I’m going out to meet him,” it didn’t take long I tell my self, still holding that smile. She is already beginning to retrieve that tension in her face—I’m working up to drinking that tequila early, but the reason I came up to Grand Forks, I tell her is to help her father put in the cement foundation for a garage, with my brother.
Her father shouts, “You kids come over here, have a afternoon beer,” her old man’s German, “Ach,” he says, to my brother, my brother standing by his side like a gendarme: perhaps more like two gendarmes standing side to side, they like to argue for the joy of it.
“We’ll start the project tomorrow morning,” Augustus says to me and Peggy, “so you to go meet everyone” although I’ve met everyone already at one time or another. I really don’t have much in common with them.
With an air of a connoisseur, Peggy fixes my hair that fell in front of my face, we are drinking the whole bottle of tequila together, it is 9:00 p.m., and we are sitting in my brother’s car getting drunk.
“Oh, you see, you’re not so bad after all, yet you try to be,” she tells me. I’m not really flattered; she says it in a drunken haste.
She wants me to kiss her, but I don’t, I just want a drinking partner this evening, and she’ll do, although she seems to be with renewed astonishment, examining me as if to find those old flaws, they are there but I just don’t show them, no reason to I’m only interested in her company.
“Did you find a job yet?” she asks.
“Don’t want one anymore,” I tell her.
Actually I kind of her getting fat and then growing too scraggy and sagging from the breasts, I did it to turn myself off, as she was trying to turn me back on. Maybe knowing she’s dating a nigger turns me off also, who knows, all I do know is that I’m perhaps too cautious, and I could score tonight, perhaps, but don’t care one way or the other if I do, and so all that romanticism that gets a guy hard as a pencil full of lead, vanishes before it gets started.
“How we do change, eh?” I tell Peggy.
She doesn’t pay any attention to me; we are now trying to catch the worm in the bottle so we don’t drink it. We stroll into the house, faces are blurred in the house to me, they come and go, I stand still in front of a bed, my heart is beating fast, and I drop to the bed (that’s all I remember until morning).
(Morning) Swiftly memories spring up of last evening, and my brother let’s me know everyone’s eating breakfast, and after breakfast, we’ll be mixing and pouring cement. And I start thinking back when I was fifteen-years old in the neighbourhood dating this girl named Jackie, she was Indian, had light bronze skin like Peggy—short and thin and cute, we kissed so much our lips got chapped, and in the afternoons we’d walk shyly and stolidly about the neighbourhood, much too embarrassed to do anything else—perhaps wanting to, and when it got dark, I’d find a blanket in bring it to the empty lot in case it rained, and summon up all the courage I had, hiding in the blanket and kissing some more. And it did rain once—the bright days of my youth, “Chick!” calls Mike, “They need you out there to pour the water into the cement…if you’re not going to eat breakfast!” He comes back in, and we walk side by side to the backyard, the world is warm and soft today, not hard like it was a few days ago. War is blotted out today, that’s good.
I have no idea what I’m suppose to do, I just fling the pale of water up and onto my left shoulder, then carry it over to where the others are working—what does it matter I tell myself, the point is to do what I’m told, like in the Army and it will all turn out okay. And it does for once. In the background is some inaudible music, Rick Nelson I think, ‘Travelling Man,’ something like that. My dreams and desires cascade into my work, and Peggy, she’s by the backdoor looking at me with a smile.
• •
Dreams: Walking out of death
(Oscar and the Ghost)
My dreams from the night before kept coming back to me, walking out of death, I call them now, pouring this water to make cement into a vat, it is better to daydream, you have more control than those nightmares. My first dream was of old Oscar, I met him at the old folks home a year or two before I went into San Francisco, and then a year beyond that, into the Army, I used to visit the place out on White Bear Avenue the old folks Farm, been there forever it seems or at least from the 1930s, started doing that when I was ten-years old—1957, got used of talking to the old timers there, kept it up. And often I became good friends with a few. Oscar I visited him nearly ever week for several weeks, he talked like a German, he responded in a German-English accent, using the ‘v’ letter more than anything, especially when sounding the ‘w’.
There was always a sad glimmer in the old man’s eyes, as if he was walking out of death, or about to walk into it, which had just come out of it. I often thought he kept on living just for my visits, but surely that wasn’t the case.
