A Question of Manhood (3 page)

“Young man, you can't possibly think anything in this world is more important than spending time with your brother! He's been over there risking his life every day, and anything could happen to him at any time. He'll be here only a few days, and you think you're going out with your friends?” She stood there, dust rag dangling from the hand that wasn't planted on her broad hip, glaring at me.

“Ma, it's not just ‘going out with my friends.' It's taking this really”—I'd almost said hot—“sweet girl, someone every guy wants to go out with, to, like, the biggest party of the fall!”

She wagged her finger at me, the rag flopping around in the air. “Do you want me to pull your father's weight into this? You're not going, Paul. I don't care how important it seems to you now. In the overall scheme of things, in retrospect, it will pale in comparison with how important spending time with your brother will be.”

We stood there, kind of facing off, a test of wills. Sometimes this works for me. She doesn't always have what it takes to stare me down; she's a softy, really. But not this time. She was ice. And the look on her face told me she would pull Dad into it if necessary. And there was no way I could win with him, once he set his mind on something. I'd need Chris for that. Chris was always the only one of all of us who could move my dad with reason or anything else, he's that stubborn.

Go ahead, tell Dad. Let him do his worst. I'm going to that party!
It was on the tip of my tongue. But my jaw clenched tight shut, almost against my will, my hands balled into fists at my sides, and I turned and stormed off. The worst of it was that I had to call Laura and tell her. When I did, I couldn't really get a bead on her reaction. I mean, she didn't pout or whine or anything, but it didn't feel like sunshine and roses. What a freakin' mess. Who could blame her if she never agreed to go out with me again?

And now, even though Chris was actually home, just thinking about missing that party this weekend made me steam. Lying there on the bed listening to Chris snore in the next room, this feeling of resentment started to bubble up. When you thought about it, I sort of had a lot to resent Chris for. He was the favorite son, no doubt there. And if he'd been some kind of monster, or at least if he'd been mean to me, I could have gotten angry with him and felt good about it.

But he never gave me a chance like that. He'd never done anything to get me into trouble, and in fact, he'd stood up for me so many times in one way or another, getting my folks to ease off on some punishment Dad was sure I deserved for whatever, getting both of them to see that something I'd done was just horseplay and not a sign of evil taking over my life and theirs. He'd always been able to calm Dad down—he was the only one who could—and he'd always done his best for me.

But I wasn't in the mood to think of what a great brother he was. Even so, as I lay there on my bed, music playing quietly, staring at the treads on one of my Ho Chi Minhs, I could feel the steam leak out of my attempt to stay angry with Chris about missing the party. And a chance with Laura. I tried to shift the focus, be angry with Mom, but I couldn't keep that up. I knew why she'd thrown the fork. I understood. As long as Chris was here, he was safe. Staying for Thanksgiving would be great, but really it was the staying that mattered. The being home, away from the danger, away from the possibility that one of those casualty reports could include him. Away—far away—from the knock on the door when some stateside colonel, hat in hand, might come to tell us the last thing we wanted to hear.

But I knew what Dad was saying, too. Maybe Mom couldn't—or wouldn't—imagine the tug Chris must feel from over there all the while he was home, but I could. And I knew that if I were Chris, I couldn't really enjoy that terrific meal. And even if I did, I'd feel guilty.

Christ, this whole fucking mess had everyone fighting. Just the previous week in school, Terry Cavanaugh and this other kid, Bobby Darnell, got into it but good. I didn't catch the whole thing, but it sounded like Bobby was talking up his brother Ken's escapades, how many VC he'd killed, that sort of thing. I heard Terry shout something about certain people having messiah complexes, thinking they could go over there and save the world, which of course set Bobby off, and we had to pull them apart.

“Easy, man, easy,” I mumbled into Terry's ear as Kevin Dodge helped me hold on to him and back away. Two other guys were taking charge of Bobby. We barely got things quiet before a teacher or somebody saw, so no one got in trouble, but it just goes to show you. War is war, and it spreads.