I’d have to say my goodbyes several times before he absorb the fact I was actually leaving, and then he’d give me that deadly look, that was there before I came, and vanished while I was there.
“I will tell you my story,” he said one afternoon to me, “While in WWI, in Germany, shortly after the war, I took leave from the French trenches, and went about visiting Germany, to Munich for a while, and Henry Ramsey, a comrade in arms went with me, and one night, not having any money we rummaged an old man’s house, he was asleep, and his wife, some twenty-years younger than he, and his daughter, about fifteen years old, we had woken up—the old may somehow remained sleeping. I told Henry to leave them be, but that didn’t satisfy him—he gagged both of them, we were masked, and we heard the sounds of our unit commander calling for us, we were AWOL, and our unit was moving out of Munich, to return to America, Henry had killed both the girls, in fear he’d be discovered—pointed out by them, and as he had rummaged through their belongings he threw about papers he had found, blood on his hands and now blood on the paper.
As our unit was about to board the ship to cross the Atlantic, this old man came up to me in disguise, said “I know you didn’t kill my wife and daughter, but I know your friend did?” and he showed me the piece of paper with blood their on it, it was the finger prints of a man’s right hand—the killer’s hand, in particular his thumb print was very visible, he forced me to make my impression of my thumb on that piece of paper next to the other one, to make sure I was not the culprit he was after, and to persuade Henry to meet him, saying it was the French General, who wanted to give him a medal, and I boarded the ship, after I had brought Henry to his executioner, and he never did return to the ship—but I knew he wouldn’t.”
I asked Oscar one hot afternoon what he wanted most of all, and he said “Ice Cream,” and I went and got him the biggest cone I could buy, that must had been 1966, or ’67. When I visited him the following week, he had passed on.
My second dream was as unbecoming—it was the summer of 1968, I used to wander among the dojo in San Francisco, when I was learning Karate from the famous Yamaguchi family, in particular Gosei, I actually slept nights in the dojo (or gym), lived there for the most part. Sometimes at night I’d turn the lights on—everyone said, the place was haunted, all the karate black belts were fearful of sleeping there, I was a brown belt at the time, had travelled 2000-milies to be taught by one of the world’s champion karate men—and wasn’t about to let ghosts scare me off—who Bruce Lee once visited and would not fight Gosei after he showed him three flying kicks in mid air in succession, before he landed back on his two feet.
Anyhow, I had been at the dojo three months, and I wasn’t sure if my imagination was working overtime, but there was something ghostly inspired—if not weird, some presence in the dojo. I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, the very one where I slept, and on this one certain night, I had sat up, the fall air was chilled—more chilling than normal, numbed me a bit, no windows open, I was a bit drowsy, there was a sobering of noises going on with the chairs and windows and whispering voices, then came the slamming of chairs, and distant shutter of windows, louder and louder each minute, when suddenly everything went dead, and heavy footsteps passed me as I stood in the archway of the dojo, I could see the wood curdling up, by my feet, as something monstrous walked by nearly paralysed me, I shouted with my long stick in hand, “Come and fight with me demon or ghost I’m not afraid of you…!” and it became like a corpse-room within that dojo, then I said, “Lord, I don’t think I can fight this beast alone,” and when I had said that, everything went back to normal.
“Chick,” says my brother, “what in heavens name are you thinking?” my face a grisly spectacle.
I couldn’t put it into words for him, there was just a voiceless hush in me, and so I simple said nothing, and went to get some more water for the cement, and went on daydreaming.
Washington High School Dance, 1965
It is 1965; I’m at a High School dance, Richard, and Reno are with me, we drank before we came to the dance, Mr. Turner one of the teachers sees us, he’s trying to figure out if we are drunk or not, I’m in my last year of school, so is Reno and Richard; Reno stands up from a side chair in the gym, not being used as a gym this evening, but rather as a dance floor, and stretches. Some folks are doing the Twist, others the Lindy, the sophomore Gail Johnson is looking at me, she’s quite pretty, she sees me in the hall all the time, says hello, she looks full of pride, she kind of scares me, but I’d like to dance with her. I know if I don’t go over there, she’s not coming to me. For an instant she’s transfigured, more exalted perhaps it is my observation not hers though.