That little episode got me thinking about loyalty. I mean, Terry was trying real hard to be loyal to his brother Ron, but Ron—hell, he fucking skipped the country! So guys like Chris and Ken, they went over, and damn it, Chris was no martyr. He didn't think he was Jesus Christ. And I don't think Ken thought he was, either. But to be honest, I was a little angry at Ron, and maybe even at Terry for sticking up for him. But I was also mad at Chris for going.

And before too long, I'd be mad at Dad for making him go. This was something I didn't allow myself to think about. Not even that night, meditating on the tire-tread sandals. But now? Now I do.

The whole time Chris was home, we all kept pumping him for stories. Sometimes he really didn't want to talk, and Mom would shoo us away. Other times he talked, and he did his best to walk a line between satisfying Dad's thirst for guts and glory and Mom's reluctance to think of her favorite child in danger. He was always good at that—keeping everybody satisfied. So he tried to let us know what his day-to-day life was like and tried not to paint too grim a picture.

Over Thursday dinner he told us about this one mission his squad got sent on, where they had to be lookouts for some other guys sweeping for mines. The VC are always coming into areas where the mines have just been found, and replanting them.

There were a couple of guys, not Chris's squad, walking down this dirt road, swinging metal detectors around and watching for spots that looked like they'd just been dug. Behind them there was an armored dump truck, loaded with dirt, that was retrofitted to drive backward, and the driver was way up high above the truck in a special little cab. This truck followed the two minesweeping guys a couple hundred feet behind, and some guys in Chris's squad were way out in front of the minesweepers, and some stayed well behind the truck, and they were all watching for snipers. The idea was that if the minesweepers missed anything and the truck ran over it, the truck would set it off. The dirt was to keep the truck from getting blown far, and the driver was supposed to get thrown to safety from the cab.

Chris said the trouble with this plan was that the driver was so far above ground that unless he landed in water, he was probably gonna get hurt pretty bad. So, as Chris put it, it took a special kind of guy to drive the thing. Chris walked behind the truck one day and in front for two days, and they never saw any snipers. But he said the driver was always stoned. I guess you'd kind of have to be.

Mom didn't like that story, because it worried her that someone Chris might have to depend on was high. In more ways than one! So the only stories he could really tell her were about life in base camp or when they were away on a mission but weren't fighting, and even then he could talk about only the most benign stuff. Nothing about what they did to get beer, or koon sa, and sure as hell nothing about girls.

But when she wasn't around, or if us guys were hanging out in the backyard trying to pretend it wasn't cold, Dad wouldn't let him get away without at least some of the gory details. He'd ask, “How many men did you lose in that encounter?” or “How bad were that man's wounds? Did he make it?” And always Dad wanted to know, “Did you hold?”

Did they hold the ground. Was Chris King of the Mountain. And how many friends did he lose.

One story was about when they were on their way someplace—I forget where—in this big truck. They were driving along this road that was typical, all dirt and not very wide, going through an area of rice paddies with farmers working in them. The farmers had tools and baskets and sometimes hats that they would set on the ridges between the paddies when they weren't using them. But then about a mile farther Chris said they noticed that the tools and baskets were there, but no farmers. Chris said no one ever left things like that; tools were too scarce. So the farmers had to have left because something was very wrong.

As it turned out, the VC had mortared the area to frighten people who lived in a nearby village. Chris's group didn't figure this out, though, until they got to the village, where they noticed mortar holes in the ground, and there was one old man there who hadn't fled. He told them the attack had happened about half an hour ago.

Chris said his friend Mason would sometimes point out how the spookiest part of being in a situation like that was that no one really knew what to do. The guy driving the truck didn't know any more about what might be wrong than the guys he was driving, didn't know what it might mean to them, or what to do about it. They had no guidance, so all they could do was look to the ranking officer and pray like hell that he had a good head on his shoulders.

My favorite stories were the ones where Chris and one or more of the other guys took care of each other. Made sure everyone was okay, that they all got out of whatever they were in. Chris told a few of these stories, and they usually included his friend Mason.

There was this one story he told Dad and me on Sunday afternoon. Mom was home putting dinner together, and the three of us drove off to this fishing spot on Parson's Lake, where we'd go in the summer. It was too cold to sit outside, so we stayed in the car. Dad cracked his window so he could smoke his pipe, and I was in the backseat straining to watch Chris's face while he talked. I couldn't see much more than a silhouette, there was so much light coming through the windshield from across the water. His voice was flat, and from what I could see of his face he wasn't allowing much expression to show there, either. He was looking almost but not quite at Dad, his gaze falling someplace off to the side of the car.

“We were away from base on a mission. It was night, and we'd made camp. There was jungle on one side of us and rice paddies on the other, and just as we were getting ready to turn in we heard the shrill sound of incoming. A whistle, then boom. And the boom was really close. But we couldn't tell where it was coming from. So all we could do was wait. And then there was another. It landed just past the edge of our camp. This time we could tell it came from the direction of the rice paddies, so we grabbed what we could and headed for the jungle.

“We hadn't come this way, we'd come up the road, so we had no idea how bad this section of jungle would be. Booby traps, mines, that kind of thing. It's hard enough to watch for trip wires even in the daylight. And from the sounds around us, I could tell some of our guys were setting off traps. There's booms and screams and shouts, the place is a hellhole. We figured out later, those who survived, that the VC must have set the place up and then fired on us to scare us into this patch. They never came across the rice paddies. They didn't come anywhere near the trap.

“But we didn't know this yet. So I'm crawling, feeling with my hands. Mason is with me, but he has this thing about snakes and won't crawl unless he's ordered to. So he's sort of bent over, following next to me. Both of us are trying to use the light from mortars and rockets to watch ahead, make sure we aren't touching anything we shouldn't. And suddenly I see something right ahead of me, something I wouldn't have seen if I hadn't been crawling, that tells me there's been activity right there. I freeze.

“Just then, someone not twenty feet from us trips a wire. There's a flash, and a scream, and he's down and silent. Mason sort of jumps, and I grab his ankle, but his other foot goes right into the area ahead, where I know there's something waiting. I just grit my teeth and hang on.

“He falls, but somehow he falls toward me and lands right next to me, but he's sliding away at the same time. It's a pit, and I know there'll be a punji stick at the bottom, probably covered with shit to make sure whoever lands on it gets thoroughly infected. ‘Grab my clothes!' I yell at him. He hangs on, and I'm pulling back with everything I've got. We scramble, clawing at the ground, and by the time I've pulled him up next to me the shelling has stopped.

“We'll never know whether it was necessary to run for cover, 'cause we never found out how many VC were there. Too many guys had been killed or wounded to return an attack, so the radio guy called for a dustoff, which means Hueys would come in to take out the wounded. Mason and I found our way to the edge of the jungle with the other guys who made it, ready to provide some cover from the VC across the paddies if we needed to. We took cover by the side of the road while a couple of Hueys landed behind us. One of them was just lifting off when we heard this grinding, scraping noise. Mason and I wheeled around, not knowing what the hell might be happening, and we saw the rotor blades had come off one of the Hueys; the Jesus nut had let go.”

This was too much for Dad. He didn't often interrupt Chris, but he asked, “What the hell's a Jesus nut?”

“It holds the whole rotor mechanism to the top of the helicopter. If it comes off when you're in flight, only Jesus can help you. But the copter had just started to lift off, so the guys inside weren't hurt badly—except for the ones they were supposed to be carrying off, of course. Anyway, the blades had been moving, so they had some momentum, and when they went sliding off they were still going around. The blade piece rose into the air a little, drifted sideways and came down like a twirly toy. Then it hit this guy and took his head right off.”

We were all silent for several seconds. Then Chris said, “Thank God it was dark.” I knew what he meant; he wouldn't have wanted to see that too clearly.

Chris turned in the seat so he was facing out the other way. I couldn't see his face now. We sat there, maybe a minute, and then Chris got out of the car. As soon as his door slammed I started to open mine.

“Paul.” Dad's voice was sharp. “Let your brother have a minute.”