On the instant I ask her to dance, and we do, my friends are cheering me on. “You’ve been drinking,” she states.
“A little,” I say, “why, does it bother you?” I ask.
“No,” she says, “but Mr. Turner is looking at you and at your friends strangely, I like dancing with you.” And we dance round-about, mostly at right angles, I can’t do her fancy skipping, and my balance is off, slantwise on the dance floor, I’m more like a mule trying to find my feet, and I try a few spins, she likes being close to me I can tell, and then the music stops, and a voice says over the microphone, “Take a fifteen minute break.”
“I’m going to have a cigarette with my friends,” I tell Gail, with her seamless dress and she sails away to tell her girlfriends she was dancing with me, and I my friends outside, we are smoking on the side of the school, Mr. Turner sees us, joins us, “You boys been drinking tonight, I know you have I can smell it on you.”
Someone must had said something, he hadn’t the fainted notion, he had never come near us until now, but now being so close to us, not a soul in the school would doubt it, “Yes, we had a few beers,” I tell him,” I can see victory and triumph on his face. He holds up his hands “You boys can’t go back in there,” he says seriously. Gail is looking from the doorway of the dance hall or gym, shaking her head as if she knows what is going on. Sure enough, I tell myself, there goes my night, and Gail.
To my memory now all I can remember is that and the shaded lights as we danced. Reno had pulled out a bottle of wine in his side coat pocket thereafter, and we all drank it down, Turner noticed it and ordered us to get off school property. I didn’t give Gail much attention before the dance, other than a smile here and there in the school, and thereafter I did the same, it was really just the dance that drew us together for that moment. Alas, I knew even then I drank too much, and we’d not make a good, so I didn’t peruse her, plus I was dating some Italian girl from Johnson High School named Barb. I suppose I appeared indifferent to Gail, because she was who she was and I was the tough guy from the Jackson Street gang. I didn’t realize girls like that, you know, the Marlon Brando type, like the movie “The Wild One.”
Looking Back
After lunch Peggy comes up to me says “Can I show you a picture of my boyfriend?” And to be polite I say yes, and I look at the picture, I do not reply, I can hear the music now, it is clearer than before, its Johnny Cash he’s singing “I Walk the Line,” my brother likes that song. She looks at me as if I’m suppose to say something, he’s a slim black boy, off an on she glances at me, the picture now on the table, a dish of food in front of me, she’s by my side, she has a white fashioned blouse on, she seems so changed in the little while I had not seen her. Can women play me false, am I so easy to read, Chris once told me I was so, Chris is the Jewish-German girl from Augsburg, she said, “Either you’re the cleverest guy in the world, or most sincere,” and then she added, “I can read you so easily.”
That kind of grew and grew on me; perhaps somewhere along the line it will outgrow my reality. But who can conceal under mannerisms things that don’t belong to you, so what you see is what you get, no one need to say ‘Who are you,’ I am who I am, simple or not, complex or not.
It is not hard for me to part Grand Forks, but I see Peggy is making a long face as I get into my brother’s car to go back to St. Paul. It wasn’t a dull weekend, matter-of-fact, it was a frisky one. In the car I think of all these women, Gail, Chris, and Peggy, Barb and Jackie and Frenchie in Vietnam, the whore who came to me during the night, feeling safe, and wanting to avoid being raped by the black soldiers—which became too frequent for her liking, and a few more, all in vain—I tell myself, it’s all in vain, and ask myself why am I now knocking at all the doors of my youth when I just want to forget. Women can make you feel ridiculous and wretched.
I’m finding out, the road back home is just that, an old road, I must find the gulf between the old and present, and I must go forward to invent the new road—make a plan, and work it out, march onward, someplace, anyplace will do, where matters not, perhaps Erie, perhaps back in the Army. And here I sit in this car, my brother and his wife, breathe in the country air. I must grab this moment before it perishes in front of me, lost to history, only to come back to it someday to remember it again—I must write it out, be a witness to it that it did exist. For a long time I stare out the care window, I’m getting tired of looking back.
2
Part One “Home from Nam” No: 624 (5-20-21-2010
Part Two” The Road Forward” No: 625 (5-22-2010)
Part Two: Chapter three… (5-23-2010)
Part Three: Chapter one… (5-24-25, 2010)