 

Sometimes after one of these stories I'd go someplace by myself. Maybe my room, or if I didn't want to be found, into a corner of the basement near the furnace, where it was warm enough to hang out for a while. In my mind I'd go over some of the scenes Chris had painted.

Chris had gotten an air rifle one Christmas, I think when he was ten, and although I never got one of my own he gave me his when he got tired of it. I found it and took it into the furnace corner, trying to imagine what it would be like to stalk through jungle, watching for trip wires and disturbed brush, anything that might give away the location of a mine or a booby trap or a pit with a punji stick in it. The air rifle became a machine gun.

Chris had told us that a machine gun isn't a rifle. You don't really take aim with it, and when you fire it's a burst of five rounds at once in the general direction of where you think your target is. There's this arc of light when you shoot, because every fifth round has magnesium on it, and it burns real bright so you can see where the rounds are going, even in daylight. The thing is, you want to pelt the area with as many bullets as possible.

In country, Chris said you often couldn't really see the enemy, you just sort of knew where they probably were. And they weren't likely to sit still while you fired at them. So this technique of raining bullets over a whole area, creating a sort of death zone where nothing could survive, was supposed to have more effect.

But Chris said you'd never know it was effective from the number of VC they kept seeing. It was like when you shot one, several more sprang up out of the ground. So one evening I sat there, pointing the old gun across to the other side of the basement, and I imagined what it would be like to fire hundreds of bullets in a few minutes at an enemy that kept growing in number. And every time I fired, there were more and more enemies swarming toward me.

I didn't last very long. I started shaking, dropped the gun, and backed farther into the corner.

I guessed Chris must have lost quite a few friends by now, trying to hold this ground.

 

Mom made an executive decision about Chris's time with us. Maybe she couldn't stop him leaving when he was supposed to, but she could move Thanksgiving if she wanted to. He'd arrived home on Wednesday, and he had to leave on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So Monday night was Thanksgiving in our house.

Mom declared that I was staying home from school, and she tried to get Dad to close the store, but he wouldn't. He said too many people were contemplating giving pets at Christmas, and lots of them started shopping early for all the stuff that went with the animals, or buying books to figure out what pet they wanted to buy.

It was fun, actually. Mom let Chris and me do some of the cooking. I cut up the stuffing bread and the onions and things that go into stuffing, while Chris made the pie. He'd always been good at pies, and Mom could never figure it out. “I didn't teach him much,” she'd say. “If I had, my crust would be as flaky as his!”

It felt a little like old times. I always liked this best, when it was just the three of us. When I was younger, I used to imagine that Chris was my dad, and he and Mom were married. They always got along so well, you know? Laughing and making silly jokes. Chris always laughed at Mom's jokes, and she made more of them when Dad wasn't there.

I hope this doesn't sound like my folks didn't get along. They were fine, for the most part. It's just that when Dad wasn't around and Chris was, Mom was almost like a girl. She was fun and silly and giggly, and Chris was somewhere between her best friend and her boyfriend. And when they teased me, which was their way of including me since I couldn't always keep up with their joking, it felt good.

So we put dinner together, the three of us. We took our time, since Dad had said he wouldn't be home any earlier than a usual work night. But he surprised us and showed up at three-thirty. He'd asked his assistant manager, Carol Burns, to come in on her day off so he could spend more time with Chris.

“Where's this turkey dinner you promised me?” he bellowed, and he pretended he'd told us to expect him early when he knew he hadn't, and he strutted around despite his limp, acting like he was annoyed and making silly faces. Mom put him to work polishing glasses and setting the table. He refused to iron the tablecloth, so Chris did that. Then Mom shooed us all into the living room while she finished things up.

“How about another one of your war stories, son?” he asked Chris, handing him a beer. I was thinking we'd probably heard enough of those, but obviously Dad wanted more.

Chris sat on the floor, his back to the sofa, and took a swallow. “You know, I have to go back there tomorrow. I'd rather not think about it. I'd much rather hear one of your stories. Something crazy somebody bought for their dog or their cat.”